Zorral

So, as the Anarchy is caused by nephew Stephen de Blois, at the bedside when Henry I croaks, and tells the lords and barons that Henry I changed his mind at the last minute and whispered into his ear that he should be heir to the throne of England, not his previously, publicly -- and loudly -- proclaimed heir, the Empress Matilda -- Alicent decides the Aegon King V was referring to was her utterly impossible, gross, incompetent son Aegon. She knew better. But she is convincing herself otherwise. Massive catastrophe. When did Daemon sneak between Alicent's sheets to beget Aemond? He's the spitting image of Daemon, and not even a that much younger Daemon -- and this includes body language. Thank all the demons of the multiple hells that the hop, flap and flop dance was barely there. Also, it made no sense whatsoever to have it going on, particularly when no one else danced. That was pathetic. So dark, dim, dreary and miserable -- claustrophic King's Landing, where nobody can breathe at all. Why haven't they yet learned they can never have a meal in Westros where all the power hungries are gathered at the same time without disasters striking?

I could see it too, though clearly it should have been lighter and detail sharper. But I watched it on my big computer monitor not a tv. Rhaenyra didn't murder Laenor. They made a deal that made him happy. He lives. He escaped with his lover.

The Rising Tide (2022) is Cleeves's latest Vera Stanhope novel. It pulls in the reader with the very first sentence, and the reader's compulsion to read 'just on more page,' 'just finish this chapter,' before going to bed. gets stronger on every page. It gets better and more interesting with every new twist and new character who must be looked at after revelations from one of the first characters. I read it three, two-hour sessions. Cleeves, how you do what you do! Thinking about that again, while viewing an episode per week of the final (#7) season of Shetland, which also comes out of a Cleeves series.

Except, of course, all those gentlemen in the 10,000, who kept re-drawing 'contracts' and thus and so forth.

That would be part of it, at the very least, when he himself became a merc.

Ha! We knew about these guys from reading Xenophon, and Herodotus, who describes this battle. Paid to Fight, Even in Ancient Greece DNA from a 2,500-year-old battlefield in Sicily reveals that mercenary soldiers were common, if not the Homeric ideal. The photo at the top of a mass grave at the battlefield, including complete skeletons of humans and equines, is impressive, to say the least. Caption to the photo says: "A mass grave of troops from the second Battle of Himera in Sicily in 409 B.C. One-fourth of the combatants are thought to have been mercenaries, compared to two-thirds in the first Battle of Himera seven decades earlier.Credit...Stefano Vassallo" https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/science/greece-sicily-himera-genetics.html

A lot of viewers are saying things like this: Why Did Last Night’s House of the Dragon Look So Bad? https://www.vulture.com/article/why-house-of-the-dragon-episode-7-driftmark-was-so-dark.html#_ga=2.34773602.235361398.1664826791-1497948549.1664826791

The best episode yet. Lots of good dragon content. Too bad we hate Aemond. Surely, if Baela gone there first -- but you know, grieving dead mom and all she was careless -- the entirety of Westros would have been happier, and so would be Vhagar, I, for one, am certain. All built out from the previous ones. Already I don't notice the actors for Rhaenyra and Alicent changed last ep., just gotten older. I prefer their older selves, who are also more interesting, to their younger incarntion. Still, those awful wiggy-wigs! But again, a primary reason for this episode’s quality is it's away from that overwhelmingly depressive rat-infested miserable dreary dark dull King's Landing! It always improves when we're out of King's Landing. Liking the consistency throughout so far: Daemon's mere appearance among the extended family ensures chaotic violence. Always. Last episode, dear Laena burned. This time it’s -- Laenor – burned, but evidently for different reasons. And … what about his dragon? What happens with Sea Smoke? They did do their best to avoid the fridge for the queer character ... I guess? Which allows those who are Rhaenyra sympathetic (as far as that goes) to stay that way, in contrast to that quite horrid Alicent, who is getting more horrid by the year. Whether it is her fault, per se, or her father's, all the way, plus hanging out with the nasty boyz, Criston and Larys, she just hates Rhaenryra. Worst of all, she demands the mutilation of a child as weregild for her own kid's eye loss. That's very bad. Then she attacks the Heir with Valyrian steel and cuts pretty damned deep. Shouldn't she be put away in a luxurious cell forever for that? Since she did this with all eyes upon her, rather than arranging for a poisoning or burning, or other form of Rhaenyra’s murder, she seems to have developed a strain of madness – unchecked bitter bile and malice do that to a person. Don’t know whether this is a heritable trait from her family, but daughter Helena seems to have something non-normie going on, but that could more than likely come from the Targaryan side of her parents. The consummation of Rhaenyra and Daemon's attraction is the sweetest lovemaking we've ever been given in this universe. And Daemon's able to perform this time, why? Because it's a consummation of equals? But then we never figured out how he could do it with Laena when he couldn't with Myseria, or Rhaenyra before. Does appear King V won’t be around for much longer,as his previous episode perkiness has departed, along with much of what remained of his already sparse hair.

I don't remember if this has already been posted here: The Peripheral series, from Bill Gibson's novel, goes up on AP on the 21st.

That's always been the point. And the slaveocracy wasn't having it. Which is always the point. From the gitgo they started the shooting. Which is also the point. And now I go away because this isn't the place to reshoot from the gitgo the war of the rebellion. And West Virginia didn't have a slave black population, which is no argument about the slaveocracy and Lincoln -- and what WV is now ....

But Westros is always at war! Also what use has magic been in Westros at all? None that I ever saw. Except for the faceless men, whomever/whatever that's about -- and is it even magic, or just extraordinary skillz, which Arya masters herself as far as it goes.

Nobody said that he was proposing abolition when he was elected. But he was staunchly anti-expansion of slavery, which was why the South was going apeshyte, starting back with their illegal recension of the Missouri Compromise -- and doesn't that also sound Roe recension adjacent or what hmmm? But he got to abolition after all -- because the slaveocracy pushed the North into doing what they were so paranoid might happen -- they're gonna take our guns away and abolish Christmas! They were as detached from reality then as Their ilks are today.

The slaveholding region by-and-large owned the government, until Lincoln. Most POTUSes were slaveowners until after Jackson, and after that, even if they didn't own slaves themselves like Buchanan, were more than friends of the slaveocracy. Abolition and anti-slavery out of the North, as the competing mercantile and capitalist economic system was their real threat, which is why in 1850 the south went berserk with California entering as a free soil state, and they held their first secession congress then, already. And then started the war -- including a lot of shooting, but it was 'regional' and local. When the presidency went to Lincoln, that was it for them, and they mobilized. And boy or boy did that traitor Buchanan help them out -- and refused to attend Lincoln's inauguration. Sorry to go on so long, but when we invoke history to illustrate our points, we -- and I include myself! and I get things wrong too often because I don't know everything which is a continuing vexation, and often I don't know something as well as I think, or just brain fart and make an error -- need to have that history correct. @Khloey got it right re the Salic Law, a convenient reaching back to the distant past to justify a contemporary objective and preference -- much like we know which states are doing right now to justify overturning a woman's right to save her life and / or not have kids.

A question regarding Scotland's whiskey which I guess is what the alcoholic beverage we all fondly knows as Scotch evolved from. For reasons I was going through the Samuel Johnson's and James Boswell's books from their journey together in Scotland. This takes place about 40 years after Culloden. Johnson tastes for the first -- and last time -- the national drink about which Boswell and others have spoken so much. He calls it whiskey. There's a conversation around this experience that tells us 'whiskey' is something the English didn't drink and was unknown in London. So when did Scotch become Scotch, and when the English turn to whiskey as what gentlemen were always drinking it seems in the 19th C and thereafter? Is this an effect of Victorian and Albert loving the Scottish estate Balmoral, and after Albert's death Queen Victoria immuring herself there, for long periods, so those who wished to discuss anything with her had to go to Scotland?

Why would that be? It's not as though magic is employed to build water mills or farm.

In the sense sure because they do such stupid things with even the 'medievalish' claims. Also so many people think this is actually how the Middle Ages were, right down to it being one thing and it stays that way until suddenly Renaissance. How many hundreds of years are we in the middle ageish times of Westros -- and yet everything is exactly the same: no innovations in all the aspects that makes a culture, which often have lasting effect and matter sometimes far more than any political moment? It takes so little to show these w/o even having to comment, after all. That's what good story telling is, no matter what the mode the story's told in, whether a folk or fairy tale recited around a fireside in a serf's hovel, or in a television series that has millions of dollars to spend. But really the problem is that it is flat. There is no emotional stake generated in any of it in the watcher. Which leaves all sorts of room for historical observation as well as structural, narrative flaws as well. Others deal with it by filling it in from their years of poring over texts generated about this fictional universe. But one cannot call something good if that's what it takes to enjoy / understand what's up, right?

Nope, did not miss -- and it wasn't enough, since Alicent will not let it go even when King V orders her not to. Why won't she let it go? Why? Her nasty daddy, who started the whole mess? Rhaenyra isn't doing that frolicking now is she? But they don't show us why she was able to grow up and be a responsible adult and good mom -- they do show us she did. Whereas Alicent keeps evermore shrinking into her shriveled toxic soul. Why? Again, it's her dad right? But more to the point, they aren't able to make us give a daman about any of them or even what happens to any of them. I am sorry for the small folk though.

From what I understand, the book(s?) are modeled on chronicles of events during these reigns. So, like historic chronicles generally, these books don't provide characterization, or go deeply into their motivations, or details in the description-declaration of events, and do time jumps too. So there is immense room for the writers of this fictional entertainment to give us all these things. But they aren't. They are doing a sort of History channel kind of thing, of having people in costumes, swinging swords against a background of fires and battlefields with a voice over -- and often those same scenes repeatedly. This is what I really don't understand. Why didn't didn't they craft and actual story and characters out those hundreds of thousands of words about places and figures who never existed (not to mention dragons didn't exist either!). It's not as though the show runners and production didn't have the financial resources to do this. Of which there are thousands and they all have the same name, making it worse than the French and English and Spanish dynasties! At least I have real events to anchors their Roman numerals to, to figure out where and when we are. As with the multitudes of Westrosi guys -- nothing good seems to have taken place in reigns of any of them, not even a good poem written or a great picture painted or an tech breakthrough like collars for draft horses or windmills or anything -- not even improvements in whatever the dragon riders use to sit on the beasts. Nothing happens except These Privileged jerkwaddies fighting each other and burning down their houses. That's certainly what we've got -- but we could have had something really great. I think of the kinds of stories that novelists have been making out of historical, primary chronicles all along. Why couldn't they do that with House of the Dragon?

I don't know who they are either! And don't care Since they aren't in the 'story' I'm seeing in this show they are meaningless. If one is expected to have spent the greater part of 20 years poring over thousands of pages of pseudo/fiction-history to enjoy or understand tv entertainment -- that just doesn't work for everybody else, ya know?

That's what I'd thought too.

As I'm not a book lore master I have no idea who this is.

Funny how there were varieties of magical whatevers in Got, dire wolves, witchfire cultists, and all sorts of stuff, but only dragons in HotD. This whole thing feels random. Especially as there is no end point, unlike defeat of zombies and eternal winter or something. All there is is a buncha spoiled power hungry aristos quarreling about who gets to sit on a toxic throne, none of whom are generally any better than the other -- though as things are standing after this episode, I'm in Rhaenyra's corner -- as far as that goes. But still, she's one of Them. What we small folk need are a pox on both their houses, pitchforks and tumbrels!

@Corvinus85 -- The show is doing a very poor job of establishing any of this. The only person who seems to give a damn about this is Alicent, whose motives are certainly impure, and her now lackey, Criston, who is just spite personified, and surely should have been executed for attacking the Groomsman to the groom not only at a wedding feast of said groom to the heir, but for doing violence in the presence of the king -- if, indeed, we're going to go all vague medievalish --or even any court any time, just about everywhere. The real problem, all of this, is caused by first, Otto, and then his daughter Alicent. First he, and then very soon Alicent, after having babies. Babies which Alicent gives no indication she even likes, unlike Rhaenyra, who is the one we would have guessed beforehand would have been the indifferent mother -- but she clearly bonds at birth with all of them, and love them dearly -- and enjoys them as persons. They have been plotting since long before Rhaenyra marries to make the throne their family's. Everything happens because of this. That we get to see this on screen, Rhaenyra doing that mom-newborn bonding with that baby, and those scenes with her older sons, shows us a great deal about Rhaenyra maturing and growing from the rather unpleasant YA person we see first. This, along with the scene at the Small Council, where she proposes something smart, and then even proposes a marriage alliance with Alicent, shows her learning to be a ruler, and already one more effective than her father. And certainly Alicent, who like Criston, is merely shell filled with the black bile of victimhood and rancor, and hatred and resentment -- of Rhaenyra. Of the trio of plotters here: Alicent, Larys and Criston -- only Criston might have a legitimate reason, but that she wouldn't run away with him is certainly not really -- particularly if we are being all vaguely medievalish here! They are truly ugly people, all three. We cannot ever forget that Larys murdered in a horrible way both father and brother for no reason at all. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Thinking about this it is clear none of the events or characters in this series register an emotional affect beyond 'flat'. Neither pleasure nor pain, beyond the empathy for women going through the agonies of childbirth and the tragedy of their deaths, bringing up an empathic echo of Laoner's, "I'm glad I'm not a woman." Indeed. The only emotions that register projected from any of them are the petty resentments and hatreds of Alicent & Co. Why this should be, I don't know. Maybe because the scenes are all so dimly lit, which spotlight then, the rats's fiesta that is King's Landing and the Red Keep. Nor can one avoid being puzzled indeed upon seeing that now Daemon's been able to finish, and even finish with three children by his wife. How is this possible, when he couldn't with Misyria, Rhea or Rhaenyra? What made this different? There's no clue, so this makes no sense.

Ah! One of the Roys, who are equally icky as these jerkwaddies and equally monstrous and equally stupid.

They were doing what they presumed was a witty and comic shout out to HBO's Succession in which son Kendall does the same thing in a window, jacking off on Manhattan. Though the window's no open and of course on the side of a much taller NYC tower.