#dearxstorm

Whenever I think about the Starklings at the end of the series, I just think about this:

When he closed his eyes, he dreamed of direwolves.

There were five of them when there should have been six, and they were scattered, each apart from the others. He felt a deep ache of emptiness, a sense of incompleteness. (Jon VII, ACOK)

There should have been six.... This is why I don’t think any more Stark kids will die (other than Jon, but you know what I mean). It’s so much sadder and more meaningful if Robb is the only one who doesn’t make it to the end. There will only be five of them, when there should have been six.

And it’s so sad, because Robb didn’t even want to be king. He was the only one of the five kings who didn’t ask for his crown. He shouldn’t have even been the Lord of Winterfell, a duty that was placed on him at the age of fourteen, years before he was supposed to be ready for it. It was a deadly responsibility forced upon a child.

“Gods be good, why would any man ever want to be king? When everyone was shouting King in the North, King in the North, I told myself . . . swore to myself . . . that I would be a good king, as honorable as Father, strong, just, loyal to my friends and brave when I faced my enemies . . . now I can't even tell one from the other.” (Catelyn III, ASOS)

And I think about this line in TWOW, when Sansa meets the seventeen-year-old Wallace Waynwood:

Robb would be his age, if he were still alive, she could not help but think, but Robb died a king, and this is just a boy. (Alayne I, TWOW)

Whenever people criticize the lack of smallfolk PoV characters, someone inevitably pipes up with how those characters are boring because they’re divorced from the intrigue. I very much disagree because what they do is bring in some serious perspective. We get all the thoughts and feelings of these highborn characters, and it’s so easy to get caught up in how they see the world, what they believe the problems are, whether they’re justified in their actions.  But whether Aemond Targaryen killed Lucerys Velaryon or Rhaenyra responded to her son’s death in battle by having her nephew murdered by a sadist, whether Daemon Blackfyre stoked resentment because he wanted a crown or Daeron sent men to arrest him unfairly, whether Ned Stark threatened Cersei Lannister’s children when he could have just gone home and minded his own business or Cersei Lannister murdered Ned Stark and imprisoned his daughters to avoid facing consequences - for all that these disputes caused immense strife, they seem so petty. Tens of thousands of smallfolk died during the Dance of the Dragons. How many more during the Blackfyre Rebellions and the War of the Five Kings? We see the fallout of the latter - it’s bad!

His relationship with Robb pre-romance is already a fairly cute one, but it has some issues with Royce's apparent coldness