The Ravenry: Week of 9/28/2015

Hello seekers,

As you may or may not know, Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire has its own Tumblr page (as well as its own Twitter and Facebook pages).  Even more excitingly,  we here at the blog have partnered with ASOIAF University to answer questions about A Song of Ice and Fire.  We – that is, NFriel and myself – take the text-based questions submitted to us, write up thoughtful text-based answers, and publish these answers on the Tumblr.

So every Monday we present to you The Ravenry.  We collect the questions we’ve answered during the previous week over on the Tumblr in post form, with a brief description of each, and publish it here, and link that post on Twitter and Facebook as well. The Queen Regent and the Lord Hand had their most productive week yet, discussing everything from books in Westeros to marriages and beddings. Plenty of hypotheticals and theorycraft, there’s certainly something for everyone this week.

Here’s The Ravenry for the week of September 28th:

Writ Small: Character Evolution in The Winds of Winter Part 1: The Good and the Neutral

A Song of Ice and Fire is nothing if not a character study painted against the canvass of politics, war and culture. George RR Martin is fond of paraphrasing Faulkner’s “The human heart in conflict is the only thing worth writing about.” As such, we expect that GRRM will continue to develop characters in The Winds of Winter. But interesting for our purposes, George RR Martin seems to enjoy contrasting and comparing character growth to historical and currently-living characters in the series. Characters often wonder about whether they’re the Smiling Knight, Tywin Lannister or Doran Martell.

But in contrast to the sometimes-popular view that all the characters are moving into dark moral and plot paths in The Winds of Winter, Nfriel, SomethingLikeaLawyer, Militant Penguin and I believe that there are some who are moving towards more positive or neutral directions. As such, part 1 focuses on the good. Thus was born a podcast idea and topic.

So, today, we analyze the following POV characters:

• Tyrion & how he’s moving from Mushroom to Lann the Clever
• Jaime & how he’s evolving from the Smiling Knight to Ser Arthur Dayne
• Bran’s wolf-knight to knight of the mind development
• Theon’s surprising redemption & movement from Reek to Torgon the Latecomer
• Asha’s pine-cone evolution & her desire not to be a boneheaded Iron Kraken.
• Arianne’s movement from Cersei to Doran Martell

If wordpress isn’t your primary spot to listen to podcasts, come listen to us over at:

• itunes
• Podbean

And if you’d like to listen along with your notes, go ahead and head on over to this link to read our manic google documenting. 

Thanks for listening!