This chapter serves as the violent, irreversible catalyst for the overarching geopolitical conflict of the series. By juxtaposing Bran's innocent, literal elevation above the physical stronghold of Winterfell with the treacherous, subterranean political reality of the Lannisters, the narrative brutally enacts the fall of House Stark and shatters the romanticized illusions of Westerosi chivalry.
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This chapter establishes the rigid, suffocating architecture of Westerosi gender roles and the psychological alienation of those who do not naturally conform to them. By mirroring the physical confinement of the needlework room with the martial tension of the training yard, the narrative maps the encroaching political conflict onto the children of House Stark and House Lannister, utilizing Arya and Jon as the critical, marginalized observers.
Spirits and loyalty to particular villages: A Theory
I just read both No Evil bonus comics and watched the whole series several times, and I have theories. Buckle up.
Unhinged ranting below the cut, plus spoilers for both No Evil: Judgement and Ornament.
So. Multiple times spirit characters in No Evil remind humans that spirits "Don't have loyalty to a particular village just because they live near it". Vinkel says so in "Sick of McCoy", and Wrip echoes him a few episodes later in "Soft Child" that it doesn't work that way.
Except... It kinda does seem to work that way. We see in Judgement that the Black Ick was what brought most of the main cast together. Before that, they mostly lived as one spirit per village.
Kitty lived in what seemed to be a large, fairly dense town. The "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" spell is hers; she's shown using it to heal the townspeople.
They don't seem to treat her very well. Her dress is ratty and too small, and once she heals this kid they send her on her way without even saying "thank you". And look what happens when her spell doesn't work to treat the Black Ick:
This might be explained by stress, but this guy was awfully quick to scream at a child. And for what? Not knowing more spells? She's like ten here.
Paula was in a similar situation. The lumberjacks of her village take Paula with them to evaluate the trees, then stop listening when she says something they don't want to hear.
(It should be noted here that Paula was right! The trees were infected with Black Ick, which got out once they tried to cut it. Go figure!)
But that's just the kids. Surely an adult spirit would be treated with more respect?
Wrong. Just a few pages before the sequence with Paula and the lumberjacks, we see Xipe Totec and her original village. The chief doesn't like her, and is even said to have threatened her with his shotgun. Regardless, she refers to herself as "The spirit who guards this village".
Shit happens. I really encourage you to read the comic, but after it's all over Xipe Totec says this:
"Only because I am a spirit that resides near your village, it does not mean that I owe you anything."
This is the first chronological instance of the argument that spirits don't owe the local humans their loyalty. Now let's look at who else is most insistent about it.
First, Calamity. We all know Hollow treated her really badly, and that she spent some time in Blackwell Asylum. I have more thoughts on what exactly happened there and how the timeline adds up, but that's for another day.
Next, Wrip and Vinkel. The timeline I've been assembling suggests they were also in Hollow when shit went down, but let's instead look at some panels from Ornament.
Wrip happily introduces herself as the "Spirit of Salem" in this flashback. Then there's a timeskip, and she and Vinkel show up in Silver Sorrow with Niccola (all but explicit alien, btw. Ornament is wild) on a crashing blimp with a stolen artifact. Dialogue at the end of the comic and in the most recent episodes suggest she and Vinkel have been in hiding ever since, hence the name changes.
For more evidence that Wrip and Vinkel were treated badly in Salem, look at this conversation between Vinkel and Bill.
Bill is an outlier in that, unlike all the other spirits we see as kids, he seems to have had a pretty okay childhood. He lives with the village elder, who acts like his grandma, and she stresses multiple times that it's unfair to expect too much of him while he's still a kid. The village children treat him like any other kid who just happens to be a prairie chicken sometimes.
When Wrip and Vinkel meet him, they're consistently surprised that he's allowed to shapeshift at will, that he's free to wander, and that he can play with the other kids. Bill's Grandma even confirms that "Someone dear to [Vinkel] hurt him very badly" in a way she won't even tell Bill about.
Skip forward to canon. Most of the spirits are living in the same area, within walking distance of each other. Only Huey seems to be in frequent close contact with the local villages. The monkey triplets, who were noted as living in Hollow during Judgement, are no longer doing so (I believe they may have done most of the raising of the main cast. More on that later). The spirits only feel the need to intervene when Hatfield and McCoy go really far over the line. This brings us to my conclusion:
The spirits are purposefully trying to de-emphasize the "village spirit" system because it leads to spirits being treated like a commodity.
And I really can't blame them. Most of them had rough childhoods in their respective villages, then saw Amaroq get worked to the bone until he vanished. The Hatfield and McCoy villages constantly accuse them of being involved in the feud, and whatever happened in Hollow was bad.
A lot of this comes from Judgement, where the original conflict between Coyolxauqui and Tepeyollotl was how spirits should relate to humans. Exactly how much responsibility spirits have towards humanity has been an underlying theme for the entire series, and I'm eager to see it explored more.
My new article is an analysis of the Spanish Love Songs album Brave Faces Everyone, and why to me it's the quintessential millennial album. It's my favorite piece I've published. If you're a millennial you may understand why.
Brave Faces Everyone and the Quintessential Millennial Experience
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The problem with so many people not being literate enough is that every discussion gets derailed in a counterproductive way. Take representation. You tell people representation is important and they will leave that conversation with the very erroneous idea that the purpose of fiction is, actually, to represent real life as it is. So they will always derail critical analysis of a narrative by not treating it like a narrative. One easy example. When people say that Toy Story 3 had the perfect ending, and how making Bonny then not care about Woody much anymore ruined her character to them, people don't try to rebut it by responding to it as a narrative, but instead will say stuff like: "Well Bonny is a kid. Kids get tired of toys all the time. It's realistic" "Wow how could you be mad at a child for acting like a child? So petty 🙄", which completely misses the point. Because Bonny isn't a child. She's not a real person. She is a narrative device. One that people felt wasn't satisfyingly fulfilling her purpose. But do people respond to that? No they do not. Realism doesn't matter when it stops serving the narrative.
And then there are the million comments just like this: "Wow I'm a twin and that's not how twins are like at all, the author is so ignorant" "That's not how relationships work, the author must be a virgin 🤭" which just boils down to the same issue I spoke of, of people taking fiction, something that exists in the realm of subtext and metaphor, and interpreting it as something meant to be taken very literally. For instance, does that person from the first example, at any point, question whether the author was trying to represent the accurate experience of being a twin in the first place? No, they do not. They just assume. Because "representation". And because they hold a particularly individualistic view of it. Because an author having twins in their work does not automatically mean their goal is to "represent the twin community". Again, fiction exists in the realm of subtext. Their goal could very well be, for instance, to represent a form of duality by their use of twins. And there is a difference, between criticizing harmful stereotypes existing in a work, and not being able to discern the purpose of a work in the first place because you believe the purpose of every work of fiction must be to represent reality and be educational in its simplest form.
