OO

Jon Snow eating the heart of Ramsay Bolton.

Jaime "im gonna launch your unborn child if you don't do what i say edmure" 🤝 Jon " Im going to let Mel burn your baby if you dont do what i say Gilly"

They both said :

if i spent three novels being tormented by blonds id be crashing out too💔

Jon - take on the classic long lost hero archetype/hero's journey

Bran - take on the king arthur/magical apprentice spiced with horror

Arya - take on the coming of age young adult adventure spiced with horror

Sansa - take on fairy tales/princess in the tower drifting to gothic horror

Daenerys - take on sword and sorcery genre/hero's journey

Brienne - take on the knightly hero

Quentyn - take on far way adventurous prince trying to get a princess

case in point:

(ACOK, Catelyn I)

flash forward and robb corrects him AGAIN:

but five seconds later:

(ASOS, Catelyn II)

feel free to ignore if you’re not comfy sharing 🫶🏼

I’ve actually received a few asks about this and I am happy to answer but sorry if my thoughts on it aren’t completely coherent🫡

I think that boils down to a couple things. 1) I think a lot of casual viewers tend to choose Natalie as their favorite because (and I hate to perpetuate this criticism I’ve heard over and over again but I do think it’s happening) they like the way Sophie Thatcher looks, and they tend to hate or not care about adult Natalie whatsoever. I see so much neglect for the brilliance of adult Natalie’s character amongst these kinds of fans. Adult Natalie kicks ass! And she contrasts teen Nat in such a tragic and important way.

2) I think a lot of people just like Natalie because she’s the “hero” or think Natalie = good and Everyone Else (especially Shauna) = bad. Which I think reduces her character and all of the other characters down to something much simpler than they are. Yes, Natalie is kind-hearted, compassionate, and has the strongest moral compass in the group. But she’s also manipulative, frequently deceitful, and has an interesting role of remaining complicit/a bystander in the violence that occurs around her, allowing others to commit violence which she benefits from but doesn’t have to carry the full weight of responsibility for. She’s done some truly terrible things and has hurt quite a few people. And ignoring this darker side of Natalie is missing out on a really interesting half of her character.

Daenerys going mad seems to go against the hidden romanticism and optimism of the series and feel more cynical and nihilistic akin to Benioff and Weiss. Rather than her working to break abusive cycles like her anti-slavery campaign, she ends up continuing the cycle and becoming mad like her father and brother, meaning breaking cycles is hopeless. People can never escape the patterns of abuse within their own families, so there's no point in fighting it.

By contrast, Cersei becoming a parallel for Aerys actually does more thematically. For Cersei, she imagines herself to be her father when she actually resembles the mad king he served as Hand. Jaime finds himself back to where he started in serving a mad tyrant, and it is a while before he fully realizes it.

The Lannisters were always wannabe Targaryens, wanting to marry into them and sit their throne, have a doctrine of their House's supremacy. It seems only fitting then that their ruling monarch imitates the last ruling Targaryen monarch on the Iron Throne. It comments on the nature of monarchy and elitism itself as the Iron Throne and a house's self-obsession makes them resemble the family they largely helped to overthrow.

It also helps to show the contrast between Daenerys and Cersei whom Martin admitted are foils. Despite coming from a family with a history of madness, Daenerys isn't mad as she is not obsessed with power, and she wants equality with her subjects, having wanted a home her whole life. The closest she gets to paranoia is suspecting Groleo and Reznak, but she dismisses the first quite quickly and the latter is more due to Quaithe's warning.

Cersei, on the other hand, shared her father's belief in that she was above everyone else, wanting not community but domination. She does anything within her ability to do that, and her paranoia in large part stems from not just prophecy but her fear that the people she hurt may come back for revenge like Tyrion, or that they are trying to do to her family what her and her family did to others like the Tyrells murdering their royal in-law to seize the throne as Cersei did with Robert, and Tyrion killing her children like she did with Robert's and Tywin's with Rhaegar's children.