ON SIBLINGS, VISERYS & DAENERYS TARGARYEN.

ON SIBLINGS, VISERYS & DAENERYS TARGARYEN.

george r.r. martin, a song of ice and fire. game of thrones (2011). steven berkoff, the fall of the house of usher. the crane wives — never love an anchor. jake55778, the house with the red door. james baldwin, giovanni’s room. the 100 (2014). fear street (2021). succession (2018). pierce brown, red rising.

Sansa whenever she is put into yet another betrothal

From "I love him, Father, I truly truly do" to "If I give him sons, he may come to love me" to "'He was only . . . he was . . .' Kind?" to "She wondered if Lord Robert would shake all through their wedding." to "Please, he doesn't need to love me, just make him like me, just a little, that would be enough for now."

There's something about the discussion around Dany's ending and who gets to have the throne that pushed me to ponder a bit & to come to some semi-conclusions of sorts.

Like for one...does anyone "deserve" a throne ? There's much discussion on who would be the best ruler or who has the best claim but at the center of it all there is maybe this notion of who deserves it. And my critical ass would kind of be like, no one ? No one deserves to rule other men as a feudal ruler. No amount of skill or will or pain or love can give someone that. It always has to be democratic to an extent, to be granted. Does Dany deserve a throne ? No. Neither do all of the other contenders. What she deserves is love, a home, safety, and a throne in Westeros has always been the obvious answer to her to have at least some of that.

On the other hand, there's kind of the idea that Dany will finally be able to rest and find peace when she reaches Westeros, defeats the white walkers and take her place in King's Landing (or elsewhere if it's destroyed)...but from her chapters ruling Meereen and the general view we get of what ruling is through different characters & stories...ruling fucking sucks. Sure, ruling Westeros might be a bit less tourmenting than ruling a foreign city whose culture you're trying to reform against the will of it's most powerful citizens ; but again Dany has never been to Westeros, which is currently massively divided by various conflicts and will take some time to fully recover (and frankly her Essos work looks like it'll need a lot of time too). Ruling is gruelling work, so I frankly have a hard time imagining it being an idyllic ending for Dany, who wants to rest & be a child ; not unless we get into full fairy tale logic. Besides, Dany's ascent would probably bring (progressive) change to Westeros, change that could warrant further conflict.

So i'm not quite sure how Dany's story will end, but I feel it will indeed be bittersweet, by the look of it. Dany is maybe good at ruling and maybe one of the most promising rulers Westeros has ever seen but both the themes of the story around ruling & her own aspiration to rest and to the taste of carelessness & childhood are in conflict with her future no matter what, including if she ascends the throne.

Speaking of Margaery Tyrell, I also drew her for Tyrell Week on twitter. Long may she reign! 🌹

Revisiting the Rat Cook, Part 5: "Those were the only choices"

I usually say that each of these posts will ideally stand alone, but this part is perhaps the "nexus" of this series; every part so far has led up to this, and every part afterward will be built out from this in one way or another. Hopefully this part stands alone too, but it will mean more if you've read the parts so far, because the themes build up. Links to: part one, part two, part three, and part four.

This is Part Five of a prospective 9-part series in which I examine the themes and symbols present in the "Rat Cook" story, as relayed in ASOS Bran IV, and how those elements reappear throughout ASOAIF.

To anyone who is reading this part first, "Revisiting the Rat Cook" is a series that is built on the understanding that GRRM's use of metadiegetic legends provide a "road map" of symbols and meaning, used in their abstract form, which we, as readers, can use to better understand the relationships between symbols, motifs, and themes as they reoccur throughout ASOAIF as a whole. The Rat Cook story is about a rat which eats rats, or a cook who serves kings; The Rat Cook story is about fathers and sons, about cannibalism, about trust, about vengeance, and about damning one's legacy.

"Those were the only choices"

So far in this series, I’ve talked about the repeated instances of turning cannibal, the trust in the social dynamics of guest right, and the significance of “eating rats”. In the last part, I pointed out how the smallfolk are “rats” themselves, and how they are facing the punishment that the Rat Cook faces before committing any sins, apropos of nothing.

In the last part, we saw from the eyes of those ruling and from the survivors of besieged castles how everywhere that people are abused, overlooked, trod upon, or left with no recourse, they must turn to eating rats. We also saw that eating rats is nearly as good as turning cannibal, both because the threat of actual cannibalism follows so closely behind eating rats, and because those smallfolk are, in a way, as low as rats already.

These ideas recall the Rat Cook story, albeit rearranged—the cannibal Rat Cook’s rat form strengthens the associations between eating, rats, eating people, and “eating rats”, the cook and the King… but Old Nan would point out another key element of the “Rat Cook” story, one which is so important that it is given its own line: “A man has a right to vengeance.”

Understanding the Rat Cook’s vengeance in these contexts, however, is difficult when viewing the plight of the starving smallfolk from afar. Ned offers an impersonal recollection of Stannis’ siege, and even Renly’s account is couched in the jest of the young and innocent. Tyrion only sees fleeting glimpses of the starving smallfolk between feasting with the King. Dany receives reports of the displaced freedmen from atop her pyramid. None of these people have borne the weight of these implications and almost none have suffered those same conditions—yet. Their point of view offers an outsider’s perspective on the destitute. Some sympathize, some strategize, some wonder at the state of the world. Even when we read between the lines of Cressen’s omission, or puzzle out the larger movements that lead to such terrible conditions, we’re doing it from the perspective of that nobility… until A Dance With Dragons, Reek I.

Reek really lets us feel it, and offers the most visceral account in the series of eating rats, one which sets the gruesome tone for the book to follow:

Blood ran from the corners of his mouth as he nibbled at the rat with what remained of his teeth, trying to bolt down as much of the warm flesh as he could before the cell was opened. The meat was stringy, but so rich he thought he might be sick. He chewed and swallowed, picking small bones from the holes in his gums where teeth had been yanked out. It hurt to chew, but he was so hungry he could not stop.

Ramsay and Reek are a particularly brutal pairing, and a particularly extreme case between master and subject. However, their case is so extreme that it verges on archetypal, and the relationship between Ramsay and Reek, even in its abnormality, acts as a microcosm of the harsh reality of the relationship that is taken for granted as normal in so many other cases of “lord” and “vassal”. We’ll return to the two of them again to expand on this idea further, but for now our focus is on the personal circumstances that bring someone to eating rats—brutalized, imprisoned, toothless.

Appropriate for a larger metaphor where food is representative of hierarchy, being toothless is being metaphorically without power. Consider how Varamyr-as-wolf perceives weapons with the primitive clarity of an animal brain in the ADWD Prologue:

One had a wooden tooth as tall as he was.

Or how even a child with no agency whatsoever might still try to resist, shown for example in ADWD The Griffin Reborn:

Connington ordered them confined to the west tower, under guard. The girl began to cry at that, and the bastard boy tried to bite the spearman closest to him.

Reek is the archetypal disenfranchised subject: in this moment, Martin makes us notice how even his teeth have been removed, and shows just how powerless someone might feel when they are eating rats. Even in the midst of the act, Reek thinks he might be sick—recalling Sam vomiting while imagining Bannen’s delicious corpse in ASOS Samwell II. Reek gives us a very personal picture of how unpleasant this life is, and yet how even as it “hurt” to chew, “he could not stop”.

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Bran himself offers a much less gruesome insight into the mindset which makes eating rats seem less than objectionable. After having pushed through the worst of the travel and having made it to the relative shelter of the cave, Bran gladly accepts rat as food in ADWD Bran III:

And almost every day they ate blood stew, thickened with barley and onions and chunks of meat. Jojen thought it might be squirrel meat, and Meera said that it was rat. Bran did not care. It was meat and it was good.

At this point, Bran has been faced with the worst possibilities. When it comes to eating rat, he no longer cares. Meat is still meat. If we consider Coldhand’s sow as an even more recent and possibly even present threat, this is doubly true. Bran viewed that meat from Coldhands with harsh suspicion, but now, in comparison to cannibalism, rats are easily the better of two terrible options.

For Bran, though, this is particularly loaded when placed in context to the desperation that Bran and his party faced coming to Bloodraven, and the desperation that still surrounds them in the form of the cold, empty north. Bran does not eat rats of his own accord, he is being served rat by the Children of the Forest. The alternative is to leave the cave and not eat at all, a fate still being experienced by Summer, starved out in the cold. Bran is happy to eat rat, but in truth, he’s being fed this option, and given no other.

That meal, and the unspoken threat of what could be worse, have metaphorical significance: Bran and his party have been led into a situation where there appears to be no other option than to align with the Children of the Forest. He’s happy to eat rat, but does he really have another choice?

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Bran and Reek have two very different experiences regarding the prospect of eating rats, however. Bran “doesn’t care”, and thinks being fed rat meat would be fine; this is an act of complacency, a lack of agency, a surrender to those who hold the power in this scenario—those who are feeding him meat only the starved would eat. Reek, by contrast, takes the rat for himself. He catches that rat despite not being fed at all.

His is an act of finding agency in a place where there is little to be had, and this distinction is not lost on Ramsay, who defines the act not as a surrender to Reek’s conditions, but instead as an act of defiance in ADWD Reek I:

"A rat?" Ramsay's pale eyes glittered in the torchlight. "All the rats in the Dreadfort belong to my lord father. How dare you make a meal of one without my leave."

Of course, Ramsay doesn’t truly need a reason to punish Theon here, and never does. Every affront from Theon is an invented one, and Ramsay wants Theon to suffer regardless of whatever he does. However, in this caricaturish extremity, Ramsay offers a glimpse of the truth of the relationship between the powerful dominating the poor and the powerless.

When Jaime visits the Riverlands in AFFC Jaime IV, he predicts the future state of these people in their ruined lands.

They will be eating rats by winter, unless they can get a harvest in. This late in autumn, the chances of another harvest were not good.

Why are they starving to begin with? What happened to their harvest? We might remember the words of Jaime’s father in AGOT Tyrion IX:

Tell them I want to see the riverlands afire from the Gods Eye to the Red Fork.

They will be reduced to rats by winter because the lords made them that way without reason. Tywin doesn’t even think of them aside from being pieces in a game between a different class of people. The smallfolk of the Riverlands are made to eat rats, as punished as the Rat Cook was following his betrayal of guest right, yet all the smallfolk did was live where they happened to live.

Of course, where they live is on a lord’s land, by his decree, just as the Rat Cook lived by the grace of the King, just as Reek, tortured as he is, lives within the Bolton’s castle—a detail Ramsay does not let Theon forget. “All the rats in the Dreadfort” belong to the lord of the castle, and therein lies the absolute extent of the power of this governance. The dominion of the lord extends as low as to the rats, and the rulers and the enacters of those lords’ wills ultimately decide who eats what and when. Under those terms, even Reek’s pathetic act of desperation is an act of defiance, because he claimed that life for himself.

In a way, he’s not so different from Will, the very first POV of the entirety of ASOIAF, who went to the Wall for poaching:

Will had been a hunter before he joined the Night's Watch. Well, a poacher in truth. Mallister freeriders had caught him red-handed in the Mallisters' own woods, skinning one of the Mallisters' own bucks, and it had been a choice of putting on the black or losing a hand.

The Mallisters own even the deer in the woods, just as Lord Bolton owns even the rat in the dungeons. Will needs to live, though, so he must eat, and so he poaches. Indirectly, Ramsay names Reek a poacher too; conversely, Reek is a poacher because Reek must eat too, because he needs to live.

Reek, despite everything Ramsay has done to him, despite his constant internal narrative that death would be more preferable, is still doing whatever he can to survive, even if it means eating rats, and perhaps—even metaphorically—if it means eating people, too.

Reek, for his part, argues that he has no other choice. It’s not a situation so passive as simply starving. No, as Reek well knows, the rats were eating away at him, first:

"He's been eating rats," said the second boy. "Look." The first boy laughed. "He has. That's funny." I had to. The rats bit him when he slept, gnawing at his fingers and his toes, even at his face, so when he got his hands on one he did not hesitate. Eat or be eaten, those were the only choices. "I did it," he mumbled, "I did, I did, I ate him, they do the same to me, please …"

Considering the other associations of the rat motif we’ve already examined, note how Reek’s thoughts verge into sounding like cannibalism: this isn’t about eating an “it”, he says “I ate him,” instead. In a sense, Reek understands that the rats are his equals, and this is akin to cannibalism, as discussed in the last part. Perhaps we are also being shown the cost of surviving, and how holding onto life whatever the circumstances may require “eating” another, either literally or metaphorically.

Even more potent, the image that Reek gives us of rats chewing away at his body echoes Dany’s vision from the House of the Undying in ACOK Daenerys IV:

In one room, a beautiful woman sprawled naked on the floor while four little men crawled over her. They had rattish pointed faces and tiny pink hands, like the servitor who had brought her the glass of shade. One was pumping between her thighs. Another savaged her breasts, worrying at the nipples with his wet red mouth, tearing and chewing.

This scene has been analyzed deeply elsewhere, so for expediency’s sake I will move forward understanding that the woman represents Westeros, Dany’s kingdom-as-body, assaulted by the five kings at war. To quote the eloquent PoorQuentyn, who said it best: “The kings are assaulting the realm, villains one and all when you zoom out.”

Note, though, how each has “rattish” faces, and are raping and eating her simultaneously. This moment in Dany’s vision consists of all the same imagery that the Rat Cook has been built out of: Kings, rats, and eating—eating the “future”, too, as each of these Kings, as well as Dany herself, hope to later wed this same woman.

The Riverlands are reduced to eating rats because Tywin sets afire the very realm which he is supposedly protecting. Just as the Rat Cook eats his children, just as the Andal King eats his prince, these Kings at war are eating their own realm alive.

Reek, too, is this woman, and is this realm. Before we even understand the extent of Reek’s physical and sexual abuse, we are told how his entire body is bitten at by rats in an identical scene—his fingers, his toes, his face. Reek lies in the Dreadfort’s dungeon, acting out the plight of the smallfolk everywhere, acting out the scene of the woman-as-Westeros.

In light of that comparison, Reek’s reaction to these conditions, as an act of pure survival, of retaliation against the rats who are eating him alive, and of defiance—at least as perceived by his lord—foretells a Westeros, and the people in it, who might come to realize the same truth that Reek has: eat or be eaten, those were the only choices.

With this, we see how the other key element of the Rat Cook story relates to these motifs as we have examined them; Old Nan’s reminder about the Rat Cook feels like a rephrasing of Reek’s realization: “A man has a right to vengeance.”

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If this is the case, we might expect to see that the smallfolk—those driven to eating rats, those living in the body of Westeros itself, bitten by those “rattish” kings—might take up arms themselves, and, like Reek, bite back. Indeed, that is what we begin to see in AFFC and ADWD, as the War of the Five Kings draws to a close and the Faith Militant reach King’s Landing. The smallfolk are driven en masse to the faith, then to arms, and then to the capital.

The people of King’s Landing have been eating rats since ACOK, with some respite following the arrival of the Tyrells. They are still eating rats, though, as we see in ADWD Cersei II, at a point where Cersei is at her absolute lowest:

Cersei tried to walk faster, but soon came up against the backs of the Stars in front of her and had to slow her steps again. A man just ahead was selling skewers of roast meat from a cart, and the procession halted as the Poor Fellows moved him out of the way. The meat looked suspiciously like rat to Cersei's eyes, but the smell of it filled the air, and half the men around them were gnawing away with sticks in hand by the time the street was clear enough for her to resume her trek.

These men are eating rats—evidence of their place as being the lowest of the low in society. Contrary to that position, though, the power dynamic in this scene is entirely reversed: it is Cersei who has reached her absolute nadir here, and these rat-eating men who hold the power.

Cersei wants to escape this moment, she wants to “walk faster” and return to her High Hill. She cannot, because the Stars in front of her are walking slower… but slower still is the rat-skewer cart, which “halts” the procession entirely. This utter nobody of the smallfolk—selling roast rat—is able to completely stand in the way of the Queen’s return to her throne.

Moreover, this power contains the potency of sexual threat and physical abuse. She walks naked and humbled, and these men stare at Cersei while they “gnaw away” at the rats with “sticks in hand”. These sticks might be weapons, the threat of an armed uprising, or they may be phallic, the masturbatory gaze of low men upon the Queen.

The two threats become one as she sees a man who stands out in particular:

"Want some, Your Grace?" one man called out. He was a big, burly brute with pig eyes, a massive gut, and an unkempt black beard that reminded her of Robert. When she looked away in disgust, he flung the skewer at her. It struck her on the leg and tumbled to the street, and the half-cooked meat left a smear of grease and blood down her thigh.

Amidst this crowd of otherwise nameless smallfolk, Cersei saw a man who "reminded her of Robert"—both a former King and her former abuser. He throws the skewer at her, an outright physical threat that results in a smear of “blood down her thigh”, reminiscent of the aftermath of sexual violence.

These men, wielding their rathood as weaponry, are able to metaphorically rape the Queen just as effectively as the “rattish” Kings in Dany’s vision. These should be her subjects to command, and yet in this moment, they hold the exact power that Cersei's former husband and King had over her.

This rathood-as-weapon power is the same tool which the Rat Cook uses as well. His access to the Andal King, and presumably the prince, is purely because of his low status, because therein also lies his threat. It’s significant that this occurs against the backdrop of the Faith Militant dominating the Queen because the Faith Militant—first seen in AFFC pouring out of those same desecrated Riverlands—represents one way that these disenfranchised, starved peoples reclaim agency: through violence.

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With this understanding, we can also return to Stannis’ rat-eating starvation and see it in a new light. The perspective of the siegers themselves—those in power, representing the crown—see the difference too, just as Ramsay sees it in Reek, described in ACOK Catelyn IV:

"Yields?" Lord Rowan laughed. "When Mace Tyrell laid siege to Storm's End, Stannis ate rats rather than open his gates."

Rather than signal his defeat, Stannis eating rats in spite of the feasting enemies at their gates evidenced his refusal to be defeated. Eating rats was more than a sign of desperation, it was also a sign of strength. The men of Storm’s End decided to hold onto life whatever the circumstances. Stannis had two choices: eat rats, or surrender. Eat or be eaten. They ate rats.

Jaime faces the same lesson when he negotiates the Bracken/Blackwood siege in ADWD Jaime I. Knowing how Stannis’ rat-eating is a symbol of strength even as it is a symbol of punishment, we can clearly see how hilariously wrong Jonos Bracken is:

“They're down to rats and roots in there. He'll yield before the next full moon."

This is the exact wording of “roots and rats” that we hear about in the siege of Storm’s End, here in regards to a siege that is so far just as unsuccessful. Given our understanding of what it means to be eating rats, this instead signals their determination not to yield. Jaime gives them generous terms, seemingly ceding this truth.

This is what else the story Rat Cook tells us: how the Rat Cook took vengeance upon a king despite being only a cook—how to exercise power in situations where there seems to be no power to be had. It’s what Manderly’s Rat Cook emulation does, too: fight back. It adds double significance to Manderly requesting a song about the Rat Cook as he stumbles past Theon—it’s not just a jest, it’s a call to action. Reek, too, can be a “rat cook” himself. Even if it must be in secret, creeping in the dark and the dungeons, even if he cannot outright rebel for the threat of being slain, Manderly found his way to fight back nonetheless, just as Stannis did, just as the smallfolk do at the end of Feast/Dance.

As for the Blackwoods, Jaime suspects that even in their besieged state they might be aiding either the Blackfish, the Brotherhood Without Banners, or both. This is fitting, as the Brotherhood Without Banners—longtime defenders of the smallfolk against wolves and lions alike—are “rats” themselves, too, hunted by “dogs” in AFFC Brienne VIII. Thoros of Myr makes the comparison himself:

"What place is this? Is this a dungeon?" "A cave. Like rats, we must run back to our holes when the dogs come sniffing after us, and there are more dogs every day."

Thoros continues, making the connection between the desperation of rats and the resolve that it brings even more explicit:

“This is a cave, not a temple. When men must live like rats in the dark beneath the earth, they soon run out of pity, as they do of milk and honey.”

This is the same message that we learn from the interaction between Reek and Ramsay, explained by one of the “rats” himself. If men become like “rats”, if they are hunted and abused, there is only so far before they are forced to bite back.

Even as Jaime suspects the riverlands will be down to “eating rats by winter”, the Riverlands are instead overrun by “rats” of a different kind—rats that form a Brotherhood, and who use their rat status as their strength, not their weakness. The Brotherhood may not possess a keep, nor do they follow a proper liege lord, but that very disadvantage also means that they can never be besieged, nor found when the dogs hunt after them. Like the rats they are, they melt into the floors, the walls, the dungeons of the realm.

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In the last two parts, I talked about how guest right—a key part of the “Rat Cook” story—is a social contract. It is an arrangement tacitly entered between the two parties, the “host” and the “guest”, in which both agree to do each other no harm in order to achieve a common unity while eating together, the most basic and essential of situations.

In the “Rat Cook” story, though, these two parties are of unequal footing to begin with, even before the story begins: the person being fed is an Andal King, and the person feeding him is only a lowly cook. The hierarchy of power is inherent to the story, and it gives that social contract double meaning.

Feudalism itself—and, in truth, all governance—is a social contract, too: one in which the ruling party, here the Lords and Kings, tacitly agree not to abuse their subjects and, in return, their subjects tacitly agree not to overthrow their overlords. It’s less explicit in the story, as it is a dynamic taken for granted before the telling begins, but it’s equally as important for the functioning of society in Westeros and the world.

The King rules and owns all, the cook serves. However, like the insidious rat, the cook in the “Rat Cook” story is able to act against the king because of this exact position: the King may own all the game in the wood, but it is the cook who makes the pie, and it is the cook who is so overlooked that he may even bake a prince into it.

The “Rat Cook” story, in which the cook is able to kill the King’s son and deceive the King, is not only about the broken social contract of “guest right”, but also about the broken social contract of hierarchical power. From the perspective of the Andal King, the “horror” of the Rat Cook story is also in the ability for a cook’s de facto power to usurp the de jure power that a King wields.

However, the rat cook was not the first to break that contract. He had a right to vengeance. Why? Old Nan never explains that—because it doesn’t need to be explained, it is as baked into the telling of the story as that prince is into his pie. The very existence of the smallfolk cook subjugated beneath the Andal King is deserving of vengeance in itself.

The smallfolk are experiencing their own version of the horrors of the “Rat Cook” story, but in reverse: they experience the very punishment that the Rat Cook suffers first, before the sin. They are men made into “rats” under the heel of the powers above them, and driven to eat rats, simply because of the nature of their relationship.

When that happens, as Thoros says: men soon run out of pity. As Reek says: eat or be eaten, those were the only choices. As Old Nan says: a man has a right to vengeance.

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In the next part, I'm going to take Thoros' cue and and make a quick digression into the relationship between rats and dogs, and how that relates to the hierarchy of power.

the way alicent and rhaenyra love their children like. alicent can face the goddamn facts and tell her son he will die if he does not get a grip that they must stick together. and rhaenyra with the wool over her eyes just like her terrible father desperate to keep her children happy even though it will kill them. and love is the death of duty and everyone died the end ^_^