STORM OF SWORDS: Red Wedding

I don't often bother with spoiler alerts, but this time don't say I didn't warn you.

The scene to which the title of this post refers is somewhere up among the most shocking I've encountered in fiction. After reading it, I wrote, "Oh man, I can't believe what I just read." In comments, Sean T. Collins added, "When I read this, I LITERALLY could not believe it. Like, I thought I must have gotten it wrong. So I reread it. Then I got so upset that it literally kept me up that night."

One of the most surprising things about the scene, though, is that it's surprising at all. Author George R. R. Martin foreshadows the living hell out of it. This starts all the way back in Clash of Kings when Catelyn recalls Stannis's threat to Robb after she's witnessed his sorcerous assassination of Renly firsthand. A little less than midway into Storm of Swords, we see Stannis working this dreadful sorcery again, this time casting a death-curse on all his rival kings. He says Robb's name last in the casting of the spell, and as he does so, it's like Martin is daring us not to believe that Robb is bound to die. We haven't seen this magic fail yet, though, and sure enough, Balon Greyjoy perishes in ominously short order. So Robb's impending doom ought to seem pretty surely sealed, right there.

As to the when and where for this curse to fall, Catelyn has one chill of foreboding after another from the instant the Freys welcome Robb and her into their domain. These discordant moments swell like the off-kilter drumbeat of the musicians/assassins just before the bloody business commences in earnest. Again, it's like Martin dares us not to see what's coming. And remarkably, I didn't.

How could such a bluntly, heavy-handedly foreshadowed scene not only sneak up on me but sucker-clobber me into the middle of next week like that? I think it's because Martin also convincingly foreshadowed a rich and--crucially!--bittersweet future for both Robb and Catelyn. Faced with this dilemma, I instinctively reached for the latter horn.

To be sure, some wishful thinking was involved. Mostly, this centered around Arya's reunion with Robb and Catelyn. She'd been separated from them so long, and it had been so hard on everyone, I couldn't help wanting them to have that moment of happy reunion. But that's not all there is, even to this thread. The Hound told Arya he would offer Robb his services, and that could make for some intriguing story possibilities. In this way, Martin coils a little conflict and ambivalence around a happy possibility, and the added complexity helps it seem more likely to occur, less likely to be yanked away.

Darker and remoter prospects also seem to anchor Robb and Catelyn in the future. For one thing, how could Martin destroy Winterfell without forcing Robb and/or Catelyn to suffer a wrenching, traumatic mockery of a "homecoming" to the charred ruins? There's something really shocking about the fact that neither of them ever made it back to see that, nor ever will.

Pushing the point a little further, I'm reminded of an Edward Gorey bit where a novelist,

is engaged in making diagrams of possible routes and destinations, and wishing he had not dealt so summarily with Lirp, who would have been useful for taking retributive measures at the end of Part Three. At the moment there is no other character capable of them.

The sack and burning of Winterfell is just one among many tragedies to befall the Starks that called for "retributive measures." Before the Red Wedding, Robb and Catelyn seemed the likeliest candidates to exact or contrive some bloody reckonings. And now? "At the moment there is no other character capable of them." Unlike Gorey's author Mr. Earbrass, though, Martin deliberately rips away our hopes for justice, to shattering effect. More generally, the deaths of Robb and Catelyn take the Starks out of contention for the "Game of Thrones" for the foreseeable future. All that remain are the youngest children in diaspora, in situations not unlike where we found Dany way back at the very beginning of her journey.

I think what really threw a blind spot in my way was Thoros having a vision of the Lannisters conquering Riverrun, and then Robb leaving Jeyne behind there in presumed safety. Whether they killed Robb's young wife or just captured her, it would be a devastating blow to him. It's the kind of blow Martin has trained me to expect. It never occurred to me that Robb might not live to have his heart ripped out like that.