ASOIAF Central Mystery Roundup

My ASOIAF studies have outpaced my ASOIAF writings so severely that the only way I can make time to get my ideas and the results of my research out into the world is to sit down in front of the microphone and just start talking. If you want a no-frills, straight to the point crash course on how ASOIAF’s central mysteries resolve, these videos are the only places I’ve shared those ideas. There are more episodes to come, but the first two or three contain the core of ASOIAF’s surprise endings.

Part 1

https://youtu.be/DWnWS3Q967I

Part 2

https://youtu.be/5PyjKyBuA00

Part 3

https://youtu.be/WlIuPobxn7M

Part 4

Will probably be about Elia Martell and/or Rhaella Targaryen.

Part 5

I will show where and how the R+L situation is symbolized throughout the story.

Somewhere along the way I will cover the Trident more thoroughly.

Somewhere along the way I will show where and how the Tower of Joy situation is symbolized throughout the story.

I will update this page with video links when I make new videos in the Central Mysteries series.

Created Sep 20, 2025

Preview of Robert’s Rebellion Symbols

I’m finally on A Storm of Swords in my second read-through of A Song of Ice and Fire. Now that I know the answers to most of the central mysteries, one of the things I’m doing during this reread is I’m finding many places where those answers have been symbolized all along. I’m far from finished, but I thought I would share some of what I have found so far because it’s exciting. Seeing how the secrets of all these mysteries were secretly being shown to us every step of the way is really awe inspiring. It is increasing my awareness of the massive scope and beauty of ASOIAF as a work of symbolism. Anyway without further ado let me give you a glimpse of what I mean.

To understand my notes, you’re going to have to know what some of those secrets are, so I will tell you explicitly now. I used to guard these secrets closely but I don’t have the time to do them the justice I wanted to and nobody believes me anyway so it’s time to set them free.I know much more than this anyway. If you don’t want to be spoiled close out of this page now.

…

Here are a few of ASOIAF’s most closely guarded secrets about its central mysteries, meaning the mysteries about the various things that happened during Robert’s Rebellion.

1. At the Battle of the Trident, Rhaegar drowned to death because his feet were caught in his stirrups and his horse couldn’t stand up after it took a stray hit and fell over in the water.

2. Lyanna Stark was a skinchanger who skinchanged Rhaegar at the Tourney of Harrenhal, fought in the tournament and won, and placed the crown of blue roses in her own lap.

3. Rhaegar was homosexual.

4. In the riverlands, when Rhaegar and company came to arrest Lyanna for skinchanging him, Lyanna skinchanged Rhaegar again and raped herself with his body, making herself pregnant with his baby.

Mirrors That Rhaegar is Gay

Vaegon Targaryen
Signals a bunch of Rhaegar similarities (targ prince, wine pour, surprise combat training, loves books) to show you that Rhaegar, like Vaegon, was uninterested in women (vaegon = asexual, rhaegar = gay) As with Rhaegar, the audience will say Vaegon was a pervert (used porn scrolls), mirroring when they said Rhaegar was a pervert / pedo who statuatory raped Lyanna.

Gaemon Palehair
Gay man pale hair. enough said. clue that rhaegar like gaemon was being manipulated by a group of whorish power hungry women who were trying to advance feminism (make rhaenys king).

Daemon “The Fiddler” Blackfyre
is gay, mirroring that Rhaegar was gay. See: Mirrors of the Trident Battle: Daemon The Fiddler.

Loras Tyrell
gives a red flower to Sansa Stark at the Hand’s Tourney in King’s Landing. Loras is Rhaegar, Sansa is Lyanna, the red rose is the blue rose crown. Loras being gay is a clue that Rhaegar was gay, and that therefore, in both situations, the giving of the flower/s did not indicate his romantic interest in her. Sansa realizes this later when Loras comes to get her from her room and escort her to meet Olenna.

Mirrors That Lyanna Skinchanged Rhaegar

ACOK Bran I
Bran warged into Summer fighting the old wolf and winning = Lyanna warged into Rhaegar fighting Barristan and winning in the Harrenhal final tilt. Summer being “prince of the green” matches Rhaegar being prince of the kingdom. Tyrion = Lewyn because in both cases that prince is his nephew. Rhaegar is Lewyn’s goodnephew, it matches with Joffrey being Tyrion’s nephew. Bran being in an isolated tower makes this partly a TOJ parallel, because Lyanna was the skinchanger in the Tower of Joy.

Rhaenyra Targaryen and Criston Cole
At the start of the Dance of the Dragons. Rhaenyra paralyzes Criston and rapes him. I think she used the same poison that was used to castrate Varys. Varys says it paralyzes you but you can feel everything. It was probably popular in the sex circles Rhaenyra was running in during her brothel tour with her uncle Daemon.

Joffrey Velaryon
Steals his mom Rhaenyra’s dragon Syrax. Joffrey is Lyanna, she “stole a dragon” when she skinchanged Rhaegar. In FAB. Joffrey is impaled by his own sword, symbolizing when Lyanna impaled herself with her own sword, Rhaegar’s dick. There is a Tower of Joy parallel here too with the 7 queensguard and 3 of them died. 7 and 3 invokes TOJ.

Mirrors of the Trident Battle

Davos
Drowning at the Battle of the Blackwater mirrors Rhaegar drowning at the Trident. Blackwater river = Trident river. Wildfire trap and feet tying trap have trap in common. Tyrion’s chain = Rhaegar’s shoelaces practically LOL!

Dunk vs Lucas “Longinch” Inchfield in The Sworn Sword.
Two men fighting on horseback in a river. Lucas is Robert because he has a two-handed weapon. Dunk is Rhaegar because his horse takes a stray hit from the enemy’s weapon, his horse falls over in the water, Dunk’s foot is stuck in the stirrup, and he almost drowns to death.

Daemon “The Fiddler” Blackfyre
gets defeated in a joust in the rain. They call him “The Brown Dragon” because he’s covered in mud, like the mud that the horses kick up in the Dunk v Lucas scene and the Davos Blackwater scene. Daemon is the symbolic Rhaegar because he’s a Targ prince, like Rhaegar he’s trying to be king, like Rhaegar he’s trying to usurp the current king, like Rhaegar he loses the fight and gets wet and muddy, and like Rhaegar he’s gay.

Mance Rayder
when Stannis attacks the wildlings. Mance is Rhaegar, he goes into battle on a horse and his horse gets hit and goes down and then there’s watery language (steel tide washed over him). It mirrors that Rhaegar’s horse took a hit, went down, and Rhaegar drowned to death. Mance’s tent is a mirror of the TOJ, it’s a shelter that the Rhaegar symbol left to go fight a battle, and where he left a pregnant woman who’s pregnant with his baby (Dalla / Lyanna).

ASOS Samwell I
After escaping the battle at the Fist, Sam is crossing a frozen stream when a Night’s Watch man runs up and pulls him off his horse and steals his horse and rides away. Then Sam’s foot gets stuck in a root and he falls down. It mirrors Rhaegar in the Trident having his foot stuck in his stirrups, falling in the river (Trident) and drowning to death.

Created Jul 4, 2025

“Changes Will Be Made” E + L = R

Elia Martell + Lewyn Martell = Rhaenys

That’s why Rhaenys was killed despite not being in the line of succession. She WAS in the line of succession. Rhaegar secretly made her his heir in order to launch the coup sooner rather than later, because he can’t launch it without an heir. The problem was that by Westerosi law a daughter cannot inherit the throne, only a son. But Rhaegar didn’t have a son yet, only a daughter. But because Rhaenys and her mother are dornish, Rhaegar was going to use dornish law instead, and in dornish law the firstborn inherits regardless of its sex.

E + L = R explains what Rhaegar meant when he said “changes will be made, I should have done it long ago but it does no good to speak of roads not taken.”

“Then guard the king,” Ser Jon Darry snapped at him. “When you donned that cloak, you promised to obey.”

Rhaegar had put his hand on Jaime’s shoulder. “When this battle’s done I mean to call a council. Changes will be made. I meant to do it long ago, but . . . well, it does no good to speak of roads not taken. We shall talk when I return.”

Those were the last words Rhaegar Targaryen ever spoke to him. Outside the gates an army had assembled, whilst another descended on the Trident. So the Prince of Dragonstone mounted up and donned his tall black helm, and rode forth to his doom. (AFFC Jaime I p.119)

The changes he was going to make were that he was going to name his son Aegon his heir, supplanting Rhaenys. He knew he should’ve done it as soon as Aegon was born, but he wanted to do the coup as soon as possible and Rhaenys was all he had for an heir when setting up the coup.

E + L = R is the reason King Aerys said Rhaenys “smells dornish” when Rhaegar presented her to him.

When Prince Rhaegar and his new wife chose to take up residence on Dragonstone instead of the Red Keep, rumors flew thick and fast across the Seven Kingdoms. Some claimed that the crown prince was planning to depose his father and seize the Iron Throne for himself, whilst others said that King Aerys meant to disinherit Rhaegar and name Viserys heir in his place. Nor did the birth of King Aerys’s first grandchild, a girl named Rhaenys, born on Dragonstone in 280 AC, do aught to reconcile father and son. When Prince Rhaegar returned to the Red Keep to present his daughter to his own mother and father, Queen Rhaella embraced the babe warmly, but King Aerys refused to touch or hold the child and complained that she “smells Dornish.” (TWOIAF p.121)

Aerys KNEW that the father was Lewyn not Rhaegar, and that’s what he meant by it. This was his way of saying ‘I know Lewyn is the father not you.’ Because Lewyn being the father means Rhaenys is not 50% dornish 50% Targaryen, she’s 100% dornish. Aerys wasn’t being racist, he was telling Rhaegar that he knows who the baby’s real father is, and showing him that he’s not happy about it but that he’s not in a hurry to tell the secret either.

E + L = R is the reason Arianne Martell has a dream about having sex with her uncle Oberyn.

“My uncle brought me here, with Tyene and Sarella.” The memory made Arianne smile. “He caught some vipers and showed Tyene the safest way to milk them for their venom. Sarella turned over rocks, brushed sand off the mosaics, and wanted to know everything there was to know about the people who had lived here.”

“And what did you do, princess?” asked Spotted Sylva.

I sat beside the well and pretended that some robber knight had brought me here to have his way with me, she thought, a tall hard man with black eyes and a widow’s peak. The memory made her uneasy. “I dreamed,” she said, “and when the sun went down I sat cross-legged at my uncle’s feet and begged him for a story.” (AFFC The Queenmaker p.299)

Elia is the story’s primary Martell princess from the past, and Arianne is the story’s primary Martell princess in the present. The Martell princess in the present is mirroring the Martell princess in the past. Arianne having a latent desire to have sex with her uncle Oberyn is a clue that Elia had sex with her uncle Lewyn.

E + L = R is the reason Aerys thinks Lewyn Martell betrayed Rhaegar at the Trident.

Birds flew and couriers raced to bear word of the victory at the Ruby Ford. When the news reached the Red Keep, it was said that Aerys cursed the Dornish, certain that Lewyn had betrayed Rhaegar. (TWOIAF p.129)

Because Lewyn DID betray Rhaegar at the Trident. Because Lewyn knows that as a sworn knight of the kingsguard he broke his vows when he fathered a child. As the story of Lucamore the Lusty shows us, the penalty for that can be as harsh as castration and the Wall. But as long as Rhaenys was Rhaegar’s heir, Lewyn’s secret was safe, because neither Queen Elia nor Queen Rhaenys would let that secret get out or be repeated while Rhaenys’s claim to the throne depends upon her father being Rhaegar. But once Rhaegar said to Jaime that “changes will be made” Jonothor leaked the word to Lewyn and Lewyn knew what the changes would be. Rhaegar is changing his heir from Rhaenys to Aegon, and suddenly Lewyn’s nuts are on the line again. With Rhaenys being dornish and Aegon being named heir, Aegon and his loyalists are going to make sure everyone knows Rhaenys’s father is really Lewyn not Rhaegar, and then Lewyn will be in big trouble. Lewyn couldn’t let that come to pass, so he made sure Rhaegar died before Rhaegar could change his heir to Aegon.

This whole situation from Robert’s Rebellion era is a mirror of Cersei, Jaime, Robert and Joffrey in the present day. Jaime is a kingsguard who is the real father of Joffrey the supposed rightful heir of king Robert. Lewyn is a kingsguard who is the real father of Rhaenys the supposed rightful heir of king-to-be Rhaegar.

E + L = R explains why we get that detail from Arianne about Lewyn having a paramour.

“I never had the honor to know Prince Lewyn,” Ser Arys said, “but all agree that he was a great knight.”

“A great knight with a paramour. She is an old woman now, but she was a rare beauty in her youth, men say.” (AFFC The Soiled Knight p.193)

It’s character evidence that Lewyn is a sexual deviant. You know what else is sexually deviant? Having sex with and impregnating your niece.

E+L=R explains why we get that detail that Lewyn would always tickle child Arianne until she can’t breathe.

“I will not soil my cloak.”

“Yes,” she said, “that fine white cloak. You forget, my great-uncle wore the same cloak. He died when I was little, yet I still remember him. He was as tall as a tower and used to tickle me until I could not breathe for laughing.” (AFFC The Soiled Knight p.193)

Tickling his niece until she can’t breathe for laughing is character evidence that he likes overwhelming his nieces with physical pleasure. It’s a metaphor for having sex with his other and older niece, Elia.

I wrote this fast and sloppy. Sorry it isn’t up to the quality I normally aspire to. I’m just getting it out there. Maybe I’ll come back and do it justice some day.

Audio notes where I figured these things out: https://www.tumblr.com/applesanddragons/784847208185987073/apples-and-dragons-elia-martell?source=share

Update Dec 17, 2025

In ACOK Tyrion IV, Varys gives Tyrion a “shrewd look” and says Elia “cried a certain name when they came for her.”

“A council seat is not to be despised,” Varys admitted, “yet will it be enough to make a proud man forget his sister’s murder?”

“Why forget?” Tyrion smiled. “I’ve promised to deliver his sister’s killers, alive or dead, as he prefers. After the war is done, to be sure.”

Varys gave him a shrewd look. “My little birds tell me that Princess Elia cried a . . . certain name . . . when they came for her.”

“Is a secret still a secret if everyone knows it?” In Casterly Rock, it was common knowledge that Gregor Clegane had killed Elia and her babe. They said he had raped the princess with her son’s blood and brains still on his hands.

Tyrion is worried that House Martell and Dorne will side with Renly Baratheon in the war. In an attempt to win House Martell and Dorne to the crown’s side, Tyrion plans to give Oberyn Martell a seat on the King’s Small Council, and to deliver Elia’s killers to Oberyn. Then Varys replies like this.

Varys gave him a shrewd look. “My little birds tell me that Princess Elia cried a . . . certain name . . . when they came for her.”

Varys gives Tyrion a shrewd look, and then with hesitation he mentions a mystery name that Elia cried when her killers came for her, but he doesn’t say the name. He censors himself with the phrase “a certain name”.

Since Varys is working as Master of Whisperers for King Joffrey and House Lannister, and since Gregor Clegane is a soldier of House Lannister, the reason for Varys’s hesitation and self-censoring appears to be that he’s afraid to get in trouble with his bosses, House Lannister. Tywin Lannister would probably not appreciate having Gregor’s crime being talked about using Gregor’s name, because Gregor’s guilt is a threat not only to Gregor, who is Tywin’s asset, but to Tywin, because as a general rule, and certainly during an event as important as the sack of King’s Landing, Gregor only acts on the orders of Tywin Lannister.

So, what is the thing we’re interpreting here? We’re interpreting the cause of Varys’s hesitation, or ellipses (…), to be precise. There are a lot of things an ellipses can mean, but what these ellipses appear to mean is that Varys is hesitating before self-censoring.

Tyrion thinks the name was Gregor Clegane because Gregor is one of the two men who “came for her” and killed her and her children. Amory Lorch was the other. In Tyrion’s interpretation, Elia’s crying of a name was an attempt to stop Gregor and/or Amory from attacking her and/or her children.

But when you put yourself in Elia’s shoes, that doesn’t make sense. Gregor has already charged into the city, the castle, and the room with the specific intention to carry out the orders to kill Elia and her children, and he has already killed many people before this. Considering all that, how is Elia shouting Gregor’s name at Gregor going to stop him, or persuade him to stop? It seems extremely unlikely, though perhaps worth a try anyway. In the end, this possibility feels very weak and implausible.

Another possibility is that Elia’s crying of a certain name was meant as a call for help. In that interpretation, the name could be the name of somebody nearby who might hear her and come to her aid, such as a guard or Kingsguard. But upon further thought that interpretation makes little or no sense either, because Gregor is already there and would have already fought and defeated any guards before being able to enter the room.

In the interpretation of Elia’s intention for crying a name, there are three categories of possibilities.

A command to stop the killer/s.
A cry for help against the killer/s.
A plea to stop the killer/s.

We have just ruled out categories 1 and 2, so the only category left that can make sense as Elia’s intention or motivation for crying a name is the 3rd one. Elia was pleading for the killer/s to stop.

Knowing that, I can see that this mysterious line from Varys in ACOK was a subtle clue that Rhaenys’s father was Lewyn Martell rather than Rhaegar.

The name Elia was shouting at Gregor wasn’t Gregor, it was Lewyn. Elia was crying that Lewyn is the children’s father, in a desperate attempt to save them from being killed by Gregor and Amory. Because since Lewyn is the father, that means the kids do not have a claim to the throne, because they’re full Martell rather than half Targaryen, they’re not the son of the Prince, and they’re not even legitimate, and therefore they are not a threat to the rebel side of the war, who will want to kill anyone whose claim could challenge the claim of the king they put on the throne after they win the war.

Though this paternity reveal would only be true of Rhaenys and not Aegon, Gregor wouldn’t know that because he’s just a Lannister pawn, and that fact wouldn’t stop Elia from lying to save Aegon’s life along with Rhaenys’s life.

In this passage, Varys was giving Tyrion a chance to prove that he knows this secret of Robert’s Rebellion, and Tyrion failed by reciting the official version of events, that Elia’s killer was Gregor Clegane. Remember, Varys lived with the Targaryen family in the castle and worked as the king’s Master of Whisperers. He knew everyone’s secrets and loved the Targaryen children. From Varys’s perspective, the killer of Elia and her children may not be Gregor or Amory or Tywin. In Varys’s mind, the person who he considers the real killer of Elia Martell may be Elia’s uncle, Lewyn Martell, who should not have had sex with or impregnated his niece in the first place.

If Rhaenys had been Rhaegar’s daughter rather than Lewyn’s daughter, Lewyn would not have needed to betray Rhaegar at the Trident to protect himself from punishment for the crimes of breaking his Kingsguard vows, cuckolding the Prince, incest, et all. And then Rhaegar would have won at the Trident, and then Elia and her children would never have been attacked by Gregor, Amory, and Tywin. From Varys’s perspective the causal link between Lewyn impregnating his niece Elia and the murders of her and her children would be plain as day.

Created May 28, 2025
Updated Jun 7, 2025 – Added book quotes
Updated Dec 17, 2025

I cracked The Trident!

After thinking about the Trident mystery for months, yesterday I cracked it!!! I mean I figured it out. Today I spent an hour ironing it out in my ASOIAF notebook. The answers are cool and sad and dramatic and symbolic and all that fun stuff.

It was the last central mystery I didn’t know the answer to yet, so that’s why it gnawed at me for the past 6 months or so. At the rate I’m going, maybe I’ll write an essay about it in 3 years. -_-

If you want to take a crack at solving the Trident mystery yourself, the scenes I used to figure it out were:

ASOS Jon X: Mance Rayder vs Stannis’s army (Mance is symbolic of Rhaegar)
The Sworn Sword: Dunk vs Lucas “Longinch” Inchfield (Dunk is S-Rhaegar)
The Mystery Knight: Daemon “the Fiddler” vs Glendon (Daemon is S-Rhaegar)

I feel like I’m forgetting a scene but if I remember it I’ll edit and add it here.

This goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway. You also need to have a working knowledge of the information available in the main and extended book series about the Battle of the Trident.

That’s all for now.

Mood: excited

Created Feb 13, 2025

Aerys The Mad King

Calling people crazy is dismissive.

When it comes to Aerys the Mad King I pick out one specific situation that involves Aerys being evil and I ask the reader to put himself in Aerys’s shoes. I say, ‘Tell me what you would do if you were Aerys in that situation.’ Invariably, one of the things the reader will say is ‘The question is moot because I wouldn’t have made the mistakes Aerys made that led to that situation (because I’m not crazy).’

The purpose of the question is to get the reader to reconsider Aerys’s moral alignment. The question is supposed to make that easier by constraining the reader’s attention to one situation at a time, protecting his moral judgement of the one situation from being influenced by the cloud of evilness in the situations that surround it. This response shows me that the reader still has not really reconsidered Aerys’s moral alignment. The reader defers the origin point of Aerys’s innate evilness to an earlier time. Thus, the intention of the challenge is essentially dodged.

If you go back far enough to a time when Aerys’s evilness can’t be deferred to an earlier time, such as in Aerys’s childhood, the reader’s willful blindness to a sympathetic consideration of Aerys will become more obvious. Elsewise, the reader will proclaim (as though I were suggesting it) that the sympathy in Aerys’s childhood doesn’t excuse the villainy in Aerys’s adulthood! The reader is right, of course. But yet again, the reader will deliberately resist sitting with the idea of sympathy in Aerys no matter Aerys’s age, because the feeling is that to acknowledge any sympathy in any version of Aerys is to excuse or justify the evils that he did later in life.

But for someone who is seriously concerning himself with the question of how to fight evil, the question of how evil develops is where the rubber meets the road. The transition from innocent child to evil king obviously happened somewhere in-between those two points, so the questions are where? And what could Aerys have done differently to right the situation? And even, what evils were non-Aerys people doing to worsen the situation?

Thus, readers are instilled with a belief about Aerys’s moral alignment that amounts to original sin. Their treatment of Aerys is as though his evilness is inherent and innate, it has no discernable point of origin, and there is nothing to be gained in taking the question of its origin seriously. Worse, that there is something to be lost in taking the question of its origin seriously.

What is to be lost? Perhaps a stable consensus. And inasmuch as a stable society needs a stable consensus about good and evil, perhaps a stable society is at stake, too. This seems the likely function of our stubbornness about questions of morality. If we begin considering Aerys in a sympathetic light, and worse, if we succeed and find sympathy in him, couldn’t that become an invitation, nay an inspiration, to more Aeryses and evils in the future?

It’s a fair concern, and one to be taken seriously. History has no shortage of copycat villains whose manifestos tell the story of a disaffected person who came to sympathize with a notorious villain too much, and then set out to be just like him.

Yet, at the same time, aren’t we at risk of becoming stupid about the true origins and nature of evil if we misrepresent the people who did evil? If we tell each other the lie that they were evil all along? Neither has history any shortage of people who succumbed to cruelty, fear, and temptation because they had become naive about how harsh or sneaky evil can be — the almost imperceptible way ordinary everyday sins give way to extraordinary ones down the road.

If I press the issue, sometimes I may get the reader to say ‘I guess Aerys’s behavior is understandable, but I still wouldn’t have done what he did.’ Then I say ‘But if you have never experienced the same thing, how can you know for sure? These are extreme circumstances we’re talking about, here. Betrayals from lifelong friends and partners, tragic stillbirths, being kidnapped…’ And if I’m feeling snarky, I might say ‘Are you the first person who lived to never act rashly from extreme emotion?’

People ask me, ‘Why do you think the story contains a hidden sympathetic angle for the Mad King? What purpose would that serve for the story?’

Stories are how we gain a deeper understanding of people. In a story, we get to see the main characters develop gradually before our eyes. We get to vicariously experience their emotions and share in their distresses and euphorias alike. This activity gives us a kind of understanding of other lives that goes well beyond what we can get from a collection of dry facts about the same life.

Our mistake with Aerys is a natural one, but in ASOIAF it is a mistake nonetheless. We assumed Aerys’s development is not supposed to matter because we didn’t see it and he is not a main character. So, ASOIAF asks its readers an open question: How much improvement is there to be gained in our real lives if we all stopped assuming the same thing about one another?

Created Dec 31, 2024

Tower of Joy, A Study in Symbolic Interpretation – Chapter 14

Chapter 14 – The She-wolf

Previous: Chapter 13 – The Black Bat

Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction

Three Kingsguard

One of the long lasting questions about the Tower of Joy is ‘Why were there three Kingsguard, as opposed to one, two or four?’ It seems overkill for Rhaegar to have so many of his deadliest fighters devoted to guarding a 14 or 15-year-old girl and a tower in the middle of nowhere, especially while those Kingsguard could have been the difference between victory or defeat at the Battle of the Trident, as Ned and Oswell point out in Ned’s Tower of Joy dream.

“I looked for you on the Trident,” Ned said to them.

“We were not there,” Ser Gerold answered.

“Woe to the Usurper if we had been,” said Ser Oswell. (AGOT 39 Eddard X p354)

Ned’s line suggests that Ned was expecting more Kingsguard at the Battle of the Trident, and Oswell’s line suggests that Oswell would have preferred fewer Kingsguard at the Tower of Joy and more at the Battle of the Trident. So these lines steer me away from the questions “Why not four?” and “Why not more?” and toward the questions “Why not two? Or one? Or none?” What’s so important at the Tower of Joy that Rhaegar thinks two Kingsguard are not enough to guard it?

If the baby Lyanna is birthing at the Tower of Joy is Jon Snow and Rhaegar is Jon’s father, then maybe Rhaegar wanted to protect Lyanna and his son Jon. But since Rhaegar’s first son and heir (Aegon) was still alive in King’s Landing at the time, it may not make sense for Rhaegar to have placed the three Kingsguard at the Tower of Joy rather than at King’s Landing. So maybe Jon isn’t the reason. On the other hand, the Tower of Joy is more vulnerable than the Red Keep, so it might make sense after all.

The Number Three

In November 2012, a mobile phone application was released by the name of George R. R. Martin’s A World of Ice and Fire — A Game of Thrones Guide (henceforth AWOIAF). AWOIAF provided new tidbits of information that can’t be found in any of the previously published books. The information in it is considered semi-canon, because it was written by Martin’s co-authors from The World of Ice and Fire, Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson, with input from Martin himself.

In the Rhaegar Targaryen section of AWOIAF, we learn that, after the Targaryen defeat in the Battle of the Bells, King Aerys sent his Kingsguard commander Ser Gerold Hightower from King’s Landing to find and retrieve Rhaegar. Though Rhaegar returned to King’s Landing, Gerold did not. Gerold was next seen at the Tower of Joy in Dorne, with Arthur Dayne and Oswell Whent, guarding Lyanna Stark.

To judge by this information, it seems that when Gerold found Rhaegar at the Tower of Joy, Rhaegar told Gerold to stay and help guard it, and then departed for King’s Landing himself.

It’s a little strange that the commander of the Kingsguard obeys a command that keeps him far away from the king he’s sworn to protect, and during dire times such as these. It seems even stranger considering that the command comes from Rhaegar, who the king believes is trying to usurp the throne from him. Though, it doesn’t seem much stranger than Oswell Whent and Arthur Dayne doing the very same thing.

Whatever is really going on here regarding these characters’ true loyalties and motivations, I notice that this new crumb of information has the effect of highlighting a familiar-looking intrigue about the Tower of Joy: When Gerold arrived, Rhaegar left. In other words, when three guards became two, Rhaegar made it three again. Yet again, the Tower of Joy clues lead us to a question about the number of guards.

What’s so important about the number three guards? What can three guards do that two can’t?

Now that we know Lyanna was a skinchanger, we can tie a bow on this mystery, too. Three is the minimum number of guards needed to guard a skinchanger.

Think about it. Whenever a group of two or more travel companions go to sleep in dangerous territory, what do they do? One person stays awake to keep watch while the rest of the group sleeps. Halfway through the night, the watcher wakes a second person and they switch places so the watcher can get some sleep too. The purpose of this is to make sure there is always somebody keeping watch and the guards get enough sleep to function the next day.

If the group is guarding a prisoner day and night, two guards is enough guards to ensure there is always one person watching the prisoner, and each guard has a chance to sleep if they take turns. But if the prisoner is a skinchanger, two guards isn’t enough anymore. While Guard-A sleeps, the skinchanger can take the body of Guard-B, use it to kill Guard-A, then open any prison doors and manacles, and then manacle or kill himself before returning to her own body. With three guards, that won’t be possible because two can stay awake and watch each other for suspicious behavior.

So, when the third guard arrived (Gerold Hightower) that freed up Rhaegar to leave the Tower of Joy and bring battle to the Trident.

Now recall the “strange chill” that Ned felt on the way to visit the dying Robert Baratheon. It becomes even more understandable. The three Kingsguard Ned passed reminded him that Lyanna skinchanged Oswell Whent, but it did more than that. It also reminded Ned why the number of Kingsguard at the Tower of Joy had to be three. Two was not enough guards to guard a body snatching prisoner. Like so, the implicit question in Ned’s Tower of Joy line “I looked for you on the Trident” receives an answer. ‘Where were you on the Trident?’ asked Ned. ‘I was stuck here,’ each of the three kingsguard men could have answered, ‘because two isn’t enough guards to guard your sister.’

The Queen of Love and Beauty

If there is one single moment in ASOIAF that comes to readers’ minds more than any other when the phrase “Central mysteries” or “mysteries” is uttered, then I think it must be the image of Rhaegar placing the queen of love and beauty’s crown of pale blue roses in Lyanna’s lap at the Tourney of Harrenhal.

Yet when the jousting began, the day belonged to Rhaegar Targaryen. The crown prince wore the armor he would die in: gleaming black plate with the three-headed dragon of his House wrought in rubies on the breast. A plume of scarlet silk streamed behind him when he rode, and it seemed no lance could touch him. Brandon fell to him, and Bronze Yohn Royce, and even the splendid Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning.

Robert had been jesting with Jon and old Lord Hunter as the prince circled the field after unhorsing Ser Barristan in the final tilt to claim the champion’s crown. Ned remembered the moment when all the smiles died, when Prince Rhaegar Targaryen urged his horse past his own wife, the Dornish princess Elia Martell, to lay the queen of beauty’s laurel in Lyanna’s lap. He could see it still: a crown of winter roses, blue as frost.

Ned Stark reached out his hand to grasp the flowery crown, but beneath the pale blue petals the thorns lay hidden. He felt them clawing at his skin, sharp and cruel, saw the slow trickle of blood run down his fingers, and woke, trembling, in the dark. (AGOT 58 Eddard XV p526)

‘Why did he do it?’ we all want to know. Did Rhaegar fall in love with Lyanna because of her selfless deeds as the Knight of the Laughing Tree? Did Rhaegar know how insulting this would be to his wife Elia Martell? That it would be received as such a scandal? That it would start a civil war? Was Rhaegar just so obsessed with prophecy and getting his “third head of the dragon” prophecy baby that he calculated those risks and damages were worth it to, ostensibly, save the world from the Others and the Long Night?

As with the mystery of the three guards, the mystery of the queen of love and beauty can now be solved by applying what we learned in our Tower of Joy investigation. The reason Rhaegar Targaryen rode past his wife Elia Martell and laid the crown of blue roses in Lyanna’s lap was because, for that moment, Rhaegar was not Rhaegar. He was Lyanna Stark.

Lyanna reached out with her psychic skinchanging power and took control of Rhaegar’s mind and body. She jousted in the tournament, won the crown of blue roses and the opportunity to bestow it upon the loveliest woman present. Then Lyanna, as Rhaegar, rode past Rhaeger’s wife Elia Martell and laid the crown of blue roses in her own lap. Now having awarded herself with a public display of affection from the crown prince, Lyanna returned to her own body to receive her reward in full, leaving the prince atop his horse feeling “love struck” indeed.

I use the phrase “love struck” because I’m referring to GRRM’s answer to a fan question in 2016 at an International Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico.

u/dyhtstriyk

88 pts 2016

So my question was: Why do you think the political institutions in the Seven Kingdoms are so weak? His [GRRM’s] answer: the Kingdom was unified with dragons, so the Targaryen’s flaw was to create an absolute monarchy highly dependent on them, with the small council not designed to be a real check and balance. So, without dragons it took a sneeze, a wildly incompetent and megalomaniac king, a love struck prince, a brutal civil war, a dissolute king that didn’t really know what to do with the throne and then chaos. Interesting answer. [reddit]

Lyanna skinchanging Rhaegar is a resolution to the Queen of Love and Beauty mystery that will undoubtedly cause much of the ASOIAF subculture to shift uncomfortably in their seats, because it comes during the 28th year of a tradition of heaping most of the blame onto Rhaegar, and of enshrining Lyanna as simultaneously empowered and helpless, woman and child, hero and victim.

u/Salem1960s

625 pts 2023

(…) Rhaegar Targeyen was a cunt. Who looks up from a book and says: ”It seems I must be a warrior.”? That’s a fucking pompous statement, isn’t it? Forget for a moment that Lyanna was a dumb teenager in love, who may not have not known any better, essentially groomed by an adult male. Forget that for a moment. Forget about the prophecies for a moment. Let’s imagine for a moment that prophecies, or at least, that prophecy were absolute and utter bullshit. Let’s look at this in practical terms: This guy was, in all honesty, a massive fucking idiot: Reckless, impulsive, heedless, irrational, and frankly, selfish and narcissistic. He threw everything aside for a fucking prophecy that he was narcissistic enough to think was about him. And one could argue that that “prophecy” was an excuse to bang a young girl. Didn’t seem to care that his actions got his new side piece’s dad and brother killed. Oops! (…) [reddit]

A teenage girl’s desire for the most desirable man in the kingdom, in and of itself, should not be surprising. Rhaegar has the good looks, athleticism, authority, money, and prestige that has always attracted women. Yet it still surprises us, and one major reason is because it’s a reversal of our modern expectations. Wherever a man and woman are found cohabiting a scandal, our collective tendency is to assume the man is the predator and the woman is the victim. But as every sufficiently attractive, successful, and prestigious man can tell you, the truth is often quite the reverse — that the woman is the predator and the man is the object of her predation.

Sadly, most of us will never experience what it’s like to be Rhaegar-Targaryen levels of desirable to women, leaving us with little cause to consider that a woman’s desire for a man, even a 14- or 15-year-old “child-woman of surpassing loveliness” as Ned Stark puts it, is the smoking gun in a long beloved and belabored mystery. With this acknowledgement, I can see that this old mystery owes much of its fortitude to its audience’s protectiveness of women and jealousy of men alike.

In a Tower of Joy parallel at the Whispers, Brienne’s hatred of men resulted in the death of an innocent man named Nimble Dick Crabb, symbolizing that if the ASOIAF audience wants to solve the Tower of Joy mystery, we need to notice how our own hatreds of men are preventing us from discovering what happened at the Tower of Joy. In the fog of the Rhaegar and Lyanna mystery, jealous men and man-hating women have found a common cause. As one commenter all too aptly said it:

u/Usual_Jackfruit

7 pts 2023

All this subreddit do is trash on Rhaegar like he is a real person [reddit]

A New Whisper

Once more, we’ve come upon a compelling partial answer to the question of what the whispered promises were that Lyanna asked of Ned in her dying moments. ‘Promise me, Ned, that you won’t let anyone know that I skinchanged Rhaegar and crowned myself the queen of love and beauty.’

A Fledgling Philosophy

To echo something I said in Chapter 7, the first time you solve a big mystery you have your first complete model of how ASOIAF’s symbolic revelations work from bottom to top, and the things you can learn from that model will generalize to the rest of the story’s mysteries, setting in motion a gradually snowballing effect of mystery solving by improving your understanding of the story’s philosophy and your educated guesses.

We’ve got our snowball rolling at a good pace now and we have knocked down a handful of the big mysteries at the center of ASOIAF, so now is a good time to stop and ask, what do you think is the story’s philosophy? To put it another way, what attitudes in the audience are the story’s revelations consistently subverting?

Nimble Dick Crabb was being a good guide when we thought he was being a bad guide.
Brienne was being a bad knight when we thought she was being a good knight.
Rhaegar was a victim when we thought he was being a predator.
Lyanna was being a predator when we thought she was a victim.

The pattern will become easier to see if I rewrite them this way.

A man was being good when we thought he was being bad.
A woman was being bad when we thought she was being good.
A man was being good when we thought he was being bad.
A woman was being bad when we thought she was being good.

The philosophy that’s guiding all of these revelations is about men characters being better than the audience thought and women characters being worse than the audience thought. The story is implicitly suggesting that its audience, on the whole, is overcritical of men characters and undercritical of women characters. To put it another way for those who don’t like the notion that a story makes suggestions, George R. R. Martin is suggesting that his audience, on the whole, is overcritical of men characters and undercritical of women characters.

It is a simplistic philosophy, to be sure, but just like when defining a symbol, when defining a philosophy it’s good to start with a simple and straight-to-the-point description and then refine it as you go. The implicit prescription, then, is that we should become less critical of men characters and more critical of women characters, if we want to solve more ASOIAF mysteries. Because of its repetition, we can expect this philosophy to generalize to the rest of the story.* In the next chapter we’ll apply this understanding to the mysteries of Rhaegar Targaryen. “It seems I must be a warrior” the mysterious boy prince enigmatically said.

[[ * While 2-4 repititions are enough to warrant this conclusion, if tentatively, in practice I didn’t notice the philosophy until I saw it repeated across many mysteries. So admittedly I am jumping the gun with this conclusion for the sake of demonstrating an advanced stage of symbolic interpretation while constraining myself to information we’ve covered in this Whispers≈TOJ symbol investigation. A sad side effect of doing this is that I’m spending revelations that would have been more satisfying by booting up a new symbol and working up to them incrementally like we did in this essay series. For instance, a Prologue≈TOJ symbol could have taught us some of the same things we learned from Whispers≈TOJ, like that Gerold’s sword broke (like Waymar Royce) and one of Ned’s seven men did not fight (like the six Others). This would have been our predicament no matter which TOJ parallel I chose to investigate, so it was unavoidable, but hopefully the Whispers was a good choice and the surprises will still be satisfying. ]]

Next: Chapter 15 – The Dragon Prince

Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction

Created Dec 6, 2024
Updated Dec 12, 2024
Updated May 17, 2025 small fix
Updated June 2, 2025 small change

Aegon IV the Unworthy – Response to Goodqueenaly

This is a Tumblr post by goodqueenaly from History of Westeros that I’m responding to.

goodqueenaly: https://www.tumblr.com/goodqueenaly/768392425023700992/obviously-aegon-iv-was-generally-a-shitbag?source=share

Obviously Aegon IV was generally a shitbag (including to Naerys) and generally a completely selfish person, so I wouldn’t necessarily need to ascribe any greater motivation to Aegon’s extramarital sexual relationship with Megette than the king’s overall lust, greed, and cruelty. (Indeed, I’ve compared Aegon’s acquisition of Megette to Tyrion’s acquisition of Shae.) Yet I wonder whether part of Aegon’s idea in making Megette his de facto official mistress was to humiliate Naerys in a very particular, very cruel way.

After all, Aegon didn’t just make Megette his sexual partner – according to Yandel, “[Megette] and Aegon were even ‘wed’ in a secret ceremony conducted by a mummer playing a septon”. Of course no one would have believed that Aegon and Megette’s play-marriage was legally binding, given that “bride” and “bridegroom” were already married to other people and that the officiant seems to have been deliberately chosen for jovial mockery. Yet the very farcical nature of the “marriage” may have been precisely what Aegon wanted, specifically to hurt and demean his sister-wife and queen.

Aegon had every reason to know that Naerys was deeply unhappy in their own marriage, in no small part I think because of her religious scruples. I very much believe that Naerys had wanted to become a septa, rather than marry her brother, because she (along with other Targaryens of her generation) believed the Doctrine of Exceptionalism was a heresy which had incurred the wrath of the Seven. Moreover, when Naerys had attempted to voice her pious resistance to their incestuous union, Aegon had responded not just with denial, but with scornful, sardonic cruelty.

So perhaps Aegon, with his penchant for vicious, decided to frame his relationship with Megette, his first major mistress following his marriage, in the way that would most hurt Naerys. If Naerys had resisted an incestuous union as heretical in the eyes of the Seven, Aegon would now force her to engage in an even more heretical relationship – an unwillingly bigamous “marriage” in which not only was she married to her brother, but another woman was as well. To twist the knife more for Naerys, perhaps, Aegon had chosen as his play-second wife a woman who was herself already married – that is, a sort of double bigamy on top of the incestuous union Naerys had been forced to endure. This was Aegon openly sneering at the concept of marriage as defined by the Faith of the Seven, and as such attacking Naerys in that piety she held so dear. He so little cared about the Seven’s institution of marriage, so he might have wanted to show Naerys, that not only was he going to insist that she stay married to him despite the physical danger to herself and (so she may have believed) the spiritual danger to her soul, but he was going to turn marriage itself into a joke – so obviously flouting the principles of Faith marriage, with his married play-wife and a mummer to oversee the play-polygamy.

Morality Binds and Blinds

Aegon had hated the Dornish and warred against them, and those lords who desired the return of those days—despite all the associated misrule—would never be happy with this peaceable king. (TWOIAF)

As you can see above, the historian’s writings of Aegon IV are seasoned with unsubtle jabs at Aegon IV. They are reminders that you’re supposed to think he’s a villain.

As I read through Goodqueenaly’s writings about Aegon IV, I can see that they are seasoned the same way.

Obviously Aegon IV was generally a shitbag

Like Shae, Megette was a lowborn woman whose life prior to meeting her aristocratic male partner (and I use that term extremely loosely) was neither truly free nor independent:

The historian’s propaganda has done its work on Goodqueenaly, causing her to seize upon cheap opportunities to demonize Aegon IV in the eyes of her readers just like the historian is doing to his readers. All the better to moralize the issues.

When you make an issue about good versus evil (moralize), rather than about the facts, you blind people to reason. And when you blind people to reason, you increase the difficulty and danger for a truthseeker to promote conclusions that are more true. Now you have a Westerosi society (and a fandom) that is bonded together by the shared belief that Aegon IV was evil, before the reader has had a chance to do any reasoned deliberation of the facts to determine for himself what he believes about Aegon IV’s moral alignment.

To a society of people that is strongly bonded by the idea of Aegon IV’s villainy, who would dare say that Aegon IV did something good, even if it’s true? The social cost of saying it is not worth the reward, except to the rare person who is sufficiently devoted to the truth. Those are the Aristotles and Galileos of our own world, people who paid the ultimate price because they would not be deterred from a truth that their societies couldn’t bear to know.

If Aegon IV was a villain in reality (the story’s reality), wouldn’t the facts stand in evidence of that all on their own? I mean, without the incessant commentaries about his moral alignment? Surely, readers can be trusted to conclude that a king who actively terrorized, humiliated, and harmed his wife was evil, so long as the facts majorly show that terror, humiliation, and suffering were what King Aegon really intended or caused, and/or what Queen Naerys really experienced.

Though I don’t expect you to believe it before I present and explain all the evidence (Indeed the heart of my lesson [and ASOIAF’s lesson, I gather] is that you should not believe the guilt of anyone where severe accusations are made, before you’ve seen and considered all the evidence), King Aegon IV did not terrorize, humiliate, or harm his wife Queen Naerys. But in fact, Naerys did all of those things to Aegon. The morality of these characters is reversed. And the reason these histories reverse the morality of these characters is because Daeron I The Good was the bastard son of Queen Naerys and Aemon the Dragonknight, and therefore an illegitimate king.

But why would present day historians care about Daeron the Good’s legitimacy or illegitimacy? Because present day historians are writing under present day kings, and the legitimacy of present day kings derives from the legitimacy of past kings they’re descended from. In other words, if it were to become widely known and accepted that Daeron the Good was a bastard, it would become known that Aerys II is illegitimate, too. Because Aerys II descends from him. Under the reign of King Aerys II for example, the spread of that knowledge would be disastrous for the ruling family because the line of succession would jump all the way back up the tree to Aegon IV’s natural sons, who are legitimate heirs because they were legitimized by a legitimate king — Aegon IV himself on his deathbed — and Targaryen civil war would ensue.

Why would GRRM write the story that way? Because this is part of ASOIAF’s baked-in commentary that its audience does not pay enough attention to or give enough weight to the succession politics of Westeros. For the noble and royal people in the story, matters of succession are an ever present reality that shapes their daily lives. Even children such as the Walders Frey are constantly tracking lines of succession for this reason. But for the reader, matters of succession can be comfortably ignored, because most of the plot and drama does not require you to pay attention to politics in order to enjoy it on a surface level, and because your own well-being does not hinge upon noticing, for instance, that your uncle wants to kill your brother, and will want to kill you too when you take your brother’s place on the throne (Thinking of Baelor I). As Goodqueenaly’s analysis often shows, even readers highly knowledgeable of and attentive to ASOIAF’s political machinery are mostly blind to its political subtext.

In keeping with my thesis, her blindness is a morally motivated kind of blindness, because accompanying many of her oversights is a speculative rationale that is commensurate with (and often flattering to) her personal sense of what’s right or wrong, good or evil. Here’s one example.

As the official story of history goes, Aegon IV’s extramarital activities were an insult and humiliation to Queen Naerys, because a husband is supposed to be monogamous with his wife. Sure enough, Aegon’s non-monogamy is the premiere villainy that characterizes Aegon in these histories. There are a whole two pages dedicated to Aegon’s mistresses. Then Goodqueenaly proposed the possibility that part of the reason Aegon IV had his marriage to Megette officiated by a mummer playing a septon, rather than a real septon, was that it gave extra insult to Naerys by giving insult to the Faith’s institution of marriage, because Naerys loved the Faith of the Seven.

But if Aegon marrying Megette was an insult to Naerys, by that same logic shouldn’t Aegon fake marrying Megette be less of an insult to Naerys rather than more? The marriage was fake, after all, because the septon was a mummer and not a real septon. Using the original logic that disloyalty to your first marriage is wrong and mean, surely the use of a real septon officiator in the second marriage should be more wrong and mean than using a fake septon officiator.

What I’m highlighting is that Goodqueenaly’s speculations about the situation are driven not by a logical consistency, but by a moral consistency. Aegon being bad and Naerys being good is the moral framework that is guiding her speculations, and the logical framework is rearranged to support it. What goes largely unnoticed by her is that with the addition of her speculation the situation as a whole has become illogical.

And what usually goes entirely unnoticed by her is that the nature of the illogic suggests an alternative and viable possibility for what the true nature of these events really was. It just requires us to do the opposite of what Goodqueenaly did—preserve the logic and invert the moral alignments instead. That is, suppose that Aegon was good and Naerys was bad.

If Aegon was the good guy in this situation and Naerys was bad, what would that situation look like and what speculations would help it make sense? Now you’re in the right frame of mind to work and solve the historiographic puzzles of The World of Ice and Fire and Fire & Blood.

Created Dec 5, 2024

Tower of Joy, A Study in Symbolic Interpretation – Chapter 13

Chapter 13 – The Black Bat

oswell whent 3

Previous: Chapter 12 – Shagwell’s Morning Star

Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction

Last time, we discovered the common factor that connects Shagwell’s morning star to Oswell Whent’s sword. Both weapons were used in an attack that outwardly looked like friendly fire but really was not. From inside the Tower of Joy, Lyanna Stark skinchanged Oswell Whent and used his sword to surprise attack Arthur Dayne during Ned Stark’s 1-vs-2 fight in order to save Ned’s life. It created a situation that appeared to be friend-on-friend violence, but was really foe-on-foe violence when you correct for the fact that Lyanna was controlling Oswell’s body.

Meanwhile in A Feast for Crows, the same kind of surprise happened to us as we read the Whispers scene in the chapter Brienne IV. Shagwell’s violence to Nimble Dick seemed to be friend-on-friend violence, but it was really foe-on-foe violence when you correct for the fact that we were wrong that Nimble Dick was on Shagwell’s side.

Here in essay Chapter 13, the Whispers≈Tower of Joy symbol and its child symbols have survived the stresses of my symbolic interpretation all the way from their first definition in essay Chapter 6 to now, without needing to subtract from or change the original descriptions. Because I chose my words carefully when defining those symbols in the beginning, the symbols excluded more possibilities. And because they excluded more possibilities, they constrained my symbolic interpretation to a narrow path, guiding me to one precise possibility that correlates a great number of wide-reaching mysteries.

I refer to this cluster of mysteries as ASOIAF’s central mysteries, because they are all so tightly knitted together narratively, temporally, politically and more. It’s a feature of ASOIAF’s mysteriousness that suggests to me that this great number of wide-reaching mysteries can and will be correlated in the end by a small amount of surprising information. (Tower of Joy Ch. 4 – Establishing Our First Symbols)

Brienne is symbolic of Ned now in the same ways she was symbolic of Ned in the Chapter 6 description. The only differences are additive because we found more commonalities to strengthen the symbols. Podrick is still symbolic of Howland Reed, Pyg of Gerold Hightower, Timeon of Arthur Dayne, Shagwell of Oswell Whent, Nimble Dick Crabb of Ned’s five slain companions, and the Whispers castle of the Tower of Joy tower. Mostly, the symbols are defined by what side of the fight the character was on, when the character died in the fight, and who killed him.

On top of those, the weapons of each character or group of characters in those symbols have commonalities that never needed to be subtracted from or changed in order to connect the weapon in one character’s hand to the weapon in his symbolic counterpart’s hand. Timeon’s spear is still characteristically dornish like Arthur Dayne’s Dawn is characteristically dornish, Pyg’s broken sword is still a broken sword like Gerold Hightower’s broken sword, and Shagwell’s morning star is engaged in a surprise-unfriendly friendly-fire attack like Oswell Whent’s sword is engaged in a surprise-unfriendly friendly-fire attack.

As Kingmonkey described all those years ago, there is indeed a pattern of events repeated in ASOIAF that’s connected to the core mysteries of the series — that is the core mystery of the series, in truth. The Tower of Joy ritual is creating ripples in the river of time, figuratively speaking, and making the event replay as echoes before and after. Although these ripples were not strictly magical, careful measurement of them told us all about the raindrops they originated from, and those revelations may now feel to us like a storytelling kind of magic. Ahem. My English teachers always told me to repeat at the end of an essay what I said at the beginning. So there, I hope I made them proud.

By preserving these fight-related details of the initial Whispers≈Tower of Joy symbol, we were able to discover that Ned Stark used Ice at the Tower of Joy, Gerold Hightower broke his sword against Ice, Ned Stark killed Gerold Hightower, Gerold was the first kingsguard to die, Oswell Whent killed five of Ned’s men, Ned Stark was in a 1-vs-2 fight against Oswell and Arthur, Howland Reed’s mysterious intervention temporarily removed Oswell Whent from the fight, Lyanna Stark skinchanged Oswell Whent and attacked Arthur Dayne, Ned Stark killed Arthur Dayne next and then Oswell Whent last, and by the end of it all Ned Stark had killed all three of the three kingsguard himself.

It goes without saying, but that is a mountain of information about the Tower of Joy that we didn’t know when we began, and has never been seen in ASOIAF discussions before. It’s so much information that we’re almost finished with the Tower of Joy mystery. But there’s one more big question that needs to be answered. What did Howland Reed do to save Ned Stark’s life at the Tower of Joy? Let’s find out now!

Aim for the Head

One thing about the Tower of Joy mystery that has been the object of mild curiosity if not skepticism for readers like me is why Ned brought Howland Reed. The Tourney of Harrenhal story shows us plainly that Howland Reed was kind of a wimp. “He was small like all crannogmen,” his daughter Meera Reed would tell Bran Stark some day. Howland didn’t know how to swordfight. It’s suggested that he had more experience pulling oars than riding horses. And the three boys who beat him up were all younger than him. They were 15 and he was between 16 and 21, his specific age currently unknowable.

They were none older than fifteen, yet even so they were bigger than him, all three. (ASOS 24 Bran II p281)

Granted, there were three of them, but can you imagine even the reserved and ordinary-sized Ned Stark losing as feebly as Howland did? Hardly. Granted again, Howland knows how to use a frog spear. Still, a frog spear seems weak against the swords that the three kingsguard are bringing to the fight. The wooden haft of that frog spear is going to get chopped up against two castle-forged steel swords and Arthur Dayne’s veritable lightsaber. Ned and Howland must have known that. For all of the capabilities that we’re told Howland possesses in the beginning of Meera Reed’s tale, I can’t shake the sense that Ned Stark bringing Howland Reed to the Tower of Joy fight just doesn’t seem to fit. On top of that, Ned’s thoughts indicate beyond a shadow of a doubt that Howland was so effective in the fight that he saved Ned’s life? Time and time again this thought process leaves me aching to know… “How?!”

Ideas about how Howland saved Ned’s life range as widely as you would expect, from the magic of the green men to the poison darts of the crannogmen. But now that we’re on the other side of the Tower of Joy mystery, we know enough of what happened that we can satisfyingly answer this question using nothing but what we already know.

As our Podrick Payne≈Howland Reed symbol from essay Chapter 7 indicates, Howland being worse at direct combat than Ned is a characteristic of Howland that should be relevant to the Tower of Joy mystery, because it’s preserved in Howland’s symbolic counterpart Podrick Payne, who is worse at direct combat than Brienne the symbolic Ned. But until now, we haven’t had a good answer for why the Whispers≈TOJ symbol is preserving that characteristic. Well, the answer is simply that Howland Reed did not directly partake in the Tower of Joy fight. He partook indirectly.

As the 2-vs-1 scenarios of Ned Stark and Brienne both show us, two people is enough to practically guarantee a kill against one person, absent some lifesaving intervention. Because two people can spread out and force the one person to expose his/her back to attack. So, since Ned brought 7 men to fight 3 kingsguard, that left 1 man, Howland Reed, free to do something else.

As Podrick Payne’s stone throw suggests, Howland was the cause of a ranged attack against a symbolic Shagwell’s head (Oswell’s head). Howland Reed slipped past the 3 kingsguard while they were occupied with the other fighters. He entered the Tower of Joy and, knowing that Lyanna Stark is a powerful skinchanger, he instructed Lyanna to launch a psychic assault against Oswell Whent.

Why did Howland choose Oswell Whent instead of Arthur Dayne? Because unlike Arthur Dayne, Oswell Whent was cynical. His dark humor is a clue to his cynical nature, and his cynicism made him the easier target for psychic domination. Lyanna was weak from childbirth herself, so even for a powerful skinchanger the easier target was the wiser choice in her condition. Besides, Oswell Whent’s sword was just sharpened.

Ser Oswell Whent was on one knee, sharpening his blade with a whetstone. (AGOT 39 Eddard X p354)

Little did he know he would soon be using it against Arthur.

With this concept of the Tower of Joy fight, I can see how the details of Podrick Payne’s stone throw were symbolic of the details of Howland Reed’s actions at the Tower of Joy. Both characters set into motion an attack against a Shagwell≈Oswell Whent symbol, and both attacks are happening from a distance and directed at the target’s head. Shagwell’s head got hit by Podrick’s stone, and Oswell’s head got hit by, well… Lyanna’s anima.

Now let’s update two of our Whispers≈TOJ symbols to see how they grew, and to test the symbol by finding out if this commonality can be put into falsifiable words.

Shagwell ≈ Oswell Whent

Shagwell and Oswell Whent are both:

A man who fights in a group of three men at a Tower of Joy symbol and is killed by a Ned symbol, whose name ends with “-well”, who has a reputation for dark humor, and who was removed as a threat to the Ned symbol during a 2-vs-1 fight by a ranged attack to his head that was sent because of something a Howland Reed symbol did.

Podrick Payne ≈ Howland Reed

Podrick Payne and Howland Reed are both:

A physically unimposing young man at the fight on the Ned symbol’s side, who is friends with the Ned symbol, who is worse at direct combat than the Ned symbol, and who prevented the Ned symbol from being killed in a 2-vs-1 fight by doing something that caused a ranged attack to an Oswell symbol’s head and temporarily removed the Oswell symbol as a threat to the Ned symbol.

Oswell Whent, the Black Bat

Well folks, now that we know all the big stuff about the Tower of Joy, we can go back and appreciate more of the small stuff that we missed or didn’t have time to look at. Let’s do that now.

Oswell Whent’s house sigil is the black bat of Harrenhal, and his black bat is displayed on his helmet in the Tower of Joy scene.

Across his whiteenameled helm, the black bat of his House spread its wings. (AGOT 39 Eddard X p354)

This can establish Oswell Whent as a symbolic bat, just like the dragon sigil of the Targaryens often establishes Targaryens as symbolic dragons, and the wolf sigil of the Starks often establishes Starks as symbolic wolves.

In the Whispers scene, Oswell’s symbolic counterpart — Shagwell — enters the scene in a unique sort of way.

From behind her came a rustling as a head poked down through the red leaves. Crabb was standing underneath the weirwood. He looked up and saw the face. “Here,” he called to Brienne. “It’s your fool.”

“Dick,” she called urgently, “to me.” (AFFC 20 Brienne IV p293)

Shagwell pokes his head down and out of a weirwood tree, which means he must be hanging upside-down, just like a bat. So strengthens the symbolic relationship between Shagwell and Oswell through the principle: embodying a bat. We have Westeros.org’s Sandy Clegg to thank for this catch. Updating the symbol once more…

Shagwell ≈ Oswell Whent

Shagwell and Oswell Whent are both:

A man who fights in a group of three men at a Tower of Joy symbol and is killed by a Ned symbol, whose name ends with “-well”, who has a reputation for dark humor, who was removed as a threat to the Ned symbol during a 2-vs-1 fight by a ranged attack to his head that was sent because of something a Howland Reed symbol did, and who is embodying a bat.

Whispers Underground

One of the long lasting questions about the Whispers scene is ‘Why is it called the Whispers?’ Not from an in-story standpoint, but from an out-of-story standpoint. Surely the author knows that the word whisper hearkens to one of the story’s most famous mysteries, Lyanna’s “Promise me, Ned” whispers.

Promise me, she had cried, in a room that smelled of blood and roses. Promise me, Ned. The fever had taken her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister’s eyes. (—Thoughts of Ned Stark, AGOT 4 Eddard I p35)

Promise me, Ned, his sister had whispered from her bed of blood. She had loved the scent of winter roses. (—Thoughts of Ned Stark, AGOT 58 Eddard XV p527)

The in-story reason the castle is called the Whispers is because the wind passing through the caverns below makes a sound like people whispering. At the same time, there is a local legend that explains this ordinary phenomenon in an extraordinary way.

“His wife was a woods witch. Whenever Ser Clarence killed a man, he’d fetch his head back home and his wife would kiss it on the lips and bring it back t’ life. Lords, they were, and wizards, and famous knights and pirates. One was king o’ Duskendale. They gave old Crabb good counsel. Being they was just heads, they couldn’t talk real loud, but they never shut up neither. When you’re a head, talking’s all you got to pass the day. So Crabb’s keep got named the Whispers. Still is, though it’s been a ruin for a thousand years. A lonely place, the Whispers.” (—Nimble Dick Crabb, AFFC 14 Brienne III p213)

According to the legend, the whispery sounds really are whispers, because Ser Clarence Crabb kept the reanimated heads of his defeated foes on shelves in the caverns, and they whisper to each other from time to time because, of course, a head has to entertain itself somehow.

On the surface, the legend is about learning from your enemies. A head is where a person’s wisdom is stored. No doubt Clarence’s past enemies provided good counsel against his new enemies. The weaker Clarence seems, the weaker they seem too, because they were defeated by him. Better for your legacy if people think you were defeated by an undefeatable foe. The implication may be that their counsel (and their egos) was a big part of how Clarence was able to defeat so many foes. On Clarence’s part, it takes humility to recognize that there are things you can learn from the men you defeated, and even more humility (and a pinch of insanity) to recognize the value in keeping your defeated foes around so you can interrogate their wisdom again later. The metaphor for books is right under our noses, here. Ser Clarence seeks counsel with his home library of heads like we seek counsel with a home library of books. But there’s more going on with this legend than an authorial instruction to read books more and master our egos.

The Whispers is the name of the ruined castle that stands on the surface of the land, and legend has it that there are whispers lurking beneath the surface of the land, too. With whispers above and beneath the surface, ASOIAF was showing us that the fight scene at the Whispers castle contains the wisdom we need to understand the fight scene at Lyanna’s whispers, the Tower of Joy. Ser Clarence’s whispering heads are symbolic books, directing the reader to take a closer look at books in general. When the reader applies that lesson to the book that’s already in his hands, he may notice that the Whispers fight was a symbolic Tower of Joy fight lurking beneath the surface, waiting for the reader to spot the commonalities and work out what happened at the Tower of Joy.

[[ Some readers will say that I’m reading too much into it. ‘Do you really believe GRRM meant for the whispering heads to be symbolic of books? And that was meant to make us look more closely at our AFFC book?’ To respond I point out the absurdity of the inverse. Surely we can all agree that what books and Clarence’s heads have in common is “stored wisdom.” Do you really believe it’s a coincidence that there is a metaphor for heeding stored wisdom (heads) referenced directly in the part of the stored wisdom (book) that we’re investigating right now? As if GRRM didn’t know readers would investigate the Tower of Joy mystery? Even now, after we achieved success with the mystery by looking closely at it (reading this essay series) for a long time? Not a chance. The story is cheekily reflecting the reader’s situation back at him so completely that readers who still don’t get it can seem dense to readers who do.

If you find yourself still not getting it, let me assure you that doesn’t indicate you’re dumb. Your immovability from literal interpretation is as much a superpower as symbolic aptitude is, and the two traits are vital parts of one functional whole society. As I said before, literal interpretation must be the foundation for good symbolic interpretation. In modern readers there’s a rush to do symbolic interpretation because it’s abstract thinking and we associate that with intelligence, but we often mess it up by neglecting the literal interpretation that the symbolic interpretation stands upon.

The story’s tendency to cause its audience to disagree along the line of literal versus symbolic interpretation is not a bug but a feature, for a variety of thematic reasons. GRRM has much to say in ASOIAF about the phenomenology of storytelling, but perhaps that belongs in a different kind of essay. ]]

What was she waiting for? Brienne told herself that she was being foolish. The sound was just the sea, echoing endlessly through the caverns beneath the castle, rising and falling with each wave. It did sound like whispering, though, and for a moment she could almost see the heads, sitting on their shelves and muttering to one another. “I should have used the sword” one of them was saying. “I should have used the magic sword.” (—Thoughts of Brienne, AFFC 20 Brienne IV p291)

Before Brienne entered the Whispers castle, the sound of the wind made her spooky, and for a moment she found herself imagining that the whispering heads are real. Just like Brienne, Ned’s whisper event gave Ned the creeps too as he entered a castle.

Within, Ned passed two other knights of the Kingsguard; Ser Preston Greenfield stood at the bottom of the steps, and Ser Barristan Selmy waited at the door of the king’s bedchamber. Three men in white cloaks, he thought, remembering, and a strange chill went through him. (—Thoughts of Ned Stark, AGOT 47 Eddard XIII p420)

As Ned walked from the Tower of the Hand to visit King Robert at his death bed in the Red Keep, he counted three men in white cloaks, meaning three kingsguard. So, too, went the count at the Tower of Joy. I might get a strange chill too if something reminded me of the time my sister stole a man’s body to help me kill him. Let’s update our Ned ≈ Brienne symbol accordingly.

Ned ≈ Brienne

Ned and Brienne are both:

A person who journeys to an isolated building to retrieve a Stark girl where he/she finds three men enemies, fights them, and kills them, and who is creeped out by a situation involving whispers as he/she is entering a castle.

With our newfound knowledge that Lyanna Stark was a skinchanger and what she did at the Tower of Joy, we have some compelling new answers to the question of what the promises were that Lyanna begged from Ned. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone what I did to Oswell Whent and Arthur Dayne” and “Promise me you won’t tell anyone I’m a skinchanger.”

A Clue from Sansa

During Sansa’s time as a hostage in King’s Landing, she was more or less confined to a tower room. In the aftermath of King Joffrey’s death, Sansa escaped King’s Landing with the help of Littlefinger. The news of Sansa’s escape eventually traveled to Sandor and Arya at the Inn at the Crossroads, but the story underwent some changes in the telling. Here’s Polliver’s version.

“What wife?”

“I forgot, you’ve been hiding under a rock. The northern girl. Winterfell’s daughter. We heard she killed the king with a spell, and afterward changed into a wolf with big leather wings like a bat, and flew out a tower window. But she left the dwarf behind and Cersei means to have his head.”

That’s stupid, Arya thought. Sansa only knows songs, not spells, and she’d never marry the Imp. (ASOS 74 Arya XIII p843)

This tall tale seems to have been warped by the embellishments of bored smallfolk, or maybe it has been purposefully propagandized by the ruling family. On the bored smallfolk side of things, maybe Sansa’s wolf-bat transformation is derived from Sansa’s heritages in both House Stark (wolf) and House Whent (bat). On the royal propaganda side of things, maybe Cersei and the ruling House Lannister want to control the narrative of political events and who people consider the good guys and the bad guys. So, the tale turns Sansa into a literal monster, a wolf with bat wings, to make her seem villainous because that suits the idea that Sansa and Tyrion killed Joffrey.

Now that I know Lyanna skinchanged Oswell Whent at the Tower of Joy, I can see how this tall tale was a clue for that. Oswell Whent can be symbolized by a bat, because the Whent sigil is a bat. Since Sansa and Lyanna are both Starks, they can both be symbolized by a wolf. Oswell Whent being skinchanged by Lyanna Stark is a wolf with bat wings. So this gossip about Sansa mirrors what actually happened at the Tower of Joy about sixteen years earlier. A wolf with bat wings flying out of a tower is a perfect representation of Lyanna Stark skinchanging Oswell Whent from inside the Tower of Joy.

Next: Chapter 14 – The She-wolf

Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction

Created Nov 23, 2024
Updated Nov 27, 2024
Updated May 17, 2025 small fix
Updated May 25, 2025 small changes

Tower of Joy, A Study in Symbolic Interpretation – Chapter 12

Chapter 12 – Shagwell’s Morning Star

Previous: Chapter 11 – Cold as Ice

Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction

In essay Chapter 10 we began looking at how the weapons in the Whispers scene are symbolizing the weapons in the Tower of Joy scene. There’s one more weapon-to-weapon symbol we haven’t looked at yet — Shagwell’s morning star and Oswell Whent’s sword. How is Shagwell’s morning star symbolizing Oswell Whent’s sword? That’s the question we’ll explore in this essay chapter.

A Pattern Between Patterns

Timeon is symbolic of Arthur Dayne, and Arthur Dayne’s weapon and Timeon’s weapon have dornish in common, because a spear and Dawn are characteristically dornish weapons.

Pyg is symbolic of Gerold Hightower, and their weapons have broken sword in common, because both of them have broken swords. Although Pyg’s sword was broken from the start of his fight and Gerold’s wasn’t, their breaking doesn’t need to have occurred at the same time in order for them to have brokenness in common. Their swords being in a state of brokenness at some point during the fight is enough of a commonality to seal the symbolic relationship, because the fight is the parent symbolic relationship, and the weapon symbols are happening beneath that umbrella, because weapons are fight-related.

Notice the progression of change that happened from the first weapon symbol to the second one. The first weapon symbol was easy because the spear and Dawn share the same commonality that their fighters do: dornish. Another thing that makes Timeon and Arthur’s weapon symbol easy is that the commonality is a fact about the in-story world. It’s a fact that Dorne is strongly associated with spears, and it’s a fact that Dawn is strongly associated with Dorne, because Dawn originated in Dorne and House Dayne lives in Dorne.

The second weapon symbol was a little harder and a little less contained in the story. One reason it was harder was because before we could figure out what Pyg and Gerold’s swords have in common we had to combine that question with another question about whether or not Ned Stark used Ice at the Tower of Joy. Ice’s unbreakability is what clued us in that Gerold’s sword broke against it, and that therefore what Pyg and Gerold’s swords have in common is brokenness. So, another thing that made this symbol harder to figure out was that not all of the relevant information was explicitly contained in the story. Some of the information we needed was outside the story, and that information was the fact of our own curiosity about whether or not Ned used Ice at the Tower of Joy. Or perhaps more specifically, that information was that our curiosity about whether or not Ned used Ice at the Tower of Joy originates from George R. R. Martin, rather than from within ourselves.

Is it fair to say that the reader wanting to know the answer to a question is evidence that the question is contained in the story? If so, then the question isn’t contained in the story explicitly, but implicitly. Apparently, something about the story’s design implied to us that the question is relevant and the answer to it is interesting. And certainly the author could have written the story that way on purpose, because a good author knows how to suggest things without explicitly saying them. So yes, it is fair to say that the questions we generate about the story are contained in the story, they’re just contained in the story implicitly rather than explicitly, through the art of suggestion. This sequence of reasoning is needed in order to notice that your own thoughts about the story are not entirely your own, are indeed contained in the story, and therefore can and perhaps should be treated as a part of the story that the answer to any given mystery needs to explain. That is to say, the answers to the question ‘What happened at the Tower of Joy’ need to include a good answer to the question ‘Why do I want to know if Ned used Ice at the Tower of Joy when that question is not asked anywhere in the story?’ Or alternatively, ‘Why did the author write the story in a way that caused me to want to know if Ned used Ice at the Tower of Joy?’

Certainly we have ourselves to credit for some of our own curiosity, but we must also credit GRRM, because it was his story that provoked that curiosity in us, after all, and he may likely have done that on purpose. When a storyteller says the hero has a magic sword and the hero fought a mysterious fight, that is predictably going to make the audience want to know if the hero used the magic sword in the mysterious fight.

To summarize, the progress of the weapon symbols is that they require us to relinquish to the author more ownership of our thoughts and perceptions about the story. So, if we want to figure out how the last pair of weapons are symbolic of one another, we can expect that we will have to relinquish to the author even more ownership of our thoughts and perceptions about the story. In other words, there is something we perceived about this part of the story that we think belongs to us, but really it does not entirely belong to us because the story made us perceive it and we haven’t noticed that yet.

Surprisingness, Not Surprise

In his essays, fantasy author C.S. Lewis once wrote:

In the only sense that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second time. Knowing that the ‘surprise’ is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn’t look as if it were suddenly going to bring us out on the edge of the cliff. (—Of Other Worlds, 1966)

One of the brilliant features of the design of the chapter AFFC Brienne IV is that, because the shock of Nimble Dick’s recontextualization from creepy betrayer to tragic victim happens to the reader through Brienne, there is never a moment when the reader has to confront the fact that his expectations about Nimble Dick were wrong. ‘It was Brienne who was wrong, not me,’ we can tell ourselves.

Admit it. As Nimble Dick walked into the ruined castle shouting “Halloooo, anyone there?”, you were thinking to yourself ‘This son of a dog is walking my girl Brienne right into a trap.’

After Brienne told him to stop shouting and Nimble Dick shouted again, you thought it again.

Then, when Pyg walked out of the bushes and Timeon climbed out of the well, you were thinking ‘I knew it! It’s an ambush. Nimble Dick is in league with the ambushers!’

Then, when Nimble Dick was standing under the weirwood tree and Shagwell jumped down beside him, you were thinking ‘Nimble Dick set this whole thing up!’

Then, when Nimble Dick said “Here, it’s your fool!” you thought Nimble Dick was terrorizing Brienne with his betrayal.

Then, when Brienne called Nimble Dick to come stand with her and Shagwell laughed, you thought the reason he was laughing at Brienne was because Brienne is too stupid to realize Nimble Dick changed sides.

And then when Shagwell swung his morning star and exploded Nimble Dick’s knee in a mess of blood and bones, you thought ‘What the heck is going on here? Was that friendly fire? Is this clown just so crazy that he would kill his partner in crime?’

As the fight unfolds, we’re swept up in the action and carried along to its conclusion, depriving us of an opportunity to consciously notice that our expectations were unceremoniously obliterated like Nimble Dick’s knee. And perhaps more to the point, depriving us of the chance to admit to ourselves that we’re wrong and to take ownership of it by closely examining the situation. Being wrong is uncomfortable, so most of the time we’re not likely to object when the winds of the plot blow past our wrongness. It takes a special and deliberate kind of curiosity to want to return to the scene of your own failure and meditate on what exactly happened to trip you up.

As we approach the scene now, we’re looking at it in an emotionally detached way for the specific purpose of learning more about the scene it’s symbolizing, the Tower of Joy. Fueled by curiosity for that far away mystery, any embarrassment we might feel about being wrong in the Whispers scene is lessened and easier to bear. ‘Okay, so I was wrong about Nimble Dick.’ I think to myself. ‘Big deal? I really want to know what happened at the Tower of Joy. If that’s all I have to admit to learn what happened at the Tower of Joy then I admit it gladly. WHAT IS SHAGWELL’S MORNING STAR SHOWING ME ABOUT OSWELL’S SWORD?!

Well my loyal readers, now you’re in the right frame of mind to work out the answer to that question. Because now you’re searching for a way that the story is referring to you. As I said in essay Chapter 5, a story is a symbol of you. The subject of any story is always ultimately the person reading it, because stories contain lessons and you have to extract the lesson. When you don’t see how a part of the story is referring to you then you have misread the story and you need to read that part again until you see it.

Believe it or not, what Shagwell’s morning star and Oswell’s sword have in common is found in your surprise. Yes, yours! And this is it:

The attack looked like friendly fire but it really was not.

This quality of Shagwell’s morning star is shared by Oswell Whent’s sword. If you want to think about how, stop reading now, then come back when you’re finished thinking and continue reading.

Oswell Whent 1 cut

During the 2-versus-1 fight with Ned Stark against Oswell Whent and Arthur Dayne, Oswell Whent stabbed his sword into Arthur Dayne. The attack looked like friendly fire but it really was not.

Because, even though Oswell Whent looked like Oswell Whent, for that moment he was Lyanna Stark.

Next: Chapter 13 – The Black Bat

Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction

Created Nov 15, 2024
Updated Nov 16, 2024 – Some additions
Updated May 25, 2025 – small changes

Rhaella Targaryen

Here’s my super popular theory about Rhaella Targaryen (short version)

Video version (long version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXXjdCpWYmI

She’d stood with one hand on her breast, her lips parted, her green eyes shining. She is crying, Jaime had realized, but whether it was from grief or ecstasy he could not have said.

The sight had filled him with disquiet, reminding him of Aerys Targaryen and the way a burning would arouse him. A king has no secrets from his Kingsguard. Relations between Aerys and his queen had been strained during the last years of his reign. They slept apart and did their best to avoid each other during the waking hours. But whenever Aerys gave a man to the flames, Queen Rhaella would have a visitor in the night. The day he burned his mace-and-dagger Hand, Jaime and Jon Darry had stood at guard outside her bedchamber whilst the king took his pleasure. “You’re hurting me,” they had heard Rhaella cry through the oaken door. “You’re hurting me.” In some queer way, that had been worse than Lord Chelsted’s screaming. “We are sworn to protect her as well,” Jaime had finally been driven to say. “We are,” Darry allowed, “but not from him.”

Jaime had only seen Rhaella once after that, the morning of the day she left for Dragonstone. The queen had been cloaked and hooded as she climbed inside the royal wheelhouse that would take her down Aegon’s High Hill to the waiting ship, but he heard her maids whispering after she was gone. They said the queen looked as if some beast had savaged her, clawing at her thighs and chewing on her breasts. A crowned beast, Jaime knew.

By the end the Mad King had become so fearful that he would allow no blade in his presence, save for the swords his Kingsguard wore. His beard was matted and unwashed, his hair a silver-gold tangle that reached his waist, his fingernails cracked yellow claws nine inches long. Yet still the blades tormented him, the ones he could never escape, the blades of the Iron Throne. His arms and legs were always covered with scabs and halfhealed cuts. (AFFC Jaime II)

Rhaella completely faked the attack. Aerys didn’t do anything to her.
The door was closed, so nobody saw into Rhaella’s bedchamber.
The only time Jaime saw Rhaella after the attack Rhaella was fully covered.
The news of the attack comes from Rhaella’s maids. The Queen’s servants will say whatever the Queen tells them to say. If they were “whispering” how did Jaime hear them? Because they were whispering LOUDLY.
Rhaella’s cries sound fake. “You’re hurting me!” She’s narrating.
The reason Jonothor Darry didn’t interfere is because he has been a kingsguard longer than Jaime and he knows Rhaella is a lying faker.
The reason Rhaella’s maids were whispering loudly in front of Jaime is because Jaime was the new guy in the castle and Rhaella wanted to turn him against King Aerys.
The reason Jonothor Darry didn’t protect his best friend Rhaegar’s mom is because he knows Rhaella is a lying faker.

If you disagree then what’s your theory for why every scene in the series that has teeth doing violence to breasts also has a closed door in it:

ACOK Daenerys IV p526
ACOK Theon IV p609
AFFC Jaime II p232
AFFC Brienne VI p466

Sorry this post is not the quality I usually aim for. If I get time I may come back later and spruce it up.

Reddit Censorship

Due to the invisible nature of censorship, this section is for my readers and fellow ASOIAF truth seekers who want to know when censorship happens in the ASOIAF community and what kind of truths are targeted. On Oct 31, 2024, I posted the above theory on the subreddit r/asoiaf. After a period of unanimously hostile engagement from commenters (some of whom themselves suffered censorship when they crossed the line, to the credit of the subreddit’s moderation), the subbreddit’s staff removed the entire thread. I can still view the thread on my account, but this interpretation of the story has been erased from the view of the entire subreddit without their knowledge. I was not messaged or notified in any way about the censorship, and no reason was offered. Not that the reason is any mystery to me. The theory is quite damning to the misandrist attitudes that characterize so much of popular ASOIAF theory. To keep a record of this sad violence against GRRM’s fandom and the atrocious behavior of the radicalized and intellectually stunted r/asoiaf community, what follows is a history of every comment in the thread. Enjoy, and feel welcome to take what you learned here about Rhaella and apply it in your own ASOIAF journeys. The truth always comes out in the end.

person_number_1038
Given everything else we know about Aerys, it’s probably safe to assume he was hurting her. I doubt there is going to be some twist involving Rhaella and the various plots against Aerys. [5]

applesanddragons
Let’s put a number to that doubt. Is this like a 90% certainty or 99%? [-4]

person_number_1038
It doesn’t add anything to the story. If Jamie was manipulated through tenuous means to turn against Aerys, it takes away from his character arc. Killing Aerys was his decision. It’s him acting as a true knight and having that action be perceived as his worst. Not everything is a scheme.

Aerys was a schizophrenic sex pest, him brutally raping his wife makes more sense than his wife subtly turning his guards against him through eavesdropping and rumors. [4]

applesanddragons
You just learned about it half an hour ago. How can you know it doesn’t add anything to the story before you have done any research into the story about it? You disliking a part of the story is a far cry from something being a meaningless or bad part of the story.

You just said a meaningful part of the story is that Jaime’s heroism is perceived as his villainy. It logically follows, then, that it can be just as meaningful for the story that Aerys’s innocence is perceived as his guilt. What’s with the double standard? Why do you apply one standard to Jaime and a totally different standard to Aerys? Do you need 17 POV chapters of Aerys before you can imagine that there might be a victim of false rape allegations behind the Mad King propaganda? Or do you suppose Robert Baratheon’s version of the history of the Mad King is a fair and sober telling? [-4]

person_number_1038
I’ve said all that needs to be said. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.

What would this theory add to the story? [4]

applesanddragons
What does Jaime being innocent add to the story? Is that plain enough? [-2]

olivebestdoggie
What does this add to the story

And Jonthor does say “nah it’s all good to Jamie” he says “it’s not our job to protect her from him”

Darry is not best friends with Rhaegar either that’s Arthur [5]

applesanddragons
Whatever it adds to the story, I bet it has absolutely nothing in common with what Dany being the villain adds to the story. LOL

You’re misquoting me and Jon Darry at the same time. Worse, you’re doing it right beneath my quote and Jon Darry’s quote. Astonishingly silly thing to do.

Rhaegar was good friends with several of the kingsguard, and Jon Darry is one of them. [-4]

Jon_Satin_MPregBot
Is this supposed to be a shitpost? [7]

[deleted]
Comment removed by moderator ((called my post problematic and insulted me))

applesanddragons
You should start a petition to censor my problematic theory, that way it won’t be so obvious to people that you completely failed to refute any of the points.

olivebestdoggie
No Jon Darry was not one of Rhaegars friends on the Kingsguard. Barristan names his five of Rhaegar’s six friends as Myles Moonton, Lewyn Martell, Arthur Dayne, Jon Con, and Richard Lonmouth, there is not textual evidence anywhere supporting Jon Darry as one of his friends.

There is not a single shred of evidence Jon Darry was best friends with Rhaegar. The most likely sixth friend is Oswell Whent who is mentioned in the mobile app as helping Rhaegar kidnap Lyanna.

Find me a single quote supporting your Jon Darry claim and then come back and we can argue the merits of your rape denying theory.

Also if every scene with teeth doing violence to breasts has a closed door in it, then the door being closed for Rhaella lends more credence that it’s true. [2]

applesanddragons
Jon Darry was one of the three kingsguard who went with Rhaegar to the Trident. There’s every reason to think Jon Darry and Rhaegar were friends. It’s so funny that you’re focusing your criticism on this part of the theory, because it’s not even a prerequisite for the theory to be correct. It’s the weakest angle of attack you could have taken, which just shows that the rest of the theory is rock solid and you know it. It’s no storywriting coincidence that all the details of the situation prevent the reader from having any hard evidence of the attack on Rhaella. The storywriting purpose was to fool us until GRRM is ready to spring the trap.

Also if every scene with teeth doing violence to breasts has a closed door in it, then the door being closed for Rhaella lends more credence that it’s true.

How does a closed door support Aerys’s guilt? The door being closed supports Rhaella’s guilt, not Aerys’s. That’s how the author draws attention to Rhaella’s guilt, he highlights the significance of the closed door by putting a closed door in every scene where the kind of violence Rhaella is lying about happened. The contrast speaks to how despicable of a lie it is, because it’s something that really happened to other people. [-1]

olivebestdoggie
Barristan went to the Trident with Rhaegar and he states they weee not friends. Kingsguard who were friends would be the one at the TOJ. I said we could discuss the theory when you provided evidence that Jon Darry and Rhaegar are friends, and there is no textual evidence they were.

You made the claim Rhaegar was friends with Jon Darry I asked you to support this claim and you have none

Barristan names the identity 5 of Rhaegars 6 closest friends and the AWOIAF app states the sixth. Darry is none of those.

As you admit Jon Darry’s friendship doesn’t particularly matter for your theory, so why make it up. [2]

applesanddragons
I will take your hyper-fixation on Jon Darry as acquiescence to the rest of the theory. Sure, it’s possible albeit unlikely that Jon Darry and Rhaegar were not friends. Regardless of that, it remains true that Jon Darry was a kingsguard for a long time and would have known if Rhaella was a habitual liar conspiring against her husband, the man Jon Darry is sworn to protect, which would have played a great role in his decision to ignore her shouting and to advise Jaime to stand down. Unknown to Jaime.

What’s extra funny about your critique is that Jon Darry NOT being friends with Rhaegar actually strengthens my theory by removing one of the things that it needs to explain. If Jon Darry and Rhaegar were not friends, my theory doesn’t need to explain as strongly why Jon Darry was not especially concerned with protecting Rhaegar’s mom. [0]

olivebestdoggie
I’m not even considering your theory at all since you have zero evidence to back up an extremely simple claim.

We are told exactly who Rhaegar’s friends and confidants are and Darry is not one of them. Rhaegar is know as private and dour. He is not some gregarious dude making friends with every single person.

If you are unable to defend the simplest part of your argument then there is no reason to value any of your other ramblings. [2]

applesanddragons
I was thinking about the way you inverted the meaning of the evidence, and it’s really a remarkable case study in both literature and evidence. It helped me realize that the best test for who’s telling the truth straight and who’s inverting the truth is to check who found the pattern first.

If your interpretation is right then you would have found the pattern first. But clearly you had no idea the pattern even existed until I told you in this thread. Because I found it first. And the fact that I found it first is what settles the matter that my interpretation is more useful than yours at finding patterns in the story. From there it simply follows that an interpretation that’s more useful for finding patterns in the story is also more true. [0]

jcw163
George I’m begging you [4]

applesanddragons
That girl was lying like Crystal Mangum. [-1]

Ok-Owl2214
I swear this place is hitting new lows every day. [4]

applesanddragons
Only for those who are allergic to the truth. [-1]

DornishPuppetShows
Going through a tough break-up? Haven’t read as much subtle misogyny in one post for a time.[2]

Created Oct 31, 2024
Updated Nov 1, 2024 – Censorship