finitefall

[finitefall]

Sometimes I think the real betrayal wasn’t even D&D. It was the audience's reception. The part of the audience that followed Daenerys Targaryen’s story for years, the girl who was sold, the child who walked through fire, the woman who broke chains, crossed deserts, built cities from nothing, spoke to the forgotten, and still accepted seeing her turned into the mad queen, the threat, the final mistake of the story.

The truth is that Daenerys was always meant to be the central figure. Not one protagonist among many, not the love interest orbiting someone else’s arc, but the actual driving force of the story. That’s clear in the structure of the books, it’s written right there in the title, A Song of Ice and Fire. She is the fire, not as a symbol in the background, but as a living principle. She is the energy that refuses stasis, the fire that consumes dead systems so something new can be born. She wasn’t just a plotline, she was the temperature of the entire myth. Without her, there’s no ASOIAF.

But the way the show and a large part of the fandom responded to her story tells us something deeply, deeply unfortunate. We are still uncomfortable with women who possess power that isn't granted or allowed by someone else. Daenerys is Show!Sansa anthitesis. Daenerys wasn’t powerful because she belonged to someone, or because she was the daughter of a king, or the wife of a warlord. Daenerys’s power sprang from her will to conceive a radically different world and to act upon that vision. She aspired not merely to survive a broken world but to reforge it entirely.

That’s where the discomfort starts. Because the moment a woman says out loud that she wants to break the system instead of inheriting it, people flinch. That kind of ambition gets rebranded as madness. That kind of clarity becomes extremism. And that’s how she was rewritten, her character retconned to serve the comfort of viewers (readers too) who crave familiar patriarchal rhythms.

Men in that story destroyed cities and murdered innocents, and we called them calculated, burdened, tragic. Wherever Daenerys acts from fury and/or grief, it’s framed as a personal collapse. Even her victories are weighed with suspicion, as if her righteousness was always waiting to tip into tyranny.

And when the time came, they didn’t even let her fall through a real confrontation. She wasn’t undone by an equal, or even a villain. She was betrayed by the man who said he loved her, and silenced in the name of peace (by cowardly deceit to boot!) But peace for whom? For what world? For which vision of the future?

A lot of the audience and fandom accepted it. That’s what hurts. They said it made sense. They pointed to the signs. They said it was always going to happen. As if foreshadowing were a moral justification. As if showing the possibility of a fall means that the fall is deserved.

But myth does not compel us to follow predetermined breadcrumbs. We choose which myths to uphold, which voices to center, which futures to fight for. And in the end, the writers chose to extinguish the character who never lost faith in the possibility of renewal.

This is not only about feminism, although it is also that. It is about narrative imagination. Daenerys represented a kind of leadership that did not rest entirely on lineage or diplomacy or soft power, but on vision. She wasn’t flawless, she wasn’t always right, but she was real in a world that rewarded nothing but control. And instead of letting her challenge that world, they killed her to RESTORE it. Targaryen’s restoration suck y’all, except the feudal one approved by the Stark King. Now that we can get behind!!!! Long live the rightful Royal Family!!!!! Yay for progress…?

This isn’t just about representation. It’s about how narratives respond to disruption, to radical agency. Daenerys wasn’t a threat because she lost control. She was a threat because she challenged control itself. She questioned the structures, the cycles, the moral logic of the entire political world around her, and she stopped believing that playing by the old rules would lead to meaningful change.

What happened in the final season wasn’t a tragic arc unfolding. It was a political and symbolic containment of a character who had outgrown the ideological frame she was supposed to stay within.

Her death didn’t serve the story. It RESTORED the familiar order.

And the fact that so many viewers accepted it as “necessary” says more about our collective discomfort with revolutionary agency (especially when embodied by a woman) than it does about Daenerys as a character.

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Yunkai surrendered on terms, and Daenerys honoured her agreement with them.

The leaders of Meereen, OTOH, fought to the bitter end, and nailed up 163 children, to boot. After taking the city by storm, she would have been entitled to execute every single defender or sold them into slavery, according to the laws of war or the maesters’ own standards, as they would be understood in this world (the fandom have no problem with Stannis stating Tommen and Myrcella will be executed as part of his “scouring” of the court once he took King’s Landing). But the large majority were spared, and kept their wealth.

Henry V’s speech outside Harfleur, in Shakespeare’s play, represents the norms of war in a pre-Geneva Convention world.

I’ve no issue with deeming the leaders of the city collectively guilty of crucifying the children. Had they truly objected, they could have come over to Daenerys’ side. They’re all Ramsay Boltons on a much huger scale. At best, all that any one of them could argue is that children have died at his hands (as a result of kidnap, gelding, punishment, the fighting pits), but he did not favour this particular child murder. Mind you, the theory that some of the Great Maesters weren’t pro-crucifying those 163 children is a complete headcanon, there is absolutely nothing in the series to support that ridiculous argument.

I find it strange that the deaths of Great Masters (who possess agency), attracts more fandom indignation than the enormities practised against slaves. You may recall that Brandon Stark (Ice Eyes) cut out and hung the entrails of slavers, after stripping them naked and giving them to the slaves to be tortured.

WRT the Freys, nobody, in-universe, cares about the degree of guilt of any individual Frey. The BWB hang them, Wyman Manderly bakes them in pies, and any Freys that may be captured by Stannis will be burned. If the Twins are taken, nobody will be left alive. Nothing that we would consider due process exists in this world.

My sole criticism is that Daenerys chose a half-measure, when she needed to go much further. She enraged the Great Masters, but left them in a position to seek revenge. Executing every Great Master would have been a far more effective deterrent (certainty of punishment is more of a deterrent than severity of punishment). You can’t appease the unappeasable. A big reason the Reconstruction failed was because the same power structures were left in place. The elites were able to subjugate the freedmen.

Whoever you are, you're the best, anon. And it's just great that you use the Reconstruction and the hell that came and is still happening after it to make your point, though this will anger/upset exactly those who this anon is speaking about. Now anyone reading this can know.

I’ve no issue with deeming the leaders of the city collectively guilty of crucifying the children. Had they truly objected, they could have come over to Daenerys’ side

That part.

After taking the city by storm, she would have been entitled to execute every single defender or sold them into slavery, according to the laws of war or the maesters’ own standards, as they would be understood in this world (the fandom have no problem with Stannis stating Tommen and Myrcella will be executed as part of his “scouring” of the court once he took King’s Landing).

OMG, yes. Like, pray tell Dant antis and slavery apologists, are you going so hard when you know that the masters understood winning wars and meting out punishments/broadcasting deterrents.

The Henry V speech outside Harfleur anon is talking about:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;    Or close the wall up with our English dead.    In peace there's nothing so becomes a man  As modest stillness and humility:    But when the blast of war blows in our ears,    Then imitate the action of the tiger;    Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,    Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;    Let pry through the portage of the head    Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it    As fearfully as doth a galled rock    O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,  Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.    Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,    Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit    To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.    Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!  Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,    Have in these parts from morn till even fought    And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:    Dishonour not your mothers; now attest    That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you. Be copy now to men of grosser blood,    And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,    Whose limbs were made in England, show us here    The mettle of your pasture; let us swear    That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not; For there is none of you so mean and base,    That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.   I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,    Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:    Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'    Exeunt. Alarum, and chambers go off.

Basically, let the bloodlust overtake you and prove that you are a "man", more than that a good English man, no matter your class. Do all sorts of horrible things that war and killing can permit. Better yet, indulge your impulses, it's natural during war.

There isn't anything about being necessarily free from punishments for things, and there were "rules of war" in England and EU both in the medieval ages and afterward before the Industrialization. Those rules, however, weren't limiting your average soldier from committing crimes against, say, a mother and her child. They were there to leave the way open for later negotiations and for nobles to have ways of keeping titles, lands, modes of negotiation, etc. AND maintaining discipline of the toops for later use/make sure your population losses don't racket up too much for later in peacetime as to encourage rebellion at home when you don't/can't provide much for affected "veterans" and the impoverished.

And this speech conveys a war leader's encouragement to inspire fear and raze his enemies' seeming of humanity by encouraging his soldiers of various degrees to focus on their own "rage" above all else and to consider those they maim or kill as "meat" (hunting dogs, greyhounds). Regardless, Henry also compares and characterizes the yeomen (English peasant landholder that could also be a retainer, guard, attendant, or subordinate official) as his hunting dogs, effectively dehumanizing them even as he says they have/may have/can prove to him they actually have the "noble lustre in [their] eyes" (seemingly complimenting them by calling saying they seem to have aristocratic features in how "brave" they can be). Henry wants these men to become and act as his devices of war, one could say.

You could say that maybe when this play was performed the audience would have largely and mostly seen this as a necessary commingling and unity of ENGLISH people, too, which wouldn't be too far wrong. In that, you can understand that war and doing it "well" was far more important to monarchist societies.

There's a book called War Crimes Law Comes of Age by Theodor Meron that I can't get access to online that gets into Henry V and the rules and activities of war: strategy, what was considered crimes and why, War in Shakespeare's works, what were the duties of rulers, and what made one a "rebel". It's a 1998 thing so it might be horrendously out of date, but it may also be a good start.

[finitefall]

This Was Supposed To Be My Town (Consequences)

Faith Lehane never had a chance.

Put yourself, if you will, in Faith Lehane’s shoes. You are seventeen years old. You have no friends, and in fact never seem to have had any. You grew up poor, neglected, and physically abused by your mother. Said mother dies when you are still a child, but you are taken under your wing by another woman: your Watcher, who reveals to you that you are a Chosen One - granted the power to fight vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness. She then also dies; violently murdered in front of you. 

So you move across the country to another town, where you meet someone just like you. Like, freakily like you. As if you are her mirror image somehow. She is exactly like you, except she has friends, a loving mother, a living Watcher, and a warm three-bedroomed home to return to every night. You have none of these. You live in a run-down motel that you can’t afford. You have to feed, house and clothe yourself, and none of the adults in your friend’s life make any attempt to rectify this situation, including the one that’s meant to be acting as your Watcher. Again, you are seventeen years old.

But you carry on. You become good friends with this mirror-girl. Perhaps you even have a bit of a crush on her. You think you are inseparable, until you find out she has been secretly keeping her ex-boyfriend in a mansion. At the same time, you get another new Watcher who promises to take care of you, and you start to look up to her. Then she betrays and tries to kill you. And then dies. You spend Christmas Eve with this girl, but again she disappears to look after her ex who’s trying to kill himself. You carry on getting closer with her, finally feeling in tune with another human being who’s coming around to your way of thinking. Then a strange man basically runs into your stake and, oops, you’ve taken a life and might be facing manslaughter charges. It feels like everything in your life other than your freedom has already been denied you, and now you might lose that as well.

What I’m saying is: you wouldn’t have reacted that great either.

Read More

[finitefall]

daenerys deserves to live.

she deserves to plant her trees and to watch her kingdom grow. she deserves to eat lemoncakes and watch her dragons grow bigger and bigger until she is wrinkly and happy. she deserves to save the world and wield a sword and get her happily ever after with a loving family with someone who loves her, and her castle should be filled with the sound of her children giggling and their cousins laughing. she deserves to learn about the good her family did and not just the bad. she deserves to see her targaryen name mean something good.

she deserves it.

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Hello lm hamdi ,I humbly ask for your support by reblogging this post on your account to help me and my family. As newcomers to Tumblr and GoFundMe, we are in desperate need of your kindness and support. 🙏🇵🇸🍉😔Please donate 🙏🏼Let's reach the goal as soon as possible .

Dear Hamdi, my thoughts go to all of you. If anyone here is able to donate and help your family, I hope they will do it.

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Question are you still alive??? There hasn’t been a post from you in sometime

I am, I'm very sorry if anyone was worried. I haven't logged in on tumblr for a very long time, because this place sucks sometimes and I need to put my mental health first. I'm here for now, but I might take a break again whenever I feel like it. I hope everyone understands! :)

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I don't mean any disrespect whatsoever, but I will honestly never understand all the hype and love for Damon, and how such a horrible character ever even had fans in the first place, because there's really nothing special or appealing to him whatsoever. He also isn't really all that hot or attractive either, which makes it even more disgusting how people looks the other way when it comes to his actions, and use his looks to defend and excuse his actions. I don't care how good-looking a character might be, it's not an excuse to defend every single thing that character does. You can be a fan and find them attractive, and still hold them accountable when it's necessary.

I'd also like to point out that putting down Stefan/Stelena, bullying and harassing their fans to uplift your fave, and bullying and harassing people in general who don't like your fave doesn't make Damon/Delena better. I don't particular like Stefan or ship Stelena either, but Damon/Delena fans are just the absolute worst. A fictional character/ship is never that serious for people to act so bent out of shape and take so personally, or to be so hostile, petty, childish, immature, and aggressive. And from my end, what difference it makes when you're neutral and not on either team. Best way to be unbiased.

But what trips me out is the fact that to this very day, you flat out deny Damon raped and abused Caroline. It doesn't matter if Caroline was the one who flirted first or made the first move. You can be the one to flirt first and make the first move, and still get raped. You can be the one to flirt first and make the first move, and still change your mind and say no. And the fact that you look the other way, because it's your fave being called out on this, and would blame the victim just because she was the first one to make the move, speaks major volumes about you and your character, and not in a good way at all.

Anyone who has the nerve to blame the victim and chooses to support and defend a rapist/abuser gets no kindness and compassion from me. You all deserve to be called out for what you really are, and you should all be ashamed of yourselves. If this is how you view fictional characters in a situation like this, I can't imagine how you view and treat real life people in similar situations. Such a shame and very vile, disgusting, and repulsive of you, honestly.

Thank God you didn't mean any disrespect whatsoever by sending this to someone who has been a victim of SA. Who's the bully here? Because I have never bullied anyone because they ship Stelena and I have absolutely no idea why you're sending me this bullshit full of hate. The only thing missing is telling me to go kill myself.

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princess arianne martell and queen daenerys stormborn

— commission made by @/Cj_KhalifP on twitter

[finitefall]

So I've been rewatching Grey's Anatomy those last few months. I stopped after season 16, wishing I had given up earlier because this show should have ended years ago. But I still love early Grey's so, so much. That being said, I don't love everything about it. The worst part is still Owen Hunt. I literally have no idea why people in this fandom still ship Crowen or Omelia or whatever Teddy and Owen ship name is. I did like his character a lot at first. I shipped Crowen at first, Cristina being my favorite character. But this man is... I see so many Owens all over social media complaining about their fragile straight white men feelings being hurt by feminists. Why on earth is this character still considered a good man by so many women? Who the hell thinks that Cristina Yang, Amelia Sheherd and Teddy Altman deserved his trash? I know Teddy and Owen got married finally (vomit...), I'll only watch Grey's again if she finally decides to dump his sorry ass, tell Cristina and Amelia about it and we get to see those three amazing women dancing it out (bonus points if it's on his tombstone).

[finitefall]

My Queen.

[finitefall]

This is also the difference between Hannibal with an audience and Hannibal with only Will. But no, Hannibal isn't scared of death or physical pain. Living without Will, though? "well the only solution is to turn myself in and hope he'll visit me one day"

It just hit me so hard that Hannibal was having the time of his life in Digestivo after being kidnapped and trussed up like livestock, yet was broken to the point of surrender by a few soft, cruel words from the mouth of the man he loves. While being threatened with a slow and painful death he was the happiest duckling imaginable; and while that mostly has to do with the fact that he’s, well, Hannibal, and ticked just about every box in his Super Fun Murder Times book, and also he still managed to maintain his dominance and control while naked and bound on his knees, there is a startling contrast between his emotional state before escaping with Will in his arms and after, when Will breaks up with him.

I mean, this is Hannibal’s face after Cordell explains how he is going to prepare his hands and feet for consumption:

and this is Hannibal’s face as Will tells him he never wants to see or think about him again:

And while Hannibal certainly doesn’t have a traditional perspective on life and death, I think it’s safe to say that for him the idea of continuing his life without Will in it is worse than the most painful of deaths.

[finitefall]

Hannibal: Will Graham is not a lesbian. Margot: He sure made a go at it.

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Didn’t I?

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Betrayal and forgiveness are best seen as something akin to falling in love.

[finitefall]

make me choose: daniels-gillies asked: will graham or marcus kane

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See, this is all I ever wanted for you, Will.

[finitefall]

“Strange seeing you here in front of me. Been staring at afterimages of you in places you haven't been in years. I wanted to understand you before I laid eyes on you again. I needed it to be clear… what I was seeing.”