i've been sitting on this a while. hold my hand through this word salad. thramsay is... complex. obviously. there are layers there on both sides. it's not explicitly romantic but inarguably it's implicitly homosexual in nature. homosexuality in westeros seems about as prevalent as it is in the real world, which might make one wonder - if grrm's intentions were portraying a sadistic homosexual relationship, why not simply... say so? why not paint ramsay as explicitly homosexual as renly or loras are? to which i say (i theorize, really, i do not claim any of this is fact) - that'd be too easy. that'd be too shallow. it'd negate the depth he might've intended to ascribe to the relationship between these two characters, it'd become too easily dismissed as some allegory expressing "evil sadistic gay man violates unwilling straight man" or a similar sentiment. that's been done to death, that borders on homophobia.
so, the dynamic is intricate. the romantic implication is there, though it's twisted. it's grotesque. the existence of it almost invites more distaste and some general feeling of revulsion than the (equally obvious and equally implicit) sexual aspect of their... thing. in a way, it's a homophobic straight man's nightmare: being treated like a piece of meat, being treated like women often are. which isn't to say that most women experience being literally tortured in a medieval dungeon, but here lies the allegory. the obvious: theon loses his manhood - literally - and thus becomes "lesser than." a character already degraded by being likened to women or "womanly behavior", losing the one thing that might certainly separate him from the "weaker sex" (as understood in universe, not by the author of the post.) in doing so, ramsay too takes his dignity - a byproduct of the de-mahood'ing, but something oft denied to most women of westeros, regardless of their high/lowborn status. then, he loses his name. forcibly, it is stripped from him - as it is stripped from every woman once she enters a marriage contract. and lastly, he loses agency; he loses agency over his body, over his mind, over his whereabouts, over the things he's allowed or not allowed to say and think, over himself; he goes where ramsay goes. he does what ramsay says to do. he is consumed by ramsay bolton (née snow - funny how this works, hm?) and it is this act of consumption (perhaps consummation, if you will) that precisely both implies an undercurrent of romance and sexuality in their relationship, and it is precisely what makes thramsay completely terrifying, conceptually, to an average man. or something
