#and I do take a lot of modern freedom bc goddamn are there many gay people

[breitzbachbea]

Rotating JJerusalem AU Francetto at the highest speed in my head, because Francesco values Dolcetto for seeing through all the class and order bullshit and values him as someone who is intellectually of his rank and who he will defend and behind closed doors treat as an equal, but it IS still medieval times and Francesco values his head upon his shoulders, so he also never openly challenges the social order nor would Dolcetto ever dream to suggest something like that. And Francesco expresses his affection also partly by reassuring Dolcetto of his high and deserved status.

Like, people outside the dominant social system have always existed and putting them back into the world via historical fiction, acknowledging that we haven't heard of them because they survived by being lowkey, is fun! It is not necessarily an ahistorical modern point of view if done right. But I just think that also trying to incorporate a worldview that is as similiar to ours as it is different can be a lot of fun in fiction.

[waters-and-the-wilde]

vivez (you have 1 life let it Be Gay)

woo okay Fools and Angels stalled out a bit because all the later stuff wants to happen but the in between stuff still won't get its shit together and the later stuff is relying on that for at least some semblance of coherence (also i went on a road trip and went to a wedding and ran away to a farm on the west coast so it was a busy month)

so i'm going to hash around my dumb gay fic headcanons to get back in the swing of things pls enjoy

first of all, i recognize that canon Percy and Marguerite are textbook dumb heteros who just need to talk to each other and fuck knows why i like them so much, but i also used to think queer people were just better at that sort of thing (bc you know I thought that the self-knowledge and courage and ability to see through dumb cisheteronormative expectations that came with the territory would give one an edge) and honestly it's been a bit of a trip to constantly discover the extent to which we're all complete disasters

anyway all this to say, Percy and Marguerite are a matched set of distinguished-disaster bisexuals and peak mlm/wlw solidarity. they both went to boarding school and Mrgt was in theatre so like. they Know what they're about.

(side note back in the day i wanted Scarlet Pimpernel but Lesbians nd it was gonna be Pimpernels and Violets w/ Gwendolyn Christie for Percy and Gugu Mbatha-Raw for Mrgt.)

but honestly while we're here with my old headcanons I rly want POC Mrgt and Armand especially knowing what I know now about Alex Dumas and how many multi-racial folks from Haiti were knocking around Parisian society being wealthy and fabulous

(whole other set of reasons to stand back and sip champagne while letting Crowley loose on Thomas Jefferson)

this adds some whole other considerations that I would need to research mostly because of England being weird and whether Percy and Mrgt could have gotten married in the first place. but like if you were black, France basically was the only promise for freedom. you didn't have other places to go. how much more weight does that lend to Mrgt's decision to condemn de St. Cyr? being willing to make that call because the idea of royalist invasion and having that first lick of freedom snatched away is intolerable? having to struggle with watching those real possibilities get corrupted and torn away but really truly knowing what it was worth to begin with and never quite knowing when to break away from it?

and Armand, who's all in for the same reason, Armand who's smart and passionate and idealistic who gets to help shape the new government only to realize it's becoming a monster and swallowing him up while he's stuck on the inside

whoops i made myself sad

anyway i can have trans guy Sir Percy, as a treat. he's gottn away with it bc he was like four years old and wanted to be a knight and his father needed an heir and he said 'well why can't I be a boy? I want to be a boy I want to be Sir Percival' and his mother was sick and old Algernon Blakeney thought bout it and he went and fudged some things and bribed some nurses and raised bby Percy with private tutors, and Percy managed to make it through boarding school by virtue of being six foot odd of gorgeousness and good at getting people to see what he wants them to see so i guess that makes him bisexual in both the archaic and the modern sense

due to Percy's charisma stats he became the center of the Eton queer penguin huddle, starting with Andrew Foulkes when he realized he wasn't terribly interested in women except that he just thinks they're neat (thought maybe he was gay before realizing men weren't really his thing either, aromantic, now platonically devoted to Percy and the league and Marguerite)

Tony Dewhurst had an entire blazing crush on Percy that eventually settled into a platonic devotion, (okay but have you seen 80s Tony Dewhurst and the way he looks at Percy? it’s like he was taking lessons in Gay Babey from Aziraphale) now in a close relationship with his 'valet' (actually a bf from France who they rescued nd is now in England disguised as Dewhurst's valet so they can be close w/o raising eyebrows)

half the league is their Eton queer penguin huddle tbh, hence the sense of discretion and willingness to risk danger bc life already be like that

fuck it they're all queer except Armand, i'm not sorry and i do make the rules

poor Chauvelin, repressed disaster bisexual, loses half his braincells in Sir Percy's presence because the man's so goddamn infuriatingly attractive and he doesn't know how to process it except as pure loathing and contempt for his enemy and rival, and while we're on the subject, Crowley's slinkiness and conflicting gender cues and background noise aura of temptation also make him feel an awful lot of things he doesn't want to look at too closely, and while we're on the subject, so does Mrgt in a soldier's uniform

(it doesn't help that like queerness was, if acknowledged, thought of as a vice of the aristos in France whereas England's molly community skewed more middle class, and Chauvelin was a marquis' son who's trying desperately to fit in and prove his loyalty to the Republic and Max Robespierre's purity culture so that's a whole extra layer, boy he and Aziraphale need to have a talk)

baby lesbian Suzanne de Tournay had an entire blazing crush on Mrgt but she was a few years older so it was more of a senpai notice me thing. genderfluid awakening from that time she got to go around in disguise as a soldier. marriage of convenience with Sir Andrew? that way Maman approves and isn't constantly overseeing her and they can both hang out with Mrgt on the regular who can introduce her to all the London debutantes. ya girl is french she doesn't give a heck she's gonna be mistress to half the unhappily-married women in London whose husbands have bad teeth

Armand is... straight. it happens. however instead of being the token dumb hetero, Armand is not only a good bro and ally but he's actually pretty emotionally astute, he's just not a schemes-and-layers thinker like literally all the others, and he's reasonably in touch wth his feelings and acts on them which just gets him in a lot of trouble with 'rational' society and furthermore he's the one who reminds people to actually talk instead of playing mind games and that friends is why Armand has the brain cell

the song Killer Queen is heavily based on Marguerite and Mme de Serpens bc of Freddie Mrc hearing Crowley ramble about his time in France thank u for coming to my ted talk