Hello to you!

No, I don’t believe that Benjen is consciously trying to teach Jon a lesson in their last conversation together, because he starts that kind of push-and-pull before Jon even asks him about joining.

He talks to Jon like a man to be recruited until Jon takes him up on it, which turns Jon back into a boy who doesn’t know what he wants. Also, “let me throw a slur in a drunk teenager’s face” is not the thought process of an aspiring life coach.

I also don’t know why he’d be giving Tyrion tough love? But those conversations are pretty harsh and dismissive:

I do agree with you on Benjen’s opaqueness. I think he makes the most sense if the context is that he knows the story about Jon on some level, even having not been explicitly told. He clearly cares about the kid, but it’s not necessarily easy to handle someone when you’re always trying not to notice that they’re the elephant in the room. And then the first few chapters are these fraught couple of weeks where everyone’s really frightened for Bran, and Benjen’s also tuned into the tension of being shut up in the castle with Ned, Jon, and Robert. (It took me, at least, some thinking about this dynamic before it clicked how scary that must have been, at least for Ned and probably for Benjen.) Then when he gets out of there he’s looking at this really immediate commitment to lying to the kid, and possibly himself, for the rest of his life. I’d probably be a little short with people too. 

From that angle I think it’s understandable, but acting understandably doesn’t necessarily mean acting in someone else’s best interests. Tough love would’ve been “if you can’t hack it yet, go home and grow up because you’re literally a child.”

I feel like you’re underestimating 1) the recklessness of the twins and 2) the ability of both Varys and Littlefinger to bait stable, mature adults into doing dumb stuff. 

But it’s also entirely possible that one or the other of them just confesses. That did actually happen in AGOT:

I mean, we can’t all be the hard-nosed interrogator Ned Stark is, but it’s not that hard to get her to crack. 

If it were just Jon Arryn and Stannis on the case, there’s a chance that they don’t think too much about the other kids. If it did come to that point, it’s possible that she’d be given the chance to join the Faith rather than be delegitimized. The issue is that they aren’t the only players. Varys and Littlefinger are always going to want to expose Cersei and Jaime, and they haven’t let anyone else stand in their way.

It’s not impossible, I guess. But I don’t remember anything that necessarily indicates it, and on a story level I’m not sure what use there is to it now. 

There really isn’t an option other than Margaery, as Renly and Mace well knew. Severing ties with the Lannisters means that the crown will need a new source of wealth, and the Tyrells are the closest to the Lannisters in that regard. (Arguably, they’re even wealthier.) And, probably the more important factor, Robert is Robert and he doesn’t care very much. If Cersei and her children are removed before Jon Arryn dies, he’ll do whatever Jon Arryn says; if not, Renly has this whole thing set up to be the path of least resistance. And even if Jon Arryn was still around, I don’t know if he’d have an alternative. Maybe the Hightowers, but passing Mace’s daughter over for his in-laws seems weird. The only other eligible daughters of lords paramount are Asha Greyjoy and Arianne Martell. The Greyjoys are still out of favor. It would be interesting to see what happens if someone tries to bring the Martells into it - either Doran and Oberyn have to abandon their plot, or they have to explain why a twenty-year-old unmarried princess is rejecting the king - but I don’t see why anyone would.

It was pretty amazing how quickly and smoothly the Tyrells took over in ASOS, when there wasn’t the kind of power vacuum there would be if the Lannisters fell from favor, so I think that’s a pretty good indication of how the court would look. It’s difficult to say how accurate that appearance would be and how long that status quo would last. There’s no marriage Robert can make which will deal with more than one subversive element at court. Varys and Littlefinger are both effectively political guerrilla insurgents: they can and will get in under the radar to exploit any vulnerabilities. The Tyrells have far fewer liabilities than the Lannisters at the beginning of AGOT. But nothing will deter Varys from creating openings for Aegon, or Littlefinger from creating openings for Littlefinger. 

In this scenario it’s pretty likely that Mace becomes Hand very quickly, either immediately after Jon Arryn’s death or as soon as Ned thinks he can pass the baton and go home. Robert skipped his father-in-law in AGOT because he would have been suspicious of anything Cersei would want that badly, but he wouldn’t feel that way about Margaery - and, again, path of least resistance. Then Stannis swoops off to the Batcave to sulk, naturally.

And thank you, I’m glad you’re enjoying. 

Jaime pushes all of them out a window, maybe? It doesn’t make sense for Ned to defer to Robert by accepting the position as Hand but refuse to marry one of his kids to one of theirs, and Cersei isn’t about to leave one of her children at Winterfell.

Yes. It was wrong. All else aside, he was a kid. It was wrong for Ned to allow it, it was wrong for Catelyn to force his hand,* it was wrong for Maester Luwin to push for it, it was wrong for Ned to let the situation get to a point where Jon thought this was his best option. It was also wrong for Mormont and Donal Noye to manipulate him into forgetting that he was technically free to leave.

IMO the fact of his parentage isn’t even the worst thing about this. If Ned had made a good faith effort to look out for Jon’s interests in other ways, you could maybe argue that any action he took that might expose his secret would carry so much risk to so many people that it outweighs his right to know who he is. I don’t think I could bring myself to agree with that, but there is a moral logic there.

What lacks moral logic is Ned allowing him to join the Watch at that age despite these two moral tenets he never questions:

Guess what, when Jon tried to bail at the end of AGOT, he was only fifteen, meaning he hadn’t come of age. He was still a child. Not like, he seems young to us, he was actually a minor in-universe. If you think it’s morally wrong to hold someone to a promise, and you think people must be held to their promises, then it’s wrong to put someone in a position to make that promise.

So yeah, it was a good solution for Ned for Jon to fall off the edge of the world before he was able to understand what that meant. That matters less than the fact that it was a pretty crummy solution for Jon. Ned allowing this to happen at all, and essentially under false pretenses, despite being the person Jon depends on and trusts…says a lot about Ned and explains a lot about Jon.

*Sidebar to whoever’s opening up the text box for that woke-ass subtweet: she seriously wanted to push a fourteen-year-old child out of his own home for being born that way so maybe just don’t.

Well, then it’s not a War of Five Kings. Secession is a non-starter with Stannis, and remember, it wasn’t something Robb set out to do. He was trying to live up to his obligation to protect his vassals, and Ned’s execution made it perfectly clear that doing so was irreconcilable with paying fealty to Joffrey.

How things would play out from there....hm. I think that what Stannis and Robb would plan to do would be for Stannis to move on Kings Landing sooner rather than later. If he has the North and the Riverlands, he has less motivation to spend time taking Storm’s End. (For that matter, it’s entirely possible he doesn’t need to worry about the Stormlands. Renly is arguably acting out his own little psychodrama, but he and Mace are also acting under the assumption that this isn’t going to be particularly difficult or costly. If Stannis got the kind of support that would make his victory seem likely, there’s a real chance Renly bends the knee and starts waiting for Stannis to die.) Attacking the capitol before Tyrion is prepared, with a much bigger force, and without causing the Lannister-Tyrell alliance by killing Renly, things look pretty good for Stannis.

Whether it would work out that way is less clear. Neither Varys nor Littlefinger has any interest in allowing Stannis to consolidate power, and Robb can hardly protect him from them.

Well, it’s a piece of evidence. A piece of evidence does not, in and of itself, have to be a bulletproof case, it just has to help support a conclusion. The fact that none of Cersei’s children look like Robert, while all of Robert’s other children look like Robert, is unusual enough to be a clue to the truth and a big part of the case that Jon Arryn would have made to the public. He couldn’t show people all of them, but he could easily locate at least four, plus Stannis, Renly, and (I think) Shireen also have that look. But he’d present it in context of other information about the twins. Cersei’s denials of the accusations tend to be telling because she doesn’t actually want people to believe her denials, and Jaime’s reputation is enough to create a presumption of guilt on his part.

So in-universe, people wouldn’t be considering Princess Rhaenys in that context. Ned, presumably thinking more or less the same way most people would, notes to himself as he reads Jon Arryn’s book that Lannister-Baratheon pairings resulted in children with Baratheon coloring, not that Baratheon children never inherited another parent’s light hair. If you’re asking more about consistent worldbuilding, assuming that hair color more or less follows Bio 101 Mendelian genetics in ASOIAF, it’s not inconsistent. If you assume that the Baratheon coloring is dominant (B) and lighter hair colors are recessive (b), it’s possible that Rhaenys’ mother had (Bb) genes (Orys was probably Aegon I’s half-brother, so the earlier Baratheons could have been carriers of Targaryen traits, and the Velaryons had a history of marrying into the Targaryens so her husband could have been a carrier as well), so Rhaenys and her kids wouldn’t have that look, but Robert has (BB) genes so all of his children will have those traits.

But again, that’s more for the reader. Something as concrete as a paternity test wouldn’t be a part of anyone’s expectations. The queen’s fidelity isn’t something that’s going to be decided by, like, a rational finder of fact operating from a presumption of innocence. In practice, it’s almost the opposite: if she’s in a weak enough position to have to defend herself from scrutiny, she’s probably screwed. The case Cersei tries to build against Margaery in AFFC is transparently bogus to the reader because we witness her inventing it, but it does illustrate the standards here. “She’s been alone with a musician and asked a maester for moon tea” may be less convincing than the hair color of hers and Robert’s children, but it would be taken seriously. (In our world’s history, too. Anne Boleyn died for less.) And that’s not even about the parentage of a child who actually exists! If the queen’s sexual history can be impeached, then that preemptively calls the legitimacy of any children she may have into question, which is potentially catastrophic to the legitimacy of the monarchy.

Cersei’s putting the cart before the horse there, though. Accusations that the queen’s children aren’t the king’s children aren’t exactly a source of power. What they can do is support or justify the overthrow of a ruler by force. Varys isn’t planning to install Aegon just by going public about Cersei’s kids, it’s one of a few things that he’s planing on doing to weaken the regime enough that the Golden Company can take Kings Landing. The more instructive contrast in the histories is the “Daeron Falseborn” story from the Blackfyre Rebellion, for which the evidence was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The Blacks thought they had the muscle to take the IT, but they couldn’t keep it if they didn’t preserve the idea that the Targaryens have the right to rule. Delegitimizing Daeron II personally was a way for the Blacks to take up arms against the king without delegitimizing the Targaryen dynasty.

That’s all built in to the “being queen” deal. (And the deal for noblewomen generally, but for a queen consort the stakes are life and death because infidelity is treason.) Margaery’s entourage serves a few purposes, but the most important one is that she always needs at least one credible witness to her chastity. That is to say, the queen lives under a presumption of guilt. Every minute of every day, she has to be creating this really intimate defense from charges that don’t even need to add up.

While I do think that it works as worldbuilding and is reasonable for characters in-universe to buy into, I also think you’re right to feel like something doesn’t make sense about it, because there’s a broader issue here. A system of government which is predicated on state ownership of women’s bodies is fundamentally absurd. It is going to have implications and outcomes that don’t make sense. If it feels off, that’s because, you know, it should.

Doubtful. The big thing to remember with counterfactuals about Cersei’s children is that Jon Arryn’s and Ned’s investigations aren’t really driving events as far as other characters are concerned. There are too many other people with an interest in exposing the truth, and the twins are compulsively indiscreet. Sooner or later, Renly and the Tyrells are going to think they have Robert committed to Margaery, or Varys and Illyrio will believe that Aegon is ready, and when that happens they’ll see to it that Jaime and Cersei are caught together. Once that happens, her children will be presumed to be illegitimate and struck out of succession.

Rolling with it for a minute, it’s not impossible that AGOT shakes out differently under those conditions, because public judgment about the incest rumors doesn’t really become an issue until Stannis sends his letter in ACOK. Cersei and Ned might tread a little bit more carefully around each other if they have a grandchild away in the North who might be put at risk by that conflict, which in turn might keep things from going explosively haywire after Robert’s death.

If Ned gets out, Northern secession is out of the question. Unlike Robb, Edmure, and their vassals, Ned knows about Joffrey’s illegitimacy by the end of AGOT. They don’t know, how could they? People at court have figured it out because they know the king’s marriage is rocky, they see the interactions between Cersei and Jaime, they see every day the resemblance between the Baratheon brothers, and they watched Renly grow up at court so they know what a young Robert should look like. Without Ned’s word for it, nobody in Robb’s army has any of that knowledge. With Ned’s testimony, there’s not a difficult conversation about which claimant to back against the Lannisters, and so it never gets to the point where they have to make their own option. The North would back Stannis, and the Riverlords are already allied with the north and mobilized against the Lannisters.

IMO it’s questionable whether the Northerners would bring the same kind of fervor to fighting for Stannis in this case, especially once he starts burning people alive. (They’re barely tolerating him by the end of ADWD, even with nothing to lose and every reason to want to take the Boltons down.) But it’s probably enough to tip the balance in his favor.