#(i have a lot of feelings about aeron damphair i know he's gonna die but i wish he wouldn't)

[navree]

i cant see jonsa happening 😭😭😭 id ont hate the ship or anything but i just cant see how itll work out. jon couldn't even be with dany after he learned that she was his aunt even though they never really knew eachother and never got to emotionally know eachother as aunt and nephew. sansa may be his cousin but he was raised alongside her as her brother and he sees her as his sister. this might cause a lot of issues

Said it once and I'll say it again: ship what you want guys, it's only fiction and if it makes you happy go for it. And if Jonsa is your passion then let it be your passion, do your thing, I support y'all.

But personally, for me? Yeah, no, it's not for me. I don't hate it virulently but it's not for me. It's a combination of things, Jon's not my favorite character by a fair stretch and while I love Sansa's storylines (tho she's been doing some stuff of late that is just Not It for me) I don't really like her as a character at all, to the point of active dislike almost. And we don't see any hint of a relationship in the books that I could build on for shipping, and by the time they got any sort of relationship in the show I'd completely written off the writing is stuff that was pissing me off (and post-books show!Sansa is just......ugh, I could not stand her I'm sorry) so I was never able to get into it. So for me, between that utter lack of Anything from them in iterations I can tolerate, combined with the fact that, yes, he was very much raised to view her as a sister and was socialized that way with her, not dissimilarly to the way he was with Robb and Bran, and that there is an actual blood relation (acceptable by Westerosi standards but still), not a fan.

(I'll admit to some slight hypocrisy cuz of my Jonrya beliefs, but also they're at least giving me shit to work with so far)

I don't necessarily ship Jonerys either, mostly because again, it is incredibly rare for me to pull something out of total wholecloth with two people who've never even met and barely know of each other's existence, if at all, though they had some moments in the show and the theme Ramin made for them is one of my favorite love scores. But I do think that it's the more likely option cuz like you said, I don't think Jonsa's happening. Not in the books, not in the story that GRRM has created. We've got five books out of seven and Sansa, sorry, is in like bottom tier of people Jon thinks about from Winterfell, I could make a more compelling argument for Jon/Robb than I could for Jon and Sansa. More importantly I don't think it would serve any purpose in the narrative, not when Jon's got three potential love interests kicking about (Val who he's already got some affection for and is at the Wall, Dany for the Ice and Fire motif and her importance in the war against The Others, Arya for their prior connection and the fact that GRRM did plan for them to fall for each other in his original outline) and Sansa's story is more tied to the Vale and to the politics of Westeros rather than things like Northern Independence (which is still a bad idea for an endgame I'm sorry) or The Others.

So with all of that combined, not only is it bordering on nOTP status for me, it just seems so incredibly implausible to the point where if it did happen I would absolutely call bad writing that I literally cannot get into it, and I certainly don't believe it's gonna be canon or even hinted at for canon.

That being said, if it's your jam, go for it! Make your fics, make your gifsets, make your art, the ones I've come across are incredibly lovely even if it's not for me, and like I said: it's fiction. Do what makes you happy <3

#personal #answered #anonymous #yeah tbf i just don't care that much about jon so anywhere i fall on the stupid 'jonsa/jonerys debate' #is more about the fact that i don't like sansa and idk i like dany fine and i really like her plots #thing is if people ask me about favorite characters from the main series you're going to be hearing about like #tywin and ser barristan and mostly a lot of pre series people from like f&b or twoiaf or oddly enough aeron damphair #(i have a lot of feelings about aeron damphair i know he's gonna die but i wish he wouldn't) #so my feelings about jonsa are basically just '-_- nah' and then i move on with my day

[tearsdrownedyou]

Edited highlights from “The Forsaken”

Here’s a round-up of text from Aeron’s sample chapter in TWOW, demonstrating how Euron humiliates and degrades his enemies before killing them. Gotta warn ya, there’s nothing nice below the cut.

The mutes had robbed him of his robe and shoes and breechclout. He wore hair and chains and scabs. Saltwater sloshed about his legs whenever the tide came in, rising as high as his genitals only to ebb again when the tide receded.

This is a mockery of a private ritual Aeron keeps as a priest; he’d get naked and walk out into the tide, he’d stay out there a while and think, and then he’d come back to shore.

“Drink with me. Your king commands it.”

Euron grabbed a handful of the priest’s tangled black hair, pulled his head back, and lifted the wine cup to his lips. But what flowed into his mouth was not wine. It was thick and viscous, with a taste that seemed to change with every swallow. Now bitter, now sour, now sweet.  When Aeron tried to spit it out, his brother tightened his grip and forced more down his throat. “That’s it, priest. Gulp it down. The wine of the warlocks, sweeter than your seawater, with more truth in it than all the gods of earth.”

Aeron is a recovering alcoholic, and so forcing a cup of liquor down his throat is a violation unto itself. Even worse when it’s shade of the evening.

Aeron hawked and spat. The spittle struck his brother’s cheek and hung there, blue-­black, glistening.  Euron flicked it off his face with a forefinger, then licked the finger clean. “Your god will come for you tonight. Some god, at least.”

And when the Damphair slept, sagging in his chains, he heard the creak of a rusted hinge.

“Urri!” he cried. There is no hinge here, no door, no Urri. His brother Urrigon was long dead, yet there he stood. One arm was black and swollen, stinking with maggots, but he was still Urri, still a boy, no older than the day he died.

“You know what waits below the sea, brother?”

“The Drowned God,” Aeron said, “the watery halls.”

Urri shook his head. “Worms... worms await you, Aeron.”

When he laughed, his face sloughed off, and the priest saw that it was not Urri but Euron, the smiling eye hidden. He showed the world his blood eye now, dark and terrible. Clad head to heel in scale as dark as onyx, he sat upon a mound of blackened skulls as dwarfs capered around his feet and a forest burned behind him.  

“The bleeding star bespoke the end,” he said to Aeron. “These are the last days, when the world shall be broken and remade. A new god shall be born from the graves and charnel pits.”

Then Euron lifted a great horn to his lips and blew, and dragons and krakens and sphinxes came at his command and bowed before him. “Kneel, brother,” the Crow’s Eye commanded. “I am your king, I am your god. Worship me, and I will raise you up to be my priest.”

“Never. No godless man may sit the Seastone Chair!”

“Why would I want that hard black rock? Brother, look again and see where I am seated.”

Aeron Damphair looked. The mound of skulls was gone. Now it was metal underneath the Crow’s Eye: a great, tall, twisted seat of razor sharp iron, barbs and blades and broken swords, all dripping blood.

Impaled upon the longer spikes were the bodies of the gods. The Maiden was there and the Father and the Mother, the Warrior and Crone and Smith...even the Stranger. They hung side by side with all manner of queer foreign gods: the Great Shepherd and the Black Goat, three-headed Trios and the Pale Child Bakkalon, the Lord of Light and the butterfly god of Naath.

And there, swollen and green, half­-devoured by crabs, the Drowned God festered with the rest, seawater still dripping from his hair.

Then Euron Crow’s Eye laughed again, and the priest woke screaming in the bowels of Silence, as piss ran down his leg. It was only a dream, a vision borne of foul black wine...

Euron is using Aeron’s religious fervor to torture him. Also, the memory of their deceased brother Urri. These things are usually a source of comfort to Aeron, and Euron is putting them to work in a system of terror. 

Aeron isn’t alone in the Theater of Degradation, either. Lots more clergy to join him!

It was in the second dungeon that the other holy men began to appear to share his torments. Three wore the robes of septons of the green lands, and one the red raiment of a priest of R’hllor. The last was hardly recognizable as a man. Both his hands had been burned down to the bone, and his face was a charred and blackened horror where two blind eyes moved sightlessly above the cracked cheeks dripping pus. He was dead within hours of being shackled to the wall, but the mutes left his body there to ripen for three days afterwards.

Last were two warlocks of the east, with flesh as white as mushrooms, and lips the purplish­-blue of a bad bruise, all so gaunt and starved that only skin and bones remained. One had lost his legs. The mutes hung him from a rafter. “Pree,” he cried as he swung back and forth. “Pree, Pree.”

Most of the next passage I’ve quoted before on this blog, but it’s relevant here as well:

Euron produced a carved stone bottle and a wine cup. “You have a thirsty look about you,” he said as he poured. “You need a drink; a taste of evening’s shade.”

“No.” Aeron turned his face away. “No, I said.”

“And I said yes.” Euron pulled his head back by the hair and forced the vile liquor into his mouth again. Though Aeron clamped his mouth shut, twisting his head from side to side he fought as best he could, but in the end he had to choke or swallow.

The dreams were even worse the second time. He saw the longships of the Ironborn adrift and burning on a boiling blood­-red sea. He saw his brother on the Iron Throne again, but Euron was no longer human. He seemed more squid than man, a monster fathered by a kraken of the deep, his face a mass of writhing tentacles. Beside him stood a shadow in woman’s form, long and tall and terrible, her hands alive with pale white fire. Dwarves capered for their amusement, male and female, naked and misshapen, locked in carnal embrace, biting and tearing at each other as Euron and his mate laughed and laughed and laughed...

Aeron dreamed of drowning, too. Not of the bliss that would surely follow down in the Drowned God’s watery halls, but of the terror that even the faithful feel as the water fills their mouth and nose and lungs, and they cannot draw a breath. Three times the Damphair woke, and three times it proved no true waking, but only another chapter in a dream.

It’s not gonna get better any time soon.

One septon made a frightened noise as the mute undid his chains, a half­-choked sound that might have been some attempt at speech. The legless warlock stared down at the black water, his lips moving silently in prayer. When the mute came for Aeron, he tried to struggle, but the strength had gone from his limbs, and one blow was all it took to quiet him. His wrist was unshackled, then the other. Free, he told himself. I’m free.

But when he tried to take a step, his weakened legs folded under him. Not one of the prisoners was fit enough to walk. In the end, the mutes had to summon more of their kind. Two of them grasped by Aeron by the arms and dragged him up a spiral stair. His feet banged off the steps as they ascended, sending stabbing pains up his leg. He bit his lips to keep from crying out. The priest could hear the warlocks just behind him. The septons brought up the rear, sobbing and gasping. With every turn of the stair, the steps grew brighter, until finally a window appeared in the left­hand wall. It was only a slit in the stone, a bare hand’s breadth across, but that was wide enough to admit a shaft of sunlight.

So golden, the Damphair thought, so beautiful.  

When they pulled him up the steps through the light, he felt its warmth upon his face, and tears rolled down his cheeks. The sea. I can smell the sea. The Drowned God has not abandoned me. The sea will make me whole again! That which is dead can never die, but rises again harder and stronger...

“Take me to the water,” he commanded, as if he were still back on the Iron Islands surrounded by his drowned men, but the mutes were his brother’s creatures and they paid him no heed.

They dragged him up more steps, down a torchlit gallery, and into a bleak stone hall where a dozen bodies were hanging from the rafters, turning and swaying. A dozen of Euron’s captains were gathered in the hall, drinking wine beneath the corpses. Left­-Hand Lucas Codd sat in the place of honor, wearing a heavy silken tapestry as a cloak. Beside him was the Red Oarsman, and further down Pinchface Jon Myre, Stonehand, and Rogin Salt­-Beard.

He thinks the sea will make him feel all better. Oh, dear. He likes to drink seawater. Not enough to put him in any real danger, but he takes comfort in the taste of salt.

And so, Aeron Damphair returned to the salt sea. A dozen longships were drawn up at the wharf below the castle, and twice as many beached along the strand. Familiar banners streamed from their masts: the Greyjoy kraken, the bloody moon of Wynch, the warhorn of the Goodbrothers. But from their sterns flew a flag the priest had never seen before: a red eye with a black pupil beneath an iron crown supported by two crows.

Beyond them, a host of merchant ships floated on a tranquil, turquoise sea. Cogs, carracks, fishing boats, even a great cog, a swollen sow of a ship as big as the Leviathan. Prizes of war, the Damphair knew.

Euron Crow’s Eye stood upon the deck of Silence, clad in a suit of black scale armor like nothing Aeron had ever seen before. Dark as smoke it was, but Euron wore it as easily as if it was the thinnest silk. The scales were edged in red gold, and gleamed and shimmered when they moved. Patterns could be seen within the metal, whorls and glyphs and arcane symbols folded into the steel.

Valyrian steel, the Damphair knew. His armor is Valyrian steel. In all the Seven Kingdoms, no man owned a suit of Valyrian steel. Such things had been known 400 years ago, in the days before the Doom, but even then, they would’ve cost a kingdom.

Euron did not lie. He has been to Valyria. No wonder he was mad.

“Your Grace,” said Torwold Browntooth. “I have the priests. What do you want done with them?”

“Bind them to the prows,” Euron commanded. “My brother on the Silence. Take one for yourself. Let them dice for the others, one to a ship. Let them feel the spray, the kiss of the Drowned God, wet and salty.”

This time, the mutes did not drag him below. Instead, they lashed him to the prow of the Silence beside her figurehead, a naked maiden slim and strong with outstretched arms and windblown hair...but no mouth below her nose.

They bound Aeron Damphair tight with strips of leather that would shrink when wet, clad only in his beard and breechclout. The Crow’s Eye spoke a command; a black sail was raised, lines were cast off, and the Silence backed away from shore to the slow beat of the oarmaster’s drum, her oars rising and dipping and rising again, churning the water. Above them, the castle was burning, flames licking from the open windows.

When they were well out to sea, Euron returned to him. “Brother,” he said, “you look forlorn. I have a gift for you.” He beckoned, and two of his bastard sons dragged the woman forward and bound her to the prow on the other side of the figurehead. Naked as the mouthless maiden, her smooth belly just beginning to swell with the child she was carrying, her cheeks red with tears, she did not struggle as the boys tightened her bonds. Her hair hung down in front of her face, but Aeron knew her all the same.  

“Falia Flowers,” he called. “Have courage, girl! All this will be over soon, and we will feast together in the Drowned God’s watery halls.”

The girl raised up her head, but made no answer. She has no tongue to answer with, Damphair knew. He licked his lips, and tasted salt.

#euron greyjoy #the winds of winter #aeron greyjoy