This post will contain spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. Be warned!

When people call George R. R. Martin a cruel man, they’re usually thinking of The Red Wedding. The culmination of Robb and Catelyn’s stories, the Red Wedding is the ultimate gut-punch to the reader, a massacre of epic proportions. It was shocking in 2000, when A Storm of Swords was released, and it was shocking again in 2013 when the GOT episode “The Rains of Castamere” aired for the first time.

But it was more than just a shock to the readers. The Red Wedding has sent waves out throughout both the physical world of Westeros and the metaphysical realm of dreams and visions. In this essay, I’m going to show how the Red Wedding is really the Red Comet, appearing to all our characters and affecting the physical, the metaphysical, and even metatextual realms.

Echoes in the High Halls

The Red Wedding completely overturned the political dynamics in Westeros. Simple as that. In a single swoop, two Great Houses were brought to their knees and replaced by usurpers – the Boltons in the North and the Freys in the Riverlands. The Official Version of the story (licensed by the Freys, Boltons, and Lannisters) suggests that Robb Stark was a mad dog, and that the Northerners went wild and had to be put down. But nobody – literally nobody – believes this. The Lannisters don’t believe it, the Manderlys don’t believe it; as Renly told Stannis, “the realm denies it, from Dorne to the Wall.”

This single act has provided the casus belli for any eventual retaliation against the houses responsible. As Jaime discovers in A Feast for Crows, there’s never really going to be peace in the Riverlands so long as the ghastly specters of Robb Stark and Catelyn Tully hang over the realm. It’s not just plot contrivance that’s sending Jaime into the arms of Lady Stoneheart; his entire AFFC and ADWD arc is about the bitter, vengeful Heart beneath the veneer of an unjust peace. Anytime anyone thinks about siding with the Lannisters, a loyalist has only to remind them of the Red Wedding in order to re-awaken that spirit of vengeance. Lady Stoneheart is that spirit of vengeance personified.

We see that specter in the North as well, with Wyman Manderly and the Merman’s Court. As Davos and Wylla argue in Davos III ADWD, the peace promised by the Bolton/Frey/Lannister alliance is a false peace, a peace founded on injustice and fundamental wrongdoing. And as a result it can never be a true peace. Anyone who still thinks GRRM is a pacifist should re-read that chapter; this is a love letter to the idea of a Just War, a war to overturn an illegitimate, tyrannical regime. Much like when Aerys II murdered Brandon, Rickard, and their party, the Red Wedding is a breach in the fundamental dynamics of feudalism. And it’s so egregious, so brutal, that it calls into question the safety of every single vassal in the Seven Kingdoms.

And it’s not just the lords who feel the sting of the breach of guest right. This is a tradition at all levels of society; guest right is essentially Westerosi in the same way that baseball, apple pie, and wage gaps are essentially American. The burgeoning populist movement of the Sparrows is fueled partially by righteous anger over the Red Wedding. In Cersei IV, AFFC, the small council discusses finding some way to appease the sparrows by giving them some Frey scapegoats for the atrocity.

It has nought to do with us, claims Cersei, and the council is quick to agree. They’re quick to agree because Cersei has surrounded herself with lickspittles and yes-men. But everyone knows the truth. The smallfolk most of all should fear this government, a government unchecked by either political counterweight or moral qualms. The Red Wedding is an act of tyranny, an act of a government that believes itself above all recompense. And nobody has more to lose under such a government than the smallfolk of Westeros.

So we see how the Red Wedding – much like the Trials of Brandon and Rickard – is this firestarter event, the Rubicon of tyranny. And the political implications of that are still echoing and rippling into The Winds of Winter. Books 4 and 5 showed us how the Red Wedding brought a false peace, and TWOW will see that peace shattered in a quest for justice.

But there are implications beyond the political. The Red Wedding and its effect on dreamers tells us a great deal about the way trauma can ripple through time and space like a stone thrown into a vast, mirrorblack sea.

Ripples in the Dreamscape

(I already posted these ideas in a reddit thread here, so check out that discussion as well. I’ll go beyond the breadth of that thread here, though. So keep reading, ya filthy animal).

The Red Wedding is shown to us in A Clash of Kings, well before it takes place, by two separate dreamers.

First we have Dany’s visions in the House of the Undying:

This is 1:1 with the Red Wedding, at least on a symbolic level. The man on the throne is obviously a king, and that king is Robb Stark, with his iron throne and wolf head. Heck, they even served lamb at the Red Wedding, and the wolf-king brandishes a leg of lamb. Taken in the context of Dany’s other visions, this one stands out as distinctly non-Targaryen. The other door-visions are:

Four rat-men tearing a beautiful woman apart, a symbol of Westeros being ravaged by the War of the Five Kings.

Old Ser Willem Darry beckoning her back to her house with the red door.

Aerys II on the Iron Throne

Rhaegar with his infant son Aegon

Pyat Pree in a beautiful garden

The Undying themselves in an opulent chamber

All these other visions are heavily tied to Dany – her role as avenger of Westeros, rescuing it from the squabbling little men; her desires for home back in Braavos, with the red door and the lemon tree; the truth about her father, Aerys II, and his pyromania; Rhaegar and his prophecies, which doomed the realm; and the Undying themselves, beckoning her to learn the “secret speech of dragonkind.”

But this vision of Robb Stark is almost like an intrusion. He looks at Dany with “mute appeal,” like he wants her to avenge the atrocities of the Red Wedding.

I believe the Red Wedding sent ripples out in the dreamscape, echoes that rang through the minds of everyone who dared to tread on the mystic unland. And to a certain extent, this makes sense for Dany. She is the ultimate Avenger, the Righter of Wrongs, the Breaker of Chains. Given that the Red Wedding did, in fact, involve “chains for the guests and chains for the bridegroom,” that mute appeal in Robbwolf’s eyes is a literal appeal to Dany: Right the Wrongs of the Red Wedding. Break the chains.

The second appearance comes from Theon, in Chapter 56, when he dreams of the feast thrown for King Robert when he came to Winterfell. The feast turns macabre as all the now-dead attendees spill their guts, and the ghosts of Winterfell emerge from the shadows (including Lyanna Stark, interestingly enough). At the end of this dream, Robb and Grey Wind enter the hall of the dead:

This right here is odd. Theon isn’t a particularly mystical character – or at least he doesn’t seem like one. But this dream here feels like Theon is a little kid stumbling into the grown-up dining room. The specters of injustice are feasting here, ghosts unleashed by Theon Greyjoy. Robb and Grey Wind are mostly reminders of Theon’s greatest guilts and fears – he’s betrayed the man who he once loved as a brother – but their presence among a host of ancient Stark dead suggests a different level of foreshadowing.

Earlier I mentioned Patchface’s chant, “chains for the guests and chains for the bridegroom, aye, aye, aye.” This comes from early in A Storm of Swords, Chapter 10, Davos II. The full line (for posterity) is:

Fool’s blood, king’s blood, blood on the maiden’s thigh, but chains for the guests and chains for the bridegroom, aye, aye, aye.

Of course, this too is 1:1 with the Red Wedding. We have fool’s blood (Jinglebell), King’s blood (duh, come on), blood on the maiden’s thigh with Rosalin Frey’s bedding, and chains for the guests (Greatjon Umber comes to mind) and chains for the bridegroom (Edmure becomes a prisoner as well). We know Patchface is somehow attuned to the dreamscape and the metaphysical; even without this line, he also portends the wildfire holocaust on the Blackwater early on in A Clash of Kings:

Under the sea, smoke rises in bubbles, and flames burn green and blue and black. I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.

Not to reduce magic to science, but it almost seems like the Red Wedding is an emergency broadcast on all frequencies, an abomination so horrible that the sheer awfulness of it careens outward like a sonic boom. For Theon, it’s a guilt-inducing nightmare. For Dany, it’s another injustice that needs to be met with justice. For Patchface, it’s band practice.

This has far-reaching implications. In the reddit post I linked above, I argued that we’re getting similarly-connected visions about a black and bloody tide crushing towers and bearing a one-eyed kraken monster. If Euron Greyjoy is planning some big atrocity, these might be our clues – and he might be trying to harness that power. The Red Wedding shows us that atrocities and terrible acts send out ripples in the fabric of magic and dreams. And that, I think, is an underrated fact. It explains most of the visions we see in the books – the ghost of High Heart, for example, sees visions of atrocities or crimes against nature -even small-scale ones, like the death of Joffrey. Heck, way back in the day, Daenys the Dreamer led the Targaryens away from Valyria twelve years before the Doom because she saw it in a vision. If mass death and breaches of fundamental rules send out broadcasts in the cognisphere, the Doom is the proto-example. We see this too with the Sorrows in Tyrion’s chapters in Dance; the mass death and slaughter at Chroyane has left a magical stain on the place, a stain that does not fade.

Robb and Cat don’t seem all that connected to the magic plotlines at first glance, which is why it’s so surprising that Dany and Theon and Patchface dream of the event. On one level, sure this is just GRRM using dreams as tools to drop foreshadowing. But I think it’s also there to tell us how dreams and visions work. The mass atrocity of the Red Wedding wasn’t intended to be a magic ritual – but it sure looks like one, doesn’t it? The tents are rigged to collapse and burn, king’s blood is spilled, Catelyn’s throat is cut and her body systematically ritually disrespected. And whether they meant it as a ritual or not, the Freys and Boltons unintentionally made a thin place where magic bleeds through and the real world bleeds back.

I want to touch on this one last point. Because I think the RW is so atrocious – and ripples so far – because of the violation of guest right and the spilling of king’s blood. Not because there’s inherent godly power in those things, but because power- magic power – literally resides where men believe it resides. Like the ancient Greek Gods, magic significance draws its power in ASOIAF from the belief of men. When guest right is violated, it shatters an ancient and critical taboo – but it’s a man-made cultural taboo. What I’m suggesting (and I know this is radical and crazy, so feel free to ignore this paragraph and pretend I’m a reasonable person) is that the collective belief in guest right as a fundamental law of the universe made it into a fundamental law of the universe.

Alright, I’ll get off my magic system soapbox. The point is – something about the Red Wedding caused a huge upheaval in the ether. Like the Red Comet, it brought with it magic and death. Now we’re seeing more visions, visions of black tides and stone beasts. Our first hints at the Red Wedding were shown to us in dreams.

Remember this, as we sail into the apocalypse.

Eddies in the Fanosphere

But the effect of the Red Wedding stretches beyond even the books and the show. The Red Wedding still, still resonates in the fandom, and shapes the way we think about ASOIAF.

Before the Red Wedding, you could make the argument that the world seemed pretty safe for our heroes. Sure Ned died…but when you really look at it, he’s the Obi-Wan anyway. He’s not the main character, he’s just dressed up as one. Robb and Catelyn, though – they had a story ahead of them! Right?

GRRM teaches the reader with the Red Wedding. Ned’s execution was a random act of violence as far as the clues in the plot go – sure, you could predict that Joff would kill Ned, but at the end of the day it felt like a coin toss, there on the steps of the Sept of Baelor. But the Red Wedding was different. It’s the result of a complex set of political and personal decisions on the part of characters who, up until then, seemed like background players. Heartbroken we re-read the books, and to our horror discovered that all the pieces were there the whole time. The Red Wedding wasn’t a shocker, it was coming from inside the house. So to speak. The visions, the political machinations – all those things you breezed past the first time turned out to be massively important.

That knowledge – that GRRM hid clues to a massive, heartbreaking plot twist all through the first three books – completely changed the way the fandom approached books 4 and 5. It made us paranoid. We don’t trust characters anymore. When the Pink Letter is sent at the end of A Dance with Dragons, many readers’ first thought is “I don’t buy it.” Readers are on the lookout now; like Aerys II Targaryen, we see daggers in every shadow.

The Red Wedding was a betrayal on every scale – political, spiritual, and metatextual. The political implications drive the plot. The spiritual implications guide the characters. And the metatextual implications drive us. With the Red Wedding, GRRM showed the reader that they need to be paying attention. He’s handing us clues all the way along, and it’s up to us to piece them together before they culminate. I know GRRM never planned to take 16ish years to get to The Winds of Winter, but there’s a bit of serendipity at work here. The first three books tell us “look for clues!” and then we have fifteen, sixteen years to comb two quiet books for clues. Yeah, I wish The Winds of Winter was out now. But if the lesson of the Red Wedding was to read closely, I appreciate having the time to read Feast and Dance very, very closely.

Conclusion

The Red Wedding reverberates wide. In terms of the plot, it sets up an enormous amount of the political and personal motivations for the upcoming volumes. In terms of the metaphysical, it demonstrates to us that immense atrocities have spiritual consequences – a lesson that becomes more and more relevant as crazy visions show up in Feast and Dance. And it teaches the reader to pay attention. “Minor” characters are just as human as everyone else; they have motivations, desires, goals, ambitions, and will do terrible things to realize those goals.

And as for the show? The Red Wedding aired three years and one day ago today. And I think it’s the event that made seasons 5, 6, 7, and 8 exist. Game of Thrones was definitely popular before the Red Wedding – but the utter gut-punch of that episode spread like wildfire. People were talking about it. People who had never heard of a fantasy novel in their life, people who thought fantasy just meant goblins and dungeons. The Red Wedding punched Game of Thrones up into the stratosphere, and it hasn’t come down yet. I’m not kidding. Look at this great graph from Watchers on the Wall:

Other big-name shows at HBO – True Blood, Boardwalk Empire – started to fizzle and fade in the third and fourth seasons. Game of Thrones? The season four premiere was massively larger than the season 3 premiere. And that was the Red Wedding. I believe that in my bones. The Red Wedding defines ASOIAF and GOT in pop culture. It has everything – politics, magic, villains, murder, treachery, shock and awe. And it keeps going up.

The Red Wedding hit us like a boulder hitting a koi pond. And the ripples haven’t stopped, sixteen years later.