ADWD 10 Jon III

Wow this chapter was loaded with stuff I’ll be chewing on for a while. I love the tone of the whole thing. It’s like mystical high fantasy elements hiding behind a gritty low fantasy, day-in-the-miserable-life overtone. Exactly what I love about ASOIAF.

The most interesting part to me is the additional or alternate Azor Ahai story. It never comes up in AA theories that I’ve seen, but there’s no way it isn’t supposed to be a piece of the puzzle.

Lonely and lovely and lethal, Jon Snow reflected, and I might have had her. Her, and Winterfell, and my lord father’s name. Instead he had chosen a black cloak and a wall of ice. Instead he had chosen honor. A bastard’s sort of honor.

Jon and Val seems like a fanfic worth writing. Jon accepts Stannis’s offer and then Jon and Val have a sappy romantic ending. Start the gofundme.

I didn’t notice this on my first read through. It was pointed out to me much later. But Melisandre glamoured Rattleshirt to look like Mance and tricked him into the burning.

Inside his cage, Mance Rayder clawed at the noose about his neck with bound hands and screamed incoherently of treachery and witchery, denying his kingship, denying his people, denying his name, denying all that he had ever been. He shrieked for mercy and cursed the red woman and began to laugh hysterically.

I imagine Melisandre told Rattleshirt that the plan is to burn the real Mance and make Rattleshrit the leader of the wildlings, glamored as Mance.

And then Jon wonders what Val was feeling as she watched Mance kneel.

Next came Rattleshirt in clattering armor made of bones and boiled leather, his helm a giant’s skull. Under the bones lurked a ruined and wretched creature with cracked brown teeth and a yellow tinge to the whites of his eyes. A small, malicious, treacherous man, as stupid as he is cruel. Jon did not believe for a moment that he would keep faith. He wondered what Val was feeling as she watched him kneel, forgiven.

Which is ironic if Val is in on the secret, because then Val is feeling pretty good about it! Haha Because she knows that the Mance who’s being killed isn’t the real Mance, it’s Rattleshithead. And the Rattleshirt who’s joining her on the safe side of the Wall is really Mance.

He read the letter from the Shadow Tower again, sharpened a quill, and unstoppered a pot of thick black ink. He wrote two letters, the first to Ser Denys, the second to Cotter Pyke. Both of them had been hounding him for more men. Halder and Toad he dispatched west to the Shadow Tower, Grenn and Pyp to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. The ink would not flow properly, and all his words seemed curt and crude and clumsy, yet he persisted.

This was pretty interesting. Earlier in the cafeteria or whatever it’s called, Toad and Pyp were being kind of insolent toward Jon. But Grenn stood up for Jon.

I looked up Halder. Halder is a friend to Jon too. He carved the wolf head hilt of Longclaw, and he was part of the group that brought Jon back to the Wall when Jon tried to desert the Watch.

So with this order, Jon is sending people away in groups of 1 friend + 1 foe, dividing his foes. But he’s also failing to surround himself with friends at this tense moment in his command. Maybe he’s trying to balance his friends and foes at each castle to reduce the risk of any individual castle organizing against him.