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Heresy 228 and one over the eight


Black Crow

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5 minutes ago, corbon said:

Surely, by the far the simplest, most straight forward and logical explanation is that Rhaegar did it on his own, as a reward for her KotLT exploits? Not so much the QoLaB but the anonymous Queen of Justice, Courage and Honour.
Thats extremely simple. 
Thats extremely straight forward.
Thats extremely logical.

The only issue comes afterwards, and thats the made up 'politics' one. Sure, "all the smiles died". But nothing actually happened as a result, did it - for all the hoo-hah we give it here.

When would Aerys have a chance to pressure Rhaegar, and why would Rhaegar agree? Its not something Aerys could enforce, nor something he could hold over Rhaegar.
That seems neither simple, straight forward, nor logical to me, let alone 'by far the mostest' of these things.

Yes, I accept that as a simple, straight forward explanation also.

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3 hours ago, corbon said:

Oh yes. the WW and their wights are definitely a thing. I just think the whole Nights King Story sounds like so much #fakenews put about as propaganda by the enemies of a perfectly normal human Lord Commander  who went rogue (or his enemies were the rogues), and the enemies won, turning their propaganda into 'history' which became myth/legend.
And I'm not 'convinced thats the case', its just where I stand on a balance of probabilities sort of thing.

I think either this is the case or that the Nights King story was true and he was doing it for noble reasons. But similar to Jon Snow he was misunderstood by the Nights Watch and they mutineed.

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3 hours ago, LynnS said:

When would Aerys have a chance to pressure Rhaegar, and why would Rhaegar agree? Its not something Aerys could enforce, nor something he could hold over Rhaegar.

When Rhaegar reported back to him on the results of his investigation. He is the one who was offended and he's the one who called for the investigation.   Aerys is the king, he can certainly order Rhaegar around and he would have no choice but to obey.

Placing the crown in Lyanna's lap, from the end of a lance is backhanded compliment in my view.  If he wanted to honor her, he would have gotten down off his horse and placed it on her head with his own hands.   

Lyanna is both the winner and the loser.  Aerys won't have any satisfaction in not discovering the identity of the KoLT and he is a vengeful character.  It's Lyanna's wolf blood that ended her life and Brandon's life.  She deserved better than a butcher according do Ned.  Aerys fits the description of  butcher. 

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In reading the passages about Sansa and Lady;  I wonder if they represent a parallel to Lyanna and Jon.

Quote

A Game of Thrones - Eddard III

That was when Sansa finally seemed to comprehend. Her eyes were frightened as they went to her father. "He doesn't mean Lady, does he?" She saw the truth on his face. "No," she said. "No, not Lady, Lady didn't bite anybody, she's good …"

"Lady wasn't there," Arya shouted angrily. "You leave her alone!"

"Stop them," Sansa pleaded, "don't let them do it, please, please, it wasn't Lady, it was Nymeria, Arya did it, you can't, it wasn't Lady, don't let them hurt Lady, I'll make her be good, I promise, I promise …" She started to cry.

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A Game of Thrones - Eddard III

They were all staring at him, but it was Sansa's look that cut. "She is of the north. She deserves better than a butcher."

He left the room with his eyes burning and his daughter's wails echoing in his ears, and found the direwolf pup where they chained her. Ned sat beside her for a while. "Lady," he said, tasting the name. He had never paid much attention to the names the children had picked, but looking at her now, he knew that Sansa had chosen well. She was the smallest of the litter, the prettiest, the most gentle and trusting. She looked at him with bright golden eyes, and he ruffled her thick grey fur.

Shortly, Jory brought him Ice.

When it was over, he said, "Choose four men and have them take the body north. Bury her at Winterfell."

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A Game of Thrones - Eddard I

"She should be on a hill somewhere, under a fruit tree, with the sun and clouds above her and the rain to wash her clean."

"I was with her when she died," Ned reminded the king. "She wanted to come home, to rest beside Brandon and Father." He could hear her still at times. Promise me, she had cried, in a room that smelled of blood and roses. Promise me, Ned. The fever had taken her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister's eyes. Ned remembered the way she had smiled then, how tightly her fingers had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals spilling from her palm, dead and black. After that he remembered nothing. They had found him still holding her body, silent with grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand from his. Ned could recall none of it. "I bring her flowers when I can," he said. "Lyanna was … fond of flowers."

 

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A Game of Thrones - Eddard II

"You were not there," Ned said, bitterness in his voice. Troubled sleep was no stranger to him. He had lived his lies for fourteen years, yet they still haunted him at night. "There was no honor in that conquest."

"The Others take your honor!" Robert swore. "What did any Targaryen ever know of honor? Go down into your crypt and ask Lyanna about the dragon's honor!"

"You avenged Lyanna at the Trident," Ned said, halting beside the king. Promise me, Ned, she had whispered.

It seems to me that both Sansa and Lady are stand-ins for Lyanna.  The direwolf , innocent, gentle and beautiful, like Lyanna; who's bones are sent North for burial just as he promised.  Ned again acts on the promise by sending Lady north for burial.

Sansa pleading for life of her wolf pup perhaps not unlike Lyanna pleading for Jon's life.  Robert wanted vengeance and perhaps Ned did as well and it's only after Ned agrees not to seek vengeance that the fear leaves Lyanna's eyes.

Sansa says that Lady is innocent, did no wrong and this may also be a thing that Lyanna said to Ned. Sansa will make sure that Lady is good.  Perhaps Lyanna extracts a promise from Ned to raise Jon to be a good man.   

Lyanna  presses Ned hard for his promises and I wonder why he seems so reluctant to agree.  What does it take for Ned to want to kill an infant unless the truth is horribly disturbing, something that drives him to vengeance.  

Of all the candidates I have in mind; Aerys would be the most disturbing to Ned. Lady/Lyanna deserves better than a butcher. 

If Lady is Lyanna, where does Ned find her 'chained up'?  

What would Catelyn do if she knew?  The thought makes Ned shudder.

 

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6 hours ago, corbon said:

Oh yes. the WW and their wights are definitely a thing. I just think the whole Nights King Story sounds like so much #fakenews put about as propaganda by the enemies of a perfectly normal human Lord Commander  who went rogue (or his enemies were the rogues), and the enemies won, turning their propaganda into 'history' which became myth/legend.
And I'm not 'convinced thats the case', its just where I stand on a balance of probabilities sort of thing.

Hey! Something we agree on! 

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7 hours ago, corbon said:

Thats rather over-egging the problem. Just letting Jon know who he is (who is parents were) would be enough, and a far more reasonable thing for a dying Lyanna to be concerned about than "Make him King".

I tend to agree with this. Unless ofc it is being done to protect Jon from something even worse. 

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7 hours ago, corbon said:

Thats rather unlikely. Its doubtful anyone knew, or even expected, Rhaegar to actually enter or win. I don;t think its something that can be effectively planned in advance. Note that even when that thing was tried, in a far far more controlled environment, it failed miserably.

Maybe. Bit just because something happened one way in the past, it doesn’t mean that it will now. 

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7 hours ago, corbon said:

Oh yes. the WW and their wights are definitely a thing. I just think the whole Nights King Story sounds like so much #fakenews put about as propaganda by the enemies of a perfectly normal human Lord Commander  who went rogue (or his enemies were the rogues), and the enemies won, turning their propaganda into 'history' which became myth/legend.
And I'm not 'convinced thats the case', its just where I stand on a balance of probabilities sort of thing.

Now that’s where you and I separated. If we have evidence of magic occurring elsewhere y not then too. 

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6 hours ago, corbon said:

Ideas? What ideas? :) Usually mine aren't really articulated even to myself until I need to explain them to someone. I work better analyzing and adapting others ideas than generating original ones.

Are you sure about that?  How will you know if you never try. 

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6 hours ago, corbon said:

A rarely seen (thought to be locally extinct) animal that is the sigil of the local ruling house. 
That is clearly dead as the result of a fight with the sigil of the King? The King that in the very next chapter we find out is coming to visit?
That has living pups that exactly match the ruling family's children, down to the outsider extra?

Nah, thats outside interference by someone or something. Old Gods seems most likely to me, given the Stark history and allegiances and the fact that they are direwolves - perhaps through Bloodraven.

Ok. So there are one metric ton of coincidences involved. But from what I can see that is all that you have proven thus far. Why is there a need to go beyond that? 

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6 hours ago, corbon said:

You said they must be true dreams, sent by the gods, and can't be changed.
This dream of Ned's clearly originates within his own memories, not sent by the gods, and has changed. 

So by your definition, its not.

Just because it’s based upon his own memory it doesn’t mean that someone or something did not manipulate those particular memories. Maybe the dream changes based off of what the current message is that Ned needs to hear? 

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21 hours ago, Black Crow said:

Lord Eddard thinks of broken promises, so what might they be? Lord Eddard has raised Jon as his son, nurtured him, concealed his identity and ultimately protected him. Unless the promise was to proclaim him the Targaryen heir raise his banners and storm King's Landing, its a bit hard to see what more he could have done and where broken promises come into the story, unless...

There are various ways to finish that idea.  A pretty simple one would be: Unless Jon's mother made Ned promise to tell Jon the truth about his parents once Jon came of age.  

This would fit pretty well with:

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"I dreamed about the crow again last night. The one with three eyes. He flew into my bedchamber and told me to come with him, so I did. We went down to the crypts. Father was there, and we talked. He was sad."

"And why was that?" Luwin peered through his tube.

"It was something to do about Jon, I think." The dream had been deeply disturbing, more so than any of the other crow dreams.

 

If Ned believes he's about to die, he also knows Jon will never learn a thing from him, and thus his promise to Jon's mother on that score will go unfulfilled.  So he is sad.

It would be something like GRRM realizing he will not finish ASOIAF, and therefore also realizing his many promises on that point to the fandom will go unfulfilled.

Let's hope that day never comes, and we never get such dreams.

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16 hours ago, corbon said:

Imagine Monica had just secured Bill a $50m donation. And he said "you're the greatest". Its a bit more ambiguous, especially to her, now.

This has no apparent connection with naming the queen of love of beauty, so where you wrote "ambiguous," I would write "logically unrelated to Harrenhal."

16 hours ago, corbon said:

But given her actions as KotLT, I think the poltical ramifications might be secondary in her thoughts, at least initially.

Assumes facts not in evidence.  The fan concept that Lyanna was the KotLT does not make it so, because as I pointed out before, mobthink does not create reality. 

And actually the case for Lyanna, despite its popularity, is rather weak.  The case for other candidates also being weak -- which it invariably is -- does not make the case for Lyanna any stronger.

16 hours ago, corbon said:

I bet Rhaegar's smile didn't die.

I bet you can't demonstrate he was smiling in the first place.  It's just another thing you're assuming, like the identity of the mystery knight, and it makes little sense.

Rhaegar, like Lyanna, was also no fool, and he knew quite well what he was doing and how it would be seen.

He understood how it would affect his marriage (badly), his daughter's concept of him (badly), his parents' concept of him (badly), the relationship between the crown and Dorne (disaster), and that it would be seen by some including his paranoid father to support conspiracy theories of a secret alliance between him, the Starks, and other major players. 

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23 hours ago, Melifeather said:

Whether you believe Lyanna is Jon's mother, or Rhaegar and Lyanna, or Ned and Ashara, etc, etc, different people can read the same passage and draw a completely different conclusion, because the context has changed. I find this little writing magic trick really remarkable, and its how GRRM misleads readers while hiding clues in plain sight.

Yes, I said much the same thing to someone else recently. 

It's hard to let go of our personal approaches to analyzing canon.  And given such a huge thicket of text, so dense with symbolism and allusion and subtext and alternate possibilities, there's really no "objective" way to analyze it and cut through it to the answers we want.

The best compromise is probably to think like GRRM... which is hard for those of us who have no experience of dealing with him.  It's probably easiest for Parris, of all people worldwide at this point, and she's also the one who reminds us "George doesn't do obvious."

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8 hours ago, corbon said:

When would Aerys have a chance to pressure Rhaegar, and why would Rhaegar agree? Its not something Aerys could enforce, nor something he could hold over Rhaegar.
That seems neither simple, straight forward, nor logical to me, let alone 'by far the mostest' of these things.

That’s the thing. As readers we have no idea if these things have occurred. The only person who might know is Rhaegar and he’s pretty much staying quiet on that front. 

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1 hour ago, JNR said:

This has no apparent connection with naming the queen of love of beauty, so where you wrote "ambiguous," I would write "logically unrelated to Harrenhal."

Assumes facts not in evidence.  The fan concept that Lyanna was the KotLT does not make it so, because as I pointed out before, mobthink does not create reality. 

And actually the case for Lyanna, despite its popularity, is rather weak.  The case for other candidates also being weak -- which it invariably is -- does not make the case for Lyanna any stronger.

I bet you can't demonstrate he was smiling in the first place.  It's just another thing you're assuming, like the identity of the mystery knight, and it makes little sense.

Rhaegar, like Lyanna, was also no fool, and he knew quite well what he was doing and how it would be seen.

He understood how it would affect his marriage (badly), his daughter's concept of him (badly), his parents' concept of him (badly), the relationship between the crown and Dorne (disaster), and that it would be seen by some including his paranoid father to support conspiracy theories of a secret alliance between him, the Starks, and other major players. 

Hmmm. This is the best assessment I have seen so far. Nice work. 

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59 minutes ago, JNR said:

Yes, I said much the same thing to someone else recently. 

It's hard to let go of our personal approaches to analyzing canon.  And given such a huge thicket of text, so dense with symbolism and allusion and subtext and alternate possibilities, there's really no "objective" way to analyze it and cut through it to the answers we want.

The best compromise is probably to think like GRRM... which is hard for those of us who have no experience of dealing with him.  It's probably easiest for Parris, of all people worldwide at this point, and she's also the one who reminds us "George doesn't do obvious."

:agree:

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20 hours ago, Melifeather said:

I had to return to this, because I missed this part of your question.

Loras's armor was described as a suit of "fabulous silver armor polished to a blinding sheen." By definition the word "sheen" means his armor had a lustrous surface, and it was bright and shiny. So bright as to be blinding. What else is so bright it blinds? Answer: lightning. 

There are 89 references to lightning in the books. Waymar's broken sword was described as "splintered and twisted" as if struck by lightning. Old Nan told Bran stories about a bad little boy who climbed too high and was struck by lightning. The tallest watchtower in Winterfell was struck by lightning, and was the same tower Jaime pushed Bran from. The wooden staircase up the side of the Wall switched back and forth like a lightning bolt. Beric Dondarrion, who seems to echo Bloodraven, is called the Lightning Lord. There are many more instances/examples of lightning, but IMO all of the lightning imagery is a metaphor for magic. 

Circling back to Loras's fabulous armor, I think it's meant to imply that what happened at Harrenhal with the Knight of the Laughing Tree was an act of magic.

How could I have missed this?

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