Fuck Shipping. I'm Canoeing Everyone Now.

I feel like typically the "dead wife" montage does nothing for me, even when executed very well, because it's often just like "here's this woman you'll never get to meet, she only matters because a man loves her so much and now he's sad."

But the montage wasn't just Mark's recollections. It was her perspective too. He's her dead husband. He's her Eurydice as much as he's his own Orpheus.

This isn't humanizing Gemma for Mark's sake. This is humanizing Gemma for Gemma's sake and it's there not for us to root for Mark, it's there for us to realize we're rooting for Gemma. Every moment Mark reaches out for her, she's reaching back.

The dead wife montage normally deprives a woman her agency, making her a tool for a man's arc, but this episode fully restored Gemma's agency. She's fighting back, she's yearning too. She hurts, she aches, she angers. She fights, she bleeds, she gets frustrated too. And has been before she was ever Ms Casey,

I've never seen a show restore a character's humanity as fully as this single episode did for Gemma. She went from an abstract concept--a wife, a severed employee, a ghost--to a tangible person.

And this was realized so literally as well. We literally see her bleed, we literally watch her eat, her hands cramp up, her teeth ache. It's like watching a hologram become flesh muscle by muscle, bone by bone.

I'm in awe of what they were able to do for her in just 50 minutes. In many ways, I feel I know Gemma better than I know half the cast.

Uh oh. It's happening.

bonk

the greyjoys aren’t even weird that’s just what having a lot of uncles does to you. they keep disappearing the loadbearing ones too like aeron’s hardly even a warm body at this point it’s just hp euroncraft and victarion the wise toting around various limbless anime girl fetish torsos summoning monsters from the fathoms below or whatever. asha was fine because she had rodrik the baller to queen out with but theon had to be his own uncle and we all saw how that worked out also urri croaked at the tender age of teenager so he never got to grow into his unclehood SAD! well there are other uncles. soooooooo many uncles. and they call them nuncles also so like that’s an entirely new layer to the complex uncle ecosystem they’re cultivating over there. taking out balon was like a trophic cascade it’s fucking battle royale

Does your hand in any way own your stomach?

jeanscottwarren as challengers

George just told me what Littlefingers Winds of Winter arc is going to be btw. He’s going to try to fuck Stoneheart

you guys are so annoying. why do i have to see discourse every year that's like "was tolkien really a woke king or was he your conservative uncle?" the guy was a devout catholic and a genteel misogynist who maintained lifelong friendships with queer people and women, and this isn't even paradoxical because that was part of the upper-class oxford culture he was immersed in. tolkien told the nazis to fuck off (and in doing so demonstrated a real understanding of what racism is and why it's harmful, beyond simply "these guys are bad news because they're who my country is at war with right now") but his inner life was marked by internalized racism that is deeply and inextricably woven into the art that he made. he foolishly described himself as an anarcho-monarchist, and it's kind of crazy to see people on this website passionately arguing that he likely never meaningfully engaged with anarchist theory, because...yeah, no shit, of course he didn't. tolkien didn't have to engage with most sociopolitical theory because as an upper-class englishman of his position, he was never affected by any of the issues that this theory is concerned with. what is plainly obvious from reading both his fiction and letters is that tolkien's ideal political system was that the divinely ordained god-king would rise up and rule in perfect justice and humility; he didn't want a government, he wanted a king arthur, even though (obviously) he was aware that outcome was impossible. why is it so hard for people to accept that he was just some guy! his letters aren't a code you have to crack. no amount of arguing or tumblr-level analysis is going to one day reveal a rhetorically airtight internally consistent worldview spanning jrrt's fiction, academic work, and personal writings, thereby "solving" the question of whether he was a woke king or your conservative uncle. his ideology was extremely inconsistent because, at the end of the day, he was just some guy.

rip jon snow you’d have loved the prince of denmark

kinda crazy how few dany twow theories seem to take into account that ***an archmaester of the citadel who traveled around the known world and studied in asshai who is known as “the mage” and gives way more credence to magic & the supernatural than any maester*** AND ***a red priest with a dragon’s head staff spitting green flame who makes so-far very accurate predictions in the flames and may possibly be the 2nd most “powerful” red priest in the world with a magic dragon horn near him*** are coming around dany’s orbit. like i think the whole storyline with/around dany in twow is gonna be a lot more than just the political conflicts of the free cities & iron throne claim crisis. magic/prophecies/dragonlore is gonna be just as (and probably more) important to everything imo