#which is not to say that line couldn't have been dual-purposes but i think writing letters is perfectly sound

[homielander]

everyone is clowning alicent for writing letters to rhaenyra and taking that small council guy's reaction ("an apology for her dead son?") as proof that she is so stupid and politically inept but i do think that proceeding diplomatically is the best course of action in her scenario. alicent does not lack awareness that her attempts at reaching out to rhaenyra are unlikely to produce results; she admits as much to otto in this very episode when she agrees with his assessment that violence is inevitable. but that doesn't mean she shouldn't do her best to temper any retaliation from rhaenyra's faction. appealing to rhaenyra is literally all she can do from her position and her best chance at minimizing the scale of any ensuing conflict. that this small council member is so comfortable openly deriding her -- the former queen who once sat at the head of the council -- speaks more to how drastically her power has been diminished since aegon's coronation.

[starbright-cobweb]

i want to have something smart to say on this topic; but i don't have the line yet, so I'm just going to observe it:

calls for "we need more representation of effeminate gay men" are very strange to me, because there's a sense in which that is the dominant, overwhelming mainstream representation.

(60s to 90s, think John Inman, Kenneth Williams, Graham Norton. In contrast to this, depictions of gay men as normatively boring or pumped up hulks ARE the pushback, are the radical action)

There's a dual, simultaneous sense in which the opposite is true.

(situations in which fems, camps, transfemme-adjacent-to-actual-transfemme, are excluded from social spaces, history, dating spaces, or the overall narrative)

There's a third, very nebulous sense that all representation is erasure when it's stereotypes for straight consumption rather than coming from an authentic perspective fleshed out from diverse angles.

(i.e. there is always a boundary line that you may not cross; sure, John Inman can camp it up on the telly but he couldn't, say, have a boyfriend; within either masculinity or effeminacy, the images produced are still confined by normative acceptability, be that straight acceptability or queer social norms; as such, all representation can be a way of hiding away dissonant existences)

A fourth discomfort around the ways people can template straight discourses of men and women onto queer cultures in ways that don't quite fit (i.e. assuming masc gays and fem gays are two different genders in an oppositional power hierarchy that's basically the same as men and women in cishetero contexts) - in this case, the implication that masculine expression is inherently a threat to feminine expression.

A fifth discomfort about the latent homophobia and misandry going on in so many labelled-as-queer spaces and discourses, and about whether these folks would actually recognise and celebrate authentic effeminacy when they saw it (if it didn't meet a mental image they're looking for and which they wish to consume); and the extent to which this is outsiders who are uncomfortable with masculinity but want the illusion of safety, consumability, even greater privilege over people who are feminine.

A sixth discomfort about how many of these critiques aren't coming from gay or bi men, a demographic which seems comparatively sidelined and quiet within labelled-as-queer spaces; and how this is very much an inside-the-community psychological knot, gay people's anxieties around their genders, about visibility, about being punished for self expression, how they police it in themselves, in others, and how healing can possibly occur in a world like this; and it's a little Awkward for outsiders to that to be weighing in. This is fraught. Oh yeah, queer men's horizontal aggression-anxiety about other queer men's gender performance is a Whole Thing; but you need to back off. Unless that's also where you're at, unless you're part of that horizontal.

a seventh handwave about the differences of culture, age, upbringing, preferred media type, and how that impacts what's dominant in your consumption (but not necessarily, in production; or what is a priority politically)

an eighth vagueness about how there's far too little media by, for and about us period, and so representations aren't in competition with one another, and all of them should be uplifted as a victory. Not every piece will serve every purpose, but collectively - as a body of artwork - they reflect us - a crowd of people. Where contrasts don't exist within texts, they exist between them.

A ninth hope and assumption that - as is so often true - someone smarter and more thoughtful than me will have thought through this before, and at some point i'll stumble across them writing or speaking and be able to sharpen this into a real observation, rather than a vague awareness that there's something a bit Off here, something complex that's not been fully named.