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Day/Night

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Concept: in a setting where vampires exist and can only be harmed by symbols of faith (crucifixes, etc.), a James Randi-style skeptic/supernatural debunker witnesses his family murdered by vampires, and dedicated his life to hunting down what he believes are a cabal of ordinary serial killers with a blood fetish and some cheap plastic fangs. They die when he shoots them with an ordinary gun, granted holy status by the sheer force of his belief that they are actually just ordinary humans who will die when shot.

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While I don't disagree that many iterations of Dungeons & Dragons have mechanical balance problems with respect to spellcasting classes versus non-spellcasting classes, you can't overlook that a big part of the problem also stems from the fact that D&D as a culture of play is rife with people who will happily deny the rogue their Sneak Attack damage on the basis that "ranged weapon attack" and "attack with a ranged weapon" mean slightly different things, then immediately turn around and let the wizard casually destroy an army with a second-level spell because they forgot that the spell in question has a weight limit. The propensity to be exacting to the point of absurdity when adjudicating the actions of non-wizards while simultaneously adopting a purely vibes-based approach to deciding what wizard spells can do isn't something you can fix with better wording!

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Python installed successfully 🐍😎

[slythernim]

do we need to like. talk. about how grrm taking so long to complete asoiaf means the original subversion of daenerys targaryen's character has been basically lost.

because aside from the show massively fucking the ending up, you also have to consider the seismic shift of the perception of fantasy as a whole since asoiaf hit the mainstream and since more intersectional perspectives and deconstructions of white saviorism have risen in prominence.

like it's a good thing that we're collectively critiquing and sideeying dany's storyline for the questionable, orientalist and often outright racist elements, and that the girlboss dany idea is being challenged. but uh guys. take a look at grrm. do you really think he was setting out to write a paul atreides style deconstruction of white saviorism with dany. or is it not more likely that he put those things into his story by mistake and didn't realize those problematic elements were there until decades later-- especially since girlboss feminism didn't fucking exist when he started writing asoiaf. is it not more likely that he missed the points he was trying to make about dany being a foreigner interfering in eastern politics and the white savior vibe her story sometimes puts off is completely accidental.

people do not seem to realize what the climate of fantasy was when grrm was writing asoiaf in the 90s-00s. the moral grays and grimdark elements of modern fantasy were in part popularized by asoiaf. grrm wasn't subverting the idea of dany being a good ruler. dany being a good ruler was the subversion.

daenerys targaryen is a deconstruction and subversion of the almost comically evil sorceress-queen antagonist of a fantasy novel that would never be written today.

think through what dany looks like from the outside:

she's the daughter of the mad incestuous king who terrorized westeros only a generation ago, and she's back to get his throne for herself.

she's going to make her arrival by invading from the Savage East and killing the one true lost heir, the son of the prince everyone loves and wishes were king, who was raised among the people, who's a boy, who practices the faith of the seven and will marry a westerosi lady. and she's going to destroy the shining city that he's going to rule from.

she rides a black and red dragon that spits black and red fire. she has two other dragons with her and used blood magic to hatch them. she killed a house full of warlocks, has prophetic dreams, talks to mysterious sorcerers and witches and is linked with magic.

she comes from a family of incestuous, weird-looking, magic-using, dragon-riding conquerors who are the last survivors of an empire that conquered half the world and decimated and enslaved an entire continent by using dark magic, dragons and horrifying experiments. and her family in particular is infamous for having a tendency to go insane.

she's so beautiful men are throwing themselves at her. she dominated one husband and killed another. her dragon set poor sweet quentyn martell on fire when all he was doing was trying to honor a betrothal agreement. she has sex with both men and women where she's in control of the encounters. she had a sexual relationship with her brother. she 'bewitched' the most powerful warlord in essos with her sexuality, convinced him to kill her brother for her, took over his following, and will come to westeros with control of the most deadly cavalry in the world who are already considered to be 'savages' -- and her association with them has already started rumors that she fucks horses because she's so insatiable.

she's infertile and sacrificed her one pregnancy (gasp, the Firstborn Son!) to hatch her dragons.

kinslayer allegations: her brother, her son, and her (fake) nephew. even her mother, to an extent.

she has very tanned skin, spooky silver hair (that's very short) and purple eyes, a tyroshi accent and wears revealing clothing that would scandalize westerosis.

she's the savior figure for a Foreign Religion that's spreading in westeros and competing with the faith of the seven.

she's either the savior figure for the 'barbarian' nomadic raiders, or the mother of their prophesized savior.

she's leading an army of foreign (brown) slave soldiers, sellswords and 'barbarians.' she's being advised by foreigners. her handmaids aren't Nice Noble Girls-- they're nomadic horsewomen who are stereotyped as unmannered and promiscuous.

and the westerosis in her camp are the ones westeros hates: pirates that just destroyed oldtown, westeros's beloved center of trade, faith and knowledge. specifically euron, who wants to marry her. the dwarf that killed king joffrey and escaped and is now back because he wants to burn down king's landing. an ugly westerosi lord from backwater bear isle who was banished for selling slaves. a westerosi knight who refused to accept the king's wishes for him to retire and ran off to serve the opposition... and probably marwyn, a controversial maester.

she destroyed the essosi economy, has sacked multiple cities, turned the ruling class out of their homes, crucified a bunch of nobles, and will probably burn the volantene tower full of nobles on her way west.

she's a woman, specifically a teenage girl, who has power in her own right, who wants to claim more of it. and who has no more powerful man to answer to.

daenerys is the embodiment of everything westeros hates and fears to such an extent that even if she does everything right, or doesn't do anything at all, westeros will never accept her.

we spent five books following dany off on her own in essos because that plotline's all about giving you context before she arrives: here's the Evil Queen's backstory, so by the time she does what she does, the reader completely understands and empathizes with her, even if they disagree with her actions. and when all our heroes hate her, and she decides to strip them of their power like she did in essos with the slavers, we don't know what to do.

the subversion is: what if our view of this evil antagonist is xenophobic and sexist, and all the things we're scared of her for were taken out of context or twisted to villainize her. what if the foreign culture she's from isn't evil, and what if her slave army is actually freedmen who chose to follow her, and she opposes the legacy of slavery her family sources their power from. what if she's 'mad' because she's understandably angry and upset, and not ~craaazy~. what if the nobles she was killing deserved it, what if the system they depend on was evil and deserved to be destroyed. what if our system that we've been fighting to preserve isn't much better and needs to go too, even if People We Like are in charge of it. what if she's a teenager who doesn't always make the right decisions, especially when much older adults with their own motives are manipulating her.

the subversion is: what if the evil sorceress-queen who's going to invade our wonderful fantasy realm and bring all her big bad scary changes with it is a complex person with good intentions who actually has a completely legitimate reason to burn it all down.

so if dany genuinely does go evil when she gets to westeros... there's no subversion anymore because the trope is played straight. therefore, she won't. but it won't even matter. we'll know that dany isn't a monster, but nobody else will see her that way.

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[slythernim]

my boss (a breathtakingly brilliant man who has been the lead [specific discipline omitted because you could google him instantly] engineer at a NASA center for thirty-five years) regularly answers complicated questions by consulting a relevant textbook.

real life is always open-book.

idk if any young person needs to hear this but when you work at a job you absolutely can google anything you don’t know or ask someone for help. school has you conditioned to think you have to have everything memorized all the time but let me tell you. I am dumb as shit and I am great at my job because it’s not a test, it’s just work. the more resources you utilize the better.

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[slythernim]

Guys I just realized something

I’m reading Return of the King, and have just reached the chapter called “The Tower of Cirith Ungol,” in which Sam makes to rescue his master.

Something notable about this is that Sam has put on the Ring not once, but twice so far - and both times, his experience has been markedly different than Frodo’s.

Firstly, his vision is impaired. Everything he sees is somewhat obscured by a dark fog. It’s unclear whether this is an effect of the Ring entering Mordor, or if that’s just what it does to him specifically; after all, the Ring acts differently for each Wearer.

It’s the second effect that’s really interesting. You see, for some reason, the Ring improves his hearing. In both instances, he can hear orc-chatter from afar, as well as tumbling rocks and the foaming of Shelob. But what’s really wild about this is that the same never happens to Frodo.

Because the Ring reflects the Will and Strengths of the User, I can only assume this means one thing.

The One Ring empowers Samwise Gamgee’s eavesdropping.

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i know some people criticize the “put a bow on a creature so people know its a girl” approach to character design but come on this rules

[slythernim]

prometheus: hot take,

the greek gods: no give that back

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I had a vision

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There's something hilarious about how so much subsequent media has positioned Vampires and Werewolves as, like, binary opposite entities, and then you read Dracula (1897) and realize that wolves are that guy's preferred solution to every problem. You'd say something to Dracula about "ah yes, werewolves, vampires' great eternal enemies," and he'd just be like "you mean my subcontractors?"

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tangerine snail 🍊

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😳