Some Sound Variations of Spring?

[Phylum of Alexandria]

I recently re-read GRRM’s short story Unsound Variations, and was struck by the ending and what it might mean for Bran’s story in ASOIAF.

I won't get into the plot details of why it's relevant, as others have done this before. Preston Jacobs has a 6-part video series speculating on what the nature and extent of Bran's time tampering within the weirnet might be. It's definitely worth watching. Here's the section where he talks about Unsound Variations:

Aside from their inclusion of time travel, all of the older GRRM stories covered in this video are quite relevant thematically for Bran's ASOIAF arc. Because they all touch on the temptation of changing the past, the desire to erase one's mistakes and misfortunes, and start fresh.  

Surely this would be a temptation for Bran. The young dreamer, the boy who climbed towers and dreamt of being a knight, is now a crippled boy, most of his family dead. He is living a dark cave at the edge of the world, laying next to a talking corpse. Not at all the life he thought he'd be living. Yet he is coming to understand that he does have power, and may be capable of great things.

Like all weird powers in GRRM's writing, time tampering has its costs, and it tends to create more problems than it solves. One cost for Bran is the temptation to live in the past forever, even if it's just watching his family from various times in the past. But another temptation is to tamper with the past to try to prevent all of the bad things from happening.

It's not unreasonable to think that Bran's time tampering will probably serve some helpful purpose that aids the heroes in the final act of the story. But without invoking the details of the Thing-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, it's also reasonable to assume that Bran's tampering can have unintended consequences, perhaps tragic ones.

I recently wrote about Dying of the Light, and one thing I touched on was the protagonist's embrace of risk and uncertainty by the end of the story. It was a dramatic way to bolster GRRM's rather existentialist view of morality and heroism.

Unsound Variations does something similar, in a way that's relevant for psionic time tampering:

Spoiler

Despite his life having turned into a bitter disappointment thanks to the tampering of a time traveling sociopath, the main character ultimately rejects the temptation to correct his life via his own time travel. He decides instead to embrace the risks inherent in sticking with the life he is already invested in, and working with the people he's already attached to rather than wiping the slate clean.

Currently in the ASOIAF story, Bran has the potential to become a magical tyrant like the God-Emperor of Dune, but I think his great bittersweet heroic choice will be to pull away from all of the quick-fix temptations, despite Bloodraven's utilitarian justifications.

I think that Bran will not just leave the weirwood cave, but will ultimately abandon greenseeing altogether. 

By the end, he may even argue for the destruction of these unstable forces in the world, to prevent any further temptation to destabilize the realm. 

The final book's titular dream of spring will likely be the commitment to work toward a tenable future among the surviving humans, a future shaped by the actions they take and the responsibilities they carry. And I think this will be most strongly embodied by young Bran embracing that future and all its uncertainty as it is, without magical intercession. In doing so, he would be committing to the world as it exists, for all its flaws and misfortunes, as a sound variation for humanity to work with. 

 

[Craving Peaches]

4 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Bran has the potential to become a magical tyrant like the God-Emperor of Dune

What if this is the CotF's master plan? All the humans get so fed up with Bran's tyranny that they go back to Essos, leaving Westeros human-free again.

[Craving Peaches]

37 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Bran has the potential to become a magical tyrant like the God-Emperor of Dune

Double Post 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

33 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

What if this is the CotF's master plan? All the humans get so fed up with Bran's tyranny that they go back to Essos, leaving Westeros human-free again.

I don't know if they're in the weeds of human affairs to that extent, nor do I think they would invite an attack from Team Blue just to kick humans off of Westeros. But, I don't think that they are above some ruthless "culling" of the human species for the sake of ecological balance.

Still, given the major real estate limits of the remaining story, my feeling is that GRRM will leave open the possibility that other Class A Greenseers may also have tried to time tamper, and leave the rest to readers' imaginations.

But it seems that Bloodraven is only a Class B Greenseer. I guess he could have been lying, but it seems more like he really didn't know about the potential for tampering.

[Evolett]

5 hours ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

But another temptation is to tamper with the past to try to prevent all of the bad things from happening.

It's not unreasonable to think that Bran's time tampering will probably serve some helpful purpose that aids the heroes in the final act of the story. But without invoking the details of the Thing-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, it's also reasonable to assume that Bran's tampering can have unintended consequences, perhaps tragic ones.

To be honest, I sincerely hope we do not see time-travelling into the past to correct ancient paths taken. None of those theories appeal to me.

Bran seeing through the trees to discover past events and secrets, maesters or other avid readers discovering bits of history that might inform relevant actors on the stage and thus aid in finding a solution to the Long Night, the Others, Euron, the quirky seasons etc., is more appealing to me than actually tampering with past events to turn the tide of history.

Acquiring knowledge should be the key, the missing links that need to be revealed, not time travelling to alter past events. And the author seems to be going in this direction. Not for nothing are we reminded that Jon Snow "knows nothing" or that the Watch has forgotton, or that the North or the Royces "remember" but we ask ourselves what exactly do they remember, just to mention a few examples. But that's just my opinion.

We already have nebulous characters from the past meddling in the events of the present  - Azor Ahai who is "reborn" to wake dragons from stone. Jon's direwolf Ghost also seems to indicate the presence of an ancient spirit reborn in the body of a wolf, dark powers awakening and all that. I look forward to seeing a solution or conclusion based on the creativity, resourcefulness and perseverance of current characters. In short, I hope the ink of the past is indeed dry. 

 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

2 minutes ago, Evolett said:

To be honest, I sincerely hope we do not see time-travelling into the past to correct ancient paths taken. None of those theories appeal to me.

Certainly when I first heard this speculation, I was aghast. Why muck up the story like that? I do think that Preston can sometimes come off as a bit strong as far as what may happen. He may say that he's simply laying out the possibilities, who knows. 

After reading those older stories, I can definitely say it's something that GRRM is interested, but usually in pursuit of that theme that I mentioned above: the temptation of the power, not so much the utility of the power itself.

Given that Bran's body can't travel with him, the most tampering that we might see would be similar to the tampering we already see: dreams, voices, talking crows, etc. With these, GRRM lends enough distance to still allow the other characters their choice to act according to their own wills, even with this mystically-acquired information. Though, as I mentioned in a recent discussion about Jojen and possible sacrifice, if his greendreams were sent to him by someone like Bloodraven rather than "the old gods," then that makes Jojen subject to manipulation, and is morally quite dubious.

It may be that GRRM chooses to keep a lot of this ambiguous. Maybe we'll never know who sent Jojen's greendreams or Bran's dreams (Bloodraven doesn't quite seem to understand what he's talking about when Bran asks him about it). I'm thinking (and hoping) that time tampering will mostly be left to our imagination. 

But I would also not be surprised by at least one major instance of time meddling, to demonstrate how catastrophic such a power could be.