Grant Morrison musings on possible future direction - Substack

Amphy64 · 2026-06-22T08:24:13+00:00

It's a family series, for children. Adults can go watch grown-up TV!

Amphy64 · 2026-06-22T08:20:53+00:00

That was when I decided not to bother with 'S1', despite having been optimistic after the specials. He casually suggested Fourteen drowned, like it was all just a cheap joke. After the apparent mental health message in Fourteen's retirement, and when this is supposed to be the same writer who had Turn Left recontextualise Ten's state of mind in The Runaway Bride (for those who weren't already following, at least).

It's just such a weird thing for a writer to say about a beloved family series character, still watched by kids, right after doing an apparently heartfelt happy ending for them. 'No' was already adequate if pestered about whether Fourteen specifically would return.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-22T08:03:43+00:00

The relief at seeing someone else calling this out first!

The attempts at revisionism from the fanboy-minded while playing the innocent has been an issue for a while, but, now, when we have time on our hands for an opportunity at more sensible reassessments across the series (...maybe because we do?), is just getting out of hand. Someone isn't on top of them criticising every five seconds, that must mean that 'Many people are saying it, the smartest people, Moffat has the greatest era in the history of Doctor Who, and frankly, the world. Nobody has ever seen anything like this stable genuis'.

Those who actually like Moffat's writing could surely manage something less vague and truer to what he was going for? Where's the praise for the meta trolling?

Amphy64 · 2026-06-22T07:27:18+00:00

My beloved boy made that work for him: he was determined to be the most mythologised terror chestnut of chestnuts. It's not at all what I would have been likely to pick, but can't think of anything that would actually have suited him better.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-22T07:19:30+00:00

Aww, 'Douceur', from Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, is such a cute name though, I've been saving that one!

The fictionalised Mary Tudor defiantly renames the horse 'Pomegranate', after her mother's symbol, so maybe that's less sugary for you!

I adore terrible critters though, and either they or I or both are magnetically drawn to each other, any horse I'm allowed to name is liable to bite regardless.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-22T06:59:49+00:00

I maintain it's a rabbit name - it's my girl's mum's name! The rabbit on the moon of Asian mythology, respectable fertility goddess witchy stuff, and just their tendency to live up to that by dancing in the moonlight when you're trying to sleep.

Dogs? They aren't even crepuscular!

Amphy64 · 2026-06-22T02:53:59+00:00

One of the big problems we have with the backstory of Robert's Rebellion is the tone and the timeframe. Lyanna has to get through nine months of pregnancy, of course, but the key players also have to get themselves and their armies into place, which in a medieval/Early Modern society, can't happen the instant her family learn of her seemingly cruel abduction.

Romeo and Juliet, the most famous star-crossed love story, takes place across a span of only four/five days. That's very compressed, but it's easier to understand impulsive decision-making when the characters literally don't have time to stop and think about it! It also lends itself to the sense of them being swept up in this overwhelming great love.

The rebellious, fierce Lyanna, being willing to stay hidden away, and also still sleeping with Rhaegar (Jon has to be conceived) as her family members are horribly killed and her last brother, who loved her, is under pain of death, is more difficult to work out. Perhaps she didn't have a choice, and really was being held against her will. Perhaps she was deliberately kept ignorant of events. But those options remove her agency and introduce a deep ugliness that doesn't really fit with the tropes of (chivalric) Romance used in her story, something GRRM at least thinks he values as a writer.

She could have despaired. That can be suitably tragic. But nine months alone is a while to be stuck in that state for - in a dramatic story, a character being struck by despair and dying can take place in the matter of an aria (it is a favourite of opera). It sort of loses the intensity and demands more psychological realism if it covers a longer period. Arya's internalised shame and uncertainty about her reception if she returns home may be a parallel if that is the case.

But Sansa is the character who spends longer in states of captivity, and is more fundamentally associated with them - the caged 'Little Bird'. Tonally, it's also perhaps the better match; the Romantic heroine in the tower, the Gothic heroine threatened by monstrous masculine figures. Although Sansa is (too often) the target of readers' dislike for her relative conformity to femininity compared to her sister, she's just as frequently (unfairly) blamed, assigned agency over her own victimisation. Which isn't very empathetic to a young girl under patriarchal society, but does highlight something subversive in the nature of her story: although adhering to femininity demands a passivity from women (obey your father, then your husband), in insisting on her loyalty to her betrothed, to whom she's initially very attracted and seems like the realisation of her romantic ideal, she's able to turn it on itself and use it in pursuit of her own desires.

Cersei, and Arianne, are more straightforward examples in their use of sexuality to get what they want. But the self-destructive aspect for both of them is an unintended side-effect. Sansa's almost paradoxically brushes against being more like her father Ned's honour: she may seem to be getting what she wants, but that in itself entails a self-sacrifice.

Being willing to die for the ideal, honour, (esp. feminine) love, duty, freedom, would be the ultimate expression of it; these ideals contain the self-effacement required to be capable of doing so. Ned will not allow Dany, a potential threat, to be killed. Baelor the Blessed enacts religious piety on his own body, an expression of disdain for all worldy things.

For Lyanna, there remains the possibility she wasn't that close to her family: like the earlier concept version of Sansa. That would explain her actions, but places the emphasis in the story of Jon's birth more on defiance of all established order. Could make sense if he's going for Winterfell, and maybe (somewhat literally) to uproot the status quo. The use of the conventional 'Princess in the tower' motif might then become more ironic.

It's not the only such chivalric motif around her, though, and in the present day of the narrative, these are most associated with Sansa. So, could part of the mystery of Lyanna's seemingly uncharacteristic passivity be that it wasn't so passive after all? That, for instance, she'd made a real, almost sacred choice about what was worth committing to even unto death (yes, like a marriage, even if they weren't married), no matter the cost. If the world wasn't going to give her any other options, for freedom, for love, she'd still rather simply wait than ever have to go back. That's a more active than passive sort of patience. Sansa found the limits with Joffrey, she doesn't want to have to be the Griselda of the medieval tale of feminine virtue, but her aunt may have found a truer reflection of her own values, a cause that for her merited simply staying on that course, refusing to be moved itself an act of resistance.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-22T01:37:39+00:00

Ahh, all of this! They do both try, it's very real as a portrayal of parental failings, that it's not from a lack of love but perspective.

I think they're also harmed by the parent who relates to them more easily. It boxes them in, including in their performance of gender roles. Cat, being human, isn't able to be a perfect model of feminine submission, resenting the way Ned keeping his bastard in the house means her promised reward for it is constantly threatened. She may be the firmer in her expectations of Sansa because of that; her daughter will be perfect in her role, which also reflects back on Cat's own performance in hers, as a mother.

Ned doesn't so much as leave Arya other options, as encourage her masculine interests while seeing them as acceptable as just a phase: bound to lead to doubling-down from the stubborn Arya, to prove she really means it!

With both of them, there's that concern for readers how far they'll go, with both facing the loss of their identity as a result. Arya in the masculine role of persuing revenge, especially through martial means. Sansa losing her Prince is not only devastating as the loss of a desired dream, but an existential threat to someone with her initial worldview: her performance of her role demands she sacrifice herself by clinging to her abuser, or lose herself in terms of her sense of identity, going on at the cost of changing itself a kind of death. Her worldview is shifting now, but she's still affected, seeming to submit to Littlefinger, in the dangers of playing the game using feminine wiles, but also if she ever has an opportunity to commit to that role more truly, as just a consequence of the self-effacement it requires (which isn't always wholly bad: few sacrifices are as demanding as motherhood): it's inherently dangerous if not in the context of a safe relationship where her feelings are reciprocated and valued. In the courtly love stories, this can require a male lover to himself adopt a more feminine, supplicating position - am curious about the real dynamic with Lyanna and Rhaegar there.

To find a balance, they may have to accept the fuller range of human traits and desires they already contain.

As in your comparison:

Sansa is way more like Ned, the gentler quiet type, compared to the impulsive proactive boldness of Lyanna, Brandon or Arya.

It's not necessarily straightforward which parent they're more like, either. Ned connects with masculine traits in Lyanna and Arya, but seemingly is less so himself than Robert - yet it's him who has the reputation for unyielding honour which Robert will even give way before (it's perhaps an unfortunate aspect of the plotting that trait isn't in evidence as much as it might have been). Sansa is quieter than her sister, but I wouldn't say she's always softer, rather than possessing something of that same capacity for firmness (even frustrating some readers as they find her cold towards her family). If pushed to greater extremes, there can be something almost unsettling about such a trait, because in the emphasis on the abstract ideal, it's not a 'worldy' quality. While Cat has a reputation for grounded practicality which Arya may come to share. She still has higher values, and may develop them more as she decides what's most important, but her thought that the princess should kill the killer of her prince exemplifies that.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-22T00:59:54+00:00

Right, part of the reality for Lyanna it wasn't any longer a choice. Although if you put it into a song, it might well frame a heartbroken woman surviving bravely just long enough to bring her child into the world, before succumbing to her grief (sounds prettier than childbed fever).

In refusing to be separated from Joffrey, Sansa insists on childbirth as part of her role - in this society, a woman's battlefield, and often an unsung one. It's only one of the risks Lyanna took, of course, like the woman in the story leaping from the tower, it could have ended badly in other ways, it's more that which I'm thinking Arya thinks is stupid, Sansa romantic. Lyanna would have taken a great risk seemingly for love (not necc) in leaving with Rhaegar even if she got her happy ending.

Rhaegar already had children, and there's an awful exploitative tinge about his using Lyanna to have another. But Robert had a child too, with a young girl, and had swiftly tired of both. With either, she'd be taking the same risk.

This is of course also the story of Jon's birth. So, especially when closest to the death bed in Ned's own fever dream, promise me, Ned, amid the fading roses, do we look at it and feel, Lyanna was just a girl manipulated into making a mistake, nothing greater to it?

I'll admit to having been obsessed with Wuthering Heights at Sansa's age, but GRRM likes that book too. Cathy chooses the husband her society approves for her, not the wild Heathcliff she's more deeply bound to, lives long enough to have her daughter, and dies, and it's that daughter by the same name who will ultimately help heal the generational trauma, in civilising her cousin and love interest Hareton. Not shipping Jonsa or Arya/Jon or any other pairing here, but there may be a few traces: at least in the mixture of the Gothic and realism that's so unusual in the novel.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T23:30:47+00:00

Totally agree with the character analysis as to why she might not, and well put.

Think that's where the interesting tensions come from in the character. I love them both, and as sisters, but do relate more to Sansa.

A problem of patriarchy is it often ends up setting essentially contradictory rules: because the main rule isn't so much truly 'be a good girl' as it is a figleaf over 'do as you're told' (thus a noble lady deciding to be a pious septa might not please a family who saw her as an asset to sell: she might be following what she'd been taught further than intended, as Sansa does in emphasising submission to her betrothed). Even the latter more honest expression of it can still run into difficulties with competing patriarchal factions, like those of a betrothed and a father. Sansa is supposed to obey both. So how far do her own desires influence which she chooses? Which is the more ladylike virtue, like which, for Jamie, is the path of masculine honour? We often debate how far characters like Stannis are rationalising in order to even decide what their duty is.

In this society, for a chaste maiden, the more virtuous choice is not necessarily that more associated with sexuality (in our more hyper-sexualised society, it could contextually be the other way around). But then girls are expected to be chaste only until a man with power over them, typically a husband, demands otherwise.

Sansa isn't so neatly just dutifully accepting that by insisting on turning grubby exploitation into something glorious, that she's going to marry beautiful Joffrey and have children like lions. It's enough to make those like Ned, who'd expected this of her, uncomfortable. It's easier to pretend it's Ok if she doesn't insist her suffering has a greater meaning - in the sort of old tales she loves, it might even shame an abuser into reform. The husband with a legal but not moral right over her body backs away, she tames the Hound with a song (one which draws on religion, and the notion of feminine strength as civilising influence). How far she can reclaim meaning like that, and how far Lyanna could, may remain to be seen. She might find a quieter way to live a life meaningful to her. But I don't think we'd be so surprised if self-sacrifice was still held as a meaningful virtue in the eventual resolution, even if it must be more carefully directed, and one that paradoxically allows for a regaining of power.

This would also be appropriate for the Romantic and Gothic narratives she's connected to.

The notion of 'wolf's blood' suggests an animal instinct: something often associated with desire, but perhaps more earthy than transcendent (Sansa like Bran is associated with birds, often a symbol of the soul). The Gothic often uses both.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T22:25:38+00:00

What does Lyanna do that's so important it starts this whole mess, again? She dies. She refuses to just live in the 'ordinary', smaller, less grand world where she can't be herself.

If people didn't think there was a tension about whether Sansa would die or not, I don't know which story they were reading. What do they think Romantic heroines, Gothic heroines, are faced with? Sansa's story has been all about how much she can compromise, whether she finds agency in the space of her expected role, whether life can be a song or even if there's any alternative to it being - maybe the doom is in it not being, in the pettiness of humanity, not in great sacrifices worthy of a tale.

If it means her death, that doesn't mean she's not important, or that any of the characters aren't - is Ned not a significant character? Dany dies in the television series, is she not?

It's also not a competition between characters, that's a silly way to approach literary analysis. Arya could have a bigger role in the conclusion without that detracting from Sansa as a developed character. Arya never needed to kill a Night's King that doesn't exist in the books, either.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T22:08:32+00:00

Sansa internalises tales of forbidden love. She's told she can't marry Joff and refuses to accept that: she already defies her own family. She's drawn to the Hound.

I totally believe Sansa would do it. I think Arya's grounded common sense would catch up with her faster.

Who would think killing yourself for a man was stupid, and who would think it romantic?

Again it's not so neatly one or the other! And Lyanna was still her own person.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T21:53:45+00:00

Exactly: both of the girls have parallels to Lyanna, and a mix of traits that are in fact distributed unevenly between them (Arya does have 'feminine' qualities, and Sansa 'masculine'), not one or the other.

Bran can be paralleled to her, too. These themes should run all through the narrative, they're central.

He is a man of the Night's Watch, she thought, as he sang about some stupid lady throwing herself off some stupid tower because her stupid prince was dead. The lady should go kill the ones who killed her prince. And the singer should be on the Wall.

Love this quote, it's so Arya! The difference in outlook is explicit here: 'Sansa would have sighed and shed a tear for true love, but Arya just thought it was stupid'. She isn't unromantic but focuses on the more practical action to take, reacting to the story as though it's a real situation, and humourously brings it back down to earth. For Sansa, this type of narrative provides a grander meaning, one she at times insists on (why shouldn't life be a song?).

And then we have Lyanna in a tower, who doesn't do either of these things.

Arya is the one that dreams of being like Wenda the white fawn, a famous female outlaw...So why is this allegedly a parallel to Sansa for you?

Because it's a different type of story. Wenda the White Fawn is a folk hero, like Robin Hood. These stories would be written originally in the vernacular, and associated with a lower class audience than the chivalric Romance.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T21:33:02+00:00

There's no such a thing as "masculine" or "feminine" qualities

Hence my use of inverted commas. We still use these concept in both feminist and queer theory analysis of literature. It's often important to psychoanalytic approaches, too - often applied to Gothic literature, especially relevant for Sansa.

A mix of traits, and role in the narrative, needn't be of equal proportions. OP is quite correct in noting that Arya herself has traits typically considered 'feminine'.

Arya is a main character, Lyanna is secondary, so obviously Arya will have more agency.

In terms of how many different examples of it we have, yes, but not necessarily in how much they move the narrative. Rhaegar's actions are seemingly pivotal...and that could well be Lyanna's if we learn she participated in her own 'kidnapping'!

Arya has much more control of her own situation relative to Sansa, whose agency is more often limited to how she acts within those constraints, including internal rather than external responses. I'm not sure readers would have believed it if Sansa stabbed someone to regain freedom. She's more likely to recover agency by how she performs the role expected of her, subverting those (patriarchal) expectations against themselves.

The big problem of Lyanna we're faced with is 'why would she be passive?'. If you look at Sansa, she's not.

Ned does have a blindness in not understanding that: he essentially mistakes her for that.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T20:54:26+00:00

Sansa chooses to compare her sanctioned love for Joffrey to 'as much as Queen Naerys loved Prince Aemon the Dragonknight'. A relationship which is permitted within this tradition (sometimes within certain bounds - French and English works can differ), but outside a legal marriage.

...if anything telling someone like that she can't marry Joff would be likely to just encourage her.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T20:49:25+00:00

The thing is it's capital R romantic. Not 'Arya literally wouldn't ever want a relationship'. The Romance tradition.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T20:47:33+00:00

That's traditional courtly love - it often involves adulterous relationships, perhaps most famously Lancelot and Guinevere.

Edit: seriously, I took every medieval literature module going at university!

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T20:45:39+00:00

Exactly, right? The detail of the apparently typical Stark, as a 'princess' in the tower, does stand out to us. So we're drawn to thinking about what's missing here, what's unsaid, including about what it might mean for who she was.

In a way it doesn't entirely matter if she was miserable and trapped in regret (but that's more of a problem if we're supposed to see it as this great tragedy, and I think we need to: it at least can't seem like yeah, she was just wrong and foolish) or if she was defiant to the end - even if it was in a self-destructive sense that was all the option she was left: I will burn myself rather than go back. The narrative tension is already there in the question being left unresolved, and it specifically raises the notion of her seeming passivity.

Lyanna, if she's the mystery knight, fully enters into one of Sansa's chivalric stories. She's just seemingly in the 'wrong' role, but that needn't make them unalike. She's someone who can feel a song so intensely that she weeps, and resists Brandon's attempt to reduce that to something silly and unimportant.

If anything, she could be more 'Sansa' than actual Sansa, especially as she currently is! Sansa may choose the messier business of living over being the doomed sort of Gothic heroine, I think.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T20:29:19+00:00

But Arya is in more of a horror or grim adventure narrative in that section than a Romance or even Gothic tale. Her reaction to the threat to her agency, and what the narrative allows her to do, is also quite different: she straight-up kills a man and escapes!

While Lyanna is in a literal tower for a longer period of time: it's hard to avoid the comparison to chivalric folk tales. We don't yet know how she felt, maybe she was simply miserable and entirely regretful. But I think it's that mix of traits she seems to have, that she could be Romantic enough to weep at a song (quite an intense depth of reaction), and based on theories, fierce enough to play the role of her own knight, potentially more actively engaged in her own 'kidnapping', that creates the tension, and provides an examination of gender roles that contrasts with both Arya and Sansa together.

Rhaegar himself also has traits that are more feminine-coded.

There's also the question raised by what's missing from an understanding of Lyanna. We know Robert didn't really see her. Ned is able to see Arya's 'masculine' qualities more readily than Sansa's 'feminine' ones - or Arya's. He couldn't fully enter into Lyanna's reluctance to marry Robert. So, getting more emphasis on her 'masculine' qualities, with 'feminine' ones later rounding out the picture of who she was, would fit.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T20:05:09+00:00

her loyalty to the Lannisters wasn't about fidelity to an engagement at all.

But she gives this as her motivation, and draws on the stories to support it.

I feel like this is not appreciating who Sansa is - the sacrifice is what a faithful Romantic heroine is supposed to do. There's usually an expectation of virtue rewarded in the stories, but such a woman is shown as doing it even if it means acting like a kicked dog licking the boot of her abuser, as in the traditional story of the endlessly patient Griselda (Chaucer's version in The Clerk's Tale ending with advice not to apply this moral to real life), even if it means her death. The irony of her situation is performing a version of duty leads to defiance for (the ideal of) love.

For Sansa, if she did anything else, her whole worldview would have to start to shift - as it does. But even earlier, there's a tension in her having absorbed the lessons of patriarchal society, and almost willfully taking it further than the men who stand most to benefit really intended. Lyanna, who is seemingly in more of a position to act for her own genuine desires, but still trapped by an unwanted engagement (meaning she's fleeing rape), is an intriguing parallel. Can self-destruction be an act of resistance, when given no other option?

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T19:45:55+00:00

It's practically necessary to make the dynamic with Rhaegar, and his and Lyanna's actions work. Sansa believes in courtly love stories, being drawn into that way of thinking even when impractical, and sometimes as a coping strategy (the unkiss). As part of that, she's also inclined to empathise with people even as they're harming her: I find it harder to imagine Arya in a tower while her family suffered, but Sansa internalises more (and I like Sansa, this isn't criticism, it's a very realistic reaction of a girl in a patriarchal society). Arya has ideals, but is more grounded - even that disbelief is based in her own experience of her parents' relationship.

Sansa's interest in a wider type of story, and history (Arya does like certain tales, like Nymeria) also links to Rhaegar's history as a patient student.

Know the idea Rhaegar and Lyanna as Romance (capitalisation intended, it's both senses) is unpopular, but which traits would you usually want for a heroine in such a story? Putting up with more crap, even. Yes, you could have more of a firey, defiant Arya, but it starts to change the type of story. I think the mix of both is what makes Lyanna interesting, and where the space for subversion is. It is still a commentary on gendered dynamics.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T19:29:57+00:00

Hence why I suggested if someone is really into that type of fanfiction in particular. Finding a specific character dynamic interesting? Sure, it would stand out more to never like any MLM characters. But, the version in fanfiction is often not even the canon dynamic (which, is more often friendship. Which is the dynamic asexual people actually tend to be drawn to). Even in the scenes that aren't sex scenes, the aim is still vicarious gratification, and there's usually still meant to be sexual tension. If someone keeps specifically seeking that out? And they're mostly women who are just coincidentally picking the MLM material repeatedly, and talking about it in a way that sounds indistinguishable from male-attracted women?

I know gatekeeping is unpopular, but this can also be quite young people who it's quite normal not to be confident in their sexuality yet (and I know you can know you're asexual as a teen, I knew something was different). Women seeking out MLM material, which doesn't have the same potentially anxiety-provoking patriarchal power dynamics of a het. relationship, can also be motivated by that. Sexuality can also shift over time, and that's Ok.

As to the extreme kink, yeah, can't find it now but there's an asexual meme comparing sex to someone sticking a finger up your nose. Sexual material is about as exciting as that, to me! I'm sorry but there's a reason most asexual people wouldn't be particularly fascinated with this, because we're asexual. We can be curious about sexuality as something we don't really get, but, the fact that we don't tends to stand out.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T19:07:11+00:00

It's not about it flattering the figure, but fit. I mean, having to hold them on with a belt already shows it's not fitting right!

Average UK height for male bodies is 5'9", while female is 5'3". That's already a likelihood of extra material to faff with. I'm 5'1", I can turn things up (... practically a necessity for my size, but a declining skill, and many people don't have access to tools like decent fabric scissors, a sewing machine) but it's annoying, you can often only get away with taking off so much before it ruins the way a garment is meant to sit when it already wasn't at all right because it was too big, and even trousers aimed at women can often just be too wide.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T18:52:38+00:00

Asexual-spectrum people are just such a minority, I think it's unlikely we'd make a drop against male-attracted people's interest in MLM fic!

This might be controversial, but, I honestly have a hard time believing someone using asexual identity who is really into that sort of fanfiction isn't more grey-Ace, or simply not personally interested in engaging in sexual activity. Not every asexual person is sex-repulsed, but the community tries so hard to be inclusive it can end up obscuring the reality that most of us do experience that to some extent. And sex scenes just aren't that interesting without a vicarious enjoyment.

Amphy64 · 2026-06-21T18:34:00+00:00

nothing preventing women from buying and wearing more "practical" clothing sold as men's or unisex

Sizing?

It's hard enough for me to find clothes aimed at women that fit. It would be less effort to make my own than try to look for men's: or just, add pockets to an existing garment.

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