What do you mean when you say that Jaime and Brienne’s relationship would have some toxic traits or that Jaime would be “a bit toxic” with her? What do you actually think he’d be like with her in a relationship? Because I feel like most people frame them as the wholesome endgame, and I know you ship them, so I’m curious what you mean. Wouldn’t that go against the idea of them bringing the best of each other?
They do make each other better. But I think people have a very flattened idea of what “better” means. Better doesn’t mean “fixed.” I don’t think their relationship would exist in this space of pure mutual improvement where they never struggle and never clash and every flaw is corrected by the other person’s presence.
Jaime Lannister is not a wholesome person. He’s just not. He’s sharp-tongued, impulsive, reckless with himself and others, prone to dramatic gestures that prioritize the emotional moment over any kind of long-term thinking, and he has spent his entire adult life inside an abusive, codependent relationship, which means he has essentially no model for what healthy love looks like. And I think people assume that because Brienne is different (because she’s “good), that Jaime will just naturally become a different person in response to her, like she’s some kind of corrective influence that will smooth out his edges by proximity. And that’s not how it works imo.
If we ever get to explore their relationship in the books, i don’t think all of Jaime’s intensity would simply disappear just because he’s with Brienne. It would just be redirected, because all of that intensity isn’t a Cersei-specific trait. It’s a Jaime trait. It’s who he is. He’s not a measured person. He doesn’t do things by half. And the idea that he’d suddenly become temperate and gentle just because he’s finally with someone who is “good” is a fantasy.
And headcanoning away (as I don’t think we’ll ever get time to actually go deep into this even if the book gives us time to see a glimpse of their relationship and dynamics), the way I read their relationship, I think Jaime in a relationship with Brienne would be a lot. I think he’d be devoted to the point of recklessness; we already have evidence of this, given what he had done for Brienne or where Brienne is concerned. I think he’d be protective in ways that would occasionally veer into possessiveness, and we have a preview of that too, because a man who punches Red Ronnet Connington in the face over a secondhand insult about a woman he isn’t even “with” yet is not a man who’s going to handle threats to her (real or perceived) with grace and restraint. I think he’d be overwhelming sometimes. Too present, too intense, too much in ways that would require Brienne to actively push back, which she would, and that friction is actually part of what makes them work. But it would still be friction.
I think his humor (which is one of his primary defense mechanisms) would still cut sometimes. Not because he’d want to hurt her, but because Jaime defaults to deflection when he’s vulnerable, and being genuinely, fully known by someone for the first time in his life would make him very vulnerable. Brienne would see through it with time, but seeing through it and not being affected by it are different things.
I think he’d throw himself in front of danger for her without hesitation, and while I do think that is very romantic, it’s also a form of not valuing his own life very highly, which is its own kind of problem that Brienne would have to confront. I think he’d struggle with letting her fight her own battles for example, and not because he thinks she’s incapable but because the idea of her being hurt would be intolerable to him in a way that overrides his respect for her competence. I think that tension between knowing she can handle herself and being physically unable to stand by and let her would be a real, ongoing negotiation between them, not something that resolves neatly.
Brienne also has her own set of deeply ingrained patterns that would be genuinely difficult to navigate in a relationship, and I don’t think people engage with them enough because she’s the “good” one. But Brienne bottles things up. That’s not a minor character trait either. She has been mocked, rejected, humiliated for the better part of her life, and she learned how to absorb that (more or less), but she has also built a wall, and walls don’t come down just because the person on the other side of them loves you. She doesn’t let people in, as she said so herself, she doesn’t know how to trust anymore. And with Jaime specifically, I think that tendency of hiding behind her walls would actually get worse before it gets better, because the stakes are higher. She’d shut down. She’d go quiet in a way that Jaime would find absolutely maddening. I don’t think he would handle that well at first. He’d push. He’d provoke. He’d say something sharp to make her react because her silence would be unbearable to him, and then they’d fight, and the fight would probably be clarifying in the end but the road there would not be pretty. Brienne is also self sacrificial to her own detriment, another problem they would have to contend with. Her willingness to throw herself away for honor and to sacrifice herself for those she loves would be something he’d have a hard time dealing with. He’d try to stop her. He’d put himself in front of whatever she was trying to walk into, which is its own form of the exact same problem, and Brienne would be furious with him. It’s ironic because they would be essentially doing the same thing for each other, but that would 100% cause problems in their relationship.
I think they are two people whose defense mechanisms are almost perfectly designed to antagonize each other, and they’d have to learn to navigate that.
Something else they would have to contend with I think, is that love, for Jaime would not always express itself in ways that are noble. I think he would, without question, prioritize Brienne’s life over other people’s lives for example. If the choice is Brienne or the more honorable path, he’s choosing Brienne. And that’s not a “flaw” he’d grow out of, that’s the shape his love takes. He already pushed a child out of a window to protect what he loved. I’m not equating the two situations, obviously, and of course that comes with its own price; we see in text how what he has done eats at him. But the capacity for that kind of ruthless, uncompromising prioritization is still in him. It’s just that now it would be in service of something real, and of someone who wouldn’t ask that of him. And Brienne, who structures her entire identity around doing the right thing, the honorable thing, would find that genuinely difficult to reconcile. That’s complicated.
The sexual aspect would be no different as well imo. I think people picture Jaime and Brienne’s physical relationship as something tender and tentative, a lot of gentle first times and nervous vulnerability, which, fine, there might be elements of that given Brienne’s, and even Jaime’s to a certain extent, inexperience. But the text has been building a sexual charge between them since the moment they were on page together, and nothing about that charge is gentle. They are extremely physical people. And they match one another in that physicality. When it does go somewhere, I don’t think it’s soft. I think it’s the release of something that’s been held under enormous pressure for a very long time. I think the sheer amount of suppressed want between them would produce something pretty consuming. These are two people who have been starved in different ways, and I don’t think either of them would be particularly restrained about it once the door is open.
So when I say it would be a little toxic, that’s what I mean. I don’t think love has to be always portrayed as this clean cut nice thing, and I don’t think George does that either, even when it’s a love that is “worthy” of existing, even when it’s justified.
Also visual representation of their relationship at any point in time:
Thoughtful! Deep! Wise! 👏⚔️😍
