Just a backup in advance of the detumblring
The problem is that you need the grace before the fall from grace otherwise it doesn’t land.
And the bigger problem is when you flip-flop on the BwB is bad – for example, going from Lem murdering Meribald to Beric showing up and hanging him. It’s thematically muddled.
Dunno.
They’re not as hostile to the Starks specifically – “we mean your brother Robb no ill, milady” – but that changes after the Karstarks go rampant.
As to the stags, I don’t believe the BwB ever took a position on Renly or Stannis because they never came to the Riverlands.
Will address in the next Arya chapter when the Mad Huntsman shows up.
I spend a good bit of time in Arya III talking about how the Kingswood Brotherhood is dark as hell, how the Brotherhood Without Banners is morally ambiguous, and the modern history of political kidnappings, so no, I don’t think I romanticize them.
That being said, ASOS sets out why people in the Riverlands support the Brotherhood Without Banners, because no one else is stopping monsters like Septon Utt and the rest of the Bloody Mummers.
Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Arya III, ASOS
“I could have stayed with Hot Pie. We could have taken the little boat and sailed it up to Riverrun. She had been better off as Squab. No one would take Squab captive, or Nan, or Weasel, or Arry the orphan boy. I was a wolf, she thought, but now I’m just some stupid little lady again.” Synopsis: Arya has two conversations with Harwin, one more honest than the other. SPOILER WARNING: This chapter…
Glad you like my work!
As for House Osgrey of Leafy Lake, we know it died out sometime before 210 AC. Now, Eustace’s cousin (his uncle’s youngest daughter) was roughly Esutace’s age and his uncle was alive when Eustace was in his teens (kissing a girl for the first time), the House would have been extant around 175 AC. Assuming for the sake of argument that his uncle died of natural causes, that probably happened sometime around 180-190 AC.
As for the Dance, we don’t have any records, but given their trajectory of picking the losng side in every other civil war, I would guess that they probably backed Aegon II and the Greens.
Yes, with caveats.
What makes movies feel “crowded” or “overstuffed” with villains is that filmmakers have felt the need to treat all of the villains equally when it comes to screentime (especially since they’re often introducing them in the same movie that they’re using them) – if instead of that, you’re using already extant villains and make them part of the whole story instead of their own stories, it’ll go much smoother. To give an example, Spiderman: Homecoming featured…
(cut for spoilers)
the Vulture, the Tinkerer, two Shockers, the Prowler, and Scorpion. But it didn’t feel crowded or overstuffed because the film didn’t feel the need to make all of their villains equal in screentime, or give them all backstories and arcs. Rather, Vulture was the main villain and everyone else was part of his story as either a henchman or a customer. Very quick little bits explained that the first Shocker was a flaky hothead and the second was more cautious and loyal, that the Tinkerer was a quippy nerd, that the Scorpion was a psycho that no one liked, and that the Prowler was laid back and only tangentially in the game.
Moreover, in future movies, we’re not going to need a full backstory to explain why the second Shocker or the Scorpion want revenge against Peter Parker or who the guy making the bad guy’s tech is. The previous movie does the setup for us in the same way that Cap: Civil War did the setup for Parker so that Homecoming didn’t have to explain how he became Spiderman besides a quick joke about the spider being dead.
So that’s how I’d do a Sinister SIx or an Acts of Vengeance – rather than giving everyone equal weight and doing backstories and arcs for each villain, you put the focus on the ensemble, and trust in the setup you’ve done in previous movies to do a lot of the work for you so that you can maintain pacing.
Barristan and the Ironborn defeat the Yunkish and the Volantenes, then probably fall to scrapping between them, then Dany shows up with her Dothraki to end the fight, meanwhile the Shavepate’s purge ends the Sons of the Harpy.
Now everyone’s free to move on plus Dany has her navy to sail west.
Still tricky.
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