wildling
I love my son Rickon who is alive and well and on his way to becoming a very powerful link between starks and wildlings.
(via lyannas)
I mean, the book is called The Winds of Winter, and “the real enemy is the cold” ie dehumanization. I fully expect to see Tyrion doing some really cold, dark, dehumanizing (Tywin-esque) things in this book. I fully expect to see each and every hero doing some really horrible things in this book.
But ASOIAF isn’t about the dark horrible things. It’s about finding the light.
That’s why it’s called the war for the dawn.
Anonymous asked: “Honor gets you killed” seems to be one of the themes in ASOIAF. Does this mean that characters like Jaime will eventually die because of it? Not to say that Jaime is the most honorable of them all, but he seems to think about it a lot.
Ah, one of my pet peeves! “Honour gets you killed” is most certainly not one of the themes of the book series, A Song of Ice and Fire.
Honour might get you killed, in this series. So might love (the virtue that really killed Ned, by the way). So might sheer bad luck. Virtue alone may not save you, and GRRM’s pushing back against genre conventions where that exact sort of thing happens. The right thing to do might not be clear, and there may be no good solutions to any given moral problem. This does not change any moral imperative to fight injustice and wrongdoing, to try and make the world better, however you are able.
Just to take a good, clear Jaime example of what GRRM’s after, there’s the bear pit. What makes it a “yes!” moment isn’t the fact that Jaime defeats the bear, because he does no such thing. Nor is he killed off for doing such a daft thing as jumping unarmed and un-handed into a bear pit, as he would be in a series where honour gets you killed. What makes it a “yes!” moment is the fact that he decided to do the right thing. With every reason in the world to save his own skin, he decided to put that aside and do his best to save Brienne from a grisly death. Succeed or fail, he did the best thing he knew he could have done, and that is what GRRM is trying to say is important.
This is also why characters like Ned and Robb don’t lose the narrative’s sympathy (as opposed to the sympathy of certain audience members) following their deaths; they might have died and they might have been able to be more effective, but Ned was trying to keep war to a minimum and to protect children from someone who would have murdered them, while Robb married Jeyne to prevent her totally unfair disgrace. In spite of their failures, their willingness to put others before themselves is still worth something.
Conversely, the people who live by the principle that honour is for chumps aren’t currently finding long-term success, and it’s precisely because of that attitude. Nobody trusts them, not even their own families. They cannot build anything, they cannot restore peace, and they’re currently destroying themselves. This is the basic narrative of AFFC and ADWD.
Given all that, Jaime’s not getting killed off for anything as simple as thinking too much about honour.
“Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”— The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle (via sonnywortzik)
(Source: kylorenvevo)
Anonymous asked: Do you think Arya's problems with needlework might come from her being left handed? Especially if she was being taught to do it with her right hand?
Hmm, from what we see, Syrio is the first to recognize Arya’s left-handedness:
It was not just a stick, but a true wooden sword complete with grip and guard and pommel. Arya picked it up and clutched it nervously with both hands, holding it out in front of her. It was heavier than it looked, much heavier than Needle.
The bald man clicked his teeth together. “That is not the way, boy. This is not a greatsword that is needing two hands to swing it. You will take the blade in one hand.”
“It’s too heavy,” Arya said.
“It is heavy as it needs to be to make you strong, and for the balancing. A hollow inside is filled with lead, just so. One hand now is all that is needing.”
Arya took her right hand off the grip and wiped her sweaty palm on her pants. She held the sword in her left hand. He seemed to approve.
“The left is good. All is reversed, it will make your enemies more awkward.”–AGOT, Arya II
…and not just the first to recognize it, but approve of it…
Then yes, I think it’s very probable that Arya had trouble coordinating her stitches due to being taught to use the wrong hand. And not just needlework, but likely other crafts (drawing, painting), and musical instruments too.*
Mind you, I don’t think Arya has realized that her sword hand (and stick hand) is the one she should be using for other coordinated work, as per her TWOW preview chapter Mercy’s sewing is still “wretched”. Maybe that will change eventually?
*(Note: I’m a lefty, and though I never had trouble with my teachers due to observant and caring parents (my dad’s a lefty too), I think my left-handedness was a possible reason why I never had much in the way of music lessons. Also note that my younger brother did have a teacher who claimed he couldn’t write, until my parents found out the reason, that she was trying to force him right, and well that teacher got her ass handed to her, and the situation fixed immediately.)
There’s a lot of fandom meta and analysis that is so predicated on people starting from their conclusion and working backwards, so you get these bizarrely sanctimonious posts that are all like “lmao do Just Friends look at each other like this???????” and “if [Plot Point] isn’t true, then how do you explain the look on this character’s face?” and these metas or gifs or whatever become Canonical Proof of the thing they were reverse engineered to conclude, so that eventually there’s entire subgroups of fandoms who’ll be like “don’t believe us?? lemme show you the receipts” and I feel like the clerk at the returns desk at Target who’s like “these are lovely receipts, really, you put a lot of thought into them and I can clearly see your inspiration and interpretation, but I can’t give you store credit, my dude, you drew the damn things yourself”
