Phantom fanfic pet peeves
6 March 2021 12:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeWhy 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
Date: 2021-03-06 02:56 pm (UTC)Probably because they hear "Why so silent, good messieurs?" and think "Messieur" is the singular. :P
"Sir Drinkwater" made me giggle. :D
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?
I didn't know that. Do the French have an equivalent of manors?
I can understand why someone over here would assume that daily life in the 19th century was the same all over Europe as it was in England, but that's still no excuse for not doing any research.
As for the lowercase titles, I guess some people don't realize that what's acceptable on social media isn't necessarily appropriate on fanfiction websites.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-06 07:36 pm (UTC)I wondered about that -- I mean, I don't see where else it can come from, because it's not common in written French at all (normally written "MM." in my experience, just as we rarely write out "Missus" for "Mrs") -- but surely they hear the managers addressing one another as "Monsieur André" and "Monsieur Firmin" at the masquerade? Or, if they only pay attention to the Phantom's pronouncements, surely the Final Lair ("Monsieur, I bid you welcome...") is more iconic?
And I actually critiqued a would-be commercial script that used "Messier" consistently throughout, which so far as I know is something they must just have made up themselves :-p
If you speak French at all, it ought to be obvious that 'mon' is the singular ('my') and 'mes' is the plural form -- hence mesdames et messieurs (and mesdemoiselles). Sieur and demoiselle are mediæval honorifics that the average French schoolchild probably doesn't know about outside that context (La Salle, who discovered Missippi, was actually the Sieur de La Salle; his surname was apparently Cavelier), and thus the polite forms of address were in origin simply 'my overlord' (mon sieur) and 'my liege lady' (ma dame) -- just as the Frenchman still addresses his commanding officer as mon capitaine or mon colonel. But once you know about the constitutent parts, it should be pretty easy for anyone who has even a smattering of the most elementary 'Franglais' (which is most people in the UK; I gather the USA favours Spanish) to remember that you can't use 'mes' to refer to a single individual.
The French do have manors, of course -- I was overstating my case there. (I imagine the French manoir is where we get the word from, thanks to the Norman Conquest.) But the people who write about 'Changy Manor' [sic] are clearly not picturing a fortified country farmhouse with a communal hall and an upper solar (e.g. https://www.prestigeproperty.co.uk/french-manoir-for-sale-182/) but are picturing something more along the lines of Versailles or Woburn Abbey.
And no manor, by its very nature, can ever be situated on a street in Paris....
I believe this particular trope may originate in the US Marvel Universe, where Batman apparently lives in "Wayne Manor" in Gotham City.
I'm not the best at titles myself; I tend to resort to the timeworn favourite of a well-known quotation or else a phrase describing the work. But I don't understand how 'titles' like "you, me, a single tear" or "we are so small beside the stars" or "and find your home where the lily lies" are supposed to work in the first place.
Unless they are quotations from some e.e.cummings-style writer, I suppose. Maybe all this stems from the fashion for social media micropoetry?
Another constant pet peeve: "my parents both passed when I was five" -- no, they didn't, not unless they were travelling in opposite directions :-p They died, or they were taken to Heaven, or they are no more, or they are deceased, or they met their Maker, or she lost them, or they passed on or passed away. On old tombstones they are often said to have "fallen asleep", which always makes me cringe. But "they passed" is an American neologism that I've heard only in the past twenty years or so, and it jars as badly as "train station".
no subject
Date: 2021-04-06 12:35 am (UTC)So, a manor is basically the "intermediary" thing between a farm and a castle (château), and it's pretty much only used in Brittany and Normandy - which makes sense, with the Norman conquest and everything. Depending on the region, you'll have terms like gentilhommière (as in "gentilhomme", or gentleman), château, or bastide being used much more often.
To be fair, the distinction between a manoir or a château is more or less clear more often than not, but given that what should be the ancestral town/fiefdom of the Chagny family is in Burgundy, that means it would be a château rather than a manor - and there is actually a Château de Chagny there.
(Funnily enough, during the 18th century, it seems like the actual Chagnys were barons and not comtes, and that their family name was not Chagny, but Clermont-Montaison, Chagny being just the title. They also emigrated in 1792 and never came back to their lands, so... if you want to give Raoul and Philippe some family backstory, you could say their grandfather became a comte during the Restoration period under Louis XVIII.)