Yes, I absolutely believe there was an element of personal rage and vengeful catharsis going on with Tywin and the Red Wedding. Look at the satisfaction he takes in melting down Ice, or the way he threatens to smile when Tyrion comes very close to figuring out that Sybell is the lion lord’s agent.
As far as their bodies go…certainly possible that Tywin ordered that, but Roose and the Freys are more than brutal enough to come up with that on their own.
Agreed. I don’t see Tywin outright ordering Robb’s and Catelyn’s bodies to be desecrated in such a way but it’s a case similar to how he didn’t directly order Elia’s rape and murder – he simply did not need to. Walder Frey was a famously
irascible
man who brooded on insults and who wanted to avenge himself of the Starks and Tully, he was perfect for being a proxy for Tywin in exacting a bloody revenge to satisfy personal rage. He was always going to be brutally dishonorable and petty in how he dealt with them and Tywin knew that, just as he knew that Gregor Clegane would be brutal with Elia.
But the thing about this act is that the Freys’ actions were inspired by Tywin. I think Walder Frey was trying to emulate Tywin in being merciless in dealing with his enemies and those who insulted him and his house, something which surely appeals to a man who never forgot an insult and longed to repay it and assert his House’s standing in the face of those who mocked him. More importantly, Walder is emulating Tywin in his overly violent (and very personal)
political action – perhaps there is an element of him trying to do what Tywin did in eradicating the Reynes and Tarbecks and letting the ruins of Castamere and Tarbeck Hall stand as a reminder of what happens to those who cross the Lions. Walder is making an example out of Robb and showing the consequences of insulting House Frey – and also asserting the consequences of crossing the Lannister since their support is what’s propping the Freys and allowing them to get away with their crime (for now). In that sense, killing Robb was not enough, the Freys had to obliterate his memory so that people would not remember him as the Young Wolf who outsmarted Tywin Lannister and turn him into a legend, but as a cautionary tale to what happens to those who cross the Lions, and their friends of Frey.
Cersei didn’t find out what valonqar meant until some time after she received the prophecy.
“Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds,” she said. “And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.” “What is a valonqar? Some monster?” The golden girl did not like that foretelling.
She could still hear Melara
Hetherspoon insisting that if they never spoke about the prophecies,
they would not come true. She was not so silent in the well, though. She
screamed and shouted. “Tyrion is the valonqar,” she said. “Do
you use that word in Myr? It’s High Valyrian, it means little brother.”
She had asked Septa Saranella about the word, after Melara drowned.
To be quite honest, I find this what-if extremely unlikely in the first place. Cersei and her companions went to Maggy’s tent at the Lannisport tourney in honor of Prince Viserys’s birth, in 276. They went of their own free will, because Cersei wanted to know her future because she had been told that the announcement of her betrothal to Rhaegar would be that night. It wasn’t some evil fairy showing up at a christening; Cersei barged into the maegi’s tent, woke her up, insulted her, and demanded her fortune told. That’s… not going to happen with girls age 7 or younger, sorry. (Noble girls that young have guardians who’d prevent that sort of adventure.)
It’s not going to happen with a Cersei whose mother is still alive. It’s not going to happen without a tourney for Maggy to set up a fortune-telling tent at. It’s not going to happen without Viserys’s birth and Tywin’s desire to flatter the king. It’s not going to happen without a proposed betrothal (again, age 7 or younger is way too young for that). So in short, it’d never happen. Hope that helps!
Additionally, it’s been quite established that Cersei’s ableism and preconceived notion of Tyrion’s monstrosity is why she zeroed on on him as the person in the prophecy, something that would never exist with Jaime whom Cersei is firmly convinced is her other half and mirror image. The reason the revelation of Jaime as the valonqar is going to be so shocking to Cersei is because she has been conditioned to think of Jaime as a part of her, and of Tyrion as an evil monstrous being whose birth was an ill omen to House Lannister all around. Cersei expected depravity from Tyrion long before she ever heard the prophecy and decided to punish him accordingly when he was literally only a newborn babe. Without these conceptions of her brothers fueling her deduction process, Cersei is never going to ever conceive of Jaime as the subject of that prophecy.
I find that trying to assign Cersei’s belief that Tyrion is the valonqar to any other person misses the point of the story and often understands it backwards –
Cersei did not revile Tyrion because she thought he would kill her, she thought that he would kill her because she already reviled and demonized him from the moment of his birth. Her ableism and prejudice are what drove her to that conclusion.
She already thought him a monster so it was a foregone conclusion to her that the monster who killed her mother would end up killing her as well. This is an element that is simply not there with Jaime so it doesn’t really matter when Cersei heard the prophecy, she was never going to believe him the valonqar of the prophecy. The circumstances that made Tyrion an easy target for Cersei’s scorn and condemnation simply do not exist in Jaime’s case.
“Ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.”
The Dead Ladies Club is a term I invented** circa 2012 to describe the pantheon of undeveloped female characters in ASOIAF from the generation or so before the story began.
It is a term that carries with it inherent criticisms of ASOIAF, which this post will address, in an essay in nine parts. The first, second, and third parts of this essay define the term in detail. Subsequent sections examine how these women were written and why this aspect of ASOIAF merits criticism, exploring the pervasiveness of the dead mothers trope in fiction, the excessive use of sexual violence in writing these women, and the differences in GRRM’s portrayals of male sacrifice versus female sacrifice in the narrative.
To conclude, I assert that the manner in which these women were written undermines GRRM’s thesis, and ASOIAF – a series I consider to be one of the greatest works of modern fantasy – is poorer because of it.
I don’t like trying to read people’s minds with so little evidence to go on.
However, if it was GRRM’s intent to make “a deliberate point about women’s lives and contributions being minimized or outright erased in a deeply sexist society,” it hasn’t really worked, compared to other of his efforts to make such critiques (think Cersei’s walk of shame).
Q: Speaking about women there’s is a hidden figure:
Ned’s mother, you only say “she was Lady Stark and she died”. Nothing
more? Nothing important or something too important? (please at least
choose one hypothesis).
GRRM: If there is anything important, I will reveal it in due time.
(Did Tolkien ever get letters asking about Aragorn’s mother, I wonder?)
No, George, people didn’t need to ask Tolkien that because he actually wrote about Gilraen, mother of Aragorn. (Among other places, notably in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, in the ROTK appendixes.) She had a heartbreaking story where she chose to marry Arathorn, heir to the chieftainship of the Dunedain, much younger (at age 22) than their people normally did, because her father foresaw that he would have a short life but her mother foresaw that if she did not then the chance for hope to be born to their people would be lost. They married, and a year later Arathorn became chieftain when his father was killed; then a son was born to them… but only two years later, Arathorn was killed in battle. Aragorn was raised in Rivendell for his protection, and given the name Estel (hope) to help hide him. When he fell in love with Arwen, Gilraen advised him against it (for how high he was aiming, and she feared that Elrond would stop caring for the Dunedain, and she foresaw that Aragorn would spend many years in the wilderness alone). Elrond charged Aragorn to defeat Sauron and his works (and later said he would only grant Arwen to no less than the king of Gondor and Arnor), and Aragorn said farewell to his mother and left to do so. He would return rarely, but once (about 10 years before the War of the Ring) he came to the North to find his mother prematurely aged, and seeing the coming darkness she knew her death would be soon. Aragorn tried to reassure her, hoping that she would live to see the light beyond the darkness, but she only replied, in Elvish, “I gave Estel (Hope) to the Dunedain, I have kept no hope for myself.” Gilraen died before the next spring.
In contrast, Ned Stark’s mother… had those two quotes above. (Starting from 1999, 3 years after the release of AGOT.) Oh, and in 2014, The World of Ice and Fire was released, and the Stark family tree in its appendix revealed that Ned’s mother was named Lyarra Stark, and she was the first cousin once removed of Rickard Stark. And that’s all we know about her. “Lady Stark. She died.”
This idea that the Dead Ladies’ Club is “a deliberate point about women’s lives and contributions being minimized or outright erased in a deeply sexist society,” has always made me a little uncomfortable. Not just because it’s wrong-footed, but because it strikes me as a train of thought that doesn’t differentiate between a sexist society and a sexist narrative.
Because, yes, Westeros is a deeply misogynistic patriarchal society in a lot of ways. It mistreats, minimizes and victimizes women and all that dehumanizing and marginalization of rights towards women is baked into the system, from the way they’re looked at as baby-makers and localizing their responsibilities to the domestic area. It gets real bad as Cersei and Arianne point out.
Now, when GRRM consciously deconstructs or critiques Westerosi patriarchy, more times than not, he does nail it and it comes off effective, in my opinion. Like, Asha being dumped with diminishing misogynistic remarks at the kingsmoot, Cersei with her entire drive to be her father’s true heir in power and Arianne’s abject refusal to be diminished in favor of her younger brother, etc.
These are all examples of women who, yes, are marginalized and constricted by gender boundaries and a sexist society, but the narrative generally isn’t misogynistic towards them. It doesn’t discredit them as people. It explores their interiority, their struggles, their quirks, habits and flaws and triumphs. It validates their pain and difficulties with the patriarchy.
Hell, Brienne’s A Feast for Crows arc makes “a deliberate point about women’s lives and contributions being minimized or outright erased in a deeply sexist society,” given how much Randyll victim-blames her for “encouraging” the men to harass her, shits on her capabilities as a female non-knight, even though the only differences are sexual organs and (lack of) title, and erases her sword skills by snapping that "The sword is quick.“
The problem with assuming there’s an authorial point to these ladies… well, first off, there’s something to be said about the presence of a deliberate point not inherently being good. Because, let’s assume, for a moment, there’s a deliberate point to these women being dead the way the narrative cast them in. Great! They’re still victimized in inherently gendered manners of death/abuse. That doesn’t really tell us anything new about Westeros we didn’t already know and since this isn’t tailored as a critique against patriarchy, it’s still a fundamentally unchecked problematic facet of the narrative, intent or not.
Second off, we don’t get a full sense of their lives and contributions. Narratively speaking,
you have to pen a sense of interiority, of personhood, of self and living experience with these ladies before you attempt such a deliberate point. Otherwise, we get the “minimized or outright erased” part (by dint of their usually brutal deaths)… but we don’t get the “women’s lives and contributions.” Like… show, don’t tell? The narrative has to stand up to bat for these women too or else you have one that diminishes the lives and contributions of women by offering little or none of them in the text and only has the victimization of them, which is a sign of a casually misogynistic part of a narrative. We lose the voices of these ladies.
Third off… GRRM makes mistakes. He definitely hits more than he misses, but there’s just stuff like Dany and Drogo’s marriage and a ton of Essosi world-building that I can definitely say where he’s dropped the ball. And, given @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly‘s GRRM interview quotes, it’s more likely he just dropped the ball here rather than made an deliberate point about the Dead Ladies’ Club. It happens. Authors just make mistakes sometimes.
LOS ANGELES—In a room inside the Versace mansion in Miami, just a few steps from where Andrew Cunanan fatally shot the designer, Darren Criss was told that Ryan Murphy, who cast him in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” paid him the supreme compliment.
Hearing that the award-winning executive producer-director cast him as Cunanan because he always knew there was a great dramatic actor in him, Darren gave a fittingly serious answer. Playing the serial killer, who murdered at least five people, is a big shift for Darren, who first worked with Ryan as Blaine Anderson in the musical TV series, “Glee.”
“Oh, how far we’ve come,” Darren quipped with a laugh. He has taken off his gray suit jacket. “Miami heat is getting to my head,” he explained.
We were in a room with walls gilded with mosaic tile work and stained glass windows, typical of the designer’s lavish home.
Like Cunanan, Darren is Filipino-American. The actor— the son of a Cebuana, Cerina (nee Bru), and Charles William Criss from Pennsylvania— noted his eerie resemblance to Cunanan. The latter’s mom (Mary Anne Schillaci) is Italian-American, while his dad, Modesto Cunanan, is Filipino.
For the actor who starred on Broadway in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” this role represents his biggest and most dramatic challenge yet.
Ryan, on a career high with his “Feud: Bette and Joan” and “The People v. OJ Simpson,” picked a fine cast to join Darren: Edgar Ramirez (Versace), Penelope Cruz (Donatella Versace) and Ricky Martin (Antonio D’Amico, Versace’s longtime lover).
The FX miniseries, which continues to shoot, debuts in early 2018.
Excerpts from our interview:
Ryan Murphy said he always knew there was a great dramatic actor in you, and he wanted people to see that in this show. How scary or daunting is that for you? Actors are only as good as the parts they get to play. It’s a passive art form. People will hate me for saying that because obviously, when you’re doing it, it isn’t passive. But if I’m a musician, I can pick up my guitar and play it. If there was no one in this room, I can still play my guitar. I can proactively be a musician.
I always say the best actors in the world, we’ll probably never know about. We’ll never get to see that guy do “King Lear,” that woman do “Hedda Gabler.” You have to wait for those moments.
This is a moment for me, and I recognize that. I do feel like my ship came in for this one. “Glee” was a big hit before I was on it. I had a very objective relationship with it. I was in college when it was all over the place. So, to suddenly be thrust on it was a strange but very wonderful experience.
It brings me here for which I’m unfathomably grateful. But I studied acting. I treat acting like a real craft as much as you love to roll your eyes at that little word. But it’s true. There’s no sense of entitlement. But I worked hard. I believe in doing the necessary steps to get to a certain place.
So, to be finally be given this opportunity, I feel prepared. Whether or not it’s good is a whole other story. It could be horrible, crash and burn. But it’s like that—give me the ball, coach. And Ryan certainly gave me a good throw. So I’m very excited about that.
You were 10 when Versace was killed. At what point in your life did you know about him? I knew Versace was killed in front of his home. I’d been here before, the first time I went to Miami. I remember looking it up, seeing the steps. This is so eerie. I vaguely remembered that he was half-Filipino. If there’s any half-Filipino in the media, you tend to pay attention to it.
I had, through the fabulous world of “Glee,” met Donatella. I had been to Versace’s home in Milan. But, that was about as far as a connection that I had.
Can you talk about filming the crucial assassination scene? It was gruesome. Because we were not shooting this in a sound studio in Los Angeles. This is the house—and people walking around here were there for that. We couldn’t hide it. It was in broad daylight. So, to feel that energy of this very real event, it weighed heavily on me.
When I shot it, I was thrilled because Edgar wasn’t here for that. If I had to look in Edgar’s eyes and do something like that, that would have been tough, because it weighs on your conscience.
But, as an actor, when you’re doing something like that, I’m not thinking of my conscience. As far as I’m concerned, I’m the hero in this story. That’s how I have to play it. There’s a certain longing, loss, confusion, hurt and just a f**kload of pain that is coming into an act like that.
That’s what you have to channel. It helps that we’re in paradise because we do this really gruesome stuff, then I can go home and have a cocktail on the beach. It’s like, “All right, real life is OK.”
Can you clarify why you didn’t film that scene with Edgar around? Only because that had to do more with the technical aspects. It’s highly technical, but the biggest meat of the shot was of me making the decision [to kill Versace] and going up [to him]. It’s giving a little bit away. So now, you know about that shot. Sorry, Ryan.
How did you research on Andrew Cunanan? The series is mainly based on the book of Maureen Orth, who’s an extraordinary journalist and did mind-bending work and collection of data from friends, family and all records available.
What’s interesting about this particular case is, as famous as Versace is, there’s not a whole lot of stuff [about it]. There’s only one book, at least one that’s pretty serious. The others are trashy pulp novels.
There are three different versions of Andrew that I have to deal with. There’s the real version that none of us knew. There is the version that people did know, then there’s the version that we’re telling.
As an actor, I can contact the family members or friends, but they’re all going to have different answers of who he was. My job is to serve the script. As much as I want to stay true to who Cunanan was, we really don’t know what kind of person he was. We just have to humanize him as much as possible and hope for the best.
Elia had asked to see the baby. It was really curious to her that no one seemed to want to talk about a newborn babe, let even mention it.
Cersei and Jaime, she could understand, they were children who had just lost their own mother – but even Elia’s mother herself seemed to be… ill at ease when she asked about him. Everyone was whispering, but never talking.
Tyrion, Cersei said he was named, her face wincing in disgust and anger. “He’s horrible, you know. He is a monster, and he killed our mother, you really don’t want to see him.”
Yet Elia had insisted, and Cersei had decided to make a show of it. “He will die in a few days anyway. He does not have long left.“
Even Oberyn had looked shaken in the end ; not by the babe’s looks, but by the way Cersei hurted him. Is someone talkingto these children ? Did no one even comfort this girl about her dead mother, for her to take it out on a baby ?
Then, Elia stayed behind.
While Jaime pulled Cersei away from the squalling babe, she stayed behind. She could hear them arguing on the way out. Even Oberyn had not yet noticed that she did not follow them – it would not be long. No one would allow her alone in the nursery.
She let the babe grab her fingers with his little hands. Sure, he is small, and his head is a little big, but he is a baby, just a baby… She smiled, then. He would be strong, she was sure of it. It’s not good telling him he’ll die…
“Do you know what the maesters said about me, little one ?” she whispered, close to the wide, mismatched eyes that were staring at her. He had stopped crying. “I was very small when I was born. I think I was smaller than you even. They all said I wouldn’t live… My mother had lost two sons already, she was scared, but she did not believe them. And I did not die. I’m ill, and a little frail, but I’m alive. I think you too will live, Tyrion Lannister. Maybe it will be hard, but it’s better than dying.”
“Elia, are you coming ? Leave him.”
“I hope we will meet again,” she added before kissing the tiny fingers that held on hers and running after the others.
Sam speaks 