sleepy as always

Just imagine it:

First, imagine an AU that plays by Bequeathed from Pale Estates soulmate rules. Which is to say: soulmates are rare, undeniable, holy, and as much romance as divine retribution. It's an honor to be marked, but there's always the undercurrent of our marriage is healing a blood feud as there is in so many noble medieval weddings. Children of these marriages are always legitimate, as the soulmates can bed no other.

Second, imagine that someone with some sense was in the room when Robert Baratheon tried to keep Jaime Lannister on as a Kingsguard. However you look at it, even knowing the full story of events, it would have made more sense politically and for his own personal safety for Robert to have released Jaime from his Kingsguard vows after the Sack.

So we have a Jaime that is reinstated as his father's heir c. 283 AC but still desperately in love with Cersei. Tywin is to some degree aware of this and strives not only to see them kept apart, but to get Jaime married to secure his line. Though he succeeds in the former, he fails in the latter. Tywin arranges three marriages for Jaime over the years, but Jaime manages to be absent for the first two ceremonies and, though dragged to the third, refuses to say the vows.

By 297 AC, Tywin is at his wit's end with Jaime - who is more commonly known as Jaime the Bridegroom a la Edderion Stark than the Kingslayer these days - when his son gets a soul mark.

Tywin has the bard's playing songs about how romantic it is that some part of Jaime knew to wait for the other half of his soul mark before he even learns the woman his heir is fated to marry is the bastard daughter of Eddard Stark, whom we shall call Jeyne Snow.

There's no way for Jaime to avoid a marriage to his soulmate, and after 14 years of only seeing each other occasionally from across crowded rooms some of his obsession with Cersei is rubbing off. It doesn't help that she's clearly been taking one of their uncles or cousins to bed to have three golden-haired children that look so little like her husband... so Jaime goes through with this marriage. It's part resignation, part spite, and part maybe Cersei isn't my other half after all.

Jeyne, for her part, is mostly pleased to be legitimized even if it's only to be sent away to the Westerlands to marry an indifferent husband. It's not ideal, but it's honestly the best she could have hoped for in her situation and she's nothing if not practical. Perhaps even ruthlessly so, as a female bastard who practices the old ways has neither the Wall nor the Faith to escape to.

Ironically, Jeyne ends up spending the first year of her marriage liking Tywin better than her husband, because for all the man is calculating and ruthless, he has that same vein of practicality. Tywin sees it too and ends up training Jeyne to rule after him, because gods know Jaime will only see everything he's built turn to ruins if left to his own devices.

But Jeyne and Jaime do soften to each other, if only because they're in this together and there has to be some compatibility for the gods to have marked them as soulmates. It's not easy, and they figure out the sex long before the friendship part of things, and so by the time Robert dies they have a young son, Loreon, to continue their line.

The exact details of what happen in the capital don't matter so much - maybe they happen exactly as in the books, maybe Ned being Jaime's wife's father keeps Joffrey from executing him, maybe Ned being Jaime's wife's father makes Cersei encourage the execution that much more - but either way we end up with the same basic situation: the North rises against Joffery.

But what is Tywin to do? He's schemed his whole life to get a child of his blood on the throne, but even he can see just how bad a king Joffrey would be even with the most detailed management. If that was his only option, Tywin would be forced to stick with it - but it's not. His heir's wife is Ned Stark's most beloved daughter, Robb Stark's most beloved sister, and the military strength of the North is never to be discounted. (Maybe he's already starting to suspect that Jeyne is Rhaegar's daughter; maybe he's considering claiming she's Rhaegar's daughter to keep his blood on the throne.)

And... that's it really. I really want to see Tywin forced to decide between Cersei and Jaime, between the mad grandson already on the throne and the infant grandson he could place next to it.

I suppose there would be a lot of plot in the background involving Jaime and Jeyne learning to get along, and Jeyne adjusting to the Westerlands, and Tywin coming to like Jeyne despite himself (and maybe, through Jeyne's inexplicable fondness for Tyrion, value his youngest son just a little). But at the moment I'm focused on Tywin being forced to decide between what he's always wanted, but achieved the worst possible way and what he's always wanted, but better for the realm and with the possibility of ending badly.

Bonuses include: 1) At least one character mentioning the first time they see Jeyne dressed in Lannister red that she almost looks Targaryen and wondering if her mother was a dragonseed. 2) Jeyne learning to be at least a little bit sneaky and in the process saving all, or most, of House Stark. 3) Tyrion serving as marriage councilor for both Jaime and Jeyne without either party being aware, and being driven to drink even more than usual.

As always, feel free to adopt this poor plot bunny, just let me know if you do anything with it.

Because there isn't one. Which I think is odd because, after possibly Hermes, his Greek aspect is arguably the god we see the most of in PJO. With the exception of Jupiter and Vulcan, we see the Roman aspects of all the other godly parents of the Seven, so why not Neptune?

Personally, I'd argue that Rick put so much into Poseidon (and Hermes) in the original series that when it came time for the sequel, he couldn't think of an easy way to make Neptune (or Mercury) markedly different, and so he didn't bother. Or maybe he just wanted to focus on other gods in this series - it's hard to tell. But either way, that's not what interests me.

What does interest me is the prospect of what an in-universe Neptune might be like.

Now, as some of you know from my Kistos fic, I've a very, very specific mental image of Neptune and it is Victorian fisherman chic. (There are several reasons for this, possibly my fondness for Edwardian Farm, which has a few episodes on the Devon coast; possibly my bizarrely specific and inexplicable knowledge of how the medieval climate optimum effected cod trade in the North Atlantic and the rise of the Hanseatic League.)

Regardless of the origin, I can make a good argument for my mental image being valid. And it boils down to the fact that New Rome doesn't appreciate Neptune at all.

Granted, the Romans were hardly better. Their navy was mostly inconsequential, particularly in the Imperial period, when, "the Mediterranean became largely a peaceful 'Roman lake'" [x]. After all, why should anyone concentrate their military in the center of their empire when there are barbarian hordes on the inland fringes? That's not to say the Romans didn't have some spectacular feats of naval power in during the Punic Wars - but even then a common coda to most of their naval successes was, "but because the Romans were such terrible sailors, they were unable to read the signs of a storm coming and lost 90% of their ships on the way back. And so they had to build another navy."

Even then, Neptune only had one temple in Rome (not even listed on this site) whereas Jupiter had three. Apollo had two in the city itself and Cybele, a foreign goddess, had one as well. I can easily see Neptune being bitter and displeased by the Romans even at the best of times, if that's how they treat a god who is so primary to the Ancient Greek pantheon and the Ancient Greek way of life. And by HOO, things have hardly been the best of times for nearly 2000 years.

In short: Neptune is a bitter old man, and what sea-related trope better typifies a cantankerous, curmudgeonly cur than a Victorian fisherman? The cable knit sweater, meerschaum pipe, and chinstrap beard just complete the image.

But also: I figure because Poseidon is so well-loved amongst the Greeks and Neptune so disliked amongst the Romans, Poseidon spends all of his time in his Greek aspect and almost no time at all in his Roman one. And as anyone who has ever updated a computer before knows, if you get behind on your updates, it will take you a lifetime to get caught back up. (At my old job, I once encountered a computer which hadn't had any Windows updates run in 5 years. It took me 13 hours to run through them all.)

And as anyone familiar with version control knows, you have to pull (update locally) before you can push (send your changes to the repo), which is why I figure Poseidon probably has next to no idea what his Roman aspect has been getting up to for the last two millennia - he's not be getting the updates, because Neptune's not gotten to the point of being able to make them all. (Forgive my SE metaphors, but they make sense in my mind at least.)

Or, to make a long story very much shorter, I wish that we had seen Neptune in HOO, but since we didn't, look at my curmudgeonly Victorian fisherman take on the subject.

look at this hamster that looks like tyrannosaurus