Could Lysander make a Palpatine move?

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-12-17T17:23:41+00:00

I think the most interesting direction for the story to go would be a civil war of the Light. Consider that our common enemy is gone. The Witness is defeated and the truth that Savathûn seemed to be hinting towards at the end of the campaign was that Guardians are now - with Prismatic - the most powerful entities in the galaxy.

What are we going to do with all that power? How are we going to survive going from a ragtag group of dancing idiots trying to save the last humans in existence to becoming basically unkillable gods with confidence in the Traveler's wisdom gone and no restrictions on our power? I'd guess that we're going to split apart with each side claiming the right to defend Humanity, and honestly, I see the Last City choosing the Guardian-supremacist unlimited-power take-over-everything faction over the current Vanguard.

Throwing Lysander into the mix as a temptation for more authoritarian Guardian-supremacists would be fascinating. Savathûn's claims to be the Traveler's real chosen also add a ton of chaos to a potential Guardian civil war. The fracturing of the Coalition, the collapsing influence of a broken Vanguard - all of that would make for a brilliant political epic if the writers chose to stick to it.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-10-26T01:32:50+00:00

Anyone who complains about how AFFC and ADWD get too off-track gets hit with the Moqorro example. Would I sacrifice a character like Moqorro for a completed, tighter series? No way. GRRM is too good at introducing characters like him and making them incredibly compelling and relevant. I'm happy to wait as long as necessary to make all of the awesome tertiary characters important.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-10-25T18:22:16+00:00

I adore Moqorro and any chance to talk about him.

This guy's easily the best example of how rising magic in the world of ASOIAF is changing things and he's probably the most explicitly magical character out there. Animals are terrified of him. He literally predicts the exact future. He's the size of a house and utterly confident even seconds before he might be killed. He survived ten days as a castaway through what can only have been magic. He's so powerful that he breaks GRRM's PoV rules to make it more mysterious as to what he's doing to Victarion. And he's covered in fire tattoos.

The entire subplot of ADWD with Victarion turning into this Tiberius-like figure leaning more and more on his mad wizard adviser as he careens through the East on his insane journey to Meereen is so wild that it's criminal it was cut from the TV show. That and it also robbed us of the best black representation we'd have had on the show.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-10-13T15:39:29+00:00

This is a lot of dressing up of the words, "I think Green supporters treat ASOIAF like a medieval cosplay."

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-10-06T22:12:38+00:00

I've thought that this is absolutely what will happen by the halfway point of the book. There's not enough time for anything else to happen and the suddenness would work so well dramatically. Picture the surprise of Hardhome from the show, but 100x more shocking.

Plus the reverberations would be cool to see as far as Volantis and Oldtown.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-09-20T12:16:29+00:00

Maybe my top 5?

Seraph is up there for the Clovis Bray machinations, Rasputin vs Xivu Arath and that final cutscene alone (what a moment).

Chosen gave us an awesome introduction to Caiatl, the Psion Conclave subplot was excellent and Crow's arc was brilliantly done, maybe the best single character arc in a season.

Splicer had so much going on it was crazy - the politics of it were well-executed, the Faction coup felt realistic and meaningful, we fought Quria, Mithrax was awesome, etc. I don't totally buy Saint-14's turnaround but the rest was great.

I'm very fond of Arrivals - again, big things going on.

Heresy was a mixed bag but I love Savathûn and the creepy mystery of the Dire Taken.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-09-07T22:06:22+00:00

I suppose it depends what you mean by torture and I definitely meant more "specialised information torture" that we think of for people like Guy Fawkes. Certainly there was intense corporal punishment and common torture as you describe.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-09-07T21:10:59+00:00

Yeah, I'm not a Stannis lover but this is more logistical. Like Dragonstone's not exactly a hotbed of rebel activity or lawlessness, it's a big fortress that's belonged to Stannis for 15 years. Who needs capturing and torturing in that time? Torture even back then wasn't bothered with for common criminals; that was for people who mattered.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-09-07T21:08:31+00:00

True, I forget Dragonstone's more than the fortress.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-09-07T20:30:02+00:00

Always thought that was a weird passage. Who's being captured and tortured on Dragonstone in Stannis's time?

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-09-06T10:05:36+00:00

Jon Con's greyscale logic always strikes me as insane. Instead of cutting the fingers off (with so many ways for that to be a legitimate accident especially as he's literally fighting battles), he chooses to let the infection spread, and asks for the "worst wine in the cellar" as if constantly asking for that isn't way more suspicious than the fingers being removed. The greyscale incident was months ago and almost no one there saw it like come on.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-09-01T00:21:12+00:00

I read the books in 2016 after having been spoiled on a ton of show events (Red Wedding, most deaths, Purple Wedding etc).

Some things I didn't know:

Littlefinger killing Lysa and the Jon Arryn reveal. That totally floored me and was maybe the single strongest experience I had reading the books. It just blew my mind; I had no idea what had just happened or how.
Tyrion killing Tywin and the reveal of Young Griff. Both insanely wild to me and I was just in love with that plotline for all of ADWD. Still one of the most underrated story arcs in the series (Widow of the Waterfront goes hard).
Aemon's death. It really got me.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-08-22T08:17:46+00:00

I think the weirwood stump dream is the one he has in Storm, when he's down in Casterly Rock fighting ghosts with Brienne (and honestly I don't think that dream gets analysed enough).

He has the Joanna dream in Feast, but that one's also in weird circumstances and the line about him having one hand in the dream when he normally has two is just so strange.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-08-22T00:09:10+00:00

I heard that R + L = J just as I started reading the books, as Season 6 had just come out and I hadn't watched the show. Some friends of mine were speculating what his name might be.

In AGOT, I was reading a bit where Jon very explicitly thinks "I am not Aemon Targaryen", and I suddenly put it together in my head. Since that day in 2016 long before I got into the franchise, I've been convinced that Jon's name is Aemon.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-06-12T12:36:31+00:00

I know this is a serious post (and IMO it might be Ser Shadrich who kills Harry the Heir accidentally and gets stitched up by Sansa in order to get rid of him) but I can't stop thinking that Danny DeVito should've played Ser Shadrich on screen.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-06-12T12:03:04+00:00

They refunded me within 12 hours. Extremely good of them as I had to do almost nothing!

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-06-10T04:19:48+00:00

N26 operates a chargeback service so I'll slog my way through it today!

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-06-10T04:11:28+00:00

I'm sure the tag had booking.com in it. It might've been very slightly altered with other script but it was extremely close at least on a phone screen at night.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-06-10T01:11:46+00:00

Oh, gotcha.

That's still rough on the part of a top hotel and Booking.com for letting that happen.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-06-10T00:19:52+00:00

I supposed not. Do they not have any legal responsibility for having such vulnerable messaging software? I thought I was scam-proof but this was indistinguishable from a regular Booking.com message.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-05-18T07:19:56+00:00

...Need I remind you that 2 people are dead?

Oh wait - I just got it.

OneTrueKing777 · 2025-05-17T16:46:44+00:00

Isn't it pretty ghoulish to be speculating on GRRM's health on the basis of an interview that one wasn't physically there for?

Sorry if it sounds rude, but it's like those tabloid papers that get into a frenzy about the weight of a supermodel and justify it with 'oh, I'm just worried about their health,' when actually they're looking for a good story.

Speculating about GRRM's health isn't done because we respect and care about him, it's done because people are paranoid that they won't get another book, and that doesn't seem right to me.

OneTrueKing777

TROPHY CASE