Perhaps the most famous character cut from the TV show
was Lady Stoneheart, but that is but one aspect of her existence
that is unusual, if not just short of unique.
George twisted the undead trope or inverted it, whatever you
want to call it, to make Barack Dondarian a good guy.
But he may have gone more classic with Lady Stoneheart
returning from death to take revenge on those who wronged her
and her family. I say may have, because we
pretty much know the full story of Barack Dondarian.
It's complete. We may learn a few more details,
but for all intents and purposes, it's over.
Lady Stoneheart, not so much. We have, honestly, she hasn't
been around very long, so we have a lot less to work with and
a lot more guesswork. So there's clearly a lot more to
come. Or at least if it's not a lot
more to come, we have a lot of trouble guessing what it's going
to be. Jamie, Brienne, the Brotherhood
without Banners, Thoros, Harwin and the rest.
The phrase the Red Wedding, 2 point O, Jane Westerling, Edmure
Tully, The Blackfish, these are all characters she might
interact with or are interacting with actively.
Obviously the rest of the BWB and Thoros and Harwin.
But there's other characters she may interact with and we have to
consider what that might be like.
We know she's searching for Aria, but will she find her?
Will Aria and Catlin be reunited?
Will she learn that Rickon and Bran are alive or where Sansa
is? And what does her case tell us
about the undead? I mean, she's basically a
firewhite, right? I mean, that's what he called
Barrick and Barrick passed his wife force on to her.
So she is the same category in terms of what animates her and
has her walking around the the power behind all that, even if
we don't know exactly what that is.
It's the same as what it was for Barrick, even though their
personalities are quite different.
So we've got a number of possible reunions to discuss,
who's on her hit list, what's in store for her and the rest of
the BWB, and we'll include a bit of real life lore about
revenants and related mythology to spice things up a bit.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros
podcast. Hello and welcome back
everybody. It's another episode of History
of Westeros. It's Sunday at 3:00 Eastern,
which is when we do our regular live streams.
When we're in ATV season, the time slot is 6:00 PM Mondays.
Since we're getting closer to that, I wanted to throw out that
reminder. If you want to catch us after
the live stream or on a different platform, we're
available as a video also on Spotify and any other podcast
platform as an audio episode. And if you listen on Patreon as
a member, you get it ad free. Shout out to our good friend
Nina. Happy anniversary to Nina and
her husband James. It's their it's their first yay.
Make sure to check out good queenalley.tumblr.com.
That's one L in alley and she gave me some good thoughts for
this one as usual. No surprise there, right
questions. If you have them, put them here
in the chat or ask us at westeroshistory@gmail.com or
send us a message on Patreon. Hit us at Blue Sky or in the
Facebook group or on the Discord.
We'll we'll see it and we'll answer it.
Maybe not right away, but we'll get there.
Our trivia question for today answer will be at the end, but
the answer is also during the episode.
If you're paying attention, you might hear me drop that.
Lady Catlin of course, is killed at the Red Wedding, but what was
the original location George planned for her death?
Like I said, answer at the end. Today let me tell you what our
different sections are. We have first appearance and
mention as we so often do. Then we have undead unfinished.
Then we have rumors. Then we have what is a revenant?
That's the IRL discussion. Then we have a broken
brotherhood. That's actually a quote from
Thoros, a swarm of swords appreciation.
This Lady Stoneheart's reveal is at the end, of course, of of A
Storm of Swords, a book that is full of climactic moments.
So I wanted to sort of just compare a lot of his climactic
moments to each other real quickly before we get back to
the episode at the halfway point.
And when we do so, we'll continue with the path of the
Hang woman. Then you must prove your face.
Then a section on reunions parsed to Aria, Uncle Brendan,
Hallen Reed, Sansa, Winterfell and the North, and then we will
finish with outlook for vengeance.
Some of the meatiest part of the episode is at the end, but
there's plenty of good stuff before our poll today.
If you are watching on YouTube or if you are catching the
episode on Spotify, which I believe is the only places where
our polls can appear, the technology, technology, the the
functionality isn't there on other platforms like we do not
have the technology for polling the.
Technology exists. The technology does exist, just
not on every platform that we're on.
That's what I meant to say. So the question is, will Arya
and Stoneheart meet? Simple yes or no question.
Do you believe Arya and Stoneheart will meet or do you
think they won't? Let's get to the first mention.
After a series of incredible climaxes and a Storm of Swords,
this is the final one in the whole book.
Quote. They say Lord Barrack always
gives a man a trial, that he won't kill a man unless
something's proved against him. You can't prove anything against
me. The Red Wedding was my father's
work, and Ryman's and Lord Bolton's Lothar rigged the tents
to collapse and put the crossbow men in the gallery with the
musicians. Bastard Walder led the attack on
the camps. They're the ones you want, not
me. I only drank some wine.
You have no witness. As it happens, you're wrong
there. The singer turned to the hooded
woman. My lady.
The outlaws parted as she came forward, saying no word.
When she lowered her hood, something tightened inside
Merritt's chest, and for a moment he could not breathe.
No, no, I saw her die. She was dead for a day and night
before they stripped her naked and threw her body in the river.
Raymond opened her throat from ear to ear.
She was dead. And then she was in the river
for a while before Barrett came along.
She was dead. Was.
Or maybe she still is and is walking around.
It's a semantics point, we don't need to get into that.
Now. This isn't the bravest man in
the 1st place. I wouldn't say he's a coward
either, but this would be. I mean this is enough to make
brave people terrified. And before seeing her he was
already trying to argue. Don't hang me.
So he was already quite afraid before that.
He was, well primed for additional fear, shall we say.
He had already knew that basically the moment he saw his
cousin Peter Pitt. I forget if that's his cousin or
his brother. What?
I don't remember. It doesn't matter.
He knew. I mean, Peter could have made
that same argument. I have no proof.
You have? No.
Yeah, but they they do have proof.
And I don't think they really care about proof because Lord
Barrack's not around anymore. It's really just guilt by
association at this point. But he really was guilty.
So, yeah. Fair enough.
Now let's just think about this from her perspective, not this
hanging of merit that's a little more straightforward, but I just
mean like the moment she came back to life, quote UN quote.
When Barrick woke, it was jolting and strange.
He describes it. He felt the fire in his mouth,
he felt the wound. He had some idea where he was,
but it was confusing. But his body was whole, right?
He except for the actual hole in his chest from the Lance that
Sir Gregoire put there. But he wasn't like debilitated
all over. His flesh wasn't rotting, his
skin wasn't melting, you know, in the water and all that.
So I consider the possibility that she is in pain all the
time. It's also possible she doesn't
really feel much pain. So it's really just both ends of
the spectrum are possible here. Has she looked in a mirror?
That's a tough question. It's not like mirrors are common
in Westeros and she's not exactly living like a lady in
these caves and and hideouts we see.
But I mean, maybe she saw her reflection in water.
That's not unlikely. And she sees how everyone looks
at her. But what does that matter to
her? I mean, as an undead being
that's really focused on her revenge and finding her children
or maybe just one child in particular at this point.
I don't know how much this effects her, but it might affect
her a lot. Because if you think about what
she was as a living person, she cared about looks when she was
alive. I mean, she was high born and
good looking. And yeah, I mean, I'm not
faulting her for that, but it definitely matters.
She, I'm not saying she was vain, but there's that time she
thinks about how sad it is for Brienne to be ugly.
The the quote is pity filled Catlin's heart.
Is there any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman?
Now, to be fair, the follow up line, 'cause that's kind of,
that's a little gnarly of a statement there, but the
following line is then. Yet when Renly cut away her torn
cloak and fastened a rainbow in its place, Brienne of Tars did
not look unfortunate. Her smile lit up her face and
her voice was strong and proud. And then she swears to defend
Renly with her life. And then Catelyn goes right back
to pitying her when she sees how Brienne is looking at Renly like
oh boy, she is just besotted, isn't she?
So. And that's important too,
because the next person Brienne swears to is, is her, right?
She swears to Renly and then Renly dies and she swears her
life of service to Catelyn instead.
Now, yeah, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
This isn't a, you know, there's no system for this kind of sort
of thing. But Lady Stoneheart is probably
the ugliest human like creature walking around.
I mean, wow, she's fearsomely disturbing when you get the
description. And here it is.
Merritt Frey would surely agree. Quote.
Her cloak and collar hid the gash his brother's blade had
made, but her face was even worse than he remembered.
The flesh had gone, putting soft in the water, and turned the
color of curdled milk. Half her hair was gone, and the
rest had turned as white and brittle as a Crohn's.
Beneath her ravaged scalp, her face was shredded skin and black
blood where she had raked herself with her nails.
But her eyes were the most terrible thing.
Her eyes saw him, and they hated.
That's such good writing. Like the description is
terrifying, but the eyes are the worst thing and there's nothing
like unnatural about them, right?
He doesn't describe like they're discolored now.
There is a later quote that it makes it sound like they're a
bit reddish. We'll talk about that at the
time. But he's not saying anything
about that. It's just the, the look in them.
It's not the their physical qualities.
And of course, he doesn't note anything unusual about them.
So it's just her intensity is more disturbing to him than her
horrifying visit, which is really quite horrifying.
So that's very intense, very descriptive.
Now he says she was worse than he remembered because he saw her
dead body. And you saw her dead body as it
started to turn for about a day, day and a half.
Then they threw her in the water and the body drifted downstream
to be found. George is very big on emotional
eyes. Coming back to that briefly.
We saw the polar OPS. It's like just now if you caught
that, we got the purest love look from Brienne to Renly, and
then the purest look of hatred and murder from Stoneheart to
Merritt Frey. So the red eyes burning thing is
kind of a reminder that she's a fireweight.
I don't know that it's meant to be taken literal, but yeah.
Well, what's something to think about now?
The actual first time the word stoneheart appears is in a
Brienne chapter when she's speaking to Lord Randall Tarley.
Quote. Cleganes turned outlaw.
He rides with Barack Dondarian now, it would seem.
Or not. The tales vary.
Show me where they're hiding. I will gladly slit their bellies
open, pull their entrails out and burn them.
We've hanged dozens of outlaws, but the leaders still elude US.
Clegane, Dondarian, the Red Priest.
And now this woman's stone heart.
How do you propose to find them when I cannot?
Obviously Randall Tarly, not a very big fan of Brienne, and
obviously he has some information wrong here, or at
least he acknowledges that he might know that the information
might be wrong. Like Clegane is not writing with
Barack Dondarian. Matt Gerndarian isn't writing
with anybody. And that's Lem Lemon cloak, not
not Sandor Clegane. And actually he's referring to
what Rorge did. Rorge was wearing the helmet
when the worst of the crimes were committed.
But of course, Rorge was killed by Brienne, and it's now wearing
the Lem, is now wearing the helmet.
So Tarly has a lot of experience in hunting outlaws.
And he says, I've hanged dozens of them.
And one of the brothers later points that out that, yeah,
Tarly's killed a lot of us. But that's done.
Tarly has stopped because he went to King's Landing the
moment he heard that Marjorie was about to go on trial.
And then he was made master of laws.
He's on the Small council. He wasn't when he was chasing
the outlaws. So that's a big difference.
He's he's way above this now. He, he might send someone else
out to hunt outlaws, but it's really just not his business
anymore. It does make sense that the
Master of Laws would deal with outlaws, but he's got much
bigger problems. Like the Golden Company just
landed and the War of 5 Kings is still raging.
And he might be plotting against the people he's planning to work
for. He might be on the side of Aegon
and the Golden Company in it. That's a whole separate topic,
but the point is he's not really concerned with Stoneheart
anymore. If he turns his attention back
to that, it won't be something he handles personally.
Here's a quote from A Game of Thrones.
Might just be a coincidence. Check the wording here, it's
pretty curious. Quote.
Rob, I will not soften the truth for you if you lose.
There is no hope for any of us. They say there is not but stone
at the heart of Castor the Rock. Remember the fate of Rhaegar's
children. Whether George meant that as a
setup for Stoneheart, like it's entirely possible he hadn't
chosen the name Stoneheart, we definitely know he planned for
her death from the beginning, but it wasn't like this that he
changed a lot of it. And maybe the end game too.
We don't know what the original end game for her was, and we
don't know what it is now, but it's still a good quote even if
it wasn't intentional. It's it's it's telling because
he's her last line. There is.
Remember the fate of Rhaegar's children?
And when Cat becomes Stoneheart, she has a similar attitude.
She has no problem hanging Podrick Payne.
He's a 14 year old. At most he might only be
thirteen. So yeah, she doesn't even like,
consider. She's like, yeah, this is a
Lannister Squire. Like, no question, we kill him.
It wasn't even the idea that he's too young didn't matter to
them at all. Brienne's argument towards that,
it didn't help. Like she didn't even really try
to get Heil Hunt off because she didn't really have an argument
to make. They're like, that's Randall
Tarly's man, you know, blah, blah, blah.
I got nothing but Podrick Payne. He's a boy.
Like that should have counted for something.
But now they didn't care. And if what would she do if she
got her hands on Tom and her Marcel?
I don't think it would be pretty.
I don't think she's going to get her hands on either of them.
I'm not predicting that. But just the point being she is
on that level now. She's willing to go that far,
and I am predicting both Tommen and Marcelle to die, just not at
the hands of Lady Stoneheart and her people.
And Speaking of the Lannisters and hands, it's notable that she
nearly had her throat cut by a Lannister foot pad sent to kill
Bran instead of her throat. It was her hands or hands.
I forget if it was one or both. Anyway, those scars became part
of her POV. She'd look at them from time to
time. They're, you know, they're a
memory of what she's capable of and her symbol of her devotion
to her children. I mean, when it came down to it,
she did not hesitate. She proved herself willing to
take a knife for her kid. And that wasn't just bravado.
It wasn't like, if it came to this, I would do that.
No, we saw her do it. It's in the books, right?
I don't mean like in the book, like Game of Thrones.
I mean, it's it's done and accounted for when it came down
to it. Yeah.
She put herself between that blade, no question.
I never really thought about that as a lesser version of her
eventual fate. I don't know that George
intended that as a setup either, but it certainly works that way,
right? She has that dagger almost cut
her throat, she gets away from it and then the dagger does cut
her throat at the Red Wedding. And in both cases, it's a kind
of an unimportant person, right? It's the foot pad that Joffrey
probably hired to send to kill Bran.
We don't even know what that guy's name is.
It doesn't even matter. And the Frey that killed her is
like Raymond, not Raymond. Raymond, one of the unimportant.
I mean, a lot of them are kind of unimportant, but one of the
phrase that you only hear name spoken a few times.
It wasn't like Black Walder or Edmund or any of the more famous
ones. It's just one random Frey.
So again, it was Joffrey's work, almost certainly, but Cat was of
course led to believe it was Tyrion.
But that almost doesn't matter because Joffrey, Tyrion.
Either way, it's a Lannister and she doesn't really have nuance
about these things these days, as far as we can tell.
So any Lannister is worth killing.
I think that is where we could say her mind is at these days.
A hidden layer here is Catlin's mother, Manissa Went, whom she
remembers is having a warm smile and soft hands, which is not
much else she has to remember because she didn't know her
mother. Her mother died young when she
was young. But Stoneheart's hands are torn
up and scarred and she's no longer warm.
She's as cold as stone, and her grim visage is certainly not a
warm smile. So she has become more the
opposite of her mother. I guess then you could say that
she was the opposite of herself. There's still a lot of Catalan
in Lady Stoneheart, but comparing her to her mother,
which to be fair there's very little detail here it but it
does appear to be pretty much the opposite.
Undead unfinished. Both Barrick and Catelyn are
seemingly made more single minded in Undead.
As if trying to finish the unfinished, Barrick continued to
bring justice to the small folk. He was sort of still on the
mission. He was originally sent out on
Catelyn. Literally died a moment after
killing Afray in revenge for them killing her son.
So that's still what she's involved in.
But Stoneheart is also highly interested in finding Aria.
It's not just about the revenge, it's also about the rescuing her
child. Now, what would she do if she
finds Aria? That's a tough question.
Like she can't like be a mother to her.
Does she just want her to be safe?
And is that enough? Like what is her end game with
finding Aria? I mean, as a mother, you want to
find your kid. You don't need an end game
there. But this is just so different
because this is this is an undead.
Like, it's just, she's just not the same person.
So she would surely give up a lot for her family, even in this
state. We saw her do it in life.
She would surely do it in death. But if it's not Arya or one of
her other family members, it's just kill, kill, kill.
You know, revenge kill, murder. Phrase.
Lannister's, Bolton's, Bolton's are kind of out of range for her
right now. We'll talk about that a little
more later. But Lannister's and phrase,
there's plenty of them around now.
Harwin at the time, what we're told is Harwin begged Thoros to
give her the kiss of life. And Thoros is like, I don't know
about that. Look at her like she's been in
the water for three days. I'm not doing that.
He just, he says, I don't want to do that.
But Barrick did. He brought her back, passing the
life force of himself. And there's a couple of aspects
to that, which is a little, maybe a little more about
Barrick than than about her. He had been expressing how he's
tired of it, you know, he's this this existence is becoming
torturous for him. He can't remember who he is.
He doesn't have an identity. He is becoming slipping more and
more into maybe a trophy undead version like the kind of
mindless, not that he ever became fully mindless, but he
was slipping towards that and he recognized it.
He recognized he was already in kind of inhuman and getting more
and more like that. And that's not a very good place
to be. So I wonder if he had considered
that before, if there's anybody else he considered passing the
gift on to. And when did he even learn he
could do that? Like, how did where did that
come from for Thoros? It was something he'd done a
bunch of times as a ritual. And then it just worked.
Barrack just somehow knew he could pass that on to her.
That's an interesting little puzzle, isn't it?
So he was willing to give himself up and for her.
And she rose what this is like. I mean, what must everybody have
thought? Now?
She isn't dying repeatedly. So that's a different thing that
they have between them. I she may still have a tortured
existence. She might be in pain a lot like
physical pain. As I said, obviously she's not
happy with what happened to her family.
That's torturous too, just day-to-day living with the
knowledge of that happened. So that's crucial because if she
were losing her memories, then maybe some of that would fade.
She's not though. She has not died a single time.
Now that raises two other questions Later in the episode,
we're going to consider the idea of her passing her life force on
to somebody else, like paying it forward yet again.
It goes from Barrack to Stoneheart to well, I don't know
who that third person would be. There's a few candidates.
But and the other concept here is, is she going to is something
going to happen to her when like is there is there an end state?
Is there some sort of like, oh, I've done what I came back for
so I can just pass on, right? Is that even a possibility?
Like, is that where this is headed?
And of course, the other question that this addresses is
it gives us fodder and theory material to work with for how it
might go for Jon Snow. Now here's when Brienne meets
her quote. A trestle table had been set up
across The Cave. In a cleft in the rock behind it
sat a woman, all in Gray, cloaked and hooded.
In her hands was a crown, a bronze circlet ringed by iron
swords. She was studying it, her fingers
stroking the blades as if to test their sharpness.
Her eyes glimmered under her hood.
Gray was the color of the Silent Sisters, the handmaidens of the
stranger. Brienne felt a shiver climb her
spine. Stone Heart.
Indeed, that's the implication behind that particular nickname
of hers, one of many, the Silent sister.
Very fitting, right? This.
The Silent Sisters work with the dead and they don't talk.
Now, Catelyn can talk a little bit, but of course it's very
difficult for her and it's hard to understand even when she is
managing. And of course, she dresses in
Gray, so that matches as well. That's what the Silent sisters
do. And of all the seven, well, it's
pretty easy to say which of the seven she most identifies with.
And it's not the mother and it's not the Crone, even though she's
got elements of both of them. It's the stranger.
Yeah, it's definitely the stranger.
Nina had a good comparison here. It's like those people that have
to use the talk box that have, they've just smoked too many
cigarettes and they have had surgery or a whole poked in
their neck to be able to talk properly.
And it's, you know, the, the sound comes through there.
It's like that, but without the technology.
It's a hole in your throat. You can still communicate
through like she has to hold her, she has to pinch the slash
closed in order to get sound to come out.
And even then it's difficult. So that's just even the way she
talks the, the logistics behind her using her voice is creative
and terrifying. You know, George is so clever
with that sort of thing. So she represents death in the
unknown, which is why I, you know, seem think the Stranger is
the best pairing there. Now, of course, that's Rob's
crown she's looking at. She's checking it out.
It's the bronze circle at Ring by Iron Swords.
She must be remembering what happened and just thinking about
Rob and Vengeance and maybe remembering what it was like to
be his mother. Just who knows what's going
through her head, but she's clearly moved by it, and this
isn't an idle moment. She's just gotten this crown.
When Brienne meets her, Stoneheart has just returned
from Fair Market. It's not necessarily obvious
what that means. We find out in a different
chapter that Ryman Frey and his escort were hanged at Fair
Market and Ryman Frey had the crown.
Yes, so in fact, Ryman Frey was being petty.
I believe what happens is Ryman is doing a terrible job be
leading the siege against River Run and he's cavorting with a
sex worker and he's placed Rob's crown on her head.
She's wearing the crown when Jamie walks up and he's like,
what the hell is going on here? He embarrasses Ryman's, tells
him to get the hell out of here, go back home, gives charge to
his son Edwin instead and nicknames this sex worker the
queen of horrors. He's like you can take your
queen of horrors with you, but the crown stays.
Well, clearly the crown did not stay Ryman, I guess, perturbed
or his pride stung at Jamie's treatment of him was like, well,
I'm keeping the crown. Screw you, man.
No, you're not. You're getting hanged.
And Stoneheart has the crown now, so that's maybe something
that was easy to miss. Like I think most people caught
that was Rob's crown, but you might not have caught how the
the journey that the crown took to get to her.
But Brienne doesn't recognize it.
She's never seen it. She was never in Rob's presence.
More importantly, she doesn't recognize her.
She doesn't know this is Catelyn.
She just knows this is Stoneheart.
She's heard about Stoneheart but has yet to make the connection.
But here is the reveal quote. Lady Stoneheart lowered her hood
and unwound the Gray wool scarf from her face.
Her hair was dry and brittle, white as bone.
Her brow was mottled green and Gray, spotted with the brown
blooms of decay. The flesh of her face clung in
ragged strips from her eyes down to her jaw.
Some of the rips were crusted with dried blood, but others
gaped open to reveal the skull beneath.
I got thrown because it was a poem for a second there.
Green and Gray with brown blooms of decay.
George is so good at that. But yeah, his ability to
describe things, his description is something I'm having read a
few other novels lately, and it's something I'm always
keeping track of, is comparing George's writing style to other
people's. It's not always just in the
front of my mind, but it comes up from time to time.
And just his ability to be poetic with his descriptions.
I say I think something that really stands out, that other
people just don't bother with as many descriptions as he does.
And when they do, they're a lot more straightforward.
They're a lot more mundane. But yeah, this is just like,
like, even if you got this, even if you use this imagery stuck
with you, having the words read to you again to reshape that
vision is like, yeah, it's just really powerful.
So Brandon didn't know who it was until this moment.
She's like, Oh my God, it's, it's, it's Catelyn.
And she's not as terrified as Merritt because she isn't being
threatening, threatened with hanging.
Well, she is, but she doesn't know it.
She doesn't know how much danger she's in at this point because
she doesn't know that's Catelyn. That's part of why she doesn't
know. And what is switching POV's
here? What is going through
Stoneheart's mind in this moment, too, when she is
reunited with Brienne and is confronted with what looks like
pretty damning evidence against Brienne?
We know better. We know very thoroughly better.
We've been in her head. We've seen Jamie's reactions,
and in his head, we know both of them are sincere.
But obviously that nuance is very far from clear here, if
even, if it would matter. So here's what Stoneheart is
doing when while we're wondering what's going through her head
quote. She studied the sword, the
parchment, the bronze and iron crown.
Finally, she reached up under her jaw and grasped her neck as
if she meant to throttle herself.
Instead, she spoke. Her voice was halting, broken,
tortured. The sound seemed to come from
her throat. Part croak, part wheeze, part
death rattle. The language of the damned,
thought Brienne. Yeah, I almost wish they had put
put that on TV. What would that have sounded
like? They could have done some clever
things with that. So even the sound of her voice
is horrifying. Merritt Frey didn't really deal
with that. He it was enough for him, but he
didn't actually hear her attempt to speak.
It's like pursing your lips to whistle, but it's your neck she
has to purse. And it's a wheeze, not a whistle
or a death rattle or a croak, as it says.
There's a vague similarity to Roose Bolton here, symbolic
maybe, or maybe just the way it works out the, the, the, the
gravity of the speaker here, which is that he doesn't speak
inhumanly, but he intentionally speaks very softly.
So people have to strain to hear him.
It's a form of power. He's like, you have to work
harder to hear what I'm saying, but you have to hear what I'm
saying because I'm a Lord, so you can't just ignore me.
So yeah, he's exerting his will over people and in kind of a
petty manner. Mccaitlin isn't doing that on
purpose. It's the only choice she has.
But it has the same effect. It has the same gravity as
everybody has to really. You have to pay very close
attention and concentrate just to even hear what she's saying.
Now, she also has some help. Harwin is basically, to borrow a
concept from The Lord of the Rings, she's like the Mouth.
He's like the mouth of Stoneheart, but not really.
The Mouth of Sauron is a human that is an independent being
that has his own goals and is very cunning independently.
But he is, he was Sauron's like ambassador in a sense.
This is just, you know, Harwin isn't really an ambassador.
He's just translating rumors. Brianne and Sir Heil, before of
course they are captured, discuss where the hound, of
course not knowing who the hound is at this point, might be
quote. Dondarian's men are looking for
him too. They have put out word that they
mean to hang him for what he did at Salt Pans.
They had no part of that. Lord.
Randall is putting it about that.
They did in hopes of turning the Commons against Barrick and his
brotherhood. He will never take the Lightning
Lord so long as the Slaw folk are protecting him.
And there's this other band led by this woman, Stoneheart Lord,
Barracks lover, according to one tale.
Supposedly she was hanged by the phrase, but Donderian kissed her
and brought her back to life. And now she cannot die, no more
than he can. You can just look at this and
see how the truth turned into rumor, the kiss of life.
Well, like, oh, he kissed her then maybe they had a
relationship, right? You can see how that turns into
Lord barracks lover cause of the kissing, right?
And if they're both leading bands of the brotherhood, you
could see maybe there's some sort of equality there.
But of course, this is all wrong.
She wasn't hanged by them close enough.
You know, her neck was slashed. It was these these days had the
part of the body right and Donderian isn't even there
anymore. There is there is two groups,
though that one of them is not necessarily a group so much as
the people that left the brotherhood.
And some of them are still together, maybe going to
Starfall with Edrick Dane. Shout out to our Edrick Dane
episode read from recently. But I don't know that we can
call them a group as a whole, but they are the members that
left there is, you know, we can call them a group in that sense,
but I don't know that they're a group in that they're all
together. They're ironically actually
following remnants of the Bloody Mummers.
The salt pans raid, as I said before, was done by Rorge
wearing the Hound's helmet, which good, because they wanted
to kill the Bloody Mummers. That's part of bringing justice
to the Riverlands is getting rid of those folk.
We already, we saw that long ago when Barrack was alive, they
would definitely take on the Bloody Mummers whenever they
could. So it's notable that people see
it that way because it's important for us readers to be
kept abreast of what the rumors are.
We know basic truths here, but it's important to know what
other people think, that they think that there's a stone heart
and a barrack out there. And I don't know what would
convince them that there is no barrack.
It might just be a matter of time.
And like they go, a year passes and they haven't seen him again.
No one's reported him. They might start to be like, OK,
maybe Barrack isn't around anymore.
Maybe something happened to him. Maybe he died and we just as
news of him just never comes again.
On the other hand, someone could tell stories and say Barrack did
this. Barrack did that, just like how
Randall Tarley is making up stories about how it was the
Brotherhood that sacked Saltpans.
So lies can go a long way here. Propaganda from either side
could make a difference and we know that that was a big deal.
When Arthur Dayne defeated the Kingswood Brotherhood, it was
partly because he turned the small folk against them.
And that's addressed here. It says Lord Tarley will never
catch Barrick and the Brotherhood as long as the small
folk are on their side. If the small folk are on his
side, on Tarly's side, then he's got a huge advantage.
But Tarly winning over the small folk, that's not his strong
suit, is it? And as we said before, he's not
even working on it anymore. So yeah, I I do wonder what
about how many people left? We know names of people who
left, but we don't have numbers. We do know that the
Brotherhood's numbers swelled pretty substantially during the
earlier portions before Stoneheart.
Now we know that her leading them in a darker direction.
Some people left, but we really don't have numbers.
We a don't have a total picture of what their numbers are, let
alone what their numbers dropped to afterwards.
But it should still be pretty substantial.
I mean, we're told that Tarly has hanged dozens of them well,
and they're still operating as they were before.
It doesn't seem to have slowed them down.
Like they still killed Ryman Frey after that, so or during
that, you know, so it's seems like they might have more
numbers than it seems. But like, like a lot of
revolutionary cells, they aren't foolish enough to all be in the
same place at the same time so that they can't all be captured
all at once. Like they can't give their end.
They can't make it that easy for their enemies to to end the
whole group. What is a revenant?
Let's talk about that concept. The title of this episode
includes that term. I've been throwing that term
around with relation to her for about as long as we've been
doing this show, and here's our chance to discuss it in a little
more detail. First of all, a quote from
Thoros. Lightning comes and goes and
then is seen no more. So too with men.
Lord Barracks. Fire has gone out of this world,
I fear. A grimmer shadow leads us in his
place. A grimmer shadow.
So he's referring to Barrack as a shadow also cuz grimmer
shadow, they're both shadows. He was just a less grim shadow
and they're both undead. So fairpoint right?
I guess that works that. And that's of course part of
Thoros issue here is he believes all this is the work of Rellore
and he can't leave as long as that's the key.
He's the one whose action raised Barrack and then that in turn
raised Stoneheart. So he's he's got to see it
through. Now in many real life traditions
the term ghost and revenant are interchangeable.
Not always. It's often though.
Unfinished business. It isn't always justice.
That's a very common 1 though. Sometimes it's just, you know,
something incomplete. The the being the person was
trying to do something really important to them and maybe they
died in the process of that or someone stopped them in some
tragic way. George inverting this trope a
bit with Barrick was that he became even more about justice
after his death, but not justice for himself, justice for
everyone else. It was he would put himself last
almost in that. And his and justice, of course,
is, is stretched a bit to include things like a right to
eat, you know, which I think a lot of us would say, OK,
fairpoint, you know, a starving person is going to ignore
justice, right, Because we're going to ignore the law because
survival is more important than obeying the law to 99% of
people. And I wouldn't argue that they
have a a burden to follow the law when their life is on the
line in such a circumstance. So I think that which is kind of
gets to a greater point about why everyone needs to eat.
So, but with Stoneheart, it's of course not that, you know, she's
not trying to feed the small folk.
As far as we know, it's not about justice, it's about
vengeance now. So a lot of ghosts or revenants,
when their purpose is complete, they go away, they end they're
they can be at rest, whether it's someone else has to do it
for them, like a ghost that haunts a house.
The ghost isn't going to finish the job.
They're just a tortured soul stuck on the in the plane of
existence where they first existed rather than passing on
to the afterlife. So someone else has to solve
that problem for them, whether it's proper burial or bringing a
murderer to justice. Sometimes the revenant actually
goes after the person that did this.
So there's a lot of variations on this around many different
traditions, around many different cultures all around
the world, but there are a lot of overlaps in commonality,
whether you're talking about revenants slash ghosts from like
Japan or. South Africa or you know, Native
Americans. It's just there's a lot of
overlap with what people believe.
Like there's just common enough beliefs that the dead can
return, spirits, souls, things like that.
Those are ubiquitous beliefs across a lot of cultures.
Even if there's pretty substantial differences in how
those beliefs manifest. The baseline is similar.
There's some sort of life after death or some sort of way our
bodies or spirits, whatever continue.
It's all related, right? So back as far as 4000 BC,
humans have unearthed the graves of much older humans from 6000
plus years ago that show anti revenant measures ways to keep
the corpse from rising, like rocks placed on top of a body
just to keep it from, you know, to keep it down, you know, or
like mesh wire above the ground or things like that.
Some of these are for anti vampirism things, but they're
all related in that sense. It's just preventing the undead
from coming back. They're in Roman literature,
Revenants are in Roman literature, they're in Polish
literature, they're in Celtic folklore.
You can't really say Celtic literature 'cause there isn't
much of that written down from back then.
Celtic folklore is written down now quite a bit, but you know,
back then not so much in the in Norse there there's the concept
of the drow gear. There was a drow gear in the
movie The Northman. They the other name for Norse
name for the undead is an apterganger, which just means
again Walker. So it's like, hey, it's walking
again after death. The movie Revenant with Leonardo
DiCaprio is based on a book called Revenant, a novel of
revenge. Yeah, there you go.
Now, of course, that movie is not based on a dead person.
It's but it's based on a person left for dead.
So it's kind of symbolic or metaphorical.
And this person comes back and, you know, puts things to write
in a sense. So this raises the, pun
intended, an important question. Stoneheart doesn't go into
battle. She hasn't been killed
repeatedly like Barrick was. We talked about that before in
relation to memories. But what about just can she?
Can she, if she is killed somehow, could she rise again?
I assume so since Barrett kept doing it.
But it wasn't Barrett rising on his own, it was Thoros.
Like reinvigorating him somehow. She would give him the kiss of
life again. He didn't just stand back up on
his own. He had to have Thoros bring him
back. Thoros said he wouldn't bring
her back when Harwin first asked, but has he changed his
mind now that he's seen what happened?
Now that she's leading them and has them on a new mission?
Would he still be like, no, I'm not ring bringing her back.
I think maybe he's changed his mind and this time he would.
But that's an interesting conundrum.
An interesting question. Maybe Thoris will be just like,
Nope, let's just let her be at rest.
That's we're done with that. The concept of a lich is
somewhat overlapped here too. The word lich derives from old
English. It just means corpse really.
But in fantasy is where liches are a lot more common fantasy
fiction, you know, like things like stranger things, but
obviously well before that too. The idea is basically a sorcerer
or wizard, some sort of magic user who makes themselves undead
in order to achieve immortality. They can't make themselves
living immortal, so they go undead, immortal.
When this is generally done via sacrificing your soul or your
spirit, that's kind of the undertone of it all.
Which is kind of the opposite here.
Barrett gave his soul to cattle and he didn't sacrifice it.
He passed it on. It's not his soul.
It's, I mean, it's for lack of a better term, It's whatever was
keeping him walking around, whatever power, whatever that
you call that semi immortal. We also have the term lich yard
used in A Song of Ice and Fire, which is not, you know, just a
Westerosi thing. That's a real term that's been
around. It isn't really used anymore,
but it just means graveyard. So nothing, nothing special
there. There's also lich gates in the
real world and that's just, that's an old concept.
It isn't really around anymore, but maybe it is in some places.
Maybe it's not so much in the Western world.
I think because it's where a body is kept before burial.
Now we keep those in the morgue. So it's it's and it's also where
if there's a funeral procession entering a cemetery, it's the
gate they would enter by. This is where the procession
enters the cemetery. A broken brotherhood.
Yeah, at one point, Thoros calls them that.
He's like, yeah, we're a broken brotherhood.
Now he's lamenting what they used to be, that their purpose
isn't what it used to be. Their leadership has changed.
Their day-to-day living has gotten a lot harder.
Yeah. Here's a memorable quote we've
quoted before, because it's a great quote to quote Thoros to
Brienne Quoth. I remember justice.
It had a pleasant taste. Justice was what we were about
when Barrick LED us, or so we told ourselves.
We were kingsmen, Knights and heroes.
But some Knights are dark and full of terror.
My lady. War makes monsters of us all.
Brienne's follow up is so you're monsters and she's no, we're
human. He's very quick to, he's like,
look, it's making us monsters, but we're that way because we're
human. We were transitioned to that
because of what we've experienced, not because of what
we chose. I mean, some of it's choice, but
most of it is, you know, trying to be good and the the path of
good leading to this war made monsters of them all.
Before Stoneheart came along, he would have said something
similar, maybe with a little more optimism, maybe with a
little more of his faith powering his energy behind all
this. But the sentiment would still be
pretty similar. When they were helping peasants,
they could at least feel good about themselves.
They were helping somebody. This is this is just being part
of the murder squad is this isn't the same thing, right?
It changes you even when you begin as the good guy just going
around killing people. That disregard for life and lack
of nuance and all that. It's just yeah, you can't be who
you were if you're doing that. I don't know if y'all caught the
word play here from Thoros. If you you certainly didn't if
you were listening to the audio book.
He says we were kings, men, Knights and heroes, but some
Knights are dark and full of terror.
He says Knights with AK, as in some Knights ordained in the
light of the Seven, or in the case of the Knights of the
Hollow Hill under the lore. So he's saying, yeah, even
Knights who swear holy vows and begin their lives as good people
and set out to do good and honor and justice, they can end up
like this with the right circumstance or the wrong
circumstances. I was perusing the westeros.org
forums and found a great take from user Curled Finger.
Thanks Curled Finger. Who said this of the BWB?
They are the stifled outrage of the people in villages and
castles. They are the embodiment of all
the hope left in the Midlands of a continent decimated by war
facing winter. Well said, well said.
And I agree with that. I couldn't put it better.
Very succinct. And yeah, even more under
Stoneheart. They're like that.
They are under Barrick. It was more of a righteous
outrage. This is vengeance again.
It's just, it's more vindictive. It's still somewhat righteous,
but it's a much darker version of it.
It's not the kind that you would want to live under afterwards.
It's a temporary thing. What Barrack was trying to do
was something that you would carry forward, even in
peacetime, you would want to do as Barrack did.
But this is, well, war makes mantras of us all, and we're
seeing that through. This includes some nobility too,
by the way. There are, it's not just the
Knights and some small folk and people who aren't Lords and
ladies that have been supporting Barrick and like Ladies Mallwood
for example, Right, That was, that's a big one, probably the
most notable name we can point to for certain.
We have suspicions that other Lords, especially in the
Riverlands, have been helping the Brotherhood.
How does this impact their support of the Brotherhood?
On one hand, if they know who that is, if they know it's
Catlin, they might be more likely to do something because
that's she was unjustly murdered.
Her story is tragic. And you know, it's the kind of
thing that a lot of nobility would would stand up for.
You know this because they see the life of a noble lady like
Catelyn is very important that it's, it's an offense when
something like this happens. So but, but is she still with
them? This is this is the kind of
thing we don't know whether we know that Angai and and Edrick
and some others left, but it's implied that others are no
longer helping the Brotherhood. But we don't know whether Lady
Smallwood is one of those who was left or maybe she's doubled
down on her support. Who knows?
You know, maybe she's all about it now.
Like actually, I like this angrier, more vindictive,
bloodier version of the brotherhood.
She might actually like that, you know, because she really
hates the phrase also, or something like that, or the
Lannisters. So Callan's never any sort of
war leader, let alone an outlaw. This is a new life for her.
Berrick it wasn't quite as different because, I mean, he
was chosen for this mission because he was someone that had
experience. He's a knight.
He had fought in war. He had learned how to be a
warrior, which means learning how to fight ambushes and
learning how to deal with ambushes and scouting and all
these other things that were not part of Catlin's upbringing or
her adult experience. But when she got attacked on the
High Road by the mountain clans while trying to take Tyrion to
the Erie, that was probably the first time she was in a fight,
like up close, where she was a direct target of the people in
the battle. Other than that, she watched the
battle of the Stone Mill from atop River Runs walls, which was
actually after this, and she wasn't her direct participant,
she's just watching from the walls.
So I think that's it. I don't think she has any other
combat experience except for what she's since acquired with
the Brotherhood, which doesn't involve her wielding sword.
But it probably does involve her learning things about ambushes
and tactics and how to run A outlaw cell or an outlaw
organization and all the things that go with that.
You know, keeping people separate, communication, spying,
all the different things that they're engaged with all over
the river lands. That all became her
responsibility. And that's kind of interesting,
isn't it, that they, she's a much different kind of leader,
yet it's still somewhat straightforward why they follow
her. You know, she's a lady.
She's the wife of the man that sent them out in the first
place. And her story is just so tragic.
They all it's just the kind of thing that demands justice.
What happened to her, even if you have nothing to do with it,
You hear that and you go, damn, that was really unfair.
That's really the phrase violated guess, right?
That's awful, right? She's the victim of that.
So and her and everybody knows all her children have been
killed, even though that's not accurate.
She has lost children and she has that.
She's dealing with those feelings even though it's not
true, which is still pretty heavy.
She perceives it as truth. So it's very different.
Here's Brienne waking up, coming to after being captured and and
kind of finding out what her predicament is.
It's it's pretty interesting quote.
Renly stood behind the girl, pushing his black hair out of
his eyes. Not Renly Gendry.
Milady means for you to answer for your crimes.
Milady the wine was making her head spin.
It was hard to think Stoneheart is.
Is that who you mean? Lord Randall had spoken of her
back at Maidenpool. Lady Stoneheart.
Some call her that, Some call her other things.
The Silent Sister, Mother Merciless, the Hang Woman.
That is an implication. Obviously we know what those
names imply. The killing, the the vengeance,
the some version of justice. But the implication that I'm
getting out here isn't these different nicknames.
It's how quickly she seems to have acquired them.
Her reputation is spread very quickly because, well, it's
quite a story, isn't? It's this, this being this
mysterious, murderous woman who came from nowhere that most
people don't know who she is. Very few people do.
It's something that the readers know a lot better than the
people in the world. But Gendry has seen a lot of
this. Gendry knows who she is and he's
listing off all these nicknames. So he has seen some of this.
He he doesn't have those nicknames for nothing.
These are not just rumors. We know she's been hanging
people. That's a fact.
So he's a valuable member of the Brotherhood.
So he's got a little, maybe gained a little bit of clout
within the organization because he's their might be their only
blacksmith or at least one of them.
So she's got 4 nicknames already.
It's a pretty good nicknames, right?
Randall Tarley has caused him a lot of problems.
As I said before, she's he's hanged quite a few of them, but
no big names. As far as we know, there weren't
any names we recognize have been hanged by him.
It wouldn't be surprised if he's a bit megorish with his methods,
you know, meaning that he's executing people that really
don't have that much to do with it.
Maybe they just have a tangential relationship with the
Brotherhood. Maybe they were in the same
village that the Brotherhood got some food from.
They may not have even helped or participated in that.
But hey, you're in the village where this food was given to the
Brotherhood. You must be guilty.
So of course, with with things like that, how is anyone going
to win over the loyalty of the small folk when they're doing
that kind of thing? Yeah.
Randall Tarly, he's good at killing and soldiering and and
fighting, but this aspect of the campaign kind of eludes him and
but again, irrelevant. He's no longer part of the
campaign. He's moved on.
But it still left them with all these things.
It's still his time. Hunting them had a big impact on
who they were and and how they operate now.
Remember what Tywin did? This is a similar thing.
Tywin hanged Mashahedel. Masha Heddle, if you recall, was
is the proprietor of the end of the crossroads.
She had nothing to do with Tyrion getting seized by
Catelyn. She in fact tried to stop it.
She's like, don't stop, don't do this here.
But because it happened at the end of the crossroads, she's
responsible. So Tywin hanged her.
Tyree is exactly that sort of man.
He would do the same thing he would like OK, you were
connected to this even though it wasn't through your own actions.
You're going to die. So yeah, this is this is what we
saw him doing at Maidenpool when he was justing out justice.
He had similar thing like he his versions of justice were
extremely brutal, extremely harsh and probably not as
effective as they could be. Now Gendry's identity as a side
topic here, what a thing for them to learn about whether it's
Stoneheart learning or everybody or whatever.
The son of the king of their original mission.
You see that with with Brienne briefly thinking it's Renly,
like wait, that's not Renly, it's Gendry.
But damn, he looks like Renly that maybe they haven't really
noticed that part of it that he looks so much like Robert.
I don't know a lot of them maybe didn't even have that
familiarity with what Robert looked like, but they are they
always talk about how they were they were King's men.
Maybe they don't talk about that so much anymore under Stonehart,
but they they haven't forgotten he is that King's son.
So, yeah, it's just, it's right there.
They just, they just don't have the information.
Neither does he him. Brentley doesn't know.
I mean, Gendry doesn't know who he is.
So. So they did get a major target.
We mentioned this briefly before, but let's go through it
a little more in detail. The heir to the twins.
Here's Jamie speaking to Walder Rivers.
Has some. I'll befallen Sir Ryman.
Hanged with all his party. Said Walder Rivers.
The Outlaws caught them two leagues South of Fairmarket.
Dondarian. Him for Thoros or this woman's
stone heart. Edwin Frey has a different
theory that it's Black Walder. Black Walder is trying to climb
the ladder to be Lord of the twins.
Edwin Frey is not wrong to be wary of Black Walder, but he
isn't guilty in this particular case.
And you can still see them blaming things on Donderian.
They still, of course, they don't know more evidence of
that. So a few questions as we move
our way into the second-half of this episode.
Can they last like this as they keep getting darker and farther
away from their original mission and living harder and harder and
becoming more and more like broken men?
Remember what Sandor called them when they were still under
bearish control? He said you're the sorriest lot
of broken men and outlaws, blah, blah blah blah blah.
They're way worse now, right? I mean, they're they're more
dangerous in some ways more violent, but they might also be
sorrier in that regard. So yeah, how long can they go
like this? How long can this persist?
It does not have the makings of a long term organization, does
it? We rely on your support.
We are a two person operation. 2 1/2 maybe.
Hey folks, Sean is going to be coming back for the TV season
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There's a great Audible holiday promotion going on right now.
I listen to lots of audio books. Audible is my main platform for
that. One book a month for the
subscription fee is pretty solid.
It's a low price for a book that I get hours of listening out of.
I do use audible to re listen to A Song of Ice and Fire.
I am currently on a re listen and I'm currently in A Feast for
Crows. I'm pretty early in it, maybe
like chapter 8 or so, and enjoying it as much as always
learning new things, remembering old things, brushing myself up.
It's great. But they have a promotion.
Like I said, right now if you sign up for Audible during the
end of before the end of 2026 or sorry, end of 2025, it's only
$0.99 for the first three months and you could theoretically just
take those three months and then bail.
I don't recommend that because the deal stays good afterwards,
even though it's more, but you could absolutely get 3 books for
$3 across three months and just call it, call it a day.
You can also start with a free trial.
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it's a great way to to still be reading or listening, you know,
I prefer to sit down and read, but just can't always do that.
Here's a few questions from y'all history of Westeros from
Tony Sled says. What do you think of Lady
Mormont's role will be going forward?
And Tito's Blackwood for that matter.
Oh, interesting question. Yeah.
Lady Mormont, are we talking about?
Liana Mormont, Are we talking about one of the Others?
Because we have Mage Mormont? Yeah, I.
Think they're talking about Mage.
They're talking about the idea that Rob's administrative
Council is still at large. Yeah.
Well, I would certainly recommend our episode on Rob,
the Riddle of Rob's will for a lot of that.
But yeah, I think that there's still a lot of loyalty there.
They're lying low because their opportunity isn't there.
But at the same time. Some of them may have learned
about Rickon, that Rickon is alive and that Manderly is doing
his thing. Manderly would want to tell
other people that he perceives as Stark loyalists about this
'cause he would want help and he would want to build that group,
build this resistance group, not just he doesn't want to do it by
himself. Right?
So Taito's Blackwood could be involved in this, but he's a
little distant from the North, obviously.
I think he's more likely to be aligned with the Brotherhood,
especially if they're going to start targeting things like
Jamie's party that he sent with Sir Forley, pressed her to lead
Edmure Tully and Jane Weschling to casture the Rock, for
example. Widely theorized that that group
will be ambushed, something we'll talk about a little bit in
the second-half as well. So yeah, Tito's Blackwood, very
honorable, very loyal. He just had to had to surrender
because he had no choice. He was be completely beaten and
he was being threatened. His family's being threatened.
Like what's he going to do? He can only stay loyal.
He can only go that far. But given the chance, I think
he'll come right back. That said, winter is coming and
Titos and a lot of the Riverlands, they are more
distracted by the need to find food to get through the winter
than they might be concerned with the war.
Or maybe it's just two things pulling them in separate
directions. So they've got a lot on their
plates and, well, they don't have enough on their plates,
food wise, so that's why they have to worry about that.
Urias Tosh says Stoneheart gets captured by an enemy.
What happens then? I can see Kyburn having her
studied in his dungeons. Yeah, that's an interesting
thought. I definitely hadn't thought
about Kyburn. Yeah, 'cause he's obviously
studied Gregor and he's going down that necromantic path of
sorts. So yeah, he would be very
curious to get his hands on her. Whether he what?
I don't think it'll happen, but man, he would want to.
He really wants to experiment on her.
He's like, wow, what's going on here?
Tell me. I need to learn more.
Great thought. Your eyes, Tosh.
Very creepy though. A Storm of Swords appreciation.
Let's talk about that briefly. At the beginning I mentioned how
her appearance, I don't mean her physical appearance, I mean her
just popping up in the story in a book full of surprises and
climaxes and payouts is arguably one of the least expected, if
not the least expected. I don't necessarily mean the
most shocking the OR the most impactful because that's
probably the Red Wedding, but just in terms of out of nowhere,
like you might imagine Thoros bringing her back because Aria
asked about bringing Ned back. And so you might have might have
entered your mind at some point, but you wouldn't have been able
to guess that Barrack could pass it all.
And I don't think that was completely out of nowhere.
The idea that Barrack could, you know, pass it, pay it forward,
give himself up for her that we had no idea that was possible.
Tyrion killing Tywin, you can kind of see it coming, like not
far ahead necessarily, but when he's in his room with the
crossbow, you know, like he's kind of like, OK, I can see
where this is going. He might actually kill him.
You don't know for sure it's going to happen when you're
reading it the first time, but it isn't a complete surprise
when he pulls that trigger. Like, oh wow, it really did
happen. But you you've perceived the
possibility by that point. The Red Viper losing was pretty
surprising and unexpected, not just in general, but it seems
like he had won. He had seemed to have won, and
then, oops, he didn't. So that's kind of up there.
The Red Wedding, like I said, it's it's probably the most
shocking, the most out of the ordinary for an author to put in
there in terms of a plot direction.
But there's a lot of foreshadowing for it.
You might have caught on and you could see the danger there.
You might not have thought it would go that far, but with grey
winds warning and the the drums and the rain and so many other
things, just the straightforwardness of Walder
Frey's personality and his vindictiveness and his pride,
You might not have thought it would go that far, but you might
have seen something coming. Jamie losing his hand, that's up
there. Because you really didn't see
that coming. Jamie didn't even even he.
And Jamie's inner narrative pushes back against the idea of
what's about to happen. He's like, they're just trying
to scare me. And you might believe him in
that moment. I mean, it's just one sentence.
You're not sitting here scrutinizing every single every
single thing that's said. And then the next sentence is,
oh, wow, that really did happen. So it does turn pretty quickly.
Joffrey's poisoning. It's up there too.
It's fairly sudden. I mean, you know, people want to
kill this kid. He's awful.
But the actual moment that it happens is like, oh, there it
is. It's pretty sudden when it does
happen, but it's still there's like he's coughing slowly and
you can see he starts to choke and he's like, Oh my goodness,
this is happening. It isn't that he just drops
dead. Sam killing another.
That's pretty darn surprising. But that's not really climactic
because it's like the first third of the book.
So maybe that's a specious argument against how important
it is, but it isn't. It's hard to call that
climactic. It's just a big, big moment.
Mormont's death is also pretty sudden, but the Nights Watch
were dropping like flies at that time.
Maybe the manner of it was a little surprising, but I don't
know. I I don't that it's not as big
as Stoneheart to me. Cold hands.
All right, that's that's up there.
That's up there. Just whoa, who is this?
And it especially because it's not Benjen.
That was a pretty big follow up surprise.
Stan is showing up at the wall. That's a pretty big one, too.
That's hard to see coming. Just all of a sudden his Knights
are charging at the Free folk. Like John is just chatting with
Mance and you're you're learning who Mance is.
You're distracted by this is the first time you've seen Mance on
screen, you know, or not the first time, but one of the first
times. And he's having this
conversation with John about different things.
They're arguing and John's trying to figure out just how
much to tell him. And then all of a sudden, boom,
Stanis attacks. Yeah, that's, that's pretty
surprising. And the, the, the last one I
have notated here, maybe I missed one or two 'cause there's
just so many big climactic moments in the Storm of Swords
Is the Littlefinger reveal that he's the one behind Santa's
rescue. That's more of if you hadn't
figured that out, which at the time my first read, I hadn't, it
was like, oh, of course, of course it's him, right.
Like that, right. Of course it's Littlefinger.
But you don't go. Oh, of course Catelyn came back
as an undead revenant. Yeah, obviously that.
Of course that was going to. Nah, no one did that.
No one said that. The path of the hang woman.
Let's try to sketch out her movement somewhat after her
rise, ending with where we know her to be at the end of the
books, which is with Brienne having LED Jamie into their
clutches. And that's somewhere between
River Run and the Twins. We don't exactly know where.
Or, sorry, not River Run and the Twins.
River Run and Raven Tree Hall because it's after Jamie leaves
Raven Tree Hall on his way back to River Run, where he is
accosted and and tricked into going off with her.
It must have been a awkward moment if we're going back to
the when she became their leader, many of the brotherhood
would have seen Barrick give his life for he would have they
would have witnessed this. They would have been standing
there going wait, what is he doing?
And then he just flops on the ground as the life force leaves
him and she rises. Just what a strange thing to
witness. So they would know for sure.
There's no doubt he's gone. He's done.
They probably buried him. They had literally just seen the
wolves running off. They know that these are bodies.
They're, they're not going to like leave his body there.
They probably wouldn't do that anyway, but especially not with
wolves in year round. They would.
They would give him a proper burial.
Now, how exactly did she take charge?
You know, she's not like she can't give some big speech,
right? I think it's just comes down to
they fell into line because she's of the nobility.
She was sort of ordained by Barrick.
Like he's the he's their leader. And he passed this on to her.
He sort of nominated her in a sense.
And Thoros followed immediately. And Thoros is kind of like the
de facto second in command, kind of the heart and soul of the
whole organization. Even though they've gone so
dark, obviously he's seen it through.
And that alone encourages others to see it through.
I think I may have said that before, but Thoros is the most
recognizable leader of the Brotherhood these days, the one
who is still somewhat human. I mean, human in, you know, I
don't mean that in a literal sense, 'cause obviously she's
not entirely human. That's not what I mean.
I mean like being a person, acting like with sympathy and
empathy and living, you know, not going not being a broken man
or woman. Harwin was almost certainly one
of her biggest advocates. Harwin was was the son of the
master at horse at Winterfell. He grew up with Catelyn Stark as
the highest ranking woman in his life.
Only Ned Stark was higher. So he grew up with her as an
authority figure. And in Westeros, they teach you
to love the nobility, even if it isn't something that necessarily
comes naturally. They impart that.
And so she he probably had some pretty genuine love for her.
Maybe love isn't the right word, but dedication, devotion may be
better. So he was not unlikely one of
the people that quickly got behind her and encouraged others
to follow, you know, especially with Thoros doing the same.
And since he's seems to be her interpreter and, and always by
her side, he's a Northman. So that might mean she trusts
him a little bit more. It sort of looks like he's in
her inner circle, whatever that even means, along with Lem and
Jack be Lucky. And Lem has gone pretty dark and
Jack be Lucky is maybe the similar.
But she doesn't sleep and they have to.
So her guard has to rotate at least somewhat because if she's
active 24/7, well, they can't be.
So they have to. They have to go in shifts.
I guess. Now old Stones is when we first
see her, right with Merritt Frey, that's near there.
That's not terribly far South from the twins, probably just a
matter of maybe like a week at most, maybe, maybe quite a bit
less. So it's easy enough to guess she
was reborn downriver, right? The she tossed into the river.
She floats downriver her body. Then they find her there and
then they go South farther. Now Fair Market is roughly
equidistant downriver from there.
So you go the Twins, Old Stones downriver a bit, you get to Fair
Market, so roughly the same distance between the Twins and
Fair Market, from Fair Market to Old Stones, and it's on the same
side of the Blue Fork. They're both on the West Bank of
the Blue Fork, so that kind of lines up.
Sir Lucius Vibran hunts them near Fair Market with no
success. We're told she was seen at
Hagsmire, which is where the headwaters of the Blue Fork is,
and it's near the town of Seven Streams, which is where Tom oh
Sevens is, of course, from. Hagsmire is also where Rob
announces his will and it's where a Chet is from, so kind of
an unsavory place there. Poor spot.
Black Walder also hunts them there.
He's he chases them there, but they get away.
They apparently have a good system for keeping an eye on the
roads and the approaches, so they kind of always know when
someone's coming towards them. They know the land better than
anybody. They have people who live there
their whole lives on their side, which is why having the common
folk on your side is so, so vital when you're a resistance
organization. It's if I can get real world for
a minute. It's a huge part of how the
mafia operates and why they're so successful.
Very often they help the communities that they prey on in
order to win their support, even though they're also praying on
them. They do enough good to make some
people convinced that it's better than not having them,
that they're more good than bad. Rarely is that true, but it's
propaganda, it's marketing. You know, they are able to
convince people of this and you know, Pablo Escobar pulled that
off on a grand scale, but much smaller level criminals and drug
dealers or what have you do similar things.
So, yeah. So it's it's interesting to
think about that and and how important to having the common
folk is. If you don't have the common
folk, you have nothing in this when you are an outlaw or a
resistance movement. Another time we're told
Blackwalder chases her party is north of here and there.
He he chases them for a while, like it's quite a chase, like
several days, maybe even a week or two.
And he's constantly on their heels and they're constantly
trying to get stay ahead of him. They flee into the neck and he
does not follow them there. So because he's not stupid and
because following them in the neck would be a bad idea, they
probably have the support of the craning men.
I mean, they're enemy is the enemy of the enemy is my
friends. And they may not even be.
They may be friendly anyway because you know, it's
Stoneheart, it's the brotherhood, it's Ned Stark's
connection and all that. Anyone who's going after Frey is
is going to have an opportunity to win over the chronic men now.
So that that's kind of what I mean by that.
Not only not to mention Rob's will is probably in their
possession or was and as well as a lot of Rob's officers might
have either still be in the Neck or have passed through the Neck
and have spoken with Helen Reed, etcetera, etcetera.
So a number of reasons why Blackwalder was wise to not
follow them there. Generally speaking, all of the
sightings of her have been in the region of the twins.
She hasn't been seen terribly far away from there.
The Neck is about as far north as she's been seen, just a
southern portion of the Neck, presumably because no one
follows her in there. She doesn't have to go that deep
into the Neck because no one's going to follow her there.
And then, you know, around old stones and around Fair Market,
none of these are that far from the twins, you know, maybe a
couple weeks at most. So, yeah, right before her
judgement and near hanging, Brienne is told that she's going
to meet Stoneheart pretty soon, but not yet because she went to
fair Market. And of course, that's, as I
explained earlier, that was to hang Ryman.
Now, how did she know that they were there?
Well this is almost certainly a part of their intelligence
network. The most obvious is Tomos Evans.
Tomos Evans is at River Run, he was right there playing for
Ryman Frey when Jamie said you must go back to get the hell out
of here. So maybe the Queen of Horrors
character informed the Brotherhood, or maybe Tomos
Evans, or maybe both. Because we are pretty sure that
the camp follower that was with Lord Bracken is is a Brotherhood
Without Banners member as well. She was explicitly so in prior
versions of the unpublished versions of the dragon before
the final version was written. Like some draft versions of it.
Hildy was absolutely a Brotherhood spy.
Now she probably is, it just isn't explicit.
So we already have seen this element.
This is this is a an angle that they take.
They use camp followers, sex workers to get close to the
leaders of the of the Lannisters and the river Lords who were
still on the side of them and like the phrase and all that to
get information, to get travel plans and things like that.
So this is almost straightforward.
Ryman was told to leave, kicked out in front of at least one spy
for the Brotherhood. So they knew exactly what was
going on there. So that that's pretty
straightforward. But but we've been told there's
a lot of other hangings not of famous people.
Only Merritt and Peter Pimple and Ryman Frey, as far as we
know, are the only phrase they've hanged people with the
last name Frey that is, but they've hanged other Frey and
Lannister soldiers, household people, things like that.
Because otherwise we're to believe that she's gotten all
these nicknames for just hanging Merritt and Peter Pimple.
Like because the Ryman hanging came after she had already
acquired 4 nicknames. So yeah, it, it seems like
there's been a lot of hanging going on.
They just, George has no reason to describe every single one of
them. There are people that whose
names we've never heard before. It's enough to imply it, and
most of her revenge will be against the phrase.
They're the most responsible, they're the most numerous, and
they're the closest to her. You know, physically located
Lannisters are also fairly numerous and also not that far
away. And they are, of course,
intertwined with the phrase. And she also hated them.
First, she's hated the Lannisters for a lot longer than
she hated the phrase because of, well, the whole brand trying to
murder brand thing, right? That's a pretty good reason,
especially when she's lied to by Littlefinger, to have even more
reason to hate them. But even with that lie taken out
of the picture, even with Littlefinger's machinations
taken out of the picture, she still has plenty of reasons to
hate the Lannisters. And as I said before, she can't
really get her hands on any Boltons right now.
They're neither numerous nor close by.
But it is a question for us. Will she go north?
And if she does, is that one of the big reasons why she's like,
OK, I've done enough to the phrase in Lannisters, let me get
at some Bolton's. They deserve that too.
Or maybe it's she goes N for some other reason.
But there's also the Bolton's. She's like, well, I can also,
there's multiple reasons for me to go north.
But it's also quite possible that the Bolton's will be out of
the picture before she goes there or she just won't go
there. That's also possible.
You must prove your faith. After hearing the arguments,
Lady Stoneheart delivers her judgement on Brienne quote.
The thing that had been Catelyn Stark took hold of her throat
again, fingers pinching at the ghastly long slash in her neck,
and choked out more sounds. Words are wind, she says.
The Northman told Brienne. She says that you must prove
your faith. The Northman is Harwin.
Brienne doesn't really know him, but we do.
She knows that Jamie and his army on the move by this point,
meaning Stonehart does. Of course, there's certainly
multiple spies in the region, as we've as we've said.
And of course there's multiple spies at River Run, not just in
the region. So there's a lot of thinking and
planning and cunning ahead of time.
They're definitely a lot of planning ahead, you know,
getting ahead of what the Lannisters are going to do and
ambushing them. Now, that said, they're
obviously beefing up security. There's been several frays
hanged as in the epilogue. It's like, hey, we brought, I
brought the ransom money. You're not.
Yeah. And they're they're like, yeah,
we weren't. We're not going to get away with
that one again, are we? They're not going to fall for
the old ransom trick again because we murdered you.
So they aren't about that. They're not going to.
They're not going to get away with that.
Also, any Frey travelling from place to place is probably smart
enough to travel with a bigger escort.
Now, Ryman Frey had 12 warriors with him, which isn't that many,
right? He's him and that's 13 guys, and
it's kind of a stretch to call him a warrior, but they might
still underestimate how many men the Brotherhood can bring to
bear. Maybe not though, because that's
as we were saying earlier, it's hard to hard to get a feel for
how many people are in this group.
Nevertheless, this was also something they were good at,
like even before Stoneheart ambushing and spying and all the
stuff, they were already quite adept at this.
So. So Stoneheart probably isn't the
one instilling this in them. She's just taking it over and
making use of it, but adding to something she already knows.
I mean, she knows some things about River Run.
She knows some things about how the highborn think.
There's definitely something she's bringing to the table, but
a lot of it was already in place before she arrived on the scene.
So Barrick and Stoneheart, they're they've lost some of
their humanity, some of what makes them human, but they don't
seem like they're less intelligent.
Like they still have the IQ level they had before, but maybe
not as much emotional IQI don't know how to, I don't know the
right terms for this, but I don't.
They seem like they're processing power.
Their logic is all still there, but some of their memories and
their emotional state, that's all different or at least
compromised. Now here is the confrontation.
Of the delivery of Stoneheart's verdict quote.
What does she want of me? She wants her son alive or the
men who killed him dead. Said the big man.
She wants to feed the Crows like they did at the Red Wedding.
Fray's in Bolton's eye. We'll give her those as many as
she likes. All she asks from you is Jaime
Lannister. So that was Lem speaking.
She was referring to Harwin, but it was Lem who answered.
Lady Stoneheart has another form of power, which is that as scary
as she is, as dark as she is, people hate the phrase more
probably, even though they're, you know, human.
And she is the avatar of this because she's both the prime
victim and prime hunter of the phrase.
So she hits the sympathetic argument on her side.
She's got the unjustice argument on her side.
She's got the I'm the leader that's making this happen
argument on her side. Her very existence is a
testament to how big a crime the Red Wedding was.
It's almost like the gods have answered they're like this
shouldn't be this shouldn't be possible.
Yet it's clearly happening, and the only explanation is powers
beyond humanity, other beings, deities, powers from beyond have
taken a role here. And it's the easy answer is
because of the monstrosity that was the Red Wedding.
It was that much of an offense to the gods.
Guest right. Just it's that big a deal to
violate guest right on that scale with this much infamy.
I mean, it's just so big. Now, of course, Brienne resists.
She's honorable. She's not going to give up just
like nothing. She's got to put up a fight, at
least an argument if she can. But she doesn't really have much
choice, does she? She has to give in.
You know, she's like, no, I won't, I won't do this.
Jamie's innocent. I know he's innocent.
I've seen it. You know, it's person, my
personal judgement and his actions prove it.
It's so tragic. We've seen inside Brienne's
head. I mean, she is more than
sincere. Here it is.
I I pulled the quote because it's it's it's kind of heart
wrenching just how devoted she is to this mission only to have
Stoneheart think she's betrayed it.
Yeah, here it is quote. She had spoken of Arya too, her
younger daughter, but Arya was lost, most likely dead by now.
Sansa though, I will find her, my lady.
Brienne swore to Lady Catlin's restless shade.
I will never stop looking. I will give up my life if need
be. Give up my honor, give up all my
dreams, but I will find her. She would give up her honor.
This is Brienne. Like that's a huge like this is
number one on her list. This is more important than
killing Renly's murderers. Like she doesn't even think of
Renly in this moment. That's how big this is for her.
And the quote there, Brienne swore to Lady Catlin's restless
shape, she doesn't know Stoneheart exists at this point.
This quote is from way earlier. Is this from like her first
chapter in A Feast for Crow? So well before she even knows
Lady Catlin's walking around. So that's that's a little clever
wording there by George. So we see this inside Brienne's
head. That's one of the things that
about the POV structure of of this whole series that gives us
surety on certain things, but we don't see inside Stoneheart's
head anymore. We used to when she was alive.
That makes her an unusual, interesting, unique POV.
She's the only POV character that's still walking around.
I can't say alive, but walking around, whose POV we don't have
any more. We lost the POV of a person
still walking around. George said no new POV's.
He could go back on that if he wants to.
Of course he can change his mind.
He didn't sign some contract saying I will never put a new
POV in. No of course not, he could go
back to her. She's technically not a new POV,
right? It also raises questions about
John. Might that be the path for John
too? Will John cease to be APOV?
Not for the rest of the series, although that's possible too.
I kind of doubt that, but maybe temporarily.
As long as he's in Ghost, as long as it's his second life, as
long as he's in that state, we might not get his POV when he
comes back to his own body. Maybe we will.
That's just one possible way for George to to handle it.
For all we know, he hasn't even decided yet.
I hope he has, but that's a possibility.
Whatever's going on with Catelyn, with Stoneheart, we got
to try to see put that on John and see how it works.
You see how it fits. So Jamie is captured.
We know that much. It's seemingly straightforward
there. Kevin tells Cersei that he went
off with Brienne. For some reason.
Cersei is baffled by that, and Kevin probably was too.
They both don't have any idea why he did that, but we do.
We know that Brienne. We know exactly what Brienne
said to him, that the Hound has Sansa, but he'll kill her, you
know, if you don't come. So he goes with and he's like,
well, you know, which is more proof that he's sincere about
helping Lady Catlin. He's sticking to his vow.
He wouldn't go off with her if he didn't care about fulfilling
his vow. He's like, go, go ahead, go
ahead. Let the Hound kill Sansa.
I don't care. It's also, by the way, as an
aside, it's interesting that Brienne's focused on finding
Sansa had had given up on Arya. Stonhart hadn't given up on Arya
because the brother had had her in their possession.
So she's that's the one she's most concerned with because she
was lost in the Riverlands. She was like, OK, this is maybe
my best bet. So they both have a different
view of who the other is looking for.
But of course, Brienne actually doesn't know that they've
continued to look for Aria. Maybe she'll find that out.
Maybe they've told her more since she's been off screen.
Either way, though, like I just don't see either Brienne or
Jamie dying at the hands of the brother.
And I just don't see it. I don't think that's how it's
going to go. So first of all, how ungrateful
by the Brotherhood that they don't thank Jamie for sending
Ryman Fray like it's his. He sent Ryman Fray away and they
captured him because of that. Don't they have?
Don't they owe him something for that?
But we've seen how the Brotherhood is willing to settle
things by trial, by combat. Jamie can't fight for himself.
He's incapable, and Brienne knows for sure that he's
innocent. So Brienne would step up if it's
a trial by combat, Brienne would would fight for him.
And presumably when I don't, there's not a single member of
the Brotherhood that can take Brienne.
I don't think, I mean, not anyone.
We've heard of Lem. Lem can't take Brienne.
He might think he can, but no, no, no way.
Thoros himself, I don't think so.
I don't think Thoros is going to fight in a trial by combat.
It's not his role. I don't think.
Don't think so. Anyway.
Will Stoneheart honor the result?
That an interesting possibility that she's just too vindictive
and too vengeful to to to abide by the result.
However, I still don't think it will result in the end of Jamie
or Brienne. Maybe there's just no trial at
all. We we shouldn't assume that's
what's going to happen. Maybe they will use Jamie for
some other purpose, something that doesn't kill him.
Something that as a as bait or as a lure as who knows, they may
have something more clever in mind.
But presumably he gets out of this and Brienne does too.
How we'll have to wait and see. I think the trial by combat
maybe the simplest explanation, but even that is has some
issues, you know so but it's this hard.
It's still hard to predict how either of them would die there.
You know, even said don't I mean I'm not referring to the TV show
ending for either those characters as why I'm perplexed
here. I just Brienne's ending that
would be such a weak ending for her to be killed by the
brotherhood. I don't see, I don't see it.
And Jamie being killed there, that's not foreshadowed.
Like he has to be the one to kill Cersei, doesn't he?
Or at least be reunited with her.
So there's further tragedy and settling of that arc.
I don't know, it just doesn't doesn't seem like it's going to
end there. But what if they do have a trial
by combat? There's another option here.
What if it's fought in front of a heart tree or near 1?
Could Bran then witness it? Well, he could witness it
anyway. His powers may have grown to the
point where he doesn't have to have a heart treat if we see
things. Well, let's assume he does.
Or let's assume that there's something other some other
reason for having a heart trainer by which that Bran could
maybe try to communicate through.
Maybe he could whisper through it like he may have done to
Theon. Even just observing it would be
a big deal because Bran hasn't seen that his mother is walking
around undead. What a revelation that would be.
Not a pleasant one for sure, but it would also be confusing and
it might even be weird to the children.
The children who have all this magic and Lord, they might not
be aware this is possible. They might be like, whoa, wait,
what? How is they have this magic too?
Which might lead to an explanation of some things.
This might be a path to explaining how the others work
in the 1st place, their origin like these, these similarities,
this concept of the undead and all these people walking around.
I mean it, it, it needs explanation.
Bran needs to understand this. He's freaking 8 years old,
y'all. He can't just know these things.
So the children have a lot more to teach him.
Blood Raven has a lot more to teach him.
And if he ever just sees that we've, we've theorized on all
sorts of things. Bran might gaze into the past
and see or see in the present. And this is just such a big one.
Like he's going to want to know what's happening to the rest of
his family. He's not sure that Ari is dead.
They think he's dead, but he doesn't have this news that Ari
is definitely dead or he doesn't think Sans is dead either.
He thinks his mom's dead. He knows his father's dead, but
there's a path to him learning otherwise.
Or at least maybe someone else tells him if he's reunited with
somebody. What if he meets Brienne, you
know, at at Winterfell? Like, by the way, your mom's an
undead being, you know? So there's a lot of ways he
could learn that. And what a strange thing to try
to predict. Like, how would he react to
that? Like Bran is no longer just a
kid. I mean, he is literally, but he
doesn't have the the personality of one anymore because of all
he's seen and, and had talked to him and and learned and all
that. Now Merritt was horrified to see
Lady Stoneheart. Here's our section called
Reunions. Even though he knew he was about
to be executed, it was still a a step up.
Somehow it was scarier. Like he already knew he was
going to die, yet somehow it got worse without physical pain
adding into it. You know, somehow being seconds
away from strangulation was it got worse somehow?
Like, it's hard to make that worse.
But the sheer impossibility of what he was seeing like this
doesn't necessarily register with all of us readers because
we've seen the undead since the prologue, right?
We have to remember that the vast majority of Westeros
doesn't even know this is possible for the dead to be
walking around to them. It's a silly story.
It's teary, and it's like snarks and grumpkins.
It falls in that category. It's something that either never
happened or stopped happening long ago.
So that is just seeing something that shouldn't be possible is a
different kind of terrifying. It's a different kind of
unnerving. It's like, wow, I'm my very
notion of reality, of the thing that the way I perceive the
world is wrong. What I believe is possible is
wrong. There's clearly things if this
is possible, if it's possible for the dead to walk, what else
am I ignorant of that's possible in this world?
So it's not quite the same as Barrick because he was killed
repeatedly and that added to his like legend.
Like people were afraid of him just because he's like, you
can't seem to kill this guy. They don't literally think he
was killed all these times. They just think, wow, the
stories about this guy or he's hard to kill.
That's how it it ends up appearing to a regular person.
They won't think, oh, that guy's been killed 6 times.
Yep. But he keeps coming back because
of relore. No, that's not how they perceive
it. They either they just perceive
it that he's just hard to kill. That's that's more rational.
That makes more sense. And and again, he was raised
quickly every single time, every single time he died, he was only
dead for, you know, minutes or an hour or two, right?
So that's very different than the three to four days she was
in the water. Surely there's a lot of other
folks like Merritt that have been in the same spot as
Merritt. They know they're about to get
hanged. And then they are confronted
with who's behind this and they realize that how is it possible?
So yeah, it's it's pretty scary. Let's be specific here with some
people that you might reunite with.
Aria, of course, is one of the biggest ones because it's the
child of hers that she's actively looking for, the child
of hers that was actually in the presence of the Brotherhood
before her time. What would they do?
It's both of their reactions are very hard to predict Stoneheart.
Like it's hard to picture her softening, like she's just a
creature of vengeance and death. Seeing her daughter like can she
can she feel happy about this? I maybe can she feel maybe,
maybe satisfaction, maybe just a sense of something positive?
Maybe just she can relax a little bit.
I don't know. Like they can't really talk.
They can't have a conversation very easily.
Maybe they can talk and they can communicate a little bit.
Now, all that said, Aria is one of the few people not just in
her family, but period that might not be horrified because
of everything she's been through.
I mean, is Aria is the one who ate the worm out of the skull
face and the kindly old man. We've tried to look like that,
right? So she can manage, right?
She's also already seen her mother's dead body through
Nymeria's eyes in that wolf dream.
She might not be horrified, but she will be shocked.
She will be surprised. Arya, just like just about
everybody, is not familiar with any form of the undead.
She has not seen that. She's seen some things.
She's seen more than a lot of people.
She's seen some things at the House of the of the Undying.
I mean, houses are black and white.
And she knows more about the potential of the supernatural in
this world. She's been exposed to more
things that should not be than the average person.
But she hasn't been exposed to this particular thing.
And it's very personal to her. Of course, 'cause it's her
mother. It isn't just so.
Oh, the dad can walk. That's crazy.
Oh, my mother is a walking undead.
Yeah, that's a whole nother level, isn't it?
And coming back to Nymeria, that's a reason why Arya might
go to the Riverlands in the 1st place.
She doesn't know her mom's there.
She doesn't know Stoneheart as Catlin.
But if she's going to the Riverlands, maybe to go after
the phrase because she they are on her list, not specifically
because she doesn't have names. She just knows the phrases are
responsible for the Red Wedding. So if she goes there, if she's
pulled there, if she's drawn there because of Nymeria, that
could lead to an encounter with her mother like the Brotherhood
might see her and be like, oh hey, that's Arya.
Question from Chance Wilson from Patreon.
Do you think Stoneheart won't recognize Aria if and when they
cross paths? That's an interesting question.
Like if Aria is in disguise, she Stoneheart might not know who
she is. And if Stoneheart might not be
recognizable to Aria by the same token, I think the truth would
probably come out, but and I'm not sure that Aria needs to hide
who she is because not a lot of people know what she even looks
like. Just given the fact that Roose
Bolton is using a fake Aria as part of the evidence of that,
you know, like a part of that is people aren't willing to
challenge Roose on that. But part of it too is they know
they can get away with it because most people don't know
what Aria looks like. So that's an angle that is
something I hadn't considered. Very good question.
Chance. I think that even if she doesn't
recognize her, if Stoneheart doesn't recognize Aria, I think
that would come out. What if what we saw on TV with
Aria killing all the phrase, which is a bit over the top or a
lot over the top? What if that is something they
do together? What if that's they reunite and
that's where it leads? You know, the two of them are
capable. She's like, hey, I'm in on this
plan. Let's get those phrase.
But this may happen before Aria gets to Westeros, right, Aria?
Who knows if the timing will line up on that.
On the other hand, Aria's mercy chapter already sends seems to
be pushing her tour away from the from the House of Black and
White. She's already broken their rules
again. She, you know, did her own
murder. So maybe that's enough of a ball
rolling for her to get Westeros to Westeros soon enough for
these things to kind of line up. Uncle Brendan, this is a tough
one. He doesn't have Aria's
experience with supernatural, which is kind of a funny
sentence to say. So he won't just react like, oh,
this is nothing. You know, he will be like he's
another person has no idea the dead can walk.
And he's been he's been living a lot longer.
So his life experience is a little more settled.
You know, a 50 year old man discovering the dead can walk is
different than an 8 year old discovering that he won't
exactly object to what the brotherhood has accomplished to
hanging phrase. He'll be like, he'll be all
about that and they would love to have his leadership in their
group. I mean, his ability to plan
ambushes, his knowledge of River Run itself could be very useful
in the planning of strikes or ambushes or infiltration.
His ability to communicate like they already had do that really
well. But he would add to that, and I
believe he's still loyal to the Kingdom of the North.
I don't see any reason to see otherwise.
Like why did he escape? Why did he, what was the purpose
of him escaping if he was not going to continue fighting?
If he had given up, he would have just surrendered and taken
the black. That would be it.
That'd be the end of it, you know?
So he clearly continues to keep going.
That's what Jamie believes. That's what others believe.
They they know what kind of man he is.
Again, he's been around, he's established, his personality is
well known. So they they can make
predictions based on that. And they're right.
So again, coming back to the idea that the The Winds of
Winter prologue chapter is supposedly going to include Jane
Westerly. Not that she's the POV, not that
she isn't, but she's in it. Which means we have her party
with Ed Muir. 400 men led by Sir Forley Prester heading to
Casterly Rock could be ambushed by the Brotherhood.
It could be ambushed by the Brotherhood with the help of, or
with or without Nymeria's Wolfpack, with or without
Blackfish. Lots of possibilities.
He's also a man that people would rally to if the
Brotherhood is having trouble with recruiting because
Stoneheart is villainous or dark and they don't necessarily want
to sign up for that. They might sign up for fighting
under the famous Blackfish, especially Riverlanders, who in,
you know, the, the region he's from is and, and not just
because of him, because he's a great guy to fight for, because
he's an honorable leader to, to follow an established legend,
living legend, but because the phraser cursed.
A lot of people see the phrases just they need to be punished.
They, they violated guest right and say no more.
That's a reason to go after them.
You know, they, they people just hate the phrase for that, even
if it's not personal. And for a lot of people it is
personal. It's really hard to judge what
Stoneheart will think of of well, what, what Blackfish will
think of Stoneheart walking around like this.
Like, I have a real difficulty guessing how that might go.
But ultimately he will have to take note that their goals are
in alignment at least somewhat. Maybe he's not as excited about
just murdering phrase for the hell of it, but that certainly
is in line with his goals of fighting for the Kingdom of the
North, the the fallen Kingdom of the North, which he hasn't given
up on. Remember, he pointed to Jamie
Lannister's like, see the Stark banister flies over these walls.
You know we're not. As long as that's there, You
know, I haven't given up. And of course, Stoneheart has
Rob's crown, which that's meaningful to him at least a
little bit. He not only does he want to
fight for Jane Westerling, Rob's queen, but the crown of the
North is an important artifact, important item for their cause.
So yeah, who knows what they'll talk about like that.
This maybe probably isn't a scene we would have on page, but
it's just really hard to figure. I don't think Stoneheart, it's
not hard from her perspective, she'd be like, hey, uncle, get
on board, help us out. We could really use your skills.
His reaction is the one that's hard to figure questionable
further theories in our Blackfish episode.
We've got more in that one, so check that out if you want more
on him. Earlier we mentioned the
possibility of going into the neck.
So what about the Hal and Reid? What is Hal and Reid's
involvement here? We mentioned some of the
northern leaders that might be hiding in the neck with him, but
what about him specifically? Could he help?
Could he have an opinion on Catlin walking around?
He knows what she looks like, unlike a lot of the other
people. He would have met her briefly,
only briefly because he never went to Winterfell after Robert
Rebellion were told. But he did likely go to the
wedding of Catlin and Ned, which happened at River Run like right
before the war. So he he was with Ned all
throughout the war. So he was probably there during
that part as well. But we still know Hal and Reid
very well. We've never seen him on screen.
So it's all it's it's, we do know Blackfish, and it's hard
enough predicting his reaction to Stoneheart.
We don't know Howland Reid very well.
So it's even harder to perceive this.
The one thing about Howland, and I'll say is he's definitely more
open and aware of the supernatural.
The fact that she's a dead person walking around might be a
lot less surprising to him. Even though it might, it's still
probably surprising, but less surprising.
He might be aware of a lot more what's going on in the North,
Sansa. So everyone knows everyone quote
UN quote knows that Santa fled after Joffrey's murder.
She's implicated by some people and that Tyrion was her husband
and that Tyrion escaped as well while killing Tywin.
So a lot of people think Santa's probably guilty.
A lot of people think Santa is it was implicated that she's a
murderer. So that's a big deal.
But also like Arya, I mean, she's not like Arya and that she
can see a a skull and not react to it.
She's a little more squeamish, maybe a lot more squeamish, but
she also has no idea the undead are a thing, let alone that her
mother is one of them. Right?
So question for Ranabir Mitchra. Here's a good one.
Does Baelish's plot potentially intersect with Stoneheart?
As in, maybe she's the one either directly or indirectly,
or part of the solution to Peter Baelish in the long term?
He probably dies. Probably dies in Winterfell, or
at least in the North. So maybe she's part of what
undoes him. You know, Sansa alone can do
this with maybe the help of Aria or just some Winterfell
loyalists. But that's a good one.
Stoneheart's knowledge of what happened and what she's learned
since. Yeah, that could really, that
could help undo him. And that would be kind of poetic
for the person that he has lusted after, that a lot of his
career was of a, as a intriguer and wanton man of ambition who
is has no qualms and scruples, is motivated by his desire to be
worthy of a Catelyn Tullhey. And, you know, he believed he
deserved her, that he should have won her.
And he's spent most of his life trying to, you know, correct
that or, or fix that or whatever, or get revenge for
that, however you want to frame it.
So what a thing if he finally does get her, But it's it's
really her getting him, you know, he's like, I'm finally
united with. Yeah.
Another possibility, though, is that he goes to Harrenhal.
You know, it's, it is his castle.
And I don't suppose he will. I figure he's going to go from
the Vale to the North and and never bother to go to Harrenhal.
But what if he, you know, maybe he makes a stop there on the
way. It's not really on the way, but
he might need to go that way for some reason.
Probably not, but it's worth thinking about it it.
That would be a way for this to come to a head.
Like it could happen there. She's in the Riverlands.
George doesn't want Stoneheart to go north, so he's got to have
this resolution happen down there because, yeah, because
happened Stoneheart go north. That might be tricky for her as
well. She might not want to go north
because it's where the phrase and Lannisters aren't up there.
Well, there are some phrase up there, but not as many.
I don't think it'll be difficult for her to go north because
Howlin Reed, the Neck like that should be open to her, but
especially not that the Ironborn are no longer in Moe Caitlin,
but stone hard and Baelish. Yeah, that is definitely
possible. It's a compelling thought.
I I'm down. I'm not too big on the Harrenhal
possibility, but it's worth mentioning the Winterfell
possibility. Yeah, like, imagine him.
Imagine. Picture merits reaction.
Picture Brianne's reaction to realizing who this really is.
Like, Oh my God, it's her. Littlefinger's reaction to that
would be the like the the smirking.
I know you what you don't know, man.
Truly undone by something he could have never seen coming.
Some the Game of Thrones is what he's focused on, and the Game of
Thrones for the most part does not involve the supernatural,
just the fight for the throne. And he's so focused on that this
is not part of his world. What a thing.
There's a lot of people who are pure intrigue, pure mundane.
I don't mean mundane, boring. I mean they're not involved with
anything supernatural. A lot of that's going to come to
a head. The supernatural is becoming a
bigger part of the story. It's stretching out.
It's it's flooding more of the POV's.
More and more of the arcs are getting tied into it little by
little or a lot by a lot, or some of them are already quite
deep in it. So those collisions will be very
interesting to see. The people who have operated
very successfully outside of supernatural means,
Littlefinger, Varis, to a lesser extent, Tyrion, things like
that. When they come full circle and
realize that this stuff is real and that it's big and that it's
can't be ignored, well, there's a lot of reckoning going to
happen there. A lot of people are going to
have to really change their worldview, and some of them
won't have time for that. Some of them are just going to
die before they can ever, you know, figure out what it is they
missed or understand what it is that's happening.
So in the winter, so Winterfell in the North, we we're kind of
already in that subject, but a little more here.
The original plan for Catlin in a game when it was a trilogy,
when George had that his his first thoughts on what was going
to happen. Catlin was going to die beyond
the wall. He didn't specify that she would
be resurrected or raised afterwards that in the original
outline that I can recall. But it seems likely that that
was his plan because that would be of a place for that to
happen, right? For a someone dies beyond the
wall and then they come, they rise up again.
Like, that's plenty of that happening, right?
That would be quite a thing to have happened to her.
But whether he was going to, she was going to be like a cold
hands kind of thing where she still had a lot of her
personality and could still talk and do other things, or whether
she'd be more like a real ice white that has maybe nothing
going on other than some memories deep in there.
They can't talk. They can't.
Yeah, so a lot has changed since then in both how George is
conceptualized, not just the series, but the world, these
characters, how the supernatural stuff works.
Still, there's some of those original elements are probably
still around. Can she pass the wall?
Probably not. She's undead.
Like, I don't think the, I don't think the wall is attuned to
only the undead raised by the others.
It's probably all of them. I mean, I think, you know, and
might have problems with Winterfell too.
Winterfell has some anti magic in it too.
Storms End had anti magic in it. Remember, Melisandre needed to
be rode inside in order to unleash her shadow.
Had she released a shadow outside, it wouldn't have gotten
in. So these things are perhaps
related conceptually, Yeah. And I wonder, maybe George is
going to be nicer and let her find out that Rickon's alive,
that Bran's alive, that Sansa got out of Tyrion's clutches and
was never really that deeply in his clutches in the 1st place.
Either way, she's away from the Lannisters, although she's in
Little Fingers clutches instead, which might even be worse in
some ways, but less worse than others.
Because Littlefinger is not as powerful militaristically as the
Lannisters. He doesn't have the wealth and
all that, so in some ways he's a less dangerous foe.
If you've identified properly that he is 1.
What makes him so hard to get is he's so clever about not being
recognized as the problem. So I really wonder about that.
Like will, will she learn? Will she have that relief of
learning that actually Rob is the only one that's dead of your
children? It's quite opposite from what
you believe You believe. Like for a while you thought Rob
was the only one around, but you have it backwards.
So that would be nice for her to learn that.
But how does that affect her in this state?
What is feeling better mean when she's a a revenant type
creature? Now in terms of the dark side
here and her outlook for continuing vengeance, what might
she accomplish? What kind of predictions do we
have? We've talked about the Red
Wedding 2 point O in a bunch of different episodes and she is
absolutely possible here. The addition of the Blackfish
into her squad may add a lot of potential there because if
they're not only does he just have general expertise and
motivation, but he has knowledge of river Run, right, The Red
Wedding, 2 point O, that's where it would take place at river
run. So to in order to have the new
phrase of river of river run sort of announced their presence
or to kick off their their reign and announce, you know, just to
establish themselves within the Riverlands, right.
It's no longer the Tully's. It's us.
We could have a big event to, you know, spread the word, all
that. So that's a possibility.
And if that happens, then that might be a lot of phrase getting
killed. That might be the getting us to
the place the TV show took us with a whole lot of phrase being
killed, except it'll be by her instead of by Arya.
And coming back to the Jane Westerling, Ed Muir's captive
party led by 400 men going to Cashley Rock.
That's obviously included here, as well as a strong possibility
for her to interfere with that that train of people.
So the phrase and Lannisters are no longer ignorant of her,
they're ignorant of her. True origin and the fact that
she's a magical being, but so this, you can't just assume that
this Red Wedding 2 pointer will be easy to pull off, that they
won't be. Well, of course it won't be easy
to pull off, but they won't see it coming.
The phrase and the Lannisters and all this folks in the
Riverlands that are on that side, they're well aware that
they're hated. They're well aware that phrase
are getting hanged from traveling from place to place.
They aren't ignorant of that. It's very straightforward.
So they're going to tighten up security.
They know what they did. They're wary of of of kickback,
of a vengeance of people coming back at them.
Doesn't mean it will be sufficient security, doesn't
mean that they will prevent what's coming, prevent their
karmic justice. But they won't be caught totally
off guard either. I don't think in fact, just
people traveling to the wedding, going to the wedding, that might
put them at risk. That alone might be a problem.
Like, I don't know if I want to go to that wedding, I might get
killed on the way there. I don't want to travel with 100
men to make sure I make it there on time.
That's just really expensive. On the other hand, these are the
new Lords. These are the new Lords of River
Run. They're not the new Lords of the
Trident, but they are the new Lords of River Run.
So yeah, I would put them in a difficult spot.
They also want to put the Red Wedding in the past.
Like they're they don't want people to keep thinking of that.
They want sort of erase their wrongdoing here.
Like, let's do as much as we can to correct people's opinion of
us. It's going to take a while, but,
you know, better get started on that.
We'll try to have a big successful wedding party, a
fresh start, a new beginning. Well, we'll see about that.
And will the wedding still go off the way it was going to with
Jamie being captured or running off with Brianne, like his army
is just kind of listless and standing there and waiting to
figure out what happened to him. Is the wedding just going to go
along as planned with things like that happening, or are they
just like Jamie's just on some side quest?
Don't worry about it. You know, they don't know what
to think at this point, but the longer he's missing, the more
they'll be concerned. The Lannisters are also aware of
who they're climbing in bed with and they don't like it.
It was Tywin's deal. Tywin made the deal with them
and kind of inflicted it on the rest of the Lannisters.
No other Lannisters were even aware of it before it happened,
except probably Kevin. It's another massive failure on
Tywin's part, His legacy. He wanted to make his family
safe and powerful and for the long run.
But this is not a this is accomplished the opposite.
He's empowered a whole generation of people who look at
the Lannisters, the phrase more so, but also the Lannisters as
Breakers of guest right. They're not as accursed as the
phrase, but their reputation is was already bad and now it's
worse. And with Tywin's death, they're
now not as scary. So you've got, they're, they're
where they're at is hanging on to power, but no one really is
loyal to that. They're just there because they
don't have a choice. If given an alternative, people
will jump that Lannister ship, whether it's to Young Griff or
someone else like a Sansa going north or to Daenerys or
something like that, who knows. But they're not going to be tied
to the Lannisters out of, you know, loyalty or ideology.
It'll be just because they don't see a better option for their
own survival. So people like Jamie and to a
lesser extent Cersei Kevin would have been in this category where
he not dead now too are yeah, we are concerned about how everyone
sees us because of our involvement in this heinous
event. So check out Davin Lannister who
if there's a Red Wedding 2 point O he's the groom.
So he's right in the middle of this.
Here's what he has to say about it while speaking to Jamie.
Quote the phrase are prickly where marriage contracts are
concerned. I would hate to disappoint them
again. Sir Davin snorted.
I'll wet and bed my stoat, never fear.
I know what happened to Rob Stark.
From what Edwin tells me, though, I'd best pick one who
hasn't flowered yet, or I'm like to find that Black Walder has
been there first. I'll wager he's had Gatehouse,
Amy, and more than thrice. Maybe that explains Landsell's
godliness and his father's mood, yeah.
This isn't exactly the speaking, you know, in tones about your
former leader that are very respectful.
Yeah. Like he doesn't mention Tywin,
but it's Tywin who arranged all this.
And he's like, why did he put us up to this?
Why did he make us do this? Why did he tie us to this house
that everybody hates? Like we're we're being pulled
down by this, you know? So, yeah, the comment about
Stoat is hilarious, right? He's a lot of people say the
phrase look like we weasels, but you know, Davin thinks it's more
like a stoat means like that's weasel isn't quite right.
It's more of a stoat. So if we're talking about other
people who are a target, you know, a younger Lannister like
Joy, who is a a bastard of Joy Hill, who was being he's being
married to one of the Spicers or an elder one like Jenna
Lannister. Tywin's sister, like Jenna's
largely innocent, but she's certainly guilty by association.
She's married to a friend as a Lannister by birth.
In terms of the Brotherhood, that's a it's about as bad as it
gets. And now if we're going back to
the realm of tragedy, because I don't think too many people will
be sad about Jenna Lannister or even Joy Hill being killed, it
we might recognize that it's not necessarily fair.
But they're not exactly beloved characters.
If Olivar or Perwin Frey, the good guy phrase.
The ones that when Catelyn is having her dark revelation about
what's about to happen at the Red Wing, she realizes, uh oh,
she touches the male on Ryman's arm or Edwin, I forget which one
it is, realizes what's going on. She realizes that Olivar and
Perwin's lack of presence is part of the picture.
She's like, Oh my God, that's why they're not here.
They wouldn't have participated in the Red Wedding.
Is she so far gone that even they are targets now?
And she's like, I don't care. Olivar, Perwin, They're all
phrase. That would be a way for us to
tell if she murders, executes Olivar or Perwin, especially
Olivar, who's young. He's a he's like, not Kendry
Podrick's age. That's dark as hell.
And it tells us how that she's gone that far.
If she scruples to not do that, well, then that's telling, too.
I have a feeling it's going to be the former, though, if any,
that she's just that far gone. And the Brotherhood wouldn't
necessarily know. They don't know that Oliver and
Perwin were the good ones, so they wouldn't even be.
They wouldn't necessarily speak up and go, isn't this guy like,
wasn't he kind of all right? Yeah.
So I don't. I don't know about that.
That's bad. So returning briefly to the idea
that her she might go north, it could be in relation to the
others like the other, like this is an attack on the realm.
The Brotherhood might want to help with that and some of them
might break with her over that or she could lead them there to
to deal with that. But while secretly she's more
interested in fighting Bolton's and frays that are up in the
North, or maybe she's heard that Sansa or Arya is there and she
wants to go there to be reunited with them.
It doesn't have to be the main motivation.
Might be just one of her children or Ricken, right?
Doesn't have to be related to her, her vengeance.
It could be related to reuniting with her children.
But it could also be both. Yeah, 'cause the Bolton's might
be done for by the time she even considers going north, Stannis
might be in charge. He might be dead too.
Who knows? So with the Jamie and Brienne
stuff happening, reunion and her family can impact where she's
going and there's the vengeance. What about after all that?
What if all or none of that happened?
Well, some of it will happen can't all be not not happening.
But it what about it? What about past that?
But we just don't know. Even people who can look ahead,
even people with prophetic powers don't know.
Bran has not seen her in the flames.
Melisandre has not seen her in the flames.
Thoros has specifically looked and here's what he saw or didn't
see quote. We were King's men when we
began, the man told her. But King's men must have a king,
and we have none. We were brothers too, but now
our brotherhood is broken. I do not know who we are, if
truth be told, nor where we might be going.
I only know the road is dark. The fires have not shown me what
lies at its end. Very metaphorical way to put it.
The the fires are what shows him the future, but the the road is
dark. It's like the fires do not
illuminate that portion of what he's looking for.
So and not only does no one perceive her now, no one
predicted her like we didn't see.
There's no prophetic vision or dream in the entire series I can
think of that is tells of her coming.
There is no like stone hearts coming kind of thing, even
something vague. If I'm missing something,
definitely point it out for me and I'll give you a shout out.
I just I nothing I could see that that points to that.
Plenty of things are predicted. Plenty of things are seen.
The Red Wedding of course, is one of those things that comes
out even in the ghost of high arts visions, but nothing after
if she passes it her life force on because her maybe she feels
complete. Her children she finds out are
alive. She's murdered enough Lannisters
and frays to to be satisfied. What happens?
Does she pass her life force on to somebody?
Now? Back in the day before A Dance
with Dragons, before A Feast of Crows, when we only knew the
barest existence of Stoneheart because obviously she's the last
chapter of A Storm of Swords. The theory one of the theories
were was that she'd redeem herself in the with regards to
Jon Snow and her treatment of him by passing her life force on
to him. It doesn't seem like that's the
case though. It seems like Melisandre is
right there and she's more likely to do it, let alone the
fact that that's how it went on the TV show.
Which it's not necessarily strong evidence the TV show, but
it certainly isn't helping the other argument.
It surely doesn't push toward things toward Stoneheart, which
it couldn't because Stoneheart wasn't on TV.
So I don't know, maybe maybe it's like Barrack where he
passes his life force on to someone who he she thinks was
killed unjustly. Maybe she has some sort of
repenting moment or she sees somebody that needs to go on
that's more important, someone who is needed.
I don't know why she would perceive it that way, But this
is George R Martin. We can't predict what he's going
to do. He's he's his level of
creativity is certainly beyond our ability to predict his
creativity. It could even be someone like
Brienne. Like, what if Brienne dies and
he brings her back or she brings him.
She brings her back. Like that seems not very likely,
but even that's possible. She just realizes she treated
Brienne badly. She realized that she was was on
this quest all along. I don't know how she would learn
that. I don't know how she would learn
that Brand was sincere about that.
But it's possible, right? So if all the characters got
from the show, this is also probably the one George was the
most vocal about. He even said to Michelle Fairley
after the end of the season with the Red Wedding Season 3, he
said, see you next season. That was awkward because she was
like, I'm not coming back. She knew already.
But he didn't. So yeah, not the best of
communication. They're showrunners to George.
So she's a very unusual and tragic and murderous character.
The murderousness is fueled by a lot of the tragedy, too.
Her supernatural elements are also pretty unique.
Not directly raised by a red priest, but seemingly empowered
by the magic of Relore, expanding on what we know to be
possible in that regard and just deepening the level of raised
beings, undead beings in the story, widening that umbrella.
One of the very few people raised from the dead who isn't a
ice white. It gives us more knowledge and
what fire whites are. And it's, it's pretty
fascinating. And I hope we learn more and not
just from Stoneheart, but from maybe from John, maybe from who
knows who else. Our trivia question today was
Lady Catlin is famously killed at the Red Wedding.
What was the original location George planned for her death?
The answer is beyond the wall. Wasn't any more specific than
that. Just beyond the wall.
The Starks were going to flee beyond the wall because of all
the Tyrion capturing Winterfell was the original plan or them
losing Winterfell instead of Theon or the Bolton's.
And yeah she was going to die beyond the wall.
So there you go our poll results.
The question was will Aria and Stoneheart meet yes or no?
77% of you said yes, 23% said no.
So most of y'all, more than 3/4 say yes.
I would put myself in that group.
I would say yes, I think they will.
What do you think of Shia? I said yes, but there was also a
debate in the chat about whether Arya has met Stoneheart because
Nymeria pulls Stoneheart's body out.
But I argue that that's not Stoneheart at that point, that's
a corpse. Yeah, she hadn't been raised
yet. Yeah, she.
Hadn't been raised yet, so I still don't think that counts,
but that was the debate that happened.
But she would recognize that if she saw Stone not walking
around, you would remember that moment and be like, Oh my God,
how are you? Yeah.
So but that doesn't. Yeah.
It doesn't get directly at this question.
So some other episodes mentioned that relate to this one.
Aria's list, Blackfish, Our Mercy chapter analysis, Our
Elaine chapter analysis, The Brotherhood Without Banners
episode, The Thoros of Mirror episode.
We have our Valariritis series for Feast for Crows and the
Dance with Dragons, the relevant chapters.
Janie, Cersei, Brienne, and of course, the Kevin epilogue,
which contains some of these related thoughts as well.
I believe I mentioned one or two other ones that relate to this
one. But you know, I can never keep
them all true, never keep track of them all.
We just have too many episodes. What do we have?
We have well over 500 episodes. Not that many if you subtract TV
episodes, but it's still over 300.
So as we go farther, deeper and longer, it becomes a little
harder to keep track of. But that's a good problem to
have, isn't it folks? Thanks Janina for her insight
and great takes on this topic. Thanks to Joey Townsend for our
intro music. Thanks to Michael Klarfeld for
his great map design. You can see it behind us and the
intro video. You can find him at KLARADO
x.de. Link should be in the
description. On behalf of Ashea, I'm Aziz.
We'll see you next time, and you know what to do.
Until then, Balar Riritas.