Spoiler tags, Taure. Use them well.

That said:

Spoiler

Yeah, Jon being Lyanna and Rhaegar's son makes a lot of sense, especially considering the circumstances of Lyanna's death and Jon's arrival at Winterfell.

Regarding your Warg theory: while it'd be nice to see the Stark children reunited in death, a few of the wolves are already dead. Lady, belonging to Sansa, died in Thrones. Then Robb's Grey Wind was killed by Frey men at the Red Wedding in Swords, and his head was sewn onto Robb's corpse as an insult to the Starks.

As it stands, the only direwolves still with their masters are Ghost, Summer, and Shaggydog, since Nymeria, after being chased off by Arya, is probably leading hordes of wolves all across Westeros on murderous raids.

I'm not sure about Edric Dayne, but your ideas seem plausible. I'm more inclined to have Arya riding a dragon, but the symbolism wouldn't be there if she did.

 

Eh, it seems odd to use spoiler tags to discuss stuff in books several years old. Using them in the TV show thread makes sense, because lots of people will be watching the show without reading the books, but it seems to me that it's fairly safe to assume that people who are reading a discussion thread about a series will have read the series. And if they haven't and they don't want to get spoiled, they shouldn't be reading the discussion thread.

Regarding Arya: I'm not so sure if she can be the third. She most definitely does not have Targaryen blood, and her storyline seems to be taking her away from being able to lead armies etc. An assassin is not a warrior, and it seems that the type of assassin she will be is the kind that means she can't just go around killing whoever she wants.

 

Thought this was the tv show thread for some reason. :facepalm

But yeah. Agreed on Arya- as much as I'd like her to be on a dragon, it's not going to happen.

My only hope is fanfiction! :awesome

While GRRM doesn't really approve of it, he said he can't stop people from writing fanfics about the tv show. Semantics, but unless HBO says otherwise, I really want some good Thrones fiction.

 

On the Arya note...As Taure mentioned, she's training to be one of the faceless men, those badass assassins that can seemingly wield strange magics, altering faces and guises, turning animals feral and against their masters. Though if I was to place my money on anything, I'd gamble that Arya will cross Dany and more than likely return to the seven kingdoms with her and the rabble army she's mustering.

With Jon being the possible son of Rhaegar and Lyanna...well, I suppose I can see it. I'm pretty sure I remember at the start of the series that Jon was described as being more Stark in look then any of the current Starks - barring Arya. Does it mention that he shares any defining physical traits from the Targaryen line?

As for the Dragons, well there's that horn taken from the ruins of Valyaria (?) that's supposed to be able to control them...That three heads prophesy doesn't exclude one of them being usurped from Dany by the Iron Islands ruler (can't remember his name...crow-eye maybe?).

 

A twin, Jon? No. Edric Dayne is four years younger than Jon, around Arya's age.

About Jon's physical traits, all we know is that he looks like a Stark, so his parents could as well be Rhaegar and Lyanna or Ned and a whore from King's Landing, for exemple. It's true that I prefer the Rhaegar/Lyanna theory. Ned doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's whoring around, especially when he's already married.

If Jon really is a Targaryen bastard, I would very much like Melisandre's reaction, she still wants to burn someone of royal blood for her dragon.

 

Fuck, its been a while since I read the books so I've forgotten so many of the side characters.

That said I want Arya's plot to advance, a year or 2 at the very least, so shit can happen.

Jon as Rhaeger's son, I totally believe it.

 

One thing that I've been thinking of recently is how wealthy the Starks are at the beginning of GoT. They're one of the great families, with a long heritage and large lands, and seem to have been led by many prudent men. It stands to reason that they have a reasonable amount of wealth. But I wonder how much. Certainly they're no Lannisters or Tyrells, but I wonder how they compare. I think it likely that the North has some iron mines, and copper and tin for bronze (the crown of the King of the North was made of iron and bronze). Then they have farmland, and trade from their ports. Furs and pelts, probably. Maybe even some silver mines - much of the Stark clothing seemed to have silver on it.

Anyone know of any word of god on this matter?

 

It's been a while since I read Game of Thrones, but shouldnt Jon be immune to fire if the is the son of Rhaegar, or is that something they cocked up in the tv-show?

 

I never got the impression that she was resistant to fire in general. I always considered it not a property of Daenerys, but rather a result of the events taking place around the Dragons. All the instances of Daenerys being immune to fire involve her dragons. I never really got the impression that she could just stroll through a regular fire.

 

On the note of dragons, I wonder... Was it simply the sacrifice of a life for a life that brought them back or was it the fact that both Miramaz Durr and Dany were present? Could it have been accomplished by anyone else with anyone else or did it need a strong shaman or a Targaryen? I've been mulling over this ever since I started to wonder just how fucked Westeros would be if Jaime Lannister hadn't stopped Aerys from burning King's Landing. Surely there were some dragon eggs still left in the city? Hmmm...

 

I get the feeling that the magic in SoIaF isn't so rule bound. It's quasi-religious, very mystical. I doubt that it's a matter of "with given inputs you'll get a certain output" e.g. "sacrifice a life + dragon's egg = dragon". It definitely feels like a kind of fated event. Plus, you had a lot more than those inputs. You have the fact that she was a Targaryen, the fact that Drogo and her son died, the factor of revenge, the general happenings in the world (The Others). Who knows which were relevant and which weren't. I certainly doubt that, were she to get more dragons eggs, she could replicate the feat.

I do definitely feel that the Targaryens are special in some sense. Sure, they don't have overt superhuman powers - GRRM is far too subtle for that - but that doesn't mean they're common people. Valyria definitely had something magical going for it, and presumably controlling dragons isn't something that could be done by just anyway (or maybe it can, who can say?).

Anyway, random theory:

Melisandre's religion is dualistic. She talks about R'hllor and "The Other", who is the god of darkness, night, cold etc.

The Other.

The Other's.

The Others.

COINCIDENCE?

 

In the beginning of Game of Thrones, didn't Dany step into a steaming bath and was fine? I know it happened in the show, but I thought it also happened in the books.

On an unrelated note, has anyone got the feeling the Melisandre is going to try and convince Stannis to sacrifice his daughter for a dragon since everybody else with king's blood keeps being taken away from him?

 

I didn't think the steam bath was amazingly hot - not so hot that going in was miraculous in any way. I always took that section to be about Viserys' abuse of Daenerys and how she felt the need to scald his touch off herself to feel clean.

 

Reading on the wiki, I can't glean any particular special talent the Valyrians had to help them control dragons. It seems that they were just the lucky bastards who happened to live close enough to find them first and the Targaryens were the twice-lucky ones to escape the Doom. Judging by the Hedge Knight they seem to live for a while but that seems to be it, but then again we have little to go on. Or hell maybe spending all that time with magical creatures did make them magical, who knows?

And I thought it was explicitly stated that Melisandre was trying to defend against The Others? If not it certainly is strongly implied. First she finds a king then she recreates Lightbringer, the sword of Azor Ahai, the one who drove The Others back the last time. And then they go to the Wall to help defend it. I'm pretty sure she's certain that as rightful king it should be Stannis' job to drive them back, I can't wait till she finds out about Dany.

Melisandre seems like the type who would sacrifice Stannis if it came to it. And it might.

 

I didn't actually read the books until after I watched the first few episodes of the show so I suppose my perception of the scene could have been affected by that. In the show, the water looked pretty damn hot.

Can somebody explain why everybody seems to hate Dany? She wasn't my favorite character, but I did look forward chapters focused on what was going on around her more than a lot of the other chapters.

 

First, that bath? A typical, soothing, comfortable Japanese bath runs at 41~43 degrees C.

That bath ain't hot.

To answer your question (even though she's one of my favorite characters), a lot of people might feel that she's not a powerful enough character, especially in book one. That is to say, she didn't really come into her own for a considerable amount of time. On top of this, she's really not doing anything immediately relevant to the current events in Westeros. She's just out doing her own thing, gallivanting with her slave army and experiencing zero failure and being heralded and loved as the savior queen and all that stuff.

She's seen sort of as a Mary-Sue (yes, I know GRRM probably doesn't have fantasies of turning into platinum-haired girls and being impregnated by barbarian horse lords), since she's such a perfect character.