GRRM: I’m gonna include two septa-authors in Fire and Blood Volume 1.

Me: Cool!

GRRM: Well, one of them will only have become a septa late in life.

Me: Ok, well there is precedent for that. What’s her story?

GRRM: She has sex with a 30 year old groom in her father’s household when she is 13.

Me: You mean she’s raped by him?

GRRM: That’s not really important to discuss, I’m just gonna mention his erection.

Me: Ummmm …

GRRM: Then she gives birth to a bastard son.

Me: Wow, being forced to give birth to her rapist’s son, I bet the story really gets into the hard complicated emotions of that.

GRRM: No, I’m just gonna mention that she never sees her son again. Me: Ummm …

GRRM: So then the Hand of the King, who is also her father’s liege, is going to physically examine her and then tell her to have sex with the king in order to break up the king’s marriage.

Me: Oh man, being sexually assaulted and then forced into sex by someone with so much power over her, how does she take that?

GRRM: Oh we’re not going to talk about her perspective. This will mostly be quotes from him.

Me: What.

GRRM: Don’t worry, the sex between her and the king will have a certain sweetness to it.

Me: … how?

GRRM: She’s going to find out he’s a virgin and teach him how to have sex.

Me: But didn’t you specify that all of her sexual experiences up to the point were based on rape or sexual assault?

GRRM: Yes.

Me: And now she’s being forced into having sex with someone who is already married -

GRRM: Yep.

Me: To someone he loves -

GRRM: Yep.

Me: By someone that has sexually assaulted her and has complete political power over her and her family.

GRRM: Exactly.

Me: And you consider this sweet?

GRRM: Well, the sweetest version. Me: Do I even want to know the others?

GRRM: In an alternate version the king passes her around to his seven Kingsguard to have sex with after he does.

Me: What.

GRRM: And in another one she has sex with Jaehaerys and Alysanne together.

Me: The teenage rape victim being forced into this situation.

GRRM: Exactly.

Me: Well what does she think of all of this? Is she shocked and horrified at her powerlessness in a world that seems to only value her as a sex object?

GRRM: Oh I’m not going to speak from her perspective at all. 

Me: What.

GRRM: Then she’s going to run away with the married son of the commander of the castle garrison.

Me: How does that happen?

GRRM: Not important.

Me: But she’s still only about 15 right?

GRRM: Yeah, thereabout.

Me: And if this person was married, there’s a good chance he was older than she was.

GRRM: Sure.

Me: So what was that power dynamic like? Did he force her to go with him? Did she believe he loved her? Did he tell her he’d marry her in Essos?

GRRM: Not important.

Me: … ok, so then what happens to her after that?

GRRM: The man she goes away with dies and she has a series of adventures in Essos, including temporarily serving as a slave, before ending her life as a septa in Oldtown, where she writes this book.

Me: Wow, I bet that will be fascinating to read about.

GRRM: Oh I’m not talking about those. I’ll never mention her again after the affair with the king.

Me: What.

GRRM: Not important.

Me: Ok, so what’s this book’s purpose? Is it to be sort of like St. Augustine’s Confessions, where he talks about his sinful youth as part of his journey to God?

GRRM: No. This is erotica.

Me: WHAT.

GRRM: Yeah, it’s really about all her sexual adventures. Me: The teenage rape victim’s sexual adventures.

GRRM: Yep. And to show how bad Rogar is.

Me: But you’ve pretty clearly demonstrated elsewhere that Rogar was bad, right?

GRRM: Sure.

Me: So this doesn’t really add to that?

GRRM: It says Rogar is bad and wants to split apart Jaehaerys and Alysanne.

Me: But we know Rogar is bad and wants to split up Jaehaerys and Alysanne.

GRRM: Yep.

Me: So you could take this out of the story and nothing would change.

GRRM: It’s erotic too.

Me: And how long are you going to spend on this?

GRRM: Not long. About 2500 words.

Me: How long is the chapter?

GRRM: About 12,000 words.

Me: So this is going to be almost a quarter of the chapter?

GRRM: The author’s only talking about it reluctantly, you understand.

Me: I’m not sure you understand what that word means.

GRRM: And it’s erotic too, don’t forget.

People are very happy to fill their books with bloodshed, homophobia, misogyny, and a nauseating, weirdly voyeuristic (and inaccurate) amount of sexual assault, but are hesitant to touch on the artistic and philosophical legacy of the Middle Ages. Where are the musicians? Where are the frequent church-sanctioned holidays? Where are the innovators and the humourists? Where is your Gritty Realism for the good things?

There are a couple of problems with this whole approach to writing.

1) If you’re apparently going for realism in the first place, why pick fantasy?

This is, perhaps surprisingly, one of my favorite lines from the TWOW sample chapters, and after talking with @poorquentyn today I think I can put into words why.

On the one hand, it’s just a damn funny line. Mary Mertyns, despite only being in one chapter in ASOIAF and having only a handful of lines, is an immediately memorable character, fully in keeping with the snarky, confident widows whom GRRM has delighted writing into the story (from Barbrey Dustin to the Widow of the Waterfront to the Queen of Thorns herself). “Spry and cheerful” despite her captivity, mildly commenting that her sons and grandsons will “hang this lot of thieves” when they return from the war, Lady Mary has nothing but calm disdain for her captors and the men they serve, and that disdain feeds directly into the quote above. In Lady Mary’s eyes, Jon Connington still seems to be Lord Armond’s young son, a boy getting into childish mischief on Cape Wrath; you could almost imagine her wishing she could drag him by the ear back to Griffin’s Roost and censure him in front of Armond (presumably while JonCon stared at his feet and scuffed his shoe into the ground).

But what I love about this line is that it’s not just an amusing quip in the midst of “Arianne II”; it actually fits perfectly with the themes of that very chapter. Throughout “Arianne II”, characters are trying - and often failing - to take things seriously. For Elia, this adventure with her legitimate cousin is just that, another game, with no real consequence; twice Arianne has to remind her that her exploring in the caves, her kissing the maester’s servant, and her general attitude toward the venture are inappropriate for the seriousness of her business. But Arianne too is guilty of not taking things seriously enough, no matter how often Ser Daemon tries to convince her of the danger present. She understands that she has to approach Young Aegon with far more caution than she did her abortive plot to crown Myrcella, but she little understands that Daenerys, far from being a “young girl” and her (dead) brother’s would-be consort, is a power in her own right, who will bring Essosi hosts and fearsome dragons to what Arianne conceives as a Westerosi affair. Mary Mertyns fits exactly this theme: instead of seeing Young Aegon and the Golden Company for what it is - a real attempt to seize the Iron Throne and undo the history of Robert’s Rebellion - Lady Mertyns treats it as a local conflict, something her menfolk will take care of once they get back from the war.

Indeed, even the reader might fall into the same trap - thinking that this is a purely political chapter in a purely political story. Yet with a key setpiece of this chapter being a cave of the children of the forest, GRRM reminds the reader that for all the politics of Young Aegon’s new conquest, there is a far more terrible threat looming, not political but supernatural, not against one faction but against all humanity. Mary Mertyns’ comment, far from being a mere throwaway joke in a politically tense chapter, is another reminder of that failure to understand true gravity, which will doubtless ramp up even more in TWOW before the final showdown of ADOS. 

So. Sansa. I hear some people think she’s not very clever. This is a view shared by several characters in the books.

But there’s no reason the readership should share those views. Sansa is a very clever individual who makes increasingly good use of several skills she started the series with, and develops greatly as an observer and an actor over the course of the story.

Putting everything under a cut, for reasons of four books of brainpower.

thotho part two: idiototoque

you’ve heard of thom yorke

now get ready for thotho

Obama used to be a law professor. This is key.

Law school is so, so different from college. 

In college, everyone expects there to be a “syllabus day,” kind of a grace period where they can show up and get the lay of the land, figure out the bare minimum that they can get away with, the TA gives everyone their office hours, there’s an introductory lecture, and everybody leaves a few minutes early to go take a nap or something. You do the bullshit assignments, you say something in class now and then to get your participation check mark, and figure out how badly you can do on the final and still pass. 

But see, in law school, all the methodologies you’ve spent the last 17 years operating under go out the window. Day one of law school is you being thrown into the deep end of the pool—you’ve had a homework assignment for two weeks now, and it’s to read the first 200 pages of your casebook. And now it’s you and the teacher (who is usually as smug as Alex Trebek) gauging and assessing what you managed to absorb while you skimmed through all those pages of reading so you could hurry up and get to the other 150 pages of reading for your next period class, in front of 50 people who are all smarter than you. And if you fuck up, or you didn’t do the reading, you are at the mercies of not just the professor, but the silent satisfied judgment of your peers. 

Law school is hard, and it will make you feel stupid and tongue-tied and like you don’t know anything and can’t form an argument—because you don’t, and you can’t. Everybody there has had a 4.0 since birth. Everybody there was the smartest kid in their class, and you’re all rabidly competing for a sliver of a chance at something down the road. It’s petty, and savage, fiercely entrenched in a culture of formalities and ceremony, and exactly like Washington DC. 

Yesterday when I was driving home, the NPR reporter talking about the Oval Office meeting mentioned that Trump had thought it was going to be a “getting to know you” type meeting, but that he was surprised when Obama stretched their talk out to 90 minutes before sending him along to the Capitol building where he met with congressional leaders for more lengthy meetings and stuff he didn’t want to do.

And he hasn’t even gotten to the actual job yet. 

So think about that as we go into this. 

Trump walked into the Oval Office like a two-pump-chump freshman thinking it was syllabus day, and what he got was the first day of law school, and he hadn’t done the reading like everyone else had, and Professor Obama decided to put him in the hot seat. 

This was Obama’s chance for the most perfect revenge that would never be picked up on as revenge at all. He was gracious, polite—everything he needed to be for a peaceful transition and a good review from the press. And that would continue when the doors were closed, because that’s the key. Not a Come to Jesus meeting, oh no. If Obama were smart—and he is very smart—he would have treated Trump like an equal, and brought the discussion to a level that assumes far more of Trump than anyone has so far. Assumes that he’s an adult who’s been paying attention. Statistics, esoteric minutiae about the executive branch procedure, economic growth numbers, labor figures, domestic policies, countries Trump has never even heard of, shit that would never in a million years have been in Trump’s campaign soundbites or digestible summaries. 

No way to escape. No aides to remember any of it for him. Just the two of them. 

Because that’s what would strike a precise chill into Trump. The thundering realization that he’s woefully unprepared for the hard, boring, thankless reality of this, and Obama’s version of a smooth transition won’t and shouldn’t include remedial civics. 

That’s what I saw when they shook hands and Trump stared at the floor instead of looking back into Obama’s face. He’s just figured out how little he knows about any of this.