#austinincranbourne

don’t be sorry! we’re here to give support or a shoulder to cry on! if any followers (especially followers who can personally relate, please!!!) can help with resources.

i wish i could do more than give you a website of resources: https://interactadvocates.org/resources/intersex-organizations/

again-- followers, if you can do anything!

Wow this is a very interesting question. So I think, depending on how it's being portrayed, the hypotheticals of how a historical figure may have lived if they hadn't died is super interesting. Granted you are right and it is all fictitious at that point. At the same time when someone dies really young, like at 7, you can barely get a grip on someone's personality to even attempt at creating a realistic portrayal of them in the future.

Hi @austinincranbourne I’m gonna answer this question on this side blog!

So, first of all, I think counterfactuals are very interesting and useful if done well. I have to say that I don’t exactly know a lot about the examples you give here but I think that counterfactuals about leaders-to-be who died young are especially tricky. The example you give about Margaret, Maid of Norway, seems particularly undoable to me. She was so young when she died that we can’t possibly know anything about what her ideas on governing would’ve been, so saying anything about a potential reign of hers is purely guesswork. Have people actually tried to do that? The only thing that you might be able to say anything about is how others would’ve reacted to the new ruler, and that’s still tricky because those reactions are partly dependent on the new ruler’s ideas. 

Friedrich III of Germany is something entirely else imo because he was actually a grown man and we have examples of how he handled state affairs. However I know next to nothing about the man and his incredibly short reign so it’s rather hard to assess for me exactly how realistic it would be to write a counterfactual based on him. But theoretically I think it could be possible? It would in any case make much more sense than a counterfactual based on a 7 y/o. But if the resulting counterfactuals are so completely opposite I think we have to accept that it’s not possible.

I know there’s a counterfactual about William I of the Netherlands dying before 1830, which means William II would’ve ascended the throne of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands earlier and his different approach on the Belgian-Dutch problems would’ve prevented the Belgian independence. It has been a few months since I read that counterfactual but I seem to remember it was rather well done. It is not exactly an example of what the question was about but William II never actually was the monarch of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands so there is some similarity, if I’m making sense here?