🔎 What detail(s) in the story are you particularly captivated with? Is there any behind the scenes info or backstory?

again, i'm late answering these, but i'm working on the next chapter right now and i thought of a good answer so here we go

it's such a small thing, but then small details are how you give a story texture, so here it is: before daeron ii's death, baelor refers to him almost exclusively as 'the king' inside his own head. even in scenes they share, even when daeron is attempting to be fatherly. take this section in chapter five:

"Father–" Baelor said, turning to face him and then losing some of that courage when he took in the king's face properly, saw how drawn he'd become, how distant his eyes. How this long absence had taxed him, doing everything he'd spent the last decade delegating, with no certain hope that Baelor would return well enough to take up those duties again. That Baelor would return at all. "I must rest, and wash up from the journey. I am not– wholly strong again yet." "No. Of course." The king shifted creakily, made to stand. "Would you help me up?"

baelor calls him 'father' in speech but not in narration. he is about to confess his own ailments, his weakness; then he recognises daeron for the king, not his father, never truly his father. something baelor must live up to in strength and something baelor can never disappoint. a few lines later is one of the rare occasions he describes daeron as his father — when he is helping him up, creaky and old and weak. he can only view him as his father when he is lesser, when baelor is stronger than him. on some level it's a power thing: an innate, and learnt, struggle to have a positive relationship with someone in the position of king, a cognitive dissonance that follows in separating the man from the role and yet his own inability to do the same for himself.

and what follows on is that after daeron ii dies, he is almost only ever baelor's 'father' in his narration. rose-tinted glasses and all. baelor, of course, becomes the king: and that role is so all-consuming for him that it erases all that came before it. it's easier to love the dead. and it restores daeron his humanity: a king is not a person. a corpse is.

'The hedge knight lives, so I hear. Licking his wounds and pacing up and down outside the castle wall all hours. Your latest loyal dog.'

// Prince Baelor survives the blow at Ashford Meadow, but not without consequences. The seasons begin to turn.

Chapter 15: SUMMER 211 A.C.

Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall. Not so thick as to miss an insinuation like that one. The colourless moonlight, how Emmanar was looking at him, how he was talking, those beautiful letters, the man with a devotion and the man who held the sword. Targaryen or no, Dunk might tell him. You are not the Targaryen for me.

finally getting around to answering these... crazy few weeks jobwise. but i'm back let's go

🥇 What scene were you most excited to write? Did it end up being the one you enjoyed writing the most?

hmm... see the scene i'm most excited about is still yet to come, so i don't want to spoil anything; it's coming probably in about three or four chapters' time. i've written pieces of it but not the whole thing, since i mainly write chronologically, and i'm so excited to get there.

as for scenes already published... ngl, the first scene in dunk's tent after the tilt was one of my favourites. as you can probably tell from my blog i've been in a massive hilary mantel phase and i was very influenced by her writing on jousting in bring up the bodies (excerpts here). which definitely follows on from my interest in rodeo culture and how it expresses the death drive; as i've written about before, akotsk is a western.

i'm just fascinated by baelor as a jousting knight of great renown and how that requires a certain death-defying recklessness, suppression of survival instinct. now, of course, his life has narrowed to become about survival, both from a physical standpoint of his new disability and also from a monarchical standpoint — the realm is contingent on his survival and strength, on his wholeness, and on his fitness to rule in more ways than one. there are parallels to be drawn here between queerness and disability, how they're viewed in westeros in the text and how i'm using them in the fic. what it would be like to surrender himself to the recklessness of love? it would be foolish. but brave, too, and maybe braver than he ever was at tourney because it's real, not simulated for the image of courage.

that's kind of what i wanted to get at, here: his frustrations with his own limitations, the sense of loss of purpose and identity because he can no longer prove himself in the lists, but prove himself to be what? i wanted to question the value of that performance, foiling it with the assassin a few scenes later: real threat, and the real bravery that is acting upon love in the face of it. hopefully that comes across.