#but goddamn i hope i don't

[jonnywaistcoat]

Hi Jonny! 🦇 I've heard mention of a discord server and I was curious if it's a closed server or if there's a way to obtain the link. Thank you!

If it's when we're streaming, it refers to a private Discord me and Sash maintain with our stream mods, where they send through messages from chat (and sometimes give me advice if I'm stuck on a game).

The idea of being in any way responsible for any sort of public or semi-public discord server makes me break out in a cold sweat.

[hiding-under-the-willow]

"Put on the lab coat science boy!" I cheer while half of the fandom is still reeling from the minor skin changes he's already made

[specsthesecond]

°❆⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°࿔*:･°❆⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❆⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❆⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

The only thing you register is the murky darkness beneath you and the ice above your head. It's calm for a long moment before you feel the twinge in your lungs and your body lurches with a suffocating need. You pound on the ice ceiling, acheiving nothing but bruised palms as the air bubbles leaving your mouth accumulate on the ice.

Then suddenly a sallow hand reaches up from the depths and grabs your leg. The knight’s dead eyes scrutinise you from below, as if offended that you would struggle against this well-deserved fate. Your scream is drowned by the water as you're pulled down, further and further into the icy abyss.

You jolt awake, breathing harsh and eyes frantic. You look around the room, brown curtains shut out the light of the moon, high in the sky. Thick sheets cover you, yet you're still cold, ever aware of the vacant spot next to you that wasn’t when you went to bed. Your heart aches, with longing or exhaustion, you're not sure.

Light emits from the ajar bedroom door. You climb out of the large bed, shuffling away heavy sheets and fixing your thick winter nightgown. You tiptoe down the short hallway, cold stone ground chilling your nerves through your socks until you reach the thick carpet that covers most of the living room.

Your orc sits in the middle of the room, hunched over the dining room table. A candle on the table casts a warm glow, you can hear graphite against paper, the movements slow and deliberate. He only notices your presence when you touch his shoulder. The orc looks up at you from his seat, and your eyes must have been red or puffy because he immediately knows something is wrong. He pushes out his chair so that he’s facing you and gives you a worried look.

You shake your head, trying to ease his concerns but knowing it won't work. He plays with the sleeve of the loose tunic he must have slipped on when he woke up and then reaches out to softly wrap thick fingers around your wrist, sliding them down until he holds your hand in his. It’s warm and grounding, his thumb slides over your knuckles, questioning but never demanding. You sigh and say,

“I had a nightmare.”

You place your hands together and rest your head on them, closing your eyes, trying to convey the action of sleeping and then you shoot your head upright, trying to convey shock. His face lights up in recognition and even though the hasty gestures are a little embarrassing, you still feel…proud when he understands you.

He says a string of orcish and you only catch the words, “I’m sorry.”  He then gestures to himself and nods sadly.

He had a nightmare as well?

You feel foolish for not considering that, extremely foolish for feeling disappointed when you noticed he wasn’t in bed with you, as if he isn’t dealing with his own troubles, as if you’re the only one who’s looked death in the face. Your eyes flick to his chest. How long has it been since you’ve cleaned his wound? Are you really so selfish you can’t remember to clean the fresh wound of the one you call your lover? You look from where his wound should be then back to his eyes, silently asking for permission to touch. He nods and you lift his tunic up his chest until you reach the wound, a wound covered by fresh, clean, white bandages. You scrunch your eyebrows and look back up at him, he looks back with a proud smile, almost smug, you’d say.

You scoff, drop his tunic back down and look away, irritation flowing from you. You’re glad that he knows how to clean his own wounds, you never doubted he couldn’t but you're responsible for that lifelong scar and you feel an obligation to help take care of it. You just want to make up for the pain you’ve caused, why isn’t he letting you? Not only have you not thanked him nearly enough for saving your life, but you've only made his life worse by being in it.

Your lover notices your mood and reaches for your hands again, leading your eyes to meet his, when you do, you can’t help but let the pain flow freely onto your face. The self-loathing finally too much to try and hide it from him with a tight smile. He sighs and brings your hands to his shoulders, pulling you gently until you’re sitting on his lap, head placed right next to his beating heart. He whispers something in orcish, rubbing your back. You know he doesn't see it the way you do, he doesn't see you as a burden but that doesn't negate the fact that you are burdening him. And yet, despite knowing this, you cling to him so tightly, wholly unwilling to let go. When did you become so selfish?

You look away from him and notice the loose pages on the table. There are loose pages with scribbled orcish and human common, some messily scratched out while others are crumpled into tight balls. You reach for one of the loose pages unthinkingly, but your lover reaches them first and pushes them further away. You're slightly startled by the action and look up to see him turned away, cheeks dark and eyebrows scrunched. He's angry or maybe embarrassed? Maybe he's angry because he’s embarrassed? You reach for his cheek to make him look at you and when he does, you lightly nod your head, trying to convey that you won’t peek at what he’s writing if he doesn’t want you to. You think he understands as his shoulders ease up and his hand comes back to your waist. You rest your head against his chest and let out a tired breath, closing your eyes. His fingers comb gently along your scalp as he eases back against the chair, with you nestled comfortably in his arms. You didn't intend to fall asleep but sleep comes anyway, it always seems to come so easy when you're close to him like this.

When you’re nudged awake, you can see out the window that some time has elapsed since you fell asleep, but not enough that the sun has come up yet. You rub your eyes and look up at the lovely orc who woke you. He looks down at you apologetically and nods his head towards the paper on the table. You reposition yourself and reach for the page, straightening up when you realise just how much is written on it, more than either of you have written before. You thoroughly rub your eyes clean of sleep and with one more glance towards his nervous face, you begin reading.

“My name is Շɿoþƚɿiǫ.

Please tell me your name.

I can’t might not be able to pronounce it but I want to try.

In my mind I have been calling you Ꮦлαᗩ, I think it will mean “My Love" in Human.

I’m sorry it is this way. Sorry you have to leave home. Sorry you had to kill that man those men. Sorry that you lose sleep. Sorry your life has changed so much. I want to I will make it better for you.

When you said you love me, do you mean it in the way I mean it?

Orc courting are different from humans, so I will explain.

I think of you when you are not here, I want to touch you when you are close, I want to make you smile and laugh. I want to make my home feel like your home.

Orcs don’t have marriage but we do have courting. This is what I want with you and I deeply wish that you feel the same.

If this is not what you meant then I'm sorry for misunderstanding.

I still love you.”

You read the letter once, wipe your tears and then read it again. He only looks back down at you when he hears your wet sniffle. His hand massaging your thigh stops moving, he looks at you with worry. You don’t know what else to do, so you nod your head and cry, pulling him into a hug. You hold him close, not knowing at all how else to respond besides burying your head in his neck and nodding, a poor attempt at an affirmation. He rubs his hand down your back, hugging you back, clearly hesitant but it seems like a weight has been lifted from him.

It takes you a few minutes to calm down. You thought you were good at hiding your emotions and being stoic but it may just be that you’d never actually felt such strong emotions in the first place, and now that you do, you have no idea how to hide or even manage them, it’s incredibly embarrassing.

Even more so when he is so patient with you, letting you melt into him, letting you wet his shoulder and hiccup into his chest. You curse yourself, he must be so nervous, anxiously waiting for a clear response to his carefully crafted words but all you can do is cry and nod.

You pull away, wipe your raw eyes and hiccup one more time before turning around and grabbing the thick graphite pencil. You sit on his lap and begin paging through the dictionary. He sits patiently, arms around your waist, resting his head on the back of your shoulders, giving you the same privacy you gave him to write your thoughts out. You struggle immensely with choosing the right words, there’s so much you want to say but it doesn’t need to be a poetic love letter, it needs to be clear and understandable. Even though he deserves all the most beautiful poetry the world could craft.

You are, unfortunately, not a world-renowned poet. You feel so exposed and it's ridiculous, honestly, trying to channel your most intense emotions into graphite lines on a page. You're not even sure any medium, language or alphabet could truly express these feelings but you have to try for him. You write until dawn is approaching, looking down at the orcish words your own hands have written, you sigh to yourself wearily.

You nudge the orc behind you and he simply hugs your form tighter. The man fell asleep around halfway through your painful writing process, back against the chair with his arms never leaving your waist. He breathes in deeply, sleep melting away slowly as he comes to.

You gently unwrap his heavy arms from around you and stand up, placing your letter in front of him on the table before he can argue about the loss of contact. He rubs his eyes and stares down at the page, you try not to stare at him while fidgeting to the side. He glances at you for a second and then pulls his chair in a little, picking up the small page.

“My name is ______

I would love to hear you say it.

This is difficult so I will be direct.

Please don’t be sorry for me. I killed for you because I love you and I don’t regret it.

That is what I mean when I say I love you. It means I want to protect you, clean your wounds, make food with you, help you when you can't sleep.

These are things I have never felt before you.

I don't know why you saved me from the ice, but I will live my life trying to thank you for it. Even if you say I already have.

I have never dreamt of marriage but I dream of you. I want to live with you next to me, I want you to be my home. We can call it courting or marriage, as long as I get to love you and feel your love in return.

I think you understand me perfectly, My Lover”

At least that's what you hope it says. Taking into account punctuation, tense and grammer issues, it probabaly reads very differently.

Your stomach churns when you remember all the sincerity that went into those penciled words, and still it isn't half as thoughtful as his. His was so beautiful and concise, while yours feels not nearly as put together. He deserves better. What if you translated it so badly that he doesn’t understand? You realise that he must have been feeling this exact same way when you were reading his letter but that thought only quells your anxiety a little.

You feel like hours go by in just those few minutes. You can't decide if you want to watch him read it or avert your gaze, so you do both, glancing back at him every few seconds while trying to give him the patience and privacy to read in his own time. You can’t help but watch how he rubs his eyes and sniffs quietly, you want so badly to console him but you just stand there and wait.

He wipes his eyes once more and stands up from his chair, moving closer to you, reaching out his hand for you to take. You do and he brings you into his hold. You hug tightly as he bends down to fully engulf you. He whispers something into your shoulder and gives the skin a little kiss over the material of your nightgown. You try to separate to ask him what he’s trying to say but he squeezes you close, nuzzling into your neck. He mutters in orcish and kisses your neck, repeating the process all the way up your neck until he reaches your lips. He looks into your eyes and it seems that whatever he was looking for in them was found when he leans his head onto yours.

You lean forward just a bit to kiss him, the same as your kisses have been before, slow and deliberate, meant to convey as much as possible. When you can’t convey something with words you have to convey it with actions. You separate from the kiss and he breathes out a soft word in orcish which you can now identify as “My love” and he blesses you with another searing kiss. You kiss back, feeling his tusks on your cheeks as the kiss deepens.

His hands smooth down to your thighs, where he picks you up slightly and places you on the dining table so he doesn’t have to bend down so far, you assume. He still kisses you so lovingly, whispering soft orcish. You try to decipher his words but your thoughts are quickly led astray by his lips on yours and his hand gently intertwined with your hair, holding you as close as possible while leaving room to move away if you please. You don’t.

As you kiss, you wrap your legs around as much of his waist as you can, just trying to get as close as possible, your chest presses against his and you're grateful for the scant layers between you. You can feel the fabric of his tunic dampen with sweat, the downsides of running so hot, you suppose. Though it doesn’t feel like such a downside to him as he feels your hand trail up under the tunic, feeling the thick fat and dense muscle of his stomach, he shivers at your touch but the cold doesn’t stop him from reaching back and yanking his tunic off, tossing it aside as if it offended him.

You stare at your lover, now able to appreciate his physique with all your attention, nothing to distract you from following his chest hair down to the trail that disappears into his sleep pants. His chest moves up and down with every breath as your gaze lingers, you bite back a grin when you think you can see him flexing his arms. You like that he can feel your eyes on him.

Your gaze meanders back up to his face, framed by messy strands of black hair contrasting strongly with his cream-white tusks. You want to feel those pretty tusks on your neck again, grazing against the soft skin there. He can clearly see you staring at them and he bends down to your height, resting his hands on the table on either side of your thighs. His face is inches away from you, his amused grin mirroring your slightly more nervous one. You lean forward and kiss him flat on the lips, then kiss both his tusks, your way of letting him know you accept him as he is, in the same way you know he does. A way of saying you love him, not despite the fact that he’s an orc or because he’s an orc but that you love him as whatever he may be. You hold his face in place while you attack him with loving kisses and pull him into your neck, not so subtly encouraging him to lay his own kisses on the recently discovered, very sensitive area. Your hands travel down his broad shoulders, feeling up the large expanse of muscle and skin.

He finally moves his hands to cup both of your thighs, touch burning hot, you let him trail his hands up your thighs until he’s massaging the fat around your hips. Your thighs squeeze around him as you shiver, the fabric pooling at your hips. You can see his eyes linger where your nightgown pools at your hips as your legs wrap around his waist. After debating a bit in your head, you make the decision to shift and shuffle your nightgown up and off your body, the action making you feel much more vulnerable than you expected, even in the heat of the moment. He stares unabashedly, trailing his hands up and down your waist. You can’t help but cover your breasts from him, it’s not that you’re shy, that’s not the word for it, though you’re clearly overwhelmed and a little out of your depth.

Luckily, it seems he understands. He places a kiss on your lips and then trails a few down your neck, making sure to nudge his tusks against the skin, it looks like he's figuring out exactly what you like. He then places kisses all over your neck and shoulders, he kisses as if he's blessed to even get to offer his affections at all. You breathe deep and let yourself feel his warmth, slowly taking your arm away from your chest and sliding the hand behind his head. You lead him down and he follows, trailing kisses down your chest until his hot tongue makes contact with your nipple, and you downright moan.

He moans back in return, suckling so sweet and gentle. He brings a hand up to your other breast to feel the weight of it in his hand. He pulls your hips closer to his, at the edge of the table, he has to bend down a considerable amount to reach your tits and have your hips meet his, but it’s clearly worth it for him.

You can feel how big he is through his sleep pants, and you know he can feel your heat through your underwear. You press even closer, wanting to feel more of him, and you grind your clothed cunt against him. Just that little friction has his grip tightening and his breath hitching. At the very least, you can be assured that your lover is probably as experienced as you are and will probably last just as long as you if you both keep getting so worked up so easily. You grind forward again, pushing his head into your breast, scraping his blunt tusks against your plush chest as he laps and sucks the soft skin. He suddenly grabs your hips with both hands and lifts you up, wrapping your legs around his waist tighter and holding you close with one hand on your back. You look each other in the eyes, you're getting really good at assessing each other's feelings through body language. You don’t need to tell him you want him, and vice versa, you can convey that with your bodies.

He places a hand on your ass and you pull him into a searing kiss as he grinds his hips forward, making both of you moan. He leans on the back of the couch next to the living room table for support. Clearly very sensitive himself, he slowly sinks to the ground, with you in his arms, still keeping you as close to him as possible. Now that he’s sitting on the floor, back against the back of the couch, you have more freedom to move how you want, now actively grinding into each other, searching for the incoming climax.

It feels so good, even through the layers. You can't help but murmur praises at him and he seems to like this very much despite the fact that he can't understand most of it. When you stop your praises to suck in a breath or moan, he whines softly and looks at you with a pleading expression that only melts into pleasure once you start talking again.

It just feels right, not too much too fast and yet the most pleasure you’ve ever felt. You can see him getting closer, hands clutching you tighter, moving you against his bucking hips. When you can feel yourself getting closer, you pull him into a passionate kiss. Your lips fit together so well, and so do your bodies, pressed as close as possible, save for two layers of cloth. You release the kiss only to rasp out his name and the words "I love you" in his mother tongue as you reach your peak. He groans out what you're pretty sure is a swear word of some kind before kissing you so deep you feel your lips might bruise. He kisses you through his shuddering climax, and you stay connected like that well into the come down.

You rest on top of your lover, feeling his heart beat alongside yours. Any attempt to move your lower half sends pain towards your most sensitive parts, having been rubbed raw against your soaking wet underwear. You shift a little and he sucks in a breath, the hand rubbing your back moves to still your hips. As if you needed any more evidence of his enjoyment, his thin sleep pants are absolutely soaked, you're not sure where his wetness ends and yours begins, but you find the sight oddly endearing. You look up at him and grin, he grins back and you both snicker at yourselves. It must be a funny sight, two star-crossed lovers, former lonely wood dwellers, cumming in their pants the first time they get even slightly intimate with each other.

Your lover only releases you from his embrace when you shiver from the cold night air, though not without a few more kisses and whispered endearments. You slowly lift yourself up, stretching and grabbing your nightgown before walking, only wobbling a little, to the kitchen to make you both some well-deserved tea. You can hear your lover trail into the bathroom, probably to get a fresh pair of pants and you know you'll have to do the same when you feel the wetness slowly cooling uncomfortably between your thighs. The stupid grin on your face stays there the entire day, only matched by the equally stupid grin worn by your lover.

°❆⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°࿔*:･°❆⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❆⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❆⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

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[darkdragon768]

Various doodles of the Dorito Twins.

I just like to play with them like dolls and put them into situations.

[kals-kool-blog]

ok this is ACTUALLY fucking insane. did we as a whole learn NOTHING from what happened with welcome home. even from a strictly logical standpoint! if you make the creators uncomfortable, they leave, and if the creator leaves, so does the content. oh my *god.* just because they make music and tell stories doesn't mean they don't deserve to be respected. to quote keath itself: LEAVE IF YOU ARE UNKIND.

[tropicalcontinental]

"If i don't come back I love you all."

how about your lungs first?

[nguyenfinity]

This month's feature is Crazy:B, with this edition releasing alongside their new Valentine's Day single 'Lovebug'! (written and produced by my hopes and dreams)

art-only version below the cut!

[lesbianwyllravengard]

People who don't enjoy horror can play Resident Evil games by pretending every zombie/boss is going after the playable character because they want them sexually. Trust me it works everytime. Mr. X ain't so scary now that you know he just wants to fuck Leon

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[blondeaxolotl]

Sighs, got inspo to draw them after seeing @nullbutler 's post about them, of all pairs, these two were the least I expected to end up drawing together but here we are

Here's the post in question, the ✨inspiration and motivation✨:

[bossuary]

[covington-shenanigans]

christ alive I love my parents and I'm glad I got to see them but they are just. so fucking exhausting

[overchromatic]

COMMISSIONS ARE HERE!!! I'm broke as hell so I gotta draw for cash. If you're interested or have any questions DM me. <3

I'm Liazrad on Paypal, Cashapp, Venmo, and Ko-Fi!

[sophsun1]

the audacity of people on here is just baffling... imagine making THREE gifsets entirely out of my gifs, putting them out into the general tags to be reblogged and thinking just because you gave me a lousy @ on the end of them, it's okay? that's my hard work jfc 🙃

the account is @justforthedreamers who is a gif reposter

[shsl-analyzer-guy]

hey this is the opposite of what I wanted from season 6, actually. Why do these writers hate me personally

[i3utterflyeffect]

have you ever seen the post about hoards creating dragons? that is, the physical accumulation of wealth causes a king or whatever to gradually transform (scaling with wealth) into a monstrous shape befitting their greed.

anyways, wouldn't it be fucked up if victim began to transform into a cursor as they collected more technology. horrifying agonizing shift into an alien geometry, ya know.

I HAVEN'T SEEN THAT. THAT'S SUCH A COOL IDEA THOUGH

and FUCK MAN.... shit..... blows the fuck up. i love horrifying agonizing shifts into Something That Is Not You