I tend to like the boring good guys in fiction - mainly because I find the choices these characters make to be more relatable and their inner conflicts more sympathetic.
A Jaime Lannister who attempts to murder a child to cover up his adultery is beloved in fandom because he’s hot, witty, snarky and the traditional bad boy on the way to redemption.
But, I think, a Ned Stark or Jon Snow who would not have killed a child to cover up their crimes and accepted the consequences would be equally interesting characters - in Westeros, their choices would have been harder to make. Both Ned and Jon do suffer from far worse as a result of the hard choices they make compared to Jaime Lannister.
I do think these works of fiction requires some of the boring good guys, otherwise the world is too bleak and nihilistic. Of course good does not have to be stupidly noble and a saint - like the terribly written show version of Jon Snow - but a good character can have human flaws and be smart and complicated and conflicted AND good.
And hence my love for book Jon Snow and Ned Stark and James Holden and Rand Al’Thor.
Now that WOT is getting adapted I can see Rand Al’Thor getting the same treatment as Jon Snow - disliked and ignored as boring until he gets involved in love triangles and shipping - and considering Rand’s love life in the books - I think Tumblr will have a LOT to say about THAT, lol!
Rand is an interesting character - a character who reluctantly embraces his destiny knowing all the time how it is going to end for him, all the while slowly going mad. And we are on this journey of insanity with him through his POV. If book Dany is indeed going mad in ASoIaF - I very much doubt this - then Rand Al’ Thor would be a perfect example of how to write this happening.
I do hope the casting for Rand Al’ Thor is good. Like Jon Snow, Rand is a very internal character. We don’t get a lot of him talking and he keeps a lot of information to himself, but we read about these things he feels and his ideas and plans. In GOT, they basically reduced Jon to a noble idiot who is only good for swinging his sword - not even that in season 8 - taking away all his complexity evident in his book chapters. I can only hope Rand gets better writing and the actor they cast does a good job of portraying a character that slowly changes from this lovable young man to becoming a bit of an arrogant ruler and someone on the verge of losing it and restraining himself from destroying the world in the blink of an eye.
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staff You are recommending that I follow a nazi blog I blocked last night. Your site promotes anti-semitism to Jews. Your site shoves Nazi Swastikas in the faces of Jews. It’s bad enough that the Nazi blogs seem to be sprouting up like weeds on a site that claims to have an anti-hate policy, but to actively promote them to people who have taken the steps of blocking these blogs is beyond the pale. Clean this place up. It’s turning into Stormfront.
I encourage everyone who sees this post, Jewish or otherwise, to reblog it. Tumblr has been ignoring the growth of Nazism on this site for too long. It needs to end.
i don’t want to achieve equality by sinking to men’s level, i want them to get on ours! why should i have to unlearn the conversational art of waiting my turn, unlearn sexual self-restraint, unlearn trust in others’ good intentions, unlearn the impulse to cater to others’ needs, just to have a chance at success among savages? why can’t the men learn some fucking manners so we can all conduct our affairs in a civilized manner? i shouldn’t have to stop saying sorry, you say sorry!
In the 80s when I was in my freshman year in college, they still had entirely separate mens and women’s dorms. I was in class waiting for a final to start and one of the guys was telling someone about how he had had to go into a women’s dorm to drop something off, and he was startled to see posters on the walls, flowers, curtains, etc. He said his men’s dorm had holes in the walls, things on fire, fights, guys walking around with open wounds and he just didn’t understand why they had to live like this. He said, “I want to live with the women, in civilization.”
Am reading Sisterhood of Spies, about women working for the OSS during WWII. One of the stories mentions that the women in London had a male visitor who would eat in their mess hall once a month. He was married and wasn’t interested in hitting on any of the women; he just wanted to eat in an atmosphere where people said “Please pass the butter,” instead of “PASS THE GODDAMNED GREASE”
I dated a guy who brought me along on group activities (movies, video game night, etc.) with four or five other male friends. Once I mentioned to one of the other guys that I hoped I wasn’t intruding on their “guy time” or some such. He got this sort of rueful look and said, “The truth is, I really like it when you’re here because it gives us a reason to act better. When it’s just guys, we all have to try to outdo each other with how vile we are.”
So the moral of these stories are men don’t even treat each other like human beings.
Me to my 6-year-old son: “You seem to like playing with the girls at school more than the boys. Why do you think that is?”
6-year-old son: “Sometimes I just don’t want to be pushed. It hurts and is mean. And the girls always pretend to be princesses or fun animals and stuff when they have tea parties. The boys just dump the tea all over the place. That’s just stupid and I don’t like wasting all that tea. It takes forever to make.”
Me: “Wow, I can understand why you’d rather play with the girls. The boys seem like they’re kind of rough.”
6-year-old son: “And when I play with the girls they make me the king because none of the other boys want to play tea party.”
Me: “Do you like being the king?”
6-year-old son: “Not really – I’d rather be a wizard, but it makes Georgia and Vivian happy.”
