THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON 2 EPISODE 8 (2022-) | LABYRINTH (1986)

When you broke up with your situationship did you

A: become a dictator

B: start a cult

C: join an underground fighting ring

D: do drugs with your former teacher and his new student

[...] the mother, says about her son, "You got his sweet ways" when she sees the same kindness in her son that his father had.

— "Beloved" by Toni Morrison

tbh alicent being a shit mother is such an important thing to me. all of her relationship with motherhood.

since i could talk i always said i didn't want children. the adults laughed at me everytime, this stupid little girl, saying i just have to wait. it'll change when i get older. i'll see the appeal, apparently. of course i don't see the appeal still, no matter how old i am. but i noticed how assumed it was of me, expected even, that i didn't know shit and there's some secret parental gene that would manifest.

that's young alicent holding little crying helaena and wondering why she doesn't feel anything. if she's deficient in some way. if maybe she can make herself do it long enough, or hard enough, she'll settle in. and guess what? she fails. she doesn't settle in. she grows to love her children in time, they came out of her, of course she loves them, but she never gets better at handling them. with no help from either her husband or her father, she fails even harder.

my mom, who always dreamed of children, told me how scared and disoriented she was when i was born (her first). all the books she read didn't mean shit in that moment. and she's a happy mother, one of the best parents i know, but she worked SO HARD for it. saying that's just her maternal nature is directly spitting on all the blood and guts she poored into this. it's a hard-won satisfying job when you want it, it's hell on earth when you don't.

FUCK THIS COUNTRY

What if they just danced 👉👈

Something something the parallels between Vi being trapped under rubble as Vander dies brutally mutated before her, Ellie being physically restrained as Joel is beaten to death.

The ultimate doomed father-daughter relationships, the mirror images, and grief channeled as rage and physical violence that will be their ultimate undoing.

this goofy mf

white queers are always so damned certain that "true" queerness is for them & them alone. expressions of queerness from Black people (most notably, Black women & those percieved as women) that don't center whiteness & aren't tailored for white audiences are always, always pegged as being unbelievable. all this plus a heaping dose of thay classic "all bi women are dirty attention seeking liars" brand of biphobia. fuck off man

the need to talk about the characters vs the fear that all of my analysis is just empty prose and surface level understanding

How we feeling, Bi Rhaenyra Nation??????