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Heresy 227 and the Great Turtle


Black Crow

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7 hours ago, alienarea said:

If you still believe the books will be finished, you have not been paying attention, sweet summer child.

I have yet to read a convincing proof of this.  All we have are half-assed suppositions.

Here's mine.  I think GRRM can, in theory, wrap it in two books.  He also seems confident he'll have TWOW out pretty soon -- this is not the first such remark he's made in recent months, after years of zero predictions.

So finishing will probably come down to whether TWOW tells half the remaining story of ASOIAF.  If it doesn't, that will be clear.

I would say the odds are very low that if he doesn't finish, anybody else will.  He's famously been clear on this point and I doubt his wife would spit on his wishes.

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4 hours ago, Black Crow said:

I'll let JNR speak for himself, but to my mind I think that Bran will play a key role in the return of House Stark.

Uh huh, good way to put it.  I think he'll manage that in various ways both literal and metaphorical. 

4 hours ago, Black Crow said:

a great big gaping hole in their version is the failure to address the Musgrave Ritual, and what's going on with the children of Winterfell. Perfectly understandable in choosing to concentrate on the game of thrones, but GRRM isn't writing that story.

Yes.  This is another area where he apparently told D&D nothing, and they and their assistants figured out nothing, and that evidently includes the scouring of the fan ideas they did.  They would have featured this sort of thing on the show given a chance... but they literally didn't have a clue.

(And that's why I'm kinda disappointed there will never be a Long Night show, even though I dislike prequels on principle.  Some of the best clues to the future are in the past.)

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20 hours ago, JNR said:

"Bran never sits the Iron Throne or is recognized by the public as king of Westeros, but he becomes a sort of king, eventually, in that he succeeds Bloodraven as a greenseer," then yes, that's certainly plausible and even likely

Just a bit of symbolic support for this...

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Under the hill, the broken boy sat upon a weirwood throne

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The singers made Bran a throne of his own, like the one Lord Brynden sat

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Bran, frightened, pulled away. His father and the black pool and the godswood faded and were gone and he was back in the cavern, the pale thick roots of his weirwood throne cradling his limbs as a mother does a child.

Now with this imagery in mind, ask yourself if GRRM might have said, as a holy-shit moment, something like:

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Bran's future ultimately features him on a throne he never wanted, but learns to accept.

What would D&D -- who just openly admitted they never analyzed the books, because it was too much work -- have thought about a remark like the above?  I wonder.

We have no way to know what that third holy-shit moment really was, but we do know it supposedly came at the "very end" of the show according to D&D.

This is also a good example of why it's always important to get GRRM's exact words.  He's one of the slyest bastards in the history of F/SF.

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Yes, exactly.  The above quotes point to Bran on a weirwood throne.  I don't ever see him leaving the cave at this point.  Why would that even be necessary when he can occupy the entire weirnet at will.  He will have a thousand eyes, can warg any beast.  The Wall may keep the Others in but it also keeps Bran safe for the moment.  He has the cotf to look after all his bodily needs.  I think if Jojen, Meera and Hodor ever leave; they will be bound in some way never to speak his name or reveal his location.  Since he can communicate with Jon, it's likely Jon will end up being his batman.

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16 hours ago, Lord Aegon The Compromiser said:

A better candidate would be Benjen showing up alive...and not as Coldhands.

Benjen is dead, my friend. Othor and Jafer were part of Benjen’s ranging posse and were purposely left near the Wall as bait to lure men of the Watch to send out a search party so they could be killed too - and they all nearly were at The Fist of the First Men. If the reverse happened and only Benjen’s corpse were found, I don’t think LC Mormont’s expedition would’ve been as large.

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3 hours ago, JNR said:

I have yet to read a convincing proof of this.  All we have are half-assed suppositions.

Here's mine.  I think GRRM can, in theory, wrap it in two books.  He also seems confident he'll have TWOW out pretty soon -- this is not the first such remark he's made in recent months, after years of zero predictions.

So finishing will probably come down to whether TWOW tells half the remaining story of ASOIAF.  If it doesn't, that will be clear.

I would say the odds are very low that if he doesn't finish, anybody else will.  He's famously been clear on this point and I doubt his wife would spit on his wishes.

How hard can it be to write a winter tale where nearly everyone dies? Which is what I’m expecting to read: an extended winter that starves most of the common folk, who in turn gather under the direction of the High Sparrow to overthrow and maybe kill all the nobles in Kings Landing and every other castle in the seven kingdoms.

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3 hours ago, Feather Crystal said:

Benjen is dead, my friend. Othor and Jafer were part of Benjen’s ranging posse and were purposely left near the Wall as bait to lure men of the Watch to send out a search party so they could be killed too - and they all nearly were at The Fist of the First Men. If the reverse happened and only Benjen’s corpse were found, I don’t think LC Mormont’s expedition would’ve been as large.

All of this only requires Benjen to be pre-occupied, not dead.

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10 hours ago, Lord Aegon The Compromiser said:

All of this only requires Benjen to be pre-occupied, not dead.

Pre-occupied or dead, doesn't really signify in this case. I'm open to either, but so far as the written story goes he's actually a relatively minor character and no matter how welcome his return, its hardly going to be a Holy Shit moment and certainly not on the level of Bran's elevation.

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20 hours ago, LynnS said:

The above quotes point to Bran on a weirwood throne.  I don't ever see him leaving the cave at this point.  Why would that even be necessary when he can occupy the entire weirnet at will.  He will have a thousand eyes, can warg any beast.

He apparently can get weirwood memories from anywhere on the net, at any point in time... but how do we know he can skinchange anything, anywhere? 

Every time he's skinchanged something to my recollection, it has been in his nearby physical proximity (and certainly never backwards in time, as on the show). 

Summer is, granted, not close to him at times during wolfdreams -- as with Arya skinchanging Nymeria from Essos -- but I think that's a special case, emerging from a special bond.

So maybe he can remote-skinchange something, but I think that remains to be established, and if not, he's very likely to need to leave the cave.  Though before he does that, there are things he will need to learn and understand from the history of Westeros.

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20 hours ago, Feather Crystal said:

How hard can it be to write a winter tale where nearly everyone dies?

Would you really be satisfied as a reader with that? "Snows fall, everyone dies."

It's an enormously complex job GRRM faces IMO. He has to resolve every major character arc, aligning the plot with his endgame goals (that he's known all along). He has to provide revelations for every major mystery (and he's known them all along, too).

And he also has to maintain continuity in all the ways the show never did. People cannot know or do or say the wrong things, physical laws must be observed (ravens cannot fly a thousand miles overnight), common sense must be retained (the Wall is not going to fall in two minutes because of a wighted dragon), and on and on.

I think he can do it, but I also think it's remarkably complicated.

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3 hours ago, JNR said:

He apparently can get weirwood memories from anywhere on the net, at any point in time... but how do we know he can skinchange anything, anywhere? 

Every time he's skinchanged something to my recollection, it has been in his nearby physical proximity (and certainly never backwards in time, as on the show). 

Summer is, granted, not close to him at times during wolfdreams -- as with Arya skinchanging Nymeria from Essos -- but I think that's a special case, emerging from a special bond.

So maybe he can remote-skinchange something, but I think that remains to be established, and if not, he's very likely to need to leave the cave.  Though before he does that, there are things he will need to learn and understand from the history of Westeros.

Agreed and I think that we've the old difference between communicating and warging. Bloodraven, as we've seen, can come to people in dreams, but that's rather different from skinchanging. The latter may well be possible at a distance when a link has already been established, but I don't see it working otherwise.

A point worth looking at, is how Bloodraven established the link with Bran in the first place?

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3 hours ago, JNR said:

Would you really be satisfied as a reader with that? "Snows fall, everyone dies."

It's an enormously complex job GRRM faces IMO. He has to resolve every major character arc, aligning the plot with his endgame goals (that he's known all along). He has to provide revelations for every major mystery (and he's known them all along, too).

And he also has to maintain continuity in all the ways the show never did. People cannot know or do or say the wrong things, physical laws must be observed (ravens cannot fly a thousand miles overnight), common sense must be retained (the Wall is not going to fall in two minutes because of a wighted dragon), and on and on.

I think he can do it, but I also think it's remarkably complicated.

You do not have to resolve character arcs if they die prematurely. That's actually very life-like. Lives don't always end with a tidy bow. This is also why I believe Benjen is dead. Sometimes people disappear and you never find out what happened to them. 

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5 minutes ago, Black Crow said:

A point worth looking at, is how Bloodraven established the link with Bran in the first place?

In my opinion that's the definition of "flying" - the ability to "fly" into anyone's dream without any type of connection.

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1 hour ago, Black Crow said:

A point worth looking at, is how Bloodraven established the link with Bran in the first place?

It appears to involve Bloodraven skinchanging the weirnet and then using the weirnet to enter their dreams.

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I dream of a tree sometimes. A weirwood, like the one in the godswood. It calls to me.

Is that the way Bloodraven manifests in such dreams? I think so, though others might dispute it.

Very similarly in the same book, we see Bran commnicating with Jon in Jon's dream, also probably using the weirnet, and certainly appearing to Jon as a talking weirwood:

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The weirwood had his brother's face. Had his brother always had three eyes?

We might also ask if Bloodraven (not Bran) can remote-skinchange, and has been doing so in the books... or if he, like Bran, is limited to skinchanging life that is close to him physically. 

I think he is skinchanging the local weirwoods, and through them accesses the weirnet.  But if you put Bloodraven on a raft in the center of the Sunset Sea, I doubt he could skinchange anything in Westeros.

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6 hours ago, JNR said:

Would you really be satisfied as a reader with that? "Snows fall, everyone dies."

It's an enormously complex job GRRM faces IMO. He has to resolve every major character arc, aligning the plot with his endgame goals (that he's known all along). He has to provide revelations for every major mystery (and he's known them all along, too).

And he also has to maintain continuity in all the ways the show never did. People cannot know or do or say the wrong things, physical laws must be observed (ravens cannot fly a thousand miles overnight), common sense must be retained (the Wall is not going to fall in two minutes because of a wighted dragon), and on and on.

I think he can do it, but I also think it's remarkably complicated.

Agreed. Which gives even more reason why he should have spent all these years actually sitting down writing TWOW. Instead he has spent the vast majority of these 8 1/2 years doing anything else, including writing 2 fake history books.

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13 minutes ago, Lord Aegon The Compromiser said:

Is this true? It's even worse than what I was hearing.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/10254771/game-of-thrones-prequel-axed/amp/

Yes. We were just discussing this a few posts back. They passed on Bloodmoon, which GRRM referred to as The Long Night, but they ordered ten episodes based on Fire and Blood called House of the Dragon.

Your link has some interesting details that I hadn't read before though, specifically that it was cancelled because it was "too woke". It had the first white walker as being black, a lesbian central character, a mixed-race Stark ancestor, and featured "colonialism". These criticisms seem to bolster the idea that the Others were simply outsiders - people who were outcasts - and targets of "otherizing". It's not a new concept to Heresy. We've discussed these themes many years ago as well as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the parallels to Bran, Bloodraven, the wildlings, and the white walkers.

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1 hour ago, Lord Aegon The Compromiser said:

Is this true? It's even worse than what I was hearing.

It's true the Long Night show is gone.  Don't know if all the stuff in the link is true.  This did catch my eye:

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HBO were terrified the first prequel would scare hardcore fans.

OK, well, speaking as a hardcore fan...

1. Lesbianism is in the books already and is no big deal.  Where it occurs, it's primarily mocked by the fans not for the subject matter, but for GRRM's ludicrous phrase "Myrish swamp," which is rivaled only by "fat pink mast" as a phrase badly in need of rewriting.

2. Black characters are already in canon too.  No big deal.

3. One of Ned Stark's ancestors in the books is already a crannogman and hence, Book Ned already arguably descends in part from a different "race"

4. However, Westeros had no widely established indigenous human population before the First Men -- certainly not one that was exploited or abused by an empire that colonized the land -- so this:

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the main theme was to be colonialism

...makes zero sense to me if true.  It would have amounted to abandoning the canonical tale of the Dawn Age, and would probably have been about as thrilling as a textbook of moral philosophy.  

But I still don't know if that was the real plan... or if it was, why GRRM would have wanted anything to do with it.

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56 minutes ago, Feather Crystal said:

Yes. We were just discussing this a few posts back. They passed on Bloodmoon, which GRRM referred to as The Long Night, but they ordered ten episodes based on Fire and Blood called House of the Dragon.

Your link has some interesting details that I hadn't read before though, specifically that it was cancelled because it was "too woke". It had the first white walker as being black, a lesbian central character, a mixed-race Stark ancestor, and featured "colonialism". These criticisms seem to bolster the idea that the Others were simply outsiders - people who were outcasts - and targets of "otherizing". It's not a new concept to Heresy. We've discussed these themes many years ago as well as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the parallels to Bran, Bloodraven, the wildlings, and the white walkers.

Those interesting details are what I was asking if they were true or not. Nerdrotic called it awhile back that it was going to be a "woke" (aka "representation" and virtue signalling over good plot and story) version of Game of Thrones. I don't remember these details though. If true, he was right.

 

Edit: Prime example of a woke show is the dumpster fire that is current Doctor Who.

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