#nikolushka

[anotherfandomtrash]

Petya was asked to go on a walk with Nikolenka

[sneakystorms]

Can you tell us more about Marya being a horny mess please? It's such an interesting interpretation of her character and has extra bonus points for the potential to make Tolstoy livid 🤭

Sure! Honestly i don't even feel like I'm going against tolstoy on this one because it's an interpretation i somewhat extrapolated from her canon characterisation.

One of my favourite marya moments (and there are many) is when she gets annoyed at mmelle bourienne for something or else, and her internal response to this is horror at herself for harbouring anything but the most amicable of emotions. So she forces herself to be friendly with amelie, but the repressed animosity is left to fester until it grows into disproportional hatred. A similar thread appears in her relationship to her father - because she believes she has no right to be anything less than loving and appreciative, she represses her negative emotions for him, but they continue to work their way in her subconscious. Speaking of her father, he has a very direct role in reinforcing this pattern of behaviour - when he mocks marya for dressing up for anatole, for enjoying the thought of romance or being courted, this causes such intense shame in her that she tries even harder to rid herself of any romantic inclinations, which is reflected in her social isolation once in moscow. I also love the moment where marya sees anatole making out with amelie and, rather than react in justifiable anger, appears more sympathetic to Amelie than ever, swearing to help her and anatole realise their love for each other. I read this as marya internalising shame so fully that she's relieved at an "excuse" not to indulge in that which she desires, because years of self denial have resulted in pursuit of her own wishes appearing frightening. Although i certainly am not opposed to reading this scene as her lesbianism peeking through and making her all too happy to have a reason to give up on her relationship with anatole lmao

All this to say that marya is an incredible portrayal of freudian repression a hundred years before freud, and particularly of the way one can repress shameful or impossible to realise desires and sublimate them - redirect their libidinal energy - into other, more acceptable pursuits. For freud this is most often art, but in Marya's case i think you can read her as sublimating all her shameful desires or emotions into religion, which is of course a highly moral thing for her to obsess over, providing an even stronger barrier against sinful thoughts than something like an artistic hobby might have. But as always in freud, urges that have been rejected by and banished from the conscious seep into the unconscious, where they threaten to fester and develop. Iirc the metaphor freud uses is that of a blocked water passage which causes the stream to leak through whatever other paths or cracks it can find - this is how you get repressed urges manifesting in weird, roundabout ways like dreams or odd fetishes.

This is kind of what i see happening to marya - both with her anger, which escapes in her teaching nikolushka, and with her desire for sex and romance. But I'm also throwing in a half-serious observational tidbit about how christians who have an unhealthy relationship with their own faith and repress their "sinful" urges sometimes go on to attach so much importance to rituals of self-protection, self-cleansing or self-punishment in hopes of saving themselves from sin that those very rituals end up as subconscious escape routes for the repressed horniness and other undesirable things. This is how you get jokes about medieval catholics being little too into lashing, or about people for whom the religious bliss that comes from prayer borders on the erotic, or about those who are a little too obsessed with staying virgins until marriage...

That's kind of what i was alluding to with the "kinky in that way some xtians are" comment (or however i phrased it). But that's only an aside, the main point is my girl is pushing down all her horniness and one day, hopefully, that bottle is gonna burst and as far as I'm concerned it might as well burst in Helene's nimble fingers. I also think she'd find it fun and gratifying to mess with Marya's head by convincing her that the wild gay sex they're having doesn't count or isn't really sin or something like that, which is obviously a narrative marya would cling to if she did ever slip up and give in to the throes of sodomy

[officialleotolstoy]

1, 18 and 21. Burn the wap fandom alive baby

1. The character everyone gets wrong:

I already talked about Pierre in my other answer, so I’m going to go with a weird pair of characters: Marya B and Anatole. With Marya B, people love to just turn her into a soft girl cottagecore lesbian stereotype character and ignore all of the nuance she has. She helped essentially run the estate when her father was dying and whipped everyone into shape when no one else stepped up. She basically raised Nikolushka for her absent brother. She was relieved her father was dying and felt horribly guilty about it. She helps out people down on their luck out of the goodness of her heart even though her family disapproves. She’s so much more than just a cute sweet girl that can be dismissed because she’s “soft” and “boring”. She can be soft AND strong AND interesting.

As for Anatole, everyone treats him like he’s either a haha silly stupid guy who just makes mistakes and doesn’t think and infantilizes him to excuse his actions like he’s not a grown adult man OR treats him like some evil mastermind heartbreaker who just wants to hurt people. He is neither of those things. He’s too stupid to be actively manipulative but he’s also too self absorbed to care if anyone gets hurt while he pursues what he wants. He’s not innocent and naive but he’s not calculated either. His major problem is that he is horribly horribly selfish. He’s the worst and I hate him forever still of course

18. It’s absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on…

My usual answer is Vera Rostova, but it seems there’s been a bit of a revolution around her recently. Not really sure what’s going on in Veraland but I salute you all. So I’m changing my answer to Boris! He is one of the guys ever and we need to talk about him more. He’s ambitious he’s driven he’s a mommy’s boy he wrote his wife emo poetry and doesn’t even like her anyway. He’s friends (or something…) with Hélène. The guy ever

Also Petya!!! He’s sooo interesting as a parallel to Nikolai and a tragic cautionary tale about idealizing war. The scene between him and that young French prisoner of war haunts me forever

21. Part of canon you think is overhyped:

I want to say the philosophy rants but NO ONE is hyping that up lmao. I’m going to go with the bear cop river thing. Don’t get me wrong I love that bit but people talk about it like its a whole volume of misadventures when it’s literally mentioned once in passing

[astrovtea]

I believe in the whole "Nikolushka being a secret Kuragin" theory because I refuse to believe that Andrei impregnanted anyone

unless he impregnanted Anatole

[dolokhoded]

Who do you think is the female w&p character that Tolstoy treats the worst (aka for which he deserves to be brought back to life just so he can be killed again)?

honestly i think they all have horrible fates. i can't really compare them to each other because they're so different and they all want different things etcetcetc but they all have terrible lives. i can tell you who i think was shown more kindness, though, and i think it's marya b. her getting married to nikolai was out of nowhere but she seemed much happier at the end of the book than at the start of it and that's what matters, she runs her own home, she's not depended on her abusive father anymore, she raises her brother's child as her own which i think is nice, she has a much healthier relationship with her faith, there are still some weird things abt the epilogue but overall i think marya levelled up. her life wasn't perfect but by the end of the book i was happy for her.

everyone else was absolutely fucked over. helene was abused and misunderstood and forced into boxes and incredibly toxic dynamics her entire life, until she died a just as sudden and 'dramatic' death with little to no explanation just so she could be out of the way and pierre could remarry. natasha lost her entire personality, became bitter and sad and bland just to pop out a few babies, and completely stopped singing after finding her 'true purpose' in marriage, while her singing is what was used as a metaphor for her happiness for the entire book. sonya constantly lived in the shadow of her family with no life of her own and ended up being a babysitter for her cousins and their spouses. lise was robbed of her life and her friends to be isolated with her husband's toxic family without anyone ever considering her own happiness, ended up dying from something that could easily be avoided if she had been provided proper medical care (even in 19th century standards), didn't get to ever return to her friends or raise her son who she seemed so excited about and was completely written out of the narrative, not even being mentioned in the epilogue as the woman who literally birthed nikolushka, while he only ever cared for his father. vera was mocked and ignored by her entire family for no good reason, was never taken seriously by anyone and even when she finally met someone who cared about her and got married and managed to leave that house tolstoy had to come in a bunch of chapters later to remind us that btw vera never finds happiness because she's so unlikable and she and her husband hate each other, then is completely alienated from the rest of her family by the end of the book. i could go on these women were all having a fucking terrible time. i don't see their situations as comparable, so i can't tell you which had it worst. i can tell you who i'm the most emotionally invested it, and therefore seems worse to me, but i couldn't tell you which is worse. i wouldn't want to be in any of their places equally.

tldr we should bring tolstoy back to life just so i can kill him with my bare hands

[nastassyafilippovna]

marya voice i tell my kids i dont love them when im angry at them. i surely have no traits of my father. i am going to go scream at nikolushka now goodbye

[incorrectlit]

Nikolushka: Dad, could you read me a bedtime story?

Andrei: No.

Nikolushka: Pretty please?

Andrei: The physical expression of the word please doesn’t change my answer.

[kirillovnas]

When Pierre went to Borodino, and Napoleon matched toward Moscow, Anna was likely either with Marya or the Rostovs.

In the case of being with Marya, she tries to help Nikolai get them all out of Bogucharovo, and helps with Nikolushka and seeing to Prince Nikolai's affairs. She would also go with Marya to see Andrei and the Rostovs. And would generally stay with Sonya while Marya stayed with Natasha.

In the case of being with the Rostovs, she tries to be helpful however she can. She helps Natasha with Andrei, helps Natalia and Sonya with the house, etc. She'd still probably spend most of her time with Sonya, though.

[mynameisemma]

Yes, I agree with you completely that the need to endure her father's abuse and that her relationship with him would be absolutely different him if she was a man.

However, I do like the idea of male!marya being a fail son for not living up his expectations and standards of masculinity (which, imho, destroys Andrei in the canon). I can imagine him becoming religious through several years long identity crisis (male!Marya being not interested in military service but doing it anyway because that's what expected from him by society and his father and then fighting in a war and seeing the most vicious side of humanity catapults him into depression and severe disappointment in a high and then secular society in general). Male!Marya journey to God would be very different to the one we have in the canon (or, to be more precisely, the one we don't. We can only speculate on why and how Marya became so religious) but I don't think it's entirely impossible for him to develop his own religious tendencies especially when we saw Andrei's entire values system got destroyed after the Austerlitz in the canon.

I've just been thinking about how Marya dreamed to become a pilgrim/fool for Christ which never happened because she couldn't leave her father and Nikolushka (and Nikolushka to her father...) and also because Tolstoy had this ideal for a noblewoman HEA, where she has a family and is a to break free from the constant performance society and his father demand from him and his father's abuse; male!Marya paving his own way to authenticity; and all of that wrapped up in a story of a nobleman, an only heir and a son of war hero, starting a life of an extreme humbleness which allows him to be finally at peace with himself even if it makes people think he's mad.

one thing about war and peace is that you really can’t imagine any of the characters with their genders flipped. girl nikolai and boy natasha would literally just be each other. girl andrei and boy marya is incomprehensible. girl pierre and boy helene—well, that one’s fascinating, actually—

[windsweptlassie]

hey! I’m crying

[anotherfandomtrash]

Jamming to the tunes Little doddle and clean versions under the cut

[andryushas]

can you ms paint nikolenka and andrei

i’m sorry anon

[officialleotolstoy]

Andrei cries when Nikolushka is born; Nikolushka cries when Andrei dies

Something something father/son parallels everything ends in death, everything,

[comradebezukhov]

Marya B: One thing you should know about your father is that he has no friends at all.

Nikolushka: What about Uncle Pierre?

Marya: That's his boyfriend.

[officialleotolstoy]

why is Nikolai Bolkonsky such a piece of shit?

i thought this said nikolai rostov and i was ready to send you over to @petyarostov to get hands thrown

[nastassyafilippovna]

Ok ship bingo.

Andrierre

Ippolise (is that how you spell it…?)

And finally….

Napolexander (napoleon x tsar alexander this is a joke by the way I’m so sorry)

Andrierre: honestly this is because I just hate andrei so much I don’t even want to think about who he’s fucking because I want him to suffer die die die pain forever ahhhhh. But I do think his friendship with Pierre is really sweet and I love them :-) I just don’t care that much

ippolise. I love what my friends have done with it but for some reason I’m not 100%. J think they’re doing didfeeent things with their lives and ippolit is just flirting with her because he’s insane. I also love the concept of nikolushka being ippolits baby but it’s just not Real to me.

What to even say about tsarpoleon.