#they kinda suck every now and then

[dirtytransmasc]

In the book aemond is a psychopath, aegon a rapist, alicent a cunt. Haelena is the only normal child, in the show is the same. How can someone be team green? You said the are more 'complex' but no, they are just more problematic

the show is different then the books, by a fucking mile. the situation and circumstances for almost everything surrounding the greens is drastically different. when I talk about them, due to not having fully read the book (cause it's long and I can't get my ADHD to grab onto it like the show), I'm talking about the show. in the show they are significantly more fleshed out and complex, they earned far more of my pity than Rhaenyra and her kids did in the show, and I just liked them more.

in the books, they are bad people, but so is everyone else, especially Rhaenyra and Daemon. the sword has two edges. honestly, from what I managed to read/know about the book, everyone in that damn thing seems like they suck (outside of Helaena), but thats fine, that's great actually. a full morally grey to not so grey set of characters is interesting. they're all problematic, it's a game of pick your favorite sicko(s).

also the "Aegon's a rapist" horse has been beaten to dust. the only potential proof that he is one is from a very black favoring unreliable narrator who slanders the greens almost every chance he gets... so while I, and nobody, can say that it's 100% false, similarly, no one can say that it's 100% true either. (the vibe I picked up is that he may be a bit handsy without consent and a whore who frequents whorehouses as a customer, but not a rapist. doesn't make it right, but those two things are very different. I also think people tend to forget that the concept and age of consent in medieval times was VERY different. again, doesn't make it right. but there were things that were just... ok... then, that are far from ok now. all of this greatly effects aegons situation and the nuance around it).

Aemond was and still sorta (in the show) is a psycho. I won't deny that, but he has so many layers in the show, so many why's and hows to him and his growing instability, that IS fascinating and complex and I love to dig around in his characterization and psychology and I know I'm not the only one.

from the sounds of it, Alicent is like any other greedy noble ever, she's just a woman and a mother as well, so she's a bitch and she's protecting her kids which people don't like. Rhaenyra's also a bitch and she's protecting her kids. they all hate each other, they all want each other's heads on spikes. it's war between two sides of terrible people told through the lenses of unreliable narrators, no side is better than the other, "just pick your favorite asshole" seems to be the rule of thumb at that point cause who knows what the hell actually happened. (take this with a grain of salt, cause from where I stand, all I say is hearsay)

just let team green fans live their lives and remember that not everyone gives a shit about the book.

[lunarharp]

if i just told you i love you would this world change

[demadogs]

i like to mentally cast actors for hypothetical adaptations of my favorite books. for YEARS now i have been searching for the perfect simon snow. i have some baz contenders but ive never found a perfect simon. i am pleased to announce that i have FINALLY FOUND HIM…. its walker scobell. he’d be a perfect simon snow.

[trashburgersblair]

Because I'm working on my hanged man rusts price I've been listening to hnoc on repeat.

And "the hermit". My god "The Hermit".

Everytime without fail I need to stop what I'm doing as Jonny describes Galahad's sacrifice. It just. It paints such a vivid picture in my mind. A clear shot of Galahad, faith in hand, walking up while the turrets rain hell upon him.

Every time.

[batsplat]

from the stuff i’ve heard marc’s former honda teammates (dani jorge and pol in their media careers but joan also i guess) say about him now that they’re racing is generally quite positive, both on a professional/riding level but also seemingly on a personal level? i’m wondering what you make of that given that, yeah, marc doesn’t seem like a very good teammate (unless you’re alex who i’ve left off this list). like MARC wants to separate on and off track stuff and it seems like all of these guys are willing too at least in retrospect, so he can’t have truly burned bridges with them. do you have any thoughts on that

(x, x) most riders are quite good at not burning bridges with each other! it's not like marc's competitors don't know that this stuff is kinda part of the game. I mean, all of marc's past teammates were also trying to assert themselves within the internal hierarchy... you can say that certain teammates engage in 'worse' behaviour than others, but, like, these people do understand they're supposed to be fighting each other! a baseline degree of nastiness is factored in and will be accepted to a greater or lesser extent by your rivals - especially when it comes to asserting yourself in intra-team power struggles. you might hate the other guy in the moment, but generally speaking once the active part of the rivalry is done with... you will probably get over it. marc's fellow riders are aware of how ultra-competitive marc is - and to a certain point they do respect it, not least because they're aware that this is part of the reason why marc has ended up with all those titles. it's like dani said, right, it's marc's strong suit. and in general, you do have to say that there's relatively few teammate pairings that devolve to the level of toxicity that it completely destroys the interpersonal relationship. you might need some level of preexisting animosity... most of the purely competitive sins can be healed with a little time

on the 'separating on-track and off-track' thing... well. this is kind of a question of how you define these things, you can say that marc generally speaking isn't going to massively hold grudges over isolated on-track incidents or whatever... but he doesn't just leave his fighting to the track, and personally I've also never felt he can entirely separate these things out in his mind. can you really say his professional and private relationships with other riders are completely detached from one another? mostly, he's opted to be pretty disengaged from his fellow riders as a collective, and obviously that's a good way to not take things too personally... it's all part of the game, isn't it? sometimes it's good to go with the straightforward approach: marc tells you he will make your life hell, he does indeed make your life hell, and then you both move on with your lives and can maybe actually have a pretty amiable relationship with him in years to come. he's not really defying your expectations at any point here, is he now? it's still a question for each of them as individuals as to whether they think that kind of behaviour is above board and acceptable or not... but everyone by now knows that marc plays these games, so it's not like they're going in blind

and it's not like other former teammates are constantly badmouthing each other. I mean... look, let's just cut to the chase here and bring in valentino as our reference point (as he is for the sport as a whole, which by the way does also help create a certain baseline of acceptability for marc's antics - maybe goated riders are just supposed to be dicks who knows). vale's premier class teammates were 1) nobody (2000-01), 2) tohru ukawa (2002), 3) nicky hayden (2003; 2011-12), 4) carlos checa (2004), 5) colin edwards (2005-2007), 6) jorge lorenzo (2008-10; 2013-16), 7) maverick vinales (2017-20), 8) franco morbidelli (2021), and 9) andrea dovizioso (2021). of these eight men (let's just exclude 'nobody' for now), do you know how many had serious complaints at any point about valentino as a teammate? that's right, it's one guy. one. some of valentino's other teammates, like hayden, checa and edwards, were even quite actively positive about their whole experience. this is the thing - you do need some specific circumstances for teammate rivalries to escalate from 'being kinda bitchy every other month' to 'actively fantasising about stabbing each other'. not accounting for natural interpersonal animosity, let's list some circumstantial factors that you need to get a bridge-burning-worthy level of feud:

you need a competitive bike. it is possible to beef about development direction when you're in the trenches (cf late 2010's yamaha, 2020's honda)... but generally speaking this is going to be quite low-level petty stuff, not actual war

you also need something that approaches competitiveness between teammates. if one teammate is unquestionably stronger than the other one, then it is very unlikely that you are going to get any open hostilities. the tension comes when the two sides are close enough to each other for the internal hierarchy to actually be a contentious issue (this is also basic self preservation... if you're the far weaker teammate then you do not want to make the situation troublesome, because then you will be the one to be fired)

following on from those first two things... well, it doesn't hurt to have a title fight in the mix. there are also other ways you can generate competitive stakes, like, for instance, if you and your teammate know that one of you will be out of a job soon. basically, it helps to have something to squabble over

it is maybe easy to forget how rare it is this century for teammates to be fighting directly for a title, let alone over the course of multiple seasons. only two 1-2's since the year 2000 and they're both for the factory yamaha's (though 2006, 2011-13 and 2017 did all prominently feature two factory hondas). which means that for valentino, the prerequisites were met just the once in his premier class career... and yes, the results were pretty memorable, but (topic! for! another! post!) it's worth pointing out that even that relationship was pretty much 'fine' whenever there was a sizeable disparity between the two of them performance-wise (2008 and 2013 are the most clear cut examples). I think the way I'd frame it with marc is that he has a bunch of mildly dubious strategies up his sleeve to assert himself within the team, which don't really deviate that far from what you'd expect from a rider of marc's calibre and only need to be escalated under specific circumstances. that doesn't mean he doesn't have the potential to be ruthless, but up until now it's mostly been a fairly 'acceptable' level of ruthlessness on the intra-team level... and not something that is likely to make other riders actually hate him

taking marc's teammates one by one... dani was the closest to meeting the bridge-burning prerequisites, though he was only a title rival in marc's rookie season. and marc did go further with him than he did with anyone else, and dani has made some pointed comments about marc's style as a teammate... but yes, he is fonder of marc these days. partly I'd just emphasise again that this is a fairly natural progression when you've stopped directly competing for long enough, and partly it's also just a question of individual personality - dani's not massively into holding grudges. then there's jorge, who... I mean, they might as well not have been teammates, given that jorge was either too slow or too injured to even be sharing any track space with marc. you have to put that one down primarily to circumstance, seeing as jorge's own track record on the teammate front isn't exactly spotless. marc and jorge beefing in 2019 would have been pretty dumb and also a massive waste of everyone's time in a year in which marc singlehandedly won the team's championship. even those two needed more to get things going

moving on to the dark years, pol and marc had an extremely stop-and-start partnership on a honda that was generally pretty uncompetitive... so the only stuff they could get ever so mildly irritable about were riveting incidents like 'marc saying pol wasn't the biggest championship threat' (neither of them were) or 'pol saying he'd copy marc's set up' (which proved entirely useless). not exactly title decider territory, is it now, and marc very much had pol covered as a challenger throughout their partnership. also, those two do have a longer history! they've known each other since they were kids and hold a pretty significant place in each other's careers. now that pol's more or less retired, it's natural there'll be quite a lot of sentimentality there - which will paper over any small cracks that appeared during those two years. and joan was a one year teammate at a time in which the bike was consistently close to offing them both. they only managed to start a sunday race together as teammates on thirteen occasions. it would take some serious effort to engineer a feud with that little opportunity, and, really, why on earth would you bother. maybe if honda had gone for rinsy rather than joan for the factory seat, it could've been a bit more prickly, but it's unlikely that it would have escalated beyond that

this is the thing, right, the only one of these partnerships that would have been worth burning bridges over was dani, and even there marc pretty much had him handled after the first season. in general, marc has been pretty clear on how he's not interested in making friends with the other side of the garage while the teammate relationship is ongoing... which is fine! there's some prominent-ish teammate pairings that are actually good friends, some teammate pairings where one of them is actively helping out and advising the other one, but some riders prefer to just keep their distance. it would have been a little silly of marc to start a feud with a teammate who is galaxies away from being a competitive threat, let alone a title rival, but generally it is possible to toe the line between 'attempting to suppress your internal rivals enough to stop them from becoming a problem for you' and 'taking radical enough action to make your internal rivals despise you'

especially in the post-dani era, marc never really had any need to push things too far... and, let's face it, how many of your teammate relationships end up with burnt bridges is also quite frankly a question of luck and circumstance. do you want to guess which top rider on paper has the worst track record this century with premier class teammate feuds, in terms of a) how many they've had, and b) how little public reconciliation there has been since the end of the rivalry?

yes, that's right, it's the first name that comes to mind when you're thinking of toxic and conflict-prone riders: andrea dovizioso. that old devil, constantly causing trouble. just couldn't stop undermining his poor, innocent teammates. can somebody please stop this ruthless bully before it's too late

I think you get the point. I would personally suggest that dovi is not in fact the worst teammate it is possible to have in a motogp top team. he just happened to find himself in a situation where he was teammates with two separate guys he did not click with at all, in situations that involved a pairing of riders who were (or had the potential to be) competitive with each other, as well as some proper stakes attached to the rivalry. in general, situational factors are going to determine this stuff more than anything else... and marc more often than not does have a reasonably good feel for picking his battles. he's flirted with the line, but he's mostly avoided crossing it. he hasn't had to

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

Me wondering why my cat and i have spent pretty much all day in my winter bed blanket and pillow nest and kinda shivering when I’m outside of it, checks my weather app

Oh. That would do it

[tardis--dreams]

I swear if my period doesn't start tomorrow im gonna kill myself (hyperbolic) ♡

[thewingedwolf]

when i say “my parents” i’m usually talking about my mom and stepdad. this does not mean i like my stepdad or respect him as a parent. on the contrary i would say he sucks as much as my father but in the complete opposite way. i simply respect my stepfather’s right to be a bad dad. if my actual father can be shit from a butt and still call himself a father, the idiot who actually raised me deserves to claim me too.

[lesbiansanemi]

“Do it scared” “do it alone” what if I’m tired of doing that. what if that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life and I’m just tired of it and I’d like to not be scared and alone anymore. what then

[asmodeusamaryllis]

I don't think I can keep being open minded to n@tl@n guys

[mysimsyuri]

FINALLY got to watch the musical episode !! im now more in love with my partners than i was before . you will always be famous to me jamaican inspector man o7

[arolesbianism]

Realized it’s been over a year since I last drew him and couldn’t stand by that