Author: stevenattewell

Hi, different anon. About Rhaegar and Lyanna, don’t you think that Barristan’s account that “Prince Rhaegar loved his lady Lyanna”, is reliable?

This is a tricky subject, because I think it’s an area where modern fandom and medieval literature have almost perpendicular perspectives. Let’s take the case of Lyanna and Rhaegar at the Tourney of Harrenhal, as seen below: 

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Oh no, wait. That’s actually a painting of Lancelot and Guinevere from 1890, a classic love story that involves adultery, murder, toxic relationship dynamics, and everyone dying horribly. And a lot of chivalric romance is like that – Tristan and Isolde, Gawain and the Green Knight, Percival and the Loathly Lady – they’re not about healthy relationships, they’re about DRAMA and TRAGEDY. 

Now that doesn’t mean we can’t find something interesting/redeeming in them; a lot of feminist scholars have pointed out that the mechanics of courtly love at the heart of these chivalric romances (which often found their dramatic tension in the conflict between masculine-coded chivalry and feminine-coded courtly love) kind of results in this weird dom-sub thing where the lady is in charge of the relationship and spends a lot of time punishing the knight for not being impossibly faithful to her or thinking about anyone but her at any point. 

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(I mean, I can’t be the only one who sees something in all these paintings of men kneeling in front of women, right?)

But wrt to Rhaegar specifically, the knock on him is that he abandoned his wife and kids to run off with another woman in an unequal power dynamic. But if you shift the marriages around in any of these chivalric romances – so Lancelot is abandoning his wife to run off with Guinevere, or Tristan from his wife to run off with Isolde – you’d wind up with the same dynamic. Including the necessity of both of the adulterers to die in the end to restore the stability of patriarchial marriage. 

And I think that’s what GRRM did, he took these stories that he’d grown up on and switched it around so that it was the prince running away from his wife instead of the queen from her king. 

So does that pass muster with modern fandom’s conceptions of a healthy relationship? No. It’s not meant to (if only because unhealthy relationships are easier to mine for drama and tragedy). 

A Romantic story is not the same thing as a romantic story. 

Completely serious question: How is masturbation treated in Westeros? Since the Faith of the Seven borrows from the Catholic church. do they also consider it impure/a sin? Or is it a non-issue?

Non-issue. The Seven is way less conservative on sexual issues than the Medieval Catholic Church (which was less conservative, or rather more weirdly inconsistent than you would think). Part of that has to be about havng three goddesses in their pantheon/ heptinity. 

You’ve expressed the belief that Jon will go on an expedition north of the Wall after he’s brought back from the Dead. PoorQuentyn believes that Jon will journey south to the Tower of Joy after learning the truth of his parentage. I have a hard time believing there’s enough time for both of these journeys in the next two books, so I was wondering if you could outline your argument for North of the Wall rather than Dorne.

No, sorry, @poorquentyn is wrong here. There isn’t enough time for Jon to go to ToJ outside of Bran bringing him along back to the past and then get back to the North where his plot lies. 

I mean, I can list it off: Benjen’s disappearance, Jeor’s argument to Jon at the end of AGOT, Qhorin’s argument to Jon in ACOK, everything that Jon goes through in ASOS, his driving purpose in ADWD, all of it is about the Army of the Dead. 

In my mind, therefore, Jon’s parentage matters in terms of prophecy and bringing together Ice and Fire to save the world.  

Hypothetically, if Ysilla Royce was betrothed to Harry the Heir, how much would that be taken as a threat/insult to Robin Arryn? Especially during the period in which the Starks are at war and Lysa is holding back the Valelords, but also maybe even before Jon Arryn dies?

goodqueenaly:

Lysa, I think, would have certainly seen a betrothal between Harry Hardyng and Ysilla Royce as a move against her. For one, Lysa was already fearful of Yohn Royce during her Vale regency:

All the sternness melted off her aunt’s round pink face, and for a moment Sansa thought Lysa Arryn was about to cry. “Sweet Petyr, I’ve missed you so, you don’t know, you can’t know. Yohn Royce has been stirring up all sorts of trouble, demanding that I call my banners and go to war.[”]

What’s more, I would believe Lysa already knew about Harry Hardyng’s closeness in the Arryn succession. Little Robert Arryn states in no uncertain terms in Sansa’s first TWOW chapter that Harry is “just waiting for me to die so he can take the Eyrie”, and he had to have learned that from somewhere; a paranoid, overprotective mother dreadfully fearful of anything taking little Robert away from her seems a likely source. So if Lysa saw that Yohn Royce, so powerful and demanding, betrothed his own daughter to the boy who came after Robert in the Arryn line, I have to think she’d see it as an insult to her. Royce would be effectively saying at that point (certainly in Lysa’s mind) that he believed Robert Arryn would die childless, leaving the way open for Harry, and eventually his Royce-blooded son, to inherit the Vale.

Jon Arryn … well, I doubt he would have missed the subtle political implications of such a betrothal. After all, it would be rather surprising if, in the ordinary course, a daughter of the Lord of Runestone was betrothed to a mere landed knight bannerman of another Vale vassal House; the only reason Bronze Yohn would seek such an otherwise disadvantageous betrothal (unless some scandal had attached itself to Ysilla) would be because of young Harry’s high place in the Arryn line. Still, Royce’s conduct would be within the bounds of ordinary feudal politicking; Jon Arryn might have wondered why his greatest vassal seemed to be hedging his bets with House Arryn – publicly swearing fealty to him and his son while essentially investing in an alternate succession to the Eyrie – but would not have grounds to challenge it.

However, I think that if Yohn Royce had been interested in such a move, he would have been a bit more gradual and subtle about it than an immediate betrothal. I’d guess Bronze Yohn would try to secure Harry as his ward (though he’d have to have a pull with Anya Waynwood for that; Harry’s low on the Vale table of ranks, which would ordinarily make the offer of a fostering at Runestone automatically accepted, but Anya is no fool and would not surrender control of her dynastic prize easily), then imbue him with Royce ideology, then provide the way for getting him a knighthood as he did IOTL, and then marry him to Ysilla. All of those are natural steps for a lord to take, gradually swallowing Harry into House Royce.

Just thought of this, so sorry for not mentioning it earlier @goodqueenaly:

One reason why Jon Arryn would be less fussed about it is that he’s already had a long time to get alongside the idea of alternate successions before: first it was going to be his nephew Elbert, then it was going to be his cousin/nephew-in-law Denys. 

And Sweetrobin is not healthy, so one has to think practically.