ASoIaF, GoT, HotD, & AKotSK side blog • Jaime/Brienne OTP • Team Decolonize-Land Back Westeros • Season 8 = dumpster fire, and D&D suck, but you wont really find other hate on this blog • main blog @the-august-one
cersei was so stupid lucky she was not able to try this maneuver but i want to see the world in which she somehow successfully got stannis and then renly and THEN robert killed in quick succession in a realm that already hates the lannisters and then fully expected to beat the allegations. no plausible deniability no plan to get out of the situation just vibes. this will work
cersei explaining to the realm that the king and both of his brothers and probably also coincidentally jon arryn all of whom she had highly personal and vicious problems with for years have all dropped dead. BUT it was because they just all got hit by a boar while crossing the street or something and NOT because she decided to play small council bowling and get them all at the same time. don’t worry about it she’s queen regent now
Revisiting this, one of my favorite ASOIAF tumblr posts, to, humbly, offer this addition:
Cersei stumbles from one idiocy to the next ... I always anticipated that she would beggar the realm and destroy herself, but I never expected she would do it quite so fast."
How do you feel about the JB age gap? Some people feel it is problematic and I wondered what you thought
tbh I once wrote like 500 words in response to an ask like this explaining why I don’t have a problem w the age gap and trying to justify it but atp I don’t think it’s even worth that level of dissection. I don’t need to justify it. Jaime and Brienne are both consenting adults and that’s really all there is to it.
as for the people who say it’s ‘problematic’ - honestly I don’t believe that they’re genuinely sat there troubled by the jb age gap. they’re reading asoiaf, where there are literally hundreds of other things they could be worrying about than two adults having consensual sex.
maybe there are a few people out there for whom the age gap is a bit of a personal ick, and like…. ok go with god if that’s you. but most of these people just don’t like the pairing because they ship a competing pairing/they don’t like Jaime and have made that part of their fandom identity/they enjoy maintaining a ‘Brienne deserves better’ shtick without ever meaningfully engaging with Brienne as a character (probably for one of the two former reasons actually), and the age gap discourse is how they try and make out that actually they’re right for hating jb and you should feel guilty and ashamed if you ship it.
and sorry to those people but I don’t feel bad at all. and I also don’t believe they truly give a shit, it’s purely performative and they’re just making up contrived reasons to make other ppl feel bad, bc that’s what fandom does.
ultimately if there’s any party equipped to be discussing the age gap, it’s jb fandom who are actually interested in the role it plays within the relationship. but really all it comes down to is the fact that Brienne has been an adult woman since she met Jaime (ppl will pretend she was 17 in ASOS to make their point and they’re lying - or what like you say you feel strongly about this but you can’t even check the wiki to see if you have ur facts straight?? lol), so w/e.
People tend to forget why age gap relationships are dangerous and problematic. When we talk about two consenting adults, it’s not really about age, it’s about the power imbalance it may create.
Now look at Jaime and Brienne’s relationship and provide me one example where Jaime being older gave him any kind of power over Brienne.
Let’s walk through their entire ASOS journey and take note of the power dynamics between the two.
We start with Brienne having power over Jaime due to him being her prisoner. Jaime goes out of his way to shift the scales by mocking her, and it culminates in their fight.
Aha, Jaime is an older and more experienced fighter, this is where his age makes a differe—
Oh no, he’s malnourished and out of practice, and Brienne is stronger, so he doesn’t win.
They get captured and both become prisoners. Now they’re equal in physical power, but Jaime still has social power due to him being a man, a Lannister and a prisoner of interest. Not because of his age.
Jaime uses his social power to save Brienne from rape. And he does it not by flexing his family’s wealth (he will do that later and lose his hand), he saves her by elevating her own social power by lying about Tarth’s wealth.
This lie will backfire on Brienne later in the story, but this detail is crucial to their dynamic. When Jaime finds himself having power over Brienne, he uses it to lift her up, not diminish or reshape her for his own interest. We will see more than one instance of that.
Jaime loses his hand, and once again Brienne has physical power over him. But instead of kicking his ass like last time, she uses it to care for him.
They arrive to Harrenhal, Jaime confesses why he killed the Mad King, he gains Brienne’s respect, and they make a truce.
One may say that Brienne’s high regard for Jaime is one of the ways he has power over her. And I agree but with two important remarks: 1) it once again has nothing to do with his age, it’s about his deeds; 2) Jaime is not aware of that power, and therefore he doesn’t use it.
Jaime doesn’t know that Brienne frames her search for Sansa not only as keeping the oath to Lady Stark, but also as a quest for Jaime’s honour. He doesn’t want nor expect her to restore his honour. He works on it himself by taking his Kingsguard job seriously for once and honouring his own vow to Catelyn during the siege of Riverrun.
I think Brienne is so sensitive about Jaime’s reputation, because she’s trying to overcorrect her own misjudgment of him. It irks her when people don’t see him like she does, because she’s beating herself up for being so naive to believe the world to be black-and-white. So it has very little to do with Jaime, and everything to do with her own character growth.
But let’s come back to ASOS. Jaime once again uses his power as a prisoner of interest to save Brienne from the bear, and then his power as a Lannister to take her with him to King’s Landing.
Once they reach the capital Jaime gains a new kind of power — institutional — as the Lord Commander of Kingsguard. Now that’s the power he could have easily and very justifiably abused. Brienne is a sworn sword of an enemy, he lost his hand under her watch, and he knows she plans to find Sansa and get her as far as possible from the Lannisters.
And Brienne thinks that’s exactly what he does when he first places her under arrest, and then gives her a Valyrian sword. She thinks that Jaime gives her an ultimatum: go kill Sansa or you’ll stay a prisoner here (or worse).
But we know that Jaime would never do that. He arrested her to save her from Loras Tyrell’s vengeful wrath. He arms her, sponsors her and gives her a legal permit to do what she already wanted to do. When Jaime finds himself having more power than Brienne, he shares it with her. And isn’t it beautiful?
So yes, they have an age gap, but it doesn’t make their relationship problematic. The point of this whole rant is to prove two points:
There have yet to be any canon instances of Jaime’s age giving him power over Brienne.
When the time comes, and Jaime’s age and experience will give him power over Brienne (when they become intimate, for example), he will use it to protect and empower her. Anything else would be majorly out of character.
Moral of the story — stop making stuff up to justify your aversion to something, you can just hate it for no reason and that’s okay.
this final season of a show is bad and disappointing and then fans designating a little actor man as a mascot to project their feelings onto cycle is so cringe to me like u r literally reaching into space and making all of this up that actor man doesnt care they were getting paid for a job and r friends with the ppl u r shitting on here u dont need official actor man to affirm u and u just sound like deranged tiktok celebrity body language analysts
Loras during the Kingsguard meeting thinks that Sansa had a grudge against Margaery presumably for taking her place as Joffrey betrothed. Is he just naive, because Loras doesn’t strike me as a Arys Oakheart level idiot?
Here's the quote for context:
"No," the Knight of Flowers said, unamused. "Sansa Stark was the poisoner. You all forget, my sister was drinking from that chalice as well. Sansa Stark was the only person in the hall who had reason to want Margaery dead, as well as the king. By poisoning the wedding cup, she could hope to kill both of them. And why did she run afterward, unless she was guilty?"
Jaime VIII, ASoS
Loras makes valid points about what it looks like - Sansa lost an opportunity to be queen and then fled after the crime. Over in the Vale, Littlefinger is not exactly rushing around to clear Sansa's name. A big part of why he isn't is because it's a useful part of his ongoing plan to make Sansa appear (and feel) complicit in his various murder plots.
If you don't have the personal information behind all this, then yeah, this might look okay on paper. Loras is also accounting for why Sansa might want to kill Joffrey, after all. Joffrey for revenge, Margaery out of jealousy. It's not so out there. The only Queen of Westeros Loras has ever known, Cersei, might do the same.
But as for why Loras misjudges this matter... I would say that Loras is a highly privileged seventeen-year-old who spends just about all his time with highly privileged men. He knows the sort of power and luxury that's at stake, but he was not around to witness the height of Joffrey's public abuse of Sansa. He's not a part of private conversations between women about domestic violence and its effects (which you know are going on behind closed doors). He wasn't brought in on the assassination plan - he was, in fact, one of the main reasons the assassination plan was carried out as it was.
And he doesn't know Sansa herself.
Loras killed three of his fellow members of the Rainbow Guard when he discovered his boyfriend had been murdered. Loras knows irrational wrath. What he's struggling to imagine is a reaction like this:
How can I let my sister marry Joffrey? she thought, and suddenly her eyes were full of tears. "Margaery, please," she said, "you mustn't." It was hard to get the words out. "You mustn't marry him. He's not like he seems, he's not. He'll hurt you."
Sansa II, ASoS
He doesn't have the empathy to imagine Sansa's own empathy. When his own sister's safety was apparently at stake, it's a tall order to ask him to imagine it, too. There's reasons no Tyrell should have been anywhere near the investigation of Joffrey's murder - even if they hadn't carried it out.
