#but also this v briefly touches on the fact that i feel billie is an incredibly interesting character after the conclusion of the show

[paigemathews]

Do you ever think about what Wyatt and Billie’s relationship would look like? I mean, do you ever think that maybe he sees Billie as an omen? A prophesied witch with not only extraordinary power, but projection specifically, that evil has hunted and desired for years, to the point of creating intricate plots to turn them from a young age? (While my Wyatt doesn’t realize yet, the fact that Billie and Wyatt both fell into evil’s clutch in the past? That their redemption came at their sibling’s life? That their deaths can be traced directly to them?)

Imagine Billie post-series, who has lost. honestly, everything in under a year. She went from a confident, headstrong newly-discovered witch determined to save the day to a powerful witch who lost her entire family and was manipulated and used by evil to attack good as a whole. After all of that, I don’t really think that you walk out of that without it becoming a deeply impactful and integral part of your experience.

So a Billie who is more subdued and removed from magical affairs. A Billie who knows the price and risks with magic, especially her own. A Billie who learns how to master her magic, because she’s already seen the consequences of her failures, but there is no real need for it anymore with the lack of demonic attacks. And she is asked, by the sisters who she betrayed and had to earn their trust again, to help teach a witch just like her to control his powers.

Beyond her own experiences, do you think Billie ever told the sisters about Dumain showing her what Wyatt was supposed to “become”? Or did she just chalk it up to his lies and manipulation? And even if she did tell them, do you think that the sisters would be able to tell her? When they themselves never actually knew how bad it was in the unchanged future? When they’re still unsure if they can trust her again and handing her that information includes telling them how, despite all of their power, they could still do nothing as a son/nephew died in front of them?

So she tries to impart how important it is that Wyatt uses his powers for good, not to harm. She trains him to control his power, tries to teach him to respect it as something incredibly dangerous. She conveys over and over again that projection is powerful, but dangerous and if you’re not careful, it can create a lot of harm. She isn’t his only teacher, but she, with her own history and the same power and the knowledge that he will outclass them all and that vision that is bad enough without considering what else he is able to do, is the one who is able to understand best. Piper and Phoebe and Paige are extremely powerful, obviously, but their power is rooted in their bond and that itself helps keep them in check because there is a balance. Billie, her sister (the key) dead and her as the real Ultimate Power, is the closest to knowing what that’s like.

Except Wyatt is Wyatt, his mother and father’s son in everyway but especially his heart. He’s the child who tried to prevent conflict before he was even born. He’s the child who took everyone’s burdens on himself as his to solve before he could even speak. He needed to protect his loved ones, no matter how powerful they individually were. When he failed, he blamed himself. When people struggled, and he couldn’t help them, he blamed himself. Not only does he blame himself for not being able to save or help people, he pins his entire worth as a person on his ability to help. This is the child who thought that he deserved to die because of his father’s grief and inner turmoil, something he wasn’t even to blame for. And he sees so much of himself in Billie, sees her story as a warning if he is to slip to the wrong side, if he is to be blinded to evil and used as a weapon. He takes every message that Billie tries to teach and internalizes it just a little bit too much, takes it just a bit too personally.

And imagine what happens. Billie, who can relate to Wyatt’s potential future just a bit too much, trying to teach him caution and instead teaches him fear. Wyatt, who sees a bit too many similarities in Billie’s past, transforms her lessons of control and innocents into repression and his value. Because they see those similarities, but they don’t quite see the differences and those differences change everything.

[kingedwardviii]

What are your thoughts on the narrative regarding David/Edward and Wallis portrayed in The Crown? Sorry if you’ve been asked before!

Hi! I was asked something like this a while ago, but it was before season 2 which kinda changed my view on the show a little bit. 

I’m actually still working on a pretty substantial series of posts for my other blog about the various allegations in episode six of season two, which are a mixture of complete bullshit and things deliberately taken out of context. But here is my latest post, with actual citations, about the various Nazi related rumors and the problems with that narrative. The odd thing about The Crown is that unlike most fictional portrayals of the royal family, you get the feeling that the research was done but then kinda ignored to make the plot go in the direction the writers wanted it to. 

Other than the fundamental issue of whether or not the Windsors supported the Nazis (tldr; they didn’t) after the jump are my pros and cons about the accuracy of their portrayal in both seasons. It has been about six months since I’ve watched any of it, so I might be missing a few things, though I did refer to some notes I had about season two. 

Pros:

-There was an impressive attention to detail when it came to recreating their clothing, Wallis’s jewelry, and some of the details in how they decorated. A lot of research and effort must’ve gone into it, and I was happy to see Wallis’s cross bracelet, the pug pillows, and many of David’s real outfits replicated. 

-There was a definite ring of authenticity to David’s letters home to Wallis, at least for the season one episodes. Since the season two plotline of him coming home during Billy Graham’s visit and being banished by Elizabeth was 100% fake, obviously the letters there weren’t based on anything factual. Apparently for reasons having to do with copyright, the letters in season one were rearranged and a lot of it was rewritten, but as someone who’s read the real letters and pretty much knows them backwards and forwards I was fooled at first into thinking they were real letters just cut up out of context. The nicknames were real, though I think the show implied they were more malicious than they actually were since David and Wallis had nicknames for *everyone*. He did call her Peaches, a detail other dramatizations have missed. 

-Wallis and David could both be kind of petty, bitchy, overdramatic people, especially when it came to the royal family. This came from a genuine place of deep hurt which you need some level of background knowledge to understand, but that is certainly a very realistic aspect of their personalities and their dynamic as a couple that comes through when you read their letters from any point after the abdication. 

-There aren’t really any fictionalized portrayals of David and Wallis that go into their life after the abdication, and even less so if you’re talking about after the war. I think The Crown did a good job showing their relationship in a realistic way, and showing the complexities of his feelings; though she didn’t get as much depth. It seems to be hard for some writers (both of fiction and “non-fiction” that is more like fiction) to wrap their heads around the fact that the Windsors, her especially, were bitter about living in exile, had their share of regrets, but also did genuinely love each other. They most certainly did not live happily ever after, and even had tension in their relationship over the abdication, but also showed a lot of affection for each other and tried to make their marriage work. Though I think some of this was the realistic chemistry and it’s more of a credit to the actors, who probably studied over old photos and videos quite a bit, rather than the writing or directing. 

-Considering they got a relatively small amount of screen time, the depth that we got of his characterization was pretty impressive. Peter Morgan does have something of a gift for telling you a lot about a character in a relatively small number of scenes, which is noticeable with other characters such as Tony Snowden and Jackie Kennedy as well. 

-David and Wallis Windsor were 100% the sort of people who would’ve thrown a birthday party for one of their dogs. I have no evidence something like this happened but if you read how they write about their dogs in their letters, it seems plausible. 

Cons:

-Wallis’s character is not given much agency or a voice of her own. She gets less screen time as David and has no real relationship with the protagonist of the story, so this makes sense on some level, but I also feel like there were some missed opportunities there. For instance, along with David’s letters to Wallis, we have her letters back to him which are an incredibly important, but often ignored, source of insight as to her personality and her feelings towards her husband. The royal family seemed to view Wallis as a one-dimensional villain character, and the media at the time and even today treats her as more of a plot-point than a complex human being. Even though The Crown at least shows her as affectionate towards David (which is accurate) and not totally lacking in humanity, there is no real attempt to subvert or reexamine the incredibly misogynistic narrative the royal family and their supporters built around her and some of the inaccuracies I’m about to mention play into this.

-Wallis is shown as being present during the abdication flashback scenes in season one, even being in the same room as Queen Mary in one of them. She wasn’t there, she was out of the country during most of the abdication crisis and, crucially, Queen Mary refused to ever meet her at all, during or after the crisis. The closest they came was over a year earlier when Wallis, at a series of large events David had gotten her into, was in the same room as King George V and Queen Mary and was briefly presented to them. I am guessing this is just a case of bad historical research; any biography of the people involved, even a bad one, would’ve set them straight. But it creates a very misleading impression because they missed something very significant to understanding David’s attitude towards his family: Queen Mary considered Wallis so far beneath her she refused to even be in the same room as Wallis once she knew David wanted to marry her. After the abdication, the rest of the royal family mostly followed her lead, so at the time both seasons of The Crown are set, Elizabeth II has only ever met Wallis once (or maybe twice), fleetingly, when she was a little girl. This was also widely covered in the press, so Wallis had to deal with the fact that not only did her in-laws hate her and blame her for the abdication, but the entire world knew that. Also, though the show doesn’t touch on the tension between Wallis and David over the abdication (except perhaps that weird exchange at the party in season two), which is probably the right choice given the time period covered, to make a very long story short if you want to understand Wallis’s side of that story the fact that she wasn’t there when David abdicated and he didn’t tell her until it was already put into motion is pretty fucking crucial. Making her seem more involved in that situation also serves to make the royal family’s treatment of her seem more justified than it actually was.

-That they even referenced (much less treated as factual) the ridiculous story about Wallis sleeping with the Nazi diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop is pretty disgusting. This is a somewhat distinct issue to the fundamental problems with the Nazi narrative as a whole that I covered in the post linked above. Not only is there no evidence whatsoever for this story, but it can be directly traced back to a misinterpretation of another false rumor that Wallis was overly friendly with Ribbentrop’s predecessor Leopold von Hoesch, Wallis at least knew Hoesch, who it’s worth noting was not a member of the Nazi party. Ribbentrop only met Wallis a few times, fleetingly, at parties. Of all the ridiculous “affair” stories, this one is the least credible (and none of them are credible), doesn’t really make any logical sense, but is also the most widely repeated. The reason for that is this particular story uses the decades of baseless slut-shaming that has been heaped on Wallis to give credence to the extremely flimsy narrative that she was some sort of Nazi agent. And because Wallis isn’t given a ton of agency or characterization, the viewer might find this allegation believable even though it seems to contradict what little we are told about her. Whatever pre-conceived notions you have about Wallis that might stem from misogyny, either through false allegations or taking an overly judgmental attitude to things that are true, will make you more inclined to believe the Ribbentrop story, and then that story in turn props up an entire narrative about her being a Nazi collaborator. It’s bullshit, but it gives people a more socially acceptable reason to hate her in this day and age and prevents any sort of feminist reexamination of how Wallis was treated. 

-Though we see a few bitchy comments from the Queen Mother, by and large the royal family’s nastiness towards David and Wallis is downplayed in season one, and then given a completely bullshit justification in season two. The entire plotline of the episode in season two, as it pertains to David asking Elizabeth if he can return to England and her telling him off because for being a Nazi, is completely false. It goes to show how much of an impact that The Crown has had on how the royal fandom views David and Wallis that people now seem to genuinely believe Nazi sympathies had something to do with the royal family’s banishment of the Windsors. The royal family viewed the Windsors as negatively (or possibly more negatively) before the war, than after it, and their vendetta against Wallis started before the visit to Nazi Germany, even. Their complaints about the Nazi Germany visit, to the extent that we have documentation of them, center around it being a publicity stunt rather than it involving the Nazis. David and Wallis were allowed in Britain more often after the war than before it. In the 1960s, Elizabeth II finally agreed to meet Wallis, agreed to let the Windsors be buried in Britain, and actually invited Wallis and David as a married couple to an official engagement; this was the closest to a “reconciliation” that ever happened and all of it was after the Marburg papers were published (which if you skipped the link earlier, didn’t exactly say what Peter Morgan would have you believe they did), and after episode six of season two of The Crown is set. I am going to guess season three of The Crown will not cover any of that because they doubled down on the Nazi angle to such an extent that it’s not only incredibly historically inaccurate, but pretty much rules out any reconciliation between David and Elizabeth unless they want to retcon some of it. Elizabeth II was mostly following the lead of her parents when it came to her views on Wallis and David, and her parents were pretty open about their feelings: they were bitter and angry about the abdication and how it impacted their lives, and they also held a lot of backwards, sexist views about Wallis, views that were not kept secret either in public or private. To the extent that Elizabeth’s attitude towards them changed during the ‘50s and ‘60s, she became less hostile to them because of changing attitudes about divorce and women’s rights, not more hostile to them because of anything to do with Nazism. 

-Around the time of David’s appearance in season two of The Crown, he was writing a book (Windsor Revisited, published in 1960) which he did go to Britain to research. Furthermore, at this point he’d already written his memoirs (A King’s Story, published in 1951) which were an international bestseller, so the idea of him coming to Britain to work on a book should hardly have seemed surprising or questionable to anyone. Also by this point David had basically given up on ever being given a position in Britain again; when George VI and Queen Mary died and nothing changed, he basically gave up because he realized the Queen Mother’s attitude was not doing to change and she would remain an obstacle even if her daughter was nominally head of the family. 

-The idea that the royal family was (or even still is) trying to cover up some sort of connection between David and the Nazis isn’t really backed up. Churchill, who had been a close friend of David for many years, did try to suppress Nazi documents that mentioned him, as did President Eisenhower, who was friendly with the Windsors, but also who was involved with capturing the deposits of documents to begin with and felt the Nazis didn’t tend to make very reliable sources. Bertie, on the other hand, said the documents probably should be published. Two of the men involved in sending the documents to the American researchers, insuring their publication, were closely tied to the royal family. One, John Wheeler-Bennett, who found out about the “missing” documents and insisted they be included in the publication with the help of American historians, was subsequently chosen by the Queen and Queen Mother to write the official biography of George VI and later was knighted by the Queen for service to the royal family. The other was Tommy Lascelles, and according to Wheeler-Bennett, he actually made the microfilms of the documents that were sent along and later published. More damaging than anything that has actually been published is this idea that there is more of it out there that the royal family is still concealing. Not only is there no reason to believe there is anything more out there or that the royal family has “covered” for David and Wallis, we know that the one chance they had to do so, they weren’t cooperative and may very well have helped undermine Churchill’s attempt to do so. And they really didn’t have a motivation; the narrative now is that David and Wallis were Nazi sympathizers or even collaborators, and perhaps that now is slightly damaging to the prestige of the monarchy, though it’s not like they didn’t have their share of questionable figures already and it’s not like other monarchies in Europe haven’t faced similar allegations, most of them more credible. But in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, if you read contemporary newspapers and magazines, the Duke of Windsor was still a relatively popular figure and polls suggested the public thought he should be allowed to live in Britain again. Even when he died in 1972, there was a large public showing of grief and sixty thousand people waited in line for hours to view his lying in state. For the main branch of the family during that period, it probably looked much better to encourage the public to think David was a bad apple and they kicked him out of the country so he couldn’t do any damage (especially if Wallis is blamed for corrupting him) than to say there was a decades long family feud where everyone (including George VI, the Queen Mother, and Elizabeth II) behaved badly and they kicked a popular member of our family out of both public life and private family events because of personal drama and attitudes about divorce that look more out-of-touch with each passing year. 

-The back story between Churchill and David is largely left out; their one major scene together in season one seems to hint at it (one of Churchill’s lines suggests he’s helped David before and it didn’t end well), but the little bit we see of Churchill in season two doesn’t hint at it at all. And theoretically that would’ve happened first; even though the whole show is written by Peter Morgan it almost feels like two different writers, one of whom knows that Churchill was a friend of David for decades and his primary supporter during the abdication crisis and one who either doesn’t know that or is choosing to go in a different direction. I am leaning towards the latter idea since I feel like David’s plotline in season two was written entirely in response to criticism from people who largely don’t know that history who thought the show was being too sympathetic to David and Wallis. I’ve seen some of these same people treating this as a plot hole, wondering why Churchill would’ve had dinner with David “knowing” all of these supposedly horrible things David did, but in real life they did remain friendly and Winston and Clementine Churchill had even went to stay with David and Wallis in France during the period he was out of office. Though arguably there’s a lot of back story relating to David and Wallis in general that perhaps should be included but isn’t. Especially for a show that loves giving back story about characters to try and explain their actions.

-Wallis never smoked, but weirdly most period dramas seem to want to show her as a smoker. She didn’t smoke, she hated the smell of it, believed it was unhealthy, and was constantly nagging at David to cut back. But if you’re someone that just likes to watch period dramas about her instead of reading books, you’d probably think she did smoke because almost all of them make that mistake. Or it may be some sort of deliberate stylistic choice because smoking while dressed in period clothing with period hair and make-up looks cool. Plus in old movies, “bad girl” characters always smoked and that is usually how Wallis is portrayed. 

-David and Wallis were in New York when he was informed of George VI’s death, which he found out about from the press rather than his family or the local consulate. They were also in New York when he was informed of Queen Mary’s illness and left to go see her. David’s sister Princess Mary, who doesn’t really exist in The Crown except a few off-screen references, was visiting New York at the time, and they travelled to Britain together to come see her. Princess Mary was the only person in the family who remained on good terms with David, and actually boycotted Elizabeth and Philip’s wedding when he wasn’t invited to it. Wallis was also in New York for the burials of both George VI and Queen Mary, not their house in France.