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occupyvenus · 5 years

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Human Genetics 1.0.1

Plus: How closely are Jon and Daenerys related exactly?

Dear @iheartdandelions, this this is no way supposed to be an attack on you but I’ve seen you claim that Jon is more closely related to his mother than his father one too many times and felt the need to clear some things up. See this as an opportunity to learn something about this fascinating topic, rather than becoming defensive about it. You misunderstood or misinterpreted a lot of the things stated in this article and I just have to point them out.

What this isn’t about: I am not making a point about incest being necessarily bad in the asoiaf universe. I’m not arguing that Jon and Dany’s close genetic relation is a reason for them to not be together. I will not even talk about it. I don’t care. This isn’t about ships but scientific accuracy.

What this is about: Jon did not “inherit more genetic makeup from Lyanna than Rhaegar” because he looks like her. There is no conceivable way in which Jon and Dany have as little as 1,7% of their DNA in common. Both those statements are objectively and factually wrong. Jon is half Rhaegar and half Lyanna, no matter how he looks and he and Dany have anything between 30 and 50% of their DNA in common, most likely 44%. I will prove it with science and explain it in excruciating detail.

This essay is structured into the following sections:

1. DNA, Genes, Chromosomes and Alleles

2. Genotype vs Phenotype / Dominant, recessive, co-dominant and intermediate inheritance

3. Mitosis and Meiosis

4. The 1,7% were based on outdated, flawed data

5. Targcest vs Nocest / the coefficient of relationship and how closely Jon and Dany are actually related

Anyone who thinks they don’t need to refresh their knowledge on basic human genetics can feel free to jump to the last section. It might still be interesting.

1. DNA, Genes, Chromosomes and Alleles

This is the your DNA:

It is made up of about 3 billion adenine-thymine and cytosine-guanine pairs. It’s the main thing that makes you you.

Portions of DNA that code for specific proteins are called genes.

The majority of human DNA is actually not used for producing proteins and was formerly called “junk-DNA”. We falsely believed that it was pretty much meaningless. We are only now starting to understand how much non-coding-DNA influences the way our genetic code works.

Your DNA is packaged into chromosomes. Every species has a different amount of them, which is the main reason why different species can’t interbreed or why the offspring of different species (Mules, Ligers, etc) tends to be infertile. Human beings have 23 different chromosomes. 22 autosomal ones that are not sex-specific and one sex chromosome (either X or Y) that specifies your biological sex.

However, only sperm and egg cells have 23 chromosomes, which is called haploid.

All other cells in your body are diploid, having two different sets of the 22 autosomal chromosomes and 2 sex chromosomes (either two X chromosomes if you are biologically female or one X and one Y if you are biologically male). That would look like this:

You have two sets of chromosomes because you inherited one set from your mother and one set from your father. You always owe half of your genetic material to your father and half to your mother, no matter who you resemble more.

You also have DNA that isn’t packaged into chromosomes. For example your mitochondrial DNA which is only inherited through your mother. When compared to your chromosomal DNA however, it’s amount is so minuscule that it won’t influence how closely you are related to your mother and father in any meaningful way. (And no, mitochondrial DNA does not influence your appearance so this isn’t the reason why Jon resembles Lyanna more than Rhaegar.)

Gametes (sperm and eggs) only have one set of chromosomes because they are going to be combined with the set of another person to produce a new human being. That human being will again have two sets, one paternal (from the father) and one maternal (from the mother).

Your paternal and maternal chromosome 1 (for example) are called an homologous pair. The genes present on each will have the same general job, they will however not be exactly the same due to random mutations and genetic variety. Mutations can lead to the same genes working in slightly different ways. (eg coding for brown or blue eyes. They still both influence eye color.) Every human being has the genes that make him a human, but humans still aren’t exact copies of one another.

Different variations of the same gene are called alleles. You can either have the same alleles on both chromosomes, what is called homozygosity, or you can have two different alleles on each chromosome, which is called heterozygosity.

These variations in alleles for each gene is why people look the way they look. To find out why people sometimes resemble one parent more than the other, we have to look at how these different alleles can interact with one another.

2. Genotype vs Phenotype / dominant, recessive, co-dominate and intermediate inheritance

Genotype = your actual genetic code in its entirety

Phenotype = what traits (appearance, behavior, diseases, metabolism, etc) can be observed

Someone's phenotype doesn’t necessarily tell you what exact genes they carry. Here’s why:

2.1 Dominant vs recessive

In some cases one allele will be dominant and the other recessive. This means that the dominant trait will always be expressed when present, while the recessive one will be expressed only if no dominant allele is. If one dominant and one recessive allele is present, if you are heterozygous for that specific gene, the dominant one is expressed while the recessive one is only “carried”. You can still pass it to the next generation.

Two people could carry the allele for a recessive trait without even knowing it (due to it being silenced by the dominant one) and still have a 1/4 chance of producing a child with that recessive trait.

The children in this case did not inherit more genetic makeup from their father, they simply ended up expressing the dominant trait inherited from him and not the recessive one inherited from their mother. However, all children in this setup will end up carrying the recessive allele and can potentially pass it on to their children.

One of the few traits in human appearance that are inherited monogenic (only one gene is responsible for a specific trait) and dominant-recessive. Your type of hair-line would be one example.

If neither you, nor your wife have a widow’s peak, your children won’t have one either, since you are both homozygous for a recessive trait.

If one of them does have one ... it might be time to call Jerry Springer.

We believed for a long time that hair- and eye-color are also inherited like this (with darker colors being dominant and lighter ones being recessive) but we do now know that things are more complicated than this and that several genes (and epigenetic factors) are involved in deciding your hair color.

Generally speaking however, both darker eyes and darker hair tend to be dominant. It thus makes perfect sense that the child of these two people:

is most likely to take after his mother’s darker coloration.

Not because he inherited all his “hair and eye color genes” from her and none from his father, but because his mother's genes are more dominant and will thus be visible in his phenotype. He still carries some “blond” alleles from his father and could have blond children if whoever woman he has children with, also has “blond” alleles.

Ned figured out that Joffrey, Myrcella and Tommen are NOT Robert’s children with the exact same logic. Every time a black-haired Baratheon had children with a blonde woman, their children had black hair. Which is pretty consistent with real life. None of Robert’s children with Cersei following this trend was just too much of a coincidence.

This is the main reason why genetic diversity and avoiding inbreeding is so important. The more closely people are related, the more likely the are to carry the same recessive alleles for a specific condition, the more likely they are to have a child with a condition. As good as every person alive carries recessive alleles for one disease or another, but, not reproducing with people we are closely related to, makes it unlikely to meet up with a person who carries the exact same recessive alleles as you.

The coefficient of inbreeding tells you how likely it is that a person is homozygous for a specific allele by descent. It is actually impossible to accurately calculate for House Targaryen, because we do not know how many generations ago they started marrying their siblings. Even generous approximations (assuming the Aegon I was the first to incest) sets it way higher for Daenerys than for any known real human that has ever lived. But since we don’t care about Dany’s risk for recessive disorders, but only her relation to Jon, we are just going to ignore this. Only bringing it up because it is a thing.

2.2 Co-dominant alleles

Co-dominant alleles will both be expressed to the same amount, none of them is dominant enough to silence the other. They can however still be fully dominant against a third trait. The ABO system of blood types would be an example of this in human beings. The traits for blood type A and B are both dominant to O, but co-dominant to each other. This means that a couple where one has the blood type A and one has the blood type B have equal chances of producing a child with any of the four blood types if they are heterozygous and carry the allele for O as well.

A child ending up with blood type A ( A == phenotype, AO == genotype) didn’t inherit “more genes” from its mother because she shares the same blood type. It merely inherited a dominant trait from its mother and a recessive trait from its father.

2.3 Intermediate inheritance

The third most common way for alleles to interact is the intermediate one. Meaning that if two different alleles that code for two different traits are present, the phenotype will be a mix between the two. If a flower's color is inherited this way, a white and red flower will produce pink ones.

This is for example how human skin color is inherited. In reality, it is an immensely complex process that we don’t fully understand yet, but simplified: We have numerous genes that code for the production of melanin in our skin and certain mutations lead to a reduced production, leading to lighter skin.

Let’s assume we have only three genes A, B and C that all contribute the same amount to the color of our skin (in reality it’s much more and not all have the same influence, there are also epigenetic influences but we are trying to keep this simple here): An uppercase letter means that the gene will contribute to melanin-production, a lowercase letter is a mutation that will not. Three genes on two chromosomes makes six alleles in total. Having six ... let's call it “melanin-points” will lead to the darkest skin coloration possible while having zero means producing no melanin at all.

Even in this extremely simplified version we only have 7 phenotypes and 24 different genotypes showing once again that simply looking at someone doesn’t tell you all that much about what specific genes they are made of. Let’s look at a little example of what would happen if a dark-skinned man and light-skinned woman had a child:

Their child would have a 50% chance of its skin color being a perfect mix between the two and a 25% each, of being a bit more on the light or the dark side.

A child ending up inheriting 4/6 “melanin-points” would not be more closely related to its father and a child ending up with lighter skin would not be more closely related to its mother.

This is of course far more complex in real life but it can occasionally lead to mix-raced couples having children with vastly different skin tones. It’s the most obvious (and cute) when it happens to fraternal twins (twins that are only as related as normal siblings and don’t share 100% of their DNA).

These children are 50% mom and 50% dad, they are in no way more closely related to their black or white parent. The one with darker skin just happened to inherit more alleles coding for the production of melanin and statistical improbabilities can sometimes lead to extreme variations.

This also goes the other way around. I won’t write out all possible genotypes (it would be 64 in total) but here are the probabilities if both parents are medium-dark-skinned:

While highly unlikely, two people with medium-dark skin can have children with far darker or far lighter skin. Genetics can be weird like that.

Some alleles involved in hair- and eye-color also interact like this, instead of dominant/recessive.

So, now that we have that out of the way there is only one more thing we have to cover before moving on to the topic of how related you are to what relative. It gets a bit more complicated when it comes to siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc but with your parents IT IS ALWAYS 50/50. ALWAYS.

3. Mitosis and Meiosis

Mitosis is the process of normal body cells duplicating themselves. One mother-cell produces two identical daughter-cells with the exact same DNA. We don’t need to get too into detail here, what’s important is that the initial two (!) sets of chromosomes are copied perfectly, leading to 4 sets of chromosomes being present temporarily and later the mother-cell dividing itself into two new cells who take two sets of chromosomes each with them. Creating two completely normal diploid cells.

Meiosis is the creation of four haploid germ cells out of one diploid cell. Four (4) because this process starts out the same way as mitosis: by duplicating the existing diploid chromosome set. Meiosis produces four haploid cells instead of two diploid ones is the one big difference. The other being the recombination of your homologous pairs of chromosomes. What happens is that some portion of the paternal chromosome will be swapped with the same portion of the maternal chromosome.

This is also called “crossing over” and just like sexual reproduction itself, it increases the genetic diversity of someone’s offspring. The newly created germ cell won’t simple receive one half of the maternal or paternal chromosome, but can potentially inherit a random combination of the two.

This is what the article you read talked about. In the example above Child 2 inherited far more DNA from it’s maternal grandmother than grandfather. This will however only influence how closely related the children are to their grandparents and to themselves. They still share 50% of their DNA with their mother and 50% with their father.

This will happen with all 23 chromosome pairs and will most likely average out to 50% shared DNA between siblings, 25% between grandparents/grandchildren, etc. Those number are of course only averages and there is indeed some range. If through pure coincidence child 2 consistently inherits a bit more from it’s maternal grandmother, it will indeed be more closely related to her than to its maternal grandfather. It still doesn’t change its degree of relationship to its mother or father. Which are, by the way, all things the author of that article mentions.

The less closely related two people are, and the more crossovers can occur, the bigger that range gets respectively and the more likely it is that their actual shared amount will deviate from the statistically expected one. With close relatives like aunt/nephew however, the expected amount of shared DNA is vastly bigger than 1,7% even when working with the lower limit of that range. Why that is, is what we’ll talk about next:

4. The 1,7% ... were based on outdated, flawed data

Some things about this chart ... just don’t look right.

The average cM for Aunt/Uncle is stated to be 1703, the range given is 121 - 2227. One should think that random processes like this would lead to a Gaussian normal distribution, but while the highest cM given is 524 points higher than average, the lowest is 1582 (!!!) lower. An almost three times bigger deviation. That doesn’t sound right.

Also, other relations of the same degree (with similar averages) have extremely different ranges:

Grandparents: Avg: 1760, 875 - 2365

Half-Sibling: Avg: 1731, 787 - 2134

The same is true for other relations of the same degree. Half-niece/Half-nephew having a lower range of 540, while first cousins only have 83 (!!!) , Great Aunt/Uncle having 236, Great-Grandparents having 547.

This all looks immensely inconsistent.

After doing some digging I found out that this chart was created by the “Shared cM Project” that introduces itself like so:

The Shared cM Project is a collaborative data collection and analysis project created to understand the ranges of shared centiMorgans associated with various known relationships. As of August 2017, total shared cM data for more than 25,000 known relationships has been provided. To add your data, the Submission Portal is HERE. I am always collecting data, and perhaps the next update with have 50,000 or 100,000 relationships!

Collecting genetic information by asking the public to only submit data about known relationships? Whatever could go wrong? When you have to rely on people knowing for certain whose sperm produced which child? Except for people not being quite as closely related to each other as they think they are .... Do I have to bring up Jerry Springer again?

I looked at their website a bit longer and could find this additional information about the chart above:

When compared to the minimums of the other Aunt/Uncle subgroups it is quite obvious that “121″ is a statistical outlier that shouldn’t have been included in the final publication.

I am afraid you fell victim to bad data.

Or maybe you willfully fell victim to it, since the person writing the article you love quoting did bring up the possibility of it being a fluke:

He probably should have been a bit more assertive about this being a runaway value (because it most obviously is) but still. I would have honestly been very shocked if a Stanford professor would be negligent enough to overlook this.

Looking at the newest published data from April 2018, it becomes even more apparently clear that the first one from 2015 simply didn’t have enough reliable data yet to show any conclusive results. (and they probably shouldn’t have included the absolute minimum and maximum but the 99 percentile as they did here)

Average cM and range for Aunt/Uncle from 2015: 1703, 121 - 2227. Average cM and range for Aunt/Uncle from 2018: 1750, 1349 - 2175.

That looks ... more reasonable. A lot more reasonable to be honest. Which would put the lowest possible amount of shared DNA between Aunt/Uncle and Niece/Nephew according to this data at ... 19,27%. Which also sounds a lot more reasonable than 1,7%.

Another thing to keep in mind when looking at these numbers is that DNA-tests are not necessarily 100% accurate. Whether your DNA is compared to somebody else’s by a private company like 23&Me or by law enforcement, they are not going to sequence your entire genetic information. The costs for sequencing an entire genome are still estimated to be around 1000$ and ain’t nobody got money for that. What they do instead is look at several distinct sections of your DNA and calculate your degree of relation depending on the matches in differences they find in those. The more sections they look at, they more accurate the results will be but depending on how much money you invest it will be somewhere between fairly and somewhat accurate.

The information put forward by this project will however get better and better the more data they collect and it’s pretty cool endeavor over all.

That still doesn’t tell us how closely Jon and Dany are actually related, since this chart does not consider the insane amount of inbreeding that went on in House Targaryen.

5. Targcest vs Nocest, the coefficient of relationship and how closely Jon and Dany are actually related

Jon and Dany might be aunt and nephew in name, but not in genes.

To start things out, let me show you how brother-sister incest influences the genes shared by their children by the hypothetical path of one chromosome pairs inheritance. I determined which parts of which chromosome would be passed on with a random number generator.

But where do the expected 12,5 and 75% come from? I didn’t just pull them out of my ass, so let me explain:

5.1 Calculating the coefficient of relationship

That percentage is also called the coefficient of relationship. It tells you what percentage of DNA two people are expected to share by common ancestry. The easiest way to calculate it is through drawing a family tree and simply counting lines. The more generations that family tree includes, showing also any degree of inbreeding in the past, the more accurate the calculation is. Using the last three or four will however be sufficiently accurate in most cases.

This is your average family tree without any inbreeding:

To find out how much DNA the siblings John and Jane Doe have in common, you look at all common ancestors through which they are related, ie through which you can draw paths from one to the other without passing through the same ancestor twice. In this case, this is only true for their parents. Let’s simplify their family tree down to that relationship.

I have included their grandparents to highlight why they can’t be used in the same way. If you were to connect John and Jane through one of them you would always have to go back through either their father and mother and passing through the same person twice isn’t allowed.

There is one unique path through which they are connected through their first common ancestor: Their father.

Now, what does the number of line segments tell us? As stated above Jane Doe and Joe Doe are each going to inherit 1/2 of their fathers DNA. Put differently, each part of Papa Doe’s DNA has an equal chance to be inherited or not.

It’s like flipping coins, there is a 1/2 chance to get heads and a 1/2 chance to get tails and if you flip a coin several times it will show heads 1/2 of the time and tails 1/2 of the time. This essay has already gotten way out of hand already and I don’t want go into the basics of probability calculation as well but I promised to explain all this in excruciating detail so I guess I have no choice.

You have 1000 thousand coins, flip them and lay them out in a row. ~500 of them will show head, ~500 of them show tails. Heads symbolizes the half of dad’s DNA that is passed on to the firstborn child, tails is the half that isn’t. This symbolizes the 50% of Joe Doe’s DNA that John inherited, symbolized by line 1 in the graphic above.

You do the same thing once again for the second child and lay out the row next to that of it’s older sibling. That’s the 50% Jane inherited from her father, that’s line 2 in the chart.

To find out how much DNA inherited from their father it has in common with its older sibling, you look at all their coins that show heads and count how often their siblings coin next to it also shows heads.

Since you are again looking at a sample of randomly flipped coins, about 1/2 of them will show heads and half of them won’t. That means 1/4 (one half of one half or 1/2 x 1/2) of the coin pairs will both show heads, meaning that 1/4 of their DNA is identical through inheriting the same genes from their father.

One (1) line segment simply stands for a probability of 1/2, and since 2^-1 is just another way of writing 1/2 we will use this notation. (2^-2 being equal to 1/2, 2^-2 to 1/4, 2^-3 to 1/8, 2^-4 to 1/16 and so on and so forth.)

The amount of identical DNA two people inherited from a common ancestor is 2^-[amount of line segments].

In this case it’s two lines, so 2^-2 = 1/4 = 0,25 = 25%.

We do the same thing for their second common ancestor, their mother, and also get 2^-2. By adding this two together we get our final answer:

2^-2 + 2^-2 = 0,25 + 0,25 = 0,5 = 50%

They inherited the same 25% from their father and the same 25% from their mother, making 50% in total.

If you want to calculate the amount of DNA shared between someone and their direct ancestor (mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, etc) you simply count the lines directly connecting the two. 2^-1 or 50% for parents and child, 2^-2 for grandparents and grandchildren and so on.

Next are first cousins. John Doe and Jane Doe each got married and had a child with their perspective partner (that have no relevant, close common ancestry with each other or with the Doe family)

They can be connected through two common ancestors: Grandpa and Grandma Doe. They can both be connected through either of them with one unique path:

If we count the lines and enter the number into our little formula, their coefficient of relationship is 2^-4 + 2^-4 = 0,125 or 12,5%.

You can also see in this charts how closely related Daughter Doe is to her Aunt Jane Doe: You simply ignore the fourth line that would connect her to her cousin and get 2^-3 + 2^-3 = 0,25 or 25%.

Before jumping into the clusterfuck that is the Targaryen family tree here are two examples that are a bit more convoluted but that can still happen in real life, with no incest involved.

Sibling-cousins or 3/4 siblings if two brothers have two children with the same woman (or vice versa)

In this case, John Doe, the Second and Jake Doe, the Second, have three relevant ancestors in common: Their grandparents and their mother.

They are connected through their mother with two lines, so we can start our calculation with 2^-2

and through their grandparents with one unique line each with a length of four, which makes: 2^-2 + 2^-4 + 2^4 = 0,375 = 37,5%. Another way of coming to that number is by thinking about them being both half-siblings (25%) and cousins (12,5%) and adding those percentages together 37,5%. You could make the joke that their fathers are also their uncles. Just without any incest involved.

The last special case I want to talk about before moving on the Targaryen family tree, are double cousins. When two siblings marry two siblings.

Son Mustermann and Daughter Joe have four grandparents in common, whereas “ordinary” cousins will only share two. You can again look at all the unique paths through which they are connected through those four to get their shared DNA:

Through Grandma Doe: 2^-4

plus Grandpa Doe makes: 2^-4 + 2^-4

plus Oma Mustermann makes: 2^-4 + 2^-4 + 2^-4

plus Opa Mustermann makes: 2^-4 + 2^-4 + 2^-4 + 2^-4 = 0,25 or 25%. They are quite literally “double”cousins. We have already doubled the amount of shared DNA between the children of two siblings and we haven’t even thrown incest into the mix! Which we shall do now.

5.2 How closely Daenerys and Jon are actually related

The last known common ancestors of Daenerys and Rhaegar who were not related to each other were their Great-Grandparents, Aegon V and his wife Betha Blackwood. Adding earlier ancestors wouldn’t make any sense since their paths would need to lead through Aegon twice (which we don’t do). Here is the relevant part of the Targaryen family ladder in all it’s incestuous glory:

As you can already see, there are tons of unique ways through which Dany and Jon are connected through common ancestors. In order to make this a bit simpler, I will work my way down from top to bottom.

How close are Aegon and Betha related? 0%. No known common ancestry.

How close are Jaehaerys and Shaera related? 50% Same as every other brother and sister. You can just look at the example shown above.

However, how close Aerys and Rhaella are related is an entirely different matter. We can draw paths through both their parents and grandparents without going through the same ancestors twice.

Their coefficient or relationship through their mother and father remains unchanged: 2^-2 + 2^-2 = 0,50. Things are a bit more complicated when it comes to their grandparents though:

Aerys and Rhaella are connected through Aegon through two (2) distinct paths with 4 segments each: 2^-4 + 2^-4

and through Betha through two distinct lines with 4 segments each: 2^-4 + 2^-4.

You may notice that this is the exact same configuration of lines as the double-cousins example above. The only difference is that their four shared grandparents are condensed into only two people. And indeed, Aerys and Rhaella are both full-siblings and double-cousins. Aerys’ mother is also his aunt and his father is also his uncle and the same is true for Rhaella.

By adding the expected amount of common DNA inherited from each ancestor together, we get:

2^-2 + 2^-2 + 2^-4 + 2^-4 + 2^-4 + 2^-4 = 0,75 = 75%.

And Rhaegar and Dany? They are related through their parents with 50%, to their grandparents with 25% (same as Aerys and Rhaella) and also through their great-grandparents through ...

4 times 2^-6 through Betha and ...

4 times 2^-6 through Aegon which ...

makes 4 x 2^-6 + 4 x 2^-6 = 0,125 or 12,5% common DNA through their Great-Grandparents which ....

makes 50 + 25 + 12,5 = 87,5% in total.

I will even do you the favor and calculate their 99 percentile range according to the latest data of the shared cM project!

They are full siblings: ave % = 50, range = 42 - 64%

They are first cousins two times over: ave % = 25, range = 16 - 35%

They are second cousins four times over: ave % = 12,5%, range = 2,5% - 27,6%

Making their (very unlikely) minimum amount of shared DNA: 60,5% and their (equally unlikely) maximum amount of common DNA: .. 126,6%. Let’s just say 100% because more than that is ... literally impossible.

If we now want to calculate the coefficient of relationship between Jon and Daenerys we can either do that whole thing again, adding one line-segment that connects Jon to Rhaegar, or we can just take the easy route and take Dany and Rhaegar’s coefficient and divide it by two (since Jon got half is DNA from Lyanna and half is DNA from Rhaegar and he will inherit the parts shared with Dany and the ones who are not proportionally).

Which means ... Dany and Jon are at least (!) 30,25% related (if you want to be intellectually dishonest and assume that they always only inherited the least amount possible from each common ancestor they share), most likely 43,75% related, with a potential maximum amount of 50%.

Not 1,7% or 25%, but ~30% or ~44%. Or maybe even 50%.

And I haven’t even considered their shared ancestry through their Blackwood great-grandmothers but since we don’t know how those two were related to each other and it’s only going to matter to ~1% I just won’t bother with it.

Whether Jon looks more like Ned or Daenerys doesn’t matter. He “only” shares about 25% of his DNA with Ned and about 44% with Daenerys and that is a fact. While big differences in shared genes might make a bit of a difference in which grandmother you resemble more, that effect is going to be dwarfed by the interplay of dominant and recessive alleles. He only shares about 12,5% of his DNA with Arya (okay, maybe a tad more because of the intermarriages in house stark, but I really don’t feel like going through all the trouble to calculate that as well. It’s not going to be as severe as the incest of House Targaryen) and they still look super alike because they both inherited the same dominant genes.

After reading all 5201 words of this, you will hopefully never, ever, ever again write or even think that a) Jon got more genes from his mother and that b) he and Dany might only share as little 1,7% of their DNA.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, isn’t genetics a fascinating topic?

#Jon Snow #Daenerys Targaryen #House Targaryen

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qqueenofhades · 5 years

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I know you dont watch GoT anymore. And that Braime and Sansa are your favorites. But I know you've read the books and are obviously really interested in the story. And I was just wondering what your thoughts are on the whole Jon killing Dany thing? Is that something you can see happening in the books? And if it is do you think it'd be in the same context as the show did it?

Ahaha, welp. Just jumping right in there.

(Also, you never have to apologise for asking GOT/ASOIAF questions. I obviously have been a fan for 16 years and wrote fuckin’ TNR with its half-million-plus words, so I clearly do have Thoughts on the story/characters, especially with the bag of lukewarm cat vomit that was s8 of the show.)

I already answered this ask discussing how much I hated the Mad Queen Dany thing, both because a) it was horrifically badly handled and b) these mediocre misogynist douchegobblers have managed to outdo themselves in terms of the gross messages they’ve sent about women, after 8 seasons of that. (These are the same people who made Sansa say that she was grateful for her rapes and who claimed that Dany’s turn into madness was foreshadowed by her having a “chilly” reaction to the death of her abuser, Viserys, in s1, so…. make of that what you will.) I’m not saying that it was narratively impossible, especially since GRRM has been toying with the same thing in the books and has more than his own share of Male Author Syndrome. But at the start of 8x04, Dany is in Winterfell, perfectly sane, toasting Arya as hero of the battle. By the end of 8x06, she’s crazy, a war criminal, and dead, murdered by her boyfriend, because… well, something something plot reasons. Even if you didn’t like Dany or were rooting for her to go mad or whatever, that was wildly badly handled.

I personally think it would be pretty gross for GRRM to also go down the Mad Queen route, though at least if he does, we will have had Dany’s POV chapters beforehand and presumably something resembling a justification and a building narrative momentum toward it. But she also got stuck in Meereen for so long because by his own admission he didn’t know what to do with her there or how to get her out of the situation and moved onto Westeros, which remains, theoretically, her outstanding goal in the books. It would obviously not be outside the realm of possibility for this to happen, given GRRM’s focus on “grittiness” that the show took to max factor 5000. I would still find it reductive and trying to make a Clever Postmodern Point and etc if it happened in the books, because literally why invest us in a character this long, especially one who has tried so hard to overcome the circumstances of her past/to not be her father, and then just do exactly that? Obviously there would be elements of Shakespearean tragedy to it, and if done well it could be compelling, but I personally just have a different approach to fiction and what people want out of a story (especially one now as famous as GOT/ASOIAF and how universally betrayed everyone seems to feel by the ending). I’m not saying Dany’s ultimate ending needs to be sunshine and roses and getting what she wants, because often character arcs and resolutions become all the more powerful for being subverted and thwarted (think the “I said I wanted [x] but [y] was there instead” sort of endings). But whatever it is, it needs to be…. not that.

Also, Jon in both books and especially show has been the epitome of Mediocre White Man. I stopped watching in s4, but Kit Harington’s acting was so wooden and the writing for him was very much Standard Misunderstood Brooding Fantasy Hero that I could barely pay attention to his scenes. I find him somewhat more interesting in the books, though ADWD dragged for everyone and it was obvious GRRM was writing in circles. But everyone has noticed that especially in the show, Jon does absolutely bupkis. His ass is constantly saved by the women in his life, he makes an absolute hash of any power that he is given and doesn’t want it anyway, and his ultimate ending was…. going back to the Night’s Watch (as their idea of satisfying narrative storytelling is to literally put everyone back where they were in the very first episode, apparently). Never mind the fact that there’s no need for the Night’s Watch, but the point is, even the fact that Jon is Rhaegar and Lyanna’s son ended up being relevant for like half an episode. That has been one of the major plot points/secrets of the books (although not so much anymore) and it just…. fizzled out like a damp squib. Dany actually TRIED for multiple seasons to be a good ruler and to learn how to handle power and become a queen, so for her to have to be the one to die for Jon to once again do diddlysquat is… well, as I have said before, the misogyny leaps out. They ended up wasting so much potential and so many other things that were also foreshadowed (and far more convincingly than “wah wah she was gonna go evil!”). For this? So Jon can just go brood in the snow again? Cool.

Not to mention, I find it gross on principle that Dany’s boyfriend had to be the one to kill her, especially after rape/sexual violence/loss of agency was such a big part of her early-season storylines (and how horrifyingly and grossly that has been handled on the show overall). We’re obviously supposed to sympathize with Jon in this scenario and to feel that it is justified to “stop a tyrant” or whatever. Also, if the episode was going to be called “Queenslayer,” why the fuck wasn’t it Jaime fulfilling the valonqar prophecy, another thing they forgot about, and killing Cersei, at great personal grief/cost, to once more stop an insane monarch from burning down King’s Landing? But that, of course, would be actual character development/overall arc, and they preferred to also trash that by having Jaime “killed Aerys Targaryen literally to save half a million innocent people and lived with his reputation being destroyed ever after” Lannister unironically claim that he never cared about the lives of the innocent and only wanted Cersei. After she again tried to kill him and Tyrion like three days ago, not even to mention what they did to Brienne and with that whole arc, but I will have a ragestroke if I think about it too much.

Basically, the ending wasn’t “bittersweet.” It was tragic, reductionist, ham-handed, hugely disappointing for everyone who put years of investment into these characters, and ended up in the amusing position of making Bran Stark the younger and more beautiful queen who comes to cast Cersei down. He became king because… reasons? Whatever? And he knows literally everything about everyone thanks to being the Three-Eyed Raven, so there’s no way that can go horribly wrong. He has basically done nothing except sit in a wheelchair and look creepy for several years now, his arc has never been remotely about being king, and Isaac Hempstead-Wright himself is apparently on record as saying he genuinely thought it was a joke script when he read it. This after both Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington broke down over learning what happened to their characters/Kit apparently realized it for the first time at the read-through and was horrified. Emilia already talked about wandering for five hours and having a crisis and calling her mom and asking to be talked off the ledge like….. fictional choices/characters completely aside, that’s a gross thing to do to your actors. I know they’re all proud of their work and they have apparently and understandably been defensive about the existence of the petition to rewrite s8, but they’ve all been pretty clear, while still being professional and supportive, that there is stuff that they’re just as much WTF about as we are.

Basically, as everyone keeps saying, the acting, cinematography, visual effects, music, etc was clearly up to as high a standard as ever, but was betrayed fundamentally and comprehensively by this god-awfully shit writing by a couple of hacks who clearly rushed the final season to get on to ruining working on Star Wars. They have also been on record about saying “you can’t do what the audience expects or it’ll get boring blah blah blah,” which is a profoundly flawed storytelling strategy if you’re paranoid and trying to outsmart your audience and do something that nobody has ever thought of because you’re an Intellectual Postmodern Commentator On Our Violent Society. If your audience can guess where a story is going, but are still surprised by major twists along the way that then make sense in hindsight, you’ve done your job. If you’re relying on grimdark and cramming in gimmicky plot twists and deus ex machinas and Shocking Moments rather than authentically developing your story, it’s going to bite you in the ass in a big way, as was just proven.

Nobody expected a completely happy ending from GoT. But the fact that they went to such lengths, especially in s8, to build up characters/ships (Jonerys, Braime, Gendrya were all torched after major canon moments completely unexpected by fans, especially the latter two – why even include it unless to just be more Tragique, and Gendrya is the only one that has even a chance in the future since half of it didn’t end up idiotically dead) and then just wrecked all of it…. as I’ve said, good endings don’t need to be rainbows and unicorns and kittens. But if you’ve asked eight years of audience investment, there has to be something that makes it worth it and that doesn’t make everyone feel like they were duped and stupid to get involved in the first place. They have been beating the “it’s a hard world and bad things happen to the characters” drum for all they’re worth, but… it’s just bad. You can analyse and ask why the hell they did things and so forth, but it’s bad. At this rate, the show should have either ended after 8x03, or they should have taken the money HBO offered and done the proper 10 episodes and let Bryan Cogman write all of them. He was the only one who appeared to remotely give a shit about the characters, and since D&D wrote the last four episodes themselves, yeah, this disaster is on them.

Fortunately, I left the show years ago and have TNR and am used to ignoring their version of things. And I knew all along that they never really got the characters or the story. But I feel really bad for everyone who has had this thrown back in their face, and it seems like a communal disenchantment with this ending is going to enter the pop-culture consciousness on a possibly unprecedented level. So if GRRM does do the Mad Queen Dany killed by Jon in the books (though he has apparently called the show’s ending “traumatic”), I’ll probably still not like it. He has a chance to sell me it on/justify it to me narratively, which the show categorically failed to do. I don’t think I will, just because as I said, I don’t like anything about it, but yes.

Anyway. This is a long post already, and I probably have more to say still, but it’s pretty obvious I think it’s just really, really bad, and that’s about the essence of it.

#got #got spoilers #got critical #anonymous #ask

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janiedean · 6 years

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But why do you hate Cersei that much? Is it because you are hardcore JamiexBrienne shipper? (Classic)

… this question was fairly fine until the classic, which denotes a certain passive-aggressiveness typical of the usual cersei stan so excuse me if instead of getting a nice answer I might have toned down a bit you’re getting all the ugly truth - next time consider not implying that I’d hate a character just because it’s in the way of my ship, thank you, since I tend to actually multiship and I don’t hate jeynew for being technically an obstacle to my main ship and so on. but okay. you wanna know? let’s go in order,

spoilers: this is gonna be ugly, I am not going to hold back any venom and so if you like cersei you’re welcome to not read this. I warned you.

one: classic. my dear anon, I’ll tell you a secret: 80% of the jb fandom actually likes cerse. I’m in the minority. most people I know who ship jb either also ship jc or like cersei as a villain/as the horrid person she is because they enjoy a well-written villain. i don’t, but most *hardcore jb shippers* actually LIKE cersei. if then you take ‘she’s horrible but I love her character’ as people hating her then it’s your goddamned problem.

two: I actually loathed her abusive, controlling, manipulative and murdering ass way before brienne even showed up in the book let alone reading asos.

NO, REALLY.

three: I find cersei a technically very well-built and written character. no, really.

four: too bad that if there’s one thing I hate in fiction is incompetent villains, and if there’s three kinds of people I hate irl it’s a) people who think they’re so much better than the others, b) people who use person X who loves them as an emotional punching bag/their own servant without realizing what’s wrong with it, c) people who don’t accept responsibilities of their actions. rings a bell?

ah, right.

five: I find cersei’s povs utterly, terribly and fucking boring. okay, she’s insane, okay, she’s completely out of this world, okay, she’s great in her being completely insane and wanting to rule, okay, she’s a great villain, I found it amusing for one chapter and then I fell asleep. I can’t care less to be in the head of a narcissist asshole who thinks the world is an extension of herself and digs her own grave while blaming everyone else for her shortcomings and not even getting it when she’s directly confronted with it.

six: cersei is a fucking disgusting human being. and before y’all go like BUT ROBERT, I’m just gonna say that I am in no way, shape or form required to be interested in someone who threw a 12 year old into a well because said person dared say she had a crush on her brother when she also was twelve herself. like. okay, maybe for some people she’s interesting, to me that’s child psychiatrist material.

seven: I have also absolutely no fucking interest in an abusive fuck who spent her entire life actively or not actively trying to prevent jaime from actually having an identity separated from hers or who sexually molested her other brother while he was in the crib and justifies it with WELL HE’S A MONSTER. no, fuck you.

eight: an abusive fuck who also thinks she’s her father and couldn’t do politics if they hit her in the face. I mean, I actually like roose as a character and I don’t hate him even if he actively put a knife inside my actual favorite character’s heart because a) he’s not an incompetent fuck, b) he knows when you should not do horrid stuff because it’s not politically convenient, c) just wanted to rule his damned land and isn’t going out of his way to mess shit up jUST BECAUSE HE HAS THE POWER. cersei is just that, all along, and I can’t give a fuck about it.

nine: I have absolutely zero sympathy for 99% of her plights - at most I can give her that marrying robert was miserable, but OMG I AM A WOMAN IT PREVENTS ME FROM BEING MY FATHER SO NOW I WILL HAVE TO BE HORRID TO EVERYONE ELSE WHILE EXCUSING MYSELF ALL ALONG is not my cup of tea.

ten: OMG SHE’S A WONDERFUL MOTHER!!!! yeah a wonderful mother who sends tommen to whip someone when he’s not tough enough, totally great. and fandom even buys that. blergh.

eleven: I can’t stand her treatment of jaime and tyrion but jaime especially and I find it absolutely revolting and excuse me but I might find it such especially since if you look at it she basically dragged him into doing sexual stuff when they were younger than eight and from then on she did everything to make sure he wouldn’t have a life apart from her when she was ready to drop him if rhaegar accepted to marry her? like, why the fuck am I obliged to like this kind of person if it’s not my kind of character? ah, and it’s not about the incest because if that was the problem I wouldn’t be here shipping thor and loki and the other three sibling incests I occasionally shipped throughout my life, I just hated it since book one. am I allowed?

twelve: I’m gonna tell you a secret now (not so much but whatever). I read books 1-5 in a month marathoning and I didn’t exactly have time to form opinions until after I was done, and I started shipping jb during asos but I mean it sailed at the end and I was mild shipping, not hardcore. you know when was the moment where I thought, re cersei, omg fuck you I hope you die in a fire we’re Done I’m never giving you second chances I don’t care you can choke didn’t even have anything to do with jaime, it was when they were discussing the red wedding post-thing and someone said that catelyn went insane when she watched robb die in front of him and she started laughing about it. and excuse me anyone who finds the red wedding funny ESPECIALLY someone who professes that they’re a wonderful mother who loves her children is completely banned from my list of people who deserve me giving them a second chance to get back in my ‘I like you’ list. okay? my favorite character is robb, cat is in my top ten and I actually love cat to bits even if I don’t agree with her on half of what she says/we are fundamentally different in a lot of fundamental aspects, except that cat’s not an asshole and I can like her because she has things I like about her other than being very well-written, cersei’s just well-written but for the rest she’s the sum of everything I hate in a) fictional villains, b) people irl.

thirteen: also, the fandom tends to justify basically everything this asshole does with the excuse that she’s a woman so SHE’S AN EMPOWERED PROTO-FEMINIST when no she’s fucking not and cersei stans regularly show up bashing on my jb shipping that I try to keep actively away from them for example not tagging anything I say about cersei because I know they don’t wanna read it, while the brienne tag is riddled with crap like OMG YOU SAY SHE HAS TO BE CISHET JUST BECAUSE YOU SHIP HER WITH JAIME BOOO, or gems like ‘omg jb fans are all ugly women who want to bang jaime and project on brienne how pathetic muahahaha cersei had it so much worse’ plus coming on anon at regular intervals to send shit to people in the jb tag (I even have a tagged/jb-wank tag for it, TRY IT), so her fans definitely made sure that I went to general dislike to full-on hatred and that’s not even counting d&d trying to make cersei more sympathetic. blergh. as if there’s the need.

fourteen: I also don’t need to like someone who has no problem condemning people to death, ordering TWENTY children dead without losing a moment of sleep on it (I mean theon did the same with two and has nightmares about it, jon swapped two didn’t even kill them and he has nightmares about it, this asshole hasn’t even thought about it once), ordering people tortured or unethically experimented on and ordering rape on other women (in the show at least) all along while thinking she’s the best thing that ever happened to this planet. I have a few limits and people who only think about themselves and see other people in terms of HOW USEFUL THEY ARE TO ME are one of them, thanks.

fifteen: and for that matter, my favorite fictional villain ever is randall flagg ie a dude who killed an entire planet once or almost and who’s an unrepentant asshole and unapologetically evil, except that he actually doesn’t think he’s this great person because of it. he’s just evil incarnated, but what the hell. I like competent villains who don’t try to tell themselves they aren’t villains and who don’t frame their actions as anything but horrid shit. I’m fine if they enjoy it and I’m fine if they have a skewed set of morals according to which they see it as perfectly acceptable, but cersei doesn’t have a skewed set of morals, cersei’s just fucking out of it and has the worst narcissistic disorder in recent literary history. and she’s an incompetent fuck who thinks she’s better than everyone else who abuses everyfuckingone she runs into, and I just said jaime and tyrion but if I got into sansa, lancel, tommen, myrcella and just about everyone she interacts with I’d end up the day after tomorrow.

sixteen: my dislike was thoroughly cemented by how much I didn’t enjoy her pov chapters in affc/adwd but that was way before I hardcore shipped jb because at that point the only things I HARDCORE shipped were jon/sam and sandor/sansa, I wasn’t even shipping t/rhobb at that point. and my hardcore j/b shipping happened by the end of affc/by the time I was finished, and even then it took me one year to actually get into that side of fandom for real. so, no, actually the fact that I ship j/b has absolutely nothing to do with my dislike of cersei ie a character I disliked in got, hated in acok, was disgusted by all of the damned time in asos and throroughly detested in affc for reasons that guess what had everything to do with her and nothing to do with me shipping jaime with someone else.

because really, as long as he got away from that abusive fuck that’s his sister, he could have done it with arthur dayne, catelyn, the blackfish, fucking jon connington, oberyn or tv!bronn for what I care. I absolutely hate her also because I want jaime far away from her, but as long as he is, the fact that brienne is there and she’s his canon love interest (deal - with - it) is just a good convenient thing. otherwise I still would want him a planet away from that asshole that’s his sister. clear? shipping jb has nothing to do with that. fuck’s sake, the two most popular jon ships are jon/sansa and jon/dany and I ship him with EVERYONE BUT THOSE TWO and robb, and guess what I don’t hate sansa or robb (they’re both in my top ten/fifteen) and I don’t care about dany either way. I’m not so fucking not objective that I loathe a character so much just because they’re canonically in the middle of my ship, I’d be an immature or it’d be an immature reason and I’m enough of an adult to actually admit it. she happens to be in the middle of my ship more or less, but believe me I don’t hate elia or lyanna for being in the middle of r/jonc, sure as fuck I don’t hate cersei because she’s in the middle of jb.

I hate cersei because all of us has limits when it comes to irl and fictional characters and she’s wildly beyond all of mine and guess what, that was clear since the moment I read book one, after which jaime was my second-fave overall and she was at the damned bottom of the list. ah, except that if you dare liking jaime but not her you’re suddenly a Bad Feminist because liking the man out of the two of them but not her means you’re somehow having internalized misogyny. when instead it could be that jaime’s actually not an asshole and she is, but since, oh, wait, this fandom villanizes jaime a lot because in order to justify the crap cersei does they have to go along with that fucking THEY’RE THE SAME PERSON spiel which the narrative had denied from page five of the first tyrion pov chapter or so, I also have to get told that if I like the lannister guys (who are grey and fucked up but not inherently bad people and ah wait, both abuse victims since the damned cradle while she’s not) but not her I’m a Bad Feminist TM and excuse me but that attitude should have died years ago and it also helped making sure I would never budge when it came to c.

seventeen: the fact that the more time passes the less I can’t stand her means I can’t stand her in the show either. wow, too bad. I also couldn’t stand the th/ramsay scenes and watched them muted. but did I go ask t/hramsay ppl how they found them watchable? no. because I mind my own fucking business. and I wasn’t gonna even say it until people basically had to tear it out of me keeping on telling me I should like cersei/lena’s portrayal better than kit/jon because she’s a better actress than he is. most likely, but I don’t wanna punch jon in the face. and I wanna punch cersei in the face. for all the above reasons.

that have nothing to do with jb and all to do with the fact that cersei is an abusive/manipulative/incompetent fuck. okay?

there. that’s why I hate cersei. satisfied?

ps: and that’s why I don’t talk about cersei outside of jb meta, because I know that 50% of this is most probably my flawed subjective opinion and that she irks me also because of personal reasons that don’t have to be rational (there’s a reason why I hate incompetent idiots irl and why I hate people who think your life revolves around theirs irl btw) and that people will like her for a lot of the reasons why I dislike her. it’s fair. and that’s why I usually don’t share.

but if you really had to ask, that’s your damned answer.

classic, my ass. 80% of jb fans around actually don’t agree with me on 80% of what I wrote. some of us just don’t fucking like cersei. deal. with. it.

thanks for coming to my fucking ted talk.

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #anti-cersei lannister #anti-cersei #swearing cw #i guess i cussed a lot in this one #va bene va bene va bene in verità #abuse cw #rape cw #torture cw #child murder cw #WOW WHAT AN UPSTANDING CITIZEN #Anonymous #ask post #long post for ts

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sxpiosexualx · 6 years

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why do you ship jonsa? my best friend is a hard core jonerys shipper but lately ive been really critical of daenerys, so i cant really hop on that train. i dont really have a preference for jon either way so i wanted to know why you ship them

Oh hello! What a lovely question to ask, though I must warn you this could most likely get draggy and long because I’m so passionate about these two and this ship, they’re my OTP. Actually I only started reading the books last year, before then I was a casual watcher until up to Feb 2016 before season 7 aired. Jon and Sansa had just reunited on the show and I came across this Jonsa instagram on my explore page and I thought, what the fuck is this? It was such an absurd ship to consider - and this is coming from someone who was crack shipping Tommen and Sansa! But I kept scrolling through, the captions in the post came from posts on Tumblr(with credit) explaining the parallels and the ways in which Jonsa could go down and it was sort of like… this strange theory that I subscribed to and was soon convinced of. I tried bringing it up to my friend but she was a casual watcher and didn’t really pay much attention to it so I was craved of my need to discuss this. So come season 7, I rejoined Tumblr and the Jonsa tag was SO rich in content and meta, detailing all the parallels, how it could happen, why it makes sense and how it would wrap up up the narrative in the most satisfying manner. I’ve never shipped something so hard and wanted it to be canon more than with Jonsa(though canon or not I’m not fussy lol).

I’m gonna outline to you some of the main reasons why I think Jonsa has a strong chance of happening in canon, because they’re really why I ship them so hard, they complement each other perfectly though it’s very easy to miss this. I’m keeping this under a ‘Keep Reading’ tab because I know this will get lengthy. Also, any of my followers/people seeing this, do add on in the comments why you ship jonsa or perhaps leave some links to some of your fav meta’s in the comments for OP to screen through if they feel like it!

This will be lengthy but remember I am trying my best to be brief, hopefully the other Jonsa’s will link some metas/parallel series to give you a better idea - I’m only outlining the backbone of the ship!

The Ashford Tourney Pattern

So it actually began when I came across this theory: The Tourney at Ashford was held in-universe, and I wont go much into detail except to mention that all of the 5 champions in that tourney coincide with the houses of the men Sansa is betrothed/married to (i.e. Sansa’s suitors). It goes

Lyonel Baratheon

Leo Tyrell

Tybolt Lannister

Humfrey Hardyng, and,

Valarr Targaryen.

Now, granted the show’s made some changes but ultimately they’re coming to the same conclusion, and as for book!Sansa(i.e. canon) she’s first betrothed to Joffrey Baratheon, then is promised to Willas Tyrell(changed to Loras on the show), marries Tyrion Lannister, is currently in the works of being betrothed to Harry Hardyng(in the Vale - the Ramsay plot is not hers), and so the logical conclusion would be to complete the pattern by marrying her final suitor, the endgame - a Targaryen. That makes Jon the only candidate viable to her, and yes that sounds ‘out there’ but if you take a look at the narrative, it could make complete sense, so let’s go into how this could logically happen.

Logic

Given the story began with the Starks being the heart of the series, you can only anticipate that the final installation, initially named A Time For Wolves would promise a continuation of the Stark line, and that could come about through Jon and Sansa. They are the only Starks left who’s storyline touches on ideas of fatherhood and motherhood - the only Starks left to ever consider having future children(and weirdly enough where Sansa wants to name her children Bran and Rickon and thinks of a girl who looks like Arya in her dreams of children, Jon wants to name his son Robb - even their dreams complement each other, they’d be rebuilding the Stark family with themselves), the only Starks left to think of restoring Winterfell(and they already go on to do this on the show) etc. When you think of Sansa and how she’s had to fight hard to retain her Stark identity and reclaim it, I cannot imagine GRRM marrying her off to some random lord at the end of the series, when she’s just made it back home. For Jon too, he’s wanted Winterfell, and dreamed of that domestic life as Lord of Winterfell, as a Stark, and Sansa, the Key to the North, could give him that - the same way her marrying Jon who’s actually a prince would be fulfilling her childhood dream as well. They both get what they want in the way they least expect it, something very GRRM-esque. There’s the narrative convenience of R+L=J that would allow for some catharsis once Jon realises he’s not her half-brother, and the convenience of them being the only Starks to not have an established relationship beforehand. But despite that, whenever they do think of the other in the books, it’s never with any resentment, contrary to popular belief, they don’t hate each other(they think of each other fondly, even). It’s something that could work politically in show!verse just as well, say word gets out that Jon’s a Targaryen, the Northern lords would never accept him unless Sansa brokers a political marriage to tame them.

History would also be repeating itself in a poetic way, but done right this time. Jon and Sansa marrying would parallel Ned x Cat, they each parallel them so much and S7 has hammered those visual parallels more than ever. A Stark would be wedding a Tully. And if you embraced Jon as a Targaryen, then they would parallel Rhaegar and Lyanna in a sense too by having a Targaryen prince wed a Stark lady. It also nicely twists what happened to Cersei, where she was supposed to marry a Targaryen prince(Rhaegar) but ends up marrying a Baratheon(Robert) - Sansa was betrothed to Joffrey Baratheon, but would be marrying a Targaryen prince in Jon, which only adds another layer to her being the YMBQ from Cersei’s prophecy if you subscribe to that!

Complementary Storylines

If you take a closer look at Jon and Sansa’s arcs, they tend to echo off of each other, always linking the two through themes, yet the author does a great deal to ensure they’re the last two Starks we ever associate with each other which honestly, would be something he’d do if he meant to pull them marrying as a huge plot twist no one would expect. But thematically, both Jon and Sansa:

start their arcs as naive,

are the Starks most interested in leaving WF - Jon goes to the Wall where he assumes the men are ideal knights, and Sansa journeys South with romanticised ideas of court, and both characters are quickly disappointed.

Jon gets dubbed “crow” for most of his arc, the same way Sansa gets dubbed “little bird/dove”.

Both characters at the same time, have to pretend to be something they’re not around their enemies - Jon going undercover as a Wildling, while Sansa had to blend in with the Lannisters.

They both get dubbed traitor around the same time too, Jon’s seen as a traitor for leaving the Wildlilngs while Sansa gets dubbed traitor/murderer once they thought she poisoned Joffrey as she leaves KL.

Jon who starts off as a bastard, rises to the title of Lord Commander at the Nights Watch the same time Sansa, who starts off as a Lady, gets forced to pose as Littlefinger’s bastard daughter.

It’s the same case on the show, and there’s reason enough to believe Jon and Sansa will be the first Starks to reunite in the books and reclaim Winterfell as well(though the circumstances may be different, it’s heavily foreshadowed in Sansa’s final ASOS chapter).

Complementary Dreams

GRRM has a weird way of connecting these two through their shared dreams. Where Sansa’s final chapter in ASOS heavily foreshadows that she’ll come to rebuild Winterfell with Jon(and she already goes onto do this on the show with Jon), Jon is also the only other Stark to think of reclaiming and rebuilding it, and this occurs in the same book. They’re both weirdly also the only Stark kids to be referred to as the Blood of Winterfell. ASOS(the 3rd book in the series) is also where both these characters start to undergo a sexual awakening(Ygritte’s attempts with Jon, and Sansa coming into her own body and developing).

It’s the same book where Jon considers having a son of his own, thinking he could name him after Robb, and Sansa thinks of giving her betrothed children, noting that in her dreams her children looked like the brothers she had lost and that she wants to name them Eddard and Brandon and Rickon(after the brothers she’s lost). So yes, while that sounds very odd, these two coming together would actually be giving each other what they long for in a family, children who look like named after their pack. Once you remember that book wise, Jon looks like a carbon copy of Ned and Sansa looks like a more beautiful version of Catelyn then you could only assume their children would look very much like the siblings they grew up with too.

It’s actually strange how alike they are and how their arcs tend to echo off of each other but it even comes down to the same romanticised idea of courtship. Sansa remembers the rose Loras gave to her during the Hand’s Tourney, and when met with the prospect of marrying Willas, starts fantasising of sitting with her lord husband in a garden. Lo and behold, a couple chapters later Jon thinks of showing Ygritte Winterfell, and plucking a flower for her from Winterfell’s glass garden. In other words… they would be perfect together.

Their first loves are stand-ins for each other

Ygritte could actually be seen as a foreshadowing for Sansa, namely because so many of her traits are things we’ve come to associate with the latter but GRRM makes a point to keep this out of Jon’s subconscious in his POV chapters. First in the choice of words in her description, her red hair, her blue-grey eyes(sansa’s eyes are blue), but people tend to stop right there and use it as an excuse to mock the idea of Jon x Sansa immediately which honestly, is lazy. It goes deeper than that. Ygritte weeps when she sings and hears the song of the last of giants, and she’s known to favour songs and tales - things we again associate with Sansa. There’s also the instance of her telling Jon Snow that she’s “half a fish” which seems to nod at the fact that Sansa’s basically half a fish too(Half Tully). Strangely, right after Ygritte words out her famous line “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” in Sansa’s chapter, Sansa sees Margaery’s cousins and comments that “they know nothing,” on their naivety. When Jon gets stabbed, the line is again associated with Sansa in his final thoughts:

“Of Sansa, brushing out Lady’s coat and singing to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow. ”

In Sansa’s case, her first love(crush, really) was a man of the Night’s watch named Waymar Royce(“She had fallen wildly in love with Ser Waymar,”) - who is described as grey-eyed, graceful and slender the same way Jon is first described in AGOT as having grey eyes, being graceful and being slender. The connection between Waymar Royce and Jon Snow is further strengthened in the fact that Waymar(who appears in the very first prologue of the first book) death foreshadows Jon’s death.

Other parallels and easter eggs

There are other ways GRRM’s linked the two in his novels through easter eggs too, for e.g. Sansa calls out for the heroes she knows, calling for Prince Aemon the Dragonknight(from the songs), and then we get a flashback of Jon remembering how he’d play with Robb in the field and pretend to be Prince Aemon the Dragonknight. Sansa also wishes someone would behead Janos Slynt, and Jon goes onto do this in ADWD, unknowingly being the literal hero she asked for.

They both have a strong connection to the pomegranate symbolism, tying them both to the greek mythology of Persephone. And in terms of actual history, Jon and Sansa share heavy parallels with Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York(who ended up joining their houses through marriage after the War of the Roses of which one of the main conflicts of GoT was based on).

There are plenty of other parallels throughout their chapters, one off instances of both characters put in the same environment or situation, more than I could count really. But what I personally find most odd is how some of their chapters completely mirror each other’s in terms of environment, theme and situation. Look to Jon and Sansa’s first and second ASOS chapters(that come right after the other’s) and you’ll find it’s almost like reading the same chapter twice. GRRM’s a man with words, it’s strange how similarly he words and crafts the environment he puts them in, unless he meant for their chapters to echo each other.

It’s not beyond GRRM

We know from his original outline that he intended for Jon and Arya to be the first Starks to reunite at the wall and struggle for non-platonic and very inappropriate feelings for each other which would torment them until Jon’s parentage is revealed in the final book - sounds not that far from what’s happened with Sansa tbh. Again, you have to remember that yes things have changed from the outline, Sansa was meant to choose Joffrey over her family, bore him children, then die, and none of that happened. Arya was also supposed to do a heck lot more in her storyline but what seems to happened is that GRRM knew he could never have Arya accomplish that much plot in so little time and so he might’ve split initial Arya into a fully fleshed version of Sansa, thus why Sansa and Arya are two sides of the same coin. It would also explain why while Arya looks like Lyanna, both sisters possess her traits and parallel her in their respective ways.

With Jonerys… listen… it’s just a doomed pairing. I was open to the idea but there are one too many kinks in it to have it be endgame not to mention Jonerys on the throne would completely go against the anti-war message ASOIAF has established. Not that doomed pairings have ever stopped me from shipping but they’re just so fundamentally different at this point that the idea of them just doesn’t work anymore(season 7′s rushed tryst was problematic and didn’t sell it to me either).

Additional Thoughts

I could drag on but these I think are some of the main points for me. There are a plethora of other reasons backing this up but yeah I think they have a solid chance. Points aside, I guess I also ship them because there is literally no man who’s a viable suitor for Sansa and her status, that could treat her how she deserves - show!Jon has proved himself worthy, and Sansa has fed him with the well deserved validation he’s needed and craved, acknowledgement of him being a Stark. They work so well together.

Jon is the only man in her arc who canonly has acknowledged that “Winterfell belongs to […] Sansa.” i.e. the only man who wouldn’t marry her for her claim. For a girl who came to the realisation that “No one will ever marry me for love.”(which was followed by Jon’s chapter right after btw), that’s a huge deal. A JonSa endgame would be done so out of political reasons but love would no doubt follow. He is the only man to respect her boundaries and treat her as a human being, to see her for more than just her beauty. You can comment a suitor in her arc she was involved with and I will be able to point out how it’s problematic and wouldn’t work for endgame, how Sansa deserves better. JonSa is my OTP because they genuinely and effortlessly are perfect for each other :)

Trust me I could point out more and more, but hopefully people who see this post link some of their metas/own reasons in the comments in case you want to learn more! Thanks for the ask, this was lovely x

#jonsa #jon x sansa #jonsa fam do contribute <3

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bitchfromtheseventhhell · 7 years

Note

what are your asoiaf (maybe pre-asoiaf idk) ships? also merci for being in this shit-storm we call a "fandom", you light in darkness

ahh thanks

i had a lot of fun with this. i’ve deleted more asks than i can count asking me about what ships i don’t like, so getting to squee about what i do and dive down a rabbithole was great!

because i’m a fucking parody of myself, get excited for some layered bullet lists.

Stark

Canon-era

Ned

Ned x Catelyn

Nedbert

I like parts of Ned x Ashara, but wouldn’t say I’m #invested in it

Catelyn

Ned x Catelyn

Cat x Jaime was my first crackship and I’ve grown away from it but it holds a fond place in my heart.

Cat x Cersei would be incredible tbh

Cat x Brienne

Robb

Robb x Jeyne

I was big into Robb x Myrcella back in the day. Less so now, but I’m distantly fond of it.

Throbb (I mean...how can you not love the ship with the name Throbb? It’s like...perfect...as a ship name....and I hate...ship names....)

Robb x Margaery

I’m also casually into things like Robb x Meera and Robb x one of the Mormonts bc Robb x Northern Ladies is great.

I kind of like Robb x Roslin, but prefer Edmure x Roslin and don’t think the “what if the Red Wedding had never happened” AU is interesting to me at the moment.

Jon

Lately I’ve been super big into Jon x Daenerys (in case ya missed it l o l).

This I find to be hilarious because I think there are definitely receipts to be found somewhere on this website of me going “ew jon/dany is so boring ew” womp wompw omp wopm wopmw

Cackling @ my past self

This also happened with me and SanSan which I find similarly hilarious.

Other than that the main one I have is Jon x Asha (the good ship Crowken) because it’d be most excellent and you know it. It’s been a while since I wrote it, and they have never interacted so it’s based purely on potential.

Which lends itself well to the mostly unpopulated ship of Jon x Asha x Daenerys, which like...hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah gimme.

Sansa

Hi I’m perpetually in SanSan hell bye (no, this is not an exagerration)

I also am rowing my little Sansa x Edric rowboat come play it’s great and hits so many of my !!!!!!!!!!s about Sansa’s themework (and also Edric but he’s a smaller character so headcanons abound!)

I wish I shipped Sansa x Brienne more than I do; I salute it from afar tbh, and hope the books will give me more fodder for it.

Sansa x Podrick is heartcluchingly adorable

Sansa x Mya is the lesbian ship that Sansa deserves fight me

I have more emotions than shippy feelings about Sansa and Theon; I think what shippy feels I have come from Theon’s wistfulness more than actively shipping it.

On that note, I also like Sansa x Myrcella a good deal

I’m fond of Sansa x Tyrion tbh and hope they don’t get their marriage anulled in TWOW bc I think that’d be fascinating since everyone assumes it’s gonna happen (including Sansa). I’m down with it as an endgame ship for Sansa t b q h.

Arya

Hello and welcome to my Arya x Gendry tag

I multiship Arya a lot, actually, but AxG hits so many of my personal boners that it’s the big deal in my life and when I find myself in times of trouble, GRRM comes to me, speaking words of wisdom “you can be my forest love and me your forest lass”

I also like Arya x Aegon blame Jo she did this to me

Arya x Myrcella and Arya x Tommen are both wildly underrated ships imo

As is Arya x Shireen

Arya x Hot Pie is something I wasn’t expecting to like but then a few years ago an IRL friend of mine talked about how she goes out, does stuff, and comes home to freshly baked pies and how great that was as a life and I havne’t been able to let go.

Arya x Podrick sure why not

Bran

Bran x Meera = important

Bran x Lyanna Mormont = a big good thing

I respect, even if I don’t ship, Bran x Jojen. Not so much my thing. Bran x Meera is where it’s at for me and the Reeds.

Rickon

HI LET DADVOS BREATHE AND MARRY GAY RICKON TO HIS SON STEFFON K BYE.

Pre-series

Elia x Lyanna is v v v important

Arthur x Lyanna is also a good ship

Arya Flint x Rodrik Stark is a great ship too, I keep meaning to write more of them.

Brandon x Barbrey is a hot mess and I love that

Torrhen Stark x Aegon the Conqueror

Targaryen

Daenerys

As mentioned above Jon x Dany is a thing

I’m also into Dany x Tyrion

Peter Dinklage did this to me he’s so gd talented @ fandom please don’t be really gross and ableist when HBO turns this into a love triangle (since they already did).

Ok, let’s be real here, pissing off Tywin Lannister also did this to me though to a lesser extent than Peter Dinklage can you imagine how mad he’d be? It’d be fantastic. Fuck that guy so hard.

Dany x Asha also is a good

I’m into Dany x Daario because I like Dany having agency and she chose the actual human peacock so you know what girl I personally wouldn’t go there but I’m glad that you got to choose this particular relationship for yourself.

Everyone Else

As mentioned abouve Arya x Aegon

I crackship Rhaenys x Viserys idk man I just do

Big Into Aegon x Betha

I love Elaena Targaryen and all her love interests but if I had to Pick One it’d be Michael Manwoody

I mostly wish I had a ship for Rhaella. Maybe Willem Darry??

Brynden x Shiera is a good ship I have such specific headcanons for them that I did to myself writing a first person modern AU that I keep trying to get people to care about as much as I do.

God I can’t think of other Targaryens, chances are I ship them lol

Lannister

Tyrion

I like Tyrion x Tysha, but am not sure I ever want them to meet again? I’m very torn on that front bc both outcomes would mean such different things.

As I said above, I also like both Dany and Sansa as Tyrion ships

I also have a pointless AU in my head that is a Tyrion x Lyanna au, but I’ll never write it bc I don’t have enough of a plot so much as a “wow I’ve liked this for years.”

Cersei

Jaime

Also Cat as a crackship

Also Rhaegar as a “what if”

Jaime

Cersei

Cat as a crackship

I have very torn and mixed feelings about Jaime/Brienne. It hits a lot of what I like about Brienne, but hits very little of what I care about with Jaime and Saw some Things that Made Me Mad a while back. And then I read Bea’s thesis about Brienne and got even more confused. So idk man idk idk idk. idk.

Baratheon

Robert

Ned is basically the only acceptable ship for Robert tbqh

Though someone wrote a Robert/Cat AU that I liked?

Stannis

Big into Stannis/Asha

And Stannis/Asha/Jon

Also Stannis/Mel

Renly

Loras is it kids.

Gendry

AXG or bust. I’m a multishipper on Arya’s end but am Not Really on Gendry’s. Maybe a Heddle sister? Maybe? but AXG or Bust TBH.

Shireen

Shireen x Devan is the cutest

I also like Shireen x Edric

And Shireen x Arya

Myrcella

Myrcella x Trystane is adorable

Myrcella x Sansa and Myrcella x Arya are similarly cute

Tommen

I read a Tommen x Arya AU I liked--other than that I don’t have major shippy feels about him.

Other Ships

Alys x Sigorn is a top notch ship

Elia x Arthur is a similarly top notch ship

Missandei x Grey Worm is the best thing to happen on GOT tbh.

I’m at the end of my leash and can’t think of more and this is probably more than you bargained for when you sent this ask isn’t it?

If you’re reading this and you saw me miss something lmk??

#me: shipping #anonymous

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diaryofanobsessivefangirl · 7 years

Text

Masterlist of Ships Subtropes

Dynamic tropes

Puppy love

Romance between children.

Examples: Gendry x Arya, Arnold x Helga, Mike x Eleven, Shaoran x Sakura

Childhood Acquaintance

They meet when they were children, regardless of the frequency or how close they were. They may have been raised together, may have saw each other every now and then, or even just once.

Used to be Friends

Examples: Petyr x Catelyn; Erik x Christine; Mina x Lucy

Used to be Lovers

Couples that were officially together (At least had sex) before everything went to hell. Ships that only flirted, such as Anna/David (The Guest) and Jackson/Lisa (Red Eye) are not included.

Examples: Athos x Milady; Tom x Elizabeth (The Blacklist); Dolores x William

Love Makes You Evil

A character who was originally good but did things for love that turn him to the dark side.

Examples: Anakin, Petyr Baelish and Claude Frollo

Love Makes You Crazy

A character driven to the brick of sanity because of love.

Example: Claude Frollo from Notre Dame de Paris and Ram from Princess Daisy

Not So Different After All

Opposites/rivals/enemies that actually have many hidden similarities. They are canonically each other’s shadow and are compared as two sides of the same coin.

Example: Anne x Vincent, Steerpike x Fuchsia, Kylo x Rey, Jackson x Lisa

Love Beyond Death

Meeting in the after-life, meeting reincarnation or person coming back from the dead.

Example: Catherine x Heathcliff, Petyr x Catelyn, Dracula x Mina, Naraku x Kikyo

Dragging You to the Gutter with Me

A villain turns a heroine into a brutal lonely broken thing only he can understand what it’s like to be, and still she won’t come to him. So what keeps them together is also what keeps them apart. Read more.

Example: Naraku and Kikyo; Alina and Darkling; Petyr and Catelyn; Dolores and William

In Love with the Mark

A man who works for some really big, bad guys. He may or not believe in their ideology; that is not the point. He is there for the money and he prides himself of his professionalism. For some reason, this organization working on the shadows have “business” to deal with this ordinary everyday woman. So he is hired to stalk, threaten, or even kill her. Turns out, Stalking is Love, and he develops feelings for his target. That doesn’t stop him from keeping up with the job, thought. He had to be undercover to get closer, so cases of Used to be Lovers/Friends are probably included. You will likely hear from a character In Love With the Mark the quote “It wasn’t personal.”

Example: Jack/Angela; Jackson/Lisa; Vincent/Anne; Tom/Lizzie (Jacob/Masha); Skye/Ward

The Queen and her Champion

Woman occupies traditionally feminine roles of power and the man is an example of masculinity for others. She uses clever words, social understanding and schemes. He is her sword and her armor, but nothing more. Because of their different stances, he is bound to be close to her he protects, but never with her.

Examples: Maly and Alina; Zelda and Link; Lancelot and Guinevere; Rhaenyra Targaryen and Criston Cole; Daenerys and Ser Jorah; Every Elizabeth Tudor romance, Queen Anne and Aramis; Lucrezia and Cesare; Cersei and Jaime.

Art Inspires Love

When character A realizes or falls (more) in love with character B after watching him dance, sing, or doing something artistic.

Examples: Frollo/Esmeralda, Christine/Erik, Hap/Prairie, Isaura/Leôncio, Anne/Vincent, Sandor/Sansa and Babydoll/Blue Jones.

Supernatural Connection

The characters have a psychic or physical connection. Maybe they can communicate through telepathy or can feel each other’s presence and emotions when they are nearby. There might be a spell connecting their hearts in a way one can only die when the other one does. Maybe they are twins. Whatever the reason, these characters are bonded in a way no one else could be.

Examples: Kylo x Rey, Nuada x Nuala, Darkling x Alina and Cersei x Jaime.

The Frollo Effect

A guy falls in love with a girl he is suppose to reject, repulse or dehumanize, and fights against it. By trying to suppress it, her converts love into hatred against her and himself, and probably punishes both hoping it will make the feeling go away. It does not work and the guy starts doing things he never thought he was capable of in order to deal with this unbearable need. He is usually proud, rational and very in control of himself until she comes along. Her initial dismissal as a suitor commonly starts out as social expectation - in which the characters are from divergent social segments and ideologically separated -, but it’s always a expectation the guy has over himself, regardless if anyone else imposes this on him.

Examples: Esmeralda x Frollo (Gypsy and priest), Amon x Helen (Jew and nazi), Isaura x Leôncio (Slave and master), Daisy x Ram (Sister and brother), William x Dolores (Host and guest) and Hap x Prairie (Subject and scientist)

Bonding undercover

When the bad guy pretends to be a normal person long enough to befriend the good girl and make her fall in love with him. This is usually how tragically two-sided vxh happens, because she gets to know his other side before the bad one gets in the way, but they can still have a happy ending because it also establishes they could have the base for a healthy relationship if only he could abandon his malicious quest. This only happens when the girl develops deeply romantic feelings for him; if it's only a crush or devilish attraction (Red Eye, The OA and Agents of SHIELD) than it doesn't count. She must be sobbing on the floor when this is done. May also involve an amnesia period in which the antagonist approaches the hero as an old friend or a lover.

Examples: Steerpike and Fuchsia, Christine and Erik, Kiara and Kovu, Elizabeth and Tom, Dracula and Vanessa

Generation Parallel

A love story doesn’t end up well. Years later another generation repeats the first one in a slightly different manner. Most of the time, the parallel between the two affairs means the characters from the first one have the chance to develop as we wished they would, and that their love might have grown roots under a different field. Sometimes it just means shit happens no matter the circumstances, and that people will make the same mistakes of their elderlies despite that they should have known better by now. If we are talking about the first generation’s offspring (Incest not necessarily included), it might mean their love is on their DNA and they would fall over and over again under different names and places. In any case, this trope is the romantic side of History Repeats Itself.

Very common theme in incest, because their birth requires a previous affair between their parents, but it only counts if it is a story on its own, full of ups and downs, and people talk about it. If it’s not mentioned or important to the plot, there is no point in calling it Generation Parallel.

Examples: Jaime and Cersei (Joana and Tywin), Arya and Gendry/Jon (Lyanna and Robert/Rhaegar), Catherine and Hareton (Cathy and Heathcliff), Abby and Henry (Wakefield and Sarah), Rey and Kylo (Padme and Anakin), Isaura and Leôncio (Almeida and Juliana), Leonardo e Marina (Pilar e Murilo).

Roaring Rampage of Romance

Love that starts a war and the main plot. Characters that destroy cities and galaxies because Love Made Them Evil, because they are trying to be with whom they love or to secure their safety and happiness. It might be on purpose, in which they have foreseen the consequences but choose to take them anyway as a means to an end, or it was accidental. There may be decades of conflict and the count of a hundred corpses, or maybe a famous massacre with a handful dead extras. Maybe a murderer is hunting down everyone on an Island so that he can be alone with his beloved. Anyway, innocent people that had nothing to do with them nor interfered with the couple’s happiness will suffer the collateral damage.

Common trope among royalty, since marrying or bearing the children of someone you were not supposed to could have disastrous consequences to the State, still people would do it for love.

If the character is causing the rampage in search for something else, like power, and to secure his beloved is an incidental bonus, it isn’t considered Roaring Rampage of Romance, unless he is doing it because Love Has Made Him Evil. Alina/Darkling and Nuada/Nuala, for instance, don’t fit this category.

Examples: Penny Dreadful, Inuyasha, ASoIaF (Rhaegar x Lyanna, Jaime x Cersei, Petyr x Catelyn), Harper’s Island, Westworld, Notre Dame de Paris, Wuthering Heights, The Phantom of the Opera, Bram Stroker’s Dracula, Apollo and Cassandra, Star Wars (Anakin and Padmé)

Taboo Tropes

Incest

Self-explanatory. Cousins will not be considered incest in here. I’m brazilian.

Subtrope: Decadent Aristocrats

Ho Yay

Homosexual couples

Age gap

Ships with age gap between then, 10 years at least. Supernatural/immortal beings won’t be taken into account unless the other part is a child or coming of age.

Wife Husbandry

A man adopts or temporarily takes care of a little girl. She may or not develop a precocious crush on him. Little girl grows up into a extraordinary and desirable woman. She had him on a pedestal all these years and has been saving herself for him. Man is distressed bc he can’t reconcile the image of the child he cherished as a father and the provoking woman she turned out to be. He mostly resists her advances, but they work that out by the end.

Example: Older!Mathilda/Leon AU, Nancy/Hartigan (Sin City), Veronica/William (Final Girl)

Development Tropes

End game ship

Is not everyday an OTP becomes end game

AU ship

A.k.a. “Canon? Who needs canon?” ships. OTPs that had a lot of potential but were ruined by canon. So either I ignore the end they were given, either some parts in the middle. Unlike Not Canon ships, these were meant to be romantically involved, but the way it was executed ruined it.

Secondary Interest ship

That One Scene ships are the ones with nothing shippable except for one or two scenes. Sometimes is not even canon and are more anti-recs than anything, but it’s still about villain x heroine, so it’s relevant to this blog.

Not canon

Word of God stayed silent and, according to my best judgment, the subtext was not enough. If something sexual or romantic happens between the characters but isn’t based on desire, such as the villain seducing the heroine for his advantage, it’s not canon.

Example: Scream (Billy/Sidney), Kim Possible (Kim/Shego), Mulan (Mulan x Shan Yu), World Without End (Carys x Edward), Sky High (Layla x Warren), Star Wars (Obi-Wan x Padmé), Richard III (Anne x Richard), Tesis (Angela x Bosco)

#List #Management

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nineteensixtieschikadee · 7 years

Note

your annulment post is absolutely on point. the way d&d have been handling the whole r+l+e pisses me off so much and it seems like they want to avoid things being complex to make things more clearcut (idk if that's the word?) and simpler to write even though as you said, that complexity is what makes asoiaf so great and what attracted such a massive fanbase for got in the first place. now, d&d don't even see how their simplification is weakening the story, making dumbass moves, (1/2)

I absolutely agree with you. Unfortunately, this is one of GOT’s biggest issues. Ever since GRRM had left the show to finish writing TWOW *damn you George* and now that the show has passed the books, the showrunners have seemed to forget one of the most important aspects that has to fit both the books and the show for it to be it good. And that is the overall theme of human/story complexity. I am thrilled, overjoyed that R+L=J is “semi confirmed.” However the sad thing is the showrunners decided to fucking touch this plot line and simplify it. One of the reasons that got me reading the books years ago, was because I had stumbled upon this theory years back, and the history of GOT had intrigued me so much that I ended up reading this book series. It did not disappoint. The show however… The whole R x L x E story line in the books is one of the most mysterious, intriguing, alluring and interesting plot line out of all the GOT plot lines. It is in fact also the most complex of them all. And the fact that the showrunners had touched upon it before the books is really devastating. Because GOT has become so huge now, and the fact that it has a wide general audience that only care about dragons, bobbies and magical ice zombies saddens me. Because there is so much more to GOT than just those qualities. It’s known to be a modern realistic tackle on the consequences of war, on human relationships and identities, and most importantly, human complexities. But even that was changed and taken away. It’s as if the showrunners believe that the typical general audience are dumb asses who need to have everything condensed and simplified for them to understand anything that’s going on.

Out of all of the storylines, Dorne’s plot had been affected the most by this stupid change. They decided to only focus on one part of the Dorne plot line, and fucking ruined by making the characters useless and illogical to plot. They had decided to cut out half of it’s characters, including important ones like Arianne Martell and stick to 3 lame ass, one dimensional characters. With also having other notable characters be the complete opposite of their book counterparts. This is why I didn’t want the show to touch on the R x L x E story line. They are all connected together as a wide, complex clusterfuck that was slowly but surely unraveling in the novels. But look what they. They touched it, and ruined it by a single sentence claiming that Rhaegar had “annulled” Elia that same day he married Lyanna. This probably would have made more sense if Elia had already died and Rhaegar needed an heir so he married Lyanna afterwards. Though this is most likely not the case because they decided to put in a fucking plot hole that disposed Elia quickly and made Rhaegar and Lyanna into a disney couple. R + L are OTP asf. However, they are far more complex than a disposable Romeo and Juliet type. Rhaegar especially is complex because we truly don’t know his motives (at least in the books) Though it does look like the show will come to that conclusion soon. -_- Lyanna too, she is the most important character in the Northern arc plot line because she is the reason all this shit happened to the North. If Lyanna really didn’t believe that Robert would keep to one bed, but still decided to marry Rhaegar for love, then yeah, she’s a fucking hypocrite. Though not in the way that dehumanizes her. If that were the case then her personality, her identity as a Northern warrior and her inner thoughts are far more complex than what is thought to be. And people forget this. People who are so anti Lyanna, or Rhaegar forget that the main theme of human complexity, the character contradicting to itself, is so fucking important to the story. It’s what makes the story so real and I guess character wise, relatable too.

What people also seem to forget is the major importance that Elia plays in this story. Like I said, Elia is the other half that completes the song of ice and fire. Without her, the whole R + L = J plotline would be stupid, and more so cliched and FAR LESS complex than it already is in the show. Without her there would be no story of Jon Snow. Which is what everyone seems to be forgetting. However we can’t also deny the fact that people who are so anti Lyanna and Rhaegar forget that Elia herself, was also as complex as they were. Because we don’t know anything about her, even less than Rhaegar and Lyanna, that makes her character arc so complex and ambiguous because we don’t even know her reaction to the Tourney at Harrenhall incident. For all we know, she could have been a part of it. Or not, depending on your own opinion. Like what you said, the show runners seem to view the Dornish people as some sort of villainous type who are viewed as “sexy and dangerous.” Which is so fucking far off from what the Dornish people actually are. The Dornish people aren’t just dangerous or sexy people who are open to polygamous relationships. No. They are unbowed, unbent and unbroken people. They are poc who chose to be their own nation and chose to be stronger than the others. They are intelligent and cunning. And the Martells especially. What I hate about this whole situation is that people always limit Elia to a “delicate little flower” who deserved better. Which in truth, yeah she deserved better, speaking from all of us who ship R + L. BUT SHE WAS MORE THAN A DELICATE FLOWER. Like her family. Like Oberyn and Doran and like Arianne too, she wasn’t just a “delicate flower.” She was a Dornish. She was a Martell. She was a fucking viper. Elia is kind, and gentle and sweet and beautiful and witty. But she was more than that. She was clever and politically intelligent. And maybe even cunning. She was more than a flower type, and the fact that her fans can sometimes reduce her to only that. Like what? Elia too was just as complex. Just like Cersei, Varys, Petyr, Oberyn, or Margery and Arianne, Elia most likely knew how to play the game too. And she was probably good at it. If my speculation ever became true, and Elia was a part of this conspiracy of Lyanna and Rhaegar, creating a far more complex story line, then it just means that Elia herself, undermined her own strategy, and made a wrong move in the political game of thrones that lead to dire consequences.

I said this before, and I will say it again. The moment you choose to limit a character to only one defining quality is what erases the character’s own complexity. It what all fans of either Rhaegar, Lyanna and Elia miss. We all choose to stan them or dehumanize them based on one of their defining traits. Example being, Jamie Lannister who is dehumanized by everyone (excluding Brienne) as a kingslayer for he stabbed and killed the mad king, the king that he sworn to protect. This became his defining quality, and therefore all his other qualities and complexities were brushed away.

There are more than meets they eye of these 3 complicated characters. These characters were strong, intelligent, selfish and so fucking complicated. And the way that the show runners decided to play with them, sucks. To add on to what you said, by playing around with what was arguably the most strongest story line from the books, had made it’s show’s counterpart arguably the weakest, after the Dorne plot line. These 3 characters had one of the most politically unique story lines in the books and it honestly sucks that they aren’t getting the revelation that they deserve. Lets be honest, the whole R x L x E story line deserved better.

#game of thrones #game of thrones spoilers #rhaegar x lyanna #elia martell #Rhaegar Targaryen #Lyanna Stark #elia deserved better #asoiaf #book readers deserve better #I still love Rhaegar and Lyanna #but sorry babes #your plotline sucks this season

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