#DOOM SPIRAL DOOM SPIRAL DOOM SPIRALLLLL

[visenyaism]

hello hello . seeing as ur the adwd scholar around here. what exactly is the connection between the varamyr prologue and theon describing the dead girls + women that were hunted by ramsay as coming back as the dogs. is there even a connection. i apologise but thank u for reading this if u do <3

hell yeah there is! at least to me. So both of those are elements of what I would consider to be the central theme of a dance with dragons: the idea that the distinction between what is Right and what is Abomination is not a hard binary, but a gently sloping path that pulls you in. The boundary between the correct and the abject has dissolved because of everything that has happened in the series. (the spiral-shaped tragedy!!! the narrative bringing you around exactly back where you started and the only thing that is different is that YOU are worse!!) It’s almost winter. the world is not alive and not dead yet, but some grey clinging-on stage.

the book’s treatment of cannibalism is a big example of this: when we look at it on the outside, it’s this extreme abject societal taboo, it’s a line we do NOT cross. but for the characters in the narrative, it’s not. It’s just the thousandth moral concession that they’ve had to make to justify their own survival. The horror is in looking up and realizing that not only are you doing things that you would have sworn off as abominable, but that there was never a line to cross at all for you: it always felt justifiable. The boundary between the abject and the just is completely dissolved by circumstance.

Likewise, the boundary between what is a person and what is an animal in adwd is also just gone. We see a little bit of that with the cannibalism theme and Euron last book declaring that “men are meat.” At the start of his arc, Reek is somewhere in between a human and an animal, made that way through extreme dehumanization and violence. So I think the thing with Ramsay naming his dogs after the woman he killed is that it’s an example of the extent to which he dehumanized them. They were always just sport for him, and now they have to be sport forever because all that’s left of them after he has ripped them apart mind and body is that act of carnage. Even after they are gone, they are not at peace because through naming his gods after them Ramsay owns them forever.

I think the parallel with Varamyr is that he contextualizes his skinchanging as an act of domination, obliterating an animal’s mind in order to own its body. Which is why it is so extremely horrific when he tries to skinchange into a person. we find out he was already treating women like that, using his animals as a violent threat in order to assault them, because the important part to understand is that his violent dehumanization is not the crossing of any kind of threshold but just an extension of who he already was. Like Ramsay and his dogs, it’s a horror story about how there is no boundary between man and meat for him anymore.

TLDR: the entirety of a dance with dragons is about the collapse of the distinction between human and thing at the end of the world, which is what both of those orbit around.