What is the meta significance of the impressive number of scars Jon Snow has accumulated? Even before his ventilation at the hands of his sworn brothers, he suffered a burned hand and arm, bird claws raked across his face, and an arrow to the leg from his girlfriend (and I may have omitted one or two). No shortage of scars or mutilations in ASOIAF, of course, but what of the contrast with Jon’s apparent Ice/Fire counterpart Danaerys, whose beauty remains intact despite all she has endured?

Partly it’s a slight deconstruction of the whole Cool Scars trope, but partly it plays into it. Jon Snow is still pretty despite the scar over his eye, and he can still fight just fine, but the burned hand makes him a little slower to draw Longclaw and the limp slows him down on foot.

Guest Post at Tower of the Hand: The Blacks and Reds, Part II

Part II in my series on the Blackfyre Rebellions is up on Tower of the Hand. In this part, I try to reconstruct the course of the First Rebellion, explain Daemon I’s reign from a single coin, and try to explain what happened at Redgrass Field.

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I haven’t read every essay you’ve done so perhaps you’ve addressed this already and I simply haven’t gotten to it, but were there any historical analogs to the mountain clans? In the sense that they seem to eschew some of the stereotypical “medieval lord” trappings moreso than any Northman in their ruggedness and less, for lack of a better word, “civilized” behavior, yet are still fiercely loyal to the Starks.

They’re pretty stereotypical Scottish highlanders, right down to the greatswords, tossing the caber, and even the naming patterns.

So wait are the dreamers actually impaled on icicles or is that just imagery. And does that mean that these dreamers die at the hand of the dreamer version of the Others or do they die from the equivalent of dreamer exhaustion?

I think it’s one of those psychic death things. Remember, Bloodraven is reaching out to people already in grave distress from injury and disease, so I think a lot of them simply never wake up. We don’t see their deaths, because they’d look natural, ordinary.

Does Walder Frey hag a valid complaint that the lords of westeros look down on his house, and was this typical amongst the upper class in the Middle Ages? The feeling I always get is that it’s not so much his house is too low, but that Walder Frey has too many heirs. Would that be a likely reason no ones interested in the Freys, as where is the value of marrying or mentoring a frey

It’s something I associate more with the Early Modern period and the Enlightenment, but snobbery by the old blood against the nouveau noblesse as it were was extremely high. Big part of the reason why Anne Boleyn fell was that the old nobility didn’t like the idea of a knight’s daughter getting above her station; in the ancien regime, the noblesse d’épée despised the noblesse de robe as a bunch of upjumped bourgeois social climbers.

As for why people despise the Freys, it’s a mixture of the fact that the Freys are ambitious and obsequious social climbers, that they’re grasping middlemen who are “toll collectors” and “coin clinkers” (i.e, their money comes from trade not land), there’s the subtext that they enforce their monopoly by burning other people’s bridges and that they tried more than once to conquer the Neck (hence their hatred of the crannogmen), and that they’re disloyal (the Blackfyre Rebellions, Robert’s Rebellion, the War of Five Kings), etc.

If Euron is a failed dreamer, do you think there are others in the story? On westeros I remember people proposing robin Arryn as one, is it likely? Or just coincidence that he’s obsessed with flying?

I think there are, but they’re mostly dead. Impaled by spikes in the heart of winter sounds not good.

hey, i was just wondering if i could get a link to the race for the iron throne series. thanks

Bam.

Can I ask, what is it that you refer to as the scarlet rehearsal dinner? Because I’m rereading the Race for the Iron Throne series and it’s come up a few times in passing and I can’t quite work out what event it’s referring to? Thanks.

It’s my joking way of referring to the Red Wedding.

Whats all this talk of Euron being a failed apprentice and him having been an ex protégé to Bloodraven,that seems so out of left field. And would that not also suggest that there were various failed protégés?

In AFFC, Euron says “When I was a boy, I dreamt that I could fly…When I woke, I couldn’t…Perhaps we can fly. All of us. How will we ever know unless we leap from some tall tower?” and subsequently takes the name crow’s eye. That’s really, really close to Bran’s three-eyed crow dream, and we know from both Bran II of AGOT and Bran IV of ACOK that Bloodraven is recruiting “dreamers” to help fight the Heart of Winter/Great Other.

As for the other failed proteges, the imagery of them impaled on giant icicles in the Land of Always Winter suggests that most of them die in their sleep.

I have to ask regarding “The Princess and the Queen”, where many of the fans see Rhaenyra as proto-Cersei without parsing through the text and Gyldayn’s obvious misogynist PoV. I am seeing many fans reading it and saying that Viserys II was wrong in trying to make a woman a heir and the like. Do you think we are supposed to take Rhaenyra’s reputation as “Maegor’s teats” or that the Iron Throne cut her while she was wearing armour at face value?

randomfactgirl:

racefortheironthrone:

Rhaenrya had her good qualities and her bad. I think chiefly among her bad qualities was an early-Stannis-like inability to let anything slide, thus the moment she actually gets into power she spends more time taking revenge than actually ruling. Hence, mass arrests and executions and torture, and people side-eyeing her because of putting Alicent in chains and poor Haelena committing suicide over the death of her children, hence completely counterproductive orders to execute her own dragonriders.

I’m sure we can chalk some of it up to propaganda, but some things are historical fact – Rhaenrya so alienated the people of King’s Landing that they rose up against her and killed her dragons, breaking the power of her House. That on its own discredits her as a politician.

But ultimately, Viserys II’s mistake was that he couldn’t make up his mind. If Rhaenrya was going to be his heir, he shouldn’t have remarried and had more children.

I think this is really good analysis, but kind of disagree with the last paragraph. I don’t have WOIAF on me, but there are plenty of reasons beyond having heirs for Viserys to remarry – though yes, back-up heirs are generally a good idea. That said, Viserys made it very clear that Rhaenyra was his intended heir, including granting her Dragonstone.

We have a really strong history of male-preference primogeniture in the modern western world, but at this point in Targaryen rule (as far as I remember), that hadn’t been firmly established. Viserys may seem like he was being unclear to us, but in his mind he probably thought he was doing everything necessary to ensure Rhaenyra’s succession.

If you’re looking to blame someone other than Alicent and Aegon for the Dance of the Dragons, I’d say Criston Cole is your best bet.

What I was more getting at was that, regardless of gender, remarrying and having children from an entirely different dynastic alliance is a terrible idea because it creates a huge incentive for the relative families to see the other as a rival/enemy.

You don’t need male preference primogeniture to get siblings to try to kill each other for power.