I wonder if people take Jaime’s surface-level narration about Brienne far too literally. He calls her ugly, mocks her body, and keeps reaching for insulting comparisons, so readers sometimes treat that as evidence that his physical attraction only develops later, once he appreciates her character. But Jaime pays an extraordinary amount of attention to a woman he supposedly finds completely undesirable. From his very first chapter, he notices the shape of her mouth, the color and expression of her eyes, her muscles, her movements, her clothes, her hair, and how her body looks in different situations, to name a few. And it is not just a one-off descriptive passage either; this kind of attention recurs throughout his chapters. I don’t remember this happening with anyone else he interacts with in his POVs. If it happened once, it could be dismissed as a narrative device to establish what Brienne looks like (even though we have already seen her through Catelyn’s POV), but the repetition makes it feel much more like it’s supposed to signalize something internal about Jaime than something for the reader’s benefit. Many readers don’t pay attention to what Jaime is doing and start believing what he insists he’s feeling, even when the two are contradicting each other.
I think this is one of the biggest consequences of Jaime being such an unreliable narrator tbh.
He constantly tells us one thing while his thoughts and actions are telling us another, never mind his unconscious thoughts that he doesn’t acknowledge on page. But people take his self-assessment at face value and ignore the narrative surrounding it. George is practically begging us to read between the lines when it comes to his chapters. I think this is why Jaime has some of the wildest takes in the general ASOIAF fandom. 😭 People either believe everything he says about himself or reject everything he says about himself, when the whole point is that neither approach works when it comes to him. He’s lying to himself as much as he’s revealing himself, and the fun of reading his POV is figuring out where those two overlap. Yes Jaime, she’s ugly, yes Jaime her muscles are something else, yes Jaime a dress looks terrible on her, yes Jaime her mouth is too wide and her eyes are too blue and that dress looks a bit better than the last and yeah ok she has more of a woman’s shape now but pal, listen… how is it that you noticed so much and why are you looking in the first place? Let’s talk about that yeah.
I think the white sword tower scene is one of the best examples of his unreliable ass:
Someone had dressed her in woman’s clothes again, but this dress fit much better / Brienne glanced down at herself, flustered. “Septa Donyse padded out the bodice, to give it that shape. She said you sent her to me.”
