Game of Thrones: The Ominous Jon and Dany Foreshadowing You Might Have Missed
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This post contains frank discussion of Season 7, Episode 6, “Beyond the Wall.” If you’re not caught up or don’t want to be spoiled, now would be the time to leave. Seriously, I won’t warn you again. Skedaddle.
Though we’ve all seen it coming for a few episodes (if not decades), this week’s episode must put to rest any doubt that Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen are being positioned as the next (and maybe last) great love story on Game of Thrones. Shirtless handholding? Yeah, even Tyrion can tell that it’s on. But even as this episode of Game of Thrones lays track for these two telegenic heroes to consummate their affection, it also buries a few potential landmines for their future happiness. Did you catch the running theme that could spell doom for Jon and Daenerys before they even get started?
It might have been easy to miss among all the action up North, but this week’s episode dropped a few unsubtle hints about the potential ramifications of a love connection between Jon and Daenerys. As Tyrion points out (in an oddly gossipy scene that surely would have been better shared with Dany’s girlfriend, Missandei), not only is Jon Snow in love with Daenerys, but the queen faces a particular challenge when it comes to empire building: she cannot have children of her own.
This is something that (in the books at least) Daenerys is told explicitly by the witch Mirri Maz Duur who, after she causes the khaleesi to miscarry and Khal Drogo to slip into a waking coma, curses her thus: “When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before.”
The HBO series skipped over the “when your womb quickens again” bit, but in both the show and the book Daenerys believes she cannot have any more children. Close-reading book lovers think they have found a tricky loophole to this curse involving characters show watchers have never heard of, but the most important thing here is that Dany thinks she cannot have children. After all, she’s been having loads of unprotected sex with Daario Naharis with zero result. In the show, she has repeated this belief a number of times, including this week to a shirtless Jon Snow.
This is a somber moment for both, true. But Daenerys is also laying out the rules to her potential future partner: “I can’t have children. You should know that before we start anything.” Having children is something Jon Snow may have only just started contemplating. It’s something he never considered as a teen (he was a virgin before he joined up at Castle Black for fear of fathering another bastard), and joining the Night’s Watch meant a vow of chastity and no hope of family. Which, sure, he broke with Ygritte. But for the most part, Jon Snow has not been planning for his future dynasty. That is, until Ser Jorah put it into his head this week.
This is an extra lovely gesture from Jorah, since the Bear knight has surely also seen the looks Daenerys and Jon have been sharing. Here, Jorah gives his blessing for Jon to have the future he never will.
So, yes, Jon and Daenerys may not have children on the brain just yet in the show. In the books, however, there has long been symbolism and obscure dreams hinting that while Daenerys may be not be able to have children with most men, she will with Jon Snow. But that’s not necessarily a good thing.
One of the most intriguing recurring symbols that crops up again and again in the books is the blue winter rose. In the books, Ned remembers “the moment when all the smiles died, when Prince Rhaegar Targaryen urged his horse past his own wife, the Dornish princess Elia Martell, to lay the queen of beauty’s laurel in Lyanna’s lap. He could see it still: a crown of winter roses, blue as frost.” Lyanna is, as was revealed last season, Jon’s mother and Ned’s sister. In the show, it’s Littlefinger who tells this story to Sansa in Season 5. Yes, he includes the roses.
This bit about blue roses is taken by readers as both literal and figurative language from Martin, foreshadowing that Rhaegar would soon impregnate Lyanna with baby Jon Snow. Lyanna crops up in dreams and visions (even Theon’s) as a figure crowned in blue winter roses. Ned dreams of her death bed and Jon’s birth:
“Promise me,” she had cried in a room that smelled of blood and roses. “Promise me,” Ned. The fever had taken her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister’s eyes.
We’re meant to understand that the room smells of roses because Lyanna is still holding on to the crown Rhaegar gave her. “Ned remembered the way she had smiled then, how tightly her fingers had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals spilling from her palm, dead and black.”
But the bit of book vision that cements the blue rose as both a literal item Lyanna held, a symbol of fertility, and Jon Snow himself comes from Daenerys. In the books, she has a lengthy, symbolism-packed vision in The House of the Undying, where she sees images of things Martin hadn’t even written yet. Most significantly for our purposes here, Daenerys sees “a blue flower growing from a chink in a wall of ice, filling the air with sweetness”—which most readers and theorists agree is meant to be a vision of Jon himself. It also may foretell the child they will have together.
The show didn’t go for any blue roses in the House of the Undying sequence from Season 2, though Daenerys did visit that wall of ice (less practically dressed than she was this week). . .
. . .and had to grapple, via vision, with giving up her chance to be a mother for a larger destiny.
So perhaps, if Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen can stop worrying, for a second, about the weight of the world, they will have the chance to make a prince who was promised. But here’s where things get sticky. Remember that last week, Gilly discovered some information about Jon Snow and his parentage.
We’ve discussed the potential incest bomb waiting to go off on this pair of would-be lovers (who happen to be aunt and nephew) several times this season, but never considered how it might affect a potential child. Let’s consider, again, Jon Snow’s traumatized feelings around having children. As he explained to Sam in Season 1:
We can presume that the King in the North and the Dragon Queen would not have a bastard—they’d certainly happily get married and solve a number of complicated political issues while they’re at it. But a baby born of incest? That’s a kind of ignominy Cersei fought hard to protect her three children from. Jon would be destroyed if he thought he was bringing similar shame to his own child.
The annulment news from last week gives Jon Snow the more legitimate claim to the Iron Throne, and many fans have wondered if that is what will cause a rift between him and Daenerys. (Everyone is certain something will come between them—it’s hard to live happily ever after on Game of Thrones.) But since that potential conflict is something that could easily be solved by marriage (and Jon would never push to be king over Daenerys in the first place), that seems unlikely to me as a point of contention. Jon’s lifelong paralyzing fear around passing the shame he grew up with down to his children, however, could be the rift we didn’t see coming. Either way, the show is clearly trying to tell us something about children and Daenerys Targaryen. Having lost a dragon son this episode, is she destined to finally have a human child of her own? And will that happy occasion just lead to more tragedy?
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.
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