Sometimes I see posts about how "I, Strahd" Tatyana has the personality of a cardboard but I don't think I agree honestly.
We only see her in very few scenes (all from Strahd's POV) and she's always very gentle and soft spoken.
Which makes completely sense since she was a lowborn orphan trying to make a good impression on her future brother in law, who is not only the ruler of the valley but also a feared war criminal. Of course she would try to be as nice as possible in front of him.
I also think that Strahd was extremely genuine in thinking he was in love with Tatyana, it's just that he never really knew her the way Sergei did. He only knew a facet.
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wait hang on 😭😭 are people seriously debating “he’s a complicated man” right now??
i agree that izzy’s an unreliable narrator, and i think that some of the things he’s said about ed aren’t necessarily true, much as many other things he’s said are also not necessarily true. he’s not really aware of the full picture the whole time, poor duck, as much as i adore him.
but like… besides the fact it really doesn’t have anything to do with wether or not you think izzy’s doing complex evil shit to ed on purpose, and people seem to be making it about that…
ed is VERY MUCH a complicated man. as someone who relates to ed probably more than stede or izzy… he’s absolutely a complicated man. ed can be violent, and suicidal, and he clearly experiences some form of emotional dysregulation, and he’s done things to people that weren’t justified. the crew was traumatised by ed’s behaviour and how much violence he placed them in a position to commit.
the way ed responds to rejection is so violent and out of proportion, his consecutive raids, his suicidal antagonism towards the crew… and for me and my personal issues, that’s extremely relatable… but it is NOT mentally well behaviour.
ed also exhibits patterns of disordered alcohol use, and his anger often causes him to lash out (yes, often at izzy who pushes his buttons, and yes, izzy’s behaviour is a factor in this. but it’s also worth noting ed has agency as a character and his violence is still violence, provoked or not) and one of his most integral traumas is how an act of violence saved him from the violent alcoholic who was his father.
there’s nothing about ed that’s not a complicated man. he’s done bad things that weren’t justified. that doesn’t make him a bad man. it makes him a complicated one. it’s very clear he knows how to be a better person. and that he can be. that the show left out a lot of that journey is really disappointing, but ed feels like he’s a monster and he does bad things to become the villain he thinks he deserves to be treated as, you know?
he is SUCH a complicated man. that doesn’t mean he’s irredeemable or bad, it doesn’t mean there’s a moral obligation to dislike him either. none of that’s the case. but izzy got it right when he called ed complicated. i think in some ways izzy had finally realised that he wasn’t always going to understand ed because ed wasn’t always going to think the way he did, but he was coming to accept that he didn’t need ed to be someone he could understand as long as ed was happy? does that make sense? i know that’s a sappy outlook on a canonically toxic relationship but i just cannot believe that there’s a genuinely widely accepted take going around which boils down to people thinking it’s wrong to call ed a complicated man. like, huh???? girl….
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@sunflowersansa, #catelyn was raised to be hosters successor for almost a decade wasnt she?
the annoying thing is we don't have an approximate age for edmure, nor any age for cat when minisa died (in childbirth with a last, stillborn son, not edmure). i've seen fanart depicting him as anywhere from a toddler to a younger teen/tween when catelyn and lysa were teenagers. but i feel pretty confident in my estimation of ~7/8yrs age difference between eldest sister and baby brother, and not just bc of symmetry with the next generation. my reasoning is thus:
we all assume catelyn had some grooming as an heiress, rather than it just being a nominal status in early childhood. how much training can one really give a 3 or 4yo, y'know? we know rickon never had any manly lord lessons from ned since he was still so young when they parted. if she was closer to 7 or 8 when edmure came along, that leaves more realistic time for education, and a sizable number of years with only daughters for hoster to try to accustom himself to lack of a son and make do accordingly. even only 1 or 2 years of rulership lessons would still matter when minisa's death left hoster more dependent on her as not just hostess but later a trusted confidant of a sort until she got married.
ned thinks of edmure as "the boy" in his pov when hearing of the mountain's first attacks in the riverlands. we know ned's not great with keeping up with ageing from his earlier comments about tommen, and he surely hasn't seen edmure in many years, but this tells me that when they did meet at riverrun, edmure was not that close in age to himself, catelyn, and lysa. (i think it's less likely to see someone as frozen in childhood if they're anywhere near your age cohort.) ned could still be wrong about edmure's age thinking he couldn't possibly be at least 25 and any green knight younger than that was still a boy or youth, but that miscalculation makes more sense to me if he was around ~26 rather than a fellow thirtysomething or a guy pushing thirty.
we also know that edmure acted as brandon's squire in his duel with littlefinger, which i read as more someone playacting at some squirely practice when not yet consideed old enough to be anyone's assigned squire, with the informal nature of the duel which meant lightly-armored littlefinger having no squire of his own, and brandon having an actual squire who likely could have been present. so that lines up with a ~10yo edmure to 15yo littlefinger, 16yo lysa, 18yo catelyn, and 20yo brandon. (this is admittedly the most subjective point and i wouldn't consider it strong evidence if not consistent with the rest.)
catelyn doubted her memories of her mother, including her appearence, which in this world strangely devoid of portraits, still makes me think she was quite young when they lost her. so, yeah, not a large gap between edmure's birth and minisa's death in her next childbirth. if catelyn was 8/9 or even 10 when her mother died and she became de facto lady of riverrun, that could line up with the lannister twins losing their mother at 7 and not having strong memories of joanna.
idt catelyn really did think of riverrun as her birthright when her brief time as conscious heiress was a small fraction of her life, with at least 6yrs knowing she'd move away to be lady (consort) of winterfell instead and the rest of her life living out that responsibility as northern wife and mother. but it must still sting to be used to such a position of importance in her earlier time in riverrun and have no real authority when she returned to live there again as an adult, especially when edmure still seemed to act (to her) like the baby of the family not entirely matured into the authority he held all for himself. there's a part in her time in renly's camp when she thought robb was years younger but still knew what he was doing more than the southern king and his knights of summer playing at war. i'd imagine a simaliar feeling whenever edmure annoyed her. that's another difference between robb and edmure, that robb was a dutiful eldest sibling like his mother, formerly catelyn's baby but never anyone's baby brother. while edmure, even if he was (my by headcanon) a few years older than renly and unlike renly was meant to be a male heir from birth, was still a youngest child of 3 like renly.
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we never see much of Dathomir, and what little we see is usually connected to Mother Talzin's side of the planet - the side where she ruled as a powerful witch, where a clan of nightbrothers is submissive to her clan and just as ready to die at her order as her nightsisters. but we do also see hints that she is just as megalomaniacal and tyrannical as Palpatine, so why should we believe this is the default?
in the better Dathomir that lives in my head if a clan is submissive to another, it is something political between them, not a reflection of the entire planet's power dynamics. the "Nightsisters keep the Nightbrothers as slaves and breeding stock" is a malicious misunderstanding by outsiders who wanted to paint dathomirians as savages. it is blatantly racist, but so is a lot of the galaxy, so no one really questions it.
in the better Dathomir that lives in my head the Nightsisters and Nightbrothers are equals, and it's not that the men are kept isolated, but that every clan lives mostly isolated from each other, possibly for safety reasons - this is the planet where rancors are originally from, it's entirely possible that in the old times wild rancors used to raid and destroy villages, and living near each other put them at risk of successive attacks. by isolating from each other they minimized the risk of losing entire generations at the same time, even if it creates a highly fragmented society and culture.
in the better Dathomir that lives in my head magic is not exclusive to the Nightsisters, it's just something some clans (of both Nightsisters and Nightbrothers) practice and others don't.
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I wish "support" and "condemn" weren't the two dominant modes of talking about a character because imo that's fundamentally the most boring way to look at it, and also because like. There are things jgy, who I love, did that I think are extremely fucked up and kinda disturbing, and how the character gets there and then deals with having done that, and why are very much part of what I find compelling. And that's not compatible with a lot of... I guess "pro" jgy stuff but that's stupid! Like. The psychosexual derangement of jgs's murder is so juicy! The "it's actually fine, just don't think about it, that's what I do 🙃" response to Qin Su and then ??????? When she thinks that's nuts is very juicy too! Yes he is very smart and very polite and often well intentioned and often has a choice between bad and worse but it is also important that he is a a little bit of a nut job and I would find him kinda boring if he wasn't tbqh
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