Ygritte

You know, I’ll never quite fathom why people feel so eager to dismiss Ygritte. You can dislike her idiosyncrasies, or perhaps her mannerisms. You can dislike her convictions and her beliefs, but I don’t really understand how anyone can outright detest her and think that Jon would’ve been better off if he’d never met her.

Ygritte was the catalyst to Jon’s growth. Even in her loudmouthed, abrasive way, she opened his eyes to a lot of things he wouldn’t have otherwise experienced. She showed him love, she showed him what it was to be free and live without the constraints of his oath or obligation. Hell, in the end she also showed him loss, and what sacrifice really meant. He gave up his slice of potential happiness because he’d been raised on the principle of honour, and it wasn’t an easy decision. He thought about staying with the free-folk, he thought about making their fight his own, and the dichotomy that was his own indecision, is perhaps one of the biggest parts of him discovering his own identity. It shaped him to become the man he grows into throughout the rest of the books.

Without her, where would he be? Stood at the wall, brooding and sulking, wrapped up in his own bundle of morality, unaware of what the world had to offer. Unaware of what it means to love and be loved in return. If he hadn’t known love, would he still be so eager to defend the world around him? If anything, his own experience of love and loss is one of the few things that makes the fight against the White Walkers that bit more pertinent. He knows what it is to lose the people he loves, and just how important it therefore is that he does everything in his power to make sure the rest of the world doesn’t have to experience that so needlessly. It’s harder to protect something you know nothing of, and honour only goes so far. Which is why from my perspective, Ygritte’s involvement in Jon’s life goes far deeper than simply being a bit on the side he opted to undergo the horizontal mambo with. She’s a valuable participant in the shaping of his future identity.

So next time, before you go prancing into a tag, to declare your dislike for a character with absolutely no explanation what-so-ever, maybe throw the rest of us that do appreciate and adore said character, a bone and elaborate, instead of dismissing an entire arc of character development and purpose, simply because it doesn’t fit in with your idyllic little notion of what should or shouldn’t have happened.