#fantasy with heraldry is particularly good for this

[chimaerakitten]

Cannot emphasize enough how much I, as a fan artist and fan-designer/crafter, appreciate it when authors give characters convenient symbols to represent them by. It opens up vastly broader avenues of craft and art making.

[kellyvela]

2021 is the year I had to read with my own two eyes that Sansa is not beautiful and that she is not the lady in a song. Now I know for certain they have not read the books at all.

GRRM created Sansa projecting on her, his giant love for knighthood, chivalry, tourneys, heraldry, pageantry and courtly love.

The first book that presented him that world was IVANHOE - A ROMANCE. A whole book built around a tourney and the forbidden love between a brooding exiled hero with his father's ward, a Saxon princess.

Years later, GRRM based the Tourney at Ashford Meadow on IVANHOE, If you know what I mean....

[…] The great romantic tradition as opposed to realistic tradition in literature. My father called it all ‘weird stuff.’ He said I liked weird stuff. He liked Westerns. So his taste was more grounded, at least in his view. I was always fighting a dragon or going off to the stars or something like that.

—GRRM

Art credit: Just Like The Songs By John Matson © Fantasy Flight Games.

There’s something about the castles, and the knights, and the age of heroes, that has always appealed to me, particularly about knighthood, I mean, I always thought that was an interesting issue to explore, I talk a lot about it in these books. If you look at human history, the code of chivalry, as was promulgated in the middle ages, is one of the most idealistic codes ever, ever put forward for a warrior. The whole idea of that using your might to defend the weak and protect the innocent, you were more, supposedly, in theory, you were more than just a soldier, you were a champion, but that was a theory, in practice of course, knights were bloodthirsty killers, and they were the great warrior in their age, and in the contradiction between the ideals and the reality, I think there’s immense drama, and that’s one of the things that drove me through it.

—GRRM

He was asked or mentioned most of the stuff that’s already been covered, but one thing he talked about that I found particularly interesting was Romanticism. He said that he is a romantic, in the classical sense. He said the trouble with being a romantic is that from a very early age you keep having your face smashed into the harshness of reality. That things aren’t always fair, bad things happen to good people, etc. He said it’s a realists world, so romantics are burned quite often. This theme of romantic idealism conflicting with harsh reality is something he finds very dramatic and compelling, and he weaves it into his work. Specifically he mentioned that the Knight exemplifies this, as the chivalric code is one of the most idealistic out there, protection of the weak, paragon of all that is good, fighting for truth and justice. The reality was that they were people, and therefore could do horrible cruel things, rape, pillage, wanton killing, made all the more striking or horrifying because it was in complete opposition to what they were “supposed” to be. Really interesting stuf

—GRRM

The Middle Ages was very patriarchal. I’m a little weary of over-generalizing, since that makes me seem like an idiot — but generally, women didn’t have a lot of rights. They were used to make marriage-alliances; I’m talking high-born women now, of course. Peasant women had even less rights. But I was focusing on a noble family here as the center of the book. At the same time, this is also the era where courtly romance was born: the gallant Knight, the fair lady, the princess, all of that stuff. That became very big, initially in the courts of France and Burgundy, but it spread all over Europe, including England and Germany.  And it still has its roots in a lot of stuff that we follow today. I mean, in some sense the Disney Princess archetype — the whole princess mythos — that we’re all familiar with is a legacy of the troubadours of the romance era of medieval France. Sansa completely bought into that, loved everything about that. She dreamed of jousts, bards singing of her beauty, fair knights, being the mistress of a castle and perhaps a princess and queen. The whole romantic thing. —GRRM

So, Sansa is the radiant fair lady in A Song of Ice and Fire. If you can't see that, you are willfully blind.

[ganymedesclock]

I think it’s fascinating how our relationship with stories grows and changes. Some things, we meet them and know immediately we love them, and love them our whole lives. Some things, we love for a while, but not later; our needs and wants change, our worldview adjusts, and the infrastructure of our hearts, minds, bodies, carries stress differently.

For myself, I did not grow up with the horror genre. I remember being kind of repulsed by the idea when I was little- why would you choose to say something bad, when you could say something nice instead? This was a thought that haunted me, particularly when I read Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, the first book I’d really experienced where a major character I was rooting for died instead. Why would you choose to make something bad, when things could just be good?

Fantasy- particularly the soaring, dragon-riding, shining-sword good-against-evil fantasy- was my beloved, and it remains instrumental to me. So I don’t think it’s surprising that its particular vernacular about light and dark sort of seeped into the groundwater of me. At its most traditional, the fantasy genre preaches a message about holding the light close, and rejecting the dark.

But what is the dark? Most of us will not be attacked by demons or giant snakes or evil wizards. We will not be turned into dogs, and, honestly, while all of us at some point or another will encounter interpersonal malice, many of us will spend our entire lives without a personal nemesis. Some of the most violent and dangerous people we will ever meet will target us because of surface qualities or even traits that we don’t have.

So what is the dark?

Is it the way I lay in bed awake at night as a small child, trembling at the thought a smoke alarm might go off, or my appendix might burst, on the simple basis that I had been taught these were real things that could happen? The way that I became- increasingly over the years- certain beyond certain that if I tried to do something and failed, that failure would be inexplicably, yawning, horrifying, devour me beyond anything?

Or was it the great forces beyond my control- politics, wars, plagues, environmental changes? The things I yearned to be a hero against, imagined shining people with swords who had very little in common with me and could vanquish all the world’s ills?

The truth was, I have been very afraid of the world. For all of how I idealized the wolves and lions and eagles that sprang across heraldry, my temperament was more that of the deer- always with my ears and nose to the wind, wondering if that sound was a predator.

The hero classic, shining and triumphant, does not fear. They do not falter or drop their weapon or run away crying, and they absolutely do not linger helpless. Fear is, after all, a darkness- as is the rage that someone might use to overpower fear and fight through it. The pure hero of light throws all darkness away from them like their torch does the cave’s gloom. They are, so very often, explicitly chosen, explicitly marked; there is no way to be mistaken. What to do, and how to do it, are etched in the stars and so nakedly evident that even the beggar-woman in the marketplace can simply peer into their eyes and see that it is true, that it is good.

The truth was, I was not that person, but I dreamed of being them. I dreamed of their existence and importance and I pressed them into words and into art. I wanted to be perfect. Radiant. A knight in shining armor, a champion to others.

As I have grown, I have moved increasingly into the dark, and ironically, it was not because I lost hope.

The truth is, we don’t idealize heroes because they’re perfect. Or at least, we oughtn’t. I know I did, for many years; it was the part of me that pulled a disapproving puzzled frown every time someone suggested there was something to find in the dark I rejected.

The truth is, a hero is a hero because they stand amongst the dark, even if it is not inside them. A hero is not safe at home, comfortable and resting; heroism is a mantle donned in the face of adversity. In the face of horror.

The knight in shining armor, pure and radiant, has an inextricable and dependent relationship with the seething darkness they ostensibly cast down and reject. At its purest, the fantasy classic myth has only two players: the knight and the dragon. The hero and the adversity.

What is the dark? What is our personal dragon? I think that people who experienced more strife from without would have different answers, but for me, I can only see the darkness with a certain lens of pity. In idealizing the hero, I spent far too much of my life carving pieces off. It was not the light that had kindness for what I was- or simply, I lacked the confidence to put the real me into the light. Instead, dreading to look at it or study it at all, I threw it into the caves, into the dark, and it was the dragon that gathered these scraps and held them in its nest.

I could not love myself with the light for the very reason that I idealized it. For the very reason that I wished to only bring the best, prettiest, ideal parts of me, parts that didn’t even need to be mine as much as they needed to be lovely, to the light. I could not sully the shining hero with myself, even as a wretch to be saved.

So it was the dark that saved me; so it was the dark that held my imperfect self.

Returning as an adult, experienced and, I believe, a lot happier as a person, I can see there are oddities to this. Did the hero really never love me, or did I simply not think I deserved heroic love? Is it really heroic, true, pure of heart to reject the dark absolutely, and is there really no interplay of these things?

Is there only the blessed kingdom and the dark forbidding cave, or are there the dappled shadows of tree leaves and stained glass windows, things that are beautiful, things that we don’t want to live without? Is there a crepuscular truth, that intermediates the boundaries of these things?

Is heroism fake, simply because we can idealize it to such a point as to make it chemically sterile, inhospitable to all life?

Or, is it that the beloved glow of the shining knight is real- but can only be seen in the way that imperfect, disappointing things, more of an off-gray- become golden as the midday sun, when they come to save us at our worst?

As I move further into horror, its scrutiny and tropes, I don’t think I have lost fantasy. My roots as a reader and writer are there, and it is the place I think I will always return to. I think that the world is horrific. I think that the world is worth loving.

I think that we do not know our knight in shining armor by the actual color or quality of his clothes, but by the moment he picks up a torch and walks down into the cave. And a cave, after all, is merely rocks, until horror lives there.

[gotojobin]

#Mythicalcreature #mystical #mythical #legendarycreature Amystical, mythical, or legendary creature is a creature from mythology or folklore (often known as "fabulous creatures" in historical literature). Examples of legendary creatures can be found in medieval bestiaries. Many mythical creatures have supernatural powers (some good, some evil), powers that even in contemporary times have no physical explanation. In these cases the creatures bear more similarity to spiritual beings, such asangels, in religious thought. Often legendary creatures came to symbolize vices or virtues, or the power of good or evil. In many cases, their actual existence was secondary to themoral of the tale in which they featured. Legendary creatures have often been incorporated into heraldry and architectural decoration. This is particularly the case with those symbolizing great strength or other power. In contemporary times, many legendary creatures appear prominently in fantasy fiction. These creatures are often claimed to have supernatural powers or knowledge or to guard some object of great value. Mythical creatures have been part of humanculture throughout the ages and across all parts of the world. They are not just the "talking" creatures, animals able tocommunicate using language and also rather clever, as in Aesop's fables. Mythical creatures are in themselves beyond normal reality, often composites of existing animals or animals and humans.