You know nothing.

 

Well, neither does Ygritte anymore.

 

Rose Leslie is perfection personified and I will shoot anyone who disagrees in the balls with a crossbow.

 

For once Jon Snow does know something.

After all, he decided to lock that shit down.

I do find it great that those two are getting married irl.

 

Last year around that time the whole 7th season was spoiled. This year they either improved their security or got more lucky with people who have access to the scripts because there is very little information about 8th season and nothing that can be certain.

Few things that are confirmed is that Sapochnik is directing two episodes, 3th and 5th, and I doubt D&D aren't using him for the big battles of the season. At least one of them is going to be a siege of a castle.

The series will return in early 2019 once again giving GRRM a little more time to at least publish TWOW before it ends.

 

What's the point of this, I wonder? It's well known that the show has diverged rather heavily from the books when it comes to some plots and characters, and delaying for a year is only going to blueball fans of the show. I get respecting the original author and fans of the books because the books are OG - to a point. Where do you draw the line with a writer who's been missing every deadline on TWOW for 6 years?

If this delay is for production or HBO programming reasons, fine. But if it's a concession to GRRM, then I'm a little frowny.

 

It's how long the production will take. Giving GRRM more time probably isn't their intention at all.

 

‘Game of Thrones’ Prequel Moves Ahead at HBO With Pilot Order.

Of all the possibilities they decided to go with the weirdest one in my opinion. Sure, going with the original Long Night and how the people of that time become later legends could be fun, especially when it's actually GRRM who is working on it making it a canon, but other than Starks and the White Walkers there aren't going to be many familiar elements for the casual GoT viewers to recognize making it almost a completely new setting.

 

The show has finished filming.

I'm sad. No S9 forthcoming in 2020. Not that I was holding out hope. And we still have a fucking year to go to see Jon pwn the Night King.

 

Just finished reading Fire & Blood. It's a bit long-winded and a lot of the material concerning the Dance of the Dragons has been seen before in his previous stories, but all in all, it was entertaining. I was hoping to read more about Dunk and Egg, but apparently that will be covered in a later installment. I just wanted to share what was, imo, the most interesting passage of the book.

Spoiler

Barth wrote, “It has been three days since the princess perished, and I have not slept. I do not know that I shall ever sleep again. The Mother is merciful, I have always believed, and the Father Above judges each man justly…but there was no mercy and no justice in what befell our poor princess. How could the gods be so blind or so uncaring as to permit such horror? Or is it possible that there are other deities in this universe, monstrous evil gods such as the priests of Red R’hllor preach against, against whose malice the kings of men and the gods of men are naught but flies?

“I do not know. I do not want to know. If this makes me a faithless septon, so be it. Grand Maester Benifer and I have agreed to tell no one all of what we saw and experienced in his chambers as that poor child lay dying…not the king, nor the queen, nor her mother, nor even the archmaesters of the Citadel…but the memories will not leave me, so I shall set them down here. Mayhaps by the time they are found and read, men will have gained a better understanding of such evils.

"We have told the world that Princess Aerea died of a fever, and that is broadly true, but it was a fever such as I have never seen before and hope never to see again. The girl was burning. Her skin was flushed and red and when I laid my hand upon her brow to learn how hot she was, it was as if I had thrust it into a pot of boiling oil. There was scarce an ounce of flesh upon her bones, so gaunt and starved did she appear, but we could observe certain…swellings inside her, as her skin bulged out and then sunk down again, as if…no, not as if, for this was the truth of it…there were things inside her, living things, moving and twisting, mayhaps searching for a way out, and giving her such pain that even the milk of the poppy gave her no surcease. We told the king, as we must surely tell her mother, that Aerea never spoke, but that is a lie. I pray that I shall soon forget some of the things she whispered through her cracked and bleeding lips. I cannot forget how oft she begged for death.

“All the maester’s arts were powerless against her fever, if indeed we can call such a horror by such a commonplace name. The simplest way to say it is that the poor child was cooking from within. Her flesh grew darker and darker and then began to crack, until her skin resembled nothing so much, Seven save me, as pork cracklings. Thin tendrils of smoke issued from her mouth, her nose, even, most obscenely, from her nether lips. By then she had ceased to speak, though the things within her continued to move. Her very eyes cooked within her skull and finally burst, like two eggs left in a pot of boiling water for too long.

“I thought that was the most hideous thing that I should ever see, but I was quickly disabused of the notion, for a worse horror was awaiting me. That camewhen Benifer and I lowered the poor child into a tub and covered her with ice. The shock of that immersion stopped her heart at once, I tell myself…if so, that was a mercy, for that was when the things inside her came out…

“The things…Mother have mercy, I do not know how to speak of them…they were…worms with faces…snakes with hands…twisting, slimy, unspeakable
things that seemed to writhe and pulse and squirm as they came bursting from her flesh. Some were no bigger than my little finger, but one at least was as long as my arm…oh, Warrior protect me, the sounds they made…

“They died, though. I must remember that, cling to that. Whatever they might have been, they were creatures of heat and fire, and they did not love the ice, oh no. One after another they thrashed and writhed and died before my eyes, thank the Seven. I will not presume to give them names…they were horrors.”

The first part of Septon Barth’s account ends there. But some days later he returned and resumed:

“Princess Aerea is gone, but not forgotten. The Faithful pray for her sweet soul every morn and every night. Outside the septs, the same questions are on every lip. The princess was missing for more than a year. Where could she have gone? What could have happened to her? What brought her home? Was Balerion the monster believed to haunt the Velvet Hills of Andalos? Did his flames start the fire that swept across the Disputed Lands? Could the Black Dread have flown as far as Astapor to be the ‘dragon’ in the pit? No, and no, and no. These are fables.

“If we put aside such distractions, however, the mystery remains. Where did Aerea Targaryen go after fleeing Dragonstone? Queen Rhaena’s first thought was that she had flown to King’s Landing; the princess had made no secret of her wish to return to court. When that proved wrong, Rhaena next looked to Fair Isle and Oldtown. Both made sense after a fashion, but Aerea was not to be found at either place, nor anywhere in Westeros. Others, including the queen and myself, took this to mean that the princess had flown east, not west, and would be found somewhere in Essos. The girl might well have thought the Free Cities to be beyond her mother’s grasp, and Queen Alysanne in particular seemed convinced that Aerea was fleeing her mother as much as Dragonstone itself. Yet Lord Rego’s agents and informers could find no hint of her across the narrow sea…nor even a whisper of her dragon. Why?

“Though I can offer no certain proof, I can suggest an answer. It seems to me that we have all been asking the wrong question. Aerea Targaryen was still well shy of her thirteenth nameday on the morning she slipped from her mother’s castle. Though no stranger to dragons, she had never ridden one before…and for reasons we may never understand, she chose Balerion as her mount, instead of any one of the younger and more tractable dragons she might have claimed. Driven as she was by her conflicts with her mother, mayhaps she simply wanted a beast larger and more fearsome than Queen Rhaena’s Dreamfyre. It might also have been a desire to tame the beast that had slain her father and his own dragon (though Princess Aerea had never known her father, and it is hard to know what feelings she might have had about him and his death). Regardless of her reasons, the choice was made.

“The princess might well have intended to fly to King’s Landing, just as her mother suspected. It might have been her thought to seek out her twin sister in Oldtown, or to go seeking after Lady Elissa Farman, who had once promised to take her adventuring. Whatever her plans, they did not matter. It is one thing to leap upon a dragon and quite another to bend him to your will, particularly a beast as old and fierce as the Black Dread. From the very start we have asked, Where did Aerea take Balerion? We should have been asking, Where did Balerion take Aerea?

“Only one answer makes sense. Recall, if you will, that Balerion was the largest and oldest of the three dragons that King Aegon and his sisters rode to conquest. Vhagar and Meraxes had hatched on Dragonstone. Balerion alone had come to the island with Aenar the Exile and Daenys the Dreamer, the youngest of the five dragons they brought with them. The older dragons had died during the intervening years, but Balerion lived on, growing ever larger, fiercer, and more willful. If we discount the tales of certain sorcerers and mountebanks (as we should), he is mayhaps the only living creature in the world that knew Valyria before the Doom.

“And that is where he took the poor doomed child clinging to his back. If she went willingly I would be most surprised, but she had neither the knowledge nor the force of will to turn him."

“What befell her on Valyria I cannot surmise. Judging from the condition in which she returned to us, I do not even care to contemplate it. The Valyrians were more than dragonlords. They practiced blood magic and other dark arts as well, delving deep into the earth for secrets best left buried and twisting the flesh of beasts and men to fashion monstrous and unnatural chimeras. For these sins the gods in their wroth struck them down. Valyria is accursed, all men agree, and even the boldest sailor steers well clear of its smoking bones…but we would be mistaken to believe that nothing lives there now. The things we found inside Aerea Targaryen live there now, I would submit…along with such other horrors as we cannot even begin to imagine. I have written here at length of how the princess died, but there is something else, something even more frightening, that requires mention:

“Balerion had wounds as well. That enormous beast, the Black Dread, the most fearsome dragon ever to soar through the skies of Westeros, returned to King’s Landing with half-healed scars that no man recalled ever having seen before,
and a jagged rent down his left side almost nine feet long, a gaping red wound from which his blood still dripped, hot and smoking.

“The lords of Westeros are proud men, and the septons of the Faith and the maesters of the Citadel in their own ways are prouder still, but there is much and more of the nature of the world that we do not understand, and may never understand. Mayhaps that is a mercy. The Father made men curious, some say to test our faith. It is my own abiding sin that whenever I come upon a door I must needs see what lies upon the farther side, but certain doors are best left unopened. Aerea Targaryen went through such a door.” Septon Barth’s account ends there. He would never again touch upon the fate of Princess Aerea in any of his writings, and even these words would be sealed away amongst his privy papers, to remain undiscovered for almost a hundred years. The horrors he had witnessed had a profound affect upon the septon, however, exciting the very hunger for knowledge he called “my own abiding sin.”

 

^Thanks for posting that, it was really interesting. I wish Martin would spend more of his writing time in Westeros instead of all these other projects he does.

 

I'm halfway done with this book and it's really good for what it is, a fictional history book, which is something that people complain about in their reviews.

And while I'm waiting for WoW, if I were to choose what GRRM should focus on, then it would be the second part of F&B because I would like a more detailed account of the First Blackfyre Rebellion.

 

I'm around 75% sure that WoW is already completed and he's working on the next one. He's seen the absolute train wreck the show has become, and he knows if he publishes another book, it'll be around for another two seasons at least. At this point it makes the most sense to wait for the show to end before publishing the real, non-Hollywood ending. He's stated in an interview that he has no concerns apart from the story ending exactly as he wants it to end.

 

This is dumb. Really dumb. Season 8 is the show's finale, that was decided years ago, and the only person I've seen publicly push for it to go longer is George who's mentioned it going for maybe more seasons and kept talking about a movie before D&D and HBO publicly put their foot down at 8. I'm assuming he was hoping for more time to finish the series before the show ended, but he's clearly botched that.

 

We shall see, then. What I think is dumb and makes no sense is that this author who previously turned out books once every five years, except the first three which came out within four years, has not turned out a book in seven going on eight.

 

He wasn't working on so many other projects during that time, though. He was pretty heavily involved in the first seasons of the show, he's written other books, and he's also consulting for the other shows that are in the works as well. Remember that even if those shows get cancelled he is still working on them in preproduction.

 

HBO wanted the show to go longer, they didn't put anything down except more money (thus the prequels greenlit) - D&D were burnt out though

 

Both HBO and GRRM would love to have more seasons, but D&D always repeated that they plan about 7 seasons or about 70 episodes. That's why the 7th and the 8th season are shorter and I suspect that some events in them weren't planned from the beginning or at least not on the scale they ended up, like the hunt behind the Wall.

One reason why I doubt GRRM is anywhere close to releasing WoW is recent publishing of F&B. It probably wouldn't happen if there was a chance of getting the other book within a reasonable amount of time. As it is, GRRM wanted to release anything at all for his own morale and maybe to make his publisher less disappointed, but that just my speculation.

 

FUCKING BE APRIL ALREADY GODDAMNIT

 

The seventh season was disappointing enough to me that I have no problem with waiting that long for the last one. If it wasn't for Miguel Sapochnik returning to direct the battles, there probably wouldn't be anything I would be excited about.

Maybe the actual trailer will manage to change that attitude.