#Arthur is racist in this AU so we can all hate him even more than we already do. He's racist in canon too but it's not central to the plot.

[iamthepulta]

Westlie Faire, Florida AU:

Westlie's father owns an extremely popular rental shop for fishing ships and tourist boats. She works whatever shifts the sub-minimum-wage staff can't cover, which leads to a lot of sleepless nights and half-daydreams about owning her own catamaran and running away.

Westlie's younger sister, Morgan, is a surprisingly competent yet completely unreliable travel journalist who keeps quitting and coming back to Florida for two weeks before bolting off again. Jellyfish and Manatees love her.

One day, Westlie was scheduled to guide a boat tour. She was half-asleep, musing about patricide if she had to listen to another "kids these days just don't want to work anymore" spiel, when one of the clients found a 8 year old stowaway in the tacklebox.

Lizzie - "Just Lizzie" - was apparently on her way to Jamaica. Westlie didn't have the heart to tell her, "Dear God, Jamaica is 550 miles away and there's a sign on the dock: 'Fairweather Boating Expeditions,' that definitely does not read 'Free Passage to Jamaica'." Lizzie also didn't have any parents.

So Westlie, who was not a great person and did not ever want children, actually, snuck Lizzie into her corner of her father's Miami McMansion. And then Morgan started to control the weather.

[edmundhoward]

(from other blog!)

🔥 choose violence ask game 🔥

3. screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

shan't be posting a screenshot, but the take that ‘defending katherine parr is defending thomas seymour’ is actually repugnant. her actions wrt elizabeth can and should be criticised — but within their proper context. katherine was a brilliant woman but she was also a woman, and legally, socially and culturally her husband overpowered her. she lived in a patriarchal society. she was negligent, at best, complicit, at worst — but she did warn ashley to keep an eye on thomas and elizabeth, did berate her husband for his ill-treatment, and did ultimately send elizabeth away. she was also pregnant with his child and the pregnancy seems to have been difficult. and elizabeth loved her; she was more her mother than anyone else. putting her on the same level as thomas seymour is just so gross to me.

8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

i PROMISE you anne boleyn does not receive the ‘worst’ historical abuse of the six wives/female historical figures. the idea of an evil, manipulative, promiscuous anne boleyn is nowhere near as culturally prevalent and pervasive as you insist it is. she very much does not have it anywhere near as bad as is claimed.

people simply do not care about anne boleyn, far more than they actively hate her — and where she does get treated with misogyny, it’s on a similar level to other female historical figures. it’s not distinct to her. moreover, what is unique to her is the level of revisionism and attention she gets. as another post has already put it: “anne's reinvention has been the most powerful and vocal in historical circles. anne is the center of almost all revisionist efforts in tudor historiography”. none of the six wives have been researched, revisited, reimagined and rehabilitated or simply discussed even a fraction as much.

we've already been over this. at this point i honestly believe insistence over this simply comes down to people looking for a thing to feel persecuted and exceptional over, while lacking the academic curiosity, talent and integrity to actually go and find something more tangible than the single most popular person in tudor history.

10. worst part of fanon

the hypocrisy/doublethink is truly something in this fandom sometimes. ‘monarchy was sacrosanct’ so therefore the commons unfailingly accepted the divine right of kings, except for all the times when they didn't and all the numerous recorded instances of royals being slandered/revolted against... but simultaneously, recognising the use of myth/prophecy and mysticism/faith in discourses of the time is ‘lionising’ historical figures, so we can't talk about henry vii and allusions to y daroganwr or king arthur but we can compare anne boleyn to classical mythology. sure!

13. worst blorboficiation

i recently saw that michael hick’s ‘the self-made king’ book about richard iii (which i haven’t read, so for all i know is very good but the title has always put me off) in a bookshop, and it reminded me how profoundly intellectually dishonest ricardians are. whether or not hicks’ book is sound, the popular/fandom approach to idealising richard iii is legitimately insane. truly i believe the only reason for mutilating the historical richard like this — to turn him into some fantasy merrie olde englande caricature of a medieval king — is to appropriate him into a racist, xenophobic, classist conservative ideal of monarchy. for as much as they might talk of him being ‘self-made’ or ‘socialist’ (as professional-at-failing-upwards matt lewis described him), they clearly do not care for such ideas, because they are centering them around (a fundamentally flawed understanding of) medieval monarchy. it's so ugly.

14. that one thing you see in fics all the time

i don’t read fanfic, but i see posts abt them and edit aus a lot and a consistent thing that i just cannot understand is the ‘fix-it’ narratives that have the women having numerous pregnancies. why? especially because the dates given essentially prove that in these aus, women never get to spend any time not pregnant or getting impregnated — including the historic protocols of lying in, churching etc., or religious conventions (sex was forbidden on certain days etc). it all basically creates an image of a husband who disrespects his wife by constantly trying to impregnate her, and a woman forced to endure the physical demands of constant pregnancy/labour with no regard for any other facet of her life/personhood. especially since these aus give these women a diabolical amount of children (including forcing twins/triplets on these women). it’s just so blatant that queenship/womanhood = being a broodmare. and, worse, these aus have the nerve to give these children horrific names.

25. common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

not directly what was asked but it’s genuinely exhausting how predominantly complaints about katherine howard being called a stupid slut have become wrapped up in this idea that katherine can only be worthy of sympathy if she did not willingly have sex. so often people trying to defend her, and criticising misogyny directed at her, ultimately constrain her to a fundamentally sexist idea — that sex can only be something done to her, as an unwilling participant. otherwise the implication is that comments about her intelligence or promiscuity are justified. there is no benefit to whitewashing katherine’s sexuality, and the insistence on characterising her almost exclusively as a victim is distressing. and it’s tiring having to repeatedly point this out. it simply feels like katherine howard is talked a lot but rarely as a fully actualised person in her own right.