Just a backup in advance of the detumblring
Hey folks! So I’m going to be away from the blog for a few days – which means I won’t be covering Season 7 Episode 2 at the normal time, sorry – but I wanted to let you know that doesn’t mean you’ll be without content. Politics of the Stormlands Part III is already scheduled to go up on Monday, and I’ve also scheduled a discussion thread to go up on Sunday so you can talk about Episode 2 to your…
Because Romantic and romantic don’t mean the same thing. The Romantic movement of the first half of the 19th century (
think Byron, think Mary Shelly, think Coleridge, think the Bronte sisters) loved it some misery and death as long as said misery and death was appropriately extra, melodramatic, and over-the-top, because the point was achieving emotional instensity and extremes. Thus, as I’ve said before, GRRM plumbs the depths of “misery and death” so that the “happy times” are that more intense.
Moreover, I want to point out that the idea that “romantic” stories should involve happy endings is pretty damn new in the historical scheme of things. Coming out of the tradition of chivalric romance – where the point was about the purity and intensity of longing *from afar* not its consummation, which threatened the social order and had to be punished with a tragic end – a lot of the classic romances are cases of “star-crossed” love, whether we’re thinking about Guinevere and Lancelot, Tristan and Isolde, or Romeo and Juliet.
Dead as the proverbial dodo.
Yes. See Red Wedding 2.0.
Because we still need a Durrandon in power in 1BC for the narrative to work.
As I said in the piece on the Stormlands, my idea would be that the Durrandons would be “Andalized” – a puppet king would be forced to marry the daughter of an Andal warlord who would rule in the king’s name until the king’s son, who would very definitely be raised in the Faith of the Seven and speaking the Andal language, would take over and cement the new order of things.
This would mean that the Andals would have truly conquered the Vale, the Riverlands, the Stormlands, the Iron Islands (sort of), and Dorne (at least in parts), while being assimilated into the more functional states of the Westerlands and the Reach. This would leave the North as the lone kingdom that never fell or intermarried into the Andals.
Jon would probably feel very different about Robb’s will from Stannis’ offer.
“Jon.” Melisandre was so close he could feel the warmth of her breath. “R’hllor is the only true god. A vow sworn to a tree has no more power than one sworn to your shoes. Open your heart and let the light of the Lord come in. Burn these weirwoods, and accept Winterfell as a gift of the Lord of Light.”
When Jon had been very young, too young to understand what it meant to be a bastard, he used to dream that one day Winterfell might be his. Later, when he was older, he had been ashamed of those dreams. Winterfell would go to Robb and then his sons, or to Bran or Rickon should Robb die childless. And after them came Sansa and Arya. Even to dream otherwise seemed disloyal, as if he were betraying them in his heart, wishing for their deaths. I never wanted this, he thought as he stood before the blue-eyed king and the red woman. I loved Robb, loved all of them … I never wanted any harm to come to any of them, but it did. And now there’s only me. All he had to do was say the word, and he would be Jon Stark, and nevermore a Snow. All he had to do was pledge this king his fealty, and Winterfell was his…
You can’t be the Lord of Winterfell, you’re bastard-born, he heard Robb say again. And the stone kings were growling at him with granite tongues. You do not belong here. This is not your place. When Jon closed his eyes he saw the heart tree, with its pale limbs, red leaves, and solemn face. The weirwood was the heart of Winterfell, Lord Eddard always said…but to save the castle Jon would have to tear that heart up by its ancient roots, and feed it to the red woman’s hungry fire god. I have no right, he thought. Winterfell belongs to the old gods.
Accepting Stannis’ offer would have meant taking Winterfell without the leave of the Starks and betraying their gods. If one takes the position that death releases Jon Snow from his vows, then Robb’s will not only gives that consent but makes it a command, and Jon would be under no obligation to burn the weirwood.
However, there’s going to be tension regardless, because there’s going to be Sansa and the army of the Vale, Rickon and the Manderlys, and possibly Bran as well if the most recent episode of the show is any indication.
Because he’s not smart.
Yes, and it’s a classic case of sunk cost fallacy.
Jon’s initial decision to send the Night’s Watch’s fleet to Hardhome does fit his overall military objectives – he wants to rescue the thousands of free folk at Hardhome, he doesn’t want them added to the army of the dead – but the risks are huge, in terms of ships, men, and officers.
Then when the expedition goes as bad as it could – half the ships lost in the storms, the wildlings unwilling to accept rescue after the slavers betrayed them, “dead things in the wood. dead things in the water” – Jon wants to commit hundreds if not a thousand men to an overland rescue mission, without any plan of how this expedition will accomplish what the second one failed to do.
And I think this is where GRRM’s thing about being a good leader vs. a good man comes into play. The heroic thing to do is ride in to save the day, but the right command decision is to cut your losses and preserve your resources when the army of the dead is bearing down on the Wall.
To quote Terry Pratchett again:
““History was full of the bones of good men who’d followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders.“
I think Balon Swann is a typical man of his class who never quite learned to think for himself beyond the ideas deemed appropirate for men of his class.
He’s not among the worst – he’s not a partisan, he’s not a coward or a sadist or a bully, he’s one of the few people who speak in favor of Tyrion (although he’s easily outmanuevered in court), he snarks back to Jaime about the proper conduct of a Kingslayer…
But he also (at least in spirit) fails the more difficult test of what to do if you’re given an order that violates the tenets of knighthood when he’s faced with Cersei’s order to be complicit in the murder of a child by bearing false witness as to his murderer.
Something tells me he’s going to be tested even more strongly at Starfall.
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