#also one of my favorite aspects of her is casually explaining the universe to the sailor quartet before being like

[cosmama]

" no one knows where a fading star goes . "

love is cosmic!

the young man is exposed to something even more elusive than a shooting star after he speaks: the pure, wonderous sound of her laughter. it makes her appear less tense, less intimidating, than usual - her shoulders gently shake, and a hand rises to cover her mouth as she continues to giggle. ❛ we do not? why, that is certainly news to me. ’ she states dismissively which earns her crossed arms and an ' i'm being serious. ' said in response to her rare bit of teasing. cosmos only shakes her head, deciding to humor him as bright eyes rise to look towards the night sky that shines so beautifully above them. ❛ the universe is vast but it is not unknowable either. ’

the woman that was before him a moment ago is gone, disappearing just as quickly as she had appeared. her voice is now wispy and distant, dripping with both nostalgia and sadness no one but her can ever understand. ❛ you can know the stars if you are patient and willing to listen marth. ’ cosmos explains to him; there is no judgement or condescension in her tone - only a deep fondness for the stars above. a pale hand reaches out into the night, unfurling it to reveal a newborn star twinkling faintly in the palm of her hand.

❛ the stars can hear us - feel us - too. ’ her words are whispered in a tender, reverent tone while she watched the young star begin to float away into the night - finally seeking its own place in the vast cosmos. ❛ if you ask where they are going, i am sure they would love to stop and give an answer. ’

[cherubcallremade]

What does elvis usually do for fun or peace of mind in terms of social or solitary entertainment or recreation ? And the last point about flower names is so cute :3 would you care to elaborate any more on it

elvis lovesss going to pubs and watching sportsball i think :) he likes the social aspect of it a lot. he prefers baseball over all else! he also likes bowling and pool and those types of stuff that can often overlap with pubs. angel is less enthusiastic about that kind of stuff but i watched a tiktok earlier where a husband makes sure to cover his partner's ears very casually when he knows everyone is about to go wild and i think that's something elvis and angel do. angel likes going out to pubs for the food and the social aspect too (pubs always have some variation of a safe food for her, so it lets her explore new stuff without too much stress) so that's their date nights a lot.

and omg ok so im gonna explain his logic behind the nicknames :)

dandelion (vinny, my oc): vinny has really curly fluffy blonde hair that reminds him of a dandelion. also vinny started going grey/white much younger than the rest of them and it reminds myers of a puffball.

clover (bill, cabinetkillerz' oc): bill's favorite color is green! and he's also very smart and myers thinks hes very lucky even if he doesnt think that of himself. also he's british and myers would say something about how "clover" just feels like a british thing

rosa (rubén, pupgendrz' oc): ruby and myers were best friends growing up!! ruby is dominican and his first language is spanish as well :) myers and he lost contact but got back together after a long time. in the universe where myers is with ruby, myers starts learning spanish again ^_^ (he never learned to speak it like he did english, but he understands it from james) for a long time myers just called ruby "ruby" because u know, like a gemstone & also they've had this casual romantic thing for a long time. but he starts calling him rosa like rose too :)

honeysuckle & pansy (emmett and richie, mickadamz' ocs): honeysuckle is the nickname for emmett!! emmett is very southern and also honey blonde, so it reminds myers of honeysuckle. it also just gets shortened to "honey" a lot but the feeling of it meaning honeysuckle is very unique for them. pansy is the semi-joke/semi-serious nickname for richie. richie is like. a very classic femme gay history teacher type. myers is mostly masc4masc but richie grew on him like ivy and they have a very teasing relationship w one another. so it makes sense he'd call him pansy.

[lifesbetterasamermaid]

I'm so curious about what Niall was thinking during that breakup in the last chapter *eye emoji*

a fun fact: this story was born from my boredom back when the world kinda imploded in march and i wrote/shared this with two friends and it was all in niall’s pov....and then i got REALLY bored and decided to write a whole thing

anyways, below the cut is the end of part 4 (also known as the only break up i’ve ever written) from lost in the light set in niall’s pov. enjoy :)

Some people needed a reason for everything. Niall was one of those people. Sometimes it was just little things he was curious about; why did every sunset look different, why did mosquito bites itch so badly, why could he never understand maths while in school. Small, inconsequential things. But Niall always wanted to know. More often than not it got him in trouble. No one ever liked the kid always asking, why? Then he grew up. And the thing with growing up was life got even more confusing. 

All those small curiosities evolved. Taking on a life of their own. Like the night his mum had packed Niall and his brother, still in pajamas, in the back of the car and driven away -their home nothing more than a still life in the rearview mirror. Niall had babbled endlessly, asking his mum why they had left. Eventually, she had pulled the car over, face in her hands, and explained they would have two houses now. There was the time Niall had been sixteen and his first proper girlfriend Riya had broken up with him outside the pub. Shattered, Niall hadn’t been able to help but ask why? Turned out she had wanted someone with real goals -university, a degree a career. Not someone who wanted to play in pubs and try out for reality shows. 

Looking back on that one, there is a certain irony to it. 

Years when Niall’s life had made no sense and there had been no reason behind the success that he could put a finger on. Just a kid plucked out of the middle of fucking nowhere in Ireland playing stadiums. Dumb luck, he figured. 

That was a lie though. Maybe luck in the beginning, behind everything there was a reason though. Looking back on his life -the records he had made, the success he had now -what had started as a random stroke of luck had morphed. Days and months and years, Niall had run himself ragged. The reason behind his success was hard work. His life had reasons behind nearly every aspect of it. Niall understood why things had played out the way they did. It made sense to him. 

But now, with a small box of Charlie’s things packed neatly by his front door, Niall really couldn’t seem to figure out a reason for how they had ended. 

Sure, Niall had said some pretty shitty things that kept him awake and staring at the ceiling for the past few weeks. And hindsight, he should have called Charlie the second his publicists told him about the photos. But Niall hadn’t really expected her to say, I don’t want to do this anymore….I can’t do this anymore. 

Standing in his living room, Niall lifted the beer to his lips, offhandedly thinking he should stop drinking. 

One, single box. 

It seemed odd to him how Charlie fit into one box. The past year she had seemed like the biggest thing in Niall’s life. This larger than life presence who had imploded his world with her snark and random knowledge of plants and brown eyes. That was his Charlie. No -not his. Never had been. Because even now Niall could hear Charlie giving him an earful about how women were not things who belonged to men. 

None of that was in the box. 

The box was filled with such practicality it bored him. Her toothbrush that had fit in the spot next to his on the bathroom counter. A half empty bottle of shampoo Niall knew she would want back because it cost nearly fifty dollars. A random coffee mug she had left in his cabinets ages ago. Her favorite coffee, which Niall was pretty sure he had bought but he didn’t mind. A million little details of their relationship were scattered throughout this house. Evidence of how their lives had woven together seamlessly. 

And now it all fit into an old Amazon box. 

Outside was cruelly perfect. A warm breeze blowing through the open back doors, bringing with it the smell of eucalyptus and orange trees. And the sun was just arching over the Santa Monica mountains. 

Niall had loved this about this place. So different from how he had grown up. This city was always moving, always changing, the sun always shining. The city demanded people to do something. Because when the days were this perfect it seemed careless to waste it. 

Suddenly, Niall had a longing for home. Grey skies and misting rain, Nothing but small brick homes dotting the landscape and endless green hills stretching all the way to the cliffs. The air so cold your breath froze before it got all the way out. Puddles littering the narrow streets, smoke filling the pubs, and old wooden floors sticky with spilled beer.

Once, Niall had mentioned to Charlie the idea of showing her where he had grown up. While they had laid in hotel robes off some highway in Colorado. Even half asleep he had felt her tense beside him. Because Charlie always wanted to keep Niall at arms length. They could pretend all they wanted, but the moment anything got to real, Charlie would run. 

But Niall had wanted it all. To take Charlie home. Show her London and Dublin and all the tiny places in between. Have her meet his friends in the city and show her all his favorite spots. Then take her out to the country. Show her how the night sky should look. Watch her run through the fields. Introduce her to his mum. 

Maybe that was what really ate at him. All the things he and Charlie never got to do. 

Whatever it was, it had him stomping into his bedroom and throwing open the closet doors. Hands wrapping around an old denim jacket. Tossing it into the box, and then reaching down to fold it nicely and tuck it into the bottom. Even if he was pissed, Niall hated messy things. 

And if Charlie wanted to run. Hide away and pretend it had been nothing but casual sex between them. Niall wanted her to have something to remember what a massive lie that was. 

His thoughts were cut short as his phone lit up on the coffee table. He dragged his hands over his face. Christ mate pull it together, he thought. 

I’m out front, want to let me in? 

“Fuck,” Niall breathed out, falling down onto the couch. It sunk under his weight as he reached for his beer. Eight words. And all Niall wanted to do was scroll up through their messages to a couple weeks ago. Was this how it always happened? One week everything was fine, the next nothing more than polite strangers. 

Weeks ago, Charlie would have punched the code in, used her key, and walked in like she lived here. Because she practically had. Now? Now she asked to be let in even though she had a code. And Niall would bet she would even knock.

He sent back an equally polite reply and then opened up the gate. Did he sit here? Wait? Stand up? Wait awkwardly by the door? 

Quickly, he downed the rest of his beer and then ran over to the kitchen to throw it away. Couldn't have Charlie thinking he had done nothing all day but drink beer and be sad. Sure, that was exactly what he had done but she didn’t need to know that. 

As expected, a knock echoed through the house. Freezing Niall halfway between the living room and front hall. He wiped his palms over his jeans and closed the distance to the door, reaching for the handle. 

She still looked the same. 

Niall wasn’t exactly sure what he had been expecting. Something different maybe. Something to physically show there had been a shift between them. But Charlie looked just like the girl who had laid around in his bed wearing his old shirts and who had danced around in his kitchen making omelettes. Only now she was the girl with a key in her outstretched hand. 

But on a second look, there were the subtle differences in the Charlie in front of him and the Charlie he had seen four weeks ago. Lilac colored bags under defiant eyes. Back ramrod straight, daring anyone to bother her. Her lips were chapped and pressed tightly together. And she seemed smaller than the last time Niall had seen her. Always had been small, but the edge of her jaw looked sharper and her clothes hung on her frame more than before. 

The end of a relationship was an odd thing. Because what was there left to do? Charlie had made up her mind. And Niall knew her, he knew there was nothing that could change this. Hurling insults or begging would achieve nothing. Charlie would still pick up the box and walk away. That’s who she was. 

So, they wove through the intricate parts. Small talk between two people who had held each other in the middle of the night. Both, eyes darting around and hesitancy on their lips. Polite nothings and the exchange of keys and Niall rambling to keep Charlie standing at his front door a little longer. 

But then it came. 

Their end. 

Charlie turned on her heel and walked down the steps and Niall couldn’t breath. Because was he really about to just let her get in the car and drive through Laurel Canyon and not know?

“I love you.” Niall blurted out. Palms sweating and heart about to burst out of his chest. Three words. Surely if Charlie knew, they could fix the mess they had found themselves in. Niall briefly wondered if he should elaborate because while Charlie had stopped, she hadn’t turned around. Explain. Niall needed to tell Charlie how he wanted to know everything about her the moment he walked in on her in the men’s room. How he thought about sleeping with her the first time their hands brushed passing the sugar at the diner. How he wanted to love her when he combed out the tangles of her hair that one night when Charlie watched him in the bathroom mirror with fresh stitches above her left eye. How Niall knew he loved her when they had danced around his house back in the summer, laughing in each other’s mouths. 

But Niall didn’t. Because those words weren’t enough to make her stay. I love you, wasn’t enough to make Charlie change her mind. 

“That’s against the rules.”

And something in Niall cracked a little with those four words.

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 10/13/20: FREAKY, THE CLIMB, MANK, HILLBILLY ELEGY, AMMONITE, DREAMLAND, DOC-NYC and MUCH MORE!

It’s a pretty crazy week for new releases as I mentioned a few times over the past couple weeks, but it’s bound to happen as we get closer to the holiday movie season, which this year won’t include many movies in theaters, even though movie theaters are still open in many areas of the country… and closing in others. Sigh. Besides a few high-profile Netflix theatrical release, we also get movies starring Vince Vaughn, Margot Robbie, Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Mel Gibson and more offerings. In fact, I’ve somehow managed to write 12 (!!!!) reviews this week… yikes.

Before we get to the new movies, let’s look at a few series/festivals starting this week, including the always great documentary festival, DOC-NYC, which runs from November 11 through 19. A few of the docs I’ve already seen are (probably not surprisingly, if you know me) some of the music docs in the “Sonic Cinema” section, including Oliver Murray’s Ronnie’s, a film about legendary jazz musician and tenor sax player Ronnie Scott, whose London club Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club has been one of the central cores for British jazz fans for many decades.

Alex Winter’s Zappa is a much more satisfying portrait of the avant-garde rocker than the doc Frank Zappa: In His Own Words from a few years back, but I was even more surprised by how much I enjoyed Julien Temple’s Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, because I’ve never really been a Pogues fan, but it’s highly entertaining as we learn about the chronically-soused frontman of the popular Irish band.

I haven’t seen Robert Yapkowitz and Richard Peete’s in My Own Time: A Portrait of Karen Dalton, a portrait of the blues and folk singer, yet, nor have I watched Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider’s Los Hermanos/The Brothers about two brother musicians separated from childhood after leaving their native Cuba, but I’ll try to get to both of them soon enough.

Outside of the realm of music docs is Ilinca Calugareanu’s A Cops and Robbers Story, which follows Corey Pegues from being a drug dealer and gang member to a celebrated deputy inspector within the NYPD. There’s also Nancy (The Loving Story) Buirski’s A Crime on the Bayou, the third part of the filmmaker’s trilogy about brave individuals in the Civil Rights era, this one about 19-year-old New Orleans fisherman Gary Duncan who tries to break up a fight between white and black teens at an integrated school and is arrested for assaulting a minor when merely touching a white boy’s arm.

Hao Wu’s 76 Days covers the length of Wuhan, China’s lockdown due to COVID-19, a very timely doc that will be released by MTV Documentary Films via virtual cinema on December 4. It’s one of DOC-NYC’s features on its annual Short List, which includes Boys State, Collective, The Fight, On the Record, and ten others that will vie for juried categories.

IFC Films’ Dear Santa, the new film from Dana Nachman, director of the wonderful Pick of the Litter, will follow its Heartland Film Festival debut with a run at COD-NYC before its own December 4 release. The latter is about the USPS’s “Operation Santa” program that receives hundreds of thousands of letters to Santa every year and employees thousands of volunteers to help make the wishes of these kids come true.

Basically, there’s a LOT of stuff to see at DOC-NYC, and while most of the movies haven’t been released publicly outside festivals yet, a lot of these movies will be part of the doc conversations of 2020. DOC-NYC gives the chance for people across the United States to see a lot of great docs months before anyone else, so take advantage of some of their ticket packs to save some money over the normal $12 per ticket price. The $199 price for an All Access Film Pass also isn’t a bad deal if you have enough time to watch the hundreds of DOC-NYC offerings. (Sadly, I never do, yet I’m still a little bummed to miss the 10Am press screenings at IFC Center that keeps me off the streets… or in this case, sitting on my ass at home.)

Not to be outdone by the presence of DOC-NYC, Film at Lincoln Center is kicking off its OWN seventh annual “Art of the Real” doc series, which has a bit of overlap by running from November 13 to 26. I really don’t know a lot about the documentaries being shown as part of this program, presented with Mubi and The New York Times, but check this out. For just 50 bucks, you can get an all-access pass to all 17 films, which you can casually watch at home over the two weeks of the fest.

Okay, let’s get to some theatrical releases, and the one I’ve been anticipating the most (also the one getting the widest release) is Christopher Landon’s FREAKY from Blumhouse and Universal Pictures. It stars Kathryn Newton as Millie Kessler, a high school outcast who is constantly picked on, but one night, she ends up encountering the serial killer known as the “Blissfield Butcher” (Vince Vaughn), but instead of dying when she’s stabbed with a ritual blade. The next morning Millie and the Butcher wake up to discover that they’ve been transported into the body of the other. Oh, it’s Friday the 13th… oh, now I get it… Freaky Friday!

Landon is best known for writing many of the Paranormal Activity sequels and directing Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. Msore importantly, he directed Happy Death Day and its sequel Happy Death Day 2 U, two of my favorite Blumhouse movies, because they so successfully mix horror with comedy, which is so hard to do. That’s what Freaky is all about, too, and it’s even harder this time even though Freaky has way more gruesome and gory kills than anything in Landon’s other films. Heck, many of the kills are gorier than the most recent Halloween from Blumhouse, and it’s a little shocking when you’re laughing so hard at times.

Landon does some clever things with what’s essentially a one-joke premise of a killer in a teen girl’s body and vice versa, but like the Lindsay Lohan-Jamie Lee Curtis remake from 2003, it’s all about the talent of the two main actors to pull off the rather intricate nature of playing humor without losing the seriousness of the horror element.

It may not be too surprising with Vaughn, who made a ton of dramas and thrillers before turning to comedy. (Does everyone remember that he played Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho and also starred in thrillers The Cell and Domestic Disturbance?) Newton is a bit more of an unknown quantity, but as soon as Tillie dawns the red leather jacket, you know that she can use her newly found homicidal attitude to get some revenge on those who have been terrible to her.

In some ways, the comedy aspects of Freaky win out over the horror but no horror fan will be disappointed by the amount of gory kills and how well the laughs emerge from a decent horror flick. Freaky seems like the kind of movie that Wes Craven would have loved.

I’m delighted to say that this week’s “Featured Flick” is Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin’s indie comedy THE CLIMB (Sony Pictures Classics), a movie that I have seen no less than three times this year, first when it was playing Sundance, a few months later when it was supposed to open in March… and then again last week! And you know what? I enjoyed it just as much every single time. It’s an amazing two-hander that stars Covino and Marvin as best friends Mike and Kyle, who have a falling out over the former sleeping with the latter’s fiancé, and it just gets funnier and funnier as the friends fight and Kyle gets engaged to Marisa (Gayle Rankin from GLOW) who hates Mike. Can this friendship possibly survive?

I really had no idea what to expect the first time I saw The Climb at the Sony Screening Room, but it was obviously going to be a very different movie for Sony Pictures Classics, who had started out the year with so many great films before theaters shut down. (Unfortunately, they may have waited too long on this one as theaters seem to be shutting down again even while NYC and L.A. have yet to reopen them. Still, I think this would be just as much fun in a drive-in.)

The movie starts with a long, extended scene of the two leads riding bikes on a steep mountain in France, talking to each other as Kyle (once the athlete of the duo) has fallen out of shape. During the conversation, Mike admits to having slept with Kyle’s fiancé Ava (Judith Godréche) and things turn hostile between the two. We then get the first big jump in time as we’re now at the funeral for Ava, who actually had been married to Mike. Kyle eventually moves on and begins a relationship with his high school sweetheart Marisa, who we meet at the Thanksgiving gathering for Kyle’s extended family. In both these cases, we see how the relationship between Mike and Kyle has changed/evolved as Mike has now fallen on hard times.

It's a little hard to explain why what’s essentially a “slice of life” movie can be so funny. On one hand, The Climb might be the type of movie we might see from Mike Leigh, but Covino and Marvin find a way to make everything funny and also quite eccentric in terms of how some of the segments begin and end.  Technically, it’s also an impressive feat with the number of amazing single shot sequences and how smooth some of the transitions work. It’s actually interesting to see when and how the filmmakers decide to return to the lives of their subjects – think of it a bit like Michael Apted’s “Up” series of docs but covering a lot shorter span in time.

Most importantly, The Climb has such a unique tone and feel to other indie dramedies we’ve seen, as the duo seem to be influenced more by European cinema than American indies. Personally, I think a better title for The Climb might have been “Frenemied,” but even with the movie’s fairly innocuous title, you will not forget the experience watching this entertaining film anytime soon.

Maybe this should be called “Netflix week,” because the streamer is releasing a number of high-profile movies into theaters and on the streaming service. Definitely one of the more anticipated movies of the year is David Fincher’s MANK, which will get a theatrical release this week and then stream on Netflix starting December 4.

It stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Hollywood screenwriter who has allowed himself to succumb to alcoholism but has been hired by Orson Welles (Tom Burke) to write his next movie, Citizen Kane, working with a personal secretary Rita Alexander (played by Lily Collins). His story is told through his interactions with media mogul William Hearst (Charles Dance) and relationship with actress and Hearst ingenue and mistress, Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried).

It I were asked to pick one director who is my absolute favorite, Fincher would probably be in my top 5 because he’s had such an illustrious and varied career of movie styles, and Mank continues that tradition as Fincher pays tribute to old Hollywood and specifically the work of Orson Welles in every frame of this biopic that’s actually more about the troubled writer of Citizen Kane who was able to absorb everything happening in his own Hollywood circles and apply them to the script.

More than anything, Mank feels like a movie for people who love old Hollywood and inside Hollywood stories, and maybe even those who may already know about the making of Welles’ highly-regarded film might find a few new things to appreciate. I particularly enjoyed Mankiewicz’s relationships with the women around him, including his wife “Poor Sarah,” played by Tuppence Middleton, Collins’ Rita, and of course, Seyfried’s absolutely radiant performance as Davies.  Maybe I would have appreciated the line-up of known names and characters like studio head Louis B Mayer and others, if more of them had any sort of effect on the story and weren’t just

The film perfectly captures the dynamic of the time and place as Mank is frequently the only honest voice in a sea of brown nosers and yes-men. Maybe I would have enjoyed Oldman’s performance more if everything that comes out of Mankiewicz’s mouth wasn’t an all-too-clever quip.

The film really hits a high point after a friend of Mank’s commits suicide and how that adds to the writer’s woes about not being able to save him. The film’s last act involves Mank dealing with the repercussions after the word gets out that Citizen Kane is indeed about Hearst.

Overall, Mank is a movie that’s hard to really dig into, and like some of Fincher’s previous work, it tends to be devoid of emotion. Even Fincher’s decision to be clever by including cigarette burns to represent Mank’s “reels” – something explained by Brad Pitt in Fight Club – just drives home the point that Mank is deliberately Fincher’s most meta movie to date.

You can also read my technical/crafts review of Mank over at Below the Line.

Ron Howard’s adaptation of JD Vance’s bestselling memoir HILLBILLY ELEGY will be released by Netflix into theaters ahead of its streaming debut on November 24. It stars Amy Adams and Glenn Close, but in honesty, it’s about JD Vance, you know, the guy who wrote the memoir.  The film follows his younger years (as played by Owen Asztalos) while dealing with a dysfunctional white trash family in Middletown, Ohio, dealing with his headstrong Mamaw (Close) and abusive mother dealing with drug addiction (Adams).  Later in life, while studying at Yale (and played by Gabriel Basso), he has to return to his Ohio roots to deal with his mother’s growing addiction that forces him to come to terms with his past.

I’m a bit of a Ron Howard stan – some might even say “an apologist” – and there’s no denying that Hillbilly Elegy puts him the closest to A Beautiful Mind territory than he’s been in quite some time. That doesn’t mean that this movie is perfect, nor that I would consider it one of his better movies, though. I went into the movie not knowing a thing about JD Vance or his memoir but after the first reviews came out, I was a little shocked how many of them immediately went political, because there’s absolutely nothing resembling politics in the film.

It is essentially an adaptation of a memoir, dealing with JD Vance’s childhood but then also the past that led his mother and grandmother down the paths that made his family so dysfunctional. I particularly enjoyed the relationship between the older Vance and his future wife Usha (as played by Freida Pinto) earlier in their relationship as they’re both going to Yale and Vance is trying to move past his family history to succeed in the realm of law.

It might be a no-brainer why Adams and Close are being given so much of the attention for their performances. They are two of the best. Close is particularly amusing as the cantankerous Mamaw, who veers between cussing and crying, but also has some great scenes both with Adams and the younger Vance. The amazing special make-up FX used to change her appearance often makes you forget you’re watching Close. I wish I could say the same for Adams, who gives such an overwrought and over-the-top performance that it’s very hard to feel much emotionally for her character as she goes down a seemingly endless vortex of drug addiction. It’s a performance that leads to some absolute craziness. (It’s also odd seeing Adams in basically the Christian Bale role in The Fighter, although Basso should get more credit about what he brings out in their scenes together.)

Hillbilly Elegy does have a number of duller moments, and I’m not quite sure anyone not already a fan of Vance’s book would really have much interest in these characters. I certainly have had issues with movies about people some may consider “Southern White Trash,” but it’s something I’ve worked on myself to overcome. It’s actually quite respectable for a movie to try to show characters outside the normal circles of those who tend to write reviews, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the movie might be able to connect with people in rural areas that rarely get to see themselves on screen.

Hillbilly Elegy has its issues, but it feels like a successful adaptation of a novel that may have been difficult to keep an audience invested in with all its flashbacks and jumps in time.

Netflix is also streaming the Italian drama THE LIFE AHEAD, directed by Edoardo Ponti, starring Oscar-winning actress Sophia Loren, who happens to also be the filmmaker’s mother. She plays Madame Rosa, a Holocaust survivor in Italy who takes a stubborn young street kid named Momo (Ibrahima Gueye), much to both their chagrin.

I’ll be shocked if Italy doesn’t submit Ponti’s film as their choice for the Oscar’s International Film category, because it has all of the elements that would appeal to Oscar voters. In that sense, I also found it to be quite traditional and formulaic.  Loren is quite amazing, as to be expected, and I was just as impressed with young Ibrahima Gueye who seems to be able to hold his own in what’s apparently his first movie. There’s others in the cast that also add to the experience including a trans hooker named Lola, but it’s really the relationship between the two main characters that keeps you invested in the movie. I only wish I didn’t spend much of the movie feeling like I knew exactly where it’s going in terms of Rosa doing something to save the young boy and giving him a chance at a good life.

I hate to be cynical, but at times, this is so by the books, as if Ponti watched every Oscar movie and made one that had all the right elements to appeal to Oscar voters and wokesters alike. That aside, it does such a good job tugging at heartstrings that you might forgive how obviously formulaic it is.

Netflix is also premiering the fourth season of The Crown this week, starring Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth and bringing on board Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher, Emma Corin, Helena Bonham Carter, Tobis Menzies, Marion Bailey and Charles Dancer. Quite a week for the streamer, indeed.

Another movie that may be in the conversation for Awards season is AMMONITE (NEON), the new film from Francis Lee (God’s Own Country), a drama set in 1840s England where Kate Winslet plays Mary Anning, a fossil hunter,  tasked to look after melancholic young bride, Charlotte Murcheson (Saoirse Ronan), sent to the sea to get better only for them to get into a far more intimate relationship.

I had been looking forward to this film, having heard almost unanimous raves from out of Toronto a few months back. Maybe my expectations were too high, because while this is a well-made film with two strong actors, it’s also rather dreary and not something I necessarily would watch for pleasure. The comparisons to last year’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (also released by NEON) are so spot-on that it’s almost impossible to watch this movie without knowing exactly where it’s going from the very minute that the two main characters meet.

Winslet isn’t bad in another glammed-down role where she can be particularly cantankerous, but knowing that the film would eventually take a sapphic turn made it somewhat predictable. Ronan seems to be playing her first outright adult role ever, and it’s a little strange to see her all grown-up after playing a teenager in so many movies.

The movie is just so contained to the one setting right up until the last 20 minutes when it actually lives the Lyme setting and lets us see the world outside Mary’s secluded lifestyle.  As much as I wanted to love Ammonite, it just comes off as so obvious and predictable – and certainly not helped by coming out so soon after Portrait of a Lady. There’s also something about Ammonite that just feels so drab and dreary and not something I’d necessarily need to sit through a second time.

The animated film WOLFWALKERS (GKIds) is the latest from Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, directors of the Oscar-nominated Secret of the Kells (Moore’s Song of the Sea also received an Oscar nomination a few years later.) It’s about a young Irish girl named Robyn (voiced Honor Kneafsey) who is learning to be hunter from her father (voiced by Sean Bean) to help him wipe out the last wolf pack. Roby then meets another girl (voiced by Eva Whittaker) who is part of a tribe rumored to transform into wolves by night.

I have to be honest that by the time I got around to start watching this, I was really burnt out and not in any mood to watch what I considered to look like a kiddie movie. It looks nice, but I’m sure I’d be able to enjoy it more in a different head (like watching first thing on a Saturday morning).

Regardless, Wolfwalkers will be in theaters nationwide this Friday and over the weekend via Fathom Events as well as get full theatrical runs at drive-ins sponsored by the Landmark, Angelika and L.A.’s Vineland before it debuts on Apple TV+ on December 11. Maybe I’ll write a proper review for that column. You can get tickets for the Fathom Events at  WolfwalkersMovie.com.

Next up is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s DREAMLAND (Paramount), starring Margot Robbie as Allison Wells, a bank-robbing criminal on the loose who encounters young man named Eugene Evans (Finn Cole) in rural Dust Bowl era North Dakota and convinces him to hide her and help her escape the authorities by taking her to Mexico.

Another movie where I wasn’t expecting much, more due to the generic title and genre than anything else, but it’s a pretty basic story of a young man in a small town who dreams of leaving and also glamorizes the crime stories he read in pulps. Because of the Great Depression in the late ’20, the crime wave was spreading out across the land and affecting everyone, even in more remote locations like the one at the center of Dreamland.

The sad truth is that there have been so many better movies about this era, including Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde, Lawless and many others. Because of that, this might not be bad but it’s definitely trying to follow movies that leave quite a long shadow. The innocent relationship between Eugene and Allison does add another level to the typical gangster story, but maybe that isn’t enough for Dreamland to really get past the fact that the romantic part of their relationship isn’t particularly believable.

As much as this might have been fine as a two-hander, you two have Travis Fimmel as Eugene’s stepfather and another generic white guy in Garrett Hedlund playing Allison’s Clyde Barrow-like partner in crime in the flashbacks. Cole has enough trouble keeping on pace with Robbie but then you have Fimmel, who was just grossly miscast. The film’s score ended up being so overpowering and annoying I wasn’t even remotely surprised when I saw that Joris-Peyrafitte is credited with co-writing the film’s score.

Dreamland is fine, though it really needed to have a stronger and more original vision to stand out. It’s another classic case of an actor being far better than the material she’s been given. This is being given a very limited theatrical release before being on digital next Tuesday.

This might have been Netflix week, but maybe it could have been “Saban Films Week,” since the distributor also has three new movies. Actually, only two, because I screwed up, and I missed the fact that André Øvredal’s MORTAL was released by Saban Films LAST week. Not entirely my fault because for some reason, I had it opening this week, and I only realized that I was wrong last Wednesday. Oh, well.  It stars Nate Wolff as Eric Bergeland, an American in Norway who seems to have some enigmatic powers, but after killing a young lad, he ends up on the lam with federal agent Christine (Iben Akerlie from Victoria).

This is another movie I really wanted to like since I’ve been such a fan of Øvredal from back to his movie Trollhunter. Certainly the idea of him taking a dark look at superpowers through the lends of Norse mythology should be right up my alley. Even so, this darker and more serious take on superpowers – while it might be something relatively unique and new in movies – it’s something anyone who has read comics has seen many times before and often quite better.

Wolff’s character is deliberately kept a mystery about where he comes from, and all we know is that he survived a fire at his farm, and we watched him kill a young man that’s part of a group of young bullies.  From there, it kind of turns into a procedural as the authorities and Akerlie’s character tries to find out where Eric came from and got his powers. It’s not necessarily a slow or talkie movie, because there are some impressive set pieces for sure, but it definitely feels more like Autopsy of Jane Doe than Trollhunters. Maybe my biggest is that this is a relatively drab and lifeless performance by Wolff, who I’ve seen be better in other films.

Despite my issues, it doesn’t lessen my feelings about Øvredal as a filmmaker, because there’s good music and use of visual FX -- no surprise if you’ve seen Trollhunters -- but there’s still a really bad underlying feeling that you’re watching a lower budget version of an “X-Men” movie, and not necessarily one of the better ones.  Despite a decent (and kinda crazy) ending, Mortal never really pays off, and it’s such a slog to get to that ending that people might feel slightly underwhelmed.

Seth Savoy’s ECHO BOOMERS (Saban Films) is a crime thriller based on a “true story if you believe in such things,” starring Patrick Schwarzenegger as Lance, a young art major, who falls in with a group of youths who break into rich people’s homes and trash them, also stealing some of the more valuable items for their leader Mel (Michael Shannon).

There’s a lot about Echo Boomers that’s going to feel familiar if you’ve seen Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring or the heist movie American Animals from a few years back, but even with those similarities, Seth Savoy has a strong cast and vision to make more out of the fairly weak writing than another director might manage. Schwarzenegger, who seems to be pulling in quite a wide range of roles for basically being another generic white actor is only part of a decent ensemble that includes Alex Pettyfer as the group’s ersatz alpha male Ellis and Hayley Law (also great in the recent Spontaneous) as his girlfriend Allie, the only girl taking part in the heists and destruction. Those three actors alone are great, but then you add Shannon just doing typically fantastic work as more of a catalyst than an antagonist.

You can probably expect there will be some dissension in the ranks, especially when the group’s “Fagan” Mel puts Lance in charge of keeping them in line and Allie forms a friendship with Lance. What holds the movie back is the decision to use a very traditional testimonial storytelling style where Lance and Allie narrate the story by relaying what happened to the authorities after their capture obviously. This doesn’t help take away from the general predictability of where the story goes either, because we’ve seen this type of thing going all the way back to The Usual Suspects.

While Echo Boomers might be fairly derivative of far better movies at times, it also has a strong directorial vision and a compelling story that makes up enough for that fact.

In theaters this Friday and then On Demand and Digital on November 24 is Eshom and Ian Nelms’ action-comedy FATMAN (Saban Films/Paramount), starring Mel Gibson as Santa Claus and Walton Goggins as the hired assassin sent to kill him by a spoiled rich boy named  Billy (Chance Hurstfield) who unhappy with the presents he’s being brought for Christmas.

While we seem to be surrounded by high concept movies of all shapes and sizes, you can’t get much more high concept than having Mel Gibson playing a tough and cantankerous* Kris Kringle (*Is this the week’s actual theme?) who is struggling to survive with Mrs. Klaus (played by the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste from In Fabric) when they’re given the opportunity to produce military grade items for the army using his speedy elf workshop. Unbeknownst to the Kringles, the disgruntled hitman who also feels he’s been let down by Santa is on his way to the North Pole to fulfill his assignment.

You’ll probably know whether you’ll like this movie or not since its snarkier comedic tone is introduced almost from the very beginning. This is actually a pretty decent role for Gibson that really plays up to his strengths, and it’s a shame that there wasn’t more to it than just a fairly obvious action movie that leads to a shoot-out. I probably should have enjoyed Goggins more in a full-on villainous role but having been watching a lot of him on CBS’ The Unicorn, it’s kind of hard to adjust to him playing this kind of role.  I did absolutely love Marianne Jean-Baptiste and the warmth she brought to a relatively snarky movie.

I’m not sure if Fatman is the best showing of Eshom and Ian Nelms’ abilities as filmmakers, because they certainly have some, but any chance of being entertaining is tamped down by a feeling the filmmakers are constantly trying to play it safe. Because of this, Fatman has a few fun moments but a generally weak premise that never fully delivers. It would have thrived by being much crazier, but instead, it’s just far too mild.

Malin Åkerman stars in Paul Leyden’s CHICK FIGHT (Quiver Distribution) as Anna, a woman unhappy with her life and inability to survive on the little money she makes at her failing coffee shop. When Anna’s lesbian traffic cop friend Charleen (Dulcé Sloan) takes her to an underground fight club, Anna her trepidation about joining in, because she has never been in a fight in her life.  Learning that her mother has a legacy at the club, Anna agrees to be trained by Alec Baldwin’s always-drunk Murphy in order to take on the challenges of the likes of Bella Thorne’s Olivia.

Another movie where I’m not sure where to begin other than the fact that I’m not sure I’ve seen a movie trying so hard to be fun and funny and failing miserably at both. Listen, I generally love Akerman, and I’m always hoping for her to get stronger material to match her talents, but this tries its best to be edgy without ever really delivering on the most important thing for any comedy: Laughs.  Sure, the filmmakers try their best and even shoehorn a bit of romance for Anna in the form of the ring doctor played by Kevin Connolly from Entourage, but it does little to help distinguish the movie’s identity.

Listen, I’m not going to apologize for being a heterosexual male that finds Bella Thorne to be quite hot when she’s kicking ass in the ring. (I’m presuming that a lot of what we see in her scenes in the ring involves talented stuntwomen, but whoa! If that’s not the case.) Alec Baldwin seems to be in this movie merely as a favor to someone, possibly one of the producers, and when he disappears with no mention midway through the movie, you’re not particularly surprised. Another of trying too hard is having Anna’s father Ed (played by wrestler Kevin Nash) come out as gay and then use his every appearance to talk about his sex acts.  Others in the cast like Fortune Feimster seem to be there mainly for their bulk and believability as fighters.

Ultimately, Chick Fight is a fairly lame and bland girl power movie written, directed and mostly produced by men. I’m not sure why anyone might be expecting more from it than being a poorly-executed comedy lacking laughs.

And yet, that wasn’t the worst movie of the weekend. That would be Andrzej Bartkowiak’s DEAD RECKONING (Shout! Studios). Yes, the Polish cinematographer and filmmaker who once made the amazing Romeo is Bleeding, starring Gary Oldman and Lena Olin, has returned with a movie with the onus of a premise that reads “a thriller inspired by the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.” No, I did not make that up. It mostly takes place in Nantucket, Massachusetts, which I guess is sort of close to Boston, but instead it focuses on the relationship between teens Niko (K.J. Apa) and Tillie (India Eisley), the latter whose parents died in a plane crash that might have been caused by a terrorist. It just so happens that Niko’s brother Marco (Scott Adkins) is an Albanian terrorist. Coincidence? I think not!

Once you get past the most generic title ever, Dead Reckoning is just plain awful. I probably should have known what to expect when the movie opens with Eric “Never Turned Down a Job” Roberts, but also, I strong feel that Scott Adkins, better known for his martial arts skills, is easily one of the worst actors ever to be given lines to say in a movie. And yet, somehow, there are even worse actors in this movie. How is that even possible?

Although this presumed action movie opens with one of three or four fight sequences, we’re soon hanging out on the beach with a bunch of annoying teenagers, including Tillie, who is drowning the sorrow of recently losing her parents by literally drinking constantly in almost every single scene. When she meets the handsome Eastern European Niko, we think there’s some chance of Tillie being saved, but it isn’t meant to be.

Part of what’s so weird is that Dead Reckoning begins in territory familiar to fans of Barkowiak’s movies like Exit Wounds, Cradle 2 the Grave and Maximum Impact but then quickly shifts gears to a soppy teen romance. It’s weird enough to throw you off when at a certain point, it returns to the main plot, which involves Adkins’ terrorist plot and the search by FBI Agent Cantrell (played by James Remar) to find the culprit who killed Tillie’s parents. Oh, the FBI agent is also Tillie’s godfather. Of course, he is.

Beyond the fact that I spent much of the movie wondering what these teens in Nantucket have to do with the opening scene or the overall premise, this is a movie that anything that could be resembling talent or skill in Barkowiak’s filmmaking is long gone. Going past the horrendous writing – at one point, the exasperated and quite xenophobic Cantrell exclaims, “It’s been a nightmare since 9/11... who knows what's next?” -- or the inability of much of the cast to make it seem like anyone involved cares about making a good movie, the film is strangled by a score that wants to remind you it’s a thriller even as you watch people having fun on the beach on a sunny day.

Eventually, it does get back to the action with a fight between Cantrell and Marco… and then Marco gets into a fight with Tillie’s nice aunt nurse Jennifer where she has a surprisingly amount of fighting skills. There’s also Nico’s best friend who is either British or gay or both, but he spends every one of his scenes acting so pretentious and annoying, you kind of hope he’ll be blown up by terrorists. Sadly, you have to wait until the last act before the surfboards are pulled out.  (Incidentally, filmmakers, please don’t call a character in your movie “Marco,” especially if that character’s name is going to be yelled out repeatedly, because it will just lead to someone in the audience to yell out “Polo!” This is Uwe Boll School of Bad Filmmaking 101!)

The point is that the movie is just all over the place yet in a place that’s even remotely watchable. There even was a point when Tillie was watching the video of her parents dying in a car crash for the third or fourth time, and I just started laughing, since it’s such a slipshod scene.

It’s very likely that Dead Reckoning will claim the honor of being the worst movie I’ve seen this year. Really, the only way to have any fun watching this disaster is to play a drinking game where you take a drink every time Eisley’s character takes a drink. Or better yet, just bail on the movie and hit the bottle, because I’m sure whoever funded this piece of crap is.

Opening at New York’s Film Forum on Wednesday is Manfred Kirchheimer’s FREE TIME (Grasshopper/Cinema Conservancy), another wonderful doc from one of the kings of old school cinema verité documentary filmmaking, consisting of footage of New York City from 1960 that’s pieced together with a wonderful jazz score. Let me tell you that Kirschheimer’s work is very relaxing to watch and Free Time is no exception. Plus the hour-long movie will premiere in Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema, accompanied by Rudy Burckhardt’s 1953 film Under the Brooklyn Bridge which captures Brooklyn in the ‘50s.

Also opening in Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema Friday is Hong Khaou’s MONSOON (Strand Releasing) starring Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians) as Kit, who returns to Ho Chi Minh City for the first time since his family fled after the Vietnam War when he was six. As he tries to make sense of it, he ends in a romance with Parker Sawyers’ American ex-pat and forms a friendship with a local student (Molly Harris). Unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance to watch this one before finishing up this column but hope to catch soon, because I do like Golding as an actor.

I shared my thoughts on Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer’s FIREBALL: VISITORS FROM DARK WORLDS, when it played at TIFF in September, but this weekend, it will debut on Apple TV+.  It’s another interesting and educational science doc from Herr Herzog, this time teaming with the younger Cambridge geoscientist and “volcanologist” to look at the evidence left behind by meteors that have arrived within the earth’s atmosphere, including the races that worship the falling space objects.

Opening at the Metrograph this week (or rather on its website) is Shalini Kantayya’s documentary CODED BIAS, about the widespread bias in facial recognition and the algorithms that affect us all, which debuted Weds night and will be available on a PPV basis and will be available through November 17. The French New Wave anthology Six In Paris will also be available as a ticketed movie ($8 for members/$12 for non-members) through April 13. Starting Thursday as part of the Metrograph’s “Live Screenings” is Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher’s Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists from 1980. Fischler’s earlier doc Frame Up! The imprisonment of Martin Sostre from 1974 will also be available through Thursday night.

Sadly, there are just way too many movies out this week, and some of the ones I just wasn’t able to get to include:

Dating Amber (Samuel Goldwyn) The Giant (Vertical) I Am Greta (Hulu) Dirty God (Dark Star Pictures) Where She Lies (Gravitas Ventures) Maybe Next Year (Wavelength Productions) Come Away (Relativity) Habitual (National Amusements) The Ride (Roadside Attractions, Forest, ESX) Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (Netflix) Transference: A Love Story (1091) Sasquatch Among the Wildmen (Uncork’d) All Joking Aside (Quiver Distribution) Secret Zoo (MPI Medi Group/Capelight Pictures)

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, I think you’re very special and quite good-looking. Feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

[arsenicpanda]

Ok, so, tumblr fucking ATE MY ASK, but @hellodinoflower asked for #7, #8, and #37 for the Writer’s Meme like a month ago, so here we go.

7.)  Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Ok, from chapter 1 of The Looming Fog and Other Strange Happenings:

For the past five years, Jughead Jones had loudly argued that Arkham was haunted. The exact words he had used were “an unholy seat of unknowable, otherworldly horrors,” but “haunted” had been close enough for most of Jughead’s friends, family, and displeased acquaintances. Betty listened to him long enough to drag him off to explore one of the abandoned houses that littered Arkham, but Betty was a better person than most and also very, very into the investigative aspects of it, so he didn’t question it.

But now that a fog loomed over the city, covering it in a pungent yet sweet stench unlike any earthly smell, and every tree bled maple syrup, it was becoming increasingly clear that Jughead was right about Arkham. And no one was happy that Jughead was right about Arkham because it meant Jughead was smug about being right about Arkham. And a smug Jughead Jones was unbearable to everyone except FP, who found it endearing, and Betty, who found it one part annoying, two parts attractive.

(No one was particularly pleased with Betty either, as she had been determinedly arguing on the side of "Arkham is a city of nightmares and eldritch terrors" for a good two months now. She had the grace not to look smug, but she did have a certain “I told you so” air about her that others described as “bordering on insufferable” and Jughead considered “beyond attractive.”)

I’m actually pretty fond of this whole chapter, which definitely has a different vibe from the rest of the fic but whatever, but this is my favorite part.  For one, I called Jughead believing insane things about his town before season 3 even aired.  This was July 2018, baby!  For another, I like describing people who know Jughead but aren’t close to him as “displeased acquaintances”.  But mainly, I like the part where Betty and Jughead are attracted to parts of each other that others would call character flaws.  I just feel it’s very them.

8.)  Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Ok, from (day)dreams can come true, here’s one of the cleanest parts I could find (I’m quite fond of the whole fic, to the point that I held off on answering this until I could finish and publish it).  It’s kinda long because I wanted to get the whole part, but still, here:

He stumbles back to sit on the bed. “Fuck, I don’t think I’ve ever come that hard.”Fand “Me either,” she says, still panting and reeling from her orgasm.

He looks down at his hands, his left covered in left-over lotion and his right in come. Wiping his left hand off on his leg, he stares at his right while flexing it. “But it was really reckless. I almost came on the window.”

“Mm, I like you reckless,” she says blissfully, and he looks up and smiles at her.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

They’re silent for a while, but as she begins to come down from her high, she realizes everything they just said, and she can’t but blush. Thinking back to his words at the end, she fidgets a bit, trying to build her confidence up to ask, “When I...That is, did you…”

“When you…?”

“When I...came...Did you like it?” she asks, voice small despite herself, and she looks away.

“Betty. Look at me,” he says, and he sounds so gentle, the way he does when he squeezes her shoulder in comfort and wraps her up in his arms. She always feels safe when he uses that voice.

She turns back to him, and his eyes are warm and smiling, she can see it even from here. “It was p—It was better than anything anyone could ever imagine.”

“That’s not what I—”

“I loved it. I love—” and he stumbles over himself here, though she doesn’t know why, “—d it.”

“You were pretty great to see too,” she tells him with renewed confidence.

“Oh, uh, thank, thank you,” he mutters, and now he’s the one to look away red-faced.

They sit in silence again as Betty tries to process everything that just happened, everything they said, if anything is different. It’s comfortable somehow, only slightly awkward despite the lewdness of what they just did.

“Hey, do you...do you want to go to Pop’s?” His voice would sound casual to most people, but she can hear the nervousness mixed with hope and her heart aches for him and oh, this boy.

For context, this is post 1x10 when Jughead is still living with Archi, and Betty and Jughead just had phone sex while staring at each other jerking off through each other’s windows.  For starters, I got to answer “Why does he say she likes him reckless?” and that was fun.  But more than that, I like having them go from the confidence that comes with overwhelming horniness to a certain increased vulnerability in the aftermath.  Betty is increasingly comfortable with her sexuality, but is Jughead comfortable with it?  The answer is hell yes, don’t worry, Betty, and I enjoyed that.  I liked getting to have Jughead almost call her perfect--because hell yeah, that’s a pretty perfect scenario for a horny teenager--just because he knows she hates the word.  Also, the little dumbass almost confessed his love to her, and I find that hilarious.  But ultimately, this is just another part of them, so why not go to Pop’s?  It’s like it’s normal, even though, yeah, no, guys, that’s not a normal thing to do.

Also, this doesn’t fit as dialogue or prose, but I’m going to include it anyway as a bonus because it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever written.  From wet dreams may come:

But BettyBettyBetty spills from his lips as he spills into his hand.

He stares at the shame coating his fingers and palm. Would she lick it off him, hungry for his cum and with that look of fondness in her eyes as she fingers—

“I’m so fucked up.”

Ok, two things:

1.) I love “spills from his lips as he spills into his hand”.  It’s not quite a zeugma--I couldn’t make it work as one without it being mega awkward, unfortunately--but it’s close!  I just really like the way it sounds.  It kept repeating in my head, very insistent, and it’s one of two things that got me to sit down and write this fic.

2.) Do you know how much I love that I got to include “I’m so fucked up”?  No, of course not, because like five of you watch anime.  Ok, so this is from an (in)famous (and perhaps even iconic) scene in The End of Evangelion, where our protagonist Shinji masturbates to completion over his not-friend/ally/whatever Asuka’s comatose body in the hospital and then feels bad because you’re goddamn right you should.  It’s not an in-universe reference because if Jughead was an anime guy, we would very much know by now because he would be annoying about it.

But I felt it was a very Jughead thing to have that level of dramatic reaction to having some (very) explicit fantasies about Betty--a girl he’s been crazy about for years and only just started dating--because he feels it violates her privacy somehow.  Like, it’s not that he thinks she’s ~pure~, but that he thinks it’s not his place because their relationship isn’t like that yet.  It made sense that that would be his feeling, and I feel the allusion hammers that home.  Bonus: I got to come back to that, to a certain extent, in (day)dreams can come true, where Jughead is having his own interior struggles with what’s ok to do and to say.

37.  Talk about your current wips.

Ok, how are we defining WIPs?  Because the only thing that’s partially published is The Looming Fog and Other Strange Happenings, and I have no idea how to unstick myself from that one.  I want Betty’s chapter to be having an adventure with Kevin in the woods, but I’m not sure what they should be doing there.  Also, ultimately, I’m not a horror writer or even reader, really, so I’ve got some self-consciouness there.  It’s a pity, because I like what bit of her plot I have, and I actually finished Kevin’s chapter, which I very much enjoy.

As for other things in the works, I’ve got two smut and one fluff-ish, the latter of which I summed up here, but who knows if they’ll ever be finished.  I’ll say this about the smut fics though: Bret, Donna, and the sex tape are involved.

[moonlitgleek]

On Account of Her Womanhood

I started this post over two months ago with the hope that it would help me work through my iffy feelings on Fire and Blood, namely how much I dislike the way many of the female characters are written in this book and how it repeats and expands on some unsavory elements of GRRM’s narrative that have been broadly noted in fandom across multiple books. But a closer look only increased my frustration with this book for how it underlined several of Martin’s problematic patterns when it comes to writing women but in a more condensed form this time, perhaps due to the nature of the medium. The history book form of F&B focuses these recurring problems and offers little to offset or challenge them that the authorial issue of casual and uncritical misogynistic writing feels more pervasive. It may be that Martin tried to address at least one aspect that’s been criticized before, but I remain disquieted with how he largely traded one issue for another.

Whatever the case, I think that a writer of Martin’s caliber and with his affinity for interrogating and examining traditional genre tropes can and should do better than this uncritical use of misogynistic writing that he not only leaves to stand unchallenged, but actively leans into. In this depressingly long post, I’ll address some of the problems that jumped out at me while reading. Feel free to add any I may have overlooked.

Objectification and the categorical sexualization of female bodies:

One of the most noticeable trends I found in F&B is how distinctly different it treats male and female bodies. While there may be plenty of overlapping, there is a decidedly heavier focus on sex in women’s stories. Too many stories witnesses a woman’s ultimate fate incorporate a sexual component, often violent and/or fatal, that is if the story isn’t completely built on sexual appetites or escapades. Fire and Blood dives into the personal lives of its characters far more than its cousin The World of Ice and Fire, and that has translated to a lot of sex. That is not inherently a bad thing, but F&B is also notably heavier on female characters so it’s really conspicuous that the number of women goes up in direct proportion to the increase in cases of sexualization and sex stories.

To put it mildly, women’s stories are drenched in sex, to the point where I’ve compiled a list in my initial notes under the title “Gyladyn is a Pervert” due to the sheer amount of unsolicited, unnecessary and disturbingly detailed accounts of women’s sexual experiences. You’d be hard pressed to go one chapter without focus being given to minute details of women’s sex lives which sometimes spans whole pages of the text. It’s primarily the women who get framed through a sexual lens in this book, especially in instances where the female characters don’t even get a story that is not based on their sexual history. Sexuality is not just one aspect of a woman’s personality like it is for the men, it is the core of her entire characterization. Far too many Targaryen ladies get that treatment, along with a myriad of other women. I chose some examples to discuss, but they are but a drop in the total number of characters receiving that treatment.

Coryanne Wylde

Lady Coryanne’s story is the most infamous examples of a gratuitous sex tale that doesn’t serve any real purpose in the narrative, but not only does it occupy way too much space in Gyldayn’s writing, he goes on to describe in excruciating detail the violation and abuse of a young girl while consistently blaming her for it. For all that Gyldayn keeps saying that we need not concern ourselves with the sordid details of A Caution For Young Girls, we get to hear quite a lot about Coryanne’s sexual history.

Coryanne’s entire narrative derives from sex. She gets no other story and no other characterization. Her voice and actions are filtered through the opinions and assumptions of various maesters. Her body is presented as an object for more powerful and/or older men to use and abuse, and the one spin of her story that affords her some figment of agency (i.e, the take that Coryanne taught Jaehaerys how to have sex because she became fond of him and Alysanne) deliberately minimizes how dysfunctional her entire situation is and neglects to reflect her real age and experiences by casting her as someone with more carnal knowledge and the ability to teach Jaehaerys about sex. Keep in mind that Coryanne’s so-called sexual "knowledge” has been exclusively through rape.

I read to what amounts to one quarter of a chapter about Coryanne Wylde but I still have no idea who this girl was. What I do know is way too much information about her sexual history and the men who took advantage of her.

Rhaena Targaryen

Rhaena is luckier than Coryanne in the sense that her characterization doesn’t derive solely from her sexuality and her story is more nuanced and layered. However, not only does Rhaena’s sexuality remain the underlying factor in her narrative, it’s kinda absurd how the narrative ties itself into knots trying to justify the inclusion of rumors about how Rhaena lost her virginity to a lowborn lover whose identity is debated, even though the information presented thus far by the in-universe author contradicts the very premise of those rumors or even the reasoning presented as the cause for discussing those rumors. The whispers of Rhaena’s so-called affair is preceded by rather strong hints of Rhaena’s preference of women; though that does not necessarily preclude the possibility of her liking men too as her reported affection for her brother Aegon suggests, it’s that affection and the note about how Rhaena and Aegon grew up expecting and welcoming their eventual nuptials that makes Rhaena’s supposed loss of virginity to a random guy all the more weird. Too, it’s been noted previously that Rhaena neither encouraged nor entertained any of her many suitors and instead preferred the company of her siblings, dragon and her latest favorite Alayne Royce. So for rumors to exist about her having a raunchy affair with some lowborn guy she met while dragonriding is not only random but baseless. Where did these rumors come from if there is nothing in Rhaena’s history to either trigger or support them?

The reasoning the narrative gives us for those rumors is to explain Rhaena and Aegon’s marriage, since Aenys was supposedly driven to marry Rhaena off as soon as possible in light of these rumors. However, reports of Rhaena and Aegon’s closeness and their expectation to wed, as well as the Targaryen incestuous tradition more than explains the match and Aenys’ decision, especially since Rhaena and Aegon were well-within the normal age for marriage in Westeros. There is nothing weird about this match that warrants an obscure affair to explain. Which only serves to illustrate the oddity of this unsolicited commentary on Rhaena’s virginity. Those rumors stand as a random tangent about a subject that no one should care about in the context of the story. Who cares whether Rhaena was a virgin or not when she married Aegon? What possible effect did her virginity or possible lack thereof have on the narrative for it to be included? The way this story is handled, Rhaena’s sexual agency is there to serve as a matter of intrigue, speculation and scandal when there is no fathomable reason for that to happen, not to mention that it makes Rhaena’s dynastic role as the expected future queen dependent on the expression of her sexuality.

Alyssa Targaryen

Full disclosure: I hate how Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s daughters are written and how sex is the make of their stories. That’s the case for five of the seven daughters they had, and it is infuriating. Is this the best you could come up with for the daughters of the best Targaryen queen Westeros has seen, GRRM? Sex, dead (Daenerys), septa (Maegelle who is clever and reconciled her parents, that’s mostly it) and barely mentioned (if you count Jocelyn Baratheon) are the only options?

The characterization of Princess Alyssa starts off promising enough with information about her personality, her unladylike interests and her closeness to her brother Baelon, but quickly devolves to be solely about sex. We literally do not hear one word from Alyssa’s mouth that is not about sex. Her story is a tale about how she loved sex, had sex, joked about sex and shrieked during sex. For all the narrative says that Alyssa was brave and irrepressible, it reduces her to someone whose sole purpose and sole story focus is sex. Alyssa Targaryen exists to have sex with Baelon and give birth to Viserys and Daemon before conveniently dying of complications after birthing her third son.

Alyssa’s story is not only symptomatic of the incessant sexualization in this book but of the recurring misogynistic problem of reducing women to their sexuality and fertility. Alyssa’s function in the story becomes intrinsically tied to both since the narrative never bothers to give her anything outside of her sex life. What non-sexual tidbits we get are either dismissed or glossed over. This is a princess who reportedly delighted in dragonriding, followed her brothers to the training yard and eschewed ladylike activities but for some reason, she responds to Baelon’s statement about how his bravery in battles does not measure to her own in giving birth by telling him that he was made for battles and she was made for childbirth. What even is that?

Alyssa Targaryen is a woman of whom Septon Barth said: “Alyssa may be all her mother is and more”, but we never get any elaboration on that. Instead we get to know about how Alyssa’s sounds of pleasure echoed through the Red Keep on a regular basis and how she constantly wanted to have sex.

Saera Targaryen

Dear god, is this an optimal example of how this book centers women’s characterization on their sexuality. Saera’s story is that she had sex with her companions and Jaehaerys punished her for having sex with her companions, which filters all aspects of her personality through a sexual lens by the narrative. It’s rather pointed that everything we know of Saera’s childhood is almost exclusively negative with a clear vibe of presenting her behavior as an escalating problem that reaches its peak when she has sex. It felt like Saera’s entire characterization up to when her sexual relations are discovered is one long build-up to that point of discovery. Saera’s “appetites” are remarked upon since she is literally a baby in a rather clear attempt to underscore her later actions when those appetites turned sexual. This is not simply a matter of hindsight coloring perception of Saera too, given how Maetser Elysar’s comments about how Saera “wants what she wants and she wants it now” are dated to 69 AC, when Saera was all of two. That gives the feel that Saera’s sexuality was the fulcrum that the rest of her characterization was build on, which certainly explains why her sexual affairs are framed as an extension of her previous bad behavior.

Daella Targaryen

Oh but this is a lesson in frustration. Daella's story doesn’t drip of sex like her sister Saera, but even when she is not unbearably sexualized, sex is still a primary filter that Gyldayn uses to shape our perception of her as this childlike frightened figure who apparently had no interests and no purpose in life other than needing comfort, and who wouldn’t talk to boys because she was frightened.

The text infantilizes Daella to such an extent that her disinterest in men who had no interest in her (Corlys Velaryon), who tried to force her into drinking (Simon Staunton) and who sexually assaulted her (Ellard Crane) is treated as a fault in Daella. Her entire story is about her parents’ ardent efforts to find a husband for her, a pursuit so irksome to Jaehaerys that he mandates that Daella must marry within the year when she approaches 16, in a conversation that introduces a rather needless sexual component in how Jaehaerys talks about Daella when he suggests lining a hundred naked men before his not-yet-16 year old daughter so she could pick one to marry. The story also seems to treat Daella’s later refusal of a bedding ceremony as a childish quirk that Rodrik Arryn indulged “his precious princess” in.

It might be a different facet of how a woman’s sexuality is used to define her than the previous cases, but it remains that Daella is treated as a sexual object by both the characters and the narrative in their dismay of how she doesn’t fit the traditional mold of womanly behavior and sexual mores in Westeros. It’s as if Daella is looked down upon for not having a sexual history.

Baela Targaryen

Wild, willful and wanton are the three words used to describe Baela Targaryen. It honestly boggles the mind that a character that has so much going for her gets introduced through a sexual situation. One of our first glimpses of Baela’s agency comes through the mention of her playing kissing games with squires followed by that one time she was found with a kitchen scullion who had his hand inside her jerkin. It’s especially notable to see how Baela’s willfulness (and unladylike behavior) is tied time and again to her sexuality and her interest in boys, which is very clear when Gyldayn talks about her unsuitable pets that she brought back to the Red Keep, a mention that is immediately followed by how her septa - who was in charge of Baela’s “moral instructions” - despaired of her and how Septon Eustace spoke of the need for her to wed immediately.

(Side note: I found the language of that paragraph so weird. It carries a heavy suggestion that Baela may have been involved sexually with her so-called pets, makes fun of her intelligence and suggests that she may or may have not been involved with the twin female prostitutes that the text then links to her own sister because they were twins “like us, Rhae” in Baela’s own words. There is a lot going on in that paragraph that I don’t know what to do with. Is Gyldayn trying to imply that Baela had sex with all of these people, including an entire trope of mummers and two girls that she explicitly connected to herself and her sister? Because he is certainly insinuating so, and I have been burned by this book enough already to assume good intentions).

Nettles

Instead of basing her characterization on it, how about we use a woman’s sexuality to undermine her accomplishments just to shake things up? Here’s a girl who relied on her intelligence instead of a pedigree to tame a dragon and succeeded in becoming a dragonrider, but her taming of Sheepstealer gets prefaced by a statement about how “worse was yet to come with dire consequences for the Seven Kingdoms” to preemptively blame Nettles for Rhaenyra’s own brutality and Daemon’s subsequent abandonment of her cause (a statement not made any better by talking about how “the power young maidens exert over older men is well-known” when discussing Daemon’s affair with Nettles as if to cast her as a seductress), and that’s when her dragontaming is not getting framed as something she traded sex for as suggested by Gyldayn’s speculation about how she traded sex for the sheep she fed Sheepstealer. He makes sure to treat us to his thoughts on the state of Nettles’ virginity when she began her affair with Daemon while he is at it as well.

Helaena Targaryen & Alicent Hightower

Straining logic to add a sexual rumor is a personal favorite of mine. Look, Gyldayn may be less zealous and less outrageous than Septon Eustace in his bias towards Aegon II, but he is still clearly biased towards him. He writes about him with a degree of sympathy not present in his writing of Rhaenyra and he goes out of his way to undermine events that may paint Rhaenyra in a better light while arguing against rumors that paint the greens as (more) monstrous. How convenient it is, then, for that bias to fail when it comes to discussing the rumor about how the teenage Alicent may have slept with both Viserys I before Aemma’s death and the elderly Jaehaerys I when she was his caretaker, a rumor that Gyldayn seems disinclined to believe (or so he claims) but more than willing to wink at its possible accuracy through a comment about how Alicent strangely spoke often of the Old King in her final hours but not of her late husband.

To add insult to injury, we’re also treated to a rumor about how Rhaenyra, on the behest of Mysaria, may have forcibly prostituted Alicent and Helaena in what comes to be referred to as the Brothel Queens. Spending time on a rumor that casts Rhaenyra in a bad light at least falls in line with Gyldayn’s biases, but it strains logic to have Mushroom be the source of that rumor. Why would a guy who loved Rhaenyra well as Gyldayn says perpetuate a rumor that casts Rhaenyra in such a monstrous light? It seems like the logic of this amounts to “Mushroom delights in sex tales and perverse rumors so he was the obvious choice” which doesn’t account for Mushroom’s feelings or biases (and which is problematic in its own way - do you think I missed that the two vulgar books that are widely quoted in this work were written by a woman and a dwarf, GRRM? Do you think I missed that the implication here is that Mushroom’s sexual perversions are prioritized over his depiction as a person who liked Rhaenyra?)

The Brothel Queens rumor adds nothing to the narrative but another case of unnecessary sexualization. Gyldayn ultimately rejects that rumor as false but I question the need to include it in the first place. Is it there to perhaps inform us that the public view of Rhaenyra was so bad at this point that people were inclined to not only believe in but also manufacture rumors about her monstrosity? Having one of Rhaenyra’s supporters as the accredited source of that rumor flies in the face of that, and narratively speaking, this doesn’t accomplish anything that the latter rumor about how Rhaenyra sent Maelor’s head to Helaena in a chamber pot - which is clearly framed as evidence of how much the public opinion on Rhaenyra has soured - doesn’t. So why is this pesky rumor there and what purpose does it have beyond showing us that Gyldayn is all too willing to spend his time discussing every sexual rumor under the sun?

As I’ve said, these examples are but a few of the number of women needlessly and excessively sexualized in this book. I have more on my list but talking about every story separately is going to make this post longer than it already is, not to mention be unbearably repetitive because many of them bear the same elements of having our knowledge of these women centered almost exclusively on their sex lives and their presence in the text reduced to their sexuality. Gael Targaryen was seduced, gave birth and died. Sara Snow's is a contrived and downright illogical story that only exists so she could have sex with Jace either as his wife or a fling. All Viserra Targaryen gets to do is pit boys against each other for her favor and try unsuccessfully to seduce her brother Baelon. Aliandra Martell is there to entertain men and possibly sleep with Alyn Velaryon to the displeasure of her siblings (psst, GRRM, your depiction of the Dornish, especially Dornish women, continues to be atrocious and this book does nothing to deconstruct the stereotype of them as violent hypersexual people). The questions Gyldayn ponders while discussing Tess killing Dalton Greyjoy include ones about her virginity and her physical beauty. Rue - one of two female writers in the book, the other supposedly being Coryanne Wylde - is there to write a vulgar account about Alyn Velaryon who she may or may not have slept with.  The list goes on and on.

Sexualizing the mundane:

The hypersexualized treatment of women bodies is so overwhelming in this book that it extends to ordinary stuff like nursing and pregnancy, both of which get weirdly graphic and gross descriptions in Alys Rivers’ story when she puts her pregnancy with Aemond’s child as “I can feel his fire licking at my womb” while her wetnursing is described as “the milk that flowed abundantly from the breasts of Alys Rivers”. Not even death or description of women’s death throes is spared that sexual aspect. While Princess Aerea is getting cooked from within in a horrifying portrait of suffering and agony, the fact that smoke is emanating from her vagina gets described as obscene, even though smoke is coming from every other body orifice. Meria Martell gets the rumor that she was coupling with a stallion at the time of her death. Rhaenyra’s breast is prickled to rouse Sunfyre.

Even in death, women’s bodies are treated as sexual objects. Mysaria’s horrific death via scourging has a sexualized dimension in how her body is put on display in her agony as she gets whipped while being paraded naked despite her crimes not being sexual in nature. To be fair, both Septon Bernard and Lysaro Rogare also get sexual punishments for non-sexual crimes, but the notable difference between them and Mysaria is that Lady Misery gets narrative focus on her “pale white body” while dying. (Mysaria’s fate is also too contrived in a way that Bernard’s and Lysaro’s aren’t but that’s only relevant here for how it appears like the narrative conspired to have her caught by that specific mob so she could get such a punishment). Even immolation gets a gendered and sexualized tint because when it’s women burning, they obviously get to “dance in gowns of fire, naked and lewd underneath the flames”. The thrashing of someone burning is apparently “lewd” if it’s a woman. Women’s suffering get inexplicably beautified (dance in gowns of fire) and sexualized, and somehow they are blamed for it because they are being lewd by thrashing in agony.

Child brides

Let’s start with their number, shall we?

Alyssa Velaryon, 15

Larissa Velaryon, between 12 and 14

Alysanne Targaryen, 13

Alyssa Targaryen, 15

Aemma Arryn, 11

Helaena Targaryen, 13

Elinor Costayne, exact age unclear but younger than 16

Floris Baratheon, 14\15

Unwin Peake’s unnamed daughter, 11\12

The Northern blacksmith’s daughter whose story Alysanne cited to ban the first night, 14.

Daenaera Velaryon, 6

Jaehaera Targaryen, 8

This list doesn’t account for those who were meant to be child brides but ultimately weren’t because of external circumstances. Cassandra Baratheon hadn’t yet flowered in 129 but she was going to marry Aegon II immediately in 131 when she was between 13 and 15. Viserra Targaryen was being shipped off to wed at 15. Myrielle Peake (14) was touted as a suitable queen for Aegon III because she could get pregnant immediately. Prudence and Prunella Celtigar were offered by their father for Maegor to immediately wed at 12 and 13 (at a time when Maegor had just murdered two wives, btw), Jaehaerys Targaryen made ardent effort to marry off Daella as young as 13 and mandated she marry by 16. And those are only the marital relationships that involve young girls, but the inherent issues of child brides exist in cases of non-marital sexual relationships like Marlida of Hull’s with Corlys Velaryon when Marlida was 15 if not younger, or Rhaenyra Targaryen’s “training” by her uncle Daemon at 14.

So what’s the problem?

This has been a subject of debate for a long, long time, whether in terms of its actual historical inaccuracy despite GRRM’s claim to the contrary, or of its defiance of Martin’s own Word of God. Margaret Beaufort is an example that has been brought up repeatedly to justify the broad inclusion of child brides in ASOIAF but while Margaret did give birth aged 13, the severe physical toll that took on her not only rendered her sterile but was a main reason she argued vehemently against her granddaughter being wed young too. But Martin only reflects the first part of the story while steadfastly ignoring the second part. Oh, it’s true that F&B acknowledges that the in-universe characters know that bedding young girls has severe and often fatal health risks, but that knowledge is either dismissed or categorically ignored.

The most outrageous example of that comes from the story of Daella Targaryen. In what could have worked as a way for the narrative to call out the problems entrenched in the concept of child brides, Gyldayn notes that Queen Alysanne blamed herself and King Jaehaerys for marrying Princess Daella too young when her physical constitution made pregnancy dangerous and indeed ultimately fatal for her. But rather than working as a resounding rebuff, the way this plot is handled makes it stick out instead as an oblique attempt for the author to say “see, I said it was bad!” rather than a serious condemnation of that constant trend. It’s a throwaway line without the commitment to showing that this information changed anything in-universe or was even allowed to stand as a clear, if a late and woefully limited, condemnation of the narrative’s over-reliance on child brides. Rather, Alysanne’s justifiable condemnation is promptly undermined by how it is immediately tied to her grief over Daella’s death with the clear aim to paint Alysanne’s deduction as an emotional - and thusly not rational - response which in turn dismisses her completely justified assessment.

Still, I might have only ascribed this to Gyldayn’s own misogyny if only that statement hadn’t been soundly forgotten by everyone in-universe, apparently including Alysanne herself. This incident appears to have come and gone with no visible effect on the main participants’ actions - it sure doesn’t look like either Rodrik Arryn nor Jaehaerys Targaryen learned one damn thing considering they go on to sign off on Aemma Arryn’s marriage at age 11, at a time when Queen Alysanne goes mysteriously silent on the subject. That is further compounded by how Alysanne herself comes to arrange for the 15-year-old Viserra to wed only four years after Daella’s death.

Be sure to give it up for the maesters’ (painfully casual) assessment that Aemma’s childbearing issues were because she was bedded too young though, it sure had as much impact on the narrative as Alysanne’s own statement years earlier, considering the numerous girls who would go on to be child brides, including Viserys I’s own daughter Helaena. Despite strong evidence of the risk of forcing girls into sex and pregnancy at an early age and despite the narrative’s own admission to it, it remains a regular occurrence to see teen girls married off (often with no pressing reason) and giving birth way too young without any kind of explanation as to why their guardians would think it a splendid idea.

Also a story where the text came close to properly addressing the core issue of child brides is that of Alysanne Targaryen. The narrative initially touches upon the issue of the inherent sexualization of child brides with Alysanne’s story, but somehow still ends up reaffirming how young girls tend to be regarded through a sexual gaze in Westeros. Gyldayn goes to great lengths in trying to differentiate between Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s nuptials and consummation, and that of your average Westerosi child bride where girls get no agency in the matches made for them, often to much older men who have no qualms about having sex with actual children. By contrast, Alysanne is shown as an architect of her marriage to Jaehaerys, actively going to him to curtail her betrothal to Orryn Baratheon and pushing for their marriage to be consummated so that no one could set it aside. Alysanne’s ability to consent in a match that she pursued to a similarly-aged boy is starkly different from what we typically see in matches with child brides, which is then affirmed by Jaehaerys’ recognition that Alysanne is too young for the marriage to be consummated after their first wedding, and her own advocacy for consummation later despite Jaehaerys’ lingering hesitance. So far, so good. It is another instance of a child bride but it’s used to add commentary about the inherent problematic elements of it rather than being presented in an abstract manner and left to stand unchallenged.

But not only is the commentary we can glean from this story undermined by Jaehaerys’ own actions with his daughters and granddaughter later, it is further diminished by the constant insistence to sexualize Alysanne. Gyldayn deems it necessary to tell us of how Jaehaerys and Alysanne slept naked, gives us servant gossip about the long lingering kisses they shared and inserts an offhand rumor about how Jaehaerys might have invited Alysanne to the bed he supposedly shared with Coryanne Wylde to “frolic with them in episodes most often associated with the infamous pleasure houses of Lys”, persisting in referring to Alysanne as “the little queen” throughout. That insistent sexualization of Alysanne contextualizes the mention of Jaehaerys’ refusal to consummate the marriage to be an attempt from the author-character to make Jaehaerys look good, rather than an attempt to offer any kind of critique to the custom of deflowering too-young maidens. It does, however, fall right in line with Gyldayn’s tendency to dedicate an ordinate amount of space to comment on the sex lives of teen girls. Which brings me to:

The hypersexualization of young girls

One can not go through this book without taking notice of how absolutely obsessed Gyldayn is with the sex lives and sex appeal of teen girls. Too much of this book is spent discussing, speculating on and pondering rumors about the sex lives of young girls, minor and major characters alike. It’s really telling that he, and the narrative by association, is so cavalier about inserting commentary about a girl’s body, sexuality or sexual desirability, even for characters who were only mentioned once or twice in the text. It’s all so disturbingly casual that it might not register on first read but there is an unholy pattern of slipping in a sexualizing comment about barely seen teenagers and pubescent girls. They may have no personality, no voice, no agency and sometimes no names but for some reason their sexual history (read: abuse), desirability or physicality is brought up. Among them:

Prudence and Prunella Celtigar. For the longest time, our knowledge of both is restricted to their age, and Rogar Baratheon’s charming comment about them being chinless, breastless and witless which Gyldayn keeps bringing up as their defining factor.

The Archon of Tyrosh’s daughter (15) is noted for her wit, hair and flirtatious manner (she is later rumored to have cuckolded her eventual husband, Orryn Baratheon, and birthed a daughter that wasn’t his, since she is a woman of the Free Citites and all that)

There may have been a nameless faceless 12-year-old girl that was being raped by Aegon II at the time of Viserys’ death. But fear not, we know exactly what kind of sexual act she was performing on him.

Jocelyn Baratheon (16) barely exists in the text, but we needed her physical description to include that she was full-breasted just so we can understand that she was desirable.

According to Mushroom, Aemond kissed all four of Borros Baratheon’s prepubescent daughters to “taste the nectar of their lips” before picking one as a bride. The second-eldest, Maris, makes a sexually-charged comment to challenge Aemond’s manhood at like, 11.

Floris Baratheon’s characterization is limited to pretty, sweet, somewhat frivolous and dead.

The only mention of the 15-year-old Johanna Swann’s is that she was sold into sexual slavery and became a famous courtesan in “a fascinating” tale according to Gyldayn.

No less than 8 girls involved in the so-called Maiden’s Day Cattle Show are defined by sexual comments and sexual deeds. (There is a comment from Mushroom about how everything couldn’t have been more beautiful, unless if the girls had all arrived naked. This is a ball that had girls as young as six and seven.)

Coryanne Wylde’s first sexual “encounter” rape happens at 13 and she is assaulted repeatedly by the time she is 15.

“Aegon III had never shown any carnal interest in either of his queens (understandably in the case of Queen Daenaera, who was yet a child)” - Uh, Gyldayn? Jaehaera was ten when she died. So why is the extent of Aegon’s maturity judged as lacking because he didn’t desire a literal child and measured negatively against that of his brother Viserys because Viserys, who was a child himself, consummated his own marriage?

As for the regular-flavor hypersexualizion of major characters by the narrative, you can find Rhaenyra Targaryen whose sexual training assault at Daemon’s hand at 14 is described in painful detail, Rhaena Targaryen who is strongly implied to have had somewhat of a sexual awakening at the age of 12, Nettles whose virginity is speculated upon with the conclusion that she must have had sex before she flowered taken as a basic fact and Baela Targaryen who gets a majority story focus on her sexual adventures.

The worst part is that there is no point to most of the above. I can maybe find a logical narrative motive for one of those stories and the only point I can find to several others is to frame the character of the men involved, including Gyldayn. But mostly, these characters exist to serve as as a set dressing, to be exploited and paraded to sensationalize a story.

Sexual violence as a punishment, a plot device, and a sacrifice for male characters’ story

GRRM has frequently claimed that the various acts of sexual violence in his books, against both men and women, is historically accurate. He takes it as a dishonest approach for him not to show that rape and sexual assault were historically a part of war. The existence of sexual violence in wars can not be denied, but it’s rather remarkable that Martin took only the negative parts of women’s lives from real life history, then made it worse for the women in his narrative. Despite his claim that Westeros is no darker nor more depraved than our RL history, Westerosi patriarchy is actually worse than the real Middle Ages and it is lacking a lot of the roles women occupied throughout history, which gives the effect of furthering the women’s suffering without giving them the benefit of having proper well-rounded narratives.

Furthermore, if, as Martin claims, sexual violence is a part of war narrative, what are we to do with the numerous examples of assault and sexual violence that occur in peacetime, both in the main narrative and in F&B? Westeros wasn’t at war when seven Lyseni slaves were used and abused by the Baratheon brothers prior to the Golden Wedding, nor did Coryanne Wylde’s repeated assaults occur during war. Alyssa Velaryon and Alysanne Targaryen were not impregnated, to the former’s grave and against the latter’s expressed wishes, by wartime enemies but by their own husbands. Saera Targaryen had her own father condone her humiliation and abuse in the name of punishing her. And what about the countless child brides who had no choice in their marriages, many of whom went on to either die in childbed or suffer health problems due to premature consummation of their marriages?

Sexual violence is a frequently used window dressing across the series. That Westeros is a terrible place for women is often the singular take of such stories that consistently build on the victimization of women, either as a decoration for the setting to inform us over and over and over that Westeros is a misogynistic society, or as a tool to characterize male characters and further their stories. This is an overarching problem in Martin’s narrative that sees the use of women’s very bodies on the sacrificial altar of the narrative’s requirements, to the extent that even in their suffering, the story belongs less to these women and more to the men whose stories they are sacrificed for. Too often does that happen in this book.

Argella Durrandon is one such case, a women whose violation at the hand of her own men is mostly there to tell us about the gentleness of Orys Baratheon. Several women are used in various ways to inform us about Rogar Baratheon in what is frankly a perplexing waste of narrative space because we didn’t really need these women’s suffering to tell us that Rogar is a grade A asshole when we had plenty of damning evidence of his villainy and misogyny. But we still get such casual mentions of Rogar and his brothers “deflowering” slaves who were probably too young, mainly to juxtapose the actions of Rogar and young Jaehaerys during the proceedings of the Golden Wedding and paint the former in a bad light while holding up the latter. Coryanne Wylde has her narrative of abuse that tells us nothing about her and more about the men taking advantage of her, and Alyssa Velaryon is severely sidelined by the narrative during the regency and has her body used to her death to further Rogar’s characterization. And while this upcoming example is a part of a war narrative, it remains that the function of the rape and sexual slavery of Lady Alys Oakheart and her ladies is largely about informing our perception of Wyl of Wyl and being used to threaten Princess Deria with a similar fate.

Sexual violence also gets used as a tool of punishment against women for various “offenses”. Argella Durrandon is stripped of her clothes and her voice alike for her defiance. Coryanne Wylde’s assault is treated as some sort of karmic punishment for her so-called promiscuity and bearing a child out of wedlock. Princess Saera gets silenced, shaved and beaten essentially for liking sex. Her punishment is designed to shame her for having had sex before she is pressed to the Faith in an attempt to force her into chastity and moral righteousness. The Silent Sisters continue to be routinely used as a threat and a punishment for sexual promiscuity.

Rape culture and normalising sexual violence

I’m having a bit of a case of stating the obvious when I say that Westeros has a flourishing rape culture. But it’s still a fact. Westerosi patriarchy perpetuates and enables sexual violence on an institutional level to the extent that rape has become so normalised that no one so much as blinks at it. The custom of the first night is a clear example of that. And although we have Alysanne and Septon Barth’s impassioned arguments against it that ultimately succeed in having it banned, Gyldayn does his level-best to downplay and beatify the sentiment towards the first night on Dragonstone and exclude the Targaryens from pushback against it. According to Gyldayn, not only was the resentment of the first night muted on Dragonstone, but “brides thus blessed upon their wedding nights were envied, and the children born of such unions were esteemed above all others". Normalise and glamorize rape, why don’t you, Gyldayn?

Also a fixed feature of Westerosi mores is the bedding ceremony, something that involves the stripping of both the bride and the groom by the wedding guests and that often include liberities taken with the bride. In F&B, Daella’s rejection of a bedding is treated disparagingly by the narrative as a facet of her childishness and immaturity, while Rhaenyra, at the age of 9, is included in the party that disrobed her father for his bedding ceremony. For the boys, the bedding ceremony is treated as a sign of virility, strength and character maturity as seen by the reactions of those who attended the bedding ceremony of the 13-year-old Maegor, and the description of how mature the 12-year-old Viserys was because he bedded his wife.

Those are facets of a problem that, for me, largely starts and ends with the authorial attitude towards some forms of sexual violence in the text. In a discussion about F&B on westeros.org, Martin’s collaborator Elio Garcia, echoing previous comments made by Martin, insisted that bedding young girls is understood to be gross and inappropriate in Westeros and that an example such as Unwin Peake’s young daughter is simply an indication of Peake’s (and his onetime goodson’s) awfulness and cruelty. However, the argument that it’s socially, if not legally, frowned upon to bed young girls in Westeros does not hold in the face of the sheer amount of young girls being wed and bedded at young age, to the extent that the matter became so normalised that neither father nor husband of any such unfortunate girl attracts any kind of censure, not even socially. I certainly saw no such sentiment when Viserys I was marrying the 11-year-old Aemma Arryn and bedding her at 13 to the tune of zero opposition. Nor when no one blinked at the fact that the-nearly-60 year old Thaddeus Rowan was searching for a suitable young maid to wed after the death of his first two wives, or when he later wed the 14/15-year-old Floris Baratheon. What about when Jaehaerys and Alysanne Targaryen arranged for their daughter Viserra to wed their contemporary Theomore Manderly at age 15? Or when the 60-year-old Corlys Velaryon started sleeping with Marlida of Hull at 15, if not younger, which earned zero condemnation and zero focus? The perversion and predatory behavior of these old men is treated as a non-issue within the text, even though Martin and Garcia keep telling us that it should. They just fail to have the narrative actually show that. But you can’t keep insisting that it’s considered perverse in-universe to bed young girls when everyone is doing it.

As for the argument that young Lady Peake’s example was meant as a deliberate point about her father’s character, that’s a fig leaf that doesn’t even hold up in the face of the text. It’s easy to say that this was an added commentary on Unwin Peake’s character when Peake is an awful human being that we’re meant to hate, but what about Thaddeus Rowan who is clearly presented to us by the narrative as a decent and moral man that we’re supposed to sympathize with? Was there a point to be made about what an awful man he was in his marriage to Floris Baratheon too? Did I miss any part of the narrative that treated Rowan as a figure worthy of denunciation for his culpability in Floris’ death, or even acknowledged that culpability? Because from where I’m standing, that young girl’s death was treated as something that we’re supposed to sympathize with Rowan over. What about Rodrik Arryn, a two-time offender who impregnated the delicate Daella and witnessed her death only to repeat the tragedy by marrying off his daughter as a child? Rodrik is also presented as a decent person who loved Daella and who is barely criticized for his part in her death, which is ironically an improvement on the lack of acknowledgment of what he did to Aemma.

You want to present child brides as some sort of commentary about the terrible character of their guardians and husbands? Don’t have your best king - who previously refused to consummate his marriage to his own sister-wife on account of her age - and his good queen arrange a marriage for their minor daughter. Don’t have the fact that Rodrik Arryn had loved Daella for years before marrying her at 16 count as something in his favor when that means he was in love with a literal child. Don’t have numerous kindly-written characters do the exact same thing that you claim indicates awfulness and cruelty. Also, also, don’t have your characters treat the rape of a 13-year-old girl as her fault. F&B is utterly unsympathetic to Coryanne Wylde despite acknowledging that the man who slept with her was in his thirties, but Coryanne is blamed by everyone for “her shame” and her subsequent assaults are treated as something she brought on herself. Don’t tell me that a boy kissed Daella against her will in those exact words, then not only act like she was unreasonable for disliking him, but make no mention of any kind of rebuke made to a kid who forced himself on a royal princess. Don’t normalise child brides and build a society that enables, encourages and accepts the rape of pubescent and prepubescent kids as par for the course.

Depiction of female sexuality and queerness:

Let me preface this section by saying that I’m not a medievalist or a historian so my knowledge of the medieval era comes from what research I did on the subject, all of which makes me scratch my head over the fascination with female sexuality present in Gyldayn’s writing. This goes beyond cases where a woman’s sexuality was a part of events that would typically be noted by a historian to include random tangents about a lady’s sexuality for pretty much no reason. That strikes me as really weird because that information is relayed to us in the form of a history book, and female sexuality wasn’t typically that widely scrutinized, recorded and commented on. Moreover, the way their sexuality is used in the narrative leaves a bad taste in my mouth, especially when it comes to talk of their queerness - the narrative gives us very little in means of a relationship between two queer women, but uses their sexual orientation to either undermine or negatively frame these women.

Queen Rhaena Targaryen is a prime example of how a woman’s queerness gets used to depict her negatively in the text. It doesn’t get any clearer than her sexuality being referred to as a beast through Frankly Farman’s Four-Headed Beast epithet that just so happens to describe four queer women. It might be argued that Franklyn is not necessarily the voice of the text and so his view is only reflective of him and not of a textual problem, but the problem is that the text never really bothers to challenge Franklyn’s misogynistic and queerphobic view. In fact, it appears as if the text is at best excusing and at worst exonerating Franklyn, first by repeatedly talking about how condescending and dismissive Rhaena’s companions were towards Androw as if to suggest that Franklyn was correct to dislike them and label them as beasts, then by having Rhaena’s confrontation with Franklyn after Elissa’s escape condemned unanimously by Jaehaerys and his court as Rhaena’s fault. Jaehaerys might have taken issue with how Myles Smallwood talked about Rhaena but he certainly did not contradict his assessment of her or Franklyn’s own misogynistic response to her. It’s Rhaena who gets the explicit censure while also being painted as wrong and borderline hysterical.

Too, I dislike the way that Rhaena’s performance of her formal dynastic role seems to have been tied to her sexuality by the text, an implication which exists in the pointed reporting of Rhaena’s rudeness and emotional absence during a royal progress until her current favorite was summoned to her side, and in how Jaehaerys seems to blame Rhaena for bringing Elissa to Dragonstone in a segment that carries a suggestion that Rhaena’s sexuality and her love for Elissa undermined her governance of Dragontone. More damning is the sense of vagueness with which Gyldayn talks about Rhaena’s companions that were killed by Androw. While the term “favorite” is consistently used when the text wants to indicate a lover rather than a friend, Gyldayn has used the term “companion” to indicate a relationship too - more clearly in the case of Jeyne Arryn and her dear companion Jessamyn Redfort - so for him to call those killed by Androw Rhaena’s companions and including two of her acknowledged favorites among them, Gyldayn (and Androw himself in his final conversation with Rhaena) seem to be implying that Rhaena was involved with all of them. Even the 14-year-old Cassella Staunton and Lianne Velaryon? It’s unclear but that vagueness introduces a problematic dimension to Rhaena’s sexuality that certainly did not need to be there and that does nothing for the story.

The story of the Maiden of the Vale carries similar elements to Rhaena, only clearer. While the story provides us with an entirely legitimate concern of how men try to leech power from powerful women as a possible motive for Lady Jeyne’s refusal of marriage, she is still the subject of rumors about being a lesbian, or alternatively, someone trading sexual favors from the 15-year-old Jace for her political and military support which links her political action to her sexuality, of which we only get a last-minute confirmation on her deathbed. The rumors about Lady Jeyne can certainly stand as an example of in-universe misogyny, but it’s undeniable that the story both builds on and asserts a prevalent misogynistic assumption that a women who doesn’t want a husband must be a lesbian (which strikes me as a modern stereotype), while linking refusal of marriage to a man to exploitative behavior.

Also a modern stereotype is the assumption that two gender non-conforming women who share quarters and appear to be close must be lovers which is present in the thinly-veiled suggestion that Sabitha Frey and Alysanne Blackwood were involved. It’s immensely strange to base such a deduction on the fact that the two ladies shared a tent and were always in each other’s company when they were the only two women in an army of men, especially in a society where a highborn lady sharing her quarters with friends, companions and ladies-in-waiting is a common occurrence. I can see where people would think Lady Sabitha or Black Aly unnatural or even grotesque in the way Brienne is treated in the main novels for being gender non-conforming and/or ugly/not traditionally beautiful, but making the jump to “well, they must be queer” for keeping company with each other and sharing a tent when surrounded by men is not a typical sentiment of the medieval era as far as I know.

This, however, is a symptom of how Sabitha Frey in particular is portrayed in the narrative. She is a fairly prominent figure throughout the Dance and yet we don’t really get much in the way of a characterization for her. She gets called merciless and grasping in passing with no elaboration as to why she is thought to be so and when she gets a moment of close examination, Gyldayn uses it to tell us of how she “would sooner ride than dance, wore mail instead of silk, and was fond of killing men and kissing women”. I don’t know if Martin was trying to lean into or affirm our negative perception of House Frey, but Sabitha’s sexuality and gender performance seem to be the focal point of her characterization so assigning uncorroborated negative attributes to her does not come across in the best light.

Another aspect of how badly this books deal with queerness comes from a certain parallel I noticed between the stories of Saera Targaryen, Baela Targaryen and three girls from the Maiden’s Day Ball, the three Jeynes as Gyldayn calls them - Jeyne Smallwood, Jeyne Mooton and Jeyne Merryweather. In all three stories, there is an offhand mention (or an obscure insinuation in Baela’s case) of how each of them had sex or at least experimented sexually with other women that is simply there to frame the scandalous wanton behavior of each of them. Saera’s relationship with Perianne Moore and Alys Turnberry, Baela’s possible involvement with the twin brothel workers, and the three Jeynes’ supposed visits to the Street of Silk are mentioned casually and aren’t treated like any kind of a meaningful connection but as a sensationalized scandal that adds color to the story through its eroticism. That treats wlw relationships as an embellishment that solely exist to decorate the narrative. It’s fetishizing and dehumanizing in the way it treats these women and their relationships as merely objects of scandal.

Portrayal of women’s relationships:

This is one part where I think Martin made an attempt to in try to fix the solitary woman issue that’s been pointed out repeatedly in the main novels – how we keep hearing about male friendships and male relationships that frame and sometimes drive the narrative whereas women are either mysteriously solitary figures or have their friendships go unexplored/framed negatively. Queen Alysanne and her companions are where Martin succeeds in fixing this problem to some extent; everywhere else..... Eh.

I’ve argued before that the problem in Martin’s writing of female friendships isn’t just that he gives precious few of them, especially compared to the male friendships that drive the narrative; it’s in the overwhelmingly negative representation of female friendships. The majority of female friendships (and that includes familial relationships) are mired in conflict and negative associations across the series, and this book is no difference. Women’s relationships are often defined by jealousy, competitiveness over a man or rooted dislike. Maris Baratheon is so jealous that Aemond Targaryen chose one of her sisters over her that she challenges his manhood and, in Gyldayn’s eyes, provokes Aemond into attacking Lucaerys Velaryon in a plot that is both unnecessary and contrived so as to blame a woman girl for a man’s actions. Cassandra Baratheon spreads a false rumor that her sister Ellyn asked Aegon III if he liked her breasts during the Maiden’s Day Ball, and that’s when we’re not spending time on rumors about how she may have been involved in young Jaehaera’s death because she blamed the little queen for her woes, which are that she didn’t get to marry Aegon II and become queen, and that she lost her place as the heir to Storm’s End due to her little brother’s birth. Oh yeah, I can certainly see how that is a natural line of thought. Cassandra then goes on to be involved in the plotting against Daenaera Velaryon and the Rogares.

Saera Targaryen is disliked by every single one of her sisters (but it should be noted that both Aemon and Baelon were amused by her). The question of the possible motive of Jaehaera Targayen’s suicide includes her being jealous of Baela’s pregnancy (Jaehaera was ten). Rhaenys and Visenya’s relationship is largely defined by a rivalry over Aegon. Rhaena and Alysanne’s relationship is afflicted by tension, resentment and blame. Lucinda Penrose’s jealousy of Daenaera Velaryon having the queenship she coveted not only led her to participate in the plot against her, but made her quite randomly blame Daenaera for no man wanting her, implying she was attacked because of Daenaera which is not true. Priscella Hogg wanted Larra Rogare dead so that Prince Viserys could marry her.

Why do female relationships need to be defined by the presence of a guy, GRRM? What’s up with the downright illogical motivations of some of them? Why is it that the only positive relationship a queen has with her ladies on-page is that of Queen Alysanne?

GRRM also has a frustrating tendency to link female friendships to their sexuality or introduce a sexual component to those friendships. In the main novels, we have Cersei’s rape of Taena Merryweather and Arianne’s youthful sexual experimentation with Tyene Sand as notable examples; in F&B, Rhaena Targaryen is the first woman who gets meaningful relationships with named women and it’s suggested that many of them were her lovers (Rhaenys, Visenya and Alyssa Velaryon are said to have had lady companions as well but we barely get anything in the way of an actual relationship with any of them, or, you know, names for them). Sabitha Frey and Aly Blackwood gravitate to each other and share a tent during the Dance and we immediately get a reference to a potential sexual involvement. Coryanne Wylde, in one of the many versions of A Caution For Young Girls, is said to have thought of Alysanne as her own sister, with the reported rumors being either that she “taught” Alysanne’s husband how to pleasure Alysanne or that she taught Alysanne herself alongside Jaehaerys how to have sex. Saera had sexual intercourse with her two female companions. It is as if two women can not be friends without sex being a part of it.

So basically, men get to have friends and meaningful positive relationships in asoiaf while women get sexually-tinged friendships or have their relationships revolve around squabbling over a man. With the exception of Queen Alysanne and her companions, the vast majority of female relationships are either negative or framed negatively by the text.

Broken mothers, broken women:

Grief is a woman’s kryptonite in this book, especially if she is a mother. Gender is used as a default explanation for why several women break and freeze after a child’s death, often as a prelude to their stories tapering off till their death. While certainly understandable in the context of the tragedies they face, I question why it’s always the women who break down, rend their garments and retreat from public life, whereas men react to similar tragedies with anger, pursuit of vengeance and singular political focus. I also question why Martin uses a mother’s grief so often as a convenient plot device to force passivity, silence and absence on his female characters to fit the requirements of the plot, even when their previous (and sometimes even later) characterization and actions fly against that abstract frozen moment of time they experience due to their grief. Why do you keep having women freeze in their grief, Martin?

The tale of the Dance of the Dragons is not new to F&B but in the stories of Rhaenyra and Helaena appears a clear gendered approach to the depiction of women’s grief over their children that is echoed in several other places. This is somewhat more apparent during the Dance for how Rhaenyra and Helaena’s reactions can be contrasted against that of Daemon and Aegon II, both of whom reacted to the death of Lucerys and young Jaehaerys respectively by swearing vengeance, exacting a bloody toll in revenge and pushing their political and military campaigns. But while their husbands reacted, Rhaenyra and Helaena suffered from crippling depression that forced them out of the war narrative entirely, even to the detriment of their respective factions as underlined by the repetitive remarks about how additional draconic power might have affected the course of the war. That Dreamfyre was rendered useless to the greens because of Helaena’s inability to ride due to her depression is pointed out repeatedly, whereas Rhaenyra’s seclusion and grief over Luke’s death and her absence from her own war council is blamed for Princess Rhaenys flying to Rook’s Nest alone and getting killed. The narrative even accentuates how detrimental Rhaenyra’s absence might have been to her own war efforts in having Corlys Velaryon blame her for Rhaenys’ death, and again in having Jace recruit dragonseeds to increase the black’s draconic power at a time when one of their dragonriders is indisposed.

In the case of both sisters, a mother’s grief is largely used as a way to get a dragonrider out of the picture, at least for a period of time in Rhaenyra’s case - a gendered approach that adds to how Rhaenyra’s pregnancy and childbirth, both clearly gendered, were also used as a convenient plot device to sideline her in the early days of the Dance. In the words of Gyldayn, “[t]he death of her son Lucerys had been a crushing blow to a woman already broken by pregnancy, labor, and stillbirth”

Mother’s grief is also used to explain how sisters Rhaena and Alysanne retreated from public life after the loss of their daughters. Rhaena leaves Dragonstone for Tarth then Harrenhal, turning into a ghost herself as she settles in the haunted castle after refusing to return to her seat on Dragonstone or have anything to do with court for years till her death (Rhaena had previously stopped governing Dragonstone and retreated to her chambers to mourn her companions as well), while Alysanne takes herself from court to Dragonstone after Gael’s death, a more acute echo of her self-imposed isolation following Princess Daenerys’ death, and the offhand mention of how her four youngest children’s marital plans brought her so much pain and grief that she considered joining the silent sisters. It just so happens that two of the four (i.e, Daella and Viserra) had died at the time and Jaehaerys persisted in pushing Alysanne to consider Saera dead as well. Alysanne even tells Jaehaerys point-blank that she is going to Dragonstone to grieve for her dead daughters.

But two exceptions exist to this trend: Alyssa Velaryon and Alicent Hightower. Alyssa is a character that defies the broken mother trope by being a main architect of Jaerhaerys I’ accession and the survival of the Targaryen dynasty after her two eldest sons died horrifically. She survived the loss of three children and estrangement from her surviving three. She could have been a sound critique to the broken woman trope, if only the narrative allowed her to stay that active dynamic figure she was instead of trying to minimize her. Despite her defiance of the trend of how a mother’s grief leads to depressed seclusion, the narrative still managed to sideline Alyssa by having her inexplicably choose a self-imposed confinement for the remainder of Jaehaerys’ regency after her confrontation with Rogar Baratheon in the small council. Not only is this undeniably minimizing to Alyssa’s character, it flies in the face of all her prior characterization. This is the woman who survived the loss of two sons by horrifying means but soldiered on and showed tremendous political ability, who dealt with estrangement from her surviving children but continued to rule the realm throughout it, who stood up bravely in the face of her husband’s dehumanizing attack. But I’m supposed to buy that Rogar Baratheon broke her? Come on now. To make things worse, this act of isolation is the last thing we get of Alyssa’s own agency.

Alicent Hightower is another case of someone who defied the broken mother trope by being a steady political presence throughout the Dance, even after only Aegon II remained to her. Even after Aegon’s death, Alicent still tried to influence the court by trying to get her granddaughter Jaehaera to kill Aegon III. But when the time came for Alicent to depart the narrative, GRRM chose to fall on his tried trope of the broken depressed woman. For the last year of her life, Alicent's time in confinement was spent weeping, ripping her clothes to pieces and talking to herself. Alicent’s deteriorating mental state might not seem unreasonable in the context of her circumstances, but it certainly boggles the mind that she is presented to us as slowly losing her wits while imprisoned in her own apartments at the same time that the horrifically tortured and maimed Tyland Lannister is said to have kept his sharp wit through his harsh imprisonment in the black cells, so Alicent’s gentle imprisonment in a familiar place with servants and septas attending her somehow took a worse toll than Tyland’s residence in inhumane conditions where he was tortured regularly. Too, Alicent's final image in the text is wretched and undignified which is striking compared to how Grand Maester Orwyle is presented as a hero during the course of the Winter Fever and a vital source of information on the Dance through the confessions he wrote while imprisoned.

So even in the cases that the broken mother trope is challenged, GRRM still uses the same element of seclusion and depression to define a woman’s fate. It has not escaped me that our final look at both Alyssa and Alicent depicts them in ghastly conditions.

Treatment of women’s voices:

Fire and Blood’s handling of women’s voices is hit-and-miss, with the misses outpacing the hits by miles. It goes without saying that not everyone in the narrative can or should have a voice so it’s not that I expect every single woman that ever appears to have one, but some of the omissions are really glaring. Take Jocelyn Baratheon for example. She was a sister/surrogate daughter to Jaehaerys and Alysanne, wife to Aemon and mother to the fiery Princess Rhaenys.... and we know almost nothing about her, leaving her function to the story to be about her motherhood and her fertility. Pages upon page of this book is dedicated to discussing women’s sexual lives but I guess the life and experiences of a court-raised onetime crown princess was unimportant to warrant a mention. Jocelyn existed to birth Rhaenys then promptly disappeared from the narrative after her angered reaction to Baelon being named heir over Rhaenys and her unborn child.

More acutely, the narrative has a bad tendency to have notable women suddenly fall silent or completely disappear at times when they should be present and outspoken, if it’s not actively punishing them for having a voice altogether, while their male counterparts get pages detailing their opinions and their reactions. The broken mother/woman trope discussed above contributes heavily to this problem in presenting a distinct sense of narrative-enforced quietness that befalls these characters once the narrative decides that their voices are no longer necessary for plot development. Princess Rhaena Targaryne is pretty much turned into a ghost on the outskirts of the story from Aerea’s death till her own. Her mother Alyssa gets turned into a nonentity not long after her fight with Rogar Baratheon in the small council. Alyssa’s retreat from public court is the last time she is given a voice of her own. The report that both the former Hand and the Queen Regent were “wounded and silent” in the aftermath of that showdown really struck me, because for all that Rogar and Alyssa fell silent, it’s Rogar that the narrative chose to restore voice to, despite the fact that, unlike Alyssa, Rogar’s silence was a result of his own hubris and thirst for power. For him and Alyssa to be treated as if on equal foot by the narrative in the first place and for their silence and “wounds” to be framed as similar is preposterous, but what’s even more preposterous is the fact that Rogar gets afforded pages to detail his reconciliation with Jaehaerys and even a transcript of their meeting, whereas Alyssa gets one paragraph in which the focus is on Jaehaerys’ own thoughts and we hear nothing from her; instead her thoughts and feelings are posited by Grand Maester Benifer.

From there on out, we don’t hear from Alyssa Velaryon, only of her. The narrative deliberately silences Alyssa and substitutes her voice with the suppositions and opinions of the men around her. It’s Jaehaerys and Rogar who get voices in Alyssa’s own marital reconciliation but we don’t hear about what she thought about it. We don’t know what Alyssa thought about either of her pregnancies or the health risk they posed. We do hear about Rogar and Benifer’s happiness and Barth’s concerns though. Even when she lay dying and arguments were made about her and her child’s chances of survival, Alyssa is denied a voice. The one statement we get from her is immediately dismissed by Gyldayn as likely not happening and we’re left with the reactions of those around her, Jaehaerys and Rogar, Alysanne and Rhaena. But we never find out what Alyssa thought or wanted. Instead, her narrative purpose lies in her fertility.

At least Rhaena voices a condemnation for the way women’s bodies are callously used by men in Westeros in a statement that is contextually very powerful but that is, once again, undermined by the narrative not too long after. It is both outrageous and unnecessary to have Jaehaerys himself ignore such a powerful statement years later in a plot that also dismisses Alysanne’s clearly expressed wishes and borderline silences her since Jaehaerys’ objection to her reasoning is voiced to Grand Maester Elysar rather than Alysanne herself, and she isn’t even given the chance to give the counter-argument that, you know, the mother that Jaehaerys is citing died because her husband only cared about having a child. Queen Alysanne may be the most prominent, most well-rounded female voice in F&B, but that does not stop the narrative from robbing her of her voice when it wants to. I certainly have not forgotten how she falls silent on the matter of her granddaughter Aemma’s marriage, or how there is so much discussion about the tragic fates of Alysanne’s children all around that conspicuous quietness. Neither have I forgotten how there is a random comment about how Alysanne contempled joining the silent sisters due to the pain and grief she suffered in the matter of her youngest four’s marital prospects.

Then there is Maris Baratheon and the convoluted needless story that does nothing but attempt to shift blame off Aemond for Lucerys Velaryon’s murder and lay it on Maris, then have her literally silenced as a punishment, whether that’s through being consigned to the silent sisters or the rumor that she had her tongue removed beforehand. Maris exists to be scapegoated and silenced, her forced silence a penalty for a man’s violent tendencies.

Going back a little in history to Aegon’s conquest gets us a few more queens who got silenced by the narrative. I’ve talked before about how Argella Durrandon’s fate stands as a unique abnormality in the history of the rebellion and how her forceful loss of voice was the last we hear of her in the narrative as the focus thereafter shifts to Orys and his own actions and behavior. Similarly, the circumstances of Marla Sunderland’s deposing bears uncomfortable parallels to Argella’s own: while not sexually humiliating like Argella’s, Marla had her voice violently stripped away when her tongue was pulled out before she was sequestered to an order that takes women’s voices away in the name of piety. That Argella and Marla were the only ones to suffer that literal loss of voice in the history of the rebellion (while Rhaenys and Visenya get their voices take away by the narrative itself since both inexplicably vanish from the story despite being physically in the area right before Argella and Marla were deposed) makes it very much about their gender.

Of course there is always the argument that it’s not only women who had their tongues ripped out or got silenced throughout the narrative, and while that is true, they were the only ones during the rebellion to receive that pointed stripping of voice by men, including Marla’s own brother. Moreover, it’s really glaring that this violation was specifically a punishment for defiance and daring to claim power. The violence visited on Argella and Marla was unnecessary for plot development, weirdly personal in a clearly gendered way, and done exclusively by men for the benefit of men as a punishment to these women for having the audacity to have agency and power in their own right.

Death by childbed

In times of peace especially, it was not uncommon for a man to outlive the wife of his youth, for young men most oft perish upon the battlefield, young women in the birthing bed.

Well, perhaps women wouldn’t die that often in the birthing bed if they weren’t getting pregnant as young as 12. Just saying.

This is another recurring problem in Martin’s writing that’s been broadly criticized for being too present in the narrative. It intersects with the problem of child brides, and the Dead Ladies Club, though it’s not only limited to them.

Death in childbirth is an inherently gendered death that is used as a rather convenient way to kill off female characters across the series. Often these women’s relevance in the text amounts to their fertility and the children they bore, and they are used as either a vessel to deliver the true important characters, or a part of the setting around a male character. By my count, F&B has 12 women dead by childbirth.

The unnamed wife of Edmyn Tully. Exists to explain why her husband resigned his seat on the Small Council

Queen Jeyne Westerling. Exists as a part of framing Maegor’s political decline and her function in the story is explicitly solely about her fertility.

Queen Alyssa Velaryon.

Princess Alyssa Targaryen.

Princess Daella Targaryen.

Queen Aemma Arryn. No characterization. Narrative function lies in having Rhaenyra.

Lady Laena Velaryon. Afforded scant characterization. Dies for the convenience of the plot. Main function is having Baela and Rhaena Targrayen.

The unnamed fourth wife of Jasper Wylde. The first three may or may not have died of “exhaustion” as well, since the man sired twenty nine children on four wives.

Lady Arra Norrey. Childhood companion and wife to Cregan Stark. Dead giving birth to his son Rickon. That’s it. That’s all we know of her.

The unnamed daughter of Unwin Peake. She died in childbed aged 12. That’s the extent of her relevance.

Lady Floris Baratheon. Pretty, sweet, frivolous, dead.

Ormund Hightower’s unnamed wife. Only mentioned in the introduction of her successor, Samantha Hightower.

The main point of criticism here is that these women didn’t need to die in childbirth or complications from childbirth of all things. They didn’t need to be reduced to walking wombs or plot devices or set decorations. They didn’t need to be a side note tacked on to explain a quirky nickname. And they didn’t need to die for the male character’s angst or characterization.

“But the above is only reflective of Gyldayn’s misogyny, not an authorial problem”

I chose to address this argument at the conclusion of this post because I know that inevitably, the argument that the problem lies in the in-universe narrator’s bias rather than an authorial failure will come up. I’ve already seen it argued, by fans as well as Elio Garcia, that Gyldayn’s own misogyny and personal views account for the problems that many fans have criticized in the text. But that’s a paper shield. Ascribing every problematic element in the narrative to the in-universe characters is not good enough at this point. This argument is neither productive nor satisfactory, and it strikes me as a rather transparent and convenient way to shut down any critique leveled at Martin’s writing, or at the very least deviate it from its intended objective to tangle us in a debate about sexist narratives vs sexist societies.

But I will have that conversation because this distinction causes a lot of confusion over what’s an authorial problem and what’s not. Westeros is a misogynistic patriarchal society that systematically minimizes, marginalizes and dehumanizes women, but just because your society is sexist doesn’t mean that your narrative has to be. We see that in the main novels when characters like Catelyn, Asha, Brienne, Arya and many others have to contend with the limitations their society places on them and the prejudices leveled at them because of their gender, but the narrative does not validate that misogyny. It doesn’t discredit these women or treat them as an afterthought. Westeros may be biased against these women but the narrative isn’t. That is not the case with F&B because Martin chose to make our sole source of information on these women a deeply misogynistic man, which made his narrative deeply misogynistic as well by virtue of the narrative adopting Gyldayn’s biases and making them a defining aspect of the characters’ stories. That is a choice on Martin’s part, just like exaggerating Gyldayn’s misogyny to the point of minimizing the few instances of challenge the narrative attempts to offer is also a choice.

It wouldn’t have cost Martin anything to leave Alysanne’s condemnation of Jaehaerys and Rodrik Arryn’s role in Daella’s death to stand without undermining it. It wouldn’t have cost Martin anything to let Alyssa Velaryon and Alicent Hightower remain as a deconstruction of the broken mother trope, instead of falling back on tired ideas that build on breaking women’s spirits down to their graves. It wouldn’t have cost Martin anything to have Rhaena’s powerful statement about how men use women’s bodies to their graves to stand without undercutting it via Jaehaerys (who once refused to consummate his marriage out of concern for Alysanne but apparently have grown to not care that much about her health in later years). Those rare cases of pushback are right there; they allow for both the characterization of the author-character and the worldbuilding of the society to stand but offer a critique of the misogyny shown instead of just leaving it present and unchallenged as a set decoration. Even allowing for Gyldayn’s misogyny, Martin could have found a way to elevate some of the problematic aspects of this book. He didn’t. He chose to undermine his challenges instead.

I find that the idea that Gyldayn is the one who should be blamed for what this book is rather than GRRM such a weird argument to make. Gyldayn is Martin’s creation; he does not exist independently from Martin. If Gyldayn is a sex-obsessed pervert, it’s because Martin chose to write him that way. If Gyldayn is a misogynistic victim-blaming abuse apologist, it’s because Martin chose to write him that way. It goes without saying that it’s not inherently problematic to write a character with these characteristics, but the problem emerges when that character is an author whose lens our knowledge of every single woman is filtered through. We’re not likely to have any information about these historical characters from any other source. The best we can hope for is a throwaway line in the main novels that wouldn’t give us much in the way of personhood for these characters. In writing Gyldayn as he did, Martin crippled our knowledge of a large number of women in Westeros history and denied them any chance of ever becoming realized characters in our eyes. So why did Martin choose to write Gyldayn as the avatar of every patriarchal bias in existence? What is the narrative gain in having your narrator be so interested in the sex lives of teenage girls? What did GRRM do to push back against Gyldayn’s misogyny? Why is Gyldayn’s characterization prioritized over the personhood of so many women? Because Gyldayn’s characterization is only relevant insofar as his function as a vehicle for authorial exposition. The narrative and the readers gain nothing by him being so painfully misogynistic. In fact, this is what is used to cut any attempts by the narrative to challenge the rampant misogyny in the text at the knees.

Furthermore, the argument that that Gyldayn’s prejudices shouldn’t be taken for the narrative’s own and thus as an authorial problem falls apart when you consider how many of the issues I discussed above exists in the main novels too, when there is no Gyldayn to blame for the narrative’s misogyny. Also, it should be noted that Gyldayn in-universe misogyny doesn’t even account for all the problems of the text. Gyldayn isn’t the one who made Jaehaerys ignore Alysanne’s wishes not to have more children. Gyldayn isn’t the one who made Septon Barth denigrate Alyssa Velaryon as someone whose main objective was to be liked. Gyldayn certainly isn’t the one who decided to kill off 12 women in childbirth, or cover F&B with child brides. Gyldayn isn’t the one who decided that multiple women needed to isolate themselves to grieve. And Gyldayn might have been the one who reported on Coryanne Wylde, but he sure as hell wasn’t the one who created her story. Those are authorial choices made by GRRM.

I’ve seen it argued that F&B is supposed to be some kind of critique of how misogyny colors history but I disagree vehemently with that notion. You can’t lean into old sexist tropes and call it a critique. You can’t put an inordinate focus on women’s sexual lives to the exclusion of their own personhood and call it a critique. I know that that depiction is not endorsement, but it is not a critique either. Depiction is not inherently a condemnation. There is no inherent challenge in events just being there - the narrative needs to make some effort to push back against them to make it clear that something is being called out. F&B rarely challenges the misogyny permeating it, and when it does, the challenge is promptly undermined, dismissed or ignored.

[nineteensixtieschikadee]

Rhaegar is in no way the most important character of ASOIAF. A character who died before the story cannot be the true hero or the main protagonist or whatever you want to call it. Also, saying that Ned and Rhaegar are the two sides of Jon is silly. It ignores Lyanna. If Jon is the song of ice and fire, then Lyanna is ice and Rhaegar is fire. Replacing Lyanna with Ned is sexist. The mothers are absent enough in the story as it is.

🤦🤦🤦 I’m assuming that you’ve come here because you stumbled upon my post: JON SNOW AND HIS TWO FATHERS: A BALANCE BETWEEN ICE AND FIRE. I’m not gonna bother arguing, but I totally 100% recommend you to read the ASOIAF NOVELS. Because there you can read Jon’s pov’s and see for yourself why Jon has equal part’s of Rhaegar’s traits, as he does of Ned’s. (And Lyanna’s.)

Let’s talk about your first point, first. RHAEGAR IS CONSIDERED THE REAL MAIN CHARACTER OF ASOIAF. Grrm has said it himself too, he’s always wanted to write a story where the main character dies before the actual story begins. And who do you think that is? I’m going to assume that YOU’RE A CASUAL SHOW WATCHER only. Because even the BIGGEST Rhaegar Anti’s who HAVE READ THE BOOKS, will admit that Rhaegar is literally THE MOST IMPORTANT CHARACTER in the Ice and Fire Universe, or at least in the whole ASOIAF NOVELS. Just because the character is long dead from the actual story, doesn’t mean the character isn’t important or isn’t the TRUE PROTAGONIST. The show literally did a SHITTY JOB of conveying Rhaegar’s character that it is so easy to see him as a crazy psycho asshole who left his wife and children for a younger woman. Not the kind of protagonist you’d want to read about. But !BOOK Rhaegar was FAR MORE COMPLEX than that of his show counterpart. Because in the books, Rhaegar actually cared for his family. For Elia and their children. He LOVED Elia as a friend. They had a good, and mutual, and respectful relationship, but also a COMPLEX one. I probably didn’t do a good job explaining Rhaegar’s intentions and how that affects Jon in my previous post. But the reason why Rhaegar is CONSIDERED the real main character in the GOT universe, is because HIS ACTIONS had set forth ALMOST EVERY SINGLE MAJOR CHARACTER ARC IN THE ASOIAF NOVELS. And even up to the 5th book of asoiaf, HIS ACTIONS ARE STILL CAUSING THE RIPPLE AFFECT 14 YEARS LATER. (20 years in the show.) The Rebellion started because of the Mad King. Even before Lyanna was “kidnapped,” everyone was plotting to overthrow Aerys and put Rhaegar on the Throne. Rhaegar’s actions was the one that TRIGGERED the actual actions for the characters of Robert, Ned, etc. And exactly how did it come to this? Because Rhaegar believed in the Azor Ahai prophecy. Like Jon, Rhaegar IGNORED the “smaller problems,” and instead LOOKED AT THE BIGGER PICTURE. His motivations to bring forth Azor Ahai is what lead to his actions, which lead to Robert’s Rebellion, which lead to the events of Game of Thrones. It’s kinda like saying, “the ends justify the means.” It was either “save the world” from the threat up North, or DIE because the people failed to come together to fight them. Because of Rhaegar’s actions to fulfill this prophecy, Lyanna was “kidnapped,” and then Brandon died, so Ned had to marry Cat to gain the alliance of the Tullys. Which then lead to the BIRTH OF THE STARK CHILDREN. And then because of Rhaegar’s actions, Robert started a war to win Lyanna back, which lead to the sac of Kings Landing. Which lead to Tywin betraying Aerys. Which lead to the deaths of Elia and their children, which lead to the exile of Daenerys and Viserys, which lead to the death of Aerys, which lead to the coronation of Robert, which lead to Cersei marrying Robert, which then lead Varys supporting “Aegon (Young Griff). And then it eventually lead back to the VERY BEGINNING OF THE START OF THE SERIES. It lead to Ned adopting Jon. And I’m sure you’re smart enough to see where else Rhaegar’s actions brought the other characters. Yes, Rhaegar may have not been “a part” of the series or influenced the lives “PERSONALLY” of all the major players, but you’d be stupid to assume that Rhaegar had no importance or impact on the story being told now. You don’t have to be alive to have an impact on a story. That’s like saying Martin Luther King JR. didn’t have an impact on ending racism because HE’S LONG DEAD. (Yeah lol, even that doesn’t make sense. So why say the same thing about Rhaegar?) Let’s also not downplay the reasons behind Rhaegar’s motivations. Because the Azor Ahai prophecy in the books ISN’T JUST a prophecy. IT’S THE ENTIRE BACKBONE OF THE STORY AT AND BEYOND THE WALL. The EVENTS INVOLVING AZOR AHAI is considered a REAL event that took place thousands of years before the story began. And we can assume that it was real, because the White Walkers are real. MAGIC IS REAL. And it is slowly coming back because the dragons are back. Here’s a really nice video and analysis to support the claim that Rhaegar is INDEED the protagonist of ASOIAF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrhqmMRv1gQ And NO. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A HERO TO BE THE PROTAGONIST. NO ONE IN GAME OF THRONES IS A “HERO.” JUST MORALLY GRAY CHARACTERS. 

Now for your second point, I just wanna say first, how dare you assume that I’m being sexist because I’m apparently “replacing” Lyanna with Ned. 😂😂😂 Lmao excuse me but LYANNA IS MY GURL. After Arya, SHE IS MY FAVORITE FEMALE STARK. LYANNA, JON, AND ARYA ARE MY FAVORITE STARKS. And I would NEVER degrade Lyanna’s importance in Jon’s story. Lyanna is SINGLE-HANDEDLY THE MOST IMPORTANT WOMAN IN JON’S NARRATIVE/LIFE JUST AFTER ARYA. Even if he doesn’t know it yet. And that is because Jon’s whole identity crises comes from not knowing that Lyanna was his mother. When you read my post, did you not see me making comparisons between Jon, Rhaegar, Ned AND LYANNA?? Because I’m pretty sure I mentioned Lyanna a couple of times. And you’re right. Lyanna represents ice, and Rhaegar represents fire. And Jon represents the balance between those two. But there are a lot of others ways to interpret ice and fire as well. Not just Lyanna and Rhaegar. For example while Rhaegar and Lyanna literally represent Fire and Ice personified, Jon and Daenerys can mirror to represent Ice and Fire figuratively. Or if you’re a Jonsa shipper, you could also say Sansa represents the fire, and Jon the ice? Or if you want Jonrya as they are a direct parallel of Rhaegar and Lyanna, both Jon and Arya themselves represent Ice and Fire as well. So when I said Rhaegar and Ned were a balance between Ice and Fire, I meant it as ONE WAY to interpret ice and fire, from the million of other ways that it can be interpreted from. In that post, I was talking about the importance of Jon’s fathers, and how Ned’s honor and morals, BALANCES Rhaegar’s passion, intelligence and leadership. Which in turn makes Jon a POWERFUL, INTELLIGENT, AND HONORABLE PERSON WORTHY OF BECOMING KING. (Someone who isn’t corrupt like literally all the other candidates for the throne. Or idiotic, for that matter)

This is a long post, but I hope I answered your criticisms accordingly. As always, hit up those asoiaf books. They may be big and fat. But they’re easy, and worth the read. :)

[faketextsfromlastmight]

Best of tags #4

A compilation of my favorite reactions to this blog.

@kumaoftheforest on Mirio inheriting One for All : (Link)

I honestly feel like Mirio’s clothes would get blown off every time he’d us OFA

Best Jeanist could take him on as a sidekick: he repairs clothes, Mirio destroys them. Don’t forget to recycle, kids!

@utsushimi-camie on All for One being an illegal experiment on a live subject: (Link)

#this hilarious to me because i joke about quirk ethics laws all the time

Oh god, I would pay good money to watch a courtroom drama set in a super-powered universe. Can you imagine how busy the jurists must be in a society where people have different abilities yet supposedly are equal in the eyes of the law? They would have to write new rules whenever a new quirk manifested. Complete juridistical nightmare. I think Pixar’s “The Incredibles” kind of touched on that with citizens suing superheroes for destroying buildings while battling supervillains, but it’s framed as them being whiny. It’s a cop-out, in my opinion. The concept of superheroics is deeply problematic from a political and legal point of view, not to mention the issue of secret identities.

Granted, Horikoshi does seem to imply that the laws of BNHA’s universe are indeed complicated. There’s a lot of red tape in place to prevent people from using their quirks in key situations. Shinsou was not able to integrate the hero course because his quirk doesn’t work on robots, but one has to wonder if the entrance exam wasn’t planned to exclude people with mind-control quirks on design. It’s tough determining in which situations people ought to get robbed of their free will, so my guess is that U.A. High saved itself the headache and made sure people like Shinsou failed the exam. Shady.

It’s also apparent in the Stain arc when the police conveniently decides to cover up the way Todoroki, Iida and Midoriya illegally used their quirks. It’s completely absurd that these young people would be punished for arresting a serial killer, so law enforcement agrees to look the other way. But that implies they also do that in certain circumstances for some of their men, which has unfortunate implications. Do the policemen in BNHA’s universe routinely use their quirks even though they’re not allowed to? Urgh.

There are a LOT of things wrong with the superheroic system as it stands today. Gran Torino even admits that he got his hero license so he could use his quirk more freely and that he doesn’t do actual hero work. Apparently no one is supervizing him. The more you look at it, the more you realize that people like Endeavor and (early-series) Bakugou are not exceptions. They’re the extreme examples of the worst behaviors the system encourages.

@meowmeowmin on Todoroki trying to bond with a fly: (Link)

Flies only live for 24 hours

Don’t tell him that! Do you want the entire area to get frozen?

@bandanagiggle on Kaminari buying a vuvuzela: (Link)

Ms Joke sold it to him

The fiend! Worse part is, she told him to serenade Jirou with it.

@iputthepaininpainting​ on a Todoroki/Bakugou household wife swap: (Link)

Actually I can see this being very good. Bakugo's dad has a nice cup of tea w/ Todoroki's mom so they can talk about how much they love their sons while Mitsuki puts the fear of god in Endeavor!! Good stuff!!!

Let’s hope the children aren’t involved in this, actually. Shouto is very reserved so Mitsuki would always assume he’s sulking or hiding something. Bakugou’s constant temper tantrums would also be difficult for Rei to handle given her aversion to violence. Or maybe I’m being too harsh on Bakugou? He canonically knows she has mental problems, so I imagine he’d make an effort to be less abrasive around her.

That being said, Mitsuki may make Endeavor even worse. The last thing he needs to learn is how to replace his illegal, horrific abusive behavior with socially accepted, casual corporal punishment. Mitsuki is problematic but only insofar as the way she treats Bakugou is something society accepts. Bakugou is violent because he was raised in an environment where violence is a tolerated form of expression. The way she educates her son is terrible but it’s fair to remember that no one really taught her any better (not even her husband).

@pikazuku on Bakugou’s hug deception: (Link)

#This could go two ways#I don't know which one is the true route

When I wrote this I intended Bakugou to actually be sick. So he’s contaminating Deku on purpose and sparing Kirishima. It’s funnier that way, at least in my opinion.

@jukeydragon on Toga being the only girl in the League of Villains: (Link)

#but#uraraka#what bout magne?

I’m assuming you haven’t read the later chapters of the manga.

LIGHT SPOILERS FOR SEASON 4 OF “MY HERO ACADEMIA”:

Without explaining things in too much details, the League of Villains experience some changes in staff management to the point that Magne is no longer considered part of the League. That’s why Uraraka referred to Toga as “the only girl” in this post.

@pinkcandyphoenix on Midnight curing Eraserhead’s insomnia : (Link)

#Actually a Eraser head and midnight friendship would be really cute and wholesome#Bnha#I am tempted to write about it

As a dominatrix, Midnight is tough on crime and punishes any misbehavior in the strictest way imaginable. Eraserhead would definitely respect that. She falls into the same mold as Present Mic in that she looks like a buffoon but is actually very efficient and professional.

@hotforhandman on All For One being a better father figure than Shigaraki: (Link)

#😂😂😂 I don’t think afo is a good dad but this is funny

If All For One were a good dad, he would have told Tomura Shigaraki about chapstick. Joke aside, I do think that the worst aspects of Shigaraki’s personality (namely his petulance) were actually encouraged by All For One. He needs him to remain in a child-like state because his arrested development is deeply rooted in his devotion to his “Teacher”. The risk being that if Shigaraki matures, he might develop ideas of his own.

That’s probably why All For One is secretly satisfied to be in prison right now. Now that they’re separated, Shigaraki can grow as a leader without any risk of disagreeing with his mentor. In fact, his efforts to free All For One from prison will only make him more devoted. All For One needs Shigaraki to idealize him, not to see him for the piece of garbage he really is. Throughout the series we see that he actually remains pretty distant and communicates with Shigaraki through conference calls, which might be on design. He can’t let his pupil too close to him or the illusion of “good parenting” might be broken. The distance keeps Shigaraki yearning for his approval and affection.

@zerounitrgb on my answer to @eva-white-11‘s criticism: (Link)

I am... really tired of people interpreting everything as romantic/friendship. They didn’t choose their pairings, they stayed together because who splits up during an attack, and you’re right, Toko would probably go crazy for anyone that saved him and got hurt in the process. Not to mention Shouji is training to be a hero so he... you know... did his JOB.

Yes. That’s also why I have my own difficulties with Ochako/Bakugou and Todoroki/Yaoyorozu. I recognize that both boys acknowledged the girls were very good in combat and clever, but that’s not a compliment, that’s a fact. They’re just giving credit where credit is due. Although in Bakugou’s case Horikoshi was probably making a commentary on sexism (with Bakugou treating Ochako as an opponent first and a girl second), people tend to interpret them as him teasing a possible romantic connection. And that’s what unnerves him, actually; that our culture is so sexist that a man acknowledging a woman’s competence is automatically interpreted as romantic interest, because why would a guy compliment a girl on anything if he wasn’t trying to get into her pants?

My gripes end there. I actually like both ships, I just have issues with people presenting these interactions as “canonical” proof that Horikoshi is teasing anything romantic between these people. Characters compliment each other A LOT in “My Hero Academia”, it takes more than that to establish a relationship.

[achronologyofbits]

GOTY 2019

I wanted to write a personal Game of the Year list, but I realized I really didn’t play that many games that were new in 2019. So I’m ranking them, but it’s less a “top 10” and more a “10 games I played and how I felt about them.”  

10. Kingdom Hearts III

Kingdom Hearts III plays like a game from 2005.

I’m not sure I can fully articulate what I mean by that. Maybe I mean its combat is largely simplistic and button-mashy. Maybe I mean its rhythms of level traversal and cutscene exposition dumps are archaic and outdated. Maybe feeling like this game is a relic from another time is unavoidable, given how many years have passed since its first series entry.  

But there’s also something joyful and celebratory about it all — something kind of refreshing about a work that knows only a tiny portion of its players will understand all its references and lore and world-building, and just doesn’t care.

Despite all the mockery and memery surrounding its fiction, Kingdom Hearts’ strongest storytelling moments are actually pretty simple. They’re about the struggle to exist, to belong, and to define what those things mean for yourself. I think that’s why the series reaches the people it does.

Those moments make Kingdom Hearts III worth defending, if not worth recommending.

9. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Admittedly, I only played about 10-15 hours of this in 2019. Perhaps fittingly, that’s about the amount of time I originally spent on Dark Souls when it released in 2011. I bounced off, hard, because I didn’t understand what it was asking of me. Once I did — though, it has to be said, I needed other people to explain those expectations to me, because the game sure as hell didn’t — Dark Souls became an all-time favorite. And I’ve played every FromSoft game since then, and enjoyed them all. Until Sekiro.

Part of it is, again, down to expectation. Dark Souls trained its players on a certain style of combat: cautious movements, careful attention to spacing, committing to weighty attacks, waiting for counterattacks. In every game since then, FromSoft have iterated on those expectations in the same direction in an attempt to encourage players to be less cautious and more aggressive. The series moved from tank-heavy play in Dark Souls, to dual-wielding in DS2, to weapon arts and reworking poise in DS3, to the system of regaining health by attacking in Bloodborne.

In some ways, Sekiro is a natural continuation of this trend toward aggression, but in others, it’s a complete U-turn. Bloodborne eschewed blocking and prioritized dodging as the quickest, most effective defensive option. Sekiro does exactly the opposite. Blocking is always your first choice, parrying is essential instead of largely optional, and dodging is near useless except in special cases. FromSoft spent five games teaching me my habits, and it was just too hard for me to break them for Sekiro.

I have other issues, too — health/damage upgrades are gated behind boss fights, so grinding is pointless; the setting and story lack some of the creativity of the game’s predecessors; there’s no variety of builds or playstyles — but the FromSoft magic is still there, too. Nothing can match the feeling of beating a Souls-series boss. And the addition of a grappling hook makes the verticality of Sekiro’s level design fascinating.

I dunno. I feel like there’s more here I’d enjoy, if I ever manage to push through the barriers. Maybe — as I finally did with the first Dark Souls, over a year after its release — someday I will.

8. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

In December, my wife and I traveled to Newport Beach for a family wedding, and we stayed an extra day to visit Disneyland. As an early birthday present, Aubrey bought me the experience of building a lightsaber in Galaxy’s Edge. And the experience is definitely what you’re paying for; the lightsaber itself is cool, but it’s cool because it’s made from parts I selected, with a blade color I chose, and I got to riff and banter with in-character park employees while doing it. (“Can you actually read those?” one asked me in an awed voice, when I selected a lightsaber hilt portion adorned with ancient Jedi runes. “Not yet,” I told her. “We’ll see if the Force can teach me.”)

Maybe it’s because I just had that experience, but by far my favorite moment in Jedi: Fallen Order is when main character Cal Kestis overcomes his own fears and memories to forge his own lightsaber, using a kyber crystal that calls to him personally. It’s maybe the only part of the game that made me feel like a Jedi, in a way the hours of Souls-inspired lightsaber slashing didn’t.

I think that’s telling. And I think it’s because so much of Fallen Order is derivative of other works, both in the current canon of gaming and of Star Wars. That’s not to say it’s bad — the mélange of Uncharted/Tomb Raider traversal, combat that evokes Souls and God of War, and vaguely Metroid-y power acquisition and exploration mostly works — but it’s just a titch less than the sum of those parts.

Similarly, as a Star Wars story, it feels under-baked. There’s potential in exploring the period immediately after Order 66 and the Jedi purge, but you only see glimpses of that. And I understand the difficulty of telling a story where the characters succeed but in a way that doesn’t affect established canon, but it still seemed like there were a couple of missed opportunities at touching base with the larger Star Wars universe. (And the one big reference that does pop up at the end feels forced and unrealistic.)

When I got home from California, I took my lightsaber apart just to see how it all worked. Outside of the hushed tones and glowing lights of Savi’s Workshop, it seems a little less special. It’s still really cool…but I sort of wish I had had a wider variety of parts to choose from. And that I had bought some of the other crystal colors. Just in case.

That’s how I feel about Jedi: Fallen Order. I had fun with it. But it’s easier now to see the parts for what they are.

7. Untitled Goose Game

Aubrey and I first saw this game at PAX, at a booth which charmingly recreated the garden of the game’s first level. We were instantly smitten, and as I’ve introduced it to family and friends, they’ve all had the same reaction. When we visited my brother’s family in Florida over the holidays, my eight-year-old niece and nephew peppered me with questions about some of the more complex puzzles. Even my father, whose gaming experience basically topped out at NES Open Tournament Golf in 1991, gave it a shot.

I’m not sure I have a lot more to say here, other than a few bullet points:

1) I love that Untitled Goose Game is completely nonviolent. It would’ve been easy to add a “peck” option as another gameplay verb, another means of mischief. (And, from what I understand, it would be entirely appropriate, given the aggression of actual geese.) That the developers resisted this is refreshing.

2) I’m glad a game this size can have such a wide reach, and that it doesn’t have to be a platform exclusive.

3) Honk.

6. Tetris 99

Despite the number of hours I’ve spent playing games, and the variety of genres that time has spanned, I’m not much for competitive gaming. This is partially because the competitive aspect of my personality has waned with age, and partially because I am extremely bad at most multiplayer games.

The one exception to this is Tetris.

I am a Tetris GOD.

Of course, that’s an incredible overstatement. Now that I’ve seen real Ecstasy of Order, Grandmaster-level Tetris players, I realize how mediocre I am. But in my real, actual life, I have never found anyone near my skill level. In high school, I would bring two Game Boys, two copies of Tetris, and a link cable on long bus rides to marching band competitions, hoping to find willing challengers. The Game Boys themselves became very popular. Playing me did not.

Prior to Tetris 99, the only version of the game that gave me any shred of humility in a competitive sense was Tetris DS, where Japanese players I found online routinely handed me my ass. I held my own, too, but that was the first time in my life when I wasn’t light-years beyond any opponent.

As time passed and internet gaming and culture became more accessible, I soon realized I was nowhere near the true best Tetris players in the world. Which was okay by me. I’m happy to be a big fish in a small pond, in pretty much all aspects of my life.

Tetris 99 has given me a perfectly sized pond. I feel like I’m a favorite to win every round I play, and I usually finish in the top 10 or higher. But it’s also always a challenge, because there’s just enough metagame to navigate. Have I targeted the right enemies? Do I have enough badges to make my Tetrises hit harder? Can I stay below the radar for long enough? These aspects go beyond and combine with the fundamental piece-dropping in a way I absolutely love.

The one thing I haven’t done yet is win an Invictus match (a mode reserved only for those who have won a standard 99-player match). But it’s only a matter of time.  

5. Pokemon Sword/Shield

I don’t think I’ve played a Pokemon game through to completion since the originals. I always buy them, but I always seem to lose steam halfway through. But I finished Shield over the holidays, and I had a blast doing it.

Because I’m a mostly casual Pokeplayer, the decision to not include every ‘mon in series history didn’t bother me at all. I really enjoyed learning about new Pokemon and forcing myself to try moving away from my usual standards. (Although I did still use a Gyarados in my final team.)

As a fan of English soccer, the stadium-centric, British-flavored setting also contributed to my desire to see the game through. Changing into my uniform and walking onto a huge, grassy pitch, with tens of thousands of cheering fans looking on, really did give me a different feeling than battles in past games, which always seemed to be in weird, isolated settings.

I’m not sure I’ll push too far into the postgame; I’ve never felt the need to catch ‘em all. But I had a great time with the ones I caught.

4. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

I have a strange relationship with the Zelda series, especially now. They are my wife’s favorite games of all time. But I don’t know if I’ve ever actually sat down and beaten one since the original Link’s Awakening. Even with Breath of the Wild, which I adore, I was content to watch Aubrey do the heavy lifting. I know the series well, I’ve played bits of all of them, but most haven’t stuck with me.

Link’s Awakening has. I wrote a piece once about its existential storytelling and how it affected me as a child. I love the way the graphics in this remake preserve that dreamlike quality. It’s pretty much a re-skin of the original game, but the cutesy, toy-set aesthetic pairs well with the heavy material. If this is all a dream, whose dream is it? And when we wake up, what happens to it?

Truthfully, some of the puzzles and design decisions haven’t held up super well. Despite the fresh coat of paint, it definitely feels like a 25-year-old game. But I’m so glad this version exists.

Oh, and that solo clarinet in the Mabe Village theme? *Chef’s kiss*

3. Control

I actually haven’t seen a lot of the influences Control wears on its sleeve. I’ve never gone completely through all the episodes of the X-Files, Fringe, and Twin Peaks; I’m only vaguely familiar with the series of “creepypasta” fiction called SCP Foundation; and I have never endeavored to sit through a broadcast of Coast to Coast AM. I’m also unfamiliar with Remedy’s best-known work in the genre, Alan Wake. But I know enough about all those works to be able to identify their inspiration on the Federal Bureau of Control, Jesse Faden, and the Oldest House.

Control is an interesting game to recommend (which I do), because I’m not sure how much I really enjoyed its combat. For most of the game, it’s a pretty standard third-person shooter. You can’t snap to cover, which indicates you’re intended to stay on the move. This becomes even more obvious when you gain the ability to air dash and fly. But you do need to use cover, because Jesse doesn’t have much health even at the end of the game. So combat encounters can get out of hand quickly, and there’s little incentive to keep fighting enemies in the late game. Yet they respawn at a frustratingly frequent rate. The game’s checkpointing system compounds this — you only respawn at “control points,” which act like Souls-style bonfires. This leads to some unfortunately tedious runbacks after boss fights.

On the other hand, Jesse’s telekinesis power always feels fantastic, and varying your attacks between gunshots, thrown objects, melee, and mind controlling enemies can be frenetic fun. That all comes to a head in the game’s combat (and perhaps aesthetic?) high point, the Ashtray Maze. To say more would be doing a disservice. It’s awesome.

The rest of the gameplay is awesome, too — and I do call it “gameplay,” though unfortunately you don’t have many options for affecting the world beyond violence. The act of exploring the Oldest House and scouring it for bureaucratic case files, audio recordings, and those unbelievably creepy “Threshold Kids” videos is pure joy. The way the case files are redacted leaves just enough to the imagination, and the idea of a federal facility being built on top of and absorbed into a sort of nexus of interdimensional weirdness is perfectly executed. And what’s up with that motel? And the alien, all-seeing, vaguely sinister Board? So cool.

With such great worldbuilding, I did wish for a little more player agency. There are no real dialogue choices — no way to imbue Jesse with any character traits beyond what’s pre-written for her — and only one ending. This kind of unchecked weird science is the perfect environment for forcing the player into difficult decisions (what do we study? How far is too far? How do we keep it all secret?), and that just isn’t part of the game at all. Which is fine — Control isn’t quite an immersive sim like Prey, and it’s not trying to be. I just see some similarities and potential, and I wish they had been explored a little.

But Control’s still a fantastic experience, and in any other year, it probably would’ve been my number one pick. That’s how good these next two games are.

2. Outer Wilds

Honestly, this is the best game of 2019. But I’m not listing it as number one because I didn’t play most of it — Aubrey did. Usually we play everything together; even if we’re not passing a controller back and forth, one of us will watch while the other one plays. And that definitely happened for a large chunk of Outer Wilds. But Aubrey did make some key discoveries while I was otherwise occupied, so while I think it’s probably the best game, it’s not the one I personally spent the most time with.

The time I did spend, though? Wow. From the moment you wake up at the campfire and set off in search of your spaceship launch codes, it’s clear that this is a game that revels in discovery. Discovery for its own sake, for the furthering of knowledge, for the protection of others, for the sheer fun of it. Some games actively discourage players from asking the question, “Hey, what’s that over there?” Outer Wilds begs you to ask it, and then rewards you not with treasure or statistical growth, but with the opportunity to ask again, about something even more wondrous and significant.

There are so many memorable moments of discovery in this game. The discovery that, hey, does that sun look redder to you than it used to? The discovery that, whoa, why did I wake up where I started after seemingly dying in space? Your first trip through a black hole. Your first trip to the quantum moon. Your first trip to the weird, bigger-on-the-inside fog-filled heart of a certain dark, brambly place. (Aubrey won’t forget that any time soon.)

They take effort, those moments. They do have to be earned, and it isn’t easy. Your spaceship flies like it looks: sketchy, taped together, powered by ingenuity and, like, marshmallows, probably. Some of the leaps you have to make — both of intuition and of jetpack — are a little too far. (We weren’t too proud to look up a couple hints when we were truly stuck.) But in the tradition of the best adventure games (which is what this is, at heart), you have everything you need right from the beginning. All you have to do is gather the knowledge to understand it and put it into action.

And beyond those moments of logical and graphical discovery, there’s real emotion and pathos, too. As you explore the remnants of the lost civilization that preceded yours, your only method of communication is reading their writing. And as you do, you start to get a picture of them not just as individuals (who fight, flirt, and work together to help each other), but as a species whose boundless thirst for discovery was their greatest asset, highest priority, undoing, and salvation, all at once.

I don’t think I can say much more without delving into spoilers, or retreading ground others have covered. (Go read Austin Walker’s beautiful and insightful review for more.) It’s an incredible game, and one everyone with even a passing interest in the medium should try.

(Last thing: Yes, I manually flew to the Sun Station and got inside. No, I don’t recommend it.)

1. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

If I hadn’t just started a replay of this game, I don’t think I’d be listing it in the number one slot. I started a replay because I showed it to my brother when we visited him in Florida last month, and immediately, all the old feelings came flooding back. I needed another hit.

No game this year has been as compelling for me. That’s an overused word in entertainment criticism, but I mean it literally: There have been nights where I absolutely HAVE to keep playing (much to Aubrey’s dismay). One more week of in-game time. One more study session to raise a skill rank. One more meal together so I can recruit another student. One more battle. Just a little longer.

I’m not sure I can put my finger on the source of that compulsion. Part of it is the excellence of craftsmanship on display; if any technical or creative aspect of Three Houses was less polished than it is, I probably wouldn’t feel so drawn to it. But the two big answers, I think, are the characters and their growth, both mechanically and narratively.

At the start of the game, you pick one of the titular three houses to oversee as professor. While this choice defines who you’ll have in your starting party, that can be mitigated later, as almost every other student from the other two houses can be recruited to join yours. What you’re really choosing is which perspective you’ll see the events of the story from, and through whose eyes: Edelgard of the Black Eagles, Dimitri of the Blue Lions, or Claude of the Golden Deer. (This is also why the game almost demands at least three playthroughs.)

These three narratives are deftly written so you simultaneously feel like you made the only possible canonical choice, while also sowing questions into your decision-making. Edelgard’s furious desire for change is just but perhaps not justifiable; Dimitri hides an obsession with revenge behind a façade of noblesse oblige; Claude is more conniving and pragmatic than he lets on. No matter who you side with, you’ll eventually have to face the others. And everyone can make a case that they, not you, are on the right side.

This is especially effective because almost every character in Three Houses is dealing with a legacy of war and violence. A big theme of the game’s story is how those experiences inform and influence the actions of the victims. What steps are justified to counteract such suffering? How do you break the cycle if you can’t break the power structures that perpetuate it? How do good people end up fighting for bad causes?

While you and your child soldiers (yeah, you do kind of have to just skip over that part; they’re in their late teens, at least? Still not good enough, but could be worse?) are grappling with these questions, they’re also growing in combat strength, at your direction. This is the part that really grabbed me and my lizard brain — watching those numbers get bigger was unbelievably gratifying. Each character class has certain skill requirement prerequisites, and as professor, you get to define how your students meet those requirements, and which they focus on. Each student has certain innate skills, but they also have hidden interests that only come to the surface with guidance. A character who seems a shoo-in to serve as a white mage might secretly make an incredibly effective knight; someone who seems destined for a life as a swordsman suddenly shows a talent for black magic. You can lean into their predilections, or go against them, with almost equal efficacy.

For me, this was the best part of Three Houses, and the part that kept me up long after my wife had gone to bed. Planning a student’s final battle role takes far-seeing planning and preparation, and each step along the way felt thrilling. How can you not forge a connection with characters you’ve taken such pains to help along the way? How can you not explode with joy when they reach their goals?

That’s the real draw of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, I think: the joy of seeing people you care about grow, while simultaneously confronting those you once cared about, but who followed another path. No wonder I wanted to start another playthrough. I think I’ll be starting them all over again for a long time.

[philosapphos]

a fleeting memoir.

I don’t know how to write a great book. All I know how to do is feel. 

At my university, his eyes narrow as he skims through my writing. “You should cut down on the adjectives. And be more precise.” During the semester, I learn how to write quietly, obediently holding my hands between the walls of the keyboard. The writing was programmatic: a steady string of code to create tight, virus-free argumentation. I feel like I was choking during my lectures and would run afterward toward the campus gardens, gasping for air. 

It’s always raining in the classics. Whether it’s the European drizzle of existentialist contemplation and ennui, the dreary Scandinavian sleet, or just the histrionic downpour of a popular romance, something about water falling from the sky touches the soul. I moved from California to England a few years ago. Upon meeting me, everyone would always joke about the weather. Even at its most aggravating, there’s still something slightly mad and magical about getting wet from the rain: from the child’s ecstasy to splashing in puddles to the bursts of unexpected showers. Film is awash with portraits of a dark-haired woman, her face and arms lifted, her eyes closed, rain streaming down her hands and cheeks: a worship of the skies and sea, bathed in baptismal rivers, rising toward truth like an ancient Niniane. 

So let’s imagine it’s raining in this story: the tale of a brunette woman in her early twenties, sliding out of her damp coat as she settles into a library desk. The world outside is darkly wet but she is wrapped around the warm glow of a favorite book, smiling softly as she turns each page. 

As she moves through time, she loses herself for a bit, as young minds tend to do; drifting away into a third-person binocular gaze of her own life. One day, as though reminded of a long-lost childhood friend, she glanced into the mirror and feels a dull ache of recognition.  

Through a series of unfortunate events, she had become an academic. (She smirks to herself as she writes that.) Clever enough to critique the system, with a delicate list of degrees lifting her above the rest of society. The academy was a castle (a fortress), and she strolled its hallways, draped in elegance. The world lay like a lavish fur at her feet: it wasn’t until years later that she noticed the delicate golden chains wrapped around her wrists.  

People will think that this is an intellectual book because its text winks at readers with graduate degrees and aspirations of Platonic cerebrality. Unfortunately, the protagonist is an ordinary human: a body of neurochemical imbalances and menstruation and psychologically complex sexual urges. I am writing a story about a woman. 

Rilke writes about solitude: about the world created within the self, the infinite loneliness and the sweet-sounding lamentations of its suffering. “There I shall live all winter and rejoice in the great quiet.” Like most people living in the recurring buzz of a city, she was lonely. She often found her peace within the walls of her apartment: a silent altar to herself, as if she were living wrapped up in the pages of her diary. She hung her friends’ art up on the walls, framed photographs of her family, and filled her bed with soft, silky fabrics. She would light incense and candles, and fill the air with soft beats of music: purifying the space, making this ground holy. 

She was a graduate student, which meant everybody outside of academia thought she was brilliant and everyone inside of academia thought she was rather interesting and worthwhile. She grew up spoonfed the myth of the metals, told the tales again and again of her own precocious cleverness, of her mystical intelligence. She read far above her grade level and overextended her vocabulary. When she was young, she called herself a bookworm, and when she was older, she called herself a sapiosexual. At twelve years old, she dressed up as Athena and silently worshipped the goddess of wisdom (—she would ignore the war and weaving part). 

She was also enraptured by Boudicca. She grew up on McCaughrean’s Brittania and D'Aulaires' Book Of Greek Myths. She was fascinated by the portrait of powerful women, radiant in their own strength. She loved mermaids, selkies, sirens: those dark and dangerous women of the seas. Boudicca rode in the streets of her city, naked except for her long hair, which wrapped itself around her body: history painted an eroticized form of the woman, straddling a horse, pale skin and trembling lips; tresses enticingly, teasingly feigning at modesty. Boudicca’s performance to make some statement, some protest against patriarchy or injustice, but it was clear to her, even as a girl, that this story was not a political one. The sculpture of Justice may be a blinded woman in robes, but there is nothing more appalling than a hysterical female voice screeching for equality. 

I don’t remember when I first discovered feminism: I only remember hating women as a child. I found a notebook once, filled with a child’s scrawl, where I exclaimed that I was so glad to be clever—not silly and pretty like most girls. As I grew into adolescence, I occasionally cast longing glances at the other girls: with their golden curls and million-dollar smiles, exquisite little dolls of coiffed femininity and rich daddies. I went to a whiskey bar recently that embodied a kind of polished masculinity: mustached waiters in tweed vests over cuffed white shirts and sculpted forearms, busts of hunted deer and other achievements of man, wooden bookshelves filled with elegantly muted book collections. It was another kind of holy place: where one kneels before the marble mantelpiece in obeisance to the power-hungry colonizer. 

My sexuality began to emerge in the office of a professor: his mahogany desk looming around me, legs spread nonchalantly in an easy authority. My heartbeat quickened, knees crossed primly in a skirt, as I blushed and asked questions about the course. Lower your voyeuristic eyes: these encounters never went beyond a comment or an accidental touch. My years as an undergraduate were spent daydreaming over my notes, talking about the world over coffee, and thinking about sex in the library. I liked that momentary hesitation of surprise as I casually mentioned something sexual from my studies: a metaphysical puzzle about pornography, the liberatory rise of polyamory to dethrone an antiquity of monogamy, the darkly wrung layers of power within sadomasochism. Perhaps it was there that I found feminism: from a language of embodying oppression flowered forth the idea that surrender could be empowering. The thought was a pearly light: the gift of femininity, of submission and release—and the deep, silent power within. 

I found my sexual power like the rest of my generation: by exerting a measure of control over the other. It was a prize to hold enticingly before them; deliciously unattainable. To have something that someone else wants: that is the only measure of worth in a capitalist landscape. The mouth of the cave was enticing: that insidious allure of Pandora’s box. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to be intelligent: one must be desirable as well. Like a trophy held above the heads of others: they needed to see the prize and want it for it to be special. She saw herself as a tightrope dancer: balancing the power of the mind with the desires of the flesh. It was an elaborate performance, a practiced soliloquy for a darkened theatre: one hopes dearly for an audience.  

I spent a year as a professor. I recall a single frozen scene: it is raining outside of the coffee shop and I am listening to achingly melancholy French music (Les mémoires blessées, Crier tout bas). I prepared my mind and body for each lecture as though I were entering a gladiatorial ring: I neatly typed and stapled my handouts, and slid into a modest knee-length dress that subtly held close to my waist and dipped along my collarbones. My clothes felt like a costume for a 1960s-style secretary or stewardess: cleanly washed with a mildly sweet perfume, hair twisted into a tidy chignon, legs folded at a desk with my books stacked in alphabetical order. I answered emails in a timely manner, graded with a kind but firm hand, and smiled with the vacantly polite gaze of customer service. I checked my evaluations diligently and tried to be likable and friendly, welcoming my students into the warm hearth of philosophy and letting them wander through my home. They would step in for a moment, tracing their fingers along the spines of the books, glancing over at me as if I were an aspect of the furniture as much as the shelves. I felt like a salesman, smiling indulgently and explaining to the unimpressed consumer why they should consider getting into academia. I model prettily, showing them the life that they could have: the picture of success in this tier of society. I still see other professors twisting into this routine: the assumed air of authority, the dignified crown of the philosopher-king. Like prophets of an ancient religion, they share their advice with all and teach the one true path toward enlightenment: the rigor and the rituals of knowledge. Like any good advertisement, they draw others in with a manufactured sense of humanity: the self-deprecating humor, the melodramatic tearing of cloth and hair at self-imposed deadlines, the pale, bony thinness of perfectionism, wasting away before an audience of other performers. 

In academia, we hide our faces under a paper-mache mask of stiffly inked degree papers and watery excuses of endless busyness. A Kafkaesque artist of twisted, exhibitionistic self-torment, a Pharisee loudly lamenting a self-inflicted agony: the scholar fights to surpass another in self-flagellation, a mortification of the unbearably corporal flesh. “Only pain is intellectual.” We tout depression as an honorable badge of intellectual superiority—the masses are dead-eyed and drunk on a cocktail of prescription drugs and pre-packaged ideology. But those gifted, cerebral children can see through the painted backdrop and television lights: they witness reality as it is.

At its best, intellectualism is unhappy—at its worst, it is cruel. The 17th-century dramatist Jean Francine wrote that life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. Some scholars do care, and care deeply: for them, a pedagogical journey is like excavating a lost city, brushing dirt away from crumbling walls, filled with warnings written in an ancient, dying tongue. Unearthing the skeletons of a forgotten history, a memory that humanity longs to forget. 

“It would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state... In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.” (A. Schopenhauer, Lehre vom Leiden der Welt)

With the inevitable tumble into nihilism and absurdity, the rarity of the compassionate philosopher sinks deeply into the quicksands of despair. But what of the hermit, the ascetic, who casts aside the ropes of human connection? From the side of the hilltop, he looks down upon the ravaged city and laughs; like a dying man in a desert, watching his horse die before the mirage of a lush oasis. Perhaps I felt this way when I was younger: laughing at my freedom before the pilloried women, imprisoned in the bodysuits of gender. Perhaps I saw myself as androgynous: a sexless fae child with inexplicable knowledge of wordly things and a playful schadenfreude. 

As a child, I saw the pillars of women and their wisdom as arching tombstones in the chilling mist of my future, the inevitable decline into the pains of labor, that aching creation of an object to be snatched away from my grasp: the anonymity of motherhood. I longed to be a maker of worlds: to hold my hands in the raging welding fire and twist metal into mechanism. When asked why I chose to study philosophy over literature and history, I tell people that I never wanted to be relegated to Whitehead’s ‘series of footnotes’ on a great thinker. The idea of dedicating my life, fawning at the frozen feet of bygone wisdom, entangling myself in the discourse of another and attempting to organize their thoughts, struck me as debasing. 

I imagine these scholars as custodians, moving slowly along the great halls of the history of the mind: dusting off the tired exhibits, examining a relic of ancient wisdom, and guiding others to a particularly showy gallery of pop intellectualism. I longed to be one of the innovative elite: developing my own ideas and launching them out into the world like sleek silver rockets. 

Still, unbidden thoughts lift to a rising echo, like bloated corpses floating to the surface of a lake:

i. This too shall pass.

ii. The truth will always emerge. 

iii. Failure in life is inevitable. 

Why have we created lives that lack a solidity of meaning? The Aristotelian virtue of striving has been perverted into a constant desire for something out of reach. We exist in the hellish stance of Tantalus: the king of Sipylus who consumed his young in an unquenching burn for power. He was condemned to the agony of desire: emaciated, shaking fingers brushing against the soft, bruised flesh of a fruit he would never taste. I never understood why the Garden of Eden was a utopian paradise—Eve and Pandora have been damned by the priests of time for embodying that trait that is valorized in men: curiosity. The great men—the scientists, the philosophers, and the poets—have loudly proclaimed the glory of the inquisitive gaze, of those first pioneers who pressed into the darkness of the great unknown. Yet it is a sin for woman: feminine curiosity is prying, gossiping, the idle chatter of busybodies. The curious woman is one who should have known better, who ought to have kept her mouth shut: her questions are barren and vain. The moral of these ancient stories is simple: obey the commands of men and remain shrouded in ignorance. When offered knowledge or understanding, the good woman will look away and choose the path of purity. (“The innocent eye is blind, as the virgin mind is empty.”) 

I recently bought my mother a print transcribed with the cheerfully defiant line, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” The sentiment is true, in the bland, platitudinal way of many inspirational quotes, but what is the fate of the women that do make history? Too often, their mangled corpses are left hanging on the city walls: a grim reminder to all of the merciless suppression of insurgent forces. 

Curious women are not considered clever: they are considered dangerous. Eve damned humanity to physical pain and scarcity; Pandora released a whirlwind of sickness and death; even Joan of Arc was burned with so many others at the stake. The women who refused to be ‘well-behaved’ are condemned to inhabit our nightmares as graffitied caricatures of the Furies: shrieking women wreaking havoc and suffering across the orderly landscape of civilization. 

Again and again, we watch these women bowing their heads to accept their punishment: Boudicca, Artemisia, and Cleopatra each died by their own hand. Western history relishes the tragic figure of Lucretia: a woman who was raped before committing suicide to preserve the honor of her father. Marble sculpture immortalizes the brutal rapes of Prosperina, of Europa, and the Sabine women. Even the Old Testament tells the story of a Levite throwing his concubine to a mob maddened with bloodlust in an effort to protect himself. She is brutally raped and murdered and, like Lucretia, she is marked as culpable for her rape: the Levite later dismembers her corpse by slicing her body into twelve pieces.

If only I had known before that the trinkets of intelligence and sexuality are finery on men, yet mark women out as scapegoats. A woman told me yesterday of a line that resonated deeply with her: “Give no-one cause to fear you.” To me, it sounded like a warning. Intelligent women are intimidating—I am told this time and time again. Men are afraid of women who out-earn them, both in pay and degrees. They are terrified of being laughed at by women—and this fear quickly boils into a destructive rage. The woman who smiles at the wrong time is beaten, raped, and murdered; the confident, curious woman is seen to invite her own destruction. 

Academia is like wandering into a gilded museum and gagging upon the stark realization that the naked bodies of your mother and sister are hanging from the walls. Silently slipping into the room, you can feel the hands of men reaching for you next. 

The kindest death that I face is to be ignored and silenced. My words have already been torn away from me or kicked into the shadows, and I have already been punished for my ideas. Men only respect other men. The esteemed title of ‘philosopher’ is unattainable unless I contort myself into masculinity. Either I must destroy the woman or they will do so. 

Catherine Malabou writes on the contradiction of a ‘woman philosopher’: “Philosophy is woman’s tomb. It grants her no place, no space whatsoever, and gives her nothing to conquer... The possibility of philosophy is thus largely premised on the impossibility of woman.”

Female philosophers are exiled to the land of poetry, where their writing is derided further. I like to say that my favorite philosophers are Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath: a comment that raises the eyebrows of male academics. These writers are mostly known for their highly publicized breakdowns and suicides: while madness is romanticized in male artists, it is scorned in women. 

The two cruellest labels against women are hysteria and gossip. The powerful wisdom of the emotions, the deep interpersonal insight of psychology have become degraded feminine ways of thinking. The kingdom of the heart, the knowledge of the self and of others, is ravaged by the pillaging armies of the mind. The ideal individual becomes a solitary agent, swathed in a protective layer of rights: he relies on nobody and protects only himself. A father is permitted to walk away at any time, while a mother never gives enough for her children. The nuanced intricacy of the web of care and dependency is wiped away in the blank face of laws and duties: men see themselves as tabula rasa, pretending to be immune to the deep memory of the womb from which they emerged. Plato wrote that the traumatic event of being born caused men to lose touch of their innate knowledge, while Socrates called himself a ‘midwife’—both espousing an ideology that men must be pulled away from the treacherous touch of woman in order to flourish into excellence. It is a mantra repeated again and again within the Western tradition: the mother is the passive soil of the earth, little more than a breathing incubator, while the father actively sows his seed and causes new life to spring forth. 

The medieval philosopher Boethius is known for proposing a theory of time, stretched out across eternity, where God stands as Being in a place apart from spatiotemporality, gazing down upon existence. He writes often of a single woman: Lady Philosophy. Even within the Romantic languages, where declension casts a shadow of gender across the syntax, the word ‘philosophy’ is feminine. So too can we return to Iustitia, the female figure of justice. In the masculine world of law and philosophy, why are the disciplines imagined as encapsulated by the female body? And why is this female body possessed only by the men who study her? 

The male gaze is not merely a visual technique of producing images of women that cater to an audience of heterosexual men. In feminist theory, the ‘male gaze’ is often imagined to be a lavascious position: the businessman watching the stripper sliding around the pole, the voyeuristic neighbor peeking through a young girl’s window as she dresses, the horny teenager scrolling through a disjointed compliation of fragmented genitalia and artificial moaning. 

But the ‘male gaze’ is the dominating gaze: there is power in the ways that we see. It is written as far back as the Genesis Rabbah: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. To see is to rule over all, and the cruelest power is forcing another’s eyes open to gaze upon the unspeakable. MacKinnon writes that women live in sexual objectification the way fish live in water: not only does it surround us constantly, but it constitutes the only environment we have ever known. We see ourselves and other women through the blurred filter of this hierarchy—gender is not a dichotomy of body parts but rather a manufactured reality: nothing remains untouched by it. When men see philosophy and law as woman, they see themselves as her conqueror: explorers stepping foot on yielding, fertile ground, eager to ravage her body in imposing their structures of violence and cruelty. Within the institution of sovereign state, her life is nasty, brutish, and short. 

Do you remember the woman from the beginning of this story? Night has fallen and the library has grown cold around her. The austere portraits of men clad in greatness loom over her, reminding her that she will never join their ranks. The female body of classical art is nude, her limbs arranged invitingly. She smiles softly and asks no questions: she allows the viewer to take what he likes from her with a self-effacing brush of coy reserve. The woman has spent many hours studying the art of the Greco-Roman world, and she has never recognized herself in any of the half-lidded eyes of these soft, eroticized women. 

She once stood at a museum in front of a sculpture of Venus. The marble woman was crouching to the ground, as if kneeling before her viewer. Her arm curls across her upper body, obscuring the breast from direct view—her thighs are pressed together, and her hair falls in elegant waves across her face. Art historians have called her posture ‘playfully erotic’: a titillating peek-a-boo of sexuality behind a veil of feigned modesty. 

She imagined the marble woman standing up: pushing back her shoulders and jutting her chin upwards. She imagined looking at the marble woman directly in the eye. The sculpture is naked, but she is unashamed of her nakedness: like the endless depictions of the Athenian youth, her body is seen as a perfection of nature—strong and elegant architecture to house a dignified mind. 

This standing sculpture does not resemble the warrior women of the Amazon: fierce mythical women who sliced off their breasts in order to kill more effectively, rejecting their femininity to transform into virago. Our culture fantasizes about the Amazonian woman as female Ares: Diana, ferocious princess of the Amazons, is often depicted in armor and headgear. Even Athena is rarely depicted without her helmet and spear. 

But standing before us is not a warrior: she is simply a woman, and her body is simply a body. We can trace the muscles along her thighs, the soft rise and fall of her belly, the bones along her neck and shoulders. Her expression is unreadable: she gazes back to meet your eye, watching your movements. Standing before her, you seem to forget which one of you is the art and which is the audience. Perhaps you hold your breath, wondering if she will reach out to touch you. 

But the woman simply turns and walks away from you. Her marble feet make no sound as they climb down the pedestal and across the hallway. She was not created for you to look at her: she was created to exist, to experience the world through herself. 

One day, I find myself resting in a secret garden: there are stone walls surrounding me and in this hidden place, I have discovered the meaning of life. A grey cat is sleeping next to me and blue butterflies swim through the air, but there is no-one else here. I breathe deeply and on the exhale, my knowledge of time disappears: I float within the essence of reality and it is beautiful in its vast eternity. Like gazing upon the sea or the sky, I look at the world that I have created. With a smile that nobody will see, I press my lips against the small cat beside me and stand to leave. I retrace my steps by memory: across the hot desert sands and snowy mountaintops and finally to a familiar dirt path. I walk until I arrive at my childhood home. Tears spill over as I hold my mother, my sister: even my dog is there, her tail wagging in recognition. In Ithaca, I have found everything I was searching for. The rest of the marble melts away, and my story is just beginning.

[spacetimewraithwrites-archive]

WIP Intro

Thriving: Rebirth (aka “Book 3″)

Converging wars wage within the Milky Way, forcing the hands of those who helped start it. A civilization rises from the ashes, taking their permanent spot on their new home. One half of a whole falls farther from their path, while the other carves theirs from soft stone. The Emmuli grow stronger, extending their feelers into the universe as they move closer to their main, malicious goal.

Protagonists:

Warren ➳ Things are beginning to look up for Warren in so many ways, but finding himself in the year 2272 is probably not one of them. He’s forced to take things in stride but perhaps it’s not as idyllic as he’s been trying to believe. As usual, there’s no time to process as he’s thrust straight into an intergalactic war he had a hand in starting.

Thrive ➳ Hundreds of years of waiting and working with little to no rest has paid off, he’s achieved two separate accomplishments once believed to be impossible. But the constant battles in every aspect of his life have started to take a toll, and while he grows more powerful, he also grows weaker. The consequences of an ill-fated decision weigh him down as he pushes himself to the limit to bring down the tyrants fueling the war.

Notable Characters:

Guetry ➳ If you need fashion or makeup advice in the 23rd century, you call Guetry Sympa. If you need someone offed or thrown into the cube for holding venevan children hostage and enslaving them, you also call Guetry Sympa. He takes no shit, but he’ll defend his friends, loved ones, and innocents until he’s got no breath left in him. He’s witty and charming and wildly talented, and a little unpredictable, a big troublemaker with a heart of gold.

Alec ➳ Having known Guetry since she was a freshman in high school, Alec Wu has a bit of the Sympa unpredictability engrained within her. She went a different direction with her career focus, repairing and maintaining starships for the Node, while also maintaining her half of the band she formed with Guetry, Skywaste.

Varussa ➳ A master pilot with several accolades received during her time in the war, Encalar Varussa is sweet and cheerful, as is typical for the silhou. Since being separated for their respective roles in battle, she and her sister are closer than ever, reluctant to be on a mission without each other in case something happens. She’s kind but badass, the best pilot in the silhou forces.

Emnophene ➳ Varussa’s twin sister and a fighter with unmatched skill. Her natural abilities may be unusually lacking but don’t let that fool you as she knows her way around a weapon of both the handheld and ship varieties. She’s not as happy-go-lucky as her sister but her intentions are the same, she’s compassionate and full of resolve that only aids her in times of trouble.

Osillo ➳ Stern and quiet, OsilloLotas was once a Silver Commander of the Highfleet in the Cyrio Faction and Captain of OmmilliCulos’ Royal Guard. Being a lenayan sniper forbids error, therefore their streak of hits has been unbroken their entire life. They’re commanding but understanding, easily finding trust in their friends despite their scarred and tough exterior.

Scotty ➳ Subcutaneous Operational and Tactical System, or SCOT, was developed by NodeSource and implanted into Guetry’s brain during an accidental overdose to repair and maintain basic neurological functions, but he’s viewed as an upgrade rather than an inconvenience. He improves everything from aim and vision to memory and speech and provides vital information when needed to keep a mission going. He’s artificial but a loyal and trusted companion.

Minor Characters:

DeCosta ➳ Leandra DeCosta, human delegate for the Consortium. A thorn in Guetry’s side, but cares about his wellbeing all the same. Isn’t the sole representative for humanity for no reason.

Mataxa ➳ Delegate for Rebellia Rotanga and a descendant of Hataxis, the nuaclan Rotanga who launched the rebellion.

Pax ➳ Hybrid nuaclan general of the Rebellia.

Feyth ➳ Feyth Rys Gara, Morrite operative in the Rebellia.

Gosrah and Nar ➳ Graha siblings fighting for the freedom of their race from the venevans.

Nyra ➳ Venevan double agent, Ysha’s half-sister, integral to taking down the tyrant.

Hyret ➳ The Blue Prince—descendant of Elygro and mastermind behind all of Morre’s involvement with the war. Allegiant Rotangans and Morrite loyalists answer to him.

and 70 more very spoilery characters I cannot mention at this time. (...okay it’s more like 10 but...well, it’s hard to explain, just trust me.)

A Handful of Favorite Lines:

"What's the plan now, old man?" Guetry asked Thrive. "I would personally suggest going in with reckless abandon and to start fighting anyone you see." "...Really?" "Yes, really." "Cool," Guetry said before kicking in the door and charging onto the base.

***

"Shouldn't you be studying?" Guetry quipped. Warren glared at him. "Can you give me a few minutes for my anxiety attack to fully manifest before getting on my case, Dad?" "Ooh," Guetry gave a lewd grin, taking a swig of the gu'l. "Found my secret kink."

***

When he ran out of words, he drank. Drained the one bottle and enthusiastically accepted the one Guetry had been nursing. They sat in quiet only broken by the hum of the ship around them. "It sounds like maybe you're an actual idiot," Guetry said at length. "I know," Warren said immediately. "It's my brain's fault. We haven't exactly been on speaking terms for a while."

***

"Well...make sure you take it easy. I know what it's like to be over-stressed. Maybe come watch me and Guetry play a set sometime." That piqued Warren's interest. "Play a set? Like...as in a band?" "Yeah!" Alec said, beaming. "It was kind of a casual thing for a while in school, but we've taken it very seriously in the last decade or so. We're pretty well-known around the Node." The doors slid open and Guetry stood on the threshold, pulling a layer of clothing up to reveal a black t-shirt far too large for him with "SKYWASTE" in thin, white letters across the front. "...Your shirt is very nice, honey," Warren said, affecting the most patronizing tone he could muster.

***

Thrive swung the rifle as he walked to the door. "Once we deal with the checkpoint, grab any and all armor you can that fits you; there will be no dying in our squad this evening. Understood?" Warren raised his hand. "Uh, I have an appointment for death tomorrow, can I still make that one?" "What you do after this mission is your business, Warren."

➸ WIP Intro for Book 1

➸ WIP Intro for Book 2

[lotsofthinkythoughts]

25 Dragon Age Questions

Tagged by: @lavellenchanted

Tagging: @fogsblue and anyone else who’s played the game and wants to do these

01) Favourite game of the series? This one’s tough, because I love all of them. Even Dragon Age 2, which is by far my least favorite, I love. Probably Inquisition, because of the characters and I prefer the combat to that of Origins. 

02) How did you discover Dragon Age?  My friend Em, played them and I was like... Hmmm, this sounds neat, so I got Origins for the PS3 which I had at the time and fell in love. 

03) How many times you’ve played the games? ... NO. I’m not gonna look in my saves folders to count. More than I should admit to XD. Enough to romance almost all the options at least once at least soooo yeah. And one of those options is actually a mod

04) Favourite race to play as?  In Origins, human, because I like the rawness of the conflict with Howe as a noble. In Inquisition, give me ELVES OR NOTHING.

05) Favourite class? I usually play Rogues Archers in Origins and then Mages in the other two. I love basically anything ranged. 

06) Do you play through the games differently or do you make the same decisions each time? I try to vary things up, but I do have a lot of repeat decisions. Like I rarely ever side with the Templars at Therinfal Redoubt. I’ve DONE IT, but I tend to go mages, and I tend to play Hawke v. pro mage as well, which leads to my Dragon Age 2 playthroughs all looking a lot alike. (I also have a severe case of ‘must do all the quests’ syndrome, which means once I know a branch leads to more quests I always must pick it or it gnaws at the back of my brain that I broke the quest chain)

07) Go-to adventuring group? Alistair, Wynne and Zevran in Origins, Fenris, Varric and Bethany (far as long as I have her) and then Isabela for Dragon Age 2, and Varric, Dorian, and Iron Bull for Inquisition.  I tend to choose my companions based on banter and just how much I like them even though I do try to have at least one of every class, so sometimes I’ll swap out Cassandra for Bull, or bring Cole instead of a warrior in Inquistion, and I party swap a lot in Origins though, because Oghren is funny, if terrible and I love Leliana and Shale and Morrigan is so fun to hear needling Alistair. Alistair is... always in my party though. He arrives and he stays. XD

08) Which of your characters did you put the most thought into? Hmmmm, I have a Diplomatic Lady!Hawke (she’s named in game because I... honestly just forgot to rename her at the time, and didn’t think I’d get so attached, but now she’s THE Marian so.. yeah) She wasn’t super well thought out at first, but by the time the end of the first chapter hit, I’d really fleshed her out in my head; her motivation for doing whatever it took to keep her sister safe (she’s my ONLY rogue Hawke too, so there’s that) after losing Carver, her need to have other people like her because of how her mother reacted to Carver’s death. So probably her, I’ve got a whole... emotional mythos in my head for her that goes with her and her entire relationship with Fenris.

09) Favourite romance? Cullen. He’s just such an adorable dork. (I also love Alistair for this reason) But also Dorian. God Dorian’s romance is SO GOOD. And even Solas’ is very good and emotional. And to represent DA2′s options, Fenris. Who I love dearly. He’s such a prickly angry guy and I just love seeing him open up over time. (Isabela is also compelling, I like the ‘this is casual WHOOPS I’ve caught feelings’ aspect both her romance and Zevran’s have) 

So... basically ALL OF THEM?

10) Have you read any of the comics/books? One of the comics, though I forget the title right now as it was a couple of years ago now. I’ve never gotten around to reading the books, but I keep meaning to.

11) If you read them, which was your favourite book?

12) Favourite DLCs? Hmmm, Well I like the companion DLCs, so Stone Prisoner and Exiled Prince. I don’t like that they ARE DLCs, but I enjoy the characters, yes even Sebastian, so probably those. Awakening and Trespasser are both also brilliant and I love them for giving me extra story. 

13) Things that annoy you? That you have to have your dog as a party member in Origins. That’s so dumb. I also hate that they decided to HIDE the relationship meters in Inquisition. I get why, but I liked knowing how much everyone liked me or disliked me. So -shrug-.

14) Orlais or Ferelden? Ferelden. What kind of question is this?

15) Templars or mages? Mages. I... am actually not going to explain this, I started to but decided this is not a debate and I don’t care what anyone thinks soooo. Yeah. 

16) If you have multiple characters, are they in different/parallel universes or in the same one? Both? Parallel in the playthrough, but there’s definitely a universe in my head where I’ve got like... seven wardens kicking around and Hawke twins and ... well actually there’s only one Inquisitor in that one too, and that Ellana Lavellen who Romances Cullen, because she’s my OFFICIAL Inquisitor but like the others are kicking around, as people, so like Adaar’s mercenary company ends up at Skyhold along with the Chargers and that sort of thing. It’s all very messy, but a lot of fun. 

17) What did you name your pets? (mabari, summoned animals, mounts, etc) I admit after heard the dog was named Barkspawn in the Darkspawn Chronicles I stole that and used it forever more, because I’m terrible and it makes me giggle. I don’t usually name my summons, I’m very bad at the game and they die too fast lol.

18) Have you installed any mods? -shoves mods in a closet- -shifty eyes- No. -closet bursts open and buries me in mods- OKAY YOU CAUGHT ME.  

SO MANY. SO SO MANY.

19) Did your Warden want to become a Grey Warden? No, with the exception of my Dwarvish Noble Princess. She was stoked because the Wardens are cool and the Deep Roads suck. (And like for the others, it’s more... being a Warden is preferable to dying, but none of them want to have to leave their lives and families behind)

20) Hawke’s personality? I tend to play Hawke as a snarky diplomat depending on who she’s dealing with. With a side order of angry Hawke when people are particularly stupid. (Sooo throw it in a blender and mix well? Tends to come out as sarcastic in the imports)

21) Did you make matching armour for your companions in Inquisition? No, they all have their own color schemes. Cole is in blues, Dorian in reds, Solas in green, that sort of thing. And then I color coordinate with whoever I’m romancing. XD

22) If your character(s) could go back in time to change one thing, what would they change? For Lisbet (my Human Noble) it’s the deaths of her family. She misses them a lot. For one very unlucky Lavellen, (who is so unlucky I’ve forgotten his name, because after this happened I noped right on out of that save) it’s the death of his whole clan. I looked up how to correctly do that quest chain quickly after that so none of my other Lavellen’s had to suffer such pain. 

23) Do you have any headcanons about your character(s) that go against canon? I mean... probably but I honestly at this moment can’t think of any. Except that my Warden Queen didn’t just disappear into thin air and totally comes back to Denerim at least once a year while she’s on her quest to cure the Calling, which she does, because Lisbet doesn’t know how to fail. (Also babies. She and Alistair have babies and canon can fight me about it.) Soooo those I guess. 

24) Who did you leave in the Fade? Depends on who is there, Sometimes Hawke, Sometimes Stroud, Loghain in the one playthrough I’ve ever done where he was made a Warden. 

25) Favourite mount? The Red Hart. So pretty.

[travllingbunny]

The 100 rewatch: 1x07 Contents Under Pressure

I’m a new fan of The 100, who first binged it last year, August to November. This is my first full rewatch of the show. I was planning to start it anyway and finish it before the season 6 premiere on April 30, and when I saw that Fox Serbia was airing a rerun (Monday to Friday, 40 min. after midnight, with repeats the next day), starting on 1st February, it was a great opportunity to start my rewatch in HDTV on my beautiful new TV. I decided to do write-ups and tag other fans on SpoilerTV website, as I did when I was first watching the show. But my posts turned into full blown essays. So, finally, after over a week, I’ve realized: Why don’t I post them on my Tumblr blog, too? 

I’ll copy my write-ups of the first 7 episodes, and then I’ll post my rewatch posts after I watch each episode. (The next one, 1x08, is on Monday’Tuesday.)  I’m looking forward to 1x08 on Monday, one of my favorite S1 episodes. IIRC, the next 3 episodes are all awesome.

Spoilers below for all 5 seasons of the show. I go of on a tangents and make a lot of references to future events.

Rating: 6.5/10

I liked this one much less than the previous few episodes, mostly because a huge chunk of it was about the politics on the Ark with Jaha and Diana (who first gets introduced here) - which I never cared about, not the first time and not now. They're both assholes and pretty much the same.

The only part of the Ark storyline that's interesting is that it's the turning point for Kane. When Raven and Clarke make contact with the Ark, you can see everyone else thinking: "The Earth is survivable!" or "Our kids are still alive!" (or, in Jaha's case, that his son is dead), but Kane is clearly thinking something very difrerent: for him, it's "I was wrong and I caused the deaths of 320 people for no reason". This is the beginning of his character development, and also the point where I stopped hating him, because he showed genuine guilt, didn't even attempt to defend himself when the angry people confronted him about the culling and keeping secrets about the 100 from them, and will genuinely change after this. But Jaha and the rest of the Council? They're unbelievable. They threw Abby out from the Council before, for trying to contact the kids and opposing the culling, but now they learn she was right and they have her to thank for the fact they got in contact with the 100 - and they still don't take her back to the Council?? Instead, Jaha gives her seat to Diana for helping him bu.ll#sit the crowd and appease them? God, they're both so full of crap. The best part is when Jaha promises to the crowd that they'll stop lying to them and reveal all the secrets... and then, later, at the Council meeting, we find out he's still lying to people and keeping a huge secret - that they don't have enough ships to get everyone on the ground, just 700 out of 2237 people on the Ark. The storyline on Earth was better, but this time I found it a bit tedious, since most of it consisted of our protagonists torturing Lincoln to get info, which is not that interesting now that I know the outcome. Meanwhile Clarke and Raven were worrying about Finn, who had been wounded by Lincoln in the previous episode, and Clarke was trying to save him with her mother's help. Which is their motivation to get involved in Lincoln's torture and try to get info once Clarke realizes that the weapon was poisoned and that Lincoln has an antidote. And it also was the opportunity for more of love triangle and a lot of moments of Clarke pining after Finn. IIRC, this pretty much stops after this episode, as Clarke mostly moves on and gets busy with dealing with more important things, but then Finn starts pining more and more after Clarke, and Raven starts moping over noticing Finn pining over Clarke. My feelings during those scenes were mostly "Oh come on, girls, you can both do better". (Sorry, Finn fans.) At one point, Raven yells: 'He's all I've got". It's really sad she feels that way, but I guess that's a sign of how sad her life has been, with the mother she had and no other family. In another scene, Clarke emotionally tells the unconscious Finn: "I cannot do this without you"... and I can't help but laugh because I remember YouTube reactor's Liam Duke reaction to this scene - he just casually said: "Yes, you can". :D First appearance of Nate Miller, who wears a cap and is one of the Delinquents participating in Lincoln's torture, besides Bellamy, Clarke, Raven, and some other random guy. The first line anyone speaks to him is Clarke telling him: "Get out of my way, Miller". Who would have ever thought that Miller and Murphy would be 2 of the only 4 surviving Delinquents at the end of season 5? The more interesting aspect of all of this was, of course, the whole debate about morality, mostly between Clarke and Bellamy. Clarke starts off opposing torture, then later agrees to it, in desperation. It's mostly Bellamy beating Lincoln up, but Raven later joins, also motivated by the threat to Finn's life, and goes, let me show you new ways to torture, and gives Lincoln electric shocks. I guess this episode made me realize I had my own strong ruthless pragmatic streak ;D because, the first time I watched this, my main thought during the torture scenes was: "Oh come on, guys, everyone knows that torture doesn't work as an interrogation tactic. Just stab him with his own poisoned knife instead. That should make him want to tell you what the antidote is." I was waiting for someone to do that (though I guess, there was always the possibility he would be really stubborn and ready to die, so it would be a risk), but finally, Octavia did something even better, cutting herself, since she realized Lincoln had a thing for her and wouldn't want her to die. Clarke and Bellamy have noticeably become friendlier and closer at this point. He even touches her shoulder briefly in a comforting way when she was sad and worried about Finn. Some pretty (in)famous lines from this episode: Clarke: "This is not who we are" - Bellamy: "It is now" Bellamy to Clarke, at the end, after they've both participated in torture, and Clarke feels bad about it: 'Who we are and who we need to be are two different things". Probably one of the crucial but also most questionable pieces of advice about leadership that she got during the course of the show. I'm not sure that Bellamy would agree with his old self now, but Clarke took that piece of advice maybe a bit too much to heart. Also: "It's not easy being in charge." Admission that they're co-leaders now. Bellamy also at one point tells Clarke that they are already at war and have been since they landed, which is very similar to what he will tell her during their argument in 3x05. And it's true. The Grounders speared Jasper the first day and engaged in intimidation tactics from the start, even before actually killing any of the 100. Speaking about being in charge, I think that the reason Lincoln assumed that Clarke was the leader of the 100 rather than Bellamy (as we later learn) is because, while Bellamy was giving orders to the other Delinquents (like Miller or the random kid), he was listening to what Clarke had to say and obviously valued her opinion and did his best to convince her to agree with him. But it's interesting that I've never seen anyone, in-universe or in the fandom, apply similar reasoning to their dynamic in the first half of season 4, when Clarke was considered the leader in many ways, but was in the habit of always consulting with Bellamy and checking if he agreed with her, when he was around. If I wanted to explain that, I'd probably say some things about how people perceive women in power vs men in power. Something similar to the well known fact that most people get the impression that women dominate the conversation when they actually talk about 30% of it, let alone 50%. It's interesting to see Lincoln's notebook now, because some of the drawings are obviously the Mountain Men in hazmat suits and a Mountain Man in a gillie suit. There's also the statue of Lincoln that he got his name from, and the Delinquent camp, with 102 lines, 10 of them crossed, for 10 Delinquents already dead. . 100 Delinquents + Bellamy + Raven. 

[iliketowrite1996]

Tying Shoelaces and New Places chapter 9

    TRIGGER WARNINGS AND THEMES- MANIPULATIVE BEHAVIOR, OPPORTUNISTIC BEHAVIOR, USING PEOPLE FOR MONEY AND STATUS, HEARTACHE, SINGLE PARENTHOOD

T’Challa Udaku does not now that his parents worry about his safety  lot. They hope that he is safe and that Autumn is safe. They check in after Sunday dinner to make sure that they made it home.

He does not know now, that, as he spends time with you, they are up and discussing him.

‘’He has not dated anyone in months. I think that me setting him up with a nice girl would do the trick.’’

‘’Ah, no! T’Challa uas a handsome and smart and kind man. He is capable of finding love on his own. Besides, you only want someone like Nakia for him.’’ Ramonda teasingly scolds her husband.

‘’There’s nothing wrong with me setting him up with someone,’’ T’Chaka defends.

‘’I know, but you know how he is. Just as stubborn as the summer day is long. He gets that from you. Now, we will let our son find love in his own way and in his own timing. Agreed?’’

T'Challa Udaku sighs heavily. There is no point in arguing with his wife tonight, so he nods his head.

Deep down, he wants someone that will respect T’Challa. SOmeone that will love him and love Autumn and respect his culture and traditions and Wakanda.

That’s all he wants for his son.

He doesn't know when, but he feels like T’Challa will find it very soon.

Autumn Elizabeth Udaku is very sharp for her age. For one thing, she's observant. She notices things and points them out to you or t T’Challa, and it takes you by surprise.

    One time, she noticed that the Santa Clause at the mall had changed to a different person without even being in line for it.

    Another time, she was the one that informed you that there was a cat sitting on the window ledge.

    She sees. She watches. She gains knowledge and she understands.

    It’s the Monday before Thanksgiving. You and T’Challa have officially been a couple since last Monday, and it’s been one of the best weeks of your life. T’Challa is fun, flirty, serious and sweet. Out of the two of you, he is definitely the more romantic one. Although hands have stayed on top of clothes and nothing has been shared physically except for a few make out sessions, he emanates passion for you and for intimacy in every movie.

    He loves the fact that you love Autumn, that you love your job, that you love being yourself. Okay, and, yeah he really loves your eyes. They’re beautiful.

    You admire his strong family values, his dedication to Autumn, his work ethic and, okay, those eyes are pretty magnificent, too.

    So it’s mutual adoration between the two of you.

    Another thing that you have in common is that you both know how observant Autumn is for her age.

    So why T’Challa Udaku, her baba, who knows all of this and thought that he could keep your relationship a secret from her is beyond you.

    You’d only stop by to drop off some homework that Autumn had left on her table in your classroom.

    It’s eight, so she’s been asleep for an hour.

    T’Challa has you pressed gently against the front door, lips moving with yours as you indulge your only alone time until this weekend. Utsa sweet and slow kiss, something you never have time for during the week.

    Autumn is asleep, and so you have nothing to worry about.

    Or so you thought.

    ‘’Baba?’’

    T’Challa’s lips go still against yours as both of your eyes widen.

    You both look to see Autumn, curls all over her head as she rubs her sleepy little eyes.

    ‘’Yes, intomba?’’

    ‘’What are you doing? Why is my teacher here?’’   

    Well. This just got awkward.

    And it looks like you and T’Challa have a lot of explaining to do.

        ‘’I’m confused,’’ Autumn yawns, head on her baba’s shoulder as the three of you sit at the kitchen table, having just explained the situation to the four-year-old.

    ‘’I am dating your teacher. He is my girlfriend,’’ he states.

    Even under the circumstances, he can’t help but to smile when you he says it.

    ‘’So does this mean you’re my new mommy?,’’ Autumn asks innocently.

    The air is heavy with guilt on both your and T'Challa's part, feeling like you rushed into an explanation and now the poor baby is even more confused than she was when she saw you making out about ten minutes ago.

    ‘’I would never, ever try to replace your mother, Autumn,’’ you tell her gently, speaking truthfully.

    ‘’Okay,’’ she nods with another yawn, ‘’Because you're nice and pretty but she’s my mommy.’’

    It says so much and so little at the same time- she accepts you but only if you know that she still adores her mother.

    You’ve known that from the beginning and would not dream of altering that reality in anyway,

    ‘’Do you have any other questions, intomba,’’ T’Challa questions his young daughter only to be greeted by her soft snores as she drifts off to sleep.   

    He chuckles lightly pressing a kiss to her ebony, coily hair before excusing himself to tuck her back into bed.

    You can see trees of his love for Autumn all over the apartment. There are pictures of her and her other relatives, her drawings, her crafts. He loves her with so much commitment. It is clear that Autumn Udaku is the best part of his life.

    But that does not mean he doesn't have room for you.

    He proves that as he includes Autumn in your Friday evening bonding sessions. Every other week for the past two weeks, you’ve been spending their weekly movie night. T'Challa has made it clear to Autumn that she still must treat you like her sister at school. So she does.

    Right now, though, she is in your lap, leaning back against you as she watches one of her favorite movies and absentmindedly plays with her ebony curls.

    You’re laughing along with her, and T’Challa is watching two of us favorite women spend time with each other, watching television.   

    This is not love, but he recognizes it as the beginning stages of such a feeling. He told himself not to fall and here he is, falling head over heels for you.

    T’Challa has been burned a couple of times in the past. Who hasn’t?

    It’s no secret that the Udaku family is every well off. T'Challa prefers working and having his own money, but his family does like to help him from time to time.

    Oh, and Ramonda and T’Chaka LOVE to spoil Autumn.

    Women see the shiny cars and the fancy clothes and the money and they don't’ see him. So, as soon as they realize he’s not emptying his pockets for a woman who can’t fill her heart with love for him and Autumn, he finds himself right back at the start…

    And apologizing to his heart for putting himself through this again.

    Then there were the woman that truly saw a future with him after only a month or two together.  They imagined a lavish lifestyle, but also holding hands and kissing and spending time with him…

    Sans Autumn.

    So they had to go, too. T’Challa and Autumn are a package deal/ She’s his daughter, his baby girl, his pride and joy. If a woman does not at her, then they don’t want the real T’Challa Udaku.

    Because, first and foremost, he is Autumn’s baba.

    How can you separate him from her, separate his identity as a dad, a very important aspect of him, and claim to still want all of him?

    You can’t , in his opinion.

    So, yeah. T’Challa’s been through his fair share of women trying to sue him and women not respecting his commitment to his daughter and women that just flat out were not right for him.    Now you are here. He loves you but he’s not in love with you. Yet. He is not in love with you yet, but he knows that it’s coming. Because even though he despises how fast he falls, he loves it. It lets him know if the woman is for him or not,and you might just be.

    You love Autumn.

    You care for him.

    You’ve never once mentioned his clothes his money in a way that made it seem like you were truthfully looking for something else.

    You're you, and he has never felt romantic affection like this outside of his love for Nakia.

    So he tries to slow down but keep the relationship going on a certain path. He spends time with you twice a week- on Wednesday’s you grocery shop for your respective apartments, adn you have date nights on Saturday.

    Maybe he’s coming on too strong and he needs to slow down.   

    He’ll try to do that. If not for the sake of you and this relationship, or even for his own, for Autumn’s.

    She’s attached to you already. Had she not found you two kissing, he would’ve waited at least five months to tell her about his relationship with you. She found out when she did though, and he does not lie to her. it was awkard,but he expects her not to lie, so he figures out how to explain him dating you to a sleepy four-year-old and he tells the truth. Also, Autumn is very emotional and analytical. It’s been three weeks since you told her that you’re dating, and she’s become pretty accustomed to seeing you outside of school only once a week.

    He has to limit this to protect her.

    Okay, yeah. Maybe part of him doesn’t want to get his heartbroken again. He has tried to have casual relationships. He really did. It’s just that one night stands are not his cup of tea, and the women that don’t even respect Autumn or him can hit the road and not look back.

    He’s terrified but this is worth the risk.

    He’ just hoping that you don’t break his heart.

    Most importantly, he hopes you don’t break Autumn’s heart.

    Because that’s what’s more important to him right now.

Next- meeting the family 

@ashanti-notthesinger​ @destinio1​ @afraiddreamingandloving​ @starsshines-blog​ @airis-paris14​ @syreanne​ @chaneajoyyy​ @90sinspiredgirl​ @shemiahsmelanin @zillmonger @skysynclair19 @bidibidibombaclaat @marvelpotterlove @constantlycravingtheunknown @imaginewhoever @wakanda-inspired @pocmarvelworks @theunsweetenedtruth @dreampovx

DISCLAIMER- I DO NOT OWN ANY MARVEL CHARACTERS OR THEIR FICTIONAL WORLDS, UNIVERSES, COUNTRIES OR CITIES.

[plumbobpost]

Fanfic Friday: Spotlight on Skell’s Fortune & Romance

Sul sul!

Today Week of Woohoo continues with a very special twist. I have had the opportunity to ask Skell a few questions as part of a new series of posts about storytelling in The Sims community.

Skell’s Fortune & Romance serves as a prequel to the Pleasantview and Strangetown storylines in The Sims 2 from the perspectives of the Caliente sisters, hence the title which references their aspirations. Her story takes place in the time period between the first and second games and fills in the gaps between the contradicting timelines of The Sims, The Sims 2, and The Sims 3. Although the story is largely from Dina’s perspective, it features most of the iconic The Sims 2 characters ranging from Olive Specter to the Tricous to Bella and Mortimer Goth, establishing its own vivid mythology in the process.

In addition to writing, Skell has also created beautiful Maxis-Match content for The Sims 2 and is a frequent contributor to the Totally Maxis Tumblr and the fansite Garden of Shadows.

Without further ado, I’ll let Skell speak for herself.

You’ve said in the past that Fortune & Romance started out as your attempt to make sense of Maxis canon for the premade characters of Neighborhood 1, Pleasantview, and Sunset Valley. How did this evolve from your personal headcanons into a full-fledged story?

“I had played TS2 off and on for years before I was part of the fandom, mostly just goofing around but I had a lot of fun taking pictures and experimenting with posing. One day I discovered Strangetomato’s “Strangetown Here We Come” on TVtropes and was amazed at the way she fleshed out the premade stories from the game. Through her comment section, I discovered the whole fandom and started paying better attention to the premades. Eventually I came up with a backstory for Dina that I really wanted to write and share.”

Why did you choose Nina and Dina Caliente to be your protagonists? Did you ever consider different lead characters?

“It was always gonna be Dina because I was intrigued her backstory with the mysteriously inconsistent Michael Bachelor and the fact that she’s part alien. I wasn’t as interested in Nina until I noticed that she was shy (like me in RL) and also autonomously beating people up all the time. That’s when I realized she was gonna be a co-star and balance to Dina’s antics.”

Instead of ignoring Maxis’ characterization of Dina as a gold digger, you embraced it and made it a focal point of her character. Similarly, you fully acknowledge Nina’s romance aspiration while not making her a heartbreaker. How did you find a balance between their implied “villainy” in The Sims 2 and making them more sympathetic characters?

“I enjoy classic movies where Marilyn Monroe or Thoroughly Modern Millie is like “teehee I’m gonna marry a millionaire,” and it’s quirky rather than villainous. In those stories, she usually falls for a poor guy and chooses love over money (and often he turns out to be secretly rich.) Since Michael didn’t give her a “married a rich sim” memory, I wanted to write Dina the gold-digger as a modern version of that kind of story.”

“Maxis kind of setup Romance sims for “villainy” by not allowing for casual or open relationships, but of course that can be fixed with mods. With Nina, it’s interesting that she doesn’t really fit the “outgoing party girl” type. I think of her as a quiet person with a very intense energy. She needs lots of exercise and woohoo so that she doesn’t explode.”

There are a lot of unconventional relationships in your story. Nina and Servo. Olive and Ichabod. The Tricous. Even Dina and Michael. That being said, there is very definitely a theme of “love conquers all.” What motivated your approach to these relationships? How does that relate back to your attempts at reconciling Maxis canon throughout different games?

“I have a thing for mixed supernatural relationships. Dina and Mike bonding over their hidden supernatural heritages was always key once I figured Michael had a magic side. I knew I wanted to have Nina be intimate with a servo because that’s HAWT, but I didn’t foresee how intimate things would get until I figured out Servo’s character. The Tricous’ happy polyamory was my explanation for all the weirdness going on with their relationships and family tree. And I wanted Olive, Ichabod, and DJ make up this very loving and weirdly “normal” Unholy Family.”

Speaking of reconciling Maxis canon, you created your own version of Michael Bachelor in order to match his appearance in The Sims better and to create a resemblance between him and his famous sister, Bella Goth. Why do you think Michael was depicted so differently throughout the first three games? What did you draw inspiration from in creating “The Ultimate Michael Bachelor?”

“I think it mostly comes down to them wanting to use a familiar name for Bella’s brother/Dina’s husband in TS2, and carrying that forward. In TS3, I saw a boy who had his life all planned out for him by his father. In my headcanon, he screwed that all up and became the graduate of TS1 who had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. His relationship to Bella is the reason why he’s still single by the time he reconnects with Dina, who helps him find direction.”

There is an abundance of strong female characters in F&R, some of which were not originally portrayed that way. Why did you feel that it was important to write them as such?

“Well, because I’m a proud “SJW,” of course! But seriously, it’s less about being strong and more about seeing them as people?”

^Best answer that I could have asked for.

A large portion of Fortune & Romance is dedicated to the mythology of The Sims universe(s) and to supernatural sims. How did you go about the process of world building? Did you draw inspiration from different games in the series and/or from outside sources?

“My biggest worldbuilding is the explanation of where the supernaturals came from. The fairies are sort of fallen angel types who each have an animal form, and their magic rubbed off on human sims to create the supernatural life states.”

“I try to base the worldbuilding off things in game or aspects of game play. The fairy backstory was heavily inspired by fairy tales, in the way they morally test humans for punishment or guidance.”

Aside from premade supernatural sims such as the Smiths, Calientes, and Summerdreams, how did you go about deciding which premade sims were supernatural and which weren’t? How did you decide what life state they were?

“Bella has that awesome bio about being descended from “occultists, decadents, and mystics,” but then in TS3 the Bachelor family is uber-normal, so it eventually became that Jocasta is a squirellier version of Samantha from Betwitched.”

How has Fortune & Romance evolved since you started? Are there things you would do differently if you were to restart it?

“I was such a younger, different person when I started it, and yes there are many things I would do differently. (Michael’s skintone, for example. I tried to split difference between games with a custom skintone in between S2 and S3, but everyone assumes he was whitewashed to S2.)”

“When recreating families for TS4 I came up with a backstory for Dulcinea and Nestor’s relationship as well as a backstory for Don that explains how he got to be the way he is. I still can incorporate these things, but it would have been nice to bring them in earlier.”

With your story having reached a climax, many readers are wondering whether or not F&R will come to an end sooner rather than later. Not to spoil anything, but will the story continue after the party and if so, do you intend for it to last until the events of The Sims 2?

“I never intended for it to last until the events of TS2 because then it would be really depressing. There is more stuff planned for after the party though!”

Aside from writing Fortune & Romance, you have also created a variety of Maxis-match custom content. Why do you prefer working in this aesthetic? How do you feel it complements your writing?

“The game is cartoony, and I like to use that style to tell the story. I prefer to keep things heightened and silly rather than realistic, which very much fits into The Sims aesthetic.”

Speaking of Maxis-match, you have been working on a project for The Sims 2 that involves adapting Maxis-based custom content to blend in better with the game files. Would you mind elaborating a bit on The Maxis Match Repository Project?

“The TS2 repository project is made up of conversions/separates/or otherwise adapted Maxis which pull their textures from the ones that are already in your game, rather than creating new ones. This makes the files much much tinier. I also wanted to create a catalog where you can easily find it all in one place rather than hunt all over the internet. Check it out and don’t miss out on the gems in the back of your catalog!”

You’ve played every main game in The Sims franchise, and you’ve even made some very popular 2t4 recreations of the Calientes and Michael Bachelor. Do you have a favorite game for playing? Creating sims? Making Content? Building?

“I enjoy a lot of things about TS4. The game looks great and CAS and Build Mode are the best of any game. My favorite aspect is making sims, especially that you can share sims with traits/careers/skills so they have their own little story packaged with them. However, it is much more difficult for storytelling since there’s not even a way to pick up sims and move them around.”

“TS2 is still the best as far as premade sims go, and it’s the only one I make content for. I’m a bit of a control freak with my sims, and TS2 has been mastered by fans at this point where you can have ultimate control.”

Why do you continue to play The Sims? Do you feel that the games provide a creative outlet?

“I always loved playing with Barbies as a kid and The Sims really is the ultimate dollhouse. The first time I ever heard about TS1 I knew I HAD to have it. My aunt bought it for me while I was on vacation, but I couldn’t play it until we got home! During the car ride back home and I read that manual from cover to cover multiple times, so many ideas buzzing in my head.”

Any parting comments, teasers, spoilers, public service announcements, etc.?

“I’ve been on hiatus a long while and am just now getting back into the swing of things. I’m currently working on finishing up the chapter I started posting on Tumblr but never finished. It was FreddyAirmail who got me back in the TS2 spirit by asking me to help out with the Crystal Springs neighborhood project. It’s a community hood with houses based on each of the Stuff Packs, and I made the families for Teen Style and Family Fun!”

Thanks again to Skell for answering my questions. To those of you out there who aren’t familiar with her work, go check out her Tumblr and make sure to catch up on Fortune & Romance.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to visit my ask box. If you are interested, give Plumbob Post a follow, and reblog for anyone else who you think would enjoy this blog. Stay tuned for upcoming posts!

Dag dag!

 *Photo Credits go to Skell*

[kakunamatatq]

Voltron Ask Meme

Tagged by @kalluraicedcoffee, @n-trace, and @teamsincline (tumblr is shit with notifs more than usual lately but I think I got everyone? thanks y’all!)

How did you discover the show?

Through tumblr, although special mention goes to this particular ML AU piece because two months before I got into Voltron, ML was my default go-to interest.

Was it love at first sight or did it take you a while to get into the show?

Pretty much. I watched A:TLA and LoK before it, so combined with all the talk about it on here I decided to give it a go.

I think I binged half of it in a day before stopping myself and thinking I had to tell my sister about it so we could watch it together lol. The first few episodes are kind of heavy on the set-up, but “Fall of the Castle of Lions” and “Tears of the Balmera” solidified my love for starting to explore Hunk’s and Pidge’s characters more.

Do you have a favorite episode?

I’ll just do one* for each season because there’s just so many episodes to love.

s1: “Crystal Venom” s2: tie between “The Ark of Taujeer”, “Space Mall”, and “The Blade of Marmora” s3: “Tailing a Comet” s4: tie between “Reunion” and “Black Site” s5: tie between “Blood Duel” and “Kral Zera” s6: tie between “Razor’s Edge” and “The Black Paladins”

*I tried and failed. Horribly.

Rest under a Read More because I’m long winded:

Do you have a favorite Paladin?

Do not...do not ask me to choose between my children (if you base if off of the “frequently tagged” suggestions on my blog it’s Keith lol. But for what it’s worth, I own these Garrison trio shirts, and the tradition is that I wear my Lance one and my sister wears her Shiro one whenever we sit down to watch the latest season drop)

Do you have a favorite Lion? (If it’s different from your fav paladin, why?)

Black because of her history with Zarkon and how it parallels Shiro’s history of trauma. Also, as Abby put it, Black “is the biggest Shiro stan & I respect her for it.”

Do you have a favorite Villain?

Haggar. Even if some things don’t entirely make sense (yet...?), I absolutely love the slow build-up we’ve been getting for her. She’s been in the thick of things since the first episode/10000 years ago, and we’ve slowly seen her piece together her own past (one of the biggest reasons “Blood Duel” is a favorite, her flashback was great) and manipulate things to her own advantage; I’m so happy she’s going to be the final boss of the series (or co-final boss if Zarkon and Lotor are going to come back in some shape or form, though maybe merely as her puppets).

Do you have a favorite Alien Race? (recurring and/or minor)

Galra for their species diversity and history (not entirely fair since they’re given a disproportionate amount of focus but still lol.)

Favorite side / other character(s)- Rebels, General, Blade of Mamora, Garrison, etc?

Hira, Kolivan, Romelle, Thace, Varkon, all of Sincline, and all of the Holt family (we’ve only glimpsed Colleen in a flashback but Ihave a feeling I’m going to love her too)

How/Why did you join the fandom?

Wanted to chat with other fans of the show because I’d already bored my friends who were either casual about it or indifferent to it to death lmao. I’ve been relatively on the outskirts since I first watched it in July 2016 because I’d rather avoid fandom drama, but I’m a bit more active now and hope to write a bit for it, as rusty as my skills are.

Care to share a favorite headcanon?

Um I like a couple of popular ones like TransGirl!Pidge, past Alforan, and Yorak for Cosmic Wolf’s name. Was really big on Acxa and Keith being siblings too until s6 seemingly disproved it. 💔 Some others: - Kolivan is Krolia’s dad. (thanks @aaawunder now I’m going to be sad if this doesn’t pan out)

- Coran knew Keith was Galra ever since the Castle scanned everyone in the first episode and he had to look at the human medical data when he stuck Lance in a pod in “Tears of the Balmera”. (keeping in line with how he knew Pidge was a girl; guy is up-to-date on everything going on on his grandfather’s Castleship)

- Hunk either got his current headband from a relative who has since passed away or it was a gift from Lance after the original one he got was wrecked somehow, and that’s how they became BFFs. - Keith’s jacket and gloves were gifts from Shiro. - Lance’s jacket was a hand-me-down from one of his older brothers.

- Shiro grew up with either a grandparent to explain his “old soul” tendencies/perspectives or was raised by distant relatives that he didn’t connect with much (basically adopting @bosstoaster‘s backstory from her Spectrum series for him because it’s amazing). It kills me that Josh was able to mention the former at a panel because that means we’re probably not going to get to see much of his backstory in canon, and I’d really like to see from his perspective what his and Keith’s friendship means to him. If he was in a similar situation of isolation growing up, if he saw that in Keith, etc.

- Alteans aren’t really hung up on gender due to their shapeshifiting abilities. Alfor’s referring to Allura as a princess when she was still so young was due to personal preference whereas the majority of Alteans would refer to their kids with gender neutral pronouns until they’re roughly the Earth equivalent of eight.

What do you think is the best part of the show?

The characters and the genre.

For me, characters frequently make shows of this nature.There can be an interesting plot, but if I don’t care about at least some of the characters to some degree, I’m not as inclined to watch. As many complaints as I have about certain aspects of this series, I’ve been endeared to these characters since s1. There could always be more content (what I would give for more filler episodes for the team to just bond and chill), but with what we have been given, there’s enough there for me to find enjoyment in.

The genre acts as a supplement to that. For me, one of the best things about space-faring adventures is seeing these characters placed in (literal) alien settings and watching how they react to all the possible scenarios the incomprehensible infinite of space has to offer. (And I’m a sucker for such things, being simultaneously made to feel so cosmically huge in one’s consciousness and so incredibly small in the vastness of a universe largely unknown to us.) There’s so much you can do with that. Any hopes and wishes for future episodes / seasons?

Holy shit do I!

- Tying into the previous question, one of the things that sort of made me sad about s3-s6/the second production season is how we didn’t get to do a lot of planet exploring. There’s an entire universe to play around with, and I know it’s impossible to show everything, but with s7 effectively being a road trip season, I’m ecstatic, largely because this provides us with the chance to see civilian Galra. I’m super interested in seeing how those dynamics play out between those not involved with the Empire and all the people who suffer under Galra oppression (we see this touched upon in s3e01 with Kolivan and the BoM, and at the time I was disappointed that it wasn’t explored more, but if they’re saving it for this season I can forgive them).

- Going further, how do mixed people fare under these circumstances? I’m really excited about this because I feel like this would be the perfect opportunity not only to expand upon the VLD universe as whole, but specifically dive into the backstories of Sincline. We know at least the upper echelons of the empire wanted nothing to do with them — how many Galra outside of that hierarchy feel the same way? People of their parents’ species?

Likewise, we could see if Keith being part Galra and Krolia being around gets the team into any sort of trouble. Since Keith’s bigger on actions than words, seeing him in a situation he can’t physically fight his way out of and having to rely on his team is a scenario of continued interest to me.

This is already way too long, but I’ll end it by saying I’m so stoked about all the potential road trip shenanigans the team could get into and for them visiting Earth again. I figured we’d be going back there around the end of s4 or s5 back when seasons were still 13-episodes long, and finally getting to see that play out after two years of waiting is again, very exciting for me.

And, uh, ships. I have my preferences. If they play out, I can die happy. If they don’t, I’ll always have the quality fanon content that keeps me involved with the fandom (all you creators are great 💜)

Do you think you’ll stick it out until the end of the show?

Barring unforeseen circumstances, most definitely. Been with it since a month after s1 dropped and it became my default fandom obsession, will be here when s10 drops in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Tag your friends or someone you want to get to know better

@grandraconteur @guegetheassassin @honestlyprettychill @mischiefandspirits @nixthelapin @pipedreamprayer @purpleneutrino @spacemare @sparklingdisneyprincess @tomodachi-to-koibito​ @winry7

And @ any else I didn’t mention but would like to try it too (Apologies if any of you have been tagged for this already. Hmu with your answers, I’d love to read them)