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Considering the public version of Baelish and Sansa's situation, as in him being a doting father to his only child, albeit illegitimate, does it raise some perplexity among the Vale nobility that he wouldn't ask for a legitimisation? Alayne is his only child, he's unmarried at the moment, and any male heir he could have in the future would preceed her anyway. Or is legitimisation done exclusively in cases of emergency, aka when literally no other legitimate heir is available?

It’s worth emphasizing that legitimization is a relatively pretty rare process: of the dozens of acknowledged bastards we know of in the history of Westeros, only two (outside the blanket legitimization issued by Aegon IV on his deathbed) have ever been formally legitimized (three if you count Jon Snow, who was all but certainly legitimized by Robb’s will but whose legitimized status is not yet widely known in-universe). Importantly, in each of those cases - Ramsay Snow, the sons of Marilda of Hull, and Jon Snow - the legitimization came about specifically because the lord or king in question had no surviving legitimate son to inherit after him (at least officially - I very much believe Mushroom’s assertion that Corlys was the biological l father of Addam and Alyn of Hull). (Again, Aegon IV is the exception here - I don’t even think he was really trying to push Daemon as his alternative heir - but I believe Aegon’s move was a sort of final “fuck you” to the future King Daeron II, a last petty stab at the son he hated rather than a genuine politico-dynastic decision by the dying king.) Likewise, only Aegon IV ever chose to legitimize a daughter (and again, only in the context of a blanket legitimization); even Oberyn Martell, for example, who held out each of his daughters as his own far earlier than Littlefinger was supposed to have done for “Alayne” (and indeed, lived with the mother of his four youngest daughters as effectively a married couple in a nuclear family), never apparently sought to legitimize any of them. Nor indeed should it be forgotten how serious a process legitimization is: only a king can legitimize a bastardborn Westerosi, and once so legitimized, both that person and his (or her) descendants would be legitimate forever.

So far from the assembled aristocracy of the Vale finding it odd that Littlefinger would not be pressing for Sansa-as-Alayne to be legitimized, I think these aristocrats would be surprised, even shocked if Littlefinger tried to make his “daughter” legitimate by royal decree. After all, the public narrative about “Alayne Stone” is that Littlefinger didn’t even know of her existence until very recently - when “at [her] flowering [“Alayne”] decided [she] did not wish to be a septa and wrote to [Littlefinger]”. While Littlefinger might have publicly recognized Sansa-as-Alayne as his daughter, and treated her relatively well by Westerosi standards (remember, this is a world where Lord Hewett made his own extramarital daughter a house servant to his wife and their children), Alayne’s social position is at best a liminal one - able to act in some ways as the lady of the Arryn household, but in other ways (as Littlefinger, Myranda Royce, and Harry Hardyng all remind her) very much considered the inferior of her blue-blood neighbors. Moreover, I think many in the Vale would anticipate that Littlefinger - now Lord of Harrenhal in addition to being Lord Protector of the Vale and the richest thief man in Westeros - would marry and produce legitimate (male) heirs of his own; indeed, Myranda teases Sansa-as-Alayne on this point, remarking that Littlefinger “needs a pretty young wife to wash away his grief” and that he “could have his pick of half the noble maidens in the Vale” (including, as she later jokes to Sansa-as-Alayne in TWOW, Myranda herself). In turn, the idea that Littlefinger, having such standing, would choose to go through the significant effort of petitioning the king to elevate a bastard teenage girl as his heiress, when he himself could marry a suitably aristocratic bride and have a legitimate son of his body to succeed him, would so grossly contrast with the patriarchal and classist socio-political expectations of Westerosi aristocracy that I think the move would cause nothing but muttering and suspicion.

What Littlefinger wants to avoid most of all with Sansa-as-Alayne is undue attention being cast on her, at least until Littlefinger himself feels ready to reveal her as Sansa Stark. Indeed, this was the entire purpose of choosing a bastard disguise for Sansa in the first place: when Sansa suggests that she could portray herself as “the trueborn daughter of some knight in [his] service”, Littlefinger reminds her that “[s]uch a tale would draw unwanted questions”, while then noting that “[i]t is rude to pry into the origins of a man's natural children”. Therefore, Littlefinger’s treatment of Sansa has to fit within the socio-political expectations of Westerosi and specifically Vale aristocratic life - which is to say, not promoting bastards above their station (again, according to the rules imposed by the elites in this society). No one, I think, would expect, much less encourage, the rich and powerfully landed widower Littlefinger to hold out his bastardborn “daughter” as his heiress, still less to go through the process of legitimizing her; better, for Littlefinger’s scheme at least, to leave her as a recognized but still illegitimate child, and trust in polite society’s reluctance to pry further, rather than foster speculation by taking the unorthodox move of pressing for her legitimization.

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you ever have situations that make you want to take people by the shoulders and go "you are not 15 any longer. this behavior is no longer quirky and cute. it is exhausting for you and everyone else to act like a teenager you haven't been in a decade or longer. knock it the fuck off"

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there is a certain scene in anora that i cannot stop thinking about that is playing over and over again in my head

the positioning of ivan’s mother on the steps of the plane behind ani with ani’s back turned toward her and igor in front of ani. ivan’s mother threatening ani’s entire life when she said she wants to sue them. her asking ani “do you have a house? do you have a car? everyone you love will be ruined” while looking at igor and winking. igor who lives in his grandmothers apartment, who drives his grandmothers car, who answers when they call and does as they say and looks at ani with the utmost understanding and empathy.

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Highest form of comedy currently is people adamantly talking about how the TikTok ban is censorship targeted at “youth organizers” all while the closed captioning is 90% code words to avoid getting shadow banned by TikTok’s algorithm.

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(source: The St. Louis Post Dispatch, December 22, 1887.)

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Day dress ca. 1840’s

From the Centre de Documentació i Museu Tèxtil de Terrassa

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Afternoon dress ca. 1830

From The Museum at FIT

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Suit ca. 1900

From the McCord Museum

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Pro tip from someone who has watched basically every smear campaign against a woman on the internet: When you’re a woman defending another woman, you don’t actually have to say that you don’t like the other woman but you feel forced to defend her. Like, you can just leave that part off your posts.

Try it out! See how it feels!

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Honestly if we didn’t share the planet with funny little animals I would have fucking lost it years ago

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youre offline because you have an irl life and miss one load bearing post on here and all of a sudden you dont understand any of the vagues on your dash for the next week

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Cozy Fantasy and Why It Doesn't Work

I think I am among many who feel like they should love cozy fantasy and have found it an incredibly lacking genre.

This newly branded "cozy fantasy" genre that has taken readers by storm since 2020 and while it is new that books are now marketed as cozy, the genre itself isn't new. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is a great example of the genre before it was labeled and also how to make it work.

Cozy fantasy is defined by many as fantasy with low stakes. Fantasy aesthetic but less sword fights. On paper, it sounds great. But the execution has been less than stellar for readers like me. The lack of physical stakes has also impacted the emotional stakes of these books, creating forgettable characters with boring problems. As a romance reader, I find this frustrating. Romance is known for being a predictable and formulaic genre, the now defunct Romance Writers of America defined romances as needing happy endings, a term romances have continued to follow. Yet these romance texts manage to have low physical stakes (how to date your neighbor, how to confront your toxic friends, etc) while still maintaining high personal stakes that keep readers invested and begging for more. So I was initially confused why cozy fantasy authors struggle to write texts that connect to readers like me.

I think I have found the answer which is the genre is just here for vibes. It is all about aesthetic, not even worldbuilding that fantasy is known for as most cozy fantasy I read have so many problems as soon as you ask one question. It is hard to acknowledge that a genre that is pitched to work for readers like me doesn't work for many of us. Especially because occasionally there is one that works beautifully to my taste.

I often say my favorite cozy fantasies that are more contemporary are short and visual, which I plays into the idea of the genre being an aesthetic. The Bakery Dragon by Devin Elle Kurtz is a good example because it is a simple story that is given the perfect amount of pages and gorgeous visuals without dragging on when the message is very clear and easy to understand. Books like The Phoenix Keeper and Legends and Lattes have absolutely nothing for me, their very clear message hitting the reader over and over so the readers don't miss it and focusing on the aesthetic of worldbuilding rather than the reality of the fantastic elements within the world.

I guess my point is. . . I realize this genre isn't for me since I have realized it is more of an aesthetic than anything. .. .but I want it to be. Should I let it go and put my efforts elsewhere? Or should I keep exploring this new trend and find the hidden gems?

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i desperately want to do one of those “pick a song that’s turning 20 in 2025” polls but instead of all the songs being chosen to appeal directly to american tumblr users who had an emo phase i will take them, with bare minimum selectivity or curation, from the uk official year end charts so that everybody has to choose between shayne ward and the crazy frog song

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"He took one of her hands and moved it onto his chest, pushing it down over his heart, the source of all this feeling. He placed his other hand, decisively, below her left clavicle. She knew that he pictured her heart anatomically beneath it. He'd told her: her heart was not beautiful, it was literally a meaty organ, located behind her tripartite sternum, off-center. To perform CPR properly, he'd once reminded her, you had to push down so hard that you heard the sternum crack. To bring people back to life, he'd cautioned when she spoke admiringly of his job, you sometimes had to commit acts of violence. He held his hand over her heart and she remembered that it had chambers in it like the ones he had put his fingers through in the lamb's heart in the biology lab, when he was fourteen and scared of being a virgin."

Roz Dineen, Briefly Very Beautiful

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"When Cass was a child, she had stepped into a shallow hole in the park soil, so her sister could bury her feet in it. Cass had stood, planted, with her arms held out like a Christ, like a human tree, and with crystals of sugar on her lips; there were prisms, prefiguring something, in the plane trees. And her mind had formed, as if grooves were being cut into the wood of it for the water to run through. When she was a child, and by herself, the basic feeling of being her, alive, within her body, had been that of being drenched. Heavenly drenched. All of life running through the grooves. And this had been a secret. Such a secret."

Roz Dineen, Briefly Very Beautiful

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"When the summers got longer and longer, she'd tell them, there were blooms as big as heads in the front gardens, all along the street. There was an ease between people. That ease that comes in heat... The summers became longer and longer and hotter still and extended into other seasons. People built their own private economies of barter, borrow and play to your strengths. And, for some weeks, there was a plague of butterflies. Thousands and thousands of butterflies, all at once, so many, crowding the streets. Dead ones, becoming undone, floating on the river. Dancing circles in the trains, then getting underfoot."

Roz Dineen, Briefly Very Beautiful