#I love patchfaces weird prophecies

[shripscapi]

Could you draw Patchface please? Your art is incredible and I think he’s the scariest character in asoiaf 😵‍💫

SUCH an excellent suggestion.. drawing patchface hadn’t even crossed my mind but this was a really fun challenge :)

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

GRRM’s Chekhov’s guns - how can we tell what they are?

yeyaboya asked:

I love the way you analyze ASOIAF and its mysteries and how you made me enjoy them even more by revealing the “Chekhov’s guns”. The last list you made is amazing! I hope this question doesn’t bother you but how can we be sure that some minor mysteries are Chekhov’s guns and not just worldbuilding? Is there something as a literary rule to distinguish them? After all, not every story needs to be told in the books and some things may work better if left open…

Thanks so much! Regarding GRRM’s Chekhov’s guns, the most important thing to remember is where the term came from:

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there. –Anton Chekhov

That principle can be understood in several ways: 1) if you intend to have something happen later in the story, you should set it up earlier in the story; and 2) if you mention a significant object or other element, it must be important to the plot, otherwise you shouldn’t mention it.

Therefore, deciding whether something is a Chekhov’s gun (for a plot point that hasn’t happened yet) is very similar to deciding whether something is foreshadowing (for a plot point that hasn’t happened yet). If you want to do literary analysis properly, you can’t look at an unfinished work and say definitely that things are foreshadowing or Chekhov’s guns – you need to wait until the work is complete, otherwise you’re only guessing. Sometimes you can guess in a way that turns out to have been pretty accurate, but sometimes the author was not going where you thought he was, sometimes the object was not significant at all, and you end up being just plain wrong.*

*(To step away from ASOIAF, consider the Harry Potter series: some thought that Neville’s parents giving him bubble gum wrappers was a Chekhov’s gun, and built theories about what the letters on the wrappers signified. Others thought that Lily Potter having been skilled at potions and charms was significant foreshadowing for Harry discovering that a potion or charm was needed to defeat Voldemort. Still others believed Harry and Hermione’s flight on the hippogriff was foreshadowing for their future romance, based on alchemical symbolism. While there were many arguments about the validity of these speculative Chekhov’s guns and foreshadowing during the time the story was unfinished, by the end they all turned out to be extremely wrong.)

However, even in an incomplete work, you can analyze pieces of foreshadowing where the thing they foreshadowed happened already, because there you can be definite. For example, the stag killing the mother direwolf, which foreshadowed conflict between the Starks and Baratheons, or all the visions and such foreshadowing the Red Wedding. (Sandor’s “maybe we’ll even be in time for your uncle’s bloody wedding” also counts as foreshadowing, though GRRM was extremely unsubtle by that point. Not that the visions were especially subtle, not at all.) To shift that to Chekhov’s guns (which are often but not always physical objects): for example, at the end of ACOK when Dontos gave Sansa the black amethyst hairnet, that was GRRM hanging the gun upon the wall (and we knew it was a gun because we had been told that strangler crystals looked like dark amethysts at the start of ACOK) – and then the gun was fired in ASOS at Joffrey’s wedding, with one of the “amethysts” in the hairnet used to poison his wine.

Another baseline to check the significance of potential Chekhov’s guns is GRRM’s own words regarding the direwolf Nymeria and her pack of wolves, where he stated that “you don’t hang a giant wolf pack on the wall unless you intend to use it.” He explicitly referred to them as a Chekhov’s gun – and we can see by the many times that Nymeria and the wolfpack have been mentioned in the story, ranging from frightening lords and peasants in the Riverlands, to killing the Brave Companions chasing Arya and her friends, to dragging Catelyn’s body from the river, to being a focus of Arya’s wolf dreams allowing her to keep her identity despite the Faceless Men’s attempts to make her “no one” (again even in TWOW), that GRRM considers them a very important and significant gun that will go off hard. What exact role they’ll play in endgame, we don’t know yet, but it is definite that they will have one.

Therefore we can consider things that have been referred to often, whose ultimate purpose is mysterious or as yet unknown, to be very probable Chekhov’s guns. Valyrian steel, for example, has been hinted to be one of the few things that can destroy the Others – therefore Valyrian steel swords are definite “guns” (Chekhov’s swords?), even specific swords that have not been mentioned much. (Widow’s Wail, not mentioned since Joffrey’s death, but in the Red Keep waiting for Tommen to grow up; the Targaryen swords Blackfyre and Dark Sister, as yet unnamed within the main books but significant within D&E/TWOIAF/F&B; and so on.) The powers of the Wall to repel the Others and focus or block magic have also been referred to often, therefore it seems very likely that the “gun” in this case is the fall of the Wall via the Horn of Joramun, allowing the Others into Westeros to raise the dead and begin the new Long Night. Jaime described how Aerys and his pyromancers planted thousands of jars of wildfire within King’s Landing, even in the cellars of the Red Keep – and while Tyrion and his pyromancers found many of those jars while preparing for the Battle of the Blackwater, significantly they did not discover the ones within the castle – so it seems probable that Aerys’s “fruits” are a huge Chekhov’s gun that’s not just going to be fired, it’s going to explode. It’s technically possible that this might not be a gun; it could be that the Blackwater was all the plot that the wildfire jars were needed for… but at this moment (especially with wildfire playing a major role in a KL explosion in the show), I’d take any bet.

And as for certain major or minor mysteries (Jon’s parentage, Ashara’s suicide, Tyrek’s disappearance, Benjen’s disappearance, Jaqen’s actions, Patchface, the many prophecies, etc, etc), whether they can be defined as a “Chekhov’s gun” or not… it’s kind of a matter of semantics. However, GRRM is definitely following Chekhov’s principle here, in that he is establishing these plot elements within the story, “hanging them on the wall”, so that when they are resolved or become relevant later, it won’t come out of nowhere. (Note GRRM has said he avoids looking at fan theories in case they’re right, because then he might be tempted to change things up to surprise people – but if it were a surprise, then it wouldn’t be based on the work he’s done that led people to figure things out in advance, which would be bad writing.) Also, we know that these plot elements are significant, otherwise he wouldn’t be mentioning them.

That leads to your question about worldbuilding, and whether elements of ASOIAF worldbuilding can be considered a Chekhov’s gun or if they’re just “flavor text” to give depth to the world of ASOIAF. And the answer is… it depends. Worldbuilding like the cannibals of Skagos seems like it will become very relevant to future events, as Rickon is on Skagos and Davos is heading there in order to bring him home. The mystery of Hardhome is another element of worldbuilding that may become relevant, if Jon needs to rescue the Night’s Watchmen and wildlings there. The mysteries of Asshai… alas, GRRM has said nobody’s going to Asshai, but it will still be significant through the people who have been there. The Deep Ones, the black stone, all that weirdness from TWOIAF – as they appear to be relevant to the ironborn and to the Hightower at Oldtown, as there will soon be a huge confluence of ironborn at Oldtown with whatever weird magical ritual Euron’s planning – well, that seems like a pretty big potential Chekhov’s gun to me. The demon roads of Valyria and the monsters of Mantarys might just be worldbuilding… or they might be relevant when Dany (probably) travels to Volantis.

But the mystery of whether the dragon Vermax laid a clutch of eggs by the hot springs of Winterfell? While that’s briefly hinted to in TWOIAF, that rumor is noted as being extremely dubious within the text, and nothing within ASOIAF itself has referred to the story. Not even any tales by Old Nan, who you’d think would mention it if anyone would. Though it’s possible that it will be related as one of her tales in TWOW (and the TWOIAF-only thing is just ‘cos GRRM’s so late with that book), and the crypts of Winterfell are surely significant for many reasons (Jon’s parentage, secret passages, the mystery of why the statues have swords, what might happen when the Others make the dead rise). So there could be a Chekhov’s gun involved here… or maybe not.

And there’s also the fact that GRRM doesn’t always follow Chekhov’s principle. Besides him being a gardener-writer and not an architect-writer, not everything he writes in detail is significant to the plot of the story. Sometimes he just wants to show the grim-n-grittiness of the world, therefore the constant mentions of pee. Sometimes he’s just showing the pageantry of the medieval era, or the mysteries of “here be dragons” in lands beyond common knowledge. Sometimes he’s making private jokes, including references to writer friends or fan friends or comic books or Harry Potter or the Three Stooges. Sometimes GRRM just wants to describe amazing food, because he loves food. Though once in a rare while, food actually is relevant to the plot. ;)

So, the question of whether something’s a Chekhov’s gun or not, and how you can distinguish a mystery that’s intended to stay a open mystery, from one that will be resolved and/or significant to the events of the story? Well, for things that haven’t come to a conclusion yet… you can do your best at guessing, but honestly, you can’t know. The proof is in the pudding. When the story’s over, we’ll know. Even if you take lots of English classes, even if you study classics of literature and fantasy, even if you read GRRM’s favorite books, even if you read other GRRM works and try to figure out his patterns, you may have become a better educated guesser, but it’s still no guarantee. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is. In the end, some fans who tried to make predictions will be right and some will be wrong and many will have never even guessed where GRRM was going; some things we thought were Chekhov’s guns or foreshadowing won’t be; and some things we’ll go back and see that GRRM had been laying the groundwork all along and we never noticed. (Though it’s a big fandom, I’d bet at least someone would have noticed.)

And really, I think the possibilities of being wrong, the possibilities of being not quite right – that’s half the fun of writing about this series. If we figured out everything that was going to happen before it did, what would be the point of reading, after all? Though if it turns out you did figure things out correctly… you can be glad you did. :)