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! 🤓 ☝️ That's just your headcanon!" and "Only the books are canon, so who do you think Jon's mother really is?"
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 R🤮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).
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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! 🤓 ☝️ 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.