AKOTSK: Why I Believe Lyonel Baratheon is Bisexual

SPOILERS for Season 1 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and some of the third Dunk & Egg novella, “The Mystery Knight.”

DISCLAIMER: When I talk about Lyonel Baratheon’s sexuality, I am talking about the character’s sexuality only. I am not speculating about the sexuality of his actor, Daniel Ings. I just need to clarify that before we get started.

I really love the new Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. It has great characters and really strong themes, and it’s overall fun, funny, and weighty at different points. I could go on and on about all the wonderful things in this show, but I really want to talk about one of my favorite characters in Season 1, Lyonel Baratheon (the Laughing Storm), and why I think he’s bisexual.

One more thing before we get started: I’m a bisexual woman. It’s something I’ve been working through and realizing for a long time now.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about Lyonel Baratheon being bisexual because I’ve seen a couple of videos by straight men that talk about what an amazing character Lyonel is and how he’s a great example of positive masculinity. They never mention the possibility that Lyonel is anything but straight, even though that’s clearly possible and even likely. I believe that they do this because they assume that Lyonel is straight because they are straight, and all fictional characters reflect them unless otherwise stated, right? No, not really.

Thankfully, the entire queer theory school of criticism exists, and it invites us to think outside of heteronormative social norms and ideas. Like, if you’ve ever heard of the concept of gender being a performance, not an inborn trait, that comes from queer theory. Now, I’m not doing a hardcore academic criticism of Lyonel Baratheon or A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms as a whole. However, it is based on the idea that we can interpret characters and fictional works outside of heteronormative binaries.

A Note to Straight Men: Lyonel Baratheon is still allowed to be your favorite character in AKOTSK even if you can see how he may be bisexual. The sexualities of fictional characters that you like do not reflect your sexuality. For example, my brother is a straight man, but he really loves Lestat de Lioncourt, a bisexual character, in the recent AMC+ adaptation/reimagining of Interview with the Vampire. And yet, my brother is still straight.

Continue reading →

To My Fellow Americans: Keep Resisting ICE

Hi, there. I just need to say one thing: FUCK ICE.

Okay, I’ll say another thing: keep resisting and fighting against ICE.

How can you do that? There are many different ways:
– You can protest in person, of course.
– Avoid buying things from companies like Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Whole Foods, since they all work with ICE.
– Get involved with local organizations to help protect people and find protests to participate in. Your local branches of Indivisible and 50501 are good places to start.
– Call your representatives and put pressure on them to abolish ICE and invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump (and all his cronies) from office. You can find their phone numbers with a quick online search, and the staffers on the other end will write down your message.
– If you see a snitch hotline phone number being passed around on social media, call it and give the workers and/or answering machine extremely useless information. Sing songs, rattle off trivia, quote movies and TV shows, talk about who you think is in the Epstein files, or mention anything else that comes into your head. (I did this for a Texas snitch hotline that went up last summer, and the whole process was strangely cathartic.) This helps gum up the hotline and prevents real snitches from informing on innocent people.
– If you own a business and ICE agents try to use it, refuse them service. It’s your right to refuse them.

And here’s the most important bit of advice: DON’T. GIVE. UP. Keep resisting, protesting, and fighting back. Everyone is angry at ICE right now, and if we keep pushing back against them, they cannot win. There are 340 million of us, after all, and they can’t get rid of us.

I know that telling you to rebel against a U.S. government agency is a far cry from what I usually write about here, but I have to say something. And actually, many of the narratives I’ve covered in my posts are explicitly anti-fascist (hi, Star Wars, Captain Marvel, Wicked, and even Harry Potter), so this feels a bit like life imitating art.

Also, it scares me that both Renee Good and Alex Pretti (ICE’s most recent murder victims, who were innocent people) were just a year old than I am. Like, yikes, we’re the ones you’re going after? I guess I see the Millennial generation as people who are trying to figure our lives out, while ICE sees us as fully adult threats.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now.

Ironheart: He’s a Man of Wealth and Taste, and He’s Here

SPOILERS for Episode 6 of Ironheart, “The Past is the Past.” This post centers on a character who only appears in that episode. You have been warned.

So, the finale episode of Ironheart introduced a particular character. This is a character that fans have been speculating about since WandaVision. People have wanted him to show up, and now he’s here. I can’t say much about him above the “Read More” cut without spoiling someone, other than that he’s played by Sacha Baron Cohen.

Continue reading →

Ironheart: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions

MAJOR SPOILERS for Ironheart, including the sixth and final episode, “The Past is the Past.”

Ironheart is here, and it’s a good series, despite what a certain chunk of the MCU fandom will tell you. In fact, I think it’s one of the best-written Marvel shows on Disney+.

The thing about Ironheart, though, is that it’s not a simple tale. It’s the story of a young, genius Black woman who doesn’t have the resources to immediately start her own company and make millions off her inventions. She also doesn’t want to go off and just work for some other tech billionaire in San Francisco or Seattle. Riri Williams wants to work and live in Chicago and invent on her own terms. But in order to do that, she has to pay a price.

Continue reading →

Why and How We Should Protect U.S. National Parks

Most of the time, this is a pop culture blog. However, my country is turning into a fascist nightmare run by insane tech billionaires, and they’re tearing the U.S. government apart. One way they’re doing that is by illegally firing federal workers en masse. They’ve fired 3,400 new Forest Service hires (people who’ve been hired in the last years or so), along with 1,000 National Parks Service (NPS) recent hires. According to that article from The Guardian, that accounts for 10% of the Forest Service’s workforce and 5% of the NPS’s workforce. That’s important to know because Elon Musk and his Muskrats at DOGE (which is not a really or legal U.S. federal department) want the National Parks to shut down.

Why would a bunch of ultra-rich tech-bro asshats want to shut down the National Parks Service, which has been called “America’s Best Idea” in the past? So they can shut the NPS down, and then their billionaire buddies can develop housing and apartments on some of that land and drill on other parts of that land. I imagine Elon Musk also wants to build a mansion that overlooks Crater Lake National Parks or something like that.

But they’re not supposed to do that. That’s public land that’s set aside for everyone to enjoy, and in many cases, the NPS work with local Indigenous peoples in and around those parks to preserve their sacred spaces. And according to that Guardian article, the U.S. National Parks welcome 159 million visitors per year. 159 million people is the size of a large sovereign nation (for reference, the U.S. has around 330 million citizens, and it’s one of the top 5 most populous nations on Earth). The National Park Service guards so many wonderful things, and people clearly love visiting the sites it protects. That’s why we have to make sure that the NPS doesn’t go away.

That’s the reason why we need to protect the U.S. National Parks, but how can we do that?

We can do that by continuing to show up to the sites in the NPS’s system. We need to show that we care about these places and that we want to see and learn from them.

Continue reading →

How Fascists’ Beliefs are Fueled by Projection, Not Reality

So my country has been taken over by fascists. You may have heard about it. I hate them. I hate feeling powerless. So I’m going to do the only thing I feel I can do: write about it.

Now, I want to break down what drives them, and that’s projection. The things that these American Nazis claim to hate in marginalized groups is really a reflection of them and how they see and interact with the world around them. The groups they hate don’t do the things the fascists say they do, but those fascists do those things. They think that if LGBTQ+ folks, BIPOC people, and women of all races get their hands on power, those folks will think and act like fascists and ruling class capitalists do. The non-rich fascists also project their hopes and dreams onto billionaires, thinking, “One day, that will be me.”

(I don’t have any relevant fun images for this post, and I don’t want to give people like Elon Musk extra SEO for their images, so here’s Grogu/Baby Yoda.)

Here are some more concrete examples of what I’m talking about:

Continue reading →

Wicked Part 1: Fiyero, Foreshadowing, and Spoilers

MAJOR SPOILERS for the Wicked musical AND MAJOR SPOILER SPECULATION for the film, Wicked Part 2. I’ll keep the spoilers below the “Read More” cut, but YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Okay, I saw Wicked Part 1 last weekend, and I loved it! I’ve always loved the musical’s soundtrack and the 1939 Wizard of Oz film, but I love Wicked Part 1 more. It’s just so perfect! It captures the whimsy of the Land of Oz while portraying the themes of the musical (and Gregory Maguire’s novel, Wicked, to a degree) really well with excellent world-building and character development.

Lots of content creators are already talking about Elphaba and Glinda and Nessarose and what they have going on, so I decided I want to talk about one of my favorite characters and his potential arc.

Who am I talking about? Our beloved Winkie Prince, Fiyero!

You see, by the end of Wicked Part 1, Fiyero has experienced quite a bit of character development, and he seems to be going on a journey, but we’re not sure where yet, at least in the movie musical’s timeline. However, we can guess where he’s going to go based on what we know of the stage musical and what’s foreshadowed in Wicked Part 1.

Now, before I go any further, I’m warning you: there will be spoilers for the Wicked stage musical down below the cut here. The foreshadowing in Part 1 is based on that knowledge. If you click the link below and read the rest of this post, please don’t say you weren’t warned.

I’d Turn Back If I Were You

It’s Time to Dethrone Tolkien as the King of Fantasy

Content Warning: This post does mention some racially loaded language that J.R.R. Tolkien used to describe the orcs in his works. I don’t like that language, but we do need to acknowledge his flaws.

Hey, everybody! It’s been a minute! We are now in the wonderful season of Hobbit Girl Autumn, and that means I’ve started a Lord of the Rings rewatch. Yes, I’ve been watching the extended editions, although particularly when I watch the extended Fellowship of the Ring, I realize I have the theatrical version’s story beats memorized. I read the books years ago, but I much prefer the Peter Jackson films.

There, I said it. After nearly 20 years of pretending I understood and preferred the books, I can finally admit it.

Now I have to just sit and wait.

Wait for what, you ask? Oh, I’m waiting for the diehard book fans to show up and talk about how I’m a stupid, ignorant person who can’t finish Go, Dog, Go. That I’m nothing but a dum-dum stupid-head who will never, ever understand true art or the meaning of Tolkien’s works, and that I’m probably one of those awful, hideous, moronic people who have been enjoying Rings of Power.

And that just isn’t true. I’ve read and finished Go, Dog, Go many times.

Continue reading →

Wakanda Forever: I Have a Crush on Namor the Sub-Mariner

NO SPOILERS for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever because I haven’t actually seen the movie yet. Everything discussed here comes from the film’s official teaser and official trailer as well as Tenoch Huerta’s interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

Okay, so ever since the teaser trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever dropped, I have been obsessed with Namor the Sub-Mariner. Who’s that? This guy:

I mean, how could I not? He’s a very handsome dude who has pointy ears and ankle-wings, wears Casino Royale-esque green swim trunks and a bunch of jewelry, and radiates the intensity of a thousand burning suns. What’s not to like?

What I really like about him, though, is that he just seems so highly specific.

Continue reading →

Why Star Wars Fans Think They Can Bully the Franchise’s Actors

SPOILERS for pretty much ALL of Star Wars, including and especially Obi-Wan Kenobi through the fifth episode.

NOTE: Bullying Moses Ingram and any other Star Wars actor (or anyone else at all) is wrong. I do not condone that kind of behavior, especially since I’m a survivor of years of bullying and verbal abuse from my peers growing up. However, the responses from Lucasfilm and Ewan McGregor and other actors out there seem to treat this as a problem and an experience unique to Moses. It’s not. That’s why I’m writing this post.

The Star Wars fandom has a problem. Or at least, a certain segment of it does. Whenever a piece of Star Wars content drops and that segment of the fandom doesn’t like it, they flip out and attack anyone they can. They often attack the actors who play the characters they don’t like. The latest actor to deal with this behavior is Moses Ingram, who plays Reva/Third Sister on Obi-Wan Kenobi. She recently posted to her Instagram story about how racist Star Wars fans/trolls have been sending her direct messages (DMs) full of racist slurs and hurtful comments.

However, she’s not the first Star Wars actor to endure such horribly charged ire. Both Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega faced racist attacks when they appeared in the Sequel Trilogy. But this type of actor bullying goes further back than the sequel trilogy. Ahmed Best (the Black man who played Jar-Jar Binks), Jake Lloyd (the white kid who played nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker), and Hayden Christensen (the white man who played Anakin as a young man and now plays Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi).

Continue reading →