#tinyfandom

[weirdsociology]

i have finally started king hereafter and i'm blaming all of you

[physticuffs]

ok in the tinyfandom this might get me (metaphorically) exiled from scotland but: the rallying image of Joleta as ultimately good and redeemable under all that trauma just doesn’t sit right with me. canon portrayal of all the other characters is basically accepted so i’m just confused with why Joleta is seen so differently. canonically, she tries to torture anything smaller and weaker than herself. and it’s not like other people in the story aren’t traumatized! everyone in the story is traumatized! but Joleta is traumatized and also...pretty evil! (*insert cool-motive-still-murder.gif here*) which DOESN’T make her a badly-written character, she’s as well-written as everyone else, and DOESN’T mean she deserved what happened to her, nobody would ever deserve anything Gabriel did. but there are no other characters that the fandom rewrites this way and it BAFFLES me.

(like, if you want to explore the good side of a complicated female character who had a terrible life and is an asshole but not psychopathically so, someone who canonically died tragically and would be great to give a better ending where she winds up living happily ever after, Oonagh is RIGHT THERE. also Marthe, but she’s already rightfully given a lot of love. more Oonagh love!)

(the better ending is that Marthe and Oonagh run away together and become pirate queens and nobody dies except idk some english lords)

obv this is an invitation to explain your take if you disagree

[languish-locked-in-l]

“Europe, poised delicately over a brand-new board, waited for the opening gambit” Doodled this silly little map last night. I’ve always loved this page, how in a few broad sweeping strokes it gives you an understanding of forces at play and sets up an epic feel for the books.

[claro3goesfullfandom]

tinyfandom - does anyone remember that great post about how it would wonderful to have a female character as the cold-hearted bastard/jerkass woobie, the one that uses lymond and philippa to explore some of the gendered tropes around that character type? it's from a few years ago and I can't find it. :/

[languish-locked-in-l]

The last few weeks have alternated between being sick and dealing with one stressful thing after another. So, in need of a kind of meditative focus, I've been working on another Lymond drawing. It originally started with the idea of drawing Thady Boy, licentious and dissolute, in Queen’s Play—sleeping with half the french court, glittering and wickedly witty. But in the end, I kept thinking about the passage when he first plays for the court to earn his place among them. When St André paws at his shirt, and at first Lymond is furious. He jumps up and nearly ruins the whole act. But then decides to suck it up and let his body be touched. And later, at the rooftop race, when sieur d’Enghien seizes his hand, claiming it. What history, I couldn't help thinking, had brought them to that moment? So the drawing started to become less Lymond the sex god, and more Lymond prostituting himself and pretending not to care but actually hating himself. Cumulating with this deeply self-loathing greeting to his brother: “Quite so. I, King of Flesh, flourishing in my flowers. Come in. I am sensible, sober, and have no designs on your virtue.”

[languish-locked-in-l]

Oh, God!” said Molly, and raised heavenly blue eyes to the rafters. “That hair! He was born to wreck us, body and soul, that one.

Open Game of Kings to find writing inspiration this morning, and this is what I find

[languish-locked-in-l]

She drew a long breath and released it again, her eyes open and honest on his. “Because, as you say, absence has hardened you. There are things you can face now which you couldn’t face in Stamboul. And because, I think, at last, the bond with Sybilla is being shared with another. Before, all your mind and all your emotions were contained in your feeling for her. Now it is different. Now you have Guzel’s love also.” He had been holding his breath. He released it all at once, leaving his fair skinned face for a moment as drained as his lungs, and then, after a pause, inhaled again with a long, vagrant column of air, caught as on the teeth of a ratchet with snatches of shock, and of laughter and of a sort of tearing, choked self-derision. “Wise Philippa,” Lymond said. “Wise, wise Philippa … Do you know, after all, I do not think I can manage both Master Bailey and Mistress Somerville.” And when, looking at him, she said sharply, “Sit down!” he did drop, abruptly, on to a stool by the window and remained there, his head in his hands, while Philippa found his unused cup and poured into it the last dregs of the punch. Then kneeling beside him, she said, “It will be worse if you don’t go. Do you want me to stay here and wait for you?” But instead of answering her he said, “Philippa, will you go away? Out of the room – Anywhere, just for five minutes.

Ringed Castle, Dorothy Dunnett. Read it and weep, my friends

[languish-locked-in-l]

Just made the mistake of randomly opening Pawn. 

Chapter 5. 

Fighting for the Order in Malta, sub suace jugo Christi, Jerrot Blyth had seen many things. He knew what man could do to man; he knew, given primitive nature and primitive provocation, what of suffering and what of brutalization and what, sometimes, of nobility could ensue. So he turned his back on that elegant kiosk and, closing his eyes, leaned against the smooth birch-tree bark until the sickness cleared from his brain and the blackness from his sight and until the turmoil was locked hard within him.

“Jerrot Blyth in turmoil,” I think, “how delicious, perhaps I shall read more.” 

He did not look again, after that, at that cold, lighted arbour...

“Oh shit, I did not realize it was this scene,” as my eyes continue, against my will, to read the next three pages. After a quick run to the toilet to metaphorically vomit, I thought I would share this lovely moment with you. 

Still shaking, by the way.