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sapphires-and-gold-fics · 5 years

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Fictober Day 21: “Change is annoyingly difficult.”

Fandom: Game of Thrones / ASOIAF

Characters: Jaime Lannister / Brienne of Tarth

Read on AO3

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Jaime hated physical therapy, though not as much as he hated the absence of his right hand. In the grand scheme of things, it was a hatred of physical therapy, an abhorrence for the lack of a hand, his ex, and then most of all, Brienne.

His physiotherapist was a brute. Tall - taller than him, broad of shoulder - broader than his, scarred - okay, on that account he could concede that his were worse. She was freckled all over - down to gods knew where, and she hated him. So naturally, he hated her back. Even though she had absolutely astonishing blue eyes that liked to trip him up. And even though, at the end of the day, what she was doing was helping him. And okay maybe she didn’t hate him, maybe she was just like that with everyone.

The accident that had taken his hand had been just that - he hadn’t asked for it to happen. He’d just broken up with his ex - again - and he’d been angry and cocky in his driving. It never paid to do that. The next thing he knew, the sports car was wrapped around a tree and his hand was trapped between the dash and the door frame.

From what he could tell in passing, the bulk of Brienne’s patients were alcoholics. They’d all done something idiotic like drive off a bridge, or try to do a handstand on a train platform, or operate a saw while not knowing how to operate a saw. She seemed to show them no sympathy, and he apparently was grouped in with the rest. It’s not that she wasn’t a good physiotherapist, it’s that maybe she probably would have been better suited to working with prison inmates.

On this fine Tuesday morning, she was being really hard on him, by Jaime’s standards. Not only did he have to suffer through his usual semi-weekly routine of standard recovery exercises, but every session she now had him trying to lift a little more weight using the remaining forearm - today he was up to 10 pounds. Afterwards, she would always beat his arm until it was bruised, like normal. Sure, the medical bills called it therapeutic massage, an alternating of cold packs and heat packs with pressure, but really it was just torture. If he had a physiotherapist with smaller hands, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much. Of course then maybe it also wouldn’t feel as loose and flexible come next session.

He was in the middle of lifting the ten pound weight with his forearm when he stopped and stared at Brienne across the small gym space. She stared back, an eyebrow up. “What’s up, Lannister?”

“Wench, I’ve just realized that my arm doesn’t hurt.”

“I told you not to call me that.”

Okay, so some of the antagonism had been his fault. “Sorry - Brienne. My arm doesn’t hurt.”

“Like the pressure of the band is cutting off your circulation, or like it doesn’t hurt to be moving it like that?”

“The latter. Definitely the latter.”

The therapist broke into a crooked-toothed smile that brightened her eyes, and for a second Jaime thought she actually looked like a pleasant person to know.

“That’s good, Lannister. It means your muscles are building up. Have you been working with the band between appointments?”

“Yes,” he said, curling his arm toward his chest again.

“What about your other arm?”

He nearly dropped the weight, but he stopped himself and slowly lowered it to the ground. “Uh…?”

Brienne sighed and walked over, stepping around mats and blocks. “Lannister, you’ve gotta work both arms.”

“My left arm is fine!” he flexed it and spun his wrist to show her.

“Lannister, the loss of a dominant hand means that the other is going to take some strain. It’s best if you build it up so that not only can you do everything you need to with it, but this way when the muscles build up on the injured arm, you don’t wind up looking like Popeye after only half a can of spinach.”

Jaime let out an exasperated sigh. “Change is annoyingly difficult. It’s bad enough I have to come here and be tortured by you.”

Brienne cocked her head and raised her brow.

judging me, wench? “I never went to the gym before all this.”

“You didn’t?”

“Not like this! I mean I have a gym membership but mostly I used it for cardio when it rains, or for the shower when my building doesn’t have hot water.”

Brienne’s brows drew together, but the glance was gone in an instant. “Excuse me for observing, but you seemed in excellent shape other than - this. What were you doing before the incident?”

“Incident,” Jaime said with a sneer. “You say it like all I did was stub my toe on the sofa leg. I’m down a hand, wench. At least call it a maiming.”

She took a breath and counted to ten. “What were you doing before you lost it?”

“It’s not mislaid!”

“Mr. Lannister.”

“Jaime.”

Fine, Jaime, what were you doing to keep up your physical health when you had all of your appendages?

“He scowled and muttered an answer under his breath before doing another rep.”

“What was that?”

He set the weight down with a heavy sigh. “I’m a choreographer.”

Brienne’s eyebrows perked up, and she bent her head toward him with interest. “Like dancing?”

“Almost. I thought about it for a while,” he smiled to himself. “But actually, like combat. Some film stuff but mostly stage.”

“Professionally?”

She sounds... impressed? “Yeah. You know that national tour of Targaryen Times they started running once the local franchises proved unprofitable?”

She nodded, and he noticed her neck was suddenly the faintest pink; he looked away.

“I choreographed all the sword play for that, and the jousting.” Jaime could have stopped there, but it had been so long since he’d had a chance to talk to someone about something he loved so much. “On top of that,” he continued, “my niece and nephews have been in high school for the last ten years or so, overlapping you know, and you wouldn’t believe how much Shakespeare one school can do in a decade - it’s a lot. So I kept busy… I guess I stayed in shape by handling heavy weaponry.”

“And dancing,” she japed.

He chuckled, “Yeah.”

“Well you can still do that, can’t you?”

“Why, did you want to dance my lady?”

She snorted.

Oh, that’s kind of endearing, he thought.

“I meant the fight choreo.”

“Sure I can still technically do it but I’ve always marked out a fight by doing it myself. And then I make a video of me playing it out so that the actors can learn it. My dominant hand is gone. I can barely handle a dagger in my left hand—”

“—all the more reason to work up that arm.”

“But even then my right —”

“Jaime you’re lifting 10 pounds without pain on your right arm now. Couldn’t you use a shield on that arm?”

He toyed with the thought. “I see what you’re saying. Maybe in another ten pounds I could think about that. But not all choreo requires a shield. And some weapons require two hands. At this point I’ll need to hire someone for me to direct in order to record the fights.”

She was thinking. Loudly.

“What?”

“Have you thought about prosthetics? You might be able to get one made that would be specifically for managing a two-handed grip like for a broadsword, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that you could get one made that had a lock grip with enough of a rating to hold a foil so that it would be like using your right hand again - you wouldn’t have the same range of motion, so it might not be ideal but I think it’s worth a shot, Jaime. I’ve got a colleague who specializes in 3D printing and prosthetic parts with weight ratings - maybe you can talk to him about something that does have some range of motion? I mean if you’re looking at handling a mace or a morning star I would probably insist on you just training your left hand for those - too tricky - but for other things there might be another way.”

Jaime’s mouth was hanging open, he could tell. But he wasn’t sure he had the strength to close it. He dipped his head in order to force his jaw closed.

“Did you—”

Brienne was now blushing - quite prettily, if he was honest - all over.

Huh.

“Are you trained?”

She nodded. “I actually worked for the local Targaryen Times before -”

“You were a--”

“--A knight, yeah.”

Suddenly some pieces fell into place. Her height. Her breadth. Her strength.

“So you can—”

“Yeah - spar, joust - I’ve handled a lot of weapons.” She grinned that goofy crooked tooth grin that made those astonishing eyes even bluer somehow and Jaime’s gut suddenly felt like it was on fire. “I usually won.”

“Of course you did,” he sighed before swallowing hard. “Um…” he gestured at the weight on the ground, “Should I...?” he gestured dumbly in a flexing motion, like he was suddenly struck stupid under her gaze.

She nodded, “10 more reps and then we’ll get everything nice and loose again.”

“Uhhuh.”

He did the reps and then climbed up on the table for her to start the massage that always felt like ice and fire but which today just felt profoundly like a massage - a good one. He made sure to ask her for her prosthetic guy’s info. And then he made sure to get her number - “for the videos,” he said. “I could use someone I don’t need to train on top of direct, you know?”

She’d nodded and handed him back his phone. “And maybe I can help train you. Get your sword back in your hand.”

“What?”

“Your left hand - maybe I can help you? You’re a choreographer so I think your instincts are probably good, you just need to improve your flexibility.” The belly fire was back. Huh.

#fictober #fictober 2019 #braime #braime au #modern au #physical therapy #brienne of tarth #jaime lannister #medieval times #jaime x brienne #brienne x jaime #put me back together #ao3 #ao3 link #mine

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battlestar-royco · 4 years

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updated faq

Round 2! I tried to shorten the answers so as not to be repetitive, and I also added new FAQs for your convenience. My past self who wrote my first FAQ annoys me, and this one is more thorough anyway, so here you go. I still can’t believe you all actually interact with me enough that I have to make one of these.

Questions up here, answers under the cut.

anti sjm basics

1. why are you an anti?

2. why are you specifically anti SJM?

3. do you like anything about SJM’s books?

4. terminology and practices

5. why do you hold SJM to a higher standard than other authors?/why do you focus on criticizing this one woman more harshly than you do men?

6. did you see what xyz stan did?

7. are you an anti for non-SJM stuff?

best of (in my humble opinion)

diversity and sensitivity

8. I have a question about writing and/or how to portray xyz identity...

9. can you please tag...?

10. is it okay if I like [x author]/[y series] even if I know they’re problematic?

11. what are your suggestions for aspiring authors who want to write diversely?

personal

12. is it okay if I message you?

13. why don’t you post about books/shows/movies you actually like?

14. favorites?

15. book suggestions?

16. are you a writer/what are you writing/do you plan on publishing?

17. is it okay if I follow you on other social media?

18. fandom research

19. when did you start your blog?

20. how did you decide your url?

anti SJM basics

1. why are you an anti?

I love thinking critically about the media I consume. Though I wouldn’t say I’m particularly “anti” any text or author, some people classify any criticism as “anti.” To respect people in the main tags, I post in anti tags so they don’t have to see critical posts. Otherwise, I love talking about positive, neutral, and negative aspects of books.

2. why are you specifically anti SJM?

The Anti SJM Manifesto

What made you turn into an anti? x x

Rowan/Rowaelin: x x x

The fandom: x x x x x x

3. do you like anything about SJM’s books?

Yes. I like a lot of SJM’s ideas, but I don’t like how they’re executed at all. I highly enjoyed TAB, TOG-HOF, and the witch storyline of QOS. My favorite TOG characters are Manon, Chaol, Nehemia, and Sorscha. Honorable mention for Lysandra, Kaltain, and Asterin. My favorite ACOTAR characters are Nesta, Lucien, and Tarquin. Additional links: x x x x

If you want my positive thoughts on certain SJM characters, look up: “anti sjm: [character name]” and you’ll find them.

4. terminology and practices:

Anti SJM Glossary. Seeing as many of us have had bad experiences with stans and in one case, authors, we censor names so our posts stay in our own tags.

What is soap dick? From August 2018 x x.

Manongate? when KOA came out, Charlie Bowater’s promotional art (x) depicted Manon as Asian. Here’s more on why that’s a problematic and lazy decision on SJM and Bloomsbury’s part: x x.

5. why do you hold SJM to a higher standard than other authors?/why do you focus on criticizing this one woman more harshly than you do men?

SJM alone out of all the biggest YA authors has yet to make craft improvements or display a social awareness similar to what I’ve seen from her colleagues. I give all authors an equal chance, but SJM’s writing and behavior has significantly decreased in quality compared to other fantasy authors despite her books being lauded as complex and feminist works. However, I’m not perfect, so do feel welcome to send me an ask if you think I’m being unfair.

The anti SJM community is focused on women because we all mainly read women. Critiquing women doesn’t mean we are unaware, dismissive of, or silent about the issues in men’s work. The “anti” movements for the likes of GRRM do exist, but under a different name than “anti”–there are thousands of critical meta blogs, book/TV critics and reviewers, Youtubers, etc out there who discuss his flaws in depth. I also have lengthy anti GRRM, anti GOT, and anti ASOIAF tags. Finally, I personally find critiquing and discussing women’s work a lot more interesting, productive, and empowering than doing the same for men, especially because my blog’s focus is on the YA author/transformative fan community at large.

About Leigh Bardugo: x x x x x x x

About GRRM (and GOT): x x x x x x x

About Tolkien: I've only read The Hobbit and a third of Fellowship of the Ring, and I’ve only watched FotR, so I don’t say much about him at all.

6. did you see what xyz stan did?

Probably not, especially if what they did was off Tumblr. I don’t look at stan accounts unless someone informs me that my posts or I have come up in conversation on their blog. Any specific stan urls in asks will be redacted both for their privacy and my own well-being. Stans have doxxed, harassed, and discriminated against antis, including myself, so I’d rather save us all the trouble.

7. are you an anti for non-SJM stuff?

I most often talk about SJM’s books, but I’ve also been very critical of GOT/ASOIAF. Following GRRM, several other YA authors have appeared in positive, neutral, and critical lights. On the more critical side we have Cassandra Clare and JK Rowling, and a very little bit about Victoria Aveyard, John Green, Maggie Stiefvater, Stephenie Meyer, and Veronica Roth. Otherwise, I’ve talked about Susan Dennard, Rick Riordan, Leigh Bardugo, and Marie Rutkoski. Check out my YA critical tag for more. I’m also down to discuss franchises like Star Wars, Fantastic Beasts, MCU, etc, as well as TV shows. Basically anything big in genre fiction media, there’s a good chance I’ve read/watched it and I have opinions!

best of

anti SJM

Are the Illyrians MOC?

Moral Ambiguity Series

Anti Nessian

Lucien or Rhysand?

Chaol or Rowan?

misc.

why are period dramas like... that

White Feminism

a beginner’s guide to fandom racism

diversity and sensitivity

8. I have a question about writing and/or how to portray xyz identity...

First and foremost, check my “writing advice” and “writing advice: poc” tags to see if the question has already been answered.

I am black cis girl with a dual degree in women’s/gender studies and creative writing. I will best be able to answer questions regarding black characters, women, racial oppression and identity as a whole, and most questions about queer characters. There’s a chance I can provide a basic answer to questions about demographics outside of these, but I’ll most likely advise you to ask another blogger or seek out sensitivity readers.

9. can you please tag...?

Yes. Just send an ask and I’ll tag anything. I’ve turned off all Tumblr notifications for this account so I probably won’t see tag requests in comments unless you comment within a day or so of the post.

10. is it okay if I like [x author]/[y series] even if I know they’re problematic?

Absolutely. I’m not the liking-things police and I can’t control whether you like something or not. There’s no such thing as an unproblematic author or unproblematic series, so you just have to like what you like at your own discretion and with a critical eye. As long as you’re aware of the issues and not denying or ignoring them, maybe even seeking out other people whose opinions add to the conversation, you’re good. It’s exhausting to be 100% critical but harmful to be 100% uncritical, so you have to seek out critics you like and figure out how to maintain a dialogue with the text and/or the author. The balance is different for everyone but once you find it, it gets easier to keep up!

11. what are your suggestions for aspiring authors who want to write diversely?

Concepts to be aware of and tropes to avoid: male gaze, the Bechdel test, the Mako Mori test, the sexy lamp test, fridging, Orientalism, xenoface (called “the Gamora Phenomenon” on my blog), black best friend, Spicy Latina, Dragon Lady, bury your gays, disability narratives, queerbaiting.

What not to do when creating a culture.

My advice about writing POC.

Check out these blogs if you like: x x x.

Follow as diversely as possible. Follow multiple blogs, especially writing- or fandom-themed blogs, run by POC (especially women and LGBTQ+), bloggers from religiously marginalized groups, bloggers with disabilities, older bloggers, younger bloggers, international bloggers, plus size bloggers, etc. Everyone has different perspectives and opinions, so it’s best to read from multiple sources.

Magnify marginalized voices in conversations about diversity, and LISTEN to what they are telling you.

Read diversely! Read genre fiction written by marginalized people. Maybe even read some gender, queer, race, or disability theory if you like. I’m personally a fan of Audre Lorde, Anne McClintock, and Sara Ahmed, but I like a lot more.

Seek out multiple sensitivity readers for the specific identity you are trying to represent (ie if you are trying to write a Muslim woman, ask a Muslim woman to sensitivity read for you. Experiences are not interchangeable so don’t treat them as such).

Don’t let the research stop here. This is just the beginning. There are plenty of awesome and accessible resources out there if you want to know more. I started learning about this stuff on sites like Tumblr, Goodreads, and Youtube. The Goodreads review sections, especially for YA books, are so entertaining and full of commentators coming at texts with feminist, queer, and POC lenses if you look in the right spots. There are also podcasts and Youtube videos about feminism, history of queerbaiting, and such. Happy reading/listening/writing!

personal

12. is it okay if I message you?

If we’ve been mutuals and/or we’ve interacted for a while (at least a few weeks or so), absolutely. When it comes to questions about writing or diversity advice in WIPs, I prefer asks (off or on anon is fine; if you’d like to be off anon but answered privately, you can indicate that in the ask). That way, other people with similar questions can join the discussion and I’m less likely to repeat myself. That said, I’m not opposed to messages; I just get shy around people I don’t know :). Regardless of ask or message, please try to ask the full question as clearly as possible so I can answer it to my best ability. Generally, you can expect an answer to your message or ask within a few days to a week of sending.

If you’re looking for a fight and/or if you start using condescending, rude, or discriminatory language, you will be ignored.

13. why don’t you post about books/shows/movies you actually like?

I do! :)

14. favorites?

books: Harry Potter; The Hunger Games; Six of Crows; Percy Jackson; The Winner’s Trilogy; Angelfall; The Secret History; Othello; Jane Eyre; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe/The Magician’s Nephew; A Storm of Swords.

movies: Alien, Blade Runner 2049, Harry Potter, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Annihilation, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Terminator 2, The Breakfast Club, The Lion King, Moonlight dir. Barry Jenkins, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, Tangled.

tv series: Sense8, Battlestar Galactica (2004-2008), Black Mirror, The X Files, The 100, Westworld (season 1 only), Watchmen, Homeland (seasons 1-4 only), Orphan Black, Breaking Bad, The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, New Girl, Fleabag.

15. book suggestions?

Book recs!

Maxine, did you read/watch...?

16. are you a writer/what are you writing/do you plan on publishing?

I hope to publish, yes! I write mostly YA fantasy, but I also love sci fi, crime drama, and certain elements of horror so I have works in or influenced by all of those genres. I want to get my foot in the YA fantasy door first and foremost :). Check out “polysorscha writes things” if you want to know more specifics.

17. is it okay if I follow you on other social media?

As of now I keep my blog disconnected from my personal life, so I don’t share my other socials but feel free to follow me over on my main blog @ripley-stark if you like! It’s just pretty gifs and photos of my favorite movies and shows, social justice, meta reblogs here and there, and rambling in the tags. Don’t feel like you have to follow if you don’t want to; I say a lot more on here.

That being said, I have given my Goodreads to a handful of people who ask, so if you want to track what I’m reading, private message me and I’ll send you the link. In the case that I share the link with you, please respect my privacy and do not repost or share the link anywhere else unless you see me share it on my blog publicly.

18. fandom research:

In March to May 2019, I conducted a survey on my blog in an attempt to gather information about fandom through a social justice–specifically, intersectional feminist–lens. Here are the results and my analysis of the survey x. The purpose for this data collection was to write my final undergraduate research paper in one of my two majors, women’s and gender studies (the other is creative writing!), which focused on diversity and inclusion in genre fiction media and fandom. The final paper is about 11k words. I haven’t publicly published it, but message me if you’re interested in reading it! I also plan on doing more similar surveys to gather information about what audiences want to see in future media, so if anyone is interested, please send messages, asks, comments etc about what YOU want to see and/or ideas about how we can spread the info to creators. This is much bigger than just me and I can’t do it without your help. I love hearing from diverse voices and amplifying them as much as I can. Everyone’s perspective is meaningful!

19. when did you start your blog?

No earlier than the end of April or beginning of May 2018.

20. how did you decide your url?

I wish the Celaena/Dorian/Chaol love triangle resolved in a polyamorous relationship, and that Nehemia and Sorscha were thriving. Seeing as I am black, Sorscha is one of two characters in T0G who represents me. Thus, polyamorous + Sorscha. :)

#faq

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tirairgid · 5 years

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got ask meme answers

@siriussilly 16 & 17~

@cobaltzosia Ooh can you do 14 and 20 for the GoT ask meme please?

Sure! Thanks for indulging me!

send me a msg

17. What part of GoT’s ending made you the most upset?

Did we even have an ending? I don’t recall. It doesn’t look like anything to me.

Ok. I’ll try to keep it civil: The waste of all those years of building up a story and then not even bothering threading up a conclusion that made sense within their OWN chosen stories. The utter detachment they made me feel, the way I am deprived of any closure, and the horrible messages and themes they chose to transmit. blegh I’ll never stop being mad about this.

“Story”wise? The assassination of Jaime Lannister’s arc.

16. What part of GoT’s ending made you the happiest?

Gosh. Happy is not an emotion i can physically associate with anything about 8x06. I loved seeing Sansa as QiTN but I can’t be happy for her seeing her so very alone... I can’t understand why they couldn’t have her siblings at her coronation? Not even Arya? And why wouln’t Brienne be her QG rather than Bran’s if that’s where they wanted to go? ugh. I better shut it now.

I suppose the character ending I have less of a problem with is Jon going to live with the wildlings in the real north. At least he has Ghost and his buddy Tormund and maybe he’ll run into a Val or someone like that there, he seems to get along with them fairly well so that shouldn’t be to big of an issue and he gets to hunt and scout and do all the things he loves. I think he’ll be happy enough there. And if he wants to come south for a visit I’m sure Bran or Sansa will be more than happy to oblige a permit.

14. Got death I couldn’t bear to watch:

Shireen Baratheon. Can’t stomach it. Couldn’t even force myself to fully watch it once. Ned Stark would not be proud of me. I once looked away and then i just fast forward.

20. Rate the GoT great houses in order from your favorite to least favorite.

1. Lannister. No questions here. No second thoughts, nothing. Can’t even begin to count how many lannister sigil stuff I have at home. Or how much the rains of castamere can bring me to tears every damn time.

Then... This is a tough one.

2. Tyrell. I know this may sound strange to some but think about it: Looks like a wonderful place to live, lots of gardens, palaces, cultural events, orchestras, cunning and learned, seem pretty open minded, no famine! not too hot or too cold...

3. Stark. Also needs no explanation of why I love them.

4. I know Mormont is not a great house but can i add it please? I love the fierce Mormont ladies and their motto is my fave of all Asoiaf.

5. Tully. Catelyn, Edmure, the Blackfish, need i say more.

6. Arryn. the Eyrie looks dope, and quite safe unless dragons. that’s all i’m saying.

7. Baratheon. Stannis. You were my one true king and I feel for you so much. And any house that can produce Shireen, Gendry, Mia and Edric has a place in my heart anyways.

8. It’s a tie. Greyjoy & Martell. I mean, obviously i’m happy a place like Dorne exists in this universe and on every marker Dorne is a Much Nicer place than the Iron Islands which are.. a wet cold rock full of seaweed in the middle of nowhere populated by trash pirates but... i love asha and theon and in general find the greyjoys so very entretaining!! I can’t put down their chapters! Whereas (i know this is not a popular opinion but... here it goes) I have always had serious issues with the way grrm fetishises Dorne and I found all the dornish storyline and charaters and all the martells on the wrong side of boring so... in universe i’m sure i rather be in dorne (minus the heat cause i hate hot weather) but if reading, greyjoys all the way.

9. Targaryen. Yeah... not my thing. I just do not like all the magical bloodline that must be kept pure and all the rest of their entitlement and exceptionalism that runs through the family despite some very good Eggs they’ve produced ;) Also dragons are too dangerous for anyone to control and set on one another. no more dragons please.

#cobaltzosia #siriussilly #got ask meme for ts #send me a msg instead of an ask #game of thrones #rustles in the wind #games #anti d&d #tirs leaf #txs guys!

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nobodysuspectsthebutterfly · 6 years

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Gosh, I never did post my con report for Ice and Fire Con, did I? Well, 3 weeks past, but hopefully not too late...

4/26, Thursday evening: Arrived in Columbus airport. While packing my big-ass suitcase for the con Wednesday night Thursday morning, I realized my white makeup had somehow disappeared, but I looked up a Party City in a Columbus suburb that had some. (Didn’t have time to go shopping on my way to the Chicago airport.) So, having figured that I could rent a car for the whole weekend for less than the price of a Lyft from the airport to the lodge, I did so, found that shop, bought that makeup, and had a lovely drive to Deer Creek State Park. Approaching the park, I found the name was very accurate, as a deer was crossing the road on the way there, in a very stupid way. “Should I jump the fence? Or go back in the road and wander everywhere? Durhurhur!” Finally he got a clue and I moved on, only for another car to zoom around me like I was standing still. That’s how you get deer through your windshield, son.

But anyway, got to Deer Creek Lodge by 9ish, got my room and registered and all, and started seeing people I’d met last year. Chloe (@liesandarbor) and Emmett (@poorquentyn) and Wendy (@wendynerdwrites) and Jim (@warsofasoiaf) and all, as well as others who I don’t think have tumblrs (or I don’t know them) but are excellent folk. And I heard there was an unofficial party that night, thrown at the cabin of the Chicago boys (who I don’t know actually), same as last year, so I headed down that way. This year the party was in support of one of their fellows who’s getting married, a Stag and Doe party, with raffle tickets and games, so it was extra fun, besides the drinking and all. :)

Picked up a raffle package that included a blue rose flower crown, and had a moment when I met Tara (@ageeksaga) and she thought I was Wendy, lol. I was like, nope, sorry, I’m the other short brunette Jewish fandom fave from tumblr who’s dating a guy named Jim. (And who sometimes wears blue rose flower crowns.) She was tired, it’s hard getting this con ready, I didn’t blame her at all, but lol. :) Also at the party was Michael (@1000eyesandone) and his wife Adrienne, who are awesome people who I met at last year’s con, and ended up hanging around a lot with this year. Anyway, after a night of drinks and meeting people and drinking and chatting and drinking and games and drinking and winning tickets and putting them in the raffle prize choices (there were many cool prizes but only a few that I really wanted so I put most of my tickets in those), they had the raffle, about 1am I think, and I won a prize! Woo, chocolate and popcorn and bath bombs and other relaxing things. And then I was tired so walked back to the lodge with a bunch of other people, did a tiny tumblr update, and collapsed into bed.

4/27, Friday: The con officially opened today, and I got up late but made it to the second half of the ice breaker opening thing. They had the bingo where you’re supposed to find people who meet the qualifications for the bingo square (newbie to @iceandfirecon, newbie to cons in general, prefer direwolves to dragons or vice versa, have a particular fave house, are a shipper - I volunteered a lot for that one, and so on), and also that game where you have a name on your forehead and you have to guess who it is (I was Janos Slynt, joy), and I met some very neat people. Then I went down by the lake (or creek, I guess?) for my picture with a wolf! And here, some more pictures:

Logan is such a good boy. :)

Caught lunch with Wendy and Jim and Michael and Adrienne, then I went to the Q&A panel given by the Ironwood Wolves people, where they talked about the education work they do with their ambassador wolves, and what wolf behavior is like, and all that interesting stuff (watch the video, there’s a sweet sleepy wolf in it). Got some pictures of the lake, went to the History of Westeros meetup for a bit (I have a processing thing with podcasts so I can’t listen to them, but Ashaya and Aziz are the most excellent people), and soon it was time for the @asoiafuniversity meetup panel with me and Emmett.

Alas, we were up against Quiplash in the big conference room, and I don’t think the schedule was that clear unfortunately, so we didn’t have many people showing. (Unlike last year where we got a pretty good crowd!) But for those who did come, we explained what we do, and discussed some meta topics, and it was really nice. Then I caught the end of Quiplash, which is kind of a Cards Against Humanity -type online party game where you write the answers and the audience votes... well, it’s fun, and I got to be in the last answer panel, and even had an answer some people liked. :)

Went over to the vendor room and saw so many gorgeous things, ASOIAF art and statuettes and cloaks and such, but the only thing I bought was butterfly fairy wing earrings. (Which I think takes my number of butterfly earrings up to... 10 maybe? I have a lot.) Then as it was starting to get dark I went back to my room and got ready for Shabbos (had the room key situation arranged with the hotel staff, since my Jim wasn’t at the con), and then... it was time for IaFcon’s first musical!

Inspired by the awesome performance of Tara and Brian last year in D&D’s “You’re Welcome”, this year the crew put on WESTEROS, a tribute/parody of Hamilton. And oh my gosh it was sooo good. You should watch it, honest. (@draganchitsa, I spent half the time thinking of you.) Of course the costumes and casting were excellent, and there were some truly fantastic lines, all telling the KL story from the start of AGOT to the Battle of the Blackwater... Including one last song for the shippers among us, heehee, oh gosh I was covering my face and blushing the whole time. :) :) :)

Then dinner with Wendy and Jim and Emmett, then back to the con room for karaoke. :D As it was Shabbos I didn’t perform myself (didn’t want to deal with not using the mic and stuff), but I sang along with everybody, including when Michael did Head Like a Hole to the music of Call Me Maybe, which was hilarious. ;) That ended about midnight, and I headed back for sleep, as big day Saturday... or should I call it... Weirwood Day!

4/28, Saturday: Got up early(-ish) to get my weirwood tree costume ready. :) My makeup, since I’m not that often a cosplayer (like almost never), took a while (took forever, didn’t get to two panels I wanted to see, thankfully they’re on youtube now), and I had a panel I was actually on at 1pm and I still hadn’t put the bloody tears on at almost 12:30... So I dressed up and wigged up and leafed up, and headed out, got stopped on the way for a picture, got to the panel just a wee bit late... but still, it was an excellent panel, all about the animal symbolism in ASOIAF, lots of discussion of direwolves and how they interrelate to the Stark kids; as well as other houses, dragons, lions, krakens, bears, birds, trout... all that sort of thing. The panel’s up here on youtube if you want to see me as a white-and-red dorkus talking about direwolves. :)

Then there was the tourney, outside, which looked awesome, but it was coooold out and I still wasn’t quite done with my costume, so I went back to my room and had lunch and got finished up (occasionally glancing out the window since my lodge room had a tiny corner of a view of the tourney field), and finally... finally I was ready. :D

Headed toward the con rooms with a big backpack full of art books for my panel (that was going to be after the costume parade, and I so didn’t want to go back and forth), as well as my bag full of ravens. :D On the way, had a selfie with Ashaya (@buskerlenny), who had an excellent Danelle Lothston costume. Made it in time to catch the end of Emmett and Silas’s panel on Lovecraft Mythos and ASOIAF, listening while I checked that my leaves and ravens were all arranged properly. (Next time safety pins maybe?) And soon other cosplayers started coming in, including the lovely older lady who was such a perfect Old Nan last year -- this year she was the Ghost of High Heart, with a weirwood-print dress, and she was delighted to see me. :D She had a photo taken with her sitting and me standing (as a tree) behind her, which I haven’t seen but hope shows up one of these days, it should be so neat.

And then the costume parade! So many amazing costumes, so much fun. While we were waiting to line up, I actually started tearing up (because of my contacts, eyeliner, mascara, god knows), but consensus among those who looked at me that it really didn’t hurt my makeup much and really fit the crying-tree look? so hey. :) Last year in the parade people stopped to do performances, but this year they separated out the performances till after the parade (and the voting only for that), so it moved pretty quickly. But I got a lot of applause for my weirwood, especially when I lifted up my “branches” with the ravens on them. And I heard someone say that if they had been doing voting, I probably would have won, which is really really nice. :D :D :D

Then I sat down for the performances, and oh my gosh. There was a Rohanne vs. Dunk rap battle (with shoutout to Jaime/Brienne lol), a Brienne vs bear fight (set to the Bear and the Maiden Fair of course), Chloe did a parody of Free Fallin’ (with Lyanna and Ashara themes *wince*), and there was Michael as Tom O’Sevens singing Edmure’s Floppy Fish song that had everybody lol’ing... but the room went dead quiet in awe for Septon Meribald’s Broken Man speech. Damn. (And yeah, I cried some more.)

Group photo time!

All these amazing people. :) I’m kind of easy to find, though, lol.

And then there was my and Ashaya’s panel on the history of ASOIAF fanart, also with artists @sanrixian and @palewhiterabbit. It went really well, I think, lots of cool info... I brought my Art of Ice and Fire books, the D&E graphic novels, and some @kallielef and bubug prints (also one of @chaouenmadrid’s sansan books), Ashaya had Draw ‘Em With the Pointy End and another art book... but alas, we were up against the trivia contest in the big conference room, so again not that much of a crowd. (Someone asked me if I was cross-scheduled because Emmett and Wendy and I won trivia last year, idk lol, other people won too.) But anyway, the people who were there for the panel seemed to like it a lot -- not sure if it was filmed, but if it was I’ll put up the video eventually. Or maybe I could write down my mental notes, if you like.

Afterwards, I headed back to my room for dinner, and when Shabbos was over I took a few selfies (including some duckfaces for Kelly Sue DeConnick, whose costume inspired mine), and then washed up. Because party time!

(me and Wendy, at the party - I’m wearing little bird earrings and this tshirt)

I have few mental notes for the Flea Bottom Fete, alas. Just that it was a hell of a lot of fun, tons of great music (having a convo in the hallway, “oh wait this is my song, gotta dance”), people’s party cosplays were hilarious -- I recall Michael’s punk Bloodraven, there was a group of sexy Greyjoys, Tara had party Cersei, a bunch of girls came with a Qarth dress theme, and of course there was stripper RobbWind... and, well, there was a bar. :) (And also someone brought macarons, nom nom nom.)

4/29, Sunday: I had to check out by noon. I had a panel to give at noon. I managed to get packed up, check out, put my suitcase in the car, and make it on time for this panel, coffee’d up and everything. I consider that a grand success. And then in the very excellent panel (on GRRM’s many other works, with me and Aziz and Amin Javadi and one of the con volunteers I didn’t catch his name augh), I managed to actually sell a few people on reading Wild Cards, I think. Truly a success. :D And then the closing ceremonies were lovely -- and the wolf puppy from the photos that were taken Sunday even came, oh my gosh he was so cute... but sigh, alas the con was over for me.

I’d left a note on the Facebook group that I’d rented a car and could take up to 3 people back to the airport for an afternoon flight, and a few girls had contacted me that morning to take me up on the offer. So that was a nice trip. :) Returned the rental easy, caught my short flight easy, and was back in Chicago by Sunday evening to watch Avengers and get dinner with my @jimintomystery. A lovely weekend, full of ASOIAF and friends and fun, I truly hope to do it again next year!

(goddamn, this is long. no wonder I never properly wrote up last year’s con report...)

#asoiaf #ice and fire con #cons #con reports #gpoy as the kids are calling it these days #wolves #weirwoods #cosplay #personal stuff #long post #long post is loooooooooooong #it's behind a cut but gosh it's long #go watch the westeros musical it's awesome

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renlyisright · 3 years

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Season 8 Predictions Reviewed and A Retrospective

It’s over. The last season of the throne-game-series has ended. The surviving characters continue their lives to new adventures. I have some final thoughts before I drop the curtains myself. First, reviewing my predictions from before the season:

No, the White Walkers won’t kill everyone. A bold prediction but I stand by it. The Night King dies and with it the majority if not the whole army, and that’s it. The insta-win button gets pressed.

Correct (easy) prediction is correct.

The defense of the North will be the doom of many many characters. I’ll say that the Stark family is quite safe excluding Bran, who may die because he’s too big a weapon. Edd survives because that’s what he does. If Beric is still alive he gets a final death. Jaime does something stupid and glorious and dies, which doesn’t do any good to Cersei’s thinking. The rest (all the various side characters in Jon’s and Daenerys’ groups) I can see either way, depending on the circumstances. Some shock deaths, some last stands, some sacrifices, the usual.

Shock death: Edd, check. Last stands: several, check. Sacrifices: several, yep. But Bran survived, Edd didn’t, Beric didn’t and Jaime did, so ¼ of those was correct (and Beric was the easiest one).

Sam, Gilly and little Sam all live happily ever after. Lalala, I can’t hear you.

THEY DO! This was the best part.

Qyburn goes all Frankenstein with the body of the wight and ends up doing something stupid right in the capital. He won’t survive the season, there’s a Hand pin on his chest.

Qyburn did die, but he didn’t do any experiments with the body of the wight. That would have been a fun if time-consuming way to tie up the two plotlines of the Dead and Cersei. After saving the world, the heroes come to King’s Landing, where Qyburn is just testing out stabbing someone with a knife made from the weird substance found in the wight’s body...

So is on Tyrion’s chest. Hmm. But I don’t see him dying. As I said, I’m optimistic. The world will need clever emphatic people after all this. Bronn retires with a box of treasure.

Tyrion didn’t die, and he still has the pin on his chest. Bronn’s box of treasure is Highgarden and a position as the Master of Coin.

Cersei is far too dramatic to leave the throne alive. Her baby will get born before that happens, and Daenerys has to decide what to do with her. I’m thinking that the baby is a girl. Send her away? But what if she grows up to gather an army, just like her? Can she take that risk? And if she can’t, how is she different?

Nope, Daenerys attacked before the birth happened, and what would another dead baby have mattered in that attack?

Daario Naharis shows up leading the Golden Company. Elephants on an open field, thank you. Team Jon and Team Daario will have a bitter fight, which ends with Daario’s death.

Daario didn’t show up, not even to fight on Daenerys’ side. But his Second Sons will have work to do, on one side or another, once the masters hear that the dragons are gone. And I don’t feel bad about missing the elephants. Daenerys would have just burned them.

Speaking of Jon, since him and Daenerys ruling together would be too simple, I’ll throw a curve ball and say that Jon will sit on the throne, as going from a bastard to the king of seven kingdoms would be a nice escalation… but Daenerys has worked so hard for it, Jon has never wanted it, she deserves it more… hmm… maybe have a vote? Jon winning the game of thrones without ever wanting to would be funny, I’m not going to lie.

You sweet summer child. Oh boy oh dear. Still, there was a vote, and someone won the game of thrones without ever wanting it.

Theon will rescue Yara in a final triumph after a large PTSD attack. Euron dies, Yara rules the Iron Islands. This happens early in the season as Euron is such a nice mid boss before Cersei and the Night King.

Euron lived for surprisingly long, and neither Yara nor Theon ever confronted him again. Yara got the Islands back off-screen.

The Hound and the Mountain almost have the duel the Hound promised, but something zags instead of zigging. The Mountain dies anyway, but the Hound doesn’t.

Here I was trying to be clever, and see where it got me?

Was that everybody? Melisandre predicted that both her and Varys will die on Westeros, but didn’t specify the date. I don’t think Varys gets to see the world he has spent his life trying to create, and Melisandre goes down while keeping the Dead at bay with the Lord of Light’s powers, because she has fulfilled her purpose or something like that. I would like for the Lord to stop treating people as his pieces on a game board.

Yeah, Lord of Light, stop that.

So, picking five deaths now is like shooting fish in a barrel (not that I have ever tried it), but that’s the tradition here. More main characters give more points. Let’s see, Cersei, Jaime, Qyburn, Euron, The Night King. Plus as a bonus Beric, The Mountain, Daario, Varys and Melisandre. Very conservative choices, says I. Random generator picks the following out of 31 names (for the record, two seasons ago it was 50, and now I tried to list absolutely everyone still alive): Daario, Cersei, Jaime, Qyburn, Tormund. Once again the random generator copies my answers. Least likely to die, it says, are Robin Arryn, Gilly and Lord Royce.

As Daario didn’t show up, he also couldn’t die. Computer also guessed Tormund’s fate wrong. Otherwise we were both correct, but they were easy choices. See how I didn’t pick anyone from the Stark family? I would have been wrong but that would have been bold.

And the final big thing: What’s the ending? How does this end? Things may go super bad in between, many will die horribly or get tortured, but in the end Westeros will survive. My ending would be that the Dead are defeated, but the Winter is still on, and the food shortage will be a very big problem. One character will say to another “We will survive this if we only work together”, and fade to black. The end. Then the audience can review the rest of the show and come to their own conclusion of whether these people are doomed and will all die, or if they have learnt something in these eight seasons.

That last Small Council scene was the closest to this, but it wasn’t underlined. Tyrion pointed out how they have poor to feed, but the talk quickly turned into the usual small council squabbling. So… have they learnt something? The last scenes with the Night’s Watch and the wildlings working together did end with a positive note, but I’m not so sure about the South…

So it’s over now. Laughs were made, tears were shed and faces were palmed. And finally, I can’t no longer be spoiled. I have lived in my own bubble where I watch an episode (a year or more later than others), write my own commentaries, make my own theories of all the mysteries, come up with my own inside jokes and then move on to the next episode. If someone said something about the show I quickly nope’d out. It’s been fun.

So, now that I am done, will I travel to the wonderland of the Internet and read stuff about the show? Maybe some analyses, to see if I thought the same as others? Maybe there’s some funny memes? Do I feel like finding out?

Nah.

I have some idea about the general opinion of the show in the Interwebs (I believe the proper expression is “burn it with fire”), and don’t feel like negative engagement is my thing. It’s the whole “Nobody hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans”-thing which didn’t sit right with me even when I was a big-time SW fan, and I don’t want to step into that again. Covers of the score, art, yes, bring me that, but otherwise I feel like I can continue to enjoy this show as only a viewer, without lateral engagement.

There’s going to be a spin-off series, House of the Dragon, starting in 2022. Will I do the same with that series? Never say never, but I grew almost nine years with this show, I don’t know if I will have time in the future to spend a work day’s worth of hours per episode. And I’ll likely have read the general lines of that series from all the tie-in-books of ASOIAF, which will make theorizing either super easy or super frustrating, the latter if the makers use the written stuff the same way the makers of period pieces use history books.

Speaking of that, these last two seasons had that sort of feeling. Like, if you read actual history books, obviously what really happened was a lot more messy, with continuing small skirmishes, less intense interpersonal drama, many more claimants and bannermen, and Daenerys was actually three different people composed together (one of them died of pneumonia between important stuff), that sort of thing. When the historical events were divided into 13 episodes, the important battles stayed (in a simplified form) and other details were scooped around them.

As a final bonus, some superlatives.

Best character: Olenna Tyrell. No contest. The Queen of Thorns, now and always. Not someone I’d like to spend time with but extremely entertaining when on screen.

Best main character: Oof, this one is much harder. Generally I let main characters do their main character stuff and attach myself more to the side characters. Those who are not chosen ones or master assassin trainees. Is Sam main character enough? He had his own plot lines. That’s good enough for me. Being a coward is not easy, and by still doing brave deeds he was braver than most. He valued knowledge and earned his happy ending with his family. And he was just so charming. So Sam is my pick.

Character whose death I most enjoyed: The choice is between Joffrey, Stannis and Ramsay. With Joffrey and Ramsay I was just so happy that they were finally out of the show, and seeing Stannis get executed by Brienne for killing Renly was really sweet. Tywin’s death was almost this. First he gets smacked by Cersei’s confession that the kids are not Robert’s, and his precious legacy is a lie, then his hypocrisy with Shae is shown, and finally he gets shot while in a privy. A big contender there, but losing him from the show was a big loss, so that drops points.

Best episo… no, that’s too hard, best season: Season 4. The King’s Landing stuff that season was just superb. Tyrion, Tywin, Olenna, Oberyn, Varys, Littlefinger, Cersei, everyone was at the top of their game. Losing most of them by either death or exile was a big loss. And the battle on the Wall was great.

The element I could most do without: Boobs on the screen just to have boobs on the screen. I like boobs as much as anyone but I prefer lore lessons and boobs separately, mixing them together didn’t enhance either.

Most visceral reaction to death: Oberyn’s death. It was just… eww. Of all the horrible deaths that one was the most awful in the way it was depicted.

Biggest surprise: The Red Wedding. So great, so awful. In the book universe: How much the fourth and fifth novels differed from the show. I don’t envy anyone who, after adapting the third book, had to adapt essentially two road trip novels with several new plotlines started and nowhere near resolved when the books suddenly just stop. They were nice reads and hooked me, but I don’t feel anywhere closer to the end after them than I did after A Storm of Swords.

Best king/hand -combination: If Stannis would ever in any possible reality agree to it, I think Renly as the king and Stannis as the Hand would have been a good combo. Renly being the charismatic second Robert with some reforms (he complained about Robert only hunting in his last years), and Stannis as the one leading the boring administrative work.

Most useless gods: The Seven. For the most wide-spread religion in Westeros, they certainly didn’t do much. Or if they worked in mysterious ways, they sure were glad to give all the credit to the

Most frustrating god: The Lord of Light. Aargh.

Character most likely to have just walked to the wrong set: Mace Tyrell. I’m not sure he ever figured out what kind of show he was in. But he was glorious.

Best battle: Blackwater gets points here for being the first. I was used to Rome-type fade to black (which the first season used too), so an entire episode spent in one battle was something great. And the wildfire explosion was just awesome.

Best example of season one’s budget: The royal hunt of the great boar consisting of the king and three others walking in a forest.

Best beard: Ser Rodrik Cassel. Eight seasons and none could surpass him.

Best dresses: I liked Daenerys’ dresses this season, but now that I’m refreshing my memory with pictures, she also had a great blue one in season 3 and a white one in season 5. I also liked Cersei’s wide-sleeved red dress in season 2.

There, the end has come and I survived the game of thrones. Does that mean that I won it? Now I have several seasons’ worth of Blu-Ray bonus materials to watch, time to get on that. If you read this far, thank you for sticking to it.

Even if you supported another claimant. Now that every claimant is dead, it’s time to put old quarrels to the rest and work together. Dreams of spring to everyone.

#game of thrones #renly is right

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poorquentyn · 7 years

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Men’s Lives Have Meaning, Part 6: Father, Why?

Series so far here

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire.”

–The Lord of the Rings

So. Here we are. Quent didn’t turn back, so neither can I. Part of me wants to, though, because “The Dragontamer” will never be OK; this wound does not close. In Quentyn Martell’s final POV chapter, George R.R. Martin does nothing less than sit us down and ask us to stare directly into the sun. And so we flinch. We have to.

“The Dragontamer” is about the fire. The fire, from the Big Bang to Prometheus: the nexus of both creation and destruction, the tipping point between glory and horror, the spark of the first human thought and the embers from the last funeral pyre. The fire is the true object of Quent’s quest. His story has burned through every trope it touched upon, leaving none of the genre’s promises unbroken. By the end, he knows deep down that he will not succeed. He is not really trying to succeed, not anymore. What he’s looking for, what he descends into that dank dark dragonpit beneath the Great Pyramid to find, is an answer.

What am I doing here? Father, why?

What was it all for? What did it all mean? Why did I live? Why am I dying? I gave it all I had in me and more! I did everything the songs said, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! I lost everything, and did things for which I can never forgive myself. Father, why? Author, why? God, why? Time stops, space falls away, and our hero is left alone with the fire at the heart of Story itself. Quent meets his maker. And this is what George said to him: your story was about seeing it, knowing it, being it, the fire, just for a moment before it kills you.

When he raised his whip, he saw that the lash was burning. His hand as well. All of him, all of him was burning.

Oh, he thought. Then he began to scream.

Were I there, while Drink screamed his name and the big man roared desperately for him to turn around, all I would’ve been able to do is whisper: “Quentyn, what do you see?”

Quentyn’s first three chapters are monumental achievements, but they would be empty signifiers floating in a semiotic void without “The Dragontamer” to give them meaning. They were scaffolding, and now the narrative architecture is complete, a bloodstone obelisk to be marveled at from every angle. Everything was leading to this: the dead friends and the screaming teenagers, the wicked Windblown and the “fires everywhere.” As such, the chapter hits like a mushroom cloud after a book-long doomsday countdown. In its imagery and tone as well as plot and theme, it is a chapter composed of fire, as glorious hideous shades of orange, yellow, and red flare up, ripple out, and consume everything in their path. It’s as if the author leeched away every sickening feeling you ever got in the back of your throat when you realized it was all going wrong, boiled it all down into a dye, and started to paint. “Suspenseful” doesn’t even begin to describe what it’s like to read Quent stepping into the void. The chapter is positively suffused with mortal terror, sweat-soaked with apprehension; “The Dragontamer” is dread given form.

Quentyn felt light-headed. None of this seemed quite real. One moment it felt like a game, the next like some nightmare, like a bad dream where he found himself opening a dark door, knowing that horror and death waited on the other side, yet somehow powerless to stop himself. His palms were slick with sweat.

At last a pair of heavy iron doors rose before them, rust-eaten and forbidding, closed with a length of chain whose every link was as thick around as a man’s arm. The size and thickness of those doors was enough to make Quentyn Martell question the wisdom of this course. Even worse, both doors were plainly dinted by something inside trying to get out. The thick iron was cracked and splitting in three places, and the upper corner of the left-hand door looked partly melted.

“Fire and blood,” he whispered, “blood and fire.” The blood was pooling at his feet, soaking into the brick floor. The fire was beyond those doors. “The chains … we have no key …”

Arch said, “I have the key.” He swung his warhammer hard and fast. Sparks flew when the hammmerhead struck the lock. And then again, again, again. On his fifth swing the lock shattered, and the chains fell away in a rattling clatter so loud Quentyn was certain half the pyramid must have heard them. “Bring the cart.” The dragons would be more docile once fed. Let them gorge themselves on charred mutton.

Archibald Yronwood grasped the iron doors and pulled them apart. Their rusted hinges let out a pair of screams, for all those who might have slept through the breaking of the lock. A wash of sudden heat assaulted them, heavy with the odors of ash, brimstone, and burnt meat.

It was black beyond the doors, a sullen stygian darkness that seemed alive and threatening, hungry. Quentyn could sense that there was something in that darkness, coiled and waiting. Warrior, grant me courage, he prayed. He did not want to do this, but he saw no other way. Why else would Daenerys have shown me the dragons? She wants me to prove myself to her. Gerris handed him a torch. He stepped through the doors.

The green one is Rhaegal, the white Viserion, he reminded himself. Use their names, command them, speak to them calmly but sternly. Master them, as Daenerys mastered Drogon in the pit. The girl had been alone, clad in wisps of silk, but fearless. I must not be afraid. She did it, so can I. The main thing was to show no fear. Animals can smell fear, and dragons … What did he know of dragons? What does any man know of dragons? They have been gone from the world for more than a century.

The lip of the pit was just ahead. Quentyn edged forward slowly, moving the torch from side to side. Walls and floor and ceiling drank the light. Scorched, he realized. Bricks burned black, crumbling into ash. The air grew warmer with every step he took. He began to sweat.

Image by Dejan Delic

Waiting at the heart of this masterful exercise in horror writing are, of course, Rhaegal and Viserion. And never, not once, not in ASOIAF nor WOIAF nor the Dance novellas, has GRRM brought his dragons to life quite like this. They swim into Quent’s hyperventilating POV like they’ve been summoned from his nightmares, and the writing is so vivid here that I’m going to go ahead and get out of George’s way:

Two eyes rose up before him.

Bronze, they were, brighter than polished shields, glowing with their own heat, burning behind a veil of smoke rising from the dragon’s nostrils. The light of Quentyn’s torch washed over scales of dark green, the green of moss in the deep woods at dusk, just before the last light fades. Then the dragon opened its mouth, and light and heat washed over them. Behind a fence of sharp black teeth he glimpsed the furnace glow, the shimmer of a sleeping fire a hundred times brighter than his torch. The dragon’s head was larger than a horse’s, and the neck stretched on and on, uncoiling like some great green serpent as the head rose, until those two glowing bronze eyes were staring down at him.

Green, the prince thought, his scales are green. “Rhaegal,” he said. His voice caught in his throat, and what came out was a broken croak. Frog, he thought, I am turning into Frog again. “The food,” he croaked, remembering. “Bring the food.”

The big man heard him. Arch wrestled one of the sheep off the wagon by two legs, then spun and flung it into the pit.

Rhaegal took it in the air. His head snapped round, and from between his jaws a lance of flame erupted, a swirling storm of orange-and-yellow fire shot through with veins of green. The sheep was burning before it began to fall. Before the smoking carcass could strike the bricks, the dragon’s teeth closed round it. A nimbus of flames still flickered about the body. The air stank of burning wool and brimstone. Dragonstink.

“I thought there were two,” the big man said.

Viserion. Yes. Where is Viserion? The prince lowered his torch to throw some light into the gloom below. He could see the green dragon ripping at the smoking carcass of the sheep, his long tail lashing from side to side as he ate. A thick iron collar was visible about his neck, with three feet of broken chain dangling from it. Shattered links were strewn across the floor of the pit amongst the blackened bones—twists of metal, partly melted. Rhaegal was chained to the wall and floor the last time I was here, the prince recalled, but Viserion hung from the ceiling. Quentyn stepped back, lifted the torch, craned his head back.

For a moment he saw only the blackened arches of the bricks above, scorched by dragonflame. A trickle of ash caught his eye, betraying movement. Something pale, half-hidden, stirring. He’s made himself a cave, the prince realized. A burrow in the brick. The foundations of the Great Pyramid of Meereen were massive and thick to support the weight of the huge structure overhead; even the interior walls were three times thicker than any castle’s curtain walls. But Viserion had dug himself hole in them with flame and claw, a hole big enough to sleep in.

And we’ve just woken him. He could see what looked like some huge white serpent uncoiling inside the wall, up where it curved to become the ceiling. More ash went drifting downward, and a bit of crumbling brick fell away. The serpent resolved itself into a neck and tail, and then the dragon’s long horned head appeared, his eyes glowing in the dark like golden coals. His wings rattled, stretching.

All of Quentyn’s plans had fled his head. He could hear Caggo Corpsekiller shouting to his sellswords. The chains, he is sending for the chains, the Dornish prince thought. The plan had been to feed the beasts and chain them in their torpor, just as the queen had done. One dragon, or preferably both.

“More meat,” Quentyn said. Once the beasts were fed they will become sluggish. He had seen it work with snakes in Dorne, but here, with these monsters … “Bring … bring …”

Viserion launched himself from the ceiling, pale leather wings unfolding, spreading wide. The broken chain dangling from his neck swung wildly. His flame lit the pit, pale gold shot through with red and orange, and the stale air exploded in a cloud of hot ash and sulfur as the white wings beat and beat again.

A hand seized Quentyn by the shoulder. The torch spun from his grip to bounce across the floor, then tumbled into the pit, still burning. He found himself face-to-face with a brass ape. Gerris. “Quent, this will not work. They are too wild, they …”

The dragon came down between the Dornishmen and the door with a roar that would have sent a hundred lions running. His head moved side to side as he inspected the intruders—Dornishmen, Windblown, Caggo. Last and longest the beast stared at Pretty Meris, sniffing. The woman, Quentyn realized. He knows that she is female. He is looking for Daenerys. He wants his mother and does not understand why she’s not here.

Quentyn wrenched free of Gerris’s grip. “Viserion,” he called. The white one is Viserion. For half a heartbeat he was afraid he’d gotten it wrong. “Viserion,” he called again, fumbling for the whip hanging from his belt. She cowed the black one with a whip. I need to do the same.

The dragon knew his name. His head turned, and his gaze lingered on the Dornish prince for three long heartbeats. Pale fires burned behind the shining black daggers of his teeth. His eyes were lakes of molten gold, and smoke rose from his nostrils.

“Down,” Quentyn said. Then he coughed, and coughed again. The air was thick with smoke and the sulfur stench was choking.

Viserion lost interest. The dragon turned back toward the Windblown and lurched toward the door. Perhaps he could smell the blood of the dead guards or the meat in the butcher’s wagon. Or perhaps he had only now seen that the way was open.

Quentyn heard the sellswords shouting. Caggo was calling for the chains, and Pretty Meris was screaming at someone to step aside. The dragon moved awkwardly on the ground, like a man scrabbling on his knees and elbows, but quicker than the Dornish prince would have believed. When the Windblown were too late to get out of his way, Viserion let loose with another roar. Quentyn heard the rattle of chains, the deep thrum of a crossbow.

“No,” he screamed, “no, don’t, don’t,” but it was too late. The fool was all that he had time to think as the quarrel caromed off Viserion’s neck to vanish in the gloom. A line of fire gleamed in its wake—dragon’s blood, glowing gold and red.

The crossbowman was fumbling for another quarrel as the dragon’s teeth closed around his neck. The man wore the mask of a Brazen Beast, the fearsome likeness of a tiger. As he dropped his weapon to try and pry apart Viserion’s jaws, flame gouted from the tiger’s mouth. The man’s eyes burst with soft popping sounds, and the brass around them began to run. The dragon tore off a hunk of flesh, most of the sellsword’s neck, then gulped it down as the burning corpse collapsed to the floor.

The other Windblown were pulling back. This was more than even Pretty Meris had the stomach for. Viserion’s horned head moved back and forth between them and his prey, but after a moment he forgot the sellswords and bent his neck to tear another mouthful from the dead man. A lower leg this time.

The dragons are cinematic avatars of shadow and light, and simultaneously flesh-and-blood predators who smell prey. They are Become Death, but also children in search of their mother. This duality is in part what makes it so perfect that Quent’s quest ends with them. He, too, is on the precipice between self-conceptions, the sad scared shy kid (“I am turning into Frog again”) trying to psyche himself into believing that he can be a badass like his nuncle the Red Viper, even as he knows that “this will not work” and that he just wants to see his mother again before the end (see below).

Indeed, “The Dragontamer” opens with our hero sensing the Stranger’s approach, a rattle of bones and a chuckle spread from ear to ear, as (in my mind) SHEL’s cover of “Enter Sandman” plays in the background:

The night crept past on slow black feet. The hour of the bat gave way to the hour of the eel, the hour of the eel to the hour of ghosts. The prince lay abed, staring at his ceiling, dreaming without sleeping, remembering, imagining, twisting beneath his linen coverlet, his mind feverish with thoughts of fire and blood.

Quent’s quest hath killed sleep, and his waking dreams bring him no comfort. What he’s “remembering” is no doubt Cletus’ death on the Meadowlark and the faces of the teenagers at Astapor as he cut them down. What he’s “imagining” is “fire and blood,” the very thing Doran sent him to find...and he found it, in a way Dad never dreamt. Thus, the quest’s beginning is linked to its end; it’s all one, the deaths of his friends and the Sack of Astapor and the dragontaming. All are facets of the same cursed diamond, different representations of the same idea, and that idea is that ASOIAF is eating our hero alive.

Of course, the hero’s fear keeping him up the night he takes a big foolish romantic risk is a very common trope. What makes this different is that Quent is descending, not ascending--he’s headed to his death, and he knows it:

He stared at the candle for a long time, then put down his cup and held his palm above the flame. It took every bit of will he had to lower it until the fire touched his flesh, and when it did he snatched his hand back with a cry of pain.

“Quentyn, are you mad?”

No, just scared. I do not want to burn.

Image by Tiziano Baracchi

There’s a reason I have the image above, that of Quent reaching out to the fire, as my icon. It’s a moment in which the author interrogates his genre in terms of the mindset it instills in those who believe (or want to, anyway) in the stories and the songs. I’ve been saying that the story itself killed him, but perhaps a more accurate way to put it is that in the name of story, Quentyn killed himself. He committed suicide-by-dragon. Look again at this line: “...knowing that horror and death waited on the other side, yet somehow powerless to stop himself.” His inner monologue keeps urging him on, but in his heart of hearts, he knows better. Yet he walks into the fire anyway, because he cannot bear the thought of going home a failure, knowing his friends died for nothing and that Story is a lie.

Drink, affable sleaze that he is, tells him that the solution is to get laid:

“I could not sleep.”

“Are burns a cure for that? Some warm milk and a lullaby might serve you well. Or better still, I could take you to the Temple of the Graces and find a girl for you.”

“A whore, you mean.”

“They call them Graces. They come in different colors. The red ones are the only ones who fuck.” Gerris seated himself across the table. “The septas back home should take up the custom, if you ask me. Have you noticed that old septas always look like prunes? That’s what a life of chastity will do to you.”

Quentyn glanced out at the terrace, where night’s shadows lay thick amongst the trees. He could hear the soft sound of falling water. “Is that rain? Your whores will be gone.”

“Not all of them. There are little snuggeries in the pleasure gardens, and they wait there every night until a man chooses them. Those who are not chosen must remain until the sun comes up, feeling lonely and neglected. We could console them.”

“They could console me, is what you mean.”

“That too.”

“That is not the sort of consolation I require.”

“I disagree. Daenerys Targaryen is not the only woman in the world. Do you want to die a manmaid?”

This puts me in mind of Jon’s line from ACOK: “Some men want whores on the eve of battle, and some want gods.” But Quent wants neither. This is what Quent wants:

Quentyn did not want to die at all. I want to go back to Yronwood and kiss both of your sisters, marry Gwyneth Yronwood, watch her flower into beauty, have a child by her. I want to ride in tourneys, hawk and hunt, visit with my mother in Norvos, read some of those books my father sends me. I want Cletus and Will and Maester Kedry to be alive again.

He never wanted to go on this quest, marry the beautiful princess, rule by her side. What he wanted, more than anything the wide world has to offer, is a quiet life at home with his wife. Back when I was a teenager m’self, I might’ve sneered at this, thinking it corny and dumb. The older I get, though, the more it resonates. Why pour yourself body and soul into a narrative that isn’t what the singers said it would be? Why throw your life away dreaming of adventure when adventure stinks? I shake my head to think how much time I wasted before I realized: the meaning of life isn’t to be a badass, it’s to be happy. Which, hey, might involve being a badass for some people...but not for Quent.

I think this revelation of Quentyn’s motives is absolutely vital to making his story work on an emotional level. He’s not what Arianne thought he was, a whiny selfish pretender who wants something he hasn’t earned. He’s a conscript in a war that isn’t his, playing a role he doesn’t actually believe in, while all he wants is to go home, and for his friends to not have died because of him. We might like to think we’d be the Prince that was Promised, but only one in a million can be. Who are the rest of us, then? The rest of us are Quentyn Martell. If you seek his monument, look around you.

Again, though, even as Quent knows at some level that he’s the Everyman, not the messiah, he keeps trying to tell himself differently:

“Not all risks lead to ruin,” he insisted. “This is my duty. My destiny.” You are supposed to be my friend, Gerris. Why must you mock my hopes? I have doubts enough without your throwing oil on the fire of my fear.

“This will be my grand adventure.”

“Men die on grand adventures.”

He was not wrong. That was in the stories too. The hero sets out with his friends and companions, faces dangers, comes home triumphant. Only some of his companions don’t return at all. The hero never dies, though. I must be the hero. “All I need is courage. Would you have Dorne remember me as a failure?”

“Dorne is not like to remember any of us for long.”

Quentyn sucked at the burned spot on his palm. “Dorne remembers Aegon and his sisters. Dragons are not so easily forgotten. They will remember Daenerys as well.”

“Not if she’s died.”

“She lives.” She must. “She is lost, but I can find her.” And when I do, she will look at me the way she looks at her sellsword. Once I have proven myself worthy of her.

“From dragonback?”

“I have been riding horses since I was six years old.”

“And you’ve been thrown a time or three.”

“That never stopped me from getting back into the saddle.”

“You’ve never been thrown off a thousand feet above the ground,” Gerris pointed out. “And horses seldom turn their riders into charred bones and ashes.”

I know the dangers. “I’ll hear no more of this. You have my leave to go. Find a ship and run home, Gerris.” The prince rose, blew the candle out, and crept back to his bed and its sweat-soaked linen sheets. I should have kissed one of the Drinkwater twins, or maybe both of them. I should have kissed them whilst I could. I should have gone to Norvos to see my mother and the place that gave her birth, so she would know that I had not forgotten her.

GRRM doesn’t shy away from explicitly meta ruminations in Quentyn’s storyline. Here, the author is pointing out that quest narratives are built in part around losing people along the way; what Quent’s POV demonstrates is that we should not think of this as normal, because by thinking of it as normal, the meaning has slowly seeped away. If the rules of the genre are that you’re supposed to watch your companions die because this is all just part of your grand success story, then why should we care about that loss? Quent’s story, then, can be seen as GRRM’s ultimate genre deconstruction and reconstruction. Unexamined tropes lead to the mindset that got Quent killed: “I must be the hero.”

What GRRM is saying with Quent’s arc in ADWD is the same thing he said with Sansa’s arc in AGOT: uncritically swallowing the values that stories feed you is dangerous. It leads you to believe that complicated problems are easily solved, that any costs are inherently worth the price, and that doing what you’re supposed to do will automatically lead to rewards. “The Dragontamer” stands as a natural, perfect climax to ADWD because the book’s other main characters are either struggling with leadership given these revelations (Jon and Dany) or reeling from their lives being destroyed by said revelations (Tyrion and Theon). Of course, those characters’ struggles extend backwards to the rest of the series, and forward to TWOW. Quent is more like Ned, introduced and killed off in the same book, forced to face at every step how Dad’s master plan to bring back “fire and blood” has gone horribly wrong:

Four Brazen Beasts stood guarding the door. Three held long spears; the fourth, the serjeant, was armed with short sword and dagger. His mask was wrought in the shape of a basilisk’s head. The other three were masked as insects.

Locusts, Quentyn realized. “Dog,” he said.

The serjeant stiffened.

That was all it took for Quentyn Martell to realize that something had gone awry. “Take them,” he croaked, even as the basilisk’s hand darted for his shortsword.

He was quick, that serjeant. The big man was quicker. He flung the torch at the nearest locust, reached back, and unslung his warhammer. The basilisk’s blade had scarce slipped from its leather sheath when the hammer’s spike slammed into his temple, crunching through the thin brass of his mask and the flesh and bone beneath. The serjeant staggered sideways half a step before his knees folded under him and he sank down to the floor, his whole body shaking grotesquely.

Quentyn stared transfixed, his belly roiling. His own blade was still in its sheath. He had not so much as reached for it. His eyes were locked on the serjeant dying before him, jerking. The fallen torch was on the floor, guttering, making every shadow leap and twist in a monstrous mockery of the dead man’s shaking. The prince never saw the locust’s spear coming toward him until Gerris slammed into him, knocking him aside. The spearpoint grazed the cheek of the lion’s head he wore. Even then the blow was so violent it almost tore the mask off. It would have gone right through my throat, the prince thought, dazed.

Gerris cursed as the locusts closed around him. Quentyn heard the sound of running feet. Then the sellswords came rushing from the shadows. One of the guards glanced at them just long enough for Gerris to get inside his spear. He drove the point of his sword under the brass mask and up through the wearer’s throat, even as the second locust sprouted a crossbow bolt from his chest.

The last locust dropped his spear. “Yield. I yield.”

“No. You die.” Caggo took the man’s head off with one swipe of his arakh, the Valyrian steel shearing through flesh and bone and gristle as if they were so much suet. “Too much noise,” he complained. “Any man with ears will have heard.”

“Dog,” Quentyn said. “The day’s word was supposed to be dog. Why wouldn’t they let us pass? We were told …”

“You were told your scheme was madness, have you forgotten?” said Pretty Meris. “Do what you came to do.”

The dragons, Prince Quentyn thought. Yes. We came for the dragons. He felt as though he might be sick. What am I doing here? Father, why? Four men dead in as many heartbeats, and for what? “Fire and blood,” he whispered, “blood and fire.” The blood was pooling at his feet, soaking into the brick floor. The fire was beyond those doors.

Now, why does the mission go horribly wrong at this particular moment? Because elsewhere in the Great Pyramid, Barristan Selmy is leading a coup against Hizdahr zo Loraq, and the Shavepate gave a different password (“Groleo”) to those locust-masked Brazen Beasts helping him do it. Indeed, no discussion of "The Dragontamer" is complete without talking about "The Kingbreaker." The two chapters happen at the same time and place, bringing the simmering tensions that have defined the Meereenese Knot to a head. At the center of the pyramid, the white knight topples a king; below the pyramid, the captive dragons burn a prince. Taken together, these chapters constitute ADWD's heart-in-your-throat climax (something the book's critics claim doesn't exist), every bit as much as the Battle of Blackwater in ACOK or the escalating conflict at the Wall in ASOS. The kingbreaking and dragontaming are on a smaller scale than those previous climaxes, but are no less compelling in execution and weighty in theme. This is especially so when you contrast the two, as GRRM encourages us to do by placing them side by side. "The Kingbreaker" plays host to one of the series' most cleanly and classically executed setpieces:

Ser Barristan moved closer to the king. “Are you the Harpy?” This time he put his hand on the hilt of his longsword. “Tell me true, and I promise you shall have a swift, clean death.”

“You presume too much, ser,” said Hizdahr. “I am done with these questions, and with you. You are dismissed from my service. Leave Meereen at once and I will let you live.”

“If you are not the Harpy, give me his name.” Ser Barristan pulled his sword from the scabbard. Its sharp edge caught the light from the brazier, became a line of orange fire.

Hizdahr broke. “Khrazz!” he shrieked, stumbling backwards toward his bedchamber. “Khrazz! Khrazz!”

Ser Barristan heard a door open, somewhere to his left. He turned in time to see Khrazz emerge from behind a tapestry. He moved slowly, still groggy from sleep, but his weapon of choice was in his hand: a Dothraki arakh, long and curved. A slasher’s sword, made to deliver deep, slicing cuts from horseback. A murderous blade against half-naked foes, in the pit or on the battlefield. But here at close quarters, the arakh’s length would tell against it, and Barristan Selmy was clad in plate and mail.

“I am here for Hizdahr,” the knight said. “Throw down your steel and stand aside, and no harm need come to you.”

Khrazz laughed. “Old man. I will eat your heart.” The two men were of a height, but Khrazz was two stone heavier and forty years younger, with pale skin, dead eyes, and a crest of bristly red-black hair that ran from his brow to the base of his neck.

“Then come,” said Barristan the Bold.

Khrazz came.

For the first time all day, Selmy felt certain. This is what I was made for, he thought. The dance, the sweet steel song, a sword in my hand and a foe before me.

The pit fighter was fast, blazing fast, as quick as any man Ser Barristan had ever fought. In those big hands, the arakh became a whistling blur, a steel storm that seemed to come at the old knight from three directions at once. Most of the cuts were aimed at his head. Khrazz was no fool. Without a helm, Selmy was most vulnerable above the neck.

He blocked the blows calmly, his longsword meeting each slash and turning it aside. The blades rang and rang again. Ser Barristan retreated. On the edge of his vision, he saw the cupbearers watching with eyes as big and white as chicken eggs. Khrazz cursed and turned a high cut into a low one, slipping past the old knight’s blade for once, only to have his blow scrape uselessly off a white steel greave. Selmy’s answering slash found the pit fighter’s left shoulder, parting the fine linen to bite the flesh beneath. His yellow tunic began to turn pink, then red.

“Only cowards dress in iron,” Khrazz declared, circling. No one wore armor in the fighting pits. It was blood the crowds came for: death, dismemberment, and shrieks of agony, the music of the scarlet sands.

Ser Barristan turned with him. “This coward is about to kill you, ser.” The man was no knight, but his courage had earned him that much courtesy. Khrazz did not know how to fight a man in armor. Ser Barristan could see it in his eyes: doubt, confusion, the beginnings of fear. The pit fighter came on again, screaming this time, as if sound could slay his foe where steel could not. The arakh slashed low, high, low again.

Selmy blocked the cuts at his head and let his armor stop the rest, whilst his own blade opened the pit fighter’s cheek from ear to mouth, then traced a raw red gash across his chest. Blood welled from Khrazz’s wounds. That only seemed to make him wilder. He seized the brazier with his off hand and flipped it, scattering embers and hot coals at Selmy’s feet. Ser Barristan leapt over them. Khrazz slashed at his arm and caught him, but the arakh could only chip the hard enamel before it met the steel below.

“In the pit that would have taken your arm off, old man.”

“We are not in the pit.”

“Take off that armor!”

“It is not too late to throw down your steel. Yield.”

“Die,” spat Khrazz … but as he lifted his arakh, its tip grazed one of the wall hangings and hung.

That was all the chance Ser Barristan required. He slashed open the pit fighter’s belly, parried the arakh as it wrenched free, then finished Khrazz with a quick thrust to the heart as the pit fighter’s entrails came sliding out like a nest of greasy eels.

Blood and viscera stained the king’s silk carpets. Selmy took a step back. The longsword in his hand was red for half its length. Here and there the carpets had begun to smolder where some of the scattered coals had fallen. He could hear poor Qezza sobbing. “Don’t be afraid,” the old knight said. “I mean you no harm, child. I want only the king.”

He wiped his sword clean on a curtain and stalked into the bedchamber, where he found Hizdahr zo Loraq, Fourteenth of His Noble Name, hiding behind a tapestry and whimpering. “Spare me,” he begged. “I do not want to die.”

“Few do. Yet all men die, regardless.” Ser Barristan sheathed his sword and pulled Hizdahr to his feet. “Come. I will escort you to a cell.” By now, the Brazen Beasts should have disarmed Steelskin. “You will be kept a prisoner until the queen returns. If nothing can be proved against you, you will not come to harm. You have my word as a knight.”

The aged paladin, on One Last Job, cuts down a brash young opponent in order to defy and topple the cringing cowardly unworthy ruler. Aside from perhaps the description of Khrazz’s insides, it could have appeared in any number of not-remotely-deconstructive fantasy novels. And this fits the POV; Barristan Selmy is as old-school archetypal as they come. Quent, by contrast, is Not The Hero. Whereas Barristan the Bold has been a subject of triumphant songs and stories since he was a child, The Prince Who Came Too Late is swallowed up by his own adventure. It fits so well that the mechanisms of Barristan’s straight-laced fantasy story end up interfering with Quentyn’s deconstructive one. Even as Barristan reifies the genre’s values within his own story, he has in doing so inadvertently helped burn those values down in the context of Quentyn’s story.

Image by Urukki Saki

What Barry and Quent have in common, however, is a set of companions with their own agenda. The white knight is accompanied by the Brazen Beasts, whose leader Skahaz mo Kandaq is IMO manipulating Barristan in order to rid himself of his nemesis Hizdahr (hence the locust masks, GRRM’s little hint as to who really poisoned the locusts at Daznak’s Pit). The frog prince is, as ever, reliant on the Windblown to advance his quest, and as ever, they are there to undercut the quest narrative’s values:

“They may ask for a word,” the Tattered Prince had warned them when he handed over the bundle. “It’s dog.”

“You are certain of that?” Gerris had asked him.

“Certain enough to wager a life upon it.”

The prince did not mistake his meaning. “My life.”

“That would be the one.”

“How did you learn their word?”

“We chanced upon some Brazen Beasts and Meris asked them prettily. But a prince should know better than to pose such questions, Dornish. In Pentos, we have a saying. Never ask the baker what went into the pie. Just eat.”

That Pentoshi saying is a perfect summary of the Tattered Prince’s role in Quent’s storyline. That our hero had to team up with the Windblown, take part in their atrocities, and then rely on them to get inside Meereen and now to (try and) tame a dragon, has given him the terrible knowledge of how the story-sausage is made. He’s seen the slaughterhouse floor, and now he can never metaphorically dine on tales of dashing derring-do again. The cost is simply too much, especially when Quent isn’t going to get the pie anyway.

But he tries. One last time, he tries, and every time I read it, I can’t stop myself from hoping that this time, this time...

Quentyn let his whip uncoil. “Viserion,” he called, louder this time. He could do this, he would do this, his father had sent him to the far ends of the earth for this, he would not fail him. “VISERION!” He snapped the whip in the air with a crack that echoed off the blackened walls.

The pale head rose. The great gold eyes narrowed. Wisps of smoke spiraled upward from the dragon’s nostrils.

“Down,” the prince commanded. You must not let him smell your fear. “Down, down, down.” He brought the whip around and laid a lash across the dragon’s face. Viserion hissed.

And then a hot wind buffeted him and he heard the sound of leathern wings and the air was full of ash and cinders and a monstrous roar went echoing off the scorched and blackened bricks and he could hear his friends shouting wildly. Gerris was calling out his name, over and over, and the big man was bellowing, “Behind you, behind you, behind you!”

Quentyn turned and threw his left arm across his face to shield his eyes from the furnace wind. Rhaegal, he reminded himself, the green one is Rhaegal.

When he raised his whip, he saw that the lash was burning. His hand as well. All of him, all of him was burning.

Oh, he thought. Then he began to scream.

Image by Marc Fishman

Like I’ve said before, what we have in Quentyn’s sad little adventure is a horror story disguised as a fantasy story, GRRM using the former genre to interrogate the tropes of the latter. Quent can’t trade riddles with these dragons, nor flatter their egos, nor steal that one particular piece of treasure and then hightail it outta there. They are “monsters, not maesters,” and he is not their master, but meat. The fantasy story was in his head all along, a function of his inner monologue, not the world around him. The world around him is a horror story, and it has devoured him whole.

Around our own little fires, we tell stories to keep the children happy; the fires urge us on, converting our flailing gestures to dramatic shadow puppets. Quent spent his entire life in Plato’s Cave, watching the shadows dance, telling himself they were real even as his doubts grew. At the end, he finally steps outside, to find the fire waiting for him. This fire will save the world when the Others come for us; it marked Daenerys Targaryen as a savior figure worthy of wielding it against the Long Night, and will do the same for Jon Snow and (if I’m right) Tyrion Lannister. But when Quentyn Martell reached out to the eternal flame, it spoke to him as it did to Varys, and it said no.

How does poor Quentyn respond? “Oh.” What else could he say? What else do you say to the abyss when it stares back? It echoes out like an “om” into the cosmos: Oh. My friends died for nothing. I flew too close to the sun. I’m never going home.

I’m not the hero.

This revelation is what’s been waiting for him all along. Not the princess, not the dragons themselves, not the songs to be sung, but a terrible diamond-hard clarity, a perfect knowledge of himself just as that self is utterly destroyed. No, no, it cannot be, my family, my friends, my story, I tried so hard...oh.

Oh, the light.

the light

oh gods the LIGHT

#quentyn martell #quentyn in adwd #barristan selmy #asoiaf meta #a dance with dragons

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gotgifsandmusings · 7 years

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Quick asks roundup

I’m going out of town this afternoon for labor dabor, and probably won’t be around much during the weekend. Thought I’d answer a few asks below--just a grab bag, with a vague focus on S7. Should be able to do a video one of these next week, and Julia and I are eyeing a UBS podcast episode pretty soon too.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: Have you read David Benioff's book City of Thieves? I'm curious how it compares to GoT.

I haven’t, no. I’m not sure if that’s something I want to subject myself to (it has been mostly positively received from what I know, though not across the board) when there’s so much I’ve been putting off reading as it is.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: Is cerseï pregananant in the boox?

She’s actually gregnant.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: Just read your criticism about Fair Game and wholeheartedly agree. You touched on the core of why your (and Julia's and Caroline's and Jess' and Turtle's) GoT analysis are so great: they understand the intersection of narrative flaws and social issues. Sure, some people may complain that they don't want "SJW" stuff, except, y'know, you don't stop being a feminist when you write a review. As you say, media is not produced in a cultural vacuum. Sadly, I admit I feel reluctant to...... Actively criticize GoT with people around me because the ones who dislike it also dislike ASOIAF and fantasy/sci-fi ("The show is bad because GRRM is a bad writer who isn't really character-driven, but it's not surprising since genre stuff is awful"). That sucks :(

Yes, exactly! This is in reference to this piece by myself and Julia, btw. That’s really depressing about that perception of genre fic, especially given what Martin does being so unique. I’ve never particularly understood that attitude; I want to read about cool places and stuff happening as much as I want to read about weighty character journeys, and why scoff at any that pull off both? Though Julia has a piece on that too.

But absolutely, as we said, it’s asinine to ignore the ways culture shapes media and vice versa, and often the reason the writing is so poor is because it’s so sensationalist or reliant on shitty tropes and stereotypes. “Just enjoy it (or critique) without focusing on social issues” is the ultimate sign of privilege, and it drives me crazy because it’s tossed out as an appeal to “objectivity.” IF YOU’RE IGNORING PEOPLE’S EXPERIENCES YOU’RE ALREADY NOT BEING OBJECTIVE.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: I'm curious why you guys interpret Cersei's internalized misogyny as nothing to do with gender dysphoria. All because Cersei doesn't break down during her period doesn't mean you must read her as cisgendered. She treats femininity like her least-favorite subject in school, not like part of herself. You're welcome to read her story as about women internalizing misogyny, but her thoughts feel familiarly trans, and outright denying that reading closer-to-earths her

This is really interesting, and my assumption would definitely a result of my own distance with that experience. Are there any metas on it? I haven’t really considered this before (I’ve seen the case argued for Brienne), and I’m not very convinced Martin had much intentionality here, but that’s a reading of her character I’d definitely like to learn/think more about.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: How can Euron "Crow's Eye, Terror of Pentos" Greyjoy come across as such a wimpy villain that I'm missing Ramsay? Hell, effing Joffrey could have torn that cuddly pooh bear a new one.

But...he’s the storm. You weren’t quaking in your boots when his fleet armada magically descended on Yara’s?

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: I haven't seen anyone else comment on this, but did you notice Cheryl says "You expect me to command our troops to fight beside foreign scum?" almost immediately before telling Jaime she's bringing the foreign Golden Company from Essos to fight beside their troops? Do you think the writers ever make it to second drafts or do they just knock out the first on the back of a Hooters napkin over Natty Ices and fist bumps and say, nah, we're good bro?

A showpologist would tell you it’s clearly demonstrating what a horrible hypocrite she is and actually rather cutting commentary.

It’s really, really hard for me to imagine a world where Operation Capture a Wight received a look-over. A whole lot of what they do feels thoroughly unedited.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: Hey, I really appreciate all your GoT analysis. 1) Is Cheryl's assistant actually Ezri Dax? 2) Did you see Linda's episode review where she called D&D "smug idiots?" 3) Is it possible to enjoy GoT as schlock? I can't and don't, but It is certainly bad enough and dumb enough. Thanks!

Thank you :)

1) According to wikipedia, Ezri Dax’s actor is currently starring in “Corrupt aka Trust No One” and “Where’s my Baby”, but I’m glad you made me look her up, because the resemblance there is quite uncanny. The maid is played by Sara Dylan, and has actually been a consistent, recurring character since Season 2. Apparently her name is “Bernadette” because why not.

2) Was it her newest review? I do listen to those in the background of work when I’m doing spreadsheet kind of stuff, so I may not have caught that exact phrase, but I did hear the part where she basically said “just don’t even bother writing a plot. Only write battles because everything else is terrible.”

3) I mean, the people enjoying GoT are watching schlock, so it must be possible. I happen to think the ardent defenders/honeypotters aren’t the majority, and most people turn it on to watch dragons for 60 minutes, then talk about how cool the dragons looked the next day at work. It’s just that GoT comes with a stamp of “SMART ADULT SHOW” for reasons that will never cease to amaze me. So yeah, totally, but for me, I have a hard time enjoying something when the more you think about it, the worse it gets.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: I would bet my right hand that someone in the GoT writers' room probably rewatched season 1 which is why there's so many callbacks to it like Arya's "that's not you", Dany's infertility, Bran's "I told you not to trust me", etc etc. Like it just seems so obvious that they realized they ran out of content and decided to just revisit past seasons to make themselves seem smart and like they planned ahead so much.

Oh 100%. Season 1 was this year’s Lord of the Rings, which they had obviously binged before last year. I love it because then all the critics are like, “ohh my god it’s so well-planned and deep.” But no. It’s essentially grinning into the camera going “remember when?”, completely on par with Gendry’s boat joke.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: The writers gave up 3 seasons ago, but it feels like no one was really trying this year. The cast looked bored. The wigs were trash: Dany's fire-proof wig is also boatsex-proof and freezing wind-proof. The costumes were either too anachronistic for a so-called prestiege Medievalesque Drama or straight up uninspired: Cersei's modern office wear, Dany and LF are shopping at the same department store, Lyanna S dressed up for a college roman-themed party. I guess the special effects were ok.

I’m very, very hesitant to call out costuming because I know Michele Clapton is like, making up these immaculate honeypots and ordering the finest fabrics from Lithuania to pull everything together. But...yeah, as a viewer everything was kind of clearly ridiculous (Euron’s jacket), and EVERYTHING WAS BLACK with the exception of Deadpan’s coat, that was, I’m sorry, objectively hideous. The reason people fawned over it was because it was actually contrasting the blah they had been seeing all season.

As for the cast, I mean...I think these guys are decent actors who get into their roles when they can. But who could get into anything happening at this point? Stuff happens, don’t question it. The directing was probably fine (I don’t know enough about that stuff), but when the script is fundamentally lazy and uninspired, it’s going to bleed into everything.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: (Regarding episode 7) So the only leak that didn't come true was "Cersei's" bed of blood prediction and I'm wondering if she'll miscarry next season because morally evil incest women like Cheryl don't deserve babies while morally good (with the help of our friendzoned Saint T🙏) incest women like Deadpan get to conquer infertility and birth a Targ with the help of Jonny Cardboard's magic seed. That would be one boring Aegon 2(3?) infant. Thoughts?

Honestly, I can’t make heads or tails of why she was even pregnant. Larry didn’t need that to stay on her side at all, and the only thing I can think was that it added an extra TWIST for us. Haha, viewer! You thought she might have actually wanted to fight the threat because of her unborn kid and how many times we’ve told you her only redeeming quality is her motherhood, but now she’s EVHUL and even idealized motherhood can’t save her!

I guess it’s...kind of trope busting?

I kind of agree though, I don’t see them letting a BAD woman give birth and mother. At the same time, I don’t see how enough time can even pass where this would be a relevant plot-point to anything. So...I just, I don’t get it. I’ve gotta figure out how to structure my sexism & s7 analysis, and going back and revisiting Cheryl is probably going to be one of the most confused parts of it. I see many paths for how this unfolds, and none of them are really too promising.

Alrighty, gotta cut it here for today. Everyone have a safe labor day weekend (I guess there’s no heightened risk for non-Americans, but a safe weekend all the same), and I’ll talk to you guys later!

#asks #ask roundup

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dachi-chan25 · 7 years

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Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 5 Recap Pt. 1

I seriously need to vent about “Eastwatch so bear with me please.

WARNING: SPOILERS; not a D@€n€r¥$ fan; Jonsa shipper so yeah I’m biased af.

Before diving into the recap:

1.- This are only my opinions, humble analysis and random thoughts/musings about the episode, and I am in no form or way trying to convince people I know everything or that I’m absolutely right and whatever other reading is wrong, I actually Love that thing about fandom that everyone sees things in a different way, is fascinating

2.- I’m the literal embodiment of the Salt Throne, and I feel specially salty about this episode so if you are not comfortable with that stuff I highly recommend you not to read this. I will always stay in my lane and I am not closed off to debates as long as you extend the same politeness and respect of course.

3.- My analysis of certain ships/characters is based on what I think and feel as an audience, but in no form or way do I think people shouldn’t ship/like said ship/characters. Believe me on the fact I will always defend the right to love what you love, even my most hated NOTPS are valid and I will always support the shippers and multishippers even if we don’t interact.

————

1.- Back on the lake near HG, Bronn and Jaime are fine (I already knew they weren’t going to die but I am glad they don’t even have a scratch) and golden boy is pissed cuz Bronn wasn’t delicate enough during his brave rescue, and Bronn is like yeah but why did you do such a stupid ass thing she has a dragon Jamie a dragon!!!! but our Lannister boy didn’t even cared he was willing to die to get rid of D.

OK, but that was really what a hero would do??He doesn’t know D, and the good things she has done, and we know Jaime is more than flawed, he has done awfull things, and in his mind D is the biggest threat he has ever faced (I mean he is not wrong) and still found the courage to charge at her, he just watched his man die horrible painful deaths (mind you he got PTSD from his time with Aerys right then and there) and instead of fleeing like Bronn suggested he fought and was willing to die just so he could get rid of D… That really makes you think.

Anyway Bronn is like fuck you, you can’t die before you pay me dude! but you’re totally on your own if the Dragon Woman comes to KL xoxo.

I truly love Bronn.

2.- So yeah we’re strolling through the Field of Fire with Tyrion, he looks absolutely horrified (he should) while the Dothraki take swords and weapons form the dead (yikes, can we talk about the lack of humanising of the Dothraki? We only got to know them a lil’ back on s1 and s2 and still they look like terrible people with a ruthless violent culture and no real good redeeming qualities, I mean we don’t even get a lot of depth on any Mereenese, Yunkai or Astapori beyond the ohh wondrous mysha bullshit!! and then we have Dorne, you know the PoC of Westeros, storyline absolutely butchered and thrown to shit, and this actually stinks of racism) anyway we have like what 50? 100? Soldiers and I’m supposed to pat D in the back for not killing everyone??? You kidding me right? There were 10,000 Lannister-Tarly soldiers, she killed ¾ of the army, and yet she dares to say she didn’t came to murder them or orphan their children with the same condecending tone she used for the Meerenese, Astapori and Yunkaii people???? Miss me that bullshit, she had an adavantage from 10-1 there was no FUCKING way the Lannister-Tarlys were going to win, besides if she has the noble pure righteous heart she loves to parrot about she would have given them the chance to yield before she went Dracarys on their asses (you know like Jon Snow did in the BoB telling Ramsey they should have a 1 on 1 so other people wouldn’t die) she should have taken the food, but she didn’t so it would be real nice if she stopped with all those pretty but meaningless speeches that only make her look like a hypocrite (but I totally understand why she doesn’t “if I look back I’m lost” which basically means I’m too lazy and proud to learn from my mistakes and accept my flaws) anyway it all boils down to “bend the knee or die even tho I just said I didn’t came to kill you after I had already killed most of you” and I kid you not, just 5-10 people bent immediately, only when Drogon screeches menacingly at them is that most drop to their knees absolutely terrified (*instert the “this is not freedom, this is fear” meme from Captain America) what kind of choice is this???? No choice at all, is either accept me as your newest overlord or die in the flames (yikes, I never wanted her on the IT but now more than ever).

Other thing that piqued my interest is that she uses her famous line about destroying the wheel, basically this is a medieval equivalent of communism, she says there will be no more powerfull high lords and helpless small folk, okay good, totally support this, but D you seriously need to ask yourself how are you going to manage the transition and if your replacement of this feudalistic system is all the power lies in me, my Dragons and my small council if/when I’m in the mood to actually listen then no fuck you. Communism is something we know, something we’ve seen before (Cuba, Russia, North Korea) and it has failed, even if theoretically it seems the most humanitarian and fair, in practice it has always caused an awful whiplash of tyranny, poverty and opression (history exists guys, and even if Westeros is a fantasy setting, GRRM based a lot of the stuff in ASOIAF in actual historical events) our society was not ready in any form or way for that kind of government and neither is the Westerosi society, but D is not a politician, she is a Queen and therefore she doesn’t care about future problems and consequences ‘til they hit her face and then she whines and complains about it.

Fortunately the Tarlys are having none of that overlord (overlady???) bullshit and will not kneel, is no secret I dislike Randyll Tarly cuz he is ruthless with his soldiers (flogging them for real??) and the way he treated Sam (fuck him) but he has a lot of strenght and dignity, he refuses to kneel because he already chose a side and he would stand by it even if it meant death, he is a hardass motherfucker if anything, Tyrion is like dude you seriously are going to fight for my evil sister? Point is that Cersei and D really give not much of an option do they Tyrion? As a matter of fact this scene is a good parallel to Cersei’s 7x01 one in the IT trash talking D and convincing (tho she is much more diplomatic) the Reach Lords to fight with her, then we see Randyll talk with Jaime and he says he only answered the call cuz he knew what Cersei does with her enemies. Here we have D’s pretty speech about how Cersei is evil and she is clearly the better option while intimidating them with her Dragon and Dothraki.But is the same! even if Cersei is more subtle in her approach. Anywhoo Randyll is like you say whatever you want about Queen C, but she is not a foreign invader with a army of infamous pillagers and rapers and dragons who burnt all the food of the Reach (k I added that last bit cuz I’m salty that no one seems to give a fuck about the food) and I know some people have been saying he sounded racist (he does not) that is not the case at all,every country requests being a citizen (among other things) to occupy a position in the government, because you have to know the country, lived there, care at least a little about it’s people and know them and let them know you, D meets none of this requirements, and yes it’s not her fault, it’s her dad’s and Robert’s that she had to live in exile, but still she has no right to proclaim herself as the better option when she has done nothing to show it.

So Randyll is ready to die, Tyrion wants to save him (I guess to convince himself that he made the right decision in supporting D) and suggests he is sent to the Wall, but Radyll is like nah man she has no authority to make me do shit cuz she ain’t my queen. Dickon (my brave and beautiful, and dumb son) steps out and says he won’t bend the knee also, Randyll and Tyrion collectively lose their shits (bitch me too the fuck) because they don’t want him to die and let house Tarly die with him (this rings to close to Tyrion cuz his evil sis killed the Tyrells and Aerys killed a Rickard and Brandon Stark, how is this any different from what D is doing now?) but D is ruthless and says she already gave them an option, Tyrion is still trying to be like hey how about you don’t start cutting heads off??? and D is like LMAO who said I was beheading them? Tyrion is left speechless (why were you expecting dude?? You watched her burn the army and the food, and she almost burnt your brother and your bff) but really is heartbreaking because he wanted so hard to see the mericful woman he admired and believed in and only sees a tyrant.

So of course I cried, because I played myself living in denial and happily shipping Dicksa (we can’t have nice things, but my ship is not going down, you can’t kill what is already dead!!!!) and beyond that it was heartbreaking seeing Randyll holding his son’s arm and them dying on ther feet. And I was reminded of one of the heroes of the mexican revolution, Emiliano Zapata who once said “I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees” what the Tarlys did was a common tragic hero trope.

After the Tarlys get roasted, everyone is on their knees and I would love to slap the satisfaction out of D’s face, because this is awful.

———

I rambled far too much so this needs a part 2

#Game of Thrones #7x05 #racap pt 1 #anti daenerys #just to be safe #dachi rambles

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janiedean · 7 years

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writing meme

tagged by @aftgonice thank you! :D

Rules: Answer the questions for your work. You can use different fics, and even WIPs. Don’t hesitate to link your stuff for the curious ones :) And tag writer friends to play along!

1/ Which scene/paragraph/sentence are you the most proud of?

Oh god guys. Guys. I don’t know like I’ve written so much fucking shit I have no idea, but okay first thing I can think of JUST ON AO3 IF I START GOING WITH LJ I’M NEVER GONNA FINISH is the ending of take a sad song and make it better because like I’m shit at metaphors or anything like that and... idk this one came out really well I think?

He’s taken his sad song and made it not just better but great, and maybe for the first time in his life he feels completely at harmony with the entire fucking universe and when Robb’s tongue touches his own he parts his lips with a sigh and kisses back even harder.

They only stop when they hit their heads against the damned ceiling and Robb bursts out in laughter, but they don’t crash down to the ground and Theon’s more than ready for it when they kiss again –

(heart and soul)

and maybe now he knows what his favorite song is.

It’s the one he’s living in, he realizes as his heart soars, and he kisses Robb back, and they don’t come down on the ground for a long time.

For the first time in his life, it feels like the natural state of things, and maybe that’s not the best thing of all (that one’s that he finally went through with this and confessed his damned feelings and that Robb wants him back), but it’s just up there along with all the almost-favorite songs he has already.

idk guys I’m weak for music-related stuff. I probably should stick to music metaphors.

Also I’m proud of myself whenever I write jaime lannister’s brand of humor, but if I had to go through the entire production we’d be here until tomorrow.

2/ For which work/piece of work do you get comments telling how marvelous it is, while you’re not that enthralled by that piece yourself?

More than not being enthralled (because I thought it was an okay crack fic)... well, five people who didn’t believe Ned Stark for one second about Jon’s paternity and one who did has an inhuman number of hits/kudos and it’s probably in my most popular top ten fics and like... it’s less than 2k words of crack and I wrote it in twenty minutes I swear XD I’d have never thought that would get so popular though I guess the subject lends itself to it but like there’s shit I worked on for weeks that doesn’t have a tenth of the hits, IDK GUYS XD but I don’t hate it or anything I thought it came out pretty nice. I just wasn’t expecting it. XD

3/ Which character highjacked the story they’re in?

Theon in when they built you, brother, they broke the mold (iT’S ABOUT ROBB AND JON BUT HE WANTED TO BE IN IT AND WHO AM I TO DENY IT) and jaime in you sang me a song as pure as the breeze (ngl jaime was the best thing about that story and it was ABOUT NED AND CAT FALLING IN LOVE GUYS XDD). we could also make a case for davos in some flowers bloom dead because he was supposed to be in it for one chapter and then he’s staying until the end lol.

4/ Which sentence/kind of sentence do you overuse?

Really. I use really too much. And people opening a sentence with well. And I do extra long sentences but I don’t care anymore about that. XD

5/ Which work of yours would you be dying to get fanart for?

I’ve got some fanart for a few fics but okay let’s admit it I’d die for fanart of either any scene from some flowers bloom dead or anything from the everything is cupcakes and (mostly) nothing hurts verse? that one lends itself to fanfic I think. or the jb mutant au fic especiallythefinalscene but I mean if anyone does fanart out of shit I write I’m overtly flattered <3

6/ Which work would you rather forget?

half of the crap I wrote at fourteen with OCs lol. out of the current stuff I have on... eh. a pinch hit I did for gotexchange years ago which... was... let’s just say writing it was hell on earth for reasons even if I liked the ship and I’m still so conflicted about it I never put it on ao3. now someone who knows who they are read it and said it was actually good so I might just put it on ao3 for closure but I never hated writing a fic for characters and a pairing I liked as much as I hated writing that one, blergh.

7/ Do you have a project you never got the nerves/guts to write?

My problem is that I don’t have time, not that I don’t have nerves or guts, but like there’s this psych ward au where theon has DID which has been sitting on the list for years but I’m like... I don’t want to fuck it up because I really don’t want to be the person who writes fic about mental disorders and does it wrong, but if actual psychiatrists still don’t agree on whether DID exists how do I do it damn it XD also I... kinda... want to do the canon verse fic where jaime actually realize the depth of fuckedupness his rship with cersei was and has to deal with the backload of ptsd he has been bottling up since he was fifteen and with the fact that he was in an emotionally abusive mess of a relationship for all of his life but like, a) I need to be in the right frame of mind, b) I’m entirely aware that it’s an unpopular way of seeing things, c) idk if I trust myself to be objective. so.

ah, and then there’s... a thing... that... I don’t even know if I want to mention what it is but let’s just say that if I ever write it I’m sharing it via email with selected people because if I actually posted it in public tumblr would crucify the shit out of me (spoilers: it’s... about... making fun of tumblr’s brand of idiocy in very unpolitically correct ways) so lol if I ever get there it’s gonna see the light of public day after this website crashes and burns. XD

8/ For which fandom have you written the most? (can be original fic, say if you count in terms of words, chapters or fics)

dunno, if you count LJ it’s asoiaf/lost/spn on a more or less equal basis. I have like some 200 fics for asoiaf/got but back in the day I wrote definitely at least 200 for lost and more than 100 for SPN so XDDDDDD no idea probably asoiaf if we take the sheer wordcount amount but XD

okay so tagging... @robb-greyjoy @irisparry @xihydrae @distractedbylife @skymurdock and whoever else wants to ;)

#writing #my fic #sort of #god question 7 hahahahahahahahah

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warsofasoiaf · 7 years

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I've been thinking about this for a while, so I decided to find out your thoughts on the matter. How would you go about creating a good fantasy religion?

When it comes to building a religion, the key things to remember is that religion is tied very much to ethics, the nature of reality, the meaning of life (and anything that comes after), and other deep philosophical underpinnings of what it means to be alive, to be good or evil, what responsibilities do we have in life. Religion offered to the people of the past (and continues to offer to the people in the present) profound comfort, meaning, and purpose for the entire life. So, you have your work cut out for you. But this is not beyond the ability of the aspiring worldbuilder and fantasy writer. I’m going to caveat this: I’ve studied religions, but a lot of my studies were focused on western religions. Someone who has studied more Eastern, African, or Pacific religions feel free to add anything. I acknowledge my limitations and have done what I could be as inclusive as possible, but I am certain there was stuff I missed.

Who Are You, Who Worships Me?

It’s tempting to start building a religion by building a deity or pantheon and moving from there, but I find it altogether more productive to look at the society that practices the religion and build up, rather than craft the divine and build down. Unless the piece you’re writing focuses on the perspective of the gods, or has them act as characters, they won’t be the focus of your story, but the society that your characters will be interacting with will have a profound effect on the story you’re writing.

So, when it comes to your society, the cardinal virtues that your society wishes to express will become central tenets of your religion. A society that prizes military strength, for example, will emphasize bravery, duty, loyalty, obedience to orders, hierarchy, and all of the things that enhance military cohesion. Deities will often be emphasized in martial roles, whether against enemies, other deities, or against evil itself. Antiquity often had gods pitted against each other, with the winner in warfare being the “stronger” deity, because clearly, those worshippers were the ones that won, right? The positive virtues and negative virtues of your society will be emphasized in all aspects of life, to include religion, and how it evolves over time.

Did You Ever Wonder Why We’re Here?

The meaning of life almost seems too cliche, but having a reason for existing is tremendously comforting. Religion have, throughout history, offered answers to very difficult and very terrifying questions. Why are we born? What happens do us when we die? Is this the only existence there is? Are all the bad things that happen to me just random, or is there a greater purpose to it all? Your fantasy religion is almost certainly going to have to attempt to address some of these questions in order to seem like a credible religion.

Always make sure to take into account the context of your world to think up of confusing questions that the world has to answer. Does magical talent happen seemingly randomly? Religion might attribute a divine origin to such a thing. Can the dead come back to life? That’s certainly going to factor in to your answers about what happens when humans die.

Religion offers other answers as well. Early religions attempted to make sense of the world and phenomena, because, as I’ve mentioned before, knowing why something is the way it is offers tremendous comfort. The fear of the unknown is one of the oldest fears in existence, and it’s one of the most pervasive fears even into our modern day, because the unknown calls into question a human’s mastery over his or her environment and ability to control and handle situations as they occur. Not knowing means losing one of our most powerful attributes: our ability to think rationally and plan accordingly, and this feeling of disempowerment is wholly terrifying. Good horror makes uses of feelings of weakness to amp up the fear effectively, and the use of the unknown, the paranoid cloying that something is out there but we have no idea what it is, where it is, or how to stop it, is amazing. It’s comforting to think of the sun as a flaming chariot powered by a god who wishes to keep us warm. After all, chariots are something familiar, even if the scale is beyond us, and a powerful being that looks out for our survival helps guard against the fear that at any minute, the sun could go away or expand into a giant and burn us to a cinder.

Now, a big part of religion is the concept of the sacred mystery. In the more ‘public’ sense, this would be supernatural phenomena that cannot be explained by rational means, and this forms a crucial understanding in the relationship between the mundane world and divinity. How the divine interacts with the world, if at all, is critical to understanding the relationship between any divine figure and the mortal practitioner. In the more esoteric sense, a sacred mystery is knowledge that is not commonly available to the public, accessible only by initiation and elevation to the proper rank. This was done in Greco-Roman mystery cults, as an example. In a fantasy story, for example, this is excellent for bringing in elements of the supernatural while keeping it rare and out of public hands.

Don’t fear that any point is too esoteric or minute to be important. The meaning of the divine have launched wars. Just to take an example, look at all the early theological disputes as to the exact nature of Jesus in Christianity. Arianism, Monophysitism, Monotheliteism, there was a tremendous amount of discussion and excommunications over aspects that seem almost trivial to a layperson, but this was a matter of the soul and of life everlasting to the people who lived in those times. Just because it seems unimportant to you, it can still have great significance to those who believe it. The same is true in fantasy as in reality.

The Path to Power

Now, religion is, like any other institution, controlled by humans, and humans are many things, but one thing that they are good at is building power structures. Religion has often been used as a vehicle to power. In some cases, this means an out-and-out theocracy, where political power is exercised through the clergy, but it hardly needs to be official. When a religion can control something as powerful and meaningful as an immortal soul, even without any official political power, the clergy will exert a great deal of influence.

Of course, when it comes to designing a religion, one of the big questions that will determine how much hard and soft influence said religion will have on the society at large. An informal, deeply personalized religion based on direct relationships with divine entities will not be very organized, but will still form a significant part of the daily lives of practitioners; in ASOIAF, it’s considered proper to perform important moments in front of a heart tree so that the Old Gods may bear witness, yet there does not appear to be an organized clerical hierarchy. A more organized religion will have a much more formalized organizational structure, with sacred texts and formalized rituals. Religions like Christianity and Islam are very organized, and as the number of worshipers grew, so did the size of their organizations.

The size of the organization is critical, because that determines the amount of resources it has. The Catholic Church was the largest organization in medieval Europe, and as such, had a truly gigantic amount of resources in both money and land, and that translated into a lot of power. The most powerful Popes could cow the mightiest kings of Europe, send ambassadors to distant lands, call Crusades and sanction invasions that forever changed the face of Europe. The most powerful Caliphs left their stamp on Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence that affected the way the religion is practiced today.

Now, as you might imagine, the bigger the organization and the wealthier it is, the more attractive it is to gather money, power, and influence, just like any secular organization. Corruption is present in all organizations, even the tiniest and weakest ones, and the largest and most powerful ones will definitely have corrupt officials, and those in power will use their organization to protect their power for reasons both benign (if I lose this power, I can’t help my flock) and malicious (if I lose this power, then I can’t help myself), and everywhere in between. As might be expected, corruption in any religion would be abhorrent to honest practitioners no matter their rank, corruption and hypocrisy rankle any outsider, and so anti-corruption movements would result. There were plenty of anti-corruption initiatives in Catholicism, and this ranged from peasant revolts who railed against inequality and classism to reformist Popes who cracked down on simony and usury. These anti-corruption initiatives can form critical moments in the history of your religion…or are a perfect way to have a conflict over the course of your novel.

What is a God, Anyway?

Now, of course, if you have a religion, you’ll need some sort of divine figure or idea. There has to be an origin for these sacred mysteries after all. Whether you have a monotheistic religion, a dualistic religion, a polytheistic religion, or even an atheistic one built around a philosophy, the big thing to capture is a sense of something much larger than humanity.

In a one-god religion, it’s important to settle exactly how powerful the god is. Monotheism typically asserts that the one god is all powerful, and has no peer, but that is far from the only way that works. Henotheism asserts a single divine essence which takes the form of many valid gods, and monolatrism, where many gods exist but only one is worshiped. In this latter two cases, defining the relationship between the gods is critical to the nature of the divine. Can a mortal worship the underlying divine essence of henotheism (or even comprehend it)?

In a ditheistic religion, the relationship between the gods becomes even more important, because usually whatever the one god is not, the other is. This dichotomy is often central to the formation of the world, and the religion offers a lens of contrasts and binary choices. Zoroastrianism is one of the most influential ditheistic religions I’m aware of, and it stresses the constant choices that mankind makes, to do good or to do evil, and this impetus of behavior affects many aspects of Zoroastrian societies.

In a polytheistic religion, the gods typically resolve around certain spheres of influence, and so it might be possible and necessary to pray to certain deities who have access over this sphere. Polytheistic deities typically emphasize human characteristics, and not all of them benevolent. The Greek Gods might bestow favor that ended up with horrible things happening to them. Susano-o got into a fight with his sister and flayed her favorite pony and threw the skin at her. Tezcatlipoca and Quetzlcouatl constantly unmake creation to show each other up. Odin repeatedly tried to renege on deals. Eshu walked around with a hat that looked different depending on how you looked at it just so people would fight over it. Taken as a strictly secular observer with modern values, you could probably say that these gods were, well, dicks (apologies to anyone if I called your god a dick), but they seem so strikingly and extremely human: concepts and personas taken to their immortal conclusion. Death is also a real thing for these gods. Many of the Tuatha died, including Nuada and Lugh, and they eventually lost Ireland. The Norse Gods were all fated to die on Ragnarok (save for a select few). The Aztec gods were built around death and sacrifice providing power. These concepts were all special, magical, and relatable.

I’d recommend researching ancient religions and seeing how they explored these concepts (and others) to make your religion feel genuine.

Bringing it Together

Just like anything else, you will be building a lot of things from single ideas that will invariably change. Do not fear change, and this is especially true for religions. After all, the changes you make, you can incorporate into the fictional history of your religion, as it grows and shifts over time, just like everything else (hopefully) in your setting.

For example, the religion in my fantasy setting started with a single idea. I wanted to build a society where doing good was a real concern, so I based it off Zoroastrianism. The religion was a dualistic one, with one good and one evil deity. Doing good actions strengthened the good deity of creation, doing evil strengthened the bad one. At the judgment day at the end of time, the two deities would fight, and the winner would be the one strengthened by the active thoughts and deeds of worshipers. If the good deity won, it was a remaking of the world into a land of endless paradise and plenty. If the evil deity won, the world became an endless suffering pit. This resolved the issue of free will, because mankind and free will is the active shaping force of the end of the world. It assigns significance to actions because everything that everyone does matters in judgment day, even if ever so little. The ethical framework of this society, then, becomes rather judgmental, as each evil deed is not only a crime against man, but against existence itself, and villains became interesting as they justified their crimes to render them good, or even went so far as to do other things to stave it off, and in one particularly horrible case, believed that the patient suffering of his victims offset the damage he was doing.

Then, to make matters more interesting, I made a religious schism that was based off the Great Schism of 1054, naming them after their implement of religious purity. One side, the ones who follow the sacred fire, believe that action is the principal driver of good, and so their doctrines resolve around actively doing good. The other side, who follow the sacred waters, believe that contemplation and thought are the most important, that one must actively think good and the action will follow. To the fire side, thought without action is impotent, empowering nothing and permitting evil to triumph, strengthening the evil god. To the water side, wanting to do good because of benefit (even just to strengthen the good god for the hope of the eternal paradise) is selfish and strengthens the evil god. Now, there’s actually a lot more theological discussions and some of it concerns secular concerns of power. The spectrum of belief has heretic hardliners who believe in violent action to eliminate the other sect before they do more wicked things, to more mellow followers who believe that the other side is misguided by not actively evil, to active Unificationists who attempt to use theological argument to reconcile the two sides with a variety of compromises. There’s even a sect in the hills that are fundamentalist Rejectionists who say that the schism is a sign of corruption and that there needs to be a return to a simpler, purer form of the religion, and that all came from one idea of a man constantly quoting scripture as if every single line he said was pregnant with meaning. I have (horrible) sketches of two grand temples devoted to sacred waters and sacred fires with beautiful architecture and ideas for how this schism will play out to create conflict for the protagonists, and how their ideas on it shape their actions. Follow the path where it takes you, write your notes, and don’t be afraid to come back and make revisions.

Thanks for the question, Overlord.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#writing #religion #worldbuilding #essays on writing and worldbuilding

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anoldwound · 7 years

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and we will never sever - Jaime/Brienne [ASOIAF]

Title: and we will never sever Characters/Pairings: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth Rating: hard R Word Count: ~3200 Warnings: Sexual content, language. Summary: And Jaime looked upon her face, the wide jaw and freckles, broken nose and broken teeth and torn up cheek and it was odd how it wasn't repulsive to him anymore; it was just Brienne. Disclaimer: These characters don't belong to me, and neither does the world they inhabit. A/N: This is part of the Made of Steel series, but can be read as a stand-alone fic. Full disclosure -- I have not read A Dance With Dragons yet, except for Jaime's chapter, so there might be stuff I've gotten wrong somehow? If that's the case, I apologize and we'll just pretend it didn't happen. Spoilers ahead for all of the books. (also at AO3) “What do you say, Brienne, Maid of Tarth?” Ser Hyle Hunt grinned at her. “Now that we're all safe and sound, is my marriage proposal looking sweeter?” Jaime nearly choked on his mutton. Brienne's neck had turned red, but she didn't say anything. “Marriage proposal?” Jaime asked, once the coughing subsided. He could hardly believe his ears. “You? And her? Well, of course she turned you down. Right, Brienne?” She was silent for several long, agonizing moments. “I haven't decided one way or the other yet,” she said stiffly. Surely she's joking. But she wasn't. Her jaw was set, eyes deadly calm and serious. Not pleased, not excited by the prospect, no. But still, it was there. “Oh.” A heavy weight seemed to set on Jaime's shoulders. “Well. Best of luck to you both.” He felt himself rise forcefully out of his chair and storm out of the dining room, his phantom hand clenched into a fist. “What's his problem?” he heard Hunt ask upon his exit. Good question, whelp. He couldn't explain the deep-seated anger that had arisen in his chest. It was almost like when Cersei had married King Robert, and he'd been forced to stand guard their wedding night, their moans echoing in his ears for days. Except, of course, not really anything like that at all. He was angry on Brienne's behalf. This man merely wanted land and titles, not Brienne herself. But how was that different from any other marriage in Westeros? Almost no one married for love in this place. Because she will not be happy, he told himself. If nothing else, she deserves happiness. Brienne was not made for dutiful matrimony and staying locked up in a dreary castle, waiting for such a man as Ser Hyle Hunt to steal into her bed at night and stick his vile cock inside her. She was made to fight, and roam, eyes alight and a sword at her hip and a strong horse between her legs – not him. He had to persuade her to not go through with this. The thought of her settling down with that – thing (he'd had no opinion of the man before this news, but he now found himself detesting the very core of Ser Hyle's being) – well, it was unbearable. He must speak with her alone as soon as possible. But instead he paced the floor of his room for hours, a thousand thoughts racing through his mind, none of which he could recall only moments after having thought them. It was nearly the middle of the night before he could finally make himself take those five steps down the hall and knock on her door. “Go away, Ser Hyle!” she yelled. “I've already told you, you try anything, I'll chop your balls off myself!” Jaime had to laugh at that. Stubborn wench. “Jaime?” He heard some brief fumbling inside before Brienne opened the door, robe wrapped tightly around her body, pale blonde hair disheveled. “What is it? What's happened?” “Nothing. May I come in?” She hesitated, but nodded and stood aside. Her room was much smaller than his, but cozier. The bed took up more than half the room. Brienne sat down on it, but Jaime stood. “I'm sorry to disturb you, Brienne,” he began, shutting the door behind him. “But... I feel I must tell you that marrying Ser Hyle Hunt would be a great folly on your part.” “Oh?” She crossed her arms and regarded him coolly. “Why?” “You can do better.” Brienne stared at him, then burst into high-pitched laughter. “'I can do better'?” She took a deep breath. “Have you looked at me lately? No. I cannot.” This made his heart hurt, for some reason. “Some men care not for looks.” “Yes. And Ser Hyle Hunt is one of them. In a way.” She paused. “It is true that he wants to marry me only because of my birthrights. But he's not – he's not really like the others. He would let me be me. He wouldn't try to dress me up and make me anything less than what I am. And I'm so... I'm so tired. I'm so tired of being alone. I want to go home. I want to be a knight and I want to be happy and I – I actually do want to have children, someday. I suppose it is a feeble woman's wish, but it's true all the same.” Jaime had a sudden image of golden-haired children with sapphire blue eyes sword-fighting on a grassy knoll over-looking the sea. He shook the thought away, perturbed. “Ser Hyle will not make you happy.” “Really? And how do you know that?” She seemed to honestly want an answer. Because I do. “I don't, in truth.” Brienne looked away and sighed heavily. “I haven't decided, anyway.” “Do you... do you want to marry the man?” Jaime took a few steps closer. “Truly?” She chewed on her lip as her eyes – and they really were astonishingly blue – darted about, not looking directly at him. “I don't know.” “You should know, before you decide.” He wanted to grab her by the jaw and force her to look at him, but knew she would probably punch him for his efforts. And he was so very fond of his face. Instead, he sat on the bed next to her. He suddenly felt a numb tingle across his skin. “Well, what does it matter? And why do you even care?” Brienne finally turned to face him, a defiant glare setting across her broad, homely face. Well, maybe not so homely. The moonlight was very becoming on her, even with the ghastly scar across her cheek. “I'm not sure,” he said softly, averting his gaze. “Then leave.” He almost did. He almost stood up, almost brushed off his breeches, almost took two paces to the door, almost left – but instead he said, “I don't want you to marry Ser Hyle.” She looked as surprised as he felt. What on earth made me say that? The words had left him involuntarily, with no prompting from his brain whatsoever. Brienne stopped gaping at him long enough to ask, “Why?” in a hushed – did he detect a note of hope? – tone. And Jaime looked upon her face, the wide jaw and freckles, broken nose and broken teeth and torn up cheek and it was odd how it wasn't repulsive to him anymore; it was just Brienne. Brienne and her bravery and honor and courage. Brienne, who had shown him he could be better than he was. Brienne, who had saved him, and he had saved her. Brienne, Maid of Tarth. Brienne, the Beauty. Oh, seven hells, he thought. I'm in love with her, aren't I? Everything around him seemed to shift. He supposed he had known for a while – somewhere, buried deep down where he could not find – but this was... this was too much, right now. Too all-encompassing. Too strange. He had never loved another woman except Cersei, especially not a woman such as Brienne. He needed time to think... But Brienne was not willing to give him that time, and her lips were pressed against his, forceful and pursed, inexperienced. She pulled away immediately, began to gasp out, “I'm sorry”, but Jaime was swallowing her apologies into his mouth before she could say them. It was... odd, and different, though not unpleasing. Brienne kept pulling away from his tongue slightly, embarrassed and hesitant, but eventually she settled into their rhythm. He could feel her cheek burn hot and bright against his left hand, and this was so utterly bizarre – so the opposite of Cersei, the opposite of everything he'd ever known – but also, it all fit together, and his cock was already hard. He brushed it against her leg by accident, and she yanked away. “Oh – ” Both her face and neck were red now, and only months ago he would have thought that it made her uglier, but now he just found it endearing. Especially since he was the cause of it. “I'm sorry, my lady.” “No, it's – okay...” He chuckled against her lips, and kissed her once more. It was a thrill he hadn't experienced in such a long time. Something new and interesting. He knew Cersei's body like his own, but Brienne's was new territory, muscled thighs where Cersei's were soft, rough and callused hands where Cersei's were smooth and lady-like. But Jaime had had enough of soft and smooth and lady-like. They were lying on the bed now, side to side, Brienne's hands running across his back, making him moan, his teeth nibbling her ear as she shuddered. Am I really doing this? some part of him thought as he sucked on her neck and she squirmed underneath him (oh, he had climbed on top of her at some point, apparently). Have I lost my senses? No, his senses were still intact – touch and taste and sight and all the rest – they were, in fact, heightened. The world was sharp, Brienne's breaths quick in his ear. “Jaime,” she said. “Jaime.” Something, suddenly, made him stop. My vows. She opened her eyes and gave him a worried look. “Am I doing something wrong?” “No, no.” Jaime paused. “I... the Kingsguard...” “Oh.” Jaime climbed off of her hips and lay next to her, his cock still standing comically at attention, Brienne's entire face now a deep shade of pink. Her arm was under his back, and he shifted slightly so she could move it, but she did not. “So... are you going to leave now?” Brienne's voice was cracked and breathless. Jaime turned on his side to face her. “I'll stay. But we mustn't – ” “I broke my vows for you,” she snapped. “Why can you not do the same for me?” Jaime raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Is this Brienne of Tarth I'm in bed with right now? I took you for a woman of honor.” “And I took you for an oathbreaker.” She was smirking at him now, too, something he had never seen her do before, and he felt himself get even harder, almost painfully so. “Ah, the lady knight who reminded me of the value of vows and chivalry is now begging me to toss it all away so I can rip off her clothes and ravage her.” He kissed her neck, the hollow of her collarbone. “How the tables turn.” “Is it because I'm ugly?” she blurted out. “Are you just using your vows as an excuse to – ” “If I didn't want to be with you, do you think I would be doing things like this?” Her kissed her fingertips. “And this?” He ran the palm of his hand up her legs, and she shivered, goosepimples prickling across her skin as he stopped just short of her cunt. “I don't do anything I don't want to,” he whispered in her ear. “You should know that by now.” Brienne raised a challenging stare at him. “So do it.” And he did. He palmed her cunt, incredibly wet already, and she let out a moan so loud that he almost shushed her before remembering that there was no need for her to be quiet. They were not brother and sister, and there was nothing to hide. The whole world could hear her shout in ecstasy for all he cared. He wanted them to hear. All of them. Let them wake from their sleep to hear her pleasure at my fingers, he thought, making a small circle around the part that made her cry out the most. His left hand felt so clumsy and awkward, especially at this angle, but it seemed to make no difference to her. Let them dream about it, the night the Maid of Tarth was fucked by the Kingslayer. Well, no. This was still dangerous. If anyone of import should find out he had broken his vows, it would mean his head, and possibly hers. Although he would like to see them try. And, technically, he wasn't breaking his vows right now, anyway... She was clutching him so hard now, her fingers digging into his back, her legs wrapped around his. He'd almost forgotten how strong she was, and the night she carried him out of the bath crossed his thoughts. Although she was certainly not being gentle right now. Gods, she's going to rip me in half! He couldn't say he wasn't enjoying it, but he did want to live. “You're hurting me,” he said through his teeth, and Brienne murmured something and loosened her grip on him slightly. He chose that moment to slip his finger inside, and that seemed to set her over the edge. Head thrown back, neck exposed, she clenched around him and a long, exquisite, beautiful beautiful beautiful howl was pulled out of her, her breasts slipping out of her robe, back arched, and Jaime felt about to burst with want and need and why had he waited so long to do this? They should've been together every day, every night since they had met, on the boat and in the bath and at King's Landing (If Cersei ever finds out, I hope to be in the same room, just to see her face) and everywhere in between, he had been so stupid, so stupid and so blind... Brienne was spent, her legs and arms akimbo, breathing heavily, eyes closed. Jaime smirked to himself and lay next to her, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She didn't seem to register that he was there for a moment, until her eyelids fluttered open and she gazed blearily at him with those sapphire eyes of hers. “Enjoy yourself?” he asked, smirk overtaking his face entirely. “More than I ever have alone,” she said, her voice laced with lust, and Jaime took a hungry kiss. “Where is that shy maid I knew so well?” Jaime teased. “Very un-ladylike, to pleasure yourself.” “Never been much of a lady.” “You're woman enough.” He traced a circle on her inner thigh. “Not yet, I'm not.” She reached for his breeches, clumsily untying the laces, when he held her fingers to stop her. “Are you certain?” he asked. Brienne pulled her hand away, then slowly, surely, climbed on top of him, her eyes never leaving his, and his heart pounded in his ears, and his cock throbbed. “I want you,” she said. Jaime sat up, and gathered her in his arms. “You have me.” They made love that night, and it wasn't perfect, and yet it was. His gold hand left marks on her sides, she winced slightly on his shoulder at his thrusts but ground against him still, their bodies one, and it was nothing like Cersei but he preferred it that way. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her everything, as his left hand rubbed her nipple, eliciting sighs. Snow pounded against the window. After, the night was starting to fade, but the snow was not. “I suppose we will all have to call you just Brienne of Tarth now,” Jaime said. She shook her head and grinned at him. “Go to sleep, Jaime Lannister of Casterly Rock.” “But I'm not tired in the least.” And he really wasn't. “Neither am I.” * * * They awoke the next morning with their limbs entwined, Jaime's head tucked under Brienne's, her right hand holding his left. “I'd thought it was a dream,” she said. “As did I.” He remembered the dream that had brought him back to Harrenhal, the two of them bared and their swords that cast a blue light in the darkness, and her touch that had sent a shudder through him. “What happens now?” Brienne asked quietly. The dawn had broke, but the snowstorm still continued. Jaime didn't know how to answer, so instead he kissed her cheek (the one that was not wounded) and gave her hand a squeeze. “Pod and Ser Hyle are waiting for us, most likely,” he said, and disentangled himself from her. They quickly dressed and headed downstairs to the dining area where Ser Hyle and Pod were breaking their fast with eggs and bacon. Jaime reveled in the surly glare that Ser Hyle was giving him. Pod seemed to be trying, unsuccessfully, to contain a ridiculous grin, while the innkeep was giving them both a strange look. Clearly, Brienne's cries had been heard last night. Jaime raised an eyebrow at Ser Hyle. “My, my, Ser Hyle, such a sour face to have on such a wonderful morning. Are you not enjoying your meal? Perhaps the pork is a bit much for your stomach.” Brienne was rolling her eyes, but gave him a pleased look. Ser Hyle was practically baring his teeth at him. “I hope you know that I am rescinding my offer of marriage to you,” Ser Hyle said coldly to Brienne. “I understand, Ser,” she said. “I don't think you do. No one shall ever make another offer to you again, now that you have allowed this oathbreaker to spill his seed inside of you. You'll be lucky if you don't wind up with another one of his bastard children. At least this one will not be the product of incest. I thought you had better sense than to –” The next part happened so fast, Jaime barely had time to react – Brienne had punched Ser Hyle across the face so hard that he flew sideways off of the stool and skidded down between the rows of tables. Jaime cringed, biting back the urge to laugh at the same time. Brienne was striding over to him as he was shakily standing back up on his feet. “That was for Ser Jaime,” she told him. “This is for your wager.” She kneed him in the balls, and Ser Hyle fell like a limp doll to the floor once again, and Jaime could not hold back his peals of laughter this time. He almost felt sorry for the man. The innkeep, strangely, was not making a move to stop any of this, instead watching with quiet amusement. “Hold on,” Jaime said, catching his breath. “What's this 'wager' that you speak of?” “When I was with Lord Renly's host, some of the men had a bet to see who could bed me first,” she explained. “Ser Hyle was one of them.” Any trace amount of sympathy he might have had for him vanished instantly. “You worthless excuse for a knight,” he snarled, and walked over to where he was still on the ground, whimpering and holding his useless sack. “I'm sorry for that,” Ser Hyle managed to say through the pain. “I really am. I told her.” Jaime was in no mood to hear his apologies, however, and with some help from Pod, pulled Ser Hyle up and threw him out the front door. “It's too bad,” Brienne said, as the three of them watched Ser Hyle Hunt laboriously climb up onto his horse and trot slowly away. “He was sort of useful. And easy to keep track of. Now he might reach Sansa before us.” “Doubtful, with the way he's riding right now,” Jaime said. Ser Hyle was whining with pain with every step of his horse through the piles of snow. “He'll recover eventually. And then what will happen?” Brienne gave him a sharp look when she said this. Jaime looked back at her, still unable to answer her question. “Let's go eat. We'll need our strength.” They turned to go back inside, and Jaime grabbed Brienne's right hand with his left.

#fandom: asoiaf #ship: jaime/brienne

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