cahn | (no subject)

This is totally too good to keep to myself: on my "I showed my family opera clips" post,

selenak are talking about Frederick the Great (by way of Don Carlo, of course) and it is like this amazing virtuoso spontaneous thing and whoa

Things I knew about Frederick the Great before a year ago: he was king of... Prussia??

Additional things I knew about Frederick the Great before the last couple of days:

selenak informed me last year that he and his dad may well have been at least somewhat the inspiration for Schiller's Don Carlos, and everything that goes with that: his dad (Friedrich Wilhelm, henceforth FW) was majorly awful, he had a boyfriend (Katte) who was horribly killed by his dad

Only a partial list of the additional things I now know about Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and associated historical figures due to mildred and selenak:
-Fritz and Katte's escape plan (which resulted in Katte's execution) was... really, really boneheaded. As boneheaded as opera plots! :P
-Katte was in the process of destroying 1,500 letters when he got caught (! puts all those letters in Don Carlos into perspective) (ETA: but also see mildred's comment below)
-Fritz wrote opera libretti and so did his sister
-Fritz decided to use himself as an experimental test subject to see if it was entirely possible to do without sleep via the application of coffee WITH PEPPERCORNS AND MUSTARD
-Fritz wrote a poem about orgasm that also reads as if he's never actually, like, had sex (although that was not in this post, it was in the comments to this one)
-FW apparently beat up George II when they were kids
-I am totally not even going to try to summarize the discussion about FW's "rationalized sadism" and sexual hangups and the reeeeeally bizarre Dresden interlude (go down a couple of comments for the really insane stuff)
-Fritz' sister Wilhemina wrote tell-all memoirs about her totally insane family which I am SUPER going to read now, watch this space

Also, there is apparently some subplot involving Russian fanboys that introduces an entirely new cast of people which I am dying to find out about

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

OK, mildred, I'm starting to see what you mean about teen!Fritz just not... being very good at plotting. It seems clear from the way she talks about FW and Fritz that he just wanted OUT. Wilhelmine (who seems in general a little less damaged/abused, although the queen is putting her through a LOT of emotional abuse, it's super awful) keeps trying to tell him all of this is a bad idea!

Fritz: *waltzes in wearing fancy French clothes*
Wilhelmine: WHO IS THAT WEIRDO?! Oh, it's you, bro.
Fritz: I am FED UP with FW, I have a plan!
Wilhelmine: ...that is a really, really terrible plan, bro. Here are all the reasons this is super stupid. Please don't use that plan, you'll be captured immediately.
Fritz: ...oh. Okay.

*rinse and repeat SEVERAL TIMES*

Fritz: I have another plan!
Wilhelmine: As usual, that is a really terrible stupid no-good plan.
Fritz: Don't care. I'm DOING IT.

selenak, I am now kinda wondering whether Schiller had specifically read Wilhelmine's memoirs and whether Elisabeth owes a debt to her, because Wilhelmine's pointing out how boneheaded his plans are and begging him to stop is giving me flashbacks to Elisabeth doing pretty much the same with Posa.

Alas, Schiller can't have, because he died five years before they were published. (In 1810 - 52 years after her death -, Schiller died in 1805; Wilhelmine was careful not to have her tell all published within her or her brother's or her husband's lifetimes.) Otoh, I suppose it's just possible that he could have read them in manuscript if he really wanted to, because he did know enough nobles and librarians in the relevant principalities.

Ha, well, guess it wasn't Wilhelmine -- I imagine there are other strong awesome women in the world, after all :) I can see why she didn't want it published in her brother's lifetime! (Not her husband, yet -- I haven't even gotten to the part where she gets married yet.)

OK, mildred, I'm starting to see what you mean about teen!Fritz just not... being very good at plotting. It seems clear from the way she talks about FW and Fritz that he just wanted OUT.

Yeah. :/ Even adult Fritz was like, "That went off like a childish prank, and Keith and Katte were GREAT GUYS, don't get me wrong, but, uh, about as dumb as I was at that age." ("Now I just never tell anyone anything ever, problem solved. I have a different problem now, called failing Interpersonal Relations 101, but that's okay, you can just bury me next to my dogs, k? K??")

Honestly, I feel like bb!Fritz was trapped and desperate and furious and impulsive and scared to death and also *despising* most everyone around him and especially FW, and none of these things lent themselves to thinking clearly. The real problem, in my mind, is that every time I read about these events, Fritz, who's young and not thinking clearly, is completely alone and trying to come up with an escape plan on his own, and having to drive it and drag everyone else into it, and everyone is going, "Um, maybe...not...Fritz?" and no one is saying, "Look, this is an abusive situation, you're right, you 100% need out. Sit down, it's okay, I as an adult will come up with a better idea."

I'm not blaming anyone for this, it's the 18th century with 18th century mores and FW is an absolute monarch plus totally batshit to boot, everyone gets a pass from me, but really, expecting an 18-yo to come up with a plan for escaping his abuser, when his mind goes into blind emotional turmoil every time he even thinks about said abuser, is asking for a really, really bad plan.

Actually. Writing that out. I wonder if the reason *so many* people were in the know about this plan was that, consciously or subconsciously, Fritz was looking for someone to go YES YES YOU NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE* and to actually take some initiative, instead of him having to drag everyone into his plan by sheer force of personality, when everyone I can think of is--quite understandably, given the nature of the plan and the risks involved!--very reluctant to have anything to do with it.

* This...may or may not be one of my fix-it fic AU WIPs, just saying. :P

I would point out that Alexander the Great, tactician extraordinaire and undefeated in battle, came up with a really bad plan for dealing with *his* semi-estranged father at the same age (

selenak, I'm referring to the Pixodarus affair), and the only reason it didn't end as badly was because Philip was never as awful to Alexander as FW was to Fritz.

ETA: I couldn't agree more with selenak's claim that Alexander would have killed FW well before FW killed Katte. How much of that is the difference between their mothers (Alexander's mother is #1 suspect in the eventual murder of Philip; no one's clear whether Alexander was involved or not), the difference between their centuries (Enlightenment prince vs. Achilles-cosplayer), and the difference between their innate temperaments, we'll never know.

Wilhelmine (who seems in general a little less damaged/abused, although the queen is putting her through a LOT of emotional abuse, it's super awful)

Yeah, FW was awful to his wife, Wilhelmine, Fritz, and to a lesser extent most of the other kids, but everyone is agreed that, as the heir and future king, Fritz got the brunt of the abuse. Wilhelmine, in turn, got more abuse from non-FW people.

It SUCKED to be those kids. :/ CPS for everyone.

Fritz: I have another plan!

Lol, your summary reminds me of an Eddie Izzard skit, where he's talking about Napoleon invading Russia, then deciding it was a bad idea.

Hitler: "I've got a better idea, got a better idea..." *invades Russia* "Oh, it's the same idea! It's the same idea, it's the same idea..."

ETA 2: I also wish to point out what I said in a slightly different way somewhere else in this conversation. I, at the age of 17, having just been accepted to MIT to study physics, could not figure out a plan to get across the country and attend MIT in the face of my parents' resistance, despite the presence of sympathetic adults at my high school. Which you'd think someone who'd just been accepted to MIT could do! You'd think it would be inherent in "smart enough to be accepted to MIT"! But no. That's not how it works.

And granted my situation was much less desperate. But the flip side to that was that I wasn't all panicky inside and should have been thinking more clearly. So this is one reason I'm reluctant to say this plan wasn't Fritz's best effort at that age.

Edited 2019-08-29 21:59 (UTC)

Yeah, I also got into MIT and there was nooooo waaaay I would have been able to figure out something like that. Which also makes me think of something else, which is that Fritz' upbringing does not seem like the sort to, well, feature much practical practice in the way of coming up with Plans That Don't Suck, Taking Initiative in Smart Ways, and other such things. So it's not at all surprising his first attempt to do all that was really bad!

There's that. Oh, haha, in one of my modern AUs (which is a fix-it fic AU to someone else's modern AU, which I have fixed such that Katte DOESN'T DIE), I was writing a passage earlier today where Fritz is lamenting to Katte that, if only he had paid attention to all the things Dad was trying to teach him all these years, he might be able to come up with a plan that doesn't suck for keeping Dad from capturing him. Poor Fritz, damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

In real life, I'm not sure how much going along with FW's upbringing would have taught bb!Fritz to come up with decent escape plans. It's a good question. But it was definitely not Fritz's own self-teaching priority, when he was desperately squeezing every spare moment he could sneak in on music, literature, French, and the arts.

(no subject)

Reading Wilhemine's memoirs

Re: Reading Wilhemine's memoirs

Re: Reading Wilhemine's memoirs

Re: Reading Wilhemine's memoirs

Re: Reading Wilhemine's memoirs

Re: Reading Wilhemine's memoirs