Was Gonna Draw Jon Interacting With A Bunch Of Characters And Then I Gave Up Like I Always Do Lmao

was gonna draw Jon interacting with a bunch of characters and then I gave up like I always do lmao

Who is the better written evil bitch!

Propaganda.

Cersei

Content warning for discussion of sexual abuse, incest between adult siblings, domestic abuse, and misogyny. 

To be clear, I am only talking about Cersei as she exists in the book series, not in Game of Thrones. 

Here’s the short version. Long version under the cut. 

 A sympathetic victim of misogyny in a way that modern real women will find relatable despite her living in fake medieval times with magic

 Despite being a sympathetic victim, she’s loathsome and unquestionably a villain

 Has people exiled, murdered, tortured, and made victims of human experimentation for as little as being inconvenient for her plans

 Driven by love for her children and desire to protect them but ends up being abusive in an effort to control them

 Thinks she’s the grandest mastermind in the world and feels completely untouchable only for her plans to fall apart catastrophically 

Cersei is perhaps one of the best female villains of all time as far as writing goes. Her story is sad and uncomfortably realistic even for real women in the current age. She’s the twin sister of Jaime Lannister. Growing up, they looked so similar that they could even trade places. Cersei always saw them as two halves of one person. Until they hit puberty and everything changed and she was confronted with the reality of being female. She believed herself to be the smartest and most competent of her siblings but was continuously treated as lesser by her father and others because she’s female. Her fate was to be wed to a man of her father’s choice. This turned into a bitter kernel of envy that permeates Cersei’s entire being. She envies the privileges awarded to men and desperately wishes to prove that she’s better. She idolizes her father, once one of the most powerful men in the country and perhaps the most brilliant strategist in the series, despite his mistreatment of her. She’s promised a marriage that actually does excite her only for the father of her would be groom to unexpectedly reject the proposal. She watches as this man is wed to another woman. And then, on top of that, she watches as this man falls in love with a third woman and starts a massive war that ends in the deaths of the would be groom, his wife and kids, the third woman, and his father, ending the reign of his family. 

Finally she is married off to the man who killed her would be groom and assumed the throne. He was handsome. She was the queen now. She could have loved him. But on their wedding night, when they got into bed, he whispered the name of… the third woman, the Helen of Troy. She hated him, and he hated her. He was never gentle with her. Her physically abused her. He was a wretched king. Cersei knew she would be a better ruler so she envied him too. And she couldn’t understand for the life of her why he would hurt her. That tormented her. It all tormented her. Here she is, a woman who is said to be the most beautiful woman in all the land, desired by all, and yet love escapes her. Here she is, cunning and intelligent, yet she can never hold the same positions of power as her twin or her father, just because she happens to be female. And she desperately wants to understand why. Once her husband is dead and their kids (not really her husband’s kids; their father is Cersei’s twin brother) are too young to truly rule, she grasps at the power she’s been deprived of all her life in every way she can. She sleeps with a female friend of hers and hurts her intentionally, trying to understand what her dead husband felt, why he hurt her, but gets no thrill out of this. 

She uses her charm as a way to try to reach for this power. Because she cannot be a man, she views being a beautiful woman a consolation prize. She sleeps with at least three men to manipulate them into getting what she wants but fails to realize the position of vulnerability this puts her in until it’s too late and it becomes one of the things that undoes her. She fails to realize that appealing to the sexual desires of men does not actually empower her, which so beautifully parallels the struggles many modern women, at least in the US experience. 

The true tragedy of her desperation is that she has a sense of inevitability about it. She received a prophecy as a young girl that has loomed over her head ever since. She was told that she would be queen, but that all of her children would die, that there would come a younger and more beautiful queen who would take away all that she holds dear, and that her ultimate demise would come at the hands of her little brother (which could be her twin as she was born first, or Tyrion, their other brother). She goes to extreme lengths and uses the power she’s attained (or thinks she’s attained) to prevent this from happening, growing increasingly desperate as her first child dies at the hands of Tyrion (or so she thinks), with her actions becoming more and more extreme, committing atrocity after atrocity with a false sense of untouchability as she watches the prophecy come true in spite of everything. 

That mostly summarized why I think she’s so well written, so let’s cover some evils she’s committed that I didn’t mention already. 

Pushes her childhood friend down a well because said friend knew about her prophecy (childhood)

Abuses her younger brother Tyrion and makes his life hell in general (childhood and throughout her life)

Orders that a little girl’s pet wolf be killed because a DIFFERENT wolf bit her son (who deserved to be bitten)

Holds said little girl hostage because she had been betrothed to her eldest son and allows him to abuse her horrifically. The betrothal is later broken but she continues to hold the girl as a hostage. When someone comes up with a plan to remove said girl from the castle to somewhere she’ll be safe and happy, she thwarts this plan and weds the girl to her brother Tyrion. She is 12. He is 25. 

Any time anyone inconveniences her even a little, she deals with them in a host of colorful ways. She might 1. Have them sent to the night’s watch, which is the lifelong community service option in a freezing and unforgiving region, offered as an alternative to execution 2. Simply have them murdered by one of them she’s sleeping with or 3. Offer them up to her favorite mad scientist for human experimentation 

Her bodyguard is killed by a terrible poison. A different family in the country wants his head because said bodyguard is more evil than Cersei (won’t get into it). She wanted her little mad scientist to save him, but 1. He couldn’t and 2. She needed to send the head. So she had his head removed and sent off but had her mad scientist fuse a helmet to his head and resurrect his body. This one is actually more badass than evil tbh

Is abusive towards her children in her efforts to control them to prevent the prophecy from being fulfilled

Orchestrates a complex plan to have the bride of her second son, the new heir to the throne, found guilty of adultery, which is treason when committed against the king, and executed (women cannot join the night’s watch). This involves a great deal of manipulation and torture

I think that covers it for Cersei’s greatest hits. She’s a tragic victim of misogyny and manages to be very sympathetic while also being loathsome for being so cruel and evil. She’s an incredibly complex character and definitely the most well-written evil female character I’ve encountered. 

Ballas:

This absolutely terrible awful man creates sooo many problems just because he REALLY misses his ex-wife. Who he killed because she wanted to not murder the children aboard the Zeroman 10-0. He torments his Ex's adopted children, manipulates a completely unrelated woman, Natah, into being a copy of his ex-wife, and then rats out his entire society to her dad (who is a massive evil robot) when she breaks up with him over the emotional abuse. Aside from that, he also forcibly mutated some random guy into a mute war machine and then forced that guy to kill his own family. And that's just the cliff notes of the backstory, we haven't even gotten to the actual events of the game yet!

Ballas first shows up to ''''''convince''''''' the player character's mother figure, The Lotus/Natah (it's a very long story), into going back to her shitty biological family. In reality, he manipulated and kidnapped her, but the player didn't realize this because of his gaslighting. The next time he shows up is after the player reconstructed Excalibur Umbra (the guy who had to kill his own son) where he gets way too cocky that the Tenno won't kill him. They do, specifically by giving Umbra the will he needs to impale him. Now, if Ballas was respectable, he'd die here, but instead, The Lotus/Natah shows up and gets him medical attention.

the next few cinematics are dubiously canon due to retcons, but what can be picked out is that The Lotus/Natah has been coming to her senses and has been avoiding him. Her brother, Erra, supposedly took over looking after him, but he's easily manipulated and is basically Ballas' cool little murder pet (It can be interpreted that part of why Erra was so easily manipulated was because he has a crush on Ballas that Ballas is using to his advantage, but Erra is also just kinda a pushover). At some point, Hunhow (Erra and Natah's father) starts to realize that Ballas' gross gaslighting and manipulation reflect how Hunhow treated his children, and Hunhow drops all contact with the murder robot forces, leaving Erra (and by extension Ballas) to inflict wanton damage and destruction. 

With Hunhow's loose moral code out of the picture, Ballas starts turning Natah into a living battery so that she's weak enough for him to properly manipulate her. He convinces Erra that it's for the best, and also starts taking over the Origin system with freaky mind-control masks. He forms Narmer, an empire based on mind control and a likely butchered version of the murder-robot's religion.  When the player comes to rescue Natah, he decides that now is the time to enact his sick sense of 'revenge' (that, might I remind you, is actually against a different woman that Natah NEVER EVEN KNEW) by making her watch him impale her adopted child before tossing them both into the Void.

luckily, an alternate version of the player character (there are alternate timelines in this game but that's unrelated) saves Natah from death and nurses her back to health. However, before she's fully recovered, Natah goes on a trama-fulled murder attempt, meeting Ballas on the mothership and attempting to kill him. It doesn't work, as Ballas gaslights and berates her into submission again, but the player character is here to remind Natah that hey, she really doesn't deserve to be treated like this, and also she ISN'T that woman that he killed and undefined amount of time ago! Finally, Natah is able to overcome his abuse and chuck his ass into the sun. during this scene, it's also revealed that he's going to use the sun to power a trip to the Tau Centi system and he somehow spins the imminent destruction of the sun (and therefore all life in Origin) into Natah's fault. This man is nasty. 

I hope this is the sort of awful blorbo you are looking for! Some of this is my personal interpretation of the game, but I swear the rest is canon and happens in-game.

i think that killing a dragon should have catastrophic nuclear-fallout level environmental consequences tbh. their blood should scorch and wither the earth with fire and poison, the toxic fumes released as they decay should choke the land and all nearby living creatures, and the entire landscape where they fell should be transformed into a blighted wasteland where bleached leviathan bones loom upwards out of the ground as a warning that can be seen from miles away, the boundary markers of an exclusion zone.

I do plan on watching all of these for kicks but I started by watching the two shortest (Flaccid Phoenix and Our Hilts Hurt) and the two are actually the same. The more recent one is just a reedited, reuploaded version. It’s two men talking and it’s pretty clear to me that it’s a bit they’re doing. They say that Rhaenyra selfishly chose to be born a woman and that flags it as satire for me. I don’t think these guys are Rhaenyra fans or something but I do think they’re just playing around because they think it’s funny.

one of the funniest things that i've encountered when it comes to hotd discourse is when team black or green stans attempt comparing either alicent or rhaenrya to cersei (their worst ideal of a woman villain in asoiaf) when it's like... nobody comes close to being batshit in the way that woman is. nobody is touching her insane levels. she is poetically fucked in the head. it is solely her who can only embody her. i promise you, mrs and mrs 'i want to eat cakes with you and run away together' will never be on 'while he sleeps i eat his heirs''s plane of insanity.

Do you ever have moments in your life where you’re like “wow if this was fiction this would be such a good narrative parallel” or something like that? Or am I just truly a romantic