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HARRY LLOYD as VISERYS TARGARYEN III | Game of Thrones S1E1

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The wig department hasn’t put this kind of work in since.

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house of the dragon x the unequal marriage (vasili pukirev)

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PADDY CONSIDINE The House that Dragons Built (2024) - Episode 6

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*whispers* holy shit people are amazing.

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the year is 2025

scientists are still scrambling to figure out what “zigazig ahh” is so that they can give the spice girls what they really really want

the spice girls are getting impatient

war is upon us

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quarter of the century is o.k. but halfway between 2000 and 2050 makes me feel like im in a very large and dark room and i dont know what else is in it

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HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF YOU

May 2025 be a year that makes your dreams come true

apolloniasaintclair.bigcartel.com

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Happy New Year (2024).

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looking

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Atlas of Ice and Fire: The Noble Houses of Westeros

As part of a planned upgrade of my older Song of Ice and Fire maps – which are looking a bit low-res and long in the tooth compared to my more recent work – I’ve been developing a new, large-scale map of the known world. Although the main map still has many days (possibly weeks) of work ahead on it, I did take a break today to try to do something I’ve wanted to do for ages: a map of Westeros with every known house sigil and location on it.

Please click for a much, much larger version!

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what's your take on rhaegar?

take as in, my opinion of his moral character? we don't have all the details for that, filling in the blanks involves a great deal of speculation. my read of him is based on what purpose he serves within the story.

i don't think much of him outside of what he means for dany. it's the way robb is not a character in his own right to me and exists only to serve catelyn and bran's arcs. which is why my opinion of rhaegar is mainly informed by that scene in agot, where dany dreams of him in his armour and lifts the visor to find that "the face within was her own", dany is clearly inheriting his narrative role (jon too in some capacity, but i'm not thinking of jon in relation to the targaryens before the reveal happens), it's for purely this reason i've never seen him as someone with no redeeming qualities. the memory of rhaegar shadows and informs everything she does (it is time to cross the trident) grrm writes her with shades of all her targaryen ancestors, because she's the last of them and embodies three hundred years of her house's glorious and terrible history. but rhaegar's particular echo is the strongest because that's the brother she would've married under slightly different circumstances, she imagines rhaegar as the ideal vision of the king in her mind whom she must emulate, he died and made her the prince that was promised. her entire character is constructed around him. he's not simply a strong influence in her life, she is him. they call her aegon the conquerer come again but she's been having visions of battling the others at the trident since agot, she's also rhaegar come again. she'll do everything he couldn't. it's just a bit inconceivable for a character like that to be revealed as a cold, unfeeling schemer. like, where's the heart in that? if everything rhaegar resembled was antithetical to dany's own beliefs and motives? aerys is already there to serve that exact role.

but what we learn about him from a number of contradictory sources is interesting. melancholy bard prince, born in grief, sang songs of doom and loss among the ruins of summerhall, presumably plagued by prophetic dragon dreams. he's framed as a character out of some song. all rebellion characters have that quality to them, there's a girl who dies trapped in a tower, another throws herself off a tower, the tourney at harrenhal episode is told to bran (and in turn, the readers) in the form of a song. they don't feel very real, or at least, they'll never get to be real the way our present day characters feel real because they're dead and their stories have been distorted and repurposed. robert's version is that of a king valiantly fighting for his abducted lady love, the version told to dany is that of tragic star crossed lovers torn apart by the realm. they're songs, and cannot be the whole truth. it's in the name. it was the year of the false spring and they all thought they were changing the world. rhaegar was going to call a great council and depose aerys, robert and ned where overthrowing a mad king to put an end to his atrocities. except rhaegar died having achieved nothing, robert ascended his throne on the corpses of children, then in fifteen years' time recreated the conditions for the start of another war. and lyanna simply traded one kind of gendered sentence for another. i'm not drawing a 1:1 equivalence between rhaegar and robert (and i do think it will be written as a romance with the truth somewhere between robert and dany's versions), but that she died either way is a pretty significant detail. she died in more ways than one! when they talk about her they recall a helpless maiden dead in some tower, not a girl capable of besting renowned knights.

like, it's very clear to me that the rebellion and its immediate consequences are meant to be read as a tragedy, caused not by the actions of a character(s) but as a result of the systemic failings of their world (which is why it's once again leading up to the burning of king's landing, where it all began, the city is symbolic of the very worst of westerosi feudalism). lyanna's death is less about robert and rhaegar and more about the way there was no escape possible for a girl like her—a theme that's carried over in sansa and arya's stories, except this time it will end with them getting to live the life lyanna wasn't allowed to, because this time they will change the world. dany's earnest dream of "to plant trees and watch them grow" is just that. it's the dream of spring.

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Rubens Peale with a Geranium (1801) by Rembrandt Peale

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Quick what are you doing RIGHT now (besides scrolling Tumblr)