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NEW STILLS OF AEMOND TARGARYEN IN EPISODE 4 OF 'HOUSE OF THE DRAGON' S2.

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Helaena and Criston <3

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Game of Thrones (2011 - 2019) — 5.02 "The House of Black and White" The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

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the wild wolf of winterfell.

prints + merch

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Am i supposed to be normal about that?

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you WILL give my son a pickle-less bun!

or: criston is the green kid's dad and you cant convince me otherwise

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Ned promising Robert to “guard his children as if they were his own” is so similar to Lyanna’s promise because Ned promised once again to protect someone’s bastard while they lied there, dying,  but this time, he won’t be able to do it himself.

In a twist of fate, Arya is sorta doing it for him and is holding to that promise without knowing it by protecting Gendry in the Riverlands several times.

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Bran + Parallels → Jon Snow

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“This character is dead in canon” to you. They’re dead in canon to you. To me they’re fine

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Release the blade, Alicent.

ALICENT HIGHTOWER in HOUSE OF THE DRAGON 1.07

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Episode 9 is so fucking funny to me like you have Aemond "Cole needs me Mother" Targaryen who without the slightest doubt leads Criston to one random place Aegon took him to 10 years ago and then decides to give up 5 minutes later because his brother is an illiterate whore (affectionate). And that's not even the best of it no then there's also the future King and his dorky ass brother rolling around in front of the Sept in the most sibling fight ever on TV while two members of the Kingsguard are having a very serious swordfight in the background. Also "do you love me" - "you imbecile" HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THE GREENS

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their disney villain slay

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the idea of daeron targaryen showing up in season 2 like “MY FATHER WAS SICK???” is so funny to me. like little dude was literally unaware of everything. living his life in peace when the rest of his family decided to usurp the throne.

“AEMOND LOST A WHAT???”

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To your Aemond shipping anon: no one should be harassing anyone for ships. That should be a hard and fast rule. But let us be honest. The fandom's toxicity is not just from people harassing incest shippers or something. Many incest shippers cannot handle it when someone on their own page says they don't like incest ships. They don't want to be judged by someone whom they would never interact with if they didn't go looking for it. Then they get offended. If you can't handle people hating your ship on their own pages for the simple fact it's incest or other triggering material, you're not built to be a proshipper. And many proshippers, as much as they crow in their superiority, are thin skinned. Disclosure: I shipped Jaime/Cersei in the books as a toxic mess and people hated them. I understood why they did. But this fandom wants people to accept and normalize incest ships that arent even canon and get mad when people don't.

Yeah. I’m quite active on Twitter and I’ve seen countless instances of people expressing distaste at the ship or explaining why they believe it makes little narrative sense, completely minding their own business, only to be piled on by the shippers. You can ship what you want, and you shouldn’t be harassed. But grow a thicker skin if you lose your mind every time someone so much as says something completely normal like “I don’t want this character to be secretly fucking his sister.” Bffr.

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Hello please reblog this if you’re okay with people sending you random asks to get to know you better

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He’s a medieval emo asshole, he’s a mama’s boy, he’s a fraticidal war criminal, he’s a poor little meow meow, he’s an eyepatch-wearing Disney villain, he’s a milf-worshipping malewife, he’s an arsonist, he’s a nerd, he’s a fantasy adventure boy, he’s a weird dragon girl, he’s Vhagar’s last rider, he’s his uncle’s cooler mirror, he’s a remnant of fiery rot at the heart of his dynasty, he’s gone and now they’re only human

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Got this message from @mabbon:

“I don’t necessarily think the show should be forgiven for every failing that is also in the books, but in the case of the ‘smallfolk’ I’d argue that occasionally giving lip service to the smallfolk but otherwise putting highborns front and center fits right in with the books. Just look at the POV characters. All the major ones are highborns (the fact that someone has been elevated to the nobility before he appears is the closest to giving the peasantry an actual voice says something). The less important POVs are either also highborn, exist as cameras to develop highborn characters, or are otherwise high-ranking (Melisandre is in the same boat as Davos, with her humble origins downplayed due to her current status). Even Gendry, a major link to ordinary Westerosi, is in fact the son of a king. The fact that the fandom (myself included) often generalises the peasants as ‘smallfolk’ without referencing individuals illustrates the point. Without inventing a bunch of entirely new characters and plotlines, D&D would have been hopelessly constrained by the books even if they cared about the non-nobles.”

Response time!

Sure, GRRM’s not perfect, I think we can all agree on that one. Goodness knows I keep going “so where are those merchants, hey?” every time we’re not in Braavos or Tyrion chapters in ACoK. (Much like I ask “so where are those ladies-in-waiting again?” but that’s a different complaint.) We know they exist because occasionally they sell Littlefinger stuff, but otherwise…

With the PoV issue, GRRM’s choices about the kind of story he’s telling often does prevent him from using non-nobles as PoVs. He’s centred a lot of the story around high politics in a stratified society, heavy on the genre deconstruction - to write that story from the perspective of whoever’s emptying the chamberpots would make for a very different tale, and not one I think GRRM wanted to tell. He’s also written a lot of his story around certain family relationships; that almost always means writing about sets of people who share social class. Those are legitimate dramatic choices. I can respect those.

I think the difference I see, compared to what you’ve described, is largely in the nature of “lip service.” When I say lip service, I mean the tendency to mention something because it sounds nice, and drop it when it becomes too much of an inconvenience, or insufficiently “cool.”

So. Even though he’s largely prevented himself from writing key decisions from the perspective of Daisy the maid or Wat who works in the stables, or battles from the perspective of Pate from Nowhere’s Field, GRRM’s storytelling is aware that there are maids and stableworkers and farmers et cetera et cetera all through the background of his story, that they outnumber the protagonists, and even if very few individuals of that social class have the chance to influence the course of history in the same way the privileged PoV characters do, that there is still power in the collective. The individuals we see are a mixture of good and bad, and helpful or hindering to the protagonists, because even if they have collective power the group is still made up of individuals.

Collective power and influence is most clearly seen with the people of King’s Landing - a minor blip aside when they’re all for executing Ned Stark in a holy place, the anti-Lannister sentiment of the city’s population has been developing since book one (Sansa’s final chapter in AGoT, for instance, mentions a tavern singer arrested and mutilated for performing an anti-Lannister song), and the increasing religiosity of the city’s population isn’t far behind that. It’s mentioned several times here and there that what the people of King’s Landing hold specifically against the Lannisters is the Sack, showing that there’s a collective memory there. The development of a populist movement over the course of the story, with its good points (wanting the war to stop) and its bad points (the overt misogyny), from a few people singing unflattering songs about Cersei in the pub to a movement that can have her marched naked through the streets, is to me the very opposite of lip service to the existence and concerns of the Crownlands/Riverlands lower classes.

There are similar glimpses in the North - indications that the Northern peasantry is further mythologising the Starks, and from what we see in ADWD the rank and file Northmen are as hostile to the Boltons and Freys as their highborn counterparts. Where GRRM does fall down in his incidental depictions of agency for those without economic privilege is over in Dany’s storyline, where the Qartheen lower class doesn’t seem to exist much, and the cities of Slaver’s Bay have a remarkably revolt-free history from what little we’ve heard. Even now I’m somewhat optimistic as far as seeing Essosi lower classes exert more influence over events; ADWD makes clear that the slaves of Volantis are increasingly motivated to fight their enslavers. We’ll see what happens in TWoW, and to what extent it is all about Dany.

I also disagree that Davos’ lower class origins are downplayed. It is a constant in Davos chapters, how insecure he is in his various promotions because of his low birth, and the discrimination he faces from other nobles. When other (highborn) characters mention Davos, there will almost certainly be a reference to onions or smuggling. Same with Jon Snow, whose privileged upbringing made him aware of the real restrictions of his bastardy. The tension there is never long out of sight, either. Class issues are a major part of both their characters. Again, this isn’t lip service, but a driver of drama.

Then there are the storylines that revolve around interacting with non-nobles: Arya’s and Brienne’s. Again, the choice of PoV constrains GRRM somewhat here - the demands of their storylines mean that he can’t have them sit in town and really get to know Lum the baker and Jenny the sharecropper, and has to introduce people for a few lines and then move on instead. (Contrast with Jon Snow, again, who stays in more or less the same place with smallfolk characters over multiple books, and as a result we know far more about Pyp and Grenn and Dolorous Edd than we do about most of the people Arya or Brienne have met.) Arya’s ACoK and ASoS storylines in particular are devoted to chronicling the ground-level effects of decisions made in Tyrion’s chapters, Catelyn’s chapters, Davos’ chapters. The existence of this storyline alone tells us that GRRM feels the effects of the high-level decisions are worth depicting. As for Brienne’s storyline, with its discussion of what it means to be a true knight - what that storyline tells us is that the life of someone Brienne knows mostly as War Orphan #57 is just as important as the life of Sansa Stark, and just as worthy of her protection.

This is where comparison to the show comes in. GRRM isn’t perfect, but he’s tried to ameliorate the effect of having 95% highborn PoV characters in a variety of ways. The show cut Brienne’s storyline, and seems to think that the point of Arya’s storyline is her increasing ability to kill people. It’s not a matter of inventing new storylines, it’s a matter of focusing the ones they’ve kept - they did a better job of this in earlier seasons, when there was obvious space for smallfolk in Arya’s travels and Tyrion’s stint as Hand. The more recent seasons, in particular, have a nasty habit of treating smallfolk as plot points to be put on or taken off the shelf at need, rather than as capable of collective political action, if not individual character development. That’s not just the deaths of Grenn and Pyp so there would be “shock deaths” at the end of season four, where in the books they’re alive and well and showing their hurt feelings at Jon Snow’s political decisions. It’s a smallfolk woman showing up to say “the North remembers,” followed by nobody remembering anything, and being informed that Ramsay’s men don’t want to fight for him followed by Ramsay’s men never showing the slightest hint of disloyalty. It’s the bizarre non-reaction to Cersei blowing up the Sept of Baelor. That would be a plot hole even without books to compare it to.

To me, this goes beyond condensing for adaptation, and into ignoring the points GRRM was trying to make with whatever degree of success.