Nerd Talk: How the Westeros Was Won

Game of Thrones spoilers ahead... If you aren't caught up, here's your warning. If you are, proceed! If you don't care to, you might actually find something worthwhile in my babbling anyway.

Daenerys Stormborn basically just mowed King's Landing into ash. Lots of main characters were cut down, lots of innocents to boot, and we only know for sure that Arya got out in one piece, but clearly in a state of disbelief over carnage even she wasn't prepared for.

Taking down Euron Greyjoy's Iron Fleet was gratifying. Daenerys lost another of her dragons in the last episode and it felt like justice. It's when the Golden Company surrenders and the camera goes to Daenerys's face twitching with cold hatred and that coin-flip Targaryen madness followed by Jon Snow's oh-shit face do we realize we have a Mad Queen on our hands. Amid the pointless carnage and montage of final showdowns, a lot of Daenerys fans jumped ship. At first, I thought the worst of it too but there was one thing I've been certain of while watching this show.

Like in actual human history, monarchies have to fall, in bloody rebellion, for new governments to take place. While we can't say for certain whether this was plain-old Targaryen madness or a sudden revelation that the Iron Throne would never be hers, the choice to completely destroy it was, inevitably for the greater good.

I wouldn't say I condone genocide as a solution in the real world, but facing overpopulation, oppressive governments, the rise of theological laws trumping human rights, and irreversible damage to the planet caused by human fuckery, I'm also not entirely unsympathetic to the extremes caused by dystopian desperation. However, it's the 'good intentions' of human ego that often lead to tyranny, genocide and villains who think themselves heroic.

Didn't we see this same theme with Thanos, where he went from just being the big bad guy to a misguided being with a savior-complex? There are always layers that create these moral grey areas. Genocide, wrong, but human neglect and rampant apathy, also wrong. It often takes centuries, all the while those benefitting become blind to the dirty truths of their golden empires, only to stand in shock when the desperation topples them into dust.

I couldn't be surprised that Daenerys went the route she did. She journeyed from an innocent girl who was promised a kingdom by her twisted brother to needing to wallow through the horrors of reality to get there. All the while, she tried countless times to do the right thing, to be a merciful queen. Yet it always made the oppressors stronger with that perceived weakness and time and time again, she had to secure her power through being the monsters she sought to remove. It isolated her from those closest to her, made them fear her--all but a few who truly cared. They never questioned her because it showed a lack of loyalty but even they started to show in their eyes alone a lack of faith.

Losing Missandei, the one who always looked her in the eye and stayed true, was an incomparable loss. Even Grey Worm/Torgo Nudho, while still unfailingly held her command, stopped meeting here eyes. Jon Snow's doubts were plain as day. In the scene prior to marching against the Red Keep, she asks him if he sees her as more than queen and we see without him speaking that his love for her has cooled. 

So while we could assume that she is a jilted woman, isolated and aware that the Throne could still become Jon Snow's despite his refusal to take it, the role of Queen, no, as rightful heir of the Seven Kingdoms (removing gender as a factor altogether), it is more plausible than even inherited incestual madness is less likely than her resolve to destroy the Throne altogether. It is useless to her in securing the people's faith and loyalty. If she cannot claim her birthright through civilized means, she will acquire it through fear, even knowing fear had brought the people down on her father's rule to begin with.

But he didn't have dragons. Well, dragon. Even though fan theories project Drogon might have laid more eggs when he went missing for some time.

While the tagline intimates that the Game of Thrones means you win or you die, the underlying theme makes that a bit of braggadocio, always whispering through the faceless god and the old Valyrian saying that 'all men must die', overshadowing the idea that nobody really wins at all. And no, 'all men must die' isn't some cheeky feminist hint that women are excluded, anymore than mankind actually excludes women.

No one is meant to win this. With the toppling of all major tyrants leaves most of the brilliant minds gone and the survivors not the fittest among us to pick up the pieces. We lose the glory of those times, and often the knowledge of our advancement. We lose the luxuries that allow for the facilities to advance and simply revert to survival.

A little aside here, but this is also why the Ancient Aliens show is absurd to me. The idea that the only explanation for early humans to advance as they did was for extraterrestrial influence to occur is pretty discrediting to our actual potential. While its true that someone had to observe, eat and smoke the plants to discover their properties, create language, etc. we weren't just poop-throwing monkeys, the oddly grunting caveman, and nothing but drooling morons until our modern incarnation. Even the monkeys we descended from (and projected our brain evolution came from through the Stoned Ape Theory) were rather clever creatures from the onset. The capability for wondrous brilliance of thought and utter stupidity were always a gambit. It's also very possible that many processes were not recorded, only built at the zenith of our ancestors' civilizations before greed once more tore them down before the process could be repeated or passed into general knowledge. While even today our most successful humans could hand you a roadmap of exactly what they did to succeed, the repetition  of great achievements often fails without exact conditions that are lost as being inconsequential at the time.

So, as related to the original topic, our very natures guarantee that our own egos prevent good from coming of progress. Conservatives seek to protect dying structures and those obsessed with change are willing to build with bad materials rather than risk not being able to build at all. What remains is a foundation of tears and blood. 

Daenerys must know that there is no way to win. She never comes off as being too stupid to have realized the futility. It's also true that she is a human, subject to whims, emotion, and ego. Though she also believes that nothing could stand against her dragon and beat her, it is also likely that she will be taken down by something as gentle as a whisper. 

Yet through her tyranny, both terrible lessons and even altruistic retrospection exists. Begrudgingly, she is both wrong and right and neither matters. The game is forever changed. Though thrones may not be restored, powerful humans will sit in chairs again and play with lives once more.

It's the real world parallels that make this fantasy a ripe place for comparisons. Of course Westeros isn't Earth but fiction lovers don't fail to see where our mistakes and imagination create a playground so visceral and breathtaking. While the books are a hard read, the show is truly a team effort of epic proportions. The music alone is award worthy, but the actors are no less perfect for their roles. The opening animation itself is rightfully praised as being the only intro it's hard to skip through, no matter how many times you watch it. While I'm not out to convert anyone to watch it nor shove my morally grey and idealistic views of human progress in anyone's face, I hope you were at least inspired to explore deeper than a first impression of anything.

Our very strong gut reactions are often less gratifying than the long game. It's worth reflecting on the true nature of people and world problems, especially through the distraction of fiction.

Dreams and the Writer

I rarely dream at night over the past few years especially. I suppose when I was younger, I enjoyed lucid dreams but also didn't enjoy the occasional night terror. Not dreaming at night became a godsend because when I'm awake, my brain never shuts the fuck up.

I daydream... sort of. I interrupt myself when talking and hop immediately back on course. I can hear a line coming up on a show I've watched before while reading out loud, say the line in sync and go right back to reading. My short term memory is very, very unreliable but I can remember things that happened when I was still in diapers. Hell, I can recall how the world looks at less than two feet tall and crinkling around in the diaper. I can prepare lunch from scratch and forget what I spent half an hour making two hours later. Probably sounds problematic for a writer but I develop methods to complement the way I think. Daydreaming for me can be both hyper-aware and completely absentminded in turns. It can be a bit scatterbrained or very focused. 

No matter how you dream, it's a toolbox that sometimes reveals things you didn't know you knew or absurd counter logic your rational brain might miss. Dream are a scramble of information, sometimes garbled, other times crystal clear. Sometimes it can disturb you, staging something disgusting or horrifying as a desire or turning your sugar sweet pastel world into dripping tar nightmare. Once I saw people missing perfectly geometric chunks of their body, missing legs or part of the neck, but all smiling and walking around as if it was a regular day at the cotton candy pink office. Sometimes it can trick you into feeling real. I had a really ordinary dream that got weird when my best friend and I suddenly broke into a church to steal markers from the Sunday school room. It can feel real quite literally. I felt both sensual and violent dreams that had me gasping awake.

Because of dreams, we can adopt ways to immerse ourselves in our stories and ideas. It's certainly not a requirement. Even extremely logical and rational types that never dream are capable of collecting and reordering information and making something whimsical or at least fictional. I've seen plenty of art students trying to one-up each other on who has the artiest brain. ''I have lucid dreams!" "Yeah, well, I fart realistic portraits when I eat crayons!" "That's nothing! I was born holding a paintbrush and reproduced Starry Night in womb blood!" "Tax evasion!" *Literally all dissolve into puddles of forced hysterical laughter*

I know because I was one of those and I am so. So. So happy that I didn't get a digital camera or webcam until my early 20s and post that noise on the internet. Ffs, we think we're being quirky and original but only about 15% of it is funny to anyone who doesn't know us. And in this age of aggressive and insincere complimenting being a youth trend, I see most of these kids getting sick of each other pretty quick. "No, I do mean it! My bff is so ridiculously hot, I could just stalk her and strangle her!" Funny how quickly they'll switch hot into annoying and talk garbage from there.

Yeah, we all get carried away. Dreams are a much safer victimless way to explore uncomfortable ideas. Uncomfortable can even be a breath of fresh air if you're feeling jaded by the same old stories. Really, writing can be a uncomfortable as you can lean it and you can web publish it free in most hosting sites. Other places, including self publishing markets will set guidelines so be wary of where your wicked dreams lead. 

Personally I never assume that sensual settings gave to arouse that violence can't be disturbingly sensual. I realize it very well could used as an excuse to harm but could easily sate someone to keep them from doing so as well. Sometimes I like a safe, warm or comedic story, to be light and not going fir a little shock or squirm. Sometimes I just want to be a nerd, to tackle quirks or illnesses without laying it on too thick. Maybe the challenge is trickier than I thought, but I pool through daydreams and counter failing logic with dream logic and work it out better.

Writers can often affect changes in reality, even without that intention. Interpretation from dream inspiration can spark invention and innovation. Things thought impractical can challenge a determined thinker to create the logistics to make it so. At one point, touch screens were unlikely, laughable, but now that they're common, we accept the possibility that Tony Stark's air gestures operating a dimensional holographic computer could be widespread someday even in the near future. Virtual reality that can affect other senses than sight, including smell, touch, real movement, are possible. Everything we experience is a specific charge to our brains and science shows the possibility that virtual reality might someday be a place where people with disabilities can experience a convincing facsimile of sensations they have not in the past. (I hesitate to use deprivation or call it a lack of senses-- those who have never experienced something don't exactly miss it if they never had it. We all maneuver with limitations.)

Corny and overused or not, it can't be denied that dreamers are doers, encouraging all of us to dare to dream bigger.

Do You Even Bracket, Bro?

One thing I provide as a public service is my ability to butcher popular slang and quotes on the regular. However, my cringe-worthy post heading has another purpose: utilizing all those little keys that aren't as worn on my silicone keyboard cover.

Not talking hot key shortcuts, function keys, the arrow keys or even the poor redundant Tab key that fell out of use when word processor formatting favored auto indents. Nope, I'm talking... *whomp whomp* brackets. I guess there's no mystery there...

It seems to be a personal mission to torment myself with making certain challenges towards communicating my ideas. UnNamed was about the concealment of names mostly (and the creative use of pronouns and descriptors in absence of names) and UnSung is no exception.

Aiden is mute. I am not. I don't pretend to know what it's like to be so this was not a book based on an issue I can relate to. However, I do know what it's like to desire to communicate or the exhaustion of that effort leading to isolation. In Aiden's case, he finds that his own efforts do not go unrewarded. He greets all of those moments of breakthrough with exuberance. He finds two unique ways to communicate with two of the women in his life, one through a language he created through music, one through a magical link.

Before I go into what this has to do with brackets, this wasn't an attempt to mask a disability with a superpower. That's not what this is, since the two people still aren't going to afford him the same sort of 'voice' that people who can speak have. Aiden still finds the limitations of these 'break-through' abilities and still endures the frustration of having to depend on someone's ability to want to understand him at all. As a point of reference, my granddad turns off his hearing aid when my grandma starts arguing with him, causing her hurt, frustration, rage and impotence with communicating-- that he can just 'turn off' when it doesn't suit him is always a one-sided solution that never benefits her. It would be like learning ASL to debate with a deaf person, then closing your eyes or looking away when you're done. It's worse than hanging up the phone on someone because you are right there still, negating someone with an advantage they can't use.

So, brackets. When Aiden uses his language, I knew I wanted to deviate from just italics. While his 'thoughts' are still italicized, italics are also easy to miss when spread out in a conversation and since he is speaking through these thoughts, it deserved something as important as a quote. Not these ( ). No, parentheses are a side note, often serving the purpose of injecting a secondary idea. Not these guys either { }. I'm never quite sure where those brackets are used but they're too busy. Quotation marks are clean and quick so I wanted Aiden's voice to have a similar simplicity. I dug these guys out from my high school days: ⎡⎦

Yes! L brackets! These remind me of the ¡! deal you get with exclamations in español. As you can tell, I know my way around the optional symbols on a keyboard. Other favorites are © ™ and … Yes, yes, you can make an ellipsis with Option + : (colon) on a Mac (because three periods are more work than two simultaneously pressed keys maybe). Here's the thing-- I also have to make sure that the choose-your-own-font capabilities of an ebook doesn't warp my precious L brackets into some OTHER bracket or worse-- the 404 equivalent of character nullification: the random wing-ding symbol. And no, I don't have that stupid rectangle's hot key combo memorized. I'm rather partial to this choice so I will conduct ridiculous amounts of research to make it happen.

I suppose it would be my designer training that makes me so enthusiastic about utilizing fonts to communicate effectively in a novel. No matter how complex my ideas are in planning, I always stand by the mission to deliver these ideas with all of those complexities combed smooth for sharing. I'm not going to be using ASCII art (although you should do yourself a favor and see how awesome this endeavor is), but I do work to be sure that my punctuation and style choices are the best choice possible.

Even if you don't use special characters outside of the basic set in the body of your writing itself, I bet that many people, from time to time still end up pulling one of these: 

--~~{@ TITLE @}~~--

You can't deny that a nice little bit of dressing for those headers isn't at least a little bit tempting. There use to be some serious excitement when you told people those look like roses. That was before the excitement of using eggplant emojis as penises. It's okay if you don't remember...

 And that's what matters most.