A continuity error regarding Jonothor Darry?

[Lord Varys]

On 10/31/2018 at 1:53 AM, Ran said:

Yes. This is not weird at all. I can forget the name of a _person_ I met and had a chat with a couple of days earlier, why in the world would Sansa somehow be sure to remember the name a boy gave to a sword that does not belong to her, does not matter to her, was promptly lost anyways and so isn't around, and which was only named in her hearing a couple of times? Be reasonable.

Well, I'd second you on that - but we are discussing a continuity error. And a continuity error (or at least a very strange oddity) coming from the solution to that continuity error.

I can see Jaime remembering a very important conversation - within reason - more or less word for word. And it goes without saying that the Darry conversation is important. I never suggested he would have invented stuff there - but you yourself considered the possibility of Jaime misremembering the date and circumstances around that conversation, no?

And how memorable or important that event is in comparison to Aerys' cruelty and what else Jaime had silently suffer I'm not so sure about. Jaime never actually left the Kingsguard - and right now he mainly sees and defines himself as such - whereas he clearly killed his king because he wanted this man to pay for his atrocities- both the ones he committed and the ones he intended to commit. More crucial should be conversations revolving around the wildfire plans and commands involving delivering him the head of his own father.

I simply find that a more elegant possible solution than the idea that the office of the Hand of the King remained vacant in the middle of a war. Especially since the author actually likes to play with false memories and the like rather than strange vacancies of office that have to be explained. Offhand I don't recall another long vacancy in the office of the Hand aside from, perhaps, the years Orys Baratheon was imprisoned in Dorne (and that was at the very beginning of the office). In Aerys day and age the office of the Hand is of vital importance for the management of the Realm.

The vacancy idea would need proper explanation, too, - and you gave some potential explanations - but those all touch on crucial plot-relevant issues - like the relationship between Rhaegar and Aerys in this most crucial of times. I don't think George wants to reassess or change events there just to get rid to a continuity issue.

If we ever have canon material explaining that Aerys did not immediately name Rossart Chelsted's successor as Hand, people (or at least I ;-)) will want a proper explanation as to why this was the case because it is counter-intuitive and, quite frankly, impractical and very odd.

On 10/31/2018 at 1:53 AM, Ran said:

If the Queen does not want to be seen, Jaime would have interacted with her chief ladies just fine. So long as he knows she's in the Red Keep, her safety isn't a question. 

That could be. But it is just a tendency. If there are just some days between Chelsted's death and Rhaella's departure the thing is more believable (without actual canonical information) than if there are weeks or even 1-2 months.

[Frey family reunion]

On 10/31/2018 at 9:51 PM, Lord Varys said:

I simply find that a more elegant possible solution than the idea that the office of the Hand of the King remained vacant in the middle of a war.

I really don't get why you have such an issue with this.  We have Battle of the Bells, and Connington's dismissal.  Aerys than appoints Chelsted.  Rhaegar returns from what he was doing down south.  While Rhaegar and the Kingsguards are regathering and leading their army (which was basically all Connington was doing as Hand), Chelsted becomes a busy body and sticks his nose in Aerys side project.  Aerys has him burned.  Rather than appoint another person to be Hand and have another person stick his nose in his business, Aerys holds off appointing anyone else.  After all Rhaegar is doing everything Aerys really needed in a Hand, he was fighting the war.   After Rhaegar's death at the Trident, Aerys decides it's full speed ahead on operation blow up King's Landing and become transformed into a dragon.  Rossart gets appointed, because at this time Aerys is dropping all pretenses that he's really running a kingdom, and he concentrates on his ultimate goal.

[Lord Varys]

8 minutes ago, Frey family reunion said:

I really don't get why you have such an issue with this.

I don't have such an issue with that. It is a relatively minor thing - all I'm saying is that there would have been better ways to resolve that thing.

8 minutes ago, Frey family reunion said:

We have Battle of the Bells, and Connington's dismissal.  Aerys than appoints Chelsted.  Rhaegar returns from what he was doing down south.  While Rhaegar and the Kingsguards are regathering and leading their army (which was basically all Connington was doing as Hand), Chelsted becomes a busy body and sticks his nose in Aerys side project.

You are wrong here that Rhaegar had anything to do with this regathering thing. That was done by the Kingsguard, possibly even before Rhaegar's return (Aerys gives the command after Connington's dismissal and exile). Rhaegar raised and trained the new levies in the Crownlands. He was not far away from the city.

What I find odd is that there was a side project of burning the city before the Trident. The whole living dragon thing is speculation/conjecture at this point, not something Aerys actually said to anyone out loud as far as we know. What we do know from him is that he intended to burn his city rather than to leave it to Robert, and that would have happened only after the Trident.

There is no indication that Aerys wanted to burn KL no matter what happened - even if he won the war, say. And in light of the fact that Chelsted went to such great lengths to dissuade his king from burning the city makes it rather odd that this would have taken place before the Trident.

It is basically like assuming Hitler gave the command to destroy all infrastructure in Germany (which he did) while the Wehrmacht was still winning all the battles - this was only done when defeat was certain. And the implication is that Aerys had a similar motivation (posthumous dragon transformation aside).

8 minutes ago, Frey family reunion said:

Aerys has him burned.  Rather than appoint another person to be Hand and have another person stick his nose in his business, Aerys holds off appointing anyone else.  After all Rhaegar is doing everything Aerys really needed in a Hand, he was fighting the war.

But he was not the Hand, nor was the previous Hand - Chelsted - ever charged with waging the war, was he? There is no indication Aerys even played with the idea to name Rhaegar Hand after Chelsted.

8 minutes ago, Frey family reunion said:

After Rhaegar's death at the Trident, Aerys decides it's full speed ahead on operation blow up King's Landing and become transformed into a dragon.  Rossart gets appointed, because at this time Aerys is dropping all pretenses that he's really running a kingdom, and he concentrates on his ultimate goal.

See above on the dragon thing. In this context one could also ask the question why Rossart was Hand at all. Aerys knew everybody would burn, so why even bother naming Rossart? He had done everything he was asked even before, both under Chelsted and during this alleged vacancy.

And why would Rossart want to be Hand to a kingdom he was about to destroy? Giving Rossart this authority to implement the plan makes sense - him doing half or more of the work without that authority sort of undercuts the motivation to give him that office.

[Angel Eyes]

So is it an error in the timeline or did Jaime misremember the dates?

[Lord Varys]

Thinking about the whole thing again - I have to say that the idea that Chelsted is burned before Rhaegar marches to the Trident and while the other KG are still around causes a massive problem in another department unless George has Barristan Selmy remember that he was in on the wildfire plot, never said anything about that to Rhaegar, and had no deeper issues with Aerys II burning down hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Because if Jaime knew about the wildfire plot around the time or even before Chelsted confronted Aerys II about it, then this must mean by extension that the other Kingsguard (i.e. Selmy, Darry, and possibly even Lewyn Martell) who were at court at this time must have known/suspected as much as Jaime or even more.

It is impossible to sell - to me at least - that Rhaegar just shrugged off the burning of Chelsted and that neither Jaime nor any of the other Kingsguard told him why the man had been burned - or at least their suspicions. I mean, Jaime desperately wants to be Rhaegar's man, and he doesn't tell him his mad father's mad plans to convince him to either take him with him or do something about the man's madness now?

I don't think you can sell this thing.

So the best way to make sense of that is that Jaime misremembered stuff, not that Aerys II somehow had no Hand for a couple of weeks or even longer.

Because it also makes no sense that Aerys II would have implemented the wildfire plan before defeat was a likely possibility. Producing massive amounts of wildfire - sure, for a worst case scenario. Actually making plans to burn the city of King's Landing while Rhaegar was still there - not so much. In fact, I'd assume that the implementation (i.e. the putting of the wildfire at the various points in the city) was only done after the Trident. Perhaps there were theoretical plans to do that before Rhaegar had been defeated, but there wouldn't have been any reason to implement them.

[Ran]

@Angel Eyes, there's no continuity problem. It's just that certain events happen when we're explicitly told that Rhaegar was too busy to realize what was going on, and this goes for most of the Kingsguard excluding Jaime, and we don't have the full account of events in this critical period from Rhaegar's return from the south and his departure with the army that make things clearer. But everything fits together fine.