zoo wee mama

meows loud as fuck shattering all glass within 3 miles no survivors

one of my favorite types of content is people who analyse low brow media with the same seriousness with which one generally uses to analyse artsy/prestige media. not cynicism, no mockery, no acting like they're above it, even if they think its bad. everything has themes even when not intended to be there, everything says something about the context in which it was made even if its not trying to, and sometimes the lack of depth betrays a different type of depth in what the media does not realize that its saying much more than the little that its saying on purpose. even if the craft is bad.

what makes theon so so fun to me as a character is that because he is so deeply unpleasant and unpalatable in his actions, he immediately takes on this "character it's okay to torture" role in the narrative. no action taken against him is morally wrong because he deserves it. and yet the tension in his narrative is that everything done to him is still wrong even if he sucks. he didn't deserve to be taken as a hostage from his mother as a ten year old, he didn't deserve to live with a noose around his neck carrying his would-be-executioner's sword, he didn't deserve to be treated like a freak by his family for being a hostage for nine years. the weird tension of victim-perpetrator in the esgred scene (which nosafeanchorage discusses more cogently than i can here) and obviously the theon adwd reek-ness of it all play heavily into this too. he did so many awful things. and yet the reasons he's punished have almost nothing to do with his actual crimes. there's no justice here. and that's fun.

publishers will talk about representation and "#OwnVoices" and push books about gay theatre kid humor teifling pirates having queer gay sex written by a woman from Massachusetts with a gummy smile who calls herself a "Disaster Bisexual" on twitter and women will read the books and write rave reviews on goodreads about how it was so refreshing to see good queer representation and how much they squee'd and fangirled so hard when gay pirate 1 called gay pirate 2 "his silly stinky little guy" that they woke up their husband. and people will say that if you read these books youre a morally good person and the Trumpers Will Not Win and then other women will comment about how the books about gay pirate buttsex between two "feral unhinged germlin mode queers" are the only things keeping them from killing themselves and making their family watch. and then you will go to half price books and see the gay pirate book front and center on a display for 8 months and there will always be two women standing around it talking very loudly about BTS and House of the Dragon and then after the trend dies down 18 copies of the book will take up half a shelf in the sci-fi/fantasy section and they will never move and it will just be like that for years and its all because another #OwnVoices cozy historical romantasy came out but this time its about fantasyworld Tibetan Monks having gay sex on Not Mount Everest and the whole cycle repeats again but this time with publications and goodreads articles talking about "timely" conversations about race and queer identity. but this time it will be shortly lived because it will come out that Jenny Luizou the author of the monk gay sex book is actually another Massachusetts woman with a too gummy smile and is actually not a nonbinary bipoc Chinese person from Kazakhstan but everyone should have known this anyway because she calls herself a "disaster bisexual" on twitter sometimes. the pirate gay sex book is still taking up half a shelf during all this

It's crazy criston kept his job after the beating a man to death at a royal wedding incident that alicent karma is nothing to mess with

he hits LAENOR when he tries to intervene lol no war corlys wasn't calling for his head

i think one of the reasons i dont vibe with a lot of modern "romantic" writing is that there's a notable lack of sweetness or tenderness written between the characters. the most popular tropes for intimacy negotiation between characters in modern romantic novels seem to be based around overcoming their own disdain, distrust, or resentment of the other character. an increasingly lazy, kneejerk "i hate how much i want them" approach to romantic and physical intimacy. true love requires doubt, they tell us. our desires can only be trusted when we douse them in cold hard rationality. no i'm not trying to come for the enemies rivals irritating workplace acquaintances to lovers trope that's so popular (although i'm also deeply bored by that). rather, i think it demonstrates a general jadedness in a genre that's otherwise supposed to be about "wish fulfillment HEA" yet struggles to conceive characters for whom tenderness and all-consuming desire is not a weakness. the irrationality that love can instill in a person is held at arm's length, a toxic impulse that must be adjusted in order to present a "healthy relationship." the overly-emotional lover has been relegated to "dark romance," or their behaviors channeled into specific genre-approved tropes which fit neatly into hetero-dominant relationship expectations. so much of it ends up reading pathos-less to me. in the hands of a talented writer, unhinged tenderness is the most excruciating possible thing to read. we used to have that, you know. we used to be a society.

williams brought many good things to the role but my personal favorite is how he transformed shane from a BL y/n insert into a crazy person. where is that post about how canon shane is like one bad day away from a murder suicide lol. like he made him scary 🩷