#asoiaf and the american mythos

[eldritchtouched]

Something I find fascinating is that Lovecraft wrote a legitimately polytheistic setting while being a gnostic atheist, and GRRM writes stuff that only really makes sense for American atheists' views in relation to religion in his fantasy stuff while being an agnostic lapsed Catholic.

Like, while Lovecraft tried to talk about the alien gods as being essentially indifferent natural forces, and that they're supposed to be metaphors for his own philosophy of Cosmicism (that the universe is utterly indifferent to human affairs, there is no divinity, and that humans are fundamentally insignificant).

The problem is that his own stories doesn't really bear out his philosophy, like, at all. There are actual gods like Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep which have agencies, wills, and preferences, even when specific beings and their actions are utterly inscrutable or out of focus. They sometimes show interest in humans (like Nyarlathotep taking a human avatar and Shub-Niggurath, Nug, Yeb, and Yig aiding humanity in "Out of the Aeons"), and sometimes don't (such as Azathoth), or have other preferences (Yig cares for his children- serpents). Likewise, the various worshipers, while considered crazy for believing in alien gods because of their social contexts in-setting, are actually correct- those alien gods exist, and they respond to prayers and offerings. Likewise, normal aliens actually do acknowledge those alien gods, such as the Mi-Go.

And I think his Christian contemporaries and literary descendants understood the polytheistic implications of his writing. They desperately try to reinject Christianity into the Cthulhu Mythos all the time. (And I could tangent about the weird stridency with regard to narratives and religious insecurity, but that's for another time.)

For example, Long isn't at all fucking subtle in "The Space Eaters," which is a RPF with Lovecraft as one of the characters. And Long has this weird split where Lovecraft is vocally skeptical of stuff, but there's an intimation that Lovecraft is involved in occult stuff because he somehow intuits certain things. (And, of course, Lovecraft fucking dies because he becomes a "priest of the devil" for writing about the weird alien shit, the aliens are repelled by the sign of the cross, and a shaft of Jesus Light (TM) saves Long at the end because he was a good Christian boy who kept faith, unlike atheist Lovecraft.)

Meanwhile, GRRM's bigger settings go with "no gods, all misunderstood natural phenomena for the setting" [ASoIaF] or else "all the gods/demigods are petty assholes jockeying for political power and control" [Elden Ring]. GRRM also has the usual issue Western writers have with fantasy- assuming monotheism too readily. So you get people only worshiping one god (such as Qohor and the Black Goat) and a whole thing in Elden Ring is about the insistence on there being only one god who can be in power (Marika as vessel for the Greater Will, along with the situation with the Empyreans and so on).

[joannalannister]

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

Walter Lippman

[joannalannister]

Daenerys Targaryen & JFK

“...let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. 

“All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”       --President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961

“Shall we begin?”      --Daenerys Targaryen, Game of Thrones 7x01

This post was inspired by a Dany quote from the show, but imma do what I usually do with the show, which is project my book!feelings all over it. This post is not intended to be a commentary about the show**, it’s about the books.

**There is one other Dany quote from the show that I intend to comment on below, but only because I feel it ties into the above JFK quote, in terms of ASOIAF themes and Dany’s book!characterization.

I’ve been thinking about this since the summer, when I first saw show!Dany trailing her hand lovingly over the Painted Table, over the hills and valleys, the rivers and mountains, places she’d heard about her whole life. A quote from A Game of Thrones was playing over that scene in my mind:

Somewhere beyond the sunset, across the narrow sea, lay a land of green hills and flowered plains and great rushing rivers, where towers of dark stone rose amidst magnificent blue-grey mountains, and armored knights rode to battle beneath the banners of their lords. 

And when Dany went to stand at the head of that table, it was one of the only times in season 7 where I felt I caught a glimpse of things to come in the books. A pale shadow of GRRM’s Westeros, to be sure, but I could see it. 

Tiny, slender 16-year-old Daenerys, her hair shining like molten silver in the gloom of the Stone Drum. Daenerys, standing where Aegon the Conqueror had once stood, at the head of a great painted table stretching away from her into darkness, as a great Night falls over the continent. And this table! A table -- a map of Westeros -- so large that, if stood upright, it would be over five stories high. GRRM’s Westeros has such grandeur, “like in the great stories [...]. The ones that really mattered.”

(Like, I don’t think Dany would be in that special seat where Dragonstone is located on the map, I think GRRM would deliberately put her at the head of the table, beyond the Wall, foreshadowing her true destination.)

I have no idea what wondrous and highly quotable things GRRM would have Dany say and think while standing there. But that question show!Dany asked -- “Shall we begin?” -- that question captured the essence of it for me. 

And you’re all gonna think I’m lame, but my mind jumped to President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, to that similar line, “let us begin.” And no, I don’t claim the showrunners intended this parallel between Dany and JFK, and tbh I don’t care what they intended, but I feel like it’s an apt comparison when talking about GRRM’s Dany. 

(GRRM has spoken very highly of the Kennedys, saying on his livejournal: “They were men like any other, not plaster saints, and had their share of failures and mistakes. But they fought the good fight, and left the world a better place than they found it, and no more can be asked of any man.)

I see Dany as a dark horse in the race for the Iron Throne, similar to JFK’s unexpected win in 1960. More importantly, though, I see Daenerys as a reformer, as someone young and vibrant who wants to shake up the Old Guard and change the world. 

And like, I’ve said this before, but Westeros is currently without justice, without peace, without the rule of law. It’s a place where the Lannisters can enact a dwarf genocide with no one to stop them. Where no one speaks for the smallfolk, where families’ ancestral homes can be seized and sacked, where murder goes unpunished, where a Mengele-esque mad scientist runs free. 

And those are the kinds of things that Dany stands against:

“Justice . . . that's what kings are for." --Daenerys, ASOS

She values “peace, prosperity, and justice” while a lot of the people in charge of Westeros right now value vengeance. And sure, Dany obviously doesn’t always get these things right every time, and she makes mistakes, but she’s fighting to make the world a better place.

Daenerys cares about people. When most nobles in Westeros feel little or nothing for people of low birth, Dany raises the lowborn up and gives them a place at her side and on her councils. Think of Missandei, Grey Worm, her handmaids. 

Dany’s outlook is more radical imo than Arya befriending prostitutes, or Stannis raising Davos to a lordship -- which are both good and admirable acts -- because Dany goes further. Dany wants to get rid of this whole system that grinds the lowborn to dust under the indifferent heel of the mighty. Just consider how GRRM wrote Dany’s attitude toward the tokar: “It was not a garment meant for any man who had to work. The tokar was a master’s garment, a sign of wealth and power. Dany had wanted to ban [it.]” 

She wants to bring change. She wants to stop the abuse of power, and help people. 

It’s as if Westeros and Essos both have already been under a Long Night of dehumanization, one created not by the Others, but simply by other people. And when Daenerys takes that torch from her bloodrider’s hand and lights the pyre that night in AGOT, she’s lighting the world on fire. 

And it’s a good fire, my friends. It’s this kind of fire, the kind that gets passed around, and that makes your heart swell to see it:

It’s the kind of fire that rallies people to Daenerys like iron to a lodestone, and it’s what makes cynical people disparage Dany as a “Mary Sue” (whatever that is) when she gains followers. It’s the kind of fire that makes the Widow of the Waterfront dare to dream. It’s the kind of fire that gives Tyrion purpose and direction in the darkest depths of his depression. It’s a fire of hope: “...and for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.”

Daenerys was the first spark in the forging of a brighter world. 

Light it up, girl.

(And while we’re talking about lighting fires, just FYI, I really fuckin’ hope Dany burns Randyll Tarly in TWOW, because he is a horrible person who represents everything that is wrong with the current Westerosi system. In GRRM’s early novel, Armageddon Rag, there is literally the prototype of Randyll Tarly, who GRRM describes on the page as a “fascist pig”. Burn him, Dany. And somebody necromance Tywin so she can burn him too, because only one death wasn’t enough for that bastard.) 

.

So when I heard “Shall we begin?,” Kennedy’s words echoed in my mind. “Let us begin.” Let us have “a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.” 

“Why do the gods make kings and queens, if not to protect the ones who can't protect themselves?" --Daenerys, ASOS

“Peace is my desire.“ --Daenerys, ADWD

Kennedy considered “tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself” to be the “common enemies of man” and it’s these things that Dany is fighting against. It’s this type of stuff that ASOIAF is all about imo. (It fascinates me to consider things like the pale mare in the context of this speech that GRRM grew up with.) 

But unlike Kennedy’s, Dany’s words were a question. An invitation, the way ASOIAF is an invitation: 

A Song of Ice and Fire [rubs] our faces in the reactionary brutality of its world, in the hope that we’ll see it more clearly, and fight it more fiercely, in the world we see when we look up again. [x]

I think I’ve said this before, but ASOIAF is the kind of work that requests audience participation. It doesn’t want you to remain passive. “Rage,” it commands, “rage against the dying of the light.” 

So I loved those three little words. Dany looks straight at the camera, straight at us, and she asks us, “Shall we begin?” 

“...let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.”

A new endeavor. A new world of law. Not a new balance of power. 

I said up above that Dany wants to get rid of this whole system that grinds the lowborn to dust under the indifferent heel of the mighty. 

She doesn’t want simply a new balance of power. She wants a world of laws, of justice, of peace.

Did you agree with me when I said that stuff above, about book!Daenerys? 

Because Dany says something similar in the show:

“Lannister, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell, they’re all just spokes on a wheel. This one’s on top, then that one’s on top, and on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground. I’m not going to stop the wheel. I’m going to break the wheel.”

And, like, ok, this is not my favorite show quote, and I don’t like talking about the show, but people use this quote to condemn Dany (even book!Dany) for not wanting to create a democracy or a constitutional monarchy in Westeros (and no one demands a democracy of the other (male) contenders for the Iron Throne). (I have #receipts on this fandom, just send me an ask.) 

Quoting from the book, “Mastering the Game of Thrones” by Battis and Johnston, it gives historical background and analysis to this wheel quote:

If Martin is the god of the text, he is not a benevolent deity seeking to punish evil, reward the good, or console his faithful readers. His characters’ lives are unpredictable, violent, and often brief, and beloved figures quickly fall from happiness and security to suffer betrayal, maiming, illness, and death. In the middle ages and Renaissance, such downfalls were often subscribed to Fortuna, whose wheel pulled men up to success and tossed them down again in failure. Fortune, like Providence, is a guiding force whose motion is inevitable. Her effects, however, were unpredictable; how quickly her wheel might turn or how high or low it threw those caught on it could not be foreseen. Unlike providence, Fortune does not seek to punish ill or reward good; her only motivation is movement, her only constant change itself.

In both the books and the show, Daenerys wants to punish wrongdoers and reward good. She wants justice. Justice is not compatible with this concept of Fortune’s Wheel, hence the “breaking the wheel” line on the show. The “wheel” speech is where she literally says on the show that she doesn’t want the little people crushed by the nobility’s political machinations. (It’s reminiscent of Varys’s line, “Why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?”)

Dany doesn’t want people to live merely at the whim of a tyrannical ruler. That’s no way for people to live, always uncertain whether or not they have the royal favor of the person currently at the top of the “wheel”, like when Cersei throws Falyse to Qyburn, who experiments on Falyse and murders her. 

Or like when Cersei approves of people bringing her the heads of people with dwarfism. 

Or when the Tyrells, while clawing their way to the top, throw Sansa and Tyrion under the bus. 

These are the types of things that Dany wants to stop (“break”), because life is not a zero-sum game, no matter how much Cersei would like us all to believe that “you win or you die” is the way the world works. Absolutist views like Cersei’s, where you’re either on top of the world or crushed underneath it, leave no room for the kindness and compassion and love that GRRM advocates in every chapter. That’s why people like Cersei are wrong, and why Dany will cast her down in the books. 

The entire time, books and show, the Dany I’ve seen and read wants to change how the world works, and create something bold and revolutionary. 

“All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”

This was the other reason that Dany’s “Shall we begin?” jumped out at me, because I knew what came before JFK’s “let us begin” in his speech, and I knew what came after in 1963.

In all the GRRM books and stories I’ve read, he has this tendency to leave a lot of things unfinished. Not in the sense that TWOW is currently unfinished as of January 2018, but in the sense that ... the worlds he creates go on without us, and often without the characters we love. There are things left undone at the end GRRM’s stories. 

Because, like, obviously I don’t know how ASOIAF is going to end, but I strongly believe that Dany sacrifices herself to save the world. (Like a president dying while serving his country?)

“All this will not be finished [...] But let us begin.”

For example, I get the sense that we’ll never see things all neatly wrapped up in Meereen, or see slavery completely gone from Essos. But Dany set it all in motion. Let us begin. She was the spark, and it’s now up to the people of Volantis, Lys, Myr, everywhere to fan the flames and keep them alive, even after Dany is gone. 

I was saying this in another post, that there’s a Romanticism to Dany, and in a way that’s similar to the Romantic-capital-R fairy tale attached to Kennedy and the “Camelot Era”. I’m just gonna quote myself (and Steven again) cuz I liked what I said the first time:

[...] “Coming out of the tradition of chivalric romance - where the point was about the purity and intensity of longing *from afar* not its consummation, which threatened the social order and had to be punished with a tragic end - a lot of the classic romances are cases of “star-crossed” love”. Steven cites classic examples of Guinevere and Lancelot, Tritan and Isolde, and Romeo and Juliet. Dare I add Dany and Westeros? The intense longing from afar, the threats to the social order, what I suspect will be a tragic end?

[...] I believe Dany would give everything for the people of Westeros, for the people of the world, that she would forsake her heart’s desire, her lifelong goal … that she would tear out her own heart for Westeros, and not expect to get it back, if only to keep her people safe … 

[post]

“...and it has been saved, but not for me.”

And after Dany dies -- if Dany dies -- it’ll be up to other people to pick up the pieces of Westeros and rebuild. But I don’t think Reconstruction is something we’ll ever see in Westeros. Like I said, GRRM tends to let his stories go on without us. 

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Dany reminds me of the heroes in the big fantasy stories: Frodo from LOTR, or King Arthur from The Once and Future King (who Jackie Kennedy was arguably trying to build JFK’s legacy around with the “Camelot” comparison -- and I believe GRRM was a T.H. White fan? But I don’t remember where I read that), etc. Anyways. The Fantasy Hero often leaves us in the end, and it becomes time to stand or fall on our own as we turn the last page. 

But that’s what I think some of the best Fantasy stories are about: teaching us to stand. To hold. 

“I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.“      --The Lord of the Rings movies

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wow ok that was a long post, sorry. idk man. those three words just gave me a lot of feelings. I’m sorta afraid now what TWOW’s gonna do to me because I think it’s gonna be a lot longer than just three words

im not gonna go back up to the top and read over this mind dump so i hope that made sense.

[joannalannister]

There is a road, no simple highway, Between the dawn and the dark of night.

--“Ripple” by the Grateful Dead, quoted by George R.R. Martin in Dreamsongs

[ Listen ]

Behind The Song: The Grateful Dead, “Ripple” by Jim Beviglia

Yet in 1970, the Dead released a pair of studio albums within months of each other that seemed to both capture the unease of an entire generation unmoored from their ideals and act as a balm to soothe those disappointments. [...] In the studio, the band caressed the song with the gentleness of a lover. [...] The ensemble voices on “Ripple” provide comfort when the words evoke hardship.

Hunter delivers lyrics that evoke cosmic wisdom and serenity without ignoring the darkness on the fringes of even the most blessed lives. The song nods at different religions and philosophies, from the Christian overtones of the lines about cups both empty and filled, which recall the 23rd Psalm, to the Buddhist koan feel of the refrain. The chorus even breaks off from the relatively straightforward rhyme scheme of the verses to form a haiku, another example of East meeting West in the song.

The song opens up with Garcia opining on the power of music, or perhaps it’s better to say the lack thereof. Even if his words glowed and were majestically propelled through the air on a “harp unstrung,” he has no certainty that they’ll have any positive impact on the listener. Still, ineffectuality aside, he also concedes that the world is better for having music: “I don’t know, don’t really care/ Let there be songs to fill the air.”

In the second verse, things turn much more somber, as the narrator, after wishing good tidings and full cups on his audience courtesy of that magical fountain, warns of a “road, no simple highway/ Between the dawn and the dark of night.” On this path the traveler will enjoy no company: “That path is for your steps alone.”

With these unanswerable mysteries still lingering, the chorus interrupts and the mandolin played by David Grisman seems to suspend the song in mid-air so Garcia can deliver the hauntingly lovely imagery of the chorus: “Ripple in still water/ When there is no pebble tossed/ Nor wind to blow.” We can envisage those lines, their inherent contradictions no match for the music’s ability to put them across.

The final verse returns to again strike a somewhat ominous tone, but the last line offers some consolation. “If I knew the way, I would take you home,” Garcia sings. That the narrator would offer assistance if he could is all the succor he can give to his companion, and somehow it’s enough. In this hard world, it has to be.

And if you do have to go it alone, there’s always music to bring along as company [x]

“I'm going to go ahead and try, whatever the odds, and I hope you add your voice.” [x] [x]

[joannalannister]

I was reading more about gender roles and perceptions of gender roles in mid-century America as part of my background research into Tywin’s fascist masculinity. Because Tywin is, like, medievally perfect (by perfect i mean perfectly horrible). But Tywin is also, like, a perfect representation of some deep psychological issues of the American culture wars of the 20th century (which is perfectly reasonable to me, because a lot of GRRM’s writing is pushing back against the traditional ideas of his time).  

And so, among other things, I was reading this:

Philip Wylie’s [1942 book] Generation of Vipers [...] argued that America was dominated by tyrannical, castrating wives who held all the power in their relationships. Wylie [...] inveighed against the typical American woman as a sexless, controlling, violent beast. “She is about twenty-five pounds overweight, with no sprint, but sharp heels and a hard backhand which she does not regard as a foul but a womanly defense. In a thousand of her there is not sex appeal enough to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge,” and charged that “momism” was producing a generation of emasculated, ineffectual men. [...] Keep in mind: This thinking arose out of the 1940s and 1950s, a time when women had vanishingly little social or political power.

And this, to me, really speaks of Genna, who is like the flipside of Tywin. Genna is overweight, she’s bossy, she’s “mom-ish” with her sloppy kisses, she’s emasculating, and she’s basically what every man in Westeros fears. 

And so, it’s just, so fascinating to me, how House Lannister can fit into these 20th century patriarchal fears.

Don’t reblog this, I’m still thinkin about this but I just had to put this down

[joannalannister]

I’m talking myself into it, I’m going to write an essay on “ASOIAF and the American Mythos: the intersection of literature and culture”