I am the Cat

Like I'll be having a not-so-good day, then remember how Hector had given himself an entire pep talk to fight Achilles. He saw Achilles running full speed towards him and proceeds to just book it.

Or when Menelaus got shot by an arrow in like in an ultimately nonfatal spot, and Agamemnon begins prematurely mourning him while he's standing there like 🧍‍♂️” you're scaring the men.”

Or when Odysseus is walking around the camps with a royal scepter and is just beating people with it if he finds them packing or suggesting to leave.

Or when Hector is brainstorming on how to face Achilles and for a moment goes, “Maybe I could talk with him, we’re both princes, we can both be rational, I could reason with him… that's a horrible fucking idea.”

Sierra Boggess as Christine in the Las Vegas Phantom of the Opera (2006) and as Carlotta in the West End 40th anniversary production (2026).

I don’t think it helps people look at other fantasy writers and see worlds shaped for light, where goodness prevails because the universe was built to let it. Martin’s world is shaped for choice instead. Hope survives not because the world is kind, but because some people are. Because they try, despite knowing they may fail and that poison often prevails. Hope in GRRM’s world is not grand or eternal. It lives in the small and the stubborn. It is the flicker of a candle in a storm, the hand that reaches back when it does not have to. The kind of hope that still believes in love, even when the story does not and will not promise a happy ending.

That is not nihilism. It is faith made fragile and rawly human.