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atopvisenyashill · 1 year ago

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Thoughts on the Alysanne is Maegor's daughter AU? I feel like it has some interesting potential, and it vastly recontextualizes different parts of Jaehaehae (I do not like him sjsjsjs) and Alysanne's relationship (such as Jaehaehae's treatment of their daughters) but I wanna hear what you think about it!

I’ve touched on this a bit before but since you actually want to hear my thoughts, allow me to present to you my Jaehaerys Is The Goddamn Worst, And Alysanne Annoys Me Too: An Essay lmao but my answer is basically “yeah all of what you just said.”

I think it makes Alysanne much more palatable (to me) as a character because as she stands, she just fixates on forcing her daughters through these fucked up marriages at too young an age bc it traumatized her to be married and pregnant at 15 too but she’d never admit that being a willing participant in her own kidnapping by her brother-husband was the single worst thing that ever happened to her, and because Alysanne doesn’t want to admit it (and Jaehaerys would never see it as wrong or a mistake) F&B really shies away from delving into the fact that Alysanne is as deranged of a mother as Cersei is. So as she stands, she’s very flat to me because she’s presented very flatly and inconsistently. She’s so in love with Jaehaerys, she’s maritally raped by Jaehaerys, she’s a loving and doting mother, she forces her daughters into marriages when they’re the same too young age she was, she accuses her teenage girls of being scheming whores then gets angry when her husband accuses their teenage girls of being scheming whores, and worst of all we are just told “Maegelle tells them to make up so they do” so we don’t know why Alysanne gets over all of this. What is the point of riding a dragon when you never use that dragon to protect your daughters from unwanted teen marriages? We’re just not given a good enough justification for why her behavior is so weird and frustrating towards her daughters.

Make her Maegor’s daughter though…most of her behavior as an adult makes more sense. Like a worse version of Rhaenyra’s childhood almost - a father desperate for a son, but lowkey obsessed with his daughter, who makes all his hang ups about his parents the problems of every woman around him, except Maegor is out here blood sacrificing and torturing and starting wars and forcing babies on wives he discards quickly and brutally. Then here comes Jaehaerys on a white horse green dragon to save her from the horror her life has become, and he loves her so much he runs away with her even though Alyssa says they shouldn’t marry because people won’t like it. And they have beautiful children, and a beautiful marriage, and build a beautiful kingdom.

Then her pregnancies start getting dangerous. Gaemon, then Valerion, die. Alysanne thinks of the shriveled up mutants she called brothers, if Maegor’s taint has passed to her. Her perfect husband ignores her no, and forces Gael on her. Alysanne remembers that he said nothing to Rogar when Alyssa died, merely wept. Then her daughters start to die. Daella, Alyssa, Viserra, all within a few years. Then Jaehaerys makes Saera watch as he murders her boyfriend, calls her a whore, and says Alysanne cannot follow Saera to Lys. Alysanne thinks of Maegor torturing the Harroways over Alys’ presumed infidelity. Jaehaerys says he’s sorry, and her daughter badgers her into forgiving him, and she remembers how she helped Jaehaerys badger Alyssa into forgiving Rogar. Not two years later, Jaehaerys passes over Rhaenys. Alysanne thinks of how she was never enough for her father, how she felt so superior to Rhaena banished to Dragonstone and resented by Aerea, yet there she is dragging Gael away from court because she can’t stand to be with Jaehaerys. How her father was surrounded by dead women and dead babies and how Jaehaerys is surrounded by his own dead daughters, but surely she did the right thing, surely Maegor was worse, surely the realm is better off? Is he right to pass over Rhaenys? Is she enabling a man just as monstrous as her father? She will never decide, because Maegelle will guilt her about keeping Gael isolated at Dragonstone, and Alysanne will do as she’s told, just like Rhaena, and Alyssa, and Jeyne, Elinor, Ceryse, Alys, and Tyanna, just like every one of her daughters.

I do get why Alysanne is Alyssa & Aenys’ and not Maegor’s. The weird Targ babies, the line not descending from Visenya, Jaehaerys and Alysanne being held up as the perfect Targaryen couple specifically because they are brother and sister and dragon riders. I do even think canon Alysanne is likely traumatized by her time as a hostage on Dragonstone, and the ensuing war, and the trauma bond that caused with Jaehaerys, and it makes her idolize Jaehaerys, and then he isolates her at Dragonstone so he can swiftly and safely marry, groom, and knock her up. It’s not like,,,, a fun time, and it’s enough to make anyone crazy and weird about their daughters, but I think having her father be Maegor makes Alysanne herself much deeper because it gives her, as the most beloved Targaryen queen, a blood tie to the most hated Targaryen king, and a marriage to the most beloved Targaryen king. It fits better with a lot of the themes of the main series (again, imo) - forcing the spotlight on the outsiders to see how the affect the story from behind the scenes. The fall of Aegon’s sons, and The Long Reign, not told from the PoV or to serve the PoV of any of the kings or princes, but of the queen that tied them all together.

#anti jaehaerys i targaryen #f&b critical #jaehaerys the cruel #fire and blood critical #asks #thesadboy #like he kind of does this with aenys & maegor by focusing on alyssa and rhaena and the wives and visenya.#but the Moment jaehaerys enters the scene he completely dominates it. the same way daemon and aemond do actually.#but this is not. it should not!! be their story. that’s not how the main series is told anyway!!#if f&b isn’t told by a dornish maester than it should have been written by a septa!!!#nuns wrote books!!!!!#rich noblewomen wrote novels and poetry!!!!!!!#GEORGE DO YOU READ WOMEN. I AM NO LONGER ASKING POLITELY.#i went to look for her mother and apparently this was just a mistake elio made and i’m even more depressed. i can’t believe i’m saying this #but elio damn your mind.#i bet he saw that and went ‘wait which one is her fucjing mother’ and george was like what in the goddamn hell are you talking about.#idk who would be her mother in this au. if we want to keep her within 3 ish years of jaehaerys it Has to be alys or ceryse. ceryse hightowe #is the hilarious and obvious choice. but don’t count out alys harroway second wife here either.#then there’s rhaena as her mother which with the canon timeline makes him 12 years older and isn’t THAT horrible let’s stop here actually.

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fictionadventurer · 11 months ago

Text

A Crazy Tale

By G.K. Chesterton (1897)

"Hey, diddle, diddle, The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon."

It is incredible, but true, that a young man sat opposite me in a restaurant and spoke as is hereafter set down.

He was a tall, spare man, carefully dressed in a formal frock-coat and silk hat. His tone was low and casual, his manner simple and very slow, and his bleak blue eyes never changed. Anyone just out of earshot of the words would have supposed that he was describing, in a rather leisurely way, an opera or a cycling tour. I alone heard the words; and ever since that day I have gone about ready for the Apocalypse, expecting the news of some incalculable revolution in human affairs. For I know that we have reached a new era in the history of our planet: the creation of a second Adam.

He spoke as follows, between the puffs of a cigar:

"I do not ask anyone to believe this story. Only in some wild hour of a windy night, when we could believe anything, when the craziest of a knot of old wives is wiser than all the schools of reason, when the blood is lawless and the brain dethroned, when we could see the windmills grind the wind, and the sea drag the moon, the apple-tree grow lemons, and the cow lay eggs, as in a wild half-holiday of nature; then, in the ear and coarsely, let this tale be told.

"When my story begins, I was walking in a still green place. The words sound strange and abrupt even in my own ears; but there is a reason for their abruptness.

"At that point the record of my life breaks off. The day, hour, or second before some stunning blow, some tremendous event befell me, and I awoke without a memory.

"Of the lost knowledge thus sealed within me I have a kind of half-witted fear. I move trembling in the close proximity of something huge, yet hidden in the darkness of my brain. Only of two things I am convinced. The first is, that this event, which I cannot recall, was the greatest of my life; that after all my adventures, wild as they were, were dwarfed in its unapproachable presence. The second comes of a certain hour, when suddenly, and for a second, the veil was lifted and I knew all. It had gone in a flash, but I am profoundly convinced that if I tell to another all the circumstances that led up to that instantaneous revelation, to him also, as he studies them, the words will suddenly give up their meaning, and their simplicity strike him with an awful laughter.

"This then, is the story.

"The greenness, that I walked like one in a dream, stretched away on all sides to the edges of the sky. Sleepily, I let my eyes fall and woke, with a stunning thrill, to clearness. I stood shrunken with the shock, clutching myself in the smallest compass.

"Every inch of the green place was a living thing, a spire or tongue, rooted in the ground for those fantastic armies. The silence deafened me with a sense of busy eating, working, and breeding. I thought of that multitudinous life, and my brain reeled.

"Treading fearfully amid the growing fingers of the earth, I raised my eyes, and at the next moment shut them, as at a blow. High in the empty air blazed and streamed a great fire, which burnt and blinded me every time I raised my eyes to it. I have lived many years under this meteor of a fixed Apocalypse, but I have never survived the feelings of that moment. Men eat and drink, buy and sell, marry, are given in marriage, and all the time there is something in the sky at which they cannot look. They must be very brave.

"Again, a little while after, as in one of the changes in a dream, I found myself looking at something standing in the fields, something which looked at first like a man, and then like two men, and then like two men joined, till, after dizzy turning and tramping round it like the searching of a maze, I found it was some great abortion of nature with two legs at each end, calmly cropping the grass under the staring sun. I have said that I ask no one to believe this story.

"So I travelled along a road of portents, like undeciphered parables. There was no twilight as in a dream; everything was clear cut in the sunlight, standing out in defiant plainness and infantile absurdity. All was in simple colours, like the landscape of a child's alphabet, but to a child who had not learnt the meaning.

"At one time, I seemed to come to the end of the earth; to a place where it fell into space. A little beyond, the land re-commenced, but between the two I looked down into the sky. As I bent over I saw another bending over under me, hanging head downwards in those fallen heavens, a little child with round eyes. It was some strange mercy of God assuredly that the child did not fall far into hopeless eternity."

The young man paused reflectively. I tried to say "a pool," but the words would not come. I seemed to have forgotten it. I seemed to have forgotten everything except his terrible blue eyes, big with unsupportable significance. Then I realised that he was speaking again. "I heard a great noise out of the sky, and I turned and saw a giant. Stories and legends there are of those who, in the morning of the world, strayed also into the borders of the land of giants. But it is impossible for any tongue to utter the overpowering sense of anarchy and portent felt in seeing so much of the landscape moving upon two legs, of looking up and seeing a face like my own, colossal, filling the heavens.

"He lifted me like a flying bird through space and set me upon his shoulder. I shall never forget the sight of his huge bare features growing larger as I came nearer to them; the sun shining on them as they smiled and smiled; a sight to give one dreams."

The young man paused again. I seemed to feel the whole sane universe of custom and experience slipping from me, and with an effort like a drowning man's I cried out desperately. "But it was a man--it was your father."

He raised his eyebrows, as at a coincidence. "So they said," he observed. "Do you know what it means?"

I found myself broken and breathless, as Job might have been, battered with the earthquake question of Omniscience.

He went on, smoking slowly.

"With the giant was a woman. When I saw her something stirred within me like the memory of a previous existence. And after I had lived some little while with them, I began to have an idea of what the truth must be. Instead of killing me, the giant and giantess fed and tended me like servants. I began to understand that in that lost epic of adventures which led up to the greatest event of my life, I must have done some great service for these good people. What it was, I had, by a quaint irony, myself forgotten. But I loved to see it shining with inscrutable affection in the woman's eyes like the secret of the stars. There are few things more beautiful than gratitude.

"One day, as I stood beside her knee, she spoke to me; but I was speechless. A new and dreadful fancy had me by the throat. The woman was smaller than before. The house was smaller: the ceiling was nearer. Heaven and earth, even to the remotest star, were closing in to crush me.

"The next moment I had realize the truth, fled from the house, and plunged into the thickets like a thing possessed. A disease of transformation too monstrous for nightmare had quickened within me. I was growing larger whether I would or no.

"I rolled in the gravel, revolving wild guesses as to whether I should grow to fill the sky, a giant with my head in heaven, bewildered among the golden plumage of Cherubim. This, as a matter of fact, I never did.

"It will always fill me with awe to think that no sign or premonition gave me warning of what I saw next. I merely raised my eyes--and saw it.

"Within a few feet of me was kneeling one of my own size, a little girl with big blue eyes and hair as black as crows.

"The landscape behind her was the same in every hedge and tree that I had left; yet I felt sure I had come into a new world.

"I had got to my feet and made her a kind of bow, looking a fantastic figure enough; but a red star came into her cheek.

" 'Why, you are quite nice,' she said.

"I looked at her enquiringly.

" 'They say you are the mad boy,' she said, 'who stares at everything. But I think I like them mad.'

"I said nothing. I only stood up straight, and thanked God for every turn of my rambling path through that elvish topsey-turveydom, which had led at length to this. Although I had not asked for a miracle in answer, two or three drops of clear water fell out of the open sky.

" 'There will be a storm,' cried the girl hastily.

"She seemed quite frightened of the dark that had come over the wood, and the shocks of sound that shook the sky now and again. This fear surprised me, for she had not seemed afraid of the grass.

"She seemed so broken with the noise and dark and driving rain that I put my arm round her. As I did so, something new came over me: a feeling less alien, and disturbed, more responsible and strangely strong; as if I had inherited a trust and privilege. For the first time I felt a kinship with the monstrous landscape; I knew that I had been sent to the right place.

" 'You are very brave,' she said, as the deafening skies seemed bowed about us and shouting in our ears; 'Do you not hear it?'

" 'I hear the daisies growing,' I said.

"Her answer was lost in the thunder.

"We were miles further on before she said, 'But are you not mad?'

"I spoke; but it seemed as if another spoke in my ear.

" 'I am the first that ever saw in the world. Prophets and sages there have been, out of whose great hearts came schools and churches. But I am the first that ever saw a dandelion as it is.'

"Wind and dark rain swept round, swathing in a cloud the place of that awful proclamation."

The young man paused once more. Some one near me moved his chair against mine. I remember with what a start I realised that I was in a crowded room; not in a desert with an insane hermit.

"But you have not told me," I said, "of the great moment: when you seemed to have discovered all."

"It is soon told," he said. "Ten years afterwards the girl and I stood in one room together: we were man and wife. Other men and women went in and out, all of my own stature. There were no more giants; it was as though I had dreamed of them. I seemed to have come back among my own people.

"Just then my wife, who was bending over a kind of couch, lifted a coverlet, and I saw that for which, haply, I have been sent to this fantastic borderland of things.

"It was a little human creature hardly bigger than a bird. And when I saw it, I--knew everything. I knew what was the greatest event of my life: the event I had forgotten."

I said "Being born" in a low voice.

I did not dare to look at his face.

The next consciousness I had was that he had risen to his feet, and was putting on his gloves very carefully.

I sprang erect also and spoke quickly.

"What does it mean? Are you a man? What thing are you? Are you a savage, or a spirit, or a child? You wear the dress and speak the language of a cultivated pupil of this over-cultivated time: yet you see everything as if you saw it for the first time. What does it mean?"

After a silence he spoke in his quiet way.

"Have you ever said some simple word over and over till it became unmeaning, a scrap of an unknown tongue, till you seem to be opening and shutting your mouth with a cry like an animal's? So it is with the great world in which we live: it begins familiar: it ends unfamiliar. When first men began to think and talk and theorise and work the world over and over with phrases and associations, then it was involved and fated, as a psychological necessity, that some day a creature should be produced, corresponding to the twentieth pronunciation of the word, a new animal with eyes to see and ears to hear; with an intellect capable of performing a new function never before conceived truly; thanking God for his creation. I tell you religion is in its infancy; dervish and anchorite, Crusader and Ironside, were not fanatical enough, or frantic enough, in their adoration. A new type has arrived. You have seen it."

He moved towards the door. Then I noticed he had come to a stand-still again, and was gazing at the floor apparently in deep thought.

"I have never understood them," he said. "Those two creatures I see everywhere, stumping along the ground, first one and then the other. I have never been content with the current explanation that they were my feet."

And he passed out, still carefully buttoning his gloves.

I went back to the table and sat down. About four minutes after he was gone I felt a kind of mental shock, like something resuming its place in my brain.

It occurred to me that the man was mad. I am almost ashamed to admit with what suddenness it came. For so long as I was in his presence, I had believed him and his whole attitude to be sane, normal, complete, and that it was the rest, the whole human race, that were half-witted, since the making of the world.

#g.k. chesterton #collected in 'daylight and nightmare'#an '80s collection of obscure fantastical chesterton tales #the intro calls this one of the stories of his awakening process after his juvenile depression #'a sort of willed optimism which expressed itself in a new-found delight in the world'#and i will note that the one story so far that i don't like is the only one written before this #i also want to note: he wrote this at 23 #all post-college-age writers behold and despair #he also wrote it the year after he met frances #which makes the middle part even more sweet #and the fact that they never had children makes the moment of revelation here kind of sad actually

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