Cassandra's Vision

Read my own version of Reign Season 2 at: http://cassandravision.tumblr.com/tagged/reign-alternative-season

[asagimeta]

Just realized the meta brilliance of AHS 6B (Return to Roanoke). Like, the second half of the AHS seasons are very often where everything goes off the rails in terms of plot and narrative, and it brilliantly lampshaded that by having the in-universe film crew have a plotted narrative & scares for the return that very very quickly went off the rails WHILE STILL KEEPING TO THE AHS PLOT. That was an amazing inversion of the show's own "losing the plot" trope.

I think, honestly, that’s really what made Roanoke work so well, because it was very self-aware

American Horror Story had JUST started to take the same decline every show starts to take once they begin approaching seasons 4+, there was a tiredness and a restlessness that the audience was showing during season five that I, personally, hadn’t seen with the other seasons, and I think the only reason why they didn’t start showing that during Freak Show is because it was Jessica Lange’s last season and there was alot of focus on that, but I digress

I’ve noticed it in pretty much every fandom I’ve been in except for a very small few (Orphan Black for example) that once you approach season four- and most certainly season five- the fandom gets very restless and there’s little that can be done to save the show, outside of doing something drastic like giving it a huge make-over/reboot (like Once Upon A Time is doing, jury is out on if that will please the fandom or not) or having some kind of unexpected success with a new charector/ship/plot (like Supernatural did by bringing in Castiel) the problem for AHS is that each season is contained as it’s own story so rebooting it won’t work because *every season* is a reboot, and introducing an unexpected hit charector/ship/plot will, again, be a short-lived success, because they’ll only last the course of several episodes to a season and even then not everyone will be on board, Roanoke was, in some ways, AHS making an AHS parody, they really did seem to listen to the complaints they were starting to get and did things very differently, and going into season seven, it feels alot like some of the lessons they learned from Roanoke are things they intend to keep, we still know very little about “Cult” despite the fact that it starts airing next month, and they won’t have a break for the holidays this round either- wich I truly believed helped season six, it prevented the audience from having to get re-acquainted with the season mid-way through- and instead of going on just an old horror trope they way they did seasons 1-5, they’re using something that’s very .. er.. present… in everyone’s minds these days, wile still keeping the good ol’ AHS classic vibe to it of horror tropes (clowns anyone?)

One of my personal favorite things about Roanoke is that there were just so many tiny in-jokes that really gave it a vibe of realism, my favorite AHS season has always been Coven (unpopular opinion I know) in part because it just felt closer to home than some of the others, you know? Marie Lavau was a real person, Stevie Nicks guest-starred, and even though it had one of the most disconnecting factors of the series from our world (outing witches to the rest of the world, wich I personally LOVE) it still just felt very… well, real, I suppose, familiar, there were more nods and winks to current things in Coven than there were in most of the other seasons in my opinion (Madison’s entire charector essentially being one of them, and again, Stevie, who I freaking love to death) Freak Show in particular felt enormously disconnected from the world we live in, wich was part of the point but I just couldn’t get connected to it, Roanoke had so many great little winks, like saying My Roanoke Nightmare got better ratings than The Walking Dead (*snickers*) , the “bloopers”, the social media aspect, the celebrity relationship vs the real relationship, all of that stuff made the witches and ghosts feel so much realer and I really appreciate that

I think, pre-Roanoke, Asylum was the one that really handled the back half the best, in general Asylum was the most cohesive season outside of Roanoke in my opinion, despite having so many subplots

You know what I wonder Anon? I wonder if part of why Roanoke had such a great second half is because no one died in the first half, now hear me out, I am NOT opposed to death in AHS ok? In fact I’m often rooting for it, but think about it, Roanoke allowed us to get through the first half without anyone *really* dieing so that the deaths in the second half could all come in rapid succession without actually rushing anything, I think one of the problems AHS has is having a heavy trigger-finger, sometimes they kill off some of the more promising charectors early on (like Shelley in Asylum for example) and then the ones that stick around until the end can at times overstay their welcome (*stares pointedly at several members of Freak Show and sighs*) but Roanoke avoided BOTH of these issues, they kept around all of their charectors from the first half so we could get to know them and then killed them off in a really bang-bam way so that it struck hard and fast, it didn’t linger or drag on like they sometimes do because they had a large cast to kill off and there was no sense lingering on anyone really, and they kind of gave us a soft reboot of charectors so that none of them really overstayed their welcome, we got to know Shelby and Matt in a SENSE in the first five episodes- enough that we didn’t feel like there was any loss of potential when they died- but what we knew were only cheap cut-out versions, we saw the real, messier Shelby and Matt in the back half of the season and that’s what prevented us from going “Can someone just kill them already please?” , because there were questions then- is Shelby a serial killer? Is Matt really in love with the witch (who’s name I cannot spell)? And then we had the actors who, again, we saw their faces all season, but we weren’t introduced to them until the second half, it was a good way of bringing in an entirely new cast of charectors to kill without them FEELING like new charectors because we already were used to seeing them on the screen, there was no sense that they’d overstayed their welcome and there was also no sense that they were just newbies out of the blue who we wanted dead so we could get back to the mains, it was really brilliant

I think Roanoke may have single-handedly spared AHS from getting post-season-three-show-fatigue that so many scripted dramas get hit with, and season seven looks like they’ll be following atleast SOME of the formulas Roanoke set, the aforementioned timing and the smaller episode count, and listen, I SO. BADLY. wish we still had 13 episodes ok? I love AHS, I would watch it year-round if I could, but I have to agree that ten episodes really felt much tighter and more cohesive than thirteen, I think this is why every show is either having shorter episode orders or splitting the seasons into two different arcs, Teen Wolf had to learn the hard way that sometimes less is more and Once Upon A Time still has large orders but they compensate by splitting the season… wich, admittedly, doesn’t always work… but I digress

AHS is like a long horror movie so cohesion is more important for them than alot of other shows because the mark of good horror is pace- be it getting in alot of punches in a short amount of time or drawing out one long, lingering wound over the course of two hundred years, if the style of horror you’re writing has a pace that doesn’t match up you’re really screwed, and AHS is a very fast-punch type of horror with lingering themes, the danger of that style being a TV show and not a movie is that it can easily overstay it’s welcome and feel like it’s dragging or getting too messy if it goes on for too long

But anyway, I think the brilliance of Roanoke, as you said, is that AHS was parodying themselves, remember that episodes 1-5 had something in there that referenced the previous seasons, from the nurses of Murder House to the witch of Coven, Roanoke was all about presenting AHS it’s self to something of an outsider’s veiwpoint and it was utterly, utterly magnificent

[cassandravision]

I am so glad that I decided to binge-watch Roanoke instead of watching it week after week, the series really improved! I love the meta humor in some of the later episodes and its take on found footage horror movies, reality TV, and TV shows in general. 

[thewritingpossum]

Historical fiction writers and historians like to talk about the whole “Edward abandoned pregnant Isabella to save Piers Gaveston” thing (which is entirely fake btw) but I think we should focus more on that One Time In Tynemouth when Isabella faced the possibility of an attack by the Scots because, while it’s actually an event with very little historical significance, I think it had a tremendous impact on the people directly involved in it, as it seems to have been a major trigger in the deterioration of Edward and Isabella’s relationship, which she fully blamed on Hugh le Despenser but it also appears to be one of the rare instance where Hugh was genuinely not trying to fuck her over in any shape or form.

In October 1322, Edward was dealing with the aftermath of yet another failed Scottish campaign, which included Robert Bruce invading back England. Bruce quickly marched toward where the King was at the moment, wreaking havoc as one generally do during a punishing invasion and, by mid-October, Edward was forced to flee, abandoning a whole bunch of his material possessions behind him.

The situation would have already been humiliating enough but it sparked another problem: at the moment, Isabella had been residing at Tynemouth, a little less than a hundred miles away from her husband. While there’s no clear indication that Bruce was planning to walk toward this direction or had any plan to take the queen hostage, it’s undeniable that Isabella herself believed it and was terrified.

It’s always a bit sketchy to try and gage the feelings of people who have been dead for hundreds of years (if anything, it’s also risky to try and assume the feelings of living people too so…) but in this particular case, I really do think we may reasonably argue that it was one of the most traumatic event in her life and she entirely blamed Hugh le Despenser for it, accusing him of ‘falsely and treacherously counselling the king to leave my lady the queen in peril of her person’ at Tynemouth.“, which is straight up factually incorrect.

I won’t try to debate whether or not she was in actual physical danger, partially because I don’t know enough about Robert de Bruce and his military tactics to gage whether or not he may have been interested in taking her hostage (but it honestly feels unlikely, at least in the circumstances…) but we know for a fact that even if Hugh actually did advised Edward to let his wife to rot alone at Tynemouth, that’s not what Edward actually did.

We still have a high number of letters showing Edward’s concern for his wife and he quickly charged some of his most trusted men with the task to go safely fetch the queen. The problem here is that his most trusted men obviously included some of Hugh’s subordinates. Isabella reacted to the situation just as well as you may imagine: she categorically refused to leave with Hugh’s men, not under any circumstances whatsoever. I don’t think her fear was entirely irrational: she had already gone on her knees to beg for Hugh’s banishment and I do think she may have been afraid of him using this occasion to get his revenge.

Now, I’m still not sure if Hugh ever actually intended to get rid of the queen (my opinion on that changes all the time tbh) but even if he did, I’m entirely sure he was not planning to do so here. First, there’s the fact that even if some of his men were present, he wasn’t there to command them and Isabella had no reason to distrust the actual commander present. Most importantly, Hugh’s own wife Eleanor, who had been a member of the queen’s household pretty much since she had set foot in England was also present. Hugh was a reckless man who cared very little about who he had to destroy to reach his goals but he appears to have sincerely care for his close family and it’s highly improbable that he would have voluntarily put her in a harm way, even to get back at the queen, especially since she was most likely pregnant too at the moment.

The situation must have been incredibly messy. Both Isabella and Eleanor were heavily pregnant (or Eleanor’s case, may have just given birth) and their relationship, that had been a stable and friendly one for years, since they were both little more than children, had probably been deteriorating for some time due to their husbands’ affair. Eleanor probably desperately wanted to escape with her husband’s men and Isabella’s clear and definite refusal probably felt like a knee kick in the gums.

The fact that two of Isabella’s ladies died as a direct consequence of their escape, one of them who was also pregnant and passed away shortly after prematurely giving birth was probably even more traumatic for both of them, as was the fact that the third man send by Edward to rescue the queen was actually caught by the Scots and taken hostage, which had been Isabella’s worst fear since the very beginning

Even if all technically ended well (except for those two poor ladies-in-waiting, obviously) and even if most contemporary chroniclers appear to have found the whole event fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty clear that it worsened the deterioration of marriage of Edward and Isabella, if it didn’t kickstarted it; before 1322, Edward and Isabella spent a lot of time together, even when it was not strictly necessary and we have a profusion of letters from one to the other when they were separated.

In 1322-1323, the time they spent together had shrunk to next to nothing and there’s few letters remaining to indicate that they keep contact when they were away from each other. In fact, there’s times during those two years when Edward himself was pitifully vague about the exact whereabouts of his wife, which lead me to believe that he had either temporarily casted her away from court or that she herself had decided to stay away from him (probably a mix of the two) and that he was trying to save face.

Now, what I find the more interesting is that I can easily understand the point of view of every person implicated in this situation. Isabella must have felt like her husband had abandoned her and only 'rescued’ her by sending her her worst enemy’s delegates. The fact that her contemporaries seems to have seen the situation as a non-issue and that even Hugh’s worst detractors didn’t blame him for anything, for once (the pope himself actually commended him for the way his men had acted…) must have been even more enraging for her.

Eleanor probably felt like her queen and friend had not only gravely offended her husband (and by extension her family and herself) once again but also put them all in danger for no logical reason. Edward was clearly worried for his wife at first but her refusal to cooperate was probably mind-boggling to him at first and then insulting, especially when it become obvious that she was not planning to get over it.

As for Hugh…If there’s one thing we know about Hugh’s personality, it’s that he was very good at making himself the victim in even the situations where he was the most blatantly at fault. Now, considering that he already disliked Isabella before the whole thing, can you imagine how he saw it and what he had to tell Edward about it? It must have been something along the lines of:  "Your wife essentially spat in your face by refusing the help you sent her and claiming you had done nothing useful, she offended me once again and still claimed it was somehow my fault and she also endangered my wife and unborn child, what kind of unnatural, hateful woman would behave in such a way toward her king and husband? How can you take that?” Fuck, he may even have truly believed that.

Now I’m not gonna say it’s the one thing that really determined the rest of their relationship (there was already A Lot going on long before that and there was much more to come for all of them) but I do think it was a pretty major element of how things managed to go so bad so fast and I also find it pretty telling that Isabella would later accuse Hugh of forcing her husband to abandon her to mortal danger even if absolutely no one else seems that it was what happened when it actually happened…

[confessionsofatvjunkie]

A non-shippers unbiased Jon-sa/erys opinion…

Okay, I know I’m not completely unbiased here, becasue I’m not much of a Dany fan (and won’t be until she starts being honest about her intentions). BUT since all of my shipping energy is devoted to Braime and Gendrya I just don’t have anything left for other ships! Because of this I am neither Team Jonsa or Team Jonerys, but it has become such a huge part of the fandom its hard not to form an opinion. 

First I think its important to make sure we’re separating our actors from our characters, because while Kit has great chemistry with both Sophie and Emilia, JON has great chemistry with Sansa, but watching him with Dany last season was about as exciting as watching paint dry…

I’ll come back to that, but let’s start with Jonsa first: 

I’m really not here for anymore incest in GoT, and while I know that technically they’re only cousins and not siblings, they were still raised in the same home as half brother and sister, even though they didn’t have much of a relationship in their youth. However, detractors of this ship who use their familial relationship to completely write off the the ship are forgetting a little something… GRRM. He doesn’t seem to have to have the same compunction about this topic as the anti’s do, in his original outline for the books he had a storyline where Arya (yikes, I can’t even think about it!) and Jon fall in love and are tortured by this love UNTIL they find out about Jon’s true parentage. Now we know he moved on from that storyline, but did he move on, or just pivot? Another part of the original outline was that Arya was going to be part of an unwitting love triangle, as Tyrion, who abandons his family to fight on the side of the Stark’s develops feelings for her, albeit unrequited… now can we think about a different Stark family member that GRRM pivoted a messy, and complicated relationship with Tyrion to? So if he salvaged some semblance of his original outline by transferring plot points to Sansa, its not out of the question that he would do the same for other plot points. Also people who say there’s no canonical evidence for Jonsa are choosing not to pay attention. I mean, you don’t gaze longingly at your “sister’s” lips, after kissing her on the forehead! Go find the gif, I’m not kidding, he kisses her forehead, looks her in the eye’s then looks down at her lips, and just pauses there! Anti’s you might not want it to happen, but it very possibly could happen 

Now, onto Jonerys: 

(I know they’re technically related too, but they weren’t raised together, so it doesn’t factor into my opinion, thats just what this ridiculous show has done to me!!) I know I said I’m not much of a Dany fan, but I’m going to put that aside, and just look at the evidence provided to us in the show. I think Jon and Dany’s relationship, as presented in season 7 is legit, meaning I’m not really here for the political!jon theories (not because it’s not an interesting idea, I just don’t think D&D are that creative)… so, I think Jon comes to care about Dany (yes, even if he also cares for Sansa - you can have feelings for two people at once) and I think Dany’s feelings for Jon are also real. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are end game, it just means that going into the last season we’re going to see from Dany where her true priorities lie. When she learns there is a surviving Targaryen that has a more legitimate claim to the throne than she does (this is putting aside the fact that I don’t think she has a claim at all, nor does Jon for that matter - but that’s a topic for a different post, lol!) this is the moment that will tell us what kind of person Dany is, and will end up being. She’s either going to acknowledge the claim, or fight against it - there’s really no other option. If she fights against it then I don’t exactly see their relationship surviving that? So she’ll have to decide if love or power is what she wants more. Now I think if D&D had 100% say over how the show ends then they’d have Jon, despite learning of his parentage, “give” the throne to Dany, or at least marry her and rule together (I’ve not seen such huge Dany stan’s as D&D since Jorah!!) Dany would be the hero!! But since we know they’re beholden to GRRM’s ending for the books, I think he’s got a little more imagination than that. I don’t know if Dany will go all Mad Queen, I don’t even necessarily think she’d be a bad ruler (though I do agree with Daario that’s she’s more of a conqueror than a ruler, but  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) but I just don’t think GRRM would end his series so predictably. The only reason I think Jon should “win” is becasue he doesn’t want to rule, and in stories like this it’s always the people who have leadership thrust upon them that do the best job, the one’s who rule because its the right thing to do, and not out of a lust for power. By that estimation I’d be just as happy if Sam, or Gendry, or Davos ended up King (actually Davos would make a great King… side note, this blog is now a Davos for King blog, lol) Okay, I said before I’d get back to the “watching paint dry” comment, and here it it, its true, they were boring! I’m sorry, I just didn’t buy their courtship AT ALL in season 7, again I don’t think this is purposeful i.e. Jon hiding some secret plot, I just think it was a matter of pacing. We’re so used to watching things move so slowly on this show, that to slam all that happened between them in season 7 into just 7 episodes, it just wasn’t believable to me, and all the “he’s not in love with me” and “I’ve seen you staring at her heart *wink, wink*” moments felt so forced. I think because of the pace, we weren’t able to enjoy any pining, or build up, it was, “look here’s our two stars, aren’t they pretty? They’re gonna bang”… then they did. I just wasn’t here for it, and the actors didn’t seem to be either, hence the paint drying boredom of their performances.

tl/dr: Yes, Jonerys is real, but that doesn’t mean its end game… and yes Jonsa could happen. But I don’t really care either way, I just want Jaime to kiss Brienne, and Gendry to get Arya all flustered by calling her m’lady in front of her family, and Davos is King now, that a new rule I just made but is a good rule! Okay, bye!

[mllemontpensier]

Catherine de’ Medici’s Book of Hours. Bibliothèque national de France. 

Mary ,Queen of Scots and Francis ll of Valois 

Philip II and Élisabeth de Valois

Charles III,  duc de Lorraine et de Bar Claude de Valois 

Charles IX de Valois and Elisabeth of Austria  

Henry de Valois

Henry of Navarre and Marguerite if Valois

Francois of Valois

Louis of Valois with his twin sisters Victoria and Joan. 

Luise de Vodemont, wife of Henry of Valois

Cristine of Lorraine, daughter of Claude de Valois and Carles de Lorraine

[cassandravision]

Confession

By the time the series ended, I cared more about Marie and Auguste Melmotte more than anyone else. David Suchet plays a wonderful villain and Shirley Henderson’s Marie is at once crazy and loveable at the same time. 

Apparently I’m the only one on tumblr who likes these characters more than Cillian Murphy’s character since his beautiful face takes up most of the posts in this tag. 

[chersyeux-blog]

More lasting was his fondness for small lapdogs, an interest which he shared with members of his family and court. In 1586 there were at least three hundred lapdogs in his household. The king received and offered them as gifts. Unlike Charles IX, Henry disliked animal fights.

R. J. Knecht’s The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (via chersyeux)

Why am I not surprised? I can imagine him and his mignons dressing up tiny lap dogs in little costumes and tying ribbons in their fur. 

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

[rmstitanicfacts]

DID YOU KNOW: the United States Senate’s inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic opened at a property that had been owned by a Titanic victim? Senator William Alden Smith (R-MI) and Senator Francis G. Newlands (D-NV), accompanied by two U.S. Marshals, had arrived in New York on April 18 to serve subpoenas to several survivors of the Titanic who were considered to be flight risks - including J. Bruce Ismay - and gaveled their subcommittee into order the next morning in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Colonel John Jacob Astor IV had built the Astoria Hotel in 1897 to compete with his cousin, William Astor’s Waldorf Hotel. The two hotels were immediately beside one another, and by 1900 had been consolidated into one hotel as the family feud that had fueled the competition ended. Astor lost his life in the Titanic’s sinking, and the Waldorf-Astoria offered the use of its ballroom to the Senate committee as their impromptu hearing room for the duration of their stay in New York.

[jamespaulmoody]

Charlotte Collyer photographed with her daughter Marjorie. Along with her husband, Harvey, the Collyer family boarded the Titanic as second class passengers under joint ticket number 31921 which cost £26, 5s.

Charlotte and Marjorie were rescued in lifeboat 14 but Harvey Collyer died in the sinking and his body, if recovered, was never identified.

[mindblowingfactz]

The owner of Macy’s died on the Titanic. He refused to get in a lifeboat before women and children, and his wife refused to leave without him. She said, “I will not be separated from my husband. As we have lived, so will we die, together.” They were last seen standing on the deck, arm in arm.

[honeybeelullaby]

There was peace. The world hadn’t even tended to its way. Nothing was revealed in the morning and the trembling was not known the night before. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start, keeping it moving at a rapidly increasing pace ever since, with less and less peace, satisfaction and happiness. To my mind the world of today awoke April 15, 1912.

John Borland “Jack” Thayer, Titanic survivor (1894 - 1945)

Keep reading

(via honeybeelullaby)

[beyondthegoblincity]

The horror, the helpless horror, the worst of it all–need it have been?

–Elizabeth Shutes, Titanic survivor

[beyondthegoblincity]

A postcard written by 17-year old Second Class passenger Thomas Mudd to his mother.

Dear Mother, Arrived at Southampton safe The Titanic is a splendid boat + you hardly know you are moving. Will write more fully later. Your loving son Tom- ps Please send Edie’s address also send He (sic) this card as I do not know it

Thomas Mudd died during the Titanic disaster.

[credit: Henry Aldridge & Son, via Invaluable]

[jamespaulmoody]

This postcard was sent by Titanic’s chief wireless operator, Jack Phillips, on April 6, 1912. It sold for £15,000 at Henry Aldridge & Son’s auction, making it one of the world’s most expensive postcards. The postcard is addressed to Miss Elsie Phillips, one of Jack’s older sisters. 

In full it reads: “Thanks very much for your letter. Having glorious weather, went to Cowes yesterday. Will write later before we sail. Love all, Jack.” Phillips has added in the address panel, “Miss Elsie Phillips, 11 Farncombe St., Godalming.

[thewinningside]

Rare photographs of the RMS Titanic during its ill-fated maiden voyage by Jesuit priest Francis Brown who sailed with the ship for the first leg of its journey April 10-11th, from Southampton (England) to Cobh (Ireland).

[titanic-confessions]

[titanic-confessions]