The Night Queen

Do you ever think about how when older men look at Jon they see a surrogate son who they can shape into a great leader, but when they look at Dany they see a sex object who can be their fantasy girlfriend

the more I think about my beloved ned stark, the more I think about that "he couldn't fit a whole woman in his head" quote from succession. not to compare logan roy to ned but i do think that ned suffers from misogynist blinders a lot of the time. he was aware that lyanna was Different (didn't adhere to patriarchal standards) and thinks of it mournfully. he views it as something that doomed her and wishes he had done something different to save her - but saving her would have somehow entailed ned breaking her out of her expected role as a woman and I don't think he was capable of that. He does his best as a girl dad but again he does fail his daughters to some extent through simply not being capable of seeing them as full people. he knows that Arya is unwilling and incapable of conforming, but he never even questions that she will grow up and marry and be a lady. he lets her train sword fighting, but doesn't think about the consequences of that decision. he never talks to sansa about the intrigue and plots if the court that she will have to navigate, and her naivite makes her easy to manipulate. ned never even considers that that is something she will encounter so doesn't prepare her for it. he has a happy marriage with catelyn in part because they both believe so strongly in what a Normal Marriage should be in westerosi patriarchal society, and he listens to her political advice because their worldview mostly belong to the same paradigm, so nothing Catelyn says truly challenges his view of how things should be. but catelyn also has a strong magical intuition (she understands magical omens on a much more intuitive level than anyone else around her, feeling dread, doom, etc when any foreshadowing happens in the text), but this is not something that they can share because ned can't believe in that without questioning the righteousness of Roberts rule. I think cersei is actually the closest ned comes to Grasping the Idea of a Woman in the story.

jory isn’t talked about enough

FACTS