A Song of Ice and Fire

For reference, what I mean is bookwise, the House Stark sigil is just a grey direwolf on a white field. But showwise, it’s laid against green additionally and while the other colour on the field is technically white, the shade is more like off-white/cream.  

“The Stark sigil took a long time to develop. The direwolf is a big symbol in the [TV series], so we needed to establish something that really felt right.“ - Jim Stanes, Game of Thrones: The Artisans

On set banner of House Stark in season 1.

Season 6 Stark banner. 

I guess graphic artist Jim Stanes choosing cream or off-white might’ve been guided by a similar logic that Clapton used regarding colours worn in the North. 

“We have a lot of blues and grays, murkier colors that seemed right for the harsh northern climates. The Starks represent a warm family unit, so the blues of their costumes are rather warm. But within the family, the various personalities are reflected in what they wear. For example, Sansa is in a slightly cooler blue.” - Michele Clapton, CostumeVault

(As we know Sansa’s colours get darker as the series passes showing her innocence and romanticism fading and her moving more towards grey.)

Additionally, considering all the battles that would be fought white would dirty a lot more easily and be harder to reuse so cream seems like a necessary compromise.

Adding green in was a Doylist decision on the show’s part and when seen against the Lannister and Targaryen banners, it spells out its difference more as the two share the colour red while they lack green. 

(Source: season 6 House promos)

Buckle up because this got REALLY long. 

For House Lannister and Targaryen, it’s red & gold and black & red respectively.

House Lannister: “The King does not ask. He commands” - King Joffrey

House Targaryen: “I will take what is mine. With fire and blood, I will take it.” - Daenerys Targaryen

And for House Stark, it’s grey on green, which is curious. 

“Fear is for the winter when the snows fall a hundred feet deep” - Old Nan

It’s still displayed at Belfast along with the burnt Stark banner with the additional green escutcheon. 

What’s interesting about this is that instead of white or grey or even black, House Stark got a green background. It’s understandable that they would avoid white because the Wall and beyond section falls under that. 

(The words quoted are the Night’s Watch vows)

But it’s also something Clapton mentioned before about the Starks being a warm family unit. It’s also worth noting what the placard under the House Stark section says.

“We were never bound by the rules of any particular time period. I pared it down to each group of people had a look and a colour and way. I always like to tell a story through the clothes, and I think it helps the actors, too. Sansa is a perfect example of this. She leaves Winterfell for a life at court early in the first season and begins to take on more and more of Queen Cersei’s traits as season one goes on. By the end of the season, she’s really starting to look like her. But in season two, her dresses are destroyed in the first half of the season, and Sansa starts reverting back to her childhood. The colors start coming down, and she’s trying to alter things back to where she was. So at the end of it, she’s wearing something closer to her mother’s look. She’s come full circle.”  - Michele Clapton

Even for what she spells out about Sansa’s difference, she follows it up with an anecdote about her journey back home. So the choice to not use white or black might’ve been guided by a sense of creating warmth and that feeling of home is best captured on the show through the green godswood surrounding the heart tree.

ac: My comm, art done by @cj-k [Cj_KhalifP on twitter] !!

kinslaying & war: the two heroes who are fated to be enemies.

grrm | asoiaf | luca marinelli gif | lord commander uon snow by josu hernaiz | asoiaf | a wiki of ice and fire | images found on pinterest | asoiaf | got!dany gif | asoiaf | the prince that was promised by arantza sestayo | grrm |st. george slaying a dragon | asoiaf | image found on pinterest | holy family with st barbara and the infant st john by paolo veronese | asoiaf | magdalena penitente by tintoretto | asoiaf | san agustín by philippe de champaigne | asoiaf.

Snowcastles in the Eyrie

History repeats itself and we see how everyone responds to their second chance.

Tyrion sees Sansa as his redemption at being a husband, at fulfilling his oath to protect his wife. This is what keeps him from turning on Sansa during his trial, it's why he did not force her to have sex with him, it's probably why he stopped Joffrey when he was having her stripped in the same room he was forced to rape Tysha.

Petyr sees Sansa as both his second shot at Catelyn, and at raising a daughter he might have had with Catelyn. He can't decide which he wants, which guarantees that he'll have neither because this man was creepy enough.

Jaime sees Sansa as a chance to keep his oaths, to prove he isn't Oathbreaker. It's why he gives his sword to Brienne, it's why he's treating instead of wiping out disputes.

Brienne sees Sansa as her chance to fulfill her oath as a knight. All of her charges have died, she wants to prove she can protect someone.

Cersei sees Sansa as herself, young and pretty with unrealistic goals. She tears Sansa down because she doesn't want anyone else getting what she didn't. If she had to suffer marital rape, then Sansa will too. If she got hit by Robert, then Sansa will get beaten too.

Sandor also sees Sansa as himself, before his brother abused it out of him. Before the world rewarded him for going against what he believed. Before he gave up. Sansa made him believe that it was still possible. Even for a moment.

Dontos sees Sansa as a meal ticket, unfortunately. Even her saving his life did not grant her his loyalty. It did not even spare her his sexual advances. He literally got a second chance at life and continued the same way he was before. He learned nothing.

Tywin sees a young woman in the middle of a war and waves her off as unimportant. He wants to forcibly impregnate her, despite her young age, and then he probably would have had her killed. He has learned nothing from Elia's horrible death.

Alayne Stone in the Vale of Arryn 🩵🕊️

First off, there’s the obvios seasonal motifs of his character. His family’s house words are “winter is coming,” and his role, as a man of the night’s watch, is to sound the alarm and take up arms against the cold. And his name is literally Snow.

This cold our boy has to fight is something akin to death. The prologue of agot forewarns us that “the real enemy is the cold,” and that exposure to the elements is the leading cause of death among Night’s Watch rangers. The NW has to fight against an army of the dead and some weird ice people, who seem to be the same threat. Bran’s first chapter introduces us to Ned’s greatsword Ice, which is used exclusively as an instrument of execution. Cold = ice = winter = death.

The Greek goddess of spring was Persephone, which translates to “bringer of death.” In her myth, she is kidnapped by the god and king of the dead, Hades (who was told to do so by Zeus, as a prank), and taken to the underworld to become his wife, making her queen of the dead. However, due to circumstances, Persephone must return to the land of the living every spring, and only stay in the underworld during the winter. Through our modern, largely Christian worldview, we tend to conflate Hades with Satan, and thus associate him and his underworld with fire, but in pre-Christian times that wasn’t the case. He was not fiery to the ancients, he was just “the gloomy one.”

This is noteworthy because Jon is also involved in a slightly ambiguous kidnapping/marriage situation. He is forced to pretend to join the faction that his love interest, Yggritte belongs to, and to do so convincingly, he has to enter into a romantic and sexual relationship with her. She also sees him taking her hostage when they first met as him kidnapping her, in a way that implies they are now in a relationship. Either way, as a result of a confused kidnapping, Jon and Yggritte become functionally married.

And then of course there’s the scene where Jon and Yggritte have sex in a cave. Yggritte tells Jon she never wants them to leave. The cave, a warm and wet hookup spot, is probably some sort of anatomical metaphor, but Yggritte also tells Jon a legend about an army of ghosts endlessly wandering about somewhere further in. Altogether I think this links it pretty strongly with the Greek underworld.

At first Sansa did not notice the third stranger. He did not kneel with the others. He stood to one side, beside their horses, a gaunt grim man who watched the proceedings in silence. His face was pockmarked and beardless, with deepset eyes and hollow cheeks. Though he was not an old man, only a few wisps of hair remained to him, sprouting above his ears, but those he had grown long as a woman's. His armor was iron-grey chainmail over layers of boiled leather, plain and unadorned, and it spoke of age and hard use. Above his right shoulder the stained leather hilt of the blade strapped to his back was visible; a two-handed greatsword, too long to be worn at his side.

[...] but Sansa could not take her eyes off the third man. He seemed to feel the weight of her gaze. Slowly he turned his head. Lady growled. A terror as overwhelming as anything Sansa Stark had ever felt filled her suddenly. She stepped backward and bumped into someone.

Throughout the entire chapter, Sansa is fawning over Joffrey, trying to please her betrothed and keep the fairytale like veneer over her story, and when Joffrey and Arya get into a fight, it all breaks apart. Joffrey snaps at Sansa, and for a brief moment, the illusion disappeared.

His eyes snapped open and looked at her, and there was nothing but loathing there, nothing but the vilest contempt. "Then go," he spit at her. "And don't touch me."

It's only when she wills herself to ignore that slight does her illusion of a gallant Joffrey come back into play. Even so, when we see Joffrey again in Sansa II, she's uncomfortable because she still remembers the incident at the Trident and Lady's following death. At first, she had, rightly, blamed Joffrey for it because she finally saw that romance tinted lens crack, but had to make a conscious decision to absolve him of the guilt from her mind because he was the crown prince, because he was the future king, because he was her future husband and to hate the man she, at that point, believed she'd have to spend the rest of her life with would be folly. And still, she's nervous around him.

When Prince Joffrey seated himself to her right, she felt her throat tighten. He had not spoken a word to her since the awful thing had happened, and she had not dared to speak to him. At first she thought she hated him for what they'd done to Lady, but after Sansa had wept her eyes dry, she told herself that it had not been Joffrey's doing, not truly. The queen had done it; she was the one to hate, her and Arya. Nothing bad would have happened except for Arya.

In Sansa II, she meets Petyr Baelish for the first time and immediately is uncomfortable, the unease cutting into the otherwise dreamy atmosphere of the Tourney, much like the murder of Jon Arryn's squire, from which she can't look away from.

When Sansa finally looked up, a man was standing over her, staring. He was short, with a pointed beard and a silver streak in his hair, almost as old as her father. "You must be one of her daughters," he said to her. He had grey-green eyes that did not smile when his mouth did. "You have the Tully look." "I'm Sansa Stark," she said, ill at ease.