World Bicycle Day

This is a companion blog post to my podcast episode celebrating World Bicycle Day (search Panicky Pictures in your podcatcher). It transcribes the episode, and includes supplementary links, videos and images.

I’m panickyintheuk and this is Panicky Pictures [Wilhelm scream].

I hope June is treating you well so far. I am of course working on a Pride episode, but I thought I’d put out a quick one in honour of World Bicycle Day, the 3rd of June.

So, what comes to mind for you when you think of cycling in films? Maybe Bicycle Thieves or The Flying Scotsman, which totally makes sense, but there’s a film that comes to mind for me which tends to get left off most lists of bike-related movies. I’ll give you a hint:

That’s right! The Kansas analogue of the Wicked Witch of the West, Miss Gulch, rides a bicycle. This isn’t just incidental: during the tornado transformation sequence, her bike turns into a broomstick—the broomstick that’s going to become the MacGuffin for the entire film. Dorothy taking away the Wicked Witch’s broom forms the basis of her hero’s journey—in order to triumph, she has to take away another woman’s mode of transportation. Think about it for a second—it’s not like the broom is a weapon. She’s tasked with curtailing the Witch’s mobility. Meanwhile, the good witch Glinda gets around in a wildly impractical bubble, and Dorothy has to traverse the whole of Oz on foot, wearing heels she can’t take off! They call them slippers, but those are not slippers, those are heels. Imagine how much more quickly she could have got to the Emerald City if she’d had a bike.

I love The Wizard of Oz as much as the next queer (and some people do go both ways), but I think it’s worth noting that here bicycling is associated with being a scary old spinster, and one who is possibly lesbian-coded. Tell me if you think that’s too much of a stretch.

This association wasn’t invented by Victor Fleming. Bikes were a symbol of women’s liberation right from the beginning, provoking a major backlash in the dominant culture. When the safety bicycle—a term used to refer to any bicycle that wasn’t the precarious penny-farthing—became widely available in the late 1880s, cycling was suddenly accessible to women for the first time. This led to a bicycle craze in the 1890s, and also to dress reform, since the restrictive clothing fashionable among women during that period wasn’t conducive to cycling. The more forgiving bicycle suit was invented, and lampooned in several Punch cartoons.

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Victorian doctors warned of the dangers of “bicycle face”: a weary, pinched expression, with dark shadows under the eyes. Hey, I look like that whether I cycle or not. These physicians were also much concerned with the masturbatory potential of the bicycle seat.

All in all, lady cyclists were characterised as being unattractive, mannish, and frighteningly liberated. Somehow, this didn’t put women off. In 1893, Kittie Knox became the first African-American to be accepted into the League of American Wheelmen. The Jewish-American Annie Londonderry became the first woman to cycle around the world in 1895. In 1896, Susan B Anthony said “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.”

This might all seem like a relic of the past, but in parts of West and South Asia, there are still limitations on women’s ability to cycle. In Iran, there has been a fatwa against women cycling in public since 2016, and in Saudi Arabia, women can only cycle for recreational purposes, not for transport. In Pakistan there have been regular bicycle rallies since 2018 protesting restrictions against women’s cycling.

The 2012 Saudi Arabian film Wadjda focuses on the rebellious girl of the title, whose one desire is to get a bike like her friend Abdullah. Meanwhile, her mother is dealing with a difficult commute—she can’t drive herself to work, so she’s reliant on an abusive and controlling driver. The film shows us how Wadjda and her mother’s freedom of movement is curtailed by the patriarchal society they live in. A similar dynamic plays out in the 2015 Turkish film Mustang, and to a degree in the 2018 American film Skate Kitchen, though those aren’t about bikes so we won’t linger.

In the West, though, I don’t think a strong link persists between cycling and women’s liberation in mainstream discourse. To the extent that biking is still gendered at all, I think it’s now probably associated more with men. Certainly my perception of pro-cycling is that it seems to be male dominated, and anecdotally, most of the keenest cyclists I know are men, and so are most of the bike mechanics I’ve encountered. But there are other tropes that have sprung up around cycling, particularly in American media.

Whereas cycling was once associated with making women more masculine, now it can be used as a symbol of emasculation or infantilisation for men. In an article for Slate, Nitish Pahwa makes the argument that in American media in particular, bikes are portrayed as dorky. He recently guested on the podcast The War on Cars to discuss this, and in his article he points the finger at American car culture, which became particularly pervasive in the second half of the twentieth century.

I think there’s a lot of merit in this argument: even when bikes are portrayed positively in American media, they’re often associated with childhood.

Look at E.T.—the bicycle silhouetted against a giant moon on the poster is an iconic image. E.T. was obviously a huge influence on Stranger Things, which has also prominently featured bikes in its promotional materials. Bikes have become so associated with this kind of 80s-set children’s adventure that a TTRPG based on the genre is called ‘Kids on Bikes’.

In these kinds of stories, bikes symbolise freedom and adventure, as well as perhaps a nostalgia for a supposedly more innocent time, when kids could just hop on their bikes and explore without constant parental surveillance. But those associations don’t persist for adult characters, even though I can tell you from personal experience that riding a bike—if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with a decent cycle network—is incredibly freeing. It feels like flying. And the association between cycling and flight is present in an awful lot of these stories: we’ve already mentioned the bike-turned-broom in The Wizard of Oz and the flying bike in E.T., but what about Tombo’s bike in Kiki’s Delivery Service, which he repurposes into a flying machine? Okay, he ends up getting caught up in a huge gust of wind—Miss Gulch-style—and having to be rescued by Kiki on HER broom, but he’s got the spirit. By the way, the association between bikes and brooms doesn’t end there: a companion game to ‘Kids on Bikes’ is called—you guessed it—‘Kids on Brooms’. Even when cycling is being made fun of, there still seems to be a general acknowledgement that it’s a little bit magic.

Fortunately, car culture isn’t as dominant in most of the rest of the world as it is in the US, and even there, cycling is enjoying a resurgence in some urban centres. The rise of public bicycle sharing systems and the electric bike are making cycling more accessible than ever before to disabled people and those who don’t have storage space. While there’s still an affordability issue, bikes are considerably cheaper to buy and run than a car. Still, I think we have a way to go in recognising the utopian possibilities of the bicycle in mainstream culture. In queer and feminist circles, it’s much more apparent. For example, take a look at the bike-related anthologies edited by Elly Blue, or Gears for Queers by Abigail Melton and Lilith Cooper. Bicycle repair cafés proliferate in anarchist and DIY spaces.

While there are options for disabled cyclists, I do appreciate that cycling isn’t a possibility for everyone. Still, I think that a future in which we, as a society, are much less reliant on cars would be a safer and better world. Cycling is solarpunk, and the sooner Hollywood catches up, the better.

Let’s end with a personal hero of mine. David Byrne recently attended the Met Gala with his bike in tow, and has been an advocate for cycling for years. He might have driven around Texas in 1986’s True Stories, but more recent outings like Ride, Rise, Roar and American Utopia have shown him on his bike. Maybe, together, we can built a future that’s a little less ‘Glass, Concrete & Stone’ and little more ‘Flowers’.

“Scars can heal and reveal just where you are”

Note: this post contains spoilers for Disney’s Moana, which I highly recommend that you watch right away if you’ve never seen it. There will also be very mild references to sexual violence and the #MeToo movement.

As far as I know—relying on that most unreliable of things, narrative memory—Moana is one of the three films I’ve seen the most at the cinema (the other two being Brokeback Mountain and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, so it’s something of an outlier). That, of course, was when it was released in 2016 (and probably into early 2017)—roughly six years ago. It’s hard to believe how much has changed since then, both culturally and in my life. I can’t have seen this film in more than four years, since I’ve never logged it on Letterboxd (which I joined at the beginning of 2019), yet it’s so etched into my memory and my heart that I feel like I last watched it a matter of months ago.

The film was released, crucially I think, before the #MeToo movement. Watching it again now, I was struck by how much it seems to be about female trauma and rage—and yet how easily it imagines that those things can be healed.

I definitely think that Te Fiti’s transformation into Te Kah is multivalent. In fact, I think the most obvious interpretation, at least on this watch, is as a symbol of colonial violence (despite the fact that Maui himself is Polynesian—the metaphor isn’t as direct as that). Interpreting it as sexual violence is a lot dicier, but we can certainly go as far as to say that it’s an act of male violence against a woman (or rather, a goddess). He violates her bodily autonomy; literally steals a part of her.

In either case, the solution presented is simple: restore the heart of Te Fiti to nullify her rage, which has transformed her into something demonic.

On my first several watches of this film, I admired the fact that it really had no villain (apart from Tamatoa, who is only a secondary antagonist). Maui is rehabilitated; Te Kah is revealed not to be a villain at all, but a wronged Te Fiti. On this viewing, though, I felt a bit differently. I spent many years thinking of my anger as something pathological—a character flaw. I thought it was at the root of my depression, and that it was something that it was my duty to overcome. In the last few years, though, I’ve begun to reassess that. Of course, it’s important for me not to let my rage drive me to do harmful things to other people (or to myself), but is it really something to be conquered? Rage, like pain, is an alarm system. Just as a person who can’t feel pain is in danger (shout out to that House episode where the patient had CIPA), anger is there to keep you safe—to let you know when something is wrong. Anger is what tells you that you deserve better. No wonder people who hurt me were so keen to convince me that I was wrong to feel it so deeply.

For Te Fiti, having her heart restored heals her immediately. It is also followed by a genuine apology from Maui: “Look, what I did was… wrong,” he tells her. “I have no excuse. I’m sorry.” There’s no doubt that a genuine, heartfelt apology goes a long way towards helping someone to heal, but healing is never—in my experience—instantaneous. Moreover, an apology that is given on the expectation, even the condition, of immediate forgiveness, as so many seem to be, is not a real apology at all—it’s a bargaining chip. I’ve had people turn on me when I wasn’t ready to forgive them on their terms, at their preferred time; when I wasn’t ready to shed my anger, or rather pretend to shed my anger, since anger doesn’t fall away like a coating of ash and bloom immediately into flowers. Anger, or my anger anyway, is a heat that can bleed away in time, if it’s given the right conditions. A volcanic island can support life in time, but you don’t try to settle it while the lava is still cooling.

To broaden out, then, from my personal rage to female rage (or the rage of the colonised) in general, I am troubled by the idea that healing from rage is as easy as a single act of restoration. Healing, forgiveness, and regaining trust are all processes and not events. An apology, given unconditionally, is a wonderful start, but it’s only a start. It has to be backed up by a genuine change in behaviour. If an apology were enough by itself, people could just keep on hurting you and apologising in an endless cycle.

Another thing I’ve been revisiting and reassessing in the years since I last saw this film is my unprocessed grief at the death of my grandmother when I was a teenager. It happened at a difficult age and at a time when I wasn’t very mentally stable, which I think is part of the reason why it was never fully resolved, but another reason is that my father’s grief was so overpowering that there wasn’t really any room for mine. I felt as if I had to be his support system, and nobody was there to be mine—maybe because I did too good a job at masking the fact that I needed one, but maybe also because I’ve often lacked a support system when I’ve needed one (something I’ve also been grappling with lately).

As on previous watches, I was moved to tears more than once by the portrayal of Moana’s relationship with her grandmother, especially after the grandmother’s death, when she appears as a reincarnated stingray, and then as a spectral presence. But I have to admit that it didn’t exactly resonate with my personal experience of grief, coming to it again. There’s no lingering illness—and, of course, there isn’t always one. But it’s also an easier story. One moment the grandmother is well, the next moment she is fading away—another moment, and she’s back again in a new form. A palatable version of death to serve up for children, but not a very honest one. Nor is Moana’s grief especially present in the rest of the film—we might be forgiven for forgetting about it until grandma shows up again to give her some more guidance. That, I suppose, does resonate more strongly with me. I never dealt with my grief at my grandmother’s death, and instead I dreamed for years that she was still alive, over and over again. It took perhaps ten or more years for the dreams to stop.

I think that part of me felt that grief for a grandparent would be somehow indulgent: grandparents are old. They die. One of my grandfathers died before I was born; the other I only met once and had no relationship with. My mother’s mother is still alive to this day, at over a hundred years old. I don’t know if I really had a model for mourning a grandparent until the grandmother of a friend of mine died a couple of years ago, and I witnessed her profound grief. It made me realise how incomplete I had allowed my own to be.

However much I may still love this film, I do think it’s worth interrogating its portrayals of anger and grief, especially in a narrative primarily written and directed by members of the dominant culture, and made by Disney, which might as well be the avatar of cultural dominance. Is there room for a story where anger and grief persist beyond the neat resolution? That’s the story I’m living.

2022 in Review

2021 was an extremely mixed year for me: I graduated from my MA programme with a Distinction, but I also experienced a couple of bereavements that hit me very hard. At the very end of the year I adopted my beautiful cat, who continues to be a source of joy, though I’ve never had to deal with this many dead rodents before, so that’s been a fun new challenge.

2022 was, on the whole, quieter; the highs weren’t as high, the lows weren’t as low. A lot of plans fell through. I applied for PhD funding but didn’t get it, so that’s been indefinitely put on hold. I intended to relocate back closer to my family, but the prohibitive rental market put paid to that. I started and then quit a job (technically I had already been doing the job for a while before that, but I accepted a permanent contract at the job and then quit). Still, there have been a few small accomplishments that are worth mentioning, as well as several things I’ve enjoyed a lot over the course of the year which I’d like to talk about.

Writing

I didn’t really have a big writing project last year—in 2021 I had my dissertation, and two years before that I wrote a book, so maybe every other year is fallow for me? That said, I did keep up my regular writing practice, which is usually 500 words a day, six days a week. A bit of quick maths tells me that amounts to 156000+ words in a year*, which is definitely novel-length, and a relatively hefty one at that. A huge amount of those words, though, are film reviews which go up on my Letterboxd page. While of course this “counts” as writing, maybe it’s a distraction from really focusing on a more personal or long-term project which might require a bit more stamina or depth. That’s why, for 2023, I’ve decided to put the film reviews on indefinite hiatus (probably not for the whole year, but that’s TBD) while I work on some other ideas. Since making that decision, I’ve already made significant progress on a long short story which has been patiently waiting among my drafts for a while, and I’m feeling very positive about it… though I kind of miss my film reviews. Maybe I can somehow make time for both!

Of course, I did do NaPo again last year. I can’t remember how many years I’ve now being doing it in a row, but it’s a really enjoyable tradition for me, even if I barely write any poetry for the rest of the year these days

*Nowhere near an exact figure, because in April I usually set a goal of one poem a day rather than the 500 words (and they can vary hugely in length), but also, I often write much more than 500 words. So who knows!

Reading

I took on a big reading project last year, which was to read Ulysses by Bloomsday. I couldn’t find an edition I really liked, that was both readable (decent paper and print size) but also had good annotations, so I actually ended up reading most of it on genius.com—it’s all on there, since it’s out of copyright in the US! There are user-generated annotations of wildly varying quality, and honestly I think that trying to read them all ended up slowing me down and disrupting my flow. I also read two readers’ guides concurrently, and I think that I should have stuck to just focusing on the text and then filling in the gaps with the readers’ guides rather than using the heavily annotated version. Still, I can definitely say that I’ve read Ulysses, which at one point in my life I really never thought I would!

While that took up quite a bit of my reading time in the first half of the year, I did still exceed my reading goal on Goodreads, for the second time in two years. I read 50 in 2021 and 59 in 2022, which is a huge leap from where I was for several years before, when I really lost my mojo for reading for a long time (a combination of factors played into that). I should say that that count included audiobooks, rereads and graphic novels/TPBs, but as far as I’m concerned it’s all essentially reading. I love audiobooks, and some of my favourite “reading” experiences have been listening to an Elizabeth Gaskell audiobook on a long walk. I find that I usually have just as much retention of things I’ve listened to as things I’ve read—sure, it’s possible to get distracted, but I am entirely capable of getting distracted while trying to read too, or of not doing it because I don’t have time, or because the light isn’t good enough in my room (my clip-on lamp broke!), or whatever. I don’t think I listen to audiobooks at the expense of physically reading; I think they just increase the amount of time I can devote to enjoying literature.

Apart from Ulysses, my biggest discovery last year was Theodore Sturgeon. I had previously known the name, but he was just one of many Golden Age or adjacent science fiction writers I’d never read (I think Heinlein was pretty much the only one I had). I vaguely knew that he was the model for Kilgore Trout, which I think gave me a distorted view of him. On looking into it a bit more, I think Vonnegut mostly took the piscine name and the fact that Sturgeon was down on his luck when the two men met—nothing, really, about his writing style or who he was as a person. Thanks, again, to audiobooks, I made my way through most of his bibliography—everything that’s on the Audible Plus catalogue, which includes Some of your Blood (my baptism by fire to his writing), Venus Plus X, More Than Human and To Marry Medusa. I was completely taken aback by how ahead of his time he was, both in his enlightened attitudes towards sex and gender (years before Left Hand of Darkness!) and his ideas.

I review pretty much everything I read/listen to here on Goodreads.

Language learning

As I’ve blogged about a couple of times, I decided to start learning Irish this year. I made a lot of progress! According to Duolingo’s stats, I was in the top 1% of learners for the year. I’ve been in the Diamond league basically forever (can’t ever quite seem to make that top three in the semi-finals or whatever it is). At time of writing I have nearly hit a streak of 365 days!

Of course, Duolingo is all very well, but by itself it’s not the best way to learn. I also completed the Dublin City University online courses (available on FutureLearn) up to 104. I’ve been taking a break from them for the last couple of months because they ended up being quite a significant time commitment, and I was struggling to keep up, but I definitely hope to continue with them in the not-too-distant.

Gaming

I have to admit I didn’t play a ton of games last year, and most of what I did play wasn’t new: I completed The Outer Worlds around the start of the year, which I enjoyed a lot—I’d describe it as Fallout in space, but with more of an overt anti-capitalist message, which ticks a lot of boxes for me. I’d also say that the companion NPCs are better-developed than in Fallout, on the whole (at least in my experience/memory—the only game in the series I actually completed was F:NV). While it obviously did attract an audience, I feel like it flew under the radar more than it deserved, though a sequel has been announced so I’m looking forward to that.

For most of the year, most of my gaming hours were sunk into Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. While I enjoyed the experience of playing it at the time, I have to say that the story hasn’t really stuck with me that much. It was my first time playing an AC game (apart from once attempting to play the first one on a janky PC, years ago, and giving up), and I know it was a bit of a departure for the series, moving closer to an RPG format than previous entries. Still, it’s ridiculously overstuffed with sidequests, sometimes tiresome procedurally generated ones, which makes it start to feel a bit repetitive after a while. I couldn’t help but compare it unfavourably to HZD, which I nearly platinumed (everything except a couple of dummies I didn’t knock over) and which I think has an excellent storyline and compelling gameplay. That said, there were some subplots and relationships I really liked, especially the Silver Islands storyline with Kyra, and anything involving Alcibiades. The voice acting is very variable, though—it feels like some of the actors barely understand the lines they’re delivering, and the emphasis is pretty consistently off.

To bookend the year (I think I started this right at the end of 2022, anyway—maybe it was right at the beginning of 2023? Oh well), another Fallout-adjacent game, Pentiment (which shares a director, Josh Sawyer, with F:NV). This game is clearly an immense labour of love, heavily researched and steeped in literary references; it only exists because of the opportunities afforded by digital distribution and a service like GamePass, which allows for niche projects like this to be funded.

Viewing

I won’t go into too much detail here, as I’m planning a podcast episode or two about my favourites of 2022 in the near future. I’ve already blogged about House of the Dragon and The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, but other discoveries this year for me included The Orville, which I never expected to like but found myself totally won over by (I should say I skipped season one, which is supposedly the weakest). Another was Hacks, which had somehow flown under my radar but has rapidly become a favourite. I also binged pretty much all of Work In Progress late in the year, as well as finally watching The Comeback. The TV standout, though, was probably Severance—I can’t say enough good things about it: it functions as a compelling drama, an inspired sci-fi and a commentary on workplace culture and exploitation.

I have a list on Letterboxd ranking all the 2022 movies I’ve watched so far, as well as pretty in-depth reviews for almost everything I watch (plus that podcast episode I mentioned), so I won’t repeat myself here. I’ll just say that it was a great year for animation: The House, Turning Red and The Sea Beast were all standouts this year. Like everyone else, I really enjoyed Everything Everywhere All At Once (though maybe not as much as everyone else); I enjoyed 3000 Years of Longing and Blonde much more than most people.

I’m going to wrap this post up now so I can publish it while it’s still January (honestly, I forgot about it for a little while and it sat half-finished in my drafts—whoops!). 2023 looks set to be a year full of changes, and I’m excited to see what’s around the corner. Have a good one!

Stuff I’ve been digging this week

I don’t post on this blog as often as I’d like, but I felt like sharing some of the things I’ve been finding interesting this week. It may or may not become a regular feature!

On TV

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and cancelled my Netflix account, but I still have it until the beginning of next month, so I’ve been cramming. Since I have limited time, I’ll only watch stuff that really grabs my attention; I know some things are growers, but I don’t have time for that! For example, I started watching Heartstopper, but I had to conclude that it just wasn’t for me. Way too wholesome!

So, the main thing I want to recommend is The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself. It’s based on an apparently popular YA series, Half Bad by Sally Green, which I have never heard of because I am an OA (Old Adult). From what I gather, the show is a major improvement on the source material.

I was never the biggest Harry Potter fan (which has definitely made my life easier over the past couple of years), but I do love fantasy, including fantasy that riffs on the Harry Potter mythos like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. TBS&TDH doesn’t strictly feel Harry Potter inspired–if anything, it reminded me more of the Wicca YA series (known as Sweep in other territories), which I began reading when I actually was a YA. Still, comparisons abound, despite the show not actually featuring a magical school, which is surely the main hallmark of the Harry Potter series.

It feels like Netflix isn’t sure how to market this show; the original thumbnail has been replaced with one which prominently displays HALF BAD, with the actual unwieldy title in a much smaller font underneath. I do hope this is getting an audience, though, since it’s some bold programming with a real sense of place (actual ASDA shopping bags!), not the liminal transatlantic world of something like Sex Education.

If you want to check out what else I’ve been watching, you can always check out my Letterboxd.

Reading

Along with Netflix, I’m also cancelling Kindle Unlimited and Audible this month, the upshot being that I’m trying to listen to, read and watch a bunch of stuff all at once. It’s not going well! I feel stressed!

I have been reading Cory Doctorow’s Radicalized, a collection of four novellas. I’ve been interested in Doctorow for a while, but this is my first time I’ve actually got around to reading his stuff. I loved the first story, Unauthorized Bread, but I was less impressed by Model Minority. On starting Radicalized (the title story), I decided to skip ahead, since I’m sensitive to certain medical stuff–I’d already suffered through the upsetting depictions of police brutality in the previous story, and hadn’t ultimately felt it was worth it. I’m now going back and forth on whether to finish the final story in the collection or just move on to something new. I’ll definitely give Doctorow another chance at some point, but I’m not feeling motivated to carry on with this collection just now.

Meanwhile, on Audible, I’ve been making a lot of use of the Plus Catalogue. The big discovery for me has been Theodore Sturgeon. The first thing I listened to was Some of Your Blood, a psychological horror novella written in epistolary form. I wouldn’t call it scary per se–good for me–but I did find it gripping and surprisingly affecting. Then I listened to Venus Plus X, published nine years before Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness but exploring a lot of the same ideas from a different angle. I couldn’t believe how ahead of its time it was. Now I’m listening to More Than Human, but I’m afraid I won’t have time to finish it before my subscription ends, so I may end up trying to get hold of a physical copy.

If you’re interested, you can read more detailed reviews over on my Goodreads.

Online

This online puzzle box is very cool, though be warned, for me it crashed when I had nearly completed it and I lost my progress. It got recommended by BoingBoing, and I think the server couldn’t handle the increased traffic. Part of my brain wanted me to start again from the very beginning, but instead I did the sane thing and used the solutions. Okay, I have a confession to make: I transposed the sudoku puzzles to an online soduko maker, but I messed up (I left an entire line of numbers off), so I had to use one of the solutions the first time around, too. Phew, glad I got that off my chest.

With twitter on the decline, I’ve been turning back to discord–I was an early adopter of Mastodon, but it was never really my scene, and the instance I originally joined went offline in 2018. Besides, while I’m addicted to twitter, I don’t actually want to try and replace it with a clone; I don’t think it’s a good place for my mental health. I don’t have a ton of interactions on there, and when I make my account public I just end up getting myself into stupid arguments with obnoxious strangers in somebody else’s mentions, which is bad for everyone.

Is discord a good solution? I don’t know. I often get overwhelmed by the pace, and there tends to be at least one person in any given discord that I find annoying at the very least (hey, I never claimed to be gregarious). You can’t choose whom you follow; while you can “Block” people, all it does is hide their messages–but still leaves a tempting option to reveal them, which I always end up clicking when my curiosity gets the better of me. I’ve joined and left several discords at this point after I either became overwhelmed or had an interaction that went sour.

Still, at least everyone on a particular discord is there because they have some kind of shared interest, plus it’s almost inherently interactive. Rather than feeling like you’re pouring things out into a void and rarely being acknowledged, you’re practically guaranteed to get some kind of response. Of course, that could be a double-edged sword.

For now, I’m going to stick around on a few discords and see how I get on; maybe at some point I’ll manage to kick my social media habit for good.

Transcript: Hot D mid-seasonish update

This is a transcript of (the scripted portion of) my latest podcast episode, in which I discuss House of the Dragon up to episode six.

A quick content note before we begin: I’ll be discussing themes present in the show such as incest, sexual coercion, and violence against queer characters. I’ll also be discussing the plot of House of the Dragon up to episode six, and there’s a minor spoiler for Rings of Power episode three. I’ll also mention some character deaths in The Magicians and The 100, because I’ll be discussing the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope. Okay, on with the show!

When last we met—unless you listened to my chaotic Mubi episode—I had said that I was going to continue watching both Rings of Power and House of the Dragon. That did not last long. I managed to get through the third Rings of Power episode, but only just, and I had to admit to myself that I really wasn’t enjoying this show. The third episode didn’t even have Bronwen in it! I was still kind of invested in the Harfoot storyline, and I love the dwarves though I didn’t really care about their actual plotline so far, but other than that it was not hitting for me at all. The line that actually turned me off the most was when Galadriel told Halbrand that he “chafed under the rags of the common”. I mean, Hot D has a hereditary monarchy, sure, but I don’t think it’s buying into concepts like birthright. The central thesis behind Game of Thrones has always been that power goes to the person who can play the game the best—unless you count season eight, which, let’s not. I mean, House of the Dragon explicitly tells us that inbreeding and hoarding weapons are the way that the Targs cling to power, and I don’t think it’s condoning those practices, even though Daemyra is totally hot.

Yes, I have fallen deeply into the House of the Dragon rabbit hole, so much so that I briefly started haunting the subreddit. I’ve left it now because someone was mean to me, and I know, someone on reddit being a dickhead is not headline news, but it bummed me out. Actually I think there was an influx of new members as the show increased in popularity, and the quality control really went downhill. There’d be like two posts a day where someone would say “Am I the only one who doesn’t like Daemon?” and then there’d be a bullet pointed list of all the bad things he’d done, like his character introduction wasn’t him cutting off a guy’s balls. Yeah, dude, he’s not supposed to be a nice guy! It’s like if you were in the Hannibal fandom—which I was—and had to deal with constantly being reminded that Hannibal is actually really problematic. Bullet point one: he eats people.

Anyway, I’m off the subreddit now, but for a brief window there was actually a lot of really interesting conversation happening. After episode three, there was a lot of discussion about whether Rhaenyra sleeping with Criston could be considered sexual coercion. It got quite heated, but a lot of people had nuanced and thoughtful takes. I have to say that at the time I was on the fence about it, and honestly much less invested in their dynamic than I was in the preceding scenes with Daemon, but given Criston’s subsequent behaviour in episode five, I think it actually does make a lot of sense to read him as not being entirely consenting in that scene. It’s obvious that in his ill-advised proposal to Rhaenyra, he was bargaining to try and find a way that he could incorporate what had happened into his self-concept, and when that fell apart he couldn’t handle it. You can read it as someone who read too much into casual sex, of course, but I think that his talk about honour makes it clear that this is less about any feelings for Rhaenyra and more about his own sense of self being threatened. To me, all of that is consistent with a reading of his sex scene with Rhaenyra being coercive.

On the other hand, I did notice a lot of chatter about Alicent that I felt was uncharitable and probably misogynistic in origin—I know, shocker, on reddit. I do also think a lot of that was from book readers who were letting what happens later—which I’m patchy on—colour their perceptions of the character as written on the show. It’s so obvious that Alicent has no choice or agency in marrying Viserys, to the point where she’s developed an excoriation disorder due to her anxiety around it. It was definitely interesting to see the double standards at play there, especially when a lot of people pointing to the Criston scene as being an example of sexual coercion were accusing anyone who disagreed with them of having double standards.

One more thing that I picked up from the subreddit before I fled was a very interesting observation about Mellos. Someone pointed out a look between two of the female attendants in episode one when Mellos tells Viserys that Aemma is breached and they’ve “tried everything”, and he also seems resistant to the idea of cauterisation for Viserys’ wounds later in the episode. In episode five he has another disagreement with one of his attending staff about whether to use poultices or leeches. And, of course, he brings Rhaenyra the moon tea at the end of episode four. While I’d noticed most of this, I had put it down to Mellos being stuck in his ways rather than actively plotting, but now that it’s been pointed out to me I do think that he might well have a bias towards the Hightowers and there’s something going on with this guy.

I’d also like to touch on the death of Joffrey Lonmouth in episode five. A lot of people have pointed to this as an example of ‘Bury Your Gays’. Of course, this is hard to argue with factually, and of course the emotional response some people are having to that it completely valid, but I want to explain why for me personally it wasn’t a major issue. For me, how much the death of a queer character bothers me is based on two factors: first of all, how major a character are they, and second of all, how common is permadeath on the show. So for example, while I know a lot of people were deeply upset by the death of Lexa on The 100, I have to say that I had a different reaction to it. Lexa was a relatively new character, and it was a show where major characters died all the time. Lexa wasn’t even the first of Clarke’s love interests to die on the show, let alone the first recurring character. I also felt it was pretty obvious that they were setting up her character coming back in the City of Light, which is indeed what ended up happening. Again, this isn’t to invalidate anyone else’s feelings about it, just to express my own.

A queer character death that I really was upset about was that of Quentin Coldwater on The Magicians, for a lot of reasons. This wasn’t a minor character, it was the protagonist of the show; a character whose mental illness was not only textual but was a key part of his character introduction and arc; a character whose bisexuality had fairly recently been revealed. Major characters had died on the show before, but in both cases they’d been brought back in one way or another. The thing, I think, that bothered me the most about it was that there had been a whole episode about how the show wanted to move beyond the white male protagonist and tell more diverse stories… but there was nothing stopping them from doing that without killing off a mentally ill queer character who was part of a same sex relationship, though the writers seemed to kind of forget about that. Also, the other major queer character in the show was pretty much completely sidelined for almost that entire season, because he was possessed by a monster, which was not even the first time the show had had a queer relationship break down because someone was possessed by a monster. There also was seemingly a lot of behind the scenes bullshit where most of the cast were not told that Jason Ralph was leaving, and they filmed a fake ending, and then season five—which I didn’t watch—was apparently written for spite? Listen, I don’t want to go off the rails here.

The point is, Joffrey Lonmouth was a very minor character who had only just been introduced. In terms of screen time, he’d only had slightly more than the guy who got stepped on by Caraxes a few episodes ago. It’s also a show where minor characters get offed very, very frequently. Particularly in light of the character deaths in episode six of major and beloved characters, two of whom have been around since the first episode, Joffrey’s death seems like kind of a drop in the bucket. Also, this is a Game of Thrones spin-off! Game of Thrones was notorious for killing off characters that people had got attached to. Famously, everyone was fair game. While of course I would like there to be more queer characters on TV who don’t die, I don’t really think this is the franchise to look to for that. Unlike The Magicians, which seemingly had a whole episode congratulating itself for the fact that was about to kill off its neurodivergent queer protagonist before he could even say goodbye to his monster-possessed soulmate, Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon have never billed themselves as being unproblematic bastions of positive representation. They’ve always been brutal shows full of death and incest, and while I’m not saying that insulates them from criticism by any means, and I have had major problems with Game of Thrones myself, in this instance I think that what happened was consistent with the tone of the show. Also, Laenor does now have another lover who at time of recording is still alive, so we actually still have the same number of queer characters in the show as we did before, and this one has already had almost as much to do as Joffrey ever did. But that’s just my take!

Okay, let’s move on to episode six, which comes after a major time jump and a big cast shake-up. The fantastic Milly Alcock and Emily Carey have been replaced by Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke; Theo Nate has been replaced by John Macmillan, and Savannah Steyn, who was only in one episode, has been replaced by Nanna Blondell, who… was also only in one episode.

Let’s start with Blondell. I have to say that, while the emotion of her performance was great, I was a bit thrown off by the fact that her accent was so different than what had already been established of Laena in previous episodes. As much as I love Peter Dinklage, I always had a similar problem with him, as he was the only major Game of Thrones cast member whose accent was truly terrible. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s was actually pretty solid, and he doesn’t even have English as a first language. I also thought that what we saw of Savannah Steyn in episode five was excellent, and it was a shame to lose her so soon. That said, I was NOT prepared for Laena to fucking die in this episode, in the first of two serious holy shit moments. If I were going to get upset about a death in this show on a metatextual level rather than just an emotional one—because there are other deaths that I’m very upset about but don’t consider bad storytelling—it would be this one. While I thought Laena’s actual death scene was really well-done, and it’s of course striking that this is a death where she has agency, in stark contrast to that of Aemma, it did feel like a but of a rush job to me. It’s also kind of convenient that she happened to have a conversation with Daemon immediately before that about how she wanted to die and how she wanted their children to be brought up. I do think this could have been drawn out a little bit more, but I think that events like this are kind of the nature of the way the show is operating, with major time-jumps between episodes.

To tackle the rest of the cast, I think John Macmillan is great, and I’ve been a big fan of Olivia Cooke for years. This is the first thing I’ve seen Emma D’Arcy do, but I think their take on the character is really interesting. In the case of both D’Arcy and Cooke, these definitely don’t feel like the same characters we’ve been watching for five previous episodes, but I think that might be deliberate. It’s striking how twisted Alicent has become compared to the victimised young girl portrayed by Emily Carey, and how passive D’Arcy’s Rhaenyra is compared to Alcock’s, but I can see how that could happen to these people after ten years of power games and parenthood.

Speaking of parenthood, let’s talk about those kids. We didn’t really get to know Rhaenyra’s that well—Jace probably did the most, but I don’t know if I got a strong (haha, STRONG) sense of who the two older boys were and how they were differentiated from one another. In the case of Alicent’s children, I think we got a lot more information. I’m not a big fan of Aegon so far—I mean, he seems like a pretty normal teenage boy, but my experiences with normal teenage boys have not been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve heard rumblings of spoilers about Aemond’s character trajectory, though I’ve been trying to avoid them, but at this point I actually think he’s a much more sympathetic character than his brother. As someone who was bullied at that age myself, I really felt for him and the way he was ganged up on by the other boys, though I absolutely think Aegon was the ringleader and I don’t really blame the Strong boys for it.

Then there’s Helaena. WHAT is going on there? I mean, she’s clearly coded neurodivergent, which I think is interesting, and Alicent’s attempts to connect with her are actually quite touching, but—and again, this is largely gleaned from spoilers I picked up on the subreddit, which I have now left—it seems like she may have some kind of psychic ability? I know this is something which somewhat runs in the Targaryen family, so it’ll be interesting to see how that develops.

Last but not least, the Dragon Twins, Baela and Rhaena (possibly not actual twins in the show). We don’t know much about Baela yet, but we know that Rhaena’s dragon egg didn’t hatch and that she feels overlooked by her father, though we have seen Daemon interact with the kids in a way that suggests he’s affectionate towards them, as he was towards their mother.

Like Rhaenyra, Daemon seemed muted this week, and I think that maybe that’s a reflection of the fact that they’ve been apart for so long. It seems like they’ve both been avoiding Dragonstone since the previous episode, and of course these two characters very much echo one another. They’ve both married Velaryon siblings and settled into marriages that fall on the contented but passionless end of the spectrum—though I think Daemon’s is by far the more successful of the two, and he and Laena wouldn’t have been a bad match at all if he weren’t hung up on Rhaenyra. While Daemon perhaps doesn’t love Laena as much as Viserys loved Aemma, it’s obviously very significant that when he’s offered the same option as his brother was, of sacrificing his wife to potentially save his unborn child, he not only refuses but doesn’t even seem to be tempted. Sure, Daemon’s under much less pressure than Viserys was to produce a male heir, but I think it does demonstrate that—for all his many flaws—Daemon isn’t as enmeshed in the heteropatriarchy as Viserys is, and I think we saw that in episode four too. Also, if Daemon had wanted to dispose of his wife, this would have been a very convenient way to do it without any blame being attached to him, and that he didn’t take that way out of the marriage—unlike in the previous episode where he actively murdered his first wife—shows that there was genuine affection and respect between the two of them.

I’ve talked about Laena’s death from a couple of different angles now, so I want to talk about the other two very shocking deaths in this episode. We lost our Strong men, Lyonel and Harwin, the two unproblematic kings of Hot D. Let me say this: I will never forgive that rat bastard Larys for this. Speaking of people I’ll never forgive, I was never the biggest fan of Criston anyway, but it turns out he’s the absolute fucking worst.

All right, I’m going to leave it at that for now, partly because [Seinfeld audio clip: “George is getting upset!”] but also because I originally was intending to put an episode out at the mid-season point, prior to episode six, but then I left it so late I thought I might as well wait until the next episode had come out, and if I wait any longer this time I might as well wait until Monday, and then I’ll probably keep procrastinating until next weekend and so on ad infinitum. I’ll probably do another one of these after episode ten. As always you can follow me on Letterboxd at panickyintheuk or email me at panickyintheuk at gmail.com. All right, until next time, valar morghulis.