u/full_timeoverthinker

I’m a rising third-year cancer systems biology PhD student at an R1 university in the U.S. I work primarily in R, but have been learning Python as well. I can also work with high power computing clusters, submitting/scheduling jobs, basic stuff. I do wet lab experiments and constantly learn the lab techniques to stay up to date.

Any recommendations to make myself employable in three years? Is there anything specific you think would be useful for me?

First, let me start by saying that Meryem Uzerli is a gorgeous woman & an exceptional actress. She brought the historical figure’s personality to life and she excelled.

That being said, her pretty privilege made many viewers align themselves with Hurrem. So I believe a lot of people have found a way to excuse some of her most horrible actions because they are physically attracted to her.

Hurrem Sultan was said to be not very beautiful and she rose to power because she was witty, smart, intelligent & understood how power and political alliance worked. Not bc she was gorgeous and attracted everyone and fought other concubines & Valide Sultan 24/7. I’m pretty sure there was some tension in reality, but the show reduced her to a little b*tch whose brain only worked for cheap traps she set up for Mahidevran and Valide sultan.

I cringed every time they needed some tension in a new season so they kept bringing Suleiman’s sisters to the show one by one to fight Hurrem. And it was so obvious that they wouldn’t win. Also Hurrem somehow got away with everything. She got into fights with Suleiman and the last big drama was when she secretly listened to the divan and Suleiman learned about it and told her he’d never forgive her for that. And then after a couple episodes he was back in love with her? Makes zero sense to me. I don’t know of any historical fact that says Hurrem ever fell out of Suleiman’s favor. Also I don’t know why the screenwriters thought it was a good idea for Suleiman to punish Hurrem for listening to divan. She literally probably did listen to divan or at least was very aware of what was going on since she wielded so much power and influence and was very involved in the empire’s foreign affairs. Idk why Suleiman would get mad at her.

Anyway, I think by casting someone as gorgeous as Meryem Uzerli and making her a problematic concubine fighting everyone for cheap drama, they should’ve created more tension and sense of reality by showing more of her political wit & skills. Some of her drama is hard to watch. Like why the hell Fatma burned her face if they were going to kill her? They had every chance to kill Hurrem right then and there. Why would she just burn her face? Makes no sense at all to me.

Rant over.

edit: I’m not saying she was ugly. She was obviously beautiful. I’m just saying that Meryem Uzerli & Hurrem Sultan is probably a mismatch..

I understand that the show made a demon out of Hurrem (and Rustem Pasha) to magnify the tension in the game of thrones, but it’s just very distorted and not so simple. Here are my reasons:

1. Hurrem was brought into the palace as a slave. Her entire family had been killed before her eyes. Mind you, she couldn’t even speak Turkish when she was brought to Istanbul. She entered into a system where her entire existence, her safety, her future literally depended entirely on entertaining one man who had absolute power over whether she lived or died. She had no family, no political allies, no institutional protection, no legal standing of her own. And from here, she became someone of whom (as one Venetian ambassador noted) “never been in the history of the Ottoman house a lady that held more authority.” Do you reasonably believe that a simple manipulative “witch” could’ve achieved this? I personally do not.
2. She has no power, not even a son like Mahidevran, no allies, NOTHING, only her attractiveness and wit. She holds genuine love towards Suleiman (from their surviving letters to each other, their love is genuine, deep, and we can tell Suleiman is attached to her). In historical sources, she’s said to be not that beautiful, so if we’re being blunt, she wasn’t even drop-dead gorgeous like Meryem Uzerli.
3. As she’s becoming more powerful, she’s getting called all sorts of names: a witch, a Russian b*tch, superhuman, vile, whatever. This is because she’s a woman who happened to be smart and attractive enough to the most dangerous political environment of her time. One mistake, she would’ve found herself at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
4. From her surviving letters, foreign ambassador reports, stories about her life, I cannot bring myself to believe that she is vile. She’s a smart, intelligent, witty, loving, and a strategic woman who knew how to carry herself. If this was a man, he’d almost certainly be called diplomatic, skilled, but Hurrem gets called a b*tch?

Also she helped Suleiman rule the empire, participated in the empire’s foreign affairs, advised Suleiman on his foreign policy, etc. But the show reduced her to a concubine who just fought Suleiman’s concubines and mom 24/7. This is one of my biggest criticisms of the show. I get that they needed some kind of tension, but there were definitely other ways of creating that.

6. Mustafa went to Manisa when he was 16, they almost certainly never saw each other. I think when you don’t see people, when they’re an abstract threat to you, you fear them more. She’s a traumatized slave that had to learn how to survive. How do you think she imagined Mustafa, given that they almost never met after he was sent to Manisa? I would’ve been terrified of Mustafa and Mahidevran for my kids if I were her. Yeah, right. Also just because we don’t have solid historical evidence about Mahidevran, doesn’t mean she just sat back and relaxed. She was smart enough to know what was going on, and she almost certainly tried to influence it. I’d assume she was even more scared than Hurrem because it was at some point evident who Suleiman’s favorite was, and newsflash, it wasn’t Mustafa. I mean, come on. She had money, she was powerful, she was in Manisa, she understood everything, and did nothing? Maybe I’m reading too much into her.

7. Suleiman was already scared: his dad dethroned his grandfather when he was basically a kid, and ordered HIS EXECUTION. Who could’ve guaranteed that the same thing wouldn’t happen to him? Mustafa was already known to have been a free spirit, did whatever he wanted, and frequently disobeyed orders from Istanbul. And he was loved too much by janissaries/ordinary people AND ignored it. He was smart enough to know being loved that much was dangerous, but did nothing. Also he was a grown ass man, he was like in his late 30s or 40s when he was executed. I’m not blaming him at all, this is one of the greatest, one of the saddest tragedies in history. But when people keep saying he would’ve been the savior of the empire, it’s just laughable. He could at best have delayed the eventual downfall of the empire.

I digress. Suleiman isn’t just traumatized (at this point there’s no one psychologically sound inside that palace), he’s too scared at the same time. And at some point it must’ve hit the point of no return. Mustafa was loved too much for Suleiman to not get rid of him. Picture it: he’s an old man, traumatized, scared. Despite warnings, his son is largely acting as he pleases. His favorite son died years ago. He ordered his closest friend’s execution. His unquestioned authority, his source of legitimacy is nothing/no one but himself. So any threat to his authority is a threat to his very existence as a person, let alone as a sultan. I think he saw himself in Mustafa, and he was mainly scared of that, Mustafa was a mirror (I’m leaning too Lacanian when I say this). So Suleiman was very, VERY aware of what was happening and where this was going. So save that “Hurrem manipulated Suleiman into killing Mustafa” bs please. Suleiman wasn’t dumb.

8. Now let’s say Hurrem was really calculating, manipulative or whatever. I think this is the thing most people miss when they call her cold and calculating: every single calculation she probably made came from a very simple, very human fear. The Ottoman history was extremely clear about what happened to concubines and their kids when a new sultan took power. Fratricide was literally written into law. Every single person, from sultan to kalfa and concubines, knew what accession meant. This was not some kind of secret, it was the reason Hurrem was probably losing sleep every night. I’m asking y’all Hurrem haters a genuine question - what was she supposed to do? Sit back and wait for her sons to be killed (even the faintest possibility of it was enough)?

9. The “weapons” that were available to her were.. nonexistent. She had no army, no treasury (her money came from Suleiman obviously), no independence (even though she was freed), no formal political office, nothing. The only thing she had was her relationship with Suleiman, her intelligence, and her ability to build alliances AND she understood how power worked and moved inside the palace.

10. I will admit that there probably were other options, too. She could’ve built a relationship with Mustafa, there’s actually no evidence of any hostility between them during Suleiman’s reign. So maybe a Mustafa who felt safe, could be more merciful to her and her sons?

She also could’ve focused on securing one of her son’s accession so strongly that Mustafa would have had no practical reason to fight him. Like it would’ve been pointless.

But of course the system’s logic didn’t work that way. Every year passing with Mustafa growing stronger and her sons growing into real challenging princes, every possible peaceful resolution to this problem simply shrank.

11. She has a very sad life. Behind that power, shiny titles, bottomless treasure she was grieving. She lost a family, she lost her sons, and after all of that she had to put on a show for the Shadow of God on Earth.

Would she have supported Mustafa’s killing if there was another, peaceful way? Probably not.

My point is, if you strip the labels, Hurrem was just a mother who did everything in her power to protect her kids. The power that came with it (probably) was just a side effect of this pursuit of safety, not something she inherently wanted or desired.

MC came out when I was a kid and my dad was obsessed with it, but never let us watch (bc of borderline explicit scenes I assume) so I recently rediscovered it and have been binge watching. I’m really interested in the Ottoman/Middle East history, so it’s definitely been fun to see how the screenwriters imagined what was said in private conversations and how the game of thrones played out.

If you’re obsessed with the show like I’ve been, you’ve probably gone down the rabbit hole of what actually happened, and I think most of us have a pretty solid idea of how these events played out. The show is obviously great, but i think they’ve made some terrible mistakes, like falling into the trap of making demons out of Hurrem and Rustem Pasha like many historians. So I wanted to share my opinions on the actual story rather than historical facts, which are equally important and go hand in hand.

It seems that both in history and the show, the complexity of Suleiman’s character and inner world has been largely unnoticed/ignored. During his rule, the Ottoman Empire was arguably the most powerful empire in the world. He was the most powerful person in the entire world. He was “The God’s Shadow on Earth”, aka the most powerful being after God himself. The reason I mention this repeatedly is to convey how much solitude this must have brought to his life. Ottoman shahs (certainly, Suleiman, who earned the title the Lawgiver) did not hang out with their concubines, servants, or even their kids and family like in the show. Quite the opposite, they usually had dinner alone, slept alone, did not engage a lot (during the meetings with foreign ambassadors, sultans rarely talked, if at all, to minimize the chance of looking “human”), so in their daily lives, sultans were extremely lonely.

Now in light of all of this, think again about Suleiman - the most powerful human on the face of the Earth, who is, by the way, aware of his power and does his best to maintain it. Everyone wants something from him, everyone begs him, everyone bows down to him, everyone is trying to impress him. But when you peek into his inner world just a little bit, you see that he’s the most prolific sultan-poet of the Ottoman history. He wrote more than 3,000 known poems, and historians believe there’s more out there. And he picked the pseudonym Muhibbi (the Lover of God). So he held the absolute power back then, and he wasn’t just the leader of the empire, he was THE ultimate, unquestioned authority. But he wrote under a very human, highly personal pen name - The Lover. I think it’s absolutely amazing how much lonely he must have felt and how much inner conflict he must have had while holding onto that much power, which is the reason why there is 3,000 ghazals, most of which are extremely emotional, and make him look almost powerless. He repeatedly says in different forms that those who are loved, are the actual sultans. He presents himself as the slave, a mere lover, and he calls Hurrem the actual sultan. I think it’s very striking that he can’t hold the desire to give up inside, so it oozes out of his pen into his divan.

Now, in all that neediness, everyone begging for his forgiveness, or wanting something from him, Hurrem comes and shatters the entire nizam (system), because she’s the only one who does NOT want, but she gives to Suleiman (also in his poems). We know that Hurrem and Suleiman had a very strong emotional connection, and I’d say it was probably much stronger in reality back then than it’s shown in the show. In one of her letters to Suleiman, she sends a scarf of hers soaked in her tears, and she begs him to wear it at war, and tells him that it would protect him. In their letters, if you know Turkish (and if you don’t, definitely check out translations of their letters to each other), Hurrem is very genuine in her love. But she’s also very assertive as well (of course, within bounds). For example, in one of her letters, she writes “if you listened to me, not other people’s words, you’d know that I was telling you truth…” - this is a bold piece coming from a concubine, which shows that she was literally the woman who was loved, and knew how to talk to Suleiman.

Without going off topic too much, let’s return to Suleiman. He was obviously what I call a successful victim of the very system that created him. Brothers would kill each other to get the throne, his own father (Sultan Selim) deposed and (probably) ordered the execution of his grandfather (Sultan Bayezid II). So this was the system in which the strongest have won. But there was a caveat: you must not be stronger than the sitting sultan.

If you follow Suleiman’s life, he’s already been traumatized by what happened to his grandfather. And at some point he was a threat to his own father. So the very system that traumatized him also made him the sultan. And after he came to power, he tried his best to change the system (hence his title the Lawgiver), but ended up making it even more ruthless by ordering the killing of his closest friend and son.

So if you ask me, the biggest tragedy is that of Suleiman’s. The enormous responsibility that came with power, the inability to completely reform the system, and the fact that he ended up doing the exact same thing he was deathly afraid of having to do. And, of course, Hurrem. Who, I believe, was not the villain. The true villain was the relentless succession system that kept everyone on survival mode.

I would like to share more if people are interested. I just wanted to share my perspective and I know my thoughts are a little disorganized but I’ll be sharing more.