branwinged

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manhunter best hannibal adaptation

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Two paths - Garni temple (I c.), Kotayk province, 2025

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me when the winter soldier’s theme comes on in ca:tws

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I feel like the common literacy advice to "read critically" is very daunting when you first start reading (especially in self study) non fiction or theory and you keep experiencing the common "agree with the last position you heard" problem. this problem persists for much longer than people like to think it does - how are you supposed to question opinions you hear if the thesis of every book you read is the first opinion you ever encountered on a topic? how do you know what to think when everyone tells you they're right? this is just my experience but for me the two things that helped the most were:

to read criticism; reviews of books, someone's 10 note tumblr post, essays that respond to those ideas, twitter threads, your friend who took a class one time, etc. simply put, the more you steal people's opinions, the more you can sharpen your own. this gave me an idea of what the stakes are, how to pick and choose useful and useless aspects of a text, and, metatextually, what kind of aspects of a text can be criticized, a scope that is much much bigger than I initially thought, and:

to focus on a single topic at first. it's seductive to want to read everything because of the way people write those theory essential reading lists but only reading one seminal book on each topic is not a way to develop your understanding. by starting with various books that deal with a specific topic that interests you (for me, 19th century french psychiatry) you can get a better sense of the various approaches to a topic, the way historians contradict and respond to each other, the difference between an academic book, a news article, an anonymous anarchist library essay, and a communist propaganda leaflet on the same topic, and most importantly: you realize, as you accumulate knowledge, that published writings are often wrong and false! and realising the scope of this helps you be more confident in doubting and questioning any piece of writing in a critical way.

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Mexico, 1960s. From the book “Mexiko” by Fulvio Roiter, published in 1968 by Atlantis.

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sex pollen is an integral part of the fanfiction ecosystem but i just don't think poison ivy would make anything that encourages procreation of even more humans. unless she figures out how to make the sex pollen same-sex specific or fertility-negating she's not making it at all. #philosophical

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what do you make of daemon's desire to be king in episode 5? is it all alys/harrenhal or is there some part of him that truly believes the realm will never accept rhaenyra and he's just better suited for it and alys/harrenhal is barely bringing it to the surface?

in the first episode, daemon is his brother’s heir. then he’s disinherited and his niece is made heir in his place. from that point forward, absent viserys changing his mind, the only way he will ever be king (barring acts of the gods) is if he destroys his brother and niece by violence. he is thus given a choice, one rhaenyra presents him starkly with in episode 2: if you want to be heir again, you’ll have to kill me. and he can’t do it. his fate is sealed from that moment onward. he makes that choice and the entire rest of his life is lived in that aftermath. but because the alternative is unacceptable, he doesn’t precisely surrender his former position in perfect free will, which is true of most life choices.

the question of whether daemon “wants” to be king is complicated - he wants, at least at the start of the show, certain things that being chosen to succeed his brother as king would represent for him, or the ways that being king might allow him to shape his life, which is basically close enough. and he gives those up, but the choice is constrained, stark and binary, between one thing he can live with and one thing he can’t. and a lot of this season is about his unconscious acting out that choice again and again trying to find a different answer, its alternatives, its aftermath. he sees himself kill rhaenyra and harrenhal or his own brain taunts him with the accusation this is what he wanted all along.

so he did, but he never actually did it. he never actually made that choice. he can’t ever make the choice part of him wants to make. and now he makes a move to usurp rhaenyra, and what’s essential to me is this - he fantasizes a way out of the trap, that this could happen without him killing her (“rhaenyra is welcome to join me there and take her place at my side…ruling together”), that he might have mastery and not eradicate her, or that he can have her and be free of dependence. but actually he is just going to be presented with the choice again. and again. and again. until he dies, where he will still not ever really be able to make the choice of freeing himself from her or their shared creation site at the cost of her.

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As someone who completely agrees and also loves your posting, do you think you could expand more on hotd Jace and book Jon? If and when you want to ofc, just a topic I think you could put into words really well.

🫶 so i originally just meant it in terms of appearance! harry collett as he's styled in S2 is very close to how i imagine jon but i'm considering it now and jace in f&b is something of a jon snow copy. there's the pact of ice & fire which jace finalises with cregan, about a targaryen princess being married to a stark lord - which is likely a nod to the existence of jon through rhaegar and lyanna (and like everything else about their story it involves gender inversion) but grrm's main pre-occupation with the house seems to be how social constructions of legitimacy, i.e. their reign as monarchs plays off with the prophecy of the prince that was promised, i.e. their magical destiny. the prophesied hero must be a targaryen king who will unite the realms during the long night, "a targaryen must be seated upon the iron throne" is how they've chosen to interpret it, in line with their feudal hierarchy of power and the way it flows through firstborn sons. but house targaryen's two major succession crises occur over the claim of a princess (dance) and a bastard (blackfyre rebellions) and grrm makes the last two surviving members of the house a girl and a bastard. then he creates young griff, who has the conqueror's name, as a foil to dany and jon - both deemed illegitimate in comparison but it's young griff who's clearly unequipped to deal with the threat of the long night, he doesn't know about the others and he hasn't brought back dragons.

i dislike the way hotd uses the prophecy as an excuse to not have to engage with personal gain being the primary motivation for everyone involved in the dance but i think they've got a good grasp of the themes here because by positioning the prophecy at the centre of the dance (fought over the claims of a targaryen princess and her "plain" bastard sons) they're connecting the death of the dragons—their only chance against the long night—with that patriarchal construction of power that excludes both bastards and women and in that sense rhaenyra & jace are dany & jon's precursors, they're the sole inheritors of prophecy and then alicent's son, aegon (again, conqueror's name which he can only have because of his sex assignment and valyrian look) is constructed to oppose both their claims. and while i've never gotten the feeling that the dance is simply a "both sides bad" thing because grrm does see rhaenyra's usurpation as an injustice, he's also making a point about all power being socially constructed - nettles's introduction as a lowborn dragonrider being the neatest distillation of this at a time when the realm is being beggared because of a dynastic war. so the other thing i assume they'll get into in the show is that the targaryens are going to forget/lose the knowledge of the long night—their reason for coming to westeros in the first place—in pursuit of the iron throne, which works as a good criticism of the institution. that rhaenyra and jace ultimately fail because they're working within these structures of power to advance their contested claims while a hundred years later dany & jon are are set up to succeed because they've led an othered existence away and in exile from king's landing and their arcs are about channeling those deprivations into a demand for wider social change.

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DAEMON & RHAENYRA HOUSE OF THE DRAGON (2022 - ) for @boundwithpurple

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we invite you to celebrate #branweek2025 (also known as branoween!) with us from october 25-31!

we encourage you to interpret the prompts as broadly and creatively as you like - in art, fanfiction, metas, edits, or any other medium of your choosing! 🐺🐦‍⬛

make sure to tag your contributions with #branweek2025. any questions will be answered shortly by our admins, asks are open!

this event is also taking place on twitter.

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altar of the moon

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«House of the Dragon» | 1.06 «The Princess and the Queen»  

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Don’t like that trope where women are forced into arranged marriages against their will for their family’s political advantage, it just reinforces the frankly sexist idea of women as overemotional and obsessed with romance to the point of stupidity, and neglects the reality of all the women throughout history who would gladly marry for power, riches and political advantage as long as the spouse in question wasn’t entirely awful, because ambition is not an inherently gendered trait, you gotta have a roof over your head, and that earl title suits your brother

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genuine question — how is donating money going to help Palestinians if no food is going in? What is the money for?

Medicine, water, supplies, food, fuel (much of it black market being upsold at egregious prices) — these all cost money and pretty much all Palestinians in Gaza have no source of income now. It’s drops in the bucket compared to ending the siege and occupation but it’s one way to do at least something small to help. Others are in need of money to evacuate when the border opens again (which hopefully is asap…), tuition and supplies for school to continue studies despite it all. Another fund is focused on trying to rebuild farmlands in Gaza to get food again that way.

I can’t tell anyone what to do with their money but I don’t think this mindset of “well nothings going in so we can’t help” is helpful for people on the ground who are the ones saying that donations can and do help them survive.

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necropolitics, achille mbembe

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My uncle was the one guy ever who could do magic. He pulled a coin out from behind my ear once. He went missing around a year ago though, so I guess magic isn’t around or real anymore. Figured I should let you know since you study that stuff.

WE HAVE TO SAVE YOUR UNCLE