The most disturbing thing to me (besides everything) about the story Roose tells Theon regarding Ramsay’s conception and upbringing is how equivalently Roose treats everyone and everything in that story, save himself.
The story starts with Roose hunting a fox along the Weeping Water - and, as such, well within the jurisdiction of Roose’s lands. This is Roose exercising his lordly privilege of hunting, and while there is little information on what animals are reserved for the nobility versus available for smallfolk to hunt, it’s very possible if not probable that Westerosi jurisprudence would consider that fox Roose’s fox, to be hunted at his leisure. Roose then goes on not only to note that he wanted the miller’s wife but that she was “his due”; the property language he employs with respect to her is as obvious as it is awful. By marrying his new wife without Roose’s leave or knowledge, the miller “cheated” Roose of what Roose considers his lawful property (and note how even Roose’s evaluation of the miller’s wife is more akin to the way someone would review a work animal than a fellow person.- Roose emphasizes that she was “a tall, willowy creature, very healthy-looking”, and that emphasis is his, not mine). Roose murders the miller based on a custom made illegal centuries prior, and there is no sense of passing judgement or handing down a legal punishment (which, of course, there could not be for what had not been a crime since the days of Jaehaerys I); to do so would be to imply that Roose were dealing with a person, and Roose very clearly saw this miller as less than human. Roose not only equates his horse’s lameness with the escape of the fox and the disappointing (to him) rape of the miller’s wife, but even complains that the rape was not worth the rope he used to hang the miller; in Roose’s eyes, the miller’s wife’s value (exclusively sexual, in his mind) does not even reach that of a strand of rope. When Ramsay is born, Roose considers whipping his mother (no coincidence that whips are so often used in the novels on animals and slaves) and murdering Ramsay, and stays his hand only because Ramsay is literally marked as his property, by sharing his Bolton eyes; the mark recalls to me the specific slave tattoos sported by some slaves in and around Volantis, specifying the individual entities that own them (a turtle for the slaves who serve at the Painted Turtle, a crude rendition of the figurehead for the slave sailors of the Selaesori Qhoran).
The fox, the miller’s wife, the miller, the horse, Ramsay, the miller’s brother … every single living entity in this story apart from Roose himself is equal in Roose’s cold eyes. They are all his property, as much as the non-living mill and hanging rope, to be used and disposed of as he saw (and sees) fit. He claims them as his “right” when and how he likes, and he decides when they live and die. None of these creatures (as they are in Roose’s mind, explicitly so with the miller’s wife) are supposed to have wills of their own, and when any of them shows one, it’s a source of annoyance to him: the fox getting away adds to the “dismal day” Roose had raping Ramsay’s mother; when the miller’s brother beats his sister-in-law for giving birth to Bolton’s child, Roose takes both the mill and his tongue from him specifically because he was annoyed; and he complains to Theon that the miller’s wife disobeyed him by encouraging Ramsay to think of himself as a Bolton, instead of making him “content to grind corn”. Roose doesn’t use the term “slaves”, but that is absolutely how he thinks of the people on his lands; he is a slaver as much as the formally named slavers of Essos, treating the people on his lands as equivalent to (and indeed, in some ways less than) the animals on it.
On the other hand, the wealthless, nameless, meaningless, powerless woman got her revenge in the most spectacular way possible.
It is Roose’s coldness and Domeric learning what brotherhood meant while fostered at the Redfort (by the way, Red-fort, Red-King, Dread-fort, just saying...) that leads Domeric to want to visit Ramsay
Roose suspects that Ramsay did the poisoning... but what if the wealthless, nameless, meaningless, powerless woman actually did it? Having bred Ramsay, learnt about the substance Reek carried and knowing how he was leads to Domeric’s death...
Then Roose is forced to co-opt Ramsay for his House’s survival. And we know how THAT will turn out.
The poor woman loses a son... but gains the most spectacular revenge. And Roose couldn’t possibly foresee this, because it would mean something akin to a soup actually had something to say.
IT’s also a cautionary tale, because even if a downtrodden woman, her injustice and willingness to play “the game of thrones” takes out an innocent, proving that “innocent suffer most, when you high lords play the game of thrones”
