Not necessarily, bastards could do reasonably well for themselves in medieval Europe for example. Obviously it helped if they were of noble or royal birth, but even commoners weren't treated as worthless and could get help from the Church (up to and including getting a primitive form of child support from the father, if identified). And of course, most famously one bastard conquered England while another took over Castile (central Spain), three hundred years apart.
The 'bastards are completely worthless scum with no rights and their mothers are degenerate whores with zero redeeming features' dealio was more-so a feature of the Early Modern period (with its attendant rise of Puritanism and other similarly hardline sects of Protestantism) than the actual Middle Ages, like most other things George RR Martin wrote down for edginess' sake and then tried to pass off as 'realistic'.
Honestly, that entire 'Tribulation'-themed series of comics from this April is worth a read. The wife also makes an appearance later in the same month to yank their daughter out of public school (actually that storyline starts in Tribulation 10, published on April 10 2022, but there are some unrelated strips in-between).
Seriously, all I remember about Sinfest is that it became 'the radfem comic' around 2012 or so. But I took a dive into the recent years' archive after seeing one of the newer comic strips crop up elsewhere and the creator seems to have taken a hard-right turn since 2016 and especially the trans madness spiked up, now he's at the point where he's writing straight white Christian nuclear families as the unambiguous good guys where before they would've been 'too patriarchal and heteronormative' for his former radfem self to even think of drawing.
I won't claim to know what happened, maybe Ishida had a radfem girlfriend for the early-to-mid 2010s and broke up with her or something. But whatever the cause, it's always nice to see someone turn back toward the light.
Oh yes, this + yesterday's decision on guns has been a whitepill the size of Texas. At the very least it shows that conservatives (social conservatives to be exact) can actually win and conserve something that isn't a fruit of progressivism. I'm in full agreement that this is only one battle in a larger war, but some battles can be decisive and this here is a major victory for the right worth celebrating, even if the victors should not lose focus and prepare to fight for the next objective.
Unironically, God bless America.
Yeah, this should be but the first step in trying to climb back up the slippery slope straight to Hell that America's been sliding down on since the '60s. At the very least, the pro-life movement should now refocus on a Right-To-Life amendment instead of resting on their laurels while emboldening others on the right with their victory, because assuredly the pro-abort side won't be giving them even a moment for peaceful celebration.
'equating being gay with being a criminal'
Hmm.
Looks at the past 7 years since Obergefell, the linked thread, and the comments
Well maybe that should be the case. As someone who used to be of a 'live and let live' inclination in my younger and much more foolish years, nothing has affirmed the notion that the fundies, Muslims and Joseph Stalin were all spot-on about the alphabet soup crowd more strongly than what's happened in less than a decade since the Supreme Court decided to force gay marriage onto the entire Union.
Seriously, that excuse reminds me of this meme about the Bohemian Grove.
Martin is greatly overrated as a writer, and his takes & themes aren't nearly as profound as he imagines them to be. It's also not the '90s anymore and a grimdark, nihilistic spin on medieval European-esque fantasies isn't particularly new or thrilling anymore. Because that's what Westeros is first & foremost, for all of Martin's boasting and that of his fans, the setting actually bears little resemblance to real-life medieval European society - or any other society period, he's been catching flak from not only right-wing medieval fans but also leftist wokies for how disconnected his depictions of the Dothraki & Ghiscari are from RL Mongols/ancient Carthaginians and instead being much more in-line with negative Victorian-era stereotypes of them. (The fantasy aspects also aren't very creative or even sensible, ex. the years or decades-long seasons, for that matter)
Anyway, if anything the opposite - an unironically noblebright, optimistic medieval fantasy - would be a fresher take these days. And the 'American Tolkien' he ain't, even if he did ever publish the next books in the series. FromSoft does 'dark edgy magical medieval fantasy' better than he does, funny enough.
If the series finale being as fucked up its own ass as it was came down to a lack of reference material beyond whatever post-it notes he gave to D&D, that's on him. Even if he had taken as long to publish TWOW (which he chronically boasted included a lot of already-written chapters that he just couldn't fit into ADWD and thus definitely wouldn't take as long to come out) as he did to publish ADWD - five years after the fourth book, AFFC - then it should've been out by 2016-17.
FFS, even D&D delayed Season 8 by an entire year (2018), that was an extra year Martin had to get the next book out. At this point I have to credit them for at least finishing their story and then dropping out of public view, however shit their ending was, unlike Martin who doesn't even have sufficient shame to just STFU about the series he'll never finish and retreat to obscurity for his remaining days. But nope, he insists on inflicting more of his unfinished universe on the world and talking shit about his dwindling fans instead.
Probably has contractual obligations to his publisher that prevent him from saying so out loud, lest he spend his last years locked in a legal battle with them.
But a few months ago, he blogged that he felt 'sorry' for fans who want the next mainline ASOIAF and not the bajillion prequels & side materials he has planned for the universe of Westeros. I think that's as clear an admission that he'll never finish which he can express without getting into legal hot water with the publisher.
I would bet that shortly after vomiting all this onto Reddit, this crotchety cunt will go off to read Handmaid's Tale and flick her bean to fantasies of getting bred by a strong alpha Aryan-looking Christian ultranationalist who is the opposite of whatever soycuck she leeches off of IRL in every way imaginable. From what I've observed the loudest and most unhinged feminists tend to, 9/10 times, also be the ones most into badly-written rapey harlequin 'romances' like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey.
Another Western Schism, perhaps. With 'the West' in this context stretching everywhere from Poland to the Americas to China, where Pope Francis has sold Chinese Catholics out to the CCP over the opposition of Cardinal Joseph Zen.
Nobody likes abortion, even when safe and legal.
Atwood lied in the very opening sentence of her article, of course there are people who like abortions. Just look at the myriad Lilithian demoniacs who in just the past few years have proudly 'shouted their abortions', celebrated with cakes on Twitter, declared it sacred and are now openly plotting to attack churches tomorrow because Trump's Justices have threatened their most sacred rite.
To me, the funniest thing about this production isn't even that its franchise is already stone-dead thanks to the decline and ultimately catastrophically bad ending to Game of Thrones, nor that GRRM is involved with this rather than even pretending to still give a shit about the still-unfinished main series 11 years after the publication of its last book.
It's that the Dance of the Dragons (as elaborated upon in worldbuilding materials World of Ice & Fire and Fire & Blood, which Martin also shat out rather than work on the next installment of the main ASOIAF series) is basically everything people came to increasingly dislike about GoT, condensed and ramped up to 11. Among other things...
=====================Here be spoilers, for anyone who cares=====================
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The core conflict pits two factions of extremely unlikable characters - ambitious usurpers, child-killers, rapists, sadistic war criminals, all-around unpleasant jerks, etc. - against each other for the right to sit on the world's pointiest chair.
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Of these, we are meant to sympathize with the leader of the 'Black' faction: Rhaenyra Targaryen, the subject of the quote in the title. A casual adulteress and mother of multiple obvious bastard children who her partisans maintain is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne because her dad King Viserys said so, despite this blatantly contravening all the laws & traditions of the Seven Kingdoms. She will go on to sign off on war crimes, including the murder of her infant nephews and bloody purges of her enemies.
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Rhaenyra's chief supporters include her uncle-husband Daemon, who resembles an Oblivion character in his portrayal by Matt Smith, and who is a ruthless warlord on top of being an all-around dick. Also the Velaryons, the family of her first husband (who she cheated on, but everyone was cool with it because he was gay), who have been made black in this show despite the paternity of their supposed children being a major complication for Rhaenyra's claim: in the books she had a little plausible deniability, not so on the show thanks to said race swap.
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The other faction, the Greens, is spearheaded by Rhaenyra's half-brother Aegon II, a fat lazy slob who is nevertheless legally the heir to the Seven Kingdoms by every actual law & custom in the land. He eventually becomes a bloodthirsty, vindictive psycho after being severely injured in battle and having his sons assassinated by Rhaenyra's partisans. The true brains of the Green clique is Aegon's mom (and Rhaenyra's stepmother) Alicent Hightower, who can be best described as a sane Cersei (or IOW a moderately intelligent and immoderately ambitious scheming bitch, if you haven't read the books or watched GoT).
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Aegon's chief supporters include Criston Cole, a knight who leads the Kingsguard (royal bodyguard comprised of seven elite knights) and was Rhaenyra's jilted ex-lover, and his middle brother Aemond, the most violently unstable & assholish Targaryen prince around who's also the rider of the most powerful dragon still alive. He & Aemond also had a third brother in the books named Daeron, who was one of literally three named adult Targaryen royals from this timeframe to act like a decent (even heroic) human being on top of being a badass and reasonable leader. (The others were Aegon's sister-wife Helaena, a body positive princess, and Rhaenys, a cousin of their father the old king who is also the token heroic Black) Naturally, unlike the diverse and good Blacks, the Green lieutenants are all vile white men and Daeron seems to have been written out of the show entirely - notably nobody has been cast in his role, unlike his brothers.
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The story ends with the Blacks and Greens obliterates each other entirely. Like her distant descendant Daenaerys does in Season 8, Rhaenyra caps off her reign with a murderous rampage and an assortment of atrocities aimed at innocent people & hostages that turns just about everyone against her - in other words, setting the realm to the torch herself. Aegon takes his chance to kill Rhaenyra, then is himself killed (by a cast of second-rate characters including random lords literally named after Sesame Street characters) to make way for Rhaenyra's older surviving son with Daemon, Aegon III, to take the throne as a child. Also, the Seven Kingdoms agree to ban women from the royal succession unless all male heirs have died first, which seems like an eminently reasonable thing to do considering what the various powerful women of the setting (again, with like two exceptions) get up to over the course of the books/series.
=====================End spoilers=====================
Tl;dr Martin and HBO have elected to adapt a part of the former's worldbuilding that is guaranteed to either piss off woke feminist watchers already mad that their heroine Daenaerys turned out to be a fairly realistic portrayal of a SJW handed ultimate power, even if the way it happened was insanely rushed (if they stick to his source material), or the people still naive enough to keep a flame lit for The Winds of Winter and/or to count themselves a part of the ASOIAF fandom (if they deviate to 'update' the story for 'modern sensibilities', even though Martin first published it in 2014).
Either way, I look forward to the fallout of GRRM basically Picarding his work at least as hard as Patrick Stewart did Picard and TNG.
Now far be it from me to advocate bestiality as a punishment, but I must confess to a belief that the Romans were still ahead of modern society when they had treacherous, murderous bitches raped to death by giraffes instead of letting them tutor the next generation into similarly subversive pieces of shit.
I think this is a big step in the right direction. Squeenix really had no clue what it was doing with its various Western IPs, as the rollout of the shitty 2014 Thief and the absolute crime they've done to DX (between the increasingly BLM-esque 'mechanical apartheid' direction they'd gone in which didn't really make sense in-universe, trying to bilk Mankind Divided for every possible cent with microtransactions and a disastrous pre-order scheme, and just plain not making any more DX games since 2016 so they can focus on capeshit instead even though MD's story would have basically the first act in any normal DX game) attests.
From what I've heard Embracer Group takes a laissez-faire approach to game development - they basically let the studios work independently with minimal oversight and are mainly involved on the marketing & financial side of things - which beats Squeenix's tendency to micromanage the hell out of their studios. And IIRC they own both Warhorse Studios (Kingdom Come Deliverance) and Beamdog (the SJW'd up Baldur's Gate remake with tranny NPCs) so I suppose Deus Ex, Tomb Raider, Thief and the other IPs they've just acquired could go either way.
But I frankly will be astonished if they manage to handle these franchises any worse than Squeenix did. Not saying it's impossible (especially in this day & age) but it would be very difficult to do worse. As if to showcase one more time just how clueless they are when it comes to handling and appraising their non-Japanese IPs, Square chose to retain low-value trash like Life Is Strange even as they're giving DX and Tomb Raider away for a pretty modest $300 million.
Infanticide never fails to put a frown on my face. But justice for infanticide, the real sort that DC courts would never dream of dishing out no less? Well that may not turn my frown upside-down because the baby's still dead, but it does take just a little bit of the sting out of this story.
Godspeed, Carl Jones. I don't know anything about you, you might be a living saint or a piece of shit, and you certainly made the horrible mistake of hooking up with a murderous druggie whore - but whatever you've done in your life before this, when you meet your Maker you can tell Him that you did at least one thing right by avenging your child and putting his birthing person (because it sure seems overly generous to call this LaDonia Boggs his 'mother') in the ground.
As always - they want you dead, your children raped & brainwashed, and they think it's nothing short of fucking hilarious.
Well I didn't downvote you and I'm not saying I disbelieve you right off the bat, but do you have a source for that? This is literally the first time I've heard of the RCID being able to resist its own dissolution by the state gov't and I can't find this anywhere else.
MSM sources like this one say that Disney will probably try to fight this out in the courts rather than by popular vote, and Democratic state legislators are saying that Disney is more powerful than DeSantis (lul, but they're totally gonna fight the megacorps in the RCI if the poor would but vote for them) - not that the voters in the RCID themselves can stop this.
I can get behind a Republican reversion away from corporate dicksucking and back toward Teddy Roosevelt. It'd mark another big step in the GOP's natural evolution toward becoming a properly right-wing populist party while the Dems continue to slide down the rainbow road to advocating completely welding corporations and the state together, anyway.
IMO it's a bit of this and a bit of plain mean-spirited cultural vandalism, wrapped up in a cloak of self-righteous masturbatory wokeness. The pieces of shit maladapting one beloved cultural property after another seriously seem to have a major hard-on for trying to turn said properties into trashfires to spite both the fans and the original creators, for daring to create (and like) 'problematic' messages - like how a core theme of WoT is that men & women are different but complement each other and need to work together, or literally everything about LOTR from its naturalistic, anti-industrial themes to Tolkien's devout Catholicism and desire to create an Anglo-Saxon natural & cultural myth.
Welp, at least the LOTR fanbase seems a lot wiser & more united in bitter opposition to Amazon's bullshit than the Wheel of Time fans were. I'm still flabbergasted that any among the latter were still surprised that a modern (or rather 'postmodern') adaptation of their source material would turn out so badly this late in the game, but at least their experience has served to further put the LOTR crowd on guard against Amazon. If anyone can turn the latest project of woke cultural vandals into a Cowboy Bebop-tier dumpster fire that gets canceled after one disastrous season, it's probably them.
Oh yes, I too mourn the days when vBulletin/XenForo/phpBB forums were all the rage, and were packed to bursting with actual geeks you could escape meatspace and nerd out with for hours about your topic of choice. For my child & teenage self, it was LOTR, early Paradox games and Total War up to Medieval II most of the time, and anime/manga to a lesser extent. Discussions were unfiltered for the most part, and certainly nobody would give you shit for being 'problematic' for talking about Tolkien's religiosity & political views or writing an AAR where you conquered the map & exterminated Muslim towns as the Kingdom of Jerusalem. I talked with both kids younger than myself and working men & pensioners twice my age or even older on a relatively equal footing, made my first online friends and got into play-by-post roleplaying on those forums.
Those good old days seem to have steeply declined since 2007-08, and pretty much came to an end altogether with Gamergate exploding in 2014-15. In hindsight that mid-2000s to early-2010s era felt like a perfect evolution of the Internet since Usenet and AOL, where there was truly a place for everyone, everyone could build their own place and the possibilities really seemed endless. Nowadays spaces like those old forums are sometimes still around but have fallen into obscurity (more often than not they have, as you say, gone extinct or worse still - gone corporate), while the rest of the Internet is dominated by these tech giants that want to make 'spaces for everyone' overrun by tranny jannies, corporate shills and ads. Fuck, I'd kill to have the 2003-07 Internet back now.
Personally this has removed any doubt on my part about whether he or DeSantis would be better-suited for 2024. Trump's not only ancient, he has just shown that he simply doesn't and never will have the judgment of character for the White House. He gets back in and as satisfying as it will be to hear the left reeee, it's pretty damn clear from this & his trail of other terrible endorsements that he'll continue to fail catastrophically in dealing with the Deep State. And as 2017-2021 already demonstrated, the latter is of vastly greater consequence than the former.
Fuck's sake, Oz's progressive positions (up to & including promoting transgender surgeries for kids) are pretty well-documented at this point. Even if Trump manages to get the presidency back in 2024, it looks like all the FBI brass need to do to keep their jobs is blow some sunshine up his ass, then he'll happily declare that he's impressed upon them the need for change and they'll happily go right back to plotting his overthrow and/or demise.
Embracing healthy sexual norms to own the chuds.
I'm lovin' this almost as much as I love the libs who have gone full mask-off and are now yelling 'FUCKING CHRISTIAN NATIONALISTS, I HOPE YOUR WIVES AND DAUGHTERS GET RAPED & IMPREGNATED BY A HORDE OF FERAL NIGGERS' on social media.