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[cahn]

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

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

Advantages exiled!Fritz would have over the Stuarts:

1. Smarter.
2. More strong-willed.
3. Willing to pretend to be Protestant (this is easier when you're an atheist than when you're Catholic and almost all your support is coming from Catholics).
4. Born and raised in Prussia, known by the locals, disinherited at age 18 for not wanting to be abused, as opposed to "My father/grandfather was kicked out for some really questionable politics, and y'all don't know me from Adam, but I still think that makes me king."
5. Mother and sister present. If FW has persecuted them to the point where they don't have the opportunity to form an actual party, that means even more local sympathies. Otherwise, rival party.

Heinrich:

"given the age gap between him (Heinrich) and Fritz, he wouldn't have had many memories of him, let alone those inclined to make him take Friedrich's side

Au contraire! I think the fewer memories he has of Fritz, the *more* likely he is to take Fritz's side! Why did Heinrich hate Fritz so much in RL? Because he had all those memories of Fritz treating him and Augustus Wilhelm like total shit! By the time Fritz died, Heinrich had accumulated so many grudges he needed an obelisk to contain them all.

But consider, AU Fritz has never been in a position of power, and he's the poor woobie who ran away from abusive Dad because he wanted to play the flute but kept getting beaten up. Meanwhile, Sophia Dorothea and Wilhelmine are left behind. They make Fritz into a TOTAL TRAGIC HERO. The message Heinrich gets is "Your poor brother is *just like you*, and that's why you never got to know him, it's so sad."

It's veeeery easy to idealize your tragic hero older brother whom you *never met*. And, as you know, a large part of why Heinrich and Friedrich didn't get along was because they had so much in common that I like to call Heinrich "Friedrich Lite", and of course because Fritz kind of used him as an emotional punching bag to roleplay his traumas from the other side.

Only possible way I see this not happening: FW comes down on Sophia Dorothea and Wilhelmine so hard that they're isolated from the rest of the family. But even then, Fritz managed to get letters to his mother and sister even when he wasn't supposed to, even at Küstrin! I think even if FW takes over Heinrich's upbringing and keeps him away from the women to prevent a Fritz repeat, look what happened every time FW tried to get someone to teach Fritz the error of his ways: the vast majority of people who were supposed to abuse him by proxy were gay/educated/cultured/not totally batshit. Fritz actually (before the Katte tragedy) wrote that prison wasn't as bad as living with his father, because his jailers actually had some sympathy for him.

In conclusion, I think Heinrich comes away with a pretty positive opinion of exiled!Fritz with nothing to contradict it. Then fairness and primogeniture come into play, and maybe Heinrich thinks that peaceful, flute-playing brother would make a better king than Dad-pleasing, uniform-wearing brother.

THEN Fritz comes to the throne, and THEN Heinrich starts to regret his choice, as, as you put it about Wilhelmine, "Thereafter, my moments of WTF, Fritz? Keep increasing." Actually, Fritz with a successful escape attempt, no Küstrin, no forced marriage, and Katte and Keith at his side is maybe less of an all-out asshole to his family, but still not the nicest of people and still needs that therapist.

[mildred_of_midgard]

They make Fritz into a TOTAL TRAGIC HERO.

Wilhelmine composes an OPERA about her brother the tragic hero, thus anticipating Verdi by some hundred and thirty-ish years. :P

[selenak]

So would have. Mind you, if she gets married off to Bayreuth in this AU, too, she doesn't have the chance to influence Heinrich much. (Though her mother still would have.) Though I concede you're totally right in general - an absent Fritz could have looked like a hero to identify with to Heinrich!