#anyway i hate rudolf affaire mayerling

[ottos-wahn]

rudolf affaire mayerling is elisabeth for people who think mark seibert is a good tod

[aboutyoutoo]

i'm going thru another horror phase and it's... kind of making me want to write something todolf-adjacent maybe but more in a horror vein. like i know tod isn't all that, he's sexy dramatic toxic grim reaper boyfriend etc but ! idk i want to explore the idea that death is actually something scary as well as just something that's seductive to rudolf. either that or something about the horror of actually being in that deep depressive suicidal state.

[lunatic-fandom-space]

Idk if i ever really talked about rudolf: affaire mayerling after i finished watching it, but ive been thinkinh about it again so I guess Im doing that now

Honestly I didnt like it very much, I feel like the worst parts of any frank wildhorn musical are whenever theres a a really slow boring lovesong and in those took up like half the score here, which is a shame because I do remember liking a lot of the non-lovesong songs, although I cant really remember a lot of them. Like, pretty mich the only songs from this musical that I can remember are Du bleibst bei mir, Fäden in der Hand and Mein süßer Held because surprise surprise, the sick freak whose favorite musical is the one where they romanticise suicide likes the song from a different musical where they compare suicide to sex

But anyway, thats not the reason I was thinking about this musical again, the reason I was thinkkng about it again was that other than me not liking the songs, I also found it hard to enjoy because I could not for the life of me tell the characters apart, and for the longest time I couldnt figure out why because i usually dont struggle with face blindness at all, but I think i figured it out

Its because I didnt wanna look at the screen whenever rudolf was onstage because he just made me cringe that much. Did anyone else experience something like that? Like, i dont think its just because the actor didnt have charisma or chemistry the other actors because I feel like it was so severe that Im like "theres no way someone can naturally be that rizzless and cringe, they had to have intended for him to come across like that and done something to make him as pitiful as possible" but the thing that throws me off is the fact that i cant figure out what exactly makes him so cringeworthy to me, like Im pretty sure he just acted like a normal guy, i dont remember him actually doing anything that would make me hate looking at him, he was just so naturally unbearable idk what it is

[purpleshift]

Stop me if I've posted this before, but I'm full of salt and fight and I need to write stuff down

One of these days (i.e. when I fucking finally get to reading ASoIaF) I'm going to write this stupid fic where Rhaegar Targaryen and the most recent Crown Prince Rudolf (of Austria Hungary) switch places in some alternate universe(s). You know what Jon Snow is going to be called in one of these universes? JOHN OF AUSTRIA, THAT'S RIGHT, WATCH AS I GET MY FANFICTION ALL OVER YOUR HISTORY HAHAHA, NO ONE WILL BE ABLE TO TELL IF IT'S OUR HISTORY'S JOHN OF AUSTRIA OR MY FANFIC (yeah, us millennials are often driven by spite) Here's some things I have planned out: lol prophetic dreams, try interpreting them when they're about alternate universes John of Austria, ward of King Edward the whatever number I need to make it work, King of the U.K. and other assorted territories can canon Rhaegar make sense of the trenches, where we meet our Jon Snow? Not to make fun of war, but, wow, did warfare get different in very few centuries OTL instead of OTL Princess Stéphanie, meet our fictional Princess Amelia of Portugal or Brazil or something, she's our ATL Elia Martell stand in and she's a character who exists and hopefully won't be hated on by hypothetical readers of a fic that doesn't exist yet oh and this Prince Rudolf is platinum blond, I heard there was a production of the musical/play thing where adult him was played by a platinum blond person? Yeah, that. new in controversial ideas: emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria is a better father figure than King Aerys II of Westeros (Elisabeth's the same as ever, though) (note to self: read a fucking history book) controversial idea 2: Rhaegar is IIRC depicted as more liberal than his dad (hard not to be, with a paranoid ruler), and it is known that OTL Rudolf was a liberal to his dad's conservative. OTOH, liberal pseudo/quasi-(?) feudal thinkers are not the same as liberals in a C19 monarchy. Anyway, he probably gets on better politically with Franz Joseph than Rudolf did. what a good kid, thinks Franz Joseph, knowing this is not his kid anyway, some random butterflies are that Lyanna lives (maybe because Rudolf isn't trained in whatever faux mediaeval sword's fashionable in Westeros, and runs off from before the Ruby Ford, who the fuck knows), and that Rhaegar has sex with yet another man's wife (in a loose sense, unless you go by the Crusader Kings 2 mod), though since they're pretending to be married maybe that's excusable? that baby in ATL C19 is a girl and called Valerie, after her "aunt" lol (also because this was the best pun on either Valyria or Visenya I could come up with) meanwhile in Westeros, Rudolf is apparently trying for an ATL Mayerling thing (not to make fun of suicide or murder, but like, I'm sure there is a plot thing that happens that justifies this, and like I can't diagnose from the dead, but like? why suicide-murder? in the first place? because of your royaltyness and your dad disapproving of an affair? it's super simplified but very concerning, OTL CP Rudolf. if you were alive today I want to talk as friends about recovery because you know, sometimes I have suicidal thoughts or actions but not murder? anyway you don't know because you're long dead) in any case, whether because of this or another reason, he dies! Oh, and Ned Stark arrives at some point. oh uh I had a thought about Lyanna "running away" because Rhaegar in this universe promised a fair arbitration with Robert and then universe swap happens; or maybe they "accidentally" got drunk (they = both) or desperate (but it wasn't Rhaegar who initiated) (but that sounds a bit rapey??) anyway I'm not really sure how to change that thing where it seems like Rhaegar had all the agency and Lyanna didn't say no (and it's all very dub-con)? Anyway, ATL Westeros' Jon Snow is successfully born, Rudolf dies, and they burn his body because plot reasons? (Targaryens are traditionally burnt, right, and uh since "Rhaegar" didn't die at Ruby Ford, it would probably look bad for Lyanna (not so much Ned) to say "oh hey I shot him dead while he was trying to kill me after having his kid", THERE YOU GO) In any case, apparently there is enough magic in burning universe-outsider-Rudolf's corpse because ~universe swap~, a portal opens and we get Rhaegar back; somehow a peace treaty without total destruction of the Targaryen forces is made; Elia, Rhaenys, and baby Aegon get to live because I say we should stop fridging them for Rhaegar/Lyanna. It's probably very uncomfortable in the Westerosi royal court but damn it, part of dumping (I-most-often-speak-Common-which-being-represented-by-English-in-canon-will-be-interpreted-as-English) sorry, I mean a Rhaegar who only has English/Common in common with OTL in C19 Europe, is that he has an opportunity to read about the Wars of the Roses. Fun fact: I hear that there were waves of Anglophilia in Europe in the 19th century? Being cool and industrialising and all that. Yeah, they'd know some English in Vienna. Anyway, I hope he read up on the Wars of the Roses! Wait, it's my fic outline, yeah he did. Anyway, I'm not sure, but I would think that he would also attempt to study politics in this new world. I don't think canon Rhaegar is that up his own arse, though I've seen my fair share of Rhaegar-bashing. Yeah, stuff starts changing in Westeros. Oh, and maybe a fountain pen Rhaegar was using at the time survives the magic fire and Westeros gets the fountain pen tech early. Yay. Right, meanwhile in Vienna, CPrincess Amelia and Franz Joseph have just seen the guy they've been having pretend is the Crown Prince disappear in a fire. Cons: she is a pregnant widow, he doesn't have a son in a literal sense (like where is the body). Pros: there was a fire?? (dubious - discuss) The pros massively underweigh the cons, if that wasn't clear. So they have a funeral? It doesn't change much for their timeline unfortunately, except that some seriously weird conspiracy theories pop up eventually. Sorry, that universe. Oh, you were wondering where our John of Austria comes in? In the universe he comes from, his dad (either Rhaegar or Rudolf, but it doesn't matter) publicly cheated on his wife with the recently widowed Dowager Kaiserin of Germany, and now the Kaiser has a younger half-brother being raised in the UK by their maternal uncle, which is public knowledge, which as previously mentioned gets awkward around WWI. John's parents are both still dead, but at least he knows who they really are from the start. Epilogue: Rhaegar's last dream Oh, he and Valerie the younger, the OC, they meet. She has his eyes, by the way. It's set WWII, she's Resistance, she recognises him somehow, they have an emotional talk, the end. I assume it's a happyish ending, since Westeros isn't exactly in outright civil war when the ice zombies come. Yeah, anyway, since my canon grounding is so terrible and second hand, I'm not writing it until I read the canon.