[boundwithpurple]

i write fic on ao3 @ boundwithpurple. here's a starter guide for my house of the dragon works.

highlights reel of complete fic

If you’re here for plot free porn on the more lighthearted side: try good-father [daemyra/rhaenyra/alicent, 9k]

If you’re here for plot free porn (lesbian, short n sweet): try a lesson in canvases [rhaenyra/alicent, 2k]

If you’re here for plot free porn (lesbian, fucked up, heavier character/thematic study): try price of blue [rhaenyra/alicent, 9k]

If you’re here for plot free porn (dead dove version): try claimed [alicent/aemond, 2k]

If you are here for porn AS the plot, in a more sustained treatment: try unwanted consequences [daemon/rhaenyra, 22k]

If you want porn-as-episode-coda: try the true meaning of loyalty [daemon/rhaenyra, 5k]

If you are into vampires and the gothic, targaryen style: try the rapture of that cruelty which yet is love [rhaenyra/alicent & daemon/rhaenyra, 35k]

If you want to dive off the deep end (weird CSA trauma manifesto-cum-ageplay-epic): try rūs riña [daemon/rhaenyra, 55k]

& current WIPs if you want to support what i'm currently working on...

If you want longfic about trans girl rhaenyra targaryen: try wife, mistress, queen [rhaenyra/alicent & daemon/rhaenyra, 4/25, current wc 36k]

If you want my rhaenicent mommy kink epic: try gentle mother, font of mercy [rhaenyra/alicent, 3/6, current wc 30k]

If you want my first deconstructive try at omegaverse: try beckon me in languages i've never heard [rhaenyra/alicent, 3/4, current wc 27k]

[boundwithpurple]

wow i really am not even fujo adjacent anymore…no one is trying to get me to watch ‘half man’ even after the incest rape forced orgasms monologue bit?

[boundwithpurple]

to have known such exquisite joys and still suffer so much it cannot feel possible to bear - a little life is really vary much tracking this particular real emotional tension in a way not much i have encountered does.

[notalicent]

EMMA D'ARCY as RHAENYRA TARGARYEN — 2.06 | "Smallfolk"

[boundwithpurple]

the thing about a little life is the question it is asking is can even the heights of joy and love and pleasure ever compensate for the depth and endurance of suffering. this is a serious philosophical question with deep personal relevance for me. and it is very alienating to me to find everywhere so many people think this is an evil question to ask - that’s essentially what they are saying, when they are saying that yanagihara answered it wrong in answering “sometimes, no.” and my own personal acquaintance with the question means i don’t think there is a wrong answer.

[boundwithpurple]

customer service jobs if every man over 50 didn’t apparently suddenly develop the devout unfounded belief he is a comedian and every young woman being forced to interact with them via the wage is their adoring audience:

[boundwithpurple]

maybe if i use my first paycheck to commission old valyrian priestess alicent as i wanted to after i finished the AU it will encourage me to finish the AU.

[boundwithpurple]

daemon and alicent both have this suggestive spooky old-young affect to me but since we meet daemon as an adult that sense of arrested adolescence is stronger while since we meet alicent is as a kid that sense of being prematurely aged is.

[boundwithpurple]

same image. by the order of your king!

[boundwithpurple]

rhaenyra and alicent both have traumatic ruptures related to the loss of their mothers. rhaenyra’s mother’s death ends her childhood. she cries to viserys in 1.03 “i had a family” - but her mother dies and then she loses most of the rest of it in consequence: daemon is banished, viserys marries alicent. alicent’s lack of a mother is really tied to her victimization by viserys - otto tells her to wear one of her mother’s gowns to “comfort” the king and the first thing alicent says to the adult man she has now been tasked to please is to try to empathetically connect her grief at her mother’s recent death to his at the death of his wife. and then mother loss and mother yearning becomes a very key thread for them - the 1.02 sept scene where alicent tells rhaenyra she prays to be close to her mother and suggests rhaenyra do the same; rhaenyra swearing “on the memory of my mother” to try to lie and convince alicent she’s still a virgin in 1.04 (which is definitely a part of alicent’s fury when she realizes rhaenyra lied - it’s violating that crucial bond). which is why it is interesting it is so emphasized daemon can’t remember his mother at all. like, it’s fascinating she even shows up so urgently at all in s2, because she has been dead for more than four decades by then, as opposed to aemma’s death on screen in the pilot and alicent’s mother death within probably a couple years of the show starting, at most. but she both shows up in daemon’s externalized emotional landscape/dreamscape and she shows up for it to be stressed “you never knew your mother, did you?” for two of our three protagonists, mother’s death is when your childhood dies as well, and daemon’s happened at a much earlier point.

[notalicent]

EMMA D'ARCY as RHAENYRA TARGARYEN — House of the Dragon | Season 3

[boundwithpurple]

“Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love—from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter—to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. It is a pernicious habit, but I can do nothing about it. It can be compared to the uncontrollable flick of an insomniac’s tongue checking a jagged tooth in the night of his mouth and bruising itself in doing so but still persevering. I have known people who, upon accidentally touching something—a doorpost, a wall—had to go through a certain very rapid and systematic sequence of manual contacts with various surfaces in the room before returning to a balanced existence. It cannot be helped; I must know where I stand, where you and my son stand. When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”

— Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov

[boundwithpurple]

!!!

[boundwithpurple]

about your last post regarding fandom and shipping: what do you believe love is?

i have a lot of beliefs about love, none of which involve trying to reduce it to a singular definable thing which it “is.” kind of one of the points of that post lol

[melodyyless]

Illustrated HENRY IV, PART ONE for junior thesis! Riso-printed and made into a book!! Took half a year!

[boundwithpurple]

i have always wanted to write some kind of modern AU for hotd and lately it has become a really strong urge. the reason for this is because there are two strong poles about the possibilities of "complete" AUs, especially for a canon with as many seemingly irreducible elements as this (incest marriage, dragons, royalty). on the one hand, you have the idea, which i always find personally really unsatisfying, that you can divorce characters from context entirely. you can take two hot people and a general dynamic vibe and make them anything. this is a respectable and fun pastime and i'd never want to stop people from doing it, it just isn't interesting to me, because i am obsessively invested in this canon precisely for the things it deals with that very, very few other texts do in the exact way it does them. this leads to the trend of, say, rhaenicent fic where daemon is vanished entirely or made into a one note cartoonish villain, because to have the complex, continuous, ineffacable presence of incestuous enmeshment in rhaenyra's life that is one of the things i feel must remain constant from canon in any AU is inconvenient to aspirations to any lighter treatment. i get it, but again, just personally unsatisfying - a rhaenyra who is not hurt by and who does not continue to love daemon is not rhaenyra at all for me.

then there is the opposite pole that NO translation is possible, that all modern AUs are shallow fripperies that cannot engage with the source material in any interesting way, which i think is about as off-base. i think for hotd especially because it exceptionalizes things that ought not to be exceptionalized. intergenerational incestuous marriage does not exist, but intergenerational incestuous family structures do sadly exist. girls are victimized (see above: forget daemon, viserys and alicent and otto as an abusive figure with an explicit sexualized component is near universally disappeared from modern fic as well, and an alicent that is not failed by and does not fail rhaenyra as a result of this is usually loses something integral to me). women are trapped in the strangleholds of marriage and motherhood. there are still families who monopolize power in various ways and are invested in inheritance and legacies and exclude female members from full participation. it can be a way to critically engage with the themes of a text to try to translate it across contexts and see what changes and what remains the same.

i don't want to do politics or succession style business empire. mostly because this bores me, but also that in some ways they don't in the present capture what i find most compelling about targaryen self-mythologizing, which is a sense of special dispensation that has a mystical component that does not quite come off without the divine aura of kingship. for me, something that captures that a bit better is a lineage that excels in sports or the arts (equestrian olympiads, hollywood dynasty). ruminations on possible avenues follow.

i have always been trying to crack a way into restaging rr - by which i mean another daemyra fic that focuses on those themes of transcending past trauma together through dependence. my thought has always been to do this in a modern AU - where the issues should be interestingly different enough to keep it fresh. i haven’t ever been able to really break this open to myself beyond vague ideas - rhaenyra is orphaned (as a child or as a teenager) and daemon has to confront various family histories (i DO have how the intergenerational incest as a dark family secret could work all sorted out…) while raising her, and then that relationship changing as she reaches adulthood

daemon and rhaenyra have a fucked up sexual relationship when she’s in her later teens, then some separation (as in the show) and then coming back together. one idea was rhaenyra moodily wandering around europe essos recalling this past devastating relationship in her 20s, having just ended a relationship with harwin. another was her marrying harwin young after this and having her kids and it dealing more with ambivalent motherhood and regret. this would include a past relationship with alicent that was happening simultaneously and also simultaneously with viserys/alicent, because i am really interested in teenagers having sex while also in sexual relationships with adults.

hollywood AU - the targaryens are a hollywood dynasty (from like the conquerors in silent film to jaehaerys and alysanne in the studio era, or adjusting that timeline to hit what era i want) and then daemon and rhaenyra (and alicent) are all like fucked up former child stars (i think the idea was someone has turned to directing and cast the other one in a film - perhaps autobiographical or about their family - and it's about reinvention?) no idea of a plot, i think it would just be fun to worldbuild a modern westeros movie industry and it would also be good for translating the whole deal to a modern AU. could also be combined with the above in various ways.

on the darker side, i am a big fan of AO3 user allyoops’ original fiction, and she has many universes that basically deal with incest cults - the targaryens practicing intergenerational incest in secret. something dealing with the implications of how that family structure would translate to a setting where incest is taboo in the “greater” world. the way those fics deal with finding some kind of life and fulfillment while being trapped in very horrible circumstances while also just being fetish content is creatively inspiring to me.

also would like to do another historical AU, that was fun - i had an idea for a daemryacent historical WWI/1920s AU - rhaenyra and alicent were bohemians in paris lys pre-war, alicent has married viserys after it, rhaenyra is now sort of doing this nihilist lost generation thing, daemon is rattling around the family mansion mutilated and impotent after getting his dick shot off in the trenches…that vibe. (also something with them in early hollywood instead, targaryen theater dynasty breaking in to the movies...)

reading a lot of byatt has made me want a like 50s academia AU. daemon and rhaenyra as like old valyrian archeologists and alicent is a specialist in idk victorian renaissance poetry or something and they had an affair while at university in cambridge oldtown. and some dark family secrets, the disintegrating aristocracy, that vibe.

[ms-demeanor]

How do you feel about driving?

I can drive, I am good at driving, I enjoy driving.

I can drive, I am good at driving, I do not enjoy driving.

I can drive, I am bad at driving, I enjoy driving.

I can drive, I am bad at driving, I do not enjoy driving.

I haven't learned to drive, I think I would enjoy driving.

I haven't learned to drive, I do not think I would enjoy driving.

I can't drive anymore, I was good at it, I enjoyed driving.

I can't drive anymore, I was good at it, I didn't enjoy it.

I can't drive anymore, I was bad at it, I enjoyed it.

I can't drive anymore, I was bad at it, I didn't enjoy it.

Remaining time: 20 hours 38 minutes