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carriesthewind · 2 years

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Hello tumblr! I am here to discuss some drama today! (Oh dear god I can't believe that this is what got me to finally join tumblr.)

As you may know, AO3 recently suspended a writer’s account, and the writer isn’t happy about it. They have made several public posts about it, including a very long post responding to the letter they received from AO3 in response to their appeal to lift the suspension. Now, I’m not particularly familiar with this writer. I’ve heard their name enough to recognize it, I know I have heard some rumors about them – some good, some bad. But I have never read their writing or their tumblr before, and I didn’t have any preconceived opinions about them.

But since this drama has entered my orbit from multiple sources, I decided to do a close read of their post responding to AO3. I do this fairly regularly, as a mental exercise to practice making myself a more careful consumer of media in general, social media in particular. But close-reading this particular post made me angry enough that felt the need to write up my analysis and share it.

A few disclaimers and notes before we begin:

First, I am just going to refer to the person under discussion as the “writer” – I include this person’s user name in a screenshot, so am not hiding their identity, but I’m not doing this to target them. This is an analysis of two of their posts, not of their life or online activity outside of the post.

Second, I am going to be giving the writer every benefit of the doubt I can, and am starting my reading by assuming they are acting in good faith.

Third, I am going to take the text under discussion under its own terms as much as possible, without referring to outside content. I am going to be analyzing two posts by the writer; the long post they made in response to AO3’s reply, and a shorter post that they made that long post in reply to. The exceptions to this will be the TOS of AO3, since they are central to the dispute, and a few other posts by the writer on the same subject. I will be using those other posts only when I need them to understand the writer’s argument in the main post we are looking at.

Let’s begin.

There’s two things that jump out at me from this paragraph right away. First, if we look at AO3’s TOS, there is a clear path for filing an appeal, and there is no right to a response from being pinged on Tumblr or responding to messages through other venues. There is also no deadline for the team to respond to an appeal. In fact, the TOS repeatedly note that they cannot guarantee a speedy response. Given the size of the archive, five days seems far from unreasonable.

However, this waiting period would absolutely be frustrating, and it is entirely understandable that the writer would be frustrated and angry. Speaking personally, I know that I have angrily tried to contact a company via non-official means when I felt they had wronged me and were refusing to respond to my official messages. The writer isn’t doing anything wrong here by reaching out this way and being upset at the delay – but AO3 isn’t doing anything wrong by not replying to these messages, either.

Second, this sentence, “My legally copyrighted property under the terms of Fair Use is still in kidnapped status, which is not actually legal”? This sentence is nonsense. It is so nonsense that whenever I look away my brain rewrites it. It is so nonsense I am not going to even try to break down the very many ways it is wrong, because that would double the length of this monster of a post. I will instead just state: by agreeing to AO3's TOS, the writer has agreed to allow their account to be suspended under the TOS, and the writer’s work still belongs to the writer and can be removed (more on that later) and reposted (or not removed and reposted) anywhere else.

The important things about this sentence for our close reading are as follows: 1) the writer is using a bunch of legal jargon in a way that is irrelevant and inaccurate (the alternative, which is worse, is they are lying and they know it); 2) as a corollary, the writer is talking confidently and forcefully about the situation in ways that do not accurately describe the situation (either out of ignorance, confusion, or a deliberate desire to mislead); and 3) the writer is using charged and exaggerating language to describe the situation.

Number 1 will be important shortly; for now, just keep it in mind.

Number 2 doesn’t necessarily imply bad faith; as noted, they could be talking out of ignorance or misspeaking, or some combination of both, due to the emotionally charged situation. Even though they haven’t lost their content (because they haven’t), people’s writing is very important to them; it is understandable that someone who has lost some control over the distribution of their writing would feel upset! (Please note that this is true regardless of whether the suspension was appropriate, justified, or correct - punishments hurt, by definition!) Rather, it is important because it makes clear that even if the writer has best of intentions, the way they are writing about this situation is not entirely accurate. It is entirely possible that this is the only thing about their situation that they will be wrong about - especially since legal rights and issues are extremely complicated and most people struggle to fully understand them. However, it is still an early indication to keep our eye on, moving forward. (It is also worth noting that this kind of legal misrepresentation is extremely commonly used by people who are NOT acting in good faith. This alone is not enough to assume bad faith - again, legal issues are complicated - but it is something to keep an eye on when reading posts like this.)

Number 3 is referring mostly to the use of “kidnapped” to describe the status of their works. This is not remotely accurate, for reasons which I will dive into more later. It is, however, highly emotionally charged language that indicates a couple of possibilities, any or all of which may be present. First, it could indicate, like the last point, a writer who is (again, understandably!) upset and is expressing how the situation FEELS to them, even if that feeling doesn’t match reality. Secondly, it could be the writer trying to using metaphorical language to get the reader to understand how serious the situation feels to them. Third, it could indicate a desire (conscious or unconscious) to appeal to the reader’s emotions over their logic, so they will be more likely to go along with the writer’s characterization of the situation.

The overall impression from where we are starting is this: we have a writer who is (again, understandably) extremely upset at a suspension that may or may not be justified and appropriate - so far we have no evidence either way. We have likewise no evidence that either party is acting inappropriately. However, we do have indications that the writer appears to either not correctly understand, or is (accidentally or on purpose), mischaracterizing at least some elements of the situation.

So, let’s move on to the long post.

We start with the knowledge that we do not have AO3’s whole response; there are sections that are left out that may or may not be relevant. This isn’t necessarily bad or wrong - there may be lots of good reasons not to include the full text. However, it is worth keeping in mind when we are assessing the situation.

More important is the description of AO3’s letter as, “full of fun jargon.” We will review the provided text ourselves, but AO3 generally does an admirable job trying to use as little jargon and legalese as reasonable possible, and I would include the provided text of the response in that assessment. Still, given that is a formal response to a TOS violation appeal, it does use a lot of formal language and some legal language.

However, this is an interesting complaint for the writer to make, given Number 1 above (I promised we would come back to that!). It’s a sharp contrast for the writer to use lot of legal jargon to complain about AO3 and then turn around and promptly complain about AO3 using jargon. Again, this isn’t necessarily a sign of bad faith. It is entirely possible that the writer, as described above, is confused and upset and using language they think they understand (but don’t) to express their feelings, and since they don’t understand legal language, they see the AO3 response as including a lot of jargon. However, using charged legalistic language themselves while characterizing their opponent as using “jargon” is another flag to keep an eye on. Again, in the best case scenario, this is someone who is clearly quite (reasonably!) emotional and whose characterization of at least some aspects of the situation is questionable.

This response by the writer is….confusing?

The writer seems to be arguing that punishing them for failing to comply with the TOS makes them unable to comply with the TOS right away so therefore…people shouldn’t ever be suspended for commercial content violations? I don’t think this is what the writer is arguing, because it’s not reasonable (and in some of their posts, they make it clear that they don’t believe that), but I can’t make any other sense of this paragraph.

According to their TOS, if AO3 finds a sufficiently serious violation, it can hide or delete violating content. But based on the previous “kidnapped” comments, the writer would presumable be upset (is upset?) if the works were altered or removed from public view by AO3 unless they specifically asked them to. So I’m not sure what the writer would want AO3 to do in response to a commercial content-based TOS violation.

This first quoted paragraph is being positioned by the writer as indicating some problem with AO3’s process, either in general or in this specific case, but so far, there is no actual evidence of that.

I also want to note here – this paragraph seems to be confirming that the TOS violations were valid, and the writer is just disputing their seriousness, not their existence. But to be fair, I checked some of their other posts on the topic to confirm this reading. Although they dispute the interpretations of some of the reported violations as incorrect, they do admit that at least one of the reported violations was accurate.

We are not provided this mitigating information, but the writer will include some arguments later that would seem to be the mitigating evidence, and I will address it then. I will note here - it is very common for an aggrieved party to say that a system that punished them ignored evidence they presented. While sometimes this is true, often the system reviews the evidence they present, and decides not to rule in their favor anyway. Here, for example, we see that AO3’s response notes that the suspension will not be lifted unless the writer furnishes mitigating information “that would have changed our initial determination.” So AO3 might have ignored the mitigating information, or they might have reviewed it and determined it would not have changed their decision (e.g.: they already knew about it, it wasn’t determined credible, it wasn’t determined relevant, etc.). Also note that we, seeing the mitigating information, could think that AO3 was incorrect if they reviewed the proffered mitigating info and did not rescind the suspension, but that is not the same as AO3 ignoring it. We, as readers of the post, don’t know which of these options occurred - and neither does the writer. While it is understandable that the poster is not giving AO3 the same kind of good faith that we are trying to give them (aggrieved parties don’t have to assign good faith to people they believe have wronged them!), it once again colors our understanding of how the writer is characterizing AO3’s response.

This starts with an interesting claim! That is, that AO3 acknowledged in the letter that the writer has “a history of immediately complying.” This isn’t in the excerpt of the letter that we have. Because this claim is immediately below the above excerpt from AO3's letter, it appears that the writer is misconstruing the statement, “While we appreciate your willingness to remove the violating content immediately, you must first serve your suspension to its completion before you are able to edit your works.” This sentence isn’t claiming the writer has a history of complying, it is clearly responding to the writer’s stated willingness *in this case* to edit their content to comply. If the writer is deliberately misconstruing the letter this way, that’s deeply troubling, because it shows they are both trying to make AO3 look bad (see the rest of the paragraph) and twisting their own bad behavior (note that they here acknowledge past instances of breaking the TOS) in a way that makes them look good, actually (“assist[ing] the Archive in keeping things to their TOS standard”). This is really, really, bad behavior if it is deliberate. It would be a deliberate lie to preempt their audience’s recognition of their misdeeds and frame themself as a victim of a malicious actor.

HOWEVER. That is not the only interpretation of this claim. The writer is not necessarily deliberately misconstruing the letter - again, they are reasonably upset at the situation, they’ve stated they have found the letter to be full of jargon (and thus potentially may be struggling to parse some of it), and it is possible they are responding quickly without carefully reading the letter. Alternatively, they have stated that they are only posting certain sections of the letter - it is entirely possible that AO3 acknowledges “a history of immediately complying” somewhere else in the letter. Now, even in that case, the writer is clearly attempting to reframe evidence of their past violations as evidence of their victimhood (promptly removing TOS violating content is the bare minimum of what should be expected by an AO3 user). Again, that may be a genuine (and natural!) emotional reaction, but we continue to see the thread that the writer’s characterization of (now multiple) aspects of the situation are both inaccurate and biased to see themselves as victimized.

Which leads us to the poster’s response to the next excerpt.

Here the writer acknowledges again that they have at least one previous TOS violation. They include an except from AO3’s letter that clearly shows that they were explicitly told that failing to remove commercial promotion material from their account might result in a temporary suspension. Noticeably, although they have and will continue to frame themselves as the victim of an unfair process: 1) they do not dispute they were previously in violation of the policy, and were let off with just a warning. 2) They do not dispute that since that warning, they continued to have commercial promotion material on their account. 3) They do not dispute the content of the warning. 4) They do not dispute that they received or understood this warning.

Instead, the poster disputes that the warning…wasn’t official enough? They do not indicate how or what AO3 should have done to make it “official” - likely because it is extremely clear that this was a previous warning, and spelling out an alternative would make the absurdity of this complaint clear. It is at this point that we can no longer proceed assuming that the poster is writing solely in good faith. While we cannot assume they are deliberately trying to mislead their audience or that they do not have legitimate complaints, they are at least deeply in denial and stuck in a victimization perspective and that must inform our reading of their post.

Their second complaint with this section is just as ridiculous and telling as their first. AO3’s abuse policy is NOT a 3 strikes policy, as it is explicitly designed for flexibility, so that an account may be let off with multiple warnings, or may be suspended at the first violation, depending on the assessed severity of the violation. Nothing in the quoted section of the letter contradicts this flexibility. In fact, it directly supports the existence of this flexibility, by writing that further TOS violations “might,” not “will,” trigger a suspension. The writer is just wrong, and we can see they are wrong by simply reading the text they are replying to. This can only be read as either a deliberate mischaracterization of both the letter and the TOS, or as someone so far in denial that their characterization of the situation cannot be relied upon and no information they give can be fully trusted without external supporting evidence.

(As a note on my own biases in writing this analysis: this is where I personally ran out of patience with the writer, although I have tried to maintain a more even tone in this analysis.)

The writer may still have legitimate critiques of AO3’s actions and response (for example, they can still argue that such a flexible system is bad in general, or that there were mitigating circumstances that should have caused the suspension to be lifted/not imposed in their particular case), but they are not, in this section at least, making such a legitimate argument.

Their critique of the non time-limited nature of AO3’s response to TOS violations also indicates a fundamental misunderstanding (whether genuine or deliberate) of the *problem* of a TOS violation, especially of a commercial promotion TOS violation. AO3 is an *archive* - it explicitly exists to preserve fan works and provide access to them. It doesn’t matter, from AO3’s perspective, when a commercial promotion is first posted - it matters that it is currently accessible. A commercial promotion violation does not occur solely when a user posts it - it is an ongoing violation that continues to occur for as long as the promotion remains accessible. Furthermore, the structure of AO3 is such that it relies on individual users to maintain their works in compliance with the TOS. We can imagine an archive that works differently. This hypothetical archive could have works reviewed by archive staff before being accepted into entry in the archive, would not allow works to be modified except with the approval of staff, and would allow works to be modified by staff without the users’ knowledge or consent. However, 1) this is not the TOS the writer agreed to when they posted their works on AO3 and 2) given this writer’s expressed desire for control over their own work in this very post, this would not be an archive the writer would want to use.

People can still have legitimate disagreements about whether and how the date that a violation was originally posted on should affect sanctions for that violation, and disagreements over whether the sanctions were appropriately applied in any particular case. It isn't a problem for the author to assert that they think AO3's policy should be different. It is a problem for them to mischaracterize what the policy is and mislead their audience about why a policy exists.

Once again, AO3 is describing a policy that is entirely reasonable. However, in this section the writer finally moves on to the potentially legitimate claim that the policy is being enforced in a draconian way. They advance two arguments to support this claim.

This is actually one of their better responses, because their arguments, while very hostile, are potentially legitimate complaints that support their claim of draconian enforcement in their case! (Please note I am not asserting their complaints are accurate, however - more on that in a moment.)

The first claim is that an official AO3 staff member previously checked every one of their existing fics to try to ensure that they did not violate AO3’s TOS. The writer relied on this assurance going forward, so should not be sanctioned with a suspension. This is a part of the post that, in the interests of good faith, I will discuss with the added context of another post by this writer, since the claim isn't fully or clearly expressed in the above post, and it is their best argument in favor of their mistreatment. I am also going to assume that this was the mitigation that they referred to submitting to AO3 and claim was ignored.

If the poster is characterizing this previous interaction correctly, they have legitimate reasons to be upset, and I would agree with them that this is the sort of mitigating evidence I would expect would cause a suspension to be lifted if I was the person making decisions.

…here’s the problem, though. While I would agree with them that this would be a draconian application of AO3’s polices…it wouldn’t be a violation of AO3’s stated policies in any way. If the AO3 abuse staff member made assurances that to the writer that all their posted content was clear of TOS violations, that would be counter to AO3's TOS, which makes it clear that it does not do pre-emptive reviews. It would be legitimately frustrating for this writer to find out that the promise it relied on was incorrect and be punished after relying on it. However, it is impossible for me not to see that from AO3’s perspective, if this staff member really did give this assurance, it means that the writer was given an assurance of preferential treatment over other users. There is a good argument that to continue to give them preferential treatment (that is, to rescind the suspension based on the preferential treatment) would only compound the harm. It’s a legitimately tough situation for both parties to be in. I ultimately continue to see no misconduct on the part of AO3, except potentially in allowing an official staff member to give misleading preferential treatment (I say potentially because we have no further information about what actions AO3 took to correct this harm/punish the staff member), and also understand why the writer is reasonably furious at the archive.

…or rather, that would be the problem, if we could continue to read this post solely in good faith. Unfortunately, by the time we reach this explanation, as stated above, we know that the writer is either deliberately lying in this post, or deeply in denial leading to them mischaracterization the situation. Because of what we have already seen, we cannot take their description of the alleged staff member or their actions as accurate without at least some external supporting evidence.

We are given no such evidence, either in this post or in any of the others I have reviewed. Rather, the provided evidence contradicts it, albeit subtly. Remember that we noted how the poster did not dispute the content of the August 2019 warning AO3 sent them? That warning clearly stated that failing to remove all commercial promotion from their account might result in a suspension. That warning, from AO3 (not a single independent staff member), along with the clear TOS statement that it does not do preemptive reviews, puts the responsibility for removing the violating content squarely on the writer. If that warning wasn’t “official” enough for them to take it seriously…why were they willing to rely on the word of a single person who was breaking AO3 official policy by purporting to prescreen content?

While I lost my patience at the previous paragraph, as noted above, this response is why I actually decided to write and post this analysis. Casually reading this post, the writer’s description of events here sound deeply sympathetic and would lead a casual reader to see them a victim and AO3 as a villain. It is natural (and a good instinct!) to trust people when they tell you they are being mistreated. Unfortunately, sometimes people who feel that they have been mistreated are just seeing the consequences of their own actions catch up to them.

The second potential legitimate complaint is the implied assertion that their violation was not really serious, and should not really be considered a TOS violation (“figurative, imaginative caffeine.”) Unfortunately, the writer has already admitted repeatedly, both in this post and outside of it, that they were in violation of the TOS. Thus, instead of this being a legitimate complaint, it is another indication that the poster is inappropriately mischaracterizing themself to their audience as a maligned victim and AO3 as a villain.

Oh hey, AO3’s letter is reiterating everything I just explained about prescreening! I wonder how the poster will respond.

I’m trying not to be too snarky here, but that is a really damming failure to respond.

So instead of talking about the substantive issue at hand, let’s address this wild change of subject, I guess.

This is again an instance of the writer portraying themselves as a victim, either because they are deliberately trying to maliciously mislead their audience or because they truly believe it. Just to be clear - they are claiming that they are being targeted because someone noticed and reported admitted TOS violations on their “two…most well-know fics in two major fandoms.” If they are claiming they are being targeted by someone acting in bad faith, and therefore the (again, admittedly legitimate!) violation reports are a form of targeted harassment, wouldn’t they have a much better claim if the violations were reported on fics with very low hit counts (so that someone would be less likely to randomly find them)?

And a side note - if these TOS violations were on the poster’s “most well-known fics” in “major fandoms,” that goes directly to the relevance of their ‘the violations were posted a long time ago’ mitigation claim. A well-known fic is more likely to be currently receiving continuing views (remember, the harm the violations are causing is based on people seeing them), and an author who is continuing to get hits/kudos/comments on that work would presumably be aware of its continued popularity, and thus should be aware of the need, after receiving a warning, to make sure to personally review it for violations.

Again, we’ve already addressed this issue repeatedly. So I will just note here that the writer is claiming that it is “actually fucking ridiculous” not to grandfather in active TOS violations. Imagine making this argument in any other context. Imagine an author has a book that they wrote 14 years ago but is still selling. Imagine someone notices this year, for the first time, that the author has extensively plagiarized copyrighted material. They alert the victim, who brings a suit, and the publisher stops publishing the author’s book and refuses to publish any of their other book as well. Does the writer think it is “actually fucking ridiculous” for the publisher to cease publishing the author, simply because the author was able to avoid detection for so long?

(Since I’m not doing much analysis here, let’s talk instead about what the purpose of this portion of the poster’s response might be. I’m putting this as an aside, because this isn’t strictly part of the close reading, and it is absolutely not it the spirit of good faith I am still trying to use. We’re going to look at the effect of this section in context. Let’s start by analyzing the use of the term “you” in this post. When the post began, the writer used “you” to refer to themself (“no matter how willing you are to fix it…etc.”). In the same section, the writer switches to using “you” to refer to AO3 (“if you have fans…”). In the third section, they start by using “you” to refer to AO3 (“You guys are the ones…”) and then switches in the next sentence to directly address the readers (“if any of you following me”). This switch isn’t a casual fluid switch like it was previously - instead, it is positioned in a sentence directly warning the readers that AO3 might come after them next. In the following section, they don’t use the second person, but they do imply (nonsensically) that someone is targeting them with these TOS violation reports. We then catch up with the above section - “they can and will go after you.” Note that the post starts directly addressing the reader at the same time that it builds up an escalating threat. This creates a sense of fear and camaraderie with the writer, positioning reader and writer as “us” against a malicious “them” who is not just targeting the writer, but the readers as well. This makes the reader more sympathetic to the writer, and more likely to believe their claims; after all, “you” know you’re not breaking AO3's TOS, and if “you” did, it would be an accident. How ridiculous for AO3 come after someone like “you” - someone who has broken the TOS multiple times in the past in the same way and has explicitly…been…warned…hmmm…how much like “you” is the poster, actually?)

Anyway,

I’m going to reiterate what I said after the writer’s response to the previous warning letter: what should AO3 have written to make this a warning that the writer would accept as legitimate? This is a bit longer and more detailed, but substantially the same as what was reportedly written in the previous letter. In that context, the poster said it didn’t look like an official warning, it wasn’t clear or serious enough. In this context, substantially the same content in substantially the same tone is recontextualized as too serious, a threat that secretly means AO3 already plans on banning them permanently. To borrow a phrase…"this is actually fucking ridiculous."

Again, if we are reading the post in the best possible light, this is someone who is so emotionally distraught that they have descended into paranoia and are unable to correctly characterize the situation. Alternatively, this reads like someone who deliberately characterizing AO3’s responses to best achieve their own ends. They want this suspension to appear unjustified and unjustifiable, which means they can’t have received clear previous warnings for the same TOS violations they are suspended for - so there was only one warning that wasn’t clear or official enough to give them any real notice. Now, they want to appear as a victim who is being targeted by a system that has it out for them, no matter what they do - so substantially the same warning is a threat that indicates an intent to ban them regardless of what they do next.

And we are back to the beginning: not understanding the first thing about the law and using (at this point I feel safe in saying) deliberately charged language to describe the situation.

(And mischaracterizing the text that is LITERALLY RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM – AO3 isn’t saying it will take a week to respond! It is giving you a week to comply once your suspension is lifted! What do you want it to do, impose further sections if you don’t comply within 12 hours?!?! I mean, if that’s what you’re asking for...)

AO3 is not taking control of the writer’s works. It has control how it chooses to display and store works that the writer has granted it permission to display and store. This is all very clearly laid out in the TOS.

We’ve already addressed that the writer does NOT know that AO3 did not investigate their alleged mitigation evidence. The writer is once again positioning a failure to agree with their position that the suspension should be lifted as a failure by AO3 to read or consider their evidence.

I’m not going to address most of the specifics they list, because I would basically just be repeating myself over and over again with more details and this analysis is already long enough. These specifics might be important, except that the poster has already admitted that they did violate the TOS. Even assuming they are characterizing their email, AO3’s full response, and the “Not Actually Violations” correctly, it doesn’t matter for the purpose of whether they violated the TOS (again) and received a legitimate suspension.

The only specific I will address is their blatant lie at the end: the TOS specifically bans all commercial promotion, NOT just self-promotion. The writer is explicitly, obviously lying - not just misunderstanding, not just mischaracterizing, flat out lying.

We have something in common, finally - I’m really offended too.

So I looked at some other posts for more context about this comment on deleting a work, just to make sure I wasn’t mischaracterizing: the writer apparently, fed up with AO3, wants to delete their works prior to the end of their suspension. Their “inability” to do so appears to be a major basis for their “kidnapping” claims above. This, once again, might be a legitimate complaint - AO3’s TOS does confirm that a suspended user retains the rights to remove their work (subject to certain data storage exceptions to meet AO3’s obligations).

Unfortunately, the poster’s next sentence makes it clear this compliant is not legitimate. The TOS are explicit that the way a suspended user can delete their works is through contacting AO3 administrators. If the poster had requested such delegations and been refused, AO3 would have violated their own TOS. Instead, the user states they just asked AO3 to lift the suspension. There is zero evidence that they asked AO3 to delete their works, and instead are mischaracterizing AO3’s refusal to lift their suspension as a refusal to delete their works, both in this post and elsewhere. I feel like a broken record at this point, but once again, they are mischaracterizing a very clear situation to make themselves look like a victim and AO3 a villain.

An appropriate gif of a petulant, spoiled child to match this closing paragraph. I don’t think I need to say anything else.

#AO3 drama #little tin cults #edited to add a read more #apologies to everyone who reblogged it before that #edited to fix the typo in the second paragraph that I can't believe I never noticed before

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cappymightwrite · 8 months

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An Unexpected Norse Detail in Winterfell

I was scrolling through tumblr yesterday, as you do, and suddenly paused on a gifset of the Lannister party in Winterfell during the early episodes of season 1. What caught my eye was this:

Behind the long table in Winterfell's great hall is some kind of large wooden screen/divider featuring some very interesting carvings. These carvings are near identical to those found on the Urnes Stave Church in western Norway, which dates from the 12th century:

I don't think we ever see this wooden screen in Winterfell again, but it's an interesting inclusion nonetheless, back when the show stuck more closely to the source material.

In The Vikings (Penguin, revised edition, 2016) Else Roesdahl talks a bit about this particular style of ornamentation:

The Urnes style is the last phase of the long development of Scandinavian animal ornament. This seems to have developed shortly before the middle of the eleventh century and was popular for nearly a century, that is into the early Middle Ages. After a final phase where it gave rise to details and influences in Romanesque art, now predominant in Scandinavia, it had died out completely before the year 1200. Many other forms of Viking Age followed the same course. The vigour and vitality of the Ringerike style gave way to this sophisticated, elegant, indeed almost decadent, style. It is named after the exquisite wood carvings that were re-used in Urnes Church in western Norway: a portal and a door, two wall planks, a corner post and two gable ends, one complete [...] The large, four-legged animal is still one of the main motifs, but it has become as slim as a greyhound. Snake-like animals with one foreleg, snakes and thin tendrils sometimes ending in a snake's head are also featured. The designs characteristic of this style form open, asymetric patterns, creating an impression of an undulating interweaving of animals and snakes. The large loops are often figures-of-eight and the shapes grow and diminish evenly; there are no abrupt transitions. The style is also used with virtuosity on brooches and on large numbers of rune stones in central Sweden, where the undulating ornament follows the shape of the stone and the long bodies of the snakes are used as rune bands [...] Several examples of the style have been found in England, and in Ireland it became as popular as the Ringerike style.

What's so intriguing about the original carving though is that it is depicting pagan symbolism... but on a Christian church. As mentioned above, the Ringerike style predate Urnes and was "roughly contemporary with the intial spread within Scandinavia of Christianity, and was the first to contain Christian iconography, although pagan symbolism was still present," notes Philip Parker (The Northmen's Fury, Vintage, 2014). By around 1050, it gave way to the Urnes style, named for the stave church shown above.

But what do these carvings mean? In Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North (Oxford University Press, 2013), G. Ronald Murphy offers this explanation:

The door is simply surrounded with whorls of writhing snakes and vines. The tangle is so perfectly executed in a welter of animal elongation and plant reduction to vines, that it is difficult to identify where a head begins or where a tail finally ends, if at all, or to trace what seems like a joint to a neck or a leg or a vine. The main point seems to be the inter-twined-ness itself of all living things, animal or vegetable, in one huge tangle [...] Now as one looks at the left side of the doorway there is one animal standing on four legs [see above!] that is simply startling in the clarity of its depiction. It has been called a lion and explained as the Lion of Judah (Christ) fighting with evil. I think that such an interpretation makes the mistake of using an inappropriately biblical explanation when the artist, by his very Viking-like pictorial style as well as his tangle of animal and plants, tells you he is here using a Germanic one. If you look at the animal you can see that he is eating at the vine or branch which in turn is a serpent biting at him in the neck. Look at the animal's head and you can see two small horns protruding—that animal is a young male deer, a hart. Now it becomes clear it is not the Old Testament that is giving the context here for the meaning of the portal: this is an allusion to the Elder Edda and its description of Yggsdrasill as the suffering tree with many serpents forever biting on its twigs and branches, as those twigs and branches are also being devoured by a hart. The traditiona of the single deer may also come from a previous stanza in the Grímnismál where the hart is named: Eikþyrnir [Oak-thorn] is the hart's name, who stands on Father of Hosts' hall and grazes Læraðr's [kenning for Yggdrasill] branches; and from his horns liquid drips into Hvergelmir [seething cauldron], from thence all waters have their flowing (Poetic Edda 55 and 270n)

According to Murphy, "to enter the door of the Urnes stave church is to enter Yggdrasill." So, to bring this back to the world of asoiaf, it´s an interesting piece of set design to include this screen or divider in Winterfell, a place closely connected with the "old gods" of the north and that has its own world tree, in a sense: the weirwood tree, or heart tree, of the godswood. Moreover, beneath one of Yggdrasill's three large roots is the spring Hvergelmir (mentioned above, meaning 'seething cauldron'), beneath another is Mímisbrunnr ('Mímir's well) and beneath the third is Urðarbrunnr ('Well of Urðr'), this is interesting to note in parallel to the hots springs and ice-lidded pool in Winterfell's godswood, close to its heart tree.

In the Prose Edda, one of our foremost sources on Norse mythology, Yggsdrasill is also connected with Ragnarök, the doom of the gods. In chapter 54, it is told that Óðinn will ride to the well Mímisbrunnr and consult Mímir on behalf of himself and his people. After this, "the ash Yggdrasill will shake and nothing will be unafraid in heaven or on earth," and then the Æsir and Einherjar will don their war gear and advance to the field of Vígríðr. In asoiaf, the north has its own legend very reminiscent of Ragnarök, called the Long Night and I've written about their similiarities before and keep meaning to return to that.

Anyway, I just think it's pretty cool they included that detail of the Urnes style screen in Winterfell — I'm always putting Norse details into my fics wherever I can, most recently the Oseberg tapestry.

#cappy's thoughts #yggdrasil and the heart tree #winterfell #historial influences in got and asoiaf #asoiaf and norse mythology #IT IS THE SAME DESIGN i can't believe i never noticed it before?

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