#(aegon the conqueror after marrying rhaenys even tho that wasn't seen as an option watching aemond do the same thing: new fave descendant)

[navree]

I’m almost afraid to ask: what is the Sara Snow debate? Do I need to brace myself for another Jonsa vs Jonerys type showdown 😱

SPOILERS INCOMING for anyone who wants to kept in the dark and experience the story naturally:

So, as we know, Jace starts off the Dance by going to Winterfell, where he meets with Cregan Stark and asks him to pledge his sword to Rhaenyra. According to one of the chroniclers who makes up the narrative of the Dance that we get in Fire&Blood, while there Jace meets Sara Snow, Cregan's bastard sister, and immediately falls passionately in love with her, and the two end up sleeping together, which pisses Cregan off until Sara reveals that she and Jace were really in love and had gotten married in accordance with the old gods in front of a weirwood tree, and then promptly got down in the Winterfell godswood.

All well and good, except for one minor catch: we don't know if Sara Snow ever actually existed. The only person who writes about her is Mushroom, a court fool who is seen as notoriously unreliable, and often embellished or just flat out made stuff up, and any of the more salacious rumors about the Dance was likely shit he wrote down for the fun of it. In particular, the Archmaester Gyldayn, who's "writing" Fire&Blood (given that it's an in-universe history book), seems very dismissive of the fact that Sara Snow ever existed, or that Jace would ever break his vows to Baela for her (though he does concede that if Sara did exist Jace likely could have had sex with her, but not married her), but he also doesn't help himself from sounding biased due to describing her as a "half-wild, unwashed Northern bastard" of "uncertain virtue", which, like, dude OK then.

So the big debate is a) does Sara Snow exist (and as such will she be in the show) and b) is Jace going to fall in love with her? There is one side who says no, that Sara was an invention of Mushroom's and that Jace would never do Baela like that, and another side who says that Sara could exist and Jace could well have fallen for her. For reasons that absolutely baffle me, the side that absolutely hates Sara and any thought of her existing, let alone having an affair with Jace and being the other woman to Baela's betrayed spouse, tend to be Jonerys shippers, while the side that's really into Sara and her potential relationship/love story with Jace are Jonsa shippers, and I'm very confused because, like, again, it's the prototype for Jonerys, it's hitting the same notes just at a different octave, and I don't understand why the roles aren't reversed here.

I think they might go with Sara, just for a few more female roles, and whether or not they go with the Mushroom account or switch things up is debatable (they've eschewed a lot of Mushroom stuff, but not all Mushroom stuff), but I think it would make Jace a bit more interesting, because right now the younger generation for the Blacks is the most boring, cardboard cutout group of people in this show, name me one personality trait either Baela or Rhaena have, or anything about Luke that we didn't learn in episode 10 when they remembered that they needed people to feel literally anything for him before he died.

(Personally I'm just over here casually curious and praying furiously that the Helaena/Aemond people stay calm when Alys Rivers shows up, power to all ships and y'all do y'all but I'm here to watch Aemond ride-or-die in love with his hot witch wife and I would like for there to be no insane rivalries or people getting weird or referring to women as "unwashed" for no reason other than you don't like that they might get in the way of a ship)