[spoilers] Melisandre's...

[The Oily Black Stone]

Okay, so assuming y'all watched Episode 1...

 

Spoiler

Obviously she's much older than we think... but is she a different person too? My first thought was Shiera Seastar, otherwise, is there even any other candidate? Gonna search the wiki now for magical females born 100-400 years ago!

Also, I feel like the show blatantly showing us ruby glamours lend some  credence to any theories about how someone else was glamoured as Rhaegar on the Trident... 

 

[PTMA]

I was searching through the forums and found this old thread on this topic from 2013, take a look, very interesting.

Melisandre 400 years old

[Marcus Agrippa]

She's linked to the doom in valryia I think. It's the biggest explanation  I have.

[PTMA]

That, or shes descended from Brynden Rivers, and is either secretly working for the children of the forest(and by extension the White Walkers possibly). Or she resists the pull from him as she trys to further the goals of the R'Hllor

[PTMA]

10 minutes ago, Marcus Agrippa said:

She's linked to the doom in valryia I think. It's the biggest explanation  I have.

They were saying in the thread that she could've even started the religion of the red god itself. And they could be responsible for the Doom of Valyria by extension

[Marcus Agrippa]

Best explaniation we have right now. She just went from mundane to very interesting.

[Techelles]

This is the best theory I've seen on Mel. It's a couple years old, but when I watched the final scene of the premiere last night, it's the very first thing I thought of. 

 

[GeorgeIAF]

We'll find out, but the main thing is to show how she sees herself and how she will sacrifice herself to revive Jon. 

[Marcus Agrippa]

24 minutes ago, Techelles said:

This is the best theory I've seen on Mel. It's a couple years old, but when I watched the final scene of the premiere last night, it's the very first thing I thought of. 

 

SHes too old for be melony seastar. Granted Blood raven cleary thinkgs she's imporant, but I am not convinced he knew her before yet. If she is several centuries old, we are looking at valyria.

[Techelles]

19 minutes ago, Marcus Agrippa said:

SHes too old for be melony seastar. Granted Blood raven cleary thinkgs she's imporant, but I am not convinced he knew her before yet. If she is several centuries old, we are looking at valyria.

How are you gauging her age when you come to the conclusion that she's too old to be Shiera's daughter? I don't know of anything in the text that supports that position. I'm not exactly sure of the year of Shiera's birth, but she'd've been of child bearing age about 100 years prior to A Dance with Dragons. Mel needn't be any older than that. 

[shk12344]

4 minutes ago, Techelles said:

How are you gauging her age when you come to the conclusion that she's too old to be Shiera's daughter? I don't know of anything in the text that supports that position. I'm not exactly sure of the year of Shiera's birth, but she'd've been of child bearing age about 100 years prior to A Dance with Dragons. Mel needn't be any older than that. 

As posters have stated above, it's been confirmed that Mel is "several centuries old" with an age of 400 years bandied around by various cast members including the actress who plays Mel. There is unconfirmed rumor going round that she is the last survivor of Doom (a slave girl).

I hope this will end the  theory of her being a daughter of Bloodraven and Sheira. Which is another pointless, dumb  "secret" Targaryean theory.

Speaking of "secret" Targaryean, next week will have Tyrion going down the dungeon to free the dragons. I hope that scene will destroy A +J = T theory since many follower of the theory expect a bonding between Tyrion and a dragon, something I'm pretty sure won't happen. 

[Stag_legion]

Melisandre is from Assahi, we already know people from there are not ordinary humans. It could very well be that much of the Assahi natives practice some form of sorcery that prolongs their life. Supported by the fact that no children are said to live in Asshai (cause you know all of the people are very old and have stopped having kids).

[The Truth]

It was heavily hinted in the books during her POV when it said "long before her days in asshai". In the shows it hinted a few times. In that early sequence in season 2 when maester cressen dies and she lives after drinking the poison. The cressen actor and I think either Mel's actress or one of the D's said that she was a few hundred years old. There is also that scene with Stannis after the blackwater when they get in a fight after she tells stannis "I have been fighting much much longer then you have". And it was hinted again either late season 4 or early season 5 but cant remember in specific

[The Truth]

2 hours ago, Stag_legion said:

Melisandre is from Assahi, we already know people from there are not ordinary humans. It could very well be that much of the Assahi natives practice some form of sorcery that prolongs their life. Supported by the fact that no children are said to live in Asshai (cause you know all of the people are very old and have stopped having kids).

We dont know where she is actually from. In the book when talking about her it says something like "Mel was practing her craft long before her days in Asshai.". We do know that she joined a more prominent temple there, but think she was a slave long before that as well.

I am pretty certain she is the daughter of blood raven and shiera seastar

[239JMFL34109]

I think they are totally going that she was a slave in the final days of valyria. She left after the doom to asshai and etc.. 

[The Arthur Smith]

If Mel and the other red priests/priestesses are old as the Doom of Valyria and has some connections to it, then it would explain why most of them believe Dany is their Azor Azai.

[Techelles]

6 hours ago, shk12344 said:

As posters have stated above, it's been confirmed that Mel is "several centuries old" with an age of 400 years bandied around by various cast members including the actress who plays Mel. There is unconfirmed rumor going round that she is the last survivor of Doom (a slave girl).

I hope this will end the  theory of her being a daughter of Bloodraven and Sheira. Which is another pointless, dumb  "secret" Targaryean theory.

Speaking of "secret" Targaryean, next week will have Tyrion going down the dungeon to free the dragons. I hope that scene will destroy A +J = T theory since many follower of the theory expect a bonding between Tyrion and a dragon, something I'm pretty sure won't happen. 

Confirmed? An offhand comment by one of the actors hardly justifies that word. If there's a basis in the text or in an SSM, you have my attention, and I am prepared to be persuaded. Otherwise, there's not much to say. This is one of van Houten's quotes that this "centuries old" idea is based on:

“I don’t know how old she is, but she’s way over 100 years, so she is a wiser spirit, in a way, but it’s difficult for me to say too much because A — we want it to at least stay sort of a mystery and B — I didn’t read the books.”

Seems pretty obvious to me that she has no clearer a grasp on Mel's age than anyone else. It's long been suspected by readers that she could easily be 100 or older, but there has never been any textual reason to think that she must be far older than that. The textual clues linking her to Shiera laid out by yolkboy in that thread I plugged are really quite good. They suggest a plausible connection, and, most importantly, they are founded in text, not on a comment of an actress who hasn't read the source material. So let's not be hasty. 

I'm not especially confident that she's the daughter of Bloodraven, but the link to Shiera is a well-reasoned one, and the kinds of textual cues yolkboy uses to make his case are extremely similar to ones we have seen Martin use to link other characters before (think Sarella/Alleras and Jaquen/Pate's killer).

Bottom line, maybe she is far older than 100, but there is nothing to suggest that this must be true. Nothing in the text so far requires it, and knowing that in conjunction with all the clues in that thread, Shiera's daughter is easily the strongest candidate we have so far.

If there are any other quotes I'm missing about her age, though, I'd be interested to read them.

[shk12344]

1 hour ago, Techelles said:

Confirmed? An offhand comment by one of the actors hardly justifies that word. If there's a basis in the text or in an SSM, you have my attention, and I am prepared to be persuaded. Otherwise, there's not much to say. This is one of van Houten's quotes that this "centuries old" idea is based on:

http://in.ign.com/game-of-thrones-1/91960/feature/game-of-thrones-just-how-old-is-melisandre

"Director Jeremy Podeswa told Entertainment Weekly that the show doesn't want to reveal Melisandre's exact age. "The idea is there’s an indefinite indeterminate quality that she could be ancient," he explained. "We were limited by choosing to use a real person rather than a complete CG creation. Because what does a 400-year-old person look like? We don’t know. So if you try to create that, then you’re creating something that looks beyond our known reality. Here you feel like she’s very old without putting a number on it."

"There have been a few hints before that Melisandre is much older than she appears," showrunner David Benioff said in the premiere's "Inside the Episode." "Going back to a very early conversation with George R.R. Martin about her, she’s supposed to be several centuries old. We always wanted to show her true age, and were waiting for the right moment.""

 

[239JMFL34109]

1 hour ago, Techelles said:

If there are any other quotes I'm missing about her age, though, I'd be interested to read them.

 

[Rhaechyll Targaryen]

On 4/25/2016 at 11:10 AM, shk12344 said:

As posters have stated above, it's been confirmed that Mel is "several centuries old" with an age of 400 years bandied around by various cast members including the actress who plays Mel. There is unconfirmed rumor going round that she is the last survivor of Doom (a slave girl).

I hope this will end the  theory of her being a daughter of Bloodraven and Sheira. Which is another pointless, dumb  "secret" Targaryean theory.

 

On 4/25/2016 at 11:53 AM, Stag_legion said:

Melisandre is from Assahi, we already know people from there are not ordinary humans. It could very well be that much of the Assahi natives practice some form of sorcery that prolongs their life. Supported by the fact that no children are said to live in Asshai (cause you know all of the people are very old and have stopped having kids).

I've been trying to think about how Melisandre's age can work and still have her be connected to Shiera Seastar. 

I'm sure this is totally 100% crackpot but I'm curious to know what other people who have been considering Mel/Shiera/Bloodraven connections think.

The first thing that I started to think about is what we know about Shiera's mother Serenei. She's considered to be a cold woman and it seems as though she inspired a fair amount of fear at court. She was also rumored to have dabbled in the dark arts and ended up becoming mistress to the king. So far she sounds a bit like Melisandre. 

Going with the idea that Serenei was indeed "much older" than Aegon IV and she was the last of his mistresses that presumably puts her past childbearing age yet she manages to give birth to a healthy child. 

Supposedly this woman is practiced in the dark arts and is all about preserving her beauty. I find it interesting that she died in childbirth just like any other woman. I'm not saying this is impossible or even super unlikely; obviously any woman can be unfortunate enough to have that happen for all kinds of reasons. But it made me think perhaps, maybe, Serenei didn't die. What if her soul or whatever went into her daughter and she became Shiera Seastar? What if Shiera Seastar in turn became Melony/Melisandre after 'dying' in childbirth? (Or alternatively, what if Serenei was Melony at some point before she became Serenei?) 

I do think it's interesting that Serenei was said to be from a noble Valyrian family. The line about the dark arts also brought Visenya to mind.

Obviously I have no idea what a 400 year old living body would look like but Melisandre's 'old' body doesn't look as old as I would imagine it to be if she's supposed to be that old. I honestly expected her true form to look a lot scarier. More skeletal and blackened based on that black blood. I wonder if Melisandre thinks using a glamour is a safer idea than being born again because, even if she maintains her memories, she's resistant to the idea of coming back as a child because she can't control what happens to her when she's in the physical form of a baby and child. 

I think about Melisandre talking about the lesson that she learned long ago and it seemed primarily to do with maintaining her own safety first and foremost. What if she's learned that it's safer for her to use a glamour than to try to essentially put herself into a younger body? What if taking the chance of being born again into a younger body was what indirectly led to her being in the situation where she was a helpless child who was sold into slavery? 

Again, I fully acknowledge this to be a 100% Crackpot theory but I'm more intrigued by Mel's character than ever and am curious if others have tried to come up with justifications for how Mel could be the age that she is and still possibly connected to Shiera and Bloodraven.