And that's the end of my positive Die Kaiserin posting because I fucking hated the Ludwig Viktor side plot of episode 4.
Ludwig Viktor, Franz Josef's youngest brother, was queer. He is often referred as gay in books, but it's important to keep in mind that the way we understand sexuality today was completely different to how it was understood in the 19th century. The labels we use would mean nothing to someone born 200 years ago, and even today, a lot of people don't feel confortable in a single label (without even going into detail on how these things change according to culture, age, class, and so on).
As for Ludwig: allegedly he showed homosexual tendencies since he was young. He also lived with an actress for many years; the nature of their relationship is unknown, maybe they were just friends, maybe they were lovers. He was involved in a same-sex scandal in 1904. He also propossed marriage to his cousin Sophie in 1866. Was he gay? Was he bi? We can't know, and honestly I don't think it matters that much. What's important is that by all accounts, Ludwig Viktor's scandalous lifestyle was an open secret tolerated by his family. He was a privileged man, and he took advantage of it to live life as freely as he could.
Die Kaiserin had already hinted at his queerness in season 1, and in episode 4 of season 2 we see young Ludwig developing a crush on another boy:
I thought oh that's cute! But then his mother Archduchess Sophie sees them holding hands and we get this:
The writers of Die Kaiserin had the chance to have a positive queer storyline in a period drama, something rare. Instead they gave us homophobia and religious trauma for the next twenty minutes. This was a choice, and I hate it.
This storyline isn't finished (I hope so), so I'll wait to see how they handle it for the rest of episodes. But this decision made me incredibly upset.
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