Episode 17: A GAME OF THRONES, BRAN III: "Fly or Die" with Special Guest Lucifer Means Lightbringer! (Show Notes)

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast, the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. 

And I’m your other host Emmett, better known as PoorQuentyn. 

Welcome to our seventeenth episode of the Not A Cast entitled: “Fly or Die: An Analysis of AGOT, Bran III,” in which Bran takes a Hero’s Journey Beyond the Infinite. 

This episode is brought to you all by our Lords Commander Mark N, Timothy W and Hayden J. Thank you, gentlemen!

Emmett intro to David, Lucifer Means Lightbringer, @TheDragonLML on twitter

LML intro

Spoiler warning: All published books - 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, and TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show, anything and everything!

Questions

Ser? M’Lady? Wiedemann asks:

Not sure If you guys talked about this in one of your episodes, but which are your favorite actors in the show? Especially those that are slightly different from their book descriptions.

Ser Andrew B asks:

How much of Robert's sense of loss a and subsequent rage at Rhaegar do you think we can directly attribute to the loss of Lyanna herself, as opposed to all the other traumas that loss is tied up in?

Lady BWord asks:

I posed the same question to Davos Fingers, but I’m curious on your answers. If you lived in Westeros what religion would you follow?

We do have one more question by Ser James R, but it relates to this chapter, so we’ll feature it towards the end!

Summary and Synopsis

Bran Stark feels as though he’s been falling for years. Fly, a voice whispers in the dark. But Bran does not know how to fly or so he thinks. The boy flashes back to memories from the past: Maester Luwin dressing a clay doll in Bran’s clothes and throwing him from a roof, Bran telling Maester Luwin that he never falls. The ground is far below Bran for the time being, but again, Bran is still falling. Bran thinks that the danger isn’t real as in all his prior dreams, he awakens just before he hits the ground.

And if you don’t, the voice asks.

The ground appears closer now, and Bran wants to cry as he starts to think that maybe this time when he falls, he will smash into the ground. Not cry. Fly, the voice challenges. Bran states that he can’t fly. How do you know? Have you ever tried? The voice then materializes as a crow flying around Bran as he’s falling.

Help me, Bran pleads with the crow. I’m trying, the birds responds. The crow then asks if Bran has any corn. Bran reaches into his pocket and retrieves corn and releases kernels into the air around him. Are you really a crow? Bran asks. Are you really falling? The crow responds, enjoying some of the falling corn. More questions, more tears from Bran. But tears won’t do any good, the crow tells Bran. Instead, Bran needs to use a different kind of wings and fly.

Bran looks himself over, thinking how he looks more gaunt, more skinny than he remembers of himself, and then the face of Jaime Lannister comes into view, saying “The Things I do for love.” This sends Bran screaming and the crow urging Bran to put that memory aside for now. But Bran falls faster than before.

The crow pecks Bran’s head, telling him that he’s teaching Bran to fly. Bran repeats that he doesn’t know how to fly. He’s only falling. Every flight begins with a fall, the crow replies. And then the crow tells Bran to look down. When Bran finally does so, he has visions: of locations in the story, of the near past, the present and the future, of characters known and mysterious. And we’ll get to all of those in our theory section!

Now you know why you must live, the crows says. Because winter is coming.

Bran looks at the crow and sees that the bird has three eyes, with the third eye holding terrible knowledge. Then Bran looks again below and see jagged, blue-white spires of ice waiting to embrace him. He remember his father’s words Can a man be brave if he’s afraid. And then the crow tells Bran to make his choice: Fly or Die.

Death reaches for Bran screaming, and Bran triumphantly spreads his arms and flies! (I teared up re-reading that. Very moving) Bran exclaims to the crow that he’s flying. The crow says he notices, and then the crow begins pecking at the middle of his forehead as the crow burrows into him. But in that instant, Bran awakens back to his room in Winterfell with the pain still embedded in his head and the sight of a washerwoman …

And then my daughter Livy added her own thoughts to the doc while I was making dinner on Saturday night, and they were as follows: 899999999999999999943320252\\154263225889

Nice points, Livy. Anyways, the washerwoman drops her basin of water and goes running. Bran feels movement besides his bed and then senses his direwolf jumping up to the bed with him, but he can’t feel the direwolf. He just knows he’s there. 

A moment later, Bran’s brother Robb bursts breathless into the room to the direwolf licking Bran’s face.

His name is Summer, Bran calmly tells Robb. 

Structure and Depth

Every Bran chapter so far has aggressively expanded the world of ASOIAF. The first introduced us to the Starks, the direwolves, and so many of the series’ themes; the second really established Winterfell, arguably the series’ most iconic setting, and gave us our first of many unexpected traumatic twists with Bran’s fall; now the third reveals the scope of the magical plot, the ambition of GRRM’s structure and foreshadowing, and the sheer stylistic verve of the imagery he’s using to bring it all to life. Bran Stark is the closest ASOIAF has to a singular protagonist because it’s his story that cuts to the heart of things. In Bran III, that manifests as a psychedelic journey of the mind, because what better way to reveal the context of everything than by force-feeding your Arthurian prince a handful of mescaline? “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.” 

This is one of my favorite chapters in AGOT, right up there with Sansa II (the Hand’s Tourney) and Arya IV (Syrio’s last stand), and as I’ve said about multiple chapters so far in this first book, it’s in large part because of how disastrously wrong this all could’ve gone. So much rides on this chapter--it quite literally zooms out and takes in the entirety of the story, what it means, where it’s going. It’s the author giving us a glimpse into the source code of the narrative, both stripping everything to its core and blowing it up into trippy mythmaking. He risks boring us. He risks confusing us. He risks us rolling our eyes at the self-indulgence. He risks losing Bran’s characterization amidst the metaphysical slurry. And even if it all works, he risks us not being able to come back down. After this, the blue will always be calling. 

So because there’s really no plot points to discuss here, the question becomes why does this chapter work as well as it does? What strategies does the author use to avoid these pitfalls, and what about the resulting chapter makes it stick? 

(LML)

• GRRM’s secret weapons: mundanity and simplicity 
  • Combines the two most common dreams: flying and falling
  • Operates on familiar dream logic
    • Even in dreams, you could not fall forever. He would wake up in the instant before he hit the ground, he knew. You always woke up in the instant before you hit the ground.
  • Rather than introducing new elements (with the exception of Gregor), the imagery focuses on characters and situations we’ve seen elsewhere: the Starks, the Others, the dragons of the east
  • No long infodump speeches--the scenario speaks for itself
  • GRRM knows better than to describe the heart of winter at this point…
  • ...but he lets us know that Bran is afraid of it. Emotions > exposition
• The imagery is designed to be distinctive and memorable
  • The use of color: the shining golden face, the armor like suns
  • The use of temperature: Jon growing cold and hard, dragons stirring in the sun
  • The Mountain with only thick black blood under his helmet
  • All of this is so we can refer to it easily as shorthand
• The continuation of Bran’s story
  • It seemed as though he had been falling for years. Fly, a voice whispered in the darkness, but Bran did not know how to fly, so all he could do was fall. Maester Luwin made a little boy of clay, baked him till he was hard and brittle, dressed him in Bran’s clothes, and flung him off a roof. Bran remembered the way he shattered. “But I never fall,” he said, falling.
  • The fall into knowledge that we saw take place over the course of Bran’s previous chapters continues here, in a very literal form on a very non-literal plane
  • He saw his first execution, he took responsibility for a pup, he said goodbye to his home (or tried to), he witnessed treasonous twincest, he fell after never falling
  • Now he has to face reality on a level he never comprehended and do something he never thought possible. It’s the fall into “terrible knowledge.” 
  • Like Arya’s mentors, Bloodraven exhorts Bran to see, to know, to still his panicked reactions and self-actualize, rather than accepting his fate. “Every flight begins with a fall.” 
  • And it works, leading to...
• The Call (Are You A Bad Enough Dude To Save The Universe?)
  • Now you know, the crow whispered as it sat on his shoulder. Now you know why you must live.

“Why?” Bran said, not understanding, falling, falling.

Because winter is coming.

• Bran isn’t merely being given a glimpse at quantum mechanics here: he is being recruited in a life-or-death struggle for the fate of the planet
• And he accepts, transcending the images of death
• It’s the moment he grows up and accepts his mantle as the prince of light:
  • “His name is Summer.” 
• Just like Dany, he momentarily forgets to be afraid, and even when the fear returns, he remembers his father’s words.
  • “Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?” he heard his own voice saying, small and far away.
    
    And his father’s voice replied to him. “That is the only time a man can be brave.”

Likes and Dislikes 

Like: Brevity is the soul of wisdom. I thought his chapter was much longer than it was, but it isn’t! GRRM conserves a lot of narrative punch in a short amount of pages, and it pays off beautifully. The imagery is wonderful, the emotions are intense, and the payoff of Bran spreading his wings to fly away from death and then naming his direwolf “Summer” touches an emotional chord in me. And it’s all done in the space of 8 pages per my kindle.

Dislike: Coming up empty! I do remember doing the audiobook back in the day and not liking the inflection that the late Roy Dotrice did for the Three-Eyed Crow’s lines. But that’s it. This chapter is gorgeous.

Like: It really helps to ground this chapter that the Three-Eyed Crow is not a stiff stoic mentor figure. He’s snarky and playful. See especially “say, got any corn?” and his dry response to Bran roaring with delight that he can fly: “I’ve noticed.” It prevents things from getting too pretentious, and also hints that the Three-Eyed Crow is in fact a human being (even if GRRM didn’t have Brynden Rivers in mind yet as that human being, as we’ll get into later)

Dislike: None. Bran III is virtually flawless. This is among the most iconic and important chapters in the whole damn series.

Foreshadowing and Groundwork

Catelyn/Rodrik death foreshadowing? Or perhaps foreshadowing of the storm that Cat/Rodrik encounter at King’s Landing and beyond:

He saw his mother sitting alone in a cabin, looking at a bloodstained knife on a table in front of her, as the rowers pulled at their oars and Ser Rodrik leaned across a rail, shaking and heaving. A storm was gathering ahead of them, a vast dark roaring lashed by lightning, but somehow they could not see it.

Red Comet foreshadowing!

He saw Maester Luwin on his balcony, studying the sky through a polished bronze tube and frowning as he made notes in a book.

Callback/foreshadowing: Robb Stark now practicing with live steel compared to earlier where Ser Rodrik forbade Robb and Joff from using live steel in the Winterfell practice yard. Indicates change in game for Robb. Remember how Catelyn tells Robb and Cassel that it’s past time that Robb carries live steel with him at all times too. We’re entering a war-footing in this book for sure.

The Three Eyed Crow as Bloodraven: If we go a bit deep in the weeds in George’s writing process, we know that GRRM was unsure of the origin of the Three-Eyed Crow. As Elio Garcia Jr (One of GRRM’s co-writers for TWOIAF) said:

"I recall asking George when I interviewed him: did he always know that the Three-Eyed Crow was Bloodraven? His answer was that he always knew that [The Three Eyed Crow] would be tied to the Targaryens. He didn't always have the specifics of how."

I think GRRM didn’t come up with the character of Bloodraven until he came onto the idea of the Blackfyre Rebellions, and that makes sense that George wouldn’t know that the Three-Eyed Crow was Bloodraven until he developed the character of Bloodraven. I do wonder who George had in mind for who the Three Eyed Crow was back in the day, but another question to ask George after the series is done.

The Three Eyed Crow as Mormont’s bird: 

Say, got any corn?

Euron foreshadowing: 

Bran looked down. There was nothing below him now but snow and cold and death, a frozen wasteland where jagged blue- white spires of ice waited to embrace him. They flew up at him like spears. He saw the bones of a thousand other dreamers impaled upon their points. 

Grey Mists: Notice in this chapter how grey mists are very prominent: they surround Bran at all times during his trippy dream sequence, constantly serving as spooky atmospherics for the chapter. But there’s more to them. As friend of the show Chloe, AKA @liesandarbor on twitter said in her great reddit post “A Thousand Eyes and One Grey Mist”, the grey mists are most strongly associated with the character of Bloodraven. We see grey mists in Ned, Cersei, Samwell, Melisandre and Bran chapters. We also see this in The Mystery Knight where grey mists show up at White Walls just prior to the arrival of Bloodraven and his army to put down the Second Blackfyre Rebellion.

In short, Chloe puts forward the terrific theory that the grey mists are Bloodraven watching or at least Bloodraven’s presence in the narrative. Of interest to Bran and this chapter in particular, those same grey mists appear in Theon’s ADWD and TWOW sample chapter. But! Instead of Bloodraven making his appearance here, it’s almost certainly Bran Stark himself learning at the feet of Bloodraven and using the same power that Bloodraven used to communicate with people -- but especially Theon so far in the series.

So, look out for grey mists in TWOW! Could be Bran checking in. Could also be Bloodraven.

Theories and Discussion

This chapter is full of haunting, beautiful imagery, and there’s a lot of it that is still shrouded in mystery but has led to a # of interesting fan theories on it. So, mid-way through the chapter, Bran sees a series of quick visions. So, let’s dive into each one, shall we? And I’ll get both of your-all’s takes on what each vision means

• Winterfell from an eagle’s perspective
• Maester Luwin studying the sky with a telescope
• Robb practicing with live steel in the Winterfell yard
• Hodor carrying an anvil to Mikken’s forge
• The weirwood tree in the godswood rustling in a “chill wind.”
• A galley coming out of White Harbor carrying a Catelyn who looks at the dagger and a seasick Rodrik with a storm gathering ahead of them
• His father at the Trident pleading with Robert
• Sansa crying herself to sleep at night
• Arya, silently watching, holding her secrets close to herself
  • What are the secrets that Arya is holding onto at this point? Likely:
    • The sword “Needle” and how that was made by Mikken
    • How Jory and Arya threw stones at Nymeria to chase her away rather than allow the direwolf to escape Lannister clutches (Ned calls this lie “Not without honor” in Arya’s 2nd AGOT chapter) 
• Shadows all around “them” -- likely Ned, Arya and Sansa
  • Shadow 1: dark as ash, face of a hound
  • Shadow 2: Armored like the sun, golden and beautiful
  • Shadow 3: a giant in armor made of stone with only darkness and thick black blood behind his visor
• He then sees the Free Cities, Dothraki Sea, Vaes Dothrak, fabled land of the Jade Sea, Asshai by Shadow where dragons stir beneath the sunrise.
• And then the vision takes him north where he sees:
  • The Wall
  • Jon sleeping along in a cold bed, his skin growing pale and hard as the memory of warmth fled him
    • Jon death foreshadowing?
  • The Haunted Forest
  • Rivers, frozen shore, dead plains beyond the Haunted Forest
  • And finally, the Heart of Winter. 
    • Probably the Others? Something else?
    • The 3EC immediately tells Bran after he sees this that he must live precisely because “Winter is coming.”

Ser James R asks:

What’s the deal with the dragons in Asshai?  “ to Asshai by the Shadow, where dragons stirred beneath the sunrise.” Nearly all of his other visions here turn out to be things happening right now elsewhere in the world, so I take this as strong evidence there were then dragons in ashai.  Is this an abandoned plot thread - along with Danys journey to ashai?  Seems to undermine the dragons bringing magic back to the world (?)  thoughts.

Conclusion

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