cahn | Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 22 (or: Yuletide 2020 edition)

ETA: Whoops, I missed my cue -- this might as well be the next discussion post, I guess! :)

This is about the fic I didn't author (I have another reveals post for the fics I did author).

So my goal this Yuletide was NOT to write any historical fandom (because hard!) and just enjoy the excellent stuff that other people wrote. And... that sort of happened? I didn't end up authoring anything history-intensive? Buuuuut I ended up spending a lot more time than I did on any of my own fics working with

mildred_of_midgard on her fic, which she was worried about being able to pull off because she had had this completely insane idea to write a long casefic about Frederick the Great that every time I turned around had another twist put in :P :) She supplied me with what we called a "rough opal in matrix" bus pass casefic, and I cut away the matrix that remained and in some cases carved the opal -- that is to say, writing additional text for some of the scenes, what we liked to call "putting in feels," and in at least two cases entirely rewriting and/or restructuring the scene she'd written. She didn't always keep what I wrote (which we'd agreed upon in the beginning), but when she did (which was most of the time :) ) she then went in and rewrote/restructured what I put in to wordsmith (some of the words I gave her were really rough) and match her style, adding even more scenes -- that is, polishing it up and adding some gold and diamonds -- and voila, a beautiful pendant, I mean, story :)

I'm really proud of it and also it was really fun and also what I could handle this year, especially because mildred did all the parts I thought were hard and also wrote all the parts involving actual history or subtle AU before I was brought in so I didn't actually have to know historical stuff (though I guess I will never forget the battle of Leuthen now), and took full responsibility for how the whole thing turned out, so all I had to do was be like "Here, I'll write some rough feels for you for this scene!" The funny part was that I would often then write a paragraph justifying why I *had* to write the scene the way I did, and more likely than not mildred would be like, "yeah, I was sure you would do that, of course it should be written like that." (The most glaring example of this was where I inserted the Letter of Doom at the climax. I was worried there was some reason she didn't want it there, but she said, no, she just didn't have time to put it in herself and was just trusting me to do that :) ) She started jokingly calling me her "other self," to which I replied that it was with 1000% less angst and frustration -- as Frederick the Great's brother was his "other self" (which actually comes up in the fic) that he could trust to do all kinds of competent things, but they had a relationship that was, um, fraught? radioactive? Whereas this was just fun :)

Mildred did so much more than I did (we estimated a 90%/10% word ratio, not even counting the part where she wordsmithed a lot of my text) that I felt very uncomfortable being listed as a co-author, but hey, ~3000 words is a respectable Yuletide fic length :)

Yet They Grind Exceedingly Small (30384 words) by mildred_of_midgard
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Anna Amalie von Preußen & Wilhelmine von Preußen, Anna Amalie von Preußen & Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen, Wilhelmine von Preußen & Elisabeth Friederike Sophie von Brandenburg-Bayreuth, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia
Characters: Anna Amalie von Preußen (1723-1787), Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758), Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802), Elisabeth Friederike Sophie von Brandenburg-Bayreuth (1732-1780), Wilhelmine von Hesse-Kassel (1726-1808), August Wilhelm von Preußen | Augustus William of Prussia (1722-1758), Alcmene 1 | Frederick the Great's Italian Greyhound, Voltaire (Writer), Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dysfunctional Family, Suicide, Alternate Universe - Dark, Siblings, Canon-Typical Violence, Mystery, Tide of History Challenge
Summary:

January 1758. Prince William is dead, some say of a broken heart. Frederick wants to absolve himself of blame for William's death. Henry schemes to end the Third Silesian War on his terms. Amalie and Wilhelmine team up to find out what really happened to their brother. Alcmene just wants to be told she's a good dog.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I've finished! It's short and very Voltaire :) (I am glad I read this while reading the Orieux -- having a sense of Voltaire helps, I think.) Unfortunately no really good footnotes to share in the last half, although I will say that the footnotes make it clear that Voltaire continues to make fun of everyone whom he has any kind of conflict with. But some general thoughts/description, anyway:

As even my barbaric ahistorical self knew before reading it, the major idea of Candide is to rebut Leibniz's idea that this is the best of all possible worlds (which is the teaching of the absurd tutor Pangloss). He does this by having all kinds of terrible (and often hilarious) things happen to Candide, and Candide is also put in the path of many other characters (most interestingly the Old Lady and Martin the Manichee, the latter of whom I'll speak a bit more later) who also have horrible terrible (and again often hilarious, because this is Voltaire) things happen to them. And a couple of times Candide goes about trying to prove that someone in the world is happy -- but is always shown to be wrong. The idea is that this our most well-documented of all possible worlds (as John M. Ford once riffed on it, which I think is a hilariously brilliant way of putting it) could not possibly be the best of all possible worlds given that a) all these terrible things are happening, and b) they're happening to pretty much everyone; there is no one who is portrayed as happy in the book until the last chapter (with one notable exception which I will discuss).

Honestly, I felt like the strength of his arguments varied greatly. First, there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on Leibniz being disproved by terrible things happening to an individual person. I'd always conceived of "best of all possible worlds" to be a global condition rather than a local one: that is, one could certainly easily conceive of worlds where a particular person, or collection of people, had a better life than in this one, and my understanding of Leibniz's idea (which might be wrong?) is that it refers to everyone as a whole -- whatever that means (I haven't read Leibniz source; does he quantify happiness or utility of a world in a not-totally-undefined way?) -- that although at any particular moment a person or group of people might be unhappy, as a whole this is the best for humanity. Also that there might be constraints on what worlds are possible, e.g., if there hadn't been a horribly destructive earthquake at this time (one of the events in Candide, following real life), perhaps there would have been an even worse one. Or something. (I freely admit that I'm very influenced here by my religion having basically this as its theology, so I may be projecting the arguments.)

Though one could argue that if everyone is unhappy (which as becomes more and more clear in the book is pretty much the case), then it couldn't possibly be the best of all possible worlds just because this seems unlikely to be it in absolute terms. But this doesn't seem to be the primary argument Voltaire is making, as far as I could tell (though it could very well be a secondary argument). I do think that he's saying that it is pretty easy to postulate a universe where, e.g., soldiers didn't rape Cunegonde; that universe would clearly be better than the book-canon universe where she was.

Speaking of which, Voltaire also makes a more explicit argument from counterexample: that this is not the best of all possible worlds because he can construct a much better possible world that isn't this one. In the middle of the book Candide and his servant Cacambo somehow find themselves in the hidden-away and fabled land of El Dorado, which is a utopia where everyone is happy, there is lots of SCIENCE!, there is no war or crime or poverty (how this is attained isn't entirely clear, though Voltaire seems to tie it at least partially to the lack of organized religion), and no one cares about money, though their pebbles are precious stones and their mud is (literally) gold. Also, "Cacambo explained the king's witty sayings to Candide, and even when translated they still seemed witty. Of all the things which astonished Candide, this was not, in his eyes, the least astonishing." LOL. I wonder if this king writes poems that are actually good :PP

Candide and Cacambo decide to leave El Dorado in a stunningly stupid move (so Candide can find Cunegonde, whom he's been separated from) and take a bunch of gold and gems with them, which certainly make their life reasonably easier for the rest of the book, although Candide keeps losing money through various acts of stupidity (by him) and swindling (by others). Cacambo is dispatched to find Cunegonde, and Candide takes up with Martin the Manichee (whose name has come up before in salon). Manichaeism is the belief that there's evil as a tangible power in the world in addition to good/God (as opposed to the belief that an all-good God is the source of everything). Where Martin is concerned, this manifests in him being basically a raging pessimist, and whenever Candide goes around thinking that he's found a happy person or a happy way of life, Martin is like "I bet no." (He is always right.)

At the end of the book, Candide finally finds Cunegonde (whom he's been searching for during most of the book), only to find that, horrors, during the course of her misfortunes she has become ugly. But he marries her anyway, because he feels obligated to. He's also run out of money by this time, and he ends up on a farm with a bunch of random people from the book, some of whom have shown up again after some time (including Pangloss, who seems to have died twice during the book, but both times his death was greatly exaggerated). They're all quarreling and terribly unhappy!! Until... on the last page, they meet a man who is actually happy (the first non-ElDoradoean in the entire book!), because he cultivates his small garden with his family. In the last few paragraphs Candide and the other characters decide to also cultivate their garden, and become what, if Voltaire were in fandom, I'd call a nice little found family :) (Whether this is a lasting happiness is left to the reader, and it does seem rather unlikely, though I like to imagine that they're all so tired of adventures at this point that they do keep going like that.)

~~next step: gonna go watch the Bernstein musical~~

Thank you so much! Can I just say again how lucky I feel to be in a fandom where people read me books. :D

My own reading rn consists of finishing the chapter of Horowski I'm on tonight, and the book by the end of the month. I was planning to reply to Fritz's mystery affliction today, but...I'm on a roll. :) In the meantime, just assume I'm following all salon developments eagerly, even when not replying.

Yay, you finished! Do tell when you get to the Bernstein musical, I've never seen it in its entirety, only in excerpts. Re: Leipniz' original argument and Voltaire's issue with it in context of the contemporary debate, this wiki article sums it up pretty well from what I recall - the various Émilie books I read in the past months also touched on it, but they're back in the Stabi library, so I can't look it up again.

Also, "Cacambo explained the king's witty sayings to Candide, and even when translated they still seemed witty. Of all the things which astonished Candide, this was not, in his eyes, the least astonishing." LOL. I wonder if this king writes poems that are actually good :PP

LOL. Maybe that's the true issue Fritz had with Candide, about which he once complained to Catt as I recall.

Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 22 (or: Yuletide 2020 edition)

Candide (part 2)

Re: Candide (part 2)

Re: Candide (part 2)