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stormcloudrising · 11 months ago

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The Secret Song of Florian and Jonquil- Part 9: The Grey Ghost and the Girl in Grey

December 23, 2024

This latest chapter was meant to be in one part, but it has turned out so long, I’ve decided to split it into two. Thus, today you are getting first part titled, The Grey Ghost and the Girl in Grey. Tomorrow, I will be posting part 2, and as a preview of what we will be covering, it will be entitled, The Shrouded Lord and a Mermaid's UnKiss. And so, without further ado, let’s begin.

Jon and Sansa by Arantza Sestayo for the 2023 ASOIAF Calendar

I begin this chapter with a question. Can a dead man get Greyscale?

A strange and provocative question to be sure, but I think it’s an important one that has not been but should be considered by the fandom. I say this because while I’ve seen an abundance of videos and read numerous essays about why greyscale is in the story, none seem to ask what I think is the most important question surrounding the topic, and that is why is Shereen at the Wall? More importantly, why does she have greyscale?

Why is Shireen being at the Wall important? Well, greyscale is said to be a curse called down by Garin on the dragon lords of old Valyria, and there are three dragons of note in the series. Dany, Faegon (whether he’s truly Aegon’s son or a Blackfyre descendant, he has dragon blood), and Jon. Let’s also include the Baratheons in this mix, as they also have dragon blood, which could be one of the reasons why Shireen has greyscale. But there may be a more important one.

The Volantenes and their Valyrian kin put them to the sword—so many that it was said that their blood turned the great harbor of Volantis red as far as the eye could see. Thereafter the victors gathered their own forces and moved north along the river, sacking Sar Mell savagely before advancing on Chroyane, Prince Garin's own city. Locked in a golden cage at the command of the dragonlords, Garin was carried back to the festival city to witness its destruction. At Chroyane, the cage was hung from the walls, so that the prince might witness the enslavement of the women and children whose fathers and brothers had died in his gallant, hopeless war...but the prince, it is said, called down a curse upon the conquerors, entreating Mother Rhoyne to avenge her children. And so, that very night, the Rhoyne flooded out of season and with greater force than was known in living memory. A thick fog full of evil humors fell, and the Valyrian conquerors began to die of greyscale. —The World of Ice and Fire - Ancient History: Ten Thousand Ships

Curiously enough, all the dragon blooded in the story are tied to the greyscale arc. Faegon via Jon Con, who has the disease; Dany is not directly tied to it yet, but she will be when her story intersects with Faegon and Jon Con; and then there is Jon who is connected to greyscale via Shireen Baratheon who is a survivor of the disease and has the marks to show it.

So again, why is Shireen, who has greyscale at the Wall. She’s Stannis’ daughter, but obviously there’s no need for her to have greyscale. No need that is, unless George needed someone with the disease to be in contact with dragon blooded Jon Snow, and so the question again becomes why, and can a dead man get greyscale.

Obviously as I’m proposing the question, I think the answer is yes, a dead man can indeed get greyscale. And obviously, I’m not talking about any dead man, but rather the special snowflake of the series who has been foreshadowed to rise from the dead, one Jon Snow. This is because Jon Snow is the Shrouded Lord and Shireen is at the Wall to give him greyscale and make him, the “Living Stone.”

Do I mean that Jon is the mysterious man of legend that lives in the Sorrows. Absolutely not. While Martin once intended to have Tyrion meet that figure, I don’t think that he will ever appear on the page. No, what I’m saying is that the legend of the Shrouded Lord from the Sorrows is in the story to inform and clue us in on Jon’s resurrection.

You are no doubt saying that this is a ridiculous theory and that the myth of the Shrouded Lord has nothing to do with Jon. I say that it and the inclusion of greyscale in the story has everything to do with Jon Snow, and I think that by the end of this chapter, many of you may come to agree.

This latest chapter has been six years in the writing. I started writing the theory 6 years ago, even before I wrote the first chapter of the Florian and Jonquil series. It’s one of many essays I’ve started but have not completed because once I started the F&J series, I realize that most of the half-written essays tied into the Florian and Jonquil mothership.

Some I’ve completed as earlier chapters in the series and a couple I’ve written as standalone essays. Still, I always knew that the chapter about the Shrouded Lord had to be part of the F&J series, because it’s a key part of the legend of the original characters and their modern-day counterpart, Jon, and Sansa.

I don’t think that I must go into the reasons Sansa is the Jonquil of the story because it should be obvious to all. There are also many clues that point to Jon being the modern-day Florian, including the fact that George obviously named the character after Saint Florian, the Roman soldier who became the patron saint of firefighter, who was killed when a rock was tied to him and he was thrown into a river to drown. As you continue to read this chapter, you will see that the stone and drowning aspect of the Saint Florian legend will be of major symbolic importance to my theory.

It makes perfect sense that George named his Florian after the man firefighters view as their patron saint because textural evidence suggests that the ancient Florian also fought against fire and it’s strongly hinted at in the books, that a returned Jon will lead the forces of ice against that of fire.

If you are still not convinced that Jon is the modern Florian of the story, consider this other real-world Florian whose story is strongly echoed in Jon’s arc.

Florianus (Marcus Annius Florianus; died 276), also known as Florian, was Roman emperor in 276, from July to September. He was the maternal half-brother of his predecessor, Tacitus, who was proclaimed emperor in late 275, after the unexpected death of Emperor Aurelian. After Tacitus died in July 276, allegedly assassinated as a consequence of a military plot, Florianus proclaimed himself emperor, with the recognition of the Roman Senate and much of the empire. However, Florianus soon had to deal with the revolt of Probus, who rose up shortly after Florianus ascended the throne, with the backing of the provinces of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Phoenicia. Probus took advantage of the terrain of the Cilician Gates, and the hot climate of the area, to which Florianus' army was unaccustomed, to chip away at their morale. Because of this, in September 276, Florianus' army rose up against him and killed him. —Wikipedia

Does this story about Emperor Florianus remind you of anything? Florian became emperor after the murder of his half-brother, and ruled for just three months before he was killed by his men. Except for the different circumstances, this is basically Jon’s story with the murder of his “half-brother” Robb; and him rising to be Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch before he like Emperor Florian was killed by his men soon after he takes on the leadership role.

I mentioned Florian and Jonquil at the onset of this chapter because this series is obviously about them, but their identity and symbolism is especially key to this chapter. However, before I get deep into the explanation of why Shereen is at the Wall to give Jon greyscale and why Jon is the Shrouded Lord of the story, let’s first discuss Jon’s symbolic color.

JON SNOW, THE GREY GHOST

Grey Ghost by René Aigner

Color is important in ASOIAF. George uses color over and over to give clues to his monomyth at the heart of the story. This is primarily done though sigils. However, characters are associated with colors as well, and that often has meaning in the story.

There is what I think is a mistaken theory from some in the fandom that Jon’s symbolic color is black. It is not. Jon’s color is tried and true Stark grey. It’s understandable why some may think his color is black. After all, he’s a black brother of the Night’s Watch and when he first leaves to join that order, he has this conversation with Robb.

Robb looked relieved. "Good." He smiled. "The next time I see you, you'll be all in black." Jon forced himself to smile back. "It was always my color. How long do you think it will be?" "Soon enough," Robb promised. He pulled Jon to him and embraced him fiercely. "Farewell, Snow."—A Game of Thrones - Jon II

Sadly, this moment was the last time Jon and Robb saw each other alive. In the passage, Jon tells Robb that black was always his color, but we know that’s not what he wanted. All Jon ever wanted was to be a Stark. He wanted to stand and represent the grey wolf of the house. And he wanted to follow his “father” as Lord of Winterfell. Yes, he loved Robb and would never have done anything to hurt him, but in his heart of hearts, he wanted what Robb had.

The thing is that George shows us over and over that Jon is more Stark-like than any of Ned’s kids. He looks the most like Ned and the ancestral Starks. He has Ned’s disposition, and he has the matriarchal genes of the Starks through his mother Lyanna, where Ned’s kids’ matriarchal heritage come from the Tullys. Most importantly, Jon has Ghost, the white wolf. And who is Ghost?

When he finally put the quill down, the room was dim and chilly, and he could feel its walls closing in. Perched above the window, the Old Bear's raven peered down at him with shrewd black eyes. My last friend, Jon thought ruefully. And I had best outlive you, or you'll eat my face as well. Ghost did not count. Ghost was closer than a friend. Ghost was part of him. —A Dance with Dragons - Jon III

Over and over in the text the connection between Jon and Ghost is emphasized. It’s the same for the other Stark kids and their direwolves bond mates. The human and the direwolves are two sides of the same coin once the bond is made.

Jon wondered where Ghost was now. Had he gone to Castle Black, or was he was running with some wolfpack in the woods? He had no sense of the direwolf, not even in his dreams. It made him feel as if part of himself had been cut off. Even with Ygritte sleeping beside him, he felt alone. He did not want to die alone. — A Storm of Swords - Jon V

When Ghost and Jon are separated by the Wall, Jon feels as if a part of him had been cut off. Even Ygritte beside him couldn’t lessen the loss of Ghost because Jon and his direwolf are one. They are one, and they are grey. This is one of the major symbolic reasons why Martin gave Jon the white direwolf.

Yes, Ghost’s name foreshadows Jon’s death and return, but his color in combination with Jon’s black brother symbolism make the two who are one, grey not black. So, while I understand why some in the fandom think of Jon’s color as black as an echo of Drogon, thus marking him as Dany’s mate, that is the wrong interpretation. Jon is the Grey Ghost.

If you doubt that Jon’s color is grey, consider the story that Martin gives us in The Princess and the Queen, which was further developed in TWOIAF about one of the wild dragons on Dragonstone.

Dragonstone’s three wild dragons were less easily claimed than those that had known previous riders, yet attempts were made upon them all the same. Sheepstealer, a notably ugly “mud brown” dragon hatched when the Old King was still young, had a taste for mutton, swooping down on shepherd’s flocks from Driftmark to the Wendwater. He seldom harmed the shepherds, unless they attempted to interfere with him, but had been known to devour the occasional sheepdog. Grey Ghost dwelt in a smoking vent high on the eastern side of the Dragonmont, preferred fish, and was most oft glimpsed flying low over the narrow sea, snatching prey from the waters. A pale grey-white beast the color of morning mist, he was a notably shy dragon who avoided men and their works for years at a time. The largest and oldest of the wild dragons was the Cannibal, so named because he had been known to feed on the carcasses of dead dragons and descend upon the hatcheries of Dragonstone to gorge himself on newborn hatchlings and eggs. Would-be dragontamers had made attempts to ride him a dozen times; his lair was littered with their bones. —The Princess and the Queen

Grey Ghost, sometimes referred to as “the” Grey Ghost was one of the three wild dragons on Dragonstone during the previous Dance with Dragons. He along with Sheepstealer and Cannibal were considered wild dragons because they were never ridden. Also, doesn't the use of the in front of his name almost seem like a title...something similar to "the Stark," "the Ned,” “the Great Jon,” or “the Night’s King."

While Sheepstealer was said to have hatched during the youth of King Jaeherys and some of the small folks said Cannibal was on Dragonstone prior to the arrival of the Targaryens, there is no information given on the birth of the Grey Ghost. However, all indication is that he was a young dragon because of how he met his demise.

It was about this time that a battered merchant cog named Nessaria came limping into the harbor beneath Dragonstone to make repairs and take on provisions. She had been returning from Pentos to Old Volantis when a storm drove her off course, her crew said … but to this common song of peril at sea, the Volantenes added a queer note. As Nessaria beat westward, the Dragonmont loomed up before them, huge against the setting sun … and the sailors spied two dragons fighting, their roars echoing off the sheer black cliffs of the smoking mountain’s eastern flanks. In every tavern, inn, and whorehouse along the waterfront the tale was told, retold, and embroidered, till every man on Dragonstone had heard it. Dragons were a wonder to the men of Old Volantis; the sight of two in battle was one the men of Nessaria would never forget. Those born and bred on Dragonstone had grown up with such beasts … yet even so, the sailors’ story excited interest. The next morning some local fisherfolk took their boats around the Dragonmont, and returned to report seeing the burned and broken remains of a dead dragon at the mountain’s base. From the color of its wings and scales, the carcass was that of Grey Ghost. The dragon lay in two pieces, and had been torn apart and partially devoured. —The Princess and the Queen

It is at first believed that the Grey Ghost was killed by Cannibal because the black wild dragon was known to eat dragon eggs and kill and eat smaller dragons on Dragonstone. However, in this instance, Cannibal was innocent of the crime. We later find out that the dragon that was guilty of killing Grey Ghost was none other than King Aegon’s Sunfyre.

And there Aegon might have remained, hidden yet harmless, dulling his pain with wine and hiding his burn scars beneath a heavy cloak, had Sunfyre not made his way to Dragonstone. We may ask what drew him back to the Dragonmont, for many have. Was the wounded dragon, with his half-healed broken wing, driven by some primal instinct to return to his birthplace, the smoking mountain where he had emerged from his egg? Or did he somehow sense the presence of King Aegon on the island, across long leagues and stormy seas, and fly there to rejoin his rider? Some go so far as to suggest that Sunfyre sensed Aegon’s desperate need. But who can presume to know the heart of a dragon? After Lord Walys Mooton’s ill-fated attack drove him from the field of ash and bone outside Rook’s Rest, history loses sight of Sunfyre for more than half a year. (Certain tales told in the halls of the Crabbs and Brunes suggest the dragon may have taken refuge in the dark piney woods and caves of Crackclaw Point for some of that time.) Though his torn wing had mended enough for him to fly, it had healed at an ugly angle, and remained weak. Sunfyre could no longer soar, not remain in the air for long, but must needs struggle to fly even short distances. Yet somehow he had crossed the waters of Blackwater Bay … for it was Sunfyre that the sailors on the Nessaria had seen attacking Grey Ghost. Ser Robert Quince had blamed the Cannibal … but Tom Tangletongue, a stammerer who heard more than he said, had plied the Volantenes with ale, making note of all the times they mentioned the attacker’s golden scales. The Cannibal, as he knew well, was black as coal. — The Princess and the Queen

During the period of the Dance, Sunfyre was described as a young dragon. Like Grey Ghost, the year of Sunfyre’s hatching is not mentioned in the books. However, even though he was described as young, he had to be bigger in size than the Grey Ghost as even with injured wing, he was able to kill the wild dragon. This tells us that Grey Ghost was likely younger than Sunfyre. Thus, Grey Ghost can be considered a young dragon as Jon would be as well.

As he was a young dragon and born on Dragonstone, he had to have been of the same lineage as the other Targaryen dragons. However, and this is of symbolic importance, he was wild. He was never ridden by a Targaryen, and so while he was “of them,” he was not “one of them.” This is of vital importance when you consider that he met his demise battling a Targaryen dragon of the same lineage.

Jon Snow is the Grey Ghost dragon. Like his animal counterpart, he is of Targaryen lineage, but will never be one of them. Grey Ghost’s battle with Sunfyre, a Targaryen dragon during the first Dance is also a key clue that Jon and Dany, the current Targaryen in the story will be in conflict. The rumor that Cannibal was the dragon that killed Grey Ghost may also foreshadow Jon facing off against that dragon or one like him in the future, but that’s a tinfoil theory for another day.

For now, let’s just acknowledge that George wrote the story of Grey Ghost into the story to point to Jon and what he represents in the story. His symbolic color is grey, not black and like the Grey Ghost, we will discover, that he also has a penchant for fish, because George didn’t just add that little bit to the legend by mere happenstance.

©HBO Game of Thrones

SANSA STARK, THE GIRL IN GREY

Among her many symbolic representations, Sansa Stark is also a symbolic fish. This symbolism she gets from her mother’s Tully heritage. As I discussed in the previous chapter, she is also a symbolic sea dragon, and in the story, when George talks about sea dragons, he’s talking about mermaids and vice versa. And again, I’m not talking about actual mermaids and sea dragons, but rather the symbolic representation of the female greenseers who first ruled the green sea or what the fans called the weirwood net. There is so much sea dragon/mermaid symbolism surrounding Sansa in the text, that it’s not even funny.

Petyr absconds with Sansa on the galley, the Merling King with a golden-crowned merman blowing on a seashell horn as the figurehead. Littlefinger seems to own the galley as his man Oswell Kettleback is the captain and Petyr seems to use it on a regular basis. Thus, when he and Sansa depart Kings Landing on the galley, Petyr is the symbolic merling king in the passage. Then he gets to the Vale, and makes Sansa pretend to be his daughter Alayne Stone thus making her the daughter of the merling king.

George then does something genius in the Vale arc to reinforce the symbolism. He has Petyr kill the merlin queen and usurp her rulership, which she was carrying out in the name of her son. What made Lyssa, the merlin queen you ask? Well note that that I didn’t say that she was the merling queen. I instead said that she was the merlin queen. Merlin without the g.

This is because the merlin, as in the blue falcon bird is the sigil of House Arryn. This is one of the genius ways George uses word play to emphasize his symbolism. Petyr is both the symbolic Merling King of the sea, and the Merlin King after he kills Lyssa and takes over as the Lord Protector in the Vale. This is also why Ursula Upcliff the ancient Vale figure, who is named after the character from the Little Mermaid can have said that she was the bride of the Merling King. She was likely for however brief a time married to one of the Kings of the Vale.

There is even a myth in the Vale of the Winged Knight, their ancient ruler being a friend of mermaids.

There is an overabundance of frozen sea dragon/mermaid symbolism in the Vale, and George for whatever reason, plopped Sansa who some in the fandom ridiculously argue is not that important a character right smacked in the center of it. Let me now discuss the girl in grey.

There is a popular theory in the Jonsa fandom that Sansa is the true girl in grey Melisandre saw in the fires coming to Jon at the Wall. While Mels did not have the vision on the show, they did merge Sansa’s storyline into that of Jeyne Poole and Alys Karstark and had her reunite with Jon at the Wall.

As I’ve stated on prior occasions, I have several problems with this theory playing out as proposed. First, Sansa being the girl in grey at the Wall would be a case of Martin pulling that rabbit out of the hat one too many times, and that’s not the way he writes.

First, the girl in grey was thought to be Arya. We the reader knew that it was not but Jon didn’t. Then Alys Karstark showed up and he thought she was the one that Melisandre saw in her vision. Stannis now thinks that’s Jeyne is Arya and he’s sent her to Jon at the Wall, and so you have another girl showing up. I don’t think George’s writing style leads to him going to that well for a 4th time.

Another reason that I don’t think the girl heading to the Wall is Sansa is because in the books, there will be no such merging of storylines like on the show. Also, when Sansa leaves the Vale, she will be taking the Knights of the Vale with her as she heads north. She won’t need to run to the Wall to Jon to for protection. Finally, part of Sansa’s arc as the Persephone of the story is to be stolen by the northern Lord of the Underworld, the symbolic Hades of the story.

Now having said all that, I’m going to surprise you by saying that I do think that Sansa is the girl in grey from Melisandre’s vision. I’ve confused you, haven’t I? Well, let me try to explain.

In the past when I’ve been asked my opinion about the girl in grey theory, I’ve tried to keep my answer to the part of the theory that had to do with her reunion with Jon at the Wall. I’ve done this because saying, “I don’t think she will reunite with Jon at the Wall, but I do think she is the girl in grey” would have required me to go into detail on what I meant.

This is something I was not prepared to do, because I was not quite ready to discuss the Shrouded Lord theory. However, now that I’ve finally gotten to this specific chapter of the series, I can reveal my thinking because Sansa being the girl in grey is central to the theory.

Melisandre often misinterprets her visions, as we see with the one about the towers by the sea.

Visions danced before her, gold and scarlet, flickering, forming and melting and dissolving into one another, shapes strange and terrifying and seductive. She saw the eyeless faces again, staring out at her from sockets weeping blood. Then the towers by the sea, crumbling as the dark tide came sweeping over them, rising from the depths. Shadows in the shape of skulls, skulls that turned to mist, bodies locked together in lust, writhing and rolling and clawing. Through curtains of fire great winged shadows wheeled against a hard blue sky. _____ "We've had a raven from Ser Denys Mallister at the Shadow Tower," Jon Snow told her. "His men have seen fires in the mountains on the far side of the Gorge. Wildlings massing, Ser Denys believes. He thinks they are going to try to force the Bridge of Skulls again." "Some may." Could the skulls in her vision have signified this bridge? Somehow Melisandre did not think so. "If it comes, that attack will be no more than a diversion. I saw towers by the sea, submerged beneath a black and bloody tide. That is where the heaviest blow will fall." "Eastwatch?" Was it? Melisandre had seen Eastwatch-by-the-Sea with King Stannis. That was where His Grace left Queen Selyse and their daughter Shireen when he assembled his knights for the march to Castle Black. The towers in her fire had been different, but that was oft the way with visions. "Yes. Eastwatch, my lord." —A Dance with Dragons, Melisandre I

As many in the fandom have deduce…especially after the release of the Forsaken chapter, the two towers in Melisandre’s vision are the ones in Oldtown, which Euron will soon be attacking. She has seen Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and knows that those towers look different from the ones in her visions. However, because she misinterprets things and thinks the vision is about the Wildings attacking, she quickly agrees with Jon when he asks if the towers were at Eastwatch.

She also thinks that Stannis is the Azor Ahai figure from her visions even though her visions show her Jon when she asks. She’s convinced herself that it must be Stannis because he was the Lord of Dragonstone, and all the discrepancies don’t sway her. She’s also making assumptions in her thinking of the girl in her vision, but more on that in a moment.

Alys’ arrival at the Wall does seem on the surface to fit the vision describe Melisandre, as she arrives on a horse almost dying under her. This is exactly how Melisandre described the horse in her vision, and so Jon assumes it’s Arya when he’s first awoken and told of Alys’ arrival at Castle Black.

“Arya. Jon straightened. It had to be her. “Girl,” screamed the raven. “Girl, girl.” “Ty and Dannel came on her two leagues south of Mole’s Town. They were chasing down some wildlings who scampered off down the kingsroad. Brought them back as well, but then they come on the girl. She’s highborn, m’lord, and she’s been asking for you.” “How many with her?” He moved to his basin, splashed water on his face. Gods, but he was tired. “None, m’lord. She come alone. Her horse was dying under her. All skin and ribs it was, lame and lathered. They cut it loose and took the girl for questioning.” A grey girl on a dying horse. Melisandre’s fires had not lied, it would seem. But what had become of Mance Rayder and his spearwives? “Where is the girl now?” —A Dance with Dragons, Jon IX

However, George does something strange when Jon visits Alys in that he never tells us the color of her clothing even though it was such an important point in the vision. He has Jon note them in a wet heap on the floor, but he doesn’t have him comment on the color, which is strange when “the girl in grey” is all that’s been in his thoughts.

“Maester Aemon’s old chambers were so warm that the sudden cloud of steam when Mully pulled the door open was enough to blind the both of them. Within, a fresh fire was burning in the hearth, the logs crackling and spitting. Jon stepped over a puddle of damp clothing. “Snow, Snow, Snow,” the ravens called down from above. The girl was curled up near the fire, wrapped in a black woolen cloak three times her size and fast asleep. She looked enough like Arya to give him pause, but only for a moment. A tall, skinny, coltish girl, all legs and elbows, her brown hair was woven in a thick braid and bound about with strips of leather. She had a long face, a pointy chin, small ears.” —A Dance with Dragons, Jon IX

This omission of the color of her clothing seems deliberate on George’s part…especially as he made them wet. As we know, some colors can look different when wet. For instance, reds can appear brown or black depending on the shade; and it can be difficult to tell if grey is black or vice versa. This seems as if George wants the reader to wonder whether Alys were indeed grey.

Another possible clue that the girl in the vision wasn’t Alys is the location of Karhold in relation to Castle Black. Karhold is Southeast of Castle Black. The fastest route for Alys to take would have been a straight shot east of Last Hearth through the Gift, up to Mole’s Town and over to Castle Black. It makes no sense for her to go out of her way to travel west to approach Castle Black from Long Lake as Melisandre says about the girl in the vision.

The Long Lake route would only make sense if Alys was indeed coming from Winterfell, but as she isn’t Jeyne and was coming from Karhold, that approach would make no sense. Plus, to get west of Long Lake, she would have had to cross the Last River, go through the Lonely Hills, and then also cross the lake to get to the western shore. This is a long way to travel when one is trying to reach a specific destination quickly. Plus, how exactly would Alys have crossed the Last River and the Long Lake.

There is also the fact that she was found by the Night’s a couple of miles south of Mole’s Town. This is proof that she came the route I suggested would have been the most direct to take from Karhold, and thus could not have been the girl in grey from Melisandre’s vision because as you can see from the map, the landscape looks nothing like what Mels described to Mance.

“Did your fires show you where to find this girl?” “I saw water. Deep and blue and still, with a thin coat of ice just forming on it. It seemed to go on and on forever.” “Long Lake. What else did you see around this girl?” “Hills. Fields. Trees. A deer, once. Stones. She is staying well away from villages. When she can she rides along the bed of little streams, to throw hunters off her trail.” He frowned. “That will make it difficult. She was coming north, you said. Was the lake to her east or to her west?” Melisandre closed her eyes, remembering. “West.” “She is not coming up the kingsroad, then. Clever girl. There are fewer watchers on the other side, and more cover. And some hidey-holes I have used myself from time—” He broke off at the sound of a warhorn and rose swiftly to his feet. All over Castle Black, Melisandre knew, the same sudden hush had fallen, and every man and boy turned toward the Wall, listening, waiting. One long blast of the horn meant rangers returning, but two … —A Dance with Dragons, Melisandre I

Melisandre tells Mance that the girl was Jon’s sister and she was escaping from Winterfell. Based on how she described the landscape, Mance made what he thought was the correct assumption because the girl in grey supposedly was coming from Winterfell. If the girl in grey is not Alys, might it have been Jeyne Poole who did indeed escape from Winterfell? Well, no!

First off, from the moment she escapes, Jeyne is never alone. She escapes with Theon and is soon captured by Mors Crowfood and sent to Stannis in the Wolfswood. Then as we see in TWOW preview chapter, Stannis in turn sends her to Jon at the Wall with 7 of his knights, Alysane Mormont, 12 horses, and several Black Brothers. Thus, there is no way that Jeyne is the girl in grey of the vision.

Stannis nodded. “You will escort the Braavosi banker back to the Wall. Choose six good men and take twelve horses.” ______ “Oh, and take the Stark girl with you. Deliver her to Lord Commander Snow on your way to Eastwatch.” Stannis tapped the parchment that lay before him. “A true king pays his debts.” Pay it, aye, thought Theon. Pay it with false coin. Jon Snow would see through the impostesure at once. Lord Stark’s sullen bastard had known Jeyne Poole, and he had always been fond of his little half-sister Arya. “The black brothers will accompany you as far as Castle Black,” the king went on. “The ironmen are to remain here, supposedly to fight for us. Another gift from Tycho Nestoris. Just as well, they would only slow you down. Ironmen were made for ships, not horses. Lady Arya should have a female companion as well. Take Alysane Mormont.” —The Winds of Winter, Theon I

I supposed Justin Massey and the other men travelling with him could be killed as they travel to Castle Black and Jeyne escapes and must make it the rest of the way on her own, but then one must ask what thematic purpose would that serve? I don’t mean what storyline purpose does it serve for Jeyne to arrive at the Wall. They are several. Rather, I mean what would be the purpose of her arriving alone and being the girl in grey…especially as Alys has already arrived at Castle Black and been mistakenly thought to be the girl in grey by Jon. No, Jeyne is not the girl from Melisandre’s vision.

Can the girl the true Arya Stark? Doubtful as she is halfway across the continent in Braavos, and all clues in the text that when she returns to Westeros, it will be to the Riverlands. This makes it very doubtful that she will reunite with Jon or any of the other Starks before A Dream of Spring, the last scheduled book in the series.

So, if the girl in grey is not Alys, Jeyne or even the real Arya, who is she? I say that it’s Sansa. However, just as she misinterpreted events in her vision about the two towers by the sea to be about Eastwatch, Melisandre is mistaken about the vision being about someone coming to Jon at the Wall. Rather, I think that she’s seeing events surrounding Sansa in the Vale as she tries to escape unfolding events after the Tourney of the Winged Knight.

Why is the vision not Sansa going to Jon at the Wall but of her in the Vale? Well for her to be going to the Wall, so many beats of the story would have to play out first, and like with Arya, it couldn’t happen before A Dream of Spring. Also, when Sansa goes north, she will not be travelling alone. She will have the Knights of the Vale with her, and so like Jeyne Pool, even if she goes to the Wall, she won’t be alone. And there is the fact that the Wall will likely have fallen by then.

Remember I said that Melisandre was making assumptions. What I meant is that she made it seem to Jon and Mance as if she had several visions of the girl in grey, when in fact, she had only one quick brief vision.

She came up with her own reasons of why the girl in the vision was Jon’s sister…likely because she wanted the Lord Commander to owe her a favor. She as much as thinks this. She also came up with a reasoning why the girl in grey was staying away from villages, and riding along the beds of streams. It’s not that she is necessarily wrong in her reasoning, but it is another example of how she puts her spin on things and often misinterprets the meaning of her visions.

The girl. I must find the girl again, the grey girl on the dying horse. Jon Snow would expect that of her, and soon. It would not be enough to say the girl was fleeing. He would want more, he would want the when and where, and she did not have that for him. She had seen the girl only once. A girl as grey as ash, and even as I watched she crumbled and blew away. —A Dance with Dragons, Melisandre I

White Walker Queen Sansa by AmyArts93n_DeviantArt

While I don’t think in Melisandre’s vision the girl in grey is approaching the Wall, there is one way, I think it could be the case, and that is if the vision is of Sansa and Jon reuniting in the weirwood net. Their reunion could be at the Wall in the weirwoods because after all, Old Nan did tell Bran that the Nights King first saw his corpse queen from the top of the Wall.

George has incorporated several Chekov guns into Sansa’s Vale arc that will go off in TWOW…most during the Tourney of the Winged Knights. There is the collapse of the Giant Lance causing an avalanche to descend on those attending the tourney at the Gates of the Moon. George has foreshadowed this happening from as far back as the Tourney of the Hand in the first book, and Oberyn’s battle with the Mountain in A Storm of Swords.

Lucifer Means Lightbringer also has a great theory that the Long Night was cause by the red comet knocking one of the previous two moons, in this case, the fire moon out of alignment and shards of it descending as meteors. This is what led to the Qartheen myth Doreah told to Dany.

LML proposes that the returned red comet heralds the coming of a similar event, which will cause the new Long Night, and there are strong textural clues to support this theory.

"A trader from Qarth once told me that dragons came from the moon," blond Doreah said as she warmed a towel over the fire. Jhiqui and Irri were of an age with Dany, Dothraki girls taken as slaves when Drogo destroyed their father's khalasar. Doreah was older, almost twenty. Magister Illyrio had found her in a pleasure house in Lys. Silvery-wet hair tumbled across her eyes as Dany turned her head, curious. "The moon?" "He told me the moon was an egg, Khaleesi," the Lysene girl said. "Once there were two moons in the sky, but one wandered too close to the sun and cracked from the heat. A thousand thousand dragons poured forth, and drank the fire of the sun. That is why dragons breathe flame. One day the other moon will kiss the sun too, and then it will crack and the dragons will return." —A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

This time around, the shards to impact Planetos will be from the icy moon, which is the lone remaining moon in the sky. However, the icy moon won’t break up or be pushed out of alignment as was the case with its fiery sister, but pieces of it will descend to Planetos and cause the new Long Night. The icy moon can’t be destroyed because that would also mean the destruction of Planetos. As I queried in Why are the Others Back, the fact that the icy moon remained in the sky while the fire moon was destroyed is probably what protected Planetos from total destruction during other Long Nights, and maybe of symbolic importance in regard to the Others.

It's still to be determined whether returning comet or the meteor shower will be a natural occurring event or something precipitated by magical means. As this is a fantasy story, and the red comet has already moved away from Planetos, I suspect there will be some type of magical event that will call it back.

Unlike LML, I think a shard of the icy moon will hit in the Vale with impact on the Giant Lance, precipitating the avalanche. As I discussed in previous essays, descending from the Eyrie via the three waycastles of Sky, Snow, and Stone is like riding down on a meteor with the vaporish tail at the top (Sky), the icy snowy interior/middle (Snow), and the stony head (Stone) that will impact on Planetos.

You can view LML’s Long Night theory at on his YouTube channel here. And to read more about an avalanche hitting during the Tourney of the Winged Knight, please read Sweetsunray’s essay here. While her interpretation of events is different from mine, I think that she hit the nail on the head regarding the foreshadowing of the avalanche, and it was from her that I first picked up on the idea.

Other Chekov’s guns slated to go off are Petyr having Harry the Heir killed during the tourney; the revelation that Alayne Stone is Sansa Stark; Shadrach attempt to kidnapped Sansa; and of course, the Mountain Clans attacking during the tourney. Keeping all that in mind, let’s again look to see whether there is anything in Melisandre’s vision that might point to the girl in grey being Sansa.

Funnily enough, the description that Melisandre gives that Mance interprets to be the Long Lake area, could be a description of the Mountains of the Moon in the Vale. In fact, if you look at the area around Long Lake and the MOTM on a map, you will see that they look very similar as both are mountainous fertile regions.

Hills. Fields. Trees. A lake. Unlike in the North and other areas of Westeros, we have not yet been given the names of any of the lakes or rivers in the Vale. However, we know from the map that there are plentiful. Plus, as the Vale is one of the most fertile places in Westeros, and produces much of the area food, we know that they must have an abundance of water.

There is certainly a lot of water flowing from Alyssa’s Tears before it’s frozen during the winter months. Legend tells us that the water from the waterfall turns into mists before it reaches the Vale proper, but we know that can’t really be the case, and somewhere in the mountains…and likely through a cave system, water flows down from Alyssa’s Tears to the valley below.

Aside from the area around Long Lake being similar in terrain to that of the one around the Mountains of the Moon, you might be asking, what else in Melisandre’s vision suggests it might be of Sansa in the Vale?

Well, there is the curious mention of stones. Why stones? The area in her vision, which supposedly looks like Long Lake is a mountainous terrain as the northern mountains are to the east. However, Melisandre already mentioned there were hills in the vision, and while not quite the same as a mountain, the word is sometimes used as a stand-in. Mance himself makes this connection with his belief that she��s talking about the Long Lake area.

Might she be talking about mountains when she mentions stones? It’s not out of the realm of possibilities but is certainly a weird turn of phrase when hills were mentioned previously. So, if not hills or mountains, to what might stones refer?

Could the word be a hint to Alayne Stone, the pseudonym that Sansa is currently using while she pretends to be Petyr’s bastard daughter? I think that is certainly part of the answer. You’re probably saying that Melisandre refers to stones as in the plural form, not singular as in one person, which would be the case if it was about Sansa. To that I would say that all the bastards of the landed gentry in the Vale are referred to as Stone, and that could be where the plural reference comes in.

Nonetheless, there is one possible additional explanation for the Stone reference.

"Little boyman," Shagga roared, "will you mock my axe after I chop off your manhood and feed it to the goats?" But Gunthor raised a hand. "No. I would hear his words. The mothers go hungry, and steel fills more mouths than gold. What would you give us for your lives, Tyrion son of Tywin? Swords? Lances? Mail?" "All that, and more, Gunthor son of Gurn," Tyrion Lannister replied, smiling. "I will give you the Vale of Arryn." A Game of Thrones - Tyrion VI

Tyrion has armed the Mountain Clans with steel. It’s why they are more brazen in their attack, and why they have become the woe of the Vale.

Littlefinger stroked the neat spike of his beard. "Lysa has woes of her own. Clansmen raiding out of the Mountains of the Moon, in greater numbers than ever before . . . and better armed." "Distressing," said Tyrion Lannister, who had armed them. "I could help her with that. A word from me . . ." —A Clash of Kings, Tyrion IV

Winter is coming for everyone, including the Mountain Clans, and they must prepare. With their new castle forge steel, they are raiding more in preparation, and the upcoming tourney provides them with a perfect opportunity to test out their new weapons against some of the leading warriors of the Vale and gather provisions for winter at the same time.

His dream of selling Arya to Lady Arryn died there in the hills, though. "There's frost above us and snow in the high passes," the village elder said. "If you don't freeze or starve, the shadowcats will get you, or the cave bears. There's the clans as well. The Burned Men are fearless since Timett One-Eye came back from the war. And half a year ago, Gunthor son of Gurn led the Stone Crows down on a village not eight miles from here. They took every woman and every scrap of grain, and killed half the men. They have steel now, good swords and mail hauberks, and they watch the high road—the Stone Crows, the Milk Snakes, the Sons of the Mist, all of them. Might be you'd take a few with you, but in the end they'd kill you and make off with your daughter." —A Storm of Swords, Arya XII

With steel in their hands, the clans have united in ways they never did before, and it just so happens that one of the leading ones, led by Gunthor son of Gurn are the Stone Crows, and so we have another explanation for reference to stones in Melisandre’s vision.

One of the members of the Stone Crows was Shagga who along with Timett of the Burned Men and Chella Black Ears were Tyrion’s guards. They all would recognize Sansa. Shagga and the other Stone Crows who travelled with Tyrion to the capitol remained in the kingswood after the Battle of the Blackwater and Tyrion’s later downfall. They may still be there or they may have made it back to the Vale.

Whether Shagga has returned to the Vale or not, Timett, Chella, and other members of the Burned Men and Black Ears have and they will recognize Sansa when they see her at the tourney and during the fighting afterwards. They will know that she is Tyrion’s wife and know what she represents. And if they recognize Sansa, she will know them in turn.

As the clans seem to be working together more, even if Shagga is not present, the news of Sansa’s identity will likely be shared with Gunthor and the Stone Crows as he seems to be one of the central leaders of the clans and was the one who brokered the deal with Tyrion.

Is the Mountain Clans a threat to Sansa? At the end of the day, I don’t think they will be. I suspect that they will end up being her guards as foreshadowed in A Clash of Kings.

It was as if her face were an open book, so easily did the dwarf read her hopes. "Do not take Oxcross too much to heart, my lady," he told her, not unkindly. "A battle is not a war, and my lord father is assuredly not my uncle Stafford. The next time you visit the godswood, pray that your brother has the wisdom to bend the knee. Once the north returns to the king's peace, I mean to send you home." He hopped down off the window seat and said, "You may sleep here tonight. I'll give you some of my own men as a guard, some Stone Crows perhaps—" "No," Sansa blurted out, aghast. If she was locked in the Tower of the Hand, guarded by the dwarf's men, how would Ser Dontos ever spirit her away to freedom? "Would you prefer Black Ears? I'll give you Chella if a woman would make you more at ease." "Please, no, my lord, the wildlings frighten me." He grinned. "Me as well. But more to the point, they frighten Joffrey and that nest of sly vipers and lickspittle dogs he calls a Kingsguard. With Chella or Timett by your side, no one would dare offer you harm." "I would sooner return to my own bed." A lie came to her suddenly, but it seemed so right that she blurted it out at once. "This tower was where my father's men were slain. Their ghosts would give me terrible dreams, and I would see their blood wherever I looked." —A Clash of Kings, Sansa III

Sansa turned down Tyrion when he made the offer of having the members of the mountain clans protect her, but I suspect her response will be different in the future, because just as Jon is brokering a peace between the Northern Houses and the Wildings, Sansa will do the same for the Mountain Clans and the Houses of the Vale.

Jon also could be a part of Melisandre’s stony mystery, but the answer to that will come later. And what about the deer. Martin didn’t just have Mels mention that name for no reason, and so, what might that name have to do with Sansa.

Well, as George has used anagrams on many occasions in the text, one can look at deer and see that it’s reed spelled backwards, and so could potentially hint at Howland finally appearing on the page. There is a fandom theory that he is Shadrich, but there are too many holes in that premise for me. Plus, nothing we’ve seen of the Mad Mouse fits the father described by Jojen and Meara. If Howland Reed is in the Vale to help Ned’s daughter, he’s not Shadrich. However, as the theory is out there, I had to mention it.

As I proposed in Ser Shadrich of the Shady Glen, the Mad Mouse is a Faceless Man…possibly even wearing the face of the first of their kind. And I do think that it’s quite possible that the deer Melisandre saw in her vision could be referring to the Mad Mouse. How you ask?

It so happens that there is a mammal called a mouse deer, but I don’t think it’s that type the text is referring to. A mouse deer is a cute fawn like animal. No, I think that George is quite possibly using the deer in Melisandre’s vision to refer to deer mice, the little rodent so named because its fur looks like that of a deer. As I discussed in the Shadrich essay, Faceless Men are compared to mice over and over in the text.

Now that we’ve discussed why Jon’s symbolic color is grey, and why Sansa is the girl in grey, let’s briefly talk about Martin and his love of Christian myths.

GRRM, THE LOVER OF CHRISTIAN MYTHS

The Episcopalian Church is the American offshoot of the Church of England (Anglican Church). It formed after the American revolution because priests in the newly independent nation were still required to swear allegiance to the British monarchy as head of the Anglican Church. Today, the ruling British monarch is still the head of the Church of England as they have been since Henry VIII split the church off from the Catholic Mother Church so that he could divorce and remarry whenever he wanted.

Unlike the Catholic Church which has a Pope who rules over the worldwide congregation and is considered the head of the Christian faith, the Church of England have regional bishops and archbishops who are leaders of their region and unlike catholic cardinals do not have to report to a central head. However, there are different tiers of leadership, and the most senior ranking member of the English church is the Archbishop of Canterbury who reports to the ruling monarch.

The structure the American Episcopalian Church is very much like that of the Church of England with a presiding Bishop as its titular head, but of course without the monarchy above him. It, like the Anglican Church is also very steep in the tradition of the Catholic Church. However, there are differences in the two churches and their Catholic counterpart from which they formed.

The most obvious difference is that in the Anglican and Episcopalian churches, the clergy are allowed to marry. Women are also allowed to be priests while only men are granted that honor in the Catholic church. One other major difference I want to mention is that the doctrine of the Catholic church is heavily centered around the Holy Mother, while Jesus the son, is more the focus of the Anglican and Episcopalian branches.

Other than those major differences, the Catholic and Episcopalian churches are similar in their pageantry. Both called their baptism into the faith, confirmation; both have kids as acolytes; the Catholic church has the Breviary while Episcopalian uses the Book of Common Prayer; the prayers for the different holy days are also very similar…the Apostles Creed vs the Nicene Creed among others.

I went into a brief discussion of the Catholic vs Episcopalian churches because George was confirmed and raised as a Catholic when he was young. He is no longer a practicing Catholic and could be described as more of an agnostic than an atheist. In fact, I may have heard him in an interview described himself as such, but I’m not positive if I’m remembering such an interview or if it’s just my opinion based on reading his writings.

However, it’s obvious in his writings that he loves religion…not necessarily the religious aspect or the wars that have been fought in the name of various religions. Rather, I think that he loves the myths around which all religions are based.

As George was confirmed and raised as a Catholic, I was confirmed and raised as an Episcopalian. I wasn’t an acolyte, but my brother and sister were. Every Sunday, the three of us had to attend Sunday School, and although, I no longer go to church every Sunday—and truthfully only attend services a few times a year, I’m still a member of the Episcopalian church, and can recite by heart all the prayers and homilies I learned as a child. When people ask me about the difference between the two churches, I don’t go into the detail explanation I just gave you. I basically describe being an Episcopalian as being Catholic without the guilt. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell…LOL.

Being an Episcopalian is one of the reasons that I recognize George’s heavy use of much Catholic doctrine and biblical myths in ASOIAF. This includes myths recognized and discussed by the fandom over the years such as the doctrine of the seven who are one of the Faith of the Seven mirroring that of the Trinity of the Christian faith; the ironborn’s legend of the Grey King descending to sit at the right hand of the drowned god just as in Christianity, Jesus is said to have ascended to sit at the right hand of God the Father.

In Part 1 of, Do Direwolves Dream of the Weirwood Net, I even discussed how Petyr’s killing of Joffrey echoes that of Samson’s killing of the young lion. There are other examples I’ve discussed in different essays, and some I’ve recognized but have not touched upon. However, what I want to discuss now is how one such biblical myth is baked into the legend of The Shrouded Lord as the representation of Christ in the story.

Again, I don’t mean the figure Tyrion is told about while sailing through the foggy stretch of the Rhoyne called the Sorrows. I am talking about Jon Snow, the true Shrouded Lord, aka the Prince of Sorrows, aka, His Grey Grace.

There is no character as much the focus of the Christian symbolism at play in the story as Jon Snow. He is the risen Christ of the story. It’s the reason for his grey symbolism, and I think it’s why George added the legend of the Shrouded Lord to the tale in A Dance with Dragon, just as Jon was being killed. It was to foreshadow and set up his eventual resurrection.

Aside from the foreshadowing of Jon’s resurrection George layers throughout the books, one of the most popularly accepted clues by the fandom that Jon is the Christ figure of the story is of course the legend of the Last Hero and his 12 companions, which mirror the real world one of Jesus and his 12 disciples. On the show, they also had Jon and a gang of 12 go behind the Wall on the wight hunt. I highly doubt that anything even similar will play out in the books, but there likely will be an event involving Jon and a group of 12, and maybe even a 13th, which will become clear shortly.

However, there is one scene that I don’t see discussed that is symbolically very important to the foreshadowing of events surrounding Jon’s symbolic resurrection, and it is the magical scene that takes place outside of Craster’s keep. I discussed it previously in Part 5 of my essay series, Of Sansa Stark and the Glass Menagerie and in a shorter excerpt in Waking in a Winter Wonderland. For expeditious purposes, I’m going to copy a bit of that essay here.

He woke to the sight of his own breath misting in the cold morning air. When he moved, his bones ached. Ghost was gone, the fire burnt out. Jon reached to pull aside the cloak he’d hung over the rock, and found it stiff and frozen. He crept beneath it and stood up in a forest turned to crystal. 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. “Lord Snow?” he heard. Soft and meek. He turned. Crouched atop the rock that had sheltered him during the night was the rabbit keeper, wrapped in a black cloak so large it drowned her. Sam's cloak, Jon realized at once. Why is she wearing Sam's cloak? "The fat one told me I'd find you here, m'lord," she said. A Clash of Kings - Jon III

There is so much symbolism in the above passage and I wish that I could unpack it all, but I’ll have to give you the crib notes version. Jon wakes to aching bones…almost as if he was awakened from the dead. He notes that Ghost is gone from besides him and then pulls back his cloak (a symbolic door) to go outside. Jon is the Christ like figure in the story and so the cloak he hung over the “rock” is symbolic of the stone that sealed Jesus in his tomb, which of course will take on additional meaning later when Jon is killed and returns to the land of the living.

Jon crept beneath the stone, symbolic of Christ existing the tomb and stands in the realm of the afterlife. His brothers/disciples are still asleep because it is not yet their time to join him in the icy afterlife. He is alone in this icy landscape and thinks that there is magic beyond the Wall after all. He then thinks of his sisters and how they would react to the scene. Arya would run out laughing and wanting to investigate everything, but Sansa, she would cry at the wonder of it all. I’m going to come back to Sansa’s reaction later, because it’s very important, but for now, let’s talk about what happens next. It turns out that Jon is not alone in the icy landscape of the early morning.

Jon hears someone call his name, but they don’t refer to him by his name of Jon, but rather by the moniker of Lord Snow mockingly assigned to him by Alliser Thorne. Note how Martin italicizes Lord Snow for emphasis. This is because in the scene, the title positions Jon as the risen Christ like figure. He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

He turns and sees Gilly wearing a black cloak sitting on top of the rock that sheltered him during the night. Symbolically, it is as if Gilly sheltered him while he slept. It also implies that potentially, she could have been why he awoke. Maybe she made a sound; maybe she willed him awake because she needed to speak to him.

Jon wonders why Gilly is wearing a cloak so large it almost “drowns” her. He then realizes it’s Sam’s cloak and wonders why she’s wearing it. I’ll tell you why Jon. It’s because in the scene, Gilly is the symbolic Mary Magdalene who was the first to know that Christ had risen from the dead. Her wearing Sam’s cloak positions her as a female member of the Night’s Watch as Mary Magdalene was said to be Christ’s 13th disciple.

It of course also positions Gilly as a symbolic Nights Queen/Persephone/original blue winter rose to Jon’s Nights King/Hades character. Even her name has icy Night’s Queen connotations as we discover when she tells it to Jon.

"I don't even know your name." "Gilly, he called me. For the gillyflower." "That's pretty." He remembered Sansa telling him once that he should say that whenever a lady told him her name. He could not help the girl, but perhaps the courtesy would please her. "Is it Craster who frightens you, Gilly?" A Clash of Kings - Jon III

Here is a description of the gillyflower from the wiki.

Matthiola incana is a species of flowering plant in the cabbage family Brassicaceae. Common names include Brompton stock, common stock, hoary stock, ten-week stock, and gilly-flower. The common name stock usually refers to this species, though it may also be applied to the whole genus Matthiola. The common name "night-scented stock" or "evening-scented stock" is applied to Matthiola longipetala. —Wikipedia

As we see, the gillyflower is also known as night-scented stock or evening-scented stock. Another name for it is also hoary stock. Very icy and almost most straight out of the Long Night. Sounds like the perfect flower stand-in for the blue winter rose in the scene. Notice also that Sansa’s name comes up for the second time in the chapter…this time when Gilly tells Jon about her icy sounding name.

Considering the association flowers have with romance, and the fact that the gilly flower is also called night and evening scented stock, one can argue that the name also has lady of the evening connotations. I will return to this and the hoary nature of Gilly’s name shortly but for now, I want to talk briefly about a scene that echoes the Jon magical one…this time from Sansa’s viewpoint.

Several times in the text, George writes mirror scenes for Jon and Sansa. These includes Sansa’s scene with the Hound on the top of the ramparts during the Battle of the Blackwater as they look out over the burning of the city. In the scene, the Hound puts his sword to Sansa’s throat. In the very next chapter, we get a re-enactment of this scene from Jon’s POV when he first meets Ygritte and the “flowering” of the Winter Rose. The emphasis is again put on fire, and this time, it’s Jon who puts his sword to Ygritte’s neck. And of course, in the Sansa scene, the blue rose Daughter of Winterfell flowers for the first time.

Another mirror scene is when Sansa is interrogated by the Queen of Thorns and in the very next chapter Jon is interrogated by the King Beyond the Wall. The elements and content of the two chapters perfectly matches up. It’s almost as if the Jon chapter is a continuation of the Sansa one. Or rather, it’s as if Jon’s chapter gives you the answer or at least some of them to the question raised in Sansa’s. I discussed both the scenes with the Hound and Ygritte, and Olenna and Mance in Sansa and Sandor, and Jon and Ygritte. It’s one of my earliest essay series, and while I’ve since come to different interpretation of a few of the points, overall, I’m still behind the basic theory.

I mentioned these scenes to draw attention to the Sansa one that mirrors the one Jon has in the magical realm beyond the Wall. They don’t follow each other as with the two I just mentioned and in fact, occurs in different books, but George does write them to mirror each other and obviously wants you to think of them in unity.

When she opened the door to the garden, it was so lovely that she held her breath unwilling to disturb such perfect beauty. The snow drifted down and down, all in ghostly silence, and lay thick and unbroken on the ground. All color had fled the world outside. It was a place of whites and blacks and greys. White towers and white snow and white statues, black shadows and black trees and dark grey sky above. A pure world, Sansa thought. I do not belong here. Yet she stepped out all the same. Her boots tore ankle deep holes into the smooth white surface of the snow, yet made no sound. Sansa drifted past frosted shrubs and thin dark trees, and wondered if she was still dreaming. Drifting snowflakes brushed her face as light as lover’s kisses, and melted on her cheeks. At the center of the garden, beside the statue of the weeping woman that lay broken and half-buried on the ground, she turned her face up to the sky and closed her eyes. She could feel the snow on her lashes, taste it on her lips. It was the taste of Winterfell. The taste of innocence. The taste of dreams. ASOS Sansa VII, Chapter 80

As he does with so much of their character arcs, GRRM wrote this Sansa scene to echo Jon’s from the haunted forest. In a way, it’s a continuation of that scene because where Jon stopped short of seeing Sansa enter the death realm, here she steps out into it. Both wake from having dreams of their family. We don’t learn much of either dream except that both included Arya. We’re told that Jon’s dream included Sansa as well and so we’re left wondering whether hers also included him or even if possibly the two were of the same event. We also know that for both, it is a dream of home.

In Jon’s scene, he wakes, notes that Ghost is gone from besides him and then pulls back his cloak (a symbolic door) to go outside. I’ve already discussed the symbolism of him exiting from under the rock and so won’t do so again. Sansa on the other hand, opens a real door to enter the garden and is greeted by a ghostly silence as the snow falls. GRRM’s brilliance shines through here as he ties the two scenes together as soon as Sansa enters the garden.

Ghost is the silent direwolf who never makes a sound. In fact, the words ghost and silent appears together in 21 paragraphs in the various books and each time, the reference is to Jon’s direwolf. And so, Martin connects Jon’s frozen forest scene with Sansa’s winter Eyrie wonderland by making it seem as if Ghost has symbolically left Jon’s side to be at Sansa’s. But Ghost is not just a direwolf, he’s Jon as well and he brings the snow with him, which brushes Sansa’s face as soft as a lover’s kiss.

Martin continues the kiss imagery as Sansa describes feeling the snow on her lashes and tasting it on her lips. It’s almost as if she’s receiving butterfly kisses. The melting snowflakes on Sansa’s cheeks also echoes the tears that Jon mentions she would shed if she saw the magical icy realm beyond the Wall. In fact, Sansa’s reaction to the similar scene in the Eyrie, is just how Jon thought she would react.

She didn’t want to step out, which makes sense because she’s the Persephone character and while the time for her to descend is approaching, it’s not quite here yet.

I referenced the Sansa Eyrie scene not just to show the connection between Jon’s in the haunted forest, but also to show that there has been an idea of a kiss between the two percolating in background of their arcs. This is very important as I believe that when it happens, it will play a role in Jon’s resurrection. However, before I get to that bit of the theory, let’s briefly revisit Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene in a landscape by Annibale Carracci

There are different versions of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ in the four gospels but the common denominator in all is the presence Mary Magdalene at his death, burial and as one of the first witnesses of his empty tomb.

In some telling of the story, Mary is one of the three women who discover the stone removed from the tomb of Christ. They enter to find the body gone and the presence of an angel who tells them that Christ has risen and they should go and spread the word to his disciples. In two other gospels they don’t enter the tomb but an angel rolls away the rock and tells them that Christ has risen. Jesus then appears to them and tells them to go and notify the disciples that he has risen and to meet him in Galilee. And in the Gospel of John, Mary goes to the tomb alone and it is there that the Christ appears to her.

According to John 20:1–10, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb alone when it was still dark and saw that the stone had already been rolled away. She did not see anyone, but immediately ran to tell Peter and the "beloved disciple," who came with her to the tomb and confirmed that it was empty but returned home without seeing the risen Jesus. According to John 20:11–18, Mary, now alone in the garden outside the tomb, saw two angels sitting where Jesus's body had been. Then the risen Jesus approached her. She at first mistook him for the gardener, but, after she heard him say her name, she recognized him and cried out "Rabbouni!" (which is Aramaic for “teacher"). She tried to touch him, but he told her, "Don't touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my father.” Jesus then sent her to tell the other apostles the good news of his resurrection. The Gospel of John therefore portrays Mary Magdalene as the first apostle, the apostle sent to the apostles. —Wikipedia

Mary Magdalene like the 12 disciples is a major part of the Christian myth about the Christ. Like with the tale of Christ’s resurrection, there are many different versions to the biblical myths surrounding Mary Magdalene—including the earlier belief that she was a repentant prostitute. She is often conflated with Mary of Bethany or the sinful woman who washed Christ’s feet as referenced in the Gospel of Luke. And there are some biblical scholars who believe that there was some type of romantic relationship between Christ and Mary.

Another woman of whom Mary Magdalene is confused is Mary of Egypt, the prostitute who later became a saint. In fact, in some Medieval paintings, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt are rendered in similar manner with a skull to signify their penitence, which no doubt contributed to the confusion between the two.

Whores play an important role in ASOIAF. They show up over and over in background scene but also in central roles as with Shae, and Tasha, Tyrion’s offscreen wife. Female characters are also often assigned that derogatory moniker. As a woman, it can sometimes be uncomfortable to read. However, I don’t think that George is doing it to be controversial or that he’s a sexist writer.

There is a symbolic and very important purpose behind all the reference to whor*s in the story. I think George is playing off the rumors about Mary Magdalene. House Darry from the Westeros forum and the once hopping Twitter myth-head fandom may have discovered the symbolic importance of whor*s in the story. He may have discovered why George has Tyrion asked the question, “where do whor*s go?”

House Darry proposes that often when George references whor*s, he is playing with the word hoar as in hoarfrost and icy. And ultimately, it’s to tell us something about the Others. Figuring out the answer to Tyrion’s question may provide an answer about what happened to Nissa Nissa and the Night’s Queen. You can read the thread on the forum here. I fully endorse his theory and advise reading as the thread as it contains some thought-provoking ideas.

This I believe is why George named Gilly after the gillyflower, which as we saw is also called hoary stock. The Matthiola longipetala, species of the flower, is called evening or night scented stock because its blooms and gives off their fragrance at night and wilts during the day. It’s also cold resistance. Gilly is not the Nights Queen of the story, but George often symbolically writes her as such to provide clues about the true NQ character and so it makes sense that the flower from which her name comes is cold resistant and associated with the night. This is GRRM, as I always say, being consistent with his symbolism.

Many in the fandom often joke about George having a thing for redheads in real life and that’s why there are so many in his stories. I think that he may even have jokingly acknowledged this in an interview, pointing out how his wife is a redhead. In his stories, his leading female characters are often redheads and this is true in ASOIAF as well. But here, he goes one step further and often makes his background characters redheads as well…especially the whor*s.

There is an abundance of female whore*s who show up in the background of scenes who are described as redheads. In part 3 of this series, I discuss this phenomenon, and the clues in the Hedge Knight and other books in the series that point to the corpse queen being a redhead, as well as the first blue winter rose of House Stark. Funnily enough, as seen in the above image, in classical art, Mary Magdalene is usually depicted as a redhead. You can see several representations of Mary in art at the Fitzwilliam museum.

An interesting image of Mary is not a full fledge painting but the charcoal drawing by Dante Rossetti, he of the perpetual redheads in his painting. It is titled, Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee. While done in charcoal and not paint, one can immediately see Dante’s style and recognize that if done in color, he would have painted Mary as a redhead as he did most of the women in his art.

Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee by Rossetti

Rossetti rendered Mary who is wearing a garland of roses that she pulls from her head as a prostitute trying to reach Christ and being blocked by others. What is interesting is that Rossetti was also a poet and he wrote a poem to accompany the drawing, the words of which suggests that while he might have been describing a spiritual love, it’s possible that he also believed there was a romantic relationship between Christ and Mary.

Oh loose me! Seest thou not my Bridegroom's face That draws me to Him? For his feet my kiss, My hair, my tears He craves today: – and oh! What words can tell what other day and place Shall see me clasp these blood-stained feet of His? He needs me, calls me, loves me: let me go!

According to Wikipedia, Mary Magdalene is mentioned by name twelve times in the canonical gospels, more than most of the apostles and more than any other woman in the gospels. In several of the gospels left out of the bible at the Council of Hippo, a closer relationship between Mary and Jesus is described in a way that may or may not have been romantic. For brevity’s sake, I’m copying and pasting the excerpt from the Wiki, including the passage from the Gospel of Phillip, which is one of the ones left out of the bible.

The Gospel of Philip uses cognates of koinônos and Coptic equivalents to refer to the literal pairing of men and women in marriage and sexual intercourse, but also metaphorically, referring to a spiritual partnership, and the reunification of the Gnostic Christian with the divine realm. The Gospel of Philip also contains another passage relating to Jesus's relationship with Mary Magdalene. The text is badly fragmented, and speculated but unreliable additions are shown in brackets: And the companion of the [saviour was] Mary Magdalene. [Christ] loved Mary more than [all] the disciples, [and used to] kiss her [often] on the [–]. The rest of the disciples [were offended by it and expressed disapproval]. They said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Saviour answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness." —Mary Magdalene, Wikipedia

Whether the kisses Christ gave to Mary were different from those given to the other disciples, and thus possibly signifying a romantic relationship between Mary and the historical Jesus will never be known but it is clear why over the centuries, there have been many who have considered it a strong possibility. However, I do believe that George is playing with this idea in the text regarding the Nights Queen and the very strong possibility that she was a redhead. He has folded the myth of Jesus and Mary Magdalene into ones about mermaids, sea goddess and a kiss of life.

In the last chapter, I discussed how the legend of the Grey King and his mermaid wife mirrors that of Elenei and Durran Godsgrief with both being about a female greenseer and her husband. In the Grey King version of the myth, he killed his mermaid/greenseer wife to access the green sea/weirwood net. On the other hand, the legend of Durran Godsgrief and Elenei, his mermaid wife is just the opposite. In it, the wife saves the husband from drowning in the green sea with the kiss of life.

All these myths about mermaids, sea gods, and the kiss of life are in the story to inform us not just about events during, and leading up to the last Long Night, but also about the same leading up to the next one. And as Amanda from Crowfoods daughter showed in her ironborn video essay series, the myths are also tied to those of the Shrouded Lord.

Amanda did such a great job with the theory that I’m not going to go over it again, but will simply provide the link to ironborn series so that you can watch the videos yourself.She talks about the influence of the Little Mermaid on the legends in question; Tyrion’s near death in the Sorrows; Florian and Jonquil; and the Shrouded Lord amongst other topics.

Now, I will show you how all these myths in question are about Jon’s resurrection and Sansa’s involvement in it, because as I’ve been saying this entire series, they are the Florian and Jonquil of the current tale.

However, that will have to wait until the next chapter because this essay has grown so long, I must split it in two. But I will leave you with a preview of Jon Snow the risen Christ in the story with this excerpt from 1 Peter 2:4-6 that describes Jesus as the Living Stone.

4 As you come to him, the Living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him— 5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For in Scripture it says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”

Next chapter, we will look at the evidence that shows that George is using the myth of the Shrouded Lord to mirror that of Christ the Living Stone and why Jon is the representation of both in the story.

ETA 12/24 to reflect the updated name for the next chapter from "the Infamous UnKiss, to a Mermaid's Unkiss.

#sansa stark #jon snow #asoiaf #jon x sansa #house stark #asoiaf meta #my meta #sansa stark meta #florian and jonquil #the shrouded lord #the living stone #girl in grey

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distortedkilling · 7 months ago

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I'm sorry if this is a too deep question out of nowhere, but on your HCs, how do you think the curses (and mahito especially) perceive gender? Mahito uses masculine pronouns in canon, but do you think he identifies with a specific gender? Is agender? Is interested in studying the importance we humans give to it, or thinks it's too stupid and unecessary? Does he comprehend certain prejudices that humans have due to gender ideas? I was also going to include asking about sexuality too, but I think this is already a pretty big ask </3 have a good day S2

Feel free to ask anything you like! I love deep questions.

With curses in general I think the context matters - as in, the type of curse they are. Say a curse exists that was born from the suffering women have endured, I feel like that curse would be more attached to the associated gender because its existence and nature surrounds that gender specifically. Whether that curse has the sentience or care to identify as said gender is another thing to consider. How a curse presents itself could be directly related to that gender its nature is associated with, or it could be a more ambiguous thing that covets aspects of the specific gender despite being something more akin to agender.

I think it comes down to the nature of the curse (why the curse was born to begin with) + the level of sentience of the curse (if it possesses the awareness to care about gender). I think a curse lacking sentience/awareness that identifies as a gender is likely echoing its nature without consideration - like a ghost looping in the place it died. Curses seem to echo "gibberish" about what made them or is related to their birth.

By default I lean towards the 'no' zone of curses perceiving gender to the degree humans do. While gender can be important to the type of curse it is, gender doesn't actually serve a purpose beyond that to them. It's entirely a human construct in terms of identification. Gender serves a reproductive purpose, sure, but how many curses are out there making babies? I ask that because curses, as we know them, lean more into negative and destructive habits than positive and creation based ones.

The context of a curse is what can give them a gender association, but a curse possessing sentience to some degree is what can define their perception on gender - if they even have one.

With Mahito I think he understands humans value gender perception. I don't think he personally cares deeply on the matter himself in terms of identification, but he likes the way the male form feels more-so than the female form. From the angle I write him from, I feel like he's agender but likes to be masculine presenting in body to a degree.

(Side note: I have a running theory way off to the side on the fact he was more masc leaning because human hatred, fear and betrayal in history has been more knowingly caused by men and patriarchies. That's not me saying women haven't done shit things in history, mind you, since Mahito isn't really bound to any one gender doing one. But predominantly in history, regardless of country even, we see male leaders of nations or clans being the ones to decide the fates of others. Betraying their people, enslavement, forcing their people into war, murdering for their own gain or enjoyment, etc. and the greater documentation we have of it regarding men over women.

It made me think that maybe Mahito's development into a masc leaning build was influenced by that. But he also keeps his features feminine leaning because plenty of women in history have also done wrong. Both in the past and present day - whatever the span of energy was that built up enough to make him. Or remake him (again and again).

It's a very tentative thing I'm considering because obviously it Doesn't Sound Great on paper. But Mahito is a little bit of a scholar of sorts, between human psychology, philosophy and (in my opinion) having some manner of interest in history - I can see him kind of playing with this angle because it could feel right to him to embody aspects of what birthed him. Presenting as a feminine man also is its own topic that inspires stupid amounts of hatred in people. Seeing as Mahito likes to make people upset, uncomfortable, etc. I can also see him forming his body based on that.

And while I know a person's art style is liable to change here and there and what not - I find it fun to think that Mahito is just shapeshifting himself a little here and there. Thins his muscles, gets a little leaner now and then, sometimes gets more bulky. Adjusts depending on his wants or if he thinks it's necessary to.

Anyways, these thoughts in here are just tentative ones I'm musing on because I'm trying to factor in the things that birthed him and how they've played a role in humanity. So take this section in parenthesis with a grain of salt for now.)

Back to your inquiry, I think he'd be interested to learn how humans perceive it and what the fuss is all about. The subject of gender in the modern era sparks a lot of negativity between those who are going unheard and those who are obtuse on the matter. I think Mahito understands gender in the form of human reproduction and doesn't inherently think more on it beyond that. If someone corrected him on how their identify he'd take a second to consider their physical form and if it was based on that or based on their mental perception of themselves. Either way, I don't really feel like he'd have a care in going along with how someone identifies as, since gender to him isn't a huge deal. On top of that, his interest in psychology and philosophy surrounding the subject is probably the saving grace here that would have him be interested in going along with it. Because without that, he really wouldn't care and would call someone whatever came to mind. This isn't to say he's a nice curse, btw. Mahito will likely make rude jokes at the expense of someone. Gender, orientation, whatever regarding all that isn't really off limits if he wants to be mean in some way.

I think Mahito has a good understanding on the prejudices that exist. While he has no real attachment to gender as a curse and just decides based on his whim of what he likes at the time, he understands the value humans have with it and the negativity that generates because of the subject. Hell, he was probably born from a decent chunk of the hatred ignorant people have on the subject and the hatred (and fear) people on the other side of the debate (nonbinary, trans, etc) also experience. Mahito sees this issues humans face and thinks they are silly things to squabble about. But hey, they are generating negativity and kind of proving his own ideology so he isn't about to complain either.

Also feel free to ask about sexuality! I'm pausing this answer without that part because I'm not wholly sure what about it you'd like me to address. If you mean how curses or Mahito perceive sexuality? Or if he associates with that-- like similar questions here just flipped for that subject or something else. So rather than presuming I'll let you feel free to ask if you'd like so I can give the inquiry the attention it deserves.

If I didn't answer something enough, feel free to specify and I'll clarify my thoughts further. I don't mind at all.

Mind anyone who gets this far, this is just my own opinion of how I write Mahito. It's fine if you disagree with any part of it. ^^

Thank you very much for asking! It was lovely to answer.

#also sorry if any part of this sounds short or ignorant when covering the topic. i was trying to keep concise to the inquiries and not delve #too deeply into the subjects outside of the character in question. i have my own very long history with gender identity stuff so any vague #descriptions isn't from an actual ignorant point but because i didn't want to delve into certain aspects or account for the nuances #of the subject when mahito's perception of it is more simple. this way the answer can be about him vs my opinion(s) on the topic xD #have i disclaimed this post enough?? lmfao #asks #headcanons

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butterflydm · 2 years ago

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Mat & the Aelfinn prophecies

Summary: One of Mat’s prophecies is very different from the others, in both form and execution. Maybe there’s a reason for that.

While this does have spoilers through A Memory of Light, my reasoning is based pretty much entirely on the solo Jordan books, so that’s why I’m posting it now, before I start my reread of The Gathering Storm.

however, spoilers through A Memory of Light are below.

One of things that I dislike about the Mat-Tuon relationship is that it feels like a narrative punishment for Mat (honestly, almost much everything in Ebou Dar and onward felt that way to me). But I’ve been thinking about that while I was reading CoT & KoD, and it made me wonder... what if it wasn’t the author who was punishing Mat here?

What if it was someone inside the narrative?

Mat saving Moiraine helps save the world, because she is able to help Egwene and Rand come to an agreement with each other. Mat living and dying also helps save the world by releasing him from the Horn and enabling someone else to use it (since he’s kinda busy and all). So, if two of Mat’s fates directly help save the world... what about the third fate?

Who does it aid that Mat marries Tuon? Does it aid Mat? Does it aid the Westlands at all? Why would marrying Tuon be part of his ‘fate’?

There not only does not appear to be a benefit to the Westlands & Rand, it actually seems to actively harm the Westlands -- Mat protects Tuon from being assassinated and considers ways to help the Seanchan Empire to survive past the shock of the sul’dam secret being revealed. Mat marrying Tuon also helps protect her/the Seanchan from Westlands retaliation for the invasion of their continent by putting the best general in history on the side of the slavers. Hundreds (potentially thousands) of people will end up staying enslaved as a result of the marriage, if Mat truly does mean to make certain to keep the Seanchan Empire alive in its current form.

It also doesn’t seem to aid Mat himself much -- he is trapped into a marriage where his wife’s way of ‘flirting’ is to constantly threaten to enslave or murder him, while he remains intensely attracted to many other women and obviously would not have chosen a monogamous relationship.

Mat does not end up being the key to the alliance between the Westlands and the Seanchan+ -- he’s much more important to Rand and Egwene reconciling (due to saving Moiraine) than he is to the Westlands and the Seanchan allying, because Rand is already pretty set on allying with the Seanchan at that point, no matter what the moral cost.

Ah, but Mat does... save Moiraine. From the ‘finn, the very people who gave him all his prophecies to begin with.

Mat is given three prophecies by the Aelfinn, in their last moments together in the doorway in Tear. Of those prophecies, two of them would happen no matter what as long as Mat stayed with Rand for as long as he did -- Moiraine made her choice to bodyslam Lanfear into the Eelfinn doorway based on what she saw in the silver rings, not based on what she heard in the Aelfinn doorway. And Mat would have gone to Caemlyn and gotten temporarily killed by Rahvin regardless of the Aelfinn prophecies as well (AMoL confirmed that this is the death that un-tied him from the Horn).

But their other prophecy -- that he would marry the Daughter of the Nine Moons -- is a prophecy that is only fulfilled based on Mat behaving according to how the Aelfinn have instructed him to act. Mat marries Tuon because they tell him to, no other reason. Before he finds out that she’s his prophesied wife, he was planning to leave her behind when he escaped; he was not attracted enough to Tuon as a person to consider bringing her with him on her own merits.

So this marriage seems entirely arranged by the Aelfinn and not by the Pattern*. Why would they do that?

Could it have been a punishment/price from the Aelfinn, who already know that Mat is destined to come back and steal Moiraine from them?

Tuon is perfectly calculated to be everything that Mat hates: capable of channeling, she’s a noble/royal, she abuses her power over other people and expects complete subservience from those around her, she threatens him constantly, she treats him as if he were her property, she would enslave his sister and other loved ones if she had the chance, and he doesn’t even want to be in a monogamous relationship to begin with.

In CoT & KoD, Mat talks himself into respecting and trusting her ‘because wife’ (which leads to her being able to undermine and betray him on multiple occasions such as attempting to leash the Aes Sedai in the circus or stealing his medallion) but even in their final scene in AMoL, he has to force a smile around her after she announces her pregnancy. This marriage is going to be a misery for Mat and yet there appears to be no in-text reason why it actually needed to happen. It happens because it happens because it happens.

We are warned that the Aelfinn and Eelfinn are tricky and that there is no way to beat them. It does feel much in the spirit of a fey sort of person if they gave Mat two types of prophecies: two true no matter what as long as he followed his thread of fate, and the third to exist as the price for learning the others.

And, side note and relevant to @markantonys: on rereading the text, the only ACTUAL prophecy that the Aelfinn specifically tell him will get him killed if he avoids it is that he needs to go to Rhuidean rather than going home to the Two Rivers (and it’s specifically because he will get MURDERED by people opposed to him fulfilling his fate if he doesn’t go there -- and this one is very believable! He gets the ancient memories and the medallion in Rhuidean and those are KEY to him being able to survive potentially deadly encounters with Shadowspawn & survive through dangerous battles).

He weedles the other three prophecies out of them at the end and there’s no direct implication that avoiding those three fates would lead to his death. I myself also thought that marrying Tuon was linked to him not getting killed but that implication is actually not in the text! And even if she is his ‘fated’ wife, it’s also clear in the text that he can avoid his fate, because this entire encounter is the Aelfinn warning him NOT to avoid going to Rhuidean because it would lead to him being vulnerable to being killed by his enemies. Mat decides that him ‘living and dying again’ (which he mistakenly thinks is about being hanged by the Eelfinn in Rhuidean, so there is also in-text evidence that Mat has misinterpreted at least one of his prophecies) is proof that it’s also impossible for him to escape the DotNM but there actually isn’t evidence in the text that this in the case. On the contrary, it seems like it IS possible for Mat to avoid this part of his fate and would, in fact, have been extremely easy for him to have avoided it (if he hadn’t known about the prophecy), since he would have just... left at the end of Winter’s Heart and never seen Tuon again, having absolutely no idea that she was ever meant to be his fated anything.

References from the text (The Shadow Rising):

“If you do not go to Rhuidean,” the woman on the right said. “You will die.”

...

Mat asks, “Why will I die if I do not go to Rhuidean?”

“You will have sidestepped the thread of fate, left your fate to drift on the winds of time, and you will be killed by those who do not want that fate fulfilled.”

...

He persists and asks, “What fate?”

“To marry the Daughter of the Nine Moons.” (which becomes possible as a result of going to the Eelfinn, which gives him his memory of Artur Hawkwing’s face, but also becomes possible because they just told him about it)

“To die and live again, and live once more as part of what was.” (this is locked into place just by staying by Rand’s side; which Mat would ‘sidestep’ by going home to the Two Rivers instead of staying with Rand)

“To give up half the light of the world to save the world.” (this is locked into place by Moiraine’s choices and by Mat going to Salidar by Rand’s command, as that’s what makes him meet Thom again)

Both of the second two prophecy fulfillments flow naturally from Mat’s character development and his nature; but marrying tDotNM remains a jarring departure from his previous characterization even when it happens.

+It’s possible that it was Jordan’s original INTENTION that any Seanchan alliance would hinge on Mat being married to Tuon (with him being a ‘binding cord’ like Aviendha was supposed to be between Rand & the Aiel due to their relationship, which Jordan also basically dropped as a concept) but that’s not how he ended up writing it, whether that was because he wanted to punt all moral issues to the outriggers or for other reasons, because in order to make Mat marrying Tuon key to getting Seanchan support for the Last Battle, there were two key mistakes Jordan made:

Jordan needed to not have Mat be the one making all the concessions in their ‘relationship’. Jordan just couldn’t bring himself to ever let Tuon be vulnerable, for whatever reason (maybe the same reason he glorified Cadsuane’s bullying). But, regardless of the reasons, making the Mat-Tuon relationship one where he never fights her on anything important means that it’s absolutely useless in political terms and doesn’t really count as a ‘marriage alliance’.

Jordan should not have ALREADY had Rand willing to make peace with the Seanchan no matter what the cost. Honestly, this one point is enough to render the Mat-Tuon marriage entirely pointless. Rand was already willing to bend on slavery and humble himself for Tuon, thus making it so that (once again, a familiar refrain with Tuon’s storyline) Rand must make all the important concessions while Tuon makes barely any at all and gets to keep on trucking along in her untouched slaver bubble where she never has to admit she’s anything less than perfect and The Only Real Person In The World. If it really did take Mat’s magic...skills in the bedroom... for Tuon to even be willing to listen to Rand, then the Westlands would have been much better off with her assassinated by Suroth anyway, because she’s already so far off the deep end that she’s unsalvageable.

*Note: I am not considering Tuon’s own prophecy in this analysis because she gets hers so late in the game -- she hears the prophecy from the damane literally the day before she lands in Ebou Dar and meets Mat for the first time, when all the rest of the pieces are already in place for the forced marriage -- Mat already heard his prophecy months ago, Mat already has the memories, Mat already is trapped in Ebou Dar and wants to get out. By the time Tuon gets her prophecy, Mat’s side of things has been set in stone, so the prophecy is a true prophecy for her, due to Mat’s actions, as guided by the Aelfinn.

#mat cauthon #seanchan warning #wheel of time #wot #my wot meta #wot meta #wot book spoilers #a memory of light #amol #wot amol spoilers #wot a memory of light spoilers #wot reread #one of the thoughts that came up as a result of my reread #anyway i haven't done my reread of the last three books #but i feel like this is canon-compliant as of the jordan books #intentional? lol probably not #i suspect jordan was just Real Bad at romance #but i don't think it actually contradicts anything in the text #at least as far as i can remember

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spammreviews · 10 months ago

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_____________

I would like to say that this is not a ranking of the characters based on morals. This is based on how good I think they are as characters. This is obviously extraordinarily subjective, however, I enjoy ranking and sorting.

There are three factors I generally considered for this ranking.

The first is how well written I think the characters are. Do they have dimensions, do they serve their purpose within the story, do they stand out from the very large crowd of faces within this story, et cetera. This one is less important if they are a very minor character.

The second is how fun I think they are. The point of some of these characters is to get a chuckle, and if they did that, then they succeed as characters.

The third is vibes. Sometimes, I just vibe with characters.

Art Credits to

The_Mico

https://m.facebook.com/198918470118215/photos/a.232323176777744/465124813497578/?type=3

Amok https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/File:Visenya.jpg

Riot Art Therite

https://riotarttherite.tumblr.com/

The Three Hares

Rae Lavergne

Weak Aside

https://www.tumblr.com/weakaside

Paolo Puggioni

Image of Nettles by Rlyeha https://www.deviantart.com/rlyeha/art/Nettles-885635180

Special Thanks to

A Wiki of Ice and Fire

https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Main_Page

and

A Search of Ice and Fire

___________

Without further ado, the list. This is a ranking of all characters from best to worst, with 398 being the worst and 1 being the best.

_____________________

F Tier:

398. Xaro Xhoan Daxos-

Xaro is like a weird homophobic stereotype. One could compare him to Varys, but Varys is a character and he has dimensions. There are moments where we are surprised by Varys. Varys has a boring room. Varys went out of his way to save Gendry. Varys has a fucked up backstory. Despite all of Varys’ silliness he never feels cartoony. He’s an actual capable and intelligent person who’s motivations are mysterious and intriguing. Et cetera, et cetera.

Meanwhile, Xaro Xhoan Daxos has no surprises. He’s just…ridiculously one noted, and that note teeters on the edge of being kind of homophobic with a few weird lines which I hope were not George’s intention.

All of this would be fine if he only had a few chapters, but he appears in two books. Two!

Everything Xaro says and does is so basic. He’s got simple and un-unique strategies because of his simple and un-unique motivations. Half of his lines and actions feel the same. His purpose within not just the story, but within individual chapters and conversations, never changes. I’m getting really angry right now.

I get that we are supposed to hate Xaro, but the hatred I feel with him is not a fun hatred. I do not love to hate Xaro. I simply hate him. He annoys me. The way he talks is so fucking annoying, with this stupid eloquence wich makes simple sentences turn into paragraphs. It reminds me of papers I read in college. “I have crossed long leagues and stormy seas to help you once again.” “A pretty metal, but fickle as a woman. Gold, now…gold is sincere.” Shut the fuck up. He also talks about how hot Dany is every other second. I get the point that the traits of Dany which are valued are her appearance, so even someone who’s not attracted to women is going to act pervy, but it’s still annoying.

Xaro is also ridiculously condescending. It’s purposefully infuriating, but it’s so cartoony and on the nose it’s not even a funny kind of infuriating. Perhaps he might go higher if he died a terrible death, but for now he’ll go here.

He also adds nothing to the story. He has two conversations with Dany in Dance. The first one lasts for pages, and it’s only purpose is to give us a bunch of information. The second one’s purpose is to piss Xaro off so he can declare war.

In conclusion, Xaro Xhoan Daxos is too ridiculous to be taken seriously, and too annoying to be taken comedically.

397. Yezzan zo Qaggaz-

It’s really hard to tell apart one Ferengi-esque Ghiscari from another (I think the enslaved people aren’t Ghiscari, but I’m not sure). They’re all ugly, cruel, ridiculously decadent, and greedy. It’s bland, it’s repetitive, and it’s almost, dare I say…lazy. The world of Mereen feels so drab in comparison to the world of Westeros because everyone there basically just acts basically the same. At least with the Ferengi, we were introduced to sympathetic and complex ones, and we learned about the nuances of their society and all that jazz. The Ghiscari are not afforded that same privilege. The exception is Hizdar Zo Loraq, who will be discussed later.

I’m obviously not saying that George should have introduced us to a nice, sympathetic slaver. Please do not misconstrue my meaning. I’m saying that George could have introduced us to a slaver who’s personality stands out, or a Ghiscari who wasn’t a slaver or something. You can make a character complex and interesting while still having them be completely irredeemable in every way. This is ASOIAF, after all, and this story has lots of characters who are atrocious people but who still have interesting internal psychologies. Hell, sometimes adding complexity or whatever to a character can make them more hateable, as we will later see. I know the Ghiscari suck, but there’s no slaver who provokes the same degree of anger in me that Joff or Ramsay does, and I’ll explain why later.

These are all evil, irredeemable human-shaped pieces of shit, but at least Joff and Ramsay are characters. Ramsay isn’t even that complex…he’s mostly just sadistic for no reason, but his sadistic cruelty is still interesting because he is a character with traits beyond “evil”. He’s a specific kind of evil, and there’s a reason he’s that kind of evil, and that specific kind of evil comes in a variety of ways. Grazdan and Yezzan and Kraznys are just evil.

Once again, I am not saying that George should have made a slaver sympathetic. I want to emphasize that. He could have, at the very least, given one of them an interesting quirk, like one of them is a big fan of card games or whatever and the other slavers are really annoyed because he always wants to play. I don’t know. I’m not a critically acclaimed writer of dozens of fantasy and sci fi novels.

Obviously, George making the slavers all greedy and decadent makes a clear point, but there are ways to portray greed and decadence interestingly, as we see elsewhere in this story. With the Ghiscari, George just ramps up the traits to extreme levels, making the slavers too cartoony to be seen as a realistic threat. I’m not against this series being a bit silly, but the slavers feel beyond parody, and this hurts his criticism of the systems of Slaver's Bay, as the story focuses less on how the system doesn’t work, and instead simply shows that the people who benefit from it are annoying and gross. Now, the story can focus on how a system is fundamentally flawed and also show how the people who benefit from it suck, because this story does do that, but not with Slaver’s Bay.

It’s also definitely possible to show oppressive forces as being ridiculously stupid and annoying while still having them feel real. Outside of ASOIAF, Quentyn Tarantino does this very well with Django Unchained and Inglorious Bastards. Within ASOIAF, well…we’ll see.

In conclusion, the character of Yezzan is extremely lazy writing.

396. Grazdan Mo Eraz (not pictured)-

It’s really hard to tell apart one Ferengi-esque Ghiscari from another.

Much has been written about how ASOIAF is not just a psychological story (meaning that the plot is driven by the character’s internal psychologies) but also a sociological story (meaning the plot is driven by the world around the characters). Dany’s story definitely succeeds on a psychological level as Dany’s character is well thought out. However, it only occasionally succeeds as a sociological story, in my opinion at least.

This is because the society Dany interacts with in Storm and Dance doesn’t really feel like a society. We never see what daily life is like in Mereen, or see a diversity of thoughts and opinions within the citizens of Astapor. Everyone feels like a part of one big homogenous blob. A society is made up of individual people, with all of these individual people having their own psychologies. In a sense, sociological stories are psychological stories- but with the psychology of thousands or even millions of people. What is the internal psychology of Grazdan Mo Eraz? Why has his society made him think and act this way? The answer is, he has none. He’s just another bad guy.

With much of the plot in Westeros, we see that these characters have ideologies which are a result of the world they're in, no matter how minor these characters are. For example, the two knights Brienne meets in her first chapter in Feast are clearly influenced by these ideals of knighthood and chivalry and gender, and these are very minor characters. Even the most displaceable of characters, such as Euron, are clearly influenced by their society's values.

We never get this with anyone in Slaver’s Bay.

395. Kraznys mo Nakloz-

It’s really hard to tell apart one Ferengi-esque Ghiscari from another. These three slavers are equal in value to me, as they are extraordinarily similar characters, with their only differences being different versions of sucking. One is harsh, one is jolly, and one is mocking. These are very common types of assholes within ASOIAF. I get them mixed up in my mind all the time.

I have one more issue with the Wise Masters of Yunkai and the Good Masters of Astapor. George wrote a fat character who suffered extreme amounts of abuse and bullying because of his weight and has to learn to love himself. However, he also wrote a bunch of characters who are fat to show that they’re rich. This trope isn't even subverted in any way, like with Wyman Manderly. The Wise Masters are fat, and it seems like we’re supposed to be disgusted by the fact that they’re fat because it means they’re decadent and gross. With Wyman, his weight is cleverly used against us, as we assume he’s just a bit player who only cares about himself, but then it turns out that he’s an extreme badass who uses his obesity as a shield. Even with Illyrio, we get the idea that he is more than what he seems to be, and he also serves as a reference to the “jolly fat guy” trope from Shakespeare. However, with the wise masters, they’re just overweight. We are supposed to think it’s funny that Kraznys “has bigger breasts than Dany”. I suppose maybe it’s actually to show Dany’s immaturity, and that she’s negatively influenced by beauty standards, but that’s not something which is really explored. With Cersei, we get her trusting hot people who betray her and disliking “ugly” people who are actually trying to help her.

That doesn’t seem to be a big part of Dany’s character. Kraznys is what he seems to be and nothing much more than that.

394.Doreah-

She was not much of a character

And ohhh…she had no personality

And I got this crazy feeling

I’m gonna ah ah put her low

And oh she was so boring

I didn’t care when she died

And I got this crazy feeling

George didn’t care either

As Dany only thinks of her once afterwards

You may ask what’s her name

And I’ll whisper her name

I’ll whisper her name

And her name is D-O-R-E-A-H

DOREAH! D-O-R-E-A-H

And oh, I’m gonna tell the world

She was Dany’s handmaiden

No, not Jiqui or Iqui

The only difference is that she was blonde

And the way she was described

Was very creepy

DOREAH! D-O-R-E-A-H!

Oh, what’s the point?

What’s the point of her?

Quentyn died for someone’s sins, but not mine.

392 and 393. Irri and Jiqui-

I have forgotten the existence of Irri and Jiqui. They are Dany’s Dothraki “friends”. I feel like George screwed up by making all of Dany’s friends (other than Missandei) uninteresting, and also making most of the Dothraki she encounters lacking in any depth. Jon has a large treasure trove of kooky characters for him to bounce off of. Some of these characters are wildlings, who are displayed as having a wide variety of character types.

Meanwhile, there are two flavors of Dothraki we meet: fierce men and fragile women. This fill-in-the-blanks approach to character writing is super boring, sticking out extraordinarily from the rest of the series. I don’t care about Jhogo because he is the same as Aggo who is the same as Rakharo. I don’t care about Irri because she’s the same as Irri who is just a non-Lysene Doreah.

Irri and Jiqui are not characters. That requires character traits, which they lack.

391. Reznak Mo Reznak-

Reznak Mo Reznak is just…too goofy. His whole evil manipulator schtick feels like something from a C-tier Disney movie, and there simply isn’t anything done to make him in any way interesting or memorable. And, with many of these other lower tier characters, one could argue that they work well as set dressing, but Reznak’s set is already dressed fine. We get the idea that Mereen is a pit of vipers, and we get that there are all these people giving Danny bad advice. He adds nothing but another voice, and as voices go, his is the most annoying.

390. Aegon IV-

Aegon IV feels like an AI generated list of things you don’t want a medieval king to be.

389. Alliser Thorne-

Purposefully asshole characters are old hat. Sure, Alliser Thorne was created in the 1990s, but uhhh…whatever. Alliser does feel a tad bit tropey, which makes him kind of annoying. He’s also not evil in a fun way, just a jerk. I also don’t like Rast, but I didn’t get an image of him, so I’d also put him here.

I suppose one could say that we need two dimensional jerks like this in this part of Jon’s story, and I suppose that is true. However…I still don’t like him.

I’ve seen a lot of war movies, and there are tough drill instructors who are just as dimensional as Alliser yet still manage to be more interesting. Just look at Heavy Metal Jacket.

Also, like what is Alliser’s deal? He has no motives beyond just hating everyone for no real reason.

388. Jaehaerys II-

Jaehaerys II is easily the most boring Targ king. Maybe he had a personality, but I can’t say for certain.

#asoiaf #a song of ice and fire

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29. Dana Davenport & LaRissa Rogers

Dana Davenport and LaRissa Rogers discuss their experiences as Black and Korean artists and how their research and life experiences have led them to work with specific materials, motifs, and ideas. They discuss their work through the framework of family history, belonging, and Black-Asian futurity/solidarity.

Dana Davenport (DD): Hi LaRissa! I'm so excited to chat with you about our practices, expressions of identity, and interconnected histories. I came across your work a few months back while doom scrolling on Instagram. Unlike most days, I can say it was productive as it brought me to your work. I was thrilled to come across another Black and Korean artist working within similar mediums (sculpture, performance, and video). I was equally as excited simply to meet another Black and Korean person. I asked our mutual friend, TJ, to introduce us and now here we are. As I began to dive deeper into your work, I discovered so many throughlines in how you utilize the body, draw from familial history, and use specific materials to dissect identity. Perhaps, as a place to start off, can you talk a bit about your relationship to the materials that you're currently working with?

LaRissa Rogers (LR): Hi Dana! I am very excited you extended the opportunity for this correspondence. Similarly, I found your work doomscrolling on Instagram a few years back, and I was immediately a fan. It was exciting to see someone working through their identity, familial history, and materiality as a Black and Korean femme. Then a few years later, I received a lovely email from TJ, mentioning you were in LA and introduced us! It was such a great surprise, and I am so excited to start this relationship and pick your brain! Haha.

For me, material history is the easiest way to dissect and draw parallels to identity formation and larger narratives around diaspora, migration, belonging, violence, labor, care, etc... At the moment, I am working with porcelain, sugar, and soil. I began working with soil in 2019, almost as a default. I had just finished a project, “We’ve Always Been Here, Like Hydrogen, Like Oxygen,” which was a performance on the Richmond slave trail. The performance consisted of me washing my body with oranges as a ritual of self-care. At the time, the BLM uprisings were happening, Breonna Taylor was assassinated, AAPI hate was high, and I was paralyzed by the similarities in the political landscape of LA in 1992 and the current times. For me, oranges were a direct link to the Latasha Harlins murder and the erasure/silencing of Black women and girls. But, this case is very layered and complex. It's about anti-blackness, fear of others, misinterpretation, the legacy of slavery and policing, the corrupt judicial system..and I could go on. But, essentially, we have to look at this event holistically and consider all of the ways internal and external anti-blackness showed itself in violent ways. I wanted to use the Richmond slave trail and the African burial grounds to think through how we are implicated through landscape and history. It was also important for me to link temporalities and draw out similarities between these three moments in time. This performance was an outcry, an attempt at asking: “what does it mean for Black women and girls to be protected and cared for?” The title of the piece stems from a Dionne Brand quote, when the descendants of enslaved people meet their ancestors in a slave castle – where the ancestors say in awe: “you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen.”

LaRissa Rogers, We've Always Been Here, Like Hydrogen, Like Oxygen, 2020. Double channel video Installation, 7min 22sec. Installed at Resurrection Lutheran Church, Richmond, VA.In Light 2020: Safety and Accountability. Photo Courtesy of 1708 Gallery. Photo by David Hale.

LR: This work leads me to work with soil. I was in online grad school at the time and had just moved back to Virginia (where I was born and raised) and did not have a studio. So, naturally, the landscape became that for me. As we already know, Virginia is a fraught place. I lived in Richmond for several years while attending undergraduate school and stayed a bit after. But, I was born and raised in Charlottesville, VA. Reading the news one day, I encountered this article about Pen Park. I grew up going to this park when I was young. My mom would take me to play at this park while we waited for my brother to get out of school. My father golfs there as well. But, Pen Park used to be an antebellum plantation. At Pen Park, there is a golf course, and on the golf course, there are unmarked slave graves. This place is not acknowledged. Around this time, I was also thinking heavily about monuments. The confederate monuments in Richmond were getting pulled down, and it seemed like every major city around the world was having conversations about their relevance and relationship to collective memory.

In Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake, On Blackness and Being, she speaks about residence time. She describes the residence of sodium held within the body being 260 million years, in relation to the enslaved Africans who were thrown, jumped, or dumped in the ocean during the middle passage. This residence time allows one to begin to think through the terms in which we understand the conditions of Black suffering. In contrast to water, the body takes approximately 200 years to return to dust when buried in the ground. As the nutrients of the body disintegrate back into the earth, how can thinking through residence time in the soil help us understand what it means for Black people to suffer when suffering is the ground?

Given how closely Black people are indexed to death, soil also holds the capacity to speak to regeneration. Historically, it is a place of Black resilience and possibility through geophagy, slave gardens, revolts, and the migration of African plants and foods to the Americas by way of women smuggling seeds in their hair during the middle passage. Soil is a living archive and speaks to the nonlinear nature of time. Saidiya Hartman’s theory of temporal entanglement questions how we narrate historical time when thinking about the afterlife of slavery. She calls us to examine the intersections where the past, the present, and the future, are not discretely cut off from one another, but rather, we live in the simultaneity of that entanglement. The ephemeral nature in which many traditions, stories, and ways of knowing are preserved in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities becomes visible in intangible ways due to colonization. Methods of remembering that cannot be held but are protected through and within the people themselves.

Using this as a framework, I did a few projects with soil, Virginia soil, and soil from different locations with historical relevance. You can see my attention to soil in the works “Ode to soil” “A Poetic of Living” and “On Belonging: The Space In Between.” As a material, soil does a lot for me.

LaRissa Rogers, A Poetic of Living, 2021. installation, Dimensions Variable, Soil from Pen Park and Farmington Country Club, Celosia, Fungus, Oxygen, Light, Care. Photos courtesy of Welcome Gallery. Photos taken by Stacey Evans.

LR: I am also working with porcelain and sugar. I began researching sugar after my project with oranges in 2019. We are all familiar with the sugar trade and its relationship to the transatlantic slave trade in the Americas and Global South. But I am also interested in how sugar functions today within the US context. It disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities – operating similarly to that of the plantation system. My family has a history of diabetes and sugar-related complications. Alternatively and historically, sugar is a commodity that has connected all four continents. The first significant wave of Korean laborers worked in the sugar plantations in Hawaii. There is also an expansive history of coolie workers and indentured servitude related to sugar in the US. In the 18th and 19th centuries, sugar pastillage was used by European royalty to create table displays for admiration, then consumed at the end of the night. The sugar sculptures became a status symbol often, displaying racialized and exoticized images. With the decline in sugar’s value and the impossibility to preserve the sugar sculptures for long stints of time, sugar pastillage was substituted for porcelain. This porcelain is commonly coveted within upper-class white homes as "fine china.”

Right now I am delving deeply into Anne Cheng’s work around ornamentalism. In yellow feminist theory, the Asiatic subject becomes ornament. Whereas in Black feminist theory, the Black body is bare life, these relationships are important to me and start to touch on the complexities of my afro-asian identity and how I experience violence navigating within a world that prioritizes skin. Thinking through these two materials and their relationship to the body, the mouth, the act of hunger, the ornament – become what Anne Cheng describes as the divergence between Black flesh and Yellow ornament. Using the scars from being whipped on Sethe's back in Toni Morrison’s Beloved as an example, Anne Cheng articulated that the flesh that passed through objecthood needs ‘ornament’ to get back to itself.” This is where ornamentation, particularly the chinoiserie pattern I am researching right now becomes a nuanced symbol and not just a decoration. There are moments when the wound needs ornament – we see this a lot in Black material culture through the use of gold, chains,” swag” –but there are also many times when the wound and the ornament cannot be compared.

The chinoiserie pattern, which the blue willow pattern stems from, was something I grew up around. My mom is Korean, born in Seoul. She was a war baby and orphan brought to the US by a Black soldier stationed in Seoul during the Vietnam war. It is crucial to realize the complexity of her story on a macro and micro level. Her story is a byproduct of US imperialism in Korea, GI babies, and the beginning of Korea's large adoption project that set legislation in place to rid the country of “unpure” Koreans. At this time, there was also sanctioned prostitution of Korean women for the American military resulting in a wave of Korean mothers and American fathers, who eventually moved to the US.

For my mom, once brought to the US at age four, her adoption requirements were never fulfilled, so she remains stateless. She was raised by my grandfather's mother in a poor Black household in Madison, VA. My father, a Black man, was similarly raised in a very poor neighborhood in Newport News, VA. Growing up, my mom decorated the house in this blue and white greenware. I was unaware of the history of blue and white greenware or chinoiserie, but I was always curious about this decision. I read it as a representation of a heritage or place (Korea) that she no longer had access to. My new body of work delves into this pattern, chinoiserie -- a pattern adopted by the Europeans as an idyllic and exoticized interpretation of Asian people and life. I am interested in its relationship to diasporic distance, belonging, and everyday violence that upholds white supremacy. I am also interested in this conversation surrounding the influences, perceptions, and interpretations one performs in the creation of self. The way this pattern, a distant interpretation, a fantasy of others, became removed from its violent history within the home, assumed, and merged with a Black interior aesthetic to create a new language – one that exists in the in-between, the liminal.

For me, the liminal is parallel to notions of authenticity when working with this pattern and being mixed-raced. One should always question their perceptions of purity and outside influences of authenticity. Where does culture begin? With the start of global trade in the 18th century and the rise of capitalism — cultural symbols and objects were constantly being assumed, consumed, merged, adopted, and recontextualized. It’s a violent process. But, in specific situations, this cannibalization or hybrid transformation impacts intersecting identities and allows the violent collision to become something greater than just the violence—especially for those who have been exiled. Edward Glisssant calls this “opacity” – or a lack of transparency for and toward the other– that can “coexist and converge weaving fabrics.” He states that “To understand this truly, one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of the components.” For me, opacity has become a strategy for engaging cultural multiplicity and diasporic imagery of resistance and power. Opacity allows you to be fully seen without being owned. It allows you to occupy spaces you may not be seen as a member of. Opacity and what Fred Moten coins as “fugitivity”-- “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed…a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument”-- creates portals for seeing and being seen.

Also, a fun fact, the chinoiserie pattern was used by the founding fathers (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc..) to reinforce symbols of enlightenment that uphold race within architecture commonly found in Virginia...

But, I am curious and would like to ask the same question. What materials are you working with right now, and how does your background inform those decisions?

Dana Davenport, Dana’s Beauty Supply ~and relaxation space~ (detail of family photo) , 2021,  Installation at Recess Art , Photography by Mary Kang

DD: Wow, thank you for so eloquently sharing your relationship to the materials you’ve been working with. Your use of material and the histories that they hold really resonate with me. As you know, I was born in Newport News, Virginia and raised in Seoul, South Korea. Although Virginia is not a place that I’ve spent much time in, much of my dad’s family is scattered throughout the Virginia area so it’s where we meet for family reunions and such. As a kid, I went through many different phases. One of those phases was an obsession with America (and therefore Virginia) and claiming my Americanness to my friends who also went to school on the military base in Seoul. It sounds silly to want to “prove” your Americanness while literally going to school on an American military base. But, you know how kids can be. They’ll find anything to pick on someone about. Haha. What I didn’t know or understand at that time is how fraught of a place Virginia was and still is. The way that Virginia existed in my mind as a place that validated my belonging even though I was thousands of miles away, versus the reality that even if I lived there, there would be a constant battle for the contributions of my ancestors to be acknowledged, was definitely a plot twist for me and something that I’d become more exposed to as I’d visit more frequently over the years in middle and high school. There is something eerie about being in Virginia, walking on the land, yearning to connect with ancestors, cultures, histories, and languages that have been buried in the soil. When I feel this yearningness, it’s humbling to remember that these histories exist through and within me.

I didn’t know that the first significant wave of Korean laborers worked on plantations in Hawaii! This is really interesting to hear, as my partner and I visited a friend in Hawaii a few months back and didn’t know much about the migration of Koreans (and other Asian folks) to the islands.

I’m really interested to learn more about your exploration of chinoiserie patterns. I see your use of it in Licked Until Your Tongue Rubbed Raw, 2022 and in On Belonging: The Space In Between, 2021. Are you creating the chinoiserie patterns yourself? It is quite interesting how this pattern has shape shifted and been adopted into Black interior aesthetics. I’m intrigued by aesthetics that seem to exist in between and thinking of ways that we can create visual languages around Black and Asian experience, solidarity, and futurity. For the past several years, I’ve been working with synthetic hair and hair care products as a material that binds Black Americans and Korean Americans through the beauty supply industry, an industry that we know is overwhelmingly Korean-owned with a primarily Black consumer base. Prior to this, I was doing a lot of performance work but became weary of having to rely on the presence of my physical body in my work in order to discuss not only the tensions that I felt in being a Black and Korean woman but also everyone else's interpretations and projections of the conflicts between Black and Asian communities. It was a lot to carry. After a particularly uncomfortable performance at a “prestigious” space with a nearly all white, generationally rich audience, I took a step back from performance. At that time, I simply didn’t know how to continue doing that work in a way that was also protective of my body and my experiences. So, in saying that, I was seeking out a material that could serve as a proxy for my body. I began to think deeper about hair care and the experience in obtaining these materials. When I first moved to NY from Korea after graduating high school, I remember being baffled after walking into a beauty supply store and seeing that the folks behind the counter were Korean. This was odd, as there are basically no beauty supply stores that cater to Black hair in Korea, and there wasn’t really any talk of how this industry in the US is dominated by Koreans. I started to experiment with speaking a little Korean here and there and it would not only confuse the Korean employees and store owners, but it’d severely improve the treatment that I received. I’m talking, free samples, the works! It was an uncomfortable reality of privileges that I hold. Disclaimer: I don’t speak Korean fluently so it took some courage and pepping myself up to actually speak Korean in public. All of this being said, I became obsessed with hair, hair care, and the beauty supply as a space to be reimagined where we can have critical dialogue around our collective history while envisioning Black and Asian futurity. In this reimagining, I return to the past and think about other businesses that are Asian-owned, in Black and Brown neighborhoods and how they are some of the few spaces where Black and Asian folks may find themselves intermingling. I think about the murder of Latasha Harlins. I think about my mom’s friend who’s worked at a beauty supply store for more than 20 years in Virginia (my mom and her friend are both Korean). I also think about early Chinese immigrants that opened grocery stores that served former slaves. They were successful because they offered goods at lower prices compared to plantation commissaries that inflated their prices to keep former slaves in perpetual debt. And of course, I consider the ways in which The National Housing Act of 1934 made it nearly impossible for Black folks to start businesses within their own communities.

Dana Davenport, Dana’s Beauty Supply ~and relaxation space~ , 2021,  Installation at Recess Art,  Photography by Mary Kang

DD: You studied Painting and Printmaking in undergrad at VCU and are now at UCLA in New Genres. Can you talk a bit about your journey from painting and printmaking to sculpture, performance and video?

LR: Thank you for your openness and criticality in articulating the tensions that arose from your experience, material practice, and journey as an artist. I resonated with many things you said and even found myself getting out of my chair and snapping my fingers in agreement because of it. Haha.

Firstly, when you were talking about your experience growing up in Seoul on a military base and feeling the need as a child to prove your Americaness – your virginianess -- was something I connected to. In my case, because I was born and raised in Charlottesville, it was not necessarily my Americaness I felt the need to prove, but my Asianness. I went to a predominantly white, upper-class private school, and I distinctly remember this moment on the playground when I was asked by a white classmate “What are you?” At this moment, I already knew I was different. I was one of maybe three Black kids in my grade for many years, but as a child, I had recognized the cultural currency my mom held as a Korean woman that my dad did not as a Black man. At that moment, I felt the need to legitimize my Assianness because I thought it would give me some sort of advantage. I longed to be accepted and included by my peers. There was always a feeling of not being accepted by the Black community or the Korean community. This was for a lot of reasons. My mom's relationship with her motherland was severed. Her connection to Korea and any sort of Korean roots is fragmented. Mine even more so. I did not grow up around other Koreans. My body also gets read as Black in the US. My Blackness has been prioritized because it has been perceived as more of a threat. How do we begin to talk about psychological violence? How do we begin to talk about these entangled and complex realities and relationships between Black and Asian futurity? How can we talk about belonging and arrival in the context of Black and Brown worldmaking? What are the tensions between belonging and fugitivity? Beauty and horror? Opacity and transparency?

Right now, I’m really sitting with Saidiya Hartman's offerings around monstrous beauty.

I say this and also recognize the privilege and complexities I hold being mixed-race.

I love your work and how you use the body as a material. Not just physical body, but hair as body. You asked about my relationship to the medium, particularly studying painting and printmaking and working primarily in sculpture and installation now. My journey was very similar to yours in a sense. In high school, I began to consider art as a career, and my introduction was primarily through painting. I fell in love with oil paint. The layering of color and texture, the manipulation, and the capacity for a single brush stroke to encompass expression and emotion. I went into undergrad knowing I wanted to be a painter. After the first year, that reassurance shifted. I took a time-based media class, and I was not great at making videos– but I did one performance, and something clicked. Through movement, material, place, and sound, I was able to tap into a sensory experience that felt more true to the emotion and criticality I was attempting to create in figurative painting. In the last two years of undergraduate school, I didn’t make a single painting. I began to work with hair and created a series of videos, sculptures, and performances that tried to pull out some of these tensions I felt navigating my identity.

I continued to make videos after undergrad, but I didn’t consider myself a sculptor at the time. It wasn't until after I graduated that I found object making through installation. Painting was such a distant memory at that point. Another reason I didn’t continue with painting is that I felt it was not able to do what I needed it to do. It couldn’t tell the story I was trying to convey, and the history of the medium is so fraught. I didn’t want to contend with it.

I then moved into performance. In the work with oranges, I was thinking of my body as orange. But, as I continued to perform, I would similarly get triggered. Especially performing to predominantly white audiences. This felt unsafe for my body and experiences. It got so exhausting that at one point in “My body is the architecture of my Every Ancestor,” (performed a few days after the Atlanta spa shooting) I performed inside the gallery through their “storefront window” making the audience watch the performance outside. I then pushed back the audience even further — to the sidewalk— to view the performance. I was trying to create distance, some sort of mediation of the violence of the audience, their gaze, and their interpretations of my body. I felt like an open wound, especially after my first year of graduate school. I felt vulnerable and constantly oozing…constantly being split open. Looking back, this is the moment I subconsciously turned to material as a stand-in for my body. A proxy that could be read in relationship to, but without my physical presence. This also allowed for larger narratives and histories to merge into the work.

As I continue to make performance and work that is non-archival in nature, I ask myself, what does it mean to build a practice that resists collectability/ownership and demands extensive care for its upkeep? As an ethos, how can I resist the market as a place of only transaction?

Going back to your question surrounding chinoiserie. I am starting to create the patterns myself. In "On Belonging" and "Licked Until Your Tongue Rubbed Raw '' I had not started to create my patterns yet. At the time, I was still grappling with the dissemination of these patterns. For my mom, it was less about the particular landscape within the pattern but more about the blue, white, and porcelain combination. You can now see within an American interior aesthetic, blue and white has become an interior decorating staple. The blue and white pattern has been adopted by many different cultures around the world. The interpretations, redactions, translations, adoptions, and reinterpretations don’t stop haha. This was intriguing to me because this pattern is synonymous with the colonial project. At that moment in time, I wanted this aspect of the work to be digested. The everydayness of this violence within this pattern. I was using generic interpretations of the chinoiserie to talk about the interpretation of the interpretation. The didactic. The performance of it. But now, I am less interested in that and more interested in how the pattern can be flipped or incorporated into my myth-making to generate something else. Similar to how I witnessed the pattern functioning in my home - a place of a combined Black and Korean interior aesthetic (though blue and white stems from a Chinese tradition). I am currently meditating on the beauty my mom has created through proximity of objects within the home. The rituals she has implemented so our family can begin to mend generational ruptures. For her, these mendings happen with food, and at the table. A type of physical and emotional nourishment that can happen in the home. This ability to mend and create beauty out of the monstrous, out of violence— it is a superpower. It is the Black radical tradition. It is the in-between. It is in the liminal. It is neither here nor there. It is the place where entanglement creates new futurities. It is everything all at once.

I am also curious about the aesthetic merging that happens in your work. Especially the chandeliers and Synthetic hair. Can you talk more about why the chandelier and how you landed on that form/object?

Also, in your works ``Much Love” and “experiments for relaxation” you’re working with multiple notions of care. How are you thinking through the registers of care that are required to nurture a critical dialogue surrounding Black and Asian futurities and solidarity? More specifically, What care is required to nurture yourself, your history, and your family's story? How are you thinking through care, and how do photography and family archives aid in telling this story?

Dana Davenport, 흑인 (heugin)-black person,  2017,  Performance at Watermill Center,  Duration: 2hrs,  Photography by Maria Baranova

DD: Ahhh, that very familiar feeling of wanting/needing to prove your Asianness. It’s wild that even at a young age, we unconsciously understand privilege and where one is situated within that system. While I was obsessed with America for a bit, that phase was short lived. My desire to “prove” my Asianness is unfortunately something that has taken much longer to shake off. In a lot of ways, my art practice played a huge role in that process. It provided me an unrestricted space to express all of the messy, contradicting, and nonlinear feelings that I was moving through. Initially, it was a lot of bottled up anger, a desire to be embraced by Korean culture while simultaneously resisting it in fear of rejection. This is most clearly articulated in my performance piece “흑인 (heugin)-black person”. In this performance, I write the word 흑인 repeatedly on a blank canvas on the floor. Gradually, the task became more aggressive resulting in exhaustion, examining the arduous notion of performing identity. Have you found that your relationship to Korea/Koreaness has shifted over time? And if so, what was influenced these shifts?

While our experiences differ in ways, I’ve arrived at similar questions. “How do we begin to talk about these entangled and complex realities and relationships between Black and Asian futurity?” I definitely don’t have an answer but something that I think about a lot is where are Black and Asian folks are interacting the most and under what conditions? I feel as though, within America, store owner/customer settings are the most common spaces in which Black and Asian folks gather. Commonly, Asian-owned shops in Black neighborhoods. So, that’s where I’ve started and how I arrived at the beauty supply as a space to be reimagined. I didn’t know that you worked with hair in the past! I’d love to see some of that work. I’m really fascinasted by your research around chinoiserie patterns, as it’s something that I’ve seen in so many places in totally different contexts but never stopped to think about how it lived between these spaces (I also never actually knew what the pattern was called). I always viewed it as an “Asian-coded” artistic style (often seen on vases and such) but then would also see as a wallpaper in some preserved colonial mansion in Virginia and not think twice about the overlap between the two. This pattern is truly a chameleon! I love how you are thinking about the next lifeform of this pattern, how it can shape shift to reflect a new culture, a combined cultural aesthetic, how it can be flipped as a tool to mend wounds. As you said, it is our superpower to mend and create beauty out of the violence we and our ancestors have endured. When I began working with hair, I started with simple domestic objects. A vase, slippers, rug, etc. I wasn’t really sure why, I was just drawn to it. As someone who studied Photography in undergrad, I hadn’t really considered myself a “maker” and definitely didn’t have the tools at that time to create the sculptures that I’d envisioned. Out of the many ideas that I’d jot down (and often talk myself out of trying) creating a chandelier was one that stuck. In the Summer of 2018, a family friend, Dan, offered to teach me how to weld. That changed the game for me as far as the tools that I had to create. Initially, I was drawn to the chandeliers because of their ability to elevate a material that, when worn and activated by Black folks, is criticized as ghetto, cheap, fake, and unprofessional. As I’d hang them within my studio and home, incorporate them in installations, and hang them in gallery spaces, they began to take on a protective role, setting the tone for whatever room their in and requiring that viewers look up at them with appreciation and awe.

Dana Davenport, Box Braid Chandelier #3, 블랙파워 (beullaegpawo)-Black Power, 2021, 30in x 25in, Steel, plastic beads, modeling clay, synthetic hair from Hair Style 21 (Online)

DD: Years ago, I created a piece titled “Questions Not To Ask The Artist”. It was a large piece of wood (the size of a door) that listed several things I was simply tired of being asked by viewers of my work and visitors to my studio. I was at the ChaNorth residency at the time and I placed it right in the entry way to my studio. It served as a sort of agreement between myself and viewers entering my space. I find that the chandeliers function in a similar way. In “Experiments for ~Relaxation” which was performed at Gibney Dance (New York, NY)I was processing alternative ways of performing that weren’t focused on the production of labor. I wanted to push myself to explore what relaxation could look like for me. What does rest look like for bodies that look like mine? How do we achieve mental and physical relaxation? The creation of this piece was chaotic. I found that it was actually quite difficult for me to achieve a state of relaxation. This pursuit, the awkwardness of it became part of the piece. “Much Love” was a really beautiful collaboration with Jazmine Hayes at Swivel Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). Together, we created a space that spoke to restorative practices of protection and care, transforming the gallery into what felt like a domestic space. Reminiscent of your grandmothers home with pink painted walls and red carpet. A space where you were protected, where you could release, where we honored ancestral practices. The back room served as a meditation and alter space, calling forth generational repose and threading together themes of love, labor, ritual, self-care, and communal care. We interspersed our family photos and hung them throughout the space, connecting our families and our histories. Photography and family archives are really how we mark our time in this world, how we claim that we are here. We exist. It allows us to write our own narratives and have some aspect of control over how we are represented. Family albums impact the way that we connect with the memories that we hold and how we tell stories and pass them down. My mom always made it a point to ensure that we took a lot of family photos. Unfortunately, there are only two photos that my mom has from her childhood. When she was young, her home caught fire and with it went whatever photos her family had (which probably wasn’t many to begin with). On the contrary, my dad’s family has a huge archive of photos. I recently inherited a box full of them and have had so much fun flipping through, reading all the hand written notes, and asking my reletatives who certain people are. From that box, I found a photo of my mother, sister, and a few other family members, sitting on a brown couch at my grandparents house. It had to be from 1993 or so. The carpet in the room was a dark red was nearly identical to the carpet in the “Much Love” exhibition. That was a real treat to come across. I think that to be in solidarity with eachother we must first see eachother. Literally, seeing eachother in space and metaphorically seeing eachother within ourselves, within our histories, and as living, breathing, feeling individuals. It’s important to understand how the past factors into our realities in the present but it’s equally as important to dream of our futures. Care is conveyed when we hold ourselves accountable. When we place trust in eachother. When we can share space. For the past few years, language has played a large role in how I nurture myself and my own familial history. After years of feeling embarrassed for having lived in Korea for so long and not speaking Korean, I finally started taking Korean classes. I resisted for many many years, as I’d convinced myself that learning the language meant I was surrendering in some ways. Surrendering to a culture that rejected me and my Blackness. Honestly, I just had to get over that and understand that I can show up for myself by allowing myself the freedom to learn, to recontextualize, and to grow in this way. I’d like to ask you the same question. It feels like a beautiful note to come to a close on. How are you thinking through methods of care as a tool to nurture critical dialogue around Black and Asian futurity and solidarity? What care is required to nurture yourself, your history, and your familial lineage? And how does photo documentation and family archiving contribute to these forms of storytelling?

LaRissa Rogers, My Body Is The Architecture of My Every Ancestor, 2021. Performance, 1 hr 15 min. Performed at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. Photos taken by Chan Williams.

LR: You begin your response by asking if my relationship with Korea/Koreaness has shifted over time, and I think it has. The work is a direct timeline of that shift. The Latasha Harlins case was my first stepping stone. The interaction between Soon Ja Du and Latasha Harlins speaks right to your articulation of what solidarity requires– for us to see each other individually and collectively within shared experiences and histories. Within Latasha Harlins’s and Soon Ja Du's interaction, there were fundamental misinterpretations of the “other,” and those misinterpretations are based on our system that can only survive by pinning us against one another. In “We’ve Always been here, Like Hydrogen, Like Oxygen” I directly speak to this in some of the text overlaid in the video which reads, “you and I are connected.” When I wrote it, I was thinking of Latasha Harlins but also Soon Ja Du. This conundrum reminds me of a quote I read from Scott Kurashige that states: "The 'model minority' stereotype isn't meant to define Asian Americans. Rather, it's meant to define African Americans as deficient and inferior to white people by using Asian Americans as a proxy...It was never an accurate portrayal of Asian Americans." Though I had discomfort, sometimes anger, a deep sense of loss, and a longing to be more connected to my Koreanness I needed to recognize within myself why I felt tension and separation. I use my art as a way to heal and as a means of owning my Koreanness while acknowledging my positionality within it as someone distant from the place and culture. Coming to terms with this was something I had to get over and required me to be soft with myself. But care is hard! Often we forget that. Care is a lot of work. Sitting within the pain, within the hold – as Christina Sharpe would say is not pleasant work. That is what I am trying to do with my work. It is also how my relationship with my Koreanness shifted. I am no longer preoccupied with proving my Koreanness, legitimizing it, or ignoring it, which I did for many years. Embracing and attempting to learn my history and heritage-- one I also feel does not fully embrace me at times– is an attempt to understand my mother's experience, my experience, my father's experience, and the histories of entangled experiences. It is not an either-or. It is a both and. A hybrid approach that has allowed me to reject categorization and politics of authenticity that felt restricting and violent.

It's interesting to hear you speak on the few images your mother has of her childhood because similarly my mother only has a couple of images left from when she was a child in Korea. Her father discarded most of them when she was young. Alternatively, my grandmother on my mom's side made many photo albums. When she died, the photo albums were gifted to us. In my last year of undergraduate school, I remember going through all of the photos for the first time. I would ask my mom about members of the family that I could not identify. This was a way to connect to my family and the family my mom adopted into. My grandma also loved embroidery, and every so often when I was going through the box of photographs I would find notes on the back of images, and embroidered handkerchiefs with quotes or rhymes. It was really surprising for me to discover these notes because I would never classify my grandmother as a jokester. But, a lot of the images had inside jokes written on the back of them. It was an entirely new way I understood my grandmother. By 2019 my grandmother had passed away, but I had a show “Invisible Weight” where I used her embroidered handkerchiefs as a mode of rememory and collaboration.

My great-grandmother was also a great archivist, though many family photographs were lost in a house fire.

Growing up, my mother was very good at documenting our lives. My siblings and I have a “life book” that tells our childhood story until high school. Many photos in my “life book” show up in my “Brown Paper Bag Series” from 2019. This book includes adoption photographs, songs, family vacations, holidays, and images of loved ones. Looking back, this was another present my mother gifted the family as a healing mechanism. She continued a labor of care that women in my family had done for generations. She made sure we documented our lives so we could feel seen and know where we came from. How does one memorialize the everyday? I would argue, through family archives – visual and embodied.

Solidarity requires grace. I have eight siblings, and most of them are adopted. Despite adoption, my family is close. Our home was also a foster home for many years. People cycled through, all of who came with their own “baggage.” I learned at a very young age that communing with people from different experiences and backgrounds requires empathy and grace. Grace for others, and yourself. Grace softens. Grace allows us to listen and hear, to nurture and understand. Grace creates space for everyone's story, history, and experience. In order to create new futures we need to acknowledge the past is not the past and difference is inevitable. Yet, through acknowledgment and accountability, new ways of being can emerge. In the words of my mother, care and repair requires one to "die to self."

Dana Davenport (b.1994) is a Korean and Black American interdisciplinary artist raised in Seoul, South Korea. She is currently based between Los Angeles and New York City. Her work shifts between installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Davenport's work has been shown throughout the United States and internationally including Gibney Dance, New York, NY; Watermill Center, Water Mill, NY; NYU Skirball, New York, NY; Brown University, Providence, RI; Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Cultural Center Recoleta, Buenos Aires, AR; and Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, AUS, to name a few. Davenport is currently a 2023 Center For Craft Fellow and Bandung (MoCADA + A4) Artist Resident. She was selected for the Recess Session Residency in 2021, and received the 2018 Chashama ChaNorth Fellowship. She co-organized Free Space, month-long programming at Miranda Kuo Gallery in 2018, and is the founder of Dana’s Beauty Supply.

www.danadav.com @dana_dav

LaRissa Rogers (b. 1996) is a Black and Korean antidisciplinary artist raised in Ruckersville, VA. She is currently based between Virginia and Los Angeles. She holds a BFA in Painting and Printmaking and BIS in International Fashion Buying from Virginia Commonwealth University. Rogers has exhibited and performed in institutions such as Frieze Seoul (Korea), Documenta 15 (Germany), Fields Projects (NY), 1708 Gallery (VA), Second Street Gallery (VA), Black Ground (Colombia), W Doha (Qatar), The Fronte Arte Cultura (CA), LACE (CA), Grand Central Art Center (CA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (VA) among others. She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and the Black Artists and Designers Guild Creative Futures Grant (2022). Rogers attended the BEMIS Center of Contemporary Art Residency (2022), Black Spatial Relics Residency (2022), and SOMA (2019), among others. Rogers is currently pursuing her MFA in New Genres at the University of California Los Angeles.

www.larissamrogers.com @larissa_rogers

#larissarogers #danadavenport #correspondencearchive

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ileftherbackhome · 2 years ago

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I didn’t think they were gotcha questions. I was just worried you might think so and didn’t want to come off as hostile. I did read what you said. I’m just confused. If womanhood in this context isn’t a gender, what is it? I thought the crux of your posts was that because gender was defined by both race and sex back then, that black women were considered to be a different gender than white women. You said it again just now. But then in your tags you’re saying that’s not what you were saying, that black women weren’t considered to be a different gender than white women, but then say black women were denied the status of womanhood. Those statements all seem contradictory to me. Also saying that gender was defined by race and sex doesn’t really explain what gender was. Like sure your race and sex may have determined it but what was it?

So you are approaching this with a modern lens, that is why I didn't really know how to answer your ask because it is heavily biased by our current understanding of gender.

I'm gunna take a very dehumanizing route but that's like the point of saying that gender was defined by race and sex. So gender back then was very biological essentialist, which means they believed in sex binaries. However, they didn't just believe in sex binaries. They believed that race was an important factor in determining gender.

So, I wrote once here that race used to mean species. You can see the change that happened with the word by looking at darwin's the origin of species subtitle which basically says something like something selection of races. This literally meant the same thing as selection of species, and if you read the book, you can see how race was then cooped against black people to call them a different species.

So, this is getting into race is a social construct and it's not biologically real territory but I find that it's necessary to bring it up because it plays a close and similar role to gender.

So, white people literally saw black people as a different species. So, would you say that you female cat has a different gender than you? No, that's illogical. Your cat doesn't have a gender and the way that race and sex intertwined, it would be most accurate to say at the time, black women did not have their own gender granted by society. They were just denied access to womanhood.

Like, I don't know how much clearer I can make myself because I feel like I've said it all pretty much.

When I say "gender is defined by sex and race" I literally mean unless you had the right color vagina, you were not human/woman. Because woman is a specifically human term, we do not apply it to things and animals we don't consider human.

Does that make more sense?

These statements seem contradictory to you because you seem to not be autistic and you are assuming that each of those words in those statements mean the same thing.

If I deny you access to something, I can not say anything about what I have granted you access to as well. There is an extra step there logically you are taking that doesn't actually exist.

Saying black women were denied womanhood status is not the same sentence as black women had a different gender to white women.

The original intent of the post was to expose how racist it is to say that woman was originally defined as adult, female human.

Because if that was the case, black women would not have been enslaved. They could have said "hey I have a vagina. I am a woman, therefore I cannot work." And they tried to get white people to see their gender identity but they were denied access to that gender status that would have protected them from slavery.

So that is what I mean by gender was defined by sex and race, if you were not white you did not have access to gender. You could be seen as your biological sex, for sure, the way cats are seen for the biological sex, but you weren't given your own gender.

We refer to cats as she/her if she has a vagina, but it's not a woman. It's a female cat. Like that is the difference between the statements.

So, yes, black people were denied access to manhood and womanhood and they were seen differently from white people.

Hope that clarified.

#ask and you shall receive

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max1461 · 6 months ago

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I think it was pretty important when they fought for women's right to vote and to have their own bank accounts and to expand into a variety of careers and for the criminalization of marital rape and the modern notion of sexual consent (which isn't perfect but is obviously, plainly better than what we had before) and when they generally argued on every front for a hundred odd years that women should be treated as people and not be considered property of the men in their lives, which they previously had been in the majority of the world (by population at least) for thousands of years? Did, uh, did some other political movement fight against what functionally amounts to the enslavement of 50% of the fucking population and at least in some parts of the world more-or-less successfully dismantle it?

Look, there's a lot of ideas which have long had currency in feminist discourse that bug me, and a few that I think are genuinely very harmful and allow for abuse. And I've been a vocal opponent of these on this very blog. But dismissing feminism on these grounds would be like dismissing the US abolitionist movement because it was deeply tied to Christianity and Christianity is homophobic. The scale of the good that was done so vastly outweighs the bad that it isn't even a contest.

I don't feel like this is a point I've ever had to be explicit about before but I think it's worth being explicit about: I think antifeminism is a really stupid ideology. I think feminism is a massively important political project, like one of the top 2 or 3 that have ever existed. It's so blindingly obvious that the core of the feminist project is justified and desirable.

Like any big-tent ideology/movement, sometimes it shits the bed. Radfems, 2014 Buzzfeed bullshit, whatever. I think the whole second wave was pretty deeply infused with bioessentialist nonsense. But if you're looking at feminism as a whole and writing it off for these reasons I think you're... well, either ulteriorly motivated or just kind of intellectually unvirtuous. "Intellectually unvirtuous" is a broader notion I have that I won't elaborate fully in this post, but it's like. Well unfortunately the average person is not intellectually virtuous at all.

#society

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meeedeee · 3 years ago

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My Fandom Memories: A Dark Desert Highway

I was a transformative fan long before I knew what this was. I'm in my 50s, which means I grew up with television cartoons and acting out elaborate storylines in the playground sandbox with plastic toys. Kimba the White Lion was my favorite, along with Speed Racer.

We eventually relocated to Europe, where I was socially isolated by language and of course this was long before the Internet. One summer I visited my relatives in the United States, where I found a Star Trek book with fanfiction that was professionally published. They let me take the book on the plane back to Europe, and I was hooked. The stories were so real and immediate, and they were written from a deep connection to the characters, very much like what I had seen on screen. But it was impossible to find fanfiction in Europe, especially when you didn't speak the language and were a tween. So I made do with the occasional professionally published Star Trek book which had to be imported to Europe at exorbitant cost.. And I wrote my own stories, mainly plot outlines and I drew my own space ships and maps.

Around this time, TV also began airing Starsky and Hutch in Europe, and I got hooked on that. And someone left behind a copy of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and I read those over and over and drew fan art of Shadowfax.

Fast forward another 20 + years, I graduated, was in the working world, and feeling incredibly stifled. I still read science fiction and fantasy, but the interactive creativity had gone - mainly because being a fan was considered something only children did, not adults. And because science fiction and fantasy readers were looked down upon, very much like people who "only read comic books."

Then I came across Camille Bacon Smith's Enterprising Women book about fandom and read it and realized that what I had been doing secretly, privately, others had been doing as well. Still, this was at the cusp of the Internet era, early 1990s, so connecting was difficult. We had attended a Star Trek convention where the actors were flying in from Los Angeles. They hit a delay due to fog in San Francisco, and there wasn't much to do in the big cavernous Cow Palace (yes, that was its name). But in the back, tucked away, were Jim and Melody Rondeau fanzine dealers. They are original Star Trek fans and you can still buy their used fanzines from them at reasonable price

On their dealer's table, in a discreet box, were fanzines: printed fanfiction. I had no idea what they were, but one had a very provocative cover: Spock Enslaved. There was another zine with beautiful ornate drawings of Kirk and Spock as knights in armor. I kept circling back to the Rondeaus table over and over again, picking up the zines, looking at them, putting him down, picking up and putting them down. Finally my partner told me to just buy them, because they could tell how interested I was. So I bought my first het and slash fanfiction. I sat on the couch, and squeed, and at one point I think I actually rolled off the couch and onto the floor with excitement. I did not realize it yet, but my "dark desert highway" wasn't that dark anymore.

Next: how I found other fans, both online and in person.

I will be tagging these posts with fandom memories. These will be intermittent posts.

#fandom memories #fanfiction #fandom history #kirk/spock #star trek #starsky and hutch #lord of the rings #fanzines #my fandom journeys

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butterflydm · 2 years ago

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wot reread: winter’s heart (chap 28 - end)

Spoilers for Winter’s Heart, with a section at the end with spoilers through A Memory of Light, separated out with spoilers space

Current book ranking (strongest to weakest): The Fires of Heaven; Lord of Chaos; The Shadow Rising; The Dragon Reborn; The Path of Daggers; Winter’s Heart (standalone); A Crown of Swords; The Great Hunt; the Eye of the World; Winter’s Heart (series).

Why is Winter’s Heart in two places? ‘standalone’ WH means if I’m taking the book as it is, without using my memory of the future books to ‘cheat’ on my feelings about it, if I’m assuming that the stories set up in it lead to payoff, essentially. And ‘series’ WH is how I feel about it in light of my reread, taking into account what I know about how the storylines set up here will play out in the future. It’s really the only book so far where knowing the endgame retroactively makes the book worse which is... a thing that happened.

My memory of WH was much better than my actual experience of rereading it. The main things I remembered from WH were the four-way bonding & Elayne and Rand finally reuniting, and then Rand and Nynaeve cleansing saidin. And, well, those are still things about it that I enjoyed? Much like ACoS, Winter’s Heart is an erratic book for me -- what I enjoyed, I did like a lot, but what I hated, I... well, despised.

And there was more of the dislike than the like, in this one for me. Hated Mat’s plotline (with a couple of standout moments that were good); hated Perrin’s plotline; found most of Rand’s plotline unlikeable until the very end when we actually do the cleansing (with a brief-stopover for him finally!! seeing Elayne and Aviendha again). Elayne was basically holding this entire book up for me by herself, lol, and even her plotline had some iffy parts. Kinda ominous, because I remember CoT and KoD being worse/slower than WH. But we shall see! idk if we’re ever gonna get anywhere near the peak of TFoH-LoC-TSR again tho. But a key element of why Winter’s Heart is tainted for me in my reread is pretty spoilery, so I’m going to plop it at the bottom, marked off with spoiler space.

1. In what appears to be a helpful ta’veren coincidence, the day after Mat makes all those promises to the Aes Sedai to help them escape. Tylin announces that she’s going on a week-long tour of “what I now control of Altara” with Suroth via to’raken. It is not a helpful ta’veren coincidence.

2. Instead, we are going to spend three chapters on a plan that fails so that Mat will still be in the city to say goodbye to Tylin when he finally leaves. What’s the point of having Tylin leave if Mat’s plans get delayed long enough for her to be back anyway? We might as well have started with the fourth of these chapters, when he actually starts his ‘for real’ escape plan. Things that matter in these three mostly wasted chapters (which should have been condensed into one much shorter chapter):

Mat carefully watches Ryma Galfrey, one of the women who was captured in Falme, and reluctantly concludes that she’s been so deeply broken that she would call for help if he tried to add her to the rescue plan. She laughs and claps her hands when praised by her sul’dam.

Mat tries not to be tormented by the thought of all the enslaved Atha’an Miere that he doesn’t have the power to save.

We get more Hints that Noal is important.

The gholam is still around in the city.

Tuon’s stalking of Mat creeps him out and he wishes she’d gone with Suroth and Tylin.

I think this is the first time the narrative actually mentions that a ‘week’ is ten days.

This is the first time we learn the goddawful nickname that he’s being called by the Seanchan in the palace: Tylin’s Toy. They consider him ‘half-way’ to being da’covale. And Mat is terrified that by the time Tylin gets back from her tour, she might be Seanchan enough to shave the sides of her head and genuinely make him da’covale or sell him to Tuon.

Mat is very aware of the ugly realities of life under Seanchan rule here -- how harsh they are on people who step out of line, how badly they break their slaves, how dangerous it is to speak out against them, how easy it is to be condemned to lifelong slavery.

Setelle Anan confirms her strong anti-slavery stance and says she can see the Seanchan for what they really are (and disapproves).

After his one plans fails, Domon catches up with him and they have the New Plan ready to be planned.

Mat finds out about the existence of the black a’dam that can be used on men and that it was last in Egeanin and Domon’s possession. “Light, if the Black Ajah had gotten that on Rand’s neck, or the Seanchan had...” Honestly it would have been neat to tie Mat into Rand’s plot here by having THIS be the reason Mat was trapped in Ebou Dar and not the pointless wife prophecy. But Rand is only allowed to hang out with Min (even after Nynaeve joins Rand’s plotline, it seems like they barely spend any time together?) so we all know why THAT doesn’t happen.

3. Okay, we are finally pulling the trigger on the escape. Once they are up in the ‘kennels’ to free Teslyn and Edesina, Mat goes and has one of his best scenes in the entire damn series: freeing one of the captive Windfinders before he makes his own escape. This short scene is genuinely so good and so emotional and such a showcase of what makes books 1-9 Mat such a good person & a good character. Nestelle calls Mat a “great and good” man here and it is such a true statement about books 1-9 Mat. He is both good and great here. Like, Mat’s storylines have unfortunately been such a depressing drag through this book and the last one that he was in, where he has been the person who has been faced not just with trauma but trauma that both other characters and the narrative itself has LAUGHED at. Like, Rand faces trauma too but the narrative always takes his trauma seriously. Mat’s trauma has straight-up been mocked in the books and undermined in ways that have been frustrating as hell to read. But Mat himself -- at this point, as of book 9 -- he’s a good person. He’s a genuinely good person. He certainly has his flaws, but he’s a good person here. As of book 9, Winter’s Heart. And he deflects the praise, of course, because that’s what he does, telling her that he’s ‘just a gambler’. THIS MAT. I love this Mat so much. When I think of Mat and I talk about how much I love him, I’m thinking of books 1-9 Mat. That’s my Mat Cauthon. “If he was going to do this, then he might as well make sure it was done right.”

4. For some godforsaken reason, Jordan forces us through another goodbye between Tylin and Mat. He pulls the exact same trick that he did in ACoS -- throughout the entire book, it has been obvious how generally miserable Mat has been in Tylin’s company but now, when it is time for them to part, all of a sudden Mat ~likes her and is genuinely going to ~miss her. Like I think I mentioned last time, this especially sucks because people tend to remember the ‘final note’ that a storyline ends on the best, so when casual readers (like Sanderson was for Mat’s plotline imo) think back on Mat & Tylin’s ‘relationship’, the ‘final note’ is Mat genuinely thinking he’ll miss her and Tylin suddenly being willing to let him go, and not all the horror that came before it and all the times she forced him to stay in Ebou Dar.

5. Tuon sees Mat leaving and immediately tries to establish ownership over him -- she uses “Toy” instead of his real name (a slavers’ trick to break people that the Seanchan commonly use on damane) and tells him that she cannot ‘allow’ him to leave. They fight as she tries to stop him from leaving, and Noal eventually shows up, and they can overpower her two-on-one. Tuon likes learning that he’s capable of holding his own against her (physically). Mat’s plan is to leave Tuon in the stables on their way out. He knows she’ll be found in the morning, so there’s no actual danger to her life in doing this.

6. Then Egeanin shows up and we have the big prophecy reveal scene (for Mat, anyway. It was revealed for readers in Tuon’s intro chapter) as she blurts out that it’s a “death by slow torture” to lay hands on the Daughter of the Nine Moons. So, yeah, this scene really points out what an incredibly silly theater of virtue that Tuon was putting on when she donned the veil -- EVERY SEANCHAN KNOWS WHO SHE REALLY IS (Egeanin is a literal brand-new Low Blood nobody and she recognizes Tuon on sight). They’ve all just been playacting that they don’t in order to assuage Tuon’s wounded ego/pride. But the second there’s actual danger to Tuon, Egeanin abandons the show without a second thought and calls Tuon by her proper non-veiled title. Mat says that Tuon is his wife three times and impulsively decides to take her and her slave Selucia along on their escape, without there being any actual reason given in the text for his change of heart about not wanting to be anywhere near the DotNM and despite him being creeped out by her reaction to saying they would take her (and her slave) along. Honestly, if I said “I’m taking this woman with me” and then she smiled in a way that creeped me out, she would be going straight into the hayloft. No one has time for that kind of drama in their lives.

7. Well. That’s Mat’s plot done for this book. My reread really pointed out to me how ridiculous the plot contrivances are to keep Mat stuck in this plotline. The amount of character and plot-warping that needs to be done in order to keep Mat trapped in Ebou Dar and hook up with Tuon is honestly so rickety and unbelievable once a closer look is taken at it:

First of all, we set the scene with Tylin’s obsession with Mat. The only reason that Mat is trapped in Ebou Dar after the invasion is because of Tylin’s obsession and her unwillingness to let him go.

Olver abandons the ~bosomy lady that he’s been obsessed with in order to wander the city so that Mat needs to be stuck there long enough for the Seanchan to invade.

a building falls on Mat, so that he’s injured badly enough that he’s trapped in the city for almost a month before he can be healed enough to begin planning his escape from Tylin’s clutches, thus making Tuon show up before he’s well enough to get away from his abuser

despite how he has always wanted to run away from tDotNM; he impulsively takes her along when he finds out who she is. It’s literally just reversing his characterization without giving an in-text reason.

It’s also an illustration of the same terrible Fate Says So relationship decision-making that drove Min to turn herself into a new person in order to make a guy she barely knew fall in love with her. Why does Min want Rand to love her? Because her viewing said that she would love him. Why does Min love Rand? Because her viewing said that she would love him. Why does Mat take Tuon with him? Because a prophecy said he would marry her. If Mat had never heard the prophecy, he never would have kept Tuon with him (making a marriage difficult) which makes it less a prophecy and more of the Aelfinn deliberarately creating their own version of the future. A self-fulfilling prophecy, yes, but also something that literally could not have happened without the existence of the prophecy. Seriously, if Mat hadn’t heard the prophecy, then he would just have left Tuon (& her slave) tied up in a hayloft and never seen her again.

when Rand assumes Mat is with the Band of the Red Hand & Egwene, Nynaeve doesn’t correct him and Rand drops the subject (BOTH things that go against their previous characterization)

When Rand brings it up a second time, in front of Elayne, Nynaeve, Lan, and Aviendha, all of whom know that Mat is NOT with Egwene, none of them correct Rand’s assumption.

Nynaeve not only says nothing in this scene (and it is even implied that she’s withholding the information on purpose???), but will continue to say nothing about it in all the scenes she shares with Rand in the future. She doesn’t tell him in Far Madding. She doesn’t tell him before, during, or after the cleansing. She persistently doesn’t tell him that his best friend is potentially in extreme danger. We don’t get a reason for this when we are in her PoV chapters. We never find out why she wanted to withhold this information from Rand (because the only reason is Mat Needs To Be In Ebou Dar For The Plot).

Elayne, who feels responsible for Mat as one of her ‘subjects’, doesn’t mention him to Rand at all during their time together either, despite a devotion to duty and responsibility being two of her primary traits. She has explicitly said to Mat that she wanted the opportunity to ‘save him’ in exchange for him saving her and said at the start of this book that she prays daily for Mat’s safety, but when there’s an opportunity to make that happen, she fails to do it. Her ‘reason’ for not doing it is because she wants Egwene to do it instead, despite there being absolutely no reason for her to believe that Rand and Egwene are talking any time soon and despite ‘shirking responsibility’ definitely NOT being a character trait of hers. She even notes ‘if’ they can talk, Egwene will tell him but, like, you could tell him! Right now!

Aviendha says nothing, despite being the first person in Ebou Dar to respect Mat as a person (saying they should ask him to help them find the Bowl).

Lan says nothing, despite the fact that he’s been willing to speak out before when Nynaeve didn’t want him to, when he told Mat that Moghedien killed two of his men.

Egwene has been having prophetic dreams of Mat in pain, such that she feels “agonies of grief” over sending him to Ebou Dar and is fully aware that he was “left behind” during the Seanchan invasion... and yet does absolutely nothing about this information, despite being able to contact the Wise Ones and also literally having Mat’s army following hers. She could have used either of those avenues to potentially get a rescue launched for Mat with absolutely zero risk to herself. Talmanes has to hunt her down to get her to (reluctantly) confirm that Mat is in Ebou Dar, though they’ve been feeling a tug in that direction for weeks. And even at that point, she tries to argue him out of going south!

If the Band had left when they first felt the tug, they would have possibly arrived in time to help him, at least maybe before the Return arrived. This is the most excusable though, because they’ve never felt a ta’veren tug before.

Overall, if you have to break the story and characters this badly in order to make a plot point work, maybe it’s a bad plot point. There’s ta’veren and then there’s... whatever all this was. Rand, Nynaeve, Elayne, Aviendha, Lan, Egwene, and Mat himself all get warped as characters to create this narrative. I mean, Mat’s character is going to continue to warp in unrecognizable ways as we move forward, so I guess we gotta get used to it here.

8. Ugh, no, we’re back in Far Madding. Rand’s side-quest might be the shortest out of the three ta’veren boys but wow do I find it irritating. I just want to get to the cleansing already. We spend three more chapters in Far Madding here and none of them serve any purpose going forward, because Rand has ALREADY suffered this same kind of trauma and Cadsuane ALREADY saved him and this is all just very repetitive. Should be snipped out entirely. Points of importance or frustration in chapter 32:

It’s been a week. Nynaeve still hasn’t told Rand about Mat being left behind in Ebou Dar.

Lews Therin implies that Rand is actually delaying doing the cleansing on purpose, because he’s worried about going mad while using the Choedan Kal. First time this has been mentioned or hinted at.

Verin tells Rand that the Seanchan forces have crossed the border into Illian again (I suspect this is her way of trying to goose him into action and get him to leave Far Madding; Verin MVP).

Rand grits his teeth and prepares to grovel to Cadsuane because of Min’s viewing that he needs her.

See, I would like to tell Rand that he’s wrong to feel suspicious of Nynaeve but! she is deliberately keeping a huge secret from him about his best friend being in genuine danger of his life! really hate this choice on Jordan’s part to ruin all these characters in his need to Keep Mat In Ebou Dar

Lan also hasn’t told Rand anything about Mat being left behind in Ebou Dar. So it’s not just Nynaeve letting Rand down here. Lan’s characterization also got butchered on the altar of Mat’s Plot Is In Ebou Dar. We also find out that Nynaeve does forbid Lan to tell Rand things. *sigh*

Min continues to blame Rand for her own choices and continues to attempt to control his choices and actions (she attempts to burn a letter that was sent to him).

9. Points of importance or frustration in chapter 33:

Min continues to play with knives around Rand to show her displeasure and I continue to have Tylin flashbacks. She literally throws a knife into the door in front of his face. He doesn’t flinch but he also has a death wish so I’m not even sure if that’s about him trusting her. Then she threatens to beat him with a three-tailed strap/whip, which is apparently something that comes standard in every guest room in the inns in Far Madding, because Jordan has decided that all the new cities are Abusive Wife Cities. Women are encourage to beat men here if they like, just as they’re encouraged to hit or stab men in Ebou Dar if they like. Rand probably would have let her beat him, just like he let the Maidens beat him, and then gone and done what he wanted to do anyway.

Rand’s hair is nearly shoulder-length, Min confirms.

Lews Therin liked buying meat pies in the country when he was young.

Fain is still trying to kill Rand. But neither of them kill the other and we’ve had several of Fain’s attempts on Rand’s life at this point and I’m Tired.

Lan’s BOOTS slip on the ROOF. and that’s how they get caught. WHAT. He is a WARDER. I feel insulted on his behalf.

10. Points of importance or frustration in chapter 34:

We finally get another Nynaeve PoV! ...she does not think of Mat a single time, so we still have zero insight as to why she is withholding the information about his location from Rand.

Rand ‘re-hardens’ himself in the small cell that Far Madding has put him in; completely unnecessary. He was already hardened.

Min’s loose lips apparently struck again off-page -- she’s told Cadsuane about her bond with Rand and is currently babbling about the state of his mind to Cadsuane, a woman that Rand still doesn’t trust. “Along only because she was a link to the boy”; Min’s new purpose in life is to be Cadsuane’s compass and connection to Rand I guess, now that Alanna is Off On A Mission.

11. Chapter 35, we are finally leaving Far Madding behind, hopefully forever! We were there for much less time than we’ve been in Ebou Dar, but wow I’ve hated our time there! Anyway, Rand says he’s grateful to Far Madding for reminding him that he needs to be super-duper hard at all times. A rock-solid boy. A boulder. And yet still ‘too weak’ to send Min to safety, despite there legit being no reason for her to be at the cleansing (except for Cadsuane to take advantage of her inability to keep her mouth shut, I guess) and everyone else in his life being someone he “loves too much” to put them in danger if he can avoid it. The Min Double-Standard makes no sense! She really does get treated like a plot device and not a character. If Rand’s characterization were being consistent, he would have left her in Caemlyn back in chapter 12, like he left Elayne and Aviendha. Like, I don’t think he should be avoiding ANY of them, I want to make that clear, but avoiding only TWO of them is Just Weird. This is part of why it feels like the whole Far Madding detour was pointless -- nothing in Rand’s character or choices seems to actually change as a result of his ‘re-hardening’.

12. Rand tells the rest of his companions here that he plans to cleanse saidin using the Choedan Kal, linking with Nynaeve (the only Aes Sedai he trusts to link with, he thinks, because Elayne doesn’t exist anymore, I guess. Like, I love that Rand trusts Nynaeve? But he’s BONDED to Elayne yet not willing to trust her? wtf). They go to Shadar Logoth for the actual work itself. The Aes Sedai with Cadsuane are nervous about the potential consequences but Cadsuane herself doesn’t argue against the idea.

13. Yeah, when I thought about Winter’s Heart in the past, the bits that I really remembered were the bonding near the beginning, along with Elayne and Rand (finally!) getting to sleep together, and then the cleansing itself at the end. I didn’t even remember Rand’s sideplot about the traitor Asha’man until he was attacked at the end of TPoD. The other thing I remembered about Winter’s Heart was Tuon’s arrival, which I felt a lot more mixed about. She’s a potentially interesting character on her own, but desperately needs character development in the upcoming books to be a worthwhile time investment.

14. So now when Rand experiences the dizziness that happens when he releases or takes hold of saidin, he sees the blurry vision of a man’s face.

15. Rand and Nynaeve link, so she experiences saidin (and the taint?) and he experiences clean saidar. Rand weaves a conduit made of untainted saidar to connect saidin and the city of Shadar Logoth, so he’s essentially using the evil of Shadar Logoth as a filter to catch the evil of the taint and remove it from saidin.

16. All the people who came with Rand (other than Nynaeve) now get prepared to defend him. Except Min, of course, who can’t channel and also has never shown any genuine fighting skill with her knives. Amazing that she survives this battle tbh. Does anyone even target her? I don’t remember.

17. We get some random PoVs that let us know that the giant crystal orbs being held by the actual Choedan Kal are being lit up, one near Cairhien and one in Tremalking.

18. All the Forsaken feel the vibe of all that power being used and realize that Rand has pulled the trigger on cleansing saidin and it’s time for him to be captured or die. I enjoy their misery in this chapter a lot. It’s very amusing to me. They are big ol’ failures.

It’s confirmed that Cyndane is Lanfear, still ABSOLUTELY obsessed with LTT, if anyone was wondering. She feels like him using the Choedan Kal with *gasp* another woman is a huge betrayal. Oh, Lanfear.

Demandred is busy reassuring himself that, ACTUALLY, he is much more brilliant than Lews Therin, even if this is quite a clever plan about how to remove the taint from saidin lol, god you are so obsessed with LTT too. It is confirmed here that Demmy definitely isn’t Taim, because he doesn’t recognize Damar Flinn. He’s so surprised when the ~old man is actually an Asha’man. My official guess on when Jordan decided they were separate characters is TPoD, I think. That was when Taim’s vibe changed for me.

Dashiva/Osan’gar/Aginor is not having a good time. He’s a SCIENTIST! Not a SOLDIER. lol he must have been so miserable when he was campaigning with Rand against the Seanchan. He also confirms that Moridin is Ishamael for us all.

Verin spots a woman in a streith gown... probably Graendal? Ah, yes, golden hair is mentioned. Graendal. And she’s inverting her weaves, it sounds like, and hiding her ability.

Aran’gar is figured out by Eben, who tosses himself towards her (she has been using ‘she/her’ pronouns in her internal narration) and warns the two Aes Sedai that he’s linked to.

Moghedien is figuring out a place she can hide during the battle so that she can technically be there but also survive. haha good for you

Semirhage is Lady Not Appearing In This Battle

Mesaana is also Lady Not Appearing In This Battle.

19. I like the actual battle to defend Rand too. Feels very cinematic & I approve. Cadsuane’s ass-pull ter’angreal come in handy lol. But I agree with @essie007 that we deserved more of a reunion than Rand & Nynaeve here. Should have been an ‘all hands on deck’ situation. LOVED her idea of having Egwene & some rebels (maybe her oathsworn sisters?) helping instead of Cadsuane. And this could still lead to there being tension between Rand & Egwene, because she would disapprove of HIM having oathsworn sisters (I imagine it would be Merana or one of his other oathsworn sisters who would reach out to Egwene... or the sister reaches out on her own, arguing to herself that it’s for Rand’s own good and doesn’t break her oath). And Mat would be great here too - it could help bring his story with Shadar Logoth to a close by him getting to witness the destruction of the city & he can hold his own against channelers because of his medallion. And Elayne and/or Aviendha could be there just by having Rand actually idk BE HONEST with his other love interests and tell them things rather than dipping after sex.

20. Okay, I do Not Understand the renaming thing in these books. So many characters get forcibly renamed and then just... think of themselves that way in the future. Obviously, the damane are tortured and trained into it, but why does Lanfear THINK of herself as Cyndane and not as Lanfear? I guess this is yet another point of commonality between the Seanchan and the Shadow. Forcible renaming. Okay, let me go over that list again. Seanchan & Shadow connections:

forcible renaming

ravens and moons as big important symbols

mindtraps vs a’dam (ways of controlling channelers)

attractive slaves in translucent robes

big on slavery and mind-breaking in general

treating people like objects in general

you gotta Grovel to higher ranking Darkfriends/the Blood

Spies everywhere (ravens & rats vs the Listeners & Seekers)

encourage paranoia and reporting on each other

The Return (Seanchan) vs The Day of the Return (the Chosen)

Oooh, just thought of this one: the Crystal Throne vs Shayol Ghul -- both make you feel a thirst to worship and bask in the overwhelming presence of your ultimate dictator

HAVING an ultimate dictator who must be worshipped on pain of death

Kadere the Darkfriend vs Karede the Seanchan: fight! lol this one isn’t serious btw, I just think it’s funny

21. I can’t believe that Min’s only purpose in this scene is to be Rand’s mood ring for Cadsuane. I mean, I CAN because she has absolutely no skills that can be put to use here, but it’s hilarious. Cadsuane doesn’t even need to know how Rand’s doing -- now that this has started, he’ll succeed or he’ll die trying. Literally Min only came along to Far Madding in order to give away yet more of Rand’s secrets to Cadsuane, I swear. lol she was literally put into a hole in the ground to keep her safe. and the Atha’an Miere ambassador who insists she must go along with Rand everywhere is in the hole too. haha

22. Forsaken updates:

Elza murders the fuck out of Dashiva. And we find out in her internal narration that she’s Black Ajah, so that’s hilarious, because she doesn’t know he’s one of the ‘Chosen’ and she’s just all... well, the Dark One will forgive me for just killing one of the minor Darkfriend Asha’man flunkies. I kinda enjoy Elza tbh. She just fireballs him to death. Amazing. Love it. Gold star to Elza. Some misunderstandings really are hilarious. She’s a Darkfriend so I’m sure she does terrible things in the future, but this moment is amazing.

Moghedien figures that everyone else has been killed or run away by now, but she stays there quietly to watch what happens. She gets dragged along in the wake of the collapsing bubble that was engulfing Shadar Logoth and thinks about how she’s not sure if she’ll ever be afraid of anything ever again after this.

23. The female access key is destroyed but the male one is intact, so Cadsuane appears to have stolen it (after making a big deal about disapproving of thieves earlier in the book too). Let’s see if she ever returns it. Callandor is ‘secured’, whatever that means.

24. The butcher’s bill on Rand’s side:

Kumira

Eben

Not bad! Cadsuane is like, ugh, could be better. Y’all were facing the FORSAKEN. You did good.

25. But no, that remained a very intense scene that I enjoyed a lot. Good finale. Does not make up for how boring and/or frustrating so much of the book was, but that was a Good Chapter.

26. Oh no, here comes a big point of frustration: Jahar joyfully says that saidin is clean (Damar confirms it) and Cadsuane is (x) doubt. Rand goes to SO MUCH TROUBLE and EFFORT and now she doesn’t even believe that he really did it. I’m gonna kick a wall. It honestly bothers me so much that Rand undoing the Dark’s One’s counterstroke in the previous battle -- you know, getting rid of the taint that literally led to the Breaking of the World - doesn’t get the attention it deserves (CoT was absolutely NOT the sort of attention it deserved lol). Anyway, we end with her being kinda weird and possessive about Rand.

Mat mentions:

Rand x4

Nynaeve x1

Elayne x1

Talmanes x1

Tuon refuses to call Mat by his name:

Toy x1

Unnecessary scenes (this section):

Mat-Tuon ‘courtship scenes’: 1 (7 pages)

Mat-Tylin horror show: 1 (2 pages), 1 (4 pages)

Repetitive attempts to leave Ebou Dar: 3 (51 pages)

Far Madding trauma conga line: 1 (17 pages), 1 (15 pages), 1 (12 pages), 1 (4 pages)

Mat mentioned by (whole book):

Elayne x3

Rand x8

Min x1

Mistress Harfor, First Maid x1

Nynaeve x1

Mat mentions (whole book):

Nynaeve x6

Egwene x1

Talmanes x2

Elayne x6

Rand x16

Perrin x2

Asha’man in general x1

Plot-threads started here or carried over from the last book:

Rand & Nynaeve: cleanse saidin (1 book wonder). COMPLETED.

Elayne: Become queen of Caemlyn (first book of task) - NOT completed.

Mat: Escape Ebou Dar and return to the Band of the Red Hand and Rand (first book of task) - NOT completed.

Egwene: Go to the White Tower with her army, confront Elaida, and heal the Tower (fourth book of task). - NOT completed.

Perrin: Gather up Masema and his Dragonsworn and bring them to Rand (third book of task). - NOT completed.

Plot-threads carried into Crossroads of Twilight:

Elayne: Become queen of Caemlyn (2/?)

Mat: Escape Ebou Dar and return to the Band of the Red Hand and Rand (2/?)

Perrin: Gather up Masema and his Dragonsworn and bring them to Rand (4/?)

Egwene: Go to the White Tower with her army, confront Elaida, and heal the Tower (5/?)

Rand: ???

Nynaeve: ???

Unnecessary scenes (whole book):

annoying Atha’an Miere nonsense: 2 (16 pages)

relationship drama nonsense: 1 (4 pages)

Shaido nonsense: 5 (87 pages)

Mat-Tylin horror show: 11 (48 pages)

Repetitive attempts to leave Ebou Dar: 3 (51 pages)

Far Madding repetitive trauma drama: 8 (113 pages)

Elayne treated as fetus vessel: 3 (6 pages)

Mat-Tuon subplot begins: 1 (7 pages)

Total pages: 332

Winter’s Heart has 766 pages in my version. That is 43.3%.

SPOILERS for a memory of light; insert disclaimer that this is all based on my memory, etc. and so forth

First, the easy thing:

This is really the book where the ‘pointless side quest’ vibes started jumping out at me during my reread, and I am NOT for dealing with side quests at book nine of a series. Faile being kidnapped by the Shaido is something that pads the pages, but ultimately does not have any huge impact on the endgame that couldn’t have been equally well-served by a shorter and less fetish-based subplot. Also, the Shaido should not even be here. They were a good antagonist in TFoH; they were... okay in LoC (but the Aes Sedai were the main course at Dumai’s Wells). They are completely unnecessary at this point. They only exist to serve up torture and humiliation porn at this point and to remind us that only evil women like to show off their breasts.

Same thing with Rand’s side-quest about the traitor Asha’man - no, absolutely not, this could and should have been a single chapter and not involved Far Madding at all. Everything about Far Madding’s plotline was a retread of earlier plotlines (Rand is powerless and put in a box to potentially be sent to Elaida; Rand needs Cadsuane to save him from his own recklessness; Rand playacts at being married to Min in order to trick a group of people -- all things that already happened in the story and didn’t need to be redone).

After Rand goes and picks up Nynaeve specifically to do the cleansing of saidin, his next plot point should have been... the cleansing of saidin. Not a side-quest about taking out the traitor Asha’man and Jordan showing off another city in his worldbuilding. One of the big issues in The Slog (imo) is way too much focus on side quests. It’s like we’re playing The Witcher 3 and going around to play Gwent with everyone before we head to the next plot marker: this is okay to do in a game but it’s terrible to do in a narrative. We need to find Ciri, Geralt! Stop playing Gwent! (I absolutely played All The Gwent lol).

The ‘point’ of Rand’s stint in Far Madding seems to be to harden him further but it just seems unnecessary - it’s just excessive trauma at this point imo, since he never gets to process the trauma that he’s already received anyway, just gets more heaped on his head to also not process. It doesn’t actually seem to impact his character choices at all. Again, I feel like it’s mostly just here to pad out the timeline so that Mat and Perrin have time to do their (also pointless) side-quests. Rand could have taken care of the traitor Asha’man in a single chapter and that would have been fine. It didn’t need *waves hand* all this. Winter’s Heart-Crossroads of Twilight-Knife of Dreams could and should have been a single book. Cut out the Shaido. Cut out this side-quest here. Cut out Tylin (just have her die in the invasion; idc). Condense the other plotlines. example: we don’t need to see Mat’s failed attempts at escaping; just his successful one.

Now, to move on to the big thing that really tanked my feelings on this book. I’ve mentioned to @essie007 that this is the first time I’ve reread Winter’s Heart since A Memory of Light was published. And, wow, knowing how this story ends really had an impact on how I felt about this book in a way that it didn’t for any of the earlier ones.

This book has aged much more poorly for me in my reread than the previous books and I think it goes back to broken narrative promises. Winter’s Heart is a horror show of a book in Mat’s storyline but I didn’t mind that as much the first time around because it seemed like the horror show was setting up a compelling narrative:

the secret of the sul’dam is heavily focused on in this book (in both Mat & Elayne’s plotlines)

the horrors of Seanchan slavery & their system of government is heavily focused on in this book

we get several Seanchan characters questioning their way of living and their system of goverment and oppression, from Alivia breaking free of her damane programming after 400 years in a collar all the way down to Bethamin and Egeanin, who are desperate to preserve their own freedom and know that their beloved Empire would enslave them if they knew the truth about them and their actions

the heir to the throne is a woman who is capable of learning how to channel(!)

her fated mate is someone who, in this book, is viscerally disgusted by slavery and who confronts it over and over in a very personal way -- he is treated as property himself by Tylin, threatened to be turned into da’covale, threatened to be bought by Tuon, given what is essentially a slave name (Tylin’s Toy) and even when he is at his most desperate to escape, he makes certain to do his best to bring down as much of the Seanchan power base as possible by freeing one of the Windfinders and teaching her how to free others

this woman who has a future where she is either the most powerful person in the empire (the empress) or one of the least (just another enslaved damane) ends up captive by this man who loves freedom and who has only just now escaped from his own cage

Of course, I assumed that the sul’dam secret would actually matter! Of course, I assumed that Tuon being capable of channeling would matter! Of course, I assumed that Mat would actually STAND UP against Tuon re: slavery and have an impact on her! All of those are things that flow naturally out of the narrative presented in Winter’s Heart.

And then Crossroads of Twilight immediately starts undercutting that potential narrative (with Mat inexplicably softening his stance on slavery and also, in general, because it focused way too much on navel-gazing about 'romance’ and not on the actual relevant plot questions), only for the narrative to get a stake through the heart in Knife of Dreams (when Tuon dismisses the idea that the sul’dam secret matters and ‘marries’ Mat without having ever questioned any of her assumptions about how the empire works). And the Seanchan get to stand victorious and vindicated at the end of the Last Battle, when they use their slaves to help win the war (Tuon even directly uses the ‘argument’ that freeing her slaves would make them useless as fighters iirc).

All of the horror that we were shown in Winter’s Heart (and previous books) just gets dismissed like it didn’t matter. Tuon never comes to a place where she needs to question herself because Jordan never lets Mat genuinely challenge her during their journey together -- she always has a buffer or protectors to shield her from Mat’s perspective on the world, she always has a devoted slave by her side to reassure her that slavery is actually awesome, she always slips out of any potential consequences of her actions, or Mat will inexplicably soften his previously-stated views so that she skates out of any negative reactions to her horrific choices and behaviors -- she is NEVER forced to confront the reality of her existence and is allowed to glide to the end of the series untouched by the reality of the world around her, safe in her slaver-bubble. What is the point of having her removed from her position and going on a journey if her bubble stays intact the entire time?

So while it was kinda obvious in a first read that Perrin’s side-quest was going to be pointless, it’s something of a surprise for me on my reread to realize that Mat’s entire prophetical marriage with the Daughter of the Nine Moons ALSO ends up being a side quest that has no major impact on the endgame of the series. It has some implications for post-canon, don’t get me wrong. Depressing implications about a fourth age that will inevitably need to deal with this can that has been kicked down the road. But the actual endgame events of the book series are not appreciably impacted by Mat and Tuon’s ‘romance’ (and, again like the kidnapped wife subplot, it did not require three books... I did just realize that, technically, BOTH Mat and Perrin are doing ‘kidnapped wife’ subplots) because Tuon as a person is not appreciably impacted by Mat as a person.

While Mat is used as a plot device to have Rand and Tuon talk again, there were any number of other ways to have that happen, and there is absolutely nothing that Mat and Tuon actually bring to each other’s endgame narratives -- Mat’s plots in the final books are about saving Moiraine (which is the key to bridging the gap between Egwene and Rand) and being the General of the Forces of Light (which he already had sewn up as of TFoH/LoC due to his memories and friendship with Rand), so neither of those plots required him to marry a slaver. Tuon’s actual plot in the last three books is based around Egwene and Rand, and on making deals with THEM about the Last Battle; Mat is literally just there to get a baby in her, which, again, is all about post-canon baby-trapping Mat into the Seanchan Empire and has nothing to do with the actual endgame storyline. Rand and Egwene are still the ones who have to do all the legwork when it comes to making deals with the Seanchan.

I do think this may be a place where Sanderson’s assumptions about Mat (imo he viewed Mat as a GENUINELY selfish and cowardly wastrel and interpreted Mat not being bookish as Mat not being intelligent) killed a potential story that we probably would have gotten if Jordan had written the the final books -- Mat probably would still be inexplicably ‘in love’ with Tuon by the final book and inexplicably conditionally okay with slavery, because that’s pretty in line with how Jordan wrote the majority of his romances (love is a leash around your neck to yank you to places you wouldn’t choose to go otherwise and you don’t get to choose who leashes you) and with where he decided to take Mat in CoT & KoD re: slavery, but he would likely still been smart & loyal to Rand as well, just with an inexplicable soft spot for the slaver empress. I’ll know better for sure on that one when I get to the end of KoD in my re-read but I do suspect that if Jordan had written the final books, Mat would have at least been somewhat involved in the actual negotiations, but I do think it’s probable that the actual ending still would have been fairly depressing for Mat, because Jordan was the one who inexplicably started softening Mat’s stance on slavery in CoT & KoD.

In any case, in the actual books we got, Tuon behaves the same way in AMoL that she does in WH: she still immediately wants to own any person she finds interesting (she tries to buy Mat in WH and attempts to straight-up abduct Min as a slave in AMoL, I believe); she has the exact same opinion on marath’damane as she did in WH; and iirc Mat does absolutely nothing to try to weigh in on the Westlands side of things during Rand’s negotiations with Tuon (which makes their fate-arranged marriage useless as a ‘marriage alliance’). Their marriage served zero narrative purpose. The fact that the outriggers were potentially supposed to exist at some point doesn’t matter to me -- they do NOT exist and they never will.

So, in the narrative in its completed version, Mat and Tuon’s ‘romance’ comes across as a waste of time, just like Faile’s kidnapping. Mat could have taken Tuon as a hostage for insurance purposes, they could have vaguely impressed each other as allies by the time he released her back to the Seanchan once he felt safe (and that she was safe, etc), and the narrative would have been served equally well.

Or, in an easy fix that keeps the marriage and makes the Mat x Tuon scenes from WH-KoD have a point: instead of Mat accidentally giving himself away for nothing at the end of Winter's Heart and their marriage being entirely on Tuon's terms, with Mat making a fool of himself trying to get Tuon to fall in love with him because he's already given away his choice… actually have CoT & KoD be a genuine marriage alliance negotiation where MAT (rather than Rand and Egwene in AMoL) is the one to hammer out a deal with Tuon and thus is able to reunite with Rand being able to hand him a treaty with the Seanchan.

This would require Tuon being treated as a real character in the world rather than an untouchable slaver-goddess who gets given whatever she wants and is treated with kid-gloves, but it would have made the Mat parts of The Slog feel much less pointless and sloggy and would have saved tons of narrative time in the endgame, because Rand wouldn't need to do all the work of allying with the Seanchan himself while Mat stands there uselessly.

There are just so many references in Winter’s Heart about the importance of sul’dam realizing that they CAN channel, yet we get cheated out of that story for Tuon -- that’s another thing that might have made the entire circus storyline for her worth spending the page time on it; if it had ended in her having the genuine honesty and strength of character to see the truth about herself rather than staying crystalized in Empire propaganda. Just another place where Tuon feels like wasted potential. And I feel like we don’t even get a solid story out of that for anyone? Though maybe we do and I’m just forgetting it; maybe Bethamin, Renna, or Seta has that story. I guess I’ll find out. But this was really THE story with the Seanchan that we have been promised since book 2 and Tuon seems like the obvious vehicle for that story, so this is just another place where Tuon is a narrative disappointment, lol. Like, even if a secondary or tertiary character ends up getting this storyline... it SHOULD have been Tuon.

Tuon is kinda a constant disappointment after this book, from what I remember. This book specifically really does imply that we SHOULD have gotten a specific narrative from her about realizing she could channel and what that would mean for the future for both her and the Seanchan empire... and then that entire plotline just gets tossed in the trash so that we can have Mat & Co softening their stance on slavery instead (what happened to Jordan in between writing Winter’s Heart and writing Crossroads of Twilight? My theory is that this is when he decided to write the outriggers, so he threw Mat’s character under the bus as an excuse for not writing the sul’dam story yet; if Mat stops caring as much about slavery then Tuon doesn’t need to confront what it means to be a slaver while being marath’damane and that story can be held off for the sequel trilogy instead (the sequel that never happened). If Mat cared as much about slavery in CoT & KoD as he did in Winter’s Heart, we would have profoundly different books).

Mat’s strong anti-slavery stance in this book just makes me WEEP with how Jordan & Sanderson butcher his character in the future to prepare him to be a loyal husband/yes-man/bullyboy/bedslave for the Empress of the Slavers (which starts in the very next book, iirc, with Mat starting to think that Slavery Isn’t So Bad when it happens to annoying people, whereas HERE his stance is “even genuinely awful people don’t deserve to be turned into slaves and it honestly seems like a fate worse than death”). Winter’s Heart Mat is both a good and a great man. Crossroads of Twilight-A Memory of Light Mat may still qualify as a ‘great’ man due to the ancient memories that allow him to be the General of the Light in the Last Battle but he stops being a good man, for the most part (I don’t recall the exact moment when it happens; it might be one of those changes that takes place between books. We’ll see).

And I deeply mourn the loss of that good man, and how he was killed off because he never would have been willing to play the role that ‘Knotai’ is required to play due to the Aelfinn prophecy and Jordan’s choices about what that prophecy had to mean for his character.

Mat is also definitely more sexist in this book than in previous books but, tbh, all three of our ta’veren boys seem more sexist these days. Rand is off making lol Women, AmIRight? jokes with Dobraine and has heavily backslid on respecting women’s right to agency and choice, Perrin determinedly ignores the intelligent women trying to give him advice (only his wife is allowed to give him advice), and Mat’s internal narration just gets more and more negative towards women as a whole and objectifies them more and more as well.

I hate to end this section of the reread on such a downer note! I am... holding out hope that the show will do better on all of this. We will know more when we see how they treat the Seanchan in the narrative next season.

#wot #wheel of time #wot reread #winter's heart #wot book spoilers #wot spoilers #this one is kinda a downer sorry guys #i ended up liking winter's heart so much less than i remembered liking it in the past #mat cauthon #slaver empress tuon #seanchan culture content warning #tylin content warning #ironically the less i like the book the faster i read it #when i'm really enjoying a book i linger over it more #the wheel of time

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nogoodsheepstealing-greatgrandma · 4 months ago

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@spacerockfloater Were you also furious on Jeyne's behalf when her shitty male relatives attempted to usurp her? Did you think she was asslicking when she recognised the wider ramifications for female succession, for her own rule, if the Greens succeeded? Do you think it might have been in her own damn interest for the Greens to fail? Why do you think GRRM included the detail that she'd already seen 3 attempts to usurp her by the time of the Dance - just as a little extra dressing? Or a key motivation behind her support for her female relative?

Add in the context that female inheritance at that point had been under attack ever since the Grand Council at Harrenhal. The longstanding tradition of the Andals and the First Men - that though a son may come before a daughter, a daughter comes before an uncle - was ignored by the lords assembled there. Rhaenys had been the rightful queen by all laws and traditions. Vaemond had then used the precedent set by the Grand Council to put himself forward as heir to Driftmark ahead of Baela and Rhaena (who at that point had been betrothed to Jace and Luke since infancy, an arrangement that was Laena's idea to help her friend and brother out, so no, Rhaenyra was not usurping her stepdaughters - Vaemond was essentially usurping Rhaena by contesting her betrothed).

So with that context, it's no wonder Jeyne Arryn backed Rhaenyra. It's no wonder that Lady Tyrell also sent this iconic 'fuck you' as an excuse not to send any aid to the Greens:

Little Lord Tyrell’s mother wrote to say that she had reason to doubt the loyalty of her son’s bannermen, and “being a mere woman, am not myself fit to lead a host to war.”

Icon.

"B-But what about Rosby and Stokeworth?" Here's my breakdown on Rosby and Stokeworth - in sum, no, Rhaenyra was not in a position to roll out any alienating radical reforms in the middle of a civil war.

Rhaenyra allied with Dalton Greyjoy did she? The Greens tried that too! And in the end they allied with the Triarchy - that other group of pirates with a long history of kidnap and enslavement.

"B-But what about Nettles?" As my name probably suggests, I am a Nettles girlie. I care very deeply about Nettles (I touch on her and Rhaenyra's treatment of her here). I don't think Jeyne Arryn cares about Nettles anymore than Rhaenyra, or most of the nobility on Rhaenyra's council (except for Corlys, Gerardys and Jace), or any of the Greens - because that's the point of Nettle's character.

The fact is, Rhaenyra doesn't have to be a radical intersectional third wave feminist to gain the support of other highborns who also aren't radical intersectional third wave femininsts. That simply isn't the standard by which Jeyne Arryn is judging Rhaenyra - the precedent of a woman ruling is enough.

Insist all you like that Rhaenyra hypocritically only thought of herself as the exception, that she didn't care about other women. It doesn't change the fact that the Greens are shitty to women too (including to Jaehaera!). It doesn't change the fact that Rhaenyra's ascension would have been a STEP. At worst, Rhaenyra was just the same as the Greens - but with the added bonus that her ascension would have set a new precedent. It would have redressed the damaging precedent set by the Grand Council.

Add in the general culture of loyalty to the King and taboo of oathbreaking - and no, support for the King's chosen heir isn't actually that controversial in Westeros. This is a world in which the Mad King cooked Rickard Stark alive in his own armour and strangled Brandon Stark while he watched - and Eddard Stark's reaction to the Kingsguard knight who killed Aerys is to denounce him as a Kingslayer. The writers thought they were being clever with that 'stale oaths' line last season - but honour is actually culturally important.

Especially considering Rhaenyra had been heir since she was 8, had made a royal progress that went a whole lot better than the one depicted on HOTD, and the lords had years to get used to her as heir - hence why half the realm did actually support her. The Grand Council had also already set the precedent that tradition can be overturned to crown a man, so why not to crown a woman? Especially when the Greens had dishonourably concealed the King's corpse for 10 days, leaving it to rot while plotting a coup, all to crown a man widely known as being a lazy glutton at best. So yeah, the Greens didn't exactly endear themselves from the start.

As for endangering Jeyne Arryn... literally every house that declares for either side is in danger by this measure. It is logistically impossible for either side to grant every ally a dragon. Add that in the book, the promise of a dragon, and the sending of Tyraxes, was a promise made and followed up on by a 14-year-old boy, not Rhaenyra lol. Rhaenyra at that point in the book is generally agreed to have been absent from her council out of grief - this was a point in the story where a young Jace was trying to step up as heir until his mother recovered. As teenage stumbles go it's better than the mess Daeron makes of Tumbleton.

As for the Supposed Grudge Against Targs...

What is this obsession with insisting that the other noble houses must hold a grudge against the evil colonist Targaryens? While they somehow don't hold a grudge against the Hightower Targaryens and their apparently nice not evil dragons? Is it because you think the Greens are more Westerosi? And the Black's familial ties to House Arryn, House Strong, House Baratheon etc don't count?

The Conquerors weren't doing anything that the lords of Westeros weren't already doing. Their entire involvement in Westeros began when Argilac Durrandon asked for their aid in defeating Harren Hoare, and offered them buffer lands between the riverlands and the stormlands. They decided it wasn't in their political interests to get caught up in the constant cycle of land conquests by rivalling kingdoms - but they decided to play the same game the Kings of Westeros were already playing anyway, only better.

The feelings of the noble houses towards the Targaryens actually varies depending on their unique histories with the Targaryens, including their unique experiences during the conquest. House Tyrell owes their status to the Targaryens, House Hightower is probably still shitty that they weren't made wardens of the Reach instead (maybe that's why Lady Tyrell is so iconic in her fuck you to the Hightowers?). House Tully also owe their position to the Targaryens - and the other riverlords remember who liberated them from Harren Hoare.

House Arryn had a bloodless takeover - albeit with the implied threat of violence. Though it is mostly remembered as the time a Targaryen Queen took an excited little boy for a ride on her dragon. And when that little boy was murdered and usurped by a kinslayer, it was House Targaryen who delivered justice - a justice that the Valemen fully approved of, due to the cultural hatred of kinslayers.

And Then We Get To House Stark-

-Who you also think should hold a grudge against House Targaryen at this point in history. Show Cregan Stark certainly seems shitty, claiming "at least you didn't threaten me with your dragon". I mean we could make a distinction between someone actively threatening you with a dragon and an implied threat - Torrhen Stark simply saw the dragons and that was enough. But implied violence is still coercion, true. The Starks had their fair share of both actual violence and the implied threat of violence, like every other damn house in this feudal world with an army.

Show Cregan also seemed to forget that his ancestor Alaric Stark had already addressed this grudge. With Good Queen Alysanne. You know, wife to Jaehaerys the Conciliator? Those Targaryens who Conciliated? Who used soft power and built roads and overturned the first night and did a bunch of other stuff to fix the wounds left by Maegor the Cruel? The North in particular, especially the smallfolk, have generally positive memories of Good Queen Alysanne - the Queen who strengthened the Night's Watch with the New Gift. She had towns and castles named after her.

Of course, the north is not a monolith. Alaric's son Ellard Stark was less concerned with strengthening the Night's Watch, and resented the transfer of land. It is speculated by Maester Yandel that this grudge caused him to vote against Jaehaerys' choice of heir in the Grand Council, voting for Rhaenys instead. But Jaehaerys was never as popular in the north as Good Queen Alysanne. It's also possible that Ellard Stark voted for Rhaenys because a) the north generally love Good Queen Alysanne b) Alysanne always supported Rhaenys as heir c) Rhaenys was the rightful queen and d)the North have only positive experiences with Targaryen Queens at this point.

Either way, considering Show Cregan's concern with manning the Wall, it didn't quite make sense for him to not mention Good Queen Alysanne. But I imagine Book Cregan had it in mind.

I imagine Book Cregan also had the fact that he was also almost usurped in mind when he supported Rhaenyra over the Greens. Hey would you look at that, both Cregan and Jeyne, the 'asslickers' as you call them, have personal experiences that factor into their decision to back Rhaenyra beyond simply being asslickers!

Cregan was only 13 when his father died, and his uncle took over as his regent. His uncle refused to relinquish power when Cregan turned 16. The fact that Cregan had to have his uncle and cousins imprisoned strongly suggests that they were never going to relinquish control. Cregan was betrayed by his own family. So not only did the Greens probably remind him of his uncle, but Cregan was acutely aware of the political ramifications of allowing coups to go unchallenged.

Because guess what, the North isn't actually a homogenous icescape of isolationist brexiteers like the Show suggests. The Night's Watch sends missives to every King they can during the War of the Five Kings for a reason - the question of who sits the Iron Throne actually impacts the aid and resources they receive. Barba Bolton goes south to beg for food aid for a reason - because even the most pro-independence northerner can recognise that total isolation is unfeasible.

Cregan also had a little brother who died when he was 11, and had recently lost his wife and childhood best friend. I'm sure he and Jace probably bonded over his own very recent loss. Jace also reportedly reminded him of his little brother. Cregan, like Jeyne, had both political and personal reasons to support the Blacks.

But sure, it's great that the political and the personal was excised from the story for the far superior purpose of insisting that TARGS ARE BAD. Show Cregan and Show Jeyne aren't characters, they aren't compelling, they aren't interesting - they are just mouthpieces for the tiresome agenda of TARGS ARE BAD. For the ridiculous insistence that Targs are particularly more violent and more classist, that the violence and classism of the rest of the nobility is somehow more legitimate.

Book Jeyne Arryn, fresh from the latest attempt by male relatives to usurp her: "She remains our rightful queen, and mine own blood besides, an Arryn on her mother's side. In this world of men, we women must band together. The Vale and its knights shall stand with her".

Show Jeyne Arryn: I don't have time to consider familial ties, solidarity from shared experiences or the wider ramifications for female succession, where the fuck is my dragon?

Rhaena: Should have read the fine print bitch.

Tyraxes: I was bigger in the book 🙁

#hotd critical #the complex more interesting version of f&b ladies and gentlemen #team green nonsense #pro rhaenyra targaryen #team black #cregan stark #jeyne arryn #jacaerys velaryon #good queen alysanne #alaric stark #ronnel arryn

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anamericangirl · 2 years ago

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Hello, I’m the same pro choice anon who made the bodily autonomy argument! Couple of things to address actually,

“Personhood is not a philosophical concept”

It actually is and you kinda admitted yourself in your argument. It’s a legal concept. And if you want to be consistent in that argument, you would also have to admit that if a fetus has personhood ( which is what you are arguing it has ) then that would also mean a single-celled human zygote would have a right to sue in court, have a right to own and inherit property ect. Having a right to own or inherit property not just after birth but since conception, which would require a probate of the zygote's estate if it failed to implant in the mother's uterine lining and was passed out with the menses?And would then require a funeral, and a proper burial? If the law suddenly just defined an unborn human as a "person” that would be the case. But anyways, that’s not the main core of my argument so let’s move on.

“People who believed personhood could be granted, didn’t grant it to slaves and Jews.”

Okay, first of all. I was dreading you would make this infamous argument that pro lifers love to make, I don’t think you want to bring up slavery or the holocaust in your argument. Not only is it incredibly disingenuous but in doing so, you have to take in the fact that these slaves were autonomous beings before they were forcing them into slavery. In fact, they had to take away their autonomy in order to make them slaves. To compare slaves, fully autonomous people, to a fetus who doesn’t have its own autonomy, no agency , not even a fully developed body yet inside of the womb of the autonomous being is not the route I think you want to take. And then the other question is, who’s autonomy is the one being invaded in? The pregnant person was there first. The pregnant person is the one with its own autonomy. The pregnant person is the one sustaining its own homeostasis, not the fetus who is only taking from that body. I really don’t think you want to compare something that has caused so much generational trauma to the medical procedure of removing a non sentient fetus.

If we are going to compare a slave to anyone in this conversation, it would be the pregnant person who’s bodily resources are being taken away without their consent ( With the addition that slave owners forced slaves to give birth as well, pregnant enslaved women were more costly to buyers. )

“Also, it's very important to know that the fetus is not infringing on the mother merely by existing. It's existing exactly as it's supposed to.”

That my friend, is a naturalistic fallacy. To claim that something is good just because it’s “natural” . The claim of what is/ought to be. To try and define values in terms of natural properties is simply a fallacious argument and illogical. For example, “Breastfeeding is the natural way to feed children, therefore mothers ought to breastfeed and not use baby formula.” Or “ Vaccines are unnatural therefore they are bad for you” or “ Human females have the capacity to give birth therefore all women should be obligated to have children.”

Also you simply can’t consent to a biological process, the chance of getting pregnant is still there no matter what precautions you use. That biological process can still occur even in S/A cases. Unless you want to enforce celibacy which is odd and a weird way of saying you’d also wish to criminalize sex.

“Some babies are born very early, like before24 weeks, which is when a fetus is considered viable.If a baby is born at 20-22 weeks they are not considered viable?”

If it’s viable at 20-22 weeks then it’s viable. If that baby that was born is alive and capable of living outside the womb without the mother then no, it should not be killed because it now has its own bodily autonomy. It is no longer non-viable.

When you justify violating the rights of the fetus because they aren't viable, are you claiming that viability is when a person has rights and is no longer to kill?

I’m claiming that you have be viable in order to have those bodily autonomy rights in the first place. How can a fetus that can’t survive outside a womb and without the mother’s body have its own bodily autonomy when it’s directly infringing on her bodily autonomy? How can you have those rights when you are directly dependent of another person’s body who already has those rights that you are infringing upon.

“You are not killing a person by not donating an organ. You are killing a person by performing an abortion.”

Well, the action of not donating an organ to the person who is dying and that you caused to be in that state is undeniably killing them. But you are correct, it’s not an unlawful killing. Which is what my point is, a pregnant woman denying her bodily autonomy to a non-viable fetus is not a unlawful killing. How is denying your bodily organ sustain the life a person you put in a critical state not similar or the same as you denying to give up your bodily organs to sustain the life of a fetus? Please explain that further.

You made a claim saying that the law already infringes on our bodily autonomy with the use of seat belts , masks and ect.

That’s not what bodily autonomy rights are, bodily autonomy are when nobody has a right over your bodily organs and nobody has a right to use your body in order to sustain their own life. So yea, bodily autonomy rights TRUMPS over the right to life and they always have. No other human life has ever had the right to use another person’s body for their direct survival. Regardless of if they die or not as a result.

Also don’t really want to dive into your entire excuse for the foster care system and healthcare system part right now , I’ll send another ask replying to that maybe since this is already long enough.

Thank you.

"It [personhood] actually is [a philosophical concept] and you kinda admitted yourself in your argument. It’s a legal concept."

I actually didn't though? I said the definition of person is human and fetuses are human beings from conception. Personhood is not a legal concept. There is a legal concept of personhood for dealing with matters of law, but it is not the definitive concept of personhood that we use to determine who is a person and who is not.

It is your biology that determines whether or not you are a person. The word "person" may not be a scientific classification, but it is absolutely a word we use to describe human beings. Every human being is a person. Name one whose not.

Also, I think it's very dangerous to believe personhood is a philosophical concept, especially when you are going to use it as a reason to kill human beings who you philosophically don't acknowledge as persons.

"And if you want to be consistent in that argument, you would also have to admit that if a fetus has personhood ( which is what you are arguing it has ) then that would also mean a single-celled human zygote would have a right to sue in court..."

I mean no I wouldn't because whether or not you are a person is a biological fact that is woven into your genes, not whatever the law defines it as. The law can be wrong.

And, also, I don't really have an inherent problem with a single celled human zygote having all those rights even if they can't appreciate or exercise them lol. But if your belief is they aren't persons because they can't exercise all the rights people have, then you must also be consistent. Do you assert that a two day old newborn baby has the right to sue in court, have a right to own and inherit property, etc. Do we need to probate the estate of the baby (which isn't required in every state) if it dies before leaving the hospital? And if we don't do that does that mean that baby isn't a person?

I just think it's very misguided to decide who is a person based on what the law says about it and what legal procedures are done and not on the fact that they are biologically human beings, and thus, a person.

"Okay, first of all. I was dreading you would make this infamous argument that pro lifers love to make, I don’t think you want to bring up slavery or the holocaust in your argument."

Oh I absolutely do want to bring those up. You're the one who doesn't want me to bring them up. The arguments you make for abortion are the same ones made for slavery and the holocaust and I understand you don't like that being pointed out but I'm not going to refrain from doing so just because it makes you uncomfortable. Even though I've seen pro-lifers bring it up a lot, I've yet to see a pro-choicer make a good argument for why it's not the same so I'm going to do that until I get one.

Besides, you brought up the infamous organ donation argument that pro-choicers love to make so it's only fair.

"Not only is it incredibly disingenuous but in doing so, you have to take in the fact that these slaves were autonomous beings before they were forcing them into slavery."

It's not disingenuous. I actually 100% believe they are the same argument and you're advocating for killing people with the exact same reasoning that slavers and the Nazis used. Scientifically, we know the unborn are human beings. There's no debate about it in science yet you are creating arbitrary standards of what it means to be a human being that have no scientific basis whatsoever in order to kill people, just like was done in slavery and the holocaust. They just chose different arbitrary standards than you have.

So, are you asserting right now, that it is autonomy that makes one a human being? Babies are not autonomous for months after being born. Is it ok to kill them?

"In fact, they had to take away their autonomy in order to make them slaves."

Kind of like you're taking away all rights from the unborn baby, including the right to life and bodily autonomy, by killing it.

But here is the reason I bring up the slave/holocaust argument. It is revealing a big contradiction in your belief system that you do not seem to realize. You asserted that personhood is a legal and philosophical concept. Is this true or is there a universal truth about what constitutes a person outside of law? It can't be both. If what you said at the beginning of your ask is correct, and personhood is a philosophical concept decided by law then you have to believe that slaves and jews were not, in fact, people, because the law said they were not. If you believe they were people, which you seem to, then you are saying personhood is not a philosophical and legal concept and personhood is a determinable truth that is not philosophical or decided by law. So which is it?

"To compare slaves, fully autonomous people, to a fetus who doesn’t have its own autonomy, no agency , not even a fully developed body yet inside of the womb of the autonomous being is not the route I think you want to take."

It absolutely is the route I want to take because I know that being fully autonomous, having agency or being fully developed is not what makes someone a human person. I don't think you want to take the route that you must have those things to be a person because every condition you list can also be applied to someone outside the womb and if you remain consistent with the conditions you list for why the fetus isn't a person then you are saying there are human beings who are living outside the womb that you also don't consider to be people.

People aren't fully autonomous right after being born. At what point are people fully autonomous and thus are not ok to kill or force into slavery anymore?

Babies don't have agency right after being born. When do people get agency and thus are not ok to kill or force into slavery anymore?

People aren't fully developed until years after being born. In fact, your brain isn't fully developed until the age of 25. So is it ok to kill and enslave people under 25?

Those are the conditions you listed for why the fetus is less of a person so if you're consistent with that belief then you must also believe that a three month old is less of a person than an 18 year old. And an 18 year old is less of a person than a 25 year old.

Is that the route you want to take?

And then the other question is, who’s autonomy is the one being invaded in? The pregnant person was there first. The pregnant person is the one with its own autonomy. The pregnant person is the one sustaining its own homeostasis, not the fetus who is only taking from that body. I really don’t think you want to compare something that has caused so much generational trauma to the medical procedure of removing a non sentient fetus.

If you believe autonomy is a human right then you have that right by the nature of being human, not by being born. A woman's autonomy isn't being invaded by pregnancy. If she's pregnant, she chose to engage in an act that the sole biological function of is reproduction. Your rights aren't being violated because you chose to have sex and it ended a way you didn't want.

I really don't think you want to be saying it's ok to kill babies just because they aren't autonomous. Bodily autonomy is not license to kill. If exercising your bodily autonomy requires you to kill an innocent person, you don't have the right to do that.

Bodily autonomy has limitations and those limitations are present when another person is going to be harmed or killed. And that's what going on in an abortion. An innocent person is being intentionally killed.

No, a pregnant woman is in no way comparable to a slave and it's absurd to say so. It's also minimizing what slavery is and very disrespectful to actual victims of slavery. Getting pregnant and giving birth is not slavery in any way, shape or form. No one says a woman must get pregnant. In fact, if a woman doesn't want a child I'm all for her not having one and choosing not to get pregnant. But it's not slavery to say you can't kill a baby you already have. And I don't think you want to be comparing slavery to not being able to kill your baby.

"That my friend, is a naturalistic fallacy. To claim that something is good just because it’s “natural",...."

Well my argument wasn't "it's natural and therefore good" so you're going to need to make sure you understand my argument before you try to refute it.

My argument was it's not infringing on her by existing. Natural biological process are not "infringing" on people's rights. The woman chose to risk starting the process of reproduction and reproduction is not infringing on the woman by happening. That was my argument.

If you invite someone into your home they aren't infringing on your rights by accepting the invitation.

"Also you simply can’t consent to a biological process, the chance of getting pregnant is still there no matter what precautions you use. That biological process can still occur even in S/A cases. Unless you want to enforce celibacy which is odd and a weird way of saying you’d also wish to criminalize sex."

Precisely. Which is why this is not a matter of consent. It's a biological process that can happen whether you want it to or not. If you don't want to go through the process and you are going to kill the baby if you get pregnant it would be better for you to abstain from sex altogether until you're ready to go through the process. I don't want to enforce celibacy but I do think people who are going to kill their baby if they get pregnant shouldn't be having sex. At all.

My core point here is once you are pregnant reproduction has happened. Now the baby exists. It is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception and if you abort the pregnancy at any point you are killing a human being and you have failed to give any example where bodily autonomy lets you intentionally kill an innocent person.

It's not a matter of consent. It's a matter of protecting human life. The baby does not need continuous consent to exist. You don't have the right to kill them.

"If it’s viable at 20-22 weeks then it’s viable. If that baby that was born is alive and capable of living outside the womb without the mother then no, it should not be killed because it now has its own bodily autonomy. It is no longer non-viable."

It's not viable. That's the whole point. Even after it's born at that age it's still not viable. They usually don't even survive after being born that young. So if a baby can be born at that age and we can't kill them, what's the difference when they are in the womb at that age? It's exactly the same level of viability both inside and outside the womb.

I think you need to define what you mean by viable. And where was it decided you only have human rights if you're viable?

"I’m claiming that you have be viable in order to have those bodily autonomy rights in the first place. How can a fetus that can’t survive outside a womb and without the mother’s body have its own bodily autonomy when it’s directly infringing on her bodily autonomy? How can you have those rights when you are directly dependent of another person’s body who already has those rights that you are infringing upon."

And, where, exactly, did you get the idea that you have to be viable to have autonomy rights? Is bodily autonomy a human right or not? Because if it's is human right then you have it by nature of being a human.

The fetus is not infringing on her bodily autonomy, as I've already explained and you've failed to prove otherwise. You just keep claiming it's an infringement but haven't refuted any of my arguments that explain how it's not an infringement.The fetus is a human being and has the same rights that the mother has.

The fetus has the right to life. And bodily autonomy is not the right to kill innocent people.

"Well, the action of not donating an organ to the person who is dying and that you caused to be in that state is undeniably killing them. But you are correct, it’s not an unlawful killing. Which is what my point is, a pregnant woman denying her bodily autonomy to a non-viable fetus is not a unlawful killing. How is denying your bodily organ sustain the life a person you put in a critical state not similar or the same as you denying to give up your bodily organs to sustain the life of a fetus? Please explain that further."

You are not causing them to be in that state. If they need an organ they are already in that state. You are not saving their life. And that's completely different than killing someone. It's not a "lawful killing" because you are not killing people if you don't donate an organ. They are dying a natural death. We don't have the responsibility of saving people who are dying, but we do have the responsibility of not intentionally killing people who would continue to live without our interference.

If you are the one who put the person in the critical state that made them need the organ, then you are not required to donate the organ but you will be charged with murder if they die if you literally caused them to be in that position. So you don't have to save their life, but if they die you will be held responsible.

And abortion is not simply a matter of refusing to donate an organ. Do you know what must be done to prevent the baby from using your body? You have to rip its body apart limb by limb. Induce a heart attack. Crush its skull. These are very violent acts that would be considered crimes at any point outside of the womb and it's very disingenuous of you to compare it to simply not donating an organ. You do see how those are different, do you not?

Can you commit those same kind of acts on a person who you refuse to donate an organ to?

"You made a claim saying that the law already infringes on our bodily autonomy with the use of seat belts , masks and ect.

I would really like to know where you're getting all your definitions for the assertions you make because it seems like you're making them up or just taking parts of them that you feel you can use to support abortion and discarding the parts that don't fit your belief system.

Bodily autonomy includes the right to govern your organs and using your body to sustain others, but that's not all it covers. Bodily autonomy is simply the right to govern ones own body. That's it. Not just about what you do with your organs or if someone needs assistance to live but in all matters that involve anything about your body inside or out of it.

So you think bodily autonomy is applicable if you want to kill an innocent person you created through a very specific act but it's not applicable if the government is telling you what to wear? You see how that makes no sense, don't you? If it applies in such severe cases and allows you to kill a person, then surely it covers less severe situations like if you don't want to walk outside with a cloth over your face when that hurts absolutely no one.

Skin is an organ. So if bodily autonomy is the right over your bodily organs than that has to include what you choose to put on your skin. So why is it different? Why doesn't bodily autonomy apply to other areas when you're being told what to do with your body?

Bodily autonomy does not trump the right to life and you have not given a single case where it does. The right to life is not the right not to die. The right to life is the right to live your life as you see fit until you die a natural death or forfeit that right based on your own choices. Someone else does not have the right to intentionally end your life if they don't consent to your existence. You don't get to say someone can't use your organs or body once they are already using it. Like if you donate an organ and then after the procedure is done and the person is using it you can't change your mind and take it back. Your rights end where another persons' begin.

If bodily autonomy trumps the right to life then that will apply in multiple other situations outside the womb. So give me a real life example of when we are allowed to intentionally end the life of another innocent, even perfectly healthy person, to exercise bodily autonomy. And organ donation doesn't count because you're not killing anyone by not donating an organ. I'm not talking about not making the decision to save an already dying person. I'm talking about a time when you're legally allowed to actively and intentionally end the life of another innocent human being who would have continued to live without your interference.

#anon #answered #abortion #pro-life

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