Like a shimmering of the dark air

Game of Thrones season eight, episode two: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

The episode is written by Bryan Cogman and directed by David Nutter. This is widely considered the last good ep. of GoT, but I don't necessarily agree. Anyway, this chapter covers Jaime pleading his case to Dany, whose father he famously murdered bringing an end to the reign of the Targ dynasty, and with the aid of Brienne vouching for him he is allowed a place at Winterfell. Dany and company learn that the Lannister army will not be coming to reenforce the North because Cersei, famous deceiver, in a shocking twist lied to everyone. Amidst Winterfell being made ready to withstand the army of the dead, Dany struggles with her councilors and makes overtures to Sansa, while Jon becomes aloof and incommunicative. Battle plans are drawn up and everyone settles in to await the arrival of the White Walkers, as below the castle Jon finally confesses his parentage to Dany, who does not take it well but is given no time to process as in that moment the army of the dead finally arrives.

There's a lot going on here, but I want to take this moment to pause and talk about one particular thing that is very near and dear to my cold, dead little heart.

Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand, wer ist die schoenste im ganzen Land?

The scene in this episode between Sansa and Dany is of great interest to me. With foreknowledge of the ending, S8 is trying very hard to position Sansa as The Good Queen, as a positive representation of female leadership, to counterbalance the way the narrative is turning against Dany. The entire episode, actually, is working double time to try to show that, see, look at all these women who have been (allowed) into traditionally male roles, what progress we've made. Look at all these exceptions so that we may not change the rules. It isn't that Dany's claim to the throne is being rejected because she's a woman, certainly not, no, it's because she's secretly an evil bad queen and only someone as smart and decerning and Good(TM) as Sansa can see that.

But, of course, this assertion requires scrutiny and interrogation.

So. Let's talk about Sansa.

Sansa's arc, especially in the last few seasons, is a fascinating one.

When Jon is crowned King in the North, Sansa's resentment is palpable. Despite his legal status as a bastard at the time, Jon is crowned ahead of Sansa who has the better claim based on birthright as the eldest surviving trueborn sibling of the last King in the North, Robb Stark. But Jon is crowned instead of her, chosen by the north men to be their leader despite the fact that technically Sansa won the battle to reclaim Winterfell as it was only due to the arrival of the reinforcements she secured from the Vale that the tide was turned. Yet Jon is given the credit for winning the "Battle of the Bastards" anyway, and is crowned regardless of what actually happened. No one even seems to consider giving Sansa a crown, and what she feels is rightfully hers is given away to a man because he is a man. She is skipped over as a woman.

Jon, as King in the North, departs to treat with the newly arrived Dragon Queen, Daenerys. In his absence, Sansa begins gathering power and loyalty to herself. When Arya returns to Winterfell, she correctly recognizes that Sansa is preparing a contingency plan at best and something of a soft coup against Jon at worst, which makes Arya rightly furious. But through the events of S7, Arya's loyalty shifts to Sansa (whether or not that makes sense is a rant for another day) rather than Jon.

Then, Jon returns to the North. No longer a king, he has bent the knee, giving up his crown to Dany, and effectively ending the northern quest for independence, reunifying the north with the rest of the Seven Kingdoms the ruling of which Dany claims birthright over. Jon, who only had his crown because Sansa was skipped over as a woman, gives that crown away to a woman. But it's the wrong woman. A Targaryen woman. A Targaryen woman who shows up with a massive army of foreigners and two fully grown, extremely large, and scary dragons, presumably promised to help reenforce the North against the Night King in exchange for Jon bending the knee.

And worst of all? Dany is beautiful, wields tremendous power, the kind of power denied Sansa, and Jon is obviously smitten with her. Jon recognizes Dany's sovereignty, but not Sansa's. What a nightmare for the Lady of Winterfell.

The cold fury that wafts off of Sansa like dry ice when she first greets Dany can be understood very well in this context. When she confronts Jon about Dany, snarling the words "a Targaryen queen," Jon responds that Dany isn't her father ("The Mad King"). To which Sansa sneers, "No, she's much prettier."

This all reads as very clear and poisonous levels of envy. Dany has everything that has been denied to Sansa, including Jon's respect but possibly more importantly the northern crown. And I am reminded of a trope of which I am exceedingly fond: The Evil Fairytale Queen.

I happen to be reading the final book of the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer right now, which adapts Snow White to a science fiction setting, so evil fairytale queens are on my mind (Levana <3). I also happen to be rewatching House of the Dragon at the same time that I'm doing this revisiting of GoT S8, and the episode I watched recently was We Light the Way, a.k.a Alicent's transformation into--I don't care about authorial intent or fan interpretation, I care about what's actually there in the text--the archetypal Evil Stepmother Queen. Folklore and fairytales also happen to be a hobby of mine, more generally, and I just read the original German Brothers Grimm version of Snow White, so let's get into it:

Bring Me Her Heart in a Box (or her lungs and liver, I ain't too picky)

First of all, I love me an evil queen. And in GoT we have several candidates for Evil Queen. Cersei is the most obvious for most of the show, and the final season also posits Dany as The Mad Queen, but I shall put forward Sansa as fitting the trope. I'm not particularly interested in whether any of these women are Objectively Bad or Objectively Good, but I am concerned with who the narrative puts forward as Suddenly Evil (Dany), vs. who seems to escape the condemnation of the narrative (Sansa), vs. who gets exonerated at the last moment (Cersei).

This is where the tension between what the viewer is clearly meant to think and what is actually narratively viable come into conflict. We're meant to understand Sansa's dislike of Dany as prescience; Sansa, The Good One, was able to see through to Dany's true nature before everyone else (especially the men). The previous episode begins this motif with Sansa calling attention to Dany's beauty and implying that Jon has been bewitched by that beauty into ignoring the warning signs. This motif will continue through the season of characters calling attention to Dany's beauty and juxtaposing it to her waging of violent war; as if the two things have something innately, and sinisterly, to do with each other. As if the two things are linked somehow. Dany's violence is only possible because of her beauty/her violence is especially bad because she's beautiful.

But within the context of Sansa's arc, does this hold water? Is she just smarter than everyone and, being "immune" to Dany's charms, can see the truth? Or can we see how Sansa's life has set her up to be uniquely resentful of Dany for other reasons, reasons better supported by the narrative? Because up to this point, Dany's behavior has fallen within the normal range of men in her position, and she hasn't been especially antagonistic to the North. Quite the opposite; she has pledged her not inconsiderable resources to helping the North. She's also been in the North for maybe a day, so what could Sansa have possibly observed in that time to make her this pathologically determined to dislike and mistrust Dany? All we've got is what Sansa herself has said and directly implied: that she thinks Jon bent the knee to Dany because Dany is pretty and because Jon is in love with her. In Sansa's view, Jon loves Dany enough to give up his crown for her, but it never occurred to him to give up that crown for Sansa.

Envy: Noun - a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities, or luck. Verb - desire to have a quality, possession, or other desirable attribute belonging to (someone else).

What is the attribute of Dany's that Sansa blames for Jon's behavior, that she believes has further robbed her of what she's entitled to? Beauty.

Jon gave away what Sansa sees as rightfully hers to another woman. A beautiful and powerful woman. And Sansa is furiously envious. This makes more sense to me as motivation and it tracks with what is presented on screen. Dany has everything that Sansa wants and, eventually, Sansa will devise a plan to use Jon against Dany in a way which mirrors what's happened to Sansa. Sansa is going to betray Jon's secrets, utilizing the very patriarchy which has so severely harmed her to bring Dany down by making Jon an obstacle to the legitimacy of Dany's claim on her birthright.

This echoes in some ways the story of Alicent Hightower, who, rather than try to bring the patriarchy down, instead weaponizes it against Rhaenyra to try to usurp the throne for her son. Princess Rhaenys aptly describes this behavior as follows: "You wish not to be free, but to make a window in the wall of your prison." The key difference between Sansa and Alicent is perhaps that Alicent "toils in the service of men," and Sansa has absolutely no respect for men by this point in the narrative and instead ruthlessly seeks her own personal advancement over anyone else, man or woman. But she is also most certainly not interested in advancing women who are not her. She seeks only to free herself.

So, let's return to this scene between Sansa and Dany. In particular, the fact that Sansa treats Northern independence as an open question that needs an answer. What gets my goat about this is that the King in the North already bent the knee and pledged fealty. The question is closed, and Dany has every right to treat it as closed. But Sansa, who hasn't respected a single decision Jon has made up until this point and has publicly disagreed with him in front of his subjects, is openly refusing to acknowledge Jon's final act as king as having any validity. She didn't sign off on it, so it isn't valid. Rather than hold another woman up, Sansa can only seek to tear her down, because Sansa wants what Dany has.

The thing about evil stepmothers and evil queens (and evil stepmother queens) in fairytales is how they always seem to have other women/girls as their objects of envy. The trope is inherently about women harming other women and why that may occur. As an uncomplicated heroine whose ascension to the northern throne I am meant to feel uncomplicated happiness about, Sansa is problematic for me. I bounce off of that story. But Sansa as a darkly ascendant queen, whose goodness has been beat out of her by the patriarchy, who has twisted and warped into the image of her first nemesis (Cersei), a bitter and envious woman who will destroy other powerful women, put her male family members in the line of fire, to get what's "hers"? I will gobble that shit right up. That's compelling as fuck.

So, I shall blithely ignore the authorial intent/popular fan interpretation, supplanting it for my own meaning, my own interpretation, thank you very much.

Life is not especially fun at the moment. Work/life balance is very skewed, etc. Health problems have also escalated, leaving me no choice but to make a doctor's appointment, which turned out to be A Whole Process because nothing can be easy these days.

I'm finding it quite difficult to write because I feel so hollowed out all the time. Also, much of what I'm going through isn't anything that would be particularly wise to commit to cyber space in the current moment.

I fully intended to write more, but this might be all I can muster. Anyway. I'm alive.

Important cat health update (with companying common sense trigger warnings for the subject): Grey has been diagnosed with renal disease. This has been an extremely scary two-month long trek through veterinary hell, but we are hopeful that she may have finally turned the corner with the aid of accurate(-ish) diagnosis and a hospital stay while on fluids to flush the (probable) kidney stone from her system that was causing a blockage. We've had to be trained to administer said fluids ourselves and tomorrow will be our first attempt to do so, so wish us luck.

Grey is home and displaying all her worst coping mechanisms for the extreme stress she's under, namely pulling out all her fur. But fluid and food intake is so important right now that the vet agrees that a cone would be more harmful than helpful, so we've just got to monitor and try to mitigate/treat any resulting injuries.

Things are looking a bit more hopeful now, but the last few days were a dark time. Work has been very understanding of my need to take calls and step away from my station, which has been most helpful. Thankfully, it's the weekend now and I am finally allowed to cry.

Unfortunately, this is all at the worst possible time because I am still supposed to be preparing for a move. My progress towards which has vacillated between slow and nonexistent this week.

If there can be said to be an upside to this nightmare, I've been consuming a lot of books/media.

Possibly the most important of which was Chain of Thorns, the third and final installment of the Last Hours trilogy in the Shadowhunter Chronicles series. Reading that book was An Experience(TM), which I still have not completely processed. It's definitely Cassie's most mature work to date. Other books I might like or love better, but Chain of Thorns is just possibly the best. Anyway, that lead directly into a Dark Artifices reread, of which I have completed Lady Midnight and am partway through Lord of Shadows.

I've continued my trend of reading copious amounts of BL. I've read through all of what is currently available of Black or White, which I am enjoying a lot as it develops past its growing pains. I've also read Midnight Rain, which I loved, and Toritan, which I did not. Midnight Rain, in particular, has been living rent free in my brain ever since I read it. It's definitely flawed, but it hits that crime BL subgenre nerve just right, and it is certainly A Whole Mood.

I am also slowly exploring danmei. I finished the donghua of Heaven Official's Blessing, which was lovely, as well as the first volume of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, which was rather a miss for me. After that I read the first volume of The Husky and His White Cat Shizun, which I like better than Grandmaster at least (not least of which due to the vastly superior translation, at least in terms of a smooth reading experience), but is still somewhat uneven in quality. But it's interacting with tropes I like (supremely almost cartoonishly evil and explicitly textually queer main character, yes please), and exploring tropes with Grandmaster overlap but in a way that I, personally, prefer (by that I mean HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND. Like, the book breezes past the moral event horizon within its opening chapter and never looks back). That said, pacing is probably going to be my enemy as I explore this genre. Slow burn is absolutely Not My Thing and it seems to be pretty baked into the territory, if I may horribly mix metaphors.

P.S. Lana Del Rey dropped a new song, which is now my personality. I don't make the rules.

Life very much sucks right now. I'm recovering from working the holidays, which has taken a considerable toll on my body and mental health, plus the deep freeze over said holidays, PLUS the cat was sick over the damn holidays.

[TW: gross and scary cat health details]

Grey had stopped eating or using the litter box, so we were rightly Very Concerned. On the second(!!!!) trip to the vet, they finally x-rayed her and found that she had compacted stool backed up to her small intestine. So, they gave her an enema and kept her under observation for several hours. Afterwards, they did a second set of x-rays which were clear. However, upon releasing her back to us, the office gave us essentially no instruction for how to care for a post-enema cat or any kind of idea of what to expect, and what treatment plans we were given were contradictory. So, basically, thank god for Google, and also that first night was Very Scary.

Things have seemed to be on the up, but Grey is once again showing some early warning signs. So, we're going to step up treatment and monitor, because lo, it is once more a holiday weekend. D:

[/TW]

Oh! Also, we're getting ready to move. We put in an application at an apartment complex yesterday, so we're waiting for background checks to clear etc. I'm going to have to figure out how to wrangle paystubs out of my employer in this, the digital age. (Minor rant goes here about how nowhere gives you paystubs anymore, but housing still requires them)

Anyway. Media consumption!

Mom gave me the House of the Dragon bluray boxset for Christmas, so I just finished rewatching S1 last night. Some general notes on the bluray release: HBO has clearly tried to color-correct some episodes to make them more watchable, but unfortunately "Driftmark" is still unsalvageable due to already having been color-corrected to turn midday into night (side note: love watching all the actors squinting in what was originally direct sunlight, meanwhile the screen is so dark I can barely see). So, that episode remains damn near unwatchable, which is a crying shame 'cause it's one of the best ones.

S1 episodes listed from my favorite to least favorite:

1. 1x10 "The Black Queen"
2. 1x04 "King of the Narrow Sea"
3. 1x07 "Driftmark"
4. 1x08 "Lord of the Tides"
5. 1x01 "The Heirs of the Dragon"
6. 1x03 "Second of His Name"
7. 1x02 "The Rogue Prince"
8. 1x06 "The Princess and the Queen"
9. 1x05 "We Light the Way"
10. 1x09 "The Green Council"

The top five are, frankly, all so good that their positions are interchangeable, except for "The Black Queen" which is undeniably the best. However, from about seventh position downwards is a pretty steep, and ever-increasing, drop off in quality. That said, the only episode that is truly bad is "The Green Council," and even that episode has some (few) saving graces (mostly in the forms of Aemond, Aegon II, and Helaena, who should have been the focal points of this episode, but alas. We got totally 100% necessary things, like Larys wanking to Alicent's feet, instead. Sigh).

I also watched The Handmaiden (2016) over Christmas, which was fantastic. I've been a fan of Park Chan-wook's work for a while, but this might be my favorite that I've seen so far. It's messy but extremely productive in its explorations of racial imbalance, imperial colonialism, cultural appropriation vs. assimilation, female sexuality and rage amidst patriarchy, and in particular I think this might be my favorite interrogation of the "evil lesbian" trope. There's something very Rebecca-esque in the first half of the film especially, and just. I felt profoundly seen by this film, which is both deeply unsettling and soothing at once.

On the books front, I've been consuming some BL manga titles, while still crawling through Snape (not for reasons of quality, but rather lack of spoons), and somehow I also read Ocean's Echo and reread Chain of Gold in there.

For the BL titles: I've read volume one of Love Nest by Yuu Minaduki which is a standard forced-proximity gay guy/"straight" guy romance, and the first two volumes of Black or White by Sachimo which has been an unexpected delight. It features an established relationship between two men who already know they're queer, which is rare enough, but it also includes them working through sexual dysfunction, a nearly nonexistent theme in romance, all amidst needing to remain closeted for their acting careers. So far, it's been a much more layered and productive approach to the genre than I'm typically used to.

I'm hoping to get to the second and last volume of Love Nest and volume three of Black or White today, which might be overly ambitious but whatever.

Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell was somewhat disappointing. I loved Winter's Orbit, but this second book in the universe just wasn't it for me. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just not really "for me." The trope of mind-sharing was so tiptoed around that it felt very much scifi lite, and like the narrative was trying not to scare the reader. Which for someone else might be fine, but for me I don't need the training wheels. I also didn't love the ending, and felt it was somewhat cowardly. This wasn't bad enough, or indeed even objectively bad at all, for me to lose interest in future work from Maxwell, but this particular book just wasn't to my taste.

Reporting from the other side of my second full week of returning to work. At the moment, my main goal is still giving myself grace as I readjust to the old rhythm, so I am attempting to relax and unwind in my free time as much as possible. And because it's me, that means HOUSE OF THE DRAGON.

[HOTD SPOILERS FOR ALL OF S1 AND FIRE AND BLOOD]

The season finale was last weekend, so S1 is finally a whole and complete narrative that I can analyze as a finished section of a wider story. If taken wholistically, although S1 has flaws that will probably always plague the show, HotD is a vast improvement to GoT. It is more self-aware, more deliberate with its themes (by acknowledging that it has themes in the first place), and explicitly has the intention of righting historical wrongs in the genre of high fantasy although how successfully it accomplishes its mission statement varies across the season.

Honestly, I could whole-heartedly recommend HotD to people (and have done), unlike GoT which I can only ever cautiously recommend with a list of caveats equal to its overall runtime. Which is a tremendous relief because HotD is adapting my favorite source material from ASOIAF (a fact which always seems to surprise people??? Like, yes, Fire and Blood is my favorite GRRM book. It's all Targs/dragons all the time, which is the way I like it).

The S1 finale is especially good, possibly one of the best of the season, which is exactly what you want from a finale. I've seen complaints about its most controversial elements (Daemon choking Rhaenyra and Lucerys' death being a purposeful accident), but I understood where both choices were coming from.

Lucerys' death in particular I want to pull focus on. Yes, in the overarching narrative, I don't like that all the bad things the Greens do to start the war have been contextualized as either misunderstandings or accidents, this lends itself to the interpretation that the Greens are blameless and it's all the Blacks' fault. But setting aside fandom interpretative nonsense for the moment, and with the clarifier that I don't for a second believe that Alicent would have stopped the coupe if she hadn't misunderstood Viserys' dying words, let's talk about Aemond murdering Lucerys.

Being me, guess what, I'm bringing Romeo and Juliet into this. The creators have many times compared HotD to Shakespeare tragedies, so I don't feel like I'm stretching here. We've got a blood feud, "two households both alike in dignity," we've got generational trauma, we've got the kids inheriting their parents' prejudice and hatred without fully understanding it, and when the violence erupts into fatality it's the children who die. And it's also, arguably, not on purpose.

Aemond and Luke are children. Luke more literally, but Aemond is very much a little boy playing at being a badass, playing at violence, playing at being his uncle Daemon. He doesn't understand that he's not still in a training yard. He is equal parts Tybalt and Romeo. He wants revenge for the loss of his eye, and perceived wrongs to his family, as an amorphous concept but doesn't understand the potential consequences. He doesn't understand that there's a difference between threatening his little nephew with a knife and jumping on the back of the world's largest dragon to chase his nephew down. A dragon is the nuclear option, and once you're riding on its back there is no way to hurt your opponent a little bit. It's all or nothing.

Luke, fourteen-year-old Lucerys, ironically understands this better than Aemond. For one thing, because his mother is Rhaenyra, but for another because he's the one who will die if he doesn't escape. He's flying for his life, and he knows it.

But both of them forget that their dragons, for all that people say a dragon and its rider are one, are separate entities from them, entities who choose to obey them but he are not actually under their control. Not anymore, not since the knowledge was lost with Old Valyria [fan theory rant goes here about whatever Daemon is doing with Vermithor, though. That looked a hell of a lot like dragonbinding, and it's previously established that he was doing research into dragon husbandry in Essos). Aemond and Luke are young, inexperienced riders, and their dragons have soaked up their hatred for each other, the way Aemond and Luke have soaked up their parents' hatred. So, in the skies above Storm's End, they lose control of their hatred/their dragons; the blood feud takes on a life of its own that does not need their permission any longer.

Luke dies, and with him the little boy inside Aemond, along with any chance of avoiding war. "Then, the storm broke, and the dragons danced."

All that to say, good change. I like it.