zandravandra

Her Majesty The Prince Collar Code

Added 2023-08-05 00:06:10 +0000 UTC

Hey hi folks! The next chapter of Her Majesty The Prince will be delayed by a week on account of life stuff that basically saw me get very little sleep for the past week up until the moment things resolved positively. Apologies for the delay! In the meantime though, have a sketch of how the 'collar code' works in the setting!

The beta reader who came up with the idea put it as 'little coded collar markings that indicate pronouns' - and I liked the idea so much it became canonical!

It varies per language, of course, but in Video Game RPG Fantasy France the code is as follows:

one dot: feminine pronouns
two slashes: masculine pronouns
half square: gender-neutral pronouns
...and they can be combined!

Originating as a royal guard tradition for etiquette purposes, it was adopted by the populace at large over time both for functional and for fashion reasons. It lets people know how you'd like to be addressed, and can also be integrated into accessories like ribbons or scarves.

This essentially came into being when I rewrote a scene and accidentally made it so that a new character didn't get properly introduced to the protagonist, which led to folks wondering how she was able to immediately gender them correctly. Sometimes you can turn mistakes or oversights into interesting lore! ^^

See you next week for chapter 17!