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.

Oh,no doubt. It’s easy to loseperspective on him in ASOS because we’rein his head while he is fumbling and listening to Ygritte tell him how dumb heis, but Jon survived a months-long deep cover operation for which he wasuntrained and unprepared. There are some personal traits which are needed toaccomplish that, and perceptiveness is high on the list.

Ido think that Jon’s ruminations in that first chapter about reading “the truth thatpeople hid behind their eyes” is as much about howhe interprets the information he picks up about people as it is about hisability to observe. Jon is someone who is – not quite cynical about people, butI think more intuitively inclined than most to distinguish between familiarityand reliability, and to accept that people have dark sides.

It’stough to describe exactly what I’m getting at with this, but I think the keyexample is his response to Stannis and Melisandre. Not exactly notorious openbooks, so it’s notable that Jon sees past what puts most people off aboutStannis, and even sniffs out a bit about Melisandre. And when Aemon comes tohim about what the king’s men expect for Mance’s son, Jon listens. He’s notpessimistically over-eager to believe that Stannis might burn people for king’s blood, but he doesaccept the possibility enough to take drastic action against it. That isunusual. The more common response to a situation where a person you’re relianton poses that kind of a threat is denial.For Jon to acknowledge the possibility, act on it, and carry on interactingwith these people nonetheless takes a certain….hardness of focus.

So I do tend to agree with you that this particular criticism of Jon in ADWD isn’t totally persuasive. Being perceptive doesn’t necessarily mean beinga mind-reader who can predict people’s every move. Jon is pretty persistentlyaware of his men’s attitudes.

He wasn’t expecting the attack because he’s used to the hostility, not because he didn’t know it was there. There’sa difference between being unaware of a problem and being unable to solve aproblem. Heexplained his (painfully obvious) reasons. He put his foot down. He validatedtheir concerns. He explained his reasoning again. He split up the wildlings andseparated them from the Watch. He got buy-in from the mountain clans and theheir to Karhold. What the mutineers wanted was for him to close his eyes and pretend that winterwasn’t coming fast.

(Seriously,why has nobody shared this ONE WEIRD TRICK Jon could so obviously have deployedto logic people out of self-sabotaging xenophobia? Because we really could’ve used it a few weeks ago,SUPER HELPFUL, FOLKS, THANKS.)

Victarion is probably too dense to pose a threat on his own. I mean, he’d probably be removed from the action, because the ironborn who join the Watch tend to be stationed at Eastwatch rather than Castle Black, and if he were inclined to cause a problem for the Starks, he would have had it out with Benjen long before Jon arrived.

He is pretty easy manipulated, though. I could see him getting sucked into the officers’ plot in the way Small Paul fell in with Chett’s conspiracy against Mormont. (And being roughly as focused and useful as Paul was, so...still not much of a threat.)

It’s true that there are only a few mutineers by the end there, but you don’t need many people to undermine a siege. (Four guys almost blew Storm’s End during the Rebellion.)

Stannis didn’t leave much strength behind to protect the Wall. He left behind the dregs of his army and took his main strength to Winterfell, where they have apparently lost; at least, they haven’t managed to remove Ramsay from power and deprive him of a substantial fighting force. Ser Patrek could probably overpower Three-Fingered Hobb if it came to that for some reason, but that doesn’t make them a match for the Dreadfort’s men. That’s if they don’t just make a break for it when they hear their king is dead - and if the plan is to sit around for two and a half weeks, they will hear about it - which is not an assumption Jon would be wise to make. Even if they still consider themselves bound to the dead king, their first duty is going to be to protect Shireen and Selyse.

Even if he did have reliable and usable men, those stairways and towers only go so far in holding off an enemy. Castle Black, with the numbers it had before Jon started staffing the empty forts, made it a few days holding off Mance - with his inexperienced wildling army mostly on the other side of the Wall - only because Stannis showed up. And the castle is in bad enough shape after the wildling attack, and unlike the wildlings who may have wanted it for shelter, Ramsay has no reason not to burn the whole thing to the ground, which is something that would really hurt the effort against the Others.

There’s nothing about the Pink Letter that makes me think Roose is calling the shots. I think he and Walda have beat it back to the Dreadfort. Sending a big, bombastic threat on the Night’s Watch and giving the enemy two weeks to prepare is the opposite of Roose’s usual MO. Both of them know better than to make a threat like this and not follow through. And I’m not sure what political incentive Roose has not to send Ramsay. The disavowal thing works both ways. Roose got away with shrugging off Ramsay’s actions against not just Hornwood but Winterfell itself, while Roose was still in Robb’s army. Nobody cares more about the NW than they do about the Starks.

Jon doesn’t have the preview chapters, you know? He doesn’t have reason to justify the assumption that this is a bluff, and if he makes that assumption and is wrong, the costs are likely to be massive. I mean, storming off only thinking “FUCK IT, I’M GOING TO GO DOWN THERE AND RIP HIS THROAT OUT MYSELF” would be a completely believable response. But that doesn’t mean it is necessarily what he’s doing. I think there’s a lot of evidence that he thought about it, and that he came to a reasonable conclusion as to the least bad option.

“Easier” only in the sense that it would be over soon. Castle Black is specifically designed so that it cannot defend itself from the south.

In theory, banding together in self-defense at least sounds nice. In practice, he’s spent months trying to get them to band together against an enemy much more daunting than Ramsay, and the Watch hasn’t budged. And the Watch is unreliable for other reasons. Remember, Marsh was trying to sell out to the Lannisters before Jon was ever even elected, based on the terrifying threat that Tywin wasn’t going to send the men or provisions that he has no track record or intention of sending in any event.

Wildlings, as fierce as they are, aren’t much of an asset in this situation. They don’t have the discipline or general mindset to fight that kind of battle. Their strategies are limited to stacking the decks in their favor with sneak attacks, and running like hell if they start to lose. They don’t have any emotional investment in this place or this group identity. They signed on to fight the Others from the human side of the Wall, and they understand why that’s in their best interests - and even that plan is dependent on Jon having time to train the warriors among them. And remember, not all of the wildlings are warriors. There are a lot of civilians at Castle Black, who he may or may not have time to relocate.

So a defensive strategy isn’t a viable option. Riding south makes sense, because as you say, it takes 18 days to get between points A and B. Ramsay isn’t going to wait two and a half weeks for hostage delivery. He might wait a couple of days for a raven promising the hostages, if he’s leveled up in sanity, which is a pretty big if. Riding to Winterfell means riding toward Winterfell, meeting Ramsay’s forces somewhere in the middle. (Just as easy to bait Ramsay out of his castle, after all.) And in this situation, the wildlings are an asset. They’re accustomed to the terrain in the same way the mountain clans are, and they’re great at ambushes.

So whatever you think ethically, it makes sense tactically. We as the readers see Jon’s emotional decision that he’s going to do it, but we don’t read the conversation in the two hours he spent with Tormund. Tormund is going to know how to maximize the chances of this working, and with what he’s gone through to try and save his people, he’s not going to let Jon throw them into the meat grinder now.

Finally, Jon’s leaving gives the NW plausible deniability. If he lets the Boltons come to them, then it’s officially between the Watch and the Boltons. Jon Snow the person riding south with a bunch of unaffiliated individuals means that even if he does lose, then Marsh can surrender and say, Jon deserted, we had nothing to do with it. That’s not likely to work, because Ramsay is Ramsay and he’s not going to resist the opportunity for a good slaughter, but as Sam says, a paper shield is better than none.

Short answer, I doubt it. Long answer:

He would’ve been a lot happier once he adjusted to the weather, I think. He takes to the harsh asceticism of the North pretty quickly in ADWD. The things which make the Watch unappealing to most people - celibacy, traditionalism, and grueling hard work - are kind of his jam. Even the massive loss of status might not be the worst thing in the world for him, as I think he could deal with that transparent cause and effect of a significant loss of fortune much better than he could deal with daily social subtleties and chafing pride.

But yes, regardless of his own personal well-being, he’d be extremely valuable to the Watch. Maybe this is just my contempt for Thorne, but I think Stannis would’ve made a much better master-at-arms. Certainly Thorne isn’t in that position because of any particular talent, so much as, he’s a person of rank and that counts for so much more than it should. Stannis could hardly have been any worse at the actual skills of teaching, plus, he’s not a fucking sadist. And he’s someone who rises to challenges, when those challenges have more or less clearly defined guidelines and goals.

If you’re asking if I think he would’ve ended up as Lord Commander - yeah, there’s a really good chance, probably after Mormont. (Though I could also see him being given command of the Shadow Tower really young, taking it as an insult, and burning any bridges that might have been a way out of there. He’s still Stannis.) And he would have done a really good job against Mance and Tormund, at least. The challenge would be if he could wrap his skeptical southern mind around the supernatural threat without Melisandre around to do her fire magic and fluff up his ego by telling him he’s The Savior.

Thanks for the ask! (Honestly, I started out this draft saying “damn, I can’t believe I don’t have any theories for my favorite of Old Nan’s stories!” and by the time I was done that was no longer true.)

His identity is not particularly mysterious.

Unless we’re talking about a really impressive cover-up here - and in fairness, anything’s possible - it’s unlikely that his name was actually Brandon, since the brother who brought him down was (supposedly) also named Brandon. But substantively Old Nan generally tends to be, well, on the nose.

What he was doing, however, is more ambiguous. It’s almost certainly important, as there are so many layers of unreliability that there has to be something useful in there. The in-universe teller of the story is a fallible human who heard it from another character in-universe who may have remembered it wrong, and then there’s the usual telephone game of folk stories, and we’re told several times in-universe that nothing from the Age of Heroes is really reliable, and then on top of that we (allegedly) have the people contemporary with the Night’s King who actively tried to control the narrative by destroying all records of the Night’s King while continuing to use him as a cautionary tale, ensuring that his expungement from history would itself be remembered. Narrative cover-ups this complicated don’t usually happen for nothing.

The First Men did not have any kind of taboo on human sacrifice - it’s implied in ACOK that wildlings still practice it - so it’s not a moral aversion to the “strange sacrifices” that caused the reaction it did. It was, supposedly, that the sacrifices were to the white walkers. But as far as we’ve seen from Craster, sacrificing to them is a a protection racket that doesn’t actually give a person power of their own. So what kind of magic was happening? Were their wills being bound by their being turned into wights? Were they collaborating willingly (either as the Northerners would see it, or actually willingly) but figured they could throw the Lord Commander under the bus by claiming they’d been compelled? What happened to those sworn brothers, anyway?

Who was the corpse queen? Did she even exist, or was she an after-the-fact invention to deflect blame? (A common role of female characters, as we all know too well.) If she was real, how did she get on that side of the wall? If she’s a wight or a white walker, she shouldn’t have been able to cross the Wall, certainly not during a flirtatious merry chase. So how could he meet this magical creature and bring her to the Nightfort? Did it happen before the Wall was actually finished? Could that have happened during the Long Night? (That’s when the Watch was supposedly founded, but it’s not too much of a stretch to think that the Watch could run through its first twelve commanders during an extended crisis.)

So anyway, here’s my longshot theory: I think he was the person tasked with completing the Wall. He wasn’t sacrificing to the Others, he was sacrificing to the old gods.

This is the last of Bran’s visions; implicitly, it’s the metaphysical cornerstone of Winterfell. That’s what it took for one castle - a fantastic fairy tale castle, but still, one castle. Blood magic. Even with the help of the giants and/or the Children and/or a mysterious blue-eyed zombie witch, a structure like the Wall takes a lot of juice. Maybe the Night’s King was explicitly asked to do this; maybe he’d grown desperate and gone rogue.

Maybe he was the final sacrifice, his blood used to seal the Wall’s magic.

Of course you’d want to destroy all records of that, and to create the harshest taboo you possibly could - something to the degree of depicting him as an enemy agent. You’d have to. Not as punishment, and not just to protect the Stark brand, but because you absolutely can’t let a blood magic arms race get started. The Wall is one thing, because it will stand for thousands of years to protect millions of people against the terrible cold - and even that is a painful ethical choice to make. It is blood shed for peace from the unthinkable. (It makes sense that you’d find this at Storm’s End as well: the storm god and his monsters are major threats which merit magical protection.) But that is not how anyone else would use it. It would be used for warfare between humans, leading to blood shed in vain.

It certainly supports the Free Folk’s grievances if the rest of the North was about to leave them stranded in enemy territory, a reflection of the blood sacrifice of the few to save the many. And it fits in some of the broader themes of the story: sometimes there’s no good choice, sometimes the least bad choice dooms a person’s name forever. Sometimes we mean well but go too far; sometimes going too far is the only way to go far enough. Some of the structures  that hold up our world are built on events that we find unthinkable.

It means they didn’t do a damn thing. Ned thinks inside his own head that some day he might go out and do something about Mance, but that doesn’t count as concretely helping out the Watch. Benjen told his brother that the Watch needed a real shot in the arm, and Ned sent them a few disaffected teenagers. I’d be disillusioned and irritated, too.

Thanks for the questions!

Judging Tyrion by the fact that he’s associated with Robert’s court is as much of a fallacy as people judging individual Night’s Watch brothers by the fact that a lot of the NW men are convicts. In my opinion, though, Benjen’s behavior toward Tyrion is particularly telling about Benjen as a person in a few ways.

More than that, though, it’s his pattern of snippiness to Jon and to Tyrion, who at this point don’t seem to have a whole lot in common except perhaps vaguely reminding him of the Rebellion. That suggests to me that this is how Benjen interacts with people generally, rather than as a response to these two people specifically.

He might very well dislike Robert personally, fairly or unfairly. I somewhat suspect that Robert showed his true colors in front of Lyanna at some point during their engagement, and about more than just the cheating, and that could certainly have motivated her to want out.

Right now, what seems most likely to me is that he wasn’t explicitly informed of Jon’s parentage, but of course put two and two together. So he knew, but wasn’t officially told. That’s the strong subtext of this exchange:

Now, it’s possible that Benjen knew something even Ned didn’t. It’s possible that Rhaegar had Jon legitimized and/or Lyanna was married enough in the eyes of the old gods, which, laying aside the flashy issue of IT succession, means that Jon was in the line of succession for Winterfell. Behind Arya, but still in line. And Benjen, being the only person alive who was in on any of these conversations before things went to hell, might be aware of that possibility. That’s my best guess for “what the oath would cost” him.

So Ben is kind of right but mostly wrong about this idea of the price. It’s not likely to be all that consequential that Jon is in line for the North, because Ned has more than enough heirs. Maybe Jon would still end up at the Wall. What I do think is that the fact that Jon is so eager to foreclose all of his options in life is indicative of a price Jon never chose to pay, because so much of it is about not having a place in the world. If he’s in line for Winterfell, then that means he is A Real Stark, and he might well have felt a little bit more confident to reach for something of his own, or a little more open to the idea of a romantic partnership down the line, or even just okay with waiting a little bit longer. Benjen talks about the oath as being the thing that would cost Jon because it was a big turning point in his own life, but really, the fact that Jon doesn’t see it as a huge change or even sees it as an improvement means that there’s already a lot of damage done.

So I’m not sure who he’s talking about when he says it’s a pity Jon’s not his son. Not his son instead of Lyanna’s, because that was where things went so horribly wrong? Not his son instead of Ned’s, because then he would see it as his place to tell Jon the truth? (Lies of omission: still lies.) Not his son, because he wishes he’d had his own family instead of joining the Watch? Or is he just putting his foot in his mouth like he’s been doing throughout the chapter? Solid possibilities, all. And it’s a lot. I would be surprised if it didn’t strain his relationship with Ned a bit, that Ned is the Lord of Winterfell and the one who got to say goodbye to their sister and therefore has all of the power to force Benjen into this coverup that Benjen might well have mixed feelings about or believe is entirely wrong.

Regarding the question of whether it affects how he treats Jon, that’s something I go back and forth on, despite his rudeness with Tyrion that suggests it extends outside of his family. But at the same time, I think his scenes do actually support a reading that he holds it against Jon on some level. I’m not saying he’s a monster, I’m not even saying that he resents Jon more than he loves him. I don’t think either of those things are true. But, you know, people are complicated. That push-and-pull in how he talks to Jon makes sense if it’s also how he feels about Jon.

I’m kind of pointedly avoiding the fanon that Benjen/Ned wanted him to take his vows because FOR HIS SAFETY because, you know. I’m not saying we’re talking about Mensa members here, but nobody involved is too stupid to realize that “safe at the Wall” is a contradiction in terms. Especially at this point, when the rise in desertion means that more people than usual are considering the Watch a fate worse than death. Whatever either or both of Jon’s uncles told themselves about their motivations, whatever Jon will need to believe when he gets the whole story, this wasn’t any sort of way to protect him. If either of them wanted him on the Wall because of his birth, it was about getting rid of him or getting back at him.

What IS even his deal? The thing that’s coming most strongly to mind about Benjen is how mad he gets when people act like he means what he says.

Obviously Tyrion’s cynically looking for a debt to pay over Benjen’s attitude toward him, which is judgmental and passive-aggressively ableist. But while Tyrion’s the only one who articulates this behavior, he’s not the only one who experiences it. This yes-but-no-ing is how he’s introduced to us.

Okay, whatever choice Ben wants him to make, this is exactly how you don’t handle a drunk or a kid, least of all drunk kid.

Throwing his sexual inexperience in his face in front of a table full of other young men is not going to convince him that he’s actually too young to do this thing he wants to do. It’s a great way to get him to double down and insist that this supposed marker of his immaturity doesn’t matter. And so forth. The amount he doesn’t tell Jon in this conversation is pretty staggering. He doesn’t admit what the Watch is really like, that it isn’t necessarily the honorable calling Jon’s been raised to believe that it is. He doesn’t actually suggest any other options for Jon. He doesn’t even suggest that they take a walk and try to hash it out in private. He just keeps engaging and upping the condescension.

There aren’t really flattering explanations for this. It strikes me as most likely that he’s unconsciously projecting his own issues: he wants to believe that joining the NW was the right choice for him to make. So he wants the kid to join, but he also doesn’t want it to be something just anyone can do. So he dangles the Watch as this thing Jon will find really appealing in the moment, but then turns around and says Jon is too young and inexperienced for it. The other explanation is that he’s pushing Jon’s buttons because he wants Jon to join the Watch before he’s really mature enough to understand the commitment, which is gross, full-stop. (Honestly, it’s gross that Jon was allowed to join the Watch before he came of age, regardless of what he said he wanted. It’s fundamentally exploitative that anyone is permitted to take those vows before they’re grown adults, but for people Jon loves and trusts to be responsible for it…..uuuuuugh.)

Same thing with “a man gets what he earns.” As a reader you wince at Jon’s immaturity, but, you know, at least he has the excuse of actually being a kid. But what did Ben expect, exactly? You baited this kid into leaving everything he knows with the idea that the Watch is a meritocracy, and then you get all high and mighty when he gets pissy that being good at what he does isn’t enough to qualify him for a job? Come on, dude.

So anyway, that’s why his little pissing match with Tyrion stands out in my mind, because that’s how Ben acts the entire time he’s on the page. My suspicion is that it’s an arrested development thing? I tend to agree with general fandom speculation that Benjen helped Lyanna elope and joined the Watch when he was way too young, out of guilt for all the catastrophic unforeseen consequences of the whole thing. But he was too young, too, and so he’s kind of stuck being conflicted and resentful. Possibly it’s heightened out of frustration: he was almost certainly sent to Winterfell to explain how bad things were getting up north, and Robert and Ned did fuck-all about it. I’d be aggravated, too!

I, very tenuously, lean toward thinking that he’s alive up through mid-ASOS, based on Theon’s dream toward the end of ACOK. Theon sees things he shouldn’t actually know about the past (Lyanna’s bloody nightgown), and he predicts Robb dying with Grey Wind. Whether Theon is kind of getting on Winterfell’s magical wavelength in-universe, or whether the dream is strictly Doylist foreshadowing for the reader, I assume it’s a reliable head-count (TOO SOON?) of dead Starks. Therefore, I take Benjen’s conspicuous absence as a sign for us that he’s still in the world of the living as of the Red Wedding. Now, the end of ADWD is the better part of a year later - a year of the Others, the wildlings, and the sheer cold becoming more and more dangerous - so he could still be dead. Personally I like the idea that he’s on Skaagos with Rickon, though I don’t have a better argument for it than “I like it.”

My curiosity is piqued about this bleak and twisted theory, though!

SUCH an exciting question!

I think shit is going to go sideways before Jon’s resurrection, or possibly before he’s even done bleeding out. When Jon leaves the Shieldhall, Ser Patrek has attacked Wun Wun, Wun Wun is hulking out, “Northmen, free folk, and queen’s men” are coming out into the yard with swords in hand, which is agitating Wun Wun even further - and then Wick and Marsh, honors graduates of the Joffrey Baratheon School for Strategic Geniuses, attack Jon.

So here’s the situation: Stannis’ men think that their king is dead and so are definitely having a crisis of authority and probably having a crisis of faith. The Watch is split into two factions, neither of whom have anyone with the authority to get them to cool it. The Free Folk probably don’t have any particular investment in Jon himself, but they’ll be completely right to assume that the attack on him is the opening of hostilities against them, and they have no reason not to take Castle Black for themselves. And then you have the angry giant, who has gotten attached to Jon.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, it only takes one of these people to think to unleash Ghost. Who isn’t just Ghost anymore.

I don’t see any outcome for this other than full-on pandemonium. Who or what ever is going to bring him back - presumably Mel but who knows - isn’t going to be able to get to his body for some time. Insofar as anyone can “win” in this situation, I think the wildlings are likely to take over Castle Black: they still have their numbers, but the NW’s discipline has gone out the window, so they have the advantage.

So moving from the near-guaranteed to the possible, I think there’s a sizable window for Jon-as-Ghost to wreck the traitors. As satisfying as that sounds, I’m not sure. The mutineers are weak and scared and not much more. And on top of that, Jon is a powerful warg, but not a particularly disciplined one, so I don’t know if he’s going to limit the attack to people who deserve it. Perhaps it’ll look like a kind of parallel to the panic he sees in Wun Wun, actually.

From there things get really difficult to predict, because Jon is going to be different. I don’t really see him going full-on dark side because…honestly, that sounds kind of cheap, compared to the strength of his storyline so far. But he’ll be changed by the trauma of the attack, the painful truths he’s going to learn about his own identity during his journey to the underworld, and whatever magical effect resurrection may or may not have in and of itself - and Jon is a dangerous guy at the best of times. And on top of that, you have the difficulty of, how does one raise an army against the undead, while for all intents and purposes being one of them? There’s a lot of fantastic possibilities, most of which I’m sure I haven’t thought of yet.

Well, and Ramsay Bolton is a dead freak walking. I’m pretty sure about that.