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]

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.