MANILA, Philippines - When I started reading A Storm of Swords, my friends who had read it before gave me a look as if I were happy to be basking in the light of innocence.
“You’ll know. When you get there, you’ll know what we’re talking about,†they said. And then they looked at each other. And they mourned in silence, unable to prepare me for what was coming.
It hit me one early morning. I read it. And though I searched, I found no comfort or respite in the tragedy.
Flipping through pages at 2 a.m., I could feel that something was amiss. Those blasted Freys! They were up to something. But I hoped that Robb would see it. He was too brilliant a tactician. He had fought the war too well, not to smell something rotten being planned. And surely if he couldn’t, then one of his banner-men must have sensed that it was a ruse. Besides, with all the dodgy description that George R.R. Martin heaped on the Freys, wasn’t it clear that no one in the seven kingdoms should trust any of their clansmen?
And when the massacre began, I could not bear it, but I could not bear to stop reading either. I kept going, kept hoping that the tide would turn, that someone would swing in and save them, that the doors would be broken down and the massacre would be prevented.
Evil manipulator
Oh, but master storyteller, evil emotion manipulator, George R.R. Martin, you got us again. You’d think that we would have learned. After paragon Ned Stark was rewarded a decapitation for his loyalty and honor, we should have known the kind of world we were in. As things became worse and worse for good people (and really, the citizens and peasants who we rarely focus on are in the worst plights of all), should we not have known that it was the virtuous and the good who were repaid their virtue with a stabbing?
Still we hoped. And I hoped, through the wee hours until the sun came up.
I stayed up with the book, reading page after page, hoping that the next time that I turned a page I would be given some kind of reprieve, some kind of hope or uplift to offset the traumatizing events of the Red Wedding. As I read about the Freys desecrating the bodies of the King of the North and his men, I felt a need for something to make up for this great injustice.
Ah, but this is Westeros. Justice is slow, if ever coming at all.
I stayed up, didn’t sleep. I finished the book. There was no comfort for what had happened. Only death, more death. Glimmers of hope were all but stamped out.
And now, the television adaptation has aired and the Internet is abuzz. I am happy that I can finally talk about this; start sharing this pain and trouble with the larger world. I don’t have to hold back anymore for fear of being a gigantic spoiler. I don’t have to hide this terrible knowledge.
But there is no comfort. The King of the North is dead. And this isn’t like your favorite team getting knocked out of the playoffs. This is the unjust, near unexpected loss of a whole set of characters. (Might be interesting for someone to question our emotional investment; to appreciate, on an academic/scholarly level, the ability of a fictional text to make us feel so passionately about death and loss.)
At this point, I haven’t seen the episode. My editor asked me to watch the Red Wedding — I owed it to the Internet, to the readers, to react to the events as portrayed on TV. But really, what more is there? I am not quite ready to hear them play The Rains of Castamere and not yet ready to finally see this thing that I imagined and dreaded for so long.
But I suppose one must ask, why do we do this to ourselves? We knew what we were getting into. A friend of mine swore off the show after Bran Stark got thrown out of the window. Why would you want to watch a show with that kind of world? He made sense. But we thought there must be more to it.
Think, too, on the power of fiction, and how this moves us, perhaps more than a lot of the tragedy that surrounds us. The kind of emotional investment that we have all placed in these characters, to be given this in return. One must admire the power of art, then.
In the end, though, what more is there to say about the Red Wedding, than WTF? WTF, bro, WTF?
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