it all goes back and back

i will abandon snark for this comment to say that i dislike how surface level in reading most of the responses to this question are. i know that the internet in general and reddit in particular is not always made for long thought out answers, but "war bad" and "feudalism bad" can be gleaned from like. a wikipedia summary of these books. and NO ONE BROUGHT UP GENDER

these just kill me to read. we won't ever know these book meant anything or had any themes worth conveying unless they finish. four thousand pages of nothing i guess

💯

#this is why i’m always talking about grief so much of this series is about how fully losing someone can destroy you & your ability to#connect with others and not even just in war plenty of people lose loved ones to very normal events#and the story is shaped by how in refusing to confront their own grief they break everything around them#i mean catelyn spends multiple chapters just reflecting on her own grief but people don’t like.#bring it up & talk about it as a theme outside of the context of ‘war is bad’#but it’s not just ‘war is bad’ it’s about how all consuming loss is!

this is likely to happen i think when a text actually expects u to actively engage with it in depth and wants u to come to your conclusions rather than spelling them out for u

what are any of you people saying. do you hear yourselves

the one 4 upvote comment to get it. i was starting to lose hope

2x06 / 3x06

Thank you all so much! 💗

if we accept the premise that varys is implying, which is that joffrey was convinced by someone else to execute ned stark, littlefinger is the only possible suspect. we know that varys was trying to keep ned alive by brokering his exile to the wall. we know that cersei and tywin and pycelle all want a lannister peace, which is impossible with a dead ned. renly fled king's landing and cant have said anything to joffrey. the only person with the motive and the means in all the capital is littlefinger.

so even though joffrey does make impulsive decisions, i think for all the important decisions of the war we can often see the strings of some other player (tywin, littlefinger, etc.) actually moving the pieces.

and cersei mentioning janos' lordship being littlefinger's work immediately after mentioning that she had told joff to let ned take the black makes me feel like the text is nudging its readers to make this connection. if petyr would do something as "nonsensical" (but really self serving) as making a butcher's son the lord of harrenhal, then he would do something as "nonsensical" as beheading ned stark

in retrospect this 100% sounds like something littlefinger told joffrey and cersei is trying to pass off as robert's line so that tywin doesnt blame her for joffrey's behavior

this may as well happen

???