#I haven't been intellectualising weird asoiaf marginalia for ages

[st-clements-steps]

Ohhh, crunchy! 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15, 24, 36, please :D

Hey, hey, hey, lovely, the questions are from here

2. A minor or extinct house you need more lore on; you think I'd go Mallister, but no, I want to be part of the people making the Mallister lore, I have stolen them from GRRM, they are mine now, I'll share them obviously with other patrek, patrek, patrek enthusiasts. All those really borderline magical houses intrigue me, House Reed and all the other Crannogmen please; the Knotts and the Liddells and the Flints of the mountains, all those nomadic northern ones; that one at the edge of the Iron Islands, House Farwynd, are they Selkies? Are they warging into seals? Are they just a little bit like Shetlanders? Also it's kind of basic bitch of me, but House Dayne, they're very bloody sexy but I just want to see their real depth. (Also were House Poole once Crannogmen, their name kind of fits?) 5. Dead female character I need to save: Kyra. Obviously. Also I really should save Elia because personal affinity reasons. And then I think I'd have to save Lyanna too (I have written a POV of an older, saved, her, thanks to Eva being galaxy brained, and oh it was so interesting). Also Dacey so I can marry her please. Plus let's save all the live women, Jeyne P. and Jeyne W. and Pia especially. 6. A book or character you didn't like at first but have come to love - had a difficult initial relationship with feast and at first I found Brienne's chapters tricky but I came to really enjoy them. (I love her and I love wee Pod). And I didn't dislike Arya at first, but I was a bit bored by her, she just seemed quite like all those tomboy preteens I'd read as kid, Scout and Lyra and Tyke Tiler (British 70s children's novel that was still the kind of thing forced upon you in English in 90s Britain). But actually once she gets to Braavos, I'm much more enthralled and the Mercy chapter, oh, it floors me. 9. Build your small council - Tyrion, Gilly, Missandei (even though she's 11), in fact let's go Shireen too, and Wex (master of whisperers), and then before Tyrion kills me for making it a model UN class project, Barbrey, Arianna, Davos, and one of Asha's ratboys to be master of ships (She's busy ruling the Iron Island in my head). 10. A quote so good it makes you crazy -  Tyrion ruminating on the inevitability of history (and it feels like nature and nurture too, how generational trauma gets woven into us); It all goes back and back, Tyrion thought, to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads. Theon arguing vociferously that trauma does not need to be physical; The noose I wore was not made of hempen rope, that's true enough, but I felt it all the same. And it chafed, Ser Rodrik. It chafed me raw. Sansa realising how her trauma has a molded her; My skin has turned to porcelain, to ivory, to steel. (I love this, I steal it for characterisation constantly, because being porcelain is such an interesting image especially)

And finally my boy Jon being a poet; The pale pink light of dawn sparkled on branch and leaf and stone. Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond. Flowers and mushrooms alike wore coats of glass. Even the mud puddles had a bright brown sheen. Through the shimmering greenery, the black tents of his brothers were encased in a fine glaze of ice.

So there is magic beyond the Wall after all. He found himself thinking of his sisters, perhaps because he'd dreamed of them last night. Sansa would call this an enchantment, and tears would fill her eyes at the wonder of it, but Arya would run out laughing and shouting, wanting to touch it all. 15. Favourite Parent - Cersei (she's a terrible parent I realise, but she's the only parent who lives in my pocket) 24. A ship that gives me the ick - Jon Arya (actually find shipping her with anyone very difficult, she's very 11 in my head, I know its weird because I ship Sansa with a whole raft of people and there's only 2 years between them, but it is what it is, but also for me the idea of them being romantic very much diminishes their current love for another, why does a heartfelt sibling (or platonic in some other sense) relationship need to be really just oh its actually all lust filled romance?) 36. All the dub-con, non-con that gets sexy, I'm just there scrunching my nose, wondering if there's something GRRM needs to properly address with his therapist rather than continually writing into asoiaf. Oh and the timelines piss me off no end, House Stark in charge of the North for 8000 years! Eight Bloody Thousand? Really? And there's been basically no systemic change in society over that time? Was feudal back then? Still feudal now? Hardly any linguistic evolvement over those thousands of years? Etc. Thanks so much.