The Dragon Demands

cool. We of course await clarification in Fire & Blood Part 2.

Hey, I realized "Cregan Stark" hadn't been updated to include other info about his successors, and this led into me making a major update to the "House Stark" article overall - the history section hadn't been updated all the new info from "Fire & Blood". I never got to it before because it's a daunting task, we only know bits and pieces, and some of it conjecture Elio had to address in forum notes cited in other article for individual Starks. Previously, the History part had three sections: "Kings in the North", a short "Targaryen Dynasty" section, then a "Robert's Rebellion" section. I didn't touch the first and last ones, but sought out to expand the "Targaryen Dynasty" section, which turned into breaking it up into several other subheaders by era: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Stark First I made "Targaryen Conquest and Aftermath". Pretty much retained what was already there about Torrhen Stark, but then facing the arduous task of parsing out what new info we got on the Starks from the first half of Fire & Blood. I simply addressed it head on by writing with in-universe style that "The Starks were aloof from royal politics in this era, so even major historians such as Yandel and Gyldayn barely mention specific Lords of Winterfell between the end of Aegon I's reign and the end of Viserys I's reign" and outright noting "thus a full Stark family tree hasn't been provided for this uneventful era". The biggest part was copying in info from the Alaric Stark era. The next subsection I broke it into was "The Dance of the Dragons", though I start with the Great Council of 101 AC, because the Stark vote in that had ripple effects leading into them siding with the Rhaenyra/Velaryon camp during the Dance itself. So I end the other section with noting "Alaric was forced to donate the New Gift but challenged it" then the next section saying "Yandel thinks the Starks voted the way they did at the council because they were still bitter about the New Gift" (and with ample citations pointing out the corrected info from World book, that it's not Ellard who donated the New Gift but Alaric). The "Dance of the Dragons" section includes, based on broad interpretation, the Regency era afterwards, because Cregan Stark himself lived through the whole thing and it was actually an eventful time in the North (hard winter, then plague, then a new wildling invasion). The through-line in this section is Cregan. We're a little confused what to call the next section, bridging from the end of the Regency up to the Fifth Blackfyre Rebellion / time of Rickard Stark / lead-in to Robert's Rebellion. The issue being that we don't know when Cregan died, but it's said he lived to be very old. He outlived the Regency era and into the Conquest of Dorne under Daeron I, PROBABLY lived into the early reign of Aegon IV. A question for "Fire and Blood part II" is whether Cregan was still alive during the Blackfyre Rebellion in 196 - he COULD have been, as he would have been 88 years old at the time, but it's said he lived to be very old. @Ran For the Blood of Dragons MUSH, did you ever decide if Cregan is still alive in the North during the reign of Baelor I etc? Or did you gloss over the question by simply not mentioning it? Not an easy issue to face as Cregan is a significant character but Martin gave no public info. At any rate, I then added in all the info I recently put into the "Legacy" section at the end of Cregan's own article, as his four surviving sons had troublesome reigns and faced localized threats and rebellions: Skagos, ironborn, wildlings, etc. Ending with the fifth and final son Brandon, then his son Beron...and Beron's the one who was laying mortally wounded in his castle when Dunk and Egg show up in the "The She Wolves of Winterfell" (which will presumably fill in a lot of info on the post-Cregan era). I noticed a need - that the Stark article hadn't been updated for FIre & Blood or much substantial info between the Conquest and Robert's Rebellion - then filled it in as best I could. Any help would be welcome. Direpuppy already made several improvements to my original writeup. One minor point though I disagree with Direpuppy on, just regarding the specific subsection breaks and titles: I put one overall section between "The Dance of the Dragons" and "Robert's Rebellion", which I just broadly call "Blackfyre Rebellions" (as this covers everything from the first rebellion through the War of the Ninepenny Kings, essentially the entire Dunk & Egg era)....Direpuppy split this into "Blackfyre Rebellion" and "After Cregan". The problem if course is that we don't know when Cregan died, and I point that out in the paragraph about the First Blackfyre Rebellion. What if he WAS still alive? That would make categorization complicated.... (shrug) the subsection Direpuppy made on the First rebellion is only a paragraph, and on the principle of not making subsections that are too short, I'm going to recombine them with the more vaguely titled "Blackfyre Rebellions & Cregan's Successors" or something like that.

I see that Westeros.org is having a forum update today. I guess that at some point before House of the Dragon starts, this subforum should probably be renamed "Languages" or something, because we'll mostly be seeing Valyrian languages from now on, and either way it's more than just Dothraki.

Yeah the old website shut down I've been reposting some of his important essays to the forum

On the Religion page: is "the Chainmaker" described as a god? The Barristan sample chapter just says "a statue of the Chainmaker".

I know that I was just half-asleep when I wrote it, ack.

https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Aemond_Targaryen I realize art is subjective, but can we change the profile image for Aemond to something else? The artwork with the metal eyelashes extending off his sapphire eye seems a bit interpretive / doesn't really match the books. A ready replacement with no need to ask the artist for permission would be the animated image HBO put out in Season 5's Histories & Lore set, which pretty much matches the books. I say this because spy photos just leaked for Aemond on set in Caceres and the article is about to get a lot of attention.

Blah, I overcompensated when I read "two Kingsguards".

Think they’ll get Neil Gaiman back?

Would this stream on HBO Max or Paramount+ ?

wow

https://gizmodo.com/babylon-5-is-getting-rebooted-with-j-michael-straczyn-1847752907 (fall to my knees sobbing) Great Maker! Great Maker forgive our madness!! (weeping)

Ah, it was in 58.

I don't understand... Ellard conceded the New Gift....resented it enough to vote for Laenor in 101....but at some LATER date he was succeeded by his brother Alaric, who even years later was still trying to reverse the decision? (reads quote) ah, it seems his brother wasn't lord at the time.

@Ran Sorry to raise this issue again but it may be important in HotD: specifically who was the head of House Stark who attended the Great Council of 101 AC at Harrenhal? I know there's a discrepancy in the earlier print versions. Currently we have it listed as Ellard Stark. https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Great_Council_of_101_AC#Known_attendees

Regarding HBO Max expansion, a good article in NYMag explaining their recent problems with lots of buggy glitches and buffering: https://www.vulture.com/article/hbo-max-app-crash-problem-fix.html#_ga=2.214449367.1556919069.1628822301-1762818768.1626829408 It turns out that they didn't make a new streaming platform from the ground up like Netflix or Amazon Prime - they basically bootstrapped the old programming for HBO Go and HBO Now to make it quickly. I don't even think this was a bad thing: Richard Plepler didn't even believe in streaming, "You should buy the cable service". They saw it as a supplement to the cable channel. So when the new administration came in under AT&T, they had to build up a new streaming service REALLY fast and under difficult circumstances. No one wants to be the last streamer out of the gate (the dubious honor goes to Peacock). So yes they rushed it out....but they sort of had to, because the old administration dug them into quite a deep hole. I actually think that given the massive task ahead of them, just how little the Plepler administration cared about streaming services, that HBO Max achieved a surprisingly large amount of success in relatively little time...it's just that they were that far behind when they started and there's a long way to go. The good news is HBO is fully aware of all of these problems and is actively working on fixing it. So...I chalk this up as "growing pains". Amazing how much streaming exploded in the past 5 years. Disney+ was a planned rollout for years, HBO Max was...AT&T came in as the new owners and asked "What's your plan for a full scale streaming service?" and the answer was "we don't have one". Ugh. As for the international rollout of HBO Max, to reiterate: They just had a big expansion to all of Latin America back in June "By the end of 2021" they intend to expand into Europe - specifically, markets within Europe where HBO already has a direct market, so they don't have to haggle with third party companies; basically HBO Nordic, HBO Spain & Portugal, and "HBO Europe" (Eastern Europe - Poland and the Baltics plus the Balkans, but not Russia) Parts of Europe where they don't have direct markets will have to wait longer: the elephant in the room are the countries where streaming is done through Sky One: United Kingdom + Ireland, Germany, Italy, Austria. Besides Sky One it's basically just France (OCS) and the Netherlands (Ziggo). Belgium just uses whatever its neighbors use I think, and Greece is a nonentity. Good news is that OCS's contract runs out in summer 2022, so we think France will get HBO Max by the time House of the Dragon Season 2 rolls out. The merger with Discovery+ may accelerate expansion to the MIddle East and India, on account of the fact that Discovery+ already has streaming services there. No word on expansion into East Asia No word on expansion into Canada or Australia

Recently I became aware of a great article that a fan wrote in Northumbria University Magazine, pointing out the simple logic that even before Season 8 aired, regardless of its quality, it couldn't possibly be "the same" as the book ending, because they're already changed so much: https://northumbrialife.org/?p=1057 TV fans leading up to Season 8 had...I guess convinced themselves that "whatever D&D cut out by definition wasn't important, otherwise they wouldn't have cut it"....when our entire argument is that they were indeed cutting out important things. Thus people convinced themselves that cutting out Lady Stoneheart, Dorne, Young Griff, Tyrion's ongoing Tysha plot, didn't really impact the story that much...when if you sit down to spend 15 minutes talking about it, there's no way you could remove all that without producing a drastically different ending that doesn't reflect the book ending (other than a few beats used out of context here and there). I showed this article to my Twitter/YouTube followers and everything thought it was amazing: eloquent, logical, and succinct. So I asked her if she could record an audio reading of the article, and I'd post it to my channel, along with slides I made up - slides & memes I re-use often, such as "D&D didn't run out of source material, they chose to abandon major book storylines starting in Season 5" (I have to re-use that ALL the time on Twitter...it's like having a stamp ready). Her audio performance was also really great - she didn't just read it off dryly but "performed" it as she read it. Here's the resulting 16 minute video: @Ran @Linda Please give it a watch, I think the resulting collaboration turned out amazing. If you think it has merit please share on Twitter etc.

We may need to merge "Yi Ti" with "Golden Empire of Yi Ti". We also need a map image.

James Hibberd has a new update on the other spinoffs at The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/game-of-thrones-animated-yiti-1234982593/

( Jeyne Arryn is....basically the only House of the Dragon LGBTQ character who isn't going to die in Season 1, so I hope she gets a decent amount of focus in that show, rather than D&D's penchant for killing off or simply leaving out minority characters)

Well I sent the question via Tumblr messenger, let's see if they respond....

It would actually make sense if they were honey-blonde Andals, now that you mention it. But it's the only fanart I could find that had Jeyne and Jessamyn...being pride month and all.

Side note: I'm not really sure about the rules on adding fanart to the wiki (or which fanart), but we don't have any images for Jeyne Arryn, and this fanart of Jeyne and her companion Jessamyn Redfort is really good; it's based on a pose from a classical painting: https://nobodysuspectsthebutterfly.tumblr.com/post/621216778641637377/jeyne-arryn-and-her-dear-companion-jessamyn Can we use it?

Whatever the title, I quickly put together a rough draft page for the Arryn succession war, just to get the ball rolling. Any improvements appreciated: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Arryn_Succession_Struggle_(134_AC) ....I think it should be called "Arryn Succession War" on the grounds that the chapter refers to it as a "war": "With his death, the flames of war sprang up anew across the Vale of Arryn."