(Spoilers Extended) New tidbits from Elio & Linda's recent Q&A: on F&B Dany parallel and Aerion Brightflame
A few days ago u/Elio_Garcia had an online Q&A with Italian fans, which includes many, many interesting discussions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWVzIO9k9AM
Here is the exclusive new info I've noticed:
Q: What's your relationship with george at the moment, and your involvement, is any in the development of the winters of winter?
Elio: um yeah he has asked us a couple of sort of questions over the last couple years about winds of winter related things that he's mentioned, a couple of details about things that he has been working on, which we can't share i'm afraid, i mean now.
Linda: it's less now because he has his on-site assistance. (Ed note. I hear the minion Ti Mikkel is in charge of this matter) yeah four or five of them, they multiply all the times, i'm not sure how many they are. But obviously has them to do research for him, which oftentimes is probably faster. but i guess when they don't come up with something or they're not handy, it shows up with us. but it's been a while. so yes a little bit a few little insights into what he's doing with the winds of winter based on what the questions he's asked. but beyond that, you know it's because of covid and everything, it's obviously been a very strange year where he hasn't been taking part in any uh physical conventions or anything. so it's been a bit more uh more distance than usual in that sense.
Q: it is my impression that there are parallels between westeros history and current events in ASOIAF. so in your opinion to what degree is george martin's history cyclical? because we have a lot of parallels. for example with the current history and the dance of the dragons
Elio: you know george even uses that line from talking about the the arms of house Toland, the dragon eating its tail, but it was from the archmaester Rigney which is a reference to robert jordan the writer of the wheel of time, that history is a wheel or time as a circle. i think george certainly deliberately sees, creates parallels. i mean this is a very obvious example, you know if you read the world of ice and fire, you saw the family tree of the Targaryens, and the family tree for Jaehaerys and his offspring changes quite a lot when fire and blood comes out. because george realized that he wanted to create a kind of parallel by introducing another daenerys. and he said like, i like the symmetry of it, i like the the sort of the way. you could perhaps read it as reflecting on daenerys's story, maybe. i wish it was true. i mean i think fans of daenerys need to be really worried about what's going to happen to her. although i guess game of thrones maybe has revealed kind of where things may possibly end. again the journey is going to be very different. i think you know circumstances, things are going to be very different. so there's a journey that matters. but in any case, so yes i think george uses cycles and things a bit. he likes setting up parallels of events, he likes paralleling characters, he likes paralleling events, and he likes paralleling the past and the present as well.
Linda: i think certainly that when he fleshed out the details of fire and blood, even when he first did the sidebars for the world of ice and fire, and they just grew. we could see that, okay here he's looking at foreshadowing or commenting on current events by doing a similar scenario in the past and he definitely likes to play around with those aspects.
Q: let's talk about dunk and egg. i know you have some sort of idea what's going to happen in dunk and egg in details that we other fans don't know about. so maybe of course without spoiling anything, have you ever came across a theory that made you think, oh that's actually very similar or uh exactly what's going to happen in future novellas
Linda: that was from a conference call with him for sort of filling out the last bits of that time period in the world of ice and fire, and where we hear him going through his notes, and he said oh now that i can't tell you, and oh those were some unpleasant bastards but i'm not going to tell you that, you know this you can't put in the book, or this i'll tell you but you can't put in the book. And that's where the fun part was, he told us a few things that he said that we couldn't put into the world of ice and fire, then we did our draft for that section, he went over it and put those details back in anyway. so that's obviously where we got the fantastic art of Dunk fighting the laughing storm, because that was one of the details that we had been like, okay Duncan as lord commander fighting against the lord baratheon the laughing storm, that was like, we can't use that. And then he decided to put it in after. And i think he requested the art as well. he specifically requested that duels.
Elio: the one thing i will say about what we know, and i think i can be vague enough, and i haven't really seen it. i think people haven't thought enough about Aerion Brightflame, and the details of what we learn in the world of ice and fire about him, and how that fits into to things. there's some stuff there that george hasn't really, there's some dots that people have not connected as far as i've seen. so i'll leave you guys with that.
Posted Apr 22, 2021, 2:22 AM UTC · edited