Courageous is one of many words that could describe Ms. Eloise, is it not? ✨

Penelope is a flawed character and it annoys me how the fans refuse to accept it and only see her as some kind of victim who has been done wrong. Yes Penelope has been bullied by her family and Cressida, and ignored by the society for not being what they consider "attractive" but she like you said is a manipulative character who used this invisibility to collect private conversation and then spread them for the whole ton to see and judge. She has ruined reputations of people who trusted her ( Marina, Eloise) judged people who did nothing wrong to her ( calling Daphne unmarriageable first season) and used her power to destroy others to protect herself ( ruining a seamstress reputations so that madame delacroix won't expose her secret). Season 3 should have Penelope face the consequences of her actions and own up to the mess she had done through her words, but they most likely wouldn't do anything like this. Also how the heck is Colin going to react when he finds out that she is the one who ruined both his sister reputation and his engagement? Like they better not have him be cool with it, he despised Lady Whistledown during the second season.

I agree. Penelope is a flawed character, like all the other Bridgerton characters. I love flawed characters. I adore barely reformed mean girls. I just need them to admit their flaws. My complaint isn't so much that Penelope's done wrong but that she hasn't admitted that some of her choices were bad.

Personally, I would just like to see some self-reflection from Penelope about her role as LW and the impact that has had on people closest to her.

I also want to see Pen realize that lying to Eloise was a betrayal of trust because that to me is the real issue between them. I don't think Eloise resented Penelope for being LW as some believe. By season 2, Eloise isn't that impressed by the LW gossip and has moved on to more explicitly political writing by Wollstonecraft, whose writing Pen calls "haughty." LW isn't giving Eloise what she needs emotionally, intellectually, so I'm not convinced she's envious. She wants LW to do more with her talents, but otherwise s2 was about Eloise discovering more stimulating thoughts outside of gossip.

It's that Eloise has been nothing but an opened book to Penelope and was actively searching for LW and trying at one time to protect her. And all the while, Pen was playing in her face. I want to see Pen feel some remorse for that. I don't know what other consequences I could reasonably expect her to deal with this season, but at the very least, I'd like her to reflect on her own privilege as a writer and what she's done with it and the impact of the secrets she's kept about herself vs those she's revealed about everyone else.

ETA: I don't know how they'll whitewash the Marina thing. Colin mentioned in s2 his regrets about how he treated her and how LW exposed her so brutally. I don't know how he'll reconcile those feelings with his relationship to Pen. I think they'll have to have him get over it, and it most likely won't be satisfying in any way because the person she really needs to apologize to for that is Marina. And even if she were to reappear, which I doubt, she'd probably tell Pen that it needed to happen and it's all in the past. So I have to reconcile with the fact that part of the storyline will just remain unfinished for me.

Look at you. You are a rare jewel.

QUEEN CHARLOTTE: A BRIDGERTON STORY | s01 ep06 ‘CROWN JEWELS’

Queen Charlotte and Lady Danbury Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story | Bridgerton Season 3

KATE & ANTHONY | BRIDGERTON S3 PROMO

What gets me about arguments that state Eloise is being a bad friend to Pen is that they both were engaging in secret activities that let them rebel against society's conventions and also put their families at risk. But Pen as Whistledown is celebrated and Eloise going to lectures and befriending Theo is somehow transgressive.

Marina trapping Colin into marriage was bad. Eloise meeting secretly with Theo is bad. Eloise seemingly friends with Cressida is unforgivable.

But Pen outing Marina's pregnancy (a woman who had the least amount of power than anyone in the Ton) is good, even if it leaves her open to public ridicule. Pen outing Eloise as a political radical is good because it "saves" Eloise, even if it leaves her open to public ridicule. Pen continuing to write as Whistledown is good, although she is now well aware of how much it can get her family in trouble with the Queen herself, because....why?

Other women can face the consequences of their actions because they supposedly deserve it, but Pen can continue to engage in even riskier behavior in secret, protect herself from facing no public ridicule for it, and Eloise is wrong to be angry and bitter about any of it. Her befriending Cressida is somehow worse than anything Pen has done. And if Colin finds out about Pen's secret, he's supposed to be fully supportive of her, too, or else he's wrong. That doesn't make a damn bit of sense.

As much as the new Bridgerton promo got me more interested in this season than I have been in months, I do wish that they'd show Penelope as being a mix of a sensitive, kind-hearted person and a vindictive asshole rather than this wallflower who will bloom. That's Pen as Whistledown's point of view, and she should definitely be presented as an unreliable narrator.

She is a savvy, manipulative, gaslighter like her mother, but she is also a victim of her mother's manipulation, lies, and callousness. She is bullied and also can be a bully through her Daily Mail-style Whistledown gossip pages.

You probably can't put that all in a promo but that angle is more compelling to me because it's based on how they've actually written Pen. At the end of season 2, she tells Eloise she's given up writing as Whistledown, but her feelings of rejection from Colin, her persistent resentment at the Bridgertons (no matter who much she actually cares for them, too), and her anger at not feeling truly valued wins out and she returns to her writing because her pen is mightier than the sword. If the show acknowledged that this is who Pen is (rather than whitewash her actions), it would actually make her easier to root for.

There are a lot of weird things about Bridgerton but what I can’t wrap my mind around is how they write characters doing really gross things and it’s like…they don’t even know they did it?

Pen’s treatment of Marina is a huge problem for me. They throw that stuff into the show and then expect us to just ignore it? Maybe just don’t go there in the first place! I also hated that they dragged Marina into Polin again in s2 to, I guess…absolve Pen’s behavior? It’s fucking gross.

Penelope's treatment of Marina was vile. Marina was an unprivileged young girl who was in a difficult situation. She was disgraced in front of the whole ton. Everyone knows she was pregnant out of wedlock. And why? Simply because she dared to go after the man Penelope had an unrequited crush on. If Penelope truly wanted to save Colin she'd have told him herself or found another way. But maybe Colin would've still married Marina after the truth came out. So it had to be done in this humiliating way. And bringing Marina back as a polin cheerleader was slap to the face.

Nothing absolved Penelope's behaviour. And she won't face any consequences for her actions. She's managed to make everything bad thing she did about herself. Ousting Marina and Eloise, what she did to that modiste, writing those things about Daphne and Kate and Queen Charlotte. She's the most self righteous, whining character in the show and I'm sad as a curvy girl that she's the only rep we got from the show. That show which praises itself for its wonderful representation. The show makers have no respect for their audience.

The Vanity Fair article this morning has me interested in this Eloise/Cressida friendship, even if a few glimpses of it in the trailer has given rise to cartoonish hate launched at Eloise on here at the moment. If they can make villainous Cressida into a complex character that you almost want to root for and have Eloise gain more complexity and nuance as well, I'm here for it.

Some excerpts from the article:

"You have Cressida, who has been this queen bee all along—but three years in without a husband, I think there’s some room for reflection with her. You’re going to see some new sides from her this year, and understand why she is the way she is."

"Penelope and Eloise’s breakup is really, in many ways, the secondary love story of the season."

Kanthony and this broken friendship are perhaps the main reasons I'm interested in this season.

CLAUDIA JESSIE AS ELOISE BRIDGERTON BRIDERTON SEASON THREE TRAILER

Do you believe the best foundation for love is friendship? – It is rare, but you must follow your heart. (x)

Kate and Anthony Bridgerton Bridgerton — Season 3 Trailer

‘stories can resonate with you even when the characters are nothing like you’ is something a 6 year old would understand but it needs to be explained to fandom adults on tumblr

This was really fun to listen to <3 I wanted to share the audio on here but the file is too big so have this :D

and at the end of the day, people will still hate women.

because beyonce is a terrible songwriter who has a good body and nothing more and she's really nothing compared to olivia rodrigo, that stuck-up bitch who steals other people's music, but taylor swift is an old, bitter nothing who clearly hates other girls. and sabrina carpenter deserves to die because she followed her heart, not her brain, and that's exactly why zendaya will never be good enough for tom holland. don't forget about kylie jenner, who's stealing precious timothee's innocence away and dating her is like committing arthouse cinema suicide, or how we said the same thing about miley cyrus and her disgusting profanity, think of the children, poor liam hemsworth, trapped in a marriage with such a horrible woman. lana del rey was hot until she was big and she made trailerpark sexy until her ass got a little too fat. and ariana grande, talentless homewrecker, and selena gomez, jealous and unreasonable, and hailey bieber, even more boring than the blood drying on the knives you are so quick to pull. sophie turner is a bad mom and megan thee stallion deserved whatever was coming to her.

and amidst all of this, we still don't know these women. we cannot fathom the pain of having a public divorce, one where people choose sides and hurl insults at you until the battery on their phone dies. we don't watch them chase after sweet-cheeked children in tucked-away backyards or play board games with their best friends while their chests heave in laughter. we don't know their marriages and we don't know their solitudes. we don't watch them unravel themselves, time and time again, preparing for the battle that we have made of their lives. they can never make a mistake. they can never cry. they can never be who they believe themselves to be.

and we take all of this and we go to work, we ride the bus, we go grocery shopping, we walk in dappled sunlight, and we let ourselves shrivel. i compare myself to every body i see and i comfort in the fact that i can still encircle my wrists with my fingers. food turns to dust in my mouth when i think about the fact that taylor swift thinks she's fat and people still hate sabrina carpenter for sticking by joshua bassett's side when he almost died, for God's sake, and now the people on my twitter feed are saying GUTS is the worst album they've ever heard. i liked it, the tiny voice in my head cries out. she wrote songs that made me feel noticed. they're calling the song i relate to the most a total skip.

so i close the app. i try not to think about the endless profiles screaming about how much they hate a nineteen/thirty-two/thirty-eight/twenty-three/twenty-six/forty-two year old. i try not to think about how much they would hate me, if they knew anything at all.

*we're talking about ripe, juicy tomatoes: