So the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “The glass is half empty.”
Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.” YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.
Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts.
Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned. Feeling resigned is not hopepunk.
Examples! THE HANDMAID’S TALE is arguably hopepunk. It’s scary and dark, and at first glance it looks like grimdark because it’s a dystopia… but goddammit she keeps fighting. That’s the key, right there. She fights every single day, because she won’t let them take away meaning from her life. She survives stubbornly in the hope that one day she can live again. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” is one of the core tenets of hopepunk, along with, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon were hopepunk. (Remember: Hopepunk isn’t about moral perfection. It’s not about being as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. You get grubby when you fight. You make mistakes. You’re sometimes a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you’re as much as 50% an asshole. But the glass is half full, not half empty. You get up, and you keep fighting, and caring, and trying to make the world a little better for the people around you. You get to make mistakes. It’s a process. You get to ask for and earn forgiveness. And you love, and love, and love.)
And THIS, this is hopepunk:
HOPE AND HONESTY IN A SOCIETY THAT VALUES CYNICISM AND DECEPTION IS SUBVERSIVE AND THEREFOR PUNK
I AM HERE FOR THIS MOVEMENT. HOPE AND HONESTY ARE DEEPLY PUNK ROCK. KINDNESS IS GOTH AS FUCK.
I do lean toward Lyanna going with Rhaegar willingly, given her general impulsiveness (see especially the Knight of the Laughing Tree), her explicit distaste for her fiancé Robert, and the connection forged between the wolf maid and the silver prince at Harrenhal. I also, however, think that your characterization of this decision is overly harsh, because I place the blame squarely on Rhaegar’s shoulders.
He came to her, not the other way around. He was an adult, and a married man with two children; she was a child, and merely betrothed. He made this decision in cold blood, setting up an entire infrastructure to support it (Wylla, the Kingsguard, the Tower of Joy); she made a rash romantic split-second decision that, for all we know, she came to regret. He wasn’t some handsome hedge knight with whom Lyanna had a roll in the hay; he was the crown prince, heir to the Iron Throne, and so even if Lyanna wanted to say no, she would’ve felt tremendous pressure to say yes. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Westerosi history could tell you how unwise it is to refuse a Targaryen.
For me, the central political problem here isn’t that Rhaegar had a liaison with Lyanna. That’s bad, don’t get me wrong, but it could’ve been smoothed over. What made that impossible is that Rhaegar vanished with Lyanna for a significant length of time, without explaining to anyone why he did it, and left his thoroughly insane father to handle the fallout. As such, I feel that I am on solid ground in saying that the subsequent cataclysm is far, far more Rhaegar’s fault than Lyanna’s.
Finally, given Rhaegar’s obsession with prophecy and his belief that his child by Lyanna would fulfill that prophecy, I think it’s fair to say that if she’d said no, he would probably have taken her by force. As such, I don’t think Lyanna had any real control over the outcome of this situation.
That depends entirely on what Aerys’s reign would be like without the threat of the Blackfyres. As we have explained to us by Ser Kyle the Cat, plenty of reason why the Blackfyres have so much success is the royal inaction of Aerys I and Bloodraven in the wake of Dagon Greyjoy’s reaving, along with backlash against Brynden’s increasingly draconian policies regarding the peasantry attempting to move their location in an attempt to find relief from the drought. Meanwhile, Bloodraven increasingly gains more and more power as the Hand, staffing the royal keep with loyalists, keeping all royal power to focus east on Bittersteel and the sons of Daemon Blackfyre. It’s a strong negative message, telling the people of Westeros: “Our duties to you are less important than keeping us on our Iron Throne.” Hence why even though Daeron II didn’t take the field, his two capable sons Baelor and Maekar did at the Redgrass Field and Daeron was hailed for it. Aerys’s policies on the Throne give a different message: “The troubles that you are suffering are not important to us.” Whereas Baelor and Maekar took to the field, showing that the Targaryens would put themselves at risk the same as a levy soldier and do their part to uphold their traditional duties, Aerys shut himself in the keep consuming various arcane esoterica while Bloodraven restricted the traditional rights of lord and peasant alike via his failed police state. Bloodraven’s rule had all the drawbacks of a police state: elimination of dissent, brutal suppression of individual rights and dignity, a culture of paranoia, and more besides, but didn’t even being render protection. The message is clear, the feudal obligations are not to protect the realm and its people, but to maintain the security of the Targaryen regime and the Iron Throne at the expense of everyone else.
Feudal vassals, whose basic authority as outlined in feudalism is the vassal’s service in exchange for the king’s aegis, require the king to act as a protector of the lands, hence why Protector of the Realm is a real and important title, important enough that Prince Aemond One-Eye assumed the title during the incapacity of his brother Aegon II early in the Dance. The vassal owes military service, but in times of crisis, the king uses the military service of his various vassals for the defense of the kingdom. In that sense, the instability of the Blackfyres didn’t keep the weak Targaryen regime from sliding even further, the weak Targaryen regime instead fed the Blackfyre cause as the king repeatedly failed his obligations and instead preserved royal power and stability at the expense of the aristocracy, who had to protect their own lands without the benefit of the large royal armies and coffers, and the people, who were subject to the Greyjoy raids and Brynden’s anti-vagrant policies.
So in actuality, what stabilized the Targaryen regime was not the Blackfyre presence of an outside enemy, but long-suffering, long-ignored Maekar Targaryen, who took to the field once again to crush the Third Blackfyre Rebellion and throw away the generation who saw Aerys as nothing but a weak, absentee king.
Any attempt to overthrow Aerys would require a Great Council no matter who is trying to press a claim. That’s an unprecedented move and the only way to accomplish it–short of winning the throne by strength of arms– is to put the matter in front of the lords of the realm and get their acclamation. There is no (peaceful) way to avoid it, whether it’s Steffon or Robert and Rhaegara spearheading the anti-Aerys wave.
As I said in my original post, any chances of Robert and Rhaegara getting married rests on the kind of relationship Steffon and Aerys have. If Aerys suspects Steffon of conspiring to usurp the throne, he is not agreeing to a betrothal that would make his cousin’s claim more potent and make him a more appealing replacement king. Wedding his son to the princess means that Steffon would have no competing claim to hinder any plans to displace Aerys, since Steffon’s good-daughter would not be expected to oppose her good-father which makes it easier for him to win the throne.
Note that Rhaegara’s hand would also be extremely valuable in this scenario – and the most natural way for Aerys to gain allies to secure his hold on the throne. If he marries Rhaegara into a wealthy and powerful house, he guarantees their support of him and their steadfast opposition to Steffon whose kingship would mean Rhaegara’s husband loses a crown. Bartering his daughter’s hand is the easiest and most assured way for Aerys to build a power bloc that counters Steffon’s; so why would he waste it and give it to the guy whose power he wants to check?
Sam speaks 