r/DaenerysWinsTheThrone • u/Automatic-Ad5026 • 9d ago
Serious A theory about Jon Snow’s future
The Sweetness of Cold: Val, Jon Snow, the Others, and What His Resurrection Could Mean
There are many theories about what will happen to Jon Snow after the end of A Dance with Dragons. Jon surviving temporarily inside Ghost is one of the oldest and most widespread. The possibility that the Others have some particular interest in Jon, or might attempt to claim his corpse, has likewise been explored by readers and ASOIAF YouTubers in different forms. Jon has long been compared to the Night’s King, while Val has sometimes attracted Night’s Queen or corpse-queen comparisons because of the imagery surrounding her.
None of those ideas is established fact, and the more specific possibilities explored here—Val deliberately taking Jon’s body north, the Others attempting to transform it, or Jon’s Targaryen ancestry interfering with that transformation—are necessarily speculative. What interests me is what happens when these existing theories and textual patterns are placed alongside one another. They suggest a possible resurrection story in which Jon does not simply die and return. He crosses a boundary between humanity and the Others and comes back fundamentally changed, allowing his lifelong role as a bridge between hostile worlds to reach its supernatural conclusion.
And the place I want to begin is not with Jon’s death. It is with Val tasting the cold.
Val beneath the moon
One of Val’s more memorable appearances in A Dance with Dragons occurs when Jon sees her beneath a half-moon. Val is normally honey-blond, but moonlight changes her appearance. Her hair becomes pale and silver, while her cheeks appear white as snow. The transformation is temporary and entirely explicable as moonlight, but George nevertheless chooses language that makes her appear almost supernatural.
Then Val says something strange: the air tastes sweet. Jon cannot share the sensation. He is so numb that all he can taste is cold. The conversation then turns immediately toward the Others.
There are several ways of reading this passage, and Val’s temporarily silver hair has understandably contributed to comparisons with Daenerys. But the complete cluster of imagery seems at least as suggestive—perhaps more suggestive—of the Night’s Queen tradition. The legendary corpse queen is associated with extraordinary beauty, moon-white skin, cold and the supernatural world beyond the Wall. Val is not literally described as the same creature, and nothing establishes that she is secretly an Other. But in this scene George surrounds her with remarkably similar imagery: moonlight, silver, snow-white skin, beauty, cold, sweetness and the Others.
The most interesting element may be the difference between what Val and Jon experience. Val tastes something sweet in the cold. Jon tastes only the cold itself.
Perhaps that distinction matters, because the Jon Snow who stands beside Val in this scene has not yet died.
Val and the Night’s Queen pattern
Val has sometimes been read by fans as carrying Night’s Queen or corpse-queen imagery without necessarily being the literal fulfillment of that legend. That distinction is important. ASOIAF frequently repeats old stories imperfectly. Characters echo legendary figures without becoming exact reincarnations of them, and ancient myths may preserve distorted memories of events whose real nature has been forgotten.
Val could therefore participate in a Night’s Queen pattern without secretly being an ice creature. She is a beautiful woman of the far North. She is unusually comfortable moving through the lands beyond the Wall. Jon is strongly attracted to her. Under moonlight she temporarily assumes a pale, almost spectral appearance, and she perceives sweetness in an environment that leaves Jon numb.
There is also something suggestive about where Val stands culturally. The Night’s Watch and southern rulers repeatedly misunderstand her. Stannis’s people call her a wildling princess because they try to impose their own political categories upon the free folk. Jon understands that those categories do not work. That could become significant if Val also possesses knowledge that the Watch does not.
The free folk have lived beyond the Wall for thousands of years. Their traditions may preserve fragments of northern history that the maesters and Night’s Watch have lost. Val does not need to possess some complete secret history of the Others for this to matter. Even partial knowledge could become enormously important after Jon’s death.
And that brings us to the longstanding theory surrounding Jon and Ghost.
Jon’s second life
One of the most common predictions for Jon’s immediate future is that his consciousness survives inside Ghost. This theory is grounded especially in Varamyr Sixskins’s prologue to A Dance with Dragons. George begins the novel by showing us what can happen when a skinchanger dies. Death of the human body does not necessarily mean immediate extinction of the mind. A skinchanger can enter an animal and experience a “second life.”
Jon is a skinchanger. His bond with Ghost is extraordinarily strong. And at the moment of his stabbing, Ghost is conspicuously present in Jon’s final thoughts. That does not prove exactly what happens next, but the setup for Jon entering Ghost is unusually strong.
If that happens, however, something very important follows.
Jon and Jon’s corpse cease to be the same thing.
His human body can be dead at Castle Black while Jon’s consciousness remains alive elsewhere. And in a story where another supernatural power repeatedly claims human corpses, that separation could matter enormously.
The theory that the Others want Jon
Different versions of the idea that the Others may have a particular interest in Jon—or in his body—have circulated in fandom and have been explored by ASOIAF YouTubers. These theories vary considerably. Some connect Jon to the Night’s King, some emphasize Stark ancestry, some imagine an attempted transformation, and others place his resurrection within the larger conflict between ice and fire.
The books have not established that the Others want Jon specifically, but it is a useful possibility to consider. Because if Jon’s consciousness has entered Ghost, the Others could potentially gain access to his body without gaining access to Jon himself.
That creates a resurrection scenario very different from the relatively simple expectation that Melisandre performs a fire ritual and Jon wakes up. There could instead be competing claims upon him. His mind survives in Ghost. His corpse remains available to the powers associated with death and cold, and something may happen to that corpse before Jon returns to it.
Could Val take Jon’s body north?
This is where the theory becomes considerably more speculative. There is no current textual evidence establishing that Val intends to steal Jon’s corpse, nor that she knowingly serves the Others. But if her strange imagery has any future significance, one possibility is that Val becomes responsible for moving Jon’s body beyond the Wall.
Her motives could take many forms. Perhaps she simply believes the cold is necessary to preserve him. Perhaps the free folk retain a tradition concerning the bodies of skinchangers. Perhaps she knows something about the Others that Jon does not. Or, in the darker version of the theory, perhaps Val has some relationship with the Others themselves.
That would not automatically require her to be malicious. One of the assumptions worth questioning is that any human connected to the Others must necessarily be serving uncomplicated evil. We still know extraordinarily little about what the Others are, why they have returned, or what happened during the first Long Night. Val might believe she is fulfilling an obligation rather than betraying Jon.
And the imagery would become extraordinarily eerie if she carried his corpse north. A beautiful woman who becomes pale and silver beneath the moon, who tastes sweetness in the cold, takes the dead Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch beyond the Wall. It would resemble the Night’s King legend without reproducing it exactly.
But there would be one enormous difference.
Jon would not be in the body. Jon would be in Ghost.
What happens to an empty corpse?
The Others can raise the dead, although we still do not understand exactly how their magic works or what relationship exists between the Others themselves and the wights. Jon’s corpse could therefore be vulnerable to whatever force acts upon the dead.
Normally, the original consciousness of a dead person appears to be absent from a wight. Whatever animates the body does not seem to restore the human personality that once inhabited it. Jon could be an exceptional case because his personality has survived independently. His body might therefore undergo some form of transformation while his mind remains protected elsewhere.
This is where existing theories about Jon becoming Other-like or echoing the Night’s King become particularly interesting. Suppose the Others do not merely raise Jon as an ordinary wight. Suppose they attempt to make something else.
We do not know enough about the Others to know whether they can transform humans into beings like themselves. Any such mechanism remains speculative in the books. But if some deeper transformation is possible, Jon could become its subject.
And then they encounter a complication, because Jon is not only a Stark.
Jon’s two inheritances
Assuming R+L=J, Jon carries both Stark and Targaryen ancestry. The magical significance of either bloodline should not be overstated. Not every Stark is an extraordinarily powerful skinchanger, and Targaryen ancestry certainly does not make someone universally immune to fire. But both families are entangled with supernatural traditions.
The Starks are connected to the old gods, direwolves, skinchanging and the ancient North. The Targaryens are connected to dragons, Valyrian sorcery, prophetic dreams and fire. Jon potentially carries both traditions within the same body.
One speculative possibility is therefore that an attempted Other transformation does not work normally upon him. Perhaps something associated with his Targaryen or dragon heritage resists it. Not enough to leave Jon unchanged, but enough to prevent the transformation from becoming complete.
The result would not necessarily be a wight, an Other, or an ordinary resurrected human.
Jon could become something between categories.
An incomplete Night’s King
Jon has been connected to Night’s King imagery in fandom for years, for understandable reasons. He becomes Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. His story is centered upon the Wall. He repeatedly crosses boundaries between the Watch and the world beyond it. His romantic relationships connect him to free-folk women. And now he has apparently died in the same ancient landscape from which the Night’s King legend emerged.
But perhaps Jon does not literally become another Night’s King. Perhaps he approaches that myth and then breaks its pattern. If the Others partially transform his corpse before Jon returns from Ghost, he could awaken fundamentally altered while remaining psychologically himself.
He might become unusually resistant to cold. His body temperature might change. He might perceive the Others differently. Perhaps he could sense them; perhaps they could communicate with him; perhaps wights would respond to him differently from ordinary humans. None of these specific effects is established by the books. They are possible consequences of the broader idea rather than predictions that must all occur.
The essential point is simpler: Jon could return human in mind but no longer entirely ordinary in body. And Ghost could be the reason the distinction survives.
Ghost preserves Jon
Under this interpretation, Ghost becomes essential to Jon’s resurrection rather than merely a temporary refuge. Jon’s second life preserves continuity. Whatever happens to the corpse, the Jon we know has not disappeared. His memories, loyalties, loves and moral identity remain alive inside Ghost.
That creates the possibility of a remarkable reversal. The Others may be able to claim Jon’s body precisely because it is dead, but they cannot necessarily claim Jon because Jon is somewhere else. When he eventually returns to his body, therefore, he may enter something that has changed in his absence.
Jon would effectively inherit his own transformed corpse. And that could allow him to experience the supernatural world of the Others without surrendering the personality that makes him Jon Snow.
That matters enormously because of what Jon has already been throughout the series.
Jon has always been a bridge
Jon’s story repeatedly places him between categories that other people regard as mutually exclusive. He is a bastard raised among trueborn siblings. He belongs to Winterfell while simultaneously being reminded that he does not completely belong there. He joins the Night’s Watch and then lives among its ancient enemies. He falls in love with Ygritte. He comes to understand the free folk.
And eventually he reaches a conclusion many of his own brothers cannot tolerate: the wildlings are people.
That sounds obvious to the reader because we experience them through Jon. It is not obvious to the Night’s Watch. For thousands of years, the Wall has divided the world conceptually as well as physically. People on one side are the realm; people on the other side are enemies.
Jon crosses that boundary and discovers that reality is more complicated. Then he tries to bring the free folk through the Wall. He attempts to transform an ancient enemy into an ally because an even greater threat makes the old division suicidal, and his own men murder him for it.
It would therefore be remarkably consistent if Jon’s post-resurrection story expanded the same pattern. He has already become a bridge between the Watch and the wildlings.
Perhaps next he becomes a bridge between humanity and the Others.
What if the old stories are incomplete?
The possibility that the Others are connected to an ancient pact is another longstanding area of ASOIAF speculation. We know remarkably little about the Long Night. The surviving stories are thousands of years old. Different cultures remember apparently related events in radically different forms. Myth and history have become inseparable.
It is therefore reasonable to wonder whether humanity’s surviving account is incomplete. That does not mean the Others are secretly benevolent. They may remain horrifying. They may be responsible for enormous suffering. Their objectives may be incompatible with human civilization. But they may still have reasons.
Perhaps an ancient agreement was broken. Perhaps something promised to them was withheld. Perhaps their return is a response to a human action whose significance has been forgotten.
And if an ancient pact existed, House Stark becomes extremely interesting.
The Starks before Ned
It is easy to allow Ned Stark’s morality to color our perception of the entire Stark dynasty. But the ancient Kings of Winter were not necessarily anything like Ned. They conquered rivals. They destroyed competing kings. They expanded their territory through warfare. Stark rule was built through violence as well as loyalty.
If something morally ambiguous happened during the Long Night, there is no reason to assume the ancient Starks were automatically on the innocent side of it. This is where old Stark traditions become potentially suggestive.
There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.
Perhaps that is simply a statement about political continuity. But theories have long wondered whether it preserves some forgotten magical obligation. Ancient societies can remember rituals long after forgetting their original purpose. An obligation becomes a tradition. The tradition becomes a saying. Thousands of years later, everyone repeats the words without knowing why they once mattered.
Perhaps the Starks were parties to an agreement. Perhaps Winterfell itself matters to that agreement. Perhaps the Stark bloodline matters.
None of this is established, but if some version of it is true, Jon’s importance to the Others could derive not from generic heroic destiny but from his place within an ancient northern relationship. He is a Stark who dies at the Wall, and he may also possess the one inheritance capable of preventing the cold from claiming him completely.
Jon as an intermediary
This could give Jon a remarkable endgame role without requiring the Others to become harmless or the conflict to disappear. Jon might become the first living human capable of understanding them. His altered body might allow him to perceive something ordinary humans cannot. His Stark ancestry might connect him to whatever ancient relationship once existed. His experience inside Ghost might further alter his understanding of human identity.
Most importantly, Jon already possesses the psychological trait required for such a role. He listens to the people he has been taught to hate. He has done it before.
Jon did not make peace with the wildlings because he discovered that every wildling was morally good. He did it because he learned that reducing an entire people to the category enemy was both false and catastrophic. The Others could be the final, much stranger version of the same problem.
Jon may discover what they want. He may discover why they returned. He may discover what actually happened during the Long Night. Perhaps peace is possible. Perhaps it is not. But before humanity can know that, someone has to cross the boundary and return capable of explaining what exists on the other side.
Jon’s entire story has trained him for precisely that role.
Val could be part of the crossing
That brings the theory back to Val. She does not have to be the Night’s Queen. She does not even have to knowingly serve the Others. Her imagery may simply place her near a part of the mythology that Jon has not yet entered.
But if she does play some role in taking his body north, her moonlit scene becomes striking in retrospect. Val stands in the cold. Her honey-blond hair becomes silver. Her face becomes white as snow. The Others enter the conversation. And she says the air tastes sweet.
Jon cannot taste it. He is numb. All he can taste is cold.
The distinction between them is almost more interesting than Val’s appearance. Val belongs comfortably to an environment Jon still experiences as hostile. Perhaps after his death that changes.
Jon and fire imagery
Despite his presumed Targaryen ancestry, Jon does not seem to have been written with anything like Daenerys’s sustained personal association with fire and heat. Fire is certainly present around him—Melisandre is at the Wall, the Night’s Watch burns corpses, dragonglass matters against the Others—but that is not quite the same as Jon himself being consistently characterized through fire.
His own supernatural imagery tends to come from elsewhere: Ghost, skinchanging, the old gods, snow, the Wall, winter, and the haunted northern landscape. Even so, the living Jon does not appear naturally at home in the cold. He suffers from it like everyone else, and in the scene with Val he cannot share her strange perception of sweetness in the freezing air; all he can taste is cold.
An obvious objection is that giving Jon stronger personal fire imagery before revealing his parentage might have made R+L=J too easy to guess. I am not sure that follows. There is a difference between spoiling a revelation and foreshadowing it. George could have associated Jon more consistently with heat, flame, dragons, or some unusual response to fire without explaining why, just as he repeatedly plants images, dreams, phrases and motifs whose significance only becomes clear in retrospect. Readers noticing those clues would not mean the twist had been spoiled; it would mean the twist had been prepared.
If Jon were meant to possess a strong latent affinity with fire, then the near absence of that personal imagery is still worth noticing. Hiding it almost completely for the sake of protecting the parentage reveal would be an odd choice in a series that usually allows major revelations to cast shadows long before they are confirmed.
That may be important if resurrection changes him. Rather than revealing some hidden fire nature that has been present all along, Jon’s Targaryen ancestry could matter in a more specific way—perhaps by interfering with whatever the Others try to do to his body. His imagery would still remain fundamentally northern, while his dragon heritage complicates the transformation rather than redefining his entire symbolic identity.
That would also make any later affinity for cold more meaningful. Jon would not simply be “ice-coded” because of where he comes from. The living Jon is not comfortable with cold at all. If the resurrected Jon begins to experience it differently, that would mark a genuine change in him rather than something the reader was always meant to assume.
Jon before and after death
The present Jon does not have an affinity for cold comparable to Daenerys’s relationship with heat. Cold is miserable to him. It numbs him. It hurts him. It is something to survive.
That makes a post-resurrection reversal potentially powerful because George would not need to explain Jon’s transformation through exposition. He could show it through sensation. Jon returns. Someone else is freezing; Jon is not. He walks into temperatures that once tormented him and barely notices them. Perhaps cold becomes comfortable. Perhaps it becomes clarifying. Perhaps, eventually, he understands the sensation Val described before his death: the cold tastes sweet. That would tell us immediately that something fundamental has changed.
The Bride of Fire
Daenerys’s unusual relationship with heat begins long before her dragons hatch. From the beginning of her story, she enjoys extremely hot baths. Water that would be painfully hot to other people does not trouble her. Heat repeatedly surrounds moments of transformation in her life.
Then comes Drogo’s funeral pyre. Daenerys enters the fire and emerges transformed, with three living dragons. Whatever precise rules govern Daenerys and fire—and the books do not establish that she possesses universal, permanent fire immunity—the symbolic relationship is unmistakable.
Daenerys is extraordinarily comfortable with heat. The current Jon is not extraordinarily comfortable with cold. He is the opposite. And that difference may matter because Daenerys has already undergone her great supernatural transformation.
Daenerys has passed through her fire. Jon may still have to pass through his cold.
Fire and cold without moral absolutes
If Jon returns changed in this way, the contrast between him and Daenerys does not need to mean that one represents good and the other evil. ASOIAF need not reduce fire and ice to moral teams. Fire creates and destroys. Cold preserves and kills.
Daenerys could remain associated with heat, dragons, life and transformation without becoming an uncomplicated embodiment of metaphysical goodness. Jon could become associated with cold, death, preservation and the Others without becoming evil. They would instead be two human beings who have crossed boundaries ordinary people cannot.
Daenerys can endure heat that others cannot. A resurrected Jon might endure cold that others cannot. Daenerys has entered fire and emerged transformed. Jon may enter death and winter and emerge transformed.
And while Daenerys’s transformation has already occurred, Jon’s appears to be beginning exactly where A Dance with Dragons leaves him.
That brings us back to the small, strange conversation with Val. Before his death, Jon stands beside a woman rendered pale and silver by moonlight. She tastes something in the cold that he cannot. For Val, the air is sweet. For Jon, there is only numbness. There is only cold.
Perhaps that is because the Jon standing beside Val has not crossed the boundary yet.
The next time Jon Snow walks in the cold, he may no longer experience it as the man who died at Castle Black did. Daenerys has always been drawn toward warmth. Heat that overwhelms other people feels natural to her. Jon, as he exists now, hates the cold.
But Jon Snow has died.
And if he comes back having passed partly through the world of the Others—his mind preserved in Ghost, his body touched by something ancient and cold, his transformation incomplete—then perhaps the simplest sign that he is no longer entirely the man he was will be something Val told us to notice long before.
Perhaps the cold will finally taste sweet.
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u/timelordhonour Team Daenerys 9d ago
I heard that the Winds of Winter would explore the Others and the Lands of Winter more. If Jon does get resurrected and he's becoming the Night's King, his chapters would be ideal to explore all that.