#queen family feels

[seeleybooth]

[queer-boo-radley]

[neo--queen--serenity]

I can’t get over the fact that we’ve never, not ever, seen Colin Robinson this vulnerable before (excluding his year of youth where he didn’t have his memories).

We’ve never seen Colin tell the others he’s suffering, hungry, tired, or hurting. We’ve never seen him ask for help, because he always seems so self sufficient.

So when he hung off Nandor and begged him to “take me home. I wanna go home,” my heart melted for him on the spot

[antianakin]

Happy fix-it AU where Padme leaves Anakin anyway because she realizes how bad he is for her, and she ends up retiring because she REALLY doesn't want to be a Senator anymore (it was also maybe encouraged by her Queen after her secret marriage to a Jedi was discovered) and she goes back to Naboo to be with her family. She's left behind her responsibilities but she doesn't know what to do now, she's just... adrift, sort-of in limbo and mourning her relationship with Anakin. She has to keep convincing herself not to go back to him because she KNOWS she doesn't want that anymore, she KNOWS she doesn't want to be the person she was with him again, but the thrill of the secret marriage to someone who was so passionate about being with her is also sort-of like a drug.

Her parents both offer to let her come help them in their respective jobs, but she doesn't really have the energy for that right now. She DOES like helping Sola with her nieces because their energy and innocence seems to be a balm for her heart. One day, Sola asks if Padme can take the kids to a local festival in Theed one day while she and her husband go do something else, and Padme agrees. The girls are old enough and Theed is safe enough that they can wander off on their own away from Padme as long as they know not to go TOO far and come back to her after a little while. As she peruses the different artwork on her own, one artist's work stands to her more than anyone else's, it just hits at the core of her and she's not even sure why. She stands in front of a painting of a bird in flight for what seems like hours, though it can't be more than a minute or two, before the artist himself comes over to speak to her.

He addresses her as Senator Amidala, and she quickly tells him that she's not a Senator anymore and she doesn't really want to go by the name Amidala either, she prefers just Padme these days. He agrees, and something about him, maybe his eyes, seems familiar but she can't quite put her finger on it. They talk about his art for a while and everything he says about his inspiration feels like it's speaking directly to her. Eventually, Pooja and Ryoo come up to her and start pulling at her hands, demanding that she come see something with them. Before she leaves, she finally realizes she didn't even know his name and asks him.

It's Palo. The first boy she'd ever loved. The last time she'd seen him she'd been twelve in the Legislative Youth Program. She knew he'd left politics to become an artist instead, but she'd never actually seen any of his art before or ever tried to get back in contact with him. Now she wishes she had. Pooja and Ryoo are still pulling her away so she doesn't have time to really get over her shock at this revelation before she has to leave him behind and someone else comes up to ask him a question in her place.

He shows up at her parents' door the next day with the painting of the bird she'd so adored, and offers it to her as a gift. He refuses to accept any payment for it no matter how much she insists, but asks if she'd be willing to take a walk with him instead. She agrees. They end up spending the whole day together, just talking. For the first time, Padme doesn't feel like she's drowning in her own feelings or floating with no direction. She feels a lot like she's finally come home.

[mrsrookhunt]

TO ADD TO THIS POST!!

Rook has two older siblings, and three younger, right? That conveniently goes along with the point system in Chess.

So we can actually guess which sibling is which.

Either King or Queen is the oldest (assuming King)

Rook

Knight

Bishop

Pawn

So anyways enjoy that knowledge.

@neige-leblanche you inspired part two to this. I knew about it earlier but I was keeping it short and sweet lol.

[colgeras]

i wonder if zelda brought back little pieces of ancient hyrule with her. her cadence shifting slightly to that of sonia’s or mineru’s. her looking up when someone speaks to her, almost expecting her gaze to be met by the towering figure of a zonai. small behavioural shifts subtle enough to only be recognised by her appointed knight, slight changes in wardrobe and quiet hums of songs link cant quite recognise. how quickly did they accept zelda into their culture, and how much of it lives on through her?

[weregonnabecoolbeans]

I fear no one can beat Aline Penhallow in the loving and supporting and defending her wife war.

Not one person.

[deadlydelicious]

Who the fuck were Lila's family? Her backstory in season 2 was that her parents are brits, but in this timeline she just has like 3 or 4 random american aunties and uncles and it's never explained? We're just expected to accept that she has this gaggle of family who are ready to babysit her plot device children.

And why are her and Allison the only one's who get other family members? it doesn't make sense and it feels like we were so cheated out of seeing the Hargreeves sruggle to fit in with whatever nuclear family dynamic this new timeline dumped them in

[coochiequeens]

If this is real this is an another example of the gender cult overreaching with their demands.

[wonder-worker]

I've been thinking about the tragedy of Elizabeth Woodville living to see the end of her family name.

I don't mean her family with her husband, which lived on through her daughter and grandson. I mean her own.

Her sisters died, one by one, many of them after 1485. When Elizabeth died, only Katherine was left, and she would die before the turn of the century as well.

All her brothers died, too. Lewis died in childhood. John was executed. Anthony was murdered. Lionel died suddenly in the peak of Richard's reign, unable to see his niece become queen. Edward perished at war. Richard died in grieving peace. For all the violence and judgement the family endured, it was "an accident of biology" that ended their line: none of the brothers left heirs, and the Woodville name was extinguished. We know the family was aware of this. We know they mourned it, too:

“Buy a bell to be a tenor at Grafton to the bells now there, for a remembrance of the last of my blood.”

Elizabeth lived through the deposition and death of her young sons, and lived to see the end of her own family name. It must have been such a haunting loss, on both sides.

[blasphemousclaw]

Do you think Marika regrets it? The fact that her choices messed up all of the ones she loved?

[svtfoe-archives]

we all become our mother in the end // Star & Moon study

"You can leave it all behind, skip a beat in the bloodline."

-Bloodline / Difficult Things (Orla Gartland)

honeytuesday on tumblr // Kyung-sook Shin, Please Look After Mom // supernatural, s12 ep22 // unknown // Sandy - Alex G // Bloodline / Difficult Things - Orla Gartland // Over your head - Orla Gartland // Venetta Octavia, The Burning // Lidia Yuknavitch, Letter to My Rage // Fairhazel, It Takes Time

[duchessofostergotlands]

I've said this before on the podcast (Episode 66 FYI) but Tampongate isn't actually a funny story. Two people had their calls listened to by a random stranger who picked them up on a radio. They sold the audio from one of those calls to the press, who published them on the front pages, and then for 30 years the victims have been relentlessly mocked for the content of the calls, have had people call for them to lose their jobs and even in 2023 have seen supposedly professional journalists slut shaming them. All while the stranger who recorded them and the press who published them have never once been criticised for that incident. Even after the phone hacking scandal, even after Kate's topless photos were published without her consent, even with the current narrative the British press are all irredeemably evil, there has still never been recognition that actually it's incredibly gross that it happened

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[gabriellademonaco]

Queen Letizia’s Outfits 2024

[xbomboi]

how do you think the charmings and snow react to darling being Apple's true love

lowkey i think it’s two entirely different cases in book canon vs show canon but the way most people treat it is very inline with what i think would happen in book canon so i wanna talk about show canon.

so if you read Fable Fest you kinda know that i sorta loosely imply that really the only people who actually know darling woke apple up were the ones who were there. and i think the students were all way too shaken up by the other stuff going on at the time to dwell on it or more distracted by how daring wasn’t apple’s prince charming (no thanks to him making such a big deal of it). and i’m sure dexter would do his best to help darling keep it from their parents. apple just straight up doesn’t know, so neither does snow white.

i actually have this idea for when it finally gets revealed. i’m not going to spoil much about it because there will be a time when it comes into play, but they’d all be in the same place when it does happen.

and at that point, i can say at least lance charming would have the most tame reaction. he’ll still be surprised, but he won’t be angry or anything. but he’d be worried about how queen charming would take it.

so the thing is with queen charming, i want her in show-canon to be more focused on power than anything. so daring not being apple’s true love infuriates her, because she wants her family to have influence over ever after from the top. then you have darling who doesn’t want to be in a position of royal authority, but the moment queen charming finds out, she insists darling and apple be betrothed IMMEDIATELY and that darling assume her spot on the throne. she wants influence more than anything, even if that’s not what darling wants. that’s the conflict i want to come from that.

meanwhile, snow white is really going through it (mostly deserved if we’re being honest). but i plan on exploring her knowing a lot more than she lets on, and keeping many secrets that would otherwise make her a hypocrite or paint her in a bad light. so by the time she finds this out, she refrains from commenting publicly, only to then speak to apple in private. at that point, she’d be asking apple several questions to determine her standing, before trying to reason her best options as future ruler in the situation. because, after all, she’s a very business oriented person.

see, at this point in the story, with all i want to do with it in mind, ironically the biggest relationship the reveal is going to put a wrench in is apple and darling’s. and i can’t explain just why yet right now, but i have my reasons.

my perspective on this comes from where this reveal would happen in the timeline that i have sorta mapped out in my head, so if this doesn’t exactly make 100% sense, it’s probably due to the fact that in my mind at that point in the story there are a handful of things that have already taken place prior to the reveal that influence the reactions.

thanks for the ask!