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
Re: Books
Date: 2021-09-23 02:02 pm (UTC)Same! And there were things you had told us that I had read and vaguely stored in my memory, but now I had more context. Like Sophie's account of the cat-fight between somebody's wife and mistress and jewelry and throwing things and living in the same household--I got to that in WQ and was like, "Oh, that was Karl Ludwig!" You had told us that, but I had no idea who he was, so he was just a name instead of a person.
You're ahead of me with Massie's Peter the Great - rewatching the 80s tv series based on it has reminded me I still haven't read it yet, nor another proper Peter biography, and I've been meaning to.
Not that there are no points where I'm rolling my eyes or going, "I don't think that's true," but for sheer readability, I'm actually enjoying this one even more than the Catherine the Great bio. I can see why this was the award-winning one. I recommend both, but the Peter one even more, especially since you know more about Catherine already.
(And that we both rolled our eyes about the Mary-Queen-of-Scots tie in.)
I did, but the two points where I outright felt insulted were:
Goldstone: Americans don't know who Montrose is, but...
Me, an American scholar: Excuse you, Goldstone.
It would have been so easy to phrase that in a more accurate and less condescending way as, "Montrose isn't well known in the US, but..."
Goldstone: Don't worry if you don't understand this excerpt of a letter between Elizabeth and Descartes. I read their correspondence and I don't understand a thing!
Me: Look, the Emilie biographers I've read haven't felt the need to pat us on the head and tell us it's okay if we don't understand Newton. And since I've read more works by Descartes than I have works by you, Goldstone, and I've studied way more philosophy of mind than Elizabeth Stuart or her daughters...this passage was actually perfectly clear to me.
But those were minor compared to the sheer amount of information and the very accessible writing style.