Favorite Dragon Moments

so in the Hollywood Reporter interview published in January (or Feb I can’t remember), GRRM said the following:

which to me very strongly suggests GRRM plans to kill Tyrion. like he doesn’t say that directly but lbr, the Tyrion comment is sandwiched between two comments about characters he means to kill - one could necessarily infer what he means.

and in my mind this was a huge revelation like wtf lol. how many of us last year actually thought Tyrion would be killed off. not me that’s for sure.

and yet all fandom has done w this is go ‘Tyrion will be sad about his brother being dead and might be unemployed :(‘ as though that’s significantly worse than what happens in the show. and theories have kind of just stopped there. and one of the primary reasons for that is bc certain factions tie Tyrion’s survival to the survival of their own faves bc of some spurious connections they’ve drawn based on the original outline and the concept of the ‘key five’. love that for Tyrion lmao. literally just a rhetorical life-ring for other characters apparently

so naturally the only thing that asoiaftwt actually locked onto was the idea of Sansa dying, which to me feels far less significant (given GRRM seems to backtrack in the same sentence) but ofc what is asoiaftwt when they’re not shitting on one teenage girl to champion another.

You can think what you like but I don’t think it works. Where this falls apart is that what happened to Rhaenyra—beginning with being targeted in her own home by Alicent, and being usurped, which leads to the war and her death—was unjustified and driven by misogyny. I’m not interested in a story about how THIS woman, this time, DID deserve her fate, and we did legwork to show you why so you’ll agree. I would find it far more progressive (and more satisfying) to see a story about a woman being mistreated and then killed and the narrative framing it as horrifying, and gendered, rather than her being put down like a bad dog by someone who—in Ryan Condal’s own words!—is now “more suited to the throne”, since Rhaenyra has been “contorted” by power

I found it really delicious that Helaena could be like, “There are things in the world that you’ll never know how beautiful they are, and they’re not even beautiful.” And that’s truly what she wants to get back to: having a relationship with the world and not being kept and silenced and used.

no i agree, this season has been unbearable because they simply will not let her do anything. partly has to do with them being worried about a misogynistic reaction from their audience but mostly because of the regressive gender politics of the show. rhaenyra's S3 writing amounts to almost entirely removing her from the process of governance, she hasn't made a single meaningful choice. like she is literally locked within her chambers in 3.01 and you're supposed to suspend your disbelief here, that westeros is so misogynistic that a queen regnant's teenage heir can simply overrule her authority. it was probably a parallel to alicent being ousted from the council by her sons but alicent is not a queen in her own right, she derives authority from her late husband and her sons, the season two moment was about the illusoriness of power derived from male authority, mirroring this with a queen regnant narrative makes it appear that all power held by women is illusory.