He's definitely decided that he can't have friends anymore and he needs to be taken seriously and he's just gonna have to deal with being lonely for the next fifty years (if the ice zombies don't kill them all first or they don't starve to death or w/e, nbd, nbd, ha ha!)
If you read the chapter from Jon's POV and then reread it from Sam's or kind of look at them in parallel after reading Jon's version you definitely get a feel for how exhausted and overwhelmed Jon is and where his priorities are.
One thing I will say though is that Jon is actually now pushing seventeen here. For some reason people think he's still 14-15. It's not noted in the text but with the natural passage of time, he most likely has his 17th birthday at some point in ADWD (the show ages them up so he'd be more like 21 or 22 at the time of the shankening).
People sat around and figured it out years ago. Some stuff is nebulous, some stuff is very carefully timed out. (The amount of time Jon is with the Wildlings before he gets romantically involved with Ygritte is especially nebulous, IMO.)
yeah they aren't clear about the time but i just assumed a year or two had passed just based on the amount of time it takes to go anywhere and do anything
About a year passes between the first and second book (there's a line somewhere in a Jon chapter in ACOK that I think says something like that he's been there about a year, or that his nameday has come and gone or something)
I have some small quibbles with a few of the entries on this, but the people who made it give their reasoning; it had a bunch of contributors and it's relatively solid.
I think they probably have the Great Ranging either starting earlier than it actually does or they have Jon with the Free Folk a little longer than he actually is or something (although I think they're right on about his relationship with Ygritte actually only lasting a couple of weeks)
But for the most part it's really carefully thought out. Although GRRM has said he's kind of intentionally vague about some things that he really doesn't want people to overthink or be able to nail down.
it's not like the warcraft timeline where everything happens in the same year all at once and then a year at a time after that because it's a video game lmao
Also I am prone to measuring out time in these books in Jon Units because that's all I really have to know, and that's a fallacy peculiar to me. Other people will have other perceptions.
One tremendous plotting issue I suspect GRRM is having is that he desperately needs a time skip somewhere for his plot to work, both for Dany's dragons getting embiggened enough and for putting Bran on the throne at the end via his own worldbuilding rules (which is supposedly really and truly his plan, or was as late as 2019).
I could possibly see some room for it somewhere in TWOW or between there and ADOS, but he has sure created a plotting problem in the form of the Stannis storyline.
But if he gets Dany, Jon, and whoever is on the throne in King's Landing into stable positions for a while, and kills Stannis off, maybe he can time skip then.
(Supposedly, the reason he couldn't do it where he wanted to, which I think was around where you are now in the books, was that Stannis's plot couldn't be stalled -- if I am remembering correctly. It needed to be resolved and there was no good way to slow it down.)
There's a lot about the Night's Watch that's handled slightly differently in the show and I think I understand why in each instance, including the Stannis stuff, but the book version is super interesting
(in the case of the Stannis stuff it's like, the general audience would never have been up for learning the names of a bunch of random knights and wildlings who are Around and never do much, and they also didn't have the budget: the show ran out of money in S4 and had to beg HBO, so in S5 you see a lot of Budget Tradeoff Decisions with chess move vibes.)
it was mostly the shireen bit i didn't care for because it didn't seem in line with his character at that point even if he was in a bad way and running out of supplies or whatever (i forget the exact reasons but they weren't good enough lmao)
but book!stannis is more on board with the whole religion thing than show stannis? show stannis didn't convince me on that end and at least he has the sword in the book
But yeah, even the books have a ways to go to be more convincing about Stannis doing any sacrificing. And there's a lot of debate about it because it's definitely Stannis doing it, not Melisandre or Selyse deciding to do it behind his back.
Also, the mechanics and timing of that threatening letter from Ramsay to Jon are very different between the books and the show -- that's in Jon's last ADWD chapter, so you have a ways to go before you get there.
A lot of guys just... don't pay many attention to Stannis's flaws (his rigidity) and like how he follows through on his promises, actually comes to the North's aid, promotes Davos, etc etc etc.
This used to be pretty endemic on r/asoiaf prior to about like 2017 or so (the show kind of killed it, esp with the knowledge that Stannis burning Shireen was a plot point that came from GRRM) -- there was a huge Stannis bloc there.
they really thought he had a chance at winning the throne and some also thought he might marry Dany. There's a lot of fic out there about Shireen as his heir.
But definitely not as prevalent as it was about a decade back. A lot of people think the Night Lamp theory (at that link) is almost set in stone going to happen in TWOW, though.
i figured things at the end were grrm plot points but given the budget/writing issues they were not allowed to be achieved in any way that didn't look like an assassination of established character traits so i've always blamed that on HBO/D&D
Most of s6 is kind of... decent... ish... albeit annoying in parts... and then they smack you at the end with two legendary episodes (depending on how much you want to nitpick the battle of the bastards, which I don't)
However, as you've probably picked up from my plurks, it's pretty widely argued in the fandom fandom (like, fic and RP) that S8 was totally made up by the showrunners and doesn't represent GRRM's plans at all (even though Isaac was told that King Bran is indeed GRRM's endgame,
I think the most generous interpretation from the available official information is that HBO wanted to sell merch (keeping characters popular as long as possible), and D&D wanted to be subtle and not do any more exposition than they thought was necessary (they were wrong), and maybe that's too generous.
Diana Gabaldon, who has discussed GRRM's planned plot points with him, has said in the press that that was his planned ending, with a different story written around it. How true that is, though, idk.
This makes people in the fandom really mad. (The Dany Extremists on Tumblr and Twitter in particular have gone completely in the direction of "that's all totally fake, the show and showrunners are evil, Our Queen has been slandered!" but also demonize Jon and the Starks in general pretty heavily on the basis of the show.)
(And those people have themselves totally convinced that Dany is the main hero of the books and will have a triumphant "does everything and gets everything" ending. There's a separate crew that's the same way about Sansa.)
I'm just like... s8 is a sketch of a plot that's missing so much connective tissue because (and this is established in behind the scenes material) the showrunners didn't want to overexplain. So they underexplained.
But even if it had been done really well, I think people would still reject it, because they just don't like it... they do not like the plot direction and ultimate fates of most of these characters, they did not want tragic endings... and that's on GRRM for not having finished the source material before the show aired.
and book dany gives you a look inside her head that makes me feel like you can see her potential early on to make that sort of flip if more bad things keep happening because anger, grief, paranoia, and incredible power is a hell of a drug but lol dany stans would never agree
Dany haters in the book fandom (who suck -- they way over-hate this 16-year-old abuse survivor who has good intentions and just wants a safe home and a happy marriage) were using her last chapter in ADWD to predict badness, which seems unfair. It's ambiguous, has a lot of hallucinations.
It's the chapter that corresponds to the end of s5 of the show, where she's stuck in the middle of nowhere with Drogon after flying out of the assassination attempt in the fighting pit. Her situation is a lot worse in the book.
Oh, sorry, I totally wandered off in the middle of a thought! So, back in the day, before S8, they used to say that that chapter was totally evidence that you'd see a bad ending where she was an endgame villain. And I don't personally think it's enough evidence on its own. It's too ambiguous.
Those people made Dany's most intense stans incredibly defensive about her. So I think there can be a tendency to overcorrect. Grey areas in fandom are difficult (this is also a problem with Catelyn: people have been so sexist about her that now it's difficult to have fair and accurate discussions of her flaws).
Dany is complicated and means well and thinks she is the only person who can do certain things, or is obligated to do certain things, and bad stuff keeps happening to her.
dany on the show had that same issue as jon where a lot of her character was lost onscreen because she puts up a stoic front and you only get as much of what's going on in her head as they're able to convey
she's definitely complicated in either case but iirc the show sort of framed it like "this happen because her targaryen switch flipped" when in the text there is so many more layers
and he's doing weird stuff with "hand of the king" and Jaime the swordsman losing a hand and other prominent characters in the past losing a hand. I'm sure that someone at some point has sat down and made notes on all the hand losses and metaphors and comments and stuff, because it's this whole thing in these books.
Did you notice that Shae only went to Tywin because Cersei reneged on her part of their deal and said "actually I'm not giving you anything until you deliver Sansa to me"
also canon reviewing and lol the line where viserys is like "lemme guess lord strong you're going to suggest harwin breakbones is the best match for rhaenyra"
i am entertained because it's the perfect anatomy of a disaster where if something had been done anywhere along this chain of events none of this would've happened but lol lmao here we are
my favourite thing about that scene is how paddy and matt really got along with each other in terms of playing them as brothers and so daemon has this smarmy look on his face when he walks in because part of it is daemon being daemon but part of it is just the energy of fucking with your older brother lol
and one thing i always wish we had details on is like... intent because daemon does a lot where it's like what exactly were you thinking and what did you expect was gonna happen and at the same time i like that it's nebulous but also as an rper sometimes it's nice to know things
I've always treated it as what he was thinking is that he wants to do something and what he expects will happen is something to deal with whenever he gets there
but it's also his approach to things like war if he planned or used strategy better maybe he would've realised that his tactics were going to drive the pirates into the caves but it's like they are pirates and he has dragons this will be over soon
I've inevitably been over this before but i never quite got to the point where I'm comfy with my characterisation when i went on hiatus so lol here we go again
he probably just assumes everyone is going to surrender to dragons sooner or later and also no one is ever really going to punish him because Prince Daemon
also i'm still reading the book but i don't have any specific commentary about that other than jaime remains a constant threat but i don't have anything specific in mind i could think of to do in rp lmao
Honestly some of those Otto and Daemon rivalry moments were when Matt Smith really locked in for me as amazing casting, because NO ONE does the twinkly eyes of mischief quite like him
like where he leans in like "do you want our army or not?" and daemon leans in like he is really considering saying whatever he wants to say and then changes his mind lol
surreal experience at the chiropractor where i had my tshirt on with all the hotd dragons on it and he was like WOW I LOVE THAT SHOW and wanted to know the names of everyone on the shirt
everything about this canon from the start has been like this why are y'all surprised
but lol dany stans would never agree
i love all the new POVs
jaime continues to go through it
the side characters that are also added worldbuilding
uh ohlollol oh buddy
canon reviewing and lol
the line where viserys is like "lemme guess lord strong you're going to suggest harwin breakbones is the best match for rhaenyra"
because daemon does a lot where it's like
what exactly were you thinking and what did you expect was gonna happen
and at the same time i like that it's nebulous but also as an rper sometimes it's nice to know things
if he planned or used strategy better maybe he would've realised that his tactics were going to drive the pirates into the caves but it's like
they are pirates and he has dragons this will be over soon
blood and cheese
>goes to harrenhal
>how do i get the riverlands
>lol ok join me or burn
like they must tell him he looks like his father when he was young because i can just see it
jace: no not like that
why haven't i watched this a million times yet it's so fucking funny
and daemon leans in like he is really considering saying whatever he wants to say and then changes his mind lol
WOW I LOVE THAT SHOW and wanted to know the names of everyone on the shirt