PicoBlog

What is this map! What is happening here! WHERE IS UKRAINE?

Jezebel has a pretty good group of questions about this map, but I have my own.

Okay first for those of you who don’t know, this is from the Netflix Christmas movie A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby, starring Rose McIver (who is lovely). It’s the third in the Christmas Prince series, which began with Rose McIver playing a journalist who falls in love with the prince she’s tasked to cover for some gossip site. After a bunch of holiday shenanigans, they get married. Now they’re expecting. How nice for them.

The prince is now the King of Aldovia, which is obviously not a real place but whatever, we all accepted Genovia because Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews. Like the Jezebel writer, I assumed that Aldovia was some spit of land that had fallen by the wayside after World War I. Some guy who was some Habsburg’s outbred great-cousin probably claimed it as his and no one really gave enough of a shit to stop him.

In A Christmas Prince III, the shenanigans revolve around the ceremonial re-signing of a peace treaty with a country called Penglia, and we are shown a map of Europe in the world of A Christmas Prince. Aldovia and Penglia—which both existed as far back as 1419 and okay, sure—were fighting over “Silk Trade routes” and then on Christmas Eve 1419 decided that the Power of Christ compelled them or something and they would stop fighting.

But wait. That MAP. WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THIS MAP OF EUROPE? I…

Let’s just go from left to right?

Aldovia

Wh… Where are the Balkans? What happened to Austria?!

Okay before we can really even address this, the bigger question is: What is Aldovia?

The Aldovians we see in all three movies are all sort of generically British—English, actually, with posh Received Pronunciation accents. There seems to be no Aldovian culture outside of the near-obsessive love of Christmas; by their celebration of this holiday we can assume that Aldovia is a Christian kingdom, but what kind? Are they Protestant? Catholic? Eastern Orthodox? (Okay probably not that last one.)

To go along with its lack of culture, Aldovia seems to have no tongue of its own—English is the only language ever spoken. Is this a world in which a scion of the British Empire took over the (mostly) Slavic peoples in the area and brutally suppressed their language and culture, as the English did with Wales? Did the Magyars never come down from the Urals, in this universe, resulting in the nonexistence of Hungary?

Does Germany not exist? You can kind of see text that says “GERMANIA” spread way out on that map, but it doesn’t seem like a unified country. Did something like Germany exist but get dismantled after World War I? Was there even a World War I, given that neither Hungary nor Austria nor even the Habsburgs seem to have existed in the world of A Christmas Prince?

If Germany never really existed in the modern sense we’re aware of, does this mean there was no World War II? No Nazis? No Holocaust? Does this mean Israel doesn’t exist?

Wait, back to the Habsburgs because they were a huge part of how Europe’s royalty worked for a very long time. Do you even have Europe as we knew it without the Habsburgs all marrying into royal families and then marrying each other until they looked like this?

Back to Germany now because wait, was there not a Holy Roman Empire? Because that should be on the map! That shit was around for nearly 1000 years! Is that map from 1419 because Italy as we know it did not exist in 1419 and “ITALIA” is displayed on Italy. If there isn’t a Holy Roman Empire, does that mean there’s no Pope? No Catholicism? How did the Christianity that resulted in Christmas being celebrated on December 25 with gift-giving come to Aldovia?

Belgravia

This one’s a real mindfuck. One of Netflix’s other Christmas movies is The Princess Switch, in which Vanessa Hudgens does a Prince and the Pauper/Horse and His Boy with the princess of a country called Belgravia. (These movies all sound like Thomas Pynchon made them up to include them in a novel, incidentally.) In The Princess Switch, though, the protagonist is seen watching A Christmas Prince on Netflix. This is some M.C. Escher shit. Christopher Nolan has absolutely nothing on this Christmas Cinematic Universe (please do not start calling it a… ah fuck, too late).

Anyway, where the fuck is Ukraine? If this map is from 1419, then does that mean the Rurikids never came down the Dnieper to establish Kievan Rus’? That would mean Russia as a whole never existed, which I suppose makes sense given what the Caucasus looks like (more on that in a second), but also is a pretty big fucking deal! No Rurikids? No Romanovs. Did the 1917 Revolution not happen? Does this mean that the Soviet Union just didn’t exist? No Nazis or Stalinists? That would mean no Manhattan Project, no Cold War, no space race. Have we been to the moon, in the A Christmas Prince universe?

Why doesn’t Poland exist, at least?

Given Belgravia and Aldovia’s all-consuming love of Christmas, are we to infer that they also pogrom’d all the Jewish people out? Eastern Europe in our universe was a huge center of population for Jews; is that not the case in the world of A Christmas Prince? If not, where are they? Did the Diaspora not happen in this world? Italy exists, so presumably Rome existed, and its corresponding Empire, which was one of the things that led to the Diaspora in the first place. Where are the Jewish people, A Christmas Prince?!*

Penglia

Penglia occupies essentially the entire Caucasus. There are so many bizarre things about this!

First, in the universe of the movie, Penglia and Aldovia don’t share any kind of land border, so it’s unclear why these two kingdoms, and these two kingdoms alone, were fighting over any route. Trade caravans could have easily avoided Penglia by going through what is now Turkey and taking the sea road.

Second, holy shit, how did Penglia take over the entire Caucasus?! No one has ever done that! Not any of the Khans, not the Persians or the Ottomans, not even the Russians at various heights of their military power! It just doesn’t work! The Russians tried this for centuries and ended up committing unbelievable atrocities. The only way to take control of the Caucasus in its entirety is…

Look, I hate to say it. But I think the Penglians may have genocided the Caucasus. The Circassians, the Abkhaz, the Georgians, the Avars, the Chechens, a whole host of others (including the actual victims of real genocide in our world, the Armenians).

A whole big Thing in A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby revolves around how Rose McIver is dragging Aldovia into modernity (but not to the point where she forces her husband to give up his hereditary power so the country can be a real democracy because “Yasssss Queen” or whatever). So it’s a little weird that Rose McIver’s queen makes a big deal about not getting to ceremonially sign a treaty—it’s for kings to sign, not queens—when the signers on the other side are descended from the perpetrators of an absolutely unprecedented (in that universe) crime against humanity. She should be fighting for them to recognize that crime and make restitution!

“But if they don’t sign the treaty, the countries revert to a state of warfare!” The movie says that neither Aldovia nor Penglia has a standing army, so who gives a shit? STAND UP TO THE GENOCIDERS, ROSE MCIVER.

Stop, Please. Just Stop.

“Oriana,” you go. “This is a Netflix Christmas movie. Netflix, the reigning monarch of Garbage Brand Twitter. Let it go.”

I will not. I need something meaningless over which to become unhinged, and the A Christmas Prince film trilogy’s bizarro world history is IT.

Merry December. I’m not gonna send a newsletter out for the next two weeks. Watch this Jenny Nicholson video instead.

*I actually have not watched more than the first one of these so I could actually be missing something. I tried to watch the third installment and couldn’t make it through more than 15 minutes.

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