The Atlantic

<em>Game of Thrones</em>: About That Hookup

Incest, in this show, is a practice that is also a metaphor—for insularity, for myopia, for people’s unwillingness to see beyond themselves.
Source: HBO

This post contains spoilers through Season 7, Episode 7 of Game of Thrones.

“Out of all the people in Thrones, Jon, of all people, is probably the least up for incest,” Kit Harington told Entertainment Tonight last month. “But we don’t know whether they’re related.”

The actor was talking about the romantic tension between his character, Jon Snow, and Daenerys Targaryen—a tension that , sometimes gracefully and sometimes awkwardly, has been meticulously building over the course of its seventh season. It’s been a tension complicated by the fact that while, as Harrington suggested, viewers didn’t know for sure whether the two were related … we have also been preeeeetty sure that the two are related. Sunday’s episode, “The Dragon and the Wolf,” confirmed it: Jon is not, in fact, the illegitimate son of Ned Stark; he is in fact the legitimate son of Ned’sTargaryen. Who was also the older brother of one Daenerys Targaryen. Which would, yep, make Jon Snow, né Aegon Targaryen … Dany’s nephew. Which would make the consummation of their attraction, as one of the final scenes of the season … extremely complicated.

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