Anya, Vengeance Demon

Yeah, I get what you're saying. I mean, I'll be a bit upset if I had to read all that stuff about Meereen just for it to get completely burned in the next book :dunno:

But, again, controlling dragons is shaky ground...

Sure. But the Valyrians did it for a very long time. Presumably they wouldn't have fostered dragonriding if cities were always been destroyed by accident.

Well, if dragons come into play then an uncontrolled fire is not that far fetched. I mean, "controlling dragons" is a kind of an oxymoron, isn't it?

Fires will certainly break out, I'm sure. But enough to destroy the city? That's a little hard for me to imagine. Again, the dragons are already free, and they haven't come close to burning down the city yet. Why would they be a bigger danger once they've been placed under human control and sent outside of the city?

It could be and is very likely.

That's an assertion, not an argument. Yes, dragonfire is an imprecise weapon, but Victarion's enemies are outside the city of Meereen, not within it. Surely if anything Victarion could direct the dragons to attack the organized forces beyond the walls; if he can't do that, then he doesn't have control over the dragons in any real sense. (The big problem, perhaps, would be if Barristan's forces didn't retreat in time, but that's very different.)

Regarding your earlier post, the fact that Victarion doesn't care much about Meereen in the first place is a good reason why he wouldn't care enough to destroy it, especially when it could potentially alienate 'his queen'. And once Victarion has chased off the Yunkish forces, he's going to need a base of operations to seek out Daenerys, so he would have no reason to burn Meereen at that time. And then once he finds Daenerys, his business is concluded and he might as well GTFO. At that point he would have no reason to burn Meereen, which is unlikely to pose a threat to his rule in Westeros and may well be controlled by allies. At no point would it be in Victarion's interests to burn down the city.

I thought GRRM did independently confirm that Victarion is, in fact, as dumb as a post.

Dumb compared to Euron? Sure. But people exaggerate his lack of intelligence. He's been leading men for a long time. If he was as stupid as some people think, he wouldn't still be in charge of the Iron Fleet. Balon would have replaced him a long time ago.

We don't know exactly but you don't think it's going to ugly you're intentionally being obtuse.

"Going to be ugly" is not the same thing as "will burn a major city to the ground."

I think the idea of Meereen getting torched is inspired by the fact that Vic has the horn that reportedly controls them and that Vic would control the dragons the only way he knows how to - Vic ie dragons SMASH! And burn. :dunno:

I think that's silly. Victarion can tell the difference between burning a rival army and burning the city that he's supposedly fighting for. He's not the most clever person in the series, but he's not some drooling moron.

It's not contrived at all if Vic uses the dragonhorn. It's no like he has remote control for dragons once their unleashed. And dragonfire can burn anything.

Wait... if the dragonhorn isn't a 'remote control' for the dragons, in what sense does it control dragons?

Why would the dragons burn down Meereen? Left to themselves they don't seem interested in doing so--they want to snack on passing Meereenese, perhaps, but they don't have an interest in destroying the city as such. (It's made of brick, too, so it's not as flammable as all that either.) And Victarion or Euron would have no reason to want Meereen destroyed, because they wouldn't want to alienate Daenerys, and because they don't ultimately give a shit about Meereen either way.

That sounds like a contrivance to fix a perceived problem: that Meereen is boring, and Dany in Meereen is boring, so might as well burn the place down. But that doesn't make it a plausible direction for the story.

What's interesting here is that we are getting, in Barristan's words, a replay of Redgrass Field but - with the lose dragons - I could very easily see us getting a replay of the "Field of Fire." If Vic blows his horn and disrupts Barristan's plans, they may fear the day is lost until the dragons appear and roast everyone alive.

Under whose command, though? Victarion is certainly under the impression that he's figured out the horn, but he's got Moqorro as his only help there and Moqorro's behavior has to be informed by his ominous kraken vision from mid-ADWD. If he's wrong, then he's going to summon the dragons under the command of the man who claimed the horn, i.e., Euron. Which could be interesting.

Yeah it's a bit weird that he knows about Balon's death before knowing anything about how that man had invaded the north against the Starks.

You know, it occurs to me that Quentyn's coterie would know a lot about what happened in Westeros up until the end of ASOS or so, so it's a little strange that Barristan hasn't gotten information from them. (Daenerys didn't seem much interested either, but she was a little checked out in those days.) Then again, he does have more pressing matters, so perhaps he intends to return to that subject later.

The most interesting part for me is the note about Tyrion, it seems that the Second Sons were attacked before Plumm and Tyrion had time to switch the sides. I think that Tyrion was taken captive and I can't imagine Vic liking a dwarf and Lannister and the one with mismatched eyes like Euron on the top of all, on the other hand Moqorro is with him and he knows Tyrion is important. I can imagine that Jorah fares even worse.

I don't think that's so clear. Barristan doesn't know where the Second Sons are. He assumes that they must have been distracted by the ironborn, but he sees the ironborn fighting the Yunkish. Tyrion and Brown Ben Plumm were aware of the ironborn's arrival before the battle started--we know that from the Tyrion chapter--so presumably they wouldn't have been caught off guard. (Nor could I see them attacking the ironborn under the assumption that they must be the enemy.) I imagine that they would keep their distance from the ironborn until they know what's up with this new element.

If I had to guess, I would assume that Tyrion's 'misery' comes from being upstaged by Victarion. He might still win himself over to Ser Barristan by changing sides, but everybody's going to attribute the victory to Victarion's sudden arrival, not Tyrion's cunning. (Which is always the way with Tyrion, it occurs to me.)

And if the Tyrells are going to support Aegon like many suspects,then that would be the end of Tommen.I'm sure Olena and Margaery would dispose Tommen immediately after knowing Aegon is alive so that Margaery can marry Aegon.

Leaving aside the weird idea that Aegon would appear more viable than the Lannisters, who can offer three times the swords of the Golden Company plus a pliable child-king... I'd think that having Tommen killed would make it much, much harder for them to form alliances with anybody else, simply because they'd demonstrate themselves to be untrustworthy amoral opportunists who (this being the crucial part) would just as easily turn on Aegon if the need should arise.

Good points. The Golden Company is strong enough to storm of few castles. But It can not be more than a diversion without allies. Jon Connington has expectations, but no allies are guaranteed at the moment, it seems.

I expect that to change fairly quickly, though. Contrary to what some people theorized on this thread, it seems to me that the Tyrell forces going to attack Jon Connington will be quite small (relatively speaking, of course). Randyll Tarly and Mace Tyrell already considered Jon Connington a minor threat while Kevan was alive; and with Kevan dead, the big concerns will have more to do with disorder within King's Landing or hostilities from the Lannister forces, not some rebel lord that nobody remembers. So the Tyrells will want to keep the bulk of their forces at KL to keep the peace, sending out a token force to oppose JC ... which I expect JC to defeat, creating the impression that Aegon is there to stay and giving him legitimacy in the eyes of people like Doran Martell.

Getting back to the question of a Tyrell-YG alliance, I think people aren't taking the chronology into consideration. At the moment, YG is king of a good portion of the Stormlands, and backed primarily by exiles who haven't been in the Seven Kingdoms for decades, if at all. Those stormlords who follow him do so primarily under duress. Aegon's Targaryen parentage is under serious question (for good reason). Why would Mace Tyrell look at this motley crew and think, "That's the coming power in the Seven Kingdoms"? There's no reason.

Meanwhile, Aegon's primary goal is keep the rebellion going until Daenerys shows up. Ten thousand swords will not suffice in the long run, not unless Aegon wants to stay under siege all that time. He needs to make alliances now, and the best one available to him is in Dorne. We've been told that Doran is skeptical of Aegon's chances, which fits his personality, so it's not true--as some people in the previous thread assumed--that Dorne will just fall into his lap. Doran will need to be wooed, and the best way to do that is with a marriage pledge to Arianne. (Even then, I suspect that Doran won't pull the trigger unless Aegon prevails against the Tyrell host.)

Is that short-signted? To an extent, but Aegon needs to prevail against the Tyrells now; considerations about Arianne's fitness to be queen, or alternative alliances that might be made under different circumstances, are necessarily secondary. In a similar situation, Robb agreed to marry a Frey. And in his mind, it may not even preclude a marriage to Daenerys: did not another Aegon conquer Westeros with three dragons and two wives?

And regardless of whether Aegon marries Arianne, that makes it harder for him to win over the Tyrells, who are virulently anti-Dornish in the best of times. Mace is hardly likely to see a half-Dornish king with a Dornish court as a potential friend. (And regardless, there's no indication that Mace is the kind of man who would bloodlessly throw one ally overboard in favor of another; in fact, we're told that he's quite stubborn when he sets his mind to something, and cannot be swayed by anybody. Olenna might be willing to reject Tommen, but she hates the Dornish as much as anybody else in the Reach.)

Re: Randyll Tarly, people are forgetting what Kevan said about him in AFFC: he is, above all, loyal to his superiors. He stuck by Mace Tyrell on the losing side of the rebellion, he was one of the Renly loyalists who refused to side with Stannis, and he has no reason to switch now that he's received an increase in his land and a council position.

In any case, neither Randyll Tarly nor Mace Tyrell have been terribly subtle plotters, so I don't know why we shouldn't just take their statements in the epilogue at face value: they think that Jon Connington is no real threat, and that he'll be easily defeated when the time comes.

I just wonder if the announcement from Not a Blog found here, which mentioned:

"Sansa, Sam, Aeron Damphair, Arianne, and Brienne have no chapters in A DANCE WITH DRAGONS. Several of those characters had chapters written, completed, and polished that have been moved into THE WINDS OF WINTER."

might lend itself to the notion that instead of condensing two and a half books worth of material into two books, it might be something more like putting two and 2 2/3 books into three books?

I don't think that there are necessarily two and a half books worth of material left after ADWD. Whatever sketchy plans GRRM may have had back in 1994, he's now completed five books and hasn't given any indication that the series will expand past seven. Could that change because of leftover ADWD material? I doubt it. So far, the chapters that GRRM has moved over to TWOW total ~100 manuscript pages. Add to that the two unwritten chapters that GRRM referred to a couple of years ago, and you're still talking about a small percentage of the eventual length of TWOW.

I think also what is happening here, is that we will end up with 8 books - that like A Game of Thrones, GRRM will realize that once he has finished a book's worth of material for TWoW, he will realize he's less than halfway done and have to add one more book.

I don't know about that. Presumably much of what happens in TWoW and ADoS is stuff that he's been setting up from the beginning, so he won't need to spend as many pages establishing stuff as he does in earlier books.

This experience wont steel him, it broke him...

I agree. Overcoming that kind of trauma would require a reserve of inner strength, and we've never seen that in Theon. Compare him with somebody like Jaime, whose strength of will is acknowledged even by his enemies, which enabled him to bounce back from (admittedly less terrible) hardships. I've no doubt that Theon still has things that he needs to do for the story, but I'd be surprised if he wasn't a near-wreck from here on out.

There seems to be a lot of speculation that Ramsay plans to commit patricide. From what we know of Roose Bolton, I think he's too smart to fall into some trap of Ramsay's making. In fact, I suspect that Ramsay is the one who is in danger from Roose, once fake Arya is married and pregnant. I doubt that Roose plans to keep someone intractable and unpredictable like Ramsay alive longer than necessary.

That's true enough. I assume both Roose and Ramsay have their plans regarding the other. Ramsay's advantage is that Roose has more reason to stay his hand for the moment than Ramsay does, because of the need to produce a Bolton heir to Winterfell. But that may not be enough for him.

However, I do wonder which "war" Ramsay is riding to. The obvious choice is the Ironmen in the Neck, but there is also Stannis on the Wall. Not sure that he has the troops to be taking on Stannis though...

He mentions needing Theon's aid to "help me fetch home my virgin bride." Jeyne Poole is with Roose Bolton's forces south of Moat Cailin, so I would assume that he's going to lead part of the assault on Moat Cailin. From there, it appears that he goes to Winterfell, from the Del Ray videos released yesterday. And it seems as if he's settled in there a while, since the selections suggest a series of murders committed by some faction trying to undermine Ramsay:

This one could not be waived away as some drunken tumble or kick of a horse. The dead man was one of Ramsay's favorites, a squat, scrupulous ill-favored man-at-arms called Yellow Dick. ... By midday most of Winterfell had heard, mainly from the lips of Ramsay Bolton, whose boy Yellow Dick had been. "When we find the man who did this," Lord Ramsay promised, "I will flay the skin off of him and cook it crisp as crackling and make him eat it. Every bite."

That's from a little bit more than halfway through the book. Of course, that doesn't preclude Ramsay doing something on the way to Moat Cailin or on the way from MC to Winterfell. And it's hard to know when the move against Roose Bolton takes place; is Ramsay the kind who make a swift stroke, hoping to catch his father off-guard? If so, then Roose is probably already dead by the time that Yellow Dick buys it in the quotes above.

I remember reading somewhere that GRRM had moved some chapters over from ADWD to TWoW, does anyone know how many pages/chapters that was, exactly?

At one point last year, GRRM said that there were 100 manuscript pages for TWOW from various chapters. But his editor recently said that they had done some trimming on ADWD to cut out ~50 manuscript pages or so, in order to bring ADWD in line with ASOS length-wise, and some of that may have ended up with TWOW as well.

I'm pretty sure that Braavos is primarily based on Venice: the canals, the origin, the naval strength, the Arsenal which theoretically can build a galley in a day, and the (relative) religious tolerance all remind me of (what little I know about) Venetian history.

Whether they don't, in fact, glow, remains to be seen.

No, it doesn't. Sam's line about Coldhands, quoted in an earlier post, is clear on the subject. The quote only makes sense if Sam is saying that Coldhands has some qualities in common with wights (i.e., pale skin and cold hands), but does not have others (i.e., glowing blue eyes and the lack of speech).

Without conclusive testaments one way or the other, then whether CH has two glowing blue eyes or one doesn't say anything about his identity.

The issue here is that CH's eyes do not, in fact, glow blue, as Sam reports to Bran in A Storm of Swords.

That is important for us to figure out CH's identity. If CH has 2 eyes then he could not be Bloodraven.

GRRM has always felt free to withhold details that would spoil a later dramatic reveal. I don't see why he would make an exception just to validate your theory about Coldhands.

I cannot imagine a reasonable scenario that GRRM could concoct wherein Coldhands was now revealed to have the glowing blue eyes of a wight that somehow Samwell failed to notice, despite his assertion to the contrary.

Bronn, who are you arguing with? I don't know anybody who said that Coldhands has glowing blue eyes.

Roza:

Sam thought that CH is not a traditional wight because he does not have shining blue eyes. He needed to see his eyes to come to this conclusion, that his eyes are not wights' eyes.

That's ridiculous. You might as well say that Sam needs to inspect CH's fingernails to make sure that his hands aren't on fire. If Coldhands had bright, shining blue eyes, then Sam would see that no matter how enshrouded CH's face was. If Sam looks straight at CH's enshrouded face and sees nothing but shadow, then he can be pretty sure that CH does not have bright shining blue eyes.

And again, the important thing is not what Sam notices (which we don't know), but what Sam chooses to report to Bran. The lack of an eye is a quotidian detail: lots of people in Westeros have lost eyes in combat. It signifies very little, and isn't really pertinent to what Bran needs to know, i.e., is this undead thing going to help me or eat me?

If he says that CH does not have glimmering blue eyes, that would mean he saw Coldhands' eyes.

Well, not necessarily. The eyes of a wight shine bright blue. If Sam couldn't see Coldhands' eyes because they were shrouded by a cloak, that would be a good sign that he doesn't have the eyes of a wight.

Besides, the issue here is not what Sam saw, but what he felt was worthy of comment, which is a different matter altogether. Sam obviously cares that Coldhands isn't a traditional wight, but why would he care about how many eyes Coldhands has?

This doesn't mean that Coldhands doesn't have just one eye, but you'd think Sam would have mentioned it?

People have said this before, and I think Sam (and Bran) will fail to mention any detail that will give the game away before it's time to make the reveal. Dany's POV didn't inform the reader that she was planning on capturing Astapor until the dramatic moment was right, so I'm sure that Sam could easily have overlooked what's really an unremarkable detail about Coldhands compared to the sorcery and the whole walking corpse thing.