#and its as early as agot?:?):

[ilynpilled]

The golden armor, not the white, but no one ever remembers that. Would that I had taken off that damned cloak as well.

When I reach King's Landing I'll have a new hand forged, a golden hand.

Cersei might like that. A golden hand to stroke her golden hair.

I am not myself. He eased himself down until the water reached his chin. “Soiled my white cloak . . . I wore my gold armor that day, but . . ."

“Gold armor?” Her voice sounded far off, faint.

Jaime slid into the offered seat quickly, so Bolton could not see how weak he was. "White is for Starks. I'll drink red like a good Lannister."

She did as he bid her. "The white cloak . . ."

". . . is new, but I'm sure I'll soil it soon enough."

“That wasn't . . . I was about to say that it becomes you.”

When he was done, more than three-quarters of his page still remained to be filled between the gold lion on the crimson shield on top and the blank white shield at the bottom. Ser Gerold Hightower had begun his history, and Ser Barristan Selmy had continued it, but the rest Jaime Lannister would need to write for himself. He could write whatever he chose, henceforth. Whatever he chose . . .

"Robert's beard was black. Mine is gold."

"Gold? Or silver?" Cersei plucked a hair from beneath his chin and held it up. It was grey. "All the color is draining out of you, brother. You've become a ghost of what you were, a pale crippled thing. And so bloodless, always in white." She flicked the hair away. "I prefer you garbed in crimson and gold."

At its head Jaime stood at vigil, his one good hand curled about the hilt of a tall golden greatsword whose point rested on the floor. The hooded cloak he wore was as white as freshly fallen snow, and the scales of his long hauberk were mother-of-pearl chased with gold. Lord Tywin would have wanted him in Lannister gold and crimson, she thought. It always angered him to see Jaime all in white.

Ser Jaime Lannister, all in white, stood beside his father's bier, five fingers curled about the hilt of a golden greatsword.

Fissures had opened in his cheeks, and a foul white fluid was seeping through the joints of his splendid gold-and-crimson armor to pool beneath his body.

Glory wore trappings of Lannister crimson; Honor was barded in Kingsguard white.

His cloak was Lannister crimson, but his surcoat showed the ten purple mullets of his own House arrayed upon a yellow field.

"My lord," the lad asked, "will you be wanting your new hand?"

"Wear it, Jaime," urged Ser Kennos of Kayce. "Wave at the smallfolk and give them a tale to tell their children.”

“I think not." Jaime would not show the crowds a golden lie. Let them see the stump. Let them see the cripple.

Behind the lords came a hundred crossbowmen and three hundred men-at-arms, and crimson flowed from their shoulders as well. In his white cloak and white scale armor, Jaime felt out of place amongst that river of red.

Jaime Lannister wore a doublet of red velvet slashed with cloth-of-gold, and a golden chain studded with black diamonds. He had strapped on his golden hand as well, polished to a fine bright sheen. This was no fit place to wear his whites. His duty awaited him at Riverrun; a darker need had brought him here.

Jaime had thought long and hard about whether to wear his gold armor or his white to this meeting; in the end, he'd chosen a leather jack and a crimson cloak.

For an instant, the deep red clouds that crowned the western hills reminded him of Rhaegar's children, all wrapped up in crimson cloaks.

Seven bloody hells," he started, "who dares—" Then he saw Jaime's white cloak and golden breastplate. His swordpoint dropped. "Lannister?"

quotes specifically focusing on his hand:

“The boy is dead." Jaime had drunk three cups of wine, and his golden hand seemed to be growing heavier and clumsier by the moment.

His golden fingers were curved enough to hook, but could not grasp, so his hold upon the shield was loose. "You were a knight once, ser," Jaime said. "So was I. Let us see what we are now."

“Radiant." Fickle. "Golden." False as fool's gold. Last night he dreamed he'd found her fucking Moon Boy. He'd killed the fool and smashed his sister's teeth to splinters with his golden hand, just as Gregor Clegane had done to poor Pia. In his dreams Jaime always had two hands; one was made of gold, but it worked just like the other.

"Men shall name you Goldenhand from this day forth, my lord," the armorer had assured him the first time he'd fitted it onto Jaime's wrist. He was wrong. I shall be the Kingslayer till I die.

One of them wore the ruins of a crimson cloak, but Jaime hanged him with the rest. It felt good. This was justice. Make a habit of it, Lannister, and one day men might call you Goldenhand after all. Goldenhand the Just. The world grew ever greyer as they drew near to Harrenhal.

The weight of his golden hand had grown irksome. He fumbled at the straps that secured it to his wrist.

Well, what's one more broken vow to the Kingslayer? Just more shit in the bucket. Jaime resolved to be the first man on the battlements. And with this golden hand of mine, most like the first to fall.

Around him he glimpsed the faces of men he'd done his best to kill in the Whispering Wood, where the Freys had fought beneath the direwolf banners of Robb Stark. His golden hand hung heavy at his side.

then the subconscious conclusion:

"Is it?" She smiled sadly. "Count your hands, child."

One. One hand, clasped tight around the sword hilt. Only one. "In my dreams I always have two hands." He raised his right arm and stared uncomprehending at the ugliness of his stump.

I think the narrative that is being told in the color symbolism present in Jaime’s story is the realization that glory has no presence in the man he wants to become. He gradually realizes again the truth of the golden hand covering his stump being a golden lie. It is more an embodiment of his sins, a heavy burden he carries. True honor and change will not be wrapped in gold, and obviously not crimson. But this should not lead to the return of his cynicism, which is how he approaches this early on, and why he wants to delude himself about it. He greys, and he sheds the red and gold color. The white becomes him. The crimson & gold comes back when he does his duty for the horrid Lannister regime, when he sustains loyalty to his family, and emulates his father. Nonetheless, he keeps drawing nearer to the blank white shield at the bottom of his page and distancing himself from the crimson at the top. But maybe the lesson is that he cannot start over like that. Maybe his only choices are not the evil Kingslayer and the glittering Goldenhand the Just. Maybe he should just be Jaime. That white shield is tainted. Our good actions do not wash out the bad. They will exist simultaneously. You will never be the golden heir, the perfect pure white Just Knight. You are a crippled broken man. But that does not mean you cannot choose to continue living and keep pushing to change for the better:

“What else can I do, but die?”

“Live,” she said

Maybe the blank white shield is an impossible ideal not made for him. But what remains if he cannot be crimson, gold, or the pure white?

yet she knew it was him. “Even at a distance, Ser Jaime Lannister was unmistakable. The moonlight had silvered his armor and the gold of his hair, and turned his crimson cloak to black.”

He was always meant to be a grey character. Why don’t we mix that black & white?

#something about the gold of his armor and hair being silvered turning closer to white and his crimson cloak turning black #and it is the moon #the graceful crescent during the night he decided to live #and its as early as agot?:?): #i love being delusional guys #asoiaf #jaime lannister #valyrianscrolls #asoiaf meta #also the ‘Jaime resolved to be the first man on the battlements. And with this golden hand of mine most like the first to fall’ #he is at it again oml #frank reynolds ‘sulclde is badass’ on loop #anyway the build up works very well with the vows of taking the black

[gendrie]

And no one had raised a voice or drawn a blade or anything, not Harwin who always talked so bold, or Alyn who was going to be a knight, or Jory who was captain of the guard. Not even her father. (Arya, AGOT)

a notable aspect to arya's arc is her having to confront that the northerners, both stark men and their bannermen, are flawed and, frequently, of dubious loyalty. this issue is introduced very early on, in her second chapter, and it leaves arya reeling. she had an idealized perspective of these men, in particular, those who serve her father and eddard himself. arya is close with the stark household and admires her father. so arya is deeply disappointed when none of them prevent the injustices on the trident.

She might have been able to trick a Frey or one of the Brave Companions, but the Dreadfort men had served Roose Bolton their whole life, and they knew him better than she did. If I tell him I am Arya Stark and command him to stand aside . . . No, she dare not. He was a northman, but not a Winterfell man. He belonged to Roose Bolton. (Arya, ACOK)

in harrenhal she learns the (horrific) extent to which northern men will inflict harm themselves when the boltons take over the castle. they kill, rape and terrorize those within and arya is forced to watch it all. roose is one of robb's bannermen, but he is not worthy of trust nor are those who serve him and arya realizes this as she escapes the castle.

The look she gave him was full of hurt. "I thought you were my father's man." "Lord Eddard's dead, milady. I belong to the lightning lord now, and to my brothers." [...] He gave her a searching look. "Can you understand what I am telling you?" "Yes." That he was not Robb's man, she understood well enough. And that she was his captive. (Arya, ASOS)

and even men who formerly served at winterfell can find new leadership. harwin is someone arya knew since she was a little baby, but he is no longer a man of winterfell. arya is, understandably, resentful of being taken captive, but her dynamic with the brotherhood is layered. they do treat her well and want to do right by her despite their plan to ransom her. arya also accepts that they need resources to fund their mission. harwin shows that he still care for the starks by pleading with beric to revive catelyn.

She looked at their filthy hair and scraggly beards and reddened eyes, at their dry, cracked, bleeding lips. Wolves, she thought again. Like me. Was this her pack? How could they be Robb's men? She wanted to hit them. She wanted to hurt them. She wanted to cry. They all seemed to be looking at her, the living and the dead alike. The old man had squeezed three fingers out between the bars. "Water," he said, "water." (Arya, ASOS)

again, arya is forced to witness the crimes the northerners (and their allies) committed in the riverlands. the karstark men are being tortured to death for their crimes when arya rides thru the stoney sept. she does not look away, but instead she shows them mercy. arya gives each man one last drink of water before they are executed. this is something i feel embodies her responsibility as a stark: to show mercy but to see that justice is met

these are significant experiences for arya. its an extension of ned's advice to "know the men who follow you". arya needs to know the limitations, failings, loyalties and crimes of those who claim to serve house stark. whoever is going to lead the north cannot be ignorant of those nuances. this is the stuff of northern leadership.

#asoiaf nonsense #broken record post lol #but honestly? #if arya was a male character these experiences would NOT be taken for granted #she's overlooked for a position thats given to an offpage toddler and a character who's yet to interact with any northmen #make it make sense

[nightswatchdisbandmentera]

JON SNOW FORTNIGHT EVENT 2023

Day 6 - Shadows of Heroism

“Gared was near as old as I am and longer on the Wall,” he went on, “yet it would seem he forswore himself and fled. I should never have believed it, not of him, but Lord Eddard sent me his head from Winterfell. Of Royce, there is no word. One deserter and two men lost, and now Ben Stark too has gone missing.” He sighed deeply. “Who am I to send searching after him? In two years I will be seventy. Too old and too weary for the burden I bear, yet if I set it down, who will pick it up? Alliser Thorne? Bowen Marsh? I would have to be as blind as Maester Aemon not to see what they are. The Night’s Watch has become an army of sullen boys and tired old men. Apart from the men at my table tonight, I have perhaps twenty who can read, and even fewer who can think, or plan, or lead. Once the Watch spent its summers building, and each Lord Commander raised the Wall higher than he found it. Now it is all we can do to stay alive.”

- Tyrion III, AGOT

This fandom rarely ever acknowledges the skills that got Jon his place as Jeor Mormont’s steward - which subsequently marked him as next in line to lead the Watch. It seems that most people think it was purely because of Jon’s identity as a Stark, which doesn’t seem to track with what we’re actually shown in the text.

Because up until this point, Jon didn’t register in Mormont’s conscious.

Mormont frowned through his thick grey beard. “Snow? Oh, the Stark bastard. I think not. The young ones need to forget the lives they left behind them, the brothers and mothers and all that. A visit home would only stir up feelings best left alone. I know these things. My own blood kin … my sister Maege rules Bear Island now, since my son’s dishonor. I have nieces I have never seen.” He took a swallow. “Besides, Jon Snow is only a boy. You shall have three strong swords, to keep you safe.”

Jon is, as of now, just the Stark bastard. That’s all he is. And Mormont can barely recall him in conversation. As far as the Old Bear knows, Jon is merely a privileged lordling who is yet to earn his place at the Wall. And we must recall the tragedy of Waymar Royce, an inexperienced lad who was thrust into a position of leadership a bit too early - something Mormont deeply regrets.

So what tipped the scales in Jon’s favor?

He told them all of it, even the part where he’d set Ghost at Rast’s throat. Maester Aemon listened silently, blind eyes fixed on the fire, but Chett’s face darkened with each word. “Without us to keep him safe, Sam will have no chance,” Jon finished. “He’s hopeless with a sword. My sister Arya could tear him apart, and she’s not yet ten. If Ser Alliser makes him fight, it’s only a matter of time before he’s hurt or killed.”

Chett could stand no more. “I’ve seen this fat boy in the common hall,” he said. “He is a pig, and a hopeless craven as well, if what you say is true.”

“Maybe it is so,” Maester Aemon said. “Tell me, Chett, what would you have us do with such a boy?”

“Leave him where he is,” Chett said. “The Wall is no place for the weak. Let him train until he is ready, no matter how many years that takes. Ser Alliser shall make a man of him or kill him, as the gods will.”

“That’s stupid,” Jon said. He took a deep breath to gather his thoughts. “I remember once I asked Maester Luwin why he wore a chain around his throat.”

Maester Aemon touched his own collar lightly, his bony, wrinkled finger stroking the heavy metal links. “Go on.”

“He told me that a maester’s collar is made of chain to remind him that he is sworn to serve,” Jon said, remembering. “I asked why each link was a different metal. A silver chain would look much finer with his grey robes, I said. Maester Luwin laughed. A maester forges his chain with study, he told me. The different metals are each a different kind of learning, gold for the study of money and accounts, silver for healing, iron for warcraft. And he said there were other meanings as well. The collar is supposed to remind a maester of the realm he serves, isn’t that so? Lords are gold and knights steel, but two links can’t make a chain. You also need silver and iron and lead, tin and copper and bronze and all the rest, and those are farmers and smiths and merchants and the like. A chain needs all sorts of metals, and a land needs all sorts of people.”

Maester Aemon smiled. “And so?”

“The Night’s Watch needs all sorts too. Why else have rangers and stewards and builders? Lord Randyll couldn’t make Sam a warrior, and Ser Alliser won’t either. You can’t hammer tin into iron, no matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn’t mean tin is useless. Why shouldn’t Sam be a steward?”

[…]

Maester Aemon was gentler. “Is your friend a hunter?”

“He hates hunting,” Jon had to admit.

“Can he plow a field?” the maester asked. “Can he drive a wagon or sail a ship? Could he butcher a cow?”

“No.”

Chett gave a nasty laugh. “I’ve seen what happens to soft lordlings when they’re put to work. Set them to churning butter and their hands blister and bleed. Give them an axe to split logs, and they cut off their own foot.”

“I know one thing Sam could do better than anyone.”

“Yes?” Maester Aemon prompted.

Jon glanced warily at Chett, standing beside the door, his boils red and angry. “He could help you,” he said quickly. “He can do sums, and he knows how to read and write. I know Chett can’t read, and Clydas has weak eyes. Sam read every book in his father’s library. He’d be good with the ravens too. Animals seem to like him. Ghost took to him straight off. There’s a lot he could do, besides fighting. The Night’s Watch needs every man. Why kill one, to no end? Make use of him instead.”

Maester Aemon closed his eyes, and for a brief moment Jon was afraid that he had gone to sleep. Finally he said, “Maester Luwin taught you well, Jon Snow. Your mind is as deft as your blade, it would seem.”

- Jon V, AGOT

It must have been Jon advocating for Sam. He told Aemon how he stood up for Sam and led the other recruits in making sure that he wasn’t excluded. He correctly identified that the Watch needs all sorts of people and comes up with a workable solution for Sam’s inclusion. And given that Aemon is one of the higher ranking officers in the Watch, it’s more than possible that he told Mormont of everything Jon had said and done. And Mormont saw in Jon a man who was quick on his feet, knew how to lead and delegate, and knew how to tackle the Watch’s weaknesses, which are identified by Mormont himself a few chapters earlier.

So Jon proved his worth. He proved that he was a man who could inspire and lead, plan ahead, and take action. Remember that by Jon V (when he becomes steward), he has all but taken control of the Watch’s new recruits and become the de factor master at arms (thereby supplanting the thoroughly ineffectual Alliser Thorne). He has also proven that he has an analytical nature by rightfully acknowledging that the Watch lacks learned men like Sam and he tackles that problem by placing Sam near Aemon thereby ensuring that the Watch will always be served by a learned and skilled maester.

Jon is already thinking like a Lord Commander, and he’s only a few weeks in! He knows the Watch’s weakness and correctly identifies how to bypass them. It’s all the more impressive when we note that this is quite early in his AGOT arc, meaning that his ability to plan ahead was not gained on the fly in A Dance with Dragons, but is a skill that he has always had and was slowly developing over time.

#jon snow #the nights watch #jeor mormont #sam tarly #maester aemon #asoiaf #valyrianscrolls #jonsnowfortnightevent2023 #asoiafcanonjonsnow #my stuff

[thelustybraavosimaid]

"Direwolves," Bran said. Still half-grown, they were as large as any wolf he had ever seen, but the differences were easy to spot, if you knew what to look for. Maester Luwin and Farlen the kennelmaster had taught him. A direwolf had a bigger head and longer legs in proportion to its body, and its snout and jaw were markedly leaner and more pronounced. There was something gaunt and terrible about them as they stood there amid the gently falling snow. (Bran V, AGoT)

This ties in pretty well with the Stark Look™️:

Longer-faced:

There were three tombs, side by side. Lord Rickard Stark, Ned's father, had a long, stern face. (Eddard I, AGoT)

--

The boy absorbed that all in silence. He had the Stark face if not the name: long, solemn, guarded, a face that gave nothing away. Whoever his mother had been, she had left little of herself in her son. (Tyrion II, AGoT)

--

The flames crackled softly, and in their crackling she heard the whispered name Jon Snow. His long face floated before her, limned in tongues of red and orange, appearing and disappearing again, a shadow half-seen behind a fluttering curtain. (Melisandre I, ADwD)

--

"He's to marry Arya Stark. My little sister." Jon could almost see her in that moment, long-faced and gawky, all knobby knees and sharp elbows, with her dirty face and tangled hair. (Jon VI, ADwD)

Lean/slender/skinny/gaunt:

He was of an age with Robb, but they did not look alike. Jon was slender where Robb was muscular, dark where Robb was fair, graceful and quick where his half brother was strong and fast. (Bran I, AGoT)

--

His uncle was sharp-featured and gaunt as a mountain crag, but there was always a hint of laughter in his blue-grey eyes. (Jon I, AGoT)

--

"The left is good. All is reversed, it will make your enemies more awkward. Now you are standing wrong. Turn your body sideface, yes, so. You are skinny as the shaft of a spear, do you know. That is good too, the target is smaller. Now the grip. Let me see." (Arya II, AGoT)

--

Theon Stark's the real thin one with the long hair and the skinny beard. They called him the 'Hungry Wolf,' because he was always at war. (Bran VII, AGoT)

Long-legged:

Benjen Stark straddled the bench with long legs and took the wine cup out of Jon's hand. (Jon I, AGoT)

--

Skinny as they were, her legs were strong and springy and growing longer every day. She was glad of that. A water dancer needs good legs. Blind Beth was no water dancer, but she would not be Beth forever. (The Blind Girl, ADwD)

--

That's a Brandon, the tall one with the dreamy face, he was Brandon the Shipwright, because he loved the sea. (Bran VII, AGoT)

Also:

The Weeper's red rheumy eyes gave Jon another look. "Aye? Well, he has a wolfish cast to him, now as I look close. Bring him to Mance, might be he'll keep him." (Jon I, ASoS)

--------

"It has a name, does it?" Her father sighed. "Ah, Arya. You have a wildness in you, child. 'The wolf blood,' my father used to call it. Lyanna had a touch of it, and my brother Brandon more than a touch. It brought them both to an early grave." (Arya II, AGoT)

#the starks look like direwolves I'm sorry but I don't make the rules #asoiaf

[jozor-johai]

Revisiting the Rat Cook, Part 2: Prince-and-Bacon Pie, and Pork Crackling

This is the second part of a series where I'm examining the symbols and themes present in the "Rat Cook" story, as relayed by Bran in ASOS Bran IV, and search reappearances of those elements throughout the rest of ASOIAF.

This is the first part, as well as the long version of my introduction.

"Revisiting the Rat Cook" is predicated on the understanding that GRRM's use of metadiegetic legends provide a "road map" of symbols and meaning, used in their abstract form, which we, as readers, can use to better understand the relationships between symbols, motifs, and themes as they reoccur throughout ASOAIF as a whole.

Among other things, the Rat Cook story is about a rat which eats rats, or a cook who serves kings; The Rat Cook story is about fathers and sons, about cannibalism, about trust, about vengeance, and about damning one's legacy.

This is likely going to be a 9-part series, but ideally almost all of these parts will be able to stand on their own. Each post will inform the next as I build my analysis, but hopefully each individual post is also interesting in its own right.

"Prince-and-Bacon Pie"

Last time, we talked about Wyman Manderly's wedding pies, and his favorite, lamprey pies.

In the original Rat Cook story, though, the Andal King is allegedly served a bacon pie. “Prince-and-bacon pie”, Bran calls it, and he repeats later that a “rasher of bacon” was cooked into the prince pie. The idea of pork served alongside human flesh is given repeat attention in regard to the pie, but it extends elsewhere into the story as well:

When the Rat Cook is punished, in turn, and becomes a cannibal rat eating his own kind, he is transformed into an insatiable rat “as huge as a sow”. Unusually large for a rat, but he is certainly no longer a man, although perhaps close enough, if you trust the moniker “long pork”.

This connection remains true for Lord Manderly’s Frey pies. When they are served in ADWD The Prince of Winterfell, they are introduced as being pork pies:

“…three great wedding pies, as wide across as wagon wheels, their flaky crusts stuffed to bursting with carrots, onions, turnips, parsnips, mushrooms, and chunks of seasoned pork swimming in a savory brown gravy.

Manderly’s pie is nearly identical to the one served by the Rat Cook, with carrots, onions, mushrooms, and, most importantly, down to pork as the main meat—which is to be expected, as Manderly has all but admitted to his influences.

In fact, though, the association of cannibalism, pork, and even pies comes as early as AGOT Jon IV, when the readers are introduced to the notion offhand while the Night’s Watch recruits mock Samwell Tarly:

“I saw him eat a pork pie," Toad said, smirking. "Do you think it was a brother?"

Three-Finger Hobb is certainly not serving Dickon to Samwell, but it contains all the same connections that the Rat Cook story relies on: between cannibalism and one’s own family, children baked into pork pies. The phrase “rasher of bacon” from the Rat Cook story appears in this same interaction about Sam, doubling down on the associations:

"You girls do as you please," Rast said, "but if Thorne sends me against Lady Piggy, I'm going to slice me off a rasher of bacon."

Again, this early instance of bullying, which might instead be framed as the brutal hierarchy of interpersonal domination—or we might say, brothers turning against brothers—is depicted using the same motifs as literal cannibalism. Is it Sam’s blood brother who is a pork pie, or is it Sam, called pork by the men who would become his black brothers? These are brothers turning against their own, and it is the imagined transformation of a man into a pig.

The recruits are joking here, but the comparison between slicing up a human and slicing up pork was brought up with a much darker tone only three chapters earlier, in AGOT Arya II:

Jeyne Poole had told Arya that he'd cut him up in so many pieces that they'd given him back to the butcher in a bag, and at first the poor man had thought it was a pig they'd slaughtered.

It’s dark irony for Micah, the butcher’s boy, to be returned to his father butchered like a pig. It also evokes our Rat Cook story again, with a dead son delivered to his father; like the Andal king, Micah’s father thinks—for a moment—that he’s being given pork. Also present again is the nature of transformation that this death creates: the prince becomes a pork pie, and the Rat Cook becomes as big as a “sow”, just as much as Micah becomes a slaughtered pig.

When the Night’s Watch arrives at Craster’s Keep in ACOK Jon III, Jon finds the similarity again, noting that a pig about to be slaughtered sounds eerily human:

Nearby, a small girl pulled carrots from a garden, naked in the rain, while two women tied a pig for slaughter. The animal's squeals were high and horrible, almost human in their distress.

Immediately later in the same chapter, Dolorous Edd makes a wry joke about cannibalism:

Best leave the wolf outside, he looks hungry enough to eat one of Craster's children. Well, truth be told, I'm hungry enough to eat one of Craster's children, so long as he was served hot.

Just like with the Night’s Watch recruits, this is a joke, but Edd’s line about eating one of Craster’s children transforms the earlier scene into a more chilling image: we were presented with the human-sounding tied pig appearing side-by-side in the same sentence with one of Craster’s small, naked children. With the addition of Edd’s words, both motifs appear alongside a story of eating children—just as in the Rat Cook story, where the Andal king eats his child-as-pork, and the Rat Cook-as-sow eats his own children as well.

Even more can be made of Edd’s jape, if we notice another minute detail: it’s also loaded that Edd uses “he” here to refer to Craster’s child… when Craster only keeps his daughters. Because Edd evokes sons here, Edd’s joke about eating a child calls special attention to the conspicuously missing sons from the scene. Might we expect, in the context of all this imagery, that these sons have been 'eaten' as well, even if not literally? We learn that these missing sons were sacrificed to the old gods later in the same chapter:

But the wildlings serve crueler gods than you or I. These boys are Craster's offerings. His prayers, if you will.

This is the clear meaning of the earlier association between the vulnerable child and the “almost human” pig, which is about to be slaughtered—or sacrificed—so that the keep could live, by way of eating it. It’s the same thing with Craster’s children, who are also, from his perspective, sacrificed so that his keep can live on, untroubled by the old gods.

Note here how all these motifs occur in tandem with each other: pigs as sacrifice to become food, eating children, sacrificed sons, deference (or lack thereof) to the old gods (and, importantly, their laws). The Rat Cook, in retribution, is forced to eat his children, for he forced the Andal King to do the same.

In both scenarios, the gods seemingly ‘demand’ that a father sacrifice his children; the fact that these are sons for Craster deepens the symbolic meaning, as it did with Walder Frey and the Freys in the last part: it is the death of one’s legacy by way of one’s lineage. Only sons bear the family name.

This is the paradox, the 'doom' that Craster, like the doomed characters in "The Rat Cook", is living out. From his perspective, he sacrifices his sons for the same reason he slaughters the pigs: to ensure his keep's survival. They need to eat, and they need to be untroubled by curses. But that sacrifice is Craster's curse, for even as he ensures his short-term survival, he damns his legacy. Craster may have children, but his keep has no future. Every one of his daughters, rather than become their own generation, perversely returns to reenact the role of their mother’s generation as Craster weds her; his keep, as its own patriarchal entity, is stagnant, and will die with him.

"Pork Crackling"

Regarding the equivalence of eating one’s family as an extension of eating one’s legacy, agency, or even one’s self, bear with me into an interesting digression about Victarion:

In ADWD The Iron Suitor, Victarion understands that his role as captain is both inextricably tied to his physical person, and yet is also an idea, separate from him as a mortal man. Referring to his rotting hand, he thinks to himself:

This was not something that his crew could see. They were half a world away from home, too far to let them see that their iron captain had begun to rust.

His mortality—the mortification of his injured hand—would ruin the effect of his role as captain, a higher status which the Ironborn consider to be a “king aboard his own ship”. Victarion may not be socially permitted to be so incapacitated while captain, but he also understands that if he keeps his captain identity separate from his mortal form—that is, if he can lie about the severity of his injury, keeping the state of his body hidden while playing the role of captain—he can maintain his identity as “the iron captain”.

The role of 'captain', and even more so, the arm that is required to be a warrior, is so intricately tied to Victarion’s warrior identity, and therefore to his sense of self, that Victarion refurses to allow the maester to cut off his arm to save the rest of his body. Again, his identity is greater than his mortality.

Yet, when Moqorro suddenly arrives, and Victarion is faced with an alternative, he is willing to sacrifice all else: to stray from the Drowned God towards R'hllor, to put his body into the hands of a “sorcerer” that he just met—all to pursue the ideal of his legacy as captain, divested from his person. And so Victarion, by beginning to sacrificing so much cultural baggage which he believed was part of himself, gets to keep his arm and his captainhood—and what does this arm look like?

Victarion offers this sickening description in ADWD Victarion I:

The arm the priest had healed was hideous to look upon, pork crackling from elbow to fingertips.

It’s a rare case where someone is able to look at their own body and make the gruesome comparison between their own flesh and pork as food, and this moment is Victarion’s reward. Like the Rat Cook who became a rat "huge as a sow", like Micah the butcher's boy who became a butchered pig, Victarion's arm—which was so much his legacy, his identity, that he would not let the maester remove it, so much a symbol of his personhood and his power that he would stray from the Drowned God to get it back—has become pork crackling.

- - -

Speaking of pork crackling, and returning to Craster's Keep...

When they burn the body of a fallen Night’s Watchman in ASOS Samwell II, Sam finds that it smells so much like pork that he is involuntarily hungry:

The worst thing was the smell, though. If it had been a foul unpleasant smell he might have stood it, but his burning brother smelled so much like roast pork that Sam's mouth began to water, and that was so horrible that as soon as the bird squawked "Ended" he ran behind the hall to throw up in the ditch.

Yet again, Dolorous Edd appears immediately afterward to bring the cannibalistic overtones to the forefront. Again, Edd makes the comparison between eating pork and eating human flesh, like in the Rat Cook story, and with eating one’s family, as with his own jape a book earlier, as with Rast mocking Sam in AGOT, as with the Freys eating their kin in ADWD. They may not be tied by blood, but Edd jokes about eating his brothers all the same:

"Never knew Bannen could smell so good." Edd's tone was as morose as ever. "I had half a mind to carve a slice off him. If we had some applesauce, I might have done it. Pork's always best with applesauce, I find." … "You best not die, Sam, or I fear I might succumb. There's bound to be more crackling on you than Bannen ever had, and I never could resist a bit of crackling.”

If Sam were to die, Edd suggests, he too would become pork crackling. I wonder if that says anything about Victarion's own fate... but I'm talking about Sam for now.

The even more important part of Sam’s experience here is Sam's knowledge that it is wrong, sickening, to eat human flesh—or, perhaps, to turn against his family, even his adopted family, as the two issues are conflated in these instances. Edd jokes about how delicious Bannen smells to make light of a dark, cruel truth: in these starving conditions, that might be true. Despite that suspicion, it is still firmly the wrong thing to do. Sam vomits even considering the thought.

When it comes to the Rat Cook story, though, that knowledge does not spare the Andal King any more than the Rat Cook; both, ultimately, are forced into the position of cannibalism, which makes it all the more tragic: to know the difference between right and wrong, but perhaps not to know which you are choosing. Did Victarion make the right choice turning his arm to pork to stay the "Iron Captain" he wanted to be? Did Craster make the right choice leaving his sons to die so that he could live untroubled? Do they even know?

As for the Andal King, he didn't even understand the choice in front of him; he was placed into that position by the Rat Cook—because of the violation of guest right, that significant law of the Old Gods.

Guest right is a social contract, the type that is necessary to maintain social stability. To keep interpersonal relationships, to build a community—or a kingdom—a person must be able to trust their neighbor. Practically, a guest must be able to trust that they will not be poisoned with food, in the same way that a host must be able to trust that their guest will not turn their cloak and slaughter them under their own roof. In other words, both parties must be able to trust that the social conditions of peace will be upheld.

The fact that this story of the Rat Cook concerns a power dynamic as well—between the lowly cook and the Andal King—expands the metaphor into one that describes feudalism as a whole… but I’ll expand that idea in the subsequent parts to come.

For now, consider this: that the Andal King, like Sam with Bannen’s delicious-smelling corpse, might have known the difference between right and wrong, but it may have made no difference as to what he actually did: he still ate his own son.

But what of the Andal King's own crime? Who started it? The Rat Cook broke the ancient social contract of trust called “guest right” to punish the King… but for the Rat Cook to be deserving of vengeance, the Andal King must have broken a social contract as well, perhaps a social contract regarding the position of power that a King has over a cook. The King must have broken that contract first, even before the story of "The Rat Cook" picks up.

But that will be further discussed in parts to come. Next part we’ll talk more about trust in particular, finally taking look at Coldhands attempting to feed Bran a “sow”, visiting Arya in the House of Black and White, and looking at Quentyn making a deal Meereen.

#a song of ice and fire #asoiaf analysis #rat cook #craster #victarion greyjoy #asoiaf #RtRC

[esther-dot]

Ned was there when Lyanna died in Tower of Joy. He even fought with the guards of Rhaegar to meet with his sister. Yet Ned never think bad about Rhaegar. Oberyn and Doran were shown to have no single thought on Rhaegar humiliating their sister Elia. Only Brandon was shown to be angry for what Rhaegar did to Lyanna. I mean Ned had more thoughts on how Joffery is bad news for Sansa but no thought on Rhaegar. Is grrm deliberately doing this? If these three guys have shown their anger towards Rhaegar then maybe readers will see him a bad news. I think grrm is hiding Rhaegar and Lyanna story for Jon parentage to not get reveal early. 🤔

(continuation of this convo)

I think about this a lot too, anon. For some reason it was Oberyn who really came to mind during this chain of asks, and to my lizard brain, the omission of anger towards Rhaegar feels like an oversight on the author's part or evidence that he doesn't take the issue with Rhaegar that I do. That’s a thought that’s hard for me to even entertain as someone who has hated men for committing lesser crimes against my little sister! Obviously it makes sense to hate the perp and architect of Elia’s death and focus on them as they are alive, but Rhaegar is the one who kickstarted the events that led to Elia’s death, so ya know, hate.

As for Ned, I think this was the only quote that (to me) felt like Ned having an opinion about Rhaegar:

There was no answer Ned Stark could give to that but a frown. For the first time in years, he found himself remembering Rhaegar Targaryen. He wondered if Rhaegar had frequented brothels; somehow he thought not. (AGOT, Eddard IX)

And initially, maybe it does read like Rhaegar is being favorably contrasted with Robert. But if we opt to not assume we're to form a conclusion about Rhaegar's character from this, and instead see it as the author revealing more of the truth to us, it is clearly Martin telling us, Rhaegar wasn't given to fits of passion/lust that would send him to a brothel or say, lead him to abduct and rape a girl. Martin wants us to know that what Robert believes is the story, isn't.

That doesn't mean we're being told this is a love story though!

As more info about Rhaegar is revealed we find that learning something totally altered him, that he became wholly absorbed with the prophecy/his fate. His single-mindedness in pursuit of that meant he personally transformed from a bookworm to a warrior. That certainly leaves the door open for us to imagine he’d do other things, even bad things, outside his typical behavior.

So I’d say this is less about Ned’s feelings about Rhaegar, and more, the author trying to guide us in understanding him, telling us this guy wasn’t really distracted from his purpose. Of course it makes no sense for Ned to have that thought about a man if he believed that man kidnapped and repeatedly raped his sister. It really doesn’t. However, it does work as a hit that Robert's version of events isn’t the whole story. There are occasionally lines that I don't think fit the POV perfectly and seem more like the author inserting a thought which means I hesitate to read too much into Ned's feelings there. IMO, this is primarily something the author was wanting to impress upon as as foundation for a later revelation about Rhaegar wanting another child for his three heads of the dragon stuff.

But here's another Rhaegar mention in Ned's next chapter:

It would have to be his grandfather, for Jory's father was buried far to the south. Martyn Cassel had perished with the rest. Ned had pulled the tower down afterward, and used its bloody stones to build eight cairns upon the ridge. It was said that Rhaegar had named that place the tower of joy, but for Ned it was a bitter memory. They had been seven against three, yet only two had lived to ride away; Eddard Stark himself and the little crannogman, Howland Reed. He did not think it omened well that he should dream that dream again after so many years. (AGOT, Eddard X)

and when we pair it with this reference:

Robert had been jesting with Jon and old Lord Hunter as the prince circled the field after unhorsing Ser Barristan in the final tilt to claim the champion's crown. Ned remembered the moment when all the smiles died, when Prince Rhaegar Targaryen urged his horse past his own wife, the Dornish princess Elia Martell, to lay the queen of beauty's laurel in Lyanna's lap. He could see it still: a crown of winter roses, blue as frost.

Ned Stark reached out his hand to grasp the flowery crown, but beneath the pale blue petals the thorns lay hidden. He felt them clawing at his skin, sharp and cruel, saw the slow trickle of blood run down his fingers, and woke, trembling, in the dark. (AGOT, Eddard XV)

It is clear that there are victims to Rhaegar's actions, that other's suffer as a result of his choices, that these actions may have been pleasing to him "tower of joy," "urged his horse past his own wife," but we can read the horror in them, "for Ned it was a bitter memory," "all the smiles died."

So, even when I'm surprised at the lack of venom these men have for Rhaegar whose choices set everything into motion, and don’t think it makes sense for Ned to think of him as he does, even in the most Rhaegar-favorable reading of this we can come to, it isn't the case that we're meant to brush aside the cost of Rhaegar’s choices. It's simply that, I'm such a this or that person, I see the cost and decide Rahegar is trash, Martin is a this and that person. He can still sympathize, even finds some real tragedy (it seems) in the life/death of such a man. I mean, I still call scumbag, idiot, statutory rapist at a minimum, but I’m trying not to project.

Rhaegar could have had his reasons and believed what he was doing was right, but clearly, he was wrong. Wrong about the prophecy, wrong to prioritize chasing that rather than taking practical steps to protect the realm, wrong to implode a girl’s life when she was too young to understand all the ramifications or in a position to refuse his advances. And of course, wrong to humiliate Elia, wrong to betray a woman who had done nothing, nothing to deserve such treatment. Rhaegar was so so wrong to think that his unstable father would be able to hold everything he had fucked up together.

And yet, we have disinterest where we would expect hatred. I guess that’s why your last point is the one to hold onto:

I think grrm is hiding Rhaegar and Lyanna story for Jon parentage to not get reveal early.

Martin wants it to have impact with the reader when they finally get the confirmation of R+L=J, so everything Ned is permitted to think/feel is curtailed by what the author is willing/unwilling to divulge. That’s small comfort, but I’ll take it!

#ned stark #lyanna stark #anti rhaegar #dot chat #< tag to filter #we will not be discussing how old this ask is 🤫

[agentrouka-blog]

"Fire burns them. Fire is always hungry."- Bran(ADWD II). "He was always hungry, her Drogon. Hungry and growing fast."- Dany(ASOS I). Fire is many times associated with hunger. Fire consumes. Jon compared R'hllor to 'hungry fire god.' The dragons during DOOM of Valyria were consumed by 'hungry fires.'

Hi anon!

Of course, it is only in its excess that the fire becomes monstrous.

Numerous times in the books, life-giving little fires are described as being "fed" by human hand. Human beings and their animals, children, all living beings must feed, as well. Humans need heat, to stay warm, to cook, to create. Humans need to consume and want to consume. We desire, we want, we make use of the world around us.

As such, fire represents a facet of all life, certainly of all humans.

GRRM doesn't condemn "consuming" or killing for consumption, he doesn't condemn hunger. Only excess and abuse.

Where does he want our sympathy to reside when comparing two cases of hunger in "The Sacrifice"? The starving soldiers practiced cannibalism but is that remotely as horrific as the punishment visited upon them? Both are cases of humans roasting humans, but still very distinct from one another.

Stakes. Nightfall would be on them soon, and the red god must be fed. An offering of blood and fire, the queen's men called it, that the Lord of Light may turn his fiery eye upon us and melt these thrice-cursed snows. (...)

Asha had been as horrified as the rest when the She-Bear told her that four Peasebury men had been found butchering one of the late Lord Fell's, carving chunks of flesh from his thighs and buttocks as one of his forearms turned upon a spit, but she could not pretend to be surprised. (...)

"He was dead," the weeping boy screamed, as the flames licked up his legs. "We found him dead … please … we was hungry …" (ADWD, The Sacrifice)

Human beings must eat to live. But the red god, the greedy fire, demands homage and sacrifice that sustains nothing, only destroys.

GRRM makes a fairly clear and consistent distinction between natural hunger and consumption meant to sustain - and the kind of hunger that is psychological and unchecked, that does not stop consuming until everything is destroyed, because it does not feed life, only power. 

When Dany murders Mirri Maz Duur - a fellow living human being - she consumes her body and soul in order to wake a magical weapon to serve herself. She does not sustain life in any way, she extinguishes a life in order to create constantly hungry creatures to mirror the hunger inside her soul that comprehends no food but power.

He wanted something from her, but Sansa did not know what it was. He looks like a starving child, but I have no food to give him. Why won't he leave me be? (ASOS, Sansa IV)

The hungry soul is a dangerous thing because it can turn everything around it into its food, whether freely given or not.

Dragons make no distinction between animals and humans, they burn and eat it all, and Dany struggles with that knowledge for a while, though she has been pretending it away early on. 

"You warned me that only death could pay for life. I thought you meant the horse."

"No," Mirri Maz Duur said. "That was a lie you told yourself. You knew the price." (AGOT, Daenerys IX)

Animal or person, it should make a difference but doesn’t. She forgets Hazzea's name, and embraces her dragon side in the grasslands. It alienates her from her own humanity. It turns her into a predator herself, or rather further reveals her for one.

There's a great deal of significance in the blurring of lines that occurs when humans begin to identify more with predators than with each other, a blurring of lines that goes hand in hand with the difference between scavenging meat off the dead and actively killing to consume. Actively killing just to kill. Murder and butchery reduce human beings to consumable goods.

"I killed my first man at twelve. I've lost count of how many I've killed since then. High lords with old names, fat rich men dressed in velvet, knights puffed up like bladders with their honors, yes, and women and children too—they're all meat, and I'm the butcher.  (ACOK, Sansa IV)

One presumed to threaten me, so I killed him and fed him to the other three. They refused to eat of their friend's flesh at first, but when they grew hungry enough they had a change of heart. Men are meat." (AFFC, The Reaver)

He died weeping and alone when I ripped his second life from him. Varamyr had devoured his heart himself. He taught me much and more, and the last thing I learned from him was the taste of human flesh. (ADWD, Prologue)

The dead men's clothes and coins and valuables went into a bin for sorting. Their cold flesh would be taken to the lower sanctum where only the priests could go; what happened in there Arya was not allowed to know. Once, as she was eating her supper, a terrible suspicion seized hold of her, and she put down her knife and stared suspiciously at a slice of pale white meat. The kindly man saw the horror on her face. "It is pork, child," he told her, "only pork." (AFFC, Arya II)

Lamb and dog and mutton and the flesh of man. Some of her little grey cousins were afraid of men, even dead men, but not her. Meat was meat, and men were prey. She was the night wolf. (ADWD, The Blind Girl)

When human beings cease to be persons and become consumable goods, it’s time to worry.

"He would make a monster of me," she whispered, "a butcher queen." But then she thought of Drogon far away, and the dragons in the pit. There is blood on my hands too, and on my heart. We are not so different, Daario and I. We are both monsters. (ADWD, Daenerys IV)

That’s something GRRM illustrates with the excesses of fire, but the fire itself is only a metaphor for a facet of human nature that can degrade down to monstrocity when unchecked. It’s visible in other imagery, the butcher, the cannibal, the sadistic murderer, the greed for power that would observe the beauty of a conflagration over the horror it inflicts on its victims.

#fire imagery #anti daenerys targaryen #anti tyrion lannister #<- not really just to be safe #hunger #metaphors #fire threat

[goodqueenaly]

naturally the most popular boys' name among the Targs is Aegon (11 at total, 2 before the Conquest), but the second is... Daeron, at 6, and its popularity peaked during the second halve of Targ rule. Do you think there's a particular reason for that, both Watsonian and Doylist?

Clearly, I think, the first Daerons to be thought of by GRRM (and thus named as such) were Daeron I and Daeron II, since GRRM included them in the Appendix of AGOT (as well as brought up Daeron I in Jon and Benjen's early conversation). How GRRM himself came up with the name "Daeron" is of course unclear (though we can imagine, perhaps, the author playing around with "ae"-based names, and he had already come up with the almost-identical name "Dareon" for one of Jon's fellow Night's Watch recruits in the same book), as is why he decided to give these two Targaryens that name. It's probable, though, that the author may have wanted to bookend the Targaryens' incorporation of Dorne with kings of the same name (since he added in that Appendix that "Daeron [I] conquered Dorne, but was unable to hold it, and died young" while "Daeron [II] brought Dorne into the realm by wedding the Dornish princess Myriah").

Now, while I don't believe the author had thought of this whole backstory at the time he invented the two ruling Daerons, I tend to think the future King Daeron I was officially named after Queen Daenaera's father while quietly being named to undermine the "false Daerons" who cropped up during Aegon III's reign. Daenaera Velaryon was the daughter of Daeron Velaryon, one of Alyn Velaryon's captains whose ship the True Heart was sunk (with Daeron aboard) during Alyn's attack on the Braavosi in the Stepstones. It's not unusual to have a grandchild named after a grandparent, and Daeron Velaryon’s participation (and death) in Alyn’s battle gave him a sense of permanently preserved military glory befitting a royal namesake. However, this name may have also served to emphasize that there was only one true Prince Daeron with a right to the throne in Westeros - not the false pretenders claiming the identity of Viserys I's youngest son, but the eldest son of the reigning King Aegon III (compare, say, the future Henry VIII, who was given the title "Duke of York" at the age of three in 1494, in the midst of Perkin Warbeck's attempt to assert himself as the dead Prince Richard, Duke of York).

The future King Daeron II, for his part, may also have been named for the queen's father, or his cousin Daeron, or in response to these "false Daerons", or any combination of the above. Maybe Prince Viserys (because I tend to think of the naming of his grandson as Viserys' decision, one he wouldn't trust to his highly irresponsible son) wanted to emphasize that his senior grandson was going to be a loyal lieutenant prince to his future royal cousin, just as his own eldest son was named in honor of the ruling King Aegon. Maybe Viserys wanted to give an outward sign of favor to Queen Daenaera by choosing her dead father as his namesake (perhaps demonstrating that he was not going to be any sort of rival to her husband or sons). Maybe Viserys wanted to discourage any future "false Daeron" pretenders by confirming that the Targaryens felt confident in using the name "Daeron". We'll have to wait and see.

Since "The Hedge Knight" was published in 1998, it's probable that GRRM named Daeron "the Drunken" next. Raymun Fossoway explicitly notes in "The Hedge Knight" that "Daeron, he's named, after the king" - that is, King Daeron II, the ruling monarch in 209 AC - and I think this is a straightforward explanation both in and out of universe. Once again, a grandparent being used as a namesake is a logical explanation, and with Maekar already written as a strict and dutiful son, it's hardly surprising that Maekar would have chosen to honor his father by naming his eldest son after him. Too, because GRRM has often talked about the influence of English history on his writing of the series and the repetition of names in that history - joking that everyone is always named "Edward", "Henry", or "Richard" - I don't find it at all strange that he'd repeat Daeron II's name for one of Daeron II's grandsons.

I can't say for certain when GRRM came up with the idea of Prince Daeron, the son of King Viserys I, other than it was no later than 2013 (when "The Princess and the Queen" was published). Likewise, why the author decided to go with "Daeron" as the prince's name is unclear. Perhaps he was thinking backwards from Daeron I; if he had decided even at this point that someday he would have a sort of false pretender narrative during the reign of Aegon III using a son of King Viserys, he may have thought to appropriate the name of Aegon's heir for this false pretender. Maybe the author liked the nickname "the Daring" and wanted an established Targaryen name that would provide some amusing alliteration. Maybe the author simply wanted a Targaryen name he had already come up with for Viserys' youngest son and figured "Daeron" worked as well as any other. Maybe all or none of the above. Nor did the author make clear in any of the historical works why Viserys I and/or Queen Alicent chose it as the name for their third son - but then, most Targaryen names go unexplained (we have no explanation for Aemond's or Helaena's names either, for example), so I wouldn't exactly put much stock in a lack of in-universe basis for the name. I think it's enough to assume that Viserys and/or Alicent wanted a Valyrian/Targaryen name for their son, that "Daeron" was an extant Valyrian/Targaryen name (if not seen in the Targaryens we know of before that time, certainly known by the Velaryons, since I think it's likely Daeron Velaryon was at least a little older than Prince Daeron), and that they went with "Daeron" accordingly.

Then we got TWOIAF and learned of two more Daerons: Prince Daeron, the third son of King Aegon V, and Prince Daeron, the short-lived second son of King Aerys II and Queen Rhaella. It's possible, of course, that GRRM had already decided on the name of Aegon V's youngest son even before publishing it in TWOIAF (given that he had Barristan Selmy refer to the unnamed "sons of the fifth Aegon" in ADWD, an indication that the author had at least to some extent fleshed out Aegon's family tree by that point). What the case is, I think it makes enough sense both in and out of universe that this Prince Daeron was named after King Daeron II. This name fits with the names of Aegon V's other sons in their namesakes: Prince Duncan after his close friend and longtime mentor Duncan the Tall, who had first educated him into the trials of smallfolk life, and Prince Jaehaerys after (presumably) King Jaehaerys I, the (at least publicly) wise Conciliator who had reformed the law and ruled with peace and justice. In certainly young Egg's mind, Daeron II "was a good king, everybody says so" and "a good man", who "brought Dorne into the realm and made the Dornishmen our friends" - in other words, a fitting model for the peace, justice, and universal prosperity Egg hoped to accomplish in his reign. Too, just as with Daeron "the Drunken", GRRM may have wanted to continue the historically inspired repetition of royal names within the Targaryen dynasty by having Egg pick "Daeron".

As far as baby Prince Daeron goes ... eh. Maybe it was after their uncle Prince Daeron, the dashing knight who had died nobly in battle when Aerys had been only seven (and who may have been preserved as a sort of ideal of knighthood in Aerys' mind thereafter). Maybe it was after King Daeron II or King Daeron I in testament to the highlights of their respective reigns. Maybe, like perhaps Viserys I and Queen Alicent, Aerys and/or Rhaella simply wanted a Targaryen/Valyrian name and thought that fit the bill. Or maybe they had a completely different reasoning. We'll probably never know. (And again, the point about GRRM pointedly repeating names stands.)

#asoiaf meta #names #namesakes #daeron i targaryen #daeron ii targaryen #daeron the drunken #daeron son of aegon #daeron the daring

[sherlokiness]

Dany's Death: Melting Enemies, Wolves, and Carrion Crows

Not only is Dany gonna die horribly, but her death will benefit certain wolves and carrion crows.🤭🤭

“We had one king, then five. Now all I see are crows, squabbling over the corpse of Westeros.” He fastened the shutters. “Do not go to Old Wyk, Asha. Stay with your mother. We shall not have her long, I fear.”

“No, I’ll sit the Seastone Chair.”

“Then you are just another crow, screaming for carrion.” Rodrik sat again behind his table.

We see here that Westeros is likened to a person whose corpse will be eaten by a crow. So flesh= lands/power.

In one room, a beautiful woman sprawled naked on the floor while four little men crawled over her. They had rattish pointed faces and tiny pink hands, like the servitor who had brought her the glass of shade. One was pumping between her thighs. Another savaged her breasts, worrying at the nipples with his wet red mouth, tearing and chewing.

Consistent with the metaphor above where Westeros is the beautiful woman with 4 men raping her- the 4 Kings.

Even in Oldtown, far from the fighting and safe behind its walls, the War of the Five Kings had touched them all . . . although Archmaester Benedict insisted that there had never been a war of five kings, since Renly Baratheon had been slain before Balon Greyjoy had crowned himself.

So 4 Kings depending on the timeline.

My flesh will feed the wolves and carrion crows, she thought sadly, and worms will burrow through my womb. 

Her accumulated power will feed the wolves and carrion crows.☺️☺️☺️

"Of all. They shall come day and night to see the wonder that has been born again into the world, and when they see they shall lust. For dragons are fire made flesh, and fire is power."

We can actually see that grouping again in a Jon chapter. Parallels!🤡🤡

“I see what you are, Snow. Half a wolf and half a wildling , baseborn get of a traitor and a whore."

“Peace means peace for all.”

The Norrey hawked and spat. “As well make peace with wolves and carrion crows.”

Love this talk of peace. To the Flints and Norreys, Jon is both a wolf and carrion crow.

He called Jon Snow a craven, a liar, and a turncloak, cursed him for a black-hearted buggering kneeler, a robber, and a carrion crow, accused him of wanting to fuck the free folk up the arse.

In fact, Jon explicitly gets called that in the same chapter. This is JonTheBlackBastard all over again.

Meanwhile Dany is out there finally rejecting peace.

No. You are the blood of the dragon. The whispering was growing fainter, as if Ser Jorah were falling farther behind. Dragons plant no trees. Remember that. Remember who you are, what you were made to be. Remember your words.

She's done with planting trees!

We came to raise up a king and queen who would lead us home to Westeros, but this Targaryen girl seems more intent on planting olive trees than in reclaiming her father's throne.

The trees are olives- the symbol of peace in our world. "To extend an olive branch" is to make peace. I mean, this is such a clear symbolism that Dany will choose war. Imagine if Sansa accepted Littlefinger's pomegranate, why I'd be fearing for her life. Reminder : As early as AGoT, Dany has usurped her brother in her mind before his death. She'll probably usurp someone again. FAegon or Jon? Both?

Dany's enemies melting away means defeat.

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper's rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened.

I propose this dream of hers symbolizes defeat like how Mel saw Stannis winning but it's actually a vision of him losing. There's a Jonsa meta out there detailing that when X person is exulted, the opposite happens. Dany will wake the dragon in a way that Viserys always meant it to be. She's gonna get so MAD.

"We are an old people. Ancestors are important to us. Wed Hizdahr zo Loraq and make a son with him, a son whose father is the harpy, whose mother is the dragon. In him the prophecies shall be fulfilled, and your enemies will melt away like snow."

Snow and dew. She's fighting 1) Usurper 2)armored in ice . I love that the other mention of snow for Dany is her audience with the Undying which was " a honor as rare as summer snows." Any other? Being a snow maid? Snow's maid? Oh, wait. That's the snow tasting girl. 🤣🤣🤣

"Snow," an eagle cried, as foemen scuttled up the ice like spiders. Jon was armored in black ice, but his blade burned red in his fist.

Interestingly, we have a Jon dream of him being armored in black ice.

"I am the Lord of Winterfell," Jon screamed. It was Robb before him now, his hair wet with melting snow.

The same dream where he becomes a usurper. Parallels!!!!🤡🤡🤡

"A dragon eating its own tail, aye," Valena said. "From the days of Aegon’s Conquest. He did not conquer here. Elsewhere he burned his foes, him and his sisters, but here we melted away before them, leaving only stone and sand for them to burn.

Dorne melted away before Aegon, a dragon. Aegon never conquered Dorne. So if Dany's enemies "melt away" like Aegon's did then that means the dragon is the loser.

#me hate posting #i go into the #jonsa #tag and what do I see #I don't even know if it was tag anti #i just go to the usual tag #smh #ice and fire boy and nothing so sweet #i blocked them already

[horizon-verizon]

[WAS PART OF A PREVIOUS REBLOG]

The premise/theme of House of the Dragon is that men hurt women and their relationships with each other. A prime implication from how they portrayed this theme is that men also are the definitive center of those women’s motivations.

The women just act to please or passively negotiate with the men, unless it concerns their female friends (that’s the only cause for resistance). 

Woman against man is the unavoidable, naturalized battle of the sexes, with culture forcing women to become mere puppets for the men in their lives, unable to form much complex ideas or devote themselves to their own ambitions and/or desires--or even have those that are not in some way more eminent for their male relatives/peers/children.

Women always get the short end of the stick, basically. And that female friendships become the default for the only real pushback against those patriarchal oppressions. But even those friendships are too vulnerable to dissolution under the strain of the ties women have to their male relatives and loved ones.  

But, there is also always resistance and “hard” negotiation as well as pleadings against culture even within the popular culture and amongst its most powerful rules. 

A)

This show makes stark contrast between Alicent and Rhaenyra from episode 1, which could have been fine if we didn’t just have these two giving the only richer displays of experiences women could have living in Westeros. It’s not just about noble women, after all (but more on that below).

Premise again: Women in the show are eternal victims of men and their ambition, and they can never hope to truly stop men from messing things up because they were never given the political power, nor social respect, to do so. Therefore, they--like Alicent--usually do not have enough self confidence or faith in themselves to wield whatever authority or power they do receive, customary or not, effectively.

However, Daenerys of AGoT/GoT even looked at Aegon’s prophecy or the prophecy of the “Prince” with one strain of power for herself as well as power to rule graciously for the better future of her prospective subjects. Dany got a whole arc of inner struggle from just having the one brother in exile, while both Rhaenyra and Alicent should have a whole gaggle of courtiers as well as children, followers, etc to have conflict with, as well as each other. And have us see how they, alone whether surrounded or actually alone, try to make sense of their positions.

The prophecy was never mentioned in Fire and Blood. The HotD writers and some in the fandom have used the argument that Maester Gyldayn, Septon Eustace, Mushroom, etc. all would never had access to such information, thus freeing up ther possibility of such prophecy actually being passed down from ruler to heir since his death. 

I think that that would have been a plausible reason for mentioning the prophecy here in the show, but using the prophecy this early and in a way that actually shapes Rhaenyra into giving motive for many of her power-keeping actions (refusing Criston, trying to keep peace despite Daemon, etc.) morphs her character into one with little decision-making apart from this prophecy and Viserys’ approval, which is cheap storytelling. 

The prophecy, as some in the fandom have interpreted it, became the overarching spiritual force that determines everything going on to the characters...meanwhile A Song of Ice and Fire suggests the authority and power of magic and prophecy as less influential than people have advertised or believed while also still leaving open the door of magic’s influence. There was a sense that nothing makes sense and yet the choices the characters made were “meant” to happen because that is what they chose in responses to several debasements, hypocrisies, etc. 

Much of the books strive to show how prophecies can’t really be taken too literally or even be trusted, and that it is actually because of humans’ desires for power, clarity, love, money, etc. that shape how they perceive their rights and access to the objects of their desires. So to see HotD make Aegon’s prophecy the objective moral guide and backbone of HotD and the Targaryen house’s main motivator comes across as flat and ridiculous to me.

It also still doesn’t explain the scotch-taping the writers are doing by using this as a justification/understanding of Daenerys’ madness and downfall in the last season of GoT.

What could have made this show distinct from GoT and better than what it is right now are these things that @jeynearrynofthevale lists out:

- Better pacing with less time jumps. End season 1 with Aemond claiming Vhagar and Luke cutting out his eye. This is a great way to demonstrate how the previous generation has fundamentally influenced their children and that there’s no going back. It establishes that conflict is coming and the sides are becoming more equal in terms of man power. And by having Viserys enforce no punishment while Rhaenyra demands Aemond be tortured, we see why Alicent fears for her children’s lives if Rhaenyra is queen.

- Spend way more time on court politics and the buildup of the dance. Show why the two sides are falling the way they do and establish the core issues at play. Spend some more time establishing the characters before time jumps. Maybe give Rhaenyra motivation for ruling in terms of what she wants to do. Have her and Alicent navigate around each other in court.

- Take some time to build lore and explain to the general audience what’s going on with the dragons. Maybe have a scene of Laena claiming Vhagar. Show what claiming a dragon means and talk about who has what dragon.

- Give some focus to court beyond the Targaryens. What do other lords and ladies there think? Do people still believe rhaenyra should be heiress? Who wants a marriage alliance with Joffrey? Who’s angling for court positions? What does the court actually think of Viserys?

- And even more drastically, show a little more of the smallfolk. They play a big role later on and having one or two smallfolk characters we occasionally see and interact with would make the world more rich.

In other words, where are the moments where Alicent and Rhaenyra really duke it out, where Jaecaerys and Luke and Joffery both face the court’s disdain for them and how the conflict between them and the green children develop, how Viserys excerbated all this in multiple incidents where he favored Rhaneyra, portraysls of how he treated and spoke to her versus Aegon, Aemond, Daeron, and Helaena and his different grandkids, how the ladies attending Alicent and Rhaenyra talked about the other repsective lady and spoke to their own, how Daemon, Corlys, Rhaenys, the Blackwoods and Darkllyns looked at King’s Landing and court life and Rhaneyra in private. What do the smallfolk think before, after, and away from the play of episode 4? How much do dragons and their bonds with humans shape those humans? How do the children all feel about their identity? 

You really didn’t need to make Aegon’s prophecy the floating puppeteer of the narrative.

Why is all this left more to the viewer to dream about? Shouldn’t this show fill in holes rather than go the way of its originator (F&B) and answer questions with enough actual material to back it up? Be similar to so many Chinese historical dramas in the level of detail and many smaller incidents that build up into major conflicts?

For me, there is a concerning lack of creativity in HotD, or a lot of wasted potential that has come to be boiled down to just “Team Rhaenyra” vs “Team Alicent”, or “Team Women-Who-Never-Would-Have-Won”. Like, they felt that their political-philosophical point was so powerful in its obviousness that it would carry the entire emotional weight for the entirety of the show without actually creating paradoxes and nuances of desire, psychosocial development, responses to environment and pressures apart from the two main women. (Viserys doesn’t even count because he’s justified in the wrong place.) A lot of fanfiction does all this much better than the actual show, by just showing what was listed above and thus giving us a rich worlds of different people’s inner and outer selves.

In real life, men can manipulate women without those women just reacting to those manipulations or going along with it 75% of the time, even with the lack of faith in themselves. The asker wasn’t protesting against the men manipulating, but that that is all what the show is doing. 

Not only does this TV depiction make the women look like “pawns” with no agency, it makes the men look like 2D villains with nothing more to them but careless, blind ambition or flailing incompetence with nothing to accompany those things.

This is not to say that men and boys are not systematically allowed to be violent towards women and girls. I’m saying that like Criston, we could have gotten more Otto, Daemon, Viserys, maybe Jaehaerys (a scene with him remebering Maegor), a little more of Rhea Royce (yes she is a woman, but Fire and Blood spoke more of her than did that one scene), more of Aemond and those siblings’ years between episode 5-6, 6-7,....

We need origins for the events we already saw (again, refer to @jeynearrynofthevale‘s post). There is no richness to it other than: men hurt women, and men always are the ones to win a competition that women never win, because men make victims out of women. We’ve been done that. So why are we accepting it so simply now in HotD?

You can have a television show that still gives more complexity than “I want to make my father/sons respect/guide me even though I love my best friend”. As you navigate life, there are things happening around you and your court circle that will also shape your own little bubble. Show those things, and you have yourself an actual world that feels real. Where are the other, external stakes that press onto the more personal ones, even informing them? Where are these lords who will oppose Rhaneyra and what do they think of Aegon (II), of Aemond? What do lords and peasants feel about Viserys, Otto, Rhaenyra and Alicent and their kids aside from that differently-contexted play in episode 4? King’s Landing is not all of Westeros. Television shows do not have to be so simple as that, as the first 4 seasons of GoT showed us.

There could have been more interior life from not only Rhaenyra and Alicent more persons, and they would have been much more than people meant to represent Man vs Woman. But since that philosophy is overriding the story, the story suffers. The first episode should be the launching pad, not the heft or the spectacle of the entire season.

And because the show doesn’t move on from that simplistic idea, we instead have the writers creating so many visual mirroring scenes for us to gush over: Rhaneyra/Daemon/Otto on the bridge to Dragonstone. 

B)

We have to remember that the original canon doesn’t even have these women as the same age (Alicent married Viserys when she was 18 and when Rhaneyra was 9). They also were never bosom pals.

The TV writers are telling a very particular story with a different emotional and psychological setting using the same characters, which means that the events that do match the events (or a version of them) in the book are used for the new premise. Which means they have a particular interpretation to serve the master reimagining of the original narrative.

House of the Dragon is fanfiction, not an adaptation.

Changing the ages and the initial relationships of the two women is a change made specifically so that they can express that men-hurt-women-and-female friendships-suffer-from-patriarchy premise.

From the first 4 episodes alone, we have already gotten to see how different and alike the Westerosi feudal patriarchy has treated Alicent vs Rhaenyra. Arguably, if that is all what they were going to show us, we could have just had the first 5 and be done with the show entirely. 

We’re encouraged to pit Alicent and Rhaenyra against each other or make comparisons between them from episode one because they are the only two young girls shown, interacting with each other and standing as contrast to their parents’ vulnerabilities and demands of them. Condal has gone on to say that Alicent is like a “Trumper” and Rhaneyra is “punk princess”; the first follows the rules while the other is a lot more expressive and rebellious in thought and action. These are there personalities/characterizations--they are foils to each other.

In the show and by looking at the hierarchal structure of the court, Alicent doesn’t have the same sort of power that Rhaenyra or Rhaneys have: her lineage is not Valyrian/Targaryen, she doesn’t ride a dragon, she’s not from one of the Great Westerosi houses, she’s not the daughter of the eldest living man/head of house leader/heir, she was never ever even considered for heir for the throne because of her heritage. She came into the scene on her father’s orders and she will never wield power officially in her own right, and there is no expectancy for that sort of power in her. So Alicent seems more vulnerable and stifled than the two mentioned. The show also makes it apparent Alicent goes through mid-to-severe anxiety, picking at her fingers (and this is never really shown again, or put into focus?). 

Rhaenyra, by contrast, seems a lot more put-together even when she’s down in Flea Bottom with Daemon. Rhaneyra doesn’t appear to have much of anxiety expect the trembling in her voice when facing Alicent and Viserys. Yet we do see how she doesn’t want to marry or birth children from the fear of dying in childbirth, losing what power she has while birthing, or having even more men dictate her mobility, after having watched Alicent and Aemma go through it. She also doesn’t ask for the throne nor its responsibility and feels the undue pressure to measure up tot he standards being the heir/her father’s esteem of her requires.

(Meanwhile, canonically, Rhaenyra played with her many, many rings whenever she was nervous or otherwise troubled while Alicent had no such anxious markers.)

We got all of this after the 4th episode. 

The 5th was the culmination and the 6th was an unfair interruption to the development of the toxicity of the relationship between the blacks and the greens, because stuff like how Viserys always favors Rhaneyra and passes over his sons’ little achievements could have been shown. But they weren’t. Which makes Alicent look more acting out than Rhaneyra does by episode 6. We also don’t really know if Alicent made some snide remarks or actively tried to undermine Rhaenyra in court games, and vice versa. Did either women try to promote themselves and their kids in a medieval competition of PR, going around and showing themselves to the peasants or going to almshouses to publicly donating food or money? Controlling rumors? We’ll never know, but it seems like most of the drama and contention happened only within the small court at the Red Keep, which is really (socially) unrealistic and shallow. We’re just launched right into the “final” break of episode 7, where Alicent loses it and tries to attack Lucerys/Rhaneyra.

What did episodes 8-10 really do other than close a chapter that was never really explored in the first place? Eight had us look at one conflict between the greens and blacks that involved other players who didn’t get their time to shine other than in this episode. Nine and Ten both ushered us into the next season with the reactions to the real center of this story: Viserys and the actions they take to seize power for themselves without hurting each other.

And to make matters worse, the lack of other characters or even ladies-in-waiting (as opposed to only servants) fails to really show women in Westerosi court life, which also included septas (Westerosi nuns) who were sometimes-enlisted as conduct-keepers for unmarried noble/royal women...remember Margarey and Cersei?. 

We are only given two main girls, to the point where they are presented as the only women around, making their loneliness unshown and “proven”. Why not show Alicent show some conflict over whether or not she should allow a random noble girl try to ingratiate herself with her? Try and decide that it’s better to not risk living with the m clearly just being around her, paying compliments, throwing disses at Rhaenyra, etc? Can we see how what happened to Alicent is happening with those girls, maybe a few of them being pushed into “befriending” her through their dads and some others doing it because they genuinely just want the power of being associated with the queen?  Where are Alicent’s temptations? And same for Rhaenyra as well? Where are the creepy dudes, old and young? We got Joffrey and Sansa, how they interacted as Arya rolled her eyes.

What about Laena Velaryon, who canonically becomes really close with Rhaenyra after she and Daemon marry?! Who actually seems to have developed a romantic relationship with her?!

But of course, it’s only going to be about Rhaneyra vs Alicent, and their relationship right? Talk about lesbianism, I mean....why did they sacrifice that?

You could have even left in the Alicent and Rhaenyra bond while continuing strong homosocial relationships between women in Laena and Rhaneyra. Show Rhaenyra in that context into her adulthood. But they were so focused on making Daemon look even more of a bad partner by having him ignore Laena's desire to go back to Driftmark. Meanwhile, on Fire and Blood, they definitely go back to Driftmark before Laena even goes into labor.

C)

We–the book readers and those who wanted things spoiled for themselves– already know the end of the Dance. And when it comes to stories we already know the ending of, there are still ways to make the narrative interesting without making them full on, dry, philosophical treatises. This is a fantasy world, so where is the world?

And since the intimate events of the Dance recorded in Fire and Blood are 

built from many unreliable sources (with other details still definitely reliably told) 

some events and details can be interpreted in many different ways according to how the reader looks at even one event, fanfiction writers, TV adaption writers and everyone in between can weave those events together in myriad different ways as long as they remain emotionally and logically consistent

We could have had Rhaenyra be both a spoiled girl who still was very lonely (having just lost her mom), looking to Alicent for a new mother figure but eventually seeing her as someone actively trying to take Viserys away after being named heir, maybe building insecurities as Alicent and her ladies continuously make comments and whispers about how she conducts herself in “unladylike” ways; we can have Alicent pushed into a marriage with Viserys by her father after already conditioned into believing men should be the ones determining values, or we have Alicent look at Rhaenyra as someone who is in the way of her practicing her Queenly power (whatever is left of the power she feels she can express); we could have Viserys either actually be in love with Alicent or marry her because she was available and older than the 12 year old Laena Velaryon. We could have had a combo of all of these things and more. Did Daemon ever truly love Laena, and how could we envision a world where he did? What was the quality of his care for her, if he did have it? Where are the scenes of Daemon spending time in Flea Bottom aside from the bigger parties with his gold cloaks, his having sex with Mysaria?

The possibilities are endless because Fire and Blood’s record of the Dance leaves so much to analyze and unpack while also leaving room for interpretation.

D)

Yes, it is true that these characters are not real people and that fiction/fantasy is creating new stories. Those new stories, however, also come from “old knowledge”-- legends, myth, etc. from real human philosophy, religion, and culture so that the creator may make something make a new “sense”, create something new to understand about a topic(s) or human conditions through the exploration of those themes and thus encourage more critical speculation. Entertainment, fiction and storytelling is never without study of some level or kind as well. It’s a paradox.

We cannot totally separate fantasy from its real world inspirations because that is where you build then stakes/conflicts for the characters. They are  the origins and inspiration for the meaning the writer/storyteller creators for themselves in their stories, which we as readers then feel, interpret and observe. 

And when engaging in media of any sort, we are always interpreting. Observing can’t be far from that. The level of interpretation, how deep you’re willing to keep track of patterns of meaning in a work, however is what separates actual study from “sensing” and enjoying. 

Which is not bad, but I think that’ it’s important to be aware of that. Because....

 The entire A Song of Ice and Fire world is based on real-life history and politics, especially Westeros–this continent almost 100% copying medieval Europe’s sociopolitical/cultural landscape and patterns. Even though there are polytheistic lords, the land also has a faith that resembles Catholicism’s histori-political structure (pope and his influence) and some doctrine/principles such as the Holy Trinity. Chivalric honor is a big part of Westerosi culture, as well as weirwood trees people pray to. And for the most part, HotD/the Dance is set more in the Faith of the Seven’s cultural influence than it is the old gods’ just by location alone. 

Alicent’s self control and “settling” after episode 7 is thematically supposed to be her publicly atoning and apologizing for not acting queenly, and to be a queen is to act within the confines of a woman culturally tasked with being the calm and submissive checker of the king and to be model women (making sure he acts within the confines of chivalric honor…on paper). To be models of piety and chastity. While, of course, birthing his heirs.

#rhaenyra vs alicent #alicent hightower #rhaenyra targaryen #hotd critical #hotd criticsm #hotd comment #rhaenyra and alicent #hotd #asoiaf

[queenaryastark]

“Hodor,” Hodor said, and he trotted forward smiling and set Bran in the high seat of the Starks, where the Lords of Winterfell had sat since the days when they called themselves the Kings in the North. The seat was cold stone, polished smooth by countless bottoms; the carved heads of direwolves snarled on the ends of its massive arms. Bran clasped them as he sat, his useless legs dangling. The great seat made him feel half a baby. -- Bran IV, AGOT

Early foreshadowing for Bran as King in the North.

This scene in general shows how there are signs of a leader in Bran even beyond where he's seated. When the direwolves decide to attack Tyrion, Bran is the first to act by calling off Summer and ordering Rickon to call off Shaggy. It seems like it would have been Robb who did it, but he says nothing until Bran does.

#bran stark #asoiaf #king in the north

[ladystoneboobs]

While I agree with points of your post that Sansa wasn't necessarily closer to Robb than Jon, that she still wasn't an outsider because of it, that her most positive and underappreciated sibling relationship is Bran (and while you didn't cover her in the post, Sansa is much closer to Jeyne Poole and its notable that aside from her siblings, Jeyne is one of the few people Sansa misses/thinks about when she's not repressing shit) I DO think you were being slightly unfair to try and cast Sansa and Robb's relationship in a negative light, and if that wasn't your intention, then I'm sorry for misreading.

- First off, regarding Robb's reaction to the letter I always saw that as a damnation of Robb being only 15 yo and being thrust into a leader position, rather than his relationship with Sansa. It's meant to highlight his immaturity more than anything else. Maybe it would hold more weight if we saw Robb continue to hold the view that Sansa wrote the letter of her own free will, but we don't because we see him accept Catelyn's explanation

- I'm not pulling out quotes for this because I don't want to make this too long but when Robb meets up with Catelyn again and their discussing Sansa being held captive by the Lannister, Robb is visibly upset when he asks Catelyn if they lose, the Lannisters will hurt Ned and Sansa

- Robb makes it very clear from the beginning that the trade applied to both Sansa and Arya, so while I do think it serves as commentary on how political importance of girls are viewed in a patriarchal system, I don't think grrm was trying to imply that Robb didn't love his sisters. I think it's obvious that he made decisions without always their best interests in mind, I don't think George was trying to imply he didn't love them

- If we consider how Catelyn tells Robb that Grey W is "a part of him", then the reaction of Grey W (along with Summer and Shaggydogs) to Lady's bones being returned home is pretty telling

um, when did i ever say robb didn't love her at all or even give a shit about what happened to her? jon loves sansa dutifully too and cared about her loss of lady, even though she was probably his least favorite sibling. and arya and sansa love each other deep down, despite all their fights and the fact that they're probably each other's least favorite siblings. in a family of six siblings, there's going to be favorites and less-than-favorites and some kids closer and friendlier to some than others. but the starklings are not the greyjoy brothers, or the baratheon brothers, or cersei/tyrion. only those very biased against one of the starks (usually sansa or arya) would deny there's love for all of them. that's not how i feel. i think robb and sansa just weren't all that close and friendly, he had nothing against her but didn't really think of her much either, which can be its own problem.

as far as the letter, it's not that robb wanted to blame her or continued to blame her after learning better bc of some unsaid grudge or bias, no. however, imo, there's a difference between "what's wrong with the girl?" and say, "why would sansa write this?" both speak of shock but one is more shocked at the contents about ned and lack of word about arya, not sansa's loyalty to joff after ned's arrest and ordering robb/cat to come bend the knee to him. to me, it reads as a rhetorical question taking for granted that there is something wrong with sansa. agot!robb the boy lord is a bit dense and still immature at times (too much so at times for me to buy his transformation to military prodigy as totally consistent but that early installment weirdness is another topic), but if his relationship with sansa was as good and sweet as fandom likes to imagine, i think he'd have to be pretty dense indeed to just turn on her without (non-rhetorical) question and believe she fully came up with every word of cersei's herself even before it was explained to him.

as for not trading jaime for sansa/arya, i already said i can't really blame him. that's the feudal patriarchy for ya, and we know pissing off his bannermen wouldn't go well for his cause bc we see it happen later. (even catelyn can't fully disagree until her despair after bran/rickon's presumed deaths.) so no argument there. tho i do get a bit annoyed about how blase he is about waiting to free his sister(s). that reunion scene with cat is the only time we see him express worry about sansa and then it's like his concern disappears after being reassured that the lannisters can't just murder her unless they defeat him first. when he speaks of the possibility of karstark killing jaime in catelyn i acok, he just says it would be a death well deserved, and cat has to remind him of the obvious consequences jaime's murder would bring. it's not that he doesn't care if sansa dies, or that he's too stupid to be aware that killing jaime is a big no-no after he himself first forbid it at the end of agot, it's just that he is not thinking of sansa much at all by that time. he's more consumed with his own vengeful feelings toward house lannister than thoughts about sansa as their captive, and what that means for her even if cersei doesn't want her dead. (generally idt a robb pov was needed as his perspective wouldn't be too unique when we already had ned and jon, but the one thing i would want is his inner thoughts about sansa's plight if/when he did think of her.)

on the wolves, they are a part of their respective humans, but they are autonomous creatures too who are siblings themselves and always have the bond of their pack. even bran wasn't really warging that early on, so shaggy, summer, and grey wind howling was likely the wolves themselves mourning their dead sister, an even greater loss than a living human sister losing her wolf. you can interpret it how you like ofc, and again i am not denying that robb loved all his siblings and would have felt bad for both girls' losses at the trident when he first learned about all that.

i'm sorry if the start of this sounds snippy or defensive bc i was half-expecting pushback. idk maybe i shoudn't have tagged the post with robb's name but these are just my personal thoughts and opinions. and the original post turned into a ramble about robb and bran and rickon based on fanon stuff i've seen for robb/sansa and rickon/anyone where say, a completely fanon quote will be used alongside canon quotes for other sibling pairs. but i was also trying to be vague to avoid feeling rude. i don't dislike robb! i would think the rest of my robb tag with content of robb/catelyn, robb/bran, robb/jon, robb/jeyne w. etc would be proof of that. (and i recognize you have no way of being sure of this, but i am well aware of all catelyn/robb scenes.)

#Anonymous #there's also the scene where crobb learn of sansa's marriage to tyrion #robb is v angry toward tyrion which i'd like to think was not just about winterfell #he speaks of sansa solely in political terms but also suggests marrying her to loras to gain the tyrells #which either means he's never heard of willas or was thinking of sansa's happiness #bc a) ableism b) loras is closest to her in age c) loras has a heartthrob rep and/or d) he knows about sansa getting that rose #from a letter from ned or sansa #but that's more ambiguous bc we don't know if he is passing over willas or just has no idea he exists #robb stark #sansa stark #catelyn stark

[gendrie]

curretly thinking how much Arya would have loved Arianne or Margaery, they would have really helped her be the person she wanted to be. Arya would have loved them so much and I'm sure if Arya had known them she would have wished they were her sister.

its a fun and interesting thing to consider on a lot of different levels (which i guess is why your ask inspired me to go off on some insane tangent)

margaery has quite a bit in common with arya: avid horseback riders, highly sociable, energetic, close with her brothers. its funny that sansa views one as her ideal sister while continuing to disparage her real sister's ghost as marg takes her on an active, outdoorsy date where they're hunting and riding (not unlike what arya wanted to do in sansa's 1st chapter) generally, arya was restricted from hunting type hobbies.......despite the fact it always been a common activity for highborn women.

which is a major flaw in grrm's early worldbuilding that marg and arianne (among MANY others) emphasize. in agot we get a glimpse into arya's upbringing and the expectation is an extremely narrow feminine ideal. sure, arya is given a lot of freedom to play but her (and sansa's) education is mostly left to an incompetent septa. they're clearly being molded for a mostly ornamental role and that is at odds with the rest of the text. ive complained about this before bc catelyn is not a vain character. she values practicality and duty. she was a teen bride and ran riverrun (+winterfell) from a young age. so why are her daughters being turned into dolls by an outsider? why werent practical skills prioritized?

for relevant context: in agot im fairly certain we get only one (1) adult northern born woman on page: maege mormont who is fierce, outspoken, and wields a weapon. (slightly ot note:) i hate the show as much as the next person but arya being a proficient archer from jump wasnt actually a half bad idea........precedent for that in canon too from rohanne webber to alysanne blackwood to ygritte. the wildlings are another notable example of northern women. so riddle me this: if 99% of the north's female characters break the feminine mold (lyanna, arya, wylla, the mormonts, the wildlings, meera, alys) why are they treated as the exception by the fandom? *syrio voice* i am wondering! (im not actually its bc tumblr dot com values the traditionally feminine ideal)

and i dont buy that its exclusively a north vs. south issue. when we meet the tyrell women we see that marg has been raised by olenna to be shrewd and capable. but catelyn is a deadbeat mother lol. neither arya or sansa think about her giving them guidance, advice, lessons, ect. arya was, apparently, just told to look pretty. catelyn's main memory of sansa is that she has nice hair. like.......ok. grrm is on record saying he regrets not developing the relationship between cat and her daughters, but unlike my next point this is something he never even tried to fix.

theres a real lack of female companions in general to start. now to grrms credit he clearly realized this oversight AND attempted to course correct with success imo. ie: arya's storyline in braavos features a lot of female characters (a trend i expect to only grow stronger in twow). as do most of the others.

arianne and her crew are an even more dramatic southron example. arya is treated like a freak for wanting basic autonomy; then we go to dorne and those girlies do whatever the hell they want for the most part: spears, studies, sex, ect. doran only draws the line at treason bc they were fucking up his own shit. but yeah needless to say arya wouldve flourished.

similarly, i love to think about arya being fostered on bear island or post series some of them joining arya's household. im genuinely desperate to see her interacting with the mormonts. i start shaking when i think about aly en route to braavos.

my point here is that i think the dynamic we're introduced to in winterfell, among the female characters, in agot looks very unusual in hindsight. and the worst part is that arya gets regarded by the fandom as a pariah who's only fate could be exile bc she doesnt meet an oppressive standard set by one annoying septa who made her feel bad about herself.

#ask #i didnt realize i had so many thoughts on this lol #some contradiction is natural btw #but i think a lot of it is just a symptom of first book world building being less developed

[rhaenyras]

Alicent’s stans are one step away from “Tywin wasn’t a bad guy, it's not his fault that his culture is classicist, ableist and misogynistic”, “Robert isn’t an abuser and rapist, there is no concept of marital rape in Westeros, he was a product of his culture and it doesn’t make him a bad person.”

Let’s absolve everyone from everything because it’s not their fault their culture is awful. Meanwhile let’s also ignore that numerous characters were perfectly capable of defying their skewed cultural norms because they have this little thing called morals.

GRRM stand against EVERYTHING Alicent (and her illiterate, reactionary fans) stand for:

“And I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things.”— AGOT, Bran IV

“What is honor compared to a woman’s love ? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms … or the memory of a brother’s smile ? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.” — AGOT, Jon VIII

this might sound unrelated but i´m halfway through the reading of "young, damned and fair", aka a biography of catherine howard, the teenaged fifth wife of henry viii.

at one point the author gareth russell says: "cases of child abuse were reported and prosecuted, and the concept was understood in the early modern era, so it is untrue to say that there was no perception of victimhood or coercion. the memoirs of the fourteenth-century merchant´s wife margery kempe recounted an argument that contained a threat of what would now clearly be recognised as marital rape, if the husband did not get what he wanted."

so, not only the argument that "back then men did not perceive these acts to be violence, therefore they´re virtually not to blame" is insensitive and cruel to the victims, but it´s also fundamentally false.

and even if it were true that men had no conception of sexual abuse, gender-based violence and the like, how is this ignorance ground enough to absolve them of any wrongdoing? i can and i will judge them through the contemporary lens, standards and morals, idgaf. i can appreciate and love history (or historical fiction or any fantasy work that draws inspiration from medieval/early modern europe for its world-building) as much as i do and still simultaneously condemn the people/characters in it for their actions, specifically because i am lucky enough to be alive in a different time period and possess the cognitive and cultural instruments to see how wrong they were, whether the people/characters themselves were aware of it while they were enacting the violence or not is secondary to all that (but it´s strongly implied that they were aware of it, albeit the social stigma around most types of violence wasn´t as strong as the present-day´s, of course).

and i actually draw great relief from thinking that we - meaning the entire world´s population alive on the planet right NOW in the year 2024 - aren´t exempted or safe from this backwards judgment. posterity must learn lessons from all of our mistakes and judge us very harshly for them. i would be enormously disappointed in humankind and its progress in ensuing ages if they didn´t.

posterity and its harsh judgement of our shortcomings and failures is the only comfort i find when thinking about palestine, for example. i know that eventually we will all be considered blind and ignorant at best or outright evil at worst for not stopping the genocide in gaza, just as we ourselves tend to do with the non-jewish people of the 1930s and 1940s, who did absolutely nothing (save a few exceptions) to stop or criticize the holocaust publicly or even the rise of nazifascism to power.

#yeah i´ll hijack fandom discourse to palestine. that´s who i am #ask #anon #anonymous

[thelustybraavosimaid]

@doublehex.

You asked, I shall answer on a different post (as not to clog mummersblade's activity/post):

Did GRRM always plan on Jon being resurrected, or do you think lines like that one is just a coincidence? There are times that I think GRRM always planned on it, right from the start.

Yes, I really think he did. Let me find the quotes to kind of back this up:

Finally he looked north. He saw the Wall shining like blue crystal, and his bastard brother Jon sleeping alone in a cold bed, his skin growing pale and hard as the memory of all warmth fled from him. (Bran III, AGoT)

--

Chunks of coal burned in iron braziers at either end of the long room, but Jon found himself shivering. The chill was always with him here. In a few years he would forget what it felt like to be warm. (Jon III, AGoT)

--

“Yes, life,” Noye said. “A long life or a short one, it’s up to you, Snow. The road you’re walking, one of your brothers will slit your throat for you one night.” (Jon III, AGoT)

--

He saw the glint of steel, turned toward it. “No blades!” he screamed. “Wick, put that knife…”

…away, he meant to say. When Wick Whittlestick slashed at his throat, the word turned into a grunt. Jon twisted from the knife, just enough so it barely grazed his skin. He cut me. When he put his hand to the side of his neck, blood welled between his fingers. “Why?”

“For the Watch.” Wick slashed at him again. (Jon XIII, ADwD)

Jon lost his life not just for Arya, but also from growing discontent with fellow Night's Watchmen, shown early on in ADwD and it's his inflexibility—and his involvement in the matters of the realm—that led to his demise. This line of Noye's especially seems to be foreshadowing enough for me, not dissimilar to Arya's "a wolf with a fish in its mouth?" quote.

The original outline mentions that there is a deadly rivalry, between Jon and Tyrion, over Arya. The dynamic is still there, but the members have been switched around. We've seen this enacted in the series (still with) Jon, but over "Arya" and with Ramsay (as he burned Winterfell, with the sieging "assistance" from Theon. There is obviously no real love, helpless or otherwise, between Jeyne and Ramsay, but as his wife, Ramsay claims possession of her). In a way, it is Ramsay's words and letter (assuming he wrote it) that also led to Jon's death.

Send them to me, bastard, and I will not trouble you or your black crows. Keep them from me, and I will cut out your bastard's heart and eat it. (Jon XIII, ADwD)

--

His fingers closed around the parchment. Would that they could crush Ramsay Bolton's throat as easily. (Jon VI, ADwD)

...

I have my swords, thought Jon Snow, and we are coming for you, Bastard. (Jon XIII, ADwD)

I cannot help but feel that George always intended to make him test his vows - unsuccessfully in the beginning, hard decisions to make but ones that would ultimately allow him to go back and realise his duty, before he gets hit really hard with the final one, the deadly one.

So I think his intention was always to die and come back. And that's the importance of Melisandre staying on the Wall. (I feel like Jon is the *stone dragon* that R'hllor wants her to wake, but that is a conversation for a different time.)

My spells should suffice. She was stronger at the Wall, stronger even than in Asshai. Her every word and gesture was more potent, and she could do things that she had never done before. (Melisandre I, ADwD)

So since we established that Jon was, in my opinion, almost designed to die, there had to be some kind of workaround for him to return. What better way than with resurrection?

As he had criticised Tolkien for with Gandalf, his idea of returning would come with a twist.

Even less likely is that he came up with Jon being killed and resurrected while he was writing ADWD. He starts to lay down the foreshadowing real thick in that book, so that could be evidence that he needed to lay the train tracks as the train was coming to town.

Yeah, I would even go so far as to say that he began the death imagery and hints for Jon in AGoT:

Jon shook his head. "No one. The castle is always empty." He had never told anyone of the dream, and he did not understand why he was telling Sam now, yet somehow it felt good to talk of it. "Even the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones. That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for someone, for anyone. And then I find myself in front of the door to the crypts. It's black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down. Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don't want to. I'm afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old Kings of Winter are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it's not them I'm afraid of. I scream that I'm not a Stark, that this isn't my place, but it's no good, I have to go anyway, so I start down, feeling the walls as I descend, with no torch to light the way. It gets darker and darker, until I want to scream." He stopped, frowning, embarrassed. "That's when I always wake." (Jon IV, AGoT)

There's a lot waiting down there for him - Ned, Lyanna, perhaps? Information about his parentage? But also death.

There's an interesting theory that the crypts serve as an in-between of life and death, which is why Rickon and Bran dreamt of Ned down in the crypts even before the raven came with the announcement that he had died.

The names of the direwolves also are important. The fact that we know that wargs and skinchangers live on in their bonded companions gives credence to Ghost's name.

I'm not so sure about this, as I think the biggest reason he has Lady Stoneheart and Berric Dondarion is to set up Jon's resurrection, but there is still the chance he connected all those three characters together after he wrote ASOS.

Yep! He talked about this before, actually:

And, ehh, he’s more or less the same as always, except he’s more powerful. It always felt a little bit like a cheat to me. And as I got older and considered it more, it also seemed to me that death doesn’t make you more powerful. That’s, in some ways, me talking to Tolkien in the dialogue, saying, “Yeah, if someone comes back from being dead, especially if they suffer a violent, traumatic death, they’re not going to come back as nice as ever.” That’s what I was trying to do, and am still trying to do, with the Lady Stoneheart character.

And Jon Snow, too, is drained by the experience of coming back from the dead on the show.

Right. And poor Beric Dondarrion, who was set up as the foreshadowing of all this, every time he’s a little less Beric. His memories are fading, he’s got all these scars, he’s becoming more and more physically hideous, because he’s not a living human being anymore. His heart isn’t beating, his blood isn’t flowing in his veins, he’s a wight, but a wight animated by fire instead of by ice, now we’re getting back to the whole fire and ice thing.

George describes Lady Stoneheart in this same interview as "a vengeful wight who galvanizes a group of people around her and is trying to exact her revenge on the riverlands."

Jon will be different in the sense that he is a warg and has a shield against what's causing Stoneheart and Beric's deteriorations—Ghost—but being a warg has its perils as well:

"They say you forget," Haggon had told him, a few weeks before his own death. "When the man's flesh dies, his spirit lives on inside the beast, but every day his memory fades, and the beast becomes a little less a warg, a little more a wolf, until nothing of the man is left and only the beast remains." (Prologue, ADwD)

As Jon is the only main character warg who actually died, this passage is meant to be about him.

#ramble

[jozor-johai]

Revisiting the Rat Cook, Part 8: Rats in the walls of the Red Keep

Back to usual, this is observational and you can read this part alone, but I've developed my analysis of these symbols across the entire series. You can find links to the full series here, or even just read part five, which contains most of the arguments I've built this series on.

To anyone who is reading this part first, "Revisiting the Rat Cook" is a series that is built on the understanding that GRRM's use of metadiegetic legends provide a "road map" of symbols and meaning, used in their abstract form, which we, as readers, can use to better understand the relationships between symbols, motifs, and themes as they reoccur throughout ASOAIF as a whole. The Rat Cook story is about a rat which eats rats, or a cook who serves kings; The Rat Cook story is about fathers and sons, about cannibalism, about trust, about vengeance, and about damning one's legacy.

Rats in the walls of the Red Keep

In previous parts, especially parts four and five, I argued that the rats symbolize a powerlessness that comes from low status on the hierarchy of rule in ASOIAF and also a desire for vengeance against that hierarchy, just as in the Rat Cook story, where the lowly cook becomes a "rat" as he kills the King's son.

However, what few insights we get into the plight of the smallfolk come from niche perspectives and experiences; otherwise, ASOIAF is written from the perspective of nobility. Even in settings like the Red Keep, though, where nearly all of the players are nobility, the symbol of the “rat” still maintains its associations, signifying other ways in which those without formal power are able to enact their vengeance.

-

In chapters where the POV perspective is a person with formal power, the fear of “rats” manifests like paranoia, and the concern that, like with the Rat Cook, there may be people within the bounds of the keep who are quietly resisting that rule. In AGOT Eddard XI, Ned sees informers as rats while serving as Hand of the King:

From his vantage point atop the throne, he could see men slipping out the door at the far end of the hall. Hares going to ground, he supposed … or rats off to nibble the queen's cheese.

Although Cersei was certainly not the only one with rats running around the Red Keep, this is a moment of clarity which displays Ned’s developing understanding of court politics. As Ned has well learned, Cersei—or, at least, someone—is listening, and moving to act against him.

When it is Tyrion’s turn to be Hand of the King, he too imagines the agents of Cersei as “rats” in ACOK Tyrion X:

If Cersei has someone stalking me tonight, he must be disguised as a rat.

Interestingly, though, this moment is an early example of Varys’ abilities, as though Cersei stays ignorant of Tyrion’s behavior, Varys appears later in the chapter having followed Tyrion to Shae's manse. As Tyrion suspected, those stalking “rats” were there, in truth—and, appropriately for their rathood, they are overlooked, their provenance mistaken.

Later, Tyrion’s paranoia—and fear of rats—more appropriately extends to the entirety of the Red Keep in ASOS Tyrion I:

There were rats in the walls, and little birds who talked too much, and spiders.

These three phrases are often used in the Red Keep to describe the underside of these political machinations; many of these are interchangeable, and many serve double duty. “Little birds” might well refer to Varys’, whose spies are “little birds”, but also to Littlefinger, who is also “little” and bearing a bird for a sigil. If both the little birds and the “spiders” of Tyrion’s worries are the realm of Varys, “the Spider”, then one might wonder if Varys possesses an army of little “rats,” too, like the ones who stalked Tyrion to Shae’s manse.

Illyrio almost suggests this in ADWD Tyrion II:

We both grew rich, and richer still when Varys trained his mice." "In King's Landing he kept little birds." "Mice, we called them then.

Mice are not rats, though, and have a much less treacherous connotation. Perhaps these are more appropriate words, considering he was benefactor of their actions and not the betrayed.

As it happens, though, competing “little bird” Petyr Baelish offers a less polite interpretation to Sansa in ASOS Sansa V:

It had to be the godswood. No other place in the Red Keep is safe from the eunuch's little birds . . . or little rats, as I call them.

Both Ned’s assessment of the “rats” reporting on him and Tyrion’s concern that a “rat” might be following him were accurate, but misplaced. Littlefinger, by contrast, shows that he understands better than any other what is going on in the Red Keep. Baelish means to be derogatory, but the comparison reveals the truth of the association between Varys’ spiders, little birds, and the rats in the walls.

-

Even Varys’ official role is ratlike, as is his person. As we saw in earlier parts, the “rats” accompany a lack of agency, but not a total powerlessness; the Rat Cook was still able to enact his vengeance, after all. Varys, too, excels in the space where lacking status and being overlooked makes certain powers available.

The Small Council understands Varys’ usefulness in being a man who commands the power of the metaphorical rat’s non-power. His title, Lord Varys, illustrates this allowance, as well as the power that his lack-of-power is able to afford him; he is no Lord, in truth, yet sits among the Lords as though he were. Varys wields the power of information rather than of swords, which is also a fitting role for a eunuch—a man lacking a “sword.”

Varys explains his understanding of that power to Ned in AGOT Eddard XV:

The master of whisperers must be sly and obsequious and without scruple. A courageous informer would be as useless as a cowardly knight.

Like the Rat Cook, Varys understands the important characteristics of this rat-role: to be deceitful even as one is servile, and—importantly—to be “without scruple.” The Rat Cook violated the Old God’s own laws in his search for vengeance, and if Varys were to be successful, he should be willing to stop at no less.

In the same conversation, Varys also makes this declaration:

I serve the realm, and the realm needs peace.

As Dany saw in the House of the Undying, the realm is a woman’s body, beset by the rat-faced kings. As I argued in an earlier part, the realm is Reek, a prisoner bitten by rats in his cell—and for whom there is no other choice, to eat or be eaten. In the event that the rat-bitten body of the realm might yet bite back in vengeance for the violence wrought upon it, Varys serves the realm.

-

If we see Varys as a “rat” in the Red Keep, his words about the uselessness of “courageous informers” and “cowardly knights” also illustrate something essentially misguided in the Hound’s words from the last part. In ACOK Sansa IV The Hound announced to Sansa that:

A dog doesn't need courage to chase off rats.

As Varys points out, the “dog” and the “rat” are playing the game by entirely different rules altogether. A courageous informer would be useless, and in response to the Hound’s boast, Varys might have said: a dog might not need courage to kill rats, but a rat doesn’t need courage to kill Kings—a rat doesn’t need courage at all, actually.

-

Fittingly, Varys acknowledges verbatim the symbol of “rats” as secretive betrayers when Tyrion misguidedly demands obedience in ASOS Tyrion II:

“You will bring Shae to me through the walls, hidden from all these eyes. As you have done before." Varys wrung his hands. "Oh, my lord, nothing would please me more, but … King Maegor wanted no rats in his own walls, if you take my meaning.”

We, this far into this series, do take his meaning. Rats would kill the King, or his son, so of course King Maegor would want to keep them out of his Holdfast.

In this instance, Varys defends himself by saying that his inability—or unwillingness—to obey Tyrion is out of his control. However, this is just yet another example of Varys’ ability to use his apparent lack of agency to his advantage. Like in so many other instances, his “rat” command comes from pointing out how the King controls all, even down to the walls, even down to the kitchens. If we took that level of control at face value, it would totally obfuscate Varys’ own decisions.

In truth, though, that control may not be realized in practice—and, as in the Rat Cook story, when the cook ceased to believe in the power of the King over the kitchens, perhaps realizing the King never came into the kitchens himself, then he may have realized that practically, the cook is a king in his own domain, and free to take his revenge. Varys understands this, too, of course, as he tells Tyrion in ACOK Tyrion II:

“Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less."

Does the King have power over the cook? Not so much as he might like.

-

However, Varys’ deference to Maegor’s command—and his own impotence by result—is doubly interesting knowing what Tyrion does not: that Varys is a “rat” in the Red Keep in more ways than one. The Small Council may understand that he commands “little birds,” but the reader is privy to the knowledge that Varys is playing a second game of his own, given as early as AGOT Arya III, and then later more completely in the ADWD Epilogue. Like all true rats, Varys' obedience—even his obedience to the throne in regards to his sneaking—is, in truth, defiance. Varys is the man who is no man in truth, a lord who is no lord in truth, the humble servant who is no servant in truth.

The Rat Cook story is one where sons pay for the sins of their fathers. The prince was killed in an act of vengeance against the king, and the Rat Cook is punished for his sins by being forced to hunt down his own children. All of Varys’ plotting, and the point of all these rats in the walls, is building to the reinstatement of Aegon VI, who is, notably, the prince who was supposedly killed for the sins of his grandfather, the Mad King. Thus, vengeance begets vengeance once again, and in a reshuffling of the Rat Cook motifs, our rat Varys seems to offer Kevan a version of the story where he claims that the prince survived the pie and has returned with a cook of his own.

After all, King Maegor may have wanted no “rats” in his walls, but what of the possibility that the dragons become the rats? “Rats,” like in the Rat Cook story, are those who quietly defy the King… but when the role of "King" changes, the status of “rats” changes too. Varys himself, master of all the little birds and rats in the walls, claims to support the Targaryen cause now that the Baratheons control the Red Keep.

The imagery of rats as allies of vengeful dragons in the context of the Baratheon-Lannister rule appears in AFFC Jaime I:

And all for naught. They found only darkness, dust, and rats. And dragons, lurking down below…

Jaime is searching for Tyrion here, but as we later learn, it is once again Varys instead who lurks in that darkness, waiting for a chance to install his “dragon.” As with Tyrion, the fear of rats is appropriate, only misplaced.

The association Jaime draws returns again to the transformational aspect of the Rat Cook story. Like the cook who became a rat, or like the “dogs” who became “rats” that I looked at in the last two parts, even the dragons have their turn finding allies in the dungeons. The dragon skulls, relegated to the dungeons, are a reminder that the “rat” status can be circumstantial, and those who lose their power and status might become rats themselves.

Though Dany and Varys are not entirely on the same side, we’ve already seen how Dany herself, another outcast dragon, has made the “rats” her allies as well, as she thinks in ASOS Daenerys VI:

Aegon the Conqueror had won Westeros with three dragons, but she had taken Meereen with sewer rats and a wooden cock, in less than a day.

Aegon may have had dragons, but Dany has her sewer rats by her side, just like the dragons Jaime finds, lurking beneath the keep in dust and darkness. As Dany points out, the “sewer rats” might be just as effective at overthrowing the rulers, just with different means.

-

Dragons and dogs are not the only rulers that turn to rats for allies once they lose their power, lions may as well. Tyrion, once fearing the rats tailing him, becomes a rat, too, when he is disgraced at the end of ASOS.

Truly without agency for the first time ever, in ASOS Tyrion XI, “rats” appear in Tyrion’s mind, as he confides to Jaime:

“You'll have to help me with my last words, my wits have been running about like a rat in a root cellar.”

Not only do “rats” reappear here, but also the same words, “rats and roots,” like Stannis resisting the siege at Storm’s End, or the Blackwoods resisting the Brackens’ siege. Like those instances, this is a turning point where Tyrion’s mind is cellar-low and, like the Rat Cook, primed to consider his potential vengeance. Comparing his “wits” specifically to “rats” signals the change in his mentality.

Only then, after rats have run through his mind, does Varys aid him, as he notes ASOS Tyrion XI:

“I arrived here a King's Hand, riding through the gates at the head of my own sworn men, Tyrion reflected, and I leave like a rat scuttling through the dark, holding hands with a spider.”

In these new circumstances, he and Varys are now equals, both in their lack of direct power and—though Tyrion does not fully know it yet—their desire for vengeance against the ruling party. As Tyrion notes, and as we have seen, being “like a rat” comes from the exact lack of his former authority of office and name. Yet, true to the Rat Cook story, there are still avenues to vengeance, as Lord Tywin discovers later in the same chapter. Like in the Rat Cook story, this rat can still kill—rats may not wield swords, but perhaps they can wield crossbows.

Tyrion’s self-identification as a rat in the walls makes for a brilliant moment, because amidst the hilarious levels of paranoia that make up Cersei’s AFFC chapters, her fear of the “rats” in the walls is one of the few things she is right about. At the very moment that Tyrion is thinking of himself “like a rat”, Cersei is having the exact same thought, as we learn in AFFC Cersei I:

She imagined Tyrion creeping between the walls like some monstrous rat. No. You are being silly. The dwarf is in his cell.

Perfect irony. Being Cersei, she’s wrong every time—so the one time she was about a “rat” Lannister, she assumes she is mistaken.

-

Cersei spends the rest of the book obsessing about Tyrion’s presence in the Walls, as when she burns the Tower of the Hand in AFFC Cersei III:

“If the gods are good, the fire may smoke a few rats from the rubble." Jaime rolled his eyes. "Tyrion, you mean."

Like Jaime and Tyrion before her, she’s misplaced the origin of this presence. There is someone lurking in the walls, but, as always, it’s Varys.

Even Kevan gets to very briefly make the same mistake in the ADWD Epilogue, wondering:

Could Cersei have been right all along?

What Kevan discovers in death, however, is how Varys really has been hiding in the walls, justifying Cersei’s paranoia but not her search for Tyrion.

With that too-late knowledge that Varys takes advantage of his “little birds”—or little rats, as Baelish calls them—to kill Kevan and Pyecelle, we can look back on the series of accidents from AFFC Cersei III:

They had found a thousand rats as well . . . but neither Tyrion nor Varys had been amongst them, and Jaime had finally insisted on putting an end to the search. One boy had gotten stuck in a narrow passage and had to be pulled out by his feet, shrieking. Another fell down a shaft and broke his legs. And two guardsmen vanished exploring a side tunnel.

The revelation from the Epilogue that Varys is able and willing to kill from his secret places in the walls, and that he has a small army of loyal children, makes this passage read differently. Knowing Kevan's fate, it’s easy to imagine how a guard falling down a shaft might have been subtly pushed, or that two guardsmen vanishing in a side tunnel might have run into the web of a Spider who didn’t want to be found. Jaime may have found “a thousand rats,” but it appears as though there's another thousand rats which Jaime didn’t find, rats which look like lost “little birds” and still creep around, acting on Varys’ commands.

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Of course, these rats have to remain hidden when Jaime searches for them, because “rats” operate without any courage. Rats aren’t fighters, they’re deceivers and disloyal servants.

Returning to Baelish’s words to Sansa from ASOS Sansa V, Baelish actually has more to say on that exact subject. Littlefinger displays a real understanding of the nature of the relationship between the sword-wielding men in power—the Andal Kings of the story, and their dogs—versus the rats underfoot.

“There are trees in the godswood instead of walls. Sky above instead of ceiling. Roots and dirt and rock in place of floor. The rats have no place to scurry. Rats need to hide, lest men skewer them with swords.”

Baelish shows that he has always understood the truth of what Ned, Tyrion, and Cersei have only suspected: the walls are full of rats, “scrabbling in the dark.” While being able to retreat into the hidden spots of the world is a weakness which they use to their advantage, it is still a weakness, for the rats will die if found.

His words echo the advice of Myles Toyne, which Jon Connington recalls in ADWD The Griffin Reborn:

“Lord Tywin would not have bothered with a search. He would have burned that town and every living creature in it. Men and boys, babes at the breast, noble knights and holy septons, pigs and whores, rats and rebels, he would have burned them all.”

Toyne, too, specifically links “rats and rebels,” an association that should be familiar by now. Varys explained how these rebels act on a paradigm entirely separate from courage, and Toyne tells us why the creeping is necessary from the other perspective, for he understands the Lords’ treatment of those same “rats.”

Rats are “burned”, like Toyne says Tywin would, or they are “skewered”, like Baelish says—which is strikingly consistent with the imagery alongside the earlier quotes from the smallfolk of King’s Landing. It’s the fate of the rats that Tyrion walks past in ACOK Tyrion I:

“One peddler was hawking rats roasted on a skewer.”

Or that Cersei walks past in ADWD Cersei II:

“A man just ahead was selling skewers of roast meat from a cart … The meat looked suspiciously like rat to Cersei's eyes”

If we see those smallfolk as “rats” themselves who would be skewered with swords and roasted if they rebelled, the act of eating “skewered” and “roasted” rats portends that oncoming punishment. This comparison adds new depth to the understanding that those smallfolk are eating themselves—not just eating themselves as rats, but as rats who have faced, and who will face, the full retribution of the Lords above them. These skewered and roasted rats simultaneously symbolize those seeking vengeance against the injustices of rulership, and also how those with direct power try—and often succeed—to kill them outright and squash the dissent.

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However, Jaime’s search of the Tower of the Hand reveals how difficult that task may be, far more difficult than Toyne or Baelish make it seem. Jaime may have found a “thousand rats,” but Kevan still dies to more rats, the ones that Jaime doesn’t find, just as Gregor Clegane searches everywhere for Beric Dondarrion, finding nothing but rat-smallfolk, but never the one that matters.

Even when he is caught, Beric Dondarrion, as a symbol of that resistance, is literally unkillable. Replacing him as the leader of those “rats” in a cave is the undead Lady Stoneheart, because, like with ratlike Reek and “ghost” Theon, what is dead may never die. The Rat Cook, too, is immortal—and the Rat Cook's children, that endless army of progeny succeeding their father like the splinter groups of rebels succeed Beric, reveal another element within the Rat Cook's story.

No matter how many rats they might find, there are still more hiding in the walls. Even if the rats are caught, lions or dogs might transform into rats to take their place. The Rat Cook himself, after his punishment, is able to eat and eat and eat his children, the rats of the Nightfort, yet never be sated, because his endless hunger is matched by an endless supply of rats. One simply cannot hunt them all and succeed. Or can you?

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In the next, final part, and also in my series epilogue, I’ll examine two different ways in which ASOIAF looks at this question. In the next part, I’ll examine the Lannister legacy that leads to Tyrion’s rat transformation, and Dany’s ruminations on the futility of hunting the sons, sons of the sons, and the sons of the sons of the sons.

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