poorquentyn:

*rubs hands together* Yes, please, let’s take a deep dive into the characterization of Hother “Whoresbane” Umber, the smartest and most dangerous member of his clan and one of my favorite background characters in all of ASOIAF.

Does “most dangerous Umber” seem like a stretch? Don’t get me wrong, I certainly wouldn’t want Crowfood or the Greatjon mad at me, but they’re presented as jovial life-of-the-party drunks as much as badasses. There’s a wry affectionate “oh, you scamps” sort of tone to how GRRM writes the Umber men…except Whoresbane, who is framed with an ice-cold laser-focused menace about him that his kin do not possess, despite Hother being the least physically imposing of the lot. Within the Northern political community, “Old Whoresbane” has a well-established reputation as perhaps the most fearsome figure within that community, a living legend spoken of in whispers (rather than the loud-and-proud stories surrounding big brother Mors), someone with whom you simply do not fuck if you care to see another spring: 

A crow had once taken Mors for dead and pecked out his eye, so he wore a chunk of dragonglass in its stead. As Old Nan told the tale, he’d grabbed the crow in his fist and bitten its head off, so they named him Crowfood. She would never tell Bran why his gaunt brother Hother was called Whoresbane.

And now the Bastard of Bolton was riding south with Hother Umber to join them for an attack on Moat Cailin. “The Whoresbane his own self,” claimed a riverman who’d just brought a load of hides and timber down the White Knife, “with three hundred spearmen and a hundred archers. Some Hornwood men have joined them, and Cerwyns too.“ 

Odd as it might seem, old Hoarfrost Umber had once believed his youngest son had the makings of a maester. Mors loved to boast about the crow who took his eye, but Hother’s tale was only told in whispers…most like because the whore he’d disemboweled had been a man. 

“Night work is not knight’s work,” Lady Dustin said. “And Lord Wyman is not the only man who lost kin at your Red Wedding, Frey. Do you imagine Whoresbane loves you any better? If you did not hold the Greatjon, he would pull out your entrails and make you eat them, as Lady Hornwood ate her fingers.”

“Fear is what keeps a man alive in this world of treachery and deceit. Even here in Barrowton the crows are circling, waiting to feast upon our flesh. The Cerwyns and the Tallharts are not to be relied on, my fat friend Lord Wyman plots betrayal, and Whoresbane…the Umbers may seem simple, but they are not without a certain low cunning.”

But, I hear you protest again: more menacing than Roose Bolton? Surely not! Well, look at how Roose himself describes Whoresbane. That ellipsis speaks volumes: Whoresbane Umber is so thoroughly intimidating that Roose gods-damned Bolton, the Leech Lord, Westeros’ answer to Vlad the Impaler, is reduced to trailing off and staring into the middle distance, ultimately unable to bring himself to cite specifics.

That’s the first layer. The second layer is the implication that Whoresbane has been the brains of Last Hearth for a very, very long time. He was only at the Citadel in the first place because his father Hoarfrost (which: yes) believed he had “the makings of a maester,” which certainly bucks the Umber stereotype. After Hother came home, his status as the smartest man in the room–a Halfmaester, if you will–has held as the decades have gone by. The Greatjon is certainly not an idiot (just look at how he tests and then crowns Robb), but his grab-with-both-hands approach to life carries with it some significant blind spots, and it’s Whoresbane who rides to Winterfell to point them out:

Hother wanted ships. “There’s wildlings stealing down from the north, more than I’ve ever seen before. They cross the Bay of Seals in little boats and wash up on our shores. The crows in Eastwatch are too few to stop them, and they go to ground quick as weasels. It’s longships we need, aye, and strong men to sail them. The Greatjon took too many. Half our harvest is gone to seed for want of arms to swing the scythes.”

Contrast Hother with Mors, and the picture becomes crystal clear. Crowfood, too, is far from stupid, but he comes to Winterfell to dance with the serving girls and offer his magical grief-curing cock to Lady Hornwood. Whoresbane is the one with the numbers in his head, the one keeping track of the harvest and the wildlings, the one looking out for the smallfolk of Last Hearth. Crowfood is doing everything he can to escape his brother’s household; Whoresbane is the one the Greatjon trusted to keep the lights on and bring concerns to the Stark in Winterfell. 

And yes, as that anecdote about his time in Oldtown reveals, Whoresbane is gay. (Or possibly bi, but again, Crowfood is the one who asks for Lady Hornwood’s hand and macks on the serving girls, whereas Whoresbane shows interest in neither.) For me, this is part of an overall characterization in which Whoresbane defies the public image of his House and yet somehow also turns that image up to 11. Hother Umber is a gay man in a family of aggressively straight dudes, a “gaunt” and “cadaverous” man in a family of larger-than-life giants, an intellectual in a family of jocks, and is still the most metal of them all, and everyone knows it. How can you not love that?

What really cements Whoresbane as one of my favorites, though, are the hints about what the payoff for this characterization will look like. In ADWD, Whoresbane joins Team Bolton, taking half the remaining Umber men to the Dreadfort (and from there to Moat Cailin, Barrowton, and finally Winterfell) while leaving the rest with Crowfood. As Barbrey tells us, though, there’s no pretense that he’s actually loyal to Roose and Ramsay. Indeed, in Theon’s first ADWD chapter, we see that Whoresbane is wearing armor even to dinner, and can’t stop himself from expressing disgust at Ramsay’s treatment of Theon. And then, in Theon’s released TWOW chapter, we learn a very telling detail: 

“Mors took the green boys and Hother took the greybeards.”

Whoresbane didn’t just randomly select half the remaining men at Last Hearth. He specifically brought his fellow greybeards with him. And what is it that old Northmen do when the food runs short as we know it is at Last Hearth (“half our harvest is gone to seed for want of arms to swing the scythes”), when winter is no longer coming, but here?

Alys sighed. “My father took so many of our men south with him that only the women and young boys were left to bring the harvest in. Them, and the men too old or crippled to go off to war. Crops withered in the fields or were pounded into the mud by autumn rains. And now the snows are come. This winter will be hard. Few of the old people will survive it, and many children will perish as well.”

It was a tale that any northmen knew well. “My father’s grandmother was a Flint of the mountains, on his mother’s side,” Jon told her. “The First Flints, they call themselves. They say the other Flints are the blood of younger sons, who had to leave the mountains to find food and land and wives. It has always been a harsh life up there. When the snows fall and food grows scarce, their young must travel to the winter town or take service at one castle or the other. The old men gather up what strength remains in them and announce that they are going hunting. Some are found come spring. More are never seen again.”

“Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned’s little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue.”

So I think Whoresbane’s master plan (and given all of the the above, I’d say it’s very much his plan, and Crowfood is following his lead) is to lead the old men on a glorious kamikaze mission against the hated Boltons, while Crowfood preserves the next generation, who now may have enough to eat. Like his great-nephew Smalljon, he’ll go down a Stark man to the end, Umber on the inside where it counts.