“If the little crannogman could visit the Isle of Faces, maybe I could too.”
Synopsis: Bran is told one story by the Liddle and one story by Meera.
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
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I think people are over-estimating the loss of self. Bran’s not gone, he’s just having trouble swimming through the gestalt of every greenseer ever and that’s making him a bit distant b/c he’s multitasking from a distance.
Looking at Bloodraven, who’s been the Three-Eyed Crow for at least fifty years, he certainly retains some sense of self:
“A … crow?” The pale lord’s voice was dry. His lips moved slowly, as if they had forgotten how to form words. “Once, aye. Black of garb and black of blood.” The clothes he wore were rotten and faded, spotted with moss and eaten through with worms, but once they had been black. “I have been many things, Bran. Now I am as you see me, and now you will understand why I could not come to you … except in dreams. I have watched you for a long time, watched you with a thousand eyes and one. I saw your birth, and that of your lord father before you. I saw your first step, heard your first word, was part of your first dream. I was watching when you fell. And now you are come to me at last, Brandon Stark, though the hour is late.”
The last greenseer, the singers called him, but in Bran’s dreams he was still a three-eyed crow. When Meera Reed had asked him his true name, he made a ghastly sound that might have been a chuckle. “I wore many names when I was quick, but even I once had a mother, and the name she gave me at her breast was Brynden.”
I know. I have my own ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of mine has ever reached them.
He knows his name, he remembers being a Night’s Watchman, he remembers the doggerel said about him when he was hand, and he remembers the strong emotional commitments he made in life – I’d say that’s a pretty good “sense of self” for anyone pushing 125, let alone a greenseer.
Here’s my thinking, which is somewhat different from @poorquentyn‘s theory. I don’t think Euron was contacted by Bloodraven as an adult, any more than Bloodraven waited for Bran to become an adult before he contacted him.
I think Euron had some sort of health crisis/near-death experience at a young age – a drowning, an illness, etc. – that acted as a shamanic calling. Bloodraven contacted him in that moment, and showed him this:
And he looked past the Wall, past endless forests cloaked in snow, past the frozen shore and the great blue-white rivers of ice and the dead plains where nothing grew or lived. North and north and north he looked, to the curtain of light at the end of the world, and then beyond that curtain. He looked deep into the heart of winter, and then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his cheeks…
Bran looked at the crow on his shoulder, and the crow looked back. It had three eyes, and the third eye was full of a terrible knowledge. Bran looked down. There was nothing below him now but snow and cold and death, a frozen wasteland where jagged blue-white spires of ice waited to embrace him. They flew up at him like spears. He saw the bones of a thousand other dreamers impaled upon their points. He was desperately afraid.
Whereas Bran’s vision has compelled him to seek out the three-eyed crow and try to cancel the apocalypse, Euron became a metaphysical nihilist – because in the face of the truth of the heart of winter, all gods are lies – and confirmed the non-existence of divine judgement from an early age.
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“They never listened to what he wanted, even though Bran was a Stark and a prince besides, and the Reeds of the Neck were Stark bannermen.”
Synopsis:
Warning
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“Open your eye…the crow gave you the third, but you will not open it.”
Synopsis: Bran discusses the greensight with Jojen and Meera, and then with Maester Luwin.
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
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