a commenter on my recently posted hammeranvil fic asked me to expand on my logic and world building of the concept so this post is that.
btw, the fic is a sense8-inspired au where the seven save baelor and then stick him in a brain-sharing mind-meldy group with maekar, daeron, dunk, lyonel, raymun and robyn rhysling! to reflect the "seven who are one" thing. :) and each of them lowkey champions one of the seven facets too.
anyways, more details!
first, the reason they're all chosen from the trial is because baelor explains the trial of seven as asking the gods to decide the issue, and the gods being thus honoured would be more like to take a hand (ie. be present to decide). i thought it might be interesting if the trial of seven originally wasnt JUST for conflicts, but actually originated for the purpose of choosing champions for each face of the one who are seven, meaning the gods would see how the people in the trial fight each other and then call dibs on someone lol.
(admittedly, it did pain me to choose men for the maiden and the crone---tho maekar was baked into being the mother haha---but i ultimately decided to go with trial fighters for the above reason, since it was part of the og conceit i had while ideating.)
re: the roles -
baelor as the father. this seems self-explanatory, but as lord hand and future king, he's the voice of judgement. and apparently GRRM's talked about how if he lived, he wouldve been a strong and competent king and that if he lived, it wouldve changed the course of westeros's history, so i wanted that to be literally backed by the gods lol. like, the future they want for westeros needs baelor as their leader, making the big decisions.
maekar as the mother. i mean, i know the fandom loooooves making him muña maekar, and i don't disagree. đ i do think it's sweet that despite judging aerion hard for not just fighting dunk 1v1 (he initially said he was cowering behind the trial proposal and then calls it nonsense), he still fights on aerion's side (he could've made someone else do it, or bought them like steffon was bought, but he chose to fight himself), and he cries "my boy!" and kills baelor trying to get to one of his kids. it's very fierce adrenaline mother of him ykwim.
im also planning to explore more with him and daeron now that their brains are connected, and there's a really vivid scene ive got in my mind for the climax already where maekar and aerion are in conflict and still, maekar smiles at him, referencing the line in the sing of the seven lullaby "Her gentle smile ends all strife" so. just thematically with who's involved, it makes sense for maekar to be the mother. im trying to have everyone's arcs kind of align with their facet.
lyonel as the warrior. chosen mostly bc he's famed for his prowess in battle (according to his wiki page), and he knights raymun. he's a good bro lol. i was also playing with rhys being the warrior, since he has that "we are the vessel of the warrior" line, but rhys is older than lyonel so he'd fit the crone better, and lyonel just has more of that fighter's prestige to him, as well as the confidence of a man that's used to winning on the field, what with the laughing storm stuff. ngl lyonel's actually the one im stuck on the most in terms of character trajectory, but im pretty confident on his role. i might try to build smth with why he laughs when he fights but that is still very baby stages.
rhys as the crone. as mentioned above, he's the oldest guy in the group, and he kind of has that mysteriously guiding older person vibe to him in the show. đ "if it is madness bid, it is madness delivered" sounds like crone kind of wisdom, even tho that line follows the vessel line. it also never gets explained why he's fighting on dunk's side, even in the book i think, so he's kinda free real estate? and im intrigued on exploring his relationship to the faith, that the show leaned into.
dunk as the smith. so people pray to the warrior and the smith for strength, and when it comes to the smith, it's more about labour. and dunk is the kind of guy that does the labour. he is a good man even when it's hard work to be one, and we see him teaching egg how to do even the small parts of being a knight like knowing how to mend your gear. the lullaby's lyrics for him are "he labors day and night, / to put the world of men to right" which tracks with how he approaches knighthood, and "he builds for little children" makes me think of how his guidance of egg is building a new (and better, in the sense of true goodness) world for him.
raymun as the maiden. i was mostly thinking about his innocence here LOL. he really thought rowan knew she was pregnant that soon đ„čđ there's a youth abt him, and it makes sense with his new marriage to rowan aha. the maiden's full verse is "The Maiden dances through the sky, / she lives in every lover's sigh. / Her smiles teach the birds to fly, / and gives dreams to little children." so the lover's sigh stuff again reminds me of him and rowan, and the maiden reps innocence and chastity and to look after young girls and a maiden's virtue etc etc like yeah medieval-typical patriarchal ideas of a woman's "innocence".
i would rather extrapolate this to mean innocence in general, and especially the giving dreams to little children line, i like to think that raymun stepping up in steffon's place was a lot like guarding dunk's "innocence" that there are still good men in this world. baelor rides in not just bc he's a good man but bc it was a good look for the crown and in an attempt to keep the peace for the smallfolk---he did have ulterior motives. raymun asks to get knighted bc his cousin is a dick and someone has to be good to this guy he just met that was just trying to defend an innocent puppeteer from a cruel prince---he just wanted to help. him and dunk both seem to have this really innocent belief in the goodness of other people, and so it feels fitting to have him rep the maiden for that. (and there is also the apple/fruit symbolism in relation to innocence and sin etc., etc.!!!)
daeron as the stranger. so the stranger, from the faith of the seven wiki: "He is the outcast, the wanderer from far places, less and more than human, unknown and unknowable. His face is the face of death." the stranger reps death and the unknown. the stranger also gets left out of the lullaby, despite it being called the song of the seven. i think daeron and his prophetic dreams play really well with the idea of the unknown, bc daeron casts himself out due to knowing too much and not at all wanting to. and he also doesnt know enough anyways bc he doesnt seem to be able to reliably interpret his dreams, parts of them still remaining unknown. he heralds baelor's death, making him a face of death as well. and another commenter mentioned the relationship between death and sleep and how "the realms of dreams exists outside the bounds of everyday society" so there's that as well (shoutout Roseslayer77 on ao3 lol).
and like i mentioned in my initial a/n, i think it'd be interesting if all dragon dreamers in general have a connection to the stranger like this, born with their brain expanded and plugged into some sort of god frequency.
re: other world-building stuff -
it's been kind of a rabbit hole lol bc i've only really watched the show and then poked around the asoiaf for lore in a way that is by no means at all comprehensive. so i have some ideas aboout involving the old valyrian gods and the seven having a power struggle, which is why the seven had to get involved on a more granular level by choosing some guys as champions and why im positioning baelor as the prince that was promised, but every time i chase down a thought i find an entirely new wiki page that affects all my previous thoughts so i've been figuring out the edges of my own fic and deciding where to put my foot down about what i'm including, bc there is SO much. asoiaf is SO big. đ
a small example of this would be how i went back to add maekar crying cuz the prince that was promised is to be born amidst salt and smoke under a bleeding star, but im deciding on if aemon's "the dragon must have three heads" thing is A) actually part of the prophecy, and B) metaphorical enough that i could maybe heavily imply the three-headed dragon is in fact the three targs in this lil cluster of the seven champions and call it a day. tho sticking daeron as the third head of a dragon otherwise composed of hammeranvil is. really funny to me. real "and peggy" vibes lmao.
lastly, this au came from a discussion with my buddy max about how maybe the old valyrian gods killed baelor bc they wanted a blood sacrifice for forsaking them for the new gods. so this is like if baelor dying was a punishment for westeros and the new gods were like "nope" and reinstated baelor's living status, and then i was thinking the old valyrian gods would get mad about this and start on a second doom for westeros this time (part of that doom possibly including the great spring sickness), and that's why the seven need champions on the ground.
everything else is question marks though. i'm positioning aerion to be a major antagonist and it'll probably have to do with the old valyrian gods and the Wall, since i'm kind of taken with the idea that he gets exiled there instead of to the free cities. but i want to be able to reference the actual song of ice and fire, whatever that is, since i found out quite recently that grrm was inspired by robert frost's poem "fire and ice" and there are some lines in that poem that i think would lend itself really well to this fic. like, the poem mentions perishing twice, which is perfect for both baelor having been revived, and the idea that a second doom might be brought on.
OH, and if u care about ships, aside from hammeranvil, i'm aiming to also include daeron/valarr (and possibly kiera as well for a throuple though i'm undecided lol), and then pooooossibly also dunk/lyonel, if i can get a handle on lyonel's character arc. and there's established raymun/rowan ofc.
yeah. that's what i've got for you haha. if you got this far, thanks for your interest and also for reading!
