Hyperwords

There are also some other changes to clarify how non-Siege battles work.

Very interesting.

Why should I care?

Like, as a reader, I am primarily invested in Jon Snow's parentage because Jon is invested in it. The meaning of the reveal is in how Jon reacts to it. How will he handle the collapse of what is a core pillar of his identity, especially given consequences of events in A Dance with Dragons?

Severed from the story I am invested in, the reveal is pointless. The main A Song of Ice and Fire novels are about characters, and how they move through the world. We see into that world through the character's perspectives. What first draws you into the world is not the world itself, but the people who inhabit it. They are the story.

So pieces of plot information divorced from the characters do nothing. Part of my initial reaction to the play's announcement was "Endless prequels, no forward plot progression". The story is not advancing. It remains frozen in place.

In a weird meta-textual way, the Others, the beings of living ice that herald the Long Night and an endless winter have won. The world of A Song of Ice and Fire is not longer moving forward. It is no longer alive. Instead, we get endless reiterations and adaptions of stories that are already told.

My deeply, deeply cynical answer: It's too early to know. If the overall reception is good, Martin will provide some waffle about how the play captures the intent of his backstory. If the overall reception is bad, Martin's waffle will instead blame everyone but himself and say the play doesn't count.

This is because the evidence suggests he is either not writing it, or his writing process has become so inefficient that any writing he does do makes minimal progress towards completion. It's been 14 years since A Dance with Dragons, so one (or both) of these has to be true.

However, what I will call my more cynical take is the The Winds of Winter will be published. The potential payout for the publisher is too high to not do that. Morbid as the topic is, once Martin dies, it becomes inevitable. From there, I see two broad outcomes:

A - The publisher is able to successfully strong-arm whoever inherits the rights into handing over any material they don't have. Then a mostly uncredited author hammers things out, and we see The Winds of Winter by George RR Martin. There is probably no A Dream of Spring.

B - The publisher fails with the strong-arming. However, because human lives run out faster than copyright terms, the rights eventually fall into the hands of someone who sees them as a big payday (like what happened with The Lord of the Rings). They cash out, The Winds of Winter comes out in some form, maybe even A Dream of Spring.

There is basically no avoiding this, short of Martin launching the entire A Song of Ice and Fire world into the public domain somehow. Paradoxical as it may seem, if he doesn't want anyone else finishing it, he would need to make it impossible for anyone to have a way to claim their ending is "official".

Are we already forgetting his appointment of human font of corruption Peter Mandelson? The guy who had to resign multiple times for being dodgy?

And people didn't just wake up and decide to start hating Starmer. More than once, he took up an unpopular policy position, held on until he'd pissed off everyone who opposed it... then changed his mind, pissing off everyone who supported it. However you feel about the two-child cap, expelling a group of MPs for voting to remove it, only to remove it later anyway is not going to win you many friends.

The main thought is that the reveal in the final episode that Aquakind have been secretly melting the polar icecaps not only completely derails things thematically, it also provides a justification for the actions of the "kill all the fish people" conspiracy.

Let's have a look at the specific lines that make up this reveal (transcript source):

KATE: Granted. This is Professor Bello, Tactics and Planning. What have we got? BELLO: You were right from day one. SHIRLEY: They were hiding it. You said so. It's all been a distraction. BELLO: The diplomatic talks were just war games while they were doing exactly what we thought they'd do. Aquakind are melting the ice caps. They were clever. We were searching with satellites, but we forgot how good they are with water. They positioned a layer of ice crystals at three kilometres to hide the heat. KATE: How did you find it? BELLO: We didn't. They dropped the layer. They want us to see.

The talks between humanity and Aquakind, which have been the focus of the previous episodes, are explicitly and directly stated to be a distraction. Aquakind began the talks while doing this. Then when the melting is brought up, Tide admits to it, with the rather childish justification that humanity started it. He does this as the official ambassador of Aquakind. His parting words are:

TIDE: And be certain of this, little people. This was never a war. This was an inconvenience. You were the dirt that gathered while we were away. But now we have returned, and you will be cleansed.

This very much has shades of the Daleks. It also means that from the beginning, Aquakind has not been negotiating in good faith. From humanity's perspective, Aquakind cannot be trusted. And they learn this at the same time Aquakind escalate to openly genocidal rhetoric.

Meanwhile, the conspiracy to kill the fish has been operating in secret. Given they have also been trying to sabotage the negotiations in various ways, this rather suggests they believe that humanity is otherwise going to accept whatever terms Aquakind present. It's very much "we need to Get Them to maintain our wealth and power". Except the icecap reveal means it switches gear to "we need to Get Them before They Get Us".

It also means humanity is no longer just fighting for itself, but essentially for every land-based species on the planet. If Aquakind melt the icecaps, it would cause massive ecological disruption and devastation across the planet (include to the oceans but that point never comes up). All their complaints about environmental damage are effectively rendered null, because they are willing to inflict it to win.

Aquakind see themselves as superior to humanity, and believe that gives them to right to make any demands they wish. They openly refer to humanity as "dirt" that will be "cleansed". This is their official position, as presented by their ambassador.

Then, whoops! It turns out humanity could fight back. Aquakind's sudden death by plague is tragic in the classical sense. In their hubris, they reveal themselves, beat their opponent into near-submission, only to then find themselves at the sharp end of the knife when their enemy chooses survival over honour. Humanity started melting the icecaps. But Aquakind started the war.

It's very much a repeat of the problems I see in Cold Blood. The writers clearly want to have a morally ambiguous conflict between the two sides. Except once again, the two sides are not the same. Humanity is portrayed as having a mix of views, even within the officially sanctioned side (and even the French army lady is vaguely aware doing Severance is immoral). Aquakind, meanwhile, are almost entirely aggressive, and Salt only really changes sides after she's been labelled a traitor.

Since it's also part of the RTD2 era, it comes with the particular dubious texture as on Doctor Who. The fact that Aquakind has officially escalated everything goes unmentioned. It's all Barclay's sad fish journey, into Aquakind dying badly. The show's official position is "wow the mean evil humans were mean and evil", which ignores that Aquakind were written as having equally murderous intent.

Then there's the "Accord" thing. It's completely ridiculous. At the point Salt reveals the idea, Aquakind have already destroyed their credibility. Additionally, Salt herself previously pulled off the evil genie thing in Plastic Apocalypse:

SALT: Do they want to accelerate this process? BARCLAY: We are committed to undoing the damage we have inflicted on our planet. SALT: How committed? BARCLAY: It is our greatest desire. SALT: Then we shall grant it. BARCLAY: Sorry, what do you mean? SALT: Your greatest desire... is happening.

Then all the plastic and such in all water all over the world flies out onto land. The "hee hee hoo hoo this is what you asked for" stuff isn't cute when a weird faerie king does it. It's even less cute when you do it as part of negotiating an agreement between two peoples. Aquakind, Salt included, repeatedly fuck around and act in bad faith. Only an idiot would think asking for accord would actually be useful at that point. Of course, UNIT are idiots, and can't stop taking Ls even in their own show.

I'm not sure what the conclusion is here. The show is structured in a way where the use of Severance is meant to be unprovoked. But, well. While the development of the virus certainly is, by the time it actually gets used, Aquakind have effectively declared that in five years they're going to kill everyone. Twice, technically, since they also did the whole "Ambassador Rust" thing that went nowhere.

Not much news since. The War Between the Land and the Sea was kind of damp and has had no international distribution.

That tactic being not resigning. Utterly foolproof. If you ask Starmer to resign and he says no, well, that's that.

The entire logic is that Strixhaven has enemy colour Elder Dragons, Hexhaven uses ally colours, therefore the existing ally colour Elder Dragons will return after mysteriously disappearing. Sometimes some extra scaffolding is getting added, but that's the core of it.

The incredibly obvious counterpoint here is that once again, none of the Dragonlords bar Ojutai are fit to run a school. Ojutai is also the only Dragonlord that actually aligns with the school he shares his colours with. Kolaghan, who does not speak, cannot lead a school of words. Atarka, who does not think, cannot lead a school. Like, at all. Dromoka hates necromancy, and a school of "invasive healing" that wants to keep mages fighting at any cost sure seems like it will dabble in that. Finally, Silumgar has no connection to mathematics, estoric or otherwise, in anyway. Plus Blue is fighting for its life in Silumgar, while being the shared colour between Quandrix and Theorix.

These dragons simply do not fit the given flavour of Hexhaven.

But there's another point to consider. It would make zero sense for the Dragonlords to be in charge of Hexhaven from a narrative point of view.

Hexhaven is a creation of Jace Beleren. In the Outlaws of Thunder Junction epilogue, it's established that he doesn't know what Tarkir is like, meaning he had not visited the plane before then. This means he never encountered the Dragonlords. Once he did visit Tarkir, the main sources of information about them would likely portray them (accurately) as vicious, brutal and genocidal tyrants.

Additionally, Jace's experiences with the Elder Dragons he has met are fairly negative. Nicol Bolas has left countless planes in ruins. Ugin is secretive and judgemental, even when his secrecy leds to the events he condemns. And while Niv-Mizzet isn't mechanically an Elder Dragon, he still old and dragon, one who is arrogant and vain.

Jace has zero reason to either coopt the existing Dragonlords or to create Echoverse versions of them. If anything, it would be more likely for him to excise them from the Echoverse. Indeed, since Bolas and Ugin are twins, and the Dragonlords are sort of decended from Ugin, if Jace decides he doesn't want Bolas running around, the Dragonlords might just be collateral damage from that.

Furthermore, if Jace does decide to delegate running Hexhaven, he's probably going to put the Echoverse versions of his former allies in charge. His goal with Hexhaven isn't to create a one to one mirror of Strixhaven. His goal is to have a ready-made army to help him attack the main multiverse and enable the Echoverse to replace it.

I'm now going to opine on the this initial information for no particular reason.

Fatehold – Starting strong, with a name that really invokes the idea of "inverse Lorehold". It's the school of "future histories", suggesting a focus on dictating the future rather than discovering the past.

Theorix – Namewise this one feels a little weird to say, and it's less mirrored compared to the first. As a school of "estoric mathematics", I'm not quite sure what will make this different to Quandrix.

Stingerquill – Yes, it's really called that. Perhaps a little too much "evil Silverquill" happening here. I'm also not sure how being the school of "painful words" makes it much different from it's Strixhaven version. Silverquill is all about words and how to use them.

Konstrari – Okay this one is just awkward to say, what with that rouge r running around in there. But the concept of "constructive arts" is an interesting mirror of Prismari's focus on expressive arts. Additionally, Hexhaven will be forgiven if this is the fabled "not stupid RG faction".

Vigorbloom – Getting back in the flow of things with a very anti-Witherbloom name. This is the school of "invasive healing", which has a very sinister ring to it. You know who else was into invasive healing? That's right, Momir Vig. And also Yawgmoth.

It's actually kind of weird because the closest other villain to what Riginarazione is doing, Backwarder, did need to steal other people's time before she could do what she wanted (as did Timebreaker). But Riginarazione's power seems to be entirely beneficial.

Labour literally has 403 non-Starmer MPs. To say nobody can replace Starmer is essentially saying that the party has utterly failed to recruit any new talent. Which is, well. Not good.