it all goes back and back

one big objection is that “rot” is a natural and totally neutral-to-good process. rot is a part of life on earth. things die and rot and from that rot new things are born and grow. the perspective of rot as negative is a very anthropocentric one, really: obviously, we have all had to throw out some rotting leftovers in the fridge, and it’s unpleasant; a house can having rotting walls, in which is becomes hard to live a human life within them. but to pick up the metaphor in the latter, the fault is not the rot itself, which is a natural process, but in the fact that human social structures mean that if you have a house that is rotting and can’t afford to remove said rot so your own life can flourish, that’s a problem for you that human social structures should be altered to fix to allow for human flourishing. but it is a human problem, and so is incest. incestuous abuse is a product of man-made, human social structures and concious human actions, which makes such a natural process an ineffective metaphor for me.

this metaphor grows out of deep roots in western literature; the idea of the cannibalizing process of incest in a degenerating, aristocratic house as symbolizing a privileged, hermetic class eating itself is all over gothic literature, and what people are picking up on when they talk about the “rot” of the targaryen family - a royal dynasty that practices incestuous marriage (brother-sister, avunculate, and cousin-cousin) as a tool of maintaining its own feudal power, and then periodically destroys itself through things like interceinine succession conflicts and addiction to messianic prophecies that kick off massive bloodline-eradicating subject rebellions.

so one problem with using “rot” here relates to the above: this is not a reflexive, unthinking process. there were good reasons for the incest marriage in the early targaryen dynasty in terms of practical power politics: if your power and authority derives from being the only family that can wield huge dragons capable of leveling cities, you do not want to dilute that exclusivity by allowing girls to marry exogamously and perhaps put their dragons in the power of their husbands who might oppose you. the solution is then to marry those girls to their brothers or uncles or cousins. then there is the religious justification that grows up around, or with, this marriage strategy. sibling marriages are taboo in the dominant faith of the realms you have conquered, the faith that you (house targaryen) have in turn adopted. so you have to say, well we have dragons. no one else has dragons, and the fact that we have dragons means we are special and unlike other people. unlike other people, we can marry our sisters. and even after the dragons have died out, the sibling marriages will remain, as ideology that justifies targaryen rule. attributing this all to “rot” is lazy to me. it offers no room to analyze the intersections of patriarchy and power that produce this as an experience or think about how those who experience it conceptualize it.

another problem with “rot” is it totally uncritically uptakes one of the most suspect aspects of the series to me, which is how disability is used as sign and symbol of excesses of power - from aerys’ “madness” to viserys’ leprosy in the show, this universe, both books and adaptations, often externalize the unjust power targaryen kings enact on others as mental or physical illness, where these ailments of the mind and body act as metaphor for wrong action. the ableism here should be quite obvious. i do think the source texts sometime complicate this. for example, although i object to how viserys’ abuses of women, starting with the murder of aemma in 1.01, are externalized by his body bearing the signs of such moral rot by physically “rotting” - the correlation is made clear in the show, as his illness is tied both to aemma’s death scene and his marriage to and rapes of alicent in various ways, and then this is confirmed by showrunner commentary - paddy considine’s wrenching performance of viserys’ dying, the visible agony it causes rhaenyra and alicent and daemon, the heroism and dignity of his surprise appearance in the throne room in 1.08 adds up to a real narrative compassion for his suffering and contradictory refusal to moralize it that winds up in a far more ambivalent place for me than it could have been. so how disappointing to watch the fandom, en masse, take up this kind of framing without any questions at all!

lastly, to return to the issue of “thinking about this as an experience,” which is the most important one to me here - such language casts those who experience incest as outside the human community. firstly, it buys into the targaryens’ own propaganda, which even rhaenyra at 14 sees through quite clearly (“people say targaryens are closer to gods than to men. but without [dragons; and so implicitly justifying and supporting incest], we’re just like everybody else.”) which is quite silly when such framing is purporting to critique their use of power. they are not people who arrange their intimate lives in a particular way that we can ask questions about and try to imagine, who are also thereby subject to specific manifestations of and excuses for violence because of such arrangements that we should have more empathy for than to imagine it makes them human black mold. the fandom frames them instead as themselves rot, and also pure symbol.

[whispering to you in a movie theater in between mouthfuls of salted caramel popcorn–other moviegoers who just want to watch we bought a zoo (2011) are glaring at us but i don’t care]

so in 1880 friedrich engels wrote a snappy little number called ‘socialism: utopian & scientific’. it’s a foundational marxist text and one i’d recommend to everybody–and i think some of the ideas in it are incorporated and built on in disco elysium in really interesting ways.

socialism: utopian & scientific does a few things. first, it lays out the ideas of the 18th century utopian socialists and explains the societal context in which they developed their ideas–and the core idea of the dialectic development of ideas. engels harshly critiques the enlightenment’s conception of the history of thought as a history of individual thinkers attempting to capture an eternal, immutable corpus of truth and justice–he describes this worldview thusly (emphasis mine):

What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.

and of course it jumped out to me playing disco elysium that this is exactly how human development works the world of elysium–innocences are singularly world-changing individuals who personally establish systems and ideologies within their lifetimes:

previous thread for undertale and chapter 1+2

right now kris is having a lot of fun being back in the dark world because it's an adventure for her.

chapter 3 was v fun. i feel like the story is just going to ramp up from here. a lot of time spent on tenna and what it means to spend your time in a nostalgia of the past, chasing the glory days that will never come back.

after chapter 3 deltarune is firmly a work of children's literature (positive) for me now, in how it spends a lot of time paying attention to what it means to be a kid growing up, the uncertainty of school and fitting in with peers, the growing pains associated with being too old for certain fantasies while still looking back to them for comfort, and the strangeness of looking back at your childhood while still being a child.

previous thread for undertale and chapter 1+2

right now kris is having a lot of fun being back in the dark world because it's an adventure for her.

chapter 3 was v fun. i feel like the story is just going to ramp up from here. a lot of time spent on tenna and what it means to spend your time in a nostalgia of the past, chasing the glory days that will never come back.

after chapter 3 deltarune is firmly a work of children's literature (positive) for me now, in how it spends a lot of time paying attention to what it means to be a kid growing up, the uncertainty of school and fitting in with peers, the growing pains associated with being too old for certain fantasies while still looking back to them for comfort, and the strangeness of looking back at your childhood while still being a child.

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Watsonian vs. Doylist

Trope Tropes, for all the ways tropes are used, deconstructed, subverted, and played with.

The Oldest Ones in the Book, which is basically my favorite thing on the entire Internet

Punk Punk, for -punk subgenres

Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness, Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism

The Weird Al Effect is a fun one

Chekhov’s Gun, Chekhov’s Boomerang, Chekhov’s Skill, and further variations

Law of Conservation of Detail

Law of Conservation of Normality

Anthropic Principle

Word of God, Death of the Author

Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness

Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness

Genre Savvy

Flashbacks and Chronology breaks down all the ways you can handle chronology in storytelling

Show, Don’t Tell is a very good breakdown of what is showing, what is telling, and how both can be used effectively.

Lampshade Hanging

Noodle Incident is just fun imo

Genre Title Grab Bag

Fridge Horror

Rule of Cool, and also Cool of Rule

The Smurfette Principle

The Hays Code - not a trope but a very good breakdown of how the Hays Code affected storytelling in film

Yes.

But you're not alone. I recommend these posts on the subject: @bitchfromtheseventhhell's comparison of Jon's two encounters with Gilly, @lyannas's meta on Jon's treatment of the one woman with lower social status than him., and @dwellordream's comparison of Gilly's speech vs Val's. Also, Celia's Jon and Gilly and Jon and women tags have some other excellent posts on the subject. And I would be incredibly remiss if I didn't mention @asoiafuniversity's Gilly tag, where many of the above posts are reblogged, among others.

But it was just fascinating to me that within all the metas I've seen about Jon's horrific treatment of Gilly - which to be fair there aren't nearly enough in proportion to all the puff pieces declaring Jon the Most Feminist character in asoiaf - I've never before seen anyone comparing Jon “killing the boy” in his Gilly confrontation with Jaime acting as “Tywin's son” in his Edmure confrontation? Not once in 14 years on this site reading meta since ADWD. Even though in retrospect the scenes are obvious parallels.

"And if I will not yield?" Must you make me say the words? Pia was standing by the flap of the tent with her arms full of clothes. His squires were listening as well, and the singer. Let them hear, Jaime thought. Let the world hear. It makes no matter. He forced himself to smile [...] Jaime got to his feet. "Your wife may whelp before that. You'll want your child, I expect. I'll send him to you when he's born. With a trebuchet."

Jon closed the fingers of his sword hand. “Take both boys and the queen’s men will ride after you and drag you back. The boy will still burn … and you with him.” If I comfort her, she may think that tears can move me. She has to realize that I will not yield. “You’ll take one boy, and that one Dalla’s.” [...] “You will make a crow of him.” She wiped at her tears with the back of a small pale hand. “I won’t. I won’t.” Kill the boy, thought Jon. “You will. Else I promise you, the day that they burn Dalla’s boy, yours will die as well.”

"I'll leave you to enjoy your food. Singer, play for our guest whilst he eats. You know the song, I trust." "The one about the rain? Aye, my lord. I know it."

“Men say that freezing to death is almost peaceful. Fire, though … do you see the candle, Gilly?” She looked at the flame. “Yes.” “Touch it. Put your hand over the flame.” Her big brown eyes grew bigger still. She did not move. “Do it.” Kill the boy. “Now.” Trembling, the girl reached out her hand, held it well above the flickering candle flame. “Down. Let it kiss you.” Gilly lowered her hand. An inch. Another. When the flame licked her flesh, she snatched her hand back and began to sob.

Going kinda off topic, it seems like the existing framework focuses on intent, rather than considering the threats themselves to be acts of violence or the first step in self-fulfilling prophecies. Personally I think that’s the more fruitful way of looking at it. Like, let’s say that both Jon and Jaime are 100% bluffing and neither of them intends to go through with it. That assumes that they’re going to be around to stop the events their actions set in motion. Let’s say that, in an incredibly unlikely series of events, Jaime Lannister disappears and is incommunicado for an extended period of time while Roslin remains in Lannister custody. Jaime’s threat was heard by his men, who have every reason to believe that putting that baby in a trebuchet was their Lord Commander’s wish should things go south for them. Jon’s got the opposite problem - nobody else heard his threat besides Gilly. If, in another unlikely series of events, Jon is killed and the Wall is thrown into chaos with multiple competing factions vying for control, Jon has created a situation in which the burning of Gilly’s child is the very predictable outcome. The damage is done, both Roslin’s and Gilly’s babies are going to die, as a direct consequence of Jon’s and Jaime’s actions. 

gilly's baby is in danger from being seperated from the one person in the world who truly cares for his well-being and would protect him, leaving him in the care of jon, who made the threat, and val, herself a glorified hostage also under jon's protection. edmure/roslin's future child has more worth and more people to care about the baby's fate just by virtue of being highborn. the fact that roslin believes the baby's sex could determine edmure's death date shows that old walder frey still cares about having the next tully heir in his custody/bloodline, even if the lannisters have formally given riverrun to his second son (and the lord paramount title to baelish). lord walder does not value his children and grandchildren in a loving way, but he does in a family pride sense similar to tywin, housing all his descendants in need of it and bragging about how many men he'd sired, only willing to sacrifice one (developementally disabled) frey as the price for refusing to end his revenge and allow robb stark to go free at his mother's request. jaime himself could have the authority to summon roslin and her newborn child in the name of the crown, but any of his men acting in his absence would likely have a much stickier time getting roslin from their ostensible lordly ally, as she is still in her father's custody, yet to birth, at the end of affc.