#awae shitpost

[js589]

The respective devil and angel on my shoulders:

I am SO unapologetically back on my Anne With an E fanfic bullshit.

[youthsofavonlea]

[smallest-turtle]

[js589]

So, this is somewhere between a theory and a shitpost because none of it really matters, but in my quest to Make the Math Work, I think I may now be headcanoning Billy and Prissy Andrews as twins in AWAE.

(This, uh, got kinda long. And maybe a bit unhinged. More under the cut.)

So, we know Jane, Billy, and Prissy are all siblings in the AWAE canon. And we know that in season 1, Prissy is starting the new school year studying for her Queens entrance exams. (Side note: does this take one or two years? Season 3′s treatment and a remark Miss Stacy makes in season 2 both seem to maybe indicate 1 year, but Prissy does not go to Queen’s until two years later.) We know Jane is more or less in the same “grade” as Anne as she goes to Queen’s a the same time, but we don’t really know about Billy.

We assume he’s... probably older than Jane? Between Jane and Prissy’s ages, but neither mentions having a twin.

BUT we also know that there’s a year-ish between seasons 2 and 3. We know Anne is 13 when she comes to Avonlea in season 1, (presumably turning 14 between seasons 1 and 2 rather than rounding up her age in season 1), and she turns 16 in the beginning of season 3.

Working backward, the timeline therefore looks a little something like this:

Fall 1896: season 1 begins

Winter 1896/1897 (seemed to be after Christmas, presumably sometime in January or February?): season 1 ends, Anne will turn 14 in a month or two

Fall 1897: season 2 begins

Winter 1898 (January or February, maybe? Anne’s hair has grown quite a bit since Christmas!): Prissy nearly marries Mr. Phillips

Later Winter/Early Spring 1898: Bash & Mary get married, season 2 ends, Anne either is or will soon be 15

Fall 1898: Prissy leaves for Queens, Billy does not return to school, Anne & the girls start studying for Queens

March 1899: season 3 begins; Anne turns 16

Fall 1899: Anne (and the other girls including Jane) go to Queens.

The crux of all of this is Fall 1898: Why has Billy left school? If he’s closer to Jane’s age, wouldn’t he stay another year even if he’s not going to Queens? Diana did, after all (and her parents seemed to indicate she wouldn’t be using much of what she learned that year at finishing school... They could certainly have afforded to keep her home even if she was not of age to go to Paris, just saying!)

Say that none of the Andrews kids are twins. That means that Prissy, Billy, and Jane were all born within the span of two, maybe three years. MAYBE. And that’s if Jane is maybe a bit younger than Anne and Prissy is old for her year. Either Mrs. Andrews basically had 3 back-to-back pregnancies and Prissy and Billy are less than a year apart but not twins, Jane is ridiculously precocious (which, not ruling that out entirely), or there’s a set of twins.

But Billy leaves school the same time Prissy does. He seems to be an “older” boy, maybe closer to Gilbert’s age. Assuming Gilbert’s (around) the same age as Prissy — two-ish years older than Anne and the rest of the girls — if Billy’s about Gilbert’s age, he is therefore also about Prissy’s. Possibly exactly hers. [Side note: I don’t think we ever get confirmation of Gilbert’s age in canon. It’s very heavily implied that he’s older by about the same gap as in the books, sure, but if he’s meant to be closer to Anne’s age, that makes that whole thing with Winnie look even more sketchy than it was, and it was already pretty damn sketch because of the power difference!]

...Not to mention that Billy and Prissy do actually look a fair bit alike. Yes, I know that twins do not have to look at all alike and that siblings born years and even decades apart can be spitting images of each other. BUT I’M JUST SAYING.

And now, for the biggest question of all: Why does ANY of this matter?

Well, a) as previously stated, it doesn’t, but b) I’m that pedantic kind of fan, and c) I need to be able to justify throwaway lines where I mix AWAE and book canons and I want Anne to have a “THIS EXPLAINS SO MUCH” moment about her “curse of twins”, as she puts her foot in it with both Prissy and Billy.

If you got this far... congratulations? Thank you for reading all the way through this batshit theory? IDK, it was fun to come up with, but I think I might be more confused now than I was to start with.

[js589]

@mareebrittenford and I were having a conversation, and I threw together a loving shitpost in MS Paint in 2 minutes (thus the extremely subpar quality). Please enjoy.

[js589]

@practicallyasleep (Rozmund over on AO3) and I do a fair bit of ranting to each other. A lot of it is on the subject of Anne With an E.

Don't get me wrong; we adore the show. It's just that, like many hardcore fans, we have some... points of contention, shall we say, with how things went down, and it's gotten to the point where we're lampooning ourselves with "insert the usual rant here" type comments. Of course, "insert <subject> rant here" has even gotten too long for us, and we joked that we should just use emoji to signal the rant we want to go on.

DISCLAIMER: While this post is absolutely a shitpost, it does briefly cover some more serious topics (sexual assault, racism, death, and the stealing of indigenous children from their families/cultural genocide). This post is NOT intended to make light of those scenarios, and our complaints lie in how little most of them were addressed beyond where Anne is concerned. Rozmund and I are firm believers in being able to consume media we love through a critical lens as much as a complimentary one.

Now, without further ado, the completely unofficial, "nobody actually should use this" shitpost guide to emoji shorthand for common AWAE rants (with a few raves sprinkled in):

🙊 (js) "for communication not occurring"

💰 (js) for Mr. Rose

🥀 (Roz) for Winnie (🦴 was my suggestion)

I got pretty salty pretty quickly...

🔪 (js) "For how the show seems to generally feel about women [in season 3]"

3️⃣ (js) "For the number of episodes the show just kind of forgets Ka'kwet"

4️⃣ (js) "For the number of episodes we really had Mary before she was killed"

1️⃣ (js) "For the number of episodes Josie's assault is addressed"

But we couldn't resist getting back to snark.

💥 (js) "For the schoolhouse being burned for NO FUCKING REASON"

🌉 (js) "For how many times we have to suspend our disbelief"

🧵 (js) "For the number of times we have to bridge the gap because something is left hanging"

🧅 (js) "For Gilbert's mind-bogglingly convenient lack of emotional intelligence"

🚿 (js) "For how hot and cold Anne and Gilbert ran with little in between for friendship"

📭 (js) "For the notes they never received"

😑 (js) "For 'pEnPaLs?'"

🙀 (Roz) "For Mr Barry watching people make out on the lawn like it's not 1899"

😏 (js) "Diana's reaction to the same"

🏴‍☠️ (js) "For the bonfire scene!"

🏳️ (Roz) "For Gilbert immediately giving up after Anne's drunken rambling because "Oh I guEsS shE doesN'T liKe Me i'lL jUsT maRrY WinNiE it'S FiNe""

We couldn't resist going meta for a moment...

8️⃣ (Roz) "The episode [of season 3] where my soul left my body and never quite returned because of the stupid"

💀 (Roz) "Me, trying to get through that opening scene of episode 10 without hurtling myself into the sun"

🍷 (js) "How I wanted to cope with season 3"

🍾 (Roz) "How I coped"

But we returned for a few rants and raves...

🤯 (js) "For Bash doing an instant 180 from "I knew it was Anne!" to "yeah, sure, you're making a good decision marrying Winnie""

🌩️ (Roz) "Mary from the afterlife, smiting Bash for his stupidity and bad mentorship"

☀️ (js) "For the utter ray of sunshine that is the happy Lacroix family"

💎 (js) "For Matthew being the precious treasure he is"

🔮 (js) "For Madam Lyudmila!"

🐝 (js) "For any spelling moment"

👀 (js) "For Gilbert relentlessly checking Anne out every fucking opportunity he gets (and also never saying anything any of those times because 🤷🏻‍♀️)"

🙄 (js) "Their classmates every time something happens wondering when the fuck they're going to figure it out."

And finally, we went meta again...

🤨 (Roz) "Me, every time something happens, wondering when the fuck they're going to figure it out"

🤦🏻‍♀️ (js) "my reaction to the same"

🗄️ (js) "for how much we've written about this to this point"

💃 (Roz) "for how much fun I'm having"

(That last one was really the best way to end this. Thanks, Roz, for being such a brilliant friend and letting me yell at you and yelling right back. ♥️)

[sunjaesol]

i need a conflicted and dramatic gilbert blythe season three type of dude to obsess over me