Episode 142: A CLASH OF KINGS, Sansa VI and Tyrion XIV: "Burning Bridges" 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 forty-second episode of the Not A Cast, titled: “Burning Bridges: An Analysis of ACOK, Sansa VI & Tyrion XIV,” in which Tyrion charges headfirst into hell, and Sansa wishes she could join him just to get away from Cersei.

This episode is brought to you by our NotASmallCouncil:

• Hand of the King WolfmanZack
• Grandmaester Timbob, troubleshooter of systems and designer of circuit boards
• Lord Commander of the Kingsguard Mark N.
• Lord Travis, Master of Ships and Warden of the Waves, Captain of the war galley NIGHT WOLF, the ship that stalks the Seven Seas, and Wielder of the Valyrian Steel trident SUMMONER, the blade that brings the Deep Ones
• Ser Keith J, Master of Whisperers
• Lord Philip the Merciful, Master of Laws
• Archmaester June, Healer of the Lesser Poxes
• Ragged Michael, Warden of the North
• Nelson the Hammer, Prince of Dragonstone
• Scarlett the Other Red Woman and Mistress of Whisperers
• Lord Micah, the Quilled Lion, Warden of the West, Herald of the Golden Tooth, Master of the Banefort and the Kraken’s Bane
• Lord James: the Jim that was Promised
• The High Bearded Priest
• Lord Jake, Assistant (to the) Hand of the King
• Lady Xena Valyrian
• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen's Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• His Grace’s High Inquisitor Frank
• Ser Jasper the Cruel, the King’s Justice
• Laurence, Prince of Dorne
• Kelly, Warden of the East and Mistress of (Old) Bay of Crabs
• Steven the Steadfast, Master of Hounds
• The Blue Winter Rose Knight of Highgarden
• Lady Stephanie
• Lord Anonymous
• Lord Carlos
• Lord Andrew the Restless, a Priest of the Drowned God
• Ser Sourcedelica
• Low Energy Dent, True Master of the Banefort and True Master of Coin
• Lord Penchant for Nostalgia
• Queer Alex, Beyonce's Favorite Stan and Bastard of Chromatica, Rainbow Commander of the Theydes and Gentlethems
• Haldivar, The Waiter for TWOW
• A-a-ron Damphair Prophet of the Forsaken and High Priest of Euron Crows Eye
• Lieutenant Glenn Lord of H town
• Vanerys of the House Colgaryen, the First of Her Name, Princess of Dragonstone, Mistress of Art, The Overworked, Queen of the Pencils, the Eraser and the First Draft, Queen of Monochrome, Devotee of the Great GOT, Portraitist of the Realm, Lady Realist of the Seven Kingdoms, Blender of Paints, Maker of Drawings and the Michaelangelo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Lord Adam T
• Lady Alexandra of Tarth
• Ser Kristoph Logas, Bloody Scorpion of the Red Field, Defender of the Letter of Kin, and the Wolverine of house Qorgyle
• Lady Elizabeth, Mistress of Horse (Faced Lesbians)
• Ser Josh Snow Bastard Bounty Hunter of the North
• Ser Veyor, Chief of Parties in the Frozen Wastes
• Lord Peter
• The Dead Sheppard Reborn, Preacher of the Poor Fellows
• Marshall Harrison—Absent, shipwrecked in the Jade Sea
• Grave-Robb Stark, the Cadaver King and Horror of Harrenhal
• Olaf, proponent of establishing a feudal, pseudodemocratic system of Great Councils, wherein every count votes
• Ser Tim: The Knight Who Was Guided By Voices
• Lord Nick
• Thucydides, Lord of Plagues
• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen’s Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• Lady Anna, The Lovely Castellan
• Pat Yronwood, the bloodroyal and guardian of the Boneway
• Lord Charles Tyrell of Highgarden, Lord Paramount of the Mander, Defender of the Marches, High Marshal of the Reach, Warden of the South, and The Heir of House Tyrell
• Luke, Lord of Lone Leaf & The Pillar of Autumn
• Master of Zorse
• Joe Snow “King of the Metro North and protector of the Tri-State”
• Squire Matt S, future Ser Matt S, the one who will bring balance to the Kingdoms
• BWord, Queen Beyond the Wall
• Lord Kyle
• Lord Samuel Seaworth
• Ser Max, Lord Commander of the Constitutional Guard
• Blackberry the Bold, Champion of Feel Good Times
• Lady Ivory Dayne, aspiring noble author in the seven kingdoms, lady of Starfall, wardeness of the south, and patron of freewheeling bisexuals
• Lady Jemisa, She Who Suggests That Coconuts Migrate
• And our newest member of the small council: Lord Kristoff of Arendelle, official ice master and deliverer, the valiant pungent reindeer king, keeper of feisty pants, and prince consort to his ginger sweet love Queen Anna (Pronounced Ah-nuh)

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

Hunding, Master of Guest Right, a Sworn Sword patrons, asks:

I have a question. (I'm a bit behind on listening now that I don't commute so sorry if this has been covered). I don’t believe it would be in-character for Shae to obediently sit staring at the wall for the long days and weeks when she's offscreen in aCoK. The appearance of Symon Silvertongue in her manse is one of the few glimpses we are given that she has a mind of her own outside Tyrion’s POV. What side-hustles does she have going on? Does she already have a fat stack of Lannister gold, and where does she keep it? What’s her long-term exit strategy? I would like to see an odd-couple spin-off with Shae and Chella finding creative ways to make money without Tyrion or Varys noticing, and this would give an interesting view into King’s Landing’s smallfolk and merchant classes under the Lannister regime. Thanks for the T-shirt, and for shipping all the way to the UK! Hunding, Master of Guest Right

So, thank you Hunding 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, merch, access to the NotASlack, and we’re proud to announce our next patreon-only episode in which we go all the way back to the start of this pod-cast and ASOIAF!

Indeed! We’re going to take a look back at the AGOT Prologue. If you go all the way back to our early episodes, you might notice that the format was a lot different, and I was nervous as a Catholic priest about to tell Pope Jon Paul II the synopsis of The Last Temptation of Christ. So, now we return back and look at this chapter with fresh eyes and with Season Eight in the rearview. We’re so excited!

But enough about patreon, when we last checked in with Sansa, she had gone to church and then went to a ladies small group bible study in Maegor’s Holdfast. Meanwhile, when we last checked in with Tyrion, he was bravely leading the charge to keep a psychopathic monster on the Iron Throne, because he is GOOD. Let’s see the power of prayer in this synopsis of ACOK, Sansa VI and then find out what worth bravery in ACOK, Tyrion XIV!

Synopsis

The torches shimmered brightly against the hammered metal of the wall sconces, filling the Queen's Ballroom with silvery light. Yet there was still darkness in that hall. Sansa could see it in the pale eyes of Ser Ilyn Payne, who stood by the back door still as stone, taking neither food nor wine. She could hear it in Lord Gyles's racking cough, and the whispered voice of Osney Kettleblack when he slipped in to bring Cersei the tidings.

Boy do I love George starting this chapter out with Sansa knowing there’s darkness in the hall even with the light. Superb.

Sansa is finishing up some soup when Osney came the first time. He smells like horses and has scars on his cheek very definitely from the battle and not from Alayaya. Sansa overhears his report that Osney whispers the battle: fleets, wildfire, chains, Stannis landing: basically a 280 character tweet summary of Davos III and Tyrion XIII. Inside the city, Osney reports that there’s another round of rioting in Flea Bottom with Bywater dispatching cops to put it down. And Baelor’s Sept is full of people praying.

Cersei asks about her son, and Osney says that he’s on the walls, telling the men to be brave. Yeah. Something like that. Cersei orders another round of wine, and yes, this is not the first round. Sansa thinks that all the heavy drinking is making Cersei more beautiful though. Her eyes especially were bright green, like wildfire. Hm.

Musicians played. Jugglers juggled. Moon Boy lurched about the hall on stilts making mock of everyone, while Ser Dontos chased serving girls on his broomstick horse. The guests laughed, but it was a joyless laughter, the sort of laughter that can turn into sobbing in half a heartbeat. Their bodies are here, but their thoughts are on the city walls, and their hearts as well.

The salad course follows the soup course, and Sansa might have loved this once, but not tonight. She doesn’t have an appetite, and she’s not alone in that. Gyles Rosby was coughing a lot, Lollys Stokeworth was shivering, a young bride was weeping. Cersei tells Frenken to put her to bed.

"Tears," she said scornfully to Sansa as the woman was led from the hall. "The woman's weapon, my lady mother used to call them. The man's weapon is a sword. And that tells us all you need to know, doesn't it?"

"Men must be very brave, though," said Sansa. "To ride out and face swords and axes, everyone trying to kill you . . . "

"Jaime told me once that he only feels truly alive in battle and in bed." She lifted her cup and took a long swallow. Her salad was untouched. "I would sooner face any number of swords than sit helpless like this, pretending to enjoy the company of this flock of frightened hens."

"You asked them here, Your Grace."

Oh, well, yeah, but that was because it was expected of Cersei. She hates these women. She needs their men though. If Tyrion somehow prevails, the women will return to their husbands and talk about how courageous Cersei was. Oh really? You think that’ll be their takeaway?

"And if the castle should fall?"

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Cersei did not wait for a denial. "If I'm not betrayed by my own guards, I may be able to hold here for a time. Then I can go to the walls and offer to yield to Lord Stannis in person. That will spare us the worst. But if Maegor's Holdfast should fall before Stannis can come up, why then, most of my guests are in for a bit of rape, I'd say. And you should never rule out mutilation, torture, and murder at times like these."

Sansa is horrified. These are noblewomen and unarmed. Yep, and their birth might protect them as they might be worth a ransom, but after battle, soldiers aren’t so interested in money as rape. But maybe their status will protect them. Out in the streets, different story. The women are all in for rapes, and it doesn’t matter their age, appearance or physical state. Even Sansa is not immune.

"Me?"

"Try not to sound so like a mouse, Sansa. You're a woman now, remember? And betrothed to my firstborn." The queen sipped at her wine. "Were it anyone else outside the gates, I might hope to beguile him. But this is Stannis Baratheon. I'd have a better chance of seducing his horse." She noticed the look on Sansa's face, and laughed. "Have I shocked you, my lady?" She leaned close. "You little fool. Tears are not a woman's only weapon. You've got another one between your legs, and you'd best learn to use it. You'll find men use their swords freely enough. Both kinds of swords."

Fortunately for Sansa, Osfryd and Osney Kettleblack arrive to rescue her. These Kettleblack bros were favorites of Cersei and got along with everyone, especially the serving wenches. Strangely, Sansa had never heard of the Kettleblacks before Osmund joined the Kingsguard. They report that Tyrion has lit the wildfire and blown a hundred ships up. Cersei asks again about Joffrey, and they report he’s at the Mud Gate, being very brave and telling the men how to handle a crossbow. Uh huh. Cersei tells them to make sure Joffrey stays alive. She turns to Osfryd for his report. He tells Cersei that they’ve caught thieves. Cersei orders Ilyn Payne to deal with them.

“Another lesson you should learn, if you hope to sit beside my son. Be gentle on a night like this and you'll have treasons popping up all about you like mushrooms after a hard rain. The only way to keep your people loyal is to make certain they fear you more than they do the enemy."

"I will remember, Your Grace," said Sansa, though she had always heard that love was a surer route to the people's loyalty than fear. If I am ever a queen, I'll make them love me.

I love Sansa here. I just do.

The third course is crab pies which sound awesome. Then some mutton. Lollys Stokeworth eats too fast and throws up. Gyles coughs, drinks, passes out. Cersei dismisses him as barely a man, blaming the gods. Then good ol’ boy Osfryd returns and tells Cersei there’s rich merchants gathered outside. What should they do? Tell them to go home, and if they don’t shoot them, Cersei replies. Strictly business.

Actually, I lied. It’s personal. Sansa sees the drunk anger in Cersei’s face. She slurs that she wishes she could go murder people with a sword. And then she talks about how when she was a kid, everyone would confuse her for Jaime and vice versa. They encouraged this by dressing in each other’s clothes. And yet, when they got older, Jaime got a sword, and Cersei got nothing.

“We were so much alike, I could never understand why they treated us so differently. Jaime learned to fight with sword and lance and mace, while I was taught to smile and sing and please. He was heir to Casterly Rock, while I was to be sold to some stranger like a horse, to be ridden whenever my new owner liked, beaten whenever he liked, and cast aside in time for a younger filly. Jaime's lot was to be glory and power, while mine was birth and moonblood."

"But you were queen of all the Seven Kingdoms," Sansa said.

"When it comes to swords, a queen is only a woman after all."

By now, Cersei’s wine cup is empty. But she declines more to keep a clear head … I guess? Lol. Osney returns and tells Cersei that Stannis is on the tourney ground, but Tyrion is riding out against him. Cersei dismisses Tyrion’s earned bravery and asks if Joffrey is with them. He’s not. He’s very bravely flinging prisoners into the Blackwater.

Cersei calls this folly -- which I agree with, and then tells Osmund to retrieve Joffrey and bring him back. I don’t agree with that. When Osney starts to disagree, Cersei tells him to follow her orders, not his. Osmund will do the same, or he’s going out in the attack with Osney. So, the knight very bravely decides to follow Cersei’s order. And everyone returns to their meals.

After all the dishes are cleared, Tanda requests to take her daughters home, and Cersei agrees. Then a singer comes forward and sings sons of Jonquil and Florian, Aemon the Dragonknight and Nymeria’s ten thousand ships. Sansa and the women get misty-eyed, and Cersei notices.

"Very good, dear." The queen leaned close. "You want to practice those tears. You'll need them for King Stannis."

Sansa shifted nervously. "Your Grace?"

"Oh, spare me your hollow courtesies. Matters must have reached a desperate strait out there if they need a dwarf to lead them, so you might as well take off your mask. I know all about your little treasons in the godswood."

"The godswood?" Don't look at Ser Dontos, don't, don't, Sansa told herself. She doesn't know, no one knows, Dontos promised me, my Florian would never fail me. "I've done no treasons. I only visit the godswood to pray."

"For Stannis. Or your brother, it's all the same. Why else seek your father's gods? You're praying for our defeat. What would you call that, if not treason?"

Sansa, probably breathing a massive internal sigh of relief, says she’s praying for Joffrey. Oh, really, how about being truthful, Cersei says. The now queen pushes a drink on the future queen, telling her to drink. No, no. Don’t sip it. Chug it frat-boy-pledge style. Sansa does this, and Cersei asks if she wants more. No, she does not. This makes Cersei angry. As a result, Cersei starts doing some truth-talking, asking Sansa whether she truly knows why Ilyn Payne is here.

Sansa doesn’t know, but she doesn’t reply either. Cersei motions Ilyn over, and he comes over with an unsheathed Ice. Blood, from his earlier execution, runs down the steel. Cersei instructs Ilyn to tell them why he’s here. He opens his mouth and chokes out a rattle with no expression on his face.

"He's here for us, he says," the queen said. "Stannis may take the city and he may take the throne, but I will not suffer him to judge me. I do not mean for him to have us alive."

"Us?"

"You heard me. So perhaps you had best pray again, Sansa, and for a different outcome. The Starks will have no joy from the fall of House Lannister, I promise you." She reached out and touched Sansa's hair, brushing it lightly away from her neck.

And that is ACOK, Sansa VI! Now to transition over to Tyrion XIV …

Ahem

Tyrion XIV

As Tyrion rides gloriously forth to battle, he can’t see for shit. He has to turn his head to see three of Stannis’ ships beached on the tourney grounds, with a fourth one still on the water catapulting burning pitch. Tyrion orders his men to form a wedge behind him. On his right is Mandon Moore, with his white armor, white shield, white barding...and dead eyes. How reassuring!

On the left, Tyrion was surprised to see Podrick Payne, a sword in his hand. "You're too young," he said at once. "Go back."

"I'm your squire, my lord."

Tyrion could spare no time for argument. “With me, then. Stay close.” He spurred his horse into motion.

They accelerate as they follow the walls toward their foes. Said foes are at the King’s Gate, wrestling with a large ram. Tyrion orders lances and charges ahead at top speed. He almost sends himself flying from the saddle, ending the battle for him as quickly as the Green Fork on the show, but just manages to hold his seat.

...the arrowhead flew, a long scream of steel and silk, pounding hooves and sharp blades kissed by fire.

Damn, George. I can see and hear and even smell that. Incredibly vivid writing.

And so the battle is joined! Mandon Moore drives Joffrey’s banner into a dude’s chest so hard he lifts him off the ground. Tyrion cuts a knight’s head in half...but he’s a Florent, so who cares? Tyrion hears cheering from the walls as the Baratheon troops abandon their ram. Tyrion’s horse balks at the ram itself, but Mandon Moore vaults it and keeps killing. Podrick is nowhere to be seen, but Tyrion realizes he’s a sitting duck if he stays there to look for him, so instead he rides off over the bodies.

Downriver, the Blackwater was jammed with the hulks of burning galleys. Patches of wildfire still floated atop the water, sending fiery green plumes swirling twenty feet into the air. They had dispersed the men on the battering ram, but he could see fighting all along the riverfront. Ser Balon Swann's men, most like, or Lancel's, trying to throw the enemy back into the water as they swarmed ashore off the burning ships. "We'll ride for the Mud Gate," he commanded.

Ser Mandon shouted, "The Mud Gate!" And they were off again. "King's Landing!" his men cried raggedly, and "Halfman! Halfman!" He wondered who had taught them that. Through the steel and padding of his helm, he heard anguished screams, the hungry crackle of flame, the shuddering of warhorns, and the brazen blast of trumpets. Fire was everywhere. Gods be good, no wonder the Hound was frightened. It's the flames he fears . . .

No, really? Ya think?

Tyrion realizes his formation has fallen apart. He regrets riding out here, but it’s too late now. Baratheon soldiers stagger out of the water; Tyrion takes the battle to those few still in fighting condition, and George once again brings it with his description of combat.

The war shrank to the size of his eye slit. Knights twice his size fled from him, or stood and died. They seemed little things, and fearful. "Lannister!" he shouted, slaying. His arm was red to the elbow, glistening in the light off the river. When his horse reared again, he shook his axe at the stars and heard them call out "Halfman! Halfman!" Tyrion felt drunk.

The battle fever. He had never thought to experience it himself, though Jaime had told him of it often enough. How time seemed to blur and slow and even stop, how the past and the future vanished until there was nothing but the instant, how fear fled, and thought fled, and even your body. "You don't feel your wounds then, or the ache in your back from the weight of the armor, or the sweat running down into your eyes. You stop feeling, you stop thinking, you stop being you, there is only the fight, the foe, this man and then the next and the next and the next, and you know they are afraid and tired but you're not, you're alive, and death is all around you but their swords move so slowly, you can dance through them laughing." Battle fever. I am half a man and drunk with slaughter, let them kill me if they can!

Tyrion howls with laughter as he cuts down Stannis’ fiery heart banner, but the jubilation fades when he comes across a maimed knight offering up his own severed hand in surrender. Yikes. Tyrion is then joined by Balon Swann, covered head to toe in blood and smoke. Ser Balon points at something downriver.

Tyrion swung his horse about to peer down the Blackwater. The current still flowed black and strong beneath, but the surface was a roil of blood and flame. The sky was red and orange and garish green. "What?" he said. Then he saw.

Steel-clad men-at-arms were clambering off a broken galley that had smashed into a pier. So many, where are they coming from? Squinting into the smoke and glare, Tyrion followed them back out into the river. Twenty galleys were jammed together out there, maybe more, it was hard to count. Their oars were crossed, their hulls locked together with grappling lines, they were impaled on each other's rams, tangled in webs of fallen rigging. One great hulk floated hull up between two smaller ships. Wrecks, but packed so closely that it was possible to leap from one deck to the other and so cross the Blackwater.

Hundreds of Stannis Baratheon's boldest were doing just that. Tyrion saw one great fool of a knight trying to ride across, urging a terrified horse over gunwales and oars, across tilting decks slick with blood and crackling with green fire. We made them a bloody bridge, he thought in dismay. Parts of the bridge were sinking and other parts were afire and the whole thing was creaking and shifting and like to burst asunder at any moment, but that did not seem to stop them. "Those are brave men," he told Ser Balon in admiration. "Let's go kill them."

That, uh....that does not go well. Sure, the Baratheon troops scatter before them, but Tyrion’s too busy fighting to rein up in time. His horse leaps into the river and breaks its legs. Tyrion mercy-kills the poor horse; covered in its blood, he makes his way across the burning bridge, ship to ship, fighting as he goes.

His two white shadows were always with him; Balon Swann and Mandon Moore, beautiful in their pale plate. Surrounded by a circle of Velaryon spearmen, they fought back to back; they made battle as graceful as a dance.

His own killing was a clumsy thing. He stabbed one man in the kidney when his back was turned, and grabbed another by the leg and upended him into the river. Arrows hissed past his head and clattered off his armor; one lodged between shoulder and breastplate, but he never felt it.

All around them, stones and Antler Men alike fall onto the bridge of ships, finally wrenching it apart and sending Tyrion spilling into the water. As Tyrion crawls back up onto the deck, he catches a glimpse of a battle on the southern shore. He doesn’t understand--who could Stannis be fighting on the wrong side of the river? Hmm, who indeed?? Regardless, Tyrion realizes that if he stays here, he’s going to be shoved up against his own chain and trapped. Then he hears someone calling his name.

"MY LORD! TAKE MY HAND! MY LORD TYRION!"

There on the deck of the next ship, across a widening gulf of black water, stood Ser Mandon Moore, a hand extended. Yellow and green fire shone against the white of his armor, and his lobstered gauntlet was sticky with blood, but Tyrion reached for it all the same, wishing his arms were longer. It was only at the very last, as their fingers brushed across the gap, that something niggled at him . . . Ser Mandon was holding out his left hand, why . . .

Was that why he reeled backward, or did he see the sword after all? He would never know. The point slashed just beneath his eyes, and he felt its cold hard touch and then a blaze of pain.

Tyrion plummets into the water once again, but once again manages to crawl his way back onto the deck. He stares up at the fires blazing overhead, having just enough time to admire the beauty before Ser Mandon shows up. He puts his sword to Tyrion’s throat to finish him off, when suddenly he vanishes overboard. Tyrion sees his rescuer looming over him. He assumes it’s Jaime, because who else would bother saving him?

"Be still, my lord, you're hurt bad." A boy's voice, that makes no sense, thought Tyrion. It sounded almost like Pod.

Depth

Sansa VI

The Battle of Blackwater begins with Sansa V; it ends with Sansa VII. Right in the middle we have Sansa VI, the still point around which all the chaos revolves. The other chapters are cinematic panoramas; this is a theatrical tableau, focused not on action but dialogue. We’ve taken a step back from the actual fighting, and while the outcome of the battle certainly affects everyone in this room, there’s enough distance to dig into what it all means. Sansa VI is a glimpse behind the curtain; it’s all about inconvenient truths.

It’s inconvenient truths couched in a Sansa who is increasingly less a wallflower, cringing before authority to survive, and more a maturing woman who is coming into her own and starting to critically evaluate the bullshit that she’s forced to hear. I love how Sansa has a commentary track to Cersei’s monologues about how it’s better to be feared than loved while ordering murder from the comforts of her luxury. To which Sansa thinks If I am ever a queen, I'll make them love me.

There’s this term that gets tossed around - mostly by dumb misogynists - which regards female protagonists as “Mary Sues” - that is the protagonists who suddenly come into powers/abilities without the requisite character build-up and foundation. Again, this is mostly dumb pejorative made by dumber people, but that’s not an accusation you can throw at Sansa. George has carefully set all the foundation for Sansa to rise high, and her bravery and thinking here on the Blackwater is just one piece of the larger whole to make Sansa’s rise as Queen in the North plausible, palatable and great storytelling.

• The mood in the room
  • The transition between Davos III and Tyrion XIII was smooth: from the victims of the wildfire inferno to the perpetrator. By contrast, the transition between Tyrion XIII and Sansa VI is deliberately jarring
  • The narrative shrinks from the widescreen scope of the battlefield back to the intimate confines of Maegor’s Holdfast with Sansa and Cersei
  • All around Sansa, the surface appearance of peace persists. Musicians are playing. Jugglers are juggling. The fools dance. Maegor’s Holdfast is all silvery light and comfortable furniture. What war, you could ask?
  • But as Sansa realizes, there is still darkness in this room, everywhere she looks. The war is here, in whispered messages, in Ilyn Payne’s eyes
  • Back before her life fell apart, Sansa might’ve been convinced by that shadow on the wall. Now she knows better; she realizes that the forced laughter is covering up sobs, and that everyone’s thinking about the battle
  • She’s sitting close enough to Cersei to overhear the battlefield dispatches she receives from the Kettleblack bros, which establish the timeline
  • As the chapter starts, we get word that the fleets have met, Sandor is killing archers, and Tyrion is raising the chain: halfway through Davos III
  • We also hear that Joffrey is out raising everyone’s spirits, which is quite the generous interpretation! The Kettleblacks have to keep their courtesies
  • Sansa’s chapters are increasingly about this double vision of hers, wherein she sees both the surface and the reality at once, and has to learn how to determine the relationship between the two
  • The Kettleblacks are such unctuous assholes in this chapter, I love it.
  • But part of what Sansa sees in the Kettleblacks is the surface-level flattery and ingratiation they do around Sansa to get their way.
  • All the while, Sansa is aware of their true nature -- about how they get on with the serving wenches best of all.
  • These guys play at being knights, but their true power lies in being able to sweet-talk their way into Cersei’s favor and into the beds of women.
  • What Sansa detects here is their falseness. She doesn’t know that they are ostensible agents of Tyrion or that they are (or will become) agents of Littlefinger.
  • In that falseness, though, the Kettleblacks are dark mirrors to Sansa. Because Sansa is not truly down with Cersei and really not all for Joffrey at this point.
  • She’s not a triple agent of various power players, but that’s not totally the point.
  • The point is that she is watching, observing and learning the modes of survival within an oppressive political structure.
  • And at the same time, she’s learning about the types of courtiers which exist in any political structure and evaluating them based on their loyalty and competency.
  • The Kettleblacks fall well short on both counts, and that will be part of their undoing come AFFC.
  • But back on the who's paying them argument. We know that Littlefinger will ultimately be their paymaster and benefactor.
  • The Kettleblacks, then, can be seen as a mini-boss for Sansa to the endgame boss of her arc: Littlefinger.
  • For me is much less unctuous and much more subtle in his manipulations.
  • But Sansa has been exposed to lesser versions of Littlefinger, and she’s learned from it.
  • So, come her QiTN arc, we’ll see how Littlefinger lands -- or more accurately, how his head lands.
• Cersei on power and gender
  • Sansa’s case study for dealing with both the surface and substance of power is Cersei...though she’s less role model than cautionary tale, because she is getting shitfaced, even more so than usual
  • We’ll have more to say on Cersei’s alcoholism come AFFC. Suffice to say here that the main reason Cersei is drinking so much is that she feels trapped in this room with her fellow women, who she despises
  • In the same way that Catelyn can be seen as an “evil stepmother” character given her own story to tell, Cersei can be seen as a “wicked queen” whose relationship to her gender is explored, rather than assumed
  • Cersei resents restrictions placed on her by men, but reserves most of her hatred for other women. Why? Because Cersei doesn’t want to overthrow nor even reform the system. She wants one change: her in charge
  • After all, uplifting other women would require significant social transformations, of the kind that might lessen Lannister power
  • So, to quote Futurama, Cersei believes that the worst kind of discrimination is the kind against her, personally
  • She believes herself to be a special kind of woman, one who ought to have been allowed into the powerful circles of the menfolk
  • The rest of the women, though? They deserve their plight. They have to, because otherwise, the system Cersei wants to rule would be bad!
  • Cersei is merciless to other women, not so much to win the approval of men as to demonstrate her own exceptionalism to herself
  • When a young woman whose husband is out fighting bursts into tears, Cersei has no empathy. She mocks tears as “the woman’s weapon”
  • This is an idea that comes up frequently in the series--that a woman’s tears aren’t a genuine emotional expression, but a tool of manipulation
  • There certainly are women in the series who pull that trick (successfully and otherwise), but it really does not appear to be the case here
  • So Cersei isn’t actually assessing the situation. She’s just regurgitating a stereotype, cynically denying that the woman has good reason to cry
  • There is also a huge amount of hypocrisy at work with Cersei’s worldview.
  • Obviously, we should take Joffrey’s POV with a grain of salt, but recall what Joff tells Sansa back in AGOT:
    • "Your brother defeated my uncle Jaime. My mother says it was treachery and deceit. She wept when she heard. Women are all weak, even her, though she pretends she isn't.”
  • Cersei’s relationship with Jaime is incredibly complicated. Is it love? Is it narcissism? Why not both?
  • The point being that when Cersei was confronted with the possibility of Jaime dying in Stark captivity, she may have wept, same as the woman whose husband is out fighting on the walls of King’s Landing.
  • But Cersei, if she thinks about it at all and isn’t engaging with cognitive dissonance (which she is), would probably view her tears over Jaime as legitimate.
  • She’s a special. This woman is not, according to her.
  • Cersei learned this idea from her mother. Given what Cersei says later, my guess is Joanna said this to make Cersei accept not being allowed to fight
  • My daughter, you can’t have the sword, the castle, the crown. The men control those things. But you can control the men individually. As the saying went: Tywin ruled the realm, but Joanna ruled Tywin
  • This didn’t work out for Cersei. That’s in part because she’s been murderously violent since childhood; she likes that kind of power. But it’s also because her husband never treated her like a partner
  • That’s how Cersei arrived at her current worldview: men are brainless predators, women are cowardly fools who deserve to be preyed upon
  • Sansa is still forming her adult worldview, and so stands in contrast to Cersei’s certainty in her own cynicism
  • Cersei resents men for wielding the power of the sword. Sansa says that men still have to be brave, because they’re facing other men with swords
  • Cersei shoots back that Jaime says he only feels alive in battle and bed. This frames war as a parallel to sex, as with the Swordfish and its ram
  • If fighting is like fucking, then men aren’t brave to fight. They’re just trying to feel alive--again, they’re mindless animals seeking serotonin
  • Cersei goes out of her way to deny vulnerability and empathy, because her hardline view of power politics makes no room for those things
  • She is ultimately raging against her own powerlessness, saying she’d face those swords without fear because it would mean doing something
  • Instead, she has to surround herself with women. Sansa points out that Cersei invited them all here. This was your choice; you are in power, right?
  • Not really, says Cersei. It was expected of me, as it will be expected of you. These women are connected to powerful men, and Cersei wants the women to tell those men what a great job she did keeping it all together. So who’s really in charge? Once more we are back to Varys’ riddle
  • Cersei is not devoid of political instinct. She’s read the rulebook; she knows what a queen is supposed to do during battle. But it’s not enough
  • This is a great character moment for Cersei, because you’re right! She knows what duties are expected of a queen, knows that she has to maintain this women’s court.
  • But this is where Tyrion’s estimation of Cersei having a low-cunning comes into focus. She opts merely for the optics with none of the substance.
  • What exactly is Cersei doing here in this dining room besides getting increasingly hammered? She certainly signals for courses of food to be served, but she’s not actively encouraging these women or boosting their spirits.
  • Everyone is miserable and fearful in this chamber, and Cersei does nothing to ally the misery or fear.
  • Instead, she sends out Ilyn Payne to do some executions and keeps throwing barbs at Sansa.
  • Really, the only person who demonstrates the substance of a queen is Sansa, but we’ll have to wait for Sansa VII to get more deeply into this.
  • Cersei says that if the castle falls, she might have enough time to perform the role of queen, going up to the walls to surrender in person
  • If she doesn’t have that time, however, the veil of chivalry will fall completely, and the women in this room will be subject to assault
  • Sansa is horrified by this, and it’s worth teasing out why. She says they are women, unarmed, and gently born. Multiple kinds of logic at work
  • “We are defenseless” is a universal plea for mercy. It cuts across all cultures and time periods: don’t attack those who can’t fight back
  • “We are women” is rooted in the Westerosi mores Sansa has absorbed. The songs and stories of Westeros declare, as Sansa said in her previous chapter, that true knights would never harm women and children
  • “We are rich women” is yet another kind of argument, more worldly. This is Sansa arguing that a “golden shield” might be enough to save them
  • Sansa has the double vision of someone who has only just begun to mature. She makes naive and cynical arguments simultaneously
  • Cersei is a woman who has been spat out the other end of that process, in which neither idealism nor realpolitik is enough to save you from the void
  • In Cersei’s worldview, tears are an ineffective weapon, because during battle, very few men are going to be moved by a display of emotion. Same goes for the golden shield of wealth: it’s not enough when blood runs hot
  • Instead, Cersei falls back on her weapon of choice: sex. She frames her vagina as a sheath, a way to calm and control men’s eager “swords”
  • But that’s not going to work on Stannis, because Stannis is notoriously uninterested in sex. Cersei says she’d have better luck with his horse
  • This is a hilarious image, of course; George always mines Stannis’ stick-up-the-ass reputation for humor as well as dread. That reputation is so well established that all a character has to say is “this is Stannis Baratheon,” and we know what they mean. That’s A+ characterization
  • On reread, however, I realized that this makes Stannis’ invasion the worst of both worlds. If his men were as chaste as him, these women wouldn’t be in danger. If Stannis was as horny as his men, Cersei could seduce him, and so keep these women safe from his men
  • But the particular combination of a horny army and a chaste general means that there is no way for Cersei to weaponize her sexuality
  • FANTASTIC POINT! Cersei is in a lose-lose proposition whoever shows up to the walls of the Red Keep.
  • This makes me think, weirdly, of Daenerys in ADWD.
  • When George originally had AFFC/ADWD as one book, his plan was to parallel Dany and Cersei’s chapters. (10 chapters for Cersei in AFFC, 10 chapters for Dany in ADWD)
  • Recall in ADWD how Daenerys rationalizes wedding and bedding Hizdahr zo Loraq as the “price of peace”, to keep the Sons of the Harpy from killing her children (the freedmen and women)
  • And this works in Meereen as the Sons of the Harpy stop killing Dany’s freedmen after Dany agrees to wed Hizdahr if she receives 90 days of no-murders (whether this is a temporary hold or not is a question we’ll cover when we get to ADWD).
  • The point being is that in Westeros, in Planetos, a woman’s sexuality is often used as currency to cement peace or form alliance.
  • Look only at Jon Arryn securing Robert’s fledgling rule by wedding Robert to Cersei. Or how Hoster Tully leveraged Lysa as a potential bride for Jon Arryn himself as the price for his continued support for the southron ambitions conspiracy.
  • And though it plays well with the fucked-upped-ness of the Lannisters to have Cersei bed brothers (Hello Kettleblacks!), Stannis is not Robert. Sexuality and women in general make this Baratheon feel uncomfortable.
  • Still, you can’t help but feel sad for Cersei in this scene. She’s internalized how Tywin used her sexuality as barter to try to wed her to Rhaegar and then Robert.
  • And she has considered using it again with Stannis to try to save the people in her women’s court.
  • It’s all about reputation and performance, the eye of the beholder. Sansa knows this by now. When one of the Kettleblacks comes in, she thinks about how they’ve created quite the reputation for themselves around the castle...but if they’re so good, why hadn’t I heard of them before?
  • This is my favorite Sansa: Extreme Chivalry Nerd Sansa, who memorized the back of every knight’s rookie card
  • Sansa is no longer swallowing the songs on face value. She is using them as interrogative tools to make sense of the deceptions around her
  • She specifically compares the Kettleblacks to Sandor. As much as the Hound frightens her, he also impresses her, unlike the KB bros
  • Cersei does not appear to notice Sansa’s evolution. She still thinks of her as an easily shocked little fool. The irony here is that Sansa is performing her role better than Cersei, by keeping a lid on her emotions
  • When some servants try to sneak away, Cersei orders them executed. As I’ve been saying, the call is coming from inside the house. Stannis’ attack threatens King’s Landing, but when people try to escape, the Lannisters kill them. The common folk are trapped, with no safe haven on either side
  • Cersei is not a straightforward brute like Gregor Clegane; she insists that there is a logic to her actions. Mercy for traitors increases the number of treasons. To win, your people must fear you more than the enemy
  • I think this is BS for a number of reasons:
    • These servants weren’t actively supporting Stannis like the Antler Men, they just wanted out of his way
    • Cersei herself contributes to the collapse of morale by ordering Joffrey to be brought deeper inside the castle
    • Fear easily turns into anger, hatred, and rebellion, especially if people think death is their only alternative
    • Even if ruling through fear gets you through the battle, it weakens your political legitimacy in the aftermath
  • That last point especially applies to Tywin, from whom Cersei presumably learned all this. He never prepared his family to rule in peacetime
  • Sansa thinks she always heard that the best way to get people to follow you was not fear, but love. If she’s ever queen, she’ll make them love her
  • This, of course, is one of the most significant and oft-quoted passages in Sansa’s story. George is arguing against ruling with an iron fist
  • Instead, your politics should be driven by empathy, compassion, and encouraging everyone to be their best possible self
  • Not only is this kinder, it’s actually stronger in the long run. We see that with Ned, who presumably taught Sansa this like Tywin taught Cersei
  • The Northmen loved Ned, and so fight and die for his family. The Westermen merely feared Tywin, and so slip away from his family. Love lasts beyond the grave. Fear withers with the flesh
  • It is the memory of love that sustains Sansa; it is the absence of love that has corrupted Cersei. George wants us to understand how she got here
  • One of George’s inspirations in writing is comics -- particularly the silver age of comics.
  • His first published piece was a 1963 letter to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in response to Fantastic Four #17 after all!
  • Now, it should be pointed out that George is also writing against some of the tropes of comic book stories, saying things like:
    • That's a comic book kind of thing, where the Red Skull gets up in the morning [and asks] "What evil can I do today?" Real people don't think that way. We all think we're heroes, we all think we're good guys. We have our rationalizations when we do bad things. "Well, I had no choice," or "It's the best of several bad alternatives," or "No it was actually good because God told me so," or "I had to do it for my family." We all have rationalizations for why we do shitty things or selfish things or cruel things.
  • That said, one feature of many of these Silver Age comics was so-called origin stories. And I imagine that George took inspiration from these origin stories in crafting Cersei’s villain origin story alongside Sansa's heroic origin story.
  • As Cersei touches on her and gets a longer exploration in AFFC, Cersei isn’t just evil for the sake of being eeeevilll.
  • Cersei’s villainous origin story is one of an extremely shitty father who projected his misogynistic worldview onto her at an early age.
  • Here in ACOK, we learn only about how Cersei was trained in a strict gender role of smiling, courtesies and marriage. And it’s only in Cersei’s telling of her story.
  • This origin story is later expanded in Cersei’s POV chapters in AFFC, with Maggy the Frog and her friends (one of whom she murders).
  • With Sansa, we have her learning love from her father and mother at an early age, learning chivalry and courtesy.
  • But this is tempered by her real-world experiences. This is Sansa’s heroic origin story of her journey to queenship and rule.
  • Intriguingly, I also think George was writing Tyrion’s supervillain origin story through his ACOK/ASOS chapters.
  • Tyrion, too, doesn’t simply become more villainous in ADWD, because he woke up one morning and decided that he was breaking bad.
  • Cersei’s voice starts to slur; she’s just drunk enough to be vulnerable. She tells Sansa that as children, no one could tell Jaime and Cersei apart
  • Their childhood was Eden, a paradise free of shame. They could even dress in each other’s clothes. No one could tell. Their identities were open
  • The change, the Fall, was not created by them but by the expectations of the world around them. We were alike; they made us different. Jaime got a sword; Cersei asked what she got. This is a defining moment for Cersei’s character, as with “if I am ever queen I’ll make them love me” for Sansa
  • Jaime was to be granted the tools of agency, power over himself and others. Cersei was to be treated like she was merely one of those tools
  • I think George does a great job here of capturing how individual lives and the systems around them intersect in a chicken-and-the-egg sort of way
  • Did the patriarchy create Cersei Lannister? Yes, but she also created herself in her reaction to the patriarchy, her desire to imitate it
  • Cersei is both victim and abuser, sympathetic in terms of the world she was born into but unsympathetic in terms of what she has made of it
  • Both Tyrion on the battlefield and Cersei in this room contrast themselves with Jaime. Jaime was the one who got to live his life, out there with the swords, and all they could do was listen wistfully as he told them about it
  • But where did that lead Jaime? To a cell underneath Riverrun, where he confesses that his Perfect Manly life never made any sense to him at all. Robert wasn’t happy with kingship, despite his physical power over Cersei
  • If Cersei could understand that, then she might understand that running the world through fear is the original sin, and love is the only way out
  • Instead, she reaches the conclusion that power is identical to happiness. Powerful men must be happy, and have denied that satisfaction to her
  • When it comes to swords, she says, she’s just a woman after all. Cersei has never found a way to be proud as “just a woman.” Will Sansa?
  • You’ve been pointing out so well how George has Sansa balance her naivete, her love of chivalry with her growing maturation and knowledge of the real world. She’s starting to see beyond the surface, knowing that sometimes bad people are beautiful.
  • Here, we see that Cersei, much like her Robert’s Rebellion fellows, has had her development arrested by the traumas of her youth.
  • Because Robert wasn’t actually happy being an abusive alcoholic. Tywin doesn’t seem all that happy with the power he’s accumulated.
  • But Cersei can only see the glittering surface. Robert atop the Iron Throne, her lord father in gleaming, golden armor.
  • But underneath that surface, that adulthood, these are sad teenagers who react to their own traumas, who are desperately lonely at the top.
  • Love can certainly be a sweet poison as Cersei told Sansa back in Sansa IV, but the thing is that going all-in on fear isn’t the answer either.
  • Again, you have to be Ned Stark, balancing a father’s face and a lordly face.
• Ser Ilyn
  • Throughout the chapter, George is exploring the tension between the surface appearance of peace and the hidden realities of war
  • Even as Cersei drinks, she looks more and more the part of the queen, her cheeks flushed a rosy red. But her eyes give her away: eyes of wildfire
  • As the chapter begins, she’s already betraying what will be her fatal flaw in leadership: fixating on Joffrey’s personal safety at the expense of all else
  • It’s not even rational, as Lancel desperately tries to point out to her in Sansa’s next chapter. Pulling Joffrey back makes it harder to hold the city due to collapsing morale, increasing the odds Stannis wins and kills Joff
  • But Cersei’s not thinking rationally right now: fear, anger, and above all booze are clouding her mind. Her behavior is wildly inconsistent
  • She accuses Sansa of treason with one breath and then talks as though she’s still going to marry Joffrey with the other
  • As the chapter ends, she threatens Sansa’s life with execution by Ilyn Payne should Stannis prove victorious. It’s a skin-crawling moment
  • Cersei’s nihilism, her inability to see anyone else as anything more than a pawn to be sacrificed for pride and spite, reminds me of the Mad King. I shudder when Cersei brushes Sansa’s hair aside for Ilyn to strike…
  • ...but in Sansa VII, Cersei flees without so much as glancing at Sansa. So while on first read, I was afraid for Sansa’s life, the tone felt different on reread. It was oddly pathetic: Cersei insisting on still having some power
  • She doesn’t even care about executing Sansa so much as reassuring herself that she could if she wanted to; she is still in charge around here
  • That mixture of aggressiveness and pettiness reminds us that being powerful is not the same as being strong; we can see that in the present day, with how fragile Trump is even/especially at his most dangerous. We use power to bolster our ego. What will that ego do to hold onto power?
  • It’s petty nihilism without teeth. Cersei can’t bear the thought of other people living on if she falls.
  • She wants it to be a suicide pact - unwitting to everyone but her, Ilyn and now Sansa - but as you said, it’s pathetic, because she doesn’t have the actual power, and she doesn’t have the will to carry it out when she thinks the fall of her house is at hand in Sansa VII.
  • Still, there’s drying blood on Ilyn Payne’s sword. But it’s not his sword. It’s Ned’s Ice that was stolen by the Lannisters.
  • When I think about Ice, I think about Ned using it against Gared back in Bran’s first chapter in AGOT.
  • And though Sandor claimed that Ned loved killing, we know that’s not true as we find Ned cleaning Ice and spending time in prayer in front of the Winterfell heart tree in Catelyn’s first AGOT chapter.
  • Then, it was as if Ned was going for an “Out, damned spot” of cleaning  from Ice long after his blade is free of blood.
  • All the while, Ned cleansed his soul with prayer.
  • Here, though, Ilyn Payne is one such person who Sandor Clegane is right about. He loves killing. He loves it so much that he lets the blood of innocent people linger on it.
  • Ilyn lives for killing and despite being the King’s Justice, he doesn’t kill reluctantly like Ned does to satiate justice. He’s a killer who loves the sword for itself.
  • Ilyn Payne has profaned the blade with the blood of innocents, and he is willing to do it again and kill more innocents like Sansa if Cersei orders it.

Tyrion XIV

• The King’s Gate Charge
  • Tyrion XIV opens with some fabulous wording by George talking about how Tyrion’s vision is limited to only what’s in front of him which speaks to the entirety of Tyrion’s arc in ACOK: his vision has only been limited to figuring out a solution to today’s problem, all the while knowing that the long-term problem remains Joffrey and the even longer term problem is the illegitimate Lannister cause in totality.
  • He also can’t see Mandon Moore’s betrayal coming until it’s almost too late. As the chapter begins, he sees Moore at his side, dead eyes under white armor like a ghost, an angel of death waiting for him to grow weak
  • Thankfully, he has Pod on his other side. Doom and deliverance, a false knight and a true squire; Tyrion walks on a knife’s edge between them all
  • Kudos to Tyrion for trying to send Pod back. One on one, he can still try to do the right thing. But brave Podrick refuses, and good thing he does!
  • Tyrion sees three landing vessels have beached and another ship was providing support by fire with its catapult for Stannis’ men landing.
  • What this means is the catapult is suppressing Lannister artillery and archers on the wall, allowing for Stannis’ men to move to the King’s Gate under cover.
  • Tyrion orders his men to move in a wedge. If you’ve never played anything in the Total War series, you might not know what this is. It’s basically a triangle-shape.
  • Why use it? Because it brings the maximum amount of force to bear on the center of the enemy line and engage all elements across the line in sequence, thus not allowing the enemy to form a cohesive defense.
  • George describes their movement as “knee-to-knee” which indicates that they’re tightly-packed together.
  • Given how thin the strand of land is between the Wall and the Blackwater, they’re probably doing this out of necessity so as not to have horses charging into walls or into the river.
  • It also applies the full combat force of cavalry trying to drive Stannis’ men into the river or into the ground
  • Tyrion takes the lead atop his red horse with Mandon Moore, looking like a ghost mounted on a black horse to his right with Podrick on his left. Fire and blood imagery right there.
  • The approach to the King’s Gate is a tough one, and we see the extent of what Sandor was facing on his sorties.
  • The gate was being rammed, and Stannis’ ships and archers were shooting at anyone who popped up.
  • Tyrion orders the cavalrymen to move to lances -- a lance being a long wooden instrument with a metal point at the end.
  • Given that tight formation, the lances probably were held underarm (George is borrowing from real-world history here with his knights holding their lances in French or German style)
  • Stannis’ men recognize the danger only at the last minute and try to form a line to repel Tyrion’s charge, but it’s too late. The Lannister cavalry cuts through the Baratheons and forces
  • Lances extend the range of the Lannisters to deliver death blows to the Baratheons, though Tyrion himself draws an axe and Mandon, after impaling a Baratheon soldier with the king’s banner (No symbolism detected), draws his sword.
  • The Baratheons flee to the east away from Tyrion’s charge, and Tyrion keeps his cavalry in pursuit.
  • George has to strike the balance here between the pleasure of reading a plan unfold and capturing the fog of war as chaos overtakes all the plans
  • Everything moves faster on the battlefield. The wedge formation comes together like a divine lightning bolt, but comes apart just as quickly
  • In the middle of fighting, Tyrion’s brain will pause to take in the cheers from the wall, or wonder what Shagga would’ve made of all this
  • Tyrion’s focus is all over the place, but that changes as he charges onward and the battle fever takes over
• The Mud Gate Charge
  • Tyrion compares battle fever to the feeling of being drunk, and I love this.
  • When I knock back a few IPAs (the king of beers), I feel more of myself than before. Words and thoughts and actions come naturally, and I feel more alive than usual.
  • Tyrion’s battle fever is one in which his actions flow organically -- as if it’s an unconscious movement of his limbs.
  • I love that line where Tyrion raises his axe to the stars and hears them call back to him “Halfman! Halfman!”
  • That said, Part of Tyrion’s feeling here is a fever borne of feeling perhaps for the first time like that people like him, rather than grovel to him because he’s Tywin’s son.
  • Tyrion has earned the admiration of the men he’s leading into battle, and that gratifies in a way that’s hard for him to quantify.
  • It’s a bittersweet moment when Tyrion’s men cheer “Halfman!” and he wonders who taught them that. It wasn’t him! But it should’ve been
  • I said earlier that Cersei has simultaneously inherited and invented her cage, and the same holds for Tyrion. To a large degree, his reputation is out of his hands. He’s been called a monster from birth, a punishment sent from the gods to humble the father who transparently hates his guts
  • Tyrion doesn’t need Varys to tell him that power resides where men believe it resides. Everyone sees him as a villain, so he’ll become one
  • It feels like an inevitable outcome, a law of thermodynamics: you become your mask. Who are we but the person we are in the eye of the beholder?
  • After his fall from power, after his family openly turns against him at last, Tyrion will confess (if only to us) that he thinks we are all powerless:
    • It all goes back and back ... to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads.
  • That’s an authentic statement of the human condition. It is also an attempt to avoid reckoning with Tyrion’s own choices in the face of fate
  • Those men shouting “Halfman!” is a brief glimpse of a different mask for Tyrion to wear: that of a war hero who overcame obstacles to win the day
  • Tyrion was convinced, in ways that were large and small but uniformly brutal, that he cannot be loved, that his public image is out of his control
  • This has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because Tyrion thinks he can’t have a good reputation, he guarantees that he won’t have one; he fails to cultivate the positive public image of the Halfman to counter the Imp
  • We already saw this in action during the bread riots:
    • "Yes, and I am a monster besides, hideous and misshapen, never forget that."
  • Tyrion’s alienation from a world that hates him for circumstances beyond his control is sympathetic. But just as Cersei remade herself in the image of patriarchy, Tyrion takes rejection as a given. It's the only taste he knows
  • It all comes back to their parents, as Tyrion said; to their origins. Yet his own decisions have still contributed to the spiderweb in which he is stuck
  • This is also where George mirrors the writing to Tyrion’s mental state.
  • Instead of a movement of armies, men, pieces on a chessboard, George opts for an impressionistic and episodic storytelling.
  • We’re deep into Tyrion’s headspace, and it’s a ride.
  • In that vein, we get the sensory experience: especially the sights and sounds of war. The war horns and screams of wounded and dying men, the smoke and fire.
  • Tyrion notes that most of his original attack party is now dead or fled, leaving only a small group to make the move east towards the mud gate.
  • Most of Stannis’ army that Tyrion encounters are survivors from the wildfire explosion, and Tyrion kills many of them.
  • Here, though, George flip-flops between the glory of war and the horror with Tyrion’s battle fever and bravery intermingling with things like the knight who offers his gauntlet as a token of submission only for Tyrion to discover that it was actually his severed hand he was offering in submission.
  • George’s writing achieves mastery here. As Updike said about Nabokov, he “writes prose the only way it should be written: that is, ecstatically.”
  • The collision of elemental awe, gut-level carnage, and Tyrion’s steadily warping perspective produce a sort of double vision. It’s an enchantment of Tyrion’s thought process that George reflects in the style
  • Tyrion is both inside his body, the meatshell at high risk of death, and outside his body, as an immortal soul reveling in existence itself
  • At first, the body’s fear paralyzes him. The very fires he unleashed are hemming him in; he understands too late why Sandor was afraid
  • The battle strategy that unfolded a thousand times in his mind’s eye has unraveled, robbing him of his secure foundation: the illusion of control
  • It’s replaced by the world as it appears when you first step outside Plato’s Cave: you are an ant and God is a boot. Oh look, a ship just exploded! Which side was it on? Who knows? Who cares?
  • The borders between the sides have blurred. Both sides wield fire, both sides are a threat to civilians, and now Tyrion literally can’t tell them apart
  • The war is now its own entity with its own logic, like that wildfire Balrog that burst into being in the sky. It’s a mouth eating everyone alive
  • Tyrion thinks that he should have turned back, echoing the opening lines of the story...but as in the Prologue to AGOT, it’s already too late
  • In order to face the fire, he must purge the part of himself that fears, and with it, the part of himself that cares. He guides his horse forward, representing his will’s domination of the terrified animal body
  • The industrial purge of war has stripped Tyrion of his favorite weapon, rational thought, and taken him back to the primitive
  • It’s the arc of the human mind laid out in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Intelligence is linked to the evolution of warcraft, which then returns us to a place before (and beyond) the ego that allowed the process to begin. George’s mental map of the battle fever is psychologically resonant
  • Tyrion transcends, not through shade of the evening nor literal blood sacrifice, but by unlocking a side of himself hidden even from himself
  • The part of Tyrion’s brain where he consciously hangs out loves books, the world of the evolved human imaginary, but another part of him is still conditioned to kill or be killed. That part is connected to the uncanny, the intuitive and instinctive. It’s that part of him that shivered at the memory of a wolf’s howl in the North; he’d rubbed elbows with the unknown
  • The war shrinks to Tyrion’s eyeslit. Only the miracle of his ongoing existence matters, and he secures that miracle through bloodshed
  • His enemies are no match for him. This is in part because, as you say, they’ve just made it out of the hellish wildfire inferno; they’re in bad shape
  • But it’s also because Tyrion has entered a different state of mind, in which the knights that always loomed above him suddenly appear small
  • Tyrion salutes the stars and hears them call “halfman” back. It’s a hallucinatory moment in which Tyrion feels at one with the cosmos; his family and society never approved of him, but the universe itself does
  • Tyrion recalls what Jaime told him of the battle fever. Physical pain seems to vanish and time slows to a crawl. Your self-awareness itself is gone
  • As Jaime said: you stop being you. It’s an almost Zen state of enlightenment in which the fears and desires of the ego are purged
  • Tyrion has lived his life on the mind side of the classical mind-body divide; now, for the first time since Tywin ripped Tysha away from him, Tyrion does not hate his own body. He accepts being “half a man,” because getting “drunk with slaughter” has temporarily unburdened him of shame. For once, I’m happy to be alive. So therefore, I am not afraid to die.
  • It’s remarkable that George is able to capture this fierce joy in combat even as he expresses his antiwar sentiments; it’s doubly remarkable because George has never himself experienced the battle fever
  • Amidst war, Tyrion has ironically achieved a state of peace...but it can’t last. As you said, the knight without a hand transforms the tone once more
  • This knight is playing by the rules of chivalry, the idea that common humanity should persist even when everyone’s trying to kill each other
  • He’s yielding in the name of that humanity, begging for mercy from his enemy Tyrion, who the knight came here to overthrow and execute
  • Despite the battle fever, Tyrion is willing to play by those rules. He reaches down to accept the gauntlet of surrender. It seems that mercy still holds…
  • ...and then comes another burst of wildfire, illuminating the scene, and Tyrion realizes what he’s looking at. That’s not water beneath the man, that’s blood. That’s not just his gauntlet, it’s his severed hand
  • What appeared to be an image of humanity persisting in war has now been revealed as an image of war stripping away our humanity
  • You can see this as a metaphor for George’s overall storytelling strategies. He shows you the projected self-image of this society--a soldier yielding with courtesy to the enemy and receiving mercy in turn
  • The wildfire explosion illuminates the scene and reveals the truth, just like the author’s perspective acts like a shaft of light guiding our understanding. Black and white yields to the color that defines ACOK
  • Now we see the truth hidden from us about how this society--and how this story--works. Yielding won’t save this knight, any more than it did Lommy
  • This moment is also a microcosm of Tyrion’s story in particular. He tries to do justice on an individual level, but the wildfire that he himself unleashed shows him the truth: he has contributed to bloodshed and societal decay
  • Tyrion throws back the knight’s hand, out of visceral horror and perhaps also out of guilt for what he’s done. All the knight can do is sob the word “yield,” insisting that the words still carry weight, that the songs and stories were true, even as the evidence to the contrary piles up
  • It is difficult to accept the brutality of man and the indifference of god. Even as this nameless knight bleeds out on the ground, he still wants to believe
  • Amidst all this, Ser Balon Swann’s party joins with Tyrion, and he points out that things are about to become much worse for the Lannisters.
• The Bridge of Ships
  • Back in Tyrion XIII, Tyrion notes that his wildfire plan had not gone off without a hitch as the wildfire spread unevenly and many ships escaped.
  • Recall, too, how Davos talked about how tightly the ships were packed together as they entered the Blackwater Rush. Tyrion had the wildfire go up right at that moment to do the most impact to the fleet.
  • The unintended consequence is that all those ships packed up tight together were good and combat ineffective, but now they’ve formed a bridge of ships that stretches from the south to north bank of the Blackwater.
  • Stannis’ men are now crossing that bridge of ships, meaning that the original idea of denying Stannis the ships to cross the river is now null and void.
  • Well, not totally null and void. As far as bridge crossings go, this bridge is less the Golden Gate and more a “sinking, fiery, creaking and shifting bridge” which might burst apart at any moment.
  • And yet, Stannis’ men are crossing it, despite the danger.
  • As far as I overthink and overanalyze things, this is one of those spots where I wrestle with whether this was a directed movement, ordered by Stannis or his subordinate leaders taking the initiative to cross.
  • Given that Tyrion notes that it’s hundreds of men crossing, I do wonder whether this order came from the top.
  • At the same time, holy shit. These dudes are crossing a burning bridge of ships, with one knight even trying to get his horse across to try to win one for the Gipper, I mean Stannis.
  • It’s an early beat of that Asha line about how the common men had faith in their king.
  • For his part, Tyrion is overcome with the heroism of his enemy, though he does think they should go and kill them.
  • Every step of the way, George pairs Tyrion’s growing battle fever and the evolving stakes of the fight with imagery to match
  • ACOK has been a story told in colors, and this is the climactic moment for the book’s protagonist, so Tyrion XIV sears the visuals into your mind
  • Balon’s white cloak has been saturated with smoke and soaked in blood, all the purity gone. The battling black and white swans of his heraldry stand out: the duality of man, the blurring borders of war, like the innermost doors of the House of the Undying
  • The river is a riotous rainbow of death: black water, boiling blood, geysers of flame, the sky reflecting red and orange and green like divine light
  • It’s an expert fusion of realism and impressionism. The intestinal churn of medieval combat comes together with a painterly display of the elements
  • The ethos behind this aesthetic is George’s understanding of war as an idealized state achieved through the basest of means. His most sublime artistic achievement so far is made of mud, blood, guts, and screams
  • The burning bridge of boats is a perfect statement of purpose. Our more evolved sensibilities flinch from the sheer horror of this, but our lizard brains go fuck yeah. That’s why action movies are what they are!
  • Along the same lines, the Baratheon men crossing the burning bridge are framed as being both unbelievably brave and unbelievably dumb
  • Tyrion’s own reaction speaks to this irreducible duality: he’s both sickened and giddy. He admires those men, and now rides forth to kill them
  • In the crucible of war, rational structures are forced into contact with the irrational and the unknown, captured in the image of the burning bridge. Tyrion metaphorically burned bridges with the wildfire; now he pays for it
  • The Lannisters charge into the mass of Stannis’ bravest coming at them, Balon Swann loses his horse, and then Tyrion loses his.
  • Again, George opts for a dreamy impressionism in describing this particular part of the battle. Tyrion kills his horse after it lames, he somehow grabs a spear and kills and wounds more Baratheons, Mandon Moore and Balon Swann fight back to back with Tyrion.
  • Tyrion sees that the two kingsguard make the battle a dance as they kill away at a mass of Velaryon spearmen.
  • Even here, George wants us to be aware of the class distinction in the fighting styles and armor of the kingsguard vs the Velaryons.
  • They can twirl around in a dance, because they’ve been brought up in arms from an early age, and their gilded white armor protects them, makes them nigh invincible. No such luck for these likely-smallfolk Velaryons.
  • Tyrion does contrast the dance to himself, noting that he’s clumsy and awkward -- the subtle distinction is similar to what we saw with Cersei before. He’s contrasting himself to Jaime - another man who learned the sword when Tyrion did not.
  • More chaos ensues with Lannister trebuchets targeting the bridge of ships. A naked man falls and bursts above Tyrion’s head - very likely one of the antler men.
  • Chaos takes over at this point. Tyrion’s glorious ride ends with him charging headlong into the burning bridge, and “madness followed.”
  • Tyrion’s linear thought process fragments. He can’t really internalize what’s happening any longer, and George represents that as a stream of images, highlighted by grace notes of sheer obscenity: the scream of the horse and the rush of its blood, an antler man falling from the sky
  • Every step of the way, Tyrion is covered in blood, to remind him and us of the cost of his actions. It’s all been for Joffrey, and now Joffrey catapults men into the battle to cover Tyrion in the blood of his sins
  • The wonder remains as well as the terror. The white knights of the Kingsguard are there to embody combat as a dance, a martial art
  • But Tyrion’s own killing is a clumsy thing, as he says, eroding the aura of majesty and agency. Life has become brutish, random, and short
  • The artillery proves effective as the bridge of ships starts to tear away. Great news for the Lannister cause. Not so great for Tyrion as he slides into the Blackwater.
  • The ship lists (which means tilt to one side) so severely that Tyrion is forced to climb up it like a mountain.
  • The ship then turns which disorients Tyrion. He reorients himself by using a landmark (the Red Keep) and then looks at the south bank of the Blackwater and sees that there’s fighting on that side too.
  • This is clever on George’s part, because he uses Tyrion’s confusion and dreamlike state to obscure what’s going on south of the Blackwater -- namely: Tywin and the Tyrells have arrived to take Stannis in the rear.
  • It’s another instance of the fog of war serving to obscure the rigid binaries that the war is supposedly all about. The sides are literally switching place in Tyrion’s perspective, and he can’t recognize his own deliverance
  • But then the listing, twisting ship slams into another boat, and Tyrion hears the voice of salvation. Doom.
• Attempted Assassination and the Bravery of Podrick Payne
  • Tyrion’s arc in ACOK is one in which he spends the entirety of his story propping up his monstrous nephew, keeping him in power and protecting King’s Landing - especially the elites - from the horrors of Stannis.
  • So, it’s only natural that his arc culminates here with getting rewarded by nearly getting fragged by one of those elites.
  • The voice is Mandon Moore aboard the next vessel over. The ships slam together, and Mandon offers his hand.
  • It’s the wrong hand, though. It’s the left hand he’s offering, and Tyrion knows that something is wrong about that.
  • Is this symbolic on George’s part? Is Tyrion the wrong hand here when Tywin is the true hand of the king?
  • Still, Tyrion’s feeling that something is wrong probably saves his life as Mandon Moore brings his sword down on Tyrion with his right hand as Tyrion is flinching away.
  • The cut should have severed his head. Instead, it takes him just below the eye.
  • Tyrion falls into the Blackwater, his eyes and mouth filling with blood and water. He grabs ahold of an oar and somehow hoists himself up onto the deck of the ship.
  • He rolls over onto his back and sees all the horrible beauty of green and orange flame between the stars. And then Mandon obscures his view.
  • The way George writes Mandon is chilling: The knight was a white steel shadow, his eyes shining darkly behind his helm.
  • Like Ilyn Payne from Sansa V, Mandon Moore is all about this killing and not the justice or injustice of war. It feels good to him as he puts the sword point against Tyrion’s neck.
  • It’s also chilling, because this is Tyrion’s narrative payoff. All that fucking work he put in to prop up his family: this is its denoument.
  • George wants us to feel ambiguous about Tyrion’s ACOK arc, and I think he succeeds by showing us that Tyrion has attempted (small) amounts of justice but is ultimately propping up a bad king.
  • But here, George wants us to know that everything is still rotten, and he treats Tyrion like the frog and Mandon Moore like the scorpion from the scorpion and the frog parable.
  • It’s in Mandon Moore’s nature, in the nobility-at-large’s nature to lash out at those they deem unworthy due to societal, or in Tyrion’s case, physical defect.
  • And now that they’ve squeezed as much juice as they can from Tyrion, he can be discarded.
  • Tyrion is swept downriver toward his own hellish trap. The protagonist of this book about power is about to die as a result of his own master plan
  • And even when his power seems suddenly to save him, with a Kingsguard knight calling out “my lord” and holding his hand, it almost gets him killed
  • Mandon Moore appears at first to be the very soul of chivalry, risking his life to pull Tyrion back from the brink. Tyrion comes close to falling for it
  • But there’s something off. Again George’s use of color is at its best--the yellow and green of fire, the red of blood, the black water--which only emphasizes Tyrion’s realization that one visual detail doesn’t add up
  • Moore is using his left hand. As you say, it’s an ironic image given Tyrion’s role as acting Hand, which is about to yield to Tywin, who just arrived
  • It also speaks to the hidden and traitorous nature of what he’s doing. Everything is reversed, as the guardian becomes the assassin
  • As with the Baratheon knight and his hand earlier, this moment is all about the surface appearance of this society and the stories it tells itself versus the reality of what it is like to take and hold power in Westeros
  • The appearance: Mandon Moore as the savior, a literal white knight. The reality: his sword slashing across Tyrion’s face. This is Tyrion’s downfall
  • Tyrion’s arc in this book has unfolded in a contrapuntal fashion to Ned’s arc in book one. He rides into King’s Landing determined to learn from his predecessor’s downfall; we as readers are engaged in the same process
  • Thinking about them as contrapuntal melodies within the Song of Ice and Fire, that means Tyrion’s chapters ultimately harmonize with Ned’s
  • It’s the same story told through a slanted mirror. Tyrion makes his own version of Ned’s mistakes, the wheel of time filtered through his own arc
  • Ned gave away his own men and gambled on Littlefinger, to his doom. Tyrion sent away his clansmen and is saved only by Pod, who he tried to send back at the start of this battle. Is he really in control of any of this?
  • Ned also had fifteen chapters, and in his fourteenth chapter, he experienced his downfall in the throne room. He, too, had a blade turned on him by someone he considered an ally
  • Tyrion makes it to the next book alive, which Ned didn’t. But for all that Tyrion is a more cutthroat ambitious politician than Ned, Tyrion’s survival doesn’t have much to do with his own decisions
  • He lives because he pulled back at the last second. That’s the difference between him and Ned, and he admits he doesn’t know why he did it
  • Was it because he saw the trickery at work, making him wiser than Ned, who was fooled by Littlefinger? Or was it just because he saw the sword?
  • He’ll never know, partially bc his face was subsequently sliced apart, but also bc it happened so quickly, instinctively, in the stress of combat
  • Either way, Tyrion has been exposed to the bitter reality beneath the white cloak and the rainbow of fire: men are meat. Per Naked Lunch:
    • All agents defect, and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth … A writer lives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is, he files a report on it.
  • Quite a cynical view of politics from George here, but as always, George balances the cynicism with his romantic heart.
  • Just before Mandon can finish the deed, the unlikeliest of heroes enters stage left.
  • Podrick Payne, Tyrion’s squire and the least of House Payne, pushes Mandon Moore over the side of the ship and saves Tyrion.
  • It’s absolutely heartbreaking that Tyrion first thinks that Jaime saved him, because who else would save him except Jaime?
  • Tyrion’s void is that he’s internalized how the world sees him and thinks that only one person actually loves him: his brother Jaime.
  • How wrenching it is that in ASOS, Tyrion’s faith that the one person who loves him will be ripped to shreds by Jaime’s revelation about Tysha.
  • Blood fills his mouth as Podrick Payne keeps Tyrion safe. The least of these saved Tyrion from the greatest of these.
  • George closes Tyrion’s chapter on a cliffhanger about whether he lives or dies.
  • Really well said about how George balances this moment. This whole chapter has been about colliding opposites. The two sides of the battle get confused; the two sides of the river get confused; the battle is both glorious and grotesque; the style is both grounded and impressionistic
  • In the middle of all this, Tyrion gets one moment on his back to admire the balls of fire streaking like celestial objects in flight across the sky
  • He’s the lord of both creation and destruction, killing thousands to birth a  beauty that is now about to claim him as well
  • And then as you say, Mandon is annihilated by his opposite. Podrick is squire rather than a knight, burdened by emotion rather than empty of it, loyal to Tyrion rather than selling him out. They rode out on either side of him. They even have alliterative names in common: MM and PP
  • George restores romanticism right after ripping it away, finding it within an unlikely source and so framing it as earned, rather than merely performed
  • Tyrion makes it out of the chapter, but I agree about the lingering heartbreak in his assumption that no one but Jaime would save him
  • He’s going to wake up in Tywin’s world, a world in which he is once again all alone, and so Podrick has saved his body, but cannot save his soul

Foreshadowing/Groundwork

Cersei will be more and more into wildfire as the series continues.

Sansa will indeed rule as queen through love, if Season 8 holds true in this regard

Podrick Payne always searching for Tyrion to help/rescue him becomes a major theme in AFFC in Brienne’s arc. At this point, George was not planning on Brienne becoming a POV character, but I think he went back to the work he started with Tyrion and Podrick and made it one of the features of Brienne’s arc.

Theory/Discussion

Who ordered Mandon Moore to assassinate Tyrion?

• The case for Joffrey
  • Of the three major candidates, I think Cersei is the least likely. Tyrion assumes it’s her, and she never thinks about it as a POV; moreover, Tyrion currently holds Tommen as a hostage against her (or so she thinks)
  • I think Littlefinger is more likely. A couple factors give me pause, however. I don’t buy the idea that Mandon Moore acted in Vardis Egen’s name
  • Mandon Moore’s whole characterization is that he’s a corpse-like man, lacking any feelings or motivations of his own. He has no friends, as Varys notes; his whole life was as a hired killer. He wouldn't act for vengeance
  • And that IMO makes him an unlikely catspaw for Littlefinger. Unlike the Kettleblacks, Mandon isn’t looking to move up. He’s already where he wants to be. What could Littlefinger use as leverage?
  • So that leads me to Joffrey. Mandon is in his Kingsguard. Joffrey wants revenge on Tyrion for slapping him during the riot. There’s a terrific irony at work given how hard Tyrion is working to keep Joffrey safe during the battle. For me, this sums up the contradictions of Tyrion’s arc in this book
• The case for Littlefinger
  • I agree that Cersei is unlikely. Another character tossed in the mix is Varys, and I think he’s even less likely as I think Varys has plans for Aegon-centric plans for Tyrion down the road, or at least a “divide the Lannisters” plan by playing Tyrion and Cersei off against each other down the road.
  • I see the case for Joffrey as he has motivation and leverage over Mandon Moore to order the deed.
  • Furthermore, S03’s “The Climb” has Tyrion confronting Joffrey over Mandon Moore, and the impression we’re left from the show is that Joffrey was behind the deed.
  • But I’m going to argue for Littlefinger here, and I’m basing my argument mostly on redditor galanix’s argument from 2013.
  • I agree with you that Mandon Moore probably wasn’t seeking to avenge Vardis Egen, because you said: he has no friends and is only interested in Vardis insofar as Tyrion threatens Mandon by saying “Hey, this Bronn. He killed Vardis. You gonna let me through the door?”
  • What I think is a strong motivation, though, is that Tyrion pricks Mandon Moore’s pride, and in steps Littlefinger with a means to satiate said wounded pride.
  • Littlefinger and Mandon Moore both hail from the Vale, and we learn that Mandon and Littlefinger were both brought to court by Jon Arryn.
  • But those are tertiary points. The main point is that Littlefinger has every reason to try to kill Tyrion.
  • For one, Littlefinger is quite aware that Tyrion knows that Littlefinger tried to frame him for the catspaw dagger.
  • As we discussed back in Tyrion IV, Tyrion tells Littlefinger that he’ll give Lysa Arryn Jon Arryn’s true killer.
  • This makes Littlefinger sit up, very interested. He thinks that Tyrion is cued in on his role in murdering Jon Arryn. Or at least, he’s on his trail. And that makes him very nervous.
  • Moreover, Tyrion also played Littlefinger falsely in feigning to gift him Harrenhal in exchange for keeping his secret about where he plans to send Myrcella.
  • And we also have this whole thing where Littlefinger’s MO is trying to kill Tyrion on the sly. Remember how Littlefinger falsely claimed that the catspaw dagger was Tyrion’s? Recall that later in ASOS, Littlefinger will all-but-frame Tyrion in Joffrey’s murder?
  • Framing or trying to kill Tyrion is a #mood for Littlefinger. He uses catspaws to get it done, and he has good reason to do it.
  • Now, the one weakness of the theory is how does Littlefinger communicate to Mandon Moore when he’s outside of the city?
  • For that, I would note that Littlefinger is either in communication with Dontos Hollard or has left him instructions.
  • I think the same applies with LIttlefinger to Mandon Moore: he’s either somehow in touch with him or has left him instructions (kill Tyrion in the midst of battle). I think the latter is more likely.

Conclusion

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