make me feel better when we're aloft

Effective immediately, I have broken up with canon. It's been a long time coming, and there were warning signs from the beginning. I should have had the strength to do this a long time ago, after one of the unnecessary and fabricated murders and rapes or character assassinations or character exclusions or a thousand thousand other things. I was naive and foolish and I wanted to believe that they could turn it around, that it couldn't all be bad, that all of the care and concern I'd put into this show and these characters (specifically the many women I'm fond of) couldn't possibly be for nothing. If it was, didn't that somehow reflect back on me as a person, and not the creators I'd foolishly put some manner of trust in? I loved my women, I could stick it out for them. Even as more and more of them were ignored or brutalized, I thought I could stick it out.

Not so.

After hearing what went on in s8e04, specifically regarding blessed and good Missandei of Naath (and also the potential narrative ripples that may follow that), I made the executive decision that I didn't need to watch the last three episodes. Furthermore, I have no plans to read the last two books if they're ever published. At this point, I don't think B&W deserve to handle these characters, nor do they understand them well, especially the women and POC characters. I'm not even sure GRRM does. But that's the power of transformative works, right? Those of us who see something valuable in parts of a story, like characters or rich settings, but want to build on those in ways that feel meaningful to us as people. Those of us who see, for example, female characters with the potential to do amazingly epic things that could mean a lot to a lot of people and want to tell those stories because the original creators have decided they're not valuable or worth their time.

Well, the original creators have made it pretty clear that the stories that matter to me don't matter to them, and I'm only going to make myself sadder by following their story through to the very end. I've already played with divergences (as evidenced by the fact that most of my women are dead by now) and that's where I intend to live. I don't intend to live in the grimdark and miserable, especially in roleplay where we're all constantly rewriting stories. I'm here to make something with the pieces that some idiot men threw away.