#pov trap

[agentrouka-blog]

GRRM hates fanfic and has already shut down Sansa/Sandor and Jon/Arya shippers before, why do you think he never denied Jon/Dany?

The former two pairings are comparatively easy to dismiss, I imagine, because they are pretty out there as far as probability goes. He's not giving anything away by being fairly unambiguous about rejecting the option. It really isn't a credible line of speculation.

Outright denying the very possibility of Dany and Jon as love interests, on the other hand, does take away from the game of "see with your eyes" and unreliable narrators that he has set up from the beginning. There's still plenty of people who will not believe Dany is on a villain arc because her own POV obviously portrays her as the hero of her own story, surrounded by otherwise a sycophant like Barristan who doesn't question her at all, or a figure set up to be more obviously unreliable in his own way, naive and uncertain Quentyn, whom Dany considers the "sun's son". Nothing explicitly hinders people from falling for her delusions if they aren't inclined to critical thinking. Which is how he challenges the reader.

An outright denial of the classic expectation for a female heroine, of a romantic entanglement with the elligible hero, would really shake that up because GRRM hasn't presented other credible attractive options on that front in Westeros, so if genuine romance is not in Dany's future at all... what is she working towards, thematically?

He'd be spoiling his own set-up.

He also hasn't outright denied Jonsa, btw. Just refused to comment.

[agentrouka-blog]

Can you elaborate on “maybe show her (Sansa) being actually valued by a single character in their POV” - don’t you think that ever happens in AGOT?

Rarely, vaguely, too late in the game? Plus, it's competing with family members actively voicing disapproval or open chastisement.

Sansa being described as "charmed and gracious" by Cat is fairly impersonal, Jon describes her as "radiant" which is sweet but fleeting, Ned describes her as "only eleven" then spends the rest of the book dismissing her every concern or snapping at her until she's used as a hostage against him. Bran has the grace to remind Robb that "she's lost her wolf" when he's all "what's wrong with the girl", and Jon has the grace to include her in his musings about his sisters' safety. Pit that against Arya's projection of a Mean Older Sister who has everything? Arya who is showered with attention and affection from Jon and Ned, is "friends with everybody" and has four heart-to-heart conversations about her feelings, and is praised by a supercool sword master who sacrifices himself to save her life.

The only character who consistently at least approves of Sansa or prioritizes worry over her is Catelyn, whom many readers are also biased against because GRRM was so heavy-handed in her scene with Jon. It doesn't confer the same sense of undisputed value to be loved by a character who isn't unquestionably sympathetic. Same with Evil Bully Jeyne. The only person who bothers to have ANY serious conversation with Sansa at all is the Hound! The only one!

I'd be grateful to be reminded of more positive examples, but ultimately, the lack of affection toward her that GRRM built in, is pretty unfortunate. Many readers take it as confirmation that she must somehow deserve it. Many don't even realize how lonely and slighted she feels, that she deserves better and is reacting to trauma and unfair treatment and neglect. Tween girls are just hysterical and dramatic, right?

Tell me a scene of Robb or Bran or Jon thinking of her with unambiguous fondness would not have changed how readers perceive her entire situation?

[agentrouka-blog]

Do you think Sansa would have been better received by the general audience if her pov chapter was switched with Arya?

I am not sure? The way they are set up explains why Sansa is operating on limited information regarding Joffrey, and Arya is not, and gives us the context for Needle.

But something from Sansa's POV before she is placed in a highly stressful environment (impress her royal in-laws and future owner husband) would have been helpful - show her in her "normal" mode.

Or maybe show her being actually valued by a single character in their POV. Emphasize her status as a real human person in someone else's eyes and the reader may follow.

Or leave out the "horseface" thing for later (which was Jeyne, but whatever) and let Arya's distorting bias appear just a little clearer by letting Sansa's actual actions in the scene work their contrast with Arya's. Because of the mean nickname most readers really shut down all closer reading and make a straight leap to "mean girl bullying ring" and "evil stepsister", insert whatever stereotypes they've absorbed from other media, and Never Look Back. People would be more willing to look past petty childhood conflict if Sansa's was already established as a Proper Character with various other traits.

A lot could be acomplished with a few small tweaks, I think.

[agentrouka-blog]

One of the things that drives me crazy in regard to Rhaegar apologia is that a lot of them use the fact that no Martell has directly blamed Rhaegar in the text for what happened as proof they don't blame him and it's absolutely mind boggling how dumb this is. First of all, Rhaegar has been dead for close to two decades, whereas the Baratheons and Lannisters are still very much alive so obviously the Martells' wrath will be directed towards them. Second of all, we barely have Martell POVs and POVs are not some omniscient, all-knowing insight into every character's opinion on all of the 456732 characters that have been introduced across five books. The lack of indictment re Rhaegar does not mean they don't blame him. Also, GRRM is not the kind of writer that is going to spell something as obvious as this out in crayon. If you need the author to directly tell you that Doran and Oberyn would be apoplectic at Rhaegar's actions toward their sister, maybe this is not the series for you. These are the same people that say, 'Well, we never got E's reaction to L being crowned at the tourney so we can't know if she was offended....' Like, these people really need the narrative to explicitly state that E was humiliated because her husband crowned another woman at a public tourney in front of nobles from across the 7K. I just.....these people are Not Very Bright and appear incapable of connecting even the most simplest dots. There are certain things that do not need to be and will never be spelled out because GRRM assumes his readers have at minimum a high schooler's level of reading comprehension and media literacy but here we are lmao.

Ned never thought much about Aerys either, the guy who murdered his brother and father. Are we to surmise he didn't terribly mind?

GRRM waited until book #3 to create a dramatic and righteous confrontation with the crime perpetrated against Elia and her children, even though the bare facts have been with us since the beginning. He waited until book #4 to introduce the Dornish perspective and vengeance plan in actual POVs, and until book #5 to introduce Elia's surviving son. Dorne, Elia, Aegon - it is a long game.

It slots well into his use of the POV trap with Dany and the comparatively slow dismantling of any positive patina on the Targaryen dynasty. We don't get a proper face on the horror of it until Jaime's confession in the baths of Harrenhal in ASOS. Maester Aemon was practically presented as a saint up until AFFC where he suddenly revealed himself to be a prophecy truther who had been corresponding with Rhaegar about exactly when he tried to impregnate Elia with his comet-fuelled wonder sperm - all this time, without telling anyone in the Watch about this supposedly fundamental savior concept. Dany's veneer of good intentions is falling apart for anyone paying attention.

Questions the reader could have asked from the very beginning, because the facts were always on the page, are being fleshed out and dragged to the forefront in the latter stages of the book series.

Considering Jon Connington and Aegon - son of Elia and Rhaegar - are about to collide with the Dornish plotline, the question of the Tourney at Harrenhal and Rhaegar's character is going to be much less subtly handled from this point on.

There are going to be a whole lot of revelatory collisions in TWOW.

[agentrouka-blog]

Asoiaf fandom has also failed to understand the term unreliable narrator and that every narrator is unreliable. They seem to think that only Sansa is one based on grrm's quote, which was in answer to a fan asking him, and unreliable doesn't mean everything she says is false. We don't even need another pov to test her statements, in her own pov, her thoughts would be contradicting to what actually took place. Its easy to figure out what is true and what is her rewriting events. And its true for ALL the characters. For example, Daenerys is the one of the biggest unreliable narrators. She thinks she cannot be burnt when in her own pov we can see she has burns from the fire. We see her blaming Mirri for her son's death when she earlier admitted it was Jorah's fault and we actually see Mirri warning her not to come into the tent (which she had no reason to do if she wanted to harm her).

Well said, anon.

[agentrouka-blog]

Someone claiming to be a jaime and cersei fan on tik tok just described their relationship as Cersei being the toxic groomer and Jaime being her victim. I'm browsing through your anti jaime tag to cope

Glad to be of service in such trying times. 😊

People take his self-pity mix tape in AFFC at face value and miss all the ways it contradicts his own agency, toxicity and hypocrisy in the relationship.

🌸POV trap.🌸

Almost makes me want to compile some quotes that highlight Jaime's half of this mess.

[ladyqueenofwinter]

Your comment about how evil certain characters are, cartoonishly so, made me wonder, what is the point of such disgusting characters? A number of people have said how overboard the suffering of Jeyne and Theon is. Do you think there is value there or would what GRRM is saying be as effectively conveyed with a little less?

Hi anon!

I think the biggest point is to make it overboard, honestly. Let's face it, after ACOK making Theon in any way sympathetic would have been. Difficult. (Although GRRM has expressed surprise bordering on shock that people, especially women, would like him or similar characters, such as Cujo Come Again or J@ime.) He was making a point over vengeance versus justice, as he often does.

We might have wanted Theon to suffer over betraying Robb, over Winterfell, over trying to murder Bran and Rickon, killing several side characters and murdering the miller's boys. But just as he apparently wanted us to feel some measure of sympathy during Joffrey's death, tried to remind us he was a thirteen-year-old boy and IRL might have just been a schoolyard bully, the point is that vengeance is not justice, and almost always goes too far. Theon had to be dragged through utter hell, so there was no doubt left with the readership that the author does not endorse this sort of punishment at all.

What he put Jeyne through is, however, far past acceptable. The worst we've seen her do is name-calling, for all the Ship Girls call her a bully. And here's the damn problem, the fandom. Jeyne is thirteen, had her father murdered by the Lannister guards, was sex trafficked and 'trained' in one of Littlefinger's brothels, and is now living an absolute nightmare complete with losing her sense of self. When half of the HEROIC main characters (so, not Tyri0n or D@ny) do worse on the regular than what Jeyne did, there is no excuse for her treatment. Except people somehow see this little girl, who would be in what, seventh or eight grade, and think she deserves this torture because she was mean years ago to their favorite character. I genuinely can't handle those people, they're messed up in the head.

Something else that may be the reason is that if he creates these cartoonishly evil characters, it actually helps hide some of his real villains - read: the non-heroic examples above. If they seem like they are given justification and complexity, they can't be the bad people, right?

The other bad guys are either literal zombies or flat-out evil characters like the Boltons or House (Jof-)Frey of the (Lannister) Twins. (Never let it be said George isn't a gigantic troll.) Cersei is the rare obvious villain POV, most others are written through secondaries (Stannis and Melisandre through Davos (and Stannis is largely hidden behind Davos' loyalty), Cressen, and Jon and Sam; Joffrey through a billion people...) or hidden through POV trap, or equally cartoonish and one-dimensional to offset the real villain being a POV character (the slavers in Essos to hide D@ny). The few times an obvious villain is made a POV, such as Cersei in FeastDance, Melisandre's lone chapter, or the Greyjoys, it happened books later and while George may flesh out their inner motivation some, they can still come out rather cheesy movie villain like.

All in all, they do serve several purposes. They help disguise the villainy of the big bad main characters by making them 'a lighter grey' on the sliding scale of morality in comparison; they are the ideal way to demonstrate how justice and vengeance are different things; and if he gives the Token Threshold Bad Guys 0 redeeming qualities he can give more care to his main villains and flesh them out better, since their tragic backstories and moments of goodness stand out more in the sea of rotten evil if these are rare examples.

That doesn't mean he doesn't go overboard or that it's not a revolting read sometimes. Jeyne was way past normal, and she isn't the only example.

Thanks for the question!

Post Referenced: Not All Banners Are Grey at Night. Some Are Pitch Black

[agentrouka-blog]

I always found it disturbing how D#ny burning Mirri was somehow always praised as some "You go giiirl'' moment rather than a dark ritual and birth of vilian

That’s the power of the POV trap. 

If you come away with the idea that Mirri is actually culpable in betraying Dany and murdering Rhaego, and if you consider Dany a victim in this circumstance because she had been a victim in other circumstances, then burning Mirri alive - fire being the weapon of her ancestors - and then stepping into the pyre with her dead husband... it seems like a show of absolute unflinching devotion to her family. Vengeance. Justice. And a fearless uncompromising commitment to herself. She takes a horrible crime done against her and owns it fully, she gets vengeance without apology, and emerges from the fire with a miraculous reward, a true testament to her strength. I can see how that would seem like a deeply satisfying power fantasy for anyone struggling with past injustice.

Of course, that is not what actually happens on the page. At all. 

It’s a calculated move by GRRM, hiding monstrosity in the appearance of righteous strength. How else do you challenge the reader to actually look closer and interrogate competing “realities”. 

Abuse of power often clothes itself in the mantle of the underdog finally rising up against injustice and oppression - in a way that feels credible on the surface. That’s why it works. It’s a ficticious reversal of the actual power dynamics involved.

That’s how you get people cheering for the slave owner burning her slave alive  to get personal WMDs.