asongoftinandfoil

[asongoftinandfoil]

𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐓 𝐒𝐌𝐈𝐓𝐇 as 𝐃𝐀𝐄𝐌𝐎𝐍 𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐀𝐑𝐘𝐄𝐍

House of the Dragon. Season 1, Episode 4.

Daemon's grey-black and red jerkin clothes.

[asongoftinandfoil]

asoiaf universe is so much tamer and softer than real life if you think about it. realistically, every noble house should have a ramsay or two due to the way they view smallfolk, and there should be a lot of rape happening in the nights watch, which is an all-male prison basically.

i disagree that asoiaf is "unrealistic" in the "opposite" way of the common and inaccurate "grimdark" critique from people who have allowed their memories of the show to completely overwrite their memories of the books. BUT, i also think "realism" is simply not the point of the series? it's not something that i see grrm trying to acheive and it's very strange to me how often it's brought up. westeros is not medeival england, no matter how deeply george draws from historical references for his inspiration. every castle is so big it genuinely boggles my mind when i read about it. every helm has 3ft of ornamentation. seasons last years and years before cycling, and their rates of change are unpredictable. there are ice zombies and fire wights and dragons and unicorns. i just don't see "realism" as a goal grrm has in mind. westeros is its own world, influenced by but separate from our own.

i could agree with you about wanting more sexual violence and predation in the night's watch but i don't think this is a weakness in the text nor a realism issue. i would just like to see jon snow passed around like a ragdoll. but i can tell you from a plot standpoint this doesn't happen because:

1) sending your chosen one protagonist to prison to get gang raped isn't going to tell the same story as sending your chosen one protagonist to be an indentured forest ranger at glacier bay national park

2) the night's watch has been reduced to an all-male prison but the original intention of the order was not as a gulag, but rather an honorable order sworn to protect the realm

3) george only thinks male gangrape is sexy when it happens to theon so that's who it happens to because i stay winning

and to your final point the thing is that every greathouse DOES have a ramsay!!!

rams is my special little boy but he is actually not noteable or unique in westeros, neither for his brutality nor for the protection offered him by his social status as a man, a legitimized bastard, and just a physically big dude (even if you don't subscribe to my leatherface faceclaim he was a miller before he got daddy's black card and spent his days doing hard physical labor, then was trained (poorly and informally) to weild a greatsword with full plate. he is physically strong and imposing in canon whether he looks like bubba sawyer to you or not).

roose's objection to ramsay's behavior is not that it's sick and cruel. his objection is that it's gauche and unsubtle.

is ramsay's kidnapping lady hornwood and marrying her at swordpoint meaningfully different than sansa being married off to tyrion while she's being kept as a prisoner of war? different than sixteen year old walda frey being sold to roose bolton in exchange for her weight in silver and a solidified political alliance? is it different than cersei being given to robert as a politically advantageous replacement for lyanna? is it different than rhaegar locking lyanna in a tower for the final months of her pregnancy? (ok the answer to the last question is yes it is different because the big plot twist wrt r+l=j is that rhaegar and lyanna were for real in love but he did ultimately betray her in the end by choosing the prophecy over her. but let's not get too off course!) is it different than lollys being sold off to bronn after the battle of the blackwater which grants him castle stokeworth in the crownlands for the low low price of the fat, traumatized, plain faced, pregnant, gang-raped "halfwit" daughter he need take to wife?

is ramsay locking jeyne naked in her bed chamber and raping her with his hunting dogs different from gregor clegane orchestrating the gang rape of a 13 year old innkeeper's daughter in front of her father? or tywin orchestrating tysha's gang rape and his proxy rape of tyrion? or roose seeing a random comely young miller's wife by a river and raping her under the still-warm corpse of her husband?

is anything rams does to his three brides meaningfully different from anything any lord in westeros does to his? sixty year old jon arryn accepting hoster tully's offer of his "ruined" second daughter and impregnating her like ten times before they finally had sweetrobin? gregor clegane's three unnamed dead wives? maegor's black brides? thirteen year old dany being sold by her brother to khal drogo in exchange for an army?

ramsay will forever be the worst thing that ever happened to donella, theon, jeyne, and the dozens of anonymous northern girls he raped and skinned with reek in the forests surrounding the dreadfort. to anyone and everyone else he is barely a political blip on the sprawling realm cleaving backdrop of the war of five kings. he is unique to house bolton only in the manner and presentation of his brutality. and even that isn't truly unique to him!! i would say that annointed westerlands knight gregor clegane is not any more or less refined and noble mannered than rams, and the things he does to women, children, and smallfolk are just as horrifying as rams' house of 1,000 corpses hobby. disgraced maester qyburn and his herbert west/dr. satan schtick is another great example, actually, of a very open secret being protected by wealthy, powerful nobility.

ramsay, like craster, serves not to show the unique and unprecedented cruelty of one character, but to expose the general casual normalized cruelty of westeros as a whole.

[asongoftinandfoil]

catelyn competing with a woman who never actually existed to maintain her status as lady of winterfell vs cersei competing with a younger and more beautiful queen, who is everyone and no one, to maintain her status as queen.

catelyn and cersei knowing that their power as highborn women is wholly dependent on their fathers and husbands and sons. sinking their teeth in and refusing to let go. never forgetting how easily they can be replaced. forever haunted by a woman lurking in the shadows (she’s not real) (she’s everywhere).

[asongoftinandfoil]

but if you REALLY think about it, all the lannisters are inherently incestuous in their family dynamics...

[asongoftinandfoil]

“catelyn’s mistreatment of jon is wildly exaggerated within the fandom” and “jon’s childhood trauma is heavily based in catelyn’s resentment towards him” and “catelyn and jon are both victims of a dysfunctional family dynamic” are statements that can all coexist btw

[asongoftinandfoil]

The question about why the Starks don’t just genocide the Boltons is one I see a lot (esp on the Reddit; see also Ironborn genocide enthusiasts) and it just fascinates me because how can you miss the point so bad. Like killing every member of a family and going scorched earth is bad no matter what and innocents will always be caught in the crossfire

I cannot understand people who read the books and came away with the opinion that it’s not that mass murder is bad, it’s just that it was the evil houses doing it! if the niceys good guy wholesome Starkarinos killed all the Boltons/Freys/Ironborn it’s totally fine and morally good

yeah it does really shock me (perhaps it shouldn't!!) how often people's response to any story is "but why didn't the hero just SLAUGHTER them all? why wouldn't the hero solve this problem by just KILLING ALL OF THEM?"

like, well... not only would this cause more problems. down the line. but... is this how you would expect a hero to act?

the pre-ned starks were not paragons of gentle virtue but they also weren't genocidal maniacs. if you think that makes them weak or stupid then... ok!! you would not have held the north for eight thousand years, then!! if it had been you making these decisions then the boltons probably would've taken over pretty quickly after rallying mass support from the rest of the north to overthrow their brutal dictators. and then the boltons themselves would've been brutal dictators and we would've had kind of a broil of power struggle for a while (i imagine) until aegon swept in and conquered the dozen or so independent kindgoms that made up the north of westeros. no time to build a wall btw since we're all busy scratching each other's eyes out as quickly as we can, so good luck mister and missus and missus conqueror there are ICE ZOMBIES RUNNING AMOK.

but like in this specific story i find it so much more shocking because like... we don't have to talk about my fav textual parallel we can expand our horizons it doesn't have to be about roose and tywin. let's look at robert.

notice how ned was the one to stay his hand every time he championed mass slaughter? notice how we are shown that the ugliest side of robert is that he is big, strong, and can easily overpower most people, which he uses to get whatever he wants whenever he wants it? not a very kingly feature. and the robert we meet in canon and hear about in flashbacks was being tempered by his advisors and councilors and boyfriend!! he could've been even worse!!!

we can use an even simpler example. when jon first comes to the wall he is a sullen, grieving 14 year old trust fund kid who beats the living dogshit out of the poor underfed boys he's put up against in the yard. he learns that this is no way to make friends. this will win him no allies. this does not make him a great fighter who is proving his strength it makes him a privileged asshole who no one can stand to be around. when he reaches out in friendship and understanding to the boys around him, he makes lifelong friends. he begins to belong. he earns their trust and their loyalty. these are not feelings he could have inspired in pyp and grenn and sam if he had stayed a spoiled 14 year old trust fund baby who was beating the living dogshit out of them.

this is a lesson that 14 year old jon snow learned quite quickly when it was spelled out for him by his mentor. this is a lesson reddit did not learn alongside him, even though they should have since they were there when it happened. supposedly.

[asongoftinandfoil]

Behold! All the families related to the Targs.

I decided to list out the entire Targ family tree to see how much of the rest of Westeros is connected to them by marriage. (Until the last 50 years or so, not much!)

Here is the result.

From Aenar Targaryen to baby Aegon. Several Houses are listed with only one or two members, even if we know of many more. I decided to only include relationships that we know for sure, rather than guessing. (So even though House Glover is on my list thanks to two marriages to the Starks, I didn't include the "modern" Glovers like Galbert or Robbett, as we don't know their relation to these Glover Starks.)

I wasn't able to get the Ironborn featured anywhere. They really are that insular. (At least until Euron/Cersei becomes canon.)

[asongoftinandfoil]

Lmao guess who forgot that Tyrion married Sansa????? Yeah that connection was way simpler than I initially thought.

The Lannisters are out here marrying into just about every major house. Baratheon, Tyrell, Stark, Frey. They are the real heart of this family tree project--the Targs are just an incestuous tumbleweed hanging off to the side.

On a whim I decided I would write out the Targ family tree to see how many other family trees would intersect through marriage. Like, as soon as someone marries into the royal line, I can start plotting out their house as well.

But there's so much incest. SO MUCH. That I was beginning to think I would only have a dozen houses in the end. Massey, Velaryon, Baratheon, Arryn, Penrose, Dayne, Dondarrion, Blackwood, Bracken, Corbray, Hightower, Plumm, Caron, Manwoody, Martell. (And if you believe that Jeyne Lothston is the daughter of Aegon IV, let's add Lothston and Stokeworth to the mix.)

For almost 300 years of history, that's not very many families.

It's only as I reach the "modern" royals that I realized I have a link to the Starks. (We don't know how Alysanne Blackwood is related to Melissa Blackwood, so I can't use that connection.) Baratheon -> Lannister -> Frey -> Tully -> Stark. We also get to add the Florents, Tyrells, Arryns, and basically all the major families in the Reach.

It really paints a picture of how insular the Targs were and how big of a deal it was to have so many great houses intermarry.

[asongoftinandfoil]

On a whim I decided I would write out the Targ family tree to see how many other family trees would intersect through marriage. Like, as soon as someone marries into the royal line, I can start plotting out their house as well.

But there's so much incest. SO MUCH. That I was beginning to think I would only have a dozen houses in the end. Massey, Velaryon, Baratheon, Arryn, Penrose, Dayne, Dondarrion, Blackwood, Bracken, Corbray, Hightower, Plumm, Caron, Manwoody, Martell. (And if you believe that Jeyne Lothston is the daughter of Aegon IV, let's add Lothston and Stokeworth to the mix.)

For almost 300 years of history, that's not very many families.

It's only as I reach the "modern" royals that I realized I have a link to the Starks. (We don't know how Alysanne Blackwood is related to Melissa Blackwood, so I can't use that connection.) Baratheon -> Lannister -> Frey -> Tully -> Stark. We also get to add the Florents, Tyrells, Arryns, and basically all the major families in the Reach.

It really paints a picture of how insular the Targs were and how big of a deal it was to have so many great houses intermarry.

[asongoftinandfoil]

“Ned had named that murder; Robert called it war.” (agot 93)

“In war you kill your enemies. Didn’t your father teach you that, boy?” (asos 227)

the IRONY of lord karstark referencing ned to justify the murder of “enemy” children during wartime—not knowing that ned and robert had the same fight over the targaryen children. both ned and robb stand over the bodies of these dead “enemy” children and name it murder, even though the killers are their own allies.

“When he had protested that the young prince and princess were no more than babes, his new-made king had replied, ‘I see no babes. Only dragonspawn.’” (agot 93)

“They were captives, locked in a cell, asleep, unarmed . . . boys. Look at them!” (asos 227)

robb stark, you are truly your father’s son.

[asongoftinandfoil]

I love you hated female characters. I love you female characters who are flawed. I love you female characters who mess up and try to do the right thing after. I love you female characters who get the undeserved vitriol from fans. I love you female characters who fans completely condemn because of one mistake they made. I love you female characters who fans completely condemn because of one mistake they made as a child. I love you female characters who people blame for ripping apart their ships instead of the larger forces that be. I love you female characters who get all the hate as the male characters who do worse in canon get absolutely none. I love you female characters who get hated on because they told a man “no.”

[asongoftinandfoil]

I THREW A KID IN THE WELL

DONT ASK ME ILL NEVER TELL

I WILL REGRET THIS IN HELL

BUT HE WAS IN MY WAY

[asongoftinandfoil]

They should make a game like Disco Elysium but it’s about a young knight trying to solve the disappearance of her lady’s daughter, a maid of three and ten with auburn hair, in the Riverlands

[asongoftinandfoil]

There’s something so tragic about Cersei hating Robert (rightfully so) but becoming him all the same.

She hates ruling but loves the power it gives her over others. She drinks heavily. Abuses those around her. She fantasizes about a life with Rhaegar a man she never knew and never loved in the same way that Robert obsessed over Lyanna. She becomes someone that even Tommen (her son whom she loves dearly) fears. It mirrors the ways in which Robert abused Joffrey, but she hurts Tommen emotionally as opposed to physically.

All her life she wanted to be Jaime but instead she becomes the man she despised.

[asongoftinandfoil]

the lady x sworn shield dynamic can take on many iterations, including as lovers (cersei/jaime), brother-sister (loras/margaery), mistress-attack dog (sansa/sandor, alicent/criston cole), or parent-child (catelyn/brienne), and often it's multiple at the same time, but first and foremost it must always be weird about it.

[asongoftinandfoil]

i say this as a catelyn enjoyer, catelyn's hatred of jon is not particularly rational in the sense that it doesn't hinge on jon's own personal character. like some of it is borne out of wider prejudice regarding bastards (socially stigmatised as treacherous and grasping of their trueborn siblings' rights) of course, but the thing that hurts her most is what jon's presence in the household symbolically represents. and it's not the infidelity, it's the perpetual reminder of the disenfranchised position of women in their society and how little agency she truly has in her marriage and in the wider social sphere. the thing about catelyn's character is that she might be the conforming lady archetype, but she's also written to be very much aware of how disadvantaged women are in westeros.

"I might have been able to trade the Kingslayer for Father, but . . ." ". . . but not for the girls?" Her voice was icy quiet. "Girls are not important enough, are they?" Catelyn I, ACOK Is this my punishment for opposing him about Jon Snow? Or for being a woman, and worse, a mother? Catelyn V, ASOS “Father,” she said, “Father, I know what you did.” She was no longer an innocent bride with a head full of dreams. She was a widow, a traitor, a grieving mother, and wise, wise in the ways of the world. “You made him take her,” she whispered. “Lysa was the price Jon Arryn had to pay for the swords and spears of House Tully.” Catelyn I, ASOS Brienne looked at her with those blue and beautiful eyes. “As ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.” “Children are a battle of a different sort.” Catelyn started across the yard. “A battle without banners or warhorns, but no less fierce. Catelyn VI, ACOK

^ these are not the words of someone who's content with her lot in life or has made perfect peace with the rules of westeros's feudal patriarchy. brienne and catelyn are both acknowledging the thankless role women are made to play. "no longer an innocent bride" / "wise in the ways of the world" has a certain misery to it, considering the topic at hand is hoster's abominable treatment of lysa for transgressing social norms. even a sentiment such as - "Pity filled Catelyn's heart. Is there any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman?", is not coming from a place of scorn or thoughtlessness, but from knowing too well how cruelly their world treats women, how brienne's appearance would affect her marriage prospects.

“Our duty.” Catelyn’s face was drawn as she started across the yard. I have always done my duty, she thought. [...] I gave Brandon my favor to wear, and never comforted Petyr once after he was wounded, nor bid him farewell when Father sent him off. And when Brandon was murdered and Father told me I must wed his brother, I did so gladly, though I never saw Ned’s face until our wedding day. I gave my maidenhood to this solemn stranger and sent him off to his war and his king and the woman who bore him his bastard, because I always did my duty. Catelyn VI, ACOK

there's such clear resignation here, this is not how you talk if you're proud to have done your duty, if you feel you were actually rewarded for having done it. and duty here means meeting the unforgiving expectations of westeros's feudal patriarchy. if sansa's chapters are about growing out of that conditioning by realising that there is no reward to be found here, then catelyn's chapters are about showing the personal cost of having lived your entire life internalising those ideals. her house words being 'family, duty, honor' is a very deliberate character choice.

so it's not just that ned cheated on her, but that he unanimously made the decision to install jon at their home and catelyn's feelings were allowed no say in the matter, that it happened even before she was able to step foot in winterfell with robb is another blow. she had just been exchanged as goods from one (dead) brother to another and she was supposed to be okay with all this, like the most natural thing in the world because her house words were drilled into her since childhood. but we know she wasn't. she stamped down that resentment out of duty, because he's her lord husband and she was to obey him, but that pain and the alienation for having done her duty was going somewhere. openly resenting her husband or her father is not a socially allowed option, so all that resentment gets unfairly taken out on jon, someone she has authority over. and i think identifying the major cause of that hatred as her frustrations with westoros's patriarchal ideals is important because that means knowing the truth of jon's parentage wouldn't have changed anything. that ned kept such a thing from her and again, unanimously made the decision to commit treason without consulting catelyn, is once again simply telling her that she has no control in this marriage, that her judgement is both unasked for and not valued.

[asongoftinandfoil]

sometimes when you guys discuss who is the REAL younger more beautiful queen you sound exactly like cersei. it's no one and it's everyone. it's the idea of a younger more beautiful queen simply existing. cersei thinks it's sansa, then thinks it's margaery, and it is. because cersei's crazy paranoid brain has done the work for her. the ymbq as a figment of her imagination has actually cast her down and taken all she holds dear.