I Finished The First Book In The Series. I Came Here To See If Anyone Else Liked The First Book Like

Fun Fact:

I learned this while researching for my Prince Hamid essay. Naturally reading about the Ottoman Empire leads you to learning about the Sultans and then by extension the Harem. I can’t find a place for this fact in my essay, but it left me absolutely hysterical with laughter for some time so here it is…

Prior to 1861, all artist renditions of the harem at the Ottoman palace had been done by men. Now I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the penalty for a man seeing a woman of the sultan’s harem was death. However, all these paintings were created and they resulted in so much romanticizing of the harem all throughout the western world. Beautiful women, dancers, lithe bodies, all generally partially naked just there and hanging out together. It was the college dorm fantasy of the time.

Enter Henriette Browne, a French painter, with royal and diplomatic ties, who travelled to Constantinople (among other places). She would paint there and usually favored eastern subjects. She enjoyed school scenes and scenes with women especially. Anyhow, she’s given access to the harem. Henriette is the first painter who sees the harem because she’s a woman and she was allowed by law to be there. She paints the harem, among other subjects, and returns to Europe.

Cue all of Europe’s collective gasp when she unveils her Une visite, interior de harem, Constantinople to the eagerly awaiting public. Her painting shocked and stunned them because she had actually been inside and painted no partially clothed women.

But where’s all the naked ladies?!

i’m sorry

This!

feeling bonkers about measure for measure again. obsessed with the way angelo and isabella are such blatant foils of each other. angelo's introduced instigating the crackdown on vienna's sexual immorality while isabella's someone who's just become a nun and wants /more/ restrictions on her activities. (if you want a similar literary character from a different century, think dorothea from middlemarch.) devotion weaponized into self-restriction. they're both dangerously devout in their own way, though tellingly angelo's the only one who tries to push his beliefs onto other people and thus the one revealed to be a hypocrite in the end.

by contrast, the duke's a figure of total amorality. he spends most of the play in a friar's robes without performing the rites or following the strictures dictated by said robes. the duke has no faith the way angelo and isabella do. he's vaguely worried about ~corruption~ but why take a stand when he can get his overzealous second-in-command to do it and take the fall for him? dude could have revealed himself so much earlier but. he doesn't. the duke pretends to be in a comedy, but he's just a psychopathic puppeteer. he lets everyone think claudio's dead and for what. fucking deranged!!

the end of the play has the duke proposing marriage to isabella: her most important religious values mean nothing to him. angelo and isabella have their own beliefs, however self-flagellating. the duke only believes in himself.

Gaspard de Coligny gives off major Ned Stark vibes. 

Are we sure GRRM didn’t base his Song of Ice and Fire/A Game of Thrones on the French Wars of Religion as well as the English Wars of the Roses? The French Wars of Religion already have a guy who’s missing a nose, another guy who is missing an arm/hand (replaced by an iron arm instead of a golden hand), and it has a wedding far more brutal than the Red Wedding. Seriously, if you love ASoIaF/GOT, please go read about the French Wars of Religion. They’re so similar! And the French history has a more satisfying ending (Henri IV > Bran). 

Ceresi only wishes she was as good at being bad as Catherine de Medici. 

Emma (2020), dir. Autumn de Wilde

Quiet…… I am Yearning

Bran and Sam should have written A Song of Ice and Fire. Sam wrote the prose and Bran did all the research. 

Bran should have been either King of the North, Master of Whispers (with his own army of literal little birds to replace Varys), or an advisor to the new king or queen of Westeros, not king himself. 

‘Who has a better story than bran the broken?’ is blatant meera and jojen reed erasure (osha and hodor as well). Osha busted them out of winterfell, jojen showed up with his green dreams to guide them to the three eyed raven, and meera dragged his ass home after. The only thing bran managed to do is touch the night king and get a bunch of people killed (including the last living members of an entire species). Bran in general has very little agency in his own story. Jaime throws him out the window, robb leaves him in charge, theon takes the castle, the three eyed raven decides to train him. Even when he finally seems like he might actually do something in the battle with the dead, he just doesn’t.

I saw the point made that if the idea had been that the person with the most stories, that knows the most history, should be king, then this might work a little better. A 'those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it’ type thing. But as it stands, it’s such a ridiculously unsupported choice.

Are the writers saving all the deaths for the finale....???

GOT spoiler ahead!

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that episode. The whole battle from what I could see was great, it was intense and the music was just blowing me away. And sure I’m happy at Arya being a badass and taking out the Night King but it felt too easy and too quick. It didn’t give us any answers either. I dunno. They made the enemy too powerful, too mysterious and gave him too much hype that I thought there would have been a larger one on one fight with someone then killed.

Jon returns to his one true love...Tormund.

Hey, he always loved those red heads!