Tag: queued

Cersei & Lysa Parallels

starklyannas:

Envious of their sibling

When we were little, Jaime and I were so much alike that even our lord father could not tell us apart. Sometimes as a lark we would dress in each other’s clothes and spend a whole day each as the other. Yet even so, when Jaime was given his first sword, there was none for me. ‘What do I get?’ I remember asking. We were so much alike, I could never understand why they treated us so differently. Jaime learned to fight with sword and lance and mace, while I was taught to smile and sing and please. […] Jaime’s lot was to be glory and power, while mine was birth and moonblood. (Sansa VI, ACOK)

Yes, your mother, your precious mother, my own sweet sister Catelyn. Don’t you think to play the innocent with me, you vile little liar. All those years in Riverrun, she played with Petyr as if he were her little toy. She teased him with smiles and soft words and wanton looks, and made his nights a torment. (Sansa VII, ASOS)

Suspicious of Sansa

Queen you shall be … until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear. (Cersei III, AFFC)

You think you can have any man you want because you’re young and beautiful. (Sansa VII, ASOS)

Resented the patriarchy for being “sold off”

I was to be sold to some stranger like a horse, to be ridden whenever my new owner liked, beaten whenever he liked, and cast aside in time for a younger filly. (Sansa VI, ACOK)

Father said I ought to thank the gods that so great a lord as Jon Arryn was willing to take me soiled, but I knew it was only for the swords. (Sansa VII, ASOS)

Unhappy marriages

There were chills in this room, and her wretched royal husband had died beneath this canopy. Robert Baratheon, the First of His Name, may there never be a second. A dim, drunken brute of a man. Let him weep in hell. (Cersei VII, AFFC)

That was hard, to see him every day and still be wed to that old cold man. Jon did his duty in the bedchamber, but he could no more give me pleasure than he could give me children. His seed was old and weak. All my babies died but Robert, three girls and two boys. All my sweet little babies dead, and that old man just went on and on with his stinking breath. So you see, I have suffered too. (Sansa VI, ASOS)

Killed their husbands

Oh, indeed. Cersei gave him the wineskins, and told him it was Robert’s favorite vintage.“ The eunuch shrugged. “A hunter lives a perilous life. If the boar had not done for Robert, it would have been a fall from a horse, the bite of a wood adder, an arrow gone astray … the forest is the abbatoir of the gods. It was not wine that killed the king. It was your mercy. (Eddard XV, AGOT)

No need for tears … but that’s not what you said in King’s Landing. You told me to put the tears in Jon’s wine, and I did. (Sansa VII, ASOS)

Had secret affairs

And Jaime and I are more than brother and sister. We are one person in two bodies. We shared a womb together. He came into this world holding my foot, our old maester said. When he is in me, I feel … whole. (Eddard XII, AGOT)

I want you now, this very night. And I must warn you, after all these years of silence and whisperings, I mean to scream when you love me. (Sansa VI, ASOS)

Killed by their lover, the last person they expect to betray them

And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you. (Cersei VIII, AFFC)

“Only Cat.” He gave her a short, sharp shove.

Lysa stumbled backward, her feet slipping on the wet marble. And then she was gone. She never screamed. For the longest time there was no sound but the wind. (Sansa VII, ASOS)

therealncrth:

♛ || ❛ … and dead. No one has seen or heard of Arya since they cut Father’s head off. Why do you lie to yourself ? Arya’s gone, the same as Bran and Rickon, and they’ll kill Sansa too once the dwarf gets a child from her. Jon is the only brother that remains to me. Should I die without issue, I want him to succeed me as King in the North. I had hoped you would support my choice. ❜ — 𝗥𝗢𝗕𝗕 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗞 ( 𝑪𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒍𝒚𝒏 𝑽, A Storm of Swords )

jakegyllenheel:

“It’s just a stupid sword,“ she said, aloud this time…but it wasn’t. Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father, even Sansa. Needle was Winterfell’s grey walls, and the laughter of its people. Needle was the summer snows, Old Nan’s stories, the heart tree with its red leaves and scary face, the warm earthy smell of the glass gardens, the sound of the north wind rattling the shutters of her room. Needle was Jon Snow’s smile. He used to mess my hair and call me “little sister,” she remembered, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes. The gods wanted me to have it. Not the Seven, nor Him of Many Faces, but her father’s gods, the old gods of the north. The Many-Faced God can have the rest, she thought, but he can’t have this. ― A Feast for Crows

moonlitgleek:

On second glance, the flashback at Winterfell gave us more about Lyanna and the eldest Stark generation that meets the eye.

Lyanna and Ned both exhibit the same rose-tainted glasses view that we’ve seen of the younger Stark generation from Jon to Sansa to Arya. Neither Ned or Lyanna think anything of asking Wyllis to play at swords with Benjen, ignoring the class distinction between them that could prove to be very dangerous for Wyllis. There’s less class tension in Winterfell but the Westerosi society as a whole does not take kindly to a lowborn boy battling a highborn lordling, one much younger and smaller than him at that. On merit of size and age alone, Wyllis would get branded aggressive and be at a great risk that, outside of Winterfell, could prove fatal. Hell, what happens if Wyllis accidentally hurts Benjen since he has no training to discipline his moves? Wyllis is the one standing to take the fall in such a scenario.

And he does take the fall in the flashback to an extent since Old Nan reprimands him and pinches his ear despite it being a situation where he doesn’t have much choice in considering his status compared to Lyanna and Ned’s. It might be a small thing, a quick reprimand, but it’s an indication of how the hierarchy between them makes Wyllis the one in the wrong no matter what. Ned and Lyanna should have been made to see that their free and casual association with lower classes in that way and in that context can pose a risk to those with lower status, and that even asking Wyllis to spare with Benjen is unfair to him as well as risky, since he can’t very well refuse them, and since that instills in him a more casual regard of class distinction that could land him in hot water with nobles who aren’t the Starks.

But that apparently doesn’t happen and the Stark children do not get that warning since the same rosy view gets passed on to Arya who shows the same attitude years later with Mycah the butcher boy, and this time Arya’s dismissal of class distinctions does prove fatal to Mycah. Even without Joffrey’s involvement, the scenario of a butcher boy playing with a highborn lady in what could be perceived as an aggressive manner would still hold severe consequences for Mycah if any noble saw fit to punish him for his presumption that he could. Arya does not consider that when she asks him to spar with her.

That extremely naive view of the world is present in all the Starks of both generations. Ned and Lyanna’s brother Brandon hasn’t appeared on the show but I keep thinking of the extreme naivete, ignorance and impulsiveness he showed in the books when he rode into King’s Landing calling for the crown prince to come out and die after Rhaegar’s supposed kidnapping of Lyanna. Because there was no way this could go wrong at all. Brandon held no regard to the difference between him and Rhaegar that gives Rhaegar and the royal family power over him, power that Aerys ended up using to punish him for the same disregard of class that his siblings exhibited on a smaller scale.

And Brandon was the heir to Winterfell. By merit of his gender and status, he was paid the most attention among his siblings when it came to his education. So when the heir has that naive view of the world, it’s not hard to imagine that the same view played a big part in Lyanna’s speculated eloping with Rhaegar. She simply had no grasp of the political consequences a move like that would have, from the breaking of her betrothal to Robert to the tension it would cause between her family and the royal family to the insult this poses to both the Starks and the Baratheons. Until Robert’s Rebellion, the Stark children showed they have no real grasp on how the world worked outside of Winterfell, and that got passed on to the next generation.

Two thumbs up to Winterfell’s education system.