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Jaime and Brienne'due south Game of Thrones Relationship Isn't Sexual — It's Fifty-fifty Deeper

These ii. Photo: Courtesy of HBO

For a brief moment on this week's Game of Thrones, Ser Bronn of the Blackwater sounded less like "an upjumped sellsword" and more than similar a randy fanboy. "You recollect they're fucking?" he asks his old friend Podrick Payne. "Why non? I'd fuck her. You'd fuck her, wouldn't yous? … Well, he'd fuck her, that's for sure. And she'd fuck him, don't you remember? The mode she looks at him … The way all women await at him is frankly irritating." The target of his indiscreet inquiries? Their bosses, Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth. In the parlance of our times, when it comes to the Kingslayer and Brienne the beauty, Bronn ships it.

But should he? Obviously, his chat with Pod is played for laughs, and his insistence on Brienne and Jamie's universal fuckability is meant to be comically crass. Yet it's non just Bronn'south bawdiness we're reacting to here, but his oversimplification of 1 of the most emotionally circuitous relationships on the show. These two warriors' connection does not require them to accept sex to exist as revealing and intimate as anything this (in)famously R-rated series has depicted.

In sex activity's absence, physicality has notwithstanding played a role in this relationship throughout its history. Jaime first meets Brienne when she manhandles him across the Riverlands, in bondage, in an effort to exchange him for the imprisoned daughters of Catelyn Stark. Glowering and wincing at every insult he sends her way — about her size, her nontraditional femininity, her love for Renly Baratheon, whose homosexuality was an open secret at court — she eventually gets the last discussion by defeating him in a duel when he attempts to escape. He's correct to assert that with his hands in shackles and his trunk weak after a year in captivity, he is hardly at his best during the boxing, but that'southward beside the bespeak. Her forcefulness and skill wears him downwardly physically, becoming office of the slow process by which he begins to reevaluate himself and his bear in the earth mentally as well.

That process is given a major shot in the arm when he loses his hand. Later intervening to forestall her rape past the soldiers of House Bolton, who capture them after their sword fight, he'southward maimed as penalty, and fabricated to wear his severed body function on a necklace every bit a reminder of how his once unimpeachable prowess as a warrior has been castrated. On the brink of suicide, he'due south given a brusk but necessary ersatz pep talk past Brienne, who essentially insults him out of depression. "You sound like a woman," she says of his woe-is-me whining. The line is a sword that cuts both means: Reflecting the internalized oppression and self-loathing of a woman who's been mistreated all her life for her failure to accommodate to order's standards for her gender, information technology besides reminds Jaime that he's simply now getting a taste of the shit outsiders and the oppressed take been served since birth.

While no sexual contact is involved, the pair'due south single most emotionally naked scene takes place when they're both physically naked likewise. Half-swaggering, one-half-doddering into the baths at the fortress of Harrenhal, where the Boltons are treating them both better to make up for their mishandling on the road, Jaime uses his nudity to make Brienne uncomfortable, as he's constantly tried to do with whatever means at his disposal. But shortly, worn down past burnout, trauma, and the sheer estrus of the water, he reveals his deepest secret to her.

"Never forget what you lot are," his dwarf brother Tyrion one time told Ned Stark's bastard son, Jon Snow. "The rest of the earth will non. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you lot." This had been Jaime's attitude toward his insulting nickname, Kingslayer, given to him after he murdered the mad monarch, Aerys Targaryen, he'd sworn an oath to live and die protecting. Only now does he tell anyone the true story behind the slaying, and it's Brienne who chooses to hear it. The Mad King, he says, had planned to burn the entire city of King's Landing to the footing with massive underground caches of napalmlike wildfire; Jaime's expose was the only thing standing between hundreds of thousands of people and the conflagration. Still such was his ego and pride that he preferred to continue this to himself, rather than justify his actions to any outsiders, from Ned Stark on down.

The story so drains him that he collapses, requiring Brienne to physically keep him afloat. "Help," she cries, "help! The Kingslayer!" "Jaime," he corrects her equally he loses consciousness. "My proper name is Jaime." This is his truthful self, truer even than what his sis and lover Cersei has seen. And it's not simply a i-way street, either: Now that she knows he'southward experienced such a traumatic level of isolation and hurting, Brienne can be bodacious that he's capable of agreement hers as well. When she acknowledges this during his departure several episodes later by pointedly saying "Good-farewell, Ser Jaime," the depths of both her newfound respect for him and his wordless gratitude for her are profound. Much transpires betwixt them subsequently — his return to rescue her from the carry pit the Boltons accept dropped her into; Cersei's confrontation of her with the knowledge that she loves the man — merely information technology's all gravy subsequently this game-changing substitution. If I were to pinpoint the show'due south single well-nigh moving moment, at that place you accept information technology.

This made their reunion on this calendar week'southward episode such a live wire of unspoken affection and unspeakable loss, 1 in which every line they exchange is humming with power. Sure, they adopt their usual antagonistic odd-couple conversational rhythm to a certain extent. Only when Jaime says how proud he is that she found Sansa Stark and thus fulfilled their shared adjuration to Catelyn, information technology's clear to her and united states alike that he means information technology. When she chastises him for saying "girls similar [Sansa] don't live long" by barking back with "I don't call back y'all know many girls like her," she's intuitively echoing his own famous cocky-assessment — "There are no men like me. Only me." — in a style that gets through to him, whether or not he tin can admit it. When she appeals to his decency in asking for his assist in ending the siege of Riverrun and aiding Sansa's crusade without further mortality, she knows that this decency exists and tin can be counted on, considering she's seen it in a way no one else has. When he refuses to have back Oathkeeper, the priceless Valyrian-steel sword with the lion-headed hilt he gave her when he sent her off to take upwards their shared quest, he says, "Information technology's yours. It will always be yours" — a symbolic representation of the best role of himself, in her possession forever. And when they acknowledge that they might wind up having to fight against ane another despite everything, including their own hopes and desires, they both await horrified at the prospect. Zero brings home the nature of state of war equally a colossal crime confronting humanity the fashion forcing 2 people who are this close to kill each other would.

In the end, Brienne fails in her endeavour to persuade the castle'due south commander, the Blackfish, to surrender it and march north with her to Sansa's assist. Jaime, by contrast, succeeds in forcing the 'Fish's nephew Edmure to assume command and relinquish Riverrun, threatening the man'southward infant son in the procedure. The result is that Brienne and Pod must flee via a underground passage to the river outside the castle walls. Alone on the ramparts at dawn, following his morally dubious triumph, Jaime spots the pair; rather than sounding the warning, he lifts the golden paw he wears to replace the 1 he lost in her company and waves skilful-bye. She waves back, the gulf between them growing wider by the moment, a gulf they both know they'll never be able to bridge once more. The cold morning low-cal makes his devastated face expect half gargoyle, one-half ghost: He knows that, no thing what he says well-nigh Cersei, the woman who knows him all-time is sailing away from him, and a part of his soul is sailing away with her.

All of this is what makes boiling their relationship downwards to "Yous recall they're fucking?" so light-headed. It may exist ex-prosecutor Marcia Clark, of all people, who's best put this into perspective. She and former colleague Christopher Darden formed this year's other great star-crossed-romance story line in FX's stunning docudrama The People v. O.J. Simpson. Clark has spoken eloquently of their bond, marked by similar forced intimacy, breaches of trust, and mutual understanding: "Fact of the matter is, Chris Darden and I were closer than lovers. And unless you've been through what we went through, you can't maybe know what that means." I'yard guessing Jaime and Brienne would have more than than an inkling.

Which is non to deny the bodily erotic potential of those two big, beautiful, blond-haired, brokenhearted warriors going at it. Repurposing the ideal physicality and emotional intensity of your favorite fictional characters into the stuff of sexual fantasy is an entirely righteous enterprise, or at the very to the lowest degree a harmless one. If your goal is to get off, by all ways hop on that transport and sail off into the postorgasmic sunset. It can even provide readers or viewers, especially those whose sexuality has been marginalized, with vital grist for imagining and thus understanding their own needs and desires. The problem with aircraft arises when the entire spectrum of intimacy between adults is reduced to the romantic or the sexual. It does a relationship like Jaime and Brienne's a tremendous disservice to flatten it into "will they or won't they." In the means that thing most, they already have.

Jaime and Brienne's Relationship Isn't Sexual