#sinister remarks

[bymyhandsinister]

The thing about the Valonqar thing is that prophecies are generally fulfilled in an ironic way. Oedipus runs away from home to avoid killing his father and instead meats his bio dad on the road and kills him in a stupid argument. Would anything in Macbeth happened if he didn't kill the king?

Random, tragic, ironic, that's how prophecies go. Trying to prevent it from happening ensures it's fulfillment. The person who hears it is always wrong about who it refers to.

So clearly it can't be Tyrion, it has to be Jaime that kills her. But I also think it's wrong to think that Jaime is going to strike Jaime in righteous fury to dole out some punishment for her sins. He is not pulling up to her like this

Ultimately Cersei has to doom herself but not with just general immoral actions but by actively trying to prevent the prophecy from being fulfilled. For example, by trying to kill Jaime. Maybe even succeeding. The point tho is that she wouldn't die, if she didn't try to stop it.

[bymyhandsinister]

Daeron's dragon dreams ruin his life because they constantly haunt him, they show him things he can't do anything about and lead him to drinking and early grave. Dragon dreams also ruin Daemon II' life but in complete opposite way - he has total confidence in everything he does, never troubled by what his visions could actually mean - clearly they all have to be about himself - and so he destroys any chance of being a king because he thinks he cannot lose.

now that I wrote all that, Daemon reminds me of Rhaegar. Maybe he really was a dreamer in that same way.

[bymyhandsinister]

For a supposed mastermind Littlefinger eats shit a lot more often than I remembered. Tyrion tricks him, Cersei basically laughs in his face when he offers to marry Sansa and Lysa almost ruins all his plans when she tries to kill Sansa. And the big one, which goes unaddressed, but it must be there: he failed to protect Cat from the Red Wedding.

It does make me wonder if he is lying about Cersei destabilizing the realm being all part of his plan, or is he simply trying to impress a teenager. The more I think about him the more he strikes me as an opportunist, good at putting his men in the right places and social climbing, two moves ahead but never more than that.

Jon Arryn's death, Ned's death, Tyrion being framed for murder - all of those things strike me as motivated by spite first. All his plans involve a lot of taking petty revenge for sometimes very old slights.

[bymyhandsinister]

Arianne isn't gonna die, she will instead live to see herself become her father - the cautious one with a real plan in a room full of hot heads that she can't really stop.

[bymyhandsinister]

Maybe the most underrated small detail in ASOIAF is the realistic distribution of information. None of these characters knows shit about what's happening anywhere else and half the time what they know is like a quarter-truth at best.

Like what LF tells Sansa about taking the North is probably mostly true, just not the entirety of his plans. But to a reader that plan might seem fake just because we know all those things that LF doesn't: the Others, the Wildlings, Rickon is alive.

He is the second best informed character in the series and he still has no idea what's going on.

[bymyhandsinister]

It's kinda incredible how complex the relationship between Jon and Cat is, even though they only interact once in the whole story. An entire web of material and personal issues that leaves psychological scars on both of them.

Others pointed out all sorts of interesting social reasons for Cat's dislike of Jon but to me another, and underdiscussed, aspect is her own insecurity.

She is at her most unreliable as a narrator when it comes to Jon - she thinks she would be fine with a dozen bastards far away but she is appalled by the mere idea that her father might have a lover at some point. I even think she overstates how much Jon looks like Ned.

Because Jon is already at Winterfell when she arrives, he was there before Robb. He looks like a Stark and Robb doesn't. What Cat projects onto Jon is all of her fears and insecurities. She thinks she doesn't belong, she thinks her children stick out in the North, she thinks that Ned loved Jon's mother more.

Cat rationalizes an irrational fear and never realizes that Jon now lives in her head rent free. She keeps thinking about him even long after he goes to the Wall.

[bymyhandsinister]

People often point to all sorts of things as reasons for why Robb died but something about Roose already scheming against Robb in Clash of Kings finally clicked stuff into place for me about just how doomed he truly was.

Marrying Roslin did not save Edmure from a jail cell, it wouldn't have saved Robb either. Roose married Walda during the events of ACOK! Walder was planning to fuck Robb over at least that far back. It was probably not the Red Wedding, but there was something. There would always be something because those are not trustworthy people. Similarly, Balon Greyjoy would always attack the North, Theon or no Theon. Karstark's men were already leaving before he was executed.

And if one accepts Robb as being doomed from the start that helps see his mistakes primarily as moral failures. He is so concerned with what others will think, what others will accept and it literally doesn't matter - he is dead anyway, they all are. Doing the right thing, in hindsight, would cost him nothing. He could've saved Sansa, he didn't need to sideline Cat.

He sacrifices his principles and morals and his family telling himself that it was the only way to win. But in reality those things he didn't do would've been the only ones that would've actually mattered.

[bymyhandsinister]

Jon's biggest flaw is that at the end of the day he can't find it in him to respect people that can't save themselves. He will help them, but he will think less of them, without even realizing. The main example of this is of course Gilly.

The ironic thing is that he has more in common with Gilly than he thinks. When he was with the Wildlings he exchanged his body for survival, an extremely feminine-coded action - but also an action that he doesn't see through this lens, so even though it should make it easier for him to get Gilly's situation instead it just doesn't register. He keeps being dismissive of her.

That dismissiveness will likely surface in a big way and be challenged by his future interactions with Jeyne Poole and Theon. Which is why I think there's no way the three of them aren't meeting. There's too much juice there.