The fact that twincests don’t understand that if Jaime & Cersei got together, THAT would be the standard fantasy romance trope that GRRM wants to subvert and make realistic while Jaime & Brienne getting together and having their happy ever after would be going against the grain

Take away the incest for a moment okay? What are Jaime and Cersei in the beginning of AGOT? She’s the beautiful queen, abused by her fat whoring cheating husband, and Jaime is the Golden knight of a sacred order, having a torrid affair, her children are really his, their love

Starts a war, he protects the people he love, she claims he would kill Robert if he ever hit Cersei in the face. They claim their soulmates, two bodies one soul, if she was a woman she would be Jaime, if he were a woman he would be Cersei, and in the end they die in eachothers

Arms, because that’s where he’s meant to be, with his other half, together forever
...
Yawn. Boring. Been there done that. Them being happy togetber is beating a dead horse, even with their ‘complexities’ (aka she treats him like shit and abuses him, he occasionally snarks)

Even the incest itself is boring like okay they’re twins.... and? It’s the oldest trope in the world. Two twins are intertwined with connections and feelings, there’s a closeness no one can break, yada yada yada. The point is; is we’ve seen that before. A hundred times.

But you know what we haven’t seen? (Apart from his favorite fairytale?) an woman knight who isn’t badass fighter smirking confident who fights in skimpy armor, weighs 115 pounds but can take out guys 3 times her size. She’s BIG, and she’s TALL and she’s UGLY, and she’s a shy

Naive teenager who wants true love, who loves romantic songs, who joined the kg not bc she wanted to prove women can do it just as well as the boys but to be near her crush. She isn’t comfortable being a fighter, and she doesn’t quip and snark and smirk, she blushes and is

Stubborn past the point of sense and stammers and CSNT meet people’s eyes. And Jaime is a handsome golden knight who calls her ugly, who can’t stand her and Vice versa. They didn’t start out smirking and leering, he started off trying to antagonize her and she refuses to give in

When has an ugly woman, a genuinely ugly woman not like Bella Swan ‘plain’ or ‘I’m not like other girls ugly’ but a genuinely ugly woman, gotten with the handsome guy? We’ve seen it a hundred times in reverse, every sitcom from early 2000’s has fat mehh hubby and sexy size 0 wife

But, especially in fantasy where ugly is usually code for evil and beauty is code for good, when has an ugly woman gotten a happy ending with a handsome knight? That’s not ‘lolz they expect a Disney ending harhar lolz!’ That’s realizing Brienne and Jaime, while they do follow

Some of the traditional romance tropes and subvert others (Jaime saves her from rape, she avenges his maiming), being endgame IS the realistic ASOIAF take on a typical fantasy romance.

And also once you get past AGOT & ACOK, we realize that Jaime and Cersei are subverted too but in a bad way. Their ‘traditional’ romance is turned on its head. The woman abuses the man, the man leaves the abusive relationship, turns out their twins who act NOTHING alike, and I

Have already discussed why the ‘if I was a man I’d act like jaime, if I was a woman id act like Cersei’ take is garbage and if Jaime was a woman he actually would be, you guessed it, Brienne. Who he laments several times that they know eachother, that she makes the same choices

He would, that he sees himself in her and through AFFC you see them each start to take on the better parts of the other. Brienne grows a little more confident, Jaime starts to remember who he wanted to be. And then in the same breath Jaime and Cersei BOTH, several times, talk

About how they don’t know one another and they just believed what they wanted to be. These twins, these supposed soulmates, this person they shared a soul with, are as different as night and day.

Anyway idk why I decided to make a thread about this at 2 AM but every word is true. Cersei and Jaime dying together or murder/suicide would be the Hollywood typical standard ending. Jaime and Brienne living happily ever after though..... that’s an ASOIAF ending.