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Frederick the Great discussion post 9
...I leave you guys alone for one weekend and it's time for a new Fritz post, lol!
I'm gonna reply to the previous post comments but I guess new letter-reading, etc. should go in this one :)
Frederick the Great links
I'm gonna reply to the previous post comments but I guess new letter-reading, etc. should go in this one :)
Frederick the Great links
Re: Toppings of all types, continued
I don't know about Seckendorff (I suspect he'd do whatever it took to advance the cause of Seckendorff)
Well, that goes without saying. But he'd have to figure out which position furthers the cause of Seckendorff more first!
I've spotted FW/Grumbkow on AO3 in the Fritz/Katte stories, too, but haven't read it. Agreed that if he didn't repress like hell, he'd definitely want the beloved tall guys to top. Incidentally, I think the fact that he and SD clearly kept having sex while clawing each other's faces off, so to speak - Ferdinand was born in 1730! -, long after the dynasty was secure and the marriage had gone to hell was probably due to FW following St. Paul's "better to marry than to burn" advice, i.e. needed to channel his sexual urges in the only way permissable to a good Christian King (tm). I mean, he was only 51 when he died, which is easy to forget given one Imagines him born middle aged.
Moving on from the depressing topic of FW's sex life, to me the most bemusing A03 pairing in our fandom is Fritz/Casanova - not that it exists - canonical meeting and Fritz canonically finding good old Giacomo attractive - but that alt!Casanova according to the tags is the Doge of Venice's so who meets young same age Fritz. I shall never understand why people take a potentially interesting pairing and then promptly remove anything that would make it interesting, making it into a generic Any Two Guys instead. For starters, Casanova wasn't upper class, he was the son of an actress and an actor, which very much colored all his interactions with the upper class. He was among other things a highly successful con man whose default setting towards people in power was flirt and scheme to relieve them somehow of some of their valuables/ at least get their patronage. (Yes, and getting into bed with some of them.) Why on earth would you change that when pairing him with a brilliant paranoid snarky control freak? And if you don't want Fritz to be a generation older, why bother with Casanova at all when Algarotti is right there?
Re: Toppings of all types, continued
Agree.
But he'd have to figure out which position furthers the cause of Seckendorff more first!
LOL. How tall is he? Because if tall, then probably top. :P
I mean, he was only 51 when he died, which is easy to forget
The reason I don't forget is that I think, painfully, of just how *many* years Fritz had to imagine Dad potentially living when he was trying to run away at 18. 10 is a lot, but Fritz couldn't have known it wouldn't be 40.
given one Imagines him born middle aged.
But he *was* born middle-aged! Even his parents knew that. :P
For those who don't know young FW as well as Selena, here's an account of his youth from a biographer:
The new king, Frederick William, had manifested from childhood a violent aversion for ceremonies and luxury. One day, when quite a small child, curled, powdered, clad in a gala costume, he hid himself in a chimney, whence he was pulled out, black as a chimney-sweep. He threw a brocaded night-robe into the fire, soon after it was tried on him. The sight of the big perukes made him furious. Finding some courtiers in his father's antechamber, warming them selves, with their heads thrown back, so as not to scorch their beautiful periwigs, which had cost them 200 thalers, he forced them to throw their wigs into the fire. Another time, they picked up at the foot of the staircase a maitre de la cour whom he had kicked to the bottom. He was extremely parsimonious, and kept an exact account of his receipts and expenditures, in a faultless register, on the first page of which he had written: “Rechnung fiber meine Ducaten,--Account of my Ducats.” “Miser,” exclaimed his mother, “and at so tender an age!"
I shall never understand why people take a potentially interesting pairing and then promptly remove anything that would make it interesting, making it into a generic Any Two Guys instead.
It's true, a lot of AUs devolve into of generic Any Two Guys. I can see the appeal, but for myself, I generally want there to be *something* of the original dynamic retained, and not just the names.
Why on earth would you change that when pairing him with a brilliant paranoid snarky control freak?
Long ago, I tried skimming some of the earlier Fritz/Casanova material by the same author, the one where Casanova *is* a generation younger, and the impression I got was of a sweet, somewhat naive, almost childlike, stereotypical sub, and I was like...this is his twin brother who was given away at birth and ended up with the same name, right?
Anyway, the most prolific AO3 author in this fandom is far from my favorite, and the rampant cliches that I found just lightly skimming her work reconciled me to her unwillingness to use the enter key to put spaces between paragraphs, making her works into one thoroughly unreadable run-on wall of text for me. Space your paragraphs, people! (It's a pet peeve of mine.) Anyway, the unreadability doesn't matter because it's not something I want to read, which is too bad, because there's so much of it, haha.
I'm still raging at the part where a character, probably Casanova but I wasn't inspired to find out, was waiting, with evident author approval, for Fritz to get up the "courage" to visit Katte's* grave. Not everyone grieves the same way! Rituals around death are for the comfort of the living, not something owed to the dead! "Fuck you," is all I can think.
* Yes, most of my skimming took the form of "ctrl-f Katte". ;)
Re: Toppings of all types, continued: Fritz/Casanova
FW/giants is canon, and Giants Top! ought to be!
Re: Toppings of all types, continued: Fritz/Casanova
Honestly, I haven't read any because the summaries and the tags already tell me it's not this. Which I would also love to read. Instead, AU Casanova seems to be a sweet natured comfort providing sub, if said summaries and tags are anything to go by. Which, for this particular pairing, I have zero interest in.
On the other hand: if you visit Sanssouci these days, there's apparantly a tour through the park where Casanova tells you all about his meeting with Fritz and adds a few stories he's heard about him to boot, which probably is more fun, and more historical, even if it's lacking them actually getting it on...