Big Blue Elf

hasty swing.

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⊹ What do they want vs what do they need. these should not be the same thing. what they want is the surface goal ( the job, the person, the revenge, the answer.) What they need is the thing underneath that they can't name yet. The story is what happens in the gap between those two things. if they're identical your character has nowhere to go.

⊹ What are they wrong about. Not morally wrong necessarily. just. what belief do they hold that the story is going to test. What assumption do they make about themselves or the world that turns out to be incomplete? A character without a wrong belief is already finished. They have no arc, give them something to learn even if learning it hurts them.

⊹ How do they talk when they're nervous. Do they go quiet or do they talk too much? do they deflect with jokes? do they get weirdly formal? do they ask questions instead of answering them? the way a person behaves under pressure is who they actually are. And it should be different from how they behave when they're comfortable.

⊹ What do they find funny. this one sounds small and it is not small at all. Humour is worldview. What makes someone laugh tells you what they value, what they're afraid of, how they handle pain. A character with no sense of humour is just flat. even the gravest person finds something absurd. find the thing.

⊹ What are they ashamed of? not their tragic backstory. their actual shame. The small ugly thing they would never say out loud. The time they were a coward. The feeling they pretend not to have. The desire they think disqualifies them from being a good person. Shame is where the most interesting character work lives and most writers skip straight over it :(

Your action hero just got shot in the shoulder, stitched it up in a motel bathroom, and is now running through a forest. I need you to know that a shoulder wound severs muscle, nerves, and sometimes bone, and the human body's response to that is not "mild wincing followed by full range of motion." here is what injuries actually do to peoplee...

⊹ Adrenaline is REAL and it does allow people to do extraordinary things immediately after injury, BUT it is a loan, not a gift. you borrow the function and you pay it back later with interest. Your character might genuinely be able to run for twenty minutes after being stabbed. and then the adrenaline drops and everything the body was delaying arrives all at once. the collapse is NOT weakness. it's biology collecting its debt. write the debt collection. it's more interesting than the heroic sprint anyway.

⊹ Blood loss changes cognition before it drops you. you don't go from "fine" to "unconscious." you go through a whole middle stage of confusion, poor decision-making, emotional dysregulation, a strange calm, tunnel vision, difficulty forming sentences. Your injured character making a bad call, saying something they normally wouldn't, becoming suddenly and inexplicably gentle--that's blood loss. use the middle stage. it's dramatically rich and almost nobody writes it.

⊹ Recovery has a timeline and the timeline is long and boring and inconvenient to plot. a broken rib takes six weeks and during those six weeks sneezing is a genuine emergency. a concussion means no screens, no reading, no bright lights, and symptoms can persist for months. a stab wound to the abdomen means weeks of infection risk, limited mobility, and a specific kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. Your character being sidelined and frustrated and useless for a long time is not a narrative problem. it's the story.

He’s the beautifullest Fragilest Still strong Dark and divine And the littleness of his movements Hides himself He invents a charm that makes him invisible Hides in the air Can I hide there too? Hide in the air of him Seek solace Sanctuary

Excerpt from a letter from Simon to Philomene Asteris:

I came to know him, a little, in Duskhaven. We worked alongside each other, tending to the refugees. He worked himself to physical and mental exhaustion, sometimes passing out on a bench for a scant hour or two of rest before the next wave of frightened, displaced people arrived. I was clearly Cursed by that time, forced to wear a worgen’s body, unable to change back–but he showed no distaste in working with me or any other Cursed Gilnean. His example went a long way towards our acceptance, in those days immediately after the city evacuation.

*explodes*

oh, these made me YEARN like a mf.

BAELOR.

Baelor sleeps wrapped around you. One arm under your neck, the other banded around your waist, his chest a broad steady heat along your spine. This man doesn’t just sleep next to you. He gathers you, hoards you, his forearm snug across your middle as if he’s shielding something from sight. Some part of him still doesn’t quite trust the world not to steal you while he dreams. So to trace his features you would have to disentangle yourself, slowly, without waking him, which is its own minor heist in truth. And when you finally got your hand free, what you would find, in sleep, is a face that has finally let go of duty.

His brow unknits. That crease between his brows (the one that lives permanently in the daytime, the crease that comes from carrying a kingdom on his shoulders) is gone. You would touch it lightly with your thumb because the absence of it is so striking. And you would trace the line of his nose, the slight bump where it was broken once in a tourney mishap he refuses to discuss. You would map the shape of his mouth, which in sleep falls slightly open, vulnerable in a way it never is when he speaks. You would touch the silver at his temples that the southern light at the Red Keep kisses, as if the gods simply meant to mark him there. And you would feel, with a sharp and unbearable tenderness, the thinness of the skin beneath his eyes. The bruised hollows of a man who’s not slept properly in years until he started sleeping with you. The wonder of it would land on you like cold water: I am the reason this man rests.

He would catch you at it. Baelor sleeps the lightest of any of them despite being the most exhausted, because part of him is always listening for the realm. His hand would close gently around your wrist mid-trace and his eyes would crack open. That strange mismatched gaze, dark and pale, dazed with sleep, and he would smile, slow, delighted. What are you doing, wife? And you would, mortified, try to retract your hand, and he would not let you. No. Carry on. I should like to see what conclusions you reach.

MAEKAR.

Sleeps like a soldier. On his back, one hand resting on his stomach, the other near where his sword would be. Even now, even in your bed, even years into a marriage he’s come to want with all the fierce surprise of a man who didn’t expect to want anything again, he still sleeps in formation. Braced. His body has not unlearned the war. And to trace his face in sleep is to trace a map of every fight he’s been in, because Maekar’s face is evidence of them. The faint pox scars across his cheeks. The new split scar along the ridge of his knuckle from a sword hilt that bit him years ago. The cut along his cheek that has faded but not gone from Redgrass Field.

His hands are the part that would steal your breath, though. Rough, scarred and callused from years with a sword in his hand, from battles he’s had to fight. You would lift his hand from where it rests on the coverlet and you would turn it over in yours and you would map the calluses with your fingertip. The place where the pommel sits, where the reins lie, where the bowstring pulls. And somewhere in this, he would wake. Maekar wakes fast. Soldier-fast. He would wake with his other hand moving toward where the sword should be, and then he would register it was you, and the readiness would drain out of him in a single long exhale, and he would look at you with that gruff bewildered tenderness he can never quite hide and he would grunt, voice rough with sleep: what. Not a question, exactly. More a statement of presence. And you would say, softly: go back to sleep, husband. And he would, but only after pulling you closer, his big hand settling at the small of your back, his face turning into your throat where he can smell you.

AERION.

Catastrophic. And not in the way you’d expect, because Aerion doesn’t sleep braced or guarded the way a man with his obsession ought to. Aerion sleeps curled toward you, every line of him already oriented your way, like a flower that grew toward the sun in the dark and has not bothered to dissemble about it. One hand fisted in the fabric of your shift. One leg hooked over yours. His face turned into the pillow you share, lashes pale against fever-warm skin, breath stirring the loose hair at your temple. And the moment your fingertips graze his cheek (the moment you have the audacity to touch him while he sleeps)he doesn’t startle, doesn’t flinch. He leans into it.

Greedy is the only word for him. Aerion in sleep is greedy for you, in a way his waking self has spent years trying to disguise. Awake, his obsession comes barbed, sneering, costumed in cruelty so he doesn’t have to admit how badly he wants. Asleep, none of that machinery is running. So when your thumb traces the line of his jaw, he turns his face into your hand. Open-mouthed. Half-conscious. Like a dragonling rooting toward heat. His lashes flutter. He makes a small, rumbling sound in his throat. And he moves. That lean dangerous body shifting closer, closer. Until you understand he’s not simply asleep beside you but winding himself around you, leisurely and deliberate. His face is inches from yours and his forehead nearly brushes yours and you’re nose-to-nose in the dim, his breath on your mouth.

Presenting himself. Offering himself. Look at me, the whole shape of him says, even in sleep. Map me. Mark me. It has always been yours.

And so you do. You trace the cropped softness of his hair at the nape, where it grows in stubble-pale from the time he cut it for you. You touch the scar on his jaw. Smooth your thumb along the high arrogant ridge of his cheekbone, the place that goes flushed when he’s feverish or furious or wanting. You touch the corner of his full mouth, and his lips part for you, automatically, the same way they parted for the cup of water you held to them when he was sick. And his eyes are open by then, of course they are (Aerion sleeps shallow, the dark thing in him will not let him sleep deeper than that) and they’re pale and blown wide, fever-bright in the dark, watching you map him with the desperate attentiveness of a man who’s been waiting for this his entire life and would die before he admitted it.

He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t break the spell. He simply lies there, curled around you, face inches from yours, and lets you have him. Lets you claim him. The whole tableau of it. The hot dragonish body coiled into yours, the parted mouth, the eyes that have not blinked in what feels like minutes. He’s a man being handed over to you in the only language he’s ever been able to speak: the language of stillness while you do what you like. He’ll be vicious about it tomorrow, say something cutting about your sentiment. Your softness, your northern habits. He will perform the disdain so you can’t take from him what he was unable to refuse you tonight. It won’t work. And the next night he’ll be curled into you again, fiercer, before the candle is even out.

BAELOR. Baelor has spent his life being told he’s good, honourable, dutiful and brave, never really beautiful. Half-Dornish at a court that whispers about his mother’s blood, the heir who carries the weight of legitimising his father’s reign, the man who can’t want for himself because wanting is what Aegon the Unworthy did. Nobody has ever looked at this man as a body to be admired just for himself, only a king-in-waiting to be measured. So when you tell him he’s beautiful (and you have to whisper it, soft against the line of his jaw, your hand on his face so he can’t turn away) he stills. completely. like the word doesn’t quite compute. and then his eyes change, that particular flicker, where the dark one goes almost black and the pale one goes almost silver, and he says your name, low and rough, because the praise is too much, because he doesn’t know how to receive it without it feeling like he doesn’t deserve it. So you have to make him take it. Press your mouth to his ear and say it again, you are so beautiful, my love, and feel him shudder like you’ve struck him.

MAEKAR. Scoffs. Scoffs. Genuinely can’t accept it without deflection. You say you’re beautiful, husband, and he grunts and says don’t be daft, woman, and shoves his face into your throat to hide the fact that his ears have gone pink. But you’ll feel his hands tighten on you. You’ll feel the way his next thrust comes harder, deeper, like he’s retaliating for the compliment, like he has to fuck the embarrassment back into you. Maekar has been the spare and the soldier his whole life, the gruff one, the not-Baelor, beauty is for his eldest brother, his older brothers, never him. But you keep saying it. You say it when he’s flushed and breathing hard against your collarbone, you say it when his silver hair has fallen out of its tie and stuck to his temples with sweat, when he’s looking at you like he’s afraid you’ll vanish. And one night, very late, he’ll mumble into your hair say it again and you will know you’ve won.

AERION. oh, catastrophic. This is a man who’s weaponised his beauty his entire life because it’s the only thing about himself he’s ever been allowed to like. He knows he’s beautiful. He’s been told it, casually, by every courtier and serving girl since he was a boy, and he holds it at arm’s length like a coin he doesn’t trust the weight of. Compliments from strangers slide off him. But from you? From his wolf, from the woman who saved him, the woman whose mouth he’s imagined the shape of for years? Whe you tell him he’s beautiful (properly tell him, with your hand splayed against his cheek, looking him dead in the eyes, you are so beautiful, Aerion) he will break apart. He’ll go feverish, his pupils will blow wide, he’ll grip you too hard and bury his face in your neck because he can’t let you see what’s happening on his face. He’ll say something cruel about it after (careful, sweetling, I’ll grow vain) but you’ll feel him trembling. You’ll feel the truth of it in his hands. And the next time you fuck, he’ll be worse. Needier, more vicious, more desperate to extract it from you again, because now he knows you’ll give it and he’ll spend the rest of his life chasing the high of it.

In good storytelling small details matter, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is proof of this. It shows a lot in the way characters are presented. Now, since it's Lyonel Baratheon who's responsible for male nudity (and partially Dunk), the Targaryens, who are the opposite of Baratheon in a sense (especially Baelor) look very reserved. They only show their faces and hands. Needless to say that the show's creators have done a great job here.

Here's the frame that's always worth mentioning. You instantly know where to look, your brain knows, and it's thanks not just to our hero's good looks — it's also thanks to the lighting and values. Artists are taught this. And here the center of immediate attention is not even Baelor's face, it's mostly his hands. And both look fine (how dare he look so fine), but his hands are somehow so particularly fine that we just can't get over them. Nature's been very generous indeed to Baelor Targaryen/Bertie Carvel. The director and the cinematographer have made all the right choices.

So there he sits, playing with his ring absent-mindedly. And he does this thing a lot (probably the actor's choice). The first time we see him, he's eating something (most likely grapes), and he twiddles a grape with the air of a man who just loves to have something to play with in his fingers. Probably a piece of characterisation — because Baelor is a fun guy. But also, his sense of touch is obviously important to him. And I also see this as a part of his general agility and, in a sense, his training as a fighter. Heightened senses — agile limbs — hallmarks of someone who's good with a sword.

But anyway, for some reason these beautiful hands with long nimble fingers become important. We know them, we remember them, we admire their owner.

Fast forward to the last scene where Baelor's talking to Raymun Fossoway.

He's received the fatal blow, he's dying, while still remaining on his feet. And he's obviously noticing some sinister signs — something's not right. But he doesn't say "The headache is killing me", or "I'm getting sleepy", or "I'm cold", though all of these would have been accurate. He says, "My fingers feel like wood." It's the first thing that comes to his mind, something that surprises and unsettles him most of all.

Something that's been important to him for all of his life, an integral part of him is leaving him, and he doesn't know why. He most probably does feel something's gone very wrong by this point, but he cannot know the full extent of the damage. All he knows — he's in pain, he feels weird, and now his fingers feel like wood. For him it's like saying "I don't feel like myself anymore, there is something wrong with me, and I probably need help" without saying it.

It's sad. It's heartbreaking. It's brilliant.

oh okay i see this -

Baelor is someone who is surrounded by and constantly burdened by duty, and as a result, is definitely someone I can see feeling melancholy about how locked out of the rest of the world he feels.

Now, with the song Black Beauty, it portrays the feeling of loving someone who is distant, burdened, and unable to fully let joy in. AKA Baelor, feeling the pressure and weight of the realm to the point where he is scared to fully let another person in so that they too don't feel so burdened by it as well.

It's why i think he never remarried after Jena - duty killed her and a part of him. And it's also why he lets Valarr have it easy. Obviously, we don't see the full lengths of their relationship, just what Egg sees - but Baelor, in my mind, wants Valarr to feel unpressured by the realm and to live a life not living up to the expectations Baelor grew up with. It's why he's given easy challenges at Jousts and isn't burdened with politics until Baelors dies.

He is someone who has everything but can’t feel it - literally what Baelor’s position as heir and prince is, he has the power, respect, and purpose, yet his life is dictated by responsibility rather than desire. There’s an emotional distance in him, not because he doesn’t feel, but because he can’t afford to indulge those feelings.

Honestly, the whole song could be linked to someone who loves Baelor singing it about him, and how they are watching him give everything to duty while quietly losing parts of himself.

His “darkness” isn’t cruelty or volatility, but the slow, constant weight of expectation. Someone who is shaped by a life of honour that comes at a cost of his personal happiness and is forced to accept obligation over love.

so yeah, it reminds him of me too, like, actually perfectly.

tomboy, meaning "this child is clearly queer but let's hope it goes away"

sensitive, meaning "clearly neurodivergent and often distressed but let's keep going until they grow numb"

self-sufficient, meaning "next to zero trust in parental figures' ability in various aspects of parenting"