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Seattle reading, any details?


Arataniello

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Reading:

He read two chapters from TWoW. One was the full version of the Victarion chapter that's been going around (I'm not sure where it is online - I downloaded a PDF someone posted here). The other was a Tyrion chapter. Both were set-up chapters for the battle of Mereen, which is shaping up to make Blackwater look like a schoolyard scuffle.

Victarion: this chapter takes place on a ship. Victarion calls three thralls to his cabin and orders them to blow the dragon horn. Each will blow it once, hopefully avoiding the fate of the man who blew it three times at the kingsmoot and then died. Then the dusky woman bleeds his hand and there was some sex that was pretty awkward to hear GRRM read. Finally, he gets dressed up in some intense armor, goes to the deck, the war drums start beating and they prepare to attack. It was a pretty badass ending.

Tyrion: This scene takes place in Brown Ben Plumm's tent. He and Tyrion are playing cevasse. This chapter seemed to have 3 major plot points:


  • Setting the stage for what's going on in Mereen, all the various factions, etc. Most of this is a recap from the end of DwD. One interesting thing is that several of the Yunka'i have split the three remaining hostages amongst them and Tyrion seems to be trying to figure out a way to capture Daario. Oh also: the Yunka'i are loading trebuchets with pale mare corpses and lobbing them into Mereen.

  • Tyrion begins trying to persuade Brown Ben to go turn cloak again and go back to Dany, which Ben seems amenable to.

  • Jorah shows up at the end and tells them that there are ships in the bay with black sails and kraken sigils and everyone goes "what the fuuuuuck?"

Fun tidbits from the Q&A, in no particular order:


  • Morrocco will be the location for the Slaver's Bay cities next season.

  • Apparently, he wrote 3 characters that are meant to be the 3 Stooges into the first book! But he wouldn't say who they were, just that they'd died. I'm not entirely sure he wasn't fucking with us. Any ideas?

  • Victarion is "dumb as a stump." I think this tells us everything we need to know about his eventual fate (my thoughts, not GRRM's words).

  • He was asked a bunch of questions about his writing process. He told us that he does, indeed, know where the plot will end up, but not how it will get there. He said it would be like if he drove from Seattle to NYC - he'd know the destination and the general route, but not everything that was going to happen along the way. He also said that his characters were "treacherous" and sometimes forced him to change his plans. :)

  • One of my favorite questions was about Howland Reed. A woman asked if his children might know anything about what happened at the Tower of Joy. He scoffed a little and said he couldn't tell us that, but then admitted "yes, the Reeds may know some things."

  • He assured us that we will learn about Jon's parentage: "all will be revealed."

  • Someone asked if he reads fan theories and he said no, because it would be too tempting to change things if people got things right that he wanted to be a surprise, which would mess everything up, so he just stays away.

Nothing new except for the stuff about the Reeds maybe. Notthatso was the one who posted the link to this info first, but that was in the thread on this event in the general section of the forum. I'm just re-posting it here.

Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/w0mrp/spoiler_twow_some_notes_and_2_brief_chapter/

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There were some new details that weren't there, courtesy of my wife skylark:

Victarion

The horn is an actual horn from a dragon. Bigger than Balerion.

Victarion is feeding the horn his own blood from his black fire hand. He's doing this to bind it to him, so that when the horn is blown the dragons will go to him.

Victarion's black fire hand - the one that was injured - appears to be significantly magical. It still is black and charred, but now smokes with his rage. One of the details was him putting on all his armor and clutching his fist while saying 'he pities any many who tried to stand before him on this day' and smoke rises from his gauntlet.

The three thralls might be important but it's not clear. One is a bastard's bastard, one is the young one, and the third wasn't clear. The young one speaks a lot, and Victarion normally would beat him but he's likely to die anyway.

The three thralls have been promised freedom and a ship if they survive after the blowing.

He fingerbangs the dusky woman as he doesn't want to spend himself before battle. Yeah, that would have been fun to hear in person.

Tyrion:

Tyrion is trying to convince Plumm to switch sides...again. The best argument (he makes many) is that Dany will forgive him because it'll be his turncloaking that seals the battle.

One of the other commanders apparently tried to buy Tyrion when he was on the blocks as a slave. she wears a breastplate with a harpy on it. Skylark thinks her name was Melaza.

Penny advised Tyrion to lose some times when playing Cyvasse, but Tyrion can't; Tyrion thinks that if he's not clever all the time, his value will be nothing and no one will want him.

Tyrion notes that Dragons don't care about sides and are very fickle when it comes to burning and eating people.

Brown Ben thinks that Dany will take back Mormont - especially with Tyrion.

General:

Ran & Linda are his general go-to sources when there's a question about things

He hand-draws all his maps to start with on 9x11 paper

The Dothraki sea was a blank sheet of paper with three dots on it, one of them labeeled Vaes Dotthrak. they redid that map :)

He writes specific characters in a row - for instance, he's written 4 Victarion chapters in a row.

He really likes the new scenes in the show; his favorite was the Robert/Cersei scene in the first season and the Littlefinger/Varys scenes

He wrote Blackwater, but didn't write the brothel scene with Bronn and Sandor; that was D&D.

Magic is on the rise in the world, and there will be more magic in every book going out

It is not clear whether the walkers cause the cold to come or the cold causes the walkers to come.

He has gotten many, many letters from women to do an explicit gay male sex scene. Not a single one from men requesting it.

He confirmed that while he doesn't like it, if you don't see the body chances are they're not dead.

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Oh yeah, one more thing - Carrie said that Mormont said that the ships coming in didn't just have Kraken banners and sigils - they had the sigils of dragons as well (detail from her was that they were 'flying dragon banners'). Victarion has already declared what side he's on.

Also, Victarion is gathering up as many ships as he can get for the trip back. He knows he'll need more than his 50 and is doing a Q-ship strategy to capture.

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There were some new details that weren't there, courtesy of my wife skylark:

He has gotten many, many letters from women to do an explicit gay male sex scene. Not a single one from men requesting it.

He confirmed that while he doesn't like it, if you don't see the body chances are they're not dead.

Regarding never getting a single letter from men requesting a gay sex scene, well that’s certainly easy to remedy. ; )

About people whose bodies we don’t see probably not being dead, yeah, that’s what I pretty much figured. And some whose bodies we do see, too, like Lady Catelyn and Jon Snark, er Start.

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He confirmed that while he doesn't like it, if you don't see the body chances are they're not dead.

Do you know anything more about what "while he doesn't like it" means? That's a confusing quote to me - he's the one who's doing it, so why wouldn't he like it? If he doesn't like it, wouldn't he stop doing it? This is one of my big pet peeves with the series lately (one of the only ones, lots of other things that bug people don't bother me at all) so any additional insight you have, if there is any, would be great.

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He writes specific characters in a row - for instance, he's written 4 Victarion chapters in a row.

Either the battle for Slavers Bay is a very long battle, or Victarion survives the fight. I'm actually surprised that there is going to be 4 Victarion chapters, but probably should have guessed this from his final 'Dragons' chapter being called 'Victarion

'.

Do you know anything more about what "while he doesn't like it" means? That's a confusing quote to me - he's the one who's doing it, so why wouldn't he like it? If he doesn't like it, wouldn't he stop doing it? This is one of my big pet peeves with the series lately (one of the only ones, lots of other things that bug people don't bother me at all) so any additional insight you have, if there is any, would be great.

I wonder if this is a somewhat self-critical quote due to the number of fake-out deaths we have had in recent books. I agree, it is also one of my biggest peeves too and takes away from Martin's original methodology that if his characters were in a dangerous situation then they might die.

It also comes back to the idea that a viewpoint character never dies in their own PoV chapter other than the prologue/epilogue.

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Either the battle for Slavers Bay is a very long battle, or Victarion survives the fight. I'm actually surprised that there is going to be 4 Victarion chapters, but probably should have guessed this from his final 'Dragons' chapter being called 'Victarion

I agree, 4 Vic chapters surprise me... I guess this is all the chapters he'll get in the books but I would have bet on much less !

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The 4 chapters include the last two from ADwd. So there's at least one more coming.

On bodies not being seen - he doesn't want the series to turn into a comic book and he doesn't want to overuse the surprise, but he does admit that right now, if you didn't see the body you can't count them as dead. He also said that he's got too many povs right now and will be killing some off.

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I agree, 4 Vic chapters surprise me... I guess this is all the chapters he'll get in the books but I would have bet on much less !

I am beginning to wonder whether he is going to be a major viewpoint in 'Winds' - I imagine that he will only get a couple of chapters set during the battle itself. Either that or it is going to be a very long battle!

In the other thread it was suggested that the paperback version of 'Dance' was available. Any indication of which chapter is contained in there?

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The 4 chapters include the last two from ADwd. So there's at least one more coming.

He also said that he's got too many povs right now and will be killing some off.

I'm going to guess that the next one will also be his last one. Victarion seems to me one of the more expendable POVs and his story looks to be coming to its climax.

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I'm a pretty big sports fan, so he threw this little one out to us and I loved it. When Tyrion takes a long boat ride, he has the option to read 3 books. One of those books detailed a brilliant general/leader "Belichickio" or something like that who won many battles in a row and seemed invincible.

Until he was eaten by 3 Giants.

Sorry if this has been up before, but I thought it was brilliant.

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I'm going to guess that the next one will also be his last one. Victarion seems to me one of the more expendable POVs and his story looks to be coming to its climax.

Probably, he's necessary for the Iron Fleet and to get Daenerys out of that shithole, afterwards his story could be over.

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Probably, he's necessary for the Iron Fleet and to get Daenerys out of that shithole, afterwards his story could be over.

He was necessary for bringing the Iron Fleet to Meereen and probably to serve as a sacrifice to whatever scheme Moqorro is planning, but I think his usefulness ends there. I seriously question whether he will ever actually see Daenerys or whether he will be dead by the time she comes back.

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