[Fandom] Regency romances taught me too much

[jennaria]

Back in the day, I was huge into Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, and lots of their modern-day sisters. Which meant learning about nobility, because 95% of modern Regency romances involve titles for one or both of our protagonists. Is it correct to call our hero Lord Hadrian when he's only a Baron? (No, he'd be Lord Potter.*) Once Ginevra marries the Duke of Thingy, is she Lady Ginevra? (No again - she's Lady Thingy, "Your Grace" for formal.*)

...so basically, dear people who are writing Harry Potter wish fulfillment fic wherein he inherits All The Titles? Harry will not, in fact, wind up as Harry Potter Black Peverell Slytherin Gryffindor Extra, and no self-respecting goblin would call him that, even to wind him up. (Well, maybe just to wind him up.) He would be Harry Potter, Duke of Peverell, Marquess of Gryffindor, Count of Slytherin, Viscount of Black (to arbitrarily designate actual titles), and he'd be called Lord Peverell, with all the rest just sort of...elided underneath, no matter how rich and important they are.

(I enjoy a good wish fulfillment fic as much as the next person! But after the third or fourth or twentieth fic that thinks inheriting titles means piling on the last names, I just...yeah.)

*On the off chance that any of y'all are curious, I checked my memory here.

Comments

[cimorene]

I feel this so hard. I have difficulty with a lot of historical universes, even without having ever deliberately studied history of anything, just from the trivia I've picked up over the years. But the few historical eras that I've become fannish about - the Regency, the 1920s-30s, and to a lesser extent, the Enlightenment and Victorian era - are the worst, because even when I can keep reading because they obviously tried, I spend the whole time thrown out of the story, which results in bookmarks like "This is really great except that's not how textiles worked in the middle ages and the whole plot falls apart as a result" and "This was fun, but that method of inheritance is just fundamentally incompatible with the economy as written".

[jennaria]

Yes! I've gotten better about suspending disbelief as I've gotten older and read more things, but there's still a qualitative difference between 'swept along by the story' and 'following the story, but can't forget how they got a Critical Point wrong.'

(Once of the Midsomer Murders episodes, I called the whole thing as being a modern-day HAMLET a good hour before the detective figured it out. It's only a 90-minute episode.)