#specifically the death of the duke's original heir

[iturbide]

Oh, I agree a lot with your analysis on TWSITD's actions from a tactical POV. I think folks paint them as losers because the player 'wins' every mission against them, but folks forget that despite all of the victories on the battlefield against them TWSITD's plans continue almost unimpeded for most of the story. They're kind of terrifying being so many steps ahead of the player like that. That little bit in the tags too. It made me think about how tragic, like Othello or Hamlet, Edelgard is. She is trying to play a game of wits and deceit against the proverbial devil, but she is not really a character built for that. You know, hero(ine) is in the wrong story kind of deal. (Hero might not be the right word here, but Protagonist is in the wrong story does not roll off the tongue as well).

THANK YOU I'm so glad that someone else views them that way! It's really easy to get stuck on the final outcome where they're defeated (or set back in their plans as in AM...or known but not dealt with in the case of CF), but when you step back and take a broader look...it really is terrifying to realize just how much they've accomplished, and how they very well might have succeeded in their plans if not for the fact that Byleth (with their connection to Sothis) arrived unexpectedly and threw a wrench into their plans.

Just think about it: the situation we're introduced to at the start of the game is a direct result of their manipulations. Faerghus is being helmed by Rufus, a weak and incompetent ruler, because they orchestrated the death of the last king in the Tragedy of Duscur. Edelgard's siblings are dead and her father reduced to a puppet of a ruler because they stepped in to support the nobles in the Insurrection of the Seven. Lysithea's family is barely managing because they slithered in after Hrym and used the Ordelia as their testing ground for their Crest experiments. And on top of all that, they have active agents stationed in three of the four major Fodlan powers: Cornelia in the Kingdom, Arundel in the Empire, and Solon in Garreg Mach, all holding such highly ranked positions that they have intimate access to what their enemies are planning.

And that doesn't even get into the fact that they have so many interwoven threads of intrigue going that severing one doesn't even stop them: at best it's a setback on one front, which they can step back from and reconsider their path forward while refocusing their efforts elsewhere. Solon's outed as an agent at Remire and forced to retreat? Oh, well -- good thing they already inserted Kronya into the Black Eagles under the guise of Monica. Their invasion of Garreg Mach is thwarted? Psych -- that was just the advance guard, and their new slew of artificial demonic beasts is perfectly positioned to capture Seiros...or, in CF, they still have Cornelia to keep an eye on Rhea once she retreats to the Kingdom. Edelgard kills Cornelia on her way to Fhirdiad? That sucks -- might as well nuke Arianrhod to send a message that she's not in the position of power she thinks she is. Edelgard is defeated even after turning her into a Demonic Beast? What a shame -- time to slink back into the shadows to regroup and plan the next attempt. In all honesty, any route that doesn't directly and explicitly deal with them leaves me with a horrible sense of dread because we've seen how well they can go to ground and how thoroughly they cover their tracks: if their base isn't found and their technology destroyed, I struggle to believe that they would be defeated...and given that they use the Javelins of Light while Hubert is on the war path with Edelgard in CF, preventing him from zeroing in on Shambhala, and don't use them at all in AM, I have a terrible feeling that some routes will still have that threat lurking decades if not centuries into the future while they bide their time, plan their next manipulation, and wait to make their next move.

I do think that it's reasonable to call Edelgard a Hero in this context, though -- we're all the hero of our own stories, after all, and she definitely thinks of herself as the hero who will return Fodlan to the way it should be. She honestly is a tragic figure, and I do find her fascinating in so many ways: her drive and conviction, her stubborn refusal to give in no matter how many setbacks she faces, even her willingness to burn down anything that might stand in her way on the assumption that it will be an obstacle, really are extremely compelling character traits. I think my biggest frustration really does come from CF's end cards, that try to make out like the future is all coming up roses for her when she's already shot herself in the foot by revealing her intentions to the Agarthans at Arianrhod with the murder of Cornelia. That should have consequences, and I wanted so badly to see her get burned by that rash action. But that never happened, and that dissonance is a big part of why I came out of CF feeling so uncomfortable.

[beyond-crusading]

Thinking about the scene where Paul enlists the Southern Fremen in Dune part 2. I really love this scene, and, let's not kid ourselves, there's an element of power fantasy to it.

But there's something much sinister going on there. Paul specifically screams "I am Paul Muad'Dib Atreides, Duke of Arrakis". The mere fact of calling the planet Arrakis instead of its original Fremen name Dune, and the fact that he claims to be the legitimate Duke of the planet because he's the heir of House Atreides is an insult to Fremen independence. What he was allegedly fighting for this all time...

There's a consistent theme in this scene of Paul refusing to follow Fremen customs, like when he refuses to kill Stilgar and speaks anyway. Paul is doing that on purpose. He asserts his dominance by showing Fremen rules don't apply to him. He can dismiss anything he dislikes about their culture and remake it according to his will.

This scene shows simultaneously the crowning of Paul as a Fremen Messiah and the death of traditional Fremen culture. Paul is pursuing by other means what the Harkonens started.

What Paul is asking of (or rather demanding of) the Fremen, is that they join him in a revolution. But not a revolution towards more freedom, justice and equity. A revolution meant to create a society based around the supreme power of a tyrannical leader. And that's a central component of fascism.

Which can make us question the ethics of Villeneuve's film. This scene shows the birth of a fascist movement in a very epic and heroic light. The intended message of the film is clearly anti-authoritarian, but cinematography leaves much room for misinterpretation.

[justporo]

Back Under the Weeping Willow

Brimsterton | A Staevstarion Regency AU

A/N: So we kind of all had a collective feverdream on a Discord server and what came from it was this Astarion x Staeve Regency AU - namely Brimsterton. Much of this originated when we went ham on the server and ping-ponged ideas around. So, many of these ideas were a collective effort with credit specifically going to @somewhatclear @silmaryel and @astarions-pervert-goth-wife. Thank you guys, mwa! That was so much fun. And ofc also big thanks to @velnna who keeps letting me play with his blorbo. Staeve is my favourite barbie doll! <3 Will I ever come back to this? We will see... ~~~ Summary: Astarion Ancunín, only heir to his family's estate and name, finds himself back in his hometown. Suddenly Duke after his parents untimely demise duty demands he takes matters in his own hands and goes towards an unsure future. But back home is still the same: the same old people, the same old fields. The same old memories, the same old yearning as he meets his childhood friend Staeve again - the reason why he left in the first place all these years ago.

Pairing: Astarion/Staeve Wordcount: 1,7k Warnings: mention of character death

The message about his parent’s death had reached Astarion through a courier letter as he had been attending a social gathering. A disease had withered them away more quickly than anyone could’ve had believed. He was duke now. He now owned the estate.

He’d read the words. And a second time and a third. Then he had excused himself without further words and had gone home to pack.

Had someone observed him they would have probably only thought he’d encountered a mild inconvenience. Nothing of consequence really.

And Astarion would have preferred it if had been nothing but a minor inconvenience. That he didn’t have to return to his hometown, to his parents’ - no his - estate now.

But duty demanded it. And duty, in the end, had always been the master that the young duke had bowed to.

On the inside though, conflicting emotions had been wreaking havoc: a certain sadness about all of this, surely, but more than that fear, concern, lodging below his ribs.

But deeper another thing entirely had reared its head: a spark of yearning suddenly being reignited, that he thought had gone cold a long time ago. Almost ten years ago, to be exact.

But as he had quickly arranged for everything to be packed up, a carriage to be sent and for a message to be delivered to a friend to hopefully accompany him on this trip that was bound to become a disaster, he felt his mind preoccupied not with thoughts of mourning. He had barely remembered to request for his all black attire to be laid out for him as visions of forest green hair, teal eyes and that wicked grin flashed through his mind - long past, but surely not forgotten. Never forgotten.

And with memories of old clouding his mind, he had begun his journey towards home - and an unsure future.

Coming home had hurt.

Not merely because of the harsh reality of Astarion’s parents' untimely end. Because this was obviously all very tragic and unfortunate of course.

But in truth he had been estranged from his parents for as long as he could remember. And it had gotten worse over the ten years he had been spending apart from them - and there. Scarce letters had been his only bridge to a past he usually tried to forget.

The real pain though, as the carriage rattled down the rough roads to his past home, had lingered in how everything was still the same.

The same flower fields being turned into grassy seas of green speckled with colour by the wind rushing through them. The same rocks the carriage’s axle struggled not to break under. The same sky painted grey with a storm that might or might not come. The same small town, the same houses, the same ancient weeping willow up on the hill.

The same people.

The same memories.

The same pain pestering him as his hometown came into view after the same final turn of the road.

The same ache he had felt when leaving all those years ago.

Not even Jenevelle accompanying him and laying a calming hand on his knee as Astarion had kept staring out of the carriage window, with his arm propped up and his hand pressed to his cheek, had been able to soothe this particular pain.

Stoically, he had carried on, just the same.

He’d been welcomed at the Ancunín estate with everyone of the staff wearing black and sullen faces. All of them had waited in a line before the manor. Awaiting the new duke with heavy, grieving hearts.

And word of the young duke returning home must’ve had travelled fast because almost immediately after he had received the staff’s condolences, shaking everyone’s hands and exchanging the customary friendly words and sad smiles, people from town had made visits.

There had been more handshakes, eyes full of understanding, even some tears had shed and Astarion’s shoulder patted more often than he would have liked. And even a few confused glances as people noticed his company of a young fair haired woman without the accompanying rings on either of their hands. But at least the shock about his parents’ untimely demise and the grief laying on the whole place like a sheet had spared him the judgement.

It hadn’t spared him of people coddling him though.

So now here he was at a small get-together at someone else’s estate. Having been pushed to attend because visitors had felt guilty about leaving the mourning man alone at this giant estate where everything must be reminding him of the family he had just lost.

Astarion would have much rather stayed at the Ancunín estate. But he couldn’t have exactly told anyone that. Not when polite and caring invitations had been made - and duty demanded of him to kindly take them up on it.

Unfortunately, the small get-together had also turned out to be a not small at all ball. People were dancing and drinking. And then quickly hiding their smiles behind their hands, putting on masks of sadness and concern as soon as they spotted him.

The evening had been filled with more people crowding around Astarion, grabbing his hand to offer him words of support and understanding or a story about his parents he had to pretend he hadn’t heard a million times yet.

Finally, after Astarion had badly mimicked almost breaking into tears after having been told the same story of how his parents had organised that one particular ball, everyone in town still remembered, for the fourth time in a row, he had been left alone. And thankfully even Jenevelle had, after throwing him another asking look, just went to explore the event on her own.

Now the young duke was sitting in a corner alone, holding on to what was now his third cup of wine, as he observed the couples turning on the dancefloor. He watched through people passing by and obnoxious, incredibly pretentious and tasteless low hanging palm leafs from trees that had been placed everywhere. At least they also provided for a nice and rather hidden corner where Astarion had fled so as to not be approached by griefing townsfolk anymore.

Cheerful dance music drifted through the air and the sweet smell of spring flower bouquets filled the massive room as gauzy skirts in all kinds of pastel colours swished over the floors with young ladies smiling coyly and young men nearly falling at their feet for just one of those smiles.

Even as Astarion found himself not as closely moved by grief as people expected him to be, he found it all abhorrent.

It were the same tasteless people with their same tiny mindsets only reaching from here to the next bigger city and their same annoying and boring soirees.

There had only ever been the one person who had made this place interesting.

Astarion downed the rest of the wine in one big gulp and got up to grab another one while wondering how much longer he would need to stay for it to not be considered rude. 

He spotted a servant with a silver tray carrying new drinks in crystal glasses - unfortunately almost on the other side of the room. With a curse under his breath he began moving through the crowd, his head held low to avoid eye contact and more people feeling the need to talk to him, reach for him, console him.

As he passed the edge of the dancefloor he made the mistake of looking up and across the dancefloor where couples were still happily moving in endless twists and turns.

And found the sight he’d been fearing most for. Or yearning for. Astarion really wasn’t quite sure.

On the other side of the dancefloor stood the inspiration and source for those pictures and memories plaguing him since he had sat down in that carriage travelling here. And that ache. And that longing.

The trillering joyful music drifting through the air suddenly seemed muted, time almost slowed down as all those images suddenly came together all at once.

He looked almost like he remembered - the only thing he was not mad about for being the same.

Long dark green hair messily tied back, clothes fine but just a tad dishevelled as to let everyone around know that he wasn’t just like everyone else around. That he didn’t fear to be a little rough around the edges. Teal and black eyes were glinting just as vividly as in Astarion’s memories as he was talking to some lady and lazily holding his cup of wine by the rim.

And then there was his smile. That wicked smile curling up the corners of his lips as he listened to his companion talk.

The freckles on his dark skin had gotten a little more intense and plenty, Astarion could immediately tell. They suited him just as nicely though as they had back then. There were a few lines around his mouth and eyes now and his face just a little leaner, having lost the softness and immaturity of youth in the flesh. But  - as Astarion kept being transfixed by watching him - not his manners or his mind it looked like.

Staeve.

Almost all the same.

As were Astarion’s emotions, finally having torn themselves free from below the worry and the fear. The twinge of longing setting his chest ablaze, threatening to let him burn up right on the spot. His heart began to thunder and his hands still clutching the goblet started to tremble as he stood there rooted in place and beholding the sight of the man that had made him leave his home so many years ago.

Then Staeve’s expression changed. Eyebrows drew together and his eyes darted to the side. As if he had caught on that he was being watched. His head flew around, probably rudely interrupting his date’s words and immediately spotting Astarion.

The young duke immediately felt the heat spread to his cheeks and he hastily tried to turn away as if nothing had happened.

But Staeve didn’t even waste a heartbeat to smile at him, deepening the lines around his mouth and eyes even further. The moment drew out between two heartbeats, feeling endless, as they laid eyes upon each other after ten years apart.

Then Staeve lifted his cup in greeting - as if it had only been yesterday.

And only then did Astarion feel that he had returned home.

[hello-eden]

My Reverse Robins AU.

Terry Wayne -32-Antihero- Batwing

Helena Kyle Wayne -30- Thief- Stray

Anastasia al ghul-28- assassin- Viper

 Carrie Kelly -26- hero- Blue jay

 Matt wanye-23- hero- Nightwing

 Alexandria / female damian al ghul-23- hero- Swallow

Stephanie Brown-21- antihero- Red Hood

 Tim Drake -21- hero- Oracle

 Duke thomas -17- hero- Signal

 Cassandra cain-15- hero- Secret

 Jason todd -15- hero- Shadow

 Richard grayson-12- hero- Robin

 Barbara gordon -11- hero- Batgirl 

-The gender bend Damien is caused by my Pinterest.

 the mantle Robin is called shadow in this AU 

 I do know Terry and Matt are mcginnis's but in this one they are just called wayne

The ages that I have applied are just the base ages that I used for my math 

If anyone wants to write my AU I give you my permission.

I do know if I'm doing reverse Matt should be older but by the time I realized by mistake I was too far in so just ignore that.-

My reverse Robins AU story

 Terry and Matt were originally created due to a super soldier program. That the government used Batman's DNA for. Bruce found them and they were the original children taken in.  Matt is the original one to create the title of shadow. He shares it with Terry. 

Anastasia was created the normal way through Talia and Bruce, Alexandria was a biological experiment to be a backup heir. Alex and Matt call each other twins due to being born two weeks apart. Anastasia had already gone on League missions so she had a harder time conforming to the rules but she is very close with Terry while Alex had not gone on any League missions but did have the training.  Anastasia goes by the name Viper which was her League name then it turned into her hero name but she later went back to being an assassin after she killed Joker for Stephanie and got into a fight with her father. Alex shares the name shadow with Matt after Terry takes the name batwing.

Selena got into a lot of trouble and needed to give Helena to Bruce. Bruce only has sole custody for about a year and a half before they do split custody once everything is settled. Helena takes the name Stray to honor her mother. Helena is originally a hero with the rest of her siblings But becomes a thief like her mother after she separates from the family when Stephanie dies due to grief. she does come back.

 Carrie is a child vigilante inspired by shadow. She is not adopted until she is 16  when her guardian dies in a car accident. She ends up being quite close with Terry, Helena and Anastasia.

Tim and Stephanie are friends with Matt  and Alex. They go to Gotham Academy together.They are introduced to vigilante life due to a kidnapping accident involving the four. Stephanie still takes the name spoiler and Tim ends up using  the mantle shadow when Alex is injured. Stephanie ends up being the one that dies and Tim was tortured to be Joker junior not even a week after she was killed. due to the torture Tim is wheelchair-bound. Stephanie's death causes a major Rift in the family which leads to Terry, Helena and Anastasia not talking to Bruce. Matt still talks to Bruce but he ends up moving to bludhaven at 17 while Alex stays at the Manor to take care of Cass while Bruce is grieving.Due to Alex being the only one at the Manor She ends up being close to Tim(which I specifically wrote in to be ironic)The League of Assassins do resurrect Stephanie though there is no big reveal due to the fact that Anastasia is working with her mother when Stephanie is Resurrected though she was not in on the resurrection. Stephanie comes back to be red hood and feels detached from the family due to Bruce Kicking Anastasia out for the Joker's death. Tim ends up taking the name Oracle to help Anastasia due to their not being as many vigilantes in Gotham then there was before Stephanie died due to the big fight. 

Cassandra has her usual backstory but she's brought into the family before Stephanie is killed. Cassandra ends up taking the name Secret due to her secretly following Batman and the rest of the vigilantes on patrol before she was adopted into the family. 

Bruce ends up fostering Duke after failing to save his parents from a joker attack and takes him in due to guilt. Duke is the first one to be taken in after Stephanie's death so there are a lot of funny interactions with him having no idea how the family was before and meeting the older siblings. Duke later finds out about Bruce being Batman and the rest of the vigilantes being his children then takes on the name Signal. 

Jason is taken in the same way as before hitting Bruce with the tire iron and everything. Jason ends up being shadow and also being the only Shadow to work Solo due to their usually being two Shadows. Jason is the one that ends up bringing Bruce back from being Lost in Time.

 Richard is taken in the same way as well. Richard ends up taking the name Robin to honor his parents instead of the name shadow.Richard is taken in for about half a year before Batman has lost in time.Richard feels very cursed with losing parental figures back to back but he does end up getting very close to Alexandria before Batman comes back.

Barbara becomes friends with Richard at school and later goes out as Batgirl.

[loudwolftraveler]

𝔒ℭ'𝔖 𝔑𝔞𝔪𝔢 𝔏𝔦𝔰𝔱 (Pt.1?)

A/N: Hello, hello! these are the OC's Name List, specifically the names of the original characters i have in my fanfic works so far that may publish here soon. I won't add the main cast of the MFJINX SERIES here yet. There will be more to go but these are the focusing OC that will play a role. More characters will also appear in the future ongoing series. 

OC = Original character.

WORDS: 672

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

In another life & history repeat itself characters.

The Main Cast: Husband and wife.

First name of the husband: Amillo Angles Bernadotte.

: The heir of the Bernadotte family.

: The future emperor of Bernadotte Empire.

: The lover of Sophia.

Second name of the husband: Chester Elsher.

: The reincarnation of Amillo Angles Bernadotte.

Wife's name: Sophia Herbert → Sophia Bernadotte.

: The illegitimate child of the duke Herbert from Herbert Household.

: Empress of Bernadotte Empire.

: The lover of Amillo.

The second name of the wife is based on the reader's name.

—------------

MFJINX SERIES: Mystery or Reminiscence?

.

World 1 (Arc 1): An Ideal Love For Flawed Pair.

-Main Cast of the Arc 1:

Heroine, Employee: Evelyn Wilson → Hero: Elise Wilson.

1st ML, CEO: Zian Hart

2nd ML, COO (MC): Anthony Mitchell

Antagonist?, Chairman: Cyrus Elrod 

.

World 2 (Arc 2): The Mafia's Darling And Her Desires.

-Main Cast of the Arc 2:

Heroine: Natalia Anderson

ML: Liam Ross (R.) Albrecht

ML's Fiance's (MC): Rachel Paterson

.

World 3 (Arc 3): On earth, You're Ours to Claim.

-Main Cast of the Arc 3:

Heroine: Eleanor Scott (Got a nickname of "Ellie")

Heroine's Brother: Jacob Scott (Got a nickname of "Caleb")

1st ML (Pride): Ashmit or "Ash" by Eleanor.

2nd ML (Gluttony): Gaurava or "Raj" by Eleanor.

3rd ML (Envy): Livius or "Livi" by Eleanor.

4th ML (Lust): Sharnaz or "Arna" by Eleanor.

5th ML (Greed): Isidore or "Isis" by Eleanor.

6th ML (Sloth): Morey or "rey-rey" by Eleanor.

7th ML (Wrath): Ursula or "Silas" by Eleanor.

.

World 4 (Arc 4): A world without you.

-Main Cast of the Arc 4:

Heroine: Diana Winfred

ML: Jeremiah Stewart (Subject-099, Nicknames: "Jerry" or "Jeremy")

Side character & The Villain? (MC): Emrin Reid (Subject-0100)

—-----------------

Your heart never belongs to anyone, not even me & A weird dream upon knowing everything.

Hellion Bruesewitz

Liliya Chiara (Cherly Rae possessed this character's body)

Eloise Chiara (step sister)

Isaac Ryder

Winter Grace

Xianna Bruesewitz (The Novel Mc, the daughter of both Eloise and Hellion)

Cheryl Rae (Mc)

—--------------

Sweet Lies (Ocs x oc) (SERIES)

Mentioned:

Ezra Darius

Sylvia Hensley

Cosette Hwang (Mc)

Characters will introduce later:

Ethan Colton

Luka Thomson

Amir Hansley (Older brother of Sylvia)

—-------------------

I would fall in love with a dominant woman like you. (M!Oc x Reader)

Huizhong Asrava

—------------------

The world I never wanted to be (Hsr SERIES) (X Gn!reader)

Benjamin Sylvester

Shin Keiko

Ji-hun

—-------------------

The old tale about once heroes. (SERIES, Miraculous ladybug concept idea) (Ocs x Oc)

Daughter: Magdalena or "Lena" Beaumont (Mc)

Papa: Zion Beaumont

Mama: Madeleine Wynn → Madeleine Beaumont.

Death son?: Theodore or "Theo" Beaumont

And more...

—-----------------------

Reincarnated as a love interest but I dislike the heroine. (Ocs x M!Oc) (SERIES)

Heroine: Daphne Swega

1st ML: Dylan "Sullivan" (The character the mc possessed.)

2nd ML: Isaac Lyle

3rd ML: Mike Andre

4th ML: Max Cecilia (C.) Adonis

5th ML: Helen Henry *Also known as "kierian"

6th ML: Alastair Raven

MC's Family

Older Brother: Chris Adler a.k.a Xavier Zack [Chris Z. Adler] (The mc)

Sister: Kristen Z. Adler

Father: Elijah Zack (Z.) Adler

Mother: Iris Z. Adler

Scarlett Thatcher (Chris' female best friend, also his close confidant in both his model and YouTube/Steamer career.) 

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

That's all, as i told you on my conversation, there's more but i stil don't feel shy to publish those :') Hopefully if I am able to complete those and have a little confidence, i might be able to share those. Btw One is full of scenarios from the romance manhwa while the other one has parts.

Also from the sweet Lies, the prologue is done, probably around corner :)  

Yesterday i was scrolling to the youtube watch few videos here and there, then one of the video make my brain have a new idea 💀 PleAse T-T I can't have more ideas cuz my works will pile up T-T 

(I will write that idea now--)

- July 5

[discet]

Amphibia - Scorched Earth AU Questions

Got a couple of these so gonna knock them out in one post

In Amphibia, scattered about as the lowest rung on the species ladder. 

The premise of the AU is as follows

1. Leif does not manage to touch the box and doesn’t get the vision that sets the events of Amphibia in motion 1000 years ago. 

2. Because of this the invasion of Earth goes off as normal, however Andrias is horrified by the destruction and slaughter done to humanity. With his moral compass and support of Barrel and Leif still by his side, he is confident enough to suggest an alternative to his father/the core. The Earth would be mined out as planned, BUT they would treat the humans as another resource to bring back. 

3. Humanity is brought back as a new servile class (reforms by Andrias move Frogs up to a more mercantile/skilled labor class of living, on par with the toad warrior class) and have been the labor backbone of the empire ever since. 

4,The trio are born into the town of Old Saint which is roughly in the same place as Wartwood is in canon. Sprig and Polly(who as descendents of Leif, are nobles in this AU) end up crashing down into on Sprig’s 13th birthday after testing out one of her inventions. 

‘Scorched Earth‘ is not referring to the military strategy, the Earth itself has been scorched. It is an uninhabitable rock a dimension away. Humanity has survived but Earth did not.

House Plantar is the highest ranking frog noble family in the empire. Descended from Arch Duchess Leif Plantar. In short, the Plantars are a family of means, lords of swaths of southern agricultural land. They generally are known for being affable and their close connection to the royal family, 

As for our three favorite frogs specifically, 

Arch Duke Hopediah - Patron of the arts, especially the theater, Hopediash is the current head of House Plantar. Had originally passed on the title to his eldest, but after his untimely death, he took up the title once more until his grandchild Sprig can come of age. Tries to be a good lord but is a little disconnected from common life.

Sprig - Age 13 Heir apparent and good natured, if a tad spoiled. Gets into mischief with his sister around the palace and nightmare to Olivia. Has trouble sitting still for his lesson and generally has dreams of going out on adventures and leaving his responsibilities behind.

Polly - Age 8 A child of many talents, has a zeal for robotics and inventing. Close friends with her brother as their station has distanced them from kids their age. While on the surface the two seem to always bicker and fight, they are as thick as thieves. 

The music box is sitting in the capital powering the empire. It was never taken to Earth. How I think it happens is that after season 1 the girls convince the Boonchuy’s to allow them to do a road trip back to Newtopia  (they would be 15/16 at this point in this AU) to bring Sprig and Polly back home. When they leave they are convinced Sprig and Polly are commoner kids from the capital, so its a big surprise when they arrive only to be accused of kidnapping  and then welcomed into the palace.

So I think the big turn is when Sprig sneaks the girls in to see the magic box as a kind of ‘look at this cool thing.’ and the girls touch it and just absorb the power straight out of the gems and shut down the entire civilization. Like imagine if here in modern Earth if all electricity suddenly just shut off? Cause that’s what  the second half of season 2 and season 3 would explore. 

[queens-an-tings]

Lady Jane Grey was de facto monarch of England for 9 days in July 1553 and, following a period of imprisonment, executed the following year. She had been found guilty of having signed a number of documents as “Jane the Queen”. She was beheaded in the Tower of London in February 1554 on the charge of treason.

For more info, Helen Castor’s documentary ‘England’s Forgotten Queen: The Life And Death Of Lady Jane Grey’ is worth a watch. For information about a painting which famously - and inaccurately - portrays the execution of Lady Jane Grey, see here.

I wrote the following summary using the notes I made from Castor’s programme, describing how and why Edward VI chose Jane to be his successor.

On his deathbed, the young Edward VI faced a situation unprecedented in the history of the English monarchy: the first seven heirs in line to the throne were female. His late father, Henry VIII, had abhorred the notion of a woman ruling the realm and Edward was of the same opinion. However, as time progressed, it became increasingly evident that he would not live long enough to produce male issue himself (crowned at the age of 9, after a prolonged illness Edward VI was to die before he reached 16). In the weeks prior to his death, Edward made an alteration to an earlier hand-written device he’d conceived concerning the succession to the throne - one which would have major repercussions and change the course of history. He added the name of Lady Jane Grey (without her knowledge) to be his successor.

Jane’s lineage to the crown was as great grand-daughter of Henry VII on her mother’s side. Henry’s daughter Mary had been the grandmother of Jane’s mother, Frances and her aunt, Eleanor. Edward was keen to select Jane as his future heir as she was, like him, staunchly Protestant and, being young and healthy, probably likely to produce heirs (hopefully of the male variety!). But Jane was far from first in line. The eldest natural heir was Mary, followed by Elizabeth, but at the time both were technically regarded as illegitimate. (After the execution of Anne Boleyn, their father, Henry VIII, had them both declared ‘bastards’ with the passing of the Second Succession to the Crown Act of 1536.) Third in line was Mary Queen of Scots (doubly undesirable in Edward’s eyes as head of the English monarchy as she was Catholic as well as female) and then Frances (Eleanor had died six year earlier in 1547). The remaining female heirs were Frances’s three daughters: Jane, Katherine and Mary.

Edward’s original draft of the succession had specifically stipulated Jane’s male heirs as those next in line to the throne, and not Jane herself, but as his health deteriorated and he edged closer towards death he altered the document by adding Jane’s name too. This is why the succession neatly skipped Frances, who would have qualified as the nearest heir who was both legitimate and Protestant. Indeed, when Jane made her first public appearance as queen, the crowd were shocked to see her mother, superior in her claim to the throne, carrying Jane’s train and this in itself caused stirrings of disquiet.

It’s worth noting here that although the document is in Edward’s handwriting and was most likely an accurate expression of his wishes, there is much speculation as to what extent this document was influenced by Edward’s principal adviser, the politician John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland. Indeed, Dudley had already speedily arranged a marriage between Jane and his 15 year old son Guildford, with the intention of ruling by proxy via the young couple. What the Duke did not know at the time was that Jane, on becoming queen, would refuse to make Guildford king. Moreover, his biggest miscalculation was thinking that Mary’s bid for her rightful royal inheritance would conclude in failure.

[anghraine]

Here's the GW1/Gwen Thackeray rambling post I promised @venndaai a ... while ago. It is extremely rambling, and also, I feel like I should probably warn for something. GW1 keeps the true brutality of the Charr invasion offscreen, but it doesn't really conceal what's happening.

Um—okay, CW for, hm, military conquest, mentions of large-scale killing and enslavement, including sometimes specific references to the means of death. Also spoilers for a lot of GW1.

As I've mentioned before, Gwen is my favorite character in the entire series, despite the GW1 writing being more uneven than GW2's (I think GW1's writing tends to be conceptually/structurally "better" but the execution on the sentence level is very unreliable). I can't remember everything I've said about it before, so here are ALL of my Gwen/Ascalon Blorbo Emotions.

GW1, especially the original game (re-titled Prophecies), tends to be very railroad-y in story terms, even by comparison to GW2. As a Prophecies character, you're an Ascalonian living in your home before the Searing, and a new member of the elite Ascalon Vanguard led by King Adelbern's son and heir, Prince Rurik.

As the game starts, you're finishing up your training in Ascalon City. You receive the command to go just outside the city to meet the trainer for your profession (usually mesmer in my case). The moment that you walk out the front gates, you see a shrine on your left, attended by a female monk, and a dark-haired little girl skipping around. Both the monk and the girl have quests for you.

The girl, of course, is the young Gwen (she had no other name back then). We're not told her age at the time, though if I recall correctly, the lore says she's ten. In my opinion, she looks and acts considerably younger.

In any case, she has lost her flute just across a nearby river. She's too afraid of the local skale to fetch it herself, and asks you to do it for her. However, when you kill the skale and go across the river, you discover the flute is broken, much to her dismay.

You do your various early adventures, and when you go back to the city to sell to the merchant, you have the option to buy things like a flute, a fairly expensive red cape, and the like. These are things you can give to Gwen. If you buy her the flute, she always has it afterwards (well, until the Searing...), and if you talk to her again after buying her a new flute, she'll follow you around and periodically heal you by playing the instrument.

You can also give her red iris flowers, to her delight. They're her favorite flower and spawn throughout the pre-Searing zones (if you talk to the right person, you'll discover that she uses them to make flower wreaths for a friendly dolyak). If you do this enough, she bonds with you, and will eventually give you something she considers valuable: a red shred of a tapestry (its purpose would not be revealed until the third expansion—it's part of a hall of achievements).

As she follows you around, she also chatters quite a lot about various things, including what little we know of her early history. Unlike a lot of NPC major characters, she has no ties to royalty or aristocracy or anything like that. She's the daughter of a random adventurer and of a village woman near Ashford Abbey. She sort of wants to be a warrior, but she really likes the mesmers' superior sense of fashion, and it's a struggle (#relatable; also, she does ultimately become a mesmer).

She mentions one specific mesmer, incidentally: Lady Althea, the daughter of Duke Barradin. Althea runs a theatre outside of the city, teaches students in illusion magic, and true to mesmer form, wears one of my favorite outfits in the game.

—but which tragically has yet to be ported to GW2. Anyway.

As the pre-Searing game progresses, we learn that after the last king died, the next person in the line of succession would have been Duke Barradin, Althea's father. He stepped aside for Adelbern, a war hero, and thus far, a competent and largely popular king who is loyally supported by Barradin, among others. The only opposition to his rule at this point comes from obnoxious snobs.

Anyway, Althea is engaged to Prince Rurik, Adelbern's son, and little Gwen wants to go to the royal wedding. She's never actually seen the prince and wonders if she ever will (she doesn't, in the event).

*deep breath* Then the Searing happens.

The Searing is devastating for both the land and the Ascalonians. The earth is turned into a cracked desolation marked with burning crystals. Rivers turn to sludge. Thousands of people are killed in the Searing alone and thousands more flee from the Charr invaders. Althea Barradin is taken captive and burned alive, down to ashes. Other people are captured and enslaved. Even GW2 says the Ascalonian aqueducts ran red with blood after the Searing.

As for the PC, you belatedly discover the details of this upon returning from a two-year Vanguard mission away from the heart of Ascalon. The full Charr invasion force is still being held back by what remains of Ascalon's armies, but Charr forces break through at points, and it's obvious the Ascalonians are now losing.

Meanwhile, the Ascalonian people are deeply traumatized. Enough of them went insane after the Searing that Ashford Abbey has been converted into a mental sanitarium. NPCs are trying to put together a census to figure out who is even alive at this point. In the battered but still standing Ascalon City, the random guards are like:

By and large, GW1 does not pull its punches.

As for Gwen, you have no idea what happened to her at this stage, though you find her flute—broken again—out in the desolation beyond Ascalon City. In fact, Prophecies never reveals what happened to her, and the two stand-alone expansions are in totally different locations with different, Charr-unrelated, plots (they're set in Cantha and Elona respectively, and for the full stories, you would make new Canthan and Elonian characters to play them).

Meanwhile, Prince Rurik (who adored his fiancée Althea) and the PC gradually realize the Ascalonians can't win this war. They need to accept the help offered by their traditional enemies in Kryta and take refuge there for the sake of their people. King Adelbern is ... not the same after the Searing and increasingly irrational. He refuses and disowns his son when Rurik argues with him.

Rurik is like ... fuck it, and he leads anyone who will go with him into the Shiverpeaks to get to Kryta, including the PC. Some friendly dwarves help out (there were lots of dwarves back then), while the malevolent Stone Summit (who I think oppressed the dredge??) try to kill the refugees and end up just murdering Rurik for no particular reason. This series of events is why the Ascalonian sector of Divinity's Reach is "Rurikton," though he himself never made it to Kryta.

BTW, Rurik's sword would be found and seized by Rytlock many generations later. This is what Logan is referring to in GW2 when he snaps at Rytlock, "Gut me? With what? That human-made sword you looted from Ascalon?" And 200+ years after the fact, Adelbern is still grief-stricken by how terribly wrong things went with Rurik. His mental state seems to have declined even faster after Rurik's death, which Rytlock mocks him over in the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon. This is a tangent, but, well.

After Rurik's death, you lead the refugees the rest of the way to Kryta. There, the also-theocratic but ostensibly benevolent White Mantle leadership of the country has offered you a settlement for the Ascalonian refugees. (The settlement is continually besieged but still standing in GW2, though the Ascalonians there are treated fairly dismissively.) You help the settlement and White Mantle for awhile before discovering the latter are super evil. You end up switching allegiances, and helping to overthrow them and place the daughter of the former king of Kryta (who fled during the Charr's triple invasion of Kryta, Orr, and Ascalon) on the throne.

(This post doesn't get into the invasions of Kryta and Orr, which don't have even the tenuous justification of the invasion of Ascalon. But they also happened around the same time, and the Orrians were terrified of experiencing what the Ascalonians did.)

The plot continues but is mostly unrelated to this arc. So you deal with Canthan stuff in Factions and then Elona stuff in Nightfall. And then, some eight or nine years after the Searing, you end up traveling wayyyyy north into Norn lands (this is the first time we encounter Norn) and discover a sanctuary there, the Eye of the North, which is actually home to a bunch of Ascalonians.

I can't remember if it's a GW2 retcon or not, but the Norn were actually pretty pro-Charr as far as the invasion went, apparently because they thought it was super badass, so they let the Charr pass through their lands. But they also let Ascalonian strike teams have a base up north, presumably also because they found it badass (I don't actually remember the rationale for the Ascalonian base otherwise).

Anyway. These Ascalonians are the early Ebon Vanguard, who at the time, are an elite force answering to King Adelbern and operating deep behind Charr enemy lines. Their numbers have grown, however, through the rescue and recruitment of human former slaves, prisoners, and refugees of the Charr. This matters because you're greeted by one of them when you arrive—a Vanguard member named Gwen.

Yup, it's her, at last.

So we find out what happened to her. She has some quests, and becomes both a hero (an NPC companion with a lot of player control options) and actually playable in a sort of mini-episode where you try to finagle her escape from the Charr and find out what her life was like before then.

Real bad, it turns out.

Back in/after the Searing, her mother was killed, and tiny Gwen wandered desperately around the devastated landscape, looking for help. This is kindly illustrated!

Instead, the Charr found her and enslaved her, which was apparently their standard practice for children. According to Gwen's official story, she "toiled under the constant lash" of Charr masters for seven years. Many other human slaves around her either broke and/or were killed. Gwen herself was afraid of the Charr but also developed a seething hatred of them.

At seventeen, she tried to escape and was quickly recaptured and judged useless by the Charr, except as a final entertainment. See, they had this fun practice of setting up gladiatorial matches inside their camps "for the glory of the legions." They'd set unarmed human slaves against wild animals and get a kick out of the humans being disemboweled (this is 100% canon!). So here's 17-y-o Gwen right before her planned disembowelment:

However! Gwen was smart and tricky enough to outwit the beast supposed to kill her, and she managed to kill it (iirc) and escaped into the labyrinthine tunnels below. These turned out to be the Charr's grisly depository for the bodies of those killed in the death matches over the years. Gwen was hardened enough by then to make her way through the dead, determined to escape for good. On the way, she discovered a book of mesmer spells and was able to learn them as she continued on.

She knew she'd be killed in an even more painful way if she were ever captured again, and the only thing to do was to keep going. She emerged from the tunnels and fled her pursuers, striking out for the mountains. On the way, she was discovered again—this time, by members of the Ebon Vanguard operating in Charr territory. She escaped with them, joined the Vanguard, and served them loyally.

That's not the end, though. By the time the PC meets Gwen, she is still very psychologically damaged, and part of her ruthlessness and rage comes from lingering fear. In the course of the plot, you end up freeing some Charr dissenters—not dissenters from the conquest or the Searing (this is explicit), but from being subject to theocratic rule based on gods who have turned out to be false (this is why Charr in GW2 are so hung up on trusting weaponry and "not false gods"). One of these dissenters is Pyre Fierceshot, a Charr hero by GW2 (and also a playable companion-hero in GW1). Gwen is immediately and intensely hostile towards him, as might be expected, while he proves to actually be trustworthy.

He calls her "mouse" (as Charr call all humans) and vaguely trolls her, but is ultimately fairly understanding of why she's so angry and scared. He turns out to be kind of trying to help her overcome her terror, and when the PC asks if he blames her for her rage and fear, he responds, "No. She was a prisoner of the Charr." But in his view, her fear is still crippling her and he's trying to get her to overcome it (because she's not useful!).

Gwen and Pyre end up cooperating in order to accomplish assorted things, but mainly working to spark a Charr revolution against the shaman caste whom Gwen and Pyre both have reasons to want gone (as does the PC, especially if you're a Prophecies character—and therefore an Ascalonian survivor of the Searing). Gwen does ultimately end up processing (some of) her trauma and overcoming her fear, and faces Pyre again. He asks if she's come to apologize, and this is what she says:

I want you to know: I do not like you. I do not forgive you. But most of all, I do not fear you. I hate you. There’s a difference.

me: 😍

I was concerned that her arc would culminate in her being shown to be wholly unreasonable and forgiving the Charr dissenters even though they're deeply complicit in what she, the PC, and their people have suffered. But no! She never forgives the Charr (at least in life), and she is never anything but a relentless opponent of them who seeks revenge and gets a lot of it, because she kills so many Charr that they remember her with fear and hatred as Gwen the Goremonger.

What an icon <3

Sometimes people will be like, well, the conflict depends on your POV, the Charr did bad things, but so did Gwen to become the Goremonger #bothsides. And I'm just like, "how dare you besmirch the honor of my blorbo, Gwen did nothing wrong in her entire life, THANKS."

But then we get to my least favorite part of her arc, though she remains incredible overall. It's the obligatory het stuff that I was complaining about awhile ago.

I don't know when they decided she was going to be the ancestor of the human mentor in GW2—maybe it was planned the whole time for Eye of the North (third expansion), maybe not. They had a sort of proto-Living World thing with new releases after the core Eye of the North story while working on GW2, which were meant to culminate in the founding of Ebonhawke. The arc got cut short because of a push from higher-ups to get GW2 out (RIP, Ebonhawke arc that I would have been incredibly into).

Some of what we did get, though, involved Gwen's romance with Keiran Thackeray, another member of the Vanguard. He made "advances" that she coolly rebuffed, but this turned out to be more a product of her trauma and difficulty connecting with people or trusting them than anything else. When she thought he and his unit had died, she was deeply upset that she'd never get the chance to make things right blah blah blah. It's got shades of Han/Leia in ESB, which would normally be a compliment (my favorite movie!), but isn't from me (I dislike the Han/Leia dynamic in 80% of ESB, actually!).

Anyway, he's not actually dead, and she's super relieved, and they end up getting married, and I suspect this whole "she needs to get over being cold and hard and he's just the guy to do it" dynamic exists mostly for the sake of Logan's existence in GW2. There's also a subplot involving her dead mother being on Team Keiran that I won't go into, but it all just feels kind of forced "of course our strong female character needs a man" to me.

It might annoy me a bit less if Logan, the result and likely partial cause of Gwen getting slated for romance, were not as bland as the romance itself. But while I generally like him, he is very milquetoast. I used to call him the beige heartthrob and even so, only realized how bland he is when I played a sylvari, and discovered the mentors are not all like that.

On the bright side, the obligatory het romance does not prevent Gwen from a life of righteous bloody vengeance. If anything, her husband likely helped out, which makes him slightly less annoying. They served together in the north until Adelbern sent the Ebon Vanguard and a suspicious number of civilians south to establish/fortify/defend Ebonhawke. Gwen's superior had died earlier and Gwen was in charge by then, and to go by the account in GW2, she made for an inspiring and hardcore leader on the way to Ebonhawke and in its defense over the rest of her life. She's a beloved hero and icon to the Ascalonians of over 200 years later, and her grave is still imbued with the magical power of being that cool.

[richmond-rex]

I’m currently listening to Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies by Hayley Nolan on Audible, and I’m trying hard to like it because it has really good information discrediting some of the beliefs surrounding Anne; but I have to admit that it’s grating me to hear the author stating that the Tudors were “usurpers” and that they were preventing a “more rightful heir” from gaining the throne. I almost screamed in frustration when she blamed H8’s sociopathy on Margaret Beaufort and especially Henry VII, using that one source claiming that H7 once tried to kill H8 in a fit of rage as firm evidence of a miserable childhood (ignoring all evidence stating otherwise); because of course having an overprotective parent (which is all H7 was) is going to cause you to grow up with no conscience. Also is it true that H8 was given absolutely no training in monarchy and came to the throne completely uneducated in that regard, I find that incredibly hard to believe regarding H7.

Hello! First of all, there's so much to unpack here. I think we have to go step by step. A big disclaimer is that I have not read Nolan’s book, so I’m only considering what you told me here. Secondly, I will not be addressing any claims against Margaret Beaufort because, frankly, what did that woman ever do be accused of that — the same Margaret Beaufort who 'of marvayllous gentyleness she was unto all folks' , and who 'unkind she would be unto no creature'? Are we talking about the same Margaret? We know one of her old servants, Henry Parker, was talking about his 'godly mistress the Lady Margaret’ to her great-granddaughter Mary well into the mid-1500s, and we know the time Margaret reprimanded a dean in Christ's College for beating one of his pupils (crying ‘gently, gently!’). I don’t see how she could be considered the origin of anyone’s sociopathy, but I also dislike the term — antisocial personality disorder is a medical condition and I doubt we could ever diagnose Henry VIII with that or anyone else who died five hundred years ago for that matter. The rest of my answer is under the cut! 

Well, now for the rest: I wouldn't say all of the Tudors were usurpers. Henry VII very much was one, as he did unseat England's king at the time of his invasion though that hardly makes him worse than other 15th-century English kings (as I've talked here, Henry IV was a usurper, Edward IV was a usurper, Richard III was a usurper — hell, William the Conqueror had been a usurper four centuries earlier). None of Henry VII's successors would have been usurpers, though (unless we should say every English king after William the Conqueror was a usurper, I guess?). Especially if you consider that they were also the natural successors of the Yorkist line via their descent from Edward IV's eldest daughter and heir, Elizabeth of York. I have no idea who Nolan could be referring to as the 'more rightful heir': the de la Poles, the descendants of Edward IV's sister? The Poles, the descendants of Edward IV's brother? Even if you go by Yorkist descent alone (which not everyone in England regarded as the most legitimate), who would have had a better claim in England than Henry VIII, the son of Edward IV's surviving heir and the son of England's most recent conqueror, Henry VII?

As for Henry VIII's miserable childhood, I don’t think there is evidence of that. We know Henry was well-educated; his father made sure to appoint tutors who taught him in the arts, classics, music, dancing, discourse, courtiership and theological disputation. We also know that Henry VII was personally involved with his sons' education, whilst his wife Elizabeth was involved with their daughters'. It is true that Henry VIII was not initially prepared for kingship but once his brother Arthur had died his father began preparing him for his future office. In July 1504 Prince Henry officially moved into his father's household where it seems Henry VII tutored him personally in some subjects. In August of that same year, the Duke of Estrada, a Spanish ambassador, wrote that 'Formerly the King did not like to take the Prince of Wales with him, in order not to interrupt his studies [...] But it is not only from love that the King takes the Prince with him; he wishes to improve him. Certainly there could be no better school in the world than the society of such a father as Henry VII. He is so wise and so attentive to everything; nothing escapes his attention'. So you can see that Henry VIII was assisted and had at least five years to prepare for the office of kingship, which is more than Henry VII himself ever had.

Lastly, it's clear that Henry VII loved his son. The same ambassador, Duke Estrada, also said in his dispatch: 'It is quite wonderful how much the King likes the Prince of Wales'. There are several entries in Henry VII's privy purse accounts describing items and stuff he bought to his younger son, always referring to him as 'My Lord Harry'. For all we know, Henry VII saw much more of his second son than he ever saw of Prince Arthur who lived in Ludlow, away from court. There is that anecdote about the time Henry VII knighted Prince Henry when he was only three years old: during the ceremony the king picked up his young son and placed him on a table for all to see — a gesture possibly made out of love, fondness, and/or delight in his youngest, though we can only speculate. Henry VII seems to have been determined not to expose his remaining son to danger in the same way that Arthur had been, and some of his more overprotective measures (like the setting of the Prince's apartments, accessible only by way of his own) can be understood as born out of paternal concern, all things considered. The rumours that the Calais garrison was not willing to crown Prince Henry in the event of his death were certainly of great concern to Henry VII.

To sum up, there is evidence that Henry VII did love and care for his son Henry. No doubt their relationship may have been strained at times thanks to Henry VII’s overprotective measures, but it’s also true the king let his son shine on many occasions in his place, denoting both affection and trust. Henry Pole's claim, made in 1538, that the king ‘had no affection nor fancy unto’ his heir should be seen in its proper context: one in which his brother, Reginal Pole, was involved in an ideological campaign against Henry VIII — the message was that not even Henry VIII's own father had loved him. I cannot say if Henry Pole actually said those words (anyone with more expertise please feel free to correct me) or if those were brought up as charges against him, but they do belong in the realm of (real or invented) seditious language. I tried to find the claim that Henry VII once tried to kill his son over a fit of rage in the dispatches sent by Fuensalida (allegedly the one who made that claim according to Hutchinson’s Young Henry), but the only thing I could find was something akin to court gossip, saying Henry VII treated everyone badly for a time (including his son) and spent three hours every night with his eyes closed but not sleeping...... which is?? 

(Here I should comment that Fuensalida not only disliked Henry VII but he was also several times denied access to the king and the Prince of Wales on account of what the English most likely considered to be his rude behaviour. He is also the one who said the Prince was kept closeted away like a girl, not realising that he was specifically denied access to the Prince — perhaps not without reason, seeing how Ferdinand had instructed him in winning the Prince over to their cause. Fuensalida was, of course, only serving the interests of his king, but his skills in diplomacy are somewhat unusual. Even Catherine of Aragon would later complain about Fuensalida’s behaviour). 

In any case, I cannot speak about Nolan’s book as I have not read it but I wouldn’t be surprised if the author makes some unsubstantiated claims, considering the book was not peer-reviewed. That’s exactly how many pop history books work and why it’s hard to hold them to high standards. I hope this answer is not a big rambling mess, but really there were so many things to address, I didn’t even know where to begin. Thanks for the ask, anon! 🌹x

[royallyprincesslilly]

Title: Pleasing The Duke {1}

Duke of Hastings/Rege Jean Page x OFC Jemilla “Jemi” Remmington

Warning: Plot, Regency Period Piece, Slow Burn, LOTS OF WORDS

Words: 5.7k

Summary: After your four weeks on the marriage mart and the tumultuous way yours and the Duke’s budding friendship that turned into a faux courtship, then a real crisis that could have tarnished your name forever, you are now married to the Duke. Only this is no traditional marriage. The Duke has professed to never fall in love, never get married, and never sire an heir, a matter you know nothing of. Furious that his wanton, lustful desires have gotten him to forego one of those vows, he is determined not to break the other two. That would usually be an easy feat. Only with you, it might be more challenging to keep those vows, seeing as no matter what, you are the only thing on his mind.

Note: Inspired by Rege Jean Page’s portrayal of Simon Bassett. This fic will not have any other characters from the series, except Lady Danbury, mainly the portrayal version of her by the incredible Adjoa Andoh and maybe Queen Charlotte portrayed by Golda Rosheuvel. This series will focus on The Duke and an OFC female character and will be a sultry and erotic historical romance. Anyone under 18 is advised not to read.

***Let me know if you guys want me to add like glossary terms at the end of the chapters for period specific words/items.

***Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to Julia Quinn’s characters, nor the Characters established by Bridgerton. I own the rights to the original characters created in this story.

If you enjoyed this please LIKE, COMMENT, REBLOG!! 😘  

As always, thank you so much for reading. ❤️❤️

***Loosely Edited/Proofread***

***Slightly Interactive***

Chapter One: The Duke & Duchess Of Hastings

“I pronounce you husband and wife.”

 You kept your back straight and your limbs stiff though you felt at any moment either or both would give way, sending you tumbling to the ground in a heap of white lace, silk, and tulle. Perhaps you’d even be sucked into the ground for good measure, you thought. No one spoke once those words had been uttered. Almost a full minute passed before the clergyman spoke again.

 “Eh-em, I declare you husband and wife.”

 You gulped and slowly found your head swiveling toward the man beside you. a man who was practically a stranger, a man you’d now found yourself joined to until you were parted by death. Your husband—The Duke of Hastings. When your eyes met his, you noted a look of strangled fear and disgust. His jaw was clenched, and he looked as if he were seconds away from revealing the contents of his stomach right on the front of your gown.

 Long moments seemed to pass with the two of you just gazing into each other’s eyes. This was not the gazing of enamored lovers or even lustful suitors. It was the gaze of a man who’d been forced into a marriage he did not want and a woman riddled with guilt for her part in it.

 “Your grace.”

Simon’s head snapped back in front of him to find the clerk holding out the book he was to sign his name into. You watched as he took the quill from the clerk and slowly signed his name. He paused after every word as if he were seriously contemplating scratching his name from the book entirely. An act that was to be seconds took a full minute, and the entire time you wondered if he would turn to you and call the whole thing off, leaving you a ruined and jilted woman.

 Simon held the quill to you for your turn. As you took the object, your gloved fingers grazed his. Even though your skin did not touch his, you shivered all the same—that was before Simon snatched his hand away to drop them to his sides. You glanced down at his hand that you’d ever so softly grazed a week or two ago and watched his fist clench tightly.

 “Your grace,” the clerk repeated, this time to you.

 Bringing your attention back to the book in front of you, you proceeded to sign your name beside Simon’s. Instead of writing the name you’d been accustomed to your entire life—Lady Jamilla Remmington, you signed your new one for the first time—Duchess Jamilla Bassett, The Duchess of Hastings. It looked strange to your eyes, but it did not look terrible.

 “Congratulations, your graces.”

 The voices began to overlap as each of those in attendance for the small ceremony extended their felicitations to both of you. Neither of you could find your voices or the words to reply to even thank them. There was nothing to be thankful for, you thought. You’d traded one unhappy future for an equally unhappy one, quite possibly more unhappy as you’d just entered the very thing you’d refused to—a loveless marriage.

 Thankfully leaving the church, there weren’t people outside ready to shower the newlywed couple with rose petals and cheers. Unfortunately, you had to ride in the same carriage as your new husband. Simon sat across and diagonal from you, peering out the window at the scenery. Holding your bouquet of fresh flowers while fiddling with the blush-colored silk ribbon it was tied with, you watched Simon take a flask out of his coat pocket and knock back something strong from the whiff of it that caught your nostrils. He grimaced, then groaned before he looked at you.

 The way he looked at you nearly made you stop breathing, not from him taking your breath away, but from the hostility you saw in his eyes. Simon grumbled before looking from you back out the window. Your stomach fell, realizing just how severe and hopeless your fate was. For the remainder of the carriage ride, you worked to keep your eyes off of Simon. It was a task that seemed more manageable for him than you.

 Every so often, your eyes found their way back to him to take in other parts of him. Either it was the way his cravat looked around his neck, and the sly way peeks of his throat could be seen through the tiny slots, or it was the way he tightly gripped the flask he held. A flask he didn’t bother to hide. He was already so unhappy with you that he didn’t care to continue the ruse of propriety for you. It was disheartening.

 Simon kept his jaw firmly clenched as he watched the scenery pass, but he didn’t look as if he were looking at the rolling hills or passing farms. He appeared to be looking directly through anything that passed. This was just day one of your “new” life, and if the two of you couldn’t muster any conversation, you didn’t know what hope there was for the future.

 The carriage ride from the church to your reception took all of fifteen minutes, give or take a few. You’d tried to plead with your mother to forgo the reception, stating that it was outdated and unnecessary, but your mother wouldn’t hear a word of it.

 “The wedding reception is one of the joys of the beginning of a married woman’s life. It is the time she greets the ton as a Mrs. She is no longer a miss. You will get to revel in your new role in front of all the other unmarried women. The reception lets everyone wish you well while being the source of envy in their eyes.”

 You sighed, hearing her words in your memory from the night before. You did not fault her. she did not know the true way your nuptials had come about. She thought you and Simon had genuinely fallen head over heels while pretending to have fallen head over heels. She did not know about what had transpired to bring the two of you to this outcome. You didn’t dare tell her.

 While a loving and kind one, your mother preferred her children, mainly her daughters, to be the supreme example of propriety. She had groomed you to be nothing but a proper lady. That meant you always had a chaperone when you were going most places. You were never alone with anyone that wasn’t a woman. Your hemline was the exact number of inches deemed appropriate, as was your neckline. It also meant that your education was top of the line—well, most of your education.

 You learned to read, write, do arithmetic, play the piano, do needlework, draw, paint, sing, dance, how to catch the eye of a suitor, the propriety of courting, and how to run a household for marriage. Your accomplishments could have been seen as superior, but your mother said you had to be better than average. You had to be perfect. She pushed you further, saying because your skin color was different, expectations for you to be perfect were high. So, you expanded your education to learn two languages, French and Latin. Excelled in piano and learned to play the harp. You were quite accomplished, usually more than those around you.

 The part of your education that was lacking was knowledge that went past things others could see. Your mother made sure to keep any discussions of inappropriate topics away from you and your sisters, only giving you the smallest of details. She sure stressed what was inappropriate but skimmed past any other things. It was while learning about science and animals that you grasped procreation at the most basic level.

 You had plenty of unmarried friends. There was Tessa Carmichael, your best friend who lived across the road, Abigail Prowler down the road on the left, Edith Bunfeld down the road on the right, and Letecia Grother, whose aunt was on the neighboring street. All of you often spent your afternoons walking around the park and gossiping about many things, including the joys and privileges of married life. None of you really knew what to expect. Of course, many unmarried ladies tried to grill the ones who were married, but they all remained tightlipped. All they did was giggle into their fans, saying, “you will find out on your own.”

 Here it was, the evening of your wedding day, and you still had no idea. Your mother had assured you earlier in the day before you left home for the final time as a Miss that “The Duke will take the lead, all you must do is follow it.”

 “Your grace?”

 You came out of your memories to see the footman holding out his hand to assist you out of the carriage. Once you stepped out, you rearranged your dress until Simon stepped out beside you. You watched him tuck his flask in his jacket before he held his arm out for yours without even sparing you a glance. Sighing, you looped yours with his and let him lead you into the building.

Once you walked in, the first people you saw were your mother and Landy Danbury. They both had bright smiles on their faces.

 “Your graces,” Lady Danbury said, dipping her head.

 “Oh, you know you never have to bow your head to me—never to me,” Simon said with a fond smile on his face as he looked at Lady Danbury.

 You knew his affection for the woman went deep. You weren’t entirely sure about most of it, but you knew that she’d taken care of him helped him become who he was. You’d only known him about five weeks, and that wasn’t nearly enough time to peel back the many layers of The Duke Of Hastings. You suspected you’d need a lifetime for that. A lifetime which you now had.

 “Are you all right, dear?”

 You plastered a smile on your face and nodded.

 “Of course she is mother, she is now a duchess,” your sister Jerrikka piped up as she came over to pull you into an embrace.

 “You know very well I am not the type to hold so much weight on a title,” you replied.

 “Is that so? Not too long ago, I remember you bragging you were to be a Princess,” Simon dryly shot out.

 You glanced at him trying to keep the glare away. You remembered the conversation you’d had where you’d uttered those words and remembered why you’d said them. You’d wanted to pointedly show him that you were desirable though he behaved as if you weren’t. Perhaps part of you wanted to enrage him or garner any reaction from him at all. He’d been so damned stoic. It was next to impossible to know what toiled in his head.

 To not draw suspicion of trouble so soon after wedlock, Simon smiled at you. It almost looked like a real smile, a warm one, but his eyes remained cold—detached. He then led you into the ballroom, and as he did, all eyes floated to you. Everyone in the room held broad smiles on their faces as they dipped down into a respectful half curtsey or head bow. You and Simon both returned the gesture before the members of the ton flooded around you, each offering their happiest felicitations for your marital bliss.

 You kept your back straight, face neutral, smile stretched, and hoped it shone all the way to your eyes. Your eyes always gave away whatever you were thinking or feeling. It was what you considered your fatal flaw. Your mother could hide everything behind her relaxed expression and only allow others to see what she wanted. Even, your sisters, Jerrikka and Jacinda, could remain relatively stoic, you were the one who was cursed. Your father always called you his little lightning bolt because of how quickly your emotions flashed.

 By the time the congratulations finally subsided, it gave you time to take your first ever taste of Ratafia. Your mother had never allowed it. She said it was for married women. You and Jacinda had only been allowed one glass of cordial at any event. Once you’d had your one glass, it was lemonade after that.

 You were standing close to the fireplace in the corner of the room. It gave you a good view of all that was happening. Simon was beside you, slightly turned away with one elbow resting on the stone of the fireplace. His stance allowed you to take in his side profile. Even standing leisurely with his other hand on his hop and one leg crossed over the other, he still looked regal. Before you thought it was conceit you sensed in him, but you’d come to see it as pride.

 It wasn’t a detrimental pride or one that said he thought himself high over others. It was a different kind of pride entirely. It was one that made him more attractive in your eyes. His slim but masculine frame you’d gazed over tens of times over the last month always set your curiosities running wild. Right now, you found yourself wondering if all of him had the muscles he’d displayed two weeks ago when he rolled up his sleeves.

 You hadn’t even seen your brothers in that state before. he was the first. As your eyes traveled the length of his body, you raised your glass to your lips and took a sip of the coveted Ratafia that many ladies seemed to love. Your eyes stopped at his backside, and that was where they remained. The liquid passed your lips and washed over your tongue.

 The most unexpected flavor filled your mouth. It was one that was stronger than anything you’d ever tasted. As soon as you swallowed it, you began coughing. Simon’s head spun to you with a worried expression.

“Are you all right?”

 Your response was another fit of coughs, which made Simon take a step toward you.

 “Jemilla?”

 You held up your hand as you cleared your throat once more.

 “Good heavens, this is absolutely terrible.”

 Simon’s eyes flittered between the glass in your hands, your face, and back to the glass. Slowly a smile spread across his lips before he pressed them together.

 “Is this your first time having Ratafia?”

 You nodded.

 “How? Every lady in London has a Ratafia habit they think no one knows of,” he said with a smirk.

 “Is that so?”

 “Why yes. Look.”

 He stepped to the side then nodded his head to the ladies of the ton. You looked at a few of them, and each of them brought glasses of the horrid tasting drink to their lips, including your mother, older sister, and Lady Danbury. He was right. It would seem the ladies did have a liking for the thing.

 “How is it that your mother and sister drink it regularly, but you have not?”

 He was facing you again with plenty of curiosity in his eyes. Needing something to do, you nearly raised the glass back to your lips—nearly.

 “My mother doesn’t let any of us have this. She says it is for mature married ladies. So I did not qualify.”

 Simon nodded and raised his glass of Brandy to his lips.

 “I see. So, now that you are in the company of those married but not quite mature ladies, you decided to partake.”

 Curiosity nipped at you now. Tilting your head to the side, you took him in.

 “Married but not quite mature ladies? Pray tell what you mean by that, your grace?”

 Simon didn’t attempt to speak. He just took another mouthful of Brandy and studied you with the utmost scrutiny. A hint of mischief flickered across his face before he scoffed and turned away from you, taking up his same stance from before. You could have tossed the remaining Ratafia in your glass at his back. He’d always had this uncanny ability to wind you up since the day you’d met. It still hadn’t changed. Your mother said that it was a blessing, and it would mean your marriage would not be a bore.

 “It figures you would regress into a state of cowardice at the mere spark of a conversation,” you speared, knowing it would rile him up.

 As expected, Simon spun around to face you but also took the three steps needed to be only inches from your face.

 “Did you call me a coward?”

 You fought a smile. “I wouldn’t dare, your grace.”

 You knew he heard the sarcasm in your voice.

 “All right, your grace, I shall educate you, but only a little. You are married, as sure as that bauble decorates your dainty finger, but just because you are married, it does not make you mature,” Simon reiterated.

 You waited for him to continue, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing you anxiously wanted to hear the end of his thought. Your eyes dipped lower than his to his mouth and watched him smile. That smile was something that was growing on you every time you saw it. You realized the dryness of your throat then, and you snaked your tongue out to wet your lips. His eyes dropped to your lips and stayed there for several long moments.

 Simon leaned an inch closer. He could almost touch your nose with his. “You are not mature until you have woken the next morning in nothing by the bed sheets, with aches in muscles and places you never knew you could ache, and a road map of marks along your body all made with nothing but lips all from your first night with a man,” he said in the most alluring voice.

 A strange feeling washed over you, and you feared you might actually swoon. Clouds seemed to fill your head as your entire body became so heated as if the fire you were standing near had caught on your body. You tried to control your expression, all the while Simon watched you. After a few seconds, Simon’s jaw clenched, making the muscles in his neck jump.

 “Maturity, your grace, requires a toll be paid, and it must be paid over and over and over,” he finished. A scowl replaced his clenched jaw, and the thought that he felt disappointment made your stomach sink.

 “And how many tolls have you collected, your grace?

 Simon looked caught off guard by the question. It wasn’t a dignified question. One does not ask a man, even if he is her husband, such things.

 “Plenty, but remember one needn’t make it an all-night occasion. Five minutes or so in a parlor could suffice.”

 Jealousy hit you, and you couldn’t hide it. Simon smirked, then scoffed, but the smile slipped and was replaced with a frown.

 “Well, my husband, the rake. I am surprised you wed at all.”

 Simon looked pained, but you did not focus on it.

 “As am I, but I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?” He muttered it, but you heard it through. Instead of letting another emotion slip, you raised the glass to your lips and drank it all down in one agonizing and sicking move. Once finished, you walked off, leaving him there.

 Mere hours into your marriage and things were already falling apart; you thought as you walked out of the ballroom and outside into the chilly night air. You took a deep breath, held it, and did it again and again. The man made you angry and flustered in under five minutes. You couldn’t help but reminisce about your time casually talking at balls and events around London while you were on the marriage mart. He’d been terse to begin with, but slowly he’d warmed to you.

 You’d developed the beginning buds of a friendship that took you by surprise but was welcoming. While every man in London was trying to put their best foot forward to entice you into marriage, Simon was not. He showed plenty of his bad habits, his cynicism and preference to see the worst in people, his inability to see the true heart of those in his company, his stubbornness, his temper, and on some occasions, his rakish ways. It didn’t matter, you never judged him for it, and you could tell he appreciated it.

 “My, how things have changed,” you said to yourself once you were under a wide-spanned tree sitting on the stone bench.

 You closed your eyes and listened to the night, finding comfort in the chirping crickets, the sound of the wind rustling the leaves, the faint rolling of the wheels from passing carriages, all backed by the orchestral music from the ballroom. Slowly your anger subsided. You didn’t even know why you were angry. You’d known he had no plans to marry. It was one of the very first things he’d told you, and he repeated it on so many occasions it was seared to your brain. The Duke of Hastings was not in want of a wife. Yet, here you were married to him, all because of one night similar to this one.

 It was your fault. You felt as if you’d left him with no other choice. You thought back to the night that had changed everything. You didn’t know what you were doing when you allowed him to cross the lines of proper distance between two unwed people. The only thing you could think about when he slowly came closer and closer was how badly you wanted to know what he smelled like underneath his cravat. For weeks the casual way he had it done with the different materials that were so much more vibrant than others always drew your attention.

 In your few moments of stupor, Simon had managed to come so close you could see the small flecks of auburn within his eyes. His unexpected closeness made you swoon slightly, and his arms were there to catch you and hold you against him. It was your first time being close to a man that was not either of your brothers. Even then, there was some distance.

 Simon’s hand then grazed your cheek and trailed down to your jaw before curving back to where your earlobe hung. You’d lost whatever strength your knees had and slumped against him just as his finger dipped down your neck and coming across your collar, and it was there he stopped. It took several moments for his finger to plunge lower until it dangled right above the rise of your breast. When he dipped his head down while maintaining eye contact, you began to shake in his arms. He took a deep inhale at the swell of your breast.

 “You’re trembling like a leaf, are you cold?”

 You shook your head slightly.

 “Then what are you, Ms. Remmington?”

 You could smell the brandy on his breath, but there was something else too, something you couldn’t make out.

 “Quite fevered,” you whispered.

 Simon took another deep inhale of your skin then moaned.

 “Goodness, you smell of roses, night jasmine and--,” he inhaled again. “Orange blossom. You smell like my best dreams, Ms. Remmington.”

 Your breath hitched. Simon came closer and closer until his lips hovered over yours. You should have moved and chastised him about impropriety, but you stood there while the hand that was at the middle of your back slid lower and lower until you felt his fingertips pressing into the flesh just above the swell of your bottom. The action brought your lower half firmly against his. You didn’t know what you felt, but it was something. His lips only slightly grazed yours before you’d heard voices approaching you. He’d been the one to pull away from you first and apologize profusely before he’d walked off, leaving you pressed against the wall of roses that was right behind you.

 “Already hiding from your husband?”

 You opened your eyes and saw your best friend, Tessa, standing there with a teasing smirk.

 “Tessa.”

 You began to stand, but she stopped you, sitting beside you instead.

 “Your grace,” she said.

 Scoffing, you bumped her with your shoulder. “Oh, stop it. Do not tease me. I am still Jemilla. I will hear no nonsense of your grace from you.”

 “I know you are Jemi, but you are also a Duchess now. It would be faulty to not acknowledge it, especially in public, at least once.”

 You sighed and fiddled with the new ring on your finger underneath your white gloves.

 “We are not in public now. It is just you, and I so do away with it.”

 “Very well.” Tessa remained quiet for a few seconds before she turned to you with an excited smile. “All right, show it to me.”

 You pulled off the glove and showed her the wedding ring Simon had placed on your finger earlier in the day. Tessa gasped, grabbed your hand, and brought it closer to her face.

 “Oh my. I dare say the Duke has excellent taste. It is quite beautiful. While most husbands give their wives one jewel, yours had bestowed you a bevy.”

 You snorted and looked out into the night while she continued to gawk at the bauble.

 “So why are you out here and your new husband nowhere in sight?”

 You bit your bottom lip then looked at her. You’d told her everything that had happened between you and Simon. You’d told her the reason your engagement was so quick and that there was no love between you and him.

 “Oh come, come, Jemi. I know you wanted to marry for love and desire and passion, but just because your marriage did not start that way does not mean it cannot end up there,” Tessa suggested.

 “Tessa, be realistic. I have told you the things he has said about marriage. He came to town with no intent on marriage.”

 “And look, he is married now, in mere weeks no less. Jemi, a man will say all sorts of things to prevent something, but from this day on, he is yours.”

 It was then you thought back to his words by the fireplace.

 “And how many tolls have you collected, your grace?

 “Plenty, but remember one needn’t make it an all-night occasion. Five minutes or so in a parlor could suffice.”

 You could have laughed out loud, but you didn’t. He hadn’t been yours before, and you doubted he was now.

 “Tonight is your wedding night. Perhaps you shall feel differently in the morning,” Tessa said, a broad smile spread across her face.

 You knew what she was insinuating. You had heard the chatter of a woman’s wedding night but had heard nothing of consequence. All you and Tessa were left with were speculation and plenty of possible theories and fantasies. Tessa stood and held out her arm for yours. After slipping your glove back on, you looped your arm with hers and allowed her to lead you back into the ballroom.

 Once you were seen, your mother approached you and swiftly brought you towards your new husband, then enticed him to dance with you for all the ton to see. Simon, of course, complied, and the two of you drew every pair of eyes. Rather than looking directly at him, you kept your eyes somewhere neutral, somewhere that it would appear to others you were staring into his eyes.

 “Remember what I said to you the first time we danced like this?”

 “We’ve never danced like this, your grace.”

 “You are right; our titles, or rather your title, has changed but are we not the same people?”

 You fell into the trap and met his eyes.

 “Are we, your grace?”

 Simon peered deeply into your eyes as if he were looking for that very answer.

 “I am told we have our entire lives to figure it out.”

 Feeling your face beginning to shift to give away your inner feelings, you looked away, back to his ear.

 “Stare into my eyes.”

 They were words he’d said before, in the exact manner. You ignored his instruction, though the urge to obey pulled at your willfulness.

 “Jemilla,” Simon said in a low, deep voice.

 “Stare into my eyes.”

 You caved and darted your eyes to his. Simon held it for a few moments.

 “If this is to work, we must appear madly in love,” he said.

 The words garnered almost the same reaction as it had the first time he’d uttered them. The only difference was you were well aware that appearances were not nearly all that they seemed. It had worked a little too well, and now you were married and so far from madly in love.

 By the end of the evening, your feet hurt from all the walking around and dancing, and your head throbbed slightly, probably from the music and being unable to eat even one bite due to the anxiousness that had plagued you all day. After you’d said your goodbyes to your siblings, mother, and friends, you climbed into the carriage with Simon, unsure just where you were heading. You didn’t pay too much attention to the darkness outside the window because your head was too caught up in thoughts of what was to come.

 You fiddled with your gloved hands, your bouquet that you’d nearly stroked all buds from all in an effort to take your mind off of things. After thirty minutes in the bumpy carriage, you saw a large tree pass by. You looked around you, trying to figure out where you were.

“Where—where are we?”

 “One of my estates, Briarvale, Simon answered.

 “Briarvale. I thought we were going to Clyvedon?”

 “No, Clyvedon is quite far, much too far to travel tonight. Briarvale is the in-between point. We will stop, rest for the night, then continue on and should reach Clyvedon by late afternoon next.”

 You nodded and lowered your eyes. “I should have made you aware of the plans before. I am afraid I am so used to consulting no one I did not stop to realize I now might have to. I apologize.”

 He didn’t sound angry about it, just remorseful. Maybe he was being sincere. When the carriage stopped, the jarvey opened the door and helped you out. Some torches lit the entire walk path to the front door, where two servants were standing at either side of the door. Simon stepped out beside you and cleared his throat.

 “After you, your grace.”

 You walked ahead while taking in the large home before you. It was two times bigger than the one you’d spent half of your life in, and you imagined Cleyvdon would be four times larger than this one. You never imagined marrying this wealthy. Wealth was never one of your concerns at all.

 “Welcome, your graces.”

 You and Simon walked inside into the foyer.

 “I will let you get settled,” Simon said before walking off, leaving you standing there and wondering where he was going.

 One of the maids led you through the house to the stairs. As you climbed them, you took in the paintings on the wall and the wood’s shine. It was a well-kept residence. A few minutes later, the maid stopped in front of a door.

 “Your room, your grace.”

 “Thank you. what is your name?”

 She looked surprised by your question, but she still answered. “Ingrid, your grace.”

 “Thank you, Ingrid.”

 She smiled and bowed her head, and waited for you to walk inside. When you did, the fire was crackling, making the large room very inviting.

 “Is everything to your liking, your grace?”

 You nodded. “Thank you, yes.”

 Ingrid nodded, then walked out of the room, leaving you with your thoughts. You knew he would come, so you waited. You took the time to look around the room at the different paintings and objects and even examining the material of the sheets on the bed. Still, Simon hadn’t appeared. That was when your pacing began and did not stop. After pacing for quite a while, you finally stopped, then took off your shoes and waited some more. When another ten minutes passed with no Simon, you peeled off your stockings but hesitated to remove any more articles of clothing.

 When you were sure you’d waited an hour more, you got annoyed and walked to the door. As soon as you opened it you saw one of the maids passing.

 “Hello there.”

 The young woman turned, startled, then dipped down to a bow.

 “Your grace, is something the matter?”

 You were embarrassed even to ask her this. “No, nothing is wrong. Have you—do you know where—has his grace retired for the evening?”

 The maid gave you a curious look. No doubt she was thinking that you should know better than her. He was your husband, after all.

 “Uh—no, ma’am. His grace is still in the study. Would you like me to deliver  a message?”

 “No! No. Thank you.”

 You went back into the room, closed the door, and sighed out. She undoubtedly found it strange, and you worried you’d be the gossip of the house in the morning. You began undressing as you’d done plenty of times before then climbed into bed, leaving your petticoat on. Instead of going to sleep right away, you sat up and waited.

 You didn’t know what was going on or what to expect, and that was the part that gave you the most anxiety and distress. After another hour, it was clear to see that Simon was not coming. You didn’t know what to think or feel. The very little you’d been told to expect still made no sense, especially since it hadn’t happened. Or had it? Your mother told you that your husband would take the lead. Had Simon taken the lead by staying away?

 After going over it tens of times in your head, you snuffed out the candle that was on its last inch of life and lay down to stare at the upper canopy of the bed.

 You were married, but his actions had proven the line was drawn, and you were on opposite sides with chasms between you.

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

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[nxmuzluv]

mexican empire — trivia

The empire (that is more formally known as the Second Mexican Empire) was started in 1864 by Emperor Armando, Jacqueline’s great-great-great-great grandfather. He was a lieutenant general within the Mexican army, and after he forced French forces out of Mexico and ordered their surrender, due to his wealth and influence (as he hailed from a Cuban-Mexican old money family), he declared himself emperor of Mexico due to his desire for the Mexican empire’s restoration.

During the reign of Jacqueline’s great-great grandfather—Emperor Gustavo Hernando—a socialist and wannabe dictator named Álvaro Angel Hernandez created an anti-monarchy “party” that wished to abolish the Mexican empire due to seeing the (then current) imperial family as corrupt. The party gained members, notoriety, and infamy throughout Mexico, and Álvaro had even gained some power over Mexico City and its neighboring territories. Álvaro seemingly went mad and randomly decided to storm the palace in an attempt to overthrow Emperor Gustavo. That attempt was unsuccessful, and Álvaro was tried with heavy treason and sentenced to death by hanging. His execution sparked the Guerra del Palacio (the War of the Palace), and the conflict lasted for three and a half years.

With the empire’s power, and with the help of Brazilian, Cuban, and later American troops, the Mexican empire defeated Álvaro’s party and prevented being replaced with an authoritarian, socialist regime. Since then, the War of the Palace has been the only civil war that the imperial family has had to face.

Mexico has one of the wealthiest imperial families in the world, having a net worth of $10.5 billion, and placing them at 5th on the list of wealthiest monarchs in the world. All of that money belongs to the emperor, and it stems from Mexico’s investments in the oil industry and agriculture, their various exports (such as beer, chocolate, chilis, and tomatoes), the support from the Mexican citizens, and from the emperor’s own investments into large scale banks around the world. The $10.5 billion will be split between the emperor’s immediate family (his daughters and his eldest daughter’s three children) upon his death.

Mexico became the first monarchy in the world to implement absolute primogeniture (meaning any child can assume the role of heir apparent to the throne regardless of their gender) in 1914. It was proposed by Emperor Gustavo after the birth of his three daughters after the birth of his eldest son. He was worried about the potential extinction of the dynasty if his son either died or was unable to marry or produce a male heir, and Gustavo’s own lack of another male heir only increased his worries. To ensure that the dynasty would live on, he proposed the idea of absolute primogeniture to the Mexican government.

His proposal was taken into question, as back then, women were seen as “unfit” monarchs and were seen as incapable of ruling a country. However, due to much pushing by the emperor over the course of eight months, by a vote of 71–63, absolute primogeniture was officially adopted in Mexico in regards to the empire’s line of succession. The empire received its first female heir apparent upon the birth of Crown Princess (now Empress) Victoria in 1967.

Since 1873, the empire of Mexico has also been known as the United Empire of Mexico (or the Imperio Unido de México) due to the numerous conquests ordered by Emperor Armando. Countries under the United Empire of Mexico include the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. From 1891 to 1959 (68 years), Cuba was also a part of the United Empire, and monarchs and their consorts held the titles of Emperor and Empress of Cuba.

The Second Mexican empire started off with a rather large amount of wealth, as its founder, Lieutenant General Armando José Enrique Velasco, hailed from a Mexican-Cuban old money family that was worth $16.4 billion ($302.5 billion in today’s money) by Armando’s father’s death in 1867. Upon his father’s death, the money was split between Armando and his brother, with both of them receiving $8.2 billion ($151.2 billion in today’s money). That fortune has been slightly diminished and restored over the years.

The Second Mexican Empire is an absolute, hereditary, and self-proclaimed monarchy. It was originally a semi-constitutional monarchy during Emperor Alphons’ reign, and during Emperor Fernando’s reign, it became a complete constitutional monarchy. The empire only became an absolute monarchy after its restoration. It is a self-proclaimed monarchy due to Emperor Armando declaring himself the emperor of Mexico after defeating the French.

Emperor Alphons—Armando’s eldest son—had the shortest reign of any Mexican monarch ever, as he only reigned for 11 years. He was known to be somewhat sickly from birth, and his sickness worsened later in his life, resulting in his early-ish death. Alphons was also said to be attractive during his youth and was quite the notorious playboy before he met his wife and consort, Josefina Ivette Isabel Correia, Lady Salvaterra, to whom he was distantly related to.

In his youth, Emperor Gustavo had quite the large selection of noble and royal ladies to choose from for marriage (or rather, for his parents to choose from). From that selection, he had wed Princess Helena Dorothea Maria Anna of Greece and Denmark, Viscountess Württemberg, a member of the Greek royal family and of the German noble House of Württemberg. However, they’re relationship was rocky and they seemed more like acquaintances than husband and wife, and just a year later, Gustavo and Princess Helena divorced. However, their marriage did bring the Mexican, Greek, and Danish royal/imperial families closer together, and it solidified their relationship for the next four generations. Princess Helena was never given the title of empress. A few months later, Gustavo married Agustina Natalia Sophia, Baroness of San Luis de la Paz, and the daughter of the Duke of Guanajuato.

Emperor José Manuel established the most international connections for the Mexican empire, ranking just below his son, Fernando. His marriage to Yoo Hyeryun, a middle class Korean native, was one of them, as well as his ally-ship with India, his friendships with the British, Greek, and Spanish royal families, and his push for exports and the offering of support to foreign allies. José Manuel also has the second longest reign of any monarch in Mexico, placing behind his son.

Emperor Fernando became the first Korean-Mexican to ascend to the imperial throne after his father’s death in 1960. He also has the longest reign of any Mexican monarch, and will uphold that title until his daughter can manage to surpass him.

Empress Victoria became Mexico’s first female regent in all its 139-year history, which caused her to also have the most viewed coronation since her father’s in 1960, amassing a total of 81.5 million people in Mexico and 24 million people worldwide. Meaning, a total of 105.5 million people had watched Victoria’s coronation. She also became the second mixed Korean to ascend to the Mexican throne.

Empress Agustina was known for introducing a lot of foreign customs to Mexico during her husband’s reign. She was known for her love of travel and for her interest in other (specifically European) cultures. She introduced the Scottish Lomond waltz to the Mexican imperial court, and had also introduced the concept of debutante balls to the country, as she established Empress Agustina’s Debutante Ball (Baile de Debutante de la Emperatriz Agustina) after attending Queen Charlotte’s Ball in London.

Dowager Empress Consuelo Teresa (or Yoo Hyeryun) became the first Korean woman to assume the title of empress (consort) of Mexico upon her husband’s ascension to the throne in 1928. She achieved massive notoriety due to this (and also due to her beauty), and further established positive connections between Mexico and South Korea. She also became known as the first commoner to marry into the imperial family, and became the first commoner to assume the title of empress consort. She is also the longest living empress in the empire’s history, being 102 years old by the events of Trigger Happy Havoc.

There had actually been a empress regent of Mexico prior to Victoria, although she wasn’t officially counted as a reigning empress like Victoria. Her name was Princess Josefina Maria Lupita, and she was Emperor Alphons’ older sister, and Emperor Armando’s first born child. Due to Mexico’s male preference primogeniture at the time, Josefina was misplaced at heir to the throne once her brother was born. She didn’t see it as an issue until she was in her thirties. Just a few months after Alphons was crowned, Josefina secretly mobilized a part of Mexico’s military, and had ordered them to storm her brother’s apartments within Chapultepec Castle

A few dozen were injured during that attempt of a “coup,” and two had died due to their injuries. Alphons originally thought that the attack was ordered by anti-royalists, but he later found out that it was ordered by his own sister. He was quick to declare war on Josefina, who was forced to flee to Costa Rica with the remainder of her troops. The war—which was named the “War of the Chrysanthemum”—lasted for only seven months, before it eventually came to a stalemate due to the intervention of the siblings’ mother. Alphons wanted to keep Josefina in Costa Rica, but was advised not to. After the war, the siblings never even looked at each other again, and Josefina moved out of Chapultepec Castle and into a separate estate

During the war, Josefina had triumphed over her brother for a short period of time (about a month or two) and had become Empress Josefina, and was “ruling” from Costa Rica. However, as she had never had a formal coronation and as she had an incredibly short reign, historians do not count Josefina as a true sovereign, and the title of “first empress regent of Mexico” officially goes to Victoria. Technically, however, it goes to Josefina

Emperor José Manuel’s brother, José Ramón, Jacqueline’s great-great uncle, had married Princess Alexandra-Beatrice of Battenberg, the youngest daughter of Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, and of Prince Louis of Battenberg. Alexandra-Beatrice—Jacqueline’s great-great aunt—was the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, making the former queen of the United Kingdom Jacqueline’s great-great-great-great-great grandaunt.

Jacqueline’s great-aunt—Princess Valentina of Spain—is married to Prince Georgios of Greece and Denmark, Jacqueline’s uncle, and her title upon her marriage became Crown Princess Victoria of Greece and Spain. Crown Prince Georgios was formerly King George III of Greece, while Princess Valentina was Queen Valentina of Greece, the country’s first Spanish queen consort. However, Georgios only ruled for two years, and he abdicated the throne in favor of his younger brother, the now King Constantine II of Greece. Due to the marriage between Valentina and Georgios, however, that makes the Mexican imperial family relatives to the Greek royal family.

King Constantine II is Jacqueline’s great-uncle and his wife, Queen Anne-Marie of Greece and Denmark, is her great-aunt. Crown Prince Pavlos is Jacqueline’s second cousin, once removed/uncle, and his wife—Crown Princess Marie-Chantal—is her aunt. Pavlos and Marie-Chantal’s five children are all Jacqueline’s second cousins. Furthermore, that makes Crystal Bienvenu (Jacqueline’s classmate) and her siblings Jacqueline’s third cousins (and they had no idea that they were that closely related).

The Mexican imperial family is incredibly popular among its citizens, and is said to be well loved. They are known to be a very progressive, casual, down-to-earth, and friendly family to the Mexican public, royal watchers, and to foreigners. They are also known for their close relationship despite their large number of members.

Despite their close relationship now, the Mexican imperial family was known as very rigid, somewhat cold, and had a nearly distant family life up until Emperor Gustavo’s marriage to Baroness Agustina Natalia Sophia.

Although the empire was previously abolished in 2003, after society was restored following the events of The Tragedy, Mexico was significantly affected by the world’s societal collapse and by a devastating war between the country and Cuba caused by The Tragedy, and in an overwhelming 125–9 vote, the Mexican empire was restored, the imperial family was allowed back, and Emperor Fernando got his political power restored. However, six months later, he abdicated the throne in favor of his eldest daughter and Jacqueline’s mother, Victoria.

During the holiday season and before Christmas, the imperial family sends out cards with a portrait of the entire family—both the Mexican imperial family and the extended Bourbon-Perez/Spanish royal family—on the front. 1,000 cards are sent out to random households in Mexico and around the world every year, and all of them are personally signed by the emperor and empress. Only 50 cards are signed by other members of the family. This tradition started during the reign of Emperor Alphons in the late 1800s, and had increased in popularity during the reign of Emperor José Manuel.

Christmas portraits of the emperor’s immediate family and individual portraits of members of the imperial family are also released before Christmas, as well.

The children of the family also make Christmas cards, write messages in them, and sign them for the palace staff. The messages usually thank the staff for their hard work throughout the year. Jacqueline is known for tying each of her cards with gold, red, or green ribbons, and she’s known for gifting the staff with homemade cookies, as well.

There is a Christmas tree located in one of the imperial family’s winter residences, and before Christmas, the family makes decorations to hang from the tree, and they also hang home baked cookies—that are mainly baked by Jacqueline—from it, as well. Additionally, the oldest or youngest child gets to place the star/angel on top (it depends on the year).

On Christmas Eve, a formal dinner is held at the family’s winter residence and includes only the family members and their close guests (such as friends and government officials with close connections to the imperial family).

Also on Christmas Eve, the imperial family usually plays soccer/football on the grounds of their winter residence. This tradition was started by Emperor Gustavo in the early 1900s. Currently, Prince Alejandro and Empress Victoria have won the most games. The imperial family also plays Monopoly on Christmas Eve, which was started by Prince Alejandro.

Alejandro and Jacqueline also skate on the pond on the grounds of the family’s winter residence on Christmas Eve, which was turned into an ice skating rink at Emperor Daniel’s request when his children were young. Additionally, the imperial family also plays ice hockey. In regards to that, Jacqueline and her teams have won the most games.

The Mexican imperial family usually attends church service at the Catedral Metropolitana on a Sunday before Christmas. On Christmas Day, they attend church again, no matter what day it is, and that service is a much more public event due to it taking place on Christmas Day. During service, the emperor and empress’s Christmas speeches are broadcasted throughout the country, and tens of millions of Mexican citizens either watch or listen in. After service, the imperial family has a carriage procession through Mexico City, and that night, a final Christmas ball is held. Following the ball, the family usually watches Christmas movies at their winter residence, as well as a late night rerun of the emperor and empress’s Christmas broadcast.

Christmas is one of the imperial family’s favorite holidays, along with Independence Day, Day of the Dead, and Chuseok.

The imperial family combines a lot of Christmas traditions from different countries during the holiday season. Of course, there are mainly Mexican, Spanish, Korean, and British traditions, but there are also German and Scottish traditions mixed in, as well.

Mexico is known for sending numerous equestrians, sailors, surfers, soccer players, and runners to the Olympics, most of which have medaled. Members of the imperial family who have competed in the Olympics include: Emperor Alphons’ second son, who competed in equestrianism and won bronze, Emperor Gustavo’s youngest son, who competed in sailing and placed fourth, Empress Victoria, who competed in equestrianism and tennis and won silver and gold, Princess Luisa, Victoria’s younger sister, who competed in swimming and won gold, Prince Alejandro, Victoria’s eldest son, who competed at both the summer and winter Olympics and won gold in figure skating and gold in equestrianism, Princess Jacqueline, who competed in figure skating and won gold, as well, Princess Isabel, Victoria’s other younger sister, who competed in snowboarding and won bronze, and Princess Catalina Anita, who competed in gymnastics and track and won gold and bronze.

Like the United Kingdom, the Mexican empire has an established social season as well. It starts on February 1st with the state opening of Parliament, and it ends on December 9th with Empress Agustina’s Debutante Ball. In between, events like flower shows, opera performances, sports tournaments, society galas, a dog show, and an imperial derby are held. A five month break also occurs in between July and December. The social season was also introduced by Empress Agustina, but it didn’t become widespread until Emperor José Manuel’s reign.

Mexico is also known for its classic original operas, productions, and various opera singers. The annual opera performance at the Gran Teatro Nacional is one of the most anticipated events during the social season, and it is one of Dowager Empress Consuelo Teresa, Emperor Fernando, Empress Catalina-Beatriz, Empress Victoria, and Victoria’s children’s favorite event during the season.

Mexico also has quite the large amount of painters and photographers. Two of the most renowned painters and photographers are Lady Magdalena de la Cerda, a member of the aristocratic la Cerda family and a famous landscape, surrealist, and portrait artist, and Guillermo Hernandez-Mendez, a photographer famous for his landscape shots and creativity. Both of them work for the imperial family, and they usually create the family’s portraits.

Mexico is also known for its incredibly strong military. It’s head is, of course, the current monarch of the empire. Emperor José Manuel had extensive military knowledge and training, which he passed on to his sons, the future Emperor Fernando included. Fernando passed that military knowledge onto his eldest daughter and heir apparent, the future Empress Victoria, who further strengthened Mexico’s military just like her father and grandfather had done.

Dowager Empress Consuelo Teresa introduced the Korean holiday of Chuseok and the celebration of doljanchi to the imperial family upon her marriage to Emperor José Manuel. Since Emperor Fernando’s doljanchi in 1937, almost every member of the imperial family has also had one. Unlike other holidays, banquets are not held for Chuseok. Instead, smaller family dinners/potlucks are held in the family’s summer palaces, and they also get the chance to speak to their extended family in Korea.

The family’s main residence—Chapultepec Castle—is lit up with colored lights for various occasions. Some of those occasions include Independence Day, the birthdays of members of the imperial family, the births of members of the imperial family, and coronations. The lighting of Chapultepec Castle was introduced by Empress Catalina-Beatriz and started after the birth of Empress Victoria in 1967, and it has been done ever since.

Other traditions include the public lighting of the Christmas tree in front of Chapultepec Castle, and the ringing of the Catedral Metropolitana bells once an imperial baby has been born and during an imperial wedding.

The title of Prince/Princess of Tijuana is a title given to the heirs to the throne of Mexico. It was created in the early 1900s by Emperor Alphons as an 18th birthday gift for his eldest son, the future Emperor Gustavo. Since then, there have been five Princes of Tijuana and two Princesses of Tijuana. The title of Duke/Duchess of Bourbon-Perez is a title given to the current monarch and their spouse, and it was created by Dowager Empress Consuelo Teresa upon her eldest son’s ascension to the imperial throne. The title of Earl/Countess of Bourbon-Perez was created by Emperor Fernando upon his eldest daughter’s marriage in 1988.

Upon Victoria's ascension to the Mexican throne, Prince Alejandro—Jacqueline’s older brother—became the new crown prince of Mexico, and he also received the titles of Prince of Tijuana (a title given to the heirs to the imperial throne) and Earl of Bourbon-Perez. Jacqueline also moved up a spot in the line of succession, going from fourth to third.

Most of the members of the imperial family have married/have been engaged to people with noble/aristocratic titles. Only five members have not done so, with those being: Emperor José Manuel, who married Yoo Hyeryun, a Korean woman hailing from a middle class family, Crown Prince Alejandro, who got engaged to Vivienne Young, a woman hailing from an old moneyed Peranakan family, Princess Isabel, who married Stephanos Alexander Onasis, a Greek commoner, Prince Maximilliano, Emperor Fernando’s younger brother, who married Bianca Rosalia Rodriguez, a Cuban commoner, and Princess Alejandra of Spain, who married Hernando Enrique Torres, an Ecuadorian commoner hailing from a wealthy oil family.

The Mexican imperial family has a total of 19 residences. They have nine residences in Mexico, and 10 residences in other countries (such as Cuba, the United Kingdom, and Spain).

[pauldron-pieces]

Elanor's Backstory: The Dark Secret of House Amroth-Rubiaceae

Fandom: Dungeons And Dragons (5E)

Pairing: N/A, Elanor-Centric

Rating: Holy shit M.

AN: This is a hypothetical narrative scenario featuring original characters in a world created by my Dungeon Master. As usual, this is non-canon and I own nothing aside from intellectual properties specifically attached to Elanor Amroth-Rubiaceae. This installment is mechanically unsound in a multitude of ways and ignores certain important lore facets.

Applicable trigger warnings are listed inside. Enjoy!

Taglist: @sporadic-fics and @cookiethewriter!

Inspired By: Josh Groban: She

[Elanor Amroth-Rubiaceae is a level five Aasimar divine soul sorcerer and her appearance can be found here]

[!TRIGGER WARNING!: This installment contains multiple triggering scenes including mentions of character death, emotional neglect and infidelity. Stay safe!]

The family tree of Rubiaceae had many branches, and Amroth was one such branch. Known for their legacy of powerful Aasimar sorcerers with ties to draconian bloodlines, it was no wonder that there were many bids for the heirs of the Amroth house.

Duke D'Arnaud and his wife the Duchess Celeste were a loving couple in naught save the records of the kingdom. Fueled by greed, their union was one of shrewd calculation and cold practicality in order to strengthen their individual hamlets.

The two lived in separate wings of a grand and characterless manse, and were only ever seen together at festive events. Despite this distance, they bore five daughters in somewhat rapid succession. There were, of course, salacious rumors that the Duke was actually sterile. It was popular opinion that his title-less younger brother, a clergyman in the family parish, had accepted a certain allotment of finances to the church each month in order to 'stand in' for matters of the bedroom. Unfounded as the rumors were, the Duke and Duchess had remarked that they found them, 'an amusing diversion', and thus made no effort to confirm nor deny the claims.

The daughters were platinum blonde, the hallmark of House Amroth, and all but the eldest showed signs of their draconic blessing at an early age. The eldest, named Elanor, did not appear to have any magical ability at all, and as such was foisted aside in favor of grooming the rest of her siblings for the greatness they were surely destined to achieve.

Elanor spent much of her younger years alone. That is, when she wasn't being educated in the ways of etiquette and poise. Her parents insisted that even though she may not be as useful as her sisters, she must still be trained up as a potential wife for a lesser lord or lady.

"All to strengthen our house, little Elanor." Her father had told her many a time, always toying with the triangular pendant she had been given on her naming day.

×+×

On the night their fifth daughter was born, Elanor (who was only eight at the time) had taken refuge in the family chapel. There in the peaceful silence of the chancel, the little girl wept herself to sleep for want of the love of her parents.

She awoke to someone stroking her hair. "Little one, what troubles you?" Her uncle (formerly D'Artan, now simply Artan after he had joined the chantry) had enquired softly, his eyes kind in the flickering candlelight. "Do you fear for the new babe's health, perhaps your mother's safety?"

Selfish as it was, Elanor was a child, and as such had erupted with a colorful string of barely-coherent vitriol about her parents and sisters. Father Artan listened patiently, waiting until it seemed like her words and tears had finally run dry.

"You truly believe you have no magic, little Elanor?" He mused, tapping her forehead. "No skill or inclination? Or is that merely what you've been told all these years?"

Elanor had shook her head angrily. "I don't have any at all! Not like Mama or Papa or Nessa or...or anyone!"

"Oh, Elanor," Uncle Artan sighed, a sad look crossing his face. "There is so much I wish I could tell you." Gentle hands straightened out the necklace she wore, his expression turning serious. "You have always kept this on, correct? This chain with your naming-day pendant."

"I can't take it off." The child had answered sulkily. "It's too hard." The chain bore no real clasp, but she of course did not know that. She just assumed that it was difficult to find.

The priest had tipped her chin up, offering her a smile as he brushed away the remainder of her tear stains. "Come visit me when your new sister is seven. We will have much to speak about."

×+×

Her hair was as black as midnight.

Fifteen year old Elanor stared at herself in the looking glass for a time after her uncle had helped her remove the pendant. Her fingers rose to stroke through the strands, the young girl not fully believing her eyes.

Uncle Artan cleared his throat. "It has been such a color since the day you were born, Elanor." His free hand absently fiddled with his own shaggy black hair, now interspersed with shocks of silver. "I'm afraid I may have passed on a bit more to you than my dear brother would have cared for."

"Passed...so you are my…?" Elanor's words trailed off when he nodded yet again.

"I am sorry to have kept this from you, little Elanor." The remorse was thick in his voice. "I am afraid I robbed you of much happiness in your younger years. Perhaps I was a fool to believe you would be looked after in the same manner as your sisters." Artan sighed, shaking his head. "Truthfully, I wish that I had mustered up the courage to claim you as my own child when it would have meant something to you. Now, I fear it is too late."

Elanor clutched his hands. "No! Tell me everything, tell me why I'm like this--please!" She begged. The stained glass windows in the chapel rattled, as if in reply to her outburst.

Artan seemed a bit perturbed, his eyes darting to the windows and then back to her face. "Little Elanor, are you certain this is what you want? Once you know, there will be no returning to the way things were." The cleric warned. Elanor nodded furiously and Artan sighed. "Very well. But promise me one thing," he requested, the chain of her necklace still dangling in his grip. "You must put this back on. You have been lied to in order to protect the family's reputation. It is not your fault, I must stress this fact, that you will not be able to rein in your abilities at first. You were never taught."

"I understand." Elanor, brave, quiet Elanor, had been on the receiving end of her siblings' wrath many a time before. Of course she understood the danger of unchecked magic.

Artan looked as if he would much rather be doing anything else aside from this, his hands trembling slightly as he clasped the necklace around her throat once more.

×+×

She was twenty when Artan died. One day he was there, and the next...

With 'Uncle' Artan gone Elanor retreated wholly into herself, constantly running through the lessons he had taught her about their shared method of divine spell casting. Her parents had no idea that she knew of their betrayal, the now-elderly Duke and his wife more concerned with securing marriages for their 'better' daughters.

This suited Elanor just fine. She spent her days reading in the salon, and her nights were full of wondrous rituals. The eldest daughter honed her spells like a secret blade, unsure of why she felt such urgency to do so but more than willing to continue her training alone.

Her only respite was her music, or the occasional adventuring mercenary band that her father would hire to ensure the peace was kept in his small domain. Rough men and women who always had thrilling tales, ones that left Elanor sighing wistfully whenever they would inevitably depart. Oh, she would give anything to trade places with those fine folk!

×+×

Her twenty-fifth birthday brought with it silence and a letter from her mother. It stated simply that in three days' time she would be sent to a convent in the countryside, where she would live out the rest of her life in pious service to the church.

She had been deemed too old to marry and, as such, was no longer of use to the family. Truthfully, this was not so abrupt as her mother seemed to believe; the Duchess' most recent suitor had voiced his disapproval of the spinster Elanor continuing to live in the family home numerous times.

It was still a stark shock to the young woman. Twenty-five and sent to the nunnery, cloistered from what little she had seen of the outside world! Elanor took a moment to collect her thoughts, steeling herself to read the remainder of the letter.

Auguste will escort you to ensure you arrive safely. Your dear father, may he rest in peace, always spoke so highly of him. I know you shall fear for nothing with him by your side.

The vellum in her hands began to wrinkle as her grip tightened. Auguste De Verley, the peerless marksman. He was not well-known for his mercy, or sympathy towards the plights of title-less spinsters.

Elanor sighed heavily, then shook her head. It was a foolish idea, to think that she could sway De Verley to her side! No, she must resign herself to her new Spartan lifestyle.

But maybe...

Part Two: Further Misadventures

[noshitshakespeare]

I'm wondering if the literary James I may have been one of overthink a problem, and to rely on compromise in order to avoid war even though he believed in divine right of Kings. And, much energy was being lost in internal strife. Moreover, his Queen was from the Danish / Norwegian 'tribe'. I can see the themes in Hamlet being very 'stimulating' for them. I was wondering if you have thought about what Shakespeare AVOIDS writing given the what may have passed for Political Correctness in 1609?

Why 1609? Almost all current critical consensus points to Hamlet having been written around 1600-1601, and the Stationer’s Register records ‘A books called the Revenge of Hamlett Prince of Denmarke as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servantes’ on the 26th of July 1602, with the first Quarto published a year later... So even at latest it’s hard to believe it was written during James’ reign. Of course, Shakespeare may have predicted the succession of James, but that remained very much in doubt until the very end of Elizabeth’s life, so it’s a little bit of a stretch to assume that the play is fundamentally referring the James’ political ideas and beliefs. There’s too much speculation here for my liking. 

I see your point about James’ interests and Anne of Denmark, but topicality is a difficult subject in Shakespeare Studies, because he’s rarely very obvious about it. And if the play is based on ur-Hamlet, or on whatever other stories Shakespeare may have consulted, the location of Denmark is one present in the sources, not an active topical choice (see this post). Yes, one might select a story based on the topicality of its location, but given that the story is already in circulation in Elizabeth’s reign and before Shakespeare takes it on, there are too many possible reasons he could have chosen this story.  

What does Shakespeare avoid writing? Well, he avoids or doesn’t write about a lot of things.  Some of those things maybe he just wasn’t interested in writing about, others, perhaps he felt he couldn’t, but there’s no knowing what interested him and what didn’t. Again, there’s little point in speculation. As a scholar I can only really comment on what he did write. Still, ‘Political Correctness’ in the seventeenth century could be an issue of life or death (or imprisonment and a hefty fine), so the stakes are high. I try not to ascribe too much of a personal biographical reading to the sonnets, but he does write in sonnet 66 that art is ‘tongue-tied by authority’, so presumably he knew what it meant for there to be things you couldn’t write about. And he’s good at it, because unlike many of his contemporaries, he never seems to have been involved in very serious treason or libel cases. 

The question is far too broad to answer in any level of detail, but I think one way Shakespeare avoids writing about things that might get him in trouble is by not going into too much topical detail (and setting his plays abroad). He does have some topical references through which people date the plays, but not as much as a lot of his contemporaries. And in some of his plays Shakespeare does get into a little trouble, so he has to do things like rename Oldcastle Falstaff in the Henry IV plays. There’s a flattering imagined description of Essex returning from Ireland in Henry V, but it’s not present in the Quarto version, maybe because Essex was disgraced by the time that was published. Polonius is often considered to be based on William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s advisor... But here we start to see more how Shakespeare works, because it’s not a direct parallel, nor quite a parody. It’s more that some parts of Polonius draw on things Lord Burghley did. The same goes for Falstaff, in fact, because, whatever the name Shakespeare chose, the original Sir John Oldcastle is nothing more than a point of departure for the character Shakespeare created. Once the name is changed, it’s hard to say Falstaff is a direct parody at all. These characters are seldom 100% nasty or good, and even in instances where people say Shakespeare is flattering a particular figure it’s always ambiguous. So Banquo is presented as the ancestor of James, but while not a co-conspirator of Macbeth’s, he’s not exactly Duncan’s protector either. the Duke in Measure for Measure is widely recognised as sharing many of James’ characteristics, but the resemblance isn’t complete, and there’s no consensus on whether it’s the portrait of a wise ruler or a sinister spying tyrant who controls his people through dubious means. Shakespeare avoids making direct comments by creating ambiguous characters who are not simplistic parallels of existing people. In most cases, if a censor asks ‘is this meant to be so-and-so?’ you could easily say, ‘No, not at all, this is how different my character is’. 

It always seems to me that the way Shakespeare approaches certain themes is much like how he draws on particular characters. He may write a play that could appeal to a king interested in witchcraft, but Macbeth’s witch-like figures are the weird sisters, and never explicitly referred to as witches. The queen was getting old, and the succession crisis was a serious political concern in England when he wrote Hamlet, but Shakespeare explores the question through an old story, and never completely specific to the circumstances of the time. It contains a queen whose marriage and sexual fidelity raise questions about heirs and succession, but Gertrude isn’t Elizabeth. It contains spying as a means of control, but it’s never entirely successful, and Polonius isn’t the prudent Lord Burghley. It shows a foreigner coming in at the end to take over a country left without a successor... A potential outcome of the queen’s childless reign, but brought about by the stock mass death of a revenge tragedy, not because of childlessness. All the circumstances depicted are only laterally related to the issues in England at the time and could easily be dismissed as a chance resemblance, rather than a direct comment, just as Hamlet’s complaint about ‘the law’s delay, / the insolence of office, and the spurns / That patient merit of th’unworthy takes’ (III.i.72-74) could refer to any society.

There are no doubt resonances and thoughts that happen because one lives in a particular time, but frankly, topical references in Shakespeare are not what interests me about his writing. While thinking about his writing in terms of contemporary events and references can reveal new and interesting things about them, that approach can never explain the plays completely. It’s very easy to end up reducing the plays to just another historical document, and losing what makes them so interesting and artistic.  

[electricprincess96]

I never understood that line Edel has about the Empire requiring many heirs so her father had many lovers. That feels like it has all the makings of a succession war between the children. And yeah I couldn't really buy into the idea that Ionius and Patricia had a true love thing going paired with the brief info we get. Related to this is my issue with Hanneman and Hubert's support which implies the Insurrection may have been justified but the B support abruptly ends before getting into it. (1/2)

Based on this and a bunch of other moments that hint at CF undergoing late rewrites, I have a theory that the original story was possibly that Ionius was a sleaze who'd collect a bunch of women as consorts and cared about power and was ultimately a poor ruler. The ensuing Insurrection of the Seven was then a justified event (maybe with a few of the members also having ulterior motives as well). Edelgard taking the throne would then be portrayed in a more morally gray light than in canon. (2/2)

I think you might be onto something here so let's take this to its logical conclusion and try and figure out what a potential early draft of the script was like with Ionius being not as nice as he is portrayed to be by Edelgard.

Firstly man seems to have been rerolling on his kids cause there is absolutely zero reason for him to have had 11 kids. Premature death doesn't seem common in Fódlan and it's not a religious practice like it is in most countries where it's practiced in the real world because the Church of Seiros doesn't seem to specifically promote polygamy or anything like that. The only time in universe people are having loads of kids is to try and get one with a crest. Edelgard was the only one of her siblings that was born with a Crest but it was a minor one (now ignoring the fact Dimitri's minor crest makes him a literal killing machine) so he kept trying with no luck. I think Ionius was the one who wanted an Emperor that possessed a Major Crest.

We know Ionius was trying to consolidate power onto himself and when that backfired the six great noble families plus Arundel opted to instigate a soft coup and strip him of his power.

So the Seven Nobles have just stripped a power hungry emperor of his power because they feared he would centralise all power in the Empire onto himself. Now why then, would they seek to turn one of his children into a superpowered Emperor when they just tried to render the last one powerless?

What I think is more likely is either TWSITD started whispering in Ionius' ear OR Ionius went seeking them out and offered his children to them in order to try and turn one of his children into an Emperor that can reclaim the power that he thinks should have been his and seek to punish The Seven who led the Insurrection (or at the very least punish Duke Aegir who now holds the power in the Empire).

Imagine once Edelgard is the last one left he tells her that it was The Seven Noble Families that did this to her, and not him. She would be around 13/14 years old, scared, confused and wanting the comfort and protection of her parents but Patricia is either in the Kingdom or already died/missing so she clings to her father and drinks up every word he says like gospel.

Ionius might also blame The Church of Seiros for not doing more to stop the Empire from splintering since he is aware Rhea has the ability to transform into a Dragon so he feels by not taking action in the War of the Eagle and Lion that is as bad as the Church helping the Kingdom. This could be ideals he passes onto a very fragile Edelgard who takes these sentiments and runs with it.

It doesn't explain how the rest of the Nobility didn't notice 10 Royal Kids dropping like flies but it's at least a more compelling story that "evil mole people did it". Sure TWSITD are still involved (although you could cut them out of this plot and it would still work, Ionius just used nameless mages that can be easily disposed of, or he studied dark magic himself).

Also him telling Edelgard the story about him and Patricia would be his way of making her feel like she was always the most special to him, the daughter of his lady love, and it has nothing to do with the fact she's the one who survived the experiments done to her and her siblings thus making her the Perfect Emperor in his eyes. Nope nothing to do with that at all....

How much more tragic would this be if Edelgard was actually being manipulated by her own father? The father she clearly idolises.

Now I know this robs Edelgard of some agency because she's basically been fed falsehoods her entire life but in the game we actually got she's either been taught lies as well (Nemesis wasn't a bad guy lol) or she actually knows everything (including the origins of crests) in which case she's 1000 times worse than I originally thought.

[bigskydreaming]

1) Hi! It’s a strange question, I know, but I’m curious: how much do you take what happens behind the scenes into account in your analysis of a character or a storyline? To make an example, the push and pull of Dick’s filial status in the narrative is a consistent and frustrating thread in the comics, but has probably roots in the fact that Dick’s arrangement made sense in the 40s in a way that it didn’t anymore by the 80s.

Its a good question, without a good answer. Best I can say is it varies and I kinda take things on a case by case basis. Sometimes behind the scenes stuff doesn’t really change much about what’s on the page one way or another, and sometimes its extremely relevant. 

For instance, your example of Dick’s status as ward vs adopted...I think its very much something where real world context and factors have a ton to do with it. I’d definitely agree that Dick as Bruce’s ward made total sense in the writers’ eyes and didn’t need changing or addressing until the 80s, which culturally is when adoption and blended families became a lot more....it feels weird to say mainstream in regards to that, but it kinda fits because the concept as a whole became more popularized and normalized and likely to have a presence in media in the 80s in ways it never really had before. 

Personally, I don’t think there’s really any issue with Dick not being adopted before then, and think it has more to do with the zeitgeist of those times rather than in character choices about Bruce not wanting to adopt Dick for whatever reason. So my own approach to this particular matter is for me, it only became an issue when an additional variable was added...Jason and his adoption....as especially once Dick himself was written asking Bruce why he never adopted him...even though the most relevant answer up until that point was likely just that it had never been a culturally significant issue for their characters to have until now......once writers DID introduce Dick’s own view/question on the matter into the canon, THAT’S when I personally view it was being more of an issue that Bruce waited so long after THAT point before actually adopting Dick.

So for my own take...whether in meta and discussions of canon or my own fic stuff....I don’t really put much emphasis or even focus any real attention on Bruce not adopting Dick before that point in canon stories OR the concurrent position in the timeline....by that I mean, the approximate age I think Dick was when he first asked Bruce about that, eighteen or nineteen. I think there are certainly stories that can be written that involve Bruce adopting Dick or raising the matter for discussion earlier in Dick’s life like when he was fourteen or fifteen....but I don’t personally feel much of an urge to write things with a negative slant towards Bruce not adopting Dick earlier than that because I AM aware that in terms of canon, it wasn’t really an option before that point due to the writers’ own cultural norms informing their character choices.

But once the writing introduced that angle and element...it became fair game in my opinion to question why Bruce would wait so long before acting on Dick’s pretty clearly expressed desire there...and yeah, I think its fair to have a bit of a judgmental eye towards Bruce character wise for still waiting so long when it could have changed so much for the better between them and spared Dick at least a few years of angsting and uncertainty about it.

All that said, when talking about fanfic deviations specifically, I think its entirely fair to consider character choices within the context of the fanfic as much as the original canon. So if a fic is already making significant departures from the canon events of Dick’s early years in order to write the author’s own take on Dick and Bruce’s early relationship....then in THAT context, specifically, regardless of what canon had to say about it and the behind the scenes reasons for that, its still valid IMO for characters or readers to wonder why in light of how much our cultural norms have shifted by now, why a fic about that time but written in the context of the modern day....like, IMO there Bruce doesn’t really have the same justification canon has for him not touching on Dick’s status as ward vs son earlier in Dick’s life.

If that makes sense?

Similarly in terms of recent years and canon, I think a TON of flip flopping and uncertainty in regards to how the Batboys’ relationships to Bruce are described or referenced is because DC or the various writers and editors just don’t like committing to the idea of Bruce Wayne: father of five (or six, depending on how one views Duke’s positioning in the family). 

Like, I’ve long had the sense that a lot of the powers that be over at DC just flat out don’t LIKE Dick, Jason, Tim and Cassandra’s legal adopted status and wish none of them had ever happened as they for whatever reason think it takes something away from Bruce’s character or premise and they’d rather Damian be the sole actual son and heir. Hence having not only Damian emphasize the blood son thing but also having the other kids like, when talking to Damian refer to Bruce as YOUR father (which is a little thing that bugs the SHIT out of me, lmao)....as well as being as vague and ambivalent as possible when having Dick, Jason, Tim and Cass reference Bruce to others or address him and put as little focus on them using an actual label for their relationships to him as possible. And its not just New 52 I mean here, I think this was an issue still well before Flashpoint.

I’m almost certain if some of DC’s editors and writers had their way, those other adoptions would never have happened and their official status would just be wards/foster kids/proteges. Which is annoying not just because I’m a fan of the family being a FAMILY, like, purely on a personal fannish level....but also just in terms of narrative....I think its fucking stupid to try and play fast and loose with those relationships when everyone knows damn well that each of those kids being Bruce’s KIDS has nevertheless very much been a thing that happened and exists in most fans’ minds. Like, that’s not a genie you can ever put back in the bottle. There’s no realistic chance of getting readers to just en masse forget that any of those characters were ever officially and legally Bruce’s children at some point. Like, you did that, or at least writers before you did that, just accept it and USE IT instead of pointlessly muddying the waters to obscure relationships most of us view as father/child regardless of what canon has to say about it now.

So for example, in THAT case, I fully believe the confusion about the kids’ various legal status and their view of Bruce and his view of them...like, I honestly believe the ambiguity of that at various times in canon is deliberate. And also, dumb. Thus I don’t feel any need to take canon’s current vagueness into account because I feel there the behind the scenes motivations are extremely relevant...and thus I’m completely content to just ignore them and keep them all as Bruce’s children in legality and heart, via whatever story context makes the most sense for my purposes.

Another example of when I personally feel behind the scenes motivations are hugely relevant and should be kept in perspective...is Jason’s death. Because I’ve read a ton of stories and meta that sometimes victim blames Jason and treats it like his fault he died, sometimes makes it Dick’s fault for not being closer with him and someone Jason feasibly could have turned to instead of going to Ethiopia on his own, and sometimes Bruce’s fault for the division his judgment after the Garzonas case had forged between him and Jason and with that basically driving Jason to go to Ethiopia in the first place.

And like, I personally hate each and every one of those takes because I think its never going to lead anywhere good, upholding Jason himself or either of his immediate family members as being in any way at FAULT for his death and everything he went through after it....but also I don’t like emphasizing narrative or character blame on any or multiple of those characters because IMO it disregards the MOST crucial factor in Jason’s death: editorial mandate.

Like, they held a freaking phone poll for whether he should live or die. Jason’s fate was decided by call-in votes, NOT by ANY character’s actual choices or actions or even lack thereof. There was no way any of those characters could have been written making different choices that avoided Jason dying, because they were deliberately written making choices that smoothed the way to Jason dying because it was going to happen not because it was where the STORY inevitably led, or any of their choices inevitably led there....but because the editors WANTED it led there and to end up where it ultimately ended up. 

IMO its pointless to point fingers at character choices when we KNOW for a FACT, like oftentimes we have to guess at writer motivations in order to have an opinion on that variable at all, but this is one of the rare occasions where we inarguably KNOW....it was going to happen one way or another because editorial decreed it had to happen. So I think its pretty pointless even in terms of meta analysis of the story and character motivations to ultimately point a finger at any of the character choices and assign blame for Jason’s death...when there was literally no chance of them ever being written making choices that allowed Jason to avoid dying.

Especially when you consider that literally the only narrative change that even needed to be made to avoid Jason dying, regardless of everything that led up to that point...is simply not having him die in the explosion. Come up with literally any explanation for a last minute save, escape or rescue. Like so many comics have managed so many other times.

Like, there are no rules with fanfic so obviously you can write fic of Jason’s death in any way, and make it the end result of any character choices you want and make it some character’s fault or not according to your own preferences and narrative choices....but in terms of canon events and choices, I think that’s one of the very rare stories where its both impossible and pointless to examine it on any level, without taking the behind the scenes context into consideration as well.

So like I said, it really just varies from story to story, depending on how much or how little writer or editor motivation, decisions or bias were likely to be a factor in any given story. *Shrugs* Thus for me, I don’t really see any way to go about that other than taking each story on a case by case basis.

[roadsiderose]

Huckleberry Finn and the Missing Prince

I read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when I was a kid, and I think I liked this book more than the one on Tom Sawyer. I chuckled reading this theory for the first time, it brought back memories of the book. 

This post was originally posted on the reddit forums by /u/wren42. I scour the forums for posts like these, that show the literary or historical significance of plotlines, characters. Here it is...

Introduction

A while back there was a post about our favorite subtle allusions in ASOIAF, and I mentioned Huck Finn. A few posters were curious to see a longer writeup of the parallels -- so here it is. =)

The chapters detailing Aegon’s travels on the Rhoyne have often been noted by astute readers as containing references to another famous river trip - Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

There are obvious parallels in narrative and the imagery GRRM chooses: Young GrifFinn wears an iconic straw hat and travels down a river on a barge having adventures.

If these similarities weren’t blatant enough, GRRM drops this bit in ADWD:

The Upper Rhoyne was full of snags and Sawyers, any one of which could rip out the Shy Maid's hull. Griff did not want to hear it. What he wanted was Volantis.

A sawyer is an unusual and archaic word -- “a fallen tree stuck on the bottom of a river, where it constitutes a danger to boating” -- it’s also of course the name of Huck Finn’s partner in crime Tom Sawyer.

Most people assume the connections stop here, and that these cheeky winks are just a cute cosmetic reference, like the Wheel of Time or Harry Potter easter eggs.

However, when you dig deeper into Huck Finn, you can find connections to a popular tinfoil subplot:

**I believe Young Griff’s similarity to Huck Finn is actually an intentional subtextual clue to his Blackfyre lineage. **

The story of Huck Finn contains thematic and narrative elements that GRRM may have purposefully drawn from in crafting the Blackfyre subplot. George is known to do this - he draws heavily from English and French history as well has various mythologies both for world-building inspiration and specific plot points. I believe that GRRM included the Huck Finn references because he was amused by the cleverness of the thematic parallels with the Blackfyre story.

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" isn’t just the story of a kid floating down a river -- it features mistaken identities, blood feuds between two aristocratic houses and the extermination of the male bloodline of one, and a pair of con artists who falsely pretend to be royalty "the duke and the king" and put on a mummers show to scam money. These themes are reflected as in a dark mirror in GRRMs secret fAegon Blackfyre subplot.

The False Nephew

The core conceit of the blackfyre conspiracy theory is that fAegon is not the long lost son of Rhaegar, but in fact a descendant of the bastard Blackfyre line, found by Varys or the Golden Company(depending who you ask), and put forward as a pretender in order to hijack the throne.

So how is Finn similar to fAegon?

Both Young Griff and Finn falsely pretend to be the Nephew of an influential family to cheat them.

Huck Finn’s plot is rife with cases of mistaken identity, disguises, con-men, and pretenders. However the most notable is his identity swap with the infamous Tom Sawyer. Near the climax of the story Finn arrives in a distant town and insinuates himself into a wealthy family by pretending to be the Nephew of Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps. He uses this position to help effect the escape of his friend Jim from slavery.

Why does this matter?

The true Aegon would be Daenerys’ nephew -- but Young GrifFinn isn’t truly her nephew, he’s a fake. The mistaken identity in Huck Finn is paralleled in fAegon’s false claim and attempt to steal the throne from Danny.

And this isn’t the only such clue -- Huck Finn features other cons and pretenders, even some who claim, laughably, to be nobility.

Noble Pretenders and Stolen Inheritance

In Huck Finn two con artists “The Duke and the King” pretend to be royalty and perform various stunts to rob people.

They introduce themselves as the long-lost heirs of noble houses, one to the Duke of Bridgewater, the other as the Lost Dauphin, the King of France Louis XVII.

Louis XVII’s actual history is of keen interest here, and with it we start to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

History of the Lost Dauphin

During the French Revolution, where the long standing dynastic monarchy was overthrown, Louis XVI was imprisoned and executed. Louis XVII was actually the second son of the king, but his elder brother had died leaving him as heir apparent.

Little Louis-Charles was technically recognized as King by the nobles but never ruled and was kept imprisoned by the new Republic government. This is where the conspiracy theories start to spring up.

Immediately after his father’s death, plots were hatched to free Louis-Charles from confinement, but these came to nothing at the time, and eventually he died of illness in captivity under mysterious circumstances -- it being suspected that his doctor was murdered by poison. However, popular theories abounded in the day and for many years afterward of conspiracies to smuggle the child out of confinement in the Temple tower. They proposed that the autopsy and burial records had been falsified, and that in fact the boy had lived and been spirited away.

Rumours abound and when the monarchy was restored some 20 years later, hundreds of claimants pretending to be the “Lost Dauphin” came forward to attempt to take the throne.

GRRM The Histrogrifter

This is perhaps one of the most famous stories of a lost prince in European history, and GRRM would certainly have studied it in preparing his narrative around the Targaryen Restoration. It’s well established that he based the history of westeros on English and French history and this plot could not have been overlooked.

Thus, the appearance of a Dauphin pretender in Huck Finn can be taken as something GRRM would have noted, given he’s included references to Huck in fAegon’s chapters. Here is an obviously false claimant pretending to be the long-lost heir of a royal bloodline whose throne is about to be restored - a juicy intrigue to parallel in his own story!

And indeed, in fAegon we have an heir presumed dead after a revolution, only to supposedly have been spirited away by Varys during the sack of King’s Landing, and appearing later as a false claimant when the original line is restored. The similarity to Louis Charles is stunning.

Scammers, Swindlers, and Mummers

The antics of the “Duke and the King” provide the basis for other allusions in ASOIAF as well.

Later in the story the group arrives in the town of the primary target -- a recently deceased nobleman who has left a large inheritance to his daughters. The “Duke” pretends to be the missing heir of this nobleman to swindle the Heiresses of their fortune -- again paralleled by fAegon’s royal pretensions attempting to steal the Iron Throne from Daenerys. But of course, the Duke, like fAegon, is a fraud.

The two con-men engage in a variety of schemes, one of which involves putting on a play -- or mummer’s farce, if you will -- entitled “The Royal Nonesuch” -- ie a play about false royalty. The play is a bawdy flop and complete ripoff of the town’s populace, and they eventually have to flee for their lives or risk being hung.

These themes are also hinted at in the Duke and King’s theatrical fumbles -- in addition to the “Royal Nonesesuch” the pair practices scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, and Macbeth, the former of course being the archetypal tale of feuding families (which we will revisit shortly), while the later two are again stories about wars to usurp a throne.

These theatrical elements have been worked into AOSIAF via references to fAegon as the “Mummer’s Dragon”, and parallels in his story to those of Richard and Macbeth. It has been theorized that, just as the townspeople turn on the Duke and Dauphin when they learn the truth, the people of Westeros will turn on fAegon when his false identity is revealed.

Family Feud and the Extermination of a Male Bloodline

So we’ve established the falseness of fAegon’s claim, but how do we get to the Blackfyres, specifically?

The answer comes from another conflict Huck stumbles upon during his adventures.

The Blackfyres were a branch house of the Targaryen dynasty, started from a bastard line. After the wars that settled the legitimacy of their claim, they retreated into the east, and ultimately the male bloodline was believed to have been wiped out. Did GRRM draw inspiration from Huck Finn for this part of the story as well?

Huck Finn’s parallel to the Targaryens and Blackfyres comes in the form of the conflict between the Shephersons and Grangerfords. These two bitter rival families are engaged in a 30 year blood feud, and Huck quickly becomes entangled in their war. Notably, the Grangerfords have a son Huck’s age who he befriends, and is then shocked to see gunned down in a firefight. Like the Blackfyres, the males of the Grangerford family are wiped out, ending the feud. This section can also be seen as an additional reference to Romeo and Juliet, as the final confrontation is kicked off by a forbidden tryst between children from opposing families.

If GRRM is drawing on Huck as a model for fAegon, then this conflict should play a prominent role in his story. fAegon should be not just a royal pretender, but a pretender tangled up in a long standing blood feud between two aristocratic families -- the Blackfyres and Targaryens.

One other subtle hint in Huck Finn supports the idea that fAegon is from a bastard royal line.

During their elaborate plot to break Jim out of captivity, Huck and Tom form a secret nation, complete with a royal coat-of-arms. Among the many superfluous and conflicting components of the crest, Tom insists they include a "bar sinister" -- the mark of a bastard line.

Finn and the Future

So we’ve established a strong connection between Huck Finn’s narrative and the Blackfyre subplot in ASOIAF -- but what might these parallels say about the future of fAegon’s story?

At least two plotlines from Huck Finn appear to be relevant here.

The ending of Huck Finn centers on the plot to free Jim from slavery out from under Tom’s Aunt Sally (which, you recall, parallels Danny as fAegons ‘aunt’). Tom hatches an absurdly complicated plan based on his ideas from romantic adventure stories.

This romanticism is reflected in Young Griff’s naivete and impulsiveness, traits that will likely lead to his downfall. In wanting to live out his romanticized vision of a great Conquering King, fAegon will be led to make unrealistic and foolish decisions. fAegon’s ultimate fate will likely be failure and defeat, brought on by his own naivete. Like Tom and Huck, he will act based on how he imagines a romanticized story would go, rather than on the practicalities of the situation, and in the end will be betrayed by the cold hard reality.

The second portion of Huck Finn that may become relevant is the fate of the Duke and King when their frauds are discovered. In the case of the “Royal Nonesuch”, they are run out of town at risk to their lives when the people discover they’ve been swindled.

It’s quite possible that fAegon’s claim will be delegitimized in some way, and the people of Westeros will turn against him. Where they first hailed him as a hero, once his true identity is discovered they will resent being duped and rise up against his claim.

How might this happen?

As a final spurious bit of tinfoil- in attempting to identify the true identity of the Duke after trying to steal the girls’ inheritance, the town is forced to exhume the dead brother’s body for evidence. While we can’t say for certain this detail would have any bearing on GRRM’s plot, it could perhaps be read as a hint about the identity of some trueborn heir in a certain crypt…

Were several claimants to all argue for their legitimacy, it would be a beautiful and subtle allusion on GRRMs part to mimic Huck Finn again in the conclusion of fAegon’s arc, and have Jon emerge as the true heir as a result of evidence exhumed from the Crypts of winterfell.

Thanks for your attention, I hope you enjoyed this little literary float trip. =)