G’Day (ahhh, Duncan!) and welcome back to VOK’s Epic Linear A Song of Ice and Fire Re-read. This episode is hosted and edited by Sarah aka Lady Weaver and her co-hosts Tanja (Scilens), Marie (Nymeria) and Noah (Pops88). It covers the events from the 8th to the 22nd of January aka Arya 12, Sansa 6, and Jaime 8, which includes Lysa marrying Littlefinger, and Jaime getting literary in the White Book. All of the events of today’s chapters take place within 62 pages of the books, or 4 chapters in the published order.
If you are following along at home, the next episode will be hosted by Bina007 and covers Tyrion 10, Jon 8 and Jaime 9 – including the epic Mountain vs The Viper duel!
Warning – this podcast is dark and full of spoilers for all published worked in ASOIAF but not necessarily Game of Thrones.
Picture credit – HBO’s Game Of Thrones.
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Vassals of Kingsgrave 
another episode of the everything George does is sexist podcast, with an extra dose of rape discussion because that’s why we all read the books, to have rape discussions
I loved the Arya 12 discussion! Any thoughts about the horse Craven? I think she’s talking about herself when she describes the horse. I see it as her dealing with survivor’s guilt in an angry way. Anger is a useful emotion, in that it is supposed to motivate us to protect ourselves and the ones we love. It comes up when we or our loved ones are wronged, and we get the energy to engage with the problem. However, anger is also often a secondary emotion stemming from a failure to deal with deeper ones, like shame, fear, or sadness. Arya seems to be ashamed of them having run away from the Twins, so she externalizes that as anger at the horse and names it Craven. Arya’s destruction of the girl’s doll in the village to me wasn’t just a sign of her coldness and emergent sociopathic traits like I think many people read it. Under all this coldness or irrational anger we see her exhibit, I believe she has unacknowledged emotions. It is far easier to lash out than to feel sadness at the innocence you’ve lost. She may be doing the kind of violence that on some level (wayyy too deep for her to acknowledge) is to protect the girl from her view of valiant soldiers being destroyed in the horrible way Arya’s understanding of the world has been shattered. It’s a lot like Season 3 of Bojack Horseman (I won’t spoil the specific events, but just the concept) in which Bojack’s mother had things taken away from her to teach her not to love (to avoid getting hurt by loss). It also seems similar to how the Hound “protects” Sansa by saying mean things to her to try to ruin her innocence early so no Gregor does it for her. I also particularly appreciated Noah opening discussion of the “dark Dunk and Egg” relationship between the Hound and Arya. In short, I still see Arya’s behavior as normal responses to trauma, but I wish she had some help. If she were with someone other than the Hound who uses anger as his chief coping mechanism, she might be on a different path right now.
And gyfs, I can understand your frustration when you might just want to have fun with this fandom. However, it’s far from a majority of VoK reread episodes that has such serious in-depth discussions of sexual violence. People have a variety of approaches to the fandom. Personally, I think it’s appropriate to sometimes dive into how the text interacts with the real world. I get that not everyone agrees. A podcast like VoK provides us with the opportunity to experience just about every angle we’d want, just not in each episode.