kingslaying enjoyer

my problem with sexual assault in hotd s3 is really exemplified by the fact alicent is sexually assaulted in 3.02 and it never comes up again. we don’t get her thoughts or feelings about it. how does that effect her? how does it fit in with her lifelong history of abuse, how is it the same as previous experiences and how is it different, how is she framing or making sense of this? no clue! we no longer have any meaningful access to alicent’s interiority, which is a huge issue with the season, so we simply do not know. this is also true of the nameless girl assaulted by a nameless soldier, also in 3.02. you get slightly more with kat, hugh’s wife, about the attack her brother fended off, but also kat is so entirely written as “wife who is going to die so this man’s plot can advance with no significant narrative presence outside this function” so also not really, in combination with the rest it feels of a similar category. after the first season where alicent and rhaenyra’s experiences of rape and sexual coercion were given such thorough attention, it’s noticeable. even dyanna’s rape by aegon in 1.08, though it mostly exists to be a mirror for alicent and tell us about her, is at least given a real emotional weight and narrative centrality in that episode, and i really appreciated her showing up in s2 even if only in a small role, to show her life exceeds that moment. it’s a disappointing turn. the number of onscreen sexual assaults have picked up but the narrative attention or care given to them has dropped - bad, bizarre combo!

slow horses 🤝 house of the dragon: delaying a canonical character death in order to keep freddie fox around longer

i do think the kpopification of asoiaf arguments has to do with how hotd was marketed as one team vs the other on top of that just being how twitter talks about most everything now

i think it is just stan culture and how it developed and worsened over time. it is not like this wasnt there with game of thrones lol, id argue hotd just built on it and became an extension of it, but i wouldnt even say it is about the marketing or material of the show as much as just pushing asoiaf as a series back into the mainstream and making it have a very active audience again