🌿 - and yeah 100% i think ramsay's mom poisoned domeric or influenced ramsay to acquire the poison... if you have any thoughts on what domeric might have thought of ramsay and his mother(and what that means about his father?) i would loooove to hear them
also domeric does seem by all accounts to be a Nice Young Man- maybe in part because he spent formative years(9-16?) being fostered in barrowton and then the vale. not much reflecting roose at all!
rue, my friend! i hope you've been well. it's been too long since i sat down and wrote you a proper letter. i've been saving this one because at the time that you sent it i didn't feel like i had anything particularly interesting or worthwhile to share.
in some ways i avoid thinking about domeric. i don't have a good sense of him the way i do with the miller's wife (who i've purposefully not invented my own name for) and heke. i don't think about what he was like with his mother bethany and his aunt barbrey, or what roose might have been like as a father to a wanted and truly beloved child. my vision and understanding of domeric is limited to those sort of beautiful dead wife laughing in crisp white linen sheets montages. he was the very best of house bolton and could not, for that reason, be suffered to live. horses... the boy was mad for horses. lady dustin will tell you.
i feel almost as if fleshing domeric out in my own mental landscape of understanding and headcanon would do his character and purpose a disservice. he is a little glimpse into a truly impossible thing. he is the one person we ever encounter throughout the series who roose sees as a human being. he's only been dead for two years at the start of the series, so his loss is still fresh. it is still, no matter how many times i read it happening, shocking to hear the kind of deep fatherly love roose expresses towards his late son. he's so proud of him he can't resist bragging to theon about what an accomplished rider he was. roose bolton -- who would cut out arya's tongue as easily as one might cuff a dog, who urged ned and robert to cut ser baristan's throat on the trident, who gifts catelyn some small token of revenge -- mourns for the child he loved and lost due to his own callousness and cruelty.
it is very interesting to think about how domeric might have seen roose, especially since he was so different from his father, based on what little we know of him. i imagine his queer colorless eyes were maybe the first and only of that sort to have a warmth in them. i wonder how he felt about roose and how much he knew of roose's reputation. i wonder how he might have found out about the miller's wife and what he might have assumed happened between her and his father. i'm curious what she and heke and ramsay may have told him, because i'm certain they'd spin a yarn. i wonder if he could tell they were all lying to him and i wonder if he might have assumed they were doing this to spare him from the truth of his father's cruelty.
but i don't wonder enough about these things to have solid answers to them or to prefer one interpretation over another. i love that domeric is the lens flare children's laughter waves crashing on a beach laundry hung up on the line to dry overlooking a bucolic landscape of green rolling hills flashback montage kind of dead. it's what serves the story best.
if i wanted to play in this sandbox of possibility i might ship him with lyanna tbh! just on account of them being referenced in the same paragraph, and not as an endgame for either of them. i like stark/bolton couples with tragic endings (one day i will share my outlined loredump about my cryptwife oc) because there's a sweet romeo and juliet flare to it.
i'm sorry that this didn't really answer your question at all. i hope you've been well!!
