#lord and serf

[grayrazor]

My headcanon for the Klingons is that, just like with the vikings and samurai that they're based on, the honor-obsessed warrior elite are maybe 10% of the population at most. If you visit a Klingon planet and go anywhere other than the castles of the great houses you see farmers, industrial workers, scientists, engineers, etc.

Maybe in times of relative peace they start giving the more prestigious bureaucratic and clerical jobs to the warrior class, like Edo-era Japan did, to give them something to do so they don't make mischief, that's why you see "warrior-lawyers" like Colonel Worf, Ch’Pok, and Kolos.

Another data point is Martok, who was a commoner--relegated to being cleaning staff on a starship because of Kor's prejudice--but became a warrior after proving himself in combat.

[throwawayasoiafaccount]

let’s be honest for a sec

if you don’t want dany in a position of power at the end of asoiaf then you cannot actually care about the small folk.

you just want your fav on a throne while the small folk continue to be little better than slaves : )

yes, i know that other characters (like jon and arya) are also clearly positioned to make change but dany is the one with the dragons. she has the power to make true lasting change by using her power, and at the end of dance she finally understood that fire and blood was the only way to make true peace in meereen/slavers bay. if it takes fire and blood to strip some power away from lords and ladies in westeros and make the small folk a more protected class then i know dany will do it because she has the means and the kind heart to see it through

[sbnkalny]

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, Lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to our neural pre-sets.

eyeoff

[bludraws094]

ykw im bored im gonna sing tme from memory in the tags

i memorized it probably at least over a year ago, idk i have no concept of Time

[rxttenfish]

ngl theres something deeply uncomfortable to me in both fandom's and canon's repeated insistence that miranda just needs to learn how to do things on her own or how she cant do anything by herself and thus this is a character flaw that she needs to overcome

i dont really have any specific Words for it, but its just. the more that i think about it. and especially the more that i think about it with miranda's eating serfs, the repeated insistence that she has her serfs to eat for her simply because she's too lazy to do it on her own or refuses to do even that much for herself, the more i get Deeply Uncomfortable with the entire thought

which, tbh, probably why i tend to write it more as an artifact of cultural differences (merfolk, being far more communal, tend to have little to no stigma around someone else doing something for you), an aspect of her role (she's fulfilling a specific duty for the throne that is going to be focused on, meaning of course they wouldn't want her "wasting time" doing basic chores), physical differences (merfolk have different anatomy for landfolk, which means even very simple things like chairs or counters or shelves are inaccessible for merfolk), disability (merfolk aren't made to stay on land for this long, and on top of this strain injury and constant fatigue, miranda's stunted and has a compromised immune system), and abuse (the throne is not particularly willing to place her in situations where she can be more independent away from the throne and the royal family, because then she's more dependent on them)

which, in all cases, just telling her to start doing shit on her own and forcing her away from her existing methods to cope and manage it at all are doing more harm than good

[lightdancer1]

I think it a point worth restating:

The first Muslim claim to Jerusalem is the same claim that the Greek civilization in a Christian form it deposed had. The Yarmuk and Gaugamela have equal legitimacy, if Muslims are the indigenous culture of the region then they supplanted an indigenous culture. If the Greeks they displaced are imperialist colonizers then a religion imposed by soldiers is innately colonialist because it replaced a Christian and Zoroastrian Aramaic and Farsi speaking world with an Arabic Islamic one. Nobody 'voluntarily' adopts a new language, it is always forced by means more or less overtly imperialist, whether or not people have the historical awareness enough to realize this is what happened.

The claim deposed by General Allenby in 1918 at Megiddo was won by the same means by the armies of the Ottoman Sultan, who went against the heirs of Sultan Baibars, eraser of the Crusader states. At the time the three sub-provinces of what would later be termed Palestine were eastern Mamluk zones. As a result of this battle, where the heroic legions of Baibar's successors were butchered by cannons much like they would be again by Napoleon, showing the signal inability of Mamluks to accept the implications of why they were semi-loyal servants of the Ottomans in the first place, the region later merged into Mandatory Palestine became Ottoman territory for 402 years.

And so the question. If winning a battle made Abdulhamid II and the genocidal murder-gang called the Committee of Union and Progress the rightful masters of Jerusalem, why does this only apply to the empire whose conquest unraveled in another conquest and when is the statue of limitations on conquest met?

This is one of the reasons why trying to apply a logic suited to understanding the history of the Americas breaks down very hard in the region where empire begins at the dawn of humankind's experiments in civilization in the hubristic and grandiloquent boasts of the lords of Sumer and Agade of being 'lords of the four corners and all the world.'

Either empires and the identities they spawn as their bastard offspring or legitimate or there's never been any coherent ethnocultural identities in the region, only a sequence of fallen empires and rising and falling religions loosely superimposed into a historical narrative. To grapple with this is to grapple in turn with one of the simplest realities of history. Not every culture comes close to sharing the same narratives or experiences, and projecting the ideal self-image of one culture onto the vastly different experiences when Selim the Grim is a founding father of a 400-year world which was much younger than Ottoman rule of the Balkans, as compared to a world started by James Polk's blundering horde ripping apart the semi-functional and badly wounded Mexico of the Age of Santa Anna.

Some principles, if held to be universal, render entire elements of histories and cultures incoherent and impossible to describe unless one is willing to admit that the history of the Middle East is not that of Europe, or China, or India, or Central Asia, or the Americas, or the Australian continent and that different regions should be treated respectfully, and differently, with awareness the underlying faultlines are also distinct.

[pateralba]

FEODALİZM

Konuyu evrenselleştirmek için kral vs. gibi yetke adları yerine "egemen" sözcüğünü kullanmayı seçtim. Öncelikle bilinmelidir ki feodalizm komplekstir. Ayrıca zaman ve mekan bakımından tüm Orta çağı kapsamaz. Feodalizm, burjuva devrimlerine kadar süren erken feodalizm ve manoryalizm (feodalizmin doruğu - malikane sistemi) olarak iki sürece ayrılır. İki ayrı feodal sürece ek olarak yıkılış sürecinden söz edeceğim.

Feodal toplum, köleci toplumun bağrından koptu. Orta çağda, köleci toplum devrilirken feodal toplum kuruldu. Feodalizm yavaşça ortaya çıktı. Büyük toprak tekelleri rakiplerine baskı yaptı ve eşitsiz rekabet oluştu. Köylüler iflas etti ve seçkinlerin gözetimine geçti. Feodal toplumda koruyan-korunan (süzeren-vassal) ilişkisine dayanan fief sözleşmesi vardı. Bu sözleşme ile taraflar bağlılıklarını yasallaştırdılar. Feodalizm egemenliğin savunmasına dayanıyordu. Orta çağda egemenler topraklarını savunamadı ve toprağın bir bölümünü soylulara verdi. Soylular toprak kazandıklarında düşük rütbeli korunanlara dağıttılar. Onlar da kendilerine verilen toprağa karşı asker beslemeye ve feodallere destek sözü verdi.

Feodalizm, ayrıca egemenlerin en üstte olduğu hiyerarşik ilişkiye dayanır. Köleci toplumdan kalan devletler, toprakları çıkarları karşılığında kölelere dağıttı ve köleci toplumun sonunu hazırladı. Dağıtılan toprak (feod) sınıflı toplumun feodalizm sürecini başlattı. Yeni egemen sınıfa hizmet eden serfler, köleler gibi mülksüzdü. Toprak satılsa da, feodal değişse de serf toprakla birlikte satılırdı. Tarımda serf emeği köle emeğinin yerini aldı. Tarım ekonomisinde tekelleri feodaller temsil etmeye başladı. Orta çağın özgür çiftliklerine allod denir. Allodları alıkonulan köylüler, topraklarını düzenli işleme koşuluyla tekellerden toprak aldı. Bu geçici kullanıma prekarey adı verilir. Tekeller yerleşik düzenden yarar sağladıkları için köylüleri topraklardan çıkarmadı. Feodalizmin kuruluş sürecinde feodalin mülkünü kullanan bağımlı köylüler hukuken üçe ayrılıyordu. Özgür kökenliler, bağımlılar ve köle kökenliler. İkinci ve üçüncü gruptakiler, erken Orta çağda ortaya çıkan toprağa bağlı kiracı çiftçilerin (kolonuslar) ve köle kökenlilerin devamı olanlardı fakat birinci gruptakiler feodalizmin başlangıç sürecinde topraklarını yitirerek serf olanlardı. İlerleyen süreçte allod sahibi diğer özgür köylüler de topraklarını ve bağımsızlıklarını feodale kaptırdılar ve serf oldular. Feodalizmde feodaller, iki gruptan oluşur. Soylular ve ruhban takımı (din adamları). Soylular, köleci toplumda bedeni kuvvetli olanlardan buraya değin gelebilmeyi başarmış aylaklar, krallar, prensler, dükler, baronlar, kontlar veya başka dillerde çok daha fazlası idi. Ve insanlığın ilk asalakları din adamları, psikoposlardan rahiplere veya başka inançlarda başka şeyler olarak adlandırılan bir yığın parazit sürüsü. Ve ayrıcalıksızlar, serfler! Feodalizmde güçlü merkezi devlet yetkesine rastlanmaz. Skolastiğin egemen olduğu toplum yaşamında din etkilidir. En üstte egemen (çar, padişah, kral vs.) vardır. Çoğu ulus için egemenleri, yaratıcı ile bağlarını kuran varlıktı ve kontrolü altındaki toprakların tek sahibiydi. İlerleme çok yavaştı. Dolayısıyla artı değer yönetimi egemenlerin yetkesiyle belirlendi. Yani feodal toplum da tıpkı köleci toplum ve ileride feodal toplumun bağrından kopacak kapitalist toplum gibi siyasidir. Feodalizmde, feodal yönetim yereldir ve bu yönetim kamu yetkesidir. Ayrıca güçlü merkezi devlet yetkesi olmasa da merkezi yönetim ve kamu yetkesi hiçbir zaman tümüyle kaybolmamıştır. Egemen ise eşitlikler arasında birincidir. Feodalizmin temeli serfler tarafından üretilen artı değere tekellerin el koymasıdır. Temel eylem tarımdır ve bu toprağı temel üretim aracı yapar. Bu tekellere toprağın rantından yararlanma imkanı verir. Erken feodalizm, ticaret ve şehir yaşamının ortadan kalktığı ve yerini kır yaşamının aldığı bir düzendir.

Temel mülk toprak ve buna bağlı üretim ilişkileri feodalizmin tüm toplumsal düzenine işlemiştir. Ayrıca şehirde de sosyal farklılaşma vardır. Çünkü feodalin etki alanında yalnız köyler değil şehirler de yer alır. Feodalin sömürüsüne şehirli zanaatkarlar da uğradı. Çünkü feodalizmde köy, politik olarak şehre egemendi. Feodal, şehirliler için en büyük egemendi. Fakat zanaatkarlığın artması ile tefeci ile burjuvazinin elinde servet birikmesi, sonunda şehrin köy üzerinde egemenliğini beraberinde getirdi. Feodal egemenlik zanaatkarlığı ve ticaretin gelişmesini engelliyordu. Bu nedenle şehirler sürekli olarak feodallere karşı mücadele ediyordu. Sonunda politik özgürlüklerini, öz idare hakkını, sikke hakkını kazanmayı ve vergiden kurtulmayı başardılar. Burjuvazi, tefeciler ve zengin zanaatkarların elinde yeterince para bulunduğu için, şehirler feodallerden para karşılığında da kurtuldular. Fakat yine de çoğu kez özgürlüklerini silahlı mücadelelerle kazandılar. Feodal egemenlikten kurtulan şehirlerde ise burjuvazi, tefeciler ve büyük emlak sahipleri egemendi. Feodal mülkiyet, mülk olan toprak üzerindeki insanları da kapsardı. Erken feodalizmde ücretsiz ekonomi ve faiz ekonomisi olmak üzere iki temel üretim biçimi vardır. Ücretsiz ekonomide bir bölümü feodale ayrılan toprak ikiye ayrılır. Serf, feodalin toprağında kendi ihtiyacı için emek verir. Bu ekonomide gerekli ürün ve artı ürün zaman ve mekana göre birbirinden ayrılır. Serf feodalin toprağında çalışmadığında kendi toprağında çalışır. Faiz ekonomisinde bütün toprak köylüye dağıtılır ve ürünün bir bölümü faiz olarak feodale verilir. Serf, bu ekonomide artı emeği kendi ekonomisinde harcar. Köy ile şehir arasında ticaretin gelişmesiyle iç pazar oluştu. Ticaret sermayesi, köylü ve zanaatkar arasındaki değişimin aracıydı. Burjuvanın karı, eşit olmayan değişimden kaynaklanıyordu. Burjuva metayı değerinin altında satın alır ve üstünde satardı. Karın kaynağı, köylü ve zanaatkarın ürettiği artı ürün ile bazen de gerekli ürünün bir bölümüydü. Dış ticaretin gelişmesiyle birlikte meta üretim ve dolaşımının farklılaşması da güçlendi. Dış ticaret, köleci toplumda oldukça gelişmişti fakat feodalizme geçiş sırasında geriledi. Üretimin artması ve meta ilişkileri dış ticareti yeniden canlandırdı. Sonuç olarak para dolaşımı gelişti ve sikke basımı mükemmelleşti. Üst yetkeye göre ekonomi, küçük devletçilik, yolların bozukluğu, ulaşım aracı geriliği, standart ölçü ve para biriminin olmayışı ve feodallerin burjuvaziyi soymaları Orta çağ ticaretini engelliyordu. Feodal toplumda para ililşkileri geliştikçe tefeci sermayesi de gelişti. Tefeciler feodal soylulara olduğu kadar zanaatkar ve köylülere de borç para veriyordu. Para ilişkileri yaygınlaşırken feodal mülk de pazara dahil olmaya başladı. Feodallere, şehir zanaatkarlarının lüks ürünlerini satın almak için daha fazla para gerekli oldu. Böylece köylülerin ücretsiz ekonomi ve diğer ödemelerini para ödemesine çevirdiler. Bununla birlikte köylü ekonomisi de pazara dahil oldu. Feodalizmde toprak mülkiyetinin yapısındaki hiyerarşi toplumu da şekillendirir. Daha önce bahsettiğimiz gibi fief gereği, küçük toprak feodali, feodal soyluya ödeme yapmak zorundadır. Toprak feodali savaşta feodal soyluların yanında yer alır, buna karşılık onlar da toprak feodallerini korur. Fakat bu durum ileride para ile değişecektir. Erken feodalizmin asıl sorunu, fetihten sonra başlardı ve egemenin sorunları çözmesi gerekirdi. Çözümler temel bir zorlamaya dayanırdı. Fethedilen topraklar egemen istediği zaman belli sayıda askeri beslemek amacıyla seçkinlere bağışlanacaktı. İlk başlarda bu bağışlar egemen tarafından alınarak başkasına verilebiliyordu, mirasla bırakılamıyordu. İlk egemenler öldüğünde toprakları başkalarına verebilecek kadar güçlü olabiliyorlardı. Fakat genel eğilim toprakların soydan soya geçmeye başlamasıydı. Bir kez gerçekleştikten sonra egemenler kendi güç merkezlerini oluşturdu ve kendi askerlerini kontrol eden yerel seçkinler üzerinden daha az kontrol sahibi oldu.

Bu durum egemenleri ve seçkinleri destek konusunda pazarlık yapmak durumunda bıraktı. Egemen yerel seçkinleri kontrol etmesi için taşralı ve yerel valiler tayin etti. Sorun, egemenin bu görevi verebileceği az sayıda kişi olmasıydı. Bu nedenle devlet birkaç büyük valiliğe ayrıldı. Dikkatli bir egemen söz konusu olduğunda, sistem işledi. Fakat taht verasetine karşı çıkıldığında egemene yakın olanların yararlanacağı büyük güç merkezlerinin oluşmasına neden oldu. Taht veraseti sorunlarından kaçınabilinirse, devlet istikrarlı yönetildi. Fakat yine de iç sorunlar birikti. Seçkinler soydan soya geçen mülklerine iyice yerleşiyor ve topraklarını, ya yoksul köylüden satın alıyor, ya da doğrudan köylülerin topraklarına el koyuyordu. Yürürlüğe konan vergi sistemleri giderek dağılım dışına çıktı ve verimliliğini kaybetti. Seçkinler vergi vermekten kaçındıkça, vergi ödemeyen kurumlara, özellikle dini gruplara, daha fazla toprak bağışlandı ve sorun büyüdü. Egemenin elde edeceği zenginlik, yetersiz ulaşım nedeniyle denetlenmesi zor olan taşra seçkinlerinin yükselişine paralel olarak azaldı. Her iki durum da orduyu beslemenin zorlaşması anlamına geliyordu. Genellikle dayanıksız olan egemen, yeni egemen tarafından yerine başka bir yetke getirilerek kaldırılıyordu. Fakat serfler için çok az şey değişiyordu. Mülk sahibi seçkinlerin gelmesi, egemenleriyle çoğu zaman az temasları olduğu için pek bir şeyi değiştirmiyordu. Egemenler bir iç savaş veya fetih sürecinin ardından çok az istikrar sağlardı. Fakat bu etkili bir vergilendirme ve bir miktar yiyecek fazlasına el konulması demekti. Manoryalizm, egemenliği kendine yeterli duruma getirmeye dayanıyordu. Toprak, korunanlar ve koruyanlar arasında bölündüğünde, efendiler köylülere bir toprak parçasında yaşamaya ve işleyim yapmaya izin verdiler. Efendiye ait olan topraklarda yaşamanın bir sonucu olarak, köylüler, efendiye ürünler sağladı, evlerinde onlarla ilgilendi ve istedikleri her şeyi yaparak hizmet etti. Bu köylüler serfti. Bu özel korunana ait tüm toprak, rabbin malikanesinin etrafında dönüyordu. Böylelikle manoryalizm ortaya çıktı. Bu ekonomik bir sistemdi. Bireysel olarak varlığını sürdürdü ve serf ile rab arasındaki ilişkiyi ele aldı. Feodalizmin doruğu manoryalizmde, birçok kırsal ekonominin yerini malikane ekonomisi aldı. Manoryalizm, seçkin toprak sahiplerinin köylülerle holdingleri arasında ilişki sistemidir.

Serflerin her açıdan yargı yetkisi altında oldukları efendilerine karşı sorumlulukları vardı. Malikane toprak mülküydü, ekonominin merkezi ve bu toprak seçkinlerinin yanı sıra din adamlarının organizasyonuydu. Din adamları yönettikleri manorlara "rabbin malikanesi" dediler. Bu malikanenin merkezinde büyük bir ev vardı. Bu ev malikanenin efendisinin yaşadığı yer, ayrıca malikane mahkemesinde yapılan davaların yeriydi. Malikane ve toprak sahibinin mülkleri büyüdükçe, diğer soyluların gelip gidebilme amacıyla daireler ev üzerine yapıldı. Efendinin birçok malikanesi olduğunda, her malikaneye bir denetçi atardı. Burası aynı zamanda askeri gücün merkeziydi ve kale kadar güçlü olmasa da malikaneyi çevreleyen duvarlar, evin duvarlarının içine kadar girerdi. Korunan bu evin etrafında küçük kiracı evler, tarım arazileri ve tüm topluluk tarafından kullanılan ortak alanlar vardı.

Kiralık topraklar, efendinin ekonomik çıkarı için köleler veya kötü adamlar olarak bilinen kiracılar tarafından işlendi. Bu kiracılar kalıtsaldı, tek bir ailenin birkaç nesli aynı alanlarda çalışabilir ve yaşayabilirdi. Buna karşılık, serf ailesi yasal olarak efendiyle varılan hizmet anlaşmasını sağlamakla yükümlüydü. Son olarak, serbest köylü toprağı yaygın değildi. Ancak bazı küçük işletmelerde serbest toprak vardı; köylüler burada serf komşularının aksine özgürce ve hala malikanenin yetki alanına giren kiralanan ve yetiştirilen toprakta üretebilirdi. Serfler ve kötü adamlar genellikle özgür değildi ama köle de değildi. Onlar ve aileleri sözleşmeli olarak malikanenin efendisinin yargısı altına girdiler. Adaletin sisteminin merkezi, malikane mahkemesiydi ve davaları düzenledi. Hırsızlık, saldırı vb. diğer suçlamalar kiracılar arasında anlaşmazlık olarak görüldü. Malikaneye karşı işlenen suçlar sosyal düzeni bozduğu gerekçesiyle ciddiye alındı. Örneğin efendinin ormanından bir şey alıp yiyen daha şiddetli cezalandırıldı. Daha büyük görülen suçlar daha büyük bir mahkeme ile egemene veya temsilcisine gönderildi. Sözleşmeler, kiracılık, çeyizler ve diğer yasal anlaşmazlıklar, malikane mahkemesinin baskın işi idi. Çoğu durumda efendi kendisi karar vermez ve on iki seçilmiş erkekten oluşan bir jüri karar verirdi. Köleci sürece göre ilerici olan feodalizm artık gericileşti. Birikim yapamaz duruma geldi. Tarım ve ticari sermaye grupları arasında çekişmeler başladı. Ülkeler, toprağın sermaye olduğu bir piyasadan, ticarete dayalı bir piyasaya geçtiğinde malikane sistemi geriledi. Daha sonra çoğu malikane, para temelli bir ekonomiye geçti. Avrupa da para temelli bir ekonomiye geçtiğinde, malikane sistemi sonunda yok olmaya başladı. Fief sahibi korunanların sunduğu hizmetler, daha etkili ve daha az sorun çıkaran kişiler tarafından görülmeye başlandı. Merkezi devlet yetkesinin güçlenmesi ve yetkinin artık gerçekten egemenlerde toplanması, diğer taraftan şehirlerin zenginleşerek kendi güvenlik birimlerini oluşturması, feodalizmi zayıflattı. Feodal egemen sınıfın gelir sağladığı ve bu gelirini artırabileceği tek kaynak, serfin kendi geçimini sağlamak için gerekli olanın ötesinde emek vermesidir. O süreçteki emek üretkenliği koşullarında ürünün arttırılması için çok az boşluk vardı. Artı ürünü çoğaltma yolundaki girişimler, yetersiz toprak parçasını işlemeye yönelik zamanın azaltılmasıydı. Bu durum insanın direncini aşan bir noktaya geliyordu, ya da yaşam koşullarını insanca yaşamanın altına düşürüyordu. Emek üzerinde baskının artması, sistem için yıkıcı sonuçları beraberinde getirdi. Sistemi besleyen emeğin üzerinde artan baskı, manorlarda sadece umutsuzluktan kaynaklanan yasa dışı göçlere yol açmadı, aynı zamanda feodal ekonominin boğuşacağı bir dizi bunalımı beraberinde getirdi. Orta çağın başlangıcındaki feodal ekonomide para için fazla yer yoktu. Fakat şimdi şehir burjuvazisi, feodalizme karşı "para" silahına sahipti. Feodal, gereksinimi olan her şeyi, ya çalışma biçimi ya da ürün biçimi olarak kendi serflerinden sağlıyordu. Tüm feodal egemenlik, kendi kendine yeterken savaş yükümleri bile ürün olarak isteniyordu, ticaret, değişim yoktu, para önemsizdi. Genellikle yağma yoluyla kazanılan para vergilerin ödenmesine yarıyor, toplumsal işlevden çok siyasal işlev görmeye hazırlanıyordu. Artık her şey değişmişti. Para, yeni baştan, evrensel değişim aracı durumuna geldi ve bunun sonucu olarak niceliği oldukça arttı. Artık soyluluk bile paradan vazgeçemiyordu. Ve satacak çok az şeyi olduğu, ya da hiç olmadığı, yağma da artık kolay olmadığı için, burjuva-tefeciden ödünç alıyordu. Feodaller, yeni toplar tarafından şatoları saldırıya uğramadan önce para tarafından çoktan esir alınmıştı. Eski kaba ekonomi çoğunlukla varlığını sürdürse de, birçok ülkede köylüler feodale ücretsiz ekonomi sunmak yerine para verdiler. Kırda bile feodal kurumlar toplumsal tabanlarını yitirdi.

Bu çağda, ülkeleri saran para hırsı, 15.yy sonunda feodalizmin para tarafından içten çökertileceğine işaret eder. Bu yüzyılda feodalizm çöküş durumundaydı. Feodalizm karşıtı çıkarlara sahip şehirler, her yerde feodal toprakların içlerine sokulmuşlardı. İsteklerini gerçekleştirmek için kendi başlarına güçsüz olan burjuvazi, tüm feodalizmin başı olan egemenin ta kendisinde, güçlü bir dayanak buldu. Burjuvazinin toplumsal ilişkiler düşüncesinin devlet ilişkileri düşüncesine vardığı, ekonomiden siyasete geçme noktası tam da buraya dayanmakta. Bu noktadan diyebiliriz ki, modern uluslar da, sınıf mücadelesinin ürünleridirler. Ulus devletin gelişiminde egemenin buyruğu vardır. Ticaretle uğraşan burjuvazi monarşiyi desteklemiş ve Papalığın kan kaybetmesi ile monarşiler ciddi güç kazanmıştır. Bu genel karışıklık içerisinde, ulus devletçi egemenlikler ilerleme aracı oldu.

Çünkü egemenlik, düzensizlik içerisinde düzeni, ufalanma karşısında oluşma durumundaki ulusu temsil ediyordu. Bundan dolayı, feodalizmin bağrında oluşan tüm devrimci oluşumlar, egemenlik ne kadar onlara dayanmak zorundaysa, o kadar egemenliğe dayanmak zorundaydı. Gelişme, devamında Roma hukukunda kaldıraç buldu. Feodal koşulları kesinlikle tanımayan ve modern özel mülkiyeti (kendinden önceki koşullara göre iyidir) tamamen önceleyen bir hukukun yürürlüğe girmesi büyük bir ilerleme idi. Feodal soyluluk artık Orta çağda ekonomik anlamda egemenleri ve burjuvaziyi sıkmaya başladı. Çünkü şehirlerin ve o çağda yalnızca egemenlik biçimi altında olanaklı olan ulus devletin gelişmesi için de engeldi. Bu durumda evrenselleşen kültür hareketi feodalizme karşı savaşta burjuvazi ve egemenliğin işini kolaylaştırdı. Egemenler, burjuvazinin ve ticaretin gelişmesine paralel olarak aldığı vergiler nedeniyle merkezi bir ordu kurma ve soylular üzerinde denetim kurma fırsatını yeniden buldular. Gücünü burjuvaziden alan egemenlerin yetkesi arttıkça, soyluların ekonomik üstünlüğü sona erdi. Sonunda merkezi devlet yetkesi kendini soylulara kabul ettirdi ve feodalizmin egemenliği zayıflamaya başladı. Vergilerin artması ve ekonomik duraklamayla birlikte soyluların maliyesi tam bir darbe yedi. Bu noktaya kadar feodal soyluluk, aynı zamanda silahları kullanma tekeli olduğu için her şeye karşın ayakta kaldı. Fakat egemenler bu feodal ordudan kurtulmak ve kendi öz ordularını kurmak için çaba gösterdiler. Bu çağdan sonra, askere alınmışlar ya da kiralanmışlardan oluşan birlikler oranı durmadan arttı. Başlangıçta şehirlerin işgalinde ve kuşatmalarda kullanılan piyadeler söz konusuydu. Ama çağın sonuna doğru kendilerini yabancı prenslerin hizmetine kiralayan ve feodalizmin yıkılışını müjdeleyen şövalyeleri de görüyoruz. Aynı zamanda, şehirlerde özgür köylüler arasında savaşkan bir piyadenin koşulları oluşuyordu. O zamana kadar, alt görevdekiler ile birlikte şövalyelik, ordunun temelinden çok, ordunun kendisiydi. Şövalyeler bir süre bütün savaşlara katıldı ve sonuçları belirledi. Fakat durum birçok noktada birden değişti. İlk olarak İngiltere'de toprak köleliğinin yavaş yavaş ortadan kalkışıyla, yeoman (ordu olarak yetiştirilen özgür doğmuş) ve toprak sahiplerinden oluşan kalabalık bir özgür köylüler gurubu oluştu. Aynı zamanda soyluların veraset çatışmaları ve korunanların özgürlüklüklerini elde etmeleriyle feodalizmin çöküşü hızlandı. Feodallerin son kozları şatolarıydı. Şato arkasına saklanan soyluların egemenlere bağlanmaktan başka seçeneği kalmadı. Zenginlik ölçütü topraktan paraya geçtiğinde sınıflar arasında değişiklikler oldu. Önceden yönetme gücü soylularda ve din adamlarındayken artık yönetme gücüne burjuvazi de ortak oldu. Ticaretle birlikte ortaya çıkan lonca sistemi, faiz, tefecilik gibi yeni oluşumlara sertçe karşı çıkan kilise artık sistemden yararlanmaya başladı. Kitapta yazgısını benimsemiş köylü özgürlüğü tattı. Ürün satışındaki artış, ticaretin yayılmasına yol açtı. Piyasa ekonomosi gelişti. Etkili bir burjuvazi vardı. Burjuvalar çıkarlarını korumak için loncalarda birleşmeye başladılar. Zanaatkarlar şehir atölyeleri kurdular. Sanatkarların feodallerden bağımsız kalmalarına izin verdiler. Bununla birlikte Orta çağın sonunda bilimsel ilerlemenin hızlanmasıyla atölyeler geçmişte kalmıştır. Kapitalistler modern üretim ve ticaret büyüdükçe feodalizmle çatıştı. Feodalizme karşı açılan savaşın ilk başlarda çok iyi sonuçları olmadı. Feodaller, toprak çevirme hareketiyle köylüyü tekrar egemenlikleri altına almak istedi. Bu durum, topraklarından sürülmüş, aç kalmış köylülerin satacak iş gücünden başka bir şey kalmaması sonucunda kapitalizmin ihtiyaç duyduğu işleyim işçilerini hazır hale getirdi. Feodalizm, yalnızca bunlarla değişmedi. Köylü isyanları günlük bir olay halini aldı. Hepsi acımasızca bastırıldı. Sıradan katılımcılar işkence görürken elçiler idam edildi. Bunlarla birlikte köylüler özgürleşti ve şehirler özgür nüfusun kalesine dönüştü. Feodalizmin son kalıntısı ise sanayi devrimi ile yok oldu.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A profoundly stupid case about video game cheating could transform adblocking into a copyright infringement

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's a weird consequence of our societal shift from capitalism (where riches come from profits) to feudalism (where riches come from rents): increasingly, your rights to your actual property (the physical stuff you own) are trumped by corporations' metaphorical "intellectual property" claims.

That's a lot to unpack! Let's start with a quick primer on profits and rents. Capitalists invest money in buying equipment, then they pay workers wages to use that equipment to produce goods and services. Profit is the sum a capitalist takes home from this arrangement: money made from paying workers to do productive things.

Now, rents: "rent" is the money a rentier makes by owning a "factor of production": something the capitalist needs in order to make profits. Capitalists risk their capital to get profits, but rents are heavily insulated from risk.

For example: a coffee shop owner buys espresso machines, hires baristas, and rents a storefront. If they do well, the landlord can raise their rent, denying them profits and increasing rents. But! If a great new cafe opens across the street and the coffee shop owner goes broke, the landlord is in great shape, because they now have a vacant storefront they can rent, and they can charge extra for a prime location across the street from the hottest new coffee shop in town.

The "moral philosophers" that today's self-described capitalists claim to worship – Adam Smith, David Ricardo – hated rents. For them, profits were the moral way to get rich, because when capitalists chase profits, they necessarily chase the production of things that people want.

When rentiers chase rents, they do so at the expense of profits. Every dollar a capitalist pays in rent – licenses for IP, rent for a building, etc – is a dollar that can't be extracted in profit, and then reinvested in the production of more goods and services that society desires.

The "free markets" of Adam Smith weren't free from regulation, they were free from rents.

The moral philosophers' hatred of rents was really a hatred of feudalism. The industrial revolution wasn't merely (or even primarily) the triumph of new machines: rather, it was the triumph of profits over rent. For the industrial revolution to succeed, the feudal arrangement had to end. Capitalism is incompatible with hereditary lords receiving guaranteed rents from hereditary serfs who are legally obliged to work for them. Capitalism triumphed over feudalism when the serfs were turned off of the land (becoming the "free labor" who went to work in the textile mills) and the land itself was given over to sheep grazing (providing the wool for those same mills).

But that doesn't mean that the industrial revolution invented profits. Profits were to be found in feudal societies, wherever a wealthy person increased their wealth by investing in machines and hiring workers to use them. The thing that made feudalism feudal was how conflicts between rents and profits cashed out. For so long as the legal system elevated the claims of rentiers over the claims of capitalists, the society was feudal. Once the legal system gave priority to profit over rent, it became capitalist.

Capitalists hate capitalism. The engine of capitalism is insecurity. The successful capitalist is like the fastest gun in the old west: there's always a young gun out there looking to "disrupt" their fortune with a new invention, product, or organizational strategy that "creatively destroys" the successful businesses of the day and replaces them with new ones:

https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/

That's a hard way to live, with your every success serving as a blinking KICK ME sign visible to every ambitious person in the world. Precarity makes people miserable and nuts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

So capitalists universally aspire to become rentiers and investors seek out companies that have a plan to extract rent. This is why Warren Buffett is so priapatic for companies with "moats and walls" – legal privileges and market structures that protect the business from competition and disruption:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-explains-moat-principle-164442359.html

Feudal rents were mostly derived from land, but even in the feudal era, the king was known to reward loyal lickspittles with rents over ideas. The "patents royal" were the legally protected right to decide who could make or do certain things: for example, you might have a patent royal over the production of silver ribbon, and anyone who wanted to make a silver ribbon would have to pay for your permission. If you chose to grant that permission exclusively to one manufacturer, then no one else could make it, and you could charge a license fee to the manufacturer that accounted for nearly all their profit.

Today, rentiers are also interested in land. Bill Gates is the country's number one landowner, and in many towns, private equity landlords are snappinig up every single family home that hits the market and converting it to a badly maintained slum:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

But the 21st Century's defining source of rent is "IP" – a controversial term that I use here to mean, "Any law or policy that allows a company to exert legal control over its competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is in irreconcilable conflict with real property rights. Think of HP selling you a printer and wanting to decide which ink you use, or John Deere selling you a tractor and wanting to tell you who can fix it. Or, for that matter, Apple selling you a phone and dictating which software you are allowed to install on it.

Think of Unity, a company that makes tools for video-game makers, demanding a royalty from every game that is eventually sold, calling this "shared success":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Every time one of these conflicts ends with IP's triumph over real property rights, that is a notch in favor of calling the world we live in now "technofeudalist" rather than "technocapitalist":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Once you start to think of "IP" as "laws that let me control how other people use their real property," a lot of the seemingly incoherent fights over IP snap into place. This also goes a long way to explaining how otherwise sensible people can agree on expansions of IP to achieve some short-term goal, irrespective of the spillover harms from such a move. Hard cases make bad law, and hard IP cases make terrible law.

Five years ago, some anti-fascist counterdemonstrators hit on the clever idea of blaring top 40 music during neo-Nazi marches, on the theory that this would prevent Nazis from uploading videos of their marches to Youtube and other platforms, whose filters would block any footage that included copyrighted music:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

Thankfully, this didn't work, but not for lack of trying. And it might still work, if calls for beefing up video copyright filters are heeded. Cops all over the place are already blaring Taylor Swift songs and Disney tunes to prevent their interactions with the public from being uploaded:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

The same thinking that causes progressives to recklessly argue in favor of upload filters also causes them to demand that web scraping be treated as a copyright crime. They think they're creating a world where AI companies can't rip off their creation to train a model; they're actually creating a world where the Internet Archive can't capture JD Vance's embarrassing old podcast appearances or newspaper editorial boards' advocacy for positions they now recant:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

It's not that Nazi marches are good, or that scraping can't be bad – it's just that advocating for the use of IP to address either is a cure that's not just worse than the disease – it's also not a cure.

A problem can be real, and still not be solvable with IP. I have enormous sympathy for gamers who rail against cheaters who use aftermarket hacks to improve their aim, see through buildings, or command other unfair advantages.

If you want to tell a stranger how they must configure their PC or console, IP ("any law that lets you control your competitors, critics or customers") is an obvious answer. But – as with other attempts to solve real problems with IP – this is a cure that is both worse than the disease, and also not a cure after all.

Back in 2002, Blizzard sued some hobbyists over a program called "bnetd." Bnetd was a program that provided a game-server you could connect to with the Blizzard games that you'd bought. It was created as an alternative to Battlenet, Blizzard's notoriously unreliable game-server software that left gamers frustrated and furious due to frequent outages:

https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

To the public, Blizzard made several arguments against bnetd. They claimed that it encouraged piracy, because – unlike the official Battlenet servers – it didn't check whether the copies of Blizzard software that connected to it had a valid license key. Gamers didn't really care about that, but they did respond to another argument: that bnetd lacked the anti-cheat checking of Battlenet.

But that wasn't what Blizzard took to the court: in court, they argued that the hobbyists who made bnetd violated copyright law. Specifically, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans "circumvention of access controls to copyrighted works." Basically, Blizzard argued that bnetd's authors violated the law because they used debuggers to examine the software they'd paid for, while it ran on their own computers, to figure out how to make a game server of their own.

Blizzard didn't sue bnetd's authors for pirating Blizzard software (they didn't – they'd paid for their copies). They didn't sue them for abetting other gamers' piracy. They certainly didn't sue them for making a cheat-friendly game-server.

Blizzard sued them for analyzing software they'd paid for, while it was running on their own computers.

Imagine if Walmart – one of the biggest book-retailers in America – had a policy that said that you could only shelve the books you bought at Walmart on shelves that you also bought at Walmart. Now imagine that Walmart successfully argued that measuring the books you bought from them and using those measurements to create your own compatible book-case violated their IP rights!

This is an outrageous triumph of IP rights over real property rights, and yet gamers vocally backed Blizzard in the early noughts, because gamers hate cheaters and because IP law is (correctly) understood as "the law that lets a company tell you how you can use your own real, physical property." Hard cases make bad law, hard IP cases make batshit law.

It's more than 20 years since bnetd, and cheating continues to serve as a Trojan horse to smuggle in batshit new IP laws. In Germany, Sony is suing the cheat-device maker Datel:

https://torrentfreak.com/sonys-ancient-lawsuit-vs-cheat-device-heads-in-right-direction-sonys-defeat-240705/

Sony argues that the Datel device – which rewrites the contents of a player's device's RAM, at the direction of that player – infringes copyright. Sony claims that the values that its programs write to your device's RAM chips are copyrighted works that it has created, and that altering that copyrighted work makes an unauthorized derivative work, which infringes its copyright.

Yes, this is batshit, and thankfully, Sony has been thwarted in court to date, but it is steaming ahead to the EU's highest court. If it succeeds, then it will open up every tool that modifies your computer at your direction to this kind of claim.

How bad can it be? Well, get this: the German publishing giant Axel Springer (owned by a monomaniacal Trumpist and Israel hardliner who has ordered journalists in his US news outlets to go easy on both) is suing Eyeo, makers of Adblock Plus, on the grounds that changing HTML to block an ad creates a "derivative work" of Axel Springer's web-pages:

https://torrentfreak.com/ad-blocking-infringes-copyright-ancient-sony-cheat-lawsuit-may-prove-pivotal-240729/

Axel Springer's filings cite the Sony/Datel case, using it to argue that their IP rights trump your property rights, and that you can only configure your web-browser, running on your computer, which you own, in ways that it approves of.

Axel Springer's war on browsers is a particularly pernicious maneuver, because browsers are the best example we have of internet software that serves as a "user agent." "User agent" is an old-timey engineering synonym for "browser" that reflects the browser's role: to go out onto the web on your behalf and bring back things for you, which it displays in the way you prefer:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Want to block flickering GIFs to forestall photosensitive epileptic servers? Ask your user agent to find and delete them. Want to shift colors into a gamut that accounts for your color-blindness? Ask your user-agent:

https://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/15/dankam/

Want to goose the font size and contrast so you can read the sadistic grey-on-white type that young designers use in the mistaken belief that black-on-white type is "hard on the eyes"? That's what Reader Mode is for:

https://frankgroeneveld.nl/2021/08/24/most-underused-browser-feature/

The foundation of any good digital relationship is a device that works for you, not for the people who own the servers you connect to. Even if they don't plan on screwing you over by directing your user agent to attack you on their behalf right now, the very existence of a facility in your technology that causes it to betray you, by design, is a moral hazard that inevitably results in your victimization:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

"IP" ("a law that lets me control how you use your own property") is a tempting solution to every problem, but ultimately, IP ends up magnifying the power of the already powerful, in contests where your only hope of victory is having a user agent whose only loyalty is to you.

The monotonic, dangerous expansion of IP reflects the growing victory of rents over profits – income from owning things, rather than income from doing things. Everyday people may argue for IP in the belief that it will solve their immediate problems – with AI, or Nazis, or in-game cheats – but ultimately, the expansion of a law that limits how you can use your property (including your capital) to uses that don't threaten neofeudalists will doom you to technoserfdom.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/#hard-cases-make-bad-copyright-law

[jeyneofpoole]

asoiaf dash simulator again

🌼 night-of-flowerz-girl

the blatant misinformation on this waebsyte is crazyyyy. guys. loras tyrell is NOT DEAD that is literally lannister propaganda 😭 please check your sources omg how do you think his family feels???

🛡️ fieldmaiden

margaery tyrell can dry her tears on the finest cloth of gold for all i care have we not established that the tyrells are smallfolk panderers who only talk about serf issues to keep us placated and working their fields? stand UP. anyways tyrelloverparty forever hope the burns hurt 🙏

🍃 greenseeeerr

omfg stop lusting after the children of the forest they are literally minor coded 😭😭😭 what is wrong with you people!!!!!

💄 andalsandal

hey op what the fuck does this mean

🐻 moremont

me and my big hairy bear husband have three beautiful daughters and i couldn’t be happier

🐻 moremont

THE ANIMAL.

⚡️dondarriugh

omfg beric is DEAD??????

⚡️ dondarriugh

ok there are some conflicting reports in my inbox hold on

⚡️ dondarriugh

oh no he’s actually dead. fly high king!!!!!

⚡️ dondarriugh

wait what????

⚡️ dondarriugh

WHAT IS HAPPENING

⛳️ brotherhood-without-banners-official

Lord Dondarrion is hale and hearty, thanks be to the Lord of Light ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

⚡️ dondarriugh

HELLO??????

🛖 small-folk-big-ass

save me bowl of brown…… bowl of brown…… bowl of brown save me…….

🛖 small-folk-big-ass

hopital

🐉 rhaeeenyraaa

the revisionist history on here is fucking insaneeeee. cersei lannister is NOT maegor come again guys let’s use our critical thinking skills ok?????

🚬 sourleef

cersei lannister is a nepo baby who dicks down her twin brother on the regular and squeezes out evil kids with weak jawlines like it’s a sport. let’s not act like she’s some kind of win for wench suffrage she’s a fucking dictatorial monarch

🍁 weirdwood

wait don’t you mean her twin brother is dicking her down?????

🚬 sourleef

i know what i said.

🐕 ramsay-bitch-imagines

IMAGINE…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You’re Ramsay’s favorite dog, and he wants to reward you after a successful hunt.

WARNING: DEAD DRAGON DO NOT EAT!!!!!DON’T LIKE, DON’T READ!!!!

Read More

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

🐋 s4ltw1fe

who’s going to tell lady asha that she doesn’t have to date those foppish little boys as community service. don’t worry queen EYE see your caerybaenor……

👤 reynesofcastamere-deactivated-3738372920

lmao that blonde little cuck is NOT getting his gold back

👤 tarbeckhall-deactivated-4748392038383

we should hook up for rebellion lol. what’s he even gonna do about it?

🦁 hear-me-roar

hey guys.

🧼 barmaid

oh my god this is THE post

🍺 pintofale

holy shit i never thought i’d see this outside of illuminated vellum screenshots

🪡 tall-tailor

this post is a fucking graveyard

[morgana-ren]

I DONT KNOW IF YOU WRITE FULL FICS BUT IF YOU DO PLEASE WIRTE ONE ABOUT TGAT LAST ASK.

Just about Astarion sitting in his throne of sorts, in the palace, with tav sitting in his lap. He’s bored, tav sits there- dissociating and wishing they were anywhere else. He asks them if they’d like to do something fun and they say something like “Only if you do my lord” and he saddens some, expecting them to come up with something fun like they used to but they can’t think of anything that he would approve of them doing after so many years of breaking them down and he realizes it’s gotten so dull because tav was the person that brightened his life

"Awfully dull today, hmm? How would you like to do something fun, my love?"

It's an oh-so rare quiet day in the Crimson Palace, and his favorite source of amusement sits placidly on his lap, silent as the grave and still atop him. Content as he is in the peaceful quiet with solely her company, he'd spend the day with her doing– well, something, surely. It’s been a while since they’ve had any time to themselves to truly enjoy each other’s company alone. In fact, he cannot recall the last time with any distinct accuracy.

It seems so terribly long since they've had any time to themselves. Being a Lord keeps you awfully busy.

In a tender moment, he reaches forward to brush a stray strand of hair out of her face and behind her ear with a long, pale finger. She doesn’t react save a slight instinctual flicker of her lashes. Not a hint of expression on her face. He expects her to lean into his touch as she used to and is almost shocked when she does not.

Odd, he thinks. She hardly even seems to notice anything at all.

It’s almost like she isn’t entirely present.

Still, before he can chastise her, she responds to his bid for her attention.

"If that is your wish, my lord,” She responds to his question, lifeless and monotone. Perfectly obedient, just as befits her, and yet—

He frowns, just a little. It irks him, but now that he thinks about it, he cannot recall the last time he saw enthusiasm on her face– or much of anything at all aside from the blank, hollow mask she has now. Completely impassive and unresponsive in a cruel sort of practiced indifference. 

He studies her for a moment and comes to the conclusion that it reminds him of the robots they found in that strange tower in the Underdark so long ago. Programmed to respond to the right things and make the right moves, but utterly incapable of acting on her own whims. Eternally awaiting instruction. 

Empty. Robotic. Precise and yet disingenuous somehow. Eerily so.

Has she been like this before? Has he simply not noticed?

Perhaps she just needs to awaken a little more. It was such a long night, and he had kept her remarkably busy. She must be exhausted, but surely, she will perk up. She always does. 

Doesn’t she?

“Come, darling. What would you like to do?” He jostles his knees, dandling her on his legs like one might a small, particularly grumpy child. She bumps up and down, only reaching to steady herself on the sides of his throne. 

“Whatever would please you would please me, my lord.”

He groans, rolling his red eyes, a very sudden burst of irritation bubbling in his gut. Always with the My lord, My lord, scraping and bowing like some sort of indentured serf. Proper respect is important, of course, but for the first time in a while— longer than he can honestly think back on, to be honest— they are entirely alone. He is her Lord, yes, but she knew him by another name once– did know him by another name. She knows better than to tease him in front of his vassals but surely—

He can’t remember the last time she said his name. 

His real name. 

How long since he has truly sat by her side and talked with her? Spent time with her? He's been so busy, laying plans and waste, conquering and shedding blood of those who oppose him. The Lord Tyrant, come to rule over his dominion of Eternal Night. She is always by his side, never straying and yet— 

(“I love you, Little Star,” She’d laugh, planting a chaste kiss on the tip of his nose, which would promptly crinkle in annoyance. 

“I’m not ‘Little Star,’ and I’ll never understand why you insist on calling me that.” 

“That’s what your name means, doesn’t it? Little Star? Or perhaps Little Starlight– I don’t really remember.”

“Then why make that my pet name?" He rolls his eyes, annoyed at the use of his own childish moniker that follows him like a shadow to anyone who speaks even a lick of his native language. "Of all the things your brilliant little mind can concoct, you give me a child’s handle? I’m strong, dashing, capable, handsome, fearsome– but instead you choose that absurdity” 

“Because you’re my little star!” And she would smile so brightly that it seemed impossible in the darkness, and he could not help but smile himself. “My light in the darkness. My Astarion, for as long as you want to be. And I love you.” 

His expression would soften once again and he would simply sigh, pulling her close to kiss her temple. The night was cold, but she was so impossibly warm against him, somehow fitting perfectly in his lap and into his heart, where she’d wormed her way in against his own will. The dim firelight reflects in her eyes as she tells him again that she loves him forever if he’ll have her, and he can think of nothing he’d desire more than to ride out the endless night of eternity with her here on his lap, cradled close.)

Something gnaws at him. Something raw and edged with a vicious sort of misery he’d done so well to avoid in ages. He cannot place it but as he looks at her, his stomach is as a dark, abyssal pit, circling and swelling like a maelstrom. 

Something is wrong.

He cannot place the negative emotion, and so he does as he always does now, making the strange yearning her responsibility to soothe. 

He lashes out at her. 

“I’m growing bored,” He says with a cold, cruel edge to his voice. “You know how much I dislike boredom, don't you, darling?"

What he seeks is a reaction. A sudden spark of life from within her. For her to grab his hand and take him to do— to do something. Surely—

And yet, with a motion so fluid that it implies an aged and practiced skill, she slides from his lap down to her knees before him, reaching towards the laces of his breeches. There is nothing behind her eyes as she extends her hand forward to unlace him, hardly even seeing him. Nothing at all. 

“What are you doing?” He slaps her hands away, scowling down at her, taken back by her brashness. 

“You said you were bored, my Lord.”

“And why would you think–” 

Because that is what he’d taught her. 

That her body was built for his amusement; his temple to defile at will. Because of the cold nights in the castle after so many years where he would reach for her, and she would quiver and shake her head with eyes rimmed red and puffy and beg to be left untouched and yet he would speak the words without thinking and she would bend for him any way he wished. 

Because even as she would obey, she would cry and turn away, and he would give it little thought until one night the crying and protesting simply stopped. He thought she had learned. Made peace with her duties and loyalty to him and what it entailed. Mayhaps she had come to realize that her theatrics had little impact on him and surely, he wasn’t so wretched to her now that these waterworks were necessary. His touch could not repulse her so that her weeping was remotely acceptable. She loves him, surely she—

Because he would command her until she would kneel, and so now, she kneels without command.

He sighs, breathing the fire from his lungs, reaching down to pull her back up into his lap. She does not respond, only obeys in kind to his guiding instruction as he settles her back down on his legs. He finds a semblance of patience from within himself which is a strange and unusual feeling, mustering it up to once again ask:

“My dear, what is it that you would like to do?” 

Her head cocks. She does not understand. 

"What would you enjoy? If you had the freedom to do anything, what might it be?"

It takes a moment, but for the first time, a reaction: Confusion. It is slow to take hold but becomes blaringly apparent as it does. It is not as if she doesn’t know the answer, but almost as if she doesn’t understand the question. 

“Whatever you would like to do, my Lo–”

“No, no, darling. What is it you would like to do?” He impresses, harsher this time, and she flinches, recoiling from… something. 

From him.  

If her heart was still capable of beating, he'd be able to hear the way it pumps into overdrive. As it stands, he cannot, but he is aware no less. Her scent changes entirely around him to something that has his brows furrowing. Shortness of breath, dilating pupils, hands beginning to quake— Adrenaline. Steel-edged anxiety. As if this is not a question at all, but rather a test and she does not know the answer, and failure means his displeasure and his displeasure means–

"I— What would you—" She hard-swallows, harrowed by the open-endedness of the question. "—I want what—"

("Come to the meadow with me, Asto," She would grab his hand with a mischievous smile when their compatriots were fast asleep, tugging him up from the comfort of his bedroll. "I want you to come with me."

"It's late, darling. Wouldn't you rather come here and lie with me?" He would try to tug her back down playfully, but would fall against her aggressive temerity, being pulled to his feet through her sheer will. She would stifle her giggling with a hand as she guided him past their slumbering companions, through the tree line and deep into the forest. 

"Come on, lazy boy, come! Come with me!"

"Well, I'm trying to—"

She would hush him and yank him by the wrist, out into the field where he'd first had her, down once more into a bed of wildflowers and long grass. Her melodic laugh like a strange song as she yanks him to the ground despite his weak protests until she would lie her head on his chest and trace gentle patterns on his white shirt against his flexed chest. 

"We don't have to come all the way out here to make love, darling—" He would move to try to kiss her, but she would adamantly press her head against his torso, insisting he stay down in the dirt with her. 

"I'm not trying to seduce you," She would giggle, pointing at the star-spangled sky. "I want to lie under the stars with you." 

"But… why?"

"Because I know we'll have eternity to do it, but it's my favorite moon tonight and it reminded me of you."

He squints, struggling to find anything different about it at all. "I don't notice anything, darling. It looks very much like the moon we see every night." 

"It's so full and bright! Look at the rays!" She holds her hand out as if to cradle a silvery moonbeam in her palm. "It reminds me of the color of your hair." 

She reaches over him to delicately pluck something from the grass, tucking it gingerly behind his ear after she does so. "These poppies are the same beautiful deep red of your eyes in the moonlight. I feel safe here; home, with you. I just wanted to enjoy it for a moment. Just the two of us."

He would wrap his arms around her waist, squeezing so tightly that she would gasp and worm about, trying to return the favor, and yet he would not relent. 

"I want you to feel safe with me," he would whisper into her hair, desperately trying to memorize the scent of it, as if expecting Bhaal himself to come and steal her from his frantic embrace. "Now and forever, I want to feel home in your arms, with you.")

He thinks, for a moment, to return to that meadow, and that perhaps his love— the one he remembers— will return to him. As if her ghost still lingers there, trapped and waiting to be rescued. 

He can’t. 

It is not a meadow any longer, but a battlefield, not unlike the vile destruction left in Ketheric's wake at Raithewait; another one in a million places sacrificed in his conquest for glory, littered with bodies and bones. A graveyard tribute to his power, scorched soil and dead grass. No flowers bloom there anymore— there is nowhere for them to bloom between the suffocating aura of death. 

All that is left is a beautiful memory buried beneath a river of dried blood, and you cannot water flowers with dried blood or wean them on bone dust. That meadow is one moment suspended in time as trapped in amber, impossible to claw free from its temporal prison. He cannot remember the last time he saw that jovial smile she had saved just for him in that damned meadow. 

He cannot recall the last time she said the words "I love you" and cried his name as a preternaturally beautiful siren song without being commanded. 

He frowns, feeling something strange and haunting in his chest. Something viciously clawing up his throat as he looks at her: at her empty red eyes that were once the most beautiful color, full of love and life when she looked upon him; at her contorted expression that used to be as radiant as the sun and he could have sworn that her light could have sustained him through the dark, miserable nights of his eternal curse if only she was by his side; at the frailty of her body that almost seems to creak and break beneath his weight. 

"My love, look at me."

And she does, if not by command, then by instinct. 

"Smile for me, will you? Can you do that for me?" 

And she does, her lips turning upward and raising to reveal two sharp teeth— and nothing more. It's uncanny and revolting and wrong. There is nothing behind her eyes, nothing at all. No light, no life, and certainly no love. 

He used to be able to see himself in her eyes. How her heart sang for him, cheeks blossoming with blood at the sight of him. He could hear her heart rabbit behind her ribs, her hands quaking with excitement to touch him even in the most innocent of ways. Through her eyes, he found his own value— his own worth— and finally began to understand that he deserved love; he deserved happiness. She had healed him, giving almost all of herself to do it, selflessly and without asking for anything in return even as he despised himself and refused his own agency—

And she stares at him now with soulless eyes, he is left to wonder if he has taken too much from her in his quest to take everything. Wonders if she will ever be that lovestruck, moon-eyed girl again, wanting nothing more than to lie under the moonlit meadow with him. If she will ever kiss his eyelids as a delicate butterfly and whisper eternity in his ear. If she will ever feel safe and home and loved around him again in his embrace–

Save she is no longer quaking with anticipation at his touch, but trembling from fear, lost and terrified at the posing of a simple question. Her scent is foreign even as it is familiar and he cannot recall when it began to change. There is something in her eyes that haunts him, and though he can see himself within him, what stares back is not him. A terrible realization rakes knives down his soul, a gaping maw threatening to swallow him whole. A tightening in his lungs, and even as he does not breathe, he does not believe he could even if he tried. 

“Darling?” 

“Yes, my Lord?” 

Her face is impassive once more. Perfect porcelain expression. Not a crack in the mask. Not a wrinkle in the facade. Practiced day in and day out until it becomes real. He remembers it well.

How long has it been? How long since he has looked at her? Truly looked at her? Spoken to her? Told her he loved her? 

Showed her he loves her?

When was the last day he did not command from her that which she begged not to willingly give?

He cannot remember. He cannot recall. 

He demanded and she had no choice but to give. More and more and more. He drained her dry and now where was once his sacred oasis, there is nothing at all. No matter how long he looks, there is never a flicker of anything in her glassy eyes. 

He wonders if even as he has gotten everything he has ever wanted, he lost the one thing he needed. 

It paralyzes him. For the first time in an ageless eternity, he feels something: Panic. 

Even his endless power cannot bring her back. His beloved is dead, and he has killed her. Upon him sits a pretty corpse, empty and devoid of all that made her her. A doll with her face. A doll with barely even that. 

Her laugh, her smile. Her passion and desire and love. The tenderness inside of her and the warmth she once held. Everything that pulled him from his shell and showed him how to love once more. He bloomed in her light– and then snuffed it out entirely. 

How long has it been? How long has she been gone?

Though she may be undying, he realizes with horror akin to a dawning sun that she is gone– and has been for some time. 

“You seem stressed, my Lord? How can I make you happy again?”

Second part of the story HERE

[afterthefeast]

i beg of asoiaf fans to learn what feudalism actually means. not every historical oppressive system is feudal. just because they are all vaguely medieval does not mean it is feudal. a feudal system is one based on land ownership and the relationship between lords, their vassals, and their serfs. most of westeros is, broadly speaking, organised into a feudal system. old valyria, however, is not feudal. ancient rome, its obvious parallel, was not feudal. just because it is a historically-themed society governed in a way that we now think is bad does not make it feudal please stop calling everything feudal i am losing my mind here

[troublesomesnitch]

Make Your Hands Unclean

Aemond x Wife!Reader - Period sex drabble

Premise and bits of dialogue shamelessly stolen from The Borgias.

Contents: drabble, pure filth. Menstrual sex, p in v, anal touching, graphic imagery. Internalised misogyny and harmful attitudes towards menstruation. Aemond is an asshole. Porn with weird plottish vibes.

Words: 2300

idk what this even is, this thing kind of wrote itself and I just went with it. It is kind of a mess tbh.

You were supposed to marry a lord.

That is what you were raised for, and those are the skills you were taught. To sing, to dance, to play the harp; to make yourself look pleasant. Your septa taught you to sew, and a woman from Essos taught you to weave, and in the afternoons the maester taught you history and linguistics, astronomy and arithmetic, and other things that ladies rarely speak about, but nevertheless must learn. 

For it is the lady, not the lord, who runs the castle. Who manages the household, and oversees the people it employs. Such a lady must ideally be both kind and commanding, generous and frugal. She must know how to handle serfs and noblemen alike, and she must be proficient in numeracy; able to record expenses and perform difficult calculations. 

To be a prince’s wife requires no such skills. 

This castle already has two queens, and besides it is not for royal women to concern themselves with practical matters. There are ladies-in-waiting for that, and stewards, chamberlains, maids and matrons; an army of servants hundreds strong to ensure that you may always be spoiled and idle. More than a lady, but less than a queen, left to twiddle your thumbs and wonder when, if ever, the oppressive walls of Maegor’s Holdfast will begin to feel like home.

You do not like it here. 

The days are long in King’s Landing, and the air is foul, polluted by the smoke of ten thousand hearths, by the stench of filth and unwashed bodies. It seeps through every crack and crevice, and you like the early mornings the most, when a cleansing mist blows in from the sea, and the ship’s bells ring over Blackwater Bay. 

Your husband rises early too, though it is for different reasons. Prince Aemond adheres to strict routines, to noble pursuits and rigorous discipline. He is exactly as people say: a stoic, severe in both temper and countenance, condemning indulgence and deriding depravity. 

Yet for all of his moral posturing, he does seem to have developed a taste for it rather quickly. 

You couldn’t say the exact number of times the prince has had you, but it has been many, and often, and in every position imaginable, and you dutifully report it all back to your family. As they have instructed you to do.

Before you were sent off to the capital, you were relentlessly reminded that there will never again be an opportunity such as this. That a marriage to a royal prince is a rare honour for your family, and one that was only made possible because the crown finds itself at war. Your house is not a great one, and your father is not the noblest lord, but he is very wealthy. And on the field of battle, wealth does tend to triumph. 

You do not know what other promises were made, what lands or titles were negotiated. Only that so much now depends on you; on your ability to please your husband and give him healthy children. Preferably male, but even a daughter would markedly strengthen your position. So you play your part as best as you can , and you pen your secret letters, divulging all the details of your intimate affairs. That the prince sleeps with you frequently, and seems to find great pleasure in it. That he performs his movements to completion, and expends his semen inside your body. 

It is a grave responsibility to have on your shoulders, and you were utterly crushed when you woke to find your insides churning, and your sheets stained with blood. 

They will be most displeased, your mother and father. Your brothers and uncles, and your cousins too. Prince Aemond's seed has not yet taken. 

-

In the evening he knocks on your door. Two determined raps, and you are thoroughly surprised. Your maid will have told his mother of your ailment, and she will have told him, and he too must be disappointed. But you know it is the prince, for there is no one else who would visit you at this hour. 

You know very well what he has come for, too. 

“We can’t tonight,” you sigh. 

“And why is that?” he says, amused, as if the idea that you would refuse him is ridiculous. 

“My blood - I am bleeding.”

Prince Aemond hums, but he walks to your couch and begins to undress himself, unbuckling his doublet and unlacing his breeches, tugging off his boots while you wring your hands. 

He can’t be serious. He can’t mean to take you like this. 

“It’s not - it isn’t proper,” you protest. “Our maester said it is ill-advised - most men find it unclean - “

“I am not most men,” he scoffs. 

There is no arguing against that, and he says it with all the confidence of someone who knows it to be true. Aemond is a royal prince. A dragonlord, a scion of a greater people. Second to no one but his king and brother, and if he wants to get himself all bloodied, then you suppose that is his right. 

He rids himself of his undershirt, and you reluctantly move to the side to let him join you in bed. It isn’t proper, but your insides flutter when he pulls you against his naked body, letting you feel the warmth of his skin, his manhood against the back of your thigh. It is hard, and twitching when he runs his hands over your figure, your breasts and your stomach, your waist, your hips, the tops of your thighs -

“No, you mustn’t - ” you squeak, but he rucks your gown up anyway and slips his hand in between your legs.

You are wet there, with blood as well as with desire, and you can feel the stickiness when he spreads your lips, curving his fingers and sliding them back and forth along your slit. His breathing is hoarse just from caressing you, from feeling your wet, your warmth, your little swollen nub begging to be touched. You whimper when he circles it with the gentlest of strokes, light and teasing, until you arch your hips up in frustration and breathe oh please. 

Prince Aemond likes it when you beg. Only then does he press down, but not enough to bring you to a peak. Just enough to make your insides tighten, and more blood gush from your womb.

You always did find it strangely beautiful, the blood of your cycle. Deep maroon, and scarlet red - but you are ashamed to see it coating the prince’s fingers when he withdraws them. It is thick, and clotted, and he takes a moment to study it before he wipes his hand clean on your shift. 

“Are you not displeased with me?” you whisper. He should be, given that you have failed to conceive. That there is no way of knowing if you can bear children at all. 

“One mere month is not cause for concern,” the prince says. 

You breathe a faint sigh of relief. It is a comfort to know that at least your husband doesn’t hold your failure against you - yet. 

He tugs on your shift, eager to expose your body, but you cross your hands over your chest.

“Let me keep it for tonight,” you plead. 

You can’t rid yourself of the thought that you are unclean, and you would feel so much more at ease if he didn’t see your heavy, aching body. But you don’t want to entirely deny him access to it, either. Seeing as you are bleeding, the chances of begetting a child are small, which means that his wish to sleep with you must come from genuine desire rather than obligation. And that makes you very happy, as you imagine it would any wife. 

You will make sure to include it in the next letter you send back home. Hopefully it will lessen their disappointment. 

The prince looks somewhat displeased, but he lets you keep your dress, resorting instead to bunching it up around your waist. He is stern, but never cruel to you, even if he does pull at the neck to bare more of your breasts. He pinches your nipple, and then his hand moves downward again, and you throw your leg over his hip to give him more room to touch you. 

This time he does it properly. His fingers find your pleasure right away, and he swiftly brings you to your rapture, impatient as he is to have you. It leaves his hand stained and tainted, and once again he wipes it off on your shift, but this time you don’t care. 

With the position you’re in, it is easy for him to crawl over your leg and take his place between them, and he kisses you as he presses against you, deeply and hungrily, rocking his hips, his manhood throbbing and leaking between your legs. 

Your parts are soaked, but he is careful when he pushes inside. Despite the prince’s relentless pursuit of knowledge, he must not know all that much about a woman’s blood, at least not in practical terms. Where it hurts, and how much, and whether this intrusion will make it worse. You can’t hold it against him - you don’t believe there are many scholars who would want to write about the topic, and how then was he supposed to learn?

“Harder,” you pant, and he obliges, moving faster and pushing deep inside. 

You let him find a steady rhythm, hooking your legs over his hips, and letting your hands wander over his body while he has his way with you. You stroke his balls, imagining that what he keeps inside will take root in you. You pinch his nipples, all hard with pleasure, and you slide your hands down to his lower back, to the base of his spine, where the skin is dusted with downy hairs. Where you can feel each of his thrusts; the rolling movements of his hips, the rhythmic clenching of his buttocks. 

Your dainty touch makes him shudder, and you move your hands to his arse, and then further still, slipping your fingers in between his buttocks. To where he is warm and tender, and where his skin starts to pucker. 

It is filthy, the way he twitches there. The way he throbs. A dirty place to touch, and a sinful thing to do, but you have found that the prince likes it. No added pressure or attempts at entry, just gentle strokes with the tips of your fingers. Soft caresses over his opening. 

He buries his face in your neck and groans, and you can feel that he is nearing his peak. His movements are fast and shallow, his chest heaving and slick with sweat. 

“Yes, my prince,” you whisper. “Fill me with your seed, put a son inside me - “

He likes that. He hisses loudly, gripping the headboard for purchase, and you look up at him when his hips stutter. Prince Aemond’s face is always handsome, but never more than when he is on top of you, in the throes of ecstasy. His brow is furrowed and his eye squeezed shut, and the tension in his body makes the damaged side of his face convulse, his lip twitching up towards the scar. 

He wouldn’t like for you to see that, but in this state he does not feel it happening. 

You lie still as he peaks, allowing him to rut into you wildly, groaning and grunting as he spills his seed. Hot, and wet, and adding to the mess inside you. He lies limp on top of you to catch his breath, and when he finally withdraws, the blood is everywhere. On his softening organ, on his sack, and crusted to the soft hairs on his thighs. 

“I’ve made you dirty,” you state. 

“Yes, you have,” he says. “In more ways than one.” 

You look the other way to give him some privacy when he rises to tidy and dress himself. On your wedding night he stayed with you until the morning, and he has done it a few times since, but it is not a common occurrence. Prince Aemond prefers to sleep alone, and your mother chastises you for that too. She says that to rouse a man’s desire is less than half the battle, and that you must make your husband love you.

Of course if it were really that simple, then there would be no unhappy marriages and no children born as bastards, and if you knew how to make a man fall in love, you would be the richest woman in all the world. 

But you must at least try. 

“Won’t you stay with me?” You ask. “It is - important, for a woman to be embraced - to be treated gently, afterwards…”

“Next time, I will,” he says. And that is the end of that, for you will not stoop so low as to beg for his company. 

He smoothes out his shirt and pulls on his breeches, and you sit up and comb your fingers through your tangled hair. When you look down there are stains on your sheets, and a thick rosy fluid trickling out between your legs. 

“You may want to abstain from riding,” the prince says over his shoulder. “It is known to upset the balance of the womb.”

You nod, bound to obey what is clearly a command posing as a suggestion. 

“Did you know,” you muse, “that the blood of the womb is the only blood that is not born from violence?”

Prince Aemond looks at you with a thoughtful expression, one that suggests he had in fact not considered that before. 

“Quite the philosopher you are,” he remarks, with a little raise of his brow. Coming from him, that is the highest praise. 

It does not change his mind about staying, but he does press a noble kiss to your temple before he leaves you. Sore and bloodied, but content. 

You did well tonight. 

Notes

“Most men find it unclean/I am not most men” is from S1E7 of the Borgias. 

“Menstruation is the only blood that is not born from violence and yet it’s the one that disgusts you the most” is a quote by artist Maia Schwartz. I couldn’t find any more information about her unfortunately. 

Tags. @arcielee, @targaryen-madness.

[moodymisty]

Space marine trio gangbang anon read my fucking mind lol (I also have not played space marine 2 yet, but I hc that gadriel is into degrading praise rather than straight up degradation) like, please God, let me be their personal serf for whenever they need me, doesn't have ti be all of them at once. Just a titjob here, a quickie there. Hell, a hand job would probably enough for msot of them because of their repressed sexual desires. (I feel like a freaking beggar running around the univer going "spare cock? Please? Anyone have spare cock")

Author's note: oops?

Warnings: NSFW, Handjob, Very gentle degradation tbh not really much, Implied being shared among the three of them

Surprisingly, Adeptus Administratum tasks aboard an astartes ship are somewhat lacking. Though it is more than possible that one of a few people had something to do with that.

You won't complain however, no one apart from the most vehemently obsessed would prefer writing tax reports over other things that occur aboard a battlebarge as large as this.

-- come to the astartes barracks --

Normally, they don't even bother with sending messages over vox. It's either quicker to send someone to get you, or get you themselves. Knowing the sender of the message had been far more surprising however.

You've known Titus the longest. He has said that he enjoys your company; Perhaps because unaugmented humans cannot bicker and snub him off in the same way fellow astartes can.

Charion was introduced to you by Titus not long after. He seems kind, almost kinder than Titus in a way; Though it's more than likely that he is simply less afraid to show it.

Gadriel... You don't know him well. You know of him, but he seems completely uninterested in you.

Completely uninterested in that.

You don't know if he was simply being obtuse when saying it, or if he genuinely didn't know what the words for what you are doing with his battle brothers are. He didn't seem to care either way anyways.

Which had made it all the more surprising when you huffed all the way to the astartes barracks, only to find Gadriel standing in the entryway of his quarters waiting. You had thought it just coincidence at first, until he purposely calls you closer while you look for Titus.

You come to him and squeeze inside his barracks from the doorway he mostly blocks- sizable even without armor. The door closes behind you with a dull hiss. It's barren other than the basics, and a few trophies.

"My lord... Do you require something?"

The look Gadriel gives you is more than unimpressed, and dare you think almost... Pouting?

"You call Charion Charion, you call Titus Demetrian, but I get Lord?"

You shirk a bit into yourself, shrugging your shoulders. Having to speak with him is more difficult than the others.

"Will all the due respect, I don't know you."

The look Gadriel gives isn't readable- though it could simply be because you really do not know him like you do his squadmates.

The astartes moves to drop himself sitting onto his bunk, and the horrible creak it lets out crying from his weight worries you it might collapse. Thankfully however, it holds. You don't know if it would've if he was any heavier.

"What you do with them, show me."

A vague question.

You stand dumbly and look at him, watching how his robes lay over his shoulders and chest. The longer you're silent, the most irritated he gets.

"Can you, can you be a bit more specific?"

He looks at your thoroughly unimpressed, eyes glancing you up and down. You feel pressed under his stare in a way you don't know if you like or not. It unsettles a bit, for sure.

"You know. The reason you always smell like them."

Oh. You know what he's referring to now.

Titus and Charion while seeming to genuinely enjoy your company, enjoy something else you offer them outside of the things a normal space marine should know of and desire. Titus had been the first. He's an older marine, hardened and stalwart in his duties but independent.

Titus had offered you to Charion, after you agreed. Hence why despite there being two of them, you still are referred to as being Titus'.

But Gadriel had shrugged them both off, content to have little to no interaction with you other than when he stumbles upon you in their company and the occasional requisition order.

You wonder what spurred on this sudden change.

Stepping closer, he watches you intently as you to try and figure out how to even start. Titus always wants to kiss you- to try and shove his larger tongue right down your throat. Would Gadriel even care? Does he even know how? Then again if he knows enough to demand you show him how you fuck his battle brothers, he would know such a thing, correct? Then again you're well aware from experience the gaps in their knowledge are vast crevasses that take a long time and are often, quite embarrassing to cross.

At least he is thoroughly clean, however. The last time Titus and his squad had been deployed it was a two and a half week rotation, and when they had returned, Titus had eagerly come to visit you and chat once out of armor.

He had however neglected to bathe in his excitement, and upon entering the same confined room as him, you had immediately retched all over the floor.

TItus then left to clean himself of whatever ungodly concoction of putrid things he was still covered in, and you scurried away until the serfs cleaned everything.

Gadriel in comparison smells, dare you say quite pleasant. A heady, musky male odor combined with an almost chemical smell hidden underneath. Titus had said it was from their extra organs, one in particular that embarrassingly, you forgot the name of.

You stand unsure as he watches and you can see him getting impatient, as you speak up again.

"Could you, perhaps be a bit more specific?" The look he gives you is insultingly unimpressed.

"Titus always calls you smart. I don't see it."

You purse your lips, a bit upset at the insult.

"My l- Gadriel, in my defense you are being quite vague..."

The astartes sighs and loses a bit of his rigid posture, letting himself slouch just a bit as the muscle and fat of his stomach folds. You don't know why you suddenly realize just how large he is in that exact moment- how he's still almost at your height while sitting.

"Give me what you give Titus."

That you can at least somewhat work with.

Stepping even closer, you can feel the way your heart is nervously stammering. You only know Gadriel a tiny bit, despite being part of Titus' main squad. He never seemed interested in you until now. He would tend to roll his eyes at particularly Titus giving you any sort of affection, or desiring it when you weren't around.

To get any closer however you decide to walk and place his left thigh between your own; His legs are spread decently far apart enough to make it difficult. The moment your hands touch his chest, you can see him glance down to see. One of them pushes higher to rest on his collarbone, feeling the rough scars on his skin as his robe shifts to reveal more skin.

"Titus says a lot of things about you."

You can feel the way his voice rumbles in his chest, incredibly deep. You swallow a knot in your throat.

"I hope they're good things..."

Gadriel's voice is stoic and lacking in obvious emotion, but it's a bit lighter than how he was earlier. You wish you could have any clue on what he was thinking.

"We will see."

Your other hand drifts lower, brushing across his stomach. You hear a small pack of astartes walk around outside, and you unconsciously glance towards the door while your hand twitches away.

"They aren't going to come in here. Quit behaving so nervously. You can do it."

His surprising addition to the end makes your face feel a bit warm, before pulling at the fabric used as underwear.

Astartes clothes are cheap, utilitarian and mass produced, and as it goes quite easy to put on and remove.

When you wrap your hand around his cock you can't even hear Gadriel make the slightest sound, gently dancing your fingers over his skin. You feel his cock twitch in your palm, leaning forward until your own breath is fanning over his skin. Attempting to ignore the way your cunt throbs and brushes against his thigh is a gargantuan task, but you attempt it none the less.

You're close enough that you think you can just barely hear the sound of his hearts, though it could also just be your own blood thumping in your ears. You feel his cock harden in your hand and as your palm drifts up and down his shaft you feel him let out the slightest exhale.

You know from experience that even the slightest slip ups for them are far more dramatic than you would think. If he slipped up enough to let out a heavy breath, you know that it's working.

Only for a moment do you pull away your hand to lick your palm, trying not to have so much dry friction. He doesn't seem to care, but you did. When you wrack your hand around his cock against and move faster, a bit rougher, Gadriel lets out a louder noise before one of his hands reaches to grab your waist.

"Throne girl,"

He grunts out, before you move away. The look he gives you is confused and irritated, as you try and move to kneel between his legs. You think he is about to reprimand him, before he realizes that you haven't decided to just leave him with an aching, leaking erection in the middle of the barracks.

Your jaw aches just at the sight of his cock before your face, wrapping your lips around his tip. Slowly you take more and more of him in your mouth and hear the way he lets out a surprisingly loud groan, feeling the wet heat of your mouth around over half of his cock. It's all that can fit; You wrap your hand around the rest while the other steadies yourself on his thigh.

You can taste the saltiness of skin, sweat and precum in your mouth, bobbing your head on his cock. You treat cautiously- you know he more than likely isn't going to last much longer and you know he will not warn you. While a mouth full of astartes cum isn't the worst thing- at least to you though you're sure it's probably an outlier opinion- you'd rather not end up with and unprepared mouthful so much so you choke.

"So this is what they've had you doing instead of Administratum duties?"

You hum to clear your throat and attempt to ignore the throbbing between your legs, looking up briefly to see his furrowed brow and flush to his skin. He lets out a large exhale through his nose, and you feel his cock throb in your mouth.

You think you hear him mumble something- a swear perhaps you don't know, but moments later he cums in your mouth, filling the pocket of your cheek and forcing you to quickly pull away more lest he do actually choke you. It almost hurts to swallow, but when you look up he's staring at you with that stoic astartes expression; Though something is underneath it.

"The chaplains would call this heretical, whoreish behavior." You pull away and wipe your mouth.

"Are you not the one who ordered me? And who let me do such things?" He watches you closely, sternly.

"That I did. And I order you to show me more."

[missswritesalot]

can i request another robb stark x reader? Something where theyre in an arranged marriage but reader has a bit of an attitude towards him at first? maybe a bit of smut if its ok?

A/N: Requests open! sorry! No smut in this but I swear I have a spicy part two in the works. Reblog/Comment for more!

Robb hesitated before he knocked on the door to Y/N’s chamber. The Stark direwolf handles confirmed that the doors lead to the chambers of the Lady of Winterfell.

“I’ve no desire to dine in your presence,” he heard her say even before he raised his hand to knock. The door opened shortly afterwards. He had to peer down to meet her dark eyes. His beautiful wife. Beautiful, but cruel wife.

“Always on the hour, husband.” She said, words dripping with sweet venom. “It’s unfortunate but understandable that I wish to dine in my chambers.”

“Y/N, I need you there. We have important guests this eventide and I must appear strong with my lady by my side.”

“I must apologize, my Lord, I have a headache. I hope you find your meal most satisfactory.” She said, her curtesy was the most performative thing. Bile rose the back of Robb’s throat. He was still looking into her glossy eyes when she shut the doors on him.

It had all been his fault, really. He’d wanted to continue the tradition set by his late Lord father, that a peasant man may dine at the high table every evening.

He did not anticipate, but he should have, that one day a northman might offend his Dornish wife. And when she turned to Robb for justice, he turned her away. He scarcely saw the hurt in her eyes before she picked up her skirts and deserted the hall.

The meal today was as drab as every other without her. Her prolonged absence did not go unnoticed and Robb’s mother offered to pay her a visit, to check on her health. He refused her kindly, but his concern was evident to all those there.

That night, Robb broke protocol and went into her chambers after the castle had gone to sleep. The candles in her room were still burning, and the fireplace overpowered the room with heat.

Robb felt a twinge of affection in his heart for his Dornish wife, maybe her coldness was borne from how cold she must feel in the North.

“A lot of my- our, subjects, remarked on your poor health these days. Perhaps you will quell their fears tomorrow evening?” Robb said to her. She was reading and half lying down under heavy furs, he could only see the top of her dressing gown.

“I can no longer pretend to enjoy your gatherings. Perhaps you will find someone more suited to these demands,” she said cooly, closing her dusty book and placing it on the bed beside her.

Robb was weary, in his cups, and crushed by her words. Yet she was the most gorgeous woman he had laid eyes on. Her hair, long and dark as the night, hung loose and tumbled over her shoulders onto the sheets. He had never seen it unstyled, not even their wedding night.

Robb walked over to her and stroked the side of her head gingerly.

“Whatever I have done to offend you, wife, it was not my intention. The serf has been punished, and my subjects know to hold their tongue.” Robb said. He didn’t expect her to snap back from his touch, but the movement crushed his heart.

“It must be comforting to never face a different perspective.” She spat out.

“That is not true,” he said.

“I wish to return to Dorne. My father is dead, and he sent me here to this marriage. My eldest brother has written to me assuring me I would be received as per my station.” She said haughtily.

“That is not possible.” Robb said darkly. “Not without a war, dearest. You became my wife the moment you wore my cloak.”

“Hardly. You find me so vile you slept on the ground the night of our wedding.” She said, her anger made her forget her courtesy.

Robb hesitated. She had entirely the wrong idea.

Her disdain of him was obvious from the moment they met. She thought of him as a barbarous northman and herself a lamb to the slaughter. He could not imagine she could ever come to love him, if he had agreed to a bedding ceremony nor bedded her by force. There were some fractures that never healed.

He would have to correct her silly notions. But the fire in her eyes told him it would be a long time before she could accept that she wanted him.

“You will dine with me, I will hear no protest. If it is my men that bother you, then we will eat breakfast and dinner together, alone in the corridor between our chambers.” He said.

She opened her mouth, words threatening to spill out. He placed a finger to hush her. Blood rushed out of Robb’s head when he felt her warm and soft lips against his skin.

“Un huh,” Robb said, shaking his head. “No more, wife.” He leaned down and kissed her, not shyly but not too rough. Her soft gasp made him harden in his breeches.

Robb tore himself away from her and made a hasty exit to his chambers, congratulating himself on not turning around to catch one final glimpse.

[vigilskeep]

a quick guide to dog lords, telling your arls from your teyrns, and generally how ferelden works

okay, this isn't quite what anon asked for, by which i mean not at all, but unfortunately they activated my interest in some of my favourite lore. it should hopefully contain a lot of the relevant stuff and i’ll try to branch out to less fereldan specific information in other posts!

okay, let’s start with the hierarchy. there’s four kinds of noble in ferelden

royalty: you know who these guys are. except for during the orlesian occupation, ever since ferelden became one kingdom, it’s been ruled by the theirin family. which i think is for 388 years, i really hope that’s right, i got out a calculator

teyrns: these are super powerful lords, basically banns so powerful that other banns swear fealty to them. they’re second only to the king, who is essentially just the most powerful one of them. there used to be a lot of them, but with one dynasty in power for so long, that kind of opposition has been eroded away. there are only two remaining: the couslands of highever in the north, and the mac tirs of gwaren in the south

arls: these are extra special banns. they answer to a teyrn or king and hold a strategic fortress for them. we know of six—amaranthine, south reach, denerim, redcliffe, west hills, and edgehall—but i’m unsure if that’s because they are only six or because there are unnamed others

banns: these are your common or garden noble, the lowest ranking and most common. this is your local lord type. they seem to vary the most in power, though, with some banns having big speaking roles in the landsmeet

but i kind of should have written that list in the opposite direction. what do i mean by that? well, in your standard medieval hierarchy, and in a lot of the rest of thedas, power comes down from the king, who lets you hold the land. but in ferelden, most of the land is owned by freeholders: commoners, well-off enough to own their land but still not by any means nobles.

how does that work? well, let’s say i’m a freeholder.

i own my land, but thedas is a rough place. if i want to keep my land, i’d better swear fealty to a bann. i’ll pay him a portion of the goods produced on my land, and in return, he’ll protect my land from anyone wanting to beat me up and take all my goods... and also, you know, not beat me up himself, as he probably would if i didn’t have any bann looking after me. it kind of sounds like he has all the power, right? like a medieval protection racket? it’s certainly how he gets his power and wealth

so i, freeholder harker, have signed up with bann jeff. it makes sense, because he’s the closest to my freehold, and i want soldiers to actually get here in time if i’m in trouble. that’s why my family has been swearing fealty to his family for generations. it’s just how things are done

but the thing is: i hate bann jeff. maybe he takes too much of my harvests, maybe he sides with a different freeholder when we go to him with a dispute, maybe his men don’t mind their pleases and thank yous when they come for my goods. i’m well within my rights to say fuck bann jeff and leave him. especially if there’s another bann nearby who would be perfectly happy to take my goods instead and treat me right. and the less freeholders bann jeff has, the less resources and men he has to make a fuss about it with. if bann jeff pisses off enough people, he might not have any freeholders left at all. and where will his wealth and power come from then? maybe soon he won’t be a bann at all

of course, bann jeff’s family might feud with the family of the bann that stole me away for a few hundred years. but that’s hardly my problem, is it? “courting” someone else’s vassals is apparently the biggest cause of conflict within the bannorn

anyway, this isn’t just how banns work; it’s how all power theoretically works in ferelden. there are no serfs/“unfree” men. every peasant has a right to go where he will and choose which freeholder he works for, just as every freeholder has the right to choose their bann, and banns who swear to teyrns can break away. (the latter is probably less common because a teyrn could fuck you up. i’m guessing you’d have to get the king’s backing about it to survive that.) and even the king answers to his lessers in the landsmeet, the super ancient gathering of nobles where law is made, which can override the king on any matter of law. (but they’re not going to do it if the king is really popular or powerful, because. you know. there’s a limit to all things called common sense and they would prefer not to get squashed about it.) but generally, everyone who holds power in ferelden has to curry favours with their so-called lessers in order to keep their goodwill.

everywhere else in thedas thinks this is weird as hell, by the way. having to court the approval of those beneath you? even the king having to do that? wtf? but the level of freedom means everything to fereldans. it’s their highest ideal and they’re really proud of it.

(the people who really don’t have a voice are what the ttrpg calls “low freemen”, which according to its handbook, consists of criminals, prostitutes, and elves. they still have the right to freedom of movement and to be paid for their work, but they’re not going to have freeholders and banns seeking their favour and speaking for them, and they typically have to resort to bribery for entrance to cities, their homes are bought and sold by others on a whim, things like that. ultimately it makes their position incredibly vulnerable to abuse, as we see in the games. i’m sure we’ve all played the tabris origin. there’s a reason the potential boon to get a bann for the alienage is so wild.)

so, let’s say you made it, everyone loves and/or tolerates you, and you’re a noble. what good does that do you and what can you do? firstly, you have a voice in the landsmeet, which is super important and means the king wants your goodwill and advice. more generally, you have three basic functions of a noble: raising taxes/tribute, commanding soldiers, and dispensing justice. nobles are expected to live off the wealth provided by their land and it would be hugely looked down on if they did work instead, with exceptions for, like, military careers and the chantry, which are respectable for their status. they raise militia from the commoners when necessary, and they also have trained soldiers or possibly knights (see postscript) in their service. that means you can protect your land and you can win glory and spoils when the kingdom goes to war, it also means you’ll be expected to provide those men when your liegelord calls for them. and lastly the law is their responsibility. remember how in the awakening dlc you had to make judgements as the arl of amaranthine? like that! the smaller scale you are, the smaller scale it’s going to be. in turn, if you want a dispute sorted by a higher power, you have to go up to your liegelord, maybe a teyrn or the king, or if you can’t get one of them, a more powerful bann or arl in the area. possibly the chantry would be an alternate option? if it’s just about finding someone you will both listen to, which is usually the main issue

some privileges other than the standard “power over those beneath you” that you can typically expect to belong to the noble class, even if it’s not specific to dragon age: the right to carry a sword, the right to have a coat of arms, the right to precedence on formal occasions and a special seat up front in your local chantry... sometimes niche ones, like fabrics and clothing that are only permissible to wear for people of a certain rank, so it distinguishes them. you can expect favours from/common class interests with your king, you would expect to be given a trial or treated chivalrously if things did not go your way, depending on era you might be captured for ransom in battle rather than killed outright, you probably have exemptions from certain royal taxation... etc. etc.

that’s what i have! i hope these are some helpful fundamentals and that anyone who has more knowledge than me on any aspect feels welcome to contribute it

P.S. as an aside, i’m a little confused about the fereldan use of knights. they definitely exist as lesser nobility, but i don’t understand how they fit into the hierarchy. a real knight was typically a vassal who held land from his liegelord and fought for him in exchange. i... don’t know how that works in the context of land ownership mostly going upwards. they’re definitely around, anyone addressed as ser is a knight, you have the knights of redcliffe and people like ser jory and ser cauthrien. (someone in an order like the templars has the rank of knight and gets ser and everything, but is not a noble.) as a rule of thumb i think generally they’re probably just members of noble families with that dedicated military training and no greater title to lay claim to? i’m basing that on stuff like nathaniel howe being sent as a squire to his mother’s cousin, a chevalier; if he’d completed that he probably would have been a knight unless/until he inherited his father’s place? i don’t know. i’m making this up. and on the other hand, there’s very little distinction in fereldan between your regular noble and a some kind of warrior class, which is why i struggle to see the purpose. (there are also inexplicable career soldiers who are not knights. what the hell is funding that upkeep and armour, buddy. you and whose land ownership? this is why you were fighting the darkspawn with your whole arms out, aveline. stop trying to imply ferelden has a standing army you can go off and join. yes i see you carver lore. i will not buy it.) ANYWAY, because knights are more prevalent in certain areas, i do wonder if it’s an import from the long orlesian occuption, based on the knightly order of chevaliers? i don’t fucking know. worth chewing on