There’s no doubt that Alicent is experiencing misogyny. Of course she is. And it’s constantly contrasted with the misogyny that Rhaenyra faces, even though she identifies less with those traditionally feminine roles, and actively works to break from the standards of her sex where Alicent fought to prove she could be perfect in those confines. Neither of them will be spared. There is no right answer. But the show is extremely consistent in making the brutality Alicent experiences ABOUT Alicent.

a 3k word greater breakdown of the Aemond and Alicent kiss, based my little tumblr post, including images and video clips to demonstrate what I mean, as well as further analysis of how this parallels with Rhaenyra, and what HotD does right that we saw go very wrong in Game of Thrones (it's Sansa Stark, it's always Sansa Stark)

I was put on this earth to talk about the soft masculinity of Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. read in full (pls, i beg)

These shitty, dirty boys were vessels for our hopes and dreams. They were an entry way to the tastes of yaoi, avatars for a masculinity increasingly barred from those of us branded Women™ , a full-on mouth kissing, ball punching, group hugging Bacchanal ritual for those of us branded Men™, and so barred from affection. If Greene’s roving gang was desperate for a new world after the posterity and doubling down of classism after World War II, poor millennials and middle class millennials who felt the approaching peak of “house poor” were desperate for autonomy and joy under the heavy curtain of “Never Forget” after 9/11, an accelerant on the human rights violations and war crimes committed by the adults in charge of us. Knoxville and co’s representations of a reckless, hedonistic, sadomasochistic destruction was more honest than the thousands of yellow-filtered, made-for-sleeping-dads action movies that would punctuate the time. It’s not innocent of insensitive and poorly aging bits, but Jackass never made hateful, one dimensional caricatures policy, and if it is propaganda, it’s propaganda by Big Emergency Room, or The One Teenager Who Has Done Stitches Before.

I got emotional about Jackass (again).

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“Something big is coming, Cunningham.” 

Alt sneers at Cunningham as she rubs the last of the synthetic blue powder into her gums. She's told Yifan to just call her Alt repeatedly. No matter how much they risk for one another, the cold crackle hits the encoded earpiece with her last name like they serve fucking NUSA together. 

Maybe that's what the Corp culture was like in Hong Kong before the UK surrender and Arasaka interference shook it all apart and forced it to rebuild. Yifan was considerably older than herself and every other contact she had in Hong Kong. Maybe Yifan was showing Alt respect. But to Alt, respect and trust were the same thing. She trusted Yifan. She trusted Yifan by choice. And that meant that she cared about her on some level. So the surname stings. 

“How big, Yi?” 

Alt wipes a new run of blood from her nose and looks at herself in the mirror. She's been mixing some variety of the colored glass strain of synthcoke with traditional stims and synthetic benzoids for weeks. It's taking its toll. Her eyes were a little wild, cushioned by darkening bags and their swelling red waterline handles. Her face is puffy where it's usually angular and gaunt where it's usually full. Her various Euro sculpting procedures almost seem to give away to her old face. Certainly her old nose, too pointed downward, nostrils a bit too wide for the standard of the day, is threatening to reappear. 

But she had to finish this. She had to finish this and get it somewhere - or to someone - safe before it could fall into the wrong hands. 

this was originally an ask prompt and now it is 11 pages long. please enjoy soft dom Gale, light bondage, mage hand, invented spells, and face sitting. :)

His eyes darken with an increasingly familiar ache. It makes her want him more. She knows it won’t make him stray from this path of driving her wild. No matter how badly he wants her, he wants to see her out of her mind for him more. The conjured hand slides a finger on either side of her, spreading her open, and Gale licks his lips but makes no move towards her. "You know, no one would believe me if I told them how much of a tease you are,” Tav laughs, half desperate, half thrilled. “Oh, there’s so much I still mean to do to you.”

“Oh, Tav, Shadowheart said you wanted to see me.”

He pushes through the opening of Tav’s tent, a gesture that still feels painfully intimate.

“If it’s about what I said around that spider, I am sorry. I was… riled up. I can’t imagine a thing in the world that would turn me from you, though I cannot fathom why- WHY- your instinct was to lick it! I truly hate those-”

Gale is quieted by Tav’s lips finding his own as their hands tug on the middle of his robes, searching for the tie. 

“Gods,” he moans into their mouth. “Careful… I… I still don’t know…”

“Right,” Tav whispers between kisses, their hands resting on the small of Gale’s back now, desperate to be doing anything else. “Right.”

"As Eli tangles with a barely-there empathy and decides to finally read the Holy Word, there is no holy light. [...] In some hollow, good time direct-to-DVD Christian program, this would leave you heart-warmed."

A somewhat poignant reflection on what Cyberpunk 2077 means to me in an ever-dystopian world, five years after its release. A thing of beauty will never fade away…

I was an idiot baby, just like V. And just like V, I find myself becoming less of all the things I dreamed I would be, and more and more like Johnny Silverhand. With even less permanent living, worse health, and an increasingly sincere belief that I will kick the proverbial bucket before there are ever real writing jobs again, I feel blown to pieces. I feel fragmented. I feel soulless. I feel like I failed every tenet I believed in and every person who believed in me. Every fan fic, headcanon, or piece of analysis that I spend on it is an echo of what late-stage capitalism and “high tech, low life” are doing to me in real time. It’s a cool drink of water down a burning throat to engage with a story so honest about the technocracy and the enmeshment of corporate and government entities. Every time that I find a way in my mind to save Johnny Silverhand, I think I am really finding a way to save myself.