Author: stevenattewell

Why did the writer of the Pink Letter wanted Jon to send them Val the Wildling?

poorquentyn:

twhiddlegirl:

I think Mance wrote the letter…

Q: I also wasn’t sure whether Ramsay was telling the truth in his letter when he said the battle had already been fought and won, whether we were supposed to take that as gospel.

GRRM: My readers should know better than to take anything as gospel, unless they see it for themselves, and even then I do sometimes use “unreliable narrator.” No. They should not take that as the truth. What about Mance Rayder, did you think he was really dead?

Q: Yes. And I liked the reveal that he’s the bard in Ramsay’s court at Winterfell, but I was so dense I didn’t realize it was him until I read Ramsay’s letter near the end.

GRRM: Aside from the fact Mance goes south and says he’s going to take six spearwives, there’s a legend that Jon hears from Ygritte about Bale the Bard who was a King of the North who posed as a bard and infiltrated Winterfell. Mance is calling himself “Abel” which is “Bael” with the letters moved around. It’s amazing what people pick up on and what they don’t. The whole controversy over Renly and Loras, [viewers saying] “HBO made these characters gay!”

http://www.ew.com/article/2011/07/21/dance-with-dragons-shocking-twist-g

(TWOW spoilers)

I don’t take the content of the letter as gospel, or at least not all of it–I think GRRM’s doing exactly what he said there, using an unreliable narrator. Ramsay got fooled by Stannis. Look at Theon’s released TWOW chapter: Stannis is planning on faking his death. I think he did so with the Karstark soldiers’ help, and Ramsay bought it. 

The big questions regarding Mance as a potential author of the Pink Letter are why and how. What outcome was he hoping for, why was he hoping the Pink Letter would bring about that outcome, and how was he in the position to send it? (“Chaos” is not an acceptable answer to any of these questions.) Remember, the spearwives were seen helping Theon and Jeyne escape, and Mance was left surrounded by enemies in the Great Hall. 

This isn’t that hard if one pays attention to context:

poorquentyn:

I know this isn’t fun to contemplate, but I think Ramsay wants Val and the babe so he can torture them in front of Mance. 

Q: I also wasn’t sure whether Ramsay was telling the truth in his letter when he said the battle had already been fought and won, whether we were supposed to take that as gospel.

GRRM: My readers should know better than to take anything as gospel, unless they see it for themselves, and even then I do sometimes use “unreliable narrator.” No. They should not take that as the truth.

The “that” which should not be taken as gospel truth is whether “the battle had already been fought and won.” Not whether Ramsay is the one who wrote the letter. 

If your Fantastic Four movie came along, wouldn’t it make more sense for Doom to be from Sokovia?

I don’t know. Sokovia isn’t the best thought-out part of the MCU to begin with – there’s a nebulous civil war, Stark is selling arms, HYDRA infiltrates, yatta yatta. 

That doesn’t seem to be a great fit for Latveria, where the emphasis is on totalitarian order and control, rather than civil war and instability. 

Great F4 pitch! Just a question: would you do away with the comic Doom origin entirely or would you have him scarred and blame it in Richards in a later movie? The classic origin neatly showcases Doom’s brilliance but also his arrogance and obsession with infallibility, which I always felt were at the core of the character. Finally thanks for all your wonderful ASOIAF work!

Good question! 

I think I’’d go with later movie, as a sign of his growing obsession and recklessness. 

As a historian and Marvel scholar, don’t you think the comics political content is compromised by the Cold War propaganda. Like Castro (who died recently) was a hero in Africa and a friend of Nelson Mandela, but all Communists are bad guys in these comics and no attempt is made to complicate the alliances the heroes have with US Foreign Policy, nor do we get stuff like say Dr. Doom is a US-backed dictator and NATO ally, nor Cpt. America mentions that the USSR suffered most casualties in WW2?

I don’t think it’s compromised at all. Indeed, I would argue that the Cold War propaganda is important historical material to be studied, to look at how pop culture reflected the politics of the day. 

But I woudln’t argue that “ no attempt is made to complicate the alliances the heroes have with US Foreign Policy.” Marvel in the late 60s onwards is very very different from Marvel of 1961, and that includes foreign policy. 

As for Doctor Doom, I don’t think he’s U.S-backed. My understanding is that Latveria was firmly non-aligned, like Namor’s Atlantis, T’challa’s Wakanda, etc. Man, the Marvel Universe version of the 1961 Belgrade Conference must have a hell of an event. 

And I believe Captain America has indeed mentioned that – sometime in the Rucka run, if not before. Hell, Cap did fight on the Eastern Front for a bit, so he knows it first hand. 

How to Incorporate the Fantastic Four Into the MCU

So while I’m at it, I thought I’d talk about how to incorporate the Fantastic Four into the MCU if the deal with Fox ever works out. 

image

So the first thing I’d do is to have the first Fantastic Four movie set in the early 1960s similar to how the first Cap movie was set in WWII. Because as revolutionary the FF were in 1961, one of the problems that the movies have had is that everything after built on what they introduced, so that inter-team conflict and flawed heroes isn’t new. A lot of their personalities work best in their time: Reed Richards as an emotionally repressed, know-it-all, Type-A, paternalistic personality is more at home in Apollo Project-era NASA than 2016; Susan Storm (at least in the way that Stan Lee interpreted Kirby’s art) is very much trapped in the Feminine Mystique waiting for Second Wave Feminism to come around; Johnny Storm is very much a teenager of the James Dean era, all hot rods and hot dates; Ben Grimm is a product of a Jewish working class Lower East Side that no longer exists.

So here is my vision of how the movie would go:

The movie starts in a stylized Cold War/Space Race/Mad Men 1962, at an international science conference on the recent theoretical work on the existence of a parallel dimension called the Negative Zone, credit for which is split between NASA wunderkind Reed Richards and the USSR’s own Doctor Victor Von Doom. At the conference, Reed and Von Doom are pitted against each other in the media – Bobby Fischer vs. Gary Kasparov – and have something of a clash of personalities. 

We then skip ahead to a race between the US and USSR to launch shuttles to orbit the Blue Area of the Moon at a particular cosmic convergence where it’ll be possible to travel into the Negative Zone. In the process of putting together the mission, we meet Ben Grimm (chief engineer), Susan Storm (biologist and mathematician who wasn’t supposed to be on the mission), and Johnny Storm (hotshot pilot). Right before they’re set for launch, NASA gets word that there’s an unprecedented solar storm that will make the launch too dangerous. At the last second, Reed pleads with Mission Commander Jack Kirby that the one-time-only conjunction is too important to miss, no matter what the risk. They blast off into space.

Once they’re coming around the dark side of the moon, the combination of solar energy and the transfer into the Negative Zone transforms the unshielded Americans as they crash-land onto a planet in the Negative Zone. In the crash, Ben gets buried in rubble and becomes the Thing, Johnny gets caught in a fire and becomes the Human Torch, Sue telekinetically holds up the roof to allow them to escape the ship, Reed stretches to grab something while pinned. 

When they emerge from the craft, they find out that the Soviet team have made a controlled landing to provide assistance to the Americans, albeit in a patronizing manner. It turns out that, as opposed to being cavalier about the health of their cosmonauts as we might expect, the Soviets are protected by Doom’s armor.

Here’s where the twist comes.

Doom taunts Reed about his arrogance (why didn’t you protect your friends from the energy) and limited vision (doesn’t he realize that because the Negative Zone exists at all points in time, you can use it to go back and forth in time?). Reed thinks the Soviets are going to Terminator the U.S and makes his accusation known. 

But Doom reveals that he doesn’t give a fuck about the Soviets. They were the stepping stone he needed to get to the Negative Zone, but now Doom need kneel to no one. He’s going to go back in time and liberate Latveria! The Soviets try to stop him, but they’re wearing his armor, and he remote controls their armor, killing them all, and bids his adieus as he flies off the planet in his armor looking for another portal.  

Meanwhile, Reed and Co. have to build a new spaceship from scrap to chase him, because it turns out that the planet belongs to Annihulus or Blastaar! Either of whom would be fine as the throwaway first villain, allowing Doom to remain the arch-nemesis for future movies. After some well-staged action where the heroes learn to harness their powers and work together, they manage to cobble together enough of a spaceship from the Russian ship and Annihulus/Blastaar’s tech to get off the planet and go after Doom.

The Four have a big round-table discussion about whether to go back home or to take the risk of jumping through another portal to find some place and time where they can get the technology to stop Doom. And at the end of the day, they’re explorers, To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before…

And they land…in the MCU present. And this presents some fascinating possibilities: all of the sudden, Reed’s fifty years behind the scientific curve and needs to prove himself, Susan Storm now lives in a post-Second Wave world, Johnny can immerse himself in X-Games and Red Bulls free from the stultification of the fifties, and Ben….Well, Ben represents nostalgia and a sense of loss for what they’ve left behind. His Lower East Side is gone. But my thinking is that rather than just lament the past, Ben Grimm finds meaning as an anti-gentrification activist in NYC. 

I’ve heard an argument that SF metaphors for social issues are obsolete now. You should just have characters that are black or gay or whatever, not have SF equivalents like the X-Men. What do you think?

(Before you read this, you might want to jump in and read my People’s History of the Marvel Universe series…)

That’s a fair argument, especially when the characters that are standing in as metaphors are (in their civilian clothes, and it’s noticeable that all the original X-Men could pass) five WASPY teenagers (with only one woman to boot) who live in a private boarding school in Westchester that’s run by one eccentric millionaire. 

image

At the same time, there are a couple ways to deal with this: the first is Chris Claremont’s strategy, which is to make your cast more diverse so that you have characters who are black and mutant, gay and mutant, and so on. Thus, rather than the metaphor supplanting or erasing the thing it’s supposed to stand in for, you can explore interesting questions of intersectionality, passing privilege (see: the Morlocks), etc. 

Another strategy is to have the issue of mutant rights actually interact with these other movements and politics. We see a little of this when we get into Magneto’s fascinating role in the Cold War, but I’d love to see more, especially in the original period setting. How would the black power movement of the 1970s have reacted to Storm suddenly appearing as the most powerful black woman in America? How would San Francisco politics have changed with the X-Men spending some time as the city’s super-hero team? Why don’t we see mutant urban enclaves (again, other than the Morlocks) before Grant Morrison’s run on X-Men, and how would those enclaves have fit in the complex urban politics of the 1970s? Why don’t we see a mutant rights movement, and how would that movement have developed relationships with the gay rights movement or the civil rights movement or the labor movement?