a rebellion built on hope.

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Newfoundland is hardly new: Travel through 9,000 years of scenic beauty

Located at the easternmost edge of the North American continent, Newfoundland is a sprawling terra incognita sandwiched between Quebec and the North Atlantic. With picturesque landscapes of glittering tundra, rocky coastlines frequented by humpback whales and lush forests with lofty waterfalls, Newfoundland is a photographer’s paradise. Read more

When he finally dreams of Joanna in AFFC, at first he doesn’t recognize her - is she a silent sister? Is she Cersei?

He has a lot of odd blank spots around things like, exactly what he and Cersei were doing when the maid caught them. I interpret this as PTSD. The trauma, IMO, isn’t about what they were doing at all. It’s about the rather extreme (though understandable) reaction their mother had. She threatened to tell their father, as if their father knowing was the worst horror imaginable - and I don’t think that either of the twins had any understanding until then that they were doing anything terrible. Something that was their secret, yes, but children with only each other for companionship will create their own private worlds, you know? And then the fact that he was immediately exiled to the other side of the Rock, and that a short time later Joanna was dead. 

That’s a traumatic set of events in a short time, and Jaime has put memories of Joanna away inside himself and hasn’t revisited them. But why? 

I think the dream he has of Joanna provides the explanation.

In the dream he has one hand, and it’s the first time he’s dreamed of this, of *reality*. Joanna notes that everyone dreams of things they cannot have. Tywin, she says, had a horror of being laughed at, and he dreamed of his son being a knight and his daughter being a queen and both of them being so beautiful that no one would ever laugh at them. 

Jaime says well, I am a knight, Cersei is a queen.

And this causes Joanna to cry, and turn away, and leave him. Because of course, Jaime and Cersei are grotesques. They are not beautiful at all. This is difficult for Jaime to face, but he knows it’s true, which is why his subconscious confirms it, via his mother’s reaction. 

The reality that he has been unable to face all these years, and the reason he’s had to block out memories of his mother, is that since the age of fifteen…well, he’s been pretty much full time dedicated to pursuing the very act the promise/threat of which tainted the final days of his mother’s life. I’ve never been sure some of Cersei’s hatred of Tyrion maybe isn’t misplaced guilt. If Joanna hadn’t undergone such stress in late pregnancy, hadn’t been dealing with what the twins had done and frantically plotting to keep it from Tywin while ensuring nothing truly damning could happen by separating them well in advance of puberty (truly, Dorne has the right idea), would she have died? Certainly the stress didn’t help the situation. 

But Jaime doesn’t deflect guilt onto Tyrion. Projecting onto other people and punishing them isn’t his coping mechanism, any more than drinking is. His is disassociation, always has been. He simply hasn’t allowed himself to think or dream of his mother. 

And to me, that’s the biggest indicator that Jaime is done doing the very thing that so horrified Joanna. The reason he couldn’t face her, even in his memories and imagination, is that while he was actively involved in disappointing her, he had to avoid her. It is no coincidence that the immediate result of his dream of her is that he wakes up to reality - to winter - and reflects upon how not long ago his reaction to snow would’ve been that of a child with no responsibilities. But now he is different, and the letter comes, and the snow falls on it, reminding him he lives in the real world now, so he has it burned. 

Finally facing Joanna in the dream…he could never have dreamed of his mother if he wasn’t ready, at last, to stop disappointing her. Does he still have his conditioned response to the occasional thought of Cersei? Of course. Memories of their one night together were what he conjured up to soothe himself away from the trauma he underwent as a teen on the Kingsguard. He learned to use thoughts of sex to stimulate some nice dopamine to get him through difficult situations, and those coping mechanisms don’t go away easily. We see him trying to use them, with little success, in ASOS. In fact he is frustrated by how unsuccessful it is. 

I’m unclear as to why. Perhaps it’s that since it’s been exposed - I mean, two honorable women, one of whom he was attracted to in his youth, have visibly and vocally offered their disgust at his incest, so it could simply be that a light has been shone on the act and he is forced to actually look at it. And he has had an entire year in captivity to reflect, but Jaime is very very good at NOT reflecting, so I’m less sure about that element. 

A clue could be found in the simple line, “But Jaime’s walls were gone.” Not to divulge too much, but I used to be pretty good at disassociation and compartmentalization, and I remember going through a time of great trauma that wrecked that ability for me. Tbh, I miss it, at times. Maybe this great trauma he has undergone has stolen his crutch and he can’t compartmentalize, because compartmentalization is what made the crutch usable in the first place.

Seen in that light, knowing that sex memories have been his go-to disassociation technique for fifteen years now, his intrusive Moon Boy too thoughts make a lot of sense. They take his drug of choice away, make it not feel good. He cannot conjure up Cersei sex memories any more, they’re ruined. So in a way, he really has no choice but to give up that drug. 

But as always, we have to remember that Jaime is a character in a series with two volumes yet to come, and we have no guarantees that he’s going to murder-suicide his way out of the narrative halfway through TWOW. Or that he isn’t. We’ll see.