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The Bard of Banefort

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Everything posted by The Bard of Banefort

  1. Someone please remind me, did Hardhome already happen off-screen? It’s been a while since I’ve read ADWD.
  2. It would be interesting to see how Sansa processes taking another person’s life, or if she even processes it at all. Like Ned, she compartmentalizes. For instance, she’s been unable to acknowledge that LF is poisoning Sweetrobin so far, which is another factor at play in the Vale plot. That’s got to come to a head at some point. There was an old GRRM quote from the early-2000s where he said that LF was going to eventually hit a snag once he realizes that he doesn’t actually command an army in the Riverlands. Assuming that’s still something he has in mind, I’m very curious what it means for Sansa’s plot. There’s lots going on in the Riverlands at the moment.
  3. While I agree that this would be the way that it would happen if Sansa did kill someone personally, it feels more in line with her character development for her to get rid of Shadrich without doing the deed herself, which is typically how the other “political” players do it. There’s also the melee coming up to consider. Like someone else mentioned, I’m guessing that Brienne v. Hound refers to Brienne fighting someone wearing the Hound’s helm. That said, it would be pretty funny if the fight from S4 of GOT was based on something planned for the books.
  4. I doubt it will go according to plan (nothing does in this series), but what do you think is going to happen?
  5. Is the “news from White Harbor” about fArya? Which parts are you glad he got rid of?
  6. I think the missing teeth indicates that it isn’t the Mountain’s skull. It wasn’t mentioned that he lost any teeth. Davos’ plot appears to have changed the most. Despite his love for writing Tyrion, George seemed kind of unsure what to do with him. Sansa resolving to take the North technically happened in the last Alayne chapter, it was just kept kind of ambiguous how she felt about it. Was Sweetrobin originally going to get married? But the biggest takeaway is that the Mad Mouse is going to die (or was in this draft, at least). Is Sansa going to be the one to kill him? If he tries to kidnap her, it might be in self-defense. Would that lead to her exposure? And I guess George forgot how old she is lol. It sounds like GRRM didn’t plan on having Darkstar kill Arys until very late in the game. There is one glaring omission: Aegon. But it’s possible George was saving him for ADWD.
  7. The stupendous @zionius shared a remarkable discovery over on Reddit: an early outline of AFFC from ca. 2003. Lots to unpack. Enjoy! https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/s/JnhWuheM9o
  8. I don’t think it’s that assailants can get away with hitting royalty so much as that there would need to be some kind of trial first. Baelor clearly thought that Dunk was justified in defending Tanselle, and in TSS, Dunk has to fight Longinch because Rohanne and Eustace refuse to bring their case to Lord Rowan. Whatever happens, cutting off someone’s hand for hitting a prince fell far enough out of favor that Robert considered it cruel and unusual punishment less than a century later.
  9. In TWOIAF, it's stated that Aegon V spent his reign passing or attempting to pass reforms that were met with resistance from the nobility. Assuming that these reforms were influenced by Egg's travels as a squire, and based on what we see in the main series, what do you think some of these reforms were? There's at least one that I think we can confidently link back to Egg: Dunk was supposed to lose a hand and foot for striking Aerion, and the trial by combat that commenced in lieu of that was what led to Prince Baelor's death. Jaime's quote from AFFC makes it sound like this punishment was outlawed long before his time, which would line up with Egg's reign (or even Maekar's, if Egg convinced him to do it first). Other examples that trouble Egg in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms include Eustace Osgrey's smallfolk being forced to fight in a battle they are not properly trained for, and hedge knights like Dunk and Kyle the Cat losing their possessions to wealthy lords during Butterwell's tourney.
  10. This quote from The Mystery Knight about young Walder Frey caught my eye: Assuming some sort of Red Wedding 2.0 is in the cards, is this foreshadowing that Walder's corpse is going to be dumped down a well? The Freys did throw Catelyn's body into a river, after all.
  11. I think the bigger problem is that she can’t get there too quickly. A lot of things need to be in place before Dany arrives.
  12. The part about Pete Davidson wasn’t a reference to you at all. Only the first paragraph about Theon was in response to you, and originally I was just going to write it as its own comment. Why an attractive woman would want a less-attractive man is something that comes up here quite a bit (usually with regards to Sansa and Sandor), and my response in the past has been that this is something that happens in the real world all the time. I also don’t know what you or your girlfriend look like, so it wouldn’t be possible for me to pass judgement either way. Apologies if I wasn’t clear enough.
  13. Theon is a tortured (no pun intended) sadboi who uses bravado to conceal his crippling insecurities. Women want to heal him. For what it’s worth, plenty of attractive women go for men who are, so to speak, not quite on their level. Just look at Pete Davidson.
  14. I think the problem is that Daario doesn’t read like a bad boy. He reads like a clown. ASOIAF fans are fine with bad boys. GRRM has talked in interviews about all the letters he receives from fangirls who love Jaime and the Hound and Theon. If CerseixEuron happens in the books, I think it’ll be a hit. Daario is described more like one of those courtiers you’d see at the French court of Louis XVI. He’s absurd.
  15. One suggestion I saw made when ROTD was released is that GRRM’s publishing house should commission a straight-forward art book. Star Wars had one for the women of SW, and Marvel did one illustrated by Alice X. Zhang. I think that would be well-received even without any new written material.
  16. Last year, I said that about a million people probably received FnB for the holidays, a couple hundred read the whole thing, and the rest read twenty pages before putting it down for good haha. My prediction for DnE is that it won’t be as big as either GOT or HOTD, but that it has the potential to bring in new fans that wouldn’t ordinarily be interested in this universe. It’s a shame, because the only person I know who has read all the books and spin-offs IRL is my grandfather, but he’s pushing 90 and can’t remember most of the details long after he’s read them. Oh, well. Good thing we have the internet!
  17. I think that going half a decade without any new material (and more than a decade without the next book in the main series) has deflated a lot of enthusiasm in the fan community. Every theory has been analyzed a hundred times over, and people are tired of having their hopes dashed. I think that the only thing that could reinvigorate the book fandom is a new book (and not a reprinting). HOTD probably brought in some new readers, but not nearly the same way that GOT did. And during GOT’s run, GRRM released ADWD, the Dance novellas, TWOIAF, and Fire and Blood (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms as well, but that was technically all pre-published material). You have to feed the algorithm if you want more followers.
  18. Another weird thing about this movie is that everyone had some version of a British accent except for Napoleon. I don’t know if JP’s accent just wasn’t working, but it may have been part of him hamming it up, like with the one weird laugh he kept doing.
  19. I liked the movie overall, but I think the problem was that the scope was just too wide. For a solid hour, I thought I was watching a dark comedy. There was a lot of deadpanning and deliberately awkward silences, and there were many scenes where one of the characters would say something irreverent or unexpected before quickly cutting to the next scene (“I found out my wife was a slut!”). Then there were the (extremely well-done) battle sequences, when the movie switched to a serious war drama. The toxic romance, which is what the producers were promoting as the heart of the story, didn’t work for me because I never felt like we really got to know Josephine. She was on-screen a lot, but she didn’t feel developed as a character. Napoleon’s men apparently love him, but we’re never shown him bonding with them. He has a child who is seemingly forgotten by the end of the movie. Napoleon’s ego is supposedly what drove him to invade Russia in winter, but he didn’t seem much more egotistical at that point than he did earlier in the movie. By trying to fit so much into one movie, there wasn’t enough room for any of it to cultivate properly. I have two battle questions, for anyone who might know the answer: 1. Why didn’t the Austrians realize they were standing on a frozen lake. . . in Austria? Wouldn’t they have been familiar with the territory? 2. How did Wellington defeat Napoleon? Did he lure the French out to be stampeded by the Prussians, or was the British army just better trained than expected?
  20. I think this is becoming a more popular sentiment. We’d rather read something, even if it isn’t Winds, than nothing.
  21. Rhaena was a stand-out for me too, and young Viserys II. It was also confirmation that George can still write great characters, since he hadn’t written much about either of them before then. My favorite chapter is the one on all of J+A’s children, who all felt so distinct and memorable. Ironically, this also points to one of the big flaws in FnB for me. Despite having published a half-dozen versions of the Dance at this point, I still don’t really feel like I know Daemon or Rhaenyra or Alicent. If George had also written the Dance for the first time in 2017-2018, I think it they would have been more fleshed-out as characters.
  22. Yes, it’s been five years. Fire & Blood was released on November 20, 2018. It’s Thanksgiving week in the US, so I have very fond memories of reading FnB during long car rides to visit different relatives. It was such a pleasure to read, and I can only hope that we’ll get some new reading material in the near future. What was your first impression of FnB? How has it changed since then? Is there anything you wish was done differently? Let the reminiscing commence!
  23. According to @Ran, there’s a story behind their marriage, but it sounds like GRRM is saving it for sometime down the line.
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