Hmm, not really any one thing in particular. It wasn’t always my main interest, but one of many when I was a kid (I was kind of…a weird kid, lol). I was also really into Arthuriana, which makes sense I guess because there are elements of that in the Tudor era as well (Camelot, and then its sort of darker side).
There’s something about the Tudors, it is hard to quantify…they just strike me as so very human. Mythic and yet not remote, as so many royal families are/were; somehow dually mythic and accessible.
Starkey put the fascination best, imo:
Why don’t [Henry VIII’s predecessors] impress themselves on our minds in the same way…the reason that the Tudors fit themselves– that is, go into our minds in an almost subliminal way– is that they are the first dynasty that we can imagine…that we know as people. If you don’t know what people looked like, or what they were thought to look like, what they were presented as looking like, you cannot know them. And of course, this has become more and more powerful as we’ve shifted, essentially, from the rather verbal age of the 19th century, into the visual age of the late 20th century and early 21st century.
If I remember correctly, the trajectory for me went something like:
Red Rose of the House of Tudor from the school library —> the adaptation of that book into DVD or VHS from public library —> AOTD play from public library —> AOTD film from public library –> Doomed Queen Anne from public library…
Afterwards it gets murky, there wasn’t as much YA about the Tudor era then as there is today. But I know when I was a preteen, then in early teens, it was Gregory novels and then Tudors when its first season was released.
All of that sort of cumulatively piqued my interest, I read what articles I could get hold of online. I didn’t really start to get into it academically until I rewatched Tudors like…. six years ago or so? I started reading up on the inaccuracies vs. the accurate re-enactments of the show online (by then there was much more content available re: that), and the more I learned the more I wanted to learn.