Here’s how Game Of Thrones made nephew-fucking feel inevitable

Game Of Thrones’ climactic love scene this week occurred not as a stunning curtain-pull or cliffhanger, but with a sense of inevitability. The revelation of their family relation occurred alongside footage of the act; Bran and Sam barely seemed surprised about what they were discovering, and Jon and Daenerys definitely didn’t seem shocked by what they were doing. They just met eyes and closed the door.

It’s a little astonishing that one of the great taboos of our culture could’ve been embedded in the greater plot of Game Of Thrones so deeply that its enactment felt somehow organic and preordained, but, as a new video from ScreenCrush exhaustively documents, the stories of Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen have been intricately intertwined since the series began. Contrasting scenes so they appear alongside each other, the video traces the way the boy of ice and the girl of fire followed identical narratives of being cast away, gradually embracing a new culture, rising to power, and fatefully uniting for similar purposes. Even minor details—the way their lovers died from chest wounds and were burned in funeral pyres, or how they received both pets and Walker-killing tools in the first episode—have tidy parallels.

If you’re interested in a more literary analysis, The New Yorker traces the intermingling of fantasy and incest back further, at least to Wagner, and more as a function of power than sex, in that the two lovers were reclaiming power from more conventional, arranged marriages. It’s not clear how things will end up between Jon and Dany, but, you know, Wagner didn’t have ice zombies to deal with. The people of Westeros will probably be fine with any power couple that can stop the damn ice zombies.