jedimaesteryoda Asks: Brightfyre

What’s your opinion of the thoery that Aegon has some descent from Aerion as well as Daemon Blackfyre?

Personally, I think it is convoluting.

I’ve never been that much of a fan of the Brightfyre theory, and I think the WOIAF definitely makes it less likely. Given that Aerion’s exile was temporary rather than permanent and that Aerion fought against the Blackfyres in the 3rd Rebellion and did something really infamous that most likely is murdering Haegon after Haegon had surrendered, I don’t think any Golden Company loyalist would lift a finger to put his spawn on the Iron Throne.

Do you think Sybelle Spicer pimped out her daughter? I find it suspicious that pretty maiden daughter was attending to Robb and not her mother or the maester.

theculturalvacuum:

travllingbunny:

Why would Sybelle want her daughter to sleep with Robb or marry him? Her family wouldn’t have been in trouble with Tywin just because he took their castle. She didn’t need to fear repraisals just for that. Why would she deliberately cause trouble for her family?

How was anyone to know for sure that 1) Robb would marry Jeyne just because he slept with her, 2) that would necessarily lead to the Red Wedding, which would require a lot of things to go exactly a certain way, including Robb, Catelyn and others acting exactly as predicted?

The idea that the whole thing was some complicated conspiracy orchestrated by Tywin and Sybelle strikes me as 1) unlikely, as it requires a lot of anticipating the actions of various people, 2) an example of assigning Tywin incredible, almost godlike powers of planning, control and anticipation of events (fandom also does that with Varys, as with the theory that Varys put Shae in Tywin’s bed), and 3) an attempt by the fandom to relieve Robb of responsibility for his actions, and hoist it all on the Evil Foreign Witchy Woman.

The far more likely scenario, I think, is that Robb slept with Jeyne, through a conspiracy of no one but teenage hormones and heightened emotions, decided to marry her because he thought that was the right thing to do, and Sybelle naturally feared her family getting Castamered by Tywin, so she agreed to stop her daughter from getting pregnant, in exchange for protection for her family.

Seriously, the idea that some one in Sybelle Spicer’s position would WANT her daughter to sleep with the rebel lord that just conquered her castle is…. what. Congratulations for taking Jaime’s sexism and racism at face value, I guess.

Why would she do this? Because she magically knew that Robb was one of the very few men in Westeros that would have acted the way he did? (Presumably because she’s one of those Evil Foreign Witchy Women, as @travllingbunny said.) If this was a plan it was absurdly risky. All she was likely to end up with was a daughter who already had no dowry who would probably be almost impossible to marry to anyone.

Sybelle is an abusive piece of shit, but her actions are literally the only reason any of her children got out of this alive. Most people agreed Robb’s cause was doomed, even at the end of aCoK when the lovebirds would have gotten married. Wishing her death for it is a very ugly thing to say.

As for the OP original question. No one in-universe seemed to think it was odd that Jeyne nursed Robb rather than the maester. Catelyn’s pretty sharp, she would have commented if that was usual. Maybe the maester had lots of patients to deal with and only did the things that required his expertise while Jeyne did all the fevered brow wiping and stuff. Who knows. But I don’t think it’s any kind of smoking gun.

Sorry I haven’t gotten round to this earlier, but here goes.

Why Would Sybell Want Jeyne to Sleep With Robb?

At the time that the affair in question happened, Robb was an unstoppable warrior-king who had, for all intents and purposes, conquered the Westerlands, in that he had destroyed two of their armies and was now roaming the Westerlands without opposition, sacking whatever and wherever he wanted. (Look at what happened to Castamere, Nunn’s Deep, and the Pendric Hills, or the people who owned the thousands of cattle Maege Mormont “requisitioned,” or whoever got in the path of Lords Glover and Karstark along the northern coast) Meanwhile, Tywin is losing the war badly – more than 2,000 lost at the Whispering Woods, another 8,000 at the Camps, another 10,000 at Oxcross, however many thousand Tywin lost between the Green Fork, the retreat from the Green Fork, the bushwhacking in the Riverlands, the Westerlands raided, King’s Landing threatened.

”Pushing” Jeyne into his bed at worst protects the family against the very real threat that they will be put to the sword in the same way that the Lannisters did to House Darry, for example. (And it’s not like Robb doesn’t have bannermen around him like Rickard Karstark who would be down for some retaliatory executions…) At best, it gives the Westerlings one of the best positions in the new regime if Robb wins the war.

Sybell doesn’t need to have magic powers, just a willingness to play the odds, and an ability to hedge her bets. By making her deal with Tywin at the same time that she “pushes” Jeyne into Robb’s bed, she turns her potential weakness – Tywin isn’t exactly rewarding to people who fail him – into a source of strength, because now Jeyne is a bargaining chip she can use to bargain with Tywin to protect the family in case he wins instead. And while it’s a less valuable chip absent the marriage, it’s a valuable chip nonetheless.

Does Tywin Need “incredible, almost godlike powers of planning, control and anticipation of events”?

No, because Tywin was already in communication with Walder and Roose. This is where the timing of the Red Wedding and the logistics and negotiations needed to set it up becomes very important. As I argued here, the deal (including the Freys, Boltons, and Lannisters, because all three have to do their part) had to have been done before the Battle of Duskendale (i.e, before Arya X of ACOK), because that battle is necessary for the Red Wedding to take place.* Moreover, Roose gives the order before the news breaks about Robb sleeping with Jeyne, and it’s telling that somehow the news gets all the way to Harrenhal by way of “a bird from the Twins” before it gets to Riverrun despite Riverrun being 300 miles closer to the Crag.

*if we’re looking for an earliest possible start-date to when the conspiracy started, I’d peg it to Catelyn V of ACOK, where she finds out that Roose Bolton has married Walda Frey.

To me, this suggests that, because Sybell was in communication with Tywin, he leaks the information to Walder to get Walder off the fence. (How else do we explain how Walder knew ahead of anyone else?) This also means that Walder was already part of the conspiracy before the Freys were dishonored, as “he would have searched for some way to disentangle himself from a losing cause sooner or later.”

So what does this all mean for Tywin? It means he doesn’t need godlike powers, all he needs is to know the character of Walder Frey (a man he’s known since he was ten years old): he knows that Walder is a peevishly proud man who’s incredibly insecure about his family’s status, especially when it comes to marriages, and he knows from their correspondence that Walder wants to get out of the Stark camp, and he knows from universal repute that Walder is notoriously cowardly when it comes to committing himself.

In fact, as I have said before, it doesn’t really show Tywin in as good a light as people think. Up until this point in the War of Five Kings, he has been out-thought and out-fought by the Young Wolf at every single point, and has only just managed to scrape himself from the verge of total defeat thanks to Tyrion’s (and Littlefinger) swift thinking. And his master-stroke relies on a complete fluke: his rival taking a stray arrow and landing in the bed of one of Tywin’s vassals.

Does This Theory Buy Into “Jaime’s sexism and racism”?

I don’t think it does. We know from the text that Sybell and Tywin made a deal regarding Jeyne through extensive communication:

racefortheironthrone:

I don’t think she ordered Jeyne to sleep with Robb, because A. the odds of Jeyne agreeing to do that, even if it was necessary to save their family, were really low, and B. her modus operandi is usually to lie to her daughter and use drugs instead.

At the very least, I think Sybell ordered Jeyne to care for Robb, thinking that caring for a handsome conqueror king might cause her to fall prey to the Florence Nightingale Effect. But given that Sybell’s grandmother was Maggy the Frog, and that Maggy may well have taught her how to make “cures and love potions and the like,” along with the recipe for moon tea, it’’s quite possible she drugged either or both of Robb and Jeyne to “make certainty doubly sure.”

And I’m very certain that she did so after negotiating her deal with Tywin, which is incredibly cold-blooded. While some pretty awful things are going to happen in the Prologue of TWOW, I hope her death at Lady Stoneheart’s hands is the silver lining.

“I made certain of that, as your lord father bid me…”

“House Westerling has its pardon, and your brother Rolph has been made Lord of Castamere. What else would you have of us?”

“Your lord father promised me worthy marriages for Jeyne and her younger sister. Lords or heirs, he swore to me, not younger sons nor household knights.”

Given Tywin’s legendary tightfistedness, I think that this is a hell of a lot for Sybell to have gotten just for ensuring that Robb didn’t sire an heir. I think the price is right if breaking Robb’s Frey alliance is added into the pot.

However, to the extent that this theory plays into the Evil Matriarch trope, it’s baked into the text – the fact that Jaime despises Sybell while letting his father off the hook is sexist and racist (and classist), but the event is a matter of fact.

Moreover, from a meta perspective, I think it has to be asked why, if Robb and Jeyne were purely a matter of chance, GRRM felt it necessary to inform us that Sybell’s grandmother was Maggy the Frog and that, in addition to telling the future, Maggy dealt in “cures and love potions”? One could argue that Maggy the Frog dabbles in the gendered trope of the Wicked Witch and the mystical foreigner, but that doesn’t change the fact that the author added it into the text when he didn’t have to.

After all, plenty of highborn ladies have made use of moon tea without any association to Essosi Maegi – not only is it made by maesters for the ladies they serve, but Cersei finds women who can provide abortions when Robert gets her pregnant. So if all Sybell was doing was making sure that Jeyne didn’t get pregnant after the fact, GRRM could have explained this to the reader without reference to Maggy the Frog.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to whether you think someone as cooly calculating as Sybell would have left something this vital to her family’s survival to chance or not. I lean to the latter.

whats your thoughts on house osgrey?

An interesting portrait of a noble family sliding into genteel poverty, trapped by their fixation on the past and a quixotic cause.

Their fall from grace, from being Marshalls of the Northmarch, where their status clearly was founded on the need for a military presence on the Reach’s border with the Westerlands during the era of seven kingdoms, with four castles, twenty vassal houses, and 100 landed knights, to a mere landed knight with nothing more than a tower to die in, is very reminiscent of how downward mobility worked for the nobility in the Medieval and Early Modern periods.

If they were a different kind of house, more practical and political, they might have righted themselves by marrying into a rich merchant house, using the capital to invest in Dosk, Little Dosk, and Brandybottom, try to make themselves a going concern in the winemaking, brewing, and distilling industries, like House Redwyne on a smaller scale.

But no, they had to be all about Coldmoat.

Your animosity toward the Bloodraven is Maekar’s Hand retcon seems odd to me. Their relationship as of 209 isn’t great, but there’s another 20+ years between the current D&E stories and Maekar’s death. Given the enormous amount of events we’re in the dark about in order to avoid spoiling future stories, its seems plausible to me that Bloodraven and Maekar could develop a grudging respect that turns into a working relationship. They’re both no-BS pragmatists on the same side of a protracted war.

“Isn’t great” is selling it short. Maekar exiled himself from court because Bloodraven got picked as Hand. Listen to any time that Egg opens his mouth about Bloodraven, and you hear his father’s hatred and the hatred of the people in his father’ party:

“His Grace should have made my father Hand. He’s his brother , and the finest battle commander in the realm since Uncle Baelor died. Lord Bloodraven’s not even a real lord, that’s just some stupid courtesy . He’s a sorcerer, and baseborn besides.”

“The old High Septon told my father that king’s laws are one thing, and the laws of the gods another,“ the boy said stubbornly. “Trueborn children are made in a marriage bed and blessed by the Father and the Mother, but bastards are born of lust and weakness, he said. King Aegon decreed that his bastards were not bastards, but he could not change their nature. The High Septon said all bastards are born to betrayal … Daemon Blackfyre, Bittersteel, even Bloodraven. Lord Rivers was more cunning than the other two, he said, but in the end he would prove himself a traitor, too. The High Septon counseled my father never to put any trust in him, nor in any other bastards, great or small.”

That’s not just Stannis being mad at Renly over Storm’s End. Maekar thinks that Bloodraven is a false lord, that he’s a sorcerer, and the people around Maekar are saying Bloodraven is a traitor to the crown.

Their mutual antagonism is so clear that even lowly hedge knights know that “Aerys is weak, and when he dies, it will be bloody war between Lord Rivers and Prince Maekar for the crown, the Hand against the heir.“ And at the end of Mystery Knight, it looks like Bloodraven agrees, because he basically tries to take Egg as a hostage against Maekar: ”I have half a mind to take you back to King’s Landing with us…and keep you at court as my… guest.“

Going from this point to Bloodraven as Maekar’s Hand is a complete 180 degree shift. I’m not saying that it’s impossible, but that everything we’ve seen in Dunk & Egg to date is moving in the opposite direction – which from a writerly perspective is GRRM making the task of bringing them together more difficult for himself.

Is there an essay out there that details your feelings on Stannis’s right to rule/morality? From what I’ve read in your CBC analysis you seem to like him but you don’t have the mindless worship mentality a some of the fandom has. His utilitarian views when it comes to blood magic really screw with my conception of justice so when he’s deemed a just King I don’t follow at all. I really like how you think he’s a deconstruction of the sacrifice theme of traditional fantasy btw.

If you’ve already read the relevant CBC essays from ACOK, then I guess this essay and this essay would be the only things left.

Also, you might want to read this tumblr piece on legalism.

My overall attitude is that early ACOK Stannis would be a horrible king, whereas post-ASOS Stannis is the king Westeros desperately needs.

As for blood magic, I think it’s important to carefully parse which instances we’re talking about. I’m in the camp that Stannis was genuinely ignorant about Renly’s death and probably Penrose’s too – Melisandre’s whole shtick is about convincing Stannis she can see the future, so telling him she can kill his enemies contradicts that.

But Stannis is, however reluctantly, on board for the leeches, equivocates over Edric Storm, and has zero problem burning traitors. In terms of how he sees it, Stannis is something of a consequentialist when it comes to justice – what matters most is the just outcome not the method, Melisandre is the new hawk, and killing someone is killing someone so why is blood magic less moral than any other method? Hence his whole thing about making use of Renly’s former supporters despite hating pardoning people he finds contemptible.

If there is an element of deconstruction, I think it also applies to justice. Fantasy readers especially, reared on a long tradition of fantasy grounded in epic clashes of Metaphysical Good vs. Metaphysical Evil, have a tendency to think that justice is a 100% unalloyed positive, because we think of ourselves as good people who would be fine in a just world.

Well, there’s a long tradition, seeing humanity as more sinful and frail and thus prone to come in for punishment in a purely just world, that argued “Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” or:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.

Or as GRRM puts it, “there is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man.”

I’ve seen you say in a few places that the ideal strategy for Edmure Tully to defend the Riverlands during the Wot5K would be to cede ground for time and use the Trident as a defensive multiplier. I don’t disagree with you at all, but was wondering to what extent his promise of protection as liege lord to his vassals would allow him to write the Vances’ and others’ lands off in the short-term without repercussions.

I think it depends on the cultural assumptions of war in that region. Consider that the Martells’ grip on their bannermen didn’t slip an inch when Aegon was burning down every single castle in Dorne except Sunspear, for example.

In the case of the Riverlands, if you look back into their history, defense in depth and guerrilla warfare is how they win wars, whether you’re talking about the Dance of the Dragons or the revolt against the Stormlanders. So I think Edmure’s bannermen would understand the necessities of war, especially if its keeping the majority safe behind watery walls of the Riverlands.

As with the argument about the Battle of the Fords, I think people have this in reverse. As we can see from this map, the vast, vast majority of the Riverlands is either east of the Red Fork and/or north of the Tumblestone. That tiny triangle of land in the middle – which probably is just House Vance of Wayfarer’s Rest, since Pinkmaiden (the castle of the Pipers) on the eastern bank of the Red Fork – is not going to have the political influence to outweigh the rest.

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Davos I, ASOS

“He watched the sail grow for a long time, trying to decide whether he would sooner live or die.”
Synopsis: Davos may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger.
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
(more…)

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Isn’t oathbreaking a threat to social order in Westeros? A lot of people seem to think that keeping oaths is only about honor. I’m no expert on feudalism (thank the gods we have you for that!), but that does not sound right to me.

poorquentyn:

Which is, of course, not the same thing as agreeing with Jon Darry when he told Jaime that it was A-OK for them to listen as the queen was raped. As I believe you’ve argued before, young Jaime was right; the oaths they swore as knights should’ve come before those they swore as Kingsguard.

The problem with smashing this system is you need to have something better or you’re just breaking shit. Looking at you, Renly.

Yes, especially to the point of about the precedent of oaths. If more Kingsguard had received a bit of legal training from their maesters, Westeros would be a quite different place.

I’ll get to this more when I get to Beric Dondarrion and the BWB, but the oath of knighthood is potentially quite revolutionary if you think about it in the right way – because the oath says:

racefortheironthrone:

As I’ve said before, a feudal society is a society built of oaths – oaths of fealty going up the chain from knight to lord to king, and oaths of protection going down the chain. And those oaths are not incidental or merely ceremonial – it’s how property and political power are distributed, it’s how armies and taxes are raised.

Here’s how important oaths used to be: while most people think of medieval justice in the context of trials by ordeal, ordeals were an innovation that sought to improve upon the pre-existing practice of trial by compurgation, where someone accused of something would take an oath (usually on some holy relic) that they hadn’t done it, and if they could find enough people to take an oath saying they believed the accused, they were innocent.

What I would say is that the social order is under threat if oathbreaking isn’t immediately punished by the law of man or gods, if people generally begin to believe that there are no consequences for oathbreaking. Because Westeros doesn’t have any social institutions that could function in the absence of this system, so the Hobbesian war of all against all would be coming along very fast and it would stay for a while.

“in the name of the Warrior I charge you to be brave.” The sword moved from his right shoulder to his left. “In the name of the Father I charge you to be just.” Back to the right. “In the name of the Mother I charge you to defend the young and innocent.” The left. “In the name of the Maid I charge you to protect all women.”

There’s nothing in there about obedience to your social betters or the rightful place of kings, and a lot in there about upholding justice and protecting the defenseless. Hence Dunk and “a knight who remembered his vows.”

how strong exactly is the reach at full power? i know that its considerably stronger than the other kingdoms, but nothing ive seen from the franchise seem to suggest that the reach alone is capable of raising 100k men all by itself which some fans seems to believe. its at least 60k as proven during the war of the five kings, but how strong would you say it is?

I think they’ve got 100,000 men.

In ACOK, Renly’s army numbers and dispositions are a giant mess, but if you look at which houses are actually present and not which houses Renly claims, he doesn’t have the whole of the Reach behind him (nor does he have the whole of the Stormlands either). Which means the Reach has more manpower than we’ve seen so far.

Isn’t oathbreaking a threat to social order in Westeros? A lot of people seem to think that keeping oaths is only about honor. I’m no expert on feudalism (thank the gods we have you for that!), but that does not sound right to me.

As I’ve said before, a feudal society is a society built of oaths – oaths of fealty going up the chain from knight to lord to king, and oaths of protection going down the chain. And those oaths are not incidental or merely ceremonial – it’s how property and political power are distributed, it’s how armies and taxes are raised.

Here’s how important oaths used to be: while most people think of medieval justice in the context of trials by ordeal, ordeals were an innovation that sought to improve upon the pre-existing practice of trial by compurgation, where someone accused of something would take an oath (usually on some holy relic) that they hadn’t done it, and if they could find enough people to take an oath saying they believed the accused, they were innocent.

What I would say is that the social order is under threat if oathbreaking isn’t immediately punished by the law of man or gods, if people generally begin to believe that there are no consequences for oathbreaking. Because Westeros doesn’t have any social institutions that could function in the absence of this system, so the Hobbesian war of all against all would be coming along very fast and it would stay for a while.