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Bran doodle dump

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I don't mean to be arrogant but I believe I captured her essence perfectly

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Golden girls

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jaime's taste in women

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Replying "you couldn't torture this out of me lol" on someone's post about what they got for lunch today

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i don’t know if these needs to be said but calling Dany’s slaver’s bay arc orientalist is not a criticism of Dany herself. it is a criticism of GRRM, the white westerner writing it. Dany is not responsible for the orientalist tropes that arise here, any more than say, Lyanna Stark et al are responsible for the disproportionate number of childbirth deaths in the series.

and I am aware that the people of slaver’s bay are of many different races, including white! GRRM has said that many times over. but the thing is that orientalism is not so much about race as it is the east vs the west. so whilst the racial dynamics here may be more ambiguous the juxtaposition of the east and the west is not. it’s in the names of the continents: Westeros, Essos. one is made up of familiar western fantasy and medieval tropes, the other is, well, other, and made up of a range of orientalist tropes. it’s in the food, the clothes, the sex, the accents, the religion, the everything. it is there. we have to reckon with that.

and if people are somehow blaming the presence of these tropes on Daenerys herself, that’s very much on them. it is extremely reductive to use these critiques as your pedestal in a stan war. it only shows that you do not even understand the argument at stake here. but if we refuse to acknowledge the orientalism in the story for the sake of defending a white character: that is also extremely reductive.

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i don’t know if these needs to be said but calling Dany’s slaver’s bay arc orientalist is not a criticism of Dany herself. it is a criticism of GRRM, the white westerner writing it. Dany is not responsible for the orientalist tropes that arise here, any more than say, Lyanna Stark et al are responsible for the disproportionate number of childbirth deaths in the series.

and I am aware that the people of slaver’s bay are of many different races, including white! GRRM has said that many times over. but the thing is that orientalism is not so much about race as it is the east vs the west. so whilst the racial dynamics here may be more ambiguous the juxtaposition of the east and the west is not. it’s in the names of the continents: Westeros, Essos. one is made up of familiar western fantasy and medieval tropes, the other is, well, other, and made up of a range of orientalist tropes. it’s in the food, the clothes, the sex, the accents, the religion, the everything. it is there. we have to reckon with that.

and if people are somehow blaming the presence of these tropes on Daenerys herself, that’s very much on them. it is extremely reductive to use these critiques as your pedestal in a stan war. it only shows that you do not even understand the argument at stake here. but if we refuse to acknowledge the orientalism in the story for the sake of defending a white character: that is also extremely reductive.

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okay discourse over we’ve settled it now

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what was expected of me?

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genuine question why are charter schools to blame for decreased literacy in your opinion? Because of the remote learning aspect or smth else also?? I went to one & honestly did better with it than traditional hs but I had very high reading comprehension already, had no busses in my area & no parent that could drive me to school so it was a pretty specific situation where that environment worked out better for me

Well I’m glad it worked out for you but institutionally charter schools are so detrimental to public education. Let me explain why:

The principle behind charter schools, that increased competition will force public schools to be better, frames education as a product rather than a public utility. If education quality is determined by the free market, the winners and losers are children, which is just a morally unacceptable outcome to me.

Shouldn’t ignore that the school choice movement started as a way to advocate for the perpetuity of segregation. On average charters are more racially segregated than publics.

The way in which public schools receive funding varies state to state, but most states do some amount of funding per pupil. What that means is that when students switch from public schools to charter schools they take that per people funding with them if you’re leaving an underperforming public school that’s underperforming because it’s underfunded you are making the problem worse. Not everyone can leave.

Charter schools can legally kick students out if they want to. This means if students stop performing well, or if disabled or english-language learner students need extra support, they can just be removed. A lot of “charters have higher test scores” is just charters only admitted high-performing and low-need students, which puts even more of a strain on public schools.

They are really unregulated. Many “charter-friendly” states have minimal accountability measures for charter schools in a way that leads to many running the gamut between negligence to committing literal fraud instead of providing free and appropriate public education. Charter networks are multibillion dollar businesses this system gets exploited by private equity all the time.

That lack of regulation or accountability also shows up in disciplinary outcomes. The school to prison pipeline is already unforgivably bad in a public environment, but unregulated charter schools often implement draconian “zero tolerance” policies that result in black and brown students getting treated like they’re in a police state. Public schools can’t suspend or expel you or call the cops on you for how you wear your hair. They can’t escalate to dramatic consequences as quickly or do a 3 strikes demerit system. There are no legal guardrails against this in charters.

Often exist to circumnavigate teachers’ union contracts and other labor laws. This means teachers at charters are often overworked, underpaid, micromanaged, and have EXTREMELY high turnover. The additional strain on teachers and overrepresentation of first-teachers who burn out in the system and get replaced makes for bad educational environments in a lot of places.

All of these are even more of a problem because of the way that charter networks like KIPP were marketed as a way to fix public schools in black and brown areas, and have just kneecapped public schools while providing students with subpar educational outcomes instead.

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One thing that use to really annoy me about ASOIAF fandom was the insistence that Theon was the one who sacked Winterfell and this was and still is something that many believe.

It was absolutely astonishing to me because we know who sacked Winterfell, it is shown to us in Theon's last ACOK chapter. So why do many believe that Theon was the one who sacked Winterfell and not Ramsay?

It's not until recently I've figured out the answer, mostly because I'm older and wiser. There's a saying if you repeat a narrative long enough it becomes the "truth".

We might have seen what happened in ACOK and who is actually responsible for the sacking but we spend every book after that with the narrative that Theon was the one who sacked Winterfell and it's a narrative either believed and accepted by everyone or a narrative that has yet to be corrected. The only brief time we see it corrected was during Davos' chapters with Wex but not even Theon has yet to correct it. He has corrected the fact he didn't kill Bran and Rickon, though mostly to himself but not on the sacking.

To make the narrative even more believable from a reader's stand point is that no one that thinks to ask questions espeically those who knew Theon.

Jon doesn't think Theon would kill Bran or Rickon but he has no doubts about Theon burning Winterfell to the ground. The idea that might not be true has never crossed his mind like it does with the deaths of Bran and Rickon.

Robb doesn't question either and nor does Catelyn.

And I think this plays into the narrative being believed rather than the truth even if we have seen the truth with our own eyes. Because if even those who know Theon have no doubts about his guilt in the Sack of Winterfell then it must be true. Right? Afterall Robb, Jon and Catelyn are quite good judges of character and on top of that Theon has lived with them for 10 years so if they believe it then we have to believe it. Right?

Add on another layer that not everyone will read Theon's chapters twice either because they don't know his character, because they don't those chapters as important to the overarching story or even with Theon fans I know some will skip his ACOK chapters because they don't like him in those chapters but do his ADWD chapters.

So the real culprits who was behind the sacking are forgotten about through this constant false narrative that is repeating constantly in ASOS, AFFC and ADWD.

Repeating narratives can twist the truth and make people doubt what they saw with their own eyes or what they remember.

I really don't know if this was something GRRM has done on purpose but if he has it's absolute genius on his part because sometimes a narrative can become the "truth" if it's repeated.

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“Valar morghulis” – “All men must die”. That shadow lies over our world and will until medical science gives us all immortality… but I don’t think it makes it necessarily a pessimistic world. Not any more pessimistic than the real world we live in. We’re here for a short time and we should be conscious of our own mortality, but the important thing is that love, compassion, and empathy with other human beings is still possible. Laughter is still possible! Even laughter in the face of death… The struggle to make the world a better place… We have things like war, murder and rape… horrible things that still exist, but we don’t have to accept them, we can fight the good fight. The fight to eliminate those things. There is darkness in the world, but I don’t think we necessarily need to give way to despair. One of the great things that Tolkien says in Lord of The Rings is “despair is the ultimate crime”. That’s the ultimate failing of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, that he despairs of ever being able to defeat Sauron. We should not despair. We should not go gentle into that good night.

- George R. R. Martin

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clash theon would’ve finger banged barbrey dustin in those crypts, that’s how i knew my boy was crushed

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ned being held up as the metric for moral goodness in asoiaf is absurd like did you not read bran i, agot in which he beheads a man on the run from the others because he must fulfill his fedual oaths and he carries out the execution through his family's ancestral sword which was definitely forged for the exact opposite purpose, i.e. in defense of the north against the others. and then he uses ice again to behead the direwolf which was meant to protect his daughter. is it any wonder that he also meets his end the same way, through it, after spending the rest of the book in king's landing in service to a failed king, desperately trying to reassure himself that they are not repeating history. bran i is saying ice was already metaphorically broken long before tywin melted it down because the starks have forgotten their magical history yes, but also because ned represents an older, failed generation in service to hollow chivalric ideals. and it is now up to his children, the ones coming of age in a world destroyed by the previous generations—it is up to bran, sansa, arya, and jon to reforge their family legacy, away from contradictory oaths and in service to hollow paradigms. (and in a way ice is already currently being remade through brienne, who is not a knight of the songs but still the closest thing to the idea of a true knight)

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this is bc he thinks jaime is a rotting corpse of an old man but it is also bc jaime is exactly the type of man that primarily straight men find very hot. he is like ryan reynolds and soldier boy

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well i was onto…something in when i finished these books that’s for damn sure

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Chappell Roan drawn in a Disco Elysium portait style as a character, i imagine Harry calls her Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl, she hangs out at church club and is part of the homosexual underground