(TWOW spoilers)

Sure! The most basic precepts of postmodernism in literature are a skepticism (sometimes healthy, sometimes not) of meta-narratives, tropes, rigid borders between genres and cultural traditions, etc. and a eagerness to play with them in ways that shatter formal and tonal boundaries, create unexpected juxtapositions, and employ tropes in a winking manner that exposes their blind spots.

What GRRM has done with Euron Greyjoy is basically embody and weaponize this approach. The Crow’s Eye is a nightmare GRRM set loose on his own story, a cancer of horror within a fantasy epic, all set to metastasize. This is why I call him a monster wearing a pirate suit. Euron isn’t wearing an eyepatch because he’s a pirate and pirates wear eyepatches. He’s wearing an eyepatch because he’s playing a pirate in-universe to fool the Ironborn into thinking he’s one of them at heart, and pirates wear eyepatches. GRRM’s not the one relying on the trope, Euron is. His true nature underneath that pirate suit, well…

He saw his brother on the Iron Throne again, but Euron was no longer human. He seemed more squid than man, a monster fathered by a kraken of the deep, his face a mass of writhing tentacles.

His M.O. is to hijack not only individuals, but entire ideologies, schools of thought, meta-narratives, from the old gods to the warlocks to the Ironborn to the priests he keeps in the hold of the Silence, including his own brother. And he’s only just getting started, what with his draconic ambitions and the Horn of Joramun showing up in the city he’s invading. Fire and Ice, why should Euron see a difference between these narratives, why should he respect the oppositional dichotomy set up by the story? Euron eats stories. He’s already managed to hack into the narrative to rule them all: ASOIAF itself. He waltzed in halfway through the series and decided to take it over, just like did those aforementioned cultural systems.

With what endgame in mind? To destroy all stories, all myths, all continuity, and replace them with himself. There was only ever Euron. There will only ever be Euron. Feed Euron, or be eaten. 

The mound of skulls was gone. Now it was metal underneath the Crow’s Eye: a great, tall, twisted seat of razor sharp iron, barbs and blades and broken swords, all dripping blood.

Impaled upon the longer spikes were the bodies of the gods. The Maiden was there and the Father and the Mother, the Warrior and Crone and Smith…even the Stranger. They hung side by side with all manner of queer foreign gods: the Great Shepherd and the Black Goat, three-headed Trios and the Pale Child Bakkalon, the Lord of Light and the butterfly god of Naath.

And there, swollen and green, half­-devoured by crabs, the Drowned God festered with the rest, seawater still dripping from his hair.

Remember Dany in the House of the Undying? Or Bran when Bloodraven first entered his dreams? That’s Euron’s whole life. That’s how the whole world looks to him, every day. Those other vision-chapters came in the context of ancient collective sources of power, but in “The Forsaken,” it’s just Euron. He’s out to hijack the story and make it his, in a manner that reflects his horror story invading the fantasy story, and I’d argue all this is GRRM incorporating postmodern thought into his larger narrative. Euron cuts across entire genres of villainy, refusing to recognize the boundaries, absorbing all the power into his singular persona while tossing the attendant ideological structures aside. He employs the Old Way tropes simply to expose their hollowness, the ease with which they can be socially and politically manipulated, and the proof is that no one but Damphair sees through the disguise. The pirates don’t realize their pirate story just got conquered by a cosmic horror story pretending to be part of the pirate story.

Euron’s the embodiment of the postmodern drive: he’s outside the meta-narrative and looking in (again, just like those Dany and Bran chapters, but with the seer as a psychotic villain lusting only for power), playing with the tropes and unfolding storylines as he will. And even before “The Forsaken,” GRRM emphasized that by having these images of Euron come out of nowhere, burn through the context of their native chapters, and establish a vivid hellish horror tone that belongs to and is embodied by the Crow’s Eye. 

“Others seek Daenerys too … One most of all. A tall and twisted thing with one black eye and ten long arms, sailing on a sea of blood.”

Beneath her coverlets she tossed and turned, dreaming that Hizdahr was kissing her…but his lips were blue and bruised, and when he thrust himself inside her, his manhood was cold as ice.

Under it he wore a stained white leather eye patch that reminded Theon of his uncle Euron. He’d wanted to rip it off Umber’s face, to make certain that underneath was only an empty socket, not a black eye shining with malice. 

He is his own story; wherever he goes, the narrative changes to suit him. Until, of course, it won’t, and he burns as the story (embodied by its protagonists) fights back. And to expand upon and mirror this, GRRM gave us an interloper-hero to match the interloper-villain: Aegon. 

As I’ve touched on before, Aegon and Euron serve very similar thematic purposes. Their successful-so-far causes demonstrate how Dangerously Genre Savvy characters can perceive, manipulate, and benefit from the tropes and ongoing narratives around them. Aegon’s whole life has been Varys constructing a self-conscious fantasy-story construct around him to sell to the adoring masses. Euron uses the pre-existing pirate story as a cover to smuggle his horror story into ASOIAF. The protagonist and antagonist roles are conceived not as sacrosanct vessels for pre-ordained characters. Through a postmodern lens, the protagonist and antagonist roles are faces to be worn: the preening pirate, the perfect prince. That the truth is not so simple about either character is GRRM telling us not to hate tropes, but to be wary of them, to realize they can be manipulated by showing that happening in-universe for both protagonist and antagonist. It won’t end well for Euron or Aegon, because for GRRM, the tropes have to be earned.