About That Hookup

“Sunday’s episode, “The Dragon and the Wolf,” confirmed it: Jon is not, in fact, the illegitimate son of Ned Stark; he is in fact the legitimate son of Ned’s sister, Lyanna, and her husband Rhaegar Targaryen. Who was also the older brother of one Daenerys Targaryen. Which would, yep, make Jon Snow, né Aegon Targaryen … Dany’s nephew.”

“Which would make the consummation of their attraction, as one of the final scenes of the season … extremely complicated.”

“Game of Thrones is a show that has depicted slaughtered children and sexual violence and martial violence and torture both psychological and physical; it is a show that, often, looks at conventional notions of morality and scoffs at their quaintness.”

“Incest in some ways is no different: It’s a taboo that has been generally regarded with a mixture of horror and shoulder-shrugging acceptance.”

“Incest lurks everywhere in this world.”

“Incest, in Thrones, is a situation that is also a metaphor—for what happens when people get too insular, too myopic, too unwilling to see beyond themselves.”

“It is a warning about what can befall the world when narcissism gets politically weaponized.”

“Dany and—now we know it for sure—her nephew Jon come from a long line of people who, having “the blood of the dragon,” were reluctant to marry outside that line, thus diluting the blood in question. That’s one of the many ways Game of Thrones’s history parallels the real world’s: Incest, of course, was once common, particularly among nobility.”

“Historically, then—in the known world and beyond its continents—incest has given rise to a sweeping bit of hubris: People’s attempt to preserve their blood lines ended up, often, compromising them.”

“Whether Dany and Jon will have children—children who might fall victim to this sad irony—is an open question.”

“For now, their union has made for one of Game of Thrones’s more twisted plot twists.”

“The reactions have been as mixed as they are in part for the simple reason that Jon and Dany are not Jaime and Cersei. They are good people, fundamentally.”

“They grew up separately, in different places and different worlds. And, of course: They do not currently know that they are related.”

“There are Luke-and-Leia vibes to the courtship between the last of the Targaryens; they are protected, in some sense, by their ignorance.”

“And their relationship, as such, seems primed to provoke, rather than outrage or disgust, something simpler: questions—about intimacy, and its expanses, and its limits.”

“That puts the relationship between Dany and Jon in league with other such relationships in literature—which are often calibrated to be scandalous, yes, but which are just as often calibrated simply to be complicated.”

“They may provoke judgment; they also, however, often demand sympathy.”

“other portrayals—in American pop culture, in particular—use relationships between siblings and pseudo-siblings as vehicles through which to examine anxieties: about intimacy, about otherness, about the state of the modern family.”

“The treatments of incest here range from the tragic to the taunting; what they have in common, though, is the same thing that makes the shipping of Dany and Jon so uniquely bizarre and, from a literary perspective, compelling: They blur lines. They occasionally poke fun. They often poke holes. They suggest a world in which two things can be true: 1) incest is obviously wrong, and 2) incest can be more complicated than it first appears.”

“In Thrones’s case, as the show moves into its final season, it has managed to set up conditions in which Dany and Jon are at once people and allegories: They are both lovers and rivals, both new acquaintances and lifelong relatives.”

““The Dragon and the Wolf” is a paradox, because the dragon and the wolf are one and the same.”

“In one way, definitely, their newfound intimacy puts the “ewwwww” in “newfound”; it is the rough equivalent of the horror-movie character who, not understanding the full picture, decides to open that door.”

“More than that, though, it is a slow-moving tragedy.”

“In Thrones’s final season, Dany and Jon will very probably learn the truth. They will very likely suffer—through no fault of their own, but through the sins of their fathers. They, the next generation of Targaryens, will be punished for an attitude that saw the blood of the dragon and decided to keep it in the family.”