I just noticed that. I have no idea. Any thoughts, ASOIAF people?

Charles wouldn’t have recognized any court, so I think it’s a push. 

To me, the far bigger issue is refusing the Agreement of the People, which would have given the Republic a strong popular base of support instead of relying almost entirely on the person of Oliver Cromwell. 

Yeah, probably. The problem with the phalanx was that it was incredibly slow to move in any direction but forwards, so it was extremely vulnerable to being flanked and rolled up. 

Killed and probably dropped into the harbor to feed the fishes. 

There may have been some minor grumbling, but it helped that the Freys did join in and fought in the Green Fork and the Whispering Woods/Camps and Oxcross. Victory is always good for morale, and since people kind of expect the Freys to be greedy schemers, it’s not surprising enough to get people riled up. 

poorquentyn:

@chaouenmadrid you asked about evidence that Euron is Bloodraven’s bad seed: 

Bloodraven’s strongly associated with birds and eyes, and then we get Euron calling himself “Crow’s Eye,” using a banner showing birds crowning an eye (an eerily perfect representation of the three-eyed crow opening third eyes), and above all, sharing this: 

“When I was a boy, I dreamt that I could fly. When I woke, I couldn’t…or so the maester said. But what if he lied?”

That’s an exact parallel to Bran’s introduction to Bloodraven and the third eye, even down to the discouragement of the maester. So I think Euron was one of Bloodraven’s earlier choices for the savior role that Bran later came to play; Bloodraven was impressed by Euron’s raw talent enough to tell himself he could work around the whole “Euron being the Antichrist” thing. When I say Euron’s an interloper-antagonist hijacking the story, consider that at one point, he was auditioning to be the story’s protagonist. And then, of course, he did what he always does: absorb all the power and ignore the attendant ideological structure.

Euron’s entire story and its themes spring from this moment in his youth. No matter how evil he ever got, he’d never have become the would-be god of a global graveyard, an existential threat to the basic metaphysical order of things, without Bloodraven showing him the path. He followed it to Valyria, and he’s going to follow it into Doom. Not for nothing does GRRM have Moqorro share this vision of Euron’s true nature and endgame…

“A tall and twisted thing with one black eye and ten long arms, sailing on a sea of blood.”

…as he’s passing by Valyria’s Doom.

As well as providing the perfect context and backstory (he’s Evil Bran) for Euron’s occult trappings, this just fits too perfectly with Bloodraven’s story. As a politician, the failure that birthed all the rest was focusing so exclusively on the Blackfyres that he let other threats metastatize…including, hey, the Greyjoys. And in his second life, though fighting the true enemy now, Bloodraven made the same mistake: he considered the Others such an urgent and overwhelming threat that enabling Euron, quite clearly already the Omen kid crossed with Doctor Doom, would be worth it.

And here’s the great terrible beautiful irony of it all. By thinking that nothing else mattered if Euron could help fight the Others, Bloodraven ended up ensuring that the Others would invade Westeros at large, because his rogue pupil is going to blow the Horn of Joramun, bring down the Wall, and let the monsters in. 

There’s also this line:

Euron turned to face him, his bruised blue lips curled in a half smile. “Perhaps we can fly. All of us. How will we ever know unless we leap from some tall tower?” The wind came gusting through the window and stirred his sable cloak. There was something obscene and disturbing about his nakedness. “No man ever truly knows what he can do unless he dares to leap.”

The associations between dreaming of flying and third eyes and crows are already there, but the association between flying and leaping or falling from a tall tower is way too close to (and too specific to) Bran’s dream from Bran III of AGOT to be a coincidence. 

It was a small boat and Davos did sail by himself:

And so it was that he found himself once more crossing Shipbreaker Bay in the dark of night, steering a tiny boat with a black sail. The sky was the same, and the sea. The same salt smell was in the air, and the water chuckling against the hull was just as he remembered it. A thousand flickering campfires burned around the castle, as the fires of the Tyrells and Redwynes had sixteen years before. But all the rest was different.

The last time it was life I brought to Storm’s End, shaped to look like onions. This time it is death, in the shape of Melisandre of Asshai. Sixteen years ago, the sails had cracked and snapped with every shift of wind, until he’d pulled them down and gone on with muffled oars. Even so, his heart had been in his gullet. The men on the Redwyne galleys had grown lax after so long, however, and they had slipped through the cordon smooth as black satin.

Black Betha, on the other hand, is Davos’ galley and is substantially bigger. 

Well, you’d need to read my Catelyn recaps to find the answer to that question.

Braavos was founded roughly a century before the Unmasking of Uthero, which we know happened before the Doom but we don’t know how long before the Doom (although we do know that Braavos is the youngest of the Free Cities). 

So Braavos was founded at least 200 BC. But given that Nymeria’s voyage took place in 700 BC, odds are that Braavos was founded after Nymeria’s Conquest. 

There are some suggestions, but they’re all in reference to the Long Night, so it’s not clear whether that includes lesser winters:

“Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods.“

“..The Others,” Old Nan agreed. “Thousands and thousands of years ago, a winter fell that was cold and hard and endless beyond all memory of man. There came a night that lasted a generation, and kings shivered and died in their castles even as the swineherds in their hovels. Women smothered their children rather than see them starve, and cried, and felt their tears freeze on their cheeks.” Her voice and her needles fell silent, and she glanced up at Bran with pale, filmy eyes and asked, “So, child. This is the sort of story you like?”