Frederick the Great reveal post / discussion post 8

In the last several months, as anyone who reads this DW knows, mildred_of_midgard and selenak and I have been part of this quite frankly amazing Frederick the Great fandom, and I sort of assumed that the two people in this fandom who actually knew anything, mildred and selenak, were going to write fics for Yuletide, and I (who know nothing except what they've told me in the last several months) was going to awesomely enjoy reading them. In fact, mildred wrote a Fredersdorf fic for selenak's prompt which I betaed, but then mildred's medical issues got bad enough to interfere with her writing fic (making the beta edits would have involved a substantial amount of rewrite), and she wrote a post lamenting she wasn't going to be able to produce any yuletide fic. Meanwhile, I had two fics that I was pretty sure were from selenak, and I thought it would be a shame for her to write us fic and for her not to get any :(

So then mildred and I had this (very paraphrased) conversation (mildred_of_midgard has her own account here, and she has promised to reproduce the actual conversation in comments to this post):

me: You know, we should really write something for selenak! Now that I've read what you wrote about Fredersdorf, I think I could take a stab at her Fredersdorf prompt, if you edited and otherwise helped me out with historical stuff and also if you don't mind it being way more about music than something you would write.
mildred: YES GOD YES and also oh you sweet summer child thinking you know enough to write this. [Mildred was far FAR nicer than this in real life.] For starters, here are 3500 words [really!] of things I know for a fact you don't know about Fredersdorf.
me: ...I was clearly overoptimistic. But I can work with this. Um, also, all the creativity-generating bits of my brain are already being used for my assignment, so can you also come up with an idea for the fic and also answer all my historical questions?
mildred: Sure! While I'm thinking about this, have 2k more words of historical grounding! Ok, and here are some ideas too. In fact, here's a whole plot for you!
me: Great! *writes 4k words of the plot*
mildred and me, more-or-less in unison: You did all the hard parts!

Then mildred fixed all my extensive historical errors and was fortunately able in between various medical woes to add various parts like the entire Wilhelmine subtheme and the entire last scene, and we deleted some of my words, and then I wrote some more paragraphs about music at her request and edited some of her stuff. I estimate that I probably ended up writing ~4.5k of the final fic, and mildred ended up writing ~ 2k of it (does that sound about right?) Of course that does not count the... I have no idea how much historical consultantcy stuff mildred ended up writing in the end, but I imagine it was significantly upwards of 10k :P And of course she wrote the detailed endnotes :D It also does not count all the words written in comments to the google document where we argued things like that Fredersdorf should be more zen than mildred wanted to write him and less zen than I wanted to write him :)

Although mildred and I mostly agreed on things, I had final veto power (and I did wield it a couple of times), so any remaining problems should be thought of as mine :) I'm very curious, though, as to how evident the collaboration was, and how evident the seams were, as I think mildred and I have very different writing styles, but it went through enough editing passes and discussion that I suspect much of the differences got at least somewhat smoothed out?

Counterpoint for Two Flutes

The Book of Esther, ants, flute music, etc.

(Or: December 2019: the month D would say to me before bed, "What were you doing tonight, giant ants or Fritzmas?")

Traditionally I make a post here on the media I consumed for Yuletide and have a more conventional reveal post elsewhere. This year I have a more conventional reveal post as usual, and in addition because all the (two other) people who are interested are here, I also have a collaboration-detail post for Frederician RPF here :)

I don't have a lot to say about canon this year, as I said most of it in the fic, I think. I did learn some things related to Bible/Tanakh/Book of Esther and my feelings thereof, ants, and flutes. A small sampler of weird things I learned tangentially (none of this actually made it directly into any final drafts):

-Apparently I have some dreadful mixed feelings about Mordecai (which were flagged in beta, lol). (Especially the bit where Esther goes "so, I might die!" which I feel is a totally legit emotional response, and then Mordecai comes down on her. Which, I mean, I understand his viewpoint too, but I guess my sympathy is with Esther :P :) ) Though I am working through those feelings :)

-Male ants are haploid (one set of chromosomes) and female ants are diploid (two sets of chromosomes). Male ants are basically walking sperm! One of the very weird things about this is that male ants can't directly have genetic sons (the haploid contribution comes solely from the mother), but they can have genetic grandsons -- they can combine their genetic information with a diploid female to make a diploid daughter, and that diploid daughter can pass some of the male's genetic information down to a son. (How weird is that?!)

-According to a general who (wikipedia says) apparently was not very reliable, the Persians won a major battle with Egypt by carrying cats, which the Egyptians regarded as sacred, and the Egyptians didn't shoot because they were afraid of hurting the cats.

-There's this guy who pours molten aluminum inside ant nests and sells them as sculptures

-Jan Dismas Zelenka, whom I have never heard of before, was a Czech Baroque composer who wrote some really cool stuff, like the secular oratorio Sub olea pacis et palma virtutis (youtube link)