See, I have this problem where I have this strict code of ethics and a belief in political freedom and stuff in real life, but the moment the context is fictional or remote enough in historical time that I feel comfortable treating it like fiction, I have this deep emotional love for trickster figures, magnificent bastards, generals, and autocrats, and always have.
This is why my other favorite historical figures are people like Diocletian and Alcibiades, and my favorite fictional characters are people like Denethor and Odysseus. It's horribly hypocritical, but if you can impress me enough with your bastardy, I will overlook any amount of misbehavior that I won't condone in real life and will harshly criticize in anyone else in history or fiction.
And unlike these hypothetical TV show fans, long before I knew about any Woobie Fritz, I was in love with Magnificent Bastard Fritz. Anyone who could write the Anti-Machiavel in 1739 and invade Silesia in 1740 was catnip to my 15-yo self.
cahn: Crown Prince Friedrich, Enlightenment prince and flute-playing woobie, wrote this political pamphlet all about how Machiavelli was wrong and princes should be honorable and all that. Enlightenment thinkers throughout Europe were all eager to see him ascend the throne and begin a new age.
Three months after its publication in 1740, King Friedrich II was already violating agreements and invading his minding-their-own-business neighbors for the sake of capturing their resources for his own poorer country (thus forcing him to later get defensive about the Anti-Machiavel and write about how that was a nice ideal for crown princes, but when you're king, realpolitik was a much more important thing).
People were OUTRAGED.
Now, it's immediately obvious to everyone that this is exactly what Machiavelli would have recommended he do. Voltaire snarked that Fritz wasn't smart enough to understand that, and that he had just genuinely reneged on his principles once he got a taste of power. 15-yo mildred_of_midgard was CONVINCED everyone was wrong and it was all deliberate magnificent bastardy on Fritz's part, and immediately decided that he was her ultimate historical fave, because why would you have a fave that wasn't problematic. (Seriously, I'm not sure I've ever had a fave that was *less* problematic than this until 3 years ago, and that came as a great surprise and says more about surprising authorial choices than about my tastes. ETA: no, that's not true, there was Alan Turing. But that's because 20th century is too recent to be treated as fiction.)
35-yo me is reluctantly compelled to concede that, yeah, it doesn't look all that deliberate, and Fritz actually was more like if Gandalf had taken the Ring of Power, and that's why I don't believe in autocracy as a system of government. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. None of that stops 35-yo me from wanting to fly back to Germany so I can spit on FW's grave, pay more respects at my still-ultimate-historical-fave Fritz's, possibly put a potato on Katte's because they should have something to link them, and shrug at Heinrich's and tell him he has to find his own defender, because, "Sorry, I'm taken, and I'm only here at Rheinsberg in the first place because Fritz used to live here and I need to check out the grounds as part of fic research."
But at least I recognize that my fandom is a place where I get to be unfair, and that if I'm summarizing events for other people, I have to acknowledge that, while the cycle of abuse is a thing, you have to blame perpetrators and not victims for their actions.
(35-yo me also needs to reread the Anti-Machiavel, because the last time I read it, at 16 or 17 or so, I had read The Prince, but not the majority of Machiavelli's work, and certainly not a fair bit of modern Machiavelli scholarship, and I now consider myself qualified to have opinions not only about Machiavelli but about other people's opinions about Machiavelli, and I strongly suspect Fritz was shortchanging M's actual thinking, because almost everyone does.)
(To my embarrassment, 15-yo me, once I learned about Woobie Fritz, could not understand why you would faint when watching someone else get beheaded, and had remarkably little sympathy for that part. 15-yo me also could not read novels with realistic characterization, because I did not understand humans, not even a little bit. 35-yo me still sometimes feels like a Martian anthropologist who slowly came to understand humans through the medium of books, study, and conscious thought rather than through similarity of psychology.)
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
This is why my other favorite historical figures are people like Diocletian and Alcibiades, and my favorite fictional characters are people like Denethor and Odysseus. It's horribly hypocritical, but if you can impress me enough with your bastardy, I will overlook any amount of misbehavior that I won't condone in real life and will harshly criticize in anyone else in history or fiction.
And unlike these hypothetical TV show fans, long before I knew about any Woobie Fritz, I was in love with Magnificent Bastard Fritz. Anyone who could write the Anti-Machiavel in 1739 and invade Silesia in 1740 was catnip to my 15-yo self.
Three months after its publication in 1740, King Friedrich II was already violating agreements and invading his minding-their-own-business neighbors for the sake of capturing their resources for his own poorer country (thus forcing him to later get defensive about the Anti-Machiavel and write about how that was a nice ideal for crown princes, but when you're king, realpolitik was a much more important thing).
People were OUTRAGED.
Now, it's immediately obvious to everyone that this is exactly what Machiavelli would have recommended he do. Voltaire snarked that Fritz wasn't smart enough to understand that, and that he had just genuinely reneged on his principles once he got a taste of power. 15-yo
35-yo me is reluctantly compelled to concede that, yeah, it doesn't look all that deliberate, and Fritz actually was more like if Gandalf had taken the Ring of Power, and that's why I don't believe in autocracy as a system of government. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. None of that stops 35-yo me from wanting to fly back to Germany so I can spit on FW's grave, pay more respects at my still-ultimate-historical-fave Fritz's, possibly put a potato on Katte's because they should have something to link them, and shrug at Heinrich's and tell him he has to find his own defender, because, "Sorry, I'm taken, and I'm only here at Rheinsberg in the first place because Fritz used to live here and I need to check out the grounds as part of fic research."
But at least I recognize that my fandom is a place where I get to be unfair, and that if I'm summarizing events for other people, I have to acknowledge that, while the cycle of abuse is a thing, you have to blame perpetrators and not victims for their actions.
(35-yo me also needs to reread the Anti-Machiavel, because the last time I read it, at 16 or 17 or so, I had read The Prince, but not the majority of Machiavelli's work, and certainly not a fair bit of modern Machiavelli scholarship, and I now consider myself qualified to have opinions not only about Machiavelli but about other people's opinions about Machiavelli, and I strongly suspect Fritz was shortchanging M's actual thinking, because almost everyone does.)
(To my embarrassment, 15-yo me, once I learned about Woobie Fritz, could not understand why you would faint when watching someone else get beheaded, and had remarkably little sympathy for that part. 15-yo me also could not read novels with realistic characterization, because I did not understand humans, not even a little bit. 35-yo me still sometimes feels like a Martian anthropologist who slowly came to understand humans through the medium of books, study, and conscious thought rather than through similarity of psychology.)