u/KeepYourSilenceUp

I absolutely love that Jimmy's superpower is his ability to solve any problem with nothing but brute force and spite.

Currently rewatching and got to the episode after Jimmy messes with all of Chuck's Mesa Verde documents. Chuck figures out right away what happened, but it's absolutely insane for him to tell Kim, "Jimmy broke into my house and stole all my boxes of paperwork and brought them to a 24/7 copy shop where he copied and altered all the addresses using glue and an exacto knife, and then swapped them back a week later, so you should tell your client to fire you and hire me again." Because it would be absolutely insane for anyone to do that.

And like I feel kind of bad for Chuck in that scene (or would if he hadn't been such a piece of shit to Kim earlier) but it's AMAZING that Jimmy is so good at what he does purely because no reasonable person would put in his absurd level of effort.

TL;DR, Making the Velaryons black changes the story around the parentage of Rhaenyra's kids. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it makes the context (and her character) feel very different. I'm trying to decide if it makes things more or less interesting.

Caveat 1: I think it was a really good idea to cast the Velaryons as black, in terms of giving the family their own strong visual identity and making the story easier to follow. Last thing we needed was another entire family of identical blondes with identical names. I don't know if there are still people complaining that it's woke but if there are, those are not people I take seriously on a fundamental human level.

Caveat 2: I'm in the process of rewatching season 1, which I'm liking quite a bit, same as the first time. I didn't love season 2 on a first watch and I'm interested to see how that goes when I can move right into season 3. Obviously things get a bit messy but I don't recall every nuance.

In the books, Laenor Velaryon looks like a white Targaryen. So when Luke, Jace, and Joffrey are born with black hair it raises a lot of eyebrows, but in that context it seems to be in the realm of suspicious but believable. Rhaenyra's grandfather on her mother's side was an Arryn. So it's weird but I imagine it being divisive rather than a flat-out condemnation for the kids not not look like Targaryens.

In the show, since Laenor is black and Rhaenyra is blonde, it is incredibly obvious to anyone who looks that Luke, Jace, and Joffrey are not Laenor's children. Nerdy genetics of the universe aside, VIEWERS can tell. The fact that both parents have distinct and different looks, and the kids don't look like EITHER of them, is impossible to ignore. And this changes the context around the "rumors" of their parentage and Rhaenyra's entitlement throughout the whole thing. (As well as Viserys' blindness to the matter).

On one hand I find this less interesting, because the controversy isn't subtle. There's no ambiguity (and the show also dispenses with this completely in terms of its depiction of Harwin). It also makes Rhaenyra and Viserys seem obstinate in a way that makes them much less likeable. Stubbornness is not appealing when the truth is so obvious. Like how are they even pretending.

On the other hand, the lack of narrative complexity in this regard might be making the story MORE interesting. I sort of like Rhaenyra's "fuck you" approach to the situation and Visery's total unwillingness to acknowledge what's before him because it amplifies the conflict with Allicent. It makes even more sense to me how she would become unstable, in this adaptation. The show is better in some ways when Rhaenyra is a less sympathetic protagonist, and I think the audacity to say "anyone who questions my son's legitimacy is committing treason" is amazing (if not a hard line to walk when she's hoping to claim the throne with popular support).

At the end of the day I think the issue is that the race of the kids bolsters the conflict and makes Rhaenyra come across as less sympathetic in a way that WOULD be interested if the show didn't seem so dedicated to making her the unquestioned hero of the story in all other respects. Like if the story really was a question about who's in the right or wrong, this could be fascinating. But this all kind of goes out the window in season 2. So it seems like just another point to the idea that the show is about how Rhaenyra is a tragic hero...which I have never loved. So I'm back to being unsure if the change makes things more interesting or less.

Thoughts?

I started rewatching the series with a friend who has never seen it before (and after rewatching BB with him for the first time-- what a blast).

I don't think it's controversial of me to write that Gilligan intended for Chuck to be a complex but unlikable character. But he nailed it so hard. In the flashback where Jimmy first tells Chuck that he passed the bar and suggests that Chuck might hire him, Chuck gives him this absolutely perplexed look and asks "Hire you as what?" with complete sincerity.

And then he does the same thing when Howard tells him that Jimmy is working at Davis & Main. He asks "working as a what?" and Howard legit stares at him like he's a crazy person. He just does not get it. He's not being passive-aggressive or underhanded or anything, he just DOES NOT understand that his brother is a lawyer. He doesn't respect Jimmy, ok, but he also just cannot compute that anyone else might. He's so convinced that everyone else in the world shares his worldview that it's literally making him unable to operate within reality.

And frankly this depth of self-absorption makes me glad that Chuck dies in a house fire. Jimmy does some pretty bad things but Chuck is evil. What a great character but fuck him forever.