i am always sad about Ice. but seeing house lannister’s trajectory lead them straight to destruction tells me they at least won’t have widow’s wail for long.

lol, thank you. I try to reel it in from time to time but alas 🤷🏻‍♀️

ideally? she dies, but with dignity. the reason the valonqar!jaime theory irks me so much is because the idea of her dying violently by the hands of a man she (once) trusted really disgusts me.

I mean, aside from saving their lives, I’d argue that the direwolves are also emotionally hugely important as well. Jon loves and trusts Ghost a great deal; he’s cried with Ghost, confided in him, worried about him, and it’s through Ghost that Jon is able to get a measure of how his siblings are doing. He’s comforted by the presence of Ghost’s litter-mates in his wolf dreams, because they’re a direct line to his own siblings. This same contact is seen with Arya and Bran, and it’s what grounds Arya and reminds her that she’s a Stark with siblings she can one day reunite with. Conversely, it’s part of Sansa’s isolation, because she doesn’t know that Bran, Rickon, and Arya are alive, and doesn’t have a wolf to comfort her. When you remove the direwolves from the story, you leave behind a family that loses a crucial bond and their emotional support animals. The direwolves are part of the family, and that matters for a family that’s always been very close.

Compared to Daenerys, who has no family, instead created a chosen family, among them her own “children”: dragons. They are more than just weapons to her. Well before they could even be considered weapons, they were entirely reliant on her for food and care. She raised them from hatchlings to ferocious beasts, but in the process loses control of them, which is very much analogous to a parent’s experience of their children growing up and no longer needing them.

Moreover, the dragons are the causes of her problems as often as they are the solution to them. Things don’t go easy breezy beautiful because Daenerys has dragons; they’re a novelty that the greedy around her are dying to get their hands on, either through trickery or marriage or murder. Dragons are selfish, self-sufficient creatures who don’t know the difference between human and animal, and don’t care. And that’s where the dragons are meaningless if Daenerys wasn’t their mistress: they don’t care.

Dragons don’t care about slavery, or rapes, or children, or women, or thrones, or power. They don’t make policy decisions, they don’t strategize, they don’t plan battles. They can’t make emotional pleas, they aren’t charismatic, they can’t negotiate. Let them roam free and they’ll eat whatever and whoever they want, they’ll destroy cities if they feel like it, and they won’t care one whit for the social structures that humans created. Without Daenerys, the dragons are nothing but fearsome killers. With Daenerys, they can be put to a purpose, and the consequences of that purpose would rest solely on her.

honestly. we are so lucky that we have a pokemon lab in our town of 6 people, that the professor is our next door neighbor, and his son/grandson is our childhood friend. we have everything handed to us!

this is such a strange ask bc it’s either asking me to go off of evidence/foreshadowing that she will do so, or it’s asking me to speculate based off of absolutely nothing. it also kind of makes me laugh bc im imagining this in the same futureverse where dany also burns down the water gardens and turns vaes dothrak into a crisp. like damn, why are y’all insistent on having dany blow up every city she sees, when she hasn’t even done that once?

anyways. i’ll leave blowing up king’s landing to cersei. something tells me she’d do a better job at it.

Omg did you hear that y’all, I’ve grown!

I’m pretty sure you can actually see me shift my opinion starting some time in early 2015/late 2014, but I’m not going to go dig those posts up right now. When I first came into the fandom I had very much bought into the idealized, romanticized version of R/L because it is admittedly very easy to buy into. It’s got a lot of classic love story elements and huge secrets and is just an overall appealing ship at the start. I even wrote tons of fic for the ship, some of which became wildly popular even though now I look back on it and groan.

And then I pulled back the curtain and realized that none of it is okay. Lyanna’s age, Rhaegar’s actions, the location of the Tower of Joy, Elia’s situation, the final showdown at the ToJ, all of it began to rub me the wrong way until I basically decided that yeah, Rhaegar is a piece of shit and what he did was nothing short of predatory, regardless of Lyanna’s feelings towards him (or lack thereof). It took me reading meta and then starting to write my own to get into a mindset that allowed me to find stuff to criticize, really. A lot of @joannalannister‘s writing was especially formative at the time.

And now, here I am! All grown up!

okay u right. but dont forget their pops daeron ii too

when I say people put him at the center of everything, I mean lyanna and elia’s worth and/or importance often is measured in relation to rhaegar and his wants. i.e. lyanna is evil because she chose rhaegar, elia is worthless because she couldn’t give rhaegar three children, lyanna is stupid because she ran away with rhaegar, elia is annoying because she’s an impediment to rhaegar’s happiness, etc etc. they are not often fairly judged or evaluated as individuals, instead they are placed in the context of rhaegar’s desires and his alleged supreme importance above them all.

this is seen not only with rhaegar, but many other male characters in the series. lyanna’s importance in the context of the narrative is only ever in relation to other men– what she meant to ned, what she meant to robert, and what she meant to rhaegar. the picture we form of her is based on how men perceived her, how they knew her, or what they wanted her for. their desires and emotions are paramount to hers, and she is only important because of what she meant to them.

this can be seen in elia’s case with her relationship with rhaegar, oberyn, and doran. however, in oberyn’s case we are allowed to see her as an individual who deserves justice because of what was done to her, and oberyn forces everyone to answer for that crime. so while it’s nice we’re allowed a little subversion on that point, it does not change the fact that what we see of her is what the men in the story want us to know about her. when we think of elia as oberyn’s sister instead of her own person, or lyanna as ned’s sister instead of her own person, we fall victim to the male-centered narratives, where women only seem to exist to cause them emotional pain or physical pleasure, and that’s the only thing that matters.