That night she went to sleep thinking of her mother, and wondering if she should kill the Hound in his sleep and rescue Lady Catelyn herself. When she closed her eyes she saw her mother’s face against the back of her eyelids. She’s so close I could almost smell her …
… and then she could smell her. The scent was faint beneath the other smells, beneath moss and mud and water, and the stench of rotting reeds and rotting men. She padded slowly through the soft ground to the river’s edge, lapped up a drink, the lifted her head to sniff. The sky was grey and thick with cloud, the river green and full of floating things. Dead men clogged the shallows, some still moving as the water pushed them, others washed up on the banks. Her brothers and sisters swarmed around them, tearing at the rich ripe flesh.
The scent was stronger now.….Only the scent mattered. She sniffed the air again. There it was, and now she saw it too, something pale and white drifting down the river, turning where it brushed against a snag. The reeds bowed down before it….. As she dragged it up the muddy bank, one of her little brothers came prowling, his tongue lolling from his mouth. She had to snarl to drive him off, or else he would have fed. Only then did she stop to shake the water from her fur. The white thing lay facedown in the mud, her dead flesh wrinkled and pale, cold blood trickling from her throat. Rise, she thought. Rise and eat and run with us.
It was her mother she wanted, not her mother’s sister.
Wishing all the Americans who share my love of Our November celebration of blessings, family, and—let’s be honest, gluttony—a very happy Thanksgiving tomorrow!
I have all my men under my roof at the same time for the first time in nearly a year, and I’m loving every minute of it! (Even if I did just leave them all downstairs enjoying each other’s company and a bottle of Macallan while I’m heading to sleep because I’m getting up early to cook all day!!
It’s been an eventful year for the DKNC family with a roller coaster of highs and lows and big life events for everyone, but we are all well and together now—looking forward to our feast tomorrow and Son #1’s wedding in just over 3 weeks!
I miss writing. Life has conspired to keep me focused on many other things for a very long time, and given my son and and soon-to-be daughter-in-law’s selection of a mid-December wedding, I’ve no hope of reviving my traditional Christmas fic from years past this year. But I have decided that after a year like this one, I need to get back to doing some of the things I love just for me. So I’m committing to update one of my long dormant works in process at least every two months in 2022. That’s still an abysmally slow writing schedule, but exponentially better than I’ve done in ages—and I’ve gotta start somewhere, right?
In the mean time, I once wrote a Thanksgiving fic and it is the season, so if any of you Ned/Cat folks (or general Stark family fun fans) are interested in an old story set on Turkey Day, here’s the link to “Turkey and Family History.”
Part 7 of the long dormant Love, Unexpected series–a modern AU series centered on Ned and Catelyn Stark has been posted on AO3HERE. It is entitled All Kind of Messy and picks up immediately after the end of The Wild Wolf. This one is in Catelyn’s POV.
Summary: The Stark family navigates the most tragic twenty-four hours in their lives, and Catelyn finds comfort from a surprising source as she faces her own terrifying battle without Ned by her side. The only way forward for all of them is through the pain, and the only thing that can sustain them on this journey through the dark places is the strength they find in one another.
I have a Cersei Lannister doll that lives on my desk and rightfully ought to be holding a glass of wine but unfortunately is not. For those of you who don’t know, Cersei Lannister is a female (villain) protagonist of HBO’s Game of Thrones, an adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire.
I’ve been invested in fantasy literature for over a decade; my dad took me to see The Lord of the Rings when I was 9 and I’ve been reading the Harry Potter series since I was younger than that. I’ve read all 14 books of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, I endured the awfulness that was the Sword of Truth saga, not to mention every obscure girl power fantasy series from Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books and Graceling by Kristen Cashore to all the godawful books starring a self insert Mary Sue protagonist with violet eyes and white hair.
Over the years, I’ve learned that it is not particularly fun to be a woman in fantasy circles and it is doubly not fun to be a woman of color, and I have the profound luck to be both. The strange thing about nerd culture as a whole is that for something that supposedly was created to abolish the hegemony of the society we live in, it does a pretty pathetic job of it.
That is, those who dominate nerd culture don’t want to abolish the complex social hierarchy–they simply want to establish a new social hierarchy with themselves on top, a marginally more nuanced version of the trite, tired racism and sexism we have to deal with in day-to-day life. (I’d recommend Laurie Penny’s impeccable articleabout this because she expresses so many of the issues I have personally faced in these environments.)
I read A Song of Ice and Fire in its entirety when I was 16 on an offhand comment from an ex-boyfriend that I was too much of a ditz to complete them, but I didn’t watch the show until the third season was released in 2013. Game of Thrones is an unprecedented success for HBO; it’s extraordinarily well acted and the audience encompasses all walks of life, from college students like myself to adults who watch with their own friends and family. What’s remarkable about Game of Thrones is how many women are genuinely interested and invested in the series, which rarely happens in fantasy themed media, which has long been a stronghold for the oh-so-repressed white male nerd.
There are many problems with Game of Thrones, those which exist in the source material and those that are singular to the adaptation but the fact remains, on a literal level, there are more female characters of different backgrounds and convictions than almost any other mainstream television show. The sad fact about our society is that it’s still revolutionary to regard women as people with complexities and nuances that are usually only granted to men.
I have many issues with GRRM’s writing because I think he resorts to traditional fantasy tropes far too often, which are rooted in misogyny. This includes but is not limited to: the tendency to fridge women to cater to “manpain;” the derision of and tendency to apologize for the conventionally feminine, not only in looks but in personality; and a heavy hand with racial issues. The show itself does a mismatched job with those issues. As a program, I give it much higher marks than as an adaptation, but at the same time, Game of Thrones falls prey, especially in its later seasons, to what I like to refer to as “HBO’s Deference to White Male Intellectual Jerking Off.”
In other words, the True Detective effect: prioritizing the narratives and stories of white men over any other group; refusing to grant anyone else the emotional range and resonance granted to white men. And more disturbingly, the program delights in using women’s pain and bodies as props, which is indicative of a more disturbing trend in our society.
Off the top of my head, issues with the show include Catelyn Stark’s silencing and portrayal as a secondary character in Robb Stark’s storyline while she is the point of view character in the novels, Cersei Lannister’s whitewashing (which I can somewhat excuse because of the amount of misogynistic hatred even her toned down show version receives), and her rape on her son’s alter by Jaime, her twin brother/lover (which I can’t excuse since the scene in the novel is defined by her explicit “yes”).
But the treatment of Ros and other sex workers in the show, this excess of female nudity and sexual violence, is indicative of a far more sinister misogyny in the show, where women are regarded as worthless unless they are easily sexualized by the male gaze or “relatable,” hence Arya and Brienne’s “not like other girls” portrayal that their book counterparts entirely lack.
Most recently, the completely unnecessary, non-canonical rape of Sansa Stark in Episode 6 of Season 5 has been universally condemned by countless others and for good reason. Sansa takes on the storyline of a minor character, Jeyne Poole, but my question and many others’ is: if the writers didn’t bother with the source material that includes Lady Stoneheart and Arianne Martell, storylines where women have power and agency, why were they so intent on including a storyline where an underage girl was brutally raped and traumatized?
And even more glaringly, recount the horrific event from Theon Greyjoy’s perspective? They couldn’t even portray the storyline in a way that made it about Sansa herself. Instead they made it about Theon’s dissociation from his identity and it’s revolting. When Theon was tortured and brutalized, it was all about his pain, his journey; his experience wasn’t used to showcase someone else’s struggle. It’s because, like on so many other shows and in real life, women’s pain is so normalized it’s not even worth talking about, except in regards to how it affects white men, and as a young woman, as a young woman of color, as a human being capable of empathy, it’s disgusting.
Despite the numerous issues I have with Game of Thrones, I’m going to continue watching the show because I’m invested in the characters. I’m not even hate watching like many former fans (though I don’t begrudge them, or anyone who has decided to stop watching). I am going to continue to praise what the show does well, namely the acting and casting, and condemn it when it messes up like it so often does.
I will be an informed fan, taking into account my personal life experiences as well as other people’s to evaluate the show. I am not interested in people who insist on condemning those who watch it as “not proper fans.” The people who insist on praising the show to all heavens, ignoring the raging issues it has with violence against women in particular, bore me as well. “Historical accuracy” isn’t a valid argument and I’m not wrong for wanting something better.
I have always done my duty, she thought. Perhaps that was why her lord father had always cherished her best of all his children. Her two older brothers had both died in infancy, so she had been son as well as daughter to Lord Hoster until Edmure was born. Then her mother had died and her father had told her that she must be the lady of Riverrun now, and she had done that too. And when Lord Hoster promised her to Brandon Stark, she had thanked him for making her such a splendid match.
I gave Brandon my favor to wear, and never comforted Petyr once after he was wounded, nor bid him farewell when Father sent him off. And when Brandon was murdered and Father told me I must wed his brother, I did so gladly, though I never saw Ned’s face until our wedding day. I gave my maidenhood to this solemn stranger and sent him off to his war and his king and the woman who bore him his bastard, because I always did my duty.
Arya Stark Appreciation Week: Day 4 - Foreshadowing
“The Lannisters are proud,” Jon observed. “You’d think the royal sigil would be sufficient, but no. He makes his mother’s House equal in honor to the king’s.”
“The woman is important too!” Arya protested. Jon chuckled. “Perhaps you should do the same thing, little sister. Wed Tully to Stark in your arms.”
“A wolf with a fish in its mouth?” It made her laugh. - Arya, AGoT
She splashed noisily through the shallows and threw herself into the deeper water, her legs churning. The current was strong but she was stronger. She swam, following her nose. The river smells were rich and wet, but those were not the smells that pulled her. She paddled after the sharp red whisper of cold blood, the sweet cloying stench of death. She chased them as she had often chased a red deer through the trees, and in the end she ran them down, and her jaw closed around a pale white arm.She shook it to make it move, but there was only death and blood in her mouth. By now she was tiring, and it was all she could do to pull the body back to shore. As she dragged it up the muddy bank, one of her little brothers came prowling, his tongue lolling from his mouth. She had to snarl to drive him off, or else he would have fed. Only then did she stop to shake the water from her fur. The white thing lay facedown in the mud, her dead flesh wrinkled and pale, cold blood trickling from her throat. Rise, she thought. Rise and eat and run with us. - Arya, ASoS
I think it’s pretty obvious by now that Arya will meet up with Lady Stoneheart and I believe she will give mercy to her mother.
I highly recommend reading this post by@gendrie that explores the important relationship between Arya and Catelyn
