r/Anastasiainfiction

So I enjoy occasionally scrolling through YouTube and looking for Anastasia (1997) reviews. Unfortunately the algorithm has a really bad habit of only showing me the same ones I've already seen over and over, instead of anything new that may have been added since I last searched.

Anywho, for me, even though I love the movie (I grew up with it, had the VHS as a little girl, played with the toys, the whole caboodle), I also love to see reviewers rip it apart, pointing out all the historical inaccuracies, making little jokes, pausing at funny moments... I've had some really good laughs over that.

But what I like about those reviews, generally, is they're all in good fun, or at the very least to be informative for people who might not know the real history and want a fun comparison between the animated fairytale and historical fact. Even when video reviewers conclude the movie wasn't their cup of tea, there is generally a warmth, a sense of fun and respect, underneath all the quips.

And it's just really nice to see people who don't have the same hyperfixation on history and Anastasia fiction as I do still use their content to share in the fandom for a brief moment so to speak, it feels like connection. Sure there are plenty of reviewers who only like Anastasia for its Pygmalion and love story elements and whose "deep dives" aren't quite leaving the shallows, but I love seeing those too. It's so nice that we can all connect to the same story for different reasons and still share it as a common bond.

But then there is a DIFFERENT type of review. One I was unlucky enough to encounter recently...

The reviewer starts off with typical YouTube sass, warning they know the movie is beloved but they're gonna roast it, you settle in for a good laugh, and then...

Something goes horribly wrong.

Suddenly the jokes aren't about anachronisms (in fact the few they point out with way too much confidence are actually wrong, like saying the Tsar would have been in the Winter Palace when he would have been at the Alexander Palace, when trying to show how much smarter they are than the movie that has the Romanovs at the Catherine). They're not about Rasputin's talking bat, either. Or how Anastasia's hair changes length throughout the film or certain background characters don't move...

No, the jokes are all sarcastic rants about how the Bolsheviks were right and the Romanovs had it coming. Misinformation is given about Bloody Sunday. Before we even get past the prologue!

And I find myself thinking... Um, what am I watching? Where's the fun? Where's the facts about Marie actually going to Denmark and not Paris IRL? Where's the obligatory You've Got Mail reference for the Meg Ryan fans? Or spiderman jokes for the Kristen Dunst fans? Why is this reviewer talking at me like I'm an idiot she's trying to deprogram after a month in a cult? The actual heck, man? This is bogus!

I click on the user's page and sure enough, they're very very veeerrry communist. To the point where every cliche checkmark you'd count off for a commie is present.

And you know what? That reviewer is allowed to feel exactly as she does. I disagree with her disgusting disregard for the lives of five young innocents in that cellar in 1918, and her rude tone in the video, but clearly we're looking at this from very different perspectives.

What I don't understand is what this woman is doing in the fandom space for a movie (a fictionalized, romanticized, kid-friendly take on) figures in history she despises. Why does she get to weigh in here in this fandom?

Isn't that like someone allergic to seafood going to an all you can eat fish buffet and ranting at the cook and the other diners just trying to enjoy our cod and fries? Why take up space for something that isn't for you. I don't see the Anastasia movie or musical fanbase barging into communist spaces and complaining they're too anti-capitalist. I don't hunt down media about Bolsheviks in a positive light and talk about them in fandom spaces.

I feel like right now there's a lot of media that's at the very least anti-royalty as opposed to the more Royalty obsessed 90s and early 2000s. Why aren't people like this watching and commenting on those?

I think it should go for all media related to fictionalized Anastasia. If you don't feel any compassion for the children who died, fiction about one of them surviving isn't FOR you. You don't get to comment on it or spread misinformation about it.

Go somewhere else.

...and ultimately lets her get away with fraud.

I NEED more of this trope! It's so addictively fascinating. Two books featuring it is not enough!

Oh, Lord, give me patience... Yes, dearest visitors, I know reddit sometimes recommends subs that aren't to your taste, but it doesn't mean you have to comment on them. If an entire subreddit is about something you personally find problematic, simply don't participate in said sub.

It really is that simple.

Look, there are a lot of reasons people who love the real Romanovs would enjoy Anastasia fiction (including the popular 1997 film) and a lot of reasons they wouldn't.

That's up the the individual.

Some Romanov admirers are also interested in the mythology/legend (despite the mystery having been solved since 2007) that sprang up from all the imposters claiming to be them. You can love the truth and the fairytale at the same time. It's like liking Greek mythology and real ancient Greek history at the same time; you can literally be in both camps.

There's also the fact that a lot of millennials and Gen z's first introduction to the Romanovs was through fiction. Most of us didn't know who Anastasia was before we saw the Don Bluth film. Or before we read the book about her in The Royal Diaries series. Or Rubies in the Snow. Or both. But those properties led many, many of us into a lifelong love of history and into feeling compassion for the real life tragedy of Anastasia. It has to begin somewhere, guys. And just because we now have a richier knowledge of real historical fact, doesn't mean we have to abandon any love we felt for the thing that brought us to it.

You're not morally superior to someone who hums Once Upon a December just because your first introduction to Anastasia was an actual history book.

Now, IS there a discussion to be had about whether it's a bit tacky to turn a seventeen year old girl who died into a basement into a (non) Disney princess for merch? Yeah, because unlike Ancient Greek history, Anastasia's murder is relatively modern. That IS a discussion worth considering. And it is something some people are going to have strong feelings about on both sides of the aisle.

But you do not get to use that discussion as emotional leverage or as a dog whistle for any ideological standpoint on this sub.

This sub is FOR fans of various Anastasia fiction properties.

Look, I literally started this sub and am moderator and even I don't like or approve of every single fictional version of Anastasia either (I find the Sophie Lark fantasy book particularly problematic and I despise The Romanov Oracle Molly Tullis, I've made no secret of it...); I get where some of you might be coming from.

But this sub is not the place for you to attack fans or claim their compassion for the Romanovs is false and they "only love Disney princesses".

Repeated behavior of this sort to fans in comments and posts will be viewed as harassment and you can face a ban from the sub as consequence.

Consider this a warning.

And it's really well written, too. Definitely recommend.

Was wondering if the book only focuses on the "Black Princesses" mentioned in the summary and Rasputin or if the main Romanov family (NAOTMAA) feature in the novel as well.

It sounds from the summary like Alix might be in it, but I was wondering if the rest of the family (in particular OTMA) make any appearances in the novel.

Does anyone know?

Anyone else grow up with this?

Curious, because part of it supposedly takes place during the Russian Revolution.

Has anyone read it?

Yes.

Did I buy the dvd from a secondhand store anyway?

Also yes.

It's just bad in such a captivating way. Tsar Nicholas (who is a tuba in this, by the way) looks like Captain Crunch and Alexei is an accordion. An accordion with FRECKLES that eats ACTUAL FOOD. Anastasia is supposed to be a rip off of the Don Bluth version but honestly looks more like Ariel from the Little Mermaid. This thing haunts my nightmares. 😂

Also, to my fellow DVD owners, did anyone actually watch the bonus movie "Snow White and the Magic Mirror" this came with? I haven't. I keep telling myself I will someday then never do.

Apart from books like I Was Anastasia (where the gimmick is asking readers to see both Anastasia Romanova's history and Anna Anderson's before revealing the truth), most fictional narratives of the life of Anastasia Romanova are very much stuck in middle grade and the younger corner of YA.

Part of the problem is I think the average book consumer (who isn't a Russian history buff, or a world war 1 history buff) has a preconceived notion that Anastasia is for "little girls". Likely the picture in their mind of her sans debunked Anna Anderson isn't the young lady of 17 she was when she died or the younger teen visiting hospital patients during the war, it's a little ten year old in formal portraits with a kokoshnik, it's little cartoon 8 year old Anastasia voiced by Kristen Dunst. So she gets labeled a little girl for little girls to read about.

And I think most publishers and marketers follow suit. No matter how mature the writing style is, any book with Anastasia as the main character will nearly always be pushed to YA or middle-grade. The narrative being adult women don't "read teenagers".

The thing is that's bogus.

Plenty of adult women read about teenagers all the time. How many adult women have exclusively read YA Fantasy or Romance, to the point where they're a bigger part of the audience than any actual young people? (Now there is an issue that a lot of these women do seem to write bad reviews for any book where teenagers act like actual teenagers versus the 20-something year of olds in high school they're imagining in their heads, but that is not a topic that needs to be covered in this post.)

Just because a book has a teenager protagonist doesn't mean it has to be FOR teenagers thematically. Which is something marketers are quietly ignoring these last two decades.

Sometimes there's an exception if the character is a teenager at the beginning of a book, but if she's not 30 with a "sexy love interest" by the end most adult presses won't publish it, insisting it's YA even when it's not.

Anastasia of course dies at seventeen. Unless it's a survival AU, she ain't fitting into that box publishers put their adult heroines in.

A historical adult novel about Anastasia CAN be marketed, I'd argue, but it absolutely would not fit marketable "fanfic tropes". That's been tried with books like The Romanov Oracle (which really has no historical basis apart from Anastasia's name being used) and it sucked. Similar to Hollywood not making original movies or films that aren't part of a franchise, it would definitely be a book that would have to take a risk/chance.

But I still think if anyone was willing to gamble on it, it could be amazing.

Because then while the sisters surviving in England in The Romanov Heiress THINK their brother is dead, he's really just chilling in New Zealand wrongly assuming he's the only one in the family who got rescued by somebody British.

I know the fictional timeline probably doesn't hold up at all under scrutiny, but it's still a nice thing to imagine, all five escaping.

I also like thinking that, eventually, in this hypothetical crossover, Alexei/Nicholas sees the old movies Anastasia produced after the events of The Romanov Impostor and immediately recognizes his sister's handiwork.

I'm a sucker for a happy ending even if it makes zero sense. 😁

When (and perhaps where, I don't pretend/imagine it was the exact same everywhere) I was growing up, except for outliers like "Anastasia's Album" that not everyone knew about and had access to unless they were lucky enough their school library carried a copy, the only "Anastasia Romanova" books the average millennial child had were tie in media (picture or pop up, in most cases) to the 1997 film.

Which I think was why the Royal Diaries book we got in the 2000s was such a big deal. In a world where (especially if you didn't have much internet or library access, or someone to tell you you might enjoy Nicholas and Alexandra despite it being thick and from the 1960s) Anastasia was a (non)Disney princess first (unless you saw a usually very biased documentary about Anna Anderson on TV) and a real person second, Carolyn Meyer's little middle grade book was the first realistic/historical Anastasia kids got to know.

But then for a while there was a lull. It felt like Meyer's book was an outlier in historical fiction. We would get Rubies in the Snow in 2006 (which you CAN make the argument IS the superior Anastasia fictional diary book, but that's a topic for another post altogether) and The Diamond Secret as part of a fairytale retelling series in 2007/2008, but these weren't promoted and I don't think a lot of people even realised they'd ever existed/come out until years after the fact.

However I will never forget the gorgeous little boom of Anastasia fiction we had in the 2010s. Starting with Anastasia's Secret by Susanne Dunlap, Sarah Miller's The Lost Crown, and a NEW YA Anastasia book from none other than Carolyn Meyer herself (Anastasia and Her Sisters) came out in quick succession and were placed in prominent spots on the YA library shelves. Tsarina really had nothing to do with Anastasia but it got lumped in with that trend because of the Russian Revolution setting and Anastasia-like cover, and it's probably worth noting that the book (though it was published under a very obvious pseudonym) was actually by a very very popular teen fairytale retelling author at that time.

Then these books just... stopped... For a while.

I kind of thought towards the end of the decade we were on our way to a resurgence but with adult fiction since The Last Grand Duchess, The Secret Wife, The Lost Daughter, and I Was Anastasia were popping out very close to each other but it seems once the Romantasy trend took off and most women's historical fiction wanted to be Regency era to compete with Bridgerton and the resurgence of Jane Austen retellings, this trend once again faded before it could take off properly.

I'd love to see the trend swing back around again.

The 1916 ball in the animated movie seems to be heavily inspired by the IRL 1903 costume ball (you can see various guests, little Anastasia, and what appears to be Alexandra all in 16th century costume). But the Tsar is wearing what he'd wear to an ordinary ball; I kind of wish the animators had taken inspiration from his actual 1903 costume, because it's really beautiful, especially colourized.

We could have just seen him in his regular regal uniform in the Once Upon a December scene and had him in costume during the beginning.

The movie is still gorgeous regardless, I just think it would have been a cool detail if they'd included it.