WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR ALL BROADCAST SEASONS OF GAME OF THRONES AND ALL PUBLISHED BOOKS IN THE A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE SERIES AS WELL AS FAN THEORIES AND SPECULATION.
The finale of season five of HBO's Game of Thrones featured an onslaught of cliffhangers but none more shocking and upsetting than the murder of Jon Snow by his Night's Watch brothers. This brings this particular story line up to where it is at the end of George R. R. Martin's most recent A Song of Ice and Fire novel, A Dance of Dragons. Given the story's penchant for brutally killing "main characters" we've been conditioned to accept that anyone can be killed off at anytime. But Jon Snow (along with a couple of other characters) are in a different category from the others. Also, I would argue that Jon Snow can't die yet because he simply has too much left to do narratively.
A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones are both heading into the story's endgame with two books and two seasons left respectively and it feels like Jon Snow still has a lot of unresolved business. Some might say, "Patrick, life is full of unresolved business. That's the beauty of Game of Thrones. It messes with your expectations." That's fine but fiction is not life and as much as Martin likes to defy the genre's expectations he still is primarily concerned with telling a good story and teasing questions and killing off the character associated with those questions would be poor storytelling.
Of course, the main unresolved question with Jon Snow is that of his true parentage. Ostensibly the bastard son of Ned Stark, the question of Snow's parentage is endlessly speculated on by both the characters within the novels and fans who have been working on this particular puzzle for years. The most widely accepted theory is that Jon Snow is actually the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Ned's sister Lyanna Stark, to whom Ned made a deathbed promise to raise Jon and hide his true parentage lest he fall victim to Robert Baratheon's Targaryen vendetta. Indeed, Jon would be in particular danger as he would represent the union of Robert's beloved Lyanna and his Targaryen rival, Rhaegar. This fan theory is known as R+L=J and it is explored in great detail online. There's a lot of textual evidence for it in the books and even the Game of Thrones series has hinted at it, particularly in season 5. It's telling that with so many characters and plots lost in the adaptation, the show would make time to repeatedly call out two long-dead characters like Rhaegar and Lyanna.
The issue of Snow's parents is so important to the story that Martin quizzed the prospective show runners on this topic before he allowed them to move forward with the project. Presumably he was satisfied with their answer. Martin has also indicated that this mystery will be revealed in a future book, which would be rather odd and anticlimactic if Jon Snow is dead at the time.
Another bit of unfinished narrative business is Jon Snow's relation to a series of overlapping prophesies in the world of the story. In the world of A Song of Ice and Fire there is an ancient messianic prophecy of The Prince That Was Promised, a savior meant to save the world from "darkness." This darkness is possibly related to the onset of winter and the White Walkers and Jon possibly meets some of the criteria for this figure. Interestingly, Rhaegar Targaryen believed in this theory and that it was specifically tied to the Targaryen bloodline. Initially, he believed that he was the Prince That Was Promised but at some point he believed it would be his children. He came to believe that "The Dragon will have three heads," which he seemed to interpret to mean that he needed to have three offspring. Officially, he only had two from his wife Elia Martell. If you subscribe to the R+L=J theory, then Jon Snow would be the third and likely only surviving child.
A related messianic figure in A Song of Ice and Fire is that of Azor Ahai, a legendary figure prophesied to be reborn to defend the world from the Others. Azor Azai is specifically opposed to the White Walkers and, indeed, defeated them during their last incursion thousands of years ago. There are a few likely candidates and Jon Snow is near the top of most people's lists. Notably, the TV show included a scene not in the books in which Jon Snow duels and defeats a White Walker and captures the attention of their leader, the Night's King who gives him a long and meaningful stare as Jon Snow escapes on a boat, perhaps marking him as an enemy. For most of the series, the fire priestess Melisandre believed Stannis Baratheon to be the reincarnation of Azor Ahai and her thoughts and actions in both the books and TV series are very telling. In both cases, as soon as she reaches The Wall she starts showing a lot of interest in Jon Snow. If you buy Snow being a Targaryen, this makes a lot of sense since he would be full of the royal blood on which she is so fixated.
In the books, Jon Snow begins showing up in her fire visions. When she attempts to focus her visions on Azor Ahai and Stannis she sees only Jon or "snow." While the books start to plant doubts about her faith in Stannis, the show goes further into this particular storyline. She assures Stannis that she has seen visions of the Bolton banners falling at Winterfell and she has seen herself walking on the castle walls but she tells him it will only happen with a sacrifice of royal blood. After she convinces Stannis to sacrifice his daughter in order for the Fire God to aid their siege, she soon witnesses the complete breakdown of Stannis' forces. For the first time, we see her shaken and she seems to realize that she has made some great mistake and that she has been backing the wrong man. She heads back to The Wall of all places (incidentally where he book counterpart remains).
So book and TV Melsiandre are at The Wall and she may have finally come to the conclusion that Jon Snow is Azor Ahai, correctly or incorrectly. We also know that the Red Priests have the ability to bring people back from the dead. We've seen it before with the priest Thoros of Myr and Beric Dondarrion. In the TV series, Melisandre has even seen evidence of this resurrection and seemed slightly scandalized that it had been done so many times. So, she is our best bet for a Jon Snow (or will he be Jon Blackfyre?) resurrection.
It's important to note that Melisandre's visions are actually credible but she doesn't seem to be able to always interpret them correctly. In the book, she correctly predicts that a girl will ride to the wall on horseback. She describes the girl accurately but is incorrect about her identity. She sees things clearly but doesn't always have context for them. However, I do think that her Winterfell visions will come to pass. We will see her there next season but who knows how it happens.
Perhaps more important than the in-story and theoretical reasons for bringing Jon back is the fact that he's one of the three primary protagonists of A Song of Ice and Fire and for strictly storytelling reasons you can't kill Jon, Tyrion, or Daenarys. I mean, you can but why would you? I mean you can kill everyone but that doesn't leave you with a story. People point to Ned and Robb Stark as evidence that Martin is willing to kill any of his characters in service of creating an expectation-defying dangerous world but Ned and Robb were never really protagonists. In killing those characters he was commenting on the use of Fantasy genre tropes (the noble Lord, the brave and golden son with a righteous cause) and making his world dangerous and nasty. He was cluing readers into the kinds of characters that would be his true protagonists: cripples, bastards, and broken things.
The heroes of this story were never going to be the traditional High Lords and Knights but broken and abused people who are forced to fight for every inch of their power and agency. Martin's heroes are misfits and malcontents who have all been screwed over by the system such as Brienne, Arya, Bran, and Varys. While it is accurate to say that a lot of the deaths of the "hero" characters early on in the series were meant to set the story apart from traditional fantasy storytelling, it had more to do with determining what kinds of heroes A Song of Ice and Fire was going to feature than to tell us that the story's heroes could die at any moment. Ned and Robb were merely decoys to throw us off the trail of the books' unlikely heroic triumvirate.
Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and Tyrion Lannister are the true heroic protagonists of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. According to some fan theories they are even Rhaegar's prophesied "three heads of the dragon." Not only are they the three main protagonists by virtue of the amount of chapters and screen time devoted to them but they are also thematically the perfect representation of Martin's affection for disaffected broken protagonists who are underdogs in their world.
These three also have much personal history in common. For example each was born to a mother who died in childbirth (accepting the R+L=J theory). Although each is highborn each struggles with their station in life. Tyrion, while clearly clever and talented, is a dwarf and suffers constant disrespect and disdain. Dany is a young girl in a misogynistic society and her only role in life is to be married off to seal an alliance. Jon Snow, is seemingly a bastard boy with no true place in the world. They have all suffered abuse in their home relationships. Tyrion's father and family despise him on account of his dwarfism and the fact that he "killed" his mother. Dany's only family member is her brother, an unhappy temperamental bully. Jon is raised in a home with a woman who is hostile to him because she thinks he is a reminder of her husband's infidelity. In the book, she is genuinely nasty to him.
So, the real heroes of A Song of Ice and Firei are a dwarf, a girl, and a bastard. While I don't guarantee that they will make it out of the last book alive, my money is on all of them making it to the last book as they all have important protagonist-y things to do. That said, I wouldn't put a Hamlet-style bloodbath past Martin for the last scene of the last book. George R. R. Martin may be "bloody-minded" and out to subvert the fantasy genre but he's not going to undermine it to the point where he's killed off his main characters. Jon Snow will be back.
Patrick Garone
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Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and Tyrion Lannister are the true heroic protagonists of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. According to some fan theories they are even Rhaegar's prophesied "three heads of the dragon." Not only are they the three main protagonists by virtue of the amount of chapters and screen time devoted to them but they are also thematically the perfect representation of Martin's affection for disaffected broken protagonists who are underdogs in their world.
These three also have much personal history in common. For example each was born to a mother who died in childbirth (accepting the R+L=J theory). Although each is highborn each struggles with their station in life. Tyrion, while clearly clever and talented, is a dwarf and suffers constant disrespect and disdain. Dany is a young girl in a misogynistic society and her only role in life is to be married off to seal an alliance. Jon Snow, is seemingly a bastard boy with no true place in the world. They have all suffered abuse in their home relationships. Tyrion's father and family despise him on account of his dwarfism and the fact that he "killed" his mother. Dany's only family member is her brother, an unhappy temperamental bully. Jon is raised in a home with a woman who is hostile to him because she thinks he is a reminder of her husband's infidelity. In the book, she is genuinely nasty to him.
So, the real heroes of A Song of Ice and Firei are a dwarf, a girl, and a bastard. While I don't guarantee that they will make it out of the last book alive, my money is on all of them making it to the last book as they all have important protagonist-y things to do. That said, I wouldn't put a Hamlet-style bloodbath past Martin for the last scene of the last book. George R. R. Martin may be "bloody-minded" and out to subvert the fantasy genre but he's not going to undermine it to the point where he's killed off his main characters. Jon Snow will be back.
Patrick Garone
Follow Me on Twitter
