The Castaway Women make me so so bitter. Especially, as you all probably expect, Alannys Harlaw, but also the others.
Because @joannalannister is RIGHT. We should have more information about them.
Alannys is the mother of two point of view characters and was the goodsister of two more for decades. They have nothing to say about her, even in memories. Where did she stand on the culture war? Does her family have a history of breakdowns when dealing with grief? What were her relationships like with her children before the Rebellion? What was her and Balon’s relationship like? What does she think of her intellectual brother? Did her breakdown happen right away or did it hit belatedly? Was it a process? How did she reconcile raising Asha to be bold with her duty to teach her to be a lady? Was she devout to the Drowned God? Would she be proud to see Asha as a captain or think this was a bit too far? Did she ever try to protect Theon from his brothers? Did she ever have a tense relationship with Euron like Balon did?
Lynesse is Margaery’s aunt and the daughter of the lord of Oldtown. Okay, I get it. We know the Mormonts. We know Jorah. They lived with her. None of these people are point of view characters, but they are important secondary ones (except the Mormonts who are more like minor secondary characters). Why can’t they talk about her? Did she try to make the best of Bear Island even while she didn’t enjoy it? Did she appreciate Jorah trying to make her happy? Was she ever particularly interested in Jorah? What did she think of the Mormont women? If she wasn’t capable of fighting, what did she do? Was Jorah selling slaves her deal breaker? How did she meet this lord she’s with now? Does she know her nieces and nephews? Has she heard from her family since she went north with Jorah? Did she ever really love Jorah at all or did he just think she did? How much did she know about the situation? Does she have children now?
Mellario is just as straight up inexcusable as Alannys is. We have Arianne and Quentyn as point of view characters and Westeros’ interactions with Dorne are IMPORTANT. Did she and Elia get along? How did she react to the Rebellion? How involved was she in Arianne’s education given that this was a Westerosi system she was unfamiliar with? What did she think raising her children would be like? Did she mentor Arianne? What did she think of the Sand Snakes and Oberyn and Ellaria? Did she ever have friends in Westeros? How did she feel about Areo staying with Doran? Has she ever returned to Westeros to visit her children? Did she have a history of mental illness or possible self harm? Did she and Doran ever try to reconcile? At this point I will settle for Arianne recalling stories or songs from her. ANYTHING.
I’m sure there’s more of the Castaway Women, but these three are bad enough.
Thank you, @blenderbender1811! You bring up really great questions, and at least some of them are questions that I feel like we should have answers to in the text, because our POV characters would have memories of various things here, but we don’t. To answer the question you sent me,
Hi! I’m going to take a rather circuitous route to answer your question, but I promise we’ll get there in the end!
First, for anyone who doesn’t know, the Dead Ladies Club (DLC) is a term I made up to criticize a very specific type of misogynistic writing in ASOIAF that involves the conspicuous and unjustified denial of humanity of various female characters who died during the generation or two prior to the beginning of the story. It’s not something I think GRRM is doing maliciously, but, to give one of my favorite quotes from @cosmonauthill, “Casual misogyny is still misogyny.”
This is my tag for it: #the dead ladies club
In addition to the DLC, there’s another group of background female characters in ASOIAF who aren’t, well, dead, but who are imo shafted by the narrative’s casually misogynistic writing. I’ve been thinking of these women as the Castaway Women.***
Like castaways on a deserted island, these women are “far away – not just physically far away, […] but psychologically far away, not in the present picture, a woman whose place (if she still has one) is very much not wherever she is being discussed,” to quote my friend @goodqueenaly. These women are background female characters who are still alive, but they are distant, rejected, discarded, isolated and left out of the main narrative. They’re often written rather two-dimensionally by GRRM, when they shouldn’t be two dimensional.
***In the past, I conflated these two groups and sometimes included this second group of “Castaway Women” as “honorary” members of the DLC, even though they’re not dead, but I personally don’t want to do that anymore. Using the “Dead Ladies Club” as an umbrella term to include background female characters who aren’t dead caused confusion, and it created a loophole for misogynists in fandom to attack my criticisms of GRRM’s Sacred Text, and I think it was counterproductive to the specific things I was trying to criticize with the DLC. So I think it was a mistake on my part to conflate these two groups, and I now try to think of these two groups as distinct. (If other people don’t want to make this distinction, though, it doesn’t bother me; I’m not the fandom police.)
The Castaway Women are women like Lynesse Hightower and Alannys Harlaw.
Who would you consider Castaway women? Are there more than Alannys, Lynesse and Mellario?
I can’t think of any others off the top of my head, but I would be happy to hear what other people think!
I will never not be hugely bitter about the lack of information we have about Alannys Harlaw. FOUR POINTS OF VIEW IN HER FAMILY. F O U R. Not to mention three for Mellario. There’s just no excuse for this.
I can almost (ALMOST) understand Lynesse because her family aren’t POV characters, but come on. Alannys and Mellario are the mothers of four POVs between them. I get Theon is a tool who doesn’t like to think of his family, but Asha cares about her mother. She saw her mom’s breakdown. Arianne was FOURTEEN when her mother left – we are not dealing with a little girl here. Asha was THIRTEEN during the Rebellion and SEVEN when the Targaryens fell – there is no good reason neither of them think about their mothers reactions to the events that shaped their houses. Heck, even if Asha wouldn’t have understood the politics that went on when Balon ascended to Pyke and rescinded most of his father’s reforms, Aeron and Victarion were surely present (more so Victarion than Aeron, who would have only been like 11 when Balon inherited). Why can’t they remember what Alannys said? Or Areo for Mellario and conversations her children wouldn’t have been privy to?
MULTIPLE POVS. THEIR CHILDREN AND ADULTS. WHY DOES NOBODY REMEMBER THEM?
And no, ‘it’s not plot relevant’ does not cut it for me. If we have time to watch a zillion sex scenes, we have time for them to think about their mothers for more than a line or two.
I can’t think of more off my head, but just these three are enough. I’m sure I’ll write more headcanon/meta about Alannys at some point because I find her endlessly fascinating, but George RR Martin’s characters should be thinking about them too.
“POV characters never think about their mothers” is sadly a recurring theme all throughout ASOIAF (and related material), and applies to the Dead Ladies Club as well as the Castaway Women. How many times does Ned Stark think of Lyarra? Zero. (Of course, we didn’t even know her name till TWOIAF; until then she was just “Lady Stark. She died.” Argh!) How many times does Catelyn think of Minisa? Off the top of my head, I’d say one, but even then, it’s nothing personal – just biographical information for exposition purposes. How many times do Tyrion, Jaime and Cersei collectively think about Joanna? That is, think about her as a person, not their sainted mother “killed” by Tyrion for daring to be born? Maybe 6-7 times among the three of them – and that includes Jaime’s dream, which wasn’t exactly a voluntary thought.
When we have three major POV characters with dozens of chapters to their name being unable to think about their mother on more than a handful of occasions, then it doesn’t surprise me that the Martells or Greyjoys – who have only a few chapters each – seem unable to think about their mothers at all.
For me, the most egregious lack is Mellario. Did she have absolutely no influence on her children? Her Norvoshi heritage was clearly important to her (since she returned there after leaving Doran) and she was clearly not comfortable with certain aspects of Westerosi culture. But apparently her Norvoshi culture didn’t have any impact on her children. Arianne and Quentyn identify as Dornish and nothing but Dornish – no acknowledgement of the Norvoshi side of their heritage at all. It’s slightly more understandable for Quentyn, since he was fostered away, but what’s Arianne’s excuse?
YEP. The Dead Ladies Club is absolutely short shafted too. It’s almost obnoxious how little we know of them.
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