/aSoIaF/ General

Shame they fucked up the fight in the show.

>see edition name

He's good for putting ideas in your head for mulling over, but he's very heavy on the conjecture.
My personal fav is his "Quentyn is alive" theory.
Also, there's an associate/friend of preston that managed to explain Roose's motivation for Red Weddingin Robb, just by using a map of the north and a bit of know-how about ships and trade.

Is the game worth it ?

No aSoIaF game will ever be needed since the CKII mod already exists.

Clearly forgetting the greatest game of all time

Oh, dear fuck no.

I got that game in a humble bundle. I only played the first part at the wall then i got bored of it.

I see. Shame.

So i will jsut continue with what i was already doing. Could you by any chance tell me if i am playing it correctly ?

In an ideal world, what would be the last sentence of the series?

"And then Macumber opened his eyes and let out a yawn as he stretched. He slowly rose up and began to cook breakfast "

"And in their hands, the daggers."

>in a humble bundle
Me too. I stuck through the wall section, but it didn't get any better.

The Dragonriding gene is all but proven.
Might not literally be genetics as Martin has indeed said there is a magical explanation for stuff, but Valyrian blood isn't SUPER uncommon (Volantis, Lys, the Celtigaers, the Velaryons, the Baratheons) and none of them can control dragons without immediate blood of a Dragonrider family.

The entire Princess and the Queen short story is about that after all.

So some kind of special gene that only exist in some Valyrians or people with Valyrian blood in them ?

youtube.com/watch?v=4aoFCZGr3LY

Basically it's genetics.

Hasn't Martin confirmed that genetics work differently in aSoIaF, to shut down the questions about the Baratheon line having zero blondes or something?

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

>Shame they fucked up the fight in the show
they did not. Please explain to me how you would have visualized that fight any better.

>So i will jsut continue with what i was already doing. Could you by any chance tell me if i am playing it correctly ?
I don't know, is an awful lot not tending to happen? Cause that's what always happens to me.

You take that time and try to bang your close relatives.

Not exactly.
The Valyrian Freehold was like the Roman Republic, and it was controlled by 20-odd "families" that were founding members, the Freeholding Lords.
These families all had the Dragonrider thing, implied to be done as part of some kind of potent ritual they were all involved in in the distant past. It actually seems to work more or less like warging, only it only works on one animal at once and you remain more aware of yourself while riding it. The Targaryens were perhaps the least of the 20 families, but since they were well away from Valyria when the Doom happened they lived.
Valyrian blood isn't enough as half of Lys and the entire ruling class of Volatis had that; you NEED to he related to a Dragonrider family, and directly related at that. Distant relation isn't potent enough for this power to work.
Just before the Dance of Dragons anyone who claimed they were born out of right of First Night from some Targaryen family that they would be made legitimate heirs of the could bond and ride a dragon. Basically they were running so low on Targaryen's capable of it that they were getting desperate.

This is also probably why the incest thing was so prevelant among the Targs; they knew that if they diluted their bloodline too much they'd loose the ability to control dragons. After the Dance this wasn't impprtant anymore, but that matches the recurring theme of time distorting the truth of why people did things.

Not that guy, but one of Ned's buddies drops his shield for like, no fricking reason. I hate when people do that in TV shows and movies. Use your goddamned shields, people!

By not having Dayne swing two longswords like some anime retard and actually giving him proper Dawn.

Oh yea and actually including all three kingsguards

I'd have made it totally realistic swordfighting, instead of just mostly realistic swordfighting.

(In fairness, I still think it's pretty good.)

To clarify, THAT'S why Dany couldn't control the dragons as they got older.
The Targs never just had the dragons automatically obey them, they needed to go through a bonding process that only worked on just one at a time.
After DowD I'm guessing Dany has finally bonded to one, namely Drogon, but the other two she needs two other people to even hope of controlling them.

So why do the other two follow her?

Is it because they do have some motherly connection or is it Drogon they are following and by proxy her ?

The irony of realistic sword fighting is that to people who don't know anything about sword fighting it looks really unrealistic.

You're gonna have to learn to deal with that one day because historically correct fencing is kind of not a commonly known or understood skill anymore so it's not ever going to get more accurate except on a very rare case by case basis.

>The irony of realistic sword fighting is that to people who don't know anything about sword fighting it looks really unrealistic.
The actual fight did have some good parts among the lousier bits, like how you can see Dayne working his angles so all the stark men are in front of him at once and bunched up so that they can't go for heavy swings without hitting eachother.

But still, two longswords is retarded.

And Dayne was specifically written to have a greatsword. It's a really important part of the character.

Probably the "mama" thing.
The dragons are ultimately just very dangerous animals. They followed her when the were younger because she fed them and gave them water.
But a wild animal even you raise from birth is STILL dangerous when it grows up and you aren't going to be able to tell it what to do because it's still just an animal.

Dany's problem with the dragons is her recurring problem with everything in her storyline; she has no idea how to do anything she wants to do, and unfortunately the people who surround her have little to no knowledge of how to explain things to her.
Tyrion's actually a good sidekick for her because he actually WOULD have knowledge of how to play politics and because he knows everything ever written about dragons.

Selmy gives sound moral advise, but by his own admission he hates the idea of ruling and never wants any more responsibility beyond being a knight.
All of Dany's advisors either are giving bad advise, specialized advise from their narrow experienced POV, or outright lying to her because they benefit from her naïveté.

She's basically trying to play the Total War series for the first time without any instructions except a booklet filled with lincorrect information or outright lies

He's hardly a character in the show.

I will always like him because he doesn't believe the R+L=J theory

Whatever jon snow does is a result of him being ned's bastard son. Every decision that he makes has ned's imprints all over him. For all practical purposes, Ned Stark is JS's dad. Him being a special child of prophecy shits all over his character.

doubt it can be better than the ADWD ending

He's hardly a character in the books either.

But he is the guy who was a famous swordsman and had the ancestral greatsword of house Dayne.

No, you imbecile. It just means that Ned ultimately DOES get to be King, only he does it through his son.
Maybe not his son by birth, but a solid and meaningful family is more then just blood, as evidence by the Lannisters tearing each other apart compared to the solidarity the Stark's showed...except for Sansa of course.

Him being Rhaegar's son only "matters" to Westeros, and if you think that invalidates everything just because of what Westeros thinks then you're kind of missing the part where nearly EVERYTHING everyone in Westeros thinks at large is wrong or unbelievably stupid.

Basically, even though he IS Rhaegar's son, he isn't magically going to become a Targaryen in personally and appearance.
He will always be Jon Stark in his heart, and even if he's forced to take up the Targaryen name nothing will change that.

Wait. I didn't watch the most recent season because season 5 was absolute garbage.

THEY FUCKING DID THE TOWER OF JOY?
NO.
FUCK YOU.

youtube.com/watch?v=MgFPVae1Cb8

Enjoy.

Truly, he is a song of ice and fire.

bravo gurm

this is pretty much exactly as awful as I expected it to be

fuck. I should watch season 6 for the cringe.

You should had seen the battle of Winterfell

Do it. It's just priceless comedy at times.

Though it's sad how such a great show has fallen so low. Nothing makes any sense anymore

Please tell me this isn't real.
This is like, shitty football. Even LotR's wildly unrealistic battles looked better then this.

Feminism and not having the books to go off of because GRRM will finish Winds of Winter when the Sun is dead and the universe goes cold.

what is this?

I had already done that at season 5. I think "bad pussy" was about the time I had given up.

Pretty much this, it showed how inept the writers actually are.

Thats not real. Battle of bastards is weird but okay.

But Stannis vs. Roose at Winterfell is just Stannis' army standing in the middle of a field getting trampled by thousands of horsemen who just appeared out of nowhere

Battle of the Bastards. Cant you read ?
Funny that is around the same time i stopped. Heck i know a few people who also stopped there.

Yeah, I heard about/saw that.
I actually thought it was an internet meme and not a real thing until I saw the actual scene. HBO is really awful when left to it's own devices, isn't it?

I mean, at LEAST they could have kept GRRM on writing so that godawful shit like that didn't get the okay.

It gets worse

I don't know how it could possibly get worse, bar the obvious "Bran goes through history and David Hayters his way through all the important backstory of the series."

>I mean, at LEAST they could have kept GRRM on writing so that godawful shit like that didn't get the okay.
Let's not pretend Gurm doesn't have his fair share of bad lines.

He knows how to write a dramatic scene, and how to take his audience seriously, though.

Like, I don't know if she's in the books or not but Yara Greyjoy being bi/a lesbian was the most unnecessary forced thing I have ever seen.

Yea, but in his case it feels kinda tongue-in-cheek

[Asha] Greyjoy, in the books, is pretty straight as a board, even with her sexual appetite. She has a character, and useful things to do in the books, though.

Same as the oversexualiyation of Renly and Loras.

Loras in the books is a famous knight who btw might be gay in the show its just Hey look at how gay he is!

And Renly is the same, plus in the show they made him into too much of a good guy, while he is actually just a charismatic dick

havent seen his stuff yet. any theories about the black "oily" stone that appears at weird places?

Also whats Veeky Forumss opinion on Bran being Bran the Builder?

>who btw might be gay
>might

They never even really tell you about Renly and Loras. Instead the novels treats you like an adult human being and lets you put the dots together.
Neither were really flamboyantly gay either; Loras was as fancy as the series gets, and nobody at all questions if he's "girly" in the novels because he's a damn good knight, if not perhaps a particularly good commander.

Renly didn't seem like a bad guy in the books at all, he just seemed about as morally average as everyone else (meaning with a pretty shaky moral compass mostly revolving around how powerful he was or was not politically) but much friendlier and charismatic like you said.
He could've just executed Caitlyn for instance or held her cruelly hostage, but he instead just told her "no" and treated her well.

He kind of had this weird idea of the "gentleman's" war I think, one borne from a total lack of firsthand knowledge of how savage and unfair war can truly be.

You'd be AMAZED how many people when the books were first coming out argued online weather or not Loras was actually gay or not.

Though it was Renly who didn't think twice before bertraying his own brother

>Bran will go back in time and become Bran the Builder

True, but that just makes him everyone who isn't a Stark, Martell, or Tyrell so far.
And I genuinely don't think Renly wanted Stannis DEAD, I just think he wanted to be King. And he was right about one thing; pretty much nobody would be willing to deal with Stannis as a king because he's too rigid and unyielding. The people that ARE with Stannis now are only still around because they feel as though they're in too deep to get out or because they feel being with him is the best chance to screw their political rivals, like the Florents.

Stannis also didn't like killing Renly either.
Clearly he was able to justify it to himself by claiming that Renly broke the law and thus deserved it, but it's also pretty apparent that Davos' words actually hurt Stannis and that he grapples with the reality of the fact that is barely one step away from being his brother's murderer.

You're shit.

The best description about what Renly is like as a character comes from Cressen, the Maester that acted as the three Baratheon brothers father figure after their real dad died.

“Look at me!" he would shout as he ran laughing through the halls of Storm's End. "Look at me, I'm a dragon," or "Look at me, I'm a wizard," or "Look at me, look at me, I'm the rain god."
The bold little boy with wild black hair and laughing eyes was a man grown now, one-and-twenty, and still he played his games. Look at me, I'm a king, Cressen thought sadly.”

All three of the Baratheon's in the books are extremely tragic characters it seems like. I say it seems like cause we still don't know what happens to Stannis in the books, but if the theme continues, he's going to fail and die horribly.

We already know this isn't true. In the Books documenting the Dance of Dragons, its quite clear that non-Targs can use dragons. Hell, a random bastard sheperd girl gets her own dragon due to positive reinforcement and treating it with respect.

The choreography is terrible, the other Kingsguard die near instantly and he uses two swords for no fucking reason.

There are The Dark Knight Returns tier fuckups in there.

"So off he went, paddling on."

awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Deep_Ones

are they just a lovecraft reference?

Not sure what you're getting at but there's absolutely nothing in the Dance of Dragons that makes what you're saying quite clear. It's the opposite. All of the dragon riders recruited by Rhaenyra during the war were related to the old Targaryans in some way except Nettles. She definitely doesn't have the blood or gene or whatever you want to call it, but one special case hardly disproves the theory.

Martin is REALLY good at doing the thing where he can have another character summeraize a single character in just one paragraph. Basically every major character in the novels has gotten that treatment at least once so far.
You are inaccurate, but on the right track.
It's NOT the Tarvaryen NAME that does anything, because it's just a word.
It's direct relation to the dragonrider blood they (and so far ONLY they) have in them.

The Princess and the Queen explains this; nearly ALL the people who came forward to try and bond with a dragon were suspected Dragonseeds, meaning people with Targaryen blood in them because the Targs went around fucking a LOT of people and because less then half a generation before on the Law of First Night was still in effect and thus lots of people in the Crownlands region could in theory claim Targ blood, however distantly. The ones who are accepted have Targaryen blood and their claims are basically all but proven by the short story itself. The vast majority fail and usually die when the dragon injures or kills them outright, kinda like Qunetyn did.

Nettles and her dragon is definitely a weird one, but the Worldbook mentions she never actually rode it or anything; she just fed it and it kept coming back to get fed, just like Dany and her unbonded dragons did.
That said she WAS a bastard from the Crownlands region, so it's at least theoretically possible that she was some by-blow of a Targ, just that we don't know which one.

Yes, they are. That book is the exaggerations of a maester that doesn't really know anything.

Yeah, but they aren't the only one but any means.
Carcosa and Leng are regions far to the east after all, though the Lengese mentioned by the worldbook seem a lot less pure evil then in Lovecraft and Derelth's stuff.
Instead they're just very tall sex positive Asian people who are apparently "the most beautiful people in the world".

Was there ever a House that only cared about bending the knee to iron throne and never sought the Throne itself? Kind of like how the Shogun's clan where in return for the favor of the emperor served as their iron fist that ruled over weaker clans and their subjects?

That's what the Great Houses are, in theory. Also, the Wardens of North, South, etc. Just like how the Shogun was, in theory, always loyal to the Emperor, but wasn't always.

I thought it was alright but could've been better. I wished they would have had Howland Reed armed with a frog spear and had him stab Dayne in the back of the leg at the end of the fight kind of like what happened to Ned when he was fighting Jaime.

Well, in the case of the Shogun he basically superseded the authority of the Emperor entirely. He didn't need to be loyal to the Tenno because the Tenno had no power anyway.

That said, the Emperor's of Japan....eh, they didn't work the same way we think of Emperors as working in say, Rome or whatever.
Their situation was much more complex and in many ways much more limited, which is why so many were only Emperor for a very short period of time before retiring from the position.

I was thinking moreso of the Boshin War when I wrote that, I don't honestly know much about Shogunate Japan before that. I'd love to know more.

You guys just summarized why I love the Baratheons so much.

Robert is such a beautifully melancholic character. He is just really miserable being a king and living with a woman he hates.

Renly is really just a 20-year old kid who doesn't seem to realize what he is doing.

And Stannis, while others see power when they think of the throne Stannis just sees neverending duty. And he is propably going to die horribly, just like his brothers. Though I myself would like to see him as the next LC of the Night's watch, it really feels like job he would love

The Boshin War was kind of a major change, and was really more of a modern political conflict then anything that could be contextualized by older Japan.
But basically the Shogun was more or less Supreme Military Dictator (imagine the Hand of the King with absolute authority over everything and nobody to veto him and you have an idea), which meant he was effectively in control of the country because the warrior class, the Bushi, were under his command. The Gempei War in the 12th century was about determining if the Kuge (the aristocratic class of Japan) would be in command of the country over the power of the Bushi, and they lost, resulting in the Shogunate governments that followed until the Boshin War.

Now, the Mikado (Emperor) was never ACTUALLY called that because he was "Tenno" (Son of Heaven) instead; his function was equally religious as it was political, and thus they generally weren't really allowed to be people or individuals, instead they subsumed themselves in the role of Tenno no matter what. Making big complex political moves when you're not even allowed to have your own personality that isn't predetermined outside formalized religious and state functions is extremely hard, so they used important noble families (the Kuge) they were related to in some way to push forward agendas. Still, the role was extremely stressful (imagine now being allowed to be yourself at any moment of your life as long as you held it) so most Tenno retired from the role and let someone else take it up after several years of being the Emperor.
When the Shoguns took over this didn't really change at all; instead the Kuge that the Emperor used to move policy were neutered and thus there was no real way the Emperor could DO anything except perform ceremonies.

The Boshin War actually was only some about restoring the Emperor but was about the strong resistance the Tokugawa government had to modernization because that did much to strip their control over the country.

Also, it must be said, another major driving force of the Boshin War was about a bunch of formerly-important samurai families supporting the restoration of the Emperor's official power because they knew the Shogunate would never get them their political authority back at any point.
Even though the Bushi caste was abolished and the samurai lost all of their special legal privileges, those families that supported the Emperor in effect became the new aristocracy of the country and got to keep said special privileges under a different legal system, even if they weren't actually called "samurai" anymore.

Japan during the 18th/19th century was a pretty shaky time because it was trying to both modernize and determine what kind of country it wanted to be, and some wanted a more open American-style Representative Democracy with the Emperor on top (somehow, not everyone was very clear on this part) and others (the majority) wanted a more European-style Constitutional Monarchy akin to the British Empire but with the Tenno having civil authority comparable to the Austro-Hunagarian Emperor, the German Empire's Kaiser, or the Czar.

This. Gurm doesn't treat his audience like easily-amused mouthbreathers.

Pretty shit.
>Quentyn is alive and well even though he got incinerated in his own chapter
>Doran is communicating with Bloodraven and Euron through glass candles
>Euron=Daario
The only good theory he's got is that Euron was supposed to take Bran's role but went insane when Bloodraven contacted him

There are of course implications. Someone once started razzing Loras, saying he'd stick his sword up the Knight of Flowers so deep it'd reach a place not even Renly found, or something to that effect.

Of course, when asked about this one of Renly's friends pointed out when they marched him up to consummate his weading with Margaery Tyrell, the dude was hard as diamonds. Grantedif she looks anything like her actress then the immortal words of Ray Gillete echo in my mind

Aren't greatswords really impracticable in battle? Especially when you're in a special bodyguard unit and fast drawing times + ability to swing it in close quarters are incredibly important

>Aren't greatswords really impracticable in battle?
Not really.

> Especially when you're in a special bodyguard unit
Greatswords -were- a bodyguard weapon. They were essentially designed as crowd control, for one v many encounters.

Maybe Renly's just not that picky.
In any case I'm pretty damn sure that regardless of what the family's claims are, Margaery was NOT a virgin when she was slated to marry Jeoffery, that's for sure.

Margaery's kinda like "Good Cersei" in some ways.
Just as manipulative and ambitious, but actually gets along with her family very well and understands that it's both more effective and easier in the long run to make people love you rather then fear you, not to mention fairly easy to do when it comes right down to it.
Cersei's good at inspiring lust (both for her and for the power she offers when she comes to you for aid), but not loyalty, and pretty much everyone who's ever fucked her kinda admits to not liking her very much.
I guess no matter how hot you are being narcissistic sociopath is not conducive to making people want to go BACK to bed with you after tapping that the first time.

The point of Dayne was he was able to work past the impracticality of it. He legitimately was the greatest swordsman alive, aside from being one of the most honorable and dutiful men in the realm. Ned stark regretted killing him for the rest of his life.

The show has always had remarkably restrained and weighty sword choreography. The Tower of Joy was on par with the lightsaber fights in the Star Wars prequels in terms of needless flashiness.