re: the discussion about karma in asoiaf, i think it's so fascinating that one of the things that damns cersei in the end is her relationship with lancel. lancel is so constantly treated as a joke by the lannister kids in the earlier books, as an unimportant person, that it would have been easy for george to push him out of the narrative as soon as he outlasted his usefulness after the battle of blackwater bay. but the narrative cares about lancel, cares about his emotional state, about his victimization. it doesnt treat the fact that he was exploited by cersei as a vulnerable 16 year old as a joke like the other characters do.
the fact that lancel turns to the faith of the seven as a way to make sense of his trauma falls in line with how aeron and mel do the same for their own griefs, and the way that theon seems to turn to the old gods in the godswood after his own treatment--the physical descriptions of lancel and theon are strikingly similar. lancel and aeron and theon all seem to be aged severely by their trauma (while mel is the opposite, appearing youthful despite being the oldest living character of them all)
i guess in the end im just glad that lancel is taken seriously by the narrative, and that time and time again george takes the hopes and sorrows side characters as seriously as main characters. whether it's lancel or lancel or penny or eroeh or hazzea or the miller's boys, the one thing that is punished by the arc of the story time and again is the belief that certain people matter more than others
arya's decision to kill chiswyck because of how he raped and murdered layna is one of those storytelling choices that really show how the little people are prioritized in the narrative. like sure arya couldve used her jaqen h'ghar genie wishes on killing tywin or whatever. but the whole point is that layna mattered too. the death of mycah weighs heavily on arya and ned, and the fact that of all of the Hound's crimes it’s mycah’s murder that he stands on trial for at aryas insistence is significant as a story choice.
it's telling that arya's prioritization of the 'little guy' is reflected in all the starks in different ways. sansa saves dontos hollard. robb spares osha. jon saves the old man the freefolk tell him to kill. bran probably has a moment that im blanking on right now. rickon is four.
in a series where the meaning of heroism is constantly upheld and subverted in different ways by characters such as stannis and rhaegar and robb, it stands of note that the most consistent way a hero is identified by the narrative is how they uphold the worth of the ordinary person, even when it doesn't benefit them, even when it hurts them. lyanna “that’s my fathers man you’re kicking” stark, the knight of the laughing tree, stands up for howland reed. dunk kicks a prince of the crown for the sake of a puppet girl. maybe it's true that there's no such thing as a true hero, and that all honor is a mist that melts in the morning. but a common person is not "no one."
i accept that a lot of the characters had to be aged up in the show but smth about jaime being like 40 n still fucking his sister just feels unreasonable to me like girl its time to hang it up how long u gonna keep doin this...
“Seven, Brienne thought again, despairing. She had no chance against seven, she knew. No chance, and no choice. She stepped out into the rain, Oathkeeper in hand.
‘Leave her be. If you want to rape someone, try me.’ ”
In the Undying Lands, they had two hundred years of contentment together, and they used them to the fullest. By this time, neither of them were Lords of anything any longer, and had any such duties been required, there were many better suited for it. They were forced to fulfil such promises as they had made each other in the before times, and if Legolas had spent hours in exasperation that a dwarf could see any difference between two chips of stone no larger than his thumb, he was reassured that his beloved had spent at least as many hours wondering that he could need both maple and cedar in the woodlands he tended near the house they had built themselves.
Nevertheless, when Gimli left to wherever Aulë called his kind, Legolas felt the bitterness of it well up in him. Less than three hundred years had they had together.
Perhaps his father would have been able to dissuade him, but perhaps not. Regardless, his father had not come, fulfilling whatever duties or penance he had set himself in the West. Thus, easily was Legolas able to deafen himself to such advice as came his way, mostly by avoiding people altogether.
Only Gandalf (for Legolas would not now call him anything else, when they were the last remaining of their ill-fated Fellowship) still set himself in his path, looking no different from when he had still been a Wanderer, still Gandalf the Grey.
“You continue to be a fool,” Gandalf remarked.
“Yes,” Legolas agreed.
“Are you still going?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes,” Legolas replied.
At first, he went towards the Halls of the Smith, thinking perhaps of only seeing, of asking whether he was Dwarf enough in craft now to be given a few moments in his unending life of meeting Gimli again.
He spent three long years in this travel, slowly treasuring his memories of the first days he had met Gimli, when they had been far from friends, far from friendly, when they would have fought to bloodletting as soon as introduced themselves. It would have been a fine battle. Gimli had remarked more than once that if they had been allowed to have a fight, they would have become friends faster. Legolas had retorted that he did not wish to only be Gimli’s friend. When Aule came to him, he was remembering Gimli describing to him, slowly and with relish, what dwarven friends and shieldbrothers may do, under the polite cover of night.
“Thou art near as hotheaded as some of my Children,” Aulë said, appearing before him, in an ironsmith’s smock. “Where fled the wisdom of the Elder Children?”
When Legolas looked around, he realised he was in the Smithy. He bowed in the dwarven way. “I am Thranduilion of the Wood Elves,” he said, “we are not known for our wisdom.”
“And foresight?” Aulë asked, absently, taking a look at the long spear in his hand and then bending it, that had been two palms thick and over six feet long, into a ball, before he tossed it into the furnace.
“I am not known for that either.” Legolas did not rise from his bow. “All I have is my honesty and my heart.”
Aulë nodded, and then the young smith became all at once a greybeard. “And what will thee here, Wood-Elf?”
“My husband,” Legolas replied.
“And will thee take him away from his rest and his family and keep him undying beyond his spirit’s ken for the rest of the Age?” Aulë asked.
Legolas would not. “And yet I would see him,” he said. “Can I not join him in his rest?”
The greybeard sat down in his stone chair and seemed hunchbacked with age. In the next moment Legolas was back in the forest, but his eyes saw the memory of Gimli no more. It was a grave price to pay, but Legolas would have paid more, if only, if only.
He turned his weary footsteps to Mount Taniquetil. The very wind and air were against him, not harsh but warning. He knew he would not reach Ilmarin, but he also could not stop. Time slipped by him as he remembered the words Gimli had spoken to him, over a fire, against his lips, pressed to his hair. Dwarfkind revered the hair of their lovers in a way that had almost embarrassed Legolas, leaving him feeling more naked than when he washed in waterfalls under stark sunlight. Gimli had learnt, he remembered, with many false starts, to sing to the queen of the Valar.
“Unwise,” said a voice that was almost his father’s, in the rebuke covering an infinitely gentle patience.
“Elbereth,” he pleaded, dropping to both his knees.
“Everything and everyone has its place in the Music,” she told him, and it felt like he was a babe again, hiding from his own nightmares, his father stroking his back. “You fail your place. I tell you, you have no hope of seeing him in this Age again.”
“Even without hope, I must persevere,” he whispered.
She sighed. A moment later the cold winds had stopped but he was near the grove that would take him to Tirion, and he knew that if tried to turn to Avallonë where he had lived with his beloved, then he would find himself back here. He had lost all memory of his face, that much-beloved voice, even his name would not come to his lips anymore.
It had been near seventeen years since he had set out on his quest.
Eyes blinded by tears, he searched for stone on the edge of the cliff looking down onto the sea. Tears continue to drip slowly, against his will, as from a single piece of stone he carved himself and carved out all the parts that were hollow in him. This, he knew, must have been the shape of his husband who he did not know anymore. And finally he carved tulips where the stone called for it, for in these years he had finally learned how stone spoke to dwarves. And still his tears did not cease, for he could not give up and fade in despair, but less still could he give up his quest.
For a moment he thought that he saw Gandalf again, but when she spoke he bowed.
“I understand you,” she said, and it was a great and terrible thing, to have both the pettiest of his anger and his fears be seen, to know that she saw how he wanted to rail against his beloved for not staying longer, and rail against the world for creating them so unalike. And he knew she saw also the love that would shore him against even the destruction of his soul.
Legolas was tongue-tied.
“Will you not give up this fools’ quest?” she asked.
Even as tears continued to roll down his face, some flash of his old merriment came to him and he said, “My lady, it takes wisdom to give up a fools’ quest. I have searched near and far but have not found any trace of wisdom. Perhaps it hides from me.”
Then she raised her head and under the grey hood he saw her eyes were bright with tears that had not yet been shed. “You will find him, but perhaps you will fail before you may speak to him,” she said. “As it comes nearer to his time of rebirth, and as you come nearer to him, you will fade quicker.”
As she spoke, Legolas felt something grow in the hollow of him.
“I would know him by the tracks left behind when he walks or the sound the wind makes when he speaks,” Legolas told her. “Qalmë-Tári, I thank you.”
Legolas blinked and Nienna was gone and the statue as well.
The growth continued, slow, as years and centuries and aeons passed and the world was made anew. And in the New Age, it grew fast, as if it fed on the spirit of the time. Legolas wandered, wherever he went, he left little carved stone sculptures, no bigger than his thumb. He left Valinor, even as all of Elvenkind were renewed, apart from him.
The world was fresh, like a flower slowly unfurling in the low light of dawn. The growth hastened, and Legolas felt perhaps his urgent heart was feeding it. He began again to count the years as he walked with more purpose, and then as the growth reached his throat and left him unable to hear, he began to count the days.
Then one day, as he sat on the side of a road leading to a small town and carved, he began to cough. He dropped everything and stood up, looking around with urgency pumping his blood and feeding the growth in him. There was a tumult of people, Men and Hobbits and Dwarves, and even Ents. Legolas started walking into the crowd, into the heart of it, and his eyes blurred again, as if a grey veil covered it. “Ai, Elbereth,” he said, “Aulë, Nyenna,” he prayed, hoped. If he could only have kept his husband’s name he would have called it out, just to hear one word from him before he failed.
He coughed again and then couldn’t stop coughing. Petals dropped into his hands, they would be red, he knew, if he could see. Then he turned as the sound of the wind rushed at him, even as he fell to his knees, he raised his arms.
They were caught in broad hands, calloused yes, from axes, and from carving stone. Legolas coughed and coughed, until a forehead pressed against his own. The veil lightened to a flimsy silvery thing, then to nothing.
He saw his beloved, the shape of him, now. The joy rose even as the tulips urged him to rip them out or collapse.
The gaps in the shape of him began to fill out in Legolas, where they had held each other, where they had laughed and fought and cried together.
The Dwarf before him could have none of these memories, having been reborn, but still he moved one hand cautiously to press it to Legolas’ cheek and then say very simply, “I know you.”
In the end, Gimli thinks, Legolas will steal his heart and sail away with it, and even the wonders of the Glittering Caves are not enough consolation for that loss. But when Aragorn calls for Gimli’s help in dismantling the hidden traps of Orthanc, everything changes.
this has been said before but MAN we were robbed of Gimli in the movies. i just reread chapter 6: Lothlórien and it was the sweetest, most gentle thing. give me the dwarf who found out that his uncle figures died grisly, horrible deaths and then looked at Frodo, who just lost HIS uncle figure, and asked him to look in the Mirrormere with him. Just… finding comfort in each other as they leave Moria behind
There’s a recurring motif throughout the books where an innocent man, woman or (really most often) child of low birth, with no other connections to the games of the noble houses, is passed off as a highborn lord or lady and then harmed and usually even killed in their place. This happens to the miller’s boys who Theon kills and presents as Bran and Rickon, to Penny’s brother and the many other dwarves whose corpses were presented to Cersei as Tyrion, to Gilly’s baby who is switched for Mance’s son, and the list goes on and on. In the series, it functions as a very poignant metaphor for how the fighting between the lords of Westeros ends up causing more damage and suffering for the smallfolk than it ever really does for those directly involved, those who actually are responsible.
However, there are two instances where this motif is inverted: when Theon saves Jeyne Poole and when Brienne saves the children at the Inn at the Crossroads. In ADWD, Jeyne is made to pose as Arya Stark and then forced to marry Ramsay Bolton so that he can use Arya’s claim to Winterfell. At the Inn at the Crossroads, Brienne first mistakes Gendry for Renly, but, notably, there’s also another little girl who she briefly thinks might actually be Arya. To me, it seems significant that in both cases the girl is mistaken for Arya, specifically. Moreover, the two events are even further linked, as in both instances it’s the color of the eyes that don’t match, referencing the highly important theme of learning to “see” through deceptions in Arya’s arc.
Usually, with this motif, the POV characters believe that the lives of these smallfolk people are worth less in the grand scheme of things compared to the highborns they are replacing. Often, we as the reader are tricked into believing this as well. We’re meant to be relieved when we learn that it wasn’t really Bran and Rickon who died, just two random boys we don’t even know. But when the motif is inverted, it directly challenges this notion. When Theon saves Jeyne, it signals that his road to redemption doesn’t start with making it up to the Starks, it starts with saving a girl from a situation so similar to that of the two lowborn boys he murdered. And when Brienne, after she’s spent the entirety of her arc in AFFC looking for Sansa and Arya, finally has her big, climactic hero moment, it’s not about saving the lost princesses, it’s about saving a group of innocent orphan smallfolk children because, in the end, they are worth just as much.
As I said, I doubt it’s a coincidence that both of these inversions are linked to Arya of all people. Firstly, it of course mirrors how she herself has spent most of the series posing as a lowborn child and experiencing the suffering of the smallfolk firsthand. But there’s also a lot of Arya’s story that’s signaling that she, in the future, likely will be taking on the role as a champion of sorts for the common people. And so I think it’s very fitting that she’s then also so closely connected to these events where the smallfolk, for once, are protected.
romaincrisis
