#who up thinking about the tragic doomed brothers who are pawns in their father's game of ambitions? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

whatiwillsay · 3 years

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kaylor oomfs avert your eyes 😞

i get asked from time to time “why don’t you like kaylor, why don’t you like karlie, why do you think kaylor isn’t together? why aren’t you and ttb married yet?” and i think it’s high time i centralize my thoughts and receipts on all of that in a little timeline of shady things karlie has done to taylor that have made me wary of kaylor/karlie/that whole situation. don’t read if you stan kaylor this isn’t for you (unless you know you’re interested in the truth.)

first things first, i do think something romantic happened between kaylor go read @swiftiesleuth‘s realistic kay timeline for what i (generally) think happened between them.

but long story short - i think joshlie is real, i think they weren’t all that serious at the beginning, she famously didn’t meet his family for years, he didn’t take her to work events for a long time, so there’s room for her to have a fling with taylor even though we ended up with a real joshlie endgame.

taylor’s music and art supports this theory - in the wd mv she paints herself as the other woman, on rep she sings of secret sexy sex with her best friend that drives her crazy, in cruel summer she sings of a miserable, secret, and toxic situation with a person who rejects her love, in illicit affairs and august again she is the other woman - the art matches up. she also sings about her sunshine being gone on lover, and eclipsed on folklore. we have good clues in taylor’s artistic expression.

taylor’s given interviews about some of these karlie songs - she said cruel summer was about the start to a “doomed” relationship and look at what she said about august:

“It kind of explores the idea of the undefined relationship. As humans, we're all encouraged to just be cool and just let it happen, and don't ask what the relationship is — Are we exclusive? But if you are chill about it, especially when you're young, you learn the very hard lesson that if you don't define something, oftentimes they can gaslight you into thinking it was nothing at all, and that it never happened. And how do you mourn the loss of something once it ends, if you're being made to believe that it never happened at all?”

if joshlie is real which i think they are that 100% sounds like taylor having to process being gaslit by karlie while she cheats on josh with her.

so why do i think joshlie is real?

- josh has no credible gay rumors that didn’t originate on gaylor tumblr: he has old ex gfs that came before karlie, harvard message boards gossiped about him and didn’t like him but never said that he was gay, in fact one of the complaints josh’s schoolmates had about him was that he got special treatment for her girlfriend at parties.

- as stated before taylor’s art suggests she’s been the other woman with someone in her life recently. if josh and karlie are beards then what is the affair? why is taylor the other woman so often all of a sudden?

- i’ve spoken to someone with a mutual friend with the kushners - grain of salt of course, i know you can only trust stuff you hear from me with no proof so much, but i do absolutely trust this person and they say - no way in hell is joshlie fake, no way in hell is josh gay, no way in hell is karlie having taylor’s baby. also karlie absolutely has moved down to miami with josh. i’m sure we’ll see her in nyc and la from time to time but she is living in miami now.

- vicky ward, who is a real investigative journalist not some unhinged person on tumblr, wrote a tell all about the kushners. she uncovered gay rumors about josh’s father and josh’s brother but not josh. she had actual sources and was legitimately digging up tons of dirt on these people and not a word about josh being gay or joshlie being fake.

- yes karlie did convert to judaism. it’s really offensive to suggest she didn’t. of course she always could have done it for personal reasons but occam’s razor dictates she did it for josh i don’t know what else to tell you 🤷‍♀️

- also just vibes. karlie writes him love notes and leaves them with his breakfast. they make playlists for one another. if the kushners weren’t so heinous they’d be cute.

so in the joshlie is real world view i inhabit, i don’t stan kaylor the same way i do swiftgron because i don’t think kaylor was ever a committed monogamous relationship. important and impactful on taylor’s life? absolutely. inspired some amazing music? 100%. but was is true and tragic love that drives me insane and makes me feral? no. i don’t believe so. is it still an interesting and iconic ship? yes! but i don’t stan because it wasn’t like...true love or gay shit like that.

so let’s talk about karlie’s screwups that 1. assure me kaylor is not together and 2. make me have no desire to stan karlie/kaylor.

1. after the kimye drama (something that deeply traumatized taylor we now know thanks to miss americana) karlie said she was sure kim was a lovely person 😭 now i know she walked it back and tweeted she and taylor had one another’s backs. i know karlie was just trying to be diplomatic. but come on...if someone did what kim did to taylor to my lover or hell even just my friend i would say “fuck that clout chasing fame whore” bottom line. c’mon guys. have higher standards for your otp.

karlie also has vibed with kim on IG about her adidasas line. recently! yes i know she’s just promoting her brand but c’mon. taylor still hates kim, their drama got rehashed in march 2020 and just 6 months later kim n karlie are bestie-ing around on ig.

2. ALL the fucking masters drama and scooter fucking braun

- not long at all after the masters heist karlie was palling around with scooter on a yacht like come on the only other thing taylor is equally as traumatized over as the kimye drama is the master’s heist. why is karlie hanging out with him and partying with him at this time?

- karlie liked a tweet completely incinerating taylor (in a gross and unfair/inaccurate way) regarding the masters heist. she unliked it but still. why was she even looking at that shit.

- and yeah we gotta talk about perez. so perez hilton (who is a scumbag and gross but sometimes does have legitimate tea) posted a video saying that karlie and taylor were no longer friends because karlie betrayed taylor to scooter. now if that were all there was to it, it’d be dumb gossip. but a taylor fan account posted the video to twitter ashley avignone and claire winter both liked the tweet. ashley liked two tweets about it. perez proceeded to tweet that since two of taylor’s oldest and truest friends liked the tweets it must mean he was correct and neither of the girls unliked the tweets. ashley and claire are low key people, not celebs, not pawns in a “fued narrative”, just long time and loyal friends of taylor’s. they liked the tweet, imo, because there’s some truth to it.

- that brings me to spencer pratt. spencer is a reality star and super swiftie/huge fan of taylor’s. he despises karlie. he’s tweeted negatively about her and he also had perez onto his podcast to talk about the drama between karlie and taylor. taylor herself sent him a cardigan. do you really think taylor is going to allow a cardigan to go out to the guy who’s dragging her girlfriend or bestie? i don’t think so. receipts on perez and spencer here.

3. karlie posted for hailey fucking beiber’s bday instead of taylor’s and hailey hates taylor 🤢🤢🤢

4. karlie married into a fascist family that is associated with the trumps. like how can you expect me to stan? trump is a fucking criminal evil piece of shit. i know karlie isn’t like him (probably) but it’s still awful. kimby even goes around liking ivanka’s ig posts like give me a fucking break 😭.

in summation, you can disagree w me all you like, you can ship kaylor all you like, but if you’re of sound mind i don’t think you can look at the facts in this post and think i’m misguided for not being a kaylor/karlie stan. and you can’t blame me for thinking if you spend a lot of time obsessing over that ship you may not really be that big a fan of taylor’s. and if you’re spending a lot of time leading lgbt kids on to think they’re going to get a kaylor end game when all the objective facts of the case suggest that that’s never going to happen you might need to reevaluate but at the very least you certainly can’t press me for not doing all that.

#komments #of interest

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hamliet · 5 years

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I've never seen Game of Thrones but I've heard a lot about it and apparently many people are upset with the ending. Something about Targaryen becoming a villain at the last second for no apparent reason? Idk, could you explain what's going on? I heard it's based off a book series. Does the show stray from the original plot or stay loyal to it?

*starts sobbing* SPARE YOURSELF

Honestly I’d sum it up like how @mercyandmagic summed it up: image Harry Potter wins the Battle of Hogwarts, but in the very moment he wins, he snaps and the Voldemort horcrux inside him suddenly takes over the rest of his soul and he murders almost everyone and Ginny has to put him down at Hermione and Ron’s urging.

That’s what happened. It was a tone-deaf plot twist in this day and age, misogynistic, ableist, and racist in its execution, and it was poorly written as well--like, there was no foreshadowing for this twist of events.

The thing about the books is that they aren’t completed. We are 5/7 books through. The creator told the showrunners the bare bones of the ending (who lives/dies/gets the throne), so I’m hoping this isn’t his endgame exactly. Others speculate it might not be (for example, the main ship--Jon and Dany--might still have one killing the other, but it might be more in a sacrifice than in a “put the mad dog down” scenario like the show gave us. Still hate it, but not “burn it all down”).

We know they cut some characters from the books whom at first I assumed the fact that they were cut meant that they were extra fat, and... well I am now hoping that’s wrong because combining their arcs with the characters we have left would explain a lot about it being shit.

So, the primary defense I’m seeing of Dany Villain is that she’s a tragic heroine, and her descent just wasn’t written properly. I’d agree that it’s not written well, but I’d also argue that in both the books and in the show, Dany is not presented as a tragic heroine at all, but as a hero on a gritty version of the hero’s journey–just like Jon--but one of the cut characters is indeed a tragic heroine.

The thing about tragedies is that you have to manage expectations and clearly show that your tragic hero is doomed from the very early on–ie you have to show them making steadily worse and worse decisions (see: Eren Jaeger in SnK), if not directly tell your audience at the very beginning that this is a tragic story (ie see Greek choruses and Shakespeare, the prequels from Star Wars because everyone knows Anakin is Vader–plus I’d argue Anakin’s arc only works because we know he comes back to the light in the end–Kaneki Ken in the first Tokyo Ghoul, etc).

We don’t have that with Dany or with Jon, and we’re 5/7 through the books which is, frankly, too late. If they intended to show Dany as a tragic heroine they needed to start foreshadowing that in, oh, book 3/season 4-5 at the latest, and show divergence from Jon Snow’s arc instead of increasing parallels. But they haven’t, which gives me hope at least that the book’s ending plays out a little bit more like Dany burning a city as the “abyss/underworld” part of her hero’s journey (which she is on, and so is Jon) and then redeeming herself in the end fighting a greater enemy.

A hero’s journey includes a step in which the hero confronts the darkness, the shadow. For Jon, it’s a cold death and the fact that winter is coming. For Dany, it’s her father and her heritage’s legacy of fire and blood. The end of Book 5, the last book published, pretty clearly showed both of them falling to the abyss (well, teetering on the edge, and it’s going to get worse before they’re both reborn). But the important thing is that it’s not the end of their journey.

Audiences don’t like reversing on set up/undoing structure. To make Dany a tragic heroine is to go against the structure of her arc in both show and book. That’s why people don’t like it, even if the books makes it seem more believable.

You know who is set up as a tragic heroine destined to descend and die because of her flaws in the books, whose arc has almost certainly been combined with Dany’s in some sense in the show?

Arianne Martell. (and another character known as f!Aegon)

The show pretty clearly merged Jon’s (main hero’s) arc with f!Aegon’s, even giving him his name (in a nonsensical way. In the books, f!Aegon believes he is Aegon Targaryen, Jon’s brother, though he really isn’t as Aegon is dead; in the show, Jon’s dad apparently named… both his sons Aegon. Mmkay). Characters who are the mastermindsbehind the Aegon plot, supporting him over f!Aegon, take Jon’s side against Dany in the show. Similarly, the show is merging Dany with Arianne, retconning her as letting her demons overtake her in the end, when that is just not Dany’s arc’s set up at all, in the books or in the show.

In the books, Arianne is incredibly ambitious, and especially resents her brother and his quest for power. Like Margaery (another tragic character), Arianne seeks power and is intelligent and manipulative in her quest for it. But Margaery’s fatal mistake is that in seeking power and prestige, she’s become more a pawn than anything else for a villain (Cersei). She chose to play with lions, and she’ll be torn apart; that’s not surprising. Arianne, as her chapters hint, is going to almost certainly marry f!Aegon, playing with fire, and die burning for it.

Arianne’s grasping for her own power is never portrayed as cruel or stupid like the main human villain (Cersei); on the contrary, we empathize with a girl who truly cares about her people, but resents her father’s preferential treatment towards her brother. That’s the difference between Arianne and Cersei: Arianne cares. She is not cruel. But her pride is still going to get her killed.

The books as I recall have always, always portrayed the Others (White Walkers) as the primary threat, not the game of thrones. People who get involved in the game of thrones–it doesn’t end well. The thing about Dany, though, is that she sees herself as a revolutionary. “Break the wheel” isn’t in the books (yet), but it’s a pretty good character moment for her that rings true. But this sets up Dany’s primary conflict: does she want to be like her father or not? Throughout the books, she hasn’t wanted to be. But she can’t have her cake and eat it to. If she goes for the throne–symbolic of her family and her father and those ghosts, as it’s always been portrayed as corrupting–she will indeed probably become more like her father. To be unlike her father, she’d probably have to not play the game of thrones anymore at all, and the Others are like… RIGHT THERE to provide this motivation for her.

But the show said “fuck it she’s her dad let me show you a snap two episodes after she saved the world from the Others who after being the primary threat for 7.5 seasons are now an afterthought and defeated after a single day because we gotta go with Bitches Be CrayCray as a plotline”

Man, I remember being disappointed the show cut Arianne and f!Aegon, but honestly it wasn’t until this season that I’ve been realizing how wrong my thinking that “they must have just been fat that could be cut” might have been. I shouldn’t have trusted D&D, that they knew what they were doing. They did not.

Or this might all be wrong and Jon and Dany are just doomed to be victims of bad writing in any case. *shrugs* Who knows if we’ll ever get those last two books (there’s been an 8+ year gap from the last one) so. Yeah.

That is probably way too long and complicated. I am sorry. I needed to vent lol. Also, the Dany and Arianne and f!Aegon theory is not mine--other meta writers for the books have written about it, but I find it convincing and honestly it gives me hope; see here.

#ask hamliet #game of thrones #got meta #got negativity #daenerys targaryen #jon snow #asoiaf #arianne martell #aot-snk-4238

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