Going Over Jon I, A Game of Thrones 

You know NOTHING Jon Snow!

Calling Mycella insipid when we know she’s not, for example

Nice analysis

🎯

​@@AnthonyA0424OVER-analysis i'd say. Jon still gets points for not being enchanted by Cersei's beauty and noticing her empty smile. He's also unimpressed with the King in the roo., with a clear idea of how a monarch should be. Not bad for a half- drunk, surly 14-year-old bastard. It's more than any tiktok teen would ever notice.

Yeah completely agree. That’s also how I read his uncharacteristically mean/dismissive views about Myrcella and Robb. A kid clearly upset and jealous, but not willing to admit it to himself.

Yeah that's exactly what I thought also .

😂 It do be like that

People do study Tolkien. And Martin’s works are on that level

Exactly

Also Catelyn being worried to seat a bastard among the royal family

Some of these things (like the unreliable narrator) I thought were pretty obvious when I first read it. It's very strange to listen to Preston point out these "retcons" completely oblivious.

I agree. I've read the books only twice but I think it is mentioned somewhere that bastards tend to be sullen. They see what they can't have all their life. It breeds jealousy.

Wish george had taken that further and made Jon kind of a dick like cotter pyke or something still nice and friends to his siblings but had a mean streak that would justify cats dislike of him

@@avatarname0008 well he's kinda of a dick for a bit in the wall, but everyone ends up loving him anyway (except for Allister, and he's portrayed as a bad guy). He has that main character rizz going for him. Cat not liking his ass was a breath of fresh air tbh

@@bilis2866 theres plenty of guys in the watch who don't like Jon but yeah they're pretty bad I mean I want him to be belligerent and a loud mouth rather than bitter and stoic

@@avatarname0008 that would be too out of character, no? He wants to be like Ned or Benjen or any hero from the songs

Tyrion Lannister vs. Rey Mysterio book it right now

The book explains he had been hurting all over. Even though he is agile, he is still disfigured, and all that walking around and everything he had been through took a heavy toll on him. And as far as Joffrey goes, he didn't put up a fight because he was innocent and didn't expect his own family to kill him, even though he should have.

Yes, but Jon is also a super duper intelligent, super observant, highly keen mega brained genius so not grasping what Myrcella is actually like or being blinded by jealousy are already somewhat contradictory traits given how he’s been set up. 😂

@@Longshanks1690did you forget he was wasted in this scene lmao

@@connors9597 And yet he’s able to see through Cersei’s smile? Drunk men are not often known for their fondness in turning away women. 😂

@@Longshanks1690 as "shinjinobrave" said in another comment "Jon isn't observant at all. He's an insecure, jealous teenager. Everything he thinks he notices is just a reflection of his own insecurity. "noticing the truth behind people's eyes" is just his way of saying "I know you all hate me secretly, you're just not saying it""

@@mysteryboxe9230 And as I said in another comment, that’d actually be an interesting place to start his character, that like Tyrion, he vastly overestimates his own intelligence but upon coming to the Night’s Watch, he discovers that he actually doesn’t know people as well as he thinks he does and has to learn how to understand them properly instead of thinking he does. But when he pretty much gets everyone right except Myrcella, why do we jump to “he’s a dumb kid who doesn’t know what he’s talking about” when this whole chapter is meant to show that indeed, Jon does know precisely what he’s talking about? If he was consistently judging people wrong here, I’d say this was the correct take. But when we’re only saying this because of Myrcella’s changed personality in later books, I just can’t agree.

It’s “Big Fish in a Small Pond”. Jon thought he was so observant and smart while he was in his own house dealing with his own family issues but out in the real world he is just a decent 15yo kid. Same as when he was lording his sword skills over the other NW recruits: it’s easy to be the badass when everyone around you is an NPC.

Yeh I absolutely agree. Am i misremembering but doesn't Jon at some point say he heard Ben and Ned talking about settling the gift? Like Ned thinks about setting Bran in a holdfast even with him being crippled. Like at 14 getting land and a tower under the wall's vassalage seems a better to serve the wall than joining the nights watch lol

@@baswarHe does, he says so to one of the wildlings in Storm, I can’t recall if it was Ygritte or not though.

It isn’t everyone though. Maester Luwin lies to remove Jon from Winterfell for Catelyn. Luwin tells him Jon wants to go to the wall anyway, and furthermore that Benjen had spoken to him and he was in favour of the idea. But when you return to Jon’s chapter where he asks Benjen directly about joining the watch, we find he is not in favour of Jon joining and lists several reasons why he shouldn’t join the watch. But it is Luwin stating this lie which makes Ned believe Benjen was in favour of Jon going there. So he lied to Ned to get rid of Jon because his loyalty is to Catelyn first over Ned.

@@laileleneirose7966 ahh think i heard that theory before, need to reread it the chapters but i think it makes sense Luwin lied. Though ben not telling his brother to his face seems odd.

Honestly that’d be a really funny plot point if it was consistent. That like Tyrion, Jon prides himself on his intelligence and ability to read people, but as on as he gets on the wall he finds he doesn’t really understand people at all - he knows nothing you might even say - and has to learn to see people on their level. But aside from Myrcella, Jon gets everyone else exactly spot on, so it clearly wasn’t intentional. If he looked at Cersei and said no one could smile that beautiful and be evil, that’d be one thing, but he can see through her smiles but can’t see Myrcella? It’s clearly just a retcon of Myrcella’s character by George when he wanted to make her more of a personality in contrast to Tommen.

Also, he's only observant and arrogant/confident when he's very drunk...

Wel rhaegar may have taken her and been with her for months before they had sex. Rhaegar and Lyanna must have had sex shorty after Neds marriage to Catelyn right?

Wow love this

My thoughts exactly

But then, isn't it said in the Arya chapter with Ned Dayne that neither Ned Stark nor Wyla were betrothed? Obviously the Wylla thing is silly, but it seems to be a common conception that Jon was conceived before Ned and Cat's marriage? 🤔

Robb is meant to be older if we go by the official timeline, the story is that they got married, he got her pregnant on their wedding night, then went off to war and got someone else pregnant too, which means everyone robb would be the eldest, but in actuality, we don’t know when exactly Lyanna and Rheagar conceived jon and he very well could be older

@@aminaa5824 but if Jon was older, why not say so? It would give Cat some relief, I'm sure.

@@reddest-xmaybe, but that might also be worrying for her because then, there might be a chance of a succession dispute between Jon and Robb. If Robb is older, there would be no need to worry. Personally, I think Jon is older and that Ned lied about it specifically to make Cat less worried about succession

@@reddest-xyeah I agree with spacelia, I don’t think it would give her relief to know that if Jon was ever legitimised, he would be the heir instead of robb, which was one of her biggest issues, also I’m pretty sure ned says at one point to Robert (maybe it’s just the show but I think also the books) that he broke his vows and shamed lady Catelyn or smthn along those lines, which would imply that the story he went with was that it happened when he left for war

Yeah because George had forgotten to include Bran.

Love that! I had heard Tyrion having two fathers before , but the mythological etymology you provided supports that nicely.

@@umwha Tywin ~ twin, Twyin only had twins, but Tyrion absorbed his twin, which explains why he was rumored to be a hermaphrodite, the twin he absorbed was female. And Tyrion dreams that he has two heads like Maelys the Monstrous.

​@@michaelstalkfleet6989 His twin being female cant be verified and I cant see any point in it.

@@umwha Twyin does tell Tyrion that he is "no son of mine"--if the Lannister half of him was the female half, and the Targ half was the male half, then he is telling the truth. The point of it is that George himself seems to feel like both male and female at times, since he injects that theme into many of his characters across many of his stories.

@@michaelstalkfleet6989 Tyrion himself is not gender confused in the slightest so would be strange that George puts gender confusion into others but his intersex character is not .

How would Jon’s own hope and speculation not affect his own motivation?

@@PrestonJacobstheSweetrobin you right, let me be more clear. I guess I didn't get the impression that Jon had thought that all along. It seemed like something that occurred to him in the moment as he remembered the conversation with Ned. Something he speculates on at this moment doesn't necessarily affect his motivation to join the Watch months earlier

Benjen taking the black when he did is really, really odd. At the time he made that decision, Ned's entire line of succession was baby Robb and Benjen. Infant and child mortality in their world isn't especially low. Prior to the creation of spare sons, Benjen taking himself out of the line is a very risky, very dumb idea. It makes me wonder if Ben took the black to make amends for something, something serious enough that those amends were seen as a higher priority than protecting the Stark line. Perhaps he knew exactly where Lyanna was? Or some other secret of hers he should have revealed, but chose not to?

Like who would want to burn books rather than a stable?

Well, if Varys was being honest to Illyrio, he wanted to slow down the chaos in Westeros, Killing Bran speeds it up.

I imagine they use a lunar calendar and the Citadel has some unknown method of keeping track of things like dates and how long the days are. IIRC the passage of the moon is the only consistent measure of the passage of time we get in ASOIAF. You're right though it is a bit unclear.

@@parastroika2393 Yup Makes no sense. They can use moon cycles. I assume they use a 12/13 Moon cycle 'year'. But in this world, deciding 12 moon cycles is a year is completely arbitrary. The only way they can explain this is if the calendar system was made in a time when a year was a normal length. Which might be possible, if time moved normally before the long night.

​@@umwha This is what the wiki says, "Regarding the passage of time in A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin has specified "Twelve moon [turns] to a year, as on earth. Even on our earth, years have nothing to do with the seasons, or with the cycles of the moon. A year is a measure of a solar cycle, of how long it takes the earth to make one complete revolution around the sun. The same is true for the world of Westeros.", thereby confirming that a year in A Song of Ice and Fire is as long as a year in real-life. Martin further noted that "Years are not based on seasons, even in the real world. They are based on how long it takes the earth to revolve around the sun... i.e., on astronomy, the position of the sun and moon and stars. Ancient monuments like Stonehenge and Newgrange served astronomical purposes as well as religious, and helped measure the passage of years, the summer and winter solstices, etc." The calendar system currently used in the Seven Kingdoms uses the start of the reign of King Aegon I Targaryen as the first year on their calendar, dating events using either AC (After the Conquest) or BC (Before the Conquest). Individual months do not appear to have specific names. When referring to a specific day in a specific month, maesters use the format "the twenty-second day of the fifth moon of the year 130 AC". No name for week-days (e.g., "Sunday" or "Wednesday") have been mentioned, and Martin has confirmed that they do not have those names. There is one mention of religious services held in a sept "every seventh day". It is said that the world's varied cultures, both ancient and modern, all reckon days and seasons and years very differently. Archmaester Walgram's book, The Reckoning of Time, covers this issue, but there is little consensus on what these world dates mean in Westeros reckoning. As an example, the Braavosi and Westerosi do not count days the same way."

@@parastroika2393 Thats great! But the solar year cannot be desynched from the seasons. The solar year causes the seasons. The solar year involved the lengthening of days - which causes the hotter months, and the shortening of days which causes the cold months.

@@umwha I guess you're just supposed to suspend your disbelief for all the fuckery involved with the seasons. Maybe there's some weird planetary phenomena going on or the change in seasons isn't 100% natural. At this rate we'll probably never get an answer.

Misspoke - show confusion. I meant Walder Rivers.