I feel like you would be the perfect writer to write a Jacaerys fic inspired by the Swan Princess/The Frog Prince where the reader is cursed to live as a dragon. You could do what you will from there.
(Also I just realized how many fairytales there are where people are cursed into animals or beasts, wow.)
waitttt you’re so right and there’s something to this I could say abt women being seen as objects BUT I am going to say instead that im wondering if you’d accept a reader being… um basically a statue WAIT WALK WITH ME I AM THIBKING OF SOMETHING BIG HERE
well anyway i don't see adwd!theon's time in winterfell as a reckoning to the tune of too late does this heedless villain see the error of his ways or any such narrative justice. personally i find it the most thematically interesting and, stay with me here, hopeful of theon's three "returns" i.e. his return to pyke, his acok return to winterfell, and finally the adwd return in question. this probably hinges on how of late i've grown more comfortable identifying winterfell as a decimated metropolis, yet a thriving necropolis—a place where the dead have been dead longer than the living have been living. without getting too much into that, i'll leave it with how siri hustvedt paraphrases lewis mumford: "people want to live close to the burial places of their ancestors, to whom they are drawn with mingled feelings of worship and dread, and that is how the city is born."
in acok, winterfell died when it was divested of starks (a symbolic death of winterfell as there are none left to inherit it) and burnt to the ground (a physical death). my point in all this is to say there is mutuality, a symbiosis that characterizes theon's third and final "return." he comes as reek, horrified to hell by ramsay and roose. theon's dehumanization has taken from him both a physical identity—his looks have changed so drastically that he is unrecognizable—and a metaphysical one—he is no longer afforded even the nominal identity of theon greyjoy. the reason i keep putting return in quotes, which i will now stop doing, is because obviously that's a myth. in reality, return occurs in the memory, and if memories contradict then returns cannot happen even there. theon cannot go back to a time prior to his torture. on pyke his family rejects him ("your blood and your heir." lord balon grunted. "we shall see."), in acok winterfell refuses any memory of him in lieu of classifying him as an invader (she gaped at him as if he were some stranger), and in adwd he remarks that winterfell is no longer "the castle he remembered from the summer of his youth." there are no homecomings.
however, a big thing that occurs in adwd is that we see both theon and winterfell being raised back to life. these two plots are connected or perhaps even the same. reek is forced to reclaim theon greyjoy in order to renew the stark claim via jeyne-as-arya. by doing this, by becoming theon, the stark return is recognized, and winterfell is revived. the proof is in the pudding: winterfell rapidly becomes a site of conflict thanks to it's value being restored. we see that jon is unwilling to renounce his vows in order to be named lord stark until the situation with ramsay and jeyne-as-arya comes to a head. elsewhere in the north, it's suddenly time to dust off those banners and rescue valiant ned's precious little girl. wyman manderly makes his way to winterfell only after sending davos on a quest to retrieve rickon stark. in each case, it requires a living stark to make winterfell any sort of prize.
back to theon. thanks to a nifty sidequest with barbrey, theon is also the one to find the entryway to the crypts, which represents a limb of sorts to the structure of winterfell. he is the one the heart tree speaks to. two bodies destroyed yet they know one another / know each other's names. what does the beating heart of winterfell say to him? "theon." what does he say back? "the old gods... know me." okay. self-recognition through the other. love it. love it so much in the face of that whole spiel tyrion once gave:
Tyrion had only the vaguest memory of Theon Greyjoy from his time with the Starks. A callow youth, always smiling, skilled with a bow; it was hard to imagine him as Lord of Winterfell. The Lord of Winterfell would always be a Stark.
He remembered their godswood; the tall sentinels armored in their grey-green needles, the great oaks, the hawthorn and ash and soldier pines, and at the center the heart tree standing like some pale giant frozen in time. He could almost smell the place, earthy and brooding, the smell of centuries, and he remembered how dark the wood had been even by day. That wood was Winterfell. It was the north. I never felt so out of place as I did when I walked there, so much an unwelcome intruder. He wondered if the Greyjoys would feel it too. The castle might well be theirs, but never that godswood.
so yes. i am contextualizing theon's final return as a rebirth, actually. worship and dread.
Do you think Ned ensuring Lady made it to Winterfell will be mirrored by Sansa securing Ned’s bones, and having them properly buried in the crypts? 🤔
I don't know!
It would be a proper mirror to how Arya is likely to reunite with the "remains" of Catelyn after her death, and it would be a nice mirror to her confrontation with his severed head.
(Some quotes and Ned/Cat-related speculation under the cut.)
She turned that way, and saw only the city, streets and alleys and hills and bottoms and more streets and more alleys and the stone of distant walls. Yet she knew that beyond them was open country, farms and fields and forests, and beyond that, north and north and north again, stood Winterfell.
“What are you looking at?” Joffrey said. “This is what I wanted you to see, right here.”
A thick stone parapet protected the outer edge of the rampart, reaching as high as Sansa’s chin, with crenellations cut into it every five feet for archers. The heads were mounted between the crenels, along the top of the wall, impaled on iron spikes so they faced out over the city. Sansa had noted them the moment she’d stepped out onto the wallwalk, but the river and the bustling streets and the setting sun were ever so much prettier. He can make me look at the heads, she told herself, but he can’t make me see them.
“This one is your father,” he said. “This one here. Dog, turn it around so she can see him.”
Sandor Clegane took the head by the hair and turned it. The severed head had been dipped in tar to preserve it longer. Sansa looked at it calmly, not seeing it at all. It did not really look like Lord Eddard, she thought; it did not even look real. “How long do I have to look?” (AGOT, Sansa VI)
(This passage, btw, has a lot of language mirrors to Bran's coma dream.)
The heavy-handed foreshadowing that she will return to Winterfell is directly connected to Ned’s “bones”. So is her defiance, and her self-sacrificial rage.
Barbrey is lurking and wants to serve Ned’s bones to her dogs, just as she helped serve Jeyne Poole as “Arya” to Ramsay, who had come the same way through the Neck. Jeyne Poole escapes. So will the bones, I wager.
If Arya is the one to give Catelyn peace, after Nymeria recovered her desecrated body, then it would make sense for Sansa to be the one to collect Ned’s bones from their enemies and help them complete the journey home.
But I kind of also like a competing scenario.
His regency would be a short one, he reflected as the wax softened. The new king would choose his own Hand. Ned would be free to go home. The thought of Winterfell brought a wan smile to his face. He wanted to hear Bran's laughter once more, to go hawking with Robb, to watch Rickon at play. He wanted to drift off to a dreamless sleep in his own bed with his arms wrapped tight around his lady, Catelyn. (AGOT, Eddard XIII)
Which mirrors...
They had dressed the bones in Ned's surcoat, the fine white velvet with the direwolf badge over the heart, but nothing remained of the warm flesh that had pillowed her head so many nights, the arms that had held her. The head had been rejoined to the body with fine silver wire, but one skull looks much like another, and in those empty hollows she found no trace of her lord's dark grey eyes, eyes that could be soft as a fog or hard as stone. They gave his eyes to crows, she remembered. (ACOK, Catelyn V)
Both long for each other’s embrace. In theory, they could reunite in death.
I wonder if there is going to be some kind of compromise, if Catelyn and Ned will reunite in death, in a way that doesn’t privilege one tradition over the other.
Let the kings of winter have their cold crypt under the earth, Catelyn thought. The Tullys drew their strength from the river, and it was to the river they returned when their lives had run their course. (ASOS, Catelyn IV)
Either Catelyn is given a proper Tully burial to make up for the horrible mockery commited by the Freys, or she will sacrifice her tradition - and Ned as well - and both will have something different - ancient - together.
There’s an interesting conversation happening in the crypts between Ned and Robert.
"She was a Stark of Winterfell," Ned said quietly. "This is her place."
"She should be on a hill somewhere, under a fruit tree, with the sun and clouds above her and the rain to wash her clean." (AGOT, Eddard I)
Later again, they talk in another graveyard, the barrowlands - Barbrey Dustin’s lands - amid the ancient graves of the Barrow Kings.
The rising sun sent fingers of light through the pale white mists of dawn. A wide plain spread out beneath them, bare and brown, its flatness here and there relieved by long, low hummocks. Ned pointed them out to his king. "The barrows of the First Men."
Robert frowned. "Have we ridden onto a graveyard?"
"There are barrows everywhere in the north, Your Grace," Ned told him. "This land is old." (...)
He belonged in Winterfell. He belonged with Catelyn in her grief, and with Bran.
A man could not always be where he belonged, though. Resigned, Eddard Stark put his boots into his horse and set off after the king. (AGOT, Eddard II)
The barrows are older than Winterfell’s crypts. A tradition of the first men.
And interestingly enough, there is this:
"Catelyn Tully dispatched Lord Eddard's bones north before the Red Wedding, but your iron uncle seized Moat Cailin and closed the way. I have been watching ever since. Should those bones ever emerge from the swamps, they will get no farther than Barrowton." She threw one last lingering look at the likeness of Eddard Stark. "We are done here." (ADWD, The Turncloak)
I am torn.
If Ned and Cat are to be reunited in death, it cannot be in the crypts, because that would unfairly privilege Ned’s traditions. Cat has made it clear she values her own, as she should.
So it’s either something completely new for both of them, or it’s separate burials. But don’t ask me how or why. Maybe the crypts are going through remodelling. Something.
I’m terrified for Episode 3 and everything, but I can’t help but have this vision where Robb rises from the crypt, wolf’s head and all, sees Sansa and Theon, and goes:
There’s so much good analysis of their scenes in this episode. I won’t repeat but will focus on an alchemy interpretation. Jon and Daenerys have joined in the permanent, elevated Chemical Wedding, but their union is dramatically tested in this episode. Nevertheless, at the end we see that they are still united in Heart, Mind, and Body.
Daenerys and Sansa
The show has withheld an explicit declaration of love by Jon and Daenerys to each other, but we get the next best thing in the Daenerys-Sansa scene.
Sansa says “He loves you, you know that.” Daenerys acknowledges she DOES know that when she responds by asking, “Does that bother you?” When Sansa points out that “men do stupid things for women,” Daenerys reassures her with these incredibly significant words.
“All my life I’ve known one goal, the Iron Throne. Taking it back from the people who destroyed my family and almost destroyed yours. My war was against them. Until I met Jon. Now I’m here half a world away, fighting Jon’s war, alongside him. I’m here because I love your brother and I trust him and I know he’s true to his word.”
In alchemical terms, Daenerys is acknowledging that her union with Jon has utterly transformed her. She loves him, he has her Heart. But more than that, she has changed her entire life’s purpose to align with his: they are of one Mind. And Daenerys has put her Body on the line, to fight “alongside him.”
Daenerys could have just said she’s here because she has seen and fully understands the NK threat, that she is “fighting for the living.” Which is of course ALSO true, and the way she put it in her conversation with Jon on the boat in Episode 7.06. Instead she frames her participation in the war as the fruit of her union with Jon, perhaps foreshadowing that after the war is over she will not return to her former goal of the IT. She’s not ready to relinquish her claim to the North--she has not yet thrown off the influence of her malign alchemist, her brother Viserys--but I suspect that will come.
Daenerys and Jon
Jon avoids talking alone with Daenerys for the entire episode, as he comes to grips with knowing the true story of his birth.
He is standing in front of the burial effigy of Lyanna Stark when Daenerys finds him in the crypt. The crypt is essentially a cave, a common symbol for the alchemical vessel where the Great Work occurs. We had Jon and Qhorin Halfhand in a cave in season 2, Jon and Ygritte in season 3, and Jon and Daenerys themselves in Season 6.
Of all the implications of Sam’s revelation, Jon is focused on the facts about his mother. His mother loved him, and her last thought was how to secure his safety. Jon has no visions of leading a Targaryen restoration. That’s Sam’s idea. Sam has played alchemist to Jon before, when he nominated him to be Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. Jon is not going to be manipulated that way again. Instead it is Daenerys who points out that if Sam and Bran’s story is true, then Jon would be the last male Targaryen and have a claim to the Iron Throne.
When Jon decides to tell Daenerys everything, he turns to face her and takes both of her hands in his. They thus form a small circle. (Remember how they stood together in the circle of the Targaryen sigell in the throne room of Dragonstone the day they met.) Jon does not recoil from her; he even leans in to be closer when she’s initially skeptical: “It’s true Dany,” he says, using his term of endearment for her.
Their conversation is interrupted by the blare of the horn announcing the arrival of the AOTD. Then there is a lacuna in their story. The next we see of them is on the Winterfell battlements. They walk into the frame together, so it’s safe to assume they left the crypt together and climbed all the way to the top of the wall together. No words are exchanged; none are needed. Jon simply nods to Daenerys and she immediately leaves, presumably to go to her battle station atop Drogon. Jon and Daenerys are still of one Mind, one Heart, and one Body. Indeed, in one of the stills for Episode 8.03, we see them standing together looking down at Winterfell.
