Rill Redthorn

The thing with Shireen being "important" (or essential or whatever) to Mel bugged me too. I wonder if maybe they're going to use the threat to Shireen in place of the threat to Mance's infant son up at the wall to give Jon some of that character development from the books. Maybe Mel tries to burn Shireen and Jon stops her by hiding Shireen elsewhere on the Wall. We haven't heard a thing about Mance's spearwife or child and I don't think we're going to -- hell, we've hardly seen Mance himself! -- so I think if the show wants to do the "Mel would happily burn an innocent child at the stake for the sake of the power of king's blood" plot development, Shireen would be the obvious choice, and then Jon could save her with some variant on the trick he used to save Mance's child, perhaps.

I think that in order for it to count as a "Dance of Dragons", you need two people who actually claim to be Dragons, which would be Daenerys and Aegon. Jon is almost certainly a Dragon but not known to be, even by himself, and Tyrion is almost certainly not a Dragon, nor does anyone in the books think he is. If Jon and Dany "Danced" it would be "Wolf and Dragon Tango", and if Tyrion and Dany "Danced" it would be "Lion and Dragon Samba". It's only a Dance of Dragons if it's Dany and Aegon.

But the middle book of the original planned trilogy was going to be "A Dance With Dragons" anyway, which implies that Aegon was always planned to be in the story, but he was going to show up in the second book, not the fifth. I suppose there are other meanings you could put on "A Dance with Dragons", but the original Dance (in the series history) was a dispute between two Targaryens, so it makes sense that the new one would be the same. You have to admit, people would think differently of Aegon if he'd showed up in the middle book of a trilogy.

I doubt it was Aerys; he and Rhaelle were married off young to each other (unhappily) due to that "woods witch" prophesy, so there doesn't seem to be much chance of Olenna being betrothed to Aerys. But the Targ royal tree is kind of short of other candidates of the right age. Jaehaerys was likely too much older than Olenna and already married to a woman of his choosing; plus it would be odd of her to duck out on a marriage to the ruling King just on the grounds that he was Frey-faced. The most likely option was Egg's unknown third son, who would be about the right age, except supposedly Egg let all his sons marry for love, and this sounds like it was an arranged marriage. So maybe one of the kids of Egg's unknown son was Olenna's disliked Targaryen match, but if so it makes me wonder what happened to that Targ branch. Did they all die off? Or is this just more random lore-creation by the showrunners, like "Orys I"?

Yeah, I figure you just inherited your older brother or sister's account when they went off to college. Otherwise you wouldn't have this irrational knee-jerk idea that policing the boards to decide what should be allowed to "slide" and what shouldn't was somehow your job. Even if I agreed with your assessment that my saying "I think the show's going for direction X and I would prefer direction Y" was an "irrational knee-jerk assumption", that's not a crime or a sin; it's part of the lively lifeblood of this message board. Seriously, who died and made you Ran?

Wow, you must be so new here. Yes. We're doing that. It's what the boards are for (among other things.) It's perfectly fine to do so. No showrunners were in any way harmed in the making of this message board. Consider derectalizing your cranium.

The question isn't whether or not they are "good guys", it's whether or not they have comprehensible motivations for their behavior. Sauron's orcs and the mindless hordes of evil in other fantasy series like "The Wheel of Time" and "The Fionavar Tapestry" are evil just because. They have no understandable motivation or goals beyond "Destroy everything and be as nasty as possible to your enemies in the process! Always maximize suffering!" They're cartoons. The fantasy series that GRRM claims was in part an inspiration for ASOIAF, Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn", bored me to tears and I didn't finish it, but I do know that one thing Williams did that was cool was make his bad guys understandably motivated, while still not making them good guys. I'm hoping that that's one of the things GRRM was thinking of when he said that reading Williams' series convinced him fantasy could be done for adults. Adults can -- or should be able to -- appreciate that when people do bad crap, it's not generally just for the love of being shitty to other people. It's for other reasons. Adults can understand that when a war breaks out, the other side has reasons for why they fight and why they kill that go beyond "Hey, it's something fun to do on a Saturday night." (Or, "They hate our freedoms!"...get real.) So the presence of Coldhands, to me, indicated that GRRM has something more complex in mind for the Others and the wights than Old Nan's version of "They just hate everything that's alive and warm," which is the kind of thing you tell kids like Bran but not the kind of thing that holds up under closer examination. My impression of the tack the show is taking, however, is that the Others and the wights are on the same level as the zombies in the Walking Dead: just mindless forces of destruction, nothing more complicated -- or interesting -- than that. Whether or not this is "unfair" I couldn't say, but D&D have shown a marked tendency toward reducing the level of gray in the source material ("Littlefinger BAAAAD! Tyrion GOOOOOD!") so it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that on the show the Others and wights are never anything more complicated than "The Enemy That Must Be Destroyed Before They Destroy Us."

Saying you think that a character is better off skipped for narrative reasons is fine, but it's not the same thing as claiming that the character is uninteresting and you can't imagine why anyone else would disagree with you on that point and want to see him introduced. I think it's blindingly obvious why people -- including me -- wanted to see Coldhands on the show. His very existence opens wide the possibilities for what's really going on with the Others and the wights, particularly the question of "Are they a monstrous mindless destructive evil force like Tolkien's orc hordes, or are they simply very, very alien? Would it ever be possible to negotiate with them instead of limiting our engagement to all-out war?" He's a fascinating character, and his presence would have indicated that perhaps the showrunners were also interested in asking questions about the real nature of the Enemy in ASOIAF. I suspect they aren't interested in this -- the Others and wights are just BAD BAD BAD and need to be destroyed utterly, period. But I hope for more from GRRM in the actual books.

That doesn't make him uninteresting. Frustrating, yes, but not dull.

He's a wight who retained self-awareness and something close to free will, or at least a certain amount of it. He can speak! He can probably give information on the Others, how their magic works, what its limits and capabilities are. He might have some idea of how to enable the other wights to retain/regain self-awareness, rendering them much less dangerous to the living. What's not interesting about Coldhands???

Yeah, one of the things I thought (and mentioned here but it went unnoticed) was that it might have been Aerys I who was being referred to. It's possible Charles Dance just chose a slightly odd pronunciation there. Shireen pronounced "Aegon" as "Eggon", instead of rhyming the "ae" with "Play" or "Sigh" like most book readers do, so maybe Aerys is pronounced "Erris" and Dance just rounded the vowel out a lot. Aerys I is actually a good candidate for this because: 1) One of his brothers (Rhaegal) was "mad", although also "meek" so maybe not violent. 2) One of his brothers (Maekar) was known to be moody and sulky and already had a rep for killing another of his brothers (Baelor Breakspear) And Aerys I was described as both "sickly" and "clever" in the Dunk & Egg stories, so it seems reasonable he'd be the sort of bookish king known for legal justice instead of, say, personal combat ability. It doesn't actually seem all that likely that either Rhaegal or Maekar would actually have killed Aerys, but certainly it's the type of rumor that took hold often enough even if not true.

Oh yeah, I'm sure they make changes he doesn't like. But it would be rude and foolish for him to criticize D&D directly. It's much more in his interest to put it down to "Their intentions were good but wow, did they ever mess that up," and just be really tactful in how he expresses that thought. It might even be true that it was just a shortsighted poorly thought-out flub. He probably regards the show versions of his characters as completely distinct from the book versions. I will be interested to see, when WoW is released, if I can detect any signs of shifting in his characters based on show interpretations he might actually like -- as in, will he deliberately or inadvertently start modeling Tyrion more like Peter Dinklage, with Dinklage's mannerisms? Will Sansa seem more like Sophie Turner? How about Brienne and her actress? But I've simply decided to put Show Jaime and Book Jaime into two separate boxes, which is what I expect GRRM is doing as well, only more so. Show Jaime does stuff like kinslaying and rape. It's too bad, because I really do like NCW and have watched him in a number of things like that "New Amsterdam" show he headlined several years back (he was good, the show was lousy, heh), and I can really "see" him as Jaime most of the time, but I think that's over now. It's not that I thought Jaime was a good guy, but he did have his own morality centered around his family, and this guy on the show just isn't him.

GRRM spent many long years in Hollywood as a writer. I'm sure he was aware of what was likely to happen to his story in Hollywood hands. He's probably just grateful that it's not worse than it is -- and I imagine he really enjoys the fantastic amounts of money he's making, both from the show directly and from the increased sales of all his books (money that goes directly to him.) Hollywood is not, in any way, the place to take your stories if you love them too much to let someone else mess with them. GRRM knew what he was getting into.

Anyone one know what color GRRM's eyes are? If they're blue, then he's the "giant".

I definitely got that sense from the book, because if LF didn't tip off Olenna, how would she know that those "purple amethysts" were actually crystallized poison? She had to have some foreknowledge, and LF was the only source for it. I can't see it making any sense for Olenna to just suddenly notice out of the blue, "Oh hey, Sansa Stark is wearing poison crystals in her hair. What an unusual fashion choice. Perhaps I'll help myself to one and use it to poison my odious grandson-in-law." She had to have known. Ergo she and LF were in on it together. See?