Not caught up with Game of Thrones? Don’t read ahead – season six spoilers follow.
Game of Thrones recently confirmed a hugely popular fan theory that’s been circulating for years – R+L does equal J.
That is, Jon Snow isn’t Ned Stark’s bastard son – he’s Ned’s nephew, the son of Ned’s late sister Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen, Daenerys’s older brother.
And no matter how satisfied most fans were with the revelation, the questions that have been left unanswered continue to spark some furious Internet debate.
One of the most recent fan theories is trying to make more sense out of the whole Tower of Joy flashback – namely, the fight scene.
Sure, the biggest question we all had was confirmed by GoT, but some have been left wondering about the beginning of the scene shown back in episode three of the latest season.
Fans of the show are wondering why exactly, when Ned and his posse ride up to the Tower of Joy and are met by the legendary sword fighter Arthur Dayne, there’s immediate conflict. Why did they need to fight at all if Ned was only there to find his sister?
One Redditor, named therapy, may have the answer.
Therapy has some pretty good points:
‘Why is there any fighting at all? Ned is Lyanna’s sister and can be trusted with her and her baby’; ‘Before fighting, Arthur Dayne tells Ned, “Good luck in the wars to come,” a strange thing to say to someone you are about to fight to the death with’; and ‘when only Dayne and Ned are left, Dayne could easily kill Ned at any time (as the Three Eyed Raven said, he wasn’t just better than Ned, but far better) – why delay?’
He had a theory for all of that – perhaps Dayne had been given explicit commands by Rhaegar (Jon’s Targaryen father) to make sure everyone died, except Ned, in order to preserve the secret of the Targaryen baby (who is Jon Snow).
And this would be explain why, after mistakenly thinking he killed Howland Reed (the fighter who ended up killing Dayne), the legendary fighter was defeated.
But while many commenters on the Reddit thread liked the theory, others believed that Dayne was just simply protecting the prince as part of the King’s Guard, since Rhaegar would name the baby his heir and eventually the king.
We’ve got another 10 months until the next season airs, so I’m sure the fan theories won’t stop there.
