In truth, the young Lord Commander and her king had more in common than either one would ever be willing to admit.

Stannis had been a younger son living in the shadow of his elder brother, just as John Snow, Basterborn, had always been eclipsed by his trueborn sibling.

The fallen hero men had called the young wolf.

Both men were unbelievers by nature, mistrustful, suspicious. The only gods they truly

worshipped were honor and duty. Hello and welcome to the Nauticast podcast, the podcast that

usually goes through a Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week, but we're not going to have a regular

episode this week. Jeff Scott called away for work. So I'm going to be doing a solo episode touching on one of my favorite topics in the series,

and that is the relationship between John Snow and Stanis Barathean.

This is probably my favorite dynamic in the series, both in terms of how they deal with each other in person,

but also just how their characterization

and structure of their stories beat against one another. If you look at them and be abstract

and think about how they work in the narrative. Melasandra lays out, I think, really effectively

in that passage I just read, how the two line up in terms of their character arcs that both

of them have this feeling of being in second place,

of always being an also-ran, of being just barely not at the table, able to glimpse how the heroes are living their wonderful story lives and always living out of that,

and instead clinging to a perception of themselves as the most honorable and the most dutiful and the question of where that path is going to lead them.

But I think they're also interesting, intriguing contrasts in terms of their position within the narrative structure.

John is a POV character, one of the first POV characters, and he is central to the story from the very beginning.

He's central to the initial conception and the pitch letter and also to the stories that's been executed in the book so far.

Stanis is a non-POV character and he's not even found in the original pitch letter.

He's someone it seems that George conceived of all beginning to write the story rather than someone being central to it as John was from the get-go.

And Stanis, as I've argued on the main cast, is a conceptually driven character, more than I think he is someone functional to the plot mechanics and structure of the story. He's more,

...