#this has been Discourse™ I never expected in my inbox

[sea-dukes-assistant]

To reply to the last anon who talked about misogyny in the fandom (who was totally right) here’s my add on to the take.

I’ve always felt like being a man in the royal family would be so easy because you can wear the same 5 or 6 different suits and no one will bat an eye. You don’t have to come up with a new stylish on trend but “age appropriate” inventive outfit, a full face of professional looking makeup, freshly blown out hair, and a perfect nude pink manicure every time you step outside of the house while managing to walk in 4 inch heels while your 8 months pregnant. You don’t have to worry about getting berated for wearing the same outfit over and over and not being “fashionable” and you don’t have to worry about getting bitched at for constantly buying new clothes. Harry was at one point wearing the shittiest oldest beat up shoes and other than like here, in close quarters within the fandom I feel like no one really talked about it at all but if his wife, sister in law or granny had dry cuticles or something tiny like that I’d bet good money we would’ve seen zoomed in microscopic pictures everywhere of them and people bitching about how the royal women are unkept and need a manicure, let alone if they wore busted up heels.

Speaking of Harry, he goes idk years or some shit looking unkept as fuck grooming wise sometimes in military uniform and no one says anything but his wife doesn’t wear a hat to an engagement, has a rough hair day as a result and she’s still getting berated for it a few years later and the whole time Harry’s hair looks like a sucked fuzzy mango but nearly no snark there. His wife doesn’t wear tailored clothes and yes to be honest it looks less than great but I can almost swear he wore some poorly tailored suits a time or two and.... nearly nothing.

I’m a person who has my own personal reservations about Meghan (and Harry) and that whole situation but people need to be fucking for real when not noticing the double standard that they imposed on Meghan and still impose on Kate. Williams not going to sleep with you, neither is Harry. Someone’s probably going to jump 4 inches deep in my butt crack for “defending” Meghan but I’m not defending her at all, like *at all* just pointing out that her husband did the same shit if not worse for a decade or more before Meghan came on the scene and they all wanted to hop into bed with him.

Also, Catherine gets shit on for wearing “dowdy” coat dresses but if you do try to be different in your royal fashion you will get bullied online for it for years. see: Beatrice and Eugenies hats at William and Catherine’s wedding. People don’t understand because of royal dress code (*not protocol, for the love of sugar, spice and everything nice it’s not protocol*) there’s only so many new and exciting things you can do with your fashion without becoming a walking model and fashionista which is not what being a royal lady is about.

Kindly, everyone needs to stop caring about if a royal family member who happens to be a woman has worn those heels before and start focusing on the causes that she’s trying to draw attention to. People are big time missing the point of a working monarchy.

I’m sorry for the even longer rant, just a woman in the royal fandom who proceeds to also not get the internalized misogyny.

This, I think, sums up the fandom in this aspect.

Something that has irked me is that this fandom has mantained a "men's fashun is booooorrring" attitude because one guy really likes blue. Meanwhile, Sir is over here wearing professionally tailored suits that usually look good as fuck (he's had times where this hasn't been the case), with the occasional novelty tie that relates to the place he's visiting/activity he's doing (pandas for WWF for example) but nobody wants to speak on his fashun because "ew, man." He has literally been declared Britain's best dressed man more than once but no, that doesn't count.

ALSO. YES. Thank you for addressing Harry's avoidance of combs and inability to dress himself. I swear he just puts on the least wrinkled shirt in the pile on the floor...right after getting out of bed. It's bothered me on a professional level that he does not shave while in uniform, because only the Royal Navy allows beards. He wants to make his service his personality at any event he can, but refuses to shave ergo not being in proper uniform. Because of course he gets a pass from (at the time) granny because oh my god, if he didn't he'd throw an entire tantrum like "MY MOM DIED WHEN I WAS 12 I SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO IGNORE THE REGULATIONS I KNOW VERY WELL THE ARMY HAS REGARDING FACE HAIR. I'M SPESHUL! OH MY GOD THE TRAUMA." I used to bring this up myself but, as usual, got told to shut the fuck up and that "regulations don't matter." Me, an active duty Sailor:

[sersi]

hello elysia, i just wanted to say, as someone else who weathered the post-endgame anti-steve clown circus (which has continued far longer than it should've but lemme not rant) and suffered psychic damage from the worst takes possible, i am SO thankful for the steve content you've provided. like i'm not that into steggy but the care you put into your sets is so amazing and you illustrate the importance of their relationship in a way that fandom seems to either not get or willfully misunderstand. thank you so much for all you do and i hope you have an amazing rest of your day/night <3

Hiiiiiiiiii 🙋🏽‍♀️. This is honestly one of the nicest, most mentally rewarding asks I've ever gotten. And it is also got stuck/forgotten in my inbox because I was like “Oh I don’t have time to answer this properly right now”, mentally filed it as a Thing to Do Later, and then didn’t look at my inbox for a week.

So, that said, I’ve been stanning Steve for a literal decade and have been Through It™ multiple times because of him. Civil War era had me eagerly awaiting the day I would follow Chris out of the MCU and while that obviously didn’t happen, having already spent most of 2015 - 2018 engaging in increasingly aggressive curation of my online fandom experience really impacted my post-Endgame experience. It’s why I wasted no time in blacklisting aggressively. And why I was kind of already primed to communicate my love for Steve and his arc and some of the characters around him through gifset. I’ve seen so many wonky characterizations of Steve and his arc over the years that, rather than writing 1000 words about why I like some aspect of Steve’s arc only get told that something that definitely happened in canon didn’t actually happen, I prefer to have my visual Here It Is Happening In Canon references right there, in 268px or 540px widths.

I obviously don’t expect everyone to agree with or like my readings of canon--our taste in media is deeply personal and I absolutely get why Steve’s Endgame ending was never going to work for some people. But Steve is my favorite character EVER. I have thought about that man so much, for so long. I have, at one point or another, shipped almost all his popular ships. As a multishipper, I even have slightly different, not always fully compatible, readings of canon for my different Steve ships. So, one of the things that really bugged me back during peak Endgame discourse (and inspired/drove more than a few gifsets) was this notion that none of this had been set up in canon or that no one who liked the ending understood Steve’s character or his arc. Thankfully things have calmed down a ton since then, but, both with Steve and with my Other Faves, I still tend to put a ton of thought into how best to communicate the ideas behind my sets because, while impossible to fully control for, it is always my hope that my intentions (and love involved in the making of these sets) will be clear enough to break through whatever more fandom popular preconceptions people might have 🤷🏽‍♀️.