Drawing done by https://www.deviantart.com/maikyuru-kuku
Grand Princess Marie Aurore and Jean-Paul Marat
Imagine Marat having to deal with a Bourbon princess smushing against his face, and also she speaks Japanese for some reason
Well honestly, the idea of any royal and haute aristo even thinking of getting within 50 feet of him willingly would've been unthinkable
Special thanks to @maikyuru-kuku for this one!!
One of the strangest images in the story I keep returning to is our Snowflower husbando-ing various historical revolutionaries
In this case, Jean Paul Marat, the famously violently angry provocateur of the French revolution. Often very misunderstood, but that's usually because the French Revolution itself is very misunderstood.
Marat is indeed misunderstood, and whenever I used to use him in AI chats, they ALWAYS wrote him as an ultra paranoid vengeful freak who relishes seeing Aurore suffer (AI sucks at stuff; in other news, the sky is blue and your rulers are pedophiles)
And funny thing is, he WAS genuinely very paranoid and vindictive for very good reasons, but the way he's written greatly obfuscates, downplays, or ignores the nuances. He did correctly call many conspiracies on the grounds that the aristocracy was destined to undermine the Republic for their own aims, and he was almost always right.
In actuality, he'd probably champion Marie Aurore, considering the lengths she goes to crash and crush the system she herself was born into and the fact she actively works to subvert the plutofascists by exploiting the fact they never suspect her.
The French Revolution itself is extraordinarily misunderstood. Folk pop culture remembers the French Revolution as the purest "99% vs 1%, downtrodden poor overthrow and behead the decadent and tyrannical rich" revolution of them all, arguably even moreso than the Russian Revolution (or perhaps more accurately, and as Aurore herself would point out rather tellingly, it's only seen that way because it was the bourgeoisie who actually won in the French Revolution so it's the "safe" class war to tell)
Us Americans are always split on what "revolution" means, because it's just as often our "revolution" narratives are more like 1776 than 1789, and the American Revolution was an even more watered down, far more bourgeois revolution than even the French one, to the point it's vague "power to the people" populist imagery of rugged average people vs overdressed tax-collecting nobles (because of course, wealthy slave owning freemasons = average commoner)
But anyway, the French Revolution arguably is only so well remembered in the Western historical canon because you could map it so cleanly to such clear class warfare, so long as you scrub away literally everything else, and critically because the Jacobins and Directory never explicitly targeted any group we now deem "marginalized:" the blade of the National Razor was always aimed directly upwards. Even though, in actuality, the vast majority of its clients were not the wealthy or nobility. It's more the narrative: there was never a point where the Jacobins went "It's the Jews" or "It's the immigrants" or "It's this defenseless powerless group over there." Their primary enemy was always the oppressor extractive class, as incoherent as that ultimately became, so history remembers them as terribly flawed popular heroes of the common man. Every time an uppity billionaire starts talking bullshit, just remind him of how the French used to feel about his lot. Ça Ira Ça Ira!!
Of course the moment you actually study anything about the French Revolution, it almost completely falls apart as anything worth defending beyond maybe a single year or two, and almost everything we popularly remember is actually misremembered and muddier than folk history says, because the actual result of it was more like "the wealthy were cucked by the nobility, exploited popular anger at late-stage feudalism to overthrow the feudalist-mercantilist system to position themselves as leaders, some of which were genuinely revolutionary Republicans guided by neo-Roman Enlightenment values, but the ultimate goal was the triumph of the merchant class"
And even then, the fact Marxian socialism has so totally supplanted our understanding of leftism makes it difficult to actually identify the left-populist ideologies of the Jacobins, Hébertists, sans-culottes, etc. The Conspiracy of Equals and maybe the Enragés were the closest you'd get to what we'd call socialism by modern tongues; the rest were more like "social corporatists." If the National Convention ruled today, we'd probably call them something similar to the 969 movement ruling Myanmar. And considering that, I very strongly doubt they'd remain focused on combatting the old decrepit ruling elite for long. As much as certainly professor types like claiming otherwise, Western Europe was not a very ethnically diverse place in that era, so there weren't many "outgroups" to target besides the aristocracy, and the reason they hated the aristocracy is a vastly different reason from why history claims they did.
How many people are even fully aware what the French nobility even was? We always relate them solely to "the rich people," but even the fact they were only the Second Estate should make it clear enough that they were more like the warrior beneficiaries of a quasi-theocracy, and the perception was that they had completely lost all sight of said social duty and were nothing more than parasitic rentiers (and even that was more the downstream effects of King Louis XIV essentially trying to Eloi-ify them to make them politically impotent against the crown). The fact it had gotten to such an ancestral hatred level of antipathy wasn't inevitable; it was just loads of bad decisions and bad circumstances coming to roost.
Aurore's situation in the 2050s, in this pre/mid Singularity era, is utterly unfathomable to anyone of the 1790s generation.
The idea of this future Grand Princess of a restored 21st century Capetian monarchy being so infatuated with one of the most contentious figures of said revolution, especially when she herself is in revolutionary captivity, is a hilarious image.
