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"How beautiful, the queen tried to tell herself, but inside her was some foolish little girl who could not help but look about for Daario. If he loved you, he would come and carry you off at swordpoint, as Rhaegar carried off his northern girl, the girl in her insisted, but the queen knew that was folly..." -A Dance with Dragons - Daenerys VII

"I would need to steal her if I wanted her love, but she might give me children. I might someday hold a son of my own blood in my arms. A son was something Jon Snow had never dared dream of, since he decided to live his life on the Wall. I could name him Robb." -A Storm of Swords -Jon XII

Daenerys wanting Daario to carry her off at sword point, and Jon thinking of stealing Val for her love. Two parallels of one girl wanting to be stolen, and one boy wanting to steal someone. Both for love.

"None of them had ever seen a direwolf before, he realized, and Ghost was twice as large as the common wolves that prowled their southron greenwoods. As he walked toward the armory, Jon chanced to look up and saw Val standing in her tower window. I'm sorry, he thought. I'm not the man to steal you out of there." -A Storm of Swords - Jon XII

"Even if her captain was mad enough to attempt it, the Brazen Beasts would cut him down before he got within a hundred yards of her." -A Dance with Dragons - Daenerys VII

Jon is sorry he can't steal away Val, and Daenerys reflects on the fact that even if Daario did attempt to carry her off at sword point, he'd be cut down.

Both Jon and Daenerys have a sense of romanticism in their POV's. Both are hopeless romantics (perhaps Daenerys more so than Jon in a sense). Both want love, despite denying it deep down. Jon because he's a man of the Night's Watch and a bastard. Daenerys because she is a Queen over her people and accepts duty over giving in to "girlish" thoughts.

Both had found love within confinement. Jon having fallen for Ygritte while pretending to be on the Freefolk's side. Daenerys having found a twisted love in Drogo after being sold to him as a bridal slave. Both were coerced into sexual relations with Ygritte and Drogo. Both had to watch Ygritte and Drogo die (and Dany killed Drogo out of mercy).

"He found Ygritte sprawled across a patch of old snow beneath the Lord Commander's Tower, with an arrow between her breasts. The ice crystals had settled over her face, and in the moonlight it looked as though she wore a glittering silver mask [...] "Oh." Ygritte cupped his cheek with her hand. "You know nothing, Jon Snow," she sighed, dying. -A Storm of Swords - Jon VII

"And when the bleak dawn broke over an empty horizon, Dany knew that he was truly lost to her. “When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east,” she said sadly. “When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When my womb quickens again, and I bear a living child. Then you will return, my sun-and-stars, and not before.” Never, the darkness cried, never never never. Inside the tent Dany found a cushion, soft silk stuffed with feathers. She clutched it to her breasts as she walked back out to Drogo, to her sun-and-stars. If I look back I am lost. It hurt even to walk, and she wanted to sleep, to sleep and not to dream. She knelt, kissed Drogo on the lips, and pressed the cushion down across his face." -A Game of Thrones - Daenerys IX

Both Jon and Daenerys have also found interest again after the deaths of Ygritte and Drogo. Jon wants Val, and Daenerys sleeps with Daario and may perhaps love him, but doubts over her relations with Daario. Both focus on their duties over giving in to what they really want. Daenerys even marries again for peace over giving in to what she really wants.

Both Jon and Daenerys think of having children, but push away the ideal. Jon due to being a member of the Night's Watch and a bastard. Daenerys due to thinking she is barren/cursed by Mirri Maz Duur and can never again have a child born from her.

Jon reflects that if he ever had a son, he'd name him Robb after his brother. Daenerys when pregnant with Drogo's child names her son Rhaego after her brother.

Jon is the secret son of Rhaegar and Lyanna. Lyanna is associated with blue winter roses:

"He was walking through the crypts beneath Winterfell, as he had walked a thousand times before. The Kings of Winter watched him pass with eyes of ice, and the direwolves at their feet turned their great stone heads and snarled. Last of all, he came to the tomb where his father slept, with Brandon and Lyanna beside him. "Promise me, Ned," Lyanna's statue whispered. She wore a garland of pale blue roses, and her eyes wept blood." -A Game of Thrones - Eddard XIII

"Robert had been jesting with Jon and old Lord Hunter as the prince circled the field after unhorsing Ser Barristan in the final tilt to claim the champion's crown. Ned remembered the moment when all the smiles died, when Prince Rhaegar Targaryen urged his horse past his own wife, the Dornish princess Elia Martell, to lay the queen of beauty's laurel in Lyanna's lap. He could see it still: a crown of winter roses, blue as frost." -A Game of Thrones - Eddard XV

When Daenerys has visions in the House of the Undying, she sees the Wall:

"A blue flower grew from a chink in a wall of ice, and filled the air with sweetness. . . . mother of dragons, bride of fire . . ." -A Clash of Kings - Daenerys IV

Jon is the 'blue flower' she sees growing from the wall of ice, filling the air with 'sweetness'. Jon is Lyanna's son. Both carry blue flower representation.

Jon also wants to know everything there is about his mother; who she was, if she loved him, what sort of person she was. Just alike to how Daenerys wants to learn and know everything she can about Rhaegar, as she also idolizes him in a sense. Both have thoughts about these people. Jon constantly thinks about his mother (Lyanna even if he does not know yet who she is); Daenerys often thinks of Rhaegar (despite never knowing him). Both think of these people despite them already being gone from the world, and both only wish they could have known who they truly were as people and can only guess how Lyanna and Rhaegar would've thought or acted.

Jon thinks of having dragons at the Wall:

"We should have twenty trebuchets, not two, and they should be mounted on sledges and turntables so we could move them. It was a futile thought. He might as well wish for another thousand men, and maybe a dragon or three." -A Storm of Swords - Jon VIII

When Jon dies, Daenerys hears a wolf howling in the distance:

"Off in the distance, a wolf howled. The sound made her feel sad and lonely, but no less hungry. As the moon rose above the grasslands, Dany slipped at last into a restless sleep." -A Dance with Dragons - Daenerys X

Both have an association/thought relating to one another's animal sigil/companion. Jon thinks of wishing for three dragons (Daenerys' house sigil and her dragon children). Daenerys hears a wolf howling when Jon dies, making her feel sad and lonely (Jon's house sigil through Lyanna/Ned and his direwolf Ghost).

Both Jon and Daenerys dream of home. Daenerys with the house with the red door and the lemon tree. Jon with Winterfell.

Both are estranged from their families (Jon being at the Wall. Daenerys being in Essos and the last of her family having died).

Both have lost their brothers in different means. Both have had their mothers die from childbirth and never got to meet them. Both of their fathers (Rhaegar and Aerys) died during the Rebellion.

Both had arcs of leadership and rule, and struggle with their decisions and making hard choices. Jon winds up killed due to his choices at the end of ADWD, and Daenerys becomes stranded in the Dothraki Sea due to her choice of saving Drogon (and her people from Drogon) from the fighting pit and escaping on dragonback.

While Daenerys thinks of taking the IT as a duty due to being the last of her family and Viserys' last living heir, Jon admits to wanting to become Lord of Winterfell but turning the opportunity away.

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some cool people from dany’s chapters for practice

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Was thinking about how Chaghan and Qara knew how to break the soul bond yet didn’t tell Rin and Kitay and were basically just happy for them to be under the control of the Sorqan Sira. Like I get she’s their aunt and stuff and they (mainly Chaghan) were already pretty tired of her, but still 😭😭 like wtfff after everything? But I think more importantly it had to do with how they feared Rin. They saw how unstable she was, how she destroyed Mugen, and how closely she paralleled previous Speerlies so i guess in some sense their fear is understandable but it still stings a little.

But more widely how *all* the characters in tpw react with fear toward Rin. I feel like I could talk a lot about it at some point but I haven’t fully thought it through yet </3

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Into the sunflower field

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Brothers

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FE3H Pre & Post Timeskip Artworks

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sobs

completely freaking obsessed with this scene. it's just so damn beautiful and touching - and the fact that Lena doesn't know it's Shin that she's talking to. Shin showing this kind of emotion just hits so hard every single damn time.

#86 eighty six #shinei nouzen #vladilena milizé #shinlena #the only scene ever

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Exploring the tutorial island: summary

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and the octopath 2 crossed paths redraw series is done, with agnea and hikari rounding off the lineup. yay! i love this particular color palette and have used it for other (perhaps unpublished) works, it’s just so nice and it fits the two perfectly.

thanks for all the support throughout all these drawings, yall are way too nice ToT

(also, for transparency’s sake, here are the color palettes I used for these. i found these online and yes they are all pirated because i am not paying $2.75 for some colors, nor will i live in fear of. color copyright. go crazy go stupid etc etc)

#omg they're beautiful #octopath traveler 2

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*scrolls past ship i hate really fast* we can pretend that didnt happen

#e*****a #pour toujours et a jamais leur biggest hater 🫡

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“Remember when…”

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A legend of Zelda tears of the kingdom piece!!😱

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happy 11 years of merlin's finale xoxo [insp]

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reading r.f. kuang’s babel right now and after skimming through some locked reddit threads i am so disappointed by the reception.

spoilers ahead, and disclaimer that i am only on chapter 21, but i went looking for a discussion about how their plan to cover up after lovell was a little lacking, and what i found instead were hundreds of disappointed (apparently) white readers tone policing the author. calling her a bad writer, unsophisticated, and overly simplistic. Arguments that are so profoundly rich with irony as these are nameless white readers discussing the qualifications of an asian cambridge/oxford/yale graduate, but i digress. i can easily enough dismiss these criticisms as inane and incomprehensible to anyone who values non-western intellect.

Wthe criticism i have seen over and over again though, which infuriates me to the point of hysterics is that the book is too “preachy”. again and again and again dozens of people posted and hundreds of people upvoted that kuang’s book about the evils of colonialism wasn’t subtle enough. that it’s too in your face, the characters are too aware of “modern” discussions and opinions of colonialism, and that her heavy handed, over-articulated critique shows her youth and inexperience.

i could scream.

because why should colonialism be subtle? why must people of color assuage our indignation to accommodate the feelings of our oppressor’s descendants? why must the cruel, ceaseless destruction of hundreds of world cultures be boiled down to a beautiful metaphor? why is it that books about the evils of capitalism and discrimination can be so easily understood in the fantastical dark academia pieces of white authors, but the second the discussion shifts to imperialism and white supremacy, we must speak in similes and hushed whispers?

does reading about western missionaries intentionally devastating the lives and cultures of people of color for dominance and profit feel like preaching to you? imagine how the natives feel. for monolingual, white intellectuals who base their intellect purely off of western morality and philosophy, this book may certainly feel like a lecture, but for the marginalized communities who to this day speak the languages of their colonizers, this is just reality. a reality that in upper academia is still discussed in stilted, awkward tones because it would require considering where their endowments comes from. and kuang would know that, as someone who graduated from such institutions thrice.

for those that say her character’s speak with too much modern disdain and comprehension of colonialism, these opinions are not modern. the novel takes place in the 1830s, slavery, indentured servitude, and genocide were common practices of the western empires, and i can promise you none of their victims would be upset by admitting so. to say that the cantonese protagonist, with his indian muslim and haitian best friends, the three of whom were torn from their colonized home countries and now make up 75% of the incoming class of oxford’s most prestigious college, should not hold beliefs of anti-imperialism and should not have the vocabulary to express such, is so completely absurd and insulting I can’t even dignify it a response.

make no mistake, it is not that i cannot believe the outrage, because it is so very believable, but i cannot fathom how someone can deign to call themselves a reader and so flagrantly despise learning the experiences of others.

something that was particularly fascinating to watch was when someone mentioned achebe’s things fall apart, lauding it as the faithful brother to babel’s prodigal son. in an interesting reversal of roles, this black author’s novel was presented as the model to which minority writers should aspire to. subtlety, intrigue, mysticism, a delicate string of scenes and plot points to allow the reader to internalize the profound pains of cultural oppression without pointing too many fingers at whose doing the oppressing. because it is simply ‘more powerful’ to draw a beautifully direct parallel to a rhetorical issue than to point at the true source of our real world, ongoing crisis. not only is this a deeply mischaracterized description of achebe’s novel, but is precisely the rhetoric that both novels aimed to critique.

no novel is perfect. i still have yet to finish babel, and some comments I’ve seen about dialogue and characterization choices, with which i often disagree, i see the merit and validity of such arguments. however listening to the mindless degradation of this work by self-proclaimed white academics, who offer nothing of note besides overly-intellectualized statements of cultural insecurity, frustrates me on a level i struggle to put to words in any language.

anyways back to reading! i don’t imagine my thoughts are of much note, but if i have anything interesting to say, i’ll give an impassioned key smash when i finish

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that one line about ramy's bangla being rudimentary made me absolutely sob (i'm bengali) and i wanna talk about why

there's so much to it both contextually with ramy's character as well as historically. contextually because ramy is fluent in 6 languages, an insane number of languages for one person but none of which are his mother tongue. he's described as a performer, one who knows he can't blend in so instead he stands out as a means to escape as much of the racism as he can. he gets lost in it that he almost forgets who he is; this is reflected in his language ability too – he gets so lost in his linguistic academics he just barely remembers the native language of his home place that he adores.

and honestly, you can't even really blame ramy for it at all when it was induced. it's the british who saw urdu, arabic and persian as more valuable than bangla, it's the british that make ramy put on this act so he can literally stay alive. and when you know the historical relevancies between urdu and bangla, it hurts so much that ramy was forced to forget bangla

very brief history context: after the partition, where british india was split into india, pakistan and east pakistan (now bangladesh) bangla was seen as inferior to urdu due to its hindu connections. bengalis experienced so much shit because of this (and bengali muslims are still dealing with the internalised cultural racism today honestly). pakistanis tried to make the official language urdu, even though literally everyone in east pakistan were bengali and spoke bangla, so bengalis fought back against it. we still celebrate that day today (feb 21)

so to have ramy be in this position in the 1830s where urdu was seen as superior to bangla, especially when ramy is a bengali muslim, is just extremely accurate?? and maybe it's bc we don't have much western literature where we talk about this but it's just so nice to have it acknowledged

the bangla language movement didn't happen until around the 1950s, over a century after babel's timeline, but the seeds are always there. while i do think it comes with both this islamic superiority tendency a lot of asians have (arabs i'm looking at you) and britian's imperialistic racism, i just love how it all makes sense

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something about rin being betrayed by everyone in her life and in her final moments turning against the only person who would never betray her because that’s all she’s ever known (they make me go insane)

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I loved the costumes in this show but most of all I loved how they put so much character development into hair and outfits. Here is a whole essay on how much I love it. Just to clarify, I paid a lot of attention to clothes but I don't actually know much about Korean historical clothing/hairstyles.

I've been noticing lately that everyone in English tv/movies tend to have long, wavy hair no matter what their personality or profession dictates. Period K dramas seem to also tend towards long hair for women (and since cutting off a woman's hair was a huge humiliation in another show I watched, I'm guessing the long hair is a cultural point of pride in the past). But even with long hair for all the women the personality shows through.

Naksu has long hair but it's in a bun, held with a piece of wood. Hair is in her way and her only "style" is to keep it out of her eyes. This perfectly fits her assassin profession and single minded character. I'm also not totally sure, but this looks more like a male than female style (though in this show most guys have short hair, I think only the crown prince and king have top knots, Master Lee has hippie sort of hair which fits with his character).

I'm sorry Marvel, but this is female assassin hair, not this:

I can hardly run after my kid without my hair getting in the way but black widow is killing people without a ponytail? Bullshit.

At first as Mu Deok, she has a top-knot type bun and a single braid.

Again, very utilitarian. And it's not even how the other servants dress, we see most shopkeepers and other female servants in buns on the back of their heads or decorated braids (Maidservant Kim is special, I'll get to her). Naksu is just focused on training Jang Uk so she can get her power back, still no time spent on hair.

Then as she starts to like Jang Uk and soften on the whole "assassin bent on revenge" thing, she has a braid with some colourful leather in it.

It's still not very fancy but it looks far more feminine. And it's not like, "I must appear pretty for this man" but more like, "I've accepted that I am more than an assassin, I'm also a woman who can fall in love."

I also loved that as Mu Deok she couldn't even walk in the full feminine dresses. She was an assassin who lived in a cave, she's never worn them before. Her immediately taking off and selling the gown the prince gave her was priceless! Even her last episode fancier outfit is short and worn with pants:

In the second season we see her dressed simply (at least compared with her sister and mother) most of the time, but she is also aware that she looks good (she outright said she was ugly as Mu Deok) and she dresses identifiably as upper class:

She's still not girly like her sister, but she is comfortable in the female world.

Her sister, Jin Cho-Yeon, being the height of girly and having a pretty boy husband was just hilarious and fun:

And then Maidservant Kim, her style and character was really interesting.

She is basically the head of the Jang household even though she's a servant, I think she'd be a housekeeper in English? But she's raised the orphaned Jang Uk and she speaks with the other important people almost as an equal. So she wears her hair and dresses almost like a mini lady, not quite as fancy but close.

Lady Jin for comparison:

The only critique I have of costumes is that while Jang Uk in black/silver/grey for season 2 made a lot of sense because he was mourning and in a dark place (though I think white is the colour of mourning but whatever), I think it would have been nice if he started wearing blue again either at the wedding or in the very last scene because he finally got her back. Especially the last scene.

#alchemy of souls #i love to love this drama #and how much thought has been put into everything #not directly related but Jinyowon soldiers outfit is so pretty #joli ET violet je me serais engagée là-bas juste pour ça