#and I do believe Jon is gonna be the endgame king of winter/spring in a very Jesus way

[kittykatknits]

"I do have thoughts on the potential baby and how it could play into the story along with what it would mean to Jon/Sansa as characters." I'd love it if you'd expand on this.

Anonymous said:Do you think Sansa will end up raising Jon and Dany’s child?

Anonymous said:I know you said you’ll do a write up and it’ll take a few days but can you please just answer this question: Will Sansa raise Jon’s and Dany’s kid?  

The original plan was to do a longer write up after the season was over but I’m going to do this summary instead. It’s still ridiculously long. It seems like there are a number of frustrations, to put it mildly, with this season. I’m going to dispense with this whole Jon bending the knee nonsense, because it isn’t happening in the books. Then, we can go into the potential baby.

First, and this is a big surprise to me, is how much impact dropping f!Aegon from the storyline is causing. Honestly, I thought it was a good idea when first learning of it and am still pretty sympathetic to the decision. However, D&D are still trying to create, with varying degrees of success, the dance of dragons we are going to see in the books. It’s this change in the source material that is leading to the stand off between Jon and Dany. To put it bluntly, Jon kneeling to Dany is going to be a complete non-issue.

I think it is extremely unlikely Jon will be crowned the KitN, that’s a show-only invention, given to him for a variety of reasons. Right now, I’m playing with the theory of Jon as a King of Winter since it better matches with his story. Jon isn’t going to be king, he is not going to be in a position to negotiate or offer up the north.

Now, let’s talk about the wight hunt which led to Jon’’s offer to bend the knee. Sure, the specifics of how it happened are stupid, but the entire damn concept makes no sense at all. The WW are an intelligent race, they communicate, they have weapons, they have a purpose, even if we don’t know everything yet. But, wights can not go south of the wall. It’s enchanted, it’s got spells. Remember the rotting hand with Aliser Thorne? Realistically, if this happened, the only thing Jon would have to show for his efforts is a rotting corpse. He could dig up a random grave and get the same results, with a lot less danger.

So, about the big meeting at the dragon pit. Again, that won’t happen either. In the books, it isn’t going to be some gathering of nobles in KL (it will be all blown up by then) that alerts the Seven Kingdoms to the danger in the north. It’s going to be Sam at the Citadel. He’s perfectly positioned to know when the wall goes down and happens to be where the single largest collection of ravens is located in all of Westeros. Honestly, this is one of the scenes I am looking forward to the most, I expect to be crying over it.

Back to Dany, as I said, the show seems to want to keep some version of the Dance. This is why Jaime’s character is all over the place, because in the books he’s already filed for divorce. It’s one of the reasons Euron’s story has been changed as well because he sure doesn’t want the IT. As for Tyrion, he’s not Team Dany and is not going to be interested in forging some sort of truce between her and Jon. He’s actually going to play Dany and Aegon:

“Dragons,“ Moqorro said in the Common Tongue of Westeros. He spoke it very well, with hardly a trace of accent. No doubt that was one reason the high priest Benerro had chosen him to bring the faith of R'hllor to Daenerys Targaryen. “Dragons old and young, true and false, bright and dark. And you. A small man with a big shadow, snarling in the midst of all." 

- Tyrion VIII, aDwD

In the books, I do believe Dany will land at Dragonstone, ready to conquer and take the throne. She’s going to be battling against Jon C. who will use Tywin-like methods in his efforts to secure the IT for Aegon. It’s going to be bloody, a lot of innocent civilians are going to be killed. There is a quote in the first (I think) Arianne gift chapter with a dragon dream that describes just how bad it will be. Dany’s conquest will come to an end after she blows up KL, killing an entire city’s worth of people. It’s only after this happens that Dany will finally turn her attention north to fight  the WW.

In the meantime, Jon will have no crown, no houses sworn to him, and he won’t have the Vale. Kneelgate ain’t gonna happen, at least in the books. There’s a ton more regarding Northern Independence, the GNC, the “Dance of Wolves”, and other stuff that plays into this too, but they all reinforce the same conclusion. They aren’t going to marry to join the north and south, they aren’t going to mary for some grand political union.

Ok, let’s talk about the Magical Targ Baby. As I said earlier, Dany is not barren and she never was. At least in the books, if Jon has a child with her, it will be a bastard. It’s just like Martin to give Jon what he most wants, a child and family in Winterfell, and what he wants least, the child to be born as a bastard like him.

Now, will, the two of them have a child together? Maybe. Possibly. We don’t really have enough information to know for certain. Whether this happens or not, I do believe Dany will not survive the series. She’s going to go out saving humanity from the ultimate form of enslavement, fulfilling the messianic role as the breaker of chains.

As for Jon, he’s a rather straight-forward monomyth hero. He’s interesting and well-done (at least to me) but not particularly unique as far as characters go. In the show, Jon has reached the final stage of his journey, freedom to live, and is singularly focused on defeating the WW. The truly fascinating part, is that it was Sansa who came along on his journey towards the end. Like, that blows my mind every time I think about it. Sansa was the one at his side while he finished his journey. How awesome is that? In the books, we don’t yet know how Jon’s return home will play out, he’s still in the underworld.

We also don’t know what will come after. Will Jon go out like Neo, saving the world? Or will he be closer to Rand and Frodo, still alive but no longer able to be part of the world. Or perhaps he is Odysseus, longing for nothing more than going home again?

Before I go any further, I want to state, that I am a Jonsa shipper. I hope/want (like desperately so) them to be endgame but I will not say that is the case because I just don’t know. None of us do right now. I’ve also been reading these books for years and have learned to keep expectations low when it comes to my personal wish list. So, to get to a point here, I am not advocating for or wanting a Magical Targ Baby.

Frankly, this season has left me kinda depressed with aSoIaF, forcing me to think about the potential endgame for the first time in awhile and I’m not enjoying it.

If Dany does get pregnant, there are two options I foresee, neither of which I like. Dany is either going to die in battle and her child meeting the same fate. Or, she’s going to give birth and still die. If that does come to pass, I do believe the child will be raised in Winterfell by Sansa. As I said, I don’t like these options. Martin loves his dead mothers (“Lady Stark. She’s dead.”) and the idea that he would do this to Dany really turns me off.

Now, if Dany dies while pregnant, it flies really close to the idea of a Magic Targ Baby as sacrifice and the theme of death paying for life. The other option is that Dany gives birth and then dies saving the world. I can’t figure out how to make this work (that wall is on the verge of falling) in the middle of the war for the dawn. If this happens, Sansa will be raising Jon’s bastard in WF, a repeat of what came the generation before. I find this problematic too. There are a number of implications here I find deeply uncomfortable. But, it fits with Sansa’s story and the mother theme that keeps appearing in her arc.

Now, as to how this relates to Jon and Sansa. I’m going to assume, for this post, that Jon lives through the end of the series. If this is the case, Sansa will still be raising the child and be the only mother it knows. If the two of them get married, or end up together, it will be based upon a relationship of respect and affectation that will grow to something more. I am not convinced we will see all or even most of that take place on the screen/page. We will get a dream of spring.

I could go on and on but hopefully this answers some of the questions sent my way today. I will also say that I play around with and mull over theories constantly and tend to be very slow to make a final decision on what will happen. Like my “Jon will be remembered as a villain” theory or my ever-favorite “Sansa will never marry but give birth to a bunch of bastards” theory. My tendency to do this is what has kept the books fun for me so long, the idea of possibility. So, these are my thoughts, as they are today, in this moment. Ask me again in a month and you may get a different answer. 

ETA: I’m not trying to depress anyone, sorry if this did. I’m trying to answer the questions as honestly as I can while also keeping my expectations low. I will also happily remove tags if they are upsetting anyone. 

[3y7world]

TL;DR In defence of Brandon Stark

Oh, boy this ended up long, but I’m gonna post it anyway, maybe someone finds it interesting and maybe sparks some hope in them that Winds of Winter and Dream of Spring are still worth to be waiting for.

Ever since the Game of Thrones finale I see everyone crying about how Bran is actually a manipulative arsehole and the real villain of the story, and people doubting GRRM, judging him already if he was the one making this decision. I have also watched videos and read articles about raging people dissecting every inconsistency and illogical acts on the TV show and they all did much better job at it than I would, so I am not here to do that. But since I have put way too much thought into this and I hadn’t yet encountered anyone online that I could agree with a 100%, I decided to write this little dissertation on why I think Bran the Broken is the actual endgame of A Song of Ice and Fire and why it is the perfect ending.

I would like to say first though, that this is not going to defend the showrunners because they screwed up majorly, this is merely what I think that Martin might plan with the character of Bran Stark and why it all makes sense.

 Okay, it’s important for me to note that I am not exactly objective here. Bran is my second favourite character in the books (because no one can be more badass than Ser Davos Seaworth, I mean who else CANNOT WAIT for his story arc in Winds of Winter? An island full of cannibals, really?) and perhaps I have payed way too much attention to his storyline and motivations in the story so far and I might have ended up with an exaggerated version of him in my head, but it still sound kind of logical.

When the last episode came out I have been in a weird state of apathy: while the previous episodes in had left me raging, I couldn’t help myself watching the last episode and thinking “yep, I can see where they are going with all this” and I had realized very early that this might be because this is how the book will end and the two very different narrative in my head tend to mix up.

So, what A Song of Ice and Fire is actually about?

So far, I have encountered two different interpretation co-existing of this epic book series and both have been confirmed by quotes from the author himself.

The first one is very obvious: that the book is an exploration of the nature of power. How power would corrupt anyone, even the good or bad. Because we’re humans after all, we make mistakes, everyone has a bad side and a good side, and existence is basically about the inner struggle between the good and the bad in you. It goes even further and establishes that there’re no good people or bad people: “Someone’s hero is another’s villain” and it is explored in many ways through many minor and major characters. In the TV show this had become way oversimplified after they had run out of source material, making the good guys more good and the bad guys almost caricature of actual villains. We can make examples of this by comparing the things that are book canon and TV show canon. Like Jon Snow, who as commander of the Night’s Watch was spared from the more morally dubious decision he had to make in the books (i.e. switching little Sam with Val’s baby to ship off all the “king’s blood” out of Melissandre’s reach, or talking the young Karstark girl into marrying Tormund Giantsbane to somehow strengthen the position of the wildings south of the Wall). Were these things the right thing to do? Yes, absolutely. Was it cruel and unjust to people who had actually trusted him and considered him a friend? Also yes. Tyrion, whose shift into darkness was entirely omitted from the show bringing his character to a complete standstill after season 4, consequentially making it completely illogical for him to join up with Daenerys in the first place (I mean the “breaking the wheel” conversation is the stupidest thing I have ever heard and the Tyrion in the show, who is not super-vengeful towards every living thing in Westeros and a bitter shadow of himself like he’s in the books – though in there they haven’t met yet, so it might go down very differently – should have been able to point this out immediately, but I could rage on the wrongness of that single dialogue for ages, I must stop). Cersei, who started out as a cunning, insanely selfish, yet somehow strangely pitiful and very relatable character turns into an unjustified, completely illogical madwoman, with no real payoff. Or the whole complex and multi-layered politics and schemes of the Iron Islands simplified into arrrgh-igh and urrrgh-ing and some misogynistic jokes, completely killing Asha Greyjoy storyline and butchering up Euron’s entire being, making him into the most one-dimensional character ever. And the list goes on. This is the first point that made the ending with Bran Stark as king less understandable than it should be in the books, but more on that later.

Throughout the book series, at first we see the same struggle in Bran between what’s good and what’s evil and when he finally meets the Bloodraven, we can also witness him trying to leave this internal conflict behind and – as the show says multiple time – slowly become “something else”. Considering that the very first chapter is a Bran POV chapter, it immediately works in establishing his significance in the story and it gets even more prominent throughout the first book. For example, how Ned had seen him as a bridge that could possibly mend the conflict and animosity between the Starks and the Lannisters and the fact that he was in the centre of the start of the whole conflict of the Seven Kingdoms, or how Martin has dedicated an entire chapter for his post-fall experience, his first vision, which is also the first real chapter (besides the prologue) to foreshadow the main conflict of the story: the war against the White Walkers. In contrast with all this, for example Arya or Sansa chapters are in there more to further the events in Kings Landing leading up to Ned’s demise and just minorly about building up the girls’ characters, considering their importance later in the story.

Now by the end of Dance with Dragons, we are very early in the story of Bran’s journey in the books, we barely know anything about the range of his powers or the character development that he will have, but considering that we get a fairly good amount of information about the Bloodraven and his past we can kinda extrapolate that – like in the TV Series – becoming this all-powerful, ever-seeing varg/greenseer supercombo is going to lead him into loosing everything that makes him Brandon Stark who is the son of Eddard and Catelyn, Prince of Winterfell, the loveable boy who likes climbing walls etc. He has already made very important decisions that is propelling him this way, like sending Rickon off with Osha or making Sam swear to not tell Jon that he’s alive and going beyond the Wall, because he knew all these things would stop him from fulfilling his quest. On the other hand, right now, he’s still a little boy, who would go around asking “are we there yet?” and having a cute little crush on Meera and though we see glimpses of the this more mature and less human Bran more and more he still has a very long way to go and we cannot be sure which of these two conflicting sides will win over the other. But we also know that Hodor’s death scene is book canon, since George R. R. Martin said so, I think it’s safe to assume that Bran will make the same decision to fully embrace his powers after screwing up royally and leave his previous life completely behind as he did on the show.

So, after establishing all this, back to the whole point with the “power” thing, let’s see the ending.

For the record, I think Daenerys’ descend into madness and Jon ending up killing her is book canon as well. As I said, since in the show had decided to dumb down their characters into their cartoon version starting from season 5, the route to that point was way over-simplified, but taking everything into consideration that we know about them in the books, it seems like a very viable thing that can easily happen.

With Daenerys, someone who was established as a little naïve, sometimes unnecessarily cruel but overall just woman corrupted by power and chased into madness and Jon, her counterpart, who yet again would make a right, but morally dubious decision the central message about power would be that there is no human being that is worthy of the throne and thinking about it this way, Drogon burning down the Iron Throne is like the most satisfying moment in the whole saga (assuming – of course – that Drogon is previously established as a complex human-like character both emotionally and intellectually: something the show yet again failed to do).

So, in the end it would make sense, that the character that is the most “not-human” is the best candidate to rule the Kingdom.

Someone on the asoiaf subreddit had directed my attention towards the legend of the Fisher King, particularly, the old Welsh version. I wasn’t familiar with this story, but I looked it up a little bit. The legend is of Welsh origin and is strongly tied into the Arthurian myths and if I had understood correctly, he is traditionally considered as the keeper of the Holy Grail. In this version, which if Wikipedia is to be believed, the oldest version of his story, he is called Brân the Blessed, who has a very tragic story as far as I could gather. He has a bunch of artifacts, for example a cauldron that can resurrect the dead, though imperfectly (they couldn’t speak) which he had given as a wedding gift to the Irish king when he married his sister, Branwen. Branwen had been mistreated by his husband so Bran started a war against Ireland where he was wounded on his legs and poisoned: he had become the “Maimed King”. According to the legend his land had also become a barren wasteland just as his body was consumed by poison. In the end, he told his people to cut his head off, which stops the curse and he still ruled his country as talking oracle head for some 80 years. The legend part comes in that it is said, that he still looks after his lands from where he is buried in London and the ravens at the Tower are his helpers or something which is beside the fact, that is all sorts of cool, you can see the point I’m trying to make here. The Fisher King had become a great ruler after he lost his humanity, which in the case of this story was his body, making him incapable of doing things that the people of this age would have found honourable and the right thing to do: chivalrous acts or siring children and so. (If this was a very butchered version of the story, I meant no disrespect to Welsh people and their legends, but I tried to summarize it as well as I could.)

It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to assume that Martin, who is well-known for using historical events, mainly British ones, as an inspiration would want to use this legend as well. Of course, not literally probably, thought I think it would cool if the one to resurrect Jon would be Bran, who is associated with the old gods (ice) making him a nice contrast to Dany, who is pretty much believed to be the princess who was promised by the red priests and priestesses of Essos (“resurrected” by fire). After all, since Melissandre is a thousand miles away from Castle Black by the time Jon is murdered and the most possible way for Jon to survive is that he wargs into Ghost, it sounds plausible that it will be Bran that guides him somehow back to his actual body. This is of course my speculation, but it would be really awesome nonetheless.

Or who knows, maybe I’m misinterpreting the Fisher King thing, and this legend is supposed to allure to Bran the Builder or Eddard’s brother Bran Stark, but for me, just like for Old Nan, all Brandons are the same.

But even without this convoluted analogy, the Bran the Broken endgame still stands on its own.

Because the other, more allegorical interpretation of A Song of Ice and Fire is that the White Walkers are a metaphor for climate change. While everyone is occupied by their petty struggle for power, the real threat is ignored, and it grows rapidly. The only way to defeat it – by the way, this was also a point that was lost in adaptation by the TV show – is that the people of the world put aside their differences and work together to stop the inevitable destruction.

I don’t know if that will be book canon or not, but in this interpretation, the fact that the Children of the Forest created the White Walkers makes perfect sense even with the fact, that there is no Night King in the books (thus no convenient hive-mind plot device, thank Goodness! My guess is, actually, that the solution will be one of the magical horns we keep hearing about). The Children, who had been closely associated with the imagery of nature, had been hunted ruthlessly by humankind, literally cutting down their sacred trees, killing their environment, so in response, they created the White Walkers, just like, I guess, the Earth tries to “fight back” with extreme weather conditions. In this sense, Bran, who is chosen as the sort of champion of the Children ending up in a position of power kind of indicates a very hopeful outcome, if the right thing is put into focus point.

After all, this story is still a fantasy story in its core, and George R.R. Martin himself said so. In a fantasy story – however gruesome and realistic it is – needs to be a message of hope. And I think this would also tie up nicely with everything we knew about the world of ice and fire so far: in some way, we get a really sad ending when your heroes (Jon and Dany) are not really heroes, but at the same time, we get a promise of hope, that mankind might still be salvageable. Thus, a bittersweet ending.

“But this what we had seen in the show,” you might ask at this point. “If this is a satisfying ending, why I hated all this in the TV last Sunday?”

Well, the answer is incredibly simple, and it can lead back as far as Season 5.

Is it because of the butchering of the characters I had mentioned earlier? Partially, but no.

Is it because they ignored important world building of Essos and its politics in order to speed along the fanservice moment of Tyrion  I-use-complicated-words-so-people-wont-realize-that-I-am-talking-bullshit Lannister and Daenerys I-will-only-talk-solely-in-one-liner-catchphrases-so-it-could-be-used-in-a-cool-trailer Targaeryen having the dumbest chit-chat ever? Fustrating? Yes. But no.

Is it because they sacrificed one of the Seven Kingdoms and its incredibly interesting storyline with highly complicated political issues and very intriguing power players in order to Jaime and Bronn have a bro-trip to Feminaziland? No, it was horrifying, but not even that. This all could have been forgiven if repelled in later seasons. The unchangeable mistake hasn’t been these ones.

It’s because they dropped Bran’s storyline for an ENTIRE SEASON.

If him becoming king really is endgame, and not just later decided to bring into the story as shock value (ehhem, like with Arya), they must have known this when they were developing season 5.

Sure, I understand the decision from the showbusiness aspect: it would probably wouldn’t have been that interesting of a storyline and would have required a lot of boring universe building. Because it should have explored the Bloodraven’s character more, giving more gravitas and foreshadowing for the mistakes that Bran would make.

In fact, if they would have included a little trial-and-error process, wherein Bran explores the fact that even though he could interact with people through his visions, he cannot change the outcome of it, for like trying to change things that he considered bad in the past. For example, he might have caused Aerys’ “burn them all” fixation, when he tried to stop him from murdering his uncle and grandfather. Popular fan theory is that Bran sort of goes through the history of Westeros to ready the land for the Long Night: like warging into Bran the Builder and building the Wall and Winterfell, some even say that he could easily be the one who established the prophecy of light in the first place making him into Rhllor. Of course, these theories are very far-fetched and unrealistic and in order for this to work, they would have to establish many things from historical events of Westeros through boring scenes of conversation. The only reason I would have put somewhat similar scenes into the season so it would be more explicit that even though Bran knows about things, he cannot change of the outcome of the events. This way, it would have been understandable that he doesn’t try and stop Danaerys burning down Kings Landing. The cultivating moment to all this would still have been the Hold the Door scene, which kinda meant to establish this trope, but failed spectacularly, because by this point, no one in the audience cared about Bran. He had become a completely unrelatable character who “didn’t do shit”. The emotional response that Hodor’s death scene evoked in the audience was solely for the fact that he was innocent and good, yet he had to live his life in complete misery and die a horrible death for someone else’s mistake. The lesson that Bran and the audience was meant to learn from this scene was completely lost, because Bran’s emotional response by killing the last renmants of who he used to be wasn’t a moment with proper build-up. The showrunners had put Bran to the sidelines while trying to give lines to the people around him to maintain his significance (like BR telling him, that he will be waiting for the Night King and such), yet not giving him anything to do. They fell into the usual pit of writing a character that was too strong for them to handle: so they decided to only get him of a shelf when he was needed as a plot device.

All these things makes me really sad and angry as a fantasy fan, because the creators of the show have been given a once in a lifetime opportunity when they actually had the budget and resources to connect the genre with a mainstream audience and actually making fantasy into pop culture instead of a sub-culture. In the wake of the success of Game of Thrones a lot of good fantasy novels’ filming rights had been sold and was put in development, but while failing to end the show properly, they made this into a hazardous business for big companies yet again and who knows how many of these productions will we actually see?

To summarize things, in the books, where the defeat of the White Walkers will be a much more complicated issue will have more room for Bran to explore and use his powers for good and I’m absolutely positive he will and I honestly hope people won’t hate Martin if he does end as King of Westeros.

I’m not saying that this is the only plausible ending, I just wanted to point out that there’re many indicators that point to this endgame and it’s not a bad one, despite the fact that the TV show was a huge let-down and I sincerely hope that many people will give Winds of Winter and the whole fantasy genre another chance to impress them.