No, I think he knew the prophecy from childhood onwards.

Blackwater. 

Septon Barth.

Yeah, you could say that. 

My thing with Mark Millar is that I think he’s a better concept/pitchman (What if superheroes were real? What if Superman had landed in Russia?) than he is at executing his own ideas (there’s a reason why a lot of his comics get turned into movies, and that those movies tend to do well but tend to involve the director making some significant changes to the plot, characters, tone, etc.).  

When Millar executes his own ideas, not only do they often end up lacking in depth, but you also get some really icky stuff creeping in: leaving aside Wanted’s misanthropic hatred of its own audience, the treatment of black women especially is really grotesque; the graphic novel of Kick-Ass likewise has some weird stuff around both gender and sexuality and race. Throughout a lot of it runs the worst part of 90s comics – the idea that violence, sex, sexual violence, and characters acting like assholes makes something edgy, mature, and art.

His runs on the Ultimates (my beef with him started with his decision to make Captain America a jingoistic conservative, but I wasn’t a huge fan of having Bruce Banner’s rage powered by his sexual failures wrt to Betsy Ross, or re-enacting Ant-Man’s domestic violence, etc. etc.), Ultimate X-Men, etc. have a somewhat more sanitized version of the same thing. 

So yes, the MCU borrowed from some of his setups and visual motifs, it’s highly noticeable that they jettisoned his characterization and themes in favor of their winning strategy of making their hero characters likeable, good people who (mostly) get along with one another, and who we enjoy watching being together. This is why this moment was so important:

Now, I have heard that Millar has matured somewhat recently and his recent works are a lot better on this front – less misanthropy, less crude deconstructionism for its own sake – so I don’t want to write him off entirely. But he was a big part of what burned me out on superhero comics in the early 00s, so I’m just going to let it pass me by. 

It seems to be uncommon but not unknown. It’s uncommon because there’s a social prejudice against it – merchants are commoners, so you’re marrying below your social status, and merchants are “in trade,” which nobles consider to be greedy, unproductive money-grubbing as opposed to being an absentee landowner who can afford to follow an honor code and not think in a profit-maximizing way (except when you relabel “profit” as “glory”). 

The Essosi are kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand, you definitely see that Tywin looks down on the Essosi as “spice soldiers and cheese lords,” who “Lord Tywin had always held…in contempt. They fight with coins instead of swords, he used to say. Gold has its uses, but wars are won with iron.” In other words, the Essosi are seen as somewhat cowardly and merchantlike, not really nobles. Beyond mere prejudice, you definitely get the sense that there’s a rather signifiant culture clash that makes Westerosi see these marriages as inviting trouble: there’s a significant number of divorces/separations (Larra Rogare, Mellario of Norvos), there’s the cautionary tale of Serala of Myr who brought her expectations of Essosi free cities to Westeros, etc. 

On the other hand, at least since the Targaryens, the Westerosi do see marriage into Essos as potentially bringing in political benefits (Rohanne of Tyrosh, Kiera of Tyrosh) or bringing in the Valyrian “look” which is prized aesthetically. 

In either case, I think the likelihood of these marriages depend on the needs of the House in question. If the House is prosperous, it’s probably not going to bother – not when marriage alliances to other nobles can give them land (the former of which you can’t get from marrying into money) and military power.  If the House is poor, it’s not necessarily a slamdunk – marrying into the Spicers didn’t exactly elevate the Westerlings, but Lyonel got the heir he wanted and a lot of money – but it can be the shot in the arm you need. 

I’m a huge fan of Polayni, his Great Transformation remains one of the most important books I’ve ever read. I would recommend reading Marc Blyth’s Great Transformations for a more recent interpretation of Polayni that seeks to explain why the drive for social protection that Polayni described/predicted went into reverse in the 1970s and 1980s. 

The Breaking of the Arm and the Hammer of the Waters are pretty significant efforts to prevent the invasion.

A bit of 1 and a bit of 3.