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Gentle Mother

A meta piece about Sansa Stark’s role as “gentle mother” with regard to religious faith and inspired by the parallels between her hymn and a Catholic hymn about Mary, Mother of God. Read it on AO3 here. My love and gratitude to @rapturousaurora and @blacksable6364 for their feedback. <3

Sansa’s Hymn                Hail Mary, Gentle Woman (starting at 1:08)

“Gentle Mother, font of mercy,     Gentle woman, Quiet light

save our sons from war, we pray,     Morning star, So strong and bright

stay the swords and stay the arrows, Gentle Mother, Peaceful dove

let them know a better day,         Teach us wisdom, Teach us love.

Gentle Mother, strength of women,     Blessed are you Among women

help our daughters through this fray,     Blest in turn All women too

soothe the wrath and tame the fury, Blessed they With peaceful spirits

teach us all a kinder way.”         Blessed they With gentle hearts.

“Hail Mary, Gentle Mother” is a Catholic hymn typically used during the month of May, which is dedicated to Mary, Mother of God, especially during May crowning ceremonies (in which a statue of Mary is crowned with a flower crown, usually by girls who have just received the sacrament of Holy Communion for the first time. They re-wear their first Communion dresses at this ceremony, and it is a profound honor to be chosen to crown Mary.) While I cannot say for certain of course that GRRM based Sansa’s hymn on this particular hymn, as he has stated the Faith of the Seven is based on medieval Catholicism, the lyric parallels seem particularly obvious. 

While baptism is not particularly associated with Mary, Mother of God in the Christian tradition (“I baptize you in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and Mary was not present that the reader knows of at Jesus Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist in the Jordan), the language “font of mercy” as religious imagery calls the tradition to mind. In Catholicism, the holy water of baptism washes away the stain of original sin. There are no references to baptism (yet) in ASOIAF, but the tradition of kings being anointed with holy oil does also parallel medieval Catholicism. “To Jesus, through Mary” is a traditional quotation emphasizing the Catholic devotion to Mary as effective devotion to her son, Jesus Christ. The medieval theologian Odo of Canterbury is quoted as stating “In fact, one goes to Christ through Mary, one goes to the Son through the Mother. By means of the Mother of Mercy one reaches mercy itself.”

In the Faith of the Seven, the Mother is often asked for mercy (“The Mother was merciful, all the septons agreed,” and is described as giving the gift of life in “The Song of the Seven.” 

Sansa is learning, to her sorrow, that life is not a song or a story, whether from the Faith of the Seven or the Westerosi equivalent of fairytales. In the scene in which she sings this hymn, she in fact performs the role of the gentle mother comforting the women around her, in sharp contrast to Queen Cersei, who abandons that duty (and would not be deemed a gentle mother either within the narrative or by the reader). It is profound and poignant that Sansa retreats to the weirwood in King’s Landing to be alone with her thoughts, as it is the one and only place in that city most like Winterfell. It is a physical and emotional reminder of her home, of her true self.

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Pinned Post sansa stark asoiaf game of thrones meta women of asoiaf My writing catholicism hymns
catkin-morgs
dollopheadsandclotpoles

Due to that post I made re: why it's hard for aros/aces to imagine a future for themselves because society tells you a romantic partner will always take priority, a lot of people (aros/aces and allos alike) are sharing stories about how they have been discarded by their close friends and it's breaking my heart. But allos and aspecs coming in and sharing how they have the same amount of love for their partners and their best friends/siblings is healing it.

Still, there are people in the tags saying that aros/aces can "never offer their partners the kind of intimacy they need" and so they shouldn't be "surprised" when they feel closer to partners than their friends. You guys are missing the point.

The point is that we should NOT be ranking our relationships. People aren't there to be ranked on a scale of "This person is my number one and this person comes after that." The point is that you need multiple people in your life. One person cannot - and should not - be responsible for giving you everything you need. Different people will give you different things that you need in life and you should value all of them.

The idea that a romantic partner will give you every single thing you need in life is a toxic idea in itself and puts undue pressure on said partner and the relationship as a whole. A best friend won't give you everything either. You NEED multiple people in your life and they will all give you a part of what you need, but there is no one perfect person out there who perfectly gives you exactly what you want. We need multiple people and they should all be valued by you. Love is not limited.

x-i-l-verify

have i reblogged this one before? LOVE IS NOT LIMITED Thank You aromanticism aspec lgbtqiaa+ queer community

Anonymous asked:

for your ficlet collection: i'd lvoe to see your take on either of the alyssas, the first rhaella, or daenaera.

Dear Anonymous, I hope you like this! I’m still definitely mulling your other suggestions as well <3

Septa Rhaella

(Read it on AO3 here.)

The sept was quiet. It was a quiet unlike that of her bedchamber at night, where she often awoke to find her arm outstretched for a sister who was not there.

Who would never be there again. 

Each day she prayed the same prayer over and over again. 

Mother Above, have mercy on my sister. Let her rest in peace, oh Blessed Mother.

Gentle Mother, strength of women, have mercy on my mother. Please ease her burden of grief.

Her mother was due for her yearly visit soon. She loved her dearly, and prayed for her each day, but each time her mother visited, she had to contend with the swirl of memories and resulting pain. 

She could tell no one the truth of what happened, not even her mother. Many had guessed, and even threatened her life for the truth, but she would stay silent until the Stranger took her to her eternal home.

It had been ten years, but she still had to remind herself not to refer to her sister as Rhaella even in prayer.  

It would have been easier if her mother never visited. If her sister hadn’t been so reckless. 

But if her sister hadn’t been so reckless, she never would have survived.

Septa Rhaella was no longer a princess. She was never meant to sit the Iron Throne. 

Instead, she served the realm as best she knew how. She attended her studies and prayers as a model septa, and only spoke when spoken to. 

No one would ever know about her hand reaching for her sister in the darkness, about the tears staining her pillowcase. 

About the half of her soul that was ripped away the moment her sister died. No one knew Rhaella like Aerea, and no one knew Aerea like Rhaella. 

Now neither of them existed. 

The septa rose from her kneeler and left the sept before someone saw her crying.

rhaella targaryen septa rhaella aerea targaryen fire and blood asoiaf pre asoiaf women of asoiaf house targaryen fan fiction my writing anonymous asks answered asks
fyeahtheraceofmen
wintersoldierfell

Of all the redemption arcs in popular fantasy media, I feel like Theoden's in The Lord of the Rings is the most overlooked.

The movies emphasize the magical control that the evil powers exercise over Theoden, but in the books, it's more obviously a depiction of bad kingship, in the British medieval sense. Theoden takes bad advice; he neglects his family; he fails to reward his knights; and he leaves his people vulnerable to attack. He also does not honor his kingdom's promises to help nearby kingdoms, as we can tell from Boromir's account of what Gondor has been going through.

Gandalf doesn't just cast out the curse and magically fix everything. He encourages Theoden to free himself from his bad advisor, but Theoden has to take all the subsequent steps. And those choices are not easy; after so much neglect, his knights are scattered, and his only option for defending his people is to gather them at Helm's Deep. The siege does not go well. His people are afraid and despairing. But nevertheless, he holds firm and charges out to meet the enemy -- and Gandalf literally meets him halfway, bringing with him the lost knights, whom Theoden welcomes and rewards after the battle.

Theoden could have just gone home after that. But when Gondor calls for aid, Theoden proves his worth by honoring his promises. He keeps his oaths not only to his people but to his allies.

And the climax of his redemption in the book is not his death, but his leadership. The ride of the Rohirrim against Sauron's armies is described in lavish detail, with an uncharacteristically heated pace: Theoden leads the entire line of Rohan, his banner streaming behind him in the wind as they race toward their foe. And that's the end of the chapter.

I love Theoden's arc so much, and especially that moment so much, because the message is not that he has to win battles or seek power. He just has to keep fighting. Theoden's greatest enemy isn't really Sauron: it's despair. And over the course of the book, he keeps choosing hope and action over despair and hesitation, until finally he can lead his people with courage.

As someone who struggles a lot with despair, I really needed to hear that story.

mikkeneko

and it’s contrasted against Denethor’s arc; who also struggles against despair, and doesn’t overcome it.

the-other-anaander

yooooo. so I literally wrote a 20 page english paper about the Hope/Despair theme in Tolkien’s work once. It was like ten years ago and I don’t think I have it anymore, but oh boy do I have feeeeeeelings about this topic. And I have drunk a little bit of wine tonight! So here are my unasked for thoughts:

Yes, Theoden’s greatest enemy is despair! Everyone’s greatest enemy is despair. It’s the biggest fucking theme of the series IMO and it makes me crazy how often it gets overlooked.

lord of the rings is a story written by a man whose experience of war was crouching in the bottom of a trench. People like to make a lot of hay about the charge of the light brigade and it’s similarity to the ride of the rohirrim, but no. Tolkien’s experience of war was getting fucking trench fever, not watching cavalry charges. Tolkien’s experience of war was listening to the shells fall around him, knowing that death could come at any moment. He experienced war in a way where the soldiers on the other side of the line were a faceless threat, and the closest and most present enemy was his own fear.

this is the hill I will die on. This is why I hate it when people talk about LotR as a morally cowardly story about fighting mindless orcs that exist to be cannon fodder. No. Lord of the Rings is about seeing the dark coming on the horizon, and fighting yourself. Fighting the fear and despair that rise up inside you. Struggling with your own terror and powerlessness, knowing that you are small, and nothing you do will matter in the face of this massive conflict—  you’re just here, one more meaningless soul to feed into the machine guns. Lord of the Rings is about taking a deep breath, and bracing yourself, and deciding that if nothing you do matters, all that matters is how you do it. The ring can’t possibly be destroyed— we choose to form a fellowship anyway. Helms deep will surely fall by morning— we still choose to fight. The quest can’t possibly succeed— and yet we choose to march into the teeth of mordor to distract the enemy. It’s not hope, exactly? But’s it’s not not hope.

I did at one point have twenty pages written about this. Tolkien was a deeply christian man— he believed in eucatastrophe. Salvation. A better world to come, after suffering, if you bore your suffering well. But he was also a world-class Beowulf scholar with a kinda viking-warrior-type view of the world. And do you know what the vikings believed? (Pls don’t anybody @ me for saying viking, I know it’s a verb and not a culture). The vikings believed that the time of your death was preordained, and that all you had control over was how you met it.

And that is some seriously Rohirric shit!! Like, we’re all mortals doomed to die, Ragnarok is coming, and this whole world is an inevitable grind down into oblivion… but if we’re fighting a long defeat, all the more reason to fight it gloriously!! That’s epic. Eomer approves the hell out of that message.

I’m gonna be a real nerd now, and quote from a poem called the Battle of Maldon.

“Courage shall grow keener, clearer our will,

More valiant our spirits, as our strength grows less.

Here lies our good lord, all leveled in dust

The man all marred. True kinsman will mourn

Who thinks to wend off from battle play now?

Though whitened by winters I will not away,

But lodge by my liege lord that favorite of men;

By my dear one and ring giver intend I to lie.”

That’s a translation from an Old English poem that’s literally a thousand years old, but it always gets me how much it sounds like something Tolkien would write. Theoden and Eowyn are practically leaping out of that poem: We’re all going to die, I choose to meet my end fiercely. We’re all going to die, so I want to die beside my king.

It’s an acceptance of death, and even of failure, but not of defeat. Because— to get back to what I was talking about earlier— Lord of the Rings isn’t actually a story about battlefields. It’s a story about being at war with your own heart. Despair or faith? Hope or defeat? Tolkien wants you to know that even if your city is overrun by orcs, or you’re killed in a meaningless push for another 50 feet of french mud, you can still hold on to your courage with both hands and not cede up your soul to despair-- and that’s the battle Tolkien thinks is really worth writing about.

It’s a battle that every major character in the story fights. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Theoden, Denethor, Merry, Pippin, Boromir, Galadriel, Eowyn, Faramir, Eomer, Saruman, Gollum, Aragorn. Some of them hold onto hope through everything. Some of them break utterly. Some of them are defeated, and then with help find their footing again, and make a redeeming last stand.  

But the point that Tolkien hammers home again and again is: Death and failure are natural parts of life, and should be accepted. Despair shouldn’t be.

Tolkien says: hope is hard, actually. Fuck that Game of Thrones grimdark bullshit. Hope is hard fucking work. And even if you don’t have hope? Fight like you do. Because the world needs people working to make it better. Do the best you can with what you have, and whether you can see the mark you’re making on the world or not, the simple fact that you’re trying means the world is a better place.

Anyway, I fucking love these books. I am going to stop drinking wine, and go to bed now. :)

musewrangler

A hearty support to all of the above. And this is a wonderful reminder to humanity—-this is WHY we tell stories. Why fantasy is important. Why heroes and heroines greater than ourselves are needed. Because we can read and remember that in the horror of the trenches, Tolkien created something stunning and lovely and, to quote Sam, ‘worth fighting for’.

Theoden was a king and a knight. But he battled his despair and won. I’m a civilian and a teacher. I can do the same. I believe with all my heart therefore, that teaching literature and history are crucial for the health of humanity. Courage can be found in fiction and in reality. And I like writing about it as well as reading it.

Thanks to the people in this thread for discussing something so foundational. I hope folks are encouraged.

kraytwriter

All of the above, but also:

The crisis facing us all right now is, at bottom, meaningless lives. Tumblr is full of laments over the ways industrialization and globalization have made people nothing but interchangeable cogs. That corporations treat employees as expendable resources. That community has broken down, leaving everyone isolated and relationships fractured. And these points are all valid.

Outraged, angry people of all stripes want to fix everything that is wrong in society and rage at those they believe are standing in the way of their efforts. And I completely understand that desire to build utopia. The world is deeply broken and it hurts to see that brokenness. Worse, to have to live in it.

So this is another way that reading literature is so valuable. Because Tolkien reminds us that the world has always been broken. That when one evil is defeated, another will rise in its place (implied in the way Tolkien takes such care (in the chronology in the LOTR appendix) to weave his story into the flow of later history, a history that leads directly to the evils of early and mid-twentieth century). We cannot build a perfect world. And if we focus on that fact, we will despair.

But Tolkien comes alongside us and says, "If nothing you do matters, all that matters is how you do it."

To see intractable problems and imperfect solutions and say, "I know that even if everyone worked together in exactly the same way, we could not create a truly just and whole society, but I will do my small part to stand against the tide of darkness, even within myself, and to build, even a little bit," is to seize meaning for our lives, even when all that surrounds us presses us toward nihilism and despair.

"And even if you don’t have hope? Fight like you do. Because the world needs people working to make it better. Do the best you can with what you have, and whether you can see the mark you’re making on the world or not, the simple fact that you’re trying means the world is a better place."

have i reblogged this one before? hope strengthens desperation impairs this is what it's all about tolkien LOTR fantasy
noirsongbird
willofasherah

seeing everyone just mindlessly sign up for threads despite all the clear warning signs feels like I’m living in Sailor Moon or a magical girl anime episode where the Monster of the Day just set up shop over night and their product is literally draining your lifeforce for the Dark Kingdom but people keep going there

it's so true i've been feeling this way for over a decade threads meta facebook instagram I AM BEGGING YOU NOT TO DO THIS AND TO DEACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNTS AND DELETE THESE PRODUCTS

Tag Game Tuesday

It’s not Tuesday, but I actually have the time and energy to do this now, so here goes.

I was tagged by the lovely @southsidestory! Thank you so much for thinking of me <3

Name: Alexandra

When is your birthday? January 15

Favorite social media platform outside of tumblr? Twitter–I don’t actually use any other “social media” platforms.

Do you wear makeup? I do–I have to look the part of my professional career.

Favorite board game? Clue!

Do you have any tattoos? Nope

Which of the seven deadly sins would you say you struggle with the most? Lust for sure.

Best vacation you’ve ever been on? The only vacation I’ve ever been on was my high school senior trip to a resort in the Shenandoah Mountains in Virginia.

How do you get around town? Walk/bus/Metro

Describe your vibe in three words: Exhausted, overthinking, spiritual.

Share a song rec: Passacaglia by Secret Garden

I shall tag, with no obligations and everyone who sees this should play along if they like this one: @batbrucewaynes, @lenuca, @eachlittlebird, @fay-lans, @rebelrebelwrites, and @lavacastle!

tag memes about me southsidestory my friends
briarlily

Anonymous asked:

Hi Zoey. Asking from a place of ignorance, could you please explain why Threads is dogshit?

gauntletqueen answered:

Threads is the Hot New Garbagedump by Certified Scum Of The Earth and Facebook/Meta owner Zuckerburg. It is like if twitter was even worse.

There is ONLY a For You page, meaning you can never just see the posts from your followed accounts who, yknow, you followed for the purpose of seeing their posts.You can’t see those. you have to see the algorithm’s posts ONLY.
You also require an instagram to get full access to all the features like Posting Images. You need a separate social media account to properly access this new social media. And once you’ve done so, the only way to delete your Threads account, is to delete you instagram account. The Whole Thing. For Some Fucking Reason.
Not to mention, obviously since it’s zuckerburg, the thing syphons your personal information like crazy, worse still than twitter.

image

Like ALL your data. as much as it can get. (Love that it says “Other Data” btw. Nice subtle way of saying “whatever else we want”)
ALSO wouldn’t you know it? It’s fucking banned in the EU because it violates a bunch of fucking privacy laws!! So it’s DEFINITELY not safe to use!

It is as predatory and exploitative as can be, created by someone that we collectively agreed Sucks Shit and Has No Empathy For Human Life and Individuality, and nobody should be touching it with a ten foot pole let alone sign up for it. Not even to test the waters or because it’s where everyone is heading, or to see how bad it is for yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’re joining to get an account ready in case the platform ends up the new big thing. You’re feeding the statistics.
Even if you’re not using that account, Zuckerburg can show the number of signups to shareholders and investors to prove to them that it’s viable. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon in case it succeeds, inform people why they shouldn’t join, to reduce its chance of success! It’s like strikes and protests; The more of us get the word out, the more effective it’ll be!

threads instagram facebook meta I AM BEGGING YOU NOT TO DO THIS AND TO DEACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNTS AND DELETE THESE PRODUCTS please do not keep handing over your data like this yes i know there's no ethical consumption under capitalism but you can reduce your consumption according to your own ethics! your life does not have to be a spectacle for others' enjoyment mine is not and i'm so much better for it social media language tw
sashakielman
sashakielman

A moodboard for YOU TRANSFIX ME QUITE by Sasha Kielman. Six images are in two columns. In the left column, there are photos of a manor house, a candle stick, a hall with armor, and the Yorkshire moors. In the right column are photos of Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones and Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey.ALT

Sometimes dreams do come true, and even better than imagined. I'm absolutely thrilled and honored to be published for the first time, along with two of my best friends, in the upcoming Brigids Gate Press Gothic romance anthology.

I can't wait to celebrate in person and have you sign my copy, @crossingwinter and @rapturousaurora!

sashakielman

I’m so happy to share that you transfix me quite was published in CRIMSON BONES on June 27, 2023! You can purchase the anthology from Amazon here and add it on Goodreads here.

:) original works short stories gothic romance