Ring3r

Seppuku.

I know it's technically not canon to the novels, but I'd love to know the etymology of the name for the Others' spoken language, which was developed for the show, but never used. I have to imagine GRRM had some role in naming the language. Anyone got any insight into that word? The only thing I've been able to find is "skrot" which is swedish for trash.

That is my argument True, pockets of Europe banned it from their domestic economies, particularly when nations looked inward and the world became more isolationist, in the time period you're talking about. But I would call serfdom a form of slavery, and that continued on in most (but not all) places for a significant portion of time, legal or not. Very shortly after some places banned that...slavery re-emerged, with it being used in colonial environments, away from the homeland. The North Atlantic slave trade was not the only source of slaves...just one of the more recent ones. Slavery spiked again, during the 17th and 18th century, as the Industrial Revolution began putting pressure on non-industrialized industries (farming and mining)....industrialization eventually won out and now slavery is illegal in all of the western world. It's spiking again now - because we've found ourselves in a situation where the most sought-after materials (rare earth metals, etc) happen to be located in the unindustrialized parts of the world.....so demand for those materials has resulted in a dramatic rise of slavery in those parts of the world. In any case....the whole topic is extremely complex and ever shifting. The general trend has been that slavery disappears from areas that industrialize - though it's often just moved somewhere else. I think GRRM understands that - it's one of the reasons why Dany is having such a hard time eliminating it in areas that she takes over - there's no alternative yet. Westeros is actually very much like the areas of Western Europe that you're talking about - they've outlawed slavery and they're quite isolationist. They don't quite have serfdom....though the smallfolk do seem to be forced to give over a very large portion of their goods to the cities, and the concept of all the wildlife belonging to the local King or Lord still exists, which cuts the people off from a readily available source of meat. And the Free Cities (apart from Braavos, which was founded by slaves) are free in name only. Their own citizens might not be slaves, but they obviously have no problem with other people bringing slaves into their country - very similar to most places in Europe from ~1300-1700. I think GRRM has done an excellent job of portraying slavery in a very realistic way. I really wish we had a better picture of the culture (past and present) of the Children of the Forest. They're sort of the indigenous-population analog in GRRM's story. In the Americas, prior to white people, slavery was widely practiced - tribes would war, and the victor would keep the women and children as slaves. It was incredibly common (though not universal, some tribes did not practice it at all.) I wonder if the Children have a similarly checkered past? Thus far in the story, we've kind of been presented with the idea of the Children of the Forest being....just completely unified. It would be much more interesting if there were competing factions.

This point occurred to me in another thread and I figured it deserved some theorizing of it's own, because if you think about it....it's actually an incredibly important issue. All of Dany's conflicts thus far have been land-locked. Her forces primarily consist of Unsullied and Dothraki....and they have zero experience at naval warfare (with the Dothraki being actively afraid of the sea). I don't think it's realistic to expect Dany to successfully make land-fall anywhere on Westeros without a group of experienced, organized naval officers. Tyrion can advise her on the defenses around Blackwater Bay, but little else. And Euron is out there, and extremely competent. Aurane Waters is also out there, leading pirate raids with the flagship he stole from Cersie. There's a TON of threats in the ocean right now. So....which character (or characters) is going to fill that role for her? I really only see one . The only option that occurs to me is Victarion Greyjoy. We know he's been sent specifically to help her, and we know that Euron is going to betray him. He might be dumb as a post, but he's rock-solid in terms of naval warfare. It's possible that Euron's betrayal may be the breaking point that finally causes Victarion to oppose his brother. He's also got a Red Priest on-board....one who saved his life. That Red Priest views Dany as the messiah - Victarion might be somewhat swayed by that as well. He's my best-guess, in terms of who will lead her Navy. What about you guys? Is there some set of events that could result in Asha, Davos or Aurane Waters leading her Navy? They'd all be good candidates, except they're all in the wrong place and have no current link to Dany.

Many of the great houses store food (particularly, grain stores) not just for themselves but for the smallfolk, because of the unnatural winters. If they didn't, there would be no smallfolk. The city populations would simply all have died off long ago if it weren't the case. The more rural areas keep stores as well, centered around townships and inns. This is true on Planetos, and it was true in medieval times. Stores are kept for particularly rough times. King's Landing's stores have been depleted but there are still many areas of the country which haven't had their supply lines cut. And yeah, Dany definitely thinks King's Landing is pivotal. It's the figurative and literal seat of power for the continent. As for King's landing being easier to access than Oldtown....how so? They're both port cities, at the mouth of a major river. They both have lookout points on either side of the bay to serve as early warning. If anything, I'd say King's Landing is harder to access, because the defenses there have been dramatically increased due to the Battle of Blackwater Bay. That chain boom is still there and the bay is more enclosed, making it easier for a Navy to defend. Dragons may somewhat ameliorate that, ships burn.....but the bay is still more enclosed. As for Old Town being more important than King's Landing - it's closer to the breadbasket of the continent. There is more fertile land near Old Town than King's Landing - Highgarden's lands are famously productive, hence the name. An army landing there (or near there - the Shield Islands would serve as a great military staging ground) would at least not immediately starve. Militarily it makes more sense. If Dany were to land in the South and work her way North, gathering supplies on her way, she could cut off King's Landing and win the city via siege, rather than attempt a naval battle with an inexperienced Navy. There's also a very good chance that by the time Dany arrives in Westeros, Old Town's defenses will have been ravaged by Euron, with little time to recover. I'm not saying that's what Dany is going to do - she's almost certainly going to occupy Dragonstone. But if I were Tryion, I'd counsel her to start in the South....especially if Faegon already has a hold on King's Landing. My point about Dany not being much of a reader is actually quite important. She isn't going to know anything at all about naval warfare, the defenses of Kings Landing, or any of the other major port cities. She currently doesn't have anyone to advise her on those things. Tyrion will be of assistance once he sides with her, since he knows all the details of the defenses of King's Landing from his time as Hand....but she still doesn't have the equivalent of an Admiral to lead her navy. Tyrion can advise on defenses....but he's no naval commander. She's going to need one.

There are still food stores. All the great houses have them, so they can survive. And....yes....Dany does want to be in charge of the entire continent...but she currently believes that means King's Landing is pivotal. I would argue that Old Town is far more important. Aegon conquered Old Town prior to developing Kings Landing into an actual city....and it's a really bad location to defend, with sea and river access. But....she's....what....16 years old at this point? She's got a lot to learn. And....per GRRM, she's not very bookish. She's not reading any of the stuff Jorah gave her, for example.

Ned's brother is First Ranger, and the Nights Watch clearly has regular contact with the Stark family. The results of NOT shutting Ned up, in terms of the war of the 5 kings....yeah, it would have turned out basically the same. With one main difference....people would have known that Littlefinger was a player. His whole strategy relies on people not knowing that.

It would be far too suspicious for Ned to die en-route to the wall if he were killed by some random person that just happened to want to join. That'd look like a hit. The faceless men are better than that. As for why Baelish would care....Baelish's entire thing is to cause as much chaos as possible....without any of it blowing back on him. Ned knew, 100%, that Baelish was responsible, because Baelish used him to kick the hornets nest, regarding Cercie's children, and then betrayed him afterwards.

Great idea for a thread - theories that I think are wrong but I would love to be correct! For me....I'd have to say the parentage of the Lannister children is tops. There's decent cases and evidence that either Tyrion or Jaime/Cercie are half Targ. I don't think any of them are....I can't imagine Tywin, as proud as he is, tolerating that level of betrayal. So, no, I don't think any of his children are secret Targs. It's a great idea though, and if GRRM were to include it and explain it....i'd be on-board.

I haven't watched LML in a few years. Great insights on his part, just....eh. I won't get into it, that's not for here. Interesting that he had similar ideas tho. I suppose, in the end, it boils down to WHY the others were created. They appear to exist prior to dragons. What were they designed to fight, if not the army of the Bloodstone Emperor? A mystery, i suppose.

I didn't mean to imply he'd solve the entire continent's issues....clearly he cant. But if he takes control of King's Landing and releases the stored food, he could at least alleviate the suffering of that one city. The one city that Dany dearly wants to be in charge of.

I....don't think so. If anything, Benjen might be re-discovering what the Night's Watch was originally for, making him the opposite of a deserter. Love me some Order of the Green Hand theorizing.....they tend to step a bit out of the norm and field some of the wilder theories. That's really good....very useful. I think mostly they're wrong....but they have introduced a lot of good stuff to get people talking.

My favorite reference is definitely GRRM's allusion to the Others as "like the Sidhe." That's a very interesting reference. In Irish myth, after an invasion of humans, the Sidhe agreed to a pact with humans....to go underground. In ASoIaF, the Children signed a pact with the humans and appear to live underground, in the caves and root systems of the Weirwoods. The Sidhe were spirits of the trees. I think it's likely that's exactly what the Others are too....only given physical form via warg-sacrifice against a Weirwood.

This is probably the most confusing topic in the entire series. Bran becoming king is confirmed by GRRM.....but....king of what? King of Westeros? Or the new Night's King? King of Winter? It would be very much GRRM's style to say Bran becomes king....but leave out what he is King of. For that matter...even if Bran did become the new Night's King....does that make Bran bad? We don't know, because we don't know why the Others came back in the first place. We don't know why they came into being either. Clearly they are meant to fight something.....but is that dragons? Or was it the Bloodstone Emperor? Maybe Euron's birth (3 years prior to the tragedy at summerhall) woke them? Euron mirrors the Bloodstone Emperor in his actions... We just don't know.

No. Doran thinks he's clever but his ENTIRE plan is just to marry into the Targaryen family....which is about to experience another civil war, between Dany and Faegon. I suspect Faegon will be....displeased....when he finds out that Doran is playing both sides. I suspect Dany will be....displeased....when she finds out that Doran is playing both sides. Basically, Doran is just....not very smart. His entire schtick is to hedge his bets, play both sides, and try to ride on the coat-tails of the powerful. All he does is wait....and he always waits too long. He waited too long to tell his daughter his plans, so she made her own and Princess Myrcella got f'd up as a result. He waited too long to send his son to Dany....and she was already betrothed once he arrived. To make up for his father's failure, Quentyn tried to woo Dany by interacting with her dragons without permission, and now he's extra crispy. Doran is exactly what the sandsnakes think he is. He hasn't had a single plan work. His most successful machination was with his brother. Oberyn died, and the Lannister family was destabilized...but by that point, Varys and Illyrio had already identified the fact that Viserys was insane, rendering Doran's planned marriage of Arianne/Viserys moot. Doran had no idea about Young Griff. Now he'll try to take advantage of THAT....except the people behind Young Griff already know Doran is incompetent. Basically the dude thinks he's super clever but he's got no idea about any higher-level stuff going on because he doesn't have any kind of reliable spy network. All he does is wait.

I think he would have died. He'd probably been planning some way of escape throughout the trip, after King Joff rendered-moot his original mission of ensuring Ned Stark wasn't able to tell the people up North about Baelish's treachery. Things escalated too quickly due to the resulting war and he had to rely on his personality to convince Arya to help him.

She's going to do it the exact same way every other army has had to - plunder the countryside, inducing mass famine in the smallfolk. If Faegon is able to very quickly take control of King's Landing, as seems likely, he's going to be massively popular in that he stops the wars temporarily, particularly if the North turns their full attention to the Others. We know from Dany's vision that the Mummer's Dragon is going to be very popular with the people. Dany's going to face mass hatred by the smallfolk of Westeros because she's bringing a huge foreign army and will re-ignite the wars, further depleting the smallfolk's stores immediately prior to a terrible winter. I think that might be the final straw that causes her to do something drastic.....probably not exactly the same as in the show, but her repeated attempts at ruling have either resulted in disaster (astapor) or revolt (mereen.) Having the smallfolk of Westeros hate her is going to severely disturb her mental calm.....particularly if it occurs after she helps save the world from the Others and Euron and loses a dragon to each. I do think she's going to go mad with grief.....it's just going to be set-up a lot better than the show. Perhaps she won't even be responsible for the destruction personally...if she enters a deep despair over the people's reaction to her....her link with Drogon might cause him to go on a rampage against what he percieves as the source of her pain - the people. She may lose control of him.

The "troll" theories are the only ones that I really hate - they're why I took about a year long break from this place. Particularly when the people responsible would pop into every other thread to try and derail actual conversation. Everything else....eh, it's fine. Some of them I think are a bit silly, like any theory about Jon's parentage apart from R+L = J. The evidence is just overwhelming in that case, both via actual textual clues and thematic ones. I don't hate the competing theories...I just don't think they make any sense. Bloodraven not being the Three Eyed Crow is another eye-roller for me, though I don't hate it. I just think it's clear that Bloodraven wasn't aware of how Bran saw him in visions...but then he thinks about it and is like "I suppose that makes sense." Very similar to how Jojen saw Bran as a chained wolf with wings. The aspects of a person appear as physical details in the vision-world. Bran is a Stark (wolf) who is crippled (chained) with wings (green-seer). Bryndan Rivers' nick name is Bloodraven and he's a man of the Night's Watch (crow) who's capable of visions (3rd eye open.)

Only on their home soil though, not in their territories. Essentially, they outlawed enslaving their own people, but not others. They still relied heavily on forced labor. AFAIAA, France was the first country (that still exists) to ban it....in the early 1300s....except the ban only applied on French home soil - French territories continued slavery until the 1800s, shipping slave-produced goods and crops back to France. So, that's not outlawing...that's outsourcing. Western european nations only outlawed slavery piece-meal after that, with bans against the enslavement of specific groups, while it was still permitted against others. Some of them outlawed it on their home soil but not on their colonies, moving forced labor to where the core citizenry wouldn't have to see it, following France's lead. Later, most of Europe banned the slave trade in the late 1700s to early 1800s, but not slavery itself - so slavery was still legal, you just couldn't buy slaves at market anymore. They didn't abolish it and it still existed for quite a while longer in their territories. The United States did the same thing - the slave trade was banned in the US in 1808 but obviously US slavery continued through the end of the US civil war. The Western world only started the overall systematic dismantling of slavery in the mid 1800s. So....slavery showed a slow decline and eventual ban by the Western world, from the 1700s through the mid-late 1800s.....the exact same timeline as the slow rise of the industrial revolution. Honestly, you can make a pretty compelling argument that the Western world is still heavily dependent on slavery and we never actually did anything but outsource it. It is still going strong in parts of Asia, the Middle East and Africa....they make our phones and mine the lithium and other metals for our "green" batteries under horrific conditions, all driven by demand from the industrialized world. I suppose that's my happy thought for the day

I don't disagree with anything there, except life expectancy. There certainly was a transitional period.....as things advanced....one industry after another stopped using slavery. It wasn't like....poof, gone. And yeah, child labor was a huge transitional thing.....almost all worldwide cultures were used to using kids for labor....on the family farm, etc. So they could learn a trade, etc. I wouldn't say that was abusive.....and that still happens on farms. Teaching the kiddos how to do things. It was a very transitional period. The public mindset on kids was 'well they need to learn how to do stuff' and that didn't translate well to an industrial environment, where the kid wasn't going to inherit the family farm. Even today....rural areas all over the world, even in the US....parents are teaching kids how to take care of animals, farm, etc. That's certainly not slavery, or abusive at all. On a family farm.....it would be wildly irresponsible to NOT start teaching your kid how to take care of things. On a corporate-owned farm.....yeah no, totally unacceptable to use child labor. It's a matter of scale and inheritance. As for the average life expectancy statistic....I have to disagree. That statistic is almost entirely useless, due to infant mortality rates prior to antibiotics. If a kid made it past 5, they essentially had modern life expectancy. A lot of kids died from childhood disease, or during birth...and all those statistics drag the overall life-rate down...which is why couples normally had 5-7 kids back then. But....if people made it to adolescence....pretty much normal life expectancy. Maybe a few years less on average, but not all that different than now.

Which regions are you talking about that hadn't had it for centuries prior to industrialization? Honest question, not trying to be controversial.

Eh, no. If you read the first few chapters of Game of Thrones....Cat is the only one who senses the danger. She identifies the sign.....the dead direwolf, killed by a stag. She screws it all up after that, sure....although I don't think it could have gone any other way. But she identified the sign...Ned did not. Her sister is crazy tho, full stop.

Long story short (and, by the way, good point)....she isn't. This will be just another horrible reality that she's going to be confronted with. She's going to get to westeros and Faegon is already going to be popular. The only way she can win is to go scorched earth. I think she won't do that right away, she'll probably meet Jon Snow first.....but after that.....I don't think anyone can deny, regardless of how good she wants to be....her overall goal is conquering and victory. She'll snap, at some point.....after being faced with setback after setback. It's a tragedy, really. Reading her character from the first few books....literally all she wanted was a home to go back to.

I think it's pretty simple, honestly. GRRM has read a LOT of history, and he's aware that, in real life, every culture, from every race, has practiced slavery....and more often than not, against their own people. He's also aware that it was the norm, culturally, up until the industrial revolution....which hasn't happened yet on Planetos. The industrial revolution resulted in enough automation that mass labor was no longer needed. That's what stopped slavery....it's not like people somehow just got "better." Never have. Never will. He's just writing a realistic story. Slavery was a fact of life, for everyone. Hell, the word "slavery" refers to the Slavs. That's where the word came from. On Planetos, the only place even close to automation is Braavos, with their shipyards....and they happen to be the most anti-slave place in the world...GRRM knows his history.

Oh he's definitely partly based on Elagabalus. Ancient Egypt provides a lot of parallels too. The ancient Egyptians worshiped meteorites, one in particular called the BenBen stone, and meteorites were the original source for their metalwork....a big parallel with what might be going on with Lightbringer/Dawn/Bloodstone Emperor. As for whether the Shade trees are corrupted.....I have no proof, of course, but all the parallels to Weirwoods are dark and inverted. Their sap gives similar visions/abilities as the weirwoods, although all those visions seem to have a very dark twist to them, and all the people associated with them (Warlocks, Euron) are openly evil. They're the exact inverse color as weirwoods. Dany notes, as she walks through the Shade grove around the House of the Undying that it is "unusually dark." Very much like the trees are drinking the light, just as the stones in Assai do. It's also suspicious that there are zero Weirwoods in Essos and zero Shade trees in Westeros, considering we know they were connected via a very large land bridge for most of history. As for nothing growing in Assai, that's true. But we've got no idea at all what's inside the city of Stygai. If Stygai were in fact the Royal Capital...it might make sense for it to have some version of a Godswood, even that far back in time. For me, the biggest clue is Euron himself. He's drinking Shade of the Evening all the time and it's resulted in him emulating everything we know about the Bloodstone Emperor. I have to think the trees are somehow linked to the original stone that the Bloodstone emperor took his name from. Euron didn't learn the ritual that he's preparing for in Winds of Winter from nowhere. Conjecture....but a lot of things line up and start to make sense if the initial conceit of Shade trees being corrupt Weirwoods is taken as correct. Hopefully we won't have to wait for A Dream of Spring for Bran to get visions that far back.