Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30
Sep. 8th, 2021 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-13 11:42 pm (UTC)Okay, so, that flyer. :P The reason Heinrich starts commenting on the graphic design choices is because I was trying to give a Watsonian reason to lampshade the Doylist reason that the flyer looks less than professionally designed, which is that I suck at graphic design. :P
The original plan was to wait for
And then it had the added benefit of providing another example where Henry completely misses the point.
See, my headcanon for this fic is that Henry shares Fritz's attention to detail, but not his micromanagement or inability to delegate. So left to his own devices, he doesn't start caring how many pieces of paper are in the printer, but he's so frustrated with Fritz, that the moment Fritz says or does anything, Henry gets sucked into nitpicking every aspect he can find, just to confirm his frustration.
Related is the fact that he gets sucked into going in circles in his head ranting about Fritz, and he can't stop, and this kind of rumination is how he ends up borderline depressed. (Agreed in canon he was straight-up clinically depressed, but no one's died here, much less AW being hounded to death by Fritz.)
And what Kaphengst does is snap Henry out of the rumination and get him to think about something else. And over time, that's had a positive effect on his mood. And that's part of why he stays with Kaphengst for so long.
I also tried to give Kaphengst some emotional intelligence to compensate for his frivolity. Like, he can see why the relationship with Henry works, where Henry, Mr. Blinders and not just where Fritz is concerned, is still trying to get Kaphengst to be more ambitious and driven, because he can see K's potential. And that emotional intelligence on K's part is also one of the reasons Henry/Kaphengst works as well as it does.
Heinrich hated being short, most of the time. Except when he was being manhandled in the bedroom. For a second, he struggled, loving the feeling of being forcibly subdued. But then Mara paused, and Heinrich remembered who he was with. He was too used to Kaphengst.
My fanon (as I've said a million times, not my historical headcanon) is that the size difference plus sexual compatibility means that Kaphengst can do what Henry really *really* wants, which is pin him in place effortlessly and painlessly while Henry struggles, whereas the more gracile Mara can't. So Henry trained Mara to deliver a few light slaps (Henry's not into heavy pain) and some insults to get his blood roaring.
(I also think that Henry's tendency to push his lovers to achieve their potential inadvertently added to the pressures already on child prodigy Mara, which Mara coped with by increasingly heavy drinking. Whereas Kaphengst kept his chill by noping right out of the pressure and remaining a playboy. I've made him a "water off a duck's back" personality. I can't prove that's historical, but it's a guess I but rather more belief in than the BDSM aspects of their sex lives.)
About Fritz and Mike, just some miscellaneous notes.
I went back and forth on the question of Fritz getting therapy when I was plotting this. My dilemma was that I don't want it to be too depressing, and the point of a modern AU is that you *can* fix things, but on the other hand, no way for a fic exchange with the kind of time I had was I going to be able to write something that made Fritz's decision to get therapy feel real and motivated. So in the end, the only trajectory that felt satisfying to me was to have Mike and Wilhelmine lay some of the groundwork that might lead to Fritz getting therapy someday, but not have that be part of this fic at all.
Plus, I had to make the ending not feel like a cliffhanger by taking the sense of imminence away, which is why the line "I expect it'll take years for him to come around, if he ever does, but I have to try" is at the end.
I'm still laughing that Cahn and I independently came up with LOTR analogies to end our fics with! When I saw she had Denethor and Gandalf reconciling in the draft she sent me for betaing, and I had ended on Wilhelmine's "You have my sword" (modern!Wilhelmine is a geek, let's be honest), I laughed hysterically and had to decide whether to suggest a different analogy for her (she had asked for alternatives), change my own, or leave it. Since due to time pressure I couldn't manage to come up with anything better, and since she was my recipient and I couldn't overtly discuss it with her, RMSE 2021 just has the salon hive mind striking again!
A whooole lot of things got inserted into the fic because they came up in salon during the writing process.
- Mike noticing Fritz's "vivid blue eyes."
- Mike being godfather to one of the pups.
- Henry not signing the card aka not presenting the sponton.
- Mike's medical travel being motivated partly by the Voltaire explosion. We had discussed it before, of course, but we discovered the engagement was just a couple weeks after Fritz's pamphlet appeared, and Selena was so, "See? SEE!" about it that I had to include a mention in the fic, since the Voltaire explosion was already there. And since I couldn't make modern Mike get engaged, I just decided to make explicit the connection between his medical travel and the Voltaire explosion. (Cahn, remember that Fredersdorf both went to Paris and went to take the waters at Aachen while Voltaire was in Prussia. That was why I had them at the same time in my fic from the beginning; the only thing that got added later was the "Okay, this is causation, not just correlation" part. :P)
Speaking of Voltaire, I cut out a whole backstory about how that explosion went down in a modern AU, which I might either write or at least summarize here as a sort of outtake. I left the "He signed an NDA!" for Cahn, though. :DDD (I was really confused when you two first started talking about historical Voltaire signing an NDA, and then I realized that you must be using the term imprecisely, whereas in my head it has one extremely specific technical meaning. But an NDA was absolutely perfect for my corporate AU backstory. :D)
Other parallels I had fun coming up with: Mike's questionable get-rich-quick scheme investments as a counterpart to his alchemy, and his corporate espionage!
Finally,
Finally finally, I enjoyed the mugs and card and flyer more than is reasonable. :D
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-14 07:36 am (UTC)*nods* I can see that on both counts, and of course now wonder how the other boyfriends fit in. Kalckreuth certainly is someone who was both ambitious and gifted as a career military, and of course he got 7 Years Wars Heinrich, which was Heinrich both at his best (in the sense of being able to use all his considerable abilities and often far away from Fritz) and under maximum pressure himself (what with the war going on and fraternal tragedies happening), with it probably not being a coincidence that their breakup happens in peacetime, after Heinrich has time to fully feel the PTSD and the depression. Though my headcanon is that their reventual fallout would have happened anyway because Kalckreuth had this rising streak of possessiveness which Heinrich evidently didn't find sexy and for which my explanation is that Kalckreuth must have sensed Heinrich was less emotionally invested than he was. Otherwise he wouldn't have felt so insecure about Heinrich's other relationships. It's telling that while Lehndorff can't stand either Kalckreuth or Kaphengst while they're with Heinrich, Kalckreuth is the one who can't stand him right back while Kaphengst hardly seems to have noticed his existence.
Tauentzien is another career boy (so much so that he breaks up with Heinrich once it's clear that FW2 will keep his Uncle as far from politics as possible), and the last boyfriend, the Comte, is the rare case of someone who is into a military career - and will have it, and learns a lot from Heinrich - but who also basically takes the time to go private and just write military books so he can be with Heinrich until the later's death.
Your story was so great. Re: Fritz not getting therapy in it, I think that was definitely the right decision, it would have overburdened the story. Btw, speaking of fanfiction, have you two seen this discussion for RPF in this year's Yuletide?
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-15 12:26 am (UTC)I picture Kalckreuth as one of the ones who didn't need Heinrich pushing him, and was strong-willed and opinionated enough that it caused them to clash. (Which is pretty much what I said in my fic.)
Kalckreuth had this rising streak of possessiveness which Heinrich evidently didn't find sexy
Agreed, I think the open relationship part was important to Heinrich.
and for which my explanation is that Kalckreuth must have sensed Heinrich was less emotionally invested than he was. Otherwise he wouldn't have felt so insecure about Heinrich's other relationships
For them specifically, this could very well be, but speaking generally, jealousy is hardly rational. People are insecure all the time with no reason--security or insecurity says more about you than the other person, honestly.
Tauentzien is another career boy (so much so that he breaks up with Heinrich once it's clear that FW2 will keep his Uncle as far from politics as possible), and the last boyfriend, the Comte, is the rare case of someone who is into a military career - and will have it, and learns a lot from Heinrich - but who also basically takes the time to go private and just write military books so he can be with Heinrich until the later's death.
Had forgotten both of these, thank you for the reminders!
Btw, speaking of fanfiction, have you two seen this discussion for RPF in this year's Yuletide?
Yes, and I've been checking to see if you were going to weigh in, because of the three of us, you're the most opinionated on RPF! Cahn and I have weighed in on the worldbuilding post, where we have more (and apparently opposite!) opinions.
Re RPF, I see the mods making a sincere effort to have a constructive discussion about this very problem, so I'm deliberately *not* snarking about how "Alexander the Great + James VI = Historical Royals" is narrow enough one year, but "Enlightenment" is too broad the next year.
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-15 01:58 pm (UTC)Every now and then, I wonder whether I could do a filk of Ex-Wives, the introduction song to the musical Six (about the Queens of Henry VIII.), one version of Fritz' boyfriends and one for Heinrich's. But the problem is that the red thread/emotional beat of that number and the entire musical is Henry VIII's awfulness and the wives' playful competition as to who had it worst, and that doesn't work for either brother and his boyfriends, I'd have to find something else.
Re RPF, I see the mods making a sincere effort to have a constructive discussion about this very problem, so I'm deliberately *not* snarking about how "Alexander the Great + James VI = Historical Royals" is narrow enough one year, but "Enlightenment" is too broad the next year.
Haha, I had forgotten the Alexander the Great + James VI" fandom example, but I, too, kept myself from snarking about "18th Century Enlightenment" being too broad just a year after "19th Century German literature RPF" was fine. (A fandom which would allow you to list both Goethe and Thomas Mann, for example.) Because yes, no point in derailing a constructive effort, and also I don't want to annoy mods who I hope will grant me my 16th Century Habsburg RPF.
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-15 07:23 pm (UTC)and had sex with Algarotti tooand it seems like a pity to have to divide up people-Fritz-knows and people-Voltaire-knows as we did last year, and seems like an arbitrary division when "Enlightenment" does connect them more closely. Although I can see why they might think it was too broad as well, and I can also see that they wouldn't want to be litigating "just how broad is Enlightenment anyway?" years down the line (like Historical Royals/19th Century German Lit, lol).(I'll probably post something short like this on the yuletide post, if you guys think that's OK.)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-15 07:34 pm (UTC)Ah, but I thought splitting them up was something we *wanted* to do, to get two fandoms for the price of one! (Given character nomination limits, and request and offer minimums.) It was having to rename it from "18C Enlightenment" to "Circle of Voltaire" that seemed arbitrary.
and had sex with Algarotti too
Ha!
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-15 07:58 pm (UTC)Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-16 04:49 pm (UTC)https://yuletide-admin.dreamwidth.org/84171.html?view=1652939&posted=1#cmt1652939
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-16 05:05 pm (UTC)Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-16 05:42 pm (UTC)If I'd written anything, I would have sounded aggrieved, I bet.
Hard same, and that's why I didn't reply. (I could have made myself be as diplomatic as I intellectually believe the conversation should be, but setting my feelings aside and being objective would have taken a serious investment of time and emotional energy that I wasn't prepared to make.) In this case, it was best that the least emotionally invested of us replied!
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-18 05:04 am (UTC)Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-18 04:31 am (UTC)See, the thing is, so does your recip, so I wouldn't have noticed :P (one of my college friends delights in making fun of how relentlessly non-visual I am -- you're more so! but I've maybe met... mm, one or two people besides you who are more non-visual than I am).
no way for a fic exchange with the kind of time I had was I going to be able to write something that made Fritz's decision to get therapy feel real and motivated.
Haha, yes, very fair!
I'm still laughing that Cahn and I independently came up with LOTR analogies to end our fics with! When I saw she had Denethor and Gandalf reconciling in the draft she sent me for betaing, and I had ended on Wilhelmine's "You have my sword" (modern!Wilhelmine is a geek, let's be honest), I laughed hysterically and had to decide whether to suggest a different analogy for her (she had asked for alternatives), change my own, or leave it. Since due to time pressure I couldn't manage to come up with anything better, and since she was my recipient and I couldn't overtly discuss it with her, RMSE 2021 just has the salon hive mind striking again!
OKAY I have been wondering since I sent you RWFE to beta what the line was that you said was similar to the one in yours! Interestingly, "You have my sword" has entered so far into internet-meme territory that my principal association with it is "thing that people say on the internet" and not in fact LOTR! (And also, perhaps more to the point, I have mostly succeeded in scrubbing the movies from my memory, with a few notable exceptions like Denethor-the-fireball.) So it didn't even ping to me that it was a LOTR analogy and therefore similar to my fic! :D
(Modern!Wilhelmine is totally a geek!)
we discovered the engagement was just a couple weeks after Fritz's pamphlet appeared, and Selena was so, "See? SEE!" about it that I had to include a mention in the fic, since the Voltaire explosion was already there.
Heeee, and
Speaking of Voltaire, I cut out a whole backstory about how that explosion went down in a modern AU, which I might either write or at least summarize here as a sort of outtake.
Loooool yes please!
I left the "He signed an NDA!" for Cahn, though. :DDD
:D
Thank you again for this awesome story! :D
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-18 06:51 pm (UTC)Oh, funny! It's so extremely LOTR in my head that I thought it would jump out at you and Selena that both fics had a LOTR analogy at or near the end.
Heeee, and [personal profile] selenak that was, of course, when I wrote the outtake about Mike and his engagement and his Very Long Hiking Trip :D
Yes indeed! Lots of things were happening behind the scenes while these fics were being read. I greatly enjoyed Mike's autoreply about his Very Long Hiking Trip. :DD
One thing I didn't expect you to catch and indeed I'm pretty sure you didn't, which I put in for you, was
I hereby resolve to pick more battles that buy us time to clean up tech debt and not so many battles about print job statistics.
I won't even be surprised if you've made it this far, read that sentence after I've called attention to it, and *still* have no idea what I'm talking about. ;) If so, read on.
Selena, the backstory here is a long and detailed discussion that happened during the betaing of Cahn's RWFE fic, about just how archaic Voltaire's language should be. During the course of this in-depth discussion of his word choices, we discovered that "I resolved to" was extremely archaic to me (and Google Ngram backed me on this) and extremely normal and modern to her (and the LDS website backed her on this). Corpus linguistics ensued via email, complete with graphs; it was all very geeky. :D
And so it was that we discovered that the linguistic community that is the LDS church has apparently preserved a usage that has fallen out of common use in the mainstream population. I would be more inclined to say "I made a resolution to," or "I was/became determined to," if "I decided to" wasn't strong enough.
So when I was adding Henry's resolution near the end of the editing process, "resolve" was front of mind for me, because of all the linguistic geekery that had recently happened. I realized that adding "hereby" makes the use of "resolve" fine for me, because "hereby" signals that I'm switching to a more (pseudo-)legalistic and formal register, which preserves many archaic usages, such as "resolve to."
And that's how that one sentence has a whole backstory. :)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-19 04:57 pm (UTC)And so it was that we discovered that the linguistic community that is the LDS church has apparently preserved a usage that has fallen out of common use in the mainstream population.
That is fascinating. Also reminds me of how odd it feels when the very rare occasional German phrase or sentence shows up in Lehndorff's diaries, because Schmidt-Lötzen, unlike, say, Schnauth with his edition of the Sophie of Hannover letters, always then quotes this in the original Rokoko German phrasing. Whereas the rest of the text is of course his early 20th century translation from the French into German, and thus by necessity reads somewhat more modern.
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 05:03 am (UTC)OK,
I won't even be surprised if you've made it this far, read that sentence after I've called attention to it, and *still* have no idea what I'm talking about. ;) If so, read on.
omg, I reread that sentence a couple of times (before reading the rest of your text) and I had NO IDEA. Lol!
I just did an experiment: asked my kindle to search for "resolve" across all text. Of course many of the results were other ways to use the word, but in the sense of "determined to" I found it in the following places:
a) a bunch of Gutenberg stuff written relatively early, like Little Women, Hans Brinker (which is later -- 1968), or in early translations, like Wilhelmine's memoirs or Schiller's Don Carlos.
b) interestingly, people writing about historical figures; this construction appears at least once in the biography I have of LM Montgomery, the biography of Nathaniel Bowditch, and Zinsser's Emilie du Chatelet -- and once in Blanning's Fritz bio!
c) modern SF that has a particular bent towards archaic construction: Duane's Rihannsu books, where the Rihannsu intentionally can have somewhat mannered/slightly-archaic/formal speech; and Bujold's Miles books, where the Barraryans also are coded as slightly-archaic; and the Silmarillion has it a bunch of times, which, well, yeah.
d) LDS books -- sadly, on one of the two with the most hits the search function seems to be a bit borked, so I'm having trouble seeing what's there exactly, but the other one (an official publication about the early days of the Church), holy cow, a good half of the uses of the word "resolve" are in this sense. (The other books I mentioned might have ~1 out of 10 in that sense?
But, yeah, I think I see why it didn't code to me as a weird LDS thing -- even though I guess it is! -- given that I did see it other places -- it just never occurred to me (since we use it as a normal modern construction) that all those non-LDS occurrences had a common factor, that they were concerned with the past.
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 06:50 pm (UTC)Here we have another linguistic problem. I read Lord of the Rings first as a young teenager, which means I read it in the classic German translation. (There is since a few years a new one, which is why I specify.) To this day, I haven't read it in English; when I go back to the book, I always return to my green three volumes of yesteryear.
Otoh, when the movies were released, I was living in Munich with its three cinemas showing movies undubbed and in the original language (in addition to the dozens of cinemas showing them dubbed), and I had long since started the habit of watching in the original to keep my own English fluent. So I watched the movies in English and never in German. Thus, unsurprisingly, I associated "You have my sword!" with the films, and didn't think whether or not the scene goes this way in the book, not least because in the book, Frodo Beutlin aus dem Auenland who does not quite sound like Frodo Baggins from the Shire gets talked to in language slightly associating Jacob Grimm's version of some German myths anyway but a sentence like "Mein Schwert sei Euer!" was not addressed to him.
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 07:52 pm (UTC)(You're the one I actually got "You have my sword" from, since I *don't* hang out much in most non-DW corners of the internet and thus it is purely a LOTR thing to me. If you hadn't said "You have my pen" when I suggested someone should write me a broccoli test fic *cough*, I don't think I would have come up with that solution for Wilhelmine's final line. So I owe you that one.)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-23 06:44 am (UTC)Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-23 04:00 pm (UTC)Which Cahn did not, apparently! :D
But a present day Wilhelmine would definitely have read books, watched the films, argued about same and have opinions on the soundtrack as well, complete with regular "which movie has the best song for the final credit" debates.
Oh, most definitely. :)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 08:38 pm (UTC)Hee, called it! :D
Hans Brinker (which is later -- 1968)
?? Hans Brinker was published in 1865, and the language very much fits that period. Also, I don't think Gutenberg should have anything from 1968--that's well after the public domain cutoff.
interestingly, people writing about historical figures
So people who've recently been reading a whole lot of archaic English, I see, I see. :D It reminds me of how, after I'd hung out with my dissertation advisor for about 3 years, I started catching myself saying "One does this" and "One does that," which is not something I would ever say on my own! (I quickly lost that linguistic ruboff after leaving grad school.)
But, yeah, I think I see why it didn't code to me as a weird LDS thing -- even though I guess it is! -- given that I did see it other places -- it just never occurred to me (since we use it as a normal modern construction) that all those non-LDS occurrences had a common factor, that they were concerned with the past.
I had no idea you guys had kept "resolve to" alive either, so this was very educational! (This is what happens when you get your fic betaed by someone who got their PhD in the history of the English language--you have these conversations. :D)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-23 04:00 am (UTC)