A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 Speculation: SPOILERS

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Re: A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 Speculation: SPOILERS

Postby CarrieVS » Fri Jul 22, 2016 11:07 pm

Malfeasinator wrote:]It never even dawned on anyone to try anything like a freaking quarantine.


They kept all the refugees outside the walls. At one point they tried separating the sick and healthy into different camps.
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Re: A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 Speculation: SPOILERS

Postby Malfeasinator » Sat Jul 23, 2016 6:58 am

CarrieVS wrote:
Malfeasinator wrote:]It never even dawned on anyone to try anything like a freaking quarantine.


They kept all the refugees outside the walls. At one point they tried separating the sick and healthy into different camps.


With the sheer number of people dropping like flies, what they did was half-hearted and too little too late.

They took this vigilante killing business very seriously and far less people died as a result of it.
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Re: A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 Speculation: SPOILERS

Postby Marcuse » Mon Aug 08, 2016 12:47 am

So Jon Snow's election as leader of the Night's Watch is suspicious as hell. Really, it's actually very obvious who's manipulating it: Bloodraven.

Firstly, Jon is just a sort of disgraced black brother at the time of Stannis' arrival at the Wall. He has no real duties, the people in charge think he's a turncloak and only the word of Maester Aemon keeps him from being executed outright. Stannis then makes his offer to legitimise him as Jon Stark and offer him Winterfell. Jon asks for time to think and wanders about a bit. He even hears Alliser Thorne plotting to make Janos Slynt Lord Commander and doesn't seem to care at all. He's the only brother not to vote in the choosings.

He muses about what taking Stannis' offer would mean, and while he notionally keeps to his vows by saying internally that he probably won't take it, he admits to himself that he does definitely want to take the offer. At this precise moment his thoughts are literally overridden by wolf thoughts, and Ghost (who was abandoned North of the Wall) suddenly reappears. Jon immediately forgets about Stannis' offer and it doesn't come up again in his mind.

Meanwhile Sam has set about rigging the vote by convincing either Cotter Pyke or Denys Mallister to step down. Of course, the Mallisters and Ironborn get on about as well as you might expect. Sam unsuccessfully tries to convince them, and then has a bright idea out of nowhere: would they support Jon Snow? Funnily enough they both agree to this, claiming suddenly that they don't want to be Lord Commander, but feel they have to run in order to see the Watch in good hands. Sam has to make two trips in order to do this, which seems counterproductive if he had the idea before visiting them at all.

Then Othell Yarwick, who had been convinced by Alliser to step down and endorse Janos Slynt, outright admits that he intended to do so, but that he is now unable to recall why he thought he should do that. He then decides to endorse Jon instead. Dolorous Ed, who admittedly is a friend of Jon's, puts his name forward.

Then the most obvious thing happens: Mormont's raven mysteriously turns up and makes everyone want to vote for Jon. Somehow. Of course, it probably wasn't that raven at all, if it's being warged I'm sure it's not beyond the ken of the warg to make it say things another raven that's highly suspected to be under Bloodraven's influence would say.

But then we have to ask ourselves; why does Bloodraven want Jon at the Wall? Show Jon said fuck it and went South anyway, so why the subterfuge to prevent him doing something we're half sure is going to happen anyway? Was it purely moving the wildlings beyond the reach of the Others? That would be a grand strategic move by Bloodraven to deny the Others a ready source of wights, but why allow the Watch to murder Jon and fall into disarray? Assuming Jon is a pawn here and nothing more, is he not a valuable pawn? If he's some prophesied saviour then it makes even less sense to abandon him.

It may even be the case that the dreams Jon has of the crypts and long dead Starks telling him he doesn't belong there is based on the same thing: Bloodraven's desire to keep him at the Wall and keep him fighting the Others. He's keeping his minion in line by sending him dreams to aver him from claiming Winterfell as his own when he thinks everyone else who might have a legit claim is dead.
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Re: A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 Speculation: SPOILERS

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Tue Aug 09, 2016 6:04 am

To be fair Carrie (preview chapter spoilers, since you're not reading them):
Spoiler: show
"Lemon Trees don't grow in Bravos but we're told they do" comes up in a bit of dialogue in the Mercy chapter. In the form of one of the soldiers looking for Lemons and not finding any.
“Seven hells, this place is damp,” she heard her guard complain. “I’m chilled to the bones. Where are the bloody orange trees? I always heard there were orange trees in the Free Cities. Lemons and limes. Pomegranates. Hot peppers, warm nights, girls with bare bellies. Where are the bare-bellied girls, I ask you?”

edit:
He's even answered with
“Down in Lys, and Myr, and Old Volantis,” the other guard replied. He was an older man, big-bellied and grizzled. “I went to Lys with Lord Tywin once, when he was Hand to Aerys. Braavos is north of King’s Landing, fool. Can’t you read a bloody map?”


Also,
CarrieVS wrote:Plenty of families besides the Targaryens have Valyrian blood and the accompanying tendency to white hair and purple eyes. (Notably the Daynes, and one of my wilder theories was that Ashara and Ned's baby was not actually stillborn, which has the pleasing symmetry, if R+L=J, that the boy believed to be Ned's son is Rhaegar's and the boy believed to be Rhaegar's son is Ned's.)


If there's one thing I agree with Preston Jacobs on* it's the importance of Ashara Dayne to the story of R+L and J. All the evidence points to Ned having a real bastard, no matter how much people paint him as the only uncomplicated character in GRRM's books, or as a gullible foil to the scheming.
His theory is that R+L = D and Ned's kid is Jon Snow, but he also thinks it's a completely irrelevant question given inheritance in aSoIaF doesn't matter because of how intrigue and the fog of war works, and this by far is GRRM's view on the subject as well, as far as his writing shows.
By the end of the War of Five kings, the common folk believe that Cersei is incestous and not, that Joffrey was a bastard and the true king, that the Lions and Wolves are both terrible for the country and respectively the righteous people who want to save the country from the usurpers, that the Targaryens weren't all that bad (There aren't many who seem to think they were for some reason). So in the end, lines of inheritance in aSoIaF are irrelevant. So in his opinion, R+L=? just sets up a minor irony and doesn't do much more than that. So if it was D it would fit better with Ned's insistence that Dany not be killed off, as well as explain the Dayne and Red Door mysteries, while if it was J, it would fit into the Aragorn RIGHTFUL KING plot, something GRRM doesn't want to do. Of course, that's not to say R+L=J isn't an aragorn subversion too. It's just not as strong a one as Dany (someone the plot is building up to be the greater scope villain for the Westerosi) being the rightful ruler of Westeros.

*-(there's a lot. He's really good at making GRRM's books coherent and the only issue I have with him is how he seems to think the Sci Fi equivalent of magic is more legitimate than the fantasy equivalent of magic when they're both the same thing, to the extent that one of his theories is basically "Danaerys can't control fire, she has pyrokineses" WHICH GODDAMNIT)
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Re: A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 Speculation: SPOILERS

Postby Marcuse » Sun Aug 14, 2016 11:15 pm

As an aside, the first words spoken in Dorne in the narrative proper are about oranges being overripe. It has absolutely no reason to be in the narrative, except as an explicit demonstration that citrus grows in Dorne.

Edit: Here's Arya's first thought when she sees Braavos:

They have no trees, she realised. Braavos is all stone, a grey city in a green sea.
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Re: A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 Speculation: SPOILERS

Postby Marcuse » Mon Aug 22, 2016 12:00 am

Jon's behaviour following his election as Lord Commander is about a suspect as his election itself. There seems to have been a deliberate obfuscation by implying that it's merely the pressures of the job that make him distant and unreachable. However, both Pyp and Grenn's complaints about his social withdrawal are combined with his overt coldness towards Sam when he speaks to him, and his sudden willingness to lie and deceive all speak to some outside influence. In the scene when Sam is speaking to Jon, he is constantly accompanied by a raven. This is a call back to Mormont, but it's also indicative of him being shadowed by warged animals.

In addition, Jon's first actions as Lord Commander are to send away key members of his personal power base, Aemon and Sam, in order to protect Mance Rayder's son, Aemon and supposedly train Sam as his maester. The thing is, none of these things make much sense. Okay Melisandre might want to burn Mance Rayder, but she participates in the deception itself by glamouring the Lord of Bones to look like him. That's incredibly dodgy in itself, but it also gives the lie to sending Aemon away to protect him, if Mel is prepared to give up one sacrifice, why stand on point of ceremony on another?

Sending Sam off to become a maester is also a baffling move. Sam is definitely a prime candidate for it, but becoming a maester takes years, and the Others are nearly at the Wall already. They were noted by Mance as snapping at the heels of his column while they were besieging the Wall, so they're not going to leave Sam a period of several years to train. We know from the prologue that forging a link usually takes a minimum of months, and can take years.

In fact, none of the actions taken at the Wall make any sense at all. I think Bloodraven has a hand in moving pieces about, but the why of things is still unknown. Are we talking about Sam having been sent to Oldtown to stop him from getting into knowledge he might use against Bloodraven? Is he just trying to hide Bran from Jon? Is Aemon being removed because he's a Targaryen who might remember or recognise Bloodraven's name or alias? What then with Dalla's baby and Gilly?
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Re: A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 Speculation: SPOILERS

Postby Marcuse » Tue Aug 23, 2016 10:53 pm

Brienne is kinda dumb. Yeah, great revelation there Marc.

But seriously, she does several things that mark her out as fundamentally unsuited to living long in Westeros:

1. She continually asks every person from King's Landing to Duskendale about her "sister" who happens to look just like Sansa. She does this even after someone tells her to her face that they know she's asking after Sansa.

2. She doesn't realise she's not he first person to ask after Sansa. She's on a secret mission from Jaime, and she acts as though nobody else is going to be looking for Sansa at all, again, even after she's told to her face that others are and have been looking for her.

3. She rides around with a shield bearing the black bat of Lothston. House Lothston used to own Harrenhal, and were succeeded by the Whents, who also had the sigil of a bat. Sansa's distant relative Danelle Lothston was said to have telepathic control of bats, who stole children. When Bran reaches the caves North of the Wall, he finds the skeletons of giant bats, so this may not have been as false as it might seem. Everyone who sees it thinks she's cursed, or bearing stolen arms. Not the best first impression to make. She does have it repainted...as the arms of Ser Duncan the Tall (the protagonist of the aSoIaF related A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms).

4. She doesn't think anything through and doesn't realise that Sansa would be with family, and the last family she had left is in the Eyrie...with someone who until recently was based in King's Landing. Okay, she does eventually figure out that Sansa is likely with Lysa, but she doesn't do anything to get there or try to find her there. Really, Littlefinger's sojourn to the Eyrie, alongside Sansa's disappearance should have told them everything they needed to know.

5. She gives up Arya for dead, like everyone does, because of reasons.

6. She constantly spends too much gold and generally acts like she's loaded. This is unwise, especially when travelling with someone whose epithet is "the penniless".
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Re: A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 Speculation: SPOILERS

Postby CarrieVS » Sat Apr 01, 2017 6:10 pm

Martin's announced the release date, later this year.
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Re: A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 Speculation: SPOILERS

Postby Marcuse » Sat Apr 01, 2017 7:17 pm

CarrieVS wrote:Martin's announced the release date, later this year.


:o

:x

:P
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