GoT - Is Over, Post Your Drogon Sightings

uncognito

uncognito

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Cersea is not a villain she is just a sad dolphin mourning the loss of her children who were caught in the shrimping net of life.
 
Woolygimp

Woolygimp

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And yeah, I have a novel way of looking at the world. As a poker player you always try to understand another person's actions, and I guess I've taken that to trying to understand entire societies. How were the Germans capable of committing the Holocaust?

Best answer is that we aren't nearly as flawless as we think we are. We'reallsusceptible to group think and brainwashing, even the most intelligent among us. Just look at North Korea.
 
DickTrickle

DickTrickle

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Woolygimp_sl said:
And yeah, I have a novel way of looking at the world. As a poker player you always try to understand another person's actions, and I guess I've taken that to trying to understand entire societies. How were the Germans capable of committing the Holocaust?

Best answer is that we aren't nearly as flawless as we think we are. We'reallsusceptible to group think and brainwashing, even the most intelligent among us. Just look at North Korea.
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That's hardly novel. Untold amounts of history and art touch on such themes. You're not as unique a snowflake as you think.

Are these the first books you've ever read?
 
Ambiturner

Ambiturner

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Woolygimp_sl said:
And yeah, I have a novel way of looking at the world. As a poker player you always try to understand another person's actions, and I guess I've taken that to trying to understand entire societies. How were the Germans capable of committing the Holocaust?

Best answer is that we aren't nearly as flawless as we think we are. We'reallsusceptible to group think and brainwashing, even the most intelligent among us. Just look at North Korea.
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Congratulations, you've come to the same realizations as every other person ever. Such a deep thinker you are
 
Woolygimp

Woolygimp

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Ambiturner_sl said:
Congratulations, you've come to the same realizations as every other person ever. Such a deep thinker you are
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The same conclusions as every other person? What the fuck. Maybe it's because I live in the Deep South, but everybody here is like, "Why aren't we in the fucking Middle East killing the shit out of those fuckers!"

Generally, there's three things that keep a person from being hostile.

1) Tribalism (people just have an evolutionary knack to want to avoid killing members of a group/family that they identify themselves with).
2) Fear of death.
3) Fear of punishment, usually the law.

Let's take that to the next level, and it's the same thing in the context of society.

1) Nationalism. (the granddaddy of Tribalism)
2) Fear of defeat. (the death of the individual is no longer a concern, it's defeat that matters)

The fear of punishment, usually the law becomes much less of a factor because international laws are new and rarely enforced. They're also only enforced if you are defeated. No Allied commanders in WW2 were tried for war crimes even though there were plenty of instances of them committing war crimes as bad as many Germans who were hanged.

Now, when you remove the fear of defeat as you would with any society that either has or overestimates their technological, military, or manpower advantage of another group and you find that they become overtly hostile.

Great examples include:
* Rome during the Third Punic War, where they kept leveraging increasingly absolutely unrealistic demands on Carthage so that they would have an excuse for war, to burn Carthage to the ground, and to erase their culture from history.
* The Middle Ages, when Knights had fanciful expensive suits of armor that made them near invulnerable and they became overtly aggressive towards other religious groups and their neighbors.
* Ottoman expansion into the Balkans, Constantinople, and then Europe by Mehmed II. (had a massive # of men and cannon)
* In modern society, with all the False flag operations to incite war, and especially in almost every single US war post WW2. If Iraq had gone as planned, nobody would be apologizing for it, we'd have then gone to war with Iran, and so on. We'd have only stopping until we were defeated. Same thing with Korea (A-bomb advantage) and then Vietnam (defeat).

You remove these factors and people are fucking animals. The best example of this is in Ultimate Online.

There was no fear of death, nor any other real consequences.
There was no fear of punishment, by the law, rules of the game, or anything else.
There was no tribalism, everyone was anonymous. Guilds solved this to an extent and people wouldn't PK guildmates out of malice.

What happened? Over half the population turned red and started becoming overtly hostile towards the other half. Hell, you could have nothing on you and people would still burn your ass to the ground for no reason other than to be an asshole.

That says a lot about us, as our fear of losing/getting punished is really the only thing keeping us from killing one another. Can Tribalism ever become globalized so that we identify with one another as a SPECIES instead of by ethnicity, religion, or nationality? Maybe, but it's going to be really fucking difficult and take a few generations. It's our only hope of not starting nuclear war. Hell, within our own country we have our own whites vs blacks tension brewing. In the EU, it's natives vs immigrants leading to Brexit, which was a huge setback. In Iraq, it's the Shiites and Suunis.

What's the solution for all of this? Can the internet and mass media bring us together? I hope so. And can we please stop referring to the Russians and Chinese as "our enemies"? We aren't at war with them, yet. I have no desire to go over to China to kill Chinese people, they aren't my enemy. Hell, if I was drafted I'd refuse to fight unless I thought there was a legitimate reason to fight. North Korea & ISIS, which have an lot of irredeemably brainwashed people could possibly fulfill that criteria for me.

Lenas_sl said:
Skroth - Game of Thrones Wiki - Wikia

"The novel A Song of Ice and Fire clearly states that "the Others" ("White Walkers" in the TV series) speak a language with the voice "like the cracking of ice on a winter lake", but the name of the language is not given."
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Regardless of the official name, they still communicate and have a language. This is indicative of intelligence, which leads to logic, which leads to reason. What is the reason they are attacking men after 10,000 years?
 
DickTrickle

DickTrickle

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Please go elsewhere or at least keep it GoT focused. Develop some social understanding too. This is not your blog site.
 
Woolygimp

Woolygimp

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DickTrickle_sl said:
Please go elsewhere or at least keep it GoT focused. Develop some social understanding too. This is not your blog site.
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Fair enough. The books make you question what you were raised to believe through a fictional medium, and that's pretty rare. Yeah, you can read and learn these concepts through outright discussion, psychology, and philosophy but a work of art that transcends that is GRRM's goal, I think. If so, he's done a pretty damn good job. Sure, there are other novels that do the same such as Don Quixote, Canterbury Tales, and the Great Gatsby but it's never been done in the fantasy genre which is full of cliches and stereotypes.

Anyway, in S7 Sansa + LF vs Jon. Count it. I wonder if Sophie Turner is a good enough actress to pull off that transition though. She's not nearly as convincing or good as Lena Headey. If you watched Cersei in S1, trying fruitlessly to convince her son not to execute Ned, compared to now... she's really nailed it. Show Jaime has finally caught up with book Jaime it seems, took long enough for him to realize how fucked up the people around him are.

D&D also confirmed that Dany in the final scene is still in Dragon's Bay (in the finale) so she could be a complete non-factor for the first few episodes. Wonder if she'll sail through the Smoking Sea or around it, and if she does the former if there'll be any consequences and that's why they're scouting the Canary Islands?
 
Lenas

Lenas

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Woolygimp_sl said:
Regardless of the official name, they still communicate and have a language. This is indicative of intelligence, which leads to logic, which leads to reason. What is the reason they are attacking men after 10,000 years?
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Maybe it's as simple as The Others not being able to raise wights until magic started returning to the world and they aren't much of a threat without them.
 
DickTrickle

DickTrickle

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Woolygimp_sl said:
Fair enough. The books make you question what you were raised to believe through a fictional medium, and that's pretty rare. Yeah, you can read and learn these concepts through outright discussion, psychology, and philosophy but a work of art that transcends that is GRRM's goal, I think. If so, he's done a pretty damn good job. Sure, there are other novels that do the same such as Don Quixote, Canterbury Tales, and the Great Gatsby but it's never been done in the fantasy genre which is full of cliches and stereotypes.

Anyway, in S7 Sansa + LF vs Jon. Count it. I wonder if Sophie Turner is a good enough actress to pull off that transition though. She's not nearly as convincing or good as Lena Headey. If you watched Cersei in S1, trying fruitlessly to convince her son not to execute Ned, compared to now... she's really nailed it. Show Jaime has finally caught up with book Jaime it seems, took long enough for him to realize how fucked up the people around him are.

D&D also confirmed that Dany in the final scene is still in Dragon's Bay (in the finale) so she could be a complete non-factor for the first few episodes. Wonder if she'll sail through the Smoking Sea or around it, and if she does the former if there'll be any consequences and that's why they're scouting the Canary Islands?
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It will have to be pretty convincing acting and writing for Sansa to turn on Jon to the point his life would be in danger because of her actions, especially in only a few episodes. She turned down LF (though relatively kindly), all of the North is with Jon, and betraying Jon would mean she was like all the people who had hurt and betrayed her. She might be more aware of the game but she's not anywhere near Cersei level.
 
Woolygimp

Woolygimp

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Lenas_sl said:
Maybe it's as simple as The Others not being able to raise wights until magic started returning to the world and they aren't much of a threat without them.
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Magic returning does seem to be one of the bigger mysteries that hasn't really been sufficiently explained by anyone. But when did it leave, and why? We know it was existent in heavy use during the entire time of the Valyrian Freehold, as they sacrificed a shitload of slaves to perform blood spells. So it's only been gone a few hundred years, if even that since the last dragons died out fairly recently - like 100 years. It's clear that everybody's powers seem to be more powerful, from the warlocks in Quaithe. Oddly enough, I think Melisandre comments that she feels most powerful at the wall itself (someone does).

In any case, we know magic was a strong as ever as recently as 400 years ago so that kind of discredits your point. The Valyrians fought half a dozen wars against the Rhoynar with heavy use of sorcery and magic; they used blood/fire magic against the Rhoynar's water magic (the source of Greyscale). It took 300 dragons to defeat them.

GRRM has been vocal saying that Danaerys is NOT immune to fire. Her surviving the funeral pyre was her inadvertently using blood magic, which requires sacrifice.

It will have to be pretty convincing acting and writing for Sansa to turn on Jon to the point his life would be in danger because of her actions, especially in only a few episodes. She turned down LF (though relatively kindly), all of the North is with Jon, and betraying Jon would mean she was like all the people who had hurt and betrayed her. She might be more aware of the game but she's not anywhere near Cersei level.
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Exactly, yet everything that's been said and shown so far points in that direction. Sansa and LF's relationship in the books is completely different as he saves her, protects her, and even plans to marry her to Robin Arryn giving him a way to control the Vale. Wonder how D&D pull this off, but I'd expect LF to have a trump card up his sleeve and not just a complete dumbass now that he's been rejected. He seems to possibly know the truth about Rhaegar and Lyanna, so idk. Littlefinger is so disappointing on the show, and although he accomplishes the same goals he does it in a completely unconvincing and unrealistic manner compared to his manipulation in the books... and this may end up being another case of that? If this happens, I hope they make it believable.
 
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