Artist: https://x.com/sey_live2D
Lol it's Émile's fantasy.
Grande Princesse Marie Aurore would never actually say or do this, but at some point, he desperately wants her to
In the narrative I'm not there yet but I'm not going to pretend like the period of time between Marie Aurore's arriving at the Gagnon home and her being sent to Paris isn't one of the most narratively fascinating to me.
I've said this to about a dozen people now, even my dad, that it feels like every individual piece of the overall story could be its own novel, and it's difficult for me to pinpoint which one would make for the most interesting one because every piece could fit.
But I do think "What if !Not!Anastasia had to live nearly a year with a hotly revolutionary rural family in a state of extreme vulnerability" might actually take the cake for the strongest pitch. It might also be the one part where Aurore being a class traitor doesn't even matter to how interesting it could be.
Bellefontaine, Paris Rouge, and onwards all feel way more interesting to me as they currently are because Aurore is on the side of the revolutionaries.
If Aurore played loyal royal daughter straight, Bellefontaine literally becomes "French Ipatiev House," a tale of a royal family held captive by revolutionaries who hate royals and everything they stand for, and in that case I feel like I'd rather follow the perspective of the entire family as a collective, like in the form of a composite novel with each member having their own dedicated cycle of chapters, and to which probably either Louis-Auguste (son who could never live up to the ambition of his father) or Marie-Adelaide (daughter who has gone far too deep into amorality and made way too many enemies to be allowed to survive) would be the most interesting to follow. Of course Emperor-Roman Ludovic ought to be the figurehead above them all. His is a tale of the heights of manly power and glory plunging to the darkest depths of defeat and despair. His ambitions gave him his greatest glories, but they inevitably ignited the envy and vengeful hate of his most bitter enemies.
I even have this long-running joke in my notes that I decided to canonize in the story itself at future point, that Aurore herself laments she must frustrate some bitter jaded Russian novelist who would read her biography and find it so much more fitting to be about a fallen king (or king-like president) and his forever inadequate son whose enemies and mutinous subjects finally get to have their way with them as reckoning and the very human reaction to the games of power, rather than some bizarre doll-faced masochistic princess throwing herself into the hands of those enemies out of some psychotic belief in her own karmic destruction. One sounds like a terribly human passion of power, greed, ambition, habitus, revenge, and madness and its ruinous effects on the lives of men, their loved ones, and their own souls. The other sounds like a voyeuristic fanfiction about knockoff-Anastasia Romanov ryona where the point is to feel bad that the princess suffers a lot at the hands of wicked and vile commie Jacobin-knockoffs.
That's why the "Bellefontaine by itself" storyline really works better if Aurore is just a filles de France princess loyal to family and God, and just one of six characters in a grand fall from grace epic, likely the one with the least amount of focus compared to the emperor, the prince, or the Witch princess. Even Amélie— the wholesome woman of God, who was never cruel, and whose grace inspires the family, would serve a greater purpose.
Aurore in that situation would become more like "insecure and scared infanta, most obsessed with girlhood things, just a case of hapless decadence and youth swept away by revolution, trying to make sense of the unfolding events," which could certainly be interesting in its own right, but ultimately feels like the girlish feminine flavoring over the more grand masculine narrative of a reckoning of power and privilege.
Marie Aurore is the child. She's a spoiled bratty teenager who just lost all her money, her things, and her friends, and is trying to cope, but she has been sheltered her whole life and is scared and confused. At worst, she's a petty juvenile tyrant who was never told "no" until now and always got her way as the family favorite and regime idol. Now the little Snowflower withers as she faces the reality she is no one special anymore and is instead attached to a doomed dynasty, and the best she can hope for is being a dutiful servant of the same lowly people she once ignored and walked upon, if she's allowed to survive at all.
But Marie Aurore as merciless long-time class traitor, however, with a bloody bone to pick with her own family and a masochistic revolutionary punishment fetish, who so absolutely believes any pain inflicted on her in the name of the proletariat is well deserved and self-justified and any pain she can inflict on the counterrevolution is worth any bodily or dignity sacrifice, a girl who has fanatically thrown her privileges away and submits herself to a cause that inherently requires her destruction, vastly overcorrects to the point I almost don't care about the rest of the family, simply because of how ridiculously uncommon that is. It's inherently interesting because of the violent clash between what one expects and what she actually does and believe as well as for what reason. In fiction and real life alike, familial piety means we will likely never see that many Marie Aurores.
Marie Thérèse Charlotte and Anastasia Romanov both were never going to play the role. It sounds ludicrous to write and entertain even for a moment as fantasy. Imagine Marie Thérèse was spying on her family in the Temple for the Jacobins and was actually sent to Austria to help undermine the monarchy there. Imagine Anastasia was secretly a Bolshevik operative keeping watch of her family in captivity, and was spirited away from the basement to keep helping the revolution.
That sounds like borderline schizophrenic historical fanfiction conceived by a socially maladjusted terminally online loser who is simultaneously both a royalist and a socialist, and wishes against all common sense that his royal daughter-fus could have virtuously survived their falls from grace as historical protagonists.
Yet with Marie Aurore, that's just what actually happens. And now I'm intrigued how the hell this happened.
If I had to choose, the story where the young princess of the family is actually a radical revolutionary who leads her family to the slaughter intrigues me more. The story about a fallen and doomed royal family in revolutionary captivity certainly has its creative merits, because I feel there is still an intrinsically interesting root to the idea of a family once so powerful and privileged and yet now reduced to prisoners in squalid conditions managed by their social victims. Especially in a populist Luigi-fied society as we are, there's a sort of thrill in seeing the rich and powerful fall and yet also seeing what lies beneath the glamor and power and if there is basic humanity and love beneath it. That doesn't change their fate, but it can make it more tragic to realize even these gilded tyrants are human beings with familial love.
With the Sévilles, they're a despicable family that realizes too late how despicable they've been and tries to course correct way, way too late. Yes I'd read that story eagerly.
But critically I'd rather read the revolutionary princess one first.
The Paris Rouge part, I dunno, that feels more like I'd just be watching Veruca Salt in Moscow 1919. At some point, it'd just get annoying to watch a formerly super rich girl complain about everything she lost as the protagonist (which is why I literally pull this dynamic in the form of Hélöise Fontanelle during that time, but she is the antagonist to Aurore). A "Viva la Vida" narrative could work too, of course, but that sort of constant lamenting "I can't believe I'm sweeping the streets I used to own" feels like it could only go so far on its own unless the narrative's about either learning to accept a humble lifestyle or a monarchist "restore the throne" arc. And at that point, the question I'd ask myself is "So you have this successful revolution that looks like it's starting to do good things, and you're making me read about and sympathize with the bitter defeated ex-ruling class? Oh yeah, poverty, police-state brutality, and horrific state violence was awful, a bad thing that all those nameless poor people had to suffer under their overlords, but this weepy little princess has to actually work for a living now. She even has to marry a commoner! Gasp!! The tragedy! The horror! How horrible the revolutionaries to dare!"
Even if you add in the clause "Well they killed her family!" I feel the lede being buried is "Yeah and how many families did her family kill?" Heavy is the head that wears the crown; bloody is the hand of the crown's best men. You don't get to wield any level of power without holding responsibility for some atrocity, no matter how loved and admirable you are. We love to fantasize about black and white leadership, where every bad leader was just a tyrant from the outset, or that every leader is inherently evil and only anarchy is the way. The cold fact is, the world doesn't really allow for such binary beliefs; anything to do with large numbers of people with large numbers of competing interests always results in the chaotic systems we know well, and only tyranny even comes close to forcing a mass flattening of material conditions. It's just that human tyrants typically only bring a very fearful flattening. Hence why autocrats and their underlings rarely survive revolutions when popular discontent physically removes them.
It's just extremely difficult to write such a demographic as sympathetic unless they themselves are or become sympathetic to the new order, or you believe they inherently deserve to rule or the old order was inherently better. Even if the new order becomes despotic, the inherent question you have to navigate is "so does that mean the people shouldn't have revolted in the first place?" Sure they are still human beings, sure they still have feelings, sure the reality of simultaneously being a nobody and a symbol of the old regime can be fascinating, but it does feel like there's too many questions raised if you handle it poorly.
Still, it is a rather rare narrative to follow the deposed ruler after the fact, with few chances of them returning to power or privilege, just seeing what it's like for a 1%er to truly join the 99%, if they ever do or if they go down kicking and screaming.
But this still requires an element of schadenfreude. It sounds cold, it sounds ugly, it sounds like it plays into every sort of right wing talking point about the politics of envy, but the reason why always comes down to: We want to see them lose it all. We want them to care that they are no longer high and mighty. Whether the admission of defeat or the desperate pathetic struggle to regain what they've lost, the bitter tears of the fallen wealthy taste sweet upon the tongues of the poor and dispossessed.
Narratively, in universe and IRL, this is the ultimate damage Aurore deals to us. When you actively cheer your own defeat, it doesn't taste the same.
Aurore never regrets the fall. She never longs for her own privileges or exploitation-born charmed life. It would be logically incoherent for her to, unless she were a hypocrite or decided that the harsh landing from the ivory tower was too painful. Neither of which is the case.
Thus we never get that moment where we see her lament that she lost all her fine things and has to live within her means. She never gives us a moment where we can see her cringe at the thought of doing something all is poors have to do just to survive to enrich folk like who she used to be. Aurore takes to it all with gusto, solidarity, and preexisting shame. So for Aurore as she is now, it just doesn't work.
And... yeah, I find that downright admirable and magnetically fascinating. It's so completely opposite of every 1%er, failson, girlboss, and bourgeois and traditionalist apological we've come to very frustratingly expect from our late-stage crony capitalist hellworld that I've been almost manically drawn to her story for well over a decade for a reason
This is essentially why characters like Hélöise Fontanelle and a few others yet to be shown were necessary. Aurore could never play that role, but this is a story that requires someone be in that role, or else it feels almost empty.
Placing such a person in the care of someone who shares our left-populist sensibilities and expectations is a great way to explore that clash and realization.
But in the case of the Gagnon home, I'm not going to deny that "Who we thought was the enemy's daughter was actually our comrade" greatly flavors the scenes something sweeter, if not bittersweet considering they befriend/quasi-adopt someone constantly in agony and with the sense of being doomed by fate...
... there's something just as interesting to the idea of some revolutionary neo-Montagnard family having to host the heavily wounded daughter of the old tyrant they hate, and said daughter is still loyal to the memory and sovereignty of the king, but she isn't an outright cruel person herself. I don't know, it feels difficult to antagonize a grievously wounded 16/17 year old girl dropped onto your floor and kicked around by the new state. The Gagnons feel like the kinds of people who, even if they are fanatically against the old regime, would still want to be gracious hosts if it's their civic duty for whatever reason. Josephine didn't even know Aurore was Meki when she demanded to be the one to host the girl once it was clear what the fate for the royal family was going to be. She didn't even know Aurore was supposed to survive/wasn't supposed to be included in the volley. So it's not like she was only brought there because they knew she was an ally.
And that's where Émile comes in, because he has arguably the best reason of the family to go "No Séville" considering it was the regime's thugs who twisted off his leg.
But he's also a teen boy, just a few months older than La fleur de neige, this literal modern day Bourbon princesse du sang with the physiognomy of an anime girl, and she's constantly laying on the floor below him or sitting right next to him which was unthinkable a few months ago and she's not at all an unpleasant person either, and the boy's starting to get annoying thoughts.
When she's dumped onto a floor mattress and just looks miserable, before she's memorized the boy's name, it starts as "She's just the emperor's spawn, she's probably plotting to restore the throne and dispose of us, they're all scum and parasites, you can't be born to that world and not turn out rotten, why should I feel bad about the shoe being on the other foot for once, I'll never forgive, I'll never forget, Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, les aristocrates à la lanterne!"
One blush later, that quickly goes to "Well she was never really the bad guy like her family was, it's not like she could help being born to bad people, it's not fair for her to be the one who suffers so much when worse people walk free, the revolution isn't about mindless vengeance, I don't hate people I hate systems, and besides she's not a monster or rotten brat like I thought so she should have a second chance"
One brush of the leg on the couch later, that devolves to "*ARF*"
Artist: PoofinatorY2K on Xitter
Would that arc still happen if Aurore was a loyalist? I think it'd be far more brutally conflicted for Émile in that case. He's not some random boy; I always needed someone Aurore's age who fits the role of "victim of the regime's violence," and his particular instance wasn't even something unique. I came up with it just listening to various things I heard being done to Palestinians. And I needed someone that age who'd be one of the rock-throwers and graffiti sprayers as well, some hotblooded teenage youth who wants to fuck the system just as much as, if not more than, the grown ups.
Émile straight up could be the main character.
He could be the protagonist of a version of the story about the life of a working class family crushed by a plutocratic tyrant and his Curtis Yarvinite regime, risking everything as one of those Evil Antifa super soldiers engaging in civil disobedience, with the epilogue being that after the revolution, his parents take in the tyrant's youngest daughter after she had nearly gotten herself lynched by revolutionary soldiers.
And obviously if she still believes in her family's system, that could create some drama (or at least melodrama)
It's "Marie Therese Charlotte is released into a pro-Jacobin peasant family's home instead of sent to Austria." It's "Katniss Everdeen's son befriends the bitter daughter of President Snow 10 years after the fall of Panem"
You're the poor boy who never had a chance, brushing against the highest of high born girls, who herself has now been brought as low as possible and left crippled and miserable on your floor.
You could easily do something with that if you played it straight. The curveball works just as well, because at least now Émile and family don't have that tension of "She's polite and gentle, but she is still loyal to the brutal regime we just deposed". Actually way more explosively than that, it's more that she's the one responsible for that regime being deposed (or at least being deposable after seeming invincible).
