#i will never not take 1000 years to answer asks lmfao . they rot in my drafts …

[edmundhoward]

15,16,17,18,25

🔥 choose violence ask game 🔥

15. that one thing you see in fanart all the time

the ariana grande-ification of anne boleyn in fanart is truly something. and as an olive skinned white woman, i don’t think white tudor fans know what olive skin looks like. also i think there is a frankly bizarre relationship certain tudor fans have with race (ab as an Other™️ because she was supposedly swarthy, trends surrounding coa being fair and spanish, jane seymour being ‘so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise’).

16. you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

i truly do not understand the appeal of characterising female historical figures (largely royal, aristocratic) as powerless victims — with no thought to their complicity in an inherently unjust institution. catherine of aragon (as one example) was immensely privileged to the detriment of the majority of people: she believed in this superiority as morally just and fought for it. remembering what her queenship meant should colour how we talk about her: lauding her as brave for fighting for her status can and should coexist with acknowledging what she was ultimately fighting for.

17. there should be more of this type of fic/art

i myself am guilty of this, but we absolutely need more content about non-courtiers (and content in general that is active and honest about acknowledging the fundamental value of those outside of the aristocratic sphere). wolf hall came close but veers into trying to have it both ways; ‘she [Mantel] wants to relish the bejewelled surfaces, the highly wrought fabrics, the flashing beauties of the Henrician age, while also having a go at the people and the institutions which enabled that agglomeration of riches. The aesthetic delight and the political outrage are on a collision course’. becoming elizabeth’s take on kett’s rebellion was hateful. one of the best jobs i ever had was transcribing local court records for an archive, and getting to meet dozens and dozens of men and women, and hear them talk about their lives.

18. it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on...

critical thinking skills 🥴

i would be remiss if i didn’t plead katherine howard’s case yet again. she’s such a force of personality — charming and delightful and ‘fired with ambition’, when i think her ability to be as successful as she was as queen, given her lack of experience and the brevity of her reign, is nothing short of remarkable. i think people are genuinely missing out on someone so engaging when they dismiss her as either whore or victim. it’s a constant frustration, for me, that the way we talk about her remains so superficial.

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

god, i have so many of these; you could just send me 25s repeatedly atp haha. i think the most annoying thing though is the people who get weirdly offended by the insinuation that this fandom is, indeed, a fandom. there is this hypocrisy over how legitimate engagement can be — but ofc., certain people can be called ‘stans’ (indeed, ab fans can invent terms like ‘heneven eleven stans’ and ‘seyhive’, because people are just that painfully uncreative) but god forbid somebody, in turn, calls them ab stans. ‘i’m not a stan, i have a BA/BS/BE/LLB’; you write fanfiction — you are not serious people lol. it’s not an academic conference… nobody cares about you. you can leave if you’re not having fun, nobody is forcing you to be here.