Gunnilda uses her last arm

Reading the comments that other people left, I’ve noticed that their reactions were different than mine was the first time I read this. The main thing other readers seem to have taken away from this is “Poor Gunnie”, and while I do feel sorry for her, I’m far more sorry for Ethelmund.

I don’t know if it’s because we know Gunnie better than him or what; but in every bedtime chapter with them we’ve had ’til now, she’s hated having to sleep with him and had to be roused to passion through hate. The reaction to that was “Oh my God what’s wrong with him creepy Ethelmund!!!”. And as soon as he stops sleeping with her people still mostly say, “Oh poor Gunnie!” and there was even a couple more “What’s wrong with him?”.

As Verity said, Ethelmund has always had problems with the loss of children (not to say that anyone doesn’t); and taking into consideration how obvious she makes it in bed that she doesn’t want him, I don’t find it surprising at all that in his present state of mind he just doesn’t want to bother.

Good points. Ethelmund is one of those characters people seem to dislike almost through no fault of his own. Maybe it’s simply because he got in the way of Gunnilda + Egelric.

I don’t dislike Ethelmund but I do not like him either; because I don’t know him. I felt bad for Gunnie in this chapter because I felt she rushed into this marriage without knowing him. There have been posters who have wished for a way of getting Ethelmund out of the picture (death included). I also feel that some of the same readers weren’t 100% ok with Sela and Lili coming into Egelric’s life and pushing Gunnie further into the past. I was never on the Gunnie+Egelric bandwagon and I don’t know if I ever will be.

Gunnilda “knew him” very well. They were across-​the-​street neighbors for years, and their families remained close even after she moved up onto the hill.

I don’t know that Gunnilda fully realized how it would be to be married to a man in a man’s body, and not a boy in a man’s body as Alwy was. In terms of the dynamics of their relationship and their household, and in terms of sex as well.

You’re right she did know him but as a neighbor. It had to be a change for her being married and living with Ethelmund as opposed to him just being her neighbor, when she was married to Alwy. I don’t remember them being particularly close. She was close to Gytha.

Living with him and sleeping with him had to be very new for her.

I agree, my first reaction on reading this was sadness for them both. Gunnilda obviously has some heavy sexual & intimacy issues. She managed to head those off for nearly 20 years by marrying a man in a boy’s body, as has already been pointed out. She was “safe” (from abuse and neglect, but also from love, passion, or true sexual interaction) with a man she (and everyone else) knew herself superior to in a time when no woman was superior to a man. Then the whole Ethelmund thing happened, and all that poor guy knows is plucky Gunnilda-​as-​neighbor and that she’s constantly pregnant. How was the poor guy to know that she hated sex and was terrified to be with a man she couldn’t control? Now they’re stuck. Ethelmund has no love and no sex – because I believe even then most men don’t want to feel like they’re raping their wife every night. And Gunnilda is with someone who won’t always come back to her just because he doesn’t understand how dissatisfied she is with her life. She can be “in control” and effectively alone, but may have already lost her chance to be with an equal (even if romantic love was never really the end goal for these two).

Honestly, I think it’s a warning call for any Gunnilda+Elegric interaction. She’s sexually/​romantically stunted as a pragmatic teenage girl, and he’s crossed sexual boundaries even his society wasn’t ok with. Although perhaps his experiences at the hands of Maire’s brothers have ameliorated that… Yet another fascinating character line we have to wait for Lothere to reveal.

I don’t think there’s reader antipathy for Ethelmund so much as reader apathy. He is not as well-​developed a character as Gunnie (having appeared in 100 fewer chapters as of this writing), and any time there’s a conflict between a beloved character and one who readers don’t know all that well, sympathies are going to trend toward the character we already feel sympathetic to.

Dominiquex, Gunnie and Egelric may well be sexually mismatched… But then again, they might not. Egelric is the only man we’ve seen Gunnilda actually desire physiclly, IIRC, and that does make a difference.

Very possible PorkWithBones. I didn’t mean to imply that they were ultimately sexually mismatched, but more that at their current levels of sexual comfort a sexual encounter would probably not work out well without further development. (Oh my goodness, I just had the most terrible flash of something like the Encounter of March 23, 1986! ::chills:

In time, with Egelric potentially softened (which the Maire’s-brothers event might have accomplished, hard to say at this point) and Gunnie past her sexual/​intimacy issues, they could be very successful. Hard to say, and all up to the Powers That Be.