Episode 11: A GAME OF THRONES, JON II: "Catelyn Might Have Done Something Wrong Right There" Show Notes!

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast, the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. 

And I’m your other host, Emmett better known as PoorQuentyn. 

Welcome to our eleventh episode of the Not A Cast entitled: “Catelyn Might Have Done Something Wrong Right There: An Analysis of AGOT, Jon II” where Jon Snow says goodbye to Bran, Robb, Arya and Winterfell forever. But probably not.

Spoiler warning: All published books - 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, and TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show, anything and everything!

Question(s) of the week:

So, for those of you who are a part of our patreon campaign (And thank you all very much for those who donate!), we give the option for those who contribute $10 or more a month to ask us a question. Find out more about our different rewards at patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF: 

This week, we have a few great questions we were asked:

Our first comes from Ser Matt of House Very Wrong on Many, Many Things, one of our sworn sword patrons: 

Better Wyatt Earp: Costner or Russell?

Jeff: Russell even though Costner is great.

Our second comes from Ser Adam of House Slow, another sworn who asks: Have either of you tried any of the ASOIAF game mods such as the Crusader Kings 2 or Mount and Blade conversions. Enjoying the podcast, keep it up.

Jeff: Haven’t played Mount and Blade, but I played a similar-ish game called Chivalry and still play once in a while as Brynden Blackfish. Yeah. Super original. CK2 … well, I tried. After spending two hours still trying to learn the game, I gave up. It was too complicated. (Mention History of Westeros podcast and Aziz/Ashaya doing occasional livestreams on their youtube channel)

Lady Sarah of the Saturn Moons: I wanted to ask you guys what you think the impact of Game of Thrones on popular culture/the entertainment landscape will be? Will it stay massively popular, or will it be like the YA trend that developed post-Hunger Games and then disappeared? I realise we're all waiting for the next book, but once the show is done in 2019, what then?

Ser Travis, our sworn sword patron asks: We all know ASOIAF is one of the richest stories ever told and has the most fervent and devoted fandoms in the world. Great theories abound about the characters and plot, but there are some wild-ass, crazy ideas too. Talk about speculation in this community. Why do you think ASOIAF fans go to such lengths and depths? Has George deliberately contributed to this with the time between books or the layered prose and symbolism built into the books? Or is this speculating somehow indicative of the interconnected age we find ourselves in?

Jeff Synopsis

Jon Snow is climbing the stairs to his half-brother Bran Stark’s bedchamber with Ghost. It’s the last day before Jon departs for the Night’s Watch and the Wall, and Jon wants to see Bran before he goes, but there’s a giant obstacle in the way: Catelyn Stark. Catelyn Stark hasn’t left Bran’s bedside since he was brought there after his fall. Jon stands at the door and decides finally to walk in. A wolf howls, and Catelyn looks at Jon

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to see Bran. To say goodbye.”

Catelyn tells him to go away, but Jon refuses. He comes closer to Bran and tells Catelyn that she can’t stop him. When he sees Bran, he feels sick. The boy’s eyes are open yet sightless and his legs are bent at a grotesque angle. 

“Bran,” Jon says, “I’m sorry I didn’t come before. I was afraid. Don’t die, Bran. Please. We’re all waiting for you to wake up. Me and Robb and the girls, everyone.”

Catelyn watches Jon but doesn’t say anything. Jon finally says goodbye and prepares to depart, but then Cat talks to or through Jon, bitterly telling Jon that the gods answered her prayers not to take Bran with her. Jon tells her it wasn’t her fault that Bran fell. Catelyn snaps that she doesn’t want any of Jon’s absolution. As Jon prepares to depart, she calls after him.

“It should have been you.”

Jon heads down to the yard and see Robb. Robb asks how it went with Catelyn. 

“She was … very kind.” 

They exchange brotherly words and hugs. Robb tells him that Benjen is looking for Jon, but Jon has one last stop to make before he heads out with Benjen to the Wall. “Then I haven’t seen you,” Robb replies.

Jon heads up to the Keep to find his sister Arya. There, he sees Arya and Nymeria packing clothes to prepare for their journey to King’s Landing. Arya complains that Septa Mordane told Arya that she has to repack her clothes as they weren’t folded properly. 

Fortunately though, Arya repacking her clothes gives Jon an opening. He has a present for Arya. He pulls a long, thin object out for her. A sword. A thin blade seen most often in the free cities. Jon gives Arya her first lesson in swordplay: Stick them with the pointy end. They banter back and forth for a minute, and Arya tells Jon that all swords have names. Jon has a name for the sword.

“Can’t you guess? Your very favorite thing.”

“Needle!”

The memory of Arya’s laughter warms Jon on his way to the Wall.

Emmett Depth

The opening line sums it up: “Jon climbed the steps slowly, trying not to think that this might be the last time ever.” Bran II was the false farewell; Jon II is the real deal, the final chapter of the early Winterfell suite. Bran isn’t leaving the castle after all (not yet, anyway), but Jon is, and this chapter is all about leaving home, facing your complicated feelings about it, and growing up...or starting to. Jon still has many illusions to be dashed as we’ll see in Tyrion II and Jon III, and he can only cope with that because he starts to give up on childhood here. 

• Catelyn
  • The sight of Bran, legs broken and skin stretched, calls back to the loss of innocence theme in Bran II 
  • Emphasis on Cat not recognizing him/talking but not to him/seeing him for the first time. She is disassociating somewhat, of course, but it’s also a long-simmering tension finally coming to the surface right before they never see each other again. 
  • More wolf howling getting people’s attention and cuing the progression of the scene
• Robb
  • Public v. private--as we’ll see in Catelyn III, she has retreated into herself, and Robb is trying to step up.
  • “Leaving is harder than I thought.”
  • The symbolism of the heat of Robb’s body melting the snow--back to the Winterfell hot springs, forward to Robb’s lust endangering his cause
  • Tacked on at the end of writing AGOT? 
• Arya
  • Her messy clothes and recklessness (jumping to hug Jon with Needle still in hand) fit with Jon’s feeling of awkward outsider-ness
  • “Dark eyes, like his.” 
  • “Jon found himself grinning like an idiot.” Very sweet, but also revealing how (like Arya) Jon feels negatively about his own emotional responses

Structure

How George RR Martin grows Jon’s role as the outsider in the narrative.

The Jon/Catelyn dynamic is something we’ll talk about at some length at the end of the podcast, but here, I thought it might be good to get into the inner family dynamics and how Jon’s fear of Catelyn + Catelyn’s responses to Jon communicate Jon’s role as an outsider in the narrative. 

Even though Jon, like Tyrion, like Arya, is a product of relative privilege as compared to the whole of Westeros, he is an outsider as Ned Stark’s bastard. And that’s common among noble bastards in Westeros. But like we said in our analysis of Catelyn II, Jon Snow is distinct in that Ned both acknowledged him and brought his bastard home with him -- an uncommon practice in Westeros. This sets enmity between Catelyn and Ned. 

Here in this chapter, George allows the reader to see some of those tensions come into greater focus. Jon’s trepidations over seeing Bran, knowing that his step-mother is with Bran, gives us a window into Jon’s unique situation as the acknowledged bastard of Eddard Stark -- a bastard who is both acknowledged and has grown up around Ned’s trueborn sons and daughters. 

Jon stayed away from Bran’s room, because he knew his status as a bastard and knew of Catelyn’s distaste for him because of his acknowledged and living-around-the-Stark bastardy. Jon’s fears are confirmed when he enters Bran’s sickroom, and Catelyn tells him to leave and that “We don’t want you here.” The “we” has Catelyn implying herself and Bran, but I wonder whether Bran is speaking about Jon being at Winterfell altogether. Winterfell doesn’t want you, Jon. You don’t belong. Ned should have never brought you back with him.

Jon internalizes his role as an outsider to Winterfell for rest of the narrative. In his crypt-dream towards the end of A Storm of Swords, he thinks:

Up above he heard drums. They are feasting in the Great Hall, but I am not welcome there. I am no Stark, and this is not my place. 

“I am not welcome there”: is a chorus line to Catelyn’s “We don’t want you here.” But there’s tragedy in Jon’s dream as well. Remember our title for our fifth episode? I’ll remind you with the full quote by Ned:

"She was a Stark of Winterfell," Ned said quietly. "This is her place." 

Eerie parallel/contrast to Jon’s ASOS dream. Jon’s outsider “This is not my place” contrasts/parallels (almost certainly deliberate on GRRM’s part) with Ned Stark’s statement about Lyanna “This is her place.” 

The tragedy of Jon’s outsider status is that Jon isn’t an outsider. Though Catelyn may tell Jon that “we don’t want you here,” the reality is that Jon, by status of his mother, isn’t truly an outsider, and if events in Game of Thrones pan out in the books (i.e. that Rhaegar and Lyanna married), Jon isn’t a bastard either. He’s royalty. 

Jon has built so much of his identity from his outsider status. So, what a revelation that will be to Jon when he gets it in Season 8 of Game of Thrones or in The Winds of Winter or A Dream of Spring.

This is also the chapter where Winterfell is established as a place of memory for the Starklings leaving it behind. The image of Robb with the snowflakes melting in his hair comes up in Sansa’s memories as well as Jon’s, and the latter says that the memory of Arya’s laughter kept him warm on the ride north (contrast with Bran describing Jon as growing colder and harder in his vision). But Catelyn’s words remind us that Winterfell is pain for Jon as well as pleasure; his memories include the time Robb told him he could never be Lord of Winterfell. 

The threefold structure of the chapter draws the reader into Jon’s relationship to Winterfell step by step. First, Catelyn reminds him why he’s leaving: she’s the self-appointed guardian, and the one he’s really saying goodbye to (Bran) can’t hear him. That’s his alienation in a nutshell. Then comes Robb, in which the affection is fierce but they can sense the changes coming and the divisions between them. Jon can’t bring up what happened with Cat but Robb senses it, and they call each other Stark and Snow--again, with affection, yet it’s something Arya would never do. The latter is the final stage, the part of Winterfell that’s home, the one who treats Jon like anyone else. 

How does this work differently than if it went in reverse? Well, if it started with Arya and ended with Cat, the mood would be “I love this place, but it’s not my home, and it’s time to go.” But ending it with Arya and specifically the lingering memory of her laughter and love points towards the decisions Jon makes in ADWD. The mood becomes “this is still home despite what Catelyn said, and I haven’t left it behind,” and so it feels in-character that Jon repeatedly breaks his NW vows as LC, sending Mance to snatch up Arya (they think...) and then preparing to march south himself after receiving the Pink Letter. In the latter case, he flashes right back to this chapter: it was buried like a fishhook in his mind, waiting to drag him gasping to the surface.

Likes/Dislikes

Like: Dramatic writing with Jon and Catelyn, Robb and Jon’s relationship shown to be close, love the Arya/Jon dynamic and reveal of Needle.

Dislike: Some wonky/cliched writing: “It was still warm and quiet. Too quiet for Jon’s liking.” “Not for a moment had she left Bran’s side.”

Like: The sheer range of dynamics at work--fraught and contemptuous between Jon and Cat, rough and fraternal between Jon and Robb, sweet and protective between Jon and Arya. All of them feel earned, and GRRM shifts between tones with ease.

Dislike: Same--as with Jon I, GRRM didn’t seem to quite have a handle on his mini-Aragorn’s internal monologue quite yet, especially compared to the other POVs. Is it perhaps because Jon is so reactive in these early chapters?

Groundwork/Foreshadowing

More subtle early warging hints:

[Robb] seemed to have grown of late, as if Bran’s fall and his mother’s collapse had somehow made him stronger. Grey Wind was at his side.

Arya would only have to point, and the wolf would bound across the room, snatch up some wisp of silk in her jaws, and fetch it back.

Not warging, but Ghost nuzzling Jon’s hand to give him the strength to face Catelyn is another subtle example of the growing bond between the Starklings and their wolves. 

“Stick ‘em with the pointy end.”

Arya remembers Jon’s lesson when she encounters and kills the stable boy just as she’s about to flee King’s Landing:

She stuck him with the pointy end, driving the blade upward with a wild, hysterical strength.

But she also remember Jon’s words as they become pivotal for Arya’s decision not to throw away Needle and her Stark identity

She stood on the end of the dock, pale and goosefleshed and shivering in the fog. In her hand, Needle seemed to whisper to her. Stick them with the pointy end, it said, and, don't tell Sansa! Mikken's mark was on the blade. It's just a sword. If she needed a sword, there were a hundred under the temple. Needle was too small to be a proper sword, it was hardly more than a toy. She'd been a stupid little girl when Jon had it made for her. "It's just a sword," she said, aloud this time . . .

. . . but it wasn't. (AFFC, Arya II)

Syrio Forel foreshadowing 

Jon tells Arya that she’ll find someone to practice with in King’s Landing

Jon and Arya will intersect again:

“Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle. Who knows?” - Jon

Seeds of Stoneheart: 

“Something cold moved in her eyes .... her eyes found him. They were full of poison” as compared to “her eyes saw him, and they hated” from Merrett’s epilogue.

Bran will fly:

“Fingers like the bones of birds.”

Robb will die: 

“You Starks are hard to kill.” 

Theory Discussion

Is Catelyn Stark a bitch/evil? Did she abuse Jon?

Thus, the question I have is if Catelyn went out of her way to mistreat Jon in the past -- and which form this might have taken -- or if she rather tried to avoid and ignore him?

GRRM: "Mistreatment" is a loaded word. Did Catelyn beat Jon bloody? No. Did she distance herself from him? Yes. Did she verbally abuse and attack him? No. (The instance in Bran's bedroom was obviously a very special case). But I am sure she was very protective of the rights of her own children, and in that sense always drew the line sharply between bastard and trueborn where issues like seating on the high table for the king's visit were at issue.

And Jon surely knew that she would have preferred to have him elsewhere.

Silent Treatment as abuse: The silent treatment is a form of emotional abuse typically employed by people with narcissistic tendencies. It is designed to (1) place the abuser in a position of control; (2) silence the target’s attempts at assertion; (3) avoid conflict resolution/personal responsibility/compromise; or (4) punish the target for a perceived ego slight. Often, the result of the silent treatment is exactly what the person with narcissism wishes to create: a reaction from the target and a sense of control. - Andrea Schneider, Psychotherapist

“It should have been you” is the line that gets all the attention, and for good reason. But upon reread, “I need none of your absolution” stands out, because it’s a moment in which Catelyn has made herself vulnerable, and Jon reaches out to try and make a connection over their mutual love for Bran. She reacts by rejecting the olive branch, and ultimately that might be the best case against Catelyn here. 

Conclusion

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