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atopvisenyashill · 8 months

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do you have any idea of how jon’s ending is going to be? 😄

me answering this two months later should tell you that i have no fucking clue alsjfdlk. i mean...i have some guesses but i'm not completely sure on any of them and i reserve the right to change my mind as soon as 3 seconds after i post this answer and i actually had to psyche myself up to post this bc i crave validation and i feel like i'm talking out of my ass here lol.

jon's story is honestly the one that trips me up more than everyone else's. for one thing, the show is basically no help at all here - i think a lot of the stuff they did with jon in the show they mostly did because it looked cool and fit the action hero trope they were trying to fill even though "action hero" isn't really what jon's story is about or even follows. for another thing, the fandom just differs soooo much on what's going to happen to him that it's hard to sort of sift through how everyone feels and come to a specific idea on how EYE personally feel. there's a few things i feel strongly are or aren't happening so i guess i'll just ramble on a bit here:

there is one thing i am absolutely sure is going to happen and it's this:

His lord father had once talked about raising new lords and settling them in the abandoned holdfasts as a shield against wildlings. The plan would have required the Watch to yield back a large part of the Gift, but his uncle Benjen believed the Lord Commander could be won around, so long as the new lordlings paid taxes to Castle Black rather than Winterfell. "It is a dream for spring, though," Lord Eddard had said. "Even the promise of land will not lure men north with a winter coming on." If winter had come and gone more quickly and spring had followed in its turn, I might have been chosen to hold one of these towers in my father's name. Lord Eddard was dead, however, his brother Benjen lost; the shield they dreamt together would never be forged.

I really think this is foreshadowing Jon and Bran's ending wrt each other - building up holdfasts and raising up new lords and ladies not as a shield against the Wildlings but to help the Wildlings as well as the large amount of Northerners in need of somewhere safe after the destruction of the Long Night. Land and resources to help this group of people desperately in need of a new homeland - it's Brandon's Gift to his brother!

the other thing i'm mainly convinced of is i think a bit spicy of a take not just amongst the greater fandom but even amongst the jonsa side more specifically - jon isn't going to be king nor is he legitimate. it's not to say that I don't think the crown will be offered to him because I definitely believe that jon is going to have several other moments similar to stannis offering him winterfell where someone is offering him a crown and a way to jump ahead of the other starklings in the line of succession. i do not believe he will say yes. not only that, but i think his story is going to end with him leaving Winterfell and KL specifically because he doesn't want anyone building a faction around him and his name to topple his family members' claims. like maester aemon, his beloved mentor, he is going to purposefully take himself out of the succession AND get himself out of sight and out of mind so Sansa and Bran face no real backlash.

the thing is - i just don't know when that is going to happen. i generally fall under the idea that this ending will come about halfway through a dream of spring - after sticking by his siblings, supporting their claims, dealing with his identity crisis, doubling down on making Sansa QitN and Bran King on the Iron Throne, he's going to realize there's a political faction building around him and just peace out to the Gift to deal with resettling the Wildlings. Completely out of politics, completely cut off from most of Westeros.

THAT. It's the only thing I'm sure of in his story. All my other theories are a lot more vague and I'm a lot less certain of them but Jon helping resettle refugees from the Long Night (whether it's displaced people from the Riverlands and the North, perhaps the remnants of the Unsullied even, as well as Wildlings and former Night's Watch members) and purposefully going there to make sure no political faction builds around him to usurp his brother and sister's claims after rejecting a crown, that is the one thing I would bet money on happening at some point in the series.

But the other stuff...I'm gonna bullet point because I'm less sure:

Jon as Hand/Regent - there's a lot of foreshadowing about Bran having a Regent for awhile and while I'm not sure Bran is going to have a lot of say over his regents, he will have more say over his Hand and I think if Jon does access any sort of power, it's going to be as Bran's hand. But once he realizes people are still kinda itchy about the new political structure (a parliament style rule with a disabled king), that's what prompts him to leave entirely.

Jon as the Mummer's Dragon - Dany is going to show up thinking he's a "proper dragon" because she's already killed the mummer in Aegon VI (or so she thinks) and rumors have started about Jon's parentage (part of why Jon is going to refuse the Winter crown will be because any claim he has comes through Lyanna which puts him at the bottom of the rankings anyway! No way Howland is just going to let Jon get crowned without pointing all of this out!). But Jon isn't a dragon, he is a wolf in dragon's clothing. I don't fully believe he's going to stab her a la the show - I think it's more likely Arya kills her and Jon takes the fall for it to protect Arya.

Jon as a Romantic Hero - we all know I go back and forth on whether Jonsa will be canon or not. IF it does go canon, I think what happens is they fall in love through TWOW, find out about his parentage so it's surprise not incest, and then broach the topic of marrying (maybe they even do get married secretly) only for it to get put on pause because of like, ice and fire magic plot reasons, then Jon's reputation is ruined by "killing" Dany, and he leaves. I THINK that's how the story is going to end - with them separated due to the politics but with some hope of one day reconciling. if they DO end up together though, it will be after he builds a reputation for himself in the Gift (maybe even colloquially referred to as King of the Gift by the people there, the way he's called King Crow by the wildlings in the show), Sansa broaches the topic of them being together once again and this time they can because of how his reputation has built, and because it combines their claims without usurping Sansa's (and I think it's likely Jon insists on being called Prince-Consort and not King-Consort). That's the only way I see it ending happily for them but tbh I vastly prefer the idea that he lives in the Gift forever and secretly marries Sansa maybe but they are never able to live together due to the politics. But that's because I love a bittersweet romantic ending, I want those two full of longing for the love that could have been!!!

Jon as a Dragon Rider - also something i waffle on. part of me feels like you don't have a dragon named after a main character's secret father and not have that character interact with that dragon. another part of me feels like the set up of all three dragons have defined, loving relationships with their riders might be set up for dany's feelings on losing her dragons to enemies (euron/victarion and aegon) than for those dragons actually getting relationships with main character riders. i like the idea of jon, like nettles, having a close relationship with his dragon because he's serious about keeping this dragon away from other people, and treating the dragon like a pet (the way he treats ghost) instead of a war machine but i'm not sure george finds that compelling, ya know. Don't ask me which dragon he could possibly ride, i have no strong opinions one way or the other.

#jon snow #a song of ice and fire #king in the north #jonsa #queen in the north #ados speculation #twow speculation #i'm not putting this in the vs tag bc i don't want like 50 targ stans yelling at me about the 'arya kills dany' thing #also - if you can't say it nicely don't say it at all. i'm fine with a disagreement but if you're patronizing or rude #you're getting a reaction image and probably a swear as a response. talk like a normal person and i'll talk normal back tho #anons #asks #getting on my soap box

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denimbex1986 · 3 months

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"A generation of queer people mourns the childhood they never had." All of Us Strangers director Andrew Haigh spoke to The Guardian and Alex Needham about the year's saddest film .

Today, having left the cinema with red eyes, I know that what we didn't say will hurt. Because this film is not only about loneliness or loneliness, it is about parental love and the child's need for visibility, it is about tenderness, loss and the common end of all – stardust.

When Andrew Haigh was filming his new movie, All of Us Strangers, at his parents' old house in Croydon, something strange started happening. "I started having eczema again, which I haven't had since I was a kid," says the 50-year-old director. “I feel like there's a reason your body remembers the trauma. In a way things almost become embedded in our DNA and find ways to resurface," he adds.

In All of Us Strangers, the protagonist played with unflinching commitment and incredible empathy by Andrew Scott, Adam is a 46-year-old gay man who finds himself caught between what happened and what he never said.

Blocked and lonely, Adam is a screenwriter whose parents died in a car accident when he was 12 years old. Now an adult, he lives in a mysteriously empty block of flats in London. One night after a fire alarm, a younger man, Harry played by the reasonably up-and-coming Paul Mescal, comes drunk to his door and asks for his company. Adam rejects him. "Am I scaring you?" Harry asks him. "We don't have to do anything if you don't like me, but I have vampires at my door."

For Andrew Haigh this is also the most important scene in the film. Although I don't want to go into spoilers, after the screening, yes, this is the scene that defines the beginning, duration and end of a film that will leave a mark in time as a razor.

The film – which won best film and best director at the British Independent Film Awards in December – is a statue of the fragile, the kind that modern filmmaking tends to shy away from.

It's a love story, a ghost story, and a coming-of-age narrative that breaks space-time into small, sharp, pieces. In the process, her Adam suddenly finds himself in a universe where his parents are alive. This is also the missed opportunity to tell them who he is, what he is, to claim an acquaintance and reconciliation that had never happened.

Masterful exploration of loneliness and sadness, the relationship between children and their parents and a testament to the fact that time, in addition to healing, can magnify the wounds that grow stronger with us. The heart never forgets to hurt and this is reminded - the only condition of course is that you have a heart, which makes the work a risk in itself because empathy is ignored today.

A tender, aching portrayal of the insatiable human need for love and connection, Haigh's film is about people yearning to be understood for who they are, often in vain.

A knot in the stomach of a lost generation

Based on the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada (who died a few months ago at the age of 89), Strangers Among Us, written by Haigh himself, was written during the pandemic, when we were all locked in cages, faced with what has happened and what could have been otherwise.

Haigh – whose previous films include The Weekend and 45 Years, and TV series Looking and The North Water are regarded as tender examples of good television that doesn't drown in clichés by pandering to the world – wanted to make the film as personal as possible. He made it. Adam's home is the director and screenwriter's home, the one he left when he was 'nine or 10' – following his own parents' painful divorce.

The reality he conveys on the screen is his own. The middle-aged gay man who was a young teenager in the late 80s when the AIDS crisis unleashed a wave of ferocious homophobia. "I wanted it to be very specific to a certain generation of gay people, my generation," says Haigh. "It was not an easy task. Growing up, I felt that if I was going to be gay I would have no future and the only other alternative was not to be gay – which of course couldn't happen. So I wanted to tell this story," he tells the Guardian.

All of Us Strangers is hard for many reasons. The hero constantly struggles with the lingering ghosts of a childhood that was never normal as he was torn apart not only by grief, but also by prejudice and hatred.

"There's a generation of queer people mourning the childhood they never had," says Haigh. “I think there's a sense of nostalgia for something we never had because we were tortured so much. It's something like grief. A feeling that dissipates, but is always there in many different ways. It's like a knot in your stomach," he adds.

Much of the emotional power of All Us Strangers comes from the brutally repressed Adam trying to dissolve his feelings of shame and isolation in order to be seen and loved for who he really is. To this end, he takes advantage of the opportunity, denied him by their deaths, to come out to his mom and dad, separately. His mum is shocked – "Isn't it a very lonely life?" – and worried about AIDS. His dad, not unkindly, says: "We always knew you were a bit of a tutti-frutti."

"It is very difficult to move forward in life if you feel that you are not understood. And if they don't understand you, you feel like you're alone," says the director.

"It doesn't matter, as long as you find love"

In one scene in the film Adam asks his father why he never came to his room to comfort him when he heard him crying after being bullied at school. Haigh had been a victim of bullying in his school days, common memories for many.

"I was about nine and the kids around me knew something was different about me - before I even realized it myself," he says. “If you're queer and a kid, you don't want to tell your parents that you're being bullied because they're going to worry, and that's the last thing you want. Being queer in a family is sometimes the hardest thing because you're not like the others, you have a secret," he says.

Haigh told his own parents when he was 20 years old. His father now suffers from dementia and entered a nursing home during the filming of All of Us Strangers. Visiting one weekend, the director discovered that his father no longer remembered that his son was gay.

"He asked me if I was married and if I had a wife. Before this happened my father knew everything about me, he had accepted it beautifully. I suddenly found myself having the same fear I had when I was in my 20s, of having to re-introduce myself up front, and I realized I couldn't because I didn't want to upset him. But in the end, after a little silence, he said to me: 'Well, it doesn't matter, as long as you find love.' I felt so good about my father and his words. He just understood what the important thing was, and in many ways it spoke to exactly what the film was about."

The film is also based on Haigh's relationship with his own children, who are 10 and 12 years old. "They don't live with me but when I'm with them and I'm their parent, I'm always worried. Am I doing the right thing? Am I saying the right thing? I help them; As I got older, I realized that you don't necessarily need a parent to give you advice. You don't need them to find solutions for things that you can sometimes solve on your own."

Beyond meeting a child's needs, there's something about being a queer parent that makes you wonder how you and your children will fit into the larger society, Haigh points out. “Do we have a new code? Do we have a different way of being a family because we don't have a certain pattern? I know a lot of queer people who have kids and they all have the same question. Are we trying to be what our parents were to us or are we trying to be something else?'

Pop gave hope and momentum

Powered by 80s music production, All of Us Strangers uses iconic hits from the decade such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood's The Power of Love, Fine Young Cannibals' Johnny Come Home and Housemartins' Build, tracks heard by Adam when he travels back to his childhood. The musical pieces also become an integral part of the supernatural world that the hero visits to make peace with the loss of his parents and all that he never got to share with them.

"Paul Heaton (Housemartins) and Roland Gift (Fine Young Cannibals) are not queer artists, but they spoke to me as such," says Haigh. "I'm sure my political views were shaped by the times I listened to the Housemartins" – who were self-confessed socialists during the Thatcher government. “Pop music was so important – it gave me hope as a kid. I used to sing The Power of Love to myself in my bedroom, not understanding anything about myself at the time, but knowing that I longed for something and believed that something could be done. When I put that song in the film, I was thinking that my childhood self would be really amazed at what I'm doing now."

For Haigh, being LGBT does not necessarily mean alienation. “I know many young gay people who do not feel alone and alienated. But I also know people close to me, younger than me, who have found it very difficult to integrate into a society that sees them as different," he says.

“So I don't want to pretend that everything is great. But it's important to me to make it clear that these two heroes aren't alone because they're gay – they're alone because the world has made them feel different. There are many reasons that can gently slide you into loneliness and if you can't find something to get you out of it, you might stop caring about yourself, like Harry," she adds.

What ghost is really haunting you?

"I saw the film as a spiral and I let myself into it," says Haigh.

In one scene Adam starts to have a fever, which you don't explain further in the film. But what you're explaining is that Adam is running a fever after his mother brings up AIDS and her fears about this disease which in the 80s was an LGBTQ-only affair - or at least that's the narrative they wanted to sell the systemic media and their neoliberal leaders see Thatse and Reagan.

"I think all of us gay men of that generation know that every time we sweated a little more after casual sex with other people, we were suddenly terrified that we might have HIV," says Haigh. “A swollen gland wasn't just a swollen gland. I wanted to talk about it. To show that AIDS is another fear that Adam has buried. I'm telling a ghost story – what is it that haunts him?'

The end of the film is painfully bittersweet. For some it is romantic and hopeful, for others it is a finale of crushing sadness. "More than anything else, I want you to walk out of the theater and carry this film with you," Haigh says of All Of Us Strangers, which the LA Times (and countless other media and institutions, but not the British BAFTAs they snubbed the movie shockingly much) named it the best movie of 2023.

“We are all children, many of us are parents, many of us are in relationships or not finding love. Look, I want 15-year-olds to see this movie, not just people our age. If I had seen this movie when I was a teenager, it probably would have changed me," says Haigh.

Strangers Among Us has one more piece of advice for everyone. When vampires are at the door, a hug and a caress exorcises them, remember that.'

#All of Us Strangers #Andrew Haigh #Andrew Scott #Paul Mescal #Strangers #Taichi Yamada #The Housemartins #Frankie Goes to Hollywood #BAFTAs #British Independent Film Awards #The North Water #Weekend #45 Years #Fine Young Cannibals #Johnny Come Home #The Power of Love #Looking #Build

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