#going to learn black magic to curse that god forsaken ship

[scarlettfevor]

I won't lie, I don't like jayvik solely out of spite because their fans are so insufferable. Do you know how annoying you have to be where even I, someone whose not into arcane and is not in the fandom, knows how annoying yall are?

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

Ok, I just saw one of your recent posts, and I am new to the "let's theorize about stuff that's going to happen next!" side of the aSoIaF fandom, but where the hell do "thin places" fit into this series? Is there anything explicit in the books that "lots of people die here" = breakdown in reality? I admit that I miss plenty of stuff as I read because I'm mostly doing it for fun not to "solve" anything, and maybe there have been Martin interviews, but that feels very eisegetic.

It is very eisegetic. (Fun word!) IIRC the idea was first proposed by @racefortheironthrone? (Although he might have gotten it from elsewhere.) You can see some of his posts on the matter here and here, and particularly in his chapter review of ACOK Arya VI, the first one set at Harrenhal. Other meta-writers have picked up on it with a vengeance, especially @poorquentyn.

And while it has been previously acknowledged by many that Harrenhal’s curse is a very strange thing, not to mention the inexplicable time-twisting at Chroyane, I think the concept of them being Thin Places caused by massacres+magic is something that really kicked in after TWOIAF. (Where the eldritchness of the world got seriously boosted by Yeen and Mantarys and Gogossos and the Deep Ones and the black stone and Asshai, of course.) And the theorizing got turned up to 11 after the con reading of the Forsaken, the Aeron TWOW preview chapter where Euron seems to be planning something horrific involving the sacrifice of multiple priests of various religions plus the kingsblood of his unborn child; plus Aeron’s shade-of-the-evening-induced vision of the fleet of ships burning… well, the idea that Euron is deliberately trying to create a Thin Place (on his way to becoming a god) became very pervasive in the fandom.

But you’re right, Thin Places are not really exegetic, not really explicit from the text or from anything GRRM’s said. They’re just based on similarities between such places in ASOIAF and definitive Thin Places in other works in the fantasy and horror genres. As such, it really should be acknowledged that such theories as the Eldritch Apocalypse are only theories, and if you theorize based on an unproven theory then you’re really building a castle on clouds — and maybe there is a mountain hidden under the clouds, or maybe GRRM’s going to poof them all away with TWOW and the castle will collapse. But, pssh, like that’ll ever happen – I mean, this is the fandom where people write long series of non-theoretical analytic essays on the personalities and plans of characters using Southron Ambitions as a given*, without ever acknowledging that the Southron Ambitions Theory is still an unproven theory. Like, it’s a theory with a lot of support, but it’s never been explicitly textually stated in the detail people use for their essays, and the book character who titled it is a noted paranoid.

(I personally highly dislike cloud castle building. While I may accept the probable validity of certain theories, when it comes to projected possibilities based on those theories, and projections based on those projections, I always want to step back a bit. I know it’s very tempting considering the slowness of GRRM’s writing, but at some point it really is just fanfic. And I’ve been burned that way before– though it’s probably impossible to google Swpwarrior’s theories on Onslaught and the X-Traitor and the Twelve (it was in a far country called Usenet before many on this site were born), it turned out he was indeed very wrong and he did eventually write them up as fanfic (as PQ has promised to do with his EA should GRRM do something completely other). I mean, his theories were awesome and I loved them, but I did learn a strong lesson about projection and eisegesis there. edit: ooh, found one post, whee.)

*And sometimes they’ll even write things like Southron Ambitions or Eldritch Apocalypse in their essays without linking, as if people should just know what that means. Sometimes I wonder just how impenetrable and obscure the theorizing side of the fandom can be to those who’ve only just finished reading the books…