The Most Unfuckable Character On Game Of Thrones Is…

So because I have These Sorts of conversations with people, I wound up asking “So who’s the hardest person to masturbate to on Game of Thrones?”
And whenever I have These Sorts of conversations with people, people start needing rules.  “Are we counting the underaged kids?” people asked.  “We’re not counting Rickon or Arya, are we? That’d be creepy.”  Which, you know, it gets tricky.  Because the show upped the kids’ ages in dramatic ways – Jon Snow in the books is fourteen, Arya is nine, Sansa is eleven, and none of those kids are anywhere close to that age on the show.  (Which is understandable – the actors would not only be incompetent at nine, but they’d age out quick.)
So we have a weird issue – the actor who plays Jon Snow is literally double the age of the character he’s playing, so when we ask “Who’s the hardest to whack it to?”, how do we count Sansa, who is either eleven, or the actress who is nineteen now, but was certainly underage when we started, and what is the age of consent in Westeros anyway and wow holy fuck does this get crazy.
Anyway, so I’m going to ask the question based on Season Five of the television show now, according to the actors’ current ages, restricting it to actors currently over the legal age of consent, eliminating anyone who is currently dead.  (Sorry, Sean Bean fans. You should be used to this by now.)
With all those restrictions in place:
Who is the most unfuckable character on Game of Thrones? 
Now, for me, this is a weird question, because it’s so clearly Sansa. I hate Sansa. I hate her more than Joffrey.  My hot button is “People who prioritize their fantasies over reality in a way that harms other people,” and holy crap Sansa, I have yet to forgive you for taking Joffrey’s side way back in Season One and killing a poor innocent dog as a result. I loathe her so much that I can barely stand to look at her, and honestly, Sophie Turner is an attractive young woman, so that shows you how sapiosexual I am.
Yet the most popular answer is “Theon Greyjoy,” who a friend told me could see taking his anger (and current physical handicap) to to a dark, sexy place. Except that Theon has proven thoroughly, seethingly incompetent at literally everything else he’s ever done, so I’m pretty sure he’d screw up your sexual fantasies, too.  Theon’s not a bad choice to never masturbate to, though frankly I might suggest looking towards Ramsay Bolton if you want some real dark fantasies happening. Like, “Fantasies you probably wouldn’t survive.”
For me, however, if you take personality out of it, the Least Fuckable Character in Game of Thrones has to go to Lord Walder Frey.  Especially if you’re a woman.  You know why he wants you, you know you’re walking away with an heir in your belly, and you can just imagine the stink as he crawls atop you.
(The funniest answer came on Twitter, however, in the form of Ser Pounce.)
And yet this is a democracy, so I ask you: Who is your choice for the most unfuckable character on Game of Thrones, and why? Explain why your nethers shrink at the thought of this person.  And please, don’t break out in a slurry of fanfic to prove your choice, I really need to eat today.

My Glorious Ice-Cream Pants, or: The Danger of Small Fame

I have small fame. Small fame is pretty easy to get on the Internet.
“Small fame,” for the record, is that nebulous area where you have a couple of thousand fans – not enough to earn a living off of, but enough where every post you make gets a flurry of comments, and you occasionally get fan mail (which is quite nice), and if you squint nicely and don’t walk outside the Internet you can fool yourself into thinking that you are a Very Important Person.
(The way you can tell whether you have small fame or actual fame is to walk around the mall to get yourself an ice cream. Does anyone recognize you when you’re in a generically public place? They don’t? Then you’re not actually famous.)
But there’s plenty of places for people to get small fame. There’s lots of small famous people on Twitter, and small famous people on Tumblr, and Instagram and even FetLife, and tons of other places. It’s nice, like I said.
Until some of these these people self-destruct.
And what nobody tells you about small fame is that it comes with a problematic cadre of core fans, who – if you’re not careful – will mislead you.
Because what you see happening with this small fame, repeatedly, is that someone who’s now got a larger platform says something quite stupid. This is not because they themselves are necessarily stupid – “stupid” is a state that most of us fall into periodically, where we accidentally wash our hair with Vagisil or run through a stoplight or say something ill-thought-out on the Internets.
And the good news is that most of us have friends who’ll serve the same function as bumpers on a pinball table – they’ll go, “Wow, that was pretty silly of you,” and send you rebounding back into the Not-Stupid Zone.
We take our cues from our fellow humans, because we are social creatures. If you were to one day wake up and go, “I would like to wear pants made entirely of ice cream,” you would discover people staring and complaining about the ice cream drips and noticing that shortly afterwards you were displaying Rocky Road-smeared naughty bits about.
And so you would learn that this is maaaaaybe not your wisest idea, and rethink this ice cream-pants travesty.
But if you have small fame, you will have acquired a group of core fans who will love whatever you do. They are so like you that they are almost echoes of you, and will applaud and cheer and justify almost any action you would consider taking. They are not bad people, but they adore you simply because they are so close in tone and temperament to you that realistically, it’s like having a cheering section composed entirely of clones.
They will tell you these ice-cream pants are spectacular.
They will tell you that the folks complaining about the trails of dribbling Rocky Road you leave everywhere are irrationally afraid of ants.
They will tell you that anyone who doesn’t want to watch your peanut-coated nethers is just too damned prissy for their own good.
And if you are not careful, you will listen to these core fans, and not to the rest of the world frantically waving their arms and trying to warn you about the swarms of impending yellowjackets drawn to your sugar-clad genitalia.
Once you get past a certain point, you can get drunk on your own fame, and start listening to these core fans only, and start marking anyone who disagrees with you as The Enemy. When they’re not, in fact, The Enemy, but a friend who is trying to point out that hey, your ass is showing.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s a lot more comfortable to live in the core group. They don’t question you. They defend you. They cheer you. No matter what idiotic thing you do, they will assure you that ZOMG, you were correct, and look at all those idiots out there denigrating you. And you’ll come to believe that anyone who criticize you is a jealous fool, because hey, I have this cheering squad over here, how can I be wrong with all these metronome-nodding heads assuring me I’m right?
And if you’re dim, you never do the math and realize you’ve got about a hundred people relentlessly nodding their heads, and ten thousand people disparaging these fantastic ice-cream pants.
It’s sad, when someone vanishes up their own ass like that. Some of the best things I’ve learned have been from people who have, sometimes quite rudely, put me in my place. And it was painful at the time, and embarrassing, and not something I wanted to do at all, but in the end I learned how to be a better and wiser human being, and to compose pants made out of much more durable waffles.
But if you’re on the Internets, one day you too may be lucky enough to experience the danger of small fame. And when that happens, go to the mall, look around, notice how nobody is paying attention to you at all, notice how when you step outside this carefully-constructed framework you are not, in fact, such a much.
And breathe thanks that you still have people who will call you out when you’re foolish. It’s actually a blessing, I assure you.

You Don't Always Knock Down The Mountain.

“You have social anxiety?” people ask.  “After all these years?  You need to get to therapy, man.  If you’d done the proper therapy, you’d have no anxiety at all!”
No.  I’ve been in and out of therapy and thirty years, and all the talking cures and medications and hands-on exercises have yet to remove the pre-convention jitters I get whenever I have to go out in public.
I merely have found ways to work around that anxiety.
Don’t get me wrong; I get no thrill from having the full-body, heebie-jeebie quivers.  I don’t enjoy spending the next two days after every social gathering endlessly rehashing every conversation I had, noting all the ways I’ve humiliated myself.  None of this is fun, and I have worked as hard as I humanly can to flense myself of these joyless traits.
Yet it’s been thirty years, twenty therapists, probably close to $100,000 in costs at this point.  I’m pretty sure if there was a way to remove my anxiety, this anxiety would be removed.
Given that it’s not going away, it’s far better to work around it.
I think of my anxiety as a looming mountain, tall enough that men have died on its slopes, billions of tons of rock.  I am at the base with a shovel and an axe, with armchair therapists everywhere telling me to just shovel that mountain away!
Men have died on the mountain’s steep slope.
They have also died trying to cart away a mountain, bucketful by bucketful.
Yet I don’t have to destroy the mountain in order to get to the other side.  I can be smarter and map the mountain’s every craggy peak, note the deathfalls that are all but impassable, scout the mountain until I find the least treacherous paths.  I can find the paths that work best for getting over this damned thing and invest some time and effort into building nice bridges over the ravines, driving pitons into some of the steeper cliff-faces to make them easier to climb up.
As as the years pass, I can gain skill and expertise in learning how to get past this goddamned inconvenient heap of rock with the greatest possible speed.  It’s not that the mountain will disappear, but that eventually it’ll be just another everyday thing to be handled – put on my shoes, brush my teeth, climb the mountain, get drinks with my friends.
And some days the storms will swirl, and the mountain will be impassable, and that’ll be a miserable day but I’ll refuse to blame myself overmuch.  I didn’t ask for this fucking mountain in my path.  I have spent my life battling the mountain.  Almost every day I clamber over an obstacle so vast that most folks couldn’t even imagine facing it, and if these mountain-free fuckers had to face these sharp peaks before venturing out the door they’d probably not even know where to start, so I take a fierce pride in my skills.
I didn’t ask for the mountain, but by God most days I manage it.  Some days I don’t.  No shame in that.
And I look around, and some people have much smaller hills standing before their doorstep.  With therapy, they can dismantle this landscape and make for a smooth path, which is why it’s not a bad thing to at least try to dig the mountain down.  Sometimes, when you’re standing at the foot of the mountain, it looks much bigger than it is.  Sometimes a little shovelwork’ll get you through.
But for me?  It’s been thirty years, like I said.  The mountain’s no smaller.
Yet in those thirty years, I’ve gotten to be much bigger.  And stronger.  And I won’t let a fucking mountain get in my way most days.

My Ms Pac-Man Themed Nails, And, Oh Yeah, The Inadvertent Subtexts of Flex

So here’s a weird thing about writing a novel, one I knew about but never thought it would apply to me:
People read Philosophies into your text.  Not the ones you meant to put in there, but new Philosophies. Interpretations of the text that you never considered when you were sweating blood trying to figure out how to get your lead character out of this burning warehouse without him getting killed.
Sometimes these Philosophies even reflect what you meant to say.
I first got a whiff of this when I got a text from my dear friend Jenna:

…at which point I went, “Wow, yeah, that is pretty much how I feel about drugs.”  Which is not to say that there’s anything bad about drugs per se, but me personally, I feel like life is largely more interesting if you just go out and do interesting things as opposed to interesting chemicals, and that Philosophy seeped into Flex like toxins into groundwater.
Then I started reading other reviews by friends, like Bat, who I finally got to meet in Portland after knowing her for twelve e-years, and her (friends-locked) review was super-kind but said:

Ferrett uses opals as a detection system to warn people of ‘mancy usage. Being that there’s several types of opal, I’m guessing he just meant a common opal, although I kind of substituted fire opals in my head. Maybe because hematite is associated with earth/fire and opals are not only associated with water but also contain a lot more water then other minerals, their usage in the story makes sense. (During the 19th century, opals were considered to bring bad luck to anyone who wore them except for those whose birthstone it was.)
(YOU TOTALLY RESEARCHED ALL THAT AND USED THOSE TWO ON PURPOSE, RIGHT, FERRETT??)
There’s lots of video game (Frogger and Super Mario Bros for sure) and other pop culture references that become touchstones, especially for readers of my generation.
Another thing I’ll look at is names:
Paul – “humble, small”
Aliyah – “high, sublime”
Valentine – “strength, health” (makes total sense with her flavor of ‘mancy.)
Kit – (possibly short for Christopher – “Christ-bearer”)
Imani – “faith”

And while this is all a valid way of interpreting the text, I sure as hell didn’t put that in there. Why did I use opals? Because opals are, uh, pretty. And I used hematite because it was a cool name. I chose names at random, as I pretty much always do.  “Hey, does Paul sound like a Paul? He’s Paulish. Let’s go with Paul.”
I do know authors (like Catherynne Valente and Kat Howard and many other catlike folk) who do choose names for their characters with extreme care, setting up their double-meanings quite cautiously, but me? I feel like a bull blundering through a Ming Vase exhibit, because I just choose at random and yet there’s all of this analysis here about what it could mean.
Which isn’t to say the analyses are bullshit! For one thing, as noted, the drugs-as-less-interesting-life-experience subtext is something I do believe, and it’s in there even though I utterly never meant to put it in there. For another, I feel very strongly that once I hand you this book, the book is yours; I wrote the characters, but you get to decide whether you like them, whether you like what they’re doing, whether you find what they’re doing is believable.
I didn’t put it in there consciously, but that doesn’t mean it’s there.
Then I think of GreyBeta’s review of Flex, where he says this:

Paul Tsabo is the name of our protagonist. So I thought of the Apostle Paul, who was the man formerly known as Saul the ardent persecutor of Christians. Saul then saw the light on the road to Damascus and changed his name to Paul and the Bible tells us that he went on to found several churches. Paul flipped from being a persecutor of Christians to a teacher of Christianity itself.  Flex‘s Paul is a man tasked with tracking down ‘mancers, the magic users of the Flex world. That he would turn out to be a ‘mancer himself is part of the exposition phase of the novel.

This is actually exactly what happens, and it is a Biblical parallel, and it is a story I knew very well, and yet… I didn’t mean to put it in there. And yet people are reading my words and coming away with these other Philosophies, and where did those come from?
Then there’s stuff that people think I put in gratuitously, and I didn’t. I remember someone saying, “Hey, Kit told Paul to get a straight-razor shave, which seemed out of character until I remembered you had a straight-razor shaving phase,” and I did a double-take because Kit – an old-fashioned New York Jew who knows where all the old goodnesses of NYC are hidden – is precisely the sort of man who made me want to get straight-razor shaves, because all the old cranky NYC Jewish guys had this hidden vibe where they had a database of the best diners and the shvitzes and, yes, the straight-razor barbers who would neaten you up sweet.  The straight razor isn’t gratuitous to me, it’s a signal of Kit’s proclivities, and yet it can be just as easily read as “Ferrett likes razors.”
So it’s weird.  I’m not opposed to any of it, like I said, but it is odd to be reminded that people do not read the novel the author gave them; they read the novel an author brought them, and then fill it full of their own philosophies.  The end result of every book reading is a collaboration, and I am honored to be so collaborated.
Now. Here’s my amazing Ms. Pac-Man nails, done by my Mad Manicurist Ashley, and she outdid herself this time:



Before you ask: about two and a half hours’ worth of work. Yes, I tip her well. Very well.

If You Only Heard Me Properly, You'd Agree With Me.

When you’re an extremist, the problem is never that what you’re saying may be mouth-frothingly crazy.  No, your real problem is that your message isn’t being heard.
After all, this message converted you, didn’t it? And you’re a sane person, as intelligent as they come. So if anyone else hears what you have to say and doesn’t instantly convert to your side, then they must not have heard you properly. They probably didn’t know all the facts that you do.  They probably misunderstood something.
So you need to tell them again.
This message can be anything. Sometimes it’s religious, but just as often it’s political. You know that 9/11 was a conspiracy, or that white men are the most oppressed people in America, or that vaccinations cause autism. Or it’s even milder than that: every person raised in America has racist tendencies, every poor person simply doesn’t work hard enough.
The exact nature of the message is irrelevant. What matters is that it’s a message of conversion: anyone who disagrees with you simply hasn’t heard you properly.
Thing is, what you have to tell people works just often enough that this idea that “hearing properly equals agreement” isn’t entirely foolish. Sure, most people shake their heads and walk away, but every so often you find that one person who hears your True Words and instantly agrees with you, becomes another follower it is in whatever crazy-ass belief you possess.
What happens then is that the media becomes your enemy.  They propagate flawed interpretations that damages your credibility – the news covers your message and they get some minor fact wrong, and that erroneous fact becomes why people didn’t believe you.  Someone else dissects your message on their blog and they don’t quite parrot your party line perfectly, and that’s why people didn’t believe you.
Eventually, people come to your blog directly and read your words, and most of them seem to believe you!  Except for a handful of dissenters, who are mocked, pummeled, and insulted.  Clearly, you’re still not quite making the proper arguments – which is why your blog posts become increasingly long rebuttals, going line-by-line through people’s counterarguments and explaining why no, these fools didn’t comprehend what you had to say – but realistically, the problem isn’t that people have understood what you intended to say and still think you’re a cauldron of teeming turds, no.
The problem is that they have yet to really hear you.
And since the problem is all about being heard directly, you’re morally justified in doing all sorts of scummy things to sneak the message into places. The media is oppressing you, even if the media actually talks about you a lot, because the media is not on your side.  How could the media hear your grand message and have the gall to present counterpoints?  How could the media blare your message to its massive audience and give most people the impression that you’re idiotic, manipulative scumbags?
The reason I’m saying this today is because last weekend, GamerGate bought a booth at a convention under a pseudonym, with the express intent of sneaking in and disrupting some of the panels.  And normally, I’d say “renting a booth under an assumed name so you can unveil your existence elsewhere” is a pretty scummy thing to do, right or left; I’d be equally condemning if an LGBT group tried to sneak into a fundamentalist convention via similar tactics.
But what’s happening here is what you see with GamerGate in particular. The problem isn’t that much of what GamerGate has to say is self-contradictory, often threaded with rape jokes and misogyny, acting as a loosely-coupled organization so that nobody’s quite sure who speaks for them – no, the problem is that GamerGate’s message hasn’t really been heard yet, and as such the only proper thing to do is try to sneak in.
That’s not scummy, man.  That’s the only way to do this. You have to circumvent the interpretations and get face-to-face with people, so they can believe you!
And God forbid I ever become That Guy. There’s a reason my comments thread on my LiveJournal page says “Tell me I’m full of it” – I’m not always going to agree with what you have to say, but I hope I never assume that the reason you disagreed with me was because you didn’t hear me correctly.  I hope I always assume that people can disagree with me because they have understood me, and found my conclusions lacking.
Because I’ve seen GamerGaters do it, and I’ve seen my hyper-liberal friends do it, and I’ve seen zealots of all stripes think their message is an auto-conversion where the only thing stopping every last living being on the planet from thinking as they do is that they simply haven’t consumed all the facts.
And no. Sometimes, people will garner the exact set of facts that you have at this very moment, and come to different conclusions. Humanity’s complicated. You have to allow for that uniqueness of experience, even if it means that people will be working against you knowing exactly what you do.
That’s a scary idea, sometimes. But you know what’s scarier, to me?  An argument that’s actually a telepathic form of hive-mind control, that only requires tweaking to brainwash 6 billion people on the planet to a single conclusion.
Shit, that Death Star argument would be terrifying. If it existed. Which it doesn’t.