i'm remaking this blog, new blog, new fc, new start. still modern-focused but I'll have a canon verse for those into that, if y’all want me to follow you from the new blog like this and i will--otherwise, this blog is being deleted in a few hours 

do you ever think about gendry knowing that the orphanage and caves full of refugees and all the people in them won’t be able to survive when winter comes, him thinking about arya stark telling him stories about winterfell and its walls suffused with warmth, deserting from stoneheart’s revenge design and leading a caravan of orphans all the way to winterfell that’s been recently rewon, seeing arya there recently returned from the dead at the head of her pack of wolves, and the only explanation he can offer is a tired and certain : i knew you would protect them, i knew that you would find a way to keep them safe

anyways what if the brotherhood is headquartered in chicago

anyways gendry hates highborns but like not /all/ highborns because when they were children a scared and hungry stark once climbed up onto his shoulders to give water to men dying starved in crow cages who had once been loyal to her father to ease their suffering not only out of a sense of duty to them for serving to protect her family but also out of basic human compassion despite their crimes so

it’s amazing how disconnected i feel from got discourse these days

gendry’s illiteracy is so big in modern because yes it’s about CLASS like everything with him tbh but his reluctance to pursue language skills is bigger than that too, part of it is this frustration that he carries in him, this stubbornness, that’s half a refusal to participate in a system of education that seems to have been designed to pass him along pointlessly and half headbutting against academia as an oppressive construct  --  almost trying to prove that he doesn’t want to attend the party anyways so it doesn't matter if he wasn’t invited  --  but bigger than that and rawer than that and realer than that is his isolation, his huge isolation and aloneness, and the thing inside of him that feel languageless, untranslatable, to the point where reading and writing seems to him, at first, so pointless, impractical and insincere. all these words belong to other people and the whole tradition of language as communication, as storytelling, is a tradition and concept of community and togetherness and human connection and there is that thing, inside of him, that doesn’t think that he is a part of that, dialogue is a one-sided concept to him, just him being spoken at, he has no sense of the communion of language for a long time in his life and that’s part of why he doesn’t feel motivated to learn to read / write at a higher level for so long and it’s also a part of why he’s so overwhelmingly stunted and bad at conveying the stuff that makes him up into words to offer up to other people. he just can’t communicate. he’s never had to, no one has ever wanted to hear it, and he’s never wanted to tell them. and if you don’t think that there’s an element of dissonance in feeling disconnected from his memories of his mother speaking mixed english and tagalog to him, the further ghost that makes of her memory and how the fact that he remembers almost nothing functionally of the language distances him from his early-childhood self rather than rooting him, representing just another layer of translating that he doesn’t feel capable of doing, then whew