#(and also for some reason they wrote it as 'rhaena(lesbian)' like????) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

atopvisenyashill · 1 month ago

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you think the reason why grrm is reluctant to do gay incest is because he's like "oh, readers will assume i associate real lgbt ppl with incest and degeneracy and i don't want them to think that :( i shall commit myself to portraying same-sex relationships as realistic, humanizing romances :) none of the nasty, toxic stuff, i shall save that for the heterosexuals"

i'm not totally sure about that being a reason although then again...okay this might be a little all over the place but like on the one hand i feel like 'well he just writes whatever and doesn't think about the audience' but i DO think that part of his inability to hunker down and write the last two books is because he's kinda concerned about audience reception of what he's written. like, in context i'm sure a lot of what those two idiots wrote for the later seasons makes so much more sense, is in general much better, but the backlash being that crazy, imo, really has him sweating. especially because (iirc) there was already a lot of "now what are we doing" comments when he introduced the young griff and quentyn story lines seemingly out of nowhere in adwd. although with that said, he's been kind of handwavey of some of the misogyny criticisms so idk that he cares one way or another whether people think his queer characters are toxic or not lmao.

i've been of the mind that he essentially realized that gay people exist sometime in the mid aughts though alkjsfl. For Me, there feels like a bit of a change from the sort of subtextually playing around with gender roles and sexuality thing to more overt queer themes as the series goes on - JonCon being our first canon queer pov, the crazy toxic yuri going on with Taena/Cersei and how it's a lot more nuanced than some of his other similar pairings (*coughs*), Sweets being a rather significant minor character in Tyrion (and briefly Quentyn's) chapters. I think when he first started writing, he felt like the complexity of the Renly/Loras relationship was like..."enough" rep, that anything more would be inaccurate, only to come around to the idea years later that perhaps it's more accurate that more queer characters exist. and he's always prided himself on the accuracy, and defended the accuracy of what insane conservative culture war people would call "dei representation" ie the mere existence of queer people, of people of color, of queer people, in history. people will say arya or brienne are anachronistic, and he will fight them p hard on that and rightly. people will pretend like renly, loras, and joncon are anachronistic and he'll double down by giving loras and joncon two of the most well known romantic lines in the series. etc etc. so moving into f&b, i think the narrative focus on rhaena and her girlfriends, laenor and his boyfriends, and all the implied stuff about aegon the conqueror, the dragonstone polycule, daemon wanting to be viserys' wife, etc etc, i think that was him trying to branch out a bit and be like "okay so what characters do i have where it would strengthen the narrative if there was a level of queerness here" (because iirc, rhaena was stated to marry androw farman for love, like ANDROW himself initially in twoiaf, but he changed it to being for elissa later. i think he felt like having a lesbian queen here would be narratively interesting - and like, he's correct, rhaena being a lesbian is probably one of the better narrative choices of f&b).

but i also feel like....i know i say this a lot but he IS ultimately a white man named george who is pushing 80 and grew up in fucking jersey lmao. i don't want to knock him too much, like, i think he is much more self aware than people give him credit for, but i also think similar to his like, old timey old fashioned orientalism he is like Genuinely kind of afraid of writing a gay character aljsflkj

#asks #psychicpiratementality

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