30 year old woman who still reblogs shitposts on tumblr dot com. Occasional leftism and fandom content (Buffy, Doctor Who, ASOIAF, Community, Black Sails, Yellowjackets, Succession, Locked Tomb series). I post BtVS meta at herinsectreflection
ive been thinking about this a bit and i feel like i have some very different feelings towards certain things and strongly disagree with the implications present in the ways i see them discussed. i do not like to simplify these themes to “vengeance/punishment bad wahh”, because it does not at all feel complete enough to convey my true feelings, or the themes of the text itself for that matter imo, but like… ofc i personally cant read things like cersei’s walk of shame, where she is punished, humiliated, and dehumanized through the one thing she was unfairly condemned for her entire life— jaime’s maiming and torture where he is humiliated, fed things like horse piss which he forces down because he is so thirsty before vomiting it back up, gets repeatedly beaten unconscious, and is nearly driven to passive suicide— theon’s excessive physical and mental torment that would take too long to list that breaks him entirely— and even a man as deeply evil as vargo hoat (who is not at all three dimensional) having his hands and feet and arms and legs cut off, is cannibalized, and even forced to eat parts of himself, causing the pov character that swore to enact brutal vengeance on him to feel ill and repulsed— and experience much, if any, catharsis, personal feelings about these characters aside. asoiaf is a series where the author pretty often deliberately places us inside the heads of bad people that have done terrible things, who some readers may feel a certain hatred for, as they are put through torment. not to make the reader feel good and satisfied about it, but to present it as something that should not really be a thing that we revel in, and encourage us to be critical about what is even gained through what they are going through. even a morally dark antagonist without a pov like joffrey and his death was meant to have elements of tragedy. during, tyrion notes that he is a young boy with fear in his eyes that he had never seen in the eyes of his father. whether you feel a certain way about it (and i am not arguing that you are morally flawed for not sympathizing with a fictional character, this isn’t real life, i am just discussing themes that i am identifying), the goal was not really to just provide us with a feel-good “justice at last!” emotion through the brutally violent death of a 13 year old boy. it makes me genuinely wonder how some ppl come away with the idea that this series is intended to be a celebration and glorification of punitive justice. i am not saying justice in general is not a huge theme, and some catharsis, especially for victims, over the death/defeat of their abusers & tormenters is present in the text as well, understandably so, because it can mean safety. take pia smiling through broken teeth when jaime has her rapist executed and presents his head to her while setting a precedent with gregor’s men. some people need to die, and deserve it, but what does that look like? who decides it? why? by contrast, the instance of jaime actually feeling good when he hangs a bunch of random outlaws reads as something more tied to his current relationship to the self and certain selfish desires at this point in his story than any real justice, and it is further elaborated upon and evolves in different ways in the book. anyway, all these questions are not made as simple as i often see them framed as.
it doesn’t feel like to me that most things that can be interpreted as enactments of punitive justice or karma are these epic events that should just make the reader blindly cheer and applaud. there is a reason that some things go awry (like with oberyn), and it isn’t cynicism. there is nuance, and not in a way where victims are condemned for fighting back for example, or pacifist ideology is idealized. there just really isn’t a glorification of brutal and excessive punishment and suffering. same with a blind upholding of duty and law based around flawed feudalistic constructs. and all these things should not even be conflated. not to mention that punitive justice exists also in a way where it is connected to institutions. take the faith and organized religion for example. the whole process is interrogated: what is sin? what sins are being punished? how? why? and what are the actual effects? be it jaime’s and brienne’s conversations/interactions with a bunch of different tertiary characters in affc, or cersei’s punishment in adwd. at the end of the day, she is punished for her body, for being a woman. she does not suffer “consequences” for her actual wrongs and the suffering she causes. she doesn’t really learn anything, and it will all just make her spiral more. the whole concept of punitive justice gets focused on especially with theon’s entire identity being withered away through torture. he experiences so much torment that there comes a point where he is robbed of his mind and agency. what does the “criminal” learn? how can a person change in these circumstances? what is the point, and why should we feel good about this? he is not even really “punished” for his crimes, and certainly not by people with any moral high ground over him, he is just being brutalized. same is the case with jaime in asos: it is a bad person being brutalized by men even more vile than he is, and they are not doing it because they want to deliver any justice to his victims. also, though the maiming does kickstart crisis with him specifically, it is not the determining factor when it comes to reformation. this story is not actually saying that people can be, and should be, tortured into becoming better people, and if they can’t the solution is to just brutally axe them. there is nuance, sure, mercy is not something everyone is entitled to in all circumstances. sometimes “mercy” towards certain evil people will lead to the enablement of the suffering of others, even entire populations. there are certainly circumstances where compromise isn’t an option. but, again, i dont think george is ever holding back on actually interrogating the moral quandaries when it comes to identifying cycles and ending them, and he is for sure not treating every single aspect of these conflicts as black and white. even tyrion murdering his father, who purposefully does have a very ironic and humiliating death scene, which is important thematically, doesn’t end in easy and feel-good catharsis, especially for tyrion, which doesn’t even equal “oh, tywin should be forgiven and spared”.
all of this is also why i do not really see how events like the fall of house lannister (first of all, we know it is gonna include the likely very brutal deaths of two innocent small children), red wedding 2.0, valonqar etc would be these grand and glorious moments of justice and pay-off, treated as just the good guys finally getting an epic W. they will very likely be filled with tragedy, so i am genuinely curious about where these expectations for this kind of catharsis come from
Being a member of Flint’s crew must be exhausting. Twice a week you’re put in an impossible, desperate situation then the captain does something unhinged and saves the day in a way no one understands but everyone has come to expect anyway. He tells you to do something, you do it; two hours later, he tells you to do the exact opposite and you do it too (he makes a compelling argument). The crew voted him off six times already and somehow he’s still captain; no one has anything to say about it. There’s no way he’ll wriggle out of this one, you tell yourself for the eighth time this month. No one wants to die for him. You’ll all do whatever he wants you to do. He can control the weather.
I think we should have a turn of phrase for “I’m not in the right, but I AM annoyed with this situation, so I just need to go bitch to a friend about this before I suck it up and go do the right thing” because more and more I’m finding this is a critical element of functional adulthood.
In response to Slate’s article on the possibility having non-heteromative team in figure skating (particularly, ice dance and pairs), Oniceperspective shared a glimpse of Gabriella Papadakis (FRA) and Madison Hubbell (USA) working on their same-sex program. You can see how they switch the leading figure between them.
stop putting GLaDOS in polls she’s TOO powerful. she’s ratioing everybody. sweeping like she’s cleaning up for company. why would you put the queen of the fucked up lesbian robots on your poll on the fucked up lesbian robot fucker website? it’s barely even fair.
tumblr is probably the best website because you can say things like “hey. dont cry. suck her sloppy saturday wednesday ok?” and everyone will be like yeah this expresses a coherent thought
me: it’s about monsters it’s about those othered by society, it’s about civilization and weaponized shame, it’s about the power of controlling your own narrative and the devastation of it being taken away from you, it’s about security vs freedom, compassion vs pragmatism, begging for admittance vs burning the house down, it’s inevitability and foregone conclusions and the things we’ll do for love. when the king brands us pirates, he doesn’t mean to make us adversaries. he doesn’t mean to make us criminals. he means to make us monsters.
guy who wanted to date me: oh yeah that’s the uh, the pirate one right? yeah I saw some of that, it was pretty good
hannibal (framed will) killed a judge (it was his fault will was on trial) because he didnt like that the judge was going to say will is guilty (he framed him)
