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Heresy 223 and where we go from here


Black Crow

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12 hours ago, JNR said:

Well, really, GRRM has never said anything along the boldfaced lines, and D&D haven't either.  It's only speculation on your part. 

Aux contraire, after the infamous sit down in Santa Fe back in 2014, the Mummers revealed that they had pressed GRRM on how the story will finish and how certain story arcs would end and I particular remember our noting that those arcs included Bran and Arya.

Incidentally, this thread on Reddit is worth looking at 

https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/bzey0c/spoilers_extended_the_book_ending_the_show_ending/

 

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4 hours ago, Lord Aegon The Compromiser said:

How does Young Griff get a dragon in this scenario?

He doesn’t. Symbolically Young Griff is the dragon against actual dragons ridden by Euron and/or Victarion. BC pointed out that YG is the “mummer’s dragon”, and it’s possible that Victarion will use a horn to bind a dragon. But I was just spitballing, because Daenerys vs YG fits the Dance 2.0 better since the parallel was about the line of inheritance between a brother and sister.

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2 hours ago, Black Crow said:

after the infamous sit down in Santa Fe back in 2014, the Mummers revealed that they had pressed GRRM on how the story will finish and how certain story arcs would end and I particular remember our noting that those arcs included Bran and Arya.

 

Those and other vague references are all but meaningless without context. 

For instance, how the second Long Night ends is, perhaps, the most critical question to finishing the overall story. 

So... if you really believe what you wrote above... you must think the primary conflict of the novels will end when Arya slays the Popsicle Dark Lord, aka the Night King, with a single blow, and thus kills every other Popsicle and all wights everywhere simultaneously.  Because D&D did that, which means GRRM must have told them that.

Do you really believe that? 

Or do you think GRRM told D&D something vague and evasive (per his norm going back a quarter century), and they grossly misinterpreted it/chose to do a wildly different thing?

 

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2 hours ago, Black Crow said:

Incidentally, this thread on Reddit is worth looking at

Sad to say, I have always found Reddit a rather poor source of ASOIAF analysis.  This isn't much better.

It's not all that complicated IMO.  GRRM is doing his thing; the show did a very different thing.  Trying to extrapolate from the show to future books is a fool's game.

The fundamental reason for this is that D&D didn't have remotely as much info from GRRM as they needed, and they are simply piss-poor at developing and resolving storylines compared to GRRM. 

They are not narrative architects, but only contractors, who build from blueprints.  And if you don't give them a blueprint, and they are forced to improvise, the result will be unfortunate from both aesthetic and functional standpoints.  It will fall over the first time the wind blows.

GRRM all but announced this, btw, in posting the following on his blog:

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I assure you, HBO and David & Dan would both have been thrilled and delighted if THE WINDS OF WINTER had been delivered and published four or five years ago

You bet they would have been thrilled.  TWOW would have given them some sort of blueprint to work from... which they didn't have from GRRM already, and obviously never got.

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17 minutes ago, JNR said:

 

So... if you really believe what you wrote above... you must think the primary conflict of the novels will end when Arya slays the Popsicle Dark Lord, aka the Night King, with a single blow, and thus kills every other Popsicle and all wights everywhere simultaneously.  Because D&D did that, which means GRRM must have told them that.

Do you really believe that? 

 

 

No, not at all. The point I was making is that they had no idea what was going to happen, or rather no idea how it was going to happen, hence what has effectively happened is that we have the story as presented by GRRM up to the close of ADwD, and we have the last players standing - pretty much as predicted in 1993 - but we don't have what lies between, although we can be pretty sure from the various outcomes presented that R+L=J is either false or more likely irrelevant and that this isn't about the Targaryen Succession

Just for example, according to an interview with the young mummer playing Bran they confirmed that his fate was directly prescribed by GRRM, but as you suggest in getting there they had to make it up as they went along - or more likely, per that Reddit post, picked up a long obsolete clue and applied out totally out of context.

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1 hour ago, Black Crow said:

Just for example, according to an interview with the young mummer playing Bran they confirmed that his fate was directly prescribed by GRRM, but as you suggest in getting there they had to make it up as they went along - or more likely, per that Reddit post, picked up a long obsolete clue and applied out totally out of context.

The comment from Bran's actor is thirdhand information, so it's questionable as to whether or not D&D accurately conveyed what they were told by GRRM, and whether Isaac, in turn, accurately conveyed what was said by D&D.

Nonetheless, I'll play devil's advocate here: the political fate of the realm being decided by a Great Council isn't that improbable of an outcome (though I'd always thought that would result in Edric Storm being made king, even though the reader has no real connection to him as a character). If we reach an endpoint where all of the (legitimate) Baratheons, Dany, and Aegon VI are dead, then it would seem what comes next is either a Great Council, or the realm breaking apart into several separate kingdoms.

Indeed, Catelyn had already floated the idea of Robb, Stannis, and Renly making peace, and resolving the Wo5K with a Great Council:

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"Robb will set aside his crown if you and your brother will do the same," she said, hoping it was true. She would make it true if she must; Robb would listen to her, even if his lords would not. "Let the three of you call for a Great Council, such as the realm has not seen for a hundred years. We will send to Winterfell, so Bran may tell his tale and all men may know the Lannisters for the true usurpers. Let the assembled lords of the Seven Kingdoms choose who shall rule them."


So, if a Great Council were assembled toward the end of ASOIAF, who would be our frontrunners? Hard to know, since we don't know who will survive, but Edric Storm is publicly acknowledged as Robert's son, and his mother was noble, so he might be an easy consensus candidate--for example, the GC that appointed Aegon V had been pondering a Blackfyre before Bloodraven intervened, so King Edric wouldn't be that unusual. Presumably, any surviving great houses that could put together a sizable voting bloc would be contenders as well.

The hypothetical sales pitch for Bran is that, in a realm that has just survived Long Night 2.0, he's the descendant of Bran the Builder, and that he went on a journey to seek out the CotF like the Last Hero of legend; presumably, he'd have the Northern lords in his voting bloc, and possibly some of the Riverlands as well, since he's half Tully--and maybe, maybe some of the Vale, depending on how Sansa's arc goes.

That's my most generous attempt at playing devil's advocate, and I'm not satisfied. Technically, GRRM could slap Bran on the throne if he really wanted to, but there's a difference between whether or not something is technically possible in-world, and whether it actually works as a character arc and a narrative.

As a character, Bran was missing from one book, and spent two other books essentially moving from Point A to Point B--all the while, progressing little in age or maturity. "King Bran" just seems like an unintuitive endpoint to the way Bran's arc has actually played out on the page.

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1 hour ago, Matthew. said:

As a character, Bran was missing from one book, and spent two other books essentially moving from Point A to Point B--all the while, progressing little in age or maturity. "King Bran" just seems like an unintuitive endpoint to the way Bran's arc has actually played out on the page.

I suspect that the Mummers' outcome was a combination of two different sources. First of all GRRM evidently confirmed in 2014 that Bran will make it through, per the 1993 synopsis, and the third of the three holy shit moments may have been the revelation that R+L=J doesn't mean squat and that Bran, not Jon will become high king. Then there is the redacted passage in the 1993 synopsis which supposedly includes a passage referring to Bran being elected King. While this comes in the middle of the synopsis, not at the end its probably been used in default of any other clue. Having read the Mabinogion I'm comfortable with the notion of Bran becoming high king but decidedly sceptical of an election being involved

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1 hour ago, Matthew. said:

That's my most generous attempt at playing devil's advocate, and I'm not satisfied. Technically, GRRM could slap Bran on the throne if he really wanted to, but there's a difference between whether or not something is technically possible in-world, and whether it actually works as a character arc and a narrative.

This is the part of the perception I never get. Weirwood Robb 2.0 is a very creepy possibility. I certainly wouldn't call it slap, as he already sat Bran on a Weirwood throne and the Winterfell throne. 

 

edit: It's almost like there are three thrones: one weirwood throne of earth and water, one Iron throne of Iron and bronze and one of ice and fire. 

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33 minutes ago, Black Crow said:

 Having read the Mabinogion I'm comfortable with the notion of Bran becoming high king but decidedly sceptical of an election being involved

Just to expand a little for the benefit of those who may not have read the Mabinogion; the difficulty with the Mummers' version is that it places Bran Stark on a conventional throne, which although not actually the Iron Throne might as well have been.

Bran the Blessed on the other hand, [or rather his severed but living head which amounts to the same thing as crippled Bran Stark] is placed under a hill to watch over and be the guardian of Britain.

So in other words, I can indeed see Bran Stark as High King sitting on a weirwood rather than an iron throne, but doing so not in a throne room in a castle, but under the ground and not seated in a carved weirwood throne but on a living one as he watches over his realm through the eyes on the trees

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Long before, during and probably long after reading ASoIaF I am deeply fascinated with the Atlantis myth, presented to us by Platon in his dialogues Timaios and  Kritias as a story learned in Egypt. The story is never finished, though Platon lived some years longer.

One of the books I read puts this in context to anothery myth I invested some time in, Troy. Basically, the conclusion is that Platon never finished the Atlantis story, because at first it seemed like a report from a distant land, but taking a closer look into translating names and so on, he realized it was the story of Troy, and of course the Greek people knew how that ended.

Long story short, and if someone wants to discuss the above in detail please drop me a note, I wonder whether GRRM stopped writing the books because his ending is too similar to the one of an already existing story, maybe Dune?

 

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@alienarea if you're interested in Atlantis I would advise you to search YT videos about Eye of Sahara, by Bright Insight. He theorizes Eye of Sahara in Mauritania is actually Atlantis and provided great evidence. 

I think GRRM has a higher chance of dropping the series after TWOW and maybe the story resembles his other works. 

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1 hour ago, alienarea said:

I wonder whether GRRM stopped writing the books because his ending is too similar to the one of an already existing story, maybe Dune?

 

I think it more likely that his problem is the same one faced by the Mummers. He knows where he wants everybody to end up but doesn't know how to get them there. The difference is that the Mummers were faced with a strict deadline and so had to come up with something, while for GRRM there is always tomorrow

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44 minutes ago, Jova Snow said:

@alienarea if you're interested in Atlantis I would advise you to search YT videos about Eye of Sahara, by Bright Insight. He theorizes Eye of Sahara in Mauritania is actually Atlantis and provided great evidence. 

I think GRRM has a higher chance of dropping the series after TWOW and maybe the story resembles his other works. 

Will check it out and let you know, thank you.

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12 hours ago, alienarea said:

Will check it out and let you know, thank you.

Saw it, not convinced. 

Not wanting to derail the thread, but using Google Earth for measuring distances and using Nigeria's twin birth rate as an additional proof while it is roughly 2.400 kilometers away is alarming.

 

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2 hours ago, alienarea said:

Saw it, not convinced. 

Not wanting to derail the thread, but using Google Earth for measuring distances and using Nigeria's twin birth rate as an additional proof while it is roughly 2.400 kilometers away is alarming.

 

Yeah but I still think it's the best possible place to find Atlantis there is also theories about some island but I don't remember it's name now. 

A book question. Blade of others, Dawn, crystal of the Seven and the Wall are all described as milkglass alive with light, what is the connection between them? 

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1 hour ago, Jova Snow said:

Yeah but I still think it's the best possible place to find Atlantis there is also theories about some island but I don't remember it's name now. 

A book question. Blade of others, Dawn, crystal of the Seven and the Wall are all described as milkglass alive with light, what is the connection between them? 

I don't recall the Crystal of the Seven, where it is and who has it?

In my understanding the sword Dawn is older than the wall, and it isn't mentioned that magic went into forging it.

I guess GRRM just re-used material descriptions that sound mystic and hasn't decided yet whether to use them.

And if he reads this he probably claims that he had to rewrite TWoW because of the 'milkglass alive with light' knot five years from now and that it will be released 'soon' ;)

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Interesting to connect the Others sword with Dawn, we've discussed both as the original Ice of House Stark. 

Do we ever see anything other than Dawn described as milkglass?  The Other's sword is impossibly thin and has bluish light, so apart from being translucent, I don't think they are described the same way. 

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2 hours ago, alienarea said:

I don't recall the Crystal of the Seven, where it is and who has it?

In my understanding the sword Dawn is older than the wall, and it isn't mentioned that magic went into forging it.

I guess GRRM just re-used material descriptions that sound mystic and hasn't decided yet whether to use them.

And if he reads this he probably claims that he had to rewrite TWoW because of the 'milkglass alive with light' knot five years from now and that it will be released 'soon' ;)

The crystal of the seven has seven facets to reflect the seven aspects of the deity. 

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The two shields of Westeros are houses Dayne and Stark. I theorize that you would use opposing magic to guard against the other, therefore Dayne would have a sword that could defend against fire, and Stark would have a blade that could defend against ice. Speaking of Dawn - it’s probably the blade that could kill dragons.

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