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Anya, Vengeance Demon

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  • Birthday 10/21/1982

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  • The Girl From The Long Ago
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  1. Sure. But the Valyrians did it for a very long time. Presumably they wouldn't have fostered dragonriding if cities were always been destroyed by accident.
  2. Fires will certainly break out, I'm sure. But enough to destroy the city? That's a little hard for me to imagine. Again, the dragons are already free, and they haven't come close to burning down the city yet. Why would they be a bigger danger once they've been placed under human control and sent outside of the city?
  3. That's an assertion, not an argument. Yes, dragonfire is an imprecise weapon, but Victarion's enemies are outside the city of Meereen, not within it. Surely if anything Victarion could direct the dragons to attack the organized forces beyond the walls; if he can't do that, then he doesn't have control over the dragons in any real sense. (The big problem, perhaps, would be if Barristan's forces didn't retreat in time, but that's very different.) Regarding your earlier post, the fact that Victarion doesn't care much about Meereen in the first place is a good reason why he wouldn't care enough to destroy it, especially when it could potentially alienate 'his queen'. And once Victarion has chased off the Yunkish forces, he's going to need a base of operations to seek out Daenerys, so he would have no reason to burn Meereen at that time. And then once he finds Daenerys, his business is concluded and he might as well GTFO. At that point he would have no reason to burn Meereen, which is unlikely to pose a threat to his rule in Westeros and may well be controlled by allies. At no point would it be in Victarion's interests to burn down the city. Dumb compared to Euron? Sure. But people exaggerate his lack of intelligence. He's been leading men for a long time. If he was as stupid as some people think, he wouldn't still be in charge of the Iron Fleet. Balon would have replaced him a long time ago.
  4. "Going to be ugly" is not the same thing as "will burn a major city to the ground."
  5. I think that's silly. Victarion can tell the difference between burning a rival army and burning the city that he's supposedly fighting for. He's not the most clever person in the series, but he's not some drooling moron.
  6. Wait... if the dragonhorn isn't a 'remote control' for the dragons, in what sense does it control dragons?
  7. Why would the dragons burn down Meereen? Left to themselves they don't seem interested in doing so--they want to snack on passing Meereenese, perhaps, but they don't have an interest in destroying the city as such. (It's made of brick, too, so it's not as flammable as all that either.) And Victarion or Euron would have no reason to want Meereen destroyed, because they wouldn't want to alienate Daenerys, and because they don't ultimately give a shit about Meereen either way. That sounds like a contrivance to fix a perceived problem: that Meereen is boring, and Dany in Meereen is boring, so might as well burn the place down. But that doesn't make it a plausible direction for the story.
  8. Under whose command, though? Victarion is certainly under the impression that he's figured out the horn, but he's got Moqorro as his only help there and Moqorro's behavior has to be informed by his ominous kraken vision from mid-ADWD. If he's wrong, then he's going to summon the dragons under the command of the man who claimed the horn, i.e., Euron. Which could be interesting.
  9. You know, it occurs to me that Quentyn's coterie would know a lot about what happened in Westeros up until the end of ASOS or so, so it's a little strange that Barristan hasn't gotten information from them. (Daenerys didn't seem much interested either, but she was a little checked out in those days.) Then again, he does have more pressing matters, so perhaps he intends to return to that subject later.
  10. I don't think that's so clear. Barristan doesn't know where the Second Sons are. He assumes that they must have been distracted by the ironborn, but he sees the ironborn fighting the Yunkish. Tyrion and Brown Ben Plumm were aware of the ironborn's arrival before the battle started--we know that from the Tyrion chapter--so presumably they wouldn't have been caught off guard. (Nor could I see them attacking the ironborn under the assumption that they must be the enemy.) I imagine that they would keep their distance from the ironborn until they know what's up with this new element. If I had to guess, I would assume that Tyrion's 'misery' comes from being upstaged by Victarion. He might still win himself over to Ser Barristan by changing sides, but everybody's going to attribute the victory to Victarion's sudden arrival, not Tyrion's cunning. (Which is always the way with Tyrion, it occurs to me.)
  11. Leaving aside the weird idea that Aegon would appear more viable than the Lannisters, who can offer three times the swords of the Golden Company plus a pliable child-king... I'd think that having Tommen killed would make it much, much harder for them to form alliances with anybody else, simply because they'd demonstrate themselves to be untrustworthy amoral opportunists who (this being the crucial part) would just as easily turn on Aegon if the need should arise.
  12. I expect that to change fairly quickly, though. Contrary to what some people theorized on this thread, it seems to me that the Tyrell forces going to attack Jon Connington will be quite small (relatively speaking, of course). Randyll Tarly and Mace Tyrell already considered Jon Connington a minor threat while Kevan was alive; and with Kevan dead, the big concerns will have more to do with disorder within King's Landing or hostilities from the Lannister forces, not some rebel lord that nobody remembers. So the Tyrells will want to keep the bulk of their forces at KL to keep the peace, sending out a token force to oppose JC ... which I expect JC to defeat, creating the impression that Aegon is there to stay and giving him legitimacy in the eyes of people like Doran Martell.
  13. Getting back to the question of a Tyrell-YG alliance, I think people aren't taking the chronology into consideration. At the moment, YG is king of a good portion of the Stormlands, and backed primarily by exiles who haven't been in the Seven Kingdoms for decades, if at all. Those stormlords who follow him do so primarily under duress. Aegon's Targaryen parentage is under serious question (for good reason). Why would Mace Tyrell look at this motley crew and think, "That's the coming power in the Seven Kingdoms"? There's no reason. Meanwhile, Aegon's primary goal is keep the rebellion going until Daenerys shows up. Ten thousand swords will not suffice in the long run, not unless Aegon wants to stay under siege all that time. He needs to make alliances now, and the best one available to him is in Dorne. We've been told that Doran is skeptical of Aegon's chances, which fits his personality, so it's not true--as some people in the previous thread assumed--that Dorne will just fall into his lap. Doran will need to be wooed, and the best way to do that is with a marriage pledge to Arianne. (Even then, I suspect that Doran won't pull the trigger unless Aegon prevails against the Tyrell host.) Is that short-signted? To an extent, but Aegon needs to prevail against the Tyrells now; considerations about Arianne's fitness to be queen, or alternative alliances that might be made under different circumstances, are necessarily secondary. In a similar situation, Robb agreed to marry a Frey. And in his mind, it may not even preclude a marriage to Daenerys: did not another Aegon conquer Westeros with three dragons and two wives? And regardless of whether Aegon marries Arianne, that makes it harder for him to win over the Tyrells, who are virulently anti-Dornish in the best of times. Mace is hardly likely to see a half-Dornish king with a Dornish court as a potential friend. (And regardless, there's no indication that Mace is the kind of man who would bloodlessly throw one ally overboard in favor of another; in fact, we're told that he's quite stubborn when he sets his mind to something, and cannot be swayed by anybody. Olenna might be willing to reject Tommen, but she hates the Dornish as much as anybody else in the Reach.) Re: Randyll Tarly, people are forgetting what Kevan said about him in AFFC: he is, above all, loyal to his superiors. He stuck by Mace Tyrell on the losing side of the rebellion, he was one of the Renly loyalists who refused to side with Stannis, and he has no reason to switch now that he's received an increase in his land and a council position. In any case, neither Randyll Tarly nor Mace Tyrell have been terribly subtle plotters, so I don't know why we shouldn't just take their statements in the epilogue at face value: they think that Jon Connington is no real threat, and that he'll be easily defeated when the time comes.
  14. I don't think that there are necessarily two and a half books worth of material left after ADWD. Whatever sketchy plans GRRM may have had back in 1994, he's now completed five books and hasn't given any indication that the series will expand past seven. Could that change because of leftover ADWD material? I doubt it. So far, the chapters that GRRM has moved over to TWOW total ~100 manuscript pages. Add to that the two unwritten chapters that GRRM referred to a couple of years ago, and you're still talking about a small percentage of the eventual length of TWOW.
  15. I don't know about that. Presumably much of what happens in TWoW and ADoS is stuff that he's been setting up from the beginning, so he won't need to spend as many pages establishing stuff as he does in earlier books.
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