#in which i blather on about royal gossip for many paragraphs

[mermaidsirennikita]

I didn’t know about Diana’s bulimia and suicide attempts until watching the doc on Netflix yesterday and I really can’t imagine how William and Harry even tolerate any of the Windsors.

Tbh, I don’t get the sense that Harry DOES anymore lol.  And now I’m going to indulge myself and do a whole rundown lol.

Here’s what I know about Harry’s relationship to the Windsors, based on various bits of gossip picked up over many years of royal-watching (as a disclaimer): Harry was once extremely close to his brother William to a codependent degree.  This was probably the kind of “glue” that kept him close to the rest of the family as he grew up and dealt with various mental health struggles and what was clearly, from his military service years onwards, a burgeoning desire to “break free”.  This closeness extended to Kate, who William has obviously been with for many years, close to two decades counting their dating era.  These three were kind of packaged as a trio until Harry got married, and he was never REALLY an independent royal spokesperson for anything beyond military causes.

Fast forward to Meghan entering the picture.  Harry gets serious about Meghan very quickly, William expresses concern that Harry moved that quickly because William is one of THOSE older siblings who assumes that everyone has to do everything the same way.  Harry is super hurt by this as he and William have previously had each other’s backs over basically everything, including the infamous Harry Takes Las Vegas scandal, and a wedge is driven between them.  Rumor has it that this wedge actually deepens because.... William cheats on Kate.  Which Harry apparently was already pissed about because he really did love Kate as a sister + fears of history repeats with a future Prince of Wales, but THEN as the media already starts attacking Meghan, the Cambridge camp ALLEGEDLY begins planting fake stories about Meghan and exaggerating true-ish stories (like... Harry throwing a fit about wanting Meghan to get what she wants for their wedding turns into Meghan pitching a fit about a tiara, for example) in order to distract from the TRUE scandal, which is William cheating on Kate with a mutual friend.  Meghan is pregnant and very emotionally stressed already right now due to the media issues and her father’s side of the family being garbage.  So Harry understandably ices William out for this, and they’ve never been the same since.

Regarding his father, Harry and William have apparently always run hot and cold towards Charles?  Like they’ll be super close at times (Harry obviously was super grateful to Charles for walking Meghan down the aisle, which was a nice gesture but APPARENTLY HOLLOW BIG SHOCK CHARLES) and then other times it’s hard for the younger princes to be convinced to do anything with the Prince of Wales.  I imagine this wouldn’t be as much of an issue if Charles wasn’t married to Camilla, tbh.  The big family photo that was taken with William and Harry and their wives and William’s kids and Charles and Camilla was apparently really hard to coordinate because both Harry and William didn’t really wanna show up lol.  I’ve heard little concrete about Charles’s feelings re: Harry breaking free, but he has apparently tried to be Mr. Big Man by forcing the brothers to talk, by coordinating conversations between Harry and the Queen about all of this, etc.  Charles wanted to par down the senior royal circle anyway when he became king--hence Andrew’s family getting quietly put in the shadows.  (Charles knew the Andrew issue was going to be A Bigger Deal In The Future before anyone else in the family, apparently.). But I don’t know that Harry’s exit was.... how he wanted that go down.  He also apparently clashes with William a lot because both of them want to swing their dicks around be the One True Heir.  Charles is never going to step down, he’s dying to be in charge, but William knows that he’s much more popular than Charles and will be following him up anyway.  Kind of a similar dynamic to the queen and Charles, but flipped in that the son has much more popularity than the parent.

The Queen has always favored Harry, and... though she’s pissed about how the exit was handled, I’ve always read shit that this hasn’t...?  Really?  Changed?  The Queen loves a rake, is the thing.  Andrew was her favorite child and probably still is, Harry was and probably still is deep down her favorite grandchild.  She adores a military man who gets into a bit of trouble and is rascally.  So I don’t think that the personal relationship with them is actually as bad as Harry’s relationship with Charles is--which, bad luck for him, because Charles is running the show on a practical level more than the queen is right now. 

William is a pod person.  This is an exaggeration lol BUT.  Diana always said that William was an emotional individual and the rumor has always been that he’s very much a “burn me once and you’re dead to me” type.  Which is ironically what Diana was.  William hates the press; William hates the idea of Harry and Meghan coming off as more glam and charismatic than himself and Kate, even though that’s naturally going to be a perception to some when William and Kate don’t do as much press and Kate is a naturally shy person compared to the more outgoing and new age Meghan; and William has been heavily conditioned to be the heir and has evidently bought into all of that bullshit hook, line, and sinker.

And tbh, that’s not surprising.  The heir is always the most “programmed” one.  It might have been different had Diana lived and been able to continue keeping William a bit more normalized?  He’s certainly not as fucking weird as Charles was at his age, to be fair.  But I think that Harry had the freedom to do like, years of therapy and have his big come to Jesus moment about how much of this is just BULLSHIT in a way that William was probably a bit more prohibited from doing?  It’s clear that William buys into this idea of a contract between himself and the public, where he and his act a certain way and in exchange he gets this bullshit title and he “earns” his riches and privilege by acting the prince.  Whereas Harry seems to have taken a very “Diana post-divorce” approach.  He clearly still values his privilege, but less so the titles and notoriety except in the sense that he can use them to accomplish his humanitarian work AND maintain that privilege.  Like, Harry’s always going to be Prince Harry even if he isn’t formally Prince Harry, so I don’t begrudge him for capitalizing on that and making some $$$ off of what he was born into.  Because he’s making money that way, and through Netflix deals, through the natural familial wealth that Charles CAN revoke whenever he wishes but apparently hasn’t, the money that Harry was left by Diana, etc., he is not obligated to have the same blind familial loyalty that William has.  Which I’m sure has a lot to do with his break from the family. If you stay in, you’re basically making a deal with them and the public so that you can keep doing the smile and wave act to keep the lights on.

(And I will note, as someone who will forthrightly admit to preferring the Sussexes to the Cambridges--for years, Kate was referred to as Duchess Do-Little by the press, and William got some of that flack too.  They do what they’ve got to do to keep those lights on and only since they started that little war with the Sussexes have I noticed a more concentrated attempt to win over the people.  Because they basically got public love through popping out babies.  Meghan notably did a fuckton more engagements before she started to recede from public life than Kate did in the same amount of time.)

I really do recommend the You’re Wrong About podcast again for their 5-part Diana series; the episode about her theoretical plans for life after her divorce (which sadly only lasted about a year) draws a strong contrast to what Harry and Meghan have been doing, and sheds a bit of light on what I think his feelings towards the family probably are.