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A Total Eclipse of the Heart: The Nissa Nissa is Night's Queen Spitball


hiemal

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On 9/28/2017 at 8:14 PM, hiemal said:

I think they are related. As for the meteors- another great catch.

Just doing a word search pulls a couple of good quotes for Stone Men = Others:

 

Quote

DwD Tyrion V

"This is no common fog, Hugor Hill".... Ysilla is not wrong. This fog is not natural.

 "The whispering dead hate the warm and quick and ever seek for more damned souls to join them."

This recalls the freezing mist of the Others, and the "warm and quick" seems to echo Old Nan's story about the Others hating all warm-blooded things. Whispering is also a theme that shows up prominently with Weirwooods (and some other wooded settings). Fire is attempted against the Stones but it's not terribly effective - in fact the Stone Man that goes for Tyrion gets his hand burnt in a way reminiscent to Victarion's. I guess we can look at this as Tyrion moving to the Lion of Night archetype. 

This whole setting reminds me a bit of the Dead Marshes from Lord of the Rings, which is itself an incarnation of the River Styx. It's a threshold between realms, and Tyrion considers his own death throughout the chapter. This idea of a threshold between certainly recalls the Wall and the terrors beyond it, so it's likely no coincidence that the Rhoyne plays a symbolically similar part to the Wall. 

Another interesting Wall connection is the presence of Grayscale. For the most part it's played down in the Wall scenes, but in one of Jon's last chapters, we see Val kinda freaking out about it. Shireen's grayscale has got to be Chekhov's something or Other, but it's role is eluding me at the moment.

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Now as to meteors... there are three Stone Men who jump down on the boat, a number that comes up when we conjecture on the lunar and planetary impacts. 

An interesting thematic note on this chapter is that the time loop happens just as Tyrion reveals both Aegon's and his own identity. It's a sort of reset within the social interaction, as well as in time. The Stone Men seem indifferent to the boat before it's known that Aegon Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister are aboard it. That's two solar symbols hiding on a moon symbol, being attacked by meteor symbols. Maybe I'm over-construing this, but it looks like the sun is hiding behind the moon, which is then bombarded, causing the sun to bifurcate into the Lion of Night and a "true" sun that remains hidden.


Just a paragraph before the scenic repetition there is an emphasized line by Aegon, "I'm not dead", italicized in the text, which seems to fit into this idea of certain death-related cues telling us that what's about to happen is metaphorical/mythological (think of Yoren's red smile before he draws a diagram of the moon impact for Arya in CoK).  Aegon and Griff's blue hair plays into this perfectly, as blue is strongly associated with death (Others and wights' blue eyes, watery graves, blue eyed people who die, "blue is calling" in the sky cells). We have a Shrödinger's monarch here: until some box is opened, Aegon is both dead and alive. 

Now I want to get freaky with the analysis and make some assumptions that we'd normally see late in an LmL discussion. Let's look at the Stone Man who takes on Tyrion. He has some injuries. Not to his arm and neck, which is the typical injury pattern, but to his hand and leg. His hand is burnt by a torch and becomes black veined with red. Those colors look familiar. He also has a "pale" bone sticking out from his leg. Who else has pale bones? the Others, whose bones are "pale as milkglass", a phrase used only to describe Dawn. We also see a "pale stone" in Longclaw's pommel, which we suspect is meant to tie Longclaw to Dawn, and by association, Dawn to the Others. So perhaps we can look at this Stone Man's leg bone as a connection to that theme. If so, then we have a meteor with elements of both "fire and blood" and "pale as milkglass", which is quite fitting with the dual nature of the historical disaster. 

If we look at the action with the symbols, we also have a hidden true son who freezes and cowers at the meteor, and a dark sun that takes on the meteor and falls into the water. Possible coincidence, but the sun sets into the water in Westeros, Essos, Middle Earth, and real life England.

So at the end of all this, we have some pretty consistent symbolism of a meteor impact causing the sun to drown in the river of death.

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10 hours ago, cgrav said:

An interesting thematic note on this chapter is that the time loop happens just as Tyrion reveals both Aegon's and his own identity. It's a sort of reset within the social interaction, as well as in time. The Stone Men seem indifferent to the boat before it's known that Aegon Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister are aboard it. That's two solar symbols hiding on a moon symbol, being attacked by meteor symbols. Maybe I'm over-construing this, but it looks like the sun is hiding behind the moon, which is then bombarded, causing the sun to bifurcate into the Lion of Night and a "true" sun that remains hidden.


 

How about Aegon as the Maid's unfertilized ovum, like the unlikely egg who became king. The seed missed its mark, however, and quickened in a griffon instead (a solar lion given wings like dragon).

Re: The Shy Maid's Schrodinger's Box-

I like that. Until we take a peek between her legs we have a fertilized Egg and flaming menses (fire and blood!).

 

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On 9/28/2017 at 8:46 PM, hiemal said:

Perhaps the Broken Arm and the Hammer were the results of undersea tectonics- "Nagga" unleashed.

Further- although the Deep Ones are clearly tied to the sea, I am not sure that has always been the case. I think the Deep Ones were driven into the sea (and possibly beneath the ground on Leng) after losing a war with CotF. I think their magic is primarily concerned with mutation and corruption, like the Oily Black Stone they built with. I further suspect that they took some Children with them as slaves and used that magic to create the merlings to serve them in their new home. I think we have encountered a form of this magic in the corrupt blue heart in the House of the Undying and in the Shade of the Evening trees (corrupted weirwoods).

This also reminds me of "waking giants from the earth." No way Joramun made that horn and infused it with that kind of power himself. He got it from the CotF if it even exists. That brings up the question, was the horn given to him, or did he steal/find it?

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14 hours ago, Lady Blizzardborn said:

This also reminds me of "waking giants from the earth." No way Joramun made that horn and infused it with that kind of power himself. He got it from the CotF if it even exists. That brings up the question, was the horn given to him, or did he steal/find it?

That is a great question. I wonder if the Horn could in some way be connected with Nagga- as in was it once connected to its head for example, or could it or an instrument like it be responsible for the myth? If so it could be an instrument crafted by the CotF, perhaps the very one that brought down the Hammer of Waters. Or it could have been created by the Gray King, a scion of the Deep Ones unless I have missed my mark. The Horn, and the taming of Nagga's fires would be a theft from the Children- granted, I hypothesize by their mastery over the groves of weirwoods that were submerged (the Drowned God) when they warred with the Children's above ground, Pyke was splintered, and they were driven beneath the sea.

Definitely not Wildling-made, at any rate.

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On reflection I think that Mother Rhoyne and greyscale a great example of the Night's Queen archetype- the womb as crucible of death or dire transformation. In the same way that vengeful wrath at the Rhoynar's destruction translated into the pestilence of Stone, I believe that Nissa-Nissa ) likewise became the vessel of the pestilence of Ice in backlash while delivering Lightbringer.

 

Also on the Stone Men: in the theme of seeds and cycles it is a stone fruit that pops the Shy Maid's cherry.

Hmmmm

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