Blind Spot

 

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On the 19th of May 2013 I posted a meta on Jon/Sansa.

I would have not thought that exactly 6 years later, it would be the only viable Jon or Sansa ship still standing. But maybe the coinicidence is less of a sign and more of an expiration date.

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You know, until the evil empire is defeated, it’s never too late to join the Resistance – especially if you only worked in sanitation.

But Jon Snow has not been working in sanitation in episode 5. He was told point blank that only he could stop the wholesale murder of his fellow men and his only response was following an empty code of honor.

Him probably joining the Resistance in Episode 6 feels to me like a band-aid on the worst form of fictional evil – the evil of the passive bystander, the evil of the silent do-nothing, the evil of the joiner who replaces thought and morality with party lines and orders. He is a villain but he isn’t Joffrey or Tywin or Stannis or Janos Slynt. His fictional evil is not fantasy, it’s a common reality.

I mean, I get it. I did write once upon a time that turning Jon Snow morally gray was necessary for ASOIAF/GOT not to be Lord of the Rings with boobs. And I looked pretty gleefully at the idea of him embracing villainy. But he isn’t embracing villainy, he is passively falling into it.

I like what this does to the story but not what it does to my idea of the character. I feel irrationally angry at something that is a great thing to exist. Nowhere better to examine this type of evil but with Jon Snow, straight hero of the story. But the way I think and the way I feel about it are two different things.

Look, if you happen to be fictional and can be Space-Hitler, be Space-Hitler and chew up the scenery. But if you are a protagonist and decide to turn into a mindless stormtrooper who just presses the button to blow up Alderaan because who needs morals if you have orders, then fuck you, Jon Snow.

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Hey, Blindspot! Just found your essays recently and I'm curious to know what you thought of this season so far. Did you hear what D&D said about their choice for a certain character to kill a certain thing? It was underwhelming and a let down, considering all the characters' arcs.

I liked season so far and I liked episode 3. I didn’t love it because it bored me in parts of the first half. It was also very obviously the Emmy episode (Best Stunt Ensemble and Directing is in the bag), so if you want something with more spectacle, you’re out of luck. This was the upper limit of GOT could do in terms of budget and manpower in one episode. (Best writing is still up for grabs though.)

Its production must have gone sideways to tack on the “Arya in the library sequence” though. Obviously shot last with little budget, it either replaced a more expensive, unfinished or never-shot sequence or was simply added to pad runtime. Either way, it reeks of a messy production and that alone was massively distracting. The battle strategy was also exceptionally bad with them sacrificing the Dothraki for nothing. But I can see why the show needed to get rid off the horses first and in the dark and without them encountering any visible fighting. (I would also be surprised if this wasn’t actually demanded by the director before agreeing to do the episode after the BotB horse sequences were apparently a nightmare to shoot.)

As for Jon, I thought that he was so useless in the fight against the Night King, was quite hilarious and a bit foreboding. Obviously Jon thought he was gonna be Theon or Arya. Instead he was… Tormund. With a dragon. But the dragon is no excuse, because even Dany got a better shot at the Night King.

This whole thing reeks of GRRM though: Make people think character X pulls the sword from the stone/kills the monster and then it’s someone obviously less heroic. It’s the old Lord of the Rings trick. Neither Aragorn nor Frodo actually defeat Sauron, Gollum does it by accident. Arya, trained super assassin, is actually a lot less subversive choice than that. And Jon failing in a battle and having to get busted out by other people? It’s tradition at this point.

I wonder how Jon acts now he is without purpose and his supposed purpose wasn’t even a thing. I don’t have enough trust in D&D to speculate on Lyanna Mormont’s “[you’re] a nothing” being not just a savage burn but also what Jon sees in the mirror after never having had the purpose he thought he would have.

The interesting question is if Jon copes with this nothingness by moping and never acknowledging it (aka D&D ignoring it) or if he chooses just a different crusade to fight. Except in any other battle his opponents will not be ice zombies but living human beings. The risk of choosing wrong in a human-on-human conflict is much higher. In fact, GRRM, the old pacifist, might it even make it a point to write a conflict in which the biggest mistake is to fight it out in the first place.

Failing to be heroic in the Just War and then failing to be heroic by winning an unjust war would be hilarious dramatic irony. But then I still believe that Jon becoming an anti-hero is a better story than its heroic alternative, so I am reconciled with Jon being a heroic failure.

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No Bastard Ever Won a War by Dying for His Country

Over the past year I've gotten a lot of asks about Jon and what I think is going on with him. During that time I've also managed to calm down about the inconsistent number of redshirts during the Wight Hunt. Yes, I remember that this was a thing that happened, along with a bunch of other dei ex machina, like Cersei's brilliant strategies for everything, Jon's repeated, increasingly dumb survivals and the whole Winterfell plot.

But calming down about them meant that I could think about Game of Thrones again in a manner that kind of naively assumes that the work is coherent . That 2+2=4, not 5, or orange, or a tiger. And this is what I think is going on with Jon and why it is so crucial to the whole work.

George R.R. Martin once said that A Song of Ice and Fire is supposed to have a bittersweet ending. Now that phrase covers a lot of ground. A bittersweet ending might be just ASOIAF's Scouring of the Shire (which at this stage is assured) and a few good guys passing into the Great Beyond (also nearly certain) – which would be a copy of Lord of the Rings.

A bittersweet ending might also be Davos, Brienne and Sam emerging alone from the rubble like the unhappy winners of a Battle Royale. A few good guys surviving would technically make the ending not a complete downer and thus "bittersweet".

However, a more nuanced look at a bittersweet ending should look beyond mere survival and destruction but at an ending that irrevocably changes the characters and how and what we think of them.

An issue that strikes readers as unrealistic about Lord of the Rings is  that a lot of its human and hobbit-y heroes move on from the events of the story into psychologically very ordinary, uncomplicated lives that they would have lead even without the events of the story. Sam, Merry, Pippin's (and to a lesser degree Faramir, Aragorn and Eowyn's) easy passing into normalcy feels vaguely hollow.

If GRRM really plans to have a realistic take on Lord of the Rings and its "bittersweet" ending (and with his complaints about Aragorn's tax policy it appears that this is a crucial element of ASOIAF), then obviously he is going to continue what he has been doing all along and create an interplay between narrative events and characterization. Take Arya, for example. In the early parts of AGoT she would have not wanted to become a Faceless Man – for obvious reasons. But Arya from a few books later, after events have matured and traumatized her, wants to become one. And that choice will again impact her characterization and that will in turn impact future events. 
It is logical that this interplay will continue right up until the end. So speculation has to take into account that these characters are dynamic and can be pushed by events into new directions. And not just "can" – but will be.

The question is not who will be alive to experience the Scoured Shire but who they will be at this point. And that change shouldn't just be cosmetic or physical, it needs to be psychological, visible, noticeable and profound. We shouldn't get an Aragorn who just walks into a kingship after a two battles, marries the cute elf girl and then doesn't have a tax plan.

And obviously, I am not talking about Gilly. I am very much talking about ASOIAF's Aragorn. I am talking about Jon.

...

Now here is a hypothetical scenario for Season 8: Jon with the help of Dany and her dragons (and, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, the usual stock characters who fight every fictional war for us, even those in space), fight the White Walkers, win, then fight Cersei, then win (the order of this is might be reversed) and then Jon's revealed to be true heir and has to rebuild Westeros.

How does any of this really change and mature Jon as a character? How does being right about everything (the White Walkers being the real threat), then leading a righteous force to victory over evil make him a realistic take on Aragorn?

It doesn't.


What Jon needs after five books and seven season of making serviceable to great, sensible, ethical, right strategic choices (with admittedly a number of great tactical errors in between) is being wrong. And not just being wrong about failing to communicate to his sworn brothers what his strategy is, not just wrong about going on that Wight Hunt, not just wrong to send Sam away, not just lightly ethically challenged for exchanging a pair of babies against one mother's will or misleading his love interest on his commitment to her political cause... but wrong in a truly profound way that the audience cannot blame on stupidity or short-sightedness.

I admit that calling it "wrong" or even "profoundly wrong" is a bit of misnomer. What I am trying to get at is the character going into a direction where the audience cannot and should not easily follow. Those actions would be too alien as might be their rationalizations. These actions should strike the audience as questionable, reprehensible, immoral, unethical, or dishonorable.

A perhaps too perfect example of such an action is Cersei firing up the Sept. It's mass murder and it's intended by her to be mass murder. If anyone in the audience found it not reprehensible and immoral, I would have some questions for these people.

But Cersei firing up the Sept was a success. Her survival was at stake - and she survived. Before her kingdom was full of powerful enemies and afterwards it wasn't. And she even snatched the Iron Throne afterwards despite having no royal Targaryen or Baratheon ancestry.

In realpolitik terms, Cersei made the "right" choice. All other choices would have lead to her death. The first rule of anything is that you cannot do anything if you're dead.

And frankly, that's a lesson Jon desperately needs to learn. His twice-tried strategy of rushing alone against an army of his enemies is idiotic. It might be honorable for a war leader to be the first person on the battlefield but it's not a winning war strategy.

It's not a nice thing to say, but it's necessary for a war time general or commander to be willing to have other people die for him and his goal. And not just for him but in front of him, literally shielding him. An army commander who isn't willing to ensure his own survival, is gambling with such terrible odds that he has already lost the war.

Cersei's strategy of killing her enemies instead of allowing herself to be killed is profoundly wrong, immoral and yet Jon needs understand that when mankind's survival are at stake an immoral action like that might be a necessary choice.

His attempt to drown in an ice lake alone is a sign that at this point he hasn't understood the necessity of being alive to lead a war at all. As George S. Patton put it: "no poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb son-of-a-bitching bastard die for his country."

Out of all our main protagonists, Jon has never been willing to play as dirty as it should be necessary for an apocalyptic fight such as his. Unlike Sansa's willingness to go along with Littlefinger's nefarious plans for her cousin in the Vale, Arya's willingness to kill potentially innocent people for the Faceless Men, Tyrion raping a prostitute and killing Shae, the torture of innocents during Dany’s Slavers’s Bay arc, Bran warging Hodor... Jon has nothing in his arc that is as dark, dishonorable or questionable as these things. Jon appears to be a character class apart, like the hero of a more classic fantasy epic.

Is this because Jon's so special that his arc is a whole different genre or is this because he hasn't leveled up in realpolitik yet?

Or is there perhaps even a third option to deal with his relative over-the-top good guy characterization?

***

You know, when it comes to stories about morality like Game of Thrones a crucial factor for their success is not just the quality of the good guys but also the quality of the villains.

And what makes a compelling villain?

IMO, they hit more than one of these characteristics:

1. They are well-rounded, fully realized characters, drawn with the same care as the heroes.

2. They are able to win against the good guys. They are not a cardboard that will be blown over once the heroes wave a magic stick or sword around.

3. Their evil deeds get an emotional reaction out of the audience. (Most audiences tend to have a vague discomfort with CGI mass carnage while reacting to a well-executed scene of high school bullying with actual empathy or even horror.)

4. Their motivations are understandable, perhaps even sympathetic. At best they are a well-intentioned extremist, utilitarianism gone wrong, rather than setting stuff on fire because their mom was mean to them once.

Now looking at this list, it becomes obvious that GOT has a problem with its current crop of villains. Any of the three that are left (Cersei, the Night King, Euron) could be the Final Boss – to use a video game term. But none of them are very compelling villains. Two of them are inhuman monsters. To call their characterization shallow would be an insult to puddles.

And Cersei, the only one with a decent characterization (and some past Mean Girls bullying sins of her own) suffers from being incredibly stupid in the books, having a prophecy running against her and stealing Aegon from Essos' story in the show. In other words, Cersei's chances of success and survival and actually making it this far in the books are as good as that of a snowflake on a hot summer's day. One suspects that she is a show-only final-ish villain, so if one looks for GRRM’s final-ish villains, they would not find Cersei.

Talking about chances of success – the Night King isn’t winning this either. Because then ASOIAF would reveal itself to be a nihilistic mess in which all the human storylines were nothing but shaggydog stories. So the Night King is  bound to melt in the summer sun along with Cersei. There is little question about it. And is Euron "was he even mentioned in the first book?" Greyjoy  really going to win the Iron Throne in the end? Is anyone taking this possibility seriously?

And what are their motivations? Ambition, being evil and being anti-human. None of them are particularly sympathetic.

In one word, GOT's current crop of villains is not particularly exciting – especially if you compare them with some of the villains that came before them. And if one of these three is the Final Boss, he or she is gonna be lame.

But a lame Final Boss is actually a great tradition in the genre. In Lord of the Rings Sauron appears to be literally two-dimensional and about as interesting as a character. (Gollum gets to be the well-written villain and he is doing very little damage to the world at large.) Voldemort in Harry Potter is completely outshone as the most despised, scary villain of the series by the one-book-wonder Dolores Umbridge who excels at committing low-key evil deeds that make every reader/viewer wince in sympathy. The Emperor in the original Star Wars trilogy is... there and then dead and has fewer fans than a one-line bounty hunter. And the same fans that endlessly shout "Han shot first", don't even appear to care that he got a complete face replacement in the Special Editions. And if there is one consistent complaint about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's that its villains tend to be boring and forgettable. Yet they're lame and forgettable to the tune of billions of box office dollars.

So a lame Final Boss for the heroes to fight... that is indeed a thing. And that might be just the thing GOT/ASOIAF is doing. This is what we have to seriously consider. We are likely to get a MCU villain... you know on the level of Ronan the Destroyer or Malekith, the Dark Elf. And you probably need to google in which movies those two turned up.

That would be a terrible let down.

Or maybe it's not actually that terrible of a thing? Because if our final boss and villain is not Cersei, the Night King, or Euron, it's a good guy gone bad. Someone who is currently fighting on the side of the living before becoming someone who needs to be fought.

It's possible that this is in the cards. After "Ozymandias", the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad, aired, GRRM wrote on his blog that "Walter White is a bigger monster than anyone in Westeros, I need to do something about that."  

The thing is that White appeared to start out as a sympathetic if flawed hero you were rooting for even as he was making meth. What made White monstrous is not doing depraved psycho shit beyond comprehension (like nailing a living, pregnant woman to a ship like Euron Greyjoy) but that he appears to evolve into this monster before the audience's eyes.

Breaking Bad tricks the audience into liking a character for much longer than he ever deserved and that becomes crystal clear in that penultimate episode. If GRRM wants a monster like White he can't use his old, repetitive trick of making a one-dimensional psychopath do depraved stuff. He has to logically progress a character we root for into a monster.

(Of course, GRRM might also not be able to pull it off, however much he wants to. It could be that he has not prepared the ground to make a main character go Walter White and thus it will always fall short of Breaking Bad's accomplishment. Sure, Greyworm or Dolorous Edd could become evil and monstrous but even GRRM should know that's not quite the same as making your main protagonist evil.

I might also be wrong on GRRM understanding what makes Walter White feel so monstrous. The first big sign that White took the road down to hell is not an act of murder or sadism but simply not helping someone who is choking to death. His monstrosity is based in a three-dimensional characterization, not in particularly outrageous acts of evil. He is monstrous because he used to be likable. If GRRM doesn't see that, he might actually think that one-dimensional psychopath Euron nailing his pregnant girlfriend to a ship is nailing the same kind of monstrosity.

He also could be talking about a plot point we now know about but that he has not published yet – like Stannis burning Shireen. So one should be careful looking for ASOIAF's Walter White.)

Interestingly enough, the trick Breaking Bad is pulling is quite old. White isn't making meth by chance, it was the worst thing his creator could think of besides him becoming an arms dealer. The twist of Breaking Bad's "Ozymandias" is actually not that White becomes bad but that he has always been bad. You'll find a similar character in Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita where his monstrosity is barely a plot twist and even Milton's Paradise Lost where it's none at all. (The trope of the protagonist being a piece of shit throughout the whole story usually goes down as "villain protagonist" and the list of stories containing one is pretty expansive.) But the plot twist of a surprise villain protagonist is such an old one that Aesop already codified it in his fable "The Farmer and the Viper" around 600 B.C. (Farmer helps harmless looking viper, then viper bites him because it's a viper. And has been a viper all along. Duh.)

Now if Dany, for example, turned into a villain then she would fall squarely into villain protagonist territory. But the fun thing is that doesn't mean that she is already one. The viper is not a villain until Aesop has it biting the farmer. If Dany decides to slaughter her future subjects by the thousands just so she can have the Iron Throne (and this is portrayed as despicable) then this will be in line with the Dany from the first season/AGoT who wanted the Dothraki to wage their type of warfare (pillaging, raping, enslaving, killing) onto thousands of her future subjects, so she could have the Iron Throne. But that doesn't mean that Dany will cross this particular moral event horizon.

Whether Dany will turn out to be a villain protagonist is not a question of foreshadowing. It's a question whether the authorial intent will will it into existence. The viper is a poisonous snake but if the author hasn't it biting the farmer, that poison doesn't matter at all.

Now Dany is a well-rounded character (same as Cersei) and might be difficult to defeat but her most likely, hypothetical, evil deed (mass carnage via dragon) is not particularly compelling and neither is ambition as her motivation. Villainous Dany is about as compelling as Cersei. Keeping Cersei for so long when there is Villainous Dany in the wings strikes me as a weak narrative choice: “Meet your new villain, same as the old villain...” The difference would be the element of surprise but that's a paltry surprise, especially since Villainous Dany was supposed to be The Big Plot Twist.

Honestly, Dany as the mass-carnage causing, ambitious type of villain is a low-hanging fruit. Call me edgy, but it's just nowhere near "Ozymandias". It's Boromir getting seduced by the Ring.

And there are not a lot of precedents for that storyline in ASOIAF. You know the story of a good guy gone beyond redemption evil. There is Theon, whose ambition, jealousy and insecurity drove him into sacking Winterfell and killing two children – but even he turned out to be not to be beyond redemption. There is Catelyn, but she goes crazy and becomes a zombie, so it's hard to compare.

But there is, of course, the most compelling, interesting and meaningful character arc of a good guy gone bad: Stannis Baratheon. But he isn’t a good precedent for a mass-carnage causing, ambitious type of villain.

***

You see, Stannis starts out as not exactly the most sympathetic character: he burns people and places of worship, he is a religious nut, he has his brother killed. But after getting defeating at the Battle of Blackwater, his arc does a 180. He gets the call from the North to save the realm, and out of all of the five Kings involved in the war of the same name, he is the only one he realizes that in order to "win the realm, you have to save the realm."

That isn't a coincidence. Stannis is also the only king who fights for a higher purpose. Joffrey, Balon, Robb, and Renly just fight for power (be it the power over all of Westeros or the power that lies in independence). Stannis is fighting not just for power but also for his religion, for his one true god; he is fighting a crusade. That out of all the kings, the king who believes that his religion will save Westeros ends up wanting to save it from a supernatural threat is not a coincidence. One thing clearly causes the other.

And once he makes this choice, Stannis, the Mannis (as he was lovingly called by his fans once upon a time) always fights the bad guys, he fights for the living. Of course, he doesn't stop being a religious nut, he doesn't stop burning people, he is inflexible in his beliefs, he still thinks he is the chosen one, he is Azor Ahai, he is the One True King, he belongs on the Iron Throne. But he is also the man who executes soldiers of his army who rape. He has good sides. But what weighs so heavily in his favor is that out of all the people in power in Westeros, he is fighting the bad guys.

And that matters – until it doesn't when Stannis strikes out to fight the Boltons. The Boltons are special because they are despicable without exceptions. Even the Freys have Robb's squire in their midst to have that one decent family member/bannerman that all of Westeros' notable houses appear to have. All but the Boltons anyway. There is not a good or decent living Bolton. They are the literal worst Westeros has to offer.

And yet, Stannis manages to cross a moral event horizon that makes everyone forget that he is doing it to fight the Worst. And that moral event horizon is not the sacking of a city, the killing of hundred of thousands. He is not extinguishing a house or a people. He manages it, doing something every single GOT character could do right now (save for little Sam.) He kills a single person.

And he doesn't come back from that. Like a proper Ozymandias, his hubris, his pretension to predestined, prophecied greatness is followed by his inevitable decline. Killing Shireen has Stannis losing his real world fans and his in-story followers, his wife, his fight, his priestess, his army, his purpose and consequently his life. He proves very quickly that not all ends justify all means. He is the living embodiment of the Friedrich Nietzsche quotation that "those who fight monsters should take care that in the process they do not become monsters themselves."  

Stannis' final turn into villainy is actually paralleled by something another character does in ASOIAF. Except he is not a character we meet; he is a story-within-a-story; a legend, a prophecy or both. He is who Stannis thought he was: he is Azor Ahai.

And Azor Ahai absolutely does what Stannis did to turn into a villain, a monster: he murders... sacrifices an innocent to forge Lightbringer to end the Long Night. The way the story gets told makes that murder necessary, but Azor Ahai as the hero and winner of the Long Night gets to tell that story, gets to tell history his way. It's a legend and of course Azor Ahai is its hero. But remember the first person who claimed that "only death can pay for life" was a liar who wanted to make sure that "The Stallion Who Mounts the World" died in the womb. (The second was Melisandre who tends to be wrong on a lot of things and whose track record on human sacrifice is abysmal.)

So there is absolutely a chance that Nissa Nissa's death was as necessary as Shireen's. We won't get the opportunity to fact-check the legend, the ancient history. But if it's a prophecy we might see its reality.

Of course, if GOT really goes the way of making a good guy go bad, then they can do this the middling way, the mediocre way. Theon's Sack of Winterfell Redux or Catelyn's descent into madness and murder. Or by making Dany a villain protagonist who is basically just another Cersei with dragons. And despite not quite measuring up to Stannis' dark turn – ambition, grief, fear, insecurity, jealousy, vanity, or disappointment leading to mass carnage delivered onto a hundred-thousand computer-generated extras is still more interesting than the Night King Sauron with his ice dragon.

But the reality is that we don't care about the 100,000 inhabitants of King's Landing. We will cry over a single Hot Pie before ever giving a fuck about a massive number of fictional people without any characteristics. Mass carnage is easy to oppose morally because it's something we oppose in real life but emotionally there is no difference between 10 fictional people or a billion fictional people – if they are simply there to be nameless, featureless cannon fodder. The ability to cause mass carnage doesn't make you the most emotionally effective villain by default. Quite the opposite.

If Bran were to warg a dragon and set King's Landing on fire, we would get that this whole Three-Eyed Raven thing didn't work out well for his ethics and be, like, "okay". If Bran set fire to Arya, he would immediately become the most hated character ever on GOT. (And that isn't an exaggeration for effect). And any good intentions regarding defeating evil would matter as much as the fight against the Boltons did once Shireen started screaming.

I would like to add that Stannis died pretty much immediately after killing Shireen, blown over like a cardboard once Brienne showed up. But who would defeat or want to defeat a Stannis, an Azor Ahai who succeeded at ending the Long Night?

The ultimate story subversion when it comes to the classic "good vs. evil" plot is that the bad guy wins.

And wouldn't that be something if it was surprise villain protagonist? We get someone winning that we would have been okay with winning until they turned into GOT's least liked character? Wouldn't that be bittersweet? Getting who you were okay with, perhaps even wanted on the Iron Throne, who might even know which is the right tax plan and what to do with baby orcs...  except they suck now?

Now who could that true Azor Ahai possibly be?

Is there someone who has been fighting monsters longer than anyone else has? Who has been so corrupted by that fight that he has tried and sacrificed already everything he could and had to defeat them? A man on quasi-religious crusade? A man who has the sort of righteous hubris and single-minded focus on the White Walkers that makes him often deaf to good advice? Who who has already laid down his life for a chance... and even a "no-chance-at-all-now-let-me-drown-in-an-ice-lake" at defeating the Night King? Is this possibly the same guy who we think is going to be crucial to the defeat of the White Walkers?  The one who has the perfect bloodline to claim the Iron Throne in the end? The one who is shown to Melisandre when she looks for her prophecied chosen one in the fire? The one who appears to be the straight hero of the story, the Luke Skywalker, the only major character where pulling a Stannis would actually shock us?  The one who has never been "profoundly wrong"?

I am not saying, we are getting "Aegon, the Worst of His Name". I am saying that if I wanted to create a villain who subverts all expectations while fulfilling them, a villain who is truly compelling and whose turn emotionally wrecks the audience, I would not make it happen by having Daenerys or Bran roast King's Landing. I simply would choose a more likable and successful version of Stannis and have him doing something terrible, wrongfully believing it's the right thing to do.

Now theoretically this could be anyone but little Sam. And regardless of that character's identity, they would be a great, compelling villain. Practically though, the best candidate for going off that particular deep end is not some random second tier character. And it's not Daenerys "What Even Are White Walkers?" or Bran "I'm a robotic, omniscient plot device now the Three-Eyed Raven now" Stark either.

It's Jon.

***

There is an issue with this though. Stannis murdering a family member/sacrificing a child for their royal blood to win a battle was simply a continuation of Stannis' previous actions. Stannis had no issue with his wife's uncle being burned as a sacrifice to R'hllor, had his brother murdered to win a battle, and attempted to have his underage nephew (Edric Storm in the books, Gendry in the show) sacrificed for his royal blood.

Killing Shireen is Stannis taking this to its logical extreme. Everything he does is simply something he has done before. Except this time the audience isn't given an out: Shireen doesn't escape like Edric/Gendry, we care for her (unlike Alester Florent) and she isn't Stannis' opponent in battle (Renly).

What Stannis is doing, is not surprising or entirely unprecedented. It is ultimately just a darker twist on something he has done before. Which is weird because you would think that something that crosses a moral event horizon would be a real departure from his previous actions. But it's not and that is really crucial if we want to discuss Stannis 2.0.

If a good character goes bad then having them simply do something they've done before –  except this time it's just too much – makes sense. Just like the road to hell is paved with good intentions, escalating villainy should be a slippery slope of ever indefensible bad deeds.

And this is why it makes no sense to look at Jon and wonder who he is going to burn at the stake for R'hllor – because he won't.  What he would do to incur the audience's disdain needs to be something he has kind of done before. And that he has done on the show before, because it stands to reason that the show would want to keep its foreshadowing. (Hence Gendry's slightly pointless kidnapping by Melisandre in the show.)

So the the baby swap is out since it didn't happen on the show. Breaking a vow is a bit too generic and on its lonesome will not evoke any emotional reaction. And making high-handed, impulsive decisions that end up with terrible consequences has been already done with Jon making a series of high-handed, badly thought through decisions that netted the Night King a dragon and destroyed the Wall and yet netted Jon no audience disdain at all. So probably not that one either.

That leaves his relationship with Ygritte. In the books, we only see this relationship from Jon's point of view with all his justifications and inner struggles and his self-knowledge that while he lies about his allegiance to the Wildlings' cause, his feelings for Ygritte are real.

Now if one imagines that relationship from Ygritte's point of view (as she is in the books), Jon would come out of that as a supreme douchebag. He lead her on, lied to her, pretended to have feelings for her, then left her, publicly humiliated her and finally participated in a battle with her on the other side. Jon doesn't kill her but he is willing to do so by fighting her.

Now a real neutral point of view that doesn't vilify Ygritte to prop up Jon as a cool dude (as the show has done with her allying herself with cannibals and the village massacre), would be more of a wash, ethically speaking. Jon lies to Ygritte but his life is at stake and it wasn't even his own idea in the first place. There are consent issues with their relationship and Ygritte is as willing to kill Jon when she participates in that battle as it's the case the other way around.

But then Stannis wasn't that unjustified to go after Renly who was willing to fight and kill him in battle after all. Killing Renly nearly rates as self-defense. And Edric Storm got away. The question is not how horrible Jon's actions towards Ygritte were. But rather what the escalation of that sort of overall action would be like.

Now due to time constraints the only relationship where Jon could pull an escalated "Ygritte" is his relationship with Daenerys. And here I am kind of puzzled by the discourse around the idea. Because as passionately as people argue about it, they actually agree quite fundamentally: that Jon is doing it/not doing because he is the quintessential good guy.

That he either betrays his lover or the plutocratic will of his nation is disregarded as some sort of higher purpose collateral that doesn't at all reflect on his moral character.

But isn't Occam's Razor to the question of how a "good guy" manages to betray either lover or nation simply to question the "good guy" part?

But let's step back a bit. The theory that Jon is playing Dany proposes that Jon initiates this emotional manipulation because she wonders aloud about two things (while he wants her commitment on the fight against the White Walkers): 1. Her ability to achieve her overall strategic goal of winning the Iron Throne 2. What happens to her rear if she pulls all of her forces north.

Now, Jon never actually answers any of these questions (or any questions on how to get the Northern Lords to remain loyal to him and Dany) and that is a bit problematic. Because the second question of what happens in a war if you leave one side open to your enemies is an enormously important one.

What Jon appears to do, is rely on a truism about the North: that it cannot be conquered in Winter (and Winter is here.)

*beleaguered sigh*

This truism exists in our world about two countries. One is considered unconquerable in Winter, the other unconquerable in general. And while these truisms have held true for few centuries now, the reality is that attempts to conquer them have devastated both countries on more than one occasion to the sound of millions of dead inhabitants and bombing it to the bottom of the HDI.

If Jon relies on Winter to protect him and his allies from Cersei, he is an idiot. If Cersei attacks the unprotected North from the South, his ability to fight the White Walkers will be profoundly diminished even if Cersei fails at conquering the North itself. Dany is right to ask this question and he is wrong to ignore it.

And if that theory pans out and Jon took these strategic, legitimate concerns as a sign that he needs to loverboy it up instead of thinking how to protect the North from the South, then that's next level mansplaining.

But forget that point for a bit and go back to the situation in which Jon supposedly initiates it. He is recovering after the Wight Hunt and Dany swears to avenge her dragon while musing on her overall strategy of winning Westeros. And while Jon isn't in good shape, he is not in mortal danger. Not in general, not specifically by Dany. She is letting her hair down and she's pledging her support to his cause.

Jon's life is not the least on the line and the question whether Dany would or would not have pulled out of the war against the White Walkers if Jon hadn't started flirting with her in that moment is an unanswerable hypothetical. No matter how you slice or dice it, it's not certain at all (not to the audience, not to Jon) that she would have pulled out.

So Jon had three choices in this moment: not initiate a romantic relationship with Dany, initiate a romantic relationship out of genuine feeling, initiate a romantic relationship to manipulate her.

None of these choices would spell certain doom. It's not at all like the relationship with Ygritte, where not going along with it would have blown his cover and cost his life. It's also distinct from that situation insofar as he didn't choose to go undercover with the Wildlings in the first place but was commanded into the situation by his superior officer.

If Jon initiated the relationship to manipulate Dany, he chose to do this voluntarily without true necessity. It's, in fact, as necessary as Littlefinger manipulating Lysa into intrigue, murder and ill-fated marriage was. Of course, without that manipulation Littlefinger would have never advanced at court and become Master of the Coin, Lord of Harrenhall and Sweetrobin's guardian. But none of these things were necessary to grant his survival at any time.

The key difference between Jon and Littlefinger is that Jon allies himself with Dany to ensure mankind's survival instead of personal gain. But on the balance, another difference between Littlefinger and Jon's situation is that the romantic relationship wasn't necessary to ensure Dany's support. In fact, even the idea that Dany's concerns are sign of her wavering in her commitment is a minority if not fringe opinion among GOT's audience.

And that makes the idea of Jon manipulating Dany very unpalatable. The lack of necessity makes him a Littlefinger, rather than a Robb or a Ned or even the Jon who lied to Ygritte. And audiences prefer to see their heroes as honorable fools rather than manipulative, emotionally abusive jerks.

Because there is the heart of the problem. If Jon is truly manipulating Dany, he is an emotionally abusive jerk. He is profoundly wrong. He is the guy that your BFF has warned you about. "He is just using you for [something.]"

And that hits home in a way shadowbabies and Frey Pies and Qyburn doesn't. We don't know any necromancers who vivisect people. But we know the kind of jerk that Jon would be. It's not theoretical, it's something we know and because of that will not appreciate.

***

But while this absolutely checks off “make the evil deed painful to the audience” point in the “compelling villain” check list, it’s still nowhere near as ethically questionable as Stannis burning Shireen.

But Jon's Ygritte storyline doesn't end with him duping, betraying and leaving her. It ends with her getting killed. And not just killed, but killed in battle against Jon and his brothers. While Jon is not directly responsible for her death – he neither instigated nor executed the killing – he was willing to risk that his actions would kill her in that battle. The goal of a battle is to win and to use the Patton quote from above "make the other bastard die for his country." Of course, Jon acted in self-defense, Ygritte was fighting that battle against him and the NW voluntarily, fully willing, ready and able to kill him.

But then, to go back to Stannis, Stannis was also just acting in self-defense when he send the shadowbaby assassin to kill Renly. Renly had the superior force and showed himself fully willing, ready and able to kill Stannis in battle. The question whether Stannis' assassination of Renly is justified is a digression too far because that is not the point. The point is that Jon and Stannis got some person killed who was really close to them (brother, lover) and that was kind of, maybe, perhaps justified self-defense. You can argue for it in both cases.

However, as I mentioned before, Stannis' ultimate escalation of Renly's murder is killing Shireen. There is no maybe, perhaps, kind of, about the lack of justification for it. Stannis did not act in self-defense, Stannis was not provoked. The true necessity was also absent... although the proof for that is just hindsight. The sacrifice was supposed to save Stannis and his army. It did not. Thus it was never necessary. The whole thing is just wholly indefensible.

Now would an escalation of Jon's Ygritte storyline limit itself to the affair and betrayal or would it go all the way down to that self-defensive arrow that Jon wasn't directly responsible for? Except for a Stannis-like escalation that arrow could not be self-defensive, it would have to be undeserved, unjustified, unnecessary and Jon's responsibility.

The audience doesn't even have to like Dany at that point. That would be just crossing all moral event horizons, turning Jon into a villain and serving a "King Arthur Aragorn Jon  Snow is the final villain" plot twist that makes R+L=J look like child's play in comparison. It would be truly an epic twist, ending up in the plot twist pantheon next to "Bruce is a ghost" and "Soylent Green".

However, I don't think this is gonna happen. A villain protagonist on that level would have been foreshadowed much, much more, both in the books and the show. "The villain wins" is also really nihilistic and ends up on a quite bitter note with very little sweetness. Davos, Brienne and Sam emerging alone from the rubble would be a more positive and happier ending. It's also the sort of plot twist you think of five books and seven TV seasons later (too late), not when you conceive the story.

So what will happen to Jon instead if he doesn't become a villain?

There are really only two options: his characterization remains in a class of its own and he remains the only truly good guy protagonist or he takes a level in realpolitik and starts to play as dirty as necessary in whatever way. Not quite Jon, the villain but Jon the ethically challenged, Jon the Utilitarian.

(By the way, I am not saying that he has to play dirty with specific characters to qualify, just that that he has to play dirty somehow. In fact, playing dirty with certain characters might evoke a negative, emotional audience reaction that is not in proportion to the ethics violation it presents and thus the whole Utilitarianism bit might accidentally devolve into perceived villainy.)

The really fascinating bit about this is that Jon's characterization will define ASOIAF quite significantly. Jon is so crucial to the story's most fundamental conflict, that even if you discard the idea that he is The Protagonist, you would still have to agree that he is one of the most important protagonists. His characterization will contribute and lead to the resolution of that conflict. If he resolves it by playing dirty, the moral of the story will quite different than it is if he resolves it by always taking the heroic, high road.

And it's not just the moral of the story. Once the story decides to land on "Jon, the moral" or "Jon, the Utilitarian", the question whether we are consuming "Lord of the Rings with boobs" or a true deconstruction of Lord of the Rings will answer itself. And that will reflect on more than just Jon's storyline. If Jon stays heroic, Night King Sauron, our final, two-dimensional villain and other neat and flat resolutions become much more likely.

As such I would argue that the Jon’s characterization will define how good ASOIAF's famed realism truly is, what ideals it propagates, and what kind of story ASOIAF is.

I honestly can't predict how this will play out. But I remember that Ned and the Red Wedding promised a deconstruction of the genre, an acknowledgement that taking the high road constantly can be a dead end in real life. Jon not needing to be smarter than them in the end would break that promise.

[blindestspot]

"Aegon, his is the song of ice and fire"

I've come to realize that it is a cop-out to say that bad writing is impossible to analyze and predict. Because for all writing you can ask the question "why it was written this way?" A bad execution doesn't erase the intention behind it.

Of course, Game of Thrones is an adaptation, so one cannot look at D&D and GRRM's writing as ultimately separate things. D&D might take a few detours but you cannot solely use their writing to predict the ending because their ending is supposed be GRRM's ending. But I think looking at those detours and why these detours exists, allows us a glimpse at that ending.

And this is why I want to talk about GRRM's writing first, more specifically how he accomplishes the appearance of a realistic narrative/plot. Obviously world-building and realistic, psychologically sound characterization play a role. But he also uses a trick in order for the plot to appear more realistic than it is. This trick is a combination of two things: the cast of "thousands", in which is a large amount of characters are well-rounded, three-dimensional, are given full backstories and appear to be important to the main narrative; and the random appearance of luck.

The cast of thousands is a hyperbole but GRRM keeps a very large cast and if he loses important cast members, he is quick to replace them with other characters that also look like they will play an important part of the endgame. Aegon from Essos, Arianne, Val, the Greyjoy Uncles, to name a few, come into the story after important characters like Robb, Tywin and Balon disappear from it.

The “random luck” part is that luck for any character doesn't appear to align itself with the character's moral orientation. Good people have both good and bad luck and bad people have good and bad luck as well. This allows the bad guys to even get ahead temporarily, since they're more ruthless in using their good luck. It's a pattern that culminates in the Red Wedding when the good guys take a huge blow and the bad guys win, fostering the Wikipedia-approved impression that the whole ASOIAF-verse is very "grimdark".

But from there on narrative karma begins to catch up with the more villainous characters, with luck deserting them. And then they are dropping like flies: Joffrey, Tywin, Lysa Arryn, Janos Slynt... Going by the spoiler that are the deaths on GOT (which imply that these dead characters will never win/come out on top in the books and are also very likely to end up dead there)... narrative karma will come for many other bad guys as well. In fact, going by the show, only latecomer and Joffrey/Ramsay replacement Euron Greyjoy stands any chance to pull the "villain gets away with it" trope since Cersei, the Night King, Melisandre and Varys are pretty much doomed and no other important villain is left. (And the latter two are even rather morally gray than outright villains.)

No wonder people start to speculate whether a good guy will become corrupted and evil with this shortest of shortlists of leftover karma-evading villains.

Luck works a bit differently for good guys. It doesn't protect some of them but it protects a few of them quite considerably. I believe the fandom term is "plot armor" which a few characters have to the point that the readers have stopped believing in cliffhangers that put their survival in question. They are just "too important" to die. And that's why after ADWD most people speculated about the nature of Jon's stab wounds or the nature of his inevitable resurrection rather than wondering whether Aegon from Essos would take over his narrative.

They were not fooled because GRRM's trick has an expiration date. People catch on, no matter how many "important" characters he adds and how much "bad but survivable" luck his important characters get. Jon is supposed to appear to have the bad luck to get stabbed to death, but in reality we all know that he will have the good luck to be resurrected.

D&D have mostly (but not entirely) abandoned GRRM's trick. Now this is in part because they're farther ahead in the story but it's far from being the only reason.

There are actually multiple reasons to deviate from the books, so I’ll mention the obvious first: time, budget and effort. If GOT wanted to do all these extra storylines/characters that we know amount to nothing important in the end, they would need more seasons, more actors, more time, more money. It is understandable that they might consider that to be a pointless waste of time.

Another reason is that change can snowball, requiring more change. A small change early on and suddenly original storylines do not work quite as they should. Take the Jeyne Westerling storyline, for example. In the books Robb is sixteen and she is his first girlfriend, to use modern terms. Of course, when given the choice between dishonoring a betrothal to an ugly Frey girl or dishonoring his first serious girlfriend, the choice of a teenager is quite obvious.

In the show Robb is ten years older and re-enacting this storyline doesn't really work. He is not a green, dumb teenager, he is an adult man and should know better. It would play out pretty badly on screen and would be terribly strange, dumb and hypocritical for the character to do. It is pretty apparent that Talisa is the attempt to make him look less like an idiot and to prop him up with a great romance instead. D&D turned Jeyne Westerling into this hot, compassionate, witty, intelligent Doctors Without Borders volunteer, the sort of woman that in the real world would be worth losing your head for. (They actually only changed the name to Talisa because GRRM insisted. So yes, "Talisa" was their way of overhauling teenager-appropriate love interest Jeyne.) Talisa didn't quite work out for a lot of the audience but that's besides the point. We are asking why she was there, not why she didn't work.

A similar thing goes on with Shae and her relationship with Tyrion. In the books, despite seeing her pretty much only from Tyrion's point of view, we know she is only with him for the money, she is a selfish person and Tyrion is abusive towards her. So he makes a bad decision for being with a selfish person like that, an idiot for deluding himself about why she is with him and an abusive douchebag on top of that.

In the show, Shae cares about other people besides herself, falls in love with Tyrion and he doesn't abuse her when they are in a relationship. This not only makes him smarter than his book counterpart for choosing to be with secretly kind-hearted Shae and an actual nice guy for not being an abusive jerk. It actually elevates and makes him look awesome for making this cynical woman fall for him with his wit and charm. It's a total white-wash for Tyrion.

But then it's also just another white-wash for Tyrion in a long line of white-washes. As I said, once you make a change  you have to commit to the change. And once D&D decided to make Tyrion the focal point for marketing, promo and everything else for three seasons after they lost Sean Bean, they needed to change book Tyrion in order for him to be a palatable and relatable character. Being a dumb, deluded, abusive douchebag was no longer something he could be. And so a character like Shae was good enough to be used as a prop for that change – to the point of entirely disregarding her original characterization.

Of course that white-washing also encompasses the third reason for abandoning a book plot: sacrificing some plot logic in service of propping up characters. That Shae used to be in love with Tyrion makes her presence in Tywin's bed and her murder kind of way more random than it is in the books. And yet it is just one more of  the many, many plot holes that are created to cater to character. That's why Cersei is the popular ruler of Kings Landing in Season Seven despite blowing up the Westerosi Vatican and pope. (Of course, it helps that she has taken over Aegon from Essos' plot and that Lena Headey can chew scenery like nobody’s business. Sacrificing a bit of story logic to replace Aegon from Essos with Lena Headey playing someone really smart named Cersei is probably the most win-win alteration of the books that D&D have ever congratulated themselves on.)

Sacrificing plot logic for character is also why Arya can give the most fearsome death cult in the world the middle finger without consequence when she finally decides to go back to Westeros. The important part of it is that Arya moves on, becomes Arya Stark again. The show cannot be bothered with the realistic minutiae of that decision, what would be required to be able to leave  the most fearsome death cult in the world. They don't care, they don't want to get bogged down with it, they wave it off.

And then there is the fourth reason, the one that admittedly fueled D&D's desire to adapt ASOIAF in the first place: the "Oh shit" moment. I used to think of them as water cooler moments, but that's too broad and too narrow. D&D love spectacle and they love surprise moments and both can be "Oh shit" moments but an "Oh shit" moment doesn't need to be that. It's just the moment when a storyline resolves itself with the maximum emotional impact.

It allows their actors to chew maximum amount of scenery (and D&D love it when they do that) and gives GOT emotional weight to make it feel more real, more emotionally involving. Perhaps so emotionally involving that you don't notice the plot holes. (That's a fine strategy, by the way, if you’re good enough to pull it off. Because if your audience weeps properly at the end of Romeo and Juliet, they will never notice how unlikely it was for both characters to get to that place where they would be able to commit suicide in that crypt. A great emotional response can absolutely drown out rational plot analysis.)

Anyway, “Oh shit" moments are not just surprises and high-budget spectacles like the Red Wedding or Cersei blowing up the Sept. They can also be intimate, predictable moments that you saw coming from a mile way, like the scene of Sansa feeding Ramsay to his dogs. This is not only the unsurprising culmination of the Battle of the Bastards episode but also the unsurprising culmination of Sansa's entire Ramsay storyline. They spend nearly two seasons of Sansa's storyline on that moment, for that moment.

So what do these reasons for adaptational changes tell us about the future of GOT?

Well, there is one "Oh shit" moment that they've been working on since the pilot. It has become the sole reason why certain characters have anything to do anymore, why other characters are even featured on the show; it's so important that it's teased in completely unrelated contexts and storylines for ages.

To word it differently: You do know where the focus and the narrative weight lies when you get a single flashback to the creation of the White Walkers while every other flashback is about Lyanna Stark and her baby. Because somewhere at the end of those trail of breadcrumbs, flashbacks, foreshadowing and hints is an "Oh shit" moment  that is very, very important to D&D.

Jon's parentage reveal is the most teased about moment of the entire show. There is nothing that comes close to it. It stands to reason that it will be the emotional climax of the show, possibly even outshining the ending.

Now this is going to be a painful moment for Jon. Even GRRM's version of it will not have Jon jumping in joy about the fact that his entire life is based on a lie. There is nothing to suggest that show Jon will feel differently. So if D&D want maximum emotional impact, they need to tighten the screws, they need to make that reveal worse for Jon.

I concur that the obvious way to make it worse is to isolate Jon before, during and after the reveal, to divorce him from all that he holds dear – to divorce him from the North, from his previous supporters, from his family, from his best friend and from his girlfriend. Now obviously, not all of them are going to be upset about the same thing. This is why it becomes quite obvious that D&D used Season Seven to set up a situation in which everyone will be pissed off at him. And this, by the way, perfectly explains why Dany burned the Tarlys, the necessity of Jon/Dany and Jon publicly kneeling in Season Seven. It turns out that it doesn't matter why Jon (and Dany) did these things – if Jon is an honorable fool, a fool in love or someone who figured out that keeping the lady with the dragons happy beats trying to convince untrustworthy Cersei. (Or if Dany is becoming her father.) D&D had him do it (had Dany do it), so the North will hear about him giving up their independence to a “foreign whore” who loves to burn people and hate him for it, and that Sam will be pissed at him for hooking up with his family's killer, and that Dany can feel properly betrayed, thinking her boyfriend only wanted her to usurp her throne. This whole thing is not about the integrity of Jon's character or the integrity of his characterization, or about anyone’s integrity or integrity of their characterization and plot. It's about making Jon’s parentage reveal go as badly as possible for him. It's about creating the ultimate "Oh shit" moment of pain. Nothing matters beyond that, everything is a prop for it. A Watsonian reading of Jon’s motives is as pointless as the theory that Talisa Maegyr was a Lannister spy.

Yes, it’s bad writing to disregard plot and characterization integrity for the emotional impact of an “Oh shit” moment. No one’s denying that. But it’s exactly the type of bad writing that has been with us all this time. If we take bad writing as seriously as good writing, then using previous writing tactics to come to the conclusion that more typical bad writing is awaiting us, is a perfectly legitimate conclusion.

Of course, this begs the question of why D&D  put so much weight on that one moment? Why haven't we got so much foreshadowing and preparation for the moment when Dany plants her behind on the Iron Throne or Jaime strangles Cersei? Or even for the moment the Night King gets defeated? Why is there nothing else that comes even close to the amount of prep that Jon's parentage reveal gets? And why is this, his moment allowed to turn every other character into a prop for his emotional reaction? Why does he matter so much? And is this just D&D fucking up GRRM's vision yet once more?

You know GRRM actually told us the answer to this particular question a long, long time ago in A Clash of Kings: "Aegon, [...] He has a song [...] his is the song of ice and fire." This is the reality that GRRM tries so hard to disguise with his cast of thousands. Jon... Aegon isn't just an important character with plot armor, he is the main character. He is the protagonist. This way too large book series is his song, his story. The Song of Ice and Fire is Jon’s. D&D haven't invented that, they simply refused to conceal it as desperately with Aegons from Essos as GRRM does.

Now, if we assume I am right (which I do), then there are basically two ways that this story can end: either with Jon's death (literal or figurative) or him becoming king. Now the classic self-sacrifice for the greater good is the oldest trope around. This means it always has good odds. But these two options are not necessarily mutually exclusive paths. A figurative death could tie in very well with a kingship and kingship might end up in death. But if we are talking about actual lasting, endgame, Aragon-in-Lord-of-the-Rings kingship, then something really interesting is going on.

GRRM once complained that Lord of the Rings makes Aragorn this ideal, promised king without ever explaining what his ruling looked like. What happened to the baby orcs? What was his tax policy? Now if GRRM plans to have a king in the end who is "Aegon Aragorn with a tax policy" then Jon has gotten some training for that already. He has been Lord Commander in the books and the show and he has been King in the North in the show. Since Robb's will is the unresolved Chekov's Gun that is notably still around, there is some chance that in the books he will become King in the North as well. Both positions allow him plenty of hands-on experience for ruling and allow the reader a pretty good idea about what he will do with the baby orcs and his tax policy should he get in power for a third time. (Third time’s a charm.) So what I see is that he is the only character with a sustainable "tax policy" that could allow Westeros to flourish and a claim. (Nope, "ruling sucks, I am better off conquering" is not a sustainable policy for the long-term betterment of a country.) And he is the protagonist, this is his story, he is good guy, he doesn't want to be king, he is possibly (within the in-universe mythology) the chosen one and he has already died once, making a second death a bit anti-climactic. To be fair though, there are people without claims who would make decent regents for a child with a claim, so the self-sacrificial death isn't off the table. (By the way, the historical precedents for child monarchs in medieval English history, which inspired ASOIAF, are mostly pretty darn depressing.) But for some reason, I keep circling back to something I didn't recall when I first start mulling about this subject. I could remember the "Aegon... his is the song of ice and fire" bit. But I had forgotten how that vision of Rhaegar actually begins: "Aegon," he said to a woman nursing a newborn babe in a great wooden bed. "What better name for a king?"

[blindestspot]

I think the problem with this particular theory stems from the fact that it is a litmus test on how you view Jon Snow’s current character arc.

Hyperbolically speaking, either Jon is a cruel cad or he is a faithless idiot. If you step away from the hyperbole, his pragmatism or naivety might actually make him less of a righteous cookie-cutter hero and more like a flawed human being. But it’s the internet and ideas are quickly distorted into their most hyperbolic versions of themselves. If Jon isn’t wholly good, he has got to be evil. If Jon isn’t smart, he eats crayons for breakfast.

Regardless of reception, has the theory itself some merit?

You know I keep ask myself one question over and over again while looking at all the dangling plots from Season Seven:

Is this bad writing or actual foreshadowing?

I mean when characters are doing stupid shit, are they gonna be punished for it like Ned did when he told Cersei all his plans?

Or are they gonna get away with it because the plot needs to move from point A to point B and the character doing a stupid thing is a great short cut? (Like the should-have-been-suicidal wight hunt storyline that was apparently conceived to get the Night King finally past the Wall.)

Or do the writers actually consider that stupid thing actually not stupid but rather brilliant and amazing? (“Mean Girls Winterfell” was their best idea for getting rid off Littlefinger.)

And it’s not just that characters make ambiguous choices or have ambiguous characterization beats. (Cersei – smartest woman in the room for forcing her antagonists to fight among themselves before fighting her or completely myopic for not fighting the Great War?)

It’s also ambiguous presentation where stuff gets lost in the direction (like those redshirts in the wight hunt whose number actually varies from scene to scene, making their deaths and the heroes’ survival feel even more unearned) or on the editing room floor. (When exactly did Sansa decide to move against Littlefinger? In the script it’s in episode 7.07, in the show the editing allows the interpretation that she and Arya decided it five seconds after their reunion.)

So every time I try to look at Season Seven for clues about Season Eight I ask myself if I look at foreshadowing, intentional misdirection or the show letting the audience down.

And I can never tell. And everyone who says they can… well, they are selling you something.

Jon pretending to be in love with Dany for the Greater Good is an interesting theory but if anyone thinks it’s sure and true and something-this-or-that is the proof, they are not operating in good faith because the show isn’t operating in good faith and they should have noticed.

Anyone who puts the show under enough scrutiny to judge characters’ microexpressions, should notice that Jon’s five miraculous survivals on the wight hunt alone (zombie bear, convenient ice breakage, Drogon ex machina, not drowning, Benjen ex machina) is bad faith writing.

It should be impossible to not acknowledge that this show is entirely capable of fucking up a storyline and character to the degree that a theory where it’s all a ruse looks like the better explanation than the intended reality.

In Season Seven the show’s writing had one Stark sister threatening to kill the other in all seriousness over an obviously planted letter written by a imprisoned, pre-pubescent child. The editing allowed for the kinder explanation that Arya was always faking this to mislead Littlefinger. But the original intention was for it to be real. Aside from being a bad plot, this also does something incredibly unkind to Arya’s characterization – and she is a major character and fan favorite.

It pains me to say this but there is no longer a baseline to what is possible and realistic to expect in GOT. Any character can survive being dumber than Ned. Any character can survive putting themselves into a tighter survival spot than Aerion Brightflame when he drank wildfire. Any character can turn stupid. And any character can turn so unexpectedly briliant and smart that they are defeating whole armies single-handedly.

Anything goes. It’s deus ex machina, handwaving and plot holes all the way down.

The problem with a theory like Undercover Lover is the same as any other theory which relies on the argument that the creators wouldn’t execute a core plot this badly. The counter argument is in the pudding.

I mean I really would like to talk about how the show tends to normalize and soften up romantic relationships from their book counterparts. How they alter female and male characterization in order to give characters a more appealing romantic storyline. And whether something like this can be currently observed. But I try to examine the evidence and all I end up with is the same old question:

Is this bad writing or actual foreshadowing? Misdirection or wobbly characterization? Is this shot meaningful or is there any meaningful shot at all if they don’t even have a consistent number of redshirts to sacrifice?

The real implication of this uncertainty, of knowing that “anything goes” goes unfortunately much farther than one theory or ship.

It means that every theory is built on quicksand. I still believe that Cersei will die and the Night King will be defeated but I am sticking to what I’ve written about book canon. I am washing my hands off speculation that is based on show-only stuff until further notice.

There is just one thing I do wanna say as a response to Season Seven.

It’s the conclusion I arrived at in 2013 about what a potential book canon Jon/Sansa endgame has to be in order to be meta-narratively satisfying. Namely, that it needs to be narratively dissatisfying:

“…no one, not the characters, not the readers, would consider the far away possibility of happiness a happy ending. [Jon/Sansa] would be merely the least terrible of all choices. No one’s gonna be happy with that - not even people who would actually like the idea of Jon/Sansa.“

It’s time to consider the possibility that getting the ending that you ship might significantly differ from getting the ship you like.

[blindestspot]

Sansa’s Winds of Winter Storyline

The TL; DR take first: What if Season Six actually is Sansa's TWOW storyline?

Obviously, talking about this spoils the one Sansa chapter that GRRM actually posted.

First of all, is it technically possible? The answer by the way of this very exhaustive timeline and their estimation of travel time by ship from the Vale to Castle Black is... yes, if Sansa's released TWOW chapter is somewhat close to her last AFFC chapter and she leaves fairly soon after that chapter, she could arrive shortly after Jon's resurrection.

Second: Why would she go to Jon? Because for the same reason she does on the show: Jon is her last living relative and she has recently learned that he is in a position that would allow him to help her.

Interestingly enough if you stretched out Sansa's original AFFC storyline on the show to fit the timing of the books (in which the events of AFFC and ADWD happen somewhat concurrently), then Sansa would learn of Jon's promotion in that hypothetical version of the show around the same time she does in the actual show. That the show accelerated Sansa's Vale plot but kept that one bit of information in the same place makes you wonder if it is part of the books' storyline for the same reason it was used on the show.

It is really difficult to seriously consider it because AFFC was published so long ago that ABBA was still making still music back then. It's very difficult to discuss a Chekov's Gun if it has hung so long on wall that's buried under dust and cobwebs. But yes, its purpose could be to give Sansa somewhere to escape to if the Vale plot goes South.

And that's the third point: I do think that the Vale plot is very much set up to be everything but smooth sailing. That TWOW chapter looks so harmless with its dancing and lemon cakes and telling Sweetrobin stories but if you really pay attention it is somewhat foreboding.

People usually think that Sansa's Vale plot will stretch quite some time before joining the main plots and that it might involve Aegon as a marriage prospect. People expect it to be Sansa's training montage to become LF 2.0.

What no one expects to happen is the successful execution of Littlefinger's plan of killing Sweetrobin, making "Alayne" marry Harry the Heir and then revealing her to be the already married Sansa. Not only because it's a plan that has been revealed in advance (those never work out) but because it's stupid. Sansa herself says this in her TWOW chapter. She cannot marry Harry as long as Tyrion is still around and her marriage has not been annulled. And if Sansa says this in her POV, then it's basically not gonna happen. This is less Sansa's insight and more GRRM telling us that this plan is not going to work.

But anyway... let's look at the one Sansa TWOW chapter we have and see how the attempt to make this non-starter of a plan work will go:

Several months have passed since Sansa's last chapter, which means that something important is bound to happen at the tourney that the chapter prepares. It's not a snapshot of an on-going training montage. What we have here is the beginning of a turning point.

Now let's consider who is Sansa's supporting cast here:

Littlefinger. That guy would tell Sansa to jump off a cliff if it got him closer to whatever he is trying to achieve. Not a guy that has Sansa's best interests at heart. He also is somewhat blinded by his own POV. He considers himself very important and he is very much attracted to Sansa which leads him to believe that everyone else is similarly attracted to her and considers him as important as he himself does. (I am getting somewhere with this.)

Sweetrobin: Does not know that Alayne is Sansa. He genuinely likes her but is somewhat powerless.

Lothor Brune: Sansa thinks he is a good guy but then Sansa thought similar things about Joffrey, Cersei, the Tyrells, Dontos, Lysa and Littlefinger. Sansa could be wrong but doesn't have to be. I have no idea, actually. It looks like he is attracted to her which is not necessarily all that good.

Myranda Royce: Newly-widowed and very obviously wanting to make Harry the Heir husband number two. She is not happy that Sansa is supposed to become Harry's wife. She might know who Sansa really is. She also shares the name with a show-only character who really hated Sansa. This might be a coincidence. It might not be.

Bronze Yohn Royce: Probably warned away Harry the Heir from LF's wiles, possibly in the hope of making him his son-in-law.

Ser Shadrich: His great contribution to this chapter is declaring how much he loves and needs money. So Shadrich might be willing to do a lot of shady stuff for money.

Lyn Corbray: Just lost his inheritance because his brother procreated, is generally not a happy person.

And finally, Harry Hardyng, douchebag extraordinaire: Here it gets actually ugly.

I truly believe that early in the chapter Sweetrobin acts as GRRM's voice saying something incredibly important to Sansa: "....[Harry]’s just waiting for me to die so he can take the Eyrie."

Now think about this for a second: Harry the Heir expects Sweetrobin to die. He doesn't think Sweetrobin is going to survive and father legitimate children. That means that Harry doesn't see himself as a green upjumped squire of nothing that he currently is. But rather he sees himself as the future head of one of Westeros' oldest families, lord of a Westerosi kingdom that is untouched by war and owner of a fortress that can only be conquered with dragons. (And he might not know that those still exist.)

Now if Harry was actually the Lord of the Vale, he could marry anyone. No highborn princess would be below his status. He would feel himself equal to someone like Cersei, Myrcella, Arianne, Danaerys or Sansa. And he would not wrong, actually. Except, you know, he is not actually lording over the Vale.

Now who is "Alayne Stone" in comparison to that sort of might and power?

She is the illegitimate daughter of an extremely minor lord who happens to be rich.

Ironically, this is something neither Littlefinger nor Sansa properly understand. Sansa's only long-time experience with bastardry was through Jon Snow.  Jon had an unusual, elevated position in the home of his "father" (which Sansa doesn't really register as exceptional, even though Mya “daughter of a king, servant girl” Stone's fate should have informed her of that). He was also the son of Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North, descendent of one the oldest families in Westeros.

What Sansa doesn't realize is that she is not playing at being the bastard daughter of the Warden of the North. She is playing the bastard daughter of a three-generation-removed from peasantry minor lord.

Harry the Heir reminds her of that in a roundabout way by telling her that his current mistress is the legitimate daughter of a very rich spice merchant.

That is not part of the conversation solely for color or fun. This GRRM telling us what sort of social class Harry thinks is not good enough for him to marry into. And "Alayne Stone", depending how the question of "legitimate child of a very rich merchant" vs. "illegitimate child of minor noble" plays out, is either below his mistress social class-wise or barely above it.

And how does Sansa respond to Harry being so class-conscious? By doing something very unwise.

Littlefinger tells her that she should seduce Harry. He gives her very generic advice on how to do it, because in his own attraction to her, he cannot quite imagine that someone would not want to be seduced by Sansa.

He doesn't listen to Sansa at all when she tells him that Harry insulted her to her face or considers of the implication of that. That doing so is both an insult to her as an attractive person (Harry is not impressed enough by her beauty to even try to even make a neutral impression.) as well as to Littlefinger's power and influence. Harry is not impressed by LF or Alayne, which LF doesn't acknowledge at all in his advice on how to seduce him.

And so LF recommends (amongst other ill-adviced standards) to "pique [Harry's] pride" and "tease" him.

Sansa takes that advice and reduces the seduction bits to basically just sassing Harry. She does what some people call "negging".

Negging is, to quote Urban Dictionary: "a negative remark wrapped in a back-handed compliment. So your neg will confuse and intrigue [your partner] and maybe even shake their confidence a little bit, but only enough for them to fall from the clouds and be interested in talking to you. Its way to get threw their defenses..."

When Sansa tells Harry that she hope he jousts better than he talks, she is very much negging him. In fact, calling it a backhanded compliment is a bit of a stretch on the compliment part. It is basically an insult. The rest of their interactions isn't much more positive. She initially refuses to dance with him, tells him he has to quit his mistress once they marry, she doesn't want to wear his favor, her existence prompted him to be publicly reprimanded, she makes fun of his future child and implies repeatedly that he is a bit stupid.

You know the meme with the "2/10 Would not bang" image macro featuring what has been lovingly called the Butthurt Dweller?

The thing is... from Harry the Heir's POV, that is “Alayne” insulting him. She is not his equal, not in the least. She doesn't get to make fun of him or insult him to his face. Compared to what he considers himself (not an upjumped squire but the future Lord of the Vale) she is nothing.

So he doesn't just not want to marry her, implies that she is not his type (he has to actually check if Sansa is attractive and then arrives at a mere "comely enough"), he might also really object to getting repeatedly insulted by a social inferior.

So when he tells Sansa that: "No one told me you were clever." I started to get really worried. It's not actually his first reaction to her jousting remark. It is something he says and thinks is funny after he had a bit of time to think through it. And it is not necessarily a compliment. Because he doesn't actually call her clever.

In fact, this could be easily the sort of back-handed compliment that Sansa herself failed at: No one told him she was clever because she isn’t. Insulting him to his face and offending him is actually incredibly stupid.

Sansa thinks that this moment, when he laughs at her, is when he starts to like her. I wonder if not the opposite is true. That this is the moment he begins to decides to cut her down to "size", to remind her that she doesn't get to tell him "2/10. Would not bang." To remind her that she doesn’t have that power.

I know this sounds horrible and so far it’s not even speculation on a future storyline. It’s not even an alternative character interpretation.

Harry the Heir has been actually written as an arrogant, class-conscious douchebag. GRRM intentionally made him sound incredibly terrible once he opens his mouth and brags about dumping the mother of his first child for not losing pregnancy weight fast enough, He has all the markings of a minor villain as much as one can have with only chapter to go by.

But the only way I can see him not getting back at Sansa for insulting him is him learning who she really is. But as long as she is just Alayne... I don’t want to actually think about it.

So in conclusion: that tourney is not gonna turn out well. One or two characters whose interests don't align with our POV character’s are one thing. But if everyone besides a little kid is not interested in that POV's well-being and in most cases is actually out to scheme against them... Well, then someone's scheme is bound for success.

The most obvious coalition would be between the Royces and Harry the Heir to avoid the marriage to "Alayne". Throw in Ser Shadrich, the shady, Lyn Corbray, Lothor Brune (whose attraction to Sansa can become a negative if he considers himself equal or better than "Alayne" and acts on that belief) and an inattentive Littlefinger and things could go bad in a matter of days.

I don't want to predict a particular doom and gloom scenario for this storyline. But I think the mix of people in that Tourney storyline is so toxic that there is a good chance that something bad happens. Something bad enough that Sansa might consider leaving the Vale for the Wall as the best course of action.

Which brings me to point #4: If Sansa left the Vale during or shortly after the tourney to go to the Wall, it would be done in a matter of a few chapters. This would leave the bulk of her TWOW storyline in the North, where it would likely resemble the show's plot.

Now, I know most people think that Season Six's Sansa storyline is pure fanfiction but they do so because they know the storyline preceding it was. But that's a leap that's not actually supported by logic. Just because all cats are animals doesn't mean all animals are cats. And just because Season Five's storyline is wholly made up doesn't mean Season Six's storyline is.

And really, while the show takes a lot of shortcuts, it is obvious that they really try to get the characters into their "positions" as efficiently as they can. To completely ignore the original storyline of a character for not just one season but what will be the third season in a row next year is kind of weird and for a major character on GOT actually without precedent.

And then there is the matter of Robb's will. It was never part of the show, but you really noticed it being missing on it. It is somewhat odd that the lords would declare Jon king when the trueborn Stark heir sits directly next to him. But if the will existed on the show, nothing about him being made king would be odd at all. They would be just obeying Robb's will.

Basically the show is firing a Chekov's Gun that doesn't exist in it. So we can assume that in the universe in which the gun actually exists it will be fired as well - and not just to make Jon king but perhaps also to disinherit Sansa while she is sitting directly next to him.

Point #5: I could be wrong and TWOW are getting lots and lots of Vale intrigue. GRRM is a "gardener" after all. But to be fair, going by GRRM's writing speed... we might never find out to begin with.

But if for some reason we are getting TWOW in a timely manner before we can make any other assumptions through the show on future storylines (Extremely unlikely, cold day in hell, etc etc), Sansa copying or not copying Season Six would be interesting to look out for.

Not just because of the obvious reasons (new material to discuss!) but if the earliest Stark reunion is Jon/Sansa at the Wall as she escaping some trouble... we might need to reconsider the outline again. Because if D&D do it, it's one thing. But if GRRM does it, too, well, that would least put a dent in the theory that Sansa's Season Seven storyline is scheming with Littlefinger against Jon.

But then again, we will find about Season Seven’s storylines when it airs, not through TWOW, published in June 2034.

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The Great Maybe – Jon/Sansa in Game of Thrones

I’ve been asked if Jon/Sansa will happen in Season Seven or Eight of Game of Thrones. Because I don’t sell snake oil and promise you it will cure your hair loss, my answer is pretty dull and straightforward. It’s “Maybe.”

This is not necessarily the fault of Jon/Sansa. I would offer a similar answer for a lot of other questions. In my opinion, anyone who expresses absolute certainty that some things will happen or won’t happen on Game of Thrones beyond the most generic and obvious of plot developments (like Cersei dying or Dany landing somewhere in Westeros) is simply not operating in good faith. 

That’s not just because the only things in life that are certain are death and taxes. It is because for all its eliminations of book plots and characters, the show remains far more unpredictable than it would be if it was reliably well written and executed.  

Game of Thrones often enough delivers inconsistent characterisation and actions that are not properly motivated by the situation at hand. It also likes to reduce the IQ of characters out of the blue just so they make the correct stupid choices that are needed to further the plot. GRRM loves doing the latter as well but he usually hides it behind his favourite trick: the obtuse POV character, who doesn’t see the true situation and thus gets blindsided by it. And because we have only have that one POV, so does the reader. The show can’t do that, so when they hand their characters that particular idiot ball, it usually looks terrible.

The problem with inconsistent characterisation, unmotivated actions and dumbing down characters into making stupid choices is that it allows the show to take the plot into unexpected and unpredictable directions. Since we can assume that the show will give at least one storyline that sort of storytelling cheat, the show in whole becomes utterly unpredictable.

The other thing that the books have and the show hasn’t is access to key characters’ POVs. This allows the show greater ambiguity in their characterisations. Show Sansa is unfortunately heavily affected by that. As she is currently written (traumatised and maturing in some direction) it takes very little effort to write her into a wide variations of storylines and yet keep her “in character”. If she becomes a terrible person, then her trauma was just too great. If she stays good, then her trauma was a trial by fire and she emerged with a moral backbone made of steel.

Jon is less ambiguously written but even there the writers threatened that he might surprise us characterisation-wise. He died after all. That was supposed to affect him.

But in that undelivered threat, you see already another problem with the writing of the show: they sometimes want to portray certain things and utterly miss the mark.

If you watched Game of Thrones solely through interviews, you would walk away with the impression that Sansa did some sort of Ph.D. thesis-level of diplomacy in Season Six. What she actually did was a lot less impressive. The only person she convinced to join her side was Jon. Littlefinger was prepared to take the North from the Boltons the second he arranged the marriage to Ramsay. The Wildlings were convinced by Jon;  Lyanna Mormont by Davos and the rest of the North by their victory. So Sansa’s actual diplomatic accomplishment is obviously far from what it’s supposed to be.

But if we cannot even be sure if we are getting in the actual on-screen action what we are supposed to get, merely analysing the show becomes difficult. Predicting future events is pretty near impossible. And because you can neither reliably analyse the show nor predict it, people can present you a multiple of convincing, contradictory scenarios. That doesn’t mean you should be convicted by any of them.

For example, take the idea that the rift threatened in interviews between Jon and Sansa is going to be serious.

If that happens and gets maliciously and seriously in the way of Jon’s destiny then that will mean the end of Sansa’s story. The only remaining question would be if her flaming out is going to be used to prop up Littlefinger as a greater villain or if she took him along with her to her doom.

But how seriously should we take this? After last year’s “Jon’s really dead” debacle, interviews mean less than nothing. And Sansa falling for Littlefinger’s machinations two seconds after saying “only a fool would trust Littlefinger” is tremendously stupid writing.

But as we established, the show does do that sort of stupid writing and it is statistically extremely probable that at least one storyline will suffer from it. So in all its stupidity, it remains an option. The show also failed to portray Sansa as properly jealous as Sophie Turner claims she was supposed to be. That could point towards a failure in translating the idea from script to screen. It could also be a misleading lie.

But what makes me pause and seriously consider the idea though is an unrelated meta-narrative reason. Season Seven is likely to fade out the mundane political storylines and their characters to focus on the supernatural storyline and its characters. Unfortunately, Show Sansa has no foothold at all in the supernatural aspect of the show, so it isn’t unreasonable to expect her character to be written out.

So as stupid as Sansa siding with Littlefinger is, the greater goal of reducing the story to its supernatural protagonists is not.

But it’s not the only potential storyline that is somewhat convincing. In fact, “Jon and Sansa not getting together” is such a big umbrella for a myriad of storylines that there are plenty of other scenarios that should feel convincing. Not only is death always a good option in ASOIAF but so are a lot of other scenarios.

And not all of them require stupid writing. Not all of them have no foreshadowing. It might be easy and tempting to dismiss the crackpot scenarios, but that still leaves enough other ways of Jon/Sansa not happening. I cannot dismiss them. I will not dismiss them because then I would not be operating in good faith. But going through them all, examining them for their individual merit is way beyond the scope of this post. So I am not going do it.

Funnily enough though, the very thing I thought was most likely to happen if Jon/Sansa was to happen is completely impossible in the show right now. A politically motivated marriage between Jon and Sansa is out because currently Sansa brings nothing to the table that Jon needs.

Of course, that can change. Unfortunately, predicting a timing on that change is just not possible. The two might need that political marriage in the series finale. They also might need it in 7x02 when the entire North has learned of Jon’s real parentage. It might never be needed.

What makes a purely cold, rational marriage additionally unlikely to happen on the show is that the show’s take on romantic or pseudo-romantic relationships is usually more romantic than that of their book counterparts. Robb marries Talisa solely out of affection, no honor needed,  Shae ends up as a woman scorned by a beloved rather than a woman getting cheated out of her wages, Cersei in the show loves Jaime as something more than just a mirror and thus accepts his imperfections more readily than her book version… well, I could actually go on for a while with this. Pretty much every time the show has the option of romanticising and/or softening a spousal or romantic sort of relationship between two somewhat sympathetic characters, it takes it.

So I am really uncertain whether this political marriage option would ever be used on the show even if it exists in the books. And even if it did, it’s pretty likely that it would be softened and romanticised pretty much immediately or even romanticised beforehand.

The show just doesn’t have the right track record on that front. But if you soften the idea of a political marriage into something cute and lovey-dovey then you are ultimately doing a version of another storyline:

The one where Jon and Sansa reenact the original outline from the 1993 letter in some way.

In that outline Arya goes to the Wall, reunites with Jon, the two fall in love, angst about being siblings and then gladly learn that they are only cousins. And this is all the detail we know about it. We can assume that Outline Arya has as much to do with Actual Arya as Outline Tyrion with Actual Tyrion. (Judging by the rest of her plot in the outline it’s very little.)  

(Incidentally, thanks to Sansa reuniting and bonding with Jon at the Wall, they already have reenacted an altered version of the outline, no matter what will happen in the future.)

The outline is truly vague. What makes Outline Arya fall for Jon? No explanation is given, only her “torment” at realizing it. Jon is equally unmotivated. But with his character you could at least fall back on “Targaryens love their sisters that way.” But that doesn’t really work for the Starks.

If Show Sansa takes Outline Arya’s role for all of the outline, not just the reunion, then at least she has the “trauma made her do it" excuse to fall back on. The show doesn’t even have to hand her the idiot ball and rely on “stupid writing”. Just blaming it all on her trauma works. After all, Jon is the first male character since Ned got arrested who Sansa can trust.  

Sansa herself is obviously less trustworthy. But her “wounded doe with a spine of steel” act should actually be quite appealing to Jon. This lady goes to parlays, to battle planning sessions, rides across the snowy and cold North to secure allies, jumps off towers to rescue herself and is so close to the Battle of Winterfell that she literally gets there five seconds after the castle is taken. Oh, and she killed someone.

She is as close to a fierce warrior woman as she could get while having no fighting skills. She is certainly no longer the type of lady who sits over her needlework, waiting to be rescued from her tower of villainous captivity.  In fact, from Jon’s point of view Sansa might even come across as a self-rescuing, fierce, contrarian redhead with a killer instinct and an inability to trust his commitment to her cause. Who occasionally likes to question the depth of his knowledge.

This development is show-only by the way. But it plays directly into the audience’s general perception that Jon likes his ladies to be active, to be fighting. If the show wanted Sansa to become more like Ygritte it brought Sansa as close to that as it could without breaking the suspension of disbelief. It is kind of interesting that they would do that.

And the show did more than that. First of all, it brought Jon and Sansa together way ahead of schedule. And since they got together there hasn’t been an episode, involving the two, where they didn’t have a one-on-one scene.  And in these scenes, they promise each other loyalty, protection, ask each other for trust, swear on common goals and compliment each other as “True Starks”. There have been long looks, smiles on otherwise perpetually sad kitten faces; there has been a hug, hand-holding, matching outfits that amount to Ned/Cat cosplay, a long forehead kiss, a gender-flipped wedding ritual (Sansa giving Jon a cloak to make him a Stark) and imagery that positions them side by side as if they were an actual couple while they get bathed in soft light.

Now this might all be bad direction (by no less than four different directors), intentions not making it on screen as they should, actors having chemistry even though they shouldn’t and/or deliberate ship teasing/a red herring that will go nowhere. But there is this one thing that I cannot quite get out of my mind:

The original storyline has three phases: the reunion, incestuously falling in love and the cousin reveal. Obviously, the reunion and cousin reveal itself do not ask much of the audience and wouldn’t be that hard to write.

But the part that is incredibly challenging to sell to the audience is that two people, who think they are siblings, fall in love and the audience is supposed to be okay with that.  

If this was the challenge and the show chose to accept it, then Season Six’s Jon/Sansa looks less like “let’s make Jon King in the North via Sansa’s motivational speeches” and more like “let’s slow-cook the audience into liking Jon and Sansa’s slightly off-key relationship.”  We would not look at bad direction and inappropriate chemistry; we would look at a sales strategy for making incest agreeable, engaging and appealing.

And even if this sales strategy is unintentional – it’s working. Mainstream publications like USA Today, MTV and Entertainment Weekly are discussing the possibility of Jon/Sansa. Actors are asked about it. People who never considered it before are having feelings about it. Even among the book readers, it is no longer discussed as if it is an outside bet.

But to get back to the point: there is something the original letter never spells out which could make a huge difference in the execution and could ease the sale of such a storyline.

See, the timing and some of the emotional aspects of the original outline are very much undefined. The same aspects of a reenactment are equally uncertain. You could begin the sibling incest angst phase early and then draw it for the rest of the show, making the “tormented passion” (to use George R. R. Martin’s words of choice) a continuous dramatic feature, only to resolve it late in the series.

Or you could draw out the reunion phase for just as long, ending it with the cousin reveal and then have the two fall into a romantic relationship with each other pretty much immediately. This would mean that we would have seen the “siblings falling for each other” phase already, hidden in plain sight and unacknowledged by the characters.

And that would be actually the easiest way of selling the sibling incest angle, since you never need to sell it as something that happens contemporarily, only as something that happened in hindsight. And if you actually want to disguise and hide the sibling incest angle, you would just delay the getting together or visibly falling for each other for a bit after the cousin reveal. Then the “they liked each other already when they shouldn’t” bit becomes more of an unavoidable implication rather than a stark-naked reality.

The advantages of doing this are pretty clear. If the show doesn’t openly feature the incest phase as it happens, it wouldn’t need to spend effort and focus on writing a tortured romantic relationship.

And the whole thing becomes a straightforward plot twist that way. It’s the classic “Bruce was dead all along” reveal that appears to be plain in hindsight but is difficult to catch if you don’t expect a plot twist to be part of a particular narrative. Invisible jealousy aside, Jon and Sansa’s emotional relationship is certainly not a narrative that looks like it would ever contain a suprising plot twist.

Fandom loves to look for secret meaning and backstory behind every character, prophecy, political and supernatural occurence. Because sooner or later Euron Greyjoy will turn out to be simultaneously Daario, Howland Reed and the Prince Who Was Promised due to some mystical book-only hint on page Whatever of the World book. How funny would it be for a major plot twist to exist in absolute plain sight, requiring no obscure knowledge, no mystic prophecy, no secret identity, no nefarious conspiracy or scheme, nothing but an alternative character interpretation? Even if that never happens, the mere idea of the show pulling off that particular “plain in hindsight” plot twist is hilarious.

By the way, GRRM loves doing those hindsight reveals in ASOIAF and so does the show by extension. He wouldn’t be able to do this one from an involved POV but here is an interesting point about original outline: he never says that the characters know that their “passion” is mutual. They might actually undergo the torment of inappropriate sibling feelings individually instead of sharing it with each other before the cousin reveal. The outline doesn’t actually clarify that point. So if you told that love story solely from the outside of their POVs, it would be a plot twist. (As it would be on the show if neither character openly communicated their feelings to the audience.)

Keeping those feelings bottled up instead of living them might also mark a pointed difference in self-control between the morally grey and evil Lannister Twins and the more heroic Starks. In ASOIAF the loss of self-control is usually harshly punished by the narrative. And even in GOT’s show-only excesses it doesn’t fare better. Jon’s major loss of self-control in Season Six was beating up Ramsay. But there he reigned himself in and got back in control after seeing Sansa. It’s probably really meaningless but sometimes themes that look unrelated (in this case Jon’s self-control and Sansa) aren’t.

Anyway. So why is this issue, this possibility of this “hidden in plain sight” plot twist so remarkable?

Well, imagine the following, hypothetical scenario: What if the show did the cousin reveal in the first five minutes of 7x01 and had Jon and Sansa looking happy and relieved at the reveal and then dewy-eyed at each other? And then it would be all “wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more”?

Would you believe that Season Six – the very season that just finished – featured already the “falling in love with your sibling” phase? Would you be able to make that leap along with the show?

And if you don’t, how much more of the same thing would it take? How much more Ned/Cat cosplay and hand holding, how many gifts, how many kisses, how much of that continued “we against them” mentality, how many more late night planning sessions, discussions of sleeping arrangements and long and lingering looks and smiles would it take you before you could make that leap more comfortably?

And the show could even believably increase the intensity of the relationship without making it visibly romantic. For all I know, they could be swearing each other loyalty in front of a heart tree with Jon giving Sansa his cloak because she is getting cold and yet it still would not make Jon/Sansa inevitable. Despite the obvious imagery, something so outrageous could both exist and be utterly meaningless.

The show could pull off a lot of stuff in relation to the two that would not look like a romance necessarily and yet all of that would make it easier for the audience to accept it as proto-romantic the second the relationship turned romantic.

And, unlike me and my hypothetical question, the show doesn’t have to ask nicely about making that leap. If it makes that leap, it will be unapologetic about it. It will not take it back, it won’t re-write it. And I truly think that there is actually enough proto-romance already in the show to make that leap without getting anywhere near “stupid writing”.

And don’t let the “proto-” prefix distract you from what it actually means: If the show is doing Jon/Sansa, we are not necessarily looking at a a platonic pre-romantic relationship right now. We might be already in the middle of the actual romantic narrative.

But unfortunately, that’s the “If”. What actually exists, is a proto-romance that vaguely echoes a 23-year old letter and might go absolutely nowhere. And that simply does not rate more than a “maybe.”

But that “maybe” is more than Jon/Sansa ever previously had.  And frankly, that’s actually great.

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jonsa-inthenorth: How do you think it's all going to come into the play with everyone thinking Jon and Dany will get together?

Well, when I originally wrote The Case for Jon/Sansa in 2013, there was an element of "stop laughing, it isn't actually that far-fetched" to it. It‘s pretty obvious in the opening paragraph and the part where I admit that I wouldn‘t bet on it even as I made the case for it.

So the best and most satisfying thing about Season Six is that Jon/Sansa is no longer all that far-fetched. I am actually surprised by that. Although I do remember someone arguing after Season Five that the point of Sansa's questionable storyline was to get her a season early into Jon's vicinity. That way any built-up to a relationship would not have needed to be squeezed into 10 or 13 action-heavy (so not Sansa screen time-friendly) episodes as it would be if they had only been reunited in 6x09 (the Vale joining the North).

As for Jon and Dany: there is one thing I am certain about. If Jon has an "endgame romantic partner", she is in the show and still alive. That eliminates Val, Arianne, Margaery, Alys Karstark, Jeyne Poole and Jeyne Westerling. It is also unlikely to be someone who is a kinslayer, so Cersei and the Sand Snakes are probably not relevant either. Considering the age of Missandei's book counterpart and Melisandre's real age, I would also discount those two.

I am tempted to discount Arya for her age, too, but I've seen GRRM's original outline, so I cannot. If you discount all these people, you are left with the following four characters: Dany, Sansa, Yara (Asha), Brienne and Meera. (Who I had originally forgotten about.) That's it. There is no one else.

I'll be honest. Out of those five (or six, if you include Arya) Dany has the best odds as Jon's endgame partner. No need to mince words there. As long as these two are both breathing, it's most definitely in the cards. Even Dany being busy with Cersei and conquering the South, reducing the time D&D have to establish a relationship, isn't actually that much of a problem. Especially since it's likely that by the time Jon and Dany join up, there will be no more parallel storylines.

But what has absolutely changed since 2013, is that once you take Dany out of the running (and plenty of people have speculated independently of Jon/Sansa why she might not be in the running), the next likely romantic partner is not Yara (Asha), Brienne, Arya, a random person from the street or a book-only character making a late entrance. It's Sansa.

What is additionally really interesting about Season Six’s impact is that when I originally wrote the meta, I speculated that Jon and Sansa need to meet a bunch of pre-conditions before matching up becomes an obvious in-universe idea.

Those were: being single, being allowed to marry, being in the same place at the same time, Rhaegar and Lyanna being Jon’s parents and that being known to Jon and Westeros in general. Season Six made all of this happen except for the last bit.

I think it is inevitable that at some point that the last pre-condition will also be met. There is no point to Rhaegar being Jon’s (legitimate) dad if it remains a secret. If Jon merely needed to be a dragon rider, GRRM could have just written the rules of dragon riding accordingly. If he just needed Valyrian blood, he could have been Ned’s bastard with some random, quickly-invented lady of Valyrian descent. If he needed to fit a prophecy, then GRRM could have just worded that prophecy to fit Ned’s bastard.

To make this huge wave with R+L=J means that its specifics will matter to the story. But the only unique thing that Rhaegar as Jon’s father and R+L=J in general contribute to the plot is giving Jon a legitimate claim to the Iron Throne. Which I take to mean that Jon’s legitimate claim to the IT exists and will matter. And in order to matter, people will need to know about it.

But if this last pre-condition is met before Dany and Jon meet, then things will get really interesting. Not just when it comes to Jon/Sansa, but also when it comes to Jon/Sansa. It might actually level if not reverse the odds between Jon/Dany and Jon/Sansa.

Daenerys Stormborn, the First of her Name etc etc has endured and accomplished a lot of things to win the Iron Throne. Some of it is literally magical. Dany believes in the righteousness of her campaign to a degree where she has no problems using dragons and the Dothraki hordes, both wildly destructive forces, on her future subjects. She is such a true believer in herself.

For her to reach that goal, only to be told that Rhaegar had a secret, legitimate son who has a right to her throne.... Ouch. There are many ways Dany could react to that information but rolling over and being okay with Jon’s claim isn’t going to be her first reaction. And the longer Jon and Dany play on opposite sides, the longer they stay apart and the less likely they are as a pairing, especially if they start inflicting damage on each other’s teams.

Also interesting: the longer Jon is known as a Targaryen, the more his loyalty to the Northern cause will be questioned. I mean, they declared him the King in the North but actually just bend their knees to the dragons again. Just look at those flip-floppers in 6x10: Are they all gonna be as cheerful when they find out that Jon’s Stark-ness is false advertising? Are they’re going to rebel or try to fix that? And how could they make certain that he defends the Northern cause?

And then there is Littlefinger, finally given a golden short cut to the Ugly Chair Iron Throne. How could he go about that since Jon is unlikely to listen to Littlefinger directly? How about finding a proxy with open ears to Littlefinger’s suggestions who in turn has Jon’s rapt attention and trust and make certain that this proxy’s closeness to Jon does not diminish? And suddenly Littlefinger and the Northern lords might find themselves having a common goal or at least a the same common means to different goals: Uniting House Stark and House Targaryen.

Of course, none of these things have to happen or are in any way close to being inevitable. But then again, if you are in the business of wanting safe speculation on future canon why are you reading Jon/Sansa specs?

[him-e]

Sansa is absolutely being set up for a "THE STUDENT SURPASSES THE MASTER" arc next season and is going to be the one to unravel all of LF's lies, manipulations and deceitfulness. LF suffers from not being able to let go of the past. Sansa = Cat and Jon =Ned and even a little bit of Brandon for him. he's thinking that he's unravelled this family before, he can do it again. Neither Cat nor Ned knew the inner workings of his mind. Sansa does.

BLESS YOU, nothing to add here. (lol at Jon being both Ned and Brandon, I’m thinking of this)

(different anon)

this season Arya tricked and killed the man who betrayed her mother. next season Sansa is gonna trick and kill the man who betrayed her father (and who is really responsible for both her and Jon losing their fathers if it’s revealed that LF is the one who told the lie about Rhaegar and Lyanna thus starting Robert’s Rebellion)

woah, I’ve seen this speculation a few times already, that show!Littlefinger started also Robert’s Rebellion by lying about Rhaegar kidnapping and raping Lyanna, and I’m not… sure where it comes from? From the fact that he was present at the Tourney of Harrenhal? I mean it’s possible (in the show, NOT in the books), and it would make a nice parallel with him orchestrating the WOT5K / reinforcing him as probably THE political villain to defeat, but I think so far it’s a bit of a stretch. He was really no one at the time. Specifically, I’m not sure LF lying in that context would have been *so* relevant, since it’s what people were going to assume anyway (that Rhaegar abducted Lyanna against her will). I mean, no matter how you spin it, an already married prince who vanishes with a 16 years old girl who’s already betrothed to another is going to cause a major shitstorm even without LF’s contribution. Anyway, THIS:

this season Arya tricked and killed the man who betrayed her mother. next season Sansa is gonna trick and kill the man who betrayed her father

YES GOOD

[blindestspot]

The spec about Littlefinger comes from asking some obvious questions:

1. Why didn’t Lyanna and Rhaegar leave a note?

2. Why did Brandon assume Rhaegar was responsible for Lyanna’s disappearance?

3. Even in Westeros, the first thought when someone disappears wouldn’t be that they were kidnapped by a mild-mannered crown prince. So who or what gave him that impression if there wasn’t a note?

4. Brandon’s information that Rhaegar was responsible for Lyanna’s disappearance was very accurate. The information that damned him (Rhaegar being in KL with his paranoid dad) was not. The information that infuriated him (Lyanna’s disappearance being an instance of kidnapping instead of being an elopement) might also have been inaccurate. So why did he only knew half of the truth?

5. Who could have been in Lyanna’s general vicinity when she disappeared and hated Brandon so much yet knew him well enough to correctly assume that he would piss off the Mad King if fed (probably via an intermediary) this information?

6. Assuming that Jon needs to learn about his paternity and needs credible back-up on it being true to convince the general population - who could make that happen? His “brother” Bran? His “dad”‘s BFF Howland Reed?  Do these two strike anyone as credible witnesses on something so important to people living South of the Neck? Especially if they have nothing but their words as proof?

7. If Robert’s Rebellion is really Littlefinger’s fault, he does give the Night’s King a run for his money in the “most destructive person on Planetos” competition. That he will have accomplished so much evil having no magic, no fighting ability, no charisma, no high birth to aid him, makes him the boss villain of no-magic land. His only equal is Varys who (in the books) is playing a long game of Targaryen restoration or an even longer game of Blackfyre restoration. Due to the show we know that Book!Varys’ plot is doomed.

So in fact, Littlefinger has no equal. Defeating him would be an absolute accomplishment. Him being not defeated but rather having him survive and thrive in the end might actually really sour a victory over the White Walkers. Yes, the bad magic is gone, the human evil is here to stay. Does any of the above (wits being mightier than swords and magic and harder to defeat; human evil being here to stay) sound like something GRRM would write?

8. If the question of “who told Brandon of Rhaegar/Lyanna and led him to his death and caused everything that happened afterwards” was crime novel, a whodunnit, the answer would be someone we already know, someone who is still relevant. Because in a whodunnit economy of characters is nearly always key.

Think of it as an episode of Cold Case minus the pop music. Lots of people have created a tapestry of often only half-relevant and often misleading information and the whole picture comes only together in the end. The crucial information, the one that causes the detectives to write “Solved” on the box and us to reach for the tissues comes only at the last minute - and often from the murderer. Would it be more fun for GRRM to write this particular backstory as a whodunnit with lots of connections to the present day storyline or as an extended supernatural Weirwood flashback via Bran that he in turn would have to info dump on Jon?

I admit I am not married to this spec. But frankly, I do think that of all the possible answers to these questions “Littlefinger knew of R/L, send Brandon to his probable death and now has figured out who Jon Snow’s dad is and decides to compete with Varys in the Targ Restoration Games” ties such a nice bow around a lot of narrative loose ends that it feels like it’s Occam’s Razor even though it’s not Occam’s Razor to these questions individually.

To be frank though, I (and apparently other people) have written about this before and it’s not a popular theory. No one takes it seriously which is something I find strange. It’s an obvious spec to me but it’s apparenly a very out there theory for other people. But then an out-there spec to me is Varys the merman so perhaps it’s just a matter of perspective.

[blindestspot]

If one believes in dramatic irony, it is that thoughtlessness in regards to each other (and possibly Sansa’s anvilicious “that could never be” when thinking about seeing [Jon] again) that gives them the best chances of being the first (if not only) Starks to reunite.

[blindestspot]

*

A Time for Wolves - The Case for Jon and Sansa

The idea of Jon and Sansa as a romantic pairing might sound absurd but I think it is actually far from unlikely.

The heart of it is quite simple to explain: ASOIAF is not and never will be easy on the readers. So even a positive resolution will eschew looking like a happy ending at every cost. And Jon/Sansa as the endgame will be everything but easy to the readers.

*

Working on the assumption here that most of the readers wish these two characters well - wishing them the best possible happy ending that their world can realistically provide, perhaps even wishing that they'll get what they desire in life - I've come to believe that Jon/Sansa has the potential to provide everyone with everything they want, except the "best" possible happy ending. But given a not even particularly specific set of circumstances it could be very easily be the "least terrible."

And that is why I think Jon/Sansa stands a pretty good chance of happening.

There are some pre-conditions for Jon/Sansa (the aforementioned circumstances) all of them super-obvious, all of them ultimately speculative - like them being alive. It would also help for them to be single, available, in the same place at the same time - and the second greatest conjecture of all (after them being alive) - R+L=J not just being true but also being known around Westeros. 

But once that's the case, Jon/Sansa will look like a great idea to nearly everyone in the story while being a completely unforeseen turn of events to the readers. It's surprising yet obvious - the definition of a good plot twist. 

*

But then surprising but obvious is very much the modus operandi for Jon and Sansa in relation to each other.

Because, just as surprisingly, they are fairly similar characters. Disguised by the fact that they face vastly different challenges, these challenges reveal similar character arcs, similar characteristics and even similar wants and desires. They are in many ways two sides of the same coin. 

They start out in the same place, not just geographically, but psychologically. They both believe in the songs, in the heroes of those songs, and that life is just waiting to make Aemon the Dragonknight (Jon) or his lady love, Queen Naerys, (in the case of Sansa) out of them.

And as they go in opposite directions geographically, they undergo the same disillusioning journey as they are soon forced to face the same harsh reality. And from there on their journeys partially become the mirror images of each other: Sansa goes from Lady Stark to Lady Lannister to bastard (which she models to some degree after Jon) while simultaneously Jon goes from Jon Snow to Jon Stark (according to Robb‘s will, even if Jon doesn‘t know it yet) to Lord Commander. 

But other parts of those journeys aren't even mirrored but completely similar. Sansa has to pretend she wants nothing to do with her previous life while being a prisoner in King's Landing and Jon has to do exactly the same while being with the wildlings. "Fake it ‘till you make it" seems also the motto that accompanies them on their journeys with Jon being tempted to stay with the wildlings and Sansa trying to actively forget that she isn't Alayne Stone.

But as all of this happens, as they are both forced to lose their idealism to deal with choices that puts them between rocks and hard places, as they have to grieve for their family, as they even try to become other people, they both still cling to the concept of justice, of fairness, of doing the right thing, of erring on the side of compassion. They both try and sometimes fail to remain decent people.

Jon's acts of decency are active and often easily supported by rational argument, like letting the wildlings in and saving Gilly's child.

Sansa, being condemned to passivity by her situation, cannot often be active with whatever she is doing (saving Dontos is the rare exception) and thus the generosity of her passive actions seems to want to make up for it. In a seemingly self-negating, saintly way she even prays for her enemies:

  Sansa knew most of the hymns, and followed along on those she did not know as best she could. She sang along with grizzled old serving men and anxious young wives, with serving girls and soldiers, cooks and falconers, knights and knaves, squires and spit boys and nursing mothers. She sang with those inside the castle walls and those without, sang with all the city. She sang for mercy, for the living and the dead alike, for Bran and Rickon and Robb, for her sister Arya and her bastard brother Jon Snow, away off on the Wall. She sang for her mother and her father, for her grandfather Lord Hoster and her uncle Edmure Tully, for her friend Jeyne Poole, for old drunken King Robert, for Septa Mordane and Ser Dontos and Jory Cassel and Maester Luwin, for all the brave knights and soldiers who would die today, and for the children and the wives who would mourn them, and finally, toward the end, she even sang for Tyrion the Imp and for the Hound. 

(Compare that prayer to one of Arya's lists which are all about who she's gonna murder and you get an idea of how outrageous hers is.)

But Sansa's list of people she prays for during the Battle of Blackwater isn't as super-forgiving as it looks. Suspiciously missing are Cersei, Joffrey, most of the Kingsguard, and other assorted, certified douchebags. Because Sansa is sensible enough to not forgive those who have harmed her. Her generous compassion becomes a problem for her because she isn't very often correct in her assessment of people. Just like Jon (Bowen Marsh being a case in point.)

That doesn't mean they are saints by any stretch of imagination. They are both flawed, naive, still, to some degree, selfish, short-sighted and selectively blind. 

Both have repeatedly trusted the wrong people and probably for the same reason - life has killed their idealism but not their predisposition to see the good in people. Or to just passively accepting the bad and getting hurt for it. 

It's not necessarily that they're overly trusting, it's just that they have been both wrong on memorable occasions to believe that certain people wouldn't actively harm them.  (They also have been right on that account though.) But that baseline trust/selective blindness is the reason why Sansa is wanted for regicide, Tyrion‘s wife, and Littlefinger‘s bastard daughter instead of chilling with Willas Tyrell in Highgarden, while Jon is chilling with a few knives in his back.

*

Of course, being similar people doesn't make them likely to happen or anything. It's an interesting factoid that makes it easier to explain why them being with each other might not be worst of ideas, character-wise, but it's not decisive. What is decisive is that is the perfect ironic twist, that it's "be careful what you wish for" for Sansa, for Jon, for the audience.

*

"Everything you want, in the worst possible way." This is an extremely important element of good storytelling, and I find myself surprised I haven't talked about it before. Giving the audience everything they want, while stabbing them in the eyes at the same time, [...is] one of our storytelling staples..." - Jane Espenson

*

Sansa, the eleven-year old dreamer, who wished to be part of a song, wished for a valiant knight to make her his lady love, idealized Aemon the Dragonknight's love affair with Queen Naerys (making it a fairy tale when it very likely wasn't) wished for all that and defined all these idealized men as heroes.

What Jon will be like near the end of the series - if R+L=J is real and merely a quarter of the fandom's predictions regarding Jon's fate come true - is absolutely everything eleven-year old Sansa wanted. And Jon's "song" will make Aemon the Dragonknight's look like child's play. He will literally the hero from the song.

We, the audience, know the dirty, depressing reality behind that song and so will every character in the books, but this "song" removed from that reality as it will be in Westeros a few generations down the line, has all the markings of a fairy tale - Cinderella and King Arthur all rolled up in one.

So Jon could be absolutely everything eleven-year old Sansa once wanted. Valiant knight, hero, and even in a way the prince from a fairy tale.

And then he wouldn't just fit naive Sansa's idea of a hero but also disillusioned Sansa's (the one she thinks leaves the world without heroes.) And there is not and never will be a single other character in ASOIAF who can do the same: 

  Frog-faced Lord Slynt sat at the end of the council table wearing a black velvet doublet and a shiny cloth-of-gold cape, nodding with approval every time the king pronounced a sentence. Sansa stared hard at his ugly face, remembering how he had thrown down her father for Ser Ilyn to behead, wishing she could hurt him, wishing that some hero would throw him down and cut off his head. But a voice inside her whispered, There are no heroes…

----

“I will not hang him,” said Jon. “Bring him here.” “Oh, Seven save us,” he heard Bowen Marsh cry out. The smile that Lord Janos Slynt smiled then had all the sweetness of rancid butter. Until Jon said, “Edd, fetch me a block,” and unsheathed Longclaw.

  (I'm not saying that Sansa cannot adjust her definition of hero again. But right now, Jon is Sansa's only hero.)

But just like getting that pony when you're 80 that you wished for when you were 8 is completely not what you want anymore, getting Jon, despite being all Sansa has ever wished for in a husband, might not going to be a dream come true for Sansa. 

First of all, she has moved beyond fairy tales. Second, even more obviously - what will look like a fairy tale a few generations down the line, is ugly, drenched in blood and takes place on a continent that will be ruined by an endless war and The Others. The reader might be aware that Sansa's childish dreams have come true but Sansa won't probably even remember what being a child was like.

Same goes for Jon's not-so-childish dreams. Of course, on the surface, the only thing that Sansa has that he has ever shown interest in is red hair, but a closer look at his fantasy about Val and lording over Winterfell, is pretty revealing:

I would need to steal her if I wanted her love, but she might give me children. I might someday hold a son of my own blood in my arms. A son was something Jon Snow had never dared dream of, since he decided to live his life on the Wall. I could name him Robb. Val would want to keep her sister’s son, but we could foster him at Winterfell, and Gilly’s boy as well. Sam would never need to tell his lie. We’d find a place for Gilly too, and Sam could come visit her once a year or so. Mance’s son and Craster’s would grow up brothers, as I once did with Robb.

He wanted it, Jon knew then. He wanted it as much as he had ever wanted anything. I have always wanted it, he thought, guiltily. 

It's a pretty picture he paints here but what doesn't really feature is Val, as we and Jon know her. Jon dreams pretty blatantly about recreating the Winterfell of his childhood, with the wildling children taking his place, his son taking Robb's place and he himself becoming Ned. But he doesn't dream about a wildling princess who walks 500 miles uphill through Other-infested territory, a warrior queen, or even a mother of dragons here. The space for the imaginary Mrs. Snow is entirely shaped by Catelyn (the only mother Jon has ever known), and how he wishes Catelyn would have been.

He imagines Val primarily as a mother and caregiver. Romantic love is a side-effect and not one Jon even appears to desire, describing stealing Val to be loved by her in a way that seems like it is too much of an effort. Her heroics, her independence, her qualities as anything but a mother never get a place in Jon's fantasies.

And ironically, as Jon disregards Val's personality in order to make his fantasy work, his fantasy is shared by hardly any female character whose point of view we have seen. (Westerosi girls are action girls.) The dream of quiet domesticity is something that we've seen only one character seriously fantasizing about as a possible and desirable future:

  She pictured the two of them sitting together in a garden with puppies in their laps, or listening to a singer strum upon a lute while they floated down the Mander on a pleasure barge. If I give him sons, he may come to love me. She would name them Eddard and Brandon and Rickon, and raise them all to be as valiant as Ser Loras. And to hate Lannisters, too. In Sansa’s dreams, her children looked just like the brothers she had lost. Sometimes there was even a girl who looked like Arya.

  Sansa's fantasy about Willas Tyrell is truly the missing half of Jon's fantasy. They both want sons, they both think that love is secondary to marriage itself and requires effort. (I guess Ned and Catelyn's relationship might have planted that idea.) And between Jon and Sansa's fantasies they have the whole set of imaginary sons and daughters to replace their dead and missing siblings. There's Robb, Arya, Bran, Rickon, and even a Ned. Interestingly enough only they themselves are missing.

And it's with those children Sansa's dream reveals itself to be Jon's (plus puppies and a boat (but she's thirteen, so what?)) - that it's about Winterfell and their family just like they used to be. Replacing their parents with themselves to recreate their childhood. 

The thing about Jon wanting this, having always wanted it, is that there is only one girl who knows what the Winterfell of his childhood was like and who honestly wants the same thing and is not yearning for adventure, vengeance, a throne, or power above all.

And just like Jon is the only hero left for Sansa, Sansa is the only person who fits that bill. (And if Sansa's interactions with the problem-child known as Sweetrobin are anything to go by, then she has real potential to be a great mother one day and as such would be indeed the sort of mother Jon always wished Catelyn would have been.)

*

As for the reader, the readership will be largely fine with R+L=J. After all Jon is the closest thing the series has to a traditional hero. Regardless of his heritage, fandom expects dragon riding and Others-defeating and getting the Iron Throne or something. And the ones who don't "because GRRM is always subverting expectations and tropes - or should be" are usually so well-versed in those tropes that they know and accept Jon as a secret Targaryen as a real possibility. The former type of reader will easily and happily swallow R+L=J if it is revealed and the latter will complain that it’s lame because they have guessed it all along. 

But what the readers have in common is that they think it inevitable that Jon is going to be special because the narrative has done everything to convince them that he will be. Anything else would be an epic letdown. For that reason alone, him being a Targaryen would probably please a lot of people.

But here's a fun idea - what if Jon is a Targaryen not just in the way that pleases (dragon-riding, special snowflake-yness, "I predicted this since the Stone Age") but also in the way that doesn't? 

Because there are some fun facts about the Targaryens, about the things that are unique to them: It's not just dragon-riding, it's not just sporadically-appearing madness, it's also voluntary sibling incest. (Yes, let's talk about that.)

In at least three cases, that we know of, Targaryen sibling incest has been not just voluntary but also politically absolutely pointless (Aemon the Dragonknight/Queen Naerys, Aegon IV and Daena, Bloodraven/Shiera Seastar/Bittersteel). These people didn't bang each other (Or just indulged in some legendary public yearning. Same difference.) because it kept the blood pure. They banged each other because they wanted to bang each other and no one else would do.

These cases illustrate that Targaryens didn't just commit incest because it was convenient or because they lacked the biological impulse not to do it. (Although they clearly lacked it in general.) They also committed incest because they were actually attracted to their siblings. 

And yet Targaryen sibling incest has served barely any purpose in the story so far. If it existed to explain an obsession with keeping the blood pure or congenital madness, cousin marriage Habsburg-style would have sufficed. (But actual Targaryen cousin marriage gets so little mention that there is only one time it is featured with characters of note. Although calling Rhaegar/Elia cousins is actually somewhat of a stretch.) Backstory-wise it has never been important. So far the only purpose it has served in the narrative is "the Targaryens are weird and that makes Jaime and Cersei less weird." Which is not a lot, considering it's a big, pink elephant that comes up over and over again.

Targaryen sibling incest might have been just the Chekov's Gun for Jaime and Cersei but it's an extremely well-developed gun, which continues to hang prominently on the wall. Perhaps too much for it to be irrelevant now. But if Jaime/Cersei was just a warning shot - the first one instead of the first and the last one - so the audience will feel safe seeing it on the wall... now that would explain why we are still getting stories and references galore to the incestuous Targaryen marriages and relationships five books and three prequel novellas later when Jaime and Cersei aren't even a thing anymore.

If Jon/Sansa happens, GRRM can just rest on his patented troll-face and point out every single time he mentioned the Targaryen's fondness for sibling incest as foreshadowing. And suddenly it would have a point because it narratively legitimizes Jon/Sansa. 

It also paves the way for making Jon/Sansa potentially a lot less strange to Jon and more acceptable to Westeros in general. And it would also further legitimize Jon's claim to be a Targaryen. Jon Snow/Stark would never marry his (ex-)sister. But to Westeros, that Jon Targaryen does, goes a long way of proving that he is who he claims to be.

*

And if Jon is going to get released from the NW (a major requirement for his Targaryen-ness to matter in the first place) and marry -  his marriage will need to work on three levels in order to feel well-rounded to the audience. A personal one (it would be weird if Jon married someone he doesn't know at all), a narrative one (the audience would need to know that character and consider them important enough), and a political one (so there would be a narrative reason for them to marry other than pulling a Game of Thrones-Talisa "let's just do it because we feel like that" situation.)

Westeros has not many female characters who are simultaneously relevant on all three levels right now. Yet, Sansa's relevance on every of these levels is off the charts. As a POV character, she is narratively relevant, as Jon's family she is important on a personal level to Jon and politically, her relevance to Jon is probably even larger than they both could currently comprehend.

She is high up in line to inherit the North, the Riverlands, and Harrenhal and will be for as long either Rickon, Bran, and Edmure's kid have not children of their own. That Sansa has potentially so much power in Westeros makes her hand in marriage literally worth killing for. And not just random people but those with a stronger claim to the North and the Riverlands. Her mere existence puts her family in danger.

Yes, we all like to imagine she's gonna be Westeros' Elizabeth I: Independent, Single Woman, Queen in the North and perhaps even Sansa Stark, the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord (Lady?) of the Seven Kingdoms and  Protector of the Realm …. but I don't think Sansa will be Elizabeth I. If anyone she could parallel Elizabeth of York. (At least the murdered younger brothers fit.)

I mean, I love the idea of her winning the Iron Throne in the end but I have serious doubts that it will happen. And anything less than ruling over all of Westeros would be really dangerous for Sansa and even more dangerous for anyone preceding her in the line of succession.

Just look at Littlefinger attempting to murder an easily-led child just speculating on Sansa's claim, even though she has been disinherited, is wanted for murder and married. Unmarried Sansa would be catnip to every murderous, ambitious jerk in the realm. 

And to Jon as the guy in charge of any place where the North matters, Sansa being married to a Tywin, a Ramsay, a Victarion Greyjoy type of person would be a political problem.

I know that Dany with her three dragons/weapons of mass destruction looks like the better political option for Jon, marriage-wise. But gaining dragons is nice but not vital if Jon manages to not make enemies out of Dany or her dragons. (In which case, marriage would not be in the cards anyway.)

Not losing influence in the North, however, is vital. And every potential husband of Sansa's would have the opportunity and motive to fuck over Jon politically. To kill whatever is left of Jon's family. To make a second Lady Hornwood out of Sansa.

That's why it's so important that Sansa marries someone who isn't a creep and who she can trust that he cares about her for a reason other than her potential inheritance. Anyone else could be deadly to her and her family. (And she's been there, done that already.) But who can and would Sansa trust to be that person? Probably someone who she knows cared about her before she became an heiress to all that potential power. 

So actually, Jon  whether he is king or simply an landless, poor ex-Lord Commander, is her ideal political match.

Of course, if Jon survives and people know he's Rhaegar's son, it would give him a pretty good shot at the Iron Throne. And a more certain shot at gaining a "little" kingdom, so he (with his legitimate claim) would leave whoever actually sits on the Iron Throne alone.

But it's not just the idea of R+L=J that makes people believe he will be king. Or that he "accidentally" gets called "king" repeatedly. 

For example by Mormont's raven:

"King," croaked the raven. The bird flapped across the air to land on Mormont's shoulder. "King," it said again, strutting back and forth.

"He likes that word," Jon said, smiling.

"An easy word to say. An easy word to like."

"King," the bird said again.

"I think he means for you to have a crown, my lord."

"The realm has three kings already, and that's two too many for my liking." Mormont stroked the raven under the beak with his finger, but all the while his eyes never left Jon Snow. 

and also by Robert:

“Kings are a rare sight in the north.” 

  Robert snorted. “More likely they were hiding under the snow. Snow, Ned!” 

No, one major piece of evidence for everyone who believes R+L=J is the Kingsguard hanging around the Tower of Joy after learning of Aerys, Rhaegar and Aegon's death. They should have gone to Viserys. But if Jon is Rhaegar's legitimate son, they would have stayed to protect him - as he would be the legitimate king of Westeros.

So if you are like Dany or any other Targaryen loyalist (or Stannis, actually) and reject the idea of the "right of conquest/might makes right" claim to the throne (because that is a free-for-all) he already is king.

(But then if you reject the right of conquest, Robb's disappeared will and the fact that Bran and Rickon aren't dead, (so basically everything) Sansa is also already Queen in the North.)

But it's not that Sansa is kind of Queen if you squint reality away.  She gets repeatedly foreshadowed as queen and it is a lot less subtle considering that was the point of her engagement with Joffrey. Sansa even had plans to be the sort of queen that people would love. But even after that falls through, people don't entirely stop thinking about her in those terms.

Like Tyrion:

Yet when Sansa praised his valor and said how good it was to see him getting strong again, both Lancel and Ser Kevan beamed. She would have made Joffrey a good queen and a better wife if he’d had the sense to love her. 

And perhaps Littlefinger:

"....What little peace and order the five kings left us will not long survive the three queens, I fear."

Cersei, however, despite fearing a prophesied younger, more beautiful queen never seems to suspect Sansa of being the one in her POVs. Fandom, as it does with everything else, disagrees with Cersei's assessment.

So here's the one million dollar question: If all that foreshadowing and claims pan out and Sansa is gonna be (someone's) queen and Jon's gonna be king for real... isn't the most likely scenario that it's gonna be the same throne? 

Especially, if we are talking about the throne in the North? If Jon is Rhaegar's son the chances of him becoming King of the North, replacing the Starks, are pretty dim. As long as one of Ned's children is alive, Jon will not be widely seen as the better option... unless his children are also Ned Stark's grandchildren, legitimizing him as a "Stark" through marriage. There is more than enough precedent for that. Like Mance's favorite story of Bael the Bard. People seem to think that the story is a way to foreshadow the R+L=J reveal but what if it is foreshadowing for an actual future event?

It is also hardly the only potential foreshadowing for Jon/Sansa. People who believe in Jon/Dany put a lot of faith in Dany seeing a blue rose growing from a wall in the House of the Undying and hearing a howling wolf while being in the Dothraki Sea (her last chapter in ADWD.) 

In Jon's last chapter in ADWD, he gets stabbed. Jon calls out for Ghost in the same way Robb calls out for Grey Wind before he dies. But we never learn if Ghost howls when Jon gets stabbed the way Grey Wind howled when Robb was hit by multiple arrows. It stands to reason though because not only Dany hears a howling wolf in the distance around that time but also Sansa. In her last chapter in AFFC (which shares ADWD's timeline (and is most definitely after Jon became Lord Commander) and therefore could fit the timeframe of Jon's assassination extremely well) she hears something that sounds like a howling "ghost wolf, big as mountains" while coming down the Eyrie.

That far away-carrying sound of a person in need reeks of magic, of fate, and of a high-brow literary reference: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. The interesting thing here is that not only does Sansa's location support the reference to Brontë's romance, the sound she hears is described pretty precisely as Ghost and it's so loud and all-encompassing that she thinks it's the wind. The howling wolf Dany hears, on the other hand, is far off in the distance.

But Jon does more than just getting stabbed in his last ADWD chapter. His stream of consciousness about his siblings in the same chapter earlier also has him associating Sansa with Ygritte:

Of Sansa, brushing out Lady's coat and singing to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow.

Which is spectacular (even if you disregard it as romantic foreshadowing), since the two rarely think about each other at all. Sansa's POV shows her only consciously thinking of Jon when she prays at the Battle of Blackwater and when she is told he was made Lord Commander (again in her last AFFC chapter, which is with some degree of likelihood is around the same time Jon thinks about her):

She had not thought of Jon in ages. He was only her half brother, but still . . . with Robb and Bran and Rickon dead, Jon Snow was the only brother that remained to her. I am a bastard too now, just like him. Oh, it would be so sweet, to see him once again. But of course that could never be. Alayne Stone had no brothers, baseborn or otherwise.

Jon's conscious thoughts of Sansa are nearly equally rare. He says that Winterfell is hers to Stannis and remembers that she told him to always compliment a girl's name. But there is no conscious reflection of her being Tyrion's wife, for example, which seems like the thing that should be at least worth a thought. Or that she is wanted for the murder of the guy who had their father executed, succeeding where Robb and half of Westeros failed. But nothing.

If one believes in dramatic irony, it is that thoughtlessness in regards to each other (and possibly Sansa's anvilicious "that could never be" when thinking about seeing him again) that gives them the best chances of being the first (if not only) Starks to reunite.

Especially since they have never interacted on any of these nearly 6,000 pages. Which in combination with so little thought about each other, reeks of authorial intent rather than GRRM missing the opportunity to do so.

Because that way, any reunion between them will be fresh and new - the first time we see them interact and not merely passing each other by, like it briefly happens in AGOT. (Jon describes Sansa as "radiant" there, which is a weird nearly-Targaryen-like description for a sister.)

But even if Jon is that weird, he is still a step up from Sansa's usual "suitors": a collection of old creepers, murderers and kin-slayers. Maybe one day someone like Willas Tyrell or Harry the Heir or the Great Other will turn up to be a good man to Sansa. But considering how important marriage has been to Sansa's storyline, resolving it with a last minute white-knight-type character addition is so much of a narrative cop-out that it's practically deus ex machina.

(I know some people like to imagine Sansa as the prize a male character gets after he stops being a creeper and becomes a "good guy" (although that's rarely how they put it.) Personally, I find the idea of Sansa becoming a reward, even it is just a partial purpose of her character, creepy.)

Of course, other people find Jon/Sansa just as creepy because of their (pseudo-)incest. Ironically, it's exactly this sort of repulsion which makes me believe in Jon/Sansa as a real possibility. 

See, without the incest, Jon/Sansa is a tired, tired trope about a damsel in distress and a dragon-riding/slaying hero. Two puzzle pieces that fit in the way they are similar and yet complimentary opposites. Boring.

But with the pseudo-incest it becomes the most outrageous and surprising plot twist. No one in the fandom, not even the people who ship it have any money on it happening. I don't have have any money on it and I am writing a 6,000 words essay about it. 

It is ultimately one of the most surprising plot developments in terms of "love/marriage" that can possibly happen. ASOIAF lives from its plot twists. To discount this one solely because we won't see a "positive" portrayal of pseudo-sibling incest is premature.

*

But the ultimate irony for the audience here though is not that Jon gets to be a "real" Targaryen with all that this entails or that of all "smart" political matches he can and should make, Sansa is the best one, but what I mentioned in the beginning - that the average reader wishes these two characters well and gets stabbed in the eyes for that.

We don't want Jon and Sansa to die or suffer in the end. We want them to get what they want, we want them to be happy. But we also expect better from GRRM than a happy ending. Our perception of the world of ASOIAF is that it's a crapsack world where happiness cannot exist without being tainted, that wishes and wants only come true at a high price.

And Jon wanted to be important, he wanted to be Stark, he wanted a loving family, he wanted Winterfell, he wanted legitimacy, he wanted to be a hero, he wanted to be Ned. 

Sansa wanted to be queen, to be important, to be loved for herself, wanted revenge, wanted to survive, to have her family (or what's left of it (which to her knowledge the last time we've seen her is just Jon)) back, wanted to marry a good man, a kind man, a hero, a prince. 

And the readers, the majority of them, who don't actively hate either of them, would like their wishes to come true after all what they went through. 

Jon/Sansa, especially as king and queen will give everyone everything they wish or wished for. Every single thing. And half of that Jon and Sansa won't want anymore (because they are so gonna be over fairy tales, heroism, and thrones by the end of the series) and the other half they won't want because the idea of pairing up won't come to them naturally either.

I know it's super-speculative of me to say that they will marry without being in love with each other. But I don't think that Jon/Sansa makes sense in a scenario in which they end up together because they fell in love first - which is the other way Jon/Sansa could happen.

I don't see that happening because 1 - it's anti-climactic as far as story-telling is concerned, 2 - it's too happy, 3 - nothing good ever happens to people in ASOIAF who fall in love with each other without good reason, 4 - that Jon/Sansa is an ideal political match should matter and if they are majorly into each other it won't matter very much at all.

*

So here we have two characters we wish well and in a way they both get everything they wanted in life at some point in their lives. They get what we wanted them to get. 

And maybe some day that the timeline of the books certainly won't cover, they might be able to arrange themselves with that. After all, they are similar people with similar dreams and their marriage will be the closest simulacrum to the childhood they both have began to idealize and idolize. 

And Jon might just have inherited the Targaryen gene to find a sister attractive in that way and Sansa, having been portrayed as super-distant from Jon and at least sibling-like in everyone's recollection and the audience's perception of their relationship might get over the ex-sibling thing. One day, they might circle all the way to the beginning and become the family they've lost and be happy.

And maybe there will be some twisted poetry and romanticism in Jon/Sansa as Ned and Catelyn 2.0. The two had after all one of the healthiest, happiest, and because of that perhaps even most romantic relationships in ASIOAF (to be fair, the bar is low and the competition practically non-existent.) So even the romantics might get something they wished for and yet didn't. But no one, not the characters, not the readers, would consider the far away possibility of happiness a happy ending. It might be everything they want or wanted in a way, it might make them happy one day, but if it is the rational decision that I presume it would be, it would be merely the least terrible of all choices. No one's gonna be happy with that - not even people who would actually like the idea of Jon/Sansa.

GRRM, in his trolling glory, promised a bittersweet ending. Giving us something that we want but in a way we don't, with happiness as something that might occur - but only after we won't be able to read about it anymore, is most certainly bittersweet.

But then, unlike Jon/Sansa itself, that is my one certain prediction about the series - that no matter who lives and dies, who marries whom or who's gonna be sad, and forever alone in the end - that all we get in the end is the hope for happiness, not happiness itself.

* original illlustrations by James Jean

[loegningloron-deactivated201411]

Sansa 

[richislaura]

[mandeelion]

I am folded, and unfolded, and unfolding – I am colorblind.

[bluebackstabber-deactivated2017]

[blindestspot]

The woman in the scene » Natalie Dormer as Moriarty

♛

[cyborging]

someone on the westeros forum was talking shit about the starks and said “shaggydog sounds like something a 3 year old would name their wolf”