bright as blue stars

[O]ne need not argue Chinatown as either a celebration or as a radical revision when it can clearly be seen as both. The film is perhaps most famous for the “My sister … My daughter” scene in which detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) brutally slaps seeming femme fatale Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) into a confession he had not anticipated—that she has been raped by, and had a daughter with, her father. Each slap emits a seemingly opposite truth: is the young girl Evelyn’s sister or her daughter? It is revealed that both sides of the binary are true, undercutting all convention, expectation, sense of coherent order. The scene suggests the pivot or lever by which the film operates. It is not either/or, but both.

Penny for your thoughts? <3 Thanks!

It does seem like the writers are establishing parallels between Daemon and Ormund such as the one you mention re: Rhaenyra and Daeron (and perhaps their extremely calm reactions to receiving mail), but to be honest…while Daemon certainly does plenty of unsavory things in canon, I’ve never understood the fandom insistence on categorizing him as a blood supremacist beyond the scope of what’s typical for the Westerosi aristocracy (because there IS a baseline here). He’s certainly never said anything like this that I can recall:

I had to go to Wikipedia for this because if I have seen the Disney film it was ages ago and I don’t remember it and I haven’t read the source material for sure…well HOTD does seem to be going for racist Catholic zealot with Ormund, but as far as I recall he’s characterized very little in F&B so this seems to be the show’s extrapolation from the fact that his seat is located in the same city as that of the Faith of the Seven.* Of course this proximity does not ensure unity, as you probably learned from my recent post lmao. That is, to me Ormund’s most memorable trait in F&B isn’t really about him but rather concerns (future HOTD spoilers, kind of) his son Lyonel’s passion for his similarly-aged stepmother Samantha Tarly, which she cleverly leverages after Ormund’s death during the Dance in order to mostly maintain her position as de facto (and later de jure) Lady Hightower (because the High Septon declares their union incestuous, prevents their marriage, and unsuccessfully insists she “remove herself from her stepson’s bed and take vows as a silent sister as penace for her sins,” but thirteen years later the next High Septon allows them to wed)