#because longer hair could be considered a symbol of status which would reflect his king status

[drawnfamiliarfaces]

Remember the episode where the First Squad turned into animals? And I was wondering, is it possible to use the Cave of Spirits to turn an animal into a human? What would ApeTrully and Jumpy look like as humans? And what kind of animal would Mr. No Hands become?

It would certainly be an interesting and fun concept!

I feel like Apetrully would look pretty similar to his usual form, just less hairy (cause you know... humans...monkies... lol) and possibly Albino-esque? Considering his very white/red coloring. Jumpy on the other hand is a well of possibilities! Also, admittedly I drew him with white eyes at first, before i realized that he still could have black, like Lin Chung.

Mr. No Hands gives off bird energy for sure. Maybe an Albatross? Loud and very brazen. xD Or a Crane, and his crest could be same yellow color as his headband.

(sorry for low effort birds, drawing animals is hard)

[stormcloudrising]

Waking in a Winter Wonderland: An Analysis of ACOK Jon III and ASOS Sansa VII Magical Winter Scenes—Updated!

March 30, 2018

This is an excerpt from a longer 5-PART ESSAY that breaks down my theory about the identity of the historical Azor Ahai and Nissa Nissa, the importance of the Vale to the overall story and what it means for Sansa and Jon.  In this excerpt from part 5, I show how Jon’s crystal forest scene and Sansa’s winter wonderland in the Eyrie don’t just mirror each other but indeed the latter can be considered a continuation of the first.  In it, I also show some of the hints in the story that Jon will end up in the Vale when he returns from the dead in TWOW. The excerpt has been fleshed out from the original.

He woke to the sight of his own breath misting in the cold morning air. When he moved, his bones ached. Ghost was gone, the fire burnt out. Jon reached to pull aside the cloak he’d hung over the rock, and found it stiff and frozen.  He crept beneath it and stood up in a forest turned to crystal.

The pale pink light of dawn sparkled on branch and leaf and stone. Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond.  Flowers and mushrooms alike wore coats of glass. Even the mud puddles had a bright brown sheen . Through the shimmering greenery, the black tents of his brothers were encased in a fine glaze of ice.

So there is magic beyond the Wall after all.  He found himself thinking of his sisters, perhaps because he’d dreamed of them last night.  Sansa would call this an enchantment, and tears would fill her eyes at the wonder of it, but Arya would run out laughing and shouting, wanting to touch it all.

“Lord Snow?” he heard. Soft and meek. He turned.

A Clash of Kings - Jon III

And here is Sansa entering a similar representation of the realm of the dead as Jon in the haunted forest.  Notice how she views it exactly as Jon thinks she would but unlike in Jon’s vision, she goes a step further and enters the realm.

When she opened the door to the garden, it was so lovely that she held her breath unwilling to disturb such perfect beauty.  The snow drifted down and down, all in ghostly silence, and lay thick and unbroken on the ground.  All color had fled the world outside.  It was a place of whites and blacks and greys.  White towers and white snow and white statues, black shadows and black trees and dark grey sky above.  A pure world, Sansa thought.  I do not belong here.

Yet she stepped out all the same.  Her boots tore ankle deep holes into the smooth white surface of the snow, yet made no sound.  Sansa drifted past frosted shrubs and thin dark trees, and wondered if she was still dreaming.

Drifting snowflakes brushed her face as light as lover’s kisses, and melted on her cheeks.  At the center of the garden, beside the statue of the weeping woman that lay broken and half-buried on the ground, she turned her face up to the sky and closed her eyes.  She could feel the snow on her lashes, taste it on her lips. It was the taste of Winterfell.  The taste of innocence. The taste of dreams.

ASOS Sansa VII, Chapter 80

As he does with so much of their character arcs, GRRM wrote this Sansa scene to echo Jon’s from the haunted forest.  In a way, it’s a continuation of that scene because where Jon stopped short of seeing Sansa enter the death realm, here she steps out into it.  Both of them wake from having dreams of their family.  We don’t learn much of either dream except that both included Arya. We’re told that Jon’s dream included Sansa as well and so we’re left wondering whether her’s also included him or even if possibly the two were of the same event. We also know that for both of them, it is a dream of home.  

She awoke all at once, every nerve atingle. For a moment she did not remember where she was. She had dreamt that she was little, still sharing a bedchamber with her sister Arya.But it was her maid she heard tossing in sleep, not her sister, and this was not Winterfell, but the Eyrie. And I am Alayne Stone, a bastard girl. The room was cold and black, though she was warm beneath the blankets. Dawn had not yet come. Sometimes she dreamed of Ser Ilyn Payne and woke with her heart thumping, but this dream had not been like that. Home. It was a dream of home.

Note that while dawn has come for Jon when he awakes, it has not yet for Sansa. This makes sense as Jon is positioned as the one who brings the dawn and as we will touch upon again later, he will probably at some point be the bearer of the famous sword Dawn, as the new Sword of the Morning. Sansa awakes before the arrival of dawn and it is interesting how Martin writes the sentence. It is not “the dawn had not yet come.” Instead, George gives it a human quality. “Dawn had not yet come.” It is symbolically as if Sansa is awaiting someone and later in the chapter, we see that Dawn does indeed arrive.

Jon describes the icy forest as magical while for Sansa; the snowy Eyrie scene is pure.  Like with Jon’s in the haunted forest, it’s pre-dawn in the Eyrie and most everyone is still asleep except for Sansa.  In Jon’s scene, the sky is described as having shades of pink while in Sansa’s there is almost a total absence of color with black trees and black shadows.

There are multiple meanings that one can take from Martin using the black shadow metaphor in this scene one of which is that it symbolizes the Night’s Watchmen who are often compared to black shadows.  Jon even describes himself as a black shadow in a scene or two.

Jon blew out the taper he carried, preferring not to risk an open flame amidst so much old dry paper. Instead he followed the light, wending his way down the narrow aisles beneath barrel-vaulted ceilings. All in black, he was a shadow among shadows, dark of hair, long of face, grey of eye. Black moleskin gloves covered his hands; the right because it was burned, the left because a man felt half a fool wearing only one glove.

A Clash of Kings - Jon I

And here again as Jon, Qhorin and their fellow Night’s Watch brothers stalk the wildings in the Frostfang mountains.

The black brothers moved through black shadows amidst black rocks, working their way up a steep, twisting trail as their breath frosted in the black air. Jon felt almost naked without his mail, but he did not miss its weight. This was hard going, and slow. To hurry here was to risk a broken ankle or worse. Stonesnake seemed to know where to put his feet as if by instinct, but Jon needed to be more careful on the broken, uneven ground.

And later in the same scene…

Up they went, and up, and up, black shadows creeping across the moonlit wall of rock. Anyone down on the floor of the pass could have seen them easily, but the mountain hid them from the view of the wildlings by their fire.

A Clash of Kings - Jon VI

Here is another reference...

The first watch is mine, brother." Qhorin seated himself on the sand, his back to a wall, no more than a vague black shadow in the gloom of the cave. Over the rush of falling waters, Jon heard a soft sound of steel on leather that could only mean that the Halfhand had drawn his sword.

A Clash of Kings - Jon VIII

I included the four excerpts above to show that the Night’s Watch being compared to shadows is not a one off thing. These are four instances but it  occurs several times throughout the story

The black trees casting their black shadows are like sentinels guarding the garden just as Jon and his black brothers are sentinels who guard the realm of men.  The Night Watch brothers are even called sentinels as we find out when Bran tells the Reeds the story of the seventy-nine brothers who attempted to desert their watch.

"There are ghosts here," Bran said. Hodor had heard all the stories before, but Jojen might not have. "Old ghosts, from before the Old King, even before Aegon the Dragon, seventy-nine deserters who went south to be outlaws. One was Lord Ryswell's youngest son, so when they reached the barrowlands they sought shelter at his castle, but Lord Ryswell took them captive and returned them to the Nightfort. The Lord Commander had holes hewn in the top of the Wall and he put the deserters in them and sealed them up alive in the ice. They have spears and horns and they all face north. The seventy-nine sentinels, they're called. They left their posts in life, so in death their watch goes on forever. Years later, when Lord Ryswell was old and dying, he had himself carried to the Nightfort so he could take the black and stand beside his son. He'd sent him back to the Wall for honor's sake, but he loved him still, so he came to share his watch."

And so you can see that both the black trees and the black shadows are symbolic of Jon and so in a metaphorical sense, he is in the scene with Sansa, which I think is another hint from Martin that he will be in the Vale.

Sansa does not feel very hopeful in her scene, which is understandable based on the events she’s been through, the uncertainty of her future and the dastardly villains around her in the Vale.  Her scene is also very symbolic of the past Long Night and the probable oncoming of a new one when the light of the sun will be block from planetos and everything will be dark.

However, all is not lost because the sky is only a dark grey.  It is not yet totally black because some light is still being reflected down from the sun and so not all color has gone from the world.  This hope is echoed in Jon’s scene with the pale pink light of dawn shining through.  It’s pale because the light is not strong but it is just enough to make the sky above Sansa a dark grey instead of all black.  Anyone who has seen the rise of the sun on a cold winter morning or on an overcast or rainy day, knows that the grey hue of the sky is often times interspersed with hints of pink.  Grey and pink are complementary colors in nature.  It’s why designers and artists use them together so much in their creations.

In Jon’s scene, he wakes, notes that Ghost is gone from besides him and then pulls back his cloak (a symbolic door) to go outside.  Jon is a Christ like figure in the story and so the cloak is also symbolic of the stone that sealed Jesus in his tomb, which of course will take on additional meaning later when Jon is killed and returns to the land of the living.  Sansa on the other hand, opens a real door to enter the garden and is greeted by a ghostly silence as the snow falls. GRRM’s brilliance shines though here as he ties the two scenes together as soon as Sansa enters the garden.

Ghost is the silent direwolf who never makes a sound.  In fact, ghost and silent appears together in 21 paragraphs in the various books and each time, the reference is to Jon’s direwolf.  And so Martin connects Jon’s frozen forest scene with Sansa’s winter wonderland by making it seem as if Ghost has symbolically left Jon’s side to be at Sansa’s.  But Ghost is not just a direwolf, he’s Jon as well and he brings the snow with him, which brushes her face as soft as a lover’s kiss.

When he finally put the quill down, the room was dim and chilly, and he could feel its walls closing in. Perched above the window, the Old Bear’s raven peered down at him with shrewd black eyes. My last friend, Jon thought ruefully. And I had best outlive you, or you’ll eat my face as well. Ghost did not count. Ghost was closer than a friend. Ghost was part of him.

A Dance with Dragons - Jon III

This symbolism of Ghost being a part of Jon, and a protector of Sansa was echoed in the TV show with his speech about the north as well as him leaving his direwolf behind to watch over her. The show of course edited out the Ghost scene but we know it was filmed as a result of the DVD commentaries.

The falling snow also foreshadows the future event when Jon Snow literally falls and dies in the snow and for all intents and purposes, becomes a ghost. In fact, he probably becomes Ghost for a time as his spirit enters his direwolf upon his death. And so, Ghost Jon will at some point leave the Wall and the North and will end up in the Vale.  I don’t expect him to stay long but it will be just enough time to steal Sansa away and head back north.  I expect that he will head through the mountains and take a ship from the Sisters to White Harbor just as his father did when he went home to call the Banners at the start of Robert’s Rebellion.

Jon thinks that Sansa would cry at the beauty of the scene in the forests and she may have in the past but right now there is nothing but darkness around her and while she can see the beauty, she can’t cry over it in appreciation because it’s all she can do not to shed tears at her painful circumstances.  Like Alyssa Arryn, she can find no tears to shed but there will be coming as is suggested by the melting snow on her cheeks as she symbolically cries for Jon.  Both her and Jon have much tears to shed.

Others have discounted my theory but these two Jon and Sansa scenes along with her descent from the Eyrie when she thought the wind sounded like “the howl of a ghost wolf”, suggests that when he returns from the other side, Jon will end up in the Vale.  And as I broke down HERE, her sexual dreams of Ilyn Payne also points to Jon being in the Vale.  

As every past important event is replaying in some manner, I think that this will be Martin’s way of reenacting the Tourneys at Harrenhal and Ashford Meadows as there are subtle hints to both in the Alayne TWOW preview chapter.  I also think that the character from the past that Jon represents and who I will discuss in a future essay was in the Vale when things blew up and so it makes sense for him to be there this time around as well.

Another hint that Jon will be in the Vale is of course this scene as Sansa descends from the Eyrie.

"Ser Sweetrobin," Lord Robert said, and Alayne knew that she dare not wait for Mya to return. She helped the boy dismount, and hand in hand they walked out onto the bare stone saddle, their cloaks snapping and flapping behind them. All around was empty air and sky, the ground falling away sharply to either side. There was ice underfoot, and broken stones just waiting to turn an ankle, and the wind was howling fiercely. It sounds like a wolf, thought Sansa. A ghost wolf, big as mountains.

A Feast for Crows - Alayne II

I was discussing this scene with some people on another site recently and someone actually said that the ghost wolf Sansa thinks of is Bran and Summer or possibly Lady and all I could think was “jigga what!” 

The interesting thing is that this discussion was with theorists whose theories and opinions on ASOIAF I generally admire and so I was kind of surprised to hear that they thought the scene had nothing to do with Jon—an opinion of which I totally disagree.  I am sometimes truly amazed at how some fans go out of their way to discount anything in the story that connects Jon to Sansa but to think that “ghost wolf” represents Bran/Summer or Lady/Sansa to me makes no sense.

Their reasoning was that there is a scene where the words ghost and wolf are mentioned in Bran’s chapters that refers to Summer.  This is the scene in question that occurs after Summer is hurt and Bran is kicked out of their link.

And then Bran was back abed in his lonely tower room, tangled in his blankets, his breath coming hard. "Summer," he cried aloud. "Summer." His shoulder seemed to ache, as if he had fallen on it, but he knew it was only the ghost of what the wolf was feeling. Jojen told it true. I am a beastling.

A Clash of Kings - Bran VI

Now upon reading this scene when ACOK was first published, one would not have thought it had anything to do with Jon.  However, with the knowledge gain after reading ADWD that he wargs into Ghost when he is killed, one can look back on this scene in hindsight and see that it also relates to Jon and how his personality will be changed upon his return.  This scene tips to how Jon will take on some of Ghost’s personality and will need to be tempered.

Also Summer may die in the books as he did on the show but at the time of Sansa’s descent from the Eyrie, he is very much alive. And so why would Sansa be viewing him as a ghost wolf.  Her descent from the Eyrie occurs around the same time Jon is killed and so the “ghost wolf” scene is about two things—her sensing Jon’s death and also a hint that he will be in the Vale.

When Martin reference a ghost wolf, he wants you to think of Jon and Ghost. There are no ifs, ands or buts about that fact.  The scene above was part of the slight evidence put forth to support their theory.  The other scene being when Theon thinks of the collective wolves or ghost of Winterfell who are haunting him. Before Theon thinks of the Winterfell ghosts Bran reaches out to him via the weirwood tree and so I guess to them this means that Bran is now the “Ghost.”  Oy! However, if you want to discuss evidence, here is some.  

The words ghost and wolf are used in the same sentence or paragraph 55 times in the series so far.  And in 53 of them, including Sansa’s and the above referenced Bran scene, they are obviously about Jon and Ghost.  The Theon scene is about the ghosts (plural) haunting him because of his crimes.  And the only other scene with the wording is when Brant thinks of warging Summer to escape the ghosts of the Nightfort. 

In regards to the “ghost wolf” being lady—well, that is also a no.  Lady is a shade. Yes, it means the same as ghost but in this instance, Martin wants you to think of Jon and his direwolf as Ghost and Sansa and Lady as Shade.

Summer's howls were long and sad, full of grief and longing. Shaggydog's were more savage. Their voices echoed through the yards and halls until the castle rang and it seemed as though some great pack of direwolves haunted Winterfell, instead of only two . . . two where there had once been six. Do they miss their brothers and sisters too? Bran wondered. Are they calling to Grey Wind and Ghost, to Nymeria and Lady's Shade? Do they want them to come home and be a pack together?

A Clash of Kings - Bran I

Martin is very deliberate in everything he does and if he wanted the reader to think of Lady as a ghost, he would have used that word instead of shade.  Lady is Shade with a capital “s” and I will go into the importance of this distinction in a future essay.

In addition to the symbolic hints I listed that tips to Ghost Jon being in the Vale, we also get this a little later in Sansa’s scene as she builds her snow castle.

Dawn stole into her garden like a thief. The grey of the sky grew lighter still, and the trees and shrubs turned a dark green beneath their stoles of snow.

A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII

Here again we see that George has assigned human qualities to dawn.  It’s a thief that has snuck into Sansa’s garden. The Night’s Watch, as stated in their oath are “the light that brings the dawn,” and this is specifically personified in Jon. He will be the wielder of sword of the morning to bring the dawn.  He is the sword and so in a way, he is also symbolically Dawn. And so one can say that Martin is suggesting that he will symbolically sneak into Sansa’s garden and steal her away.

Many fans have written about Sansa’s arc in the Vale and how she takes on the bastard identity of Alayne Stone, which echoes Jon’s path throughout the entire series.  She even acknowledges this change of circumstances to herself as she descends from the Eyrie.

She had not thought of Jon in ages. He was only her half brother, but still . . . with Robb and Bran and Rickon dead, Jon Snow was the only brother that remained to her. I am a bastard too now, just like him. Oh, it would be so sweet, to see him once again. But of course that could never be. Alayne Stone had no brothers, baseborn or otherwise.

A Feast for Crows - Alayne II

The interesting thing is that there is another similarity between them that can be found in the meaning of Sansa’s new name.  Alayne is another spelling of Elayne (French), which is also spelled as Elaine (Celtic origin) or Elena (Spanish) in different parts of the world.  All the various spellings of the name are ultimately derived from Ancient Greek and Helene, which finds its origin in Helios.  Helios is of course the Greek God of the sun and so if you look up the meaning of Alayne, you will find that it is suggestive of a sunbeam or a ray of light.  And so it is highly interesting Martin has written Sansa as taking on a name that is so synonymous with the morning just as is the case with Jon in his role as a Night’s Watchman and probable future bearer of Arthur Dane’s famous sword who will lead the battle for the dawn. 

There is a running theme in the Jon and Ygritte storyline where she thinks he stole her.  This belief of men stealing women to be their mates is part of the Wilding culture.  

So many stars, he thought as he trudged up the slope through pines and firs and ash. Maester Luwin had taught him his stars as a boy in Winterfell; he had learned the names of the twelve houses of heaven and the rulers of each; he could find the seven wanderers sacred to the Faith; he was old friends with the Ice Dragon, the Shadowcat, the Moonmaid, and the Sword of the Morning. All those he shared with Ygritte, but not some of the others. We look up at the same stars, and see such different things. The King's Crown was the Cradle, to hear her tell it; the Stallion was the Horned Lord; the red wanderer that septons preached was sacred to their Smith up here was called the Thief. And when the Thief was in the Moonmaid, that was a propitious time for a man to steal a woman, Ygritte insisted. "Like the night you stole me. The Thief was bright that night."

"I never meant to steal you," he said. "I never knew you were a girl until my knife was at your throat."

A Storm of Swords - Jon III

Jon didn’t understand her meaning and so consistently told Ygrittte, he didn’t steal her.  He later came to understand the implications of this Wilding practice and even considered stealing Val when Stannis offered her to him as a bride before deciding against the idea.  However, with the importance Martin places on Jon stealing a mate, you know that at some point, he will do just that.  And there in the excerpt I posted above, you get a suggestion of just who the Sword of the Morning will steal.

Steal of course has a negative connotation as in taking something that does not belong to you.  However, if you look up the definition in the dictionary, you will see that it also has a romantic meaning as in stealing a kiss or another’s heart.  And there are several instances in the books where it is used in just such a manner in scenes involving Sansa.  No, the verb is not always associated with her but it seems like George’s way of saying, stealing or stole can be used in a romantic manner as well.

In analyzing Sansa’s scene, one must also consider the literary practice of symbolically comparing a woman to a garden.  Many great authors including Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood have used a garden and flowers to symbolize a woman’s innocence and her wakening sexuality as well as her ability to be fertile and bring forth life. The line, “Dawn stole into her garden like a thief,” then metaphorically suggests that a man, who I think is Jon will soon be awakening Sansa sexually.  

A stole is also a protective covering worn by a woman and as it is her garden, she is symbolically the trees and shrubs covered by the snowy stole. This suggests that Jon may also play this protective role for Sansa.

There is also another bit of interesting symbolism in Jon’s crystal forest scene. The “pale light of dawn” shines on the branches (Bran and the weirwood tree), leaf (Leaf of the COF) and stone.  The latter could of course be symbolically representative of petrified wood and as such also indicative of the weirwood trees but that is already suggested by the reference to branches.  I propose that it possibly could be a tip to the fact that Sansa, aka Alayne Stone may have some part to play in the endgame battle for the dawn.  We already know that Bran and the COF are important to the final endgame but this metaphor from Jon’s scene seems to indicate that Sansa has a role to play as well. 

Gardens are used to symbolize death as well and this aspect is also there in the scene with the description of the trees and evocative shadows.  Sansa stepping out into the death realm echoes what Persephone must have felt when Hades first took her to the underworld.   However, even though she thinks she doesn’t belong, she powers on, as Persephone also must have done as she came to love her husband and ruled the underworld jointly with him.  Jon is the lord of this death realm as is suggested when Gilly calls him Lord Snow at the end. And Sansa makes herself the Lady of the realm when very she builds her icy version of Winterfell.  

At the center of the garden in the Eyrie, is the broken statue of Alyssa Arryn, the ancient queen bee of the Eyrie, and itself a symbol of death.  It was here by the statue that Bronn slew Ser Egen in defense of Tyrion.  It was during this duel that the statue was broken when Bronn knocked it over on to Ser Egen and it became even further associated with death.  And it is next to this statue; in the heart of the Eyrie and all its symbolism that moon maiden Alayne Stone aka Sansa Stark, with the blood of Winterfell running through her veins, makes the icy death realm her own?  It is here, that very Night Queen like, she builds her icy knights and a reproduction of Winterfell, the Stark’s holdfast in the north and source of their greatest strength.  It is also here that Dawn finds her.

And it is here next to the symbolic Winterfell that Sansa Stark begins the long journey back to reclaim her identity, her heritage and her destiny.

ETA on 7/27/18 to include a discussion on black shadows and a certain ghost wolf.