"Speaker For The Dead": Bran Stark as a Reference to Ender Wiggin.
I read the first two Ender books when FAR too young to handle their themes of, y'know, the intimacy of xenocide when you're a child soldier. Scary stuff for a kid of age with the protagonist.
So colour me Unsurprised upon relearning that the language the aliens of SFTD's aliens to speak with humans... is named "Stark".
Because of course GRRM would find joy in a conveniently horrifying-by-implication Pun.
The Premise of "Speaker For The Dead" (the sequel to "Ender's Game", a Differently Horrifying inspiration for some of my childhood nightmares) is this: human colonists and the local alien species had been more-or-less at peace until a human is Suddenly & Inexplicably Murdered by the aliens who considered him a Friend.
Due to [the Plot of Ender's Game], Humans are wary of Jumping To Conclusions as to this seemingly Senseless Violence and Ender Wiggin (of Ender's Game) stops at the planet to Speak at some Funerals. To properly Speak for the Deceased, Ender investigates the Murders and because of [the plot of Ender's Game] feels certain that there has been a Fatal Translation Error.
Spoilers for SFTD & comparisons to Bran's POV Arc under cut.
He's Right.
The Piqueninos (the aliens) are still learning to communicate with the humans they're sharing a planet with, using a language named "Stark". The deceased men were both held in great esteem by the Piqueninos, one of the primary reasons why [A Xenologist Expert] was sought after: why kill someone who was their Friend?
It turns out that Ritualistically Vivisecting respected males of their society is how the Piqueninons Evolve: they had spent the entire book calling Trees their "Fathers" and they had meant that literally.
The gratuitously violent murders of their human friends were efforts by the Piqueninos to honour these men by making them Fathers, using the same method of Deification on the human men as they would to their own kind.
Cue the Horrific Revelation that, no, Humans Do Not Transistion From Life Phases via being Ritualistically Killed to Become Trees: the Piqueninos efforts to "honour" their Human Friends actually Killed Them. Permanently.
Now let's reevaluate what Bran Stark's been up with the Singers in ASOIAF.
Brynden Rivers has been sending Dreams to kids with Greenseer Potential and directing them North.
Jojen & Bran, inspired by such Dreams, go Beyond The Wall to seek out this "Three-Eyed Crow" who will teach Bran how to "fly".
Bran & Company end up in a magically warded Cave populated by the mythic "Children of the Forest" (Singers) and someone they call "The Last Greenseer", a man who has a weirwood tree growing through him & introduces himself as a Man Formerly Known as Brynden.
contextual clues identify him as "Brynden Rivers": one of three Great Bastards of Aegon IV had with Lady Melissa Blackwood*, Hand & Spymaster to Kings Aerys I & Maekar I, a Disappeared Lord Commander of the Night's Watch.
the Singers confirm the religious beliefs shared with the First Men as being Literal: the trees are gods and the gods are trees. Incidentally, Jojen brings up how Revered Greenseers are by those who worship the Old Gods.
Jojen has Greensight and Bran, as someone who can both Skinchange AND Greendream, qualifies for "Greenseer" status. Except... the Singers Very Consistently call Brynden "the Last Greenseer" even with Bran Stark right there contradicting that There Can Be Only One (the Singers also mention greenseers as existing in Plural, historically, & that those of their Own Species have "died out/[faded?]").
Brynden "The Last Greenseer" takes Bran as his [apprentice]. Part of this Training is going into the Weirwood Tree [Hivemind], a network that transcends Time & Space (because Roots, i guess?) and allows Bran to see all sorts of varyingly traumatising Visions.
Bran's lessons require his sitting on a Weirwood Throne beside Brynden who is, incidentally, a body horror Weirwood Tree-Human hybrid now.
BTW, Bran's "training diet" features an Ominously Described "Paste" fed to him by the Singers. It's made from Weirwood Seeds, apparently.
(hey isn't everyone stuck in this spooky underground cave because leaving it means getting eaten by zombies? whete are they getting these Weirwood Seeds from- oh. Hi there, Brynden the Tree-Man Abomination)
wait, if Bran's a Greenseet now then how come the Singers still call Brynden the "Last" Greenseer? is this, perhaps, an instance of, say... interspecies life phase transitions being Poorly Translated to humans due to Trees Being Gods and Trees Transcending Time & Death?
has Jojen, perhaps, Made An Assumption about "when" that Title of "Greenseer" is gained? He had said that Greenseers were Deified as Weirwood Trees, implying they were entombed upon death...
...but what if Dying is part of the deification process?
(well, for a given value of "dying"... *looks at Brynden The Tree-Abomination Rivers*)
...the Cave Singers are totally going to ritualistically vivisect Bran and make him their new Tree God, aren't they.
(and, from the looks of Brynden, some decades into HIS initiation... this process will Not Be Quick nor "Pretty")
Brynden is probably complicit in the Singers' Scheme to Make Bran A Tree, if only due to Brynden being the "Weirwood" Bran's Paste Training Diet is made from.
Brynden might also want Out from the whole "Unnaturally Alive & Conscious This Whole Time" thing because WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO BE ALIVE AS YOU ARE TURNED INTO A TREE.
let us Not Recall the descriptions of: Brynden's current appearance, the many non-peaceful expressions carved as Faces for Heart Trees, the states of humans "honoured" by the Piqueninos in SFTD, any descriptions of what Becoming A Tree involves...
...and any investigation into what, exactly, a Weirwood's "seeds" may be. I stop at "Horus in Set's Salad" and THAT WAS ENOUGH.
MOVING RIGHT ALONG, when Not Being A Tree Hivemind, Brynden & thus Bran seem to fulfil a role not dissimilar to that of "Speakers For The Dead": they examine historic events as Outside parties. Brynden instructs Bran on evaluating his Visions objectively, without reverance nor judgement. At least, I think he did. Again: preservation of own sanity > exact visuak descriptions of events in ASOIAF.
Interestingly, being an effective Speaker for the Dead requires much of the same skillset as a Competent Kingmaker (or, at least, a King UnMaker).
To Conclude, the Similarities*** between Bran's interactions with the Cave Singers and those of Human Friends & Piqueninos in "Speaker For The Dead" are Multiple &, knowing GRRM, probably Deliberate. Let's just hope Meera and Jojen have gone AWOL because Meera is Plotting Arson, not because they're of Interest to the Cave Singers' reproductive purposes too. Both series do enjoy subjecting female characters to Grim Maternity &/or Horrific Relationship Revelations.
Arson is my Ideal Plotline for Meera, Grand Elk Larceny as a distant second. All those "Last Hero" parallels Bran Stark has going on should be Recognised (by Meera) and AVOIDED (by Meera) WITH FIRE. I'm lowkey convinced Brynden would actually prefer being burned alive to "indefinitely trapped in rotting human flesh as he slowly becomes a Tree (potentially for the purposes of interspecies repropogation)".
Footnotes
*Lady Melissa Blackwoof was likely an aunt or sister of Lady Melantha Blackwood of Winterfell, Bran's great-great grandmother: there is almost certainly at least one other Blackwood in Bran's family tree, likely as one of his 4 unnamed great-grandmothers through Grandpa Hoster Tully & Grandma Minisa Whent.
It's also possible that all the Movement at the end of Brynden's reign as Hand (the Lords going to KL for the Great Council that made Betha** Blackwood Queen of Westeros & Grand Escort from KL to The Wall to send off Maester Aemon & Ser Brynden) was how Lord Beron Stark's Heir, Edwyle, ended up married to a Riverlander like Melantha Blackwood.
**Queen Betha & Lady Melantha were almost certaingly "cousins" of some sort to Brynden through his mother, Melissa Blackwood. The exact degree of relation is unknown but It's There.
The degrees of relation from "Lady Melissa, Paramour of Aegon IV" to "Lady Melantha of Winterfell" connect Brynden (through his Blackwood mother) to EVERY living Stark, courtesy of their one unanimously agreed shared Grandpa (Lord Rickard Stark, of "murdered by Aerys II & Part 3 of 4 Extremely Valid Reasons for Ned's Rebellion").
Lady Catelyn's being a Riverlander, specifically a Tully & a Whent of Harrenhal, make it likely that Brynden's related to HER too.
Jon, of course, has Black Betha as all 4 of his paternal great-great grandmothers AND Lady Melantha as one of his maternal ones (the others being Marna Locke, Arya Flint, & Lorra Royce): Jon's somehow being "5/8ths Blackwood" is how I got distracted by the blood ties of Brynden & Bran in the first place!
In HOTU passage, do you think Rhaegar was actually seeing Daenerys? And if so, did he mistake her for a vision of his future daughter, "Visenya"?
I think it’s highly significant that in the vision Dany witnessed in the House of the Undying, Rhaegar looked directly at her and met her eyes when speaking of the Prince that was Promised. And it’s significant that it felt like he was talking to her when he said that “there must be one more” and that the dragon has three heads.
However, it was still only a vision of the past, not actual time travel. Rhaegar should not have been able to see Dany, because she wasn’t actually there with him and Elia and Aegon. It wasn’t Rhaegar having the vision, not him gifted with sight-beyond-sight. As far as we know, even from Maester Aemon who’d know if anyone would, Rhaegar was not one of those Targaryens gifted (or cursed) with dragon dreams and visions of the future.
However however… we know that when under the influence of weirwood paste, Bran was also able to see visions of the past. And we know that even though Bloodraven told him you can only see the past through the weirwoods, not affect it, it did seem like Ned heard him talking… and there are other, stronger possible past-affecting things that the show and GRRM have hinted to. And most importantly, we know that shade of the evening, the substance that gave Dany visions in the HOTU, appears to be a dark mirror of weirwoods and weirwood paste.
So is it possible, that for some rare individuals, shade of the evening gives more than visions of the past (or future), it actually lets them affect those times as well? Perhaps just barely, just enough to appear as a brief flash before a witness’s eyes? It did seem that Robbwind saw her in the vision of the Red Wedding (though note that was almost certainly a metaphorical vision, as I doubt the Freys actually enthroned the body they mutilated in mockery, and of course both Robb and Grey Wind were dead and couldn’t see anything)… but also note that in Dany’s vision of Aerys commanding the destruction of King’s Landing (where he said the exact words Jaime later quoted him saying), nobody seemed to notice her presence at all.
So… if you asked me straight up, I’d say I’m pretty damn sure Rhaegar didn’t actually see Dany at that moment. But I’d still have a tiny bit of doubt, that maybe, maybe… he did.
nobodysuspectsthebutterfly replied to your post: Hi I'm new here - lovin your work. I know it's not...
intriguingly, weirwoods are a negative image of the tree that shade of the evening comes from: nobodysuspectsthebutter…
HUH. So what, do you suppose weirwood paste is the anti-shade of the evening? Opens your mind and “frees” you (for a certain value of “free”), whereas shade of the evening opens your mind, but overuse it and you wind up like the Undying Ones? Then again, I suppose you could make a comparison/constrast between the state Bloodraven’s in and the state the Undying Ones were in--both physically immobilized, but Bloodraven is much better-equipped to influence the world and (for a certain value of “be”) be in the world than the Undying Ones. Okay, now I’m very curious about the trees they make shade of the evening from.
“She had a weirwood bowl in her hands, carved with a dozen faces, like the ones the heart trees wore. Inside was a white paste, thick and heavy, with dark red veins running through it. “You must eat of this,” said Leaf. She handed Bran a wooden spoon.“
Just playing with Blender, really.
