Episode 116: A CLASH OF KINGS, DAVOS II: "Shadow of a Doubt, Part 2" SHOW NOTES! (Patreon)

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast … podcast: the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. 

And I’m your other host Emmett, better known as PoorQuentyn.          

Welcome to the one hundred and sixteenth episode of the Not A Cast, titled: “Shadow of a Doubt, Part 2: An Analysis of ACOK, Davos II,” in which Stannis and Davos have a very casual conversation. Nothing major, just bros being bros.

This episode is brought to you by our Small Council: 

• Hand of the King WolfmanZack 
• Grandmaester Timbob, who adds troubleshooter of systems and designer of circuit boards to his title
• Lord Commander of the Kingsguard Mark N. 
• Lord Travis, Master of Ships and Warden of the Waves, who adds Captain of the war galley NIGHT WOLF, the ship that stalks the Seven Seas, and Wielder of the Valryian Steel trident SUMMONER, the blade that brings the Deep Ones
• Ser Keith J, Master of Whisperers
• Lord Philip the Merciful, Master of Laws
• Archmaester June, Healer of the Lesser Poxes
• Ragged Michael, Warden of the North
• Nelson the Hammer, Prince of Dragonstone
• Scarlett the Other Red Woman and Mistress of Whisperers
• Lord Micah: Warden of the West and the Kraken’s Bane
• Lord James: the Jim that was Promised
• The High Bearded Priest
• Lord Jake, Assistant (to the) Hand of the King
• Lady Xena Valyrian
• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen's Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• His Grace’s High Inquisitor Frank
• Ser Jasper the Cruel, the King’s Justice
• Laurence, Prince of Dorne
• Kelly, Warden of the East and Mistress of (Old) Bay of Crabs
• Steven the Steadfast, Master of Hounds
• The Blue Winter Rose Knight of Highgarden
• Lady Stephanie
• Lord Anonymous
• Lord Carlos
• Lord Andrew the Restless, a Priest of the Drowned God
• The King's Cook, Nolly (No-lee) Olly (Oh-lee), Master of Cannoli
• Ser Sourcedelica 
• Prince Matthew of House Targaryen - Proud Soy Boy of Summerhall, Defender of the 5th Book and Swing Dancer with Dragons
• Ser K.W. Dent, Elsie of the Blackwood Guard, and Batman of the Seven Kingdoms
• Lord Penchant for Nostalgia
• Queer Alex, Rainbow Commander of the They-des and Gentle-thems (ladies and gentlemen)
• Lord Clint, Esq., Master of Absolutely, Positively NOT Serving As A Spy for Several Unnamed High Lords and Ladies In Order to Further the Secret Blackfyre-Style Conspiracy to Overthrow The Oppressive Small Council
• Haldivar, The Waiter for TWOW
• A-a-ron Damphair Prophet of the Forsaken and High Priest of Euron Crows Eye
• Lieutenant Glenn Lord of H town
• Vanerys of the House Colgaryen, the First of Her Name, Princess of Dragonstone, Mistress of Art, The Overworked, Queen of the Pencils, the Eraser and the First Draft, Queen of Monochrome, Devotee of the Great GOT, Portraitist of the Realm, Lady Realist of the Seven Kingdoms, Blender of Paints and Maker of Drawings
• Seanwell the Slayer
• Lord Adam T
• Lady Alexandra of Tarth
• Ser Kristoph Logas, Bloody Scorpion of the Red Field, Defender of the Letter of Kin, and the Wolverine of house Qorgyle
• Lady Elizabeth, Mistress of Horse (Faced Lesbians)
• Ser Josh Snow Bastard Bounty Hunter of the North
• Ser Veyor, Chief of Parties in the Frozen Wastes
• Lord Peter
• Lady Ashley
• The Dead Sheppard Reborn, Preacher of the Poor Fellows
• Marshall Harrison—Absent, shipwrecked in the Jade Sea
• Grave-Robb Stark, the Cadaver King and Horror of Harrenhal
• Olaf, proponent of establishing a feudal, pseudodemocratic system of Great Councils, wherein every count votes
• Ser Tim: The Knight Who Was Guided By Voices
• Lord Nick
• Thucydides, Lord of Plagues
• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen’s Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• And our newest/oldest member of the small council: everyone welcome back Lord Gene the Splendid, Master of Coin, Warden of Tampa Bay whose leave of absence just prior to the 2020 audit was not regarded as suspicious -- especially after the  

Spoiler warning: All published books, 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show. Anything and everything!

Question

Carl Z, a Sworn Sword patron, asks:

Hey guys, I was thinking after the first Forsaken episode, and had a question, should you select it: Aeron has "two mighty pillars" on which he built his life after his downing. You've spent a fair amount of time discussing the second, insofar as his reliance on the Drowned God is mostly hearing his own thoughts repeated back to him as godly wisdom.

I haven't heard as much discussion about the first pillar, Balon. What reason would Aeron have to establish Balon not only as his role model and eventual king, but a pillar for his entire worldview? The Balon we know from the books couldn't have been helpful in dealing with Aeron's trauma from the abuse he suffered. Is he merely useful as an exemplar of the Old Way, or is there another reason for Aeron to make his brother such an all-important figure in his life?

So, thank you Carl Z for the question. If you’d like to hear more about our thoughts about Aeron Greyjoy and The Forsaken, please consider becoming a Poor Fellow or above patron where you can listen to part two of our four part analysis of TWOW, The Forsaken at patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF either later this week if you’re watching live. It’ll be out by the time this episode is released on our release date!

Absolutely. And if you want to ask us questions we’ll answer here on the NotACast pod-cast, you can become a Sworn Sword or higher patron again at patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF.

But enough about patreon (patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF), when we last left Davos Seaworth, he had been witness to Stannis Baratheon and Cortnay Penrose’s parlay outside of Storm’s End. Let’s find out when he gets Stannis Baratheon “alone” in this synopsis of ACOK, Davos II, part 2!

Synopsis

Stannis said no word, but turned his horse around and started back toward his camp. The others followed. "If we storm these walls thousands will die," fretted ancient Lord Estermont, who was the king's grandfather on his mother's side. "Better to hazard but a single life, surely? Our cause is righteous, so the gods must surely bless our champion's arms with victory."

God, old man, thought Davos. You forget, we have only one now, Melisandre's Lord of Light.

Aw yeah. We’re back with Davos. And I could think of no one better to play Davos than you, ser! With that in mind, buckle up, this is going to be a dialogue heavy “synopsis”!

Stannis’ men get to talking about who should be Stannis’ champion. Ser Jon Fossoway would so totally do it. He would. It’s just y’know, he’s not as good of a swordsman as Lord Caron or Ser Guyard are. That’s what he’s really concerned about. Caron thinks it’ll be glorious to win Storm’s End in single combat. Stannis has a different thought about it:

Stannis raked them all with a look. "You chatter like magpies, and with less sense. I will have quiet." The king's eyes fell on Davos. "Ser. Ride with me." He spurred his horse away from his followers. Only Melisandre kept pace, bearing the great standard of the fiery heart with the crowned stag within. As if it had been swallowed whole.

The stag swallowed whole by fire? Again, no symbolism detected. We press on.

Davos notices all the nobles sideways eyeing each other at Stannis asking for Davos to be here, and he thinks that the easygoing Renly never talked to his lords like this. But Stannis did. When he pulls up next to Stannis, Davos notices that Stannis looks not good. Bags under his eyes and a ragged face. 

He eased back to a slow trot when his horse came up beside the king's. "Your Grace." Seen at close hand, Stannis looked worse than Davos had realized from afar. His face had grown haggard, and he had dark circles under his eyes.

"A smuggler must be a fair judge of men," the king said. "What do you make of this Ser Cortnay Penrose?"

"A stubborn man," said Davos carefully.

"Hungry for death, I call it. He throws my pardon in my face. Aye, and throws his life away in the bargain, and the lives of every man inside those walls. Single combat?" The king snorted in derision. "No doubt he mistook me for Robert."

"More like he was desperate. What other hope does he have?"

"None. The castle will fall. But how to do it quickly?" 

Stannis starts doing that teeth-grinding brooding for a bit. But then he brings up Ser Cortnay’s father. Alester Florent wants him here. What does Davos know about him? Well, Davos knows that Lord Penrose was old and dying, but he greeted Davos courteously. Awesome. Well, Lord Florent wants to put a noose around the old man’s neck and force Cortnay to surrender. What does Davos think of this?

It was dangerous to oppose the queen's men, but Davos had vowed always to tell his king the truth. "I think that would be ill done, my liege. Ser Cortnay will watch his father die before he would ever betray his trust. It would gain us nothing, and bring dishonor to our cause."

"What dishonor?" Stannis bristled. "Would you have me spare the lives of traitors?"

"You have spared the lives of those behind us."

"Do you scold me for that, smuggler?"

"It is not my place." Davos feared he had said too much.

The king was relentless. "You esteem this Penrose more than you do my lords bannermen. Why?"

"He keeps faith."

To Stannis, Cortnay’s faith is misplaced. But Davos proves relentless. He keeps faith. Stannis decides to do a little Cortnay Penrose routine, castigating the lords behind them as ones who do not keep faith. Davos concurs saying that their loyalty has been flexible to Robert to Renly to Stannis, and who the hell knows who they’ll follow next. (Joffrey). And Stannis … laughs? Did I read that correctly? He LAUGHS!? What is going on here? 

Stannis looks back to Melisandre and tells her that Davos tells Stannis the truth, and Melisandre neutrally concurs with Stannis’ assessment. But then Stannis starts being human? Is this correct? He says that he misses Davos, and all those lords behind him are traitors. Inconsistent ones at that. Stannis needs those jabronis though even if it makes him sick to his stomach to pardon them when he’s punished people for lesser crimes. Davos should reproach his king.

"You reproach yourself more than I ever could, Your Grace. You must have these great lords to win your throne-"

But Stannis is still lost in his prior thought. He smiles grimly and makes it plain that when he was talking about punishing people for lesser crimes, he was referring to taking Davos’ fingerbones. Davos reaches up to his pouch of finger bones for luck. Will he do this every again? Perhaps. Perhaps. Stannis notices and asks why Davos keeps them.

"They remind me of what I was. Where I came from. They remind me of your justice, my liege."

"It was justice," Stannis said. "A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward. You were a hero and a smuggler." He glanced behind at Lord Florent and the others, rainbow knights and turncloaks, who were following at a distance. "These pardoned lords would do well to reflect on that. Good men and true will fight for Joffrey, wrongly believing him the true king. A northman might even say the same of Robb Stark. But these lords who flocked to my brother's banners knew him for a usurper. They turned their backs on their rightful king for no better reason than dreams of power and glory, and I have marked them for what they are. Pardoned them, yes. Forgiven. But not forgotten." He fell silent for a moment, brooding on his plans for justice. And then, abruptly, he said, "What do the smallfolk say of Renly's death?"

According to Davos, the smallfolk grieve. Stannis grieves too. Not for the man he grew to be, but the boy he was. Anyways, moving on: what did the smallfolk think about news of Cersei’s incest? Well, they shouted for King Stannis while the king’s men were in town, but who knows what they did after. Stannis wonders if that means they didn’t believe in the proclamation.

"When I was smuggling, I learned that some men believe everything and some nothing. We met both sorts. And there is another tale being spread as well-"

Stannis grows irritated, talking about the absurdity of the tale that Selyse cuckolded Stannis with Patchface and fathered Shireen through their fool. It’s a vile tale, and it really hurt when Renly said as much during the parlay. Davos refuses to flatter Stannis though. He says that the smallfolk like telling the tale to each other. Davos thinks back to how the story reached many of the towns and villages they visited before they arrived

"Robert could piss in a cup and men would call it wine, but I offer them pure cold water and they squint in suspicion and mutter to each other about how queer it tastes." Stannis ground his teeth. "If someone said I had magicked myself into a boar to kill Robert, likely they would believe that as well."

"You cannot stop them talking, my liege," Davos said, "but when you take your vengeance on your brothers' true killers, the realm will know such tales for lies."

Stannis only seemed to half hear him. "I have no doubt that Cersei had a hand in Robert's death. I will have justice for him. Aye, and for Ned Stark and Jon Arryn as well."

"And for Renly?" The words were out before Davos could stop to consider them.

For a long time the king did not speak. Then, very softly, he said, "I dream of it sometimes. Of Renly's dying. A green tent, candles, a woman screaming. And blood." Stannis looked down at his hands. "I was still abed when he died. Your Devan will tell you. He tried to wake me. Dawn was nigh and my lords were waiting, fretting. I should have been ahorse, armored. I knew Renly would attack at break of day. Devan says I thrashed and cried out, but what does it matter? It was a dream. I was in my tent when Renly died, and when I woke my hands were clean."

Ser Davos Seaworth could feel his phantom fingertips start to itch. Something is wrong here, the onetime smuggler thought. Yet he nodded and said, "I see."

Stannis then talks about Renly’s peach, thinking it mockery or defiance or a threat. He thought Renly was going for his sword, but he only drew a peach. What was up with that? Why did Renly do that? Was there some sort of hidden meaning? 

The king gave a shake of his head, like a dog shaking a rabbit to snap its neck. "Only Renly could vex me so with a piece of fruit. He brought his doom on himself with his treason, but I did love him, Davos . I know that now. I swear, I will go to my grave thinking of my brother's peach."

And that is ACOK, Davos II, Part 2! I gotta admit: as much fun as last week’s discussion of the Stannis vs Cortnay parlay was, this week’s section of Davos II is even better! What did you think, ser?

Depth

Last week was all about Cortnay Penrose v. Stannis and his new lords, with our POV Davos Seaworth mostly just waiting in the wings. Now he is summoned into the spotlight by both his king and his author, to deliver his opinion on all these proceedings. The result is one of the most well-written and complex dialogue scenes in ASOIAF, in which every line carries multiple meanings, what is not said matters as much as what is said, and even as we learn much more about Stannis, Davos, and their relationship, George preserves the mystery and ambiguity that makes this storyline great. Even more than the Cortnay Penrose standoff last week, this scene makes Davos II one of the chief competitors for the title of best chapter in ACOK. 

We talked last week about how Davos only has three chapters in A Clash of Kings and how the format forced George to pick and choose the events Davos was a POV to. For instance, we don’t see Davos visiting villages and proclaiming Stannis’ letter to the smallfolk. This stands in contrast to what occurs with Davos in ADWD where GRRM spends half of Davos’ chapters charting his course to the Merman’s Court at White Harbor. I’ve been on-record as defending GRRM’s decision to write a lot of these travelogue chapters that tend to crop up in Feast and Dance. So, does that make GRRM’s decision to not feature Davos’ journey around Westeros proclaiming Stannis’ letter to the smallfolk in ACOK the wrong one? Absolutely not! Let’s dial back to why GRRM decided to create Davos in the first place:

George said that at first he was just going to use the original POVs from AGoT for the entire series, then he realized that he needed to see what Stannis was doing, but didn’t want to use Stannis as a POV. So he created Davos. Davos was his first added POV. The rest followed. – GRRM, So Spake Martin, 8/28/2003

Davos’ role in ACOK, then, is intended to be the eyes on Stannis, learning about Stannis through someone who is sympathetic to him. GRRM had different ideas for Davos’s chapters for ADWD for reasons we’ll get to in a few years, but here, getting in-depth on Davos’ journeys would have detracted from the narrative reason why Davos even exists as a POV in ACOK. And boy, does George just nail this dynamic of exploring Stannis through Davos’ eyes in just about the best dialogue scene in all of ASOIAF! 

• We left off last time with Cortnay Penrose’s sick burn. Stannis has no response to it, so thoroughly did it deconstruct his campaign, his backstory, and his very soul
• So he rides away with his bannermen, including his grandpa Lord Estermont, who frets that thousands will die needlessly if it comes to battle. Surely ‘tis better to risk only one?
• You can see George sowing the seeds for the argument Melisandre and eventually Stannis himself will make about Edric Storm: sacrifice one life to save many
• On the one hand, you can see a logic to this. From a certain point of view, this is an admirable ideology. Per Spock: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few
• The problem with applying this logic to Edric (and later Shireen) is that they don’t consent to being used this way, and arguably can’t, being children and all
• But even in this scenario, in which Stannis’ chosen single combatant would be consenting (even eager, to judge from his lords), this logic falls apart
• What Lord Estermont’s and later Melisandre’s argument presupposes is that “our cause is righteous,” so it is inherently worth paying the price. But what if it’s not righteous?
• What if it’s not worth all this sacrifice to put Stannis in power, whether that power is secular or supernatural in origin? What if that worldview is flawed from the get-go?
• You can see George working in slippages, little flaws, that end up turning Team Stannis’ arguments into rot from the inside out, starting with Lord Estermont citing “gods”
• The gods will bless our champion because our cause is righteous...but central to Stannis’ cause is that those “gods” are false gods, sacrificed to R’hllor on Dragonstone
• So even as Lord Estermont declares their cause righteous, he accidentally exposes that there is no real consensus on what that cause actually is. Whom do they serve?
• Lord Estermont is falling back on precisely the cultural mores Stannis is burning down. He will not be blessed by gods he has forsaken! Such are the wages of the fiery ladder...
• Jon Fossoway and Bryce Caron further undercut their cause’s righteousness without seeming to realize it. They point out that since garrison duty is for “old men and green boys,” Stannis’ champion would probably have an easy time of it
• In other words, it wouldn’t be an honorable duel of equals. It would be a slaughter. Does this give them pause? Nope! It makes them all the more eager for “an easy victory”
• Once more, we are seeing that honor is a shadow on a wall. It does not speak to inner worth, the heroic self-sacrificing drive to defend the innocent and lift up the downtrodden
• Rather, “honor” is a class signifier, linked to the Ser in front of your name, the fancy expensive armor you wear, the learned ability to perform chivalry rather than practice it
• The fact that these men think there is glory to be had in slaying someone who doesn’t stand a chance against them speaks to how power has corrupted the idea of glory
• This is a persistent problem across the series, but especially in Stannis’ camp--look at Godric the Giantslayer, who chased a fleeing giant to cut off its head for honor and glory
• It all comes back to the duality of Stannis and thus the duality of man. The appearance of being godlike, the protagonist of reality, v. actually being worthy of it
• Stannis’ new lords are just the worst, narcissistic hypocrites one and all. So I find it very cathartic when Stannis “rakes” them with his eyes and tells them to shut the fuck up 
• He’s right! They chatter like magpies, and make less sense. I would want quiet too if I was facing down the prospect of dealing with these assholes for the rest of my life
• George is separating Stannis out from these arrogant high school bullies, using him as a vessel to tell them off, shattering their pretentious self-image. Good work, your Grace!
• But then, the flipside. Stannis isn’t actually challenging their worldview. He’s not implementing any changes. All he’s doing is telling them to shut up. Is that enough?
• Practically speaking: no, it’s not. All Stannis accomplishes here is alienating these men. As Davos notes, Renly never spoke to them this way. That’s why they liked him!
• I think we all know someone who says they’re committed to telling the truth, but whose truth-telling mostly seems to take the form of insults. That’s Stannis in this scene
• Him ordering his lords to shut their useless pieholes is personally endearing, but politically speaking, it is disastrous, exemplifying why Stannis was weak to begin with
• Stannis is just being self-indulgent. These insults serve no purpose but to make him feel better about associating himself with these gaudy gadflies, and that doesn’t justify it
• At the surface-level, Stannis’ telling these bros to stfu is kind-of a fuck yeah moment. Yeah, you should shut up. We hate you.
• But it’s just Stannis being a surface-level insult comedian. 
• He knows that he needs them, and he needs their soldiers to take King’s Landing.
• Stannis can’t tell them to resign their posts. And he can’t hang them for traitors. Or he loses his newfound army.
• But winning the battle of King’s Landing is just one part of the deal. What Stannis is doing is politically stupid as you were pointing out.
• In a world where Stannis wins at the Blackwater, he’s still going to have these lords around him, and he needs to win the peace with them
• Pissing these lords off the entire time they’re fighting their way to the Iron Throne doesn’t ensure that they’ll rebel, but it makes it more likely that they’ll return the disfavor Stannis shows them with disloyalty down the road.
• So, we’re left one-cheering Stannis for dismissing them but cringing at his political acumen and there’s no greater cultural critique in what Stannis is doing. We’ll talk about that in a bit!
• Of course, this is also just Stannis’ personality at work--that of a lobster, as Loras says in Season 1 of the show. He is an introverted loner among boastful extroverts. That’s hell!
• I’m an introvert myself, meaning not that I can’t function around others, but that I draw energy from being alone and lose energy around others. I sympathize with Stannis
• But leadership demands you be an extrovert, or at least that you perform extroversion. I don’t wanna be in charge of any huge organization, precisely because I’m an introvert
• Stannis has set a trap for himself and walked right into it. I would be more sympathetic if he was genuinely being forced into this position, but he’s not. He chose all this
• Stannis could’ve just abdicated the throne, likely handing Renly the crown, and sat by himself on Dragonstone for the rest of his days. Why didn’t he? Because of Robert
• Stannis felt that clawing hole inside, preventing him from being at peace even when left alone. He needs the approval and love of others--he just doesn’t wanna be around them
• That’s a tragic, untenable state of affairs, which has been magnified to disastrous size by the fiery crown on his head and that fiery heart on his banner. It’s all fuel for the fire
• Stannis feels he must keep up with Robert and Renly even from beyond the grave, that he must beat them at their own game even though he hates everything about it
• This contradiction, as I’ve been saying, pushes Stannis in two directions at once, bringing out his best self and worst self simultaneously
• His best self is the one that calls forth Davos, and only Davos, to ride with him. Davos might feel out of place in this company, but for Stannis, he’s the only worthy one here
• All these lords obsessed with their status, lying to each other about honor and glory as the sun winks off their expensive armor...but the king wants the smuggler born in the slums, the one who had to invent his own last name, the one who tells the truth
• This makes the lords uneasy, every bit as much as Stannis’ insults, and good! It should make them uneasy! Davos calls their bluffs: a loyal vassal from outside the nobility
• He threatens their status just by being there, and when Stannis tells them to shut up but calls on Davos to speak, they get a glimpse of a whole new social order. A better one.
• On the other hand...Davos thinks it’s unfortunate that Stannis lacks his brothers’ knack for easy courtesies. He doesn’t take catharsis from Stannis’ insults. He laments them
• He thinks to himself that as an onion knight, he’s used to being talked to this way. The nobility insult the smallfolk (and do worse than that) without even thinking about it. That’s the way the world works. But Davos knows the noble born aren’t used to this treatment
• He considers those insults to be part of Stannis’ worst self, the self that was rejected relative to his brothers for good reason--and as he notes, it’s captured in Stannis’ banner
• The crowned stag, the source of Stannis’ power, the foundation of his claim, the memory of Robert for whom he is ostensibly doing all this, has been swallowed whole by R’hllor
• The heart on fire, for Stannis, is what the reign of the crowned stag actually looks like. His true aim is not to uphold that legacy--it’s to set it on fire and replace it with his own
• All that talk about Stannis being the last Baratheon, the heir to both Storm’s End and the Iron Throne--all of it is technically true. But it doesn’t feel like it, and Davos knows it
• What Davos can’t quite articulate due to his dogged loyalty to the man who raised him up is that this feels like the rise of the villain, not the rise of the hero. Or is it both?
• The fire has swallowed the crown. Stannis’ fury has overcome his cause. His victories will bring neither him nor Westeros peace, but instead turn to ash in his mouth
• That process of corruption has already begun. When Davos gets up close, Stannis looks terrible--a haggard face, dark circles under his eyes, as if he’s aged years
• This has both secular and supernatural ramifications. It is common for ensorceled kings in stories to reflect their inner corruption on the surface of their sacred body
• As the soul suffers, as the land suffers, so the body suffers, because the body of the king is the land, or so the conceptual framework goes. The price of magic, of playing god
• But even as George plays with Fisher King tropes with one hand, he undercuts them with the other. There are grounded, real-world reasons for Stannis to look this way
• That’s grief aging his skin. That’s guilt hollowing him out under the eyes, and behind them as well. This isn’t just about Melisandre’s shadowbinding powers sucking the soul out of him in classic sorcerous fashion. This is about what the shadow did: murder Renly
• Stannis can barely deal with the horror of what he’s done, and Cortnay Penrose has just made it impossible for him to compartmentalize it in his nightmares
• So he calls forth Davos, his embodied conscience, living evidence of his best self, to reassure him that he has not just become a villain and help him decide what to do next
• I’ve been doing some re-reading of AGOT, and I realized that GRRM is remixing the Ned and Robert scene from AGOT, Eddard III.
• If you remember that chapter, it’s the one where Robert wakes Ned up, and they go and ride off alone under the pretext of getting fresh air.
• The reality is that Robert wanted to get Ned’s take on the letter that Jorah Mormont sent to Varys informing Robert that Dany wed Khal Drogo.
• The scene is full of a lot of emotion, reminiscing on old times and a lot of Ned guarding himself against revealing anything about Jon’s mother or his feelings about Jaime.
• Here again, we have another Baratheon taking his oldest, best friend to ride out “alone” to seek his counsel on what he should do. And he looks so different than when he last saw him.
• And like the Ned/Robert scene, Davos holds back his true feelings and emotions -- all the while counseling this Baratheon to not act immorally.
• Interestingly, George has sympathetic characters talking alone with all three Baratheon Brothers: Ned with Robert, Catelyn with Renly and here, Davos with Stannis.
• The dynamic is one I was talking about in my opening thoughts: these POVs get eyes on the king and explore who they truly are inside.
  • Ned found Robert to be insecure, still feeding on his bitterness over Lyanna and anger over the Targaryens
  • Catelyn found the true Renly where there were no smiles and only open threats against Robb. 
• So, what does Davos find with Stannis?
• Stannis’ opening line is so telling: “A smuggler must be a fair judge of men.” Davos’ utility to Stannis is rooted in his background, in the class distinction between him and the other lords. Stannis implies that the noble-born need not be fair judges of men
• Why is that? Well, because they’re in power. They’re not going to pay the consequences for poor judgment. We’re seeing that in action in this chapter--Renly’s former lords judged Renly poorly (according to Stannis, anyway), yet they aren’t suffering for it
• But if Davos of Flea Bottom misjudged someone in his smuggling days, he ran the risk of losing his head for it. Not only was he constantly dealing with pirates and other thieves, but he also had to worry about running afoul of punishment-obsessed lords like Stannis
• This is a real-world phenomenon in every political and economic system. There is no greater teacher than consequences, and the powerful suffer fewer consequences
• That is not to say that everyone on the bottom is automatically a genius and everyone on top is automatically a fool. But for those on top, so many risks are abstract, hypothetical, academic sources of debate, rather than the determining factors of life and death
• Power over other people goes hand in hand with escaping the consequences of what you do with that power. Power covers its tracks, washing its hands of blood
• As such, you wind up with powerful people treating everything like a game of Risk between each other, stagnating in both their moral and intellectual development
• Alester Florent has been sheltered his whole life, and Davos hasn’t. This is inextricable from the fact that Davos has useful advice to give and Alester does not
• However, that useful advice is tempered by Stannis’ own blind spots, his own position atop the pyramid, the way he is both less and more arrogant than his noble-born peers
• On the one hand, he seeks out Davos’ advice. On the other hand, Davos spends this scene smoothing and shaping his advice into words that will suit Stannis’ mindset
• When Stannis asks Davos what he thinks of Cortnay, Davos does not automatically respond with the truth. He feels the need to “carefully” describe him as stubborn
• If this is the one true relationship, the dynamic by which Stannis accesses truth, why does Davos feel the need to use euphemisms? Because like Cressen before him, he realizes that Stannis’ isolation has made it difficult to communicate effectively with him
• Stannis may find Davos more admirable and likable than the likes of Alester Florent and Bryce Caron, but that doesn’t mean Davos can just relax and say whatever
• Davos knows that if he pushes Stannis too far, he and his family could lose everything. He’s only a knight, his sons only have a bright future, if Stannis approves of him
• Davos settles on “stubborn,” a value-neutral statement that could be seen as a compliment or a criticism...and one that could also describe Stannis
• It’s also the subtext of the part of the convo we’ll cover next week where the topic turns to Lord Meadows as the next castellan of Storm’s End after Cortnay
• "I remember another stripling who was given command of Storm's End. He could not have been much more than twenty."
  
  "Lord Meadows is not as stonehead stubborn as I was."
• It’s a little hilarious that Stannis is able to point to his own stubbornness and not see the same in Cortnay.
• But Stannis leapfrogs that insight, instead answering his own question, providing the answer he wanted to hear from Davos, rather than the one Davos gave
• Stannis wants to think of Cortnay as “hungry for death,” throwing away his life and those of his men...because that will justify killing them all. They asked for it! Their own fault!
• As always, it comes back to Robert. Cortnay must have demanded single combat because he mistook me for Robert, the kind of man who would eagerly accept
• Stannis is obsessed with escaping Robert’s shadow, but he can’t, because he’s so thoroughly internalized the idea that he is a lesser version of his brothers
• Cortnay never brought up Robert at all! But Robert’s ghost--and now Renly’s--live rent free in Stannis’ head. His deepest fear is he will always be mistaken for them, never being recognized or loved on his own terms. Hence his new banner
• Davos, though, loves Stannis on his own terms, and so is trying to help Stannis get past his self-sabotaging bullshit and stop seeing everything through the lens of Robert
• He sees Cortnay Penrose as a desperate man out of good options. Stannis once more ignores his own part in that, focusing instead purely on how to take the castle
• As he considers, he grinds his teeth, a constant Stannis quirk from his introduction forward. It defines him perfectly: his anger and anxiety lead him to self-sabotage
• Lord Alester has put forward a solution; like all Florent solutions, it’s a distasteful mix of cruelty and cowardice. He wants to threaten to hang old Lord Penrose, Cortnay’s father
• It’s difficult to express how wretched a move this would be. Lord Penrose is an old man, “sickly and failing” as Davos describes him. The journey alone could kill him!
• That’s to say nothing of the psychological torture of draping a rope around his neck and forcing him to wait while the son he must’ve been fearing for decides his fate
• If I had just come into Stannis’ service, and watched him behave in this way, I would be rethinking the terms of those service in a hurry. Davos, too, doesn’t want to win this way
• Moreover, Davos is personally affronted by a threat to Lord Penrose because Lord Penrose treated him kindly. Like an equal. Something so, so few lords are willing to do
• Even Stannis calls Davos “smuggler” whenever Davos pisses him off! Davos has gotten used to disrespect, to dehumanization, to the presumption he doesn’t belong here
• So when he meets someone who doesn’t treat him that way, someone who conducts themselves with the substance of honor rather than the surface, he remembers it
• And he doesn’t just remember it--he tries to honor it in turn. Strictly speaking, the fact that Lord Penrose was kind to Davos doesn’t have any bearing on the decision at hand
• As Davos himself said in his introductory scene back on Dragonstone: words are wind. While Lord Penrose might have said no in a kinder fashion than the rest, it was still no
• Stannis puts forth the argument that this makes him a traitor, every bit as much as those who were more dismissive to Davos or refused to see him at all. He’s not wrong, exactly
• But as is often the case with Stannis, he is overlooking nuances, subtleties, individual nooks and crannies that don’t fit the monolithic statements of One King, One God, etc.
• Davos, by contrast, honors the individual. He honors the complex contradictory nature of humanity. He is opposed to the idea of apotheosis. No one is so easily definable
• So Lord Penrose should be spared, in his mind. He should be honored not for his strict legal status, but the person he is when you stare into his eyes and talk to him
• Davos consistently embodies the idea of mercy, and mercy is something you give to people in deliberate defiance of the question of whether they deserve it or not
• Just as the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, so the quality of mercy is not strained. It may be bestowed upon the traitorous as well as the innocent. It’s not fair
• Mercy is a quality gone forsaken by most of the powerful people of Westeros, and even more so by those who do their dirty work. Davos is a beacon of light in a weary world
• But George does not write him as an unrealistic caricature. He drops Davos into one viper’s nest after another, forcing him to find his way out with his body and soul intact
• So before Davos delivers his message of mercy and honoring the individual to his conflicted king, he internally acknowledges the price he might have to pay:
  • It was dangerous to oppose the queen's men, but Davos had vowed always to tell his king the truth.
• This is a tension that will dominate Davos’ story in ASOS: the king’s man v. the queen’s men, wrestling for Stannis’ soul. With Cressen dead, seemingly everyone else in Stannis’ camp is content, even eager, to gain power through Melisandre and her red god
• We’ve already seen that in this chapter with Alester Florent and the other fair-weather converts. They want in with Stannis. Melisandre is close with Stannis. It’s simple math!
• There’s a narrative weirdness to these newfound followers of R’hllor. They’re referred to as “queen’s men.”
• “Queen’s Men” are followers of R’hllor. But which queen? Davos thinks this during the parlay with Cortnay:
  • Stannis had left his queen on Dragonstone along with her uncle Axell, but the queen's men were more numerous and powerful than ever, and Alester Florent was the foremost.
• So, in this context, “queen’s men” seems to indicate those followers of Stannis who are Selyse loyalists.
• This makes sense insomuch as we know that Selyse was the one to convert to R’hllor before Stannis fled back to Dragonstone after Jon Arryn’s death. 
• And the followers of the red god that Cressen met in the ACOK prologue and Davos explored in his first chapter were ones who likely converted along with Selyse.
• However, as Melisandre rises in prominence, the context switches. We see allusions to this in Storm, but by ADWD, Asha makes it explicit:
  • Asha would have called them king's men, but the other stormlanders and crownlands men named them queen's men … though the queen they followed was the red one at Castle Black, not the wife that Stannis Baratheon had left behind at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.
• There’s something insidious about that! Yes, I’m a bit more sympathetic to Selyse than the genpop of ASOIAF fans, but Melisandre and the red god are virus-like, taking over the court, converting Stannis. Hell, Melisandre is performing queenly duties by “soothing” Stannis to sleep.
• It’s Damon Julian and the Garoux plantation-like from Fevre Dream. (Chapter 10 will be out for all Poor Fellow and above patrons this week if you’re watching live and will already be out if you’re listening on the release date!)
• And the Baratheon sigil shrinks and is encased by fire. 
• Coupled with Stannis’ isolation and alienation from his peers, this means that only Davos has a strong relationship with Stannis that is not in any way filtered through Melisandre
• That’s not to say Davos can part Stannis from Melisandre’s influence; she’s hovering in the background throughout this scene. But it means he can address Stannis on different terms, calling on different parts of his personality, worldview, and backstory
• So when the queen’s men are pushing Stannis to the edge of the abyss, whether trying to get him to threaten Lord Penrose here or attack Claw Isle in ASOS, only Davos can pull him back. And Stannis knows that, which is why he calls Davos forth
• But Davos will always start off at a disadvantage relative to the queen’s men, because they were born to this life, and he was not. They have considerably more resources to draw upon than he does, and they have far less to lose than he does
• So he hesitates, knowing that by speaking against their plan, he could be ensuring his doom at their hands. And not only his own doom, but that of his wife and sons
• All he has to sustain himself is the bond between him and his king, the bond forged in mercy, deliverance, sacrifice, and blood right here at Storm’s End, back in the last war
• And that bond has been strengthened ever since, as Davos said in his first chapter in this book, by truth. It would make sense for Davos to be the ultimate toady, to bow and scrape before all the noble-born, just to hold onto the position he has attained
• But to do so would be to sacrifice the part of himself that actually makes him useful to his king, the part of himself that actually sustains the bond that keeps him in power
• Davos is therefore constantly at odds with himself, his self-interest never clear, even though his moral compass is as straight an arrow as they come in Westeros
• He settles on truth: what the queen’s men propose is dishonorable. Threatening to hang Lord Penrose would undercut the righteousness of which Lord Estermont spoke
• Stannis bristles at that, naming Lord Penrose a traitor...but Davos points out that he has already spared the lives of so many former bannermen of Renly, riding behind them now
• It’s interesting to note how Stannis interprets that. He does not take it as an indication that he should spare Lord Penrose. In fact, he never brings up Lord Penrose again!
• Stannis does not instinctively dwell on mercy, our better angels. He instinctively dwells on hypocrisy, and he immediately realizes that Davos is calling him a hypocrite:
  • “Do you scold me for that, smuggler?”
• As I said, Stannis has this nasty habit of putting Davos in his place by calling him “smuggler” whenever Davos annoys him. The most prominent example is in ASOS:
  • "Do you mock me to my face? Must I learn a king's duty from an onion smuggler?"
• Now, of course, Stannis does submit to learn a king’s duty from a smuggler. He admits as much to Jon later in that book: Davos was right about my duty, and I was wrong
• But that doesn’t change the fact that his instinctive reaction is to enforce the class hierarchies of Westeros, using them as an excuse to avoid self-examination
• In spite of raising up Davos to knighthood, in spite of raising him up to lordship later on, Stannis is no Beric Dondarrion. He is embedded in the system, part of the Matrix
• He is a better version of a bad idea, not an entirely new idea, and so he must always be backed into doing the right thing. Davos must always speak carefully, in euphemisms
• As such, Davos immediately fears that he’s gone too far. “It is not my place,” he says, because again, Davos is constantly 24/7 shaken by the fear that he will step out of line
• He’s already risen so far above his station, so out of “my place” within Westerosi norms, that he fears the slightest misstep will send him tumbling down. I tried to grasp a star…
• Yet “the king was relentless.” Having kicked the dust aside and discovered the core of Davos’ true argument, Stannis isn’t going to let it go just because Davos feels nervous
• Whereas Renly delighted in obfuscation and half-truths, Stannis’ conversational technique is to gnaw obstacles down like a mastiff with a bone, as George puts it
• Stannis realizes that Davos is doing more than refusing to condemn the Penroses. He actively prefers the Penroses to those former Renly supporters who now back Stannis
• Stannis demands to know why that is, because Davos’ opinion matters to him even when he doesn’t take Davos’ advice. Why does my conscience support my enemies?
• Why does Davos “esteem” the Penroses? Because they keep faith. Because they have honor. Because despite being on different sides of the war, I feel kinship with them
• Stannis snaps back that their faith is misplaced. The Penroses invested their faith in a usurper with no claim to power, and moreover, he’s dead now! What worth that faith?
• Davos acknowledges the folly inherent to the Penroses’ faith, but for him, that’s not nearly as important as the faith itself. The sincere honorable belief in something. To him, it doesn’t really matter what. Cortnay believed in Renly as I believe in Stannis
• And that, in Davos’ mind, makes Cortnay more admirable than the shining knights and lords who follow them now, because they keep faith with nothing but their own ambition
• He’s reluctant to say that because “the queen’s men were more numerous and powerful than ever.” If word got back to them of what he’s saying here, he’d be in real trouble
• But as he thinks to himself, he’s gone too far to play coy with Stannis now. “Gone too far” not just in this conversation, but in their intertwined lives. Davos is all in; he has to be
• And so he delivers the point he’s been driving at. Cortnay Penrose may have picked the wrong side in Stannis’ eyes, but at least he is reliable and predictable. A sort of honor
• The men behind them now, though? If they were so willing to jump ship to Stannis after Renly died, pretending as though that was always their intention, what will they do next?
• Who will they betray Stannis for? What happens when they tire of his grouchy attitude? As Bronn says about his sellswords: they may kill for him, but they won’t die for him
• Davos, by contrast, would die for Stannis, as Cortnay Penrose would’ve died for Renly and will die for Edric Storm. Self-sacrifice, the essence of loyalty. Putting it all on the line
• Just like Cortnay before him, Davos has used his true words to cut through the deceitful words of these turncloak lords, like a knife through butter. And Stannis...laughs
• Wait, Stannis laughing? Is he having a stroke?! We were assured by Cressen, the man who raised Stannis, that Stannis never learned how to laugh. His scowl is permanent
• Everything we’ve heard and seen of him in the story so far has backed that up. He’s been described as cold, inexorable, sour, disapproving of all manner of cheerful noise
• We’ve been shown, including in this chapter, that this is part of why most people preferred the company of his brothers. They embody the good times. Not Stannis
• Stannis has been portrayed as both too haunted by the loss of his parents and Proudwing and also too up his own ass about his image to let loose and laugh
• Yet now we see an exception. A crack in the armor. That tight frozen face loosening up into warm human flesh. Just like how the Penroses can’t be fairly summarized as traitors to Stannis’ cause, Stannis is not merely the emotionless duty robot he pretends to be
• It’s not that he’s incapable of laughter; he just doesn’t see much in his life and world to laugh about. But Davos is his conscience, his shriveled Grinch heart, and so Davos makes him laugh. Not by telling a joke--but by telling the bitterly ironic truth:
  • "I told you, Melisandre," he said to the red woman, "my Onion Knight tells me the truth."
    
    "I see you know him well, Your Grace," the red woman said.
• This is interesting because it implies that Stannis and Melisandre had a whole conversation about Davos beforehand, which reframes this conversation in turn
• As I said, Stannis never brings up Lord Penrose again when the conversation turns back to how they should take Storm’s End. This suggests to me that Stannis was never actually going to go with that plan. This whole conversation has been a test for Davos
• Stannis wanted to see if his Onion Knight still gives him the truth, even as the circumstances have changed dramatically around them. As Davos thought to himself, telling Stannis these hard truths carries even more risk than usual now
• But Davos did it anyway, proving that Stannis was right to trust him, proving that Davos is indeed still the one genuinely honorable and loyal vassal in Stannis’ camp
• He passed the test. Melisandre is impressed. Perhaps she doubted Davos! But now she sees, as she says, that Stannis knows Davos well. The Onion Knight is a truthful man
• I wonder whether Davos Seaworth is a sort-of blindspot for Melisandre when she looks into the fires.
• I’m spitballing a little here, but if I had to fill in Melisandre’s dialogue right before Stannis told her that Davos tells him the truth, I’d say it was something like “I do not know this Ser Davos you speak of. Can he be trusted?” or some such.
• Now, the reason why I think Davos is a blindspot in the flames is because there are times when Melisandre sees Davos true: like when he planned to murder her in ASOS
• And there are other times when she doesn’t see like when Davos spirits Edric Storm away: Davos watched Melisandre's pale, heart-shaped face. He saw the flicker of dismay there, the sudden uncertainty. She did not see it!
• This gap in what Melisandre perceives in Davos is potent, because he’s one of the few people that can slip one by her.
• And so Stannis opens up his heart, dropping the walls of alienation and isolation he otherwise maintains around himself. He laughs, the catharsis he so often denies himself:
  • "Davos, I have missed you sorely,” the king said.
• This is a crucial line for Stannis’ character and the Stannis-Davos dynamic. First of all, Stannis has stopped calling him “ser” or “smuggler,” instead calling Davos by his name
• This is a moment of intimacy, of equal treatment like that which Davos received from Lord Penrose. Stannis has stopped talking to Davos like a cog, a placeholder in the social structure atop which Stannis sits, and started talking to him like a person
• An individual. Someone with a name. His name is Davos, and Stannis has missed him. Again, the idea of Stannis missing someone does not line up with his reputation
• Stannis is the loner, the outcast, left cold in the shadows as the sun shines on his brothers. He’s not supposed to be close enough to anyone to miss them
• Davos, once more, is the exception. Stannis missed his presence. He wanted Davos around. His life was lesser, bleaker, devoid of flavor without his Onion Knight
• And Stannis is perceptive enough, empathetic enough in this moment, to know that this is about more than Davos giving him honest advice (though it’s largely about that)
• This is, once more, about hypocrisy...but instead of Stannis yelling about everyone else being hypocrites, as per usual, this time he looks in the mirror and recognizes his failure
• Stannis zooms in on Davos, the individual, and tries to see his campaign through Davos’ eyes. He realizes how absurd, how infuriating all this must seem to Davos
• I saved your life. You raised me up for it, but also took my fingers for smuggling. Yet you spared these lords behind us even that sacrifice. They never saved you. In fact, they abandoned you when you needed them. But now you pardon them, as you did not me?
• Stannis acknowledges how shameful this is. He has broken from his model of iron justice, which means he could’ve done it before. He could’ve just pardoned Davos
• Why is Stannis committing this wretched hypocrisy? Because he needs them. He needs these lords, regardless of their treason, regardless of their pompous corrupt uselessness
• In other words, it is the structure of power in Westeros that has produced this hypocrisy. Because those lords have power, because Stannis needs their power to attain his own, they get off scot free. They pay no consequences for what they have done
• Davos of Flea Bottom, by contrast, has no power. He gave his mercy in the form of onions before ensuring any reward for it. As such, Stannis did not need to spare him
• One man commits a worse crime than the other, yet does not pay for it, while the man who did a good deed pays for his lesser crime. Why? Because power corrupts, always.
• This state of affairs sickens Stannis. He is an aware enough man, a decent enough man, to know that this is no worthy model of justice. That’s more than his turncloak lords…
• ...but being aware of your sins is not enough. Not if you don’t do anything about it. Not if you commit yourself to carrying out these abuses of power anyway
• Stannis doesn’t learn anything from this. He does not apply it to the wildlings when he gets north. He doesn’t rebuild his model of justice from scratch, as he really should
• To do so would mean giving up on the bitter dream that drives him on, the hole inside left by his brothers, the all-consuming desire to beat them at their own game
• If Stannis was able to give all that up, he would not only be a better man, he would be a happier man. It’s the only way to find the peace that has eluded him all his life
• But as Asha says: he will never, ever turn back from his course. All these contradictions will add up until it ends with him throwing his heart and daughter into the fire
• All he can bring himself to do here is acknowledge the contradiction. All he can do is tell Davos that yeah, this is fucked up. You have every right to reproach me
• Again, the duality of Stannis. Here’s the king saying to a man born in the slums that the latter’s grievances are justified, that the peasant has the right to reproach the king
• That’s a big deal! That’s something that the other kings aren’t even considering doing! That’s a breakdown in the power gap, allowing the downtrodden to punch up for once
• This is an example of how Stannis’ alienation from his peers has led him to look differently on members of the less fortunate classes, and good for him
• On the other, Stannis succumbs to the temptation that self-awareness is enough. It’s not. Being a kinder master is an improvement, strictly speaking, but you’re still a master
• If the system is indeed that fucked, why does Stannis not un-fuck it? Well, because he wants to be in charge of it. If he messes with it too much, he might threaten his own power as well as those of the turncloak lords. Can’t have that!
• How many real-world politicians have we all seen rise to power promising to change the system, only to reach the top and decide that the system looks great from atop it?
• This is the great quandary of revolutionary politics. It is necessary but not sufficient to bring down the elites. You’ll recreate them if you leave their tools lying around: militarism, nationalism, overuse of natural resources, and of course, the root of all evil, money
• Power vacuums will often--certainly not always, but often--be filled by those who would be equally at home under fascism as socialism, interested only in ambition and power
• That’s why I recommend for anyone interested in leftist theory that after they lay the base down with Grandaddy Marx himself, they move onto other writers who have filtered revolutionary ideals through an understanding of how those ideals can be and have been corrupted by power. How do we make it work? How do we fight the infection?
• Stannis often feels to me like a post-revolutionary leader who intellectually understands why power corrupts, but lacks the empathy and imagination to create anything else
• “You have every right to reproach me.” I know I’m bad. But that individual awareness is not enough to change the system. Deeper, more radical changes are needed
• Yet Davos himself does not deliver this critique. The peasants are not perfect articulations of theory, divine beings ready to reshape power through insight
• They’re as flawed as anyone else, in thrall to their understanding of power like anyone else, shaped by fear, desire, and backstory like anyone else
• They deserve a better life not because they are automatically better people than the powerful. They deserve a better life precisely because they are made of the same stuff
• For Davos, King Stannis is his god, and so his corruption and failure are inconveniences to be argued away, dismissed lest they tear his fragile life apart and his family with it
• In the best possible light, Stannis’s hypocrisy over the justice he gave to Davos vs the pardons he gave to Renly’s former lords is a touchstone towards a deeper meaning of justice.
• In Stannis’ mind, he isn’t in a position to effect the radical, revolutionary change you were speaking of -- not yet anyways.. 
• As Robert’s brother and small counsellor, he could only urge Robert to scour the court clean, execute Varys and send Jaime to the Wall. The king was the one who could affect change. 
• Basically, Stannis is articulating a vision that he has to sit on the Iron Throne to effect justice. In Storm, he kiiiiiiinnnnndddda speaks to the type of ideal you desire in Stannis as a sovereign:
  • “I shall bring justice to Westeros. A thing Ser Axell understands as little as he does war. Claw Isle would gain me naught . . . and it was evil, just as you said. Celtigar must pay the traitor's price himself, in his own person. And when I come into my kingdom, he shall. Every man shall reap what he has sown, from the highest lord to the lowest gutter rat. And some will lose more than the tips off their fingers, I promise you. They have made my kingdom bleed, and I do not forget that." 
• Again, this is post-blackwater after most of the tail of traitor lords he has trailing them have died or bent the knee to Joffrey. 
• And Stannis is in fantasy land here given that he has no support, has no army and is just waiting to get his ass killed. So, there is that important context to consider with the Storm quote.
• There’s the other aspect, too, that we should bring into the discussion: if Stannis believes that the source of justice is the Iron Throne, and he plans to reform how reform measures were received in Westerosi history.
• The best example is Aegon V’s reign. Though we don’t know the specifics of the reforms Aegon V implemented, we know the response from the smallfolk and the nobility:
  • Though beloved by the smallfolk, King Aegon made many enemies amongst the lords of the realm, whose powers he wished to curtail. He enacted numerous reforms and granted rights and protections to the commons that they had never known before, but each of these measures provoked fierce opposition and sometimes open defiance amongst the lords. The most outspoken of his foes went so far as to denounce Aegon V as a "bloodyhanded tyrant intent on depriving us of our gods-given rights and liberties."
• I’m not a Marxist, and, in most circumstances, I tend to tend to favor Edmund Burke’s incrementalism in pursuing political reform.
• Whatever the reforms Aegon V accomplished, they ended up being rolled back when Tywin Lannister was Hand of the King under Aegon’s grandson Aerys II.
• My co-essayist at WaPoIaF Jim, AKA Somethinglikealawyer once wrote on Aegon V that: Aegon’s chief mistake was pushing reformation too hard, too fast, without a support base to give him the political clout he needed. Reformers work against institutions by their very nature, and reform is a costly, painstaking process, and the larger the institution, the less fluid it can be, and the more resistant to change.
• To get back to something we were both talking about before: Even in a best possible context with Stannis on the throne and Stannis’ best intentions at the forefront, Stannis’ ideas about rewarding good and punishing evil is a reform with zero possibility of outlasting Stannis’ probably very short time on the Iron Throne. 
• He doesn’t have Renly’s grace to build alliances and create coalitions and make reform a possibility. 
• He would not get buy-in from his fellow nobles
• He only has Davos as his one true friend.
• As such, Davos argues that Stannis reproaches himself more than Davos ever could. In Davos’ mind, Stannis taking the throne is an absolute good, the way the world should be
• Stannis needs these great lords to do so. Davos understands that. But Stannis again grimly acknowledges his own hypocrisy: he needs them “fingers and all, it seems.”
• That’s Stannis openly admitting what his earlier line about punishing better men for lesser crimes only hinted at. He realizes that he is not living up to the model of justice that led him to cut the fingers off the man who just saved his life
• Yet Davos does not condemn him for this. Instead, his fingers fly automatically to the fingerbones around his neck. They are his luck. They were a worthy trade, in his mind, for his statistically unlikely rise to power, for better lives for his children, for good luck
• It is an ironic but in my opinion very realistic twist that Stannis is harder on himself than Davos is. Stannis’ life did not change when he raised up Davos, but Davos’ did. Stannis can feel the hypocrisy all the keener because that’s the only thing at stake for him
• For Davos, the hypocrisy of Stannis’ justice is secondary to what Stannis has done for him and his family. When we get to ASOS, we will find Davos wrestling with the concept that this blind loyalty to Stannis is actually a bad thing, one that got his sons killed
• But for now, those bones remain around his neck. Stannis asks him why. He’s often wondered why Davos keeps them; again, Stannis is more empathetic here than usual
• In response, Davos...lies. He tells Stannis that he keeps the fingerbones as a reminder of Stannis’ justice. But that’s not why. We know that’s not why, because Davos is a POV, and we’ve just seen in his thoughts that he associates them with luck, not justice
• But he knows Stannis does not want to hear that. Stannis wants to associate those bones with justice. He wants to use them, use Davos, as a way of reassuring himself that (as George put it) he is still, in spite of everything, a righteous man
• Luck indicates events out of Stannis’ control. Davos thinks he owes his fortune to, well, fortune! It was chance, a roll of the dice. It’s an expression of humility that is linked to Davos’ belief in mercy. Luck, like mercy, is something that befalls you regardless of merit
• An abiding belief in luck is what got Davos through the hardest days in his old life as a smuggler, but someone who wants to be the One True King with his One True God reigning over his One True Realm doesn’t want to hear that life is basically random
• Davos is telling the truth when he says that the bones remind him of who he was and where he came from, but who he was and where he came from stands in direct contrast to Stannis’ model of justice. That’s why Stannis cut his fingers off in the first place!
• Stannis then delivers one of the signature lines that define his character:
  • “A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.”
• As per usual with Stannis, this moment signifies in multiple directions at once, George using Stannis to make the point that a hero and a villain can share the same skin
• Stannis declares that a good act does not wash out the bad, and a bad act does not wash out the good. This is a perfect encapsulation of his character’s complexity
• Ignoring the angel on Stannis’ shoulder to focus on the devil, or vice versa, is to ignore the vast contradictory nature of the human soul. None of us are so simple
• The same applies to Melisandre. Neither her atrocities nor her overall contributions to saving humanity cancel out the other. Both are true. We must keep both in our mind
• This has implications beyond just how we deal with fictional characters, however. It has implications for how we deal with each other and ourselves in real life
• How often have we heard victims of assault and murder described as “no angel?” It’s irrelevant, because none of us are angels. That doesn’t mean we should suffer for it
• Nor are any of us devils, but the fact that people who commit atrocities also experience love and laughter and sweetness in their lives doesn’t help their victims any
• We are all made of equal parts light and dark. What separates us is power, because power inflates the amount of damage you can inflict on others
• Does it not also inflate the amount of good you can do? In theory, yes. But I think you can see in ASOIAF a growing certainty that power feeds the devil more than the angel
• Take Stannis and Davos as a representative example. Stannis believes that how he treated Davos was pure justice: a reward for his heroism, a punishment for his crimes
• Here’s the problem: the punishment was permanent. The reward was not. Davos could lose his social status at any moment, but he can never get his fingers back
• Stannis gave him a place at his table, but he can withdraw it at will, and if he does, there’s nothing Davos can do about it. So he has to placate Stannis constantly
• Stannis gave him a keep and lands of his own, servants for Lady Marya. But those signifiers also make House Seaworth a potential target for the Golden Company, and even before that, they make Davos a target for the noble-born. He has farther to fall
• Stannis gave his sons a chance to live a more prosperous life. But four of them burn on the Blackwater in his service. Would a smuggler’s life really have been worse than that?
• Moreover, Aluard would only have ended on the Wall as Davos fears because of men like Stannis. It is power, not merely ill luck, that threatened his family in the first place
• We see Davos’ fear of the queens’ men in action throughout Clash and Storm with him, carefully picking his words with Axell Florent after Axell declares that he had a vision of maidens dancing in the flames, interpreting this to mean that this was the glory that awaited Stannis after taking King’s Landing.
  • Stannis has no taste for such dancing, Davos thought, but he dared not offend the queen's uncle. "I saw only fire," he said, "but the smoke was making my eyes water.” 
• Davos told Axell a half-truth here. He did only see fire, but it wasn’t because of the smoke that he saw nothing else in the fires. It was because he saw nothing else in the fires.
• It’s the same dynamic here between Stannis and Davos. He uses half-truths and obfuscation, because he knows the type of danger he’s in.
• Davos dances around the truth, because while fans cheer Stannis as the punisher, Davos is less cheery about this idea of being open and honest with the guy who has a merciless reputation.
• Furthermore, think back to Davos I and what Davos knows to be true about what happens if Stannis falls:
  • A few of the lords lingered to speak in quiet voices upwind of the fire. They fell silent when they saw Davos looking at them. Should Stannis fall, they will pull me down in an instant.
• What Davos also knows is that there are pardons and forgiveness for former traitorous lords who bring their levies to Stannis’ side.
• The same cannot be said for a Davos that Stannis perceives as playing traitor to his king. So, it puts him in an incredibly tough spot!
• What to do with a king who keeps pressing him for the truth when that truth might get him killed?
• Through all these potential rises and falls, the one constant is that Davos lacks his fingers. This horrifies young Edric Storm, who says that Stannis shouldn’t have done that
• This perfectly captures why Stannis’ rep got so negative to begin with. What he sees as justice, balanced as all things should be, is seen from the outside as shocking cruelty
• So while in theory a good act does not wash out the bad and a bad act does not wash out the good, the way Stannis has practiced that theory is not remotely equal
• Moreover, Stannis’ worldview is deeply flawed because it presumes a flawless knowledge of what a good act and a bad act even are in the first place
• Stannis says that Davos was “a hero and a smuggler,” as though these are the opposite ends of the spectrum, as though smuggling is tantamount to villainy
• This is absurd. Smuggling may be illegal, but that doesn’t make it immoral, any more than poaching (the crime that got our first POV Will sent to the Wall for life)
• Both Westeros’ economy and our own rely on black markets to fill the gaps left by the official markets. There is no such thing as a truly free market. As such, what is available, to whom, and for how much will always be filtered through corrupted power
• Given that, the official legally sanctioned distribution of goods and resources will always leave people out. It’s by design; a feature, not a bug. But the people left out aren’t just going to starve. They’re going to turn to the black market. What else are they to do?
• Moreover, property rights are not an immutable constant, but something that shifts depending on the law. As we see with Salladhor Saan, a pirate can become an admiral overnight with virtually no change in their practice. The tools we associate with smugglers and pirates--theft, fraud, violence--are also used by their official counterparts
• Whatever unsavory actions Davos took part in as a smuggler are a drop in the bucket compared to the damage done by the way the likes of the Lannisters, Mallisters, and Tyrells wield their power over the resources their people need and want
• In Davos’ first chapter in ADWD, he meets Godric Borrell, who regularly uses his night lamp to lure ships to their doom. Stannis once threatened him about it...but the lowborn smugglers who do far less damage? They don’t get threats. They just get executed
• “Legal” merchants across our history have made a habit of purchasing from smugglers to avoid taxes. That’s the whole reason smugglers exist: there is a market for them
• It is only Davos’ gray area outside the law that put him in the position to save Stannis in the first place. He thought he’d get a better price for his onions, according to George
• In ADWD, Davos recalls how he used to facilitate trade between the wildlings and those south of the Wall. His captain lost his head for it. What good did that serve, I ask you?
• Not only is smuggling not villainy, it’s actually one of the less exploitative ways to make a buck in Westeros! To suggest otherwise is to ignore the hypocrisy baked into the system
• The consistency in Stannis is that in a pinch, he falls back on the law as the ultimate decider of right and wrong.
• Smuggling is illegal; well, then, you’re going to lose a few fingers for the smuggling.
• Of course, my American heart is wondering at this whole imposing duties and tariffs without the consent of the governed. 
• It’s not as though the people voted in representatives that voted for these taxes. These were imposed by lords who achieved power through the monopoly on violence and running a massive protection racket over Westeros.
• But we return back to the point from earlier: the way Stannis regards smuggling is displaying him in a light where we know that even the best version of Stannis in the best possible circumstance is still chopping fingers off of free-marketeers.
• So from one angle, Stannis’ philosophy seems even-handed. It acknowledges the complexity of man, how we are both devil and angel, a struggle that never ends
• Moreover, this philosophy offers a realistic opportunity for redemption. Your good deeds do not erase the bad deeds you have done. But by the same token, the fact that you have done bad deeds in the past does not invalidate your good deeds in the present
• We are never still. We are in a constant state of flux, evolution carrying itself forward on the level of the individual soul as well as that of the species as a whole
• I personally take a great deal of comfort from that idea. It allows me to contextualize bad things I have done in a way that does not negate my responsibility, but also prevents me from just dwelling on how horrible I am. That’s not gonna do anyone any good
• Do the right thing because you believe it is the right thing to do, not because you are desperate to even out some karmic scorecard that doesn’t actually exist anyway
• But from another angle, Stannis’ philosophy is fatally flawed, because his punishments linger longer than his rewards and because his understanding of what even qualifies as a good or bad act in the first place has been hopelessly corrupted by power
• It always comes back to power. The problem is not evil individuals, because no one is 100% evil. When Catelyn tells Jaime later in this book that Westeros is the way it is because of men like him, she is wrong. Westeros is the way it is because of power
• Men whom Catelyn would consider to be far more upstanding individuals than Jaime Lannister have done worse things. Like her beloved father, who wiped out a village
• Hoster believed that doing so was justice for a bad act: the Goodbrooks defying their oaths to him and staying loyal to the Mad King, a cartoonishly unworthy authority
• But as George points out to us when Arya visited that village, the Goodbrooks themselves were able to make peace and move on like nothing ever happened
• That didn’t help the dead any, and the dead were powerless people who had no say in what the Goodbrooks did. Once again, the punishment lingers longer than the reward
• Hoster doesn’t see this as cruel, as profoundly unjust. Why? Is it because Hoster Tully was secretly a cartoonishly unworthy authority like the Mad King? Doesn’t seem like it
• It was the dictates of power that drove him to wipe out that village, that drove him to force an abortion upon his unknowing and unwilling daughter. Hoster was not an unusually cruel man. That’s the point. That’s what’s so terrifying. A beloved man of his class, doing what he thought was right, did these awful things to stay in power
• What must change here is not merely the empowerment of individuals with stronger moral fiber, because the very act of empowerment will weaken that moral fiber
• What must change here is the ability of one flawed selfish struggling person to wield such staggering power over the life and death of another
• A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. I believe that. But I also believe that not all acts are created equal in their scope or impact, because of power
• Once upon a time, we were graded on scorecards for our tactics on a long patrol. One of the ways we could influence our score to the positive or negative is by accruing a major-plus, minor-plus, minor-negative and major negative.
• In a ASOIAF/Stannis context, a major-plus would be Davos smuggling onions and fish into Storm’s End. A major-negative (it’s the law, I guess) would be smuggling in the first place.
• There’s a dualistic antagonism in delineating “good acts/bad acts” that’s a major part of this chapter.
• We talked about extremism last week, and we see it again here where things can only be chalked up to good and evil.
• A lot of this duality feels like French Catharism and Syrian Manichaeism rolled up into R’hllorism.
• But really, I think we see why Stannis became a convert to R’hllor -- perhaps not the god part of it, but the theology part of it!
• It appeals to him to have things be lawful or unlawful. Good or bad.
• But what if Davos act of smuggling was a good act and against the law? Where precisely did Davos get those fish and onions from? You think he purchased it from a governmentally-licensed market and brought them to Storm’s End?
• Davos works like a circus air rifle that is ready to explode the balloon of Stannis’ assumptions about the world, and I just love it.
• Moving from the general to the specific, Stannis applies this simultaneously inspiring and terrifying philosophy of his to the war as a whole and the lords riding behind them now
• This is where Stannis gets some of his most interesting political dialogue, and while again it doesn’t quite redeem him, it demonstrates that he’s more than his rep suggests
• It turns out that “they are all traitors, and all my enemies,” and “kings have no friends, only subjects and enemies” did not quite capture the scope of Stannis’ political thought
• When he’s not feeling the need to strut around waving Lightbringer, proving himself as big a man as Robert, he does acknowledge nuances, individualities, shades of gray
• While he despises the Lannisters (and for good reason), he acknowledges that the men fighting for them are not responsible for their crimes. There are plenty of “good men and true” on that side of the war; Varys describes them as good men serving a bad cause
• Of course, Stannis can only interpret the presence of decent people on the Lannister side as them believing Joffrey to be the true king. In truth, many just don’t care!
• Tywin’s lords have a history of following him, and their soldiers know that their only other option is to desert and join the broken men. Most of the gold cloaks just want to eat
• Maybe the “good men and true” are those who don’t commit themselves to any of these crowned assholes, and instead just try to be good to their fellow man (e.g., Meribald)
• Still, I think Stannis deserves credit for extending his perspective beyond himself, trying to understand where the rest of Westeros is coming from. Why aren’t they with me?
• Better yet is what he says next: 
  • “A northman might even say the same of Robb Stark.”
• This is an absolutely crucial moment in Stannis’ story, and one that often gets overlooked. From the end of ASOS forward, Stannis’ campaign is tied up with that of the Starks, as he marches through the North to take Winterfell away from the Boltons
• He marches alongside Northmen who have not bent the knee to him, but nevertheless have forged an alliance with him because he came to them and asked for support
• As I said back in Catelyn III, the Stark position is a complex and ambiguous one from Team Stannis’ perspective, because they’re not on his side exactly, but they haven’t bent the knee to any other claimant either. They want out of the Iron Throne, period
• And Stannis, in this moment, gets it. He understands that from the northern perspective, Robb is the rightful king, not him. The northmen are not traitors. They have an ideology that is different from Stannis’, but it’s an ideology that he admits he respects
• There’s a key word in there: might. 
• Stannis allows for why some of these guys might be in it, and he’s somewhat right by mistake.
• Your Greatjons and Wymans are in it, because they feel that Joffrey performed as Aerys did before them in murdering their liege lord.
• The Boltons probably aren’t in it for the Ned though.
• I think you’re right to talk about how critical of an admission this is by Stannis, though. He’s not getting past his idea of not being a king of a broken realm exactly, but he’s displaying an empathy for those he perceives as his enemy.
• On that point, I wonder whether Catelyn’s point from the parlay about Ned never being Stannis’ enemy, and that Robb extends the hand of friendship to all is having an impact on Stannis.
• Not an ideological one, but an emotional one. Hey, what if not everyone is out to fuck me completely out of my rights and treat me like dogshit?
• That stands in dramatic contrast to the lords riding behind Stannis and Davos now. They have no ideology. No cause they are serving. They backed Renly for power, full stop
• I appreciate this distinction Stannis is drawing. I think he’s right on the money. I think it’s an encouraging sign that he’s taking Lannister and Stark perspectives into account
• But back again to the flipside. The problem is that his disdain for these turncloak lords is not reflected in his actions. He’s not taking on their power in any practical way
• As we’ve said, Stannis does his best work in the dark. He confines this revelation to his conversation with Davos. The turncloak lords don’t suffer for it beyond insults
• Once again, we are seeing Stannis bump up against the limits of his worldview. Much as he “broods on his plans for justice,” he lacks the imagination to bring it about
• All at once, he seems to realize that. Out of nowhere, he starts asking Davos about what the smallfolk think of all this. What did they think of Renly and the news of the twincest?
• It’s a hilarious example of an old-fashioned patrician elite trying to expand his worldview. Oh, right, the peasants! You there, my one peasant friend! What do they think of all this?
• Under the surface, I think this is Stannis contemplating how faithless and useless his own class is, and so abruptly wondering if he might be better off rousing the smallfolk
• Once more, we see the duality of Stannis at work. On one hand, this is unusually forward-thinking. On the other, it’s an arbitrary moment unconnected to concrete action
• Rather than devoting himself, like his fellow Azor Ahai figure Beric Dondarrion, to redistributing his privileges among the smallfolk and standing with them against their oppressors, Stannis just wonders if they might like him better than his peers do
• Turns out, they don’t. They loved Renly, and they grieve for him now. Stannis’ response is “fools love a fool,” because he’s not invested in the masses beyond their utility to him
• Stannis is not interested in interrogating why Renly was more popular than him. He can only rationalize it as folly. He’s not wrong! But that lack of interest kills any chance Stannis has of reorienting his campaign in a more genuinely populist direction
• And yet it’s the common men who continue to have faith in their king as Stannis’ army marches through a frozen hell in the North in ADWD.
• We’ve all had that boss who was just terrible in whatever way. He moves on. A new boss comes in and improves things -- if only marginally. And it earns their loyalty.
• Stannis kinda reminds me of the new boss ideal. These smallfolk soldiers probably had a bad lot with their lords. But hey Stannis is marginally better. He’s even got a former peasant for a friend!
• But again, it’s reforms on the marginal level. Had Stannis come in with a Beric Dondarrion-like equality or hell, even an Aegon V-like bill of reform, he might have earned the loyalty of the smallfolk
• And it’s such an untapped place for Stannis to draw strength from! One need only to look at how the Sparrows movement is able to coalesce around the High Sparrow who has so many of Stannis’ character traits - the misogyny, the duality, etc.
• Y’know for a guy who is supremely militarily-gifted, who is always on the hunt for more soldiers, it’s practically a character flaw that Stannis never thinks Oh, Yeah. The Smallfolk. I could make use of them.
• Hell, Stannis doesn’t even have to be ideologically-aligned to them. All he has to do is tactically concede just a few things, proclaim it loudly in letter and by sending men all over Westeros proclaiming that Stannis fights for the smallfolk, and here are three reforms Stannis will bring when he sits the Iron Throne.
• I’m spitballing, but you see what I mean! Anyways, back to the chapter!
• Davos, meanwhile, stays grounded in the individuality, complexity, and irreducibility of humanity. The people cheered for you when we were there. Who knows what they did when we left? Some people believe everything, some nothing. There is no iron constant
• Moreover, Stannis’ true tale has effectively been countered by the one the Lannisters and Littlefinger came up with: that Shireen was fathered by Patchface
• The waters have been muddied. To the third party observer, it seems like Stannis and the Lannisters are just throwing these rumors back and forth, equally true or not
• As Littlefinger noted, the smallfolk enjoy spreading these kinds of rumors about lords as proud and prickly as Stannis. It reassures people the powerful aren’t so special
• But Stannis cannot bring himself to think critically about how he has contributed to his own reputation, how his alienation and isolation are sabotaging his campaign
• Instead, as always, it comes back to Robert:
  • "Robert could piss in a cup and men would call it wine, but I offer them pure cold water and they squint in suspicion and mutter to each other about how queer it tastes." Stannis ground his teeth. "If someone said I had magicked myself into a boar to kill Robert, likely they would believe that as well."
• As always, I feel two ways at once about this. On one hand, it’s heartbreaking that Stannis believes he’ll simply never be good enough. Robert’s reign amounted to wine-scented piss, yet people still loved him because he was charming and fun
• Stannis offers truth, but people don’t trust him like they did Robert, so they don’t believe. He feels powerless in face of a realm and species that seem to hate him just because
• As Stannis acknowledges, his relationship with Robert was so bad and his reputation at large so poor that people would happily believed he personally killed Robert
• On the other hand, “magicked myself into something to kill my brother” is exactly what just happened with Renly! Stannis is 100% leaning into that reputation now. He thinks it’s inevitable, so even as it hurts, he never comes up with a different way to be
• Davos tries to get Stannis to move past all this. You put that crown of thorns on your head, Your Grace. You can take it off at any time. You are wounding yourself with no purpose, obsessed with your brothers’ ghosts instead of devoting yourself to the living
• You can’t stop them talking. You can’t erase your negative reputation at will. All you can do is let your actions speak for you. All you can do is become the man you want to be.
• This is very good advice, for everyone, not just Stannis. And Stannis will listen to this advice in ASOS...but this is ACOK, and so Stannis ignores Davos’ wise words
• He’s back to brooding on his plans for justice. He will have justice for Robert’s death by taking down Cersei. And justice for Jon Arryn and Ned Stark as well
• That’s a fist-pump moment for sure, a pledge to take down the arrogant corrupt Lannisters who have murdered their way to the top. Go Stannis go!
• Then again...he’s the one who left Robert in the lion’s den when he fled back to Dragonstone. And as rereaders, we know that the Lannisters didn’t kill Jon Arryn
• So while there is definitely catharsis to be had in imagining Stannis striding into the Red Keep and stringing all the conspirators up in their own webs, we must once more reckon with how the flaws in his mindset make him dangerous as well as inspiring
• As always, Davos is here to complicate his king’s simple narrative, reminding him of the value of the individual, of the exception to the rule. What about Renly? Any justice there?
• Well, no, because Stannis already rejected the concept of getting justice for Renly. Who did the deed matters not. This hypocrisy undercuts his desire for justice for those others
• The difference, as I said last week, is that Stannis himself is the guilty party here. Getting justice for Renly would mean turning that all-seeing all-judging fiery gaze inwards
• By raising this topic, Davos has finally pierced Stannis’ defenses, the granite walls he has raised around himself to prevent anyone from hurting him like Robert did
• Stannis externalized that tearful loneliness, that sorrow that the big brother for whom he laid his life on the line never loved him back, as fury. That fury claimed Renly’s life
• Stannis is disarmed by the intimacy and potency of this challenge. He drops the facade and reveals how he really feels right now: struck through with guilt and self-loathing
• We knew that Catelyn felt Stannis’ presence in the tent when Renly died, but now we know that at some level, Stannis really was there. He was conscious within his shadow
• He saw the candles. He heard Brienne screaming. He felt the blood, on his hands, on his hands, and no matter what he does in the daylight, they will never be clean
• Oh, sure, Stannis says his hands are clean, but that’s about as believable as him saying in ASOS that he doesn’t actually want the crown. He’s terrified of his own desires
• In the moment, he realized all at once the horror of what he was doing. He groaned, cried out, tried to stop it from happening like Joel in Eternal Sunshine. Too late.
• Now Stannis is left alone in the daylight with his new lords, men he transparently hates, and Cortnay Penrose, the man in the mirror, is telling him he’s the villain
• Robert is gone. Renly is gone. Stannis is left with his bad dreams, with the memory of a peach. What did Renly mean by it? Stannis is obsessed, but can’t figure it out
• Did Renly pull out that peach just to make me look foolish? Was it a genuine threat? Or was Renly just a laughing child all along, not realizing it was for real until it was too late?
• Stannis shakes his head like a dog snapping a rabbit’s neck. Like a killer, a predator, a hunting animal. That’s who he is, and he hates it, but can’t think of any other way to be
• Stannis falls back on the fig leaf of treason, of crime and punishment, the dynamic that dictates his life. This is such a haunting, heartbreaking moment, because it’s a moment in which a lifelong authoritarian realizes that the hippies were right all along
• Love is all there is. Not a nice benefit, not a side effect to come home to at the end of the day. No. Love is all there is. Everything else is bullshit, pretense, shadows on walls
• Everything else fades before the reaper. Love is the only true immortality. Love is what lasts about us. Love is what Stannis remembers about Renly. I loved my little brother.
• He will go to his grave thinking of his brother’s peach, his brother’s smile, his brother’s blood gushing from his brother’s throat. It’s too late, always was, always will be
• Stannis has given up on life, and can only stare at it in his rearview mirror as he trudges his way forward to the grave. He says he doesn’t know what the peach means, and that’s true in the sense that he lacks Renly’s sense of humor and joie de vivre
• But at a deeper level, Stannis knows exactly what that peach meant. It was the life he could have lived, and didn’t. It was all he could have given for love’s sake, and didn’t
• It makes me think of the end of the Brazilian short film Isle of Flowers, probably the most succinct and potent case against capitalism I’ve ever encountered:
  • Freedom is a word the human dream feeds off, but no one can explain...nor fail to understand.
• Stannis cannot explain the peach, but nor can he fail to understand it. His dream feeds off it, but he has woken up to a world in which he has forsaken it. He set his heart on fire.

Foreshadowing/Groundwork

Davos will indeed lose his fingerbones at the Blackwater, and so will believe he has lost his luck. He’s gonna have to make his own from now on! All part of his character development

Davos’ statement about the storm lords’ loyalties being fickle: Robert, then Renly, now Stannis, who next will come true at the end of ASOS as many of surviving lords will bend the knee to Joffrey in the throne room. But in just a moon’s turn, their loyalty will be called into question when Renly Reborn in the form of Young Grift lands in the stormlands.

Theory/Discussion

Did Stannis consciously give the order to kill Renly, or did Melisandre do it all on her own?

• The case for him giving the order
  • I don’t think Stannis knew exactly what was going to happen at Storm’s End. Melisandre didn’t go to him and say “OK, Yr Grace, after we fuck, I’m gonna give birth to a nightmarish shadow with your face, which will slit your brother’s throat. Oh, and you’ll be along for the ride, and will have nightmares about it afterward, and it’ll reduce you to a living corpse with a heart of ash. Sound good?”
  • She didn’t say that for the same reason she hasn’t mentioned human sacrifice to him yet: because Stannis would reject such tactics....for now, anyway
  • Having said that, I find it equally hard to believe that Stannis showed up at Storm’s End, risking his army, his claim, and his sacred kingly body, on nothing more than Melisandre telling him Renly will die by pure happenstance 
  • That would require Stannis to be either a) already enthralled by Melisandre’s narrative, which he isn’t, or b) the most gullible person alive, which he also isn’t
  • Let’s look back at how Stannis describes Melisandre in Davos I:
    • “I have ships...and I have her. The red woman. Half my knights are afraid even to say her name, did you know? If she can do nothing else, a sorceress who can inspire such dread in grown men is not to be despised. A frightened man is a beaten man. And perhaps she can do more. I mean to find out.”
  • I think he found out! Not specifically the shadowbaby, but I think he went to Storm’s End with the understanding that Melisandre would take care of Renly 
  • After all, he compares her to a hawk. A hunting bird, who could do for him what Proudwing never could: bring Robert--in the form of Renly--down to earth
  • Hunting birds don’t just inform you of a fluffy lil bunny that will die on its own. They go out, kill that fluffy lil bunny, and bring its fluffy lil corpse back to you
  • Now let’s look back at how the topic of Renly’s death is broached. Selyse does not explicitly say “we’re going to kill Renly.” But when Cressen protests that Renly has only committed follies, Stannis shoots back that Renly has committed treason, and as he says in ASOS, death has always been the punishment for treason. His objections to this plan are logistical in nature, not moral
  • How do we get past his army, his lords, his Rainbow Guard? Well...Melisandre is how. Cressen calls this fratricide. Neither Selyse nor Stannis object to this
  • If Stannis genuinely thinks he does not bear responsibility for Renly’s death, why is he not eager to find and prosecute whoever does bear responsibility?
  • If Stannis didn’t make the call, why does he feel so guilty in this scene? Why does he say he knows now he loved Renly? Doesn’t that imply a previous state of mind in which he didn’t know that? What decision was made in that state?
  • Davos thinks to himself that “something is wrong here.” What else is he referring to, but the realization that Stannis’ hands are not, in fact, clean?
  • Finally, we have to consider Renly’s death in context with Stannis’ overall arc, which points like a flashing neon blood-red arrow at the sacrifice of Shireen
  • I don’t have much patience for theories that involve anyone but Stannis making the call there. It was he who made the call regarding Edric Storm
  • Threefold revelation, right? Renly’s death is the first of three. While Melisandre always keeps secrets from Stannis, I think she needs his buy-in on the big questions, because she needs him to be willing to set his heart on fire
  • “Give me this boy, and I will give you your kingdom,” Mel told Stannis regarding Edric Storm. I don’t think it’s the first time she said it. I think she was only so sure he’d be on board with killing a relative because he’d already done it once.
• The case against Stannis giving the order
  • I want to start by arguing that GRRM intentionally made this issue ambiguous and open to debate. You can come out of Renly’s death chapter and Stannis’ reflection on that death here in Davos II thinking that Stannis did or did not give the order from an honest place.
  • For purposes of this discussion, I’m going to take on the role of arguing for Stannis not giving the order -- my own feeling is a bit more complex. I’ll unpack that at the end.
  • So, as Stannis’ defense attorney here, I guess (Sorry, Ser Frank B, the King’s Justice. You haven’t taken the Bar as of this recording), I’d start by looking at the whole mess of prophecy, Melisandre and Stannis’ relationship to it. 
  • Emmett made the point that Stannis had stated that he intended to find out all that Melisandre could do for him at the end of ACOK, Davos I. And Stannis will reveal that Melisandre saw Renly dead.
  • But the impression we get (and I’m going to use those types of words a fair amount “impression”, “sense”, etc) is that Melisandre only revealed that Renly was fated to die and didn’t tell Stannis what her and Stannis’ role in Renly’s death would be. 
  • And this is par for the course for what Melisandre sees in the flames, and I wonder whether Melisandre didn’t fully know what she was perceiving in the flames.
  • We know from Melisandre’s chapter in ADWD that she sees skulls around Jon Snow. Did she see skulls when she looked into the flames and asked for a glimpse of Lord Renly? 
  • We don’t know. But it’s possible that Melisandre didn’t know anything beyond that Renly would die at Storm’s End. As she tells Stannis in Storm: "When the fires speak more plainly, so shall I. There is truth in the flames, but it is not always easy to see." 
  • Regardless, let’s shift the discussion to how Melisandre communicates whatever it is she sees in the flames.
  • In Storm, Stannis talks specifically about what Melisandre saw w/r/t Renly’s fate:
    • "She saw Renly's end in the flames, yes, but she had no more part in it than I did. The priestess was with me. Your Devan would tell you so. Ask him, if you doubt me. She would have spared Renly if she could. It was Melisandre who urged me to meet with him, and give him one last chance to amend his treason.”
  • Yes, yes. I know. “No more part than I did”. We’ll circle back to this. My sense from that quote from ASOS is that Melisandre told Stannis on Dragonstone something like, “Yeah. Renly is going to die, but maybe the prophecy can be averted.” Recall that Stannis later tells Davos in this chapter in ACOK that Melisandre sometimes sees multiple version of the future. Perhaps this was one of them.
  • Still, was Melisandre being honest with Stannis? I don’t think so!
  • Let’s circle back to Mel’s chapter in ADWD where we actually see her thoughts and words in action.
  • There, Devan Seaworth asks what she sees in the flames, and she thinks: Skulls. A thousand skulls, and the bastard boy again. Jon Snow. Whenever she was asked what she saw within her fires, Melisandre would answer, "Much and more," but seeing was never as simple as those words suggested. It was an art, and like all arts it demanded mastery, discipline, study. Pain. That too. R'hllor spoke to his chosen ones through blessed fire, in a language of ash and cinder and twisting flame that only a god could truly grasp. 
  • Melisandre is communicating here that she sees stuff in the flames, but she doesn’t come out and just tell people what she sees most of the time. She bullshits them.
  • And that brings us to the idea of showing up to Storm’s End and more importantly, treating with Renly at all.
  • As Stannis tells Catelyn, his reason for coming to Storm’s End in the first place was to take Renly’s army from his brother in order to make a plausible attack on King’s Landing.
  • But it seems very strange to me that Stannis would parlay with Renly at all if he came to Storm’s End to kill Renly. From that quote from a moment ago, his intent was to give Renly a last chance to repent of his treason.
  • Additionally, as we learn in this chapter, Melisandre told Stannis the alternative to not coming to Storm’s End: “Melisandre saw another day in her flames as well. A morrow where Renly rode out of the south in his green armor to smash my host beneath the walls of King's Landing. Had I met my brother there, it might have been me who died in place of him." (Kudos to Lord Travis, Master of Ships for a twitter thread on the morning before we recorded that reminded me of this quote)
  • I can hear the counter-argument: It was image politics to conduct a parlay. 
  • C’mon! Stannis is notoriously bad at doing image politics. There’s no sense that we get from ACOK/ASOS that Stannis parlayed with Renly to seek the high moral ground.
  • No matter the execution (which was bad!), I think Stannis’ intention was to genuinely come to the bargaining table in order to forestall Melisandre’s prophecies: either Renly will die or that Stannis will die.
  • But when the parlay went to shit, surely then, Stannis gave the order to Melisandre to kill Renly, right?
  • No so fast!
  • As we talked about in part 1 of our analysis of ACOK, Catelyn III, it very much looks like that Stannis was preparing for a traditional battle to defeat Renly’s forces in the field.
  • Why put in all that extra work for the army if the whole idea was to have Melisandre kill Renly at Storm’s End?
  • Moreover, why does Stannis then tell Davos the line: [Devan] tried to wake me. Dawn was nigh and my lords were waiting, fretting. I should have been ahorse, armored. I knew Renly would attack at break of day.
  • Why give a shit about getting up, on a horse and ready for battle if Stannis had already consented to Melisandre killing Renly?
  • Again, remember the other half of what Melisandre had told Stannis: Melisandre told me that if I went to Storm's End, I would win the best part of my brother's power, and she was right.
  • There’s ambiguity in what “winning the best part” would mean, but given the context of Stannis preparing for a battle, telling Davos that he should have been up on his horse for battle that Stannis was planning for the lesser part of Renly’s power would have perished in a battle that Stannis was preparing for.
  • This is where I want to close out the defense attorney portion of my argument: I fully believe that Stannis was willing to kill Renly. I fully believe that he was angry enough to do it by the end of the parlay. But I don’t see the evidence that he did give the order given all of the context. 
  • Members of the jury, I urge you to vote “not guilty.”
  • Switching hats. Playing defense attorney is fun. My personal take: I think Emmett, you make excellent points about why would Stannis feel guilty, why would he say R’hllor willed Renly dead; so who did the deed doesn’t matter if he wasn’t at fault.
  • And then you have Stannis' statement. I’ve edited out the line about how he should have been ahorse and getting ready for battle:
    • "I dream of it sometimes. Of Renly's dying. A green tent, candles, a woman screaming. And blood." Stannis looked down at his hands. "I was still abed when he died. Your Devan will tell you. Devan says I thrashed and cried out, but what does it matter? It was a dream. I was in my tent when Renly died, and when I woke my hands were clean."
  • My read is that Stannis recognizes by the time he talks with Davos that he bears culpability in Renly’s justifiable killing/murder.
  • He was in the tent when it happened. Some part of him was. He was angry enough to want Renly dead, and I have to imagine that was what Melisandre used to ensorcell the shadowbaby that killed Renly (and Cortnay).
  • Again, I probably think that any order that if Stannis gave Melisandre the order to kill Renly, it was unspoken, but there’s no textual evidence for that (or against that).
  • So, Stannis’ statement in ASOS that she had no more part in it than I did. The priestess was with me reads as self-deception in the best light; a lie in the worst.
  • We report on the NotACast pod-cast, you decide. 

Conclusion

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