#sleepingdaffodils

Villains

1. Rachel2. Big Brother3. Tom Riddle4. Sauron  5. Hyde

TV shows

Oh gosh Rachel and I have a list on the whiteboard hanging between our rooms of the shows we want to watch... which means I could get up and walk not even five feet, orrr I could see if I can remember some of them

Oh this was not my meta however!  You're thinking of rhllor :)

However, the post about Ned Stark and House Arryn was probably this confession.  The discussion was scattered around different people's blogs, you can hop around the notes for links.

For me personally, the Old Gods aren't exactly satanically evil so much as menacing by virtue of being totally indifferent to human needs and human nature.  That still has terrifying consequences though.  For me so far, especially because I haven't finished ADWD, this is mostly a hunch based on thematic things in the text.  First of all the old gods and northern ways in general are so enshrined by the narrative, just held up as superior to all other things, northern culture being sooo much better to southern frilly soft nonsense etc etc, that I find it hard to believe that this isn't going to be undermined somehow.  As it is, it's just too easy to go "The north is the best in all ways ever" and that's not something I want in fantasy, to read how one culture is superior.  It also just goes against things I think ASOIAF is trying to say, so if Total Northern Superiority isn't deconstructed a bit I'm going to find it inconsistent with what I see ultimately as ASOIAF's pluralist premise.

Things associated with old gods do tend to have a real menacing undertone though.  There's the way the direwolves really and truly just AREN'T fluffy pets who are always right and true and easy to control.  There's all the scary shit that can happen with warging (one really does not simply warg into Hodor, etc; I mean Varamyr Sixskins comes off super villainously to me).  And there is this whole tone of "Be careful what you wished for" with Bran and his love of creepy horror stories.  "Is this the kind of story you wanted to hear" Old Nan asks once in AGOT ... that line just always stuck with me, knowing that ASOIAF is a story about the stories we tell.