Fic/Meta rec: Penmanship, by ashen key

[beatrice_otter]

ashen_key noticed something weird: Steve's handwriting, as seen in Cap 2, looks modern and not like someone who grew up in the 1930s.  So zie wrote a fic about it, which is short and excellent: Penmanship.

Comments

[synecdochic]

Before I read the fic:

The handwriting as presented is not only modern, it's got a lot of strong 'feminine' signifiers. It's clearly the printed handwriting of someone who learned D'Nealean. Steve would have been taught Palmer (or possibly Zaner-Bloser, I'm not 100% on the switchover dates) and his writing would look way more like this. (And it would be cursive, not print.)

That was one of the things that threw me out of the movie really fucking hard, in fact, and I have been meaning to write the essay on the development of English writing scripts in the 19th and 20th centuries for a while!