wait why is the anne song from six offensive? im not a stan or gonna threaten you lol just curious
as IF i’d give a shit abt a six stan tHrEaTeNiNg me lol
‘offensive’ is perhaps too strong a word. it’s just a dumb song in a dumb musical, it’s not the musical equivalent of one of the ten plagues of egypt lol. when i posted that - however - it was following me seeing a ~Callout Post!!~ bc six had staged a dance mob @ the tower of london and it was PROBLEMATIC and DISRESPECTFUL because anne boleyn and katherine howard DIED THERE!! so i think ‘offensive’ was just a word fresh in my mental lexicon.
the song dumbs anne boleyn down to being a superficial, stupid, immature brat of a woman who is too dumb to live. the musical takes a woman who was killed on trumped-up charges, including incest, and writes her off as guilty, and then dismisses it as a joke (“maybe i’ll flirt with a guy or three / just to make him jel’”). it takes a woman who was genuinely invested in religious reform, and had a nuanced and experienced understanding of politics, and renders her instead as someone who doesn’t care at all for politics or the church - at least so long as she gets her way (“politics / not my thing”). they strip her motherhood from her. the only recognisable part of anne’s personality that they seem to have taken from historical record is her nastiness to/about catherine of aragon, by having her loudly ask somebody to hang her. it all comes across like we’re not meant to like her, and almost like we’re supposed to think that she maybe deserved what she got. which is a gross thing to suggest, anyway, but especially from a show that wanks over its own self-important idea of feminist reinterpretation. fuck off with that. i think it’s that hypocrisy that puts me off of six. i genuinely find it kind of gross.
some people have recently argued that it’s intended as deliberate, that she is self-deprecating and dismissive and nonchalant as a means of coping with her trauma... however there is nothing within canon that definitively indicates that this was the intent (at least in the performance i saw, though as i understand it the script seems to get rewritten p. regularly?) moreover, that’s a recent claim - i remember prior the leading consensus was that anne boleyn’s characterisation was, simply put, the weak point of the show.
also i think ‘don’t lose your head’ is the worst of the bunch but they’re all like this, imo. i could point out problems with most of them. though, from memory ‘no way’ & ‘i don’t need your love’ are… just kinda boring songs that don’t do anything new, but they don’t necessarily propagate anything arguably harmful. just pointing that out bc i don’t mean to suggest that anne boleyn’s song is exceedingly awful, just that of the entire show’s collection of bad songs, it’s the worst one.
