Patchface IS King Robert. (Among others.)

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Patchface is King Robert Baratheon. Not in terms of the plot, obviously, but as a literary device. I’ve seen some lengthy threads with thoughtful analysis of Patchface’s “prophecies” (if that’s what they are) but most of the discussion leaves out the context in which Patchface’s remarks are made. It’s worth taking a step back, I think, and looking at the bigger picture before focusing on the wise and cryptic words that come from this character.

Patchface arrives in Westeros at the moment that the Baratheon parents die in a ship wreck. Because of Steffon Baratheon’s death, Robert immediately becomes the Lord of Storm’s End. You could say that this is the end of his childhood, in a sense or, as Maester Aemon might say, "Kill the boy and let the man be born."

Before the wreck of the ship Windproud, we learn from Steffon Baratheon’s letter that Patchface was a splendid boy, clever and nimble and talented. What washes up on the beach is instead twitching and trembling and incoherent. By the time he is introduced to the reader, he is obese, walks funny and, we learn, has a red and green checkered tattoo over his whole face – more than a little creepy and not entirely human in appearance.

To me, the transformation of Patchface foreshadows the transformation of Robert Baratheon. Robert’s transformation does not occur when his parents die, but when he becomes king. He stops being a warrior with the body of a “maiden’s dream” and becomes fat, drunken and oversexed; a bad husband and indifferent monarch. Robert is even conscious that he has changed, telling his best friend:

I swear to you, I was never so alive as when I was winning this throne, or so dead as now that I've won it.

– Robert to Eddard Stark AGoT, Chap. 30

The clever, youthful Patchface may have “died” in the shipwreck; Robert died when he became King.

In addition to this red and green tattoo, Patchface wears a helmet fitted with antlers and jingling bells. Robert’s armor includes antlers, and his major victory in Robert’s Rebellion came at the Battle of the Bells. I believe the red and green of Patchface’s tattoo represents the colors of Renly and Stannis, Robert’s younger brothers. Renly wears green armor and Stannis is associated with the red god. Stannis and Renly are very different and may represent two sides of Robert’s personality: the strategic warrior and the happy hedonist. The two younger brothers both claim to be Robert’s heir.

In his letter home before the shipwreck, Steffon Baratheon had written of the fool, “Robert will be delighted with him, and perhaps in time he will even teach Stannis how to laugh”(ACoK, prologue). The Storm’s End maester regrets that Stannis never learned how to laugh, but one of Eddard’s POVs tells us this about Renly:

Ned was not sure what to make of Renly, with all his friendly ways and easy smiles.

-- AGoT, Chap. 27

So Patchface was (or is) supposed to teach Stannis to smile and Eddard gives us a similar perspective on King Robert’s talent for causing laughter:

"They say it grows so cold up here in winter that a man's laughter freezes in his throat and chokes him to death," Ned said evenly. "Perhaps that is why the Starks have so little humor."

"Come south with me, and I'll teach you how to laugh again," the king promised.

-- AGoT, Chap. 4

I have written elsewhere about the strong connection between Tyrion Lannister and fools or foolish behavior. Here we have Tyrion’s sister, who is Robert’s wife, confirming that her husband and brother both behave like fools, seeking adulation and laughs, in her eyes:

Robert wanted smiles and cheers, always, so he went where he found them, to his friends and his whores. Robert wanted to be loved. My brother Tyrion has the same disease.

– Cersei Lannister to Sansa Stark, ACoK, Chap. 52

Many people have commented that Patchface’s use of the phrase, “Under the sea . . .” could be his cryptic way of saying, “After death . . .” I agree that this is one meaning of this phrase. (For the sake of focus, I will not outline the additional possibilities in this original post.) Patchface seems to have experienced death by drowning. By the time the reader hears Patchface speak, King Robert is already dead. If I’m right in seeing a connection between Patchface and Robert, I think the things that Patchface says are a sort of “voice from the grave,” speaking from Robert’s point of view.

The shared voice by the king and the fool is true only in a literary sense, here; I am not suggesting that Patchface is channeling the ghost of King Robert. One of the mistakes I see in the threads deciphering Patchface’s so-called prophecies is that people are looking only at the plot and not examining literary devices such as wordplay and symbolism and theme. I am persuaded by things I have read in this forum that Robert represents the Summer King literary archetype and Eddard Stark is his counterpart, the Winter King. So Patchface is sort of an envoy from the Summer King, reminding people that there is life after death, even if the Winter King wants us to acknowledge that winter is coming.

There seems to be a strong conviction about a connection between the fool’s miraculous recovery after his probable drowning and the Drowned God of the Ironmen. I see the Drowned God and Patchface as part of a larger motif of drowning, along with (as others have pointed out) Tyrion being pulled from the river by Jon Connington and Davos finding himself thrown up on the rocks after the Battle of the Blackwater. It’s not a coincidence that Patchface drowned, but he is not intended to represent the Drowned God, per se.

At the plot level, however, two matches between Patchface and Robert may be significant: first, Patchface spends all of his time in the company of Stannis’ daughter, Shireen, and, second, Melisandre sees something ominous in Patchface that she doesn’t quite understand.

I think Patchface’s connection to Shireen matches up with King Robert’s connection to children. The King had many illegitimate children and he loved kids but he also sought the death of Targaryen children. First he defended the need to stamp out the heirs of the rival dynasty but, toward the end of his life, he felt contrite about ordering the death of Daenerys Targaryen. Many comments in this forum have described a sense that Patchface poses a threat to Shireen, even though he appears to be her playful companion. I think this duality is consistent with the two aspects of Robert’s attitude toward children, however, details of Robert’s attitude toward children tell me that Shireen will be safe with Patchface. Aside from the fact Shireen is a Baratheon heir and that one of Robert’s goals was to pass the Iron Throne to his own child, Shireen suffers from greyscale. This disease causes the skin to appear stone-like. Robert’s first-born daughter, who he adored, is called Mya Stone:

Ned remembered Robert's first child as well, a daughter born in the Vale when Robert was scarcely more than a boy himself. A sweet little girl; the young lord of Storm's End had doted on her. He used to make daily visits to play with the babe, long after he had lost interest in the mother. Ned was often dragged along for company, whether he willed it or not. The girl would be seventeen or eighteen now, he realized; older than Robert had been when he fathered her. A strange thought.

-- AGoT, Chap. 30

The symbolic connection between Shireen as a stone girl and Robert’s adored “Stone” daughter, Mya, might mean that their arcs will be linked in the plot. Readers should keep an eye out for hints of foreshadowing and parallels between the stories of the two characters.

In her vision, the red priestess says she sees Patchface, but the accompanying context of skulls and a red mouth might match Robert’s story.

Melisandre's face darkened. "That creature is dangerous. Many a time I have glimpsed him in my flames. Sometimes there are skulls about him, and his lips are red with blood."

A wonder you haven' t had the poor man burned. All it would take was a word in the queen's ear, and Patchface would feed her fires. "You see fools in your fire, but no hint of Stannis?"

"When I search for him all I see is snow."

… "Would you know if the king was dead?" Jon asked the red priestess.

-- ADwD, Chap. 43

The exchange between Melisandre and Jon Snow is a good example of GRRM using one set of words to convey more than one layer of meaning. Ostensibly, the two are hoping for a sign that King Stannis has survived a dangerous foray among enemies. But another meaning of Jon’s phrase about the dead king might strengthen the case that Patchface is intended to represent King Robert: Jon’s question could be GRRM’s way of saying that Melisandre is seeing the face of the dead king but confusing it with the face of Patchface. (A third layer of meaning could be that Melisandre’s vision of snow represents Jon Snow’s future as a king, but that he will also be “dead” and Melisandre doesn’t see or understand this. GRRM gives us past, present and future kings in one bit of dialogue.)

The most obvious collection of skulls in the books is made up of nineteen dragon skulls and is kept at the Red Keep in King’s Landing. Robert had the skulls moved out of the throne room and stored in a cellar, but he would have been surrounded by them when he first took possession of the Iron Throne.

Finally, there is a reference to King Robert’s red mouth as he lies on this death bed:

"The realm . . . the realm knows . . . what a wretched king I've been. Bad as Aerys, the gods spare me."

"No," Ned told his dying friend, "not so bad as Aerys, Your Grace. Not near so bad as Aerys."

Robert managed a weak red smile.

-- Chap. 47, AGoT

Based on this fresh perspective and some other contextual hints, I think there are many unexplored possibilities for Patchface’s “prophecies” that could give us a clearer picture of what the fool is telling us about the past, present and future.

(Hint: Why hasn’t anyone examined Patchface’s cryptic phrases as they might apply to Winterfell? Jojen’s green dream told us that the sea flowed over the walls of Winterfell. The castle complex is subsequently largely destroyed except for an important chamber that would have been “under the sea”: the crypts. Which character soon leads people out of the crypts? Another fool-equivalent, Hodor. So the Patchface group expands from stag-helmeted King Robert and drowning victims Davos and Tyrion to include marching-out-of-the-sea Hodor.)