#year of our lord...yikes.

[nat20composure]

I have no explanation for myself. Sorry your honors. Take me to andrjail.

I enjoy them greatly but prefacing right now I have. Many a critical thought about the game. Also I need them bad style

#dbh #detroit become human #dbh fanart #dbh hank #hank anderson #dbh connor #connor rk800 #rk800 #hank and connor #connor and hank #hankcon #year of our lord...yikes.

[reddstardust]

This is embarrassing.

#the fact that there are still people who like harry potter in the year of our lord 2022 #just #yikes #get well soon #🌠

[alichay]

trans women arent women bc they aren’t female, females who cannot and do not give birth are still female. hope this helps!!

this is such an incredibly stupid response that i genuinely can't tell if you're trolling lmao

#anon anon sir #also fuckin yikes didn't think there were any terfs following me in the year of our lord twenty twenty three.......... get the fuck out lol

[nohaijiachi]

Why I Think The Fandom Has Been Doing Aziraphale Dirty Ever Since Season 1 And It's Only Gotten Worse With Season 2 And It's Killing Me Inside

Before we get into the subject matter of the title let me preface a couple of things:

1- All that will follow is, big surprise, my opinion and my interpretation of this character. Do I think I am The One And Only Who Gets The Blorbo Right and that my ideas are 100% the way the author(s) intended to convey the character? No.

More likely than not the way I see Aziraphale could be intensely different from the way Authorman sees him, or Actorman sees him, and I don't think that my interpretation is necessarily any more correct than anybody's else.

That said, if I also did not think that I am, in fact, correct on a certain level, I wouldn't have bothered forming such a thought out opinion of Aziraphale in the first place, nor would be sitting here, writing this post that I can already tell is going to be entirely too long and might probably ruffle some feathers.

So I'll be writing the rest of this post with the caveat that I while I do think my interpretation correct, I'm also not trying to change anybody's mind nor to discredit anybody's else interpretation of Aziraphale. We can sit here in the sandpit and hold different opinions and still be able to build sandcastles together, it really isn't that deep at the end of the day; I can assure you, I'm not here to fight nor cause fights with this one.

2- With the above point, comes also the fact that I won't bother continuously saying "In my opinion" for the rest of this post. You already know that. So, if something will come across as a bit caustic, do know that it is very much tongue in cheek and I am poking a bit of fun at general fannish habits that I am also very much quote-unquoute 'guilty' of having partaken into, and will partake into again plenty of times in the future, I'm sure.

So, with that: Here's Why I Think The Fandom Has Been Doing Aziraphale Dirty Ever Since Season 1 And It's Only Gotten Worse With Season 2 And It's Killing Me Inside

A large part of the people comprising this fandom prefers Crowley. There, I said it.

This fandom's preference blatantly skews toward Crowley. Can we admit that openly? Let's admit that openly.

To be clear, this isn't meant to be an accusation or recrimination or any other -ation you can think of, I am merely stating matter-of-factly a phenomena I've observed in the last four years.

It is also not a wrong nor bad thing in any way, shape or form. I adore Crowley myself. I love them both so much it's unreal.

But I started with that because I think it is very much a symptom of the fact that a lot of people don't get Aziraphale.

I remember back with S1 there had been plenty of times when I found myself reading discussions and opinion exchanges about Aziraphale and Crowley, their dynamics, all the things that went unsaid behind the things that were said, and found myself genuinely surprised by seeing how some people interpreted certain moments wildly different from how I personally saw them.

I look back at that and I think "Oh, sweet summer child". Nothing could have prepared me from the onslaught of takes about Aziraphale that make me go "Good lord, what???" in the wake of S2, and the infamous Last Fifteen.

Now because I don't want to be pointing fingers at specific things and risk upsetting somebody more than I already am by being open in admitting that, guys, yes, some of the takes y'all have been sharing make me go "Yikes(tm)", I'll move on the interesting part and what I would actually love to discuss, aka cracking Aziraphale's head open and see what that actual fuck is going on in there.

Another preface: Because this duo is intrinsically linked and woven together it is downright impossible to only focus on Aziraphale without also mentioning Crowley, so... Let me circle back to our fav demon bae for a sec, here.

I think the reason why it seems that a larger part of the fandom favors Crowley is because I feel like Crowley is a much easier character to grasp. He is very open in his thoughts and feelings, at any given moment us, the audience, have a much easier time watching a scene and sort of ruminating in the back of our heads about Crowley's motivations for saying the things he says and doing the things he does.

That isn't to say Crowley is a less complex character than Aziraphale. They are very much equally complex and multifaceted individuals with their strengths and weaknesses, their issues and the way they each cope with them, how differently they approach their existence and so on and so forth.

But whereas Crowley as a character presents itself with a certain dynamism and a far more outward openness about his complexity, Aziraphale does the exact opposite; we can say Aziraphale is downright hermetic about it.

For us, the audience, he presents a challenge that requires a good deal of thought being put into him to see over the facade he presents at a more superficial level; he requires time and effort to fully dismantle him in our minds to try and see what makes him thick (other than his thighs), and thus I think it is entirely natural that more people latch on the far easier to identify-with, and relate-to, Crowley.

And that is the inevitable consequence of everything that makes Aziraphale... Well, Aziraphale.

So, where to start? Let's try and jot down what Aziraphale truly is at his core.

He is a contradiction.

This man-shaped being is a walking contradiction, constantly existing in a state of being coated in three thousand layers of misdirection and obfuscation and double thinking.

Why is that? Well. He's an angel.

Aziraphale loves being an angel. It is a tenet of his entire existence and something he cherishes. He wants, so very much, to be his ideal of what a good angel is: An entity who is kind and loving and understanding and forgiving.

Of course us, the audience, know that is utter bullshit, because we know angels can be individuals just as complex as the humans Aziraphale loves so much, with all their inherent flaws and capability for cruelty. And, on a certain level, Aziraphale knows that too.

So there we have it, one element of contradiction: Aziraphale wants to think that angels are always Good and Righteous and Never Wrong; Aziraphale knows that angels aren't, in fact, always Good and Righteous and, by god, can they make plenty of mistakes, too.

What else? How about Aziraphale sitting there, being in love with a demon, fully knowing that at the end of the day demons really ain't that different from angels, and also desperately hanging onto the concept of Good vs Bad.

And he sits there, existing with these two contrasting idea equally taking space in his mind, neither side ever capable of taking over the other.

What else do we have? Aziraphale loves God and wants so hard to believe in Her love for humanity and Her ineffable plan, and Aziraphale also time and again does things that very blatantly go against Her will, lies to Her face, and Doubts. He Doubts, a lot, and that requires the capital letter because those Doubts are what spur him in going against everything he's ever told to believe in order to do the right thing.

Aziraphale's very existence is a constant push-and-pull of things he wants to believe and things he knows are real; things he's told to do and things he wants to do. That's how we get "My side" and "there's a bit of good in you" and "you are the bad guys".

And nothing he's lived through has managed to break him out of this unhealthy way of existing quite yet; that's why he acts the way we see him act in the Edinburgh flashback in S2, or at the start of S1 when Crowley has to ease Aziraphale into the idea of trying to stop Armageddon with the usual song and dance of "temptation" and "plausible deniability" and "you'd be thwarting me", even though from the start we can tell there's a little part of Aziraphale who is clearly not at ease with the idea of the end of the world, and once he's been given 'permission' by Crowley nudging him, he is all the way in with the whole saving the world business, not take-backsies.

Both the moments I mentioned here are very important for different reasons, but of the two is very much the Edinburgh flashback that gets a lot more flack by the fandom and is blatantly misunderstood, which I think is the inevitable consequence of that minisode immediately following the glorious, beautiful, heartbreaking piece of art that is the "A companion to owls" minisode.

I've seen a lot of people lamenting that Aziraphale acts obnoxiously in the Edinburgh flashback and, yeah. He does. But I feel like the fact that we are seeing this after watching Aziraphale struggle his way through saving Job's children, even being willing to go to Hell for it, is a though act to follow and probably soured Edinburgh-Aziraphale for a lot of people, made them think that the character had regressed instead of progressing.

But, see, the way he acts is wholly congruous with who Aziraphale is and has always been and keeps being up to the very end of S2. Yes, even after what he does for Job's children.

If you get down to it, Aziraphale had been ready to give up and let the children die, in episode 2. For a brief moment, after Crowley told him he 'longed to destroy the blameless children', Aziraphale was walking away, having tried all he thought he could try to do to stop this senseless act. That was until Crowley tested him by making the crows bleat, cuing Aziraphale to the fact that his impression of Crowley wasn't wrong, and the he could count on him to do the right thing.

To be clear, I don't want to undermine Aziraphale's action by only giving the credit to Crowley but... It is, also, only thanks to Crowley cajoling him and giving him the right excuses, that Aziraphale feels safe in doing what he's always wanted to do all along.

He'd wanted to save Job's children, and thought he couldn't until Crowley threw him that hell of a lifesaver. He wanted to save the world and thought he couldn't until Crowley nudged him on the path of plausible deniability.

He wanted to save Elspeth's eternal soul, blinding himself to the hardships she'd have to endure in her not-eternal life, and was smacked right in the face by the reality of human suffering multiple times.

The way Aziraphale acts in that flashback can't be a regression, because there never was a progression in the first place: He'd always walked the line between Heaven's and God's will and his own, personal morality and sense of justice.

By all means, if we look at Uz-Aziraphale and modern-day-Aziraphale at the start of S1, his reticence about the whole saving the world business should, by all means, appear as a regression as well. You mean to tell me that he'd been ready to become a demon for the sake of three mortal children, and then suddenly a handful of thousands years later when faced with the prospect of the whole world going up in flames he'd just be all like "Heaven will triumph over Hell and it will be all rather lovely"? Like, fuck off, Aziraphale, you lying double-thinker, you (/pos)

Aziraphale constantly exist while being at war with himself. Circumstances have allowed him to rebel the will of Heaven and God more or less safely time and again, but he never quite managed to break free entirely. He'd always ended up being reeled back in, being fed the party lines, being made to feel shame for his independent thinking, until it all becomes too much and he is forced to step back from that freedom he'd been inches away from grasping.

Back and forth, back and forth, never stopping.

And all of this, all of what he is, makes it so hard for us, the audience, to truly see him. To truly grasp him. To truly watch any given scene with him and figure out what he might be thinking or feeling.

To understand Aziraphale is to understand what he is not saying when he says something, which is a good deal harder to do than it is to understand and relate to a character like Crowley, who very much revel in saying exactly whatever the heck he thinks whenever he damn well pleases.

All those layers of obfuscation and misdirection and double thinking that Aziraphale coats himself in are as much an armor that makes it harder for the audience to understand him as they are his very own downfall because, good lord, if you exist like that, if you exist forced to keep things hidden from yourself, well... It's inevitable that at some point you are going to stumble into pitfalls of your own making.

And I love him for it.

So, there? I hope I managed to explain something with this post, and that it wasn't just the rambling of someone who spends way too much time thinking about her blorbos. To be clear, I don't think people who haven't spent as much time as me trying to dissect and better understand Aziraphale's character are like, dumber than me or anything. It's just that this pair of angelic-demonic blorbos take too much real estate in my mind, lol.

Feel free to let me know your opinion and if you think I am wildly off mark and my Take Is Bad. I might answer, I might not, it all depends on time and my mood ◝(ᵔᵕᵔ)◜

#good omens #good omens 2 #meta #aziraphale #I love one(1) hypocritical angel #flaws and all #I want to create an Aziraphale protection squad sometimes

[constantinerkives]

Million Dollar (Wo)Man // teaser, (M)

PAIRING: Hotel Magnate! Yoo Jimin x Fem! Reader WARNINGS: Sugar Mommy AU, college AU, age gap, OC is in her final year of college while YJM is 34, profanity, strangers to paramours, Chopard and Cannes Film Festival Karina, good lord. OC has a slight crush on the dean lmao. OC short-circuits when pretty, older women talk to her, smut, more warnings to come SYNOPSIS: Money in exchange for companionship? Why not! If only she wasn't the dean's half-sister. Yikes.

"Excuse me, miss," Your ears perk upon hearing an unfamiliar deep yet feminine voice. Sultry and alluring. "But have you seen Joohyun?"

Joohyun? Your brows furrow. How can someone say the dean's name so casually? 

You turn in the direction of the stranger, and your eyes subtly widen at the sight of the towering beauty behind you. Your eyes take in her appearance. Her long black hair was styled; slid back, allowing you to have a good glimpse at her smooth, fair countenance, familiar doe-shaped eyes framing those sharp, intelligent hazel-colored crevices. You mentally pick your jaw from the floor. 

"Joohyun?" Your voice came out as a squeak, and you fought the urge to palm your face. "You mean our dean?"

A playful grin curls on her plump lips, "Yes," Her hazel-colored eyes scour your features, "And my," She purrs, "Aren't you a beauty?" Your cheeks warmed as the woman continued: "I should count myself lucky for asking a pretty girl like you." A subtle shade of pink dust your cheeks as you clear your throat softly, "Thank you," You muse as you shift your weight from one foot to another. "How may I help you?"

"I'm looking for-"

"Karina," Your posture straightens upon hearing her authoritative voice. Irene takes a stand beside you. Her face turns in your direction with slight surprise before she regains her calm countenance and returns her gaze to the said stranger: Karina. 

"I see that you've met one of my students," The dean gestures a hand towards the raven-haired beauty. "Y/N, meet my..." She trails off before Karina's lips release a deep chuckle, shivers run down your spine, and your stomach churns at the sound. "Don't be shy now, Hyunnie." 

Hyunnie? 

Karina holds out her hand for you to shake, "I'm Karina Bae, her half-sister. And you are?" 

Half-sister? 

Oh

That explains the familiar features, and if you have to compare the two of them by age, Karina seems to be ten years younger than the older woman next to you. But still, both women are drop-dead gorgeous. They won the battle of genes. 

"Seol Y/N," You reply in a trance as you reach to shake her hand, expecting a handshake, but she surprises you by bringing it up to brush her mouth against your knuckles, a shock traveling up your arm at the contact. Her eyes never leave yours, and you hold your breath, afraid you'll do something embarrassing if you do. Hopefully, your face doesn't show how the action flustered you. You gawk at her as she releases your hand. 

"A pleasure, Y/N." Your body glows at the way her tongue smoothly caresses your name. It's embarrassing how quick you are to succumb to the younger Bae. You instinctively look away from her raving eyes as the dean clears her throat. 

"Easy, Karina." The dean chides, "She's my student," 

A heart-throbbing smile graces Karina's lips, "Anyways," She raises a paper bag. Was she holding something all this time? How come you didn't notice? "As you can see, sister. I just returned from France," The hazel-eyed beauty hands it to her, "And I bought a present." 

You eye the two of them, feeling as though you're intruding on a moment between the siblings. Irene's lips curl upwards and takes the paperbag, "You shouldn't have, Karina. Is that why you came here?"

"Of course," Karina grins, "I can't come back to my alma mater empty-handed now, can I?" 

"Thank you, Karina." 

The latter merely hums in reply, "I'll get going now. There's no need for me to stay if a party lacks drinks." She grins while Irene rolls her eyes. "It's protocol," 

"Sure," Karina turns to you, "Take care, Miss Seol." 

Perhaps she was waiting for you to hold your hand out again, but your brain decided that risking another touch from this gorgeous woman would have undesirable consequences. A wave sufficed for now.

"It was a pleasure meeting you, Karina." 

You were wrong. Karina doesn't even have to touch you to get you woozy. Her wolfish smirk was enough to make your knees wobble. She departs, leaving your eyes to follow her lithe physique. 

COMING SOON!

#karina x reader #aespa x reader #female reader #kpop oneshots #kpop imagines #yoo jimin #yoo jimin x reader #constantinewrites #karina smut

[dathen]

Okay I know I’m being a broken record about The Copper Beeches, but Violet Hunter is praised by Sherlock Holmes as one of his smartest clients, when the story starts like this:

Violet: Hey I got job and here’s the context

Holmes: Yikes those are so many red flags

Violet: I thought so too, but I’m going to take the job anyway because I have nothing to eat

Holmes: I can’t blame you. Please tell me if you need help.

If Victorian Man Sherlock Holmes doesn’t victim-blame for someone walking into a very sketchy situation because she needs a job, tumblr in the year of our lord 2023 doesn’t need to just because it’s about a male character this time.

And then for the investigations:

Violet: I found a door constantly locked but broke in the moment I had the chance.

Violet: Oh and my boss told me I’d get fed to the dog if I did something like that.

Holmes: You are incredibly brave and smart

Watson: Yeah Holmes she’s on your level. Why don’t you date her?

Holmes: Why would I ever date anyone

So in the SAME STORY you have a prisoner (she had to sneak away when her boss wasn’t watching) breaking the rules because she knows she needs information and her creepy boss sure isn’t to be trusted to keep her best interests in mind.

So, once again, if Holmes and Watson don’t go “you stupid girl, if the door was locked obviously you shouldn’t go in?? you deserve to be fed to the dog” then 2023 tumblr yelling at Jonathan for not following Dracula’s every order despite threats has no excuse.

#dracula daily #jonathan harker #the copper beeches #sherlock holmes

[thatdesklamp]

'Intrinsic Warmth': Collector's Edition

Here is a masterpost of all 'Intrinsic Warmth'-related content: a small portion is stuff that I've written, probably in response to a question/ask, but the majority is content that I... haven't actually produced! This is so so self-indulgent because I love everything here like a firstborn son. Oh my goodness. I’ll put this on the ‘other’ section of my masterlist for reference, too.

me prattling on

The Influence of 'One Day' on 'Intrinsic Warmth', an essay-that-I-didn't-mean-to-be-an-essay about how 'One Day' by David Nicholls impacted IW (in more ways than just the shamelessly-stolen concept, lol)

music

'Intrinsic Warmth': The Musical, a compilation of all the songs people have related to 'Intrinsic Warmth' in my comments (I've added the full list below with extra comments + context for each song)

'intrinsic': The Fic Playlist, an actual IW playlist (!!!) made by ao3 user redromeow

writing

'Sunday September 7th, 2014', a true gem of a fanfiction of my own fanfiction (ohmygod); Satoru's perspective of the beginning of IW's Chapter 19, written by ao3 user late_night_secrets

'Intrinsic Warmth': The Musical: The Context and Comments = Comments you guys made when you recommended the songs :DD

Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want / The Smiths

"So, for once in my life / Let me get what I want / Lord knows, it would be the first time" -- Hebi's yearning hours

Haunted / Taylor Swift

"Stood there and watched you walk away / From everything we had / But I still mean every word I said to you / He will try to take away my pain" -- just IW in its angst era

"Come on, come on, don't leave me like this / I thought I had you figured out / Something's gone terribly wrong / You're all I wanted / Come on, come on, don't leave me like this / I thought I had you figured out / Can't breathe whenever you're gone / Can't turn back now, I'm haunted" -- Chapter 15, 2010 (Gojo + Hebi on the roof)

Don't / eAeon ft. RM

Lyrics that are very Hebi and Gojo. I particularly like: "Please, don’t leave this place / There’s no place like this elsewhere in the world, after all / Please don’t break us / Then our one heart will be divided"

look at me / george

Lyrics that are Gojo being in his feels whenever he sees Hebi (in IW's angst era specifically)

You're on Your Own Kid / Taylor Swift

"I wait patiently, he’s gonna notice me / It’s okay, we’re the best of friends" -- Chapter 14, 2009 (the first year after they graduate) Hebi is yoyok coded. Lol.

Remember the time / Michael Jackson

It fits IW v v well (it does)

Something about us / daft punk

"I need you more than anything in my life / I want you more than anything in my life / I'll miss you more than anyone in my life / I love you more than anyone in my life" -- Chapter 12, 2007 (right after Geto left). It is them.

Good enough / xdinary heroes

A song that matches the tone of their relationship

La gent normal al Mercat de Sant Antoni / Manel

I couldn't find this on Spotify! I've put it the original 'Common People' on IW:TM, but here's a link to the actual song that I got recommended; it's Hebi and Gojo.

Last Kiss / Taylor Swift

Specifically in Chapter 16, 2011 (the one with the Kiss and Breakup). Yikes.

IF I HAVE MISSED ANY SONGS Y’ALL HAVE SENT PLS TELL ME, I TRIED TO BE THOROUGH BUT I MAY HAVE MISSED SOME

#intrinsic warmth

[love-kurdt]

Swooping, Sloping, Cursive Letters: 36

word count: 688

PLEASE READ THIS IS ME TRYING FIRST, AS THIS STORY RELIES HEAVILY UPON THE CONTEXT OF TIMT

September 29, 1990

Dear Will,

This past month and a half has been nothing but absolute chaos. First off, I finally had my official gay bar initiation! I was invited back in August by my friend Alexis and some of our other friends from our Gender Studies elective course, which was good, because at least I’d be around people I knew. They ordered me this neon blue cocktail I can’t remember the name of, probably because I chugged it so fast (just kidding, I think it was called a Blue Lagoon), and I was instantly picked up by the Prettiest of Pretty Boys™. He introduced himself as Wes Butler, and we had sex in the storage closet of the bar. It was actually my first time “topping” (I put topping in quotations because you can’t really top if you’re both standing). But it was cramped, it was hot in a bad way, it was messy, and it ended quicker than it began. It was not a good time. Moral of the story: I don’t do closets. I spent my whole life in one, and lost you in the process.

If you thought that experience was weird, let me tell you about this nerd rave I went to last Friday. Some acquaintance from one of my lit courses told me about it after class, saying it was at a beat up old house on the edge of campus, at five o’clock. When I showed up, it was like I’d entered the drama club room at Hawkins High. Dim lighting, red ambiance, and about a dozen different fantasy and sci-fi related activities happening throughout the house. I was so overwhelmed, and I had no idea where the hell to begin. Despite my love for writing fantasy, I’ve tried not to interact with anything remotely nerdy at the risk of it reminding me of you and sending me into a downward mental spiral. I’m scared that one day, if the spiral is spiraly enough, I won’t be able to come back from it. But anyway, this guy came up to me and said “Is it me or do you not have a clue what’s going on, either?” I turned to face him, and my eyes nearly fell out of my fucking skull, because I was either hallucinating, or Eddie Munson had come back from the dead. We immediately sparked a conversation about how we were just normal dudes who like literature and D&D, and felt incredibly out of place amongst all the cosplayers, almost like it was a convention. I don’t know how exactly we got from Point A to Point Z, but within half an hour of meeting Walker Brooks, he was fucking me into his Lord of the Rings bedsheets. Out of nowhere, he started talking to me in Elvish– I actually looked up and translated the phrase he used most frequently, “N- a man boui an ada.” It means, “Be a good boy for Daddy.” Yeah… yikes. I won't be seeing him again.

It’s no wonder why I keep going back to Wyatt. When we hook up, it’s like he erases all the other bad experiences. He’s so gentle with me, which is honestly what I crave the most. I just want affection. I just want love, while most of the other guys I’ve been with only want to get their dicks wet. But Wyatt is different– he cares about me. He’s my friend, above all else. And because he’s my friend, he offers to listen whenever I need to talk, no matter what. I think he knows my entire life story up until this point. Which means he knows about you and everything that happened last year. Don’t worry, he doesn’t hate you. He just… isn’t your biggest fan. It doesn’t matter what he thinks of you, though, because you’ll never have any reason to cross paths with each other. If, by some miracle, a reason does emerge, I won’t hesitate to introduce you two. 

But it’s just pathetic for me to hope at all at this point. So I won’t. Hope, I mean.

Love,

Mike

-

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homepage

#byler #byler fanfic #byler fic #byler tumblr #mike wheeler #will byers #will x mike #mike x will #stranger things #stranger things fic

[cinematicnomad]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

tagged by @zainclaw and @andavs 🥰🥰🥰

How many works do you have on ao3? 39 apparently

What's your total ao3 word count? 288,797 words

What fandoms do you write for? actively right now? nothing really lol. haven't published a fic since 2022. but i guess you could say 911 and teen wolf given some random WIPs in my drafts. also i randomly started jotting down some notes for a stranger things steve/eddie fic that will probably never be written.

Top five fics by kudos 01. take my hand (take my everything) (buddie) 02. taste your beating heart (sterek) 03. so show me (family) (buddie) 04. you never said a word (sterek) 05. be careful (my darling) (buddie)

Do you respond to comments? yes, always! i usually try to wait until i have a dozen or so, which can sometimes take a bit of time, but eventually i respond to it all.

What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? i have a sterek drabble called and i fell heavy into your arms (688 words) that is basically derek seeing stiles die and then immediately letting himself be killed

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? most of them?? not sure i can think of one specifically that was happier than the others.

Do you get hate on fics? ah, i almost said no, but then i remembered that for my fic taste your beating heart every now and then i'll get scott fans who think the fic should be tagged as "bad friend scott mccall" even though he's NOT a bad friend in the fic, it's just a nuanced view of their changing relationship. like, that fic is about 3 main things that include: stiles and derek getting together, solving the main mystery, and stiles and scott's friendship maturing to a place where they can love each other and still be brothers without thinking they need to be in the same pack!! like it's FUNDAMENTAL.

anyway, i had one reader who i think quit the fic halfway through bc i gently pushed back on their rage comment insulting derek and stiles for a fight that takes place with scott. the reader left an angry reply to my response, which they then deleted before i could even look at it, and then never commented on the fic again even though they'd been commenting on the fic since chapter 1.

Do you write smut? no not really. i don't know why i'm so bad at writing sex, but i am very bad at writing sex.

Craziest crossover i have no crossovers

Have you ever had a fic stolen? not that i know of??

Have you ever had a fic translated? yes, someone translated my mike/harvey suits fic trembling hands into russian all the way back in 2013.

Have you ever cowritten a fic before? i have not!

All time favourite ship? to write? to read? no idea, so i refuse to answer.

What's a wip you want to finish but doubt you ever will? i've got a sterek idea that's an AU of the netflix show virgin river. i had a pretty brief outline that i sketched out some, and even started writing a little, but it never went anywhere. i did create an AU gifset for it and every now and then when people start reblogging it i think about going back to try and write it.

What are your writing strengths? i think i'm good at realistic dialogue? but i don't know. i haven't written in a while so i'm not feeling super great about my writing at this very moment.

What are your writing weaknesses? i suck at setting a scene. and conveying a complex emotion. also i feel like i get v bogged down in what characters are physically doing or whatever and i try to describe it and it just detracts from the story over all. yikes ok i'm feeling worse about my writing than i thought lol

Thoughts on dialogue in another language? if the context is there to understand what's being said, great. otherwise, just adding context to the dialogue tag (he said in french, in german, etc) works. personally i'd prefer not to scroll back and forth between the fic and the notes to figure out what's being said.

First fandom you wrote in? harry potter. on the site quizilla back in the year of our lord 2005 lol. i started off writing like. a harry/oc fic lol where the protagonist was the classic american exchange student who had her own prophecy. truly mortifying!!

Favorite fic you've written? i have a soft spot for taste your beating heart bc it was the first long fic i ever completed and it took me 7 fucking years to write it. but i think my favorite is actually finding our way (back home) which i really think captured everything i was aiming to do. will i ever be able to do that again??? who fucking knows. probably not. on the more self-indulgent side, i really really love the margaret buckley character study i wrote called so far from who i was.

tagging!! @woodchoc-magnum, @crazyassmurdererwall, @tattooedsiren, @machtaholic, @catdadeddie, @tripleaxeldiaz, @valleydean, @thisapplepielife, and anyone else who wants to do this.

#tagged in #about kat writes #i am. #not feeling good about my writing at this very moment apparently lol

[wildwren]

Tag game: tag 9 people you'd like to get to know better

ahhh thx for the tag!!! @forasecondtherewedwon

Last song: "how the heroine dies" - the barr brothers (x)

Currently watching: nothing atm, last two shows were Poldark rewatch and The Gilded Age first-time binge

Three ships: i built this city on Aethelflaed x Erik (The Last Kingdom) so i have to shout them out, babes of all time still remain Tom Jones x Sophia Western (The History of Tom Jones -- don't look at me i have personal problems), babes who are currently filling my brain are Morwenna x Drake (Poldark), because i re-watched and they got me BAD again

Favorite color: sage green

Currently consuming: pea snacks

First Ship: hmmmm..... i mean like technically harry x ginny but.....yikes.

Relationship status: single and generally living my best life, although occasionally i sigh and think 'why wont a lovely lady kiss me already' and then do nothing about it

Last Movie: oh. oh no. i shan't say (i hated it sooooo much).

Currently working on: intimacy trauma plot fix-it fic for morwenna x drake. nothing like writing poldark fic in the year of our lord 2024 but also this is the fic i was born to write :/

Extremely no-pressure tagging: @mollywog @minim236 @airmanslament @gabagal @flythesail @weavemeamyrtlecrown @aelswiths @tear-soaked-cheeksdonteverlast @catty-words

#tag games

[thatanimewriter]

FORTUNATELY, UNFORTUNATELY.

➳ request: Can you do jaunce arc x reader who can read into the future when touching someone on forehead?

➳ character/s: jaune arc

➳ warnings: violence, mentions of blood, mentions of death, spoilers for volume 3 to volume 9, mild angst

➳ notes: an edge lord in training and our boy desperately needs therapy-

𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐞𝐬 / 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭  / 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 / 𝐰𝐢𝐩 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

── 𝐉𝐀𝐔𝐍𝐄 𝐀𝐑𝐂.

honestly, you hate telling people your semblance

because they always want to know what their future is gonna be, but hate the outcome

you also feel that it is a serious matter to tell someone their future, because it's something that shouldn't be changed

and telling someone that their loved one is gonna die in the battle of beacon is a bit of a yikes

initially, you didn't even want to tell jaune what your semblance was

you were content with pretending as if you hadn't unlocked it like he had

but becoming closer friends with him, you ended up spilling

of course, he thought it was super cool and wanted you to look into his future

but you refused because you know what happens when people find out their future

and you're a little bit sick of being a party trick instead of a person

you're not a fortune teller at some fair

after you started dating, you eventually caved and read into the future when he asked

but you had to disclose that you wouldn't be telling him what happens

which he agreed to, cause he just wanted to have the experience

you didn't want to break his trust in you either, because technically you knew pyrrha would die but didn't say anything to him

accidentally bumping heads during sparring let you know, but you knew that jaune would also die if he tried to stop her

so you kept it to yourself

and as you rested your forehead against his, you frowned at the rapid series of images you saw

penny dead yet again, oscar kidnapped, falling into the ever after and being alone for many years weren't the nicest things to tell someone

but you do tell him some of the nice things that happen

once he wanted to know if he'd ever get a glow up-

he's mindful not to rest his forehead against yours in a relationship actually

he doesn't want you to have to see future traumatic events every time he wanted to be more intimate with you

and he wants to make sure that you get to enjoy the present instead of dreading the future that is to come

#rwby #jaune arc #rwby x reader #jaune arc x reader #rwby imagines #jaune arc imagines

[butterflydm]

wot reread: new spring (chapters 16-epilogue)

spoilers through new spring and knife of dreams

1. Lan was granted a Shienaran estate when he “reached manhood” so, like Moiraine, he also has passive income (though I’m guessing Moiraine has considerably more).

2. We get a reminder of how much Jordan loves the punch-punch-kiss-kiss dynamic, as Lan’s teacher reunites with the woman who runs the Blue Rose inn. They haven’t seen each other in six years, and she alternates between hurting him and kissing him.

3. Meanwhile, Lan reunites with his “oldest friend besides [his teacher]”, a Malkieri man by the name of Ryne, who his teacher doesn’t like much these days because he dresses as an Arafellian (bells and braids) rather than a Malkieri. The serving maid, Lira, hits on Lan and when he declines her offer (in a ‘soft no’ way that it’s kinda implied how Malkieri do things in general), she bites his ear and basically tells him that she’s going to join him in bed that night and Lan thinks about how “if he tried to say no now, she might well pull a knife over the insult”. Yikes. Shades of Tylin (...and Min).

4. It feels kinda strange to me that Kandoran women are exactly like Ebou Dari women despite Kandor being as north as you can get without being in the Blight and Altara being on the southern coast. Lan thinks about how Lira might be surprised that if she does come uninvited to his bed tonight, he will be the one taking control once they’re there. So, basically Atha’an Miere wedding vows.

5. I have to admit, so far I’ve been enjoying the Moiraine sections of this book a lot more than the Lan ones. Though we’ve also had a lot more Moiraine PoV, so we’ve dived into her thought process a lot more.

6. Lan’s “friend” who laughed when Lira basically ordered Lan to sleep with her regardless of his wishes, mentions Lan’s ‘luck’ with women with an edge in his voice that Lan suspects is jealousy. Yikes. So Lan has a toxic mentor and a toxic ‘best friend’. Lan’s unwillingness to ACTUALLY COMMUNICATE with anyone in clear words is definitely hurting him as well. It... may be intentional on the author’s part? It’s interesting either way, because Malkieri ‘politeness’ seems to be doing nothing but hurting him (just like Cairhienin modesty was doing nothing but hurting Moiraine?) He was potentially set up to be killed back in Tar Valon but doesn’t even know the name of the man who told him to go fight the Aiel on that ridge because it was impolite to ask the man’s name. He might sleep with a woman that he doesn’t want to sleep with because it would be impolite to be more firm with his “no”.

7. We also learn that Malkieri culture was heavily tilted towards men shutting up and letting women be in charge of everything (except fighting?), which continues Jordan’s late series pattern of cultures being like this -- all of the big ‘new’ cultures that our characters run into post-TFoH seems to fit this pattern? First Ebou Dar in LoC, then we have Far Madding in WH, and now we learn that the Malkieri were like that too. My brain kinda wants to poke at that in combination with how Jordan’s Women Must Not Be Killed thing and his Women Are Allowed To Commit Domestic Violence Against Their Partners thing also ramped way up after TFoH (the only time a woman punching her romantic partner is called out as a bad thing is pre-Lord of Chaos, when Faile attacks Perrin in TSR). It’s implied here that Lan and Lira are experiencing a major culture clash -- Lan doesn’t feel like he’s allowed to be firm enough with his ‘no’ that it actually comes across to Lira as more than ‘modesty’. It actually sounds like men aren’t supposed to say “no” at all to sex (from women) in Malkieri culture? Yikes. Again, between this and Ebou Dari women being allowed to murder a man unquestioned and every inn room in Far Madding having whips and paddles to beat disobedient husbands with... the only word I have is “yikes”.

8. Someone (”the Lady Arrel”) is raising the Golden Crane in Lan’s name. She’s been traveling the Borderlands raising support “to carry Malkier out of the Blight again”. Lan is weary and unhappy about this news and leaves to go look after his horse (something he has in common with Moiraine! he is also a horsegirl). Lan paces in the stables, thinking of Edeyn Arrel and her “beautiful face with large dark eyes that could drink a man’s soul even when filled with command”. He’s on edge enough that the groom who was cleaning the stables hurries out of there. He assumes the Oneness in order to push himself away from his emotions. We learn that (more yikes incoming) he was fifteen when Edeyn (twice his age) first had sex with him. This is another Malkieri tradition - an older woman can pick out a youth and become his first lover. But once he was old enough to get his hadori (the band around his forehead), then he’s old enough to decide where he goes and apparently running off to try to die in the Blight was preferable to Lady Edeyn’s bed.

9. This absolutely does remind me of the Ebou Dari practice of “pretties” and of Tylin and Mat. Was it meant to? It’s hard to say. There is none of the comedy undertone here that often infested the Tylin and Mat storyline to undermine it. Here, it’s fairly clear (at least at this point in the narrative) that what Edeyn did to Lan did not have a positive impact on him, though Lan himself has “a hundred emotions” that “loomed like stark mountains” about her. Not a positive comparison, there. The way the Lady Edeyn is abusing custom here to take advantage of Lan is straight-up pointed out in the text (again, without sugercoating it in poor attempts at humor) via Lan’s teacher - “She was always one to demand every right and require the smallest obligation be met. Custom ties strings to you, and whatever you choose, she will use them like a set of reins unless you find a way to avoid it”.

10. Lan may have been saved from sleeping with Lira (we’ll see!) as they are now attacked by six men. Well, Lan is attacked. He orders his teacher to stay in the stables, on account of that promise that he had to make not to pull his sword while he was in the city. Lan kills all six men, though not without injury to himself. Ah-ha! Someone DOES want Lan dead. Why does someone want Lan dead? He’s the king of an already-dead nation? Hmm. A Mystery!

11. Oooh, Lan’s friend from earlier notes that the men that Lan killed were all men who had listened to Lady Edeyn when she’d come through the city! And he notes that the first that they’d heard of Edeyn raising the Golden Crane “in Lan’s name” was AFTER the rumors first cropped up that Lan was dead down south. Has this mystery already been solved? Is Edeyn trying to assassinate Lan so that she can claim the loyalty of the remaining Malkieri by virtue of being the woman who first ordered him into her bed? Hmm, I wonder if Jordan maybe was trying to take into account some of the criticisms that he’d likely received about Mat and Tylin from ACOS/WH, and basically doing a better version of showing a woman taking advantage of a man who doesn’t feel like he has the right to say no (without the “comedy”)? I am suddenly much more interested in Lan’s storyline here. And note that Lan is so culturally trained by the Malkieri that he was raised by that he feels like EVEN IF EDEYN IS GUILTY, they shouldn’t be talking about it out loud? But in his thoughts, we see the truth - “he had to face Edeyn. The Blight would have been much easier”. DEFINITELY brings to mind those times Mat thought about how he’d rather face the gholam or get buried under another building than see Tylin again. Hmm, I’m interested to see if Jordan pulls his punches with Lan & Edeyn, the way he kept doing with Mat & Tylin’s storyline. It does also sound like maybe Lan did escape from Lira trapping him into having sex with her?

12. Three months into her search for the Dragon Reborn, and Moiraine is already getting a bit frustrated and bored. Does not bode well for the next *checks watch* 18-20 years. But! Our two PoV characters are now set on their collision course, as Moiraine is also in Kandor.

13. The family that Moiraine has sought out in her search today lost their battle-born child in a stable fire (along with two older brothers and the father). Hmmm. Suspicious. Anyway, she is able to eliminate the poor dead kid off her list because he wasn’t born close enough to the slopes of Dragonmount.

14. Hmm, there are five Sisters staying at the same inn as Moiraine, one of whom is Red. And babies that are the right age to be the newly reborn Dragon are dying. HMMMM. Moiraine isn’t recognized by any of them (they haven’t been in the Tower recently or don’t pay attention to novices, so they think she’s a wilder and mostly ignore her (idk how the Tower has managed to keep its reputation for being omniscient tbh). I don’t think she has any suspicions that the Black Ajah might be hunting for the Dragon Reborn too, but she is wary of the idea of being packed up so that she can go be a puppet queen for the White Tower on the Sun Throne (which really does bring me back to my concern re: Elayne and the White Tower and Caemlyn. If anyone can thread the needle of “obeying the commands of the White Tower as Elayne Sedai but not obeying as Queen Elayne”, it’s our girl, but that is such a tightrope walk. I guess it’s good that she has practice).

15. Let’s get back to that wilder thing -- many Sisters are just INCREDIBLY opposed to the idea of wilders at the Tower. And, of course, any potential novices who are ‘too old’. There are so many voluntary things that the White Tower is doing that is cutting down on the number of Sisters that they have -- a. they don’t actively search out girls, for the most part, and wait for them to come to the Tower; b. many of them disdain wilders; c. they don’t want you if you’re older than eighteen (though they might try to get you to fudge it and lie about your age if you have enough potential); d. they don’t prepare their students properly for their testing and limit the number of times that a potential can go through the tests and end up tossing out a lot of potentially quite useful candidates.

16. And, oops, just as Moiraine is feeling relieved, she runs into two Sisters who DO know her. And now she has to hope that the Aes Sedai policy of not interfering with another Sister’s business holds enough that word about her doesn’t spread.

17. *sigh* I forgot that I had to deal with Cadsuane in this book. Anyway, Cadsuane is here, as Jordan attempts to convince us that she was part of his world all along and that she wasn’t invented after TFOH because... honestly, I’m still not sure why she exists because she still has not done ANYTHING useful in the main series. She annoys me and she annoys Rand. That’s all she does. Well, maybe she’ll be better when she’s younger.

18. Jordan can’t let go of his “everyone thinks Cadsuane is dead” thing, because apparently everyone also thought she was dead pre-Aiel War when she randomly popped up (to annoy everyone, I guess). *pokes Cadsuane with a stick* What is the point of you? What is the point? What is your purpose in the narrative? We’re reminded that she basically is allowed to get away with breaking all the rules because she’s so strong in the Power. The Might Makes Right rules of the White Tower strike again (and have taught her to be the biggest bully alive). We’re also reminded that she has kidnapped three different monarchs in her lifetime, and apparently there’s a rumor that she assaulted one of the Amrylin Seats in the past. Yeah, I believe it. We know that she believes in violence as a corrective tool.  I could guess that her narrative purpose is to show Rand how NOT to behave, but she doesn’t really get used that way by the narrative in the Jordan books so... yeah, still at a loss. I think the two Aes Sedai minions that Cadsuane has here are different than the minions she pops up with in twenty years?

19. lol, Jordan tries to get me to like/respect Cadsuane by having Moiraine favorably compare her to Siuan but I disagree. Cadsuane is not born to ‘command’. She bullies. She’s a bully. Anyway, Cadsuane drills her minions for information on Moiraine while Moiraine is standing there in front of her, clenching her fists and trying to keep her outrage from showing (Cadsuane is treating her like a novice, essentially, literally ordering her to pour wine for her).

20. Is Cadsuane supposed to be ta’veren? Is that why she can get everyone to tell her all their secrets? Or is it just her ~commanding aura~? Anyway, she knows about Moiraine and Siuan being pillow-friends now, because one of the Aes Sedai with her knew.

21. Cadsuane talks a bit about how she “could live another thirty years or maybe only three” reminding us, once again, that she is so old that many of the Sisters keep eagerly imagining/hoping that she’s already gone to her grave. Anyway, the reason she’s focusing on Moiraine is because, once Cadsuane (and one other, even older Sister who I don’t think we’ve ever met) pops off the mortal coil, Kerene will be the strongest Aes Sedai. Once Kerene goes, there will be a ‘sharp drop’ in the ability and then the next strongest five, which will include Moiraine and Siuan. Anyway, Cadsuane is stressing out about how weak the Tower is growing, in terms of the actual Power levels of the Sisters.

22. Okay, thinking this through. I think that both Elayne and Egwene are ‘as strong’ as Cadsuane, and then our girl Nynaeve is considerably stronger ‘Forsaken-level’, essentially. Then, of course, once Egwene opens up the novice rolls, we start to get more powerful ones that were hidden because they were learners instead of sparkers, like... ah, I think her name is Sharina? Anyway, Cadsuane believes that the Power is dwindling and fading and fewer and fewer strong channelers will be found in the future. Incorrect!

23. Oh, gross, Cadsuane touching Moiraine without permission here and talking about her like she’s breeding stock. No, thank you! Go away, Cadsuane! Stop touching Moiraine! Anyway, Cadsuane orders her minions to go along with Moiraine on her journey. Oh, we also learn here that these are not minions that Cadsuane brought with her - they are literally just two Aes Sedai who happened to be in the city that she gathered up to order around. And now they have to abandon their own goals in order to do what Cadsuane says. lol, every chastising word that Cadsuane EVER says to Rand is so dripping in complete hypocrisy, given the way that she herself behaves.

24. Cadsuane literally threatens to BEAT MOIRAINE UP if she dares to leave the city before her new watchdogs are ready to go with her. Schoolyard bully! Worse than that, because of how much power she has. “Custom forbade physical violence against another Sister” Moiraine notes in her narration, so this is another example of how Cadsuane stomps all over everything and everyone because she’s the biggest bully on the playground. Anyway, it doesn’t sound like Cadsuane herself is planning on going with Moiraine, so this may be the only chapter we need to deal with her.

25. Moiraine feels shaken by her encounter with Cadsuane and wishes that Siuan were here with her! I don’t remember what number we were on, but that’s definitely another “aaah” moment for them. <3

26. And then Siuan is here! Peeking in the door, “sturdy and handsome”. Siuan signals for them to meet in secret and they head off, with Moiraine following far enough behind Siuan for it to hopefully look like they aren’t traveling together. She worries that the new Amrylin found out and has forced Siuan to be the one to come gather up Moiraine to force her back, but the news is much more dire -- a whole crop of the strongest Aes Sedai are now dead, including the random super-strong lady that Cadsuane name-dropped earlier plus Kerene. The show gave Kerene a much better death than the books did, where she is just one of several Aes Sedai to get murdered off-screen. They come to the conclusion that the murders were done by the Black Ajah, which has just made everything much more dangerous and complicated. They know that the Black Ajah is looking for the Dragon Reborn to kill him before he can grow up. Which means that all the lists the Accepted gathered for the old Amyrlin are now kill lists for the Black Ajah (so it’s a good thing Rand doesn’t show up on any of those lists!).

27. Moiraine comes to the conclusion that they can trust no one but each other. This is why I do UNDERSTAND why Moiraine accidentally infects Rand with this belief (trust no one) even though it was terrible both for their mentorship and for Rand in general, because twenty-ish years of believing you can only trust literally two other people in the entire world (once she gets Lan too) is going to leave a mark. So Moiraine’s instinctive secrecy is one that I do understand. But it’s just a shame that it took the certainty of knowing that she needed to bodyslam Lanfear into the ‘Finn doorway to take them both out of the equation in order for her to realize that she needed to be the one to make allowance for HIS mistrust of her if she wanted him to listen to her. Gotta take your actual goal into account in your calculations. You can’t be a successful advisor if the person that you’re trying to advise dislikes and mistrusts you (*stares at Cadsuane*).

28. Her worry that Cadsuane might be Black Ajah does make her decide that she is definitely not going to wait around in the city. And she advises that Siuan sneak to the next city on her own so that no one ever knows that they met here. Aww, during their first months in the White Tower, they decided that “what one owned belonged to the other as well”. That’s so sweet. And I’m glad that she’s not obeying Cadsuane lol.

29. Oh, hey, Moiraine is sneaking out of the city at the same time that Lan & his two companions are leaving the city! Her opinion of Lan right now is “a hard-faced young [man]” but she notices the hadori that marks him and his older companion as Malkieri. Hmm, she notes that the man with Lan (this is his toxic bff) is the same person she saw leave her inn earlier. Let me check real quick what that was about. Oooh, he was talking to an Aes Sedai Sister that Moiraine didn’t know (and she couldn’t see the color of her shawl’s fringe) and left with a scowl. HMMM. Well, if Lan’s friend betrays him, there’s an Aes Sedai hand in it. I’ll keep that in mind. Moiraine lets some merchants’ wagons go between her and the three men but does keep an eye on them as everyone heads towards Chachin (one of the cities in Kandor - this is where Edeyn is and where Moiraine is planning to meet up with Siuan).

30. She’s wondering if perhaps the three men will have information on Cadsuane and is trying to figure out how to safely approach them (as they might be Darkfriends). Lan & his companions stop in the road as dark approaches, and then Lan takes the packhorse into the woods as his two companions ride on. Moiraine decides to take a chance to try to find the “younger Malkieri” in the woods to try to ask him if his friend talked to him about meeting an Aes Sedai. Aw, Moiraine liked climbing trees and tracking when she was younger.

31. More details on Lan’s appearance: “very wide shoulders and a narrow waist. Far from a pretty man, too. Not handsome, with that hard, angular face.” She tries to steal his sword from him (to intimidate him) and he moves “before she could think to channel”, grabs the front of her dress, and tosses her into the very cold lake that he was pretending to make camp at. Wonderful first impressions on both sides lol. When he comes to warn her that parting a man from his sword is a bad idea, she does note his “startlingly blue eyes”. He then offers to build a fire and hang some blankets so that she can dry off and now he really DOES make camp, and in a bit, his companions return.

32. Ryne (Lan’s toxic BFF) makes a crack about potentially checking out Moiraine while she’s still undressed and Lan draws his sword on him and it’s Lan’s teacher who de-escalates the situation by calling both men over for a game of “sevens”. Moiraine officially asks them to escort her to Chachin. HMMM, when she asks Ryne why he’s going to Chachin, he says (sadly), “Every man has to die somewhere”. Why do you. Why do you think you’re gonna die in Chachin, Ryne?

33. Moiraine weaves Spirit around the men so that she knows every time they get up, and overhears Lan saying “I’d sooner trust an Aes Sedai”, assumes it’s about her, and channels a ton of lake water to douse Lan, declaring herself as Aes Sedai before them after they start wondering if Shadowspawn somehow did it.

34.  Back in Lan’s PoV, and he is doubting very much that Moiraine is actually Aes Sedai. He notes that Aes Sedai practice serenity but, after the water attack on him, he saw “childish glee at playing a prank, and childish disappointment that it had not worked as she wished.” Lan thinks that maybe she’s a spy that Edeyn set to watch over him, thinking that he would underestimate a woman. We go back to Malkieir honor when Lan thinks about how Moiraine offering them money to escort her was an insult to them (no, none of them actually explained this to Moiraine).

35. “An Aes Sedai, if she really was one, and a Cairhienin? There could be no worse combination”. lol. Wrong and right. All her training in the great game meant that she failed hard when set against more straight-forward people, but her secrecy did serve her well for years. Oh, we also learn that it’s currently Bel Tine.

36. Oh, hey, women in Kandor are allowed to wear pants! (”women’s pale blouses and wide trousers”). I think we might have already known this -- that’s where people think Birgitte is from, because she Wears Pants, I think.

37. Lan notices how deeply his teacher scowls when Moiraine (“Lady Alys”) refers to the three of them as her retainers and makes to a note to speak to her about how she’s basically constantly insulting them by the terms of their culture. I will note if this conversation happens! Lan talks privately with his companions - Ryne is of the opinion that Lady Alys is absolutely Aes Sedai and should not be questioned, while Lan’s teacher is wary of her for exactly that reason, not wanting to be tangled in Aes Sedai schemes. (I wonder if Moiraine is eavesdropping? that’s her favorite trick). Lan is still of the opinion that she’s a wilder that Edeyn has set to watching him.

38. Lan’s teacher is a very complicated man. He wants them to stay disentangled from Aes Sedai schemes but also wants Lan to pledge to protect Moiraine while they’re traveling with her. Lan internally notes the contradiction but doesn’t point it out. It would be rude, I suppose. He also never had the conversation with Moiraine about how her approach is inherently insulting to Malkieri sensibilities.

39. As they travel, there is a silent war between Moiraine and Lan, where she essentially torments him at night with various pranks in order to try to get some kind of reaction that would satisfy her, while he stoicly endures it all because he was raised to believe that, as a woman, she is allowed to punish him as much as she likes until she or another woman declares that enough has been done. “A woman could set the price for her insult or injury, and there were no other women here to call an end when she went beyond what they considered just”. Again, shades of Ebou Dar and Far Madding. Moiraine and Lan’s culture clash here really makes me wonder why she wasn’t able to take her knowledge of Lan and use that to her advantage in actually being able to understand and work with Rand, who is similar in some ways (though not all) to Lan, especially after Lan has been to work on him for a bit. Here Moiraine wants to “bring him to heel. Not to tame him utterly... but to make certain he knew his mistakes down to the bone.”

40. The second they reach the city, Lan is just like “okay, we said we’d see you safely here and now we are here, goodbye forever, torture lady!” (he has welts over all over his skin from Moiraine channeling fleas to eat at him all night, so I don’t blame him).

41. He finally indicates in some way (though still kinda passive-aggressively) that paying them for this has been an insult the entire time by telling her to keep her money when she reaches for her purse. He still never actually explained to her that she was offending them every time she offered payment or behaved like they were her paid servants rather than voluntary escorts.

42. We get some more of Lan’s complete horror at needing to face Edeyn again: “Entering the Blight would be much easier. Leaving the Blight alive, at any rate.” Anyway, he figures that she’s staying at the palace if she’s still in the city. Lan finds himself thinking about how he owes “Lady Alys” a (positive) debt for healing him and a (negative) debt for constantly harassing him at night, but honor will only allow him to pay her back for the good thing she did and not all the mean things that she’s done. The idea of having a conversation to try to clear all this up does not seem to occur to either of them.

43. Knowing that Edeyn might be in the palace makes Lan feel like he’s walking onto a battlefield. When he gets formally greeted as al’Lan, he gets even more concerned, because it definitely means that Edeyn has been here at work pushing the narrative that Lan doesn’t want her pushing. “He was swimming in a sea of other people’s expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that.”

44. Lan cautiously confirms that Lady Edeyn Arrel is present in the city (which makes the two serving maids he’s questioning grin at each other -- so it does sound like Lan’s ‘relationship’ with her is fairly widely known? And, yeah, this is another reminder of Tylin and Mat. When Mat was being fetched to be raped by Tylin, the serving maids all fetched him while wearing wide grins). He’s also nervous about facing Edeyn because the ‘sort of battle’ that he needs to fight against her involves politics and words, not weapons.

45. Lan thinks about how he MUST meet with Edeyn in public, because in private, she would be in charge by virtue of being the first woman who ever ordered him to her bed. Hmm, this part of the Lan-Edeyn thing feels like a dark mirror of the dynamic that is set up between Nynaeve and Lan post-marriage, where the person in charge in public is the person who submits in private, but the Atha’an Miere setup is more dynamic in that if Lan ends up having more power than Nynaeve in public, it will swap to her having power in private. But there’s this thread that SOMEONE has to be The Boss.

46. While he sits and waits for her in public, Edeyn tries to get him in private so that she has the power, first by sending a messenger, and then by sending a letter. Lan politely tells the messenger that he needs to recover from his journey first and puts her letter in the fire. Lan thinks: “Edeyn had been born to be a queen, and knew it.” Yeah, all this that she’s doing does seem like she’s essentially trying to force her way into the queenship of dead Malkier. I imagine that’s why she plucked out Lan when he was fifteen as well. It’s not at all about him as a person, but about him as a symbol. It’s about the ‘what’ of Lan and not the ‘who’ of Lan. Lan thinks about how Edeyn has likely already made an ally of all the servants in the palace.

47. Finally, Lan gets a summons from someone other than Edeyn, so he goes to speak to the ‘Prince Consort’. Oh, it seems like the prince might understand Lan’s dilemma, because he doesn’t meet with him in private (which might get led to Edeyn sneaking in and taking over, if she really does have the servants in her pocket) but in a grand hall that is filled with people. Huh, we get the mention of a weird lucky coincidence happening -- the prince’s son fell fifty feet without breaking a bone. That sounds like the luck twisting that usually happens when a ta’veren is around. Hmm. I do love, and we see it here, that Lan wants other people to have a better experience than he has had. He accepts the way he was raised and his ‘duty’ to die in the Blight avenging his nation, but he wants other kids to grow up being kids, and he tries to give Rand advice to help him get through his duty (not great advice but Lan doesn’t really have the life experience to offer great advice), and he doesn’t want the other people of Malkier dying in the Blight simply because he believes that it’s HIS destiny. And, yep, he’s led to Edeyn in the grand hall, so Lan is meeting with her in public and not private, and she is not being given an unfair advantage over him. The Prince Consort understands Malkieri culture! The first non-Malkieri in the book who does.

48. (I don’t blame Moiraine for not knowing Malkieri culture -- the country has been dead and gone twenty-five years at this point, so even if she studied up on where she was heading looking for the baby Dragon, it’s understandable that she wouldn’t bone up on Malkier)

49. It’s been ten years since Lan has seen Edeyn, which means that Lan is currently twenty-five, and is forty-five when he meets Nynaeve in EotW. Even without the power of having him in private, Edeyn tries to force his hand by kneeling and declaring that she is pledging fealty to him. Lan tells her that there is no king of Malkier. We get another reminder that apparently there’s no such thing as taking back consent once-given in Malkieri culture which... ick. The Prince Consort apologies to Lan; he had no idea that she would go that far in public and he knows that this is not a position that Lan wants to be forced into. So both Lan and Moiraine have other people trying to force them into positions of power and leadership, and both of them are trying desperately to avoid those positions. Lan manages to successfully bond with Rand over this shared issue, while Moiraine is much less successful. Lan thinks of Edeyn as a ‘formidable opponent, this woman who wore part of his soul in her hair’. Ugh, creepy (mostly creepy because it’s something their culture allows them to force on people; if it were all Lan’s free choice, great! But it’s not and that just makes it... real creepy on Edeyn’s part, since it’s clear she’s aware that she’s trying to force him into this). I don’t remember but I wonder if this is why Lan becomes Moiraine’s Warder -- to try to put an obligation to another woman (a CHOSEN obligation) ahead of the one that Edeyn is trying to force on him?

50. Oh, ick ick ick. When he goes back to his rooms that night, Edeyn is there waiting for him (and he thinks again about how she has commandeered the household servants to her cause). Using their customs as a whip, essentially, she makes him sleep with her. He thinks again about how he doesn’t have the choice of whether or not he’s allowed to sleep with her but at least he is allowed to be the dominant partner once they are having sex. God, this entire custom is so horrible. I’d like to think that there were more checks and balances for it when Malkier was a living country and culture? But Lan wouldn’t know about that either way. He’s only known Malkier as a dead culture. This scene does feel a lot more... honest about how Edeyn is abusing Lan than the main series was about how Tylin was abusing Mat. Some word choices that emphasize Lan’s lack of true consent:

“he stopped still gripping the door handle” (he doesn’t want to go inside his bedroom once he sees that she’s there)

“unwillingly, his eyes followed hers” (to the object that marks that he’s required to submit to her in private)

“lifting the hinged lid took as much effort as lifting a boulder” (he desperately does not want to sleep with her)

she even told them what it signified, the women had all been amused (what she did to him was made public so that he could not escape it; and his lack of choice was an amusement to others - this part really reminds me both of the way that the women in Mat’s storyline react to him being raped by Tylin at first; and also to the way Tuon and her slave Selucia giggle over what a fool they think Mat is)

she studied him, a lioness studying a fawn (he is an object of prey to her)

young men were chosen by their carneira, young women chose theirs (a reminder that Lan never chose to sleep with Edeyn)

It’s all kinds of heartbreaking to me that this essentially happens to Lan again when Moiraine shifts his bond to Myrelle. Myrelle uses Spirit on the Warder bond to compel him to obey her and then repeatedly sleeps with him. Not so different from what Edeyn is doing here. Honestly, I don’t blame Lan if he never forgives Moiraine for putting him back into this kind of situation. Twenty years of them being partners and then, without any kind of discussion or buy-in from Lan, Moiraine informs him that he will be handed off to a woman that he did NOT chose.

51. He does finally push back against her when she talks about marrying him to her daughter, and he tells her that she’s trying to push custom too far. But instead of talking to him about it, she takes him to bed (again, knowing that it is entirely her decision to actually have sex and Lan does not get a choice, by the terms of their culture). This is such an ugly scene but, again, so far it doesn’t get undermined the way that the Mat-Tylin scenes did. At this point, Lan thinks about how he can’t see any way out of his future wife being his rapist’s daughter (he doesn’t use that word but, yeah, he is horrified at the idea that he might be married off to Edeyn’s kid). Lan’s culture is a noose around his neck, at this point, in more ways that just him hunting his death in the Blight.

52. Moiraine is hunting out the place where Siuan is most likely to have taken rooms in the city. But Siuan ends up being the one to find her. Moiraine joins Siuan at the inn and, indeed, There Is Only One Bed. <3 Siuan hasn’t been able to check on the woman in the city who had a kid near Tar Valon, because the woman is in the palace. Oh, hey, that’s where Lan is! Hmm, we hear of someone died of a broken back with no mark on him. That sounds like another ta’veren marker, the bad luck side of the coin. Are we supposed to be wondering if there is a ta’veren here in Chachin? Moiraine and Siuan aren’t.

53. Moiraine uses her letter-of-rights to get money from a bank in Chachin, and orders herself some dresses to be made with great speed, as she sees the best way of reaching Lady Ines to be to introduce herself with her true title to the palace here. Siuan is playing the part of Moiraine’s maid. Using the invisibility of servants, Siuan is able to find out that Lady Ines is in seclusion, as her husband died suddenly ten days ago. A lot of death surrounding all the women who gave birth in Tar Valon at the right time! Moiraine determines that if her title can’t get her in to see Lady Ines, admitting that she is Aes Sedai may do the trick.

54. Moiraine on musicians: “she cared little for music and less for whoever played the instruments”. Awkward, considering! When being introduced to the Prince Consort’s children, she finds out that Lan is the “king of Malkier”. Oh, the Prince Consort mentions that Lan is keeping much to his rooms (in a troubled tone) which means that Edeyn has been forcing him to stay in her bed all this time. Moiraine abruptly runs into one of the Sisters that Cadsuane had tried to turn into a watchdog for her, and learns that the other went south instead. She again ponders the idea that Cadsuane might be Black Ajah.

55. After her conversation with the Sister, Moiraine decides to go speak to Lan and asks to be taken to his apartments. She’s refused entry but pushes her way inside, where she sees a couple of other people, and then Lan training shirtless with a sword, with claw marks on his back (from his rapist). Oh, the hair that he was obligated to give Edeyn is hanging from the inner doorway of his chambers. I’m guessing his culture forbids him from leaving his bedroom if his owner ah, carneira has placed it there. Wow, this is such an ugly cultural tradition. And I wish Moiraine would stop thinking about bringing Lan “to heel”.

56. Anyway, Moiraine is here to try to use the ancient treaty between the Aes Sedai and Malkier to request Lan’s aid, which gets pushback from him as he asks her where the Aes Sedai where when Malkier fell. She tells him that Sisters were sent, but arrived too late. Also, this answer is apparently Sealed to the Tower (taught to Accepted in history lessons but never to be told to people outside the White Tower) which seems like a... it seems like the White Tower shooting itself in the foot. Because I have to assume that they don’t want it known they were too late because that would come across as a failure but instead they look like they betrayed their agreement with Malkier, which doesn’t seem better at all! (not Moiraine’s fault, of course) “Better the Tower thought to have done nothing than to have tried and failed” - gotta disagree with that position (Moiraine disagrees with it too). She is still worried that Lan might be a Darkfriend.

57. The aid she requests is for someone to watch what the other Aes Sedai in the palace is doing and to give her warning about it, so that will be Bukama’s task. Then she leaves and poor Lan is still trapped in his room by his cultural bonds and expectations. Ugh, Edeyn is an awful person, but Lan’s teachers share some of the blame here in allowing him to abused by her and teaching him that Malkieri culture means that he must be allow her abuse of custom.

58. *sigh* Sadly, this is the chapter where Jordan kinda goes all in on the notion that Siuan x Moiraine was an “Accepted only” situation and now that they are full Sisters, it’s time to be moving on to ‘real’ romances with men. Like, I would LIKE to read all interplay and teasing about men as non-possessive bisexuality but it feels pretty clear that that’s not the intention, and that we’re meant to see their pillow-friends relationship as ‘training wheels’ for the ~real thing later on. Anyway, Siuan has managed to get herself taken into Lady Ines’s household as a maid, so they are closer to figuring out that she’s not the Dragon Reborn’s mom. Oh, side note: Edeyn’s daughter is a spoiled brat but no more interested in marrying Lan than he was in marrying her. The idea of sleeping with someone her mom deflowered oddly doesn’t appeal to her! Imagine that!

59. Lan is currently trying to escape, but he knows that all the servants are on Edeyn’s side. Ah, he has tried to leave her rooms before but she’s taken him into a very maze-like section of the palace and he keeps getting lost. So she untied the hair thing (the daori) which meant that he’s allowed to leave the chambers where she’s been raping him, but only to remind him that she expects him to marry her daughter. And she’s turned all the servants to her side. Lan is also certain that the daughter will give in to whatever her mom wants, so marrying her will only trap him even further into Edeyn’s web. Lan is determined to sneak out and run away. So, basically very similar to what Moiraine did when she ran away from the White Tower. Running away from an undesired web of expectations (again, a prime way to relate to Rand).

60. Then he gets tripped on the stairs without anyone touching him (the Power being used) and learns from servants that his teacher has been murdered (knife in the heart). Luckily, someone’s death is apparently enough to jar the servants out of “deliver Lan to Edeyn” mode.

61. He goes to Moiraine and tells her what happened; that his teacher is dead because they agreed to help her and that someone tried to kill him using the One Power. Moiraine thinks that this means that the other Aes Sedai in the palace must be Black Ajah then, and wonders if she’s targeting the Prince Consort. As they go to potentially confront her, Moiraine wishes that Siuan were here with her.

62. So this was also the Aes Sedai that Lan’s (bad) friend met in the previous city, and Ryne was the one who killed Lan’s teacher. Edeyn’s daughter is the one who brought Prince Consort and his son to the Black Ajah Sister but this seems to be based more on promises that she was told rather than her being a Darkfriend. So Lan fights Ryne while Moiraine fights the BA sister. Moiraine gets shielded when she tries to save the Prince Consort’s son from getting killed (she fails). But while the Prince Consort is being killed, Moiraine manages to stab the Black Ajah Sister in the stomach and she tries to save Edeyn’s kid from getting killed along with the two others, but her hand is bloody, so she can’t hold on and Iselle also falls to her death. Moiraine tells him that they can’t let anyone know that the Black Ajah was who killed the Prince Consort, his son, and Lady Edeyn’s daughter (she thinks to herself that the White Tower needs “its armor of secrecy”, not realizing just how deeply those waters are tainted by the Black Ajah).

63. Lady Edeyn is shattered by her daughter’s death and “whispers said she intended to retire from the world”. Yeah, overall, that was MUCH MUCH better done than the messy, contradictory writing of Mat-Tylin. It hits a LOT of the same beats but it doesn’t undermine the story. So, in this one thing, it feels like Jordan perhaps learned from his mistakes (of course, then he went on to write the horrible Mat-Tuon relationship so, you know. I am only giving him partial credit here lol)

64. Ah, Moiraine tells Siuan the story of everything afterwards and notes that the Black Ajah Sister seemed more invested in killing the son than the Prince Consort and she thinks she knows why, that it’s tied to why an attempt on Lan’s life was made as well (this does mean that Ryne was behind Lan’s assassination attempt earlier in the book and not Edeyn, I suppose) -- she thinks that the Black Ajah is targeting men & boys who are particularly lucky. And Siuan figures out why -- the Black Ajah doesn’t actually know how old the Reborn Dragon is, only that he’s out and about in the world somewhere. So instead of looking for infants, they are looks for signs of uncontrolled channeling, which often manifests as what appears to be luck. And that means killing anyone they think might be a man capable of channeling.

65. And now Moiraine and Siuan split up -- Siuan to go back to the White Tower, to look at the Blue’s eyes-and-ears reports and see if she can spot signs of Black Ajah activity, and Moiraine on the hunt for the boy. But first, she goes to seek out Lan. She asks him to be her Warder and when he balks due to his other commitment (dying in the Blight), she tells him EVERYTHING, the whole story (now that she’s certain he’s not Darkfriend).

66. He swears an oath to follow her and she bonds him. It makes for a fairly satisfying ending to the book.

I am going to categorize the books slightly differently, now that I’m in this deep, and I’ve done some reassessments of where they stand as well. Mostly, my previous ranking simply did not capture what a huge quality gap there was between the rest of the books and CoT/KoD.

Current book rankings:

Great books (strongest to weakest): The Fires of Heaven; The Shadow Rising, The Dragon Reborn; The Path of Daggers; New Spring; The Great Hunt; Lord of Chaos

New Spring is so much tighter and has so much more purpose than CoT or KoD; it’s such a striking contrast to how pointless and sprawling his main series books had become by this point. Focusing on one main storyline, with another more minor one feeding into it and joining it, really made for a much better reading experience than the mess of CoT & KoD. I also do end up feeling like Jordan wrote the issue of “person forced into sex due to cultural expectations and a person who has a position of power over them abusing that power” much better here with Lan than he did with Mat in ACoS/WH, where it felt like Jordan was constantly undermining his own storyline.

TSR remains the hardest one of these to place for me because so much of it is SO good... and then there’s whatever the hell Jordan was doing with Faile and Perrin (and which would sadly become a much more common relationship dynamic in the future). Lord of Chaos got a big bump downward because it really is the first of the ‘sloggy’ books and it introduces so many of the plot-threads that would bog the later books down.

Mostly good books (strongest to weakest): A Crown of Swords; The Eye of the World; Winter’s Heart

All of these books have some major issues that could have used a rewrite -- the “comedic” rape storyline in ACoS; the unevenness in TEotW and the ending; and Winter’s Heart ends up being a lot of unfulfilled promises plus it continues the rape storyline from ACoS. But even in the ‘bad’ storylines here, there’s some good -- Mat in Ebou Dar has the horrible Tylin storyline but his storyline with Elayne is good in ACoS and the horror vibe of the Seanchan invasion is good in WH (shame the author attempted to throw that vibe away in the next two books in the name of ‘romance’). And TEotW has a lot of good, strong sections.

First Draft Energy; please rewrite:  Crossroads of Twilight; Knife of Dreams

Yikes, yikes, yikes, basically. Elayne and Egwene’s storylines are solid, but Jordan forgot to give Nynaeve a plot at all, and all three of the main male characters have pretty trash storylines, where they basically do nothing for long periods of time and when they DO actually do something they all decide, somewhat inexplicably, that they want to ally/be friendly with the Seanchan (in various ways) and this choice is not justified anywhere near enough in the text and only ‘works’ because Jordan stacked the deck as much as possible in the Seanchan’s favor by having characters act out of character to give them the advantage (and the sul’dam secret being known by so few people at this point in the narrative honestly strains my suspension of disbelief so much, even with Jordan’s deep love for allies never sharing information with each other; and this is pretty much entirely to give as much advantage to the Seanchan as possible). I could see myself re-reading the prologues and the Egwene & Elayne sections of these two books in the future, but I think I will just skip the boys, lol. Well, Rand has that one really good scene when “Lews Therin” takes him over in the battle at the Tairen manor house. That one’s worth re-reading. But for Mat ‘courts a slaver’ Cauthon and Perrin ‘human trafficker’ Aybara... nothing in these two books is worth re-reading at all. And only two out of six potential storylines being good is... not great.

So my current list ends up being something like this:

The Fires of Heaven

The Shadow Rising

The Dragon Reborn

The Path of Daggers

New Spring

The Great Hunt

Lord of Chaos

eeeh

nah

well

A Crown of Swords

The Eye of the World

Winter’s Heart

yikes

oh dear

i mean

do i really need to rank them at all?

*sigh*

if I must

here we go

Crossroads of Twilight

Knife of Dreams

#wot reread #wheel of time #wot #wot book spoilers #wot spoilers #new spring #knife of dreams #moiraine damodred #lan mandragoran #siuan sanche

[laslow]

"laslow."

jakobs words are polite. before him he stands, hands behind his waist, posture straight and proper. "a word."

there is a moments hesitance. as if, he ponders what to say. it is explicit hesitation, if only momentarily, eyes averting their gaze and turning to the side before meeting laslows once more. "you have certainly proven to be an interesting experience here, haven't you?"

there is a passing moment, before hands present themselves to ally - within his grasp is nothing more than a simple pair of gardening shears. familiar ones, if laslow recalls, albeit slightly used - the dirt has been wiped from the edges. "make use of these, won't you?" and it is not spoken like blatant regifting, rather, with faith. "tch. i despise sharing my gardening equipment - know this. so take it, and become adept at it for the sake of your lord."

right, that was as sincere as he would get.

"i have enjoyed our time together," is all he says, before turning on his heel. "it's been tolerable. ghost hunting antics or not."

at that, he turns away, and begins his departure. "when i see you again, i expect to see those shears worn and dirtied. it may not be long, so don't you laze about," jakob sighs. "or i'll be sorely disappointed at my misplaced faith in our…"

friendship, really.

"our allyship."

Yikes, this sounds solemn.

Laslow adopts an appropriately serious expression. "Jakob, to what do I owe the pleasure?" He cants his head to one side, blinking away the overly long strands of hair that fall across his eyes. The scoff, while quite, still escapes. Jakob always had a unique way of phrasing things.

He accepts the shears with only a small trace of skepticism. Well-loved blades glint in the afternoon light. Small amounts of caked on dirt hide within the grooves, betraying years of use and love.

All annoyance and false pretense drains from Laslow. Sincerity doesn't suit Jakob well--it's more palatable hidden behind snarky comments--but Laslow appreciates this rare showing more than he can say.

Lips quirk up into a half-smile. "I'll take good care of them. On my honor as a swordsman." How much stock Jakob will put in that, Laslow's unsure.

Ah, right. The ghost.

"I still think proposing would have helped," he teases, lifting a shoulder in a shrug. "Psh. Me, lazing about? Certainly not when it comes to flowers."

He waves to Jakob's back. "Safe travels, my friend. Say hello to Lady Corrin for me, please!"

#support: jakob #PLEADING #THEY WERE FRIENDS IN THE END!!!!!!!!!! #this is rushed forgive me work posting you know how it is

[istumpysk]

Operation Stumpy Re-Read

ADWD: Jon III (Chapter 10)

They brought forth the King-Beyond-the-Wall with his hands bound by hempen rope and a noose around his neck.

The other end of the rope was looped about the saddle horn of Ser Godry Farring's courser. The Giantslayer and his mount were armored in silvered steel inlaid with niello. Mance Rayder wore only a thin tunic that left his limbs naked to the cold. They could have let him keep his cloak, Jon Snow thought, the one the wildling woman patched with strips of crimson silk.

I'll eat paper if Jon's not gifted a cloak in this story.

+.+.+

Small wonder that the Wall was weeping.

x

Beneath the weeping Wall, Lady Melisandre raised her pale white hands. 

This is hardly important, but when have I ever let that stop me?

It's subzero temperatures in this chapter. Everyone is freezing to death. Why is the Wall weeping?

+.+.+

"We all must choose," she proclaimed. "Man or woman, young or old, lord or peasant, our choices are the same." Her voice made Jon Snow think of anise and nutmeg and cloves. She stood at the king's side on a wooden scaffold raised above the pit. "We choose light or we choose darkness. We choose good or we choose evil. We choose the true god or the false."

No, Melisandre. Everything must be grey. Our choices, our morality, our clothing, my mood. . .

+.+.+

Mance Rayder's thick grey-brown hair blew about his face as he walked. He pushed it from his eyes with bound hands, smiling. But when he saw the cage, his courage failed him.

What did they tell him was happening?

If you've never read the books, that's not Mance Rayder. It's glamorized Rattleshirt, the Lord of Bones, disguised as Mance Rayder.

I did not remember it being a cage. Are you telling me they're putting Shireen in a cage? Holy yikes.

+.+.+

The queen's men had made it from the trees of the haunted forest, from saplings and supple branches, pine boughs sticky with sap, and the bone-white fingers of the weirwoods. 

And did he bury an acorn for every tree he cut down?

No, because Stannis doesn't plant trees.

+.+.+

The wildling king recoiled from the sight. "No," he cried, "mercy. This is not right, I'm not the king, they—"

Ser Godry gave a pull on the rope. 

A clue!

+.+.+

Lady Melisandre watched him rise. "FREE FOLK! Here stands your king of lies. And here is the horn he promised would bring down the Wall." 

There's only one king anywhere near her right now.

+.+.+

Two queen's men brought forth the Horn of Joramun, black and banded with old gold, eight feet long from end to end. Runes were carved into the golden bands, the writing of the First Men. Joramun had died thousands of years ago, but Mance had found his grave beneath a glacier, high up in the Frostfangs.

[...]

"FREE FOLK!" cried Melisandre. "Behold the fate of those who choose the darkness!"

The Horn of Joramun burst into flame.

It went up with a whoosh as swirling tongues of green and yellow fire leapt up crackling all along its length. Jon's garron shied nervously, and up and down the ranks others fought to still their mounts as well. A moan came from the stockade as the free folk saw their hope afire. A few began to shout and curse, but most lapsed into silence. For half a heartbeat the runes graven on the gold bands seemed to shimmer in the air. 

That fake ass horn reminds me of another (fake ass?) horn.

The horn he blew was shiny black and twisted, and taller than a man as he held it with both hands. It was bound about with bands of red gold and dark steel, incised with ancient Valyrian glyphs that seemed to glow redly as the sound swelled. - The Drowned Man, AFFC

+.+.+

"The Horn of Joramun?" Melisandre said. "No. Call it the Horn of Darkness. If the Wall falls, night falls as well, the long night that never ends. It must not happen, will not happen! The Lord of Light has seen his children in their peril and sent a champion to them, Azor Ahai reborn." She swept a hand toward Stannis, and the great ruby at her throat pulsed with light.

He is stone and she is flame.

Melisandre is a great tool for foreshadowing, all you have to do is predict the opposite of everything she says.

+.+.+

Girding his brows was a red-gold crown with points like twisting flames. Val stood beside him, tall and fair. They had crowned her with a simple circlet of dark bronze, yet she looked more regal in bronze than Stannis did in gold. Her eyes were grey and fearless, unflinching. Beneath an ermine cloak, she wore white and gold. Her honey-blond hair had been done up in a thick braid that hung over her right shoulder to her waist. The chill in the air had put color in her cheeks.

This honey-haired coat rack that only exists to remind us of other characters is wearing a crown similar to Robb's.

Robb's crown looked much as the other was said to have looked in the tales told of the Stark kings of old; an open circlet of hammered bronze incised with the runes of the First Men, surmounted by nine black iron spikes wrought in the shape of longswords. - Catelyn I, ACOK

"That means she'll be Jon's queen!" said the fool.

Why is the sister of a king's wife even wearing a crown? Lmao.

+.+.+

Inside his cage, Mance Rayder clawed at the noose about his neck with bound hands and screamed incoherently of treachery and witchery, denying his kingship, denying his people, denying his name, denying all that he had ever been. He shrieked for mercy and cursed the red woman and began to laugh hysterically.

More clues!

+.+.+

Within three heartbeats the whole pit was aflame. Clutching the bars of his cage with bound hands, Mance sobbed and begged. When the fire reached him he did a little dance. His screams became one long, wordless shriek of fear and pain. Within his cage, he fluttered like a burning leaf, a moth caught in a candle flame.

Someone's burning alive, and sounding a lot like Mirri Maz Durr in the process, so that must mean Azor Ahai Daenerys comes next.

+.+.+

Val stood on the platform as still as if she had been carved of salt. She will not weep nor look away. Jon wondered what Ygritte would have done in her place. The women are the strong ones. 

He can make me look at the heads, she told herself, but he can't make me see them.

"This one is your father," he said. "This one here. Dog, turn it around so she can see him."

Sandor Clegane took the head by the hair and turned it. The severed head had been dipped in tar to preserve it longer. Sansa looked at it calmly, not seeing it at all. It did not really look like Lord Eddard, she thought; it did not even look real. "How long do I have to look?"

Joffrey seemed disappointed. - Sansa VI, AGOT

+.+.+

Jon Snow had seen enough. "Now," he said.

Ulmer of the Kingswood jammed his spear into the ground, unslung his bow, and slipped a black arrow from his quiver. Sweet Donnel Hill threw back his hood to do the same. Garth Greyfeather and Bearded Ben nocked shafts, bent their bows, loosed.

One arrow took Mance Rayder in the chest, one in the gut, one in the throat. The fourth struck one of the cage's wooden bars, and quivered for an instant before catching fire. A woman's sobs echoed off the Wall as the wildling king slid bonelessly to the floor of his cage, wreathed in fire. "And now his Watch is done," Jon murmured softly. 

Hey, remember when Jon watched this happen?

And looked less bothered than Tyrion Lannister?

+.+.+

Mance Rayder had been a man of the Night's Watch once, before he changed his black cloak for one slashed with bright red silk.

Sure, say it again, why not.

+.+.+

Stannis Baratheon drew Lightbringer.

The sword glowed red and yellow and orange, alive with light. Jon had seen the show before … but not like this, never before like this. Lightbringer was the sun made steel. When Stannis raised the blade above his head, men had to turn their heads or cover their eyes. Horses shied, and one threw his rider. The blaze in the fire pit seemed to shrink before this storm of light, like a small dog cowering before a larger one. The Wall itself turned red and pink and orange, as waves of color danced across the ice. Is this the power of king's blood?

Close! It's the power of Rattleshirt's blood.

Storm of light made me smile.

+.+.+

"Westeros has but one king," said Stannis. His voice rang harsh, with none of Melisandre's music. "With this sword I defend my subjects and destroy those who menace them. Bend the knee, and I promise you food, land, and justice. Kneel and live. Or go and die. The choice is yours." 

[...]

And they came. Slowly at first, some limping or leaning on their fellows, the captives began to emerge from their rough-hewn pen. If you would eat, come to me, Jon thought. If you would not freeze or starve, submit.

Really bodes well for Daenerys that Jon can instantly spot when people are being given the illusion of choice.

+.+.+

Queen's men in studded jacks and halfhelms handed each passing man, woman, or child a piece of white weirwood: a stick, a splintered branch as pale as broken bone, a spray of blood-red leaves. A piece of the old gods to feed the new. Jon flexed the fingers of his sword hand.

Melisandre being hanged from a tree would be the most poetic death ever.

+.+.+

They came on, clutching their scraps of wood until the time came to feed them to the flames. R'hllor was a jealous deity, ever hungry. So the new god devoured the corpse of the old, and cast gigantic shadows of Stannis and Melisandre upon the Wall, black against the ruddy red reflections on the ice.

The weirwoods getting a taste of their own medicine. Lol

+.+.+

Next came Rattleshirt in clattering armor made of bones and boiled leather, his helm a giant's skull. Under the bones lurked a ruined and wretched creature with cracked brown teeth and a yellow tinge to the whites of his eyes. A small, malicious, treacherous man, as stupid as he is cruel. Jon did not believe for a moment that he would keep faith. He wondered what Val was feeling as she watched him kneel, forgiven.

This is actually Mance, and I don't know whether I should read into that or not.

+.+.+

It is too cold for this mummer's show, thought Jon. "The free folk despise kneelers," he had warned Stannis. "Let them keep their pride, and they will love you better." His Grace would not listen. He said, "It is swords I need from them, not kisses."

[...]

You can give them land and mercy, but the free folk choose their own kings, and it was Mance they chose, not you.

[...]

The pit fire was burning low, and the king's shadow on the Wall had shrunk to a quarter of its former height. Jon Snow could see his breath in the air. Cold, he thought, and getting colder. This mummer's show has gone on long enough.

A bit of a preview of how King Jon might handle his new subjects.

Wildlings kneeling to save their lives is a mummer's show. I'm laughing.

the king's shadow on the Wall had shrunk to a quarter of its former height.

🌺 metaphors 🌺

+.+.+

"One realm, one god, one king!" cried Lady Melisandre.

The queen's men took up the cry, beating the butts of their spears against their shields. "One realm, one god, one king! STANNIS! STANNIS! ONE REALM, ONE GOD, ONE KING!"

If Melisandre is saying this, I think there's a strong possibility this series ends with multiple self-governing territories, several gods, and many kings and queens.

"Well, there is my claim, as good as Robert's ever was. If your son supports me as his father supported Robert, he'll not find me ungenerous. I will gladly confirm him in all his lands, titles, and honors. He can rule in Winterfell as he pleases. He can even go on calling himself King in the North if he likes, so long as he bends the knee and does me homage as his overlord. King is only a word, but fealty, loyalty, service . . . those I must have." - Catelyn II, ACOK

x

Lord Gylbert began to speak. He told of a wondrous land beyond the Sunset Sea, a land without winter or want, where death had no dominion. "Make me your king, and I shall lead you there," he cried. "We will build ten thousand ships as Nymeria once did and take sail with all our people to the land beyond the sunset. There every man shall be a king and every wife a queen." - The Drowned Man, AFFC

+.+.+

"Common cause against a common foe, I could agree with that," said Bowen Marsh, "but that does not mean we should allow tens of thousands of half-starved savages through the Wall. Let them return to their villages and fight the Others there, whilst we seal the gates. It will not be difficult, Othell tells me. We need only fill the tunnels with chunks of stone and pour water through the murder holes. The Wall does the rest. The cold, the weight … in a moon's turn, it will be as if no gate had ever been. Any foe would need to hack his way through."

[...]

 Yet what Bowen was suggesting went against all of Jon's instincts. "If we seal the gates, we cannot send out rangers," he pointed out. "We will be as good as blind."

"Lord Mormont's last ranging cost the Watch a quarter of its men, my lord. We need to conserve what strength remains us. Every death diminishes us, and we are stretched so thin … Take the high ground and win the battle, my uncle used to say. No ground is higher than the Wall, Lord Commander."

Jon is making the right decision, but I obviously have to highlight the unhappy pomegranate.

+.+.+

"Stannis promises land, food, and justice to any wildlings who bend the knee. He will never permit us to seal the gates."

Marsh hesitated. "Lord Snow, I am not one to bear tales, but there has been talk that you are becoming too … too friendly with Lord Stannis. Some even suggest that you are … a …"

Why would you say that? Stannis Baratheon doesn't have the authority to make that call, and Jon is more than aware of that.

+.+.+

"Lord Stannis helped us when we needed help," Marsh said doggedly, "but he is still a rebel, and his cause is doomed. As doomed as we'll be if the Iron Throne marks us down as traitors. We must be certain that we do not choose the losing side."

"It is not my intent to choose any side," said Jon, "but I am not as certain of the outcome of this war as you seem to be, my lord. Not with Lord Tywin dead." 

Pure delusion on Jon's part, and Samwell's not around to call him out on it.

<- Davos III, ADWD

Candlelight gleamed in Lord Godric's black eyes. "If it were, you'd be in chains. It's the queen who rules."

Davos understood. He nurses doubts. He does not want to find himself upon the losing side.

+.+.+

If the tales coming up the kingsroad could be believed, the King's Hand had been murdered by his dwarf son whilst sitting on a privy. Jon had known Tyrion Lannister, briefly. He took my hand and named me friend. It was hard to believe the little man had it in him to murder his own sire, but the fact of Lord Tywin's demise seemed to be beyond doubt. 

Sansa not appearing in these thoughts is so loud.

+.+.+

"The lion in King's Landing is a cub, and the Iron Throne has been known to cut grown men to ribbons."

+.+.+

"A boy he may be, my lord, but … King Robert was well loved, and most men still accept that Tommen is his son. The more they see of Lord Stannis the less they love him, and fewer still are fond of Lady Melisandre with her fires and this grim red god of hers. They complain."

"They complained about Lord Commander Mormont too. Men love to complain about their wives and lords, he told me once. Those without wives complain twice as much about their lords." 

And Lord Commander Mormont was killed.

+.+.+

The odors of smoke and burned flesh still clung to Jon's blacks. He knew he had to eat, but it was company he craved, not food. A cup of wine with Maester Aemon, some quiet words with Sam, a few laughs with Pyp and Grenn and Toad. Aemon and Sam were gone, though, and his other friends … "I will take supper with the men this evening."

Wait for it.

+.+.+

When Jon entered, four builders were playing at tiles at the table nearest the steps. Closer to the fire sat a group of rangers and a few king's men, talking quietly.

The younger men were gathered at another table, where Pyp had stabbed a turnip with his knife. "The night is dark and full of turnips," he announced in a solemn voice. "Let us all pray for venison, my children, with some onions and a bit of tasty gravy." His friends laughed—Grenn, Toad, Satin, the whole lot of them.

Jon Snow did not join the laughter. "Making mock of another man's prayer is fool's work, Pyp. And dangerous."

I feel for Jon. He knows the king's men are within earshot, and is only trying to protect Pyp.

Unfortunately he's not the greatest at navigating situations like this, so he only sounds like a buzzkill.

+.+.+

"If the red god's offended, let him strike me down."

All the smiles had died. "It was the priestess we were laughing at," said Satin, a lithe and pretty youth who had once been a whore in Oldtown. "We were only having a jape, my lord."

"You have your gods and she has hers. Leave her be."

"She won't let our gods be," argued Toad. "She calls the Seven false gods, m'lord. The old gods too. She made the wildlings burn weirwood branches. You saw."

"Lady Melisandre is not part of my command. You are. I won't have bad blood between the king's men and my own."

Pyp laid a hand on Toad's arm. "Croak no more, brave Toad, for our Great Lord Snow has spoken." Pyp hopped to his feet and gave Jon a mocking bow. "I beg pardon. Henceforth, I shall not even waggle my ears save by your lordship's lordly leave."

He thinks this is all some game. Jon wanted to shake some sense into him. 

Do you think Ned Jon will ever explain to Pyp why this isn't a game?

+.+.+

"I'll see that he's more careful," Grenn promised, "and I'll clout him if he's not." He hesitated. "My lord, will you sup with us? Owen, shove over and make room for Jon."

Jon wanted nothing more. No, he had to tell himself, those days are gone. The realization twisted in his belly like a knife. They had chosen him to rule. The Wall was his, and their lives were his as well. A lord may love the men that he commands, he could hear his lord father saying, but he cannot be a friend to them. One day he may need to sit in judgment on them, or send them forth to die. "Another day," the lord commander lied. "Edd, best see to your own supper. I have work to finish."

+.+.+

Val stood on the tower roof, gazing up at the Wall. Stannis kept her closely penned in rooms above his own, but he did allow her to walk the battlements for exercise. She looks lonely, Jon thought. Lonely, and lovely. Ygritte had been pretty in her own way, with her red hair kissed by fire, but it was her smile that made her face come alive. Val did not need to smile; she would have turned men's heads in any court in the wide world.

All the same, the wildling princess was not beloved of her gaolers. She scorned them all as "kneelers," and had thrice attempted to escape. When one man-at-arms grew careless in her presence she had snatched his dagger from its sheath and stabbed him in the neck. Another inch to the left and he might have died.

Lonely and lovely and lethal, Jon Snow reflected, and I might have had her. Her, and Winterfell, and my lord father's name. Instead he had chosen a black cloak and a wall of ice. Instead he had chosen honor. A bastard's sort of honor.

I thought she wasn't a princess, Jon?

Go ahead and start romanticizing a girl that doesn't exist, lord knows that's never backfired on anyone before (you).

Her, and Winterfell, and my lord father's name. Instead he had chosen a black cloak and a wall of ice.

You chose a cloak, eh?

+.+.+

The taste of hot blood filled Jon's mouth, and he knew that Ghost had killed that night. No, he thought. I am a man, not a wolf. He rubbed his mouth with the back of a gloved hand and spat.

We've lost Arya, Bran, and Rickon, but Jon's still fighting the good fight!

+.+.+

"His Grace is not an easy man. Few are, who wear a crown. Many good men have been bad kings, Maester Aemon used to say, and some bad men have been good kings."

Of course a Targaryen would say that.

I don't think it's possible to be a bad man and a good king.

+.+.+

"I looked at that book Maester Aemon left me. The Jade Compendium. The pages that told of Azor Ahai. Lightbringer was his sword. Tempered with his wife's blood if Votar can be believed. Thereafter Lightbringer was never cold to the touch, but warm as Nissa Nissa had been warm. In battle the blade burned fiery hot. Once Azor Ahai fought a monster. When he thrust the sword through the belly of the beast, its blood began to boil. Smoke and steam poured from its mouth, its eyes melted and dribbled down its cheeks, and its body burst into flame."

Wow! Kind of sounds like being burned alive by dragonfire.

+.+.+

Clydas blinked. "A sword that makes its own heat …"

"… would be a fine thing on the Wall."

Be careful what you wish for.

+.+.+

Jon put aside his wine cup and drew on his black moleskin gloves. "A pity that the sword that Stannis wields is cold. I'll be curious to see how his Lightbringer behaves in battle. 

Oh my god, please tell me Stannis's sword breaks in battle.

+.+.+

He read the letter from the Shadow Tower again, sharpened a quill, and unstoppered a pot of thick black ink. He wrote two letters, the first to Ser Denys, the second to Cotter Pyke. Both of them had been hounding him for more men. Halder and Toad he dispatched west to the Shadow Tower, Grenn and Pyp to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.

Remember when Ned Stark sent all his men away from King's Landing, and you instantly knew it was a disaster?

+.+.+

The ink would not flow properly, and all his words seemed curt and crude and clumsy, yet he persisted.

Please don't persist. Stop persisting.

+.+.+

When he finally put the quill down, the room was dim and chilly, and he could feel its walls closing in. 

Mercy, George. No more.

+.+.+

Perched above the window, the Old Bear's raven peered down at him with shrewd black eyes. My last friend, Jon thought ruefully. And I had best outlive you, or you'll eat my face as well. 

I can't do it.

+.+.+

Ghost did not count. Ghost was closer than a friend. Ghost was part of him.

Stop.

+.+.+

Jon rose and climbed the steps to the narrow bed that had once been Donal Noye's. This is my lot, he realized as he undressed, from now until the end of my days.

What about after your end of days? Hmmm? Then what??

Final thoughts:

AT LEAST CATELYN AND ROBB DIE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BOOK.

WE HAVE TEN MORE CHAPTERS OF THIS.

-> return to menu <-

#operation stumpy re-read #adwd #jon iii

[squibstress]

Writing Patterns

Rules: List the first line of your last 10 (posted) fics and see if there’s a pattern!

Thanks for the fun tag, @perverse-idyll!

1. It’s a grim little thing, the Sorting Hat thinks as she walks up to the dais.

[Hag Tales, HP, Minerva/Amelia, Minerva/Alastor, Minerva/Wilhelmina. The reader's introduction to Miss Minerva McGonagall, as seen through a variety of lenses, including the Sorting Hat's. Yikes!]

2. The body remembers.

[De Aegypto, Minerva/Rolanda. The frame for a short piece about Minerva's musings on Rolanda and their complicated relationship.]

3. The first time Florean Fortescue met Severus Snape, he was mid-charm, putting the finishing touches on his latest creation.

[The Ice Cream Man and the Potions Master, Florean/Severus (pre-slash). A little scene-setting for an episodic piece in which Severus alternately confounds and charms Florean Fortescue.]

4. "Imperio."

[Rest with Your Dream in My Dream, Minerva/Severus. A line stolen from canon, as were many of the lines from this piece in which I attempt to add a little backstory to some of the key scenes in the HP books. This one from the scene where Minerva (needlessly) Imperios Amycus Carrow.]

5. Mind the gap between the train and the platform.

[Mind the Gap, Minerva/Severus. A somewhat contrived frame for this short piece about the ramifications of the age-gap between lovers Minerva and Severus. Also, I had recently returned from London.]

6. What the hell am I doing here?

[Within a Forest Dark, Minerva/Severus. A question I think Severus must have asked himself several times per day. A little tunnel into the main character's mind.]

7. The children filed into the classroom, quieter than they’d ever be again, Albus knew. The first-years were always a little awed by their first day at Hogwarts.

[One to Keep an Eye On, Albus, Minerva. Some scene-setting for a short piece about how Albus and Minerva first met.]

8. Thorfinn McGonagall sat in his study answering some of the many letters of condolence that continued to pour in two months after his wife’s death, when a shriek from somewhere on a floor above pulled him out of his chair.

[From Jupiter's Head, OC, Minerva, Albus. A somewhat ham-fisted attempt to provide a bit of (canon-divergent) backstory for Minerva, introducing both her father and her magical prowess.]

9. Anyone who’d spent any time at all at Number 12 Grimmauld Place in the past weeks would not have been surprised to see an identical pair of ginger heads creeping down a creaky staircase at ten minutes past one o’clock on a July morning.

[The Perils of Eavesdropping. Fred, George, Alastor/Minerva. Distanced narrative-setting for a short, (hopefully) humorous piece.]

10. If anyone had asked the Reverend Robert Fingal McGonagall ten years ago what he’d be doing on the third Saturday of Advent in the year of our Lord 1990, he might have laid even odds on “thumbing the harp wi’ the angels.”

[Sufficient Unto the Day, Robert McGonagall, Sr, Minerva/Severus. An introduction to the main character, Minerva's minister father.]

As far as patterns go, I'd say I tend to open with short, simple phrases, often internal dialogue splashed right up front without any context. Since my stories tend to be character-driven pieces (fanfic, ya know?), I like to get into my characters' heads ASAP. It's a little odd, given that my overall narrative style leans (too) heavily on complex compound sentences. Or, it seems, I sometimes go in the opposite direction, opening with a line that establishes a more distanced narrative, sort of a birdseye POV, if you will.

Tagging @writcraft, @bettsfic, @cailynwrites, @billsfangearring

#writing #writing life #fanfic #harry potter fanfiction

[cburambles]

Livid with the way the show treat the Velaryon family & Harwin as an afterthought just for the sake to rush to Daemon/ Rhaenyra, which also manages to bring a shit-ton of questions concerning character's decisions & how the writing room really need to have more BIPOCs aboard.

By skipping over the Daemon/ Laena's courtship, we have no idea why Corlys & Rhaenys would be ok with Laena taking off with Daemon knowing he's now a prince in exile. & Oh she was supposedly bethrohed to the sea lord of Braavos the episode prior, which you know could have been a potential political conflict but you tell me it got resolved offscreen. Ok then. & why Laena would be ok following Daemon around with their kids & being pregnant if they put out that she still cared about the importance of her noble & valyrians blood.

Apparently, monogamy culture, the idea you can have one true love when the average citizen might fall in love multiples times in their life & Rhaenyra being allowed to have only one female friend make it they had to put distance between her & Daemon/ Laena. And we're supposed to accept Daemon & Rhaenyra would be ok marrying together right after years where being far away from each other without bothering writing letters & after the many times he left Rhaenyra in vulnerable positions.

One thing that could have accentued the fact Alicent feels isolated at court was because despite the allegations of Viserys's grandchildren being illegitimate & everything, Rhaenyra, Harwin (who had the control of City Watch) the Velaryons & Daemon formed a constant & strong united front against her. Splitting the group like that, making Laenor an asshole who doesn't give a fuck about his kids but still get to name the newborn Joffrey without consulting Rhaenyra hurt the story & its characters. You tell me that he loves swordfighting but then wouln't at least bother to participate into the martial education of his sons ( & maybe would have helped Harwin to deck one or two on Criston for y'know, killing his lover 10 years ago & the unfair treatment of their kids) ?

Laenor & Laena are also the kids of Corlys & Rhaenys who are portrayed as politically savy & in an healthy relationship & you tell me that it wouldn't influence how their kids navigates court politics & how to conduct their relationships? Prior to marrying Rhaenyra, Laenor was Corlys's heir & he wanted for Laena to become queen. This episode should have been about how the factions started forming but instead everyone is isolated from each other so???

I can understand Daemon having an affinity with dragonriders but I don't think he would neglect Rhaena, knowing she could still potentially bond with an already living dragons like he did with Caraxes & Laena with Vhagar. Also if Daemon is away from court, how did he got the eggs for his daughters? Did Vhagar had a clutch with Caraxes? It also rid of one of the few of Daemon redeeming qualities that he cares fiercely about his family.

I need showrunners to understand death linked to childbirth also often happen after birth due to pulmonary embolism, hemorrhage etc... There was absolutely no need to repeat what happened to Aemma & knowing that Laena was portrayed by a black actress , she didn't need a " warrior" death to show of how much of a Strong black woman tm she is. She could still had have a peaceful dragon rider death by expending that detaillled book scene & having her ride Vhagar last one time if they just wanted & passing away with Daemon helping her instead of giving her a painful traumatic bbq death. Anyway I need for showrunners to understand that feminism for black women is different than for a white women, as our " strenght" is used as an excuse to abuse black women on a systemic level & thus deny the right to feel comforted, vulnerable, loved etc...

Also yikes to Laena accepting herself as a placeholder & fridging her because "Daemon deserved it" (when they didn't even took the effort to developp their relationship). Double-yikes.

How did Daemon suddendly manages to solves his problem of impotency?

Harwin last goodbye was sweet but also... don't do that when you're currently under suspicions of fucking a royal? Will Jace putting two & two about him being his father impact the story & his relationship to Rhaenyra or??

Beside that, Alicent, Larrys, Criston & Lyonel Strong moments were from great to OK. Larrys feels like what we should have got of Varys & Littlefinger. Alicent doesn't feel like they just made her into a Cerseï 2.0 while still retaining some of her book edge.

Also sad yeah for Heleana being neurodivergent into insects. Girl deserves going on bug catching trips instead of dealing with the shitshow that is KL & Aegon II who looks perfectly detestable in a fun way currently. Wasn't expecting Aemond being the one being bullied here at first & we can see Criston & Alicent will play a role into having the kids antagonizing the Strong boys afterwards.

But the quality of the story really dipped concerning the Blacks.

#hotd spoilers #fire & blood spoilers #laena velaryon #rhaenyra targaryen #laenor velaryon #daemon targaryen