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cabepfir — Harrenhal bath
Published: 2008-08-25 16:58:15 +0000 UTC; Views: 33535; Favourites: 330; Downloads: 1808
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The bath-house had been thick with the steam raising off the water, and Jaime had come walking through that mist naked as his name day, looking half a corpse and half a god.This one was compulsive
Unfortunately, my scanner did an horrible job with it and I was forced into taking a photo and adjusting it in photoshop.
I swear that Jaime's eyes *are* green.
ASoIaF (c) George RR Martin (thanks for this, sensei)
yay link: autocosmica.com/post/89642572/…
Kindly reblog from here so I can keep tracks - dotofink.tumblr.com/post/14124… - Thanks!
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Comments: 99
First of all, the attention to detail is amazing. You've captured Jaime's smarmy attitude, Brienne's freakishly-swole and manly body, giant hands, and coarse, freckle-splattered face perfectly. I like how you kept the brittle texture of her hair (though it's long enough to tie up in the books).
Really Brienne in general is incredible here because she's more or less identical to how she's described in the text (most people just give her a tall, gangly/toned woman's body and focus only on her face, while in the books she's specifically stated to have an exceptionally large and muscular man's physiology.)
She dropped her brush and covered her teats with hands as big as Gregor Clegane’s. The pointy little buds… would have looked more natural on some ten-year-old than they did on her thick muscular chest . A "thick muscular [or barrel-shaped] chest" is an exclusively a male description, and while high-level female athletes and bodybuilders IRL do not have chests that are exceptionally large and muscular/strong by men's standards, Brienne does. I cannot tell you how annoying it is that people overlook this specific detail, along with the fact that she's huge and strong enough to heave "a boulder the size of a cow" onto a galley after swimming across a river and scaling a cliffside [that alone implies she has a high-end MALE strongman body]. But you didn't and it is awesome.
The wench kept her back to him, the muscles in her great shoulders hunched and hard. "Great" implies not just big, but imposing as well, which you captured quite nicely here. I especially like the details in the shape of her neck and shoulderS.
She has thicker shoulders than I do, and a bigger neck, Jaime thought. Small wonder she prefers to dress in mail.
Again, see above.
She was as tall and strong as he remembered, yet it seemed to Jaime that she had more of a woman’s shape now [roundabout way of saying that Brienne has a man's build].
Had Brienne been a man, she would have been called big [this gives us some idea of her general size, proportions and muscularity relative to other men; she's built like a big man.]; for a woman, she was huge. Freakish was the word she had heard all her life. She was broad in the shoulder and broader in the hips. [her broad hips seem to be more a result of her having a wide male-shaped frame rather than actually having a woman's hip structure or fat stores, since she has a barrel-chest, is very lean, explosively fast, and that Jaime was surprised that she had "more of a woman's shape" in his dream] Her legs were long, her arms thick. Her chest was more muscle than bosom [enough muscle that she can heave cow-sized boulders, which, IRL would be the equivalent of WWE's Big Show flipping a jeep]. Her hands were big, her feet enormous [implying not just long, but wider, squarer thicker hands and feet proportioned like a big man. The knobbiness of her knuckles is a nice touch here.]
Anyway, hope you didn't mind the long post. I'd love to see more art of Brienne and Jaime as they are here (no one's done the boulder scene yet, and not many have done her fight with Rorge, so you'd have first dibs).
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Love your comment! Thanks for sharing the knowledge with some of us who haven't read the books!
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I just posted a digital watercolor of Brienne based on her Harrenhal descriptions. The neck proportions are kinda weird, yeah, but it's the shading and coloring I'm worried about. (And the background; I can't do detailed backgrounds worth crap.). Any critique or advice?
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I'll leave a comment on the artwork.
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You're welcome! A lot of people who do artwork of Brienne tend to either overlook/ignore/shy away from her canon-descriptions or just use Gwendolyn Christie as a reference to make Brienne look more "female" (not feminine, female) and or aesthetically appealing. While a character's look is ultimately subjective, it would be nice to see more artwork of how Brienne actually looks in the books with this kind of attention to detail.
I can understand why some people would overlook the subtle (and not so subtle) details correlating to Brienne's male structure and sheer size since GRRM tends to be fleeting and generalized with descriptions, but once you pick out the individual sentences, highlight the details, and piece them all together, the picture is pretty clear. Brienne is beyond looking like a "muscular butch woman on steroids"; she's literally built like a big muscular man to the point of looking utterly ridiculous in woman's clothing (like a Space Marine in a dress and a wig).
I recall one blogger comparing book!Brienne to "a WNBA player [specifically Britany Griner]" and "female swimmers" in build and implied she had a high level of body fat to explain her thick neck and enormous shoulders. While I can respect that, it does not fit whatsoever to her canon description and abilities. For one, female WNBA players (and athletes in general) tend to be either athletically gangly/toned or chubby instead of muscular, with Gwen Christie falling into the former category. Female athletes are regularly outperformed by high school/college-entry-level boys in practically all areas of athleticism, and injure themselves at significantly higher rates.
It's not because they don't try or aren't skilled or aren't better than individual men in some physical activities; they literally do not have the combination of muscle structure, skeletal structure, surface area, and durability, leverage, immediate stamina, or CNS efficiency to keep up with the majority men, let alone athletic ones. Some might argue "Steroids!" but keep in mind that steroids only affect the muscle fibers you were born with, and, in addition to holding fewer fibers, the female skeleton holds less potential mass than a male skeleton due to the proportionally smaller rib cage and thinner, narrower shoulder girdles, among other things. They won't change the basic structure of your body.
Brienne's not just "tall" or "big for a girl but narrower-shouldered/less muscular/smaller-framed than a man." She's literally wider, thicker, and visibly more muscular than virtually any other man she's around, including Renly and Jaime (who, according to both the text and GRRM, are fairly large, muscular men surpassed only by freaks like Robert, the Greatjon, and the Clegane brothers in strength, all of whom Brienne's strength and size are compared to).
Her book feats of regularly holding off multiple well-conditioned males and the entire river galley-boulder-toss-scene are, quite frankly, impossible for even a "big" woman IRL to achieve. Now, it would be impossible for a man, too, but given how big, lean, and muscular human males can get compared to females (with or without steroids) especially at the higher end of athleticism, it's significantly less of a stretch of disbelief to picture.
Also keep in mind that GRRM describes Brienne as "manly" and "freakish" in terms of her body and strength, and basically says that a woman would need to have a man's body to regularly best large, well-trained adult men in close-quarter combat like cliche fantasy females typically do. Brienne is what I call "an unrealistically-realistic example of a domineering female combatant." By "unrealistic" I mean that even with steroids, a woman would not look like or have the strength/athleticism of Brienne of Tarth/a man of identical size due to differences in the shape, proportions, and width of the skeleton.
Brienne being built like a man to have the strength of a man is an unrealistic potential IRL, but that's the entire point. To have the strength and athleticism of a large man, you need a large man's body structure. That's the whole point.
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Thank you for your detailed comment 
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Wow! This is one of my fave Jaime + Brienne illustrations I've ever seen! The water, her freckles, Jaime's expression and posture ... marvelous. I love it.
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I think you'll have to admit that had it occurred to him, he WOULD have used it! (Lannisters remain cursed with a taste for inappropriate japes even more terrible than mine own).
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Thankfully Jaime hasn't lost his humour along with his hand
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I was about to make another hand-related pun, but decided that I wouldn't want to run the risk of being mistaken for a Lannister (they're not ALL stupid, but they ALL seem to have a bad habit of running their mouths when silence will serve them better).
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Back in the second season I remember finding this when googling Brienne. I remember how silly I thought it was of Jaime(Couldn't be, that guy doesn't have a hand) and Brienne ever being in this situation. Oh how, foolish I truly was.
I think may be my favorite depiction of the scene. Her freckles and muscles really says Brienne to me.
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Thank you so much for this comment! (And you know, I'm not even watching the series
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I love it!
This is one of my favorite parts!!*O*
Sorry Tyrion,Arya and Jon Snow,but in "A storm of swords" Jaime's chapters are the BEST!
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Can you tell me what book this scene belongs?
perfect drawing by the way
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It should be in ASoS, if I remember correctly.
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y did u draw her so BUTCH? Not even that her face is really angular. Is she described as being that manly in the book?
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Well, let's consider that GRRM himself has stated that Brienne is an impossible freak of nature. Here's a couple of book quotes broken down, if you're curious.
She dropped her brush and covered her teats with hands as big as Gregor Clegane’s. The pointy little buds… would have looked more natural on some ten-year-old than they did on her thick muscular chest .
A "thick muscular [or barrel-shaped] chest" is an exclusively male description as high upper body mass is a male sex characteristic. Yes, I know high-level female athletes and bodybuilders IRL do NOT have torsos that are exceptionally large and muscular/strong by MALE standards, but Brienne, despite being biologically female (according to GRRM), DOES have a large barrel chest, along with other male secondary sex characteristics (body hair, deep voice, large hands and feet, low body fat, a heavy male brow ridge, cheekbones, and jawline, proportionally wider, heavier skeleton, ect.).
The wench kept her back to him, the muscles in her great shoulders hunched and hard.
"Great" implies not just big, but imposing as well. The word "hunched" being used to frequently describe her shoulders implies they're particularly wide and heavy with muscle (like how a bear or a bull's neck and shoulders look hunched from the weight of their upper bodies).
She has thicker shoulders than I do, and a bigger neck, Jaime thought. Small wonder she prefers to dress in mail.
This is coming from the man who, in his prime, was not only the most skilled, but also one of the strongest men in Westeros. The only people who exceeded Jaime in strength were truly freakishly-huge men muscled like bulls on steroids (the Greatjon, the Clegane brothers, Victarion, ect.). During his fight with Brienne, he uses both his prime-self and freakish men as a measuring stick to gauge Brienne's strength. This, plus the boulder toss scene and the fact that Brienne regularly fends off and absorbs hits from multiple well-conditioned male attackers at once with mostly her sheer size and strength, points to her being built like a huge man.
She was as tall and strong as he remembered, yet it seemed to Jaime that she had more of a woman’s shape now.
Jaime's wording in the dream scene indirectly states that Brienne has a man's "shape" (he's seen her naked and states that her physique is VISIBLY wider and more muscular than his own), hence his surprise that she actually has a female figure.
Had Brienne been a man, she would have been called big [this, along with her canon height of 6'6", gives us a good idea of her general size, proportions and muscularity; she's built like a big man even among crowds of above-average size and well-conditioned male knights.]; for a woman, she was huge. Freakish was the word she had heard all her life. She was broad in the shoulder and broader in the hips. [her broad hips seem to be more a result of her having a wide male-shaped frame and muscular thighs rather than actually having a woman's hip structure or fat stores, since she has a barrel-chest, a thick muscular waist, is lean enough that her leg, neck, shoulder, and chest muscles are visible in addition to being huge, and that Jaime was surprised that she actually had "more of a woman's shape" in his dreams]. Her legs were long, her arms thick [GRRM only uses this phrase when describing large, brawny men]. Her chest was more muscle than bosom [enough muscle that she can heave cow-sized boulders, which, in terms of sheer weight, is the RL equivalent of World's Strongest Man competitors flipping full-sized cars with the engines still in]. Her hands were big, her feet enormous [they're also described as "huge" (which emphasizes abnormal largeness) and reminiscent of Gregor Clegane's in size and shape, implying not just long, but wider, squarer, knucklier, thicker hands and feet like a big man.]
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she's described as worse in the book
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Please read the book first, then comment!
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I did read the book. I was just saying that I preferred the HBO version better and couldn't stop think about that version when I saw your drawing.
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Brienne annoys me sometimes but this is a great drawing
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I'm reading A Feast for Crows right now, and I picture Brienne just as I see her here.
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Seven hells. Looking at this, it's hard to remember that Brienne is a woman.
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I loved that scene
My next artwork should be the fight vs the bear in harrenhal, loved it too
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I just read this scene and it's so funny! I love Jaime's expression there.
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Oh I love this! Great job capturing this moment, and the emotions of the characters... and Brienne's eyes. <3 I also really love the freckles and the knobby-ness of her hands.
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oh my god!! I imagined it exactly like this!!! GREAT!
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LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS...oh jaime...you are so evil and I so love it...
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This is the best rendition of Brienne I've seen so far.
She is always too pretty and effeminate in other pictures, but according to her description she is extremely mannish and her only pretty feature are her blue eyes- and you got that really, really spot on.
I love her eyes and her expression.
I'd love to see some more art of her from you!
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thank you for the comment!
It's been a while since I last drew anything ASOIAF-inspired. I'll probably start again when Dance of Dragons will be published, so, cross fingers!
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