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kallypsowrites · 5 years

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Game of thrones: Conquest and Rebellion

I’m a happy camper this Christmas as I finally got Game of Thrones season 7 for myself. And I was surprised when it came with this beautiful little DVD that contains an over 40 minute history of the Targaryens in Westeros, narrated by several of the characters in Game of Thrones including: Viserys, Varys, Euron, Peytr Baelish, Sansa, and Jaime. I say characters and not actors because it is clearly supposed to be from the perspective of the characters and what they have learned about the history of the Targaryens.

Now, I was intrigued to watch this because I am actually midway through a big ol’ post on unreliable history in Fire and Blood. The basic thesis is that by telling the history of his world through the eyes of someone in that world, he makes it unreliable and biased and this is very much by design. I have my ideas about what is exagerated vs what is real in Fire and Blood, but I wanted to see how this video compared. Especially since it contains what the SHOW views as the most important notes in the Targaryen conquest.

And boy did it confirm my suspicions about unreliable history. In fact, hearing individual characters bring in their bias illustrated my thesis perfectly. But let’s talk about some of the highlights. Because I was surprised to see how the Targaryens were represented her.

1. Viserys suggests that the Targaryens may have left Old Valyria because of a court mishap and not the prophesy from ‘The Dreamer’. I have had my suspicions about some of the “prophetical” motivation behind the Targaryen conquest, because in large part it seemed like stories written to justify Aegon’s conquest. Like it’s his “destiny”. However, I never thought to question the idea of the dreamer foreseeing the doom of Valyria. Now, if this was from any other character’s narration I might call it unreliable and an attempt to discredit the Targaryens but this is Viserys, “number one Targaryen fanboy”, “my family is the best and like GODS among MEN” Targaryen. Even he thinks that perhaps the vision is just a story. At the very least, the vision wasn’t super clear as the Targaryens left a full twelve years before the Doom. Already the show seems to be calling attention to the fact that the Targaryens are just like everyone else.

2. This continues with the implication that Aegon conquered for resources and knew he could win because of dragons. This is also Viserys’ implication. He also makes a statement about Aegon “teaching the squabbling families the meaning of greatness” and it sounds very villainy. Again. This is Viserys who later on calls Maegar the cruel, “the wise” and says the title of cruel was slander! Viserys is 100% team Targaryen and yet he does not begin to make Aegon’s intentions sound noble. Even though the Targaryen history books are FILLED with that kind of thing. Viserys also calls them “strangers” to Westeros which follows the narrative of this being an invasion. in fact the next section is even TITLED ‘invasion’

After this, we switch to Varys’ narration. As a narrator, he’s probs the most trustworthy as he is the most neutral. And HE adds in the suggestion that Aegon used the hands of the envoy sent to him by Argilac the arrogant were just a PRETEXT for the conquest he’d been planning for a long time. He wanted to rule the seven kingdoms and was just looking for an excuse to attack. He also suggests that Argilac the arrogant was surpassed by Aegon in arrogance. Not a great picture painted of Aegon.

3. “Before he was done, the rivers fields and skies would turn red” -- Varys on Aegon the conqueror. Continues to speak of this man like a villain. in sharp contrast to the ‘noble conqueror’ painted in Fire and Blood. Speaking of which, Aegon is the one who comes up with the words ‘Fire and Blood’ according to this video, which definetily makes him seem like he was hoping for some casual mass murder.

4. Obviously, Harren the Black and Argilac the Arrogant sucked. Totally not coming to their defense. But how are their deaths portrated. Well, Euron is given the chance to describe the death of Harren and he is CLEARLY turned on by the destruction of his ancestors which is a bad sign. It’s description is horrifying and the animation is dark. Obviously if Euron likes it, its supposed to be kind of freaky.

Argilac, however, is given a heroic final battle seeming almost noble. Orys Baratheon, the most humanized of all the conquerors, seems to respect him enough to take his sigil and words “out of respect”. We’ll talk more about how the characters are drawn later, but there’s a big difference between Orys and Aegon.

5. Jaime describes the field of fire and he himself looks VERY MUCH like Lorren Lannister. He stresses that Aegon had “no mercy”. But its no surprise that he hates Targaryens cause they have a bad history. But still, the Field of Fire is shot like a horrifying war scene and the Targaryens are again depicted as the villain. Thousands return home as “scarred monsters”.

Favorite line “Aegon had a fetish for collecting swords”.

6. Sansa narrates the bits about House Stark and House Stark is indisputidly depicted as heroes. Now, this isn’t surprising. Sansa is loyal to her house. But she implies that the north was different than the other kingdoms because they were focused on survival not power. There is focus for a lot of time on the white walkers and how it is a Stark problem to deal with and they are a greater threat than dragons.

She puts emphasis on how Starks are willing to make alliances for survival, regadless of pride as well. She seems to respect Torrhen Stark’s decision to kneel saying ‘he had no choice’. Aegon was offering a very ‘kneel or die’ message after all. The Starks would have died if they did not bow. But their swords are still taken for the throne!

The most ominous bit is this:

“The swords Aegon took from them were not twisted or mangled” - Sansa

“Yet” - Viserys, very ominously

What an ominous thing to throw in there Viserys!

7. Most unsettling display of Targaryen villainy happens in the Eyrie, narrated by Littlefinger. Queen Arryn arrives to see that Visenya is with her son, next to her dragon. Visenya doesn’t say it, but she is fully threatening the boy. You can see it by her smile which is just...oof. It’s scary. She clearly intends to kill him if his mother doesn’t give the crown. She has “no choice” and Littlefinger describes him as a “poor boy”. Visenya is clear villain in this. This is in HUGE contrast to the two women apparently relating and connecting with each other in Fire and Blood.

8. Viserys mocks the “religious” reasons for old town’s surrender suggesting that they knelt because otherwise everyone would die. This once again undercuts the idea that the septon saw some grand purpose for Aegon which is suggested in Fire and Blood. The septon is just afraid, again, according to Viserys the number one Targaryen fanboy. Bonus: calls the north savages because Targaryens are better than everyone~~ He even calls the Targaryens the "Greatest dynasty ever.” when Aegon is crowned.

9. But after Aegon’s victory, the neutral Varys comes in to remind us of the Dorne failure. Rather than making Rhaenys seem unflapable and invincible as Fire and Blood did, Varys suggested that the yellow toad of Dorne SCARED Rhaenys. And later on, of course, Rhaenys gets taken down. Dorne really is painted as the heroic underdogs of this scene. and emphasis is placed on the fact that Aegon and Visenya set every city on fire except sunspear. If there HAD been people there, they would all be dead. Fire and Blood indeed.

10. We skip right from the conquest to the Dance of Dragons.

“With no enemies left they started fighting each other.” - Viserys

This defs doesn’t sound like the centuries of peace and prosperity that Dany talked about. This video is focused ENTIRELY on the wars of the Targaryens and not the good things or building of infrastructure. No mention of Jahaerys the concilitator at all. Instead we focus on Aegon, Maegar, the Dance, Aegon the Unworthy and the Mad King. All the very worst Targaryens. And there are lots of good things the Targaryens did! But instead of focusing on that, the show focuses on the war, which means they know that Dany’s line about “centuries of peace” is wrong.

Bonus, we have more of Viserys arguing for blood purity and that Targaryens are SPECIAL and that they would have been fine if Aegon didn’t legitimize so many dirty half breed bastards.

11. The greatest Targaryen threat, however, is madness (according to Jaime who saw the Mad King first hand). We bring up that line again: “Every time a Targaryen is born the gods flip a coin”

“We put up with Aerys hoping Rhaegar would be better but then he also proved mad when he took Lyanna Stark”

This does not place Rhaegar as the sane, good sibling most people do. Instead, it also paints him in a negative light. Which, this is Jaime, so take it with a grain of salt. But he actually never hated Rhaegar so yeah...

12. Jaime is so bitter about Ned condemning him and it’s kinda funny. I love Nikolaj narration

“I saw what Ned Stark couldn’t. Robert was ashamed of the bodies of the children... and more ashamed at his relief. Glorious heroes didn’t kill children. They simply didn’t punish their murderers” - Jaime being smart with one of my fave lines.

He clearly sees things as they are. He doesn’t like the Targaryens but he also doesn’t elevate Robert as a god. Jaime doesn’t believe in heroes and it shows here.

13. Then we end with a particularly ominous note.

“One day I’ll return and repay all traitors with the only coin my family knows. Fire and blood” - Viserys.

These are the last words in the video. A threat. It really does not paint the Targaryens as tragic characters pushed out of their rightful throne.

And this is where I want to talk about the character drawings. Every pose from the original three dragons (Aegon and sisters) is the most villainous thing in the world and the music behind their conquest is intense and dark. Their faces are often lowered but with their eyes glaring up and shrouded in shadow. Their smiles are sharp. Their body language is arrogant. It is victims of the conquest like Lorren and Torrhen who are given more humanized designs.

On the Targaryen side of things, the most humanized design belongs to Orys Baratheon who has much kinder eyes and a more open expression. And the there’s Viserys and Daenerys at the end who look like scared children more than anything. But the Targaryen dynasty that is their birth right doesn’t appear to start out on a great foot.

This kinda all backs up my point that if Daenerys wants to break the wheel, she will have to reject and correct the legacy of her family. The show clearly does not view Aegon as a great hero. So if they mean for Daenerys to be a hero, I hope they have her recognize the history and take steps to correct it (maybe even destroy the iron throne, plz?) And if she doesn’t recognize her history or tries to emulate Aegon, she could be headed down a bad path.

I love the Targaryen family because, like lots of my favorite Westeros families, they are SCREWED UP and have lots of interesting characters, and I look forward to exploring them more in my Fire and Blood post. But if anything, this video just backs up my thesis about unreliable history and what Dany will have to do if she wants to be a good ruler. Break that wheel! It was forged in fire and blood!

#game of thrones #house targaryen #fire and blood #daenerys targaryen #Jaime Lannister #Varys #viserys targaryen #sansa stark #Aegon Targaryen #game of thrones season 7 #game of thrones season 8 #game of thrones meta

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poorquentyn · 6 years

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Remember Your Name, Part 3: When That Other Man Had Come This Way

Series so far here

“That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore.”

At the end of In the Mood for Love, the film’s protagonist visits the ruins of Angkor Wat. He’d earlier mused to a friend about how back in the day, if you had a secret burning inside that you couldn’t bring yourself to share, you dug a shallow hole into a tree and whispered your secret into it, filling the hole with mud afterwards to keep the truth at bay.

But when our hero decides to try and leave behind the story of forsaken love we saw unfold over the course of the movie, he does not seek out a living thing that can survive and change and grow. He instead unburdens himself to a ruin: a monument to the ravages wrought and distances forged by time. In the sequel 2046, he disappears into the rose-colored fog within, surrounded by his ghosts on parade. Try as he might, he could not seal them away forever.

I have come this way before. It was a dangerous thought, and he regretted it at once.

“No,” he said, “no, that was some other man, that was before you knew your name.” His name was Reek. He had to remember that. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with leek. When that other man had come this way, an army had followed close behind him, the great host of the north riding to war beneath the grey-and-white banners of House Stark. Reek rode alone, clutching a peace banner on a pinewood staff. When that other man had come this way, he had been mounted on a courser, swift and spirited. Reek rode a broken-down stot, all skin and bone and ribs, and he rode her slowly for fear he might fall off. The other man had been a good rider, but Reek was uneasy on horseback. It had been so long. He was no rider. He was not even a man. He was Lord Ramsay’s creature, lower than a dog, a worm in human skin. “You will pretend to be a prince,” Lord Ramsay told him last night, as Reek was soaking in a tub of scalding water, “but we know the truth. You’re Reek. You’ll always be Reek, no matter how sweet you smell. Your nose may lie to you. Remember your name. Remember who you are.”

“Reek,” he said. “Your Reek.”

The Drunkard’s Tower leaned as if it were about to collapse, just as it had for half a thousand years. The Children’s Tower thrust into the sky as straight as a spear, but its shattered top was open to the wind and rain. The Gatehouse Tower, squat and wide, was the largest of the three, slimy with moss, a gnarled tree growing sideways from the stones of its north side, fragments of broken wall still standing to the east and west. The Karstarks took the Drunkard’s Tower and the Umbers the Children’s Tower, he recalled. Robb claimed the Gatehouse Tower for his own. If he closed his eyes, he could see the banners in his mind’s eye, snapping bravely in a brisk north wind. All gone now, all fallen.

Memory and identity are inextricable. Who you were informs who you are, and who you are invariably filters your perspective on who you were. The weight of backstory has always been one of ASOIAF’s central claims to profundity. R+L=J, the story’s central revelation and the beating heart of the fandom, is also the burdensome duty that defined our fakeout protagonist Eddard Stark. What makes Ned’s life so meaningful is that he put it all on the line not to keep the secret that his purported bastard Jon is in fact his sister Lyanna’s son by Rhaegar Targaryen, but in the name of the values that keeping that secret instilled in him.

Time was perilously short. The king would return from his hunt soon, and honor would require Ned to go to him with all he had learned. Vayon Poole had arranged for Sansa and Arya to sail on the Wind Witch out of Braavos, three days hence. They would be back at Winterfell before the harvest. Ned could no longer use his concern for their safety to excuse his delay.

Yet last night he had dreamt of Rhaegar's children. Lord Tywin had laid the bodies beneath the Iron Throne, wrapped in the crimson cloaks of his house guard. That was clever of him; the blood did not show so badly against the red cloth. The little princess had been barefoot, still dressed in her bed gown, and the boy…the boy…

Ned could not let that happen again. The realm could not withstand a second mad king, another dance of blood and vengeance. He must find some way to save the children.

Jaime floats in heat and memory in the Harrenhal bathtubs, the truth finally swimming to the surface; Barbrey stares deep into a dead man’s face, the pleasure and pain of it eternally intermingled; Robert himself admits that all he wants most is to leave behind the crown it was all ostensibly for. They all sing the same sad song, the one Reek sings as he rides fearfully into Theon Greyjoy’s past at Moat Cailin: I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell. They followed the red comet, over the edge. Their songs broke, and broke them in their fall.

Following on Theon briefly coming unstuck in time in his first ADWD chapter, Reek II builds on that disorientation by externalizing it onto his environment. The chapter is thick with memory and riddled with decay, all swathes of mist that give way to fountains of blood, because that’s what the inside of Theon Greyjoy’s head looks like. That opening chapter in the Dreadfort gave us a blood-curdling glimpse of the crucible in which Theon became Reek before forcing him out of it; now, the story goes widescreen, taking in how the North has changed along with our POV since last he stepped out into it.

The hall was dark stone, high ceilinged and drafty, full of drifting smoke, its stone walls spotted by huge patches of pale lichen. A peat fire burned low in a hearth blackened by the hotter blazes of years past. A massive table of carved stone filled the chamber, as it had for centuries. There was where I sat, the last time I was here, he remembered. Robb was at the head of the table, with the Greatjon to his right and Roose Bolton on his left. The Glovers sat next to Helman Tallhart. Karstark and his sons were across from them.

The reference to time’s fire in which we burn (“blackened by the hotter blazes of years past”), the epochal weight of the table filling the chamber “as it had for centuries,” the evocation of the ghosts that haunt Theon--all of it grounds the business of the plot in memory and time, and thus in what’s happened to our POV.

Theon smiled. Reek cannot. Theon had friends. Reek is a pariah. Theon came to Moat Cailin with an army. Now, that army is dead and gone, except for those who turned on the rest...just as he did. Moat Cailin has been made a ruin all over again, defeat and despair folded into it like Lannister crimson into Stark steel, a testament like Tristifer’s tomb to a shattered kingdom. Theon helped shatter it, and now he stumbles back shattered to help melt down what’s left. He is Moat Cailin, more or less, the broken towers a misty mirror for our broken man, the splintered teeth of his smile writ large. The fog that cloaks the fortress reflects how he’s been forced to compartmentalize his past, which is now screaming its way to the surface. There are ghosts in Moat Cailin, and he is one of them.

(image by warsandpoliticsoficeandfire.wordpress.com)

This sense of desolation and loss is mirrored in the chapter’s purpose in the larger plot. The standoff between the Boltons and the Ironborn over the Moat (and by extension, the North as a whole) is little more than a feast for crows. Both sides went for the direwolf’s throat with no higher cause than plunder and the pleasure of it; all they’re fighting over is who did it more successfully. The Ironborn here were left to rot by their Lord Captain when he went chasing his brother’s crown...

“Victarion commanded us to hold, he did. I heard him with my own ears. Hold here till I return, he told Kenning.”

“Aye,” said the one-armed man. “That’s what he said. The kingsmoot called, but he swore that he’d be back, with a driftwood crown upon his head and a thousand men behind him.”

“My uncle is never coming back,” Reek told them. “The kingsmoot crowned his brother Euron, and the Crow’s Eye has other wars to fight. You think my uncle values you? He doesn’t. You are the ones he left behind to die. He scraped you off the same way he scrapes mud off his boots when he wades ashore.”

Those words struck home. He could see it in their eyes, in the way they looked at one another or frowned above their cups. They all feared they’d been abandoned, but it took me to turn fear into certainty. These were not the kin of famous captains nor the blood of the great Houses of the Iron Islands. These were the sons of thralls and salt wives.

...and the Dreadfort men can’t lay any credible claim to be acting as defenders of the North from the reaving invaders, given the Northern blood they’ve both happily spilled throughout. (Those who hunt people for sport shouldn’t throw stones, and all that.) Ramsay in this chapter is merely mopping up after and reaping the benefits of the hard-earned victory won by Howland Reed and his guerilla fighters, and even that he’s not doing himself, but forcing a helpless tortured prisoner to do for him. The Bastard’s unspeakably hideous treatment of the Ironborn after they surrender to him in good faith is the punchline to a very dark joke, poisoned icing on bitter cake. And of course, it’s all in the service of welcoming an army soaked in the blood of the men and women with whom they sat down to dinner, as allies, as friends, as guests at a wedding.

Three days later, the vanguard of Roose Bolton’s host threaded its way through the ruins and past the row of grisly sentinels—four hundred mounted Freys clad in blue and grey, their spearpoints glittering whenever the sun broke through the clouds. Two of old Lord Walder’s sons led the van. One was brawny, with a massive jut of jaw and arms thick with muscle. The other had hungry eyes close-set above a pointed nose, a thin brown beard that did not quite conceal the weak chin beneath it, a bald head. Hosteen and Aenys. He remembered them from before he knew his name. Hosteen was a bull, slow to anger but implacable once roused, and by repute the fiercest fighter of Lord Walder’s get. Aenys was older, crueler, and more clever—a commander, not a swordsman. Both were seasoned soldiers.

The northmen followed hard behind the van, their tattered banners streaming in the wind. Reek watched them pass. Most were afoot, and there were so few of them. He remembered the great host that marched south with Young Wolf, beneath the direwolf of Winterfell. Twenty thousand swords and spears had gone off to war with Robb, or near enough to make no matter, but only two in ten were coming back, and most of those were Dreadfort men.

Even as Reek struggles to keep Theon at bay (thinking of his life before the Dreadfort dungeons as the time “before he knew his name”), making contact with the people with whom Theon rode to war is stirring something inside him, and that’s reflected in the big picture of what it means for this army to arrive in the North. Grey Wind’s forlorn eyes from the House of the Undying are watching, and judging, and waiting. Wolves prowl and howl through the opening chapters of ADWD’s Northern half, singing the song of their fall, and of Jojen’s solemn promise: “the wolves will come again.” The ghosts of the Red Wedding follow this army to Winterfell, and hang heavy on the Ramsay-Jeyne wedding and everything that follows, crying out for redress. The gods have been insulted, and will have their due. Thankfully, there’s a man going ‘round taking names, and he decides who to free and who to blame...

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...but discussion of His Grace King Stannis Baratheon, the Wrath of God, will have to wait for later chapters, as will Wyman Manderly’s culinary interpretation of divine judgment.

For the purposes of Theon’s arc, the Ironborn at Moat Cailin serve as the mirror from which he’s trying so desperately to look away. I said last time that what Reek fears most right now, even more than Ramsay, is being Theon. That name carries so much shame and pain with it that he prefers to be “your Reek,” fearing not only the external consequences of defiance (more torture and maiming), but also the internal consequences of identifying as his old self. All Theon wanted to do in ACOK was take control of his life, and now that’s the last thing he wants, because of what he did with that power once he had it. He returns to Moat Cailin flying a white flag of peace, but it may as well be one of surrender.

“I am Ironborn,” Reek answered, lying. The boy he’d been before had been Ironborn, true enough, but Reek had come into this world in the dungeons of the Dreadfort. “Look at my face. I am Lord Balon’s son. Your prince.” He would have said the name, but somehow the words caught in his throat. Reek, I’m Reek, it rhymes with squeak.

“Ralf Kenning is dead,” he said. “Who commands here?”

The drinkers stared at him blankly. One laughed. Another spat. Finally one of the Codds said, “Who asks?”

“Lord Balon’s son.” Reek, my name is Reek, it rhymes with cheek.

One of the Codds pushed to his feet. A big man, but pop-eyed and wide of mouth, with dead white flesh. He looked as if his father had sired him on a fish, but he still wore a longsword. “Dagon Codd yields to no man.”

No, please, you have to listen. The thought of what Ramsay would do to him if he crept back to camp without the garrison’s surrender was almost enough to make him piss his breeches. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with leak.

What gives this chapter its charge is that our POV is being forced by the man who shattered his old identity to resume that identity. It’s Theon playing Reek playing Theon, and he’s being made to remember his name in order to sway the people who represent his old life, because they’d never surrender to Reek. He knows that, because he used to be like them...or he wanted to be, anyway. When Theon first became a POV, his mind was aflame with song, lashing his in-between identity to the values and visions of the Old Way:

Once I would have kept her as a salt wife in truth, he thought to himself as he slid his fingers through her tangled hair. Once. When we still kept the Old Way, lived by the axe instead of the pick, taking what we would, be it wealth, women, or glory. In those days, the Ironborn did not work mines; that was labor for the captives brought back from the hostings, and so too the sorry business of farming and tending goats and sheep. War was an ironman's proper trade. The Drowned God had made them to reave and rape, to carve out kingdoms and write their names in fire and blood and song.

Aegon the Dragon had destroyed the Old Way when he burned Black Harren, gave Harren's kingdom back to the weakling rivermen, and reduced the Iron Islands to an insignificant backwater of a much greater realm. Yet the old red tales were still told around driftwood fires and smoky hearths all across the islands, even behind the high stone halls of Pyke. Theon's father numbered among his titles the style of Lord Reaper, and the Greyjoy words boasted that We Do Not Sow.

It had been to bring back the Old Way more than for the empty vanity of a crown that Lord Balon had staged his great rebellion. Robert Baratheon had written a bloody end to that hope, with the help of his friend Eddard Stark, but both men were dead now. Mere boys ruled in their stead, and the realm that Aegon the Conqueror had forged was smashed and sundered. This is the season, Theon thought as the captain's daughter slid her lips up and down the length of him, the season, the year, the day, and I am the man.

This chapter, Theon I ACOK, slots right in between Davos I (the one with Lightbringer) and Daenerys I (the one in the Red Waste), both of them positively soaked with messianic imagery and focused on weighty questions of power, prophecy, and the price you pay. But in Theon’s chapter, the launching pad for the most stubbornly secular storyline in ACOK, the messianic mindset is stripped of its finery and exposed as pitiful self-delusion. This is who you are, Chosen One, all the more clearly with neither dragons nor shadowbinders at your back: a mirror-drunk fool dreaming of atrocities while your dick gets sucked.

Three books later, that self-image has been racked and flayed and castrated before being spat back out at us as Reek. He thinks of himself as having been born beneath the Dreadfort, molded like clay from Theon’s blood and pain; are you my mother, Ramsay? He keeps retreating to his new name in his thoughts, a mantra to keep the fear away. The identity of which he dreamed is now the nightmare he cannot shake. And what better way for the author to reflect that than by bringing him up against the death of his dream, the most unshakable images of the rot eating away at the Old Way?

Reek passed the rotted carcass of a horse, an arrow jutting from its neck. A long white snake slithered into its empty eye socket at his approach. Behind the horse he spied the rider, or what remained of him. The crows had stripped the flesh from the man’s face, and a feral dog had burrowed beneath his mail to get at his entrails. Farther on, another corpse had sunk so deep into the muck that only his face and fingers showed.

Closer to the towers, corpses littered the ground on every side. Blood-blooms had sprouted from their gaping wounds, pale flowers with petals plump and moist as a woman’s lips.

Ralf Kenning lay shivering beneath a mountain of furs. His arms were stacked beside him—sword and axe, mail hauberk, iron warhelm. His shield bore the storm god’s cloudy hand, lightning crackling from his fingers down to a raging sea, but the paint was discolored and peeling, the wood beneath starting to rot.

Ralf was rotting too. Beneath the furs he was naked and feverish, his pale puffy flesh covered with weeping sores and scabs. His head was misshapen, one cheek grotesquely swollen, his neck so engorged with blood that it threatened to swallow his face. The arm on that same side was big as a log and crawling with white worms. No one had bathed him or shaved him for many days, from the look of him. One eye wept pus, and his beard was crusty with dried vomit.

“What happened to him?” asked Reek.

“He was on the parapets and some bog devil loosed an arrow at him. It was only a graze, but…they poison their shafts, smear the points with shit and worse things. We poured boiling wine into the wound, but it made no difference.”

This is how the Old Way has always died, with broken towers and the stench of corpses, from Aegon melting Harrenhal to Robert smashing Pyke. Every time it falls, the seeds are sown for its next rise; the ideology’s exposed festering folly is folded into a Lost Cause mythos that weaponizes resentment and ennobles suffering. The last time it fell, part of the price paid was Theon’s identity, and his desperate drive to reclaim it by reviving the Old Way is what led him here. He’s unrecognizable to the very world in which he hoped to finally recognize himself.

The garrison will never know me. Some might recall the boy he’d been before he learned his name, but Reek would be a stranger to them. It had been a long while since he last looked into a glass, but he knew how old he must appear. His hair had turned white; much of it had fallen out, and what was left was stiff and dry as straw. The dungeons had left him weak as an old woman and so thin a strong wind could knock him down.

And his hands…Ramsay had given him gloves, fine gloves of black leather, soft and supple, stuffed with wool to conceal his missing fingers, but if anyone looked closely, he would see that three of his fingers did not bend.

That fall from grace, the violent collapse of his projected identity, is reflected back at him by the sorry state of the Ironborn garrison. They came here as an army, together, one people; they knew who they were. And now...?

Someone seized him and dragged him inside, and he heard the door crash shut behind him. He was pulled to his feet and shoved against a wall. Then a knife was at his throat, a bearded face so close to his that he could count the man’s nose hairs. “Who are you? What’s your purpose here? Quick now, or I’ll do you the same as him.” The guard jerked his head toward a body rotting on the floor beside the door, its flesh green and crawling with maggots.

“I am ironborn,” Reek answered, lying. The boy he’d been before had been ironborn, true enough, but Reek had come into this world in the dungeons of the Dreadfort. “Look at my face. I am Lord Balon’s son. Your prince.” He would have said the name, but somehow the words caught in his throat. Reek, I’m Reek, it rhymes with squeak. He had to forget that for a little while, though. No man would ever yield to a creature such as Reek, no matter how desperate his situation. He must pretend to be a prince again.

His captor stared at his face, squinting, his mouth twisted in suspicion. His teeth were brown, and his breath stank of ale and onion. “Lord Balon’s sons were killed.”

“My brothers. Not me. Lord Ramsay took me captive after Winterfell. He’s sent me here to treat with you. Do you command here?”

“Me?” The man lowered his knife and took a step backwards, almost stumbling over the corpse. “Not me, m’lord.” His mail was rusted, his leathers rotting. On the back of one hand an open sore wept blood. “Ralf Kenning has the command. The captain said. I’m on the door, is all.”

“And who is this?” Reek gave the corpse a kick.

The guard stared at the dead man as if seeing him for the first time. “Him…he drank the water. I had to cut his throat for him, to stop his screaming. Bad belly. You can’t drink the water. That’s why we got the ale.” The guard rubbed his face, his eyes red and inflamed. “We used to drag the dead down into the cellars. All the vaults are flooded down there. No one wants to take the trouble now, so we just leave them where they fall.”

“The cellar is a better place for them. Give them to the water. To the Drowned God.”

The man laughed. “No gods down there, m’lord. Only rats and water snakes. White things, thick as your leg. Sometimes they slither up the steps and bite you in your sleep.”

Reek remembered the dungeons underneath the Dreadfort, the rat squirming between his teeth, the taste of warm blood on his lips. If I fail, Ramsay will send me back to that, but first he’ll flay the skin from another finger. “How many of the garrison are left?”

“Some,” said the ironman. “I don’t know. Fewer than we was before. Some in the Drunkard’s Tower too, I think. Not the Children’s Tower. Dagon Codd went over there a few days back. Only two men left alive, he said, and they was eating on the dead ones. He killed them both, if you can believe that.”

Moat Cailin has fallen, Reek realized then, only no one has seen fit to tell them.

And now they are lost, turning on each other, their god forgotten. Cannibalism rears its head again and again in ADWD, as the taboo wilts in the face of winter and war. Theon came here with the knights of summer; Reek returns to find the living dead. Two different armies, two different peoples, as one in his mind now. After all, he’s been trying to bridge this particular gap for most of his life. The abyss awaited both armies to occupy the Moat, as it awaited Theon. Never forget Kubrick’s parting shot in Barry Lyndon:

In ACOK, Theon tried to shed the Northern self exemplified by that shining army at the Moat like dead skin, giving himself over to the image of the Ironborn self in his head. Now Reek returns to Moat Calin to play that image, only to sacrifice it as he was as a child, sacrificed like the men at Moat Cailin to the Old Way...

“Kill him,” Reek told the guard. “His wits are gone. He’s full of blood and worms.”

The man gaped at him. “The captain put him in command.”

“You’d put a dying horse down.”

“What horse? I never had no horse.”

I did. The memory came back in a rush. Smiler’s screams had sounded almost human. His mane afire, he had reared up on his hind legs, blind with pain, lashing out with his hooves. No, no. Not mine, he was not mine, Reek never had a horse. “I will kill him for you.” Reek snatched up Ralf Kenning’s sword where it leaned against his shield. He still had fingers enough to clasp the hilt. When he laid the edge of the blade against the swollen throat of the creature on the straw, the skin split open in a gout of black blood and yellow pus. Kenning jerked violently, then lay still.

...and then again as an adult, this time to the Bastard of Bolton.

Reek swung down from his saddle and took a knee. “My lord, Moat Cailin is yours. Here are its last defenders.”

“So few. I had hoped for more. They were such stubborn foes.” Lord Ramsay’s pale eyes shone. “You must be starved. Damon, Alyn, see to them. Wine and ale, and all the food that they can eat. Skinner, show their wounded to our maesters.”

“Aye, my lord.”

A few of the Ironborn muttered thanks before they shambled off toward the cookfires in the center of the camp. One of the Codds even tried to kiss Lord Ramsay’s ring, but the hounds drove him back before he could get close, and Alison took a chunk of his ear. Even as the blood streamed down his neck, the man bobbed and bowed and praised his lordship’s mercy.

When the last of them were gone, Ramsay Bolton turned his smile on Reek. He clasped him by the back of the head, pulled his face close, kissed him on his cheek, and whispered, “My old friend Reek. Did they really take you for their prince? What bloody fools, these ironmen. The gods are laughing.”

“All they want is to go home, my lord.”

“And what do you want, my sweet Reek?” Ramsay murmured, as softly as a lover. His breath smelled of mulled wine and cloves, so sweet. “Such valiant service deserves a reward. I cannot give you back your fingers or your toes, but surely there is something you would have of me. Shall I free you instead? Release you from my service? Do you want to go with them, return to your bleak isles in the cold grey sea, be a prince again? Or would you sooner stay my leal serving man?”

A cold knife scraped along his spine. Be careful, he told himself, be very, very careful. He did not like his lordship’s smile, the way his eyes were shining, the spittle glistening at the corner of his mouth. He had seen such signs before. You are no prince. You’re Reek, just Reek, it rhymes with freak. Give him the answer that he wants.

“My lord,” he said, “my place is here, with you. I’m your Reek. I only want to serve you. All I ask …a skin of wine, that would be reward enough for me…red wine, the strongest that you have, all the wine a man can drink…”

Lord Ramsay laughed. “You’re not a man, Reek. You’re just my creature. You’ll have your wine, though. Walder, see to it. And fear not, I won’t return you to the dungeons, you have my word as a Bolton. We’ll make a dog of you instead. Meat every day, and I’ll even leave you teeth enough to eat it. You can sleep beside my girls. Ben, do you have a collar for him?”

“I’ll have one made, m’lord,” said old Ben Bones.

The old man did better than that. That night, besides the collar, there was a ragged blanket too, and half a chicken. Reek had to fight the dogs for the meat, but it was the best meal he’d had since Winterfell.

And the wine…the wine was dark and sour, but strong. Squatting amongst the hounds, Reek drank until his head swam, retched, wiped his mouth, and drank some more. Afterward he lay back and closed his eyes. When he woke a dog was licking vomit from his beard, and dark clouds were scuttling across the face of a sickle moon. Somewhere in the night, men were screaming. He shoved the dog aside, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

The next morning Lord Ramsay dispatched three riders down the causeway to take word to his lord father that the way was clear. The flayed man of House Bolton was hoisted above the Gatehouse Tower, where Reek had hauled down the golden kraken of Pyke. Along the rotting-plank road, wooden stakes were driven deep into the boggy ground; there the corpses festered, red and dripping. Sixty-three, he knew, there are sixty-three of them. One was short half an arm. Another had a parchment shoved between its teeth, its wax seal still unbroken.

“So few. I had hoped for more.” The soul shudders. And oh, how casually “somewhere in the night, men were screaming” strolls into the middle of a paragraph, and Reek rolls back over to sleep...

To be clear, I’m not holding Theon responsible for what happens to his sixty-three fellow Ironborn left at the Moat. He’s in no position to refuse Ramsay, as GRRM makes clear in his inner monologue throughout the chapter. But Ramsay is deliberately putting his prisoner through a gauntlet of the self. He has our POV act as Prince Theon son of King Balon, forces him through a cruel mummer’s farce of “choosing” to stay at Ramsay’s side as Reek, and then viciously annihilates the people who represent Theon’s connection to that old identity. It has exactly the effect Ramsay wants: “He pulled down the kraken banner with his own two hands, fumbling some because of his missing fingers but thankful for the fingers that Lord Ramsay had allowed him to keep.” This is what it means to have been Theon and to now be Reek.

This pattern will repeat itself over the course of Theon’s next two chapters, as Roose and Barbrey conspire to have him give Jeyne away to Ramsay publicly, as Theon, and so help cement Bolton control of Winterfell. At every step, Theon's identity is weaponized and turned against him. He flinches from his past, drinks to annihilate his present, and can barely conceive of a future. He is unmoored, drifting through external and internal fog, and he has once again unlocked the North on behalf of heinous authority figures he desperately wants to please. Indeed, Ramsay has wrought a fearsome image of himself in Theon’s mind, a devil equally at home tempting and punishing, and that dynamic is recreated at Moat Cailin:

One of the Codds even tried to kiss Lord Ramsay’s ring, but the hounds drove him back before he could get close, and Alison took a chunk of his ear. Even as the blood streamed down his neck, the man bobbed and bowed and praised his lordship’s mercy.

On that note, one persistent critique of both AFFC and ADWD is that the violence stopped meaning anything--the author started leaning on brutality for brutality’s sake, because he bought into his own rep and/or was out of ideas. I think it’s a valid complaint when it comes to, say, Biter eating Brienne’s face. But on the flipside, the horrific violence in Theon’s storyline is consistently linked to intertwined themes of memory and identity in a manner that I find resonant. Look no further than the man who accepts Ramsay’s offer, and why:

It was the one-armed man who’d flung the axe. As he rose to his feet he had another in his hand. “Who else wants to die?” he asked the other drinkers. “Speak up, I’ll see you do.” Thin red streams were spreading out across the stone from the pool of blood where Dagon Codd’s head had come to rest. “Me, I mean to live, and that don’t mean staying here to rot.”

The one-armed man walked at the head of the procession, limping heavily. His name, he said, was Adrack Humble, and he had a rock wife and three salt wives back on Great Wyk. “Three of the four had big bellies when we sailed,” he boasted, “and Humbles run to twins. First thing I’ll need to do when I get back is count up my new sons. Might be I’ll even name one after you, m’lord.”

Aye, name him Reek, he thought, and when he’s bad you can cut his toes off and give him rats to eat. He turned his head and spat, and wondered if Ralf Kenning hadn’t been the lucky one.

“All they want is to go home, my lord.” And so does Theon, but he has no home to go back to.

Now, of course, Adrack Humble’s dream of counting up his sons is hardly a utopian vision--he kidnapped and enslaved most of their mothers. But the world to which he belongs is the world to which Theon wanted to belong, believing in it so badly he put his life on the line for it...and it failed him, just as it always ultimately fails your average [H]umble man of the Iron Islands. As such, Reek now thinks that the man who rotted without getting his hopes up was the lucky one. This is how he talked when the Young Wolf’s army marched south...

"But such a battle!" said Theon Greyjoy eagerly. "My lady, the realm has not seen such a victory since the Field of Fire. I vow, the Lannisters lost ten men for every one of ours that fell. We've taken close to a hundred knights captive, and a dozen lords bannermen. Lord Westerling, Lord Banefort, Ser Garth Greenfield, Lord Estren, Ser Tytos Brax, Mallor the Dornishman … and three Lannisters besides Jaime, Lord Tywin's own nephews, two of his sister's sons and one of his dead brother's…"

Theon Greyjoy was seated on a bench in Riverrun's Great Hall, enjoying a horn of ale and regaling her father's garrison with an account of the slaughter in the Whispering Wood. "Some tried to flee, but we'd pinched the valley shut at both ends, and we rode out of the darkness with sword and lance. The Lannisters must have thought the Others themselves were on them when that wolf of Robb's got in among them. I saw him tear one man's arm from his shoulder, and their horses went mad at the scent of him. I couldn't tell you how many men were thrown—"

...but his story is always interrupted, his comrades died at dinner, and now he dreams only of blood. We rode to war with songs on our lips, but by the time the last notes faded and left us alone with the silence, we were utterly transformed. When Theon eagerly embraces his wine and his half-chicken and his collar, trusting them to silence the screams, all I can think of is this:

“And the man breaks.

“He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them...but he should pity them as well.”

Two chapters prior to Reek II, half a world away, the Shy Maid sailed through another mournful ruin, and when Tyrion stared into the Sorrows, they stared back.

The grey moss grew thickly here, covering the fallen stones in great mounds and bearding all the towers. Black vines crept in and out of windows, through doors and over archways, up the sides of high stone walls. The fog concealed three-quarters of the palace, but what they glimpsed was more than enough for Tyrion to know that this island fastness had been ten times the size of the Red Keep once and a hundred times more beautiful. He knew where he was. “The Palace of Love,” he said softly.

“That was the Rhoynar name,” said Haldon Halfmaester, “but for a thousand years this has been the Palace of Sorrow.”

The ruin was sad enough, but knowing what it had been made it even sadder. There was laughter here once, Tyrion thought. There were gardens bright with flowers and fountains sparkling golden in the sun. These steps once rang to the sound of lovers’ footsteps, and beneath that broken dome marriages beyond count were sealed with a kiss. His thoughts turned to Tysha, who had so briefly been his lady wife. It was Jaime, he thought, despairing. He was my own blood, my big strong brother. When I was small he brought me toys, barrel hoops and blocks and a carved wooden lion. He gave me my first pony and taught me how to ride him. When he said that he had bought you for me, I never doubted him. Why would I? He was Jaime, and you were just some girl who’d played a part. I had feared it from the start, from the moment you first smiled at me and let me touch your hand. My own father could not love me. Why would you if not for gold?

Through the long grey fingers of the fog, he heard again the deep shuddering thrum of a bowstring snapping taut, the grunt Lord Tywin made as the quarrel took him beneath the belly, the slap of cheeks on stone as he sat back down to die.

And therein lies a theme that runs through ASOIAF but for me finds its richest expressions in A Dance with Dragons: you can’t go home again.

Quentyn did not want to die at all. I want to go back to Yronwood and kiss both of your sisters, marry Gwyneth Yronwood, watch her flower into beauty, have a child by her. I want to ride in tourneys, hawk and hunt, visit with my mother in Norvos, read some of those books my father sends me. I want Cletus and Will and Maester Kedry to be alive again.

Home is haunted, by the love you lost and the family you failed.

The door to the roof of the tower was stuck so fast that it was plain no one had opened it in years. He had to put his shoulder to it to force it open. But when Jon Connington stepped out onto the high battlements, the view was just as intoxicating as he remembered: the crag with its wind-carved rocks and jagged spires, the sea below growling and worrying at the foot of the castle like some restless beast, endless leagues of sky and cloud, the wood with its autumnal colors. “Your father’s lands are beautiful,” Prince Rhaegar had said, standing right where Jon was standing now. And the boy he’d been had replied, “One day they will all be mine.” As if that could impress a prince who was heir to the entire realm, from the Arbor to the Wall.

Griffin’s Roost had been his, eventually, if only for a few short years. From here, Jon Connington had ruled broad lands extending many leagues to the west, north, and south, just as his father and his father’s father had before him. But his father and his father’s father had never lost their lands. He had.

Home is a border wall, a chain digging and twisting.

“Do you have brothers?” Asha asked her keeper.

“Sisters,” Alysane Mormont replied, gruff as ever. “Five, we were. All girls. Lyanna is back on Bear Island. Lyra and Jory are with our mother. Dacey was murdered.”

“The Red Wedding.”

“Aye.” Alysane stared at Asha for a moment. “I have a son. He’s only two. My daughter’s nine.”

“You started young.”

“Too young. But better that than wait too late.”

A stab at me, Asha thought, but let it be. “You are wed.”

“No. My children were fathered by a bear.” Alysane smiled. Her teeth were crooked, but there was something ingratiating about that smile. “Mormont women are skinchangers. We turn into bears and find mates in the woods. Everyone knows.”

Asha smiled back. “Mormont women are all fighters too.”

The other woman’s smile faded. “What we are is what you made us. On Bear Island every child learns to fear krakens rising from the sea.”

The Old Way. Asha turned away, chains clinking faintly.

Home is leagues and years away, and yet so close you can almost touch it.

Bran closed his eyes and slipped free of his skin. Into the roots, he thought. Into the weirwood. Become the tree. For an instant he could see the cavern in its black mantle, could hear the river rushing by below.

Then all at once he was back home again.

Lord Eddard Stark sat upon a rock beside the deep black pool in the godswood, the pale roots of the heart tree twisting around him like an old man’s gnarled arms. The greatsword Ice lay across Lord Eddard’s lap, and he was cleaning the blade with an oilcloth.

“Winterfell,” Bran whispered.

“I have my own ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of mine has ever reached them. The past remains the past. We can learn from it, but we cannot change it.”

You have no home. You never will.

Water splashed against the soles of her feet. She was walking in the stream. How long had she been doing that? The soft brown mud felt good between her toes and helped to soothe her blisters. In the stream or out of it, I must keep walking. Water flows downhill. The stream will take me to the river, and the river will take me home.

Except it wouldn’t, not truly.

You’ll give up everything just to get home, please, please...

Jon flexed the fingers of his sword hand. The Night’s Watch takes no part. He closed his fist and opened it again. What you propose is nothing less than treason. He thought of Robb, with snowflakes melting in his hair. Kill the boy and let the man be born. He thought of Bran, clambering up a tower wall, agile as a monkey. Of Rickon’s breathless laughter. Of Sansa, brushing out Lady’s coat and singing to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow. He thought of Arya, her hair as tangled as a bird’s nest. I made him a warm cloak from the skins of the six whores who came with him to Winterfell…I want my bride back…I want my bride back…I want my bride back…

...but it’s gone.

“I have no wish to die, I promise you. I have …” His voice trailed off into uncertainty. What do I have? A life to live? Work to do? Children to raise, lands to rule, a woman to love?

Home is a time, not a place, and there were so few times that Theon was at home. One of them was here, not so long ago, though it feels like it was. For a brief shining second as the banners caught the breeze, with roaring Umbers and fierce Karstarks, with a powerful army around him, with his brother in all but blood marching to avenge his (their?) father, he knew who he was.

And now, he can’t even remember his name.

How could who I was mean anything if it can be taken away from me like this? I was a Greyjoy among Starks, and then a Stark among Greyjoys; I was Theon and had to become Reek, I am Reek and have to become Theon. Forgive me, he calls through time to the smiling man he used to know, I was not strong enough. But Theon can’t hear Reek and never will.

...and yet.

A light rain had begun to piss down out of the slate-grey sky by the time Lord Ramsay’s camp appeared in front of them. A sentry watched them pass in silence. The air was full of drifting smoke from the cookfires drowning in the rain. A column of riders came wheeling up behind them, led by a lordling with a horsehead on his shield. One of Lord Ryswell’s sons, Reek knew. Roger, or maybe Rickard. He could not tell the two of them apart. “Is this all of them?” the rider asked from atop a chestnut stallion.

“All who weren’t dead, my lord.”

“I thought there would be more. We came at them three times, and three times they threw us back.”

We are Ironborn, he thought, with a sudden flash of pride, and for half a heartbeat he was a prince again, Lord Balon’s son, the blood of Pyke.

We are Ironborn. We are Ironborn. The point isn’t that being Ironborn is, in itself, some great moral progression for Theon. The point is that he just thought of himself as one of them, as Theon, in spite of Ramsay arranging everything that happens in Reek II to convince him that he is not. He has, just for a second, found himself.

This spark grows in strength when Roose Bolton and his army arrives to escort his bastard’s bride home. As I said last time, the identity shell-games extend beyond Theon himself; his arc in ADWD only works as well as it does because it resonates with what’s happening in the plot. The North went south united, but returns divided. Roose doesn’t exactly have “a peaceful land, a quiet people” on his hands, and bringing the hated Freys north will only further provoke Stark loyalists (as we’ll see in later chapters). Moreover, his army had to pass through the Neck, controlled by one of said Stark loyalists, Howland Reed. As such, it’s not safe these days to be Roose Bolton...so he outsourced the job.

Collared and chained and back in rags again, Reek followed with the other dogs at Lord Ramsay’s heels when his lordship strode forth to greet his father. When the rider in the dark armor removed his helm, however, the face beneath was not one that Reek knew. Ramsay’s smile curdled at the sight, and anger flashed across his face. “What is this, some mockery?”

“Just caution,” whispered Roose Bolton, as he emerged from behind the curtains of the enclosed wagon.

This is a terrific way to reintroduce a villain. We haven’t seen Roose since he shed all pretense and revealed himself, a snake with new skin, at the Red Wedding. What could be more fitting than for him to wrong-foot us along with Ramsay upon re-entry? We lean forward to see him, only to hear his soft voice behind us...

Reek pretending to be Theon paved the way for the man pretending to be Roose and the girl pretending to be Arya. It’s a mockery, a mummer’s farce, a hall of mirrors. By weaving the central question of Theon’s story--who am I?--into the characters and plot points surrounding him, GRRM elevates that story. It’s the classic existentialist quest: the eternal hunt of the elusive Real. The question of whether Theon will remember his name fits like a puzzle piece with the question of whether the North will remember its name. And the North remembers.

But Theon, try as he might, is not a Stark...and neither is Ramsay’s bride-to-be.

(image by Elia Fernandez)

Jeyne Poole is not Arya Stark, and everyone knows it. Her presence is a marker of Bolton success: the key to Winterfell, a gift from their Lannister patrons, a declaration that the old has been humbled before and folded into the new. Yet more than anything else, it is the lack of anyone willing to call the Dreadfort men on their fraud that points to their rising fortunes at this moment. This is precisely why Davos’ defiant stand against the Freys in the Merman’s Court (in the chapter immediately prior to this one, worth noting?) hits home so hard. The man who stuck his neck out for the truth will not suffer these noxious lies about what happened to the Northerners who went south, and it’s all the more admirable because he (seemingly) stands alone.

And after a chapter of his identity being used against him, rewarded with a collar for handing his people over to a butcher, telling himself again and again that he is Reek, not Theon but Reek...our POV finally drops the disguise.

The girl was slim, and taller than he remembered, but that was only to be expected. Girls grow fast at that age. Her dress was grey wool bordered with white satin; over it she wore an ermine cloak clasped with a silver wolf’s head. Dark brown hair fell halfway down her back. And her eyes…

That is not Lord Eddard’s daughter.

Arya had her father’s eyes, the grey eyes of the Starks. A girl her age might let her hair grow long, add inches to her height, see her chest fill out, but she could not change the color of her eyes. That’s Sansa’s little friend, the steward’s girl. Jeyne, that was her name. Jeyne Poole.

“Lord Ramsay.” The girl dipped down before him. That was wrong as well. The real Arya Stark would have spat into his face. “I pray that I will make you a good wife and give you strong sons to follow after you.”

“That you will,” promised Ramsay, “and soon.”

It’s only internal. There’s nothing moral about it yet. He’s yet to relate her fortunes to his own. But by allowing Reek to play Theon, Ramsay has unknowingly reintroduced his captive’s pre-captivity identity into his bloodstream like an antivirus, and Jeyne’s arrival crystallizes what this means for our POV. If she’s not Arya, then he’s not Reek.

The past is present. The mud you pack into that hole in the ruined wall won’t keep your ghosts at bay. But (to borrow from Barristan) mud can nourish the seeds from which you will grow, your past the fertilizer for your rebirth.

At the edge of the wolfswood, Bran turned in his basket for one last glimpse of the castle that had been his life. Wisps of smoke still rose into the grey sky, but no more than might have risen from Winterfell's chimneys on a cold autumn afternoon. Soot stains marked some of the arrow loops, and here and there a crack or a missing merlon could be seen in the curtain wall, but it seemed little enough from this distance. Beyond, the tops of the keeps and towers still stood as they had for hundreds of years, and it was hard to tell that the castle had been sacked and burned at all. The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I'm not dead either.

#theon greyjoy #ramsay bolton #a dance with dragons #theon in adwd #asoiaf meta #moat cailin #roose bolton #jeyne poole #a game of thrones

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trinuviel · 6 years

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ALL IS SUBTEXT - A Case for Jon and Sansa (part 5)

This is the fifth installment in my analysis of the romantic subtext in the scenes between Jon and Sansa in seasons 6 and 7 of Game of Thrones (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). I’ve examined the different techniques that the show employs to create this subtext through primarily visual means. This post is is a direct continuation of part 3 and part 4 where I began examining the romantic tropes that inform the scenes between their. Once again I’ve had to break up my analysis because there are so many tropes in play and I am trying to be meticulous in my analysis. So here is yet another very long post.

KNOW YOUR TROPES

The ambiguous romantic subtext in the scenes between Jon and Sansa exists almost entirely on the level of the visual - and that means that we have to pay close attention to non-verbal cues, costume design, image composition and editing.

I have previously mentioned that tropes are excellent tools when it comes to creating subtext because they function as a narrative shorthand. They rely on audience familiarity and genre conventions, which mean that there’s no need to spell things out - and subtext exists at the level of the unspoken.

So without further ado, let’s have a look as some more JonSa scenes where romantic tropes are in play.

Gentle readers, gird your loins - this post is hella long.

Declaration of Protection. This trope occurs when the hero’s motivation is built around protecting another person. This is usually the love interest but it can also pertain to other kinds of relationships (as well as larger entities such as a home or the realm as per Jon’s season 7 arc).

Both seasons 6 and 7 make it clear that Sansa is the hidden reason for many of Jon’s actions. She’s the one that gives him the will to live and fight again. She shakes him out of his depression and disillusionment after he’s been resurrected - and he is determined to protect her at any cost. The night before the Battle of the Bastards, Jon issues a solemn declaration of protection when Sansa states that she’ll never let Ramsay take her alive, hinting that she’ll kill herself if Jon loses the battle.

(GIFs by https://giffferrplanet.wordpress.com/2016/06/23/game-of-thrones-the-night-before-the-battle/)

Sansa’s reaction is heartbreaking. No one has be able to protect her since her father died and her scepticism in the face of Jon’s promise is understandable yet so very sad. However, the thing to notice here is Jon’s sad puppy-dog face when Sansa leaves - now it isn’t just Winterfell that hangs in the balance, Sansa’s very life rests on his shoulders as well.

Battle Couple. This trope pertains to a couple who are partners in combat:

This is the kind of couple where bullets figure prominently in the story of their romance. Where “war buddy” and “significant other” are synonyms. If you harm either one of them, the survivor will kill you as surely as the sun rises. (TVTropes)

Jon and Sansa may not fight side-by-side in the physical sense but Sansa’s presence at the parley with Ramsay (as well as her involvement with raising troops, etc) puts them into the territory of Battle Couple. Furthermore, the visuals repeatedly puts them side-by-side to emphasize them as a team.

The parley with Ramsay offers a number of shots that presents Jon and Sansa as a united front.

In short, they look “beautiful and majestic” together (as the script explicitly states).

Ruling Couple. This trope is generally used in relation to a monarchial setting:

A ruling couple, on the other hand, are equal or near equal partners, and may even be Happily Married. Rather then one ruling and one staying in the palace they jointly rule. The rulers will rely on each other as trusted counselors and they will be The Good King and The High Queen in one. Perhaps they will show this by receiving audiences on two thrones. Perhaps the consort will have a regular seat in the royal council and a vote. Perhaps even the two of them will discuss deep and labyrinthine affairs of state during matrimonial activities.

On many occasions, they will also be a Battle Couple. (TVTropes)

Jon and Sansa may not be a Ruling Couple in the traditional sense (not yet anyway). However, the visuals repeatedly show them sitting side-by-side, looking regal, when they interact with their bannermen.

The shot below is an especially strong visual because it offers a simple yet effective image composition. Jon and Sansa are placed firmly in the centre of the shot, framed by the large hearth that forms a pale background against which and they stand out visually. They are further framed by the black silhouette of the bannermen. This, along with the slow zoom in, serve to highlight them visually in a way that ruling couples often are presented. Once again, Jon and Sansa look beautiful and majestic together.

This shot is not only visually striking but it may very well be narratively significant as a piece of subtle foreshadowing. The kingmaking scene follows the most narratively important reveal in the entire show: the revelation of Jon’s true parentage as the son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen. Immediately after this revelation, Jon is chosen as King in the North based on his status as Ned Stark’s bastard son and he’s thus elected under false pretenses even though he is unaware of his true parentage.

Placing the parentage reveal before the kingmaking is an interesting (and very deliberate) editing choice because it introduces the possibility that Jon’s parentage may become a problem for his kingship in the future. Jon’s true parentage relates to several popular tropes: Really Royalty Reveal, Hidden Back-up Prince, Secret Legacy - or as I like to call it: the Hidden Prince. When a narrative employs this trope, the truth will ALWAYS come out and it is always be of extreme narrative importance. While Jon relinquished his kingship in season 7, his status as a leader in the North may very well be further imperilled when the truth comes out. There’s been written several metas on how a marriage between Jon and Sansa would effectively unite the competing claims to North and unite House Stark firmly under Jon’s leadership, so I won’t go further into this argument here.

Rather, I’d just point out that by placing the parentage reveal right before a scene that invokes a visual iconography of a ruling couple in such a strong image composition, the show simultaneously teases the likelihood of a future conflict as well as its possible solution - in one single image!

When Jon is declared King in the North, despite Sansa having the heriditary claim to Winterfell, he turns to Sansa to gauge her reaction. he wants her to approval before he accepts the kingship - and she smilingly approves without uttering a single word. Yet another instance of them being in accord.

It is a move that is similar to this interaction between King Leonidas of Sparta and his queen Gorgo in 300 (2007) - spouses in accord, there’s no need for words.

Whilst Sansa isn’t Jon’s formal co-ruler, the show continues to seat her next to Jon when he exerts his authority as king. This is especially important since Winterfell’s Great Hall lacks the visual stage-setting of power that characterizes the Red Keep and Dragonstone. Jon’s “throne” is just a regular chair and he is placed on the same level as his subjects - yet he maintains a certain distance by standing behind a separate table at the end of the room, right in front of the visual centre provided by the hearth. The table acts as a physical and visual barrier between him and his bannermen so even though he’s not physically elevated above his vassals, he does inhabit a space that is sectioned off from them (though he quickly moves beyond it). Sansa inhabits this same space, right by his side!

However, Davos also sits next to Jon, at the same side of the table. Here it is important to pay attention to the image composition! As you can see, Davos is seated a bit farther from Jon than Sansa - and this slight separation is visually emphasized by the hearth where the light reflected on the lower mantel creates a visual barrier between Jon and Davos. No such barrier exist between Jon and Sansa - and the slightly skewed perspective also makes them look closer to each other. In short, though three persons are seated side by side, Jon and Sansa are grouped together in a visually distinct manner that evokes the iconography of a Ruling Couple.

Even their costumes support this trope! @jonsalways has penned an amazing costume meta that about Jon and Sansa’s costumes in seasons 6 and 7. She notes that the colours and the overall silhouettes of their costumes match each other, which not only makes them look good together but also serve to underscore them as a team. I’m going to quote her here because she cuts to the heart of the matter in such a succinct manner:

When you look at the items they wear (it) is also wonderful. They both have a cloak, a cape, a dress/shirt, a “metal necklace”, a collar over the necklace and a belt. Every single detail in Jon’s costume has a equivalent on Sansa’s. It’s almost as they wear the female and male version of the same outfit.

When they are side by side, they look beautiful because their costumes match in pieces and their silhouette look just right. It’s comfortable to look at them because they look so similar. It’s almost like you don’t see two characters wearing two different concepts. You see them together as one whole concept. If they could switch their cloaks/capes, the colors would work just fine. And they are the only Starks whose costumes do that. Michele Clapton does it for a reason.

The elements mentioned in the quotes work on the level of the visual sub-conscious, i.e. we simply notice that they look aesthetically pleasing together but it is seldom something that the general audience give much thought to.

However, there are obvious symbolic elements to their costumes that we are most definitely are meant to notice; elements that also work as statements about their characters and their narrative journeys. In the case of Jon and Sansa, the symbolic element is the Stark direwolf, the heraldic sigil of their House - and this element tells the story of two characters travelling towards the same destination in season 6 and on parallel lines in season 7.

In season 6, we see Sansa visually reclaim her identity as a Stark through an act of (literal) self-fashioning: she makes a beautiful dress where the bodice acts as the canvas for the presentation of the Stark direwolf, made with materials that probably are supposed to evoke the natural landscape of the North - such a irregularly cut squares of mother-of-pearl (that made me remember the wonderful mussel shell necklace that Karsi wore in season 5).

Sansa’s homemade dress is a profound act of self-reclamation. She emblazons her chest with the ancestral symbol of her family - almost as an answer to the way the Lannisters put their heraldic stamp on her neck in season 3:

Throughout the season she’s repeatedly insulted as being no Stark - Lord Glover tells her House Stark is dead and Lady Mormont snidely calls her both a Lannister and a Bolton. Sansa answers that she will always be a Stark - and it is written on her body for all to see.

Jon is also wearing a single direwolf on his costume to match Sansa. However, his symbol is much more discrete in form and placement - probably both for reasons practical and symbolic. Sansa is the trueborn Stark after all. Jon’s cloak is a gift from Sansa, she made it herself - and the show actually takes the time to show us this:

We don’t see Sansa make the dress that is so important to her identity - but we get to witness her make a garment for Jon that is invested with a profound emotional, symbolic and political value. When Sansa gifts Jon with a cloak stamped with the Stark direwolf she wordlessly acknowledges and claims him as a Stark for all the world to see - the very thing that always has been Jon’s greatest wish! It is really very beautiful - she’s the one that makes a matching pair out of them (since she probably also made her own Stark fur).

Politically, Jon’s new cloak is also significant - not just because of the Stark sigil but also because it is just like the one Eddard Stark wore! The patriarch whom the North once were sworn to, for whom they went to war! It is a politically savy move because Sansa Stark understands that clothing isn’t just about covering your body, it is also a language.

(the two edits below are by @baelerion)

Season 7 builds on this symbolic aspect of Jon and Sansa’s costumes. Now they both wear a pair of direwolves facing each other. Notice how they wear the Stark sigil on the same part of their bodies in both seasons - on the chest and then at the neck! Once again they match.

The double direwolves are interesting because, unlike season 6, their stories have moved beyond becoming Starks (again). Now their narrative journey is about their partnership and that is signalled by the double direwolves. They have to learn to act in tandem. While they have their differences and instances of miscommunication, season 7 is about them acting as a ruling team, as King in the North and Lady of Winterfell - two titles that originally belonged to just one person. Once again they are being posited as two halves of a whole - the ruling pair of the North, which is formalized when Jon names Sansa his regent before he travels south.

Interestingly enough, Jon and Sansa’s double direwolves have their echoes in two earlier costumes. When Bran acted as Robb’s regent in season 2, he wore a gorget just like Jon’s - and when Robb attended the Red Wedding as KitN he wore a pair of direwolf clasps just like Sansa’s! Now the costumes are reversed, the gorget for the KitN and the clasps for his regent. An interesting detail that very likely is significant, considering Michele Clapton’s symbolic and narrative approach to the costumes of GoT.

Even down to the smallest detail, the costume design presents Jon and Sansa to the audience looking like a ruling couple; a couple that are on parallel narrative journeys. It is also worth noting that it is only Jon and Sansa who wear the Stark sigil in season 7! Neither Arya nor Bran appear to wear the Stark direwolf even after they’ve returned home to Winterfell. Perhaps that is because it is Jon and Sansa who are the leaders of House Stark and the North.

I’m going to return to the issue of image composition in relation to the Ruling Couple trope. When season 6 aired, HBO released this wonderful and very memorable photo. (I’ve reversed it for visual variety)

This beautiful image doesn’t actually match what we see on out TV screens! This is a still photograph, taken by a separate photographer (a unit still photographer). Not only do we not see this exact pose in the episode in question but it is also clear that this image has been through a graphics editor since the bluish tint from the episode has been removed in favour of a stronger visual contrast with the background so Jon and Sansa’s figures capture the eye immediately.

Still photographs like this are created specifically for publicity and marketing. This image became very popular with the media outlets that cover the show - not surprisingly since it is one of the most visually arresting images among the promotional material released to the press. This image became a very popular header picture in several reviews, think pieces and post-season articles, such as this one in TIME where a possible Jonsa marriage is discussed.

I hesitate to name this photo “iconic” because I think it is too early to use that designation. It is, however, an extremely striking image with the clear-cut profiles, the matching costumes and the sharp silhouettes against the light background - there’s no visual “clutter” to distract the eye from the regal couple. Jon and Sansa really stand out against the background and everything from the direction of their gazes to their matching colours and silhouettes tie them together visually as a couple. They look like a king and queen in this image and since it was a popular choice with the media outlets, it is an image that has repeatedly been presented to the people who follow the coverage of the show online. That kind of image repetition can also work to plant the idea of Jon and Sansa as a couple on the subconscious level.

This image is pretty much the incarnation of the line from the script about Jon and Sansa looking “beautiful and majestic”. They look like a King and Queen, there’s no need for crowns here.

No other couple has looked as regal as these two in the entire show!

In contrast, one of the most popular stills of Jon and Dany from season 7 is markedly different. @jonsalways has noted how Jon and Dany’s costumes never truly match, neither in colour nor in silhouette. That also is very apparent in this image. What is even more interesting is the fact that this composition doesn’t convey harmony and togetherness like the regal image above, which makes sense since Jon and Dany isn’t one the same page in this season. Not only do they have conflicting interests and goals, the one is also intent on subjugating the other. In short, they don’t look like a romantic couple.

In terms of body language Jon and Dany are completely out of sync and there’s a distinct lack of communication between them. Whilst Dany is gazing at Jon, her body turned towards him, Jon’s attention is elsewhere. He faces away from her and doesn’t even seem to acknowledge her presence. When compared with the JonSa image above, the background almost feels visually “cluttered”, which also means that it is much less attention-grabbing than the first image. When it comes to drawing visual attention to something, less is generally more.

As said, the regal image of Jon and Sansa doesn’t appear in the show itself. The closest the show matches the promotional image is this double profile shot:

This shot is of particular interest in relation to the Ruling Couple trope because the image composition adhere to a common iconographic schema for portraits of royal couples.

Fx in this coin minted for the 70th wedding anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

Or this design for a stamp featuring Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary of Denmark. These are but a few example from a vast number of offical royal portraits.

Throughout seasons 6 and 7, the show presents the audience with a large number of visuals that depict Jon and Sansa in a manner that is associated with ruling couples.

Interestingly enough, the Stark-centric cover of Entertainment Weekly in 2017 positively screams Northern Royal Family! This is of course a group portrait of a group of siblings (even though Jon is actually their cousin). However, not only is Sansa placed next to Jon (instead of fx between Bran and Arya), the combination of a standing male and a seated female evokes a time-honoured compositional template for official royal portraits. I’ve included a couple of examples for comparison.

Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel of Sweden.

King Frederik IX and Queen Ingrid of Denmark.

Then there’s this lovely portrait of Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary of Denmark.

This is a slightly different variation on the pose but it is also a popular one in royal portraiture. Notice how we also have a very similar image of Jon and Sansa in the last episode of season 6?

It is unclear whether the cinematographer consciously chose to model these shots of Jon and Sansa on popular visual conventions for royal portraiture. It is entirely possible that these similarities are coincidental to a certain degree. By that I mean that when we see a lot of pictures, certain types of composition becomes so familiar to us that we don’t register them consciously. However, I do think that the similarities between the image composition in the shots where Jon and Sansa are placed side-by-side are the result of some conscious choices, especially since directors and cinematographers often turn to art for inspiration (like Dan Sackheim took inspiration from Caravaggio’s art for Jon’s resurrection scene).

To be continued...

(GIFs and edits not mine)

#jon x sansa #jonsa #meta #all is subtext #romantic tropes #costume design #actuallyjonsa

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i-just-like-commenting · 7 years

Text

The Northrop Frye Theory of A Song of Ice and Fire (or, why you can be certain this series won’t have a downer ending)

The affinity between the mythical and the abstractly literary illuminates many aspects of fiction, especially the more popular fiction which is real enough to be plausible in its incidents and yet romantic enough to be a “good story,” which means a clearly designed one. (p 139)

This quote comes from Northrop Frye’s 1957 essay “Archetypal Criticism” in his book Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. An influential Canadian literary critic, Fye is especially known for his work on William Blake. I’d been familiar with his theory of the four mythoi (generalized story patterns) since high school, and while reading A Song of Ice and Fire I became convinced that Martin has to be aware of it as well. Thus I decided to read the entire essay it comes from to test the idea (not an easy task; it’s 110 pages of very dense text), and that conviction has grown to the point that I want to write the man to ask him directly.

Of course, it doesn’t entirely matter if Martin has read Frye’s work, because his mythoi are archetypes. Frye’s theory of archetypes doesn’t necessitate a collective unconscious like Jung’s; rather, he’s talking about the cultural legacy Western society has inherited primarily from Hellenistic and Biblical traditions, the tropes and symbols we all recognize instinctively. It’s part of our cultural unconscious, the background noise we’ve all received since childhood.

There’s a lot in this essay that could be applicable to aSoIaF, such as how wolves and dragons are classic archetypes of evil or at least dangerous and untamed nature, or how literature versus mythology gives you more freedom to subvert archetypal meaning, but I want to focus on his idea of mythos, and how he argues that there are four major mythoi, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, and that they archetypally correspond to the four seasons, spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

You should already be able to guess a little of where this is going.

Spring is comedy, which in its broadest outline is not just a story with a lot of humor, but a story where upstarts - often young or from marginalized categories - take on an absurd obstacle (especially a social convention) and win. Villains tend to be more laughable than hated, and ideally it ends with as many people being redeemed/included as possible.

Summer is romance in the Medieval sense of the term, which is a good vs evil story. The hero has to defeat a great evil (a tyrant, a monster, a witch, etc.) usually through great sacrifice (sometimes even their deaths) but either they or their cause ultimately triumphs in the end. Quest narratives from Greek mythology or Arthuriana fit in here, as would Tolkien, Harry Potter and most comic book superheroes.

Autumn is tragedy, where a hero is doomed by their own choices but also by a sense of inevitability, where fate or a kaleidoscope of forces beyond their control or awareness force their downfall. Heroes fail or become villains themselves. Society winds up in a worse state than it started out at, or innocence is jaded by experience.

Winter is irony, where the purpose is to expose an unjust system without necessarily meaning to defeat it. Much irony uses humor to make the criticism go down easier (pure invective works well in essays but not in fiction) and becomes satire or parody, but there is a measure of anger and contempt here not present in traditional comedy. Humor isn’t required, though, and Frye includes Brave New World, and 1984 in this genre, accurately predicting that dystopia would become a trend.

Now, these mythoi are not completely clear-cut and they tend to bleed together at the edges. If a comedy emphasizes the villains and how ridiculously bad they are, it bleeds into ironic satire. If the villains are downplayed and the focus is on the struggle of the heroes, it becomes more romantic. Likewise a romance can turn tragic when a hero’s own weaknesses are the cause of evil or his difficulty in defeating, and so forth and so on.

I would argue that the seasons in A Song of Ice and Fire, once that can go on for years, for complete stories or complete arcs, correspond fairly well to Frye’s model. Allow me to present some examples:

The Dance of the Dragons explicitly takes place during autumn (harvest season in the North) and is a tragedy of epic scale, with huge amounts of death and devastation across the countryside. Jealousy and ambition - not to mention the sexism of inheritance laws and schemes laid down decades ago - lead to the near-destruction of Westeros. The next king Aegon III grows up in winter and becomes a depressed fatalist who dies young, a parody of the usual boy-king tropes associated with summer.

“The Hedge Knight” is set in late spring, and has the set up to be a spring story, wherein a self-appointed hedge knight and his squire defend a puppeteer from an evil prince. The emphasis on Dunk as a character and the underdevelopment of Aerion, however, should hint that this is already a more romantic comedy. By the end, it has indeed become a summer story, with the deaths in the combat to reach its happy ending. It is still a fairly comedic (that is, innocent and uncynical) romance, enhanced by the awareness of the reader that you are seeing the origin story of a good king and his Lord Commander.

“The Sworn Sword” takes place in full summer and presents as a simple summer story of good Ser Eustace vs the evil Red Widow, who Duncan even imagines like a witch. This is subverted as Duncan realizes his master was a traitor and the witch a victim of circumstance, but rather than lead to true parody (an ironic category) this merely means a reevaluation of what the “sides” in play are - conflict vs peace. Through a battle where Duncan even figuratively dies (near-drowning is often a metaphor for death), peace prevails and while the wedding isn’t his, Duncan still wins the lady’s heart (a common chivalry trope).

“The Mystery Knight” is a little later in the summer, and we even get dragons, metaphorically at least. This is the one that most conventionally follows a summer storyline, since the people wanting to foment another rebellion for no good reasons are clearly the wrong side here - not that all the people on each side are purely “good” or “evil,” just that a rebellion for the reasons they give serves no purpose. What’s more, from an archetypal perspective it’s actually Glendon Flowers takes the role of the hero, not Duncan. He goes through early battles, is betrayed and imprisoned, then rescued so as to defeat Daemon, vindicating himself and dissipating the rebellion. Dunk, Egg, and Brynden Rivers are his supporting characters, as fitting their positions as a rustic knight, a hidden noble, and a wizard.

That Aegon V’s reign starts in winter is sign that, for all his good intentions and successes his reign as a “good king” will ultimately be undone later, to serve only as a foil to the bad rulers we meet later. And oh would I love to know what season Summerhall burned in...

Then there’s the False Spring whose infamous tourney is mentioned so often in the books. Howland Reed gets his dignity restored by a scrappy woman, one of them is the mystery knight who wins the cheers of the common folk, and Lyanna gets a token from a prince. Total set up for a comedy, right? But of course this isn’t; it’s a false spring, immediately followed by winter resuming, so we really just saw autumn, as Rhaegar’s choices regarding Lyanna precipitates a series of disasters that ruin him, her, and the nation.

Now, what about the main story itself? Well, we start in late summer in A Game of Thrones, and the first novel does indeed resemble a tragic romance, as Ned dies as the victim of intrigues he had no way of knowing about, but his cause is ultimately taken up by his son and by Stannis. More importantly, we have another hero much more obviously go through a struggle-death-rebirth arc at the end in the form of Daenerys and her passing through the flames to become the Mother of Dragons.

Ned’s death, however, is “the sword that slays the season,” and autumn follows in A Clash of Kings and it continues until the end of A Dance with Dragons. I don’t think I will be controversial in saying that the tragic is the main tone of the series, as even heroes with the best intentions fail, and as many of the villains themselves are revealed to be tragic figures warped by their pasts or their cultures. If I were to go through every point of tragic archetype that winds up in this series, this post would be even longer than it already is. Suffice it to say that Littlefinger is an archetypal tragic antagonist (p 216) and Frye’s six descending stages of tragic hero - from innocent child to antivillain - has some obvious parallels to the ordering of tragic moments - from Bran’s fall to Cersei’s walk of shame. One of my favorite quotes of this essay should resonate with any fan of the series:

Of course we have a natural dislike of seeing pleasant situations turn out disastrously, but if a poet is working on a solid structural basis, our natural likes and dislikes have nothing to do with the matter. (p 215)

Ultimately even disaster and misery can be entertaining if well-written.

As for winter, it should also be noted that for all extents and purposes it is winter in the North for all of books 4 and 5, and the triumph of the Boltons, their farce with “Arya,” and our only potential hero being Theon of all people stinks of irony. Snowfall begins in the Riverlands just after Jaime takes Riverrun, a sign not just of looming famine but that whatever hopes Jaime had for undoing the damage his father did will ultimately be in vain. And of course the chaos that Varys’ assassination of Kevan will bring to King’s Landing is also pure winter material, and comes precisely as winter arrives.

But what will the series be overall? Certainly various character arcs or storylines have different tones, but can I predict what the entirety of A Song of Ice and Fire will be? Yes: it will be a romance.

Why can I be so sure? Frye subdivides the romance into four parts: the agon, a hero’s initial challenges and setup, the pathos, where the hero faces off against their enemy and often loses, the sparagmos, after the hero’s defeat when all hope seems lost, and the anagnorisis, either the literal rebirth or the postmortem recognition of the hero as others finish what they started. Thus Frye concludes:

The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth. Agon or conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of marvellous adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in triumph or in defeat, is the archetypal theme of tragedy. Sparagmos, or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized, or doomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire. Anagnorisis, or recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy. (p 192)

In spite of all its tragedy, in spite of all its subversiveness, this is still ultimately a romance, a hero story, good triumphing not evil. I mean, the evil is literally represented by winter, the classic mythical enemy of a romance (p 187), and the heroes aided by spirits of nature, who “represent partly the moral neutrality of the intermediate world of nature and partly a world of mystery which is glimpsed but never seen, and which retreats when approached.” (p 196)

The difference is that of mode (here you have to go back to the first essay in the book, p 33-34). Traditionally romance has been written in what Frye would call “mythic” or “romantic” mode, where the heroes are either flat-out divine (as in Greek myth or the figure of Jesus) or human but endowed with marvelous powers (as in most fairy tales or Biblical legends). Sometimes it is written in “high mimetic” form, where the hero no longer has superhuman power but is still larger-than-life in their abilities. It is almost never written in "low mimetic” that emphasizes the ordinariness of its protagonists, how they are just like us, or in full ironic mode where the “hero” is someone we’re meant to scorn or pity.

Tolkien wrote somewhere between high mimetic and romantic (though his Silmarillion is mythic) which is what we’re used to in fantasy novels. Martin’s innovation is starting us in low mimetic or even ironic and gradually pushing us up into the realms of the supernatural. That’s why it’s harder to recognize the romantic element of A Song of Ice and Fire than in The Lord of the Rings. It feels like it should be irony, a deconstruction, but it is in fact Martin’s attempt at a more realistic (in the sense of believable human characters) reconstruction of the oldest, most archetypal fantasy tropes.

And so of course it will end in spring - or at least, with a dream of spring, the hope that out of this awful mess a better society can be built in the ashes of the old. THe Republic of Westeros...? Maybe that’s asking too much. I’ll settle on Sansa Stark, First of Her Name.

#a song of ice and fire #asoiaf meta #northrop frye #archetypal criticism #theories

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