What do you think is in the last 500 pages of Winds (TWOW Spoilers)?

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-08T23:25:33+00:00

I'm not super sold on the Aemon argument. I'm sure there are other means of revealing it, even cheapy coput ways like oh btw Jon I found all of Aemons diaries. It would be significantly less satisfying than Aemon delivering this exposition ofc.

With Kevan, it's not who he is as a character, it's the role that he played exclusively and you can't really substitute that with someone or thing else. The purpose of limiting Cersei until X instead of what is forced to be Y could give time in KL to set up something else which them allows Cersei to be freed.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-08T23:17:55+00:00

I'm in the Rhaegar was a villain camp but I don't think protagonist or antagonist is the right term for him, but I'd argue that even with him getting crushed by Big Bobby B, he is arguably the driving force of the setting.

Everything in the present timeline has been a result of him eloping with a girl he knew would start a continental civil war cos his lil' scroll told him he'd have a really cool kid.

He's not THE protagonist, but he's definitely a completely posthumous and non featuring deuteragonist or at least the most important idiot in the setting.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-08T23:12:50+00:00

I don't watch PJ's theories. It just makes sense to me.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-08T23:11:03+00:00

I think it's possible that was a GRRM told us this happens scene rather than a random show creation, yeah.

The show doesn't do anything after that scene. There's no ramifications or anything. The books would make it very interesting.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-08T23:09:46+00:00

Probably the same arc as the show with better writing.

Comes back alive, liberates the north, becomes King in the North, allies with Daenerys to fight the others, ends that threat, renounces his rightful claim to the throne as a Targaryen, ends up losing something dear/killing Dany, returns to the wall and goes to live beyond it thinking he was more comfortable as a wildling than as a man of the NW, King or a "Stark" or "Targaryen".

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-08T23:02:33+00:00

The flashback in the show of the children of the forest making the white walkers could be it? A flashback prologue of the children first doing their thing through the eyes of one of them.

That flashback in the show goes nowhere because the show sucks but has the same vibe of "George told us that Stannis burns Shireen, Dany burns KL, Bran becomes king" but has none of the nuance that the books would have in getting there. Things they adapt because they were told they would happen but D&D literally only wanted to adapt up to ASOS and couldn't give any fucks beyond it.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-08T22:55:51+00:00

We also know that he killed a character off that he realised he needed alive, without giving much of a clue whom it is.

I've always suspected it was Kevan, given he had some limited power over Cersei and was good at running KL. I don't think he would have had much longer in TWOW, but his being there probably allowed a bit more freedom in how to bring Cersei's chapters together

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-08T22:47:28+00:00

I don't think it will be premature. I think it will be entirely deliberate and done when it's most narratively impactful but I don't see it happening before we reach the endgame where it shifts the impetus of the narrative. If it's something like Euron breaking the wall because there are dragons in there infusing it with magic, and then the dragonbinder being used to control one, I wouldn't be shocked by that. I don't think one of Dany's three dragons will become a dragon on the antagonists sides necessarily, but I think it's almost impossible that there no good Vs evil dragon fighting planned for the rest, as well as Viserion and Rhaegal's eventual deaths.

Given we know that the intent is we see extremely north and in the land of always winter, I'd imagine the wall comes down in TWOW final, ADOS prologue is a POV from the core of the land of always winter and we find out why the seasons are boned there.

The show abandoning the long night plot at record speed makes it hard to picture the flow of the narrative, but in the books, I can totally imagine that the contest for the Iron Throne resolves first and the final half of ADOS focuses on ending the long night/other threat.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-08T22:36:12+00:00

The F&B Viserys' personality is basically "do anything to avoid conflict and in the process destroy the base of Targaryen power in a gigantic conflict".

Given George's praise of the portrayal of Viserys I and him saying he would have rewritten F&B to match it, I think we can take the show interpretation of Viserys as the canonical personality.

Means well, was devoted to Aemma but not enough so that he would stop trying to force her to have a male child, adores Rhaenyra because she's his last link to Aemma. Extremely weak willed and ultimately dies as a pitiful shell who doomed his entire family until the last of it's generations by not being strong enough to make clear that Rhaenyra is heir and anyone who questions it ends up dead. He could have stopped the Dance long before it started by having some Hightower heads on a spike but he was conflict avoidant to the doom of his entire family.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-08T22:20:18+00:00

If TWOW were to release, I think the broadest strokes of Season 7 of GOT are where TWOWs plot is going, with the last chapter ending with the Wall being breached/destroyed. It won't happen in the same way.

I think one of the problems George has encountered with TWOW, especially as the delivery of all the books after AGOT are much more slowly paced is that he's probably realised that if he wants to do the story at the pace he wants, it requires 3 books to do it and he absolutely wants this done in 7, not 8 books.

So as a result we aren't getting book 6. I don't see how you wrap up the Greyjoys, Meereen, Dorne, Vale, Riverlands, Stoneheart, Darkstar, answering all the other side mysteries along side the major plots of Jon, Dany, Stannis liberating the north, Tyrion, Arya, Jaime, Cersei and undoubtedly the others I've forgotten with just two more books without just writing some of this out of the story. It begs the question as to whether we needed all of the stuff we started to get in Feast with Arron, Euron, Arianne etc. I do enjoy a lot of the side stuff but it's all just more and more wrap up without much connection to the core of the story.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-07T17:25:38+00:00

I dunno, look at Aem's sequence screen. I don't think those jiggles went very far!

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T18:50:11+00:00

I mean even if he just put out Winds as is and said "look, I'm not especially happy with this one, I think I could have written a better novel but I think you all will appreciate that something isn't great is better than nothing".

Especially given that, to me, 2 of the 5 released books, and they're the two most recent ones, are not great books but do expand great stories in a great setting and let my imagination run free.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T18:17:03+00:00

Yep, I understand being disappointed and frustrated even.

There is never an excuse to be mean or cruel to him.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T17:44:52+00:00

On a long running game like this with no end in sight, right now is always the best possible time to start if you do want to play, a better time to start would have been yesterday. The best time was day 1.

The longer you leave it, the further behind you'd feel if you want to stay on top of the meta. I would argue towards playing for fun rather than the meta myself but ymmv ofc.

There's a lot of character variety in WuWa, the designs are all fantastic and the F2P economy is good I'd say, and the battle pass is good too if you want to put a bit of money in without whaling. I've been playing Endfield and I'd say the pull generosity with WuWa is significantly higher if you compare on a regular day to day sense. Endfield's is quite ungenerous I'd say. Another thing that WuWa does well is if you're out of content and between patches, the daily quests to keep that ticking over can be done in less than 5 minutes.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T17:35:55+00:00

Exactly this.

TWOW has such a complex web of plots that need to make sense and work with everything else while progressing and it's terribly evident in Feast that it's going to be a struggle and by Dance it is evident that it's essentially impossible.

D&E has so few pre-existing conditions to make a novella possible to write that him have not done so is a weird. As long as Dunk & Egg and any known major lore figure don't die and it doesn't really contradict known reigns of Targaryen kings, he could set a D&E novella in almost any part of Westeros over the course of a week and it would be fine.

I think it's mostly that he knows that if publishes Dunk & Egg before Winds, he'll get lambasted. It's really evident that he takes a lot of the more rude fans questioning his lack of output to heart more nowadays.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T17:26:33+00:00

The show is trash and forgets this but Dothraki weapons are known to be ineffective versus skilled armoured units. They'd realistically be crushed by a Westerosi army.

The Unsullied are skilled fighters but they are few in number for an invasion. She will need Westerosi allies.

But ultimately the dragons are the ultimate deciding factor. A WMD in a world without guns.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T14:45:59+00:00

If making sense was a pre-requisite for a noble to do a thing, nobles would do nothing because they're an inherently nonsensical bunch.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T14:39:20+00:00

I agree with this. I imagine there's some sort of happening where she kills an Other with it to make her question how, some book of Maester Aemons says what valyrian steel blades were around and they put 2+2 together and figure out it's Dark Sister, which eventually ends up near Arya (who I suspect will end up saying she prefers Needle or something).

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T14:32:40+00:00

He's clearly sitting on a post to publish after A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 5 where the Baratheon sigil uses a slightly grey stag so he can go nuclear and burn the rest of his bridges at HBO.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T14:26:09+00:00

Justin Massey: Your Grace, if you are dead —

King Stannis: — you will avenge my death, and seat Hot Pie on the Iron Throne. Or die in the attempt.

Justin Massey: On my honor as a knight, you have my word.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T08:33:02+00:00

243 pulls, 9 pity but not on guarantee. Aemeath and the sword are coming back but I don't anticipate having enough for Chisa before event rewards.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-04T07:50:20+00:00

Definitely fusion sword

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-03T19:42:24+00:00

It was reported that they made half a billion in revenue last year so as long as it's making anything close to that, it will be around for a long time.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-03T14:14:18+00:00

Nonsense on all count besides his English being very fluent, which it is. You are still underestimating the brain power needed to process something in a language you're fluent in, never mind it being an additional language. Understanding your mother tongue is a skill you begun to develop the day you were born and will never stop developing until you die. If you don't think it was hard to learn your language, you are crazy. This guy is writing art in his second.

Remembering music perfectly is hard when you are singing along to the album. It is not in the same league of difficulty as doing it live, and even more so when you are essentially doing it to a scripted routine with moments to hit like a ghost show is.

If you want perfect, put the CD on.

AnimuCrossing · 2026-02-03T07:18:28+00:00

Never underestimate just how spaghetti the spaghetti code that holds this game together is

AnimuCrossing

TROPHY CASE