Does Ruins of the Empire follow directly from the story of Turf Wars, or the show? That is, is it necessary to have read Turf Wars in order to read RotE? I've read only the first part of Turf Wars, and don't feel like reading the others, but definitely want to get hold of RotE. Does it involve characters or plotlines introduced in Turf Wars?
Nah, you can easily pick up with just the ending to the show, just noting that Zhu Li beat out Raiko in a presidential candidate (where they were the only two in the race).
@mytly4 replied to your photoset “frozenrevenant: Renly’s Peach.”
Renly appears to have green eyes here ... Baratheon seed not strong enough?
Ah, well...
His companion was a man near twenty whose armor was steel plate of a deep forest-green. He was the handsomest man Sansa had ever set eyes upon; tall and powerfully made, with jet-black hair that fell to his shoulders and framed a clean-shaven face, and laughing green eyes to match his armor. Cradled under one arm was an antlered helm, its magnificent rack shimmering in gold. --AGOT, Sansa I
Renly was handsome as Robert had been handsome; long of limb and broad of shoulder, with the same coal-black hair, fine and straight, the same deep blue eyes, the same easy smile. --ACOK, Catelyn II
[GRRM] did note with some amusement that his readers catch his mistakes for him (Renly's eyes being green once, then blue, and then calling them 'blue-green eyes that changed color depending on what he wears' as an out). Ditto with various horse gender oopses. --con report, 2005
@read-everything replied:
Authors are not infallible, neither are their editors. I've seen so many tiny inconsistencies like that in really great books. It happens...
It’s not really the inconsistency that’s the issue (nobody really cares that Bran’s horse Dancer turned from a filly to a gelding), but the fact that so much of an important plot point in AGOT was made of the Baratheon blue eyes, and yet GRRM somehow made Renly’s green. ;)
The dialogue between Tyrion and the Maester is awesome: it's somehow both hilarious and heart-wrenching at the same time.
Thanks! Simultaneously hilarious and heart wrenching is a good way to describe House Lannister.
This post is mostly headcanons, and I hate this concept of sorting and it is mostly useless to me, but istg Tyrion is a Ravenclaw at heart, ok? He was sorted into Slytherin because the rest of his family was there, but he *should* have gone to Ravenclaw.
I think Tyrion was a dreamy child. As I was saying in the previous post, he fantasized about having a mother who loved him to the extreme, he fantasized about an end to his abuse, he fantasized about riding dragons, he dreamed of going to Essos. These things to me suggest someone very creative, someone with an elaborate inner world (which was probably a survival tactic for Tyrion, because the world he lived in sure was shit, despite the wealth and opulence).
bb!Tyrion literally read and re-read books about the wonders of the ASOIAF world until they fell apart. (Do you think Tywin, the consummate Slytherin, ever did that? Fuck no. You think Tywin, or Cersei, gives a fuck about the Seven Wonders? Fuck no.) And Tyrion memorized that shit. He treasured that knowledge so much he committed it to memory, so he would have it always. “Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.”
And, like, the way Tyrion is so creative - he thinks outside the box, with his chain in the Battle of the Blackwater, and the way he designs a saddle for Bran and gives it to him freely, though the Starks meet him with bared steel - that is not a Slytherin.
So anyways. Tyrion. Ravenclaw. Tyrion’s obviously very clever, but I don’t think he would always do what the maesters wanted, because I think Tyrion valued knowledge more than he valued conforming to the educational plans that maesters laid out for him. He would read ahead, or he wouldn’t read it at all if he thought it was stupid, or he would be hiding a book about dragons under the table trying to covertly read it while the maester was trying to teach him, idk, astronomy.
So I think the maesters could become frustrated with Tyrion, or annoyed, or they would feel imposed upon. (“Now I gotta teach the dwarf? But I have to get my research published in Maester Monthly!”) (I think they could be ableist too.)
Because Tyrion doesn’t share with us any fond memories of the maesters of his childhood the way he has fond memories of Gerion, so I don’t think Tyrion formed a strong bond with any of them. At best, I think they were indifferent to him. (Another reason I think Tyrion is a Ravenclaw: I think Tyrion took his education in his own hands and taught himself a lot of stuff and sought that knowledge out. Oh sure, the maesters taught him “Standard Rich Lannister Boy Curriculum” like High Valyrian, because the maesters didn’t know what to do with him, but a bunch of stuff? A bunch of stuff I think Tyrion learned on his own, because he loved it, because he loves learning.
We get this in ADWD: “He had learned to read High Valyrian at his maester's knee”. But GRRM is adapting the idiom “to learn (something) at one’s mother’s knee” (meaning “to learn something at a very young age”) simply because Tyrion doesn’t have a mother’s knee to learn at. (Or this might just be the westerosi version of our idiom, because much of a (noble) child’s education is overseen by a maester.)
I think Tyrion received an education much the same way he has a custom suit of armor back at Casterly Rock. These are just things you *do* with Lannister boys because ~things are expected of them~
So yeah, just, Tyrion breaks my heart and I don’t think anybody really took good care of my baby in his childhood, even the maesters and
mytly4 replied to your post: samwpmarleau replied to your post “pinkletterday...
I’d also lay some of the blame on GoT’s door - they basically decided that Dorne = any non-white ethnicity, by giving us actors of Chilean and Sudanese descent respectively playing brothers. “Hey, they both have brown skin - close enough!” Ugh.
Got is awful in handling PoC on the very best of day so the myriad of ethnicities playing Dornish characters do not come as a surprise, though the specific Indian casting of fandom can’t really be traced to them? They certainly did not help with the ambiguity of RL equivalents to Dorne, and heaven knows that they more than showed they think brown people are interchangeable, but iirc of the actors playing Dornish characters, only Indira Varma is Indian.
Mostly, I think that there is a certain vagueness of who the Dornish are based on and that’s what leads to Bollywood casting (in addition to the fact that Indian actors are simply more present and visible in Hollywood). It’s not an exact correlation because GRRM derives his influence from multiple sources but he DID give clear answers to those influences. He named Palestine, he named the Moors in Spain, he tied them to Mediterraneans. Then you come to the actual cultural parallels in the text, something like Nymeria burning her ships which is pulled straights from the Muslim leader Tariq Ibn Ziyad. But perhaps this discussion is just not frequent in fandom and so people base their casts on disjointed parts of what GRRM said and miss the larger context.
mytly4 replied to your post: elphabaforpresidentofgallifrey: If amazon tries to...
Of course they’re going to sex it up. I see no way that this show is going to be anything other than a crappy Game of Thrones clone - which is crappy enough by itself already. So prepare for crappiness squared.
See, nothing concerns me more than Game of Thrones’ possible influence in this show (and any other speculative fiction works for that matter, but this show in particular is setting up to be GoT’s horror child). I understand wanting to create “the next Game of Thrones” when it comes to award-winning, audience, penetration in pop culture, etc. But that’s it. That’s as much as anyone should aspire to be “like Game of Thrones”.
Over the past few years Game of Thrones became an absolute mess in terms of storytelling, character “development”, themes, tone, worldbuilding... and yes, in terms of adaptation too. It completely misses the point of A Song of Ice and Fire and occasionally makes the opposite point.
Those same issues applied to Tolkien would make an even bigger mess.
ASOIAF allows more sexposition, tits and ass, gore, grimdark, etc. than Tolkien. Doing it the way GoT did is still very much missing the point of the books, but they could have gotten away with some of it. There’s some pretty dark and frustrating stuff in ASOIAF, there are a lot of sex scenes in the books too, etc.
Not Tolkien. Tolkien isn’t as fluffly and good-vs-evil as people think, but I think it’s still a much more openly hopeful story than ASOIAF and sex simply isn’t there that much. Adding this kind of element that made GoT famous would sound way too much like a “teenage edgelord version of Tolkien”.
(sorry, I got carried away. I clearly have Feels™ on this subject)
Have you seen that Turf Wars Part 2 already has a description? (I saw it on the Goodreads page ... no links allowed, unfortunately). Would love to hear your thoughts on that. :)
Oh man, look at that! Right on Amazon as well.
Uh, spoilers below the jump?
Recovering from the fight and furious for revenge, Triple Threats member Tokuga solidifies his ties with the duplicitous Wonyong. Meanwhile, when Republic City’s housing crisis reaches its peak, Zhu Li sets her sights on the biggest public figure in the city—President Raiko—in a bid for the presidency! With her friend’s success, the future of the spirit portal, and the wellbeing of Republic City’s citizens at stake, can Korra remain neutral and fulfill her duties as the Avatar?
In a more general sense, I do really feel like I need Part 1 out so I can understand most of this context. I’m trying my hardest (and failing) not to let my overanalysis get the better of me.
The cover art is also up on Amazon (and I assume Goodreads too), and I have to say any time Asami is properly “the angry one” Sato, my heart swells a bit. I mean, I know that it’s canonical, it’s just that there’s so many iterations of fanon Asami at this point. But it also makes me hopeful that if she’s this PISSED it means she might be more integral to the plot than the description reads.
That was a concern I had with Part 1′s description too (Griffin aka @progmanx as well, as we laid out in the previously linked piece). Not because Asami should take priority over Korra, but because she is a character that could do with a fair bit more attention given her parsimonious use in the series, and it’s a shame to waste such a perfect medium for her. So…cover art alone, I am tentatively excited. If this can tie into her infrastructure work, while also calling into question Korra’s role now that she’s not a true bridge anymore, but still provides spiritual guidance, this could be very interesting, and also potential be sources of friction for them. Not that they need to be fighting, but there’s always going to be stressors in relationships, and watching them work things out I think would be wonderful while slaying any potential Closer to Earth (not that they had those vibes in the show at all, cause they didn’t).
All this said, very very very hard for me not to jump to prospective-President Zhu Li. I don’t see it. At all. She’s competent, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t see that personality being drawn to public office. If anything she’d be efficiently running Varrick’s campaign, though I 1000% get why they wouldn’t want to go down that avenue, especially with the gender dynamics between Zhu Li and Varrick having been horribly uncomfortable for the vast majority of the show. They did what they could to right that, but part of me wonders if putting her in this mold comes more out of the desire to continue that course-correction than what would necessarily make sense.
Also Zhu Li is Korra’s friend now? Did someone inform her of that? And what the flip was Zhu Li doing with the housing crisis in the first place?
Still, I once wrote a comics wishlist for this, and Raiko’s re-election campaign was part of that. So the political junkie in me will be excited. And like, maybe Zhu Li could work as a sort of uninspired wet-blanket President Coin-esque figure (without the random about-face self-sabotage and idiocy…I only have the movies to go by and that was jarring, dude), so again, I’ll wait and see.
I’m a little leery because this reminds me of when I read the description for North and South Part 3 about Zuko and Kuei coming for a visit, and that already had wayyyyy too many cooks for that broth (why the fuck was Aang even there? Seriously.), but Part 2 had been out already and I saw that direction it was going, so that’s a whole other thing. Out of all the characters to foreground I personally wouldn’t have chosen Zhu Li, but could be quite interesting how they make it work, and hopefully we’ll have a clearer sense of the way the wind blows in July.
