I think people are over-estimating the loss of self. Bran’s not gone, he’s just having trouble swimming through the gestalt of every greenseer ever and that’s making him a bit distant b/c he’s multitasking from a distance.
Looking at Bloodraven, who’s been the Three-Eyed Crow for at least fifty years, he certainly retains some sense of self:
“A … crow?” The pale lord’s voice was dry. His lips moved slowly, as if they had forgotten how to form words. “Once, aye. Black of garb and black of blood.” The clothes he wore were rotten and faded, spotted with moss and eaten through with worms, but once they had been black. “I have been many things, Bran. Now I am as you see me, and now you will understand why I could not come to you … except in dreams. I have watched you for a long time, watched you with a thousand eyes and one. I saw your birth, and that of your lord father before you. I saw your first step, heard your first word, was part of your first dream. I was watching when you fell. And now you are come to me at last, Brandon Stark, though the hour is late.”
The last greenseer, the singers called him, but in Bran’s dreams he was still a three-eyed crow. When Meera Reed had asked him his true name, he made a ghastly sound that might have been a chuckle. “I wore many names when I was quick, but even I once had a mother, and the name she gave me at her breast was Brynden.”
I know. I have my own ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of mine has ever reached them.
He knows his name, he remembers being a Night’s Watchman, he remembers the doggerel said about him when he was hand, and he remembers the strong emotional commitments he made in life – I’d say that’s a pretty good “sense of self” for anyone pushing 125, let alone a greenseer.
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