fortunate hal

hal, 32. she. amateur archivist.

[fortunate-hal]

“I asked him why he kept her close, if he thought her so grotesque. He said that all his other knights wanted things of him, castles or honors or riches, but all that Brienne wanted was to die for him…”

Brienne x Joan of Arc as depicted by Wilfred J. Jones for Mark Twain’s Saint Joan of Arc, Harper & Brothers (1919)

[gnomesittingunderalargetoadstool]

Henry VI part 1, Act 1 Scene 2

Jaime III, A Storm of Swords

[gnomesittingunderalargetoadstool]

I really dislike when predictions of events (especially ones that happen in the show) are treated as fact and the characters involved are analyzed working backwards from them, as if these events have already happened in their arcs:

Stannis burns Shireen

Arya kills Lady Stoneheart

Bran becomes king

Dark Dany

even Jon's resurrection falls into this camp for me!

and so on

It's not that I particularly am invested in these fights/interpretations not happening (and in fact, probably a lot of these have a good chance of happening!), but I think it's so very pointless to discuss them as settled canon and base character interpretations and understandings in these events since we haven't seen the execution.

It makes no sense to me to discuss these things without seeing the context and how they are written. The plot point tells you next to nothing, it's all about how George composes the scene and characterization of the people involved, and that we don't know! And since we don't know, a lot of people instinctively fall back on the show characterization of events which I find to be incredibly frustrating.

I feel the wholesale adoption of these points is kind of intellectually stagnant, to be honest. There are entire swaths of TWOW that are predicted and treated as fact by fans, and I don't really think that's a good thing for our analysis and understanding of the books (and certainly not emotionally if it ever comes out lol!)

[francy-sketches]

catelyn and cersei kofi request

[vitaminkenjoyer]

jaime and brienne + their payne companions.

jaime being filled with contempt when he recognizes himself in ilyn vs. brienne being filled with sympathy when she recognizes herself in podrick

[gsope]

[ilynpilled]

i like when fiction treats love as a more complicated force and not something that is inherently pure, redemptive, or salvific. portray it as flawed and complex as any other human impulse. give me love as prejudice, love as possessive stasis, love as addiction, love as blindness, etc.

[wodania]

the red widow

[fortunate-hal]

the jaime/brienne age gap is kind of a nothingburger objection to me bc, if their white sword tower encounter is anything to go by, brienne would pass the 'half your age plus seven' rule by the time jaime matured enough to tell brienne he likes her eyes without retreating to jibes or self-deprecation. it's jock to jock communication, alas.

[melrosing]

is Jaime aware of his feelings or any feelings of his towards brienne?

kind of hard to say exactly what kind of awareness he has bc Jaime is a fake dgafer who lies to himself constantly. he still fakes disliking her in the privacy of his own damn mind lmao like I think with his chapters you just have to accept that when Jaime finds something difficult to reckon with e.g. what he did to Bran, how he feels about Brienne, whether Cersei is cheating, he’s going to be actively dismissive of his worries/feelings until they’re impossible to ignore. that’s why we get shit like Jaime basically calling Bran a creepy perv for watching him w Cers, and only later telling Cers herself that he’s ashamed of what he did to the kid. we never saw Jaime work through this, and the last few times Jaime’s mentioned what he did to Bran, it’s been more or less facetiously. you can infer based on his actions and choices that Jaime is ashamed before he states it himself, but he only rarely states his feelings outright, and often states them as the opposite to avoid confronting them.

so yeah I think the fact that Jaime mentally insults Brienne while knocking out roncon’s teeth for hurting her is all v telling, and scenes like the one where he’s horny in the bath, thinks about Brienne, deflects to the thought that he’d ’said too much’ in their shared bath (total non sequitur), and then back to thoughts of sex, is a sign that something in Jaime is deflecting from his feelings about Brienne. so he’s on some level aware, but not ready to confront his feelings yet. his relationship w Cersei is still falling apart, his duties as a KG remain, the riverlands situ persists, etc - it’s not a good time to be outright pondering a new love, but it’s nonetheless playing in the back of his mind

[salmonhere]

the woe

[goldcrescent]

pick a side

[ilynpilled]

[ilynpilled]

Do you think brienne could pull kingslayer move? If renly were alive, became a king and committed something really atrocious, would she kill him? Even if she hadn't met someone like Jaime who could challenge her black/white world view.

yeah. brienne’s entire story right now is her outlook being challenged and forced to evolve. we meet brienne as a young and very idealistic girl, and jaime is a specific catalyst, yes, but he is a product of the same world that she inhabits. brienne gaining more experience will shape and change her. this kind of beat is what the stoneheart arc is building up to too, and it wouldve happened all the same in slightly different circumstances. brienne wouldn’t really be a sheltered character, she is a knight of the summer entering winter. jaime was a very idealistic boy just like she was, there is a reason he had to be pushed until he broke.

[greenbloods]

society if we had this playing out on our screens and the people knew brienne as they knew dunk

[knightsickness]

criston moodboard

[whoishes]

[fortunate-hal]

frankly embarrassing to see adults in their mid-to-late twenties struggle to understand the structural significance and development of adult characters in a contemporary novel franchise for adults because they principally consume short-form media and children’s cartoons.

[fortunate-hal]

it’s obvious the asoiaf we have is a different (and better) story than the proposed outline and that grrm deviated from his original plan very quickly. the “five key players” outline describes a catelyn with no political agency and a marginal sansa. it’s a universe in which crucial women like cersei, brienne, asha, and arianne simply don’t exist. i like arya a lot but i’m not going to pretend the outline in which she gets the coveted “central character” designation because she’s in a love triangle with jon and tyrion is the best of all possible worlds.