#greyjoycest

i hope you know this is an insane comment to make. incest is a crucial part of house greyjoy’s dysfunctional family dynamic, from asha abusing theon on-page to victarion considering marrying his niece when he thinks he’s offered to. it’s there! there IS a psychosexual factor to euron raping victarion’s wife and emasculating him in the process, just as aeron’s rape at euron’s hands is also about power. incest is normalized in the targaryens because of pureblooded line nonsense, while here it’s very much about the enjoyment of overpowering your supposed equals (which is why we often see it happening between siblings). if targaryen incest has the half-assed excuse of being “consensual”, for the greyjoys it is about the humiliation and degradation that abuse forces upon another—and about power (be it acquisition of it through marriage or forced submission of your sibling).

there is a bitter irony in everything euron makes his siblings go through because it’s obvious to the reader that’s gonna happen anyway (euron is too smart, too unstoppable. aeron too detached, victarion too dense) but his victims (and i don’t mean solely of sexual abuse) do not. euron is a charmer as described by every other character that sees him in action and that seeps into some readers too. it’s fun to explore darker themes in fiction. it’s fun to look at euron “the antichirst” greyjoy and be completely terrified of him. if you don’t believe there’s something erotic in how euron is portrayed i don’t know how to help you! what i do know is that you’re not gonna sit here and pretend the book you like is not doing exactly the same thing you’re accusing me of with many different characters. are shiera and brynden’s relationship good divine incest or satanic perverted incest? what about snowstorm? don’t piss me off.

thank you for the ask, anon! now let's see...

theon/ramsay

i'll admit that before writing a fic about them i didn't fully see the vision. now i see it but they still fail to keep my interest for long. mostly because i find ramsay to be... kind of a boring character. he's a narrative tool for theon's story and a narrative foil to jon, but as his own character he doesn't compel me much. i DO appreciate how he affects theon, and their relationship is deeply interesting and psychosexual and creepy (my passions), but ramsay would need to be a tad more developed for me to be fully invested in this couple.

this said, i see you thramsay girlies (gn) and you ARE right. that ship is as canon as braime.

theon/asha

NOW this is something that i ship and so does george, i'll tell you that much. i find them particularly compelling for their strange similaraties with euron and aeron.

will they ever fuck? no, but asha has molested theon and that's like marriage in the greyjoy household.

i DO believe they're endgame in a way, as they will rule the iron islands together and create a better future for their people.

also, few sentences have gutted me like "sister. see, this time i knew you."

euron/aeron

"hello, i'm aeron and this my evil rapist brother whom i hate because he abused me as a child but when he speaks of conquering the realm in the name of the drowned god i think he's dope actually. but i can't let that distract me from his evils !! i must resist his wiles for i know his true nature."

"hello, i'm euron and i'm an evil murderer rapist who has comitted every crime and i have killed almost all of my brothers. but not aeron. i keep him close and i try to open his mind to my visions and i want him to worship me as his true god. i'm doing this to use him for my evil ritual and not because i need human connection and i want my little brother. i'm too evil for that as you sure can tell seeing my evil pirate costume and listening to my very evil speech."

the forsaken is the best chapter george has ever written. aeron and euron are so twisted together as characters their names almost read the same.

the tragedy of euron is that he believes in nothing greater than himself, and so he thinks there are no consequences for his actions. what if when i was a child i discovered god wasn't real and hurt you beyond repair because of it?

All I had to do was pinch his nose shut. [...] But his eyes grew frantic as he died. They begged me. When the life went out of them, I went out and pissed into the sea, waiting for the god to strike me down. None did.

what if in turn you later decided god was real as a way to escape the pain i caused you?

“It was me who taught you how to pray, little brother. Have you forgotten? I would visit your bed chamber at night when I had too much to drink. You shared a room with Urrigon high up in the seatower. I could hear you praying from outside the door. I always wondered: Were you praying that I would choose you or that I would pass you by?” Euron pressed the knife to Aeron’s throat.

what if i were your archnemesis but for me you were just my silly little brother, whom i loved in the only way i know how to love?

“Kill my own little brother? Blood of my blood, born of the loins of Quellon Greyjoy? And who would share my triumphs? Victory is sweeter with a loved one by your side.”

Bad Greyjoycest ideas nobody will ever write:

disclaimer: i've read a little over half of adwd but i've not yet reached victarion's chapters in it, nor do i know what happens in them (i only know they exist), so i can't account for what's said or mentioned in them. with that out of the way, however:

self-awarness and victarion are antonyms, they're things that walk directly opposite paths from one another, have never met, and will never meet. i'm pretty sure victarion doesn't even understand what self-awareness entails, because he thinks every thought he has had about everything is Right and the notion that they could be Wrong is not really one he considers. he's a person who doesn't really open space for doubt, which, fine, people say he's dumb, he's dense, and it's true, but those are also the qualities of a fighter and a war commander, so they do serve a purpose. especially considering victarion fights with a steel axe—that's not really a weapon that allows for unsure blows unless you intend to lose the fight you're fighting. once he draws momentum he needs to go all the way. that's victarion greyjoy, in and out of battle.

he has the very powerful ability of managing to Not perceive things that go against his beliefs of himself, his family, and his culture (or twisting those perceptions in such a way that the core of those concepts are not altered). he craves that stability, that things don't and won't change if he doesn't allow them to. and when he does commit something that goes against those principles that build the very thing victarion is made of, he acts as if he's never had the choice—that, if these unmoving things moved, then there was nothing he could've done about them in the first place.

that's how he talks about the murder of his saltwife. euron "made him do it". the way he narrates her drowning at his own hands very much paints him as the victim too. i believe he will never, but assuming he could, if victarion managed to assimilate the idea that what he feels for euron is not only hatred, he, too, would place himself as the victim once again. euron is dark and twisted and hateful, and that's why he put these things inside me—these unholy feelings that do not belong to me but rather to him and his malice. much like the murder of his wife, all is inflicted upon him by euron, and so he loses agency (which ironically puts him in a place of submission he so very much resents, though has followed before) instead of purity (or what he considers purity to be).

a way victarion could find to regain agency is by violating euron himself, which is exactly what euron wants. everyone calls his character a sadist (and perhaps in the common sense of the word he is) but psychoanalytically speaking, euron greyjoy is a masochist. he torments his victims to the point that they do and say things that contradict how they view themselves and their principles. he takes everyone over the edge. he wants to be punished. he wants to experience the guilt everyone talks of but that he has never experienced. and so it is with his relationship to victarion. even in a scenario where victarion beats or rapes or kills euron, he's won. he wants to achieve that which balon forbade him all those years ago—he wants to take victarion over the edge and die at his brother's hands. he wants to experience the power of the law that's been denied to him. he wants to be punished.