@folatefangirl / folatefangirl.tumblr.com
always infinitely funny to me how the dance of the dragons is about the futility of both sides of the struggle as they tear each other apart and doom the realm. and the fandom looked at that for all of two seconds before deciding to recreate it online
"x ship is normalizing incest-"
Buddy
If game of thrones hasn't normalized incest by now (pulling over 10 million views in the 7th season alone) then a small fandom ship most certainly won't
Spn ran for fifteen fucking seasons, it ran for over a decade, and wincest was consistently one of the two or three most popular ships. And it had no measurable impact on real world abuse. Maybe you think fandom is uniquely dangerous (why, idk, but this tumblr after all) but a pretty good rule of fandom is that if Spn couldn't do it, fucking no one else is going to manage it.
Alicent and her children.
My main complaint with the handling of Alicent is that centering the dance on two women is a very good idea, but to execute that they needed to actually make Alicent a proper co-lead and not just a featured player in Rhaenyra’s show. I can’t think of many scenes she’d had that are purely about her. We missed her trying to explain her engagement to Rhaenyra, her wedding, her feelings on getting pregnant, her childbirths, her talking to Criston and Larys to cement their alliance, her marriage souring, her politicking at court, all of it. She’s less a character and more an inconvenient roadblock for Rhaenyra and a convenient punching bag for the resident fandom misogynists. It’s only remotely compelling because Emily and Olivia are good actresses.
100% agree. And it's frustrating because the writers chose to make her compassionate and merciful and the same age as Rhaenyra. Why go out of their way to show she's a victim just to switch it around so that her personality changes whenever Rhaenyra needs a challenge? Fandoms can get behind an Amy Dunne, Cersei Lannister, Jennifer Check type. But they chose to make her kinder so they need to be consistent and flesh out her good side and complex motives.
Every episode I keep waiting to see scenes independent of Rhaenyra but they give us nothing. Alicent's writing is severely confused because it works around Rhaenyra's character arc and good image, and it's only held together by the actors' performances. It feels like we're missing several scenes from her POV that would make the greens' drastic actions make sense. When you're portraying a toxic-friendship-turned-war, you need both factions' sides of the story. Right now we don't quite have that, which waters down the complexity in a dangerous way that enables a fuck-ton of truly alarming and hateful misogyny toward Alicent.
