#monarchy discourse

[moonyvvamp]

The Crown of Jaehaerys is such a good example of how well Ramin Djawadi composes music that suits the overarching narrative while adding to the worldbuilding and instilling the story within you before you witness it.

The track starts somber, builds upto the vocalization that just strikes you and then moves to this almost epic but moreso grounded and inspiring section and it slowly builds down melancholy again to silence.

Like, that is exactly what we need from Jaehaerys' theme. For all the great king he was, for all the good he did the realm, for all the children he bore and people he helped he was also mysoginistic.

But he is the product of how the Targaryens deeply adopted the faith and doomed themselves because of how they treated their women. For all the good he did he also ended up picking Viserys over Rhaenys. I have zero doubt that Rhaenys wouldn't have been a good ruler. She should have been queen.

Jaehaerys got the crown because his sister, Rhaena, was robbed of it, his grand father got the crown because Visenya was robbed of it. There is nuance here but the brother-sister marriage thing between the elder siblings stems down to, the men must rule but we must not seem like we are discrediting the women. It's clear in the remarks he makes to Alysanne and in how he started referring to Aemon as his heir despite Daenerys being the eldest that he has the same mindset.

And that undid the Targaryens. They argued against the rightful heir and put the younger brother on the throne because of his gender and Jaehaerys picking Viserys did nothing but add to their arguements against Rhaenyra. The dance was a product of women being robbed for time immemorial and children and bystanders paying for it the most.

[bluedalahorse]

Periodically I wonder what Young Royals fandom could have been if bad faith anon discourse about so many characters and plot points hadn’t been so Everywhere during the fandom’s heyday.

[beastwars-transformers]

I am thee first person to complain about how fucking stupid fandom freaks are but I don’t think people are supporting Actual Absolute Monarchies because their blorbo is a fictional god’s specialest boy

[brettdoesdiscourse]

Say whatever you want about the Sex Pistols, but they were based when they sang, "God save the queen, the fascist regime. They made you a moron, a potential H bomb. God save the Queen, she's not a human being."

[sanyu-thewitch05]

Warning: My hot take!

Ok so I found what Red, White, and Royal Blue/RWRB us and I find it hard to have any semblance of caring about this. Or seeing this as a win for the lgbt community. Mainly cus the romance is between a monarch of Britain and the son of a US president.

I’m sorry, but am I supposed to cheer this as a gay win when Prince Henry’s family was selling and shipping me and many other black peoples ancestors throughout the Diaspora? Then his family also stole other nations jewels and has refused to give them back.

I find it hard to even feel for this character when he benefits so much from the suffering and theft of me and other people’s ancestors.

[little-desi-historian]

OP--turned off reblogs and it is bad tumblr etiquette to try reblog it again, but I am sharing this with two cents cause I have opinions + media criticism credentials + done archivist historian work + my current wip centres largely around this nuance and the nuance of inherent human unreliability. See here, and here. Meaningful citation I am gonna quote a lot… also this is just my opinion having read Das Kapital and worked at a unions museum and being a historical fiction writer + gothic horror writer.

when I say "apologize" for Robespierre I don't mean take away his humanity or complexity. The same applies to Marie Antoinette as much as I don't like at all what she stood for or her irl views, she was still a person, as well Napoleon I Bonaparte (the first 'Liberal' Dictator) are all people, not necessarily 'moral' or 'good' people, and we don't have to erase their humanity to talk about how they were not 'good.'

As competent as Louis XIV nicknamed, Louis the Great (Louis le Grand) or Sun King (le Roi Soleil) for his competence and ability to win France's colonial wars (a thing shockingly-- historians of all political leanings agree upon), could've spared France and all of its citizenry a lot of hurt if he just took away the ancien regimes social powers but left them their titles etc. TLDR: if France became a constitutional monarchy none of the French revolution would've happened.

Robespierre was by no means an "avenging angel" but it is important to keep in mind most of what he fought for was warranted and he was the victim of a posthumous smear campaign.

I cannot possibly reiterate enough times just how messed up the ancien regime was, yeah, not all nobility had power or wealth, like country nobility. But, unless you are the bourgeoise new money, titled and wealthy or court nobility. You along with the 99.9% (who is not the clergy or the second estate) might as well be getting by on scraps, Dangerous Liaisons (the book) touches on this conflict a lot.

Historical fiction is by nature fiction it shouldn't be moralized differently from any other fiction.

The French (and by extension European + American) empires never really 'died' they just rebranded themselves a lot.

[teh-nos]

you may think my niche is narrow but people on the internet arguing about the wars of the roses and who had a better "claim" to things is very much like similar arguments in the marvel cinemataticalish universe fandom and those films are extremely popular so who's sad and obscure now eh?

[roxannepolice]

I'm honestly starting to get tired of filtering fairly common names like Charles or William or Kate. Can't tumblr go hate on some other monarchy??? Do you guys even recognize Greenland is still a Danish colony and also Frederik is a much rarer name?

[shewolfofvilnius]

It's fascinating how even though you don't always hear about \ anyone other than Astarion, every origin companion in BG3 has an endgame/epilogue state that is either outright bad for them or at the very least "not as good as they deserve".

Obvious there have been books and 100,000 pages of fic and discourse written about Ascended Astarion. In the moments when he almost acts like his old self, even then it's merely humoring you with a whim.

Mother Superior DJ Shadowheart flat out admits to severe empathy for what Viconia went through, and has fully closed herself off from any sense of attachment or feeling other than Nocturne and Tav. Her continued need to find carve-outs and exceptions and loopholes parallels Viconia's own eventual disagreements with Shar. And as we know, Shar will eventually betray or abandon her if Shadowheart doesn't betray her first. It's the story of every devout Sharran we meet.

Gale, the God is a smug arrogant hubris-ridden asshole that's even mean to Tara in the epilogue. Nearly every single sentiment he expressed about why he wanted the Crown and to ascend is immediately inverted. Of course he's not going to interfere. He's a figure of aspiration. Once he received power himself he immediately forgot and forsook everyone and everything about why he wanted it in the first place. A romanced God Gale is SLIGHTLY more grounded but that's mostly just because you ground him. And if you ascend with him, that ends that.

Lae'zel's return to Vlaakith results in her ascension, which leads to her missing the party and being very dead. The things that Lae'zel claimed to value will never truly be as long as Vlaakith rules, and her not escaping and falling back into her people's death cult robs her of the ability to create a new Gith, a better Gith.

Karlach is dead, or almost as bad, a Mind Flayer. And while most of her initial personality remains, by six months in she's already grown emotionally distant and her personality is clearly and evidently being slowly overridden by the brains of the dying she consumes. She's forsaken the embrace of death for the guise of eternal continuation in her. And even surrounded by the ten people who should mean the most in the world to her, all she mostly thinks about is others' perceptions of her (ala the Emperor) and the fact that she's hungry. Mind Flayer Karlach even notes that she used to think becoming a Mind Flayer would be the worst thing ever, but now she likes it. Shades of the Emperor x1000 and a clear sign that the Karlach we know and love is rapidly becoming a memory.

and then there's Grand Duke Wyll. On the surface, it appears the happiest of the "bad" endings, but pay attention. Note how he discusses wheeling and dealing and making agreements with patriars. (How well has contracts and deals worked out for you in the past?) Oh, and in certain conditions including romance, Wyll will offer you the chance to become a Grand Duke as well - with the others being his father (Ravengard #3) and Florrick (Wyll/Ulder's longest lasting family friend). That's not a government of the people for the people. When the power is tied up by a husband, spouse, his father, and their most trusted advisor, that's the makings of a monarchy or oligarchy. Of the type of patriar power-claim to last for generations, something Wyll himself once mocked. Oh, and if you adopt a child, then you get into the worst part of it all: Wyll's been busy running a city, and oh hey, instead of y'all bringing YOUR FOUR MONTH OLD DAUGHTER with you, hey, she'll be cool being watched by the Ilmater temple for a night right? Sorry, Wyll, were you saying something a few months ago about distant parenting? Yikes.

[werewolfetone]

"A tweet would kill someone from the past" is NOT true because the intertwined religion and politics and monarchy in the 1600s in Britain was literally 100x more toxic than any social media fandom discourse. you think that you could kill a puritan with twitter? fools. it wouldn't even faze them and then they would tell you their thoughts on the divine right of kings and those would kill YOU

[fandomsandfeminism]

God, sometimes I love running across wild discourse from shows I don't watch and only kinda know about.

Like "who is the good guy/bad guy/should be on the throne/did nothing wrong in House of the Dragon?"

I don't even go here, but have we considered that NONE the main characters in the "prequel to the "actually there are no good kings because monarchy is a upheld by cyclical violence" series about the batshit tyrant house civil war" are... babygirl? Like...maybe...that's the point?

"But which child murder/treachery/act of extreme dragon violence is justified?" Maybe it's not about justification, but about how the belief that such acts CAN be justified perpetuates further violence. I dunno, just a thought.

But I guess you gotta pick your house so you know what...merch...to buy? Does this show have merch? Probably.

[welcomingdisaster]

halls of mandos dashboard simulator... part 2

Recommended for you!

🦊 fairfaefox Follow got a song on the tip of my tongue i haven't heard in like 400 years and it's driving me nuts. all i can remember about it is that it started with this really vivid image of burning ships & it had a drum beat that went sorta like dum deee dum ba beee crackle-crackle and got more intense as the song went on think it might have been in quenya? could be wrong

🌃wordsmithfoul Follow ........... ,,, op....... are you talking about the Ñoldolantë

🦊 fairfaefox Follow oh yeah that's it thanks! :)

🌧️ rainelf Follow SCREAMING LMAO OP???

👒 fllfrrur Follow

🦊 fairfaefox Follow HJKHJHKJ GIRL IM AVARI LEAF ME ALONE 😭😭😭😭😭

🏇 doriath_dude Follow Exhibit #4555 of the insane Noldor-centrism of this goddamn website. Most culturally important song of our age to fucking WHOM?? #ugh #curas fights the noldor AGAIN #discourse

( 3555 notes )

🌀positivitydaily Following positivity for elves that died in stupid and embarrassing ways! positivity for elves that don't have a cool and exciting death story! positivity for elves that fell off a cliff or drowned cave-diving or died of heartbreak over someone who was objectively speaking like a 6/10! no matter what posts get popular on here, it's totally OK not to have a cool death story nor does it make you any less worthy of reembodiment! lame death positivity!! #positivity #i'll go on record and say i died from mushroom poisoning

( 121 notes )

🧵broiderycreature Mutuals look i know it's just selection bias from my beloved mutuals but i think it's funny to imagine we're all gonna leave the halls having transed our gender & gotten radicalized. like yeah mom i'm not the daughter you thought you had but more importantly we must abolish the monarchy #lol. lmao even ( 45 notes )

🏰 Turgon_Of_Gondolin_1 Following Update: Minecraft server is back up, but I've disabled PvP and increased raiding protections. I will not name names, but please think before you act next time. ( 203 notes )

💠 LoveStruckLoaf Mutuals hey girl uhhh. sorry your boyfriend didn't come to the halls of mandos. yeah no one can say what his fate is because it isn't woven into the tapestries on of the world i'm really sorry about that haha. uhh i guess he did chose it for himself so there's that. we're still cool right? #lariel's copium

( 108 notes )

🔥Fëanáro_Official Follow

#If they are truly so loath to restrict us they ought not fear the voice of the people #Which I am sure shall be in my favor.

(12001 notes)

🐝 bee-leg Following anyone know whom I petition to learn the everlasting fate of my lemur (beloved companion)? thank you faithfully #personal

( 8 notes )

[maxdibert]

Feelings around Snape now are so, so different to how they were in 2007 when the final book was released (though there was a fair amount of infuriating sexual assault apologia on LiveJournal back then too). I do think that the predominant factor in the baffling online discourse around Snape over the last decade is the American cultural disconnect with Britain. Anglophone countries, but totally different societies. Current American dominance wins out on the internet platforms used for fandom. The unwillingness to consider the nuances in a ostracised boy who flirts with a fascist cult while looking for purpose definitely seems rooted in America’s extraordinarily polarised political environment. The ‘incel’ label incorrectly applied to Snape is based entirely on American archetypes of the male school shooter who couldn’t get a girlfriend.

I saw infinite dismayed reactions to the rumoured casting along the lines of ‘but if they cast Snape as a black man I’ll have to sympathise with him!’ which basically sums the disconnect up. The industrial history of 1970s Britain isn’t on mainstream fandom’s radar, everything is seen through the prism of America’s particular flavour of identity politics.

I completely agree, and in fact, this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s not at all a coincidence that the most fervent Snape haters I encounter online—or at least those who fail to understand how class dynamics work—are primarily from the States. And I say from the States because this doesn’t seem to be the case with people from Latin America, whose societies were colonized under a strong framework of social classes and strata due to the influence of Spanish imperialism at the time, in addition to being victims of multiple dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, and narco-governments. This gives people in Latin America a broader social perspective.

The States' people ones (because United States is not America, America is a whole continent and as a spanish person with a lot of Latin American friends i find quite disrespectful to call United States people Americans as if they where the only americans in the world lol) operate under a neoliberal worldview that is very different from this and also very different from Europe’s perspective on class struggle. Europe experienced fascism, and it’s Europeans who understand how fascism rose to power—not as something driven purely by economic elites suddenly deciding to start killing people, but as deeply populist political movements widely accepted by the social majority and even by much of the working class. These movements used propaganda to push rhetoric that fed into people’s needs and promised to address their economic and social problems.

This provides an objective perspective on how voting for Hitler or joining the Hitler Youth didn’t automatically make someone an inhuman monster. It was something that regular people, everyday individuals, did—people who didn’t necessarily have a vile or ruthless intent toward anyone but believed in a particular discourse and rhetoric. Understanding this is crucial for grasping how a character like Snape could end up joining the Death Eaters. But if you’re, I don’t know, living in a small town in Wisconsin and all you know is that it’s trendy to call any Trump supporter a Nazi and that everything is “Nazi” without having the slightest idea of what a Nazi really is, then you end up buying into a ridiculously simplistic narrative without any critical thinking or thorough analysis of the social and economic contexts that drive a society toward far-right ideologies.

I’m sorry, but they’re living in parallel realities. At the end of the day, the Harry Potter series, no matter how politically clueless Rowling is or how much her worldview is utterly bourgeois and biased, is still British. Britain is in Europe, and fascism was experienced in Britain just as it was in the rest of Europe. Similarly, Britain remains a parliamentary monarchy with a class system that isn’t based solely on economics and where a person’s value isn’t measured solely by their wealth but also by their lineage. It’s an aristocratic society, and aristocracy will always rank above the bourgeoisie. These people truly don’t understand this, nor do they make the slightest effort to try. And if they don’t do their homework, honestly, their opinions are worthless garbage.

[tanadrin]

re-listening to season 10 of revolutions, since i never finished it the first time around, and the retrospective on the emergence of socialism in the 19th century is probably the most interesting part so far. it seems to me that 19th century "liberalism" (which was scarcely worth the name) is really a very different beast than 21st century liberalism, which has in its more left-liberal strains incorporated a ton of criticisms of 19th century socialists, and is in many ways actually a pretty good synthesis of both political heuristics. certainly not perfect, and certainly still wedded to capitalism.

but a lot of early socialists were, even if they were social scientists, first and foremost utopians. it was easier to dream what might lie in the possibility-space of useful ways of organizing an egalitarian society when very little of that space had been explored, and the burst of 19th century utopia-building was part of an attempt to explore that space and put many unabashedly utopian ideas into practice. but many of the most ambitious ideas like proudhon's anarchism just weren't super workable in the end, either in the conditions that then prevailed or in the conditions that have prevailed since. liberal democracy--especially as it was refined into something actually worthy of the name--proved both durable and flexible enough to be quite egalitarian in some respects (e.g., it supports universal adult suffrage just fine! and consolidated democracies are pretty robust and quite stable, compared to competing systems). it feels similar to the high-flying hopes of early science fiction becoming tempered as we learned more about what the possibility space of future technology would really look like across the 20th century, you know?

and so i think it's natural that a lot of that early revolutionary energy went into doing politics in a liberal-democratic framework; it turns out to be a very useful framework for liberatory social projects (much more useful than either the halfhearted liberal constitutionalisms of the mid 19th century or the reactionary monarchies they usually contrasted against). but it also seems to me that a ton of the discourse in the rump left that has resulted is stuck in a very early 19th century way of thinking.

and maybe some of this is ideological distillation, with those sufficiently convinced by the virtues of the modern liberal-democratic system naturally falling out of coalition with those who aren't, so the remainder is a concentrated nucleus most likely to see fundamental continuity between the proto-liberalism of the 1800s and the more fully realized liberalism of later eras like the 2000s. plus people who are simply never going to be on board with, say, any system that is capitalist in its arrangement, no matter how prosperous or free it manages to be otherwise. but also i wonder how much of this is because for like 70 years you had a major militaristic, hegemonic state, the USSR, which was really very like the militaristic, hegemonic system it was opposed to in important ways, but which for reasons of its legitimating ideology needed to portray what differences did exist in the starkest possible terms. and the solution to that was to portray liberal democracy as of the 20th century as being functionally indistinguishable from the liberal constitutionalism of the 19th, while making themselves out to be the sole inheritors of the more egalitarian thinkers from the left. despite the fact that the USSR was pretty conservative in a lot of ways, and was basically authoritarian in a way that i don't think any of those original utopian socialists would have endorsed.

so maybe you have to keep 19th century political categories static and unchanging in order to make the dichotomy that supports your state still have meaning. even if, once you have established yourself as the ruling class of a large, powerful state, you act in ways that are actually pretty darn similar to the ruling class of other large, powerful states. and of course trying to maintain those categories even as the world continues to evolve, including the faction you have opposed yourself to (and the third leg of what is really a trichotomy, the actual, unabashed reactionaries, also continues to evolve) leads to further tensions and absurdities, which is why the most ardent defenders of the USSR like the tankies tie themselves into knots of campism and conspiracism and even frequently back directly into bog-standard reactionary ideology, because the framework they are trying to use to understand the world hasn't been updated since the 1840s, and was already having to be heavily distorted by the 1920s to make it work.

[saintbleeding]

[ID: A ten-panel comic of Alice, Gwen, Sam, and Colin from The Magnus Protocol. Alice is at her computer as it reads a case, saying “Soon will the moment of reckoning come—” and she interrupts to say “oop! No thanks, Augustus </3”. She gets up from her desk and calls to Gwen who sighs in response and says “What is it, Alice?” Alice replies “Gwen do you think swans would be Tories.” Gwen says “What.” and Alice proceeds “You know, because the Crown owns them.” Raising an eyebrow, Gwen says “I don’t think swans would respect the processes of a constitutional monarchy, Alice.” Alice says “Nah, they’d be total bootlickers.”

Interrupting, Sam says “I think ducks would vote for Labour. They’re very polite and they’d want robust healthcare and education for their ducklings.” Alice looks amused while Gwen silently regrets the trajectory of her life. Coming in the door, Colin says “I think geese would be anarchists.” Alice turns to him and asks “How did you hear this vitally important discourse from out there, exactly?” to which Colin says “I didn’t. Why, what were you talking about?” End ID.]

i mean if wishful thinking can turn something into a workplace comedy once it can do it twice right. everyone’s gonna stay fine forever. right

[catlady48]

Sometimes I feel like such a fake fan. This has mostly to do with the fact that I prefer Loki's characterisation in Thor 1 and 2 over Avengers!Loki. I also always heavily insist it was not actually his true desire to conquer Earth or rule anything, mostly because that's the way the first movie was written. I even think that plot idea is a left over from when they wanted Red Skull to be the villain of Avengers (2012). Because to me it just never made sense that all of a sudden he'd want to rule this planet he considers a backwater. I know some people argue that after having been on the throne for a bit during Thor 1 he grew to enjoy it too much or something, but I just can't see it considering his state of mind during that movie?

I especially hate that comparison during the Stuttgart scene, even if I agree you should always stand up to oppressors (especially these days). It's just created takes like "Loki is explicitly a fascist", which is factually wrong (even if he wanted to do as he stated, that'd be absolute monarchy not fascism. But also since I personally believe he wasn't doing all of it of his own will. It's also a bit weird since the movie heavily implies Loki was both tortured and to some degree influenced and this comparison contradicts it. So which is it? Did he want this and is he a despicable dictator or is he a somewhat sympathetic (even if his actions are of course still horrible) guy who was kind of forced into doing these horrible things in order to survive. It feels like the movie tries to forcibly frame him into "wait we've shown him as to sympathetic, now we must show him as the worst evil ever to compensate so that the audience will applaud at his defeat" and it doesn't match his own subtext. What doesn't help is that a lot of this was probably supposed to have been revealed during the original plans for Infinity War and that never happened so we'll never know what the true intention was. Furthermore, I think the Stuttgart scene was mostly intended to be at least partially an act and that makes that comparison even more unlogical to me.

I think I'd have preferred it that they wrote his villainy differently, without bringing the whole "he's powerhungry" stereotype into it. I know, part of that is because of what they wrote him into later, which wasn't explicitly the fault of Avengers as a movie and I also know it's a huge thing in the older comics, but mcu!Loki was explicitly not written like that before that and I think they should've stuck with that. I mean after his character arc in Thor 1, if they truly wanted him as the villain, "if I couldn't be your equal that way, I'll be your equal through being your archnemesis" was right there along with all the angst that could come with that. They wouldn't have needed to write in the torture and stuff to make it make sense with his character.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy most of Avengers and I do enjoy Loki throughout the movie. It's just some of the discourse that surrounds it that bugs me to no end. I'm afraid that I'm woobifying him too much by claiming he isn't as villainous as Marvel wants to paint him, even though this is genuinely how I interpret the movie. It feels like people are claiming that I need to embrace this (in particular the Stuttgart scene) as his true personality in order to not be woobifying him, while I think that is not the case at all based on textual evidence and I'm so tired of it. Does that make me a fake fan?