[pokabu]

welcome to my blog i hope you like lesbians

[copepods]

brynden rivers is the funniest character in asoiaf. hi it's me the king here's my most trusted and reputable advisor his name is Lord Bloodraven. he's chill though

[alicenthightowerdaily]

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON | Season 3, Episode 4, "Tumbleton"

[teathattast]

[normalbrothers]

the thing w female characters is that they are going to be hated anyway - as will be the actresses (which is inexcusable to be clear, but unfortunately a thing that happens) - so why not just let them be these fully dimensional characters who are as atrocious and as grandiose as the male characters around them. the lovers will love it and the understanders will understand, and who else is worth paying any attention to anyway

[jessmalia]

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON S02E05 | S03E03

[emmaxrosa]

RHAENA TARGARYEN House of the Dragon | 3.04 'Tumbleton'

[emmaxrosa]

AEGON TARGARYEN House of the Dragon | 3.04 'Tumbleton'

[emmaxrosa]

i will say that unfortunately the rhaenicent dynamic in s3 hasn't been doing much for me so far. at the end of 3.04, rhaenyra bringing alicent otto's ring fell emotionally flat to me because it feels like it should have been the moment where rhaenyra extends an olive branch, the beginning of alicent assuming the role of her advisor. but the series didn't allow us to sit with the aftermath of otto's death: there will always be some new hurt that ends up coming between rhaenyra and alicent, and yet this time... like we get those crazy seemingly dynamic altering shots at the end of 3.02, but we don't see any of alicent's grief beyond that (hotd loves to end on an ominous shot especially when it’s rhaenyra with no carry over into the next episode).

otto was undoubtedly an abusive father, always the hand on alicent's shoulder, shaping the entire course of her life. and while in 1.09 she articulates this quite plainly to him, his manipulation and using her as a pawn, she does love her father. when otto is dismissed as hand by aegon, alicent immediately reassures him that she will guide aegon to see reason once he's less emotionally volatile so he may return to court. then in 2.04, she is visibly seething and lets aegon have it about otto's dismissal. her anger over losing him was there. so the fact that the series barely engages with alicent's grief and she falls into the role of rhaenyra's advisor quite easily irks me. there is no tension in their dynamic: alicent is being recognized as a political agent again (after being stripped of her small council seat in s2) but she's also advising someone who publicly executed her father.

(also i am worried that alicent's entire arc this season will be providing crucial plot information to rhaenyra. helaenicent will save us hopefully).

sure you might be able to argue that as rhaenyra's prisoner, alicent has little choice but to cooperate, but again the series doesn't lean into that either. rhaenyra is a threat to alicent in the literal sense that she has the power of life of death over her alicent's entire family (something otto explicitly warned her about, you would think that would come up. or jaehaerys' death for the matter considering helaena is usually also present or in the room during these conversations). but alicent is not wearing any chains (booooo), she's able to roam relatively freely in the red keep, etc.

i think i would have preferred it if had been left uncertain whether rhaenyra would grant alicent's request to have her fathrer's remains returned to oldtown. then, when she handed alicent the ring, it would have been an acknowledgment of her loss in a way? i did enjoy rhaenyra framing it through viserys, that it was something he would have wanted, because that is quite in line with their dynamic.

also: rhaenyra begins 3.03 suspicious of alicent because although she peacefully captured king's landing as they agreed upon, aegon has fled, the treasury has been emptied, and she directs much of that anger towards alicent and yet in the same episode, she is seeking out alicent for her thoughts, it's just a bit of mess in that regard.

[guiltfactory]

BAD NEWS: it will not be the same forever

GOOD NEWS: it will not be the same forever

[emmaxrosa]

RHAENA TARGARYEN House of the Dragon | 3.04 'Tumbleton'

[barbiehelmet]

the zendaya thing isnt even a new phenomenon by any means!! the article mentions margot robbie wearing the taj mahal diamond as well, and in addition to that i also want to remind people that diljit dosanjh's request to wear the patiala necklace for the 2025 met gala was denied by cartier because they said it was in a museum and could not be loaned. however they had no issues at all loaning it to emma chamberlain, a white woman, for the 2022 met gala, while they turned down the request of a punjabi man who wanted it to honor his heritage.

this behavior is nothing new. the global south and everything in it - the people, the culture, our heritage - is seen as nothing more than a decoration or commodity to colonizers. i don't even need to bring up the koh i noor or the entire british museum; these examples are recent and egregious enough on their own.

of course this is not to imply that any of the people involved here - zendaya, margot robbie, or emma chamberlain - had any sort of malicious intentions. but the ignorance is just as bad in my opinion. the ignorance is just as harmful, if not more. because it means we are not even an afterthought. it means that the real people and histories and heritages of the global south do not even register when these people are putting together looks for their movie premiers and met gala appearances. everything is just reduced down to a shiny piece of jewelry whose history they need not bother with. it's just a continued reminder of the way colonization affects us all even long after independence, of how barely-healed wounds keep being reopened even decades later. even now, we are being denied connections to our histories and heritages while they are freely being given out to those that have nothing to do with it and don't care for it. and i'm sick of it.

[communistkenobi]

I had a lot of/still have some vestigial arrogance about quantitative methods over qualitative ones, probably in a combination of scientific misogyny + STEMlord superiority. But doing regression analysis and quant-heavy data analysis makes me realise more and more that you can justify basically any claim with numbers, and that you can construct your research in such a way as to output the numbers you want. which does not mean that all data are made up or that quantitative knowledge is all false. I think stories about scientists straight up inventing numbers or fudging experiments on purpose prove that there is a real difference between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research. but those data must always be narrativised & are always already narrativised. The act of presenting numbers itself is doing some of that narration because you’re already arguing that these numbers are worth presenting

[communistkenobi]

People in the notes are rightfully pointing out common issues with data manipulation and pre-loaded conclusions in scientific research (i.e., the academic version of asking "so, how often do you beat your wife?" and so on), but I should have clarified that I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about completely legitimate, above-board scientific research.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

So my overall point (which I didn't communicate well) is that data can always say what you want to some extent, for good and for ill. And research results (at least in my experience) tend to surprise you in ways that require explanations, which themselves can be fully justified, but again, exist within many different contexts that influence how you interpret them - and not just the results themselves, but your own surprise at your results

[alysmond]

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON | Season 3, Episode 2, "Queen's Landing"

[thelaughingtree]

everyone's favourite sheep-stealing plucky dragonrider, the wonderful nettles, by the even more wonderful @ellemnopie!!! she's gone from our screens but not from our hearts <3

thank you so much for the comm!

[ashleysjohnson]

Emma D'arcy as RHAENYRA TARGARYEN House of the Dragon 3.04 – Tumbleton

[afroesoteric]