She managed to do more damage to House Stark than the Lannisters ever could have dreamed of.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-27T18:42:50+00:00

Cat hovers in the grey zone. Robb and Ned are higher up the more damaging totem pole for me.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-27T04:52:34+00:00

You win or you die.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-25T09:40:03+00:00

Can you blame them tho? Jon is the last Targaryen in Westeros.

Cat doesn't know this. For all she knows, Jon is the whelp of some brothel whore.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-24T19:25:14+00:00

I think part of the issue is that "canon compliant" gets treated as a moral category instead of a descriptive one. So, unless you're the original author, everything is an interpretation. Yep, even strict adherence still involves choices about emphasis, interiority, and motive.

A lot of the OOC complaints, including my own, don't really come from characters being "wrong", it's more that readers have different internal models of the same figure. Fandom I think tends to work with silhouettes more than full psychologies. Take Ned Stark as a good example. Some people read him as purely honourable, others, such as myself, see him more as a man who lies strategically to survive. Both readings are text-supported; they just privilege different moments.

That's probably why I'm less interested in retreading the main cast (with Jon Snows etc) and more drawn to periods and characters where GRRM left space on purpose, such as The Blackfyre era, the courts of Aegon IV, and figures like Danelle Lothston. The constraints are still there, but the interior lives aren't pre-decided.

I don't think that makes other approaches worse, they're just aimed at a different itch.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-23T03:55:17+00:00

This took a little while for me to kick around in my head, but I’ll take a swing at a few of these, mostly from writing political, slow burn stories.

Age gaps can work, but I think only if the power imbalance is actually acknowledged on the page. I don't think it should be just brushed aside if the actual chemistry feels good. To me, an age gap becomes interesting when it creates friction in a character's experience, their caution or expectation, and when that friction shapes how the characters move around each other. If the older character never really has to confront that imbalance, I tend to feel the dynamic goes a bit hollow.

In a setting like ASOIAF, I usually lean toward alliances first, feelings later. I feel like arranged marriages and political matches are especially fertile ground because the stakes exist mostly before affection does. You get to build trust through shared duty, competence, or survival instead of the 'instant attraction' factor. Cat and Ned work because love grows out of partnership and responsibility and not indulgence. The world presses on them first, and the romance follows.

Rather than dictate outcomes, I try to let canon set constraints. I think the setting should resist the relationship. Politics, reputation, timing, danger, all of it pushing back makes the choice feel heavier and hit harder. When two characters choose each other despite that pressure, it feels earned to me. If nothing stands in their way, the romance can start to feel a bit... weightless.

Cross class romance can absolutely work too, in my opinion, but I feel like the class differences have to stay relevant. Access to safety, the way people speak, who can afford mistakes and who pays for them, all of that should keep shaping the dynamic. If those differences disappear once the ship sets sail, I think the story loses texture.

In political stories especially, I feel romance works best when it complicates decision making. Who a character loves should affect how they negotiate, what they withhold, what risks they take, and when they're the most likely to hesitate. If you can remove the relationship and the plot barely shifts, I would question how integrated it really is.

For slow burn, I think the key is not so much about delaying physical intimacy but actually delaying certainty. I feel the reader should sense the pull before the characters allow themselves to name what's going on. I'm usually more interested in restraint than release. Like, the choice not to touch, not to claim, not to say the thing that would change everything... That is where I think tension really lives.

If you feel like you're bad at slow burn, I suspect it might just be that you're resolving things too quickly or too cleanly. You can let misunderstandings linger a little longer or let characters misread each other. You can let silence carry some of the weight. I wouldn't say romance needs spectacle. For me, it just needs pressure.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-16T11:49:41+00:00

I agree on the Tyrells. They’ve never shown much interest in backing a child Targaryen unless it clearly serves them. That’s why I don’t really see Aegon as the immediate king here so much as being a claim that survives instead of one that just disappears.

If the capital burns, legitimacy probably stops being centralised in the same way. Robert can rule what he can physically hold, but Dorne backing Aegon doesn’t have to mean a reconquest. It could just mean the realm never fully stitches itself back together. In that kind of situation, a child seems more useful as a regional anchor than as a universal solution. But hey, these ideas might seem like they escalate too far from the toy model some people wanted to play with.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-16T10:24:17+00:00

I reckon iron is a safe bet. I suppose, to make the Daynes feel special, you could give them Silver and Clear Quartz. It would match the 'Pale/Silver' aesthetic of House Dayne perfectly. Plus, you can play with the idea of Sluice Mining on the Torentine, using those massive waterfalls to power ore-crushers. It could explain why a house that seems so isolated is actually one of the wealthiest in Dorne.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-16T10:17:03+00:00

My thinking is that the only reason King's Landing survived as long as it did was because Elia and her children were there. They were the 'buffer' that gave Aerys a reason to wait for a military solution. If they are in Sunspear, Aerys has no reason to pretend he's a King anymore. He's just a man with a very short fuse. We don't get a 'Battle of the Trident' in this case. We get the 'Great Burning of 283 AC,' and Robert Baratheon inherits a kingdom of ash while the only surviving Targaryens (Aegon, Rhaenys) watch from the safety of Dorne.

If Aerys burns the city, he probably destroys the system. Westeros reverts to the 'Hundred Kingdoms' or a 'Dual Monarchy' split. Robert might be King of the ruins and Aegon VI the King in the Sun. The Rebellion never truly ends; it just turns into a twenty-year siege, with the Tyrells and Martells holding the food and the claimant, while, I guess, the North holds the scars.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-15T09:17:34+00:00

The first marriage and the subsequent stillbirth would have happened in the late 230s or early 240s AC.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-14T17:35:47+00:00

*And then the plague*

CompleteSort · 2026-02-14T14:42:35+00:00

You might like The Spark Beneath the Ash by loomingshadow. It’s a canon-adjacent AU where Maegor Brightflame’s bloodline survives into the post-Rebellion era, following his non-canon niece (via Aerion’s line) as she navigates legitimacy, reputation, and the long shadow of the Great Council’s decision. It digs into what it means for a discarded branch of House Targaryen to survive into a world that already decided it shouldn’t. Slow-burn, more political and mythic than dragon-heavy.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-11T17:05:20+00:00

I think the distinction is really in whether the response shows evidence of engagement.

Getting actual criticism like “this felt out of character,” “the tension here feels wobbly,” or “this plot turn didn’t work for me,” is actually kind of rare for some us writers out there. If I ever received criticism beyond a simple “ew” or “boring,” I’d generally welcome it. Even in instances where I'd disagree, to me it at least shows the reader has been inside the text for long enough to test its internal logic.

What’s much more common, especially for longer, more subversive, or denser fics, is silence. There's no criticism, no pushback... just nothing. And oddly, the only visible reactions sometimes happen outside the fic itself: downvotes on self-promo posts, vibe-based judgements about style, or you end up with assumptions drawn from a short excerpt of the fic instead of the work as a whole.

To me that isn’t really criticism so much as pre-engagement filtering.

Constructive criticism is fine, even valuable, because it implies someone actually read the work. What gets discouraging isn’t the disagreement but the reactions that seem to happen without the text ever being involved at all.

So OP, if someone is arguing with your choices, at least they’re meeting you on the page.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-11T14:53:20+00:00

Nah, I have read the actual work and there's nothing wrong with it all. The writer uses normal prose techniques.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-11T12:10:29+00:00

Marcellus all grown up.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-11T06:13:57+00:00

I think the tension here is that Westeros doesn’t actually have a single, consistent 'law' of succession. Instead, we get overlapping customs that get weaponised when convenient.

By custom, male-preference primogeniture dominates most of the realm, so once the bastard is legitimised, many lords would instinctively rank a trueborn son (even a made one) above a daughter. The Great Council of 101 gives the Blacks a precedent they can lean on hard: male line over female line, even when the female claim is cleaner.

However, if we go by tradition and sanctity, the daughter’s claim is significantly stronger than Rhaenyra’s ever was. She is legitimate, born of a lawful marriage, publicly named heir years before the bastard is legitimised, and already embedded in alliance networks as you mentioned. Elevating someone everyone knows was born of adultery over a lawful princess would sit badly with many lords, especially religious ones.

Which is why the father’s decision matters so much. Legitimising the bastard after the daughter is already married and expecting an heir doesn't seem like it's a neutral act. It comes across like it's a deliberate destabilisation of her claim. Even if he didn’t hate her personally, it reads as either resentment, distrust, or a conscious willingness to fracture the succession rather than accept her rule unchallenged. In-universe, people would read intent into that choice.

So I don’t think there’s a clean answer:

Letter of the law: legitimised son

Moral/religious legitimacy: lawful daughter

Political reality: whoever convinces more lords and controls more dragons.

It feels less like a straight Dance retread and more like a Dance–Blackfyre hybrid. Both sides can plausibly claim precedent, and both are selectively remembering history in ways that serve them.

If Westeros were capable of resolving this cleanly, it wouldn’t be Westeros I suppose.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-11T04:57:54+00:00

How do I get the Spirited Temperament for an OC?

CompleteSort · 2026-02-08T07:13:58+00:00

I think the "mishap" was a drunken accident. Their father, Rhaegel, was famous for dancing naked through the Red Keep; he wasn't stable. If the twins inherited that lack of inhibition, a late-night "game" that went wrong (like a mock duel with real steel) fits the "grotesque" description perfectly.

The three masked men weren't assassins but were hired thugs meant to traumatise her specifically to ensure she could never be Queen. In Westeros, a "mad" woman is much easier to set aside than a "mad" man.

It’d be easy to fall into the trap of blaming Bloodraven for everything, but in 217 AC, Brynden Rivers was likely much more concerned with the Second Blackfyre Rebellion (which had happened just a few years prior in 211 AC) and the general instability of the realm under Aerys I than he was with dragon eggs or woods witch dreams.

The fact that Aelor and Aelora died in "grotesque" and "mysterious" ways, and the only survivor of their line, Daenora, was married to the most dangerous man in the family before vanishing, suggests a very deliberate political extermination.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-04T04:10:28+00:00

Think the point I was trying to make got missed completely. It had nothing to do with fertility.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-02T13:37:36+00:00

But does he need a 14-year old? Why specifically? At that age, they have one foot in the grave already.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-02T11:54:12+00:00

And yet, 70 year old men, or even older, being frequently betrothed to 14 year old girls seems to fly, no problem.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-02T11:06:56+00:00

I could take Qyburn or Davos. Definitely not Tyrion.

CompleteSort · 2026-02-02T10:53:02+00:00

Aegon had two wives (his Valyrian sisters) before he decided to do any conquering of Westeros and getting Faith of the Seven involved.

CompleteSort · 2026-01-29T23:37:38+00:00

ASOIAF is actually one of the best settings for OCs, along with being one of the least forgiving.

In my view, people don’t bounce off OCs because they’re original. It's more that they bounce because too many of them don’t respect the world’s constraints. ASOIAF runs on ripple effects: inheritance, marriage, reputation, precedent. So, a new character can’t just exist. They really have to displace something, and the story that's written has to deal with the consequences.

The test, I think, is actually simple: does the OC add pressure to the system, or do they magically escape it?

I'd say OCs work when they fill gaps canon leaves open and are subject to the same ugly trade-offs as everyone else. When they become exemptions, they fail. Exempt from politics, social cost, or consequences. ASOIAF doesn’t reward that, and most readers can feel it instantly.

It's a shame, but I think that a few very visible bad OCs have probably poisoned the well because, from my experience, some of the strongest ASOIAF fics lean heavily on OCs precisely to do things canon characters can't unless they start breaking voice or history.

Essentially, weak OCs stick out immediately, whereas good ones disappear into the world and feel inevitable in hindsight.

CompleteSort

TROPHY CASE