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Princess Principal has a backstory where they put multiple eras of English history in a blender but: does it really blend?

On a start of a rewatch, and via consulting the wiki, I noticed that the Queen is named Elfrida, but I had just assumed that she was Victoria because, like, she looks basically identical to Victoria.  Actually this is an easy one to resolve: maybe Alexandrina Victoria decided to take a different regnal name in this universe?  Perhaps one motivated by the romanticism of the era, as Elfrida is truly a retro name for a queen -- the last one ruled as regent around 980.

The bigger question is: Why are there dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine?  The only thing I can figure is that England didn't lose the Hundred Years War... and somehow still didn't lose these territories to the French later?  Like, what is happening on the continent?  Did they actually enforce the Angevin claims to the crown?  The thing is, up until, well, the Glorious Revolution, England was a total backwater.  They were able to punch above their weight in the 100YW because it was a much more centralized state than France in the 14th century, but later against the absolutist Sun King... how?

If I had to guess, maybe the Black Death really fucked over France, and England got off lightly.  And that this would be enough to negotiate a settlement that cedes the French claim on Gascony, Aquitaine and Normandy, in exchange for ceding the claim to the French crown.  It's hard to imagine they came by these specific lands later.  And if Elfrida === Victoria, the German princes need to be mostly unaffected by the change in history.  Which is to say that France still needed to rival Austria, rather than an OP Angevin Britain.  After 400 years, these people might actually be speaking English (quelle horreur) -- it took about that long to fully Romanize an area.

Alternatively: no Joan of Arc in their timeline.  Those areas are most similar to lands that England held in the 1440s.

But... what about Bonaparte?  If he fought for the French, we have to assume he took all of Britain's continental possessions (save Gibraltar... and maybe Calais for the memes?). (Alternatively, he could have fought for the Savoyards, and unified Italy a few decades early.)  Of course, the British were fighting a land war against Bonaparte in real life anyway, largely in Iberia, and funding the war elsewhere.  And, like in real life, the Brits got their land back and then some.

The weirdest thing in this show is moving the republican revolution into the what, 1890s?  What on Earth were the politics that allowed the Crown to control London and Kent and its overseas possessions, while losing most of the island to, uh, Roundheads?  Victoria (or Elfrida) was not an incompetent monarch, so it can't be that.  By the late 1800s, most of the revolutions in the world were nationalist, attempting to forge a state out of an ethnic group's homelands.  But, of course, the Midlands are just as English as London. So it seems unlikely.

But the Commonwealth is a group that can't control London (The City), Canterbury (the Church) and the colonies, but has its base in the industrial heartlands in Lancashire.  Oh my, the Commonwealth are damned commies!  For the common wealth, not the capitalist wealth!  It definitely makes the whole Berlin, er London Wall thing more appropriate.  And the late 1800s were full of communists (as well as anarchists, ultra-nationalists, etc.) – perhaps they're actually trying what Marx said, rather than applying communism onto an immature economy like Russia (still is, too).  It also explains why colonies would stay loyal to the Crown, since one would expect Indian client princes and Cecil Rhodes to want to continue keeping the proletariat down where they belong.

Anyway, that's my attempt to put Princess Principal into a plausible timeline.  Anyone else have theories?

it breaks the normal standard format copied over from HTML where you have [(thing)=url]anchor[/(thing)] where the "anchor" would be a caption or URL (by default the same as the video) as done in xenforo2 for the SB family sites.

I don't expect anything to be done about it, but it annoys me and complaining vents some of that annoyance.

They hate him here, They hate him there,
Death Eaters hate him everywhere.
Is he still living? Is he no more?
That demm'd, annoying Dumbledore.


Bob, if you like it, it's yours.

What little I know is available here

https://archiveofourown.org/users/DenSeraph/works

Instead of making a new thread for every shitty ficlet I write, here is the link to my Works page.

Short page long chapters, so easy to breeze though.

Enjoy!

Hey gang, yeah I know it's been a while & we're mostly dormant but this is important.

I just got an email from our webmaster. Apparently LLM scrapers have been attacking fenspace.net with great ferocity, lots of bots hitting the site with 5 requests/sec. 

(Given that there were like 30+ "Guests" watching the subforum when I started this post, I suspect they're here too.)

As the site owner I've authorized him to set up a bot-protection system that ought to keep the content-stealing techbro plagiarism gremlins at bay. That said, there is a catch; it'll effectively switch the site over to HTTPS, and that might - might - break some image links, templates etc.

So we're going to do this thing because frankly all of those goat molesters can go catch a bus with their teeth. But if you go look at FenWiki at any point and see something broken please let me know here. I will do my best to make sure FenWiki is working correctly.

--Mal

Back in the days of yore, when Mac OS X was new and iTunes hadn't gone past a 50mb download, they added a feature called Smart Playlists, that for once in the entire history of things marketing tagged the "smart" label on was actually useful and even a major improvement - set one up and it would sift through your library each time a song started, finished, or was added, removed, or modified, and update itself to include whichever ones matched the criteria set, which pretty much amounted to being any kind of regular expression you could set up to search for in the mp3 details fields, be it a string in the title or artist/album, a number of stars in the rating, even things only tracked by the player itself like play count. You could even combine multiple criteria with logical operators if you wanted. Further, you could embed playlistts into other playlists, and it would still get the sort order right if some of them were these smart playlists.

Naturally, I set up a nested list that included smart lists sorted by star ratings a number of times equal to the number of stars (and eventually including asterisks in the title as well for more granularity) so a song with five stars and five asterisks was ten times as likely to be played than one with one star and no asterisk, thought a specific song's chances would also be modified by how many had any particular rating, of course. If I started getting tired of one and dropped the rating, it would play less often, if I heard one that hadn't played in a while and it stuck out as feeling fresh just raise the rating and it would get more time in the rotation. It worked very nicely, at least until marketing added more and more features that turned iTunes as a whole into a stuttering chunk of bloatware, and then I needed a Windon't system for programming classes and it did not have feature parity, and, and, and...

And these days I just use Rhythmbox because it's the default install on my Ubuntu live USB, and it doesn't do any of that, not even letting you manually add things to the play queue if they're already waiting in it, and any kind of play probability management has been unavailable so long I barely remember it aside from a flash of annoyance when I think of a particular song and have to manually search it out of the library to queue it up. So, I figured I'd ask if anyone knows of a player app that does something like that, hopefully with a Linux version or at least able to run in WINE? I feel like improving the soundtrack of my life might help raise my attitude, at least, and I'll take any little bit of help I can get with that to be honest.

Imgur is not working in the UK because it doesn't want to be subject to UK laws.

Is this the standard method for displaying images for these forums or is it the choice of the poster?

Is there any way to change this?