Holy hell, this chapter is so long…

One thing that continues to puzzle me is how opaque the Faith of the Seven continues to be, despite all the words that have been written about it. For example, here we learn that there are “Fathers of the Faith” whose writings on religious matters are considered significant. I know from outside context that we’re talking about the Faith’s verion of the “Church Fathers” but the text doesn’t make it clear.

I like the quote from Septon Barth, gives you a sense of the worldly, pragmatic man who doesn’t get nearly enough screentime. I do wonder why he went with the Faith rather than the Citadel, given his interests.

This chapter has a slightly weird structure, since you have one group of political conflicts around the Three Queens and another that’s the Regent and Hand vs. the King, and GRRM keeps cutting back and forth.

The conflict between Rogar/Alyssa and Jaehaerys/Alysanne flows a bit more naturally out of the previous chapter, grounded in both political considerations about the marriage and policy but also personal grievances. Jaehaerys’ comment about “he did not need a second father” really sums up the Oedipal dynamic, but I did like the way in which Alyssa’s divergent motivations from Rogar’s complicate the conflict somewhat.

The quote from Alyssa about “my children ride dragons, and we do not” does speak to the slight anti-climactic nature of the conflict; I don’t really see a situation in which Jaehaerys would ever lose or Rogar ever win.

Speaking of Alyssa, the quote about her desiring “above all to be loved, admired, and praised” really does not track with the previous chapter where she’s calling for wholesale executions.

However, I do like the way that the whole scheme with the handmaids shows the difference between Alyssa and Rogar’s political styles: Alyssa sends women of faith to try to “impress upon Alysanne, and mayhaps even Jaehaerys, that for brother to lie with sister was an abomination int he eyes of the Faith,” which isn’t a half-bad strategy, whereas Rogar sends a honeypot to break them up.

More on this later.

Rhaena as the “Queen in the West” doesn’t quite track out of her last chapter; if she’s particularly motivated by being passed over by her “baby brother” and “my own mother,” then self-exiling to Fair Isle, marrying a second son of a lesser House, and separating from both her daughters is an odd way to go about it. I suppose the idea is that she changed her mind too late, but I’d like to see the turn happen.

Incidentally, having seen The Favourite (which you should all see, btw), I cannot read about Rhaena and her “Four-Headed Beast” without thinking about Olivia Colman as Queen Anne. Let’s just say we’re all very lucky the Stuarts didn’t have dragons.

Let’s talk about Androw Farman, who gets a lot more characterization in this chapter, but whom I have something of a hard time getting a grasp on. There’s a suggestion that Androw might be gay or genderqueer (“half a girl”), but that doesn’t track his final statement about his marriage; my guess is that similar to how Sam’s sexuality was called into question because of his inability to perform masculinity, Androw’s inability to acquire “martial skills” (or any accomplishments beyond his appearance) was equated to his gender and/or sexuality by his peers. There’s also a suggestion that he had some sort of mental disability, as he “could hardly read nor write” (although given the way his marriage and life ends was that something of a Claudius-like sham?). In the end, he seems to be a bit of a cipher, a human blancmange.

By contrast, Elissa Farman’s personality really explodes off the page, as someone who cannot wait to circumnavigate the globe. And once you read that in light of what eventually happens to her relationship with Rhaena, it makes you wonder about Rhaena’s extreme lack of communications skills, because it’s not like she was quiet about her character or her plans.

Speaking of Farmans (Farmen?), Franklyn goes down on my list of Jerkasses With a Point (a rather long list in this particular book). On the one hand, he’s rude to the point of obnoxiousness, and at one point he literally gets a 80s Movie Villain defeat. On the other hand, not a lot of lords would be happy about their in-laws acting like they owned the place while going about as far from upholding their end of the dynastic alliance bargain as one can go.

My appreciation for Lyman Lannister (and his – take a drink! – “formidible lady Jocasta”) grew substantially with his whole plan to have Ser Tyler Hill seduce Rhaena in the hopes of getting his hands on a dragon. It didn’t work due to Rhaena’s sexual orientation, but it was worth the effort, and you really have to admire his subtlety and cunning.

By the by, I think the Casterly Rock incident speaks to Rhaena’s fundamental political weaknesses: she just didn’t have the backing she would need to make a play, nor did she have the skills need to build the kind of political coalition that she would have needed.

I don’t really get how this whole scheme where they’d keep the King’s marriage secret and keep the King secluded on Dragonstone was ever going to work. In a polity where the king’s physical presence is crucial, there’s no way that the political class of the nation weren’t going to notice.

Indeed, the line about “this was a king who never acted without thinking..he had chosen the queen he wanted and would make the realm aware of that in due course, but at a time of his own choosing, in a manner best calculated to lead to acceptance” (which, btw, is a wonderful passage that really evokes J-man’s personality) suggests to me that Jaehaerys was well aware that his absence from court would undermine Rogar’s political position. No wonder that the traditional King’s Landing loyalists – the Masseys, Stauntons, Darklyns, Bar Emmons, Stokeworths, etc. – show up at Dragonstone to form his faction. Also doesn’t help that Daemon Velaryon sides with Jaehaerys instantly.

While the Jaehaerys training montage sequence is a bit 80s-tastic, it does make sense from a symbolic politics perspective. As the text points out, “King Aenys had been slighted as weak, in part because he was not the warrior.” But I think it goes further: since Jaehaerys was already a scholarly reformer type, he needed to balance out his image in order to get public acceptance for his big ideas. The nobility of Westeros will accept a warrior-poet or warrior-scholar as their monarch, but not the suffixes on their own.

This line about Alysanne Targaryen being initially overlooked because “observers at court found her of less interests than her older siblings who stood higher in the line of succession” could not be more Eleanor Roosevelt vis-a-vis Alice Roosevelt if it tried.

Also, the bit about her companions being rotated to prevent any rumors about her sexuality makes me feel sorry for a royal, which is hard to do. That is not good for childhood development, and it’s a testament to her character that she came out ok on the other end.

I quite like her resilience in the face of ongoing lobbying from the Wise Women, although she definitely does take on a more pious sensibility in all matters not involving Targaryens. (Which fits the whole Exceptionalist thing later on.)

So let’s talk about “A Caution for Young Girls.” I feel very ambivalent about this addition to the narrative. On the one hand, the approach to historiography is really impressive, leaps and bounds above what GRRM’s done before. (The bits about plagiarized knockoffs larding on the smut to gain a wider audience than the original used to happen all the time, especially in eras with much weaker copyright law.) And this kind of pornography-disguised-as-prurient-moralizing (known as “picaresque” novels) was a very popular genre of fiction in the early modern era: think Moll Flanders or Vanity Fair. I think of them as quite similar to the quasi-underground films of the 1950s which escaped the censors by having a last reel in which the wayward youth or gangsters received their just deserts, only to omit the final reel whenever the local sheriffs weren’t around.

On the other hand, it’s not plausible that the books Martin describes would exist in the world he’s created. Without the printing press, you can’t really mass-produce books to the point where they can “pass from hand to hand in the low places of Westeros.” There just aren’t enough “septons expelled from the Faith…failed students…hired quills…or mummers” to sit down and copy out whole books on hand to produce hundreds if not thousands of copies floating around that you would need to make this kind of book both widely circulating and affordable enough to find a market. Similarly, there just isn’t a big enough literate population to make up the market given how few readers there are, even among the nobility.

I’m also not entirely sure about devoting this many pages to something that’s ultimately a non-event. At the end of the day, Coryanne’s exploits with Jaehaerys don’t really matter, since she fails in her main political task no matter which carnal version one follows. Indeed, I would have preferred it if Jaehaerys gave in but was ultimately forgiven by Alysanne – sort of a FDR/Missy LeHand and/or JFK/take-your-pick situation – because that would have at least have some thematic relevance in prefiguring the Two Quarrels and complicating Jaehaerys’ character somewhat.

But hey, there’s also some public policy in this chapter. We start with the public treasury: as we might have expected from last chapter, throwing massive coronations and weddings right after two major civil wars is not fiscally prudent, however good it might be for morale.

I don’t really get why Rogar chose the Dragonpit of all public works to focus on, doesn’t seem to fit his character particularly, in that the Dragonpit is particularly associated with the Targaryens-as-dragonriders (and with Maegor for that matter).

Edwell Celtigar continues the family legacy as Master of Coin and being a bit of an also-ran. I’m rarely in favor of anti-tax arguments, but going gung-ho for regressive taxation, then compounding it by focusing taxation on just King’s Landing, hitting both exports and imports, and taxing new construction is really a poor way to raise revenue.

I feel like more could have been done with Rogar and the second Vulture King. Feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

The rebellion of the Rimegate and Sable Hall is a great addition to the history of the North (although having a Bracken being a baddie is a bit of a cliché at this point), showing some of the downsides of having the Night’s Watch on Stark turf, but also having some major dynastic implications in that Walton’s death (going three-on-one against giants, no less!) makes Alaric the Stark in Winterfell. Moreover, the added context helps to explain why Alaric was so standoffish with Alyssa, since there’s the whole matter of his brother’s death.

Speaking of losing respect for Rogar, his plan to unseat Jaehaerys is laughably bad and boorishly implemented. If this was his plan, why not bring Rhaena to King’s Landing, or you know, do any basic pre-meeting lobbying among the Small Council?

By contrast, you have to give credit to Donnel the Delayer’s clever actions in response.

I also wonder why GRRM doesn’t have Rogar die in battle against the Vulture King. Feels like his story is done in this chapter, but he keeps hanging around.