somniloquence

OK, so spoilers: I'll keep them a little vague so you have more to look forward to on the show :) Jaime does something quite spectacular for Brienne and they return to Kings Landing together where Jaime becomes gradually completely estranged from his family, especially Cersei and Tywin, in part because he's rediscovered the idealism he once had because of Brienne.

Jaime sends Brienne on a quest he can no longer carry out (I posted very spoilery - so don't read it! - meta about how Brienne becomes Jaime's sword hand in a way) and she accepts the mission to "save his honor". In the course of the next book, in which Brienne has a POV, we find out that she's fallen in love with Jaime, while not overlooking the bad things he did. (This is when I started shipping them as more than friends and comrades because if she loved him, then i wanted her to have him.) As for Jaime, his illusions about Cersei are progressively shattered by her behavior in general and specifically towards him after the loss of his hand so he spends a lot of the book watching that disintegrate. He doesn't think of Brienne quite as often as she thinks of him, but he does think of her and he gets very upset when someone who knew her from Renly's camp mocks her to his face and clocks the guy ;) And they are reunited (in a giant cliffhanger) in book 5 where Jaime reveals just how much he trusts her. There, spoilery but vague ;)

The thing about Jaime that is clear from the books though I don't know if it comes through in the show so much, but he ankilled the mad king when he was about the age of Jon and Robb and when he joined the Kingsguard, he was kind of like Jon joining the Nights Watch believing it was all heroic and chivalric and instead finding out that they had to obey a paranoid sadist in everything he ordered them to do. So Jaime reverts into this incredible cynicism because he's like "what's the point anyway?" (And that's part if why his bond with Cersei is so strong because it's the only "pure" thing in his life - I know, eww, incest, but she doesn't judge him and just, so he thinks, loves him.) But then he meets Brienne and she really lives the ideals he believed in and she's not cynical or world weary and first he tries to disabuse her of her ideals and make her as cynical as he is but he keeps doing these things like saving her from rape and the other thing and he doesn't even quite realize why. Jaime is, in some ways, almost as much of a novice at loving someone as Brienne is, because he never "fell in love" with Cersei, she and he were just, as he says, innocent until they weren't any more. And Brienne is just completely awesome in every way and I love her.

So what I'm saying is that I think there's a reason they're so prominent this season and that clearly the showrunners ship them too and I am excited. And I apologize for the immense length of this; I've been shipping them for so long I can get all word-vomity about them.