On the whole “Brienne is ugly” discourse (which, yes, she is), there’s something else that always gets lost, especially when we talk about her being worthy of love and sexual desire, and how that ties directly into Jaime.
A lot of the resistance to admitting Brienne is ugly comes from the fact that some people simply cannot accept that Jaime could love her as she is and be sexually attracted to her as she is. There’s this need to frame it as him “looking past” her appearance, as if her body is something he tolerates rather than desires.
And that feeds into a bunch of other bad readings: the idea that their love is somehow “pure” and not carnal, that it’s calm and chaste and grounded, especially when contrasted with his relationship with Cersei, which fandom loves to frame as the real sexual one. It’s also tied to that tired belief that “a part of him will always belong to someone else,” sexually and romantically, that I spoke about the other day.
And this is such a wrong interpretation of their relationship. It’s actually quite funny how fucking wrong it is.
Jaime loves it all. UGLINESS INCLUDED. And more importantly: he’s also attracted to it.
I think that’s what people don’t understand about the concept of “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” in relation to sexual attraction. It’s not that the concept of beauty changes, or that you look at that person and don’t see them for who they are. Is that what people might find ugly and therefore not sexually desirable to them because of that ugliness, it’s precisely the something that you find attractive.
Jaime desires both sides of Brienne. He is attracted to both sides of her.
Yes, he falls for her sweetness, her warmth, eyes, thinks about comforting her, defends her honor as a lady. This is the easy part for people to swallow.
What people don’t understand is that he’s also attracted to her strength, her muscles, her mouth, her freckles, her height. Everything that makes her undesirable for others… Jaime Lannister is into it. He digs it. It does it for him.
Romantically speaking, I think their relationship will be intense because they’re both people who give love freely but rarely receive it unconditionally. When they finally turn that love toward each other, they will cling to it, feed off it, give themselves over completely.
And when it comes to the sexual aspect of it, I think their relationship will be EVEN MORE carnal than anything either of them ever experienced, especially Jaime.
Jaime isn’t attracted to Brienne because he’s in love with her. He is in love with her and he is attracted to her, and those things are not the same, nor do they depend on each other.
His sexual desire for Brienne surpassed even his “love” for Cersei, almost immediately. Because he wanted Brienne from the very moment he saw her. Jaime wanted her even before he actually liked her.
His attraction to Brienne is not conditioned by his love for her. He wants her. And then he falls in love with her.
And honestly? If anything, even if he never fell in love with her at all, he’d still want to fuck her.
