Character Information

[baseborne]

- ★ NAME: Jon Snow
- ★ AGE: 17
- ★ CANON & CANON POINT: A Song of Ice and Fire (post-ADWD)
- ★ CANON INFORMATION: Here!
- ★ PERSONALITY:

Bastard children were born from lust and lies, men said; their nature was wanton and treacherous. Once Jon had meant to prove them wrong, to show his lord father he could be as good a true son as Robb. He made a botch of that.
At the center of everything that Jon Snow is is his status as a bastard - in the way the world around him sees him, yes, but especially in how he sees himself. It is the thing that informs all other aspects of himself, or so he sincerely believes. Jon's narrative is littered with quotes about the inferiority of bastards, and never once does he disagree with the common preconception of what a bastard is by nature. He only seeks to rise above it, personally, which he sees as a struggle against himself rather than a struggle against society's disdain for people like him. It's telling that even when he left the part of the world where marriage and name mean anything to march with the wildlings, he still balked at the idea of fathering bastard children on Ygritte, and used it as a pretext to avoid intimacy for a long stretch of time.

Unlike most of the characters in the series, Jon's story arc is much more about building him up than breaking him down. Jon Snow starts off the books very much a teenager, with all the annoying flaws of one. Described by most other point-of-view characters as a "sullen boy," he was that and more (he still is, a little.) He was quick to perceive a slight and take genuine offense over petty insults and transparent attempts to rile him up, and he was very vocal to his siblings of his negative opinions about pretty much everyone in the world who wasn't related to him (one look at Joffrey and he told Arya that he thought the prince was "truly a little shit," for example.) He was also prone to wallowing in self-pity, and throughout the first book he got so bad that authority figures in the Night's Watch had to repeatedly sit him down and spell out for him that he wasn't the only person in the world to go through hard times... and that his hard times weren't nearly as hard as many others'.

He eventually grew from that, after forming friendships with his brothers in black, most of whom were smallfolk who didn't have upbringings half so comfortable as his own, even with the stain of being a bastard. Over the course of the first and second books, after he was thrust into a life where he was finally treated as neither better nor worse than everyone else around him, he learned how to better interact with people without coming off as a huge snob, and he even eventually figured out how to adjust his perspective and see the world without the curtain of self-involvement shrouding it.

However, he wasn't all bad, even at the start. Jon has always been sharp and observant, quick get a feel for the people around him and to notice and to figure out how to act around them in order to draw the least ire onto himself, though instead of thinking of it as a personal skill he attributes it to his bastardy as well: "A bastard had to learn to notice things, to read the truth that people hid behind their eyes." When around people with whom he isn't familiar (AKA anyone other than his family and the few friends he made outside of it), Jon is often taciturn to the point of being accused of "spending his words as if every one were a golden dragon."

He has a hot temper (he did try to stab a man's eyes out for talking shit about his recently deceased father, after all), which (like everything else) he attributes to the fact that he is a bastard. Though he reigns it in most times, and tries his hardest to lead maintain a level of impartiality, it is still capable of shaping his opinions and blunting his wits. Equally damaging to himself, however, is his compassion, which is even still more evident than his temper and therefore easy to prey upon. He won't stand by and watch people who can't defend themselves get hurt, even when it puts him at odds with the majority - even when it's like to get him killed, as it nearly did but for the grace of plot convenience when he balked at executing an old man under wildling orders while he was infiltrating them.

He is stoutly loyal. Once he has formed a friendship, he is loathe to let it go, even when it turns out he's on the opposite side of a war for it. This is most evident with Tormund Giantsbane and a few of the other wildlings, who despite his best efforts to maintain emotional distance, eventually got under his skin and made him love them. He goes against the advice of all of his advisers and seeks Tormund out so that he can form a diplomatic relationship between their people, even at the cost of the trust of his own men.

He is reserved and has a ponderous fixation on honor, something which other characters often liken to his father's. However, unlike Ned, Jon Snow is a good liar and always has been. He is a seriously mistrustful and suspicious person by nature, and once he makes a judgment on someone, he is very slow to change it. He looks for the insult and ulterior motive in every conversation, which he seems to think is a survival instinct for anyone of bastard birth, and doesn't expect loyalty from anyone that he hasn't personally earned. Not being trueborn, before he became the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch no one had ever owed him the fealty that they owed to every other member of the ancient house he grew up in. Even after his assent to the role of leader on the Wall, many of the people under his command continued to begrudge him that much as well (though in that case, it was as much due to his youth as to his birth status.) As a result, he is careful with how he picks and chooses his fights and where to assert his power, but when he does pick a fight he digs his heels in refuses to lose ground over anything, for better or for worse. Sometimes for the better, but often times for the worse, like that one time he got stabbed to (maybe) death at the end of ADWD.

As he came into his leadership role, Jon Snow grew more and more practical and emotionally distant. He is made utterly miserable by power, but he is not ill-suited to wield it. The privileged education he received from House Stark prepared him very well to think and act strategically, and he has a good head for juggling a seemingly infinite number of problems at once and bullying his way through to solutions for most of them by the end. His good upbringing (where he learned to observe courtesies among other things) makes him palatable to people in traditional positions of power, and his stubbornness couples with that to make him a skilled negotiator and diplomat. He also has a wry sense of humor, is both soft-spoken and steely, and has a knack for getting people to like him despite themselves if they look at him as a person first, instead of as his title or lack thereof.

The most important people in Jon Snow's life are the Starks, past and present. Being born to Ned Stark wasn't half as important in shaping the person he became as being loved and raised by Ned Stark was. Jon has always and will always idolize his father, striving to live up to the example he set and constantly asking himself what Eddard would have done when the burden of leadership becomes too heavy. Whenever dealing with the wildlings, Jon's worry over what his father would have thought is never far from his mind, and it is out of a desire to make his father proud/honor his memory that he endures in the most trying times. Of all his siblings he was always closest to Robb and Arya, the former of which was his best friend and his rival both, and the latter of which was his favorite. Frequently throughout the series, Jon pines for the memories of his childhood in Winterfell, but mostly for his siblings - Bran, Rickon and Sansa as well. He misses them and agonizes over the fates that have (seemingly) befallen them throughout the series, though the emotional support that he has gathered on the Wall eventually drags him through every time.

Speaking of the Wall, the most important friendship he formed there was with Samwell Tarley, a boy he decided to protect his first day on the Wall. Jon has a tendency to pick odd friends, never particularly deterred by appearance or background. He created waves by choosing a former male whore to be his steward, he enjoyed spending long hours of free time with a giant that he saved from north of the Wall, and he even ended up greatly enjoying the company of one Tyrion Lannister back in book one. He strives to improve his friends along with himself, and he often tries to get Sam to stop seeing himself as a coward, as well as he takes it upon himself to teach his friends how to fight better even though it was never his job.

His most defining relationship on-screen is the one he shared with a wildling girl, Ygritte. After her death, her words haunt him more than anyone else's - the number of times he thinks you know nothing, Jon Snow to himself in her voice in the last book is ridiculous. The driving factor behind his desperation to save as many wildlings as he can is in no small part to the memory of her, and it's the reason for his fascination with giants and his disdain for the knights that boasted of killing them. Loving Ygritte changed Jon into someone who constantly looks for answers rather than assuming he understands anything, and the memories that he has of his time with her both pain him and are the happiest ones he has. There isn't a single chapter in ADWD that he doesn't think about her, about the things she taught him about the wildlings and about the wider world.

However, the love he bears for all of these people has always come second to his duty. Since being thwarted in his first attempt to break his oath and ride south from the Wall to help Robb avenge their father in the first book, Jon has chosen his vows and his duty over love every time. He loses sleep for it, and hates himself for it, but he chooses it anyway. It is what he calls (u guessed it) "a bastard's sort of honor."

- ★ COURT ALLIANCE:

Seelie. Jon Snow is first and foremost a guardian, a protector of the weak. This is shown in his attachment to multiple characters across the books, but most notably through Sam, a boy who joins the Night's Watch shortly after him. Without anything to gain from it, Jon decides that he's going to stop people from bullying Sam, because he sees that Sam is both incapable of and unwilling to fight for himself. He even goes so far as to find a way to convince authority figures to graduate Sam early from the training program when Jon leaves it and will no longer be there to keep him safe. He is also tediously honorable, much like his father was before him, and he has sacrificed much and more in order to keep his oath (most of his oath) to the Night's Watch during his service. He puts his stock in laws and in order, and even though it's made clear how much compassion he has for the free folk from North of the Wall, he disdains the chaos that they champion.

- ★ ABILITIES:

The gift was strong in Snow, but the youth was untaught, still fighting his nature when he should have gloried in it.
Skinchanger: Jon has the capacity to enter the minds of animals and control them, but he has not been trained to do so yet. As a result, the only animal he has enough of a connection with to possess at his current point in canon is his direwolf, Ghost. In contrast to all other (trained) canon skinchangers, Jon doesn't often fully possess Ghost in anything other than his dreams, but rather enters some sort of half-in and half-out state where he doesn't slip into Ghost, but experiences things through him in his own body. When Ghost is close enough to him, they can share senses: he has been known to taste what Ghost does ("The taste of hot blood filled Jon's mouth, and he knew that Ghost had killed that night. No, he thought. I am a man, not a wolf. He rubbed his mouth with the back of a gloved hand and spat." ^[ADWD]), or smell the things Ghost smells ("Jon smelled Tom Barleycorn before he saw him. Or was it Ghost who smelled him? Of late, Jon Snow sometimes felt as if he and the direwolf were one, even awake." ^[ADWD]) or occasionally experience his emotions/instincts ("A hunger... he could feel it. It was food he needed, prey, a red deer that stank of fear or a great elk proud and defiant. He needed to kill and fill his belly with fresh meat and hot dark blood. His mouth began to water at the thought." ^[ASOS])
Swordfighting: Jon has been trained by a skilled master-at-arms with swords since he was old enough to lift one, and is quite good at combat with a other weapons such as the spear and longbow (but the sword is his specialty.)
Ranging: Excellent at living off the land, especially an exceptionally cold and inhospitable land. Can hunt, track, and forage forested areas well enough to survive extended periods of time away from civilization.

- ★ INVENTORY: The heavy, warm clothes of men on the Wall, including a cape topped with furs, a shirt of black ringmail, a boiled leather chestpiece, gloves and boots, and several layers of thick, roughspun clothes, all black. His Valyrian steel bastard sword (haha) Longclaw, a dragonglass dagger, and his direwolf, Ghost.