Various ASOIAF thoughts

[chocolatepot]

- I'm starting to feel like Dany's not going to end up Queen of Westeros, just because she wants it so much. Narratively speaking, it'd be a bit out of character for GRRM to give someone what they want, and also to validate violent conquest (because that's what it would have to be, of course).

- I go back and forth on Jon. If you don't know/buy into the theories about his parentage, it would come as a great big surprise, but if you know about them then it's quite predictable, and GRRM likes being unpredictable. OTOH, its very predictability makes it unpredictable because of that.

- Jon and Dany both being sympathetic and both learning to lead means that GRRM might not want to kill either in favor of the other, and he'd basically have to if only one got the throne. Although I could see Jon learning who he is and doing a Captain Carrot, deciding to hide it because that would cause more fighting and because he could do more as a person and not a king. Because he does like his Wars of the Roses parallels, a Dany/Jon marriage echoing Henry VII/Elizabeth of York, although more equal, probably. That was brokered by mothers behind the scenes of the fighting, which I can also see appealing to GRRM (for its non-war-ness and for it showing women using the power they have) (although of course Jon and Dany's mothers are dead and that wouldn't actually go down that way. If he decided to do it).

- I know the thing people like to say is that Jon is good at leading but not conquering whereas Dany is the opposite, but I'm not seeing that Dany is bad at ruling in ADWD so far. What I'm seeing with her in ADWD is that she's learning that ruling a conquered people and imposing a new culture on them is really hard (to the point that it may not be worth it) - the rich families aren't co-operative, rebel groups form to kill her soldiers at night, and everyone wants slavery/gladiatorial fights to come back. So far, my take on it is that she's learning she can't just go to Westeros, beat the "usurpers" into submission, and happily take over with the peasantry singing and dancing in her honor.

- My baby Sansa parallels both Elizabeth I and Elizabeth of York. I was thinking about the former the other day (specifically because of the imprisonment, having to be somewhat politic to stay alive), but the latter seems even more probable in some ways - EoY was reputed to be sweet and ladylike, etc., had a certain amount of potential for ruling in her own right (if you don't count the Titulus Regius). If GRRM is planning to go the whole way with that, it could mean a political but pleasant marriage for her endgame.

- The Sansa fans on Westeros.org all seem very much into Sansa/Sandor and think it's near-inevitable because of the sexual tension between them and the way they affect each other. They were starting to win me over, but then I decided that what would be more thematically appropriate would be for Sandor to become Sansa's true and loyal friend and bannerman/guard.

- They're also a little unreasonably hard on Tyrion in the Sansa threads - the fandom in general is too easy on him, yeah, and too apt to take his point of view as unbiased, but he's not that bad. I'm not sure he'll find Tysha (although I think he'll find out what happened to her at some point) but I have a feeling that he's going to go even lower, and then be redeemed, and I do think romantic love is going to be a part of that. Sansa? I don't know. It'd work for them to remain married (any way of getting out of the marriage would seem contrived, imo), meet up again somehow, and gradually fall in love. OTOH, it would work even better for Tyrion's arc to mirror Jaime's, falling in love slowly with sexual desire completely out of the picture, because he's had so many lust-fuelled romps with prostitutes, his thing with Tysha was way too fast, and of course there's the way he deliberately lied to himself about Shae. But it would also be a bit weird for both of them to have the same romantic redemption arc. So I really don't know.

It's kind of funny, I didn't notice that the SanSan shippers were quite biased, as they were very analytical and clear-headed when it came to Sansa, until they started talking about how saying Sandor isn't good enough for a reciprocated romance with her = turning Sansa into a prize for the deserving. Um, no. That could pretty easily be spun the other way, "it's sexist for you to want her to be with someone who can't make her happy".