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Universal Sword Donor

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Everything posted by Universal Sword Donor

  1. Are you talking to anyone in specific, in general, or the poster immediately preceding you?
  2. At this point I am going to have to ask if you've ready literally any significant part of what I've written in the thread. It doesn't appear to be the case.
  3. The first time we see it introduced is by the maester to LF in front of her: “Sweets. Cakes and pies, jams and jellies, honey on the comb. Perhaps a pinch of sweetsleep in his milk, have you tried that? Just a pinch, to calm him and stop his wretched shaking.” “A pinch?” The apple in the maester’s throat moved up and down as he swallowed. “One small pinch . . . perhaps, perhaps. Not too much, and not too often, yes, I might try . . .” Then Colemon asks about the bleeding nose and shaking, repeats it doesn't leave the flesh, and asks again about the bleeding nose before saying he'll do it twice more. “It was too soon. My lady, you do not understand. As I’ve told the Lord Protector, a pinch of sweetsleep will prevent the shaking, but it does not leave the flesh, and in time . . .” “I try, my lady, yet his fits grow ever more violent, and his blood is so thin I dare not leech him any more. Sweetsleep . . . you are certain he was not bleeding from the nose? Very well.” They paused at the foot of the stairs. “But this must be the last. For half a year, or longer.” If her POV more or less ended at this point, I would be inclined to agree with you. However it doesn't. She self monologues about what was best for SR isn't what's best for the Lord of the Vale (also him). Then she explicitly says they have larger concerns than SR and all but tells Colemon he'll continue to dose sweet sleep as LF deems fit. “You had best take that up with the Lord Protector.” She pushed through the door and crossed the yard. Colemon only wanted the best for his charge, Alayne knew, but what was best for Robert the boy and what was best for Lord Arryn were not always the same. Petyr had said as much, and it was true. Maester Colemon cares only for the boy, though. Father and I have larger concerns.” At this point she's been indirectly told it's poisonous, directly told it's poisonous, and pushed for additional doses against the insistence and advice of the "doctor." So again, she very well knows she's poisoning him but it's a lesser concern against the governance of the Vale, disabusing notions of rebellion, and somehow avoiding the headsman's axe via treason against the IT. One can debate how far she's willing to go to protect herself, but given her mimicking of and adherence to LF -- the man who watched her father be arrested and then alter beheaded because he turned down LF, the man who murdered Ser Dontos for aiding him -- and the fact she considers poisoning SR the lesser concern, she absolutely would poison him to save herself, maybe even LF.
  4. No her POV shows that she knows exactly what is happening w the sweet sleep.
  5. I’ve already put my $.02 in here but her POV chapters make it quite clear that she’s fond of him but willing to do harmful things to him in the short term to protect LF and herself (since those go hand in hand for now). So she might do something that poisons him or or even kills him but it’s driven by self preservation vs any desire to kill the boy.
  6. Ironically: The reason I am never specific about dates and distances is precisely so that people won't sit down and do this sort of thing. My suggestion would be to put away the ruler and the stopwatch, and just enjoy the story. https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/Chronology_and_Distances Edit: To be clear, I find it frustrating too because I want to know *all* the details about the world and don't particularly care if they don't make sense.
  7. He's gone on record saying he usually drops info in three hints: one very subtle, one more obvious, and the last basically telling you what happened. The catspaw employer is usually the example I see given.
  8. If we believe Egg, then yes he was knighted. "I was supposed to squire for Daeron. He's my oldest brother. I learned everything I had to learn to be a good squire, but Daeron isn't a very good knight. He didn't want to ride in the tourney ... He's of an age where knighthood would be fairly common for nobility (see Waymar Royce, Tywin, Quentin, et al , let alone royalty, and his father clearly pushes for his sons to match Baelor's sons, of whom at least Valarr was a knight who rode as a champion in defense of the host.
  9. So far. Every single bit of crawling he’d done since ASOS takes him back to the man he wanted to be versus the person he became. Maybe he makes it, might be he doesn’t. It’s a compelling journey whether or not he gets there
  10. They can be. Scipio, Alexander, and others easily negated their effects with rather mundane strategies desensitizing the horses and animals or opening ranks to let the elephants charge through
  11. Right but they’d also marched like 10k km and hadn’t seen home in a decade (or whatever). Less about elephants — they didn’t a pretty good job of engaging them when they had to — and more about wanting to bang their wives and see their children
  12. It’s literally in Jon’s quote: “The plan would have required the Watch to yield back a large part of the Gift, but his uncle Benjen believed the Lord Commander could be won around ….” There’s no one else to yield the land back to except for the lords who it was seized from in the first place. We don’t know exactly which ones but we can imagine it’s the closest houses / clans: Umber, Flint, Norrey, Wull, Karstark (?) and / or another house that was completely moved off the gift and given land elsewhere.
  13. It is if it’s not the watch’s land, which is explicitly in the proposal
  14. That's not Ned's proposal. You're not wrong about it being far superior, but that's not ned's proposal and not many lords are going to want to bring a group* of "rapists, murderers and thieves" onto their land. * obviously there are more than a few bad apples as we see but that characterization isn't super accurate
  15. Other than grant the land -- meaning its no longer the NW's land -- to the lords, who obey WF, and pay their taxes to the NW, what other arrangements are possible?
  16. The entire premise of the proposal was that the lords pay their fees to the NW but are loyal to WF
  17. Hard to argue against this plan, given what we know of Quentyn's results and Oberyn's results.
  18. The Starks need to ask the king for leave to follow through with Ned's plan: His lord father had once talked about raising new lords and settling them in the abandoned holdfasts as a shield against wildlings. The plan would have required the Watch to yield back a large part of the Gift, but his uncle Benjen believed the Lord Commander could be won around, so long as the new lordlings paid taxes to Castle Black rather than Winterfell. Ned cannot raise lords in his own right. That can only be done via king or descent. Jon might be referring to parceling out land for people to rule as landed knights or gentry, but that would leave the onus of traditional lordly duties (pits, gallows, law) in the hands of the woefully undermanned NW; the lack of resources of the NW being the primary driver in resettling the New Gift and making sure it has people to run it. Being realistic here, Robert and / or Jon Arryn would most likely rubber stamp any proposal because it's Ned and realistically who cares about that piece of land OTHER than the NW and the new settlers.
  19. It says rattling off the armor in the middle of a schilltrom, men on horse, and men in plate, and men in chainmail. Nothing to be taken from that when the opening volley a page before shows men in chainmail charging and going down under the Lannister arrow volleys.
  20. Medieval mail with a padded jack / aketon was great at stopping arrows. There are muslim and crusader accounts of men walking around with 20+ arrows in their armor fighting because they didn't know they'd been hit. Read more about the 3rd crusades march south to Jerusalem under Richard I -- battle of arsuf -- for more info.
  21. I do think he was in love with her or in love with the idea of her because she reminded him of his first wife, Lynesse. We also see a Dothraki using a longsword in the FFG artwork. As we haven't seen either weapon wielded by a Dothraki across multiple Khalasars or multiple continents, it would be a stretch to consider them common weapons. We do see arakhs and recurve bows and whips through the series. This is the play for me. It could happen but have some patience.
  22. So the first known SotM we know if isn't really useful in that context then. We know the most prominent SotM -- Ser Arthur -- was indeed a knight and dubbed Jaime in a sept in the super formal way.The best we can assume is that Arthur Dayne's practice is a continuation of what the Andals introduced, not that there were no "knights" of House Dayne before the Andals. We simply lack the information to compare, but someone like Maester Luwin might say it's a distinction without a difference since Dawn was probably, but not definitely, handled by the best warrior in House Dayne before knighthood came in a way that isn't too different from House Corbray and Lady Forlorn.
  23. Right but Dawn and the House itself are 10K years old, and the sword was created by the founder of the house.
  24. There are no conditions attached for a knight to make a knight. None, unless you think one can revoke a knighthood for not being a follower of the seven. There are plenty of examples to counter that. Glendon ball was knighted in a whore house by a poor knight,, pretty much the opposite of being honored in a religious ceremony. Even the lords at whitewalls granted him permission to joust when someone confirmed it. They treated him like the literal whoreson he was but he was still acknowledged a knight. a common joke here is “what do you call a doctor / lawyer who finished at the bottom of their class?” A doctor / lawyer or channeling pirates: you’re without a doubt the worst knight I’ve ever heard of ah but you called me a knight
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