EVERYTHING you know about Mance Rayder is WRONG (Essay)

Comments · 488

• EM

  @Emmett-Shearer9886 · 3 weeks ago

  Mance has been stuck in Winterfell for 15 years now.

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• WR

  @Wremson · 3 weeks ago

  But how does Varys play a role in this 🤔🤔🤔

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• OR

  @OrionJA · 3 weeks ago

  "Meat and mead" is a Westerosi idiom -- it's a fixed phrase that means generous hospitality or a satisfying meal. In Eddard 4 AGOT, Ned thinks that "intrigues" are like "meat and mead" to Littlefinger. In Eddard 7, when he asks Varys who poisoned Jon Arryn, Varys says it was probably a "dear friend who often shared meat and mead" with him. I don't think Varys is telling to look for a mead-drinking suspect. It's just a saying.

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• AN

  @andrewmaciver4404 · 3 weeks ago

  "Meat and mead" is pretty clearly just a kind of linguistic flourish. I ate and drank but with alliteration and half-rhyme. "Wined and Dined" - see they drank wine!!

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• MA

  @MattBaris1991 · 3 weeks ago (edited)

  I’m willing to believe Mance was lying, but it’s hard not to feel irked at the level of certainty you use when you point out minor details that could be waved away plausibly.<br><br>Mance mentions Mead but Jon talks about summer wine: could simply be that Jon is a young noble boy with a young noble boy’s palate — younger kids prefer wine and sweeter drinks.<br><br>Mance mentions a different meat at the feast: it’s stated that nobility get access to the finer dishes and the commoners get the rest. Could be that Mance didn’t get any of the same food (same with the alcohol)<br><br>Mance says he saw Jon’s wolf “at the feast”: while the feast hall is a physical space, it’s also an event that people travel for. If I see my buddy at the gas station just before Coachella I’ll tell people I saw him at Coachella. <br><br>You qualify all these points via your legal expertise and suggest disagreement is bad faith. My emotional reaction to that is not that it adds credulity. It just makes me want to contradict you.<br><br>The video is very well organized, though. It’s good work you’ve done in presenting this cohesively

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• AL

  @altotas · 3 weeks ago

  For &quot;secret message&quot; theory to work Benjen must anticipate several things: 1.Mance must later recount precisely this story. 2.Jon must personally meet Mance. 3.Mance must preserve the deliberately false details rather than correcting them through other information. 4.Jon must remember sufficiently precise details of the feast. 5.He must recognize the discrepancies as originating with Benjen.<br><br>Saying that Jon fails to understand the clue because solving it would ruin Martin&apos;s mystery is a warning sign. Once a hypothesis requires a character to fail to perceive the mechanism specifically so that the hypothesis can remain hidden from the reader, falsifiability becomes poor.

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• HE

  @hermes7705 · 3 weeks ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYB1DppPDDA&amp;t=1400">23:20</a> Mance sat on a bench with the other freeriders and Jon sat on the bench with yonger squares. Сouldn’t they just sat on two different bench?

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• CL

  @Clepston · 3 weeks ago

  The points you make about the feast are full of holes, imo. Other comments have pointed out the” mead and meat” line being an idiom- a westerosi “wined and dined”- but there’s also a misplaced certainty with the meaning of the word “scarcely.” I’ll admit that maybe this is a regional dialect thing, but I’ve never known the word “scarcely” to mean “not at all.” I’ve always understood the meaning of that word to be more similar to “barely, hardly, etc.” Merriam-Webster’s dictionary has this meaning listed as its primary use. Mance and Jon could scarcely hear the music, but they <b>could</b> still hear it, especially if they paid special attention, as a bard might.

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• TH

  @TheC4ptain1177 · 3 weeks ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYB1DppPDDA&amp;t=896">14:56</a> just because the reason is not stated shouldn’t mean that there is no reason that the lord commander would want to personally speak with his greatest potential ally in case of a wildling attack

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• OP

  @openwide000 · 3 weeks ago

  If George is thinking this hard about this story as OP is, then I totally understand why TWOW will never come out 😔

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• AN

  @anondescriptbullet · 3 weeks ago

  I am now a personal fan of the &quot;Dalla is a CotF&quot; theory, because it would further highlight Melisandre&apos;s magical incompetence to just... not notice it

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• RU

  @RussellB · 3 weeks ago

  he&apos;s actually an olympic breakdancer

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