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

From:

cahn

Haha, no, it's good you're not always just saying good things about him :P And selenak's TV-show post had introduced me to a lot of this stuff, though not in this great detail about Friedrich :P

...that fic looks Highly Relevant To My Interests :D

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, right, the TV show post!

It's an awesome fic in the midst of an awesome series. I found the million characters confusing at first, but the more installments I read, the more I started to be able to keep track of who was who and to have at least ten favorite characters. ;)

From:

selenak

That's why I predicted that ca. season 3 or 4, the fans not able to stomach Friedrich's arc from Woobie to Magnificent Bastard would switch their loyalties to Heinrich as their new woobie.:)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

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.)

From:

selenak

Ha, I'll see your Friedrich and raise you a Federico when it comes to historical Magnificent Bastards. Mine is the Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Stupor mundi, Renaissance type in the middle ages and definitely one impressive bastard. No, but seriously, I'm fond of my share, both fictional and real, as long as they are safely separated from me by either fiction or time.

(Icon displaying my favourite fictional MB in all tv world, Arvin Sloane in Alias)

But at nearly 50 years of age, I've seen a lot of fandoms. Hence my observation about the prospect of loyalty switching among a sizable amount once it's clear where Fritz is headed. Not least because imo, a lot of fans are conservative in that they're stuck on initial impressions. It's also why fanfiction sometimes feels weirdly AU without intending to be so if it's based on first season characterisation while show and characters have moved on in a completely different direction. (Of course, if one is lucky, there are also new fans who came on board later, write with the later season characterisations and are a bit bewildered why character X still bursts into tears at the drop of a hat in other people's stories when they know X mostly as the guy reducing Y and Z to jelly. :)

ETA: sorry for all the edits, I haven't been able to figure out how to disable the autocorrect on this computer yet, and it keeps capitalizing words!

Edited Date: 2019-08-22 05:04 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I'm fond of my share, both fictional and real, as long as they are safely separated from me by either fiction or time.

See, you understand me. :D Yay.

It's also why fanfiction sometimes feels weirdly AU without intending to be so if it's based on first season characterisation while show and characters have moved on in a completely different direction.

HAHAHA, been there and done that. Sort of in reverse of your example, because Lucius Malfoy, despite being a Nazi analogue, was fictional enough that I could latch onto his Magnificent Bastardy in books 2 and 3, and then when later books came along, I started complaining to my partner. "Did he become evil?" she asked. "No, it's worse than that! *outrage* He became a wuss! (He was already evil, sheesh.)" :P

ETA: sorry for all the edits

No worries, I edit like mad whenever I think of a better way to phrase something. I've accumulated like 10 edits I would make to the Seven Years' War summary if there weren't already replies. :P

From:

cahn

...this subthread is making me feel better about all the hilarity I feel about all these comments and Wilhemine's memoirs. Which occasionally I'm like "wow, these were real people who had really awful lives" and I feel bad for them, but a lot of time I'm just enjoying WTFing at the whole thing.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

IKR? I feel bad for everyone when I stop to think about them as real people. When I'm in fandom mode, I only feel bad for the ones I like. :-P

*is writing fix-it fic for the ones I like as we speak*

ETA: In conclusion, like I said, it's not just history, it's also fandom! Enjoy your WTFery like it's a TV show written by selenak. ;)

Edited Date: 2019-08-23 03:22 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Speaking of that fic, I've been working my way through the series, and I just ran into this (non-Fritz) anecdote in an author's note that I thought you might find as delightfully charming as I did:

"The real Lafayette and Adrienne's families wanted to arrange a marriage between them, but they were concerned that their children might rebel at being forced into it. So instead, from early childhood onwards, they arranged casual meetings and and various 'whoops, hey, look who that is?' encounters. Without ever telling them. By their teens, the two of them were determined to get married NO MATTER WHAT ANYONE SAID. I like to think the parents went: 'Oh no. Well, if you must.' Then drank champagne."

OMG it's good parenting OMG!

Edited (Nested quotes) Date: 2019-08-24 11:13 pm (UTC)