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: Reading group: In the Shadow of the Empress - Intro, Ch 1-2, half of Ch 3
Date: 2021-09-24 07:36 am (UTC)LOL about the Hamilton riff.
-IDK if MT's schooling was "not particularly taxing"? Not particularly useful for an empress, I would believe. But like between all that music and dancing and drawing and languages, I bet it was a reasonable amount of work.
No kidding. The type of history she learned might have been boring to our author, and not at all helpful for governing later, but learning it still was work. Now we know less about child!MT's work schedule than those of her own children (not just Joseph's), because it's way better documented, but it was a tight lesson plan by anyone's standard. (Other than FW's, who is a category by himself in parenting.)
LOLOLOL here's the MT-Fritz marriage rearing its head again! It's foooooollowing you, Selena! (Although my impression from you guys talking about it was that it was way more complicated than she made it sound...)
She also has it backwards. Her version if that Charles offered MT to FW as a daugther-in-law, was told "no Catholics", and then offered EC instead (that would be the "Protestant relation" she mentions). Whereas in reality, the Austrians never offered MT (and with her the Empire) to Fw or Fritz directly. They first blocked the English marriages because politics, and EC (MT's first cousin, after alll) was always their candidate to tie young Fritz close to the Habsburgs. (Because Seckendorff was good at his job, and knew FW inside out, among other reasons. And because no one had forgotten the bonkers Clement affair. Selling FW on his son converting to Catholicism was an immediate no go.) It was Fritz who came up with the "how about me/MT?" idea. Well, and also the Brits telling Eugene they wanted it in writing MT would never marry Fritz in 1728, I admit, but that, again, was politics.)
Reading "Francis" for Franz Stephan feels very weird to me.
Lorraine as a festering wound and "she'd make it up to him for the rest of his life": am very much sideeying this as it sounds like Nancy Goldstone maybe wants to explain his infidelities and MT putting up with same this way. That's what we call Küchenpsychologie in German. Mind you, this whole thing was a humiliation conga in many ways (including protocol games at the wedding where he and his brother couldn't be greeted by envoys the way MT and the rest of the Imperial family was because of their lower rank), but not only was being Emperor the prize on the horizon, but FS quickly discovered he had a talent for business which would end up making him one of the richest men in Europe. If you want to use at something that gave him a sense of self instead of regarding himself as MT's trophy husband, that would be one thing. And the biographies I've read so far gave me the idea he was the one more prone to compromsing and placating her in the marriage than the other way around. See also his letter to Leopold about how to be a good husband on the occasion of Leopold's marriage.
Poisonous mushrooms: not the impression I got from Voltaire's phrasing, just that Charles died after that particular dish, and that his death rewrote the political landscape. Remember, dying after eating wasn't that unusual - it happened to La Mettrie, and no one thought he was poisoned.
Mind you, Nancy Goldstone has a worrying tendency so far of believing Voltaire's writing to be literally true, more about this in the next comment.
Re: Reading group: In the Shadow of the Empress - Intro, Ch 1-2, half of Ch 3
Date: 2021-09-24 04:08 pm (UTC)Lorraine as a festering wound and "she'd make it up to him for the rest of his life": am very much sideeying this as it sounds like Nancy Goldstone maybe wants to explain his infidelities and MT putting up with same this way. That's what we call Küchenpsychologie in German
YEAH. I was really side-eyeing that one and in the subsequent chapter when she was all "so MT gave FS this title because blah blah Lorraine," because I'm like... I bet she had other reasons other than that. And yes to FS being an awesome businessman, which I did remember! I'd forgotten the letter about the good husband, but now I remember that, that was really sweet <3
Nancy Goldstone has a worrying tendency so far of believing Voltaire's writing to be literally true
...this explains A LOT! LOL.
Re: Reading group: In the Shadow of the Empress - Intro, Ch 1-2, half of Ch 3
Date: 2021-09-24 05:41 pm (UTC)Welcome to me reading lots of things you write, although they're getting more normal by the year. ;) I laughed when I read a little further in the G1 volume last night and saw Hatton, in her obligatory section on how she rendered names, write:
The hybrid Brunswick-Lüneburg may offend the purist, but while Braunschweig is still too 'foreign'
Me: See? See!
(This is funny because just this week, Selena and I had this funny exchange in her journal:
Me: I spend so much time reading your write-ups with German spellings that you've got *me* typing "Hannover" and "Rokoko" half the time, without even meaning to! I'll let you know if I ever catch myself doing "Braunschweig." :)
Braunschweig: Still too foreign. ;)