momento vivire

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

... But in my opinion, almost nothing is as grating as Helaena's characterization.

Rhaenyra and Alicent, for all their handling is abysmal, do have a sort of guideline, at least on paper. Rhaenyra wants the throne: crying every two minute, yes, acting as she's a Geneva convention expert in an ultra feudalistic world, all right, but at least she has a goal she's moving towards. Alicent is an idiot and an hypocrite on an almost pathological level, but she wants to "be at least myself (...) die free and unnoticed" (how she wants to do that in practice is a discussion for another day), which is... underwhelming, but still something.

What the fuck does Helaena want?

She's not a Cassandra figure; she never tries to act on her visions or even warn those around her. She's too little tormented for the reference to stick. She's not a grieving mother, because it's one thing to express grief in an unconventional way, it's another to shrug your child's brutal death because "children die". She doesn't want to burn innocents but doesn't ever advocate herself for peace. She's not a dragonrider despite having a dragon. Aemond is treated as a monster for the crime of asking her a perfectly reasonable thing - help him fight against the side responsible for her boy's murder. She wants to keep chicken, because apparently anything with more layers than that is too far beyond the scope of her Neuro divergent mind.

peacefulsoaring’s atla appreciation (16/??):

It also fits with Rhysand's powers as a mind manipulator, his abuse never leaves physical marks and is invisible and therefore not real. It is a pretty harmful view on abuse imo, to only view it as physical manifestation, be it malnutrition or wounds. It is repeated over and over again: lucien is abused bc he is seen wounded even though we never see how it happened, nesta is healed bc she is eating again, tamlin only registers as hurt in the narrative once he is physically thinner and unkempt.

(…)

The notion that such a minuscule and unmanageable minority secretly controls the world is comical, which may be why so many responsible people still do not take the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory seriously, or even understand how it works. In the moments after the Texas crisis, the FBI made an official statement declaring that the assailant was “particularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community.” Of course, the gunman did not travel thousands of miles to terrorize some Mormons. He sought out a synagogue and took it hostage over his grievances, believing that Jews alone could resolve them. That’s targeting Jews, and there’s a word for that.

(…)

“Anti-Semitism has real impact beyond just hate crimes,” the civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It distorts our understanding of how the actual world works. It isolates us. It alienates us from our communities, from our neighbors, and from participating in governance. It kills, but it also kills our society.”

(…)

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” Ward explains. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.” In other words, the more people buy into anti-Semitism and its understanding of the world, the more they lose faith in democracy.