#and like the only situation i could fathom where texts would work is a sibling situation bc sometimes my siblings scream and then 5 mins

[yuwuta]

can i say something without sounding like a hater

[dramaticviolincrescendo]

Okay, what are your thoughts on Ian's relationships? With his family, his boyfriends, and Mandy (since I think that's the only friend he's had)

Oh, no. Ohhhhhhhh, no. Now you’ve done it. You’ve asked about my dear, darling favorite character on the show. My love for one Ian Gallagher runs deep, which means this answer is going to run super long. The good, the bad, and everything in between—Ian Gallagher lives rent free in my brain and always will. I derive so much satisfaction from seeing Ian interact with other people, in whatever capacity that might be. I admire and aspire to the compassion he has shown for others over the years, even and perhaps most especially those who arguably haven’t earned it. He tries so hard to be good to people, and seeing their love for him manifest when he’s reached such lows where he can’t even fathom why the love of his life would want to be with him forever? That’s powerful.

So, yeah. I said I could write essays on these characters, and that’s exactly what you’re about to get: five hours and 6k words’ worth of my thoughts. (I am so sorry. There will be text walls.)

Let’s dive into Ian’s many and multifaceted relationships—his family, his friends, and his romantic pursuits.

Ian and Family

Ian told us where he stood on this in the very first season, and it set the standard for his character for eleven years to come. Faced with a prospect that others in his position could only dream of—not being Frank’s son and having a wealthy father with a functional, prosperous lifestyle mere miles away—Ian refused to buy into it. He refused to do what might have been objectively better for his future by seeking a relationship with Clayton. In that household, he would have had access to a better public school, more financial resources, a tutor to help him where he was struggling, and less urgency for him to work so that he could enjoy being a kid. When he got sick, he would have had access to better healthcare, too. Perhaps he would have had a better shot at West Point from that background than he did at home. But that’s just it: home was with his family, and he was very clear that they didn’t live in that nice house. All he wanted—all he wanted—was to be with his brothers and sisters. He has never referred to them as only half-siblings or half-cousins; he has never even used the words, “you’re not my dad,” on Frank. That’s his family, the people he loves most in the world, and he’s always been at his best when he’s with them and at his worst when he’s not. Let’s look at each of them:

1.      Frank: It is so striking to me that Ian doesn’t appear to hold the outright contempt for Frank that Fiona, Lip, and Debbie have exhibited at different points over the years. Aside from the handful of instances where they’ve gotten into physical altercations (which Frank always initiated) and kicking him out of the house on occasion, Ian is simply indifferent to him. But there are these moments, these brief glimmers of mutual attachment and loyalty, if those are the right words. In the scene where Ian famously doesn’t count to three before using the pepper spray on him, Frank starts saying how his New Gallaghers weren’t his real kids—that Ian is his real son, and Frank is his real father. It’s a passing thought uttered while trying to manipulate his way into the house that neither of them think much of, nor does the audience…until you remember that biologically, Frank isn’t his father, and he certainly hasn’t behaved like one either. Ian has more right than anyone to comment on that, but he doesn’t because Frank is his father. He’s the father that Ian idly hoped wouldn’t come to his wedding yet sat joking about with Debbie rather than getting pissed off that he was making out with some lady in front of everyone. He’s the father who sat at the table with them eating breakfast in 11x03 and claimed Mickey was the man in their relationship without Ian saying a word to him about it, and who Ian saw no issue with taking Franny to school when no one else could. In s4, as far removed from his family as he’d been for a while, Ian still went straight to the hospital when he heard that Frank was at death’s door. We focus so much on his attitude towards Monica because of how obvious it was that we frequently miss these tiny moments and their implications. It would take an awful lot of patience, compassion, and love not to write Frank off completely after all he’s done. Not necessarily our standard definition of love between a son and his father, perhaps, but a loving soul.

2.      Monica: I have actually written a pretty lengthy post about his relationship with her because while their shared mental illness definitely plays a role in his feelings toward her, that grew complicated far earlier than his diagnosis. The first time we meet her, we see that he has a visceral reaction to news of her presence. He runs. When Ian can’t process strong emotions, that’s what he’s done in the past. I happened upon an interview Cameron did just after the end of s1 where he mentioned something I had already been thinking: Ian’s age when Monica left is extremely important. He was a kid in s1, but one who could roll with the punches, sometimes literally. She left them two years before that. Ian would have been in middle school, roughly as old as Debbie was when she still called Frank “daddy” and forgave him for everything he did. It’s an awkward age that once again set Ian in something of a danger zone—too old to accept an excuse or no explanation at all, but not old enough to process the situation in a healthy way. And then she’s back all of a sudden with no warning. Ian doesn’t cry like Debbie, and he doesn’t typically get explosively angry like Fiona. He can’t deal, so he runs. He hangs back. He only speaks when he has to and compartmentalizes: Monica wants to take Liam, and they need to stop her. It doesn’t have to be about her leaving. They have a goal—he can focus on that. And then she’s back a year later, saying she’s here to stay while Fiona seems to take her at her word and Lip isn’t there to ground everyone. Ian tries so hard to behave like Lip would with his biting sarcasm and attempts to stay emotionally distant in a way that seemed pretty exaggerated for Ian, but he’s also dealing with a fresh wave of guilt over Mickey going to juvie—and Monica gets it. She’s the only person to acknowledge that he’s in pain and actively try to make it better. She’s the only one who really knows at the time, but that hardly matters. This poor kid, whose mother left him when he still needed her, has her standing in front of him and saying she’s sorry and listening when he speaks and taking him dancing—just the two of them. Embarrassing as it was and harmful as it could have been, she tried to facilitate his dreams when no one else wanted him to go into the military. She was there for him when he went AWOL. She came for him when he was arrested and even wanted to make a place for him in her new life, unrealistic as it was. This goes so much deeper than them both being bipolar. Ian’s comment about her parachuting into their lives in s7 wasn’t about Mickey or her role in them breaking up. He trusted her. He wanted her. He needed her. And she’d convinced him that she would be there—until she left. Over and over again. She was there for him and unintentionally took advantage of how desperately he still needed his mother. She made him keep loving her, and that’s both a blessing that has him crying into a voluminous man’s arms when she passes and a curse that wrecked him more than once.

3.      Fiona: The trust these two have for each other cannot be understated. Fiona has discussed things with Ian that she never brought up around any of the other kids throughout the entire series. In the pilot episode, she tells him about feeling needed and takes his opinion on the matter to heart. At the end of the season, he’s the one she talks to about the car because she can trust him to give her an answer even without speaking. In s2, she tells Lip that the two of them are her rocks, and we see that time and time again. That’s part of what makes their falling out over the church hit that much harder: it’s Ian and Fiona. The only time they’d been on the outs in any serious manner up to that point was when Ian was adjusting to his new reality and they were trying to find a balance between sister and caretaker. Otherwise, that bond of trust had never been severed—not until Ian literally sold himself only for it to amount to nothing in the end because she had no idea the lengths to which he’d gone to get that building. That damage gets mended, thankfully, but what a powerful period of time when those two were the only ones who’d never really been at each other’s throats. There is a downside to that trust, though. As I mentioned before, Ian was so responsible and put together when he was younger that Fiona didn’t think twice about his situation with Ned or that he ran away. Not even seventeen yet, and she was telling Debbie that she didn’t like his decision to leave but trusted him. That is one of the things I love about this show—even something like trust that we always prop up as an important factor in our relationships can betray us in the most unexpected ways.

4.      Lip: I won’t go into it here, but the relationship they share is something that means a lot to me on a personal level. It’s part of how I knew that Ian would become my favorite character pretty early on. The way he simultaneously admires and envies Lip, loves and is annoyed by him, relies on him and is desperate to pave his own path in the world—what a beautiful and accurate depiction of what it means to be a younger sibling. Lip is the first person to discover that he’s gay and openly accept him for it. (I think what he tried with Karen came from a well-meaning place even if it was horribly, horribly misguided.) Lip is the one who tries to get him into West Point, hate it as he does. He helps Ian when Terry is after him, takes care of him in the aftermath of the wedding when he realizes just how deeply Ian feels for Mickey, searches the whole damn city for him when he finds out that Ian is in trouble, gets him a job, leans on him in his own time of need… He’s not perfect. He slips up, just like Ian does. Some things break my heart, like Lip insisting that he’s earned his own space when his little brother is asking him for safe harbor or Ian thanking him for being his brother outside the prison. But they love each other so much, and I just… I can’t possibly put into words how much I love their dynamic.

5.      Debbie, Carl, and Liam: I’m grouping these three together because they’re further separated from Ian in age, so we see a lot of the same trends with them as a whole. Ian loves taking care of people. We know this. We also know that Fiona and Lip don’t typically want him taking care of them—they’re the ones who take care of him when he needs it, specifically Lip. With the younger three, however, Ian can be the Big Brother. He can shake his head in utter bafflement at Debbie’s obsession with holding her breath for two minutes, walk Carl through what he needs to go camping, and promise his baby brother postcards when he leaves. The difference here is that his relationship with them is so much less fraught with conflict. We don’t see him fight with Debbie, Carl, or Liam the way he has with Fiona or Lip. While Ian tends to be the voice of reason during conflicts overall, I think it’s also because he relies on his older siblings in a way that he doesn’t with his younger siblings, and the latter don’t tend to rely on him as much as Fiona or Lip as well. There’s a lack of tension in most of their interactions growing up because that pressure isn’t there. Perhaps this is where Ian’s age and standing in the family is a bit more beneficial: young enough to have people he can rely on while too young for anyone to really rely on him for more than his share of the squirrel fund.

Ian and Friends

I’ve seen it mentioned that Ian (and Mickey) not having more friends is bad or lazy writing. I tend to believe that that fails to take something into account that, admittedly, most of us don’t really have to think about: having friends is a luxury. It requires time and effort to cultivate friendships, especially lasting ones. As a kid, Ian spent a lot of his free time working or helping to manage one family crisis after another. Going AWOL, losing his health, struggling to acclimate to his illness, trying to find a new career path, spiraling into the Gay Jesus movement, going to prison, adjusting once again to normal life, getting married, a pandemic… I’m sure he’s had plenty of acquaintances over the years, but having a family to support and constant upheavals would have made it extremely difficult to really forge strong relationships with them. I think that’s part of what makes his relationship with Mandy so special and valuable to him: she’s sort of the same way.

When we met Mandy in s1, she had other friends. We saw her meet up with them and go shopping; she told Ian a story about how one was mad at her for not sharing her make-up. As the trauma in the Milkovich household reached its zenith for her in s2 and she started thinking seriously about getting out of there, we saw those friends fall by the wayside—all except Ian. He saw her and let her see him early on. That’s a level of trust and respect that nobody else in their neighborhood would have displayed, certainly not to her. But then there’s this guy who defended her against their creepy, perverted teacher and treated her like a human being, not an object. It’s no wonder she developed an obvious, unrequited crush and sought physical comfort from him occasionally. It’s no wonder she tried to repay the favor by giving Mickey a hard time in s3 and s4, misguided and rather uninformed as we know it was at the time. (It’s also no wonder that she went for the closest Gallagher to Ian, either, but that’s for another meta.)

And Ian… Ian is loyal to a fault. We have watched Ian cut out his own heart and let the blood drip down his arm to pool on the floor at his feet if it would make a damn bit of difference for the people he loves. Like Fiona and Lip, Mandy immediately accepted him for who he is and suggested an arrangement that would protect him as well as benefit her. That is enormous where they came from. To him, that had to feel like the ultimate sign of friendship: he could trust her with a part of him that he hadn’t even entrusted to most of his family yet. From that point on, she was on the List of People Ian Gallagher Would Do Anything For. Finding out about Terry and what had happened? He held a bake sale, of all things, to fundraise for her. Seeing that his brother—his best friend—was treating her like garbage? He put him in his place. Her boyfriend was beating her? He brought her home and made it his goal to find a safe place for her to stay, even if it ultimately didn’t work. She was going to move away from all of her meager support with that boyfriend? He didn’t just rally his own arguments—he brought in outside help with Lip, who he thought might tip the scales. It’s usually just a saying that true friends will help each other hide a body, but Ian literally tried to do that. Lucky for him, he has a good head on his shoulders and used it.

No, Ian doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends. We’ve seen that he has spheres of influence, if you will, and acquaintances that he can call upon when he needs them. (For example, the guys that helped with the preacher.) However, Ian has always struck me as a “quality over quantity” type of person. Being a soldier or an EMT isn’t lucrative, but they’re meaningful for someone who sees them as vehicles for helping people. Seeing more parts of the world than just Chicago has appealed to him in the past, but he seems perfectly content to carve out a spot for himself right here at home. Having only three best friends—Lip, Mandy, and Mickey—doesn’t seem like much of a hardship for him.

Ian and Romantic Pursuits

I hate to say that there were five, but from Ian’s perspective, there were. So, let’s talk about all five. Even though…there weren’t five. There was only one. We’ll save the best for last.

1.      Kash: The first of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. I hope it goes without saying that I hate this man with the passion of a thousand burning suns. I hate him so much. However, their interactions taught me a whole lot about how kind and compassionate Ian really is—and how naïve. Of course, he would believe that Kash loved him. The man was buying him all sorts of expensive gifts, and that’s what we see on all the commercials and in so many movies, isn’t it? Grand gestures of affection through expensive gifts. Poor as they were, Ian still scraped together the money to buy him baseball tickets and CDs, convinced as he was that that was all part of what you did in a relationship. That desire to do things like a “normal” married couple in s11? Yeah, that starts here. Ian has always been a planner, and he’s always bought into certain stereotypes. We can see that here. What we can also see is Ian’s compassionate, kind, loving soul. He cares so deeply for other people, even ones that he doesn’t know very well, especially if they are living in circumstances that mean something to him. (For example, the mentally ill woman they tried to help at work and the shelter kids whose situations were so similar to Mickey’s.) Kash being a closeted gay man living in misery with a wife he didn’t love and two children he never meant to have clearly tugged at Ian’s heartstrings. Even after everything that happens, even though Ian behaves as though they’re awkward exes who just happen to work together, he still covers for Kash. He gives him that head start and takes it upon himself to break the news to Linda that he’s gone. He defends Kash to Lip when the latter finally says exactly what we all know: he was a pedophile who deserved to rot in prison for what he did. As with Fiona’s trust, Ian’s loving soul, compassionate heart, and desire for love outside his siblings are virtues that have done him harm in the past. This is one such instance.

2.      Ned: The second of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. To be honest, I don’t believe that Ian would even characterize it that way. He seemed very aware that Ned was a distraction from his problems—from Mickey being in juvie, Monica falling into a depressive episode, the money in the squirrel fund being gone, Lip moving out, losing his shot at West Point, and getting denied for service due to his age. Again, though, Ian has always wanted to feel valued, and this rich dude was letting him stay in a fancy hotel room with anything he wanted readily available. This (disgusting predator) guy was giving him attention and a distraction with no strings attached. Then the complications roll in, and he’s once again faced with being the mistress to a closeted, married man. The difference here is that he’s not comfortable with it. He tries to tell Fiona twice, which is enormous for Ian when he has never been very good at communicating if it means burdening others with or even merely facing his own problems. But he tries to tell her. He rejects the GPS unit and tells Ned that he has a boyfriend, boxing him into a strictly sexual arrangement. (This, unfortunately, makes sense. It aligns with how Fiona viewed things: where Jimmy was concerned about it, she told him that it was “just sex.”) He is also visibly embarrassed to admit to Lip and Fiona what has been going on with Ned. By that point, Ian is a year and a half older and, while still scarred and warped in his views because of Kash, perhaps a bit wiser. Emotionally, he kept Ned at arm’s length most of the time. He used Ned not just as a distraction, but as a way to galvanize Mickey into taking their relationship a step forward. But Ian is still Ian, and Ian is compassionate to a fault. Ned played that card by asking if he could have a little understanding for a man whose life was falling apart. Sure, he can. He’s Ian, the Gallagher too empathetic for his own good at times. We know how that spirals out of control. It just goes to show that even when Ian was trying to maintain some emotional distance, his heart is simply too big and his perceptions too heavily impacted by the grooming he’d experienced with two different people by then, and so he [SPOILER ALERT] still feels enough of a connection to Ned after all these years to be mildly bothered that he passed away.

3.      Caleb: The third of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. Ian’s relationship with Caleb strikes me as being similar to what he had with Ned. While more age-appropriate, Ian was very much using Caleb, just as Caleb was using him. That’s why it was so easy for both of them to walk away. Ian was in a difficult spot when they met. He was grateful to the firefighters who saved his life, but he had also just saved someone else at a moment when he was perhaps at his absolute lowest. That’s what he’s always wanted, isn’t it—to be a bit of a hero and help people? So, he’s understandably drawn there, first out of gratitude and then to be surrounded by very attractive gay firemen who helped people, saved his life, and invited him to be part of a function they were holding. But he made himself pretty clear from the start: he was interested in sex with Caleb. That was the draw. He still hasn’t come to terms with being bipolar and losing Mickey, but Ian has never not been with anyone for any extended length of time. That’s just who he is: he’s always sought some level of outward validation—from the army, Kash, Monica, Mickey, and so many others. We’re seeing him struggle with that now as he deals with the opportunities available to him as a mentally ill ex-con felon. So, he pursues Caleb as a distraction just like he did with Ned, only Caleb is a predator in his own right and can smell that his interest is coming from a place of weakness. He immediately (and initially unintentionally) preys on Ian’s desperate need for structure and order by insisting on a traditional date where Ian is very much out of his element and even goes so far as to instruct Ian on how to be intimate. It’s no wonder he mentions Mickey in these moments, as Mickey never wanted him to change, and Ian leans heavily (even slightly hyperbolically) into the fact that Mickey wasn’t a paragon of order and stability like Caleb outwardly appears. 

And I think why Ian puts up with it so long—being taught like a child, being used to upset Caleb’s parents, being paraded in front of his friends to make them jealous—is because he was getting something out of it too, just like with Ned. A stable place to live when their home ownership was in flux, a place away from his family when they weren’t providing the support he needed as he adjusted to his disorder, someone who validated his desires to help people regardless of their ulterior motives, and a physical distraction from his own problems. All of these parallel his relationship with Ned very closely. It was never going to last, of course. Ian is a strong person who temporarily forgot how strong he was because he forgot who he was, and Caleb didn’t want to be cared for—he wanted a project, like all of his sculptures. Being a project, being something that others see as needing to be fixed? That’s a hard no for Ian. It always has been. There’s a moment I love later in their relationship where Caleb tells him to turn off the lights when he goes out and lightly reprimands him for leaving one on the day prior. Ian is in a better place at that point, having regained a lot of his sense of self, and stares after him with indignation at being treated like a kid. He’s then lied to and cheated on, but I think that to mention those things to Caleb when they break up is to admit weakness on his own part—that he stuck with Caleb knowing that he was being mistreated, and Ian is not one to be called a victim. So, while we know from his discussions with Lip and Sue that the cheating and distrust bothered him most, he merely focused on Caleb lying about his sexuality, which removed a lot of the emotion from the situation—just like he did with Ned. It ultimately turned out to be a bad move since Caleb, being a skilled predator, made him question even his own sexuality in return, but we’re starting to see that Ian isn’t here to be someone’s toy anymore. Not an older, married man like Ned, but definitely not anyone his age either. I’m glad this pseudo-relationship happened because it showed Ian how strong he really was and that he could be in control of his own life. Sure, it destabilized him a little in the aftermath, but he worked through it. He leaned on his family, specifically Lip, who has always been his rock without the blurred lines that Fiona represented between sister/mother-figure/caretaker. Caleb is a garbage person, but Ian was the one who pulled the treasure from the trash, not him.

4.      Trevor: The fourth of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. Trevor is perhaps the first relationship where we don’t see Ian dive in. Whether that’s because of his confusion over Trevor’s gender identity or the fact that he was really beginning to fully mature as an adult by that point (ostensibly finishing his education, getting a career, being fully self-sufficient, etc.), he tried to take his time and not jump right in. They hung out, talked around the neighborhood, and yes, engaged in some casual intimacy at the club. Again, Ian might not be in a full relationship, but he’s never without someone for long. At that point in the series, all he was missing was a relationship when it comes to traditional, “normal” goals for people to have. But Trevor posed a situation he’s never been in before since, while gay himself, Ian has never been very interested in activism or engaging in the LGBT community. It’s just not in his culture or environment, so to be faced with someone he’s interested in that challenges a lot of his views of gender and sexuality is something he takes his time with. Unfortunately, Trevor is younger than him and not quite as mature, not quite as experienced. He tells Ian he has plenty of friends and doesn’t need another, which is an ultimatum that has never really sat very well with me personally because I’m generally of the mind that if a person needs time and you really care for them, you’ll let them have that time. I’m not unsympathetic to Trevor: he’s been burned before and has his own trauma stemming from responses to his identity, so it makes complete sense for him not to be patient in this regard. He shouldn’t have to be—but then, Ian shouldn’t have to rush into anything he’s not 100% certain he wants either. That’s exactly what he does, though, because Ian does for others without thinking of the implications for himself a lot of the time. They make great friends, but they don’t make great partners. Trevor treats Ian similarly to Caleb in that he’s a bit of a project. Trevor educates him on the LGBT community and incorporates him into his ventures for the shelter without ever really showing much interest in Ian’s life or family, which suits Ian just fine because for as interested as he is in helping with the shelter and as attracted to Trevor as he is, he seems to know they’re not compatible. Ian, who has been having sex since he was far too young, takes a step back from it when they run into compatibility issues. (And pushes back on the pressure to bottom with some of his own—neither of them were in the right on that.) He doesn’t ask much about Trevor’s family or try to be part of his personal life. They sort of embody the “friends with benefits” stereotype: they hang out, they have sex, and that’s really all there is to their relationship. 

The reason Ian doubles down on trying to make it work isn’t because there was a future for them before Mickey broke out. It’s because he thinks he’s lost Mickey forever, he knows he’s lost Monica forever, and he’s not going to get the support he needs from his family when they couldn’t stand Monica and Fiona told him what he already knew to be true, namely that Mickey being an escaped convict would destroy everything Ian worked so hard for if he got involved. So, he does what Ian does. He needs that distraction—he needs to run from these strong emotions he can’t process, so he bottles them up and unfairly hopes that Trevor will provide some of that comfort after cheating on him with Mickey. (Had Mickey been released, I think they would have broken up. Instead, that was the first match Ian lit, but certainly not the last.) Now, the thing is, Trevor said at the start that he didn’t want to be Ian’s friend. He’s also younger and less mature in a relationship, which means he threw the concept of love out there prematurely, just like Ian thought what he had with Kash was love. The death throes of their relationship were a back and forth where Ian was spiraling and seeking comfort, and Trevor was providing some while keeping their relationship pretty amorphous. (Were they exes? Were they friends? Were they people who shared interests and danced around each other? Were they going to get back together? They never officially broke up—it fizzled and resurged, then fizzled for good.) Ultimately, whatever it was that they had couldn’t survive Mickey, Monica, or Gay Jesus. Trevor wasn’t prepared to deal with a full-blown manic episode, and based on his hands-off approach with involving himself in Ian’s life even before the Mickey-shaped bomb got dropped on them, it doesn’t seem like he really wanted to anyway. He did what he’s always done: prioritized his shelter, which I’m not deriding in the slightest. By that point, Ian was too far gone to care that he disappeared anyway. Had the situation been different and he was getting the support from his family that he needed, it doesn’t seem like he would have cared much there either.

5.      Mickey: Finally. Only took over five thousand words to get here. I’ll preface this with something that anyone who knows me from other fandoms is already well aware of, namely that I don’t do romance. Ever. Never been interested. The relationships I’ve always been most passionately interested in are platonic ones, especially “found families” and siblings, which is probably obvious from the other five thousand words here. Ian and Mickey are the first relationship I’ve actively shipped or written for in a fandom. They’re the first I’ve been invested in to this extent. As such, one of the biggest pet peeves I had when I first joined this fandom was the saying, “Ian fell first, Mickey fell harder.” These two wonderful dumbasses face planted on the concrete in front of the Kash and Grab in s1 and never recovered. I could go on forever about these two, but that particular wall of text would probably be too daunting for even the most avid Gallavich stan to traverse, so I’ll keep it fairly brief. As we can see above, Ian has a very strict sense of what he “should” want in a partner. Someone who is moderately successful in their chosen field, makes enough money to at least live comfortably, and typically does something that helps other people (a doctor, a fireman, a youth counselor). These aren’t passionate people. They’re not men who operate on instinct the way most of the people in his life have always had to by virtue of their social standing. They have life goals and opportunities that he envies, and Ian has a great deal of compassion for them when they hit a roadblock or things don’t work out. The amazing dichotomy of Ian Gallagher is that he straddles a line most people can’t between the rough neighborhood that has instilled in him all of his values/behaviors and the middle-class mentality of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and aspiring to more. Ian has always aimed for what Lip said wasn’t possible for poor people: being successful without having to scam or steal. But as I said way back at the beginning of this manifesto, the South Side is his home. His family is his family. And none of the people he’s been with personify the South Side quite like Mickey—they don’t personify home like Mickey. 

And I think that’s where the initial draw for Ian is. (I’m going to focus on Ian’s side since he’s who your question focused on.) The other guys look great on paper, and Ian’s brain says that that’s what he should aim for. We know better, though. We know that Ian has an enormous heart that belongs first and foremost to his family and their home. His heart says that this person—this dirty, rude, mean, violent person—is home. His heart says this person is everything about himself that he denies having, just like Ian was everything about Mickey that the latter declined to openly acknowledge for so long. I don’t like relationships built on “making each other better.” I really don’t. The wonderful thing about this is that it’s never been that way. Ian didn’t change Mickey. He’s exactly who he’s always been, but he’s grown past the fear of his own emotions and Terry’s response to them. He’s still a thief, a con artist, violent, and rude. Mickey didn’t change Ian either. He’s still rigidly conforming to certain stereotypes of what he thinks he should want, seeking structure (to his own detriment at times), and not a great communicator. The point for them is that they complement each other, not that they make the other a better person—not even that they bring something out of each other that wasn’t already there. That’s what Ian’s other relationships did. They made him shave off his edges so that he could fit a square peg into a round hole, and that’s not happiness. It’s simply what he thought he was supposed to do—what “normal” people did. 

With Mickey, he doesn’t have to worry so much about what is normal or acceptable. He doesn’t have to worry about whether or not his life is objectively “on track,” not until fairly recently. Mickey is the only person he’s ever been with who has accepted him for who he is, faults and strengths alike, without the underlying insinuation that he should be aiming for something else or pretending to be whatever the other person needs him to be in order to care for them. Kash needed an escape—Ian provided it. Ned needed a very specific brand of toy—Ian played that role. Caleb needed a project to feel fulfilled—Ian went along with it for a bit. Trevor needed someone who accepted him as he was but did things his way—Ian did that. To care for Mickey has only ever meant being himself because all Mickey ever really needed was him. Mickey didn’t need an escape from his home—his relationship with his family is more complicated than that. Mickey didn’t need to be saved from his upbringing—it’s what made him the person Ian fell in love with and who he is happy to be. Mickey didn’t need someone to change who he is on a fundamental level because unless it is going to get him into trouble and separate them, Ian never wanted him to. (Even then, it’s about what he does, not who he is.) And yes, I’m sure that there’s a level of excitement that Ian finds exhilarating where Mickey is concerned, but I tend to believe it goes a lot deeper than that. What he finds exciting about Mickey is what Mickey embodies about the South Side—about home. About his own upbringing, but also Ian’s. About Frank and Monica, his siblings, school, work, ROTC—existing and surviving in an environment where it’s not guaranteed that you’ll have money to keep the heat on this winter or feed your family. They spent the early seasons living in a constant state of fight or flight. They couldn’t afford not to. And there’s excitement in that. Look at how many people say that the first seasons are their favorite! There hasn’t been a huge shift in the quality or direction of the writing, just the trajectory of the characters. They’ve gotten older, and their problems have been different. It’s not about survival so much of the time anymore, but those are the storylines that excite us. For Ian, that exhilaration in the constant battle of survival in their neighborhood is sewn into the fiber of his being just like it is Mickey’s. He saw his home in Mickey before they truly fell in love, and when that followed, Mickey became home.

In Conclusion

Ian has spent his entire life looking for the “right” path only to realize that it was laid before him: his family, his small circle of friends, and Mickey. I love that that is coming full circle this season, where [SPOILER ALERT] marriage has almost made him regress a bit to that place where there must be a right way of doing things going forward, and slowly but surely, we’re seeing him loosen up.

Good morning. It’s Ian Gallagher loving hours.

[srhlsx]

Rewritten & reposted March 24, 2021

MASTER | Ch. 11 | CHAPTER 12 | Ch. 13

Saturday had finally rolled around, a day you’d been looking forward to most of the week because of the plans you had made with Bokuto. Nothing too specific had been set up for what the two of you were going to do, but Bokuto told you to dress comfortably and to meet him at a nearby park at a certain time. 

You hadn’t felt such excitement like this outside of volleyball for quite some time and you had to remind yourself to stay calm and try your best not to make an utter fool of yourself at some point during the night. You kept thinking back to all the embarrassing comments Rumi was making at optional practice that morning when you had told her of your plans with the Fukurodani captain.

“Will there be adult supervision? I had plans but if you need a chaperone I’d be happy to help. Do his parents know who exactly you are?”

It was late in the afternoon, you were tidying up around the house and thinking about when you should start getting ready when you’d gotten notice from your dad. 

New Message: 5:17PM

Dad: Late night tonight, can you manage?

Your heart sank deep into the pit of your stomach as you squeezed your eyes shut as tightly as you possibly could. A part of you wanted to scream; to call up your dad, and say every horrible thing you could think of, but was that going to get you anywhere? Probably not. Things hadn’t shaped up between the two of you since you let him have it a few nights earlier - he was as skilled at avoiding confrontation as he was home.

So instead, you let out a heavy sigh, sinking down onto the floor of the kitchen, and really tried your hardest not to let the massive tears pooling in your eyes spill over. 

It's not like your dad knew that you had made plans with Bokuto and he was therefore actively preventing you from doing anything social with your life. In fact, your dad didn’t even know that there was someone in your life you wanted to spend additional time with. Maybe not anymore after this... He was caught up in his work again, it wasn’t the first Saturday he hadn’t come home and it wouldn’t be the last. 

So could you actually be mad at him? Yes… but not enough that you were going to do anything about it.

You tilted your head back and hit it a few times against the cabinet you rested your back against. The loud thunk, thunk, thunk rattled around the small space and made you feel marginally better. In the other room, you could hear the television turn up louder as your siblings yelled at one another about who was going to get to sit where.

It was much too last minute to ask Baba to spend the evening with Eiji and Yua, although you knew she would say yes - after everything she’d already done you didn’t have it in your heart to drag the old woman out of her home so late in the evening. You typed out a text to Bokuto, apologizing profusely, hoping that he understood there wasn’t much you could do in the situation. 

Of course he did.

Of course he understood, of course he could reschedule, of course he was okay with it. He was almost too good. You were brought back to your conversation with Shouta earlier this week and his comments about Bokuto as a person. You shook your head in disbelief.

You wiped under your eyes at the nonexistent tears that were still threatening to fall, laughing at the joke Bokuto made in his last text to you, and finally stood up from your place on the kitchen floor.

“Eiji? Chibi?” You called out. “Change of plans, we’re getting delivery tonight!”

*

Having ordered for yourself and your siblings, it was no surprise when you heard a knock at the front door to your apartment. You tried to get Yua to calm down in her seat, while Eiji was setting the table, before jogging down the hallway and counting the money in your hand.

“Hi, sorry! How much do I owe you again?” You asked breathless as you swung open the door without much thought. You looked up to be met with sparkling golden eyes that caught you completely off guard, making you stumble back in shock to collect yourself. “Oh my God! Wh-what are you-”

“I uh, went to the wrong place at first.” Bokuto chuckled, almost looking embarrassed as he rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. 

Bokuto knocked confidently on the door to the small but nicely kept house he had dropped you off at previously. He remembered how your little sister came barreling down the sidewalk to greet you, making your face light up with an excitement he could only dream of one day being directed at him.

He was only mildly surprised when an older woman answered the door with a pleasant smile, he thought maybe she was your grandmother. He greeted her kindly, glancing over her head to the hallway behind her in hopes of seeing someone he recognized. “Hello there, young man!”

“Hi,” Bokuto politely bowed his head in greeting and looked back at the woman. “Um.. Is (y/n) here?”

“Oh dear,” The old woman smiled, patting Bokuto reassuringly on the shoulder and motioning for him to bend down so she could better talk to him. “No, no, she lives...”

The old woman had given vague directions on where you lived, Bokuto being only slightly embarrassed that he had gone to the wrong place - but he was so sure that was the home he dropped you off at?

He wandered around the third floor of the run-down apartment building, not quite remembering the exact number given to him, so he resigned to start knocking on doors. He stepped up to the one that happened ro be right in front of him, fist raised, and knocked out a rhythm. 

You noticed that in one hand he was holding a bag from the same corner mart you and him had run into each other all that time ago. His other hand was clutching the braided leather of a dog leash, the end of which was attached to a handsome lump of fur who looked up at you with his tongue out and shining eyes. “The old lady at that house said I could find you here, but she only said third floor so we’ve kind of been knocking on every door for the last twenty minutes.”

“You could’ve texted me,” You laughed, leaning on the doorframe while you looked up at him. You were positive that your gaze was probably similar to someone having a dream, you still could not fathom that he was standing at the front door to your apartment. “What-”

“You said you had to cancel to watch your siblings,” He said before you could even get your full question out. “Buta was devastated so I brought snacks, drinks, and movies. Figured two and a half against two is a much more fair fight than you going at it alone!”

You beamed up at the way he confidently spoke, as if his answer was the most obvious thing in the world. Of course he was going to come over when you had to cancel, of course he was going to spend time with not only you but your siblings as well, of course he was just too good.

“Of course you named your dog pig. We were just waiting on dinner- oof!” You looked down to see yourself getting pushed out of the doorway by Yua, her small body standing in between you and Bokuto while she looked up at him with wide, recognizing eyes. 

“Botudo!”

Bokuto laughed when he saw your reaction to your sister’s greeting for him. He crouched down to come to eye-level with her and started speaking to her like they were old friends. “Hey hey Yua, long time no see~”

She didn’t respond right away, eyes instead focused on the dog in front of her. Bokuto glanced up at you with a knowing smirk and leaned closer to your sister, one hand clutching at the collar around his dog’s neck.

“This is Buta,” Bokuto introduced his pet like you’d introduce another human. “Buta, meet Yua.”

The dog tilted his head to the side slightly before jumping forward and licking right up the side of Yua’s face. She let out a squeal of excitement at the tickling sensation, her reaction making you laugh as well. 

“You bring snacks?” Your sister then asked, her short attention span shifting and peering into the bag hanging from Bokuto’s hand.

He laughed again and opened up the bag more for her to be able to see, “I sure did. Movies too, is that okay?”

“Yes,” She nodded, looking back up at him. “Rules say dinner first, snack after.”

“Did your neechan make those rules?” Bokuto jokingly sneered while he looked to you, a playful glint in his eyes. 

“No, silly!” Yua said, grabbing Bokuto by the hem of his shirt as he stood up and started to drag him past you into the house. “Mama made the rules!”

You smiled sadly down at your sister, something that Bokuto did not miss as he was led into your home. You shut the door quietly behind you but didn’t lock it, knowing that the food was set to be delivered some time soon as well.

When you got into the kitchen, you saw that Yua had sat Bokuto at the seat next to her - your normal spot- and Eiji was already rushing around to set another spot at the table and handle the presence of a dog sniffing around the table. He looked up to you, a slightly exasperated look on his face, as he grabbed another setting. “You didn’t tell me there was a guest coming!”

“Sorry, Eiji.” You said, ruffling his hair as he scurried by. You pulled out a bowl and began filling it with water from the sink to set down on the floor for your additional guest.

“You also didn’t tell me you knew a top five wing spiker in the flippin’ country, (y/n).” The way your brother spoke, it was like you were talking about an international celebrity. Although to Eiji anyone who competitively played the sport of volleyball was a star in his mind - yourself included.

“Okay well I think my own ranking-” He continued to glare at you. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think about it!” 

“I forgive you,” He whispered, like talking about the guest who was making jokes with your sister too loudly would make him disappear. “Do you think he’ll want to talk about volleyball with me?”

You looked over to Bokuto, who happened to be looking at you at the same time, smiling brightly when he saw that he had your attention once again. You smiled back, reaching down to swipe Eiji’s hair away from his forehead, a motherly habit you’d adopted somewhere in life, and told him that you didn’t think it’d be a problem at all to talk to Bokuto about volleyball.

*

[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.

[eldritchsurveys]

667.

1. If you found a baby turtle on the side of the road, would you pick it up and keep it? >> If I found a baby of any species on the side of the road, I’m not going to pick it up and keep it, I’m going to call the appropriate authorities and let them handle it. The fuck am I doing with a baby anything? 2. Did you and your mum ever have a big fight that caused you to move out? >> --- 3. Has the last person you kissed ever been to your house? >> --- 4. Have you had a good day today or was yesterday better? >> It was all right. At least the Sun was out a bit, and I managed to go out for once. Mostly I’m glad to be back in my bed now, lol. 5. Do you have any plans for the upcoming weekend? >> No.

6. How about you, do you have a bf/gf? >> Hm. 7. Could you date someone very attractive, but who thought they were better than everyone else? >> I don’t date, period, but I also wouldn’t hang out with someone who had a superiority complex. 8. So do you have a best friend? >> No. 9. What would you do if your best friend kissed the last person you kissed? >> --- 10. Do you dislike anyone? >> Not really. There are people I don’t really want to be around, of course, but I can’t think of anyone specific that I’m like “fuck that guy in particular” about except for people that have unapologetically hurt me (in which case it’s less “I dislike you” and more “I don’t even want to acknowledge your existence”). 11. Did you message your best friend today? >> --- 12. Do you think you will be in a relationship two months from now? >> I don’t see why not. 13. Do you always feel like you’re making mistakes? >> Yeah, because I have Trauma Brain. But I also know that I don’t make any more mistakes than the average person and most of my mistakes are easily fixed. 14. How do you feel about your hair right now? >> I’m going to need to buzz it again soon. 15. Does anybody have a tattoo with your name on it? >> Maybe someone has a tattoo of my name, because my name doesn’t just belong to me. But no one has a tattoo of my name that is actually about me. 16. Who did you last see shirtless? >> A couple of characters on Carnivale (before one of them got hanged with the word “HARLOT” carved into her forehead, of course. this is Carnivale after all). 17. How would you feel if you got the person you liked? >> --- 18. Do you think you can last in a relationship for six months without cheating? >> *sigh* 19. Do you like to make the first move? >> The first move to what? 20. Do you think you will ever be married? >> I am married. 21. Have you ever tried your hardest and then gotten disappointed in the end? >> Sure. 22. Is it possible to be single and happy? >> Duh? 23. Was the first person you talked to today male or female? >> The first person I spoke to was the bartender at Gardella’s, who is female. 24. Do you remember who you liked on New Year’s? >> --- 25. Are you a morning person or a night person? I’m barely a person. <-- mood 26. Could you go the rest of your life without drinking alcohol? >> Whether I “can” or not is irrelevant because I don’t fucking want to. 27. Have you ever felt like you weren’t good enough? >> Sure. 28. Is there anyone who likes you? >> --- 29. If the last person you kissed saw you kissing someone else, would they be mad? >> --- 30. Do you understand football? >> I understand American football. I don’t know anything about soccer football except the obvious bits. 31. What’s the first thing you heard this morning? >> I don’t know. 32. Who last called you beautiful? >> I don’t know. 33. Did you talk to someone until you fell asleep last night? >> No. 34. How many kids do you want when you get older? >> --- 35. Are you the type of person who has a new boyfriend/girlfriend every week? >> Of course not. 36. Ever been called a jerk/bitch? >> Yep. 37. Do you have feelings for anyone? >> Bold of you to assume I have feelings-- 38. If you fell pregnant to the last person you kissed, what would you think? >> Falling while pregnant is dangerous, oof-- 39. What’s your full name? >> *eldritch screeching* 40. Are you young or old? >> Depends on your perspective -- to a child I’m old, to a middle-aged person I’m young, etc. 41. What’s the gender? >> Oh, the gender outside is frightful... 42. How’s your heart been lately? >> You know. Beating and such. 43. Why aren’t you in bed? >> I am, though. 44. Did you do laundry today? >> No. 45. What kind of computer do you have? >> I have an MSI Leopard Pro and a Lenovo Ideapad. 46. Are there always other fish in the sea? >> Not if you overfish. 47. What can your tongue do? >> You know. Lick stuff. Form phonemes. Get chemical burns when I eat too many sour candies in a row. 48. What do you think your mum does when she goes out? >> --- 49. Do chickens have feelings? >> I don’t know anything about chicken neurology/psychology. 50. Do you think the body is the most beautiful thing that was ever made? >> No. 51. So how are you feeling today? >> Neutral. 52. Where is your sister right now? >> --- 53. Name five things you did today? >> Took a bus, drank at a bar, briefly logged into ESO, watched an episode of Carnivale, ate mac n’ cheese with bacon. 54. What kind of phone do you have? >> Moto g6. 55. What are you listening to? >> Nothing. 56. What do you smell like? >> A bit like my roll-on oil and a bit like my whipped shea butter. Mostly just like... clean skin or whatever. 57. What colour are your eyes? >> Dark brown. 58. Have you ever done a Chinese fire drill? >> No. 59. Do you know someone named Betsy? >> No. 60. What colour is your mum’s hair? >> --- 61. Do you have a dog? Breed? Name? >> No. 62. Do you remember singing any songs as a kid? >> I mean, yeah? 63. Are you married? >> Yes. 64. When was the last time you talked to one of your siblings? >> --- 65. Do you play an instrument? >> No. 66. Do you like fire? >> Sure, fire is nice. In moderation. 67. Are you allergic to anything? >> No. 68. Have you ever been to a spa? >> I’ve been to a nail spa because Sparrow works at one. I’ve also been to the Aveda spa that she did her training in years ago. 69. Do you miss someone? >> No. 70. Views on premarital sex? >> I have no views on it. I really can’t fathom having an opinion on whomst other people fuck and when. 71. What is a noise that you cannot stand? >> Face sounds. Any of them. Eating, breathing, sniffling, lip-licking, eugh. Stay away. (Sometimes I can hear myself blinking and I want to rip my eyelids off. It’s bad.) 72. Do you know how to do a cartwheel? >> Yeah. 73. What is the most you are willing to spend on a pair of sunglasses? >> Not much. 74. Does your mum vacuum early in the morning while you’re asleep? >> --- 75. Do you shower naked? >> Do I look like Tobias Funke to you? 76. Does wearing glasses really make people look smart? >> That’s not my interpretation. People with glasses just look like people with glasses. 77. Are you ADD or ADHD? >> No. 78. Do your band-aids have cartoons on them? >> I FUCKING WISH. I was so mad when I needed band-aids for my feet and none of the ones in the size I needed came in cartoon print. The only ones with fun designs were little baby band-aids. I think as an adult I should be able to buy whatever the fuck kind of band-aids I want, including ones with Stitch on them. Fuck you. 79. Have you ever kissed someone you shouldn’t have? >> Probably. 80. In one word, how would you define yourself? >> I wouldn’t. 81. Tell me about a dream you had recently? >> I can’t, I can never remember them anymore. I get vague wispy impressions upon waking, and then even those disappear after a few minutes. I feel disconnected from dream!Mordred and I’m so curious at what it’s been up to. 82. Who’s the funniest drunk person you know? >> --- 83. How did you feel when you woke up? >> Fine, I guess. 84. What was the first thing you thought of when you woke up this morning? >> I don’t know, probably something related to Sparrow knocking around as she got ready for work, because that’s my first sensory memory upon awakening. 85. Name something great that happened on Friday? >> It’s Thursday, ask me on Saturday. 86. When was the last time you saw your father? >> --- 87. Do you wish someone would call or text you right now? >> No. 88. Have you ever been kissed by a person whose name starts with J? >> Yeah. 89. Do you crack your knuckles? >> Yeah. 90. What were you doing twenty minutes ago? >> Probably still this survey, since it’s so long. 91. You’re thinking about someone, aren’t you? >> No. 92. Have you held hands with anyone in the past twenty-four hours? >> No. 93. What would you do if your partner still kept pictures of their ex? >> Nothing? That doesn’t affect me. 94. What if your partner went through your cellphone? >> I wouldn’t be with someone that went through my belongings without my express permission. 95. What if your partner was flirting with another girl/boy? >> I’d be glad for her. I hope she gets whatever she’s looking for from that interaction. 96. Ever liked someone you thought you didn’t stand a chance with? >> --- 97. You want someone/something? >> Not really. 98. Is there really a difference between Coke and Pepsi? >> Yeah, which is why many people have a preference. 99. Is there any emotion you’re trying to avoid right now? >> No. 100. Are there any mistakes with your recent ex you wish you could have changed? >> I’m pretty sure the entire situation in itself was a mistake, and it was changed, by us ending up having no contact with each other. 101. Has anyone ever been with you while you were throwing up? >> I mean, sure. 102. Background on your computer? >> Right now it’s a wallpaper with a scene from the movie Interstellar. (My desktop wallpaper is on a shuffle timer.) 103. Have you cried recently? >> Like, within the last week, probably. 104. Who has hurt you the most? >> I don’t know. 105. Are you happy with where you are relationship-wise now? >> Sure. 106. What language do you want to learn? >> --- 107. Your ex’s car breaks down and they ask you for a lift. Your response? >> I mean, I don’t drive, dude. Also, we live in wildly different parts of the country. This is just so many layers of implausible. 108. Would you hit a member of the opposite sex? >> ---

[a-woman-apart]

Trusting Myself More and More

TW: suicidal ideation

Just a reminder—if you are thinking about self-harming or taking your own life, there are lots of resources available. I will list the two main ones here.

Crisis text (U.S.): 741 741

Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

I just realized that I haven’t written a journal-type post on here for a while, so I am going to take a stab at it.

So much has happened. Today I will be attending my Bipolar Support Group and a therapy session that is long overdue. I’m still doing my level best to be at my Bipolar Support Group twice a week, but I always make it at least once a week as long as I’m not out of town. The resources that have been provided recently have been amazing. A lot of the material we are currently using comes from a website for Self Esteem Anonymous. I know that the site looks really outdated and some places don’t have SEA groups, but the resources on the website are invaluable. I highly recommend it if you have issues with self-esteem or emotional regulation, even if you don’t fully buy into the 12-step “higher power” emphasis.

I spent one week in the hospital earlier this month. I found out earlier that morning that there were some issues with my cars and repairs would be in excess of $300. Due to my situation, that might as well have been $3 million. I was afraid/ashamed to ask my family for help.

While that definitely wasn’t why I was hospitalized, it played a role. I went through work that day in a daze. The moment I got there, I thought, “As soon as I’m done, I’m going to get an evaluation. I don’t feel right.” This was on a Friday and after hours so I knew my regular clinic would be closed. I went to the after-hours clinic and they recommended that I be evaluated by someone at inpatient, because the after-hours clinic intake process would take over 2 hours, and by then they would be closing and unable to help me further.

So, I went ahead and packed a small bag of clothes and necessities and my phone charger. I could not explain it, but I knew that I could not remain at the house alone. I didn’t trust myself to be safe. I thought multiple times about calling my mom, but I knew it would take her 2+ hours to get to me and I really did not trust myself to last safely until then. I did not know whether the intake specialist would recommend me for admission, but I still wanted to be ready.

Intermission: I have been terrified of being re-institutionalized for years. I had not been to a mental hospital in 6+ years. Everything I was taught was that every time you become unstable and return to the hospital, your level of functioning becomes lower and lower. You lose your independence and autonomy and it becomes that much harder to re-engage with life outside the hospital. Maybe I misheard that—maybe this is only if you aren’t taking your medicine properly (I was) and you have to come down from a severe manic, depressive, or psychotic state. Either way, I took it to heart, maybe more than I should have.

Ultimately, the hospital did very little for me. It was incredibly loud, which only made my insomnia worse, despite the medicine they gave me to treat the insomnia. The food was horrible most of the time, and so it did not encourage my already poor appetite. We have to get special doctor permission to use our own hygiene products—as I suspected—and all I wanted was my deodorant, but it was never given to me and I had to use the one they provided. I didn’t bring my birth control pills, but if I had I think there was probably some red tape to get through and it has to be taken in a timely manner. If not, you have to start a new pack and they do not provide new packs in there (which I think is a travesty). It was primarily for regulating my period, so of course coming off of it messed up my hormones. The anxiety medication they gave me made me more anxious. I had to meet with my outpatient psychiatrist to get everything corrected.

The hospital really only had one purpose in my mind, though: keep me in an environment where I could not—or would not-- harm myself.

In that, it was a perfect success. When I was talking to my brother and his family on the phone, I just felt so inspired. I really would have missed it all. I cannot even begin to fathom how horrible it would be if my nephew was asking where I was, and I wasn’t able to tell him. Or, if my Mom had to bury another child, especially with there being so many unanswered questions. My whole family—siblings and all—would’ve wondered, “Why didn’t she just talk to us?”

When I was in the hospital, I made a list of goals. This is nothing spectacular or remarkable. I am a list-making queen. However, I did notice some things coming to the top of my list. Quitting my job, attending school in 2020, having healthy boundaries with others, etc. Some of them were more abstract, but some of them could be put into action right away.

So, I gave in my two weeks’ notice even though I had nothing lined up. I kept the details of my hospitalization to myself from most co-workers, but I was very candid and open with management about what happened. I thought it was foolish to hide because my doctor’s note had the hospital name on it, and if it was viewed with any scrutiny at all they could easily work out what had happened. Also, I wanted to be honest, because I wanted them to know that I really do love all the staff and I like serving the patrons, but it is really just time for me to move on to something new.

It was really scary, taking that leap, with nothing lined up and myself still so fatigued. Without going into details, though, I will say that I do now have a job lined up—one that is part-time and low-stress—that will take me at least into January. I am leaving the apartment and I am being offered a safe place at a low cost by a friend of mine. In January, I will start my classes at a new university—one that is much smaller and more affordable than the 30,000+ campuses all around.

My life was a big question mark when I left the hospital. My main goal had been to just make more money so I could pay the skyrocketing costs of living in my apartment and reclaim my financial independence. I have received nothing but silence from nearly all of the full-time jobs I pursued. There was no “sorry we can’t offer you this job” or on the opposite spectrum, requests for interview. It was the weirdest thing. Just silence.

I know I have emphasized that I do not think that things are predetermined or foreordained. I just think that life is chaotic, but sometimes it forms itself into orderly patterns. You have to flow with the moving energies of life, rather than resisting them. As Don Estill said, “You don’t need to suffer. If something is not working, try something else.” I was desperate for at least one thing in my life to stay the same. I wanted to at least live in the apartment that I had worked so hard to keep.

There was a problem, though. My mom had come over after I got out of the hospital to buy me food, help me with expenses, and most importantly, keep me company and offer support. We talked so much. After she left, I realized how empty the apartment had started to feel. I realized the toll that coming home to an empty place every day was taking on my mental health. The whole reason I went to the hospital was because I could not stand the thought of spending the night alone with myself and my terrible thoughts.

I do not need a babysitter. I just want to have someone there, even if we don’t talk about mental health. Just someone I can say, “Hey I’m going to Whataburger, do you want anything?” or gush to about my niece and nephew. I want someone to watch TV with and share meals with. Even though I have friends, it can be so, so lonely to exist like this.

One thing I do notice, though, is that “my spirit” (metaphorically) rises up in me and often will tell me something. 2 days before I was hospitalized, something rose up in me to say, “That’s enough.” I know our individualist, merit-based culture tells us to just keep trying, that motivational speakers say “never give up until you win” but sometimes you do have to practice healthy detachment. I had been searching for a full-time job for 2 months (or more). I kept taking on more responsibilities at work. I was hyper-concerned about people in my life, relationships, etc. As Iyanla Vanzant said, surrender is different from getting frustrated and throwing in the towel.

I was ready to surrender.

Even going to the hospital was a surrender. I was leaning into one of my greatest fears, because in my gut, I knew that my life was more important than money or any of my achievements. I knew it was more important than a reputation.

After that, I started to make changes, even though they were so risky. I started reaching out to people I knew, asking about housing and work opportunities. I weighed the possible consequences of my actions. My mom had invited me to return home if things did not go well, but I knew deep down that wasn’t the right choice, and I also felt “No, I think I can make it work here in the city.” I didn’t know how. It was just “a knowing.”

I am learning to trust that so much more. I am realizing that I am highly intuitive about people and situations. I am not going to pretend that I am clairvoyant or anything like that. I do know, just from living life, that what you anticipate almost never happens exactly that way. I am a firm believer in hoping for the best and being prepared for the worst. Usually, even if something bad happens, it is not The Worst. Sometimes, too, expectation fails again, and your needs are met beyond your wildest imagination. I must emphasize��your needs are met—not your wants. My experience has been that I often do not get what I want, and if I do, by then I don’t want it anymore. We are so out of touch with what is really going on most of the time.

Just know that no matter how low you are, you don’t have to give up. You need to learn to not be fixated on a particular outcome. Absolute statements like, ‘If she leaves me, my life will have no meaning” or “If I don’t get the job, I don’t know what I will do.” In Johann Hari’s book on depression, he lists “Disconnection from a hopeful future” as one of the top contributors to depression and mental illness. It is so important to have hope. There is always another path. There is always something you haven’t tried. When you are in crisis-mode though, you can acquire an extreme case of tunnel vision. I know I am that way and I have to stop and say, “Do I trust myself to get through this?”

You can have a second chance at life. Please do not think that if this One Thing doesn’t work out, there is nothing left for you to do. Please keep exploring your options. I know that there are many things bad about this country, but we still have TONS of resources available for people: food banks, homeless shelters, boarding homes, rehabs, and churches and organizations that will help with childcare and living expenses. If you are in legal trouble, there is free or low-cost legal help available for you.

DO NOT SABOTAGE YOURSELF.

That message is for me as much as anybody else. If you don’t know where to start, try to make it to a local library and just start asking questions.

You don’t have to suffer.

[theycallme-tunathot]

Suicide is the touchiest subject for me. I don’t have many things that immediately trigger me, but suicide is the only one. So, yesterday, Tumblr seemed like a land mine trying navigate it after the death of Jonghyun. While I wanted to share photos and videos, I just couldn’t. Not for all the suicide hotlines and posts that lined my dash. That isn’t to say it’s a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that’s helpful to some. But having faced suicide on a highly personal level, I was faced with a very similar emotion to when I faced suicide several years back.

I don’t like speaking about my personal life on here, at least the painful parts, because they’re still hard to cope with. But, I guess I could open up and explain why yesterday, tumblr became a little bit of my own worst enemy and why it kind of ruined a chance for me to remember Jonghyun the way I wanted.

I have a brother and a sister that you all know about. I think I talked about them like crazy when I first posted but haven’t talked about them in a while. I actually had three siblings. I had an older brother who was the second oldest. Out of all of us, he was the nicer sibling. Able to empathize, able to accept anyone far faster than humanly possible, forgiving. He was everything I wanted to be. And we were incredibly close. But I knew my brother battled his own demons too. He got into drugs to cope with a lot of internal issues and to “quiet” what he described as “all the noise inside.” I never liked it and I never missed the opportunity to tell him I didn’t like it. But we still remained close.

Just as I was graduating high school, it looked like he was making progress with staying clean, going to therapy and really getting his life back. He was happier every time I saw him and he looked he got the light back in his eyes. That winter, I didn’t go to college because I decided to take a gap year and work my first official job and had plans with him to move into our own apartment, which we did.

It seemed so out of the blue when I got the first flood of texts December 28, 2011. I was at work, unable to even notice when I got them, but when I went on break I had 56 missed texts all from him. My brother had been missing from the apartment for a couple weeks. I’d see him for a couple of hours and then I’d go two days without seeing him. But my second older brother told me not to worry much about it and that he’d keep an eye on him. But every time he made it back to the apartment, he’d look sad or even mad.

So, the 56 texts were all asking where I was and why I wasn’t answering and these all spanned over two hours. I was worried he was going into a relapse situation so I told him to drop by my work so we could eat lunch later. He never came to work, so I texted my sister to ask if she could drop by my job, pick up the food I bought and bring it to my apartment so he could eat. It was more to check up on him, but that was a given I think when dealing with him in our family. Shay said she couldn’t because she was all the way in Venus with her boyfriend. I asked my second oldest brother and he was at work as well. I did the only thing I could think of which was send him a series of texts letting him know I loved him and that if he could wait at the apartment for a couple hours, I’d be there and we could hang out and eat and maybe go out and do something.

At this point my oldest brother had no friends. Like, after he cut ties with his addict life, the guy realized all his friends were people wrapped up in all of that. And so waiting at that apartment for two hours while in his mental state—I can’t imagine what that must’ve been like for him. To this day it’s impossible to fathom while remembering so many little details about the situation.

Either way, during that two hour stint I got another flood of texts. He was asking where I was, he said he was scared, he wanted the noise to stop. Through all of these messages only one scared me. I can’t explain why none of the others scared me, because they should’ve, but his last text was the scariest. I don’t remember it verbatim, but I remember him saying in one line he never asked to be born and he never liked it here anyway.

I somehow managed to convince my boss allow me to leave early and I drove to the apartment. It was all a blur, but I remember not being able to get in the door at first. Like I had to ask for our neighbor’s help and practically break down the door because he’d placed so much shit against it to keep anyone from getting in. By the time I got in, I found my brother hanging from a ceiling fan in the living room, our kitchen table turned over and in the wrong place.

There were a lot of difficult parts to this moment in my life. At the age of 18, I lost my brother and best friend and my brother, at 26, dead. Just like that. My heart was broken and our family was shattered after that. No one spoke to anyone, my sister completely moved out of the neighborhood. I was angry all the time and couldn’t stand to look at my siblings or parents. The impact was devastating. Our family repaired all relationships after some time, but it wasn’t an easy road after he died.

But what angered me most was my misunderstanding. Everyone who knew our family in the neighborhood and section of the city had something to say. They all had this “personal” story they could share about suicide and what it looked like. It didn’t take long for my brother to lose the meaning I hoped he would have. Instead of being remembered for being one of the first graduates at our local high school to utilize the exchange student program. He wouldn’t be remembered as a volunteer for the community garden. He wouldn’t be remembered as the person I knew. He was now just a lesson, a cautionary tale, a way to bring up the topic of suicide conveniently enough so it didn’t seem so random.

I misunderstood that entire effort to use my brother as an entry point to talk about suicide prevention.

With all that said, I had very familiar feelings welling up in me when I logged onto tumblr yesterday. I definitely wanted to remember Jonghyun through the art he gave the world and his brilliant smile and how much joy he seemed to bring everyone around him, but it was hard to find through all the suicide prevention hotlines and all the notices of how important it is to talk to someone if you’re feeling troubled, angry or like you could be a danger to yourself. But the problem with that is, I didn’t even know it was a suicide at that point, I just knew he was dead. It seemed so weird for all of this to be here and then when I finally got to an updated story, it became clear.

I hope all of you are finding effective, healthy ways to cope with the loss of such a brilliant artist and voice. I hope you all know that there are so many helpful places online and offline to seek out a hand if that’s what you need. I hope you all remember him for all of the beauty he gave the world and not just the act of taking his own life.

I love you guys. I can’t believe this post is this long. This is crazy. But I felt like sharing that little piece of me and why while I really did want to be on Tumblr yesterday, it was just too impossible for me to do it.

[createdbyangels]

“C”

**Disclaimer - I can’t give details about C’s story, history or current situation.  We are contractually bound to maintain his privacy and intend to do so.  But this story is something I want to remember the details of because it could have only been crafted by God himself.  So there will be lots of letters used in place of names or other details I can’t share.  But this is a record of this story for our family to have in the future because it still seems hard to believe sometimes.

The week of December 9th was our first “back to normal” week, coming off the heels of a 4 week track out, Corbin’s birthday, Thanksgiving at Grandmom’s and our week at Disney.  Our foster license was approved 11/18 but we knew that with everything we had coming up in the next few weeks we wouldn’t even be considering a placement until at least December.  We actually got a very interesting placement email the Thursday we were at Animal Kingdom (our last Disney day) but of course I didn’t see it until late that night (after 7pm) and James and I were not even close to being in a state of mind to have a conversation about it until the next day in the car.  We decided we might be interested and I emailed our placement specialist.  She said she would let them know we were interested but she was pretty sure they had been placed already.  I felt....disappointed.  It was a sibling set in our age range it seemed like we could have been a good fit.  Several days later (the beginning of the next week I think) we got another placement email but it wasn’t something we could handle.

In the mean time, we have some friends at church who have become GREAT friends over the past year.  We didn’t realize until after we started getting to know each other that they had actually been licensed through the same agency we used months before we were.  They have teenage kids and are fostering teens - and are a general wealth of parenting knowledge along with being all around wonderful people.  And since it is hard to understand the journey of fostering if you haven’t been through the work that goes into it, we talk often about how we are feeling and what is going on.  M called me early in the week of December 9th to talk to me about a placement they were working on.  She would be visiting for the weekend (they’d met her once before) and our friends were excited about the potential.  The circumstances were different this time than they had been in past placements.  We talked for a while about what it would look like, expectations for the weekend and the fact that T had a brother who was also trying to be matched.  M asked what our age range was and when I told her “3-9″ nothing else was said.  I had a very small moment where I felt like I should offer to host the brother (even though he was out of our range) because he needed somewhere to go but I decided against it.  It might be weird to insert myself into their family’s journey and I didn’t know anything about this kid.  And he is 11 which is way older than our range anyway. So we wrapped up our call with promises to pray and keep each other in the loop.  And we knew we’d see each other Sunday at church and I’d get to meet T.

So Sunday 12/15 we got to see each other and I briefly met T since she was with our friends.  They’d had a good weekend and I found out that things hadn’t gone as well for the brother.  He’d met a few families but it wasn’t looking like they’d found a great fit.  But the siblings had to be moved to a new placement ASAP and they were relocating them to be near an older sister who was adopted a few years ago and is currently in the greater Raleigh area.

Monday 12/16 I was beginning to feel “back to normal” after all the trips and reentry from the trips.  I dropped everyone off at school and came home prepared to spend several hours working.  It was my favorite day of the year...Savannah’s school had extended hours as a “parent shopping day” so I didn’t have to pick her up until 2:30!! (Usually Monday pick up is 1:15 after kidokinetics and W/F are 12:30).  So I get to my desk and there is an email from our specialist.  Asking if we’d be interested in a “temporary placement” for a boy who we might be somewhat familiar with because our friends are taking his sister.

So, now we have been officially added to the mix.  I just stared at the screen for a minute and as I was typing a text to James I got one from him.  “You see the email?”  So I called him.  And told him everything I knew (which I hadn’t done before then because honestly, I assumed he wouldn’t care and things had been shared in confidence by my friend on the phone the week before).  James had hesitations.  There was still a family that might be interesting in taking him but they “didn’t want to move too quickly”so they weren’t ready for him to move in yet.  But it was time for him to move somewhere.  So maybe we’d just be a stop over while he visited and got to know the other family.  That seemed too risky to James.  He didn’t want to be another disappointment in C’s story.  Another failed placement.  And, he is a 6th grader.  Not even on our radar.  But everything I knew made me very insistent that it was our time.  We would frame it as, “We are getting you to the area to be close to your sisters and make it easier to find your forever home”  I had a long conversation with our placement specialist about that concern and how I wanted to be sure to talk about it.  She was on board.  At that point they said he might be arriving tomorrow.  As in, 24 hours from that initial conversation.  I called my friend and told her what was happening.  She was shocked that we’d been looped in.  And that we’d said yes.  Then she told me that T wasn’t coming until Wednesday bc that was the soonest they could be ready for her so we shouldn’t expect C until then either.  I couldn’t focus on anything else that day.  There was suddenly so much to do.  So many loose ends to tie up.  A mattress topper so the bed was more comfortable. Matching Christmas jammies since the rest of the family had them already (those came from our kindness elf so don’t mention that part of the story to the kids until they are older).  I had just THE NIGHT BEFORE gotten us tickets to a Carolina Hurricanes game in January (using Corbin’s 2 free tickets through a school reading program) so I called all the people and found a seat in the row directly behind us.so James could sit right behind us and we could all go.  We talked to the kids about what was going on and they were SO EXCITED. I honestly have no idea what happened on Tuesday.  On Wednesday I met my life group at church to help with something and then picked S up from school.  We ran one more last minute errand and then we came home to wait.

C arrived with his social worker shortly after 2pm.  He was shy and nervous but luckily Savannah is neither of those things and launched right into making him feel at home.  He’d made an ornament for our Christmas tree.  I talked to the worker for a while and then she drove away and left me fully in charge.  We played basketball for a while after showing him around the house.  When Corbin got home he was eating a sandwich.  They smiled at each other and within an hour it was like they’d know each other forever.

We went to Chick Fil A for dinner (C’s request) that night and James met us there from work.  He ended up having to turn around and go back to work that night before C’s bedtime.  C and I played a game until he got home and we tucked him in for the first time.  I distinctly remember trying to figure out what it must feel like to be 11 years old and suddenly living in a totally new place with new people and new everything.  And kind of being a professional at doing that. I couldn’t fathom it and it made me so so sad.

He had a good night sleep and the next day we were off to the races - an awards ceremony at Corbin’s school, meetings with social workers and our licensing specialist (that happened at James’s property so my dad actually got to meet C on day 2 because he was there doing a set up) and the workers bringing the rest of C’s stuff.  A LOT of stuff.  and SO. MANY. CHRISTMAS. PRESENTS.  They were concerned he wouldn’t get much at his previous placement so they really overcompensated and sent him approximately 2-3 Christmases worth of stuff.

I had a great friend in the neighborhood come over before Christmas and help me go through, open and sort the gifts to make it more manageable.  Friday he came with me to Savannah’s Christmas program at preschool.  He moved to the aisle so he could see better during their songs.  Things flowed easier than I expected.  The boys couldn’t wait for the weekend so Corbin would be home for a week and a half on Christmas break.  And boy do they have a good time together.

Now to some of the crazy things.  We found out that the family who adopted the oldest sister is friend’s with our pastor.  They go way back.  So even though all 3 siblings are placed with different families there is a tie that runs through all 3 of us.

Also - C came to us on 12/18.  Exactly one month after we got our license.  And crazier still, exactly ONE YEAR to the day from the day my leg pain moved from something annoying to something that I thought was really a problem,  I’ve said many times that I think God literally laid me out so I could understand that I’m not in control and even if I stop spinning all the plates, the world will keep turning. AND exactly one year TO THE DAY from the day I went with Pam to see “Instant Family” in the theater and told her, the first person I said it out loud to, that James and I had officially made the decision to look into adoption through foster care.  I spoke the words to someone after seeing a movie on the topic and 365 days later, C arrived.  

There are some crazy connections regarding his legal name that I obviously can’t share but they are enough to give you pause for sure.

Here is a story I shared on FB on Christmas:

Several weeks ago I went and bought "Santa wrapping paper" (2 rolls per kid for some reason) and stashed it in the back of the closet. I pulled it out yesterday and my heart skipped a beat when I realized that one of the rolls was Snoopy driving Santa's sleigh. It was meant for Corbin but I'm not sure why I picked it since neither of my kids are very interested in Charlie Brown. C LOVES Snoopy. He has several stuffed animals he sleeps with and his night light is even Snoopy. He has proclaimed his love more than once over the past week.  And one of the presents we unwrapped in the stash the social workers brought was a giant box of Nerds (one of the novelty ones) with grape and strawberry nerds.  A day or 2 before opening that package, I was laying on Corbin’s bed with the boys reading before bed.  They were acting a fool (per the norm) and I called them nerds.  They laughed and laughed and said, “Are you gonna eat us!?”  I pointed to them one at a time and said, “You’re strawberry and you’re grape”  And then I find the box.  That box came from me to them on Christmas.  They thought it was hilarious. No one can convince me that God didn't know long before we did that we'd have an extra stocking to fill this Christmas. I am so grateful for His perfect timing and faithfulness.

I saw that oldest sibling’s family had shared their story with a local church congregation during their Christmas service.  We had friends over for Christmas dinner who go to one of the campuses.  I asked if they’d heard the story or seen “these people” and they said, “YES!” They told me some of the story the family had shared (a story I already knew) and then said, “We wondered what happened to the other sister and brother she mentioned”.  My response?  “The brother.  He is upstairs” 

It keeps happening.  Please understand this wasn’t a local placement.  These kids came from a few hours away.  But the story continues to be woven together in a way that can only be explained by God.

It is day 16 and C started middle school today.  He was a lot more emotional than I thought he would be and it broke my heart.  I spent the day worried about him.  He came home smiling though.

The kids regularly and freely talk about how C should live here forever.  Our agency won’t start those conversations for at least 6 months.  We are all open but James and I are being careful about what we say.  16 days feels like a lot.  But it obviously is not.  To say this is a MAJOR decision is an understatement.  So, we continue to take it one day at a time and wait to see what God will do next.

[malcolmpeacock-blog]

There’s a Referee in my bed

Pray God you can cope. I’ll stand outside.

 It’s raining outside. It was raining when my dad died. It was pouring. My dad died in Towson in a hospice center on a Friday night at 5:21 pm. I was supposed to be seeing my friends, Bo and Karli. But I had forgotten to text them. They understood of course and I told them with such ease…guys, my dad’s about to die. When my dad’s mother called my mom earlier that day from the center, I was in the basement. Completely alone with the lights off for two days. I spent most of my time there in silence that winter on the winter break from college. I never really told anyone how sick my father had become. And I was also unaware of what was happening to me. I had already fucked up my sleeping during my first semester of school. And this whole thing of wondering when and if he was going to die was really not helping. It became evident that I wouldn’t be leaving Baltimore to head back to Richmond anytime soon. I began to isolate myself more and would spend hours online googling “hospice”. I was frustrated that I wasn’t being given answers to my fears. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that google could never answer questions that I’ve had all my life. At some point you really do have to figure things out for yourself. Of course, we are all here. And there is empathy. But, in order to feel it and to give it, I think we have to meet ourselves in a mirror.

 This woman’s work. This woman’s work. Ooooo it’s hard on a man. Now his part is over. Now starts the craft of the father.

I developed an intense relationship with death at an extremely early age. I think it’s hard for most kids to wrap their heads around. The idea that yes, it ends. Everything, physically, will die. As the artist Juliana Huxtable says, “There are certain facts that cannot be disputed.” Flesh, skin, all that, it ends. Now what extends beyond that is another story. Stories. But death and I met when Aaliyah Haughton died. Cheesy, but Aaliyah is really important in the scope of me understanding why I believe I am here. I could go on about how my family would sit around in the living room with our next door neighbors singing I don’t think you’re ready for this thing, this thing, this thing, I don’t think you’re ready this thiiiiing like many other Black people were doing during that time. And my sister doing the rock the boat dance or trying to at least and I don’t even need to mention that dress at the end when the goddess is immersed in the water (peep FKA Twigs for the tribute) but obviously I’m bringing it up because duh. There will never be another. It was hot that Saturday. I was on the computer strolling the internet, something I just enjoyed doing looking at images of my favorite singers. I heard my mom say, “Baby, Aaliyah died.” I searched Aaliyah immediately and I was confused. Died? How? I thought to myself, how do you die? What does that mean? I asked my mom for an explanation over and over. We watched some videos and sang like always and the reality or the myth rather, had still not settled in for me. I was rattled. My mom explained to me the best she could, that everybody dies one day. We all live and then we die. My dad was a loud man. And he was also soft. He had dark dark brown skin and usually a smirk on his face. He loved Aaliyah. He loved her to death. I think I was so confused because I couldn’t find language for what was happening. For the first time that I can recall, I only had feelings. No words. Raw, gut feelings. My father’s silence weighed down on my chest. He was never silent. My heart pounded viciously through that night as my head ran laps around itself in bed. I laid still thinking…I don’t want to die. I drew a picture of Aaliyah. Because I knew she wouldn’t let me die. And as far as I was concerned, she was alive. And I knew we could live forever.

 My parents would take my brothers and I to see our grandparents in Virginia when we were little. One of the rooms in the back of the apartment used to be my great grandmother’s. My grandpa, her son, would say sometimes he could feel a tug, just a soft one, on the sheets at night. He said this was his mom. When my great grandma passed I was in 2nd grade. She was my mom’s grandma. I think I remember it being winter. My mom and her grandma were close but she had Alzheimer’s and it really affected her memory. My mom was on the phone with her best friend one time and she said that it was nice to visit grandma Emily but it’s just not the same anymore and it sucks when someone you love can’t really remember who you are. My mom had sort of already begun a process of letting go of grandma Emily’s body. It’s crazy that people can slip out of their own skin. Before we know it, we’re holding a container. And we’re feeling so much that we hold and squeeze the container, hoping that we’ll get to touch that being’s magic one last time. It’s really hard though because (crying so much right now oh my gosh) if you’ve ever touched a dying person right before they go you know that’s it’s like trying to win a game of tug of war that you know you’re going to lose but you decide to play because you have to and you don’t even think about it and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. We traveled to North Carolina for her funeral. My parents met in a tiny town called Chadbourn in the state when they were 11 and 10. My dad lived there and my mom stayed with her grandma in the summer. She lived down the street from my father. They spent time together on a basketball court. During the morning of the service, I sat at a computer screen in the purple room of my father’s childhood home. I worked for hours on a painting on Microsoft paint (every 90’s art kid’s dream) for my great grandma’s casket. My right hand on the mouse detailing the stems of the flowers and my left hand wiping the snot and tears that wouldn’t stop coming. I cried for days and my mom offered words she had given before ever so gracefully. But I still could not fathom a life underground. I asked her…so everyone else just keeps living and walking around while you lay under the dirt? I buried my face into my hands for days. Eventually, I could move on to different thoughts but some days my mind would wander and tell me: I’m gonna die one day.

 While the other kids played during recess, I sat on a bench watching them. I could see my body laying under the wood chips while everyone slid down the slides. I was quickly developing a relationship with death. An obsession that would seep its way into my bones. A fixation with a word that would become my entire being.

 I know you gotta little life in you left. I know you got a lot of strength left. I know you gotta little life in you left. I know you got a lot of strength left.

 My siblings and I did karate as kids and my dad got us involved. It was a family affair. My younger brother hated it and I fell in love with it. It was fast paced like I love, but it required patience. I’ve always sort of been a sucker for things that happen over time, changes, length, and transformations. We practiced under a man named Arnold Mitchell. And his instructor was a hardass. We met him once and he called every child in the dojo ugly. Mr. Mitchell loved us so much. 13 years ago on the way to the dojo, my dad pulled over on 83. He wasn’t saying much but different symbols and lights were blinking in the car. He kept saying come on, come on. He was confused and kept looking down on his side. It was early January and I had just gone back to school after winter break. The car was warm, a little unusually warm. And he said Mal we need to get out. We were parked and he hopped out of the driver’s side, and ran around to mine. He flung open the door and grabbed me and we began to walk through the cold. Maybe 200 ft away from where we left the caravan. We had a blue caravan. The only car I really knew. I would spend the next 20 minutes having what I believe was my first outer body experience. At the age of 9, I watched my family’s minivan completely set on fire on a Tuesday night. The pickup truck that we sat in had no heat. It belonged to a stranger who picked us up. Watching the car set on fire was kind of like a movie. It was so dark outside that the car began to disappear. The window wasn’t big in the truck so really, it looked like the flames were moving across a screen. Stretching their arms fearlessly, and rolling over and over and over until it tucked my van in for the night and for forever. I remember later my dad being pissed about how the man was talking about the situation. How he was embarrassed, and mad that the man sort of made a joke of it in front of me. How nobody should speak that way in front of a child. I recall the man saying, “That was all she wrote”. And my dad saying nothing back. I remember how tight I was being held.  That night when I got home I realized that we could’ve died in our van. I found my baby sister crying in the middle of my room. She looked like me. Have you ever met yourself in someone else’s life? I went to sleep that night like normal somehow. For weeks I thought to myself….how am I going to die? When my older brother would go play in the neighborhood with bigger kids or when he went off to school, I would cry and stare out of our bedroom window. My mom would say it’s okay you’ll be able to go one day Mal. And I’d say, “But I am a big boy!”.  I find myself thinking that now. I am a big boy.

 I should be crying but I just can’t let it show. I should be hoping but I can’t stop thinking.  All the things we should’ve said that I never said. All the things we should’ve done that we never did. All the things we should’ve given but I didn’t. Oh darling. Make it go. Make it go away.

 The day that my dad died I was sort of waiting for bad news. When my mom asked me if I wanted to go see him again because the doctor said that they think this may be the last day, I said yea sure. I sort of meant yea why would you ask that? My mom has this way of trying to be as peaceful as she can when she’s really one of the most peaceful people I have ever met. She has had a tough life and I don’t know if I’ll ever know half of the things about it. She asks me for advice on how to navigate certain things sometimes with others but it’s funny because she always has what I believe is the best way of approaching things. When we all got to hospice that day we sat around the room talked and laughed and my mom told us how the nurses said that the day prior my dad had escaped and set off the bed alarm. He had crawled to the elevator and said he was going home. He was about 90 pounds. He was going home. He was going to come home. A Black man crawling home.

 My friends were in and out through the night, which was amazing to have the support. Around 5:15 that night when we looked at my dad, my family and I noticed that his breaths were getting shorter and shorter and the gasps for air were not as quick and heavy any more. His head began to tilt more to one side and lay back some.  We surrounded the bed and my dad’s mom was next to me as we all held hands awaiting the inevitable end of this journey through hospital visits, broken oxygen tanks, and vending machine snacks. There was one more breath. One last give. His lips would part one last time as my grandfather called for the nurse. She arrived to take his pulse. By this point we are gazing at each other, maybe hoping that this is not it. That somehow he just needed a break.  She placed her finger on his neck as she looked down at the foot of his bed and nodded and said, “He’s gone.”

What was just as hard, but maybe harder than watching his life end was being the one to call my older sister to tell her that our dad had died and that I’d see her in a few days. When my friend Sam’s dad died, I called to tell our friend Jon. The sound that fills the space after the word died…is the sound that understands me the most.

 The rest of that evening and the days that would follow were so emotional that some parts get lost in translation and lost in the eating of the food gifted to us, lost in the ravens games, lost in the walks with our new puppy, lost in watching the sheets move on the hospital bed while I sat on the loft imagining his body in between them. Moving so slowly and so quietly. With urgency for a new day. My father lived up until the very last second. The death of my dad left me in shambles. The first year after his death was quite possibly the most heart breaking time of my life. One year earlier, a close friend and running partner who I spent the majority of the end of high school with lost his father. After I lost my dad, I started to try to think about what was going to happen with my degree and when I would return to Richmond. I didn’t know my new friends well. And now I felt like an alien in my own home. So I went back a month late and immediately found myself in corners on the 2nd floor of Johnson hall stuck in between two walls, sitting under a public phone. In the back of a large studio room at 2 in the morning with the lights off on Bowe Street. It took me a month of being in school to realize that coming back was the wrong decision. A year passed and within that time a close friend’s father committed suicide back home and when I made the call to tell another friend about it, he answered by saying that his mom was in ICU. She died two months later. I went to three funerals that year and the week after the last one, three of my friends and I were on a road trip to Cary, North Carolina and ended up in a car accident before reaching our destination. We all lived and we looked around and thought to ourselves…how is this real? Us? Everyone in the car had lost his or her father. Three of us within 21 months of each other. One year and 8 months later, my cousin would be killed in a car collision in Carolina. He was my dad’s best friend. The day of his death is the same day as one of my friend’s father’s deaths. Large trucks killed both of them. I couldn’t process or think or do anything that year that mattered to me. After my cousin passed, I was convinced that something was wrong with me. At the start of the next year I sort of looked back. I called my mom to ask her how she was doing on the day of her husband’s death two years after that night. She said she was doing a lot better than the year before. She said grief will eat you up if you let it. Grief will kill you. It’ll take over your whole life but you can’t let it. You know you can’t let it. You have to choose at some point how you’re going to go about the rest of your life. She said you can’t let one moment in time take who you are and crush you. You have to make a choice to live this life. My mom’s words pierced me. Because although there was another loss in the following year, I looked back and realized what happened. There was a day in January of 2014 when I said I needed to make a change. I needed to do something before I did nothing. Before I died. So I did and I started to figure out how I wanted to live.

 I had never been out of the country before. I really wanted to go somewhere to see a new place and to sort of have an experience that I had never had. I found round trip flights to Nairobi that I could afford and I asked my little brother if I should get them and he said duh you could die tomorrow. So I got them. And I went. And I had an experience. Sometimes it was awful. And other times it was…just…any words would underscore what happened to me consciousness. I came back to Virginia and realized how much I was missing out. I forgot about myself. I let go of who I was for so long. While I was in Nairobi, I went out. I had so much fun I just…I got to breathe. I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t thinking about dying and when I was going to die or how or who would die next. I was meeting new people every day. I was laughing a lot and crying out of frustration with the racial politics that I was experiencing for the first time. But I wasn’t settled and I wasn’t stuck. I knew Nairobi was short and temporary but I knew I was going back. During the end of my time there I met a boy named Emmanuel. He was deaf and an excellent reader. He is such a beautiful boy. I told him I would be back. Emmanuel was hard headed and I taught him how to count to 300. We had a great time together and I almost extended my flights to be with him for longer. I sort of regret not doing it now. But I’m going back. Emmanuel helped me see a purpose and to have meaning for living each day while I was there. I’m going to go see my friends, I’m going to go out and dance and have so much fun I think. I’m going to go speak and have important, different, conversations that don’t operate on a crazy time system like we do here. I wonder what it’s going to be like. Now that I am living here. Before I went there, I was a zombie here. I attempted a marathon a few months after I returned from Nairobi. I didn’t finish but the bulk of the race that I ran was so well ran. At 18 miles, I had fell off of the pace significantly, but I was still in the top 10 of the Baltimore marathon. I never thought I’d try the marathon. But I had to. After you get so close to death, you sort of realize that time is on your side. And yes, there is no rush, but there is an urgency to see what your capacity is. To see if you can expand your capacity. I wanted to work through things that I was still dealing with after these deaths. So I wanted to run to see if it was possible to run outside of my body. In hopes of reaching another plane of existence. In hopes of connecting with whatever memories I had of those people whose bodies we had lost. I was hoping that their memories would lift me to a different space. Not heaven. But a space where I didn’t have to be afraid of being alive.  A place where I could be.

 Give me these moments. Give them back to me. Give me that little kiss. Give me your, give me your hand baby. Give me your pretty hands.

 The last four years have been so different than I would have ever predicted. I have this piece of paper on a wall in my room. It says what are you doing here and why? I’ve been thinking a lot about why recently. Why am I alive? I’ve spent years now hearing stories of friends and family both far and near. People like me. People that I confide in. Some young, some older, but all of them are living. From my lens, I look at them and I see these beings in the world. Traveling through time, trying to unravel experience in order to understand themselves, each other and the world around them. It’s tragic the amount of young people that I know who have experienced loss on such a grand scale. And it’s been so very beautiful to watch them emerge months and years later as their new selves. People who found their worth. Who chose to make a decision one day to not live in fear of what the rest of their life could possibly be. It isn’t that I admire these people because they have figured something out or because they’re masters of grieving or something else that’s calculated. I fell in love with so many peoples’ stories of death over these last four years because I saw vulnerable people who trusted in themselves. Decided that they wanted to know themselves on a more intimate level. Decided that grief could not possibly be what defined their existence. And instead of hoping that one day they would figure it out, they took a bolder approach and said I will figure this out and until then I am going to be. By being your presence is felt. Your existence, acknowledged. I wish I could thank every person who I know who has lost. And yes, I do realize that I would just be thanking everyone that I’ve ever met. But I think that living is a gift enough. We deserve to live. For ourselves and for each other.

 A year ago someone tried to kill me. I was sleeping on my stomach in my room on the second story of my house in Richmond, Virginia. It was January and I was exhausted. I was sick and wasn’t really getting better. I wasn’t able to nurse my body to health and I went to sleep thinking that the small infection I had was probably growing. In the middle of the night I heard my door creek and a shuffle across the floor. I turned over but stayed asleep, pressed to my sheets. Their breath was getting louder on my neck and then their legs straddled my back. I tried to move but didn’t want to out of fear of being killed. I lifted my head and as their hand slipped across my mouth I yelled the loudest scream that could leave my body. Hoping my roommates would hear me and come to find me. I was having a night terror. One where I was dying of an illness just like my father. Why so paranoid, Malcolm? My roommates asked in the morning if anyone heard that scream last night. I couldn’t even remember if it was real. It was. And it was me. Yelling for help. Yelling at myself. Yelling for myself. Yelling for my life.

 I knew immediately what happened. It’s more than just being afraid of being sick. It’s having to face the fact that someone you love, in this case, your own flesh and blood, your father, never spoke to you about who you are. It is the realization that your queerness was kept inside of an internalized void. Counting down the minutes, waiting to release itself when it finally had space. It’s facing the queer phobic upbringing placed upon you by the Black man who told you that you were his son. His son. It’s loving the man that changed himself for your brother but still fearing yourself so much that you projected your fears into his body. It’s hoping that you won’t die before you get to explain to him how sad some things were to hear and to see. It’s the longing to speak, to share, and to be whole and one with yourself before you meet him again. It’s knowing that there were so many moments when you felt like you didn’t belong. It’s knowing that this is your life and your life only. And that only you can be responsible for what becomes of it.

 Maybe love is just that. Maybe you experience it during the final holding of a dying person's hand and in the months and years after is when you are lost in its wake. But often this wake is described as death. Maybe love is knowing that despite someone's flaws and wrong doings, you are still willing to believe in who they are. And willing to face the reality that people are complex humans. And that our relationships with one another are so very complicated and always will be. And maybe love is accepting the fact that you could potentially be crushed by pain. Maybe love is knowing that the game of tug of war is not a battle but rather, an indescribable experience with yourself where death is the referee and not the opponent. An experience that you must be willing to completely lose yourself in if you ever wish to revel in it. Maybe love is being okay with the fact that you will spend the rest of your life feeling through the different emotions of your relationship with a person whose body you lost. And becoming more confident in knowing that the memories, stories, and thoughts of a person can yield their immortality. 

 Love is an absolute truth and we are all concerned with it. That is not debatable. Love and death are the roots of everything in and on the earth. At the age of 18, death knew me better than I knew myself. It saw me as a vulnerable child who was confused as to why death always seemed to be in my bedroom. A boy who was searching to find an answer to his only question: Why are we alive if we are going to die? 

 I recently walked for three hours to my first home. The sun was setting when I arrived. And when I made the right turn onto Streamway Court I looked out and around. The sky was bright orange and the head stones stood tall. Smiling and warm in this fiery glow. I grew up in a house surrounded by a cemetery. And I am just now realizing what my life was supposed to be. That this was the plan all along. In that house was where I found out Aaliyah died. In that house was where I found out my great grandmother died. So when death came back 4 years ago to ask me if I was ready to be completely lost, completely confused, completely depleted, and completely burned in a fire...I deferred. Instead, I slept for a year. And a year later I woke up from a slumber and was finally ready to accept an offer that death had placed on the table between us when I was a boy. An offer to open my arms. To take a deep breath. To take one last swallow of my own being before I would burn. Death held out a match between its fingers and with all my being I told it to set me on fire. I told it to watch my insides burn. 

 I miss my dad's body more than anything. But it's nice to know that time is no longer an issue. Being alive and living are not the same. We are alive so that we can choose to live. Being alive in the world is difficult. But living is a different experience. If I am going to live, then I'll completely lose myself. I made this choice to set myself on fire. When I dream, I am being smothered in my sleep. Suffocated. No oxygen reaching my brain. No thinking. No planning. Just feeling. My room is getting hotter and everyday, the temperature in here is rising. Come lay with me. I am dying in here. I am burning. And I am so so madly in love. Thank you mom and dad. 

[veannaleethings-blog]

A Bunny and a dick.

We can talk about moral compass’s, right? We are adults.  Yesterday I had this long drawn out text message conversation with a girl I guess I would consider an acquaintance. Even though she is more like a fair-weather friend, but even then, only if the weather is fair for her; and even then, she is a little flighty.

Okay so we are texting, of course, not talking, not in real time. Not in any other context than, simply taking turns responding to one another, about a new endeavor she has embarked on, of achieving her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. “What the fuck is that going to get you?” That was and is, really my response. It is the most superfluous degree one can sink into a pit of debt under. A piece of paper that really is only worth about 51k a year in New York 2015, as a graphic designer if you are a male. 51k a year might sound nice, but in New York, that’s beans!  So far, she is none of those things. Quite the contrary, she is a 36-year-old mother of two who is morbidly depressed and can’t live within the walls of society. This is partly the reason we gravitated toward one another in the first place. Turns out, even my outlook on life, is much more grim than hers, so she comes and goes in small doses. She has no plans of moving out of the city, in fact her only plan is to sell the house her and her husband recently bought, or leave it for the kids when they turn 18, and when she and her husband are older, they will buy and RV and live in that, on the road. Those are her goals. Sounds awesome, I can dig! Freedom to roam where ever, unrealistic as it is, because they can’t hardly save a dime to save themselves, still struggling even though her husband alone rakes in about 4 thousand a month. That’s just under 3 times as much the average Joe, not to mention that’s without any contribution from her, so if she did help they would be much more comfortable. Now, here she is, macabre and parading around as a self-proclaimed Satanist. Which is fine, except she isn’t, like, not at all. Only reason I say this is because after immersing into mystic, anti-theistic, Goetic conversations, I realized she had no knowledge of the basic principles of Satanism, King Solomon’s magic, the lesser key, of course, or any Rosicrucian shapeshifting alchemy. She basically just likes black clothes with pictures of Baphomet and various sigils and big numbers that read 666. I seem to have trailed off however, in the development of her hardly developed character. Anyway, as it is, she truly has no sense of her own identity and furthermore no real plans, just sort of passing time until she expires. Which is fine, I can jive with that. After all, that is exactly what everyone else is doing here on planet fuck. Just surviving, until we can’t any longer. I digress.  Back to the text conversation at hand. I questioned her reasoning, and financial output to eventual income, for this pursuit of a useless piece of paper, and implied that it would only be, even more wasted time. Her attempt at this, is not for financial gain or employability, her endeavor is for happiness and she hasn’t yet come to grips with that notion herself. She is bored. Bored and tired. She does not agree with the way the world works and refuses to give in to it, at least in her world views and morals, because absolutely has in every pliable sense of the term. She is married, (which is a civil union of patriarchal proprietorship) indebted to a mortgage, paying on a home loan, and now tied into school loans that are only producing profits for the very entities she despises. She has two children and somehow, finds a way to shop at high end food retailers to make sure her food is vegan. A real renegade, right?  We venture off course of her useless pursuit to procure and even more useless piece of paper and began talking about Nihilism, but not outright. Here is where I took the wheel to steer the ship. I had, and still have, no intent to steer it in any given direction, nor do I plan to sink it. I am just merely steering. After all, who am I to impose any influence, for I am no one. My opinions are trivial, and in this world, they absolutely, do not matter.  In fact, the only thing that matters, really, are the 4 forces that ground us here. Gravity, Electromagnetic and both the weak, and strong force of Nuclear force alone. Okay, I think I have made my point, nothing matters, nor will it when I end. It doesn’t exist outside of myself, only inside my mind and that is the point I am trying to make, because the same goes for her, and subsequently everyone else.  Not saying that I am right, just offering my opinion and, bleakly trying to end a conversation I didn’t give two shits about, because I genuinely do not care about her illogical ideas. They don’t affect me. So, I begin to explain the idea of Solipsism and relativity, which is hard for many to grasp, myself included, because if I do not matter, and I truly cease to exist when my existence is over, then why, am I equipped with any moral compass or range of emotion to begin with? What is their fucking purpose, if humans, as a specie, have no purpose at all? See how dark it is getting? It is a slippery slope this decline, down into this dark caverns of never ending Nihilism. I give her a few “for instances” one, in regards, to an inanimate object that I can see, hear, and use in a tangible way, it, even though it is all those things, is also meaningless, and will no longer exist when I stop existing. Not because I am somehow righteous over it, it is an object made of plastic and metal, but because when my consciousness is over, it’s over! Everything I ever knew, and will come to know in my future, will be over. It is only perception, that leads us down our truly unique and individual paths regardless of a common consensus. The second “for instance” I offered her was a little more complex, it had to do with humans, emotions, the relativity of them in relation to us as individuals and furthermore the death penalty. Something, she, as a pseudo liberal is strongly against…unless of course something happened to her children, (but that is not up for debate) in which case all the aforementioned factors come into play. I explained it as follows. Let’s say, there is a man waiting, just waiting until the day he dies. Kinda like her, but with less creature comforts.  He is waiting for death as an eye for an eye punishment, on death row.  Seems fair, doesn’t it? She at this point in disagreement because she does not thing that killing someone is a good way to teach a lesson to another about killing someone. I wanted to explain that there was no lesson to be taught when deciding to kill a man, but I figured it was pointless. Back to the waiting part. Here is a person waiting for his punishment, not his lesson, not ANYONE’s lesson, just punishment. Okay this is where relative emotional spectrum comes in. She had asserted, that she herself could not fathom the emotional sufferings of her children after she dies, and therefore did not want to leave them the same legacy of suffering. I responded with the assertion that, that is complete nonsense! For a few reasons, firstly, her children’s sufferings are their own. There is no way for her, in her life on earth, even more so in her death, for her to know their individual sufferings, and consequently, that works just the same for her. She can try to empathize with them, and subconsciously, she will dig in her catalog of emotions that are attached to memories in her brain, until she finds one that could be similar, and then use it to do so. Empathize I mean. Or she could accept the fact that she was extremely arrogant in the statement that she so thoughtlessly made. Who said her children would suffer after she died? They might be sad for a while but they certainly, will not, and cannot, have the same outlook on life that she does, because her experience here, is uniquely her own. Back to the man waiting. Let’s hypothesize that he has two children, he obviously has a mother, and a father, absent or not, and maybe some siblings. Okay let’s narrow it down. He has a mother. Right now, while he still lives and breathes, these few, are the only people that can possibly be effected be the choices he has made, but in their own individual way. But, he is waiting for the death penalty, so that means somewhere, there was a crime he committed. A murder, maybe simple, maybe torturous, but a murder no less. Now there are other individuals involved, with an entirely different set of uniquely diverse range of emotions on this spectrum. Okay, the one that died. He/she no longer exists. All that pain, those distinctive sufferings, this person’s everything is gone. It no longer exists, it is done. What is left however, are the particle sufferings of the individuals that were relative to him/her. Obviously, a mother, maybe some children maybe a father, just like the other man. They all have their own set of uniquely individual sufferings. A mother lost her child, and a child lost their parent, these two cannot empathize with one another though they might try, it will not be the same. They can only attempt to relate in some haphazard way in relation to each other.  But that wasn’t the point, MY point was that when each, and every one of these individuals are gone, when they cease to exist, so does the suffering. The entire act in of its self never happened, because is no one left for it to have happened to.  It stops. It isn’t thought of, recollected, reminisced, or recalled. The situation is over. Her retort was one of confusion. She circled back around and again made some foolish statement, crossing a hypothesized scenario with the actual point I was making, which was, that nothing really exists and time is limited here, and she made the statement that she did not agree with any of it at all and it all sounded like a bunch of “go kill, go murder, none of it matters so fuck over the planet, do what you want!” I laughed so hard, and my only response at that point was “Sure! If that is indeed your moral compass.” I brought everything I had said previously about her agonizing suffering being something she cannot change, and that she has no control over and dropped it right there at her feet. She didn’t have much to say and it took several moments for her to respond, not really knowing what to say. I guess, what can you say when someone looks you in your face and says “bullshit, you are in control of your life while you are here.” She finally did respond however, with “right, what was I thinking, all that negativity. I don’t know why I went there, it has been a long day and I need coffee.” My point was, that our time is limited here and suffering is both imaginary, and temporary. It is as temporary as we make it in our own minds. Life escapes us more quickly than we realize, and one day we no longer have it, so we might as well put our sufferings to and end and make life as enjoyable as possible, because it’s short. Perception. All we have is what we remember, and we only remember, while we are living.

 I realized after I made my closing statement, that you, the reader may be wondering why this is titled “A bunny and a dick.” The reason for that is because, I remind you that this conversation took place through a serious of text messages, and was over in a matter of 30 minutes. But while it was happening, I was looking at an image in the back ground of my phone screen, of a man. A man clads only in men’s briefs, running shoes, and a bunny mask. A tall, thin, pale and scrawny man. All I could see was a bunny and a dick.