#EDIT: I FORGOT TO SWITCH UP THE HAIR AND SCAR WHEN I MIRRORED THE DRAWING AAGH | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

agentrouka-blog · 4 years

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@ ygritte hate post. In broad strokes, we agree Jon and Sansa are on parallel journeys, there is also plenty of parallels between Hound's sexual assault night with Jon and Ygritte (steel kiss, hand on face, and so on). (1/3)

Then Jon gets into it at the water pool, that is his "unkiss", no doubt. Notice though, the details about him getting riled up by sex red hair, she saying she is half-fish, debating fucking your own sister. I'm forgetting stuff of course. I'm sure that chapter is rife with that. (2/3)

Jonsa fans have speculated over Unkiss being a cover for another kiss (always with the cousins, the blood and fire cloak, and so forth). It could be that cave means much the same for him. Like said they are on parallel journeys and there's all those throwbacks to each other. (3/3)

So like Sansa, Jon is repressing something there. Something that happened in the winterfell pools. Bran remembers bathing with his sisters, but unlike Bran (who did saw OSHA getting out of one in that segment), Jon saw something that was a revelation. Like Florian when he saw Jonquil bathing with her sisters. Something red and then wanted to kiss, not downstairs but upstairs. Maybe he did... and maybe Ned caught him at it, because he later dreams of being caught there being innapropriate. (4/3)

In the dream he screams he will never father a abstard, he hates being one for they are lustful creatures born of lust and lies. Like lusting after their sisters. Its not like he is a Targaryen! Distraught, Jon decides to prove his nature wrong. He is not a deviant because he is a bastard lusting after his sister! So he decides to go to the Nights Watch, where he'll be chaste ever. Maybe. Kind of creepy but funny. It all comes together too, all those tidbits that are otherwise scattered. (5/3)

PS: Six maidens in the pool... Six Stark children. Not seven for once either way. And so Jon says in the show "we should have never left Winterfell" because it echoes the We shouldn't have left the cave. And Jon says they'll go back and Yggrite yaps You Know Nothing, but he was right. Jon will go back with the real redhead Sansa, back to Winterfell real pools. (6/3)

Thank you!! This ask really sent my brain whirring.

I already like the idea of the Unkiss drawing from a repressed memory, but I hadn’t noticed how the Ygritte memory-edit might interlock with that.

We have this confirmation that they were fairly natural and relaxed about nudity among children:

"Might be there isn't." She grinned. "What are you staring at, boy? Never seen a woman before?"

"I have so." Bran had bathed with his sisters hundreds of times and he'd seen serving women in the hot pools too. Osha looked different, though, hard and sharp instead of soft and curvy. Her legs were all sinew, her breasts flat as two empty purses. "You've got a lot of scars." (ACOK, Bran II)

Hundreds of times. We know Sansa associated hot water in a bath with Winterfell.

The hot water made her think of Winterfell, and she took strength from that. She had not washed since the day her father died, and she was startled at how filthy the water became. (AGOT, Sansa VI)

So does Jon:

It was short walk to the bathhouse, where he took a cold plunge to wash the sweat off and soaked in a hot stone tub. The warmth took some of the ache from his muscles and made him think of Winterfell's muddy pools, steaming and bubbling in the godswood. Winterfell, he thought. (ASOS, Jon XII)

Then we have the image of the Water Gardens.

It was Daenerys who filled the gardens with laughing children. Her own children at the start, but later the sons and daughters of lords and landed knights were brought in to be companions to the boys and girls of princely blood. And one summer's day when it was scorching hot, she took pity on the children of her grooms and cooks and serving men and invited them to use the pools and fountains too, a tradition that has endured till this day." (…)

As the children splashed in the pools, Daenerys watched from amongst the orange trees, and a realization came to her. She could not tell the highborn from the low. Naked, they were only children. All innocent, all vulnerable, all deserving of long life, love, protection.

(ADWD, The Watcher)

And we know that the children of all ranks played together in the godswood, too.

He had watched wistfully while the Walders contested with Turnip the cook's boy and Joseth's girls Bandy and Shyra. The Walders had decreed that Bran should be the judge and decide whether or not people had said "Mayhaps," but as soon as they started playing they forgot all about him.

The shouts and splashes soon drew others: Palla the kennel girl, Cayn's boy Calon, TomToo whose father Fat Tom had died with Bran's father at King's Landing. Before very long, every one of them was soaked and muddy. Palla was brown from head to heel, with moss in her hair, breathless from laughter. Bran had not heard so much laughing since the night the bloody raven came. (ACOK, Bran I)

It’s fair to conclude that the Jon and the Starklings may indeed have not just played but also bathed together in the godswood.

There is an interesting association with Maidenpool, which is tied to the romance of Florian and Jonquil.

At Maidenpool, Lord Mooton's red salmon still flew above the castle on its hill, but the town walls were deserted, the gates smashed, half the homes and shops burned or plundered. They saw nothing living but a few feral dogs that went slinking away at the sound of their approach. The pool from which the town took its name, where legend said that Florian the Fool had first glimpsed Jonquil bathing with her sisters, was so choked with rotting corpses that the water had turned into a murky grey-green soup.

Jaime took one look and burst into song. "Six maids there were in a spring-fed pool . . ."

"What are you doing?" Brienne demanded.

"Singing. 'Six Maids in a Pool,' I'm sure you've heard it. And shy little maids they were, too. Rather like you. Though somewhat prettier, I'll warrant."

(ASOS, Jaime III)

Jonquil bathed with ther sisters, when Florian first glimpsed her.

The pool becomes filthy and spoiled. Like Sansa’s bathwater, but also like the muddy Winterfell pools. Choked with corpses?

When the dreams took him, he found himself back home once more, splashing in the hot pools beneath a huge white weirwood that had his father's face. Ygritte was with him, laughing at him, shedding her skins till she was naked as her name day, trying to kiss him, but he couldn't, not with his father watching. He was the blood of Winterfell, a man of the Night's Watch. I will not father a bastard, he told her. I will not. I will not. "You know nothing, Jon Snow," she whispered, her skin dissolving in the hot water, the flesh beneath sloughing off her bones until only skull and skeleton remained, and the pool bubbled thick and red. (ASOS, Jon VI)

The memory edit and the switch toward “love” in the cave is mirrored in this rather defiant dream, that recalls the pools at home, his father’s watching face, but also the laughter at home in the godswood. A pool in a sacred place spoiled with death.

A memory spoiled by trauma.

Dany, who I would argue is a character strongly foreshadowed in Ygritte, has her own association with sacred pools.

They rode to the lake the Dothraki called the Womb of the World, surrounded by a fringe of reeds, its water still and calm. A thousand thousand years ago, Jhiqui told her, the first man had emerged from its depths, riding upon the back of the first horse.

The procession waited on the grassy shore as Dany stripped and let her soiled clothing fall to the ground. Naked, she stepped gingerly into the water. Irri said the lake had no bottom, but Dany felt soft mud squishing between her toes as she pushed through the tall reeds. The moon floated on the still black waters, shattering and re-forming as her ripples washed over it. Goose pimples rose on her pale skin as the coldness crept up her thighs and kissed her lower lips. The stallion's blood had dried on her hands and around her mouth. Dany cupped her fingers and lifted the sacred waters over her head, cleansing herself and the child inside her while the khal and the others looked on. (AGOT, Daenerys V)

This recalls Ygritte in the pools and Sansa in her filthy bath. But the presence of the blood of a horse slaughtered for her to eat its heart, the presence of the Stallion that Mounts the World, the prophecy and the things we know comes after... all that is ominous and the kiss of the cold is unlikely to be tender.

"When you find yourself in bed with an ugly woman, the best thing to do is close your eyes and get on with it," he declared. "Waiting won't make the maid any prettier. Kiss her and be done with it."

"Kiss her?" Ser Barristan repeated, aghast.

"A steel kiss," said Littlefinger. (AGOT, Eddard VIII)

or..

But the Dornishman's blade had a song of its own,

and a bite sharp and cold as a leech. (ASOS, Jon I)

or...

Then the steel was at her throat, and its bite was red and cold. (ASOS, Catelyn VII)

The layers in this…

Anyway, there’s foreshadowing to Dany in the Ygritte mess, but it’s not exactly happy, while the Sansa connections in there tend to be positive. Sweet and foul all mixed up.

Sansa “remembering” the Unkiss in relation to kissing children (Margaery’s Girls, Sweetrobin) and with “awful” memories (Myranda’s wedding night) has that same air of mixing something rotten with something that had been perhaps sweet but confusing. I.e. covering a traumatic event with something else.

Then there’s another interesting association with the incest peach.

As she sat in the common room in her stupid girl clothes, Arya remembered what Syrio Forel had told her, the trick of looking and seeing what was there. When she looked, she saw more serving wenches than any inn could want, and most of them young and comely. And come evenfall, lots of men started coming and going at the Peach. They did not linger long in the common room, not even when Tom took out his woodharp and began to sing "Six Maids in a Pool." The wooden steps were old and steep, and creaked something fierce whenever one of the men took a girl upstairs. "I bet this is a brothel," she whispered to Gendry.

(ASOS, Arya V)

Right after this they meet Gendry’s half-sister Bella, a “peach” at the Peach.

“I’m named Bella,” the girl told Gendry. “For the battle. I bet I could ring your bell, too. You want to?”

“No,” he said gruffly.

“I bet you do.” She ran a hand along his arm. “I don’t cost nothing to friends of Thoros and the lightning lord.”

“No, I said.” Gendry rose abruptly and stalked away from the table out into the night.

Bella turned to Arya. “Don’t he like girls?”

While the bell recalls Dany, we should remember that

Sansa plays “the high harp and the bells” (AGOT, Arya I)

“Bella” translates to Beauty

this scene is an unsubtle shout-out to Jon stalking out of the welcoming feast after Benjen teased him about fathering bastards and knowing a woman. After calling Sansa radiant. (AGOT, Jon I)

So the Dany hints are joined by the Sansa hints. The Dany hints are negative (bells = battle), the Sansa ones positive (bells = music). Why are the Sansa hints there at all?

Before anyone goes “Jonrya!”, remember:

For half a heartbeat she forgot who she was supposed to be. She wasn't any peach, but she couldn't be Arya Stark either, not here with some smelly drunk she did not know. "I'm . . ."

"She's my sister." Gendry put a heavy hand on the old man's shoulder, and squeezed. "Leave her be." (ASOS, Arya V)

Arya is not a peach, she is a sister. Little sister.

And there’s this:

He liked the deep, sweet ache it left in the muscles afterward. He liked the way the air tasted way up high, sweet and cold as a winter peach. He liked the birds: the crows in the broken tower, the tiny little sparrows that nested in cracks between the stones, the ancient owl that slept in the dusty loft above the old armory. Bran knew them all. (AGOT, Bran II)

Jon only tastes the cold when silver-haired Val tastes sweetness in the air, but way up high the winter peach makes the air taste sweet, too.

"Sweet smells are sometimes used to cover foul ones." (ACOK, Daenerys II)

But foul smells might cover sweet ones, too. The Unkiss covers a bitter trauma, but perhaps it was drawn from a more innocent kiss in the past.

The naked red-haired girl by the water might trigger a rewrite of Jon’s perception of Ygritte, but it might draw that from a different kind of confusion, surrounding the same memories that feed Sansa’s editing.

The godswood is certainly a stage for kissing:

As she stood there, all the memories came flooding back to her. Her father had taught her to ride amongst these trees, and that was the elm that Edmure had fallen from when he broke his arm, and over there, beneath that bower, she and Lysa had played at kissing with Petyr.

She had not thought of that in years. How young they all had been — she no older than Sansa, Lysa younger than Arya, and Petyr younger still, yet eager. The girls had traded him between them, serious and giggling by turns. (…)

Robb got to his feet slowly and sheathed his sword, and Catelyn found herself wondering whether her son had ever kissed a girl in the godswood. Surely he must have. (AGOT, Catelyn XI)

Memories that flood back, young children, innocent games that have consequences much later on, a specific Connection drawn to the Starklings and the Winterfell godswood.

More kissing:

"I won't! I saw you kissing in the snow. She's just like her mother. Catelyn kissed you in the godswood, but she never meant it, she never wanted you. (ASOS, Sansa VII)

and yet more...

Theon Greyjoy was no stranger to this godswood. He had played here as a boy, skipping stones across the cold black pool beneath the weirwood, hiding his treasures in the bole of an ancient oak, stalking squirrels with a bow he made himself. Later, older, he had soaked his bruises in the hot springs after many a session in the yard with Robb and Jory and Jon Snow. In amongst these chestnuts and elms and soldier pines he had found secret places where he could hide when he wanted to be alone. The first time he had ever kissed a girl had been here. Later, a different girl had made a man of him upon a ragged quilt in the shade of that tall grey-green sentinel. (ADWD, The Prince of Winterfell)

Starklings, kissing and the hot springs all in a paragraph.

I would say there is material here. If GRRM wants to write about Sansa and Jon sharing a memory that involves the hot springs, kissing and references to Florian and Jonquil, he will have planted the hints. It would certainly be a bit poetic if both of them used the same memory soup to create their trauma responses.

Before anyone tries to accuse me of hypocrisy when it comes to age gaps, abuse etc. I do not think this was a case of Jon perving on his young sister. Cat was 12 when she played kissing games with a much younger Petyr and Lysa, and I don’t think we are supposed to consider this a threesome. It’s child’s play. That’s my angle here.

#jon snow #sansa stark #unkiss #anti-ygritte #kissing games #hot springs #pre-canon jonsa #mismemory #jonsa #asoiaf

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