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Hey, I was thinking about "Off to Gulltown" Do you think the song is of particular importance besides depicting UnKiss?

Yeah. Repetition draws attention to something, but to what purpose? There’s the stealing a kiss at the point of a blade line. That already happened once when Dunk passionately kissed Rohane Webber, cutting off the end of her famous braid and keeping it to remember her by. Before that, the song had first appeared in Dunk’s story when Ser Arlan of Pennytree changed the lyrics to “off to Ashford” to suit where they were going. So we know it’s not just there to be some cute little inconsequential song that has no bearing on the story or characters. It points to a bold and romantic payoff in the actual events.

The set up for it having something to do with Sansan was laid down at the Blackwater, which then gets transformed by Sansa into the unkiss; however, one might not say “hmmm” about that until later events start to unfold. In Arya II, ASOS, Arya hears Tom Sevenstrings singing “Off to Gulltown” before she encounters the BwB. This chapter also ends on the reveal that the prisoner the Madhuntsman has brought to the Peach is none other than Sandor Clegane. Fresh from his desertion and mucking up things with Sansa, he was captured pretty handily while he was shitfaced drunk. Well, he isn’t named exactly, but if you were paying attention to the hints in the chapter, it’s pretty clear who the prisoner Arya recognizes is before it cuts to black. Still, we’re not quite there in connecting the dots.

It starts to get even more interesting when Sansa is given the alias Alayne Stone, who was bastard born to a merchant’s daughter and raised in a motherhouse in Gulltown. The point that Alayne hails from Gulltown will be repeated a second time in the TWOW sample when Sansa encounters Uther Shett of Gulltown. She reminds herself to be careful around him lest she trips up and gives some cause for doubt over her cover story. This is after Uther compliments her as quote: “the most beautiful maid in all the Seven Kingdoms.” It’s undoubtedly spelled out for us that Sansa is the fair maid from Gulltown. Sansa, who also once had a kiss stolen at the point of a blade as she recalls it. The details are even more on the nose than in the Dunk and Egg novellas. Since this is being brought up again in TWOW, I expect we will get the big reveal of where the breadcrumbs were leading us all along. If the first two lines between the heigh-hos have turned out to have demonstrable truth to them, then I expect no different from “I’ll make her my love and we’ll rest in the shade.”