1) Sounds like it works, I'm just worried you may get feedback along the lines of "yet another female character who just can't deal with being in power and has to have a dude - an out-of-nowhere one at that - replace her". (From the initial description in the post, most female characters mentioned come across sounding very passive: the useless mother, the ill-prepared and then forgotten protagonist, the useless princess; the emperor and the wannabe emperor *do stuff* even if they're not the good guys of the story. But again, this is just what I'm getting from the quick outline so apologies and please ignore if incorrect.)
2) I suppose she could do what a lot of people in authority but without credentials do: mask it by acting very loudly authoritative? But then she'd have to basically lead a double life: bossing underlings to do all the real work while she gets herself equipped for it... plus this wouldn't make her sympathetic to other characters (even if it would help distance and isolation) despite the reader knowing it's a ruse; so yeah, I haven't got a good answer here, sorry.
3) That's fine; I was only remarking on the "feels imported" bit so if that's not explicit I don't think I could complain about it.
4) Fair enough! It was just that the succession of these very English elements made the setting begin to sound like 19th ct London or Bristol with Russian names and titles pasted on.
5) This can be sorted through little_details (LJ comm, not sure about a Dreamwidth equivalent) or calling your flist/network for Russians willing to help out; wouldn't worry about it too much yet, though I would run an early outline or draft by a native speaker for details that seem more off than what one would allow for a fantasy setting. The best I could say, being a Slavic speaker but not Russian, is that we tend not to smoosh words into names so for example "Witches' Wood" sounds less essentially English than Witchwood.
6) None taken! :D (A question, now that we're on the subject of places' names: "St. Catherine the Greek" says that there is a Greece in this world as well, so I'm not sure any more if your country is supposed to be like Russia but not because this isn't our world, AU Russia where there is an AU Greece as well (and the rest) or like Russia but not since Russia and Greece both exist.
If yiou want to credit me for help that's ace of you, but I'll confess I'm not being entirely altrustic here: I'm sketching out this comic that's happening across a future AU Eurasia so by thinking about the issues you may face here I'm trying to see where I too could culture!fail.
Apologies for the belated reply!
2) I suppose she could do what a lot of people in authority but without credentials do: mask it by acting very loudly authoritative? But then she'd have to basically lead a double life: bossing underlings to do all the real work while she gets herself equipped for it... plus this wouldn't make her sympathetic to other characters (even if it would help distance and isolation) despite the reader knowing it's a ruse; so yeah, I haven't got a good answer here, sorry.
3) That's fine; I was only remarking on the "feels imported" bit so if that's not explicit I don't think I could complain about it.
4) Fair enough! It was just that the succession of these very English elements made the setting begin to sound like 19th ct London or Bristol with Russian names and titles pasted on.
5) This can be sorted through little_details (LJ comm, not sure about a Dreamwidth equivalent) or calling your flist/network for Russians willing to help out; wouldn't worry about it too much yet, though I would run an early outline or draft by a native speaker for details that seem more off than what one would allow for a fantasy setting. The best I could say, being a Slavic speaker but not Russian, is that we tend not to smoosh words into names so for example "Witches' Wood" sounds less essentially English than Witchwood.
6) None taken! :D (A question, now that we're on the subject of places' names: "St. Catherine the Greek" says that there is a Greece in this world as well, so I'm not sure any more if your country is supposed to be like Russia but not because this isn't our world, AU Russia where there is an AU Greece as well (and the rest) or like Russia but not since Russia and Greece both exist.
If yiou want to credit me for help that's ace of you, but I'll confess I'm not being entirely altrustic here: I'm sketching out this comic that's happening across a future AU Eurasia so by thinking about the issues you may face here I'm trying to see where I too could culture!fail.