satinstark - Tumblr blog

satinstark · 5 years ago

Note

When one of my favourite fic writers was asked why she doesn’t like brienne’s POV she said that she’s a minor character looking for two major characters whose location we already know, they lack suspense and it’s hard to see why they’re there :( I feel like a lot of people feel this way, but what do you think is the purpose of brienne’s chapters in the grand scheme of things?

well, there’s a lot to unpack here, but:

the fact that brienne is defined minor already says all because no, she’s a pove character. she can be a secondary or not one of the main ones, true enough, but minor character? yeah, nope. she has POVs. minor characters don’t have povs unless you count throwaways with just one, but then again, melisandre has one pov and you’d never say she was a minor character, would you? yeah, exactly;

also, ‘brienne is looking for sansa and we already know who she is’: yeah, except that it’s not about sansa whatsoever, it’s about lady stoneheart and brienne herself and their rship with jaime, which means that if you’re reading brienne’s chapters wanting to find stuff on sansa you’re already approaching it wrong because ofc we know where sansa is, but brienne’s arc in affc is about sansa as much as sansa is a pretext to show you a lot of things that grrm couldn’t do otherwise.

specifically, we have two main things: worldbuilding and brienne’s character development. in order:

worldbuilding:

now, what’s happened for the first three books? people went to war and it apparently ended (in westeros) with an unlawful massacre. all of our povs until now until davos have been from nobles/economically privileged people who have mostly survived the war. we had some inklings of how it went through a) the riverrun chapters in acok where you learn that edmure had let his people in, b) the cat chapters in general, c) something from davos because he has the not-noble perspective, but did we see how the war actually devastated the entire country? no. what do brienne’s chapters offer? brienne and pod going around one of the most war-torn areas of westeros (near where the red wedding had been) and showing you exactly how much it hurt the real people living it, and sorry but if grrm, a well-known conscience objector during the vietnam war who feels about the consequence of war and pacifism very deeply, has said in an interview that his favorite scene to write in the whole of asoiaf is brienne and maribald talking about how ptsd destroys soldiers’s lives in war and war ruins people, sure as hell I’m going to assume he thinks those povs were important enough to warrant their presence;

also, you get introduced in a very subtle but effective way to a lot of future key players. as in, randyll tarly is currently on the small council or should be soon, but we don’t see him first in a sam chapter, we see him in brienne’s affc chapters where he’s presented as being basically the asshole version of stannis who told her to go back home and find a husband when he technically saved her from the bet in renly’s camp, we find out sandor is alive (!!! THE QUIET ISLE!!!), we find out where the fuck gendry ended up, we find out where the bloody mummers have scattered, we have found out where the brotherhood ended up etc, and oh wait lady stoneheart shows up and scuse me but catelyn was a major character with a shitton of povs and you’re telling me it’s a coincidence she shows up with her purpose and all in the chapters of the female character she shared a bond with, that was sworn to her and who’d have fucking died for her even after cat herself died and it’s a coincidence? like, i know this fandom hates catelyn dead or alive but she’s important, deal with it;

this also means that through brienne’s chapters grrm deals with a lot of his favorite themes to touch in a general setting without going into character-specific things, specifically:a) war, the consequences of war on who fought it, which are all negative and peace being always the best choice over it;b) those same consequences on people who suffered it without fighting (ie: have a bunch of orphans being slaughtered by bandits because their parents died!)c) the fact that the people in power don’t give a single fuck about itd) justice and how it’s dealt (randyll tarly and his exemplary methods /sarcasm)

okay, all good, you say, and then why did brienne have to do it, couldn’t it have been anyone else?

no, it couldn’t have been anyone else, and this is where we touch the other point, as in, brienne’s character development. as in:

now, george is a good writer. he also knows that if you have to set a character up for something at the peak of the series, you have to build it up before (ie: if he knew that theon was gonna save jeyne and jump from that window after regretting he didn’t die with robb, he had to start working on it since his acok chapters which he did, but you couldn’t have told that would be his storyline reading acok, right…?) which means that you need to make sure the reader has a background and knows what the hell is going on with them and why they tick the way they tick. I have previously ranted about how you can guess a lot of things about brienne if you read just acok/asos when I explained why she’s important as a literary character and I refer to that for it, but until you get to asos, since you don’t have her pov, other than ‘she’s not conventionally attractive’, you can only go insofar as:a) at some point she was in love with renly enough she’d die for himb) she’s a very morally sound person who really believes in her knightly oaths to a point that’s maybe unhealthy sometimesc) she’d die for whoever she trustsd) she will change her mind if she misjudged someone but she needs to have proofe) she doesn’t trust people easilyf) she can fight pretty damn well and possibly best than any other man in westerosg) everyone thinks she’s a joke for wanting to be a knighth) she has conflicts about wearing dressesnow, that’s not little. but still, it’s not enough for what I think george has in plans for her. now, rewind a moment, because we need to establish another point, as in…

grrm has made A Damned Point in these books of deconstructing the concept of chivalry/knighthood and pointing out how people who are seen by others as perfect knights/Good People To Boot are actually anything but and people who tried to actually do knightly things aren’t seen as such for hypocrisy or because society sucks or both (jaime and sandor vs gregor vs jaime’s old kingsguard vs the gold cloaks etc) and he’s been pretty damn going at it with a flamethrower. what you know is that at the point in the narrative westeros is at knighthood is a corrupted institution, no one believes in it (or almost), no one fits the definition of what a true knight should be or if they do other people don’t see it, and not counting the above (sandor because he doesn’t see himself as one and he loathes it because the moment gregor got knighted he got his worldview of it tainted forever, jaime because he tried and he wanted to be it and all he got was the kingslayer name) no one in these books is a darned true knight and recognized as such. now, I’ll bring up the goddamned dunk and egg books again because in those books we have a) the actual knightly oath, b) an actual true knight, as in duncan, who is/was recognized as such by the entire damned realm and actually was one. now, the oath is:In the name of the Warrior I charge you to be brave. In the name of the Father I charge you to be just. In the name of the Mother I charge you to defend the young and innocent. In the name of the Maid I charge you to protect all women….now, I’m gonna drop the question: who, while going around westeros with a *valyrian sword* she doesn’t think she deserves handling and duncan’s actual shield that she takes because there was a similar one in the armory while being on a quest to save a princess:- shows bravery at every other corner (no chance and no choice guys)- dispenses justice as much as she’s allowed to (the bloody mummers and most likely lady stoneheart later) because she kills people who did horrible things- defended the young and innocent (pod and the kids in the inn, again, no chance and no choice)- protected women (she’s out to find sansa and most people in the inn were girls and if you want to rape someone rape me)?answer: brienne of tarth. yes, brienne. no, no other. and no one else could have done that, because, and here we go to the last two points…

we knew what we knew about brienne, but the moment we go into her head we find out exactly all the reasons why she does what she does, we find out what she thinks about her life, jaime, catelyn, pod, the situation she’s in and whatnot, we find out what drives her, we find out why she was going to die with renly, we find out that her core problem (other than hating that people see her as ugly) is that she can’t reconcile being a lady and a knight and she hates disappointing his father and that she’s been subjected to a really damn crappy time in her life on account of her looks, which means that we saw her as a young girl who was about to get herself killed over renly and finally finds a woman who doesn’t laugh at her in cat chapters, we saw her as what jaime sees her as ie someone who gets him/changed his mind about him/a paragon of knightly strength and vows-upholding, but we hadn’t seen her from inside her own head.from where we find out that she’s a human being with very human issues, that she’s actually not a fluke in the sense that yes she’s that good of a person, yes she’s that nice, no she doesn’t care for glory or money or fame beyond ending up in songs where she’s celebrated as beautiful and strong and not called names like in real life, no she doesn’t have some hidden agenda to fuck things up for someone, yes she really believes in knightly vows, yes she really cares for the people she swears herself to that much, yes she suffers over catelyn’s death forreal, yes she really is gone over jaime that much, yes her self-esteem is crap, no she’s not gregor clegane.and she’s also duncan’s direct descendant, even if george isn’t dropping that bomb on her yet. (and her brother’s name is galladon like one of the fairest knights in legends and wait, in arthuriana the perfect knight is galahad of which brienne is a deconstruction in herself.)now, not to presume anything, but if I was writing a series in which I 100% deconstruct knighthood in every possible way - as an institution and as ‘what people thinks a knight has to look like’ - and I was planning to have as a plot twist to have a person who doesn’t look like a proper knight according to the audience and the other characters in the narration actually be officially hailed as The Best Knight In This Entire Fucking Realm I’d probably give them POV chapters instead of having them always be seen by someone else, because you can’t know if that person is deserving of the title until it’s always other people talking about it. the moment you’re in their head you know if they have what it takes for the job or not…

which means that the brienne chapters are there because from the moment she gets them and separates from jaime she starts on a journey which ends with her having to face her worst fears about her own shortcomings and put her in front of enormous moral and ethical choices (ie jaime - the man she loves - or stoneheart as in her former liege lady gone mad, also her mission for sansa vs saving the girls at the inn because if she’s dead she can’t find sansa… but no chance and no choice) which until now have about broken everyone who has faced them (even good people at heart ie jaime and sandor got their lives turned on for the worst when knighthood ideals and vows failed them) and guess what the entire point is that while everyone else couldn’t coherently live up to those ideals and vows, brienne most likely will because she’s exactly everything a true knight TM should be, and the moment she gets over it she’s going to get the results, and since I doubt grrm wanted anyone to say that if she got that he had written an overpowered mary sue who can fight anyone and take the moral high ground without being conflicted most of the time, he’s showing you where she comes from, that she’s hella conflicted and she has a hell of a lot of issues which still don’t stop her from pursuing her dreams.

and sorry but if she’s being written to become that (and the fact that she’s duncan’s direct descendant seals it nvm the knighting in the show which I’m 99% sure is one of the three book canon things they might have done this year because like hell dnd would have cared for knighting her before kingsguarding her, they’d have forgotten it as usual) then she can’t not have povs because then she really would look like your usual mary sue just not standard attractive, but then again you don’t get how much that hurts her or weights on her until you read her chapters. then it hits you in the face. like, reading it really cemented for me that she was top three for me and my favorite female character in existence, if it stuck at asos I don’t know if i’d have gotten it that much.

also, giving a pov to the only goshdarned canonically not attractive woman who stays not attractive with her experiences and background that ever graced mainstream literature has (for me and a lot of others I know) meant that for the first time we saw someone with our darned crappy childhood self-esteem destroying experiences being the protagonist of one storyline and believe me that didn’t hurt either, and most surely grrm also meant her as that specific rep, and that would be enough of a reason if he felt like it, but nvm that.

tldr: the purpose of brienne’s chapters is showing you that war sucks and make you understand that brienne is The Knight That Was Promised and they’re there so when she’s knighted and hailed as the best one since her ancestor and most likely even better than him you don’t go like ‘what the hell where did that come from she has no pov I’ve barely seen her in these books how am I supposed to buy it’, never mind that she’s fundamental to the conclusion of catelyn’s storyline whichever it is, and catelyn’s coincidentally an extremely major character in these series and one grrm also really obviously cares about. and grrm is doing the work now so no one falls off the chair gaping and wondering what the hell was her deal in ADOS. so if anyone thinks the purpose in those chapters is finding sansa they’re imvho very far off the mark. sansa being actually the purpose of the quest happens next book after the stoneheart situation is solved, then we can discuss it. but for now, it’s not what these chapters are about - they’re about brienne and her relationships and her quest and knighthood and the worldbuilding and about how war devastates the places it happens in always, and the fact that people read those chapters and then think ‘yes but what about sansa’ and/or ‘yes but what was the point’ is imvho a self-showing proof that it’s exactly why they need them: because like that, they them and only think about the other main characters or the overachieving plot or immediate gratification when grrm wants the reader to stop and think for five minutes about what he’s telling you and he’s pointing neon lights at brienne like ‘hey SHE is the one you need to keep an eye on because She Is The Quintessential Good Guy’. but the fact that I see people dismissing her chapters as useless and boring on principle because no plot gratification and ‘she’s boring’ about says everything that has to be said imvho, and that was my tea for today, thanks for coming to my ted talk.

#meta #brienne tarth #house tarth #knighthood #long post #winter is queueing

289 notes · View notes