i want to fly with you, on dragonback

renee , 23, she/they. extremely Normal about rhaenyra targaryen

[ridiculusmus]

[speaks softly into the void] i’m resurrecting my old blog! :)

i’m renee, 20s, she/they, queer and poc

i nerd out about latin & ancient greek poetry

currently obsessed with house of the dragon (and by “house of the dragon” i mean my dearly beloved toxic ship rhaenicent 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩)

[jillapril]

Alicent cannot have Rhaenyra and that is the great tragedy around which her entire life revolves. I’m genuinely convinced that this is what has always driven her at the deepest level. Not a desire for power, certainly not a belief in her sons as rulers, nor even an unconditional love for her children. Not even the longing for freedom she discovered in Season 2 truly motivates her at her core. Those are all just layers covering what lies beneath: Rhaenyra.

By now, Alicent has fully internalized this painful resignation. And it is precisely this realization she tries to pass on to Mysaria when Mysaria stops her escape. She has to improvise - and instinctively reaches for the only thing she truly has to offer: her own story.

“There is only one who could walk that path with her—and she chose him long ago.”

There is so much bitterness in that line.

For Alicent, one of the defining moments of Season 1 was when Rhaenyra lied to her about her night with Daemon. Something broke inside her that day - something she has clearly never fully recovered from.

A wound that kept reopening: Rhaenyra married Daemon. Rhaenyra rejected Alicent’s “Come with me.” None of it truly surprised Alicent, but it hurt every single time.

Daemon represents something much larger: the Targaryen way itself. Something inherent to dragonriders that Rhaenyra and Daemon share and that Alicent has never believed she could compete with. Even as a young girl, in her very first appearance in Episode 1, she refuses to fly with Rhaenyra on Syrax. She could never follow her down that path. It’s easy for Alicent to turn Daemon into a symbol of everything she believes she has lost between herself and Rhaenyra.

“Her attentions may be on you now that you bathe in the warm light of her gaze…”

That line alone is remarkable. Alicent describes Rhaenyra’s gaze something almost sacred. It is strikingly romantic language. She connects with Mysaria by invoking a feeling they supposedly share: the experience of standing in the favor of the woman they love.

“But will you stake so high a wager on the whims of a dragonrider?”

Alicent has been burned by that unpredictability more than once. Most recently when she believed Rhaenyra would let her leave after Alicent opened the gates of King’s Landing. Whatever political reasons Rhaenyra may have, Alicent is left with the feeling of, once again, not having been chosen. Once again, she has been run over by the unstoppable force of the Targaryen path.

So Alicent turns her attention to the only thing she still believes she can both save and keep: Helaena.

Her renewed attempts to flee, prompted by Helaena’s pregnancy, are undoubtedly an expression of genuine concern for her daughter. And yet another question inevitably arises. Given the doubts Helaena repeatedly expresses, whether about leaving Jaehaera behind or her refusal to terminate the pregnancy: who is this escape really for?

Is Alicent fulfilling Helaena’s wishes - or her own?

Her actions seem to be an inseparable mixture of love, projection and selfishness.

Helaena is the only one of Alicent’s children she still wants to save at all. Aegon, Aemond, and even Daeron seem lost to her. Helaena, by contrast, embodies something Alicent still longs to preserve. Not power, not dynasty… It’s innocence. With her neurodivergent nature, Helaena exists outside the court’s endless games of ambition and manipulation. She is as innocent as Alicent once was - and as Rhaenyra once was - before everything fell apart.

Perhaps Alicent is clinging to the last chance to preserve a fragment of that innocence she herself lost long ago… and that, in her mind, remains inseparable from her relationship with Rhaenyra.

Her fixation on Helaena is not a new motivation. It is the inevitable consequence of her old one.

She knows she can never win Rhaenyra for herself. Nothing she has ever done has freed her from that pain. She wants, at last, to leave everything behind - and save the one part of herself that has not yet been completely destroyed: Helaena.

Whether that will be possible remains to be seen. The Season 3 poster feels almost revealing. Alicent is moving away from the Iron Throne alongside Helaena - but her gaze turns back, lingering, as always, on Rhaenyra. A visual representation of the greatest tragedy of her life.

[decadent-trans-girl]

'why is so much politically-focused genre fiction centred on monarchies' many reasons, but one which I think deserves attention: monarchy is an obvious way of tying together the dysfunctions of the domestic to those of the state

[havingapoemwithyou]

A not admitting of the wound (1188) by Emily Dickinson

[ridiculusmus]

will you stake so high a wager on the whims of a dragonrider?

alicent has some very old Wounds.

[perditaiuventus]

happy pride month to marcus "sed cito curio interuenit, qui te a meretricio quaestu abduxit et, tamquam stolam dedisset, in matrimonio stabili et certo collocauit. nemo umquam puer emptus libidinis causa tam fuit in domini potestate quam tu in curionis. quotiens te pater eius domu sua eiecit, quotiens custodes posuit, ne limen intrares! cum tu tamen nocte socia, hortante libidine, cogente mercede, per tegulas demitterere" antonius

(cinaedus flag by @catominor)

[crystalis]

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

[arsvitaest-deactivated20260111]

Georges Fouquet, pendant in the form of a wisteria branch, 1908-10, Paris Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

[guerrillatech]

[soracities]

happy "everyone forgets that icarus also flew" monday. i want to throw up !

[soracities]

"anything worth doing is worth doing badly"............."not failing as he fell but just coming to the end of his triumph"......goodnight (it's noon)

[todaysbird]

god i wish this was me

[stillorbitingu]

Vocabulary, Safia Elhillo

[zegalba]

Jean-Luc Manaud: untitled (1999)

[zegalba]

Inosculation, a natural phenomenon in which trunks, roots or branches of two trees grow together. When branches or roots from different trees are in prolonged intimate contact, they often abrade each other exposing their inner tissues, which may eventually fuse.

[pulledrounder]

Mary Herbert, Neighbours of Fire (2021), acrylic and oil on canvas

[androidyogurt]

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