Man, if King Lear is your idea of bittersweet, I’m not sure what you would consider a straight up bitter ending. Lear’s last scene with his dead daughter in his is gut-wrenching, and completely rebukes Albany’s lines on the heroes’ wages of virtue and the villains’ cup of their deservings. I’ve always perceived it as the darkest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Maybe Hamlet has a higher casualty rate, but it lacks the feeling of a world passing away (Kurosawa nails it in Ran).

Oh, it absolutely is. I meant more the very specific mood of Edgar’s last speech where he’s talking about having survived this storm (of swords).

Re-reading through ASOIAF I was intrigued by Dany’s thoughts on R+L like when she describes Rhaegar “dying for the woman he loved”. Dany not only thinks highly of her brother, but is also convinced that there was love between him and Lyanna. From whom do you think she heard this version of the story, which is the opposite of what everyone else in Westeros believes? From Viserys, who was only 6? Or Ser Willem Darry, who I don’t recall was involved in Lyanna’s “abduction”? It always confused me.

I think the Targaryen side in general rationalized Rhaegar and Lyanna through the lens of abduction tropes in chivalric romances. So either of them would have worked, Viserys repeating what he himself would have been told by older people.

if stannis had won the battle back in acok and took the throne on the grounds of the twincest babies not being baratheons, do you think he would have executed tommen and myrcella, or would there be some other options for them? i’m assuming cersei and eventually jaime would have had to have died for treason?

Yes and yes.

You mentioned Jon HearthOfTheWinter equivalent mission to the wight hunt. Who do you think will be his magnificient 7 in the books? I can see Tormund being the only one who repeats from the show, Robett Glover or some other northerns, NW men (not Edd since he needs to be there when the wall falls) and Mel as cleric maybe? Also, would be cool to have Ser Andar Royce there as the required south knight amoung nothmen, would be fitting for him to be in the end when his brother was at the beginning.

Not sure, TBH. If it’s NW men, Grenn and Pypp would be the better choices from a story perspective. If there’s a Northman, I think an Umber would be good. Mel I think will be at Winterfell.

Do you think Mel knew about Ygritte with her “you know nothing Jon Snow” line or was it just an eerie coincidence?

Tormund says it too. I think GRRM just likes arc words.

On the post where the question was asked “Anonymous asked: How serious were medieval plagues and how fast did they spread?” what is up with Milan and Poland in the animation showing the spread of the bubonic plague in the 1340s? It seems unlikely that they were actually spared, as the map seems to show.

See here.

You mentioned in a previous ask that Show!Dany will be pissed off when the truth of Jon’s parentage comes out. But what will she be angry about? I can’t see Jon wanting the Throne for himself, even on the show, so where’s the conflict?

It doesn’t matter that Jon doesn’t want it, it’s still going to cause difficulties when the news comes out, because it will diminish Dany’s legitimacy as a ruler.

And Jon being already a king, it’s harder to believe that he doesn’t want to be the King, even if he proclaims otherwise.

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So Season 7’s over, my essay about LF’s schemes is up, and Sam I is around 11,000 words long (contender for longest ever, to be sure!). I’m still chugging away at that – and Parcel of Rogues Part II – and hoping to have it up by Monday. But in the meantime, we got Tumblrs to talk about: Barriers to Stepstone growth. How lack of royal charters inhibit economic growth. Negotiating between lords and…

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Reading through your Jon Wight Hunt comment. Do you really subscribe to an actual Great Other theory, that there’s some equivalent in the books to the Night King from the show directing the Army of the Dead? What evidence compels you to believe that if yes?

Well, I don’t think it’s really an equivalent to the Night’s King. I think it’s an equivalent to Sauron:

“Finally he looked north. He saw the Wall shining like blue crystal, and his bastard brother Jon sleeping alone in a cold bed, his skin growing pale and hard as the memory of all warmth fled from him. And he looked past the Wall, past endless forests cloaked in snow, past the frozen shore and the great blue-white rivers of ice and the dead plains where nothing grew or lived. North and north and north he looked, to the curtain of light at the end of the world, and then beyond that curtain. He looked deep into the heart of winter, and then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his cheeks.
Now you know, the crow whispered as it sat on his shoulder. Now you know why you must live.”

That’s not a dude throwing javelins, that’s a dark god who dwelleth beyond the northern lights, staring back at you from the abyss.

Way back at COK we saw Melissandre bypassing Storm’s End magical defenses to kill Mr. Penrose. A big deal was made of those defenses. Do you think we will see those magical walls have some importance later? Are you familiar with those norse myths theories that suggest Dany will die at Storm’s End?

I think it’s GRRM setting up the seed of the idea of the Wall itself having magical defenses built into it.

Yes, I think they’re wrong.