Yeah, what about us?! (Honestly, I think there are much better reasons to be interested, not the least of which is that if his favorites were women, no one would call you a gossipy sensationalist for being interested in his relationships with them. There's also the question of "just how did being gay in the 18th century affect people?")
Maria Theresa is just so great, so emotionally healthy compared to... well, most people at that time, but particularly Fritz. With some reason, of course. Yay no-super-traumatic childhoods and romances :P
Yeah, I mean, she may not hit a bunch of my specific buttons, but she's definitely got her shit together as a human being. Go, MT!
Re Fritz, though: we spend a lot of time talking about the ways in which his trauma fucked him up emotionally, but honestly, it's possible to look at it from the flip-side, and I do that a lot. As you know, Bob, I think there's a tendency to overestimate the extent to which the trauma shaped him. And regardless, even if, for the sake of argument, you agree with the historians about every single thing about him that's ever been attributed to the trauma...I continue to be fairly impressed by how intact he came out of all this. Compared to a lot of other people in a whole gamut of other traumatic experiences.
Part of this is genetic, of course, and his personality, but a huge part of it, I think, was that FW was an outlier. The number of people who agreed with FW and wholeheartedly joined in with the abuse are vanishingly small. Even Fritz's earliest influences, his mother and sister, were all, "Yeah arts! Yeah French!" Even the *society* in which they lived overwhelmingly disagreed with FW.
FW: Music is effeminate. Male musicians in Europe: abound. Are respected. Are often in the military as well.
Etc., etc.
So Fritz was getting validated like crazy every time he turned around. The number of validation/mitigation anecdotes is astounding. Even Katte's executioner had to be ordered three times, and was apologizing profusely to Katte! And as a result (I would argue), a lot of Fritz's time as an abuse victim was spent waiting for Dad to die already so he could join the rest of the world in Sane Land. And that kind of ability to externalize the abuse makes a world of difference to your prospects as a survivor, and is why I start twitching every time I see a biographer use the word "broken" to describe what FW did to Fritz. Hurt? Absolutely. Damage? Sure, at this point we'd be arguing semantics. But break?
I maintain that Fritz came out of his abuse difficult, frequently abusive to others, and unhappy, but with a basically intact core. And that is part of why in the other comment I said his relationship with Wilhelmine was the best thing for both of them: as far as I can tell, they both came out with basically intact cores, and without that close relationship (and at least some of the positive aspects with their mother, amongst all her terrible acts of parenting), it would have been much more unlikely for both of them.
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Re: speaking of musical relationships....
Date: 2019-10-15 06:27 am (UTC)Maria Theresa is just so great, so emotionally healthy compared to... well, most people at that time, but particularly Fritz. With some reason, of course. Yay no-super-traumatic childhoods and romances :P
Yeah, I mean, she may not hit a bunch of my specific buttons, but she's definitely got her shit together as a human being. Go, MT!
Re Fritz, though: we spend a lot of time talking about the ways in which his trauma fucked him up emotionally, but honestly, it's possible to look at it from the flip-side, and I do that a lot. As you know, Bob, I think there's a tendency to overestimate the extent to which the trauma shaped him. And regardless, even if, for the sake of argument, you agree with the historians about every single thing about him that's ever been attributed to the trauma...I continue to be fairly impressed by how intact he came out of all this. Compared to a lot of other people in a whole gamut of other traumatic experiences.
Part of this is genetic, of course, and his personality, but a huge part of it, I think, was that FW was an outlier. The number of people who agreed with FW and wholeheartedly joined in with the abuse are vanishingly small. Even Fritz's earliest influences, his mother and sister, were all, "Yeah arts! Yeah French!" Even the *society* in which they lived overwhelmingly disagreed with FW.
FW: Music is effeminate.
Male musicians in Europe: abound. Are respected. Are often in the military as well.
Etc., etc.
So Fritz was getting validated like crazy every time he turned around. The number of validation/mitigation anecdotes is astounding. Even Katte's executioner had to be ordered three times, and was apologizing profusely to Katte! And as a result (I would argue), a lot of Fritz's time as an abuse victim was spent waiting for Dad to die already so he could join the rest of the world in Sane Land. And that kind of ability to externalize the abuse makes a world of difference to your prospects as a survivor, and is why I start twitching every time I see a biographer use the word "broken" to describe what FW did to Fritz. Hurt? Absolutely. Damage? Sure, at this point we'd be arguing semantics. But break?
I maintain that Fritz came out of his abuse difficult, frequently abusive to others, and unhappy, but with a basically intact core. And that is part of why in the other comment I said his relationship with Wilhelmine was the best thing for both of them: as far as I can tell, they both came out with basically intact cores, and without that close relationship (and at least some of the positive aspects with their mother, amongst all her terrible acts of parenting), it would have been much more unlikely for both of them.
But fix-it fics for everyone!