WARNING: SPOILERS FOR ADWD AND SPEC FOR THE NEXT BOOKS, NOT TO MENTION TRIGGERS GALORE

fortinbrasftw:

nobodysuspectsthebutterfly: *sees this post in the adwd tag* SHIPPING TYRION AND PENNY LIKE I NEVER DID BEFORE MOST BEAUTIFUL PAIRING OF ALL THE SERIES *resists urge to reply with “you know she’s his daughter, right?” because that’s just my speculation even if it is obviously right there in the text* *laughs like a supervillain anyway* When it happens, the tears of the fanboys and fangirls will be a delicious, delicious thing. TELL ME WHERE THIS IS OBVIOUSLY RIGHT IN THE TEXT?! And teach me your ASOIAF seeing all the secrets ways!!!! (PS- Shipping Penny/Tyrion is so weird that I feel a little soiled inside)

OK. Note this is indeed speculation– it’s not a fully textual meta the way my Bran & Hodor thing was, nor is it as near-conclusive speculation the way there’s evidence for the R+L=J theory. But it becomes obvious when you think about it.

First of all, my first post on the subject. (You can see a few secondary posts under this tag.) But let me expand from my existing posts:

What textual facts do we know about Tysha?

She was a crofter’s daughter (a crofter is a farmer who basically works as a serf to a lord) and had to leave the farm when he died

She was being attacked and nearly assaulted by bandits when Jaime and Tyrion found her and saved her

She was approximately 13 when she and Tyrion met (note he was also 13 at the time)

She was not a dwarf

She had dark brown hair

She loved to sing (her favorite song being “Seasons of My Love”)

She didn’t care what Tyrion looked like and loved him anyway

She was a virgin when they first had sex, and Tyrion married her the next day

They were married for two weeks and spent most of that time in bed

When he found out about the marriage, Tywin decided she was an uppity nobody who only married Tyrion for his money, and thus no different than a whore; and to punish her and to teach Tyrion “a sharp lesson” for marrying her, forced Jaime to tell Tyrion she was a whore he had bought for him, had her gang raped by a barracks of guardsmen and also Tyrion at the end, and had her paid for her “services” (a silver coin for each guard, a gold coin for Tyrion), sent away, and the marriage annulled

Tyrion has a hard time remembering exactly what she looked like, after all this time (about 13-14 years onwards)

Now, despite these facts, despite the most important and tragic revelation that Tysha was not and never was a whore, the most common theories about “whatever happened to Tysha” have fans looking for her in whorehouses, like the Peach and in Braavos. Even Tyrion does, searching for “where whores go” because of what his father said, and forgetting what Jaime told him!

But no, Lanna at the Peach is a red herring, and the Sailor’s Wife (and her daughter Lanna) is also a red herring. (The Sailor’s Wife in particular was obviously married to the late Gerion Lannister.) And the constant repetition of “where do whores go” is the biggest red herring of them all. And there is no reason to assume that an innocent girl would start working in a whorehouse just because she was gang raped and paid off. (That’s Gregor-style thinking, which is why I suppose it’s only natural that westeros.org thinks that way too.)

And then in ADWD, there’s Penny. (Technically she was introduced in ASOS… but I’m pretty damn certain GRRM had no intention of using one of the jousting dwarves for this character at the time he wrote that book.) What facts do we know about Penny?

She’s a dwarf

She has dark brown hair

She’s rather young and seems emotionally immature (more on that later)

She’s sexually inexperienced (her first kiss was with Tyrion)

Her brother Oppo aka Groat was killed by bounty hunters searching for Tyrion

She and her brother were nicknamed after the smallest coins

Her family lived in Oldtown

Her father was a dwarf (known as “Hop-Bean”), devised the jousting act, and is dead now

Her mother was not a dwarf, and loved to sing to Penny and her brother

Her mother’s also dead now

And now, here’s some quotes from ADWD:

“Tyrion closed his eyes to bring [Tysha’s] face to mind, but instead he saw his father, squatting on a privy with his bed-robe hiked up about his waist. “Wherever whores go,” Lord Tywin said, and the crossbow thrummed.”

“When Penny giggled, she sounded like the sweet young girl she was … seventeen, eighteen, no more than nineteen.”

“He laughed. “No. You do not want to hear me sing.” “My mother used to sing to us when we were children. My brother and me. She always said that it didn’t matter what your voice was like so long as you loved the song.””

[Tyrion is having a nightmare] ““Wherever whores go,” Lord Tywin said, but when Tyrion’s finger clenched and the bowstring thrummed, it was Penny with the quarrel buried in her belly.”

“Penny’s mouth was frozen in a rictus of a smile. Well trained for your amusement. Her father had a deal to answer for, in whatever small hell was reserved for dwarfs.”

Now, you can use Tyrion’s estimate of Penny’s age as evidence against this theory… but note that Tyrion is a terrible judge of age (as seen by Sansa). If you assume that Tyrion is wrong – and I’d actually argue that his estimate is evidence for this, as he spends much of ADWD assuming wrong about lots of things – and that Penny is actually 13 or so… then her behavior makes a lot more sense. Penny is dreamy and naive, attached to her pets, very child-like, sexually inexperienced, and not an adult even though she’s been forced to be. Actually, there’s even a textual comparison of Penny to Sansa, come to think of it… in which Tyrion thinks she’s older than Sansa and ought to know better. Wrong again, man!

Oh hey, I just thought it might be worth comparing something else… how about the first descriptions we have of Tyrion and Penny?

“His head was too large for his body, with a brute’s squashed-in face beneath a swollen shelf of brow.” –AGOT

“Clean-shaved and pink-cheeked, with a mop of chestnut hair, a heavy brow, and a squashed nose, [s]he perched on a high stool with a wooden spoon in hand, contemplating a bowl of purplish gruel with red-rimmed eyes. Ugly little bastard, Tyrion thought.” –ADWD

Um. Um. OK, this is what I mean when I say the text is obvious. And really, really ironic.

(via fortinbrasftw)