#danny flint

Our 124th piece is...

Brave Danny Flint, by @notanotherbloodwizard here on tumblr! For quentmartells on twitter, who donated to Crips for eSims for Gaza.

Jon Snow and all the Stark children are descended from Arya Flint of the Mountains, a potential distant cousin of Danny Flint. Jon is Dany's biological family, her nephew. In this way, yes, Arya is totally related to her cousin's aunt! Good observation.

Otherwise, I'm not exactly "ignoring" this piece of information so much as I don't assign it the kind of significance you seem to.

Legendary Heroes GIF Sets → Danny Flint

Folklore has its universal rules, universal narratives it uses to weave songs and stories. A woman pretending to be a man is one of those, and not once does it end with rape, much less gang rape. It has four possible outcomes: never discovered, discovered and rewarded, dead on discovery (usually via birth) or discovered and killed. Usually the latter is framed as defiance on her part - she goads her killer, shaming him and emasculating, and he is the villain of the story, a weakling unable to bear being bested by a woman.

If we play by the rules of folklore logic, Danny Flint would end either with her made single female lord-commander, or her killer being exposed and punished and she hailed as a hero.

Rape is never the endgame in folklore. It is only used either passingly in historical songs among other enemy atrocities, or as a starting point of revenge ballads. Never. and I can’t stress it enough, is rape used as comeuppance for a woman. Death is.

Danny: Joan of Arc by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, AWOIAF Page

Varys: art by mylestoyne, AWOIAF Page

Hey, love to see someone else loving Danny Flint that much!

So basically the whole theory is about how Danny Flint could have been the one who became Coldhands because it vaguely lines up with both the timeline and their stories as well as some of the things that were said about Coldhands (and also because it would be awesome):

The timeline parallel can be summed up quickly by him being described as having been "killed [...] long ago" by Leaf, which technically makes him too old to be any of the dead brothers of the nights watch that we met in the time the story took place, while at the same time there are very few historical night's watch members that we actually know anything about, Danny Flint being one of them.

The story part goes a little bit deeper; we know that Coldhands was once a brother of the night's watch, that he was killed by the wights, and that he was raised from the dead, presumably by the children of the forest - he also knows about the black gate under the Nightfort, wanders the lands beyond the wall alone with only his elk, and considers the night's watch men that him and Bran encounter foes. Danny Flint joined the night's watch disguised as a man and faced incredibly cruel consequences for it by her "brothers", who are implied to have murdered her as well, is well known as a legendary figure of songs for her bravery, and she served at the Nightfort, which her ghost is said to haunt until this day.

Now the connection here is really far fetched but there are definitely some interesting parallels that keep me up at night:

-Coldhands knowing about the black gate under the Nightfort even though no living man remembers, Danny Flints ghost haunting it still, and the gate being what connects the Nightfort to the world beyond. Maybe her ghost is still there, and now on the other side

-Danny Flint being an outsider in the brotherhood and trying to fit in standing in direct contrast to Coldhands staying on his own, now an outsider on the other side of the world, but maybe having found peace in his existence among the dead and inhuman, as opposed to the cruel side he saw of humanity

-Her ghost remembering what her brothers did to her and Coldhands seeing the ones he meets as his enemies, with the exception of Sam, whom he found protecting someone else who does not belong with the night's watch

-Coldhands having been killed by "them", whether "they" were the others, the wights, or even who they once were - we literally don't know

To be fair, there's not really proof that any of this is related at all, but there isn't really anything speaking against it either? And yes, it's definitely a theory falling in the "wouldn't it be cool if it happened" category, but literally it would be so cool like. imagine