#particularly that dani is immediately not communicating

[sirlightningpotato]

I’m just thinkin’ about 4.8 and just… Dani, Kyana and VR-LA man… the whole episode is just them showing how much they love and care about eachother.

Kyana’s “Let me fix this on my own so it doesn’t come back to hurt you” and “I’ll leave if it makes you safer” and “What do you mean you want me to stay?”

VR-LA’s “I need everyone safe and then I will make sure everyone is okay” and “I will follow you for as long as I can, and once I can’t I will look for you” and “I will talk to a god to find you, and then I will wait at a bench with my staff as a beacon for you to come home to” and “You are not a burden to me, and I will help you, but we don’t need to get our other friends hurt” and “We will leave if it makes you safer and happier” and “What do you want?”

Dani’s “I’m not letting you get yourself killed in a sick attempt to right past wrongs” and “I need to keep us safe” and “I don’t care if my life isn’t what I wanted, if we’re together” and “You aren’t burdens, you just need to talk to everyone” and “My life’s work is this ship, and you are part of that!”

I just have so many emotions

[hereforyourdispleasure]

Now I wanna more about Dani and her lavender marriage.

-guess

Yeah- so lavender moment because of the time- she probably would've gotten married between the wars, in her 20s. There's no universe where Dani would've accepted a housewife role, so the fact that women were more widely being brought into workplaces to make up for numbers would've been great timing. Because rahhh patriotism, she's doing this to help out her country definitely not because she wants to be financially independent

I think her parents would've had the expectations of the time of oh god it's a girl, too bad ig let's ship her off to a husband asap. To which the logical response is finding someone who isn't going to demand a typical wife role- so how do you do that, oh yeah just nab a guy who isn't attracted. Dani definitely wouldn't have been open about her sexuality, because as much as the thing of oh no lesbians don't exist because women could never get their dainty brains around homosexuality so we shan't persecute the women! went on, obviously there was a lot of prejudice and homegirl does not want to get fired from a position she worked her ass off to get to

Because of this, the guy she got with was probably a very quick oh you're fruity come with me 🤝 situation. Probably literally someone in the local community she saw walking around with one of the little gay codes they had back then. Proposes marriage like a business deal to get both their families, as well as the general prejudices against single middleaged people, off their backs

So marriage, Dani swears on the bible that she'll love this guy she met a couple months ago, all good

The issues obviously coming in with the fact she's expected to have children. Trust, she would love to have children (maybe 1 kid max, I don't think she really likes kids all that much), but obviously there's very little way to go about that. The guy she's with doesn't particularly want a kid, because it's economic crisis after economic crisis, and they're both already having to work, imagine another human to feed, you're practically begging for the mines. So basically the kid is a no go , which gets a lot of side glances from people they know

Eventually, it's just a chill working marriage , with both of them going out with people if, god forbid, they get the chance, come home, how's your day been sweetie, great I shagged a guy

But it gets to a point where despite Dani being in this marriage to avoid the "wifely duties", that stuff still ends up happening. And she is no pussy, she points this out to get sorted right away. Immediately to be continuously met with oh it's your job, that's what the woman does bullshit. Even more, because of the expectation to have kids, she has to make up excuses. But what excuses can you really make? Because most of the time the blame would immediately go straight on her no matter the excuse. And she can't risk that because she needs that job, otherwise she's dependant on the guy who suddenly switched his tune with their marriage

And what do people who are in a position where there's basically no other option do? Get sought out by the commission obviously

[shewholovestoread]

Hello! I just wanted to say your analysis’s (analyses?) are absolutely 🤌🏻 *chefs kiss*. They’re literally fuelling my life right now. I know you’ve kinda of analyzed it before but in the scene where Dani tells Gigi she’s easy to talk to and Gigi responds by saying “not everyone would agree with you.” The look on Gigi’s face after Dani says “fuck ‘em” has always struck me as odd. It’s almost like Gigi is surprised by Dani’s response, or wasn’t expecting that reaction? And I can’t really figure out why lol Anyways! I just really enjoy hearing what you have to say about these two and would love to hear your insight about that interaction if you would be interested in sharing!

Hi @from-the-depthsofmysoul thank you for the ask!

I love dissecting all their interactions because there's so much subtext and both Arienne and Sepideh's performances are so nuanced that there's always more to see and discover.

I think Gigi was smarting a little from Bette's cool dismissal (while still at her house). When Dani said that she was so easy to talk to, I think it took Gigi back to Bette's reaction when she tried to talk to her earlier that day. Or really, her attempts to talk to either Alice or Nat early on in this season and in season 1. Gigi's self-aware and she knows the way people react to her and besides none of these women tried particularly hard to be subtle about their annoyance.

When Gigi says, "Well, not everyone agrees with you." She says it in a self-deprecating way. I think she sensed Dani's awkwardness after the smouldering "Soon." She says her line with a laugh clearly expecting Dani to laugh as well, trying to break the tension. And yet Dani just answers her with a "Fuck 'em" It's simple and effective and utterly unexpected on Gigi's part.

Over the past season and a half, Gigi's partners let her know that her desire for clear communication, for wanting to speak about her and her partners' feeling was annoying. It's sad but I think a part of her was a little embarrassed about it. The last thing she expects is Dani actually standing up for her and saying that it's the other people who are the problem, not Gigi. It's telling that Gigi doesn't have any smart come-backs for Dani, she's speechless. Her expression immediately after Dani's line is one of disbelief, she's a little stunned.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Gigi's already caught the feels for Dani at this point but she's aware enough to know that Dani's not ready for another partner just yet. But seeing Dani's soft support, I think Gigi falls just a little bit more. That look of disbelief turns to one of quiet appreciation. She's aware that Dani's line was an off-hand comment but she's grateful all the same. And we end that shot with Gigi checking-out Dani, unashamedly. I think this last exchange spurs her behaviour when we next catch up with them later in the day, she's not quite subtle anymore about her interest and the best part is that I don't think she was entirely conscious of it.

Anyway, let me end it here since we all know that I can talk endlessly about these two. Hope the answer is satisfying...

[thiswasinevitableid]

For mermay I would love to see some Danbrey for 24 (lighthouse)!

Here you go! I went with SFW for this one

“You excited honeysuckle?” Her father sets her sleeping bag out on the floor.

“Yes” Dani manges her bravest smile. She’s never slept anywhere but their little house on the cliffs, and the lighthouse, with its echoing stairs and lack of true darkness, is the opposite of that.

“It’ll be fun. Like a camp out. I can even make s’mores over the stove.”

“Okay.” She sets her backpack on the floor, then follows him to the kitchen. At nine, she can already tell when her parents are doing their best, can spot the way her father carries himself when he’s tired but trying not to show it.

He makes them dinner, canned chili with goldfish crackers, and gives her a little tour. When it’s time for bed, he tucks her in, handing her the Totoro plush she sleeps with.

“When is mom coming back?”

Her father sighs, “Two weeks, assuming your grandma gets better at the speed they’re expecting. Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll recover even faster than that.”

Dani nods. Her teacher expressed surprise that Dani was staying here and not taking the trip with her mom. The given reason was the gated community didn’t allow children to stay that long. But Dani knows the truth; her grandparents don’t like her dad. And because Dani is the result of her mom loving and staying with her dad, they don’t like her, either.

He kisses her forehead, makes her promise for the bajillionth time that she won’t go in the water, and tells her goodnight.

-----------------------------------------

She’s looking for seashells when it happens. Living by the sea means she knows not to turn her back on it. Too bad the wave hits her from the side, carried up and over the nearby rock and knocking her into the surf. She scrambles up, spluttering, touches her neck, and feels like she’s going to throw up. Her bracelet, the one mom gave her for luck, is gone.

“Oh no, oh no, where are you, oh no”

“Um, are you looking for this?” A girl watches her from the surf, bracelet dangling from her hand.

“Ohmygosh” She snatches the jewelry away, holding it to her chest, “thank you. It’s from my mom and, uh, and I try to be careful but it’s hard sometimes.”

“I get that.” The girl holds up a necklace, “this is from my mom. It’s like one she wears; she says I can have the real one when I’m older. Can I come on the beach?”

Dani nods, then gasps as the girl joins her. She’s seen mermaids in books or that pirate movie her mom watches sometimes. But they’re always grown ups with long hair, pale skin, and green tails. This mermaid is the same age as Dani, her dark skin dotted with freckles and her black held in place with pieces of coral. Her tail is shimmering red and black, the prettiest thing Dani’s ever seen.

“You’re a mermaid.” Dani says, because she can’t think of what else to say.

“Yeah. And you’re a human. Why are you here? It’s usually just that guy.”

“That’s my dad. I’m staying with him.”

“Do you wanna hang out?”

“Yes! Wait, how’s that going to work? I’m not allowed to swim around the lighthouse.”

“I’m allowed to be on the beach, so we’re good.”

“Okay” Dani grins, excited, before her dad’s voice carries down the beach, calling her to come in, “shoot, I have to go.”

“Okay, byyyyyeee!” The mermaid waves as Dani hurries up the sand, and is gone when she turns around for a final look.

------------------------------------------

“Got any tens?”

“Go fish.”

Aubrey draws another card, “I still think it’s weird that you don’t really fish during this game.”

“You’re just grumpy you’re losing.” Dani teases. Aubrey sticks her tongue out. Dani responds in kind.

“When your dad finally lets you swim, we’re gonna play it my way and I’ll kick your tail. Legs?”

“Butt.”

Aubrey snickers, wiggles closer on the warm sand. They’ve found a patch of beach that isn’t immediately visible from land or sea, meaning Aubrey isn’t in danger of being seen and Dani isn’t breaking her promise to her dad to stay out of the water.

“If you come to the beach near my house, I can swim there. But I’m still not allowed to swim alone. I could drown.”

The mermaid purses her lips, “I wouldn’t let you drown.

“I don’t think my mom would believe me if I said I had a mermaid helping me.”

“Man, why can’t humans just have tails? Or, like, fins.”

“I think then we’d just be mermaids. Don’t worry; I’ll get to swim on my own when I’m older and we can play in the water then.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“FINALLY!” Aubrey raises her arms triumphantly as Dani wades into the surf. It took four years and passing a survival swimming course for her parents to be okay with her swimming alone. The smile on Aubrey’s face makes the weeks pretending to swim in a riptide worth it.

“Do you wanna race? Ooh, or I could show you the ray nest, or we could go look for otters-”

“Let’s start with a race. I’ve been waiting years to kick your tail.”

The mermaid’s smile takes on a competitive edge, “last one to that rock is a rotten urchin!”

With that, she splashes Dani with her tail and zooms through the water. Dani dives forward after her, but even with her newfound swimming skills she makes it to the rock a good ten seconds after her friend.

“Best two out of three?” She says the moment she comes up for air.

“You’re on.”

Best two out of three becomes best out of ten, and on number ten Dani plays dirty, throwing her arms around Aubrey’s waist when she manages to catch her. Her friend shrieks with laughter, spinning and chasing Dani towards shore. The human slips and Aubrey tackles her, sand clinging to both of them as they roll onto their sides, cackling into the salt air.

They stay on the sand until it gets dark, counting stars and holding hands until Dani has to go home.

-------------------------------------------------

Dani’s trying not to panic; it’s not the first time Aubrey’s missed meeting her. Sometimes the mermaid gets called away for lessons or has last minute things to take care of, and they haven’t figured out a way to get messages between underwater and above it (they tried a supposedly waterproof cellphone but it only lasted an hour). But it’s been three days without a single sign of her friend.

As she’s contemplating getting the boat her dad uses for fishing on his days off and going further out to look for her, Aubrey surfaces. Even before they reach each other, it’s obvious Aubrey’s been crying.

Dani kneels in the soaked sand, opening her arms, and Aubrey burrows into them, salt water of two kinds dripping onto Dani’s jacket.

“Aubrey?”

Her friend hides her face against her neck, “Mom’s gone. There, there was an accident and she, she didn’t-” it cuts off in a sob.

Dani holds her tighter, strokes her hair, murmurs, “I’m so sorry” as Aubrey shakes in her arms. The wind whips around them, stinging her cheeks, chilling her fingers. She doesn’t care. Aubrey needs her.

---------------------------------------------------------

“Ta-dah!” Aubrey produces a massive clam with a flourish, narrowly avoiding sending water onto the slices of cake Dani smuggled down to the beach.

“Aw, thanks Aubrey, you didn’t have to--holy crap!” She gawps as Aubrey opens the clam, revealing a pearl necklace.

“Like it? It took me, like, a year to get them all. Had to fight a few otters for some of the oysters.”

“Uh-”

“Kidding!” Aubrey flops her head into Dani’s lap, “I’d never bug the otters; Dr. Harris Bonkers would never forgive me for bothering his friends.”

Dani clasps the necklace in place, rests a hand on Aubrey’s tail. She traces figure eights on it, smiling when her friend sighs and nuzzles her stomach.

“You’re the best, Aubrey.”

“Thanks. I, um, I just wanted you to have something to remember me by.”

Her heart turns to an iceberg, “You’re leaving?”

“What? No!” Aubrey sits up, bringing them face to face, “you’re eighteen now. That’s when humans leave home.”

Dani giggles, “Not automatically. I haven’t made up my mind if I want to leave Kepler or not. I might just stay in town; I like it here, and Mama offered me a job manning the community gardens.”

Aubrey’s tail flutters, “Um, I have another point in the stay category.”

“Yeah? Oh” Dani sighs as Aubrey cups her cheek and guides her into a kiss. When Dani deepens it, Aubrey trills, shifting so she’s in Dani’s lap and draping her arms over her shoulders.

“Well?” Aubrey whispers, brushing their noses together.

“Definitely a convincing point, cutie pie.”

Aubrey trills again, knocking her backwards and kissing her senseless in the sand.

-----------------------------------------------

Much of Kepler is surprised when, upon his retirement, the lighthouse keeper announces his daughter will be taking his place. After all, why would a charming young woman want such a job?

The charming young woman isn't particularly interested in their speculation. If she took the job in order to be closer to her wife well, that's her business, now isn't it?

[moribundanchor]

The Pelle/Dani Receipts, Post Five: Arrival in Hårga

Dani and the others emerge from the big yellow yonic sun gate and are greeted by several Hårgan youth who relieve them of their bags (and I’m TOTALLY SURE don’t rifle through them) while Pelle runs off camera. He returns shortly thereafter to introduce his sister Dagny, “born the exact same day as me.” 

There are a couple interesting things about this introduction. Number one, the way Pelle emphasizes her birthday underlines how “sister” does not necessarily mean a blood sibling to Pelle. If Dagny were his blood sister and born the exact same day as Pelle, she would be his twin. This is the first time that loose familial usage is really obvious since, well, Ingemar could have easily passed for Pelle's blood brother. Number two, it calls attention again to birthdays (and it is Dani’s birthday at this point, forgotten as far as she knows) and how astrology (or runeology) is important to the Hårgans. Number three, their shared birthday clearly makes Dagny special to Pelle, and so his choice to introduce his American friends to Dagny first takes additional significance. Not to mention Dagny and Dani are oddly similar names, as discussed in this post. And as Pelle does his introduction spiel, Dagny takes the opportunity to sneak a direct look at Dani, appearing to recognize her.

Dani endears herself to Dagny immediately, as she does to the broader Hårgan community throughout the film. When Dagny welcomes them to Hårga in Swedish, Dani replies with the Swedish word for thank you, tack. Pelle scrunched-nose GLOWS, nods encouragingly/proudly at Dani, and exchanges a look with Dagny that says nothing so much as “Isn't she the best?” “Yep, you got a keeper, brother.” And then Dagny abruptly bids them farewell without engaging with the others or saying anything else, as if the entire point was just for her to get a good look at Dani.

Next, Pelle runs ahead of the others to greet Father Odd. This is a particularly fervent, sustained embrace between the two men, even more emotional than Pelle's reunion with Ingemar, with Odd’s face revealing every bit of a parent’s fierce relief at the safe return of a beloved child. As Pelle remembers himself and pulls free, Odd gets a full view of the Americans approaching before/while Pelle is introducing them. He ZEROES IN immediately on Dani, clearly recognizing her before Pelle identifies her, and after his bulging eyes fit back into his skull, Odd says softly to himself, “Wow.” This might apply to the entire group or maybe seeing Josh, one of three persons of color in the whole of Hårga, but it also might just be Odd processing seeing Dani in real life. Odd warmly greets each of the Americans with handshakes and individual welcomes, but for Dani alone, he reserves a hug and “welcome home.” (Note that after Dani is crowned May Queen, Odd will tell her “welcome home” again, but this time in Swedish.) He follows this with “we are so happy to have you,” directed specifically at her, until Odd lamely tries to cover by awkwardly piling on more effusive welcomes and excusing himself.

During the entire scene with Odd talking to the Americans, Pelle’s face is frequently blocked in the camera shot by Dani; they are, again, overlapping. But we can see him from the eyebrows up, making it clear that he’s looking pretty directly and unashamedly at Dani much of the time. Once they arrive in Hårga, Pelle puts little effort into concealing his many stolen glances at her.

Our next scene is only included in the Director’s Cut version of the film, but it’s a good one for general Hårga mood/wholesomeness and Pelle/Dani substance. Everyone settles down in the shadow of the maypole for a little thanksgiving, uncanny vocal harmonizing, and a picnic, seated on the ground in the configuration of the rune Raidho. Again, we will get into the runes in more detail later, but it’s worth noting here that Raidho, meaning “wheel” or journey, is one of Dani’s runes, albeit merkstaved or reversed. Raidho is also one of two runes featured on the maypole itself, along with Fehu, which Pelle just happens to wear. (Sten, the Hårgan Elder who leads with the thanksgiving song during this scene, is also wearing a merkstaved Raidho stitched in yellow, but don’t get AnonLady started on her absurd Dani/Pelle are the new Siv/Sten headcanon no one wants.)

Dani is, as usual, seated between Pelle and Christian on mats that have been laid out in lieu of a table. From the aerial shot, we see that not only is Dani next to Pelle, but she and Pelle are actually sitting on the same mat, and that mat is yellow. (To be fair, Josh, who is also always next to his primary source Pelle, is half on that mat, too. Of course, of all the other newbloods, Josh is the one who comes closest after Dani to respecting Hårga, so we could torture some meaning out of that, too.) Pelle points out the fire pit to Dani, a prime example of Pelle’s tendency to explain Hårgan ways toward Dani. “It’s all our jobs to keep it burning,” he tells her, leaning in, and when Josh--the one whose thesis was supposedly the impetus for the trip--asks him to repeat himself, Pelle brushes him off. “I’ll tell you later.” Note this particular line, not unlike Pelle's later explanation of life being like the seasons, has morbid subtext, because we will eventually see how Dan and Ylva's bodies are cremated in the fire pit. One day, it will be Dani and Pelle's turn to keep it burning that way, too.

After the picnic, Pelle’s group sits on the lawn and hangs out with Ingemar and his guests, watching everyone folk dancing while Hårgan kids romp in a game Ingemar tells them is called Skin the Fool. [rictus smile] 

We first see everyone from Maja’s perspective, as she exits the Youth House, all set for her Christian mission, as it were, and the blocking is significant. At this point, Simon is off-camera, so not only is Christian centered in Maja’s POV, but we have Connie and Ingemar grouped on one end, with Pelle and Dani on the other. The first thing you might notice, other than Maja’s Christian-splayed focal point, is the way Dani is seated on the far end, next to Pelle, not Christian, and how she and Pelle (and Ingemar all the way on the other side) have eerily similar posture: cross-legged, straight-backed, arms resting on legs. All the other newbloods are slouching, leaning, whatever, like you do. Not Dani, and this only becomes more noticeable throughout the movie. In her movements and instincts, Dani almost can’t not be Hårgan.

So not only does Dani unconsciously mirror Pelle and Ingemar as she sits watching, not only is she moving subtly to the music, as if unable to resist dancing even when she’s too self-conscious to join, not only is she sitting closer to Pelle than her boyfriend (look at that picture and tell us who you think is Dani’s boyfriend of 4 years, we’ll wait), but she and Pelle are visually contrasted with the thwarted Hårgan/newblood couple of Ingemar and Connie. And in case that last part isn’t obvious enough, check out the wistful longing radiating from Ingemar once Simon returns, which is even more emphasized in the Director’s Cut, as we’re shown Dani noticing Ingemar pine for Connie, too.

Pelle gently suggests all of the others join the dance, but it doesn’t go anywhere (“I’m too scared,” Dani tells Pelle) until a well-timed flirty kick from Maja pulls Christian into the festivities. When Christian goes, Josh and Mark, who were totally uninterested two minutes earlier, instantly peel off to join, too. I guess they didn’t want to be left making conversation with Dani and Pelle? Anyhoo, this conveniently leaves our OTP alone for one of the High Pelle/Dani Moments, a scene and a scheme that deserves its very own post.

For more, click on The Pelle/Dani Receipts Masterpost

[givemearmstopraywith]

will you please go off about midsommar? i would love to hear your thoughts on this film

i am so glad someone asked, i have so many thoughts! and i apologize for getting too personal in this, but this movie means so, so much to me, let’s talk about it. x

cw: suicide, abuse, cult abuse.

more under the cut once again, because apparently i have a LOT to say. tumblr fucked up my post again so i’m so sorry you have this monster post on your dash

i want to start off talking about how ari aster frames some of his shots in this film, mainly because i am OBSESSED

above, christian is the center of this universe. he occupies the middle, he is flanked by his friends, he is framed in the shape of a triangle which significantly shows a hierarchical position of which he occupies the apex. his friends are resentful of dani and her emotions. they encourage him to cut her off.

below, as christian burns, dani now occupies the middle space and she has taken on the triangular shape: she now occupies the hierarchical apex. she is now the one surrounded by “friends”, and these friends feel her emotions with her. they are in the same hysterics which she has experienced throughout the film. her grief is acknowledged by those around her, meaning she no longer occupies the space of her grief alone.

the first thing is that i don’t particularly think it’s a feminist or empowering film: above all, it is a film about a cult and cult manipulation. dani is coerced into taking drugs and obviously, however likeable or unlikeable the men she arrives with are, they are ultimately murdered in sadistic and disturbing ways. this does move away from the trope of girls being killed or brutalized onscreen- something that satisfies voyeuristic desires around female suffering in the same way there exists a voyeuristic desire to see female sexuality. (this trope does not only in horror, but throughout all kinds of visual media, particularly action-based media like game of thrones or star wars.) 

dani is never sexualized, but neither does she truly take on the role of the final girl as identified by carol clover. clover argues that in slasher films, the viewer shares the perspective of the killer until about halfway through the film, when perspective suddenly switches to the final girl: she was generally the only survivor and either escapes or vanquishes her killer by the end of the film. 

obviously, the plot of the movie positions the hårga as the villains: but we never experience the perspective of the hårga through the film’s narrative. this is effective because their violence seems senseless, disturbing, and terrifying, purely because we do not understand their motivations or what is going on beyond the experiences of the newcomers to their settlement. but this also distracts us from the only perspective we experience besides dani, which is christian. 

christian is a villain. i know we’ve all picked up on this, but there’s a tendency to say “the real villain is christian” but that’s not true either: christian is an embodiment of interpersonal abuse, of trauma on a person and microcosmic level. the hårga are a much larger, socially-oriented continuation of trauma, and they themselves are evil. they select dani as the may queen because they sense her vulnerability and thus the ease with which they can manipulate her, not because there is a black and white separation of good versus evil and christian versus dani. and obviously the hårga are white supremacists and xenophobes- something that is shown to us immediately, even before we meet the members of that community:

(the sign reads “stop mass immigration to hålsingland” in swedish, and i will take this moment to self-indulgently mention how i speak and read swedish.)

dani is co-dependent on christian. we know this. and co-dependency is not healthy for anyone involved. she is also deeply traumatized and looks to christian as a kind of saviour for her- arguably this is why his name is “christian” in the first place, because dani behaves as if he is going to absolve her of her trauma by being her support system. and while it is unhealthy to look to any one individual as a source of support, christian is also co-dependent on dani: not in the same way, but in a way that he derives a sense of power and satisfaction from having someone who is attached to him as deeply and unhealthfully as dani is. hence why he wants to have his freedom, but isn’t sure if he wants to break up with her:

the opening scene of midsommar is almost verbatim an experience that happened to be repeatedly in my relationship with the person to whom i was engaged. i have been dani in this situation. i openly cried the first time i watched this scene because it was the first time i had ever recognized my own experiences with my abusive relationship onscreen: the scrambling to get ahold of the person who brings you comfort, the discussion between that person and their friends about how clingy you are and how annoying it is while you are in question is in the midst of a serious crisis, and the inability of the person you are with to actually permanently leave you because, although they don’t admit it, it feels good to a narcissist to have someone unequivocally "need” you (and we know christian is a narcissist because he steals josh’s idea for his thesis):

christian gets something out of his relationship with dani. he doesn’t admit it, he acts as if she is a burden to him, but the truth is that abusers derive sadistic pleasure from co-dependence. and yes, i will go so far as to say christian is an abuser, because if you are not capable of supporting someone in a relationship, you need to leave them even if it’s hard. it is better to be learn to survive alone than be in a relationship with someone who sees and treats you like a burden to them while simultaneously enjoying the fact that you feel like you can’t survive without them. 

this is why that famous conversation between dani and pelle is so important and moving. 

you can be possessed by someone but not held by them. possession and control is not the same as being held. to hold is a relationship: you must extend something to be held, that thing must be taken and taken tenderly. christian possesses dani without holding her. he acknowledges but does not empathize with her pain: he merely acknowledges that the pain makes her cling to him because she has no one else to rely on:

this is entirely the opposite of what dani experiences with the hårga: a community built on the common experience of empathy, of the mutual understanding of a shared agony. like a body, what hurts one part of the community hurts the rest of the community. 

it is not something dani has ever experienced before, and this is why she is particularly vulnerable to it. pain is designed and inflicted on her by the community so they can control her. and arguably this is a symptom of society’s much broader tendency to continually re-victimize trauma victims: a vulnerability can be exploited, but it’s dealt with in a way that’s kind of twistedly satisfying here, because as much as dani has been exploited she’s also survived where her peers have not, and been elevated to a higher position because of that vulnerability. 

this is also why christian changes so much towards the end of the film: he is no longer the center of anyone’s attention, not even dani’s: she’s accepted and, at least on a surface level, loved and supported. their positions have been completely switched:

EDIT: and i just realized that during the moment when dani is being embraced as the may queen she sees her parents among the hårga:

that brings me back to what i’ve started this piece with: the significance of the hårga experiencing dani’s pain with her. the disturbing part of it is that she’s escaped victimization from one person and simply fallen into another, more sinister victimization: but i like to think that the lesson here is that you should expect empathy from people who care about you. dani is full of grief until she turns back to see the hårga also expressing grief:

and i believe that is why she smiles at the end- not because she’s accepted her madness, not because she herself is insane, but because for the first time, she hasn’t felt alone with her grief.

i don’t think this is a story of empowerment, nor is it particularly feminist in the way i generally regard feminist media. but it is a skillfully, beautifully told allegory for abuse and trauma, and it means something so, so deep to me because of that. the takeaway from midsommar, for me, is that if someone makes you feel alone with your grief, you shouldn’t be with that person. and i will end it here because this already too long! thank you for asking! x

[seblaine-rph]

Re: Cartersville, they had a nonbinary Dani (proving they apparently DON'T have issues making canons trans) and the character of the main admin, on at least one occasion used feminine coded language where it wasn't particularly necessary. Heard (from the player) that Dani was then misgendered ooc when the player dropped them. Personally, once upon another time, the admin had ship-like chemistry with a nonbinary muse of mine but immediately dropped the rp when their cis male, not even love interest (seemed more like a plot device than a possible ship) left the rp. The admin has a tendency to ignore everyone in rps outside of her character's love interest and despite playing a bisexual character, has essentially brushed off any possible non-cis male love interests even when no male love interest was present, at least in the rps I have been in with her.

This is another terrible experience had at @cartersvillerpg. I've said all that can be said as an outsider at this point, but I've never silenced the voices of people in the community and I won't stop now. Anything sent in and everything I have in my inbox already will still be posted, just with less from me as the peanut gallery. My final thought on this, until I have something new to say, is that it's clear there is a problem that has been experienced by many.

[wordsbynathan]

Let’s Talk About More Burned Characters

Because I really don’t know how to stop myself, I’ve put together some information about the supporting cast for Burned. These characters may not get as much page time, but I still LOVE THEM ALL and would like to briefly talk about them!

Neil’s Children;

These three characters are already a pretty tight friend group when Neil meets them on his first day of classes. He’s significantly older than them, a result of his late surge. Regardless, they immediately take a liking to him, and in almost no time he considers them his LITERAL CHILDREN. They tend to follow in his footsteps and pay attention to what he’s doing; when Neil upsets the social order, it inspires them to stop following the status quo. A strange occurrence leaves Neil feeling particularly protective, but he wonders if it’s too late to really protect them.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Neil’s Outer Circle;

All three of these characters are incredibly skilled Psychs who go out of their way to make Neil feel welcome at Harmonium. Dani is involved in the first display of Psych abilities that forces Neil to accept the reality of his situation, Lyla treats Neil like any other incoming Psych, and Jasper eventually becomes Neil’s teacher and something of an older friend and guide (even despite the tension born from their mutual interest in Alex).

~*~*~*~*~*~

Some “Adults”;

Neil learns fairly early on that the “authority” figures at Harmonium are still basically children themselves; a lot of Psychs never fully mature due to the responsibilities placed on them so young. While Jayce does try to help Neil and is initially the only other person who knows about the amnesia, it becomes clear that there’s some favoritism toward Neil due to Jayce’s past proximity to Neil’s mother. Celeste was known for sparking debate in the Psych community due to her brash and often impulsive style of leadership, but her death (as well as Claire Destella’s) has nonetheless sent a shock through the system. Ben Zhao steps in to take her position as the only surviving member of the mission that took the women’s lives, but Neil wonders if he has any idea what he’s doing. Neil gets the impression that this older generation may be hiding something. Something big.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Taglists (ask to be +/-!)

Burned: @infinitely-empty-pages​ @dustylovelyrun​ @oddsandinks​ @yanittawrites​ @selkiewriting​ @fictional-semantics​ @sunwornpages​ @write-for-your-life2​ @aelenko​ @starlitpromises-writings​ @angelolytle​ @peggydreadful​ @writingbyjillian​

General: @my-liminal-spaces​ @ahowlinwolf​ @sugarcoatedglass​

[thebmatt]

FFXIV Write 2021 Prompt #15: Thunderous

thunderous – relating to or giving warning of thunder, very loud, powerful, or intense

It had been something of an eventful few days for the Warriors of Light. A cure for tempering, found. A civil war within Limsa Lominsa, averted. The first step towards peace with a beast tribe, taken. Had it not been for the strange towers appearing all across the star, not to mention Fandaniel introducing them all to his new version of Bahamut, it might have actually been called a good few days.

It was all of these events that had brought them to Gridania on this day. Kan-E-Senna and her subordinates within the Twin Adder needed to be briefed on all that had occurred, so they could begin making plans for how best to use their soon-to-be arriving flock of porxies. Privately, Rheika thought it would be hilarious to just let them all arrive and watch the chaos unfold as the Elder Seedseer and the Hearers of Stillglade Fane attempted to figure out just why there was a sudden mass of flying pigs in their city, but alas, getting their beastmen neighbors untempered and beginning overtures of peace was too important.

They’d spent the past few bells getting her up to speed on all that had transpired, explaining how the porxies actually functioned, how to route any communications that needed to be passed to the Scions concerning the towers, describing the appearance and capabilities of this “Lunar Bahamut”, and the like. Many had offered to make the report in their stead, but for now there was little for the Warriors of Light to actually do at the moment, and since they’d been present firsthand, they felt themselves the logical choice to inform the remaining Alliance leader who’d not yet been apprised of recent events.

As they left the Lotus Stand, emerging from the path that led to the Seedseer’s private altar into Gridania proper, Rheika gave a brief nod to both the Serpent Officer and the Conjurer stationed there, and briefly looked around. As usual, there were plenty of blue-robed conjurers going about the business of dealing with the many bureaucratic matters Stillglade Fane was responsible for. Petitioners asking for blessings for their harvest, permission to sell new wares within the city, a few asking for healing. Rheika fought to keep a sneer from her face. Gridania was for all intents and purposes a theocracy, nothing allowed to be done without the blessings of the Elementals.

She didn’t particularly trust the Elementals. She might have been born here, but her community of Keepers of the Moon generally paid them no mind. They’d lived there for generations without so much as a thank you to the elementals outside of simply taking care of the place they lived in, not over hunting or despoiling the land, and no nature spirits or treants had ever so much as bothered them. Any talk she’d ever heard of the Elementals had long since come to resemble talk of Primals rather than some benevolent forest Gods that allowed people to dwell within their boughs.

Learning how Stillglade Fane actually functioned had made it far worse. The “Hearers”, the blue robed conjurers that made up the staff of Stillglade Fane, were barely able to actually  hear the voices of the Elementals. Mastery of that particular skill was unique only to the small population of horned humanoids known as the Padjals. Their small numbers meant they were spread out through the Shroud dealing with major problems, with the only two permanently in Gridania being E-Sumi-Yan (who was permanently needed within the Conjurer’s Guild as head teacher) and the Elder Seedseer herself. Both were endlessly busy, far too much so to handle all of the requests from the citizens that needed to be answered. Thus the Hearers had developed a series of rites and rituals to attempt to divine the Elementals’ will, which they utilized in answering the day-to-day petitions brought to their doors.

Rheika had never known what exactly these rituals consisted of, but Dahkar had attended a small class on them as part of his training as a Conjurer. As an adventurer, he was not expected to serve as an official part of the Fane, but the Hearers made the class open to all students of the guild, in case they perhaps wished to utilize them in their travels through the Shroud. He’d told her what he’d learned in the quick lesson, most of the rituals consisted of what was essentially the casting of lots using leaves and sticks, and using their best interpretation the patterns that emerged. It had all seemed utterly foolish to her, and she’d seen more than one instance of a Hearer going rogue and forcing his own interpretations of the Elementals’ will onto others, only to be revealed as incorrect later on.

Rheika hated this place. She wanted to get out of here and head back home to the Rising Stones as quickly as she could. Her fellow Warriors of Light were following behind her, chatting amicably about dinner plans. They had a few other matters to discuss, but outside the guild was a poor place to do it, the Hearers did not care for loitering without official business. She traipsed forward, making for the aetheryte shard placed not far from the Guild’s entrance, already envisioning her destination, the city’s main aetheryte plaza, in her mind’s eye. She’d almost reached the shard when a series of voices reached her sensitive ears.

“-please, you must do something!”

“The girl’s only seen twelve summers!” “I’m sorry, but such is the will of the forest.” “But that’s not right!”

Rheika stopped, her hand inches away from attuning range. The words played over in her head. “Twelve summers”. “Will of the forest”. “Not right!”. She turned to look in the direction they’d come from. An elezen, a hyur, and a lalafell, all similarly garbed with upset expressions on their faces were speaking with a Hearer. The Hearer, a hyur man, was making a series of exaggerated gestures as if talking to children.  Rheika wasn’t entirely certain what to make of the petitioners, perhaps a blended family or workers at an orphanage, but it was clear that a girl in their care was needing help, and their cries were falling on deaf ears.

Few things enraged the Warriors of Light more than the inflicting of suffering on children.

She turned to the others, who had noticed her change, and looked to her with anticipatory expressions on their faces. She held up her palm, then tilted her fingers away from herself twice, a clear back up and wait signal. The others immediately backed off and stood away, near the treeline. She nodded, and turned to walk up behind the Hearer. She tried to keep the anger bubbling within her down as she spoke, only mostly successfully. “Excuse me, but what is going on here?”

The hearer didn’t even turn around, simply sighed and waved his hands in a dismissive gesture. “Move along, outsider, if you’ve business with Stillglade Fane, you must wait, not interrupt-”

“Listen up, you moss-addled twat! First of all, I was BORN in this forest. Second of all, turn your ass around and LOOK at who you are talking to!” Rheika thundered.

The hearer turned “How dare you? If you really-”. His words cut off with a gasp. “Y-you’re Rheika Aliapoh. One of th-the Warriors of Light!”

“Good boy.” she replied sarcastically, crossing her arms and giving him a disapproving look. “Unfortunately for you, you used your turn to piss me off. So now, I’m talking to them.” She looked over to the trio of petitioners, her face more sympathetic. “Hi, I’m Rheika. Can you tell me what’s going on?”

The hyur woman wiped away tears falling down her face. “H-hi. My name is Lina….my daughter Dani is sick. We think it’s Greenrot. She’s holding strong now, but it’s getting worse. We came to the Conjurer’s guild for healing but…they’re saying it’s the Elementals’ will that she die!”, Lina said as she burst into tears. The Elezen male put his hands on her shoulders and looked at Rheika. “We’ve been friends with Lina for years, and we all moved in together when times got tough for us all. Mani’s like a niece to us. Please, can you….” he trailed off.

Rheika nodded to him and turned back to the hearer, absolute fury in her face. “And you’re just going to let that girl die?”

“I-it’s not like I WANT to, but-”

“It’s a fairly simple fix, hearer. One quick Esuna cast. Hell, I’ve only had rudimentary conjury training and I know it. Surely a big bad hearer like yourself ought to be familiar with it” she said, venom dripping from her voice. “Less than a few minutes of your time, and that girl gets to live. And you’re gonna sit there and let her suffer and probably die. A CHILD.”

His face contorted into an ugly sneer. “Look, I wouldn’t expect a keeper of the moon like you to understand, given how much your kind seems inclined to just take whatever they want from the forest without-”

Rheika reached back towards the gunblade she carried strapped to her back, stopping just short of actually grabbing the hilt. “You keep talking. Give me a reason.”

“You come here to this place and try to tell ME, who has trained to hear the Elemental’s voice for years, how to do my job? You can’t POSSIBLY understand-”

“And what about me, Hearer?” intoned Dahkar’s steely voice as he stepped towards them, coming from behind Rheika. “Surely you’re not such a tremendous idiot as to believe I cannot understand, correct?”

The Hearer spun to regard him, anger on his face immediately vanishing as he blanched. Dahkar was over seven fulms of very angry looking Au Ra, clad in the pristine white robes that the Hearer had only ever witnessed the Padjals wear. “Y….you’re…you’re the one the Padjals trained in the White? But…you’re not even of the forest!”

“Wrong answer. The correct response is ‘No, Dahkar of the White, Warrior of Light, I know you understand. Also I’m going to apologize to Rheika and throw myself at her mercy before going to heal the diseased child’. Do you see the difference?”

“I….I will not be spoken to this way!” the man said, stamping his feet. “I am a Hearer, charged with listening to the wills of the Elementals and ensuring the people of Gridania live according to their will, lest we awaken the Greenwrath! Who are you, a man clearly of the Far East, to question how-”

“Gonna stop you right there.” Dahkar growled. “First of all, you really should stop making judgements about where someone is from based on what they look like. I might have been born in the Far East, that’s true, but I’ve lived in the Shroud since I was a babe, just like Rheika here.”

Rheika smiled innocently.

“Secondly, I’ve been through Conjurer training, clearly. I’ve seen how the Hearers work. The only people who can directly hear the Elementals, much less communicate with them, have horns on their head, and I don’t mean this kind” he continued, tapping the large black-scaled horn on his own head. “You and I both know a lot of being a Hearer is using your own good judgement and hoping the rituals you’ve devised over the years give you the correct result. Lot of room for error there.”

The Hearer pondered that for a moment. “Well, yes, I suppose there are instances of Hearers being wrong. I do recall that kerfuffle with the animal exhibits outside the Leatherworker’s Guild…” He looked up in realization, then began delivering with the gusto of a professional orator.  “Ah, but even you must admit that if the people lose faith that the Hearer’s word is that of the Elementals, then chaos shall reign in the city! Every pronouncement we make will be endlessly questioned, or even ignored! The peaceful symbiosis we have achieved will be undone, and the Greenwrath will be upon us all! Yes, surely even you must agree to that?!”

Dahkar’s laughter drew the attention of other nearby Conjurers, who were suddenly very interested why their fellow was loudly arguing with a Warrior of Light and a White Mage, no less. “Or you could simply exercise better judgement and not leave the healing of the citizenry that are supposed to be in your care to blind chance, perhaps? Or are you going to seriously tell me you think the Elementals have an opinion on the health of a single member of the community?”

Rheika idly watched them continue to go back-and-forth with their arguments. In truth, she was hardly interested in the debate. She was more interested in keeping the count she’d quietly started running in her head ever since drawing the Hearer’s attention to herself.

Now, she reckoned, that count had gone on long enough. The Hearer was now going on a tangent about equilibrium in nature when she interrupted him. “Thanks for hopping in there, Dahk. I was afraid I was losing his attention”

Dahkar turned to her and smiled, crossing his arms. “Reckon we gave them enough time to get it done?”

Rheika turned towards the path that led from Stillglade Fane to the rest of Gridania. “Well, I can’t see any sign of them, so I’d say it’s definitely gotta be close enough.”

The Hearer sputtered. “What…what exactly are you two talking about?”

Rheika smiled ever so sweetly at him. “Aren’t you forgetting about someone, Hearer? Or rather, ‘someones’?”

The Hearer, shocked, spun around. The three petitioners were no longer there, and as he frantically looked around the area, he saw no sign of them. “What? Where…where did they go?”

Dahkar laughed again. “Well, if we timed this right, our companions have hopefully gotten them back to their dwelling by now and are using their own healing skills to cure the little girl! They might not know anything about Conjury, but they’re pretty good in their own right. Fearless is an expert in Sharlayan Astrology, and Franks has revived the teachings of the Scholars of ancient Nym!”

The Hearer was dumbfounded. He flailed about, as if he felt like he should do something, but had no idea what. “But…the Elementals…what if this angers them? What if…”

Rheika sighed through his abbreviated rant and cut in “If the Elementals get THAT upset over this, then I’m sure the Seedseer and the other padjals can calm them down, like they have to do entirely too often anyway. Given how little they seem to care about the million other things affecting the Shroud, I doubt they’ll even notice.”

She turned to regard the other assembled Hearers and other Conjurers. “But if they do? And Kan-E-Senna can’t get through to them?” She smiled. “Well, my friends, luckily for you, we’re the Warriors of Light. We have a fair amount of experience dealing with powerful beings made of aether that care little for the lives of the mortals around them.”

She crossed her arms and smiled happily. “So I wouldn’t worry. We’ll be here to protect the people of Gridania and the rest of the Shroud if it comes to that!”

She turned and walked out of the Fane. Dahkar gave a confident smile (which most non-Au Ra would agree looked more sinister than simply confident) and nodded to the assembled Hearers before turning and following her out.

The Hearers would spend several days debating their words and whether or not they should bring them before the Seedseer. In the end, they simply opted to wait and see what would come.

[siriuslymeg]

I decided to translate a few passages from these interviews here with Leonid Toptunov's mother, Vera, all written by Francesca Dani. Her blog is here where she has several stories about Chernobyl and the people touched by that disastrous event. I strongly recommend you visit her blog and read each story in full. All of the paragraphs below were translated from Italian with google translate and have been altered only where the translation doesn't quite make sense. Most corrections are in between "[ ]" brackets.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

"I immediately notice that during our entire meeting, Mother Toptunova never calls him Leonid but rather "Lenochka" - a diminishing affectionate of his name. The diminutives are often used in Eastern countries, especially to indicate children. "Lenya", as many knew him, was a nickname used only by his closest friends, in his family, from his childhood and throughout his life he was called with the diminutive Lenochka.

Leonid Toptunov was born on 16 August 1960. He was a very obedient and reserved boy, he started reading very early and spent a lot of time on books. He loved science subjects, so much so that his physics and mathematics professors often called him next to them in the chair as an assistant during her lessons to her classmates: many times he taught her lessons.

He spent a lot of time with his classmates, he was always ready to help them with school problems, he had a great communication with anyone who came into contact with him and everyone loved him."

~~~~~~~~~~~~

"He had many friends in Pripyat, some of whom were also his colleagues at work, one of whom was Alexander Akimov with whom he shared some passions, one of which was fishing. His life outside of working hours (which in any case did not leave much time to private life) took place like that of a common 25-year-old boy: he loved the nightlife of the city and went out during the weekend."

"Lenya and Sasha; [those] who got to know them confirmed that one was the shadow of the other. Leonid probably saw Sasha as an older brother he had never had, as someone who would guide him in some life choices at a time of difficult change. Even though he had the character of a rebel, he still needed someone to cling to: being alone, at 25, away from the family, in a work environment that wasn't exactly easy, in a difficult social context, with a job in his hands so difficult and important to manage, a strange mechanism is activated in the psyche that makes you feel incomplete towards the world around you. But in the end one thinks he is incomplete and instead he is only young."

~~~~~~~~~~~~

"[Vera] speaks of an episode that has remained particularly engraved in her memory: in the last days of [Leonid's] life his face was covered with open wounds due to the bruises from exposure to acute radiation and the hair that came into contact with them caused him much pain. Vera decided to call a person to cut his hair to avoid this problem, he said, 'Mom I'm dying, it makes no sense to spend money on these things. Then just do it, take them and pull they come away on their own. It doesn't make sense what you want me to do.'"

"As a researcher on the life of this figure, I had a dream that I wanted so much to achieve: being able to hold his posthumous medal of which I spoke to you just above for a few minutes. I therefore expressed my desire to Vera if she could at least grant me to see it. My request was followed by a moment of silence and her words were a direct punch in my stomach: "I don't have it anymore, someone took it away. In all these years many people have come to the Toptunov home and some of them took away Leonid's medal from the house where she was supposed to stay."

~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Vera accompanies me on the road for the appointment with my taxi and while we wait she takes me to see her garden, a small green and well-kept jewel in the concrete belly of a chaotic messy city. She was a caring mother, it shows by the care she puts into doing even the small things.

Before leaving us she asked me a very focused question, she asked me if I was married, and I told her no.

'I hope you have three children. Don't do as I did with just one' -it was her wish for my future."

[orangedodge]

I've always felt like Aegon contrasted Dany much more closely than what you would expect from just a rival, almost more of a renunciation of her than a mirror. I've wanted to do a side-by-side rereading of both of them for a while now, to chart out the similarities, but hadn't had the opportunity to do so. Now that the show is out, I'd seen something of a revival of the discussions over Aegon's status as a fake Targaryen or a false construction of Dany's presumed destiny, and what that may mean for her arc going forward in the other version of the story. That gave me the motivation to spend a few days on my own reread, in a direction I haven't really seen yet, but have had on my mind for a few years now.

To an extent this project also ended up influenced somewhat by posts by khaleesirin and rainhadaenerys suggesting that Dany's arc is taking her away from Westeros and towards an Essosi ending, which is also my preferred ending. Where I am right now, while I do hold the minority position that sees the show as likely a one-to-one adaption of the ending GRRM provided HBO a decade ago, I also believe that a decision was made along the way to combine Dany and Aegon into one character. So part of why I'm writing this now is to show the lines between them making that possible, while also giving myself a template for separating Aegon and Dany later.

In my reading Aegon isn't here to show us a fake Targaryen, or to be exposed as a fake hero, and the question of whether Dany is therefore the “real” hero, or the true heir, isn't really relevant to what's been set up in the tale of Young Griff. His role is construed more narrowly than those wider considerations of prophesy and politics can allow. Rather I think is role is much more personal. When you compare the attributes that Aegon has been gifted with, to Dany's actual accomplishments, I think he's very specifically been lain out more as a fake version of Dany. He's a less substantive imitation of her, produced by Varys and Illyrio to fool the people of Westeros.

Everything he's been given is closely matched by what Dany has attained for herself, but without the work put in to acquiring it that might have taught him to respect his capacity to influence the world around him. And you can see this construction in everything from his educational background, to the Revenge-of-Mediocrity entourage that has been constructed for him, to the army he's just been given for his birthday. Even in the mere fact that he can just up and declare himself a Targaryen, at this late stage in the story, and reap the political rewards without consequence, whereas Dany has been hunted since the literal moment she was born for carrying that name.

This is going to be a bit quote heavy.

There are two quotes in A Dance with Dragons that I think show the big picture of what Varys has created particularly well. One a direct summary of who Aegon is, provided by Varys himself, and the other from Tyrion's narration as he witnesses Aegon's lessons. In both cases, though it may seem a stretch at first glance, you could change the subject from Aegon to Dany without a lot of work. (Which is what HBO seems to have done in their seventh season). The main difference between them is that Aegon has the performative aspects of his training down, while the presumed core lessons Varys meant to impart still elude him. Dany, on the other hand, had to find her own way, but ended up where Aegon couldn't go himself.   

“Aegon has been shaped for rule since before he could walk. He has been trained in arms, as befits a knight to be, but that was not the end of his education. He reads and writes, he speaks several tongues, he has studied history and law and poetry. A septa has instructed him in the mysteries of the Faith since he was old enough to understand them. He has lived with fisherfolk, worked with his hands, swum in rivers and mended nets and learned to wash his own clothes at need. He can fish and cook and bind up a wound, he knows what it is like to be hungry, to be hunted, to be afraid. Tommen has been taught that kingship is his right. Aegon knows that kingship is his duty, that a king must put his people first, and live and rule for them.” - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 1050).

“The lesson began with languages. Young Griff spoke the Common Tongue as if he had been born to it, and was fluent in High Valyrian, the low dialects of Pentos, Tyrosh, Myr, and Lys, and the trade talk of sailors. The Volantene dialect was as new to him as it was to Tyrion, so every day they learned a few more words whilst Haldon corrected their mistakes. Meereenese was harder; its roots were Valyrian as well, but the tree had been grafted onto the harsh, ugly tongue of Old Ghis. “You need a bee up your nose to speak Ghiscari properly,” Tyrion complained. Young Griff laughed, but the Halfmaester only said, “Again.” The boy obeyed, though he rolled his eyes along with his zzzs this time. He has a better ear than me, Tyrion was forced to admit, though I’ll wager my tongue is still more nimble.

Geometry followed languages. There the boy was less adroit, but Haldon was a patient teacher, and Tyrion was able to make himself of use as well. He had learned the mysteries of squares and circles and triangles from his father’s maesters at Casterly Rock, and they came back more quickly than he would have thought.

By the time they turned to history, Young Griff was growing restive. “We were discussing the history of Volantis,” Haldon said to him. “Can you tell Yollo the difference between a tiger and an elephant?”

“Volantis is the oldest of the Nine Free Cities, first daughter of Valyria,” the lad replied, in a bored tone.” - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (pp. 204-205).

So there we have what both Varys laying out the criteria he wants his hypothetical perfect leader to match, as well as a rough idea of how Aegon's training has actually managed to proceed in real practice. What I've found more interesting than the question of whether or not Varys can deliberately social engineer a perfect king in this way—my uninformed lay opinion being that history suggests a hard no—is the question of why he was so fixated on these specific accomplishments.

To what extent do these attributes reflect the person Aegon has grown into, and what do his success and failures say about Aegon's role in this story? Because, as Aegon and Varys aren't actually real, the specific form Aegon's education takes isn't something that just arose out of happenstance. Particularly as Martin spent so much of Tyrion's early Dance chapters detailing it, it's being described as it is for a reason. I'm sure some of it's to contrast him with Rhaegar's real son, Jon (or other son, if you like), and his immediate rival for the Iron Throne, Cersei. But, even before you look at the multiple books of lead-in and set-up to Aegon's role in Dany's story, I think he's very clearly been set up as Dany's antithesis just from the above.

Why is it important, that Aegon receive this particular education? We know Varys believes him to have grown up scholarly, self-sufficient, and capable of performing to the Westerosi ideal of the warrior aristocrat, but I think that last one is more about ensuring the existing power structure accepts him as their own, and that he's capable of responding to a crisis adequately. It's more notable that his princely education seems meant to provide him with a cosmopolitan upbringing that would make him more receptive to the struggles of the common people. I think it's to this end that Varys believed Aegon should learn what it meant to be “hungry, to be hunted, to be afraid.” I think that's the core of what he meant to accomplish, and it's fairly clear that this goal was not met.

It all falls apart where Aegon has gone through life with Duck, a personal bodyguard, and Griff, who Tyrion—a man acquainted with Tywin Lannister—thinks is merciless and frightening, both always at the ready to smooth over any problems before he knows he has them. Aegon hasn't been allowed to meet new acquaintances and judge their merits for himself, he hasn't been allowed to go explore his surroundings, or to make his own decisions. He has a lord, a bodyguard, a teacher, and a priest to do all of that for him, and thus has failed to develop as either a proper lord or as an advocate of the common people.

I think the language training has an interesting way of showing that. His learned proficiency in so many languages is an impressive scholastic accomplishment, and it shows he has a genuine aptitude for academics, as well as a willingness to dedicate himself to studies that he may personally find boring but necessary. But question of whether or not he's been trained to Varys standards' isn't to be answered by how well he speaks Valyrian, but by what lessons Varys actually hoped to impart unto him, and whether or not those lessons were learned.

This is where it's important to hold in mind that none of these people are real, and that their choices—particularly ones that Martin spends so much time elaborating on—exist in the context of his world building, and the story that he is trying to communicate. Scholarship isn't received well if in Westeros if it deviates from the mold of the traditional warrior aristocracy. As such, there is a risk of making him appear superfluously educated. Outside of HV, which may be the language of the aristocracy in Westeros, or at least of liturgy, none of these languages are spoken in Westeros.

They have no known tradition of literature, poetry, philosophy, or law linked to any of these languages. Being a proficient speaker of so many languages is impressive, but he aspires to rule Westeros, which has very little diplomatic contact with the rest of the world and no inherent need for the king to be capable of acting as his own translator, and he would have little need for anything except maybe High Valyrian in his typical administrative duties. I think therefore, the language training is a signifier of the kind of cultural and social conditioning Varys wanted to impart.

I would speculate that somewhere along the way, Haldon and Griff confused the desired end with the means Varys devised for knowing it was reached. I think knowing the languages of the Free Cities, after spending a lifetime sailing the Rhoyne, was a way for Varys to know that the lesson sunk in, and that Aegon had come to know the people of Essos, and thus might understand ordinary people as though he were one of them. He wanted Aegon to know what it was like to be afraid and to be powerless, like the common people of the Free Cities, so that he would come to Westeros as a sympathetic advocate. He wanted him to know how easily security and safety can be snatched away, so that he would respect the power Varys and Illyrio propose to invest him with. And this detail of Aegon's upbringing is specifically there as a parallel to Dany's.

The narrow sea was often stormy, and Dany had crossed it half a hundred times as a girl, running from one Free City to the next half a step ahead of the Usurper’s hired knives. - Martin, George R. R.. A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) (p. 106).

After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever. They had wandered since then, from Braavos to Myr, from Myr to Tyrosh, and on to Qohor and Volantis and Lys, never staying long in any one place. Her brother would not allow it. - Martin, George R. R.. A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1).

It didn't really connect with me until this reread that Aegon's Valyrian lessons even include the dialects of Pentos, Lys, Volantis, Myr, Tyrosh, and then end with Meereen's. After the house with the red door was closed to them, Dany and Viserys lived at various times in Pentos, Lys, Volantis, Myr, and Tyrosh, and they lived in each for a considerable period of time (and since she's been back to Braavos at least once, its likely they've revisited the others as well). Only Braavos and Qohor are missing from Aegon's lessons. And by the end of A Storm of Swords, Dany's journey has finally brought her to Meereen.  And just as Meereen is presumed by many to be Dany's last stop before returning to Westeros, Aegon's lessons end on the subject of Meereen, while he's on the outset of his own voyage west.

Does Dany also speak each of those languages as well? It's not fully confirmed, but we're told she knows what the people in the “alleys and wine sinks of Pentos” are saying about Viserys, and we see her making small talk with Illyrio's servants. We know she spent time with the sailors on the ships crossing the Narrow Sea, and exploring the camps that would spring up on the journey between Astapor and Meereen. Given how frequently Dany is said to have sailed the Narrow Sea, we can assume she's had some exposure to their common trade language as well. She liked to spend time exploring the market places of Myr, Lys, and Tyrosh, and we're given the same word as before, “alleys,” to remind us both that she was homeless, and was just wandering around, getting a street-side view of things, and not the more sheltered tour of Essos that Aegon was provided.

We learn in the third book that she knows the Astapori dialect, well enough to follow what Kraznys and the others are saying, and shortly after visiting Yunkai has picked up enough of the similar Yunkai dialect to get to know the freedmen, whose dialect is supposed to be mutually intelligible with Astapori, but otherwise extremely difficult to follow for Valyrian speakers without exposure to the Ghiscari dialects. She's fluent enough in both HV and Tyroshi that they're assumed to be her native language by other Valyrians, like the wine seller in Vaes Dothrak, who hears her as Tyroshi. Since Martin always specifies every instance where Dany is speaking the Westerosi language, her narration is probably being translated from one of these.

There's an odd connection with Tyrosh, between Dany and Aegon as well,

Tyrion turned to Young Griff and gave the lad his most disarming smile. “Blue hair may serve you well in Tyrosh, but in Westeros children will throw stones at you and girls will laugh in your face.”

The lad was taken aback. “My mother was a lady of Tyrosh. I dye my hair in memory of her.” - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 131).

That Dany is assumed to be Tyroshi, and Aegon fakes being Tyroshi is probably not an intentional parallel, but is definitely the kind of thing you might work into your book subconsciously while parallels of this type are on the mind.

While Dany had a Dothraki language tutor, we know she picked up the language the same way she learned their customs, by exploring the khalasar and Vaes Dothrak. She seems to have picked up Meereenese fairly quickly as well, even though—according to David Petersen—it's meant to have wildly different syntax and noun genders. After only a few months she's at least comfortable enough to hold a conversation in Meereenese, translates what others are saying in her narration, and receives counsel from Reznak and Skahaz primarily in their own language whenever they're in private, and is capable of holding court and taking petitions without Missandei or one of her other aides translating for her (so it's unlikely that she's speaking a more commonplace prestige dialect).

Part of why it's hard to tell how many languages Dany speaks is that she doesn't actually distinguish dialects of Low Valyrian in her narration. She just calls all of them Valyrian, or “the Valyrian of the Free Cities” (which, after perhaps five rereads, I finally realized, to my embarrassment, was the key to the Astapor plot making sense), and doesn't really distinguish one from another in her narration, in contrast to characters like Arya, Tyrion, and Quentyn who do not have her experience living in the Free Cities, and who find it impossible to understand the Low Valyrian dialects that they haven't studied.

Prior to the publication of A Dance with Dragons, we never really had any indication that the differing dialects of Low Valyrian had any variety of mutual unintelligibility to one another, because we'd only known them through Dany's point of view, and from the points of view of characters who had no knowledge of LV at all. It was only upon Tyrion's journey to Essos and the introduction of Aegon that we learned that, outside of a few closely related dialects like Astapori and Yunkish, and those of the Disputed Lands, that they were generally considered to be different languages entirely. It's not until she's been in residence in Meereen for a few months that she starts referring to the Ghiscari dialects by their local names.

(Though granted, some of this could be that—prior to Feast Dance—Martin may not have fully decided on how to name each dialect, with (most notably) the decision to start naming the Astapor and Meereen dialects “Ghiscari,” as opposed to Valyrian, not coming until much later.)

In Dany's case, other than the Westerosi language, and Dothraki, she didn't have access to a tutor. There's a clear implication that she's always learning through direct exposure, and that her language fluency is the outward sign of her cultural fluency. That she was homeless during the years before she moved to Pentos (notably when she lived in Myr and Lys) increases the likelihood that she was exposed to the local language of each, and not a koine language, prestige language, or government language.

In effect, Aegon has replicated Dany's journey from a chair. He was tutored by a scholar, when Dany was immersed in her surroundings. That's not a mark against him, of course, and I'm quite jealous of his success. But he's learning in a sterile environment, isolated from anyone who hasn't been carefully vetted. He's traveled all around the Free Cities, but he was kept safe along the way, while Dany's hanging out in the marketplace exploring her surroundings and playing with the other kids her age.

Dany reads history books for fun, and enjoys listening to oral histories. She seems comfortable enough at it as well, we've seen her quickly scan over messages in court, and summarize them for everyone else, which is noteworthy in a setting where reading regularly enough to be confident in it is unusual even for lords and masters. She's notably one of the only two people in the series who clearly reads for pleasure, not just for administrative tasks, or because they're interested in learning. Those things are true of her as well, but Dany and Tyrion are the only characters who break opened a book to relax. And Dany has read enough books for it to become mundane enough to her that she can forget where she's read one thing or another.

For Aegon learning about the Free Cities disinterests him. Again, not necessarily a mark against him, we all have our own interests. But here again, Aegon is failing in the criteria that was designed around him, and it describes Dany better than it does him. It goes back to Dany talking with Illyrio's servants and Drogo's people, and the kids in the alleys of the Free Cities, and the pilgrims in Vaes Dothrak. She just likes learning about people. Dany learns about the new cities she visits by reading their books, listening to their histories and stories, and talking to everyone she meets.

Aegon doesn't seem to, and he's only really getting Haldon's own flawed perspective on history instead. How well is it actually researched? Tyrion seems to find a lot of holes, specifically because Tyrion has read many differing sources on individual histories, and has pieced together what he thinks is the best, most consistent, understanding of what actually happened. Haldon appears to be relying on only a single source, and is repeating what he was told. He's teaching to the test, in our parlance. Aegon doesn't really care about the history he's getting, and because of that, he hasn't really learned to challenge the information he's receiving, and just goes along with whatever sounds good.

It makes a degree of sense from his perspective. He wants to rule Westeros, not Volantis, or Slaver's Bay. So while he's dutiful to his lessons, we see that he treats them as a superfluous duty, something he's been told he needs to do to be king, and of no further value to him. To an extent I think this highlights Aegon as a wish fulfillment character of the fans, and a rebuttal to the impulse that Dany should just head west already and forget about Meereen. By doing just that, he's slipped into the role that the fans (and HBO) have always wanted for Dany, and potentially into the storyline that was reserved for Dany in Martin's original pitch letter.  

“No tale. Simple truth. The why of it is harder to grasp. Sack Meereen, aye, why not? I would have done the same in her place. The slaver cities reek of gold, and conquest requires coin. But why linger? Fear? Madness? Sloth?” - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 344).

Thus Dany's adherence to doing her duty to her people, at the cost of deviating from her “correct” role, is perceived as madness by Aegon's followers. As Aegon was raised believing it's his destiny to rule Westeros wisely and justly, both he and his retainers have no understanding of why someone so similar would take such a different path. Aegon has no interest in helping the people of the Free Cities or Slaver's Bay, nor do the men and women dedicated to seeing him succeed, and they cannot fathom a world otherwise. They're no different than Jorah counseling Dany to leave 80,000 people to starve and be enslaved, for the convenience of her own personal ambition. But unlike with Dany, Aegon isn't ultimately the one in charge, and even if he were, he doesn't have any information his counselors don't want him to have.

“Aegon knows that kingship is his duty, that a king must put his people first, and live and rule for them.” And he might at that, but he has a very narrowly construed conception of “his people” if so, limiting it only to his hypothetical future subjects. And his followers haven't gotten any such message, as shown by the way they treat the out group with suspicion and hostility, and will blindly take any opportunity to advance the time table of their invasion. Dany's people understand what she's about, as shown in A Dance with Dragons, and they do their best to carry on as she would when she's not there.

And its worse than just Aegon retinue being carefully vetted to make sure they're sufficiently useful and loyal. His private army was vetted as well, and not by him. Aegon does not know any of these people, he has not had a chance to win their loyalty, they have not had a chance to prove their worth to him. He doesn't really know anything about them, and neither does Griff, because he too has deliberately kept them at a distance in the name of protecting Aegon.

In comparison, Dany knows her subordinates personally. She talks with Selmy, Grey Worm, Marselen, Symon Stripeback, Tal Toraq, and Strong Belwas regularly. She appointed most of them to their positions when she accepted their service, and they're a regular part of her councils. She also personally negotiated for her alliances with Daario and Ben, and made the decision on her own to work with Skahaz and his followers, and to allow them to earn her trust. Should that seem purely a practical matter of their skill in military affairs, she also knew Rylona Rhee well enough to have been told her personal history, and to have had the opportunity to be impressed by her talent in music, and remembers the positions she took in their governing councils. And Missandei knows her well enough to comfortable with playing with and being teased by her, and to be trusted with bookkeeping and administrative work.

I don't plan to go into literally every case Varys cites of Aegon learning to work, but I found it somewhat interesting that he highlighted how Aegon “knows how to bind a wound,” given what he does with it. First aid is a good skill to have, especially in this setting, but the object of Aegon's training is for him to share the trials and pains of the commons. Knowing how to care for the injured is nice, but Aegon does so dispassionately, purely in his capacity as a claimant king. While he does good in giving the order that saves Tyrion's life, he takes little to no interest in the recovery of a man who nearly died fighting for him. If all you're doing is slapping a band-aid on them, and then leaving them behind, what are you really doing? It's better than nothing, and of course Tyrion is happy to be alive, but these are the easy chances Aegon has to form connections with his people and show them that he cares, and he doesn't take them.

Too many of the men they had sent into the camp had been stricken by the flux themselves. Others had been attacked on the way back to the city. Yesterday a wagon had been overturned and two of her soldiers soldiers killed, so today the queen had determined that she would bring the food herself. Every one of her advisors had argued fervently against it, from Reznak and the Shavepate to Ser Barristan, but Daenerys would not be moved. “I will not turn away from them,” she said stubbornly. “A queen must know the sufferings of her people.” - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 521).

Jhogo sucked in his breath. “Khaleesi, no.” The bell in his braid rang softly as he dismounted. “You must not get any closer. Do not let them touch you! Do not!”

Dany walked right past him. There was an old man on the ground a few feet away, moaning and staring up at the grey belly of the clouds. She knelt beside him, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and pushed back his dirty grey hair to feel his brow.

“His flesh is on fire. I need water to bathe him. Seawater will serve. Marselen, will you fetch some for me? I need oil as well, for the pyre. Who will help me burn the dead?” - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (pp. 523-524).

Doreah took a fever and grew worse with every league they crossed. Her lips and hands broke with blood blisters, her hair came out in clumps, and one evenfall she lacked the strength to mount her horse. Jhogo said they must leave her or bind her to her saddle, but Dany remembered a night on the Dothraki sea, when the Lysene girl had taught her secrets so that Drogo might love her more. She gave Doreah water from her own skin, cooled her brow with a damp cloth, and held her hand until she died, shivering. Only then would she permit the khalasar to press on. - Martin, George R. R.. A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 2) (pp. 145-146).

Dany on the other hand, is shown to actually comfort the people around her, even if she can't do anything but sit with them while they die. She justifies herself to her companions by citing her duty as a queen and as khaleesi, but it's clear she would have behaved the same way regardless. It's a sign that she actually cares about the people she's met along the way, above and beyond what is personally convenient to her, or even safe for her to show. Whereas with Aegon, like so much else about him, its just performative. You're alive thanks to the grace of the king, now off you go to make yourself useful to him.  

Young Griff did not seem to share his misgivings. “Let them try and trouble us, we’ll show them what we’re made of.”

“We are made of blood and bone, in the image of the Father and the Mother,” said Septa Lemore. “Make no vainglorious boasts, I beg you. Pride is a grievous sin. The stone men were proud as well, and the Shrouded Lord was proudest of them all.” - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 256).

Griff drew his longsword. “Yollo, light the torches. Lad, take Lemore back to her cabin and stay with her.”

Young Griff gave his father a stubborn look. “Lemore knows where her cabin is. I want to stay.”

“We are sworn to protect you,” Lemore said softly.

“I don’t need to be protected. I can use a sword as well as Duck. I’m half a knight.”

“And half a boy,” said Griff. “Do as you are told. Now.”

The youth cursed under his breath and flung his pole down onto the deck. The sound echoed queerly in the fog, and for a moment it was as if poles were falling around them. “Why should I run and hide? Haldon is staying, and Ysilla. Even Hugor.”- Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (pp. 260-261).

Dany had wanted to lead the attack herself, but to a man her captains said that would be madness, and her captains never agreed on anything. Instead she remained in the rear, sitting atop her silver in a long shirt of mail. - Martin, George R. R.. A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) (p. 979).

As far as their ability to perform to the expectations of the men under their command and the people under their protection, insofar as their conduct on the battlefield is concerned, they both have the necessary performative aspects down. But while Aegon is a classic member of the warrior aristocracy, Dany's role is closer to soldiering, which is ultimately more useful to the people around her. She's not a glory hound and doesn't care about chivalry, she's strictly there to win, and to get everyone out of danger alive. This is a radically different mindset from Aegon, who just tells everyone who can't fight to get out of the way and take care of themselves.

There's part of Dany that is tempted to put herself in direct danger at Meereen, but that's not about seeking glory—it's about feeling useful when there's otherwise no obvious place for her once her orders have been given. It comes after she'd stayed behind in the camp and faced the uncertainty of not knowing what was going on in Yunkai. It shows that she's not actually comfortable holding herself apart from others; if they're in danger, she feels that she must be in danger as well. And ultimately, she finds a way to still there with her men if anything goes wrong, but at a safe distance behind the lines, which is where someone in her position of leadership actually is most useful.

It's a bit more complicated in Aegon's case. There's an element of wanting to be useful as well, but it's also presented as more a manifestation of his untested youthful vainglory than anything. And it also goes to show how sheltered he's been by his retinue, who should have clamped that impulse down by now. There surely is a middle ground that could satisfy both Aegon's needs and those of his caretakers, if not their respective egos, but instead of reaching it they're kept separated by Aegon's impulsive need to prove himself, and Griff and company's need to keep him out of trouble.

He's not really Griff and Co.'s king, in essence, he's become their child, which might not be a problem in and of itself, except for the part where they're planning to launch an intercontinental war of conquest in his name.

Despite the incredible burden they're preparing for him to take up, Illyrio and Griff didn't trust him with Tyrion's identity, instead opting to allow potentially dangerous fugitive enter the inner circle and come along for the ride in secret. Aegon really needed to know, for his own ability to protect himself if Tyrion proved untrustworthy, that the man who lit Blackwater Bay on fire, and murdered both Tywin and (so is believed) Joffrey, has been sleeping down the hall from him.

But they don't trust him with that. They just let him think all is well, and everything will work out alright, and it's not long before we see he's come to rely upon and internalize that lesson beyond all reason. He really thinks Aunt Dany is going to just give him a dragon and beg him to lose half her men at sea too, just because Griff says she has to and Griff never lies. Aegon's insistence that everything will go according to his aspirations, is matched by Dany's constant introspection and fear of failure, and her early certainty that Illyrio was just having Viserys on. It solidifies the idea that Griff really is more of the father in this relationship than a trusted aide.

On the subject of being sheltered, I think there's a significant, widespread, misreading of Dany's backstory on this subject, that I'd like to address. She was not Viserys' shadow all of those years wandering Western Essos, or limited to seeing only what he allowed her to see. With all of the talk of her wandering alleys and meeting servants and merchants, her familiarity with the food and art of different city-states, and her confidence in exploring new venues on her own, she must have been more her brother's latchkey kid than his hostage. He was abusive and controlling, but he was also disinterested when she wasn't immediately useful to him, and was never organized or sophisticated enough to keep a close eye on what she was doing.

Young Griff arrayed his army for attack, with dragon, elephants, and heavy horse up front. A young man’s formation, as bold as it is foolish. He risks all for the quick kill. He let the prince have first move. Haldon stood behind them, watching the play. When the prince reached for his dragon, Tyrion cleared his throat.

“I would not do that if I were you. It is a mistake to bring your dragon out too soon.” He smiled innocently. “Your father knew the dangers of being overbold.” - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 305).

The prince stared at the playing board.

“My dragon—”

“—is too far away to save you. You should have moved her to the center of the battle.”

“But you said—”

“I lied. Trust no one. And keep your dragon close.” - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 309).

During the chess game, Tyrion gives Aegon intentionally bad advance about how best to utilize the dragon piece, in their game's current setup. Intentional comparison to Astapor? Dany knew how best to use her dragon, and wouldn't be dissuaded by the advisers who thought they knew best, and who thought they needed to control her. Aegon has his own ideas as well, but he discards them immediately just because Tyrion says so, when facing far lower stakes.

Aegon goes on to lose the game, which transitions into him making his ever first plan as king. It's a bad one too, and his supporters are all too eager to jump on it. It's an interesting transition; he's been their child sidekick for years, but the second he hits the right notes they expect of a king, they're willing to throw doubt and caution aside because he can look and sound the very part they've trained him to fake. They've just meandered around Volantis for years waiting for Illyrio to fix things for them, and when he can't, they jump on the first plan available, over all rational objections. Overly bold, just as Tyrion warned.

Dany, in contrast, abandoned Illyrio's plans at first opportunity and made her own way, with the support of the people who were there and able to work with her. She relies on her advisers, but the relationship is far more reciprocal than what Aegon has been allowed. Because of that, they can combine their individual strengths and perspectives, and arrive at a plan of action that's useful for more than merely indulging their own smug sense of Byronic pathos.  

Yet they were all the horse she had, and she dared not go without them. The Unsullied might be the finest infantry in all the world, as Ser Jorah claimed, but she needed scouts and outriders as well. - Martin, George R. R.. A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) (p. 574).

While Joso’s Cock and the other rams were battering the city gates and her archers were firing flights of flaming arrows over the walls, Dany had sent two hundred men along the river under cover of darkness to fire the hulks in the harbor. But that was only to hide their true purpose. As the flaming ships drew the eyes of the defenders on the walls, a few half-mad swimmers found the sewer mouths and pried loose a rusted iron grating. - Martin, George R. R.. A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) (p. 986).

While Dany can also be described as “bold” and aggressive, as Tyrion dismisses Aegon, she's not overly-so. Dany is aggressive, but it's a methodical, considered, aggression. Aegon losing half his men is specifically tied to both his reckless lack of planning, and his YOLO driven assumption that everything will just work out on its own to give him a throne. Dany, meanwhile is someone who knows the cost of even a single failure and knows she can't afford to have one, and so she knows to gain as much information and leave as little to chance as possible.

At Yunkai she treats separately with the leaders of each of the forces charged with the city's defense, to gauge their personalities while they're isolated from one another, and she has her bloodriders thoroughly scouting out the physical location at the same time. During the long march to Yunkai, she's shown to have interviewed everyone she had access to with experience related to the Wise Masters.

It took an hour to work out all the details. Now begins the most dangerous time, Dany thought as her captains departed to their commands. She could only pray that the gloom of the night would hide her preparations from the foe. - Martin, George R. R.. A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) (p. 581).

And only after this preparation does she actually commit to a plan to defeat the city and free its slaves, and not only does she pull out a fairly complicated plan, but does so after rigging the game for herself as thoroughly as possible. She gives the Yunkai'i and the sellswords both different—false—timelines, gets the Second Sons drunk, uses the campfires of her noncombatants to mask a midnight attack, and relies on the psychological effect that charging Dothraki will have on poorly trained conscripts. And, remember, she didn't actually need to do any of that. She almost certainly would have won either way, but she wanted to win as decisively as possible, to keep herself and her people in the best possible situation going forward.

Judging by the amount of time they're planning out the battle, we can also determine that it was an extended back and forth between the group, and so we see Jorah, Grey Worm, Rakharo, Jhogo, and Aggo are all trusted with a great deal of trust, as well as autonomy, once it's time for them to move.

I have to admit that prior to this reread I'd never been fond of the taking of Meereen, which seemed to attributable to luck for my taste, and didn't appear to work well as a follow-up to Yunkai and Astapor. But I'd failed to really account for the sheer scale of Dany's entourage, which had so many tens of thousands available, that it's not luck at all that one of them would just happen to be familiar with Meereen's sewers. And with the distraction provided by assaulting the harbor, and through her use of fire arrows to ruin the night vision the city's defenders, it was a fairly safe plan. They either made it into the city, or they'd just be left to wait it out in a sewer until everything was over.

More importantly, I'd neglected the relative lack of importance of the sewer infiltration in my previous assessment. She didn't actually need it at all, but was happy enough to take the advantage as it presented itself. Altogether it paints a good picture of a woman who really puts in the work at gathering information, fostering relationships, and taking advantage of the expertise of the people around her, to ultimately manufacture her own luck just by reaping the rewards that her own conduct puts her in position to find. Her initial liberation of Slaver's Bay works to one of Dany's biggest strengths as a leader: she's never found an advantage she was too proud to take, and she isn't afraid to look greedy by taking too many.

And a lot of Dany's advantages come from being a good judge of character and talent, and being generally good at knowing how much to trust the people around her, and how to sort out responsibilities appropriately.

“No. Hear me, Daenerys Targaryen. The glass candles are burning. Soon comes the pale mare, and after her the others. Kraken and dark flame, lion and griffin, the sun’s son and the mummer’s dragon.” - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 166).

For Dany, here are just a small selection of the people who gravitate towards her. Ironborn, Dornishmen, Westermen, Stormlanders, Valyrians, and red priests. Marwyn as well, in A Feast For Crows.  You can probably throw in Benerro and Volantis as well, on the basis of the widow of the waterfront (“Oh, I think it will be war as well, but not the war they want.”) as well as the show's consolidation of all of the Volantene characters into Kinvara.  This is basically every major group represented, of the cities and nations we've visited personally, or who have had direct impact upon the story. She's made contacts nearly everywhere, and where she hasn't, she's sufficiently inspired the people around her that her story has encouraged others to seek her out as well.

Dany and Aegon both draw followers heavily from the dispossessed, but notice that Dany's people tend to be drawn from one of two groups: people who want something to believe in, and people with nowhere else to go, who are in search of protection. Aegon's people are generally those with no other options at all, and those searching for revenge out of bitterness and spiteful nihilism. These are a group of people who just weren't good enough for their aspirations, resent their failures, and are looking for one last wagon to hitch themselves to.

Griff was incompetent and ineffectual as Hand of the King, and dreams of being Aegon's very own Tywin. Haldon wasn't good enough to graduate his university, and spends his days spitefully challenging total strangers to trivia contests, and threatening them with death when he loses. Should these boys really be educating a king? Yes, Dany has awful people in her retainer too, like Jorah Mormont, but she doesn't blindly and incuriously trust them to have her best interests in heart. She gives them clear, specific, instructions and carefully keeps watch on what they do with them to see how much trust they deserve.

Outside of maybe Duck, and Septa Lemore, Aegon's men have no higher aspirations, just romantic visions. They've all given up on that. It's no wonder that half of them end up missing in a storm, and it's surely no accident that Tyrion doesn't belong with them. I talked earlier about how poorly positioned Aegon and his supporters are to take advantage of one another in a mutually beneficial way, and I think the short argument between Lemore and Griff over the Golden Company is further instructive.

“We have gone to great lengths to keep Prince Aegon hidden all these years,” Lemore reminded him. “The time will come for him to wash his hair and declare himself, I know, but that time is not now. Not to a camp of sellswords.”

“If Harry Strickland means him ill, hiding him on the Shy Maid will not protect him. Strickland has ten thousand swords at his command. We have Duck. Aegon is all that could be wanted in a prince. They need to see that, Strickland and the rest. These are his own men.”

“His because they’re bought and paid for. Ten thousand armed strangers, plus hangers-on and camp followers. All it takes is one to bring us all to ruin." - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 336).

These are strangers. They don't know Aegon yet. He's just been given these men. The appendix actually calls them of “uncertain loyalty.” Given House Blackfyre's association with the Golden Company, we might ascribe the company's saying, “beneath the gold, the bitter steel” as well, to be a way of saying both of them are an off-brand imitation.

It also reminds me a bit of Stannis' fake lightbringer, and the hints regarding Drogon. Aegon's almost certainly going to end up with the sword, Blackfyre, and Dany just happens to have a dragon that breathes black fire, and is associated with swords. He's even introduced as a puppet dragon in Dany's Clash chapters, in contrast to Dany's mythical role of the Last Dragon. Aegon's a fake, and to show that his retinue has literally been gilded over. It's also surprisingly reminiscent of Viserys and his golden crown. And like Viserys, what are these men actually worth to anyone?

From that day to this, the men of the Golden Company had lived and died in the Disputed Lands, fighting for Myr or Lys or Tyrosh in their pointless little wars, and dreaming of the land their fathers had lost. - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 86).

I ask, what have the Golden Company ever actually accomplished? They have had some early successes in the Stormlands, true, but it's hard to know how seriously to take that when the Stormlands have been leaderless and at war for years, and everyone who knows what they're doing is either in King's Landing or the North. And I somehow doubt that they're going to do a prudent job of governing the fiefdoms they're seizing.

The Golden Company have a fearsome reputation, but it mostly extends from sacking their own client for failure to pay, and of taking control of disorganized pirate bands in the Stepstones. How much of their reputation is an authentic reflection of their skill, rather than a product of the same grand guignol that built Gregor Clegane's? Their real record has been one of pointless little wars, failed invasions of Westeros, and kicking down at people who can't defend themselves. And they seem to be playing a shell game with the three cities of the Disputed Lands, with how often their contract changes hands, and how rarely they're ever called on to do anything in that conflict.  

They found the Golden Company beside the river as the sun was lowering in the west. It was a camp that even Arthur Dayne might have approved of—compact, orderly, defensible. A deep ditch had been dug around it, with sharpened stakes inside. The tents stood in rows, with broad avenues between them. The latrines had been placed beside the river, so the current would wash away the wastes. The horse lines were to the north, and beyond them, two dozen elephants grazed beside the water, pulling up reeds with their trunks. Griff glanced at the great grey beasts with approval. There is not a warhorse in all of Westeros that will stand against them.

Tall battle standards of cloth-of-gold flapped atop lofty poles along the perimeters of the camp. Beneath them, armed and armored sentries walked their rounds with spears and crossbows, watching every approach. - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 339).

We have ten thousand men in the company, as I am sure Lord Connington remembers from his years of service with us. Five hundred knights, each with three horses. Five hundred squires, with one mount apiece. And elephants, we must not forget the elephants. - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 345).

Black Balaq commanded one thousand bows. In his youth, Jon Connington had shared the disdain most knights had for bowmen, but he had grown wiser in exile. In its own way, the arrow was as deadly as the sword, so for the long voyage he had insisted that Homeless Harry Strickland break Balaq’s command into ten companies of one hundred men and place each company upon a different ship. - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 876).

A third of Balaq’s men used crossbows, another third the double-curved horn-and-sinew bows of the east. Better than these were the big yew longbows borne by the archers of Westerosi blood, and best of all were the great bows of goldenheart treasured by Black Balaq himself and his fifty Summer Islanders. - Martin, George R. R.. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5) (p. 876).

I've always found the structure of the Golden Company interesting. So we have a force of 10,000 men consisting of 24 elephants, 1,000 archers, and 1,000 knights and squires, with the remainder appearing to be infantry with spears. Within the archers alone, we see the important thing is highlighting that they've drawing influence from each of Westeros, the Dothraki, the Free Cities, and the Summer Islands.

Doesn't this sound a bit familiar? Dany also starts off with 1,000 armored guys with bows riding horses, courtesy of her alliances with Daario and Ben, and with around 8,000 to 10,600—the numbering gets weird whether the trainees are included or not—guys on foot with spears. So visually, the Golden Company and Dany's forces are roughly the same idea, developed convergently.

She later gains 2,000 more mercenaries from the Windblown, and “several hundred” pit fighters. Later on she'll also have nearly twice as many infantry as she did when she set out from Astapor, when somewhere around 10,000 freedmen have added to the initial group Unsullied. That's again, visually similar to the Golden Company, and it's the force whose loyalty she earns as an indirect consequence of not peacing out to Volantis to join up with them.

Throughout her time in Meereen the leaders of those thousands of freedmen are fleshed out as they gain more experience as well as become influential among Dany's people. While Aegon is given 10,000 men and wanders off to Westeros right away, Dany wins the loyalty of her own 10,000, and stays with the people she's grown to feel responsible for. While Aegon loses half his men right away, Dany at least doubles her forces right away, putting her in a better position to accomplish her immediate goals than Aegon in his.

The size of Dany's forces continually increase while Aegon's continually divide and split apart, and there's a general theme of different groups of people coming together within the traveling city that's sprung up around Dany's person. The Brazen Beasts are formed from equal numbers of freedmen and shavepates. We don't really know how many there are, beyond there being enough to secure a city with a population likely in excess of 1 million, and to defend its walls during a major siege.

Barristan has 26 squires with him by the end of A Dance with Dragons. Three in particular are highlighted, the Red Lamb, Tumco Lho, and Larraq, are all former slaves who become knights. What's to notice about these three? They're all slaves—presumably from Meereen—but the Red Lamb is originally from Lhazarene (Dany's primary ally in the region, whose support she negotiated), Tumco is a pit fighter, and Larraq was one of the slaves of Meereen. All three are slaves, but within them we see a microcosm of her support from Lhazar, the freedmen, and even the reluctant, sometimes fraught, support she has among the pit fighters.

Dany starts off with a similar army to Aegon, but her's grows, because it's actually not  just an army. Dany's freedmen are their own community.

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 strongenough 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. - Martin, George R. R.. A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) (p. 574).

Her host numbered more than eighty thousand after Yunkai, but fewer than a quarter of them were soldiers. - Martin, George R. R.. A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) (p. 775).

Aegon's army is Dany's army—the difference is that Dany gathered her force herself, and it's primary purpose has developed into protecting the greater community that's formed around it. Aegon's army is only there to conquer Westeros, and someone just bought it for him. If Dany finds herself in need of a specialization that goes outside what Grey Worm and Daario can take care of, she has tens of thousands of people on hand to ask. When it's time for Aegon and his men to go to Westeros, they just ask the first people they meet to give them boats, and hope they don't sink, because that's all they can do.

Therefore to be more precise, we must compare the Golden Company not to Dany's army, but to Dany's khalasar, as her fighting force has become indistinguishable from her nation by the time she reaches the gates of Meereen. When adding in the freedmen and women bearing arms to the Unsullied and the sellswords, you even have the noncombatant section of the the camp in a similar proportion to that of a Dothraki khalasar. When standing before the gates of Meereen, Dany thinks to herself that the Great Masters do not treat her comunity with the same respect that they would treat a khalasar, showing where her mind is. When she resolves to stay in Meereen, she looks back and realizes “[she has] been more khal than queen.”

Her Mhysa identity itself is also linked directly to Dany's status as khaleesi. The moment she was hailed as Mhysa was the moment the freedmen ceased to be a burden and became her people. It's important therefore to note that there is actually no conflict between Dany-as-Mhysa and Dany-as-the-Dragon. Rather, they are intrinsically linked, as Mhysa is directly intertwined with Dany's identity as khaleesi, and the freedmen with her khalasar, which are both made possible by the power of her dragons.

Rather, this trio identity of Mhysa/khaleesi/Dragon is directly in opposition to Dany as Daenerys I, that is, Dany-as-Queen, the aspect of herself that still works to benefit the privileged few at the top of the social and economic pyramid, that compels her to make an effort to treat with the Great Masters. This struggle can be seen even in Dany's name, which in A Dance with Dragons, for the first time, swings back and forth in her narration between Dany and Daenerys, rather than Dany being dominant as in past volumes.

And for once, this aspect of Dany is closely paralleled with, rather than contrasted by, Aegon in his own quest to retake the Iron Throne for solely his own benefit and that of his elite supporters, with provision to the common people made on a case by case basis only. Dany's ongoing struggle throughout Dance is in effect a struggle to resist the temptation of becoming like Aegon, which is the same as becoming her show counterpart.

I don't think it's fair to judge her too harshly for her works with the Great Masters, even if they do represent backsliding onto the wrong path. Even as a homeless teenage war orphan, with no formal education, she has a lot of experiences to learn from and to unlearn. And as she has no one to lean on with experience in the right direction, her politics have by necessity been made up on the spot, guided only by experience and her own moral clarity.

I'd like to cite @khaleesirin on that note, who summarized Dany’s tendency flesh out her principles from her experiences better in the linked post.

Because Dany is the closest thing we really have to a character whose headspace we can insert ourselves into, I think we've developed a collective tendency to forget that she's been forced to make things up as she goes along. Her path forward is a bit sloppier than we're used to seeing in this type of fiction, but she's definitely moving further along it all the same, as experience forces her to fine tune her way of doing things.

There had been a throne there, a fantastic thing of carved and gilded wood in the shape of a savage harpy. She had taken one long look and commanded it be broken up for firewood. “I will not sit in the harpy’s lap,” she told them. Instead she sat upon a simple ebony bench. It served, though she had heard the Meereenese muttering that it did not befit a queen. - Martin, George R. R.. A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) (p. 980).

Dany's bench is seen as less queenly, and that seems to be exactly the point in having it. She had correctly identified the throne as an inherently oppressive construct. She is again being “more khal than queen” to her people. What I think is interesting about that conflict is how it's a development upon what Dany's already learned from her time with the Dothraki. When Drogo resided in Pentos, he held court in his manse not unlike any other magister. When Dany resides in Meereen, she does so in one of their pyramids, and holds court in the style the Ghiscari seem to, albeit with her own twist to show her alignment with the freedmen. But then once that's done, it's back to the felt coats and painted leather vests, just as Drogo kept his own customs on the road.

Khal Drogo is, admittedly, a surprising model for a lefty revolutionary to pattern herself on, but I think the important thing is less his example, and more that he and his khalasar provided her with a new set of rules to explore herself within. Knowing them gave her permission to live among her people, putting on the face she needed to guide them to safety, and to allow herself to be called upon through a criteria other than blood and birthright. As for the rest, there's still more room to grow, and I think it follows that when Dany leaves Slaver's Bay, whether she follows the show's course or not, she's inevitably going to be more Nymeria than Aegon.

The first thing Dany ever did as a conquering queen, by the way, was take one look at the throne she'd won, and order it destroyed and replaced with a nice bench. Just saying, I don't think Drogon is destroying the Iron Throne as his own political thesis in the books.

So what are we left with when we consider the case of Aegon? He's a manufactured hero, he's been handed the key to a grand destiny, through no merit of his own, and he's been set up to fail spectacularly. That would normally imply that a real hero needs to emerge, the woman whose destiny he's stolen, coming to power through the longer rode that Aegon ignored. But it's not necessarily true that just because common storytelling logic dictates such an outcome, that it will come to fruition.

It seems odd, and I think necessarily unfulfilling after five full novels, to think that we may be presented a succession of failed heroes, only to reveal the real hero, and then pull the rug out from under her as well in the end. Yet it isn't inconceivable that Martin would invoke the same bait-and-switch multiple times to diminishing returns—after all, consider that Quentyn's story, exploring the trauma of war, was already presented to us, with greater detail and closer and more personally, through Arya's time in the Riverlands—but it would feel like a tremendous waste of time, and hard to square with how disconnected Daenerys' arc has been from the other characters.

After all, she doesn't think she's Azor Ahai Reborn, or the Prince that was Promised. Unlike the fans, she's only vaguely aware that these things exist, and has been spending most of her time trying to end slavery. I do wonder, when I look at Aegon, if he exists so that there will be someone on hand to fulfill Daenerys' original purpose as the warlord who invades Westeros after years of infighting. Do we actually need two characters for that? There is, of course, an element of wishful thinking, but I'd like to think Martin's realized that Dany's character has grown too far from her original design.

Aegon is false because his path is false. And if his path is false, than that implies that kingship itself is the false path. We've seen Dany move further away from the Iron Throne throughout her arc, both geographically, and sociologically. When she finally has a taste of being queen, she's miserable, and can't stop reliving her past actions—as Mhysa, as the Mother of Dragons, those actions that brought her to where she is—as ones inherently in opposition to the idea of being a queen. Unless Dance truly is just a course correction document, made to transform Dany (and Jon, and Tyrion) into different characters, it strikes me likely that Aegon's purpose is to show the reader that Dany is right to move on and break free of what she's been taught is her duty to House Targaryen.

Aegon wasn't just accidentally set up as her negative. I've always thought, or at least since Dance that her arc was taking her away from Westeros. Her fate seems as though it should be tied to Essos, with her people—specifically that nomadic city of freedmen and Dothraki that she's adopted as her own. Why abandon that? Why introduce these flawed analogues for Dany—Viserys, Aegon, arguably Stannis—only to have her make their mistakes and lose everything she's found? A dark arc is one thing, so is a brief layover in Westeros for humanitarian purposes, but to abandon everything and just become Aegon is to render both of them red herrings.

A Dance with Dragons ends with her dispirited, dejectedly realizing that Meereen was never her city, and resolving to go to Westeros. But this is her lowest moment, a few books away from the future conclusion of her journey. The resolution seems as though it should be for Dany to realize that while Meereen isn't her city, the people who followed her there from Yunkai are still her people.

[dancingkirby]

Jonerys Week-Day 2-Dragons

Note: Takes place immediately following the events of my Day 1 story.

It was a nice day for flying, Rhaegal thought.  Yesterday had been gloomy and full of thunderstorms, and if that wasn’t enough, he’d also had to endure Drogon screaming about it all day. (Granted, Rhaegal may have contributed to the screaming himself…but only a little!)  However, today had plenty of sunlight, with just enough cloud cover so that the sun didn’t get into his and Drogon’s eyes.  There was also a slight breeze, which felt good moving past his scales.  In fact, his only concern at the moment was that he was getting hungry.  He decided to dive down to the ocean to boil up a couple hundred or so fish for lunch.

Yes, fish again.  Rhaegal would give anything for a nice big sheep.  The charred meat mingling with the crispy fat and crunchy bones made for an exquisite experience as he gulped the animal down.  However, that would have to wait until they were back on land. He and Drogon could survive on fish indefinitely, and had already done so multiple times.  Besides, maybe he’d get lucky and manage to find a pod of those really big fish with the holes on the back of their heads, which were the size of many sheep and almost as good.

Cheered up by that thought, he began his descent, only to have to come to an abrupt stop as his brother’s voice boomed within his mind.

“RHAEGAL!  Come here and look at this!”

Rhaegal decided to humor his excitable brother this once.

“Yes?” he asked as he flew back up.

“Mother and that man stopped waving that stick around and are doing that thing with their mouths again.”

Rhaegal glanced down at the two small figures on the deck of the flagship.  “So I see.”

“And?  Wouldn’t that be painful?”

“They don’t have teeth like us, Drogon,” Rhaegal reminded the larger dragon.  “Their teeth are so pathetic that they have to cut their meat into tiny pieces before they can even eat it.”

“Oh.  That still doesn’t explain why they’re doing it, though.”

“Humans are strange creatures.  Perhaps some of their customs are best left unknown,” Rhaegal mused.  Drogon blew a puff of smoke from his nose as he contemplated this.  For a while, the two of them slowed their flight so as not to get ahead of the boat. They watched as Mother detached her mouth from the man and began discussing whatever silly things it was that humans liked to talk about.  Rhaegal had always found human communication to be inferior to that of dragons; they appeared to not be able to talk inside their heads like he and Drogon did, and had to resort to relaying their thoughts using sounds that anyone else could hear.

“So what do you think?” Drogon finally inquired.

“What do I think about what?”  Rhaegal said.

“Him.  What did Mother call him again?  Gon?”

“I believe it was Jon.”

“Right.  So what is your opinion on this…Jon?”

“Well, Mother seems to like him,” Rhaegal replied.  “They’ve been together almost constantly on that boat, so he must be important to her.  But I haven’t properly met him yet like you did.  What do you think?”

“He’s unobtrusive enough.  As long as he doesn’t take Mother away from me, I will tolerate him.  Just as I do her other human companions,” Drogon said.

“Yes, I heard from Viserion how much you tolerated him.  So much so that you let him pet you as if you were one of those very small sheep from Meereen that sit on their owners’ laps and yip.”

Drogon gave a low growl and emitted a greater amount of smoke.  “What are you implying?”  

Rhaegal reconsidered. Given that Drogon was nearly half again his own size, perhaps it was not a good idea to pick a fight with him.

“I was simply curious,” he said in an attempt to be at least somewhat conciliatory.  “Normally you turn any Not-Mother human who dares to touch you into ashes.  As do I.”

“If you truly want to know, he smells a lot like Mother. I would have never let him touch me otherwise.”

“Of course he would. They’re together all the time, like I said.”

“No, it’s not just that he has Mother’s scent on him…although there’s that, too.  I mean that his own scent is similar to hers.  He had his hand right next to my nostril.   I could tell the difference.”

“Oh.”  It just so happened that the breeze shifted so that it was coming towards them from the ship.  Rhaegal carefully sniffed the air.  “Yes, I can see what you mean. I do think I will be looking forward to getting acquainted with this man.”

“How acquainted is acquainted?  Are you thinking of letting him ride you?” Drogon pressed.

Rhaegar decided not to let his brother goad him.  He replied with a noncommittal “Possibly.  But for now, my goal is to catch some fish.”

“Good idea,” Drogon admitted.

Meanwhile, on the deck of the ship, Jon muttered, “That’s strange…”

“What’s strange?” Dany, who had been occupied by looking at a particularly visually pleasing cloud, turned to face him.

“Your dragons.  I’ve never seen them keep pace with the ship this long before.  D’you think…they’re watching us?”

Naturally, as soon as Dany looked in the direction that his finger was pointing, Drogon and Rhaegal abruptly broke formation and dove down to the water’s surface.  Jon’s brow furrowed in consternation.

“Do not worry. I believe you,” Dany told him.  “Dragons are much more intelligent than most people give them credit for.  They’re probably also more intelligent than most people too.”  She raised an eyebrow as if daring him to say otherwise.

“I don’t doubt that,” Jon assured her quickly.  “It almost looked like…” He broke off because he was worried it would sound silly.

“Almost looked like what, Jon?” Dany inquired.

“Well, to be honest…it almost looked like they were having a conversation with each other.”

Dany smiled brightly. “Who says that they weren’t?”

[momo-de-avis]

Wordtober Day 6: Build 2.0

Yall, I cheated. And am also late. I couldn’t get anything done with ‘husky’, so I decided to prolonge my previous prompt, as the last one didn’t give me room to fully explore my idea. So... be warned that this is... quite long. Possibly very long. I leave that up to you.

It’s a continuation of this one

𝚆𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚗 𝚊𝚌𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝙻𝚞𝚒𝚜 𝙲𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚓𝚘 𝚛𝚎𝚐𝚊𝚛𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚒𝚗𝚟𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚐𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙼𝚊𝚍𝚞𝚛𝚘 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚝𝚢 𝚋𝚎𝚝𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝟷𝟿𝚝𝚑 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝟸𝟻𝚝𝚑 𝚘𝚏 𝚂𝚎𝚙𝚝𝚎𝚖𝚋𝚎𝚛, 𝟸𝟶𝟶𝟷, 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝙳𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚎𝚕𝚊 𝚍𝚎 𝚕𝚊 𝙿𝚊𝚣.

Dani and I had done this before, many times. We’d had our fair share of paranormal investigation—sometimes just plain investigation—and most of the times, it even amounts to nothing, if not a slight disruption of a picture or the ‘mysterious noises’ turning out to be either stray cats or a group of teenagers setting a horror movie set for strangers. But the Maduro case was peculiar to us. It was Dani who suggested we’d investigate the Maduro case, and she always did seem rather curious about the outlines of the case.  

We did the needed investigation before we got there. Aside from some news articles, there was the original 1983 police report, which looks… sloppy, rushed, and honestly, not like they were even trying at all. The majority of the photos vanished, supposedly lost in mishandling of paperwork, except three—the ones well known—and both disappearances were chalked up under ‘runaway children’, despite the fact that Samuel Maduro was 15 and Aura 28 at the time of each of their disappearances.

We knew the house had belonged to Aura after her parents, and before that, to Amelia and Augusto Maduro, the grandparents, who used to own a quarry up until 1939, when they sold their part of the business to Mr Maduro’s partner. At the time, we couldn’t really find the reason why they sold it, though what we did conclude afterwards is nothing short of speculation, so we just assumed it to be some sort of financial strain. There was a civil war going on, though we couldn’t find confirmation on the Maduros’ political affiliations, nor is their village located anywhere close to where the war hit, but… War always does bring about hard times, so it wasn’t at all that inane.

What was surprising was finding our first clue that contradicted the original 1983 report. Though Claudia Maduro, mother of both Samuel and Aura, suffered from a lifelong heart disease and eventually died four years after her son’s disappearance—a time spent between check-ups and several psychiatric consultations—the father’s death, Francisco Maduro, does seem related to the case.

He appears to have lived the last ten years of his life as a recluse, and the only visits he ever had were a gardener—who helped around with the backyard—, a maid—mostly responsible for doing his laundry, some cooking and cleaning—, and a man named Antonio. He was the last one to see Mr Maduro alive, though his name wasn’t even mentioned in the original report.

According to Antonio, when he arrived at the house that afternoon, Mr Maduro was in a state of distress. He had set up a ladder to go up the attic and was going up and down frequently, to fetch several items, all of which he recognized as being used for construction purposes: toolboxes, measuring tapes, rope, sandpaper. Of this, Antonio reportedly joked for a while, asking him if he was building something, or maybe fixing a piece of furniture, but Mr Maduro was majorly unresponsive, instead appearing focused on his task. He simply kept mumbling: “The animals keep tearing it down.”

It must have been shortly after he left that Mr Maduro fell off his ladder, approximately two meters high, hitting his head on a rock and being found hours later by the maid, who had him rushed to the hospital, where he died an hour later.

Here’s what’s so appalling about this. Looking at the original police records, there were no interviewed. It looks like the police simply asked no questions to anyone, no acquaintances of the family, no friends, no neighbours. Every evidence was gathered from inside the home, and every conclusion reached without taking into consideration the village itself. At first, we thought they had been careless—ridiculously careless, mind you—but as our days went on and we tried speaking to others, it became clear just what the real reason was.

The villagers avoided the Maduros because they were afraid of them.

Overall, it seems neither Aura nor Samuel—nor their parents, for that matter—were particularly hated, rather ostracized by what the villagers saw as a need. The priest at the time, one father Ángel, even did his best to include the two children in his community, and we did find several photos of Samuel carrying the podium of Santa Marina during one of its processions. Both siblings appear to have been devout Catholics too: crucifixes and rosaries were found in both rooms, as well as prayer books and Bibles, they attended church regularly, got involved with the community and celebrated every day of the calendar.  

The problem was not Samuel and Aura, nor Francisco and Claudia—the Maduros’ dark history was older than that.

There was one fundamental piece to their history that everyone completely overlooked, which wasn’t on records for reasons that, for a while, seemed mysterious enough, though it became clear as we unravelled the story. Francisco Maduro, grandfather of both Aura and Samuel, disappeared without a trace in 1939, immediately after selling his part of the quarry.

After searching through records, old newspapers and considerably angering the locals, all we found was one newspaper clipping, though not an article. It was an ad, an announcement, posted by the local police, asking villagers to please notify them if they new anything about Mr Maduro’s whereabouts. And nothing more. The only way to understand what had happened was by asking, and by now, we knew nobody would say a word about it, so we thought Antonio would perhaps collaborate.

By all means, it must be said: Antonio had a bit of a drinking problem, and we might have bargained in that sense. I’m not terribly proud of it, but in my defence, he looked desperate to talk, like he had kept something buried so deeply he waited years to finally speak up. Though I wasn’t expecting a confession exactly. After all, Antonio was, in his own words, Francisco’s best friend, though the two weren’t as close in adulthood as they had been in childhood. And like the Maduros—maybe because he appeared to be the only one in the village who didn’t fear going near the house—he was a bit of an outcast.

He told us that Amelia Maduro was far from being a heart-warming woman. He recalls her posture from childhood, which I think can be seen in the pictures found inside one of the locked rooms of the house: haughty, stern, impeccable. She seldom smiled, and her face bore something grievous to it, a chiselling of austerity that made children everywhere tell stories of her beatings and whippings. She was very pious too, at times too severe in her belief, and her doctrine was an imposing one. Antonio recalls an event from childhood, after visiting Francisco one afternoon: she had stopped a maid on her tracks, taken a step back and inspected her outfit; then, she had asked why was her skirt three fingers above the knee, to which the maid, flustered, replied she had to borrow her sister’s, who was younger, considering she had found a hole in hers that morning. Then, without warning, Amelia slapped the young woman across the face and said: “I will not have whores serving me.” And she fired her.

This might be explanatory to what truly seems to be the reason behind the quarry issue. Shortly before, Francisco Maduro became romantically involved with a supposed worker at the quarry, a woman who would bring refreshments to the men on the field every afternoon. It turns out, however, the woman was Pilar Deocampo, niece of Alfredo Deocampo—Francisco’s business partner. She became pregnant and decided to plan an escape with the aid of Francisco, who was supposed to meet with her after dealing with some logistics as to not leave his family with no support, but the plan failed when Amelia discovered their affair. When Pilar gave birth to baby boy in 1939, things took a grim turn.

From here on, Antonio swears, the story has become folklore, but the vast majority of the villagers strongly believe it to be true, and stands as the reason for them to stay away from the Maduros and their home. Amelia, without her husband’s knowledge—who was away for a few days—invited poor Pilar for some afternoon tea, under the guise of friendship and empathy before her condition—unmarried and with a son borne from a married man. How it happened differs, since nobody was present if not one maid who left the house immediately after, but on one thing all tales are consistent: Amelia killed the child in front of his mother, proclaiming that her act was justified before God because it was in God’s plans to cleanse the earth of sinners, and that the child was impure and shouldn’t have been born either way.

In a fit of rage, Pilar Deocampo attempted to injury Amelia, but failed to. As a result, Amelia inflicted several wounds on the grievous mother, who bled out in her living room. Many say Mrs Maduro watched, untouched by her very own gruesome actions, and in her dying breath, Pilar Deocampo uttered one last thing, something the village now chants as much as a curse as a reminder: Mi sangre marcará tu tierra, y mis huesos serán tu mausoleo. Por cada uno que pierdas, un otro quedará en sofrimiento, y como las árboles de tu finca, vosotros marchitarán lentamiente.

My blood will mark your land, and my bones will be your mausoleum. For each one you lose, another will stay in suffering, and like the trees of your property, you will wither away slowly.

Amelia then proceeded to force her very own maids into taking the body to the nearby forest, dig up a grave and bury them; then, she placed the two pillars with the chain to forbid anyone from going into the area, and never spoke of the subject again—until her husband arrived home the next day. Seeing the maids scrubbing blood from the wooden floorings, he inquired his wife as to what had happened. Amelia didn’t spare any details; in fact, many agree she was quite assured in her grim account, believing hers had been a righteous act.

Francisco Maduro then, in a frenzy of grief and despair, ran into the woods to see it for himself, to see the grave of his beloved and his child—and he crossed the space between the two pillars. He was never seen again.

Amelia would die less than ten years later, and despite everything, many agree she was incredibly grievous of her husband’s disappearance and entirely devoted to her faith. The Maduros then became a cautionary tale—it’s unclear to me whether or not Francisco witnessed this event, considering he would be around 18-20 at the time, but the tale became part of the villages’ folklore so much he became a person they willing avoided. Antonio swears, however, that both Aura and Samuel were entirely unaware of this past.

From the story came a legend, one the villagers believed to be real, from the case of Samuel and Aura Maduro’s disappearance. Anyone who crossed the space between the two pillars would find the secret burial place of Pilar and her child; keeping her promise, it seems a Maduro would always be bound to find the place in one way or another, and it was none other than Pilar who called them, leaving someone else behind to suffer for their absence, until no Maduros were left.

It seems Pilar achieved her goal, then.

This also explains something about the house, something Aura herself spoke of in her last journal entry: that there was an overwhelming sadness to it, something bittersweet that didn’t seem to belong there. If the path itself sent a shiver down our spines, and there always seem to be something lurking between the trees when we looked, inside the house we felt… safe. Dani even recalled feeling this sudden pang of sadness which she described as being ‘like a mother losing her child’. At the time, I laughed it off, told her she was just missing her cat, but after Antonio told us the tale, we… froze in dread, to be honest.

Energy like this is nothing new—the spirits of those who died inside the place always leave some speck of it behind, and we feel it like something external. We thought it strange at first because no Maduro had died inside the home that we knew of: Francisco at the hospital, Claudia at the local market, Samuel and Aura vanishing, and as far as we could tell, with Francisco also vanished, Amelia died while in mass of a heart attack. But it started making sense then: the only people who had died inside the house were not members of the Maduro. It was their pain we felt, and consequently, that Aura felt.

Dani and I weren’t sure what to expect of this, but it certainly explained why all those who had tried finding the clearing described by Aura never did—because they went around the two pillars, not through them. We had come all this way to find answers, so we figured there was only one thing to do.

I think we were naïve. We believed the tale was only a tale, and if any of it was to be taken for truth, it was certainly aimed at the cursed—the Maduros, not us, mere wanderers. But… we were wrong.

I took a recorder and a camera with me, while Dani took a photographic digital camera. For a while, we stood before the two pillars in silence and tried telling ourselves it was fine, perfectly fine, it was just a piece of local folklore based on Catholic devotion of two women, one a sinner, the other scorned. We’d heard many like that, and it seemed improbable the clearing even existed in the first place. So we held our hands—though why, I can’t exactly tell—and we leapt over the chain.

Every single one of Aura’s words travelled back to me. She was right. It was… daunting. Shapes hovered about, escaping my sight constantly, caught only from the corner of my eyes, and the dense vegetation closed around us. There was a horrible silence all around—more of an absence of sound—and we couldn’t even hear our own heart beats. The sun struggled to transverse the heavy foliage, and the air was thick and prickly. Dani snapped a few photographs as we trod on, but it was clear she was aiming at nothing specifically, just frantically moving her camera with a gasp and a jitter, frightened by a sudden movement from which came no sound. Even the snapping twigs and crunching leaves beneath our feet seemed muffled.

After thirty minutes, we stopped. Before us, the space opened widely, and trees sprouted from a bald batch of white and brown earth, entwining together above our heads like a gable roof. Dani stopped, her camera frozen between her hands, but her eyes were glazed into a sort of mania I had never seen before. With a shuddering finger, she pressed the shutter, but didn’t look into the screen, just ahead—contemplating, focused. Her arm lowered then, and I called her name; Dani jittered, blinked and looked down at the photo she had just snapped—frozen and pale.

When she showed me photos, my heart sank to my feet. Every single one of them was so corrupted almost all of them were unusable, but a few of them showed something buried beneath the static corruption. Shadows, figures, silhouettes. A pair of baby feet. Faces, hollow and daunting, frozen into a scream.

I pressed my recorder, but it didn’t seem to work; Dani pressed some buttons on her camera but suddenly halted, and her eyes—glazed once more—cast curiously all around. She gave a step forward, and another, and a few more—all considerate and cautious, though they grew, and unexpectedly, she took her backpack off her shoulders and threw it on the ground; she dashed ahead, her hands diving deep into a bush, rummaging through meshes of thorny foliage, and a faint yet vivid laughter escaped her lips.

I called her in screams, but she did not react. At this point, I was terrified and could not move; all I could see was Dani dashing back and forth, stacking sticks under her arms and wiping the centre of the clearing clean, hands covered in white and brown dust—until I realized what she was doing.

I remembered Aura’s account. She was building something.

I shouted again, telling her to stop, as loud as I could, but this time, I couldn’t freeze. I ran to her, wrapped my arms around her when she began to struggle, and with all my might, held her steady, face buried against my chest. She smacked her fists at me, but I persisted, desperately trying to keep her still. I thought then that all it mattered was that she wouldn’t see, she wouldn’t look at the clearing, at that spot where she was feeling somehow compelled to build. I closed my eyes shut, and wind gushed past—no sound still. And I waited.

I opened my eyes first, didn’t let Dani move, and froze again. Before me was a house—small, no higher than a meter and a half tall—made of something white, polished and scraped to precision. Bone.

Stood in a moment of suspension, my arms relaxed, and my fingers stopped gripping Dani’s clothes. Her body shuddered against mine, and her breath raged louder than the gushing wind around us, louder than any sound in that deathly and hollow clearing. Then, she screeched—a gasp that grew in timbre, a rising cadence that somehow seemed to come far slower than I took notice of, and she jolted herself. In a motion faster than I could have anticipated, her body escaped my grip, and she ran—she ran away from me, towards the bone house that rose before us, without really having actually seen it before turning her head with resolution and dashing away.

I tried to grab her, but she escaped; her hands smacked open at the door, and on her knees, she crawled; her panting, heavy and desperate, came like an omen. She was famished for whatever exited beyond it, and I tried to stop—I screamed and ran after her, but she was elusive and fast and set on getting through that door and into the darkness that sucked her in and in and in—and I was too slow. Inside the door, nothing but blackness—swirling, consuming blackness—and as Dani entered the daunting absence of it, she evaporated from her very being. It was like watching someone being devoured by an invisible mouth that swallowed her into nothingness, and her every gesture came with so much reassurance I finally understood what Pilar Deocampo had warned: one always stays behind to suffer.

It wasn’t just meant for the Maduros; it was meant for anyone who desecrate her grave.

When the door slammed shut with a hollow thud, I collapsed to my knees and screamed her name, over and over until nothing existed inside my throat but the soreness of my efforts and the saltiness of my tears. There was not a sound. The entire space around me was engulfed in nothingness. I couldn’t see nor hear Dani anywhere, and before me, the house made of bone appeared far too small for her body to fit inside.

I curled up, and though the terror that had consumed me and made my heart pound so harshly my chest hurt, I couldn’t move. I grabbed the camera, but was unable to turn it off. By my side, Dani’s backpack laid forgotten, tossed aside in a rush. I had studied the Maduro’s case to the smallest detail and I knew she wouldn’t come back. And I finally understood what it was that had consumed Aura in such overwhelming grief, enough to make her leave her home and never come back, until her father passed away and she realized—she must have—he too crossed the space between the two pillars. I finally understood what madness had possessed Amelia after her grim crimes.

It was knowing they weren’t dead, but sentenced to absolute nothingness, left to hover in a sea of absence and non-existence, spiralling down to possible madness. It was knowing they were better off dead.

I blinked my teary eyes open, cold and trembling, hands gripping the camera, and saw something. The house was still there, but next to it, someone: sitting on the ground, back turned to me, legs crossed and shoulders slouched forward, clothes ragged and torn, and in their long auburn hairs, small leaves and twigs were caught in the slender threads. Instinctively, I turned the camera and snapped a quick picture—but the figure didn’t move.

My eyes didn’t move away from the strange figure in front of me, and as I put the camera down, I realized it could only be one person.

“Aura Maduro?”

Her head rose slowly, as if she tried to have a look at the skies, hairs swaying behind her, but she said nothing. Then, I felt it again—that same pressing sadness we always felt inside the house, like a mass of air that swarmed around me, emanating from the spectre before me.

“Where is Dani?” My voice was low, considerate; I looked at the figure and I still saw who I had seen in Aura Maduro the moment I had arrived there—a victim, as much as I was now. “Can you please bring her back to me?”

Immobile. Time passed, though I couldn’t measure, couldn’t tell how long it had been, if it was night or day though the sun existed somewhere in the sky—of that, I was sure. Then, her voice floated in the air, a ragged tune, husky and dragged, but frayed by an overwhelming agony that consumed me like a gust of wind.

“She has to stay.”

My breath rose and whipped the back of my throat; I moved restlessly, but couldn’t leave the small batch of earth on which I knelt. “Please,” I pleaded. “Please, just let me take her home.”

“El sangre marca la tierra,” she spoke, “y sus huesos son nuestro mausoleo.”

“I know what Pilar did to your family.” Every word seemed senseless to me, as if I read from a book: reciting a prayer in order to save myself, though unsure I was there was any salvation left. I wanted to say more, let her know that I understood that misery that encompassed us both, that exuded out of her like a cold wind—but every word died.

“One always stays,” she said, “and the other feels pain. But I look after them.”

I felt my chest tear open in that same sweeping sadness—it was something carved deep into her words, something instilled in the worn-out tone of her voice.

“I look after them,” she continued—and in between her words, a dissonance came: of a woman that wept in silence, the distortion of a throat filled with swallowed tears, “so they don’t feel so lost.”

Defeated, I looked down at the earth beneath me, at last understanding what never-ending horror Pilar Deocampo had cast on the world, that projected grief that would never cease, a continuous cycle of pain and terror—meant forever to steal and burden those who lived, who came out unscathed, to unfathomable pain.

I thought there was something I had to say, though I sincerely don’t know what my reason was: “What can I do?”

Her hand waved in the air, and from the ratty long-sleeves of her jersey, a slender finger, bony and pale, pointed to her left. I noticed there was a watch, glass cracked and black bracelet, with gold rims around. “Take him,” she said. “Let Sam rest.”

The order was immediate, and somehow, I understood. I stood, paced slowly towards the area she had pointed at—below a tall tree, at a small mound covered in pine needles and dried leaves, a batch of golden-brown amidst a soft green. I knelt, pushed the leaves aside, dug my fingers into the earth, and shuddered at the touch of something cold, harsh and angular. A hand, made of bones entirely, no flesh left, emerged—and when I understood at last what she demanded of me, I nearly vomited—sure I was completely incapable of completing the task.

I didn’t look back; short of breath, lungs collapsing at every sweeping movement of my hand, I didn’t rest. When I was done, a putrid smell filled my nose and I covered it with one arm; I ran back then, to Dani’s abandoned backpack, and rummaged for something useful enough for the rest of the deed. We had both brought our sleeping bags, expecting to perhaps spend the night to collect some evidence—so I unrolled Dani’s, pulled the zipper open, and with a force I hadn’t felt before in my life, unsure still where it came from—an urgency of survival, perhaps, or something outside of myself, cast upon me by Aura Maduro—I grabbed the pile of bones and put them inside the sleeping bag.

She was still there when I was done, her hand resting on her lap again. I stopped, stared at her with a cold shudder—whether of dread or something else, I can’t say anymore. Aura Maduro—what was left of her—simply sat in contemplation, her head still raised as she stared at something ahead, and only then did her words echo in my brain in full meaning. I grabbed my backpack, put the sleeping bag carefully on Dani’s, and stared at her. I had almost forgotten about the bone house.

“Do not return,” she said. “You won’t resist next time.”

Somehow, there was an unpronounced message in the air, something that wafted by like a tune carried from the distance, something you only notice when you stop and listen carefully: I am sorry you will have to suffer like we all did. I am sure that was it. Somehow, the precision existed in the tone of her voice, exuding out of her like a radio wave meant to be captured; somehow, I knew.

I walked back—ran back—and once I leapt over the chain, almost instantly, the air was weightless, soft and comforting. But everything else—my entire existence—began to press against my shoulders into a burden that was only now beginning to emerge. Guilt. Terror. Sadness. Crushing, overwhelming sadness—and Dani’s inexistence, her sentence into nothingness, collapsed over me.

It goes without saying I never saw her again.

I buried Samuel Maduro in the backyard of the house, and with nothing to mark his grave, I simply left, on the mound of earth, a framed picture I had found in the house—of Samuel and Aura. In it, she was wearing a wristwatch, black bracelet with golden rims.

I left and never went back. Though sometimes there is a burning wish to grab my things and drive until I see them again, the two pyramidal pillars with that creaking chain between, I never did. I think of Aura’s words, her blooming sadness, and something about it breaks my heart to pieces. The last of a cursed family, unknown of what she carried. On the night she had finally returned to her brother, in 1983, she had sacrificed far more than I could have anticipated. Cast into nothingness forever, sentenced to exist in a limbo of non-existence, forever imprisoned in the blackness of the bone house, she had willingly become a guardian. A watchful soul over those who fell victim to Pilar’s treachery—unable to put an end to it, she had at least given herself to the chance of easing their burden, making that consuming nothingness a bit more bearable. The core of it is, however, what it means to the two last members of the Maduro family.

I was never religious. I still am not. But they were stark Catholics, born and raised between catechesis and Saturday mass. For them, being sentenced to a limbo that is neither death nor life, neither Heaven nor Hell, and something far worse than purgatory… It must be horrifying.

I destroyed my camera and the footage, as well as the tape recorder I took with me, though there was nothing in it. I couldn’t bear, however, to destroy Dani’s digital camera. It was a piece of her, and every little thing that attested to her existence, I just… held on to it.

It was only months later that I turned that camera on again. To my surprise, there was a picture I had never seen—the last one I had taken, of Aura Maduro herself.

I can’t describe it. I will leave it to your eyes to see what lacks words entirely. Perhaps you can understand what it that I felt that afternoon.

I wish I could tell Dani how sorry I am.

________

𝙻𝚞𝚒𝚜 𝙲𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚓𝚘 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚖𝚒𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚜𝚞𝚒𝚌𝚒𝚍𝚎 𝚘𝚗 𝙽𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚖𝚋𝚎𝚛 𝟸𝟶𝚝𝚑, 𝟸𝟶𝟶𝟷. 𝙷𝚎 𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚝 𝚑𝚒𝚖𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚏 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍 𝚘𝚗 𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚋𝚎𝚍. 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚊𝚌𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚝 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍 𝚘𝚗 𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚔, 𝚊𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐 𝚜𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚊𝚕 𝚙𝚒𝚌𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝙼𝚛 𝙲𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚓𝚘 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙼𝚜 𝚍𝚎 𝚕𝚊 𝙿𝚊𝚣.

𝙳𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚎𝚕𝚊 𝚍𝚎 𝚕𝚊 𝙿𝚊𝚣 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚋𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍.

𝙰 𝚋𝚘𝚍𝚢 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔𝚢𝚊𝚛𝚍 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙼𝚊𝚍𝚞𝚛𝚘 𝚏𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚢 𝚑𝚘𝚖𝚎, 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚋𝚎𝚍 𝚙𝚒𝚌𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝚘𝚗 𝚒𝚝, 𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚘 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚏𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚑𝚕𝚢 𝚋𝚞𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚛𝚟𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚒𝚍𝚎 𝚊 𝚜𝚕𝚎𝚎𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚊𝚐. 𝚆𝚑𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚒𝚝’𝚜 𝚂𝚊𝚖𝚞𝚎𝚕 𝙼𝚊𝚍𝚞𝚛𝚘 𝚘𝚛 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚜 𝚞𝚗𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚏𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚎𝚍.  

𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚍 𝚙𝚑𝚘𝚝𝚘𝚜 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚘𝚗𝚕𝚢 𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚜 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚛𝚟𝚎𝚍 𝚘𝚏 𝙼𝚛 𝙲𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚓𝚘’𝚜 𝚊𝚌𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚝, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚎𝚕𝚘𝚠 𝚊𝚜 𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚍𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚎. 

_________________

Wordtober Day 1: Ring

Wordtober Day 2: Mindless

Wordtober Day 3: Bait

Wordtober Day 4: Freeze

Wordtober Day 5: Build I

[themachiavellianpig]

Prodigal Son, Episode 11: Malcolm’s No-Good, Very Bad Day

Episode 11 of Prodigal Son and, good Lord, was this an episode worth waiting for. 

Malcolm begins the episode metaphorically much were we left it - in the hands of a maniac - and geographically in an unknown location. Being hit hard enough to be knocked out isn't good for anyone, so it's probably no surprise that we start off with a little flashback/hallucination to a much younger Malcolm being reassured by Jessica that he is not a monster; he's a survivor. 

As the episode proceeds, all we can do is hope that Jessica is right. 

Full review and spoilers galore under the cut. 

The story splits off into two separate threads - Malcolm trying to survive his imprisonment and torture at the hands of Paul Watkins, the Junkyard Killer, and the rest of the team desperately trying to find him in time.

Malcolm's interactions with Paul serve as a very good reminder of how good Malcolm is at his job, as he uses his knowledge of Paul to try to forge a connection or, at least, find a weak spot to exploit. The trouble comes from the fact that Paul knows more of Malcolm's story that Malcolm may of Paul's - particularly when it comes to their original meeting. Over the course of a significantly unsettling conversation, we learn that Paul did accompany Malcolm and Martin on a camping trip, and that Paul enjoyed his time "working with" Martin - I'm really hoping for some hints in later episodes as to how the discovery of the Junkyard Killer develops the story of the Surgeon. Maybe it could be the topic of Ainsley's next exclusive? 

Interestingly, Paul declares himself to be finished with his previous mission of punishing the wicked, in favour of trying to convince Malcolm to take his father's place as Paul's co-murderer. Even though Malcolm makes the valid point that he's not a killer, Paul remains unworried - he wasn't a killer either until he passed "the trials". 

Paul also indirectly confirms that the girl in the box was real and that she was killed on the camping trip which Malcolm can barely remember - but she wasn't the only one to suffer on that trip, as Paul himself was stabbed. 

He was stabbed by none other than little Malcolm. 

And, because turn-around is fair play in the world of serial killers, Malcolm gets stabbed as well. 

Meanwhile, the NYPD and the FBI are doing all they can to find Malcolm. Paul's blind and furious grandmother refuses to do anything more helpful that sing creepy Old Testament hymns about the wicked being punished, so Gil gets Special Agent Swanson to agree to two very different, and equally questionable, lines of inquiry - Malcolm's mother and Malcolm's father. 

Sidenote, but Swanson does explicitly say that she doesn't trust Jessica purely because she was married to the Surgeon - and while a certain degree of scepticism about Jessica's innocence or guilt may be understandable (I indulged in a little of it myself in the first half of the season), intending not to inform someone that their son has been kidnapped by a serial killer is a choice which I really want someone to call her out on at some point. 

Gil, one way or another, gets permission to share some of the photos of John's childhood home with Jessica, in case she can remember anything about John or the camping trip which might help them locate Malcolm. It certainly shuts down her attempts to identify the Girl in the Box, at least in the short term. 

(I also like that Gil clearly knows how Jessica got the picture of the bracelet, because he's not an idiot, and also how he is clearly not sharing that information with anyone else, because FBI doesn't deserve to know.) 

We also get a brief glimpse into Ainsley's life; the interview with her father has benefitted her career in the way which she had hoped, and she's on her way to a meeting with some bigwigs about her next move when her mother summons her home for emotional support. Ainsley and Jessica's last conversation was hugely stressful for all involved, and for me watching it, but I couldn't help but notice that at least one thing that Jessica said in episode 10 seems to have stuck ("There are victims! Real ones! ...And why is the story never about them?"), because she wants to do the next feature on the victims, not the killer. I am very amused that Jessica using 911 as an emergency code fails - but the word please succeeded. 

And then we get the interaction which I have been dying to see for quite some time now - Gil versus Martin. 

Apparently an NYPD consultant being kidnapped by the Surgeon's former accomplice is a valid reason to yank someone out of solitary confinement, but Martin's time in solitary has scrambled his brains a lot more than maybe anyone was anticipating. Amusingly, Martin instantly knows that it was Malcolm, not the NYPD, who found Paul Watkins - although the news that Paul has taken Malcolm knocks him for six. So convinced is he that Malcolm is dead that he collapses. There are still plenty of questions still to be answered about Paul and Martin's partnership, and about how Paul evolved after Martin was arrested, but it's very interesting that Martin is so instantly convinced that Malcolm is dead - unlike the NYPD, who are clinging to the fact that Paul liked to hold his victims for some time before killing them. Is that a habit which he developed after Martin was out of his life - or does Martin simply know that the relationship between John and Malcolm was far more adversarial even before Malcolm started actively hunting him?

Either way, the strength of Martin's reaction to the news prompts medical intervention in the form of sedatives - which gives us all the joy of seeing a Martin Whitly who is not in full command of his faculties accuse Gil of trying to replace him in Jessica and Malcolm's lives. Apparently this is a notion which has been plaguing the bad Surgeon for quite some time. But even with his concerns, he can still be convinced to give up the location of the cabin from the camping trip - if only as a sign of faith in his own son's ability to stay alive. 

Given the amount of time left on the clock, I was pretty certain that the cabin location was going to be a bust, but I was still on the edge of my seat as the show cut between JT and Dani on one side of a door and a madman with an axe on the other side. Different doors, of course, but a classic done well is always a lovely thing. 

While the FBI, the NYPD and a whole host of other people with guns kick down the wrong door, Malcolm learns a little bit more about his camping trip - and his first serious assault, which was apparently in self-defenses, as the whole point of the camping trip was allegedly to kill Malcolm. Little Malcolm, who had seen too much and, apparently, been chloroformed to the point of it losing effectiveness, and who therefore was starting to remember too much. 

It's a revelation which definitely takes Malcolm by surprise - and while it's something which he openly rejects when Paul first says it, it is something which he later accuses his 'father' (okay, fine, the stress-induced hallucination of his father) of attempting to do. Most telling of all, the hallucination of Martin openly admits to it. No matter what the truth was or is, in the moment, Malcolm truly believed that his father attempted to kill him - and will he ever really be able to believe any of Martin's denials?

Unfortunately, in the course of this particular argument, Malcolm reveals his ultimate motivations: "I protect my community and my family!" 

And Paul, being not all that stupid, immediately zeroes in on the best way to hurt Malcolm: by hurting his family: "Sacrifice shall be your final trial. But don’t worry. It won’t be something you have to do, just something you have to endure." 

Meanwhile, Ainsley is putting together some of the story for herself. The photos left by Gil almost immediately trigger a memory - the collection of angel statues in John's childhood home matches one which Ainsley was given as a child. Jessica brushes this aside as a present from Martin, but Ainsley disagrees - her imaginary friend, Mr Boots, gave it to her. The imaginary friend who she saw moving through the Whitly home, but thought was simply a ghost because he vanished in the basement. 

And then, in a gorgeous piece of timing worthy of any high budget horror film, Jessica and Ainsley look around a corner to see John Watkins emerging from the secret room in their basement, axe first. 

(Was this secret room where Martin killed his victims? How paranoid will Jessica be about that entire basement from now on? SO MANY QUESTIONS)

In the ensuing chase sequence, Jessica loses some points for stopping to fiddle with light switches, then immediately gains all those points back and then some for smashing John over the head with the first ceramic object to come to hand. She gets herself and an injured Ainsley upstairs in a bathroom, behind two locked doors, and barricades the door further with a dressing table. She is calm, collected, and absolutely bloody furious. Her attempts to reassure Ainsley are simply heartbreaking, talking about the headache Ainsley have in the morning, the illicit pills Jessica will offer, the simple declaration that they don't need anyone to save them even as John starts to chop through the door. 

All she had was a pair of scissors, but I truly believe she would have made John pay dearly before the end. 

Fortunately, it doesn't come to that. Malcolm, egged on by the hallucination of his father (I, as always, preferred the therapist), smashes his own hand with a hammer to get out of the cuffs and off he goes after John. He's been stabbed, concussed, and now just a little mutilated, so it's understandable that he avoids a straight-up confrontation, instead luring John back downstairs so he could freak him out with a open trunk and then blindside him with a crowbar - before locking him in the trunk. 

The framing of the final confrontation made me wonder for a second if we were going to have to watch Malcolm become the killer he's always feared, probably as he brutally beat to death the man who had tried to kill his family. A potentially unsatisfying plotline would develop of Malcolm being tormented by his own dark side, or equating justifiable homicide with his father's sadism. Maybe even a hugely dull trial. But I didn't need to worry. As Jessica said in the opening scene, Malcolm isn't like his father. He's a survivor. 

A survivor with a bit of a mean streak, given the way in which he effortlessly uses John's claustrophobia against him, but still. Not yet a killer. 

The reunion with Jessica and Ainsley was adorable, and almost makes up for us not getting to see Malcolm reunite with his team - especially after they gave us cute flashbacks of Dani's developing friendship with Malcolm, and showed JT's obvious and understandable concern for the guy. Hopefully we'll get to see a little more of that in next week's episode. 

Previous Prodigal Son reviews are available here. 

Ainsley Whitly Character Profile available here. 

[unpack-my-heart]

Midsommar spoilers ahead – read at yer own risk.

This post contains discussions of suicide, murder-suicide, graphic ritualistic violence, dissociation and mental illness. These are triggers that also apply to the film, so please be careful if you decide to go and see this film.

I went to see Midsommar last night. I thought it was a fantastic film, that raised a lot of interesting themes about gaslighting, dissociation, belonging, fascism and free will.

I’ll start with the cinematography. This film is gorgeous. The scenery is so beautiful it’s almost unbelievable – rolling greens and constant blue skies. Probably not the normal setting for a horror film, right? Compare this to the cinematography of Aster’s other film, Hereditary, with its bleak, oppressive constant grey-tone, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Midsommar was a departure from the horror genre all together. This works in Midsommar’s favour, though. It’s horror in broad daylight, constant daylight. I think it’s important to remember that the horror genre is not, and should not, be limited to just gruesome torture porn, or an endless assault of blood, gore and guts. I mean, I like bloody horror as much as the next person, but that is not where the genre should begin and end. Of course, Midsommar has some incredibly gruesome aspects (meaning that in Britain, the film has received a rating of ‘18’). The suicide of the two elderly members of the Hårga is played on screen with an unflinching gaze, and it is about as shocking as shocking gets. Especially when the elderly man jumps in such a way that he doesn’t immediately die, and instead shatters his legs. The other Hårga members caving in his skull with a large wooden mallet elicited pained gasps from many of the people sat in the cinema with me. It was brutal. But the main thing I took away from the film was an unrelenting reminder that grief is a transformative experience – not always for the better – and that vulnerable people can be drawn to bad people, bad organizations, or to make bad decisions, and we must question whether this means they are irredeemable.  

This is actually where I started thinking about free will. The Hårga are a community bound by tradition. Their lives are to be a predetermined length, and within this, their lives are divided up into four ‘seasons’ of equal length. At the end of the winter of their lives, the period spanning 54 years old to 72 years old, you are expected to walk (literally) willingly, and freely, to your death. This is exactly what the two elderly members I just mentioned do. They are carried on sedan chairs to the top of a cliff, and then throw themselves to their deaths. Whilst I must be careful of cultural imperialism, I couldn’t help but wonder how much agency the Hårga have. Is this suicide an expression of free-will or an example of coercion driven by traditional practice? We can only speculate, but I wonder what would happen if someone refused to die at the predetermined age. This really cemented to me that the Hårga are not a peaceful community living in a psychedelic Swedish plane, but are in actuality, uncomfortably close to eco-fascism.

According to eco-fascist ideology, you’re expected to sacrifice your life in order that the group more generally can protect the interests of nature more broadly. This goes some way as to explain why the elderly members of the community, who are statistically more likely to be suffering from disease, ill-health or infirmity, are coerced to take their own lives. They have fulfilled their purpose, and they are invited? forced? to remove themselves from society. This is, of course, a society that is absolutely, entirely white. The only non-white bodies in the community are those of Josh, Simon and Connie – and these people end up dead, murdered in increasingly disturbing ways. Josh is killed whilst trying to take pictures of the Rubi Radr (the sacred text of the Hårga) – something he was explicitly forbidden to do – and his body is dragged away by a member of the Hårga who is wearing Mark’s skinned face as a mask. Connie and Simon both disappear at different points in the story, and both turn up dead. Simon is executed in a particularly graphic way – he is suspended in the chicken coop, as a blood eagle. The blood eagle is a form of ritualistic murder detailed in the Germanic and Nordic sagas, wherein the ribs are broken and the lungs are pulled out of the body, in such a way so that they look like ‘wings’. Simon’s lungs seem to inflate and deflate, as if they were breathing, but we cannot be sure whether he is still alive, or whether this is caused by Christian’s drug-addled brain.

This is where the film becomes uncomfortable for me. Connie and Simon are … very minor characters in this film. They don’t really serve any purpose other than to be tormented, murdered, sacrificed. They do not really interact with the main protagonists (Christian, Dani, Josh, Mark), other than a few pleasantries at the beginning, a shared horror at the suicide of the elders, and a very brief interaction between Connie and Dani when Connie discovers that Simon has ‘left the commune without her’. I am uncomfortable with calling Midsommar an explicitly feminist film as I believe the treatment of Connie, a sidelined, innocent, brown woman, who is brutally killed for no apparent reason other than her status as Other violates any claim the film might otherwise have as being explicitly feminist. But maybe this isn’t the point. I don’t think Midsommar has to be ‘explicitly feminist’ in order to make very valid points about how a very specific kind of female pain, grief and trauma is often ignored and overlooked. Connie’s body violates the very specific white ableness championed by the Hårga, and her experience as Other legitimizes her death. Dani’s body, a white body that does not violate any of their traditions, is permitted to live. She is permitted to access the underbelly of the commune, but this comes at a price, and I believe that price is a combination of her sanity, her sense of self, and any remaining link she had to her past.

That’s what I think Florence Pugh was so unbelievably good at depicting. I was absolutely blown away by her ability to howl like that. That sort of primal, unabashed screaming. I think the two times she -really- cries set up a really interesting dichotomy between female pain and male reactions to female pain. The first time that Dani really howls is when her parents and sister have died. It is dark, she starts this sort of crying whilst alone over the phone, and then Christian is with her but he feels entirely distant from her. The room is dark, he is rubbing her back and she is draped over him, but he feels entirely emotionally removed from the situation - he is not participating in her grief, he doesn’t look that affected by it. His presence makes the scene feel just that little bit more jarring. Actually, does he even say anything to her? As far as I remember, no he does not. She tells him they’ve died, we see a shot of him walking through the snow to her apartment, and then they’re in the apartment. He says nothing. The only noise is Dani’s screams. He is entirely silent. Compare this to the second time she howls, when she’s surrounded by the female members of the Hårga. This scene is entirely different. It’s light, and she’s surrounded by women who are touching her, caressing her, but most importantly, screaming with her. They howl and cry and scream with her. They are her perfect mirrors. They are ACTIVELY PARTICIPATING in her grief, they share in her trauma. This was probably the most harrowing shot of the entire film for me. Not the gore, not the mutilated bodies – but a woman, screaming and howling like a wounded animal, and having a horde of sympathetic women scream back at her. It’s hard to not feel drawn into this community. It’s hard to not forget the evil things they have done, or are willing to do. That is precisely what is so dangerous about the Hårga, or more generally, this very specific brand of eco-fascism.  

Some quick fire symbolism stuff that I picked up on:

the symbolism of Christian wearing dark clothing and standing away from the rest of the group when they were celebrating Dani becoming the May Queen. The way he lurches around, looking entirely out of place - she is sat at the head of the table - dressed as they are, crowned with flowers, nature moves with her - she has basically entirely assimilated - he is still outcast.

I thought it was really interesting that the group of women during the dub-con Christian/Maya sex scene mirrored how Maya was feeling. I think the focus on women mirroring each other, appropriating and absorbing how each other is feeling is a fascinating detail.  Christian, on the other hand, looks out of place in that room, a male body who only has one purpose and then is entirely redundant. This is reinforced by the bit where the girl he is sleeping with holds her hand out and he tries to grab it but instead one of the women grabs it. He basically serves no purpose beyond impregnating her - and even then he isn’t even that good at it, because one of the other women has to push on his butt to push him along in the process. Women as being the most active and present in sex, men just … seed? Is this a subversion of how sex is usually seen?

The disabled boy seems to serve no purpose in society other than being the oracle - he does not participate in the banquet or any of the celebrations. He is almost never on screen, apart from a few very close up shots of his face, and one occasion where the camera shifts to him from the sex scene  -  a very jarring decision, in my opinion. Panning to him during the sex scene was super interesting and really not expected. It was an interesting visual choice, and it made me think about whether the point was to emphasise how he will presumably never participate in sexual acts etc. because of the eugenics practiced by the Hårga. This was a pretty damning condemnation of the Hårga as an eco-fascist group who actively engages in eugenics/”selective breeding”. You can definitely see links here between the growth of fascism and eugenics in the early 20th century and the practices of the Hårga.

I really liked how the entire time they were at the commune almost felt like … a fever dream in a distant fairytale land. Walking through the large sun at the beginning, having to trek through the fields to get there, everything looking very idyllic and exactly how a young child would imagine a Swedish landscape to look. The perfect environment to discuss dissociation, in my opinion.

These are some scattered thoughts I had after viewing the film!!

Overall, I really enjoyed it, despite some of the troubling social themes, and it’s another absolute win for Aster in my book.

[bethsblog-languageandnewmed-blog]

The Disease of Entitlement

With the introduction of social media platforms such as Instagram, the interactive ‘reply’ ‘comment’, and ‘re-post’ options came with it. These enable users to comment and adapt a post in order to include their own opinion and express how they feel towards or about a post or another user.

Free-speech, of course, is not a new thing. In face-to-face communication, we are able to communicate our feelings and opinions in many forms: observations, questions, compliments and even insults. In contrast, though, to computer mediated communication such as on social networking sites, if we say something that offends or threatens another’s face, we would almost always and immediately experience a reaction to said utterance or action: perhaps an emotional reaction, a sudden silence, an agreement, or if you have offended someone, perhaps a punch in the face. So, in other words, there is always a repercussion for an action, that cannot be avoided in face-to-face communication. As a result, in face-to-face communication, this means that people would be put-off of confrontation and saying things that could potentially offend someone else, or create a situation in which confrontation or disagreement would occur. 

However, the introduction of social media has meant that a barrier between communicator and receiver has been created, and has unfortunately resulted in a lack of consideration for these potential reactions and repercussions, leading to people sometimes commenting and replying things that they may not say in real life. Users are able to disconnect from the comments they leave on others’ accounts by creating anonymous users with no connections to their real selves, creating a sense of disassociation and a complete lack of responsibility for what they say - as the aforementioned repercussions won’t be experienced. This leads to some pretty nasty comment sections on Instagram. Take the comment section of reality stars such as Kim Kardashian, Katie Price and Love Islands’ Georgia Steele.

Many users even try to justify their comments by stating “no offence” and “no hate” - as if this takes away from the offence they inevitably cause... 

The people commenting these awful things clearly feel entitled to their opinion and are not ashamed of it, which I found most surprising. You may remember initially, I stated that people often use anonymous accounts to post comments such as the ones above. However, during my “research” into these celebrities instagram accounts, all too often I realised that actually, this anonymity is not what pushes people to leave horrible messages under the pictures of people they don’t even know, as many use their personal accounts: their name, age, and picture all visible. 

So, what does this show us?

Social media has allowed for a new wave of communication - called trolling, that before computer mediated communication was a thing, didn’t and couldn’t exist. So, what is trolling? 

“Trolling – (verb), as it relates to internet, is the deliberate act, (by a Troll – noun or adjective), of making random unsolicited and/or controversial comments on various internet forums with the intent to provoke an emotional knee jerk reaction from unsuspecting readers to engage in a fight or argument.”

As a result of these celebrities sharing their lives, users and viewers feel a huge sense of entitlement.  It is not uncommon for viewers of reality TV shows such as Love Island or Keeping Up With The Kardashian’s to feel as if they actually know the celebrities featured in the television shows on a personal level, and therefore have the right to have an opinion on anything they do, forming judgements on them, with the internet providing these people with the perfect platform to air their views on with all the possible repercussions removed.

The trolling and these comments often get so bad that celebrities optionally choose to remove the comment sections of their accounts, which, in my opinion, is a positive step to ensure that they are not burdened with the unnecessarily unfair and nasty comments and opinions of others. On the other hand, many argue that this means that they “cannot take the life they signed up for” - a line that is often particularly used for reality stars who share huge amounts of their lives. But these people didn’t sign up to a constant barrage of hate when signing up to these shows, did they? Why are we justifying the actions of trolls with this statement?

Following a recent break-up and scandal, Megan Barton-Hanson of 2018′s season of Love Island temporarily disabled the comments section on her instagram page to avoid such comments. This is because many users felt that whilst watching her relationship with co-star and now ex-boyfriend Wes Nelson develop over the summer in such a public and intimate way, that they are entitled to have an opinion and form a judgement.

However, it is not only celebrities that are subject to abuse online. With a public Instagram or Twitter account, anyone can see your posts online and comment on them - opening many people up to an onslaught of abuse from people that a lot of the time, they don’t even know. 

The computer-barrier that has promoted the birth of key-board warriors is higher and stronger than ever, and leads to pretty much harmless people being inundated with hate, hate that is fuelled by the disease of entitlement. Unfortunately, whilst social media brings with it so many affordances, as mentioned in my previous blog posts, the constraint of trolling, for some, (including Megan) is all too much to handle. 

Love Island’s Jack Fincham posted an Instagram story a couple of days ago summing up my sentiments, after his girlfriend Dani Dyer was subject to online abuse:

But the question is - do people feel the same disease of entitlement towards people that they know in real life, or just strangers? Do you think that social media gives a platform to these trolls? Do you think this feeling of entitlement is to blame? Let me know!

Urban Dictionary. (2019). Urban Dictionary: Trolling. [online] Available at: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Trolling [Accessed 11 Mar. 2019].