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.)

---

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]

Why do people write 'Messieur' instead of 'Monsieur'?

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.

[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?

[watervole]

With you totally on historical fashion. Our heroine would have been out shopping for a new corset, wanting a really modish one, and explaining how useful it was in supporting the back muscles, etc.

[erimia]

"Victorian France" gives me war flashbacks of so many fics and discussions. I always wonder if this is supposed to take place in some alternate history universe where the British Empire managed to turn France into its colony. :D

The lowercase titles indeed seem to be mostly taken from song lyrics. I don't know why they are lowercase, but they usually give me strange anxiety - they look so oddly detached. The use of lowercase reminds me of avant-garde poetry, but I have no idea how such influence would make it into fanfiction and why others didn't, if so.

[zellephantom]

Well, speaking as someone who only just now realized that the plural was spelled messieurs and not monsieurs, I have a few guesses...

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.)