i've carried a romantic idea of people all my life - perhaps too romantic. that has changed quite a bit recently. i saw a great love as a kind of perfect love. maybe it's not. maybe a great love, like a great country, or a great leader, even, is a flawed one. maybe what makes it great is its embrace of our failures, our scars, our fucked-upness. as long as we are questing always for better, knowing that we will bring ourselves down as often as we set ourselves free.
ELLE FANNING as Catherine the Great in The Great, Season 2
i dont want to be in a fandom that critisizes the choices of fictional characters like they are human beings. i want to see THEORY and ANALYSIS and STORY STRUCTURE and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!! I WANT PARALLELS AND MOTIFS AND VISUAL CUES!!! They're not REAL they are TOOLS so stop acting like they are people who made bad choices and should be punished. of course they made bad choices!!! that shit is funny and cool to watch!!
'he would not fucking say that' maybe he would if he knew he was starring in his very own porn fic for the sole purpose of delighting some freaks on archive of our own dot org. maybe he'd play it up for the cameras. ever consider that
I know this goes against their entire established personalities and relationship dynamics but I simply can’t believe we got Bobby/Companion/Terrence threesome before we got TT!Aerion/LS/Valarr threesome (the original pookies) 😭😭😭 What would need to happen to get them there?? What would it be like?? And would it end in bloodshed??
Again very out of character I know (Especially for Aerion) but I’m curious and horny 😔🙏
M!!!!
so. tt!au iceflamespring poly is, mechanically, almost impossible.
and the reason is not that aerion is "too jealous" or "too possessive" in the abstract, it's that the entire tension of tt!au is class. that's the whole verse. aerion's rage at valarr is structural. it's the rage of a man who works in a garage and smokes outside it watching a man who was handed everything walk toward the one thing he himself fought for. for them to share you in tt!au, the premise of the verse has to dissolve.
which means tt!iceflamespring only works if valarr is also poor.
like, an entire-targaryen-line-crashed-out, both-of-them-grew-up-broke, no-trust-fund-no-MBA scenario. strip valarr of the polish and the cushion and suddenly aerion can see him as a person instead of as everything he was denied. suddenly there's an us axis to align on instead of just a him vs me one.
that version exists, conceptually, and that version could work.
rich-boy!valarr in the original tt!au? aerion would sooner cut his own dick off and feed it to the gutter rats, i'm sorry to report. there is no universe where tt!Aerion shares you with a man whose entire existence is a personalised insult to him.
HOWEVER. the actual question i've been getting in my inbox a lot is whether iceflamespring poly is possible at all, and yes, it's possible in a few settings. so:
— the poor-valarr tt alt above. noted, addressed, would have its own particular flavour (I think it'd be the meanest of the three settings, weirdly, because the class anger gets redirected outward at the world instead of at each other, and the resulting dynamic is two feral men who have very pointedly decided you are the one good thing and they will share you specifically to spite a world that has given them nothing else).
— modern!au. genuinely, yes, and possibly the most interesting one to write. modern!aerion is a freak who's secure, which is the unlock. when aerion isn't operating from scarcity-brain, when he has his penthouse, his books, his inheritance and a sense that the floor is not going to drop out from under him, he becomes a man who can afford to play.
and he likes fucking with valarr too much to pass up the bit. he'd come at it competitive (who can get more of you, who can wreck you better, who has the edge) and he'd treat it as sport. a challenge. a way of getting under valarr's skin while also getting under yours, which is two of his favourite hobbies stacked.
the problem (and this is the good problem, dramatically speaking) is that aerion in this register thinks he's playing a game and then he catches feelings, as he is congenitally unable not to do when it comes to you, and once that happens the whole thing recalibrates and he's furious about it. that's where it gets messy. that's where it gets interesting. modern!aerion would not start out monogamous about you and would absolutely end up monogamous about you and the in-between would be the fun bit.
— and the one some of you might not expect: dragons-survived-the-dance!au, original AKOTSK setting. now, hear me out.
aerion with a dragon is a fundamentally different man. not in personality (still obsessive, still possessive, still cruel and dangerous) but in settledness. dragon-aerion has been claimed by something larger than himself, has been chosen and matched and bonded, and that does enormous psychological work on him.
the chronic scarcity-brain of canon-aerion (he's the fourth son's spare son, denied the dragon he believes is his birthright, raging at every closed door) that brain produces an aerion who must take, must claim, must hoard.
give him a dragon, and a meaningful amount of that pressure releases. he can be more open. he can be more generous. he can share you with his cousin in a way that the man without a dragon simply cannot, because dragon bound!aerion is no longer competing with valarr for the central thing, he already has it. valarr can have you in part because aerion already has himself in a way canon-aerion never gets to.
ever since i was a child, i felt like greatness was in store for me. a great life, i felt. like god himself had spat me forth to land on this earth and in some way transform it...that i was here for a reason, a purpose. why did he make you a woman, then? for comedy, i guess.
ELLE FANNING as Catherine the Great in The Great, Season 1
