#ask pam

I hate, hate with a burning passion how much this kind of argument takes agency away from Laenor, and Corlys for that matter. Y’know, the only two men whose opinion on the subject actually hold any weight. Like, if Laenor really wanted to, he could’ve accused Rhaenyra of adultery and he could’ve taken legal steps against her, if people wanna complain about how much PrIviLegE Rhaenyra has that the patriarchy can’t touch her (narrator: it can) and she can get away with whatever she wants (narrator: she can’t), well then Laenor is the one person who wouldn’t have any problem challenging her because, like Rhaenyra, he’s a dragonrider descended from royalty and his father is the wealthiest man in the realm so I’m sure he was never super intimidated by Rhaenyra’s so called Targaryen Male Privilege. But instead Laenor was 100% on board with Rhaenyra having those children, loved those children like he were their biological father, and claimed them as his own, which means that legally those boys aren’t bastards and no one can prove otherwise. So really, who cares?

The only other person who could potentially care and have any say in the matter is Corlys… but he also didn’t gaf. He like Laenor, fully knowing the truth of those children’ real parentage, claimed them as his grandsons and named Luke as his heir, and as the Lord of Driftmark he had the complete authority to do that which was why Vaemond had no business trying to challenge that decision and why he never had the guts to bring the issue to his brother in person and why he had to wait until he was gravely injured to run to the Hightowers trying to gain support for his usurpation plot (also why he never bothered to name Baela or Rhaena as potential heirs, because he only cared about getting power for himself).

Spoiler alert but when Addam and Alyn eventually appear, and are made heirs to Driftmark, even though they’re very obviously Velaryons if not by name, they’re still gonna face a lot of prejudice and be challenged by their relatives for being “dirty bastards” daring to step “above their stations” in life, it doesn’t matter who they might resemble.

Like I get the need to flesh out the greens and not making them as outright villains as they are in the book. I get it. But I also think there’s ways to do that without taking away their bite? I mean in asoiaf the Lannisters are very obviously the villains, they are presented to us from the very beginning as the bad guys but they’re still allowed to be sympathetic and fleshed out and even, dare I say, characters the readers can find themselves rooting for.

And yeah, the Dance is a conflict in which everyone does bad things at the end but the greens still end up coming off as worse because at least the blacks get to have characters on their side who are always portrayed as wholly heroic, like Jace, Baela, Addam, and of course the rest of the squad that includes Good Guy Houses such as the Starks, the Tullys and the Blackwoods—no seriously the biggest indicator we get that the blacks are supposed to be the heroes is the fact that the Blackwoods are supporting them, that’s GRRM’s default Manic Pixie Cool House lmfao.

Even Daemon, who orchestrated what’s arguably the worst thing that happens in the Dance (B&C), is still presented as heroic during his lasts moments, maybe he’s undeserving of that heroism but that’s the direction the story takes.

Funnily enough, f&b as a source is heavily biased against Rhaenyra, and I think that’s a deliberate choice on GRRM’s part because he still manages to make Rhaenyra come off as sympathetic and likable at times, even if she does her fair share of war crimes. She, of course, gets the brunt of the criticism out of all the characters on her side, mainly because she doesn’t behave as a “good woman” ought to lbr. People love to bring up the fact that she’s called Maegor with teats in universe as a gotcha for how terrible she was as a ruler without realizing that A) they’re falling into the same misogynistic propaganda that was used against Rhaenyra to hurt her reputation and B) how fucking disrespectful that is towards Maegor. I mean he didn’t kill and torture his own teenaged nephews, kidnaped and forcibly married several women, almost single-handedly annihilated a religion, and brutally murdered anyone who opposed him, only for y’all to claim Rhaenyra was just as bad as him? She fed one (1) guy to her dragon, ordered the execution of a few people and failed to carry it through, and raised some taxes on KL. Being like Maegor? PLEASE, she doesn’t have the flair nor the commitment to be Maegor.

The point about Rhaenyra is that we simply don’t know how she would be as ruler, without the war and the trauma she underwent and affected every single decision she took as queen. Maybe she wouldn’t have been great at the job, but we can summarize Aegon wouldn’t have been any better. It doesn’t matter because that was never the point, and I’m aware I sound like a broken record but idgaf: the Dance was never a conflict in which both sides were equally in the wrong, even if both sides do terrible things, merely because the circumstances that lead to it were a woman being usurped and betrayed on account of simply being a woman. Rhaenyra may not be a perfect victim to some but that doesn’t mean she isn’t one, she doesn’t need to be an enlightened third wave feminist for us to understand that the patriarchy was weaponized against her in order to undermine her, that she was shamed for her sexual liberation and attacked at every turn and made to feel as if she was the irrational one for not peacefully giving up her power to her shitty little brother.

I don’t agree entirely tbh, like I do not hate all changes the show made with Alicent’s character, mostly because the book version is so cartoonishly evil and uninteresting, there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting her to have more depth, and I think the idea of turning her into a repressed catholic lesbian is amazing, A+, no notes. However I do dislike how much into a victim the writers ended up turning her into, because that’s almost as boring as the one-note villain version of f&b, and twice as annoying.

But I don’t necessarily think Rhaenyra is the one who’s harmed the most by the victimization of Alicent, the character who actually bears the real brunt of that is Viserys. Because in the book there’s nothing indicating that Viserys is ike, abusive or neglectful towards Alicent or the children he has with her. When they marry he’s only 8-9 years older than her and she’s 18, and some might find that situation still a bit icky but it’s nowhere near the same as a man in his mid 30s marrying his daughter’s 15 year old friend. Alicent also isn’t a teen mom, she has Aegon when she’s twenty.

We don’t know how good of a father Viserys was towards his younger children but we know he wasn’t a great one to Rhaenyra, since he allowed some of the more harmful rumors to grow around her, especially in relation to Criston Cole and their supposed romance that started when Rhaenyra was still a teenager and him several years older than her. Viserys also did nothing when Alicent started to antagonize a much younger Rhaenyra and isolating her from court. Not to mention the fact that he threatened Rhaenyra with disinheriting her when she very understandingly didn’t want to marry Laenor.

Aemond’s scuffle with the Velaryon kids is even farmed differently in f&b since Aemond, to start, had beaten one of his nephews “savagely” and then Viserys made a decree that Alicent and her children would go back to KL with him while Rhaenyra and her family would stay at Dragonstone,… and yeah my guess is this was mainly because he hoped some distance would solve the problem without him having to do any of the work, but sending Rhaenyra away really opened the opportunity for the greens to move further with their agenda and enabled them to usurp her in the first place.

And again, how he was as a father towards his younger children is hard to judge; we know his last night alive he spent it telling stories to Helaena and her kids, so maybe we can come to the conclusion the he at least had a positive relationship with her. Aegon and Aemond didn’t seem to be super devastated by their father’s death but Aegon and Aemond were huge assholes, so maybe their reaction shouldn’t be indicative of Viserys’ worth as a parent.

I feel like the main thing about book Viserys’ relationship with book Alicent is that by all accounts he wasn’t a terrible husband to her but she resented him anyways because the one thing he wouldn’t budge in was naming her son Aegon as his heir. She never forgave him for that and she sized the throne and left his corpse to rot. And of course the show tweaked that by having Viserys start to rot before his actual death, still due to his ow actions (or inactions).

Obviously the show also switched Jaehaerys’ role in Alicent’s story with Viserys as the dying king she cares for and calls her by another woman’s names, but I think that quite misses the point because I feel like Jaehaerys (despite my own personal opinions on him) represented something in Alicent’s life that she could genuinely look back to fondly and wasn’t corrupted by all the politics and scheming Otto dragged her into. In her dying moments she wanted to see her children and she also wanted to read to the kind old king who called her by his lost daughter’s name but never asked anything else from her. It’s an humanizing moment, the only one Alicent really gets in the book.

Hey remember those Targ/Stark bestie combos we’ve had over the generations, Alysanne and Alaric or Jace and Cregan? That’s going to be them, I just know it lol.

Hello Anon! First of all I know it’s been like, a while since you send me this ask. I’m sorry it took me so long to answer. But better late than never, I hope…

Ok so there’s a few separate parts of this ask, so I’ll try to answer each one separately.

What do you think of the moment where Bran thinks of Arya as his little sister?—Eh, honestly? I think this is just a mistake from GRRM and his editors. With a thousand and so pages long book, they’re bound to happen. I personally never thought there was more to that line than an editorial mistake, I could be wrong though. If I could think of an ‘in universe’ explanation, it would be that Bran tries to paint himself as older and more mature than he actually is, and thinks of Arya as younger than him, which imo, is kind of in-character for him.

I also wonder why GRRM wrote Bran seeing Lyanna and thinking she's Arya.—Well I think this is GRRM’s way of showing us that Lyanna and Arya share a similar appearance and personality. As if everybody who knows Arya and also happened to know Lyanna on a personal level inevitably making the comparison between the two wasn’t enough to hammer the parallels home. I know this is a controversial and touchy subject in the fandom (tho tbh what isn’t), but the way I see it, these shared similarities are important not necessarily because Lyanna is the Special Girl and being like her makes you Cool (though if you enjoy Lyanna as a character and also Arya, that’s obviously a plus), but because this ties directly to Jon’s own story, him growing up wondering what his mother was like, what she looked like, whether she would have loved him or not, all the while spending his childhood with a girl so similar to his mother, who loved him and accepted him so wholeheartedly despite his social status, and who Jon loved and cared for in return and he carries that bond they share and is unable to truly let it go even if it goes directly against his vows to the NW, which perfectly connects to the ongoing theme of continuing love despite distance and hardship that I would argue is a pillar for the series as a whole. In this essay I will—

I never said that? I think the way GRRM writers Arya can definitely be read as someone who doesn’t enter into the gender binary and I know people who see themselves in her or in other characters like Brienne, Asha, or even Dany and I have no right whatsoever to tell people how to interpret a fictional character.

Like, this is literally a quote in one of Arya’s chapters:

"Boy, girl," Syrio Forel said. "You are a sword, that is all."— Arya II, aGoT.

And while yes, Arya does very much insist on being seen as a girl and I think that’s worth noting when approaching how we talk about the character, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for someone who doesn’t necessarily fit onto this category to relate to her experiences.

And Emma D’arcy themselves have mentioned how they identify in Rhaenyra’s struggle with gender and wanting to break away from its confines, and that makes it even more easy for us a a modern audience to see show!Rhaenyra as someone who, had she at her disposal the terminology that we do, might not necessarily identify as a cis woman.

However that’s not what my post was about. My post was criticizing people who claim female characters who don’t conform to their gender expectations are inherently more privileged than those who do, or having “internalized misogyny” for being unable or unwilling to do what was expected of a woman of their culture. So Arya has “internalized misogyny” for being adventurous and liking to play outside, and she has to undergo a whole ass character arc so that she can come to terms with her own privilege of being a small child on the run in the middle of a war zone and facing all kinds of deprivations and abuse, but the girls who mocked her and made her feel inferior for not measuring up to what a highborn lady was supposed to be are totes fine lol no need for any kind of self-reflection whatsoever. I would wait for people to wipe out some quotes about Arya looking down on women simply for being feminine but there simply aren’t any.