#i'm just like obsessed with the concept of narrative violence don't mind me

[lemonhemlock]

so, i'm going through your anti team black tag and living my best life, but one post in particular that you made got me thinking.

“george made damn sure rhaenyra’s bloodline sat on the throne at the end bc, if the hightowers won, house targaryen would have been reformed, and he couldn’t kill them all off at the end of the main series”

i'm pretty sure this might've just been a joke, but it makes me curious. do you think something like a targaryen reformation would be possible, hypothetically speaking? i certainly wouldn't mind it in a "greens win" AU scenario, but that's just me. i wanna know if anyone else sees potential in this. 💚💚💚

Hello, yes, this was mostly a joke, as it happens. 😅 (anon is referring to this post) To introduce another lengthy parenthesis, I remember at the time that some of the reactions to that post were in the range for "why doesn't anyone understand that the Hightowers are also feudal lords vying for their own interests and not some great reformists out to save Westeros", which... Listen. 😄 To put equitably, this fandom has a considerable issue with knowing when to level criticism and when to just treat banter as lighthearted horsing around and not take it too seriously. Something which even I'm not exempt from, I don't think. 🤷‍♀️

So, in the interest of making a meme, that post was kind of half-true in that it simplified a more nuanced concept (that was never an avenue that the author decided to explore anyway) for the sake of humour. I have, in the past, detailed my thoughts on House Hightower and what I think is their role in the wider narrative. This is based on the information we have on them presently. If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. Who knows, maybe Lord Leyton and Melara plan on blowing Oldtown up for shits and giggles. We don't have to guess everything correctly - another aspect this community struggles with in their fandom wars and obsession with having the most correct, morally pure take.

Regardless, yes, the Hightowers obviously are a privileged family at the top of the social food chain, benefitting from the exploitation awarded by feudalism - a political-economic system based on vast inequality. Therefore, any type of reform they might be willing to undertake will be limited and not really something that significantly changes the status-quo. Just like the beloved, fan-favourite, and mostly confirmed "winners" - the Starks. A third element that our fandom has trouble accepting is the concept of incremental change. I feel like it would basically be a truism to point out that incremental change has been the most reliable vector of socio-economic evolution throughout human history. So, bad news for them, I suppose, but any superficial study of history will reveal that feudalism hardly collapsed overnight. Which leads us back to the idea that any small change, no matter how limited, does matter in the long run, because, as time passes, it will be compounded with another small change and so on.

Anyway, coming back to the question. Would Targaryen reformation be possible? Certainly! GRRM could have made up any story he wanted. Anything is possible if you plan for it and it makes sense within your worldbuilding. As it stands, the Targaryens are foreigners with a questionable culture, hailing from a land that used to engage in practices that even the feudal Westerosi found backwards, distasteful, barbaric or immoral: slavery, human sacrifice, incest, great feats of violence such as pillaging and conquering neighbouring lands for the sake of feeding their population to their volcano gods etc. The Targaryens also have fire-breathing monsters that, while not exactly enough all the time to prevent any rebellions from happening, are weapons that no one else has access to and that can cause a great deal of damage that no one else can replicate.

So, in order to "reform" and integrate, they would need to renounce all that. They would need to do it the traditional way. They do some of the work, but never go all the way. They accept the main religion of the land, but they don't let go of inter-marrying, because they don't want to lose their access to dragons. There are attempts to integrate, but, by the time of the events of the main series, they have returned to incest. Funnily enough, Aegon V plays a role in both - he marries outside of the family and has no dragons left, but his succeeding son and daughter marry each other and, eventually, Aegon decides that bringing back dragons is not such a bad idea after all. I do think that the symbolic weight of Daenerys having both her parents and her grandparents as brother-sister sets is laying the "dragon blood" metaphor thick - and that it holds more magical weight than any mathematical calculation of her actual watered-down Targaryen DNA.

In any such scenario where GRRM decided to go down a Targaryen reformation path, IMO it would have been thematically-relevant to ease into it via a marriage alliance with one of the oldest families in Westeros - a well-respected, rich house that also has close links to both the only centre of higher education and the main religious organization in the land. Hence the meme. :) But it doesn't last and the Targaryens go back to their dastardly ways eventually, that's the point of them in the story, because the author chose it to be the point.

#call me crazy but grrm wasn't obligated to place BOTH the starry sept and the citadel in oldtown #and then have oldtown be controlled by 1 family #there is symbolic importance there and the hightowers /will/ play some part in the last two books #house hightower #anti team black #anti house targaryen #<- for filtering purposes #anyway #some fans really like to throw this 'feudalism is bad' interpretation like some sort of 'gotcha' #which? yes? but this is also the story. like. 🤦‍♀️ #positive change will occur at the end of the series but it will also be limited in scope. that was always going to be the case? #something something there is a line between not romanticising a historical period that was rife with inequality #vs having realistic expectations of our heroes; the story; and what the author can actually accomplish in the given setting #there is a line and it can be treaded and sometimes it's NOT that serious #you don't have to act as if liking the hightowers or *insert other westerosi noble family here* equals shilling for feudalism #at the end of the day it IS fiction and it IS meant to have a fun quality to it. you know. entertainment. just be normal about it

[eldritch-elrics]

“man i wish we could have gotten more lore about mo xuanyu, like maybe a flashback that included him or something like that”

vs

in denying us almost any information about mo xuanyu that does not come from a biased outside source, the narrative itself parallels the violence inflicted upon him by the cultivation world and by himself. like his half-brother jin guangyao and his body-heir wei wuxian, mo xuanyu is the subject of much rumor and speculation, yet we never hear the entirety of his side of the story. in the untamed, he doesn’t even have his own actor, it’s just xiao zhan there at the beginning - there is nothing about mo xuanyu that isn’t intrinsically bound to wei wuxian. the price of the sacrifice is more than just destruction of his soul, it is destruction of his entire metatextual character and narrative. in order for the protagonist - the character the narrative spends the most time looking at - to complete his story and get his happy ending, another character must be completely excluded from the narrative’s gaze. mo xuanyu forfeits his entire being, becoming something that exists only in the memories of other characters and not in the eyes of the narrative. mo xuanyu would not be the same character if we had ever been allowed to meet him in-story or if the tragedy of his sacrifice had ever been properly lingered upon. it is the gaps in the narrative, the things that are never properly questioned or called attention to, that make him who he is and that add an extra level of heartbreak to his already tragic story. in this essay i will

#mo xuanyu #mdzs #analysis #I KNOW IT'S NOT THAT DEEP BUT LISTEN. #we know from svsss that mxtx knows how to do meta shit #so like this is probably not intentional but i am thinking about it #my post #mxy #i'm just like obsessed with the concept of narrative violence don't mind me