whoa cookie run content :0
speedran these last night,, they WERE supposed to get fully rendered but B.A.D 4 decided to take over the crk twitter and sign lots of stuff so gradients will do
got zzskull (beloved) to sign one
stan B.A.D 4
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dude i have a question that might be considered out of pocket but i need your brilliant take on it
i was rewatching the finale last night (because i like to cause myself pain) and i got to the part where aemond said he wanted to make a gift of luke's eye to his mother
so my question is
genuinely, what the hell do you think alicent would have done if aemond returned with luke's fucking eye😭😭😭
lmao welcome to my entirely unrequested character study of aemond. short answer: she'd be horrified, and that scene more than anything speaks to the beautiful fraught asymmetry of alicent and aemond's relationship, palpable and tragic and woefully understudied.
alicent does not desire violence and does not particularly respect violent people. e.g., we can imagine characters who might have been heartened or reassured — even if interspersed with guilt — that larys had been willing to kill to advance their interests. alicent is never shown to appreciate this silver lining; she is deeply remorseful and properly disturbed. the end of the season finds her attempting to stave off catastrophic violence surrounded by men who are effectively unbothered by the thought. aemond is one of these men. he is also her favourite man. i think this breaks her heart a little.
i'll preface this by stating again how much i sympathise with aemond, who is really neither a slick badass — his facade — nor a calculating psychopath — his caricature. aemond spends his childhood awash in a feeling of inescapable, humiliating powerlessness, and everything he becomes is a direct response to this experience, including his unfailing loyalty to his mother, his sole childhood advocate and ally. but aemond clocks alicent's powerlessness, too; and probably at no other time more palpably than during the quarrel at driftmark. viserys leaves her in the lurch; cole backs out when the rubber hits the road. when he tells her i gained a dragon, i don't think he's actually saying it was a fair exchange; clearly he doesn't really feel that way — he's still seeking his revenge years and years later (and fair enough). rather, i think he's telling her — and importantly, telling the people he perceives to be her enemies — we have real power now. we're safe. i got you.
aemond consistently strives to be alicent's one reliable ally. aemond also spends his life trying to make himself more powerful, and, if i were to really speculate, probably hasn't determined within his own heart whether he's done so to protect himself and his mother in the conflict he's seen presaged at driftmark, or in excited anticipation of that conflict as an opportunity to seek revenge. herein we find the crucial difference in how alicent and aemond each perceive safety, and perceive power — alicent thinks safety is found in the absence of violence, and power is the ability to be free from it; aemond seems to believe safety is found in a monopoly on violence and power is the ability to do it. it's entirely unrelated, and not to be insensitive by mixing factual and fictional tragedy, but i think sometimes about something prince harry once said about his childhood experiences watching the press chase and torment princess diana — his frustration knowing he would one day be a man, that he would one day be able to protect her, but not yet — and the anger, the frustration that caused. i append to aemond, though fictional, a very similar pain.
regardless, to whatever end, aemond's intention is to be feared and to be dangerous. he tells cole i don't give a fuck about tourneys for the express purpose of tipping us off: aemond is trying to become as effective as possible at killing real opponents in a real conflict. two things here: first, though aemond may not care for tourneys like the knights Rhaenys calls green as summer grass, he's equally inexperienced; he also doesn't know — cannot know — the true meaning of war or the costs associated. (see, e.g., his crucial misunderstanding of the nature of vhagar.) and second, tragically, though he's probably (if perhaps only partially) done so for her, he's become exactly the kind of man who has left alicent feeling trapped and perpetually terrified. olivia cooke somewhere noted that alicent lives in trepidation surrounded by 'psychopath men', and part of this fear seems to be what these men will do in her name and under the guise of advancing her interests. e.g., she knows larys' murder of lyonel did double duty. Tis only a look of pride, Ser Criston. Larys is the new lord of Harrenhal. to have become somewhat afraid of aemond — apprehensive, at least, of his adult nature — will likely only grow harder on her and harder to ignore. and the same will likely come of aemond's unintentional killing of lucerys, and would come had aemond returned instead with his severed eye: horror at the act; guilt and terror and frustration at the knowledge — however deeply buried — that aemond would have done it not for her, or for their family, but for himself; and that once again, she has been made the unwilling catalyst for the very violence she strives so painfully to prevent.
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Deercember Day Twenty-Seven: Columbian Black-tailed Deer | Will-o'-wisp
The Columbian black-tailed deer or blacktail (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) is found in western North America, from Northern California into the Pacific Northwest of the United States and coastal British Columbia in Canada. East of the Cascade and Sierra Nevada Ranges in Oregon and California, black-tailed deer are replaced by other mule deer which have a different tail pattern. They have sometimes been treated as a species, but virtually all recent authorities maintain they are subspecies of the mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus). Strictly speaking, the black-tailed deer group consists of two subspecies, as it also includes Odocoileus hemionus sitkensis (the Sitka deer). Despite this, the mtDNA of the white-tailed deer and mule deer are similar, but differ from that of the black-tailed deer. This may be the result of introgression, although hybrids between the mule deer and white-tailed deer are rare in the wild (apparently more common in West Texas), and the hybrid survival rate is low even in captivity. These two subspecies thrive on the edge of the forest, as the dark forest lacks the underbrush and grasslands the deer prefer as food, and completely open areas lack the hiding spots and cover they prefer for harsh weather. One of the plants that black-tailed deer browse is western poison oak, despite its irritant content. During the winter and early spring, they feed on Douglas fir, western red cedar, red huckleberry, salal, deer fern, and lichens growing on trees. Late spring to fall, they consume grasses, blackberries, apples, fireweed, pearly everlasting, forbs, salmonberry, salal, and maple. More information here.
References: Deer, Background, Mushrooms 1, Mushrooms 2.
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“Mushroom Cloud!”
Fantastic Four #45 (December 1965)
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Joe Sinnott and Stan Goldberg
Marvel Comics
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