Welcome! I mainly write fanfics here, but I occasionally post general writing stuff and updates about my first novel.
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🖤 Baldur's Gate 3 Masterlist
🖤 A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Masterlist
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The collapse of fanfics and online writing // by The Young Writers Initiative and Rena Shaine via Substack // regarding the use of AI and c.ai to create fanfiction
Underused Microexpressions for Characters Hiding Something
Everyone writes about characters "not meeting Character's gaze." Let’s retire it for a minute.
• A smile that doesn’t reach the eyes
• Holding eye contact a beat too long
• Laughing half a second too late
• Over-correcting posture when addressed
• Clearing their throat before answering
• Adjusting sleeves, cuffs, jewelry repeatedly
• A visible swallow before speaking
• Exhaling through the nose instead of responding
• Looking at the exit mid-conversation
• Nodding too quickly
You tilted your head, letting a slow, considering smile spread across your face as if you were reviewing the merits of a moderately interesting trade proposal.
"Over your shoulder," you repeated, tasting the words. "That's the offer. A man who can't learn my name by conventional means resorts to luggage arrangements." You clicked your tongue, soft and disappointed, even as your heart was doing something catastrophically undignified against his hand. "I've had more elegant proposals from stable boys, Baratheon."
His grip on your belt tightened by a fraction.
"You have until three," he said, very quietly.
"Mmm." You leaned back, the stone cool against your shoulders, and looked at him with the patience of a woman who has nowhere better to be and all the time in the world. "And then what? You'll cause a scene in front of every man and woman who owes your king a levy? You'll make a spectacle of yourself for a woman who hasn't given you so much as a surname?"
"One."
"Think very carefully about what that does to your reputation."
"Two."
"Lyonel." You said his name this time, just his name, a single word with nothing attached to it. Not a concession. A test. You watched his jaw work.
"Three."
The world tilted.
You had exactly enough time to register the ceiling, the startled gasps of nearby courtiers, and the very firm surface of his shoulder against your stomach before his hand landed once, flat and decisive, against the back of your thigh.
"You," he said, and there was a roughness in his voice that hadn't been there before, something stripped of performance, "are going to tell me your name."
"Eventually," you agreed, from somewhere level with his belt, watching the floor pass beneath you with unseemly calm. "Perhaps when you've demonstrated that you're capable of asking nicely."
The sound he made was not quite a laugh and not quite a growl and entirely, catastrophically, something you intended to think about for a very long time.
The second smack landed with enough force to send a involuntary sound out of you that was neither dignified nor quiet.
The hall noticed.
You heard it ripple outward from the epicentre of your humiliation like a stone dropped in still water. A sharp feminine gasp somewhere to the left. A bark of male laughter, quickly swallowed. The music, bless the musicians, stumbled for exactly half a bar before recovering.
"Lyonel." Your voice came out steadier than you deserved credit for, given that all the blood in your body was currently making decisions about your face. "People are staring."
"Yes," he agreed pleasantly, and turned.
He turned. A full, unhurried pivot that swung you in a wide arc, one hand braced flat against the back of your thigh with a casual, proprietary confidence that made it abundantly clear he had done this before and found no difficulty in it whatsoever. You got a rotating panorama of the great hall. Goblets arrested halfway to mouths. A pair of ladies with their heads bent together, one with her hand pressed to her lips. A Baratheon bannerman who appeared to be having the best evening of his adult life.
A knight you vaguely recognised from the tilts actually raised his cup in salute.
You became aware, with a kind of detached scholarly interest, that Lyonel Baratheon was not straining. Not even slightly. He was carrying you across a crowded hall with one hand while the other accepted a fresh cup of wine from a passing servant with the ease of a man collecting his hat.
He was strong. Absurdly, almost offensively strong, in the way that men who have been swinging steel since boyhood sometimes were, where it stopped being performance and became simply the resting state of a body that had never been asked to be anything else. The shoulder beneath your stomach was solid as packed earth. The arm across the back of your legs didn't tremble.
You had, you realised, significantly miscalculated.
"You're enjoying this," you said.
"Immeasurably." He took a sip of wine. "You were saying something about substance?"
"I was saying," you replied, with great dignity, "that you are a barbarian."
"Stormlands born and raised." He turned again, slower this time, letting the room drink its fill, and you felt the collective held breath of approximately forty witnesses who were going to be dining out on this story for the better part of a decade. "We do tend toward directness."
Your hand, operating on some instinct entirely independent of your better judgment, curled into the back of his tunic.
Not to push away. Not to signal distress.
Just to hold on.
He felt it. Of course he felt it. His hand shifted against the back of your thigh, the pressure changing from restraint to something almost unbearably deliberate, a slow spread of warmth through the fabric that made your breath go short in a way that had nothing at all to do with the indignity of your position.
"Still thinking about the bannerman?" he asked, very mildly.
"I hate you," you informed him.
"You're gripping my tunic hard enough to wrinkle it."
"I'm trying to maintain some semblance of—"
"Of?"
You closed your mouth.
Around you, someone began to clap. A single pair of hands, slow and appreciative, and then two more, and then the particular kind of scattered, delighted applause that meant the hall had collectively decided to enjoy the entertainment rather than pretend they hadn't seen it.
Lyonel, the absolute menace, gave a small, courtly bow.
Which meant he bent forward.
Which meant you slid precisely three inches toward gravity before his arm locked and caught you, effortless, inevitable, the muscles of his back and shoulder barely registering the correction.
"Name," he said softly, once the bow was complete and the applause had crested. His voice had dropped back to that register that lived in your sternum. Not a demand now. Something quieter than that. The patience of a man who has already won and knows it and is simply waiting for you to catch up.
You turned your head. From this angle, you had an excellent view of his jaw, the sharp line of it, the faint shadow of a day's growth. The gold hoop catching the torchlight.
You weighed your options with the thoroughness they deserved.
Then you leaned up, close enough that only he could possibly hear you, and you told him.
Where to now, dear reader?
He sets you down and asks you to dance. You say yes.
He doesn't set you down. He carries you out entirely.
A post about Baelor Targaryen's hands and their significance for the story. Or, why do I believe Baelor's hands have a storyline of their own? Here's why.
In good storytelling small details matter, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is proof of this. It shows a lot in the way characters are presented. Now, since it's Lyonel Baratheon who's responsible for male nudity (and partially Dunk), the Targaryens, who are the opposite of Baratheon in a sense (especially Baelor) look very reserved. They only show their faces and hands. Needless to say that the show's creators have done a great job here.
Here's the frame that's always worth mentioning. You instantly know where to look, your brain knows, and it's thanks not just to our hero's good looks — it's also thanks to the lighting and values. Artists are taught this. And here the center of immediate attention is not even Baelor's face, it's mostly his hands. And both look fine (how dare he look so fine), but his hands are somehow so particularly fine that we just can't get over them. Nature's been very generous indeed to Baelor Targaryen/Bertie Carvel. The director and the cinematographer have made all the right choices.
So there he sits, playing with his ring absent-mindedly. And he does this thing a lot (probably the actor's choice). The first time we see him, he's eating something (most likely grapes), and he twiddles a grape with the air of a man who just loves to have something to play with in his fingers. Probably a piece of characterisation — because Baelor is a fun guy. But also, his sense of touch is obviously important to him. And I also see this as a part of his general agility and, in a sense, his training as a fighter. Heightened senses — agile limbs — hallmarks of someone who's good with a sword.
But anyway, for some reason these beautiful hands with long nimble fingers become important. We know them, we remember them, we admire their owner.
Fast forward to the last scene where Baelor's talking to Raymun Fossoway.
He's received the fatal blow, he's dying, while still remaining on his feet. And he's obviously noticing some sinister signs — something's not right. But he doesn't say "The headache is killing me", or "I'm getting sleepy", or "I'm cold", though all of these would have been accurate. He says, "My fingers feel like wood." It's the first thing that comes to his mind, something that surprises and unsettles him most of all.
Something that's been important to him for all of his life, an integral part of him is leaving him, and he doesn't know why. He most probably does feel something's gone very wrong by this point, but he cannot know the full extent of the damage. All he knows — he's in pain, he feels weird, and now his fingers feel like wood. For him it's like saying "I don't feel like myself anymore, there is something wrong with me, and I probably need help" without saying it.
