fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6116 ]

[ SECRET POST #6116 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6116 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 14 secrets from Secret Submission Post #874.
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.

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06. https://i.imgur.com/6junFfX.png

You can say "Philippa Gregory"!

Or Josephine Tey

+1, good that someone realizes there's another relevant author out there besides Philippa Gregory.

Are these Ricardians who "ruin" everything by not making Richard a two-dimensional cartoon villain in the room with us right now? Even Philippa Gregory, whom everyone cites as part of the problem, succumbed to the Tudor propaganda and turned him incestuous! And, trust, the people who insist on turning Henry VII into an ahistorical knight in shining armor are WAY more annoying than the people who want R3 to be a tragic antihero.

Oh, come on, seriously?

Yep, here we go. It's wildly illogical to act like it's totally black and white - either Richard III is an "evil Shakespearean hunchback" or he's a sexy,misunderstood saint. Truth is, he was a well respected strategist and soldier, loyal af to his brother, but... his hatred and fear of the Woodvilles and of being left out in the cold political meant he made some really fucked up decisions that ultimately led to his downfall. He has an established track record of executing people who got in his way without any sort of trial or solid proof of wrongdoing. Only people who are in denial about this act like it'd be unthinkable of him to quietly have his nephews smothered in their sleep in order to remove the threat to his throne.

And, you know, just because a person doesn't think Richard III should be canonized doesn't mean they worship Henry VII. They were both products of their time, as ruthless as they had to be in a ruthless era where various factions were plotting against one another. Henry VII was no warrior, unlike Richard III. He didn't win because he was a hero on the battlefield, he won through many other factors, including Richard undermining his own cause. Only the Henry VII society (IS there a Henry VII society?) doesn't spend their time hand-wringing about how wronged their woobie is.

Phillipa Gregory turns everything incestuous.

They'll accuse it of ripping off Game of Thrones.

Really the best kind of show would take all the sides, show motivation for everyone and how they can be both right and wrong at the same time. For example Henry V invading France was not really a good idea, despite later ringing speeches and appreciation for longbows.

After all, it's history, they all made a lot of mistakes, there were no Avatars Of Good And Evil, just people.

But I can't think of any series that has done that kind of nuance, anyone?

When it comes to Richard III, people don't seem very interested in nuance, unfortunately. You see an example of it upthread where a nonny assumes that if you don't think Richard III is innocent, then you must be a victim of vicious Tudor propaganda and are also romanticizing Henry VII. In the mind of a lot of Ricardians, it's just that black vs. white. They cannot imagine others taking a more objective, nuanced look at BOTH Richard and Henry, because they cannot bring themselves to do so for Richard.

Requiem of the Rose King is a pretty interesting take on it, though it does focus on Richard (and makes him both bishounen and intersex, however he's also still clearly screwed up as well). I'd say it's more Shakespeare-inspired than historical though, but there is a lot of intrigue going on.

You know what super annoys me about this debate which is obviously referring to The White Queen series? The idea that Richard is portrayed in the series as some sensitive woobie who did nothing wrong ever. Both Richard fangirls and Richard haters seem to think this is what happened in the series and it is not. The series merely posits that he did not murder his nephews (the person PG tries to blame probably didn't do it either but that's for another conversation). He is still clearly someone who is *capable of murder* as he is, in fact, *shown helping his two brothers secretly murder someone*. Am I the only person who saw that?

THIS. i remember people talking so much, for good and ill, about how sympathetic TWQ made richard, and it really does not. (i actually watched it on that account, hoping that it would even out to at least a semi-historically accurate take on the man and got...also not that, lmao.)

I think this is actually a really good illustration of why Ricardians tend to err on the side of overcorrecting and over-romanticizing him, honestly. You'll get a show like The White Queen that portrays its characters, not necessarily *well*, but at least with a degree of nuance on all sides, as people capable of both good and evil acts - and *still* people come away complaining that it was too kind to him.

I mean he also probably did murder his nephews

tbf the baseline for the war of the roses is that all the big players were willing to commit extrajudicial murder of some sort to a family member however distant. so moral characterization would come from either being worse or better than that. the closeness of the princes in the tower to Richard means that it's on the "worse" scale, even though...they are all family of one sort or another.

Also the fact that they were kids!

Also fair!

If a kid is old enough to be crowned a king, he's old enough to be murdered about it! /s

But, come on, there is not an age range in which murder becomes worse. It's bad all around.

True, but it's not just the murder of children*, though that was certainly bad enough. It's that Richard III went on a spree of very public, rather flimsy attempts to discredit his own brother (to whom he had a reputation of being completely loyal and one of his staunchest supporters, so this looks uber-backstabby) and nephews on a political level by attacking and legally invalidating their legitimacy first, after his successful campaign to execute political rivals (like various Woodvilles and Lord Hastings) also using rather flimsy, unsubstantiated accusations. It's because he set himself up as ostensibly as young Edward V's protector against those vicious, scheming Woodvilles... but it very, very quickly turned into his own run for the throne, which makes his earlier protests about protecting his nephew look like obvious bullshit.

* Because Henry VII had Perkin Warbeck executed and never faced the amount of criticism Richard III has faced for it. You can certainly argue that circumstances were different - Warbeck wasn't his blood relation, he was being used as a pawn, there'd been multiple rebellions against Henry VII already, and he was clearly already becoming the focus of potentially larger and very serious threats to Henry's throne.

Ironically, those are all very similar and good reasons as to why Richard III would've had a good motive to execute his nephews, but many of his supporters are kind of in denial about that. It's one thing to claim he didn't do it, but claiming he had no motive or reason to kill his nephews is just silly. Of course he did. The politics of the time were motive enough and political murder is always on the table as an option, no matter how noble someone might appear in other areas of their life.

i quibble with analogizing this to perkin warbeck, but i agree that in every way richard's positioning of himself as a more respectable claimant than even his dead brother, to the point of slandering his mom a bit, which is W I L D, suggests something entirely different and yes a little worse about richard's ethics.

there's also an assumption in this whole conversation that richard's culpability resides in whether he gave an actual order, and like....it doesn't lmao. "i won't tell you to do [bad thing] but i also won't inquire if anything happens" is a common political workaround even now.

Richard wasn't the one going around accusing Edward IV of being illegitimate. You're thinking of George. Richard's defense of his usurpation rested solely on questioning the legitimacy of Edward's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville and the children thereof.

(no subject)

meadowphoenix - 2023-10-07 16:42 (UTC) - Expand

I don't disagree that Richard was being underhanded with the Titulus Regius, but the central claim was not that flimsy. Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth *was* shady and Edward IV ought to have known better, as a king, than to go about it in such a way.

Phillipa Gregory is currently the most well known writer of this time period thanks to her popular books and series like The White Queen, but you're jumping to conclusions if you think she's the ONLY one, and of COURSE that must be what the secret is referring to, even though it doesn't actually mention her or her work.

The whole Richard III and Princes in the Tower issue predates her work by many, many decades. There are many works (both fiction and non-fiction) that argue for Richard III's innocence, and anyone who has more than a superficial knowledge of history knows this. It'd be safer to assume the secret referred to the controversy as it exists in academic and historical circles because that's where the bulk of the debate has been, not amongst fans of a TV show.

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