it all goes back and back

what makes theon so so fun to me as a character is that because he is so deeply unpleasant and unpalatable in his actions, he immediately takes on this "character it's okay to torture" role in the narrative. no action taken against him is morally wrong because he deserves it. and yet the tension in his narrative is that everything done to him is still wrong even if he sucks. he didn't deserve to be taken as a hostage from his mother as a ten year old, he didn't deserve to live with a noose around his neck carrying his would-be-executioner's sword, he didn't deserve to be treated like a freak by his family for being a hostage for nine years. the weird tension of victim-perpetrator in the esgred scene (which nosafeanchorage discusses more cogently than i can here) and obviously the theon adwd reek-ness of it all play heavily into this too. he did so many awful things. and yet the reasons he's punished have almost nothing to do with his actual crimes. there's no justice here. and that's fun.

Can I speak my truth. I don’t think Brienne is even a little gay. I think she’s a kinsey zero who false positives on everyone’s radar. I think if you dropped brienne into new age 2024 she would get treated as a lesbian in her day to day life but whenever a woman liked her she’d be like. Ummmmmmm I’m really sorry but I don’t. Feel like that. I think she’d give lesbianism the good old college try bc of the direness of her male love life and come down firmly on the side of not attracted to women. I think she is quintessential pnw woman who you think is a slam dunk homerun lesbian based on everything about her who drops the word husband on you. I think she gets clocked on sight and mentions a partner named Jaime which makes people go. Okay. Partner i know that game. Jamie easily the name of a lesbian. Easily. And then she drops the he pronouns and you go. Well. Could still be a weird lesbian. And then Jaime is a business major in a frat with generational wealth. And HE is the kinsey five in the relationship.

Everyone invest in caltrops gwayne who takes hobert hightower's place and murder suicides ulf with poison stocks with me

yall it is dire on asoiaf reddit. they dont even know barristan selmy sucks

2026 and they've finally come around to it because enough people started calling him bystander selmy. so redditors can understand themes if you spoonfeed them in memes. jaehaerys next

why are these books treated by some as if they were only historical accounts of great battles? why are only the themes of war and power and violence treated as worthy of note, of analysis? why is the political treated as a topic of greater focus than the personal, when the books spend so much time understanding the raw beating hearts of each and every one of our main characters? i mean, i think i know why. but why.

the winds of winter comes out and it's just 700 pages of characters reading out every theme of the book in excruciating detail. jaime's lady stoneheart encounter is a 40 page meditation on the nature of vengeance and redemption. it's taking so long to write because george doesn't know the themes of his own book because winds of winter hasn't come out yet to spell it all out

tumblr level reading comprehension is easy to rag on but it's no match compared to reddit level reading comprehension. dawg what is this

the red wedding in asoiaf, the trojan horse in the odyssey, the backstabbing leading to the bloody baptism in the nibelungenlied, even oppenheimer and his atom bomb…. all stories about how the violent breaking of a certain social norm or law of warfare breaks the whole world apart on the psychic plane to reveal the blood roiling underneath. but this can easily be levied into a conservative, great-man, one single man or choice can decide our destinies sort of idea, even with good intentions…. what’s crucial in these stories is not that That specific event is the original sin of the world from which all other sins emerge, but that it is only a (uniquely remarkable) byproduct of the *existing* systems of that world, which reward and feed off blood! that there is no Good society to return to, no law of warfare that would make war acceptable