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chansondesalleurs · 7 years

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Picking up a tag from @natsumi82 and @theon-greyjoy-has-a-good-day who gave some A+ answers in their turn, and are super-fun and loving all-round. I only want to apologize for what I deem an awful lot of toing-and-froing in between trying to make sense of my own inclinations and individual preferences – it really was a case of a surprise host of half-formed ideas collapsing in on themselves before they could get past that early developmental stage – and scouring my mind for outcomes to go with a piece that is easy to assemble and assumes a larger perspective than even a cursory reading of the characters involved would have me adopt.

I am crazy attached to some of these folks, and I wanted to be able to think things through to ensure that the underlying aspects and idiosyncrasies attained their most vivid expression and slotted right into place in my head.

Basically my answers for the ubiquitous A Song of Ice and Fire ensemble – guessing you can pick any fandom, though?

Rules: Answer the questions and then tag seven people.

• First character I fell in love with: Daenerys – like many others, be it part of GRRM's earliest fanbase or stumbling into fresh territory through an episode or ten of the famed television series, royal exile Daenerys and her entourage were my introduction to some of the author's most varied, diverse even, work to this day. I remember being handed a copy of the first volume in the series to look over at my leisure, and whether a closer squint was enough to hold my attention, when my folio fell open in the middle of a pretty engrossing Dany chapter. I am not a hugely sentimental person when it comes to fictional characters, and I rarely, if ever, loosen up enough to allow myself the occasional sniffle, all the same I kept rooting for Dany to bail the crap out as she gamely went through the rigmarole of pitiable deprivation and a dearth of general levity, with no real sense of belonging and the looming absence of lasting familial comforts to prospectively sketch her demands of the world and help ease her way through life.

Dany's overreaching arc is essentially about being displaced. It's not that she accepts her marriage to Drogo (she doesn't) any more than she wishes for the cruelty visited on her by Viserys to continue – including, apparently, a measure of sexual cruelty – or the material eschewal of what property they may yet stand to salvage to endure, barely more than a girl herself, if ironically old enough to see through her brother's illusions of grandeur, and just as conscious of his manifest shortcomings. We talk a lot about the moral and social dilemmas that face Daenerys on the heels of her outlandish fire and blood, birth-of-the-dragon one-off, which likewise marks the high point and execution of a narrative crescendo laden with symbolism in the structuring of ASoIaF's three-act fantasy plot. A similar consideration is whether a uniform, non-peddling approach to competing claims of distinction and the gamut they seem to run from “Dany is a petulant child monarch with questionable ethics and twice the gall that renders one a liability more than an asset” to “Dany is Mary Sue-material, and I'm an owl” is tenable. I'd be lying if I said that the love I have for the Mary Sue type myself is circumstantial and a little tongue-in-cheek, quite the opposite. Besides, I like to think of owls as choice company which, as is the way with all things impossible, rocks way harder than I do.

Most of the time, the thematic conflict here is enough to compact all the absurdities of the political and the personal, as action and re-action both are being attributed to Dany to lay out a dawdling path for the major events at work. In such a context, even her route around Slaver's Bay is clearly, if concisely, mapped out as she travels from Illyrio's vast Pentoshi mansion out to the plains of the Dothraki sea at the heart of the Essossi continent, and eastward by the sea. As the book opens, it becomes evident that her function is to serve as a stepping stone for her brother's vengeance, who is later revealed to be a pawn in an ongoing game of political ambition and secrets, and (let's face it) probably severely traumatized due to circumstances as a young fugitive on the run. In time, the covey of strands merge to form one long, drawn-out account. Although new cracks appear in the wall as Dany stumbles and falls in her pursuit of an autonomous existence, which the text insists is all the present concern, she nevertheless looks poised to rise above her predicament as a child bride and dweller in foreign lands, and much like the narrative imperatives of suspense and intensity dictate, lead her people to greener pastures to perform the sort of zippy junk the priests foretell.

I interpret Dany's single most prolific desire as this i n t e n s e yearning for a place to call home, which is not so much a conversion as a double-natured energy at the edge of her inner vision, and thus difficult to quantify. Initially, Dany is projected to vary her brother's concentration circa-Game on the massive landmass across the Narrow Sea, theirs by right, notwithstanding that a certain idle desire of their former abode (“a house with a red door” outside Braavos) does still remain with her, tinting her expectations about Westeros. Now I've only ever heard the term “identity” used about this series of books, but my understanding of it is that it compresses all the debates within itself, rather than set them in awkward juxtaposition. I feel like the whole of A Song of Ice and Fire is predicated off of a descriptive relationship between belief and prejudice, intended and unintended consequences, the semiotics of power and intent, interacting motivations and an expunging of the self, which, at times, might threaten individual subjectivity and its foray into the surrounding hinterland of public conviction with a kind of falseness.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, the difficulty of matching one's core self-definition and aspirations is highlighted by the contrasting responses of the world. The question of how to truly know another hangs over GRRM's characters as they attempt to recommend themselves to their social and cultural milieu, and with respect to Dany, who seems to be motivated by some sort of reduction of suffering for the most people possible, it is none the less striking. Rather than allowing her experiences to enfranchise her from any duty toward her immediate circle, the personal happiness secured by Dany is presented as not just a matter of carving out a niche for herself, but of drawing in the communality of her charges, on the alert for future trouble, and on an unprecedented scale. As she sets out without a settled home, her brief stint in Yunkai, Astapor and Meereen becomes the acme of transient living. In the midst of backchanneling to a rigorously-ordered hierarchy, smashing the entire economic structure of Slaver's Bay in one fell swoop, and from no model but the vision of her meditations, runs an unstaunchable river of need, so that Daenerys must long either to return to the dwelling-place of her brother's manic summoning, or to substitute the distance in between with her own philosophy in life. Her oft-repeated mantra of 'I am the blood of the dragon' and 'If I look back, I am lost' is almost a prayer with Dany, not ominous in hindsight, yet furtively reminding us that security is beyond certain. In any case, it is some combination of her identity as a dragon and last surviving daughter of House Targaryen that steels her resolve, and ultimately saves Daenerys from beyond the pale of actual matrimony when Viserys (or rather, Illyrio) and Drogo come to an arrangement between them.

Two kinship plots contrast and tangle from this point onwards: her relationship to motherhood, and that of Daenerys as a dragon. In the beginning, Daenerys is unwilling to expose herself to the visitations of dragons – a direct parallel to Bran's encounter with the three-eyed crow and his uninhibited arsenal of wolf dreams – as they regularly conflate with thought-trains of Viserys, and all that may be bestial or ungovernable in human behaviour. With the passing of Viserys, Dany literally becomes the dragon, and in giving life to a triple-clutch of fossilized dragon eggs, she becomes a mother, too. Thus begins Dany's quest to re-make herself as her own patchwork mishmash of ideals and circumspect values, and because the only realistic source from which to take her opinions is, and always has been, Viserys, she must expend thrice the effort necessary to incorporate the originals available into a larger schema, one that she can be reasonably proud of.

During her time in Meereen, Daenerys is placed in a peculiarly tender relation to her Targaryen heritage and its vocabulary as the only other inhabitant of her commonwealth, which is a solitary island more than a permanent country seat. Soon she feels compelled to put away her dragons, keeping them under lock and key, and that decision, in turn, proves a threat to her usual blithe equanimity and conception of selfhood. At a stroke, the dragon motif and its invocation within Dany's inner orbit achieve yet greater intensity in this double deuce of names as talismans, as diminutive item forms full of meaning that is impartial and genuine and unique to the individual. ('Remember who you are', per Quaithe's words.) Daenerys later formulates this in an almost therapeutic burst of feeling imbued with a past beneath consciousness, now finally 'in play', and if there is a failure of tact in her haste to relieve herself of the traditional tokar before she takes off on Drogon, she is all the better for it.

By the end of Dance, Daenerys is shown at her most self-conscious: smarting under an increasing series of moral concessions, buried beneath the rehearsal of fixed impressions, a meagre ghost of all that has gone before in the confines of her formal position. All she can do to recover any sense of equilibrium is to gaze with clear eyes on past mistakes and admit, at last, to the full scope of her decisions against the political landscape of Meereen, much as her actions are curtailed, and she is relegated to interpreter between all the various household commonwealths, and an observer in each. In Daznak's Pit, her psychic drama is addressed when she finally breaks through the barriers raised by her intelligence of her own mixed motives, and in this switch from a state of stasis to acceptance, she is released from last lingering pretensions and reunited with one of her children. For one, Dany is left to contend with the discovery that she has been seeing in glimpses, or through distorted lenses, for she must indeed 'go back to go forward', and it is a monumental experience that frightens her, because she cannot pinpoint the apparition of Drogon and what it portends. The reader can share in the sumptuous relief, communicated for the most part through an imitation of intimacy as Dany acts to reconnect with Drogon, swooping in to bodily snatch her from her path of ruling malaise, and to rediscover a part of her as well.

So, it is definitely some sense of character emerging from the gloomiest surroundings that resonates with me, not the sort of button-pushing, id-pandering thrill of being given a magical boon of recognition and going around dispensing justice as if all it takes is a pinch of salt (and glittery effervescent Faerie Dust), but the author's express engagement with such an ambivalent setting, politically and ethically, and hence perhaps his reluctance to let the character off the hook easily enough, or without the compensatory gravitas of charting Dany's journey after she acquires her dragons, and its implications for the text. Like, Dany is 14 when she performs what has been, on numerous occasions, described as a miracle. Even if we assume that she has the chutzpah to get by well enough and survive by the heft of her own clever bootstraps, the fact that her retinue now consists of quite a few people and a triptych of hatchlings cannot be ignored. Obviously humanity doesn't work like that, but let's put this argument aside for the sake of the books being pure, unbridled fantasy. Dany is forced, early in Clash, to navigate the Red Waste unprepared, and riven by a shortage of supplies. Are we meant to believe that a teenager who has already suffered an assassination attempt on her person, and whose grasp on politics can be defined as rudimentary at best, would not be casually roped into a situation where the more leisured would seek to placate her for their benefit, if not write her off as a nuisance in light of her most recent investiture?

Daenerys is unique among GRRM's cast of compelling characters in one respect at least: her own network of connections and other affiliations is, unlike the rest of the action, located in Essos. She is also, iirc, the first character to accomplish so much about a fraction of the way in. If the trajectory of Dany's character arc convinces, it is because it gives the reader direct representation through Dany's inner-POV, and so largely escapes bathos before rebuking the audience with this Celtic knot of complicated interactions and endless politicking, which the author has spent way too much time building up to tear it, in a matter of pages, down. It is interesting to me that the exploration of the different shades of right and wrong, withdrawal and passion, has clear advantages to a fabulist in search of the perfect sequence to take Daenerys out of Essos and drop her in the middle of Westeros, when the alternative is easier to accommodate and far, far more appealing. I'm not the biggest GRRM fan, and if we're talking aspects of the main plot, there's a lot to pick apart, but I have rambled since whenever, and I need to get this into shape. I'm just saying that I consider this Meereenese thing one of his best/worst experiments with fictional spaces, and though mileage on how successful this has been may well vary, following Dany as she proceeds to shed her brittle exoskeleton and cross an invisible boundary upwards to become her own person is a seminal experience, 10/10 would rec, especially since the result of this ecdysis is a character refusing to be daunted into submission, refreshingly uncowed by the immensity of her cutting designs, and much as this word has grown obsolete, c o m p l i c a t e d. Then again, what isn't?

(Brevity and I have now gone our seperate ways. Imagine if I tackled fandom religiously and with gusto. This could be a joke for the ages.)

• A character I never expected to love as much as I do now: Stannis – so. here. First off, I love Stannis. Took me a while to warm up to him, but it was bound to happen.

I figure I'm just going to be earnest here as I admit to a queer sort of fascination with Stannis Baratheon, whom I found so irritably dour in Clash, and then in over his head, and then kind of arrogant, and then FINALLY about when he went north and everything that happened there and blah blah blah, I grew to love with a passion. Plus, I really ship him with both Jon AND Davos now, but what even is a Stannis without his Onion Knight, you might ask. Besides, his interactions with Jon throughout Dance are like, the highlight of the book for me, so very clever and typical of both characters.

Stannis is devisive internally; my headspace splits and goes in all sorts of different directions and it’s consequently really difficult to gather my feelings into a cohesive opinion. I think he’s a fascinating character, partially because he does inspire such confusion. Stannis is charmless, inflexible, stubborn, confoundedly upright, and has persistence past the point of common sense. He has no charisma, and his insistence on kingship seems to me to stem not so much from ambition as from some misguided attempt to reinstate himself as the rightful ruler of Westeros, born of duty and a sense of obligation. This is an unpopular opinion to fess up to, but I'm not one to hold any degree of coldness or callous behaviour against Stannis, at least not to the exclusion of any real depth of feeling. However, it's the sort of feeling that motivates those who have known immeasurable grief and despair, who have been loved and forgotten, and above all, denied everything they've ever deserved that defines Stannis more than anything else.

Even as a person rather than a name/title, Stannis is flawed, if not outright tragic. He's a character full of diametric contradictions, which is why I could talk about Stannis till the cows come home and still never quite get to the core of who he is. Part of this, I suspect, is because GRRM is not all that inclined to allow his readers to peer into Stannis's head, and so Stannis becomes accessible to us solely through the POV of his advisors on one end, and Jon on the other. It is my contention that Stannis tries to do good, even as he fails. The king/man duality with Stannis does not negate the tensions between the contradictions, but even so it will probably be his undoing.

While we're at it, I will also say that I come to Catelyn Stark from a slightly different angle (albeit with similar results.) Catelyn is probably my favourite character in the entire AsoIaF!verse, bar none, as well as someone I identify with on a deep, personal level. Just to paint you a little visual, when expressing love for Catelyn among a group of my rl friends, I was told that the character isn't necessarily the most fun to read, that they were systematically put off by how dreary and maudlin she can get, and I understand that. For one thing, Cat's chapters are like getting dragged through the grief of a woman who is living out the destruction of her house's words (“family duty honour.”) GRRM's portrayal of Catelyn is that of a typically feminine character who embodies a classical role of historic femininity (motherhood), and who refuses to be rendered as a passive agent. I can only think of one or two other characters with ties to motherhood like those assured in the figure of Catelyn Stark – the entire Dany narrative provides a rich seam in that regard. But while Catelyn refuses to be objectified or designated to a footnote, even written on a course to become a voice for conciliation, it is in death that the pressures threatening to suffocate her in life are relinquished. The point here is not a channeling of un!Cat's involvement in an ongoing crisis through the accents of renewed importance, but rather becoming in death the incarnation of impulses her living counterpart would struggle against. As such Cat's tragic narrative progression, in which she is sadly unmade in terms of her principles and begins to unravel mentally as a result, is thematically beautiful and so very poignant.

(Btw, I realise that I'm biased in favour of both Cat and Stannis, if for no other reason than show-wise, Michelle Fairley and Stephen Dillane are two of my absolute favourite actors, so this a lot like tying up all that's ever mattered to me in a nice little bow and everything.)

• A character that everyone else loves that I don’t: [/confession time] i was about to say Jon Snow, which FRANKLY is a bit of a ridiculous statement considering how much I stan the guy. Ugh, Jon, my apologies; I am a mess. ALSO! because I went into some detail with Dany, I figure I might just have to whip out my devious card of deviousness and dodge the question a teeny bit by talking about what attracts me to Jon as a character. Saying that I'm only tangentially interested in Jon's arc is nothing short of an understatement; mostly, there's enough fandom people who talk about Jon more and better than I ever could, sorry!

Since I have very little defence against this double-whammy of understanding of character and Jon's motivations, to my notions, the range of feelings provoked by his inner-POV has imo more to do with Jon learning that he's not the centre of the universe – not because Jon himself seems to think that, but because it's what makes him more than a troperiffic prophesied saviour of mankind within the heroic paradigm that he inhabits. Of course, that may change, what with Aemon's stanza of “kill the boy and let the man be born”, and the mystery (?) of his parentage coming out to test, as I suspect, Jon's deep-seated convictions. I strongly believe that Jon is the key to the restoration of balance/fighting off the White Walkers thing (along with Tyrion and Dany) and the only secret Targ that is needed. In simpler terminology, everything from Jon's tentative introduction to his arrival at Castle Black to the ranging beyond the Wall to his coming-of-age narrative with Ygritte and the wildlings leading up to his et tu-Brute moment at the end of Dance has been expertly crafted so far, and explored with the lightest touch. Good stuff.

• A character I love that everyone else hates: Aeron Greyjoy – the “Damphair” is on the little support ship I tug along beside me dubbed the U.S.S Kraken Force Extaordinaire. I love Asha, and I love Theon. I just really love the Greyjoys, and Aeron's Kingsmoot chapters in Feast are fascinating to me.

• A character that I used to love but don’t any longer: not being coy here at all, but honestly, I can't think of any. At the most, I guess I wasn't all too keen to take up Bran and Arya's stories again in Dance, which BUGS, because bb Starklings!! But no, that's about it.

• A character I would kiss: natsumi82 speaks to my soul; Jaime and Theon are like obvious choices here.

• A character I would slap: um, Gregor. Worst plan ever, I know. /whelp

• A character I’d want to be like: Brienne! Who is not just a hell of a fighter (!!!) but also has the ability to remain kind in a world that seems bent on pitting her ideals against the harsh realities of her setting. Brienne is my lodestar, and my second favourite character within ASoIaF, one that I've written about and will continue to write about. For my part, I'm still hanging on the edge of my seat, hoping against hope that GRRM delves deeper into her relationship with Jaime, and in that way we as readers will be able to examine how their characters have changed, and the comparison of that will be sizzling.

• A character that makes me laugh: all three Lannister siblings are hilarious to me!

• A character that I miss: Ned (also, if you didn't know how I felt about this character, now you do.)

• A pairing that I love: Jaime/Brienne (see above), Theon/Robb. Further yet down the ladder are SanSan, and Ned/Cat.

• A pairing that I don’t like: While I'm only really at the omnishipper point for fandom as a whole, at this point I have het ships, slash ships, crack ships, OT3 ships, poly ships, doomed ships (you don't want to know), and just about anything else you could name, I can’t think of any off the top of my head that I’m just immediately like GET IT AWAY FROM ME AND KILL IT WITH FIRE. With that in mind, I might have to make an exception for Petyr x Sansa.

Here are some people I tag: @irhinoceri @drafee @valorfaerie @blackbetha @gwendoline @earningbournvilles @bibliophilic-cat

#text post #about me #thank you for tagging me <3 #tumblr meme #a song of ice and fire #abuse cw #heed the warnings #though ultimately #whatever this is #it isn't any more graphic than asoiaf #verbosity for ts #wow okay stopping now this novel thing is obscene #i never said i was a rational human #shipping for ts #long post

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