George R. R. Martin: Yes, My Fans Have Figured Out the Big Secret in "Game of Thrones"

Ah, sweet confirmation.

I'll keep this short and move on to another post to cap the day.

Note the above article contains some possible spoilers and what I would deem one Confirmed Spoiler, so read at your own risk.

I've read Martin talking about this before. He put a lot of clues in his first book -- subtle ones, but very clear once you noticed them -- pointing to a Great Big Secret.

The moment you read the fans' theory, you say: "Well, that's it. There's no doubt. The case is airtight. There's no way he included all these clues (sneakily inserted so that you wouldn't take any notice of them) pointing to one conclusion accidentally."

Anyway, Martin has before talked about changing the secret he had in mind, so that people would be surprised, but then said he'd decided against that.

After all, all those clues point in one direction; he can't rewrite the first book to change them. (Well, I guess he could: he's writing virtually everything he can think of except these last two books.)

Martin doesn't say what this "conclusion" is, but it's pretty clear.

As a matter of fact, Sean Bean, Ned Stark himself, just confessed the Big Secret himself in a Reddit Ask Me Anything a few days ago. (That is linked in the article above.)

So, then, if you've been wondering whether this Big Secret was actually intended: Yes it was. You figured it out.

Below: A major hint about the Great Big Secret. (No really -- it does involve a weiner!)

More: Here's what he said. This echoes things he's said before.

"So many readers were reading the books with so much attention that they were throwing up some theories and while some of those theories were amusing bullshit and creative, some of the theories are right. At least one or two readers had put together the extremely subtle and obscure clues that I'd planted in the books and came to the right solution.

So what do I do then? Do I change it? I wrestled with that issue and I came to the conclusion that changing it would be a disaster, because the clues were there. You can't do that, so I'm just going to go ahead. Some of my readers who don't read the boards--which thankfully there are hundreds of thousands of them--will still be surprised and other readers will say: 'see, I said that four years ago, I'm smarter than you guys'."

The Secret: The below video explains the theory, and offers a lot of the evidence for it.

Spoiler Warning, obviously.

posted by Ace at 07:17 PM

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