Chi-Chi-Chimera @chi-chi-chimera - Tumblr Blog

Fic Ideas (free to a good home)

Long masterpost of various plot bunnies and fic ideas I’ve had over the years, for various fandoms. Pick them up if you’re interested.

Note: the formating on this only works if you go to my blog itself, not on dashboard.

#fanfiction #plot bunnies #mdzs #the untamed #rivers of london #transformers #atla #fma:b #star wars #critical role #tma

catboybiologist

VENT POST

iconuk01

I'm very proud of my countrymen for introducing America to the world of the proper football chant.

None of this cheerleader stuff for soccer, oh no sireee, I mean, no disrespect to cheerleaders who put a LOT of work and effort into their performances, but somehow "Rah-Rah! We're the best" from peppily gymnastic young things can't quite match the sheer power of entire stadiums of grown up fans yelling at the top of their lungs things like....

It's unclear if this one originated with the English of Scottish games (spelling of "old" as "auld" notwithstanding), but either way, well done.

And it's striking home too! :D

Sportsball holds no interest for me, but that doesn't mean I can't respect the participation aspects sometimes.

captain-price-returns

Him getting smaller and smaller as he walks up to the truck is some real Peter Jackson The Lord of the Rings forced perspective movie magic

turtle-paced

If, for whatever reason, Cersei was unavailable as a bride by the end of Robert's Rebellion, which other candidates were there for the position of Queen?

We'd be looking through the ranks of Tier 2 nobility at that point - the Hightowers would be a good first port of call. Going to that second tier is not unprecedented (Westerlings anyone?), but not ideal for a king coming to the throne in the aftermath of a rebellion. Unless Cersei was unavailable or nonexistent at the start of Robert's Rebellion, in which case I think you could well see Robert-Catelyn and an attempt at Ned-Lysa (that could still end up in Jon Arryn-Lysa).

But that's weird. In the highest families of the realm, there are a grand total of five daughters of a remotely marriageable age around the Rebellion era: Cersei, Lyanna, Catelyn, Lysa, and the already-married Elia. Contrast to the similarly-aged sons in the same set of families: Rhaegar, Brandon, Ned, Robert, Stannis, Oberyn, Jaime. In the 'not dead in infancy - not quite marriageable' age bracket we have Viserys, Benjen, Willas, Garlan, Renly and Tyrion on the male side, and on the female side there's... Arianne. Overall, that's two sons to every daughter.

And just a step down the social ladder, we run into a vast field of ???.

This is what I mean by GRRM's not a great worldbuilder in terms of feminist issues, and it starts with raw numbers. This is a work of fiction, not a historical source (or written as a fake historical source) where the existence of women is filtered out in the telling. You'd expect the sex balance to be the same approximate 50-50 as it is in the real world. And yet we hear of so many fewer women just around and about the setting. Where are the sisters? The female lines of descent, aka the indicators that men in the backstory had sisters? The female friends and cousins? The second wives? The widows, especially those who still have use-rights over their late husband's holdings? The senior septas who turn their institutions into businesses or schools or hubs of patronage? All these people tend to exist only when and where the plot requires them to exist. When the complexity of the human setting has been scaled back to make it easier for the author to handle and the reader to consume, it's those women and girls who vanished in the process.

Again, it's worth mentioning that GRRM has improved in this sphere. There are examples of women in most of those categories in the series! Usually from AFFC or ADWD. They're secondary or tertiary characters, because GRRM was not thinking about this sort of issue when he designed the bones of the series in AGoT.

GRRM made Cersei queen in backstory by designing a setting where there were no other available candidates who brought anything close to what Cersei brought in terms of political alliances. It works, it makes an important thematic point about justice vs political expediency, and it's a blunt instrument of plotting and worldbuilding.

sunderwight

So, Crusader Kings II has an exemplary Song of Ice and Fire mod. It being a medieval grand strategy game natively, with elements that allow for conquering armies, political marriages, lines of descent, etc, natively makes it a good fit for a game based on the books, and while there's a mod for the 3rd game in the series I don't have the hardware to play it so I can't speak to it. However, last I checked it was still a work-in-progress, and overall I'd recommend CK2's version as one of the best games based on the books period, despite it actually being a fan mod.

Anyway, one of the things about CK2 is that every region on the map has its landed lords, and they have their families, vassals, people in their courts, etc. When you are conquering or forging alliances or arranging marriages, you can get a list of potential spouses based on what the game thinks are the smartest choices for you in terms of geography, non-aggression pacts, allies, etc, as well as the possible standout skills of the prospective bride.

One of the things about the game is that this makes for a LOT of NPCs. The mod lets you start things, at the earliest, about a hundred years before Aegon's conquest, with recommended bookmarks in periods like the Dance, the Blackfyre rebellions, Robert's rebellion, etc.

So I can actually load up the game and check to see who the most advantageous possible matches for Robert are, according to a military strategy game at least, outside of Cersei. Which out of curiosity, I did!

The game's suggestions in order of best advantages were:

One of Walder Frey's daughters (Morya Frey)

A daughter of Lord Hightower (Leyla Hightower)

A sister of Lord Bracken (Catelyn Bracken)

A Swann (Jeyne Swann)

A sister of Lord Blackwood (Alysanne Blackwood)

A sister of Lord Lefford (Leonella Lefford)

So, one of the things about the mod is that it has a feature where if a character is from the actual lore for the books, a button lights up that links to their article on the ASOIAF wiki. So you know who is from the books, and who is an NPC that's been generated by the game to flesh out the population. Since it would be difficult to populate the entire world based on who is mentioned in the books, there are plenty of game-generated NPCs precisely for things like making decent matches.

Of the ladies offered by the game, the Bracken and Blackwood do not have wiki links, so I assume the game created them or at least gave them names and such. That leaves us with Morya Frey (age 13, so even in Westeros Robert would have a wait on his hands), Leyla Hightower, Jeyne Swann, and Leonella Lefford, with the game suggesting Morya Frey due to the strategic importance of controlling the Twins, and also being related to House Blackwood through her mother. But her age means that Robert might pass her over for Leyla Hightower, the next best option thanks to the Hightowers being the second strongest house in the Reach, and the Tyrells lacking marriageable women.

Anyways one of the funny things about the game is that when you hit the bookmarks where GRRM's specified more of the family trees, and thus the gender ratios are less influenced by the game trying to populate everything reasonably, basically every lord starts having to marry down because there are simply not enough named women.

All this is probably beside the points about narrative and world building, which are excellent, I just think it's interesting that the likeliest answers (at least according to a game with decidedly military interests, but then Robert also has decidedly military interests) are indeed a Hightower or a Frey. Canonically, Morya Frey married Flement Brax and had three kids with him, and Leyla Hightower married Ser Jon Cupps (no mention of kids). House Cupps doesn't seem to be an even remotely prominent house, so they might have been a love match.

Jeyne Swann is also a bit noteworthy. The game specifies her as a sister of the Lord of House Swann, and she is the lady rescued along with her septa from the Smiling Knight incident. The books don't really mention what happened to her in the long run.

#asoiaf #meta

txttletale

or to be a little less pithy, groundedness means a sense of internal consistency, the idea that events and traits of a story or world are grounded in a coherent set of logics.

while realism means--exactly that, adherence to the specific logics of actual reality and its physics, logistics, etc.

there is of course nothing wrong with wanting realism in a story, but 99% of the people who say they do really want groundedness. like the vast majority of dumb arguments about asoiaf/got are its fans saying "its realistic" when they mean "its grounded" and people ridiculing them because it is in fact not very realistic (and not just because of the overt fantasy elements)

prokopetz

In my experience, another big part of the problem with talking about "realism" in fictional milieux is the product of a specific Type of Guy employing the term as a sort of semantic bait and switch, sometimes without consciously realising that this is what they're doing.

There's a particular recurring discussion of "realism" in media that goes something like this: "okay, but realistically the heroes would always win because they'd just shoot the villain while they're monologuing" – while refusing to acknowledge the obvious follow-up question: "wait, but if monologuing reliably gets you shot, where do all the monologuing villains come from?"

i.e., what we're really discussing is not a milieu which has adhered to some notional model of "realism" ab initio, but one which was apparently governed by the conventional tropes of its genre right up until the moment the character the person framing the scenario wants to win walks into the room, whereupon "realism" asserts itself.

Heck, there were folks doing this song and dance in the notes of the post this one is following up on, trotting out hypotheticals like "in a realistic fantasy setting the twelve-year-old chosen one would always lose because experience trumps skill and the power of friendship isn't real", implicitly taking it as given that in a milieu where this is true, people would still be handing out magic swords to twelve-year-olds.

It's basically treating those silly "How [Media] Really Should Have Ended" YouTube videos as a legitimate critical lens, and in circles where this song and dance is common, it leads to a lot of people reflexively shutting down the moment they hear the word "realism" because they assume (often quite reasonably!) that oh great, it's That Guy again.

elumish

I think one of the places where authors can get tripped up with realism (by the OP's definition of it, which I agree with) is when the author/story tells us that a thing works the same way as it does in normal regular earth and then makes it not work that way without any sort of explanation (usually because the author doesn't understand how that thing works).

This is, in some ways, where groundedness and realism intersect--once the story has established that, for a certain thing, the internal logic of the world aligns with the logic of reality, readers will (reasonably) expect that to continue to be true.

One of the sort of notorious examples of this is horses in fantasy worlds--you can have horses that don't work like Earth horses, but once you establish in universe that they do work like real Earth horses, readers (or at least readers who know horses) will want a realistic portrayal of horses.

If in the story you say "this is a steam train" people will expect it to work like a steam train, but if you say "this is a magic train" people will put up with it working kind of however.

#meta

hppjmxrgosg

"going out to get milk" is a common turn of phrase used to describe a man abandoning his family.

the "milkman" is a common figure in stories depicting a woman's infidelity and adulterous affair.

this implies that the ability to provide milk would both decrease the likelihood of a man abandoning his wife and children, as it would eliminate the need for leaving to get milk AND would secure that man's marriage, as his wife would have no need to seek milk from an extraneous source.

therefore, all men should produce milk, through various means such as:

- being a cow

- being an almond

- being a woman

- being a coconut

- being in the omegaverse

- being an oat

(list is exemplary and not finite)

in this essay, i will redefine the nuclear family and explain the seductive and inflammatory nature of the 1993 "Got Milk?" commercials.

hppjmxrgosg

you shut your mouth.

gwaynes-hightower

BERTIE CARVEL as BAELOR BREAKSPEAR and PETER CLAFFEY as SER DUNCAN THE TALL A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS // 1.02 Hard Salt Beef

applecrumbledore

I think about these tags a LOT @takiki16

tadpole-art

Red string of fate

#svsss #art #shen jiu #yue qingyuan

spaceytingz

angronius

chudismund. due to recent events

#warhammer 40k

luntfontanne

yuspart

tgc:yuspart

#the winter soldier #bucky barnes #mcu #art

bellowsmith

If Hot Rod and Damus switched places-the DJD leader instead calls himself Nyon, and is known not for his voice but for the searing heat from the Pit that befalls any mech whose designation ends up on the list.

#art #transformers #rodimus