#I have nothing against anyone that enjoys tinfoil and crack theories for fun

[thebluelemontree]

hello! we all agree that The Elder Brother is actually at the Vale with Sandor and Lord Howland posing as the hedge knights in service of Littlefinger. But who was he before he become The Elder Brother? I read a theory that he is Prince Lewyn Martell from Aerys' Kingsguard. What do you think? It would be interesting because Lyn Corbray believes he killed Prince Lewyn at the Trident. I hope you stay sober until your last day. Greetings from Poland

Thank you for your support!  Well, you and I agree on that first part.  Not everyone is convinced, which of course I understand, but I am quite pleased that the reception to that essay has been overall very positive from the feedback.  

So I googled “Elder Brother is Lewyn Martell” so I could get a feel from where people are coming from with that.  I’m not going to do a Reddit deep dive, but I read the one big essay that came up in the results.  I’m not sure if that’s the one you read.  Let me just start off by saying, there are parts of it that I am not going to touch.  This person obviously gets a lot of enjoyment from tinfoil as part of their fandom experience and I don’t have a problem with that.  It’s not my cup of tea personally, but I see no harm in it any more than people’s tastes in fanfic.  So I don’t want to say anything that could be construed as being a critical jerk toward someone unless it was a theory that was disgusting or unfairly disparaging toward a character, which it isn’t in this case.  I’m just going to focus on the Lewyn Martell bit.         

From what I can see, they made a comparison between EB’s appearance and the closest relatives of Lewyn (mainly Quentyn Martell) to get a composite of what he may have looked like based on that.  This is just their guess.  There is no description of Lewyn in canon.  Basically, it comes down to a stocky build, being possibly dark-haired, and possibly drinking too much alcohol.  But Lewyn doesn’t necessarily have to resemble any of his living relatives or share their habits.  There is not one mention of Lewyn being a serious drinker.  In her childhood memories, Arianne remembers Lewyn as “tall as a tower;” however, she was very young when she saw him, she’s clearly romanticizing her kingsguard uncle, and pretty much any grown man would be super tall to a small child.  If you’re making a secret identity theory, I think you need a lot more evidence than a vague, unverifiable physical description.  If GRRM wanted us to draw a connection between EB and LM, meaning this was going to be a very important plot point later on, he would have given us way more specific information on the latter.  

There are other reasons too why EB is not LM or has anything to do with LM.  Jon Arryn returned Lewyn’s bones to Dorne, so his body was recovered from the battlefield.  There’s a reason why important people wear their sigils and highly recognizable armor on a battlefield.  A) You don’t want your own men attacking you by mistake because your face is hidden by a helm.  You want them to know who they should be following and taking orders from.  B) If you are captured, you want to be identified, so you’re more likely to be taken as a valuable hostage to be traded/ransomed.  Kingsguard armor is pretty distinctive, and he’s the only KG on the Trident.  Lewyn was also leading ten thousand Dornishmen.  So supposedly not one of his own men fighting beside him actually saw Lyn Corbay slay their commander and they also somehow lost his body on the Trident?  If so, are they saying that Jon Arryn took some rando’s bones to Dorne and passed them off as LM’s?  Is everyone who was there on the Trident or later involved in handling Lewyn’s body just straight up lying or inexplicably mistaken about all this?  Even with Lyn Corbay taking issue with the fact that Lewyn was already mortally wounded before he dealt the final blow with Lady Forlorn (because it cheapens the victory that earned him his spurs), not one person has a differing account of how LM died and what happened to his body to cause us to doubt.  Again, is literally everyone involved lying, conspiring or being bamboozled here? For what purpose and by what motivation?  There’s just no mystery here, or smell of conspiracy, or any good reason to believe he washed up on the QI. It’s really just resting on this person’s say so that it must have happened because of reasons.  Furthermore, it’s nothing like EB’s account of how he “died” and washed up on the shore:

I took an arrow through the thigh and another through the foot, and my horse was killed from under me, yet I fought on. I can still remember how desperate I was to find another horse, for I had no coin to buy one, and without a horse I would no longer be a knight. That was all that I was thinking of, if truth be told. I never saw the blow that felled me. I heard hooves behind my back and thought, a horse! but before I could turn something slammed into my head and knocked me back into the river, where by rights I should have drowned."Instead I woke here, upon the Quiet Isle. The Elder Brother told me I had washed up on the tide, naked as my name day. I can only think that someone found me in the shallows, stripped me of my armor, boots, and breeches, and pushed me back out into the deeper water. The river did the rest.  

EB was hit in the head by a blunt weapon by a man on horseback.  Not a sword and definitely not Lady Forlorn.  There was no final sword battle between two men on foot.  Nothing else in EB’s backstory matches anything we know about Lewyn except that they both fought on the side on Prince Rhaegar at the Trident.  EB was from a family of knights.  Lewyn was a prince of Dorne and a kingsguard.  He’s the brother of the ruling unnamed princess of Dorne and there is no mention of him having brothers like EB.  EB had a girl he wanted to marry, but couldn’t because he had nothing to offer her.  That they couldn’t have a relationship is a major cause of EB’s spiraling into violence and self-destruction.  It was an open secret that LM kept a longtime paramour even while he was a kingsguard, feeling no shame about it.  There’s no sense that LM had the same sad, depressed life that EB had.  That he is LM completely undermines EB as a character and his relatability to Sandor Clegane.  So I suppose EB is just lying to Brienne about every single detail of his backstory too for some reason?  This doesn’t make any sense especially since he decided to bring it up his past completely unprompted by Brienne.  What would be the point of lying?  Brienne couldn’t ID him or Lewyn by any of those details.  She couldn’t even ID the gravedigger who was right in front of her face twice, and that was the guy she was actually looking for.  :/

Elder Brother has a past, but he does not need to have a secret past to make his character work.  There’s a big difference.  There were tens of thousands of people that fought on the Targaryen side, including a huge host from the Reach.  That point comes from a So Spake Martin where he says some of Mace Tyrell’s strength was with Rhaegar, while he was at the siege of Storm’s End.  If you want my thoughts on where EB might have been from, I’m going with House Vyrwel sworn to House Tyrell as my best guess.  The Vyrwel’s are of Darkdell of the Reach.  If you recall from my essay, Shadrich says he’s from the “Shady Glen,” which is also a play on the meaning of Duskendale.  They both mean a shaded or darkened valley.  Well, “Darkdell” means precisely the same thing.  Lord and Lady Vyrwell were also present at the tourney at Whitewalls, which I’ve also discussed has striking parallels to the tourney of the Winged Knights.  The only known Vyrwel we have in the current series is Igon Vyrwel, captain of the guards at Highgarden.  He’s only mentioned in the appendix, so there’s no way to speculate further on how or if they are related.  All I’m saying is that EB being from a smaller vassal house is nothing special in itself and that’s the point.  He was just one of those bannerman that happened to be called to whatever side of the battle his lord was on.  Being from a smaller house fits better with being dealt a shitty hand in life, having severely limited options, and having a sense of hopelessness about it.  It fits better with his being able to connect with Sandor Clegane so that the latter can bear his soul to him.  Aside from all the facts, Sandor Clegane is not going to be able to relate to a prince of Dorne who lived it up with a super hot girlfriend for years while he’s wearing the white cloak.  Sorry, just no.                                   

#Anonymous #Elder Brother #lewyn martell #the quiet isle #the trident #prince rhaegar #asoiaf tinfoil #crack theories #house vyrwel #bluelemons speculates #I have nothing against anyone that enjoys tinfoil and crack theories for fun #unless it's a theory that is being gross about any character #I have certain specific theories of my own #but on the whole I'm not into secret identity theories #I'm not trying to be mean to anyone and they way they choose to fandom #but most of those theories suck because they're so easy to debunk #long post