Theon dying protecting the Starks from Euron would be a good ending for him, I think.
This is my theory too. He'll be the one to steal a dragon, destroy the Wall, and lead the army of the dead in an invasion.
The question now is how he's dying and if he's going to share the NK's fate at the hands of Arya.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
Yeah, even if everyone ends up in roughly the same position as they do in the show, the circumstances by which they'll get there are vastly different.
Destroyer of Worlds
Actually, I think Stannis will be executing Theon at the weirwood tree and thereby sacrificing him to Bran.
Way different context but it’s still Theon dying for Bran in the end.
"You can't change the world without getting your hands dirty."
New here, so humor me fellas. I don't think anything in the show's finale will happen in the books. I think the GOT showrunners were Edmure to GRRM's Robb. GRRM told them a particular thing in a context and they over-interpreted and went maverick on that. That conversation happened in 2013, when Martin expected the show to go for 10 seasons while the show was ending in seven seasons with the last one bifurcated, split, and expanded into 7 seasons.
The best example for how different the finale is, is Tyrion. Tyrion in the show is presented as this moral figure, that's not who he is going to be in the books not after the fifth one. Varys is not going to occupy that role he does in the show. And the order is reversed, Dany will go to KL first and then North and not the way in the show. The reason is that there's no reason for the North to go to Dragonstone for obsidian in the books when they have that at Skagos (where Davos is dispatched to find Rickon). You're not going to have a finale where a Stark rules independened in a seceded North and another Stark occupies the throne at KL. That makes no political sense. And nobody is gonna treat someone with weirwood magic as King material in the books not without some kind of religious revival for old gods worship down south at least. So to me the show's final seasons are fanfiction. They have the same weight and meaning as any fanfic that accidentally guessed and caught up on a plot point. I don't think it means anything.
Destroyer of Worlds
@Jack I read the spoilers and I've been mulling it over since then but I think these are actual GRRM's intended endpoints without the context or good execution to make it work.
Jon killing Daenerys and Daenerys blowing up King's Landing is very well-foreshadowed within the text. It's the crux of their themes. Jon's core theme is the choice between love and duty. He's Bloodraven murdering Aenys Blackfyre then getting exiled to the North for it by the newly elected king.
Daenerys' core theme is between her identity as the Mother of Dragons and Mysha. Protector and avenging dragon. Daenerys choosing to pick the avenging dragon and Jon picking duty crosses nicely at King's Landing.
Especially since it's stated over and over again that Daenerys' downfall will be due to love.
Now whether Daenerys blows up KL first or beats the Others first is questionable but I get the idea that Daenerys never being redeemed is part of the bitter of the finale.
On the other hand, I think we're going to see the rehabilitation of Tyrion Lannister. I mean he'll be a villain all the way to almost the end but I think we'll see Bran pardoning him and putting his talents for the good of all.
I think that'll be close to the crux of Bran's argument as well in the books but it'll have more impact when we see Tyrion go into the abyss(rather than being some incompetent saint) and Bran dragging him back into the light.
Here, I profoundly disagree. Benioff and Weiss have shown that they're disinterested in Bran Stark. They'd have put someone else on the throne if they could help it. But they heavily foreshadowed the idea in season 1 so I'm willing to guess they knew the whole time that it was Bran. It's just a very GRRM-like decision after taking a look at GRRM's Tuf Voyaging.
I do think that the Forsaken chapter has introduced and foreshadowed the idea of a god-king ruling Westeros. Just replace the imagery of Euron(Evil! Bran) with Bran.
All the other gods are slain but the Old Gods in Westeros and now there is just worship of Brandon Stark.
Aeron Damphair looked. The mound of skulls was gone. Now it was metal underneath the Crow’s Eye: a great, tall, twisted seat of razor sharp iron, barbs and blades and broken swords, all dripping blood.
Impaled upon the longer spikes were the bodies of the gods. The Maiden was there and the Father and the Mother, the Warrior and Crone and Smith … even the Stranger. They hung side by side with all manner of queer foreign gods: the Great Shepherd and the Black Goat, three-headed Trios and the Pale Child Bakkalon, the Lord of Light and the butterfly god of Naath.
And there, swollen and green, half-devoured by crabs, the Drowned God festered with the rest, seawater still dripping from his hair.
People are quicker to change religions when a spellcaster comes into the forefront. Just ask Melisandre. And Bran seems on the pathway to be far more powerful than her but it helps that Bran has connections to many of the 7 Kingdoms' most powerful.
He has the North, the Vale(Ned Stark was popular there and Robert Arryn is his cousin), the Riverlands (Robb Stark was popular there and his uncle rules there) and the Westerlands through Tyrion Lannister.
Perhaps Asha Greyjoy becomes close to Sansa Stark or Jon Snow.
And I think that we may see characters close to the Starks make connections to other kingdoms like Samwell Tarly to the Tyrells and Martells.
There's a lot of ways to play this. You could have Tyrion Lannister, Sansa Stark and Samwell Tarly playing kingmaker for Bran Stark as a compromise candidate.
I agree with this. I think they were aware of how bad it looked if two mad queens went down so they created another queen in the north but I do think Sansa ruling the North is accurate. I also think that's why they decided not to have Jaime kill Cersei early on because they were going to use her as the final human villain. It looks really bad if you two mad queens being killed off by their boyfriends..
One other thing about Brandon Stark being king but GRRM's true message seems to be very anti-monarchy. No human being is fit to be monarch . Not Jon, not Dany, not Stannis, not Robb etc.
If we did have a perfect monarch, it wouldn't be anything like Aragorn. If we're to look at the broad strokes of the show, the perfect monarch wouldn't be human at all. The perfect monarch would be alien.
Just broken. Like me, he thought.
"Bran,” he said sullenly. Bran the Broken. “Brandon Stark.” The cripple boy.
But who else would wed a broken boy like him?
And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch.
https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/brdpdw/spoilers_extended_grrm_once_said_that_a_fan/
(If anyone's ever read FSN, GRRM would like Saber.)
Edited by MadSkillz on May 23rd 2019 at 1:35:44 AM
"You can't change the world without getting your hands dirty."It's somewhere along the lines of what the central antagonist of Person of Interest concludes, that mankind cannot be ruled by itself. It needs some form of omniscient, eldritch being above it. It's a interesting thought for a series, in some ways almost more than the main series.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
To me, it’s very telling that when GRRM was asked if the book finale was the same as the show, he listed off a bunch of minor characters who wrren’t in the show. To me, that says that yes, the show ending matches the planned book ending in essentials. Dany might lose Rhaegal to Euron in a different way (say, via the dragon-controlling horn), but the major events - Arya being crucial to defeating the dead, Jon and Dany starting a relationship, Dany becoming the Mad Queen, Jon killing Dany, Bran becoming king - are what’s intended to happen in the books.
And likely other major plot beats - like Shireen being sacrificed - will happen in the books as well, albeit in different ways (I’m betting on Melisandre doing it when Stannis isn’t present).
Destroyer of Worlds
Well, GRRM was a sci-fi writer more than anything else. He's just most famous for his fantasy series.
Brandon Stark with his powers is just the equivalent of the Great and Powerful Turtle from GRRM's Wildcard series who was a superhero with god-like psychic abilities or Haviland Tuf from Tuf Voyaging who was this monotone, creepy-efficient man that had a god-like ship that allowed him to terraform worlds and destroy worlds at will and had a psychic cat for a pet.
“Human,” said Haviland Tuf, in his voice without emotion. His huge pale hand was stroking Dax. “I was born human, and lived as such for long years, Moses. Yet then I found the Ark, and I have ceased to be a man. The powers I may wield are vaster than those of many gods that humans have worshipped. There is not a man I meet but I could take his life. There is not a world I pause on that I could not waste utterly,or remake as I choose. I am the Lord God, or as much of one as either of you is ever likely to encounter.”
“It is a great fortune for you that I am kind and benevolent and merciful, and too frequently bored. You are counters to me, nothing more—pieces and players in a game with which I have whiled away a few weeks. It seemed an interesting game, this plague business, and so it was for a time. Yet it quickly grew dull. Even after two plagues, it was clear that I had no meaningful opposition, that you, Moses, were incapable of anything that might surprise me. My objectives were accomplished—I had taken back the people of the City of Hope, and the rest would be meaningless ritual. I have elected instead to end it.“Go, Moses, and plague no more. I am through with you.“And you, Jaime Kreen, see that your Charitans take no further vengeance. You shall have victories enough. In a generation, his culture and his religion and his way of life will all be dead.“Remember who I am, and remember that Dax can look into your thoughts. If the Ark should pass this way again, and find that you have disobeyed me, it will be as I have shown you. The plagues will sweep your little world until nothing lives upon it.”
So yeah, maybe that theory about Bran becoming galaxy-brain Littlefinger/Varys/Bloodraven might be true by the end.
This is the type of guy that GRRM affirms is god by the end of the series.
And this guy sterilizes 99% of the population against their will for the greater good because they wouldn't strop reproducing which threatened to cause havoc , war and death across the galaxy.
This is only after stopping a galaxy-wide war by throwing his weight around and threatening to genocide planets if they don't agree to his mostly reasonable peace terms and anyone who breaks them will be wiped out root and stem.
I mean obviously this isn't played like a good thing just as something horrific that makes sense but still....
"You can't change the world without getting your hands dirty."
Shameful Display
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
How cool would it be to have a Holy Grail war with characters from Westerosi history.
The context and execution are everything. Without that no plot point or ending means anything. Saying Snape loved Lily by itself is meaningless since many fanfics had long guessed that. That still made how Rowling dealt with that revelation and blow surprising, and unexpected because it didn't land once in the way any fanfic had predicted.
"Foreshadowing isn't Character Development." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mlNyqhnc1M). And in the case of Martin it's hard to separate foreshadowing from Red Herring, teases, and false roads.
In the case of KL, you have the wildfire caches under Aerys time under the city, Cersei making new wildfire, you have Jon Connington radicalized, sick and dying. Jon Connington is the guy in the books with a thing for bells and he's the one going "What would Tywin do?". And of course Tyrion is the guy set up as "The small man with a big shadow snarling in the middle of it all". So this is set-up to be a massive Gambit Pileup not Dany coming in and massacring them all "just coz".
In language so vague that you can interpret it any ways. Just that she would know three betrayals. She would be "the Mother of Dragons, Slayer of Lies". Daenerys is set up to be at best a Tragic Heroine, not "What if John Brown were Hitler" which is how the show plays it.
To Galadriel,
Maybe because Martin doesn't see those as "minor characters" nor would we expect to still see them as "minor characters" by the end of the books. The show has expanded what were already minor characters into significant ones. Like you know Ramsay Bolton appears in just two out of five published books and is mainly tied to Theon's story. The show made him a major villain for four straight seasons (3-6) because of their love for Torture Porn. Jorah Mormont isn't remotely the same guy on the show as he's in the books.
I definitely don't see GRRM resolving Dany's story by saying that she was Evil All Along and that she was always doomed to be evil because of who her father was, or dismissing her entire story of abolitionism and liberation by playing all of them in the same way Sauron's forces were Equal-Opportunity Evil played straight. That seems to be so antithetical to the basic argument of the stories and themes, that it's laughable.
Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on May 23rd 2019 at 8:42:21 AM
Destroyer of Worlds
@Revolutionary_Jack Oh then I agree with your points.
Massive gambit pile up with Daenerys receiving all the blame seems about right.
Even the showrunners are hiding their asses and saying that Daenerys was a tragic heroine and not a villain.
Edited by MadSkillz on May 23rd 2019 at 8:59:18 AM
"You can't change the world without getting your hands dirty."
The show literally has Tyrion say that she's a worse person than Tywin/Cersei/Gregor and equates the slaveowners she killed as being the same as marginalized groups no different from the Jews, Romani, LGBT targeted by the Nazis.
Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on May 23rd 2019 at 9:06:18 AM
Should we cover the show ending as spoilers or is that unnecessary?
Dany burning King's Landing is going to make a whole lot more sense if she is facing Aegon VI and the Dornish rather than the Lannisters. The Golden Company being under Cersei is the biggest red flag that this is what will happen.
Aegon the VI is going to be extremely popular. So much so that Westeros, aside from perhaps the Starks, would never accept Dany as their queen. The smallfolk hate her. The lords hate her. Aegon's troops follow out of loyalty, not fear. He'll probably be the guy that drives Cersei back to the Rock. And I think he might even be the guy that takes down Euron (unknowingly with the help of Bran's greenseer abilities), as I don't think there is enough time for Dany to face the Others, Euron, and Aegon.
Compared to Aegon VI, Dany will just be the leader of a bunch of slaves, dothraki, and northmen. She has terrifying dragons. She claims to have defeated a bunch of zombies and ice people, but that never affected that south. No one will want her as queen, and Dany will come to believe that she must rule by fear. Combine that with the fact that Aegon VI's forces are probably going to kill Rhaegal.
All of this makes sense for Dany eventually. Killing the masters of Slaver's Bay may be justified. Killing Mirri Maz Duur... a bit less so, but understandable. Drogo deserved it, but you can argue whether or not that killing Rhaego may have been necessary. But Dany burning her was understandable from an emotional perspective. Having the wineseller's daughters tortured, however, was an extreme act of brutality that is often forgotten, and very clearly shows that Dany's actions can be driven by her rage. That isn't just foreshadowing: that is Dany's established character.
I am not about comparing Dany to the Nazis though. The slaver masters and the victims of the Holocaust are in no away comparable.
Edited by SilentColossus on May 24th 2019 at 1:12:58 AM
If anything Dany and Aegon are one-another's Spear Counterparts in the books. Both of them are (possibly in Aegon's case) Targaryens that want to take what they see as their rightful place on the Iron Throne after living in Essos their entire lives. Both have armies fanatically loyal to them (especially since in the books the Golden Company has fought for each Blackfyre pretender, so Aegon would likely be no different), and both are aided by former major players in Aerys II's government (Connington in Aegon's case, Barristan in Dany's).
But yeah, the slavers are nowhere near the Jews and other minorities.
Edited by theLibrarian on May 24th 2019 at 3:39:00 AM
Uhhh don't know about that. I am pretty sure that Daenerys is going to King's Landing first and then go North. I think the show flubbed and changed the order because they care more about "who wins the throne" then Martin does. Having the series end with "House Stark won the game" is thematically not Martin's point. In the HOTU visions, chronologically, "the cloth dragon cheered by crowd" happens before the vision of a blue rose atop the wall.
Others also point out that if anything like the Jon Snow stabs Dany thing is gonna happen in the books, which I have some doubts about of which more later, the set up for that is Azor Ahai and Nissa Nissa. And that particular subplot isn't about any throne, it's about the Long Night, so metaphorically Jon Snow stabbing Daenerys because he doesn't like global abolitionism isn't gonna happen in the books because there's no thematic setup for that.
Like I said, I think practically anything and everything in the finale is garbled. 
My one big suspicion is that the showrunners changed and switched the endings of Jaime/Cersei with Jon/Dany. I think it was originally Jon and Dany being Together in Death after they save the world while Jaime kills Cersei which is highly foreshadowed in the books. I think all the showrunners got from Martin was that both Jon and Dany would die and also told them Cersei's fate, so they decided to switch over and transfer because they do that with a lot. And also they have a Lannister-fetish and tendency to whitewash them, so making Jaime and Cersei, an incest which the show normalizes, into an expression of romantic love while raking Dany over the coals falls in their pattern of screwing every non-Lannister to make them look better and more capable. They made the Starks dumb, the Tyrells are Paper Tiger, they made Ellaria Sand evil, and finally they made Dany Hitler.
I think Dany restarting her conquest of Westeros is going to be more of an extended epilogue, showing that old grievances and conflicts won't just disappear when you become the hero. The idea will be that Dany won. The Long Night will be a much more dangerous and climatic event in the books, perhaps taking up most of the Winds of Winter, with Euron and Aegon's war being a little sideshow that distracts the South. The world is saved, and she could just settle down... sorta. Much like in the show, I think Jon will be apprehensive about continuing a relationship with Dany after finding out she is his aunt. So that makes "settling down as Queen in the North with Jon as her King" a bit less appealing to her. Dany can choose to plant trees, or she can choose Fire and Blood. She chooses what she has been choosing. Fire and Blood. So she decides to continue her crusade to reclaim Westeros for the Targaryens.
I do think she may consider staying in the North, and become this close to doing so, only for Tyrion to convince her to head south. All in the name of House Targaryen... but can we stop at Casterly Rock first? Tyrion forgot some things.
I agree Jaime is going to kill Cersei in the books, but it'll take place in Casterly Rock, which about to be taken by Tyrion and Dany. I did always imagine Tyrion burning/melting the Rock around his siblings, causing them to be buried like in the show, but after reading a few Tumblr posts about how big the damn Rock is, I find that less likely. But whether Jaime kills Cersei out of mercy or out of his new grievances towards her, I'm not sure. It'll probably be both. Tyrion will still find them, but seeing the corpses of his dead siblings will make him question the path he is on.
tl;dr: Tyrion and Dany will want to fuck shit up even after the Others are defeated. So they commence in fucking shit up.
Who wins the throne is important to the characters. Dany won't give it up. She has been raised her entire life to believe that reclaiming the Iron Throne is the destiny of House Targaryen. And who has the throne is important, of course, because rebuilding Westeros is going to be an important note to end the story on. Sansa will be a fantastic fit for the North. I'm still contemplating about how Bran works.
Edited by SilentColossus on May 24th 2019 at 8:48:35 AM
Martin has mentioned how his favorite bit of Lord of the Rings is the Scouring of the Shire (i.e after they defeat the main supernatural and apocalyptic threat, the heroes fight the far lesser, more mundane and personal threat back home). I'm quite sure the "Others, then South" order is staying in the books as well.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
The Shire in Lotr represents the orderly idyllic home and place of nostalgia. Emotionally it had to be that for the scouring to work. KL has never been that for any of the characters. Winterfell is. So Dany heading south after she saves the wall doesn’t fit emotionally with scouring of the shire.
That seems like a overly narrow view of what the Scouring of the Shire can stand for, even because Daenerys has no particular love for Winterfell either. King's Landing is just a decent bet because that's where her life's goal (the Iron Throne) lies and it serves as a useful panopticon for the Westerosi society due being the largest city of the kingdom and its central, pulsating heart (hence why its avoided destruction by Aerys is such a crucial story lynchpin). It has a lot of thematic weight.
If you want to link a Westerosi location to Daenery's emotional anchor, the closest would be Dragonstone (which is a possibility, given all the talk of stone dragons awakening and the stone dragons in Dragonstone), and that's also South.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
There’s another specific one. Dorne. The water gardens. Dany is specifically prophesied to destroy that. And a Targaryen dragon rider completing the conquest of Dorne fits better with the overall effect. I think she would do that for them siding with Young Griff and install the yronwoods. A liberator eating the legacy of another liberated people fits better. House Martell called itself unbent, unbowed, unbroken. Eventually someone has to do that for real. Ironic house words and tempting fate amirite?
I think GRRM outright refuted that one on his blog.
Edited by SilentColossus on May 24th 2019 at 9:39:25 AM
Which one? And when?
I feel like Book-Euron may side with the White Walkers and end up broadly fulfilling the same archetype as the Night King did in the show (i.e the individual face of the nameless legion of undead) and fall in a similar manner in Winterfell.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."