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.”