Hopefully a long, long time, because I think there’s a lot more stories left in Gambit/Rogue as a heisty couple than there is in will-they-won’t-they, after 20 years of the latter.
Author: stevenattewell
What did you think of the Kitty and Colossus wedding twist?
Well, given my feelings about the marriage as a concept, I might as well comment.
WARNING: Spoilers for X-Men Gold #30.
I would categorize the fandom’s issue with the wedding being twofold: first, that writers would use the marriage between Kitty and Colossus to avoid ever having to address Kitty’s bisexuality, and the deeply emotionally intimate (if not canonically physically intimate) relationships she’s had with Rachel Grey and Illyana Rasputin (which has got to be a source of awkwardness, given her role in the proceedings). At the same time, it’s not like bisexual people don’t get married to opposite-sex partners, but it’s rare for writers to tackle that and do a decent job. (I believe @elanabrooklyn has some more thoughts on this.)
Another reason is that Kitty and Piotr’s relationship has always been a rather rocky one, as the comic itself notes, and leaving aside the fact that Kitty began pursuing the relationship when she was 13 and Piotr was 19, it’s been marked by Piotr dumping Kitty via editorial mandate back during Secret Wars, and recently(ish) him getting very creepy with her when he was possessed by the Phoenix Force:
That’s not to say that they’re the only comics couple with issues, but there hasn’t exactly been a lot of time where the two of them have had a chance to work out these issues and demonstrate some real passion and chemistry. Which made the whole thing feel very editorially-mandated.
And then we get to the switcheroo: Kitty gets cold feet literally with the ring being slid on her finger and phases into the ground, which is a VERY soap opera-y way to do it. (To be honest, I feel like the event would have landed better if there had been better build-up where we see Kitty having second thoughts all the way through.) At the same time, there’s nothing very concrete about why she gets cold feet, and her bisexuality remains unmentioned.
…And then Rogue and Gambit get married instead, which I love as an idea, especially since it’s in the wake of the x-cellent Rogue & Gambit miniseries by Kelly Thompson in which Remy and Anna Marie processed a lot of continuity in a way that made me believe in the relationship in a way I hadn’t in years, and iit’s leading into a new series written by the same Kelly Thompson in which Rogue and Gambit are going to do married heist shenanigans in space, which is what this couple should have been doing for a long time if comics writers were less relationship-phobic.
The switcheroo does feel a bit abrupt, and I wonder if it woudln’t have worked better if they’d been a bit more experimental with time and sequence, showing us a happy wedding but also these two couples intersecting, one coming closer together and another drifting apart, but kept us in the dark as to which were which. Also, the speed at which Colossus and Kitty make up and just smoothly pivot to marrying off their friends doesn’t feel genuine.
That being said, I loved the background stuff: the fun interactions between the Jeans and Rachel, Lockheed’s +1, and Storm providing for perfect weather in full gown.
TLDR: the whole wedding storyline seems a bit of a bust, but the silver lining is we get more great Rogue and Gambit stuff.
Regarding Riverrun-2, would a Lord Paramount actually have the power to just take a chunk of land like that from an existing lord? And would he need permission (from the King?) to build a castle and start charging a toll?
Well, it’s not entirely clear who the land at the confluence of the RedFork and the Blue Fork belongs to. There aren’t a lot of noble houses listed in that area – there’s the Mallisters up on the coast, but Oldstones does not have a ruling house (hence the whole business with Jenny), there’s no known ruling house of Fairmarket, and the only other named house from that region are the Blackwoods, and they seem to be center more to the west (directly north of Riverrun). If the land is not currently occupied by a ruling house, than the law of escheat says it reverts back to the liege lord.
As to whether you need permission to build a castle and start charging a toll, there isn’t explicit text either way. However, if King Daeron II had the authority to give Daemon Blackfyre the right to build a castle in the Crownlands, my guess would be that the Lord Paramount of the Riverlands has the authority to grant a license to build a castle on its own lands. And the same logic would likely hold for tolls, given that it wouldn’t be interfering with a royal highway and if a lesser Houses like the Freys can charge tolls for bridges I would imagine the same would apply for their liege lords.
How long would it take to build a castle like Riverrun 2 and what would you call it?
Years if not decades, based on historical examples. As for a name, @goodqueenaly suggests “The Tines,” since the tine is the sharp point of the Trident and this castle would be a strongpoint on the Trident. Also, it’s a nice echoing of “The Twins,” another bridge-castle of the Riverlands.
Where does all the money the Great Houses generate go? Like does it sit in vaults or do they invest it? I can imagine vaults for the Lannisters, but what about the other Great Houses? Where do they put it and what do they do with it?
Well, a lot of it gets spent to support their lavish lifestyles – the food and drink, the clothing, the servants and guards, the food and drink and clothing of the servants and guards, and so on, all of that has to be paid for, a lot of it in kind, but a decent amount in cash too.
And a good amount has to be invested back into their estates – leaving aside how actively the Great Houses invest to increase the incomes from their estates, there are some not-inconsiderable bills for maintenance and repair of estates on everything from fixing the fences and hedges on your own lands so that the peasants’ animals don’t wander in to repairing the walls and roofs of your castle so that it can stand a siege.
The balance would probably be held in strongboxes as cash and/or plate and other treasures in secure rooms, and would be held as savings against some future expense, like paying for a dowry or paying a ransom.
Youve said that you’d like to build riverrun2 at the mouth of the trident before but isnt lht right /there/ already?
Not exactly. I want to build Riverrun 2 here:
That’s a good bit west and north of Lord Harroway’s Town. This location would allow a castle to have rivers on three flanks and a moat on its western flank would give it the same capability to withstand sieges as Riverrun.
Moreover, two drawbridges anchored on that center spit of land could allow land traffic to cross from the south bank of the Red Fork to the north bank, and then from the north bank of the Red Fork to the northern bank of the Green Fork, at the castle’s discretion. At the same time, lowering the drawbridges would allow the castle to intercept river traffic on all three forks of the Trident.
Is it weird that we never meet (or even hear about) the Steward of the Red Keep in the novels? I imagine the most important castle in the kingdom would have a steward and that they would wield considerable influence within the day to day happenings of the court. Seems strange that they wouldn’t appear on page, especially given all the political turmoil over the course of the series. Just something Martin didn’t think was necessary back in the 90s?
It is a bit weird, but on the other hand, the King’s Landing cast is pretty overstuffed as it is.
So I often see Buchanan ranked as the worst US President, a sentiment I agree with, but I wonder, could it simply be a case of wrong place, wrong time? Was the secession inevitable by that point and Buchanan is just the scapegoat?
Buchanan isn’t blamed for making secession inevitable – although he definitely contributed by putting his thumb on the scales with the Dredd Scott case – he’s blamed for doing nothing when secession was happening.
Canal Talk
should a trident-gods eye canal start from the trident or the god’s eye?
The Godseye.
When you’re building a canal, one of the trickier bits of engineering is that, until you’ve dug out the channel connecting the two ends and gotten the slopes, depth, and lining right, you need to keep out the water on either end, which usually involves building a temporary dam/levee on either end. This is especially the case if you’re building locks and gates which need to be put in place beforehand.
It’s a lot easier to do that with a relatively still body of water like the Godseye lake than it is with a river which has a current behind it.
What do you think of the photos of Chris Pine on the Wonder Woman: 1984 set are about? Thanks
about the economic development plans, was diverting half of rippledown rill to trident and deepening it enough to form a canal from trident to god’s eye included? if not, that might be a nice feat to be able to navigate all the way from neck to KL inlands.
I don’t think the geography of that quite works out.
From my reading of the text, the Rippledown Rill would have to be to the west of Harrenhal (on a rough northwest to southeast loop), which would substantially extend the length of a Trident-Godseye canal compared to just building north from Harrenhal (where the Godseye is about 50 miles closer to to the Trident compared to the eastern or western sides) to the nearest point on the Trident.
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