#who up thinking about the tragic doomed brothers who are pawns in their father's game of ambitions?

[borgialucrezia]

"There is that final embrace that I think helps with letting his brother go in a way. Juan has been the one who drove Cesare to become what he is now, and I think Cesare is building walls around his heart. You do get colder and less sentimental when you take that path. He has to go on and he can't mourn him forever, especially since he's responsible for his death. He's not making excuses for what he is anymore, and what he wants to be. He ultimately feels that it's the right thing for himself. It's something that he focused on and I think he can control his mind into having no second thoughts. And that's the only way you can rule in that era, really." — FRANÇOIS ARNAUD

[whatiwillsay]

kaylor oomfs avert your eyes 😞

i get asked from time to time “why don’t you like kaylor, why don’t you like karlie, why do you think kaylor isn’t together? why aren’t you and ttb married yet?” and i think it’s high time i centralize my thoughts and receipts on all of that in a little timeline of shady things karlie has done to taylor that have made me wary of kaylor/karlie/that whole situation.  don’t read if you stan kaylor this isn’t for you (unless you know you’re interested in the truth.)

first things first, i do think something romantic happened between kaylor go read @swiftiesleuth‘s realistic kay timeline for what i (generally) think happened between them.

but long story short - i think joshlie is real, i think they weren’t all that serious at the beginning, she famously didn’t meet his family for years, he didn’t take her to work events for a long time, so there’s room for her to have a fling with taylor even though we ended up with a real joshlie endgame.

taylor’s music and art supports this theory - in the wd mv she paints herself as the other woman, on rep she sings of secret sexy sex with her best friend that drives her crazy, in cruel summer she sings of a miserable, secret, and toxic situation with a person who rejects her love, in illicit affairs and august again she is the other woman - the art matches up.  she also sings about her sunshine being gone on lover, and eclipsed on folklore. we have good clues in taylor’s artistic expression.

taylor’s given interviews about some of these karlie songs - she said cruel summer was about the start to a “doomed” relationship and look at what she said about august:

“It kind of explores the idea of the undefined relationship. As humans, we're all encouraged to just be cool and just let it happen, and don't ask what the relationship is — Are we exclusive? But if you are chill about it, especially when you're young, you learn the very hard lesson that if you don't define something, oftentimes they can gaslight you into thinking it was nothing at all, and that it never happened. And how do you mourn the loss of something once it ends, if you're being made to believe that it never happened at all?”

if joshlie is real which i think they are that 100% sounds like taylor having to process being gaslit by karlie while she cheats on josh with her.

so why do i think joshlie is real?

-  josh has no credible gay rumors that didn’t originate on gaylor tumblr: he has old ex gfs that came before karlie, harvard message boards gossiped about him and didn’t like him but never said that he was gay, in fact one of the complaints josh’s schoolmates had about him was that he got special treatment for her girlfriend at parties.

-  as stated before taylor’s art suggests she’s been the other woman with someone in her life recently.  if josh and karlie are beards then what is the affair? why is taylor the other woman so often all of a sudden?

-  i’ve spoken to someone with a mutual friend with the kushners - grain of salt of course, i know you can only trust stuff you hear from me with no proof so much, but i do absolutely trust this person and they say - no way in hell is joshlie fake, no way in hell is josh gay, no way in hell is karlie having taylor’s baby.  also karlie absolutely has moved down to miami with josh.  i’m sure we’ll see her in nyc and la from time to time but she is living in miami now.

-  vicky ward, who is a real investigative journalist not some unhinged person on tumblr, wrote a tell all about the kushners.  she uncovered gay rumors about josh’s father and josh’s brother but not josh.  she had actual sources and was legitimately digging up tons of dirt on these people and not a word about josh being gay or joshlie being fake.

-  yes karlie did convert to judaism.  it’s really offensive to suggest she didn’t.  of course she always could have done it for personal reasons but occam’s razor dictates she did it for josh i don’t know what else to tell you 🤷‍♀️

-  also just vibes.  karlie writes him love notes and leaves them with his breakfast.  they make playlists for one another.  if the kushners weren’t so heinous they’d be cute.

so in the joshlie is real world view i inhabit, i don’t stan kaylor the same way i do swiftgron because i don’t think kaylor was ever a committed monogamous relationship.  important and impactful on taylor’s life? absolutely.  inspired some amazing music? 100%. but was is true and tragic love that drives me insane and makes me feral?  no.  i don’t believe so.  is it still an interesting and iconic ship? yes!  but i don’t stan because it wasn’t like...true love or gay shit like that.

so let’s talk about karlie’s screwups that 1. assure me kaylor is not together and 2. make me have no desire to stan karlie/kaylor.

1.  after the kimye drama (something that deeply traumatized taylor we now know thanks to miss americana) karlie said she was sure kim was a lovely person 😭 now i know she walked it back and tweeted she and taylor had one another’s backs. i know karlie was just trying to be diplomatic.  but come on...if someone did what kim did to taylor to my lover or hell even just my friend i would say “fuck that clout chasing fame whore” bottom line.  c’mon guys.  have higher standards for your otp.

karlie also has vibed with kim on IG about her adidasas line.  recently!  yes i know she’s just promoting her brand but c’mon.  taylor still hates kim, their drama got rehashed in march 2020 and just 6 months later kim n karlie are bestie-ing around on ig.

2.  ALL the fucking masters drama and scooter fucking braun

-  not long at all after the masters heist karlie was palling around with scooter on a yacht like come on the only other thing taylor is equally as traumatized over as the kimye drama is the master’s heist.  why is karlie hanging out with him and partying with him at this time?

-  karlie liked a tweet completely incinerating taylor (in a gross and unfair/inaccurate way) regarding the masters heist.  she unliked it but still.  why was she even looking at that shit.

-  and yeah we gotta talk about perez.  so perez hilton (who is a scumbag and gross but sometimes does have legitimate tea) posted a video saying that karlie and taylor were no longer friends because karlie betrayed taylor to scooter.  now if that were all there was to it, it’d be dumb gossip.  but a taylor fan account posted the video to twitter ashley avignone and claire winter both liked the tweet.  ashley liked two tweets about it.  perez proceeded to tweet that since two of taylor’s oldest and truest friends liked the tweets it must mean he was correct and neither of the girls unliked the tweets.  ashley and claire are low key people, not celebs, not pawns in a “fued narrative”, just long time and loyal friends of taylor’s.  they liked the tweet, imo, because there’s some truth to it.

-  that brings me to spencer pratt.  spencer is a reality star and super swiftie/huge fan of taylor’s.  he despises karlie.  he’s tweeted negatively about her and he also had perez onto his podcast to talk about the drama between karlie and taylor.  taylor herself sent him a cardigan.  do you really think taylor is going to allow a cardigan to go out to the guy who’s dragging her girlfriend or bestie? i don’t think so.  receipts on perez and spencer here.

3.  karlie posted for hailey fucking beiber’s bday instead of taylor’s and hailey hates taylor 🤢🤢🤢

4.  karlie married into a fascist family that is associated with the trumps.  like how can you expect me to stan?  trump is a fucking criminal evil piece of shit.  i know karlie isn’t like him (probably) but it’s still awful.  kimby even goes around liking ivanka’s ig posts like give me a fucking break 😭.

in summation, you can disagree w me all you like, you can ship kaylor all you like, but if you’re of sound mind i don’t think you can look at the facts in this post and think i’m misguided for not being a kaylor/karlie stan.  and you can’t blame me for thinking if you spend a lot of time obsessing over that ship you may not really be that big a fan of taylor’s.  and if you’re spending a lot of time leading lgbt kids on to think they’re going to get a kaylor end game when all the objective facts of the case suggest that that’s never going to happen you might need to reevaluate but at the very least you certainly can’t press me for not doing all that.

[hamliet]

I've never seen Game of Thrones but I've heard a lot about it and apparently many people are upset with the ending. Something about Targaryen becoming a villain at the last second for no apparent reason? Idk, could you explain what's going on? I heard it's based off a book series. Does the show stray from the original plot or stay loyal to it?

*starts sobbing* SPARE YOURSELF

Honestly I’d sum it up like how @mercyandmagic summed it up: image Harry Potter wins the Battle of Hogwarts, but in the very moment he wins, he snaps and the Voldemort horcrux inside him suddenly takes over the rest of his soul and he murders almost everyone and Ginny has to put him down at Hermione and Ron’s urging.

That’s what happened. It was a tone-deaf plot twist in this day and age, misogynistic, ableist, and racist in its execution, and it was poorly written as well--like, there was no foreshadowing for this twist of events.

The thing about the books is that they aren’t completed. We are 5/7 books through. The creator told the showrunners the bare bones of the ending (who lives/dies/gets the throne), so I’m hoping this isn’t his endgame exactly. Others speculate it might not be (for example, the main ship--Jon and Dany--might still have one killing the other, but it might be more in a sacrifice than in a “put the mad dog down” scenario like the show gave us. Still hate it, but not “burn it all down”).

We know they cut some characters from the books whom at first I assumed the fact that they were cut meant that they were extra fat, and... well I am now hoping that’s wrong because combining their arcs with the characters we have left would explain a lot about it being shit. 

So, the primary defense I’m seeing of Dany Villain is that she’s a tragic heroine, and her descent just wasn’t written properly. I’d agree that it’s not written well, but I’d also argue that in both the books and in the show, Dany is not presented as a tragic heroine at all, but as a hero on a gritty version of the hero’s journey–just like Jon--but one of the cut characters is indeed a tragic heroine. 

The thing about tragedies is that you have to manage expectations and clearly show that your tragic hero is doomed from the very early on–ie you have to show them making steadily worse and worse decisions (see: Eren Jaeger in SnK), if not directly tell your audience at the very beginning that this is a tragic story (ie see Greek choruses and Shakespeare, the prequels from Star Wars because everyone knows Anakin is Vader–plus I’d argue Anakin’s arc only works because we know he comes back to the light in the end–Kaneki Ken in the first Tokyo Ghoul, etc).

We don’t have that with Dany or with Jon, and we’re 5/7 through the books which is, frankly, too late. If they intended to show Dany as a tragic heroine they needed to start foreshadowing that in, oh, book 3/season 4-5 at the latest, and show divergence from Jon Snow’s arc instead of increasing parallels. But they haven’t, which gives me hope at least that the book’s ending plays out a little bit more like Dany burning a city as the “abyss/underworld” part of her hero’s journey (which she is on, and so is Jon) and then redeeming herself in the end fighting a greater enemy.

A hero’s journey includes a step in which the hero confronts the darkness, the shadow. For Jon, it’s a cold death and the fact that winter is coming. For Dany, it’s her father and her heritage’s legacy of fire and blood. The end of Book 5, the last book published, pretty clearly showed both of them falling to the abyss (well, teetering on the edge, and it’s going to get worse before they’re both reborn). But the important thing is that it’s not the end of their journey.

Audiences don’t like reversing on set up/undoing structure. To make Dany a tragic heroine is to go against the structure of her arc in both show and book. That’s why people don’t like it, even if the books makes it seem more believable.

You know who is set up as a tragic heroine destined to descend and die because of her flaws in the books, whose arc has almost certainly been combined with Dany’s in some sense in the show?

Arianne Martell. (and another character known as f!Aegon)

The show pretty clearly merged Jon’s (main hero’s) arc with f!Aegon’s, even giving him his name (in a nonsensical way. In the books, f!Aegon believes he is Aegon Targaryen, Jon’s brother, though he really isn’t as Aegon is dead; in the show, Jon’s dad apparently named… both his sons Aegon. Mmkay). Characters who are  the mastermindsbehind the Aegon plot, supporting him over f!Aegon, take Jon’s side against Dany in the show. Similarly, the show is merging Dany with Arianne, retconning her as letting her demons overtake her in the end, when that is just not Dany’s arc’s set up at all, in the books or in the show.  

In the books, Arianne is incredibly ambitious, and especially resents her brother and his quest for power. Like Margaery (another tragic character), Arianne seeks power and is intelligent and manipulative in her quest for it. But Margaery’s fatal mistake is that in seeking power and prestige, she’s become more a pawn than anything else for a villain (Cersei). She chose to play with lions, and she’ll be torn apart; that’s not surprising. Arianne, as her chapters hint, is going to almost certainly marry f!Aegon, playing with fire, and die burning for it.  

Arianne’s grasping for her own power is never portrayed as cruel or stupid like the main human villain (Cersei); on the contrary, we empathize with a girl who truly cares about her people, but resents her father’s preferential treatment towards her brother. That’s the difference between Arianne and Cersei: Arianne cares. She is not cruel. But her pride is still going to get her killed.

The books as I recall have always, always portrayed the Others (White Walkers) as the primary threat, not the game of thrones. People who get involved in the game of thrones–it doesn’t end well. The thing about Dany, though, is that she sees herself as a revolutionary. “Break the wheel” isn’t in the books (yet), but it’s a pretty good character moment for her that rings true. But this sets up Dany’s primary conflict: does she want to be like her father or not? Throughout the books, she hasn’t wanted to be. But she can’t have her cake and eat it to. If she goes for the throne–symbolic of her family and her father and those ghosts, as it’s always been portrayed as corrupting–she will indeed probably become more like her father. To be unlike her father, she’d probably have to not play the game of thrones anymore at all, and the Others are like… RIGHT THERE to provide this motivation for her.

But the show said “fuck it she’s her dad let me show you a snap two episodes after she saved the world from the Others who after being the primary threat for 7.5 seasons are now an afterthought and defeated after a single day because we gotta go with Bitches Be CrayCray as a plotline”

Man, I remember being disappointed the show cut Arianne and f!Aegon, but honestly it wasn’t until this season that I’ve been realizing how wrong my thinking that “they must have just been fat that could be cut” might have been. I shouldn’t have trusted D&D, that they knew what they were doing. They did not.

Or this might all be wrong and Jon and Dany are just doomed to be victims of bad writing in any case. *shrugs* Who knows if we’ll ever get those last two books (there’s been an 8+ year gap from the last one) so. Yeah.

That is probably way too long and complicated. I am sorry. I needed to vent lol. Also, the Dany and Arianne and f!Aegon theory is not mine--other meta writers for the books have written about it, but I find it convincing and honestly it gives me hope; see here.

[getoffthesoapbox]

[7DQ] - Willing Prey to the Tragic Flaw

Are we driven to madness, or do we invite it in ourselves?

~ letting doom in by the front door ~

It’s easy to write Yeosangun off as crazy or insane at this point. Maybe he was in real life, but I don’t think this particular show’s version of him invites the viewers to write him off so easily. I think the creators are trying to explore the natural progression of a lifetime of bitterness and resentment, and what giving in to those two emotions does to a person. 

There’s an old story most people know from the Bible--Cain’s killing of his brother Abel. Cain was the first human, and the first human was a murderer. The first human becomes a murderer because he failed to make the appropriate sacrifices to God and actively chooses to fall prey to his resentment of his brother, who seemed to effortlessly receive the favor he could not. God tells Cain it’s his own fault he’s not receiving the favor--he opened his heart to darkness and willingly allowed it to have its way with him. Cain’s furious, and he murders Abel out of spite toward God. Thus, there is nothing more “human” than the darkness that lurks within each of us and the actions we take to get revenge on the world for our own failures. 

Yeonsangun at last fully takes up Cain’s role in this middle section of the story, setting himself up for his inevitable deposition and demise. He falls prey to the very emotions he’s willingly invited in to sustain himself--resentment and long bitterness. Because he fails to reframe his thinking, because he fails to take advantage of the opportunities countless people have offered him, because he spurns his allies and refuses to accept reality, he willingly invites his own destruction into his house with open arms, and naturally falls prey to what he’s invited in. This is the inevitable trajectory of resentment. 

So consumed by the ghosts of the past--ghosts of people long gone--Yeonsangun can’t even see the forest for the trees anymore. He’s drowning in suspicion and has completely lost sight not only of why he even wants to be king in the first place, but who he actually is and what he wants to accomplish. He renders himself unfit for the throne by losing sight of all that’s important--he becomes fixated on having Chae-kyung for himself, on possessing everything Yeok has, even though he never wanted any of that to begin with. He loses sight of what’s important, and his genuine affection for Chae-kyung becomes tangled up in his resentment toward the brother he both loves and hates. 

Yeonsangun, like Cain, will never be happy until he takes everything his brother has. But, like Cain, even that will not bring him happiness, as we see during the episodes where he genuinely believes Yeok is dead. Only facing himself honestly and accepting his mistakes and moving on from them would do that. And instead of facing himself honestly, Yeonsangun just digs his grave deeper and deeper, a Scrooge unable to heed his ghosts. 

~ hell paved in resentment ~

I’m personally of the opinion that most kings of the past who people deemed “Insane” weren’t insane in the way we mean it today--they probably for the most part weren’t sociopaths or psychopaths or bipolar or multiple personality disordered. At most, they had extreme paranoia--but that’s more a natural consequence of living under both constant surveillance and constant threat of being murdered by ambitious rivals. Kings on the whole were rather merely mortal men who, through their own failings as human beings, were unable to rise above themselves and fell prey to their own inner vices--resentment, suspicion, greed, fear, and jealousy. I think people in the modern world tend to downplay how powerful these emotions are, and the insane and at times inhumane lengths to which they will send people if allowed to reign unchecked by higher order thinking. On top of this, a king generally is surrounded by the worst kinds of people--greedy sycophants, ambitious rivals, spies--none of which can be trusted to help him stay on the straight and narrow. 

There’s an old axiom that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Without any check on the king’s power, any king can fall prey to his own inner vices. And with the absolute authority to put those vices on display to the world, this leads to despotic rulership. If a king--a human being--is gifted such authority--authority that should be abstracted and placed above him in a deity or ideal that even he must live by--, chances are high that if he’s not properly keeping himself grounded as a human being and/or has people around him reminding him he’s merely a human and helping him hold true to his higher self, he will inevitably fall prey to one of the darker emotions. Yeonsangun is such a king. His childhood neuroses and complexes about his father and mother are heightened to paranoia and delusion as one by one the people around him prove untrustworthy--in his eyes. 

Because he’s a king, and because he has an incomplete and fragmented sense of self, and because he doesn’t value other people outside himself due to his own failure to actualize himself, he begins severely misusing his power. He kills ministers for minor infractions, he is capricious, he abuses the very woman he seeks to receive love from, he murders innocent men for merely trying to protect their loved ones, he has no mercy, he has no affection for anything. He’s lost to the very dark impulses that he invited in to protect him long ago. 

Apparently the Roman generals used to have a slave stand by them when they were victorious in war reminding them that they were “only human.” Yeonsangun needed someone like that at his side. But more than that, he needed to find his own worth on his own, without requiring validation from others. He needed to figure out why he wanted to be king, and why it mattered to him. Being king out of spite “just because Daddy didn’t want him to be” is no way to be king. I loved that Chae-kyung asked Yeok why he had to be king--Yeok will actually have an answer before he takes the throne. Chae-kyung’s a wise woman, and Yeok will most likely be a better king than his brother thanks to her influence.

The sad thing is that Yeonsangun did have access to her influence--if he’d been willing to accept her as family, and not try to push her for more. Had he been smart enough to listen to her and allow her to guide him in the right direction, maybe he too would have been a better king. But that’s all lost now.

~ the grass is always greener ~

I don’t want to absolve Yeosangun of his responsibility for his deeds. I don’t think the narrative absolves him of it either, and that’s what I find so fascinating about his character. The narrative gives us a deep understanding of why he acts the way he does, and why he falls, while never budging on the ramifications of his actions--he’s wrong and he must be stopped. 

But I as a viewer, even as I’m watching him fall, can’t help but wish that he could have been saved earlier. I wish he’d understood his heart earlier. I wish he’d come to terms with what he really wanted for himself--not the birthright his father denied him, but rather what he himself wanted--much earlier. When he admits to his concubine, far far too late, that he’s at last beginning to wonder if he wants to be a king or a husband, I can’t help but find it tragic. This foolish man didn’t see what he truly wanted until he was so far down the well no one could ever pull him up. 

His relationship with Chae-kyung is honestly one of the most tragic things I’ve ever seen in k-drama land. He can’t even admit he loves her. Every time he even gets around to spitting the words out, he clams up. He can’t even be honest about this one thing. If he were able to be honest, and upfront, she’d be able to reject him gently and maybe they could move into healthier territory. But he’s so obsessed with taking everything that Yeok wants--and although I do think his love for Chae-kyung is genuine, it’s twisted up with his jealousy over Yeok. 

He was foolish to think he ever had a chance with Chae-kyung. She was never going to look his way--she just never noticed him as a man, other than when she was a child. Had Yeok not returned, I don’t think he would have seen her that way either. Yet it still tears my heart to pieces that he doesn’t want her to be a pawn in the Queen Mother’s games, even as he’s making her a pawn in his. He’s such a foolish, stupid boy and he has no self-awareness and no one near him to slap some sense into him. 

Honestly, I think even if Yeok had “come back from the dead” and been loving and forgiving and only asked for Chae-kyung, Yeonsangun would still have wanted to kill him and take his life from him. Yeonsangun is the kind of man who will never be at ease, whether his brother is alive or dead. He’s failed over and over to face himself, to do the hard work of accepting his failures in life and overcome himself. No one ever taught him how to do that--they just gave up on him and passed over him.

Watching him fall apart is hard for me, because all I can think is that my son is driving himself and everyone around him into an abyss from which none can escape. And for what? Why does he have to be king? What good has being king ever done for him? Why not set down the burden, let Yeok play king if he wants it so much? Why not become a painter or a minstrel and travel the world and be free? What does Yeonsangun even want for himself? He hates ruling! His hatred for it is in every minute he’s on screen! Most of all, he seems to hate himself and of course he’s the only person he can’t run away from. 

~ too late to learn the lesson ~

I can understand why some viewers might just want to write Yeonsangun off and not have any sympathy for him--he’s certainly not meant to evoke sympathy, methinks. I just personally find his character so compelling and well written and it’s very hard to watch the last glimmer of light get snuffed out by the darkness he’s willingly embracing. 

Heh, I feel like every time I write about this character, my thoughts are just all over the place. He’s the reason I keep coming back to this story--as cute as Chae-kyung is and as endearing as Yeok is, I’m not half as interested in them as I am in my foolish Yeonsangun. (I can’t believe he was 31 when he died! Goodness no wonder he was a mess of a king!) Sometimes it’s hard to watch historical dramas, because you know inevitably how things are going to turn out. It would have been nice if this had been more AU, but I’ll suffer to the end anyway. =) I just hope that when he’s deposed, Chae-kyung shows him a bit of pity; it’s not like he’s going to last very long afterward. 

Even so, I still find myself dreading losing him. I’m so fiercely attached to him; I haven’t been this attached to a character in a long time. I didn’t think I would dread his deposition and final days, but here I am, dreading it. 

In the end, I just think Lee Dong-Gun is incredible at bringing this character to life and fleshing him out as a complex human being. That such a character, who’s fallen to such depravity, can still evoke deep human emotions from me is something I truly appreciate, even though I just feel more and more despondent with each passing episode. This is how you do a tragedy right, I think. True tragedies are about characters with tragic flaws who, because they won’t face their flaws and overcome them, fall prey to them through no one’s fault but their own.