for the WIP meme please ššš (i think the animal was a giraffe. if it was a horse or donkey or something then thatās the one i mean and apologies for romanticising it into a giraffe)
LMAO its a giraffe dw about it and also a giant as fuck one in my inbox for some perplexing reason. Who understands tumblr! Not I.
š¦is there any part of this fic where you feel you're stretching the amount of belief for the reader/yourself?
Okay to be very fair to myself, I set myself a very tall order in insisting that because this is in the tradition of the Regency romance, there has to be a happy ending which is at least implicitly monogamous, even if "temporarily" so. However, I also don't want to resort to the usual cop-outs that tend to happen with transmasc protagonists in the genre i.e. a closeted queer sex life, while married life is publicly heterosexual. This does pose some logistical and political problems in reconciling it to historical attitudes towards both homosexuality and Catholicism at the time. On the third hand, I also do want to highlight the fact that our imaginary of the past is not necessarily always accurate and that people did make very radical arguments for both sexual freedom and the decriminalisation of "sodomy" if not outright legitimacy of homosexuality (the extremely long Don Leon for example), and people did live extraordinary lives especially if they were - as both Eloise and Curufin are - members of the aristocracy and could successfully enforce a barrier between their private and public lives.
Which is also why I have been working and reworking the plot for the ending for the past month and I think some endings are going to strain people's suspension of disbelief more than others and personally, mine is being strained at the point at which I try and reconcile how Eloise Bridgerton can have both a happy romance and be reunited with his family / not face social ostracisation.
āļøāļø i am assuming this means you want two (2) facts:
Fact 1: I am very enchanted by this anecdote from 1801 in The Masquerade: A History of Extravagance and Intrigue by Meghan Kozba. Apparently at the turn of the 19th century, masquerades were all the vogue and bc of the masked nature tended to have a certain amount of gatecrashing. As a result, hostesses started introducing very customised, personalised invitations, where a forgery would be immediately evident. However, in this particular case the Viscount "Kitty" Courtenay & his sisters discovered they had received forged invitations to a certain Miss Morgan's masquerade, which would have left them stranded out in the rain... EXCEPT:
His pleas were finally heard and Miss Morgan appeared at the door. He begged entry for himself and his sister, to which Miss Morgan replied, āif he would invite her to his [masquerade]Ā ballā tomorrow evening, then āshe would receive his Lordshipā.Ā Of course. It all made sense. How could Kitty have been so foolish? Miss Morgan had not received an invitation to Sophiaās ball and, in retaliation, sent the Courtenay siblings fake invitations to her own assembly. Kitty immediately accepted her proposal and the pair were at last allowed inside.
Fact 2: I am EXTREMELY tickled by this anecdote from An Elegant Madness re. Sheridan i.e. the author of The Rivals, amongst other satirical plays, and also the er, House of Commons:
At the same time it was also an age when men burst into tears on the slightest provocation, and thought nothing of crying in public. They cried about love, money and even politics, long and loudly and without embarrassment. Walpole reported that Fox was in floods of tears on the floor of the House of Commons over a political quarrel with Burke, who was so upset himself that he started weeping as well: Creevey, writing in 1814, said that āthere was not a dry eye in the Houseā, adding that one minister sobbed so much that he was unable to speak.
Sheridan was another one who always burst into tears when he failed to get his own way. On one occasion the Prince had just given Sheridan a particularly lucrative sinecure, worth Ā£800 a year, but the latter wanted to pass it over to his son; when the Prince refused, pointing out there was little enough justification for giving the father the post and none at all for the son, Sheridan made a frightful scene and began to ācry bitterlyā.
