useless, each without the other

(Iain A. MacInnes, “‘All I Ever Wanted Was to Fight for a Lord I Believed in. But the Good Lords Are Dead and the Rest Are Monsters’: Brienne of Tarth, Jaime Lannister, and the Chivalric ‘Other’”)

“It is a rare and precious gift to be a knight,” she said, “and even more so a knight of the Kingsguard. It is a gift given to few, a gift you scorned and soiled.” A gift you want desperately, wench, and can never have.

(ASOS, Jaime II)

“Brienne of Tarth.” Jaime sighed. “I have a gift for you.” He reached down under the Lord Commander’s chair and brought it out, wrapped in folds of crimson velvet.

The funny thing about this essay is that MacInnes also argues that

[i]nstead of the feudal tradition of father passing on his rights to his son, Jaime rejects his family completely. In choosing to honour his oath as a member of the Kingsguard, Jaime begins to construct a new family for himself. Brienne of Tarth arguably takes her place within this new construct, Jaime’s apparent dubbing of her acting to incorporate her into this newly forged familial identity.

but acknowledges that

[t]he final television series subverts this analysis somewhat by including sexual intimacy between Brienne and Jaime, creating a knight-lover relationship that problematises a more chivalric reading of their bond.

“newly forged familial identity” forgetting something aren’t we?

The sickness was there, the need to run, the need for something else too. Kaz thought he knew the language of pain intimately, but this ache was new. It hurt to stand here like this, so close to the circle of her arms.

CROOKED KINGDOM | Chapter 26