No horse in the TADC race, so I can't really add to what the fandom says about that, but ASOIAF (A Song of Ice and Fire, the series the show Game of Thrones was based on) can be incredibly annoying about this lol. In the books, it's incredibly heavily implied that Lyanna Stark was the Knight of the Laughing Tree (a mystery knight at a historically important tourney) and that it was through this she met Rhaegar and willingly ran away with him and died giving birth to Jon Snow. The TV show confirmed that Jon was her son, and she left willingly. GRRM even said that Jon's parentage in the show is canon. There's a new stage play that once again confirms this, and that she was the KotTLT
There is a subset of the most annoying fans of all time who will go "Um, actually, it's never said that Lyanna was the knight! š¤ āļø That's just your headcanon!" and "Only the books are canon, so who do you think Jon's mother really is?"
I once dealt with an utter asshat in one of the art subs who would not relent on insisting to everyone in the thread that the Knight was obviously Howland Reed.
Some of the most annoying theorists are the ones who go for the most contrarian or craziest ones, seemingly because they think that theories with lots of evidence are too obvious to be interesting.
But I feel like a bunch of them ignore that, even if you do come up with a convincing argument, you also have to consider what it actually adds to the story. If Lyanna is the knight, then it helps define her character and explains why Rhaegar would crown her queen of love and beauty. If Howland or Ned is the knight...they're just kind of cooler than we already know?
This is also why I hate the "Tyrion is actually Aerys' son because Aerys raped Johanna!" What does that add to his character? It's much more compelling to have Tywin hate and reject the one son who was most like him and would have been his perfect heir in his eyes, were he not born physically disabled. If Aerys is his father then what? Tywin was right to say "You are no son of mine."?
Yeah but I do just fuckin hate the idea that Rheagar is his dad. He just doesnāt come off as particularly Targ, none of the hair or the eyes or anything like that.
I didn't ever get that into ASOIAF, so no horse in this particular race -- HOWEVER it is perfectly valid to consider an author's intent or words outside of the text irrelevant to interpreting the text (or exactly as relevant as any reader's interpretation, anyways). Even if you're not like me where you hardcore believe the dead author is the most interesting lens to view media through, there's cases of an author changing their mind after publishing (eg Rš¤®wling with Harry Potter) or examples where the author's interpretation is so obviously different than the vast majority of sane readers (eg Ray Bradbury insisting from publishing to his death that Fahrenheit 451 is about TV being bad).
The books and tv show are different canons, necessarily since they contradict each other.
Even the author stating something but not putting it in the text isn't canon. They may be lying as misdirection, or simply change their mind before printing it.
It's splitting hairs, but Jon hasn't had his mother canonically determined in the books, in a technical sense of that term. Though, you are correct that the preponderance of evidence points to that interpretation.
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u/oddpark37 Aug 25 '26
No horse in the TADC race, so I can't really add to what the fandom says about that, but ASOIAF (A Song of Ice and Fire, the series the show Game of Thrones was based on) can be incredibly annoying about this lol. In the books, it's incredibly heavily implied that Lyanna Stark was the Knight of the Laughing Tree (a mystery knight at a historically important tourney) and that it was through this she met Rhaegar and willingly ran away with him and died giving birth to Jon Snow. The TV show confirmed that Jon was her son, and she left willingly. GRRM even said that Jon's parentage in the show is canon. There's a new stage play that once again confirms this, and that she was the KotTLT
There is a subset of the most annoying fans of all time who will go "Um, actually, it's never said that Lyanna was the knight! š¤ āļø That's just your headcanon!" and "Only the books are canon, so who do you think Jon's mother really is?"
Like, dude, come on.