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Post by min on May 4, 2016 2:35:58 GMT
Singing Raven Man... now you've got me wondering about the nature of green men and if the presence of a second consciousness provides immunity from blue eyed popsicle status. We don't see any cotf wighting around the place. And perhaps Ghost does the same thing for Jon. Or it could be the cotf become like the original spirit when they access the memories of the previous occupant and not even they can tell the difference.
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Post by Ser Duncan on May 4, 2016 15:04:33 GMT
Or it could be the cotf become like the original spirit when they access the memories of the previous occupant and not even they can tell the difference. Can't be, though I do like the idea. If the CotF/greenseer took over or became one with host's spirit and body, then Bran wouldn't have been able to detect there was a third presence in the raven he skinchanged in the cave. The implication of Bran's feeling the presence is that while the Child is living a second life in the bird, she is still distinct and apart from the bird itself. But what you're saying could come about in a different way. One thing that always struck me as odd is BR saying to Bran that the Child in the bird is long gone. It echoes what Leaf says about CH having been killed long ago. So going on the assumption that time for a race that lives hundreds of years is more or less relative, how long is long ago? Ravens can live as long as men do but, according to the Children, men live short lives. Doesn't seem to be possible then that a long gone, centuries old Child is living in a bird. So what if when a CotF takes over a body, that body lives as long as Child would? I don't know how this would happen, but say it's the spirit that keeps a body alive as much as the physical form itself, then the raven would live a long life. In the case of CH, I wonder if he wasn't taken over at the moment of death, just like Thistle, but this time successfully? Varamyr was pushed/run out of Thistle, so what would've happened had she been more like Hodor and not fought tooth and nail to keep him out? Additionally, what if Thistle had been a skinchanger herself? This is the closest I think we can get to what happened to Coldhands. He must've been a skinchanger in life because his body still has the ability to control not only the ravens but an elk as well.
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Post by Melifeather on May 4, 2016 15:45:02 GMT
The spirit does seem to be the life force factor here. The more of it, the more lifelike the body seems. You can run electricity through a dead body and shock the nerves into moving, but that doesn't mean that the body is alive. Doctors use electricity to shock hearts into beating again, and drowned (wo)men can be resuscitated with air. The wights are more like the cadavers that have had their nerves shocked with electricity...only look at it more like they're on life support. Remove the air and they cannot move. There's not enough spirit left in them to be totally revived, but Jon wasn't dead all that long, so he had enough spirit to be resuscitated.
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Post by Ser Duncan on May 4, 2016 17:52:06 GMT
but Jon wasn't dead all that long, so he had enough spirit to be resuscitated Sorry but this reminded me of ...
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Post by Maester Flagons on May 4, 2016 18:05:20 GMT
I've long held the ravens to have some role between men and singers. More than what is spelled out in the books. Even between the weirwoods and the singers do I believe the ravens had influence. Possibly the birds brought the singers to the trees.
Coldhands is right there in the mix, and I hope he comes back to the stage with some answers.
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Post by Ser Duncan on May 4, 2016 18:33:36 GMT
Coldhands is right there in the mix, and I hope he comes back to the stage with some answers. Yeah I'm hoping the same. Considering what was said in the show about Bran not staying in the cave, maybe it'll be Coldhand's job to take them into the Land of Always Winter?
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Post by Deleted on May 5, 2016 19:45:06 GMT
Coldhands is right there in the mix, and I hope he comes back to the stage with some answers. Yeah I'm hoping the same. Considering what was said in the show about Bran not staying in the cave, maybe it'll be Coldhand's job to take them into the Land of Always Winter? I can't wait.
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Post by Maester Flagons on May 6, 2016 2:25:52 GMT
Yeah I'm hoping the same. Considering what was said in the show about Bran not staying in the cave, maybe it'll be Coldhand's job to take them into the Land of Always Winter? I can't wait. Agree. That would be awesome.
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Post by Melifeather on May 6, 2016 15:14:21 GMT
I was having a conversation with Paulus about Aristotle's belief that humans don't die until their bodies are separated from their spirit. That theory seems to apply to the story since the "bones remember" implying that the spirit is still in the bones. The spirit remains in the bones unless they are cracked open. BUT Skinchangers are able to slip their skins and move their spirits into another host. They remain tethered to their bodies, but their bodies don't die while they're away. So why did Varamyr's tether to his body break?
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Post by min on May 6, 2016 15:18:27 GMT
I was having a conversation with Paulus about Aristotle's belief that humans don't die until their bodies are separated from their spirit. That theory seems to apply to the story since the "bones remember" implying that the spirit is still in the bones. The spirit remains in the bones unless they are cracked open. BUT Skinchangers are able to slip their skins and move their spirits into another host. They remain tethered to their bodies, but their bodies don't die while they're away. So why did Varamyr's tether to his body break? The third eye isn't open? Only one in a thousand skin changers are powerful enough? He broke the bond with his own body when he attempted to take Thistle's body?
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Post by Paulus on May 7, 2016 14:40:05 GMT
Actually I met a guy last night and he told me of a theory that Hodor was like bran - except that for hodor his "wolf" was a horse. Then hodor stayed too long in the horse so that he lost some of his human-ness.
So I re-read something on Aristotle and body and soul just now, just to recap for myself. So the soul is the reason the body has life, but each creature has a different kind of soul. So as a human you have a human soul and you are meant to have a human body. You aren't meant to have a wolf's body or a horse's body so in some sense the body is the "fit" for the soul. Maybe if you occupy another creature - its hard to do it because the creature does not fit the soul, and if you stay too long you end up becoming more and more like the creature you occupy. Maybe GRRM wouldn't formalise his "metaphysics" in this way but I think it kind of fits.
I don't know how this helps us explain cold hands tho.
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Post by Melifeather on May 7, 2016 15:41:09 GMT
Doesn't Jojen pretty much tell Bran the same thing? That he has to learn how to control Summer so that Summer doesn't take over him?
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Post by Ser Duncan on May 7, 2016 16:15:19 GMT
I was having a conversation with Paulus about Aristotle's belief that humans don't die until their bodies are separated from their spirit. That theory seems to apply to the story since the "bones remember" implying that the spirit is still in the bones. The spirit remains in the bones unless they are cracked open. BUT Skinchangers are able to slip their skins and move their spirits into another host. They remain tethered to their bodies, but their bodies don't die while they're away. I'm not sure it is their spirits skinchangers are moving. Don't get me wrong, I'd love for what you're saying to be right, and I think it is, because we know wights remember things. And it would support my theory that a skinchanger's body would retain the gift of skinchanging because it lies in the bones of their bodies. But I think it may just be consciousness that is being moved. At one point both Bran and Arya can see simultaneously through the eyes of animals and their own eyes. Arya was blind at the time, but she remained in the darkness of her blindness while images came to her in the pub. Later she is able to hit the Kindly Man with her stick while looking through the eyes of the cat, so she's not in that paralysed state that Bran experienced when he was in Summer, early on. Bran too finally achieves that in the crypts. So I'm thinking the spirit wouldn't know how to interpret visual and sensual content the way a consciousness does. As far as we've seen all the skinchangers receive not only visual information, but also sensual (not sexual, but pertaining to the senses) and emotional information from their beasts. All of that gets interpreted by the skinchanger, within their own body. Or conversely in the host's body. Spirit doesn't interpret, spirit is energy without thought. So why did Varamyr's tether to his body break? I think the simple answer to this is that Varamyr went fleeing from Thistle's body because she fought much harder than he thought she was capable of doing. And he didn't want to go back to his ailing and dying body, so he just fled, searching for a host and landed in the tree. From the tree he felt everything that made up the world around him, which says quite a bit about what greenseers see and feel. I don't think he actually untethered from his body entirely, I think in his panic he skinchanged the tree.
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Post by Melifeather on May 7, 2016 16:39:44 GMT
What I am thinking is the leap to another host has to be made while the skinchanger's body is still alive, because once the body is dead the spirit wouldn't be able to leave. Therefore, since Jon didn't seek out another host his spirit remained in his body. His body is dead...so he's basically "warging" his own body. I actually tried making this argument on Heresy as the definition of how Jon could armor himself in black ice. You cannot kill someone who's body is already dead. The words "black" and "ice" both symbolize death, so Jon is armored in death.
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Post by Paulus on May 7, 2016 20:18:27 GMT
I wonder if the idea behind "the bones remember" come from people gaining some aspect of "personality" after an organ transplant. I have read more than once people who had an organ transplant they gained some likes and dislikes. If the idea is that someone's body is fitted to their soul then the body will maybe "remember" some aspects of a person's likes and dislikes.
But someone tell me something. How do we know "wights" remember things, I must have missed that. P
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