Hello, simply refer to me as 'Hierune' or 'Hiero.'
I use He/It, I am transmasc and demisexual with no preference. Lover of everything dark and macabre. Sadly I do not follow back due to this being a side blog. Most of my posts are musings or vents
Interests include: Psychology (Freud especially), literature of any sort, TV & Films, bird watching, medicine and intimacy, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), linguistics, teaching, forensics, cannibalism and psychological profiling.
I am autistic and an adult so my responses may seem detached and/or take longer due to my busy work ethic. Tone indicators are not necessary. People of all beliefs are welcome here.
We could explain the unknown of horror away as a lack of information, which is, in principle, rectifiable . . . This, however, obviously goes against our constitutive intuition about horror, which indicates—however obscure and preliminary this indication might be—that something can appear to me exactly as unknown rather than something that is to be known better. If our goal is to investigate the phenomenon of horror, we need to treat this unknown as a positive determination of an appearance. Thus, we should ask overselves how something could positively resist the very attempt at identification and retains its positive indeterminancy. What is the structural unity of such an appeaace?
Daniil Koloskov, "Beyond Reach: Horror and Phenomenal Life"
I think one of the most interesting things about sexuality and gender is that people so often expect them to be internally consistent, neatly categorized, and easily explained.
Psychology has rarely supported that expectation. If anything, one of its recurring themes is that people are inherently contradictory. We contain competing desires, conflicting identities, unconscious motivations, and aspects of ourselves that don’t always fit together in ways that make immediate logical sense.
Human beings are not equations waiting to be solved.
Take myself, for example. I comfortably place myself somewhere on the aroace spectrum, while also describing myself as polyamorous. To a lot of people, that sounds contradictory—as if one identity automatically invalidates the other. But why should it? Aromanticism and asexuality describe patterns of attraction, while polyamory describes a relationship structure or capacity for multiple intimate relationships. Those ideas can overlap in countless ways depending on the individual.
Even beyond that specific example, people often experience attraction in fragmented, inconsistent, or situational ways. Human experience doesn’t owe anyone perfect coherence.
More broadly, I think there’s a tendency to mistake categories for reality itself. We invent labels because our brains like organization, but nature has never cared much for the boxes we draw around it.
Psychology, sociology, and even biology repeatedly show that variation is the rule rather than the exception. Every time researchers think they’ve found a universal model of identity, another group of people comes along whose experiences complicate it. Rather than treating those people as anomalies, perhaps they’re reminders that the model was never complete to begin with.
Pope Cody as the Femme Fatale, a character study. ⌖♱
♱ NB. Discussion of trauma, abuse, mental illness, violence, and manipulation. This analysis explores Pope Cody through the literary framework of the femme fatale archetype.
One of the most fascinating things about Pope is that, despite being written as the physically imposing, hypermasculine eldest brother of a Southern California crime family, he occupies a narrative role that has historically belonged almost exclusively to women.
Pope is, in many ways, the femme fatale of Animal Kingdom.
Not because he is feminine, seductive in a conventional sense, or sexually manipulative in the classic noir style, but because he fulfils the same literary function. He is the beautiful catastrophe around whom desire, obsession, guilt, and destruction orbit.
He is the person everyone believes they can save, fix, possess, or understand, only to discover that loving him inevitably comes at an unbearable cost.
The traditional femme fatale is often misunderstood as simply "the sexy woman who ruins men." In reality, the archetype is defined less by gender than by narrative gravity.
The femme fatale is someone whose existence destabilises the people around them. They expose hidden desires, force impossible choices, and become the object onto which others project fantasies of salvation or redemption. They are rarely the sole cause of anyone's downfall; rather, they become the catalyst that reveals what was already there. Pope performs this role almost perfectly.
Nearly every significant relationship in Pope's life revolves around someone believing they can reach the version of him that exists beneath the violence.
Whether it is Baz trying to keep him functional, Julia refusing to abandon him, Lena instinctively trusting him despite everything, Angela attempting to reconnect with the vulnerable boy she remembers, Amy believing his capacity for kindness outweighs his brutality, or J constantly trying to predict him, Pope becomes a figure onto whom everyone projects hope.
They each imagine that if they love him correctly, understand him deeply enough, or remain patient long enough, they will finally uncover the "real" Pope.
The tragedy is that there is no singular, hidden Pope waiting to be discovered.
There is only a man whose identity has been fragmented by profound childhood trauma, emotional neglect, manipulation, and violence. Yet because flashes of extraordinary gentleness exist within him, people become convinced those moments are his truest self. The rarity of his softness only makes it more intoxicating. When Pope smiles, it feels earned. When Pope protects someone, it feels monumental.
The audience, and the characters, begin chasing those moments in exactly the same way noir protagonists chase fleeting glimpses of vulnerability from the femme fatale.
This dynamic is amplified by the fact that Pope is almost impossible to read. Traditional femme fatales conceal their intentions behind charm and ambiguity. Pope conceals his behind silence.
He is emotionally opaque, often staring longer than is socially comfortable, speaking in short, uncertain sentences, and responding to situations with an unpredictability that keeps everyone around him perpetually off balance. His unpredictability creates the same narrative tension as the classic femme fatale's mystery. Nobody, including the audience, can ever be entirely certain whether Pope is about to comfort someone, walk away, or kill them.
His physicality also contributes to this inversion of the archetype.
Femme fatales traditionally weaponise beauty; Pope weaponises vulnerability. Shawn Hatosy's performance constantly communicates contradiction. Pope is physically enormous, intimidating, and capable of horrific violence, yet his posture often resembles that of someone trying to make himself smaller. His movements are hesitant. His eye contact lingers with almost childlike uncertainty.
He frequently appears less like a predator than a wounded animal waiting to determine whether it is safe to approach. That vulnerability becomes magnetic. It invites protection even as it warns against it.
One of the defining characteristics of the femme fatale is that people mistake proximity for understanding. Because they have seen moments of intimacy, they believe they know the whole person. This is exactly what happens with Pope.
Amy believes she has seen the man beneath the criminal. Angela believes she remembers the boy beneath the trauma. Baz believes he understands how Pope thinks. Smurf believes she controls him entirely. Each of them confuses access with comprehension. They mistake fragments for completion.
Perhaps nowhere is Pope's role as the femme fatale more evident than in his relationship with Julia. Julia sees Pope with a tenderness no one else quite manages, but even she cannot ultimately rescue him from Smurf's psychological control. Their bond is arguably the emotional centre of Pope's life, not because it is romantic but because Julia represents the one relationship untainted by calculation.
She sees his fear before anyone else does. She understands the suffocating environment in which they were raised because she is trapped within it too. Yet even that love cannot overcome the years of manipulation inflicted by Smurf. Like so many protagonists who fall in love with the femme fatale, Julia believes love itself might be enough.
The tragedy is that systemic abuse is rarely undone by affection alone.
Smurf herself functions almost as the noir detective pursuing her own femme fatale. She spends Pope's entire life attempting to preserve him in a state of dependence, simultaneously fearing and encouraging his instability because it guarantees his loyalty. She cultivates his emotional isolation while presenting herself as the only person capable of understanding him.
The result is that Pope becomes less a son than an extension of her own psychological needs. In classic noir, the femme fatale often exists as an object of obsession. Pope occupies that position repeatedly throughout the series. He becomes the emotional centre around which other people's identities begin revolving.
Even his violence aligns with the archetype in unexpected ways. Femme fatales often do not destroy people directly; they expose desires that already exist, allowing others to ruin themselves.
Pope's violence frequently functions similarly. His actions force characters to confront moral boundaries they would rather ignore. Loving Pope requires compromises. Excuses. Rationalisations. Every person who remains close to him must eventually ask themselves how much brutality they are willing to tolerate because they have seen glimpses of the frightened boy beneath it.
In that sense, Pope does not simply endanger people physically. He destabilises their ethics.
What makes Pope particularly compelling is that, unlike many femme fatales, he is not consciously manipulating anyone. He is almost painfully sincere.
His capacity for destruction stems not from calculated seduction but from emotional dysregulation and an overwhelming need for connection that he lacks the tools to sustain. This is what makes him so devastating. Traditional femme fatales often know exactly what effect they have on others. Pope rarely seems aware that people organise their emotional worlds around him at all.
He does not realise that his smallest moments of kindness become life-changing for those around him because kindness is so difficult for him to express consistently.
His relationship with Amy illustrates this beautifully. Amy does not fall for Pope because he is charming in the conventional sense. She falls for the possibility she glimpses within him. She sees a man capable of tenderness despite everything that has happened to him. That possibility becomes irresistible.
Yet possibility is not reality.
One of the oldest lessons embedded within the femme fatale archetype is that falling in love with potential rather than the person standing before you almost always ends in heartbreak. Amy loves who Pope might become, while Pope remains trapped inside who trauma has forced him to be.
Even visually, the series often frames Pope in ways traditionally reserved for women within noir and melodrama. The camera lingers on his expressions rather than his actions. His face becomes the emotional landscape through which scenes are interpreted. Close-ups capture minute shifts in his eyes, tiny hesitations in his breathing, almost imperceptible changes in posture.
Rather than presenting him solely as an active force driving the narrative, the cinematography frequently turns him into an object to be observed, interpreted, and desired emotionally. He is watched. He is analysed. He is endlessly read by both characters and audience alike.
Ultimately, Pope demonstrates that the femme fatale was never truly about femininity. It has always been about narrative function. It is about becoming the person through whom everyone else's desires, fears, guilt, and fantasies are refracted.
Pope occupies that role almost perfectly. He is not the cold manipulator in the shadows but the wounded centre of gravity around which everyone else begins to orbit. He inspires impossible hope, unbearable loyalty, and profound destruction, often simultaneously.
People do not love Pope because he promises happiness. They love him because every so often they catch a glimpse of the frightened, gentle boy hidden beneath decades of violence, and they convince themselves that if they could just reach him one more time, they might finally save him.
Like every great femme fatale, Pope leaves those who love him transformed—not because he intended to, but because loving him demands sacrifices they never imagined they would be willing to make.
I was an animal, howling on all fours.
With every movement, an uncontrolled,
ugly wail escaped my body.
I was an animal, no room
for any human in my
ugly pain.
— Moshtari Hilal, from "Dying Prayer," Ugliness, tr. Elisabeth Lauffer
᯽ CW: Discussion of incest, grooming-like dynamics, emotional abuse, coercive control, and trauma. This analysis is based primarily on Jaime's characterization in the ASOIAF novels and examines his relationship with Cersei through a psychological lens.
One of the greatest misunderstandings surrounding Jaime is that discussions of his relationship with Cersei so often begin and end with the fact that it is incest.
The taboo becomes so overwhelming that it eclipses the relationship itself, flattening it into something sensational rather than examining the emotional architecture beneath it. In doing so, many readers overlook that Jaime is not simply a willing participant in an incestuous relationship, but someone whose understanding of love, identity, and selfhood has been shaped by an enmeshed bond that begins so early it becomes impossible to determine where affection ends and conditioning begins.
This does not erase the harm Jaime causes, nor absolve him of responsibility for the choices he makes throughout his life, but it does complicate the moral landscape considerably. He is both a perpetrator of incest and one of its victims, and those two realities are not mutually exclusive.
The tragedy of Jaime lies in the fact that he never truly develops as an individual during the years in which identity is supposed to be forming.
Developmental psychology places enormous importance on adolescence as a period of separation, when children begin distinguishing themselves from parents, siblings, and peers in order to establish an independent sense of self.
Twins often face unique challenges during this process because their identities are frequently conflated by family and society alike, yet healthy twin relationships still require eventual individuation. Jaime never receives that opportunity. Before he can understand himself as "Jaime," he is taught to understand himself as "Jaime-and-Cersei."
Their relationship is repeatedly framed, especially by Cersei, as one of perfect unity rather than siblinghood.
She insists they are two halves of the same soul, that they entered the world together and therefore belong together, that no one else could ever understand either of them in the way they understand each other.
While such language can appear romantic on the surface, psychologically it is profoundly possessive. It denies the existence of separate identities. Jaime is not encouraged to become his own person who happens to love his sister; he is encouraged to remain one half of an inseparable whole.
What makes this particularly unsettling is that Cersei consistently demonstrates a need for Jaime's sameness rather than his happiness.
Throughout the novels, she is noticeably less interested in what Jaime actually wants than in whether he continues to reflect her own desires back at her. Whenever Jaime begins developing independent values, opinions, or relationships, Cersei interprets those changes not as natural personal growth but as betrayals.
His identity belongs to her, and any movement away from that identity is perceived as theft. This pattern stretches across their entire lives.
Jaime joins the Kingsguard largely because remaining in King's Landing means remaining close to Cersei, sacrificing his inheritance, his future lordship, and any possibility of building a life outside her orbit. At the time, this appears to him as the greatest act of love imaginable.
Looking back, however, it resembles something much sadder: a young man willingly abandoning every potential version of himself because he has been taught that proximity to Cersei is synonymous with purpose.
This is where Jaime's victimhood becomes especially important to acknowledge.
Much of the discourse surrounding the twins assumes complete equality simply because they are same in age and because Jaime physically desires her. Yet emotional equality is not determined by age or reciprocal attraction.
It is determined by power, agency, and the ability to define the terms of the relationship. Cersei overwhelmingly occupies that position. She decides when Jaime is useful, when he is wanted, when he has disappointed her. She repeatedly weaponises affection, withdrawing intimacy when he resists her wishes and rewarding compliance when he returns to her side.
Their sexual relationship, particularly in Jaime's later point-of-view chapters, begins revealing subtle but significant shifts in his emotional state. He increasingly notices her cruelty, her manipulation, and her inability to love him independently of what he provides. His desire becomes tangled with obligation.
He still loves her, but the love begins feeling less like joy than inevitability.
Leaving her ceases to be a question of choosing another life and instead becomes a question of whether he is capable of existing at all outside the identity she has constructed for him.
That inability to imagine separation is perhaps the clearest sign of emotional enmeshment. Healthy love expands the self. It introduces new relationships, encourages growth, and allows individuality to flourish alongside intimacy. Enmeshed love does the opposite. It collapses identity until one person becomes the centre around which the other's entire existence revolves.
Jaime enters adulthood with remarkably few meaningful relationships beyond Cersei. His friendships are shallow. His emotional confidants are virtually nonexistent. Even his reputation, that of the Kingslayer, becomes another mechanism through which he isolates himself, convincing both himself and others that there is little worth knowing beneath the mask of arrogance.
Cersei remains the singular constant because she has always been positioned as the only person who truly understands him.
Whether that understanding is genuine becomes almost irrelevant; what matters is that Jaime believes it.
This belief fundamentally reshapes his understanding of intimacy. Throughout much of his life, love becomes synonymous with sacrifice, silence, and self-erasure. His own desires rarely emerge independently from Cersei's because he has spent decades interpreting her wishes as extensions of his own.
One of the most striking aspects of Jaime's internal narration is how often he defines himself through relationships rather than intrinsic qualities. He is Tywin's son, Cersei's lover, the Kingslayer. His identity is entirely relational.
Remove the people around him and he struggles to answer the question of who he actually is.
This becomes painfully apparent after the loss of his sword hand. The hand represented everything he believed himself to be: the greatest swordsman in Westeros, the golden heir of House Lannister, the knight whose physical prowess justified his existence. Losing it strips away not only his greatest skill but the last stable component of his identity outside Cersei.
Suddenly he possesses neither the role of perfect knight nor the certainty of being her unquestioning reflection. He is left with nothing except the terrifying possibility of discovering himself.
It is no coincidence that Brienne enters Jaime's emotional life precisely when this identity begins collapsing.
Whether one interprets their relationship romantically or platonically is almost secondary to what she represents psychologically. Brienne is the first person who consistently interacts with Jaime as an individual rather than as a symbol. She neither idolises him nor defines him through Cersei.
Instead, she demands honesty. She witnesses his vulnerability, listens to his confession about Aerys, and gradually comes to understand the complexity beneath the Kingslayer persona.
The bathhouse confession is therefore significant not merely because Jaime reveals the truth about the Mad King but because he tells his own story without filtering it through Cersei's expectations. For perhaps the first time in his life, he allows another person to know him independently of the identity she created for him.
That moment marks the beginning of individuation, the slow and painful psychological process that should have occurred during adolescence but was instead delayed well into adulthood.
Cersei, significantly, cannot tolerate this transformation.
Every step Jaime takes toward becoming his own person is experienced by her as abandonment. She does not celebrate his moral growth because his growth necessarily diminishes her control. She repeatedly insists that he has changed, yet the accusation carries an implicit assumption that remaining unchanged would have been preferable.
Her ideal Jaime is not the man capable of reflection, compassion, or ethical uncertainty. Her ideal Jaime is the extension of herself she possessed in youth, the brother who would kill for her without hesitation, validate every grievance, and never question the stories she tells about the world.
She loves the mirror, not the man.
This is perhaps the cruelest aspect of their relationship. Jaime genuinely believes he is loved, but much of what Cersei demonstrates resembles ownership more than affection.
She values him most when he reflects her image back at her. The moment he develops independent convictions, that love becomes conditional.
Victims of emotionally controlling relationships often experience precisely this phenomenon. Their worth depends not on who they are but on how effectively they fulfil the role assigned to them. Jaime's assigned role has always been simple: be Cersei's other half. Every divergence from that role is met with rejection, suspicion, or manipulation until he either returns or suffers the emotional consequences of separation.
Recognising Jaime as a victim does not require denying the immense harm he causes.
He lies to Robert for years, fathers children whose existence destabilises the realm, and willingly participates in a relationship that carries devastating consequences for countless people. Those actions remain his responsibility. Yet responsibility exists alongside victimisation rather than replacing it.
People conditioned within abusive or enmeshed relationships frequently perpetuate harm without fully understanding the mechanisms that shaped them.
Jaime's tragedy is not that he is innocent, but that his moral agency developed inside a relationship that systematically discouraged independent thought. He was taught from adolescence onward that love required absolute loyalty, unquestioning devotion, and the surrender of self.
Unsurprisingly, those lessons produced a man capable of extraordinary sacrifice while simultaneously leaving him profoundly unequipped to recognise healthy intimacy when it finally appeared.
By the time Jaime burns Cersei's letter begging him to return to King's Landing, the act carries far greater significance than a lover rejecting another lover. It is the culmination of an entire psychological journey toward autonomy.
For perhaps the first time in his life, Jaime chooses his own judgement over Cersei's demands. He does not ask her permission. He does not seek reassurance. He simply acts. It is a remarkably quiet moment, yet it represents something revolutionary for a man who has spent decades believing that existing apart from Cersei was impossible.
The tragedy is that such a simple assertion of selfhood feels almost unimaginable because Jaime was never allowed the ordinary developmental process through which most people learn they are separate, complete individuals.
Ultimately, Jaime's story is not simply about forbidden love or even redemption. It is about the devastating consequences of growing up without ever being permitted to become a person in your own right.
The incest is horrifying not only because it violates a social taboo, but because it functions as the mechanism through which Jaime's identity is consumed.
His relationship with Cersei collapses the distinction between love and possession, devotion and dependence, desire and obligation until he can scarcely recognise where one ends and the other begins. He becomes both participant and casualty, both someone who inflicts harm and someone profoundly shaped by it.
His arc is therefore less about learning to stop loving Cersei than about learning that love should never require the annihilation of the self. Only when he begins to understand that does Jaime Lannister finally start becoming something he has never truly been before: not Cersei's twin, not her mirror, not her other half, but simply Jaime.
"I remember falling ill as a child. It's probably my earliest memory. My mother fussing over me, my father saying the healing prayer. It was the first time I had a sense of their immense, overpowering love for me. And the fact that I could entice it from them. I wanted their love more than anything. I became greedy." - Max in S1E3
This stupid quote is driving me insane. Max who downplays his injuries, Max who rolls his eyes and tells everyone to stop fussing, or flat-out lies when Oskar and his parents ask what happened to him, is the same Max writing this in his private journal.
Writing about how desperately he wants to be loved and how he worked out as a small child that being hurt or vulnerable was a way he could get people to show him some affection.
No wonder Max is always taking risks - if he does something dangerous or gets himself injured, he's rewarded with attention. And no wonder after his first encounter with Oskar, where Oskar instinctively protected him and checked he was safe afterwards, something lit up in Max's brain and he never fully recovered.
In today's state of hyperactivity, where boredom is not allowed to emerge, we never reach the state of deep mental relaxation. The information society is an age of heightened mental tension, because the essence of information is surprise and the stimulus it provides. The tsunami of information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening . . . In the process of digitalization, . . . information acquires an altogether different status. Reality itself takes on the form of information and data. For the most part, we perceive reality in terms of information or through the lens of information. Information is an idea—that is, a re-representation. When reality takes the form of information, the immediate experience of presence withers. When digitalization gives everything the form of information, reality is flattened.
A explicitly abusive version of [King Lear] robs us of our ability to feel for Lear. But an explicitly sympathetic Lear robs us of the ability to feel for his daughters. So I think the best version of Lear is exactly the one that Shakespeare wrote: ambiguous. It's the only version in which each character is frustratingly, but fascinatingly, complex. Cordelia loves her tyrannical and mercurial father, but she can't bring herself to say it. It's a paradox- and a question- so rich and sad that Shakespeare required a whole play to explore it.
Jillian Keenan, Sex with Shakespeare: Here's Much to Do with Pain, but More with Love
