Brienne doesn’t acknowledge she’s in love with Jaime, but I think you then drawn exactly the wrong conclusion from it. The fact that she doesn’t acknowledge it is, to me, one of the clearest signs that she is.

Think about what you just described. Brienne gave her devotion to Renly freely, openly, almost immediately. She saw him and she loved him and she committed herself to him, and he had to do essentially nothing to earn it beyond being kind to her once at a dance. The same is true of Catelyn. Brienne met her, recognized in her something she found worthy of devotion, and pledged herself to her.

Now look at Jaime. Jaime, who has done more for her than Renly and Catelyn combined. Who lost his hand in the aftermath of protecting her. Who jumped into a bear pit to save her. Who gave her Valyrian steel and a quest and a purpose and his trust, against his own family. Who has, by any objective measure, earned her devotion ten times over. And Brienne is still resisting it. She’s still holding him at a distance, still filing him under oath and duty rather than letting herself name what’s actually there. She gave herself to Renly on the strength of one dance. Jaime has moved mountains for her and she still won’t let herself arrive at the right conclusion.

I think that’s because what she feels is something so real and so complicated that she can’t process it the way she processed the others. Renly was safe to love because he was untouchable: beautiful, “kind”, a lord, a king, someone she could worship from a distance and never have to reckon with as an equal. Catelyn was safe to serve because the dynamic was clear: lady and sworn sword, nothing muddied or ambiguous about it. Jaime is not safe. There’s a grittiness to what they have, a realness that won’t let her aestheticize it or tuck it into the clean categories she used for the others. They’ve seen each other at their ugliest. They’ve fought each other, resented each other, saved each other, been naked in front of each other in ways that go so far beyond the literal. They know each other in ways that nobody else in either of their lives does, they access parts of each other that no one else even gets close to. And that is terrifying for someone like Brienne, who has always been able to frame her love, however it comes, as something noble and uncomplicated. What she feels for Jaime won’t fit in that frame. So she doesn’t name it.

I do agree with you (even thought this isn’t a popular take I think) that in the text, Jaime is significantly more obvious about his feelings than Brienne is about hers, at least as an external reader. Mainly because while she certainly is attracted to him, it’s clear her feelings are there, there is the element, as you said, of Brienne very easily giving her love and devotion to others. And because she’s more free in how she thinks of those she love, because she accesses that more easily in certain ways, it does raise the question that maybe she doesn’t romantically love him (although I honestly think George makes that fairly obvious with her trying to recall Renly’s face or with Jaime replacing Renly in her dreams). Still, is a take I’ve seen more often lately, that Brienne’s feelings aren’t necessarily romantic. While Jaime, in his very agressive denial, ends up coming across as more obvious about it. He’s also the one carrying the more obvious romantic tropes from the get go. He’s the one whose thoughts drift back to her and have to be actively redirected. He’s the one who hits a man for insulting her, who abandons his army the moment she appears, who jumped into the bear pit, etc etc. He’s going through his whole divorce arc at the moment. Meanwhile Brienne is the one still thinking about Renly, then she’s kinda sorting through the complicated knot of Hyle and his proposal.

And I think George is doing something very deliberate and very clever with that, because he’s structured the romance in a way that subverts what you’d expect. Brienne is the ugly one, the “beast” to Jaime’s “beauty”, and yet she is not competing for Jaime’s affections. She’s not triangulated against Cersei. She doesn’t think about Cersei at all when she thinks about Jaime, for example. Instead, George puts Brienne at the center of the romantic geometry. She’s the one with suitors. She’s the one with a past love she still mourns and a present entanglement she can’t quite shake because he’s running around proposing to her and an ex fiance talking shit about her so Jaime can hear. Jaime might potentially be in a love triangle with Hyle Hunt (hope u survive king). He’s the one who digs for information with Red Ronnet Connington and is bothered by it. All the while performing the most romantic gestures in their dynamic.

I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."

Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.

What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/uber-ceo-says-other-execs-are-lying-about-ai-they-say-it-ll-be-fine-publicly-but-privately-admit-millions-of-jobs-are-gone/ar-AA1Z9QMv

Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.

AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/

So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?

This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.

Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.

Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.

My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Shortly after writing it, I turned it into a lecture:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb