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nobodysuspectsthebutterfly · 7 years

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Two quick questions, do you think anything will happen with the Blackwoods Weirwood, and who do you think is in the right concerning the Bracken vs Blackwood feud?

I don’t think anything will happen with the weirwood of Raventree Hall? I mean, it’s very dead, and has been for a thousand years. Though I could imagine a neat scene where Bran reaches out with his powers and all the hundreds of ravens that nest on the weirwood all fly off at once, quorking some message of doom. And maybe, maybe the long-dead white tree would put forth leaves, whether every branch at once or just one single red leaf? It’s a fascinating image (and lbr half my endgame predictions are based on how cool they would look), but I really have no proof that it would ever happen.

Although I do think that the Blackwood godswood is very probably the place where Aegon V proposed to Betha. So even if the Raventree weirwood never appears again in main ASOIAF, it should have a neat appearance or two in some Dunk and Egg stories. :)

As for the Brackens and Blackwoods, they’re both in the wrong, that’s the whole point.

“How did all this begin, between Blackwood and Bracken? Is it written down?”“It is, my lord,” the boy said, “but some of the histories were penned by their maesters and some by ours, centuries after the events that they purport to chronicle. It goes back to the Age of Heroes. The Blackwoods were kings in those days. The Brackens were petty lords, renowned for breeding horses. Rather than pay their king his just due, they used the gold their horses brought them to hire swords and cast him down.”“When did all this happen?”“Five hundred years before the Andals. A thousand, if the True History is to be believed. Only no one knows when the Andals crossed the narrow sea. The True History says four thousand years have passed since then, but some maesters claim that it was only two. Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend.”Tyrion would like this one. They could talk from dusk to dawn, arguing about books. For a moment his bitterness toward his brother was forgotten, until he remembered what the Imp had done. “So you are fighting over a crown that one of you took from the other back when the Casterlys still held Casterly Rock, is that the root of it? The crown of a kingdom that has not existed for thousands of years?” He chuckled. “So many years, so many wars, so many kings… you’d think someone would have made a peace.”“Someone did, my lord. Many someones. We’ve had a hundred peaces with the Brackens, many sealed with marriages. There’s Blackwood blood in every Bracken, and Bracken blood in every Blackwood. The Old King’s Peace lasted half a century. But then some fresh quarrel broke out, and the old wounds opened and began to bleed again. That’s how it always happens, my father says. So long as men remember the wrongs done to their forebears, no peace will ever last. So we go on century after century, with us hating the Brackens and them hating us. My father says there will never be an end to it.”

–ADWD, Jaime I

The feud of the Blackwoods and Brackens is infamous, and rightly so, for it stretches back thousands of years to before the coming of the Andals. The origins of it are contested and shrouded in legend. The Blackwoods say they were kings and the Brackens little more than petty lords set on betraying and deposing them, while the Brackens say much the same about the Blackwoods. That they were both royal houses on the Trident seems true enough, and none can doubt that their enmity sprang from some cause, so entrenched that it has become legendary. Powerful as they were, they have maintained their feud despite the many kings who have attempted to make a peace between them. –The World of Ice and Fire

I mean, I slightly lean more to the Blackwood side, but I’m perfectly aware it’s because of GRRM’s narrative bias and my aesthetic preferences. The Blackwoods are tall, willowy and have colors of black, white, and red (so goth, so favorite), the Brackens are brutish and hairy and have colors of yellow and brown (urine and feces), when the Andals came the Blackwoods stayed Old Gods worshippers whereas the Brackens converted to the Faith, the Blackwoods were on the Black side in the Dance of the Dragons and the Red in the Blackfyre Rebellion whereas the Brackens were on the Green and Black, after the Red Wedding the Blackwoods stayed loyal to the Starks whereas the Brackens went immediately over to the Lannisters, and I’ll take sweet Melissa over conniving Barba (poor groomed Bethany though) and mysterious sinister wizard Bloodraven over angry resentful warrior Bittersteel any day. (re the last, I always have to rec @racefortheironthrone’s Conan and Elric parallels meta.)

Still, just because I prefer House Blackwood, I’m not going to let it affect my feelings over the feud, it’s for sure “a plague o’ both your houses” situation as literary family feuds always are. Though in the eventual D&E story where the village of Pennytree is made a royal fief (possibly the story codenamed The Village Hero, possibly another), I thoroughly expect GRRM to make us dislike the Brackens even more. But he may surprise us, and balance out his narrative bias re the feud, you never know. Mind you, with the way the Brackens have been depicted so far, I will be very surprised if he does. ;)

#lookatallthesetakenurls #asoiaf #asoiaf meta #weirwoods #raventree hall #house blackwood #my house!#house bracken #the blackwood-bracken feud #asoiaf speculation #bran stark #dunk and egg #the village hero #tbh half my endgame speculation is for the aesthetic

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