sanguine-prince

Latest Posts by sanguine-prince

"when I think of fiction written for an adult audience (besides porn) I think of something that has nuance and complexity. For a premise that's centered around redeeming sinners in Hell, it could've been the perfect opportunity to explore moral questions, like: why is this person in Hell? Do they deserve to be in Hell? Why would a sinner want to be redeemed if they seemingly enjoy causing chaos and violence? However, the only "adult" thing about Hazbin Hotel is the constant swearing and immature sex jokes. Which is also the reason there are so many minors in the fandom: that's exactly how middle schoolers and high schoolers talk! And there is little to no nuance in the story. I doubt this will change in later seasons because we all know how Vivienne writes her stories."

Submitted by anonymous

gay son or thot daughter?

@pscentral event 38: costume appreciation GAME OF THRONES + Wedding Dresses

yes i know the baratheon brothers are all representations of the different types of toxic masculinity. im still doing fuck marry kill with them

credit goes to @snowvism for their jon snow art.

old marg & sansa sketch 💐

some rebellion characters i’ve been wanting to draw ^o^

closeups under cut!

Elia and Lyanna because I had a little time to think about it💙

yes yes yes new real life pope whatever. i just watched conclave (2024) and got so hard i passed out

"how could you support media that features gore and bloodshed" well a gal's gotta masturbate to something

fanfiction isn’t enough, I need to chew on him

the bunnies did the lady and the tramp kiss. help i’m crying

Cersei when the plot to kill Robert succeeds

ADWD and AFFC being concurrent books is really funny because people in essos will be like "I'm sure the lion queen is well aware of daenerys' dragons in meereen and is preparing the kingdom for when she decides to come for the iron throne" meanwhile cersei is having the crash out of the century because of a 16 year old who likes to play dolls with her son

some book armand descriptions that tickled me

What if you wanted to be KING but your niece and nephews were BASTARDS and your brother was GAY and STUPID and everyone HATED you and you couldn’t find a DENTIST for your teeth you ground down and a PRIESTESS told you to kill your DAUGHTER and a CLOWN was there

beautiful princess disorder moment 🎀

I love that the Prince that was Promised prophecy involves a mistranslation. Of course it could also be a princess--gender is only of the most inconsistent grammatical rules across language boundaries.

It seems all gruff and barbaric likewise that the Dothraki language has no word for 'thank you,' but why would it? The major plot point involving Dothraki culture is that gifts are given and repaid in their own time. If you pass someone horsemeat around the campfire, the action is not complete until they hand you fermented mare's milk a week later. Perhaps then you then say some polite phrase which we do not see and which does not translate into English, indicating the debt has been resolved. Language both forms and is formed by the society in which it lives.

Here's a question: when the characters in Westeros see 'lion lizards' and 'spicy peppers stuffed with cheese,' what are they describing? Unsurprisingly lion-lizards, the predatory, reptilian, swamp-dwelling sigil of house Reed, seem to be alligators, which get their English name from the Spanish for 'the lizard.' Peppers stuffed with cheese are just what they sound like, though in English we call them chiles rellenos, a name borrowed from Spanish. As the Spanish language has no presence and no analogue in ASoIaF, Westeros has to describe these concept using its own words and its own concepts.

Now imagine we have a character whose name is a common noun, being discussed with someone who does not speak the language that noun exists in. The name might be shared phonetically, or it might be translated to the new language--especially if, say, the communication happens more on the level of concepts than on the level of words. For a name like Bloodraven this is easy enough. All languages have a word for blood, and all have a word for shiny black corvids, although they may or may not distinguish them from crows. But what about a name that's a little more specific? A culture that's extremely tree-focused have a word for every part of a tree, for example, and they may have a name for every part of every type of tree. But when translating a name meaning 'two month old bud on the upper branch of a weirwood' into the Common Tongue, for example, perhaps the best translation they could come up with would just be Leaf.

Bran is another example. Someone from the North would know it's a nickname of Brandon. Someone without that context might assume it refers to the edible husk removed from grain. And finally, someone whose culture eats a grain without a husk that needs removing might understand Bran's name as simply "Corn! Corn! Corn!"

love how fucked up the ned/robert dynamic is. they grew up together and got attached because they both have brothers they aren’t close to and replace with one another despite the jarring similarities (brandon and stannis). ned loving robert despite the atrocities he committed and the ones he refused to condemn, hiding himself in the north so he doesn’t have to be faced with how much of a monster his friend actually is and feeding that lie to his children. robert forcing ned to come south with him and run his kingdom all under the premise they were always meant to rule together (they were full on married for the entirety of agot tbh). robert projecting how much he wanted to be with ned onto lyanna. robert loving ned arguably more than anyone else in his life and despite all that he refuses to respect his boundaries and wishes. their entire agot relationship is held together by nostalgia and like 20 layers of traumabonding that neither would ever work through. ned getting himself killed because he loved robert too much. god what the fuck is wrong with those two.

Will you accept a mad dany arc if grrm does it in a different, more sensical way or would that always narratively suck for you?

it has nothing do with my personal feelings regarding the character. i dislike speculation of dany having a downfall arc because it reveals a misreading of the text and the narrative role she plays within it. i don't believe it can be done in a satisfying way because she was always intended to be a heroic character. the 'mad dany' reading relies on certain initial assumptions about her character that are being problematised within the story—which is difficult to discuss because grrm's intent regarding dany is at odds with the orientalist framework he employs in the construction of essos, but i'll try to be comprehensive about it. so dany is an exile, homeless and perpetually seeking a home. she was told by viserys that westeros is "our land" but she's not culturally westerosi the same way the rest of our cast is because she's also never known westeros. all she has are second hand, romanticised accounts from viserys (These places he talked of [...] they were just words to her). dany has lived her entire life in essos and absorbed their cultural norms and slavery is normalised in most of essos (There was no slavery in the free city of Pentos. Nonetheless, they were slaves), it's especially apparent in her first chapter which pointedly draws attention to the various slaves serving at illyrio's manse, something dany doesn't express any moral objection to, because nobody has taught her this is wrong. and that understanding only comes after viserys sells her to drogo and she personally experiences a similar loss of autonomy.

Do you know what it is like to be sold, squire? I do. My brother sold me to Khal Drogo for the promise of a golden crown. Well, Drogo crowned him in gold, though not as he had wished, and I . . . my sun-and-stars made a queen of me, but if he had been a different man, it might have been much otherwise. Do you think I have forgotten how it felt to be afraid? DAENERYS II, A Storm of Swords

and when mirri reveals to dany that her act of 'saving' her was no saving at all. rescuing her through the offer of a place in drogo's khalasar is a meaningless gesture since it does nothing to address the systems that have enabled mirri's enslavement in the first place. yeah, she's fourteen and possesses no power in her own right and is not complicit in drogo's crimes but mirri's presence in the story is meant to teach her that lesson. dany does not arrive already possessed with a political consciousness that opposes slavery, she learns and reorients her worldview just as jon did once he became familiar with the free folk. this is an important detail because without it her crusade in slaver's bay is no longer a story about a former enslaved and sexually abused girl being provided the means to begin a revolutionary counter-struggle against a culture of dehumanisation, but about a civilising mission where a culturally westerosi (westeros, where slavery is outlawed. westeros which is clearly imagined as the occident to essos's orient) character with superior ideals travels to foreign lands to educate the barbarians—which would've made her a straightforward white saviour figure. this IS undermined by the way her storyline is rife with orientalist tropes and i'm getting to that, but my main point is that dany's character is very deliberately written to be someone who is stateless and doesn't belong anywhere. she is an other. which is compounded by her targaryen heritage—the targaryens are narratively imagined as white enough to co-exist with the rest of westeros but they're also being othered because they're a family originating from the east with 'depraved' inbreeding and blood magic practices (practices that are reviled throughout the whole continent), which simultaneously makes them too other to ever fully assimilate despite the family being culturally westerosi in all the ways that matter. this especially comes through in the coin quote, every house has had occasional despots for rulers but people only bother to pathologise the targaryens and that's because they're foreigners. "the gods flip a coin" is presenting this dichotomy of targaryens as either mad - violent barbarians from the east, or great, in which case they're exoticised as otherworldly, above the laws of gods and men. and the final thing that serves to other her is her association with the dothraki. the dothraki are initially introduced as violent savages, but that view has been challenged since then as dany adopts dothraki customs and comes to love their people as her own and even sees herself as more of a khaleesi than a queen. and i must emphasise that this is no way done well because a) the dothraki are constructed out of offensive stereotypes about steppe cultures b) five books later grrm hasn't bothered to give any of them interiority because he clearly doesn't care about the dothraki, they're an afterthought in his narrative about dany and c) i think the subversion of their introduction as the inferior racial other basically amounts to "they're noble savages".

so you see all this at work when in-universe those who revile her speak of alleged violent tendencies, that she's coming to burn the continent down, that she hatched her dragons through foul blood magic and that she tricked her khal husband into murdering her brother and has acquired an army of savages, that her court is made up of foreigners and 'honourless' westerosi men (jorah, barristan, and soon tyrion), while others talk of her supposed otherworldly beauty ("The last of her line. They say she is the fairest woman in the world.")—the mad dany reading of her is taking all this at face value, it's falling for that in-universe narrative her enemies have come up with, which associates her and her allies' foreignness with moral depravity. (this is also what the show did, which i said "achieved her s8 ending by fully leaning into the horror of the savage oriental horde come to oppress the civilised westerosi landowning class" and that hysterical randyll tarly speech "at least cersei wasn't a FOREIGNER"). a very early example of this is in the first book. robert wanted a teenager dead because she was a targaryen: aerys's daughter, rhaegar's sister, because she married a khal and adopted dothraki customs as her own. and it was ned who put up a fight against this. ned is flawed in my ways but do you suppose the narrative will diminish ned's legacy in this, in his stance against dehumanisation. and asoiaf is primarily about that, every major character has had experience with being othered (cripples, bastards, and broken things is about this) and within this narrative dany is meant to be The Other who is working to end institutions of otherisation. her upcoming invasion of westeros is not playing into the the threat of the foreign invader but raising questions of whether westeros is also in need of some reform (at one point tyrion directly compares a serf to a slave, something that might be narratively painting westeros as not culturally superior at all for having outlawed slavery). the problem, of course, being that the way grrm subverts the image of essos as the inferior racial other is by first populating it with orientalist stereotypes. he parallels some of the violence found in ghiscari culture and the dothraki raid of the lhazareen village with ramsay and amory lorch and gregor clegane et al operating in the riverlands in acok but the ghiscari are also portrayed almost as a monolith, as uniformly morally suspect individuals because our only introduction to them is through the slavers. it's the way dany is the only active abolitionist with a narrative voice in essos (there's the shavepate. but he's also a scheming violent extremist so), i said her story is not a civilising mission but when you fail to give any of the ghiscari oppressed a voice it doesn't result in great optics. and it is undeniable that the story is About Westeros, dany's great narrative destiny lies over there, when the long night arrives—an apocalyptic threat meant to affect the entire world—the battle for the dawn will also take place over there, i doubt the essosi will play a role in that.

SANSA ACOK II // BRIENNE AFFC I

Dont feel pressured but we can have more robb's crumbs pls :(?

rotating him in my head rn

The two young lions of the Rock

wpuld love to hear your gripes about striker's design!

aah it’s mainly the fact that he looks so cool and yet way too busy. i’m used to viv’s maximalist style and for the most part i like it and don’t think character designs should be simplified because this is the show’s style—but striker has too much stuff going on with his clothes in particular.

i really liked how he looks vaguely coyote-ish, so it’s mostly his clothes for me—there are at least 3 different shades of grey in his outfit and it made it difficult for me to picture him when he wasn’t onscreen other than coyote with cowboy hat and big teeth. there’s also a lot going on with his tail—if it were a solid color without the stripes and spikes, i’d be able to follow its movement better and distinguish it from his accessories.

he also doesn’t really pop out from the wrath environment in general, having such muted colors, which i think could be intentional to show him as being much more ‘native’ to there than moxxie, but the same thing happens in other places, too—grey just really doesn’t stand out.

so yeah i think it’s just the dissonance between the fact that i think he’s really cool/yay snake cowboy so i really like some of his design, but also that his clothing is too busy without much contrast and there are so many stripes and layers which make it difficult to follow the minutiae of his movements!

sketch of ye olde pageboy. one myte evene calle him my squire-sona ?? is thiss anye thinge

he doesn’t wear period-accurate clothing because i don’t know shit about anything :D

he’s an ambitious but not entirely genius squire serving a knight who has fallen out of favor with the crown and turned to vice; his role therefore is more so that of a cupbearer

he’s also in love with said knight 👍

rewatching game of thrones right now and the scene where cersei asks for lady to be killed in nymeria’s place is such a good metaphor/foreshadowing for sansa’s experience over the course of the rest of the show (for a while). she lies and allies herself with the lannisters for her own safety, playing the perfect lady, but ultimately she is repeatedly the one punished for her family’s actions because she’s simply the stark they have lying around. killing lady symbolized them cutting her off from her family and heritage at the same time they ‘defanged’ her.

"You're too big for that now, sweetling."

Dany and Viserion portrait because I miss my girls

some late night devils minion