sine lucro friget ludus

Beauty and the beach- Vogue US (1993)

The best ones have advice on decor, how to select high-quality furniture, childrearing, fashion, etc--from a contemporary perspective, and the things the authors feel the need to clarify vs the wild shit that will just casually mention like it's something everyone knows and agrees on is REALLY revealing of the culture and how it's shifted.

And while a lot of the advice is WILDLY bigoted or just outright funny, you'd be surprised how much of it is...just genuinely timeless, and shockingly compassionate.

They ALSO, as a writer, have INVALUABLE resources--because, again, they're talking about things that are so MUNDANE that a lot of the time nobody really sat down to formally document what normal, everyday people thought or cared about--because that's boring! But a book written to provide advice and information to, say, a young woman who's never run her own home before? You can fully expect an entire chapter dedicated to The Types Of Oven, and which features are useful and worth spending money on, and which features are a huge hassle to clean and a waste of space, and what to spend that money on instead.

And like. As a writer who frequently works in the 1800s? Fuck inflation calculators, this is the kind of thing I need. This is absolutely priceless.

Now that being said.

My current favorite 'etiquette guide' in the world is actually like....70% purely practical advice, written by a gentleman the groupchat has affectionately dubbed History's Most Autistic Man In The World, and thank god they didn't have Aderall back then

Because the AuDHD is strong in this one and as a result, in addition to the deeply practical and useful everyday reference points, we also have:

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.