#but it's fascinating that they directly acknowledge that phrase in the working title

[cesium-sheep]

it is so weird in retrospect that they make all these medical drama shows and they're all about fucking interns, like why is that. is it just cuz they're presumably younger and hotter and more volatile? but then there are so many moments where they want to emphasize the Medical Drama rather than the interpersonal drama and it's like, none of these people are qualified to do any of this. these are little infant babies. at least on house they're actual attendings.

[theusurpersdog]

An Avenging Dragon

A Storm of Swords is the second big push Daenerys gets on her path to becoming a much darker person; at the end of A Game of Thrones she is hatching dragons, but her plot pauses substantially in A Clash of Kings. While she is in a higher position, travelling through the Red Waste and staying in Qarth doesn’t give her an opportunity to actually lead her people that much; she still leads them in more subtle and understated ways, but A Storm of Swords puts her back in a position to take military action. Back in the Lhazareen village, Daenerys did not have the stomach to be the conqueror she tried to be, and in this book we see how she’s grown and changed since hatching her dragons.

Bred For War

The first two books establish a very strong symbolic connection between Daenerys and her dragons, and hint at an actual physical link between them, but A Storm of Swords is the first book to really expand on the concept.

Throughout the book, there is countless examples of Daenerys’ mood actively translating to her dragons. They are particularly in touch with Daenerys’ passionate emotions; whenever Daenerys get angry with someone, her dragons also stir:

Her dragons sensed her fury. Viserion roared, and smoke rose grey from his snout. Drogon beat the air with black wings, and Rhaegal twisted his head back and belched flame

Dany felt hot tears on her cheeks. Drogon screamed, lashing his tail back and forth.

And when Daenerys is having sex with Irri, her dragons seem to experience it with her:

Still, the relief she wanted seemed to recede before her, until her dragons stirred, and one screamed out across the cabin

She screamed then. Or perhaps that was Drogon.

Daenerys and her dragons have become so interchangeable that she herself can’t tell one from the other.

This very tangible connection she has with them works on two different levels; it highlights that Dany’s dragons want what she wants, and also works to strengthen the symbolic connection she shares with them. By making this emotional connection explicit, GRRM strengthens the parallels between Daenerys and her dragons that are meant to be subtext. As the dragons begin to really grow, they develop personalities and traits that reflect on Daenerys:

At first Groleo had wanted the dragons caged and Dany had consented to put his fears at ease, but their misery was so palpable, that she soon changed her mind and insisted they be freed.

He was always hungry, her Drogon.

Daenerys’ dragons hate being held back in any way; they aren’t happy until they can soar over the ocean, free to hunt and fly wherever they want. This doesn’t fully pay off until Daenerys chains them at the start of A Dance with Dragons, but GRRM is seeding that being chained is something that both the dragons and Daenerys will hate.

It also feeds into the larger narrative point that Daenerys herself is a dragon. She herself starts to realize this as time passes, and she grows more and more comfortable equating herself to one. Back in A Game of Thrones, she called herself “the blood of the dragon”, and when she compared herself to a dragon, it was often in symbolic terms, in a removed sort of way. She still does that in A Storm of Swords, but she is also much more direct in her language when she says she is a dragon:

“I have a dragon’s temper, that’s all. You must not let it frighten you.”

The anger was fierce and hot inside her when she gave the command; it made her feel like an avenging dragon

She had not meant to be so sharp with Ser Jorah, but his endless suspicion had finally woken her dragon.

“YOU ARE THE DRAGON’S NOW!”

And not only is she comfortable directly stating she is a dragon, she uses it to excuse her behavior; especially in the context of Jorah “waking her dragon”. Not that it is at all wrong for Daenerys to lash out at Jorah, considering his abhorrent behavior toward her; but that particular phrase is something Daenerys is familiar with because Viserys used it as both a threat and a justification. It’s a way for Daenerys to excuse her outbursts as a right she has as a Targaryen; dragons can do whatever they want, and can’t be held accountable for the things they do.

Looking beyond the connection Daenerys has to her own dragons, the history of House Targaryen is starting to become ominously present within her chapters. I’ll get into Old Valyria and Aegon’s Conquest more below, but this particular line about the Targaryen’s dragons is very interesting:

“the dragons the Seven Kingdoms knew best were those of House Targaryen. They were bred for war, and in war they died. It is no easy thing to slay a dragon, but it can be done.”

Daario is introduced in this book, and with him the idea of Daenerys having to choose between peace or war, so this quote seems particularly damning for the choices she will make.

As Daenerys’ connection to her House grows, the parallels she shares with her brother Rhaegar also start to become apparent. Jorah always said that Rhaegar was the last dragon, before he saw Daenerys step out of Drogo’s Pyre, and as the books go on it’s made clear that the title of “the last dragon” is really hers. She is fascinated by her brother, and even dreams of herself standing in his shoes:

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper’s rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent.

And when she is trying to work up her courage to turn Drogon and the Unsullied against the Great Masters, she thinks to herself “It is time to cross the Trident”. Unlike Viserys, who Daenerys had to live under and experience his cruelty, Rhaegar is just a story to her; someone who can be as brave and heroic, as Romantic and honorable, as inspiring as she needs him to be.

In many ways, Rhaegar represents all the same things to Daenerys that Westeros does. Just as she cannot acknowledge the possibility of fault in Westeros (“She tried to imagine what it would feel like, when she first caught sight of the land she was born to rule. It will be as fair a shore as I have ever seen, I know it. How could it be otherwise?”), Daenerys also sees Rhaegar as flawless; instead of placing blame on him for running away from Elia Martell and his children, she asks Ser Barristan just how awful Elia was to make him abandon her. Part of why she feels so uncomfortable buying the Unsullied to fight for her as slaves, is because Rhaegar’s men followed him out of love and loyalty, which leads to Jorah Mormont’s famous line:

“Tell me, then-when he touched a man on the shoulder with his sword, what did he say? ‘Go forth and kill the weak’? At the Trident, those brave men Viserys spoke of who died beneath our dragon banners-did they give their lives because they believed in Rhaegar’s cause, or because they had been bought and paid for?” Dany turned to Mormont, crossed her arms, and waited for an answer.

“My queen,” the big man said slowly, “all you say is true. But Rhaegar lost on the Trident. He lost the battle, he lost the war, he lost the kingdom, and he lost his life. His blood swirled downriver with the rubies from his breastplate, and Robert the Usurper rode over his corpse to steal the Iron Throne. Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died.”

I find this argument between Jorah and Daenerys so important because we’re definitely not supposed to agree with Jorah. The idea that Rhaegar’s honor got him killed flies in the face of why he had to fight at the Trident to begin with; that he had run off from his wife with a young girl, and refused to stand against his father’s tyranny. Yet it also highlights Daenerys’ continued lack of understanding of what Robert’s Rebellion or Westeros really is; Daenerys specifically asks Jorah what Rhaegar said when he knighted men, the implication being that the men Rhaegar chose to knight were honorable and good. But we know that the greatest tragedy that befell Dany’s family during Robert’s Rebellion, the rape and murder of Elia Martell and her children, was carried out by Ser Gregor Clegane, who was knighted by none other than Prince Rhaegar Targaryen.

Knowing Daenerys shares such a strong connection to her brother, it makes the details we know of Rhaegar’s personality very interesting:

“Perhaps so, Your Grace.” Whitebeard paused a moment. “But I am not certain it was in Rhaegar to be happy.”

“You make him sound so sour,” Dany protested.

“Not sour, no, but. . . there was a melancholy to Prince Rhaegar, a sense. . .” The old man hesitated again.

“Say it,” she urged. “A sense. . . ?”

“. . . of doom. He was born in grief, my queen, and that shadow hung over him all his days.”

Melancholic is a very apt way to describe Daenerys in A Storm of Swords. Whether it be fear of betrayal, a profound sense of loneliness, the trauma of her past, or any other number of worries, Daenerys is incredibly sad throughout her chapters. She often finds herself crying, set off by small things, and she doesn’t even understand what drove her to tears. Similar to Rhaegar, I’m not certain Daenerys has it in her to be happy. The struggle between Dany who wants to live in a house with a red door, and Daenerys Targaryen who wants to be a Queen and Conqueror, is such a huge part of her story and in A Storm of Swords and A Dance with Dragons, is expressed through Daenerys having to choose peace or war. As we saw in A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings, choosing peace wasn’t enough for her; she could not let herself live as a khaleesi, or return and rule Vaes Tolorro. But when she chooses war, she isn’t particularly satisfied with that either:

Up here in her garden Dany sometimes felt like a god, living atop the highest mountain in the world.

Do all gods feel so lonely? Some must, surely.

The red priests believed in two gods, she had heard, but two who were eternally at war. Dany liked that even less. She would not want to be eternally at war.

The way Barristan Selmy describes Rhaegar as being shadowed by grief his entire life is also very true of Daenerys, and reminiscent of the Undying Ones calling her daughter of death. Her mother died giving birth to her, she was named “Stormborn” because her father’s fleet was crushed on the night of her birth, and her entire arc is shrouded in death; whether that be Viserys, Rhaego, or Drogo. And as Barristan says of Rhaegar, what I’ve been trying to outline in these metas is just how much a sense of doom follows Daenerys Targaryen.

Bricks & Blood

Daenerys’ complex relationship to slavery is driven to the forefront of her story when she arrives in Slaver’s Bay. While it has always been present in her story, from her first chapter when she was sold to Khal Drogo, it isn’t really the focus until she goes to Astapor to buy the Unsullied. It’s such an interesting part of her story, because it highlights both the best and worst of her personality; it gives her a chance to chase the ideal of being the Breaker of Chains, but also really shines a light on how little she understands what she’s doing, and how little patience she has to actually be a savior.

There is a lot of focus placed on the middle and end of Daenerys’ arc in A Storm of Swords, but it’s important to consider how she began her journey to Slaver’s Bay: to buy a slave army. Trying to argue the exact moment Daenerys decided to burn Kraznys and free the Unsullied is pointless, because GRRM writes her as intentionally vague in Astapor to keep the element of surprise, but it’s inarguable that she arrives there with the intent to buy the Unsullied:

“If Magister Illyrio would deny you, he is only Xaro Xhoan Daxos with four chins. And if he is sincere in his devotion to your cause, he will not begrudge you three shiploads of trade goods. What better use for his tiger skins than to buy you the beginnings of an army?

That’s true. Dany felt a rising excitement.

. . .

“Yes,” she decided. “I’ll do it!” Dany threw back the coverlets and hopped from the bunk. “I’ll see the captain at once, command him to set course for Astapor.”

And once she’s in Astapor, Daenerys is clearly torn on what decision to make. Barristan and Jorah act as the angel and devil on her shoulder, and through her debate with them we can see how and why Daenerys makes her choices. When she is faced with Barristan’s steadfast refusal of the Unsullied as a potential army, we get to see Daenerys arguing for the buying of slaves, and I find her justifications quite interesting:

“There are sellswords in Pentos and Myr and Tyrosh you can hire. A man who kills for coin has no honor, but at least they are no slaves. Find your army there, I beg you.”

“My brother visited Pentos, Myr, Braavos, near all the Free Cities. The magisters and archons fed him wine and promises, but his soul was starved to death. A man cannot sup from the beggar’s bowl all his life and stay a man. I had my taste in Qarth, that was enough. I will not come to Pentos bowl in hand.”

For Daenerys, it doesn’t matter how wrong slavery is or how negatively it will be received in Westeros, because it cannot be worse than having to beg. In her mind, she believes that having to beg the rich men of the Free Cities to help him caused Viserys to become the cruel monster he was, and Daenerys thinks that the same could happen to her; which implies that Daenerys sees Viserys’ reaction as either valid or inevitable – either way, it’s troubling.

What’s also troubling is how Daenerys uses her past to justify her present actions:

“Better to come a beggar than a slaver,” Arstan said.

“There speaks one who has been neither.” Dany’s nostrils flared. “Do you know what it is like to be sold, squire? I do. My brother sold me to Khal Drogo for the promise of a golden crown. Well, Drogo crowned him in gold, though not as he had wished, and I. . . my sun-and-stars made a queen of me, but if he had been a different man, it might have been much otherwise. Do you think I have forgotten how it felt to be afraid?”

The concept of slavery does not bother Daenerys, the brutality does. I briefly mentioned when I wrote about her A Clash of Kings chapters that Daenerys doesn’t think twice about Xaro’s slaves, which seems to be at odds with her actions in Slaver’s Bay; but I think this is because Daenerys isn’t really opposed to owning people, as long as they are treated well. She can buy a slave army, because she would treat them well, so it wouldn’t be wrong. But once she arrives in Astapor, and has to see the way the men are treated, she can’t lie to herself about her actions anymore. But, just as she did in the Lhazareen village, Daenerys tries to overcome horrific violence to continue in her actions:

She was feeling faint. The heat, she tried to tell herself.

She can’t bring herself to ignore the suffering of the Unsullied, though, as her fight with Jorah shows:

“How many men do they have for sale?”

“None.” Was it Mormont she was angry with, or this city with its sullen heat, its stinks and sweats and crumbling bricks? “They sell eunuchs, not men. Eunuchs made of brick, like the rest of Astapor. Shall I buy eight thousand brick eunuchs with dead eyes that never move, who kill suckling babes for the sake of a spiked hat and strangle their own dogs?

“If you were my true knight, you would never have brought me to this vile sty.”

But it is dark below, in the streets and plazas and fighting pits. And it is darkest of all in the barracks, where some little boy is feeding scraps to the puppy they gave him when they took away his manhood.

“The blood of my enemies I will shed gladly. The blood of innocents is another matter. Eight thousand Unsullied they would offer me. Eight thousand dead babes. Eight thousand strangled dogs.”

Seeing the dehumanization of the Unsullied makes Daenerys feel physically sick. Being exposed to that extreme level of cruelty stirs something in Daenerys; she has high ideals of what a King or Queen is for, and seeing so many abused people makes her want to stand up and fight for them. I’ll get into Daenerys’ version of justice more later, but I think it’s very important to understand how she sees herself. Freeing the Unsullied is in no way altruistic – it allows her to get everything she wants and lose nothing – but Daenerys doesn’t do it for entirely selfish reasons. This is how the scene is described:

She raised the harpy’s fingers in the air. . . and then she flung the scourge aside. “Freedom!” she sang out. “Dracarys! Dracarys!”

She believes she’s setting the Unsullied free, she’s singing out the words: Freedom!

But that’s not entirely true. Before she sets the Plaza ablaze, Daenerys specifically asks Kraznys about it:

“The Good Master has said that these eunuchs cannot be tempted with coin or flesh,” Dany told the girl, “but if some enemy of mine should offer them freedom for betraying me. . .”

“They would kill him out of hand and bring her his head, tell her that,” the slaver answered. “Other slaves may steal and hoard up silver in hopes of buying freedom, but an Unsullied would not take it if the little mare offered it as a gift. They have no life outside their duty. They are soldiers, and that is all.”

“It is soldiers I need,” Dany admitted.

Daenerys is being told in no uncertain terms that the Unsullied are trained not to understand the concept of freedom. And, by her own actions, we can see that she believed Kraznys:

She stood in her stirrups and raised the harpy’s fingers above her head for all the Unsullied to see. “IT IS DONE!” she cried at the top of her lungs. “YOU ARE MINE!” She gave the mare her heels and galloped along the first rank, holding the fingers high. “YOU ARE THE DRAGON’S NOW! YOU’RE BOUGHT AND PAID FOR! IT IS DONE! IT IS DONE!”

Daenerys makes sure the Unsullied know that she is their Master now, screaming it as loud as she can and waving the Harpy high above her for them to see, before giving the command for them to sack Astapor. Not until after they obey, does she drop the scourge. Again, Daenerys loves the idea of liberating people and she loves a version of freedom, but she doesn’t fully understand what slavery is.

A part of her is uncomfortable with her actions, though, and that comes through the most in her interaction with her handmaiden Irri. When she was khaleesi to Khal Drogo, Daenerys’ two handmaidens were her slaves, and even though she set them free at the end of A Game of Thrones, Irri doesn’t fully understand what that means:

Dany stepped away from her. “No. Irri, you do not need to do that. What happened that night, when you woke . . . you’re no bed slave, I freed you, remember? You . . .”

“I am handmaid to the Mother of Dragons,” the girl said. “It is great honor to please my khaleesi.”

When Daenerys hears this, it does not please her:

"I don't want that," she insisted. "I don't."

On some level, Daenerys understands that having sex with Irri is exploitative and wrong:

For a moment Dany was tempted, but it was Drogo she wanted, or perhaps Daario. Not Irri. The maid was sweet and skillful, but all her kisses tasted of duty.

But we’ll see in A Dance with Dragons that Daenerys continues to have sex with Irri.

I want to pause for a moment and explain why I say that Irri and the Unsullied don’t understand what their new found freedom means. I am not trying to infantilize them or remove their agency. But years and years of dehumanization and abuse have tried to take their agency from them; the Unsullied are violated, tortured, drugged, and emotionally and psychologically manipulated from the time they are little boys, all with the goal of stripping them of the very concept of self. That level of emotional damage can’t be solved by simply setting them free, especially when they’re given the option to live in their old patterns. While we don’t have details about Irri’s upbringing, we know that she was a slave Viserys was able to buy specifically to serve Daenerys, and spent a year or more of her life as Dany’s slave. So, on top of the trauma inflicted on Irri and the Unsullied through years of being told their lives were not their own, there is the added layer of them actually being Daenerys’ property at a point in their lives. It is one thing to be treated as property your whole life, and then someone comes along and tells you that you’re now free; it is quite another for someone who also treated you like property to then give you your freedom. Daenerys is, even if unintentionally, taking advantage of the slaves she freed.

This complicated relationship to slavery also gives Daenerys yet another connection to her Targaryen - and Valyrian - heritage. When she arrives in Astapor, she remembers how the Valyrians destroyed the empire of Old Ghis:

Old Ghis had fallen five thousand years ago, if she remembered true; its legions shattered by the might of young Valyria, its brick walls pulled down, its streets and buildings turned to ash and cinder by dragonflame, its very fields sown with salt, sulfur, and skulls.

Lore from The World of Ice and Fire expands on this, clarifying that the “Freehold” of Valyria learned slavery from the conquered cities of Old Ghis, and their first slaves were the Ghiscari they had taken prisoner. Similar to her ancestors, Daenerys quickly starts to profit off of selling slaves:

Dany thought a moment. "Any man who wishes to sell himself into slavery may do so. Or woman." She raised a hand. "But they may not sell their children, nor a man his wife."

"In Astapor the city took a tenth part of the price, each time a slave changed hands," Missandei told her.

"We'll do the same," Dany decided. Wars were won with gold as much as swords. "A tenth part. In gold or silver coin, or ivory. Meereen has no need of saffron, cloves, or zorse hides."

Daenerys is careful to put boundaries around men selling themselves into slavery, trying to avoid people being forced back into the slave trade, but she is equally quick to make a profit off of the trade. Now that Daenerys is directly benefiting from the selling of slaves, she has less of a reason to discourage it. It’s also unsettling how she hears of how Astapor ruled, the city responsible for the atrocities of the Plaza of Punishment, and decides we’ll do the same. Like her ancestors, Daenerys is starting to fall into the patterns of Ghis and their slave trade. She is still far from being the same as the men she hates, but she is profiting off the buying and selling of human beings, which is morally bankrupt. She could have allowed the men to sell themselves back into slavery without taking ten percent, but instead she chose to follow the example set by Astapor.

Valyria and the cities of Slaver’s Bay are extremely intertwined, and Daenerys deciding to adopt Astapor’s slave tax is just one in a long list of similarities. Before Old Ghis was conquered by the Freehold of Valyria, they were in the slave trade but had an elite source of free fighting men; then Valyria salted the very ground Ghis was built upon, and adopted their people as slaves to send into the volcanic mines, where so many slaves died it would “defy comprehension”; after Valyria drowned in the Fourteen Flames, the cities of Old Ghis were reborn as Slaver’s Bay, now with no willing men to fight for them, and thus created the Unsullied. The two empires feed off each other in a twisted cycle of human suffering (one could almost say Valyria helped create a wheel?) where one is never better than the other, and only grow more similar. By the time Daenerys comes to Astapor, the Ghiscari don’t even have their language anymore and instead speak Valyrian.

The old rhyme Barristan Selmy tells Daenerys really highlights how similar the two empires became:

"Bricks and blood built Astapor," Whitebeard murmured at her side, "and bricks and blood her people."

"What is that?" Dany asked him, curious.

"An old rhyme a maester taught me, when I was a boy. I never knew how true it was. The bricks of Astapor are red with the blood of the slaves who make them."

The meaning of the rhyme is not hard to see; the slaves are the ones who built Astapor brick by brick, the very stones stained in their blood.

Knowing why Valyria took slaves – so they could work the fire mines – it is incredibly easy to make this rhyme about the Freehold:

Fire & Blood built Valyria, and fire and blood her people.

While Daenerys is far removed from the atrocities of both the Valyrians and the Ghiscari, she fails to understand how her own people helped to create the environment in which Slaver’s Bay could exist. In her mind, the six battles Valyria fought with Old Ghis is a legend of her people’s greatness, and that Valyria was somehow better than the people it conquered. One could almost argue the opposite was true, though, since they took the Ghiscari and sent them to work slave mines inside literal active volcanoes. Daenerys doesn’t know the history of her people, of her house (who brought their slaves with them to Dragonstone), so when she conquers cities in the name of House Targaryen, as the blood of Old Valyria, she doesn’t understand what she’s saying. But she is actively benefiting from an empire that served to make Essos an even worse place than they found it.

I Am Only A Young Girl, And Do Not Know the Ways of War

A Clash of Kings gave Daenerys a taste of what being a Queen was going to be, but A Storm of Swords throws her into it. Between the moments that Daenerys loves, such as setting the Plaza of Punishment afire or being named Mhysa, she has to deal with the actual day to day of leading a people. We get to see her in political situations, making diplomatic negotiations, and making policy for her people. This is the book that gives us the first real taste of what Daenerys could or would be like as Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. And I think we start to see why Daenerys shouldn’t be Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. She loves the feeling of being a leader to her people, but the actual role she has to play as Queen is so incredibly boring to her.

After conquering Astapor, Daenerys is faced with the question of how to take Yunkai. She doesn’t want to abandon all the slaves in the city, but she also does not want to risk the lives of her men and she knows they don’t have the supplies to last a siege. Smartly, Daenerys decides to meet with the commanders of the sellsword companies and also envoys from Yunkai; but her behavior during her meeting does more harm than good:

“I say, you are mad.”

“Am I?” Dany shrugged, and said, “Dracarys.”

The dragons answered. Rhaegal hissed and smoked, Viserion snapped, and Drogon spat swirling red-black flame. It touched the drape of Grazdan’s tokar, and the silk caught in half a heartbeat. Golden marks spilled across the carpets as the envoy stumbled over the chest, shouting curses and beating at his arm until Whitebeard flung a flagon of water over him to douse the flames. “You swore I should have safe conduct!” the Yunkish envoy wailed.

“Do all the Yunkai’i whine so over a singed tokar?”

We learn in A Dance with Dragons that this is used against her quite often, and not entirely unfairly. She swore the men would have safe conduct, and then turned her dragons against them. No real damage was done, but it leaves a lasting impression on the men who were there. And Daenerys has no real reason to threaten him in that manner; her dragons are too small to threaten the safety of a city, and she is trying to propose a nonviolent conquering of the city. She does it because her temper is raised, and Grazdan said she was mad. I don’t think it’s bad that Daenerys has such a heavy disdain for the men of Slaver’s Bay, considering how they treat her and even more so how they treat their slaves, but she tries to have it both ways; offering to meet with them and give them safe passage, and also insulting and attacking them. She tries to be the kind of Queen who can meet with her enemies, but she can never follow through.

When she arrives outside the gates of Meereen, Daenerys is given another opportunity to try her hand at politics, and this is her in her element. The champion that Meereen sends is Oznak zo Pahl, a highborn pit fighter, and Daenerys has to carefully decide who she is willing to send to face him; Greyworm, Jorah, and Daario are all eager to prove their bravery and impress her, but Daenerys knows none of them are the right choice:

“Strong Belwas was a slave, here in the fighting pits. If this highborn Oznak should fall to such the Great Masters will be shamed, while if he wins . . . well, it is a poor victory for one so noble, one that Meereen can take no pride in.” And unlike Ser Jorah, Daario, Brown Ben, and her three bloodriders, the eunuch did not lead troops, plan battles, or give her counsel. He does nothing but eat and boast and bellow at Arstan. Belwas was the man she could most easily spare. And it was time she learned what sort of protector Magister Illyrio had sent her.

Where the peace of politics does not sit right with her, Daenerys is incredibly smart and intuitive when it comes to war and conquest. Her choosing Strong Belwas as her champion was a well-made decision and the best she could have made. But it also highlights something about Daenerys personality, which being Queen exacerbates; there is almost a thoughtlessness to how Daenerys sends Belwas out to die for her. Daenerys has an incredible amount of loyalty to those who follow her, especially after they proclaim her Mhysa, but she also has less concern for people when they are not loyal to her. There is a thread that connects all the people Daenerys loves the most, from the people who follow her, to Ser Jorah, to Daario; they live for her. She is capable and often loves and shows sympathy for people who aren’t centered around her, but Daenerys is attached to the idea of being a savior. Daenerys invests in people when they invest in her. That in and of itself is not a bad thing; but she invests so much in certain people that she seems to almost forget the lives of others.

That becomes incredibly destructive when she becomes Queen of Meereen, because it’s symptomatic of how self-centric her worldview is, but the full weight of that isn’t explored until A Dance with Dragons. There is small hints of how Daenerys can treat people sometimes, though, such as this:

Irri had been sleeping at the foot of her bunk (it was too narrow for three, and tonight was Jhiqui’s turn to share the soft featherbed with her khaleesi)

Daenerys lets one of her handmaidens sleep on the floor every night. Not because she’s being cruel or malicious, but because she doesn’t seem to notice how uncomfortable that must be for them. Unintentionally, Daenerys takes advantage of her position of power by allowing people to do things like sleep on the floor or go out to die for her, and does not think twice about these decisions. Being in a position of power, especially being a Queen in a medieval setting, puts people in a position where they have control over other people’s lives and their deaths, so when Daenerys has to make these choices, she should approach them with a great weight. And sometimes, often even, she does; but there are noticeable slips, moments where she outweighs the lives she controls, that are slightly alarming. A Dance with Dragons gets into this aspect of Daenerys a lot more, but it’s been present in all her chapters and A Storm of Swords is no exception.

Mhysa

So much of Daenerys’ arc is about her family, legacy, and motherhood. She is constantly being pulled in two different direction in life, whether that be by outside forces or her own internal monologue, and who she chooses to mother is no different. Her two identities, Mother of Dragons and Mhysa, stand at odds with each other.

Mirri Maz Duur telling Daenerys that she can’t have children impacts her hugely, and she invests in her dragons as if they were her children:

She felt very lonely all of a sudden. Mirri Maz Duur had promised that she would never bear a living child. House Targaryen will end with me. That made her sad. “You must be my children,” she told the dragons, “my three fierce children. Arstan says dragons live longer than men, so you will go on after I am dead.”

So much of what drives Daenerys is the idea that she’s alone in the world, that no one else is like her. House Targaryen will end with me. The way she bonds with her dragons is her attempt at having children, giving herself a future that can outlive her. She becomes fiercely protective and maternal over them:

At first Groleo had wanted the dragons caged and Dany had consented to put his fears at ease, but their misery was so palpable, that she soon changed her mind and insisted they be freed.

And she watches them learn and grow with tremendous pride:

Viserion’s scales were the color of fresh cream, his horns, wing bones, and spinal crest a dark gold that flashed bright as metal in the sun. Rhaegal was made of the green of summer and the bronze of fall. They soared above the ships in wide circles, higher and higher, each trying to climb above the other.

The joy she gets as they learn the command “dracarys” or watches them fly for the first time, is like a parent. Her dragons are the only children she will ever have, and she is determined to love them more than anything in the world. And beyond just being a mother, they become her identity; back in A Game of Thrones she thought to herself “daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons”. She thinks that she wants them to be her legacy when she dies, but they already are; everything she does is because of them. Just the idea of giving Drogon away makes her feel sick:

It was a wretched thing she did. The Mother of Dragons has sold her strongest child. Even the thought made her ill.

By the time she has told Kraznys this lie, that’s all it is; she never intended to sell Drogon. Saying the words, hollow as they were, is enough to turn her stomach. Her dragons are everything to her, even her identity.

And then she arrives outside the gates of Yunkai:

Dany felt a lightness in her chest. I will never bear a living child, she remembered. Her hand trembled as she raised it. Perhaps she smiled. She must have, because the man grinned and shouted again, and others took up the cry. “Mhysa!” they called. “Mhysa! MHYSA!” They were all smiling at her, reaching for her, kneeling before her.

Suddenly there are thousands of people, cheering, screaming, that she is their mother. These people that she liberated, that she saved, are now looking up to her like they’re her children. She has more than the dragons now; she has a people that are hers.

By the time we get to A Dance with Dragons, even though she tries not to, Daenerys just hates these people. She hates their city, she hates their culture, she hates all the things they’ve taken from her. But to understand how she ends up so miserable, you have to see just how much she loved them and was willing to give up for them:

The raggle-taggle host of freedmen dwarfed her own, but they were more burden than benefit. Perhaps one in a hundred had a donkey, a camel, or an ox; most carried weapons looted from some slaver’s armory, but only one in ten was strong enough to fight, and none was trained. They ate the land bare as they passed, like locusts in sandals. Yet Dany could not bring herself to abandon them as Ser Jorah and her bloodriders urged. I told them they were free. I cannot tell them now they are not free to join me. She gazed at the smoke rising from their cookfires and swallowed a sigh. She might have the best footsoldiers in the world, but she also had the worst.

Already there’s hints of Daenerys’ frustration, but she refuses to leave them behind. Even though they’re quickly eating through her food supplies, eating off the land so quickly she can’t gain more, and almost none of them can actually fight for her, she lets them come with her. And when taking Meereen without a slaughter seems impossible, Daenerys’ men again advise her to abandon all the people she brought with her from Astapor and Yunkai, but she refuses:

Dany had left a trail of corpses behind her when she crossed the red waste. It was a sight she never meant to see again. “No,” she said. “I will not march my people off to die.” My children.

She rides out among them, so they can see her and get strength from her:

If it helps give them courage, let them touch me, she thought. There are hard trials yet ahead. . .

The language of that is incredibly similar to the House of the Undying, when Daenerys is giving her life to the screaming crowd before it turns into the Undying Ones stealing it from her. I’ll get into it more later, but Daenerys is so in love with her people, her children, that she decides to stay in Meereen for them.

So she has these two identities, one belonging to her dragons and the other to her people. She doesn’t have to choose yet, but the stage has been set for Daenerys to make a choice; is she going to mother thousands of poor and enslaved people, or the three dragons that saved her life in the Dothraki Sea?

Do All Gods Feel So Lonely?

As the books go on, even though Daenerys begins to surround herself by more people and close companions, she only feels more alone. As I mentioned before, Daenerys is in many ways the product of tragedy; tragedies that have left her feeling alone and cut off from everyone else. And becoming a khaleesi and leading thousands of people takes her feelings of loneliness and turns them into something else, more like paranoia; and as people betray her and attempts are made against her life, those feelings only grow.

So much of her childhood was running from place to place, the only constant in her life being Viserys; and the older she gets, and the more distance she puts between that time in her life and where she is now, she loses that image of Viserys she had:

“I was alone for a long time, Jorah. All alone but for my brother. I was such a small scared thing. Viserys should have protected me, but instead he hurt me and scared me worse. He shouldn’t have done that.”

She still tries desperately to cling to the good memories she has of him, though:

Viserys had been stupid and vicious, she had come to realize, yet sometimes she missed him all the same. Not the cruel weak man he had become by the end, but the brother who had sometimes let her creep into his bed, the boy who told her tales of the Seven Kingdoms, and talked of how much better their lives would be once he claimed his throne.

The only other person that Daenerys sees as dependable in her life is Ser Jorah Mormont; but A Storm of Swords sees her emotionally cutting ties with him, too. In A Clash of Kings, the seeds for it were planted, as Daenerys felt slightly betrayed in the way he saw her; as a child or a woman, but never a Queen. Daenerys was willing to look past that, and give him time to see her for the Queen that she wants to be; but then he takes advantage of her, treating her as child he can take advantage of as a woman:

“And my vest-” she started to say, turning.

Ser Jorah slid his arms around her.

“Oh,” was all Dany had time to say as he pulled her close and pressed his lips down on hers. He smelled of sweat and salt and leather, and the iron studs on his jerkin dug into her naked breasts as he crushed her hard against him. One hand held her by the shoulder, while the other slid down her spine to the small of her back, and her mouth opened for his tongue, though she never told it to. His beard is scratchy, she thought, but his mouth is sweet. The Dothraki wore no beards, only long mustaches, and only Khal Drogo had ever kissed her before. He should not be doing this. I am his queen, not his woman.

While it is obvious that Daenerys is made incredibly uncomfortable by Jorah’s advances, the way she explains it to herself is not entirely honest:

“I . . . that was not fitting. I am your queen.”

“My queen,” he said, “and the bravest, sweetest, and most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Daenerys-”

“Your Grace!”

She is quick to remind Jorah, and herself, that what he did was wrong because she is his Queen. But it becomes clear as the chapters go on that Daenerys is really feeling a different sort of betrayal:

Dany could feel tears welling in her eyes, sudden and unwanted. Her hand flashed up and cracked Ser Jorah hard across the face. It was either that, or cry.

Mormont touched the cheek she'd slapped. "If I have displeased my queen—"

"You have. You've displeased me greatly, ser. If you were my true knight, you would never have brought me to this vile sty." If you were my true knight, you would never have kissed me, or looked at my breasts the way you did, or . . .

Daenerys is still a young girl, 15 or 16, and Jorah is a grown man leering at her. And while she doesn’t entirely understand what she’s feeling, because she was raised in a society where that sort of thing is widely accepted and she was sold to the highest bidder at 13, it’s clear that Daenerys feels used and taken advantage of sexually by Jorah. She’s in a unique position within the story, because she is the only woman we see who is in a position of power above their abuser. And while the entire foundation of their society has taught Daenerys to accept behavior like that as a woman, being a Queen gives her an outlet for her rage. She can’t let herself be mad at Jorah as the little girl he’s being sexually aggressive with, but she can punish him as his Queen:

He should never have done that. He is thrice my age, and of too low a birth for me, and I never gave him leave. No true knight would ever kiss a queen without her leave. She had taken care never to be alone with Ser Jorah after that, keeping her handmaids witth her aboard ship, and sometimes her bloodriders. He wants to kiss me again, I see it in his eyes.

While she hasn’t fully lost Jorah yet, the growing divide between them makes Daenerys feel very alone:

It was a long, dark, windy night that followed. Dany fed her dragons as she always did, but found she had no appetite herself. She cried awhile, alone in her cabin, then dried her tears long enough for yet another argument with Groleo.

But this betrayal of Daenerys by Jorah isn’t quite tangible; Daenerys hardly understands what she feels and why feels it, and almost thinks of herself as irrational in her anger toward him. Not until she finds out about his political betrayal, something she can point to and see exactly how he could have hurt her, does she banish him out of her life.

At the start of the book, Daenerys has already had two attempts against her life and is understandably paranoid:

Ser Jorah saved me from the poisoner, and Arstan Whitebeard from the manticore. Perhaps Strong Belwas will save me from the next.

Not only does this tell us that Daenerys fears another attempt on her life (which she’s right to worry over), but it also comes at the end of a long argument she has with herself over how likely Arstan Whitebeard and Strong Belwas are to betray her. (It’s also a nice piece of foreshadowing, considering Belwas will eventually save her from a poisoner). Daenerys is starting to see enemies all around.

Yet, just as when the poisoner at the market and the Sorrowful Man with the manticore tried to kill her, Daenerys does not see the next attempt at her life coming:

Dany had stopped to speak to a pregnant woman who wanted the Mother of Dragons to name her baby when someone reached up and grabbed her left wrist. Turning, she glimpsed a tall ragged man with a shaved head and a sunburnt face. "Not so hard," she started to say, but before she could finish he'd yanked her bodily from the saddle. The ground came up and knocked the breath from her, as her silver whinnied and backed away. Stunned, Dany rolled to her side and pushed herself onto one elbow . . .

The man who tries to kill her, Mero, tells her this:

“There’s the treacherous sow,” he said. “I knew you’d come to get your feet kissed one day.”

He’s using the kindness Daenerys has, her willingness to ride out amongst her people to give them hope, and turning it against her. And in her mind, this is not the first time that has happened. When she tried to save Eroeh and instead she was raped and murdered, when she put trust in Mirri Maz Duur only to get Drogo and Rhaego killed, all of these times she tries to do something good it falls apart. In A Storm of Swords, Daenerys will still fight and try to save people, but this book helps to set up for when she eventually breaks.

And later the same day, Daenerys learns the full truth of both Arstan Whitebeard and Jorah:

“Before I took Robert’s pardon I fought against him on the Trident. You were on the other side of that battle, Mormont, were you not?” He did not wait for an answer. “Your Grace, I am sorry I misled you. It was the only way to keep the Lannisters from learning that I had joined you. You are watched, as your brother was. Lord Varys reported every move Viserys made, for years. Whilst I sat on the small council, I heard a hundred such reports. And since the day you wed Khal Drogo, there has been an informer by your side selling your secrets, trading whispers to the Spider for gold and promises.”

The weight of Jorah’s betrayal, made even worse by the small lies Ser Barristan has been telling, hits Daenerys like a pile of bricks. She was nothing but good to him – she was going to take him home! And he still sold her to the Usurper and his dogs; the person she trusted most in the world still betrayed her. I find it interesting that Daenerys does not let her anger and hurt fully overwhelm her until Jorah confesses that he told Robert Baratheon that she was pregnant with Khal Drogo’s baby; the rage she feels at him for putting Rhaego in harms way is in some way misplaced at anyone other than herself, since she is the one who put her baby in reckless danger chasing the ghost of Khal Drogo.

After Daenerys learns of Jorah’s betrayal, she can’t go back to the way she was before. Suddenly, whereas before she was rightfully paranoid but often trusting, she is just waiting for someone to betray her next. The prophecies of the House of the Undying weigh on her, and everywhere she turns she sees a traitor in waiting:

Daario and Ben Plumm, Grey Worm, Irri, Jhiqui, Missandei. . . as she looked at them Dany found herself wondering which of them would betray her next.

And it starts to affect the way she treats people:

"I am going to take you home one day, Missandei," Dany promised. If I had made the same promise to Jorah, would he still have sold me? "I swear it."

Is this an act of genuine kindness, a heartwarming promise Dany is making to see Missandei feel safe on Naath? Or is Daenerys just trying to avoid another betrayal? We don’t get to know a definitive answer to this because Daenerys doesn’t know herself.

Justice . . . That's What Kings Are For

This is the first book where Daenerys has some real agency to make choices as a Queen or Khaleesi, and we see the shape of her ruling philosophy start to take form. And she does have some great ideas about how Kings and Queens should rule, and what kind of justice they should make for their subjects. But there is also a darker side to how she wields her power; a harsh, rash, childish cruelty that looks less like justice and more like violence for the sake of violence.

Daenerys wants to be a benevolent Queen, and strives to be as fair as she can be:

“A queen must listen to all,” she reminded him. “The highborn and the low, the strong and the weak, the noble and the venal. One voice may speak you false, but in many there is always truth to be found.” She had read that in a book.

As well as listening to the both the high and lowborn, Daenerys still believes in the idea of justice:

He wasn’t just my brother, he was my king. Why do the gods make kings and queens, if not to protect the ones who can’t protect themselves?”

“Some kings make themselves. Robert did.”

“He was no true king,” Dany said scornfully. “He did no justice. Justice. . . that’s what kings are for.”

On the surface, this sounds like a strong moral philosophy for a Queen to have. The responsibility Kings, Queens, and Lords had, the social contract, was to protect the people below them; to use their unmatched power to protect the weak and keep the strong in check. Kings are for justice.

But Daenerys is already showing a double standard; she refused to call Robert Baratheon a king because he “did no justice”, but she still gives the title to Viserys – even though she thinks he was vicious and cruel. Viserys did no justice, and Daenerys knows that better than anyone. So why does he get to be a King? Because he’s a Targaryen. Daenerys really does try to be benevolent and fair, but it always runs up against the way she views herself and her family. Before Barristan reveals his true identity to her, he tries to tell the truth about her father as gently as he can, and Daenerys cannot hear it:

Whitebeard did his best to hide his feelings, but they were there, plain on his face. “His Grace was. . . often pleasant.”

“Often?” Dany smiled. “But not always?”

“He could be very harsh to those he thought his enemies.”

“A wise man never makes an enemy of a king,” said Dany.

Even though she can see the discomfort plain on Arstan’s face, Daenerys chooses to place blame on the men who challenged her father.

Daenerys’ thoughts on Kings and Queens often seem equal parts reassuring and discomforting. For every good thought she has, an equally worrying one chases right after:

“Only lies offend me, never honest counsel.” Dany patted Arstan’s spotted hand to reassure him. “I have a dragon’s temper, that’s all. You must not let it frighten you.”

Her being open to council and disagreement sets her apart from many of the tyrants we’ve seen elsewhere in the story. But the way she excuses her temper is concerning. Barristan offered well meaning council, and was met with a rather aggressive put down from Daenerys; even though she says that honest council could never offend her, she hardly gives Barristan reason to give it. And when Barristan desperately tries to talk her out of selling Drogon to Kraznys, she again rebukes him:

Whitebeard stared in shocked disbelief. His hand trembled where it grasped the staff. “No.” He went to one knee before her. “Your Grace, I beg you, win your throne with dragons, not slaves. You must not do this thing.”

“You must not presume to instruct me. Ser Jorah, remove Whitebeard from my presence.”

“Whitebeard,” she said, “I want your counsel, and you should never fear to speak your mind with me. . . when we are alone. But never question me in front of strangers. Is that understood?”

Daenerys is not entirely wrong; it is not the best look as a Queen if your advisors are openly disagreeing with you. But Barristan only disagreed with her publicly because she had given him no choice to do it privately; Daenerys did not tell anyone of her plans in Astapor. From Barristan’s perspective, Daenerys is about to sell the single most valuable item in the entire world to buy an army of slaves, which he knows Westeros will not take kindly to. And not only does he believe this is a political misstep, he has made it clear to Dany that it is morally abhorrent. When he questions her, he does not do it from a place of superiority; he gets down on one knee and begs her to change her mind. Daenerys also shows him no sympathy, even though she knows he is right; she was never going to sell Drogon, never. I understand her putting on a show for Kraznys and the slavers so they don’t catch on to her game, but in private she has no reason to be so harsh to Barristan for voicing a belief she herself holds.

While Daenerys’ talk of justice sounds appealing for a monarch, the way she actually carries it out is less enchanting. When Kraznys is demonstrating how strong the Unsullied are, he shows her a grave example of their ferocity:

He stopped before a thickset man who had the look of Lhazar about him and brought his whip up sharply, laying a line of blood across one copper cheek. The eunuch blinked, and stood there, bleeding.

Daenerys has to stop him from hitting the man again, and is horrified by the inhuman response of the Unsullied, who are drugged and conditioned not to feel pain. So when she holds the whip instead of Kraznys, Daenerys doesn’t hesitate to hurt him the same way:

“There is a reason. A dragon is no slave.” And Dany swept the lash down as hard as she could across the slaver’s face. Kraznys screamed and staggered back, the blood running red down his cheeks into his perfumed beard.

There is something wholly righteous about this anger, a certain release in seeing someone hurt in the same way they hurt others. But the way in which it doesn’t matter to Daenerys is what gives me pause:

The harpy's fingers had torn his features half to pieces with one slash, but she did not pause to contemplate the ruin. "Drogon," she sang out loudly, sweetly, all her fear forgotten. "Dracarys."

The black dragon spread his wings and roared.

A lance of swirling dark flame took Kraznys full in the face. His eyes melted and ran down his cheeks, and the oil in his hair and beard burst so fiercely into fire that for an instant the slaver wore a burning crown twice as tall as his head. The sudden stench of charred meat overwhelmed even his perfume, and his wail seemed to drown all other sound.

This is written very similar to when Daenerys steps inside Drogo’s funeral pyre. In that chapter, Daenerys is too focused on the beauty of the dancing flames, the screams of Mirri Maz Duur and her people in the background less important to her. And here it is the same; there is one moment where Kraznys’ screaming drowns out everything else, his face burning with fire high into the air, but it is hardly enough to grab Daenerys’ attention.

When Daenerys is 163 miles from the gates of Meereen, she sees another horror as bad as the Plaza of Punishment:

Worst of all, they had nailed a slave child up on every milepost along the coast road from Yunkai, nailed them up still living with their entrails hanging out and one arm always outstretched to point the way to Meereen. Leading her van, Daario had given orders for the children to be taken down before Dany had to see them, but she had countermanded him as soon as she was told. "I will see them," she said. "I will see every one, and count them, and look upon their faces. And I will remember."

And, rightly, Daenerys cannot let this horror go unpunished:

Dany set great store by Ser Jorah's counsel, but to leave Meereen untouched was more than she could stomach. She could not forget the children on their posts, the birds tearing at their entrails, their skinny arms pointing up the coast road.

But the way Daenerys punishes the Great Masters seems frighteningly unlike justice:

“I want your leaders," Dany told them. "Give them up, and the rest of you shall be spared."

"How many?" one old woman had asked, sobbing. "How many must you have to spare us?"

"One hundred and sixty-three," she answered.

She had them nailed to wooden posts around the plaza, each man pointing at the next. The anger was fierce and hot inside her when she gave the command; it made her feel like an avenging dragon. But later, when she passed the men dying on the posts, when she heard their moans and smelled their bowels and blood. . .

Dany put the glass aside, frowning. It was just. It was. I did it for the children.

Daenerys has no idea how many “leaders” Meereen has. It could be any number more or less than 163; there could be dozens of men complicit in the crucifixions of the children who are free in the city, or a dozen men who knew nothing of the children nailed upon a cross for someone else’s crimes. She also leaves it up to the Great Masters of Meereen to choose the 163 men she will crucify; there is a chance that they were honest in who committed the crime, but it seems much more likely that the Great Masters picked the least respected of them to give to Daenerys.

A part of Daenerys knows what she did was wrong, though:

Dany remembered the horror she had felt when she had seen the Plaza of Punishment in Astapor. I made a horror just as great, but surely they deserved it. Harsh justice is still justice.

But Daenerys was not after justice, she was after revenge. Her crucifying the Great Masters is very similar to when Ned refused to let Loras Tyrell go after The Mountain in the Riverlands:

Ned looked down on him. From on high, Loras Tyrell seemed almost as young as Robb. "No one doubts your valor, Ser Loras, but we are about justice here, and what you seek is vengeance." He looked back to Lord Beric. "Ride at first light. These things are best done quickly." He held up a hand. "The throne will hear no more petitions today."

Vengeance isn’t entirely wrong, but it is much more dangerous than justice. Daenerys did not consider her actions, did not make sure the right men paid for the crime; she picked an entirely arbitrary number, 163, and an equal number of arbitrary men and killed them. The Great Masters are infinitely more culpable in their deaths than innocent children ever could be, but Daenerys decided to play by their own rules in serving them “justice”. There is something harshly satisfying about that; but something equally disquieting, too.

And, going back to the connection she shares with her dragons, this passage stands out:

"They have been wild while you were gone, Khaleesi," Irri told her. "Viserion clawed splinters from the door, do you see? And Drogon made to escape when the slaver men came to see them. When I grabbed his tail to hold him back, he turned and bit me." She showed Dany the marks of his teeth on her hand.

Irri was watching the dragons while Daenerys had her fight with Jorah. So, when Daenerys is angry, her dragons are increasingly volatile; ending in someone innocent getting hurt.

It’s also incredibly interesting to me, what Daenerys is able to handle and what she isn’t. When her men first see the crucified children, Daario, Barristan, and Jorah try to have them taken down before Daenerys can see; but she demands the dead children stay on their crosses, so she can see every single one and remember. She didn’t want to shy away from the cruelty of Meereen and the Great Masters, and instead wanted to see it firsthand for when she would be in a position to get justice. Yet Daenerys doesn’t have the stomach for this:

“Viserys was a child, and the queen sheltered him as much as she could. Your father always had a little madness in him, I now believe. Yet he was charming and generous as well, so his lapses were forgiven. His reign began with such promise. . . but as the years passed, the lapses grew more frequent, until. . .”

Dany stopped him. “Do I want to hear this now?”

When it was someone else’s horror, Daenerys understood why she needed to see the crucified children; she wanted to know, so she could make those men pay. But when it comes to her own father, Daenerys doesn’t want to know, and won’t let Barristan tell her. The vague idea of her father being mad, of knowing she needs to be careful with her own thoughts, is enough for her; the shocking cruelty, the details of the men Aerys murdered, is not important. Daenerys does not give Westeros the same curtesy she gives Meereen, because the monsters that tormented the Seven Kingdoms share a sigil with her.

The Face of A Conqueror

All of the different directions Daenerys is pulled in this book, and all her chapters really, comes back to a simple choice she has to make: to be the girl who lived in a house with a red door, or to be Daenerys Targaryen, of the blood of kings and conquerors. I think the problem a lot of people have when reading her chapters, is the assumption that it’s one choice to make, but in reality, it’s a series of choices. Like I said when I wrote about her A Game of Thrones chapters, the arc of a real person is not as clean as a traditional “narrative arc”; real people make good and bad choices, try to be better, backslide, rinse, repeat. I think Daenerys choosing to kill Mirri Maz Duur to birth her dragons sealed her fate in the way that her dragons were such a tangible thing, so real to her, that no matter what she would always go back to them. But that doesn’t mean that Daenerys doesn’t try exceptionally hard to be different. The end of her arc in A Storm of Swords is unique because it’s the only time (so far) where she has ended on the choice not to be Daenerys Stormborn.

In A Storm of Swords, Daenerys is trying desperately to be seen as a Queen and not a child:

“I am not a child,” she told him. “I am a queen.”

And even her line of being a young girl who doesn’t understand war, is about how Daenerys does not want to be seen that way; it’s an overly humble and self-deprecating line, something both her and her enemies know she doesn’t mean. It still works because the men of Slaver’s Bay are horribly sexist and will see her as stupid no matter what, but it is certainly not something Daenerys herself believes.

Yet, alone and to herself, Daenerys doesn’t know how to see herself:

Dany stared at herself in silence. Is this the face of a conqueror? So far as she could tell, she still looked like a little girl.

No one was calling her Daenerys the Conqueror yet, but perhaps they would.

The same person who sees herself as a lonely god can also look in a mirror and see a little girl. But it’s very important to her that no one else see her that way, not even her closest companions:

I am the blood of the dragon. I must be strong. I must have fire in my eyes when I face them, not tears.

Yet, even though she is trying her best to put on the face of a conqueror, the young girl in her is still searching:

“I was looking for a house with a red door, but by night all the doors are black.”

Part of why Daenerys can keep pushing forward, city after city, is the belief that somewhere out there is a house waiting for her; a red door promising everything she can’t seem to find anymore. She looks out on the whole city of Meereen, trying to find proof that she could belong there. When Missandei asks her about the house, Daenerys’ answer is revealing:

“A red door?” Missandei was puzzled. “What house is this?”

“No house. It does not matter.”

No house. Of course, when Daenerys answers that way, she is just hand waving so she doesn’t have to explain to Missandei a personal memory; but on a doylist level, it’s confirming something we’ve suspected for a long time: Dany is never going to find her house with a red door. The vivid memory she has of that time in her life when she was safe and happy and everything was perfect is what pulls her back from the edge more than anything else, and the longer she stays in Meereen and realizes there is no home for her there, the more she’s going to regret the choice she makes at the end of this book.

Another reason for why Daenerys turns back from completely embracing Fire & Blood so many times, is that being a conqueror makes her feel terrible. Most times, Daenerys is able to keep looking forward, onto the next city full of slaves she’ll set free, the next city to conquer, onward toward the Seven Kingdoms. But sometimes the memory of all the awful things she’s seen is too strong:

She found herself remembering Eroeh, the Lhazarene girl she had once tried to protect, and what had happened to her. It will be the same in Meereen once I march, she thought.

And she actively wants to be different than those that came before her:

“When Aegon the Dragon stepped ashore in Westeros, the kings of Vale and Rock and Reach did not rush to hand him their crowns. If you mean to sit his Iron Throne, you must win it as he did, with steel and dragonfire. And that will mean blood on your hands before the thing is done.”

Blood and fire, thought Dany. The words of House Targaryen. She had known them all her life. “The blood of my enemies I will shed gladly. The blood of innocents is another matter. Eight thousand Unsullied they would offer me. Eight thousand dead babes. Eight thousand strangled dogs.”

Up to this point, Daenerys was trying to balance both sides of herself; she wanted to sack cities and conquer peoples, but also save the girls from the horrors of war. She wanted to get her Seven Kingdoms and save Eroeh, too. But in her last chapter, she realizes that’s impossible:

All my victories turn to dross in my hands, she thought. Whatever I do, all I make is death and horror. When word of what had befallen Astapor reached the streets, as it surely would, tens of thousands of newly freed Meereenese slaves would doubtless decide to follow her when she went west, for fear of what awaited them if they stayed. . .

No matter her good intentions, thousands of girls will end up just like Eroeh. She thought she had done something good in Astapor, freeing eight thousand men and leaving the city in the hands of smart men on the path to a more just city; but instead she turned a nightmare into a living hell. Daenerys realizes that her path has to be that way; if she’s going to keep looking forward, forever toward Westeros, then she can’t avoid the horrific bloodshed.

And she decides she can’t keep going:

“I will not let this city go the way of Astapor. I will not let the harpy of Yunkai chain up those I’ve freed all over again.” She turned back to look at their faces. “I will not march.”

“What will you do then, Khaleesi?” asked Rakharo.

“Stay,” she said. “Rule. And be a queen.”

Daenerys realizes the human cost of what she’s doing, how even her good ideas only cost more lives and cause more suffering, and decides she has to change. Back in the Lhazareen village, after Daenerys turns back to save Eroeh and Mirri and all the rest, and after it falls apart so spectacularly, she makes a promise to herself: never look back. If I look back I am lost. The words serve as a reminder; that trying to help somebody had only hurt them worse, and cost her everything in the process. She needed to be like her khalasar, only looking forward on a beautiful horizon, and never back on the torn earth and trampled cities. But when she decides to stay in Meereen, for the first time since Eroeh, she breaks that promise to herself.

Daenerys’ arc this book is the best she will ever be. The character that some people fell in love with, to the point of ignoring so much else, is really on display here. Daenerys struggles, really struggles, and almost as often as not still makes the wrong choice, and gets people hurt over it too. But her heart is truly in the right place; she’s trying to fix problems she doesn’t understand, and makes a mess of it, but, in this book, she really wants to help. All of the red flags I mentioned are still there, and the seeds are planted for Daenerys to turn her back on her people, but before she does any of that, she makes the right choice.

A Storm of Swords is the story of how Daenerys looks back.

[szymonwalendowski]

Othello - race and ethnicity

DEFINITIONS AND CONTEXT The play written by Shakespeare in the XVII century is the very first whose black protagonist is portrayed in a positive way, allowing the text to acquire a vital role in the history of drama. Yet the clarity regarding Othello’s race has not always been so unquestioned. As the play has been reproduced on stage thousands of times over the past centuries, so has the perception of Othello’s skin colour. Starting from the publishing of the play in 1622 the characters dark skin remained intact, up to the 1820’s when a scholar by the name of Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a paper in which he states - ,,Can we imagine him [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth? […] It is a common error to mistake epithets applied by dramatis personae to each other as truly descriptive of what the audience out to see or know.” (Coleridge, 385). Following the release of this essay Othello was depicted as light-skinned or bronzed until the 1870’s. The problematic approach to the protagonist’s skin colour has been evident throughout history, as well as discussed in the play itself. The term moor refers to somebody from the region of Arabia, Palestine or North Africa, generally speaking - Muslims. These people had the possibility to receive high ranks and gather large fortunes (just like our protagonist did) OTHELLO VIEWED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIETY At the time, England’s population consisted almost entirely of white Europeans, and the few black people that lived in the area were heavily associated with negative traits such as dishonestly and hostility. Thus most of the literature created before the publishing of the Shakespearean drama, rarely incorporated characters of colour, and if they did, they were presented as evil, cruel villains, with the sole purpose of causing chaos and pain. Shakespeare’s play acknowledges societies perception of black people, but does not support it. Othello is consistently judged for his race, called racial slurs and undermined by people of lower rank, that nonetheless, feel entitled to insult the man. This is most visibly conveyed in Act I Scene I of the play, before Othello is even introduced. The reader/viewer witness a conversation between Iago and Roderigo during which they discuss the ‘unlawful, socially unacceptable’ marriage of Desdemona and Othello. In fact most of the racially charged vocabulary comes from those two characters and Brabantio, who later joins the scene as well. However, it is evident that Othello has managed to gather respect in his position, as the Duke of Venice, when praising him to Brabantio claims - ,, your son in law is far more fair than black” ( 1.3.291). Said as a compliment, but still undermining the man for his blackness, this is an ideal example of what Othello was usually faced with. Common pre-existing stereotypes in the culture of XVII century England regarding black men, state that they tend to be overly jealous; are exaggeratingly passionate (hence unreasonable) and gullible. All these mentioned traits have been portrayed by Othello in his behaviour, and used by Iago to manipulate him. Fundamental concepts – • Othello is generally respected as a military man. • The Duke of Venice, a person of a very high rank, respects Othello’s opinions, treating him more seriously than his own senators, which is presented in the act 1 scene 3, where the dynamics between Othello, the Duke, and Brabantio are shown. One of the symbols of respect is that Othello was greeted first, before the senator. • Although he is positively perceived, characters do not ignore his race, which makes him an outsider despite his behavior and status. How other characters refer to Othello? Starting from Iago, the characters name derives from Santiago, which is a symbolic title for people who fight against moors ( or moor-slayers ), meaning that he is by nature supposed to be opposed to Othello. Iago, being the villain he is, insults everybody around him, but he has a designated vocabulary reserved primarily to either describe or infuriate Othello, as he refers to him as an old black ram contrasting him with Desdemona represented by an ewe. Desdemona on the other hand deeply admires her husband. Unlike what the people in her surroundings think, she is infatuated in Othello. Portrayed as one of the strongest feminine characters in Shakespeare, Desdemona opposes to her fathers will, falls in love with a man her when socially it would have been unthinkable to do so, and even follows him to war to Cyprus. Her defiant personality has led some to believe that her love for Othello was kindled by his race. Othello’s skin colour, symbolises his exoticism, creates an atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity around the man, and this is what attracts Desdemona the most. She is fascinated by him. Their love is also illustrated by the imagery of the night, representing Othello, adoring the day, symbolising Desdemona. Nonetheless, their romance will be testified against her, as Iago presents her rebellious personality as a reason for her to cheat on him, creating dramatic irony. Emilia as well as Iago directly correlate Othello’s dark skin colour with his evilness. Most characters believe a black ‘outside’, meaning physical appearance, must be related with a dark ‘inside’, accusing him of malicious intents and cruelness, solely based on his exterior appearance. Fundamental concepts - • Most of the characters in the play refer to Othello using race- and ethnicity-centered epithets, i.e. “the Moor”, “the thicklips”. • Characters that aim to present him in a negative way, like Iago, often use various animals with negative connotations, for instance “Barbary horse”, or “an old black ram”. • The dark color of Othello’s skin is used to symbolize sin and evil. For example, Iago uses the term “blackest sin”, and Emilia “blacker devil”. How does Othello refer to himself? In the face of constant judgment based on his physical appearance, it is inevitable for Othello to not think poorly of himself. In Act I Scene III, the character attributes his problems in expressing his language in a courteous manner to his years spent in the military, but as the play progresses, his insecurities start surfacing. By the time the reader reaches Act III Scene III, he states – ,,Haply (perhaps), for I am black And have not those soft parts of conversation That clamberers have” – thus blaming his racial identity for the qualities he lacks. The phrase above reflects how self-doubting the character must have been of himself, if in the moment when he is presented the biggest doubt of his life, he immediately turns to his ethnicity seeking for a part of him to blame, to point out what he was most afraid would happen. Othello, indeed, numerous times wonders why Desdemona fell in love with him, and even feels anxious about having such a lovely wife. The low self-confidence of the character ignited by years of racial marginalizing, has made him an easy target for manipulation, as Iago manages to smoothly slide into Othello’s mind, pull out his biggest doubts, and without providing an explanation leave him to his thoughts. The final monologue of Othello is also crucial in understanding his perception of himself. As he prepares the knife that will later lead to his death, he lays down his principles. He asks the witnesses to ‘’Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate/ Nor set down in malice” a final plead to be remembered by his service for the state, behavior and human, instead of skin color. Othello also makes reference to his race by including exotic metaphors, and his final sentances are as follows – ,,And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took bt th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him – thus!” As Othello retells the sotry of one of his many victories while serving for the state, he indicates that he, himself, has become an enemy of Venice. By degrading himself to the level of those he despised most, which is visible in the vocabulary he used to describe the enemy nation, he presents himself as equally worthless as those who he killed, and subsequently stabs himself in a deadly lunge. At his moment of death he identifies himself as a foreigner that despite their biggest efforts, never managed to become part of the society that so deeply rejected him. Fundamental concepts - • Othello often acknowledges his ethnicity, often combing it with some stereotype, like saying that he is a bad speaker because of his race: ”Haply, for I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation” • He is conscious of the fact that he is an outsider, but he also knows that his service to Venice is important and that he is a trusted and successful soldier. • In his final monologue he uses many exotic metaphors (dropping tears as fast as Arabian trees, Indian throwing a pearl away), a reference to his background. OTHER LOCATIONS REPRESENTED o Venice - a very well prospering place due to international trade. Its location by the sea not only enabled business connections but also allowed many cultures and races mix in the city. Venetians were considered very open minded at the time, as they emphasised work and their interests rather than religious values imposed by the church. As they liked to point out – “we are Venetians first, and Christians second”. The city was a place of ambiguous morals, perhaps the only city at the current time in which an interracial marriage, such as that of Desdemona and Othello’s, would be somewhat eligible. o Florence - in Shakespeare’s time the city was considered to be the center of education. Cassio, a Florentine, speaks in a very elegant manner, which confirms this perception of Florence. A Florentine was also used to describe homosexuals, and other males with high femininity levels. o Cyprus - a place very different from Venice, as it is a fortified outpost. The island plays a very important role in the play, as the actions starts unfolding once the characters arrive. The size of the area is smaller and the political situation is uncertain enhacing the atmosphere of the island being a dangerous outpost unlawful territory, making it the perfect place for Iago to carry out his evil plan. Cyprus was also the birth place of Aphrodite, a mythological goddess of love, which ties in with the themes of love and jealous.

[mayrasportfolio]

Othello in the context of race and ethnicity

DEFINITIONS AND CONTEXT

The play written by Shakespeare in the XVII century is the very first whose black protagonist is portrayed in a positive way, allowing the text to acquire a vital role in the history of drama. Yet the clarity regarding Othello’s race has not always been so unquestioned. As the play has been reproduced on stage thousands of times over the past centuries, so has the perception of Othello’s skin colour. Starting from the publishing of the play in 1622 the characters dark skin remained intact, up to the 1820’s when a scholar by the name of Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a paper in which he states -  ,,Can we imagine him [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth? […] It is a common error to mistake epithets applied by dramatis personae to each other as truly descriptive of what the audience out to see or know.” (Coleridge, 385). Following the release of this essay, Othello was depicted as light-skinned or bronzed until the 1870s. The problematic approach to the protagonist’s skin colour has been evident throughout history, as well as discussed in the play itself.

The term moor refers to somebody from the region of Arabia, Palestine or North Africa, generally speaking -  Muslims. These people had the possibility to receive high ranks and gather large fortunes (just like our protagonist did)

OTHELLO’S RACE VIEWED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIETY

At the time, England’s population consisted almost entirely of white Europeans, and the few black people that lived in the area were heavily associated with negative traits such as dishonesty and hostility. Thus most of the literature created before the publishing of the Shakespearean drama, rarely incorporated characters of colour, and if they did, they were presented as evil, cruel villains, with the sole purpose of causing chaos and pain. Shakespeare’s play acknowledges society's perception of black people, but does not support it. Othello is consistently judged for his race, called racial slurs and undermined by people of lower rank, that nonetheless, feel entitled to insult the man. This is most visibly conveyed in Act I Scene I of the play before Othello is even introduced. The reader/viewer witness a conversation between Iago and Roderigo during which they discuss the ‘unlawful, socially unacceptable’ marriage of Desdemona and Othello. In fact, most of the racially charged vocabulary comes from those two characters and Brabantio, who later joins the scene as well. However, it is evident that Othello has managed to gather respect in his position, as the Duke of Venice when praising him to Brabantio claims - ,, your son in law is far more fair than black” ( 1.3.291). Said as a compliment, but still undermining the man for his blackness, this is an ideal example of what Othello was usually faced with. Common pre-existing stereotypes in the culture of XVII century England regarding black men, state that they tend to be overly jealous; are exaggeratingly passionate (hence unreasonable) and gullible.  All these mentioned traits have been portrayed by Othello in his behaviour and used by Iago to manipulate him.

Fundamental concepts – • Othello is generally respected as a military man. • The Duke of Venice, a person of a very high rank, respects Othello’s opinions, treating him more seriously than his own senators, which is presented in the act 1 scene 3, where the dynamics between Othello, the Duke, and Brabantio are shown. One of the symbols of respect is that Othello was greeted first, before the senator. • Although he is positively perceived, characters do not ignore his race, which makes him an outsider despite his behavior and status.

OTHELLO’S RACE REFERRED TO BY OTHER CHARACTERS

Starting from Iago, the character's name derives from Santiago, which is a symbolic title for people who fight against moors ( or moor-slayers ), meaning that he is by nature supposed to be opposed to Othello. Iago, being the villain he is, insults everybody around him, but he has a designated vocabulary reserved primarily to either describe or infuriate Othello, as he refers to him as an old black ram contrasting him with Desdemona represented by an ewe.

Desdemona on the other hand deeply admires her husband. Unlike what the people in her surroundings think, she is infatuated in Othello. Portrayed as one of the strongest feminine characters in Shakespeare, Desdemona opposes to her father's will, falls in love with a man her when socially it would have been unthinkable to do so and even follows him to war to Cyprus. Her defiant personality has led some to believe that her love for Othello was kindled by his race. Othello’s skin colour symbolizes his exoticism, creates an atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity around the man, and this is what attracts Desdemona the most. She is fascinated by him. Their love is also illustrated by the imagery of the night, representing Othello, adoring the day, symbolising Desdemona. Nonetheless, their romance will be testified against her, as Iago presents her rebellious personality as a reason for her to cheat on him, creating dramatic irony.

Emilia, as well as Iago, directly correlates Othello’s dark skin colour with his evilness. Most characters believe a black ‘outside’, meaning physical appearance, must be related to a dark ‘inside’, accusing him of malicious intents and cruelness, solely based on his exterior appearance.

Fundamental concepts -

• Most of the characters in the play refer to Othello using race- and ethnicity-centered epithets, i.e. “the Moor”, “the thicklips”. • Characters that aim to present him in a negative way, like Iago, often use various animals with negative connotations, for instance, “Barbary horse”, or “an old black ram”. • The dark color of Othello’s skin is used to symbolize sin and evil. For example,  Iago uses the term “blackest sin”, and Emilia “blacker devil”.

OTHELLO’S RACE FROM HIS OWN PERSPECTIVE

In the face of constant judgment based on his physical appearance, it is inevitable for Othello to not think poorly of himself. In Act I Scene III, the character attributes his problems in expressing his language in a courteous manner to his years spent in the military, but as the play progresses, his insecurities start surfacing. By the time the reader reaches Act III Scene III, he states – ,,Haply (perhaps), for I am black And have not those soft parts of conversation That clamberers have” – thus blaming his racial identity for the qualities he lacks.

The phrase above reflects how self-doubting the character must have been of himself if at the moment when he is presented the biggest doubt of his life, he immediately turns to his ethnicity seeking for a part of him to blame, to point out what he was most afraid would happen. Othello, indeed, numerous times wonders why Desdemona fell in love with him, and even feels anxious about having such a lovely wife. The low self-confidence of the character ignited by years of racial marginalizing has made him an easy target for manipulation, as Iago manages to smoothly slide into Othello’s mind, pull out his biggest doubts, and without providing an explanation leave him to his thoughts.

The final monologue of Othello is also crucial in understanding his perception of himself. As he prepares the knife that will later lead to his death, he lays down his principles. He asks the witnesses to ‘’Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate/ Nor set down in malice” a final plead to be remembered by his service for the state, behavior and human, instead of skin color. Othello also makes reference to his race by including exotic metaphors, and his final sentances are as follows – ,,And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took bt th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him – thus!” As Othello retells the sotry of one of his many victories while serving for the state, he indicates that he, himself, has become an enemy of Venice. By degrading himself to the level of those he despised most, which is visible in the vocabulary he used to describe the enemy nation, he presents himself as equally worthless as those who he killed, and subsequently stabs himself in a deadly lunge. At his moment of death he identifies himself as a foreigner that despite their biggest efforts, never managed to become part of the society that so deeply rejected him.

Fundamental concepts - • Othello often acknowledges his ethnicity, often combing it with some stereotype, like saying that he is a bad speaker because of his race: ”Haply, for I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation” • He is conscious of the fact that he is an outsider, but he also knows that his service to Venice is important and that he is a trusted and successful soldier. • In his final monologue he uses many exotic metaphors (dropping tears as fast as Arabian trees, Indian throwing a pearl away), a reference to his background.

OTHER LOCATIONS REPRESENTED

o Venice - a very well prospering place due to international trade. Its location by the sea not only enabled business connections but also allowed many cultures and races mix in the city. Venetians were considered very open minded at the time, as they emphasised work and their interests rather than religious values imposed by the church. As they liked to point out – “we are Venetians first, and Christians second”. The city was a place of ambiguous morals, perhaps the only city at the current time in which an interracial marriage, such as that of Desdemona and Othello’s, would be somewhat eligible. o Florence - in Shakespeare’s time the city was considered to be the center of education. Cassio, a Florentine, speaks in a very elegant manner, which confirms this perception of Florence. A Florentine was also used to describe homosexuals and other males with high femininity levels. o Cyprus - a place very different from Venice, as it is a fortified outpost. The island plays a very important role in the play, as the actions starts unfolding once the characters arrive. The size of the area is smaller and the political situation is uncertain enhancing the atmosphere of the island being a dangerous outpost unlawful territory, making it the perfect place for Iago to carry out his evil plan. Cyprus was also the birthplace of Aphrodite, a mythological goddess of love, which ties in with the themes of love and jealousy.

[dzika-zmora-blog]

Thumbnail Blaster Review and Bonus

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[ncfan-1]

ncfan listens to The Magnus Archives: S1 EP 004, ‘Page Turner’

Come to Jurgen-Leitner’s, where we have Necronomicons for every occasion and situation you could imagine! Necronomicons for summoning the dead! Necronomicons for revealing past transgressions! Necronomicons to drive the sanest man mad! Bring a friend, bring the whole family! Buy as much as you like, because you won’t be coming back! You’ll be dead or in a mental hospital with a melted brain before coming back passes your mind!

No spoilers, please!

- The evil book is a common theme in media. Books of arcane knowledge that corrupt the user in some form or another are commonplace, really, and in about half of those you will find some sort of sapient entity that may or may not interact directly with the reader. The Necronomicon of Lovecraft lore is probably the most notorious, along with Tom Riddle’s diary from the Harry Potter series; heck, the Restricted section of the Hogwarts library is full of books like this. You’ve also got ‘The King in Yellow,’ the play in book form of the similarly titled The King in Yellow. I think Evil Dead has one. The 2003 Teen Titans series has Raven come across a spell book that hosts an evil dragon pretending to be a good wizard. Eclipsa’s chapter of the Royal Book of Spells in Star vs. The Forces of Evil is this in miniature, though like many things in Svtfoe, it’s not what it seems at first glance. House of Leaves is a weird example of this, but it is an example. A Sith Holocron in Star Wars is a sci-fi equivalent. Even the Care Bears Movie had one of these.

What is it with our enduring fascination with Evil Books, anyways? The obsession seems to go beyond even Evil Books, anyways, because I can’t help but remember the way the Catholic Church reacted when people first started printing Bibles in their own vernacular. In that case, they likely came down so hard on translators like Wycliffe and Tyndale (well, Wycliffe was involved with the Lollard movement; I doubt that helped) because they knew their own power would wane if they couldn’t dictate religion to the masses, but we seem to have a Thing about books in general. Everybody’s obsessed with the Voynich Manuscript, too.

- And we’ve got Dominic insisting he’s not some crazy hobo, furthering our “mentally ill people are more vulnerable” theme; Dominic seems to understand it would work against him.

- “Probably calf, given how soft it was.” I do wonder how leather made from human skin feels to the touch. Is it, by any chance, soft?

- ‘Ex Altiorā’ is an interesting phrase, because it can mean a couple of very different things. ‘Ex’ is a preposition whose potential meanings include ‘out of’, ‘from within’, and ‘from.’ ‘Altiorā’ is the ablative case of the superlative form of the adjective ‘altus, -a, -um,’ which can mean either ‘high’ or ‘deep.’ So while it can mean ‘From/Out of the highest’, it can also mean ‘From/Out of the deepest.’

- So the book is a magic time sink?

- And after flipping through the book (one image of which was a mysteriously frighteningly night sky), Dominic is now picking up the smell of ozone.

- The pictures triggered Catherine’s vertigo? Given how affecting the night sky image is supposed to be, I’ll take that as a warning.

- Given that another Jurgen-Leitner book later shows up in Sanskrit, I wonder if the woodcut of a crooked tower with birds circling the summit represents the Tower of Babel.

- In real life, ‘Key of Solomon’ is a grimoire that was authored sometime in the 14th or 15th century in Italy. Though it is attributed to King Solomon, it was almost certainly not written by him as, again, it surfaced sometime in the 1300s-1400s. The book included incantations to summon and control the spirits of the dead and demons, how to find lost items, how to become invisible, etc. It also described the purifications the practitioner should undergo, how they should dress, how they should make the instruments used in their experiments, and what sort of animal sacrifices they’d have to make to the spirits. I got that info from Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt, but the last detail may potentially be important.

- “Something else there. Something I knew but… could not remember.” Wonderful.

- Mary Key sounds… creepy as hell.

- I wonder if dead Mary (I listen to these entries at least twice: the first time without making any notes, and at least once to make my notes) plays death metal music for a reason. Could it be, say, to block out the screams of dying animals?

- As to the picture of the eye, the eye is rich in symbolic meaning, but right now what I’m thinking of the most is the idea of God—or, if the story so intends, some other in-universe higher power—staring down on mankind and judging them.

- “Grant us the sight that we may not know. Grant us the scent that we may not catch. Grand us the sound that we may not call.” Well, we’ve got ozone so far—and something that will be revealed to us soon.

- So Mary Key’s Jurgen-Leitner book is a Jurgen-Leitner with no title, and the leather is in “better condition.” That’s great, that’s real great. Is it the copy of ‘Key of Solomon’ that was mentioned earlier on, because that might make some sense of what happens next.

- Mary’s book is in Sanskrit. If this is a copy of ‘Key of Solomon’, that might actually make sense as an attempt to pass ‘Key of Solomon’ off as actually having been written by Solomon. Sanskrit was in use in Southwest Asia (otherwise known as the Middle East), as there was trade between India and Southwest Asia; it’s actually believed that Sanskrit may have originated in what today is Iran.

- So you pass Mary’s book through shadows, and bent little animal bones fall out, “warped into shapes that bones should not form.” Interesting.

- Yeah, Mary’s been summoning demons. Or at least she was when she was alive.

- And when Dominic looks through his book—even without having to pass it through shadows—the woodcuts have changed. There are new lines in the picture, thick and dark and coming down from the sky like lightning.

- He sees the Lichtenberg Figure—grant us the sight that we may not know.

- The smell of ozone and cooking flesh—grant us the scent that we may not catch.

- The deafening lightning—grant us the sound that we may not call.

- So Mary messes with what is probably a copy of ‘Key of Solomon’, and possibly winds up being sacrificed the way she seems to have sacrificed animals. If Dominic had kept Ex Altiorā, would he have been struck by lightning?

- Jared sounds like he just wants to be done with all of this.

- So, as for Mary being in the bookstore when she was dead… Did Jared summon his mother’s spirit using her old book?

- Was… Was Jared going to use Mary’s skin as new pages for the book?

- Yeah, it was probably the grimoire that was deemed inadmissible.

- I wonder what Jared saw in Ex Altiorā, what it was that made him laugh.

- “My mother doesn’t always know what’s best for our family.” Well, alrighty then.

- So… It seems that Jurgen-Leitner makes books that are basically Necronomicon-grade tomes of forbidden knowledge fit to drive men mad. And the Magnus Institute has (or had, though it sounds like we’re going to be dealing in present tense again, now) an ongoing project devoted to dealing with his library after some incident in 1994. Well, I’m sure this will never come back in any way. Jonathan sounds so done.

- And Jonathan’s running assignment has just crossed over from “assignment that makes you rip all your hair out” to “assignment that makes you entertain fantasies about killing your boss for handing you this mess without even warning you about what you were walking into.” You can hear it in his voice. Though in this case, it sounds more like he’s entertaining fantasies of learning how to perform necromancy so he can resurrect Gertrude Robinson just to have the privilege of killing her again.

- That said, I’d say there’s more method to Gertrude’s madness than he’s willing to acknowledge right now.

- It’s possible that Dominic’s translation was off, and Martin was only looking for English translations. Because there is more than one possible translation.

[go-redgirl]

Harris Faulkner Gets a Bigger Spotlight at Fox News Channel

By Brian Steinberg

Meghan McCain says one of the biggest lessons in her TV career came when she was working alongside Harris Faulkner in the run up to the 2016 election at Fox News Channel.

A viewer had slipped into her direct messages on Twitter with an unpleasant remark, and McCain, who says she is prone to react to such things, learned a different strategy from Faulkner, with whom she appeared regularly on the  Fox News early-afternoon program “Outnumbered.”  The advice? “You’ve got to give people like that honey,” she recalls. If you’re going to respond, give that person something other than what they served you.

“I’m very impulsive,” acknowledges McCain, who speaks out regularly on the current panel at ABC’s “The View.” Faulkner, however, “is very cool under pressure,” she says. “She’s still water.”

Harris Faulkner will have reason to maintain her unflappable demeanor. On Sunday at 10 p.m., she will host a special primetime event that – for the first time in her career at Fox News –  leads with her name.  “Harris Faulkner Presents: The Fight for America” is supposed to offer a look at civil unrest and race relations in the U.S., and marks the latest in a series of special-format programs she has anchored this year (Sean Hannity will take part in the proceedings). More are on the way, notes Faulkner, who expects to continue to lead town-hall discussions as well as news  specials with her name in the title.

“We are going to take some important voices to the conversation, and we are going to talk real and raw,” she says of Sunday’s broadcast during a recent interview conducted from her home over Zoom. Faulkner, one of the few Black women anchoring weekday slots on the mainstream U.S. cable-news outlets, is in a bi-racial marriage, and says she and her husband have tough discussions about such topics every day. “We are raw with each other,” she says. “I think that’s where we all need to be as Americans. We can take it.”

As Faulkner leads these programs, she is quickly becoming more integral to the business of the Fox Corporation-owned network for which she works. Faulkner already anchors two hours each weekday on Fox News. But executives in recent months have begun to add “America Together” specials and other programming aimed at kitchen-table topics like distance learning or mental health, and create elements different from the opinion programming that represents the network’s most-watched fare. Several advertisers have steered their commercials away from programs hosted by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham after polarizing remarks they have made (the recent resignation of a Carlson staffer who was discovered to have been posting racist remarks online under a pseudonym hasn’t helped matters), and the new segments are meant to give sponsors other pieces of content with which they can align.

“Harris is very important,” says Suzanne Scott, CEO of Fox News Media, in an interview. “I think she has a lot of strength and a lot of grace and she knows how to stay steady even through tough breaking news.” That serves her well on her regular programs – the panel show “Outnumbered” and the single-anchor “Outnumbered Overtime” — but it also helps when asking viewers to come together to work their way through thorny issues. “We agreed it made sense to have her lead this conversation and help people find common ground,” says Scott.

Faulkner is also getting more prominent assignments. She and Bill Hemmer co-anchored a town hall with President Trump and she traveled solo to Dallas in mid June to interview him directly. The conversation, she said, was an opportunity for Americans to hear from the Commander-in-Chief not only as the pandemic spiked in parts of the country, but in the wake of protests over the death of George Floyd while in custody of police in Minneapolis. Her opening question set the tone for a conversation during which Trump fell short at nearly every opportunity: “You know, Mr. President, with all that’s happened in the last couple of weeks, I feel like we are at one of those historical moments where future generations will look back and they’ll decide who we were. Are you the president to unite all of us? Given everything that’s happening right now?”

Faulkner proceeded to ask him about his use of the phrase, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and explained to him its troubling origins. When Trump made a bizarre comment about President Abraham Lincoln, who ended the Civil War – “He did good. Although it’s always questionable, you know, in other words, the end result.” – Faulkner had a mike-drop rejoinder: “Well, we are free, Mr. President.”

Journalism critics are not always generous with Fox News, but one prominent academic recently praised Faulkner’s work. In a piece written for Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism who is a former senior executive at The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, suggested other reporters could take cues from her approach.

Faulkner wasn’t prosecuting Trump on air, Grueskin says, as many White House reporters seem to do every day. She was trying to engage him in a conversation. “She gave him every opportunity to talk about this in the grand sweep of American history and racial justice,” Grueskin says in an interview. “She did challenge him,” he adds, but not in a way that would put him on automatic defense. “She wasn’t in any way a pushover, and she really held her ground.”

The key to the exchange, Faulkner says, was being ready to have a discussion. She purposely did not carry cards or papers with briefs on various issues.  “I owe those moments with the President of the United States 100% of me. I have to be present and I have to be present with the facts,” she says. “Can you imagine if I’d sat there shuffling through notes?”

She might have missed important remarks.  “I didn’t know where the conversation was going to go. I could not have predicted he was going to talk about Lincoln. I wouldn’t have known. But I’m glad I was listening closely,” she says. Her line “was an honest reaction. I spit the facts. It wasn’t like I had some feeling. It’s not that I feel free. I am free. You can’t argue with that.”

Harris Faulkner’s long march in the news business took her through several local TV stations, but it’s not a stretch to say it started with the U.S. military. Like ABC News’ Robin Roberts and CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, Faulkner grew up in a military family. Her father, a former Army pilot, did two tours of duty in Vietnam, and Faulkner often had to make connections quickly in new situations as the family moved around to accommodate her dad’s career.

That facility with reaching out to people helped her at a pivotal moment. Faulkner was working as a correspondent for the syndicated newsmagazine “A Current Affair” in 2005 when she was dispatched to Aruba. While sitting in a hotel lobby, she noticed an American woman who seemed a little lost. Faulkner asked if she needed any help. “She said ‘My name is Beth Holloway, and my daughter is missing.���” Faulkner would stay on the island for a month.

The disappearance of teenager Natalee Holloway near the end of a graduation trip to Aruba captured the fascination of the U.S. media, and Faulkner was able to deliver several scoops on the subject. That led her to make appearances on Fox News as well as on Nancy Grace’s program and helped her make connections with Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren, among others. When “A Current Affair” was canceled, Grace asked Faulkner to fill in for her while she went on vacation. Faulkner joined Fox News that same year.

She spent many years working weekends at Fox News, until executives began to think about launching a panel show in the early afternoon, recalls Scott. The early-evening program “The Five” had long been a success for the network and there was some thought that a female-focused version would work well during the day. “Obviously, there are others in the marketplace, but we wanted our own version of it,” Scott remembers. Faulkner emerged as the moderator of the noontime “Outnumbered,” where female panelists spar with a male guest.

Many cable-news outlets have relegated journalists of color to weekend slots. Indeed, Faulkner continued to work weekends as well as maintain her “Outnumbered” duties. “I’m not talking out of school: executives at Fox felt it was just in case things didn’t work out,” says Faulkner. In 2017, she was given a second hour on weekdays – her own.

There are new signs the cable-news outlets are giving more notice to the issue, with MSNBC naming Joy Reid to anchor its 7 p.m. hour and CNN announcing earlier this week it will hire new journalists to cover the issue of race in America. NBC News’ Craig Melvin has been hosting a number of news specials during MSNBC’s daytime schedule and Don Lemon has carved out a unique role in CNN’s primetime. “It has been a long time. It has been an extremely long time. and I welcome the competition to jump in the water at any hour of the day,” says Faulkner. “At the end of the day, it’s driven by ad sales, and if you want to broaden out your revenue base, you’ve got to reach more people. And how do you do that? You make sure your people come from all different walks of life, with different points of view.” 

Faulkner is part of an internal committee at Fox News that discusses matters of diversity and inclusion. It’s something Scott says she put in place several years ago, and it helps executives hear concerns from employees in editorial, technology and other places. She recently asked if members of the group would hold an open forum after the death of George Floyd. The CEO says she spent hours trying to put together opening remarks, but in the end, “I just wanted to listen.”She heard a lot. “She meant it when she said she wanted an earful, because she sat there for an hour or more, and people had some things to say,” notes Faulkner. “We have had a journey at Fox,” she says, referring to allegations of harassment and discrimination that took place under former chief Roger Ailes, who was ousted from the company in 2016. “What you hope is that everyone shares their voice and you get to the bottom of the things that are out there.”Fox News viewers are likely to hear more from Faulkner in months to come. “I would like to see her involved in more of our political coverage,” says Scott, “The audience connects with her.”Faulkner says she is likely to stick to news, even if the network’s opinion programs snare its biggest audiences. “I don’t know that I would do a primetime opinion show, because I think the space is flooded right now, and I think there’s neither a hunger nor a thirst in America right now to hear Harris Faulkner’s opinion,” she says. “Everybody’s got a lane. I’m going to drive hard in mine.”

[womenandfilm5]

The film “Edited By”, by Su Friedrich, is a companion film to the website WomenFilmEditors.princeton.edu, and it holds a one minute scene from a film edited by each of the sixty-five editors who were represented on Friedrich’s website, from 1924 to 2017. The website is a comprehensive guide to many of the talented women editors that history chose to forget (and now actually includes 206 editors), and includes things such as the editor’s backstories, history, surveys, film posters, and more. The film is organized chronologically, and Friedrich herself has stated that this film is not meant to “be a “real film”- that is a film I would consider part of my body of work- but rather a sort of notebook or reference film”. The overarching theme of this film is representation, and the clearly emphasized issue is that of the under-representation of editors (although both men and women, this film focuses on women editors), and it seeks to give the audience a flavor of the type and range of editing for a shockingly vast number of works created by women editors, spanning time from 1924 to 2017.

.

     It is challenging to qualify the form of the cinematography of film in this movie, as we have works ranging from more languorous and elegant editing, such as found in “Louisiana Story” or “Moonlight”, all the way to the fast-paced and intense editing style we see in “Persona” or “Mad Max: Fury Road” represented in this 75 minute film. Each one-minute clip of a movie that a woman editor created is preceded by a black screen, and white text first detailing the title of the film, then the editor, and finally the director. Within the films, we see a transition from the black and white silent films in the early 1900’s, to the development of a lot more background music, dialogue, use of color, and special effects, such as the use of cartoons or frequent cuts in position. There is also a notable transition towards more of the end of the film of movies to TV shows.

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     When going into watching this film, I was expecting an intense number of clips from films, but what I didn’t expect was just how many films I was going to recognize, both from my childhood, and movies I have watched recently. The clips that I recognized, and enjoyed, were from “The Wizard of Oz”, “Singing in the Rain”, “Jaws”, “Star Wars: A New Hope”, “E.T.”, “Pulp Fiction”, “The Secret Life of Bees”, “Breaking Bad”, “Mad Max: Fury Road”, “Orange is the New Black” (season 4, episode 13), and “Moonlight”. In the promotional materials for the film clips seen in “Edited By”, the film posters have a block of credits at the bottom which would mention the director, producers, and actors, but the editor’s names are nowhere to be seen. These posters, Sue Friedrich noted, would often even mention the composers of the film, but not the person who put the film together in the manner it was shown in theaters.

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     Su Friedrich has produced and directed 23 films and digital videos, won the highest awards at at international festivals, and had her film “Sink or Swim” was chosen to be in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. She currently teaches film-making at Princeton, and in her academic and hands-on research she found that there is a shocking lack of acknowledgement for women editors throughout the entirety of film history, which she sought to rectify with the website she created. While preparing to teach a lesson for one of her classes, she was reading a chapter in a book on film history, and the chapter was on editors, and mentioned the director’s names, but never those of the editors. This struck a chord within Sue Friedrich, and she decided she did not want her students to read this chapter without being aware of who actually created the beautiful work described in the chapter. As previously mentioned, this led to her film “Edited By”, which is the companion film to her website, and draws attention to the beautiful work that so many talented women editors have accomplished over the past century. Friedrich has been pleased to note that both the scholarly community and the public have responded with positive responses, and commonly stated their pleasant surprise at finding out so many of their favorite films were created by women editors (Journal of the Motion Picture Editors Guild). Our socio-political community in present day, and even back in 2017, is a lot more accepting and welcoming then when film first began to gain prevalence, so people are a lot more ready to hear and accept the messages about those we forgot.

     When analyzing a scene in particular, I chose the one minute clip from the movie “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929), edited by Yelizaveta Svilova, which was particularly poignant when representing the editing process in it’s cuts from life to actual film strips, holding the image (to view the clip, go to https://vimeo.com/310219288, and watch from minutes.4:55 to 6:48). I have never seen this movie, and I chose to actually not look it up and investigate the plot when analyzing it, so that my understanding of the scene would be solely based on the cinematography I saw represented. The scene is all black and white, and we first see a man standing upright in the backseat of a moving car, using a camera to film the cart and horse riding adjacent to them. We then shift our perspective to the view of the camera utilized by the man, and we see a wide zoom of the entire scene, then we shift focus first to the many people in the cart, and then the horse in motion, galloping. Our perspective shifts again, and we see once more from the view behind the man filming, so we see the scene in its entirety. We are effectively seeing many perspectives, for we see from the eyes or camera of the person filming the man who is also filming, and then we see from the perspective of the man (or his camera) who is being filmed filming. This is perhaps an in-eloquent way to phrase the multiple perspectives, but it really made me stop and think, and I found it fascinating. This entire scene then freezes, and the viewer’s are subjected to close stills of the scene, such as a person crossing the street, and extremely close view of the horse, a wider view of the street as a whole, and then closeups of people’s faces. These zoomed in stills are then revealed to actually be pictures on film strips, and we see the scope of the sheer amount of film rolls being worked on, and then we see the woman who is working with them; cutting them up, arranging them, hanging them up, etc. From here the one-minute clip cuts back and forth from the woman, to zooming in on the strip she is currently examining, and then from there going back into the actual action. This means that if the woman editing is looking at a strip of an older woman on the street, the camera then zooms in and actually transitions to the woman in motion on the street and going about her day (Journal of the Motion Picture Editors Guild).

     The content demonstrated in these scenes with such clever cuts and transitions in camera-work is a nice way of emphasizing a variety of perspectives. This is a silent film, and as previously mentioned, it is in black-and-white, so our senses are not easily distracted and we stay far more focused on the subject matter directly shown on the screen. As viewers, focus on the visuals and perspectives forces us to confront the vast quantity of work that the editor has in front of her, and just how much film she must sift through, especially as there are multiple cameras in use. It also makes the viewer ponder reality, and think about how easily an image can be captured, and then distorted or altered, through the use of editing. The editor can make us see, feel, or think however they like, with the clever use of the content presented, the camera-work used in the scenes, and the editing itself. It forces us to confront what is reality, and what is a reality that someone else created for us to believe. This clip from the film “Man with a Movie Camera” really struck a chord within me, and led me to think about the first film we watched, “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache”. The title of the clip of the film aforementioned emphasizes the part of the man filming the images, not the woman putting it together, which I found to be all the more ironic. Su Friedrich chose the clip from the film with the contrasting (and equally important/valid) jobs of the cinematographer versus editor, with a title only representing the former. This immediately led my mind back to Alice, the first film director, who was also forgotten by the world, despite playing such a pivotal role in the development and creation of film history (Green). It made me question if the film would have the same title if it were a woman behind the camera filming, and would it be called “Woman with a Movie Camera”?

     The title of the film companion to the website created by Su Friedrich, “Edited By”, says so much in such simple terms. For a movie on the forgotten editors, particularly of a marginalized group (women), a simple title that draws immediate attention to this is incredibly effective. It poses almost a question to the viewer, of “who is this edited by”? This culminated such that every time a new clip was about to play in the movie, I took time to view the name of the editor on each title page prior. I was also pleased to note that there was some intersectionality represented, which I perhaps might not have noticed, if I wasn’t so drawn to the names of the editor’s by the title itself. -- HB

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Work Cited

Friedrich, S. (2017). Edited By- Women Film Editors. Retrieved from-

http://womenfilmeditors.princeton.edu/.

Green, Pamela B., “Be Natural: The Untold Story of ALice Guy-Blache” (2018),

https://ensemble.itec.suny.edu/hapi/v1/contents/permalinks/Si92ZgNz/view

Journal of the Motion Picture Editors Guild, “Princeton’s Su Friedrich and Her Website Salute

the Vital, Often Unsung Work of Women Editors Throughout History”. (2019, October

11). Retrieved from https://cinemontage.org/princetons-su-friedrich-and-her-website-salute-the-vital-often-unsung-work-of-women-editors-throughout-history/

[sserpicko]

Oscar: How Each 2018 Best Picture Nominee Got Here

There can only be one winner, but each of the Best Picture nominees overcame creative, financial and logistical hurdles to get this close to the finish line. Here are their war stories.

Black Panther

Fifty years ago, the phrase ‘Black Panther’ carried more political baggage than it does today, immediately summoning up images of a militant African-American revolutionary, named after by the controversial civil rights party founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966. Created by Stan Lee in a bid to deliver the world’s first non-stereotype black superhero, the comic book of the same name materialized around the same time. Unusually, The Black Panther wasn’t an alter ego—it was the formal title for T’Challa, King of Wakanda—but Lee described the overlapping of names as “a strange coincidence”, adding that “maybe if I had it to do over again, I’d have given him another name”. The sensitive politics of the next two decades might explain why the character lay dormant as a movie property until 1992, when Wesley Snipes began work on the concept, eventually securing support from Columbia in 1994.

Directors John Singleton and Mario Van Peebles showed interest, but the project stalled, only to be resurrected by Marvel Studios in 2005, when then-CEO Avi Arad announced it as one of ten new films on the company’s slate. This time development moved forward at a faster pace: a script was commissioned in 2011, and by 2013, elements of the story began to appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the character, played by Chadwick Boseman, debuting in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. Ava DuVernay was briefly attached, then F. Gary Gray, and finally Creed director Ryan Coogler agreed to take the helm. Marvel President Kevin Feige acknowledges that it was a slow but sure process, and defends the timescale. “The only way we ever wanted to do this project was the right way,” he says, “and that meant finding a filmmaker who had something personal to say, who had a vision and could take this character into another arena, and showcase the power of representation on a canvas of this size.” —Damon Wise

BlacKkKlansman

When Jordan Peele pitched Spike Lee on the story that would become BlacKkKlansman, and lead to the iconic filmmaker’s first Oscar nomination for directing, Lee was sure he was making it up. “It was one of the greatest pitches ever,” Lee recalls. “Black man infiltrates Ku Klux Klan. That’s high concept. I said, ‘I’ve seen this a million times, it’s the Dave Chappelle skit.’ He went, ‘Nah, nah, this is real.’”

And real it is, even though Lee’s film bends the truth here and there to offer an engine to a story that seizes on the rhetorical parallels with the violence in Charlottesville last year, takes a sideways glance at the legacy of DW Griffith and Gone with the Wind, and revels in its 1970s setting to play on the tropes of Blaxploitation movies. Ron Stallworth, a black police officer in Colorado Springs, really did infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. And really did interact with one-time Grand Wizard David Duke.

Lee turned to an old collaborator to play Stallworth. John David Washington was six years old when he was given a line in Lee’s Malcolm X. Reunited for BlacKkKlansman, Lee kept Washington away from the real Stallworth until the table read, determined that he find his own version of the character in prep. “It was my thinking that he would meet Ron and want to walk like him, talk like him,” Lee says. “It wasn’t like Malcolm X. No one knew who Ron Stallworth was, and that gives you freedom.”

Lee casts aside criticism of the film’s forthright allusions to current politics. “These are dangerous times. The film had to end the way it did,” he says, with footage of the Charlottesville rally and a tribute to Heather Hayer, who was murdered there.

And it took the commitment of all of his collaborators, including nominee Adam Driver and the iconic Harry Belafonte—a key player in the Civil Rights Movement—to fully realize it. “This film, the teamwork was amazing. We were like the Golden State Warriors, or the New York Knicks. We didn’t have to sit around saying, ‘Oh this is such an important film and we have to…’ It wasn’t even discussed. Everybody knew what we had to do.” —Joe Utichi

Bohemian Rhapsody

Bohemian Rhapsody is the miracle Oscar nominee this year. Typically when a production is mired with on-set problems, its doom is inevitable, but in the year-plus wake of director Bryan Singer’s firing, Bohemian Rhapsody has had immense luck, with the producers determined to buck sour Singer headlines, after he clashed with Oscar nominated star Rami Malek. Graham King shepherded Bohemian Rhapsody for eight years, and nothing was going to stop it now.

Sacha Baron Cohen expressed interest in the project early on, but dismissed it when King opted against a warts-and-all biopic.

Then King’s partner had a sense that Emmy-winning Mr. Robot star Rami Malek could do the trick, and indeed he did, with a dedication that went to masochistic measures.

“I told Graham King if he gave me this role, I’d bleed for it, and he showed me a picture of blood on the piano keys after the final day of our Live Aid shoot,” Malek says.

Editor John Ottman gets proper credit here with his first Oscar nomination, working with the producers to hammer an impressive first cut, before Dexter Fletcher stepped in for Singer to finish a handful of scenes. While a director always gets credit for a final cut, Bohemian Rhapsody is an example this season that there’s no ‘I’ in team.

The press has repeatedly asked the production team for their thoughts on Singer in the wake of the film’s success, especially on Golden Globes night when it won for Best Motion Picture, Drama and Best Actor.

King waved off the question, but Malek answered, “There was only one thing we needed to do: celebrate Freddie Mercury. He is a marvel. Nothing was going to compromise us. We’re giving him the love, celebration and adulation he deserves.” —Anthony D’Alessandro

The Favourite

It took two decades for Deborah Davis’s script for The Favourite to make it to screen. A searing three-hander based on the true history of the British Queen Anne and the two women who fought for her affections, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham, it was a tough sell even for a market in Britain that specializes in costume drama. A film in which three women rule the roost over their male counterparts, fall in love—and graphic lust—with one another and scheme their way to dominance? Whatever to make of that?

But Davis knew she had something groundbreaking, and producers Ceci Dempsey, Lee Magiday and Ed Guiney weren’t prepared to let the project go without a fight. In an inspired move, they showed the script to Yorgos Lanthimos, whose twisted and unique earlier features, including Dogtooth, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer seemed like an odd fit for a story based in true history. And yet, working on the script with Australian writer Tony McNamara, Lanthimos found a lens on the story through his own fascination with the more awkward aspects of human interaction.

“I was intrigued in trying to create these three very complicated and complex characters for women, and work with three great actresses,” Lanthimos says. “It was in my mind thinking you never see that: three female strong leads.”

For Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, the three actresses cast in these roles, all of whom picked up Oscar nominations, it was just as enticing a prospect. Lanthimos started them off with an unconventional rehearsal period, challenging them to play trust exercises, tie themselves up in knots and say one another’s lines.

“It’s strange and not strange,” Stone notes. “By the end, I think one of the most effective aspects of it was that we all felt very, very close to each other. We all touched each other, embarrassed ourselves in front of one another, and became more reliant on one another.” —Joe Utichi

Green Book

Nick Vallelonga had been carrying the story for Green Book in his head ever since he was five years old, and yet it was not until his 50s that he was able to see his dream become a reality. The plot came directly from a period of his father’s life, when, in the early ’60s, Tony “Lip” Vallelonga was hired by an African-American classical pianist named Don Shirley to be his driver and bodyguard during a potentially dangerous concert tour of the racially segregated southern states. “Even as a child, it struck me as something you’d see in a movie,” says Vallelonga. There was only only one problem: even though both subjects gave him their blessing, they also made Vallelonga give his word that the film would not be made in their lifetimes. After Tony and Don passed in 2013, within just three months of the other, Vallelonga began to map out this extraordinary road trip.

To help shape the script, Vallelonga turned to writer/actor Brian Currie. Then, two years later, during a chance encounter, Currie outlined the project to Peter Farrelly, and the idea stuck. “Home run!” exclaimed Farrelly. Together, all three began shaping the production, which passed through Focus Features and Participant Media before landing at Universal, with Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali as the leads. The result was Farrelly’s first non-comedy outside of the long-running partnership with his brother Bobby. “People had asked me over the years, ‘Do you think you’ll ever do a drama?’” Farrelly says. “And my answer was, ‘Sure, when it happens,’ because I never really planned. I probably should have, by the way, because I look at Rob Reiner’s career, and he was so smart. He did Spinal Tap, and then he did The Sure Thing, and then he goes off to do Stand by Me and A Few Good Men. He showed he could do everything. But we were just doing what came into our universe next, and we never really planned it. I didn’t plan this, but finally this dropped into my lap—I heard the story, and I thought, I gotta make this.” —Damon Wise

Roma

Alfonso Cuarón’s ode to his childhood in Mexico City, and in particular the domestic worker who helped made him, Roma was non-negotiable. “I had to do the film,” he says. “I told Carlos, my brother, ‘I don’t know if anybody is going to care about or like this movie. I have to do it because it’s something I need to do.’”

The notion started to form more than a decade ago, as Cuarón finished up 2006’s Children of Men. But there had been threads drawn from his youth in other projects—in his heralded Y Tu Mamá También, a voiceover for Diego Luna’s character tells a backstory that isn’t far off from Cuarón’s own—and he felt driven by a desire to tap more directly into that past.

Cuarón teamed up with Participant Media, who greenlit the $15 million the filmmaker needed; a tall order for a film that he knew he had to shoot primarily in Spanish, and in black-and-white. But so slavish was his desire to draw all this from his own very specific memories that Participant CEO David Linde would become one of the first and last people to ever see a script during production. He had intended to tap Emmanuel Lubezki to shoot the film, but ‘Chivo’ was unavailable when the dates finally set, and so Cuarón served as his own DP. He instructed his heads of department directly to get the details exactly as he saw them, rather than have them riff on the script. He gave his actors only what they needed for the scenes they shot, and then, only moments before they shot them. In the film’s lead, Cuarón found Yalitza Aparicio after an exhaustive search of Mexico. She was training to be a teacher when she heard about the audition. She is now an Oscar nominee.

Still, it was only after the process was completed that Cuarón understood the real challenge of Roma. With no stars, his black-and-white, Spanish-language opus was not built for the current realities of global theatrical distribution. Netflix came on board in April, when the film was looking set to debut at Cannes, and the controversy surrounding the streamer’s stance on theatrical put paid to a slot at the festival. It later debuted at Venice. But Cuarón is determined Netflix was the right home. “Our viewing habits are changing,” he says. “The challenge is now, how we can adapt ourselves, but present something that you believe is amazing and great cinema? It’s not so much about, ‘Let’s impose this kind of cinema on audiences.’ It’s also the conversation with them about how they want to watch.” —Joe Utichi

A Star Is Born

It’s hard to overstate the difficulty of shooting on stage in the middle of a music festival. Yet the cast and crew of A Star Is Born pulled off exactly that, with only a four-minute window for director and star Bradley Cooper to perform.

Serendipitously, it worked out thanks to the star of the film’s 1976 version. Kris Kristofferson happened to be playing Glastonbury on the planned shoot day, and offered a window of time in his own set.

“Bradley jumps on stage,” producer Lynette Howell Taylor recalls, “and says, ‘Hi, I’m Bradley Cooper. I’m here to perform a song from A Star Is Born, but you won’t be able to hear it. Please just look like you’re excited.’” With his vocal feed cut, only the front few rows could hear some of what Cooper sang. “We didn’t want the music to leak out.”

“There were many minutes along the way where we were running and gunning,” adds producer Bill Gerber, “But that one in particular wasn’t just a logistical threat, it was also incredible for Bradley to go from playing in controlled situations to all of a sudden literally singing live in front of 80,000 people.”

Gerber had been on the project since its early days, when, before timing got in the way, Clint Eastwood had been set to direct, with Beyoncé in the Lady Gaga role. Casting Gaga was initially a stretch for Warner Bros., Gerber says. “Even though Bradley and I were really blown away by the chemistry, the studio still wasn’t 100% sure. But to their credit, they said, ‘Do a test, spend what you have to spend, and let’s see.’”

During that test, Gerber saw the magic happen. “Bradley picked her up, and they walked out the doors of her house onto her lawn, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean. They looked at each other and it was undeniably brilliant. I thought, well, there’s our Gone with the Wind moment.” And the rest, of course, is history. —Antonia Blyth

Vice

Adam McKay probably wouldn’t have made Vice, his irreverent biopic of former Vice President Dick Cheney, if he hadn’t fallen ill for a couple of weeks at the end of 2015. The director had recently finished up The Big Short, an arch look at the financial crisis of 2008, and followed it immediately with a worldwide publicity tour, then a punishing awards season schedule. The net result was that McKay got sick, and while he was shivering with a particularly evil flu, he looked up at his bookshelves. “People give you books through the years,” McKay told the ACLU, “and you just shove them up there and don’t really think about them. And there was one about Dick Cheney, and it kind of struck me, like, ‘Wow, the book of history is about to close on that guy.’ I mean, you don’t really hear his name mentioned that much anymore, and you don’t hear [George] W. Bush’s name really mentioned, but, holy cow, those were a rough eight years.”

McKay started reading the book and found he couldn’t put it down. “I was amazed by what a large, epic American tale Cheney’s life story is—how far back it reaches, how many monumental moments in history he was around for. He had this Zelig-like presence in the ’70s through the ’80s. And then of course, I was amazed by how brilliant he was at manipulating the system.” The final impetus to tell Cheney’s story came in 2016. “Somewhere along that line,” recalled McKay, “Donald Trump got elected, and all of a sudden we started hearing people say, ‘Hey, I kinda miss George W. Bush. He wasn’t that bad, him and Cheney.’ And I really felt like I had to make the movie. I was like, ‘This is crazy that people are saying this.’ And that was it. We were off to the races.” —Damon Wise

Source: deadline

by Joe Utichi and Damon Wise and Anthony D’Alessandro and Antonia Blyth

[bookiemonsterph]

Nevernight

Synopsis:

Mia Corvere is only ten years old when she is given her first lesson in death. Destined to destroy empires, the child raised in shadows made a promise on the day she lost everything: to avenge herself on those that shattered her world. But the chance to strike against such powerful enemies will be fleeting, and Mia must become a weapon without equal. Before she seeks vengeance, she must seek training among the infamous assassins of the Red Church of Itreya. Inside the Church's halls, Mia must prove herself against the deadliest of opponents and survive the tutelage of murderers, liars and daemons at the heart of a murder cult. The Church is no ordinary school. But Mia is no ordinary student. The Red Church is no ordinary school, but Mia is no ordinary student. The shadows love her. And they drink her fear.

Title: Nevernight Series: The Nevernight Chronicles Author: Jay Kristoff ISBN: 0008179980 (ISBN13: 9780008179984) Pages:  463  pages (Paperback) Published:  June 19th 2017 by Harper Collins (first published August 9th 2016) Characters: Tric, Mia Corvere, Lord Cassius, Mister Kindly, Ashlin, Mercurio, Jessamine, Mother Drusilla, Shahiid Mouser, Shahiid Solis, Shahiid Aalea, Naev, Carlotta Valdi, Diamo, Weaver Marielle, Justicus Remus, Osrik, Speaker Adonai, Julius Scaeva, Francesco Duomo Genre: Young Adult, High Fantasy, Romance, Paranormal, Magic

I have a strict rule about reading: I have to read 100 pages of a book before I decide whether or not I’m going to finish it. Usually at that point I’ll finish it regardless because once I’ve sunk 100 pages into a book, I’d rather finish it and be able to claim I’ve read it (I’ve actually only DNF’d one book that I can remember). Maybe it’s not the best rule, but it’s how I operate. But let me tell you: Nevernight needed those one hundred freebie pages. If I’ve read another book that starts as badly, it’s been long enough that I don’t remember it. The opening chapter has some interesting things going on, stylistically, but after that… yikes. Mia and Tric, another important character, make their way across a dangerous desert to the Red Church, chased by monsters. You’d think running from monsters towards a murder church might be at least kind of interesting, but you would be wrong. It’s mind-numbingly boring. At that point in the novel, neither Mia nor Tric had done anything to get me to care about them as characters, and their repartee is not nearly as witty and charming as it’s evidently meant to be. The monster fights go on way too long and the narration doesn’t help it at all. More on the narration in a bit.

As I was reading this interminably long, interminably bad section, I complained to my friend that it was like Jay Kristoff’s editors had completely left him out to dry. Someone, I said, should have told this poor guy how many readers he was going to lose in this section. Then I figured it out. This is infodropping, I realized. We have to know about these monsters and this desert for the climax. I was right. Those stupid monsters do come back, and for the record, they’re not much better. I realize that they’re necessary for the plot, but I still think the editors needed to take Kristoff aside and say, this does not work. Rewrite it.

Back to the narration. It’s unique, for sure, and—I’m sure—base-breaking. Between Nevernight and Illuminae, it’s clear that Kristoff is a narratively skilled and innovative writer. Nevernight has a very strong narrative voice. An unnamed character who loves Mia tells the story directly to the readers, and tells it reverently, evoking religious phrases and imagery at every turn. There is also a liberal use of footnotes, which provide historical and cultural context for the fictional society. The footnotes pulled me out of the story. I couldn’t get into a rhythm because every time I did, I’d have to jump out and read multiple paragraphs about something that only peripherally affected Mia’s story. A few of them did provide important information, but enough of them were merely padding that my brain glazed over them a little as I was reading. As I’ve said, it took me a long time to care about Mia, and this was compounded by all the tangents. It’s not that I dislike tangents. Sometimes they can work really well. But when they interrupt a story that’s already limping along with something that brings it to a standstill, they’re not doing any favors. When I hit the middle of the book, they were more forgivable.

The book totally transforms when Mia and Tric reach the Red Church. Before they got there, I was desperate to get Nevernight over with. Once they arrive, so too did my interest. The challenges and trials posed to the acolytes gave the novel a structure it had been sorely lacking, and the new characters—particularly Ashlinn and to a lesser degree Hush, Jessamine, and Carlotta—changed up the dynamics for the better. Mia really only took form as a full character with the other acolytes. While lots of readers seem to really like Tric, I’m pretty neutral about him. He had a pretty blatant love interest vibe from the start. There were a few moments when it seemed like Mia wasn’t interested in him, and I was excited, but then they hooked up and my original impression was solidified. I’m not inherently against characters who are there primarily to be love interests. I can get very invested in well-told romantic storylines. But I never got Tric and Mia, and their lust-filled relationship didn’t interest me, especially considering how risky it was and how little either of them actually got out of it.

And there were a few minor things in Nevernight that bothered me. There’s a single line about Mister Kindly, Mia’s supernatural shadow sidekick, being angry when Mia sleeps peacefully enough that there’s no fear for him to feed on that fascinated me, but it never goes anywhere. The names for the assassination classes are hokey; a few of them kind of make sense, but calling poisons class “Truths” is kinda dumb. This is probably petty, but… when Mia had her appearance drastically and magically changed and is given much larger breasts, I couldn’t help thinking, this was definitely written by a dude. Sorry, but I can’t imagine a female writer giving her character a magical boob job, and especially not for assassin training. I mean, really? This poor girl went from being basically flat-chested to being apparently huge and never had any back pain? Sure.

The novel as a whole relentlessly juxtaposes the sacred and the vulgar. Mia wishes to become a disciple in a church devoted to shadow and darkness, where murder is sacred and the most relentless killers are lauded. The very first chapter of the novel intertwines scenes of Mia’s first real murder with her first sexual encounter, repeating phrases and changing only a word or two in order to align the two experiences as closely as possible. Repeatedly, violence and lust are woven together, and combined with the idea of murder-as-religion, the three ideas—sex, violence, and worship—become a kind of holy/unholy trinity. It’s fascinating, and when Kristoff keeps the uncomfortable balance, it works brilliantly. Unfortunately, the balance tips at the end. Most of Nevernight acknowledges, at least partially, that taking lives is generally considered immoral and that, therefore, a church dedicated to “Our Lady of Blessed Murder” is probably at least a little shady (pun mostly intended). The end doesn’t, though. I’ll put a spoilery paragraph at the very end of this if you want to read why the ending disappointed me.

The middle of Nevernight is very good. It has an interesting hierarchy filled with morally ambiguous power structures and characters. The beginning, though, is a chore, and the ending pulls off a dramatic twist… at the expense of the only character I actually, truly liked. The narrative voice is initially intriguing, but  it got old quickly and then I got numb to it and now can’t decide if I overall liked it or not. The same goes for the book itself. I enjoyed myself for probably around 65% of it, but was actively annoyed for a lot of the rest. I’m the rare reader who will come out of Nevernight lukewarm; I think the majority will run either very hot or very cold, because nearly everything about it is polarizing: the narration, the characters, the twist, the amount of sex and gore, the depiction of religion. I can see how every bit of it could be either adored or detested, and I’m surprised that I ended up stuck on the fence.

[kadobeclothing]

5 Examples of Brands Newsjacking in 2019

Shortly after the announcement that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were “stepping away” as senior members of the Royal Family, Madame Tussauds Wax Museum also made news by removing Harry and Megan from a wax display of the Royal family.

But, the famous wax museum’s publicity stunt isn’t the only example of a brand that’s leveraged a news event to gain awareness or viral attention. In fact, this tactic has been used by marketers throughout the 2000s. It’s often called “newsjacking.”

Newsjacking is when a brand or firm mentions or creates a campaign centered around a major, well-discussed news item. It’s slightly different from a publicity stunt in that the news item is leveraged in marketing while a stunt might acknowledge news within a public venue or place of business. Why do brands choose to newsjack rather than creating a totally original storyline for their campaigns? It’s simply because this strategy helps them get discovered by adding or piggybacking off of larger conversations happening online. In the early 2010s, we frequently saw newsjacking attempts during big, televised events like the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards. But, as marketers more frequently use social media and online channels, we’re seeing brands identify newsy topics faster and newsjack through a variety of content. If you’re looking to leverage news, trends, or current events to amp up your marketing strategy, you might be wondering, “How do I get started?” or “How can I do this tastefully?” If so, one great way to learn how to newsjack is to watch how other brands have done it. To help you get inspired, here are five examples of brands that successfully took on newsjacking in 2019, and some takeaways that you can keep in mind in 2020. 7 Examples of Newsjacking in 2019 Aviation Gin: The Gift That Gives Back News Item In December 2019, the workout bike company Peloton released a critically panned commercial that begins with a husband giving his wife a Peloton for Christmas. As the commercial continues to the optimistic sounds of the song, “There She Goes,” the wife, coined as “Peloton Wife” on social media, films herself working out every day for a year. At the end of the ad, she shares the video with her husband — seemingly the following Christmas. Here’s the commercial, which is titled “The Gift That Gives Back”:

The commercial was heavily criticized and mocked throughout social media because it enforced dated gender norms and goes against body positivity because many people believe that a husband buying a wife a workout device insinuates that she’s out of shape. The Newsjacking After the Peloton ad — and it’s instant criticisms — circulated the internet, actor and Aviation American Gin owner Ryan Reynolds immediately cast Monica Ruiz, a.k.a. “Peloton Wife,” in a commercial written to feel like a sequel to the Peloton ad. In the commercial, humorously titled “The Gift That Doesn’t Give Back,” Ruiz sits at a bar, staring blankly into the camera. She emotionlessly sips on and complements the smooth taste of Aviation Gin as her supportive friends offer her more gin and make comments like, “You look great, by the way.”

While the ad doesn’t directly mention the workout bike company, Reynolds says Aviation Gin’s commercial was a direct response to Peloton. In fact, Reynolds initially tweeted the ad with the caption, “Exercise bike not included,” and later explained that he hired the Ruiz just a “few hours” after the original ad launched. “I’ve been there as an actor, where you do something that doesn’t quite work . We got ahold of her and within 36 hours, we shot, chopped, and put out this commercial,” Reynolds explained on The Tonight Show. Shortly after its launch, Aviation Gin’s commercial went viral, receiving over 6.2 million YouTube views and 42 thousand retweets on Twitter. It’s also been noted by a number of publications including MarketingLand and AdWeek. This newsjacking was successful for a number of reasons. First, the brand quickly responded to a news item with a creative idea. Additionally, the campaign was subtle, professional, and didn’t directly acknowledge Peloton. With just a few words and visuals, it told a deeper story which was almost more hilarious than if it had directly acknowledged the workout bike company. Burger King’s “Big Mac-ish” Menu News Item After a legal battle with an Irish fast-food chain called Supermac’s, McDonalds lost its exclusive Big Mac trademark. While the fast-food giant could still keep using the Big Mac title for its sandwich in Europe, the ruling noted that any other company could also use the term “Big Mac” on its menus or marketing assets. The Newsjacking Burger King took full advantage of its competitor’s legal slip by launching a handful of marketing content discussing its own Big Mac-like products. For example, Burger King released European menus that promoted its own “Big Mac-ish” sandwiches, as seen below. It also offered a limited-time flame-grilled Big Mac that it claimed was bigger and tastier than the McDonald’s menu item. Below is the Burger King menu which highlights its Big Mac-ish items and the Big Mac copy.

Source: Marketing-Interactive.com This is a great example of how one company can take advantage of news relating to its competitor in a funny, but professional way. AeroMexico: “A World Without Borders” News Item Throughout President Donald Trump’s time in office, the administration has tightened border policies while continuing to construct a metal wall at the U.S. Mexico border. This has continued to fuel debates about whether the United States, a country that was historically founded by immigrants, should have such tight border policies and a wall. This debate reached a major pique when the Trump administration’s request for wall funding resulted in the longest government shutdown ever, running from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019. The Newsjacking AeroMexico, an airline that offers routes specifically to Mexico, paid close attention to these debates and took note of the fact that millions of Americans “did not want to travel to Mexico.” Rather than pivoting their strategy or adding routes to other locations, AeroMexico went to a rural United States town, DNA-tested residents who were in favor of the border wall, and offered them flight discounts based on the percentage of Mexican descent that was revealed on their DNA tests. AeroMexico then followed up with a commercial showing each person giving their views on immigration laws, Mexico, and the wall. During the commercial, which showed AeroMexico interviewing the residents, a cameraman asks each of them, “Would you consider going to Mexico?” Their discomfort with the idea of traveling south becomes apparent when they answer with statements like, “No way!” and “Let those folks stay on their side of the border.” It then showed their surpised facial expressions when they all found out about their Mexican heritage. Lastly, the commercial notes how most of them were interested in taking the discounted flight to Mexico once they were offered it.

“Many Americans don’t like Mexico. But … according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Mexican immigration goes as far as the 1800s, settling in on the south — meaning that a big percentage of descendants in the U.S.A. don’t even know it yet,” noted AeroMexico’s Clio award submission. “Without a significant budget, our strategy was to take advantage of the media coverage that President Trump’s government shutdown had. Therefore, we focused all of our PR resources on spreading our video on social media,” the submission added. According to the Clio submission, the campaign went viral, receiving more than 1.6 billion impressions. It also resulted in a 33.7% increase in ticket sales between the U.S. and Mexico. This campaign and commercial is a great example of how a company entered a political debate and made a point in a clever way. It also shows that they are proud of their business and those of the Mexican heritage because they’re willing to offer giant discounts, even to immigration critics, with Mexican descent. The commercial and campaign were so fascinating and thought-provoking that it even won a 2019 Clio Award. Gillette: “The Best Men Can Be” News Item In 2018 and 2019, the #MeToo movement led to a number of high-powered, and sometimes well-trusted, men getting accused or charged for sexual assault and harassment. High-level men who incurred allegations included film executive Harvey Weinstein and ex-Good Morning America co-host Matt Lauer. This movement was marked by the #MeToo social media trend, started by activist and Weinstein accuser Alyssa Milano. The trend encouraged women to spread awareness of how common sexual harassment, misconduct, and assault was by sharing stories along with the #MeToo hashtag. The Newsjacking Gillette, which has always positioned its shaving products as, “The Best a Man Can Get,” wanted to reposition its take on masculinity in light of the #MeToo movement. To do this, they aired an intense Super Bowl commercial that digs into toxic masculinity and the negative stereotypes related to manhood. The commercial begins with visuals of men looking in the mirror, with soundbites of news reports related to bullying, toxic masculinity, and the #MeToo movement. When the ad cuts to an old Gillette commercial showing a strong man, a narrator asks, “Is this really the best a man can get?” as a young boy breaks through a screen showing the old Gillette commercial while running from bigger male bullies.

The commercial goes on to show different aspects of toxic masculinity, such as texts from male bullies saying phrases like “FREAK!”, a male executive touching a woman’s shoulder in a meeting and stating, “What I think she’s trying to say is…”, and young children fighting as their father’s say, “Boys will be boys.” Suddenly, the narration says, “Something finally changed — and there will be no going back,” as the ad cuts to clips of news coverage following the #MeToo movement. The ad culminates by showing clips of men being good influences by stopping boys from fighting, standing up to bullies, and actual footage of a father telling his infant daughter that she is strong. “We believe in the best in men. To say the right thing, to act the right way. Some already are in ways big and small. But ‘some’ is not enough. Because the boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow,” the ad concludes. While the commercial highlighted a controversial item and allowed the company to take a progressive stance on it, it still came with some mixed reviews due to its sensitive nature. Although it has both positive and negative reviews, it’s important to include on this list so that marketers can learn both the positive and impacts of newsjacking strategies. Many who saw the ad felt that Gillette was desperately leaning into a sensitive movement to benefit its own brand. “Part of the Gillette’s motive for running the ad may be that there is recent research suggesting that millennials give more credit to brands using corporate social responsibility appeals,” noted a Forbes post. “In this case, it appears Gillette will learn a lesson about what not to do as pertains to corporate responsibility efforts.” Meanwhile, some still identified how it was a solid step forward in marketing. For example, a Wired post noted that the ad was an “undeniable sign of progress” despite its backlash. “Once again, the country seems divided. This time, it’s not a border wall or a health care proposal driving the animus, but an online ad for a men’s razor, because, of course,” the Wired article states. “But underneath the controversy lies something much more important: signs of real change.” All in all, it’s important to look at both the pros and cons of this example. Although Gillette’s commercial was high quality, made valid points, and stirred emotions from viewers, it’s important to keep in mind that this is a large company still aiming to succeed in a society that is much different than when its company began decades ago. Oreo’s Area 51 Tweet News Item In the fall of 2019, social media users were buzzing about a bizarre plan to raid Area 51, a highly classified government base which conspiracy theorists say is the home of testing extraterrestrials. The Newsjacking Oreo went to Twitter and simply joked, “What flavors do you think they’re hiding in #Area51?” Thousands of users, and even other brands, replied and shared the tweet.

This is a great example of a brand that affordably, and quickly, referenced newsy or trendy topics to gain engagement, likeability, and brand awareness on a social network. Not to mention, Oreo instantly got people to discuss great Oreo flavors on Twitter. While other brands on this list have embraced newsjacking with high-budget campaigns or commercials, Oreo shows that the strategy doesn’t have to get too complex, time-consuming, or costly for marketers. Newsjacking Takeaways for 2020 With fast-paced social media and online news published every second, there are more and more opportunities where marketers can embrace newsjacking. But, before you attempt to newsjack, take time to consider the news item and make sure that your strategy will be tasteful or informative, rather than offensive. For example, if you make a funny reference about a bizarre trend like the Area 51 raids, you might be seen as funny or memorable. However, if you post an insensitive campaign or comment about a controversial topic — such as immigration, you might be seen as out of touch. As you craft a creative newsjacking strategy, be sure to run it by other members of your marketing team and get your feedback to ensure that your content doesn’t flop. To learn more about how to cleverly embrace newsjacking, check out this blog post.

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The UK election and SEO games: Search, scandal, and big promises

The UK goes to the polls this week and the governing Conservatives have already made headlines for their online activities. Luke Richards dives into the political battleground that is the Google SERPs – and provides his analysis of the manifesto promises relevant to the digital business community.

As the UK heads towards its third general election in four years, the two main parties – Conservatives and Labour – both seem to agree that investment in digital technologies is crucial to tackling challenges within the economy, the environment, and the country’s working relationship with the rest of the world after Brexit.

Both parties have also invested a significant amount of their marketing budgets in their digital campaigns.

These past few weeks we’ve seen examples of good and downright poor practice when it comes to search engine marketing. We’ve seen varying success in search visibility, online sentiment, and traffic. And the content of the manifestos themselves – for a digital/tech business audience – makes for fascinating reading in light of the challenges I’ve mentioned above.

Here is my analysis.

Search visibility of the manifestos

We are massively lucky in the UK with the amount of transparency and information at our fingertips as we decide who to vote for in elections.

There are bad actors, as we will discover later, but sites such as They Work For You, Vote For Policies, and The Political Compass all help to separate the quality content from the noise. And with just a couple of clicks, we can have immediate access to any manifesto.

Even before we’ve clicked through to the Conservatives’ manifesto landing page, we already know what the party’s central plan is – should they command a majority in the next parliament: “to get Brexit done.”

UK elections Conservatives manifesto landing page SEO meta content

The “get Brexit done” mantra is one that is repeated countless times in the manifesto itself. I’d expected that the Conservative SEO team would be looking to get some visibility for this as a keyphrase. But a quick search for this finds the domain languishing only on page two of Google’s SERPs amid much negative press critical of this populist sloganeering.

Interestingly, the Liberal Democrats’ (a right-wing pro-Europe party) are targeting this key phrase as part of their paid search campaign – with their sponsored ads appear in position zero of the SERPs.

Beyond this, there isn’t much more to the search result save for the “vote conservative” call-to-action in the title and the URL. It’s notable for its brevity, leaving much of the rest of the SERPs open to be filled by positive and negative press, including two articles from The Daily Telegraph (a newspaper which previously employed Conservative leader Boris Johnson) and a well-ranked piece by Prospect magazine describing the party as a “threat to human rights”.

At first glance, the Labour party has adhered much better to onsite SEO best practice.

Their site links are well-served by Google. They command much of the SERP real estate and appear very useful to the user.

UK elections Manifesto Labour party Google SERP rich links

The choice for site links is a little surprising. The link to the “Accessible Manifesto” is a nice touch – showing consideration to web users who have difficulty reading the text. But the other links don’t really relate directly to the key policy points in the document itself such as their Green Industrial Revolution and National Education Service.

The closest the Labour search result has to a call-to-action is – the “be part of our movement – with your email address…” element, but it isn’t massively compelling.  Another misstep is that the PDF for Labour’s 2015 manifesto is still live and ranking well in position four of SERPs, which could quite easily confuse and frustrate users.

Sentiment elsewhere in the SERPs is more nuanced than what we see for the Conservatives. However, again, right-wing newspaper The Daily Telegraph takes position two and three of the SERPs – and although not immediately negative – one can imagine these articles aren’t massively objective after the user is moved to click through (although this content is behind a paywall).

Search traffic comparison

In the battle for search traffic, the Labour manifesto is vastly outperforming the Conservatives.

UK elections search traffic comparison showing the Labour Manifesto outperforming the Conservatives

At its peak – shortly after publication at the end of November – the Labour manifesto got three times as much traffic as the Conservative manifesto did when it performed best on November 24th.

The related queries according to Google Trends are illuminating. “Labour manifesto waspi” is clearly the biggest policy point in search terms online. Another breakout keyphrase is “fake labour manifesto” highlighting some of the underhand tactics employed by the Conservatives (as we’ll discuss below).

For the Conservatives, related queries are dominated by long-tail keyphrases that users are typing in to differentiate the new UK Conservative manifesto – “conservative manifesto 2019 UK” from the Canadian equivalent “conservative manifesto 2019 Canada”. Sadly for Prime Minister Johnson, there’s no appearance of “get Brexit done”. Do Google’s users actually care about this policy? Perhaps not.

Banned Google ads and misleading websites

The appearance of the breakout search term “fake labour manifesto” as highlighted at Google Trends points to some of the more bizarre aspects of this general election. The Conservatives have appeared to dabble in black hat tactics, and outright fakery, to try and confuse voters and diffuse the positive results Labour is clearly getting online.

To coincide with the launch of Labour’s manifesto, the Conservative party set up a fake website at labourmanifesto.co.uk and launched a paid search campaign to capture clicks from the SERPs.

Google banned eight search ads of the Conservatives due to policy breach

Google promptly banned eight of the Conservatives’ search ads

Google has promptly banned eight of the Conservatives’ search ads. The fake website is still live, but only really visible, currently, when searching for “fake labour manifesto” – and even then it appears below several news sources highlighting the Conservatives unethical behavior.

Google’s ad policy states:

“We value honesty and fairness, so we don’t allow the promotion of products or services that are designed to enable dishonest behaviour.”

I’d be very surprised if the Conservatives’ digital marketing team don’t know this.

But for the sake of democracy, it’s good to see the search engine stick to their principles here.

Promises to increase connectivity

Of the whole election so far, the digital policy which has perhaps received the most headlines is Labour’s “free full-fiber broadband to all by 2030”.

Back in 2016, Jeremy Corbyn won re-election as leader of the Labour Party on the back of such policy announcements as The Digital Democracy Manifesto. It’s not surprising that there is much reference to the emancipatory power of emerging technology and being properly connected in the current manifesto.

The digital democracy manifesto

As the document states, the intentions behind the free broadband initiative are to – “boost jobs, tackle regional inequality and improve quality of life as part of a mission to connect the country”. It is firmly rooted in a fairly detailed nationalization plan which will see the establishment of British Broadband with two arms, British Digital Infrastructure (BDI) and British Broadband Service (BBS), as well as bringing the broadband-relevant parts of BT into public ownership.

While it is a little more buried in the Conservative manifesto, they have their own broadband plan too.

UK election – Conservative and Unionist party Manifesto 2019

As is the case for nearly every policy point in the document, it is presented in reference to the UK’s ongoing relationship with the EU:

“We are Europe’s technology capital, producing start-ups and success stories at a dazzling pace. But not everyone can share the benefits”, it states.

“We intend to bring full fiber and gigabit-capable broadband to every home andbusiness across the UK by 2025.”

The policy is highlighted again in later pages as part of the government’s pledge to support rural life and coastal communities. “£5 billion in funding already promised”, it says. But beyond this, there is no detail on how much this broadband provision will cost to the end-user, nor to what degree it will be delivered by the private or public sector.

Education, skills and new technology

While the Conservative manifesto is presented through the lens of Brexit, the Labour manifesto is largely shaped by the environment and their central proposal to kickstart a ‘green industrial revolution.’

A skilled workforce is integral to this. The proposed National Education Service promises free education to everyone throughout their lives. This is of particular interest to those working in digital where we see re-training and re-skilling as increasingly important strategies to plug the skills gap in a fast-changing sector.

“With automation and the Green Industrial Revolution bringing major changes to industry,’ the manifesto states, ‘it is more important than ever that people have the opportunity to retrain and upskill throughout their lives…England already faces a shortage of people with higher-level technical qualifications, and demand for these skills will only grow as we create new green jobs.”

Skills are also a key feature for the Conservatives, despite the document failing to acknowledge the current gap businesses face.

A proposed £3 billion National Skills Fund is earmarked to upskill the British workforce.

“This fund will provide matching funding for individuals and SMEs for high-quality education and training”, the manifesto states.

“A proportion will be reserved for further strategic investment in skills, and we will consult widely on the overall design.”

The Conservatives also promise a further £2 billion to upgrade the entire further education college estate as well as planning to build 20 Institutes of Technology. Although there is little mention of what ends the skills fund and this education investment is for. Services are given a passing mention – “we should open up trade in services, in which the majority of us work and where most new jobs will be created.” – but there is little detail on what these service jobs are expected to be, how they will be supported by the state, and how they will be opened up.

Digital experience in health and public services

Healthcare is a massive issue in this election. Both parties are looking to emerging technologies as a way to help alleviate strains from underfunding and/or an aging population, as well as to improve diagnosis and patient experience.

Labour is pledging to increase spending across the health sector by an average of 4.3% per year. AI and cyber technology are two things earmarked for some of this investment, as well as state-of-the-art medical equipment. Their manifesto also acknowledges the importance of data rights to citizens within this increasingly digital area of our lives, promising to ensure:

‘Data protection for NHS and patient information.’

‘NHS data is not exploited by international technology and pharmaceutical corporations.’

The Conservative manifesto is not short on health tech promises either. They pledge to introduce an annual Health Technology Summit and they have also promised £1 billion extra annual social care funding to go towards – in part – new technology and facilities.

In the arena of citizen protections, the Conservative manifesto also proposes a new approach to cybercrime. “We will embrace new technologies and crackdown on online crimes”, the document states. “We will create a new national cybercrime force and empower the police to safely use new technologies like biometrics and artificial intelligence, along with the use of DNA, within a strict legal framework.”

The Labour party manifesto also devotes considerable wordcount to cybersecurity:

“Cybercrime and cyberwarfare are growing, all around the world. Every aspect of our lives, from the NHS to our nuclear facilities”, it states.

In response, the party plans to review two existing bodies – the National Cyber Security Centre and the National Crime Agency – to increase powers, capacity, and skills where necessary.

Labour also wants to extend more rights to citizens online with their proposed Charter of Digital Rights, as well as planning to introduce imprints for digital political adverts in an effort to combat fake news. Additionally, as part of their welfare plans, the party wants to give users multichannel access (online, telephone, face-to-face, and outreach support) to make help and assistance easier to access for all.

Costings

Both parties want big digital corporations to pay more tax. For Labour, this is a costed part of their plan to help fund their free broadband rollout and other projects (£23.7 billion from reversing cuts to corporation tax, £6.3 billion from unitary tax on multinationals, and £6.2 billion from their Fair Tax Programme).

UK election – Costings of the Labour party

The Conservatives have also promised to implement a digital services tax although there is no mention in the manifesto or the accompanying costings document as to what this tax rate will be, what it will bring in to the government, and which digital services this is aimed at.

On this front, my guess is Google, Facebook, Amazon et al. will be more concerned if a Labour government gets in than if a Conservative one is re-elected.

Much reference is made to British Broadband in Labour’s costings document and it is easy to make the link between their tax and spend plans. When looking at broadband in the Conservative costings document, however, its cost as part of their infrastructure strategy is reiterated, but it’s hard to see how it will actually be funded.

Further analysis of both party’s costings documents highlights the divide between them

When it comes to skills, the link between the money that’s needed for Labour to roll out their Lifelong Learning is easy to see across two tables. Yet the Conservative manifesto and costings document are harder to process. There are numerous tables, as well as proposed investments such as the ‘National Skills Fund worth £3 billion’ (as it is described in the manifesto) looking like it won’t receive any more than ~£600 million per year from 2021 until the end of the parliament (adding up to just £1.8 billion in total).

Analysis of Labour and Conservative party’s costing documents

  This trend continues in the context of health and public services technology.

£1 billion for social care per year is certainly a welcome promise by the Conservatives – with an aging population, staff shortages, and the availability of emerging technologies that help with remote care and increased independence for citizens. But when turning to the costings document again, this is nearly a third of the total income from the first year of their Sources of Revenue table and it doesn’t fill me with confidence that a party operating in the wake of their own austerity measures can actually deliver these PR-quotable lumps of cash.

Takeaways for the parties

The search campaigns by both parties in the lead up to this election have positive and negative points.

The simplistic and memorable SEO approach from the Conservatives may well be all they need to convince voters. But through the lens of the Google SERPs, the “get Brexit done” slogan has brought about some negative sentiment and doesn’t seem to be driving the traffic as we might expect.

Closing note regarding the Labour

Labour, on the other hand, has seemingly tried to capture attention via a number of issues. This is reflected in the manifesto itself, the site structure and onsite SEO, and the traffic success the domain is having with niche key phrases such as “labour manifesto waspi”.

Closing note regarding the Conservative

Yet, to look at the above and assume that the Conservatives have been lazy with their online campaign is wrong. Their paid search activity appears to have been synchronized and calculated. And rather than put forward their own policies in an attempt to influence clicks to their manifesto content, they’ve turned their efforts to misleading users and firing cheap shots at Labour policies which are seeing a positive response online.

Of course, these underhand tactics within the SERPs weren’t an isolated incident.

The Conservatives were also criticized (by The New York Times and others) when their press office passed off partisan opinion as objective ‘fact-checking’ on Twitter. The party’s activists have also been found to be posing as the Green Party in Facebook ads (in an attempt to split the left-leaning vote).

In the world of digital marketing, all these channels carry weight, but I would argue that it is the party’s search activities that are the most worrying from a democratic point of view. There’s no shifting the blame to frivolous press office employees or activists here – fake microsites and time-sensitive paid search campaigns are far more strategic, and those in the upper echelons of the party should bear at least some responsibility.

Takeaways for digital businesses

The Conservatives have been punished by Google for some of their activities, but whether they are punished at the ballot box remains to be seen. In the world of search, it is never worth trying to deceive users or impersonate competitors for clicks.

Those of us working in the digital industries are very aware of both the challenges and the opportunities in a technologically transformed world. The skills gap is a very immediate issue for all businesses adopting digital tools and emerging technologies. It is important that there are state-supported programs to try and close this gap.

In the UK, we also need a government committed to connecting those in society who are left behind when it comes to broadband provision. This is significant for those wanting to start up digital businesses away from urban centers, as well as for those whose digital audiences will grow with the rollout of dependable internet in rural areas.

In the business context

Consumers expect data protections and commitment to security – as well as experiences that are seamless across channels and customer-led. As more and more parts of our lives become entwined with digital technology – be it in healthcare or other public services – we need to be able to trust that attitudes towards rights and data are citizen-led. Members of the public must be educated, empowered, and safe.

There is much pessimism about what is around the corner for the UK – a country faced with Brexit, the environmental crisis, and more besides. In a superficial sense, it’s possible to read these manifestos as a business owner and be daunted by the detail of corporation tax rises in the Labour document while feeling that the Conservatives would be a profit-friendly prospect. But it is the lack of detail in the Conservative manifesto which should be a major worry to corporations: the ‘digital services tax,’ the commitment to seemingly arbitrary investment lumps, and even ‘get Brexit done’ rings hollow after three years of failed negotiations – how can any corporation trust this?

A government that is committed to ethical, reasonable, transparent, and long term ideas about how we can work and live together is one that I feel we should be supporting at this election and those forthcoming in the US and elsewhere. After all, these are the virtues I would expect of a modern business faced with the challenges and opportunities of a future of digital transformation and emerging technology. It seems justified to expect this in politics too.

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The post The UK election and SEO games: Search, scandal, and big promises appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/12/11/uk-election-and-seo-games/

[live4thelord-blog1]

Biblical Basics about Mother Mary – A Homily for the Second Sunday of the Year

Msgr. Charles Pope •

In this Sunday’s Gospel passage of the wedding feast at Cana, there is a theological portrait of both Mother Mary and prayer. Let’s look at the Gospel along five lines:

I. The place that Mary has – The text says, There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.

A fascinating thing about these opening verses is that Mary almost seems to dominate the scene; the presence of Jesus is mentioned only secondarily. St. Thomas Aquinas notes that at Cana, Mary acts as the “go-between” in arranging a mystical marriage (Commentary on John, 98; and 2, 1, n.336, 338, and 343, 151-152). Once the marriage is arranged, she steps back; her final words to are these: “Do whatever he tells you.”

How many of us has Mary helped to find her Son and to find our place at the wedding feast of the Lamb? I know that it was Mary who drew me back to her Son when I had strayed.

II. The prayer that Mary makes – The text says, When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”

Notice another central role that Mary has: intercessor. She is praying to her Son for others. There are three qualities to her prayer:

Discernment – Mary notices the problem, probably even before the groom and bride do. Indeed, mothers often notice the needs of their children before they do. Why didn’t Jesus notice? Surely, as God, He knew, but He waits for us to ask. Yes, God waits for us; He expects us to ask Him. In part this is respect; not all of us are ready to receive all His gifts. This expectation that we ask is also rooted in God’s teaching that we must learn to depend on Him and to take our many needs to Him. The Book of James says, You have not because you ask not (James 4:2).

Diligence – Simply put, Mary prays. Rather than merely fretting and being anxious, she goes directly to her Son out of love for the couple (us) and trust in her Son. She sees the need and gets right to the work of praying, of beseeching her Son.

Deference – Mary does not tell Jesus what to do, she simply points out the need: “They have no wine.” Mary is not directive, as if to say, “Here is my solution for this problem. Follow my plans exactly. Just sign here at the bottom of my plan for action.” Rather, she simply observes the problem and places it before her Son in confidence. He knows what to do and will decide the best way to handle things.

In this way Mary, models prayer for us. What wine are you lacking now? What wine do your children and grandchildren lack? Do you notice your needs and the needs of others and consistently pray? Or must things get critical for you to notice or pray? When you pray, do you go to the Lord with trust or with your own agenda?

So, Scripture teaches that Mary is the quintessential woman of prayer, a paragon of prayer. Not only does she intercede for us, she teaches us how to pray.

III. The portrait of Mary – The text says, Woman, how does this concern of yours affect me? My hour has not yet come. His mother said to the servers, “Do whatever he tells you.” Notice three things about this brief dialogue:

The title of Mary – Jesus calls her “woman.” In Jewish culture this was a respectful way for a man to address a woman, but it was unheard of for a son to address his mother in this fashion.

Hence, this text stands out as unusual and signals that Jesus is speaking at a deeper level. In the Johannine texts, Jesus always calls his Mother, “Woman.” This is in fulfillment of Genesis 3:15, which says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall crush your head, while you strike at his heel. Thus, Jesus is saying that Mary is this woman who was prophesied.

Far from being disrespectful to Mary, Jesus is exalting her by saying that she is the woman who was prophesied; she is the woman from whose “seed” comes forth the Son destined to destroy the power of Satan.

In this sense Mary is also the new Eve. Jesus also calls her “Woman” at the foot of the cross; He is the new Adam while Mary is the new Eve, and the tree is the cross. Thus, just as humans got into trouble by a man, a woman, and a tree, so now we get out of trouble through the same path. Adam’s no is reversed by Jesus, who saves us by his yes. Eve’s no is reversed by Mary’s yes.

The tenacity of Mary – In Greek, Jesus’ words to his mother are these: τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί, γύναι – ti emoi kai soi, gunai (What to me and to thee, Woman?). When this phrase appears elsewhere in the Scriptures (e.g., Gen 23:15; 1 Kings 19:20) it usually indicates tension between the interlocutors. On the surface, it would seem that Jesus is resisting his mother’s attempt to involve him in this matter. What makes this interpretation odd, though, is that Mary doesn’t appear to interpret Jesus’ response as resistance.

Perhaps there was something in the tone of voice that Jesus used, or perhaps there was a look between them that resolved the tension and evoked Jesus’ sympathy for the situation. Whatever the case, Mary stays in the conversation with Jesus and overcomes whatever tension or resistance existed. In this we surely see her tenacity.

We can see Mary’s tenacity at other times: Though startled by the presence of the angel Gabriel, she engaged him in a respectful but pointed conversation in which she sought greater detail. Mary also hastened to visit her cousin Elizabeth, and in the dialogue that followed she proclaimed a Magnificat that was anything but a shy and retiring prayer. She joyfully acknowledged the Lord’s power in her life and all but proclaimed a revolutionary new world order.

To be tenacious means to hold fast despite obstacles or discouragements. However we interpret Jesus’ initial resistance to Mary’s concern, it is clear that she does not give up; she expects the Lord to answer her favorably. This is made clear by her confident departure from the conversation, when she turns to the stewards with this instruction: “Do whatever he tells you.”

The trust of Mary – She simply departs, telling the stewards, “Do whatever he tells you.” She does not hover. She does not come back and check on the progress of things. She does not try to control or manipulate the outcome. She simply departs and leaves it all to Jesus.

IV. The power of Mary’s prayer – Whatever his initial concerns regarding Mary’s request, Jesus goes to work. Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus told them, “Fill the jars with water.” So they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, “Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.” So they took it. And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine, without knowing where it came from—although the servers who had drawn the water knew—the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.”

If we do the math, we can estimate that Jesus produced almost 150 gallons of the best wine. Mary’s prayer and tenacity produced abundant results.

Sometimes the Lord tells us to wait so that He can grant further abundance. Scripture says, But they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint (Isaiah 40:31).

The Catholic tradition of turning to Mary and regarding her as a special intercessor with particular power is rooted in this passage. Mary is not merely an intercessor for us, though; she is also a model. Following her example, we should persevere in prayer and go to the Lord with confident expectation of His abundant response. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much (James 5:16).

V. The product of Mary’s prayer – The text says, Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory and his disciples began to believe in him.

At the conclusion of this Gospel is the significant result that many began to believe in the Lord as a result of this miracle. This is Mary’s essential role with reference to Jesus, that she should lead many souls to a deeper union with her Son. Having done so, she leaves us with this instruction: “Do whatever he tells you.”

Mary’s role is to hold up Christ for us to see, as she did at Bethlehem for the shepherds (and later the Wise Men) and for Simeon and Anna at the Temple. Her role is to point to His glory as she does here at Cana. Ultimately, Mary’s role is to hold Jesus’ body in her arms at the foot of the cross after He is taken down.

As a mother, Mary has a special role in the beginnings of our faith, in the infancy and childhood of our faith. The text says that many “began to believe.” In Greek grammar, this phrase is an example of an inceptive aorist, often used to stress the beginning of an action or the entrance into a state. Thus, Mary has a special role in helping to initiate our faith, in helping (by God’s grace) to birth Christ in us. As St. Thomas Aquinas says, she is the “go-between,” the great matchmaker in the mystical marriage of Christ and the soul. Having done that, her final words are these: “Do whatever he tells you.” And while she may draw back a bit, she continues to pray for us.

Here, then, are some biblical basics about Mother Mary, gleaned from this Gospel passage of the wedding feast at Cana.

[orphans-forest-blog]

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Google is producing sure it will take longer to observe results from black and white hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and intent on ensuring the flux in its SERPs dependent largely on where the searcher is on the planet at the time associated with the search, and in which usually the business is located close to to that searcher. With voice search comes 2 parts of interest to SEO people wanting to connect with consumers: intention and context. I actually released our content strategy on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Hacker's blog to help other SEOs improve their website's content material. With this blog we will discuss away page SEO is detail plus will discover some effective away page SEO techniques which a person must try in first associated with all we would like in order to discuss the importance of away page SEO” and how this can be good for site owners. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION has more aspects related in order to your problem and it furthermore helps you know drawbacks associated with your website, so, promoting via SEO will not only assist you land on first web pages of Engines like google, but it furthermore lets you the find the particular defects on your website that will further assists with removing all of them. Although recommendation links will still provide several rankings to the site, the particular highest rankings will most most likely come through the integration associated with link building to SEO articles. You also wish in order to ensure that your images nevertheless index with Google when shifting to a CDN For customers of the Yoast SEO wordpress plugin, you will want to include the following code to the particular bottom of your file. Whichever way you choose to categorize keywords, one of the most important steps in SEO is doing keyword research. Properly, chosen SEO keywords help individuals to get your site through search engines. Very first of all, SEO is a good acronym for Search Engine Improved. Users don't want to wait for a internet page so if your internet page is slow in 2018, forget about SEO and your own bounce rate will down. Since this had been a major change in the particular SEO landscape, I took this upon myself to gather data and present what mobile research optimization actually is, and publish this on our company's blog. The growth associated with Google's featured snippet, voice research, Local SEO, and PPC provides better result in diverting visitors to your site as in comparison to the organic listing. Although, it is usually bit time consuming to produce a quality video, it is usually more than worth it. Ideal for traffic and SEO as properly. In this post, we will be listing five technical SEO tricks to enhance organic traffic, rankings and earnings. Backlinks performs important aspect of offsite SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Exactly why is seo (SEO) so essential? There are lots of methods to find keywords for SEO. Three major SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION intelligence platforms - SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Serpstat - help determine keywords with less competition simply by including a keyword difficulty metric. SEO in 2018 won't be greater than any kind of other year, but new tendencies are happening for sure. Plus that's one of the initial images that cross my brain each time I see sites getting penalized by Google owing to faulty SEO. Like merely said that will user experience was of comparable importance as on-page SEO regarding ranking high in search. SEO appears for Search Engine Optimization, which usually is the increasing the high quality and quantity of people in order to your website. It's not enough to merely have a good understanding associated with the 2018 SEO trends in the event that you aren't ready to leap along with both feet. Meta description plays the major role in search motor ranking of your post therefore writing an SEO friendly meta description is important for rank factor. Yes, you can now obtain more personalized, precise and well-timed search results; however, this provides made the SEO job even more challenging too. Power Tip: Such as with a article, I've discovered that you get a small video SEO boost by placing your keyword at the starting of the title. (Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the best helper! ) Neither the user nor the search engine likes malfunctioning links. CoSchedule saw the 594 percent increase in visitors by reshaping their SEO articles strategy to become more in-line with searcher intent. These ‘quality updates' are very reminiscent of Search engines Panda updates and often influence many websites at the exact same time - and often these types of focus on demoting similar ‘low-quality' SEO techniques we have already been told Panda targets. Each SEO person was always speaking about long tail keywords They will are multi-word phrases that obtain a lot more fine-tuned or even even perhaps just various methods of saying the same point. Now that SEO is getting very popular among device users, it will be safe to say that SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION on mobile platforms will improve and improve business to customer relationships in 2018. A brand new wrinkle within the SEO game is interpersonal networking or social media advertising, which not just helps your own company to be found, yet also allows your business in order to interact directly together with your potential clients. When it arrives to SEO Trends in 2018, Relevancy is still exactly the particular same. Good keyword research is the cornerstone of your SEO. Your blog site post is about SEO guidelines. We all reach out to the Step and various other local websites to promote the events, which usually aids in our SEO. With Ahrefs, a great starting stage for keyword research for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is the Keywords Explorer device. SEMrushย โ€ A very extensive SEO tool that, among other features, provides a detailed look into your domainโ€s backlinks letting you discover and remove potentially dangerous backlinks. My first tag is definitely my exact target keyword (Example: Google SEO”). With an increased concentrate on user experience, Google provides challenged the SEO community in order to pay more focus on the particular overall experience of a site and how the information interacts with users, rather than just the basic elements that many optimize toward. SEO helps keep your business at the best of the search results with regard to a long time to arrive, so who knows how a lot of more visitors you'll attract. Several marketers chose to drive their own modern marketing engine with the particular fuel of Video SEO within 2015. I haven't heard that will new videos are given concern but I have definitely noticed this and think it could be correct - I just haven't completed (or read about) any screening on it. Google likes refreshing content though and especially within the field of SEO, points get outdated quickly so a great new video can definitely become powerful. There's a great program for analyzing websites called Screaming Frog SEO Spider It gives users the opportunity to check their blogs for broken links, external and internal links, pages that don't exist anymore and redirects, defining Title, H1 and a number of other features. Your contribution to Advanced SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tricks is appreciated, It is definitely rightly said by you SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tricks to enhance traffic continues to be the same All we require to do is to highlight on making sure that every web page has appropriate name tags and that the articles is not really thin” or low-quality and other Off page tactics. One off page SEO method to be very specific along with search pages as well since to increase response and hyperlink acquisition rates in your outreach would be to actually make use of in moment options online lookup. The next SEO Methods in 2018 is to adhere to Voice Search. I believed I'd offer some advice in order to stay ahead of SEO developments that are bound to create a big impact in 2018. Understanding consumer behavior - and how in order to create a great website encounter for those users - will certainly solve most, if not just about all, of your SEO problems relocating forward. While the research engines try and deliver the particular right answer to their consumer, it really is our work as SEOs to comprehend exactly what that user is looking intended for and deliver that answer intended for them with the search motor. Another reason to enhance your images for SEO: this gives search engines like search engines another clue of what your own page is about…which can assist it position in organic search. SEO is looking futuristic along with popular search engines like Search engines, Bing and Yahoo getting better, answering more queries related in order to page results and increasing the particular trend the of voice research. As internet internet marketers, bloggers, and small business proprietors, SEO is essential. Therefore, today I'll list out 10 low-cost SEO tips that can improve your ranking on the particular search engines. The keyword SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tips and tricks was obtaining decent searches per month. Join Mark Mitchell of BrightEdge in a detailed explained preparing your SEO activity for 2018, which will include reflecting on the SEO performance from 2017, evaluating your existing resources, planning fresh SEO 2019 Slide search technologies coming down the particular line in 2018, and even more. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION includes strategies like keyword concentrating on, article marketing, backlink building, plus more, which helps your web site rank better in search motors like Google. Within order to have an efficient website along with having solid content, responsiveness and also a strong site structure it is important in order to constantly stay updated with most recent SEO-techniques and your target marketplace.

[royal-red-asks]

What [Current Popular TV Show] Can Teach You About SEO

SEO can be the complex subject. Since the requirement for Digital Advertising for business is aggressively increasing, so does for SEO Styles too. One of the many important parts of the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is creating unique content along with proper keywords. Key phrases are the foundation of productive SEO. Within SEO, we refer to the particular acquiring new backlinks as back-link And as many practitioners acknowledge, it's rather a challenging action. We can subdivide these SEO ranking facets into two sections: On-Page and Off-Page SEO. Make no error, a new website is your own first step to gaining plenty of qualified traffic, and issue of fact, a great web site will certainly help your visitors numbers increase once users discover your online location - yet until then, we recommend the great SEO campaign. Over the particular coming year, voice search will be an area SEO specialists plus marketers need to be conscious of, especially with featured clips. Site's speed is definitely of the heart in lookup engines and SEO trends 2018, whether it be in desktop or cellular. I needed in order to become an seo expert, this particular really is just awesome plus very helpful in knowing therefore much about Search Engine Marketing. Proven SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques such as for instance quality content, focused keywords plus link building are still because effective, yet there are a lot of more trends emerging that may power us to change our technique of search engine optimization. For illustration, if you're a bakery, and also you want to rank highly with regard to the term chocolate coconut cookies, ” your SEO company can be sure to create content material based on that keyword plus include it in your titles and meta descriptions. Therefore, your Local SEO strategies should be to first target as many high quality and authoritative websites as you can. If you would like to get more traffic through SEO in 2018, I suggest creating and optimizing content particularly for YouTube. Because the competition to obtain on top of search motors gets tougher, the need in order to adapt to these shifts within SEO also increases. C-K's SEO team provides sifted through many of all of them and created our list associated with key trends to plan with regard to in 2018. Daily news plus insights about search engine marketing and advertising, SEO and paid search. Because Google gets smarter, repeating key phrases in your content matters much less and less for SEO. As the next season of 2018 is closer in order to us, it is time in order to thinking about the latest SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy for 2018 to increase your website ranking in research result. It's all component of promotion and SEO, since links, and behavioral factors just increase from such collaboration. One main impact the mobile-first index simply because well as the rise associated with voice search might have upon SEO is the shift through exact match phrases to the more broad match SEO, exactly where search engines like google even more easily interpret natural language. For example, the title of this weblog post is WordPress SEO Directory - 50 Tips for 2018. ” We are placing our own keyword, WordPress SEO” on the really beginning. Just before you implement SEO to your own website, you must know exactly what words or keywords your focus on audience is definitely to lookup for the product or assistance that you simply offer. Reverse image lookup is an effective off-page SEO practice that helps link building professionals to find out blogs exactly where the image has been inserted. Keywords are important for local SEO too. While there are therefore many opportunities in the globe of SEO in 2018, articles and links are just mainly because important as ever. To obtain into the minds from the particular SEO specialists, read the comprehensive research below to get deep insights about the top priorities, problems, practices and their impacts upon latest SEO trends. In 2018, the particular key to SEO is in order to provide content that is fascinating and directly relevant for your own community to become visible further than Google's influence. As cellular usage is within the increase -- 58% of online searches are usually carried out that way, instead than the 40% on the particular desktop - it seems practical that SEO will continue performing work in that direction. The school methods of SEO are actually phased out and the new lookup engine algorithms have introduced the new at-par levels for various other techniques that should be regarded as while creating a website style. All of us do advanced SEO for Lot of money 500 websites and our strategies are built on these concepts. Now, the only method to appear in the lookup engine pages like this will be by uploading your videos upon You Tube or through movie SEO. On-Page SEO is generally accompanied with Off-Page SEO, that is usually based on building trustworthy incoming links for your site : this is most frequently known as linkbuilding. As the conduct of a user searching search engine optimization company in Mumbai ” may be different from a user looking for seo company in Chennai Therefore, advertisers should not battle in the same way since these people used to do in the particular previous years. Whether you are the marketer or a business proprietor, learning new SEO tactics plus following best practices can assist you secure a safe place online.

Create sure you leverage all these SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Trends to stay on best of the organic and presented listings of Google SERPs. 50 Best On-Page SEO Strategies to rank in the first page with zero Back hyperlinks. Just remember to pay interest to solid content creation plus copywriting fundamentals, engage your audiences deeply, and stay abreast associated with technical trends like backlinks, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION health, site speed, and schema. To get in to the depths of this subject and know how SEO styles could affect the digital marketing and advertising industry in 2018, I wanted the responses of some associated with the industry leaders. For advanced online marketers it looks something like this particular: you might have an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION plan in place, you may have your list of superior keywords, you're actively blogging plus your website is optimized. Now SEO styles 2018 have to contest along with limited real estate, preliminary cable connections in addition to all these people already deal with. I actually m glade to see somebody taken you a chance in order to explain about mobile SEO and the PWA application, Nice Write-up sir. We are excited to listen to from you about ON-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and OFF-page seo ways to position first. Nevertheless, this particular is not the real problem for Seo (SEO). There are LOTS of tone of voice searches in the world associated with local SEO. Search motor optimization (SEO) will be the process associated with affecting the online visibility associated with the website or a internet page in a web research engine 's unpaid results—often identified as "natural", " organic inch, or "earned" results. Every company and consultant has their very own SEO methodology; therefore they might use different methods to accomplish high organic rankings for sites. One associated with the best techniques for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is including search engine pleasant URL links for every plus every page that you have got written or else you will write. Entering the dialog search outside of smartphones will open new opportunities for both SEO and content marketing, allowing users to interact with users inside a unique, but still of use way for them. I believe that will 2018 is going to be the particular year where voice search changes how users search and SEOs need to optimize. The purpose of off-page SEO might be to get links in order to your information. There are usually many tools on the internet to assist with basic key word research (including the Google Key phrase Planner tool and there are even more useful third party SEO tools in order to help you do this). Another important issue to add up to the particular checklist for local SEO within 2018 is UX. The consumer experience for Local SEO will certainly become even more important within 2018. In the older times of SEO, Google didn't want to understand modifiers, meaning if We put in more keywords within like best” or new, ” I could outrank someone which failed to use those key phrases in the meta title. While the real difference, for the snippets, is not the method the information continues to become fetched by Google (as this particular works much like the great old SEO) but how the particular result is presented towards the particular user: these snippets answer the lot of questions, triggered simply by our voice. Still, the key word facet of SEO is becoming more and more difficult with Google Adwords concealing volume data. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION specialists started to abuse Page rank to be able to raise the rankings. This blog uses the particular tagline Learn SEO Straight through the Search Engines, ” plus it doesn't tackle easy topics. Learn Search Engine Marketing From The Basics Find the very good Keywords On Web page & Off Site SEO! Here's the exactly where we try to find says of Active Campaign, with simply no link to, utilizing the SERP Tool from the LinkResearchTools SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION toolkit. While this particular holistic approach will eventually get rid of a lot of the problems created by some SEO professionals through the years, I believe that search engines' engineers may initially overestimate the precision associated with their AI, leading to Penguin-level collateral damage. One important aspect associated with taking care of SEO is definitely identifying issues that are harming search engine rankings and decreasing the traffic you get through SERPs. is a Toronto structured social internet marketing agency, expert in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social networking management, digital marketing plus online branding. The biggest SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION change and trend I discover already happening in 2018 is usually Google's in order to the mobile-first index, so if the website is not yet mobile-friendly and optimized for it, is actually critical to prioritize this since it is now fundamental because of its SEO success. Because we look ahead to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018, discover our forecasts for what we should believe will be one of Google's biggest years yet for research. Keyword research is one particular of the first things trained to beginners learning SEO plus is still very effective in order to this day. Google already announced that they will are experimenting with mobile-first indexing, which shows that it's a single of the most important SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends that they are severe about prioritizing. In addition to making articles available to search engines such as google, SEO also helps enhance rankings to ensure that content material will be placed where people will more readily find this. The web is becoming more and more competitive, and those companies which perform SEO will have the decided advantage in visitors plus customers.

I agree with almost all points but still uncertain how voice search can exchange to SEO. SEO content in 2018 requirements to be fact-based, user-targeted plus compliant with Google's truthfulness specialist signals. The trouble is that SEO ranking factors have changed a lot over the years (find out how in our keyword research guide ). That means the search engine optimization methods that worked 5 in years past will not fly today. While I still notice this trend in play along with many enterprises still in the particular middle of their digital alteration, the convergence in the MarTech space is creating many synergies and opportunities which should end up being seen as a welcome advancement for brands and agencies who else are searching for an advantage in regards to their SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION motivated content marketing or outreach methods. For marketers who had been raised in the ‘traditional SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION market, ' 2018 is the time to adapt or pass away. If your web pages were designed to get the particular most out of Google, along with commonly known and now out-of-date SEO techniques chances are Search engines has identified this and is usually throttling your rankings in a few way. Although recommendation links will still provide several rankings to the site, the particular highest rankings will most most likely come through the integration associated with link building to SEO articles. You also wish in order to ensure that your images nevertheless index with Google when relocating to a CDN For customers of the Yoast SEO wordpress plugin, you will want to include the following code to the particular bottom of your file. Whichever way you choose to categorize keywords, one of the most important steps in SEO is doing keyword research. Properly, chosen SEO keywords help individuals to get your site through search engines. Very first of all, SEO is a good acronym for Search Engine Improved. Users don't want to wait for a internet page so if your internet page is slow in 2018, forget about SEO and your own bounce rate will down. Since this has been a major change in the particular SEO landscape, I took this upon myself to gather stats and present what mobile lookup optimization actually is, and publish this on our company's blog.

The growth associated with Google's featured snippet, voice research, Local SEO, and PPC provides better result in diverting visitors to your site as in comparison to the organic listing. Despite the fact that, it will be bit time consuming to produce a quality video, it is usually more than worth it. Ideal for traffic and SEO as properly. In this write-up, we will be listing five technical SEO tricks to enhance organic traffic, rankings and earnings. Backlinks performs important aspect of offsite SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Exactly why is seo (SEO) so essential? There are lots of methods to find keywords for SEO. Three major SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION intelligence platforms - SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Serpstat - help determine keywords with less competition simply by including a keyword difficulty metric. SEO in 2018 won't be greater than any kind of other year, but new developments are happening for sure. Plus that's one of the very first images that cross my thoughts each time I see internet sites getting penalized by Google expected to faulty SEO. Like easily said that will user experience was of comparable importance as on-page SEO with regard to ranking high in search. SEO appears for Search Engine Optimization, which usually is the increasing the high quality and quantity of people in order to your website. It's not enough to merely have a good understanding associated with the 2018 SEO trends in the event that you aren't ready to leap along with both feet. Meta description plays the major role in search motor ranking of your post therefore writing an SEO friendly meta description is important for position factor. Yes, you can now obtain more personalized, precise and well-timed search results; however, this provides made the SEO job even more challenging too. Power Tip: Such as with a article, I've discovered that you get a small video SEO boost by placing your keyword at the starting of the title. (Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the best helper! ) Neither the user nor the search engine likes malfunctioning links. CoSchedule saw the 594 percent increase in visitors by reshaping their SEO articles strategy to become more lined up with searcher intent.

To get exceptional SEO results, spend some period finding the best relevant content material. With the vast majority of search queries emerging through mobile, SEO professionals are focusing on it in relation to voice lookup to enhance their SEO. The SEO experts are usually depending more on videos in order to drive traffic. So, along with content material marketing, SEO now must be seriously aligned with your company's PAGE RANK efforts. These SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION crawler programs are similar in order to Google's own crawlers and may give you an overview displaying how your page will execute in SEO rankings. In purchase to help you stay within front of the competition, beneath you will find the most recent SEO trends and ranking aspects in 2018. The value associated with keyword studies still prolific within SEO, despite the fact that we've been changing to a topic-based search globe for years now. SEO is usually driven by Google Majorly and Other small search engines. What really matters within SEO in 2018 is precisely what you prioritise today therefore that in 3-6 months a person can see improvements within the particular quality of your organic visitors.

Your blog page post is about SEO ideas. All of us reach out to the Holding chamber and various other local websites to promote the events, which usually aids in our SEO. With Ahrefs, an excellent starting stage for keyword research for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is the Keywords Explorer device. SEMrushย โ€ A very extensive SEO tool that, among other features, provides a detailed look into your domainโ€s backlinks letting you discover and remove potentially dangerous backlinks. My first tag is usually my exact target keyword (Example: Google SEO”). With an increased concentrate on user experience, Google provides challenged the SEO community in order to pay more focus on the particular overall experience of a site and how the information interacts with users, rather than just the basic elements that many optimize toward. SEO could keep your business at the best of the search results with regard to a long time to arrive, so who knows how numerous more visitors you'll attract. Numerous marketers chose to drive their particular modern marketing engine with the particular fuel of Video SEO within 2015. Because they look issues up on visual search equipment, such as Google Images plus Pinterest, it's important to boost SEO on all image plus video content. We have some great ratings, but we are always searching to improve and see exactly what the future holds for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Fairly recently, I've observed a resurgence of on-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION factors making a difference within search engine rankings. Don't forget to incorporate the particular basics of SEO, featured thoughts, rich content (like videos), hyperlink earning, and UX in your own strategy. Based on how relevant these keywords are for your business, you can start shortlisting them for your own SEO optimisation process. I actually have a guide for Wp local SEO in my routing menu but most everything will be the same even for non-WordPress sites. This particular could create friction and the particular impression that many well-designed sites are very poorly optimized with regard to SEO. Unfortunately, 95% of hyperlinks from SEO link building never ever bring a single new website visitor to your site. In fact, SEO is completely vital to your search motor marketing success. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION today is not about bloatedness content with keyword variations or even optimizing a post to position for a number of key phrases; it's about optimizing a one post to rank for any solitary, specific keyword (aka, the entire page should be built about a singular idea, answering questions from every angle and within the most efficient format possible). This is usually due in part to Google's work to crack upon inauthentic content, which is what can make SEO so important. Hope, we'll all be SEOtent enough with SERP rankings. The mobile influx has had a significant impact on SEO and will keep on to disrupt and shape cellular optimization trends and strategies. Still, the keyword aspect associated with SEO is becoming increasingly tough with Google Adwords hiding quantity data. You post the great information, could you recommend me how to improve internet site ranking without doing any away page seo. Keywords: Speaking of content, key phrases is also extremely important in order to an SEO strategy. As internet entrepreneurs, bloggers, and small business proprietors, SEO is essential. Therefore, today I'll list out 10 low-cost SEO tips that will certainly improve your ranking on the particular search engines. The keyword SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tips and tricks was obtaining decent searches per month. Join Mark Mitchell of BrightEdge in a detailed facts preparing your SEO activity for 2018, which will include reflecting on the SEO performance from 2017, evaluating your existing resources, planning brand-new SEO 2019 PDF search technologies coming down the particular line in 2018, and even more. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION includes strategies like keyword concentrating on, article marketing, backlink building, plus more, which helps your web site rank better in search motors like Google. Within order to have an efficient website along with having solid content, responsiveness along with a strong internet site structure it is important in order to constantly stay updated with most recent SEO-techniques and your target marketplace.

[seattle-fog]

What [Current Popular TV Show] Can Teach You About SEO

SEO can be the complex subject. Since the requirement for Digital Advertising for business is aggressively expanding, so does for SEO Developments too. One of the many important parts of the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is creating unique content along with proper keywords. Key phrases are the foundation of productive SEO. Within SEO, we refer to the particular acquiring new backlinks as back link And as many practitioners acknowledge, it's rather a challenging exercise. We can subdivide these SEO ranking facets into two sections: On-Page and Off-Page SEO. Make no error, a new website is your own first step to gaining lots of qualified traffic, and issue of fact, a great site will certainly help your visitors numbers increase once users discover your online location - yet until then, we recommend the great SEO campaign. Over the particular coming year, voice search is definitely an area SEO specialists plus marketers need to be conscious of, especially with featured thoughts. Site's speed is definitely of the heart in research engines and SEO trends 2018, be it in desktop or cellular. Regarding example, considering the keyword tea” or marketing” may take very a long time for enhancing the ranking for every upon Google, however, using less looked terms like home tea-maker” or even SEO marketing for your business” can improve your chances associated with raking high in Google. Search Motor Optimization is done through composing SEO optimized content for the website. I WOULDN'T 301 REFOCUS users blindly to your house page in case you anticipate any SEO benefits from 301s. Nevertheless, 2018 SEO trends will prove in order to be the clincher. Canonical: This particular plug-in handles content syndication, which usually essentially allows other blogs in order to publish your job (similar to franchising) without hurting your website's SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking—simply by having a rel=canonical may get your brand and articles out on the web within multiple outlets, ensuring a better reach and bigger audience without having hurting your own search outcomes. Rich snippets and schema markup language is the one that a single needs to work on even more to get a good increase in SEO score and furthermore for having a better rank searching engine results page (also called SERP). ” The wealthy snippets are a way in order to communicate with Google concerning the content material contained within the site. Now SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends 2018 have to match with limited property, preliminary contacts in addition to all they will already deal with. The shift toward long-tail keywords will be even more necessary to SEO success in 2018. I firstly read your own SEO strategy: #1 Ranking Along with Guestographics, I really liked therefore. And when you tailor your own on-page SEO around the perfect keywords, you'll watch your web site rocket to the top associated with Google — landing you even more traffic, leads, sales along the particular way. Analyze the top 3 search results with any keywords density tool or Chrome extension, like SEOquake This is enough to form a list of relevant keywords and synonyms. Intended for businesses looking to raise their particular search engine rankings, it shows that a comprehensive social press strategy might be in purchase - in addition to most the usual SEO tactics. This used to be the bigger factor in SEO, however it still provides a high quality user experience when done nicely, increasing actions. Just before you implement SEO to your own website, you must know exactly what key words or keywords your focus on audience is definitely to research for the product or support that you simply offer. Reverse image lookup is an effective off-page SEO practice that helps link building professionals to find out blogs exactly where the image has been inlayed. Keywords are important for local SEO too. While there are therefore many opportunities in the planet of SEO in 2018, articles and links are just mainly because important as ever. To obtain into the minds from the particular SEO specialists, read the comprehensive research below to get serious insights about the top priorities, problems, practices and their impacts upon latest SEO trends. In 2018, the particular key to SEO is in order to provide content that is fascinating and directly relevant for your own community to become visible over and above Google's influence. As cellular usage is within the increase : 58% of online searches are usually carried out that way, instead than the 40% on the particular desktop - it seems practical that SEO will continue performing work in that direction. This takes ability, constant updating, plus pushiness to stay on best of the search results, gowns why many small businesses appear for elegant SEO services regarding their site. Details are important for local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION because it shows Google that will you're popular in your region. Joanna Gadel has been functioning as a search engine optimisation and marketing expert since the particular last decade in a most respected Australian SEO company named simply by SEO Sydney Throughout this period, he has viewed many adjustments in the advance SEO methods. You'll have to believe a lot more like the human while doing keyword analysis for your SEO campaigns. As a Social Media, SEO & SEM expert with over 8 years' experience in on line marketing, he uses his keen insight into customer behaviour to formulate innovative strategies that helps clients enhance their online presence & open up new business avenues. Research engine optimization, or SEO, is definitely constantly changing, and those that will practice it must keep upward up to now with these types of changes.

Create sure you leverage each one of these SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Trends to stay on best of the organic and included listings of Google SERPs. 50 Best On-Page SEO Strategies to rank in the first page with zero Back hyperlinks. Just remember to pay interest to solid content creation plus copywriting fundamentals, engage your audiences deeply, and stay abreast associated with technical trends like backlinks, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION health, site speed, and schema. To get directly into the depths of this subject and know how SEO styles could affect the digital marketing and advertising industry in 2018, I wanted the responses of some associated with the industry leaders. For advanced internet marketers it looks something like this particular: you might have an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION plan in place, you may have your list of superior keywords, you're actively blogging plus your website is optimized. Now SEO developments 2018 have to contest along with limited real estate, preliminary contacts in addition to all they will already deal with. I actually m glade to see somebody taken you a chance in order to explain about mobile SEO and the PWA application, Nice Post sir. We are excited to listen to from you about ON-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and OFF-page seo processes to position first. Nevertheless, this particular is not the real problem for Seo (SEO). There are LOTS of tone of voice searches in the world associated with local SEO. Search motor optimization (SEO) could be the process associated with affecting the online visibility associated with the website or a internet page in a web research engine 's unpaid results—often recognized as "natural", " organic inches, or "earned" results. Every company and consultant has their personal SEO methodology; therefore they might use different methods to accomplish high organic rankings for sites. One associated with the best techniques for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is including search engine pleasant URL links for every plus every page that you possess written or perhaps you will write. Entering the dialog search outside of smartphones will open new opportunities for both SEO and content marketing, allowing users to interact with users inside a unique, but still of use way for them. With that being said, carry on reading to discover more regarding the SEO trends for 2018 and what they mean regarding your business. In order to find out there how I do it, go to Article Czar for a free of charge gift and details of exactly how I use article marketing plus SEOcious to get top Search engines listings. A successful internet marketing marketing campaign may usually involve SEO, yet it also consists of the particular use of paid advertising upon search engines, building high high quality websites to interact and convince site visitors take action by means of enquiries or online sales, establishing analytic programs to allow web site owners to measure their success and improving a site's transformation rate. Shift of Desktop computer First index to Mobile Initial index, Priority of Local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in ranking, trend of Tone of voice Search etc. Technical SEO to help guarantee search engines like google may crawl your site efficiently. So - THERE IS NO BEST PRACTICE QUANTITY OF CHARACTERS any SEO could lay down as exact best practice to GUARANTEE��a title will display, in complete in Google, at least, because the search snippet title, on every single device. Techmagnate, as a responsible digital advertising agency, is hereby compiling almost all the major SEO updates, INFORMATION, strategies and techniques for 2018. We're predicting SEO strategies in order to become increasingly localised and customized for individual users instead associated with groups of users. In essence there are around six Local SEO ranking factors that play a major role. So it is quite important for you to understand the guidelines in the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION industry and make certain that the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agency that is handling your own account uses techniques that conform with the search engines' suggestions and involves no deception. Search Engine criteria being updated every minute, this is hard to know in order to have an SEO company or even individual which techniques still operating. Most people are putting an emphasis on the user experience benefit more than any potential SEO benefit, plus that is as it ought to be. These are usually only a few off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques for building links. Say, for example, I discuss this off-page SEO techniques blog post across my social channels. While videos are great intended for SEO, make sure you no longer create video content just due to the fact the format works better. The rise associated with Google-featured-content has provided its very own challenges for SEO practitioners. Our evaluations of the 10 leading search engine optimization (SEO) tools help you choose the right solution. The expression SEO, ” otherwise known because search engine optimization, ” offers increased in popularity over the particular past few years. The truth is that a person can get top Search Motor Rankings spending a little little bit of money and doing the particular work yourself or paying a good expert SEO company thousands associated with dollars to get your Web site around the first page. When you stop plus take a look back in where seo (SEO) started, really pretty incredible how far it can come in the past several years — even the previous couple of months. On the various other hand, focusing on mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is a must, whereas cellular friendliness and user experience are usually considered as a major positioning factor in SEO Trends within 2018.

Google is producing sure it will take longer to notice results from black and white hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and intent on ensuring the flux in its SERPs dependent largely on where the searcher is on the planet at the time associated with the search, and in which usually the business is located close to to that searcher. With voice search comes 2 parts of interest to SEO people desperate to connect with consumers: purpose and context. I actually released our content strategy on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Hacker's blog to help many other SEOs improve their website's articles. In this particular blog we will discuss away from page SEO is detail plus will learn some effective away from page SEO techniques which a person must try in first associated with all we would like in order to discuss the importance of away page SEO” and how this can be good for site owners. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION has more aspects related in order to your problem and it furthermore helps you know drawbacks associated with your website, so, promoting by means of SEO will not only assist you land on first webpages of Engines like google, but it furthermore lets you the find the particular defects on your website that will further assists with removing all of them. Although recommendation links will still provide a few rankings to the site, the particular highest rankings will most most likely come through the integration associated with link building to SEO content material. You also wish in order to ensure that your images nevertheless index with Google when relocating to a CDN For customers of the Yoast SEO wordpress plugin, you will want to include the following code to the particular bottom of your file. Whichever way you choose to categorize keywords, one of the most important steps in SEO is doing keyword research. Properly, chosen SEO keywords help individuals to get your site through search engines. Very first of all, SEO is a good acronym for Search Engine Enhanced. Users don't want to wait for a internet page so if your internet page is slow in 2018, forget about SEO and your own bounce rate will down. Since this has been a major change in the particular SEO landscape, I took this upon myself to gather data and present what mobile research optimization is really, and publish this on our company's blog.

The growth associated with Google's featured snippet, voice research, Local SEO, and PPC provides better result in diverting visitors to your site as in comparison to the organic listing. Despite the fact that, it is definitely bit time consuming to generate a quality video, it will be more than worth it. Ideal for traffic and SEO as nicely. In this write-up, we will be listing five technical SEO tricks to enhance organic traffic, rankings and earnings. Backlinks performs important aspect of offsite SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. The reason why is seo (SEO) so essential? There are lots of methods to find keywords for SEO. Three major SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION intelligence platforms - SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Serpstat - help determine keywords with less competition simply by including a keyword difficulty metric. SEO in 2018 won't be greater than any kind of other year, but new tendencies are happening for sure. Plus that's one of the very first images that cross my brain each time I see web sites getting penalized by Google owing to faulty SEO. Essential SEO work begins with discovering what phrases possible buyers enter into search motors like google. I really desired to understand SEO tricks used simply by the very best online advertising specialists myself, and share these types of details with other marketing experts, bloggers. Change in SEO trends is a result of changing Google algorithms. Previously, all of us have rated the best equipment for digital marketing overall, yet we wanted to drill lower to review the best solutions for SEO and content marketing and advertising to assist readers this 12 months. Apart from perfecting these trends, competition analysis plus making a credible SEO procedure is very crucial, to obtain organic traffic on your web page. There are many elements to SEO, from your words upon your page to the method other sites link to a person on the internet. Rolled out on 1 street August 2018, businesses and their particular SEO teams would have seen the shift in rankings. Mobile phone SEO will continue to become as relevant in 2018. Google focuses upon providing the best possible encounter for users, and you as well should do exactly the exact same. A website design revolving close to the user will ensure visitors on your website and that will, in turn, will continue in order to gain SEO traction.

These ‘quality updates' are very reminiscent of Search engines Panda updates and often influence many websites at the exact same time - and often these types of focus on demoting similar ‘low-quality' SEO techniques we have already been told Panda concentrates on. Every single SEO person was always speaking about long tail keywords These people are multi-word phrases that obtain a lot more fine-tuned or even even perhaps just various methods of saying the same issue. Now that SEO is getting very popular among device users, it is usually safe to say that SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION on mobile platforms will improve and improve business to customer relationships in 2018. A brand new wrinkle within the SEO game is interpersonal networking or social media marketing and advertising, which not just helps your own company to be found, yet also allows your business in order to interact directly together with your potential clients. When it arrives to SEO Trends in 2018, Relevancy is still exactly the particular same. Good keyword research is the cornerstone of your SEO.

But if most likely short on money, use these types of do-it-yourself SEO ideas to improve your own organic rankings. Whilst this holistic approach will ultimately eliminate a lot of the particular issues created by some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION practitioners over the years, I actually think that search engines' engineers will certainly initially overestimate the precision associated with their AI, leading to Penguin-level collateral damage. Well, this particular is it. Hope this SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Trends in 2018 will assist you to be on the particular track and beat your many other competitors. Today, a person are going to know a few most important SEO techniques that will will help to enhance your own organic traffic, keywords ranking plus website optimization. On-page SEO intended for ecommerce is all about producing sure your keywords are within the correct places. Location: A few businesses like knowing that these people could visit their SEO organization at any time to spending budget, campaign, and progress over espresso. I haven't heard that will new videos are given concern but I have definitely noticed this and think it may be correct - I just haven't performed (or read about) any tests on it. Google likes new content though and especially within the field of SEO, points get outdated quickly so a great new video can definitely become powerful. There's a great program for analyzing websites called Screaming Frog SEO Spider It gives users the opportunity to check their blogs for broken links, external and internal links, pages that don't exist anymore and redirects, defining Title, H1 and a number of other features. Your contribution to Advanced SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tricks is appreciated, It will be rightly said by you SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tricks to enhance traffic continues to be the same All we require to do is to stress on making sure that every web page has appropriate name tags and that the articles is not really thin” or low-quality and other Off page tactics. One off page SEO method to be very specific along with search pages as well because to increase response and hyperlink acquisition rates in your outreach would be to actually make use of in moment options on the internet lookup. In fact, SEO is completely vital to your search motor marketing success. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION today is not about bloated tummy content with keyword variations or even optimizing a post to position for a number of key phrases; it's about optimizing a solitary post to rank to get a solitary, specific keyword (aka, the entire page should be built close to a singular idea, answering inquiries from every angle and within the most efficient format possible). This will be due in part to Google's work to crack upon inauthentic content, which is what can make SEO so important. Hope, we'll all be SEOtent enough with SERP rankings. The mobile influx has had a significant impact on SEO and will carry on to disrupt and shape cellular optimization trends and strategies. Still, the keyword aspect associated with SEO is becoming increasingly tough with Google Adwords hiding quantity data. You post the great information, could you recommend me how to improve site ranking without doing any away from page seo. Keywords: Speaking of content, key phrases is also extremely important in order to an SEO strategy. The on the internet marketing strategies are evolving rapidly and they are equally competitive as Lookup Engine Optimization (SEO). In case you have more period and are keen to stick to the SEO industry, subscribe in order to Moz and Search Engine Property. In 2018, SEO strategies are usually oriented towards making a extensive relationship, helping brands to make strong networks and links that will will remain active for the long-term. Along with algorithms, technologies and optimization strategies in perpetual motion to obtain a location SEO 2019 PDF at the top associated with search engine results (SERP), this SEO experts are on the particular lookout for that next trends that will will shape the digital potential of companies. Your competition may teach your SEO firm greatly that how to promote your own website with the search motors. A single more thing to bear within mind to be successful along with link building provides quality content material and to follow some evil SEO copywriting best practices. These are called keywords, and as you'll see, they are an important portion of SEO.