cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

Last 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.

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

Achilles/Patroclus? :P

From:

cahn

Is Patroclus supposed to have been super competent? I didn't really get that. (For me, this is an integral part of the ship.) I guess I'll give you more emotionally stable than Achilles, but... this is not necessarily all that impressive... :)

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!)

From:

selenak

Seconding the question about Patroclus. I mean, both he and Achille are obviously very competent at fighting, and leading the Myrmidons into battle, but of the two, Achilles is even more so. Patroclus comes across as emotionally more stable, yes, but as you say, compared to Achilles, I dare say most of the Trojan War involved Greeks do. I would have to look up Briseis' praise for Patroclus after his death again to check what he's praised for beyond being nice to her, I guess.

(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. :)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

All right, all right, I've been caught: some of this is my interpretation. :P

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.)

From:

cahn

I think for my own personal version of this trope I need the assistant to be really good at something besides people skills. Logistics is good! Organization is good!

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 ;)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I think for my own personal version of this trope I need the assistant to be really good at something besides people skills. Logistics is good! Organization is good!

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.

From:

selenak

He, well, I did not care about Kirk, either, back then as a teenager, whereas I did love Spock, but if I wanted to be anyone as a ST-watching and reading teenager, it was Saavik.

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...