AzureOwl

Renewed for a second season.

It wasn't Mina that she was channeling. Apparently he also had a son, who died of dysentery while accompanying his father in an expedition. At least that's how I interpreted the scene. I'll have to rewatch to be sure. Remember the photograph the Murray was looking at... a boy and a girl. Mina and her dead brother.

Here's yet another excerpt of THE WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE, this time dealing with the history of the Rhoynar and their wars with the Valyrians. There's some exceedingly interesting stuff in there: The Rhoynar had water wizards, which judging from the description of their feats were practically waterbenders. It explains why the Free Cities are called Free Cities It explains why the Free Cities had no unified government in place when the Doom took Valyria out of the equation It makes the Volantines even bigger dicks for trying to conquer all the other Valyrian colonies. They weren't trying to fill in for a missing imperial government, they were trying to create one! It explains how the Kingdom of Sarnor was able to maintain its entire political organization intact until after the Doom. It explains why the dragonlords were so understanding about Braavos' existence and the Unmasking of Uthero.

One details that surprised me from this extract is the fact that the Unmasking of Braavos predated the Doom of Valyria. I was under the impression that Braavos location remained secret until the Old Freehold was destroyed. The dragonlords were more tolerant than I gave them credit for. ETA: A Hungarian publisher's website has posted several more preview pages. The artwork is breathtaking.

Here's a new extract from THE WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE, including a Stark Family Tree!! Find out the name of Ned's mother!

Watching Tyrion’s trial, I was once again amazed at how half-truths and facts taken out of context are better tools for deception than any outright lie. I we look at all the testimony, it was almost all true, but with missing pieces of information that completely changed the meaning of things. I always wondered what criteria the producers used to decide which characters would get a beauty upgrade from the books and which ones a downgrade.

This part of an interview with Michael Hirst has me wondering: How are they going to do the Viking sack of Paris without doing a time skip? At the point that season 2 ended, Charlemagne is still very much alive. And the only reason that raid was successful was because the the Frankish Kingdom was a divided mess after his death.

I detail about this episode that I found delightful was that Athelstan rode to the Viking camp in a mule. It’s almost a trope unto itself that in movies and TV shows almost always, everyone who isn’t walking is riding a horse, even when a mule would be a more appropriate option. Horses were damn expensive back then!

The single best scene in that movie, in my opinion.

I have never understood that impulse people have to assume that because one side in a dispute is evil, that it automatically makes the other one good. You don’t have to be good to fight evil… you can just as easily be a different kind of evil. Just because he saw the Soviet Union as the N° 1 enemy and contributed to its fall, that doesn’t make Reagan the good guy. By everything I know he was a colossal, hypocritical prick. He was a bad person. But the Soviets were orders of magnitude worse. Calling them the "focus of evil" might be hyperbolic, but not by that much. They were the enemies of human decency and a cancer upon the Earth. The communist leaders were monsters. Take that from someone who has among his earliest memories sitting in a kitchen in utter darkness because Shinning Path blew up the power lines, wondering if every noise in the night was a car bomb. Reagan fought that evil with tools that were both good and evil. And those tools that were evil were almost always counter-productive on the long run on top of being evil. He should be rightly derided and condemned by history and all decent people for using them, but not for fight itself. Philip and Elizabeth are evil. They are firm believers in an ideology that is unquestionably wrong and condemned millions to unspeakable misery. They are every bit as much bad guys as Tony Soprano or Walter White. And every bit as fascinating and entertaining to watch.

I have the suspicion that the Fridge was located in Morocco or pretty close. From what I can remember the tower was located at a point were the desert met the sea, and presumably it was far from any densely populated areas. Western Sahara fits those criteria, and being one of the most sparsely populated territories in the world, and under no clear jurisdiction because of its disputed status, it would be the ideal spot to build the Fridge.

Color me surprised, apparently Kwenthrith and her brother the saint are based on real people. They weren’t Offa’s children though.

I must say, for all their faults, at least Meereen has better decorators and architects than Qarth. The city looks gorgeous!

If the Franks put up with Brunhilda and Fredegund, I see no reason to doubt the Anglo-Saxons would've put up with a girl like Kwenthrith.

From what we saw of Princess Kwenthrith (damn the Saxons for their un-spell-able names!) Ecbert only postponed the inevitable. If Kwenthrith wants Athelstan, she's going to get him.

Besides some interesting genealogical information, we got some interesting details from the sample: Aenar Targaryen moved the family from Valyria to Dragonstone in 114 BC (Before Conquest) The Doom of Valyria took place in 102 BC Aegon the Conqueror began his invasion in 2 BC The Velaryons and the Celtigars are of Valyrian origin, but the Bar Emmons are not. The family name of the line of the Storm Kings was Durrandon Plus an awesome picture of Aegon riding Balerion the Black Dread!

I just wanted to give you all the heads up that GRRM is going to post an excerpt from THE WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE on his website. We already know the general outline of the War of the Conquest from a reading he did a while back, but I'm interested in what details we might learn from this.

This episode’s Darwin Award goes to Lagertha’s new husband. [Did we ever learn the guy's name? I can remember) Your wife is a shield-maiden who just finished personally leading all your warriors in battle and not so long ago she kicked your ass with her bare hands. And you think exposing her breast for all your people to see after you were so much of a coward that you sent half a dozen guys to beat her up for you is a good idea? The dude was lucky that the other warrior cut off his head when he did, or Lagertha was liable to start going to town on him with that knife. It was also nice to see that after she led them in battle, New Husband’s troops are apparently more loyal to her. Not only the dude who dispatched the husband, nobody else so much as got up from their chair when she stabbed him in the eye. Another thing that has me thinking is if Ragnar got the idea to burn all of Borg’s men in the barn from Asslaug’s nagging and namedropping about her father. Weren’t her father’s killers dispatched using the same method?

I don't think that's a viable option. Borg's jarldom is pretty far away, from what I remember of season 1. And the vikings's longships aren't exactly designed to carry bulk cargo like grain.

Hello, everybody. As many others, I'm a refugee from TWoP. You may know me over there as ElymianDucat. I was thinking that in the interest of easying the transition and preserve some of the things that made the Game of Thrones boards in TWoP so enjoyable, we should make an effort to preserve the wonderful non-spoilery Character Reference Sheet over at TWoP, compiled by Maximum Taco. I don’t know if he’ll make the move over here, but the Character List could be very useful over here. Is it OK to make a thread over here and copy the List before TWoP goes dark? With proper credit given, of course.

In the interest of helping keep the episodes’ threads from getting too off topic I’m creating this thread to deal with questions regarding the historical events in the backstory of the series as well as discussions about the geography of the setting and the different cultures portrayed in it. If you want to know who the Blackfyre Pretenders were, have questions about Robert's Rebellion or what is the Doom of Valyria, this is the place. If you want to discuss the differences between the culture of the Seven Kingdoms and that of the Dothraki this is the place. If you want to know how long is the Wall or the names of the Nine Free Cities this is the place. Of course, since most of the answers to those questions will come from the novels, be advised that there might be spoilers.