the dad you need not the dad you deserve

a got/asoiaf side to NAMORIAN. shitposts, meta, etc. Sandor is the best dog in the books change my mind.

[versains]

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Appreciation Week: ↳ Day One: Favorite Scene: Episode 03 "The Squire" Dunk and Egg and song analysis

[christophernolan]

A Brother named Gethsemane by Natalie Diaz // HOTD S01E08 // HOTD S02E06 // AKTOSK S01E06

[sugurugetos]

AERION TARGARYEN — S01E03: The Squire LYONEL BARATHEON — S01E01: The Hedge Knight

[oberynmartell]

New/Old Outtakes of Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen (x)

[maxanor]

“You must rule the realm now, until your brother is strong enough to take the crown again,” the King’s Hand told Prince Aemond. And so one-eyed Aemond the Kinslayer took up the iron-and-ruby crown of Aegon the Conqueror. “It looks better on me than it ever did on him,” the prince proclaimed.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON (2022–) Season 2, Episode 5, “Regent”

[shadowhaert]

chappelroans 5k celebration: @miwtual requested aemond + purple

[rhaenyrastormborn]

Tis I, the younger brother, who studies history and philosophy, it is I who trains with the sword, who rides the largest dragon in the world. It is I who should be–

Game of Thrones 6.09 | House of the Dragon 2.01

[miwtual]

@lgbtqcreators creator challenge — quotes + fantasy + antagonist + literature — caitlyn siehl

[warlockwyll]

Aemond Targaryen in House of the Dragon 2.01

[welightthewaysource]

Aemond Targaryen in House of the Dragon 2.01

Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones 1.02

[hellshee]

rhaenyra & aemond targaryen, season 1 and 2

[abigaillazaar]

ALICENT HIGHTOWER APPRECIATION WEEK 2024 [1/7] loneliness: tell the wolves i'm home by carol rifka brunt

[calirph]

𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐀𝐄𝐌𝐎𝐍𝐃 𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐄𝐘𝐄 𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐀𝐑𝐘𝐄𝐍

dragonriding outfit in 2x08.

[sleazyjanet]

rhaegar finding out that lyanna is the knight of the laughing tree commission for @arcane-peony

[meanderingstar]

the way Daenerys treats Irri in the books is incredibly disturbing and I hate how it's overlooked by both the narrative and the majority of the fandom.

Daenerys uses Irri for sex at least twice over the course of the story, once in Storm and once in Dance. I really, truly cannot overstate how horrific the power imbalance between them is: Daenerys is her khaleesi, her queen and her employer; Irri was formerly a slave in her service and is now her maid with absolutely nowhere else to go. She has evidently been conditioned to believe that displaying absolute obedience to her higher-ups, including sexual services, is her "duty", which Daenerys recognizes and still actively exploits for her own pleasure. This is also why consent between them is utterly impossible – contrary to some asoiaf blogs who claim that consent was not a major issue in this situation (lol) or that Irri freely consented, Irri’s conditioning means that she will never be able to freely consent to someone like Daenerys, who is her employer and holds absolute power over her. Daenerys herself acknowledges this and feels guilty (damning in itself), but ends up using her in such a manner anyway, despite explicitly recognizing that Irri's kisses "tasted of duty" and nothing more.

What makes this even worse is that despite using her in this way in Storm, Daenerys has no issue saying that Irri and Jhiqui (who are her age and have had the same, if not worse, experiences than she has) are "only girls" in comparison to her. She also dismisses their (pretty sensible, imo?) concern about her touching sick and dead people by calling them "utter fools" and saying the Dothraki were only wise when it came to horses. She says all this AFTER sleeping with Irri, which makes it twice as bad - Daenerys considers her a little girl and a fool when it comes to advising her, but still finds it perfectly fine to use her for sex? This condescension extends to their sexual relationship as well, where Daenerys refers to Irri as "the maid", "her handmaid" and "the Dothraki girl" as she has sex with her. It's patronizing, disrespectful and exploitative at best, outright dehumanizing at worst.

While I highly doubt this was Grrm's intention, Daenerys's dynamic with Irri is clearly reminiscent of the horrific way Cersei uses Taena Merryweather. Dany is obviously not as vicious with Irri as Cersei was with Taena but that really doesn't change the fact that she was still a queen exploiting her employee's obedience and conditioned sense of "duty" for her own pleasure, made even worse by the fact that Irri, as a servant and former slave with no family, no connections and nowhere else to go, was 10x more vulnerable than Taena was and certainly more dependent on Dany. It's bizarre how Cersei's treatment of Taena is recognized as fucked up by most of the fandom but Daenerys's treatment of Irri is not, even though the power imbalance between them is infinitely worse. (also: Grrm writing about TWO white queens using their brown maids/ladies-in-waiting for sex is flat-out racist. I'm also extremely uncomfortable with how both wlw interactions are dubiously consensual at best and arguably revolve around Cersei/Dany's relationships with men to some extent: Cersei uses Taena to reenact her trauma by Robert, and Dany not only "pretended it was Drogo holding her...only somehow his face kept turning into Daario's" when she was having sex with Irri, but also explicitly states that "it was Daario she wanted, or perhaps Drogo, not Irri").

Certainly, Daenerys and Irri's dynamic is part and parcel of Grrm's fucked notion of consent and piss-poor writing of wlw relationships (both of which he should be called out for far more than he is, btw), but it doesn't change the fact that in-universe, these are Daenerys's textual actions. Grrm seems to believe that Drogo didn't rape Daenerys (a 13 year old who was forced into marriage) on their wedding night because she said "yes", just like he seems to believe that Jaime didn't coerce Cersei to have sex with him over their own son's dead body because she eventually responded to Jaime's advances, but I clearly recognize them as rape and coercion. The same logic and same standards apply to Daenerys and the way she uses and exploits Irri and she should be judged accordingly.

[oldshrewsburyian]

hello! so i just found out about you (better believe i'm going to be reading those cannon law recs) and i need you to answer/reply this for me in a way that doesn't sound absolutely stupid because all i came up with was "awoiaf is fetishised to hell and back with way too much institutionalised pedophilia even for medieval times"

in respect to me posting that "" i think GRRM write way too much child bride/rape/miscarriages etc than i thought was reality""

for context, this is regarding aemma arryn, a character who in book cannon has miscarriages since she's like 12/13.

feel free to disregard, thanks!

Hello! I feel like the Hostiensis of the ASOIAF universe and I'm into it, honestly. FWIW, I don't read ASOIAF/GRRM as fetishizing child marriage, but I do think that we are supposed to read the marriages of adolescent girls/young women as part of "the dark and middle ages" (tm) as imagined.

I also think (this is part of the answer, I promise) that it is a real problem that the world of ASOIAF does not have (as far as I can tell?) a legal age of majority. This is another reason we need Fantasy Canon Law, George!! I was particularly struck by this in the case of Sansa. Her adoring parents are perfectly ready to have her betrothed to a boy of approximately her own age before she hits puberty. Sansa is also not upset about contemplating marriage at this age, as a noblewoman. The women at court treat menarche as socially/legally/medically equivalent to adulthood for her. When she does eventually get married, getting married to Tyrion, who is 10+ years older than she is and also kind, intelligent, and sexually patient/experienced is clearly a much better option than the 14-year-old psychopath. This is super-legal, also. But also also, once she's out of the dress that is clearly designed for a grown woman (which she technically is! right? right George??) her husband is frankly alarmed by her youth. Make up your mind, George! Make up your mind! Is Sansa legible in court society as a woman or a girl? Clearly it is the former at least most of the time? This really, really matters, I think, to assessing the experiences and attitudes of the characters, and yet we're never given a coherent in-world answer about it (at least, not as of the first three books. Yes, I am actively mad about this.)

ANYWAY. The average age for marriage in medieval Europe was slightly higher than that in the southern United States, where I currently teach. Yes, I looked this up for the sake of comparison to make my students' jaws drop. So there's no such thing as "institutionalized pedophilia." For approximately 1% of the population, it was often desirable to have the scions of royalty/upper nobility legally married off before consummation was possible/desirable. So, for this tiny percentage of the population, again, it was not uncommon to have marriages that were unconsummated, or consummated one (1) time for legal reasons (another reason we need Fantasy Canon Law™ if this is going to matter in ASOIAF), between teenagers. One example of this would be the arranged but very loving marriage between Elizabeth of Hungary and Ludwig of Thüringen; she had lived in his parents' household from early childhood onwards, as part of their betrothal. The legal age for consent to marriage was 12 for girls and 14 for boys, and yes, that's super young by our standards, but it's also something that was only very gradually raised (the legal age for girls was raised to 16 in late Victorian England, for example,) and again, had very little effect on most people's lives in the European Middle Ages, except insofar as any marriage made without the full and free consent of both parties was invalid under canon law (the real kind.)

As the exceptional case of Margaret Beaufort makes clear, this was rare in part because of the recognized medical risks of early pregnancy and childbirth. Picking one (1) infamous case of traumatic adolescent pregnancy as a prototype ≠ being "incredibly well-read", wtf. (I know that's not your view.) I know I've done this before, but I'm going to cite a saint's life, since such stories were used to communicate moral values and reflected (to a degree, albeit shaped by narrative tropes) social realities. So. This one is from Italy, shortly after the moment when Real Canon Law codified that underage marriage was illegal. The person in need of help in this story (which you can find here) is an adolescent girl who had been married and whose marriage had been consummated. The author uses circumlocutions for this, but he is clearly both shocked and disapproving of what, implicitly, amounted to marital rape or at least irresponsible conduct. But as a result of this -- and possibly a miscarriage -- the young woman in the story was suffering medical complications, and came to a doctor who, because of the tropes of the story, referred her to a saint who was also a young woman. I love that: the implication that St. Trophimema, who had died as a victim of male violence, was posthumously helping other girls in similar situations, with the help of the nuns who managed her shrine. Anyway! the girl was healed, and may also have joined the community of women (that's unclear too; the point of the story is the healing.) This got long again, but it's another Real Medieval Example of how both legal and social realities were complicated, and how some men being abusive assholes (technical historian term) did not mean that their behavior was normative or normalized.

[fandom-trash-goblin]

thank you!

As the exceptional case of Margaret Beaufort makes clear, this was rare in part because of the recognized medical risks of early pregnancy and childbirth. Picking one (1) infamous case of traumatic adolescent pregnancy as a prototype ≠ being "incredibly well-read", wtf.

that's exactly what i wanted to say, put in way words way better than i ever could. so basically, we're talking about legally married, maybe even via using a proxy? but consummation happens later even in that day, unlike how GRRM continuously uses the trope of child mothers as in the case of Aemma Arryn, Floris Baratheon, Naerys Targaryen, Rhaella Targaryen and countless other in-cannon examples.

[oldshrewsburyian]

Correct (proxies were also rare, though, because of the way they could introduce additional uncertainty. When making marriages for political reasons, maximum certainty about what had legally happened was always the desideratum.) To take another historical example -- which I think GRRM is setting up an ASOIAF parallel to with Joffrey, Margaery, and Tommen -- let's take Arthur, Prince of Wales, older brother of Henry VIII. He gets married to Catherine of Aragon when he's 15 and she's 16. And what no one knows, to this day, is whether they actually had sex or not. According to later testimony, what he said to the first courtiers he saw the next morning was "Gentlemen, I have been in Spain tonight!" Is this proof that the deed was done? Is this a 15-year-old bragging, performing masculinity in a particular way? Was he impotent? Did he and Catherine abstain by mutual consent? Catherine, in the infamous divorce trial, insisted that she came to Henry a virgin, as she had come to Arthur. Is this honesty, or self-preservation? Did Arthur eat her out? I know that's crudely formulated, but... this is the kind of thing historians sometimes end up contemplating, if working on legal and social understandings of sex in the early modern period. I say early modern here because that is what the Tudors and the sixteenth century are, fight me GRRM.

[oldshrewsburyian]

I have found another reason to be mad about bad medievalism in A Feast for Crows; worse, this bad medievalism is also bad for character-writing. At Tywin Lannister's funeral (good riddance), Cersei, who deserves better character-writing, exhorts Tommen to "weep quietly" because he is a king and not a "squalling child." And. Well. The idea that kings shouldn't weep publicly is kind of... antithetical to medieval ideas of good kingship and the appropriate display of emotion. What's more, my favorite scholarly commentary on this fact comes from 1957. Ahem:

"There are fashions in sensibility as in everything else. The idea that a strong man should react to great personal and national calamities by a slight compression of the lips and by silently throwing his cigarette into the fireplace is of very recent origin. By the standards of feudal epic, Charlemagne's behaviour [in The Song of Roland] is perfectly correct. Fainting, weeping, and lamenting is what the situation calls for. The assembled knights and barons all decorously follow his example."

Dorothy L. Sayers, everyone!!! As she goes on, in that excellent essay, to discuss, this literary model is of course not directly representative of social norms, but it is representative of the ideals of courtly society. I recognize that the history of emotions as a subfield was very new when AFFC came out. I'm not expecting GRRM to have read up on the concept of emotional regimes, cool as that might have been. But there was a solid 10-20 years of work on medieval masculinities (including the expression of emotion) by that point, to say nothing of earlier work like the essay cited above. And if GRRM wants to say that Westeros' emotional community (to use Barbara Rosenwein's term) frowns on public displays of emotion full stop, or by kings, or by men, or by noblemen... fine! And honestly, any of those options might be interesting (e.g. "Stop crying, do you want to behave like a peasant?") But I'm so sick and tired of a specifically 20th-century idea of masculine stoicism being projected backwards onto the Middle Ages. If you're going to have a pseudo-medieval fantasy world, let! men! cry! To say nothing of boys.

[sunnysideaeggs]

i like to think of this as a lannister thing, as tywin himself didn’t appreciate shows of emotion, negative or positive because his issues with his father, who he saw as ‘weak’ for his forgiving and lighthearted nature. cersei of course follows whatever tywin does, and raised her children in similar ways.

i can’t recall other occasions where men or boys are shamed for crying outside of the lannister sphere, but people dislike characters like stannis or roose who are very closed off, so we can assume it’s more ‘normal’ in men to show emotions than not.

there’s also this quote by sansa comforting tommen that shows how crying in public can be seen as a deep show of emotion and chivalry:

Prince Tommen sobbed. "You mew like a suckling babe," his brother hissed at him. "Princes aren't supposed to cry."

"Prince Aemon the Dragonknight cried the day Princess Naerys wed his brother Aegon," Sansa Stark said, "and the twins Ser Arryk and Ser Erryk died with tears on their cheeks after each had given the other a mortal wound."

A Clash of Kings - Tyrion IX

tywin was the weird one, he’s the one that wanted to embody the stoic alpha male archetype because he had daddy issues, and raised kids to also be emotionally constipated.

[oldshrewsburyian]

Hi! I hate to exonerate Tywin Lannister from anything, I really do, but I do read this as a more pervasive issue. If memory serves, Bran also tells himself repeatedly not to cry, as he's "almost a man grown" and not a "snivelling baby," and Arya, too, exhorts herself not to weep like a girl. And they have a nice dad!

I think that Sansa's illustrations, actually, work to illustrate something else: that she's still taking her examples from the songs and stories where maidens are fair, knights are noble, and it is always summer. And while Thomas Malory uses such stories to compare a fictional bygone era of True Nobility™ with his own late fifteenth century of Sad Decline™, my impression from approximately 4/5 of the books is that GRRM wants to make the point that the courtly literature of this world is always telling lies. (In contrast to the folk tales, which are often telling unpalatable truths, which is rather interesting from a narrative standpoint.)