I hope you had a wonderful birthday! I was wondering about meta about Ice and Fire, Daenerys versus Twyin and Roose. You discuss how Twyin and Roose are associated with the cold and atrocities while Daenerys is connected with fire and freedom. Do you think there is in significance to the Starks being connected to the cold and ice? Thematically, I mean.
[ Ice & Fire meta ] Thank you so much for the birthday wishes! It was great!
I would personally say that the Starks are connected to winter, or more specifically, a warning against winter. The Others are winter personified. (Similar to, but opposite from, Daenerys being “fire made flesh” or fire personified.) The Others are cold and ice and death.
The Starks are the guardians of humanity, the sentinels. For thousands of years, the Starks have stood against the Others’ coming, ready to light the metaphorical beacons and call humanity to war, “to rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
But “some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for [a fuckton of] years,” the Others were little more than tales to frighten children.
The Starks forgot. All of humanity forgot, but the Starks, with all of their reminders… Winterfell, their ancestral sword Ice, their house words … it’s like the Starks stuck Post-It notes all over their castle saying, “REMINDER: the Others are coming the fuck back. Stand ready.” And still they forgot.
And if the Starks forgot, what hope was there for the rest of us?
Consider Ice, for example. The Starks’ ancestral sword. It’s named Ice. Why? Why is this sword named Ice? Because it’s a reminder of who it is to be used against: demons made of ice, not deserters running for their lives, half mad with terror.
But Ned Stark has forgotten. That’s how we meet him, executing a deserter, in the first chapter of the series. He has forgotten that Ice, “dark and strong,” was forged “to fight against the cold.” Its true purpose lost, the blade breaks.
(Ice was broken long before Tywin touched it; you just didn’t realize it.**)
“But now the world is changing once again. A new hour comes. […] Battle is at hand. The Sword shall be reforged.” –FOTR
Ice will never be made whole again. Like Ned, it’s gone. But it is being reforged, in Brienne’s hands***. It is a metaphorical reforging, to remind the blade that it fights against the cold, as Brienne defends the innocent from those who would do them harm. “Renewed shall be blade that was broken…”
So do you see? Ice, Winterfell, all of it – it is not a connection to the cold. It’s a connection to the war against the cold.
The Starks are all about fire; they’re just coming at it from the other side.
Have you thought about the fires of House Stark? Beneath Winterfell fires burn, deep within the earth:
The castle had been built over natural hot springs, and the scalding waters rushed through its walls and chambers like blood through a man’s body, driving the chill from the stone halls, filling the glass gardens with a moist warmth, keeping the earth from freezing. Open pools smoked day and night in a dozen small courtyards. […] Catelyn’s bath was always hot and steaming, and her walls warm to the touch.
In the winter, the Starks allow everyone to come to the winter town to take shelter from the cold. (The inn in the winter town is called the Smoking Log - definitely not a connection to the cold.)
The Starks’ entire purpose is to keep people warm. (And I mean that quite literally; if people get cold and die, they swell the ranks of the Others. The goal is to keep people alive, warm, breathing, and not fighting for the enemy.)
The Starks have a garden that blooms in the dead of winter. That’s … that’s the whole series right there. Flowers blooming in the snow against all odds. A great fire in the cold, icy dark.****
Because humanity is fire (life, passion, love, hate (“Cersei was all wildfire”), hunger, power).
Humanity is a bonfire, blazing in the darkness of a cold, cruel, uncaring universe.
That’s the point GRRM is making: The universe does not care about us, so we have to care about us. We can’t treat each other like things. We have to care about the wellbeing of our neighbors. We have to be our own light in the darkness, when all other lights go out.
We shine brighter when night is all around us. That is The Point of the series, that is why ASOIAF is so dark – to make the lights brighter.
Humanity is fire. The Others are ice. That is why we’re having the War for the Dawn. Will the sun rise at the end of this? Or will Westeros fall into cold, endless night? That’s why it’s A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s the Others vs Humanity, with a lot of shitty icy human beings working on behalf of the other side. (Tywin and Roose and Randyll are like wights that the Others didn’t even have to ~activate~.)
Look at that description of Winterfell again. Specifically, look at the part where the castle has water running through it “like blood through a man’s body.” If you recall from my previous post, the people GRRM describes as “cold” are bloodless, practically dead. Yet Winterfell is filled with the fires of the earth, with scalding waters like blood through a man’s body.
Even the Starks’ castle is more alive and more interested in the wellbeing of humanity than Tywin is.
The Starks are all about that Fire and Blood life.*****
And that is why I believe that Jon and Dany are getting together in the books. Thematically they are already bound together.
It bears repeating: “the real enemy is the cold.”
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**Tywin simply made the break visible for all to see, because Tywin is a very concrete kind of person who doesn’t deal in the abstract. The problems of Westeros are so much bigger than any single villain, or even a handful of villains. The problems of Westeros are systemic evils, with GRRM’s great villains simply serving as handmaidens to these evils.
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***And idk about you, but I’m super eager to find out who’s going to get red and black Widow’s Wail. Will it be Young Griff? Daenerys? Jon? Tyrion? idk but some shit’s gonna go down with that sword.
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****Something I have been wondering about lately – I think Sansa/Arya/whoever is holding Winterfell in the war for the dawn and giving the dragonriders time to do their thing – Whoever is holding Winterfell, I think they will need to burn it. (Again, I mean.) The ice zombies are going to make it over the first wall, and it’s only a matter of time before they make it over the second. So just before you’re overrun, you gotta light it all up. At least I think. Only GRRM will tell.
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*****In previous centuries/millenia, “rage against the dying of the light” was literally what House Stark and the northmen did in bad winters. When the winter was especially bad, a lot of northmen would decide to die in war instead of starve, and they would make it easier for the people left behind to survive. Known as Winter Wolves, these people would come down from the North, looting and burning and killing and “fighting to the last man because there was nothing for them up North.” All about that fire and blood life indeed. Please see this post for more information about the Winter Wolves.
Hi I was thinking about Jon x Dany and, while I do like them in the show, they had very few scenes where romance was part of the equation. While I 100% think they’ll also get together in the books, I’m a little worried. GRRM isn’t that great with romance. I’m afraid he’ll make Jon x Dany too toxic. Given the romantic history of both characters, I’m having trouble imaging them in a healthy enough relationship. Do you have any thoughts about this? Hope you do : ) Your writing is always awesome!
Thanks for asking me, you’re very kind. As much as I would like to reassure you, I must start by saying that GRRM is never going to write a relationship that everyone is 100% happy with.
“GRRM isn’t that great with romance.” I’m not sure what this means. This isn’t a criticism of you, I know you’re constrained by character limits, but I think we should explore this assertion before proceeding.
What is romance? Wikipedia defines it as “an emotional feeling of love for another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken to express that overall feeling […]. Although […] widely associated with sexual attraction, romantic feelings can exist without expectation of physical consummation”.
I think GRRM is very good at conveying his characters’ emotions, including their feelings of love. For example, when Jon Connington remembers Myles Toyne, it makes my heart ache:
Myles had been possessed of jug ears, a crooked jaw, and the biggest nose that Jon Connington had ever seen. When he smiled at you, though, none of that mattered.
And in the Dunk & Egg stories, Dunk’s innocent and sweet “not too tall for me” captures not only Dunk’s feelings but also the essence of his character.
And this romantic moment is one of my favorites:
And there was one woman, sitting almost at the foot of the third table on the left … the wife of one of the Fossoways, he thought, and heavy with his child. Her delicate beauty was in no way diminished by her belly, nor was her pleasure in the food and frolics. Tyrion watched as her husband fed her morsels off his plate. They drank from the same cup, and would kiss often and unpredictably. Whenever they did, his hand would gently rest upon her stomach, a tender and protective gesture.
And if you want one of the main characters, well, this passage rips my heart in two, knowing what monstrous things Tywin has in store for these two innocent teenagers:
He dreamed of a better place, a snug little cottage by the sunset sea. The walls were lopsided and cracked and the floor had been made of packed earth, but he had always been warm there, even when they let the fire go out. She used to tease me about that, he remembered. I never thought to feed the fire, that had always been a servant’s task. “We have no servants,” she would remind me, and I would say, “You have me, I’m your servant,” [that’s some Princess Bride shit right there with Tyrion Lannister as Westley] and she would say, “A lazy servant. What do they do with lazy servants in Casterly Rock, my lord?” and he would tell her, “They kiss them.” That would always make her giggle. “They do not neither. They beat them, I bet,” she would say, but he would insist, “No, they kiss them, just like this.” He would show her how. “They kiss their fingers first, every one, and they kiss their wrists, yes, and inside their elbows. Then they kiss their funny ears, all our servants have funny ears. Stop laughing! And they kiss their cheeks and they kiss their noses with the little bump in them, there, so, like that, and they kiss their sweet brows and their hair and their lips, their … mmmm … mouths … so …”
They would kiss for hours, and spend whole days doing no more than lolling in bed, listening to the waves, and touching each other. Her body was a wonder to him, and she seemed to find delight in his. Sometimes she would sing to him. I loved a maid as fair as summer, with sunlight in her hair. “I love you, Tyrion,” she would whisper before they went to sleep at night. “I love your lips. I love your voice, and the words you say to me, and how you treat me gentle. I love your face.”
So I don’t think I can agree with you that GRRM isn’t great with romance. Maybe these particular examples didn’t resonate with you, but was there really nothing in the books that tugged at your heart romantically? Not even Renly and Loras’s relationship, from your URL?
But when you say GRRM isn’t great with romance, maybe it’s the romanticized moments you really mean?
For example, in ACOK, during the Battle of the Blackwater, Sandor waits for Sansa in her room, and he holds her at knifepoint until she sings him a song. I think this scene is about trauma more than it’s about romance. Sandor has been dehumanized by the Lannisters for so long, treated as one of their dogs of war, that he’s forgotten what it means to be human and he’s forgotten how to connect with people. So when Sandor tries to form a connection with Sansa, he does so through violence, because that’s the only way he remembers how.
But GRRM doesn’t write that scene romantically in my opinion:
Her throat was dry and tight with fear, and every song she had ever known had fled from her mind. Please don’t kill me, she wanted to scream, please don’t. She could feel him twisting the point, pushing it into her throat, and she almost closed her eyes again, but then she remembered. It was not the song of Florian and Jonquil, but it was a song. Her voice sounded small and thin and tremulous in her ears.
Gentle Mother, font of mercy, save our sons from war, we pray, stay the swords and stay the arrows, let them know a better day.Gentle Mother, strength of women, help our daughters through this fray, soothe the wrath and tame the fury, teach us all a kinder way.
It’s Sansa singing about kindness and gentleness and mercy that reminds Sandor of his humanity.
And of course, later, Sansa romanticizes this event, imagining that Sandor kissed her:
As the boy’s lips touched her own she found herself thinking of another kiss. She could still remember how it felt, when his cruel mouth pressed down on her own. He had come to Sansa in the darkness as green fire filled the sky. He took a song and a kiss, and left me nothing but a bloody cloak.
But that’s how Sansa deals with her trauma, by romanticizing it, by rewriting it as a fairy tale.
Perhaps you would have preferred a stronger condemnation of this event (or similar events) by the text? But I think GRRM knows he has very smart, engaged readers. He doesn’t have to spell it out for us; we know this is a fucked up situation.
Personally it isn’t the romance I consider to be one of GRRM’s problem areas, it’s the physical consummation.
For example, GRRM doesn’t seem to be aware that most of the rapes he wrote didn’t occur during war, so does he even realize that some of the stuff he wrote was rape? I can’t find the interview right now, but I believe GRRM commented on how the show changed Drogo and Dany’s wedding night to a rape scene, and GRRM kind of … distances … himself from that decision … as if GRRM didn’t write Dany being raped repeatedly by Drogo during the early days of her marriage.
Also, the altar sex scene between Jaime and Cersei is still very controversial. (I have a lot of thoughts about Jaime and Cersei’s sex scenes and what they mean for their relationship, but I can’t deal with tumblr’s wank culture right now.)
Also, it’s been over a year and I still haven’t recovered from this:
she walked toward him, her hips shifting forward with each step, as if her pussy were coming to him, the rest of her trailing behind reluctantly.
“as if her pussy were coming to him, the rest of her trailing behind reluctantly”
Someone really should draw this vagina monster because i can’t get it out of my mind.
Anyways.
While I disagree with you about the romance, I will say that GRRM’s sex scenes aren’t always the best. But in GRRM’s defense, some of his sex scenes are quite lovely imo:
Not a happy conversation, maybe, but a human one. Both of us needed someone, and we reached out. Afterwards, I took her back to my cabin, and made love to her as fiercely as I could. Then, the darkness softened, we held each other and talked away the night.
So I would say it’s a mixed bag in terms of the sex scenes.
What will a sex scene between Jon and Dany look like in the books?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Dunno. Will there even be a sex scene between Jon and Dany in the books? I think so, but it’s not a given. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Will Jon x Dany be too toxic in the books?
I don’t find “toxic” to be terribly useful when it comes to evaluating fiction. Again, this isn’t a criticism, so I hope you aren’t offended, but this word for me is too vague, too lacking in complexity, and worst of all, too dichotomizing. Labeling something “toxic” tends to sort ships into easily-defined categories, with the “toxic” ones to be discarded on the midden heap in search of something ~pure~, as if such purity existed outside the blandest coffee shop AU.
The “toxic” label tempts us into a mindset where certain literary relationships are perceived to have no value. “toxic” becomes the end of the conversation for tumblr, when it should be just the beginning. The relationship in Oedipus Rex is certainly “toxic” by any definition of the word, so what is it about this story that has endured for centuries? The fandom police on tumblr wouldn’t be asking that question; they would just ban the story for its lack of moral purity, and we would be all the poorer for it.
(See also: fandom’s discussion of Renly. It’s the end of a conversation, when it should be the beginning.)
So let’s set “toxic” aside.
“Given the romantic history of both characters“ Again, I’m not entirely sure what this means.
Dany was sold to Drogo and raped. Jorah pines for Dany. Daario is … Daario. Hizdahr was a marriage of convenience. But what do these relationships have to do with Jon Snow?
And what does Ygritte have to do with Dany?
I mean, I suppose there is some commonality here. Jon fell in love with Ygritte while he was little more than a captive, and Dany fell in love with Drogo while she basically was Drogo’s captive. So, like … yeah, these weren’t the best situations … but … I don’t think GRRM is trying to write “Guidelines for Relationships and Consent for the College Freshman”.
Like, Jon’s relationship with Ygritte certainly has some consent issues, and these issues are definitely worth talking about, but tumblr uses these issues to shut down the conversation, as if we need to throw this fictional relationship in the garbage and wash our hands of it. As if there’s no value to it. As if GRRM isn’t trying to say something profound about Jon falling in love with a people he was raised to believe were his enemy.
In real life, I hope nobody is in a relationship with consent issues. But in fiction … human beings are flawed, and our relationships are flawed too. Its these flaws that breathe life onto the page.
For me, Jon and Dany’s romantic history is thematically important to ASOIAF as a whole. Each of them have loved and lost, but they haven’t become hardened by it. They remain in the world, and a part of it. Our heroes’ hearts remain open. There is room for many loves in their lives. Contrast this against villainous Tywin, who had room for one love, and one love only, and once it was gone, he denied love. One of the questions I think ASOIAF asks is, how much love do you have to give? And what would you do, for love? Because that isn’t just Jaime’s self-loathing line, it’s a question central to the series.
So, for me, Jon and Dany’s romantic history isn’t an impediment. It’s proof to me that they love, and that they can keep opening themselves to love, even in the worst circumstances. (Because let me tell you, circumstances are about to get much worse.)
“I’m having trouble imaging them in a healthy enough relationship.“
What is a healthy relationship with an Undead Zombie? (Coming into contact with Jon’s rotting flesh can’t be that healthy imo.)
What is a healthy relationship with a messianic girl who made miracles?
What is a healthy relationship, at the end of the world?
I’m sorry, I truly, sincerely hope I am not hurting your feelings, and I am terribly sorry if I have hurt your feelings, but you asked for my thoughts:
For me the question of whether Jon and Dany will have a healthy relationship seems … absurd. Not because “healthy” seems obvious**, but because “healthy” seems irrelevant at the end of the world.
**It’s not obvious, because I don’t even know what “healthy” means in the apocalypse. What is a healthy relationship, at the end of the world? That was not a rhetorical question, because I really, truly don’t know what “healthy” means at the end of the world.
If the world is coming to an end, there are so many things that I would ask that are so much more important to me than “are they healthy?”
Like. Put the show out of your mind. Completely. Pretend you never saw it, because I don’t think Jon and Dany look like that. I don’t think Jon and Dany look like that at all in the books.
I don’t think it’s about Jon and Dany vying for a throne, I don’t even think the Iron Throne is going to exist anymore. I don’t think it’s about stupid wight hunts, I don’t think it’s about fighting over dragonglass, I don’t think it’s about having sex on a boat. I don’t think it’s about fighting the evil Other King, because he doesn’t exist in the books, because in the books, the true enemy is a force of dehumanization. It’s an enemy we’re all capable of becoming, and something we all have to fight.
I don’t think King’s Landing is even going to be there. I think Cersei’s going to be dead. I think the southern half of the continent is largely going to be dead or dying, while the northern half wishes they were. I think GRRM can write a sense of desperation that will have you clawing at your face with one hand while you can’t stop turning the pages with the other.
And I don’t think Jon and Dany get “together” until this desperation grabs us in its lizard-lion jaws and refuses to let us go. I don’t think Jon and Dany really get “together” until they’re beyond the curtain of light, in another world, an Other world, a fairy realm that is grotesquely beautiful and strange and cold. A place of impossible angles that hurt you to think about them, and strange labyrinths where you lose yourself in more ways than one, and terrible, terrible cruelty.
The heroes are alone (possibly with Tyrion) in a place that’s the opposite of the Garden of Eden.
And in this place, I think they’re all struggling to remember their humanity, struggling to remember why they ever came there in the first place, struggling to remember why they should even care. Why should Jon try to save a world that would murder him for helping? Why should Tyrion try to save a world that branded him a monster from birth? Why should a queen try to protect her people, when (I think, speculating wildly from scraps of the show) they reject her as their queen?
”Remember who you are“
When they’ve lost even themselves in this strange place beyond the end of the world … there are so many important questions to ask.
To me, the most important question is, will there be love? Love is our greatest glory, the greatest expression of our humanity, our greatest strength in the face of an alien species that wants to eradicate humanity. Without love, I think Jon and Dany (and Tyrion) are doomed to failure, and the world along with them. Saving the world has to be an act of love. Self-love, and altruistic love, and romantic love, and all sorts.
My next question is, will there be kindness? In Westeros, as in our world, kindness is a rare gem. We each have only so much time, and I hope everyone spreads as much kindness as possible in the time they have, even if that time is only fictional. I hope Jon and Dany will be kind to each other.
Will there be trust? Together, humanity is so much greater than the sum of its parts. I hope Jon and Dany realize this. I hope they find a way to work together. I hope they can rely on each other.
Will they have given it their all? Will they realize their full potential? I hope Jon and Dany get the chance to do everything in their power, and I hope they leave this world without regrets. I hope they rage against the dying of the light.
Will they find comfort in each other, at the end? I don’t think Jon and Dany are making it out of this alive, but I hope they hold each other, and soften the darkness, and talk away the night.
I don’t know what Jon and Dany will be like, but I can hope.
I personally wouldn’t worry about Jon and Dany’s relationship in the books yet, because it hasn’t even been written yet. I have faith in GRRM, and I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. If I’m wrong, there will be plenty of time to critique this relationship after it’s published.
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I’m sorry if this doesn’t answer your question. I’m also really sorry if I made you feel bad, I hope I didn’t, but I’m sorry if I did. (Please tell me that I didn’t, or else I will fret.)
I have a tag for discussions of Jon and Dany’s relationship, if you want to read more of my thoughts: #jdmeta
Hi there! I've been meaning to ask this for awhile now, but I was just wondering what you think Jon's reaction to finding out Daenerys is his aunt will be? I mean, in my mind, it *could* go either way ... he could just not care bc of the whole Targaryens wedding family all the time, but I'm not entirely sure. I've been waiting SO LONG for my ship to sail, and tbh, I really don't care that they're nephew/aunt, but yeah. I just wanted to get your take on it!
In the books, I think that Jon is going to find out about Rhaegar and Lyanna in TWOW, before he meets Daenerys. So I don’t think “Daenerys is my aunt” is the familial relationship he’s immediately going to focus on, although I’m sure he’ll figure that out eventually. I think Jon has to grapple with the fact that Ned isn’t his biological father, along with the fact that his biological father Rhaegar disappeared with his mother Lyanna, who was underage at the time of her disappearance. And then this disappearance ignited a chain of events that caused Jon’s Uncle Brandon’s and his grandfather Rickard’s deaths. Not to mention a war.
Quotin myself:
idk if I would be so quick to dismiss Jon’s feelings. I think the emotional impact is kind of the whole point of the story. GRRM says he’s writing about “the human heart in conflict with itself”. It’s the emotional struggle that we relate to, more so than wielding a magical sword and slaying ice zombies. It’s R+L=J that is going to play a significant part in Jon Refusing the Hero’s Call. Jon has created a fantasy about Ned and his mother, and the pain of having that fantasy ripped away, of finding out he was Rhaegar’s design, a piece of Rhaegar’s prophecy, is gonna be a really big deal to him. Jon has to work through these feelings, and decide to save the world because he chooses to, and not because it’s something on Rhaegar’s survivalist checklist. Rhaegar was doing things because he thought it was required (”it seems i must be a warrior”), because some dusty prophecy said so. Jon’ll do it because it’s right and it’s what he chooses, and his emotional journey is gonna be the whole point of twow/ados.
See also. Also also: #r plus l equals j
So that’s. A lot of stuff for Jon to work through in TWOW.
And I don’t actually think that Dany is arriving in Westeros until near the end of TWOW, and I think that she’s going to be in the King’s Landing / Dragonstone area.
Perhaps Jon will meet her there idk, perhaps not. I personally like the idea of Jon going south trying to find the Tower of Joy and spending 40 days and 40 nights wandering the Dornish desert (I would like to learn more about Dorne), but instead GRRM will probably opt for a metaphorical desert of the heart. Regardless of whether it’s a physical desert or a metaphorical one tho, I think the problem remains the same: the rejection of evil. Instead of Satan appearing to Jesus Jon, it’s indifference and despair that Jon must reject.
To quote Elie Wiesel,
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.
This is what I think ASOIAF is all about - having the courage to speak out and oppose what is wrong in the world. (This is why that theory about Tyrion losing his tongue is so heinous.) We see people speaking out when Tyrion stands up for one little girl, in Jon saving wildlings and letting them through the Wall in spite of the bigotry that will get him killed, in Dany freeing slaves, in Sansa speaking on Dontos’s behalf, and the stuff all the other heroes do.
And we see a lot of evil happen in ASOIAF when people stand by and look the other way and do nothing - like the Kingsguard.
(Remember Rhaella. Remember the men of the kingsguard who looked away. Remember Daenerys, who “dare not look away” when people are being raped or mutilated or murdered.)
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Remember the call: “ARE THERE NO TRUE KNIGHTS AMONG YOU?”
“Only silence answered.”
That’s really what I think Jon is going to be dealing with in TWOW - the temptation to sit it out and do nothing as the War of the Five Kings resumes and the Wall falls, and the ice zombies invade.
The temptation to answer all this with silence.
(Like, if you asked me to describe how I think TWOW’s going to be like … I think it’s going to be like that moment in a movie when you’re holding your breath in anticipation and horror.)
I have a tendency to resort to Wheel of Time quotes when I run out of ASOIAF quotes, but I honestly think of these two series as sisters in the epic fantasy genre so anyways. In WOT there’s this prophecy related to the salvation of the world, “The grave is no bar to my call.”
When ADOS asks, “ARE THERE NO TRUE KNIGHTS AMONG YOU?” Zombie!Jon has to choose to answer the call, despite his death, despite everything that happened to him.
So anyways … The temptation to answer all this with silence … while I think Dany’s story is going to parallel Jon’s throughout TWOW, I think the very earliest they’re going to meet is at the very end of TWOW, and maybe not until ADOS.
So by the time Jon actually meets Dany, I think he knows full well who she is, and who he is.
Sidenote - I do not think that Rhaegar and Lyanna got married in the books because
I believe Jon’s story is about coming to terms with who he is, and that includes being a bastard - just not Ned’s bastard.
I do not think GRRM would undermine and sideline Dany’s claim to the Iron Throne like that, when Dany’s story centers around a choice between her people vs her throne. It would make her final sacrifice at the end that much bigger, if it includes the throne that she must give up.
So when Jon and Dany finally meet … I think it’s all going to be very chaotic and desperate.
Also. Jon will be an undead fire zombie in the books, so let’s.
Let’s not forget that.
Because I think that is going to be Very Important.
I would say that death … or zombification … or whatever word you would like to use for the experience of being murdered and resurrected … is going to be a much bigger issue for Jon and Dany’s relationship than simple incest.
I think throughout GRRM’s body of work – not just ASOIAF, but everything – there’s this theme about … about … the boundaries of love, but more importantly, the breakdown of those boundaries that stop us from loving each other. It’s A Song for Lya. It’s the spider loving a human woman in Tower of Ashes. It’s Vincent in Beauty and the Beast.
It’s GRRM saying that love is boundless.
So with Jon and Dany … I’m hesitant to speak here because GRRM has so much left to write … I think that Jon has to realize, with Dany’s help, that death doesn’t stop you from loving.
Think about what Jon’s been through.
He was murdered. Betrayed by his own men.
Murdered because he wouldn’t leave the wildlings to die on the other side of the Wall. Because he let them in, in his love and his compassion for humanity. Murdered because he loved a wildling girl. Murdered because he loved his sister, and he wanted to go save the girl he thought was Arya.
Like, you can get into all the political reasons behind Jon’s assassination, but in the end? I think it was about love. Bigots like Bowen Marsh lack that kind of love.
And Jon died for it.
I think Bran’s AGOT vision is a metaphor for Jon in TWOW: “Jon sleeping alone in a cold bed, his skin growing pale and hard as the memory of all warmth fled from him.”
Warmth is love.
Remember, “The real enemy is the cold.” The cold is slavery, abuse, murder, cruelty. The cold is all the ways that people hurt each other. The cold is indifference, despair. The cold is the absence of hope. The cold is death, dehumanization.
So in TWOW, I think Jon’s going to have a lot of problems letting people in.
I think Undead Jon rejects love. I don’t think he’ll remember what it is, and that’s what will make him initially reject his savior role. That’s why he’ll initially be indifferent to humanity’s fate. Zombie!Jon just can’t find it in him to care anymore imo.
You can’t step up and save humanity if you don’t love humanity.
I think Dany has to warm Jon up, so to speak.
Because humanity is fire (life) and the Others and their army of the Undead are ice, and the song of ice and fire is the war between humanity and the Others. With Jon zombified and, worse, indifferent … refusing the call … he’s an (unwitting) agent of the Others, and Dany has to save him. I mean, Dany has to save everyone, but she has to save Jon first. She has to make him remember what it means to be human.**
Like, Mel is going to bring Jon back pretty quickly imo, but … what is life worth, “when all the rest is gone?” Being back isn’t enough. Dany’s going to make Jon live again, as she never could for Drogo. (That’s gonna be a nice bookend, @GRRM, if we ever get to read it.)
Like, ASOIAF is about second chances. Samwell failed to release the ravens on time in ACOK, but you can bet he’s gonna release them on time when it really counts. Dany couldn’t make her Sun and Stars live again in his undead state … but you can bet your ass she’s gonna make Jon Snow live again.
I don’t know exactly how that’s going to happen, but I really, really, really don’t think Jon and Dany bang until they’re beyond the curtain of light, in the Other World Faerie Realm Lovecraftian Parallel Universe of Nightmare and Death.
If Westeros has a version of Adam and Eve, two people alone and in love at the birth of the world … well, I imagine Jon and Dany as the inverse, two people alone “at the end of all things”.
Imagine Belle’s magic mirror, Galadriel’s basin of water, Saruman’s palantir … the Sony JumboTron … whatever far-seeing device the Others can use to demoralize Our Heroes … imagine Jon and Dany watching all the dead and dying as Winterfell’s outer curtainwall falls. Imagine them watching when … I don’t know … someone in a critical defensive position betrays them. Imagine Grey Worm dying. Imagine idk horrible things. Disheartening things. Imagine Our Heroes losing heart. (The human heart in conflict with itself!)
(I think the Others are smart and I think they understand psychological warfare. Look how they play with people.)
Jon: “I am glad you are here with me, Dany. Here at the end of all things.”
Not a happy conversation, maybe, but a human one. Both of us needed someone, and we reached out. […I] made love to her as fiercely as I could. Then, the darkness softened, we held each other and [pushed] away the night.
–Dreamsongs
Did it matter to Adam, that Eve was born of his rib? That’s why this issue with incest is so irrelevant to me when it comes to Jon and Dany - I think the circumstances are going to be so weird, so wild, they’ll make that fish-fucking movie look normal.
Jon is a zombie. They’re going to be in a Lovecraftian Universe. It’s the end of the world. Dany and Jon being related is not going to matter.
In this Other World, this alien Lovecraftian dimension, I think Jon and Dany are the only two humans in this whole Other universe (with the possible exception of Tyrion, but Tyrion’s really a wildcard, more morally ambiguous than either Jon or Dany imo and therefore much more difficult to predict).
And so Jon and Dany reach out to each other – they have sex – as a celebration of their humanity, an act of defiance against an alien species that wants to destroy humanity.
And this act revitalizes them, gives them their second wind … and they can go do … whatever it is they need to do … to defeat the Others.
Love, life, salvation … there’s so much bigger stuff at stake here than “She’s my aunt”.
So no, I don’t think it will matter to Jon.
I have more Jon/Dany thoughts here, if you like: #jdmeta
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**When Aemon gives Jon that “Kill the boy” speech, I think the mistake Jon makes is that he thinks he must kill his humanity. He pushes his friends away, he becomes isolated, he heartlessly steals Gilly’s baby. It’s cold and cruel … almost Tywin-esque. And I joke about Tywin being a golden cyborg, but that’s what toxic masculinity is … it’s a denial of humanity. I think Dany will have to help Jon remember what it’s like to be human.
me: the Others are ice and humanity is fire, because fire is life and love and rage (against the dying of the light) and passion and all that jazz, and the cold is death (and what the fuck do we say to death). Dany is the bride of fire and she is one of humanity’s messianic figures with fire-breathing lizards, but Jon is (gonna be) a fire zombie and so technically I think it could be argued that Jon is both ice and fire (dead yet alive) but he is clearly fighting on the side of the living so I would align him with fire but it’s complicated and with a lot of nuance, because what else could we expect from Evil Santa when he names his fire zombie Snow.
Also I would like to point out that GRRM has suggested this war between ice and fire all along, from the prologue of AGOT when he states that “the true enemy is the cold” which, as I have stated in detail elsewhere, relates to a lack of empathy and neighbor turning against neighbor. The AGOT prologue was basically warning us against the War of the Five Kings, even as it set the stage for the series as a whole being about the War for the Dawn.
And when the icy characters like Tywin and Roose do the Others’ work for them and treat people like things, this was intentional on GRRM’s part. Just as Jon will be aligned with humanity (fire) even tho he’s dead, men like Tywin and Roose and Randyll were aligned with ice (the Others, death) even when they were alive, because they enslaved and dehumanized their fellow human beings. (And this is what leads to wacky crack theories like “Roose is a vampire!” because people are picking up on GRRM’s icy death enslavement theme without putting it in a larger context.)
And this is why everyone on every side of the argument can pull a GRRM quote out of their ass because yes the war for the dawn is largely about Jon and Dany, but it’s ALSO so much bigger than Jon and Dany and dear lord if I have to have all that show Discourse contaminating the ASOIAF Discourse for the next decade, I will scream
I just wanted to write down some of my Jon/Dany thoughts before I go to sleep. This isn’t in tracked tags, and I’m sorry I can’t help it about search. I don’t wanna argue with people about this, ok?
(this is about the books, this is about ships I like, (this is about tywin), this is about asoiaf themes, please do not talk to me about that show)
ASOIAF, to me, is a celebration of humanity. It’s about “our great glory, and our great tragedy”. When Maester Aemon says to Jon, “We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love,” that seems to me to be one of the great themes of ASOIAF: love. What better way to celebrate humanity than love? Love is the greatest celebration of the human condition.
So much of ASOIAF is about love. As @poorquentyn pointed out earlier today, even many of “ASOIAF’s top-tier villains [typically care deeply about someone else in their lives]; Tywin loved Joanna, Ramsay feels protective of his mother, Joff wanted Robert’s attention and respect, etc.” The importance of love is in Sansa’s “If I am ever queen, I’ll make them love me,” and it’s in Ned’s approach to ruling by developing a close personal relationship with the people he rules, and it’s in Cat’s heartwrenching “Ned loves my hair” and it’s the driving force behind so many vengeance/justice narratives, and it’s in Tyrion, my poor baby, longing for love in spite of a society that tells him that no one could ever love him (because ableism).
I’m not ultra invested in either Jon or Dany individually, but I’m super invested in ASOIAF on a thematic level. So it’s important to me that Jon/Dany fall in love. In my opinion, Jon and Dany falling in love is the biggest FUCK YOU they could ever give to the Others, the best way they could ever say not today, motherfuckers to the eldritch slavers trying to destroy humanity. I can already hear some people laughing at me, but it’s like ... Jon and Dany being in love, taking their love to the Other realm beyond the curtain of light ... it’s the best way for Jon and Dany to declare defiantly, “We’re human, we’re still alive, we’re “still breathing” as show!Jon says, and whatever you do, whether we live or die, we chose this love, we chose each other, and you can’t take this away from us.”
GRRM weaves a lot of poetry into his writing, and when he wrote for BATB, he referenced Dylan Thomas:
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
Like, ok, some big shit’s going to go down beyond the curtain of light, some big OMFG shit that I have no idea about, shit that nobody but GRRM knows -- can the Others tap into Jon’s mind post death? what are the rules of the Other realm? can a person ever come back once they go there? -- but Jon/Dany being in love is like humanity’s ~secret weapon~ in the War for the Dawn, a love that can outlast death itself. So truly -- TRULY -- I think Jon and Dany need to be in love to fight the Others. The True Knights going behind enemy lines in the War for the Dawn need to be the ... the most vital**, the most ... the most human we can possibly send, people with a heart full to bursting with love, and a love of humanity so great they would willingly sacrifice themselves for it.
**the irony of describing post-resurrection Jon “Technically A Zombie” Snow as “vital” is not lost on me, but GRRM likes irony. Black brothers as true knights, white-cloaked kingsguard as corrupt, etc, you get the picture.
In AGOT, Benjen says,
"You are a boy of fourteen," Benjen said. "Not a man, not yet. Until you have known a woman, you cannot understand what you would be giving up."
"I don't care about that!" Jon said hotly.
"You might, if you knew what it meant," Benjen said. "If you knew what the oath would cost you, you might be less eager to pay the price, son."
Jon felt anger rise inside him. "I'm not your son!"
Benjen Stark stood up. "More's the pity." He put a hand on Jon's shoulder.
"Come back to me after you've fathered a few bastards of your own, and we'll see how you feel."
and this idea of Benjen’s that life is worth living is kind of summed up to Jon when Ygritte says, “And if we die, we die. All men must die, Jon Snow. But first we'll live."
Because Jon was so in love with Ygritte. He loved her, and that’s why GRRM made it hurt when she died. (And I like my ASOIAF to really hurt, so I like to imagine Ygritte was pregnant with Jon’s child when she died.)
And the thing about “But first we’ll live” is that you have to keep living. That’s why it’s sooooo so important to me about Jon/Dany on a thematic level. More on that in a sec.
*~*~*
And I’m sorry but I can’t write an ASOIAF post without bringing in Tywin, because I love him. I love him, because he’s the perfect obverse of all of GRRM’s themes that I love. Tywin’s like a black hole among the stars, like negative space in the narrative. When studied, he increases my understanding of all the rest. (GRRM works a lot with negative space in the narrative imo.)
With Tywin, it’s like he died. It’s like he lived and loved Joanna and then he died with her long ago,. But he keeps walking, like one of the Others’ reanimated wights, raised up to continue their agenda to dehumanize every person in Westeros. (I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Tywin unwittingly works on behalf of the Enemy.) (Also, please nobody try to twist my words on me, Tywin was obviously a terrible person long before Joanna died, but he was exceptionally monstrous, even to his own children, after she died.)
People ask me relatively regularly, like, who do you think Tywin would marry in an AU after Joanna dies, and I’m always like 1. I don’t like AUs and 2. he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t remarry, and he definitely wouldn’t fall in love again, because that’s the Point of his character. He’s the negative space. Tywin’s the anti-celebration of humanity, he’s humanity’s sad, lonely, rainy funeral that no one attends. He doesn’t love, he doesn’t smile, he doesn’t eat much (read the descriptions in the books), he takes no joy in meat nor mead (oh gosh could I talk about GRRM’s Tuf Voyaging here), he doesn’t live in a book series that celebrates life.
Tywin doesn’t even celebrate the life that he loved, Joanna’s life. There’s this moment in ASOS where Tyrion thinks about how his father p much never talks about his mother. Think about that.
There was something I was reading recently, I can’t remember where, but it was about the parents of a child who had died, and it said something along the lines of, the worst thing you could do to them was to avoid talking about their child, to pretend as if the child had never existed. Because talking about their child, remembering their child, was how they kept him alive, how they kept loving him.
But Tywin never wants to talk about his wife who was the great love of his life. Tywin never even says Joanna’s name in the books, never says her name in a book series that places so much importance on names and naming.*** He doesn’t want to breathe life into her memory, doesn’t want to love. If not for Tyrion’s presence as a constant reminder of everything he lost, I think Tywin would be content to pretend that Joanna hadn’t existed at all. (Ouch.)
*** @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly, I really liked your theory (do we still call it a theory?) about how in the books Jon will be the first person to call Dany “Dany” out loud since Viserys. Just, ugh, the naming of people, and the intimacy, the connection created by saying a name, or the distance created by not saying one, ugh
*~*~*
OK anyways, that was more than a sec, sorry, I got carried away, but BACK TO JON SNOW. With Jon, to me, the narrative demands that he keep living, keep loving, keep finding love. A living love in Daenerys.
There’s this short story GRRM wrote a long time ago in Dreamsongs about a guy who has his heart broken, but he gets back up and loves again, only to have his heart broken again, and so on, until he gives up and concludes that love is a lie, and he decides never to look for love again, and he closes his heart, and that’s it, that’s the end. It’s a horror story.
And with Jon -- Jon isn’t that horror story, he’s not that guy who has One Love, and when that One Love dies, that’s it, that’s the end. Being human is to keep loving, and to keep looking for love even after your heart is broken. (And let me tell you, Jon is looking in ADWD; “lonely and lovely and lethal”. He’s searching, but not yet finding.)
And I know that people call this cliche, but to me, GRRM plays with archetypes, so here he’s playing with the hero and heroine falling in love, and putting his own spin on it. (Fire wight romance!!! Think back to 1993 and ask yourself how many fire wight romances there were when ASOIAF was conceived!!! Cliche. heh.)
And I’m just ... my mouth is watering in anticipation of GRRM’s Jon/Dany romance in the books, because it’s like!! Technically a dead guy!! Technically a zombie!!! A dead guy resurrected by fire!! To fall in love with the bride of fire!!! A technically dead guy is gonna be representing GRRM’s greatest celebration of life!! This is almost as good as the psychedelic BATB spider falling in love in Dreamsongs!!! God!!! GOD!!!! PLEASE GEORGE, FINISH TWOW, I’M SO EXCITED FOR THIS
Male sacrifice and female sacrifice are often not [treated] the same in popular culture. To boil it down - men sacrifice, while women are sacrificed.
[...] The male characters who get to go out guns blazing choose that fate; it’s the end result of their characterization to do so. Think of Syrio Forel. He chooses to sacrifice himself [but the women who die in childbirth in ASOIAF don’t get a choice.] There was no grand choice to sacrifice themselves in favor of saving the world, there was no option to refuse the sacrifice, there wasn’t any choice at all.
And that’s key. That’s what lies at the heart of all of GRRM’s stories: choice. As I said here, “Choice […]. That’s the difference between good and evil, you said. Now it looks like I’m the one got to make a choice” (Fevre Dream). In GRRM’s own words, “That’s something that’s very much in my books: I believe in great characters. We’re all capable of doing great things, and of doing bad things. We have the angels and the demons inside of us, and our lives are a succession of choices.”
[original post]
I think this is why I’m not fond of the theory that Dany is Jon’s Nissa Nissa, or the theory that Dany dies in childbirth in the end. Sure, these theories are possibilities that could happen in future books and I can see the internal logic to them -- a repetition of the Azor Ahai myth for the first, and the idea that Dany should have died in childbirth in AGOT if not for the magical intervention for the second -- but I don’t like them, because I don’t want to see Dany be sacrificed. Sacrifice herself, yes, but be sacrificed, no.
I want to see Dany make choices. I 100% think that Dany is going to die saving the world, but I want it to be her choice to save the world, her choice to forsake saving the Targaryen Dynasty in favor of saving humanity. I want it to be an active choice, not an outcome that’s thrust upon her by circumstances or a choice that someone else makes for her.
When GRRM says that choice is “the difference between good and evil” ... it’s a concept ties so strongly into the Eldritch slavery practiced by the others. The humans enslaved by the Others have had all their choices taken away. Choice defines humanity, and the Others have robbed so many of the freedom of choice, the freedom to be human. It’s something evil, not having that freedom to choose, to treat people as objects.
Dany choosing to save the world would be so much more meaningful than just becoming a sacrifice.
So I just hope that GRRM considers Dany’s choices to be worth writing about in the end.
GRRM might go the childbirth route. He’s very fond of killing women in childbirth, and Dany’s been living on borrowed time since AGOT, so he might do it, I’ve talked before about how he might do it (1, 2, 3) and the show is almost certainly gonna do it but I don’t think I’d like it if GRRM went that route. I think GRRM is better than this, so I have a lot of hope that he won’t do it, but I’m not sure.
His brothers and sisters had not been permitted to bring their wolves to the banquet, but there were more curs than Jon could count at this end of the hall, and no one had said a word about his pup. He told himself he was fortunate in that too. His eyes stung. Jon rubbed at them savagely, cursing the smoke.
Dany could see the anger in her brother’s lilac eyes. He did not like sitting beneath her, and he fumed when the slaves offered each dish first to the khal and his bride, and served him from the portions they refused. He could do nothing but nurse his resentment, so nurse it he did, his mood growing blacker by the hour at each insult to his person. Dany had never felt so alone as she did seated in the midst of that vast horde. Her brother had told her to smile, and so she smiled until her face ached and the tears came unbidden to her eyes.
I’ve never listened to the audiobooks before at any length, and different things stand out to me while listening as opposed to reading. I loved the parallels between these two feasts, the one at Winterfell from Jon’s POV and the wedding feast from Dany’s POV. Jon is seated too low, far below his family, while Dany is seated too high, above her brother. Both of them feel so isolated, so alone, and both these kids are crying and trying not to :( Both of them have been marginalized and mistreated by society, Jon struggling against classism and Dany struggling against misogyny. I can’t wait for GRRM to bring these two together in the books
After GRRM said Jon is gonna be a fire wight in the books, I’m even more excited about Jon/Dany in the books because that feels to me exactly like the sort of doomed romance GRRM loves to write, like “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr” or “This Tower of Ashes,” all doomed.
Think of it tho!!! A fire zombie and the bride of fire!!! I think there will be elements of classic Beauty and the Beast to it because, in Cocteau’s BATB, which GRRM loves, “The Beast’s own task is [...] the reclaiming of the human within himself.” After Jon spends time in Ghost (not to mention the zombie part), I think he’ll be “less human” / more Beast for a while, and there will be such a great internal messianic struggle of why Jon wants to save humanity after he was betrayed by people he trusted.
And what better way for Jon to find his humanity again than by falling in love, “our great glory,” the greatest celebration of our humanity, a defiant declaration of resistance to the Others when Jon and Dany visit the alien realm of faerie beyond the curtain of light at the end of the world
and just!!! a fire wight who’s already semi-dead but still has one last mission to accomplish, and a living girl who would give her life to save the world if that’s what it took, WHAT A GOOD DOOMED ROMANCE, I’M SO EXCITED, BRING ME THAT HORIZON
