Yuletide tags are out: Frederician version

[cahn]

Come join us in this crazy Frederick the Great fandom and learn more about all these crazy associated people, like the star-crossed and heartbreaking romance between Maria Theresia's daughter Maria Christina and her daughter-in-law Isabella, wow.

OK, so, there are FOURTEEN characters nominated:
Anna Karolina Orzelska (Frederician RPF)
Elisabeth Christine von Preußen | Elisabeth Christine Queen of Prussia (Frederician RPF)
Francesco Algarotti (Frederician RPF)
François-Marie Arouet | Voltaire (Frederician RPF)
Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great (Frederician RPF)
Hans Hermann Von Katte (Frederician RPF)
Joseph II Holy Roman Emperor (Frederician RPF)
Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria (Frederician RPF)
Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf (Frederician RPF)
Peter Karl Christoph von Keith (Frederician RPF)
Sophia Dorothea of Hanover (Frederician RPF)
Stanisław August Poniatowski (Frederician RPF)
Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758) (Frederician RPF)
Yekatarina II Alekseyevna | Catherine the Great of Russia (Frederician RPF)

This means some fourth person kindly nominated Algarotti and -- I think? -- Stanislaw August Poniatowski! YAY! Thank you fourth person! Come be our friend! :D Yuletide is so great!

I am definitely requesting Maria Theresia, Wilhelmine, and Fritz (Put them in a room together. Shake. How big is the explosion?), and thinking about Elisabeth Christine, but maybe not this year.

I am also declaring this post another Frederician post, as the last one was getting out of hand. I think I'll still use that one as the overall index to these, though, to keep all the links in one place.

(seriously, every time I think the wild stories are done there is ANOTHER one)

Comments

Re: On a lighter note

[mildred_of_midgard]

Also, if this is an AU where Katte lives (aren't they all?)

Yes. Yes they are.

then I think it's very possible Katte might be interested in some of this newfangled stuff, and that might be an avenue to introduce it to Fritz.

That's exactly what I'm getting at. In all my modern AUs, Fritz is ranting about newfangled X, Y, and Z, and Katte is sighing to himself while gradually introducing Fritz to newer things. I'm just trying to figure out *what* Katte is introducing him to. Good witty comedy? What about *films*? Surely in the set of all films produced in the last hundred years, a modern Fritz comes around to liking at least one!

The other reason I think about this is that I think a less traumatized Fritz is less aggressively close-minded. He's still very opinionated, but...okay, I'm not trying to oversimplify here, but I do think his chronic trauma affected the way he related to things like the arts. It's just so radically in character with the way he reacted to everything else in a way that makes sense in light of his personality intersecting with PTSD. (It's never just PTSD. As rachelmanija once said, memorably, "People react to trauma in character.")

For example, I don't think Fritz's exaggerated antipathy toward German and love for French, even relative to his contemporaries for whom French was the language of the nobility and intelligentsia, was solely due to FW burning/getting rid of Fritz's French books and forbidding anyone to let him speak or read or write anything but German at Küstrin, but I don't think it's irrelevant either.

So if Katte's around (and I said "time machine" for the sake of simplifying my question, but my actual mechanism is reincarnation, which introduces whole new kettles of fish), and therapy is around, and also other things I have introduced into this complex, never-to-be-written-and-posted universe, I feel like Katte is having fun exploring everything that happened in the last 300 years, while coaxing his grumpy boyfriend into dipping his toes in the water.

Re Don Carlos and Die Bürgschaft, I would give him major detailed trigger warnings first and let him decide. :)

Katte and Fritz reincarnation

[cahn]

I feel like reincarnation may make this part easier? In particular, what's the mechanism whereby he acquires his past memories? If he acquires them past age zero (and if he has them at age zero, that's... going to be interesting, growing up) then he'll have some acclimatization to this world that will make it easier to try new things from this world.

Katte might introduce him to films, but he is *definitely* going to introduce him to flute music, right?! :)

Re: Katte and Fritz reincarnation

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yes, exactly. No, he doesn't acquire them at age zero, for that exact reason (it's too weird, developmentally). They start coming back little by little as the reincarnated kids approach puberty (which means all of them have an *interesting* adolescence, in a world where reincarnation = crackpottery and nobody believes them...look, I said I was evil).

You mean new-to-him flute music? By the time Fritz & Katte meet in their twenties (yes, I'm evil and like to make my characters *work* for their happy ending), Fritz is already a professional chamber musician (and yes, a grumpy one) and pretty familiar with the repertoire of the last 300 years, and yes he has to play things he doesn't like for his job. Like selenak said, it's hard when you're not king and can't have everything your way. He considers it a price he's willing to pay to be a professional musician (which is part of the fix-it aspect for me). :)

But Katte has been doing a lot more exploring of everything that happened in the last 300 years, in multiple languages/cultures, and has a lot more breadth and a lot less resistance to new things (I have opinions about Fritz's resistance, and a lot of it comes down to personality meets chronic trauma). So he definitely gets to be the one who tries to get past Fritz's resistance gently with things he might like.

Re: Katte and Fritz reincarnation

[cahn]

Ah, okay then, so he knows about flute music. I imagine that even with his Fritz-intrusive memories, if he has to actually PLAY all this music he'd have come up with some post-Monteverdi composers he would actually like! (My guess would be the Romantics and Mozart, who are kind of hard to dislike. The Romantics especially are very easy to love as an adolescent.)

So in that case I think it would be fairly easy for Katte to say, hey, Mozart ALSO wrote these cool operas, come see them with me! Verdi might be a harder sell but after being warmed up by Mozart operas it might work. /is projecting at this point from my own experience