Disaster

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.

The Starks have had terrible things happen to their family but all of that happened for some explainable reasons. It was coherent. Ned stark endangered cersei, bran saw cersei and Jaime together, Robb and Catelyn were betrayed for money. Rickon was killed because Ramsay was a little sadistic bitch. But the Lannisters?? Their mother died giving birth to Tyrion only for Tyrion to kill their father. Joffrey was poisoned at his own wedding, and we see the parallels between the red wedding of course, but the fucked up thing is that his death had nothing to do with the Starks. Myrcella was poisoned (like Jon Arryn was poisoned), and also Oberyn’s weapon was poisoned, and she died in her father’s arms, for the first time giving Jaime acceptance, despite it being acceptance of incest. Tommen threw himself out of the window for the organisation that kept his mother captive. Tywin, the proud man and the richest man, is killed on the toilet. Jaime loses his hand to the Boltons, kinda reminiscent of the way Theon is tortured by the Boltons, but then the particular hand situation also has nothing to do with the Starks, it was because he was behaving like a Lannister in hopes of saving Brienne. It’s like they are cursed, just like Cersei says in season two “maybe this is the price we pay for what we’ve done, for our sins”. For all the killings, but also Jaime pushed a kid out of a tower. Jaime fucked Cersei literally on the body of their own dead son. Everything that happens to the Starks is tragic, but whatever happens to the Lannisters is deeply disturbing.

THIS LINK leads to a video where Charles Dance (aka Tywin Lannister) reads a fragment of “50 shades of grey”

The fact that I’ve lived for so long without seeing a video of Tywin repeatedly saying “kinky fuckery” is such. a. shame.