ADWD Jon II

I just finished Davos I. Gave myself a bit of padding there. Hopefully I can cover Tyrion III and Davos I in one post tomorrow (when I read Jon III) and then do Jon III and whatever comes next on Friday and then I'll be all caught up.  On the one hand I like having padding in my schedule just in case I have a heavy reading assignment some night and can't give as much time as I'd like to reading and posting for pleasure. On the other hand, I'm trying to remember stuff I read on Monday.

Fortunately, I have A Feast For Crows and Sam I to help job my memory a bit. Yes, we're five books in and only now does George finally pull a Rashomon on us. But I'll get to that in a moment.


So first we have a scene between Jon and Gilly, where he does exactly what anyone who finished A Feast For Crows knew he did. He has Gilly switch her baby with Mance Rayder's so Melisandre can't burn the prince. Even though North of the Wall Kings don't work like that. And even though if Jon's entire plan to get Melisandre to not burn a baby was to say "oh by the way, that's not Mance's son," he could just say "oh by the way, that's not Mance's son" even if it was, and save Gilly the tears.  But as I hope I've made clear by now, A Song of Ice and Fire is not a series in which characters always do the most logical thing. I understand that; it makes them human. What bugs me is when I find myself asking, "Okay, did Catelyn kidnap Tyrion because she trusted Petyr's word, or because GRRM needed to get the plot moving in a specific direction?"

Enough griping (at least for now). One thing I do like about this scene is Jon's promise to eventually tell Gilly's son who his mother is. Y'know, because Jon himself is a bastard who was never told who his mother was. I snark a lot about GRRM's writing (which is normally indicative of praise of whatever I don't snark at) but I want to single this section out for praise. You know that Jon's thinking about his own mysterious parentage without GRRM drawing any attention to it. This scene is the best thing I've read in the book so far. And, if Jon really is the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna, then there's some delicious additional irony in him doing exactly the same thing his "father" did and hiding a prince by raising him under false pretenses for his own safety. 

Next up Jon summons Sam and has the exact same conversation we already read in Feast, only from Jon's perspective. Apparently he's grown out of being a dick to people because he's a bastard and has started being a dick to people because Maester Aemon told him to. Jon doesn't really read like a seventeen-year-old at this point... but come on, once you're over fifteen in any sci-fi/fantasy setting*, you're an adult. Just ask Leia Skywalker, Senator at something like eighteen.  And besides, GRRM admitted that there was supposed to be a five-year gap between Storm and Feast (in Westeros time, not in the real world), and since there wasn't, the younger generation is just going to be acting a tad too mature for their ages and we just have to deal with it.

*Except Middle-Earth. By the way, I was thumbing through my cousin's copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. I can no longer take the phrase "Frodo, son of Drogo" seriously.

After Sam, Aemon and Gilly are sent off to go be in the previous book, Jon starts the next phase of his plan, namely re-manning the abandoned castles along the Wall. Unfortunately, he realizes that Janos Slynt - sorry, I have to pause here and note that my spellchecker somehow recognizes "Janos" - is one of the brothers most suited for command.  Slynt scoffs in his face and goes off to have breakfast. When Jon confronts him in the mess later, Slynt scoffs in his face again.

So Jon whacks his head off.

Well. Not to put too fine a point on it, but every Stark who has whacked someone's head off in previous books was dead by the end of that book. So if Jon's still alive at the end of this book, I'm pretty confident in that R+L=J.