#hotdtxt

a) gwayne is consistently trying to save lives, but he's consistently advocating for it by saying "this is a hopeless situation, we need to give up and flee." he's trying to make the best of things while always seeing the worst. he can be brave when he thinks he has to be, but if there's any other option he's extremely risk-averse. think of how completely his attitude switches from carelessness to total refusal to ride in daylight after his first dragon encounter: there's a danger, there's an obviously safer option, that door is closed. end of story. and when he tries to bargain with daemon, when he should be making a show of strength and confidence, he gives away far too much of his self-perceived powerlessness. he even uses the word "pleading" out loud.

b) as i said in another post's tags, gwayne has a pattern of offering his loved ones cages as if they're escapes. gwayne's protectiveness of alicent against criston comes from a genuine fear she's being abused, but attacking her lover is still a patriarchal thing to do. gwayne's offer to criston is a real attempt to save him (and all their men), but it's still imposing class hierarchy on criston, and it's still undercut by gwayne's own nostalgia for an abusive home.

and in the sept scene in the finale... it's complicated, but there is an aspect of this, at least in terms of how daeron receives it. gwayne is trying very hard to protect daeron as a parent should, because he knows he's failed to do so in the past - but he's paralleled with ormund as he does it. he's treating daeron as a helpless child while daeron is trying to be an adult; he's unable to see that daeron's reasoning is about a sense of responsibility, not just obedience or shame; he calls daeron "my boy", which is simultaneously a touching act of affection and possessive, belittling language; and he's literally telling daeron not to unchain tessarion. while tessarion is growling at him. daeron has only ever known a parent-child relationship as a cage, and the way gwayne presents it to him doesn't actually challenge that. even when he's trying his hardest, gwayne offers daeron love and a slim chance of safety, but not autonomy.

c) gwayne has chosen not to tell alicent about daeron's abuse, despite the fact that daeron is only a ward and therefore could be removed from his situation. this is implicitly because gwayne thinks that king's landing would be no better. and like, it IS bad, but is it really worse than oldtown? i'm genuinely not sure.

but the one thing oldtown definitely has over the red keep is that incest (and by extension abuse as a whole) isn't openly treated as "normal" there, and given the emphasis on daeron being kind in this conversation, i think gwayne is more concerned about daeron losing his sense of right and wrong than daeron suffering.

(which i think is a less indefensible stance than it might sound on the surface - he's trying to break the cycle, he's trying to limit how deep the effects of daeron's abuse can go, he's trying to make sure daeron remains himself rather than becoming someone the current daeron would hate - but it still means gwayne is deciding, on daeron's behalf, that there is no better option than enduring. maybe even that enduring is on some level "good".)

(besides, who's to say that the daeron formed under one form of abuse is any more "himself" than the daeron formed under another? is daeron's kindness really just despite ormund, or is it also, in part, a result of ormund keeping him scared, ashamed and obedient?)

d) during criston's final speech where he lists all of the seven, gwayne is paired with the smith, a god people turn to fix a broken world. i've gone back and forth on what that means, but i think ultimately it's ironic. gwayne's mindset seems to be that the world IS broken and far beyond his power to fix. all that's within our power is personal morality and endurance. he's still determined to retain those, but his hope is not for the world as a whole, it's more like: maybe i can at least spare some of my men. maybe i can at least protect my family. and that hope gets ground down and down to an ever smaller scale until it's just: maybe daeron can still live. even if thousands of others are dying on my watch, maybe i can just save this one boy.

when gwayne goes to war, that is the longest he's spent away from oldtown (and ormund) in at least a decade. and he spends that time getting more and more attached to a man who reminds him of ormund in some of the worst possible ways. he very nearly dies trying to find the good in this man and save him (and others) from himself.

gwayne may hold the class and ethnic privilege over criston, but he is also, in his own way, someone very used to being an outsider and second-best: an untitled ward in oldtown, a superfluous second-in-command in the riverlands, a gay man in a hypermasculine world. and he is still outranked by criston, subject to his whims, and dependent on his decisions to stay alive.

and criston cole is many things but among them, he is fanatically religious, prone to violent outbursts, and fond of making chilling philosophical speeches. (but criston's emotions are honest, while ormund plays games.) he is someone who shrugs off and philosophises rape committed by his men when gwayne asks him personally to condemn it. (but ormund actively punishes those who resist rape.) and over time, gwayne's relationship to criston devolves more and more into gwayne arguing and pleading with him to think of the safety of those in his power, himself included, and being refused. (but at least he isn't punished for questioning him at all.)

gwayne's abandonment wounds are freshly salted by otto's disappearance, but he doesn't want to talk about it with alicent, so he keeps turning away from her and trying to shake her off until finally he comes out with: "you get on with it, don't you? (meaningfully) when there isn't any choice."

and then alicent says: "my son daeron." and gwayne draws himself up, looking... uncomfortable. pained. guilty, even.

and then when gwayne can't avoid the question he looks at the ground, then puts on one of his showy exaggerated tones and pretty blatantly tries to work out what alicent wants to hear. what he says about daeron is true but it's also a list of relatively superficial status symbols until he relents and just says "he's kind." and then he reassures alicent that she made the right choice while avoiding eye contact for a full ten seconds. his only fully sincere words after daeron's name is mentioned are "he's kind" and "i'm sure you did your best". and immediately after saying the latter he ends the conversation with a shaky voice. he grasps alicent's hand as he leaves, but he doesn't meet her eyes as he does it.

a) this is nothing like how ormund talks to daeron. he threatens and shames daeron, but it's always very grandiose. we've never seen this kind of playful malice from him before. he's even doing a fucking """gay voice""", and that gay voice is based on gwayne's.

b) the way ormund uses daeron against gwayne... it's not just that it's daeron being mean. it's ormund taunting gwayne with the sight of a smirking teenage boy.

c) 'backs against the wall' is not a line that works one-on-one or even really as a three (since it's plural). that's something you say to shun someone as a group, a way of announcing the moment you see them that they're other, unwanted, and fair game. and gwayne's weary reaction really seems to say: yeah, i've heard that one before.

and then in gwayne and daeron's argument afterwards, gwayne seems to have lost sight of the actual power dynamic of his and daeron's relationship. he's acting like a) he is entirely helpless to defend daeron, b) daeron has the power to say no to ormund and defend gwayne and just isn't doing it, and c) daeron has betrayed him for his own safety (when gwayne should know full well that there's nothing safe about being ormund's favourite.) and almost the whole time the camera is emphasising the fact that daeron is taller, while gwayne looks up at him and speaks with an outraged but pleading tone, as if he is the child.

i think this is genuinely an emotional flashback. gwayne is on one level trying to be the parent and to wake daeron up to ormund's behaviour being unacceptable, as he's surely had to do many times before, but in this moment daeron has a better grip on what's happening than gwayne does. ormund has transported gwayne to his memories of peer abuse and distorted everything, and gwayne's only able to ground himself in the reality that this is actually child abuse, and he is an adult responsible for that child, when daeron gets desperate enough to directly ask for his mother.

but basically. i was talking about gwayne's morals and posthumus pointed out that gwayne is not naive or idealistic, despite a lot of people kind of assuming/expecting him to be. which is really interesting to me.

i think a lot of people (myself kind of included, although i hadn't thought about it very hard yet) were anticipating gwayne's arc with criston to be one of corruption, and took that one conversation of theirs - "we will all become beasts before our end" / "only if we abandon our principles" - as gwayne being an idealist who would be disillusioned just as criston had been. like, he was trying to do a good thing, but this is still a rich man saying the world would be a better place if we all just Followed The Rules. is that not a privileged perspective?

but while gwayne did have to unpack privilege, the corruption never happened. what he lost was more like hope than innocence, and he doesn't emerge broken, just worn down. he's actually kind of narratively vindicated - the arc's conclusion is essentially that gwayne can't save criston or his men, and his attempts to do so were flawed, but it was still good and worthwhile that he tried. he gets to tumbleton and has a moment of nihilism there before deciding to keep trying yet again.

and gwayne's backstory really recontextualises the above conversation. gwayne is not talking about principles this way because he hasn't suffered, or hasn't had to make hard choices, or because the rules have always been on his side; and the violence they're talking about is not just any violence, but specifically rape. which is actually, as it turns out, a form of violence gwayne understands far better than criston does.

also: gwayne threatens to leave in the reunion scene, but we're still implying that he's normally present. gwayne being absent can't be the status quo or, again, daeron would not relate to him this way (the most trusted person in his life*, the only person seriously competing with ormund for his affection) or talk this way about him leaving (as if he's breaking a promise). if the situation deteriorated in gwayne's absence, that means he was previously preventing or at least slowing its deterioration.

and gwayne doesn't just ignore daeron asking him not to leave; gwayne's arc in this episode is him making an active decision to stay. (arguably it's implied that he has a change of heart as soon as he looks back at daeron, but it takes until the window scene for him to commit out loud.) and that decision is not really framed as gwayne recognising and making up for past failures - that comes later, in the finale. in this episode, it's more like gwayne, shortly post-death-march, is finding the courage to recommit to a fight he's grown weary of after fighting it for so many years.

none of this is to say gwayne couldn't be doing more. whether gwayne is practically or psychologically capable of more is a much thornier question which i don't really have answers to at the moment. i'm just saying... he's definitely been doing something.

gwayne and daeron share a lot of scenes, but they only make physical contact twice. both times it's gwayne initiating it, and neither time is it for the purpose of showing affection.

during their reunion, gwayne grabs daeron by the upper arm to turn him to face him; and during the battle, he grabs him the same way to physically drag him out of danger. the first is ever so slightly violent just by virtue of being tinged with anger (although i don't think it actually hurts), while the second is a definite sign of love, but either way, the touch itself is one of the least intimate ways it's possible to touch another person. and even this only happens in moments of desperation, when gwayne feels an imminent threat of losing daeron forever.

obviously gwayne has his own trauma, but i do think this boundary is daeron's, because there's a clear contrast here to how gwayne interacts with alicent. gwayne and alicent share only two brief scenes but gwayne is physically affectionate in both - he kisses her hand in the first one and holds it in the second, in an unmistakably protective way. obviously there's a gender difference in expected forms of affection, but if gwayne is comfortable with this with his sister it's hard to see why he would be uncomfortable, say, putting his hand on daeron's shoulder unless daeron didn't want him to.

and daeron really doesn't seem to be seeking out physical affection from gwayne. even when he's pleading with gwayne not to leave him, he doesn't touch him or even reach out towards him, he just... looks at him.

with ormund, physical contact always carries an air of menace. most of the time daeron seems to be purely enduring ormund's touch, but even when he seems to be leaning into it in some way, it's incredibly pained. and significantly, in the knighting scene, daeron looks longingly at ormund at first, but when ormund actually puts his hand on him, his faint smile fades.

the only time we see daeron initiating and genuinely comfortable with touch is when he's with tessarion, and i think it's really significant that this happens with a dragon, which must be an entirely different sensation from touching a human.

it's also notable that daeron seeks out affection from tessarion in secret, knowing ormund disapproves - because ormund also vocally disapproves of gwayne and daeron being close, to the point of calling gwayne a child molester over it, but that doesn't seem to be the actual reason for their lack of physical affection. gwayne and daeron defy ormund in private in many ways, but their physical withdrawal remains. i think we can safely conclude it's not imposed upon them.

when i first noticed this aspect of gwayne and daeron's dynamic, i wondered if it was actually a failure in gwayne's parenting, where he'd set too firm a boundary in his determination to differentiate himself from ormund and left a need unmet, while daeron was too inhibited and shame-ridden to assert that need... but i don't even think it's that any more. i think this is genuinely the only way to approach daeron that can make him feel safe. when he's with ormund he has to endure unwanted touch after unwanted touch without even being free to look too uncomfortable with it, so to be able to breathe around anyone else, he needs it to go without saying that he refuses.