I'm In Need Of Luck And It's Monday So

I'm in need of luck and it's Monday so

the funeral (a grotesque display of two queens’ grief, forced on them against their will) being interjected by images of aegon beating blood into a bloody ruin says something about how women’s grief is exploited and paraded around as a virtue while male grief is only allowed to exist in conjunction with violence.

female sorrow is expected to be public, dignified, and even noble, it serves as a symbol of quiet strength and resilience. otto uses it as a tool to gain sympathy for their cause. notice how he forced alicent and helaena into it, while he allowed aegon not to participate. wouldn‘t the king being at the funeral send a powerful message? yes, it would. but otto looks at aegon with contempt, the other councilmen and alicent do not know what to do with his tears. the realm cannot be allowed to see the king grieve. not like this.

male grief is denied its own space and validity unless it manifests in aggressive or destructive acts. aegon realizes this to some degree too— he lashes out publicly by killing the rat catchers. he shows his grief by being violent, by spilling blood.

the toxicity of it all is very effectively shown at the end when aegon is crying by himself. did he retreat there to be alone and finally let it all out? his mother is either letting him have that moment alone or she’s deeply uncomfortable with it and chooses to leave. no matter what motivated alicent in acting the way she did— the moment still reveals how male vulnerability is something people fear. it shows that even the most human expressions of pain are not acceptable for some.

yeah

@mummer criston cole being more important in a feast for crows 170 years after his death than he is in fire and blood when he’s alive and mostly just going to locations is so special to me. everyone has polished a mirror into his gleaming kingsguard armor and looked at themselves to ask: what does it say about the world if i have the power to change history with a single decisive action? what does that say about me? do knights serve a cause or a king? what if those conflict? what does it mean to exist at the intersection of political, personal, and systemic violence? but during his life he does not appear to have weighed those questions in his own mind at all. too busy trying to figure out more synonyms for jezebel that he can call rhaenyra i guess

The last dragon the Targaryens ever hatched, according to the books, was described as a green female, "small and stunted with withered wings", and was said to be sickly, though laying five eggs which never hatched. A skull later displayed in the throne room was later described as being "no bigger than a mastiff's skull, and oddly misshapen", likely belonging to her.

I'd seen quite a few fanart of the unnamed last dragon and they usually depicted her with an aspect of majesty and beauty, which sounded odd for what was the dying gasp of a once-powerful empire. So my take on the last dragon is the opposite, an absolutely pitiful and grotesquely deformed freak of nature, with basically everything possible wrong with her, at a glance clearly something not bound to have lived very long. Clubbed feet, a kinked tail, a severely shortened upper jaw that caused painful breathing and eating difficulties, a crooked neck, and said withered wings being hideously disfigured, one berely functional as a forelimb to hobble around on and the other a useless appendage with tangled digits. Unable to breathe fire, fly, or be used for riding in combat, she is a perfect representation of the Targaryen dynasty in its final years: frail, impotent, and a mere pathetic shadow of the glory and fearsomeness of its forebearers.

For the purposes of this poll, major recurring characters are recurring characters who interact directly and routinely with the main cast but who are not the subjects of the plotlines being followed in s6.

main character edition

Y'all have seen this, now spin the wheel

Reblog because reblogs are cool and for bigger sample size, thx!