Short Review: Red, White and Royal Blue

[jennaria]

I have the book out of the library, so I will revisit this with a comparison post, but in the meantime!

Aside from a bit in the beginning (I am not a fan of second-hand embarrassment), this is the frothiest, fluffiest rom-com ever. Our two leads are very pretty, it hits all the expected beats, and the only part where I really blinked and shook my head was where a major Democratic party strategy was enrolling significant new voters in Texas and somehow this did not get featured in attack ads and challenged to hell and gone by the Republicans. Is the author from Texas? Because I feel like there was some significant wish fulfillment going on there.

(Also, if y'all expect me to believe that the King of England is a homophobic old bastard, nothing more, maybe cast someone other than Stephen Fry? Because I instantly came up with theories about how he's being a bastard because of his own Lost Love back in the day.)

I did see some reactions on Tumblr that wanted it angstier. Eh, de gustibus. Let me have my silly rom-com! Sometimes you just want a Hallmark movie but gay!

Comments

[stranger]

I've been a fan of the book since it was published, haven't accessed the movie as yet, but trailer publicity etc. suggest it follows the book with some detail changes. Yeah, even in the book, Texas flipping in that election sequence was plain fantasy. Although the story is also clearly, more or less explicitly, informed by The West Wing, which *also* flipped Texas as the climax of their big election finale arc. Even without that, the First Family being from Texas and especially Alex's strong sense of heritage there, made it inevitable that Texas would come through for him when it mattered, in rom-com reality.

Sigh. It's a dream, but it's a *good* dream. Also, I quite like your take on Stephen Fry, whose Sekrit Past is even more plausible given the messy history of royal Jameses. Did they give him a number? Jacobean historians would like to know just what kind of AU this is...

[jennaria]

I mean, the rules of rom-coms absolutely meant that as soon as Alex put effort in there, it would pay off. That's how rom-coms work. It's mostly that I just moved to Texas, so there's extra smoke in that pipe dream, so to speak.

(Wikipedia says King James III. I do not know my Jacobean history well enough to say what this implies.)

[stranger]

James I was the first Stuart king of England, with the shift in dynasty after the Tudors looking a bit dodgy from the perspective of Scotland having been the traditional enemy-to-the-north for a couple of centuries. He was also possibly the gayest king ever, showering his male favorite(s) with titles and riches.

James II, one of his grandsons, was deemed unsuitable by parliament over religious conflicts and was kicked out (he wanted to remain a Catholic, and hoo-boy that did *not* fly after Charles I and Oliver Cromwell). He was replaced by his sister Mary and her husband William of Orange.

The former James II lived in France for the rest of his life, and later one of his sons was recognized James III (and later a son of his was the storied Bonnie Prince Charlie) by some European powers, inciting the Jacobite followers in England to support them against the new new dynasty, the Hanoverian Georges. From whence descended Queen Victoria, and the family now called House of Windsor.

Making the AU King of England in 2020 be a James III means it's a straightforward substitution for fictional purposes. There haven't been any notable Hanover descendants named James, I would guess exactly to avoid bringing up the troubled history of the 17th century, which a fictional James IV would have done. The copious romantic literature about Jacobean expats, spies, breathless escapes, civil unrest, lovers parted and reunited across political divides, etc., etc., (Walter Scott was one of the early writers on this theme), was not always very comedic but definitely played into the romance genre as it is today.

[fox]

I read the book yesterday, and it . . . could have been a trilogy, I think? I mean a trilogy of novellas, maybe, but it had more than its share of climaxes (listen, the pun is not what I would have intended, but it's also utterly inescapable in the circumstances) and resolutions, so I can dig how for a single feature film they had to pick one and stick with it. And shift a couple-few things around, as well; I appreciated for example that they made the one hero a law student rather than a college senior, because while people certainly do find the loves of their lives in their very early 20s, I'm not sorry to have the main characters be slightly more of a grown-up. On the other hand, I regretted the diminishment or outright loss of a couple of the minor characters, some of whom were sacrificed along with their plots but others who I guess it seemed would just have cluttered up the place. Pity.

The royal family situation in both the book and the film is a stumper, where the other hero is the younger son of the daughter of the monarch - the book keeps calling him "the Prince of England," which drives me bats (there is no such title), and "the heir to the throne," which assuming his mother is the monarch's only child¹ (and the succession laws are what they are in the real-life UK, that is, from 2015 onwards it's straight-up birth order and boys don't outrank girls provided everyone in the conversation was born after 28 October 2011, which no one in this conversation can have been) he's no higher than third in line and will be demoted steadily as his brother and sister-in-law, whose wedding is the precipitating event of the whole story, presumably have children. The movie has him clarify that he's the (or in fact a) spare, but still. Anyway in addition to the blue-Texas rom-com wish fulfillment, of course one detects a certain amount of And You Could All Have Been Nicer To Harry And Meghan in the Prince Henry Falls In Love With A Biracial American of it all.

1. Because if the mother has brothers, even younger ones, they and their children will succeed before her and this dude would be far down the list and likely not actually a prince in the first place. His royal parent has to have been his mother both because we needed the dead-dad backstory—which had to be a dead dad rather than a dead mum for probably a variety of reasons but one of them absolutely had to be not making this a complete Prince Harry parallel—and because the other hero's powerful important parent is his mother and the parallels between them required it. But the adjustment to How The British Royal Family Works isn't entirely clear to me. I haven't read The Heir Affair, but I was reading GFY a lot at the time the authors were working on it, and they had a lot to say about where to separate their alternate reality from our real reality to get the fictitious royal family they were writing—chiefly, I remember them saying they had to diverge some time after the Victorian era because of how influential so much of her legacy still is in the modern monarchy as we know it. (I think they went with Albert Victor Didn't Die, so they actually split from the real timeline after Edward VII.) In this book, the same level of care doesn't seem to have been taken? The monarch is Queen Mary and her daughter is Princess Catherine, both of which are perfectly cromulent names, but the book still does refer to "a great-uncle who abdicated because he was a Nazi," that is, Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor (not that that's why he abdicated, but it's just as well that he did, because he was), so the fictitious Queen Mary might be an Elizabeth II analogue who . . . only had one child, and that a daughter? The widowed daughter being known as Princess Catherine is fine, but her late husband would have had to have been elevated to prince himself for their children to be princes and a princess—or, I suppose, the queen could well have done a special arrangement to make them so if they were her only grandchildren. Not too fussed about that. But the film calls the widowed daughter the Duchess of Edinburgh, which incidentally is what Elizabeth was called early in her marriage when George VI was still alive—Princess Elizabeth, D of E, so this fictitious unseen character would be Princess Catherine, D of E, even after her husband the Duke of Edinburgh had died—which means our hero should have been called Prince Henry of Edinburgh and probably his elder brother Philip, second in line for the throne, should have been Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, which . . . I think would have been pretty confusing for a lot of viewers. [eta: Oh! I had forgotten that at some point in the book Henry says he and his siblings generally just used Wales as a surname - so the fictitious Queen Mary seems to have created her daughter Princess of Wales, as I imagine a monarch would in These Modern Times if they didn't have a son—though George VI didn't, even though all the world knew his daughter was going to succeed him—which makes the fictitious QM's stodgy hidebound attitude even harder to reconcile, doesn't it? On top of which, if the monarch's daughter can be Princess of Wales in her own right, then presumably her own children will succeed in strict birth order rather than with any male preference, so the fact that in the book the sister (Princess Beatrice) is the middle child and Henry the youngest would make him no higher than fourth in line for the throne and really his marriage and procreative prospects ought to be of absolutely no concern. Anyway, I'd better take all this to a top-level post, but I did want to come in here and correct my own record just for a moment. Sorry to disturb again. ;-D] Interesting choices all around. At that point, making the monarch a king rather than a queen seems like it was probably timely, no? Uncle Wiki says filming wrapped in August 2022, and herself didn't pass until September, but still.

. . . this is all much too much of a ramble and shows that I need to stop and have some lunch.

[stranger]

With you on missing some characters, though keeping Nora seems a better choice than keeping June. It's always startling how little of a book fits into a two-hour movie -- evidently visuals aren't always worth a thousand words. Well, not the same thousands words as were in the book...

Agree also that the royalty stuff is weirdly AU: weird by constantly implying that Henry is the current heir apparent, when his older brother is *right there* and all the other succession links and titles are as skewed as you detail. Less weirdly, because British fiction that has royal-family characters generally fictionalizes them, however lightly, and reconciling the fictional characters with the weight of actual history is always a bit of a broken jigsaw puzzle. Even so, it's odd that McQuiston, or at least the RW&RB characters, seem confused about who's in line for what.
(One can theorize that maybe Philip-the-brother isn't *technically* legitimate due to Catherine being the kind of free spirit who defied the royal-protocol machine to the extent of having a child with her movie-star boyfriend before they got married; then Henry could be considered the first in line after Catherine... but this ignores Beatrice, and is pure theory anyway.)

[jennaria]

I was willing to forgive the implications that Henry is the heir, because most of those implications seemed to come from American media, which I can absolutely see blithely lumping all princes together and choosing to imply that their favorite is the heir even when it's not true. But it's also true that I might be mis-remembering the movie, having only seen it once and not read the book yet.

[jennaria]

I think you've probably put more thought into it than the movie did, and possibly more thought than the author did, and I think your thoughts are fascinating.

(I mean, there's a place for blithely gliding over reality! But I feel like the way British royalty works is low-hanging fruit, research-wise? Because I didn't know all of those details, but I did know some of them, and to ignore all of them is leaning kinda heavily on your audience both Not Knowing and Not Caring, which is on the careless side when it's that possible to just look it up.)