Did Anyone Ship Holly And Bluebell When They Read Watership Down Or Is That Just Me

hey guys have you ever heard of THE CHARACTER. i’m thinking about THE CHARACTER. honestly can’t even get shit done because i’m thinking about THE CHARACTER. i’m listening to a song and imagining THE CHARACTER. all i know and love is THE CHARACTER

Will you accept a mad dany arc if grrm does it in a different, more sensical way or would that always narratively suck for you?

it has nothing do with my personal feelings regarding the character. i dislike speculation of dany having a downfall arc because it reveals a misreading of the text and the narrative role she plays within it. i don't believe it can be done in a satisfying way because she was always intended to be a heroic character. the 'mad dany' reading relies on certain initial assumptions about her character that are being problematised within the story—which is difficult to discuss because grrm's intent regarding dany is at odds with the orientalist framework he employs in the construction of essos, but i'll try to be comprehensive about it. so dany is an exile, homeless and perpetually seeking a home. she was told by viserys that westeros is "our land" but she's not culturally westerosi the same way the rest of our cast is because she's also never known westeros. all she has are second hand, romanticised accounts from viserys (These places he talked of [...] they were just words to her). dany has lived her entire life in essos and absorbed their cultural norms and slavery is normalised in most of essos (There was no slavery in the free city of Pentos. Nonetheless, they were slaves), it's especially apparent in her first chapter which pointedly draws attention to the various slaves serving at illyrio's manse, something dany doesn't express any moral objection to, because nobody has taught her this is wrong. and that understanding only comes after viserys sells her to drogo and she personally experiences a similar loss of autonomy.

Do you know what it is like to be sold, squire? I do. My brother sold me to Khal Drogo for the promise of a golden crown. Well, Drogo crowned him in gold, though not as he had wished, and I . . . my sun-and-stars made a queen of me, but if he had been a different man, it might have been much otherwise. Do you think I have forgotten how it felt to be afraid? DAENERYS II, A Storm of Swords

and when mirri reveals to dany that her act of 'saving' her was no saving at all. rescuing her through the offer of a place in drogo's khalasar is a meaningless gesture since it does nothing to address the systems that have enabled mirri's enslavement in the first place. yeah, she's fourteen and possesses no power in her own right and is not complicit in drogo's crimes but mirri's presence in the story is meant to teach her that lesson. dany does not arrive already possessed with a political consciousness that opposes slavery, she learns and reorients her worldview just as jon did once he became familiar with the free folk. this is an important detail because without it her crusade in slaver's bay is no longer a story about a former enslaved and sexually abused girl being provided the means to begin a revolutionary counter-struggle against a culture of dehumanisation, but about a civilising mission where a culturally westerosi (westeros, where slavery is outlawed. westeros which is clearly imagined as the occident to essos's orient) character with superior ideals travels to foreign lands to educate the barbarians—which would've made her a straightforward white saviour figure. this IS undermined by the way her storyline is rife with orientalist tropes and i'm getting to that, but my main point is that dany's character is very deliberately written to be someone who is stateless and doesn't belong anywhere. she is an other. which is compounded by her targaryen heritage—the targaryens are narratively imagined as white enough to co-exist with the rest of westeros but they're also being othered because they're a family originating from the east with 'depraved' inbreeding and blood magic practices (practices that are reviled throughout the whole continent), which simultaneously makes them too other to ever fully assimilate despite the family being culturally westerosi in all the ways that matter. this especially comes through in the coin quote, every house has had occasional despots for rulers but people only bother to pathologise the targaryens and that's because they're foreigners. "the gods flip a coin" is presenting this dichotomy of targaryens as either mad - violent barbarians from the east, or great, in which case they're exoticised as otherworldly, above the laws of gods and men. and the final thing that serves to other her is her association with the dothraki. the dothraki are initially introduced as violent savages, but that view has been challenged since then as dany adopts dothraki customs and comes to love their people as her own and even sees herself as more of a khaleesi than a queen. and i must emphasise that this is no way done well because a) the dothraki are constructed out of offensive stereotypes about steppe cultures b) five books later grrm hasn't bothered to give any of them interiority because he clearly doesn't care about the dothraki, they're an afterthought in his narrative about dany and c) i think the subversion of their introduction as the inferior racial other basically amounts to "they're noble savages".

so you see all this at work when in-universe those who revile her speak of alleged violent tendencies, that she's coming to burn the continent down, that she hatched her dragons through foul blood magic and that she tricked her khal husband into murdering her brother and has acquired an army of savages, that her court is made up of foreigners and 'honourless' westerosi men (jorah, barristan, and soon tyrion), while others talk of her supposed otherworldly beauty ("The last of her line. They say she is the fairest woman in the world.")—the mad dany reading of her is taking all this at face value, it's falling for that in-universe narrative her enemies have come up with, which associates her and her allies' foreignness with moral depravity. (this is also what the show did, which i said "achieved her s8 ending by fully leaning into the horror of the savage oriental horde come to oppress the civilised westerosi landowning class" and that hysterical randyll tarly speech "at least cersei wasn't a FOREIGNER"). a very early example of this is in the first book. robert wanted a teenager dead because she was a targaryen: aerys's daughter, rhaegar's sister, because she married a khal and adopted dothraki customs as her own. and it was ned who put up a fight against this. ned is flawed in my ways but do you suppose the narrative will diminish ned's legacy in this, in his stance against dehumanisation. and asoiaf is primarily about that, every major character has had experience with being othered (cripples, bastards, and broken things is about this) and within this narrative dany is meant to be The Other who is working to end institutions of otherisation. her upcoming invasion of westeros is not playing into the the threat of the foreign invader but raising questions of whether westeros is also in need of some reform (at one point tyrion directly compares a serf to a slave, something that might be narratively painting westeros as not culturally superior at all for having outlawed slavery). the problem, of course, being that the way grrm subverts the image of essos as the inferior racial other is by first populating it with orientalist stereotypes. he parallels some of the violence found in ghiscari culture and the dothraki raid of the lhazareen village with ramsay and amory lorch and gregor clegane et al operating in the riverlands in acok but the ghiscari are also portrayed almost as a monolith, as uniformly morally suspect individuals because our only introduction to them is through the slavers. it's the way dany is the only active abolitionist with a narrative voice in essos (there's the shavepate. but he's also a scheming violent extremist so), i said her story is not a civilising mission but when you fail to give any of the ghiscari oppressed a voice it doesn't result in great optics. and it is undeniable that the story is About Westeros, dany's great narrative destiny lies over there, when the long night arrives—an apocalyptic threat meant to affect the entire world—the battle for the dawn will also take place over there, i doubt the essosi will play a role in that.

i refuse to believe that i’m the only one on this site who projects onto rapunzel (tangled 2010).

The two young lions of the Rock

the franken monster. angel

for my lit class :)

so i’ve only watched sn 1 and a bit of sn 2 of the boys, but i’m really digging hughie’s pseudo coming-of-age arc, which contributes to the oedipal themes of the show as a whole. in season 1 one of hughie’s minor journeys as a character was self-actualizing into someone his father was no longer babying. he lived with his dad & robin was going to be the one who forced him to gain independence from his father by having him move in with her. then she died, and he spent the rest of the season getting mixed up with the wrong ppl but trying to become his own person. in season 2, the father from which he is trying to grow beyond and metaphorically “kill” is butcher (who quite literally refers to himself as daddy (😩) in the first ep) by asserting himself as a new sort of leader of the boys and by doing things on his own.

the other side of this oedipal coin is homelander, obviously, with his lust for a mother figure (stillwell in s1) and hatred for his father figure (vogelbaum). this doesn’t need much explanation. in the second season he is also in a fight to assert himself independently from his paternal company.

overall, this points to a consciousness of the characters’ stunted growths and their inability to self-actualize without an element of conflict. this is a commentary on human nature but moreover our current culture of toxic masculinity. i hope they carry these themes forward in some shape or form, whether that’s a continuance of the cycle or a subversion of it, with ryan and homelander + butcher!

fizzarolli 💕🌈💕🌈💕🌈💕

this was too violent for tiktok lol

the boys x my chemical romance

writing these are addictive

wpuld love to hear your gripes about striker's design!

aah it’s mainly the fact that he looks so cool and yet way too busy. i’m used to viv’s maximalist style and for the most part i like it and don’t think character designs should be simplified because this is the show’s style—but striker has too much stuff going on with his clothes in particular.

i really liked how he looks vaguely coyote-ish, so it’s mostly his clothes for me—there are at least 3 different shades of grey in his outfit and it made it difficult for me to picture him when he wasn’t onscreen other than coyote with cowboy hat and big teeth. there’s also a lot going on with his tail—if it were a solid color without the stripes and spikes, i’d be able to follow its movement better and distinguish it from his accessories.

he also doesn’t really pop out from the wrath environment in general, having such muted colors, which i think could be intentional to show him as being much more ‘native’ to there than moxxie, but the same thing happens in other places, too—grey just really doesn’t stand out.

so yeah i think it’s just the dissonance between the fact that i think he’s really cool/yay snake cowboy so i really like some of his design, but also that his clothing is too busy without much contrast and there are so many stripes and layers which make it difficult to follow the minutiae of his movements!