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Phantom fanfic pet peeves
Why do people write 'Messieur' instead of 'Monsieur'?
Why do they have absolutely no idea about how titles work in English, let alone in French? (Hint: they're geographical. You can't be 'Duke Wellesley' -- or even 'Sir Drinkwater'.)
Why does Raoul always live in 'Chagny Manor', when the French don't have manor houses, the house described is never anything like a manor, and manors are also geographical rather than having family names tacked on the front?
Why do they keep inserting inappropriate modern slang into the characters' mouths alongside laborious attempts to prove how 'period-accurate' their social attitudes are? (NB: 19th-century French characters did not think of themselves as 'Victorian' -- why would they care about the English Queen? -- and they certainly didn't walk around monologuing about oppressive 'Victorian' beliefs and clothing; they saw themselves as modern and in general more enlightened than anything that had come before them. Nobody in the 1960s talked about 'Sixties attitudes', for example -- they talked about 'modern attitudes', whether with disapproval or satisfaction.)
I suspect the answer to most of these is that the authors all copy each other in a game of Chinese whispers, just as they all crib the same bad sex motifs because they don't have any experience in that department either... but what exactly is the point of those unbearably cutesy titles all in lower case? Are they supposed to represent some kind of hashtag communication, or just a postmodern attitude to punctuation?
Why do they have absolutely no idea about how titles work in English, let alone in French? (Hint: they're geographical. You can't be 'Duke Wellesley' -- or even 'Sir Drinkwater'.)
Why does Raoul always live in 'Chagny Manor', when the French don't have manor houses, the house described is never anything like a manor, and manors are also geographical rather than having family names tacked on the front?
Why do they keep inserting inappropriate modern slang into the characters' mouths alongside laborious attempts to prove how 'period-accurate' their social attitudes are? (NB: 19th-century French characters did not think of themselves as 'Victorian' -- why would they care about the English Queen? -- and they certainly didn't walk around monologuing about oppressive 'Victorian' beliefs and clothing; they saw themselves as modern and in general more enlightened than anything that had come before them. Nobody in the 1960s talked about 'Sixties attitudes', for example -- they talked about 'modern attitudes', whether with disapproval or satisfaction.)
I suspect the answer to most of these is that the authors all copy each other in a game of Chinese whispers, just as they all crib the same bad sex motifs because they don't have any experience in that department either... but what exactly is the point of those unbearably cutesy titles all in lower case? Are they supposed to represent some kind of hashtag communication, or just a postmodern attitude to punctuation?
no subject
My first speculation would be that it might be an overcorrection from the American tendency to (if you're unfamiliar with French) look at the word monsieur and think it's pronounced "mon-sewer" whereas messieur looks, to someone who only speaks English, much closer to how monsieur sounds when spoken.
I think it just chalks up to unfamiliarity and a lack of research- messieurs and monsieur are both used in Phantom in different contexts, and someone listening could very well assume that they're synonyms and not realize that one is exclusively plural and the other is singular.
The same could be said for manor- just assuming that it means a big house where a noble family lives, named after their last name without doing any further research.
Oh, I think the lowercase titles thing is both a symptom of the 'talking in tags' phenomenon on tumblr and copied from the phenomenon of song lyrics/lines from poems being used in all lowercase as fanfic titles. As a result of this, any vaguely poetic sequence of words 'rendered in all lowercase (like this)' is supposed to be seen as ~ artistic ~, more dramatic, and just a touch pretentious. It's an aesthetic choice made because it supposedly looks cooler, for some reason.
Your examples like "we are so small beside the stars" fit the trend for titles so well that I had to look up whether they were real fic titles or not! ("and find your home where the lily lies" sounds a lot like a title for a fanfiction centered on Severus Snape.)
no subject
That makes a lot of sense!
I'm flattered! I didn't want to quote any real ones in case I inadvertently ended up insulting someone (well, more than I was doing already by complaining about the titles...), so I tried to come up with a few of my own. I have to admit I didn't actually check to see that something I'd made up *wasn't* an existing title -- but the chances are against it, right? ;-D
That particular style of 'free verse' is all too easy to parody, though. Which is one reason why I have very limited respect for free verse; I can't literally write it standing on my head, but that's only because I've never been able to stand on my head...
(That was a 'poem' that I purely and simply made up as I went along, in about forty seconds flat; it really is that meaningless and trivial an exercise.)