A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones Spoiler-Filled Discussion

I can't wait to see how the response compares to the one that followed Eddard's death.

 

I think it may be even more shocking to those who haven't read the books than was Ned's execution.

 

Yeah, it was definitely worse. It was the point in the series where you sort of gave up rooting for the good guys to win in the end, and just decided to read the rest to see if the bad guys get their due as well.

After that, they pretty much killed anyone you were following or rooting for, and you had to start over with lesser prospects...

 

^
I dunno, there was still Jon Snow and Daenerys to root for. Dany's arc in Storm of Swords is definitely at her most heroic... and Jon's been your heroic noble fantasy lead guy ever since he donned the black. Given both of them had way more prominence in the books than Robb and their own POV chapters it's a little easier to see them as the novel's heroes, too.

Honestly I pegged Robb Stark to die back in A Game of Thrones because he was the only major Stark without a POV chapter (I'm not counting Rickon here), and even during his heroic stage as the Young Wolf he's a mostly off-stage hero - we hear secondhand about most of his victories, and only when Catelyn is in camp do we get any views of the young King.

The death of Catelyn was the thing I didn't see coming at all and really churned my stomach.

 

I'm not sure that Martin is interested in giving readers people to "root for" in an uncomplicated sense-- he'd rather have even the most sympathetic characters fail and make major mistakes, taking apart the tropes (heroic boy king, noble warrior queen, valiant bastard who rises to power) instead of indulging them. Jon and Dany seemed broadly true to type longer than anyone else, but they both diverge from the script in complicated ways in A Dance with Dragons.

 

Martin seems to love killing Starks off. Ned's father and brother were tortured to death by the mad King. Ned was executed. Benjen appears to be dead. Robb and Cat were killed at the Red Wedding. And Jon? Well, we'll have to see.

I'm hoping the subplot with the Onion Knight and Rickon will lead to the latter ultimately becoming Lord of Winterfell. I think Bran and Jon's destinies lie elsewhere.

 

Jon's not a Stark, he's a Targaryen. He'll be fine.

 

^^^ Not a full one. Remember, he got burned by the lantern he used to kill the White that attacked the Lord Commander. We are regularly reminded of this every time he flexes his sword hand. He may be like Veseries, a partial dragon-born.

 

I'd really like to think Jon is dead for good, and I say that as someone who likes Jon. Martin is in danger of going to the familiar fantasy well of reviving characters with magical BS a little too often; brutally slaying Ned and Robb does not give him an automatic pass to contort the fantasy magic of his world to revive people at a whim.

That the readership has basically taken Jon Snow's revival as a fait accompli, for example, pretty much ruins the end the books left for him.

Hardly. Jon Snow is definitely presented as one of the main heroes of the novel, and with his boy-growing-into-a-hero arc it's a recognizably familiar one. He's sympathetic, noble, heroic and magnamious, his ultimate intended foes are quite literally inhuman monsters. Giving him bad judgement is the kind of flaw that in no way tarnishes his virtue or his heroism and does not complicate us rooting for him at all. He's not Walter White or Achilles, in other words.

 

Martin had to actually go on record and say that Targaryens aren't immune to fire, it was the Dragon eggs that were protecting Daenerys until they found a way to hatch. Once they were born they had to take back their protection magic.

 

Jon's death only makes sense dramatically if he is reborn in some way. He may no longer be Jon as we know him, but he must at the very least live on through Ghost(otherwise why bother with all that Varamyr stuff?) which would be even less interesting than him being dead. So far no one that has died has come back "whole" so Jon could be unique in that (boring)way and/or he will be Azor Ahai. Considering shit needs to start moving towards a climax at some point soon, I'm going with the latter and the loss of him as a POV with the role of informing us about the northerly goings-on being passed to Melisandre.

 

Yep. Besides, if Targaryens were truly immune to fire, then Aegon V wouldn't have burned to death when he tried to hatch his dragon eggs at Summerhall.

 

Jon's arc from A Game of Thrones to A Storm of Swords is a slow evolution from a boy to a man, from the bastard son of the Starks to a man in the Night's Watch and finally culminating in becoming the Lord Commander, the guy at the top.

His entire arc in A Dance With Dragons is about gradually mismanaging the balance between the different factions and agendas and the rest of it that itch against the Night's Watch - trying to take the noble, high minded Everyone Against the Others line while being unable to really stem the disatisfaction many even in his closest circles hold towards their new wildling allies, and finally culminating in a decision to use the Night's Watch to aid the forces of Stannis... all of this ending in his death.

It's an anticlimactic, seneless death, but those can happen and indeed his half-brother (or cousin if you're into the whole R+L=J) died in a very similar manner.

Having Jon not die kind of takes away from that impact. Why bother to even kill him if the next step is so plainly a magical resurrection of some kind, a step in his character evolution (to, yes, no doubt a changed figure, but that doesn't make the death itself any less banal). The death is no longer the wrenching, arresting event it is at Baelor and the Red Wedding and now just a checklist to be scribbled in.

 

^^^ Agreed, and considering how such a magical resurrection changed Catelyn (as opposed to the healing of Beric Dondarrion), I suspect that Jon will also likely undergo a similarly drastic change. I got the impression that they're not fully alive. It will be curious to see how his POV chapters are written to hear what's going through his head.

 

Beric was rescurrected rather quickly after his deaths but lost more and more of himself as time and the revivals ran on.

Cat was dead for days before they found her body. Stoneheart seems to retain some of Cat's memories, but has lost much of who Cat was as a person.

Perhaps Martin's goal in Jon's Ceasar like stabbing was to kill the standard hero of the story and replace him with something darker?

Were other forces at work in Jon's final POV? Mel? Bloodraven? Bran? I don't know.

It could all just be a feint. Was the slash to the neck just a nick or did Jon sustain a more grievous wound than he realized? Would his layers of wool, leather and perhaps chainmail protect his abdomen? Would the knife in the back paralyze him? Is that why he did not feel the fourth knife?

A friend pointed out to me that Martin's characters never die in thier own POVs. (Cat got brought back.) I will know Jon is dead when Mel confirms it. She is the only other POV character we have on the Wall, right?

My personal pet theory (of the day) is that the Others are coming which is why Ghost was flipping out. Jon is dead, and the Wall is getting ready to fall.

 

He's not remotely sentimental about killing central characters off, so my reading is if he's left it open, there's a reason for that.

 

I took Ghost's unease at being able to sense Jon was in danger right before he was attacked. Sensing the Others' arrival makes sense too, but we won't know for certain until the beginning of the next book. IIRC, GRRM will be opening with "two major battles". Most likely Stannis' siege on Winterfell and, as you said, the Others at the Wall. Are there any other things going on elsewhere? Ironborn attacks? Dornish displeasure towards Kings Landing? City-state battles in Slavers Bay?

 

I assumed the two battles Martin mentioned would be the battle in the snow (Stannis vs. Bolton forces) and Merreen (sp?).

Barristan and Co. seemed pretty screwed at the end of Dance. They were besieged and plague ridden.

But, I don't discount things getting nasty on the Wall. The Wildlings, the Watch and the Queen's men are going to probably turn on each other big time, even if the Others don't come.

Will there be a time lapse in which we don't know what is going on at the Wall? Jon was our main POV there. Mel has only had one POV, and Sam is at the Citadel now. I always assumed we would hear of what went down at the Wall secondhand for some reason - reports of the Others from stragglers that survived the carnage or urgent birds to Stannis from Selyse's company. Of course that is all just spec.

 

What I was curious about was how long the Wildings were allowed to remain unmolested by the Others while they were hanging out north of the wall. The Others/Whites army was already on the move when they attacked the Watch at the Fist of the First Men, only slightly behind the Wilding army at best, marching in parallel with them at worst. The Wildings make it to the wall first, obviously, and they hang out there for quite some time - enough for Stannis' forces to arrive, come to an agreement and bring a ton of people through the gates. What are the Others waiting for? The bunching-up of the Wilding civilians moving through the wall would have been a perfect time to surround and attack a huge contingent of humans that would have been quickly turned to swell their own ranks. The time frame doesn't quite add up to me. Are they aware of Mellisandre's presence and, if so, scared of her? Does her presence and, ergo, the presence of the Red God slow their advance and the influence of He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named?

 

The next novel could pick up with Stannis having sent either Reek/ Theon or Asha back to the Wall and they could be the POV character(s) there. But I still think Jon will either live or be resurrected.