Phantom fanfic pet peeves

[igenlode]

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.)

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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?

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

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.

That's correct, probably because so many native Spanish-speakers live here. I'm not sure how many schools teach French. I had the choice of either French or Spanish in school, but I didn't go to a typical school.

I believe this particular trope may originate in the US Marvel Universe, where Batman apparently lives in "Wayne Manor" in Gotham City.

Batman is a DC character, not a Marvel character, and that is virtually all I know about Batman. :P

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.

Those sound like song lyrics to me. Of course, song lyrics don't make sense as titles unless your readers know the songs.

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".

I've never heard "they passed," just "they passed away." What do you call train stations over there?

[igenlode]

probably because so many native Spanish-speakers live here. I'm not sure how many schools teach French.

Makes sense - your immediate neighbours speak Spanish, just as ours speak French...

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.

Those sound like song lyrics to me. Of course, song lyrics don't make sense as titles unless your readers know the songs.

That's an interesting suggestion - I wonder if they are lyrics that I don't recognise?
I came across a classic collection of such lower-case titles being used on blog posts on Dreamwidth the other day, but I doubt I can locate it -- it was a set of links I didn't click on, appearing on the second or third reading page of a friend of a friend that I've never seen before and will probably never see again.
(Wasted a lot of time going back through my browser history and re-clicking on links that looked vaguely plausible, while getting frustrated by bloggers who don't use cut tags and hence have only a handful of posts per page... no, can't find it. Although a lot of people do seem to use either (a) random phrases as blog titles but without the lower-case (e.g. "Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand" or "And the rooks and the crows and the seagulls will come flocking after me", which may possibly have been related to the article content if you recognised the context of the original line, if such it was) or else use lower-case blog titles, such as "why I am not human" or "the unbearable badness of programmers" -- I'm sure those were not the specific ones I was looking at, though.)

I've never heard "they passed," just "they passed away."

Even more interesting; maybe it's a regional thing. I had the impression that it had become completely ubiquitous in fanfic of late, and was even creeping into 'professional' printed material such as newspapers and magazines.
From a very rough search on AO3:
happiness, maybe, for the first time since he can remember, since his father passed
matt and adore used to be best friends, that was before adore's father passed





(Also -- no, Raoul, you cannot accuse Christine of 'acting out' when she panics about ghosts, any more than you can accuse her of not 'moving on' when she grieves for a lost love. Neither of those phrases or concepts are period-appropriate...)

What do you call train stations over there?

They've always been called 'railway stations' -- until recently.

[igenlode]

I came across a classic collection of such lower-case titles being used on blog posts on Dreamwidth the other day, but I doubt I can locate it -- it was a set of links I didn't click on, appearing on the second or third reading page of a friend of a friend that I've never seen before and will probably never see again.

Found it again (coincidentally, as a result of pursuing the same reading-page process)
https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/topaz