[ADwD Spoilers] All of the little things

[Myrish swan]

One minor issue that Mel's POV chapter more or less confirmed is that Mel and Stannis have continued sleeping together post shadow babies. There's a subtle hint in the fact that Mel's bedroom is noted to be in the same tower where Stannis is staying. Then it is more or less spelled out when Mel thinks "Since Stannis had gone, her bed had seen very little use."

Minor, but notable. Especially if there's going to be a Mel/ Jon hook up in the next book, as I suspect there just might be.

[tze]

Two things I just noticed:

1) One of Tormund's sons was killed during the battle for the Wall by a knight with moths on his shield. Later, during the march to Winterfell, we see that Ser Richard Horpe has three death's-head moths as his livery.

2) The Connington/Aegon/Golden Company contingent has a spy in their midst. In the Epilogue, the Small Council is discussing Connington's return, and it's mentioned that Connington is planning on attacking Storm's End. The only way to know that is through a (probably highly-placed) spy.

[Ser Taron Dax]

Does Thoros have a tattoo?

No. Thoros is Myrish.

[senorwhack]

@tze i dont think its so much that there is a spy, but that enough time has passed that they have already began their march to storms end.

[olennaredyne]

wait.....what does Manderly saying "mayhaps" have to do with anything?

[Dragonfish]

wait.....what does Manderly saying "mayhaps" have to do with anything?

Back in ACoK, the Walders explain this game to Bran and Rickon, in which one person controls a crossing over a stream, and another person tries to get their permission to cross. However, if the person trying to cross says "mayhaps" at some point during the "negotiations", then they get to knock the other player off the stream and take their place as the "Lord of the Crossing."

Fast-forward to ASoS. Robb is passing through the Twins so he can make it back North. During Robb and Catelyn's conversation with Lord Walder, he says "mayhaps" several times, soon before he betrays Robb and has him killed. The "mayhaps" thus acts as a bit of foreshadowing of Lord Walder's betrayal.

Likewise, Wyman Manderly saying "mayhaps" is his (or Martin's) way of turning the foreshadowing back on the Freys and the Boltons. Just a nice little detail for the readers, the sort that you usually don't catch until a re-read.

[Eustace Black]

If a Stark beheads someone, they will soon be betrayed and killed in that same book.

[pow]

Seems more likely that it's the Wall that's stopping their wightification. They're imprisoned inside the Wall, which is known to have strong anti-Others enchantments. Iron is a possibility, but wights have wielded iron weapons in the past and otherwise been exposed to iron without anything unusual happening.

Yes the corpses don't become Wights because the Wall stops the Wights.

Thats why they used the get the Nightwatch to carry them in trick the first time, past the wall.

Wouldn't be much use if the Wights could just climb over it.

Your assuming to much what about the wight that attack Lord Mormont He was on .. behind the wall. Same stuff might be right about Iron.

[Autumn Wind]

Blood Raven is technically a Lord Commander of the Night Watch right? He's oath is for his watch to not end until he dies.

[Mark Antony]

If a Stark beheads someone, they will soon be betrayed and killed in that same book.

yeah hopefully arya never takes any heads in bravos

[Galen M]

Let's review dominant genes.

You can be homozygous (meaning two copies) of a trait or not a trait.

You can be heterozygous (meaning one copy of the gene, and one copy without) for a trait.

Dominant genes are expressed in homozygous people.

As I recall, dwarfism is dominant, and being homozygous for it is fatal. (I also seem to recall it being caused by two different genes, but either one is dominant).

So, anyone with dwarfism mating with someone without dwarfism:

50% chance of a child with dwarfism

50% without.

Dominant does not equal "always passed on".

Tyrion can have normal-sized kids.

I understand Mendelian genetics. I said that non-dwarf parents can have dwarf children. If it is purely Mendelian, that means dwarfism is recessive. Denote D for the dominant dwarf allele, and d for the recessive "normal" allele. A non-dwarf parent must have the dd genotype. Therefore, two non-dwarf parents, both with the dd genotype must a have a non-dwarf child with the gg genotype. This is a contradiction since non-dwarves can beget dwarves, so dwarfism must be recessive. I then corrected myself when I read that a mutation can cause dwarfism in the offspring of non-dwarves. However, that is not pure Mendelian genetics. Your explanation is irrelevant to what I had posted.

[Dinsdale!]

Does anybody know why the Selaesori Qhoran (Tyrion and Jorah's boat) has a pickled corpse in it's hold? That struck me as kind of an odd thing to ship across an ocean...

[Kaitscralt]

Does anybody know why the Selaesori Qhoran (Tyrion and Jorah's boat) has a pickled corpse in it's hold? That struck me as kind of an odd thing to ship across an ocean...

I thought about that too. I was thinking that maybe it was someone who got greyscale or something and they didn't want to just dump the body, so they are keeping it safe until bringing it home.

[Morrigan]

Blood Raven is technically a Lord Commander of the Night Watch right? He's oath is for his watch to not end until he dies.

I always wondered how Bloodraven simply stopped being LC, or part of Night Watch altogether.

[Anthem]

I always wondered how Bloodraven simply stopped being LC, or part of Night Watch altogether.

Like Benjen, maybe he ventured beyond the wall and simply never returned?

[Andre]

Another thing that hasn´t been mentioned before: I found the words of the red priests on vicarions ship intersting: He insisted that there are only two gods -the "lord of light", obviously connected to light and fire (and probably summer) and "the other", darkness, cold and winter? At first, it seems as though the lord of light is the good one here... even though melisandres shadow magic does not seem very "human" either...

And then there was the description of the "doom of valyria" while tyrion travelled on the "fragrant steward". Seems as though it was destroyed by some supernatural fire-disaster. "the lands of long summer scorched and drowned and blighted". And the same seems to have happend to quite a few other major towns; maybe even the greyscale comes from this disaster. Might it be that "greyscale" is the summer variant of the wights of the others?

If so, it seems as if "winter is coming" is not the only danger; instead, summer is just as dangerous. And being the reborn A.A. might not be something desirable at all...

[Clariana]

Qarl the maiden...

He's called that because Asha deflowered him!

[Good for her!]

[Morn of Swording]

This may not mean much but Wyman Manderly's daughter Wylla, baring the same name of a potential mother of Jon Snow, is strongly defending vengeance for the death of Eddard Stark and Lady Leona goes on to say "Hush!. You know nothing." That spanked my mind a bit, if nothing else.

[wombat1138]

Noticed during a current reread of ASOS-- when Arya is taken to the underground cave of the Brotherhood Without Banners, it has white weirwood roots writhing in and out of the walls and ceiling. The first time she spots UnBeric (a few pages before he actually comes out and identifies himself), here's the description:

"[...T]he roots formed a kind of stairway up to a hollow in the earth where a man sat almost lost in the tangle of weirwood."

Like Bloodraven, UnBeric is a not-quite-dead guy who's lost one eye. Could he have been hooked into the WeirWoodWeb too?

[Spring Bass]

I just finished re-reading the first Jon Connington chapter, and there's an interesting little tidbit in there when the subject of the Tyrells comes up:

Laswell Peake rapped his knuckles on the table. “Even after a century, some of us still have friends in the Reach. The power of Highgarden may not be what Mace Tyrell imagines.”