Warning: The following article contains a massive — properly, genuinely massive — Game of Thrones season 7 spoiler.
It's official: Jon Snow will be meeting two of Game of Thrones' most important characters in the seventh season.
Earlier this year, a set of leaked production art first broached the possibility that Jon will come face-to-face with both Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) this season. But it's not just a possibility any longer.
Confirmation comes from a rather unlikely source — Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton — in an interview with Uproxx about the seventh season's wardrobe choices.
Speaking about Jon Snow's fashion overhaul, Clapton explained: "[This season,] he really embraces this Northern, over-the-Wall style, the Wildling style, and the reason he embraces it is because it's practical.
"Kit [Harington] was delighted that he didn't have the big heavy cape. This was agile and he could fight and move and I think it was a really interesting process just to take him out into this new look."
And then came the spoiler: "We had a lot of discussions about does the cape give him presence or is it better to not have that presence? What are we trying to say?
"There are times when we removed it because we wanted him to be more vulnerable. Especially I think, when he saw Dany, and he went to see her for the first time in her chamber. We decided to remove it, but then when he went to see Cersei, we put it on."
The clues about these historic meetings have been drip-fed to fans for the last several weeks, most recently in episode synopses that hinted at Jon on a journey away from Winterfell. His interaction with Cersei will be particularly interesting, since he was only a boy when he last saw her in season one.
Then there was the most recent trailer, which featured a telling call to action from Jon to an unseen character: "For centuries our families fought together against their common enemy. Despite their differences. We need to do the same if we're going to survive because the enemy is real."
Even producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have slyly admitted that the seventh season is the culmination of their conscious choice to keep the most popular characters apart.
Weiss recently said: "There's a whole bunch of reunions and first time meetings that people have been waiting for for a long time and when you put it on paper you just want to do justice to the work that these guys have done building these characters over so many years. You want to give them as much as you can."
Hopefully we'll get these meetings straight away when Game of Thrones returns to HBO on Sunday, July 16 and Monday, July 17 on Sky Atlantic in the UK. Watch an extended trailer for these new episodes below:
