GOD the Jaime-Cat Dungeon Scene (tm) is so good. We spend chapter after chapter watching Cat in utter conflict with herself, torn in different directions. She wants to find her daughters in King's Landing, to go to Winterfell and parent her sons, to stay with her dying father, to mourn her recently dead husband, to be an advisor to her son and brothers that they actually listen to. She is trying to be a mother, a daughter, a sister, to both nurture and council Robb. But it's too much, she can't do all of it.
Meanwhile, Jaime is locked in a dungeon for the entire book (very wife in the attic of him) and yet scarcely goes a chapter without his name being referred to by one person or another. He's practically present in conversations with Cersei and Tyrion, for how much they evoke his name to try to convince the other of something. Others think of his battle prowess, or want him dead, or share the story of his evil deeds, and Cat isn't excluded from this. He's a symbol more than he's a person, a token, a bargaining chip. Never to be harmed for fear of the Stark daughters' lives, but completely trapped by his own status.
So this makes it all the more satisfying to see Cat, in a fit of rage and grief, go downwards to question him at last, after hundreds of pages of this evocation of his name. She's tired of the lack of movement, of the posturing of the men around her, of all that she has lost and had to shrug off to keep going. And what does he tell her? That there are too many vows, too many promises that conflict. He says that honor is too much, that he could never have kept all the plates spinning. That it's too much!!
After a whole year of endless loss and fear and feeling completely alone, one visit to this symbol of a person and he completely and transparently spells out her entire deal, so much of her internal anguish. And then he looks at her and says that there are no men like him, that no one else would get it. like oh my god. george!!!
