Rougo is very different from a standard Isekai. The protagonist can actually warp back and forth between our world and the other world. At 10 chapters in I've detected no hints of a Reverse Harem. And the Different World in question does not actually seem to be a fantasy world, the MC has Magick but no one else seems to, so far it just seems like an alternate Medieval (or sometimes more Victorian looking) world. She also forces an American Militia group to sell her guns and train her to use them. It's pretty interesting.
What inspired this post however is a scene where she introduces herself to a Noble family by pretending to be a member of a Noble family of a far away land. And that of course reminded me of a few years ago when I was reading a lot of 19th Century literature because of my Paul Feval/BlackCoatPress fixation which itself kind of spun off from my earlier involvement in the post-Twilight Vampire craze.
Those novels involved a lot of characters, sometimes protagonists and sometimes antagonists, posing as Nobility when they really weren't. The examples of this that are still reasonably famous today would be The Count of Monte-Cristo and Dracula, and to a lesser extent Carmilla and Lord Ruthven. In the case of the Vampire examples however there is always the implication that they were real nobility when they lived, so Monte-Cristo is the purest example of this that is still reasonably well known. Alexandre Dumas was of course influenced by what Paul Feval had done earlier with The Marquise of Rio-Santo, the leader of The Gentlemen of The Night in his serialized novel The Mysteries of London.
It's a trope we don't see a lot of today. Partly because of a perception that you simply couldn't get away with it nearly as easily since we now have Google, I suspect every still active title of European Nobility has a Wikipedia Page. Plus it's 19th Century viability had a lot to do with Germany and Italy being broken into innumerable mini-states so of course there could be one you haven't heard of.
The thing is in a lot of those stories once people got suspicious of them investigating it was possible. And today we still have African Prince email scams, and con-artists claiming to be lost heirs to the Stuarts or Louis XVII that actually have supporters in fringe history circles. The success of this scam was always mostly about people being too trusting and often wanting to believe the exotic story they were being told.
The lack of this trope in modern fiction is more an assumption that no one reveres that old Feudal concept of nobility anymore, and so modern Vampires like Lestat would rather be Rock Stars. And yet the fact that there is so much fiction looking back on this era, or about Fantasy Worlds with this system still in place, tells me there is a sub-concise desire among even many Americans to still romanticize it.
The reverse of this trope definitely still happens in modern fiction, a commoner who finds out they're secretly the heir to some Noble or Royal inheritance.
A liberal or Leftist moderner might be inclined to accuse the villainous examples of this trope of being a conservative attempt to avoid actually vilifying the Nobility. But trust me as someone who's read a lot of this stuff real nobles were often worse people. Even the explicitly conservative writers like Paul Feval and Ponson Du Terril wrote about villainous nobles. They idealized the ideal but seemed to feel the Feudal System's downfall was brought about by their own decadence.
This plot in Rougo reminded me of all this, but also does certain things with it only Otaku media would do.
No comments:
Post a Comment