#which first of all what purpose does it serve to the narrative? that scout says the word faggot?

[0sbrain]

i think one of my least favorite troupes in tf2 fanfics has to be scout finds x and y are dating and freaks out/starts being openly homophobic towards them because "canon typical homophobia"

they are mercenaries. fucking contract killers. do you think anyone gives a flying fuck about homosexuality being illegal? you see, they are ok with murder and gruesome violence, HOWEVER they draw the line at two men holding hands because the words on the paper say it's a no no

he would probably tease them because, that's normal that's what friends and annoying coworkers do. and sometimes he might step on a line. but my dear friends. if scout was genuinely homophobic to any of the other mercs, im afraid he wouldn't survive the winter (irse a mimir). he would get snapped by a twig and it doesn't even have to be by the merc he was insulting. anyone in the vicinity would suplex his ass. son, we all suck dick here. get used to it

[aboveallarescuer]

How prophecies, dreams and magical intuition drive Dany’s story

As I was rereading ASOIAF, I made it my goal to compile all* the book passages demonstrating either certain key attributes of Daenerys Targaryen (e.g. that she's compassionate and smart) or aspects of hers that are usually overstated (e.g. that she's ambitious and prophecy-driven).  Doing such a task may seem exaggerated, but I'd argue it's not, for many, many misconceptions about Dany have become widespread in light of the show's final season's events (and even before).

It must be acknowledged that it can be tricky to reference, say, ADWD passages to counter-argument how she was depicted in season eight (which allegedly follows ADOS events). Dany will have had plenty of character development in the span of two books. However, whatever happens to Dany in the next two books, I would argue that there is more than enough material to conclude that her show counterpart was made to fall for flaws that she (for the most part) never had and actions that she (for the most part) would never take. (and that's not even considering the double standards and the contradictions with what had been shown from show!Dany up until then, but that's obviously out of the scope of these lists)

Another objection to the purpose of these lists is that Game of Thrones is different from A Song of Ice and Fire and should be analyzed on its own, which is a fair point. However, the show is also an adaptation of these books, which begs the questions: why did they change Dany's character? Why did they overfocus on negative traits of hers or depicted them as negative when they weren't supposed to be or gave her negative traits that were never hers to begin with? Another fact that undermines the show=/=books argument is that most people think that the show's ending will be the books', albeit only in broad strokes and in different circumstances. As a result, people's perception of Dany is inevitably influenced by the show, which is a shame.

I hope these lists can be useful for whoever wants to find book passages to defend (or even simply explore different facets of) Dany's character in metas or conversations.

*Well, at least all the passages that I could find in her chapters, which is no guarantee that the effort was perfectly executed, but I did my best.

Also, people could interpret certain passages differently and then come up with a different collection of passages if they ever attempted to make one, so I'm not saying that this list is completely objective (nor that there could ever be one).

Also, some passages have been cut short according to whether they were, IMO, relevant to the specific topic of the list they're in, so the context surrounding them may not always be clear (always read the books and use asearchoficeandfire). Many of them appear in different lists, sometimes fully referenced, sometimes not.

I listed the passages back to front because I felt doing so highlighted Dany's evolution better.

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

To justify the existence of this list, let's see examples of widespread opinions that I feel misrepresent Daenerys Targaryen:

The more absolute power she consolidated, the more she was lauded as a selfless hero. [...] Being hailed as a savior for so long has made her fall for that narrative more than anyone. She’s come to believe she is a goddess among men. So when she slides into doing the wrong thing, it becomes easy for her to justify why -- if she did it -- it must be right. [...] It’s almost impossible to imagine walking through fire and experiencing the intense worship she’s known without coming to think you have superhuman rights to decide the future of the world. (The Take)

~

The gods flipped a coin for Dany that can — and does — fall either way. But it tends to come up good when the people love her, and bad when the people don’t. She’s repeatedly saying I have a destiny. I will park my ass on the Iron Throne. Here’s how it’s going to work: You’re going to bend the knee, or you’re going to die. I’d prefer if you loved me. I’ll accept that you fear me. A bent knee or your death. (x)

~

She can and does dehumanize those who stand between her and her (perceived) destiny. (x)

I would argue these claims certainly cannot be made after reading the books (some can't even after watching the show's first 71 episodes, but the show can be all over the place and ... I digress), so take a look at these passages.

NOTE: I didn't include anything from ACOK Dany IV because she's receiving the prophecies rather than reacting to or acting based on them. I preferred to focus on how they influence her characterization and felt that that chapter wouldn't serve for that purpose. The dragon dreams on AGOT, however, are often interwoven with her reactions and the strength and confidence she usually derives from them, so I added them.

A Dance with Dragons

ADWD Daenerys X

“To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward, you must go back. To touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”

“Quaithe?” Dany called. “Where are you, Quaithe?”

Then she saw. Her mask is made of starlight. “Remember who you are, Daenerys,” the stars whispered in a woman’s voice. “The dragons know. Do you?”

~

Bells, Dany thought, smiling, remembering Khal Drogo, her sun-and-stars, and the bells he braided into his hair. When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, when the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves, when my womb quickens again and I bear a living child, Khal Drogo will return to me.

~

She called until her voice was hoarse ... and Drogon came, snorting plumes of smoke. The grass bowed down before him. Dany leapt onto his back. She stank of blood and sweat and fear, but none of that mattered. “To go forward I must go back,” she said. Her bare legs tightened around the dragon’s neck. She kicked him, and Drogon threw himself into the sky. Her whip was gone, so she used her hands and feet and turned him north by east, the way the scout had gone.

ADWD Daenerys IX

“Khrazz believes the hearts of brave men make him stronger,” said Hizdahr. Jhiqui murmured her approval. Dany had once eaten a stallion’s heart to give strength to her unborn son … but that had not saved Rhaego when the maegi murdered him in her womb. Three treasons shall you know. She was the first, Jorah was the second, Brown Ben Plumm the third. Was she done with betrayals?

ADWD Daenerys VIII

“The Yunkai’i grow weaker as well. The bloody flux has taken hold amongst the Tolosi, it is said, and spread across the river to the third Ghiscari legion.”

The pale mare. Daenerys sighed. Quaithe warned me of the pale mare’s coming. She told me of the Dornish prince as well, the sun’s son. She told me much and more, but all in riddles. “I cannot rely on plague to save me from my enemies.[”]

~

Every child knows its mother, Dany thought. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves … “They call to me. Come.”

~

Dany slid her arms around him and let him have his way. Drunk as he was, she knew he would not be inside her long.

Nor was he. Afterward he nuzzled at her ear and whispered, “Gods grant that we have made a son tonight.”

The words of Mirri Maz Duur rang in her head. When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before. The meaning was plain enough; Khal Drogo was as like to return from the dead as she was to bear a living child. But there are some secrets she could not bring herself to share, even with a husband, so she let Hizdahr zo Loraq keep his hopes.

ADWD Daenerys VII

She found herself remembering her nightmare. Sometimes there is truth in dreams. Could Hizdahr zo Loraq be working for the warlocks, was that what the dream had meant? Could the dream have been a sending? Were the gods telling her to put Hizdahr aside and wed this Dornish prince instead? Something tickled at her memory. “Ser Barristan, what are the arms of House Martell?”

“A sun in splendor, transfixed by a spear.”

The sun’s son. A shiver went through her. “Shadows and whispers.” What else had Quaithe said? The pale mare and the sun’s son. There was a lion in it too, and a dragon. Or am I the dragon? “Beware the perfumed seneschal.” That she remembered. “Dreams and prophecies. Why must they always be in riddles? I hate this. Oh, leave me, ser. Tomorrow is my wedding day.”

ADWD Daenerys VI

“Captain, you made mention of four free companies. We know of only three. The Windblown, the Long Lances, and the Company of the Cat.”

“Ser Grandfather knows how to count. The Second Sons have gone over to the Yunkai’i.” Daario turned his head and spat. “That’s for Brown Ben Plumm. When next I see his ugly face I will open him from throat to groin and rip out his black heart.”

Dany tried to speak and found no words. She remembered Ben’s face the last time she had seen it. It was a warm face, a face I trusted. Dark skin and white hair, the broken nose, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Even the dragons had been fond of old Brown Ben, who liked to boast that he had a drop of dragon blood himself. Three treasons will you know. Once for gold and once for blood and once for love. Was Plumm the third treason, or the second? And what did that make Ser Jorah, her gruff old bear? Would she never have a friend that she could trust? What good are prophecies if you cannot make sense of them? If I marry Hizdahr before the sun comes up, will all these armies melt away like morning dew and let me rule in peace?

~

“I thought you would be the one to betray me. Once for blood and once for gold and once for love, the warlocks said. I thought … I never thought Brown Ben. Even my dragons seemed to trust him.” She clutched her captain by the shoulders. “Promise me that you will never turn against me. I could not bear that. Promise me.”

ADWD Daenerys V

His bitterness dismayed her, so much so that Dany found herself wondering if the grizzled Pentoshi could be one of her three betrayers. No, he is only an old man, far from home and sick at heart.

~

“We must pray,” said the Green Grace. “The gods sent this man to us. He comes as a harbinger. He comes as a sign.”

“A sign of what?” asked Dany.

“A sign of wroth and ruin.”

She did not want to believe that. “He was one man. One sick man with an arrow in his leg. A horse brought him here, not a god.” A pale mare. Dany rose abruptly. “I thank you for your counsel and for all that you did for this poor man.”

~

“Your Worship, I beg you, take the noble Hizdahr for your king at once. He can speak with the Wise Masters, make a peace for us.”

“On what terms?” Beware the perfumed seneschal, Quaithe had said. The masked woman had foretold the coming of the pale mare, was she right about the noble Reznak too?

ADWD Daenerys IV

“...In him the prophecies shall be fulfilled, and your enemies will melt away like snow.”

He shall be the stallion that mounts the world. Dany knew how it went with prophecies. They were made of words, and words were wind. There would be no son for Loraq, no heir to unite dragon and harpy. When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, when the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. Only then would her womb quicken once again …

~

Dany folded her hands together. “Words are wind, even words like love and peace. I put more trust in deeds. In my Seven Kingdoms, knights go on quests to prove themselves worthy of the maiden that they love. They seek for magic swords, for chests of gold, for crowns stolen from a dragon’s hoard.”

~

Beware the perfumed seneschal. Has Reznak made common cause with Hizdahr and the Green Grace and set some trap to snare me?

ADWD Daenerys II

“...Hear me, Daenerys Targaryen. The glass candles are burning. Soon comes the pale mare, and after her the others. Kraken and dark flame, lion and griffin, the sun’s son and the mummer’s dragon. Trust none of them. Remember the Undying. Beware the perfumed seneschal.”

“Reznak? Why should I fear him?” Dany rose from the pool. Water trickled down her legs, and gooseflesh covered her arms in the cool night air. “If you have some warning for me, speak plainly. What do you want of me, Quaithe?”

[...] “To show you the way.”

“I remember the way. I go north to go south, east to go west, back to go forward. And to touch the light I have to pass beneath the shadow.” She squeezed the water from her silvery hair. “I am half-sick of riddling. In Qarth I was a beggar, but here I am a queen. I command you—”

“Daenerys. Remember the Undying. Remember who you are.”

“The blood of the dragon.” But my dragons are roaring in the darkness. “I remember the Undying. Child of three, they called me. Three mounts they promised me, three fires, and three treasons. One for blood and one for gold and one for …”

~

When Reznak and Skahaz appeared, she found herself looking at them askance, mindful of the three treasons. Beware the perfumed seneschal. She sniffed suspiciously at Reznak mo Reznak. I could command the Shavepate to arrest him and put him to the question. Would that forestall the prophecy? Or would some other betrayer take his place? Prophecies are treacherous, she reminded herself, and Reznak may be no more than he appears.

ADWD Daenerys I

There were times when Dany wondered if that razor might not be better saved for Reznak’s throat. He was a useful man, but she liked him little and trusted him less. The Undying of Qarth had told her she would be thrice betrayed. Mirri Maz Duur had been the first, Ser Jorah the second. Would Reznak be the third? The Shavepate? Daario? Or will it be someone I would never suspect, Ser Barristan or Grey Worm or Missandei?

A Storm of Swords

ASOS Daenerys VI

Across the room, Grey Worm wore the plain uniform of the Unsullied, his spiked bronze cap beneath one arm. These at least she could rely on, or so she hoped ... and Brown Ben Plumm as well, solid Ben with his grey-white hair and weathered face, so beloved of her dragons. And Daario beside him, glittering in gold. Daario and Ben Plumm, Grey Worm, Irri, Jhiqui, Missandei ... as she looked at them Dany found herself wondering which of them would betray her next.

The dragon has three heads. There are two men in the world who I can trust, if I can find them. I will not be alone then. We will be three against the world, like Aegon and his sisters.

~

“Daenerys,” he said, “I have loved you.”

And there it was. Three treasons will you know. Once for blood and once for gold and once for love.

~

She was Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, khaleesi and queen, Mother of Dragons, slayer of warlocks, breaker of chains, and there was no one in the world that she could trust.

ASOS Daenerys V

“If you were grown,” she told Drogon, scratching him between the horns, “I’d fly you over the walls and melt that harpy down to slag.” But it would be years before her dragons were large enough to ride. And when they are, who shall ride them? The dragon has three heads, but I have only one.

~

Could I love Daario? What would it mean, if I took him into my bed? Would that make him one of the heads of the dragon? Ser Jorah would be angry, she knew, but he was the one who’d said she had to take two husbands. Perhaps I should marry them both and be done with it.

~

“Khaleesi, it was only at the start, before I came to know you ... before I came to love ...”

“Do not say that word!” She backed away from him. “How could you? What did the Usurper promise you? Gold, was it gold?” The Undying had said she would be betrayed twice more, once for gold and once for love. “Tell me what you were promised?”

“Varys said ... I might go home.” He bowed his head.

I was going to take you home! [...] Was there no one she could trust, no one to keep her safe?

ASOS Daenerys IV

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

~

Ser Jorah urged her to go, but Dany remembered a dream she had dreamed in the House of the Undying. “They will not hurt me,” she told him. “They are my children, Jorah.” She laughed, put her heels into her horse, and rode to them, the bells in her hair ringing sweet victory. She trotted, then cantered, then broke into a gallop, her braid streaming behind. The freed slaves parted before her. “Mother,” they called from a hundred throats, a thousand, ten thousand. “Mother,” they sang, their fingers brushing her legs as she flew by. “Mother, Mother, Mother!”

ASOS Daenerys III

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper’s rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened.

She woke suddenly in the darkness of her cabin, still flush with triumph. Balerion seemed to wake with her, and she heard the faint creak of wood, water lapping against the hull, a footfall on the deck above her head. And something else.

Someone was in the cabin with her.

“Irri? Jhiqui? Where are you?” Her handmaids did not respond. It was too black to see, but she could hear them breathing. “Jorah, is that you?”

“They sleep,” a woman said. “They all sleep.” The voice was very close. “Even dragons must sleep.”

She is standing over me. “Who’s there?” Dany peered into the darkness. She thought she could see a shadow, the faintest outline of a shape. “What do you want of me?”

“Remember. To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”

“Quaithe?” Dany sprung from the bed and threw open the door. Pale yellow lantern light flooded the cabin, and Irri and Jhiqui sat up sleepily. “Khaleesi?” murmured Jhiqui, rubbing her eyes. Viserion woke and opened his jaws, and a puff of flame brightened even the darkest corners. There was no sign of a woman in a red lacquer mask. “Khaleesi, are you unwell?” asked Jhiqui.

“A dream.” Dany shook her head. “I dreamed a dream, no more. Go back to sleep. All of us, go back to sleep.” Yet try as she might, sleep would not come again.

ASOS Daenerys I

They are my children, she told herself, and if the maegi spoke truly, they are the only children I am ever like to have.

~

“Sit, good ser, and tell me what is troubling you.”

“Three things.” Ser Jorah sat. “Strong Belwas. This Arstan Whitebeard. And Illyrio Mopatis, who sent them.”

Again? Dany pulled the coverlet higher and tugged one end over her shoulder. “And why is that?”

“The warlocks in Qarth told you that you would be betrayed three times,” the exile knight reminded her, as Viserion and Rhaegal began to snap and claw at each other.

“Once for blood and once for gold and once for love.” Dany was not like to forget. “Mirri Maz Duur was the first.”

“Which means two traitors yet remain ... and now these two appear. I find that troubling, yes. Never forget, Robert offered a lordship to the man who slays you.”

~

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

“Your Grace!”

“Your Grace,” he conceded, “the dragon has three heads, remember? You have wondered at that, ever since you heard it from the warlocks in the House of Dust. Well, here’s your meaning: Balerion, Meraxes, and Vhagar, ridden by Aegon, Rhaenys, and Visenya. The three-headed dragon of House Targaryen—three dragons, and three riders.”

“Yes,” said Dany, “but my brothers are dead.”

“Rhaenys and Visenya were Aegon’s wives as well as his sisters. You have no brothers, but you can take husbands. And I tell you truly, Daenerys, there is no man in all the world who will ever be half so true to you as me.”

A Clash of Kings

ACOK Daenerys V

Dany found her thoughts returning to the Palace of Dust once more, as the tongue returns to a space left by a missing tooth. Child of three, they had called her, daughter of death, slayer of lies, bride of fire. So many threes. Three fires, three mounts to ride, three treasons. “The dragon has three heads,” she sighed. “Do you know what that means, Jorah?”

“Your Grace? The sigil of House Targaryen is a three-headed dragon, red on black.”

“I know that. But there are no three-headed dragons.”

“The three heads were Aegon and his sisters.”

“Visenya and Rhaenys,” she recalled. “I am descended from Aegon and Rhaenys through their son Aenys and their grandson Jaehaerys.”

“Blue lips speak only lies, isn’t that what Xaro told you? Why do you care what the warlocks whispered? All they wanted was to suck the life from you, you know that now.”

“Perhaps,” she said reluctantly. “Yet the things I saw ...”
“A dead man in the prow of a ship, a blue rose, a banquet of blood ... what does any of it mean, Khaleesi? A mummer’s dragon, you said. What is a mummer’s dragon, pray?”
“A cloth dragon on poles,” Dany explained. “Mummers use them in their follies, to give the heroes something to fight.”

Ser Jorah frowned.

Dany could not let it go. “His is the song of ice and fire, my brother said. I’m certain it was my brother. Not Viserys, Rhaegar. He had a harp with silver strings.”

Ser Jorah’s frown deepened until his eyebrows came together. “Prince Rhaegar played such a harp,” he conceded. “You saw him?”

She nodded. “There was a woman in a bed with a babe at her breast. My brother said the babe was the prince that was promised and told her to name him Aegon.”

“Prince Aegon was Rhaegar’s heir by Elia of Dorne,” Ser Jorah said. “But if he was this prince that was promised, the promise was broken along with his skull when the Lannisters dashed his head against a wall.”

“I remember,” Dany said sadly. “They murdered Rhaegar’s daughter as well, the little princess. Rhaenys, she was named, like Aegon’s sister. There was no Visenya, but he said the dragon has three heads. What is the song of ice and fire?”

“It’s no song I’ve ever heard.”

“I went to the warlocks hoping for answers, but instead they’ve left me with a hundred new questions.”

~

“The great cog Saduleon is berthed at the end of the quay, and the galleys Summer Sun and Joso’s Prank are anchored beyond the breakwater.”

Three heads has the dragon, Dany thought, wondering. “I shall tell my people to make ready to depart at once. But the ships that bring me home must bear different names.”

“As you wish,” said Arstan. “What names would you prefer?”

“Vhagar,” Daenerys told him. “Meraxes. And Balerion. Paint the names on their hulls in golden letters three feet high, Arstan. I want every man who sees them to know the dragons are returned.”

ACOK Daenerys III

“No trick,” a woman said in the Common Tongue.

Dany had not noticed Quaithe in the crowd, yet there she stood, eyes wet and shiny behind the implacable red lacquer mask. “What mean you, my lady?”

“Half a year gone, that man could scarcely wake fire from dragonglass. He had some small skill with powders and wildfire, sufficient to entrance a crowd while his cutpurses did their work. He could walk across hot coals and make burning roses bloom in the air, but he could no more aspire to climb the fiery ladder than a common fisherman could hope to catch a kraken in his nets.”

[...] “And now?”

“And now his powers grow, Khaleesi. And you are the cause of it.”

“Me?” She laughed. “How could that be?”

The woman stepped closer and lay two fingers on Dany’s wrist. “You are the Mother of Dragons, are you not?”

~

“You must leave this city soon, Daenerys Targaryen, or you will never be permitted to leave it at all.”

Dany’s wrist still tingled where Quaithe had touched her. “Where would you have me go?” she asked.

“To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”

Asshai, Dany thought. She would have me go to Asshai. “Will the Asshai’i give me an army?” she demanded. “Will there be gold for me in Asshai? Will there be ships? What is there in Asshai that I will not find in Qarth?”

“Truth,” said the woman in the mask. And bowing, she faded back into the crowd.

~

The comet led me to Qarth for a reason. I had hoped to find my army here, but it seems that will not be. What else remains, I ask myself?” I am afraid, she realized, but I must be brave. “Come the morrow, you must go to Pyat Pree.”

ACOK Daenerys II

Last of the three seekers to depart was Quaithe the shadowbinder. From her Dany received only a warning. “Beware,” the woman in the red lacquer mask said.

“Of whom?”

“Of all. They shall come day and night to see the wonder that has been born again into the world, and when they see they shall lust. For dragons are fire made flesh, and fire is power.”

When Quaithe too was gone, Ser Jorah said, “She speaks truly, my queen ... though I like her no more than the others.”

“I do not understand her.” Pyat and Xaro had showered Dany with promises from the moment they first glimpsed her dragons, declaring themselves her loyal servants in all things, but from Quaithe she had gotten only the rare cryptic word. And it disturbed her that she had never seen the woman’s face. Remember Mirri Maz Duur, she told herself. Remember treachery.

~

As the handmaids toweled her dry and wrapped her in a sandsilk robe, Dany’s thoughts went to the three who had sought her out in the City of Bones. The Bleeding Star led me to Qarth for a purpose. Here I will find what I need, if I have the strength to take what is offered, and the wisdom to avoid the traps and snares. If the gods mean for me to conquer, they will provide, they will send me a sign, and if not ... if not ...

ACOK Daenerys I

The Dothraki named the comet shierak qiya, the Bleeding Star. The old men muttered that it omened ill, but Daenerys Targaryen had seen it first on the night she had burned Khal Drogo, the night her dragons had awakened. It is the herald of my coming, she told herself as she gazed up into the night sky with wonder in her heart. The gods have sent it to show me the way.

Yet when she put the thought into words, her handmaid Doreah quailed. “That way lies the red lands, Khaleesi. A grim place and terrible, the riders say.”

“The way the comet points is the way we must go,” Dany insisted ... though in truth, it was the only way open to her.

~

Dany looked at the horizon with despair. They had lost a third of their number, and still the waste stretched before them, bleak and red and endless. The comet mocks my hopes, she thought, lifting her eyes to where it scored the sky. Have I crossed half the world and seen the birth of dragons only to die with them in this hard hot desert? She would not believe it.

~

“Ghosts,” Irri muttered. “Terrible ghosts. We must not stay here, Khaleesi, this is their place.”

“I fear no ghosts. Dragons are more powerful than ghosts.” And figs are more important. “Go with Jhiqui and find me some clean sand for a bath, and trouble me no more with silly talk.”

~

Khal Drogo had been her sun-and-stars, her first, and perhaps he must be her last. The maegi Mirri Maz Duur had sworn she should never bear a living child, and what man would want a barren wife? And what man could hope to rival Drogo, who had died with his hair uncut and rode now through the night lands, the stars his khalasar?

A Game of Thrones

AGOT Daenerys X

Bound hand and foot, Mirri Maz Duur watched from the dust with disquiet in her black eyes. “It is not enough to kill a horse,” she told Dany. “By itself, the blood is nothing. You do not have the words to make a spell, nor the wisdom to find them. Do you think bloodmagic is a game for children? You call me maegi as if it were a curse, but all it means is wise. You are a child, with a child’s ignorance. Whatever you mean to do, it will not work. Loose me from these bonds and I will help you.”

“I am tired of the maegi’s braying,” Dany told Jhogo. He took his whip to her, and after that the godswife kept silent.

~

[“]Please, Khaleesi. I know what you intend. Do not. Do not.”

“I must,” Dany told him. She touched his face, fondly, sadly. “You do not understand.”

“I understand that you loved him,” Ser Jorah said in a voice thick with despair. “I loved my lady wife once, yet I did not die with her. You are my queen, my sword is yours, but do not ask me to stand aside as you climb on Drogo’s pyre. I will not watch you burn.”

“Is that what you fear?” Dany kissed him lightly on his broad forehead. “I am not such a child as that, sweet ser.”

“You do not mean to die with him? You swear it, my queen?”

“I swear it,” she said in the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms that by rights were hers.

~

The Dothraki were muttering and giving her strange sideways looks from the corners of their dark almond eyes. They thought her mad, Dany realized. Perhaps she was. She would know soon enough. If I look back I am lost.

~

“Bring my eggs,” Dany commanded her handmaids. Something in her voice made them run.

Ser Jorah took her arm. “My queen, Drogo will have no use for dragon’s eggs in the night lands. Better to sell them in Asshai. Sell one and we can buy a ship to take us back to the Free Cities. Sell all three and you will be a wealthy woman all your days.”

“They were not given to me to sell,” Dany told him.

She climbed the pyre herself to place the eggs around her sun-and-stars. The black beside his heart, under his arm. The green beside his head, his braid coiled around it. The cream-and-gold down between his legs.

~

As she climbed down off the pyre, she noticed Mirri Maz Duur watching her. “You are mad,” the godswife said hoarsely.

“Is it so far from madness to wisdom?” Dany asked. “Ser Jorah, take this maegi and bind her to the pyre.”

~

“I thank you, Mirri Maz Duur,” she said, “for the lessons you have taught me.”

“You will not hear me scream,” Mirri responded as the oil dripped from her hair and soaked her clothing.

“I will,” Dany said, “but it is not your screams I want, only your life. I remember what you told me. Only death can pay for life.” Mirri Maz Duur opened her mouth, but made no reply. As she stepped away, Dany saw that the contempt was gone from the maegi’s flat black eyes; in its place was something that might have been fear.

~

Then there was nothing to be done but watch the sun and look for the first star.

When a horselord dies, his horse is slain with him, so he might ride proud into the night lands. The bodies are burned beneath the open sky, and the khal rises on his fiery steed to take his place among the stars. The more fiercely the man burned in life, the brighter his star will shine in the darkness.

Jhogo spied it first. “There,” he said in a hushed voice. Dany looked and saw it, low in the east. The first star was a comet, burning red. Bloodred; fire red; the dragon’s tail. She could not have asked for a stronger sign.

Dany took the torch from Aggo’s hand and thrust it between the logs. The oil took the fire at once, the brush and dried grass a heartbeat later. Tiny flames went darting up the wood like swift red mice, skating over the oil and leaping from bark to branch to leaf. A rising heat puffed at her face, soft and sudden as a lover’s breath, but in seconds it had grown too hot to bear. Dany stepped backward. The wood crackled, louder and louder.

[...] She could smell the odor of burning flesh, no different than horseflesh roasting in a firepit. The pyre roared in the deepening dusk like some great beast, drowning out the fainter sound of Mirri Maz Duur’s screaming and sending up long tongues of flame to lick at the belly of the night. As the smoke grew thicker, the Dothraki backed away, coughing. Huge orange gouts of fire unfurled their banners in that hellish wind, the logs hissing and cracking, glowing cinders rising on the smoke to float away into the dark like so many newborn fireflies. The heat beat at the air with great red wings, driving the Dothraki back, driving off even Mormont, but Dany stood her ground. She was the blood of the dragon, and the fire was in her.

She had sensed the truth of it long ago, Dany thought as she took a step closer to the conflagration, but the brazier had not been hot enough. The flames writhed before her like the women who had danced at her wedding, whirling and singing and spinning their yellow and orange and crimson veils, fearsome to behold, yet lovely, so lovely, alive with heat. Dany opened her arms to them, her skin flushed and glowing. This is a wedding, too, she thought. Mirri Maz Duur had fallen silent. The godswife thought her a child, but children grow, and children learn.

Another step, and Dany could feel the heat of the sand on the soles of her feet, even through her sandals. Sweat ran down her thighs and between her breasts and in rivulets over her cheeks, where tears had once run. Ser Jorah was shouting behind her, but he did not matter anymore, only the fire mattered. The flames were so beautiful, the loveliest things she had ever seen, each one a sorcerer robed in yellow and orange and scarlet, swirling long smoky cloaks. She saw crimson firelions and great yellow serpents and unicorns made of pale blue flame; she saw fish and foxes and monsters, wolves and bright birds and flowering trees, each more beautiful than the last. She saw a horse, a great grey stallion limned in smoke, its flowing mane a nimbus of blue flame. Yes, my love, my sun-and-stars, yes, mount now, ride now.

Her vest had begun to smolder, so Dany shrugged it off and let it fall to the ground. The painted leather burst into sudden flame as she skipped closer to the fire, her breasts bare to the blaze, streams of milk flowing from her red and swollen nipples. Now, she thought, now, and for an instant she glimpsed Khal Drogo before her, mounted on his smoky stallion, a flaming lash in his hand. He smiled, and the whip snaked down at the pyre, hissing.

She heard a crack, the sound of shattering stone. The platform of wood and brush and grass began to shift and collapse in upon itself. Bits of burning wood slid down at her, and Dany was showered with ash and cinders. And something else came crashing down, bouncing and rolling, to land at her feet; a chunk of curved rock, pale and veined with gold, broken and smoking. The roaring filled the world, yet dimly through the firefall Dany heard women shriek and children cry out in wonder.

Only death can pay for life.

And there came a second crack, loud and sharp as thunder, and the smoke stirred and whirled around her and the pyre shifted, the logs exploding as the fire touched their secret hearts. She heard the screams of frightened horses, and the voices of the Dothraki raised in shouts of fear and terror, and Ser Jorah calling her name and cursing. No, she wanted to shout to him, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don’t you see? Don’t you SEE? With a belch of flame and smoke that reached thirty feet into the sky, the pyre collapsed and came down around her. Unafraid, Dany stepped forward into the firestorm, calling to her children.

The third crack was as loud and sharp as the breaking of the world.

When the fire died at last and the ground became cool enough to walk upon, Ser Jorah Mormont found her amidst the ashes, surrounded by blackened logs and bits of glowing ember and the burnt bones of man and woman and stallion. She was naked, covered with soot, her clothes turned to ash, her beautiful hair all crisped away ... yet she was unhurt.

The cream-and-gold dragon was suckling at her left breast, the green-and-bronze at the right. Her arms cradled them close. The black-and-scarlet beast was draped across her shoulders, its long sinuous neck coiled under her chin. When it saw Jorah, it raised its head and looked at him with eyes as red as coals.

Wordless, the knight fell to his knees. The men of her khas came up behind him. Jhogo was the first to lay his arakh at her feet. “Blood of my blood,” he murmured, pushing his face to the smoking earth. “Blood of my blood,” she heard Aggo echo. “Blood of my blood,” Rakharo shouted.

And after them came her handmaids, and then the others, all the Dothraki, men and women and children, and Dany had only to look at their eyes to know that they were hers now, today and tomorrow and forever, hers as they had never been Drogo’s.

As Daenerys Targaryen rose to her feet, her black hissed, pale smoke venting from its mouth and nostrils. The other two pulled away from her breasts and added their voices to the call, translucent wings unfolding and stirring the air, and for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.

AGOT Daenerys IX

Wings shadowed her fever dreams.


“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

She was walking down a long hall beneath high stone arches. She could not look behind her, must not look behind her. There was a door ahead of her, tiny with distance, but even from afar, she saw that it was painted red. She walked faster, and her bare feet left bloody footprints on the stone.

“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

She saw sunlight on the Dothraki sea, the living plain, rich with the smells of earth and death. Wind stirred the grasses, and they rippled like water. Drogo held her in strong arms, and his hand stroked her sex and opened her and woke that sweet wetness that was his alone, and the stars smiled down on them, stars in a daylight sky. “Home,” she whispered as he entered her and filled her with his seed, but suddenly the stars were gone, and across the blue sky swept the great wings, and the world took flame.

“... don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

Ser Jorah’s face was drawn and sorrowful. “Rhaegar was the last dragon,” he told her. He warmed translucent hands over a glowing brazier where stone eggs smouldered red as coals. One moment he was there and the next he was fading, his flesh colorless, less substantial than the wind. “The last dragon,” he whispered, thin as a wisp, and was gone. She felt the dark behind her, and the red door seemed farther away than ever.

“... don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

Viserys stood before her, screaming. “The dragon does not beg, slut. You do not command the dragon. I am the dragon, and I will be crowned.” The molten gold trickled down his face like wax, burning deep channels in his flesh. “I am the dragon and I will be crowned!” he shrieked, and his fingers snapped like snakes, biting at her nipples, pinching, twisting, even as his eyes burst and ran like jelly down seared and blackened cheeks.

“... don’t want to wake the dragon ... ”

The red door was so far ahead of her, and she could feel the icy breath behind, sweeping up on her. If it caught her she would die a death that was more than death, howling forever alone in the darkness. She began to run.

“... don’t want to wake the dragon ...”

She could feel the heat inside her, a terrible burning in her womb. Her son was tall and proud, with Drogo’s copper skin and her own silver-gold hair, violet eyes shaped like almonds. And he smiled for her and began to lift his hand toward hers, but when he opened his mouth the fire poured out. She saw his heart burning through his chest, and in an instant he was gone, consumed like a moth by a candle, turned to ash. She wept for her child, the promise of a sweet mouth on her breast, but her tears turned to steam as they touched her skin.

“... want to wake the dragon ...”

Ghosts lined the hallway, dressed in the faded raiment of kings. In their hands were swords of pale fire. They had hair of silver and hair of gold and hair of platinum white, and their eyes were opal and amethyst, tourmaline and jade. “Faster,” they cried, “faster, faster.” She raced, her feet melting the stone wherever they touched. “Faster!” the ghosts cried as one, and she screamed and threw herself forward. A great knife of pain ripped down her back, and she felt her skin tear open and smelled the stench of burning blood and saw the shadow of wings. And Daenerys Targaryen flew.

“... wake the dragon ...”

The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door.

“... the dragon ...”

And saw her brother Rhaegar, mounted on a stallion as black as his armor. Fire glimmered red through the narrow eye slit of his helm. “The last dragon,” Ser Jorah’s voice whispered faintly. “The last, the last.” Dany lifted his polished black visor. The face within was her own.

~

Flakes of ash drifted upward from a brazier, and Dany followed them with her eyes through the smoke hole above. Flying, she thought. I had wings, I was flying. But it was only a dream. “Help me,” she whispered, struggling to rise. “Bring me ...” Her voice was raw as a wound, and she could not think what she wanted. Why did she hurt so much? It was as if her body had been torn to pieces and remade from the scraps. “I want ...”

“Yes, Khaleesi.” Quick as that Jhiqui was gone, bolting from the tent, shouting. Dany needed ... something ... someone ... what? It was important, she knew. It was the only thing in the world that mattered. She rolled onto her side and got an elbow under her, fighting the blanket tangled about her legs. It was so hard to move. The world swam dizzily. I have to ...

They found her on the carpet, crawling toward her dragon eggs. [...]

“I must,” she tried to tell them, “I have to ...”

“ ... sleep, Princess,” Ser Jorah said.

“No,” Dany said. “Please. Please.”

~

“Bring ... I want to hold ...”

“Yes?” the maegi asked. “What is it you wish, Khaleesi?”


“Bring me ... egg ... dragon’s egg ... please ... ” Her lashes turned to lead, and she was too weary to hold them up.

When she woke the third time, a shaft of golden sunlight was pouring through the smoke hole of the tent, and her arms were wrapped around a dragon’s egg. It was the pale one, its scales the color of butter cream, veined with whorls of gold and bronze, and Dany could feel the heat of it. Beneath her bedsilks, a fine sheen of perspiration covered her bare skin. Dragondew, she thought. Her fingers trailed lightly across the surface of the shell, tracing the wisps of gold, and deep in the stone she felt something twist and stretch in response. It did not frighten her. All her fear was gone, burned away.

~

My son is dead, she thought as Jhiqui left the tent. She had known somehow. She had known since she woke the first time to Jhiqui’s tears. No, she had known before she woke. Her dream came back to her, sudden and vivid, and she remembered the tall man with the copper skin and long silver-gold braid, bursting into flame.

She should weep, she knew, yet her eyes were dry as ash. She had wept in her dream, and the tears had turned to steam on her cheeks. All the grief has been burned out of me, she told herself. She felt sad, and yet ... she could feel Rhaego receding from her, as if he had never been.

~

Ser Jorah and Mirri Maz Duur entered a few moments later, and found Dany standing over the other dragon’s eggs, the two still in their chest. It seemed to her that they felt as hot as the one she had slept with, which was passing strange. “Ser Jorah, come here,” she said. She took his hand and placed it on the black egg with the scarlet swirls. “What do you feel?”

“Shell, hard as rock.” The knight was wary. “Scales.”

“Heat?”

“No. Cold stone.”

~

“When will he be as he was?” Dany demanded.

“When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east,” said Mirri Maz Duur. “When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before.”

~

“When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east,” she said sadly. “When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When my womb quickens again, and I bear a living child. Then you will return, my sun-and-stars, and not before.”

Never, the darkness cried, never never never.

AGOT Daenerys VIII

The Dothraki were shouting, Mirri Maz Duur wailing inside the tent like nothing human, Quaro pleading for water as he died. Dany cried out for help, but no one heard. Rakharo was fighting Haggo, arakh dancing with arakh until Jhogo’s whip cracked, loud as thunder, the lash coiling around Haggo’s throat. A yank, and the bloodrider stumbled backward, losing his feet and his sword. Rakharo sprang forward, howling, swinging his arakh down with both hands through the top of Haggo’s head. The point caught between his eyes, red and quivering. Someone threw a stone, and when Dany looked, her shoulder was torn and bloody. “No,” she wept, “no, please, stop it, it’s too high, the price is too high.” More stones came flying. She tried to crawl toward the tent, but Cohollo caught her. Fingers in her hair, he pulled her head back and she felt the cold touch of his knife at her throat. “My baby,” she screamed, and perhaps the gods heard, for as quick as that, Cohollo was dead. Aggo’s arrow took him under the arm, to pierce his lungs and heart.

[...] The breath went out of her; it was all she could do to gasp. The sound of Mirri Maz Duur’s voice was like a funeral dirge. Inside the tent, the shadows whirled.

~

“Take her to the maegi.”

No, Dany wanted to say, no, not that, you mustn’t, but when she opened her mouth, a long wail of pain escaped, and the sweat broke over her skin. What was wrong with them, couldn’t they see? Inside the tent the shapes were dancing, circling the brazier and the bloody bath, dark against the sandsilk, and some did not look human. She glimpsed the shadow of a great wolf, and another like a man wreathed in flames.

[...] No, she shouted, or perhaps she only thought it, for no whisper of sound escaped her lips. She was being carried. Her eyes opened to gaze up at a flat dead sky, black and bleak and starless. Please, no. The sound of Mirri Maz Duur’s voice grew louder, until it filled the world. The shapes! she screamed. The dancers!

Ser Jorah carried her inside the tent.

AGOT Daenerys VI

She would not shiver with fear. The Usurper has woken the dragon now, she told herself ... and her eyes went to the dragon’s eggs resting in their nest of dark velvet. The shifting lamplight limned their stony scales, and shimmering motes of jade and scarlet and gold swam in the air around them, like courtiers around a king.

Was it madness that seized her then, born of fear? Or some strange wisdom buried in her blood? Dany could not have said. She heard her own voice saying, “Ser Jorah, light the brazier.” “Khaleesi?” The knight looked at her strangely. “It is so hot. Are you certain?” She had never been so certain. “Yes. I ... I have a chill. Light the brazier.”

He bowed. “As you command.”

When the coals were afire, Dany sent Ser Jorah from her. She had to be alone to do what she must do. This is madness, she told herself as she lifted the black-and-scarlet egg from the velvet. It will only crack and burn, and it’s so beautiful, Ser Jorah will call me a fool if I ruin it, and yet, and yet ...

Cradling the egg with both hands, she carried it to the fire and pushed it down amongst the burning coals. The black scales seemed to glow as they drank the heat. Flames licked against the stone with small red tongues. Dany placed the other two eggs beside the black one in the fire. As she stepped back from the brazier, the breath trembled in her throat.

She watched until the coals had turned to ashes. Drifting sparks floated up and out of the smokehole. Heat shimmered in waves around the dragon’s eggs. And that was all.

Your brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, Ser Jorah had said. Dany gazed at her eggs sadly. What had she expected? A thousand thousand years ago they had been alive, but now they were only pretty rocks. They could not make a dragon. A dragon was air and fire. Living flesh, not dead stone.

AGOT Daenerys V

“What does it mean?” she asked. “What is this stallion? Everyone was shouting it at me, but I don’t understand.”

“The stallion is the khal of khals promised in ancient prophecy, child. He will unite the Dothraki into a single khalasar and ride to the ends of the earth, or so it was promised. All the people of the world will be his herd.”

“Oh,” Dany said in a small voice.

AGOT Daenerys III

Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream again. Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood. Her blood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma, and when it opened its mouth, the flame came roaring out in a hot jet. She could hear it singing to her, She opened her arms to the fire, embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and temper her and scour her clean. She could feel her flesh sear and blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and yet there was no pain. She felt strong and new and fierce.

And the next day, strangely, she did not seem to hurt quite so much. It was as if the gods had heard her and taken pity. Even her handmaids noticed the change. “Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said, “what is wrong? Are you sick?”

“I was,” she answered, standing over the dragon’s eggs that Illyrio had given her when she wed. She touched one, the largest of the three, running her hand lightly over the shelf. Black-and-scarlet, she thought, like the dragon in my dream. The stone felt strangely warm beneath her fingers ... or was she still dreaming? She pulled her hand back nervously.

From that hour onward, each day was easier than the one before it. Her legs grew stronger; her blisters burst and her hands grew callused; her soft thighs toughened, supple as leather.

~

As she let the door flap close behind her, Dany saw a finger of dusty red light reach out to touch her dragon’s eggs across the tent. For an instant a thousand droplets of scarlet flame swam before her eyes. She blinked, and they were gone.

Stone, she told herself. They are only stone, even Illyrio said so, the dragons are all dead. She put her palm against the black egg, fingers spread gently across the curve of the shell. The stone was warm. Almost hot. “The sun,” Dany whispered. “The sun warmed them as they rode.” [...] “Have you ever seen a dragon?” she asked as Irri scrubbed her back and Jhiqui sluiced sand from her hair. She had heard that the first dragons had come from the east, from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea. Perhaps some were still living there, in realms strange and wild.

AGOT Daenerys II

There are no more dragons, Dany thought, staring at her brother, though she did not dare say it aloud.

Yet that night she dreamt of one. Viserys was hitting her, hurting her. She was naked, clumsy with fear. She ran from him, but her body seemed thick and ungainly. He struck her again. She stumbled and fell. “You woke the dragon,” he screamed as he kicked her. “You woke the dragon, you woke the dragon.” Her thighs were slick with blood. She closed her eyes and whimpered. As if in answer, there was a hideous ripping sound and the crackling of some great fire. When she looked again, Viserys was gone, great columns of flame rose all around, and in the midst of them was the dragon. It turned its great head slowly. When its molten eyes found hers, she woke, shaking and covered with a fine sheen of sweat. She had never been so afraid ...

... until the day of her wedding came at last.

[julystorms]

Hello! How do you think the Survey Corps handle unplanned pregnancies within their ranks? Especially, let’s say, if they are people with positions— like squad leaders. I really wanna know your thoughts on this :D

Sorry, I promise I wasn’t ignoring your first ask! I just wantedto find the time to respond properly. For the longest time I had a drafted metapost about this topic (“Pregnancy & Disability in the Survey Corps”) that Ioccasionally added to when I had a thought. I think I deleted it when I purgedmy drafts, though. Oops!

I definitely have a lot of thoughts on the topic. This is a really long post; there are a lot of things to consider with a question like this!

Let me start by saying this: I feel that strong worldbuilding isprimarily a result of consistency. I know SnK’s worldbuilding is, overall,rather weak, but there’s no reason we as creators can’t force consistency intoour own narrative explorations of that world! A consistent set of rules for thecharacters to operate under make for a better experience overall, not just inthe canon, but also for readers/viewers of fanworks. You can always switch thingsup for fun, but I personally like to have one particular set of rules that I useby default. It makes it easier for me as a writer to sink down into the storyand portray it without having to think too hard about every little detail as Igo.

One of the most interestingthings about SnK is that it portrays a sexist world but still allows women intothe ranks of its military branches—all three of them. However, we generallydon’t see women in positions of power: there are no female government members,no powerful merchants, no notable members of the aristocracy, and no confirmedtop female officers*.

*Rico is the closest we get,but she doesn’t seem any higher-ranked than Ian or Mitabi were, and is clearly outrankedby Kitz, so she doesn’t count. Hange is the only POSSIBLE high-ranked femaleofficer in the entire series, but “possible” =/= “actual” so again, no-go.

Boris accuses Hitch of(essentially) using her femininity in an underhanded way to get into the MP; asI’ve said before, we don’t know if he’s right or if he’s just trying to be anasshole because he doesn’t like Hitch, but I think it’s fair to say that thiskind of misogyny is something that women in SnK’s military face on the regular,especially if they perform on par with male classmates. Hell, this is somethingwomen who work in male dominated fields face daily in our world. It doesn’t surprise me. Isayama’s not portraying autopia with this series, after all. But it’s clear he didn’t put a lot ofthought into the little things: like sexism/misogyny in the military and how itwould clearly impact the lives of the girls and young women who enlist.

I don’t think it makessense to say: SnK’s world is 100% reliable and the narration we receive is 100%credible. We don’t see what happens to our female characters behind-the-scenes.We don’t see if they’re treated differently by their instructors, teachers,trainers—in front of peers or alone. We don’t see if any of them werepropositioned for sex or other favors. We don’t know that team leaders in theSurvey Corps, Military Police, and Garrison don’t abuse their positions of relativepower over new recruits. We have to assume that in an imperfect and clearly sexistworld, these kinds of things do happen, and some people aren’t left with a lotof choice as to how to deal with it. What would Hitch be able to do if hercommanding officer (Eibringer IIRC) propositioned her or touched her or [insertother possibilities here]? Who is she going to tell? Will they believe her? Andwhat are the chances that saying something would tank her career in the MP? Shedid all that work to get into the MP; would she risk doing something now that might get it taken away again? Yeah, saying nothing means putting up with abuse, but if she doesn’t disturb thewater, so to speak, she’ll have a long career that pays well ahead of her—somethingmost people on Paradis don’t get to have. These are the little details thatweren’t considered but do mean agreat deal when you’re writing about the daily ins and outs of the world thesecharacters live in.

Which brings me topregnancy, sex, and all related topics. I’ve seen writers use various kinds oftea as “birth control.” I’ve seen authors use oral sex or the pull-out methodto try and avoid the possibility of pregnancy. Some characters track theircycle (assuming for them it’s reliable enough to be tracked) as a form of birthcontrol. And look, all of these are perfectly valid and all are very likelyused in the world of SnK. Not all of them work. There may not be many herbalremedies that are effective; there may not be many that are readily or cheaplyavailable. These are the things to think about. Just because someone claims itworks doesn’t mean it does. The characters have to contend with that!

And because no methodexcept abstinence is 100% effective, some characters are going to get pregnant—andnot just in the Survey Corps.

This world is sexist. Youhave to consider whether or not the Garrison or MP would allow for pregnantsoldiers to stay enlisted and you have to think about what would happen after ababy was born. Think carefully. Yes, it seems feasible to work and raise achild, especially on the Military Police’s paygrade. But would it be allowed? Again, we don’t see hardly any femalecharacters in a position of power, and the ones we do see aren’t shown to bemarried or have children.

Think, too, about thepopulation, and about the world’s belief that humanity is going extinct insidethe walls. All of these things affect the mindset of the general population:how they feel about women, what they feel a woman’s job/place in the world is,and so on. Notice that in background shots, you see women carrying babies,groceries, with their children, and always wearing skirts. Chances are, womenare wives, daughters, housekeepers, and babymakers first and foremost, andworking women (women who don’t have a choice and/or are yet unmarried) do “lowerwork” and probably not for much money (laundry for better-off folks, shellingnuts, simple factory tasks, sewing/darning, waitressing, prostitution).

All right, so…with these considerationsin mind, let’s talk about pregnancy.

There’s a lot to thinkabout when it comes to someone in the military of SnK’s world getting pregnant.Is it considered shameful to get pregnant out of wedlock? Seems kind of thatway, re: Historia’s awful mother and cheating father. Nobody blinks an eye atmen having affairs but women are another story. What are their optionsregarding birth? Are midwives easy to find? Doctors who can make a differentsure seem rare (re: Grisha showing up and magically being able to help people;Ragako Village letting some quack come in and inject them all without oncequestioning it)! Midwives who are trained and experienced? Expensive andprobably not easy to come by. You’re probably going to be stuck with anotherwoman who has given birth before helping you out, and if something out of the ordinaryhappens, you or your baby could die. Because of this, abortion may be anoption, but what kinds of choices do these people have? The old coat-hangerroutine (that can easily end with death when the bleeding doesn’t stop and isextremely painful)? Herbal remedies that might have side-effects that you can’thide/that may spell the end for your career?

If we assume that pregnancyand childbirth are a free pass out of the military, it will be abused. Therehave to be measures in place that would make a person want to avoid pregnancy.Is it a dishonorable discharge? Do you have to pay a fee? Do you have to givethe baby up for adoption? These sorts of things would discourage a lot ofpeople who might otherwise benefit from having a baby. The Survey Corps alsohas a built-in discouragement: your lover dying and leaving you alone with ababy to raise. But then, what’s to stop them from crippling themselves to getout? It wouldn’t be that hard to drive a sword through your own foot and makeit look like an accident. (No doubt doing this on purpose is treasonous andpunishable by death, just like running away/disobeying orders if doing soyields bad results.) The only way to keep that in check is to assume that itwould be hard for them to find work if they were too disabled. Maybe for somepeople it would be worth it, but others…not so much.

Being realistic, losingyour post in the Military Police would be discouragement enough; characterslike Hitch who are young and wanted very much to get in and stay in are likelyto avoid pregnancy like hell; any man who got her pregnant could deny it andwhat recourse would she have if he refused to acknowledge her and help her? Theydon’t have paternal testing in this world. And she’s not a high-rankedrespected member of the military: she’d be out of a job with two mouths to feedand no experience in anything but military training! That’s terrifying. In manyways, that serves as its own form of birth control. (But we can’t pretend thatmen don’t abuse their positions of power in the military and push themselves onwomen anyway. We can’t pretend that characters like Hitch can always say no and have that norespected. She’s going to be thought of as disposable to many people.)

The Garrison is a littlebit more interesting. They’re not hurting for soldiers, so if a few women hereand there decide to get pregnant and leave the military, there will be plentyof replacements to take their places. It’s possible that the Garrison forcesyou to quit but it’s not looked on so poorly. It’s also possible that if you’rerespected or liked enough, or you know the right people, you might be allowedto keep working doing administrative work. Hey, being a paper-pusher might notpay as well as scouting on top of the walls or cleaning artillery, but at leastit’s work if you need it. And if you’re single: you will. Plus, since yourstation is permanent, you could have your parents move in with you to help withthe kid and maintain a full-time job without too many issues. Hell, because it’snot so terrible a crime, or even a crime at all, you can probably speedily getmarried and avoid too much gossip. (That’s not to say that people aren’t kickedright out of the Garrison for getting pregnant, but there’s probably more roomfor the well-liked and hard-working individuals to stay on after giving birth.The MP are elites and may view pregnancy out of wedlock (possibly also workingwives) as imperfect and therefore not okay. Garrison soldiers are not elitesand don’t have those kinds of delusions or grand appearances to keep up.

That brings me to theSurvey Corps. How many people join only to regret it a few months later? A babyseems a small price to pay compared to being eaten by a titan, trampled, orworse, mangled so badly you’re permanently disabled & discharged from themilitary—left with no way to care for yourself (except to maybe rely onrelatives if you have any to take care of you). Like I said earlier, if havinga baby was a free ticket out of the Survey Corps, people would be trying for iton purpose. There must be rules in place: dishonorable discharge,fraternization rules with stiff penalties, a steep fee you have to pay toleave, you’re forced to stay in the military and give up the baby for adoption.One or several of these would work well.

That said, giving up a babyfor adoption seems fine, but this is a world where the population is both “toosmall” and “way too big” (ugh…). It makes sense in its own way, but there areprobably tons of homeless children out there like Eren, Mikasa, and Armin, who didn’t join the military. There areprobably lots of young women in poverty with babies they can’t take care of,dropping them off at churches and on the porches of slightly better off people—maybeeven at military HQ buildings. That makes that option feel…a lot less likelyIMO.

I want to look at anexample. Let’s say Nanaba and Mike are in a relationship and she finds out thatshe’s pregnant. Now, Mike’s a decent person, right? He won’t deny his role inNanaba’s pregnancy. In that way, she’s luckier than some women would be, butshe still has to tell him, still has to deal with his reaction. It’s her bodybut her options kind of all suck, so it might be nice for her to discuss itwith him and get his opinion, too. How far along does she think she is, howsafe are abortion methods, would she be comfortable aborting, what are theside-effects of trying something like that—arethe risks worth it? If they are, she has to try one of them, and theoutcome could be: hey, she can return to work in a few days (everyone probablyknows why she wasn’t around, tbh). It could also just as easily be: she triesto return to work and can’t due to side-effects of an herbal remedy or becauseher body is too weak, or she hemorrhages and dies within 24 hours, or she doesreturn to work but the side-effects linger and cause her death on an expedition—orworse, they cause someone else’s death.

So maybe she decides tokeep the baby. Mike cares about her, he won’t abandon her to raise a baby alonewith no help, but where is she going to live? With her parent(s)? His? Alone?What if neither of them have living parents? Or, as portrayed in the anime,what if her parent(s) are abusive? Is she going to take her baby back to aplace like that? Does she have much of a choice?

Maybe she does. Maybe Mike’sparents will be happy to have her live with them. Mike can send them money. Heonly gets furlough at most 4x a year so they get to see each other a few timesa year for a few days/a week. This could depend on how far away they live, somaybe Mike uses some savings to move them closer so that visiting can happen onweekends or afternoons off. Cool. Great.

If Mike is 40, his parentsare likely to be 60+ years old and maybe not in the greatest health. This worlddoesn’t exactly allow for easy aging, you know. Are they working? Is Mikepaying all the bills himself? Well, what’ll happen when Mike eventually dies oris hurt so badly he can’t fight anymore and is sent home to die or lay arounduselessly?

Nanaba has to sit at homeand think about that kind of stuff. What if Mike dies? She can’t help him, can’tbe there for him; she’s just at home waiting for the news. It’s possible he’lldie before their kid is very old and won’t remember him at all. How are thebills going to be paid? Are his parents capable of watching the kid if Nanabahas to try and go to work herself?

It’s scary no matter howyou slice it.

And that’s not includingthe potential dishonorable discharge, payment of a high fee for leaving, andpossibly even a paycut for the remaining spouse if they fess up to their rolein it (all of which make raising a baby even more difficult).

You would think thispotential future (or worse, depending on circumstance) would promote abstinence(or at least methods of sex that have no chance for pregnancy)—and it probablydoes…but not in everyone. A lot of people enjoy sex, and mistakes happen; somepeople may just get carried away but others may have too much to drink or lackthe foresight to consider what may happen to them if they do get pregnant.

The problem here is that it’swomen who primarily suffer the consequences of a pregnancy. It’s women who losetheir position in the military. It’s women who can be pushed around or abusedby male peers or superior officers and women who won’t be trusted or believedif they complain. And it sucks, but in the world we’re presented with in the canon…itfits. And it leaves us to wonder how many women this happens to. How many arepassed over for promotion because they’re women (and considered likely toleave/want to leave/or less-than their male counterparts)?

It really makes you think!

I know I didn’t give you adefinitive answer to your question, anon, but I hope that there was enoughspeculation here to help you come up with your own headcanons (while alsogiving you a good idea of what mine might be). ;)

The usual disclaimer: IMO, YMMV, et cetera and so on.

To add, I didn’t really talk a whole lot about pregnancies as a product of rape or of a loving relationship where the man denies his part in it, but a lot of the same things apply. 

Lastly, I don’t want readers to think that men can get away with anything in the SnK world; I don’t actually think that’s the case. But like in our own world, a patriarchal society makes it hard for women to feel safe speaking up, with the result being that very few women do. The problem with SnK is that there aren’t many ways to prove that what you’re saying is true; if you say you’re pregnant, you can’t prove who the father is unless by some miracle that baby comes out looking like them (and that would truly be a mixed blessing anyway). If you’re not a respected officer who will believe you? If you’re accusing a respected officer, or worse, accusing someone who is married with children already, do you think anybody will be on your side? I do think some men are caught in the act, or there is proof of some kind (love letters clearly written  by them); sometimes they’re even brought to court and prosecuted for crimes and fired or sent to jail or fined (and forced to pay some compensation to the mother-to-be in the case of a child). But how often do these things end in favor of the women involved? Probably not often. With rape it’s: “Boys will be boys.” “What were you wearing?” “Well you can’t blame him... you’re a healthy, attractive young woman.” How many women say something and are faced with these kinds of things? In court, even? Women still hear some of these things today. In a modern society. And with men who would choose to run from their responsibilities instead of facing them like an adult, the women involved still have to deal with the emotional betrayal and all of the other fallout. 

It’d be kind of silly to imagine that a fantasy world that clearly functions as a patriarchal society wouldn’t be almost exactly the same in this regard.

[functioningcog]

The Craftsman’s Linyvky

 These are Ukrainian Pysanky eggs. An ancient tradition of the Ukrainian people kept and preserved for centuries. The tradition of painting eggs in various styles or colors exists in other cultures, but Pysanky eggs are uniquely Ukrainian. Pysanky means "to write" in old Ukrainian. The eggs are "written".  

 There are many legends and stories surrounding their origin and purpose. For example, the Hutsuls of the Carpathian Mountains believe that the eggs guard the world against an evil serpent, kept imprisoned on a cliff. Should the eggs one day no longer be written, the serpent will break his chains and wreak havoc on the world. Chaos and anarchy would rule the world. But as long as the eggs are written and the traditions passed down, the serpent is held at bay and order is maintained; chaos kept in control.  

 After the rise of Christianity and its spread through the Slavic regions, some of the old stories were adapted to fit new narratives. Mother Mary giving eggs to the soldiers at the Cross. Mary Magdalene carrying eggs to the tomb. The Pysanky were always associated with good people and good deeds. But despite the drastic culture shift, the traditions employed in writing these eggs remained. Pysanky can be adapted and applied to new generations, but their importance and power are not easily disrupted.  

 The writing of these beautiful eggs is painstaking and meticulous. The colors are applied by hot wax and fine tools, starting with a base layer that holds the egg together and placing the colors on layer by layer. The more intricate the designs, the more powerful the supposed shield against demonic forces. The finished piece is often breathtaking in its complexity and intricacies, all stemming from a simple idea created through often rudimentary tools. A properly written Pysanky egg is a beautiful thing, and according to the Hutsuls, means all is right with the world.

 Now imagine a certain craftsman. A craftsman of little skill and worse intent. He only cares for his own glory and prosperity, and not that of the world around him. He has no regard or reverence for the rich traditions and skills of those who preceded him. He doesn't understand the details or symbolism inherent in Pysanky eggs, and he certainly doesn't know or care about that old serpent. And yet, he's obsessed with making his own. The best that's ever been. All will look to his Pysanky and kneel in awe, for they did not understand as he does. Their eggs, however beautiful or legendary once thought, will be but shadows and vague memories after his timeless writing is complete. In short, this craftsman is out of his mind. Totally delusional and quite narcissistic. The worst kind of person to write a Pysanky. 

 Our hypothetical craftsman eagerly sets out to reorder the world of artistic eggs in his own image. But as I mentioned, he doesn't know the proper method. He may not base his elaborate color scheme on that solid wax foothold, and the colors begin to run. This egg would be called not Pysanky, but Linyvky meaning "lazy". A gross attempt to pass off poor painting, plastic, or paper as a Pysanky. A travesty that is meaningless in the battle against chaos. 

The Serpent stirs.  

The craftsman accidentally misses a crack in the shell that will begin to smell as the egg decays. The smell begins to seep throughout his decadent workspace and out onto the streets. People turn up their noses. What is that horrid stench? 

 The Serpent smells the rotten egg amongst those well written and senses a weakness in the shield against him. Is this his time? 

 The craftsman may later drop his crudely written egg, enlarging the cracks or breaking the shell in a myriad of shards. Shards of that which once could have held the serpent in check through it's order and attention to detail, had its author cared at all for any semblance of order. Shards which make it clear for all to see that this is no Pysanky egg but rather a simpletons poor attempt to pass off garbage as art. 

 The Serpent's chains are loosening. His minions are scouting the world for weak spots. Cracks in the dam. Loopholes in the system. Methods by which to sow dissent and discourage any remaining adherence to tradition. They report back good tidings to their master. The world is barreling towards his cliff, having largely forgotten why they wrote those old eggs at all. The craftsman is one of many it turns out who have forgotten their past and care not to learn. Some of them seek to follow him on his errant path.  

 Our "hypothetical" craftsman, cares not what the townsfolk and elders have to say of his eggs. "You're living in the past" he says. "We don't need those old eggs anymore. Pysanky?! How pretentious! I have created a new art form. Perfect and beautiful eggs which will need a new name. Something catchy and simple. Who needs all that complexity anyway? And all those stupid rules. We should make the eggs look however we want! Huh? What smell? I don't smell anything at all. In fact, the air has never felt better since I made that egg in there. It's the greatest egg ever painted in history!" 

 Night falls on the our craftsman's village. The Serpent peers over the cliffside. His time is near. Come morning his chains will be ready to break and he shall tear through this village and all other villages, destroying all the Pysanky and any memory of their existence. This stupid craftsman has served him well. He might just let him keep making his "new eggs". They may serve a purpose. They may fool the masses into giving up on old ideas entirely. Just do whatever the craftsman says. He's always right, and he knows all! Yes, the Serpent likes this idea. Not long now . . .  

 The dawn has arrived. The Serpent is ready. but then he sees something that strikes fear into his heart. The townspeople have gathered and they're marching towards our craftsman's workshop. They're carrying chains and look quite determined. This isn't how it's supposed to go! It was to be the Serpent's time at last! He strains to break free with every fiber of his being. His minions rally around the workshop, spewing lies and half-truths about the craftsman's new and wonderous eggs. Some townspeople stop to listen, but many steel themselves and press on through the door.  

 There is a brief silence. Then a pitiful whining voice as the people drag the craftsman from his shop and back through the streets towards a distant hut. The charade is over. The shop's Linyvky discarded. The tradition of the Pysanky will endure, and the Serpent's chains give him a sharp yank back to his abyssal prison. He snarls in fury as the village fades from view. So it wasn't his time just yet. But one day . . .  

 The townspeople drag the craftsman into the hut and toss him on the floor. Sitting across from him is a wizened elder of the village. A babushka who has seen his kind before. She is the master of Pysanky in their village, and the keeper of the old methods and stories. She leans down to him and speaks slowly but without wavering. "So, you thought you had it all figured out did you? You thought these traditions were a waste of everyone's time and we should all forget them and blindly follow YOU? Follow and admire your "beautiful, perfect eggs". Well son, some of us still remember why we have those old eggs in the first place, and why they're written a certain way. And we will not sit by and let you throw it all away. You can paint however you like and even smash your eggs and call it art. But at the end of the day, eggs are fragile things. And Pysanky eggs in particular, have rules. You might even think of them as laws. Laws which exist for a reason, and which I'll fight for until my dying day.  

 Now you're free to leave this village and live your life as you wish. But we won't be following or listening to your ramblings any longer. And you'd best remember that Pysanky, like our little village, have rules."

[verdisketch]

Reply for @minutia-r and @polar-night-scout, minu first bc i was drafting as scout appeared, this is a lot of scrolling sorry guys

MINU:

The thing I would take issue with is that Tuuri never ever says she shouldn't have gone.  She says that she thought it wouldn't happen, and one might infer that therefore if she had known it would happen she wouldn't have gone and now that it has happened she regrets going, but she never actually says that and I don't think that's the only possible way to understand what she says.  In fact, when she does say something on the subject (albeit before she knows for sure that she's infected) she says she doesn't regret going.  Not because she is still holding out hope that she isn't infected (although she is at that point) or because she considers the journey worth it even if she is infected, but just because it's in her nature and she couldn't have done otherwise.  So in that sense, yes, tragic hero, because her doom is inevitable and the only way she could have avoided it is to have been a different person.  But I don't think that it's necessarily an indictment of Tuuri's character traits?  Which you could describe as flaws, or even tragic flaws, but part of what makes Tuuri such a great character is that she has the flaws of her virtues and the virtues of her flaws.  The same traits that get her into trouble or cause her to harm others are the same ones that make her such a joy to be around and give her life direction and purpose.  And, in the end (if this is the end of Tuuri's story, which it might be, but it's also possible that it's not, one way or another) I think it's important that she lived and died on her own terms.  I don't even see her suicide in terms of giving up; it was an active step she took in order to avoid the fate of the voices she was beginning to hear.  It might have been an impulsive, emotion-fueled step rather than a rational and considered decision, but then, so many of Tuuri's choices always were.

I personally don’t know how the scene could initially be read in other ways, though I concede the earlier scene is in fact Tuuri stating pretty firmly she doesn’t regret going. The thing is, there’s really only a few ways to read Tuuri’s final words. My initial reading, where Tuuri is regretful, and blames herself (if only I had wised up in time - if only I wasn’t so naive -) or just a general ‘well, fuck, this is how the chips fell, my life wasn’t perfect but i got to live it’. Maybe even just bewilderment, because she’s still in shock over the Rash. In my view, I prefer my initial reading, maybe without the regret, but definitely Tuuri blaming her own worldview. This is because of very small details (Tuuri’s downturned head in the last panel, the way the swan swoops ominously, straight for her, and the fact that the narrative to this point is, well, I see this as an indictment of her virtues, but that’s something I’ll talk about in a sec.)

The thing is, killing a character is always killing their flaws AND virtues. I absolutely agree Tuuri was a vibrantly interesting character who had more than enough flaws that fed into her good points, because where she was ambitious she was overreaching, and where she was smart she would put down people. She is very flawed, and so interesting with it. Here, I’m moving away from in-text reasons why Tuuri has to die (she has the rash and she wants to die clean) and more towards how this works on a meta level. Because for me, personally, if this doesn’t work on a meta level, I can’t take the in-text reason as a good substitute. So yes: Tuuri died on her own terms, but it’s important to examine why it is that the author chose to make Tuuri die, not how she decided to portray it. Example: I understand that a lot of Game Of Thrones makes perfect logical/in-text sense, but a lot of it is so unsatisfying I don’t give a damn.

 Killing a character kills what they stand for. In the case of Dumbledore, and a lot of Harry Potter’s parental figures, he dies because he symbolizes protection, wisdom, and a fallback Harry can always turn to. Harry needs to do shit on his own, so mentors need to die. Protection dies. To return to Game of Thrones, Ned Stark dies because he’s the last uncomplicated/nonambitious person of power left. He symbolized moderation, or at the very least, decency. In order for Game of Throne’s plot to proceed, and its worldview of everything sucks, he needs to go.

This isn’t to say that every single character death in all of media is a specific punishment for specific people. Death =/= this character is bad and dies because they’re bad. Those two examples above are examples of characters who die because they’re not bad, because the narrative needs it.

The reason why I say Tuuri’s death is an indictment of her character is because the reason she dies is explicitly tied to her character, by her own admission, and the contrast between her and the other characters (I will address this). Like you said, that exchange basically sums up that she would have gone anyway, because who she is is an explorer, and she’s not immune, and she couldn’t have done otherwise. The flaws of her personality (very emotion-driven thinking, doing things without telling anyone because she’s right all the time Isn’t She) gets her to the beach, but it is specifically the virtues of her personality (her curiosity and drive to explore) that land her on the mission, that put her at risk, that means that she will die and she does. So why does the narrative need Tuuri to die? What does her death serve? Her death is cheap as chips if it’s just to darken the tone of the comic or for shock value.

Remember that Tuuri is the only one enthused about exploring the outside world. Lalli doesn’t give a shit, Emil wants money and prestige, Mikkel is....there, Sigrun wanted a holiday and money, and Reynir as the only other non-immune who wanted to explore the outside world and is summarily backtracking on his worldview pretty much immediately, with no signs of stopping. Tuuri’s death? haha, good luck prying that kid out of Iceland. Tuuri’s death is the death of exploration and the death of curiosity, because god knows none of these other characters were supplying any of that, and the only character who did (Reynir) is actually explicitly blaming his worldview of curiosity and exploration for his current predicament.

This is why I am saying that this is an indictment of Tuuri’s character, and more broadly, that the message of the comic is one I don’t like, because it is broadly saying that it’s better to stay at home and take no risks. It’s an Icarus message, turned up to eleven. It’s trying not to be that, but the author is basically reinforcing that message through Tuuri and Reynir over and over again, and through the complete and utter disinterest the other characters have in anything that’s not money or fighting. This mission is supposed to be an official factfinding/exploration mission for the government as a cover, with illegal books on the side, and yet we have only seen the looting aspect. No one even seems particularly interested in the knowledge inside the books except for - you guessed it - Tuuri. Mikkel a little bit, for the cure, but Tuuri eclipses him in enthusiasm. Will Mikkel turn out to harbor the spirit of adventure? I don’t know, but at the moment it looks like he’s focused on surviving and only surviving, to the point where he just shuts down any negative thing Reynir says.

The comic is basically reinforcing ‘stay still stay silent’, and Tuuri embodies the exact opposite of that message. Her dying only fuels that.

So I acknowledge my reading of the comic was incomplete and I do appreciate that you’ve brought that to my attention, but I really do think that her death was a writing move that reinforces a message I find...unsatisfactory.

SCOUT:

I strongly disagree that the death of a character means the death of what they stood for. Look at V for Vendetta (the comic) for a work that explicitly states the opposite, though there are many others. Even in SSSS, Reynir is almost a clone of Tuuri's core intentions and personality (something that's bugged me for a while, but now I see the reason behind it) so it's not like the comic punishes all adventurousness and innocence.

Personally I think Tuuri died because we need a character in the afterlife for a solid reason (maybe explicitly a Finn/Hotakainen) so her death was necessary to advance the plot somehow, and not intended as shitting on her world view. It still sucks that she had to be "used" like that, I think her character had a lot more potential alive, but I'm not the one writing the comic. So I hate that she died but I read very different things into it than you do.

The thing is, I usually read that death thing because a lot of the times its how death as a tool is used in stories, but I agree - a lot of the time death can be a triumphant/noble thing. Sacrificing yourself for a cause carries a lot of weight, and immortalizes you. The entire point of Rogue One is that they give their lives over for hope, and that sacrifice enshrines their death in meaning, etc. If you die doing what is right or good or important, then yes, death is absolutely not something that’s gonna ‘cheapen’ a good character. It’s not a defeat if you go down advancing your cause, helping to make the world a better place, or, hell, just doing something you know in your heart is right.

But in this case Tuuri’s death doesn’t really...advance anything. Because Tuuri isn’t dying doing something that people think is noble or good. Tuuri’s drive to explore is treated as eccentric at best, and downright suicidal at worst. She even acknowledges herself it’s kind of incredibly dangerous, but she never sits up and says it’s something she’d absolutely die to do because she thinks it’s just - personal to her. From her own perspective, you could argue she set out to explore, she did, she got to breathe air without a mask, case closed, but I think you and I both know that’s a weak argument. Exploration is not presented as important in either a good or bad way in-comic. It’s just kind of ridiculous. Hell, the government doesnt think it’s important, and neither do the organizers, who are in it to make money. 

And Reynir isn’t really looking to explore right now either! I pointed it out in my reply to Minu, but he’s basically backtracked on all exploring. He says in that conversation with Tuuri when she says ‘yes I wanted to explore’ that he wants to go home and never leave. Reynir is supposed to be the clone of Tuuri exploration and curiosity-wise, and yet right now he’s uh. He is deeply regretting setting foot outside of Iceland, and Tuuri dying sure as hell isn’t going to help with that. Kid’s depressed. And has also explicitly blamed his own mindset for being in this situation.

So that’s my opinion, and if it turns out that Tuuri has use in the afterlife, that would be great, but as the comic stands right now at the time of writing, it looks like Tuuri just died and is definitely not coming back. So. If she resurrects or happens to be able to exercise her adventure-y worldview, and if Reynir does an about face and decides he wants to keep exploring, I’ll eat my hat, but I dont think I gotta reach for my beanie anytime soon. I seem to have read very different things into her death than you guys did, which is interesting. 

[clausvonbohlen]

The Holy Mountain

I spent a few weeks last summer in the Engadine valley in Switzerland. It is a place that has been dear to me since early childhood. In the Spinas valley, which forks off from the main Engadine valley, there is a footpath called the ‘Märchenweg’ – the fairytale path. Every kilometer or so, in a small clearing, stands a wooden chair carved from the trunk of a tree. The chair is surrounded by smaller tree segments that serve as stools. Inside the chair is a wooden file that contains the text of a fairytale from the area. Each story is printed in 5 languages – German, French, Italian, English and Romantsch, the local tongue that is a remnant of the Latin spoken by Roman legionaries stationed here.

  These six little clearings, with their storyteller’s chairs, are paid for by the village council and have always epitomized for me everything that is best about Switzerland. I have written about them before in a previous blog, but the charm does not fade. They bring to mind the lovely German expression eine heile Welt – an unbroken world. For me, it is a counterweight to global politics, economic crises, climate change, refugees, pain in all its many forms. Back in August, I did a drawing of one of these circles of chairs. It felt very peaceful.

  That same evening, I watched a short documentary segment in the Swiss news about Najah al-Bukai, a Syrian artist with a photographic memory who was held and tortured in one of the regime’s detention centres. He finally managed to escape from Syria, and now lives in Paris where he creates, from memory, haunting images from his time in the detention centre. Talking about his work, he says, ‘It is a personal therapy that allows me to evacuate.’ In an emotional sense, one assumes.

                  Drawings by Najah Al Bukai

After watching this report, I felt that my own work was embarrassingly frivolous by comparison. The feeling persisted for some days, until it dawned on me that although the outcomes could scarcely be more different, our motivations are similar: drawing, and art in general, as a form of therapy, and a way to find tranquility. With that in mind, I completed a few more small pieces.

                                  *

Once back in Athens, I lost some of that Swiss tranquility. The summer is long, and the pleasure-seeking attitude that goes with it leaves a psychological hangover. This was the first anniversary of my life in Greece. The first 8 months had been busy, finding a place to live, and a place to work, doing them both up, taking my first steps in learning the language, and accumulating the thousand and one small objects that are required for a comfortable settled existence in a Western metropolis. The next 4 months had been summer, with friends visiting, and time spent out of doors. And now I had run out of excuses, and pocket money; I needed to knuckle down and get to work, and that made me feel… restless and unbalanced. Not that I wanted to be elsewhere, just that I was not accustomed to long periods of focused activity. That, and the underlying anxiety that my output would fail to live up to my aspirations.

  Ironically, the one thing that my restless mind was able to settle on was the thought of restlessness itself; I kept coming back to this. We must surely live in the most restless of times. Scrolling through social media, multitasking, channel-hopping, budget travel… these are all expressions of our restlessness. It is not as acute in Greece as elsewhere, which is partly why I like living here, but it still exists. Very few people are unaffected - that is perhaps a lifetime’s work.

  I sometimes think back to an older English lady I knew in Beirut. She was married to a Lebanese man. For some years they had lived in Dubai. She once narrated to me a particularly cherished memory: she remembered waking up one morning in their house in Dubai, the sun filtering through the curtains, her husband back from a business trip and fixing breakfast in the kitchen, and the sound of her two children playing in the garden. And at that moment, she told me, she felt at perfect peace. Everything she wanted or cared about was right there, within reach. She was, for once, free from desire.

It is a beautiful image, and an enviable one… ‘So far the poet.’ But what the narrative does not reveal is the transience. Her husband will go away on business again. Her children will grow up. Dissatisfaction will return. How does one address the root?

                             *

  This is the background against which two significant things happened to me recently. The first is a book, and the second a short trip.

Over the summer, a close friend recommended Empire of the Summer Moon, an outstanding book by S. C. Gwynne, about the rise and fall of the Comanche tribe on the American Great Plains, towards the end of the 1800s. It has made me reconsider some of my most deeply held convictions.

  Like most boys of my generation and background, I grew up admiring the cowboys of the old Wild West. They were brave, independent, steely men. They were fighting against savages whose custom it was to scalp people. And, I suppose, the cowboys were white and basically European.

  Then, when I was old enough to question the cartoons and comics and movies that had shaped this worldview, I had to confront some nasty truths. The whites took the land from the Indian tribes, who had never believed in ownership in our modern sense anyway. The Indians had lived off the land, and roamed freely over it. The whites made treaties and broke them. They were driven by greed. Before the cowboys, there were Spanish missionaries who had attempted to impose their God – the same God in whose name much of South America had been enslaved – on an indigenous culture that lived in harmony with the natural world, and whose spirituality was a living breathing thing, not relegated to a clapboard Church once a week.

  That is how I started to think. And corroboration was not hard to find. I read about C. G. Jung’s visit to Taos Pueblo in New Mexico in 1925. Jung met and befriended Ochway Biano (‘Mountain Lake’), the medicine man of the tribe. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), Jung quoted Ochway Biano:

  ‘See,’ Ochway Biano said, ‘how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think they are mad.’

 Yes, I thought. We are always uneasy and restless. And perhaps mad too.

  Then I read Cormac McCarthy’s magnificent Blood Meridian, and it seemed that white moral supremacy was a myth too: the whites were also scalping the Indians on punitive missions. It was a bloodbath all round.

  I read The Gospel of the Redman by Ernest Thompson Seton, a writer and wildlife artist who later became the founder of the Boy Scouts of America. In it, he records the  dedication that a Tekahionwake Indian was expected to speak over the body of a deer he had just killed, and I was moved by it, much more so than the bland Christian ‘Grace’ intoned at school mealtimes.

  To The Dead Deer

I am sorry I had to kill thee, Little Brother.

But I had need of thy meat.

My children were hungry and crying for food.

Forgive me, Little Brother.

I will do honour to thy courage, thy strength and thy beauty.

See, I will hang thine horns on this tree.

I will decorate them with red streamers.

Each time I pass, I will remember thee and do honour to thy spirit.

I am sorry I had to kill thee.

Forgive me, Little Brother.

I went on to study psychology, and focused on the psychology of shamanism, and traveled to the Amazon to explore an indigenous worldview that created a matrix of meaning in which myth, history, culture, medicine, ritual, cosmology, and the natural world all hung together in a coherent and purposive whole… and this is what the early missionaries had demonized as ‘devil-worship’! My own experience, naïvely romanticizing as it may sound, was that people are happier, calmer, and less neurotic the less exposure they have had to Western values. And the indigenous perspective often seemed much more beautiful too.

  (for more on this, see http://www.clausvonbohlen.com/post/20467603477/what-can-we-learn-from-shamanism)

  So, I have been pretty down on the ‘achievements’ of the West for most of my adult life (though nevertheless grateful for advances in medicine and dentistry, and appreciative of certain artistic achievements).

  But Empire of the Summer Moon has given me a lot to think about. The book charts the rise and fall of the Comanche tribe, with a particular emphasis on the story of Cynthia Ann Parker. Cynthia Ann was the daughter of settlers whose small fort was attacked and overrun by a Comanche raiding party in 1836, when Cynthia Ann was 9 years old. She was taken captive, along with her younger brother, her 17 year old aunt and her aunt’s infant son, and another young woman called Elizabeth Kellogg.

  Before being captured, Cynthia Ann saw her father scalped and her grandmother raped. Then the prisoners were tied to their Comanche captors on horseback. The Comanche rode hard to distance themselves from possible pursuit. When they camped for the night, the two ‘adult’ women - Rachel (17) and Elizabeth Kellogg - were gang raped in front of the children. Rachel Parker’s baby was eventually dismembered by being dragged around behind a horse. 9 year old Cynthia Ann went on to be adopted by a Comanche family, and eventually married a Comanche chief. Their son, Qanah, was the last chief of the Comanches, and the book also tells the story of his life.

  But so what? A one-off story of brutality from an unusually vindictive Native American tribe, right? Well, that is what I would previously have thought. But, if the author is to be believed – and the book is an impressive and well-referenced work of scholarship – then this was not a one-off incident at all. Raiding and counter-raiding had been the norm for Indian tribes long before the first whites arrived. And raiding was always conducted with astonishing brutality: men who were not killed were invariably tortured, women were gang raped, and babies were generally skewered.

  The picture that emerges from this book is one of a culture without anything that we would recognise as morality. There were certainly taboos, and spirits to be placated, but it is a far cry from the notion that I have long cherished, of peace-loving peoples living in harmony with each other and with the natural world. The author writes:

  It is impossible to read Rachel Plummer’s memoir without making moral judgments about the Comanches. The torture-killing of  a defenseless seven-week old infant, by committee decision no less, is an act of almost demonic immorality by any modern standard. The systematic gang-rape of women captives seems to border on criminal perversion, if not some very advanced form of evil. The vast majority of Anglo-European settlers in the American West would have agreed with those assessments. To them, Comanches were thugs and killers, devoid of ordinary decency, sympathy, or mercy. Not only did they inflict horrific suffering, but from all evidence they enjoyed it. This was perhaps the worst part, and certainly the most frightening. Making people scream in pain was interesting and rewarding for them, just as it is interesting and rewarding for young boys in modern-day America to torture frogs or pull the legs off grasshoppers. Boys presumably grow out of that; for Indians, it was an important part of their adult culture and one they accepted without challenge.

 The first shock, for me, was the realization of the wanton cruelty of native Americans towards each other. The second shock was that they saw nothing wrong with this, as the following passage makes clear:

Enemies, meanwhile, were enemies, and the rules for dealing with them had come down through a thousand years. A Comanche brave who captured a live Ute would torture him to death without question. It was what everyone had always done, what the Sioux did to the Assiniboine, what the Crow did to the Blackfeet. A Comanche captured by a Ute would expect to receive exactly the same treatment (thus making him weirdly consistent with the idea of the Golden Rule), which was why Indians always fought to the last breath on battlefields, to the astonishment of Europeans and Americans. There were no exceptions. Of course, the same Indians also believed, quite as deeply, in blood vengeance. The life of the warrior tortured to death would be paid for with another torture-killing if possible, preferably even more hideous than the first. This, too, was seen as fair play by all Indians in the Americas.

 I have recently been reading the Odyssey, and I have been struck by a similar absence of moral sentiment in it. At no point does anyone question whether there are any values beyond strength and skill. Even heroic Odysseus boasts about putting all the men of a city to the sword, and carrying off the women, just because he could. But we ought not to be surprised by this; it wasn’t until the time of Socrates and Aristotle, some 300 years later, that people first started to question whether might is always right (at least as far as written records reveal).

  The parallel between Homeric times and Native Americans should not be surprising either: the Maecenean period that is the basis of Homer’s narrative was a late bronze age culture, whilst the Native Americans were – in terms of their technology - a stone age people. The two have a lot more in common with each other than with the highly organised, industrialized West that the white settlers represented.

 S. C. Gwynne argues that morality as we understand it today is closely linked to complex social organization. But this kind of organization only develops when large numbers of people can live together in one place, and when they have the leisure to develop capacities which are not directly related to meeting the most basic human needs.  Agriculture made this possible, but agriculture is something which the Native American tribes did not begin to practise until the arrival of Anglo-Europeans. Plains Indians such as the Comanche remained nomadic hunter-gatherers until the bitter end. If this theory is correct, it means that there is a direct causal connection between higher moral values on the one hand, and complex civilization on the other. Morality has developed in conjunction with the increasing complexity of human society. This was a big realization for me. For all of my adult life, I have thought that the opposite is true.

                                *

  The second significant event was a trip, at the end of October, to visit Mt. Athos, the ‘Holy Mountain’ in the north of Greece. It towers over the tip of a peninsula that sticks out into the Aegean. The whole peninsula is an autonomous monastic region; women and domestic female animals are not permitted. The area is sacred to the ‘Panayia’ - the Virgin Mary - and it is also known as ‘the Garden of the Mother of God’. There are about 20 functioning monasteries on the peninsula, connected to each other by footpaths and dirt roads. Some of them were founded a thousand years ago.

  Permits are not easy to come by for non-Orthodox visitors. I have wanted to visit Mt. Athos for some time, but in the end I could only go when they happened to have a permit to spare, though happily still before the winter. I was planning to walk from monastery to monastery in traditional fashion. Board and lodging in the monasteries is included in the cost of the permit, but you do have to book ahead. I set about doing this from Athens, but again, it was not easy – the monasteries only answer the phone at very specific times, for a couple of hours, and often in heavily accented Greek. In addition, it is hard to know exactly how long it will take to walk from one monastery to another, and you do not want to arrive too late since the gates are locked at sunset and remain closed until the following morning.

  I approached this trip as if it were a short trek. I was looking forward to seeing a new area of Greece, and to spending some days walking through virgin forests. The absence of technology and commerce was appealing too. I had my rucksack, my half-read copy of Empire of the Summer Moon, a sleeping bag, and a loaf of bread – the latter two in case I did miscalculate and ended up being locked out.

  I left Athens at midday and arrived in Thessaloniki around sunset. It was a Saturday evening and Thessaloniki had a lively, friendly feel to it. I bought some gourmet trail mix on the promenade, then pushed on to Ouranoupolis, the jumping off point for Mt. Athos. The last two hours of the drive were along winding, misty roads through a forest, in the dark. I was listening to ‘Up and Vanished’, a podcast about a real life murder investigation in a provincial American backwater. All together, it made for a spooky drive, particularly when a large truck tailgated me for some distance.

  I spent the night in a small hotel in Ouranoupolis. At 7.30 the following morning, I made my way to the Pilgrims’ Office to pick up my permit. The office only opened at 8, but I thought I would get there early to avoid any last minute mishaps (there was only one ferry to Mt. Athos and it left at 9.30). I was surprised that the office was already open when I arrived, and even more surprised to see a queue of at least fifty people waiting to receive their permits. They were wearing a lot of black leather. Many of them looked more like football hooligans than pilgrims. Almost all of them spoke Russian, though I was later to discover that they came from a number of Orthodox countries – Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia as well as Russia. Being Orthodox, it is easier for them to get permits.

  The queue moved faster than I had anticipated and I soon had my permit. I proceeded to the ticket office for the small ferry, and had to queue again, with the same crowd. After a tasteless breakfast by the quay, most of it spent swatting flies, I boarded the ferry. There were no longer any women to be seen, and a holiday atmosphere prevailed. As the ferry nosed towards Athos, some of the Russians pulled cans of beer from their pockets and cracked them open. Others threw pieces of bread into the air for the trailing seagulls to catch. My particularly thuggish looking neighbors kept turning in their seats and inadvertently (I think) elbowing me. I put my headphones on and returned to the murder investigation podcast. This was not quite as I had imagined.

The ferry stopped at each of the monasteries along the way to the tiny port of Dafni. I had planned to walk from Dafni, across the peninsula, to the monastery of Iviron on the east side. But when we docked, I saw that two buses were waiting to take people to Karyes, the administrative centre of Mt. Athos, and half way to Iviron. If I took the bus, I would be sure of arriving at Iviron before sunset. I climbed on board, and encountered one of the more characteristic aspects of life on Athos: male body odor. It would appear that, in the absence of women, men wash less, or smell more, or both. Boys’ schools are the same, as, I imagine, are armies.

  The bus to Karyes took half an hour, on a dirt road, and from there I walked to Iviron monastery. The morning’s clouds cleared and I was granted some beautiful views of Mt. Athos itself, to the south. For over two hours, I only saw one other walker; the other pilgrims had vanished. This continued to be the case for the whole three days – once or twice I encountered an Athonite monk, but no other pilgrims. And this solitude contributed to a deep sense of peacefulness.

  As I walked, I studied the piece of paper I had picked up in the permit office, detailing guidelines for visitors. These were quite strict – no shorts, no bathing etc. (not unrelated to the body odor, perhaps). The paper began by welcoming me to the ‘Garden of the Mother of God’… what a beautiful phrase! Garden, Mother, God… what’s not to like? But what does it really mean? How can God, the life-force that animates the universe, have a mother in any meaningful sense? Is it not the narrowest anthropocentrism? So beautiful, and yet, once again, I felt on the outside… the foreigner, the observer, wishing I could believe in something so lovely, but unable to deceive myself.

  These ruminations were cut short by the appearance of Iviron itself, a medieval fortified keep beside the sea. I located the guestmaster, was shown to my room, and then attended the afternoon service. There was incense, and chanting, and monks in black habits with long beards. I admired the ritual, and the solemnity, and found it wholly unintelligible. There were other pilgrims too, all Orthodox, who appeared to know exactly what to do, and went in for an orgy of icon-kissing and crossing of their chests – so often, in fact, that it began to look like a nervous tick, rather than a sign of devotion. After the service, we were led across the courtyard to the refectory. Here there were two long tables with plates of roast fish in front of every place. We ate while listening to a reading from the Bible, in Alexandrian Greek.

                                Iviron 

After dinner, we filed out into the courtyard, where it was still light. The half hour after meals was one of the few times when monks appeared to talk to each other. I wandered by myself between groups of Russian speaking pilgrims and pairs of Greek speaking monks. I went outside for a few minutes before the gates were closed for the night; there were Russians smoking outside. Then, as I crossed the courtyard again, I was astonished to hear two English accents, emanating from two bearded old monks. I approached them and introduced myself.

  Both were indeed English, and both had converted to the Orthodox faith a long time ago. One had initially lived in a Coptic monastery in the Sinai desert, the other had been a doctor, then a psychiatrist, then a priest, then an Anglican monk, and now, finally, a monk on Athos. And they also wanted to know why I was there. I told them, as best I could.

  Brother David saw through my meandering narrative. ‘If you are genuine in your search, then God will reveal himself to you,’ he said.

  ‘But there is so much that doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘Like the Garden of the Mother of God… it’s a beautiful idea, but how can God have a mother?’

  ‘Well,’ said Brother David, ’We believe that Christ was human, so he had a mother, but he was God too.’

  Of course! How foolish of me not to think of that! I felt myself blush.

  ‘You may find that mysterious, and it is. But if you follow this path, then over the years, many mysteries will become clear to you.’

  ‘But I am not sure I can just believe something because someone, or some book, says so. That is what I like about Buddhism – it’s experiential, empirical, scientific. You practise a technique, and then you see whether it works, whether your experience matches that of others.’

  Brother Irodio, the ex-Copt, had been less talkative so far, but now he said, ‘That is what the Orthodox religion is like. We train ourselves too, over a lifetime. And then, over time, God reveals himself to us.’

  For a long time now, I have thought of myself as a pluralist. Most religions consider themselves to have a monopoly on the truth, and that has always struck me as highly dubious. From within the perspective of any given religion, the claims and the texts and the norms are perfectly coherent… everything hangs together and makes sense. But the same applies across the board, to all religions. So why are Christian arguments that rely for their evidence on the Bible any more compelling than Moslem arguments that rely on the Koran?

  Brother Irodio and Brother David made no effort whatsoever to convert me. But Brother David in particular emanated a peacefulness, and a warmth, that made a deep impression on me. And this quality of peacefulness, this sense of Eine Heile Welt, grew deeper with every day that I spent on the Holy Mountain.

  Of course, you might say that it is hardly surprising that these monks seem peaceful – there are no women to distract them, and they have no money to worry about, and nothing to buy or own. That is true. But I think that many people would find that very challenging. Many people actually like the drama, the games, the getting and having and then again spending or losing…. But I am not sure that I do, any more. And sometimes, maybe all that noise is a way of distracting oneself from what is going on inside.

The following morning I left early, while the monastery was still shrouded in mist. I continued south along the coast for about an hour, then struck inland to cross the peninsula from east to west. The dirt road snaked its way upwards to the central ridge. A couple of pick up trucks drove past me, and both times the monks stopped to ask if I was lost. One of the monks was American, and when I told him that I was heading to Osoriou Gregoriou, he told me the name of an English monk there.

  The leaves were falling and I was reminded of a previous pilgrimage some years ago, to Santiago de Compostela, much of which was also during autumn. The temperature dropped as I got closer to the ridge. On a couple of occasions I passed monks chopping down trees. They used chainsaws, but enormous shire horses were waiting to drag the trunks out of the woods. When the horses snorted, conical clouds of condensation jetted from their nostrils.

  I crossed the central ridge, with the peak of Athos to my left, then descended steeply down the other side towards the more sheltered west coast of the peninsula. I arrived at the monastery of Osoriou Gregoriou in the middle of the afternoon. While waiting for the guestmaster, I chatted to a rotund monk from Kalamata who had formerly been a pizza delivery boy. He was keen to reminisce about English football, and I fear I was rather a disappointment to him.

                          Osoriou Gregoriou

Osoriou Gregoriou is perched above the water. Mondays are days of fasting, and the evening meal was a bowl of lentils, but the meager fare was made up for by the sight and sound of the sea directly below us. After dinner I enquired after brother Damien, the English monk. I was led down a number of staircases to a bookbindery where Brother Damien was putting the finishing touches on a newly bound spine. He had a curly grey beard and a humorous manner. He was originally from Stockwell in South London, just down the road from where I used to live in Brixton.

  We chatted that evening, and again after breakfast the following morning (which was in stark contrast to the evening meal – it was accompanied by wine, and finished off with a Ferrero Rocher chocolate). To say that Brother Damien was a conspiracy theorist would be an understatement, and I don’t particularly want to go into all that again, nor relive the sense of vertigo the conversation gave me (admittedly, we were also perched on a small wooden balcony above the sea). But I am grateful to Brother Damien for introducing me to the concept of ‘Theosis’. This is perhaps the central tenet of the Orthodox religion. It holds that the true purpose of human life is nothing less than for man to become one with God, to become a god himself.

  When I said goodbye, Brother Damien gave me a slim volume written by Archmandrite Georgios, the former Abbot of the monastery. It was entitled ‘Vergöttlichung: Das Ziel eines Menschenlebens’. He only had this German copy, but I later found an English version. The English title is, ‘Theosis: The True Purpose of Human Life.’

  I left Osoriou Gregoriou and headed north, back towards Dafni. After about an hour I passed through the beautiful gardens of Simonas Petras. The monastery itself towered above me, its walls inconceivably high, like CGI battlements from a Lord of the Rings movie. I passed back through Dafni and then climbed the final hour up to Xiropotamou monastery. Here the friendly young Romanian guestmaster (not a monk) plied me with tsipouro (Greek Schnapps) and Turkish Delight.  Perhaps he felt he was atoning for the monastery, since it was rather an austere place: being non-Orthodox, I was not allowed to attend services or even eat at the same time as the monks.

                        Simonas Petras

That evening I read Archmandrite Georgios’ book on Theosis. He wrote:

  Since man is “called to be a god” (i.e. was created to become a god), as long as he does not find himself on the path of Theosis he feels an emptiness within himself… he feels that something is not going right, so he is not joyful even when he is trying to cover the emptiness with other activities. He may numb himself, create a glamorous world, or cage and imprison himself within this world, yet at the same time he remains poor, small, limited. He may organise his life in such a way that he is almost never at peace, never alone with himself. Surrounded by noise, tension, television, radio, continuous information about this and that, he may seek to forget with drugs; not to think, not to worry, not to remember that he is on the wrong path and has strayed from his purpose.

In the end, wretched contemporary man finds no rest until he finds that “something else,” the highest thing; the thing which actually exists in his life which is truly beautiful and creative.

  That gave me plenty to think about.

 The following morning I again left before the sun had risen. There are terraces behind the monastery where many gnarled olive trees grow. I saw a monk with a great white beard and a staff; he was walking between the trees and inspecting the leaves. He seemed so entirely at peace with himself and the world, his world. A wave of emotion swept over me in that moment – there is such a thing as eine Heile Welt. And there are great mysteries too.

  As I returned to Dafni to catch the ferry, I wondered about that wave of emotion: was it a tiny experience of what the faithful call ‘Grace’, something like a gift from God? And that bearded monk in the cool of the morning… for years I have assumed that men have anthropomorphized God, that we have created him in our image. But maybe I’m wrong? Maybe we really are created in the image of God? Not that God is male and bearded, nothing as simplistic as that, but maybe we do share some of God’s qualities? Maybe the divine is less abstract than I have always assumed? Maybe a personal relationship is not only possible, but necessary?

  Since I was 11 years old, when I dropped out of confirmation class, I have not considered myself a Christian. A few years later, at boarding school, I encountered a couple of Reverends who could scarcely have been less inspiring: one a sad weasely figure, the other an ignorant bully and former army Padre who tried to show off about how many Argentinians he had killed during the Falklands War. Chapel was a daily bore, although the music and choir were good. Then, in my 20s, a couple of visits to Charismatic Christian churches, and a couple of sessions of the Alpha Course, but it was all so cheesy! So paper thin! Whereas on Mt. Athos, I felt there was something ancient, mystical, solemn, and deeply inspiring… qualities that I have rarely encountered in the West.

  On days when I feel inexplicably tense, or somehow ill at ease, there is a phrase that comes to my mind from those dull chapel services of my adolescence: ‘The peace of God, which passeth all understanding…’ Could those be more than just pretty words? It is certainly worth investigating. I think I was wrong about the Native Americans, and that was a longstanding conviction too.

[isoristudiesus]

Guide to Instagram Marketing || AVEX Designs

Instagram has 1 billion monthly lively customers, and that number is projected to rise. The social media platform has grown tremendously since its launch in 2010, and if your enterprise isn’t profiting from the 60% of Instagram customers who log in day by day, you’re missing a serious revenue stream.

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information to Instagram advertising

Carry a Uniform Model Voice

The phrases and imagery you employ on Instagram ought to mirror the type and content material used on your web site, other social media channels, and print advertising supplies. Your brand voice is what sets you aside from the competitors, and should you aren’t purposeful about defining that voice, your brand will get lost in the shuffle of on-line shoppers.

The brand voice encompasses numerous parts: language, colors, photographs, audience engagement, customer support, and the record goes on. Your model voice ought to be uniform across all contact points of what you are promoting.

Take the healthy ice cream model Enlightened for instance.

Colors: The company uses enjoyable, daring colors across its web site, product packaging, and Instagram content.

Language: The model’s language is straightforward and easy with a touch of humor across all digital platforms. To throw in a 16-letter company word can be method off base from the brand’s voice and audience.

Pictures: Imagery on any Enlightened platform is high-quality and crammed with vivid shade. The photographs are so lifelike, it’s as should you might scoop the ice-cream off the display.

Audience engagement: A current contest from Enlightened gained loads of attention. When the brand chose the ice-cream-for-a-year winner, they used the identical language, colors, and imagery used across all platforms. And when you need a main instance of great UGC, checkout the Enlightened homepage.

Clients should simply acknowledge your model by means of the various parts used to create your model voice.

guide to Instagram advertising

Use Hashtags on Instagram

Once you’ve developed your content fashion and Instagram posting schedule, it’s time to research hashtags that greatest characterize your model and products. There are times when a custom hashtag is desirable, as with a selected UGC campaign, but you also needs to embrace commonly used hashtags to broaden your model reach.

A number of the most popular hashtags on Instagram, according to net.stagram.com, embrace:

To connect together with your audience and turn your hashtag use into engagement and revenue, use hashtags strategically. They need to be utilized to content that’s consultant of the hashtag. Don’t simply slap it onto a submit as a result of it’s well-liked. Instagram permits for 30 hashtags. Use ones that make sense — sometimes five to 9 per publish — and alter up your hashtag use for recent content. In case you are not sure which hashtags are related to your posts, there are numerous web sites to provide help to out.

information to Instagram advertising

Create Customized Captions

The Instagram battle isn’t over with the posting of an awesome photograph. The caption beneath your picture or video have to be equally as partaking. Be descriptive and use becoming hashtags and tags.

The Instagram caption is restricted to 2,200 characters and after three strains of textual content, the caption is minimize off with an ellipsis, nevertheless it’s possible you gained’t want almost that much area to write your content material. Instagram captions with 135 to 150 character perform nicely, however there’s room for an extended type publish when applicable. Offering an excellent image is compelling, however telling the story behind it’ll get more engagement.

guide to Instagram advertising

Join Via Geolocations

If your brand is hosting or is part of an occasion, use geo-tagging or location tagging to join with event-goers or these occupied with following the happenings. New users can use the geolocation to find your model. Posts with location tagging receive 79 % greater engagement than these without it.

Geo-tagging can also be a good way to curate UGC. Whenever you comply with the event’s hashtag, you’ll discover pictures and movies shared by those on the occasion and may use them for future UGC campaigns.

information to Instagram advertising

Optimize Your Instagram Bio

Concentrate on an important facet of your brand when using the allotted 150 characters. It’s your alternative to educate clients, display your brand voice, and join clients to your web site.

You possibly can embrace one hyperlink in your Instagram bio. When deciding what that hyperlink must be, contemplate the Instagram objective you set for your small business. Are you making an attempt to drive visitors, launch a product line, or showcase your brand’s group involvement? Once you publish to your Instagram account, tell followers where to discover the link. Use “link in bio” or something comparable within your content material caption.

information to Instagram advertising

Wrapping It Up

Establishing and constructing your model’s attain on Instagram is a must have in your digital advertising repertoire. Your model is exclusive, so your content and posting technique should comply with go well with. Comply with our ideas to create your Instagram advertising technique and create an interesting method to inform your model’s story and work together together with your clients.

The post Guide to Instagram Marketing

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IN HIS FASCINATING linked novellas The Garbage Times and White Ibis, Sam Pink exposes the absurdity hidden just below the surface of everyday life. In The Garbage Times, this takes the form of a deep dive into society’s underbelly to reveal the grime most people turn away from when walking down the street: homeless people defecating, rats scurrying, pigeons eating dirty food, drug addicts having illogical conversations. It is all there, and Pink won’t allow the reader to ignore it.

The Garbage Times is an homage to the randomness of life, the inevitability of shit, scum, and death, and the beauty that glimmers amid the filth. The story’s unnamed narrator is a man who deals with all manner of absurd behavior as he loads garbage, plunges toilets and sinks, and works as a bouncer at a bar. Despite the character’s peculiarities, readers will likely find his barrage of thoughts, explosive emotions, fantasies of violence, and bursts of tenderness easy to relate to. Most of us, Pink implies, are more like this “crazy” garbage man than we would like to admit as we “plunge” our way through life trying to get rid of the shit — pun intended.

The narrator is diligent in his job. Surrounded by rats and pigeons, he takes on each clog with vigor and an absence of fear or disgust, and this endless drive to clean up the messes of others — shit seems to be everywhere — takes on a hilarious cast. Throughout, Pink’s profanity-laced prose feels fitting, as it places the reader deep in the minds of characters choking on the so-called civilized world’s muck.

In counterbalance to the crassness and moments of violence that punctuate The Garbage Times, Pink’s narrator shows a deep, humanizing love and respect for women and animals. For example, when he returns home to his cat Rontel, one of his main companions, he thinks,

Inside my apartment, Rontel was lying on the stove — his eyes half closed, wagging his tail.

He went to meow but didn’t make a sound.

He stretched, knocking a metal burner off the stove.

“Come here, my little shithead,” I said.

I picked him up and kissed his head four times real quick.

In a really deep and gravelly voice, I said, “Rontel, you a handsome baby!”

He was blinking a lot and licking his snoot, staring up at the ceiling.

Sun lit my room.

Pink’s fascination with animals continues in White Ibis, in which there is a sad, profound moment where the narrator sympathizes with a lizard trying to defend itself against the housecat Dotty, who is slowly killing it by batting it around:

This lizard was for real.

It looked up at her, gill things puffed out, like “All right, all right yeah, big tough guy, let’s have it. [wipes nose] You wanna pick on someone? Yeah ok, all right, pick on me, tough guy, go ahead and — ” but Dotty just mangled it some more.

She left it broken and mostly dead, on its back, barely breathing.

Since the lizard is suffering, the narrator’s girlfriend pressures him to kill it, and he does:

I smashed the lizard’s head with the heel of my boot. Its guts came out its side. Fuck. You tried. You tried. I get it. Sometimes you just gotta pick a place and say, “Right here. Here’s where it happens. Right here.” Gills out, boss, gills out. R.I.P.

The power, humor, sadness, and tenderness in Pink’s writing is haunting when he is at his best, as in this observation of a turtle at a laundromat aquarium in The Garbage Times:

Short bookcases with aquariums on them — turtles swimming in shallow water.

I watched this one turtle trying to swim through the aquarium wall as I dumped a garbage bag of my clothing into a washer.

The turtle made the same sideways swimming motion with both arms.

The same tap of the head against the glass.

Same tiny wave of water bouncing off the glass and coming backwards.

Each time.

Fucking shit.

This is the beauty of Pink’s work — he shows the simple devastations of containment, of beings (in this case animals) living without dignity but still striving toward hope, over and over again, as we all do, wanting things to come out all right. This is the heart of his message, the essence of his book: we will never stop trying to keep moving no matter how confined we are. No matter how random life is, we press on toward something intangible in the distance with only the will to live fueling us.

In this quest for life and dignity is an equally powerful desire to succumb to death. Its inevitability curls underneath each page, hides in each scene. Morbid readers will really dig this book. As will lovers of the absurd, though the magic of Pink is that he turns the absurd to a purpose. The novellas are hilarious and unabashedly honest in showing how bizarre life is, how unpredictable people are, and yet how each person craves love, dignity, freedom — the fundamental needs we all share. In its surreality and sadness, The Garbage Times leaves readers with an impression of characters living in the grime of the world, amid constant violence and despair, yet striving to rise above and make sense of it all.

Pink is a master of dialogue. He nails slang and the odd way people often misuse or mispronounce words, particularly folks who have been traumatized in some way or just talk funny. For example, in The Garbage Times, the narrator frequents a bar where he has a strange affection for the female bartender, who has a bizarre accent that he imitates good-naturedly:

“Stahhp! Quit maykin me laugh! Oh hey, watch [Regular] over dair. He’s doing the hair ting.”

[Regular] was a Vietnam vet who came in every day

[…]

he was whipping his long hair around, and hiking his pants over his huge belly, sitting at the corner of the bar with a group of people behind him.

His face was totally red and he was talking to himself.

The look on his face was so evil.

I laughed.

The novellas, as eccentric as they are, are grounded in scenes with a powerful sense of authority. And some of Pink’s lines are pure gold, encapsulating some universal truth or humorous insight, or both: “And all the animals headed back to their corners, to wait for tomorrow. Hiding from the things with real teeth and power.”

At the same time, Pink can get carried away. There are moments of overindulgence and repetition where the narrator will pick up a thought and run with it too long. But Pink’s audacity in taking risks is admirable. His style is purposefully messy — he is having fun writing and playing with how obsessive the brain can be. He thrills in breaking convention.

The conversational tone only adds to the humor of these novellas. Despite its odd formatting, the book becomes very readable once the reader adapts to its strange, galloping style. Pink takes the reader on an adventure, and there is a mysterious momentum at work in the voice-driven narrative, a Murakami-like invisible hand that guides these characters with a purpose to press on and preserve dignity, preserve authenticity, through a seemingly sordid, artificial world.

In White Ibis, the unnamed narrator admires the strange, titular bird that walks to and fro at the end of his driveway in Florida, the way it shoots judgmental glances and avoids direct contact with anyone or anything. It serves as a symbol for the narrator’s desire to be free of domestication, of playing along, but he’s torn because he wants to keep his girlfriend and maintain some sense of normalcy. So, while he struggles to get a job, attends parties, and carries on normal conversations, the pull of the white ibis strutting around and doing its own thing perpetually calls to him. When he sees it, he thinks, “I really wanted the white ibis to like me and to be my friend. And to its credit, it — seemingly — did not. Ok. Well. Hell, I understood.”

In pondering the nature of the ibis and all creatures that fight for survival, he articulates the theme that links the two novellas beautifully:

The peacock and other weird non-bad-ass birds like the white ibis seemed hilarious, given evolution.

I imagined all creatures at the beginning of time, right before it all begins, in private, devising their offenses/defenses and then coming out into an open field and revealing them.

Into the field of existence with means to survive.

Like hey, check this out, got a big horn on my face!

In the hands of a lesser writer, the narrator would rebel against being in a relationship and the story would implode with bickering. Instead, the young couple in White Ibis seems genuinely happy and in sync with one another, and she accepts his social anxiety as his to deal with.

White Ibis ends on a tender note. A Girl Scout troop holds a sleepover at the couple’s home, and while the narrator at first resists he ultimately enjoys the girls and their exuberance. He empathizes with their fears about being ugly as he is pressured into drawing their portraits (he is known as “the artist”), and as a result finds unexpected meaning and beauty in connection with other alienated humans.

Reading Sam Pink is an unpredictable experience. He hits varied tones and moods, and readers never know where he is taking them next. He’s been labeled “experimental,” but these novellas are just good fiction. He sucks readers in and makes them see the world as his narrators do. His stories are unique and true and impossible to put down — what more could anyone want?

¤

Taylor Larsen is the author of the novel Stranger, Father, Beloved (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, 2016). She teaches fiction writing for Catapult and the Sackett Street Writers Workshop and is co-editor of the literary website The Negatives.

The post The Things with Real Teeth and Power: Two Novellas from Sam Pink appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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