#of all the topics shown in the asoiaf series you really only think that the main point is the dragon ppl are evil and deserve to be killed

[pearls-n-opulence]

Listen I don’t really like the Targ Dynasty myself (I’m a Stark girlie 🌚🌚) but I just saw an anti say that Robert was right. You do realize that man took the throne not because he cared about saving people from the tyrannical Bad Guy™ evil silver haired people but because he was mad about being cucked by a Targaryen Prince and started an entire Rebellion-War over a girl he probably didn’t even love that much?

Targ Antis have such plot irrelevant takes; I swear half of yall don’t even understand what you’ve watched/read bc the main thing you took away was “dragon ppl bad”? Really?

[melrosing]

Ok I will certainly agree with those who claim ASOIAF depicts a hyper-patriarchy, like Westerosi society is in many ways more misogynistic and oppressive than any society it’s based on. and there’s a host of conversations to be had about that. But I’m so stumped by these twitter takes claiming asoiaf celebrates that kind of society?? That it’s just this cock fest where the worst of toxic masculinity is exhibited without criticism or contemplation? like!! come on!!!

practically every male POV in the gd series is wrestling with the masculine ideal, and losing. the closer they get to it the more it burns them - quite literally in Quentyn’s case. it’s his efforts to become the powerful man he thinks he ought to be that kills him. the same shit will happen to Victarion: his obsession with power and respect has only ever lost him those exact things. same shit has already happened to Theon, whose power struggle has left him practically the most powerless POV in the cast - his rise is in finding another way to be, outside of that ideal he once aspired to.

and in the men who have achieved it, the masculine ideal is repeatedly shown to be utterly hollow: Jaime realises that as the greatest swordsman in Westeros, he was only a hand - and all the more fragile for it. Robert’s prowess won him nothing but a crown he never really wanted, and as that prowess decays we see all the weaknesses he was hiding. Renly tries to take Robert’s place, and despite all the power he accumulates, all it does is make him more vulnerable to a brother with the same ambitions - and it scatters on impact. Tywin, who is thought of as eternal, who has dedicated his life to constructing and embodying the masculine ideal, is ultimately just as vulnerable as any other man, and trampling the son he always saw as the greatest insult to his image is precisely what kills him. and then there's Gregor, strongest man in the 7K, who is literally just lost in his own violence.

like the only way men survive this narrative is by abandoning their quests for the ideal, and their obsession with their own image and power and strength, and the whole game of fuckin thrones, and embracing a cause beyond them and their house. Sam’s arc isn’t to become the heir his father wanted, Jon’s isn’t to become the heir he never was, Theon’s isn’t to take his place as Balon’s, Jaime’s isn’t to take his place as Tywin’s. they are not meant to succeed to these roles, because nothing about this story suggests that the patriarchy is worth sustaining, or that the men who propelled it were worth being. and there is so much to say on this topic but you don’t get to join in if you have only seen game of thrones!!!

[hyena-frog]

Anti Darrow arguments are either trying to excuse slavery or they are misinterpretations of the character himself. The only character that I have seen getting this type of treatment, but way worse, is Daenerys Targaryen from the asoiaf series. Why do you think that this happens? You don't have to answer if you don't want to, but I do advise to stay away from RR fb groups to avoid this type of drama.

For real though, some people in this fandom really sound like this sometimes:

I’d like to think people aren’t actively excusing slavery. It could be the mindset, “oh it’s just fictional slavery so it doesn’t matter” and ok, yes, this is a fantastical sci fi series where people fly around in purple armor and Minotaur helmets. But it’s also extremely tied to real life political and social issues. Specifically how insidious fas///cist government is. PB studied political science and it shows! He’s passionate about these topics. His series is trying to say something about these issues! So, in my opinion, these things shouldn’t be excused just because it’s fiction. It just drives me nuts when people don’t think critically about what they read. Some series are written for pure entertainment, I get that, but this isn’t one of them. It’s both entertaining and encourages the reader to think critically. At least, that’s how I read it.

Some folks misinterpret Darrow so badly, which baffles me. How did you get through the first trilogy, which is shown entirely through his perspective, come to know how he thinks and feels, only to enter this second trilogy suddenly agreeing with Lysander that Darrow is the devil incarnate? How many times have I read ”Darrow’s gone feral and needs to be put down” or some such disgusting thing, because he made difficult, morally grey decisions, and yes, acted like an asshole sometimes? This was true in the first trilogy, too, so why is it so unforgivable now? Darrow made his mistakes but nothing nearly so heinous as to deserve these bizarre misinterpretations.

All of the POV characters are biased in their own ways (including Darrow). This is what makes them so well written to me. It’s very human. Maybe these people who misinterpret Darrow were startled, come Iron Gold, to suddenly be introduced to three perspectives who don’t view Darrow favorably? But over time, both Lyria and Ephraim grow to understand and respect him better. It’s only Lysander who continues to dislike him. I’m willing to admit I’m biased against Lysander, but I just don’t see what is so special about his POV that people continue to use it to prove Darrow is evil or something. Even after Dark Age and all Darrow went through and how he learned to be better? It’s mind boggling.

I can’t speak for Daenerys because I haven't read ASOIAF nor watched GOT. I do know her basic story through fandom osmosis though. I’d be interested to hear comparisons between her treatment and Darrow’s if it’s so similar? 🤔

As for certain FB groups... I’m glad I never joined. I was tempted, since RR content can be hard to find, but I’ve heard enough horror stories secondhand. 🤣 This fandom is relatively small, so I wish I didn’t have to block out any part of it. Alas.

(Sorry this took so long to answer!! I’m doing my best to get through my asks.)

[neuxue]

Since you seem to have read a Song of Ice & Fire, I wonder if you have any thoughts about Tigraine vs Rhaegar, wrt their efforts to conform to prophecy and what that meant for their kids, both the ones they already had, and those conceived as a result(also spouses, but Tarangail & Elia are opposite ends of a sympathy spectrum)? - thank you

This is a super interesting question, anon! Largely because I’m mostly indifferent to ASoIaF these days but Rhaegar is one of the exceptions; he fascinates me. 

But much of that is because… okay, this is probably a topic for another essay (that I may or may not ever write), but he’s so central to everything that’s happening, and he casts this enormous shadow over the entire story, and yet he’s like a void in the narrative. An empty space with so much gravity and impact but only ever seen obliquely, in silhouette, through a kaleidoscope of biased memories… and so much is anchored to this unknown. And I just like the way he’s kept unknown, never shown in a way that the reader can trust to be reliable, and deliberately shown in contradictory ways, and even then only enough to suggest that there is Far More To The Story. You can love him or hate him or remain uncertain but you can’t ignore him and you can never know him and so much leads back to him and we’ll likely never really know why. Anyway, my shorthand for this is that he is, to borrow Westeros’s own religion, the Stranger.

So that was a tangent. 

But also not, because I think that’s part of what Tigraine is missing, and why I wouldn’t have thought to liken them to one another. There’s a… dimensionality to Rhaegar (for all that we only see his shadow) that Tigraine isn’t given. Which isn’t a criticism, per se, but just a case of authors making different choices about what they want to focus on or play with. So in WoT, Tigraine feels a bit more like a plot device, and instead as a focus we get the Rhuidean sequence, and the whole mess of having your past life’s failures invading your mind, and the intricacy of a pattern of coincidence and fate across millennia. So Tigraine is merely a part of that web, rather than the focal point of it. Which works, for WoT, because WoT isn’t setting out to question the very nature of prophecy: it’s letting ‘prophecy exists in this world and we go from there’ serve as a backdrop against which we can see characters interacting with or reacting to that fact. But it’s a fact; this isn’t really a series about the fallibility or infallibility of prophecy.

Whereas ASoIaF does try to interrogate or play with that concept of prophecy itself, especially as it collides with all the messiness of human choices and flaws. To treat it less as a given truth, and more as...  another thing people can fuck up. Did he succeed? Did he fail? Did he make the right choice, in surrendering himself to prophecy? Who even defines what the ‘right choice’ is -- are we looking at whether or not the prophecy was fulfilled? Or whether or not he achieved his ends? Or just at the chaos and suffering that followed?

And I should stress again: I don’t mean any of that pejoratively; they’re just different choices made by different authors interested in different things. 

But it does make for one of my favourite types of compare-and-contrast, which is when two things look (or can be made to look) almost identical on paper, and then the fun part is figuring out why the feel so completely different. That’s what this feels like to me: you can bullet-point Tigraine’s and Rhaegar’s storylines side-by-side and come up with something that looks similar, but the purpose they serve is entirely different. We accept Tigraine’s choices because that’s what had to happen. We question Rhaegar’s because... did it?

Tigraine is a thread in the pattern; Rhaegar is a way of questioning whether there is a woven pattern, and whether that’s a good enough reason to keep weaving it. 

[phosphorescent-naidheachd]

I was asked about my thoughts re: the political!Jon theory, but my thoughts ended up being WAY too long to go into a message.

I know the political!Jon theory is a somewhat incendiary topic in sections of the GOT fandom, so I’ve placed my reply under a cut. If you choose to read this, please be aware that these are just my personal opinions---no condescension or offense is meant towards anyone. 

As much as political!Jon might help make sense of the clunky pacing and tone of Jon's decision to bend the knee in S7, I don't think that theory is going to be canon on GOT. IMO, what you see is generally what you get with GOT; if what you see doesn't make sense, that's just due to poor writing/pacing rather than it being a red flag for viewers to look closer. Keep in mind, these are the same fine people who brought us Season 5's "Marry Your Enemies for Revenge" plotline and who managed to utterly misconstrue who characters like Ellaria Sand and Stannis Baratheon are at their core in ASOIAF. You can’t look at GOT from a purely Watsonian standpoint when trying to make accurate predictions; you have to keep the Doylist factors in mind. And from a Doylist standpoint, I highly doubt that D&D would intentionally write political!Jon. Which is a pity, because that could make for such a rich, interesting storyline!

Beyond that, I can't decide whether political!Jon would be in character for show!Jon at this point. For one thing, I have a difficult time seeing show!Jon initiating sex with someone he doesn’t care about in order to manipulate them. (Going along with it, on the other hand...) For another, the people writing/directing GOT seem to believe that characters can’t simultaneously be clever/cunning and be kind or have a strong sense of morals. In the GOT universe, honor gets you killed, full stop, so obviously if honor=good, then good=always stupid. (Don’t get me started on the nihilistic way in which The North Remembers plotline has been implemented on GOT lol.) The writers have been hammering home that Jon is honorable but occasionally thick-headed because of it for several seasons now... it’s possible that this is just a misdirect to make political!Jon seem all the more ironic and/or shocking in retrospect, but I rather doubt it. See again: when in doubt, I generally assume that what you see is what you get on GOT, and that goes double for anything that would have required planning across multiple seasons. (Note: big book plot points like R+L=J are an exception, and even those don’t tend to be foreshadowed very consistently on the show.)

As a general rule, I think the GOT writers/directors have a difficult time crafting character arcs that feel organic and earned, and that this weakness was exacerbated once they lost the scaffolding of GRRM’s books. For instance, take a look at show!Sansa, whose character has been jerked this way and that over the seasons according to what’s most convenient for the plot. In some episodes, she’s reasonably intelligent, whereas in others she’s clearly carrying the Idiot Ball rather than merely making mistakes that would make sense for her character. (And this situation, I hasten to add, isn’t unique to her character.) Of course, that’s not getting into the show’s tendency to have important developments occur offscreen... and I’m not just talking about huge developments like Sansa and Arya learning the truth about Baelish, I’m talking about smaller things too, like Arya actually being shown learning how to fight rather than just being constantly beat up by the Waif until suddenly she wasn’t. Obviously we don’t need to see everything---viewers can be trusted to intuit a fair amount and can put pieces together without being constantly spoon-fed them---but we do need to see a certain amount onscreen in order to find a character arc believable and satisfying. Headcanons are all very well and good, but they should be an added bonus... not a necessity.

Though it may not seem it, I have a fair amount of empathy for the people running/writing GOT. Intelligent characters are incredibly difficult to write, especially if their strengths are different from your own! And not only has it got to be hard to try to wrap up this massive series from just a handful of plot points from GRRM, but what works well in books doesn’t always translate well to the screen. I don’t think the writers on GOT are always bad at their job... they’ve added some good original scenes to the show (ex: Ned saying goodbye to Jon in S1) and they’ve made some good changes (ex: book!Sansa says “Maybe my brother will give me your head” in response to Joffrey’s taunt about gifting her with her brother’s head; show!Sansa says “Or maybe he’ll give me yours”, which is a much snappier retort, IMO). That said, they’ve also become increasingly lazy over the seasons and are far too fond of shocking “twists” that exist merely to be “shocking”. I enjoy GOT for what it is, but when people create clever theories about what’s happening on it and genuinely believe that those theories will be borne out in the show, I think that they’re usually setting themselves up for major disappointment. (Having said that, I’m certainly not some arbiter of How You Should Fandom. As long as you aren’t harming anyone, do what brings you joy, y’know?) And hey, I love reading all the cool theories that fans come up with! This is a creative, talented fandom, and it’s much enriched by all of the theorizing, regardless of which of those theories end up being true.

When well executed, I enjoy political!Jon in fanfic, as long as it doesn’t become too mean-spirited towards Daenerys. I’m not much a fan of show!Dany---she’s another character who has been rather poorly served by GOT, IMO, especially with Tyrion taking on so much of her role in the show’s adaptation of her ADWD plot---but the level of vitriol that some fans have towards her makes me extremely uncomfortable. Once again, I’m not saying fans can’t write what they want to, that there aren’t a lot of legitimate criticisms to be made about Dany and her decisions, or that dark/antagonist!Dany can’t be written without bashing her... just that some people really hate her and want to see her utterly humiliated and destroyed to a degree that I simply can’t wrap my head around. (I think that some of this has to do with the usual fandom shipping wars and that some of this has to do with the usual societal unconscious sexism/misogyny, but YMMV.)

As far as ASOIAF goes, I’m not ruling the political!Jon theory out, but I don’t feel like I have enough information to make a decision one way or the other. Dany hasn’t even heard of Jon yet in ASOIAF, after all, and Jon has only barely heard her alluded to, IIRC. Whether political!Jon ends up being a thing in ASOIAF or not, however, I suspect the pacing and tone of Jon allying with Dany will be significantly different (and more nuanced) than it was on the show. This is because book!Jon and book!Dany are different characters than their counterparts on the show; because books are a different medium than TV and allow for both more detail and more internal character development; and because, quite frankly, I think GRRM is a better writer than the people writing GOT. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hope this rather long-winded reply answered your question!

[thelawyerthatwaspromised]

I’d very strongly argue that Occam’s Razor would point to the show following its own patterns which make it far more likely that the events happening on screen is not the full extent of the plot mechanics as that’s never how D&D have operated.

I’m not sure you care too much to read it but I did a pretty lengthy write up on how the D&D use onscreen dialogues to misdirect viewers from offscreen machinations. (x)

As far as political!Jon theories from the books - I’d agree that it’s definitely not mainstream but I’ve seen posts from as far back as 2011 (I think Westeros.org) predicting that Jon and Dany were on a track to interact and Jon is set up to manipulate her. I can give it a shot to find those links if you’re interested.

But I’d say the North, above all, is shown time and again to be independent leaning, skeptical of southerners, and particularly weary given the recent-ish events on the show and just prior (particularly back to the build up to Robert’s Rebellion. Whether that actually comes to fruition in the form of independence is certainly debatable but more importantly it guides how the North will react to Dany’s arrival and Jon’s obstacles after RLJ.

And this is also a book reader in me that doesn’t really think the point is that politics are silly and petty. Political power and, maybe more importantly, the pursuit of political power have always and will always be tremendously important. I believe GRRM when he says that the heart of ASOIAF is a meditation on power and how people deal with having that power.

Even if an asteroid hits but people survive - the issue of power after the conflict will be important and good people will be corrupted by it and bad people will do anything to acquire it. I’d argue one of the strongest themes of the entire series is rooted in deconstructing the story structure where the hero achieves one great big thing and it fixes the whole world.

After the existential - politics will still remain and people-based conflicts will as well. If the LOTR ending bothered GRRM because we didn’t see how or why Aragorn was a good king, I very much doubt that the series-long political conflicts (many of which are rooted in very justified wars like the beginning of Robert’s Rebellion) will prove to be petty and unimportant because the Others/White Walkers exist.

At its heart, I still believe the series is about conflicts between people and how power influences those conflicts. An entire finale season where we already know Cersei’s big plan as the only complex political game is....well I think the Occam’s Razor would say, given the totality of the series and themes, political conflict we don’t already *see* is more likely to happen than not.

As kind of a last piece to that, RLJ completely changes the game politically. Dany’s entire invasion is based on the claim that isn’t as strong as she believes. Jon very likely would be dead if RLJ was revealed while Robert lived. Gendry’s half siblings were all killed because of kingly claims that those bastards might possess. Simply put, it matters.

It’s awful that this type of thing would lead to violence, to be sure, but I think it’s unlikely given how long the build up to Jon’s identity has lasted and how important the issue of a “good claim” has been - for the long awaited reveal that Jon is the heir with the best claim will only have non-political implications for Westeros.

Sorry if I jumped around topics there.

so what y’all gonna do when undercover jon doesn’t happen? what are we gonna cry about next? lemme know so i can prepare myself