#who has a better story than bran the broken FUCKING EVERYBODY

[killerchickadee]

You ever rewatch Game of Thrones and get really really mad at how fucking stupid the last season was?

I know I probably make this exact post every year or two but jesus fucking christ.

[weirwoodking]

who do you think will be on the throne at the end? is there a chance it will be a woman? do you agree with the theory that bran will be king in the north bc he symbolizes winterfell? idk if i see dany on the throne bc i don't feel like she belongs in westeros, i think she would be better off with a throne on the other side of the narrow sea but i really don't know what i'm saying

It’s very hard to make predictions for ADOS, because we don’t have TWOW yet. So much can change about the story and the characters in one book, thematically and narratively. Think of how much the plot was influenced by just that final Bran chapter in ADWD. 

But, here I go anyway.

My short answer is: no one. (And no, I don’t mean Arya)

Let’s get into it.

Part 1: How the Show Tainted Everyone’s Brains

Obviously, a lot of people care about the Iron Throne plot. Sometimes too much. I do believe that this is mostly because of how much the HBO show changed everything about the story to make the Iron Throne seem like it was more important than anything else. Like promotional posters of all the actors each sitting on the throne, the name of the series itself being changed to “Game of Thrones”, actors getting asked in every interview “who do you think should get the Iron Throne?” as if it’s the last cupcake at a birthday party that everyone’s fighting over, the final episode was titled “The Iron Throne”. The marketing for everything was “it’s the fight for the Throne!” up through the eighth season. It made the object itself become a huge pop culture symbol.

It almost felt like the show was trying to make it seem like the goal of the Night King (a character not in the books) was to sit on the Iron Throne! The show portrayed it as if the Others were just a little distraction that needed to be dealt with so the characters could get back to arguing over the Porcupine Chair. However, in ASOIAF, it’s the exact opposite. The Porcupine Chair is what’s distracting the characters from the real conflict, the Others.

It’s almost comical how that has somewhat transferred over into the fandom, the “game of thrones” is what’s keeping everyone from focusing on what really matters, the “song of ice and fire”.

Part 2: GRRM’s Quote

It wasn't easy for me. I didn't want to give away my books. Every character has a different end. I told them who would be on the Iron Throne, and I told them some big twists like Hodor and "hold the door", and Stannis' decision to burn his daughter. We didn't get to everybody by any means.

-George R.R. Martin

So, he “told them who would be on the Iron Throne”. Something important about this quote is that he doesn’t say who. And, of course, the Iron Throne gets destroyed at the end of the show anyway. Show!Bran doesn’t really “end up on the Iron Throne”. Show!Dany does. George never said that who “ends up” on it in the books is who ends up on it in the show. He’s said that the Shireen thing and the Hodor thing will “happen very differently” in the books anyway. And, of course, another major part of that quote is “every character has a different end”.

I don’t think that who sits the Iron Throne last is necessarily going to be the ruler of Westeros at the end. For example, Cersei (or Aegon) may be the last person to sit the Iron Throne. Or even Euron (however, even though his goal is to rule post-apocalyptic Westeros as a god from the Iron Throne, I don’t think he’ll actually get there). If wildfire is hot enough to melt iron, I could see the throne being destroyed during whatever fiery shenanigans go down with Cersei and JonCon in TWOW. I think it would be fitting for the fight over the throne to end in the next book. ‘Cause the winds of winter are coming, baby, and it’s gonna be time to start dreaming of spring.

Part 3: The Weirwood King

The idea/theory of Bran becoming King has been around for a long time, long before the HBO show even started airing. This is because of the Celtic myth of King Brân the Blessed, whose name means “Blessed Crow” or “Blessed Raven” in Welsh. Other than the obvious connection with the name, Brân the Blessed’s story involves a magic cauldron that can bring the dead back to life. 

In the myth, Brân’s head is cut off and continues talking (think of how Bran’s most powerful aspect is the magical powers of his mind), because in Celtic mythology the head is believed to be where the soul is.

Celts had a reputation as head hunters. According to Paul Jacobsthal, "Amongst the Celts the human head was venerated above all else, since the head was to the Celt the soul, centre of the emotions as well as of life itself, a symbol of divinity and of the powers of the otherworld." (source)

Catch that? “Otherworld”. There is another myth (Irish, specifically) called the Voyage of Bran, in which the title character goes on a quest to the Otherworld. The Otherworld is a supernatural realm in Celtic mythology. It is also where the sidhe (a.k.a. aos sí) live. Remember, the sidhe are what George has said the Others are inspired by. In Irish mythology, the Otherworld is called Tír na nÓg, Mag Mell and Emain Ablach, in Welsh mythology it’s called Annwn, and in Arthurian legend it’s called Avalon. Fun fact, “Avalon” was the title of the novel George was writing when he had suddenly had the idea of a scene in which a young boy and his brothers see a beheading and then find a litter of direwolf pups in the snow. And so ASOIAF happened.

I’ll leave that there, and try not to go down the great big rabbit-hole of Celtic (and other cultures) mythology connections in ASOIAF. The takeaway is: ASOIAF has been influenced by these myths.

I do believe that Bran is going to be King. Not just because of his ties to this mythology, but also because of symbolism in his own story. The most notable one being…

Under the hill, the broken boy sat upon a weirwood throne, listening to whispers in the dark as ravens walked up and down his arms.

[...]

The singers made Bran a throne of his own, like the one Lord Brynden sat, white weirwood flecked with red, dead branches woven through living roots. 

[...]

His father and the black pool and the godswood faded and were gone and he was back in the cavern, the pale thick roots of his weirwood throne cradling his limbs as a mother does a child. 

- Bran III, A Dance with Dragons

Bran is also the only one of the Stark kids who still thinks of himself as royalty:

What was he now? Only Bran the broken boy, Brandon of House Stark, prince of a lost kingdom, lord of a burned castle, heir to ruins.

- Bran III, A Dance with Dragons

Bran is the heir to Winterfell. It doesn’t matter if Robb named Jon his heir in his will, the will was written under the pretense that Bran and Rickon were dead.

However, Bran doesn’t have any connection to the Iron Throne. It’s far more likely that he would sit on a weirwood throne, because of, y’know, everything about his story. So, if Bran was King of the Seven Kingdoms, I don’t think it would be on the Pincushion Stool.

If Bran is king of the realm, I do think there would still be a separate Lord/Lady of Winterfell, but I do think that there’s a possibility of a Pevensie siblings ending, where all the Stark kids would rule together as the Lords and Ladies and Winterfell.

Something that I’ve never really seen talked about regarding the idea of Bran becoming King of the Seven Kingdoms is the religious differences between the North and the southern regions of Westeros. Of course, the show didn’t deal with this at all. For fuck’s sake, they had Cersei blow up the Westerosi verison of the Vatican and face no backlash. It was so laughably absurd how Show!Cersei’s destructive reign was shown to have like… zero impact on the Seven Kingdoms. 

In short, I’m not too sure that the Kingdom who is majority Faith of the Seven worshippers would react too well to a weirwood-tree-Old-Gods-warg-wizard-king. I mean, when Janos Slynt finds out Jon is a warg he calls him a “thing”, a “creature”, and a “beastling that is not fit to live”, and wanted to execute him not just for being a turncloak but for being a warg as well. And Jojen warns Bran of these things, saying that his own folk may want to kill him if they know what he is.

But… all of that anti-magic attitude might not matter after night falls. 

Part 4: Winter is Coming

I believe that the Long Night is going to be very devastating for the Seven Kingdoms.

Martin is a big believer in making things have meaningful, permanent consequences in his stories. I don’t think that an apocalyptic event like the Long Night is something that’s just gonna get dealt with in a quick snap and have no lasting effect.

A lot of people are going to die. I don’t mean main characters, I mean people that would not survive a normal winter and sure as hell won’t be prepared for this one. Westeros’s food stores have been severely depleted by the War of the Five Kings, and we’ve been told multiple times in the text (particularly AFFC and ADWD) that feeding people during this winter is going to be extremely hard.

Besides that… the whole, uh, invasion of the eldritch ice beings thing might have a bit of an impact on the realm. 

I won’t go into depth about how the Seven Kingdoms will be affected by the Long Night, ‘cause we really have no idea. But, however it all goes down, I do think it will have lasting changes for the people of Westeros. The impact that it leaves may make the concept of Bran being a wizard-king more acceptable. “Oh, well we’ve just seen zombies and winter elves, so what’s too surprising about a magical greenseer warg king?” I think that Westerosi culture becoming more aware and accepting of the existence of magic is the only way that Bran could become the king of the whole realm. The Westeros at the end of the series is not going to be the place that it was at the beginning.

Part 5: Dany: A Home, Not a Throne

To sum up my thoughts on our dragon girl, I don’t think Dany will end up on the Spiky Toilet. I don’t want Dany to be on the Spiky Toilet.

Now, my personal speculation (which a lot of people disagree with, which is fine) is that Dany will never see King’s Landing before the Long Night. I personally don’t think that Dany will ever meet Aegon or Cersei. I don’t see there being enough time in the story for that. Yes, GRRM said that there will be a second Dance of the Dragons, but he also said that the second Dance does not have to involve Dany. He may have originally planned for it to be Aegon and Dany, but probably not once the Meereenese Knot happened.

The Meereenese Knot is what Dany’s ADWD plot is referred to as. GRRM did not intend for Dany to stay in Meereen as long as she has, but because of his “gardener” style of writing, that’s where the story led him. GRRM has said that one of the hardest parts of writing the Meereen plotline (which involves Dany, Barristan, Quentyn, Tyrion, and Victarion) is trying to find a way to cut the plot knot he accidentally got himself stuck in. He has said that Tyrion and Dany will meet towards the end of TWOW, which means that Dany will most likely be spending a large portion of her story with the Dothraki. That part is a completely blank page, but I believe that Dany will meet Tyrion possibly ¾ of the way into the book, and sail for Westeros at the end.

I won’t write a full meta about this here (because that’s not what this post is about), but to summarize my prediction: Aegon VS Cersei is going to be the battle in King’s Landing, a battle which will destroy the city. Dany (who has already rejected sailing for the Throne multiple times) will still be stuck in Essos, dealing with everything she’s still got going on, and will sail for Westeros at the end. Not for the Throne, but to go North for the real fight (remember that Marwyn is also on his way to Meereen to tell Dany that they need her).

Because Dany's purpose is not to fight for the Iron Throne, it’s to fight the Others. Dany (fire, light, and life) VS the Others (ice, darkness, and death) is the main thing the title refers to:

“Well of course the two outlying ones, the things that are going on north of the Wall and Daenerys Targaryen on the other continent with her dragons are of course the Ice and Fire of the title, the Song of Ice and Fire.” 

- George R.R. Martin, 2016

One of the most important excerpts that shows us where Dany’s story is headed is this:

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper's rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened.

- Daenerys III, A Storm a Swords

Dany has a short prophetic “this is what I was meant to do” dream. Dany could possibly have more dreams about the Others in TWOW, visions that will make what Marwyn has to tell her more believable. It’s not like that dream was the only one Dany has had that alludes to the winter threat, Dany has had visions about this since book one:

The red door was so far ahead of her, and she could feel the icy breath behind, sweeping up on her. If it caught her she would die a death that was more than death, howling forever alone in the darkness. She began to run.

- Dany IX, A Game of Thrones

Anyway, there’s just a lot more foreshadowing in the plot that this is what Dany is meant to do. I think adding in another conflict into her story once she leaves Meereen would make the story feel bloated and would severely fuck up the pacing.

I don’t think Dany will ever see the Iron Throne. The themes of her story have never been about her wanting the Iron Throne for what it is, but for what it represents to her. It represents the possibility of a home and of feeling safe for the first time in her life, what Dany truly wants. I think that it’s absolutely fine if Dany never sees the Throne or sits on it, and that it makes more sense for her narrative arc if she discovers that she can find a home somewhere else, not necessarily where she thought it would be. 

Part 6: Final Thoughts

So, in conclusion, I don’t really give a shit who ends up placing their ass on the Forbidden Laz-E-Boy, I care about the War for the Dawn. I care about seeing the characters I’ve followed for the past five books coming together to fight the real conflict of A Song of Ice and Fire. Also, even if we do get a Scouring of the Shire-type post-climax for ASOIAF, it doesn’t matter. People don’t see the Scouring of the Shire as the climax of Lord of the Rings, they see the climax as Aragorn leading the forces of good against the forces of evil and Frodo and Sam throwing the One Ring into Mount Doom. Whatever ending resolution comes after the climax of ASOIAF, it doesn’t change what the climax is.

"Do you think your brother's war is more important than ours?" the old man barked.

Jon chewed his lip. The raven flapped its wings at him. "War, war, war, war," it sang.

"It's not," Mormont told him. "Gods save us, boy, you're not blind and you're not stupid. When dead men come hunting in the night, do you think it matters who sits the Iron Throne?"

"No." Jon had not thought of it that way.

- Jon IX, A Game of Thrones

TL;DR:

My prediction: Cersei will be the last person to sit the Iron Throne, which will be destroyed in the Wildfire of King’s Landing. After the Long Night devastates the Seven Kingdoms, Bran will become the King of this new Westeros that has been majorly affected by the return of magic. Also, it would be real nice if Dany found her red door.

God I hope my rambling made sense

[cchellacat]

Game of Thrones Finale

Here be spoilers for the last season of GoT.  Turn back now or forever hold you peace.  Trust me, I am not holding my peace, I feel like going to war and breaking a bloody wheel over the back of D&D’s heads.

I knew going in, this wasn’t the ending I had been hoping for, or even expecting for nine years.  After the penultimate episode the writing was clearly on the wall, so I watched this final chapter, ready for crushing disappointment and grief. D&D did not let me down. 

They completed their character assassination of Daenerys with all the clumsy, lazy, pretension and dreadfully written dialogue as one might have come to expect, if they had been paying attention since the start of the season. 

When left to flounder in the seas of uncertainty without the masterfully crafted scaffolding of GRRM’s books to hold them afloat, the writers sunk the whole thing gleefully. I’m absolutely certain they took great pleasure in destroying every logical expectation.

This constant need to justify their own twisted ending and eradicate certain characters development and arcs, left me feeling bewildered and horrified.  The beautiful woven foreshadowing that had been building since season one seemed to be cast aside at the last and replaced with some Frankenstein monster, cobbled together from a need to be “different”  to “surprise”, to be “edgy”  and “subversive”.  

This isn’t how good writing is done.  You don’t change the track of a story just because it’s deemed predictable or because fans guessed the ending. 

The onus then, is on the writer, to follow through and complete the story while still making it enjoyable and intriguing.  It isn’t to upturn the apple-cart and refill with limes.  It’s to take the damn apples and make pie.  Make it interesting, draw the audience in, there is nothing wrong with giving the audience what they want. There is nothing wrong with delivering a satisfying and sensible conclusion.  There is nothing wrong with giving the main character/s a happy ending.

Their fear of cliche, lead them straight into trope hell.  The “face heel turn” of Daenerys from Liberator and Mother to Tyrant and Murderer was sloppy, poorly written and did not have a justifiable history to back it up. 

Do not even get me started on how they killed her.  JFC.  Could they have been anymore obvious about how that was gong to go down?  Talk about cliche. 

Murdered by the man she loves, who loves her and who is also her only family.  We’ll talk later about what they did to poor Jon.  Just for reminders sake though, here she is, held in the arms of the man she loves as he promises her she will always be his queen, kisses her and stabs her right in the heart.  **blood boiling**

Turing Sansa into Littlefinger 2.0 made my inner rage monster scream.  Her transformation from  the “The High Queen”  to “The Chess-master” makes me think the North isn’t in any better hands than it would have been with Littlefinger in charge.  How convenient that none of her siblings will be nearby to notice.  Bran in the south, Jon in the True North and for some inexplicable reason, the girl who spent eight season finding her way home, decides to go gallivanting off into the west on some LotR, knock off elf quest. 

Arya’s end is as unsatisfying as every other one.   She spent years growing stronger, learning to kill, striving to be No-one.  Her whole character arc was about her coming to terms with her loss and recognising that no matter how far she ran, she would always be Arya Stark. 

Then is was her journey home, learning that she could go back, that even changed by war and blood, family meant everything.  Her clarion call, that the “lone wolf dies but the pack survives” has been with her every step.  It’s the message her father taught her, one she held too.  Why on earth would she leave her pack behind? 

What even was the point of having her and Gendry meet again and come together if she was just going to walk away?  I’m not saying a character has to be defined by a romantic relationship, but why bother giving the fans a few crumbs just to spit on it an episode later?  This is clearly baiting of the worst kind.  I’d rather they met as friends and parted as friends than the shit show of having Gendry propose, only for her turn him down.  I mean, she could have learned another lesson with the Hound, that defining your life by revenge and forgetting to live only ends in death.  Her returning to Gendry after that would have made sense.  It would have made sense for her to go build a pack of her own.  But no, that would be too easy.  What shall we do with Arya?  Lets put her on a bus!

He did love her.  Jon was crazy about Dany.  She was crazy about him.  This is the man who puts family first, who lives by his honour.  He is his Uncle Ned come again.  Ned, who lived and died by his oaths.  The only time he broke them was to protect his sisters son, to protect Jon, his family. 

This is why they had to destroy Daenery’s character so completely.  They had to make her the worst villain imaginable to make it look even remotely plausible that Jon would;

1. Break his oath of fealty

2. Murder his own blood.

3. Betray the love of his life.

They had to preserve Jon’s good name, oh yes, because Jon wouldn’t kill her for power or because she lost her temper and disagreed with him.  No.  They destroyed both Jon and Dany with this plot. 

Jon is now Queen Slayer and Kin Slayer and he has broken his word, his oaths of loyalty, his unspoken oaths of love and protection, which she rightly expected from him as her blood and her lover and has been reduced to a shadow of the man he was meant to be, the king he could have been. 

He is cursed by the gods in the eyes of most Westerosi, or he would be if they knew the truth.  After all, look at how the nobility treated Jaimie after he killed the Mad King.  It didn’t matter to them that the King was evil, no, what mattered was that he broke his oath.

Oath breakers are anathema in Westeros. 

So much for a Targaryen Restoration.  Goodbye Iron Throne.  The whole point of Jon’s character was just erased.  Did he defeat some great evil?  No.  Did he overcome war and death and end triumphant on the throne as the last dragon?  No.  There was no point in bringing him back after his death in season six.  Anyone could have went to bargain with Dany and the outcome would have been the same.  Ugh!

Jaime and Brienne.  The love story/redemption arc I was so invested in.  One hand gives and the other takes away.  In the end it seems that Jaime learned nothing, according to the writers that is.  I call bullshit.  Jaime had redeemed himself.  If he had to die, it should have bee while killing Cersei.  The foreshadowing of him being Cersei’s death has been around for years. Cersi didn’t love Jaime, she loved controlling him.  Cersei loved no one but herself.  That was the lesson Jaime was meant to learn.  Thanks so much for taking away eight season of character development and self realisation.

Tyrion got shafted too.  His speech near the end, it was a load of cow dung.  In the end they left Tyrion to be Westeros’ own comic relief.  The Small Council was a bloody farce.  All that scene did was reinforce my belief that nothing in Westeros has really changed.  It doesn’t matter what title you give someone, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Give it ten years and Bron will be the power in Westeros in all but name. 

Now who have I forgotten?  Ah yes.  My Special Mention.

Sandor went out the way he meant to, bringing an end to his brother.  But not before the writers gave him a brief moment with Sansa.  There you go Sansan fans, he called her little bird!  Now shut up and let us kill him in a fiery fall of doom. 

Death by fire, the worst death they could give this man.  He wasn’t a good man, it’s arguable that none of the characters were good people.  However, Sandor Clegane suffered more than most.  He spent his life, angry and bitter, seeking revenge for himself and his sister and father.  I think, if they had to kill him, they could have given the man a better exit than him tossing both himself and his brother into the flames.  It was cruel to make that the only way out, the only triumph he could claim.  I think Sandor should have lived.  He deserved to find a life of peace after all the fighting he did.   It is not poetic or clever to kill a character off with the object of their own fear.  It’s not clever when they do it to a villain, it’s doubly unfair to do it to a hero.  He was a hero by the end.  Sandor deserved better.

Now look, I‘m not saying that in a show like this, that everybody should live or necessarily get the end they deserve, but, they went too far in the name of shock value, leaving no one happy, well, virtually no one. I guess the rabid Sansa fans who loathed Dany are feeling pretty good about now. 

(Yes, okay that was mean, but I got sick of seeing it in my timeline and unfollowed a few people.) 

I was always very much of the belief that Sansa and Dany had more in common than would drive them apart.  I didn’t expect an easy friendship or alliance, but I did expect them to find common ground and be able to build a relationship over time.  Strong women supporting each other is what we need more of on TV.  Not this misogynistic desire to see two strong women fight over a man, which is essentially what they reduced Sansa and Dany too with poor Jon caught in the middle.  

In conclusion...

I feel as though the writers went into season eight with a clear idea of where they had been building and then someone get a bee in their bonnet and posed the question, “Who is the least likely to end up ruling Westeros?”

The answer of course is Bran.  Bran the Broken, how fucking ignorant is that?  How about Bran the Burdened or Bran the Broker or Bran the Benevolent, if you’ve really got such a hard on for alliteration?

So now Bran, who is so disconnected from feeling that he can’t love anyone, sits the Iron Throne and is somehow meant to be a good ruler. 

All that’s needed to achieve this happy ending for the writers?

Goodbye Character development and epic love stories, hello smear campaign, death, destruction and the end of one of my favourite canon ships to ever sail.

Rest in Peace Jonarys.  I believed in you.