Mikki Kendal (@Karnythia on Twitter and most other places) did a thread about Netflix’s Meghan Markle x Prince Harry documentary and one tweet really stood out to me because it was her asking how the royal fans missed what he has been saying about his feelings about his position. So of course, mini thread time.
I’m locked and Mikki doesn’t follow me here so she can’t see it but I think @royal_suitor probably has a good explanation for this focused on the royalty fandom specifically but also fandoms around celebrities and/or that are actively against Black women do the wildest leaps to justify their belief systems?
And here you have a fandom that’s built up around propping up British royals, that considers itself to have held ownership of the (young, handsome) heirs to the throne for decades, and that has been either defending or ignoring racism for as long.
And it all combines to where the fandom basically is writing meta (but worse??) about how Harry couldn’t have ever been unhappy in his role (as a royal, a treated son) or to do his duty until the mean Black American gaslit and groomed him into feeling unhappiness.
It’s pretty much the same approach fandom tends to take to fictional Black women in media?
For little under a decade, fandom has actually started to re/define Black female characters as groomers and manipulators making their nonblack love interests do bad things? [Not included in the original thread but have y’all seen the way people in the Arcana fandom talk about Mel as if she enslaved Jace as a sex slave? It’s really disturbing and they vilify her in really gross ways in the process of infantilizing him.]
And with celebrity fandoms and the parasocial relationship it’s also that the fans who think they know the white guy best of all and therefore deserve him the most lose their minds at unworthy Black women getting access so they decide everything wrong is their fault
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