turtle-paced:

“It was the cold,” Gared said with iron certainty. “I saw men freeze last winter, and the one before, when I was half a boy. Everyone talks about snows forty foot deep, and how the ice wind comes howling out of the north, but the real enemy is the cold.”

– Prologue, AGoT

The prologue’s there to frame the conflict of the entire series, and it’s outright stated that the cold is the enemy. (And at the end of the book, Dany proclaims that the fire is hers. Bookends.) The ultimate antagonist in this series is an inhuman, anti-human force against which all humanity should unite. 

The idea that people should work together to face threats greater than themselves recurs across the series. Whether it’s Ned telling Arya that she and Sansa will need each other, Catelyn imploring the Baratheon brothers to work together, or Jon and Stannis making common cause at the Wall itself, the idea’s there. The White Walkers are a problem bigger than anyone, and people should work together. The idea that at the business end of the series one of the protagonists will callously manipulate another protagonist into helping sort out the final showdown is just bizarre to me. Especially when the other option is one protagonist convincing another protagonist to lend a hand and a few dragons, nothing but good faith between them. Even the show has started to bear in this direction from time to time.

I think this theory is also pretty OOC for even the show versions of Jon and Dany. The show’s got its issues with showing us one thing and telling us another, but that theory pretty well denies that Dany could ever want to save the world because the world’s worth saving, and ignores Jon’s distress over deceiving Ygritte.

Given the options between “offscreen, Jon decided to give up on a good faith alliance with Daenerys and instead seduce her into offering her assistance,” and “the Jon/Dany romance writing did not come off altogether as convincing as intended,” I know which I find more plausible.

Oh it goes against everything in the book. It flat-out
ignores how Dany’s actions in Beyond the Wall echo
Stannis when he prioritized the Wall’s needs and came to their aid. That
little plot that branded Stannis as the king who still cared and that
marked his change from a king who demanded fealty to one who earned it and that ended up getting him more men after he lost his main body of support in the Blackwater.
The parallel is way too obvious to Dany. The show wasn’t at all ambiguous when they had Tyrion plead with Dany
not to go because of the risk to the political war nor was it ambiguous
when they had Dany choose to come to Jon’s aid even though she didn’t
even believe in the Others. But some people insist on being stuck in the first couple of episode when Dany was demanding fealty or bargaining for it and completely ignore the part where she pledged protection and manpower with no strings attached. It’s almost as if she cares about people or something.

Also, also, haven’t we thoroughly established how crippling bad faith negotiation is to the peace process? Or that it only lends itself to immediate but ultimately hollow victories that get torn down so easily? The Lannisters have been doing nothing but negotiating in bad faith throughout the War of the Five Kings, how is that working for them? Just a question…. what the hell happens when Dany discovers Jon has been manipulating her? Has raped her by deception?

What makes this theory refuses to compute even more is that it’s even worse than suggesting that
one of the protagonists will callously manipulate another protagonist into helping sort out the final showdown (which is I agree is utterly bizare). It’s that it is built on the idea that Jon would do that after Dany had already pledged to fight the Others. He didn’t need to seduce her and sleep with her to get her assistance. Meanwhile Jon goes on to give an entire sermon about good faith while negotiating with Cersei fully knowing that her agreement to the truce hinges on his word but refusing to lie to get her cooperation. So Jon was simultaneously a callous pragmatist that had no problem manipulating Dany into a sexual relationship even after he got what he wanted from her, but also a staunch proponent of good faith negotiation that he risked foiling the truce they needed so Dany could give her full attention to the fight north.

So which one is he? Because Jon can’t be both at the same time.