Having recently read Poor Quentyn’s opinion on Euron Greyjoy’s plot going forward, what’s your opinion on where this particular storyline is going? Knowing your opinion of him as a drug-crazed psychopath; I wondered where on the fence you sit. Lovecraftian near-apocalypse with Crow’s Eye at it’s head on a magic horn-possessed dragon? A basic failed invasion of the Reach or something entirely different?

poorquentyn:

racefortheironthrone:

Much more the second. Euron, Balon, Dagon, Dalton, etc. There is a pattern. 

Aw, and we usually agree!

I think Victarion, not Euron, is meant to represent the continuation of the pattern you cite. After all, it’s the former who runs on a Change Nothing Because Balon Was Awesome platform at the kingsmoot:

“When Balon was wed, it was me he sent to Harlaw to bring him back his bride. I led his longships into many a battle, and never lost but one. The first time Balon took a crown, it was me sailed into Lannisport to singe the lion’s tail. The second time, it was me he sent to skin the Young Wolf should he come howling home. All you’ll get from me is more of what you got from Balon. That’s all I have to say.”

And indeed, only someone as profoundly incurious as Vic would stick to such a blatantly unworkable organizing principle as the Old Way. We see it plainly in Balon’s first rebellion: the Ironborn want independence, but what they do with that independence (reave, rape, and enslave) is so antagonistic to their ultimately more powerful neighbors that it inevitably costs them said independence.

Far from following the pattern, Euron perceives that contradiction and sets out to resolve it; so too does Asha, but they put forth opposing solutions. Asha wants her people to abandon the slave-state attitude toward labor that you’ve talked about before, and instead commit themselves to peace and farming. (“Little late for that,” says the entire North.) Euron wants them to stop subsisting on table scraps and instead take the table; no backlash from the mainland if the mainland belongs to us! That’s well beyond anything Dalton, Dagon, or Balon proposed; it’s a pretty big jump from robbing and running away to conquering the planet with dragons. Indeed, that’s what Euron is counting on–that deep down, the Ironborn know that (Balon’s revanchist approximation of) the Old Way isn’t working even for them, and that they either need to pack it in or back it up with flying WMDs. Naturally, they go with the latter. 

I’m not saying Euron is going to succeed at his goals, but that said goals are on an entirely different plane from those of his forebears. He’s a break in the pattern, and it shows in his thinly veiled contempt for his people and their values. As I’ve said before, the Old Way is nothing more to Euron than his first language in harvesting pain, and he’s less a pirate than a monster wearing a pirate suit. (Hence eyepatch.) 

Fair enough, but the Hoares thought they could rule Westeros too. Look what happened to them.