#my own stannis take does hurt me somewhat because for a while fanon stannis was /my/ boring little man

[astradrifting]

Hi! Were there any perspectives in the ASOIAF fandom that made your eyes roll? If there are, what made you say so? Thanks!

[mostly written in 2021, and posted very late. Sorry nonny!]

woof, this could open up a can of worms. I'm almost afraid this is a bait ask but I'm also very willing to run my mouth online about ASOIAF, and I love making fun of dumb theories, so let’s go!

Every time someone says that Jon and Dny are the song of ice and fire, my soul dies a little. Enough said.

I also hate the idea that parallels between ASOIAF history and the events of the books don’t matter. Not to state the obvious, but Westerosi history isn’t real. No part of it actually happened organically, GRRM has manufactured all of it, so everything must have been written with a purpose. I don’t buy that it’s just all world-building, because if parallels are obvious to us, they must be a thousand times more so for the man actually writing it all, and the army of editors who are probably helping him keep it straight.

There is absolutely no way that anything about Jonnel ‘One-Eye’ is a coincidence. Half-brother to Rickon Stark is obvious enough, but then we have his mother. Lynara sounds very similar to Lyanna (side note: a jonsa baby named Lynara would be adorable), but the real link is that she was born a Stark - all of the women on the family tree are listed under their maiden names. Her relation to her husband Cregan isn’t specified; it would have been so easy to have her be from another random house, or even a Karstark, yet what George wanted to convey is that Jonnel has a Stark mother, as well as a Stark father who happened to be heavily involved with the Targaryens.

Another fun thing linking Jonnel to Jon! Jon’s first relationship was with a red headed girl, who claimed that they were married because he’d stolen her. In the same conversation where she’s called half fish…

“You know nothing, Jon Snow. I’m half a fish, I’ll have you know.”

“Half fish, half goat, half horse…there’s too many halves to you, Ygritte.”

(ASOS, Jon V)

this conversation is already jonsa gospel as foreshadowing because of “half-fish”, but the horse part was always a little strange to me. As far as I remember, they didn’t have a prior conversation about her loving horses or riding particularly well, so that was seemingly out of left-field.

Well Jonnel’s second wife was a Ryswell - their sigil is a black horse’s head with a red mane.

pictured: the jonsa agenda winning again

The idea that Stannis will take Winterfell isn’t as personally annoying to me, all these dudebros have very detailed, tactics-based reasons to believe he’ll win I’m sure (something about a nightlamp?), but I just think it doesn’t do anything for the narrative, nor does it make sense with either his arc or Jon and Sansa’s.

Winning Winterfell will put Stannis in a position of strength, give him a base of operations in the North that’s not on loan from the Night’s Watch, and would probably lead to most of the Northern houses swearing allegiance to him, as Manderly has already promised to do. Why would a man in that position ever choose to burn his daughter, his only heir, alive? That is literally one of the few guaranteed book plots we have, so IMO speculation about Stannis all needs to work backwards from this end point; it’s ugly and horrible, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stomach reading it, but it’s the only ending to his arc that makes sense.

Kinslaying reoccurs time and time again in Stannis’ arc. Kinslaying for his own personal benefit, no less. In his first appearance in ACOK, he listens to Selyse suggest that he kill Renly, then stands by whilst Melisandre kills Maester Cressen, his surrogate father. Cressen raised him and loved him like a son; yet if he had killed Melisandre instead, Stannis would have lost the power she wields for his benefit, the main reason he has a chance at the throne. Later in the book, he implicitly allows his brother to be murdered so that he could gain the Stormlords that had rallied to Renly instead of him (anyone trying to argue that the shadow wasn’t technically Stannis so technically it wasn’t kinslaying will be put in the naughty corner for excessive pedantry). In ASOS, he’s willing to sacrifice his nephew, an innocent 12 year old under his guardianship. He says it’s for the realm, for duty, but really it’s for his destiny. What is the life of a bastard boy against a kingdom so close to his grasp?

It’s escalation. Each time so far he’s had a layer of deniability, but he’s not going to have that in the end. Ordering Shireen’s death himself, murdering his daughter in some desperate bid to secure victory over the Boltons, will be the final step off the cliff. Maybe he’ll have some military victories before that, smarter people than me have no doubt discussed the parallels to the Greek myth of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia, but I have no doubt Stannis’ story is headed only towards tragedy.

….Turns out that I do have a lot of feelings about Stannis. But to get back to my original point, Jon and Sansa taking Winterfell back together, travelling through the North doing the work and proving themselves as worthy rulers, makes a lot more sense for their future roles in the story than Stannis winning it all for them. It’s also much more affecting and thematically resonant, so I refuse to believe D&D entirely made up that storyline.

I also inevitably end up rolling my eyes whenever I'm bored enough to go onto r/asoiaf, there's always a bad take right on the front page. One that annoyed me enough to go into @istumpysk’s inbox and kickstart my jonsa blogging was one asking what the point of R+L=J even is, because it never amounted to anything and just muddled up J/D being “the song of ice and fire”.

While it gets so close to the point that it’s funny, there’s no way the “song” is going to boil down to a relationship, let alone JD. I would almost buy Jon and Dænerys being the song of ice and fire if Jon actually were just Ned’s bastard, all ‘ice’. Hell, if he really wanted to make a relationship the song of ice and fire, he could have cut out the middleman and made Jon a trueborn Stark from the start - make them starcrossed lovers from warring families, truly ice and truly fire. Utterly boring, but thematically coherent at least. A major point of Jon’s character is that he is both - and something a lot messier than that besides, as a bastard.

It's not all bad on r/asoiaf though, when I went back to look for that post I saw another about how the Titan of Braavos is a Pacific Rim-style mech that will come to life to fight any dragons coming to the city, a theory that I will be championing from this moment henceforth.

Wait, nevermind, in that same thread someone said that Jaehaerys is the sexiest Targ name, so r/asoiaf is immediately cancelled again. That's another fandom perspective that makes me roll my eyes, the idea that Jaehaerys is in any way an acceptable name, especially as Jon's ‘secret’ name.

This 👏 is 👏 Targaryen 👏 propaganda 👏

Just look at it!! How do you even pronounce that? The hill I will most definitely die on is that this name is ugly.

#astra rambles #me throughout this ask: AND ANOTHER THING #my own stannis take does hurt me somewhat because for a while fanon stannis was /my/ boring little man #however then I read the books and didn’t actually like him much lmao #jonsa #anti stannis baratheon #anti house targaryen #anti daenerys targaryen #anti targaryen stans #just covering my bases #meta #within all the rambling at least #jesus this is long #I cut out another terrible r/asoiaf post I was ranting about because it’s seriously been a year since I started this