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HEloo today I did WALKING and got many small gravel in my shoes!

I was thinking about how a lot of the contemporary horror around the guillotine has to do less with the idea of “mechanization” and more to do with class dynamics—namely, that execution by beheading was a death reserved for nobility, as opposed to hanging. (There were other execution methods, some…more gruesome than others, but the two main methods of execution were beheading and hanging.) Nobles and other high-ranking convicts got beheaded, low-ranking convicts were hanged, as a general rule.

The reason for this is mostly to with dignity—beheading minimizes pain, if the executioner is skilled and the convict doesn’t move; and it minimizes humiliation, since it has minimal spectacle beyond the single stroke.

So when the death penalty was handed out during the FRev, it was done equally across classes—everyone got the noble’s death, because it was the quickest and easiest with the guillotine. (There’s some interesting history behind why and how the guillotine was put into place but this isn’t FRev history, this is a GoT meta, I promise we’re getting there.) The horror came, not from the mechanism of the guillotine, but from the equalization of “citizen” extending even into death, and thus taking the privilege of a quick and painless death from being nobility-exclusive and making it commonplace. [This article talks about all of this in much more depth.]

Okay. Meta time. You know who else executes low-ranking convicts via decapitation?

Ned Stark.

And it’s implied that this is the general trend in the North! Generally, it seems that if you get the death penalty in the North, you’ll get your head chopped off by the local lord, (unless you get caught by the Boltons,) and this fits in with the idea of the North being more egalitarian than the South—Ned’s clothing isn’t that much different from anyone else’s, it’s just more finely made.

On the flipside, I’d bet that decapitation for all is not the trend of things in the South, and that this gets used on both sides as…not propaganda, necessarily, but definitely fuel for prejudice.

#a think #meta #got #game of thrones