Booze in the era of PotC
You don't drink rum in pints!
...That's what I've wanted to say to several of my favorite writers in the Pirates fandom. I don't want to hurt their feelings, because in the examples I've read I love the story otherwise, but it always spoils the mood a little for me when a character goes out drinking and orders "a pint of rum". (
justawench, it annoys me the way the phrase "zips his pants" in an 18th-century setting would annoy you:-) I sit there thinking how ghastly green-faced sick the character would be after a binge like that. Of course, the authors probably don't drink, so they've had little experience with the difference between beer and distilled liquor.
Then again, I don't drink much either. It makes me feel that I should ask a booze-checker to beta-read all my stories and tell me if the drinking is realistic (kinda like getting a sex-checker to tell you whether your slash is doable). In my experience, you drink beer in pints, or tankards which hold about a pint. You drink wine in glassfuls, about a half-cup of wine per glass. You drink your rum-or-other-hard-liquor from a shot glass holding about an ounce, and two or three shots are enough to make a guy drunk. (Mixed drinks are a whole other issue, but I'm just looking at single types of booze here.) Is there anything I'm overlooking?
Another misleading factor is that the characters in PotC drink unrealistically sometimes. Johnny Depp tends to make it look like he's swigging ginger ale. Keira's acting in the island scene is good, as I recall--she looks like she's not used to drinking hard likker and it burns her throat.
Very fun community, BTW.
...That's what I've wanted to say to several of my favorite writers in the Pirates fandom. I don't want to hurt their feelings, because in the examples I've read I love the story otherwise, but it always spoils the mood a little for me when a character goes out drinking and orders "a pint of rum". (
justawench, it annoys me the way the phrase "zips his pants" in an 18th-century setting would annoy you:-) I sit there thinking how ghastly green-faced sick the character would be after a binge like that. Of course, the authors probably don't drink, so they've had little experience with the difference between beer and distilled liquor.
Then again, I don't drink much either. It makes me feel that I should ask a booze-checker to beta-read all my stories and tell me if the drinking is realistic (kinda like getting a sex-checker to tell you whether your slash is doable). In my experience, you drink beer in pints, or tankards which hold about a pint. You drink wine in glassfuls, about a half-cup of wine per glass. You drink your rum-or-other-hard-liquor from a shot glass holding about an ounce, and two or three shots are enough to make a guy drunk. (Mixed drinks are a whole other issue, but I'm just looking at single types of booze here.) Is there anything I'm overlooking?
Another misleading factor is that the characters in PotC drink unrealistically sometimes. Johnny Depp tends to make it look like he's swigging ginger ale. Keira's acting in the island scene is good, as I recall--she looks like she's not used to drinking hard likker and it burns her throat.
Very fun community, BTW.