[If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention.]
The Bolton sigil is a red flayed body upside-down, outlined by a white X, on a black field
The flayed man encapsulates the Boltons’ ruling style: threatening and truly evil,
they don’t care about loyalty, alliances, or winning hearts and minds.
They dominate through intimidation and terror.
As the sigil boasts, the house is infamous for its centuries-old practice of torturing
and flaying their enemies, and the fact that they put this on their sigil reveals how
proud they are of their ability to inflict physical and psychological torture.
It’s hard to claim the superlative of the most despicable character in Game of Thrones
-- the skeevy Walder Frey, and the abusive Joffrey Baratheon, come to mind.
But the character that can arguably put them all to shame is Ramsay Bolton, bastard of
Roose Bolton, who resided at the Dreadfort in the North.
Born as a product of rape, the violent, twisted Ramsay is ultimately the demise of his house
-- he murders his father and feeds his stepmother and infant brother to his hounds, only to
be devoured by those same hounds after finally having trained Sansa to master his own brand
of cruelty.
[They're loyal beasts.]
[They were. Now they're starving.]
But while Ramsay stands out as a villain, it seems to run in his family -- the Boltons
inherit cruelty both in nature and in nurture.
Ramsay’s father, Roose, is ruthless, but in a more cool and calculated way.
So the cruelty of the Boltons may run through Ramsay’s veins -- his mother claimed he
was angry and problematic as a child.
But Ramsay’s cruelty also seems to be a product of his upbringing by a servant named
Reek who raised him and corrupted him. Ramsay later gives his captive Theon Greyjoy same name.
[What is your name?1?]
[Reek.]
Reek taught Ramsay to rape and kill the girls he had crushes on in his childhood.
And since Reek never had any proper arms training, he may also have been responsible for Ramsay’s overly
aggressive style of swordsmanship.
Before the events we see in the show, Roose had a legitimate young son, Domeric, who was
considered pleasant by the Northerners, but this amicable side of the Bolton family was
short lived. Ramsay poisoned his half brother out of jealousy.
While the Northerners are relieved to know that House Bolton is now wiped out, its memory
lives on in the abuse that is never truly over for its victims.
And as we see these characters deal with their lingering trauma, House Bolton makes us question
how abusive behavior is learned, imparted and continued over generations, far outliving
the original perpetrators.
[And you were so beautiful in your white wedding dress.]
[I have to go back inside Bran.]
The Boltons’ disturbingly interesting storylines show that while we’re horrified by these
practices, they can also be grotesquely fascinating to watch.
Most characters on Game of Thrones live in the grey zone, pulled between the
good and bad within themselves, but the Boltons and their symbols represent a willing embrace
of total evil, the absence of human empathy, and a learned violent cruelty that humans are unfortunately
capable of.
House Bolton has two mottos: the official “Our Blades are Sharp” is already pretty
menacing, but this informs the darker unofficial motto used most by Roose Bolton:
“A Naked Man Has Few Secrets; A Flayed Man, None.”
Throughout their history, the Boltons have
passed down a sharp, thin knife used for flaying, instead of a Valyrian great sword like some other Houses.
While their blades are sharp, their boasting about it illustrates how their words and
mind games are equally sharp, disturbing weapons.
The Boltons revel in the rumors that they wore their skin of their enemies as cloaks
They believe fear and terror are as effective as pure might and power.
These rumors, like the rumors of the Targaryen dragons, elevate the Boltons to an other-than-human
level: As a satanic myth that evokes dread, whereas the otherworldly Targaryens
inspire awe, as well as fear.
Their cruel abuse is psychological as much as physical, as we can see in the way Ramsay
terrorizes Theon, turning him into Reek, a shell of a man. As well as Sansa, who has already
endured the brutality of King Joffrey but comes to see that Ramsay is a whole other
level of evil.
The psychological taunting is clearly seen in the prelude to the Battle of the Bastards:
flayed men on burning X’s psych out the Stark men, and Ramsay
uses Jon’s own brother as a trap.
[Laymen of House Bolton. Too gruesome for my taste.]
The House Bolton sigil contains red, white and black.
Their red is ruthless and bloodthirsty.
The color also signifies determination and ambition -- the Boltons were tired of living
under Stark rule and resolved to take the North.
White, while it can be clean and pure, is here sterile and emotionless -- an absence
of human warmth and empathy.
In the books, the background of the sigil is pink, evoking imagery of peeled skin, but
the show changed the backdrop of the sigil to black, signifying bottomless terror -- dark
as the petrifying rumors that surround the Bolton family.
While each of these colors can have other meanings, taken together red, white and black
evoke hardness and violence, a total lack of human softness and empathy --embodying
that what’s so scary about the Boltons is that human feeling is entirely missing from them.
[He's your brother.]
[I preferred being an only child.]
Instead of a traditional animal, the Bolton sigil features a flayed man.
The fact that it turns a tortured human being into an animal-like prize underlines the Boltons’
lack of respect for human dignity.
They view people as beasts to be degraded, which in turn reveals that the Boltons themselves
are not human, but a perverse imitation of man.
Instead of boasting about their noble strengths, their sigil boasts their willingness
to commit extreme acts of violence and torture.
So this sigil is clearly designed to evoke terror in their enemies.
The Boltons get inside their enemies heads with the idea that they won’t just kill
you; they’ll subject you to far, far worse.
The Bolton’s stronghold, the Dreadfort, received its name from the torture that occurred
there at the hands of the Boltons. It was rumored that the flayed skins hung on display
at the castle.
Structurally unimpressive, the fort is painted flesh pink and decorated with scratch
marks and brown dried blood -- additions that visualize the flayed man of their sigil in
the architecture, and serve as another tool for the Boltons' psychological terror.
Choosing to embrace the flayed man of their sigil is also a defiant message that the Boltons
won’t obey the laws of their day.
When the Boltons bent the knee to the Starks, they promised to cease the flaying practice,
as is was outlawed in the North by Ned Stark.
But they don’t honor this pledge.
Roose defends his family’s tradition of skinning their enemies alive:
[We're not torturing them.]
[The high road is very pretty. But you'll have a hard time marching your army down it.]
Roose also continues the practice of the first night, an outlawed marriage tradition where
the lord or king of a region claims the right to have sex with a commoner or peasant bride
on her wedding night. You probably remember this from Braveheart. It's a practice that may have some
historical basis in medieval Europe, though it’s not verified.
[This marriage by taking the bride into my bed on the first night of her union.]
Roose’s first night practice drove commoners to marry in secret -- Ramsay’s
birth mother and her husband, a miller, were one such secretly married couple.
On finding out, Roose hung the miller and raped Ramsay’s mother, resulting in Ramsay’s
conception.
The Boltons’ insistence on continuing these brutal outlawed practices shows their refusal to
limit their sadism, their insubordination to the Starks’ authority, and why they’re
despised in the North.
Deeming themselves the Red Kings of Dreadfort, House Bolton has struggled with House Stark
for power over the North for centuries.
The feud between the Boltons and the Starks culminated in one of the most
beautiful war scenes in television history -- the Battle of the Bastards in Season 6.
The significance of the battle derives from these two very different bastards of the North.
Ramsay, the legitimized bastard heir of House Bolton, was raised without love or respect. His
father paid his mother to conceal his true parentage.
Jon, though never legitimized and hated by Catelyn, was raised as a Stark boy,
alongside the other Stark children.
The battle speaks to each character’s true nature -- Ramsay uses tactical strategy and
cruel but effective traps, caring nothing about appearing noble or honorable, observing
no rules of decency.
Yet his battle strategy is smart and sound, and echoes successes by great generals in history.
Jon fights with heart and honor, immersed in the middle of the fight with his men, but
nonetheless this bravery makes him Ramsay’s pawn, until Sansa -- who has learned a thing
or two from her abusive husband, and knows that Jon will do exactly what Ramsay wants
him to do
-- calls on Littlefinger's Knights of the Veil and rescues the day.
While the Boltons are now extinct, we see the impact of their torture on the characters
that remain.
Theon is shaped by the trauma of Ramsay’s abuse, displaying signs of PTSD.
Sansa carries the memory with her, and seems to have reacted to her experiences
by making herself more cunning.
cynical and hard.
She masters Ramsay’s psychological torture and turns it back on him:
[Your House will disappear. Your name will disappear. All memory of you will disappear.]
And she even turns his hounds against him, getting sweet revenge.
Yet while this satisfying moment proves Sansa has the intelligence and experience to beat Ramsey
at his own game, cunning, what exactly Sansa has learned from Ramsay, or will internalize from her abuse
long-term, may have a more troubling answer.
[I'm sorry for all that's happened to you.]
And as we watch Sansa and Theon emerge from their time in tortured captivity, we see that
the true legacy of the Boltons is still alive in the evil sadist abuse and fear that they
have spread for centuries.
[My name is....Reek.]