Grumbkow & Seckendorf: We’re the incredibly dumb evil stooges of this play. The clever evil schemer is someone else, to wit:
FW’s valet Eversmann: Me!
WHAT
I thought Maria Theresia's dad made a much better Disney villain, and that's saying something!
G, S, E: Sire, Archduke Leopold the future Emperor is asking for your daughter’s hand!
Me: *blinks* I thought... there was this whole thing with the Pragmatic Sanction...? [personal profile] selenak: WHO? Me: Oh good, it's not me this time! Wikipedia and mildred, more or less in unison: Charles had a son Leopold who died at age SEVEN MONTHS.
...There was a lot of my eyebrows contorting rather a lot reading this, I will have you know! Although I think it is hilarious that the Potsdam Giants showed up, because I think it is meta-hilarious that LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD EXCEPT FW thinks the Potsdam Giants are hilarious!
resumably the one publication Gutzkow must have read when doing research for this are Wilhelmine's memoirs. Can you imagine reading them and coming up with this plot?
MAN. I still don't know where Leopold came from, but as for the rest of it, the only thing I can think of is a) lots of alcohol b) Gutzkow must have desperately wanted Wilhelmine to have a happy ending and a happy marriage as I did by the time I was done with volume 1 (I still haven't finished Vol 2).
I thought Maria Theresia's dad made a much better Disney villain, and that's saying something!
I know. And if not him, and you want to present FW himself as strict but fair because you're a 19th century German playwright and evil Hohenzollern kings are not on, what's wrong with G & S, single or together, as the main villain(s)? Where does the evil valet come from?
think it is meta-hilarious that LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD EXCEPT FW thinks the Potsdam Giants are hilarious!
I know. Even the occasional fervent FW defender whose text I've read thinks so.
the only thing I can think of is a) lots of alcohol b) Gutzkow must have desperately wanted Wilhelmine to have a happy ending and a happy marriage as I did by the time I was done with volume 1
As good an explanation as any! I can just imagine him reading that passage about her husband being subjected to the Tobacco Parliament and abused by FW only to talk back and leaving and thinking "in a play, that would have impressed her father and been the prelude for a happy ending and would have happened before the marriage, not after! I know! I'll write a Hohenzollern RomCom!
And if not him, and you want to present FW himself as strict but fair because you're a 19th century German playwright and evil Hohenzollern kings are not on, what's wrong with G & S, single or together, as the main villain(s)? Where does the evil valet come from?
If you've been reading W's memoirs lately, she does rather hate on Eversmann, so I can kind of squint and see where you'd get that.
What's interesting to me is that Eversmann, being a valet, really is a stooge rather than a main villain in the memoirs, and specifically his main role is carrying messages between FW and Wilhelmine. And she hates on him SO MUCH, that given that the messages are things like "Your dad is beating up your brother again, fyi he's covered in blood" and "All this family strife is your fault for not marrying the latest guy your dad picked--just do what he wants and everyone can be happy!" that I have to wonder how much of the sheer hate-on is transferred anger at her father that W can't give full expression to. What with W's classism, the fact that hating your parents is not on, and hating and loving your parents at the same time is complicated in any century, never mind the 18th, Eversmann looks to me like a really, really safe target for sheer unadulterated hatred. Even G & S come across in W's memoirs as more three-dimensional characters than Eversmann does.
think it is meta-hilarious that LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD EXCEPT FW thinks the Potsdam Giants are hilarious!
I know. Even the occasional fervent FW defender whose text I've read thinks so.
Not Showalter! Dennis Showalter, modern military historian, thinks they were TOTALLY sensible and not at all a fetish. From his 1996 military history of Fritz:
Even the King’s most often-cited military indulgence, his regiment of ‘giant grenadiers’, was a useful test bed for new methods of drill and new items of equipment as well as a military hobby.
...
The King preferred tall, well-built soldiers. Big men could more readily handle and more quickly reload the long-barrelled infantry musket. Linking size and physical fitness was also reasonable in an economic environment where malnutrition was common and a military environment where captains and colonels concerned with keeping their muster rolls reasonably honest might well overlook such minor problems as double hernias.
One important thing to note in this context is that nearly every page of Showalter's book has some kind of "Actually, so-and-so had a really good strategic reason for such-and-such a decision, despite a centuries-long history of criticizing their judgment and/or attributing the decision to psychological factors" interpretation of something or other. So be aware that he has this particular bias.
If you've been reading W's memoirs lately, she does rather hate on Eversmann, so I can kind of squint and see where you'd get that.
Point taken, though Gutzkow picking him rather than G or S as the mastermind, and presenting them as his evil yet foolish to incompetent stooges is still his choice!
I have to wonder how much of the sheer hate-on is transferred anger at her father that W can't give full expression to. What with W's classism, the fact that hating your parents is not on, and hating and loving your parents at the same time is complicated in any century, never mind the 18th, Eversmann looks to me like a really, really safe target for sheer unadulterated hatred.
Oh, that's very plausible! And let me add that it's also in miniature form the tried and true vehicle for anti-monarch feelings through the centuries - it's really the evil minion/mistress/advisor/favourite who is hateable and responsible for the bad policies under which I'm suffering, not the monarch themselves. I mean, the father/daughter issue is largest for Wilhelmine, of course, but the fact that FW is the King is also there. (Both because she's been raised in a state of absolute monarchy, and because she gets at the time of writing her memoirs a good deal of her self esteem in tiny Bayreuth - where her husband is still part of FW's army due to having one regiment since the wedding - from the fact she's the daughter of a King.)
....and with all that, you still have all those later 19th century and early 20th century editors (like Stratemanns) complaining what a terrible, unfeeling daughter she was to write the way she did about her father.
Meanwhile, Lord Hervey is the outlier in the "blame the minion!" game in that he's fine with blaming Fritz of Wales entirely for being a love rat the worst, and while treating his (Hervey's) successor in FoW's friendship, Doddington, with contempt and dissing on Mrs. Archibald Hamilton and Princess Augusta for not even being that pretty (both) and badly educated (Augusta), he still reserves his supreme bile for FoW. Who wasn't his King but as far as Hervey knew when writing this would be by the time these memoirs got to print. And of course G2 only fares slightly better in that book, with the occasional not awful moment, but his awfulness still outshines that of anyone who works for him.
LOL on Showalter. Does he explain why Fritz dissolves the regiment if the Giants were so useful?
Point taken, though Gutzkow picking him rather than G or S as the mastermind, and presenting them as his evil yet foolish to incompetent stooges is still his choice!
Oh, definitely! It's a very odd choice even assuming you want to redeem FW. Hence "kind of" and "squint." ;)
it's really the evil minion/mistress/advisor/favourite who is hateable and responsible for the bad policies under which I'm suffering, not the monarch themselves
Horowski on multiple occasions stresses that the political influence of the maitresse en titre was always overstated, because when someone in power had one position to bestow and 20 nobles who wanted it, it made a nice appeasement tactic for the families of the 19. "Well, *I* would have given it to your son/brother/nephew, but you know, when the mistress speaks, what're you gonna do?"
Lord Hervey is the outlier in the "blame the minion!" game
Voltaire: Let me remind you that, mockery of Freytag's accent notwithstanding, I had no trouble placing the blame squarely where it belonged: on the monarch I still miss and write to regularly. Mixed feelings FTW!
LOL on Showalter. Does he explain why Fritz dissolves the regiment if the Giants were so useful?
He might; I read the book about 6 months ago. But since the soldiers were retained, just distributed across other regiments, that addresses the point about the value of having tall soldiers in your army. As for experimenting...I think Fritz had other ways of doing his experimenting, like in battle. "Well, that could have gone better, let's change that up." ;)
Oh, one thing I've had on my list to talk about re Showalter, might as well do it now.
Way back when, in October, I had a funny experience in which on one fine Saturday, Selena reported the following:
When Boswell arrives at Dresden, he is well and truly shocked by the scars from the war, and his Fritz opinion plunges downwards. No more hero of the Protestant faith, for:
Tuesday 9 October: I strolled about & viewed the city. It is finely built of freestone. It gave me great pain to see the ruins made by the Prussian bombardments. I hated the barbarous hero. He was under no necessity to bombard Dresden. It was from mere spite that he did it.
The next day, on Sunday, I was reading Krockow, and I read about Fritz shelling civilian neighborhoods in Dresden for no reason, and Heinrich congratulating him sarcastically on his victory.
Then on Monday, I discovered that the ghost of Fritz really wanted me to know about the bombing of Dresden *right now*, because I then read this in Showalter:
For Frederick, Dresden was a means to an operational and strategic end. He hoped to draw Daun back from Silesia and into a major battle on Frederick’s terms – a replication of the Battle of Prague in 1756, only this time presumably with more positive results. For the lure to work, the threat to Dresden had to be something more immediate and more spectacular than a formal siege, for which in any case Frederick lacked the resources. Instead, he brought up a dozen heavy guns and opened a general bombardment of the city on 19 July. In sharp contrast to normal eighteenth-century practice, civilian buildings, especially the centrally located Kreuz-Kirche, were specifically designated as targets. resulting fires burned down much of the city without affecting the 14,000-strong Austrian garrison. The moral impact was correspondingly negative. Even in his own camp Frederick’s actions were interpreted as the product of malice or frustration. The King’s principal modern military biographer [Mildred: principal English-language modern military biographer? Because surely even after 1945 German scholarship hasn't totally abandoned the subject to the Brits?] charitably suggests that Frederick did not expect Dresden to be so inflammable after his experience at Prague. In fact, when Frederick ended the blockade it was because of Daun’s continued reluctance to meet the King’s expectations.
So again I was struck by Showalter presenting a strategic reason for an action that's attributed to emotional reasons. I haven't had a chance to read the biography he's referring to (Duffy's--it's been on my wishlist since day 1), so I don't have an opinion of my own on the matter. I was planning on waiting until I had read it to bring this point up, but I've read another of Duffy's military histories and know that I shouldn't take on a book by him until I have both the concentration and finances to justify the $40, and the stars haven't aligned there yet, so while I'm here talking about Showalter's tendency to justify everything everyone on any side of the war does as being totally the decision of a rational actor...here's another example of something that's come up in our fandom before. Fritz was totally trying to lure Daun back from Silesia while bombing Dresden civilians!
Which is still what we call a war crime, Fritz, even by the standards of your contemporaries Heinrich and Boswell.
Meanwhile, Lord Hervey is the outlier in the "blame the minion!" game in that he's fine with blaming Fritz of Wales entirely for being a love rat the worst
Another thing I had on my list was that your intro to Hervey and the love rat included the line,
I terminate our relationship, your highness. My bitchy memoirs about my time at the Georgian court lack the three years of our relationship completely and only resume afterwards, when I have decided to hate you forever and ever.
which at the time I remembered as Hervey omitting all mention of him from his memoirs out of spite, so I was surprised when encountering Horowski's statement that it was the bowdlerizing 19th century descendant Lord Bristol who is to blame! I mention this in case anyone else took that interpretation of a sentence that I now see doesn't say that at all. Thus does misremembrance make Zimmermanns of us all. ;)
Which is still what we call a war crime, Fritz, even by the standards of your contemporaries Heinrich and Boswell.
Let’s not forget Andrew Mitchell, who got to watch this in real time and wrote: December 1760:
My other letters by this messenger will inform your Lordship of everything that has passed since the 12th, and I am very unwilling and very unfit at the present moment to make reflections. I cannot think of the bombardment of Dresden without horror, nor of many other things I have seen. Misfortunes naturally sour men's tempers, and the continuance of them at last extinguishes humanity.
3rd January 1761:
The very harsh manner in which the country of Saxony is treated fills me with horror, though there is now the fatal plea of necessity for adopting measures which were practised before that necessity existed.
Yeah, no, Showalter. I’m not impressed by the ignoring of post WWII German biographers, either. (Which as you guessed do exist. :)
And I know Fritz + militarism was a bit taboo for a while there, but by the end of the century, I fully expect that his "principal" military biographer is writing in German. I have to say, being limited to books that are affordable, on Kindle (mostly), and in English (for now!) does not always result in me getting to read the best of all possible scholarship. I really miss having access to a research library and the ability to use it. :/
What with W's classism, the fact that hating your parents is not on, and hating and loving your parents at the same time is complicated in any century, never mind the 18th, Eversmann looks to me like a really, really safe target for sheer unadulterated hatred.
:( That sounds very plausible.
The King preferred tall, well-built soldiers. Big men could more readily handle and more quickly reload the long-barrelled infantry musket. Linking size and physical fitness was also reasonable in an economic environment where malnutrition was common and a military environment where captains and colonels concerned with keeping their muster rolls reasonably honest might well overlook such minor problems as double hernias.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reply to the RomCom
FW’s valet Eversmann: Me!
WHAT
I thought Maria Theresia's dad made a much better Disney villain, and that's saying something!
G, S, E: Sire, Archduke Leopold the future Emperor is asking for your daughter’s hand!
Me: *blinks* I thought... there was this whole thing with the Pragmatic Sanction...?
[personal profile] selenak: WHO?
Me: Oh good, it's not me this time!
Wikipedia and mildred, more or less in unison: Charles had a son Leopold who died at age SEVEN MONTHS.
...There was a lot of my eyebrows contorting rather a lot reading this, I will have you know! Although I think it is hilarious that the Potsdam Giants showed up, because I think it is meta-hilarious that LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD EXCEPT FW thinks the Potsdam Giants are hilarious!
resumably the one publication Gutzkow must have read when doing research for this are Wilhelmine's memoirs. Can you imagine reading them and coming up with this plot?
MAN. I still don't know where Leopold came from, but as for the rest of it, the only thing I can think of is a) lots of alcohol b) Gutzkow must have desperately wanted Wilhelmine to have a happy ending and a happy marriage as I did by the time I was done with volume 1 (I still haven't finished Vol 2).
Re: Reply to the RomCom
I know. And if not him, and you want to present FW himself as strict but fair because you're a 19th century German playwright and evil Hohenzollern kings are not on, what's wrong with G & S, single or together, as the main villain(s)? Where does the evil valet come from?
think it is meta-hilarious that LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD EXCEPT FW thinks the Potsdam Giants are hilarious!
I know. Even the occasional fervent FW defender whose text I've read thinks so.
the only thing I can think of is a) lots of alcohol b) Gutzkow must have desperately wanted Wilhelmine to have a happy ending and a happy marriage as I did by the time I was done with volume 1
As good an explanation as any! I can just imagine him reading that passage about her husband being subjected to the Tobacco Parliament and abused by FW only to talk back and leaving and thinking "in a play, that would have impressed her father and been the prelude for a happy ending and would have happened before the marriage, not after! I know! I'll write a Hohenzollern RomCom!
Re: Reply to the RomCom
If you've been reading W's memoirs lately, she does rather hate on Eversmann, so I can kind of squint and see where you'd get that.
What's interesting to me is that Eversmann, being a valet, really is a stooge rather than a main villain in the memoirs, and specifically his main role is carrying messages between FW and Wilhelmine. And she hates on him SO MUCH, that given that the messages are things like "Your dad is beating up your brother again, fyi he's covered in blood" and "All this family strife is your fault for not marrying the latest guy your dad picked--just do what he wants and everyone can be happy!" that I have to wonder how much of the sheer hate-on is transferred anger at her father that W can't give full expression to. What with W's classism, the fact that hating your parents is not on, and hating and loving your parents at the same time is complicated in any century, never mind the 18th, Eversmann looks to me like a really, really safe target for sheer unadulterated hatred. Even G & S come across in W's memoirs as more three-dimensional characters than Eversmann does.
think it is meta-hilarious that LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD EXCEPT FW thinks the Potsdam Giants are hilarious!
I know. Even the occasional fervent FW defender whose text I've read thinks so.
Not Showalter! Dennis Showalter, modern military historian, thinks they were TOTALLY sensible and not at all a fetish. From his 1996 military history of Fritz:
Even the King’s most often-cited military indulgence, his regiment of ‘giant grenadiers’, was a useful test bed for new methods of drill and new items of equipment as well as a military hobby.
...
The King preferred tall, well-built soldiers. Big men could more readily handle and more quickly reload the long-barrelled infantry musket. Linking size and physical fitness was also reasonable in an economic environment where malnutrition was common and a military environment where captains and colonels concerned with keeping their muster rolls reasonably honest might well overlook such minor problems as double hernias.
One important thing to note in this context is that nearly every page of Showalter's book has some kind of "Actually, so-and-so had a really good strategic reason for such-and-such a decision, despite a centuries-long history of criticizing their judgment and/or attributing the decision to psychological factors" interpretation of something or other. So be aware that he has this particular bias.
Re: Reply to the RomCom
Point taken, though Gutzkow picking him rather than G or S as the mastermind, and presenting them as his evil yet foolish to incompetent stooges is still his choice!
I have to wonder how much of the sheer hate-on is transferred anger at her father that W can't give full expression to. What with W's classism, the fact that hating your parents is not on, and hating and loving your parents at the same time is complicated in any century, never mind the 18th, Eversmann looks to me like a really, really safe target for sheer unadulterated hatred.
Oh, that's very plausible! And let me add that it's also in miniature form the tried and true vehicle for anti-monarch feelings through the centuries - it's really the evil minion/mistress/advisor/favourite who is hateable and responsible for the bad policies under which I'm suffering, not the monarch themselves. I mean, the father/daughter issue is largest for Wilhelmine, of course, but the fact that FW is the King is also there. (Both because she's been raised in a state of absolute monarchy, and because she gets at the time of writing her memoirs a good deal of her self esteem in tiny Bayreuth - where her husband is still part of FW's army due to having one regiment since the wedding - from the fact she's the daughter of a King.)
....and with all that, you still have all those later 19th century and early 20th century editors (like Stratemanns) complaining what a terrible, unfeeling daughter she was to write the way she did about her father.
Meanwhile, Lord Hervey is the outlier in the "blame the minion!" game in that he's fine with blaming Fritz of Wales entirely for being
a love ratthe worst, and while treating his (Hervey's) successor in FoW's friendship, Doddington, with contempt and dissing on Mrs. Archibald Hamilton and Princess Augusta for not even being that pretty (both) and badly educated (Augusta), he still reserves his supreme bile for FoW. Who wasn't his King but as far as Hervey knew when writing this would be by the time these memoirs got to print. And of course G2 only fares slightly better in that book, with the occasional not awful moment, but his awfulness still outshines that of anyone who works for him.LOL on Showalter. Does he explain why Fritz dissolves the regiment if the Giants were so useful?
Re: Reply to the RomCom
Point taken, though Gutzkow picking him rather than G or S as the mastermind, and presenting them as his evil yet foolish to incompetent stooges is still his choice!
Oh, definitely! It's a very odd choice even assuming you want to redeem FW. Hence "kind of" and "squint." ;)
it's really the evil minion/mistress/advisor/favourite who is hateable and responsible for the bad policies under which I'm suffering, not the monarch themselves
Horowski on multiple occasions stresses that the political influence of the maitresse en titre was always overstated, because when someone in power had one position to bestow and 20 nobles who wanted it, it made a nice appeasement tactic for the families of the 19. "Well, *I* would have given it to your son/brother/nephew, but you know, when the mistress speaks, what're you gonna do?"
Lord Hervey is the outlier in the "blame the minion!" game
Voltaire: Let me remind you that, mockery of Freytag's accent notwithstanding, I had no trouble placing the blame squarely where it belonged: on the monarch I still miss and write to regularly. Mixed feelings FTW!
LOL on Showalter. Does he explain why Fritz dissolves the regiment if the Giants were so useful?
He might; I read the book about 6 months ago. But since the soldiers were retained, just distributed across other regiments, that addresses the point about the value of having tall soldiers in your army. As for experimenting...I think Fritz had other ways of doing his experimenting, like in battle. "Well, that could have gone better, let's change that up." ;)
Re: Reply to the RomCom
Way back when, in October, I had a funny experience in which on one fine Saturday, Selena reported the following:
When Boswell arrives at Dresden, he is well and truly shocked by the scars from the war, and his Fritz opinion plunges downwards. No more hero of the Protestant faith, for:
Tuesday 9 October:
I strolled about & viewed the city. It is finely built of freestone. It gave me great pain to see the ruins made by the Prussian bombardments. I hated the barbarous hero. He was under no necessity to bombard Dresden. It was from mere spite that he did it.
The next day, on Sunday, I was reading Krockow, and I read about Fritz shelling civilian neighborhoods in Dresden for no reason, and Heinrich congratulating him sarcastically on his victory.
Then on Monday, I discovered that the ghost of Fritz really wanted me to know about the bombing of Dresden *right now*, because I then read this in Showalter:
For Frederick, Dresden was a means to an operational and strategic end. He hoped to draw Daun back from Silesia and into a major battle on Frederick’s terms – a replication of the Battle of Prague in 1756, only this time presumably with more positive results. For the lure to work, the threat to Dresden had to be something more immediate and more spectacular than a formal siege, for which in any case Frederick lacked the resources. Instead, he brought up a dozen heavy guns and opened a general bombardment of the city on 19 July. In sharp contrast to normal eighteenth-century practice, civilian buildings, especially the centrally located Kreuz-Kirche, were specifically designated as targets. resulting fires burned down much of the city without affecting the 14,000-strong Austrian garrison. The moral impact was correspondingly negative. Even in his own camp Frederick’s actions were interpreted as the product of malice or frustration. The King’s principal modern military biographer [Mildred: principal English-language modern military biographer? Because surely even after 1945 German scholarship hasn't totally abandoned the subject to the Brits?] charitably suggests that Frederick did not expect Dresden to be so inflammable after his experience at Prague. In fact, when Frederick ended the blockade it was because of Daun’s continued reluctance to meet the King’s expectations.
So again I was struck by Showalter presenting a strategic reason for an action that's attributed to emotional reasons. I haven't had a chance to read the biography he's referring to (Duffy's--it's been on my wishlist since day 1), so I don't have an opinion of my own on the matter. I was planning on waiting until I had read it to bring this point up, but I've read another of Duffy's military histories and know that I shouldn't take on a book by him until I have both the concentration and finances to justify the $40, and the stars haven't aligned there yet, so while I'm here talking about Showalter's tendency to justify everything everyone on any side of the war does as being totally the decision of a rational actor...here's another example of something that's come up in our fandom before. Fritz was totally trying to lure Daun back from Silesia while bombing Dresden civilians!
Which is still what we call a war crime, Fritz, even by the standards of your contemporaries Heinrich and Boswell.
Meanwhile, Lord Hervey is the outlier in the "blame the minion!" game in that he's fine with blaming Fritz of Wales entirely for being a love rat the worst
Another thing I had on my list was that your intro to Hervey and the love rat included the line,
I terminate our relationship, your highness. My bitchy memoirs about my time at the Georgian court lack the three years of our relationship completely and only resume afterwards, when I have decided to hate you forever and ever.
which at the time I remembered as Hervey omitting all mention of him from his memoirs out of spite, so I was surprised when encountering Horowski's statement that it was the bowdlerizing 19th century descendant Lord Bristol who is to blame! I mention this in case anyone else took that interpretation of a sentence that I now see doesn't say that at all. Thus does misremembrance make Zimmermanns of us all. ;)
Dresden
Let’s not forget Andrew Mitchell, who got to watch this in real time and wrote:
December 1760:
My other letters by this messenger will inform your Lordship of everything that has passed since the 12th, and I am very unwilling and very unfit at the present moment to make reflections. I cannot think of the bombardment of Dresden without horror, nor of many other things I have seen. Misfortunes naturally sour men's tempers, and the continuance of them at last extinguishes humanity.
3rd January 1761:
The very harsh manner in which the country of Saxony is treated fills me with horror, though there is now the fatal plea of necessity for adopting measures which were practised before that necessity existed.
Yeah, no, Showalter. I’m not impressed by the ignoring of post WWII German biographers, either. (Which as you guessed do exist. :)
Re: Dresden
And I know Fritz + militarism was a bit taboo for a while there, but by the end of the century, I fully expect that his "principal" military biographer is writing in German. I have to say, being limited to books that are affordable, on Kindle (mostly), and in English (for now!) does not always result in me getting to read the best of all possible scholarship. I really miss having access to a research library and the ability to use it. :/
Re: Reply to the RomCom
:( That sounds very plausible.
The King preferred tall, well-built soldiers. Big men could more readily handle and more quickly reload the long-barrelled infantry musket. Linking size and physical fitness was also reasonable in an economic environment where malnutrition was common and a military environment where captains and colonels concerned with keeping their muster rolls reasonably honest might well overlook such minor problems as double hernias.
WHAT. Uh-huh. Does that explain the painting?
Re: Reply to the RomCom
ROFL! A hit, a palpable hit.
Re: Reply to the RomCom
I've been meaning to say, I think it's super awesome that you can pick up on so many historical inaccuracies now!