Her view may not be an orthodox one. Lots of Christians believe in a second coming, but if a priest said it’s this one specific guy, I’m not sure he’d have a lot of people following him.
Melisandre has some ability to see the future. She is also something like 400 years old, so she may be the only red priestess who saw the threat was coming to Westeros in this time.
Thoros was actually sent to KL to try to gain some converts for R’hillor, but I don’t think the Red Priests sent him because they thought the threat from the others was coming in his lifetime.
Though Tyrion does come across a red priest in Volantis named Benerro who is preaching that Daenerys is Azor Ahai reborn.
We have seen red priestresses joining Danaerys in an episode, some season ago. I thought this involvement of the cult of light would be an important element of the story (in fact, I thought it would be one of the elements bringing Danaerys to tyranny and craziness), but it went nowhere.
Right. I suspect the “broad strokes” were very broad. The books may end up in the same place, but will take a very different path to get there. Apparently, Hodor’s and Shireen’s deaths are straight from the mouth of GRRM, and I’d suspect Arya serving the killing blow will be too. But probably everything else will be vastly more complicated and interesting.
The books mention a “Night’s King”, the 13th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch (in comparison, Jon Snow was the 998th LC of the NW) from 8000+ years ago, who is not a White Walker or wight, but married something like it. She and he ruled the Nightfort (a castle at the Wall), made sacrifices to the Others and enslaved the Night’s Watch until the King in the North and the King Beyond the Wall teamed up and brought him down. This was comparatively soon after the first Long Night, so we know the WWs weren’t eliminated then, just kept behind the wall.
The original Long Night was a generation long. Probably 30 years of darkness at least. Somehow I can’t imagine it being like that if all it took was a fast kid stabbing the top Walker to end it. Although they didn’t have Valyrian steel back then.
Am I the only one who wonders if they’ll rebuild the Wall? Or tear it down? What will be the fate of the Night’s Watch? I know Edd died and Jon got a mulligan, but Sam is still a sworn brother, even if nobody else is left. But he is supposed to be Lord of Horn Hill, right?
Disagree about the very different path to get there. GRRM has about fifteen or twenty million reasons (or whatever HBO paid him) to not vary too much from how D&D have chosen to write the last few seasons. There probably will be a lot more description of food and clothing than we saw in the show though.
Moreover, and this might be a bit more controversial, even without the show, I don’t think GRRM now could write the last two books with the same mindset and skill (and maybe editing) with which he wrote the first three. That guy isn’t coming back. And probably didn’t know how to finish the series from there anyway. So, I agree with you that Shireen’s death probably is right from the mouth of GRRM, but it’s today’s GRRM, not the guy who wrote, e.g., A Clash of Kings.
You think HBO bought the rights to the show contingent on them getting to dictate how the story went? That sounds pretty far fetched to me.
Albert Burneko has a magnificently snarky review of 8.03.
Orys Baratheon, the founder of the House Baratheon, was a bastard child of a Targaryen, Aegon the Conquerer’s uncle. Robert’s grandmother was also a Targaryen, one of the daughters or Aegon V (Egg, from Dunk and Egg). Pretty much every major house is related to the others through the years, but the Baratheons and Targaryens are closer than most.
So way they would constrain George on what he can or can’t write. Whether he will or not is a different discussion, but he absolutely has the freedom to write what he wants. He owns the IP, full stop, HBO only owns the adaptation rights.
I suspect George will run far afield of the TV shows since half the stuff he wants to do isn’t fully formed in his head yet, by his own admission. He famously doesn’t do outlines, all he knows is what he thinks he wants to happen, but if you know anything at all about the history of these books he’s changed course many times over the decades making the story much longer and broader. Will the NK lose, of course, will Arya kill him, possibly, will there be a battle at Winterfell survived by all the heroes we know and love, I highly doubt it.
I’m not surprised TV-Edd died, but Book-Edd is on my very short list of people I think will survive till the very end. Like… he’s too awesome to just kill off, too inconsequential to have his death be in-story a big deal. He can’t throw him away, can’t make him a hero. Plus he has to be so much fun to write. How can the last written scenes of what remains of the NW not have some droll little quip from him? (Sam is also on my list because he’s so clearly an author avatar. And that might be my entire list. Those two.)
Arya killing the main Other… it worked fine as far as the show goes and while I don’t want anything bad to happen to her and I’d love for her to be The Big Hero, I just don’t see that as being where the books are going. And if it is what happens, it won’t be the same how and why. Maybe FM send her. Maybe no one knows she’s there and she pops out surprising the reader. Maybe Bran dies… or Meera, if she’s still around by then.
Jorah and Theon are 100% dead by that point in the books. Heroic redemption arcs, but maybe not exactly the same way.
I reflect on S3 through the end of book material and there are many significant changes. Sure, the beats are still there, the overall story, but there are layers missing. So I’m sure some of the things are close to the same, but I read the books for much more than the highlights. I don’t take the show as anything close to what will happen in the books in a deep sense, even if some of the characters might do some of the same things.
Why? So as not to kill the market for the later seasons of the TV show, or of any derivative works, if Martin goes completely in another direction for the last couple of books. Moreover, given the writer’s block we can infer he has with finishing this series, it’s got to be awfully tempting to use the show as a template, flesh it out slightly differently, crank the books out and finally put this thing behind him. Or I’m just bitter from how Stephen King finished The Dark Tower series in a similar rushed, different from the first books, manner. No big TV show to guide King though.
I’m surprised HBO didn’t get all of the IP rights from him, or at least as an exclusive licensee.
Ah, thanks. I’d forgotten that. Love the connection to Egg!
Martin is going all in on the GoT prequel. He is the show runner there.
I am guessing a lot of the ”Others” storyline, which was supposed to be in Winds of Winter has been transferred to that show.
That definitely doesn’t track with who GRRM is. I mean this is the guy who said what a year or two ago that he realized a main character death was ‘obvious’ even though he hadn’t thought of it before, implying the character was still alive in the show.
The dude doesn’t seem like the guy who gives a shit about what the show does.
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We’re talking here as if GRRM will ever write these books. It seems clear to me that they’re fictional, in the sense that they will never be written on this literary plane.
OTOH, suppose Martin does in fact finish the series, and it has a TON of differences, important ones.
So two years after the last book is published HBO starts filming “Game of Thrones – The True Version.” Hey, ten more years of a property that made them millions, why not? How many times have people started over again with Superman or Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood or whatever?
And, of course, it would result in increased sales for the books. If the books and show track exactly many would say well I already know the story. If there are significant differences, but it ends in roughly the same place, then people may be more intrigued to read Winds of Winder and Dream of Summer.
I actually kind of like this.
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It’s a death which subverts our narrative expectations, about which GoT watchers cannot really complain.
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The NK/LoL fight is incredibly Manichean and actually what’s made GoT interesting for so long was the fact that all our heroes and villains had shades of grey. Dispensing with the forces of pure evil opens up the scope for some proper morally ambiguous scenarios to take place.
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It’s subverting fantasy tropes, another strong point of the series. “After the Evil Wizard was defeated, the Good King reigned for a 100 peaceful years, the People of the Dale put aside their long rivalry with the Hillfolk, the Citadel opened its gates to outsiders and all was well in the land. And the wedding of Princess Doris to the young dung farmer Herbert, who had proven his worth to all, marked the beginning of a new era of peace and plumpness.” How about, no? Let’s look at the immediate aftermath of WWII. How long after the forces of literal evil were defeated before the US and allies on side and the Russians on the other were subtly maneuvering against one another? Trick question, it was already happening before V.J. day. Hell, how long before the allies started, if not in-fighting, then jostling for position and advantage? History doesn’t stop, and in a land with Westeros’s history of constant political and military turmoil, it’s a big ask to assume that hatchet-burying is even an option.
The foreshadowing of this was done clumsily, in that it was largely done by making Sansa not only say it, which is fine, but say it to Daenerys, which was dumb. But unsubtlety aside, we’re now in a really interesting place.
Do the North/South alliance really have the resources to take on Cersei?
Can they stay together long enough to give it a go?
Pick a character at random. How divided are their loyalties? Which bonds will break and which hold?
Who turns on whom first?
We just saw a decent-ish zombie movie. Which is fine for a change of pace. But that’s not why I watch GoT.
Yeah, I’m not that broken up about the NK getting dealt with first. However, I would like to see some scheming going on now as they are on the way to KL, but I’m not sure the showrunners can really plot that well. I mean they turned Tyrion into a dolt.
My hunch on the Night King’s demise and the “choice” in the show to have Arya be the executioner has less to do with the show going its own way, and more to do with the ongoing adaptation decision to leave out Lady Stoneheart from the books.
I suspect that in the books, it will be Stoneheart who takes down the Night King, in a last act of humanity and motherhood. She does it to save Bran and she does it with the same dagger that was once meant for Bran’s assassination.
Since Stoneheart isn’t in the show, the writers have adapted her main story beats as part of the Sansa and Arya plot lines, with Sansa asserting her own agency to deal justice to the Boltons and with Arya doing in the Freys. Beric continues to lead the Brotherhood, and he shows up in Winterfell to pay off the Red God’s investment in seeing the Night King destroyed.
So the show “choice” to have Arya do the deed wasn’t the show just making up some surprising twist to thwart everyone’s favorite fan theory; it was just in keeping with their adaptational decisions about how to represent the Stoneheart material in the show.
And no, this isn’t my own beloved Promised Prince theory. I only came to it after watching the episode and pondering Beric’s role in it and how that might intersect with the different elements in play in the books.
As for the various prophecies - they can’t all be right and maybe none of them are. Ancient mystical mumbo-jumbo is a poor basis for planning one’s life and maybe just as poor for developing fan theories.