Episode 137: A CLASH OF KINGS, THEON V: "New Nightmare" ft. Alisha Benton 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 thirty-seventh episode of the Not A Cast, titled: “New Nightmare: An Analysis of ACOK, Theon V,” in which Theon Greyjoy is introduced to the idea that his actions have consequences. He … doesn’t take it well.

Alisha Intro:

This episode is brought to you by our NotASmallCouncil:

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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

Lord Patrick Blackfyre, a high lord patron, asks:

What do you guys think about Theon being named after Theon Stark?

Maybe since Balon was planning to rebel & return to the Old Way, he named Theon for a legendary reaver that expelled land-loving Ironborn from the North, a place that didn't follow the Old Way. To take it further though, why did GRRM add Theon Stark to the history? Theon Stark & House Bolton’s story lines up w/ Theon Greyjoy & Ramsay. Ramsay was born by the Weeping Water. The Battle of Weeping Water is where Theon Stark & Boltons came together to expel Andals from North. Boltons & Theon Stark tortured & tied Argos Seven-Star to prow of ship before seeking revenge for invasion. Theon Greyjoy & Ramsay story is filled w/ torture. We also have Euron tying his brother, a holy man he doesn't agree w/ to his prow to go on an invasion. We don't know Argos is a holy man but to be named Seven-Star we can assume so. Theon Stark also expelled Ironborn from the North. Theon Greyjoy expelled Ironborn from the North at Moat Cailin. Theon Stark is also remembered as gaunt & constantly at war. Theon Greyjoy is certainly gaunt & could be considered always at war: A hostage from the age of 10, part of War of Five Kings. Ironborn invasion. Captured Winterfell & eventually participated in the Battle of Winterfell & War for Dawn.

So w/ all these connections between Theon Stark & Greyjoy, why did Balon name his son Theon & what is the history trying to tell us through foreshadowing?

So, thank you Lord Pat for the question. If you’d like to ask us questions we’ll answer here on the NotACast pod-cast, you are welcome to become a Sworn Sword or higher level patron over at patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF where you can get show notes, bonus episodes, merch and more!

Absolutely. And we hope you all have been enjoying our episode on the Pink Letter if you’re a patron, and our patreon sample of TWOW, The Forsaken, Part 2 as a non-patron. And if you liked what you heard, there’s three more parts on The Forsaken, our analysis of Kingdom of Heaven and that Pink Letter episode! And like 30 other episodes! Check them out!

But enough about patreon. When we last checked in with Theon, he had gone joy-riding through the wolfswood playing a fun game of hide and go seek with Bran and Rickon. But having not found the boys, Theon grew worried for his foster brothers; so, he asked for a hint on Bran and Rickon’s location from his really good friend Reek, and Reek had told Theon where Bran and Rickon’s hiding spot. Let’s find out what happens after Theon finds some boys in this synopsis of ACOK, Theon V!

Synopsis

The sky was a gloom of cloud, the woods dead and frozen. Roots grabbed at Theon's feet as he ran, and bare branches lashed his face, leaving thin stripes of blood across his cheeks. He crashed through heedless, breathless, icicles flying to pieces before him. Mercy, he sobbed. From behind came a shuddering howl that curdled his blood. Mercy, mercy. When he glanced back over his shoulder he saw them coming, great wolves the size of horses with the heads of small children. Oh, mercy, mercy. Blood dripped from their mouths black as pitch, burning holes in the snow where it fell. Every stride brought them closer. Theon tried to run faster, but his legs would not obey. The trees all had faces, and they were laughing at him, laughing, and the howl came again. He could smell the hot breath of the beasts behind him, a stink of brimstone and corruption. They're dead, dead, I saw them killed, he tried to shout, I saw their heads dipped in tar, but when he opened his mouth only a moan emerged, and then something touched him and he whirled, shouting . . .

Huh. Same dreams and same exact way I wake up every morning. Weird!

Theon grabs for his dagger, knocks it away and finally comes to with Wex and Reek in the room. He demands to know why they’re there, and Reek tells Theon that they’re there, because Asha has arrived, and Theon left instructions to wake him when she did.

Theon thinks it’s good and goddamn time that Asha has finally shown her ass up. He sees that it’s dawn in Winterfell and asks where she is. The Great Hall with her men comes the reply. And so Theon gets out of bed, demands hot water and tries to shake the dream of the boys with wolves’ faces. Weird how the bedchamber felt so cold.

All his dreams had been cold of late, and each more hideous than the one before. Last night he had dreamed himself back in the mill again, on his knees dressing the dead. Their limbs were already stiffening, so they seemed to resist sullenly as he fumbled at them with half-frozen fingers, tugging up breeches and knotting laces, yanking fur-trimmed boots over hard unbending feet, buckling a studded leather belt around a waist no bigger than the span of his hands. "This was never what I wanted," he told them as he worked. "They gave me no choice." The corpses made no answer, but only grew colder and heavier.

The night before, it had been the miller's wife. Theon had forgotten her name, but he remembered her body, soft pillowy breasts and stretch marks on her belly, the way she clawed his back when he fucked her. Last night in his dream he had been in bed with her once again, but this time she had teeth above and below, and she tore out his throat even as she was gnawing off his manhood. It was madness. He'd seen her die too. Gelmarr had cut her down with one blow of his axe as she cried to Theon for mercy. Leave me, woman. It was him who killed you, not me. And he's dead as well. At least Gelmarr did not haunt Theon's sleep.

Wex shows back up with water, and Theon bathes himself, taking his time in revenge for Asha taking her time to get here. He gets on his good boy prince clothes, but then he remembers that Asha was into blades more than fashion. So, he changes again -- this time into soldier boy clothes and straps a sword and dagger to himself, totally not hoping to #own Asha by having the knives this time unlike the last time when Asha humiliated him in Pyke. Finally, he puts on his big boy crown. Actually, it’s an ugly-ass crown. Since Mikken had unexpectedly passed away, Theon had to use a less-than-ideal smith, and he was dogshit. I, too, hate reaping what I’ve sowed.

Theon heads out with Reek, Urzen and Kromm, and lol, we’re back to Ironborn mothers hating their sons by giving them grunts for names. Theon thinks that everyone in Winterfell wants him dead; so, he has guards with him everywhere. And Theon knows this, because all sorts of his Ironborn bros were turning up dead: pushed down steps, throats slit, tossed down wells.

He could not let the killings go unpunished. Farlen was as likely a suspect as any, so Theon sat in judgment, called him guilty, and condemned him to death. Even that went sour. As he knelt to the block, the kennelmaster said, "M'lord Eddard always did his own killings." Theon had to take the axe himself or look a weakling. His hands were sweating, so the shaft twisted in his grip as he swung and the first blow landed between Farlen's shoulders. It took three more cuts to hack through all that bone and muscle and sever the head from the body, and afterward he was sick, remembering all the times they'd sat over a cup of mead talking of hounds and hunting. I had no choice, he wanted to scream at the corpse. The ironborn can't keep secrets, they had to die, and someone had to take the blame for it. He only wished he had killed him cleaner. Ned Stark had never needed more than a single blow to take a man's head.

But now the killings had stopped, but his bros were anxious. They weren’t scared of fighting a foe in the open, but this cloak and dagger shit scared the bejesus out of them. Black Lorren has a little suggestion for this:

“We would do well to leave this place."

"I am the Prince of Winterfell!" Theon had shouted. "This is my seat, no man will drive me from it. No, nor woman either!"

Asha. It was her doing. My own sweet sister, may the Others bugger her with a sword. She wanted him dead, so she could steal his place as their father's heir. That was why she had let him languish here, ignoring the urgent commands he had sent her.

Glad Theon isn’t giving into paranoia here. That would be unfortunate if he did. Regardless, he finds Asha sitting in the high seat of the Starks eating some chicken while her men and Theon’s men were swapping stories. In fact, it’s so loud that no one notices Theon entering. But then Theon realizes that there’s only fifty guys in the hall, most of them his. Where was everyone else, all the people Asha was supposed to bring?

Well, that’s everyone, according to Reek. How many men did Asha bring? Uh, twenty? Angry, Theon marches over to Asha. And, sigh, Alisha, would you play the part of Asha? The people demand it.

"Why, 'tis the Prince of Winterfell." She tossed a bone to one of the dogs sniffing about the hall. Under that hawk's beak of a nose, her wide mouth twisted in a mocking grin. "Or is it Prince of Fools?"

"Envy ill becomes a maid."

Asha sucked grease from her fingers. A lock of black hair fell across her eyes. Her men were shouting for bread and bacon. They made a deal of noise, as few as they were. "Envy, Theon?"

"What else would you call it? With thirty men, I captured Winterfell in a night. You needed a thousand and a moon's turn to take Deepwood Motte."

"Well, I'm no great warrior like you, brother," She quaffed half a horn of ale and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I saw the heads above your gates. Tell me true, which one gave you the fiercest fight, the cripple or the babe?"

This is literally the worst day of my life that I have to let you play someone owning me online. The worst.

Theon feels his face getting flushed, and he knows, just knows that he took no joy from killing those children. And then the reactions of everyone back at Winterfell made it worse.

Old Nan stood with her soft toothless mouth opening and closing soundlessly, and Farlen threw himself at Theon, snarling like one of his hounds. Urzen and Cadwyl had to beat him senseless with the butts of their spears. How did I come to this? he remembered thinking as he stood over the fly-speckled bodies.

Only Maester Luwin had the stomach to come near. Stone-faced, the small grey man had begged leave to sew the boys' heads back onto their shoulders, so they might be laid in the crypts below with the other Stark dead.

"No," Theon had told him. "Not the crypts."

"But why, my lord? Surely they cannot harm you now. It is where they belong. All the bones of the Starks-"

"I said no." He needed the heads for the wall, but he had burned the headless bodies that very day, in all their finery. Afterward he had knelt amongst the bones and ashes to retrieve a slag of melted silver and cracked jet, all that remained of the wolf's-head brooch that had once been Bran's. He had it still.

Back to the present, Theon claims he treated Bran and Rickon generously, and they so totally earned their fates. Asha tells Theon that everyone earns their fates which just drives Theon up a wall. Besides, how were the twenty dudes Asha brought supposed to help him hold Winterfell?

"Ten," Asha corrected. "The others return with me. You wouldn't want your own sweet sister to brave the dangers of the wood without an escort, would you? There are direwolves prowling the dark." She uncoiled from the great stone seat and rose to her feet. "Come, let us go somewhere we can speak more privily."

Theon knows that Asha is right, and he hates that. He leads her up to Ned Stark’s solar where he declares to her that Dagmer Cleftjaw had gotten his ass defeated by Rodrik Cassel. Asha concurs, adding in more information that Theon doesn’t know: his shield wall was broken by mounted northmen, but Dagmer is alive at the least. He was moving back to the Stony Shore.

Theon realizes that Asha knows more than she does. So, to counter, he tells Asha that the Manderlys are moving knights, siege engines and warhorses up river by barge while the Umbers are gathering at the Last River. He’s going to have a ton of northmen at his gates soon. And Asha brought only ten men?

"I need not have brought you any."

"I commanded you-"

"Father commanded me to take Deepwood Motte," she snapped. "He said nothing of me having to rescue my little brother."

"Bugger Deepwood," he said. "It's a wooden pisspot on a hill. Winterfell is the heart of the land, but how am I to hold it without a garrison?"

"You might have thought of that before you took it. Oh, it was cleverly done, I'll grant you. If only you'd had the good sense to raze the castle and carry the two little princelings back to Pyke as hostages, you might have won the war in a stroke."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you? To see my prize reduced to ruins and ashes."

"Your prize will be the doom of you. Krakens rise from the sea, Theon, or did you forget that during your years among the wolves? Our strength is in our longships. My wooden pisspot sits close enough to the sea for supplies and fresh men to reach me whenever they are needful. But Winterfell is hundreds of leagues inland, ringed by woods, hills, and hostile holdfasts and castles. And every man in a thousand leagues is your enemy now, make no mistake. You made certain of that when you mounted those heads on your gatehouse." Asha shook her head. "How could you be such a bloody fool? Children . . . "

"They defied me!" he shouted in her face. "And it was blood for blood besides, two sons of Eddard Stark to pay for Rodrik and Maron." The words tumbled out heedlessly, but Theon knew at once that his father would approve. "I've laid my brothers' ghosts to rest."

Asha tells Theon it’s “our bros”, and she doesn’t really believe him anyhow. Theon snarls at Asha that she doesn’t understand that men need vengeance. Maybe Balon won’t be about Winterfell, but he’d love his son avenging his dead brothers, right?

Asha snorted back a laugh. "This Ser Rodrik may well feel the same manly need, did you think of that? You are blood of my blood, Theon, whatever else you may be. For the sake of the mother who bore us both, return to Deepwood Motte with me. Put Winterfell to the torch and fall back while you still can."

"No." Theon adjusted his crown. "I took this castle and I mean to hold it."

His sister looked at him a long time. "Then hold it you shall," she said, "for the rest of your life." She sighed. "I say it tastes like folly, but what would a shy maid know of such things?" At the door she gave him one last mocking smile. "You ought to know, that's the ugliest crown I've ever laid eyes on. Did you make it yourself?"

Last time I’m ever getting owned online, I promise you that.

Asha departs Winterfell, leaving only ten of her men behind, and she rubs salt in Theon’s wounds by leaving the same gate that Bran and Rickon very definitely used to escape. Theon watches all this from the walls and thinks maybe he should have listened to her. But then Reek is there, asking if she’s gone. Theon hadn’t heard him arrive. He hadn’t smelled him either. Really, he should have killed reek when he had the chance. But killing Reek made Theon feel nervous. Somehow, Reek could read and write, and maybe he left behind a hidden account of what they’d done. So, he couldn't kill him, I guess.

"M'lord prince, if you'll pardon me saying, it's not right for her to abandon you. And ten men, that won't be near enough."

"I am well aware of that," Theon said. So was Asha.

"Well, might be I could help you," said Reek. "Give me a horse and bag o' coin, and I could find you some good fellows."

Theon narrowed his eyes. "How many?"

"A hundred, might be. Two hundred. Maybe more." He smiled, his pale eyes glinting. "I was born up north here. I know many a man, and many a man knows Reek."

Reek can just summon two hundred men just like that? That’s odd, but surely Ramsay, Reek isn’t up to something. So, Theon says do it, and Reek can name any reward he wants. Ah, well, Reek wants Palla since she’s already been had.

He had gone too far with Reek to turn back now. "Two hundred men and she's yours. But a man less and you can go back to fucking pigs."

Reek was gone before the sun went down, carrying a bag of Stark silver and the last of Theon's hopes. Like as not, I'll never see the wretch again, he thought bitterly, but even so the chance had to be taken.

And then big boy Theon heads to bed and has another fun dream:

That night he dreamed of the feast Ned Stark had thrown when King Robert came to Winterfell. The hall rang with music and laughter, though the cold winds were rising outside. At first it was all wine and roast meat, and Theon was making japes and eyeing the serving girls and having himself a fine time . . . until he noticed that the room was growing darker. The music did not seem so jolly then; he heard discords and strange silences, and notes that hung in the air bleeding. Suddenly the wine turned bitter in his mouth, and when he looked up from his cup he saw that he was dining with the dead.

King Robert sat with his guts spilling out on the table from the great gash in his belly, and Lord Eddard was headless beside him. Corpses lined the benches below, grey-brown flesh sloughing off their bones as they raised their cups to toast, worms crawling in and out of the holes that were their eyes. He knew them, every one; Jory Cassel and Fat Tom, Porther and Cayn and Hullen the master of horse, and all the others who had ridden south to King's Landing never to return. Mikken and Chayle sat together, one dripping blood and the other water. Benfred Tallhart and his Wild Hares filled most of a table. The miller's wife was there as well, and Farlen, even the wildling Theon had killed in the wolfswood the day he had saved Bran's life.

But there were others with faces he had never known in life, faces he had seen only in stone. The slim, sad girl who wore a crown of pale blue roses and a white gown spattered with gore could only be Lyanna. Her brother Brandon stood beside her, and their father Lord Rickard just behind. Along the walls figures half-seen moved through the shadows, pale shades with long grim faces. The sight of them sent fear shivering through Theon sharp as a knife. And then the tall doors opened with a crash, and a freezing gale blew down the hall, and Robb came walking out of the night. Grey Wind stalked beside, eyes burning, and man and wolf alike bled from half a hundred savage wounds.

Wow, again, I have the same dream sometimes. And like Theon, I, too, wake up screaming. When Theon wakes up, he startles Wex; so, the boy goes running out of the room, and his guards come bursting in. He demands Luwin be brought to him, and that occurs. He tells Luwin it was a dream and meant nothing. And Luwin agrees very, very solemnly. He leaves Theon with a sleeping potion, but Theon thinks it’s maybe poison, and he pours it down the privy shaft.

Theon next sends for Kyra, and he proceeds to, well, to rape her and physically abuse her before sending her away. But he still can’t sleep. He spends the whole night awake. He dresses at dawn and heads outside to the battlements with the wind swirling around him as the forest changes color as the sun rises. Theon looks to his left and sees the great heart tree in the godswood.

Ned Stark's tree, he thought, and Stark's wood, Stark's castle, Stark's sword, Stark's gods. This is their place, not mine. I am a Greyjoy of Pyke, born to paint a kraken on my shield and sail the great salt sea. I should have gone with Asha.

On their iron spikes atop the gatehouse, the heads waited.

Theon gazed at them silently while the wind tugged on his cloak with small ghostly hands. The miller's boys had been of an age with Bran and Rickon, alike in size and coloring, and once Reek had flayed the skin from their faces and dipped their heads in tar, it was easy to see familiar features in those misshapen lumps of rotting flesh. People were such fools. If we'd said they were rams' heads, they would have seen horns.

And that is ACOK, Theon V! Among our recent chapters, this one is pretty short, but man, I couldn’t help but quote rather than summarize it (admittedly with the villain Alisha’s help. Thank you.) What did you all think of the chapter?

Depth

The key to manipulating your audience is a command of tone. George started off Theon’s chapters in this book with a comedic tone: we wince and chuckle as this arrogant fool gets his comeuppance, over and over and over again. In the background, however, George was also building up a different tone--one of dread at what Theon will do to overcome those setbacks. Now, in Theon V, that tone of dread takes over. There’s still a hint of the comedic tone with Asha’s snappy sarcastic dialogue, but mostly this chapter feels like we’re plunging through thin ice into the freezing water below. George cuts, with dazzling swiftness, between the dreamworld and the daylight to capture how fragmented Theon’s mindset is right now. It’s all built around a structuring absence: Theon murdering two children in between his last chapter and this one. The horror of that action broke Theon’s soul and story alike; we’re left to pick up the pieces.

-Theon’s big issue is that his entire waking existence is one big fumble after another because he has no actual grasp on reality

-From the get, even before the nightmares, we see example after example of Theon rejecting reality

-Inflated sense of self

-Attempting to bulldoze his way into gaining approval, respect and even love

-Playing off his mishaps as intentional, even in inner monologue,

-accidentally shooting ol’ dude in the belly when he meant to hit the cup

-In sleep, reality comes for Theon, and it’s terrifying, but we see him repeatedly try to brush it off as “only a dream”

-Asha’s arrival at Winterfell not only stirs him out of the literal dream he was having, but his waking illusions as well

-Asha is not only a foil to Theon on a narrative scale as a whole -shining a light on his Pretty-Fly-For-A-White-Guy Syndrome- but within the chapter she’s his rude awakening from the very unrealistic dreams and aspirations Theon holds in waking

-Just like the dream with the wolves, consequences that he can’t outrun are catching up to him

-Mocking as Asha may be toward Theon, she has his best interest at heart. She’s there to essentially offer him an out, where his nightmares don’t have to be prophetic, they really can be “just dreams”

-Theon refuses this because he’s big dumb, and what’s a story with prohpetic dreams without self-fulfillment?

Why structure this chapter immediately after ACOK, Catelyn VII? A big part of it is that this concludes the four-part narrative punch that starts in Theon IV with Theon’s declaration that he won’t be merciful now that he knows where Bran and Rickon are. Tyrion XII with Tyrion receiving news of Bran and Rickon’s death, Catelyn VII which portrays Catelyn in the depths of grief over Bran and Rickon’s death and this chapter which closes with the revelation that Bran and Rickon are not dead. That's a tight setup and payoff! Well-done, George! But I think I love how George shows Theon losing his mind. Watching this unfold right after Catelyn VII where Jaime starts the long confession about Aerys II is brilliant. The similarities are striking: Theon begins to grow paranoid and starts jumping to paranoid conclusions about who’s killing his men: Asha? The Winterfell smallfolk? That’s Aerys territory. Barbaric executions of men who did nothing wrong? Aerys burned people. Theon throws them down wells. Child-murder? Yes and yes.

But the thing that cinched it for me was the way George described Kyra after Theon raped her:

By the time he finished, she was sobbing, her neck and breasts covered with bruises and bite marks.

Compare this to how Jaime described Rhaella after Aerys raped her after he burned Rickard Stark and had Brandon Stark strangled in AFFC:

[Queen Rhaella Targaryen] had been cloaked and hooded as she climbed inside the royal wheelhouse that would take her down Aegon's High Hill to the waiting ship, but he heard her maids whispering after she was gone. They said the queen looked as if some beast had savaged her, clawing at her thighs and chewing on her breasts.

In essence, what George does is give us a snapshot of the mind of Aerys II Targaryen through Theon’s POV. And I have to think that Aerys II may have had troubled dreams, and that’s how this chapter opens.

• The first dream
  • As Jeff said, we are coming into this chapter believing that Theon Greyjoy is guilty of murdering Bran and Rickon. We are predisposed to hate him
  • But George still wants us to identify with Theon, locking us into his mindset and trapping us there. We can’t detach from him entirely
  • So that’s a challenge for the writer. How do you maintain intimacy when the reader is recoiling? By plunging us into the most intimate possible situation: a dream. More specifically, a hellish series of nightmares
  • George is drawing from multiple different traditions here. On one hand, there’s the idea of dreams expressing the subconscious, particularly emotions that the conscious mind is determined to reject
  • The walls of compartmentalization and self-justification go down with the sun. Our dreams are unfettered thought, showing us who we really are
  • Shakespeare’s use of dreams is often cited in this regard--the nightmares plaguing Lear and the Macbeths stand in for their guilty consciences
  • On the other hand, George is not working purely in the domain of tragedy here. This is still genre fiction, and you see that in the specific imagery
  • Theon’s opening nightmare is Evil Dead every bit as much as Macbeth. The trees and roots whipping his face, grabbing at his feet…
  • Theon is being hunted through his dreams, which for George’s 1990s pop culture audience, can’t help but evoke the Nightmare on Elm Street series
  • The twist here is that our POV is not a fresh-faced youth being chased by a child killer. Our POV is the child killer. It’s as if we are stuck in Freddy Kreuger’s mind at the end of one of the movies as his victims strike back
  • Before getting into the dream itself, the other factor beyond Shakespeare and horror films is post-traumatic stress disorder.
  • Again, I think George, Boomer that he is, is sourcing this to the Vietnam War and the PTSD that many veterans experienced coming out of that conflict.
  • Given George’s background as a peace protestor and conscientious objector to the war, I think GRRM is channeling his complicated feelings about soldiers from that war.
  • I talked about William Calley, the platoon leader from the My Lai massacre, as a potential inspiration for Theon last time, and here, I wonder whether George is attempting to explore the psyche of that type of child-killing war criminal through Theon.
  • Because even if Calley and Theon are monsters for their actions in murdering innocents, the trauma from that act has to reverberate through their subconscious.
  • In 2009, William Calley spoke out about the My Lai massacre, stating:
    • "There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," Calley told members of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus on Wednesday. His voice started to break when he added, "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."
  • Whether you judge Calley to be sincere or not (I kinda do and don’t), committing an act of murder against innocent sullies the soul.
  • The thing about Theon is that I think the dreams prove that he’s not sociopathic. He feels things about what he’s done, and even if he represses it consciously, his soul is roiling due to his actions.
  • What makes violence so objectionable to us is empathy--we project ourselves into the victim. Certainly, people can and do construct more intellectual arguments around that, but empathy is the foundation
  • And so Theon’s horror at what he has done is expressed by a dream in which he has become the victim. He is now the one being hunted through the woods outside Winterfell. He is begging for the mercy he denied
  • He is specifically being hunted by wolves with boy’s faces; the key to effective dream imagery is this kind of uncanny juxtaposition of elements
  • He was on the hunt for both wolves and boys in his last chapter, and now the two have merged to hunt him down. It’s a reflection of how the Starks are their wolves on some level, but from the outside, as a monstrosity
  • The trees laugh at Theon, reflecting how he has been abandoned by the gods for his crime--the gods of the North, where he is now trapped
  • These dreams do reflect reality, as through a distorted mirror. They show us what happened, but not directly. This is in part because George doesn’t want to give away what happened; it’s also because Theon is repressing it
  • When he wakes, he finds Reek aka Ramsay lit with a candle beneath his face--a chilling avatar of death and doom, hunting Theon like the monsters
  • That’s where the true threat is coming from, but Theon cannot see it, reduced to flailing and demanding to know what they all want from him
  • It is Aerys-like as you said Jeff, grounded in this case by how the reader experiences Theon’s dragon-ish dreams directly. We cannot forget
  • In Theon IV, it was as if nature itself was turning traitor to Theon. The woods he hunted with Farlen in, the rivers he drank water from: these all became dark places haunted by the magic of the Children of the Forest.
  • Now, Theon’s conscience has turned traitor on him, and that may be aided by the magical powers which flow through Winterfell.
  • I think what George does with these dream sequences is have them flow from the trauma that Theon experiences (from the trauma he inflicted), and then have that aided by the castle of Winterfell itself.
  • Winterfell is a hinge of the world, a place where winter fell and possibly where the Others were stopped the first time.
  • Given how magic works in the series, it’s like the castle itself is rejecting Theon, telling him he doesn’t belong, aiding the dark visions he’s having in his sleep.
  • Plus, Theon is sleeping in Ned Stark’s bed in said magical castle. We’ll return to that later!
  • The main reason Jeff invited me on to NotACast for this chapter specifically is because he really needed someone who could be relied upon to humiliate him, that way he could really get into character while reading Theon parts.
  • The other, not as important, reason is because we know each other well, and he knows I am personally well, well versed in intense and oft times “prophetic” dreams
    • Whether my dreams are trying to communicate an important truth to me about the here and now, or communicating to me about what can come to pass, my dreams are on the nose every time
      • Share a bit about own experiences with navigating through trauma within bad dreams, especially with guilt involved
        • When we have intense dreams, or even nightmares of something that has already happened to us, it means we haven’t yet let go, and that thing remains unresolved.
  • As much as I believe this dream was his conscience gnawing at him, I do also kind of think that it did have some prophetic tones, because that is oft how ACTUAL clairvoyant dreams work, but, we’ll get into that later
  • This is where I am going to sound a bit like I’m reaching, but hear me out
    • If i tried to come up with a “prophetic” explanation for the fugly ass wolves without having read the whole series in some time… admittedly I’d be reaching so hard, so I’m not going to do that. We’ll just focus on Theon and the branches of the tree tearing at him while he tries to make a getaway
  • *Preface with the evolution of your own wolf dreams and how they went from terror to aid*
  • *Scooby Doo on Zombie Island parallel because I want to annoy people
  • During one of Theon’s Dance chapters, when he runs into the infamous hooded man, this mystery man, who is definitely Robett Glover, is kind taken aback and asks Theon “How is it you still live” or something, to which Theon replies “The gods are not done with me”
  • So, what if. What if. What if…. Though the tree branches are terrifying to Theon, they represent the weirwoods and the Old Gods? And what if they’re actually clinging to him because they’re calling to him, and they’re not done with him?
    • Theon has a good number of passages of great significance that have him in front of a weirwood tree
    • These are the moments, more than once, that he swears the tree is whispering to him (Bran)
    • There’s even a moment in ADWD: A Ghost in Winterfell where he prays to the Old Gods in front of the weirwood and he says “Please." He fell to his knees. "A sword, that's all I ask. Let me die as Theon, not as Reek." Tears trickled down his cheeks, impossibly warm.
      • I actually think that last bit is really fun, not because it actually ties into the prophetic aspects, but in his dream he does get raked across the cheeks by branches
    • Prior to that,  the Dance chapter “The Turncloak” says "Please," he murmured through his broken teeth, "I never meant …" The words caught in his throat. "Save me," he finally managed. "Give me …" What? Strength? Courage? Mercy?
    • Both of these passages, to me, heavily echo Theon’s dream as he’s crying out “Mercy mercy” over and over again
  • I am definitely not the first person to take note that Theon has an obvious connection and pull to the weirwoods, which I know is just Bran trying  to reach out to him
  • But what Bran is trying to accomplish, I have no idea. I’m too lazy to try and craft theories. I just take note of patterns and correlations. So please don’t ask me to try and connect any dots… I’m just going to throw the dots in front of you and declare that they are dots. Because I’m annoying
  • Returning to those dots… in the Theon’s TWOW sample chapter, we see yet another instance of “fate” just kind of pulling Theon toward the weirwood.
  • 
    
• The second dream
  • As it turns out, Theon has been having all kinds of nightmares lately. They keep getting worse, he thinks. It’s as if they’re about to step into reality
  • Theon hated what he did at the Stony Shore, so he had to come up with a bunch of increasingly absurd justifications for it. The same pattern applies here, but this time, Theon is barely in control of his own mind
  • What he has done is so hideous that he is drowning in it psychologically, just as Catelyn was on the emotional flipside of this atrocity
  • The dreams feel like jarring edits, one reality brutally superimposing itself upon another. It’s blunt force trauma, all of it coming from within Theon
  • All his dreams are about death. His first dream seemed poised to conclude with his own death. The other two dreams he describes to us at the start of the chapter are about his culpability in the deaths of others
  • In the first dream, he’s back at the mill, dressing the dead boys. This is a major clue that the boys he killed weren’t the Starks--why dress them?
  • But the first time reader is unlikely to pick up on that, because this part of the chapter is a blast of pure emotion--dread, horror, our hatred of Theon
  • The truth is hidden from us, as Theon keeps it hidden from himself. The compartmentalization that will transform him into “Reek” has begun
  • Regardless of their identity, these are dead children, and Theon killed them. The realization settles on him as rigor mortis settles on them
  • Their limbs grow stiff, seeming to resist him. They’re resisting the clothes and the lie supported by the clothes; even in death, they defy him
  • Theon tells the bodies that he didn’t want this. They left him no choice. It’s so telling and haunting that Theon doesn’t specify who “they” refers to
  • Does he mean Bran and Rickon, forcing his hand by escaping? Does he mean his family, who won’t accept him as he is? Does he mean the Ironborn as a whole, or the Northmen, or the Starks? It could be any!
  • In truth, it’s all of them. Theon’s never had a true home, and so, no true family, no true people, no true identity. That has led him here
  • Theon, of course, owns the decision to murder those kids. But as with Catelyn v. Jaime, George is exposing problems that run deeper than individuals. Even if Theon was a more upright, admirable fellow, he would still have no place to be, and would probably compromise himself trying to find one. These are the wages of exile; they chafe like a noose around the neck, as Theon will tell Ser Rodrik in his next and final chapter in the book
  • Theon believes he had to do this, but he is not so detached from humanity as to not recognize the visceral awfulness of murdering children
  • So he begs the bodies to forgive him. Understand the corner into which I have been backed! They give him nothing, only getting colder and heavier
  • Theon’s justifications fail him, as they will with Asha. There is no redemption; a shaft of light does not break the firmament to gather the children to Its holy bosom and absolve Theon for his sins
  • They’re just corpses, as he will be one day. Men are meat, as his uncle Euron says. This is what it feels like to be left alone with the consequences of your actions after a lifetime of always being able to find an escape route. Theon is forced to take life (and death) seriously, too late
  • Interestingly, a voice from beyond will reach out to Theon in ADWD--namely, the real Bran. But no such deliverance awaits him here
  • In ADWD, and in Martin’s lapsed Catholic parlance, Theon has paid for his sins, and he’s seeking a redemptive death to die as a Greyjoy of Pyke.
  • But here, he’s only recognizing how awful it is to have murdered children, but he’s still in a spot where he’s still trying to justify his awful behavior.
  • Does that remind anyone else of Jaime from the last Catelyn chapter and his rationalization for why he pushed Bran from the window?
  • Remember George and his statement that Jaime was motivated by saving Cersei and his own children from Robert?
  • That’s not the case with Theon here. He killed kids not to save someone else’s life, not even his own life. It was to spare him embarrassment from Asha.
  • Theon’s eggshell-thin masculinity has cracked, and he’s murdering children as a result.
• The third dream
  • The night before that, Theon dreamed of the miller’s wife. We’re being told these dreams out of order to match Theon’s scrambled, unstuck mindset
  • Laid out chronologically, these dreams bring Theon closer and closer to what he has done. It started with the death of the miller’s wife, proceeded to the death of the boys, and will now inexorably lead to his own doom
  • As with Theon III starting with Benfred spitting in Theon’s face, we start here with Theon’s ongoing downfall, and work backward to fill in the rest
  • There are blank spots in Theon’s recollections. Again, these exist on a plot level to conceal the twist about Bran and Rickon until the end of the chapter, but on a character level, they reveal more about Theon’s nature
  • Theon doesn’t remember the name of the miller’s wife. All he remembers is the sex--the stretch marks on her belly, the claw marks on his back, the literal marks of lived experience. All of that is transformed for him now
  • Theon is realizing, if only at a subconscious level, that he does not treat women like full humans...which means someone could treat him that way
  • So the woman’s vagina has teeth in his dream, and she castrates him. Your stereotypical Freudian therapist would have a field day with this!
  • The meaning of this dream is pretty clear. Theon defines himself by sex, in part because he didn’t have any other identity readily available to him
  • The memory of his sexual conquests and the anticipation of further conquests to come is basically what gets him through the day
  • Now his sexual prowess has failed him, because a memory of getting laid has been tainted by the fact that he had the woman in question killed
  • He is unmoored, more than ever, so the key to his self-image--his penis--is ripped away in vengeance by the woman he killed, the woman who once bolstered that sexual self-image. Theon still denies all responsibility
  • He passes it off to Gelmarr, who struck the blow, even though Theon was the one who led them there, and it was to Theon she cried for mercy
  • Theon also reveals Gelmarr is dead here before elaborating later. This whole chapter is an unveiling and unraveling of Theon’s constructed identities. His dreams reveal what’s waiting: shame, the ego-death. Ramsay will make this castration fear literal in ADWD
  • Throughout ACOK, Martin has done a subtle job of paralleling Theon Greyjoy with Ned Stark.
  • The dreams and troubled sleep of Theon Greyjoy is another spot where George is showing Theon as similar to Ned.
  • Remember Ned from back in AGOT, Eddard II?
    • Troubled sleep was no stranger to him. He had lived his lies for fourteen years, yet they still haunted him at night.
  • The lies that Ned was living with were related to R+L=J, protecting his sister’s son, lying to Catelyn and Robert about fathering a bastard.
  • But Ned’s lies were intended to save an innocent life. The troubled sleep he experienced, the fever dream he had of the Tower of Joy were the result of Ned’s traumas.
  • Theon’s lies that lead, in part, to his troubled sleep were his lies to save his own ass.
  • I don’t remember which episode, but Emmett, you made the great point that heroism in this series is about putting your own safety and reputation on the line in order to save someone else.
  • Theon is acting opposite this, throwing the corpses of innocent children, his former booty call ahead of him to save his ass.
  • And again, it’s not actually even to save his own life. His own life is even more endangered by killing these kids and claiming that they’re Bran and rickon.
  • It’s only to save his reputation; so that no one will laugh at him, think he’s the stumblefuck FailPrince that he knows he is.
  • Ned has sacrificed his reputation, his honor to save Jon. The trendline of Theon as transgressive Ned Stark continues.
• The murders
  • There are so many isolated passages and mini-scenes in this chapter; we had to keep breaking it up to smaller sub-headings in the doc
  • As I said about Jon VII when we covered that chapter with Stefan, Theon V is the middle child, second out of Theon’s three Winterfell chapters
  • And so like Jon VII, Theon V is not as cleanly structured as the chapters before and after it. Theon IV is all about the hunt; Theon VI is all about his downfall. Theon V jumps all over the place in order to connect the dots
  • It also captures how Theon feels overwhelmed by his self-created problems, outnumbered by them as they keep piling up
  • Not only did he murder children alongside his fellow Ironborn, but those fellow Ironborn have since turned up dead
  • George runs down the dead one by one as he ran down Theon’s dreams.

Gelmarr the Grim fell down some steps. Aggar’s throat was slit. Gynir Rednose tried to guard himself with a dog, but was thrown down a well

• It feels as if Winterfell is cursed, the very stones rebelling against the deaths of the Stark boys. There’s a clear parallel to Arya carrying out revenge killings in Harrenhal. Even the same number of deaths: three
• That ghost-story mood transfers to the Ironborn themselves. As Black Lorren says, the Ironborn are into open bloodshed, not all this uncertainty
• Ironically, Black Lorren has just spelled out why the Ironborn conquest of the North was never going to work. All the Ironborn care about is the act of reaving itself. Actually ruling would require “dwelling amongst enemies”
• Theon has lived for years with that same tension, of never knowing whether you’re at home or in enemy territory; it has rubbed him raw
• It has left him determined to carve out a space of his own with fire and blood, no matter the cost to innocents, his own men, or even himself
• I am the Prince of Winterfell, he shouts at Black Lorren. I will not abandon my prize. It’s the delusion of the Ironborn campaign writ small
• And in order to hold onto his prize, Theon has not only murdered children. He has murdered his own men, the ones who killed the kids for him
• In a frenzied moment, he slips and reveals to the reader that he had them killed because they can’t keep secrets. The first time reader doesn’t yet know what that secret is, but the point is Theon’s moral descent
• Violence begets violence. One murder justifies the next. Theon had to hunt and kill those boys to keep Winterfell, and so then he had to kill his own men lest they reveal the truth, and then he had to execute Farlen as a scapegoat for the murders. Blood calls for blood, and it never ends
• It took oh only about a dozen reads of this chapter to realize that the murderer of these Ironborn bros was Reek.
• In my defense, IT’S VERY SUBTLE!
  • I should have had him killed after he did the others, he reflected, but the notion made him nervous was seemingly very easy for my eyes to gloss over.
• Anyways, this detail was interesting, because it was a signal that Theon was shedding his Ironborn identity.
• As we talked about back in Theon III, he really hates all of these guys anyways and thinks they’re trash (not wrong. They did just murder two kids and their mom).
• And recall there, Theon accidentally put an arrow through Todric and then claimed that he so totally meant to do that.
• Here, we’ve got Theon engaging in some Poe’s Law: having a northman murder his own men to rid him of any loose lips on purpose. Real life begins to emulate the parody.
• We are on the descent with Theon. Turncloaking, killing a former acquaintance, murdering Mikken, hunting Bran and Rickon, murdering miller’s boys and the miller’s wife and now turning against his own men, his father’s people.
• Coming off our five-part analysis of TWOW, The Forsaken, you can’t help but see how Theon’s arc in ACOK is the forebear to Nuncle Euron doing much the same before and after he returns to the Iron Islands: murder, kinslaying (as we’ll talk about at the end of this episode), rape and then using the ironborn to do his bidding before.
• The difference, of course, is that Euron Greyjoy is horrifyingly at peace with being a monster. Theon is anything but at peace.
• Every step of the way, Theon is motivated by pride and shame. In truth, they’re not opposites. Humility is the opposite of pride; shame is the same emotion with the tone flipped. It’s all about me, my precious self-image
• He executed Farlen to look good. It’s an official response to the murders, it establishes Theon as the source of authority: judge, jury, executioner
• But as he admits, even that went wrong for him. Before he could have someone else execute Farlen, Farlen reminded everyone that Ned Stark always did his own executions. That was the sober mature standard set by the last lord of Winterfell, who was respected by everyone, unlike Theon
• So Theon tries to live up to that standard, but he doesn’t understand it, so naturally, he can’t do it right. He needs three tries to behead Farlen
• It’s a total failure of leadership on every level. Theon falls short of both Ned’s admirable standards of masculinity and his own frankly ridiculous ones. Afterward, he throws up, because he actually knew Farlen
• They’d been friends, or at least, as close to friends as Theon ever had, like Benfred Tallhart. He was always an outsider in Winterfell, but it was the closest to home and family he had, and now he’s given it all up
• Ned had never needed more than a single blow. But now Ned has himself been beheaded, and Theon is left to try and fail to take his place
• There’s an intense amount of play-acting in Theon’s rule of Winterfell where he tries to play Ned Stark and Balon Greyjoy and fails at both.
• As we’ve talked about, the play-acting represents a failure in Theon to identify what made these men popular with their people.
• A major part of Ned Stark’s appeal that ensured the loyalty of the Winterfell smallfolk was that he extended his loyalty and care to them and brought them to table, hearing their concerns and being a generally benevolent lord to them.
• Balon’s appeal was to a feeling of racialized ironborn supremacy and in evoking the radical individualism of reaving, raping and paying the iron price to take what they wanted.
• But Theon can only see the exteriors of these men, the ways that he saw them as cold and stern like Ned and brutal and violent like Balon Greyjoy.
• Both of these character aspects existed in these men, but they were only a part of the appeal.
• Theon attempts to emulate these two approaches to rule, but he fails to see Ned’s warm heart and care for his smallfolk, and he fails to reward his ironborn with the plunder they desire.
• Moreover, in the case of trying to be Balon Greyjoy, he ends up committing shocking murders which sicken Asha Greyjoy - no shrinking violet when it comes to violence and ironborn culture.
• And Theon has failed to be loyal to people who showed loyalty to him the way Ned did.
• Not only was Farlen a near-friend of Theon’s, but he was also fulfilling Theon’s orders from the prior chapter with him bringing his hounds to hunt for Bran, Rickon, Meera, Jojen, Hodor, Osha and the direwolves.
• Theon had ensured Farlen’s loyalty by threatening his daughter Palla’s life, and now Farlen has ended up murdered by Theon.
• I don’t watch that Simpson’s show, but I do know the meme: Dig up, stupid. That’s Theon, trying to dig up to be Balon and Ned and only sinking further.
• Thankfully, we don’t have to be the only ones to point this out to Theon. An in-universe character arrives to show Theon how far he’s fallen.
• Reintroduction of Asha
  • Again, what Theon fears most is humiliation. He murdered children to avoid being laughed at. It’s the classic masculine character flaw
  • Not that women don’t experience pride and humiliation (Cersei), but there’s something gendered about the way Theon’s need to belong somewhere, anywhere, gets wrapped up in his frustrated sex drive
  • We saw that on the Iron Islands with Asha’s introduction. Theon got horny for a sexy lady, then was left holding his dick when said sexy lady not only turned out to be his sister, but also turns out to be the true heir to Pyke
  • It’s one giant throbbing ball of shame in Theon’s brain. I have to be the right kind of man or I am worthless, and the right kind of man fucks. The right kind of man takes castles. But does the right kind of man kill kids?
  • Asha returns to the narrative now to bring all this anger and shame to the forefront. Just as the dreams pried Theon apart in the night, Asha tears his fragile ego to pieces in the daylight, in both personal and political terms
  • Theon knows that Asha performs Ironborn masculinity better than he does, yet he cannot bring himself to learn from her, partially because of her gender and partially because he can’t admit to any vulnerabilities
  • So instead, she just becomes one of many voices in his head telling him that he sucks. When he wakes up from his dream at the start of the chapter, he thinks that he needs to scrub up so he isn’t all stinky and disheveled for her. He dresses in finery for her at first, only to remember the Old Way standards that already got him in trouble with their father
  • Theon can’t play the role of Ironborn conqueror any more than he can play the role of Ned Stark 2.0. He doesn’t know his lines, he’s wearing the wrong costume, and he’s constantly being upstaged
  • Theon resents Asha for usurping his rightful position, but as his actual position gets worse and worse, he’s also beginning to realize that she is his only way out, and worries she might abandon him. Again: no mercy
  • So he takes a blade along, thinking that he knows how to use it, even though he’s asking Asha to save him from an untenable situation! It’s just like how Catelyn is both relying on Tyrion and wishing that he was dead
  • Last, Theon dons his crown. Let’s pause to make fun of Theon’s crown. It’s the single ugliest crown we see in the series
  • This is not the sort of crown that convinces people you are the rightful center of the action. It’s the sort that makes you look like a pompous fool
  • It’s a perfect symbol of how Theon is trying and failing to live up to his projected image of power. He’s taken the castle, he’s declared himself prince, but he doesn’t look anything like his fantasy self
  • On a more literal level, the reason Theon’s crown looks this way is because he had Mikken, the smith, killed for insulting his pride
  • The Ironborn carelessly squandered a vital resource, and as a result, Theon can’t get a decent crown made. You couldn’t ask for a better summary of the short-sighted self-destructive tendencies of the Old Way
  • So when he strides into the Great Hall to cement his presence as Prince of Winterfell, he looks instead like the fuckup he is. All the doubt and fear he’s trying to keep beneath the surface is externalized by his fool’s crown
  • Earlier, I talked about how George paralleled Theon’s behavior from this chapter with what we learned about Aerys II in the last Catelyn chapter, but here, George changes course and draws Theon’s weak defenseo f child-murder through Robert Baratheon.
  • Back at the end of Robert’s Baratheon, Tywin Lannister laid the bodies of Aegon and Rhaenys at Robert’s feet. Ned declared it murder. Robert didn’t see children, only dragonspawn.
  • Theon doesn’t see Bran and Rickon either. It’s not them after all. But more than that, it’s what the boys represent.
  • They represent a threat to Theon: that he can be exposed as a failure and not a real ironborn reaver or prince of Winterfell.
  • But of course, Theon didn’t present the actual heads of Bran and Rickon anyways. And in Young Grift’s telling of the story, it wasn’t actually baby Aegon’s body there either. It was a pisswater prince that Varys purchased.
• Sibling wars
  • Right away, George communicates that Asha will not be fitting into Theon’s narrative. Instead, as with her introduction, she has her own
  • Theon sees immediately that she has ignored his “command” to bring enough men to hold Winterfell. She only showed up with twenty
  • Theon has no real authority to give commands to her, after all. It’s one of the more fragile shadows-on-a-wall in ACOK; Asha just ignores it
  • After all, she lives and breathes authority--at least as far as her men are concerned, and she definitely puts on a better show than Theon
  • She’s lounging in the high seat of the Starks, taking his place just as she did on Pyke. She rips into her food as her men talk her up; like Robert in his Rebellion-era prime, she is pure charisma, everything Theon isn’t
  • Asha immediately calls attention to the gap between Theon’s idealized image of himself and the increasingly desperate reality
  • Ah, here is the Prince of Winterfell...or is he the Prince of Fools? Asha doesn’t feel the need to maintain public decorum. She mocks Theon with ease, because he has no reputation to fear in either domain now
  • And he has done this to himself. He blames Asha in his thoughts, but Theon is responsible for how toxic his reputation has become
  • Note, too, that Asha is casually lounging on Ned Stark’s high chair - the one that Theon sat upon in judgment and his men couldn’t give less of a shit.
  • Asha is actively dishonoring Theon, and his men seem happy to have a real leader in their midst.
  • Everyone is chowing down on food, yelling and laughing and swapping stories - hell, you could make the argument that they’re practically feasting Asha’s arrival.
  • I’m reminded of that feast scene back on Pyke from Theon II when Asha was seated at Balon’s right hand, and Theon just cannot handle it:
    • Theon took the empty seat beside Asha. Leaning close, he hissed in her ear, "You're in my place."
      
      She turned to him with innocent eyes. "Brother, surely you are mistaken. Your place is at Winterfell."
  • And now it’s happening again. Asha is sitting in Theon’s place of honor, his literal seat of Winterfell, and no one except Theon cares.
  • He cannot deal with that, so instead, he insists that Asha is just jealous of his accomplishments. He even calls her a maid, which...she very much is not, but that just reveals even more how Asha has disarmed him sexually
  • In order to reassert himself as the manliest man around, Theon points out that Asha needed a thousand men and a month to take Deepwood Motte, whereas he took Winterfell with fifty men in a night
  • This is not technically inaccurate, but as Asha is about to outline, Theon has completely ignored the larger strategic picture
  • Before Asha even gets there, however, she dismantles Theon on his own terms. Oh, you’re a great warrior? Do great warriors butcher children?
  • Theon’s defense mechanisms briefly falter. He is forced to flash back once again, this time to the moment he revealed the bodies to everyone
  • He recalls Old Nan’s devastated face, Farlen’s incoherent rage, Luwin’s stone-faced plea to bury the boys with some honor in the crypts
  • He is now despised by the only people who know him. How did it come to this, he asks himself? Because of the man you were trying to be
  • He burned their bodies like he burned his old life, retrieving only the melted remains of a wolf-head brooch: all that’s left of his time here
  • He keeps it still, a cross to bear, a totem of sacrifice. But that’s all on the inside. On the surface, he feels the need to justify himself to Asha
  • Theon insists that Bran and Rickon are responsible. Again--they left me no choice. They brought their fates on themselves
  • Asha shoots back: “so do we all, brother.” Another perfect summary of Theon’s arc in ACOK. He can blame her all he wants, but the truth is that in his futile efforts to find peace, Theon has sealed his own doom
  • He still doesn’t have her leadership skills, after all. Asha stands and leads him out of the room to discuss the war privately; Theon realizes too late that this was his move to make. He should’ve summoned her to him
  • Once more, Asha looks better in the public arena, and she continues to outclass him with her military knowledge when they’re in private
  • Theon knows that Dagmer lost the fight against Ser Rodrik at Torrhen’s Square, but Asha knows more details, which only makes Theon angrier
  • Asha knows the outcome of his own master plan better than he does, because she has a stronger handle on intelligence like everything else
  • That’s not to say Asha is without her own blind spots. Like Black Lorren, she keeps inadvertently giving away how stupid their dad’s master plan is
  • She says that Dagmer was doomed to lose against Ser Rodrik, because Ironborn can’t withstand a cavalry charge. She says this as if it makes Theon--and only Theon--quite the fool, ignoring the obvious comeback: how were the Ironborn ever supposed to conquer the North in that case?
  • White Harbor has a lot of knights on call, and the Dustin/Ryswell territory is known for breeding horses. What’s the plan to deal with them?
  • There is no plan, even from the more forward-thinking Ironborn like Asha, because their Ubermensch ideology tells them they don’t need a plan
  • Their innate racial superiority, ordained by the one true god beneath the waves, will inherently assert itself in any martial contest, or so they think
  • Theon and Asha are smart enough to poke different holes in this worldview, but they can’t step outside Plato’s Cave to see the whole thing
  • Asha recognizes that Ironborn victory rests on naval power: “krakens rise from the sea.” Deepwood Motte may be a wooden pisspot, but it can easily be remanned and resupplied from the sea--that’s how we fight
  • Winterfell makes no sense as a base of operations because it is too far inland. Supply lines will be stretched thin and will be easily disrupted
  • Theon didn’t think about that, because his education in Ironborn ways was suddenly and permanently interrupted, whereas Asha learned it all
  • Theon did, however, get a half-education in Northern ways, just enough to realize the flaws in Asha’s approach. Winterfell is the heart of the land
  • If you’re going to break apart and remake Northern politics for the long term, you need to cut the head off the snake. Take down the Starks!
  • Otherwise, once the Northmen recover from the initial shock of the invasion, they will simply rally around the Stark in Winterfell and drive out the Ironborn with their superior numbers, supplies, and strategies
  • Dividing and conquering is the only chance the Ironborn have--it’s what worked for them in the Riverlands, after all--and that is only possible in the North if you take Winterfell and rip apart that ironclad direwolf #brand
  • So both Asha and Theon have half a point, but they’ve been operating on their own and so have wound up making both kinds of mistakes
  • Because I haven’t gotten a good chance to shit on Balon Greyjoy’s plan in a few weeks, I thought this might be an opportunity to do so again.
  • Because there is a place where the Ironborn succeeded at conquering a region of Westeros historically: namely House Hoare and the conquest of the Riverlands just prior to Aegon’s arrival.
  • There, the Ironborn launched an invasion of the Riverlands, ruled weakly by the Storm Kings and used shock tactics and mobility to attack at multiple points and worked to secure disloyal riverlords (The Brackens) to defeat the loyalists of the Storm Kings.
  • This was historically similar to how the Danes were able to secure large parts of England and Ireland in the 9th Century CE.
  • Balon Greyjoy and his underlings have not followed the example of their ironborn forebears and instead have opted for a war of attrition.
  • This war of attrition against the northmen, of course, being against a massive piece of land without easy access to the sea.
  • The only thing that has kept Balon’s conquest alive for so long is that Robb Stark’s army is away in the Riverlands.
  • But the Ironborn took the Stony Shore, Moat Cailin and Deepwood Motte, and now Theon has Winterfell.
  • There’s a commonality among all the ironborn subordinate commanders: they have taken their castles, and done fuck all.
  • Asha has not moved to secure Sea Dragon’s Point or to move her ships against Bear Island and the Mormonts.
  • Victarion has firmly planted his ass at Moat Cailin and done nothing to threaten Barrowton or White Harbor.
  • Theon, as you were saying Emmett back in Theon IV, has simply just sat at Winterfell for weeks.
  • The entire conquest is at the point of extreme inertia, and this has allowed every other player to gather up their strength to counterattack.
  • The first blow fell at Torrhen’s Square, and now Dagmer Cleftjaw is running back to the Stony Shore after Ser Rodrik Cassel defeated him.
  • Meanwhile, the Umbers are gathering their men at the Last River in advance of marching on Winterfell. And even the Manderlys have stopped killing Dreadfort men in and around Hornwood to maneuver their knights up the White Knife in preparation for marching on Winterfell.
  • And the Ironborn are sitting there doing … nothing, and they will continue sitting there doing nothing until omg, the northmen are attacking - and that’s as late as ADWD!
  • Asha and Victarion only depart Deepwood Motte and Moat Cailin to stake their claim at the kingsmoot. Once that fails, Asha returns to Deepwood and does … nothing until Stannis is at the gates.
  • Meanwhile, Victarion becomes a lieutenant of Euron Greyjoy, and in the conquest of the Shield Isles, we see how a possible successful invasion/conquest of a major region would work.
  • Euron doesn’t just take the Shield Isles and sit around for a bit. He sends Victarion east to Meereen, and he keeps raiding the coast, striking up towards Oldtown and taking more castles on the isles in and around the Arbor.
  • That’s how you do a successful ironborn conquest of a region. You synchronize a weaponized old way with shock tactics and striking at weak points and keep fucking moving!
  • You kind of wonder whether Balon was really all that invested in actually occupying the North and ruling it through conquest when you consider how asinine and half-assed his plan was.
  • He really just seems to have thought about the invasion from the perspective of satiating his wounded pride at the expense of an actual strategic plan for the invasion.
  • And that wounded pride and bitterness has bled out into his surviving offspring.
  • Throughout ACOK, we’ve been seeing these dysfunctional sibling relationships breaking apart each family trying to present a united front
  • We saw that with Stannis and Renly, we saw that with Tyrion and Cersei, and we see it here with Theon and Asha. Theon can only sputter that Asha didn’t bring enough men to fight off the Northern army coming for him, and Asha can only snap back that Dad didn’t order her to save him
  • Neither is addressing the elephant in the room: that both Theon and Big Daddy Balon screwed up big time, and their screwups are now merging
  • Even if they were trying to address the big picture realistically, personal baggage is weighing them down, especially Theon. Asha points out that Theon is the one who has made himself a permanent pariah here
  • Instead of convincing everyone he’s tough, killing “Bran and Rickon” has made him public enemy number one. How does Theon justify himself?
  • By declaring that he has avenged his trueborn brothers, Rodrik and Maron. Ahh, there are just so many levels of bullshit at work here
  • First of all, Theon didn’t actually kill Bran and Rickon! Secondly, he never gave a damn about Rodrik and Maron. Thirdly, as he himself thought in his first chapter, the Starks were not responsible for his brothers’ deaths
  • None of that matters to Theon, though, because he’s just desperately searching for a justification of which his father might approve
  • Somehow, somehow, Theon feels he must wind up king of the hill at the end of all this, and so drapes his brothers’ deaths over his atrocities
  • We’re seeing the Lost Cause mythos of the Old Way at work. Our foolish and morally bankrupt revolution got our sons killed; clearly, the solution is to kill their sons, thus erasing our insecurity over losing the last war
  • The bitter irony is that Theon doesn’t even believe in what he’s saying. He’s just trying to be the kind of person who would say something like that, because Balon might actually love that guy, but he’s not that guy
  • Asha knows it. She rolls her eyes and brushes off his feeble attempt to claim the family mantle, which suggests Balon would react the same way
  • Theon doesn’t belong, and they all know it, and there’s nothing he can do. Even parading the corpses of his other family isn’t good enough
  • As Asha points out, Theon has guaranteed that he will pay the price when the pendulum of revenge swings back in his direction via Ser Rodrik. Theon wanted to play the game of thrones; this is what it looks like
  • For all that Asha mocks Theon, for all that she’s got her own blind spots that will be made clear to her in AFFC/ADWD, what makes Asha different from the Baratheons and Lannisters is she still loves her wayward sibling
  • Her mockery is tough love at the end of the day. Asha wants to secure her position against Theon, no question, but that has turned out to be easy
  • That being accomplished, she doesn’t wish him any specific harm, and he’s still her brother, her last brother. There are worse fates than being useless, and Theon is currently diving headfirst into one of them
  • Asha gives Theon one last chance to come back with her, to swallow his pride, accept consequences for his actions, and give up his self-image
  • He refuses, of course. He’s come too far to turn back now without the massive humiliation that he genuinely fears more than he fears death
  • He will live or die as the Prince of Winterfell. Asha leaves him to his fate, with one last dig on her way out the door: your crown is just so ugly
  • That captures how Theon’s drive to make something of himself has come to nothing, especially relative to her. And he knows it. As Asha rides out of the book, Theon finds himself wishing he had gone with her. If only.
  • To riff off of what Emmett said a bit ago, Theon *is Asha’s last brother. Whatever else he is, he’s still her brother, and her baby brother at that.
  • Maybe I can’t speak for all sibling dynamics, but i myself come from a family where there’s just two of us siblings, and that’s it
    • In an environment where the older sibling might not have had the most nurturing environment, (and I doubt Asha’s upbringing was all that nurturing. I get the feeling Balon’s high praise for Asha is based around how well Asha was able to make her own way) said older sibling really does not know how to guide the younger sibling in any other way than tough love
      • I have my own experiences with this, as my brother approached guiding me in the same way
  • In my opinion, the intent to go to Theon at Winterfell was purely an act of love, even if tough love is thrown in the mix
  • I kind of like to believe that Asha would still have a soft spot in her heart for Theon even if she didn’t feel as secure in the succession as she does now, even if it might translate a little differently
  • But the bottom line is that she did show up to Winterfell, which, she pointed out to Theon that she did not have to do,
    • She could have just sent for him through her own men and at the end of the day half-heartedly tell herself and others that “she tried”
    • But she went personally because she genuinely wanted to make sure he came back with her.
    • Even the number of men she brought with her, in my opinion, is telling. She brings just enough for an escort of her own, and just enough to leave for Theon in case she cannot talk him out of his blowhard fuckery. Yet I think she also purposely brought too few men in an attempt to scare Theon witless into coming back to Deepwood Motte with her. It’s a gamble, but that’s where the tough love plays back in
      • The fact that she left men with Theon at all shows how much she loves him, because Asha isn’t a leader who sees her subjects as disposable (which is part of why she’s a great leader)
        • She’s leaving them behind knowing that they’re likely to die
  • Though she wants to help save Theon, his missteps aren’t going unchecked by her.
    • Again, the way that Asha knows how to serve up guidance to her little brother
  • Theon is being thrown a rope, and we see him struggling with whether or not to grab hold, even though we see him consciously admit to himself that he should
  • While Asha is a semblance of the very first thing Theon remembers being home, she’s already made it abundantly clear to him that the Iron Islands are not his home anymore. Though trying to help him, she exasperates this with the tongue lashings she keeps giving him. (though they are very well deserved)
  • So Theon instead clings to the only “home” he’s known for the last 10 years, Winterfell, even though it’s made clear to him that he is neither wanted or welcome there….  “Better the devil you know”. And as previously pointed out by y’all, being in a hostile environment within the walls of WInterfell is a feeling that Theon is far too familiar with. And it’s sadly become his mother’s milk.
  • I think on a certain level Asha recognizes this, and it’s why she leaves him to his own device
    • But not before getting in one last little jab at that damn crown… which, rabbit-trailing about my disgusted cringe at this crown is going to be hard NOT to do.
• Reek’s gambit
  • As soon as Theon’s last hope vanishes, Ramsay pops up with comically perfect timing. As I said in Theon IV, Ramsay starts in the background, obscured by his guise as “Reek,” but he steps closer and closer to the reader with each appearance, unveiling himself at the end of the book
  • Now we learn that he was the one going around killing the three Ironborn men who accompanied Theon to the mill, though we still don’t know why, nor have we learned what exactly “Reek” had in mind at the mill
  • All we know is Theon is covering something up, in the real world as well as in his dreams, and in the process, has sold his soul to the devil
  • If the three deaths at Winterfell parallel the three deaths at Harrenhal, then Ramsay is playing Jaqen’s role: the shapeshifting assassin
  • The seductive logic of violence begetting violence leads Theon to conclude that he should have “Reek” killed as well, but he didn’t, because “Reek” can read and write. This is where George needs Theon to be blind
  • It is a gigantic red flag that this peasant looked down upon by everybody somehow became literate
  • I super love this small detail about Reek’s literacy, because it feels like a spot where George had a writing problem and ended up resolving it in a way that speaks to Theon’s paranoid mindstate and works towards the awesome (in a chilling, horrifying way) payoff at the end of Theon’s arc.
  • Here’s the writing problem: Theon has had Reek killing his own men to keep the secret of who he murdered at the mill alive.
  • So, why keep Reek alive as well when Reek also knows the truth about the mill?
  • Answer: because Reek is literate, and he would so totally leave a written account of what happened, right?
  • Does this seem particularly intelligent? Or even plausible? I don’t think so! Where would the message be kept? Who would Reek give the message to? Why would anyone trust what Reek wrote down provided that he stored a message somewhere in Winterfell?
  • This is an extension of Theon’s growing paranoia we’ve seen throughout this chapter.
  • But that paranoia which George writes into Theon’s characterization is realized in the plot as Theon’s rationalization to keep a literate Reek alive, and then this seeds the chillingly awesome reveal at the end of ACOK: That the reason Reek is literate is that he’s Ramsay.
  • Theon is just not smart enough to get beyond the surface of how an odd detail can affect him beyond the present or near-present.
  • As if that wasn’t enough, “Reek” then claims he can rustle up two hundred men, offering no real explanation as to how. As if that wasn’t enough, George throws in a mention of “Reek’s” pale eyes, not long after the reader was reacquainted with Roose Bolton
  • Theon, too, has met Roose Bolton, as Steven Attewell noted. But he doesn’t pick up on any of this. Why not? In part, it’s what Catelyn said:
    • "He saw a pair of mud-spattered travelers by the side of the road, wet and tired. It would never occur to him to suspect that one of them was the daughter of his liege lord.”
  • And what Sandor says:
    • “...knights are fools, and it would have been beneath him to look twice at some poxy peasant ... Keep your eyes down and your tone respectful and say ser a lot, and most knights will never see you.”
  • Theon’s fragile vanity is built first and foremost around his sexuality, but his sense of class superiority is definitely a contributing factor
  • It is beneath him to dig deep into a peasant’s motives...which ironically, prevents him from realizing that “Reek” is not a peasant at all
  • Theon was dealt a terrible hand, no question, but it is his own unexamined worldview that leads him to dig himself deeper and deeper into the hole
  • His own identities are tattered cloaks he wears despite how transparent they are, yet he cannot perceive how “Reek” is a cloak Ramsay is wearing
  • Like Asha, Ramsay is pulling off what Theon can only try and fail to do: find authenticity within artifice. Hence the emphasis on him as a writer
  • Ramsay skillfully unlocks Theon, first by pointing out the obvious: without Asha’s help, Theon is now thoroughly screwed. As Ramsay himself pointed out the night Theon took Winterfell, there are still plenty of men in the North, and they don’t need Robb’s help to take Theon down
  • Then again, Theon still has one big advantage: the castle itself. Winterfell is a terrific defensive force multiplier. It doesn’t take that many men to hold. Is that a long term strategy? Nope! But like his dad, Theon is not really thinking in the long term. He’s just trying to steady his shaking hand
  • “Reek” uses the promise of those men to get himself a bag of Stark silver, a horse, and escape from a castle about to be under siege. The beauty of how George writes this is that it’s plausible this is all “Reek” wanted
  • That’s what Theon thinks to himself: he ripped me off, that’s the last I’ll see of him. (Again, if only!) The first time reader is left to conclude that “Reek” just wanted out. The chapter quickly moves on to deeper, darker matters
  • What Theon thinks of as a longshot backup plan is, in retrospect, the key plot point of this chapter. He watched Asha ride away with his hopes; now he watches “Reek” ride away with his doom. He brings fate down on him
  • Before “Reek” leaves, though, he makes sure to sink his meathook claws deeper into Theon’s soul, because Ramsay is not just a torture device
  • He tempts Theon into hell and then punishes him for his sins. He makes Theon culpable in his own downfall, so as to make it easier to break him; Ramsay’s weapon of choice is guilt as much as the flaying knife
  • “Reek” asks that in exchange for saving Theon from the consequences of his actions, he be allowed to rape Palla. After all, he says, she was already raped by the Ironborn men. What’s another assault?
  • This is Ramsay expressing not only a desire to commit atrocities but an entire worldview behind the atrocities. The world quickly shatters innocence, the shield of the soul; after that, you are meat, you are prey
  • Again, it’s all about the cycle of violence. Murders justify more murders. Rape justifies more rape. As Theon thinks, he’s gone too far to turn back
  • Ramsay’s argument that Palla has been “broken in” and so is fair game for further rape reflects real world arguments that leave women prisoners of not their own bodies so much as how men view their bodies
  • A lot of this stems from a perception of humanity as sullied by contact with sin and suffering. George is showing us how that perception, far from working to reduce human misery, actually ensures that misery continues
  • Theon is becoming more like Ramsay, and so ends up a prisoner of Ramsay’s world, subject to the same torments as his previous victims. The circle of violence comes round and closes; the bell tolls for him at last
  • Ramsay had to have seen how easy it was for Theon to be manipulated into doing whatever anyone else wanted.
  • All Ramsay had to do to become Theon’s confidant was to bend the knee to Theon and tell Theon he’d bathe.
  • Luwin was able to convince Theon to spare everyone but Osha with the bare minimum of effort, and then Ramsay was able to easily manipulate Theon into murdering the miller’s wife and sons just as easily.
  • Farlen shamed Theon into conducting his own execution Ned Stark-style when Farlan had no power other than to shame Theon into doing something.
  • Flattery, advantage, getting Theon out of a jam and shame: those are the ways that people use to get Theon to do their bidding.
  • Chillingly, Ramsay has seen all of this, and it’s like he has a set of keys on a keyring, with each key able to unlock a door in Theon’s mind.
  • Here, Ramsay reaches for the “get Theon out of a jam” key and offers him a potential lifeline: some good boys he can summon up so long as he has a bag of silver and the chance to rape Palla.
  • Remember Palla who’d already been raped by two ironborn men? The same Palla whose safety Theon had used as leverage to force Farlen to accompany and aid Theon in the hunt back in Theon IV?
  • Palla means nothing to Theon. His word to Farlen meant nothing. He had come too far with Reek.
  • Ramsay is bending Theon to his will, unlocking the void that is Theon’s interior life and filling it with worse and worse evil.
  • As I said in Theon IV: before Theon becomes Reek to Ramsay between the end of ACOK and the start of ADWD, the process is well on its way, and he’ll be using all of the keys to break Theon and refashion him as his creature.
• The final dream
  • The Rule of Three hangs heavily over this chapter. There were three dreams earlier, which might lead one to conclude we’re done with dreams
  • But those were all of a set, and the final nightmare in this nightmare of a chapter stands all on its own, longer and more grandiose than the rest
  • Theon’s subconscious drags us back to the beginning of the story: the feast welcoming Robert to Winterfell, just before this war began
  • Like the Battle of the Whispering Wood, this night defines the good life to Theon: wine and women and song. And also like the Battle of the Whispering Wood, it has all been corrupted by what he’s done since
  • The room goes dark. The wine turns bitter. The music seems to fall apart around them; George describes notes hanging bleeding in the air
  • It’s a powerful dream image. The story that makes us who we are, the Song of Ice and Fire cradling our characters, has fallen apart. The word of god, the song of Iluvatar, gives way to the discord of Melkor
  • Theon looks up, and he’s dining with the dead. Robert Baratheon, once the avatar of furious life, is spilling his guts out on the table
  • Eddard Stark, the man Theon watched behead people, has himself been beheaded. The ripple effects of these deaths has led Theon here
  • He knows the rest of the corpses too: the men who died with Ned at King’s Landing and those who died when Theon took Winterfell, all the weights on Theon’s soul, everything he has left behind, an army of the dead
  • This is the heart of Theon’s subconscious gauntlet of guilt, but it doesn’t belong to him alone. George widens his camera to include Lyanna, Brandon, Rickard, the Stark ghosts recently invoked by Jaime
  • Theon’s downfall, driven by needs specific to him, is nonetheless part of this larger tragedy, intertwining like branches from neighboring trees
  • Theon is glimpsing the Tree of Life, from which we all sprout, hang, rot, and finally fall. Beyond it all lurk the white walkers: the triumph of death
  • Then the doors crash open, and the winds of winter come howling in to claim the summer (k)nights. Robb and Grey Wind are the last of the ghosts, and the most terrifying for both Theon and the reader, bleeding from dozens of wounds, their eyes burning through the darkness
  • Somehow, Theon is catching a glimpse of the Red Wedding. This is never explained on any literal level, but it ties into the sense of fate at work
  • Theon simultaneously feels like a prisoner of his own agency and a puppet on strings with no agency at all. The human condition!
  • Back in part two of our three part analysis of Dany’s House of the Undying chapter (ACOK, Dany IV), you brought up a point that’s really stuck with me:
    • The single most iconic sequence in the series is so iconic, so memorably dreadful, such an inversion of the state of nature, that it beats down the walls of spacetime itself, sending signals back into the past.
  • That’s stuck with me (and sorry for quoting ya!), because I think that’s in evidence here in this dream.
  • The pulsing signals of the Red Wedding reaches as far away as Qarth and Winterfell, spreading beyond the space-time continuum.
  • But there’s a key commonality between Theon and Daenerys seeing the Red Wedding: the presence of sorcery.
  • For Dany, it was the drugs and the House of the Undying itself which showed her true visions of future events.
  • There was also the weirwood doors that Dany passed through and a thicket of weirwoods grows in the Winterfell godswood too.
  • Perhaps it’s the presence of the weirwoods - which have magical properties that we see in “A Ghost in Winterfell” and Bran’s third ADWD chapter - that influence the sorcerous dreams that Theon is having.
  • Or maybe it’s just Winterfell itself. Given that George has already layered Winterfell with magical overtones and also given that we see another castle in the form of Storm’s End with magical wards to keep Melisandre out, you could make the case that nature and Winterfell are rejecting Theon by giving him disturbing dreams.
  • Perhaps that magical power then extends to giving Theon disturbing visions of the future too - Bran may get a taste of this come TWOW.
  • Also, I don’t know if this is a note of hope or not, but there was a key absence among the dead Starks: Benjen! Perhaps this is a very subtle clue that Benjen Stark is alive!
  • *Will come back and flesh this out. But i have a lot to say about the manifestation of dreams, Theon’s later constant fixation with ghosts in Winterfell, Drowned God/Patchface/Weirwood shit, Theon giving off the appearance of a corpse/Grey King imagery, “A Stark at last.”
  • Some tinfoil shit that will ban me from your show
  • Theon’s fate, to me has Big Black Cauldron energy
  • Quotes I need
    • ”But under the hood, his hair was white and thin, and his flesh had an old man's greyish undertone. A Stark at last, he thought.”
    • “It felt like some strange underworld, some timeless place between the worlds, where the damned wandered mournfully for a time before finding their way down to whatever hell their sins had earned them. Are we all dead, then? “
    • ”Here and there a torch burned hungrily, casting its ruddy glow over the faces of the wedding guests. The way the mists threw back the shifting light made their features seem bestial, half-human, twisted.”
• The big reveal
  • After that final nightmare, there’s nowhere for Theon to hide. He can’t trust Luwin’s sleeping draught, and raping Kyra gives him no respite. As you said Jeff, it’s the Aerys pattern of paranoia and predatory behavior
  • The next morning, Theon wanders the castle alone, already one of the ghosts. The godswood is the heart of the castle, the magnetic force that will draw Theon back to it in ADWD. It all comes from the tree, and Theon knows that’s Ned Stark’s tree. It’s where we saw him cleaning Ice
  • It’s Ned Stark’s tree, and Ned Stark’s godswood, and Ned Stark’s castle and Ned Stark’s people and Ned Stark’s life, all his even in death
  • Theon has just put his life on the line to make it all his instead, but he knows deep down that it wasn’t worth it. It will never be his home
  • It’s all a charade, a mummer’s farce, and that revelation finally hits home in full in the final words of the chapter, as Theon gives the game away
  • He stares up at the heads, and they stare down at him. They’re not Bran and Rickon, Theon admits at last. They are the boys from the mill
  • This reveal pays off and sets up so much at the same time, yet George executes it so quickly, to leave us gasping and wondering what’s next
  • George hid this secret in plain sight. We know Theon failed to track Bran and Rickon, we know that Ramsay had a plan involving the miller’s boys, we know that Theon had to re-dress the boys’ corpses, and we know he had a secret dangerous enough to kill three of his own men over
  • Yet the first time reader is extremely unlikely to put all this together before the reveal, because we were directly told in Tyrion and Catelyn chapters that Theon killed Bran and Rickon. We fell for the shadow on the wall
  • You can feel George’s television writing coming into focus at chapter’s end as George hits the readers with a massive revelation.
  • This massive reveal at chapter’s end is over and done with in a flash, and it forces us as readers to keep turning the page to find out what occurs next.
  • But to make this reveal as magnificent as it is, George first lays a false breadcrumb trail with previous chapters leading us to think that Bran and Rickon are actually dead.
  • It’s a trick that George uses quite well - especially in the context of “Who killed Jon Arryn?”
  • When Theon says that the people of Winterfell projected Bran and Rickon onto the faces Ramsay had flayed the features off, he’s talking about us!
  • We are the observers tricked into thinking the Starklings are dead. We are Old Nan and Farlen; Theon is the equivalent of George himself. He set the stage, manipulated the truth, like the images in the House of the Undying
  • Speaking of prophecy, this reveal is also part of the payoff for Jojen’s vision about “Reek” killing Bran and Rickon and skinning off their faces
  • The image held divine truth; the fault was in the observer. Jojen, like the reader, was working with incomplete information and misread what he saw
  • Those boys weren’t Bran and Rickon, just like “Reek” isn’t actually Reek. These identities have been cut loose from their moorings, drifting as signs and signifiers. There is no pure identity. Everyone just wears their masks
  • As the first time reader recovers from the shock, they might also suddenly realize that Bran and Rickon must still be alive somewhere, and then suddenly realize that whatever Catelyn did with Jaime after the cliffhanger in her last chapter, it was based on false information
  • Everything is coming together and unraveling at once, which is a perfect capper to the fragmented kaleidoscopic nature of this chapter as a whole
  • All of that will pay off later. On reread, the character ramifications stand out more clearly. Theon has been lying at every level, about what he’s done as well as why he did it and how he feels about it. It’s all a put-on
  • Theon has been acting like he belongs here, just like he pretended those boys belong here, just like how Ramsay is pretending to be Reek
  • Even now, he dodges the impact of what he’s done, displacing his self-loathing onto the people of Winterfell. They’re such fools for not seeing the truth! Just another transparently ridiculous justification
  • But like the telltale heart, Theon’s guilt worms past his defenses. He can’t help but compare the wind tugging his cloak to small ghostly hands. Doesn’t matter who those kids are; Theon will carry them with him forever
  • I kind of hated myself for how even in this re-read, I felt a sense of relief that it wasn’t Bran and Rickon, even while knowing that two other children took the boys’ place.
  • The miller’s boys were sacrificed in the place of Bran and Rickon to cover up Theon’s sins/mistakes.
  • But George isn’t thinking of the sacrificial lamb from Tabernacle-era Judaism here as he will later do in “The Forsaken.”
  • Instead, it’s a play on Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac that I see here.
  • In that story, God tells Abraham that he must sacrifice his one and only son Isaac
  • The connection is the final line from the chapter:
    • People were such fools. If we'd said they were rams' heads, they would have seen horns.
  • In the Biblical story, Isaac is only spared when God finally speaks to Abraham, telling him that now God knows that Abraham fears the LORD.
  • And he provides a ram for Abraham to sacrifice instead of Isaac.
  • In George’s reframing of the Abraham and Isaac story, the ram isn’t a ram. It’s actual children who are sacrificed in Bran and Rickon’s place.
  • Bran doesn’t actually find this out in the books so far, but I like in the show how Bran overhears Luwin telling Osha about the miller’s boys.
  • Theon bears the full responsibility and culpability for what he did, but Bran doesn’t know yet. When he does find out, I can’t imagine the guilt that Bran will experience.

Foreshadowing/Groundwork

The murders in Winterfell will be repeated in Theon’s chapters in ADWD

Theon will be hunted along with Kyra by Ramsay shortly after they are imprisoned in the Dreadfort, just like he’s hunted through his dreams in this chapter

Asha thinks that Deepwood Motte’s location is ideal for reinforcement and supply as it is close enough to the sea. She also implies that she can quickly abandon the castle and make for the safety of the sea easily, and this is what she attempts after the mountain clansmen come up onto Deepwood. Unfortunately, Asha’s claim proves overconfident, and the Mountain Clansmen and Stannis’ army overtake her Ironborn fleeing from Deepwood.

Luwin wants to put the boys in the crypts...which is where the real Starks are hiding

Amidst the vision of the Red Wedding, Theon sees that Lyanna has a white gown with gore on it. A white gown might just be a white gown, or it could be Lyanna’s bridal cloak that she wore, implying not only R+L=J, but also that Rhaegar and Lyanna were married.

Theory/Discussion

Was Theon the father of one or both of the boys he had killed?

• Theon claims to have repeatedly had sex with the miller’s wife
• He was certainly old enough to father the younger child; maybe not the elder
• The miller himself seems curiously absent from all this
• In ADWD, the hooded man calls Theon a kinslayer
• The spearwife Rowan later repeats that accusation, even as she says she knows the Starks were not his kin
• Crowfood Umber also calls Theon a kinslayer in his released TWOW chapter
• When Theon thinks back to killing the miller’s boys, there seems to be something he is repressing, struggling to simultaneously remember and forget
• It wouldn’t be the first time he failed to recognize his own family until it was too late--same thing happened with Asha back on the Iron Islands
• How bitterly ironic that Theon, always looking for a family to call his own, wiped out the only family unit that hadn’t rejected him, the only thing that was truly his
• Theon vs. Euron and how Theon has to come around on his crimes
• Theon still in denial over doing something wrong
  • He never wanted to do any harm to Bran or Rickon. Reek made him kill those boys, not him Reek but the other one. (TWOW, Theon I)
• For Theon’s arc to be complete, I think he has to reconcile with the fact that he not only has to ask Bran for forgiveness but the boys, his sons as well.
• And that’s even if he never realizes that they’re his kids.

Conclusion

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