"Only 500 pages to go" for Winds of Winter

[sifth]

20 minutes ago, Gilbert Green said:

Dany is a gift to Drogo, and ultimately, so are the dragon eggs.  By giving them to Dany he also symbolically cements her status as Targaryen Princess.  The eggs are valuable in themselves and delivered in a way that tends to confirm the value and authenticity of Dany.

Ilyrio is buying the Dothraki horde, though not in quite the crude sense that Viserys understands.

Why not give Young Griff the dragon eggs?  Because he is buying an army, and Young Griff does not have an army.  Khal Drogo does.

Because he exchanged them directly for the army and the invasion.

Drogo never looks twice at the dragon eggs. I read AGoT's for the first time in ages, just a few months ago and there isn't even one scene of Drogo saying "man those dragon eggs are nice". Dany was the gift to Drogo and Dany alone. The 3 eggs were a gift to Dany and for what reason, I still don't know.

Preston has a whole conspiracy theory, about how Illyrio was setting up the eggs to hatch all along. I don't fully believe it, but it makes more sense than a lot of the stuff I heard the fandom come up with, in regards to why he gave them to Dany, if she was only pawn to be thrown away for Faegon.

Edited January 16, 2023 by sifth

[sifth]

24 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

Yes, and how does Drogo invading help their plan with Young Griff? 

The two things (Viserys/Dany and Connington/Young Griff) openly contradict each other. The blue haired boy might have crossed paths with Dany or Viserys at some point if he existed back then, but he didn't. 

Had Young Griff existed back during AGoT's, GRRM would have set him up better. It's sort of like how Blood Raven didn't exist back during AGoT's, but GRRM admitted he always wanted the Three Eyed Crow to be somehow connected to the Targs. The character didn't exist yet, but the outline for one did.

[Gilbert Green]

1 hour ago, butterweedstrover said:

The plan Ilyrio and Varys had in AGOT cannot be integrated with the plan they came up with in ADWD. 

With Young Griff there is no need for Viserys whereas Viserys in actuality was a vital component to their original plot.

Viserys' role in the plot is to confirm the auntenticity of Dany.   Dany's role is a gift from Illyrio to Drogo.  Because of this gift, Khal Drogo owes Illyrio a favor.

1 hour ago, butterweedstrover said:

In the dungeons they mention the need to delay the conflict so the Dothraki could be prepared for the eventual war. 

This signifies that Khal Drogo is willing to invade Westeros when Illyrio calls in his favor.  But the Khal is not an obedient slave who will invade on command.  One of his whims, evidently based on Dothraki custom, is that he will not invade while his wife is pregnant.

1 hour ago, butterweedstrover said:

So what was their plan? Have Viserys and Drogo lose on purpose (destroying the brand name of the Targaryen sigil) or have them win only for a third claimant to come and take the throne (eviscerate their own forces).

The plan is not for Viserys to lead the invasion.  Viserys is not in charge.  It is to Illyrio, and not to Viserys, that Khal Drogo owes the favor.  The only person crazy enough to think that Viserys is in charge is Viserys.  And that mistake costs him his life.

1 hour ago, butterweedstrover said:

Why give something so powerful to Daenerys in that case. Even if they didn't believe the eggs would hatch they gave Dany, and by extension Viserys, a powerful tool that might mitigate any military strength of a dragonless Young Griff. 

Illyrio did not expect the fossilized dragon eggs to hatch.  Valuable?  Yes.  Powerful?  No.  They were part and parcel of the gift to Khal Drogo, for which Illyrio eventually expects an invading horde when he later calls in a favor for this gift.

1 hour ago, butterweedstrover said:

Unless they were clinically braindead, this was not part of their plan. And there was no way they could (or should) have thought that a thirteen year old Dany would have become stronger after being raped incessantly, watch Viserys die, lose her own child, lose her husband, and then build up an army of slaves instead of heading west thereby giving Young Griff time to grow up and Connington time to build up his own forces. 

Of course not.  Dany's role is that of a piece of meat thrown to a dog to earn the loyalty of the dog.  Illyrio later tells Tyrion he expected Dany to die on the Dothraki Sea.  Call that a retcon if you like, since it does not come till book 5, but it sounds perfectly plausible to me, given the overall circumstances.

1 hour ago, butterweedstrover said:

I'm sorry, but there was no way this wasn't invented until after ASOS. There is not even an inkling that such a child exists, I don't mean baby Aegon, I mean that blue haired fraud, mummers dragon or no.  

The only thing we know about the original plan is that it involved Illyrio, in cahoots with Varys, buying an allegiance with Khal Drogo for use in a future invasion of Westeros.

We have no idea who was planned to lead this invasion.  But it certainly was not going to be Dany.  Her transformation from a meek abused tweenager to powerful dragon queen was a complete surprise.

Viserys thinks Viserys will lead the invasion.  But this mistake costs him his life.  Nobody respects Viserys, and Illyro's own agent refers to him as "less than the shadow of a snake".  It is to Illyrio, and not to Viserys, that Khal Drogo owes the favor.

Edited January 16, 2023 by Gilbert Green

[Gilbert Green]

1 hour ago, sifth said:

Drogo never looks twice at the dragon eggs.

That's beside the point.  Illyrio is gifting a dragon princess to Khal Drogo as a bride.  The dragon eggs, in effect are jewelry for the dragon princess.  It's all part of the package.  The point being that he's gifting to the Khal a princess, and not some random Lysene slave girl.

And the realistic expectation is that Khal Drogo will end up owning the dragon eggs.   He understands them to be a kingly gift.  Whether he appreciates them as toys to play with is beside the point.

1 hour ago, sifth said:

I read AGoT's for the first time in ages, just a few months ago and there isn't even one scene of Drogo saying "man those dragon eggs are nice".

So what?  He seems to like his dragon princess.  And there is no reason to suppose he doubts that she is a dragon princess.

1 hour ago, sifth said:

Dany was the gift to Drogo and Dany alone.

If he owns Dany, he also owns what she owns.

1 hour ago, sifth said:

The 3 eggs were a gift to Dany and for what reason, I still don't know.

In effect, jewelry cementing her value and status as a dragon princess.

1 hour ago, sifth said:

Preston has a whole conspiracy theory, about how Illyrio was setting up the eggs to hatch all along.

If so, I disagree with Preston on this one.  Illyrio did not expect the eggs to hatch.

Edited January 16, 2023 by Gilbert Green

[sifth]

1 hour ago, Gilbert Green said:

That's beside the point.  Illyrio is gifting a dragon princess to Khal Drogo as a bride.  The dragon eggs, in effect are jewelry for the dragon princess.  It's all part of the package.  The point being that he's gifting to the Khal a princess, and not some random Lysene slave girl.

And the realistic expectation is that Khal Drogo will end up owning the dragon eggs.   He understands them to be a kingly gift.  Whether he appreciates them as toys to play with is beside the point.

So what?  He seems to like his dragon princess.  And there is no reason to suppose he doubts that she is a dragon princess.

If he owns Dany, he also owns what she owns.

In effect, jewelry cementing her value and status as a dragon princess.

If so, I disagree with Preston on this one.  Illyrio did not expect the eggs to hatch.

Sorry, but I don't agree. The eggs were clearly for Dany and only Dany. The text clearly reads as much, that they were her gift. If you want to believe they were Drago's to fill in the blanks, that' fine, but I'm more of a facts person and only stick to them.

Yea, but if Preston is wrong and I very much think he is, we're left with a plot hole. We have Illyro giving Dany jewelry that's worth the price of 3 armies and wasting it on a decoy princess. That doesn't make sense.

Edited January 16, 2023 by sifth

[Gilbert Green]

12 minutes ago, sifth said:

Sorry, but I don't agree. The eggs were clearly for Dany and only Dany. The text clearly reads as much, that they were her gift.

You are playing semantics.  Dany was Illyrio's gift to Drogo. 

Yes, the eggs were a gift to Dany, if you want to insist on that.  This is one of the trappings that shows that Dany is a dragon princess, and not some common Lysene slave girl.

But don't let this fool you into thinking Dany is being treated with respect by Illyrio.  She isn't.  She's being traded like a piece of meat.

And when Illyrio later says that he did not even expect her to survive, this is, at least, perfectly consistent with what we already knew, and makes perfect sense in light of what we already knew

12 minutes ago, sifth said:

If you want to believe they were Drago's to fill in the blanks, that' fine, but I'm more of a facts person and only stick to them.

Do you think Illyrio's statement that he did not expect Dany to survive was a retcon?  If not, what is the point of this quibbling?

12 minutes ago, sifth said:

Yea, but if Preston is wrong and I very much think he is, we're left with a plot hole.

At most there is a mystery.  In book 1, we are obviously not being told the whole story, and are being teased with the promise of further information at some point down the road.  If we then get further information down the road, as promised, it is not evidence of a reton.

Sure, it MIGHT be a retcon.  GRRM might be making it up as he goes along.  But until he writes himself into a corner he can't write himself out of, there is no problem.  By giving us further information, he is only keeping his promise. 

12 minutes ago, sifth said:

We have Illyro giving Dany jewelry that's worth the price of 3 armies and wasting it on a decoy princess. That doesn't make sense.

It makes reasonable sense if Khal Drogo's Dothraki horde is worth 3 armies.  Or more than 3 armies.

I'm not sure what you mean by the phrase  "decoy princess".  Whether she is a "real princess" or not, it is obvious that putting her on the Iron Throne was not the original plan.  Young girls are not preferred as claimants, and until Dany hatched some dragon eggs, nothing seemed particularly compelling about her claim. 

[Takiedevushkikakzvezdy]

On 1/11/2023 at 12:13 AM, SeanBeanedMeUp said:

He's trying to make it the best story he can.

The thing is that the more time goes by, the better Winds has to be in order to justify the wait. And at some point it will be impossible to live up to the enormous expectations. 

[Werthead]

18 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

He did seed the idea of baby Aegon being alive, but whoever that is that doesn't have to do with the child we meet in ADWD. He is an entirely different character if only inspired by the idea of a living Aegon certainly not Aegon himself. 

Had George thought of this fake as part of Varys or illyrio's schemes he would have been referenced in some way, even if not by name. According to Varys in ADWD the plan was to make Young Griff king but then they raised Viserys to rule during that same time. 

They were literally talking about it in the dungeons and no hint of Connington or this child were given. Things had to turn out spectacularly wrong for him to be introduced in ways Varys/illyrio could not have predicted, from Viserys death to Drogo's infection to the hatching of the Dragons. 

Connington had zero place in any story. Ned or Robert might have mentioned him once but they never did, it was completely a decision made later in the game. 

Yes, it's entirely possible that when George conceived the "rival Targaryen" plotline he did not have the exact mechanism for when the character would show up worked out. He has form for this, like elsewhere noting that when writing AGoT he did not know who the Three-Eyed Crow would be, beyond a possibly Targaryen connection. That only crystallised into Bloodraven when writing A Storm of Swords when he first conceived of the Blackfyre Rebellion and then started planning The Sworn Sword. 

So whilst he clearly envisaged Aegon as either surviving or, his survival being plausible but he's really a pretender, in AGoT, it is possible that he had not locked in the mechanism by which that would happen or be revealed. The "mummer's dragon" in ACoK is the strongest evidence for Aegon being a pretender or a fake. Of course, the Blackfyres did not exist until GRRM wrote ASoS and started prefiguring The Sworn Sword, so any chance of him being related to the Blackfyres was not on the cards until that point.

Viserys being set up by Illyrio and Varys as the king was always bizarre, but Illyrio very clearly holds Viserys in total and utter contempt from the second we meet them in AGoT and the idea of him backing Viserys as king is pretty laughable in that context. The argument that Illyrio actually maneuvered Viserys into accompanying Khal Drogo deliberately as a means of killing him is more plausible. Telling Viserys not to do something, as he vehemently did when advising him to stay in Pentos, is the best way of ensuring that Viserys will do something. Whether that makes the fAegon gambit more plausible is arguable, since they might have decided to try to exercise influence over Daenerys and Drogo instead, but that feels chancy as hell (especially if you buy Illyrio's ADWD statement that they didn't pay much attention to her), since it was possible she would have died in childbirth on account of her very young (too young, and Illyrio should have known that) age, if not to an assassin, and Drogo would likely not really give two shits about Illyrio beyond vaguely acknowledging his help.

Connington is also mentioned quite a lot in A Storm of Swords.

In fact, we know that George revised the 1993 outline around 1998 or 1999, and I wonder if he solidified a lot of these other ideas in that (never-seen) second document. A lot of vague earlier ideas seemed to come into sharp focus after that point (the Blackfyre Rebellion, Bloodraven, Connington etc).

18 hours ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

To be completely fair, Aegon was not mentioned at all in the 1993 outline.

Neither was Cersei

Quote

George had a meeting with D&D around the time of pre-production for Game of Thrones season 4 in which they mainly discussed in broad strokes what would happen in The Winds of Winter and in A Dream of Spring.

My understanding is that George met with D&D to jointly work with them on an outline for the rest of GoT, based on D&D's requirements versus what George had planned in the rest of the books. So George told them certain things and they decided to use that or disregard it, and if they had already planned "not to go there," there wasn't much point discussing it. Aegon and his entire arc was disregarded almost immediately, seemingly because it seems they thought it would add far too many new characters and would require too much time to the show.

It appears one of their priorities was to hatch a timeline they were comfortable with in ending the series. GRRM and HBO believed the show had become enough of a cultural juggernaut that they could got 10+ seasons but D&D believed that the workload to get to that number of seasons was unsustainable, and they would risk killing the golden goose and people would get bored if they kept spinning out the show without any kind of resolution.

It is worth noting that in the 1993 outline (the continued value of which is questionable since George has gone so far off-course from it), 

Spoiler

Bran is said to hold a seat in the North or beyond the Wall - it's unclear which - already, suggesting that by that point in the arc Robb was dead and Bran had become King in the North in his stead, or Bran had ventured beyond the Wall (with Cat, in this version) and was now sitting his weirwood seat. These both suggest alternate avenues where Bran could become a literal or thematic "king" in ways which the show may have extremely simplified in its rushed version of the ending. Or maybe not and Bran literally ends up as king in the same way as in the TV series.

 

[butterweedstrover]

Couldn’t the “rival” Targaryen have just been Jon? 
 

Mummer’s Dragon means the Dragon of a mummer (possession), not that the Dragon is a mummer.

[Gilbert Green]

2 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

Couldn’t the “rival” Targaryen have just been Jon?

Jon may or may not be a secret Targ.  But he is unlikely to have ever been the planned leader of Varys & Illyrio's planned Dothraki invasion.  Because, for one thing, Jon knows nothing about it.

[Takiedevushkikakzvezdy]

23 hours ago, Werthead said:

The argument that Illyrio actually maneuvered Viserys into accompanying Khal Drogo deliberately as a means of killing him is more plausible.

I agree for the most part, but what gives me pause is this: "First Viserys Targaryen was to join us with fifty thousand Dothraki screamers at his back. Then the Beggar King was dead, and it was to be the sister, a pliable young child queen who was on her way to Pentos with three new-hatched dragons."

It seems like Illyrio did tell the Golden Company that Viserys and the Dothraki would join them. I don't really know how to square that with the Aegon plan.

Edited January 16, 2023 by Takiedevushkikakzvezdy

[sifth]

42 minutes ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

I agree for the most part, but what gives me pause is this: "First Viserys Targaryen was to join us with fifty thousand Dothraki screamers at his back. Then the Beggar King was dead, and it was to be the sister, a pliable young child queen who was on her way to Pentos with three new-hatched dragons."

It seems like Illyrio did tell the Golden Company that Viserys and the Dothraki would join them. I don't really know how to square that with the Aegon plan.

Was the original plan to have the Dothraki and the Golden Company invade Westeros and only reveal Faegon after the fighting was done?

[Mithras]

There was no Golden Company or anything Blackfyre until after AGoT, ACoK and the Hedge Knight was published.

[Takiedevushkikakzvezdy]

5 hours ago, Mithras said:

There was no Golden Company or anything Blackfyre until after AGoT, ACoK and the Hedge Knight was published.

But both Varys and Illyrio get a lot of page time in AGoT, and are even seen conspiring together. What would their purpose in the story be without Aegon? Escpecially Varys, since he already has a powerful position in Westeros, and has had it for a very long time. 

The Aegon storyline is confusing no matter which way you look at it.

[Mithras]

31 minutes ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

But both Varys and Illyrio get a lot of page time in AGoT, and are even seen conspiring together. What would their purpose in the story be without Aegon? Escpecially Varys, since he already has a powerful position in Westeros, and has had it for a very long time. 

The Aegon storyline is confusing no matter which way you look at it.

Varys and Illyrio should have a totally different agenda back when GRRM wrote AGoT but we don't have enough clues to figure out what. As mentioned above, based on the Qarth episode, a fake Aegon seemed to have been in the plans before anything Blackfyre existed. Maybe it was a descendant of Aerion Brightflame. But we don't have anything else on that front.

I have a fringe theory that while restoring this or that Targaryen pretender was in Illyrio's plans, Varys had a secret agenda even Illyrio was oblivious to. I believe that the original Varys in AGoT was a sorcerer in league with the Others. He was trying to create destability in the Realm while looking for the perfect vessel for the "Night King" to claim when the time was right.

[Brother Seamus]

On 1/15/2023 at 10:48 PM, sifth said:

I actually agree with this. The only foreshadowing we get for Faegon is, that GRRM reminds us in each book that Gregor killed a baby. The only thing else we get is the murmurs dragon, vision Dany gets in the second book. Both of these are very weak evidence for “this was all planned”, but it’s what some people want to believe. 
 

Though no way is Faegon planned in the first book. It’s clear as day, Varys and his partner want Dany and her brother on the throne in that book.

I think your degree of confidence is unfounded.

Marrying Dany to Drogo is at least equally consistent with getting her and Viserys out of the way for fAegon. 

 is it really a reliable plan to think that a 13-year old girl is going to influence Drogo to cross the sea and invade westeros? yes, there is supposed to be some kind of understanding between Illyrio/Viserys and Drogo, but there's no way to hold him to it.

What they didn't anticipate is the dragons and Dany's leadership abilities.

BTW, on the agreement that Drogo would invade as a kind of quid pro quo for Dany: what do we see directly in terms of Drogo acknowledging this obligation? I think there's a scene in GOT where Viserys demands they invade, and Drogo basically says I'll get to it when I get to it. Correct? The he kills Viserys soon after, so arguably at that point invading westeros is not so much in the cards. Then Drogo more or less promises Dany he'll do it after the attempt on her life, but it seems he was at best 50-50 before that. Do I remember correctly? 

[Brother Seamus]

another reason why I think fAegon was part of the story from early on is that the english wars of the roses is the main - though far from the only - historical source and analog for the story, and that history includes the Perkin Warbeck episode, when some guy shows up after Henry Tudor has won and become Henry VII, and claims to be one of the "boys in the tower," the sons of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville who were imprisoned in the tower of london by their uncle, Richard III, and never seen again.

[Takiedevushkikakzvezdy]

23 hours ago, Werthead said:

Neither was Cersei

True, which is why we can’t prove that she existed in the story at that point. But if she did, I wonder what role she would have had, given that Jaime was the one doing all the villain stuff. Maybe she just would have been Robert’s wife.

[Brother Seamus]

I've also been partial to the notion that Illyrio and Varys were really behind fAegon all along; that the idea was to get Viserys and some dothraki to invade;  Viserys would be discredited by allying himself with foreign savages; the weserosi would have a hard time against the dothraki, but would fight back and hold out for a while;  fAegon and the golden company could then ride in and tip the balance and save the day, repel the foreign invader, kill viserys, and take the throne. 

 

so the viserys/drogo/dany plot was to soften up westeros for fAegon's invasion, discredit and get rid of Viserys, and set fAegon up as a conquering savior hero; three birds one stone.

oh, and the golden company finally gets their due after generations of waiting; four birds.

Edited January 17, 2023 by Brother Seamus

[Mithras]

26 minutes ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

True, which is why we can’t prove that she existed in the story at that point. But if she did, I wonder what role she would have had, given that Jaime was the one doing all the villain stuff. Maybe she just would have been Robert’s wife.

Not true. That 1993 outline included the first 13 chapters that were almost identical to the published version.