#apologies for the hetalia flashbang!

[proosh]

can you talk more about gilbert being a massive hater when voltaire came to stay at the prussian court thats so fucking funny to me

oh it's a SPECTACULAR amount of beef.

You have to understand. Voltaire quite famously did not have a very high regard for the Prussian state and its peoples, and Fritz himself had something of a complicated begrudging view of the kingdom he inherited, so Gil was operating on one hell of an inferiority complex with both a desperate need to prove himself as well as being fiercely posessive and protective of his king.

Voltaire was but one of the various array of bisexual intellectual artsy types Fritz collected in his harem but he's probably the one that Gilbert ended up feuding with most catastrophically: Voltaire viewed the nation as a boorish brute, and was likewise in return scorned and distrusted for his elitism and pretension (and his Frenchness, of course).

I do think that Gil probably referred to him as a Blackscheisser (TL: "ink-shitter") and Fritz probably had to regularly send him to go dig a canal or something to cool off because otherwise he would be regularly challenging the French fuck to duels over (actual, or perceived) slights to his honour.

That being said, towards the middle and latter half of the 1700s Gilbert became increasingly influenced by the burgeoning Prussian Enlightenment and was increasingly able to intellectually give as good as he got and became a competent, if vicious, rhetorical sparring partner for both of the old men.

I think that probably towards the end he might even have developed a strange sort of fondness for the Blackscheisser, even if he still wanted to strangle his skinny neck. Any possible similarities this dynamic shares with Gilbert's relationship with a similarly French piece of shit is something that remains stubbornly, deliberately unexamined.