#stachedocs

Prim is a very fun character to play with because there's kind of two different "versions" of her unfolding at the same time: the version of her that exists now in the present, and the version of her that existed "before." When her story opens in chapter one it shows Prim waking up in the Shire... immediately following the Battle of the Five Armies, where she saw many of her friends and her lover dying, but then when she herself is knocked down... instead of dying, she wakes back up at home a full year before the quest ever began. She thinks she's gone mad, her family certainly thinks she's gone mad, but ultimately she realizes and accepts that this is the reality: she really did live through all that, and now she has a second chance.

One thing that is most fun to me about The Calling is that it's built on an age-old time travel trope that I positively adore, one that I have read countless times over in the Hobbit fandom alone... BUT there's a key difference from Prim's story to others I have read: she wakes up a YEAR before the quest starts. Not a few days, a few hours, or a few minutes... she has a lot of time to think her approach through and isn’t forced to wing it. She has months and months during which she's just stuck there ruminating all day long over the things she knows are in store. And instead of wallowing in her misery (although she kind of does that internally lol) she immediately takes action and does everything she can to ready herself for the quest, and — much to the shock and horror of most other hobbits — ready the Shire for some nebulous threat which only she believes exists. Even though (to her knowledge) the Shire was never really threatened during the "before" time, she has this overwhelming sense of doom and gloom, that something bad IS coming, and it drives her up the wall that most hobbits would rather just ignore the outside world than prepare for any kind of threat. The exception to this is the Bounders, which she is able to force her way into by the grace and favor of Old Took lol.

Prim is... a very angry, very bitter person, but she is that way because of how much she loved her friends and family before, and how much sorrow she felt at losing them. She's a VERY different person this go round; the Prim of before was much more easy-going and really didn't know a thing about survival or fighting, much less war and bloodshed. She comes back a changed person, but of course the people around her don't have the context for it to make SENSE why she's changed so much.

And an unfortunate side effect of that personality shift: she's quite literally a different person now, so of course her relationships with the Company don't slot into place the same way they did the first time around. As much as she was underestimated and judged harshly as a useless dead weight on the group, she was also a kindhearted and easygoing type person who loved a good laugh... as compared to the Prim of NOW, who is much more stand-offish, very goal-oriented, and her sense of humor has very much been killed off, so it takes her a lot longer to reconnect with the Company. And with Kíli in particular! In the OG timeline, Prim and Kíli were smitten with one another very early on, with similar natures and similar humor that they bonded over. Whereas the “now” version of Prim is kind of a big buzzkill, and she finds herself frustrated because she loves  Kíli very much — but the version of him that she remembers is the one who had already been through so much on the quest and matured a bit. And then the dwarf who shows up in the Shire is making foolish mistakes as they set off, and telling jokes about wargs and things that THIS version of Prim doesn’t find funny, and she ends up being frustrated and pushing him away and they kind of hate each other for a bit in the second go around lmfao.

They do reconnect, of course, in the end — and Prim is successful in her mission of saving the Durins! For the most part, there is a happy ending for them all. But there's a lot of heartache on the way there, and Prim is kind of a fantasy take on how trauma impacts a person's life even long after it took place. Some wounds never go away, only scar over and still hurt from time to time... but she DOES get to heal and I think that's important. There's a lot of hurt in this fic, but it isn't a tragedy in the end!

You could call Sarella a spiritual successor to Cressida! I do definitely think of them as individual, separate ideas and characters. In terms of plot and storylines, there’s almost no overlap between the two of them! However, one of the things I thought about a lot because of Cressida was how a sister would slot into the Stannis-Robert-Renly family dynamic — who would she get along with, and how would that change the war? Is she the type of person who would rally the Baratheon vassals after the brothers have died off?! The answer is different for each of them: Cressida is the type who could and does rally the troops, Sarella not so much.

Sarella is also very different from Cressida in several key ways. For example, in the first couple of chapters of Storm’s Roar you see that, up until the events of the story, her whims have been largely indulged by Robert. The biggest of these is that she’s run off every single one of her suitors thus far, not desiring a loveless political marriage, and Robert allowed it out of a dual amusement at her antics and affection for his little sister. This drives a massive wedge between them as the story kicks off, as Robert (whose strings are being pulled behind the scenes, of course) seeks to gain a tighter hold on the West by betrothing Sarella to Jaime Lannister against both of their wills. She protests, but ultimately Robert is the king and his word is law, and this is really the first time since she was a young girl that she has ever been powerless. It’s not an experience that she takes kindly to, even though — very hypocritically — she has very much used that power to her own advantage in the past!

Storm’s Roar is very much a relationship driven story. It’s not about Westeros as a whole, it’s really not even about how the war gets resolved, it’s very narrowly focused on Sarella and the people she loves. Being Renly’s twin, she was a young kid during Robert’s Rebellion and was kept very sheltered from everything that was happening at that time. And from her adolescence on into adulthood, she’s been living a life of great luxury in King’s Landing. As the War of the Five Kings kicks off, the things she loves start to get stripped away from her slowly but surely: garden parties and lavish feasts morph into sieges and armies at the gates, Robert is killed, Renly and Stannis go to war against one another, and her “nephew” Joffrey is a puppet ruler who hates Sarella almost as much as Cersei does — he hates her because she treated him very much like Tyrion did when Robert was alive, mocking and reprimanding him when he was being vile, and of course Cersei’s pre-existing hatred for her is blown up into astronomical proportions when she’s married off to Jaime. Then there’s Jaime, who wants fuck-all to do with her, Tyrion who sees her as a friend but can never really decide how much to trust her, and Tywin who wants her to learn to be a demure little lady and give his house the heirs he’s after. And in the middle of all this there’s Sarella: her friendship with the Starks, taking on a big sister/protector type of role with Sansa and Arya, her grief over her family’s demise, and her relationship with Jaime wherein they both gradually start to care for the other over time no matter how much they both try not to. Along the course of the story, she is stripped out of her life of luxury and forced to FIGHT for what she wants in life. It takes her from a very vapid and spoiled pseudo-princess figure to a much more cutthroat and down-to-earth woman, by the end of things.

OKAY SO. Cressida is a fun one! Honestly, she’s one of my first GoT OCs that I can remember. Sadly, I’ve definitely forgotten a lot of daydream plotting I was doing way back when, because I was a moron who didn’t write a lot of it down, but I DID find some notes saved from 2019 for her story!

By contrast to Sarella: she’s just enough older that it makes a difference, such that unlike Sarella she wasn’t successful at fending off marriages. Cressida was just old enough at the time of the rebellion that her hand was promised away as a political alliance to help Robert win the war. And thus, her first romantic relationship: Tommard Dondarrion. Only, it isn’t really a romantic thing. Cressida is not attracted to men, not even slightly — though of course our terms don’t exist within her world and so she never names herself as such, she IS still a lesbian — and so this marriage is even more stifling than marriages like this inherently always are. She knows her duty, and she does it: she has two children by Tommard, a teenage son named Steffon, and a young girl named Argella. She loves them very dearly and defends them fiercely, but being forced to play the role of wife as such is still very stifling to her.

After Tommard’s death, she kind of blossoms into a brighter version of herself freed from the shackles of marriage, which is something she feels very guilty about given that he was only ever good to her. Cressida grapples with it a lot because she can’t bring herself to hate Tommard. As far as forced marriages and orientation go in GoT world, she basically struck gold: Tommard is a very kind and respectful husband. He’s sad that she can’t love him the way he loves her, but he doesn’t hate her for it, he doesn’t treat her cruelly, and he has zero sexual expectations of her: they only lay with one another for the purpose of having children, which is not something she was pressured into. Tommard is a wonderful father and Cressida feels very guilty that she can’t give him the love she thinks he deserves. And then he goes off and dies fighting the Greyjoys, cutting his life short, which only serves to make her feel even more guilty.

Along the way, she has some other loves or wished-for loves: she has long had a crush on Brienne of Tarth, which Renly thought was quite funny and 100% would have endorsed except that Brienne is oblivious to it for some time and then avoids Cressida after discovering it because she doesn’t return the same affections and doesn’t really know what to say, because she respects Cressida and values her as a friend. It’s dreadfully awkward LOL. They end up being separated for years during the war, and when they reunite... they’re both very different. Brienne has grown past the awkwardness and tries to apologize for not being there to protect Cressida and her children, though Cressida tells her that’s foolish and she was playing a more important role with Sansa. Cressida has long since moved past that unrequited love, and they reunite as friends, in the end!

Her next “love” never really got to blossom into a full one either. She and Margaery Tyrell had a bit of a thing, but of course Margaery knows the importance of being discreet. Most of their love story is stolen glances and gestures full of promise, things wished for but not acted upon. Margaery still dies in this story, which cuts their story short before it really has a chance to bloom.

Her last love is the one that is fully requited, and the one she gets to keep in the end, which is a non-POV OC, Jeyne Hornwood. Jeyne is someone Cressida meets during the war in the last few years of it. They are friends first, supporting one another, and it evolves into love. When the story ends, Jeyne is alive and well at Cressida’s side, welcomed into the family by the kids and everyone.

As for the war: Cressida has a much bigger role in it than Sarella! She’s more mature, she’s more martial-minded than Sarella is, and she’s got a rapport established with the Baratheon vassals that Sarella does not. When Robert and Stannis and Renly are all dead, Cressida steps into the power vacuum and takes charge, refusing to let House Baratheon fall into nothing or be absorbed by another house. This is a VERY condensed version because holy fuck this post got long (I’m so sorry) but the story ends like this: House Baratheon remains on the throne with Cressida as Queen and Gendry is legitimized as her heir much to his panic, but with Cressida ruling for a good many years yet he has time to learn the ropes. Likewise, Cressida’s son Steffon inherits Storm’s End, and Argella is named heir to House Dondarrion’s seat. Shireen, having been saved from Melisandre by Steffon, is recognized as Stannis’ heir and inherits Dragonstone. Cressida actively searches for her brother’s royal bastards, determined not to let Blackfyre history repeat, but almost all of them have been killed off: Edric Storm was sacrificed to R'hllor (which was extremely angsty for a while because Cressida was led to believe that Steffon had been sacrificed, instead) and Mya Stone is the only one left standing other than Gendry, however she refuses any offer of legitimization and chooses to continue living her quiet life guiding mules to the Eyrie.

I don’t remember a great deal about how the rest of the kingdom fared after the war (it’s mostly focused on the various branches of House Baratheon, and those they call friends) but I believe in the end: Dorne and the North were fully independent. Cressida has a strong relationship with the Starks, and a cordial kind of working relationship with Dorne. The majority of the Lannisters (Jaime and Tyrion excluded) and Targaryens were wiped out, between first fighting each other and then the Others. And the Vale and especially the Riverlands maintain a STRONG bond with the North, but do ultimately remain a part of the kingdom under Baratheon rule. Cressida is a much better ruler than Robert ever was, and Gendry is a better heir than Joffrey ever was, so the story ends with lots of promise for the kingdom to build back strong after all that bloodshed.

for the inspo!! ♡ we know we're set in h0td timeline just so I can make heart eyes at @samwilsonns and @kingsroad characters. but these two might appear in a more game of T setting because I love the worlds of @toilandtroubledbled and @stachedocsocs a big ♡ thank you ♡ to @zoyazenik, @prosemoireia, @fleetwoodmcs, @toilandtroubled, @richitozier, @fragilestorm, @elmunson