ALL LEATHER MUST BE BOILED

Elio and Linda from Westeros discuss Mirri Maz Duur’s…prophecy? Maybe?

This is the long-awaited final video in their series on prophecies that came true in whole or in part during A Dance with Dragons, and it raises a few interesting points on prophecy in the series.

First, E&L point out that Melisandre’s contention that her visions sometimes show her possible futures — a claim frequently used by readers to counter the idea that visions and prophecies proscribe free will in the series — is basically bullshit. All of Melisandre’s visions appear to come to pass eventually, albeit frequently not in the way she anticipates. Since she is so locked in to her preconceived notions of how things are supposed to work, her “possible future” explanation is her way of rationalizing information she receives that she can’t fit into her framework of what her visions should mean. The best example of this is her vision of Renly smashing Stannis’s forces beneath the walls of King’s Landing, which she had around the same time as her vision of Renly’s death. She took the fulfillment of the latter to preclude the former and thus interpreted the Renly vs. Stannis @ KL vision as a possible future she’d avoided. Of course, they both came true: She and Stannis killed Renly, but then someone dressed up in Renly’s armor, posed as his ghost, and defeated Stannis’s host anyway. I still think there are plenty of ways to persuasively argue for the existence of free will in the face of prophecies and visions, and I’ve done so myself, but “they just show possible futures, not guaranteed futures” isn’t one of them.

Second, I wonder if the fandom displays the skepticism it does toward the veracity of prophecy in the series, despite the many many cases of prophecies coming true, because of what happened with the first prophecy we hear (I think,): the dosh khaleen’s apparently just-plain-wrong proclamation that Dany and Drogo’s unborn son will be the Stallion Who Mounts the World. Instead he’s born both deformed and dead. Now, by the end of book five, we have enough experience with the fluid way prophecy works in these books to come up with all sorts of ways the prophecy could still pan out — maybe their magical ultrasound machine was on the fritz and they misidentified the Stallion, so that it’s actually Daenerys and not the baby; maybe they actually saw a future child and got confused — but during that first read, what comes across is “Wow, this gaggle of witches got it disastrously wrong.” That’s a hard hangover to shake no matter what else happens.