i have very little respect for romanov fanatics to begin with but i have even less respect for people passionate enough about the late 19th-early 20th century extended romanov family to have a podcast or youtube channel dedicated to them but STILL dont bother taking literally 5 minutes to learn the cyrillic alphabet to pronounce all their names right lmao. (and most of the time you dont even have to do that, on the wikipedia pages of a good number of them, in the first ! goddamn ! line ! of ! text ! theres an ipa transcription or a link to an audio clip or both!!!) 

i just clicked on a recommended video (idek why honestly, cuz i certainly wasnt interested in watching any part of this 15 minute long veneration of a minor russian princess) and this person pronounced the name “xenia* georgievna” as Зе́ня Джордже́йвна. and, like........ im not pedantic enough to fault someone who doesnt speak russian for saying it like that. if you didnt know how those names were pronounced and you were seeing them for the first time and reading a text out loud, there’s no reason to expect you to know the pronunciation. 

BUT (!) considering the amount of time, intellectual effort, and sometimes actual real money that goes into this shit (a lot of these things have pretty glossy editing and production quality), its ridiculous that you wouldnt take the time to check this seemingly minor but (imho) very important detail. you’re not being put on the spot, you’re literally reading off of a script into a fancy microphone! there’s really no excuse! how can you be THAT obsessed with the russian royal family and apparently still give precisely zero fucks about something as basic as how to pronounce these super common russian given names?

but i guess that makes sense cuz the romanovs were not even russian OOOOOOOHHHHH SICK BURN