Bimyselfhistory

-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)

-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt

-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint

-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-

Book Alicent was surrounded by rumors from a very young age. There are stories that she slept with Viserys before her marriage to him, rumors that Daemon took her virginity, even claims that she was involved with or molested by the elderly King Jaehaerys. Whether those rumors are true is almost beside the point. The fact that they existed at all shows how quickly a teenage girl’s reputation could become public property and it’s damaging and sexualization. Adults were openly speculating about her sexuality for political purposes when she was still around fifteen.

Otto positioned Alicent to do excessive work for Jaehaerys I, acting as his caretaker. At just 15yo she was bathing an old man and fetching his food. Then the text itself notes that people at court suspected Otto had larger ambitions and had brought Alicent to court with the intention of advancing the family’s position "there were those who murmured that the Hand had risen above himself, that he had brought his daughter to court with this in mind." The book practically winks at the reader and says that people noticed what Otto was doing.

That doesn’t mean Alicent had zero agency and It doesn’t mean she never wanted power. But having ambitions does not magically erase abuse. A teenager can want power & status and still be used by her father and a woman can participate in politics and still be sexualized by the adults around her.

If her wanting to be a queen doesn't make her a victim, then Rhaenyra isn't a victim either.

What makes Alicent not loving Viserys and wanting power “shallow”? Seriously. People act like a woman not marrying for love automatically makes her selfish or inferior but that’s a very modern way of looking at her society. Love matches weren’t the norm. Even GRRM has talked about how noble marriages were primarily political arrangements not about love.

Rhaenyra herself didn’t marry Laenor because she was madly in love with him. She married him because it was politically necessary and because Viserys essentially threatened to disinherit her if she refused. So she accepted to marry him because she wanted to be a queen.

Alicent understood the world she lived in and tried to make the best of the opportunities available to her. In a society where women are expected to be silent, obedient tools for the ambitions of men, she found ways to gain influence and exercise power herself.

That’s not shallowness that’s ambition. And it’s funny because people praise ambition in male characters all the time. Men can want power, and they’re called strategic or interesting. A woman wants those same things and she’s “shallow” or “power-hungry.”

Alicent actively participated in politics. She helped lead the Green Council. She built relationships and influence at court. After Viserys died, she remained one of the most politically important figures in the realm. She didn’t just inherit power through a husband. She made herself politically relevant in her own right.

And the idea that she only cared about power is such a misogynistic take. We know that she genuinely loved Jaehaerys and took care of him. We know that she spent time with her children and grandchildren. We know she was close to Helaena and she suffered enormously after Blood and Cheese. We know the deaths of her children devastated her. We know that by the end of the war, grief has practically consumed her. That doesn’t sound like someone who only cared about power it sounds like a woman who cared about both power and family.

And honestly, that’s what makes her feel realistic. Most people aren’t driven by only one thing. Human beings are messy. They can be ambitious and loving and they can want power and still genuinely care about their children.

Alicent’s tragedy isn’t that she loved power half the nobles in Westeros love power her tragedy is that she lived in a system where power, family, survival, and duty became so tangled together that she could no longer separate them.

I have always wanted to explore why Rhaenyra Targaryen could never truly be a feminist. This isn't just because George R.R. Martin chose not to write her that way, but from a purely logical perspective, the constraints of the medieval era she was born into are not all that different from the systemic struggles we still face today.

By the absolute laws of feudal autocracy, Rhaenyra Targaryen was trapped in a systemic paradox where attempting to be a modern feminist and dismantle the patriarchal society would have guaranteed her immediate destruction. The political power of every highborn lord in Westeros rested entirely on male-preference primogeniture: if Rhaenyra had tried to overturn this system to grant equal inheritance rights to all women, she would have directly threatened the birthright of almost every first-born son in the Seven Kingdoms.

Expecting her to champion a social revolution while fighting a civil war completely misinterprets medieval politics, as her remaining noble allies would have instantly abandoned her to unite with the Greens, viewing her not just as an illegitimate ruler, but as an existential threat to their entire dynastic wealth and power. Attempting to force such a systemic upheaval would have ignited a much greater war, a total societal collapse far exceeding a mere war of inheritance or the tragic deaths of her children. Such an all-consuming conflict would likely have fractured Westeros right back into its chaotic, bloody pre-Targaryen era of rival kingdoms, leaving not a single soul alive to even record what occurred in the historical annals.

To secure the Iron Throne, Rhaenyra was forced to play by the rules of the very system that oppressed her, assuring traditional lords that her ascension would change absolutely nothing about their daily lives or successions. This perfectly mirrors the real-world medieval history of The Anarchy, where Empress Matilda could only fight for her personal birthright, knowing that attempting to upend 12th-century feudalism would cause an even greater crisis and destroy her only path to victory. Ultimately, Rhaenyra had to prove she could be just as unyielding, traditional, and stable as any male monarch, demonstrating the tragic reality of feudalism: she had to strictly enforce the patriarchal rules against other women just to protect her own survival at the top of the pyramid.

Rhaenyra’s inability to dismantle the patriarchy is deeply tied to her own internal battle with her identity, where her complex queerness, fluid sexuality, and profound gender envy were actively weaponized against her. She did not seek to reform the system for all women because her desires were intensely localized: she craved the unique freedoms, bodily autonomy, and raw institutional power reserved exclusively for men, viewing herself as an exception rather than a revolutionary. However, the genuine blame for her tragic entrapment within the system rests squarely with King Viserys I, whose passive negligence, stacking of the Small Council with Green loyalists, and brutal sacrifice of Queen Aemma on the childbed created the institutional rot that enabled the war. Otto Hightower, a master political strategist, expertly recognized these vulnerabilities early on, most likely discerning Rhaenyra’s deep, unspoken feelings for his daughter, Alicent. By explicitly orchestrating Alicent’s marriage to King Viserys, Otto didn't just secure a Hightower bloodline on the throne he executed a cruel, pre-meditated psychological agenda alongside the elite lords of Westeros, who chose a catastrophic civil war over allowing a woman to set a dangerous inheritance precedent for their own first-born sons.

By alienating Rhaenyra from her intimate queer bonds and trapping her in isolation, Otto and the elite ruling class ensured that her deep-seated envy and trauma would dictate her future actions, forcing her to aggressively play by the patriarchy's rules just to survive the very trap they all built. For decades, a distraught Rhaenyra viewed this as a cold, whole-hearted betrayal, never realizing that her former companion's outward hostility was actually born out of a deeply repressed, agonizing love and a severe case of sexual jealousy over the freedom Rhaenyra possessed to move between male and female partners.

i can recognize white people as a whole have systemically oppressed POC in america, which is where i live 

most people when they make white people jokes only mean the shitty white people and i am not a shitty white person 

MBTI has been proven completely ineffective at predicting anyone’s success at a particular job, and half the people who take it twice will get different results. Reputable psychologists do not recognize it, and the company that owns the rights to it uses it to scam people. People don’t adhere to strict binaries in basically anything. Very few people are going to be exclusively introverted or extroverted. It’s just astrology repackaged as pseudoscience. Shockingly enough, you can’t boil the complexity of the human experience down to a dozen Types of Guy.

The concept of IQ is flawed from the start— “intelligence” is an abstract concept that encompasses many different skills, from social intelligence to emotional intelligence to the very narrow kind of problem solving intelligence IQ tests generally measure for. It cannot predict how fast you learn, how much you know, or how logical and well read you are. It mostly measures how good you are at solving puzzles. Coincidentally, it’s also a pretty good predictor of income and education level, take a guess why. Most people’s IQ will change throughout their lives, because it’s inconsistent bullshit we’ve only held onto this long because we’re still kinda hoping we can breed the ubermensch. IQ tests and the way they attempt to categorize people are explicitly eugenicist and racist.

BMI was developed by a man known as the grandfather of eugenics, who first of all was a mathematician, not a doctor, and second never intended the formula to be used to categorize individuals. It’s intended to give a rough estimate of obesity in populations, and it’s not even good at that. It hangs around because of fatphobia and insurance companies who want it as an excuse to charge fat people more.

The study which determined people’s prefrontal cortex was still developing at 25… stopped measuring at 25. Evidence suggests your brain probably never stops developing. Stop infantilizing grown adults. This is a branch off from the larger mess of misinformation surrounding fMRIs.

The Price of Gilded Cages: The Jezebelification of Katherine Howard, Rhaenyra Targaryen, and Alicent Hightower.

The parallel between Queen Katherine Howard, Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, and Queen Alicent Hightower is a stark study in how patriarchal societies transform young victims of systemic exploitation into narrative villains. Across history and fiction, these figures are subjected to a profound "jezebelification" or character flattening that reduces their complex realities into a singular, moralizing trope: the manipulative woman who engineered her own ruin. By stripping away historical bias and narrative propaganda, it becomes clear that Katherine, Rhaenyra, and Alicent are fundamentally cut from the same cloth. They are young girls trapped in gilded cages, surrounded by immense political power but possessed of zero personal autonomy, forced to navigate a world where their bodies are public property and their survival depends on men who view them only as objects of desire or political currency.

The foundation of their shared tragedy lies in the sickening reality of childhood sexual abuse, masked as education, affection, or duty by the trusted adult men in their lives. In Tudor England, an impoverished, neglected Katherine Howard was only around twelve or thirteen years old when her music tutor, Henry Manox, used his position of authority to systematically groom and molest her. Manox frequented the young women's dormitory, repeatedly groping Katherine in her bed and engaging in illicit sexual touching a disgusting violation that Katherine later testified she only submitted to because she mistakenly believed he would leave her alone afterward. This stomach-turning dynamic is mirrored with horrific precision in how the men of Westeros view and treat Rhaenyra Targaryen. Rhaenyra’s body is treated with the exact same casual, nasty objectification: her own uncle, Daemon Targaryen, views her childhood innocence not as something to protect, but as a political canvas to defile. When Daemon takes her to a King's Landing pleasure house, strips her down, and exposes her to a hyper-sexualized underbelly, he is enacting the exact same grotesque betrayal as Manox using a position of absolute trust and familial authority to fundamentally compromise a child's bodily autonomy for personal gratification.

Furthermore, Katherine, Rhaenyra, and Alicent existed in high places of power where they were treated as supreme royal prizes, yet they possessed less actual agency than the lowest-ranking men at court. Katherine was used as a literal biological token by her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, who thrust her into the path of a volatile, aging King Henry VIII to secure political leverage for the Catholic faction: she had no legal or social mechanism to refuse the supreme monarch of England. Similarly, though Rhaenyra was named Heir to the Iron Throne, her status did not grant her freedom: it merely turned her into the ultimate political commodity, paraded before the lords of the realm like a prize mare. Alicent’s situation was no different: she was traded to the crown to secure Hightower blood on the throne, forced into a marriage defined by profound power imbalances where she had to pick and tear at her cuticles until they bled just to cope with the suffocating, silent anxiety of her reality.

This illusion of power was further complicated by a crushing double standard regarding reproductive duty and chastity, where a young woman's worth was entirely reduced to the state of her body. Henry VIII famously objectified Katherine as his "rose without a thorn," demanding she embody a pristine, submissive fantasy designed to revive his fading youth. When Rhaenyra and Alicent reached marriageable age, the entire political stability of the Seven Kingdoms was similarly pinned to their virtues, but in completely inverted ways. Rhaenyra was expected to remain pure while the men around her operated with total sexual impunity. Alicent, conversely, was forced to become the epitome of the quiet, submissive, and pious maiden sacrificing her youth to silently disassociate and stare blankly at the ceiling with hollow eyes while fulfilling her "sacred obligation" to breed male heirs for an aging, rotting sovereign. Whether they sought pleasure or merely submitted to duty, their bodies were never truly their own: they belonged to the state and to the lineage.

The true horror of their interconnected narratives is exposed in the way men disgustingy use them for sex, hiding behind a mask of moral righteousness while enacting the ultimate "Jezebel" trap. This is embodied entirely by Ser Criston Cole, who hypocritically exploits both Rhaenyra and Alicent for his own desires while destroying their safety. Criston willingly takes Rhaenyra's maidenhood, but the moment she refuses to abandon her crown to run away and soothe his wounded pride, he turns on her with bitter, lifelong vitriol, painting her as a reckless whore. Years later, he climbs into Alicent's bed under the guise of being her loyal, pious protector. While he actively uses Alicent for physical solace, his dereliction of duty allows assassins to infiltrate the Red Keep and murder her grandson yet it is Alicent who bears the crushing weight of shame and narrative vilification. Like Katherine Howard, whose survival tactics with Thomas Culpeper were twisted into treasonous manipulation, both show women are systematically used by men who prioritize their own urges, only for the court and the realm to rewrite these young women into calculating, sexual predators who brought about their own ruin.

The historical and narrative erasure of their trauma is where the process of vilification becomes complete, shifting the blame of structural abuse entirely onto the victims. For centuries, traditional history books and popular media flattened Katherine Howard into a frivolous, boy-crazy nymphomaniac who essentially engineered her own execution through sheer stupidity, rather than a child victim of a predatory court. This exact distortion plays out in modern fandom discourse surrounding House of the Dragon. Viewers frequently misread Rhaenyra’s early arcs, either celebrating her grooming by Daemon as an empowering "girlboss" romance or vilifying her as a reckless hypocrite. Simultaneously, the audience often flattens Alicent into a venomous, bitter stepmother, completely erasing her quiet, self-harming nervous tics, her deep disassociation, and the overwhelming systemic pressure that stripped both Westerosi women of their agency.

Ultimately, all three women were crushed by the very systems that elevated them, their lives cut short or permanently marred by a legacy of state-sanctioned violence and character assassination. Katherine’s story ended on the executioner’s block at just eighteen years old, her name dragged through the mud as a warning to unchaste women everywhere. Rhaenyra and Alicent’s trajectories mirror this descent into ruin: the weaponization of their youth and their bodies eventually fractured their families, leading to a devastating civil war that consumed them both.

The patriarchy could not tolerate a woman who existed outside its rigid, impossible definitions of womanhood, and so it destroyed them all rewriting their histories to ensure they were remembered not as victims of a brutal political meat-grinder, but as the architects of their own tragedy. To look at Katherine Howard, young Rhaenyra Targaryen, and young Alicent Hightower is to see the exact same reflection across three different mirrors one forged in historical reality and the others in high fantasy. They are bound by the shared tragedy of being young women whose youth was stolen by predatory men, whose power was an illusion, and whose survival instincts were rewritten by history as inherent vice. By recognizing how all three figures are systematically flattened, we expose the persistent cultural habit of blaming young women for the predatory environments that consume them. They are one and the same because they represent the ultimate, tragic truth: in a patriarchal system, a young woman will be condemned whether she fights the rules, breaks the rules, or follows them to the letter.

Sources and Historical References:

Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII. (Primary state papers detailing the 1541 examinations of Katherine Howard, Henry Manox, and Francis Dereham regarding the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk's household).

"When I think about you, which is, like, all the time, I get dizzy and my maxilla goes numb."

"And do your patellas quiver?"

"I'm surprised I'm still standing."

Happy Pride Month!

Faust is back for the 5th time! If you want to use the flag of your choice as an avatar, they're under the cut. They're free to use as long as it's for personal use only.

Alicent pushing for her sons isn’t selfish act it’s pretty consistent with how inheritance works. Most mothers “widows” in that world would absolutely prioritize their children’s claims, especially in a system where a rival claimant is also a potential threat to your kids’ lives. Disinheriting a son in a male-preference system isn’t a small thing, it’s a massive slight with real consequences for status and safety. People downplay that way too much.

A) It’s not unusual for women in history to go against their husbands wishes for their sons.

What even counts as “selfish” in a world where survival and family protection are all entangled with political violence and succession crisis?

William the conqueror publicly mocked his eldest son Robert by calling him “Curthose” (“short-stockings”) He favored his younger children. William didn’t trust him, didn’t respect him, and never gave him real authority. And his mother Matilda secretly funded her son’s rebellion against her husband William, risking her marriage, status, and safety. By defying the most powerful man in Western Europe to protect her child, William publicly accused her of using his money to “arm and succour and strengthen [the rebels] to my grave peril.” 

Isabella of France fled to France. she returned with an army and an alliance with her lover, Roger Mortimer. She successfully deposed her husband king Edward II and had him imprisoned (and likely murdered) and helped place her son, Edward III, on the throne.

Eleanor of Aquitaine went against her husband, Henry II, and backed her sons' revolt against him. The rebellion failed, and Henry imprisoned Eleanor for 15 years. However, upon Henry II's death, her son Richard I took the crown, freed her, and she wielded power acting as regent during his crusades. When Richard died, she successfully campaigned for her younger son, John, to succeed him as King.

Margaret Beaufort spent years maneuvering politically to secure her son’s claim. was deeply threatened by the Yorkist kings. She went against them, turning to political intrigue and plotting rebellions against Richard III. She successfully united support for her son, Henry Tudor.

God forbid GRRM writes a historically accurate woman who fights for her son’s position instead of quietly obeying and dying tragically after fulfilling her reproductive function. Queens, queen mothers, regents, noblewomen defending their children’s inheritance is not impossible feminist anomaly invented for fantasy drama. history is FULL of women scheming, ruling, rebelling, or outright going against husbands, councils, and political expectations for their children’s survival or claims but somehow a woman acting politically for her son in a succession crisis becomes “evil ambition” while passive suffering gets instantly romanticized as the more acceptable form of femininity.

If every major house do the same thing advancing their own bloodline and protecting heirs then calling one woman “selfish” for doing it is less about ethics and more about selectively feminism by punishing a female ambition inside a system everyone else is already playing.

The point of the story: This tale isn’t about “one woman the main character being denied power.” No it’s the tale of the princess (rhaenyra) and the queen (Alicent), the Blacks and the Greens. You can see from the title of the story. I can also flip the argument and reduce the whole tale to a second wife who risked her life in childbirth and was denied power through her children, simply bc she was treated as an exception. But It isn’t just a ONE woman denied. It’s TWO women the princess and the queen. It’s not simply “ambitious greedy entitled woman vs. wronged woman.”One woman is treated as an exception to male preference, the other is treated as an exception to the usual power afforded a queen mother. Exceptions are unstable. That’s why the story isn’t just about personal bitterness. It’s about a political order that tried to hold two contradictory ideas at once: A daughter can inherit like a son. A queen consort has no independent claim through her children if it contradicts the king’s will. 

B) Competition for power happens with other women too.

We will see Stark widows women push for their sons’ inheritance. Widows and noble mothers act as political protectors for their children, bc their own status is tied directly to whether their sons inherit. If the line of succession is unclear or threatened, it makes sense that different Stark women would try to secure advantages for their own children behind the scenes.

“The She-Wolves” story and “The Princess & the Queen” being included in an anthology called Dangerous Women already frames them in a specific way.

The anthology introduction emphasizes women with actual political influence and disruptive power inside their societies. Not passive little NPC wives standing prettily in the background. These women matter bc they can alter succession and redirect history itself.

And notice how women become “dangerous” the second they wield power in ways that aren’t purely decorative. Men scheming, conquering, manipulating succession and starting wars, is treated as standard political behavior. But women doing the exact same thing become threatening, manipulative, hysterical, evil, etc. The double standard is baked right into the language.

So…

when Stark widows or Alicent are described as “dangerous,” it’s more about women acting as players in succession struggles and women using limited tools available to them to protect their children’s claims.

They’re not “dangerous” bc they’re uniquely power-hungry. They’re “dangerous” bc they work in spaces usually dominated by MEN, they assert claims (their sons’ & their own position) and they refuse to stay passive when inheritance is at stake. The Stark widows fighting behind the scenes or Alicent another widow pushing for her sons isn’t unusual it’s what happens when women in a restrictive system finally have leverage.

These women aren’t just reacting emotionally they’re engaging in the same logic as everyone else. The only difference is that when women do it, it gets written as something more threatening or “dangerous”, bc it disrupts expectations of what they’re “supposed” to be. There’s a gendered double standard in how agency is interpreted.

And since house like the Starks that has multiple marriages across generations. If Beron Stark is dying, it makes sense that different Stark women would be active behind the scenes, each trying to protect their own children’s position in the line of succession. Women like Serena & Sansa being left out of clear inheritance paths would logically contribute to those underlying disputes, since their children’s status would depend on how that succession gets decided.

Widows in Asoiaf are politically weaker overall, bc their authority is tied to their husband’s status or their sons’ inheritance. If their sons don’t inherit, that weakness can increase even more:

they lose the main source of their long-term influence (their line continuing power)

their position at court becomes more dependent on others’ favor

rival branches of the family may push them aside

they can be politically sidelined if their faction loses the succession struggle

A widow’s stability is closely connected to whether her children secure inheritance. If they don’t, her influence usually declines, bc she no longer has a direct stake being recognized in the power structure.

I am not talking about widows in the sense of whether they are “deserving” of power in a moral or governmental evaluation of what rulers should do for the public. I am talking specifically about widows as political actors inside succession systems, and what kinds of conditions determine whether a highborn widow can actually secure her position or her children’s inheritance without being challenged.

Check this post about marriage contracts.

If Viserys had made it absolutely clear before marrying Alicent that Rhaenyra would not be replaced as heir, then the political situation around that marriage could have been very different. Otto’s decision to push Alicent forward is tied directly to uncertainty about succession, not just personal ambition. It’s common for men without sons to remarry specifically to produce a male heir, and that expectation shapes how other lords interpret a king’s choices. That’s why Corlys offering Laena to Viserys makes sense politically it’s another attempt to secure influence through a potential male line and strengthen alliances at the same time.

Fire&Blood:

The rough prince:

And it wasn’t just Otto and Alicent others in the realm also questioned it, pointing back to the ruling of the Great Council in 101. Viserys’ response, though, is essentially to shut the conversation down instead of clearly reinforcing or revising that precedent in a way everyone can accept. So instead of resolving the uncertainty, he leaves it hanging.

It was EXPECTED and NORMAL for noble women to want their children to inherit.

CATELYN STARK

Catelyn is highly sensitive to anything that threatens her children’s inheritance that’s a big part of why she resented Jon, since she saw him as a potential rival to her children. Within that same framework, it’s very hard to imagine she’d be fine with a stepdaughter inheriting over her own son. Her own blood!

“Precedent,” she said, her voice bitter. “Yes, Aegon the Fourth legitimized all his bastards on his deathbed. And look at all the misery, war, and death that followed. You may trust Jon now. But will you trust his sons? Or their sons after them? The Blackfyre pretenders kept coming back for five generations, until Barristan the Bold finally killed the last of them. If you make Jon legitimate, you can never unmake it. If he marries and has children, any sons you have by Jeyne will never be safe.”

“He is your son, not mine. I will not have him.” — Catelyn Stark, A Game of Thrones.

DAENERYS TARGARYEN

Daenerys herself was already imagining her son as king while Viserys was still alive. There doesn't seem to be much doubt there, and she sounds pretty certain that her son will sit on the iron throne.

“Yet they were bound to Drogo for life and death, so Daenerys had no choice but to accept them. And sometimes she found herself wishing her father had been protected by such men. In the songs, the white knights of the Kingsguard were ever noble, valiant, and true, and yet King Aerys had been murdered by one of them, the handsome boy they now called the Kingslayer, and a second, Ser Barristan the Bold, had gone over to the Usurper. She wondered if all men were as false in the Seven Kingdoms. When her son sat the Iron Throne, she would see that he had bloodriders of his own to protect him against treachery in his Kingsguard.”

VISENYA AND RHAENYS

Even GRRM did confirmed that Visenya and Rhaenys competed for Aegon influence, and authority. There was tension and rivalry in how they related to him and to their positions in the new order.

MARGERY AND OLENNA

Margaery and Olenna absolutely wouldn’t just accept their line being sidelined. Olenna is ruthless, she’s willing to have Joffrey killed when she sees him as an immediate existential problem. Y’all really think Olenna would just sit there and accept her granddaughter Margaery’s son getting passed over for Rhaenyra, the stepdaughter?

RHAENYRA & DRIFTMARK

Check this POST!

Rhaenyra herself acts violently when her children’s position is threatened, which shows she works under the same logic as Alicent. When her line is at risk, she doesn’t respond with restraint or principle she prioritizes her children’s survival above all else.

This isn’t Alicent being uniquely selfish. It’s a system where almost any mother in her position would push the same way. But I know a lot of team black stans being historically illiterate and it’s not shocking when parts of fandom discourse treat a quasi medieval succession crisis like a modern election cycle with HR policies and peaceful transitions of power. You can absolutely support Rhaenyra’s claim and still recognize that queens, queen mothers, noblewomen, and regents historically fought for their sons, feared rival claimants, and did not just politely sit down waiting to see what happened to their children. That’s not “evil woman behavior,” that’s fucking historically accurate woman, the problem is less “which team” and more when people flatten medieval / early modern succession logic into modern discourse and then act shocked that characters behave according to the brutal rules of their world.

(for the shaunahat scene analysis masterpost, click here)

Alright, we’ve reached the first “actual” shaunahat scene. The one where the ship officially sailed. And oh boy, there is a lot to say about this scene, so bear with me.