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Rum Hamilton

@rum-hamilton

Dis my fanblog. Currently focused on what happens when a 30yo bi woman gets really into comics
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goodqueenaly
Anonymous asked:

Why was melissa blackwood so loved? What kind of relationship did she have with Aegon?

goodqueenaly answered:

We know unfortunately little in detail about Melissa Blackwood. Yandel notes that “Missy had a kind heart and generous nature that led even Queen Naerys herself - as well as the Dragonknight and Prince Daeron - to befriend her”. She also managed to stay with the king for around five years, longer than any other mistress save Bellegere (and their interactions were likely sporadic at best, given Bellegere’s career as a trader and pirate and her habit of having a “husband in every port”).

Now, why she was so loved … well, I imagine that was because Melissa Blackwood worked hard to make sure that she stayed in the king’s affections for as long as possible. In particular, I think Melissa Blackwood took note of the example of Barba Bracken and made that her model of what not to be as a royal mistress. Where Barba had been vivacious and outspoken, Melissa would be quiet, kind, and gracious. More importantly, where Barba had made enemies in the legitimate royals - enemies who had then called for her ouster from court - Melissa would make sure that she had, if not the support, at least not the open hostility of the Queen, the crown prince, and the royal Kingsguard knight. What form her campaign took is unknown, but I would presume that she always spoke deferentially to these royals, insisted that they were seated in their proper places at court events, maybe even sending the queen flowers and gifts as Madame du Pompadour was noted to have done for Queen Marie Leczinska. I could also see where Melissa might have followed the examples of successful consorts before her to win favor, supporting charities like Rhaenys or being courteous and gracious toward smallfolk like Alysanne. Overall, I think Melissa tried to strike a balance between using her newly exalted position for the benefit of others and reminding the court that she was only the king’s companion, not his would-be wife. 

As for Melissa and Aegon’s relationship, again, I think Melissa would have tried her best to be a calming influence in his life; Melissa’s apparent tactfulness and gentleness might have given Aegon a sense of stability (something he might have thought was lacking in his life since his mother had left him at a young age). I have to imagine Melissa was someone who could tolerate Aegon’s probable petty rages, his demanding nature, his jealousies and insatiable appetite; presumably, she would neither have berated him (as Anne Boleyn did when Henry VIII proved unfaithful, which caused Henry to compare Anne negatively toward his first wife) nor have been slavishly devoted to him (which he might have tired of with Cassella Vaith), but struck a difficult middle course. For his part, I think Aegon might have thought Melissa was in a perfect position to be the dignified consort he had never had in retiring Naerys: here was a woman whose high birth and innate graciousness would allow her to preside over courtly functions with dignity. After the scandal of Barba and the Bracken ambitions, Aegon might have wanted someone who seemed quiet, dignified, and as far from troublesome as possible, and Melissa probably fit that bill excellently.

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goodqueenaly
astroboxuniverse asked:

What do you think Melissa Blackwoods motivation was? Why did she become Aegons mistress when he a) clearly was not an attractive partner and b) unlikely to marry her. Every other mistress gets a pretty understandable motivation (he was hot to becoming queen to a patron) except her. Am I missing something?

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goodqueenaly answered:

Number one, I think it’s important to note the huge power disparity between Melissa and Aegon. She was merely a relation (of unknown closeness) of the Lord of Raventree Hall - hardly the smallest of Riverrun’s bannermen, but not as great as their Tully overlords, and much less than the Targaryen royals. As Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, Aegon had largely unchecked power over his subjects, including the power to reward or punish them at his whim. I think Melissa was pretty smart, but it wouldn’t have taken much genius at all to realize that Aegon could make her life miserable if she refused him. If she said no, she would have had no guarantee that Aegon would not try to punish her or House Blackwood - by taking away lands (as he did from House Bracken later with the Teats), perhaps, or by appropriating its wealth (as he did from Ossifer Plumm), or even by drumming up charges against them (as he did against his own queen, and later presumably against Bethany Bracken and her father). Plus, even if she did refuse, there would have likewise been no guarantee that Aegon would not have tried to take her by force, and do whatever he pleased to House Blackwood. Melissa, a teenage daughter of an old but not overwhelmingly powerful House, would have already been in a tough spot to say no to a king completely driven by his own selfish desires and absolutist in his quest to fulfill them.

Number two, I don’t think it should be discounted that her Blackwood relations might have been encouraging her to accept or even seek out herself the position of mistress. With a Bracken now ousted from the seat of power (and Aegon IV perhaps feeling peevish toward that family), the Blackwoods might have seen this as the perfect opportunity to press their advantage. Melissa, everything that Barba was not, might have seemed in their minds the ideal ambassadress of Blackwood interests - a woman who, in sharing the king’s bed, could whisper to her royal lover about lands and offices and titles that the Blackwoods wanted, the sort of rewards Aegon could and did lavish on the families of his favorites (even if it’s not clear whether Aegon made a Blackwood Hand, as he did for the Brackens, Lothstons, and Serenei’s patron Jon Hightower). Again, what power would Melissa have to refuse her father/brother/uncle/cousin? As a Westerosi woman (and a young woman at that) without lands or titles in her own right, her livelihood depended on what her male relations chose to do with her; I doubt Melissa would have seen many good consequences of refusing them. 

Relatedly, I think that there might have been a certain faction at court that also encouraged Melissa to accept the king’s advances, such as they were. After all, Barba had been ousted from the position largely because she had attempted to supplant Naerys as queen, and probably install her own little son as the new heir in place of Daeron. Barba had failed, of course, but a dangerous precedent had been set - an ambitious noblewoman could attempt to use the position of royal mistress to aim for the throne. Those who wished to keep Naerys as queen and Prince Daeron as the heir to the throne might have wanted to ensure that the next occupant of the place of royal mistress would be someone who would not try to marry Aegon or advance her children by him as royal heirs. Melissa, sweet, modest, and gentle (and, I think, already at court as one of the queen’s lady companions), might have appeared the very sort to share the king’s bed without aiming for more.

Plus, and this is not unimportant, Aegon IV might not yet have been the rotting mess he was at the end of his reign when he first approached Melissa. He was “fat and foul-tempered” when he was with her successor, Bethany Bracken, but at 37 (when their affair first began), there might still have been traces of the handsome, charming youth about the king. (Henry VIII, to whom Aegon IV is often - though I think largely unfairly - compared, really started to decline in health and appearance after his major jousting accident of 1536, when at the age of 44 Henry suffered a very serious jousting accident - he fell off his horse and was crushed underneath it, going unconscious for two hours and sustaining a major leg wound that festered and never healed for the rest of his life.) It might not have seemed so unattractive a fate, especially for the daughter of a non-paramount House, to be the de facto first lady of the realm, fawned upon by courtiers, showered with gifts, doted upon by the king himself. As a Blackwood maid, she might have at best married the lord or heir of one of her family’s neighbors, or very maybe a Tully; as the mistress of the king, she could be at the summit of favor for the whole of the Seven Kingdoms, a queen in all but name. 

So if Melissa were feeling considerable pressure from her family and the king, if she thought that there were few options for her otherwise, and if she was perhaps charmed by the prospect of becoming the king’s mistress and not completely disgusted with the king himself as of yet, I could see where Melissa eventually acceded and became Aegon’s mistress.

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goodqueenaly

I’m so curious what happened to (among, obviously, many others) Melissa Blackwood, specifically after she ceased to be the principal mistress of Aegon IV. Yandel leaves her ultimate fate at best ambiguous: while he describes Melissa as having “reigned” as Aegon’s mistress for five years, and notes that Barba Bracken and her father groomed Bethany “expressly to win the king’s favor and displace Melissa Blackwood”, the author does not actually note what the king decided to do with Melissa, or Melissa (or her family) decided to do on her behalf, once Aegon IV “took [Bethany] back with him to King’s Landing”. This is in contrast to virtually every other principal mistress of Aegon IV: Prince Viserys “persuaded the king [i.e. King Aegon III] to name [Lucas] Lothston Lord of Harrenhal in order to remove Falena from court” and “return[ed] Megette to her husband” following the end of that affair, King Baelor “pardoned all the hostages” - including Casella Vaith - “and personally took them back to Dorne” following Daeron I’s assassination, Princes Daeron and Aemon “forced [King] Aegon [IV] to send [her i.e. Barba Bracken] and the bastard away” once Queen Naerys recovered from childbirth, “Lady Bethany and her father were executed” following discovery of the Terrence Toyne affair, and “the Lothstons were … all sent from court” once the king infected Jeyne with a “pox”.

I do think it is worth noting, though, what Yandel says about Melissa’s son Brynden a little later in TWOIAF. Yandel notes that Brynden “had been able to maintain his close relations at court” because “[his] mother had been well loved during her life, and was fondly remembered”. To me, this language suggests that Melissa died relatively early, at the very least before Brynden was beginning to make his way at court: the detail on her being loved “during her life” might imply that that life had already been lived (and finished) by the time Yandel is referring to, while the phrase “fondly remembered” seems like the sort of language one would use for a time - or, say, a person - permanently gone and only recalled from the impassable gulf of nostalgia (compare, say, Asha’s wry commentary to Tristifer Botley that she “remember[ed] that [i.e. their shared childhood experiences] as well” but “not as fondly as you do”, or Sansa in the guise of “Alayne Stone” commenting that she “remembered[ed] Gulltown fondly” while adding “a smile as vague as it was pleasant”, in testament to the invented backstory of “Alayne Stone” as a native of the city). It’s of course entirely possible that Melissa could have outlived Aegon IV but died early in the reign of Daeron II, and it’s likewise possible that these phrases were more an artistic choice than an indication of a character’s biographical data, but I still think there’s a fair argument to say that they might reflect on an early death for Melissa Blackwood.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if, having been sent away from court by the king when he installed Bethany as his new mistress, Melissa returned to Raventree Hall only to die of a sudden illness shortly thereafter. Still young - Melissa would only have been in her late teens or at most very early 20s when she ceased to be the king’s mistress - Melissa could be preserved in memory (specifically the king’s, the Blackwoods’, and the court’s respective memories) as an idealized figure: eternally youthful, eternally beautiful, eternally faithful to the king, obedient to his will even when it meant she was cast away. How easily the Blackwood faction might have played such a fate up for Aegon IV, framing Melissa’s illness as a sort of pining away for the king, dying of a broken heart because the king had believed ill of her. Indeed, such an argument might have gained even greater strength once the Bethany Bracken and Terrence Toyne affair came to light (especially if the Brackens had used a suggestion of unfaithfulness to oust Melissa from the king’s affections): those no-good-very-bad Brackens had driven away the king’s good and faithful mistress through wicked calumnies to advance their own, faithless daughter as Melissa’s replacement, and look how that had ended - again, so the Blackwoods might have argued. 

Too, I think this might make some sense from a real world inspiration perspective. With GRRM openly referring to Aegon IV as “the Henry VIII of Westeros”, it’s clear that he’s drawing at least some inspiration from at least some of Henry VIII’s wives for mistresses of this king. So to the extent that we readers are supposed to see Barba Bracken and Melissa Blackwood as versions of Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour - or, at least, versions of the broad popular images of those women, the ambitious, vivacious mistress versus the gentle, well-loved mistress - then this may be a variation on Jane Seymour’s death; Melissa did not die in or as the result of childbirth, but she would have died, were this true, as the idealized love of the king. Likewise, GRRM clearly modeled Bethany Bracken to some extent on the popular conception of the story of Katherine Howard, and while I would not say Melissa Blackwood’s story resembles that of Anne of Cleves (who was, of course, Katherine Howard’s predecessor as queen) in any meaningful way, it is worth noting that both Anne and her brother the Duke of Cleves eagerly anticipated Henry restoring Anne to queenship following Katherine Howard’s downfall, with Anne being praised by one contemporary woman in contrast to “the Queen that now is” [i.e. Katherine Howard, already imprisoned at the time of the remark]; a dead Melissa could obviously not be restored as the king’s mistress, but could very much be lamented as a virtuous, honorable woman who had been replaced by “the mistress that now is”.

I’m not saying I want Melissa as a character to die young - by no means! But if GRRM is implying via Yandel that she did, then I can see how that story might play out. A king so recently betrayed (in his own mind) by the mistress for whom he turned out Melissa, grown nostalgic for a woman he could not go back to; a court lamenting the sweet and good-natured predecessor of the late Bracken mistress, who had in her time won over even the king’s sister-wife, brother, and son; the Blackwoods eagerly seizing on this nostalgia to portray their relation as the king’s true love and faithful to the king even to death, and her children by Aegon as virtual orphans, cast aside not by their father’s displeasure but by their ancient enemy’s enmity and falsehood - with, of course, the expectation that those fine feelings by king and court would prompt Aegon to raise his children by Melissa as favored courtiers instead of letting them languish in genteel exile.

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visenyaism

i do need fire and blood two because at present bloodraven has 2 absolutely unremarked on seemingly normal older sisters and it’s so crazy to me. like yours is the blood of old god worshippers with ambiguous magic talents and also old valyrian crazy sauce. your half brother is the king. your other half brother is leading an ongoing rebellion against him. your most normal half siblings are doing crazy influencer numbers in braavos. your other other half brother is on the side of the bastard rebellion and also he’s locked in a freaky supernatural psychosexual obsession love triangle with your half sister who may or may not be a blood witch and your baby brother who is also the chosen one of the old gods or something.

you though. you are just posted in raventree hall like playing cornhole with elderly former 13 year old war criminal uncle benjicot. mya and gwenys rivers were so real for this

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wweskywalker

“During the five years of her ‘reign’, Missy bore the king three bastards, most notably the boy Brynden Rivers, later called Bloodraven.” #FireAndBlood

L-R: Gwenys, Brynden, and Mya Rivers

Nobody ever seems to draw Bloodraven’s sisters, and they’re probably dead as infants in canon, so I will 🥳

Gwenys got her father’s hair and eyes, though hers is a very deep dark hue. I gave Mya the similar flavor I ought to give Missy one day when I draw her. I find it very hard determining their palette and couture since we know so little of them aside from being Bloodraven’s sisters, and although they’re bastards, their mother was Aegon’s favorite, even in favor with Queen Naerys. So it’s all up to our imaginations :)

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tumbledrylowwest

Aegon the Unworthy and his sister-wife Naerys, their two trueborn children and his many bastards.

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tronodiferro

The Seeds of the Blackfyre Rebellion From left to right: Daemon Blackfyre; Aegor Rivers/Bittersteel; Barbra Bracken; Shiera Seastar; Brynden Rivers/Bloodraven; Mya Rivers; Melissa Blackwood; Gwenys Rivers. Background: Aegon IV Targaryen the Unworthy.

From and art by JotaSaraiva

Source: tumblr.com