Call me Button. I'm a Millennial cishet white woman. Fandoms you're likely to find here are The Magnus Archives/Protocol, Eskew Productions podcasts, the Girl Genius webcomic, and A Song of Ice and Fire. I stream my WoW raids, and occasionally other games, at https://www.twitch.tv/boombutton . Come hang out if you like.
I know you disagree as you’ve laughed about some Reddit posts pointing that out before, but I’m gonna go ahead: Jaime is in love with Brienne, but I’m not totally convinced Brienne is in love with Jaime. She’s still thinking about Renly as late as her last chapter, about wanting to tell him she loved him. She’s transferring loyalty from one person to the next: Renly, then Catelyn, now Jaime. I think she cares about him deeply, obviously, but I don’t think she’s in love.
The whiplash from the previous anon to this one lmaooo. Why am I having to fight for J/B rights of having their love for each other recognized.
Brienne doesn’t acknowledge she’s in love with Jaime, but I think you then drawn exactly the wrong conclusion from it. The fact that she doesn’t acknowledge it is, to me, one of the clearest signs that she is.
Think about what you just described. Brienne gave her devotion to Renly freely, openly, almost immediately. She saw him and she loved him and she committed herself to him, and he had to do essentially nothing to earn it beyond being kind to her once at a dance. The same is true of Catelyn. Brienne met her, recognized in her something she found worthy of devotion, and pledged herself to her.
Now look at Jaime. Jaime, who has done more for her than Renly and Catelyn combined. Who lost his hand in the aftermath of protecting her. Who jumped into a bear pit to save her. Who gave her Valyrian steel and a quest and a purpose and his trust, against his own family. Who has, by any objective measure, earned her devotion ten times over. And Brienne is still resisting it. She’s still holding him at a distance, still filing him under oath and duty rather than letting herself name what’s actually there. She gave herself to Renly on the strength of one dance. Jaime has moved mountains for her and she still won’t let herself arrive at the right conclusion.
I think that’s because what she feels is something so real and so complicated that she can’t process it the way she processed the others. Renly was safe to love because he was untouchable: beautiful, “kind”, a lord, a king, someone she could worship from a distance and never have to reckon with as an equal. Catelyn was safe to serve because the dynamic was clear: lady and sworn sword, nothing muddied or ambiguous about it. Jaime is not safe. There’s a grittiness to what they have, a realness that won’t let her aestheticize it or tuck it into the clean categories she used for the others. They’ve seen each other at their ugliest. They’ve fought each other, resented each other, saved each other, been naked in front of each other in ways that go so far beyond the literal. They know each other in ways that nobody else in either of their lives does, they access parts of each other that no one else even gets close to. And that is terrifying for someone like Brienne, who has always been able to frame her love, however it comes, as something noble and uncomplicated. What she feels for Jaime won’t fit in that frame. So she doesn’t name it.
I do agree with you (even thought this isn’t a popular take I think) that in the text, Jaime is significantly more obvious about his feelings than Brienne is about hers, at least as an external reader. Mainly because while she certainly is attracted to him, it’s clear her feelings are there, there is the element, as you said, of Brienne very easily giving her love and devotion to others. And because she’s more free in how she thinks of those she love, because she accesses that more easily in certain ways, it does raise the question that maybe she doesn’t romantically love him (although I honestly think George makes that fairly obvious with her trying to recall Renly’s face or with Jaime replacing Renly in her dreams). Still, is a take I’ve seen more often lately, that Brienne’s feelings aren’t necessarily romantic. While Jaime, in his very agressive denial, ends up coming across as more obvious about it. He’s also the one carrying the more obvious romantic tropes from the get go. He’s the one whose thoughts drift back to her and have to be actively redirected. He’s the one who hits a man for insulting her, who abandons his army the moment she appears, who jumped into the bear pit, etc etc. He’s going through his whole divorce arc at the moment. Meanwhile Brienne is the one still thinking about Renly, then she’s kinda sorting through the complicated knot of Hyle and his proposal.
And I think George is doing something very deliberate and very clever with that, because he’s structured the romance in a way that subverts what you’d expect. Brienne is the ugly one, the “beast” to Jaime’s “beauty”, and yet she is not competing for Jaime’s affections. She’s not triangulated against Cersei. She doesn’t think about Cersei at all when she thinks about Jaime, for example. Instead, George puts Brienne at the center of the romantic geometry. She’s the one with suitors. She’s the one with a past love she still mourns and a present entanglement she can’t quite shake because he’s running around proposing to her and an ex fiance talking shit about her so Jaime can hear. Jaime might potentially be in a love triangle with Hyle Hunt (hope u survive king). He’s the one who digs for information with Red Ronnet Connington and is bothered by it. All the while performing the most romantic gestures in their dynamic.
But I think Brienne is in love with Jaime. Completely. And I think her reluctance to name it, far from being evidence against it, is the single most compelling piece of evidence for it.
[T]here was part of her that yearned for Evenfall and her father, and another part that wondered if Jaime would comfort her should she weep upon his shoulder. That was what men wanted, wasn't it? Soft helpless women that they needed to protect?
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It’s not rose, it’s not stood up, it’s not got up, it’s not pushed himself to his feet.
Scrambled.
It’s haste, it’s a loss of composure. Immediate movement. Instinct, really.
Throughout the first part his chapters of AFFC, Jaime cannot think about Brienne without reaching for some protective layer of mockery. Everytime he wonders where she is, or remembers her, or hopes she’s alive and well, he cushions those thoughts with insults. Stubborn, ugly, a face that could curdle milk. Wench. The longing for her is there, but so the reflexive need to disguise it from himself.
Then two very specific things happen, shortly from one another:
1) Ronnet Connington. Learning from her ex that she was once engaged, hearing him sneer and mock her. Ronnet laughed. Jaime did not. Golden slap as we all know it. Sending the guy away because he can’t stand the sight of him. After this, something changes in Jaime’s head. The insults disappear. The wench disappears. She becomes Brienne now.
2) He remembers the bath they shared in Harrenhall. It’s a very specific scenario. He’s kind of aroused by Pia hitting on him, and his mind recalls this other time where he was also aroused, when he saw Brienne naked and he had a boner. And he thinks that now, with Pia, he no longer has an excuse like he did before. Which is an astonishing thought when you stop to look at it, because no longer has an excuse for what? The implication is obvious. Deep very very deep down he knows he has been making excuses. It’s interesting because he doesn’t feel the need to excuse his attraction to Pia or to Hildy later on. But he felt the need to do that with Brienne.
And after these two very specific scenes, there’s almost a silence where Brienne is concerned. It’s as if Jaime is deliberately avoiding thinking about her.
And I wonder if it’s because he’s running out of ways of explaining things away. Running out of excuses. He can’t hide behind the insults anymore, behind the disrespect, behind the jokes. He lost the taste for it after Ronnet, he doesn’t want to be Ronnet for Brienne. So silence is the next best defense. Which is Jaime’s preferred method for dealing with anything that genuinely moves or unsettles him and that he’s not ready to confront yet. Avoidance. Ignore it.
And then in his last and only chapter in ADWD, there’s that little thought:
Brienne, where are you?
It almost feels accidental, like something that slipped out before he could stop it.
A few pages later, a guard tells him a woman is demanding words with him.
A moment later, Brienne walks into the tent. For one brief second, before the defenses come up, we see exactly what Brienne causes him when he doesn’t have a moment to compose himself.
Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.
The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there
Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.
And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.
love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears
it's actually so crazy how much the simpsons would fucking suck if it didn't have any of the simpsons characters. just a bunch of shots of empty houses and streets for half an hour while nothing happens. that would be so badddd lol
yeah that tends to happen when you remove characters from media. without characters its all just background. i guess movies set in scenic locations would still land as kinda nature docs but even then
For example: Leonard Nimoy was a frequent cameo in geekish shows, including a few Simpsons episodes. He also appeared in three Futurama episodes. I want to be clear that this isn't multiple characters sharing a voice actor: in both shows the character who shows up is famous actor Leonard Nimoy.
Does Leonard Nimoy wander through an empty Simpsons episode, saying his lines to characters who aren't there? Or does he disappear from Futurama?
What happens if, say, Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory is shown watching an episode of the original Star Trek? (I don't know if that ever happens in BBT, it's just easier to talk about a specific hypothetical than a non-specific one). Within the universe of BBT, Sheldon would be watching not Spock, but Leonard Nimoy portraying Spock. Would BBT's version of Star Trek then have only empty space where Spock would otherwise be?
Or since Leonard Nimoy the real life actor is a Simpsons character, does any footage of him count as footage of a Simpsons character, and so all characters he portrayed are also erased?
It’s not rose, it’s not stood up, it’s not got up, it’s not pushed himself to his feet.
Scrambled.
It’s haste, it’s a loss of composure. Immediate movement. Instinct, really.
Throughout the first part his chapters of AFFC, Jaime cannot think about Brienne without reaching for some protective layer of mockery. Everytime he wonders where she is, or remembers her, or hopes she’s alive and well, he cushions those thoughts with insults. Stubborn, ugly, a face that could curdle milk. Wench. The longing for her is there, but so the reflexive need to disguise it from himself.
Then two very specific things happen, shortly from one another:
1) Ronnet Connington. Learning from her ex that she was once engaged, hearing him sneer and mock her. Ronnet laughed. Jaime did not. Golden slap as we all know it. Sending the guy away because he can’t stand the sight of him. After this, something changes in Jaime’s head. The insults disappear. The wench disappears. She becomes Brienne now.
2) He remembers the bath they shared in Harrenhall. It’s a very specific scenario. He’s kind of aroused by Pia hitting on him, and his mind recalls this other time where he was also aroused, when he saw Brienne naked and he had a boner. And he thinks that now, with Pia, he no longer has an excuse like he did before. Which is an astonishing thought when you stop to look at it, because no longer has an excuse for what? The implication is obvious. Deep very very deep down he knows he has been making excuses. It’s interesting because he doesn’t feel the need to excuse his attraction to Pia or to Hildy later on. But he felt the need to do that with Brienne.
And after these two very specific scenes, there’s almost a silence where Brienne is concerned. It’s as if Jaime is deliberately avoiding thinking about her.
And I wonder if it’s because he’s running out of ways of explaining things away. Running out of excuses. He can’t hide behind the insults anymore, behind the disrespect, behind the jokes. He lost the taste for it after Ronnet, he doesn’t want to be Ronnet for Brienne. So silence is the next best defense. Which is Jaime’s preferred method for dealing with anything that genuinely moves or unsettles him and that he’s not ready to confront yet. Avoidance. Ignore it.
And then in his last and only chapter in ADWD, there’s that little thought:
Brienne, where are you?
It almost feels accidental, like something that slipped out before he could stop it.
A few pages later, a guard tells him a woman is demanding words with him.
A moment later, Brienne walks into the tent. For one brief second, before the defenses come up, we see exactly what Brienne causes him when he doesn’t have a moment to compose himself.
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interesting that (presumably dead) lords are responsible for naming children in Cyshane. it’s a fun little demonstration of the paternalism of the takeover + the idea that the dead are specifically superseding the living as authority over children.
But this doesn't seem to be a new tradition! Sore Morel, Lively Faillamp (the High Mischief of the Lick), Nametaker (legal name Mewling Lamb), and Dogged herself were all born before the conquest of the Dead, and have names that work with this scheme.
I take this to mean that this paternalism was already part of society. The Lords were already given authority over all children, the first impression of an aristocrat leaving a foundational mark on every child's identity.
Which only goes to show that, as much as the Dead have fucked up Cyshane, the real problem isn't that the aristocrats are dead: the real problem is that there are aristocrats.
It's so interesting how both in and out of universe, people don't talk like Caul Serrikane is one of the dead. Like, in the fandom discord, people point out that [casting call spoilers] is Dead all the time; but I've yet to see anyone act like Caul herself is one of The Dead. Someone in the discord joked that she is "death-fluid;" but if [spoilers] is considered Dead after they've been resurrected once, surely Caul should be considered Dead after being resurrected habitually?
And the Nametaker also acts like Caul is alive! Like, I can't prove they would treat her differently if they thought of her as dead, but the general vibe in their introduction seems very much like they consider her a living person. They also say they run an all-living organization because the dead don't answer to the boss, they answer to the one who raised them — apparently without it even occurring to them that this statement, if true, should also apply to Caul.
Which makes me wonder: does death-diving somehow not count as dying? Caul has been death-diving for long enough to build up a reputation and demand a high fee even for the trade. She's got to have died at least a dozen times, then, yeah? So why isn't she Dead, in the eyes of the fandom or the Nametaker? Why isn't she rotting? (Maybe she is rotting?)
Is a brief, less-than-an-hour dip in the Neth somehow a short enough time that the body of the diver doesn't get a chance to really die, and can resume its function in a way practically indistinguishable from the living?
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.
Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"
I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?
"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."
In 13 minutes.
You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:
Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"
I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."
Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:
AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.
What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:
AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:
Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.
AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:
So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?
This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.
Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.
Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.
My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:
Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:
But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.
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“When we were kids, the Phonics Wizard came to our town to show off how the letter E can change the sounds of vowels. He turned a can into a cane, a pin into a pine. This one kid had a cap and he changed it into a cape, that kind of thing.
“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”
She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”
After a moment, she put the ball of twine back onto its pillow. “Anyways. They tried to arrest the Phonics Wizard, but he had a plan in case something went wrong and he turned it into a plane and flew away.”
easy to miss that one of the reasons maternal mortality is diminished so extremely by modern medicine is that modern medicine makes it so much more possible to identify the pregnancies that will die and take you with them, or are otherwise unacceptably high risk. and then discontinue those ones safely, before it's too late.
thought about this because it's so frustrating when people argue that 'dying in childbirth' is a historical sort of event that doesn't happen nowadays (false) and therefore is irrelevant to the legal status of abortion, since it's not a real danger.
except it super is, and i think a lot of people haven't noticed that this argument in addition to simply being incorrect is basically the same as when people say we don't need vaccines for deadly diseases because no one gets those now anyway.
like yeah one reason for that is we vaccinate everybody ffs.
Note: after the end of Roe v Wade in the US, the maternal mortality rate (and the infant mortality rate) are showing clear increases in the states with the strictest anti-abortion laws.
Forcing people to carry high risk or non viable pregnancies to term kills.
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So, I'm the raid leader for my World of Warcraft guild.
Sometimes during a fight, I ask a question and it gets mistaken for a statement or a command. This is because clipped sentences are standard in a raid, so for example "Urist, are you in a good position to do the ball mechanic?" would come out "Urist, you got ball?" The fact that it's a question is intended to be conveyed by tone alone — but whether due to too-flat affect on my part, or bad audio processing on theirs, the question intonation sometimes gets lost. And then Urist obeys the "command" and dies to the ball, because no, actually, he was out of survival cooldowns and couldn't handle it, and I would have asked someone else if I'd known that.
And of course, "can you" questions get misread as requests all the time, even in real life.
Because of repeated wipes to this kind of misunderstanding, I've gotten in the habit of adding "question" at the end of questions during a fight. "Urist, you got ball question?" "Wipe question?" "Can you solo soak question?" Just to make it 100% clear that I am asking for information, not giving an order.
Anyway, Project Hail Mary is all over my dash now, and I feel like an Eridian.
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
