at first I was thinking I might ask for this AU for Yuletide too only, like, it's all right here so I don't even need to ask for it
Hee! I've been thinking this too! Sometimes a plot outline is almost as good as a fic, and they're a lot easier to generate.
How over the line would it have been if in this MT/Fritz AU where Fritz isn't having sex with her, MT had found someone else (Franz Stefan?) to father her kids?
I've been wondering the same thing, only with brother Wilhelm, if an annulment was out of the question. Yesterday I entertained the idea of Fritz allowing Franz Stefan to father his heir, for about two seconds, and then went, "Naaaahh. DDD-:" But if I squint, I could almost just barely see some parallel universe where Fritz is telling his brother and MT, "Okay, you two, heirs from my wife and my next of kin, get to it, I have better things to do." Fritz is just enough of a "I do what I want" person that if he decides he wants something, societal expectations be damned. That's the scenario in which I see him agreeing to this.
Problem is, even in the rather unlikely scenario where MT/her family/the Austrians put up enough of a fight against Fritz's reluctance to father heirs that he concedes there needs to be a child of the marriage, *and* he decides that it doesn't need to be of his body if everyone involved is discreet about it, I see MT's piety and sense of duty as the sticking point. selenak can tell me if she disagrees, as she knows MT rather better than I do, but I have a hard time imagining it.
And that's *if* Fritz goes along with it, which 1) probably requires it to be his idea, and 2) requires him to have his back to the wall in terms of admitting he needs an heir via MT and not be willing to do it himself. (If he really is incapable of getting it up with a woman, I see an annulment agreed to or better yet, insisted on, by MT as the most likely scenario.)
Interesting point re all this, though: Goldsmith interprets "C'est pourquoi, si je me marie en galant homme, c'est-à-dire laissant agir madame comme bon lui semble, et faisant de mon côté ce qui me plaît, et vive la liberté!" from one of his letters to Grumbkow to mean that Fritz might have been okay with EC having discreet affairs. Now, as noted, Goldsmith puts a lot of weight on evidence that won't hold it up, imo, and my eyebrows immediately flew up. Especially since the preceding text is "Once I get married, I'm in charge, no woman ever tells *me* what to do."
Plus, even if Goldsmith's right (curious what you two think), what desperate Crown Prince Fritz thinks and what autocratic King Friedrich II thinks are two different things. *Plus*, a child is not the same thing as a discreet affair, although if it's his idea and it's discreet enough that no one knows/no one talks about it, and he's keeping up appearances enough that it's plausibly his...I would be interested in what selenak thinks, because my own gut reaction is that having someone else quietly father MT's children is a very sensible solution to a political problem, but Fritz's resistance to having his hand forced in any way combined with MT's piety means that, even if one of them manages to come up with the idea, the other one most likely isn't going to go along with it.
Re: Nomination coordination redux
at first I was thinking I might ask for this AU for Yuletide too only, like, it's all right here so I don't even need to ask for it
Hee! I've been thinking this too! Sometimes a plot outline is almost as good as a fic, and they're a lot easier to generate.
How over the line would it have been if in this MT/Fritz AU where Fritz isn't having sex with her, MT had found someone else (Franz Stefan?) to father her kids?
I've been wondering the same thing, only with brother Wilhelm, if an annulment was out of the question. Yesterday I entertained the idea of Fritz allowing Franz Stefan to father his heir, for about two seconds, and then went, "Naaaahh. DDD-:" But if I squint, I could almost just barely see some parallel universe where Fritz is telling his brother and MT, "Okay, you two, heirs from my wife and my next of kin, get to it, I have better things to do." Fritz is just enough of a "I do what I want" person that if he decides he wants something, societal expectations be damned. That's the scenario in which I see him agreeing to this.
Problem is, even in the rather unlikely scenario where MT/her family/the Austrians put up enough of a fight against Fritz's reluctance to father heirs that he concedes there needs to be a child of the marriage, *and* he decides that it doesn't need to be of his body if everyone involved is discreet about it, I see MT's piety and sense of duty as the sticking point.
And that's *if* Fritz goes along with it, which 1) probably requires it to be his idea, and 2) requires him to have his back to the wall in terms of admitting he needs an heir via MT and not be willing to do it himself. (If he really is incapable of getting it up with a woman, I see an annulment agreed to or better yet, insisted on, by MT as the most likely scenario.)
Interesting point re all this, though: Goldsmith interprets "C'est pourquoi, si je me marie en galant homme, c'est-à-dire laissant agir madame comme bon lui semble, et faisant de mon côté ce qui me plaît, et vive la liberté!" from one of his letters to Grumbkow to mean that Fritz might have been okay with EC having discreet affairs. Now, as noted, Goldsmith puts a lot of weight on evidence that won't hold it up, imo, and my eyebrows immediately flew up. Especially since the preceding text is "Once I get married, I'm in charge, no woman ever tells *me* what to do."
Plus, even if Goldsmith's right (curious what you two think), what desperate Crown Prince Fritz thinks and what autocratic King Friedrich II thinks are two different things. *Plus*, a child is not the same thing as a discreet affair, although if it's his idea and it's discreet enough that no one knows/no one talks about it, and he's keeping up appearances enough that it's plausibly his...I would be interested in what
AUs are fun!