the thing about the temeraire series is
(ok there are multiple things about the temeraire series but bear with me)
the thing IS. that the books present Napoleon as this admirable, wonderful, attractive, compelling guy who makes good points and has good ideas and is very progressive.
and like. I have READ about the way Napoleon made stuff worse in France on things like slavery and racism, among other things! and also he was. an imperial conqueror and stuff. he was not your progressive ideal.
but the temeraire books present him as the Sexy Enemy. Nemesis comics kind of guy.
and it irritates the heck out of me
BUT the point I wanted to make about this is! a significant subset of the fandom ships the main character with napoleon, because you know, blah blah blah sexy enemies I get it. if it weren't about an idealized version of the historical Napoleon I would be here for it even!
but!! there was this Laurence/Napoleon soulmate fic I read recently where the premise is that soulmates have a tendency to find the things that their soulmate has lost. which as soulmate premises go is a pretty cool one!
I want that one to overtake the name-on-wrist one as a common soulmate trope please
(I say as a person who doesn't even really enjoy soulmate fics because I'm too interested in agency to even want to read about a world where soulmates might be a thing)
@soph_sol Only into soulmates if having a soulmate makes everything weird/worse
@Betty that's super valid and also, I'm not personally into it even then! even fics that are about subverting soulmate tropes don't work for me because in order to subvert it, it has to engage with the idea of soulmates being a thing in the first place!
@soph_sol I think I'm able to engage with fic that makes it weird because I can read soulmates as a kind of of allegory for allosexuality/alloromanticism
@Betty that makes a lot of sense as an approach! I wish I could do that too, both for soulmates and for the biological determinism of a/b/o fics, which I also have a No Thanks reaction to. but here I find myself.
I do still read these fics sometimes, because sometimes there are very well written and well constructed ones, but I always have to work to ignore the soulmates or a/b/o content in order to enjoy them
@soph_sol I have a *shoving breadsticks into my purse* "I have to leave now, immediately" to a lot of what I think of as "core" a/b/o so I get this
