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cahnLast post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.
Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-04 02:25 pm (UTC)Who is the ship: Fritz/Katte
Do they have a trope? Starcrossed lovers
The story in short: Abused prince wants to escape with tragic boyfriend, both get caught, tragic boyfriend is executed in front of abused prince by tyrannical king.
Key quote(s): "Forgive me, my dear Katte! A thousand times, forgive!" "Nothing to Forgive, my prince - I die for you with joy in my heart!" (We can agree about the ideal version for the manifesto later)
Tell me more: here we mention or link good posts/biographies/films
Who is the ship: Fritz/Fredersdorf:
Do they have a trope?: Magnificent Bastard/Trusted Lieutenant, Life Partners
The story in short: Imprisoned Prince meets musical soldier, musical soldier becomes faithful servant, prince becomes king (and magnificent bastard), faithful servant becomes Consigliere, both become life partners until Consigliere retires for health reasons and dies.
Key Quotes: The "come to the window, I want to see you when I ride out, but keep the window closed and the fire on" letter of course. Though I'm also fond of:
"I thought you loved me and wouldn't want to cause me grief by killing yourself. Now I don't know what to believe! But you must believe I only want what's best for you and that the diet and the medicine is only prescribed so you can recover your health again. I beg you, listen to me, and remember you promised me! Please recall Rothenburg who killed himself by infecting himself with podagra through drinking Hungarian wine and eating a hot soup. Your illness is no laughing matter, and if you don't follow a correct diet and take the right prescribed medicine, you'll die! Think about how this would grieve me! If you love me, then listen exactly to the prescriptions! God keep you! Don't write back!"
Tell me more: link to Rheinsberg posts and AO3 stories.
And so forth. Now, I think dividing the post into big ships (Fritz/Katte, Fritz/Voltaire, Fritz/Fredersdorf, Fritz/Algarotti) and rare ships (Fritz/Keith, Fritz/Suhm, Fritz/Keyserlingk, Fritz/Casanova - I wouldn't include the last one except that they did meet and there are A03 stories with people bearing their name and having none of their personalities) makes sense - anyone else?
And of course yours truly would make a platonic subsection for the two sibling ships, i.e. Fritz & Wilhelmine, Fritz & Heinrich. While in all justice, we should also add Fritz & dogs, and by we I mean that part would have to be written by Mildred who surely has a good quote or several at hand.
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-04 04:24 pm (UTC)Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-05 09:50 am (UTC)Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-06 06:31 am (UTC)I don't have really any comments yet, but in terms of tropes,
-Fritz/Fredersdorf: there must be some sort of "supercompetent lieutenant" trope, right?
-Fritz/Voltaire: and surely some sort of "mutual snark" trope? (Or is that covered by "vitriolic best buds"? I feel like it isn't quite the same, though?)
-Fritz/&Wilhelmine: I feel like there needs to be some sort of "subtextual incest" trope?? :)
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-06 08:40 am (UTC)Fritz/Voltaire: How about adding "Snark-to-Snark Combat"?
Fritz/& Wilhelmine: I was wavering on whether to add "if not for his gayness and her low sex drive, might have ended up as embodying "Incest Subtext" trope.
(Well, there's always Wilhelmine-as-Folichon proposing to Fritz-as-Biche, and Biche-Fritz accepting...)
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-08 02:58 am (UTC)Fritz/Voltaire: How about adding "Snark-to-Snark Combat"?
YES THIS
Fritz/& Wilhelmine: I was wavering on whether to add "if not for his gayness and her low sex drive, might have ended up as embodying "Incest Subtext" trope.
I mean. Also the part where he writes her on his wedding night!
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-08 03:00 am (UTC)Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-08 03:14 am (UTC)Oh! There's also of course Kirk/Spock :)
(Most of these ships I don't necessarily ship explicitly romantically, but I am there for all the emotionally compromised codependence between them!)
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-08 07:09 am (UTC)(Admittedly: not a fan of Achilles/Patroclos, their existence as one of the oldest slash pairings not withstanding.)
I guess Alexander/Hephaistion counts, speaking of a pairing who fanboyed Achilles/Patroclos, since Hephaistion isn't just more stable than Alexander and good at fighting but apparantly also at general right-hand-maning of an ever enlarging Empire and Alexander completely folds after his death.
Anyway, we can always invent a trope, and I can change Fritz/Fredersdorf's to Competent Leader/Hypercompetent Sidekick - as long as we're not into Bertie Wooster and Jeeves territory, so people don't complain about being misled as to what to expect. :)
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-10 09:53 pm (UTC)He's supposed to be a competent fighter, but not as brilliant as Achilles (or even Hector), and a competent healer, but not as brilliant as Achilles (he learned from Achilles who learned from Chiron), but...he is supposed to have some people skills. Not just more than Achilles but enough to live with Achilles. And I always figured that took the people skills of a Fredersdorf, or a Hephaistion, or a Pepper Potts. ;)
Furthermore, the Myrmidons are a byword for blind loyalty...and while that could be just because everyone is just so impressed with Mister So Great at Killing, it might also be because he's got Mister People Skills backing him up. <-- This is total headcanon, I admit. I think I slotted it into the trope of Brilliant but Mercurial Leader and Differently Brilliant and Steady Second-in-Command, where a lot of the success comes from the quiet one who lets the famous one get all the credit.
But I would point out that all claims of Hephaistion's logistical hypercompetence are based on a few pieces of evidence that he was sometimes entrusted with a task and it went smoothly, which some historians have felt free to extrapolate from to "must have been hypercompetent!" and others have felt free to dismiss as "a few pieces of evidence that he didn't screw up absolutely everything he touched."
One of my great grumbles about Classics is a rant actually specifically inspired by Hephaistion (and others): that historians will make confident claims about his personality based on a couple anecdotes that were written down hundreds of years later and go back to biased primary sources (like Ptolemy) when we even know what those sources are. And they will do this about literally everything they write about. And I'm like, "Look, I *know* what the sources are for your claim, and you're extrapolating! This is history, not your fandom!"
So yeah, I'm extrapolating for Patroclus, but historians are extrapolating for Hephaistion. :P
Kirk/Spock is a good one! I suspect I would ship them if I had known about slash when I was a Trekkie. Unfortunately, now any time I think about them, I still have the "ewww, no" emotional reaction of my 13-yo self. (I don't make the rules for shipping in my brain, otherwise there would be a lot more Fritz/Wilhelmine and lot more Fritz/Fredersdorf.)
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-14 04:58 am (UTC)I think I slotted it into the trope of Brilliant but Mercurial Leader and Differently Brilliant and Steady Second-in-Command, where a lot of the success comes from the quiet one who lets the famous one get all the credit.
Yes! This is the trope I like! Except that the leader doesn't actually have to be mercurial, and I like it better when the leader's not (another reason I don't like Achilles that much).
Oh, yeah, I don't really ship Kirk/Spock in a sexual way because Star Trek was my teenage fandom, but WOW when I look back on, say, the old Trek novels I would read over and over again, there was a lot of Kirk and Spock being very emotionally compromised in a subtextual extremely shippy way -- Entropy Effect, with Spock flinging himself into time and slowly destroying himself to save Kirk; Triangle, which there's really no other description for but "Spock and Kirk have an extremely shippy threesome"; I wasn't able to get my hands on the Phoenix books at the time (and by the time I did find them wasn't into them enough to remember them very well) but I believe they had a lot of shippy stuff in them too and I would have eaten them up as a teen -- and then my favorite episode (and it was my favorite even before I watched it, just from reading descriptions) was "Amok Time," with Kirk being Spock's sex-charged ritual champion (and that heartbreaking "Jim!" at the end!) - I mean, yeah, my teenage self goes "ick" at overt slash shipping, buuuut she knew what she liked ;)
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-14 01:28 pm (UTC)See, Patroclus is in my headcanon (*someone* has to be, and I *don't* think it's Achilles), but I fully admit I'm not basing that on anything in canon. But I agree with you, it really helps.
Yes! This is the trope I like! Except that the leader doesn't actually have to be mercurial, and I like it better when the leader's not (another reason I don't like Achilles that much).
I know I'm in a minority on this in the 21st century, but Achilles/Patroclus is possibly my favorite ship of all time. And I absolutely love and sympathize with Achilles. And yes, I showed up on the first day of grad school and the professor said something derogatory about Achilles, along the lines of, "I've never met anyone who liked him," and I was like, "WELL NOW YOU HAVE." :PP
I mean, yeah, my teenage self goes "ick" at overt slash shipping, buuuut she knew what she liked ;)
Yeah, even speaking non-shippily, my teenage self had not yet developed whatever preferences I have since developed that mean I would probably have cared about the two of them if I'd encountered them later, or if I were to go back. I did not care about Kirk at all, not even a little bit, and I basically wanted to *be* Spock, but I'm not sure I cared about him as a character in any other sense.
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-14 04:17 pm (UTC)Adult me warmed up to Kirk a little bit and could see where all the slash came from but they still never became a pairing I shipped. And I was one of those ST fans in the early 1990s who were definetely replying "Picard!" in the "Kirk or Picard?" debates. My first two ST slash pairings were, accordingly, Picard/Q and Garak/Bashir. Neither of whom work with the Mercurial Genius/Hypercompetent Sidekick trope, so Fritz/Fredersdorf might even be a first in that regard...
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-14 04:35 pm (UTC)Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-14 04:42 pm (UTC)Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-14 04:45 pm (UTC)Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-14 04:47 pm (UTC)Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-14 10:42 pm (UTC)Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-04 05:20 pm (UTC)Evidence of a much more timid interest in his pages comes from his surviving letters to Fredersdorf, in which there is talk of a certain Carel (C. F. von Pirch). it records slights: ‘Carel has been extremely impolite’; and presents: a leveret and a hussar’s coat for his fifteenth birthday; but it would be hard to see such obsessive doting as a manifestation of the rapacious and tyrannical sexuality described by Voltaire or the pamphleteer.
The contrast with yes-homo Blanning is striking.
Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-05 09:55 am (UTC)Re: Your Mission: Composing a Manifesto
Date: 2023-03-05 01:30 pm (UTC)Incidentally, this quote from Primi Visconti - that I was twenty five years old already and had a beard. He replied that Frenchmen of taste neither were bothered by the age nor the beard - tells you something about Visconti (a straight man) expecting gay men to be only interested in teenage boys and young beardless men in their early 20s, while the Marquis de La Valliere evidently finds men of all ages attractive.
Not that Blanning is unwilling to let Fritz have relationships with men his own age, like Algarotti, but I suspect the pederastic narrative is in the back of his, and other people's, minds.
I must admit I really hope he didn't get too handsy with a 15 years old entirely dependent on the all powerful King
Same!