Terrible, Beautiful Sparks in Space

ngl I’m kind of liking the Rhaena change like waaaaaay more than I thought I would

The idea of being emotionally neglected your entire life because you’re not a dragonrider and thus not useful in the impending dynastic civil war and dragons are who we are and thinking if only I can fix this personal deficiency then my dad and my family will love me and then at the last minute while being sent away you risk your life but manage to hunt down and claim a wild dragon but you cannot control the dragons you cannot actually pock the consequences of war and in defending you the dragon who has kept you alive actually makes sure you can never ever go home again and be a Targaryen. maybe you’re something else now.

i think a lot of people heard about chekov's gun and thought it only applied to like. actual guns. and that it wasn't meant to be extended to literally every element a writer puts in a story

chekov's gun is supposed to be about how no superfluous elements should exist in a work at all. there shouldn't be anything there that doesn't serve a purpose. on its face, it's a directive aimed at writers. but the inverse of that, for us the audience, is that if something is in a story, we can generally assume that it wasn't put there on accident. we can assume that it serves a purpose. even if it seems random and pointless at first, we have to assign it meaning, because otherwise it wouldn't be there. that random piece of characterization? the author must have considered it vital, or it wouldn't be there. the way the camera lingered on a specific thing? you can be sure it's important. the way characters dress, their backgrounds, their habits, it all says something about who they are and how the author intends you to see them. it's the basis of media analysis: why does this element exist? what's its purpose? why was it put there? people always say i'm great at media analysis, but this is really all i do. you recognize the elements, and figure out what purpose they serve.

an interesting thing about clothing in late medieval and early modern europe is that, while lower class people generally did wear brightly colored clothing instead of muddy brown clothes, there were very distinct differences in the color of clothing people of different classes wore. clothing was done with all natural dyes, of course, but they were either dyed locally with cheap and easily accessible ingredients, or they were dyed in holland, italy, the ottoman empire, or even further afield using a jealously guarded secret combination of difficult-to-access ingredients, including (crucially) better-quality fixatives. this means that not only did expensive imported fabrics maintain a dark, rich tone much longer than a locally dyed one, which would get a washed out look after a couple of years, but there were also certain colors that a working class farmer literally couldn’t afford to wear, and even though the difference between a cheap local lincoln green and an expensive imported popingay green might seem subtle to us people then seem to have been very sensitive to those differences. that’s also why the colors puritans tended to wear seem uncharacteristically bright to our modern eye—black was such a rich and expensive color that it would be inappropriate to wear to anything other than a portrait sitting, but the colors orange and kendall green were deeply humble in their origins

no one anywhere ever has been "self sufficient"