#eyrie and charon are not the same person but they are the same person

[impossible-rat-babies]

the thing w hermes and charon (eyrie’s azem) is that the two of them were close. close enough to share their struggles and their strife. being so close to death, grief and the struggles of existence charon understood hermes internal strife. how much life is worth; they understood what life meant.

charon was never quick to use creation magicks, especially not creating living beings. they cared not for the creation of life, but it’s endings. dignity, honor—the price of creation. maybe if they weren’t so occupied with their duties, or not as isolated as Hermes was, they might have taken the same road as him. but for all their understanding and their closeness, they couldn’t stop hermes

[snidgett]

Hi there, so you made a comment on Sarah z post that you worked on a paper comparing Sansa Stark to Persephone, would you be so kind as to elaborate? This sparked my curiosity to say the least

Yeah for sure! It was basically an analysis of how her character arc and storyline symbolically represent the journey of Persephone (i.e. from being a young naive girl associated with youth, beauty, and love to being abduncted by a man representing death and darkness to becoming queen of the underworld in her own right). 

In the books this is mainly done through her abdunction by little finger from the summery warm kingslanding to the cold and dead Eyrie. This transition involves her being tricked into sailing their on a boat with him (like Charon on the river styx), being offered to share a pomegranate with him (which, unlike persephone, she refuses) and changing her name to Alysane stone and dying her hair black so she is no longer associate with her family (like persephone being ripped away from demeter and her name changing from Kore meaning maiden to Persephone meaning bringer of destruction). Since in the story ice and cold are very much associated with death due to the correlation with the white walkers, the Eyrie is an icy parallel to the underworld. Being in the Eyrie also allows for the season to symbolically change to winter as Sansa enters the “underworld” just as they do when Persephone enters Hades and Demeter causes the land to become infertile. while in the Eyrie Sansa has also learned from littlefinger and begun to take responsibility to people and events there, like stepping into the role of queen of the underworld.

Also, although littlefinger is the biggest parallel to Hades, George R.R. Martin also made sure that all of the people that Sansa has in some way been betrothed to or married are also symbolically associated with Hades. Of course there is Joffrey whom Sansa’s father betrothes her to against her mother’s wishes (like Zeus not getting permission from Demeter) and who is constantly referred to as a monster and even has his own hellhound (the Hound) as a bodyguard. Speaking of the Hound, he also symbolically marries Sansa during the battle of the black water when he gives her his cloak and has all sorts of hellhound/deamon symbolism. finally, the person she actually marries, Tyrion, is most commonly refered to as an imp which means devil spawn. 

In the show things are slightly different with Ramsay taking the role of Hades instead of littlefinger. the show also decided to have Persephone get revenge on Hades by killing him and eventually ruling the underworld herself (winterfell can be the underworld in the same way the eyrie is). It may not have been intentional in the part of the showrunners (I doubt it was) but this still makes a statement about the role of Persephone and is a resolution of her story much more in line with modern values of female empowerment. 

My main argument was that Martin reimagined the myth of Persephone in order to highlight the tragedy of her story as well as the effect that it has on her psyche (i.e. losing her innocence and having to become more calculating and closed off in order to survive).

Sorry if that was a lot! It was a super fun essay to write and research and there was so much more I could have talked about especially in terms of the role of demeter (both with catelyn stark and brienne of tarth). Thanks for asking!

[impossible-rat-babies]

maybe. perhaps. I will figure out a way to work whm into eyrie’s lore

[impossible-rat-babies]

eyrie and elidibus are so similar it’s kinda. boggling

[impossible-rat-babies]

DT 100 MSQ spoilers

Save me living memory music. save me ;—; I’ve been rotating that music + the whole. what the gang does in living memory is so, so much what Charon did. tending to those on their way to death. the lost souls of the dead on their way to their final resting place. saying their last goodbyes—wishing the best for the future and knowing their memory will live on. so much of Charon’s philosophy of caring for people is written in this expac and I’m so. emotional about it. eyrie carrying out her duties with the same grace, fear, loneliness and hope. how one cares for the departed and remembers them.

I’m also gnawing on the idea of eyrie pondering what people they could have seen in living memory. what would the people they knew look like, recreated at their happiest? what would they have to say? what would they say to them? they settled so much of their grief over haurchefant, ysayle and papalymo to rest that it’s like. to see them in living memory would be shocking, but ultimately they have nothing more to say, nothing more owed to the dead beyond keeping their memories alive. (A much easier task on paper.) anything they would say to these fragments would be for their own benefit.

but to zenos again…….that is a can of worms. they left so much unspoken, so much they have yet to unravel. it would be naught but a memory, but there is still…so much that burdens them still. is it a chance to find some answers? what sort of answers would this person created from memories have to say? it’s the one part of living memory that still…bothers them? on a personal level anyway. it bothers them much the same way ultima thule bothers them. and amarout. these places are ghosts—shapes and shadows of dreams, the dead and the dregs of the hopeless. it’s not places they like to revisit often