fortunate hal

“I asked him why he kept her close, if he thought her so grotesque. He said that all his other knights wanted things of him, castles or honors or riches, but all that Brienne wanted was to die for him…”

Henry VI part 1, Act 1 Scene 2

Stannis burns Shireen

Arya kills Lady Stoneheart

Bran becomes king

Dark Dany

even Jon's resurrection falls into this camp for me!

and so on

It's not that I particularly am invested in these fights/interpretations not happening (and in fact, probably a lot of these have a good chance of happening!), but I think it's so very pointless to discuss them as settled canon and base character interpretations and understandings in these events since we haven't seen the execution.

It makes no sense to me to discuss these things without seeing the context and how they are written. The plot point tells you next to nothing, it's all about how George composes the scene and characterization of the people involved, and that we don't know! And since we don't know, a lot of people instinctively fall back on the show characterization of events which I find to be incredibly frustrating.

jaime and brienne + their payne companions.

kind of hard to say exactly what kind of awareness he has bc Jaime is a fake dgafer who lies to himself constantly. he still fakes disliking her in the privacy of his own damn mind lmao like I think with his chapters you just have to accept that when Jaime finds something difficult to reckon with e.g. what he did to Bran, how he feels about Brienne, whether Cersei is cheating, he’s going to be actively dismissive of his worries/feelings until they’re impossible to ignore. that’s why we get shit like Jaime basically calling Bran a creepy perv for watching him w Cers, and only later telling Cers herself that he’s ashamed of what he did to the kid. we never saw Jaime work through this, and the last few times Jaime’s mentioned what he did to Bran, it’s been more or less facetiously. you can infer based on his actions and choices that Jaime is ashamed before he states it himself, but he only rarely states his feelings outright, and often states them as the opposite to avoid confronting them.

society if we had this playing out on our screens and the people knew brienne as they knew dunk