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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.
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...