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Nothing ever stays dead... but with Viktor and Jayce!

This is an Arcane art style study I did a few days ago🩵 I also wanted to make a drawing/study with the both of them, so when I saw the new S2 poster, i thought that was the perfect opportunity lol

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i want to fight for winterfell, lady sansa.

prints + merch

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I wanted to draw him in sea light

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request! theon greyjoy & jeyne poole

heyyy i'm back its been a while :( life has not been v nice to me lately. but hopefully i can get back to posting! (more requests should be coming soonish so dw if you sent one, it'll happen i promise <3)

anyways this was fun to draw - still not sure how to draw jeyne and post-ramsay theon

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New Theon art for the first time in two years or so. He'll always be my favorite!!

#theon greyjoy #game of thrones #a song of ice and fire #house greyjoy #greyjoy #alfie allen #art #fan art

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I got rid of his oxygen tube (is that what it’s called??) he’s not in the hospital he’s at home and snug and comfy and everything is wonderful :))

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theon thoughts about age 'adulthood' infantilisation...

19-21 is terribly, tragically young to go through everything theon goes through, at the same time it is also the case that theon, by being a hostage, was kept in 'perpetual childhood', and that normally he would at 19-20 already be doing things of import in a military-aristocrat kind of way, which he isn't doing, and that this lack of purpose clearly makes him very frantic, and impatient. theon actively distances himself from the children in winterfell ('you are children') while also socially stuck at their level. robb (14) can boss him around even. theon is eager to go to work as an adult: whenever there is some manly task to be done in the stark household theon is shouting: me! i'll take care of that! (from killing monster-babies over going to war over organising for battle over helping the lady of the house down her boat).

"i am the man," he fantasises, going home to the iron islands, only to be slapped in the face by his father, "like a child", later he gets chaperoned (& supervised) on his first raid by his uncle and dagmer, "like a child" again. by then, of course, the spiel is that he deserves this treatment, since he has proven himself immature. a the consequence creating its own reason situation.

in fandom you do often see theon as 'one of the kids', while other young adults (rhaegar, tyrion, beric dondarrion) who haven't hit 25 get considered adult men or middle aged men even. rhaegar, tyrion, teenagers like robb, jon, dany, inhabit roles of adulthood, with burdens of responsibility and power we don't associate with childhood. it is brutal that those so young must be that.

for theon, being a 19/20 year old child was yet not a reprieve, nor a choice, nor something inherent in him (like a lack of ambition, say-on the contrary, ambition theon doesn't lack!). a 20 year old theon who grew up on the iron islands would have all sorts of adulthood responsibilities and skills that he didn't get to develop; this is a relevant plot point even.

of course theon is anything but a willing freeloader at house stark who doesn't want to grow up and doesn't want to leave: on the contrary, he wants so very much and is very very motivated, but is, you know, kept captive; another relevant plot point.

so fandom reception as theon 'as one of the kids' might be one of these things: a) a reaction to his actual social position as a child at the beginning of the story, parallel to the stark kids, and his disastrous coming-of-age horror arc later, again parallel to the asoiaf kids, which slots him into the same age category b) a general unwillingness to consider theon victimised by house stark, so he wasn't kept captive, he encrusted himself out of his own free will, he wasn't kept from doing things, he just avoided responsibilities, etc. transposing the violence into personality.

and then the only time in the narrative, this brief window of time in his life where he is not captive, and he fails so bad & follows all his worst impulses! captive again, his fault, he is a villain, how could he go free? look at how terrible he is when left to go free. i know so many disagree on that, or consider it apologia somehow to bring up, but you do need the captivity for theon as story to make sense, imo, you need it. maybe that's why theon's captivity & hostage status is what grrm keeps explaining in interviews about him. if you dismiss the captivity as emotionally not relevant, what are you left with?

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My first contribution to the tumblr Greyjoy ecosystem 🧎‍♀️

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Reek and post-Reek Theon doodles.

(In the universe where Theon stays with Asha <3 maybe grows his hair out in Greyjoy tradition. Secretly dyed it dark again)

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Hey Theon fans!! I'm looking specifically for a traditional art print of Castle Pyke to hang in my house! I'd love watercolor, ink, or oil paint. There's a lot on Google, but most of it is digital, and an organic, old-world look is important to me in wall art. I thought, who better to ask than the asoiaf-lore-obsessed Greyjoy fandom?? Let me know if you have favorite art pieces!! Would love to support a small artist if possible!

#theon greyjoy #game of thrones #a song of ice and fire #pyke #castle Pyke #greyjoy #house greyjoy

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A song of ice and fire House Greyjoy Castle Pyke

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well anyway i don't see adwd!theon's time in winterfell as a reckoning to the tune of too late does this heedless villain see the error of his ways or any such narrative justice. personally i find it the most thematically interesting and, stay with me here, hopeful of theon's three "returns" i.e. his return to pyke, his acok return to winterfell, and finally the adwd return in question. this probably hinges on how of late i've grown more comfortable identifying winterfell as a decimated metropolis, yet a thriving necropolis—a place where the dead have been dead longer than the living have been living. without getting too much into that, i'll leave it with how siri hustvedt paraphrases lewis mumford: "people want to live close to the burial places of their ancestors, to whom they are drawn with mingled feelings of worship and dread, and that is how the city is born."

in acok, winterfell died when it was divested of starks (a symbolic death of winterfell as there are none left to inherit it) and burnt to the ground (a physical death). my point in all this is to say there is mutuality, a symbiosis that characterizes theon's third and final "return." he comes as reek, horrified to hell by ramsay and roose. theon's dehumanization has taken from him both a physical identity—his looks have changed so drastically that he is unrecognizable—and a metaphysical one—he is no longer afforded even the nominal identity of theon greyjoy. the reason i keep putting return in quotes, which i will now stop doing, is because obviously that's a myth. in reality, return occurs in the memory, and if memories contradict then returns cannot happen even there. theon cannot go back to a time prior to his torture. on pyke his family rejects him ("your blood and your heir." lord balon grunted. "we shall see."), in acok winterfell refuses any memory of him in lieu of classifying him as an invader (she gaped at him as if he were some stranger), and in adwd he remarks that winterfell is no longer "the castle he remembered from the summer of his youth." there are no homecomings.

however, a big thing that occurs in adwd is that we see both theon and winterfell being raised back to life. these two plots are connected or perhaps even the same. reek is forced to reclaim theon greyjoy in order to renew the stark claim via jeyne-as-arya. by doing this, by becoming theon, the stark return is recognized, and winterfell is revived. the proof is in the pudding: winterfell rapidly becomes a site of conflict thanks to it's value being restored. we see that jon is unwilling to renounce his vows in order to be named lord stark until the situation with ramsay and jeyne-as-arya comes to a head. elsewhere in the north, it's suddenly time to dust off those banners and rescue valiant ned's precious little girl. wyman manderly makes his way to winterfell only after sending davos on a quest to retrieve rickon stark. in each case, it requires a living stark to make winterfell any sort of prize.

back to theon. thanks to a nifty sidequest with barbrey, theon is also the one to find the entryway to the crypts, which represents a limb of sorts to the structure of winterfell. he is the one the heart tree speaks to. two bodies destroyed yet they know one another / know each other's names. what does the beating heart of winterfell say to him? "theon." what does he say back? "the old gods... know me." okay. self-recognition through the other. love it. love it so much in the face of that whole spiel tyrion once gave:

Tyrion had only the vaguest memory of Theon Greyjoy from his time with the Starks. A callow youth, always smiling, skilled with a bow; it was hard to imagine him as Lord of Winterfell. The Lord of Winterfell would always be a Stark.

He remembered their godswood; the tall sentinels armored in their grey-green needles, the great oaks, the hawthorn and ash and soldier pines, and at the center the heart tree standing like some pale giant frozen in time. He could almost smell the place, earthy and brooding, the smell of centuries, and he remembered how dark the wood had been even by day. That wood was Winterfell. It was the north. I never felt so out of place as I did when I walked there, so much an unwelcome intruder. He wondered if the Greyjoys would feel it too. The castle might well be theirs, but never that godswood.

so yes. i am contextualizing theon's final return as a rebirth, actually. worship and dread.

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theon greyjoy is truly the worlds most compelling character. imaging you are nineteen living through The Horrors but right before this you were debating whether or not you had enough black clothing to go join the “we forgive you” squad in middle of antarctica bc you took over the home that you grew up in and killed two kids (not the two you said they were)! all of this for your dad to prove a point, and he doesn’t even love you. btw you’re never going home again!!!!!!

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This is excellent! The last portrait in particular i love, I always loved that shot of him and you really did justice to his cheekbones!!

Some portraits of Theon Greyjoy (Game of Thrones), one of my favourite characters. <3

#Theon Greyjoy

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these thoughts getting so tangential to the og point that i'd rather make a new post on the subject, the subject being: is killing off your deeply traumatised character for closure per se bad writing, or do people fail to appreciate tragedy.

most or all times i have seen minority rejection of a character death, that death was not presented or proposed as a tragedy in the first place, but as 'good' ending.

for instance: people who fantasise about dany killed as villain or dany self-sacrificing out of guilt or selflessness don't imagine a tragedy. her death would be a good ending that satisfactorily cleans up ends: the villain vanquished, the bothersome character dead for a good cause leaving the room for the survivors. bittersweet, maybe, sad, but as it should be.

theon's death in got was seen as satisfactory, because he redeemed himself dying for the house he betrayed. because "after having been a coward all his life he died brave". i quote common reactions here. readers fantasise about theon's death in asoiaf because it "would release him from his pain". but also because it seems morally satisfactory: a character that did this amount of evil shouldn't survive, so for theon to cross over into the groups of heroes that we may feel sad for, he must die.

in contrast, among theon enjoyers, who tend to be pro theon survival generally, there is also a tradition of writing theon death fic. but in these fics, theon's death is used as indictment of theon's situation or environment, it is used as proof that not all is as it should be when theon dies. he dies a waste. he death should upset and not please. it throws a taint and shadow over the heroes instead of releasing them from responsibility. we don't walk away with a sense of justice and opportunity created for the more deserving characters. it's a tragedy.

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asoiaf characters as posts that remind me of them pt 2

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