#lol if this does even the smallest numbers i will delete in .02 seconds

[girl-mercury]

i finished watching queen charlotte before i start watching the next installment of bridgerton, and i am fascinated by the worldbuilding in it

so like, this show, about young queen charlotte marrying george III only to find that his incapacitating mental illness has been hidden from her, starts out with a disclaimer that no one should treat this like history. it should not be compared to history, it is framing a story with historical figures but telling things that never happened, so don't get worked up about it being inaccurate when it is 110% intended to not portray history accurately. this is an extremely necessary disclaimer, and based on all the critical response i've seen to the show, not read by anyone except me

bridgerton has been notable for having colorblind casting in a regency romance, and simply not making any kind of deal out of POC being a part of high society, which i appreciate: that's basically the last thing on the list of things i care about being inaccurate in historical fiction (the first might be corsets.) (and victorian views of sex in non-victorian eras.)

in queen charlotte, race actually is part of the story. but here we dive straight into the fact that regency romance (even though this particular story is from the 1760s) is a fantasy genre, not history; in this fantasy, the obstacles of gender and class are what matters more than anything. so in this fantasy version of eighteenth-century english nobility, nobles venture outside europe to look for people of suitably high breeding to marry; lady agatha danbury, for example, is a princess from sierra leone married to a (Black) english landowner. however, these people are not fully accepted by white society, because they are of lower class.

but there is something dubbed "the great experiment," which i don't know if it actually has a historical parallel or if it was made up wholecloth. charlotte, a german princess of moorish (Black) heritage, marries the king, and to provide her with a suitable court, many of this lower class of POC are given titles by the crown, and suddenly, they're being integrated into society, and also facing the regency-romance-typical threat of potentially losing those positions due to legal questions (of if the title is hereditary) or financial ruin.

there's no mention of slavery and no way in which slavery affects how POC are viewed: it is straight up class issues. pure alternate universe where the nobility marriage network heads straight into africa and asia

it reminds me a little of ek johnston's that inevitable victorian thing, in which there is the alternate history of queen victoria going "FUCK we gotta slow down the inbreeding, my million children will be getting spouses from as far abroad as possible to preserve the empire"

idk it's just really interesting to me! and not something i've seen anyone talk much about. shonda rimes made a fantasy world where POC get to have silly balls and fancy clothes and romance concerns without being obliged to carry historical trauma with it. white people have the privilege of getting history-flavored fantasy without reliving trauma all the time, but the opportunity to do that for anyone else is not as readily available. all regency romance whitewashes history, but usually only white people get to enjoy representation in the result. this universe allows for more, though.