it's not queerbaiting it's saving the world

i guess one reason among many i find the developing “fascism” beat in hotd (rhaenyra is now being presented in behind the scenes commentary as someone “cognizant” of using “fascist imagery” even while the actual beliefs she’s expounding are like “i am divinely ordained to rule this feudal kingdom via prophetic mandate and myself have a semi-divine status” which to me simply has many more immediate ideological connections to other things than to fascist ideology or rhaenyra promoting a modern cult of dictatorial personality) enormously grating is because domination existed before the 20th century. there have been many, many, many empires. as someone who thinks about the horrors the roman empire a lot. daemon and rhaenyra’s valyrian revivalist turn in s3 is more analogous to like byzantines being really into the good old days of the western empire. and obviously all of this exists after fascism, it is pretty inescapably inflecting the imaginary, and fascism made its uses of previous empires. but i do think that’s exactly why there is benefit in disarticulating it, rather than just handing huge swathes of human history to fascists in this way. and resent the idea you can apparently never use fantasy to tell stories that wrestle with or examine any other epochs of human time, other societal orders and other belief systems. all is subsumed to us and what made us, we can and should only ever try to talk about ourselves. “rhaenyra targaryen, feudal monarch with a dragon, is literally, ideologically, a fascist, despite having no actual beliefs that fit neatly to fascism, which is a real ideology with identifiable beliefs, not just like, vibes, because she makes a speech to a crowd that’s supposed to be scary” as opposed to something that allows connections across times ideologies etc to be drawn but does not overdetermine the matter - which i think could be generative - is that kind of giving over.

have to say i do think people are glazing gwayne's commitment to daeron somewhat simply because his competition is alicent (absent) and ormund (unfortunately very present). like i'm sorry but his trusted adult advice and support was just 1. don't kill yourself and 2. try not to let your uncle touch you anywhere you don't want until you can become president and make it illegal for him to do that. anyway i'm going to go rest my eyes on the couch now. the only halfway decent parental figure boymoder sansa stark has is the teen omelas dragon chained to a radiator in the basement.

"repeatedly going back to rewatch specific scenes" stage of fic writing always so so good

going insane right before i go on vacation (staycation) so i wont be problematically avoiding my work but will just have like 11 days of uninterrupted time to fuck around with writing. so excited.

our house of dragon is collapsing

really seeing the difference in how tme nonbinary people are treated vs tma nonbinary people demonstrated concisely in the promo material/interviews coming out ahead of teenage sex and death at camp miasma & how comments are needing to be limited or turned off only on videos of jane schoenbrun speaking and not on those of jack haven

also i somewhat suspect that the smaller scale harassment & smearing calling schoenbrun a pedophile for making a movie with the words "teenage sex" in the title will go a little more mainstream post-release and when you're talking about how stupid this is i need you to recognize that it is specifically happening because the director is transfem and not simply as the result of a nebulous "cultural puritanism"