A handful of maesters, influenced by fragments of the work of Septon Barth, hold that Valyria had used spells to tame the Fourteen Flames for thousands of years, that their ceaseless hunger for slaves and wealth was as much to sustain these spells as to expand their power, and that when at last those spells faltered, the cataclysm became inevitable.
Of these, some argue that it was the curse of Garin the Great at last coming to fruition. Others speak of the priests of R’hllor calling down the fire of their god in queer rituals. Some, wedding the fanciful notion of Valyrian magic to the reality of the ambitious great houses of Valyria, have argued that it was the constant whirl of conflict and deception amongst the great houses that might have led to the assassinations of too many of the reputed mages who renewed and maintained the rituals that banked the fires of the Fourteen Flames.
Do you think that like the Night’s King made sacrifices to the Others, the Valyrians made sacrifices to beings (maybe fire versions of the Others) in Fourteen Flames in exchange for learning sorcery?
If the FM whacked the mages, then the shortage of sacrifices could have pissed those beings off enough to cause the Doom.
I don’t think that’s quite how it worked. The Valyrians were not the kind of people to sacrifice to a metaphysical entity; as the WOIAF puts it:
“Some scholars have suggested that the dragonlords regarded all faiths as equally false, believing themselves to be more powerful than any god or goddess. They looked upon priests and temples as relics of a more primitive time, though useful for placating “slaves, savages, and the poor” with promises of a better life to come.
The Valyrian practice of human sacrifice was squarely focused on blood magic (as Marwyn puts it “All Valyrian sorcery was rooted in blood or fire.”) rather than religious ritual.
So a while back I talkedabout how I would integrate the X-Men into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but in more general thematic terms as opposed to plot and specific continuity.
A tweet by “Moviebob” Bob Chipman got me thinking in more detail, and I think I have some ideas:
Part of the issue I was having is how to combine certain timeline issues with the new revelation about mutants’ existence, and I think I’ve hit on a nifty solution. We already know from CA:CW and Ant-Man (and Hulk too) that the U.S Govt. had a covert superhero program from the 60s onwards, trying to replicate the lost Super-Soldier program.
This project could easily have included more forceful and less savory attempts to recruit mutants into the national security state, i.e Weapon X, with SHIELD trying to cover up the existence of mutants and HYDRA infiltrating the unethical human experimentation side. In response, mutants go underground to avoid being turned into weapons of war against their will and have remained underground ever since. This solves the problem of how to combine secrecy and the mutant metaphor.
The mutant “Masquerade” to borrow from my White Wolf days continues until the emergence of the Avengers and the collapse of SHIELD, since now the public is starting to warm to the idea of superpowered people as good and the institution that’s been hunting them is deinstitutionalized. Xavier (who’s updated to be a Vietnam War veteran) begins to recruit and train the X-Men into becoming an Avengers for the mutants.
However, the events of CA:CW creates the basis for “a world that hates and fears them” through the backlash against the Avengers and the creation of the Sokovia Accords, which looks very different to mutants. Now the whole world is out to get them, not just SHIELD/HYDRA. At the same time, the events of Infinity War and A4 convince Xavier that the X-Men are needed to save the world, since mutant registration is moot if someone like Thanos kills half of the world. However, this stance is controversial within the mutant community, not everyone agrees, but after the first appearance of the X-Men the cat’s out of the bag…
Which brings in the X-Men’s own protagonists. Personally, I wouldn’t bring in Magneto as the primary villain in the first film – he’s been really over-used by the Bryan Singer X-Men films and needs a break. Rather, I would start the X-Men off with someone who hasn’t been seen yet in the X-films:
Yes, the mad scientist Mr. Sinister, who brings in all the same eugenics/Darwinian theme as Apocalypse but with glam rock stylings instead of ponderousness. And the best part is, the X-Men can totally kill off Sinister in the first film without wasting him, because Mr. Sinister has INFINITE CLONES. Hell, if they want to, they can even do the gender-swapped Miss Sinister thing, because Mr. Sinister doesn’t care about gender norms.
So how do we deal with Magneto’s timeline thing? Well, to begin with, I’d keep him in the background and build him up through mentions in dialogue and post-credit scenes until they’ve built him up enough (especially if they need to recast Magneto). And there’s a couple of ways you can hook Magneto into setting while still keeping his origin:
We know that HYDRA was operating human experimentation programs during WWII, and that they used human cryonics to deal with potentially dangerous subjects. What if HYDRA were experimenting on a young Erik Lensherr (a bit older than the child the Singer films had him, more like a young man in his mid-20s, closer to Claremont’s continuity), he rebelled and they flash-froze him to prevent him escaping?
He’s stuck in an abandoned HYDRA lab for however many years are necessary, but at a useful time, the systems keeping him frozen fail and he wakes up. They could go the amnesia route (he’s been down that road before), or you could have Magneto hunting HYDRA from the shadows as in First Class.
At some point, he meets Xavier, they become friends but disagree about the possibility of mutant integration into human society. Then sometime around A:AoU, Magneto finds out that the wife and/or kids he thought died in the camps survived and settled in Sokovia…and Wanda and Pietro were his grandchildren, experimented on by HYDRA to unlock their genetic potential.
This gives him a good hook into a main cast member of the existing MCU – he’s the grandfather of an Avenger – but also a good reason to be an anti-villain: he hates HYDRA and the Sokovia Accords, but also blames Stark and the Avengers for the death of his kin.
For their own, Unseelie, reasons, the Others are actually not that unwilling to take dominion over destruction, for at least the period of a mortal’s lifespan:
He remembered the hearth tales Old Nan told them. The wildlings were cruel men, she said, slavers and slayers and thieves. They consorted with giants and ghouls, stole girl children in the dead of night, and drank blood from polished horns. And their women lay with the Others in the Long Night to sire terrible half-human children…
“He was a wildling,” Bran said. “They carry off women and sell them to the Others.”
“He gives the boys to the gods. Come the white cold, he does, and of late it comes more often. That’s why he started giving them sheep, even though he has a taste for mutton. Only now the sheep’s gone too. Next it will be dogs, till …“ She lowered her eyes and stroked her belly.“
“The gathering gloom put Bran in mind of another of Old Nan’s stories, the tale of Night’s King. He had been the thirteenth man to lead the Night’s Watch, she said; a warrior who knew no fear. “And that was the fault in him,” she would add, “for all men must know fear.” A woman was his downfall; a woman glimpsed from atop the Wall, with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars. Fearing nothing, he chased her and caught her and loved her, though her skin was cold as ice, and when he gave his seed to her he gave his soul as well.
He brought her back to the Nightfort and proclaimed her a queen and himself her king, and with strange sorceries he bound his Sworn Brothers to his will. For thirteen years they had ruled, Night’s King and his corpse queen, till finally the Stark of Winterfell and Joramun of the wildlings had joined to free the Watch from bondage. After his fall, when it was found he had been sacrificing to the Others, all records of Night’s King had been destroyed, his very name forbidden.“
Where I think most people in the fandom go wrong is they misunderstand the motivation and method of dominion; there are no examples of stable arrangements, formal treaties, or genuinely symbiotic relationships between men and Others. Rather, all the examples we have show such interactions as parasitical and corruptive, spiralling and intensifying at every step until they’ve wrung as many sacrifices as they’re going to get and turn on the person who’s served them.
This is what makes them like the Unseelie: if you lay out milk, throw salt over your shoulders, and stay away from fairy circles, they might not kill you in your bed; but you can do everything right and they might steal your children anyway for some unfathomable, inhuman reason.
I don’t know. They don’t seem to be hugely active evangelists, there’s a good bit of syncretism, etc.
So I don’t think it’s going to be a case of a *huge* population of the Riverlands converting. If anything, I think it’ll be more like the Cathars: a small but influential religious minority.
Yeah, it’s a bit strange sticking way out there on the western end of the Stormlands. My theory about this, which is not supported by the text at all, is that the Carons were formerly part of the Reach and/or the onetime Kingdom of the Marches, and joined the Stormlands following a political dispute with the Reach Marcher Lords like the Peakes, Tarlys, etc.
Good spot – this is one I’ve asked myself, but more so on reading the comic then seeing Retribution, as there actually feels a slight difference between McCree’s attitude in both.
Thanks Anon! Love lore questions and debates. I’ll bring all these up in my next Lore Talk (need a better name for this series!) / going through theories video on YouTube 🙂
The comic tone is certainly that Jesse wants to pop a bullet Antonio’s way, where Reyes wants to bring Antonio back alive – perhaps in line with Gerard’s wishes, as they discussed.
Gerard gets hurt, the Blackwatch facility gets attacked – Reyes flips on the spot with Antonio.
The “tone” of the event then is definitely that McCree is upset/angry with Reyes for this.
I think if McCree reconciled himself to Reyes’ plan of “bring him out alive”, only for his boss to then kill the guy (and get the whole Strike Team in trouble), that can explain McCree’s apparent shift in attitude. Or, that it’s a change in Reyes that he finds disturbing/unreliable perhaps. If your commander seems unreliable and is putting you at risk, do you still want to obey their orders?
I think on a wider note, we can’t hold too much station on the “changes” of mood within the event. Otherwise, we have a McCree who is wisecracking with Reyes about Waiters and Band one moment, then really angry at him in the next. Gotta allow the story of the event to have a little room for flavour and fun! 🙂
I think the “how” matters here. Yes, they’re both black ops dudes, but as we see from modern McCree, he clearly doesn’t have a problem with killing people per se – he’s still a gunslinger, after all – but he does believe quite strongly in having a moral “code” about how and when that should be done. So the problem is that Antonio was unarmed and not resisting when Reyes shot him, and Reyes was clearly acting out of anger rather than out of military necessity, which makes it murder in McCree’s eyes.
Also, I think no small part of McCree’s anger is that the way Reyes killed Antonio put McCree and the team in danger in a way that a planned strike wouldn’t have.
Most of the X is really Y ones, any of the A+J ones, X+A=D/J, Bolt-on, are the ones I could think of off the top of my head.
Okay, what is wrong with Bolt-On? I mean, it is 100% fake, but it is a pretty fun theory and is a cool way of doing vampires in Westeros. And since the Starks are pretty much werewolves, it fits!
I get that it started very much tongue-in-cheek, but it became emblematic of the over-ferment in some corners of the fandom where people started arguing for OTT theories just because they were novel.
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