Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30

[cahn]

In 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

Comments

Re: Goldstone Ch 5-6

[cahn]

Jewelled snuff boxes, btw, were a standard Fritz gift for people he liked, but not just handsome young men. His siblings got their share, too.

And porcelain snuffboxes! (Which I'm not likely to forget, after watching Mildred figure out how to structure the reveal of her fic around that porcelain snuffbox ;) )

Mind you, I do think she's on to something when talking about how all the pregnancies and the weight gain must have left their traces in MT; the connection between the physical and the emotional/psychological is something older biographiers often overlook.

Yeah, that's a good point!

Speaking of the footnotes, I see FS' business sense and accomplishments is banished to one as well. If you read the main texts of these chapters, you have the impression he never did anything but hunting and wenching.

UGH, yes, I forgot to mention that! I had a VERY different view of FS from what you've told me than the one that I'd get just from reading the main text here.

re: Pompadour, I'm with you, though I like Goldstone's description of all the many things she had to be at that court in addition to being Louis' lover (jester, councillor, art patron, "part snake-charmer", etc.), all so Louis would never get bored. Being and remaining Maitresse-en-titre was a gruelling job which had very little to do with how good or bad you were at sex.

Ha, yes, I did like that part :D

Re: Goldstone Ch 5-6

[mildred_of_midgard]

And porcelain snuffboxes! (Which I'm not likely to forget, after watching Mildred figure out how to structure the reveal of her fic around that porcelain snuffbox ;) )

Well! So while I know that Fritz was big into giving out snuffboxes, and he was Mister Porcelain, so at some point he surely gave out porcelain snuffboxes, I don't know that for sure. Chekov's porcelain snuffbox happened because I was looking at 18C snuffboxes on Google images for inspiration, and when I saw that they made snuffboxes out of porcelain, I had to use it, because Fritz had *just* occupied Meissen and helped himself to everything he could get his hands on.

So that was actually creative license that's probably historically accurate, not a fact I know to be true! (But I will not be surprised if felis promptly pops in to tell me about some letter or document that mentions a porcelain snuffbox. ;))

Re: Goldstone Ch 5-6

[felis]

;) He did indeed send some from Meissen during the war and Countess Camas got two, one painted with forget-me-nots and one with a dog.