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absolutely love it when people are like why do you like this fictional character so much look at all their bad qualities. my brothersister in christ their bad qualities are why i like them

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justice and fair trials are good and all but i personally hope sansa pushes LF off a cliff or a tall building. and lies shamelessly about it!

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"performative rhaegar hatred" lol what makes you think people are being performative

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why is it that ppl can understand liking cersei without agreeing with her internalised misogyny but cant when it comes to alicent

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asoiaf terrible fathers bracket round 1: ned stark vs. viserys i targaryen

ned: listen. he’s not great either. Failed to educate any of his children about the real world or the dangers of kings landing to their own mortal peril. held a state-sanctioned execution for his daughter’s beloved innocent puppy dog and then didn’t talk to her ever again to her own mortal peril. would have killed the child-hostage living in his home on a moment’s notice. wanted to take a three year-old to a beheading because he is almost a man grown.

viserys: Was such a lackluster father that he managed to get his children to not only murder each other but start a near-dynasty-destroying civil war immediately after he died. Somehow neglected two sets of children in favor of the other simultaneously, watched his 10 year old son get his eyeball ripped out and then threatened to take his tongue also, killed his wife and then didn’t talk to his teenage daughter for six months about it before marrying her best friend.

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before you become an apologist for a toxic female character, ask yourself: is she a SHIV?

S - selfish and self oriented

H - helpful to no one around her

I - insanity inducing

V - very very sexy

if she is all of the above, then apologies are not needed! youve found the perfect toxic female character to stan

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you know i really really hate it more than anything when people call character actions in stories especially within a tragedies irrational or hypocritical. like girl that’s the human condition

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lol i watched the first episode of breaking bad and i thought it was pretty good!

You know I see a lot about male fans who hate Dany, Arya, or Sansa and like… where are they? Reddit? I’ve only interfaces with other fans on tumblr and in real life and I’ve never met a male fan who hated any of them. I’ve seen plenty of indifference but the only people I’ve known to hate any of these characters are female. But maybe that’s just because I’m on tumblr, which has a userbase that’s heavily female dominated, and not Reddit, which is more male dominated. But as far as men I’ve spoken to irl? They all prefer Jon, Tyrion, Jaime, and a shocking number of dedicated Oberyn fans, but none that I’ve met actually hate any of these characters. I met a guy who hated Missandei but he was show only and his favorite was TYWIN so 🚩

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rewatching episode 1 and what's tragic is i don't think alicent's internalized and externalized misogny is a fundamental attribute of her character. she gossips cutely with rhaenyra about a noblewoman pregnant with a child out of wedlock with no real sense of censure or condemnation but only a teenager's titilated delight in the presence of sex; she recognizes rhaenyra feels fear about being supplanted by a brother even if she won't speak it and diagnoses a desire for power in rhaenyra that she can't quite articulate and that rhaenyra can't either. she dresses rhaenyra for her investiture as heir with tenderness and looks on with real pride. even through episode 3, she says rhaenyra was chosen as heir because she was the better choice and seems to have no unshakeable beliefs about women's inability to hold political power. a tainted life shapes her into the figure of the queen and mother that lashes out at rhaenyra's sexual transgression in episode 4 from a complicated mix of motives: bitterness at rhaenyra's temporary flight to freedom (the fact that rhaenyra's revelatory sexual encounter with daemon is intercut with alicent's own marital rape really makes clear the irrational, childish - she's 19 here! - bitter outburst at someone who got out of the cage even for a moment, rather than anyone responsible), this idea that she is protecting rhaenyra by making sure she doesn't throw away barbed patriarchal protection or approval by sexual misconduct, simple jelaousy because rhaenyra had sex with someone else that wasn't her. her venom toward rhaenyra in episode 6 also seems to me to have a lot behind it: the false perception rhaenyra is "freer", hooking her sense of betrayal at the events of episodes 4 and 5 to rhaenyra's perceived sexual incontinence in a misogynistic way, and making strategic use of that misogyny for her own political ends to achieve the safety of her children.

obviously people who hate her like to imagine her as simply like, a modern conservative, which is not true, but more unsettling to me is her fans who almost fetishize her misery and the ugly forms it takes as she thrashes around as something innate to her and inescapable rather than a complex reaction to circumstances that is far from inevitable to me. an obvious counterpoint might be that alicent chooses how she reacts to those circumstances, and is responsible for them, and i agree, but i do think there is a something unique to how fundamentally her burgeoning sense of adult self was totally destroyed by the fact that she was a child bride and mother at 15. what is alicent's self? there is a degree to which she never gets a chance to even develop it but there is something in the girl that shares an illigitimate pregnancy as nothing more than an entertaining bit of gossip to amuse her best friend, that is flattered by daemon's asking for her favor, that tugs rhaenyra forward by the hand to joint flirt with another handsome knight, that suggests it could have gone differently. she could, indeed, have become someone else, if she'd been left alone to continue becoming someone at all.

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rhaenicent is kinda iconic if you think about it because everything about the way it's written and performed and discussed in interviews is textbook queerbaiting and it's also by miles the only good part of the show

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omg you’re so clever calling the fictitious feudal aristocrat children ‘classist’. shall we throw a party? shall we invite the mythical non-classist feudal aristocrat children? oh, your meta is ever so insightful!!!

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the first man to mother

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every time someone posts a “ned dumb”take grrm delays twow by another year.he told me himself.

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hotd/f&b drama girlies dont understand how crazy a REAL lore nerd goes. "retconned rhaenys' baratheon hair :(" "alicent was just a bitch in fnb :(" do you guys even know that rhaenys had her hair retconned already. grrm forgot about the black hair the first time and had to retcon it in f&b. do u guys even know the drama of the jaehaerys children getting retconned. how in TWOIAF his eldest child was listed as aeryn and then in F&B aeryn was written out and replaced with daenerys who died of a winter chill. they dont even know that alyssa velaryon's mother changed from a targ to alarra massey in order to explain why alysanne had blonde hair and blue eyes. lmao do they even know about maestar gyldayn..

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the world of asoiaf has a mother wound which manifests as violent misogyny towards female characters....huh