#theres also that ‘no one’s cousin no one’s sworn sword no one’ etc passage in asos

[ilynpilled]

i know people mostly take note of jaime being associated with the warrior & the maiden because of the whole huge gender extravaganza that is going on with j/c/b but i love how he also seems to be strongly connected to the stranger throughout the text. other than all this, he has the death motif (death of the boy, scythe sword chops hand/rebirth, aerys, ilyn the executioner, the bear, stoneheart, cersei, hooded figures in his dreams, the ghosts etc) along with the dance with death thing. when he refers to himself as “a stranger in my own house,” in the next few chapters he gifts oathkeeper to brienne and aids her in working against his family’s interests, the major color symbolism shift starts: crimson/gold vs white, and frees tyrion which leads to the death of his father and the head of his house (he told the corpse. “The blood on his hands as much as… Tyrion’s.” The blood on his hands as much as mine, he meant to say.) and i think we can all guess what else is coming when it concerns jaime embodying the stranger in the future. i like that cersei “all the time was the stranger” to jaime, and he comes to that epiphany and continues diverging from her, and he “has become” it for cersei, but she is not aware of it, like she doesn’t think he means her death. and i am sure it is meant to be loaded that the character who is the primary deconstruction of knighthood/the kingsguard in the series also embodies the stranger (he certainly fulfills the role of executioner & judgement in some form, and i do like these layers when it comes to the medieval narrative of “it is ‘god’ who shall judge tyrants, not anyone else” which can also serve as a tool for class stratification, and avoiding the precedent of sovereignty being challenged. it is touched on in different ways in the text) but i dont have my thoughts together enough about this lol. we do know george is an agnostic:

"I suppose l'm a lapsed Catholic. You would consider me an atheist or agnostic. I find religion and spirituality fascinating. I would like to believe this isn't the end and there's something more, but I can't convince the rational part of me that that makes any sense whatsoever. [...] And as for the gods, l've never been satisfied by any of the answers that are given. If there really is a benevolent loving god, why is the world full of rape and torture? Why do we even have pain?”

his view is verbatim jaime’s argument: “If there are gods, why is the world so full of pain and injustice?” and the whole conversation parallels brienne’s statement: “Jaime Lannister murdered the rightful king […] Where were the gods then? The gods don’t care about men…”

but george is absolutely not a nihilist in any way, so i think much of it is about placing human agency at the center of all this, and it is some kind of discussion when it comes to karmic or divine intervention. he is half a corpse too. a man is a man, not god. and a man is “whatever he chose.” it is man who acts, not gods.