Post by kingmonkey on Aug 7, 2015 4:13:56 GMT
Wow, this sucks. I lost my reply. Here's version 2...
Rather that develop a treatise on vows, chastity, or fidelity, Ned is making a very simple observation: Rhaegar was not like Robert.
So Rhaegar was like Roose Bolton? Rhaegar was lustful? Rhaegar took his infidelity seriously? Rhaegar took his bastards seriously?
Like Roose? No, that was just an example of the false equivalence between frequenting brothels and having bastards. Rhaegar took his infidelity seriously? Now that sounds more like it. ;^)
6. I'm not sure what reasoning you are referring to...
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I was referring to your jokey "Lusts? Wait a minute... What lusts? Rhaegar surely wasn't acting out of lust! He had just fulfilled the prophecy of tptwp with the birth of his son Aegon, and the dragon needs three heads." I agree that this passage seems to tell us that Ned thinks of bastardy in terms of lust, but that doesn't necessarily mean he is right. Rhaegar might have had entirely different reasons for abducting Lyanna than the ones Ned believes.
Exactly! Ned never made the connection until Sansa blurted out that Joff was a lion. Why wouldn't Ned make the connection if he were staring at a near-perfect recreation of what he found (a young girl abed with a royal bastard)... if Ned was protecting a hidden heir born of lust, you'd think he'd recognize Jon Arryn doing the same. Ned isn't the quickest player in the game, but he isn't quite Hodor.
There's no correlation, as far as Ned is concerned. At this stage, he sees no need for protecting Robert's bastards:
AGoT ch.30 said:
Cersei could not have been pleased by her lord husband's by-blows, yet in the end it mattered little whether the king had one bastard or a hundred. Law and custom gave the baseborn few rights. Gendry, the girl in the Vale, the boy at Storm's End, none of them could threaten Robert's trueborn children.Ned needs to make the intellectual leap to questioning the parentage of Joffrey, Tommen and Myrcella before this parallel can become apparent. If we look at Ned's moment of realisation:
AGoT ch.44 said:
"He is!" Sansa insisted. "I don't want someone brave and gentle, I want him. We'll be ever so happy, just like in the songs, you'll see. I'll give him a son with golden hair, and one day he'll be the king of all the realm, the greatest king that ever was, as brave as the wolf and as proud as the lion."Arya made a face. "Not if Joffrey's his father," she said. "He's a liar and a craven and anyhow he's a stag, not a lion."
Sansa felt tears in her eyes. "He is not! He's not the least bit like that old drunken king," she screamed at her sister, forgetting herself in her grief.
Father looked at her strangely. "Gods," he swore softly, "out of the mouth of babes . . . " He shouted for Septa Mordane. To the girls he said, "I am looking for a fast trading galley to take you home. These days, the sea is safer than the kingsroad. You will sail as soon as I can find a proper ship, with Septa Mordane and a complement of guards . . . and yes, with Syrio Forel, if he agrees to enter my service. But say nothing of this. It's better if no one knows of our plans. We'll talk again tomorrow."
Why would Ned make this jump of reasoning based on what Arya and Sansa had said? He's not going to throw Westeros into turmoil just because the kids don't look like Robert. Something has primed him to see this possibility, has made him open to this revelation. I'd suggest to you that what Ned was puzzling over at the brothel is exactly that. He doesn't find the equivalence obvious straight away, because what he believes he knows (that the bastards would be no threat to Cersei's trueborn children) argues against such an equivalence. However, because there was that equivalence, he was more open to realising what was really going on when prompted.
Lots of people have commented that Ned's conclusion that Joff etc. were not really Robert's kids seems a bit sudden -- but if that equivalence has been at the back of Ned's mind since visiting the brothel, then his revelation makes a lot more sense.
Another point worth making here: notice Ned's immediate reaction on making this realisation, the very first thing he thinks about when he realises what Arryn was up to? He immediately thinks about protecting the kids.
11. It is tricky, if Rhaegar is important. He need not be. I know he is for RLJ, and that motivates the need to resolve these discrepancies. But it need not be so.
It's tricky if Rhaegar isn't important, too, because it's clearly false. That raises the question of why GRRM wrote it.
Why would GRRM have written this, whether true or false? It seems to me that by making it clear that Ned doesn't have Rhaegar on the brain, he is telling us that Ned must have some specific reason for thinking of Rhaegar in this context. If Ned doesn't think about Rhaegar often, then he can hardly regularly be contrasting Robert and Rhaegar. Whatever the discrepancy means, the inclusion of that detail indicates that there is something unique to this situation that makes him consider the contrast between Robert and Rhaegar. What's unique? Well, Ned knows that Robert has bastards already. What's new is that Robert has hidden bastards that Arryn has been protecting, and that he has been reminded, by promises and a smile that cut the heart out of him, of Lyanna -- and immediately following that, of Jon Snow.
I would say we learn that Lyanna was not fond of infidelity, nor of men who father bastards across the realm.
Agreed -- though to be fair, we should be suspicious of any theory that relies on a 14 year old girl being constant in affairs of the heart. Now, you talk about Rhaegar's character, and how it's contrasted to Robert: "Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man's nature." How can Lyanna's feelings about Robert's nature be considered an argument against her having more positive feelings towards the man who you agree is being directly contrasted to Robert in this chapter? Rhaegar is not like Robert, that's the whole point.
I would say we learn that Jon Snow is a bastard sired by a lustful man.
I broadly agree, but two very important caveats:
1. This is what Ned believes, not necessarily what actually happened.
2. "Lustful" is a dangerous word to use in this context, as it may imply connotations not present in the original. "If the gods frowned so on bastards, he thought dully, why did they fill men with such lusts?" In this sentence, "such" might be an amplifier, but looks much more like a specifier. In other words, you can read this as "why do they make men so lusty", or "why do they make men sexually attracted to woman who they are not married to".
I think we can safely conclude that, whoever Jon's father was, Ned believes that he was sexually attracted to Jon's mother, and that attraction was strong enough to drive him to an unwise cause. We can't conclude that Ned believes that man was more than usually lust-filled compared to the generic "men" who the gods fill with such lusts.
I would say we learn that Rhaegar, unlike Robert Baratheon, did not lustfully visit brothels and father bastards.
Visit brothels, yes. Father bastards, no. I don't see anything in the chapter that implies that Rhaegar would not father bastards. The only mention of Rhaegar is that last line about him not frequenting brothels, which says nothing about not fathering bastards -- and indeed the very fact that Ned thinks of Rhaegar in this context of royal bastards, despite not thinking about Rhaegar much, makes it more likely that Ned does think of him as someone who fathers bastards.