Brother Seamus

On 2/6/2022 at 10:57 AM, EggBlue said:

honestly , this quote and everything else we've seen of him suggests to me that High Sparrow can potentially be one of the darkest characters in the books . and knowing Martin used to be a catholic and probably familiar with the concept of religious leaders misusing people's fear and misery, he must have created High Sparrow to be more of a villain in the story . Yet, when I put High Sparrow among top 5 monstrous characters right beside the likes of Tywin and Euron , people mock me!

I agree the High Sparrow is being set up as a major villain. more to come.

Here is the latest, from a 7/22/23 grrm blog post, for what it's worth. i guess it could be worse.

And, yes, yes, of course, I’ve been working on WINDS OF WINTER.  Almost every day.  Writing, rewriting, editing, writing some more.   Making steady progress.   Not as fast as I would like.. .certainly not as fast as YOU  would like… but progress nonetheless.

It keeps me out of trouble.

On 7/2/2023 at 9:22 AM, Lady Winter Rose said:

I think we might see book 6 announced completed soon. It's been little over 7 months since this Martin words. Same happened with Dance, he announced 3-5 more chapters, then we had book in 5 months.

bless your heart.

On 5/9/2023 at 10:30 AM, The Bard of Banefort said:

 

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Jon won’t be resurrected until well into TWOW, possibly not until the end of the book.

My prediction/hope is that he is not resurrected but is grievously injured and in a coma until after the 3/4 mark of wow, when he revives, and finds that his siblings have begun to gather at winterfell, and then he travels there and the siblings, maybe with the exception of Bran, are reunited. 

any little ray of hope is welcome

I've also been partial to the notion that Illyrio and Varys were really behind fAegon all along; that the idea was to get Viserys and some dothraki to invade;  Viserys would be discredited by allying himself with foreign savages; the weserosi would have a hard time against the dothraki, but would fight back and hold out for a while;  fAegon and the golden company could then ride in and tip the balance and save the day, repel the foreign invader, kill viserys, and take the throne. 

so the viserys/drogo/dany plot was to soften up westeros for fAegon's invasion, discredit and get rid of Viserys, and set fAegon up as a conquering savior hero; three birds one stone.

oh, and the golden company finally gets their due after generations of waiting; four birds.

another reason why I think fAegon was part of the story from early on is that the english wars of the roses is the main - though far from the only - historical source and analog for the story, and that history includes the Perkin Warbeck episode, when some guy shows up after Henry Tudor has won and become Henry VII, and claims to be one of the "boys in the tower," the sons of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville who were imprisoned in the tower of london by their uncle, Richard III, and never seen again.

On 1/15/2023 at 10:48 PM, sifth said:

I actually agree with this. The only foreshadowing we get for Faegon is, that GRRM reminds us in each book that Gregor killed a baby. The only thing else we get is the murmurs dragon, vision Dany gets in the second book. Both of these are very weak evidence for “this was all planned”, but it’s what some people want to believe. 
 

Though no way is Faegon planned in the first book. It’s clear as day, Varys and his partner want Dany and her brother on the throne in that book.

I think your degree of confidence is unfounded.

Marrying Dany to Drogo is at least equally consistent with getting her and Viserys out of the way for fAegon. 

 is it really a reliable plan to think that a 13-year old girl is going to influence Drogo to cross the sea and invade westeros? yes, there is supposed to be some kind of understanding between Illyrio/Viserys and Drogo, but there's no way to hold him to it.

What they didn't anticipate is the dragons and Dany's leadership abilities.

BTW, on the agreement that Drogo would invade as a kind of quid pro quo for Dany: what do we see directly in terms of Drogo acknowledging this obligation? I think there's a scene in GOT where Viserys demands they invade, and Drogo basically says I'll get to it when I get to it. Correct? The he kills Viserys soon after, so arguably at that point invading westeros is not so much in the cards. Then Drogo more or less promises Dany he'll do it after the attempt on her life, but it seems he was at best 50-50 before that. Do I remember correctly? 

it's heartening to me that he is apparently feeling a sense of urgency.

for the record, this is a dumb debate. this is a fictional story, set in a fictional world. but saying Arya is insane is so obviously objectively wrong and misguided I'll spend a few minutes on it.

first, it is apparent she is not psychotic: dissociated from reality, hearing voices, suffering from hallucinations, unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, suffering from paranoid delusions, that kind of thing. no evidence of anything like that is in the books. so, according to the normal English-language meaning of insane, she is not insane.

Nor do I see her as being psychopathic or sociopathic, both of which involve a lack of empathy for others, psychopathy including pleasure in inflicting pain, sadism, etc., and neither of which is a diagnosis in 5th edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm-V). Arya seems perfectly capable of appreciating the pain, happiness, sadness,  joy, etc of others, and there is no indication she takes pleasure in others' suffering.

Does she suffer from a mental disorder that falls within the definition of something in the dsm-v? almost certainly. PTSD for sure. but this is subjective stuff. most of us can be said to suffer from emotional/mental disorders or syndromes, from time to time and to some degree. whether a formal diagnosis is justified is a matter of judgment.

would she be institutionalized under modern western standards? I doubt it, due to her age, and the fact that most of the violence she inflicted was in self-defense. depending on how her actions came to the attention of the criminal justice system, perhaps long-term mandatory counseling, but maybe not.

Arya is 9 when the story starts, around 12 at the end of dwd. she has been traumatized by horrific violence, and de-sensitized to that violence, and found herself in situations where her survival required her to use violence. the cases where she she didn't act in self-defense were committed after she she was horrifically traumatized, and then taken in and fed and protected by a bizarre death cult of assassins. Arya's capacity for violence is understandable if you follow her arc. the fact she has gotten to the point of being trained as an assassin and meting out justice to night watch deserters seems to her like reasonable behavior. to me this is perfectly reasonable, especially given her age.

I would suggest that, if you're looking for modern-day analogs, think of child soldiers, such as those in the various African wars, civil wars, insurrections, rebel and outlaw/gangster movements we've been reading about for the past few decades; e.g. Liberia, Congo, Sierra Leone, etc. no doubt some do become psychotic, others are surely crippled by ptsd, and many more have their moral compass permanently and seriously twisted up as a result of what has happened to them. But,those that have gotten away, especially to europe, the US and elsewhere have generally been treated as victims and cared for. I'm sure many are beyond help, but many have gone on to productive and normal lives.

So, that's from the modern real-world perspective, which of course is irrelevant to Arya, a fictional character in a fictional world roughly based on medieval Europe. she is set in a fictional society where violence and cruelty are much more acceptable and common, not unlike medieval europe and virtually the entire world for most of human history. while her capacity for violence is unusual in-world, due to her age, she is otherwise not outside the norm. she rightly burns with hatred and vengeance for numerous violent wrongs done to her, her family, and others. no one in-world would say she was unjustified in killing Raff, an act of vengeance, and all her other killings were in self-defense or in combat, other than Dareon and the insurance broker. the killing of dareon was justified and appropriate by in-world morals and rules because he was a night's watch deserter, even if she technically was not one granted authority to levy that penalty. only the assassination of the insurance broker is unjustified, but that is done at the direction of her caretakers, the faceless men, and thus excusable.

That said, what becomes of her in the story, personally and psychologically, is an interesting question. I hope it doesn't come as news to anyone that one of the themes and subjects of ASOIAF is the horror of war, and violence in general, and its disproportionate effect on the the common folk, the lower echelons of society. GRRM is a boomer, don't forget, a generation for whom Vietnam and the morality of war was a preoccupying and formative social issue.

So, will GRRM show us an adult Arya forever emotionally scarred and dsyfunctional as a result of the trauma she has suffered (and inflicted)? Will we see Arya find some kind of love and redemption and eventually return to a more normal and happy emotional life? will she be able to reintegrate into her family and larger society? We'll see. I have a suspicion that GRRM has some kind of warm feelings for Arya as a character and he will bring her back from the moral abyss and she'll find some form of happiness.

But that will be after she inflicts some horrific violence, motivated by revenge.

This is a rank guess, but I think that, after she inflicts some extraordinary vengeful violence, her vengeance will bring her some peace and satisfaction, but also that she will ultimately feel revulsion at what she's become, realize that killing people will never make her feel whole, that violence begets violence, and she'll turn back from going completely over the edge.

another observation: GRRM likes toying with the revenge trope. Revenge, in case you haven't noticed, is the driving force in lots of popular fictional media, especially movies. it's virtually a cliche movie formula for the bad guys to hurt the protagonist's family - especially children - to set off the narrative where the protagonist goes on a rampage of vengeful violence. it's a plot device to justify all kinds of entertaining carnage and virtually everyone accepts it.

one thing GRRM has done is have bad guys get their comeuppance from unexpected quarters, unrelated to their original crimes. Janos Slynt is executed by Jon for nothing related to his betrayal of Ned. Amory Lorch is killed by another psychotic sadist, Vargo Hoat, for sport and pleasure, not for his numerous crimes, such as the attach on Yoren and NW recruits. The mountain is (temporarily) killed in the duel with Oberyn, who is acting out of a desire for revenge for his sister and her children, not for any of the mountain's war crimes against the small folk of the Riverlands. Tywin is killed as a result of  emotional cruelty to his own son, not for his war crimes. And so on.

Arya's acts of violent revenge may be the ultimate pinnacle of this switcheroo. I'm thinking perhaps GRRM will want us to see her as a kind of avenging angel not just for her family but for thousands of others abused and injured and killed in this absurd and selfish war among the great and the mighty. the ironic twist will lie in the fact that she is a traumatized 12-13 year old girl, who, though the daughter of a great aristocratic family, has spent these 2-3-4 years at the very bottom of society, where she has seen up close how vulnerable the masses are to the violent whims of the elite. GRRM may want us to see Arya's revenge as the revenge of the meek on the mighty, when the meek have finally had enough.

20 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

When speaking of Arya as a criminal I would expect them to be using the word in the legal sense. If they just said 'mad' then maybe, but 'insane' means something specific in the context and if they don't mean it like that, well then it kind of doesn't mean anything...I just feel it's one of those words that has a fixed meaning in the context of crimes and legality.

If it's looser then it isn't really insanity though.

I understand what you're saying, I just really feel in the context it's not one of those words which is down to interpretation/has subjective meanings.

sure it has subjective meanings. people use insane to just mean extraordinary - beyond normal understanding - all the time. "did you see the game? it was insane!"

and we constantly say that people who do bad things are crazy or insane, meaning we find the person's behavior unfathomable, without really meaning that the person is "technically" insane.

even technically, insane has more than one definition. the legal definition, for an insanity defense, is pretty narrow. I don't think the psychiatry/psychology profession really uses the term in a technical sense, instead classifying people as "psychotic" or "dissociative" or something else. in guardianship law the issue is whether the person is "incapacitated" as a result of mental illness.

22 hours ago, Quoth the raven, said:

The justice system in many places in this country can only be described as broke and "woke."  They coddle the criminals.  Insane policies in the name of "social justice" like Prop 47 and Cashless Bail created dangerous crime waves in many cities.  That is obviously not where we want to send Arya.  We want the punishment she deserves rather than what an overly lenient criminal justice system will give.  She needs to be held in a max security detention center for a very long time.  Perhaps for her life span. 

idiotic right-wing propaganda, with no connection to reality. fox is rotting your brain.

On 11/10/2022 at 5:35 PM, Craving Peaches said:

Arya is objectively not insane though. There is an accepted definition of the word by medical and legal professionals. Claiming Arya is insane is objectively wrong, based on what the text shows us. If you have a different definition of insane then it isn't really the same thing anymore...

If people are not using it in a medical or legal sense then I think they should clarify. Using the word 'insane' all the time if you don't really mean it is detrimental.

I agree she's not insane, but that's my point. people are using the word in a much looser sense, which, is not incorrect just a different usage and meaning of the word.

she's obviously not insane, in the normal sense of the word. it looks to me that's really going on here is you're all talking past each other based on an implied disagreement on what insane means. why anyone would want to waste time on a fan site essentially debating vocabulary, without really acknowledging that's what you're doing, is a mystery.

On 10/25/2022 at 6:35 AM, Rondo said:

Well done.  That settles the debate for me.  Daenerys will bring a very formidable force to Westeros consisting of Unsullied and Dothraki.  

Dany will have a huge army when she gets to westeros:

unsullied

at least one dothraki khalasar of 5,000-10,000, maybe more

several thousand freedmen from slaver's bay

most or all of victarion's ironborn

two or three of the sellsword companies now at mereen

tens of thousands of freedmen from volantis and other city between mereeen and volantis

several tens of thousands from lys, pentos, myr and/or tyrosh some or all of which she will conquer before sailing to westeros

thousands of random others who flock to her banners from all over essos

some kind of force, probably mostly naval, from Braavos, which will throw its weight and funding behind her when they see what has happened to Volantis and the other cities of essos

I am probably forgetting some.

i predict something in the neighborhood of 200,000 total, by far the greatest army ever assembled in the known history of planetos. and don't forget the dragons.

she will be unstoppable, and but for the others would conquer westeros quickly. but, before she completes her conquest, she realizes that the invasion of the others is more important.

Jon is not warging into Ghost. He's not dead. Just gravely injured. He will be out of commission until sometime in the last 1/4 of wow. he'll revive a little before the 3/4 mark, and be back in action sometime in the last few chapters. once he's up and aroud he'll be heading to winterfell with a force of wildlings and maybe some NW fighters, because he'll have gotten word that one or more - i predict all - of rickon, arya and sansa are there.

On 8/10/2021 at 6:37 PM, Mister Smikes said:

Tatters, burnt beyond recognition, died on Dany's bed.  Quentyn is with Viserion at the Pyramid.  Tyrion missed something when he was in the tent, but when the commander rode up in a rage against the Windblown, it is because Archie's secret plan (that he could not tell Gerris in front of Barristan) succeeded.  Archie's plan to turn the Windblown has succeeded, but in a manner he could not explain in front of Barristan.

LOL, not even Victarion?  The text does not even make a secret that Victarion is Euron's puppet.

And if Euron has no connection in Essos, what the hell has he been up to for the past 15 years?  He clearly has ambitions that go beyond merely being a pirate.

Well, I would not exactly trust him.  But, in this case, why do you think he's lying?  Where would he be going if not where he says he is going, where he sent the entire iron fleet ahead of him, and where a climax of some kind is going to occur?

Well then, how will Dany get to Westeros after the battle is over, if the dragons are still uncontrolled?  Or will Dany not reach Westeros til book 7?

"OL, not even Victarion?  The text does not even make a secret that Victarion is Euron's puppet."

you're playing word games. obviously vic is there because euron sent him, but now he's thousands of miles away and can do what he wants. whatever you mean by "control" it's not the kind of control that counts, meaning that euron can make decisions and influence events.

"Well, I would not exactly trust him.  But, in this case, why do you think he's lying?  Where would he be going if not where he says he is going, where he sent the entire iron fleet ahead of him, and where a climax of some kind is going to occur?"

when does euron say he's going to mereen? he sent vic to fetch dany for him, so he's not going. seems clear. where does this certainty come from?

"and if Euron has no connection in Essos, what the hell has he been up to for the past 15 years?  He clearly has ambitions that go beyond merely being a pirate."

it seems pretty clear he wants the iron throne and dany and dragons.

On 9/26/2021 at 2:43 PM, Jaenara Belarys said:

"Come on you sea rats, get off yer ships!"

I suggest not trying to argue with him. He's stubborn beyond reasoning. 

 

 

My predictions: Ser Barristan and his men are going to kick ass and take names. Dragonhorn either doesn't work or makes Rhaegal and/or Viserion go nuts. Volantene fleet arrives, helps mop up the slavers. Dany arrives after battle with Dothraki hordes at her back. After finishing up the last bits of ruling Meereen she sails west to either Westeros or the other Free Cities to free more slaves. 

yep. the sample chapters are setting us up for ser barristan and the mereenese to rout the yunkai et al.

how we get from the end of the battle to Dany leading an army off to westeros is unclear, it could go several different ways, but if it takes more than a week or two, maybe a month, and more than 3-4 chapers, I'll be very surprised.

Same for the journey from mereen to westeros. even with detours to volantis and/or pentos or elsewhere, it will be less than six months in story-time and more important no more than a half-dozen or so chapters.

GRRM has to wrap this baby up and he knows it, and it shouldn't be hard to do. of course, if he was 30 instead of 70+ he could continue to expand the story and work on this for the next 40 years. but he doesn't have that much time and he knows it.

16 hours ago, Mister Smikes said:

That's not the question.  The real question is "why did the Battle of Meereen not make the cut for "A Feast For Crows"? And the answer is that GRRM got carried away and bit off more than he could chew.

No.  The book's overall theme is "I'm still trying to finish A Feast for Crows so Dany can get to Meereen and the second Dance of the Dragons can begin"..

Totally wrong.

Nonsense.   There is not going to be any "Battle of the Redwyne Straits" and even if such thing occurs, Euron is not going to be there.    This is a fan delusion.  Neither Euron nor GRRM have said anything to suggest that Euron intends to encounter the Redwyne Fleet.  What Euron intends is for the fools who accepted his poison gifts to be slaughtered by the Redwyne Fleet. The Redwyne Fleet is on its way to the Shield Islands, to reconquer these same fools.  And the Redwyne Fleet will have been decoyed to the other side of Westeros.  Just in time for Dany's crossing.

Euron does not give two hoots about his crown, just as he does not give two hoots about the Seastone Chair.  He will take it, use it, and throw it away, like the dragon egg.  His crown and his Ironborn subjects are expendable tokens in his game of chaos.  

He will be traveling to Meereen with his 12 captains.  And he already sent Victarion ahead of him.  And he already controls the Storm Crows and the Company of the Cat. 

Quentyn has a dragon.  He is hanging out with his new friend Viserion in an abandoned pyramid.  If Euron manages to get one or more dragons as well, and/or manages to get Dany herself, he will have gotten what he is after.  He wants dragons, he wants Dany, and he wants the Iron Throne.  He does not care about the Seastone Chair.

Euron and GRRM are not even trying to fool anyone.  Euron makes no secret where he is going and what he wants, but nobody listens.

Quentyn is dead.

Euron has no control over any sell sword company in meereen or anyone else in meereen.

I strongly doubt Euron is going to Meereen.

I don't see anyone taking control of a dragon in connection with the battle of meereen.

Dany will come back well before the battle is over.

On Invalid Date at 0:12 AM, The Bard of Banefort said:

This probably came up a long time ago, but does fAegon acting as the Westerosi Perkin Warbeck count as homage?

Right before I started watching GoT and reading ASOIAF, I read Philippa Gregory's "The White Princes." Now, I realize that Gregory doesn't exactly have the best reputation when it comes to historical accuracy, but what I found interesting is how similar her portrayal of Elizabeth of York was to Sansa in ACOK. Both of them "played dumb" in order to avoid saying the wrong thing and ending up on the chopping block. I don't support the theory that the War of the Roses can predict how ASOIAF will end, but I definitely see the parallels between Sansa and Elizabeth of York, more so than between her and Queen Elizabeth I. 

I agree Perkin Warbeck seems to be the best inspiration for Aegon (fake or not; I think he is fake).

Oh, excellent! Thanks for the correction!

yeah. what they did with the show is mash/transposition from the novels

For the massive amount of people that hate UnCat in the books, I cannot fathom how so many people are disappointed with no LSH reveal this episode. And if there was a LSH reveal, you know all these same people would be complaining that it was too early for this reveal and it is so chronologically out of order since it happens in the ASOS epilogue.

I agree. I don't understand the complaints. we don't hear anything about catelyn's body for several chapters after the rw, and LS is revealed in the epilogue. in the book we're allowed to believe she's completely dead for half the book. if they're doing it right we don't see LS until the last episode of season 4.

I only came to know about GRRM after watching the HBO series (a HUGE thanks to them). Before this, apart the from the popular choices, i.e., LOTR, HP and the Chronicles of Narnia, I wasn't much into the fantasy genre. Martin changed my entire perspective about it. His sheer ambition and grandeur bowled me over completely. I started reading the series in late September, 2011 and since then have been thoroughly obsessed with it. I can't recall spending an entire day since then, without thinking about the world of ASOIAF.

Thank you so much for this brilliant thread. I enjoyed reading it, a lot.

My own opinion is, that atleast another book is needed apart from the already announced 6th and 7th book. The battles for the Iron Throne and the war with the Others together seems, atleast to me, to be quite a lengthy story to be finished with only 2 books remaining.

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to wait for TWOW. But at the same time, I don't want Martin to rush to the ending. Westeros and Essos seem to exist in a parallel universe now, and its hard for me to imagine that the characters, in the end, will live like the cliched fairy-tale happily ever after.

same here. hadn't read fantasy or sci fi since high school. thought it was too low-brow. started GOT Oct 2012 because I was/am thinking about writing a historical novel, and I wanted to see how a successful popular novel (that's kind of like a historical novel) was written. boom. totally hooked. read all 5 books in a about 3 weeks. it did not even occur to me until I was near the end of DWD that the series wasn't finished!! re-read again in March. I'm obsessed.

i'm still hoping wow comes out by xmas 2013. please GRRM, write write write.