Let the Reader Beware
The Rantings and Ramblings of a retired student president of the Carleton College Science Fiction and Fantasy Alliance who is also studying to become a medievalist. Home for this year, but hopefully resuming my M.A. Program in York next year if all goes well.
Martinus (RL: Ross). 23. Male. Massive geek and nerd of many descriptions. Singer (but can't read music). Writer (fanfic). Chronic meta writer. Catelyn Stark/Samwell Tarly hybrid and proud of it. Callsign: Stan.
Resolute and stubborn stan of cerebral protagonists (and antagonists at times), honor-bound soldiers, flawlessly flawed 'righteous' warriors living in fear, walking identity crises (often of the morally-grey variety), children-at-heart, lost souls looking for somewhere to belong, lost souls who keep running, and those characters who take 'working inside the system' as a challenge, not a limitation.
This is not a spoiler-free blog for anything not currently airing.
I love nothing more than when characters reveal themselves while talking about someone else. And there is nothing more innately human than hypocrisy born of fear.
{ wear }
{ GAME OF THRONES }
Taking her own life would be the ultimate act of control in the ultimate heat of chaos on Cersei’s part—hers and Tommen’s. The episode begins with all of her children out of her reach, Myrcella in Dorne and Joffrey off to the battlefield, both next to death, as far as she’s concerned. She fears because she’s their mother, the loss of Myrcella cuts deep because she’s a girl sold as chattel and the loss of Joffrey threatens like the loss of power, but every threat to her children is also a direct threat to her.
An enemy army is battering down the walls, and she is told (as she cannot see for herself) that the war is lost. And she takes her last child, goes to the Iron Throne, and sits, with her little king on her lap, ready to kill the pair of them. This is an act of mercy, but it’s also aclaim. This is Cersei telling a story where they win, when she’s been told all her life that she has no control over the shape of her life, told by the prophecy that her children would die no matter how hard she tried to save them and her life would be taken from her no matter what measures of self-preservation she took. If this is the end of the line—the lineshe made, her children with her brother, like little pieces of herself, little claims on power and little pieces of her destiny—she is going to take it as her own: Cersei doesn’t pray, and her father raised her to fight the gods. She doesn’t flinch. This is the only possible victory in an unwinnable war, and it’s hers, and it’s her way of making the war hers, and she takes it on the Iron Throne, wearing armor.
(But the war is over; she drops the vial; she never needed to fight at all.)
As invested as I am in this relationship, I’m not obsessed with it to the extent I am in others, so I initially missed the rather massive errors the production team made last night in Stannis’ dialog.
Fortunately, Team Dragonstone stan supreme meta master Maddi did not:
So he are some links for you to posts that rather well explain what went wrong.
Stannis Baratheon is not trying to claim the throne.
Stannis Baratheon is already the king, because it is his duty as Robert’s rightful heir.
It is about succession, not ambition. He has played along with Robert’s shenanigan’s re: Storm’s End and Renly because he was expected to do so. Now it’s his turn to have what is by the law of the land his.
Stannis makes Davos his hand because Davos alone among his supporters is honest. Not loyal - loyalty is mutable. But honest. He makes Davos his Hand for defying him. Not for serving him. “How can that be treason?”
Also: Stannis already has a Hand (a Florent), because he is already the king. There is no ‘when’ about it. Whatsoever.
So the necessity of Tyrion’s scenes in this episode was to show that Tyrion is ruled by his emotions. He tries to be his father (in all the wrong ways) but in the end his heart is still stunted from what happened with Tysha. As much sarcasm and wit as he throws out, he’s still a thirteen year old boy at heart who’s completely vulnerable. And vulnerable to everything, good and bad alike.
Tyrion is not a badass. He’s really not. He’s a twisted ball of complicated desperate emotion, full of needs that have never been met. Even the illusion of love from Shae is enough to make him desperate for more, and he transfers all those unresolved feelings from the disaster that was Tysha onto her (which is completely unhealthy for them both but that’s because Tyrion is at a mentally unhealthy state in general).
But even if he’s just projecting his feelings towards Tysha onto her (and he is, he really is) that doesn’t mean that his feelings aren’t real. They are. That’s what hurts the most. As much as Tyrion screws up and has deep-seated issues, he has genuine feelings and can be truly hurt. You see it on Shae’s face when he begs her to stay with him—he’s fallen for her act and she doesn’t want to tell him that it was an act because a) she’s at his mercy, but also b) show!Shae cares about good people and Tyrion (and Sansa) are generally good people.
Yes, it’s problematic that Tyrion views every woman who treats him decently as Tysha 2.0 (the madonna trope, really) and every woman who disdains him as Cersei 2.0 (the whore trope, in his mind). Those blinders aren’t there because he’s inherently a bad person, though, but because of a horrible upbringing and a lack of self-examination so far (partly because people of Westeros are calling him a monster all the time for things that aren’t even problematic/his fault, so why would he examine himself for further faults?). Tyrion’s fucked up, but he genuinely cares about some people, and it hurts to see all the foreshadowing for how that caring will be his ruin.
And Peter Dinklage is so good at portraying all this with just a look in his eyes and the tone of his voice and UGH WHY DO I CARE ABOUT ALL THESE DAMAGED PEOPLE?
YES. I loved all of Tyrion’s scenes tonight - no surprise, really - but I’m trying to be unbiased here, and they all still seem really necessary. There’s no mistaking that Tyrion cares for Shae - really cares for her, even if his feelings are borne of a lie he’s continually telling himself. And AUGH, he cares for Ros too! Not like he does with Shae, to be sure, but he doesn’t want to see her hurt because, as a rule, Tyrion doesn’t like seeing people hurt. Some people might think they’re softening Tyrion in the show, but I just don’t see it. This is the damaged, self deluding, but fundamentally caring man I knew in the books. And I’m glad HBO’s doing so well - at least with this.
As invested as I am in this relationship, I’m not obsessed with it to the extent I am in others, so I initially missed the rather massive errors the production team made last night in Stannis’ dialog.
Fortunately, Team Dragonstone stan supreme meta master Maddi did not:
So he are some links for you to posts that rather well explain what went wrong.
Stannis Baratheon is not trying to claim the throne.
Stannis Baratheon is already the king, because it is his duty as Robert’s rightful heir.
It is about succession, not ambition.
Stannis makes Davos his hand because Davos alone among his supporters is honest. Not loyal - loyalty is mutable. But honest. He makes Davos his Hand for defying him. Not for serving him. “How can that be treason?”
Also: Stannis already has a Hand (a Florent), because he is already the king. There is no ‘when’ about it. Whatsoever.
I like that Game of Thrones has addressed Joanna Lannister and how her loss affected the surviving members of her family. Especially, I appreciate that we see Cersei’s bitterness, with the implication that living as a woman in a man’s world is doubly hard when you’re without that solid rock of womanliness that is a mother.
I do appreciate all that, but it makes me more upset that Riverrun and the Tullys have so far been unaddressed. Catelyn and Cersei are, by virtue of their roles and the fact that they are POVs, compared and contrasted to each other. Their war is the war of mothers fighting for children, not just kings fighting for thrones. We’ve seen this onscreen, but the differences and similarities don’t ring as true as they do in the text. For the comparison to work, you need to understand where both women came from.
Many fans look at Catelyn and dismiss her as a stereotype. The Good Wife and the Good Mother all in one, what Sansa wants to become someday. And modern fans don’t tend to care for such stories, so they dismiss her. Without the inclusion of the Tullys and Catelyn’s backstory, the complexity of her character takes effort to find. It’s not impossible but let’s be honest, fandom can be pretty lazy at times, especially casual viewers.
And this complexity is important. Catelyn is the Good Wife and the Good Mother, not as meta tropes that we as the audience apply to her, but in-universe itself. Before Catelyn turned ten years old House Tully lost its matriarch and Catelyn (ever following the words Family Duty Honor) stepped into her place. She’s not a grown-up Sansa—she did not have times for dreams of Jonquil and Florian. That is not her trope, for she’s not unaware of how she became who she is. Unlike Tywin, Hoster didn’t shun all femaleness because his wife was lost, but neither did he marry again. Catelyn had to take her mother’s place for father, siblings, and the great house itself. While Sansa has simply dreamed of the role society has ascribed to her, Catelyn lived it.
And to everyone in Westeros, that’s who she’ll always be. Wife or Mother. Lysa responds to Catelyn, not just as a younger sister envious of her elder, but in a manner rather similar to a teenage girl rebelling against her mother as she tries to find her own way. Edmure is not just an adoring younger brother, he’s a son looking up to his mother. Hoster relies on Catelyn as a platonic wife, as lady of his household, placing burdens on his daughter that he doesn’t even understand.
And Catelyn takes these burdens into her heart and swallows the bitterness and does her duty. Willingly, but not blindly.
Were feminism to exist in Westeros, would Catelyn suddenly step up and go “Hey, women can rule and fight? BRB off to be a warrior queen”. No. Cersei, maybe, but that’s because Cersei grew up stripped of any notion of motherhood at all. She reclaimed the lost femininity of her childhood through Jaime and her children, while simultaneously fighting for something more. She wants what her father had, what her brothers had, what she didn’t have—because without a mother she had nothing and she needs something.
Catelyn is not Cersei. She could have stayed a girl and played kissing games with Petyr, and House Tully would have withered and the world would be different. She could have been someone unlike Catelyn Tully. But she was. She is Catelyn Tully. Firstborn and first to understand duty, she took on mantles that were not supposed to be hers (and she knows it, she feels it, under all the poise and grace and competence, never doubt it). Not because she knew nothing else, but because it was the only option she could live with. Riverrun needed a Lady. Catelyn became that Lady, and again for Winterfell, and again for Robb’s camp, and again for the Brotherhood Without Banners when they robbed her of her other duties.
Without the Tullys, without the realization that Catelyn stood up and became Wife and Mother at the age of nine, the strength and complexity of her character wavers and is easily lost. Without the Tullys, Catelyn is easily and wrongly simplified down to lazy writing of a stereotypical woman. Without the Tullys, viewers don’t realize that Catelyn’s life of duty is her agency, and her mind is not weak or fearful because of it.
Catelyn is she-wolf, yes, but let us not forget that she is a trout as well.
YES. Catelyn is equal parts Tully and Stark. She wasn’t just assimilated into the north - and I know this might sound silly, but sometimes I worry that her HBO wardrobe kind of implicates otherwise. She adapted to the North, surely; she took her husband’s land and family and carved a place for herself in it. But she never never lost herself. Cersei may always be Cersei Lannister, but at once, Cat is both Catelyn Stark and Catelyn Tully, an identity entirely her own - and not purely dicatated to her through societal roles. She is both of the North and of the Riverlands. She embraces both the Stark and the Tully words - and more than that, she exemplifies them.
I will fight tooth and nail to argue that Jaime Lannister has undergone serious character development in the time he has been separated from Cersei and his right hand. That he is not the same person he was, though the changes are slight and his view of them is seriously unreliable/rooted in intentional internal trolling. That he has the potential for further change, positive change even. That he is not permanently and irrevocably locked into the role of ‘Cersei’s other half’ (and vice versa). That his time with Brienne has shown him a life different from his own and even re-awakened, however twisted by time and trauma, the embers of that zeal for true knighthood he once possessed when he fought the Kingswood Brotherhood.
But one thing that drives me nuts is this idea that Jaime was ever anything more than a generally amoral apathetic troll, Cersei’s (very much willing) other half, and a generally terrible human being, from at least the moment when he made quite possibly the only significant morally decent decision of his young and troubled life and was forever cursed for it.
Yes, Jaime grew up with shiny ideas of knighthood, fanboying over Barristan Selmy. But then he was named to the Kingsguard. Then his dreams fell out from under him. Then he witnessed Aerys’ cruelty and depravity and the utter unwillingness or inability of his fellow Kingsguard to do a thing to stop it. And he willed himself to become like one of them, until Aerys sought to consume King’s Landing in an inferno, and he put an end to it. He became the Kingslayer and saved thousands of lives.
But he wasn’t rewarded for that; he was punished. He was not the ‘Savior of King’s Landing’ (even before the Lannister armies sacked the city), he was the ‘Kingslayer,’ cursed in the eyes of Gods and Men, a betrayer of the most sacred vows, a man without honor.
The point of this post is: the Jaime Lannister who was pressed into the Kingsguard, thinking it was an honor when it was really an act of petty vengeance and control on the part of Aerys towards Tywin, was not the same Jaime Lannister who pushed Bran from a Winterfell tower. That apathy, that disregard for human life, that effortless cruelty, that single-minded and unthinking (literally) devotion to his relationship with Cersei, the one thing that really matters to him, that drove his actions, drove him to shove a child out a window with the intention of killing him, was the product of years of disillusionment, the general moral vacuum that comes of the ambitious and ruthless Lannister family (which Cersei reflected as strong as any of them), and a general desire to not. give. a. shit. Because that’s easy. Look at the Kingsguard who stood by when Aerys abused Rhaella. That’s the model Jaime is following. Because they were remembered with dignity, and he was the Kingslayer.
And so this is his identity at the time of A Game of Thrones: he loves Cersei, he loves to kill things (because he’s good at it), and he loves to not care about anything else.
He’s not suited to imprisonment.
So the show is not making Jaime Lannister darker by having him brutally and mercilessly murder the rather endearing Alton Lannister. They are showing him as he is, as so many of his fanboys refuse to see him. They see him as tragic and misunderstood, and maybe he is that, maybe he suffers under the burden of ‘Kingslayer,’ but at the time of GoT S2.
Jaime Lannister
Is
Not
A
Good
Person
So I had a conversation with my Whovian enthusiast bestie last night after re-watching ‘The Doctor’s Wife,’ which sort of brought up a number of the issues that I felt plagued S6 - she’s generally less critical of it than I am (her love for Rory is undiminished, for example) but there were some things we could definitely agree on.
#get #out #physically repulsed by both your performances #isolated from the rest of the world; spend the entire time clawing one another from the inside out #but backed into a corner and surrounded by a prison of bodies; you still seek each other out #he is not jaime and she is not someone who has ever scrupled to show you affection when she could show you malice #not the person you want but you’ll take what you need when you’re trapped on all sides #because anybody else is an enemy #because this is how the lannisters function#because you are terrible people who will do terrible things to one another #but those terrible things still belong to you and you alone #but those terrible things are yours to do and yours alone #because you are the architects of your own doom #this perfectly calibrated (mal)functioning family of fools #could’ve won the game if you’d just played it together could have had it a l l
[TONY VS. STEVE THOUGHTS — SPOILERS FOR THE AVENGERS]
When I saw The Avengers for the first time, immediately one of my favorite aspects was the trials all of the characters went through. While they were all great, my favorite conflict was Steve Rogers vs. Tony Stark.
Steve is, and always has been, a soldier. In his dreams, his spirit and steadfastness would carry him through battle. He’d live a soldier and he’d die a soldier. At the end of The First Avenger, when Steve makes the call to sacrifice himself, he expects to die. He’s been preparing for this moment ever since he first wanted to be a soldier, because that’s what a soldier does. They lay down their life for the cause. This wasn’t only the death he expected, but the death that he had won for himself, the death he deserved.
But he doesn’t get it. He wakes up and everything he recognizes is gone. He’s called in to fight and of course he goes, he’s a soldier after all, he’ll always answer the call, but even being a soldier doesn’t mean what it meant before. Now it’s sophisticated and electronic and something he doesn’t fully understand. And in a way, that makes him feel cheated; he did what he was supposed to do, he died for his people, and yet here he is.
And then there’s this guy. This guy who is all full of swagger and self-importance and seems to be the opposite of everything Steve believes in. This guy in his magical flying red suit always gets out alive because he’s just that damn clever. He’s faced danger, sure, but he’s not faced death in the way that Steve has, because Stark has never truly given up on the fact that he could make it out alive.
That pisses Steve off, not only because Stark’s attitude flies in the face of everything he believes in, not only because Stark has never seemed to have to make that call of self-sacrifice, but because Stark reflects Steve’s own perceived failure at being a hero. Every time Stark goes on about how he got out alive and walked away, it reflects the fact that Steve thought he wouldn’t and yet, he still did.
And Steve’s a little jealous. Not of the fact that Stark is always able to make it out alive, but jealous of all of the heroes that made the call to give up their lives and went through with it. It’s not that he wishes for death now, but he had been prepared to go. He had come to peace with it, and it was also his opportunity to be the hero, to seal the deal and let the world take care of the rest, because he’s a soldier, not a tactician, not a general, but just a kid from Brooklyn with an unbreakable spirit.
But now he can’t. He has to keep fighting and striving to be a hero in a place where he has nothing and nobody to rely on. And on top of it, there’s this guy.
What makes this conflict so great is that it’s not just about Steve, it’s about Tony. When these two look at each other, they see nothing special. Steve asks Tony, “Take off the suit and what are you?” and of course, Stark has a pithy reply, but he flashes it back at Steve when he tells him that everything special about him came out of a bottle. They don’t see, or perhaps refuse to see, what makes the other so incredibly special. Or perhaps they do, and there’s a level of insecurity there: Steve hates to think that he is anything like Tony, and Tony knows that he doesn’t have it in him to be the selfless hero that Steve does.
When it comes to the moment when somebody has to make a hard call and put their life on the line, it isn’t Steve, it’s Tony. It’s Tony who is the one who has to be the hero, and he faces what seems like certain death with fear and sadness, sure, but also with determination. He knows what has to be done and he’s finally willing to sacrifice himself, the thing that probably matters to him most of all, and he doesn’t have any clever plan to get out. His suit goes dead. He’s alone.
Yes, he makes it back. He survives, but not by his own cleverness or skill, but by sheer blind luck and somebody else plucking him out of free fall and saving him. It isn’t his abilities that got him out, but something entirely out of his control.
This moment teaches them both something. Tony surviving by sheer luck and somebody else’s intervention teaches Steve that heroism doesn’t really mean “not making it out” or “dying for the cause” but something deeper. In their respective moments, Tony and Steve both fully believed that they were done, that they had to give it all up for something bigger than themselves. That’s what makes them heroes, not their ability to die. Anybody can die at any time; what makes it heroism is the fact that they believed, whether for several minutes or seventy years, that they were done. Tony learns what he’s truly made of; that he’s not only the super-genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, but that he too can be a hero.
Despite their very different personalities and qualities, I was very impressed with their complementary narratives, and everything they learned from one another.
warning for GOT 2x05 spoilers and also general saltiness
First up, let me just sing the praises of Catelyn Stark - a character who’s maligned and underrated by huge swathes of fandom - for two seconds, okay? Placed in a medieval setting and drawing a tonne of inspiration from medieval literature, one of ASOIAF’s most interesting subversions of the genre is the multitude of women’s voices vying for a place in the books, in a canon where the vast majority of texts are told by men, handed down by men, largely revolve around men. And amongst that multitude, Cat’s voice has to be one of the most fascinating - this woman, who is Southron born and bred but can still carve a home for herself amongst the Northern landscape without complaining, this woman who can see what is good in the long-term for her house and family’s prestige and what is good in the short-term for their happiness and well-being and choose accordingly, this woman who could easily have been a largely silent figure, an icon of Westerosi womanhood, filtered to readers through a man’s gaze but is instead narrator of her son’s story and orator of her own so we as readers are constantly forced to acknowledge and understand the journeys she embarks on to reach her decisions, whether or not we agree with where she ends up. And most of all, this woman who is multi-faceted when she could be one-dimensional, whose arc is messy where it could be simplistic, who is perceptive enough to know that society has chosen a role for her - the way of the Mother - and still recognise that she shares as many traits with the Mother as she does with the Warrior and even the Stranger.
So, the question has to be begged, why is HBO stripping down the complexity of her character and reducing all that richness to a dour one-note of wanting to be home with the youngest of her brood again? It’s not like they don’t have a great actress in the role (however problematic the treatment of the character by the writers, all the kudos to Michelle Fairley and the steely set of her jaw) and it’s not as though this isn’t a network that forged a name for itself on being able to explore every grey shade of the anti-villains that starred on its screens (notable example: Tony Soprano but the list goes on…and on and on). So why not Cat? Why isn’t the huge and continually opinion-provoking topic of motherhood as compelling a narrative ground to delve into as mobster families or the inner workings of the city of Baltimore? Sure, Cat’s not a perfect mother in the books but guess what? That’s because the idea of perfect motherhood is a fallacy! And Catelyn Stark knows it’s a fallacy, Catelyn Stark who grows up without a mother and has no example to learn from and still, still for a good chunk of her narrative tries to be the perfect mother - tries to do what is impossible and what is still perversely expected of her (and we can see that in readers’ as much as in Westerosi judgement), to split herself in five and guard each of her children respectively. And when she can’t do that, because like almost every other character in the books she is human and fallible not the idealised role society casts her in, she goes to the new head of her family, to her eldest son and does what she can to save the rest of them through him.
Not perfect no, rather messy as fuck, every bit as much of a desperate woman lashing out in desperate ways as her other mother/soldier/Queen counterpart Cersei Lannister is. But its the messy aspects of her character that make her interesting, that make her polarising, that make her impossible to ignore, regardless of how you feel about her. Erasing those aspects when translating her narrative to the screen doesn’t make her more interesting and far from making her more likeable, it makes her seem naive and out of her depth in a series that is all about peeling back the appearances of medieval life to show the muck of humanity that lies underneath. And if there’s one thing, Catelyn Stark almost never is, it’s naive and depicting her as such does a giant disservice to her character and her narrative and what it says about being a woman and a mother and a soldier in Westeros.
So HBO, maybe next time you could throw me abide and actually write some material worthy of the actress in the part and the character you’ve allegedly based her on from the books?
Thoughts on what seems to have been a rather polarizing episode below the cut:
Alright, so I’m going to be very quick about this. I am not happy with the way that they portrayed Loras in the scene after Renly’s death, and I am not happy with how they automatically implicated Stannis in his death, and I am not happy with the fact that Brienne was given much of Loras’ reaction. And here is why.
gunhilde replied to your post: gunhilde replied to your post: Mal you are kind of…
When I say ‘all things considered’ that includes the events in his life which have hardened him. He isn’t some sort of ideal hero, but humans generally aren’t. He may not believe in much, but in spite of it all, he still cares, more than he’d admit.
I definitely agree with that. There’s still a spark of idealism trapped within all that cynicism. But I suppose my point is that he’s not just troubled, he’s actively dark. In the space of two episodes he shot a law officer in the face while risking the life of a teenage girl his target was holding hostage, and then fed a stubbornly bellicose enforcer into a ship’s engine turbine (I was thinking about the comparison to Willow’s flaying of Warren, clearly her darkest moment - Mal does it with a whole lot less fanfare). So there’s the part of him that views human life as disposable (because the universe views him and his as disposable, regardless of their virtues), and the part of him that still wants to be better than the Alliance because that means he fought and suffered for the right cause, at least. Jayne encourages the former, Wash, Kaylee, Book, and Inara the latter, and Zoe sort of rides the middle, though she does have certain lines she will not cross.
