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ladystoneboobs · 8 months

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Lord Tywin did not, in the end, shit gold.

so, let’s talk about the recurring motif of shit concercerning the lions of casterly rock/king’s landing. the tywin connection is perhaps strongest and most obvious, yet the appearence of either literal poop or poop talk comes up with all the other lannisters too, barring only myrcella and tommen.

i counted at least 9 mentions of the joke about tywin pooping precious metals. (8 in the main series plus 1 in the world book) this includes the title joke in his death scene, and then there are over 10 more references to tywin dying in the privy.

we’ve also got:

one of our first descriptions of joffrey’s bad personality is jon snow’s summation of him as “a little shit”. not literal poop in this case, but i thought the choice of insult was interesting. (in fact, i believe this is the only time that term is used this way. no non-lannister could ever be so shitty.)

tyrion’s first job from tywin being putting him in charge of all of the drains in casterly rock, presumably including the ones from the privies.

tyrion asking “why does a bear shit in the woods?” in response to cat’s question of why littlefinger would lie to her

bronn telling tyrion he won’t “m'lord you every time you take a shit” in the same chapter where tyrion tells the vale mountain clansmen that his “father’s smiths shit better steel” than their weaponry.

walder frey deeming tywin and stannis “both bungholes who think they're too noble to shit” (”think” meaning walder knows better, that tywin does shit and it’s probably just as gross and stinky as frey poop)

tyrion listing “magnificient destriers shit everywhere” as a reason his battlefield days were done (or so he thought)

tyrion telling varys he should wear his rugen disguise to court and that it would make cersei “soil her smallclothes”

tyrion choosing to poison cersei with laxatives so that she’d be too busy shitting to bother him during court business.

tyrion deeming his predecessors, lords arryn and stark, “too honest to live, too noble to shit” (in this case i think he’s using “too noble” in a different sense than walder frey did, implying that shitting is practical and immoral, like any competant lannister would like to be)

the king’s landing riot on the day of myrcella’s departure starting with multiple clods of dung being flung at joffrey.

joffrey’s crown then being “dung-encrusted” as tyrion attacked him after they escaped the riot

tyrion telling varys and bronn that joffrey was not fit to sit a privy, let alone the throne

catelyn comparing jaime’s honor to the contents of the bucket where he’d been forced to piss and shit in his dungeon cell. an implied shit-for-honor metaphor which he returns to several times, twice in that last chapter with her and repeatedly (at least 7 times, the magic number!) in his own pov.

tywin’s horse taking a shit in the throne room right before he made his grand entrance post-blackwater

tyrion being trapped in a room smelling of “blood and shit and burnt flesh” when he was warehoused with all the other wounded and dead/dying immediately post-blackwater

tyrion saying cersei treated him like a mushroom on his sickbed post-blackwater because she “keeps me in the dark and feeds me shit”

tyrion thinking of the upcoming royal wedding and its pie, believing that doves especially love to shit on him, a sentiment repeated on the wedding day

a king’s landing urchin trying to throw manure at tyrion, and later tyrion telling sansa they must keep the curtains closed on his litter to avoid those fecal projectiles. (the kingslanders seem to be very fond of dung-throwing since tyrion was told they also threw it at his vale clansmen as they were sent home)

jaime recalling that the mad king shit himself in his last moments (meaning jaime’s kingslaying and tyrion’s kinslaying came with the same odor)

jaime noticing the abundance of horseshit in the stables of the outlaws’ inn he and bri and cleos visit

jaime recounting that brienne had to clean him when he soiled himself in the saddle post-mutilation

on jaime’s first return to harrenhal he notes “Someone had dug a privy trench in the very spot where he'd once knelt before the king to say his vows.” (gotta love all the obvious symbolism in jaime’s pov. “it was that white cloak that soiled me, not the other way around.”)

tyrion wishing the father’s statue would fall and “crush joff like a dung beetle” during the royal wedding ceremony

jaime explaining the stink of the capital to his northern escort as “Smoke, sweat, and shit. King's Landing, in short.” (kl being a setting associated with the lannisters, perhaps even moreso than never-seen-yet casterly rock.)

jaime correcting a man at the gates of kl who thought tywin shit silver instead of gold

the hound saying sansa “shit on the Imp's head and flew off.” when learning of her escape

jaime seeing a crow shitting on blessed baelor’s statue as he and cersei spoke to mace tyrell at tywin’s funeral

tyrion seeing a pile of horse dung on the old valyrian road and thinking of his father down in some hell

tyrion telling duck and haldon "Pissing is the least of my talents. You ought to see me shit." as his means of introduction

even kevan gets into the poop game telling jaime "I was hanging outlaws and robber knights when you were still shitting in your swaddling clothes”

cersei then tells jaime that kevan will have his hands full at darry “teaching Lancel how to wipe his arse.”

cersei dreaming of keeping tyrion’s severed head in her chamber pot to pee and poop on

tyrion describing the smell of old volantis: “There's fish in it, and flowers, and some elephant dung as well. Something sweet and something earthy and something dead and rotten.”

tyrion thinkling the mud in the poorest part of volantis was the color of “a baby’s nightsoil”

tyrion noticing dung carts pulled by dung-tattooed slaves and almost walking into elephant dung until jorah snatched him aside

jaime meeting shitmouth on his 2nd return to harrenhal

cersei being disgusted by all the sparrows befouling baelor’s plaza “with their pigs and goats and nightsoil” (nightsoil = human poop euphemism)

jaime recalling merrett frey being branded by wenda the white fawn and “the kettles of shit his fellow squires made him eat once he was returned” (presumably in a figurative sense)

genna telling her husband he could wipe his arse with the deed to riverrun for all the good it did while the blackfish still held the castle

edwyn frey’s plan in jaime’s riverrun war council involving shit-smeared arrows

jaime describing the freys’ messy siege camp with “raw brown mud, mixed with horse dung and torn up by hooves and boots alike” and only “flies, horse dung, and Ser Ryman's gallows, standing forlorn” left after their departure

tyrion thinking the people laughing at his fall in his and penny’s show on the ship would “have laughed hard enough to shit their breeches along with him[tywin]” if they’d seen him kill his father

then tyrion and penny being trapped during the storm with her dog and ever-shitting pig (and the ship’s creak sounding like “a constipated fat man straining to shit”)

tyrion again experiencing the “stink of blood and shit” in the slavers’ camp amid the bloody flux

tyrion thinking the yunkish supreme comander looked “as formidable as a loose stool”

tyrion and penny having to clean yezzan’s pools of slimy, bloody shit after he contracted the bloody flux

doing all that in “a miasma of sweat, shit and sickness inside yezzan’s pavilion”

one of the second sons offering to behead tyrion and toss his corpse in the latrine pit upon his arrival in brown ben’s tent

cersei smelling the essence of kl upon her release from baelor’s sept: “the scents of sour wine, bread baking, rotting fish and nightsoil, smoke and sweat and horse piss. No flower had ever smelled so sweet.”

cersei later slipping, during her walk of shame, in “something that might have been nightsoil”. which was probably not so sweet

cersei walking on, after she could see the red keep ahead, through mud and dung, bleeding and hobbling

brown ben plumm telling tyrion he’d have to shit into a bucket bc of too many eyes at the latrines

tyrion telling penny “Fight or hide or shit yourself, as you like, but whatever you decide to do, you'll do it clad in steel."

some of these are just turns of phrase or everybody poops situations included for the sake of comprehensiveness, but i do think the sheer amount of lannister-related poop references is meaningful. does it mean anything that tyrion, as tywin “writ small”, (and tywin’s most unfavorite lannister) is the child of tywin with the most shit references (or is just that he also has the most pov chapters?)? or that cersei, tywin’s other heir (and tyrion’s other abuser) ends up trapped in a privy after being dosed with laxatives by tyrion, and then tywin dies in a privy after being shot by tyrion? or that myrcella and tommen, the most innocent lannisters, are not so associated with shit?

this imagery does have different meanings with each character. for tyrion it’s usually about his father and society at large shitting on him, for jaime it’s mostly about his solied honor and the dishonorable characters he interacts with, for joffrey and cersei it’s about the common people they disdain reacting to them, bringing them down by dirtying their bodies, human waste connecting the lannisters with those they rule, not so different after all. and for tywin, poop regularly ruins his moments of glory whether it’s his entrance to the throne room, his death failing to shit gold, or his very smelly funeral. but for all of them it is a humanizing element, showing they are just as gross and vulnerable as anyone else. jaime is no golden god, he’s a disabled knight at one point too weak to wipe his own butt in the immediate aftermath of his injury. perhaps that is the real lasting legacy of tywin lannister: a load of reeking shit which can be gilded like gold but never truly mistaken for perfection.

#valyrianscrolls #asoiaf meta #asoiaf #tyrion lannister #cersei lannister #Jaime Lannister #Tywin Lannister #Joffrey Baratheon #kevan lannister #lancel lannister #genna lannister #Pride of Lions #ive had this sitting in my drafts since pretty much the start of this blog #inspiring to finally finish it by the last season of suck session and all the talk of logan's piss motif #(c)lsb #didn't lj-cuts have an endpoint so you could put a visible conclusion tl;dr below?#anyway i wish tumblr readmores worked like that #long post #sh1tpost

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