[ SECRET POST #4503 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4503 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Sorry for the slightly erratic schedule, should be back to normal by Friday.

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 41 secrets from Secret Submission Post #645.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

02. https://i.imgur.com/G25FoDn.png

[el_regrs]

I can understand this. Shitty characterization is awful to the character, and just awful to read.

[sparklywalls]

Entertainment doesn't often have time to pay attention to the historical reasons for a person's story being much more nuanced and Anne Boleyn gets this perhaps more than most because the monarch she was involved in was ripe for writers/TV producers/film makers etc. Everyone knows Henry VIII "because he had six wives" and it's such a well-worn path it feels like the only way to make your adaption stand out is to be even more scandalous than the others in some way.

It is really lazy though to act like it was all on her being a power hungry bitch. I punch the air when I see acknowledgement that *any* of the wives couldn't exactly tell the king to shove it. See also: Catherine Howard gets maligned as well as some sort of empty headed slut.

[(Anonymous)]

I hear you re: Catherine Howard. She didn't have the sharpest social and political acumen, but geez, look at her semi-feral upbringing. She was groomed to be a pawn for her family and married off to a man more than old enough to be her father.

[sparklywalls]

I have so many arguments with my own mother about this! She always circles back to "well, she wasn't the sharpest knife if she thought playing away from the king was a good idea" and I'm always gobsmacked. I have to point out she was what, 17? Possibly even younger. Henry was much older, obese and probably smelled due to ulcers on his legs. I think film and TV adaptions have convinced everyone Henry was still hot at this point and they don't try to imagine how it would feel for a teenage girl to be in that situation.

[(Anonymous)]

That would annoy me so much! Catherine Howard was 17 or perhaps even younger than that when they were married, it wasn't a love match and Henry was already older and not in great physical shape and HELLO HE'D ALREADY BEHEADED HER COUSIN. Was she a genius? No. But from the sound of it, she was starved for love and attention as a child. It was a disaster in the making.

[(Anonymous)]

Absolutely. Bad characterization is made even worse when people make someone one dimensional just because they were a 'bad' person... And she's real, so there is plenty of evidence to prove she wasn't just some needless bitch.

(oddly good timing for the secret btw, since I was literally just searching her up the other day)

[(Anonymous)]

It is frustrating to see how often the unfavourable opinions of other people are adopted into the characterisation of powerful female figures by modern writers.

I feel bad for Anne in particular because being accused of some pretty wild things with no actual evidence led to her death.

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly. I think people just get excited over the whole witchcraft, incest, infidelity, etc. angle and ignore the less exciting but more politically complex reality.

[(Anonymous)]

I'll be the first to admit I enjoy some of the sillier and less accurate versions (The White Queen miniseries was very pretty, okay!), but it's disappointing when they're going for a more serious and accurate version and they ignore some of the real intrigue and focus on the things that were likely only court gossip. We have more reliable evidence about Catherine Howard's infidelity than Anne's, for example.

[(Anonymous)]

Just left a rage filled rant about this on Goodreads. Not about Anne, but a different historical figure. Real people are super complicated and there isn't always a clear cut villain. It especially bothers me if an author claims to be a professional historian, because they're not acting like a professional historian, they're writing propaganda.


And in the Twitter roleplaying community, anyone who starts an Anne Boleyn account is putting a target on their back. People come out of the woodwork to "test" the writer's knowledge of her or bully writers under the guise of "ic reactions".

[(Anonymous)]

I honestly had no idea people did historical figure roleplaying. That's wild... and annoying.

[tabaqui]

I feel you. I read a couple books on *all* the Henry the VIII wives, and none of them got a fair shake in their lives, or had anything like a happy life, for the most part. To have any of them be treated like villains is crazy - they really didn't have that much power, when it all came down to it.

[(Anonymous)]

Given that the a large part of the "evidence" against Anne Bolyen came out from the confession of a man who was tortured so severely he had to be carried to the scaffold, I'm not sure why "she bewitched The King" has much more credibility than "The King never had sex with that Spanish woman, Mary is a bastard, but we'll keep her around just in case."

Seriously, if there's a juicy story there, it's how both Crown and Parliament habitually created their own truths in order to justify their politics, much like the Republican party.

[(Anonymous)]

same!

also, henry viii was a fucking dick who ordered assassinations on pretty much higher-ups who dared question his rule (i.e., the tudors only having a tenuous grasp on the throne), or his break away from catholicism, etc.

i've just learned about colonel da l'armi (who was hired to carry out a hit in milan by henry viii, on cardinal reginald pole, who was in hiding in italy bc you know, catholic). pole was able to escape and survive multiple assassination attempts, just because he'd written a treatise saying that maybe it was a dumb idea to break away from the church.