Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

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.

Comments

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: The Rebuttal

[mildred_of_midgard]

Of course! Tolstoy was wrong: all unhappy families are unhappy in the same ways :P

Lol! Well, I think unhappy families are probably like Rachel's description of PTSD: there are about a dozen symptoms, and one person rarely has all of them, but once you've met a bunch of people with PTSD, you can see that they each have a different subset of a handful of those dozen symptoms. There are ways in which dysfunctional families are dysfunctional, and each unhappy family grabs a different handful of dysfunctions to operate on.

Inheritance has never been a thing in my dysfunctional family. It's not discussed, nor does anyone care, nor have I ever heard of anyone leaving anyone anything that was worth talking about. When I met my wife and she talked about inheritance in her family, it was like when you first talked about family reunions: "Oh, yeah, other families do that. I forgot that was a thing."

You have to go back 100 years in oral family history to get a story about inheritance disputes in my family.