ALL LEATHER MUST BE BOILED

retodd64 asked: Sean, love the podcast and am so looking forward to re-reading Feast/Dance. i'm not sure you covered it in the podcast yet but how about a topic related to hbo vs. the books and the race going on there, the aging of the kids etc...I'm worried that hbo will catch up and either have no source material or the showrunners will be forced to write the scripts to finish it off. the only good solution will be that grrm finishes them before that happens. have you seen the GRRMLEF on facebook? :-)

The aging of the kids: look, that ship has sailed. They’re just going to have to roll with it in terms of how some of their material is presented. (I’ve seen people talk about recasting, which is preposterous.)

The show catching up with the books: This will happen, I’m guessing. And I’m really bummed about it, because I want to read the books cold, but we live in a fallen world.

axle476 asked: Martin once said that FeastDance was originally supposed to have a multi-year (I think it was 3 or 5 years) gap after SoS, until he realized it couldn't quite work. Any guesses on who was supposed to jump, and why it couldn't work? My guesses for jumps: Arya (learn the ways of the Force), Sansa (learn the ways of Littlefinger), Tyrion (5 years of wasting away), Sam (becoming a Maester), and possibly Jon (what is ruling like)? I think King's Landing and Dorne forced it to be immediate.

Daenerys seems like the most solid candidate to me, allowing her to establish herself as a monarch in a foreign land. And given the difficulty Martin had with the Meereenese Knot, it’s logical to conclude that this was a storyline that changed significantly from its original conception.

grinningsouls asked: What do you think/hope it's going to happen with Sansa in the following books?

I hope she survives. I hope she winds up someplace secure. I hope she remains true to herself. I hope Littlefinger dies. I hope she ends up in a position where her hard-earned experience will do other people some good.

deceptacle asked: Can you break down what exactly the Dany prophecy says?

Not if I want to get anything else done today! Seriously, there are plenty of places online that do a solid job of this. My only additional input, given the opinions of large segments of the fandom, would be to pay especial attention to what she sees in proximity to the phrase “slayer of lies.”

misterfalcon asked: With regards to Dany's HOTU prophecy, I've always felt her mistaken when she assumes that Mirri Maz Durr fulfilled the betrayal for blood, since that happened BEFORE she got the prophecy. Do you agree it's a possibility, or am I foolish for thinking that?

I think you’re off-base, yeah. With each of those triplicate prophecies, the first one has already been fulfilled by the time Dany hears the prophecy. She rode Drogo’s horse to bed. She lit his funeral pyre to bring the dragons to life. And she was betrayed by Mirri Maz Durr for the khalasar’s crimes against her people.

eclemens27 asked: What do you think the legacy of ASoIaF will be (if it gets finished!) in 25 years?

It’s the great revisionist epic fantasy. With the help of the show it’s one of the most widely popular and culturally influential fantasies of all time, too — not at the level of Tolkien or Harry Potter, or Narnia, but I’d say it’s a firm fourth-place finisher at this point. (Unless you count Star Wars, which you probably should.) I think it depicts war and misogyny in an uncompromising and challenging way. It’s impressive as a feat of raw imagining. And in 25 years some young punk will come along to topple it from the throne because that’s what happens to classics.

musicstuph asked: Among the visions Dany sees in the House of the Undying is a corpse being dragged behind a silver horse. From the readings GRRM has done of TWOW chapters, Barristan rides Dany's silver into the battle. A minor amount of research says many people have already attributed this vision to the bloody flux. It could be both, though. Does Barristan die in the upcoming battle? Your thoughts?

Isn’t this just the dope who tried to poison her, who was in fact dragged behind her silver horse?

javimgol asked: You said that you'd make AFFC+ADWD in Season 4(a bit),Season 5 and then end them in Season 6 with the full battles of Ice and Fire. The problem that way is Season 5.How could you get nice cliffhangers at that point(2/3 of AFFC+ ADWD)?There is not an even remotely similar event such as RedWedding in ASOS in that point.What would be your ideas?For example,you can not end S5 with Cersei in prision because she needs to appear in a full season (S6) and would only have 2-3 scenes until the end of ADWD

First of all, that producer who said that he hopes to have seven seasons total for the show complicates this considerably, though I’m not convinced he didn’t just misspeak. 

One natural cliffhanger/climax for my theoretical Season Five would be Dany flying away on Drogon. Doesn’t leave her with a lot to do for most of Season Six, but I’m sure they can come up with an entertaining vision quest for her, and at any rate you’ll have the Battle of Fire at the end to redeem it.

isitaboutmycube asked: I apologize cuz I'm pretty sure this was asked before, but I can't find the answer. Where do you stand on the whole unVictarion idea? I see the evidence for it (the viewpoint detachment, Dany's vision in the HotU, etc) but I can't definitively come down one way or another on it.

I don’t buy it. First, the shift to a perspective outside his quarters on the ship is odd, but then we shift back. Second, I can’t bring myself to believe that Catelyn Stark’s POV chapters end when she becomes Lady Stoneheart, but Victarion Greyjoy is such a special snowflake that they just march right along without missing a beat — within a chapter, no less! Third, to be frank, I rarely if ever trust any ideas generated by Victarion stans, who strike me as the most drastically point-missing readers of A Song of Ice and Fire around. (Sorry folks!) Fourth, I just don’t think it scans at all as something Martin would do or as something reflected in the prose.

Here’s the list of the Top 25 Game of Thrones Season Three characters by number of lines, complied by Walter_Eagle:

1. Tyrion – 185
2. Jaime – 119
3. Daenerys – 93
4. Sansa – 87
5. Arya – 86
6. Cersei – 84
7. Tywin – 81
8. Jon – 79
9. Robb – 73
10. Margaery – 72 
11. Olenna – 71
12. Thoros – 67
13. Ygritte – 65
14. Theon – 64
15. Joffrey – 63
16. Brienne – 60
17. Missandei – 58
18. Shae – 54
19. Melisandre – 51
20. Davos – 48
20. Gendry – 48
22. Varys – 46
23. Bronn – 45
23. Stannis – 45
25. Jorah – 44
25. Sam – 44

Catelyn, we’re told, ranks 40th. 

1. Catelyn’s the line item that’s attracting the most attention, and rightly so, frankly. A POV character, and a Stark, and a major player in a pivotal Season Three storyline, with fewer lines than Bronn? It’s a bummer, for sure, and I say that as someone who’s both disappointed with how that character has been translated from book to screen — by far the weakest of all the main characters — and who tends not to be disappointed for the same reasons that the Catelyn stans are. 

Personally, I’d have liked the Stark/Tully/Riverlands storyline this season to use her, not Robb, as its central character. For one thing this would map more closely to how the books handled it, not that that’s something I tend to care about overmuch. Mainly, she’s simply a more sympathetic character right now than Robb — certainly than show-Robb. Her internal struggle is more interesting to me than his is. 

Granted, if you look at her material during this segment of the series, much of what she does in her chapters is internal. She tends to think about a lot of stuff for almost the entire chapter, until the final paragraphs arrive and someone tells her that something important has happened. That’s difficult to turn into compelling television. But the show’s obviously capable of concocting plot to keep a character at the forefront if they want, and I wish they’d done so here if that’s what it would have taken.

2. Look at the gender breakdown for this list. Women occupy five slots in the top 10 most prominent characters, and a majority of the top 20. I doubt that most of the top-shelf TV drams have anything even close to this level of gender parity. The Good Wife, I suspect, and maybe The Americans, and mmmmmmmaybe Homeland simply by virtue of its female lead, but as a sheer numbers game I think Game of Thrones comes out on top. And compared to Breaking Bad or Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men (however well Mad Men handles its core female characters)? Forget about it. Actually I suppose Downton Abbey has it beat, but even so. When we’re talking about how the show treats its women characters, this bears attention, and frankly praise.