atopvisenyashill

[atopvisenyashill]

i write meta by going “what’s the most useful way for ME to remember this information” this three eyed crow thing was me trying to track who was talking to who in what dreams and then i was like Now Wait A Fucking Minute Here now we are entering “how do i make this make SENSE”

[atopvisenyashill]

i have switched to three eyed crow bran i love to talk about accidentally on purpose sacrifice as a form of magic

i realized writing this whole thing about dany & meereen that i should probably either add an entire section about her last dragon chapter in agot or just do a separate post about Why And How I Think She Sacrificed Rhaego

[atopvisenyashill]

i realized writing this whole thing about dany & meereen that i should probably either add an entire section about her last dragon chapter in agot or just do a separate post about Why And How I Think She Sacrificed Rhaego

[atopvisenyashill]

Bran stared resentfully at the sweating boys below. "If I still had my legs, I could beat them all." He remembered the last time he'd held a sword in his hand, when the king had come to Winterfell. It was only a wooden sword, yet he'd knocked Prince Tommen down half a hundred times.

A Game of Thrones - Bran VII

@thenorthsource for Palestine, Lebanon, and Sudan: @sayruq donated to the Khartoum Kitchen and requested Bran Stark

[atopvisenyashill]

lyanna and her nieces, had she survived

lyanna talking to arya about swordsmanship, and lyanna gifting sansa a no-face doll (the starks are native and no one can tell me otherwise)

[atopvisenyashill]

people are too stan brained in this fandom but i'm a dark dany truther because it's the only possible outcome, anything else it's just shitty writing 😭

like just from a thematic standpoint but also a pacing standpoint and a character standpoint it makes absolutely zero sense for her to just stomp her way to eternal queenship. this whole series is a monkeys paw of getting what you want but not the way you wanted it to happen, so why would it make any sense for her to go to westeros and..............get exactly what she wants with no caveats? how does that engage with the story? with the themes of power and the cycles we trap ourselves in? or she shows up and the continent has already been destroyed and she gets to be the savior, again with absolutely no nuance here? it's just silly, people are incapable of liking a character and admitting that character is capable of being bad. like "i think the dark descent for twow is greatly overexaggerated" it's called the winds of winter............they're all going to start acting up, and ados will be a reckoning. i'm sorry it's not a ya story where the villains are obvious and the heroes are always good and always win, but like, that's just not happening. and it's also boring.

[atopvisenyashill]

The reason holiday is so popular is because 1) Borgias costuming and girl was working but 2) she’s attractive conventionally. I don’t think Emma is ugly at all but the fandom is clearly focused on aesthetics.

I think that’s from the fact that the Targaryens are unrealistically pretty. So of course people imagine them to be attractive (eg: Daemon. Matt Smith has a lot of charisma but he is not what I would call “picture perfect attractiveness”, but he has charisma and unconventional attractiveness about him).

Besides the fact that irl historical figures were glazed to oblivion so the mythical beauties might’ve been regular looking, it’s a book to show adaptation, they want actual actors and they’re not gonna hire super models who can’t act because of goons and targ supremacist!! Plus they’re not ugly, so people being fuck ass for no reason.

I aah this because look at who’s casting is the most complimented: Danaerys & Viserys III (GOT). All the edits about “perfect casting”, “Targaryen beauty” “True Targaryen” and it’s the most attractive actors.

So yeah I think for fancast, Holliday get pulled up because there’s multiple material of her in period dress but also she is pretty.

i mean this is a lot of words just to say "holliday is more conventionally attractive than emma" which is, like, the point the main point we're all making here ldsjfkl. i guess we're dong pretty discourse here but there's a real latching onto the whole "valyrian beauty" as mapping exactly onto our own sorts of beauty standards and that's not particularly true. arianne herself mentions lysono looks kinda freaky, and in agot there's a mention of valyrians being "otherworldy" or "inhumane." they're meant to look a bit alien, which is why to me matt smith & emma d'arcy are perfect casting. they're not conventienally attractive. matt smith has been getting people talking about his looks in wildly out of pocket ways for his entire career but he's regularly cast as Hot People in part because he just has charisma. And you can say the same for Emma, in that they have charisma they have presence. They also have like, an unconventional sort of attractiveness (their NOSE) when compared to, ya know, that other lady in the first show.

but that's the precise point everyone is making here - people use holliday not because she's actually well suited to the character or even because she "fits" the look but because she is cis, and more attractive to them than emma. they'll be like "blessed book rhaenyra" but what is the difference between them, like really? they're both white, they're both skinny, they're both great actors. the difference is holliday is cis and hollywood hot and that's it. it's like, remarkably naked misogyny i won't lie and it's crazy to me that it just happens so blatantly with so many people and no one like...acknowledges the elephant in the room lol?

[atopvisenyashill]

Lyanna Stark❄️

Jon here is certified mama's boy

[atopvisenyashill]

listen to me. are you listening. the jon and dany parallels do not matter. the bran and dany ones do and they’re a doozy!

[atopvisenyashill]

pattern wise it’s interesting bc dany’s calls are very much constant - she is pulled to the real world, then the magic calls again, she is pulled to the real world, then the magic calls again. but bran’s is more like one long call - slowly pulling him away from the real to be consumed by the magic. dany is constantly fighting, like she’s being drowned but trying to come up for air. but bran’s is very much a frog in a slowly boiling pot, struggling to notice how hot (or well, cold) it’s getting around him.

[atopvisenyashill]

dany starts to weigh her options, wrestling with what is the right move politically, and every single time the magic appears and encourages fire & blood, and she succumbs to it. on the great grass sea, in qarth, even in the ghiscari bay - she’s measuring how to deal with the unsullied, and quaithe the shows up with riddles & warnings about waiting too long to get to westeros. she grapples with what to do in meereen, feeling like she’s done nothing to change anything, and then drogon appears to kill hundreds of the meereenese, and she flies. it’s always there in the back of her mind - the easy out. just use magic, and things will fall into place. and it all goes back to mirri - she learns not that life without meaning is as good as death, or that some things are beyond even the ability of magic to fix, but that life pays for life. extraction, violence, power; these are the only languages she knows how to speak anymore. bc the final truth she cannot face is how complicit she was in the death of rhaego, if maybe she looked at a slave and chose madness to punish her slave, and what she did was not righteous at all. and when meereen makes her start to question that righteousness, makes her look back - she chooses to get lost with drogon on the great grass sea. she would rather be lost than admit she is just as cynical as the masters she’s been fighting against.

[atopvisenyashill]

Dany's dragon dream

[atopvisenyashill]

thoughts on unsullied

i think the reason it takes so long for dany to realize “slavery bad” as well as her continued weirdness surrounding slavery is because dany “learns” through her emotional attachments and then doesn’t really dig in anymore after the “lesson.”

she identifies with the unsullied despite never having been a slave so she sees their slavery as the same as her mistreatment. i think the dissonance between how she sees the dothraki (mostly as same faced servants) and how she sees the unsullied and meereenese (as her loving and useful children) is because she can relate to the unsullied emotionally in a way she can’t to the dothraki. her bloodriders were never slaves so while she’s fond of them for their loyalty to her she doesn’t love or relate to them the way she does Jorah, Barristan, Missandei, or Grey Worm. Irri & Jhiqui were slaves but they accept their fate without a fight; Irri & Jhiqui are mentioned to be the daughters of Khals that Drogo defeated. They are very dothraki in that they don’t try to break free from their enslavement; Dany associates strength with violence so often that I think she looks down on them for not having her same thirst for freedom, nor Doreah’s interest in stories, nor Jorah’s Westerosi heritage. The Unsullied are different; like Dany, they experience terrible violence through no fault of their own and like Dany, their worth is tied to their name (Unsullied vs Targaryen) and their ability to do great violence.

Therefore, unraveling the institution of slavery should be as easy as her own freedom - standing up to Drogo, killing Viserys, and gaining her dragons saved her so surely killing the masters of astapor with her dragons will save the Unsullied. of course, it’s so much more complex than that! Not everyone is given gifts of food and clothes just for being who they are. as queen she has the job of ruling but that’s not really a paid position and she doesn’t even think of how to pay the Unsullied or anyone in Meereen.

this wine of courage…it seems that while Unsullied who have already been cut have been on this for a long time and likely don’t feel pain, but the unsullied from astapor aren’t just the fully trained ones - dany explicitly buys and takes the young boys with her as well. i’m wondering if it’s going to come up once she leaves Meereen or if it was just another “look how dehumanizing the Unsullied training is” thing.

it’s this passage that i think convinces Dany to do something riskier than just buy them but sack Astapor. I don’t think it’s something that occurred to her before she talks to Missandei partially because she’s been so surrounded by slavery for so many years that it clearly doesn’t occur to her that slavery is awful. Dany is impressed with Missandei’s ability to translate on the fly & work under pressure so when Missandei opens up quickly it makes Dany question her decision to buy the Unsullied even more.

Then Quaithe makes her worry about getting to Westeros fast enough with the worst advice in the world. I think - just me guessing - that Quaithe chooses now to message her because Dany is weighing her options. Kraznys suggests they sack smaller cities and send the captives back to him to train into more Unsullied. While I think it’s unlikely Dany would have sent the Unsullied back, I do think there’s evidence that Dany is weighing the idea of sacking several towns with her Dothraki anyway.

Whether she means to attack more slaver cities to conscript the slave soldiers into her army or whether she’s thinking of other cities, to me it seems the idea is already there to sack a city. It’s only Missandei mentioning her brothers that makes Dany realize she doesn’t like the deal she’s made because there’s a human face and emotional connection there, then Quaithe makes her nervous about the long road ahead of her.

but the sack…that’s the dragon in her. she might have left by killing the unsullied masters, using her dragons as a threat to allow anyone who wants to be freed and come with her. instead she leaves astapor a ruin. again, it’s because of her emotional reactions. she’s not actually breaking any wheels or ending slavery; it’s the same as when she takes the lhazareen women into her personal slave khalasar. Better to serve Dany than serve an evil person, no matter if they don’t want to serve anyone at all.

they are the dragon’s now. bought and paid for.

[atopvisenyashill]

no hate, but holiday granger has ruined all historical targ fan casts for me because I know her ass is going to show up somehow and it irks me.

I also think it’s crazy how so many double down on the fancast even after emma was brought as Rhaenyra while granger was defending and befriending jkr as if that doesn’t look… suspicious on a fandom level.

ya and i don’t like to like, nitpick about fancasts it’s all hee hee, but it’s definitely a little 🤨 bc this is a fandom that has a problem with being hypercritical of everything the actors do and say but suddenly can’t read for holliday specifically. like, these are people that are as engaged in fandom speak as your parents are. they speak very imprecisely, they do not think about this character when they don’t have to. it’s their job. but emma says some wonky stuff that would absolutely fit in at your local queer book club about gender and it’s all WELL EMMA JUST DOESNT GET IT. bc holliday would?? come on. people get real in on eve best for stuff like this too & it’s like im sorry but this is a grandmama. do you expect the old lady at the grocery check out line who says she likes hotd to know the exact correct words to say when discussing feminism in hotd? no? then why are emma and eve so controversial!!

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am i irked. should i keep it in my drafts. perhaps. but i think ignoring that daenerys obviously, with no reservations or nuance there, chooses the “dragons plant no trees - it’s time to abandon meereen for westeros” at the end of adwd and saying this means that her “dark” spiral was actually compromising with slavers and that she’s decided not to compromise with them anymore, is as naive, misguided, and frankly like, dumb, as the people who look at how bloodraven has been luring bran north and see no connection to bran rationalizing his mind rape of hodor. it’s right there i’m sorry you can’t see it, but no, it’s not slavery apologist to be critical of dany making the exact choice she knew was wrong a book and only a few months ago, when nothing had changed, it’s getting annoying and old that this is the only argument people come up with about this. you 🫵 missed the obvious hints - sorry!!!

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i’ll be like actually i’m going all in on westeros uniting as one and then two seconds later im like no obviously they’re breaking up

[atopvisenyashill]

And the peasants, eternally at the mercy of the wind and the sea Who pray constantly to the gods