And Not Shove Harmful Stereotypes On Em Just Cuz?? - Tumblr Posts

what the fuck

the fuck did they do to william

HOW THE HELL DO YOU MESS UP THIS BAD??? AND KEPPEL??

LIKE TF DID I JUST READ

alright @unanchored-ship... going to make this its own post separate from the clinton post, it got kind of long bc i got kind of upset in the middle of it so it's under the cut. heed the tag warnings!

the book in question is Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, which is not rlly a book but more like a series, this volume in particular being called Quicksilver which i have not read allll of admittedly. some parts aren't awful i do have to say that. however i hate how William was handled here

and also i do have to retract that statement in the tags, looking back at the pdf of this book i can't actually verify Keppel's age as i dont thinkkk the author mentions it, but i do know that at the very least he IS possibly implied to be a child just bc he's referred to as a page and those are usually pretty young, and i know he was like 15-16 when he started off as William's page. obv when he got the earldom and all that when the fucken rumors were in full swing he was No Longer a Boy. anyway all this to say i was probably wrong, he might be a little older but still a child in this book!

now Keppel is also implied to be a Dirty Queer and William's lover

(also i love this phrasing sm unironically it's so fucking funny like. historical novels can't say bisexual right off the bat so they're like yeah my man would fuck a fence too)

which itself i really wouldn't mind but again. in this context. how many historical novels am i gonna have to read where gay men are made out to be predators. i seriously thought we were over that myth. and ig it could be argued that oh it's a historical novel and men took 16 year old lovers all the time, he just happens to take a boy instead of a girl, NONONO. yknow how i know he was meant to come off as a predator. boom William does this to Eliza (one of our main characters)

if that was not clear enough bc that's where there's a cut-off, uh yeah William is just implied to have raped her. with Keppel watching. and the comment, TOWARDS A FUCKING CHILD, is just eugh. nasty. that's another reason why i say Keppel is probably a child here-- the statement he makes towards him implies that Keppel is 'inexperienced.'

like this is just proof that most people have not figured out how to properly write William. Bowen's the only one that did it right, he remains completely straight in her novels yet somehow to me as a modern reader comes off as super queer (in the trans direction, but still). uhh thats just my lunatic interpretation tho, obv you can write William as awful as you want but this was not done with good intentions i don't think in regards to the queer rep. this wasn't anything like that this was just saying that William was a predator as part of his sexuality!! i don't need to explain why that's just... a rlly harmful stereotype.

honestly i don't even mind CSA interpretations. obv i have my fair share of them, i kind of have my own version of this in some more historically-accurate-ish AUs (but still highly implausible-- they're just not fantasy/modern ones like my others LMAO) where Marly is a victim of grooming by James, and i always write the Maria/James relationship as starting off by pedophilia on James' part. but, especially in the Marly case, it's not bc James is gay.... it's bc he's James. and the way i see it, the way i write it, is not meant to forward a stereotype, i just think it's an interesting way to go about these relationships! also i've been ehh kinda quiet about it here but as a CSA....experiencer (? i dont like to use the terms victim/survivor lmao) it's just a way for me personally to see this all on paper. obv i dont care if ur not someone who has ever experienced CSA but you still write it, like go the fuck off i dont care anyone can write dark stuff forever. i don't see it as any different from writing whump just bc you find it fascinating

you can just tell that Stephenson did not put this in bc he wanted to explore what this meant. i can hardly fault him for that bc William isn't the main character but... it was SOOO obviously thrown in to make William look worse. and i hate it. it wouldn't even make sense historically. you could've just used Bentinck, which wouldn't have made the whole William's-a-rapist bit better, but...having Keppel there as a young boy is just so extra. it doesn't even make sense for William, like period full stop as interesting as it might have been it just doesn't make sense for him. he's not about that life

anyway sorry this got long, i was just....waugh why can't we have a good queer William. i want my favourite prequel