Disaster

You can’t win as a woman in fiction. Be too positive, you become a Mary Sue, have flaws and those flaws are why almost nobody likes you. Be moderate, you have wet-cabbage personality, be exuberant, you are an unrealistic example. Have strong morals, and you’re badly developed, be morally corrupt and you’re hated with such vigour fans will send hate mail to the actress who plays the character. Be kind and soft and in love, you’re a representation of sexism, be cruel, harsh and cold and you’re just a bitch. Be a complex, realistic, ambiguous character, and either your flaws or your positive traits will be ignored or blown out of proportion and into oblivion. There is no winning for female characters.

A little obsessed with themes of haunting and ghosts in asoiaf. Characters are surrounded by ghosts, they are ghosts, they love ghosts, they are part of ghosts, they live in places that are ghosts, they unleash ghosts and they bargain with ghosts, most importantly they are haunted by ghosts. Ghosts and curses and prophecies are all very closely tied together in the narrative. Arya who is a ghost in Harrenhal, already a place full of them, Harren and his sons, countless lords and servants, burnt by wildfire, burnt again and again, because the place is said to be cursed. The Red Keep with bodies of its builders buried somewhere within, the Red Keep full of black cells with some half-men, half-ghosts still waiting for justice and sunlight. With skulls of dragons beneath its floors, a defeated legacy. Winterfell with its crypts, full of dead starks, and they are more than just crypts: they are a shelter, a haunted house, a sept in a way. The whole of the riverlands one single haunted space, as if executed with one giant hand of Tywin Lannister. He unleashes a curse with deeds so vile they start haunting lands and fates and houses, Westeros itself. That story Bran tells, about the rat cook who killed guests in his own house, and was cursed to devour his own sons; Walder Frey murdering his guests at the Red Wedding. Drogo is taken from Dany through a bargain with the dead. The dead haunt her: Rhaegar on the Trident, dragons and hundreds of her Targaryen ancestors. House Targaryen is a ghost. Westeros itself is haunting Dany, something she cannot remember. The entire white walkers story is literally the dead getting up from the graves, from the ground and walking, killing. Not alive, not dead, not exactly ghosts. What harm can Lyanna Stark’s ghost do us? Catelyn Stark back from the dead, mute. “She don’t talk but she remembers”. Idk it all seems very consecutive, as if the ghosts are active parts of the story, even from the grave navigating the characters, affecting reality. “It all goes back and back to our fathers and mothers and theirs before them”. Jenny dancing with her ghosts.

We all hate season 8 of got because of Daenerys and Jon’s destroyed characters, but I’ve been rewatching it with my brother, and the battle of Westeros bothers me more and more. The point of the prophecy that plays quite a big role in the books is that a Targaryen shall conquer the death that comes from the north with fire and blood. And yet, neither Jon, nor Dany did. They were both there, fighting, yes, but the conqueror was Arya. Which threw the entire prophecy arc (that served as a motivator to generations of Targaryens) out of the window. Asoiaf was about Targaryens as well as the Starks and the Lannisters, perhaps a bit more about the Targaryens, since Jon and Dany are both major characters and both are Targs, but got just made it all about the Starks in the end. The Starks sitting on the iron throne, the Starks winning against the Night King, the Starks getting their family home back. While Dany just got killed off so that Sansa and Bran could get an end to their stories that the show runners surely thought to be satisfying (spoiler: it isn’t).

The themes of home and homesickness and alienation and connection and tragedy and love in asoiaf really get to me. The way the Starks are always in some mind connection with their past and family, how the memories of each other’s brothers and sisters and parents are brought up so often in their chapters. Something always reminds them of each other, they fall in love with people who remind them of each other, they long to see each other, but it’s a dead longing. A longing that says “I wish I could be that little girl again, that little girl whose hatred for her siblings was love”. “I wish I could be her, but I never will, I wish I could see their faces again, because then part of me will reconnect to home”. The desperation, the sadness behind all that. The wolf howls, the wolf analogies, the wolf dreams. The way Sansa is cut off from all that, because she becomes a Lannister. The way Arya is trying so hard to forget Winterfell and Nymeria, and Jon, and Ned, and Bran, and Sansa, and Needle, but it can’t leave, it’s under the skin, the face beneath the masks is still Arya’s. The wolf dreams she has no control over. The way for Bran the wolf dreams, thoughts of Winterfell are a comfort rather than a faint memory, in his wolf dreams he is alive and well. In his dreams he is powerful, he is Brandon Stark of Winterfell, not a lost cripple boy among endless snow. How Jon has left home behind, and yet can’t help thinking of Arya and Sansa and Robb, and yet he rejects the title Stark, because for all he wants it, he can’t forsake his vows, because that is what his father had taught him, and it all ties back to Winterfell. Winterfell, the home and the tomb. The womb, the prison, the haven. The Stark children are scattered across the world like seeds in the wind, and yet even if they aren’t trying to come home, home is in their minds, always. The regret, the homesickness, the desire to return, and yet the way each of them choses leads them away from home. I wonder what will happen when they come back. Will they realise that Winterfell is home no longer? Will they rebuild it and make it home again? Like, the struggle is there. They can’t escape being Starks, no matter the colour of the cloak, the words they speak, the people they wed.

Game of Thrones heroines + phrases that give them strength

My skin has turned to porcelain, to ivory, to steel.

(A Storm of Swords, Sansa V)

(Game of Thrones women as Greek goddesses)

Aphrodite was a goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, passion and procreation. The Greeks believed that she either emerged from sea foam, or was the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Her beauty was a reason for many wars, including the Trojan War; she, Hera and Athena were the ones fighting for the golden apple that was marked “For the Fairest”.