One Of The Saddest Little Moments To Me Of ADWD Is The Short Conversation Between Asha And Alysane Mormont

One of the saddest little moments to me of ADWD is the short conversation between Asha and Alysane Mormont in “The King’s Prize”. Asha is at a pretty low point in that chapter, personally and politically. Her ankle broken during the skirmish outside Deepwood Motte, all but a few of her men slain, herself taken captive and paraded in chains in the midst of Stannis’ host, Asha knows that she’s been defeated. She is trapped among people who either want her for her claim to Pyke or despise her as the kraken’s daughter, the living symbol of ironborn invasion into the North, yet she is powerless to both; her army is gone, and her defeats have too clearly marked her a failure in ironborn eyes.

In this nadir of her career and life, Asha’s thoughts turn to Theon, and the haunting message sent by Ramsay Snow revealing her brother’s torture. With her father dead, her elder brothers long gone, her mother sunken into a deep depression, and her uncles either disappeared, ruling in her wake, or loyal to the new ironborn regime, Theon is the last of her Greyjoy family left to her. She had failed to convince him to abandon Winterfell before it was burned, and the belief that he had been slain in its sack had weighed upon her through AFFC. Now she knows he is alive - but “[b]etter dead than this” she thinks to herself after reading Ramsay’s bloody missive. Her brother is even more hated than she is, she knows, and the possibility of her ever seeing him alive again is slim.

It is, then, in thinking about Theon that Asha attempts to connect with her warden, the She-Bear Alysane Mormont:

“Do you have brothers?” Asha asked her keeper.

Alysane Mormont hardly makes a likely audience for Asha’s question: the She-Bear had only just sneered that no ironman could be trusted “after what your brother did at Winterfell”. Still, with only Alysane as a more or less constant companion, Asha’s choices for a conversation partner are slim. “[A]lone among five thousand foes”, even more alone thinking about her lost band and little brother, Asha is reaching out for some human companionship, even if it is with the gruff and ferocious She-Bear. 

Of course, Alysane corrects her immediately:

“Sisters,” Alysane Mormont replied, gruff as ever. “Five, we were. All girls. Lyanna is back on Bear Island. Lyra and Jory are with our mother. Dacey was murdered.”

Alysane’s insistence on underlining that all five children of Lady Maege were girls almost seems targeted toward spiting Asha’s question; how foolish of you to think there must be a brother somewhere, the words might suggest, we are tough enough as she-bears, daughters of a ruling lady. But Asha picks up on Alysane’s last note, and it’s in her response that the conversation changes dramatically.

“The Red Wedding.”

“Aye.” Alysane stared at Asha for a moment. “I have a son. He’s only two. My daughter’s nine.”

In a single phrase, Asha has begun to pry open the firmly shut gates around Alysane Mormont. She’s hit upon exactly the right answer, not only factually but emotionally. While Alysane was laser-focused on the ironborn’s falsity and treachery, and saw Asha only as a representation of her culture, Asha has reminded her that there are other enemies for House Mormont beyond the men of the Iron Islands. The Red Wedding was not just a horrific event, but a tragedy at which northmen killed other northmen; the Boltons and their followers had slain Flints and Ryswells, Norreys and Lockes, their own neighbors and countrymen. 

This is the moment Alysane starts to see Asha as a person, rather than merely an other standing on behalf of an evil idea. If not all northmen could be allies - and the Red Wedding had been the awful proof of that - then perhaps not all ironborn were enemies either. Asha did not gloat in the death of a Mormont, her family’s ancient foes; indeed, in knowing and naming the massacre at which so many good northmen were slain, Asha had almost (if unknowingly) echoed that “the North remembers” spirit voiced by Wyman Manderly and Barbrey Dustin. It’s not a friendship - there’s still too much distrust, too many long years of bloodshed on both sides for anything like that - but a beginning of something other than hate and mutual wariness.

So Alysane, unprompted, offers more of herself to the captive Asha. She’s not simply a Mormont in a strong-blooded clan of fierce Mormont women, but a mother to little children. She is the terrifying She-Bear in battle, clad always in mail to be ready for an attack, but here she hints at a gentler side to her - a toddler son and young daughter waiting for her at the Mormont keep, still wrapped in the innocence of childhood. Alysane might not have a brother, but she does have a family of her own besides her three living sisters, and admitting to this allows her to creep toward a bridge of sympathy with Asha. They are both here on behalf of their families, not simply dynastically but personally; they are responsible (or at least, for Asha, feel responsible) for their young kin, and will fight to keep them safe.

Feeling the start of this bridge, Asha presses forward on the topic of family:

“You started young.”

“Too young. But better that than wait too late.”

A stab at me, Asha thought, but let it be. 

Again, it’s not a friendship between them - Asha is still a Greyjoy, and Alysane still deeply cautious toward any kraken. Nor does Asha fail to recognize the insult Alysane meant toward her: even among two women whose dynasties care far more about battle prowess than southron ladylike behavior, Alysane is suggesting a woman’s role still inherently involves bearing the next generation - and that a woman like Asha, solidly in her mid-20s but still childless, is quickly losing her chance to do so. But, critically, Asha doesn’t press the point. She will let Aly Mormont have these barbs, because she’s noted something far more valuable about her keeper-companion. Alysane is willing not simply to reveal more about her family, but to criticize her past decisions, namely the decision to have children at such a young age (and indeed, Alysane was probably only in her early teens when her daughter was born, since she is “almost of an age” with the roughly 25-year-old Asha). This is a level of inward revelation Asha might have never guessed she would get from the gruff She-Bear at the beginning of their conversation, nevermind the start of her captivity. For once, Alysane is not showing Asha the tough, boiled leather exterior of her personality, or at least not totally; she, a Mormont of Bear Island, is admitting some degree of mistake in her life to a kraken of Pyke. It’s an amazing moment, one in which the ancient hatreds start to drop away in favor of more personal understandings of one another: Alysane treats Asha not as a Greyjoy to her Mormont, but as a woman to her woman, uniquely capable in that army of men to understand the benefits and sacrifices of starting a family so young.

Moreover, as Asha digs farther into Alysane’s family life, the understanding becomes even more extraordinary:

… “You are wed.”

“No. My children were fathered by a bear.” Alysane smiled. Her teeth were crooked, but there was something ingratiating about that smile. “Mormont women are skinchangers. We turn into bears and find mates in the woods. Everyone knows.”

Alysane is teasing, of course; it seems extremely implausible, even if the Mormont women have skinchanging powers, that human children could be conceived through a supernatural mental process which leaves the human’s own body prostrate and cannot nourish it. Yet the very fact that she is joking, and with Asha of all people, is no short of wondrous. It is a fantastical idea - but Alysane’s “ingratiating” smile and mock-superior note that “everyone knows” this to be a fact are clear indicators that Alysane wants Asha to laugh along with her, not at her. Now, whenever Asha hears someone (like Janos Slynt, who had assumed Maege Mormont “[b]eds down with bears”) mutter about the Mormont women taking bears for lovers, she can smile too. Aly Mormont has let her in on the joke.

For this one singular moment, Mormont and Greyjoy can exist together in peace and even joviality. The centuries of blood between them are put aside, and they are two women sharing a secret jest. Their similarities - inhospitable home islands, martial training and experience, family losses, unexpected thrusting into the position of heiress, the struggle of being both a woman and a warrior - matter far more than their differences here. This is the dream of peace that formed the thesis of Asha’s kingsmoot pitch - northmen and ironborn as allies, not opponents, side by side against common enemies. If the heir to House Mormont and the sometime heiress of House Greyjoy could start to approach something like friendship, then perhaps it would not be so crazy to think that this peace could work.

But then it all goes wrong. Just as Asha was the one who started the opening up, so Asha unwittingly shuts it down:

Asha smiled back. “Mormont women are all fighters too.”

The other woman’s smile faded. “What we are is what you made us. On Bear Island every child learns to fear krakens rising from the sea." 

Just like that, the beautiful dream of healing is shattered, its thousand shards cutting Asha to ribbons. In her excitement over this burgeoning bond between her and Alysane, Asha has inadvertently run directly into a conversational land mine - the grievous, belligerent history between the denizens of Bear Island and those of the Iron Islands. They are both fighters, she and Aly, but as the latter so bluntly points out, the Bear Islanders did not have the luxury of choice in that regard. Asha’s people were the imperialist expansionists, men like Ravos the Raper who made Bear Island a launching point of reaving; Alysane’s were the guardians charged by the old Kings of Winter to defend Bear Island against all comers. Our fighting is not for conquest, Alysane is not so gently reminding Asha, but simply for survival; when we fight, it is so that we and our children are not hauled away in virtual slavery by one enemy or another. It’s a lifestyle in stark contrast to Asha’s, who had received her father’s instruction to take Deepwood Motte by "sweetly” noting that she “always wanted a castle”. 

This is the painful lesson Asha has to learn throughout ADWD. Her kingsmoot speech might have sounded reasonable on face, with its advocating for peace and friendship, but it was a speech built on a false premise. Put simply, the northmen do not want or trust the ironborn as friends. There can be no peace and friendship when their foundation is sacked northern castles, burned northern lands, and the slain bodies of northmen (including two Stark princes). Alysane’s words to Asha are a verbal slap, snapping her into cold reality: we’ve seen what you’ve done, Alysane is telling her in no uncertain terms, and we want none of your fine promises. Asha closed her eyes to the truth of the northmen-ironborn relationship at the kingsmoot, so eager was she for the crown, but here she has to face it for herself; she came so close to a personal connection with Alysane, and nearly succeeded, but Alysane could not ignore “what you made us”, as Asha once could.

i don’t want to achieve equality by sinking to men’s level, i want them to get on ours! why should i have to unlearn the conversational art of waiting my turn, unlearn sexual self-restraint, unlearn trust in others’ good intentions, unlearn the impulse to cater to others’ needs, just to have a chance at success among savages? why can’t the men learn some fucking manners so we can all conduct our affairs in a civilized manner? i shouldn’t have to stop saying sorry, you say sorry!

God yes. Please, give me a close knit group of friends where AT LEAST HALF ARE FEMALE. LIKE YOU KNOW IN REALITY.

“team of people and there’s one girl” is literally the worst trope and I’m Tired of it

maybe my favorite thing about jaime today is that despite his refusal to address the reason why he does things within his own head, he does NOT refuse himself the pleasure of doing or saying or thinking stuff anyways

“I have no idea why I’m thinking about brienne in relation to babies but imma pray for her big stubborn self anyways”

“Imma save you from this bear no wench I won’t be taking criticism at this time”

“Imma give you a dress and say it goes with your eyes and here’s a magic sword and a paper that says you can do whatever you want and some money and a pretty horse no I will NOT accept thanks get out”

“come on wench you should be kissing me rn like rn too don’t you see you should be kissing me it’s like obvious you should be doing just that”

“i’m not interested in you like that wench i’m just making us both share a bath naked and this stiffy is just happenstance”

“did you just talk shit about brienne *fucking slaps the shit talker* *tells him off* *sends him far away* trash ought to be outside i derive no pleasure from this it’s just fact that brienne deserves respect and that is final”

“sitting next to baths is an experience because every time im in proximity to a bath I remember brienne and her thicc legs and wait did you just think I was thinking about you? as if”

“my lady im surprised I didn’t expect to see you so soon that’s the only reason why I just jumped from my chair obvs i knew you’d find the girl i’m your #1 fan but dear gods who the fuck did that to you of course im coming with no biggie”

Jaime “I don’t want to acknowledge I know why I bother” Lannister

Does Satin tower over Jon or is it real manlet hours in the castle black armoury?

I think satin being way taller than Jon is really cute! :D satin is tall and ^__^ towering over tiny jon who looks like he hasn’t slept in a week and wants to take out someone’s kneecaps

alluther: massive wardrobes filled with cheesy couples clothes for every occasion, including the hypothetical. they routinely coordinate their outfits to match and take it Very Seriously. those tooth-rottingly fluffy, corny touristy ‘his and hers’ outfits? they have dozens of them, and save them for special occasions. luther has a ‘if lost return to allison’ coat to correspond to the the ‘i am allison’ jacket allison wears, which she had donatella versace custom-make for them after luther got lost looking for the bathroom when they went to the supermarket together and spent six hours wandering the aisles in a state of increasing panic.

benkliego: a pile of clothes of ambiguous cleanliness on the floor, about waist-high. supposedly, there’s a chair in the middle of that pile, but no one’s ever found it. no one will ever find it. every single article of clothing, save one neon-pink feather boa and one novelty hawaiian shirt, is black or a dark shade of gray. there is never a mix-up that lands ben in klaus’s pants, diego in ben’s hoodie or klaus in diego’s turtleneck, they just… implicitly know whose is whose. each of the three can instinctively find exactly what they’re looking for immediately with minimal searching. they can just Sense where what they’re looking for is.

fiveya: ultra-minimal wardrobe consisting of ten shirts, ten jackets, seven flannels, six sweaters, eight pairs of pants, four suits, two coats, ??? socks, dozens of scarves and gloves, vanya’s One Threadbare Bra, and two bulletproof vests bought by five Just In Case. no shorts. everything is all mixed together. no one can tell what belongs to who. some days five’s shirts are a little tight or his sleeves creep up his arms, and vanya’s hang off of her, and it’s because they’re wearing each other’s clothes and they genuinely didn’t realize until hours later when someone else pointed it out.