User:The Dragon Demands

 ASK NOT THE SPARROW HOW THE DRAGON SOARS.

 QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES

The Dragon does not ask, it demands.

If you Wake The Dragon, the Dragon Demands.

I am the Dragon. You are privy to a great Becoming, but you recognize nothing. To me, you are a slug in the sun. You are an ant in the afterbirth. It is your nature to do one thing correctly: before me, you rightly tremble. But Fear is not what you owe me. You owe me Awe!

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations."
 * -- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, Chapter 12

"I have become a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls."
 * -- Job 30:29

In case you people have forgotten, this wiki operates under the same rules as the rest of them. Vandals are not the law. I am the Law.

In running a wiki, there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are also many moments for ruthless action...What is often called "ruthless". What may, in many circumstances, be only clarity: seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it: directly, quickly, awake, looking at it.

As for my critics, I am unconcerned. I am beyond their timid, lying morality. And so I am beyond caring.

Heads. Spikes. Walls.
''The heads. You're looking at the heads. I, uh – sometimes he goes too far, you know – - he's the first one to admit it!''


 * User:LovelyChrys - banned June 2012
 * User:Ch'vyalthan - banned January 2013
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 * User:Rjcripe - banned May 2013
 * User:TVH - banned May 2013
 * User:DragonGirlRock - banned May 2013
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 * User:30isthenewdead - banned March 2014
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 * User:Annewbiz - banned July 2015

"Well, you see...things get confused out there: power, ideals, the old morality, practical necessity. But out there with these natives it must be a temptation to be God. Because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Every man has got a breaking point. You and I have one. He has reached his. And very obviously, he has gone insane...He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And his methods have become...unsound."

Warning: anyone will instantly earn a permanent ban and join the other heads mounted on the wall if they ever mock my great friend Michael Hunt. I will not have my friend Mike ridiculed by common wiki-editors.

The New Number One

 * There's always someone else trying to be Number One.

"There is difference between a grub
 * Appointed as an Administrator of Game of Thrones Wiki - February 26th, 2013.
 * Ranked up to #1 contributor on Game of Thrones Wiki, January 16th, 2014.
 * First contributor to surpass 25,000 edits - July 21st, 2014.
 * First contributor to surpass 10,000 wiki achievement points - July 21st, 2014.
 * Made one of three Wiki-Bureaucrats ("Triachs") on Game of Thrones Wiki. - October 24th, 2014. In the process I assumed the Mantle of Responsibility.  Some day, in due time, it will be seized from me in turn, by one more capable.  This might happen ten years from now or tomorrow - but not today.
 * First contributor to surpass 30,000 edits - January 31st, 2015.
 * First contributor to surpass 15,000 wiki achievement points - September 3rd, 2015.
 * First contributor to surpass 40,000 edits - September 8th, 2015.

and a butterfly; yet your butterfly was a grub.

This Martius is grown from man to Dragon:

he has wings; he is more than a creeping thing."
 * -- Coriolanus, Act V, Scene IV

I've been asked if I'm in the Game of Thrones business, or the Wiki business. The answer is neither: I'm in the empire business.

Titles
My self-appointed and self-congratulatory titles include:

Wiki Administrator and Wiki Bureaucrat, Triarch of Game of Thrones Wiki, Mailed Fist of the Wiki, Prince of Cats, Ace of Swords, Magister Artium, and Duke of New York (I'm A-Number One!)

Quotes
"Daeron at first met resistance from his uncle, his councillors, and many great lords when he first proposed to 'complete the Conquest' by bringing Dorne into the realm at last. His lords reminded him that, unlike the Conqueror and his sisters, he had no more dragons fit for war. To this Daeron famously responded: 'You have a dragon. He stands before you'."
 * --The World of Ice & Fire

"Over the centuries, House Targaryen has produced both great men and monsters. Prince Daemon was both. In his day there was not a man so admired, so beloved, and so reviled in all Westeros. He was made of light and darkness in equal parts. To some he was a hero, to others the blackest of villains. No true understanding of that most tragic bloodletting known as the Dance of the Dragons is possible without a consideration of the crucial role played before and during the conflict by this rogue prince."
 * --Archmaester Gyldayn

"In five years, we'll all either be working for him, or dead by his hand." -- 30 Rock

"Influence is largely a matter of patience, I've found...Step by step, one distasteful task after another, I made my way...Influence grows like a weed. I tended mine patiently."

- Varys

"I made my fortune by being tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties!"
 * -- Scrooge McDuck

"I took the Canal Zone, and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on, the canal does also."
 * -- Theodore Roosevelt

"Lots of ways to help people. Sometimes heal patients; sometimes execute dangerous people. Either way helps."
 * -- Mordin, Mass Effect 2

"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."
 * -- Salvor Hardin, Foundation

"You disapprove? Well, too bad! We're in this for the species, boys and girls. It's simple numbers. They have more. And every day I have to make decisions that send hundreds of people like you to their deaths."
 * -- Starship Troopers

"You better wake up. The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping. There is another world beneath it - the real world. And if you want to survive it, you better ''LEARN. TO PULL. THE TRIGGER!"
 * -- Blade (1998)

"Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls, and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence is your answer."
 * -- Javik, the last surviving Prothean. Mass Effect 3

"Fear me, but follow! If you will not serve in combat, then you will serve on the firing line!"
 * -- Unknown Imperial Guard Commissar, 412th Cadian Regiment, as he shot one of his retreating soldiers through the head, to rally his remaining troops into a counter-charge. Minutes later he and his entire platoon were wiped out in a vital rear-guard action, which ultimately ensured victory in the Lorn V campaign.

"Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man."
 * -- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

"I am a trafficker of information, I know everything I can." -- The Merovingian, The Matrix Reloaded

"Every man dies, not every man really lives." -- Leeroy Jenkins

"Adam Friedberg is a visionary". -- George R. R. Martin

This wiki is my private, self-inflicted Hell. Rolling boulders up a hill only to see them fall down the hill again, time after time for eternity. Yet here I may reign secure, and in my choice: better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.

"Blake understood. Treated it like a joke, but he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together...he saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection of it, a walking parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That's why he was lonely."
 * -- Rorschach, Watchmen

"I want to go with you...I can't. I do belong here. These bad people...are what I'm good at. Out-talking them, out-thinking them... it's what I am. And I like it. I like it more than anything I've ever done."

"I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it, and I was really – I was alive." - Breaking Bad

"I...I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life, I don't apologize, to take care of my family. And I refused to be a fool dancing on the strings held by all of those big shots. I don't apologize, that's my life. But I thought that...when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the strings...There wasn't enough time...there just wasn't enough time..."

I am a monster...who dreamt he was a man...and loved it. But now the dream is over. And the Dragon is awake...

On TV Adaptation
"If you read comics, if you read DC comics, there’s Earth 1, there’s Earth 2, and the way I reconcile it, as a fan of the books — as one of the biggest fans of the books — there’s Westeros 1 and Westeros 2, and they’re alternate universes; some things are the same, some things are different."
 * --Bryan Cogman


 * -->"They wanted to finish two whole books in one season! It's...madness!  That's, looking at it now when we've got the whole season - I can only say it's madness, complete and utter madness...The decision to combine those two books into one season, and they're not small books either - they didn't have to make that decision.  If they felt that this size is not optimal for storytelling, they really should have looked at another season.


 * Making the decision to try and get it all into one season...if they didn't realize that this wasn't optimal, if they thought what they ultimately produced in Season 5, that this was a great way to get through the material...well then they really are clueless, and I have no faith in them.


 * So no matter how you look at it, either they decided to sacrifice the story because they were absolutely set on doing this in one season...or, they didn't even understand that they were sacrificing the story. I don't know which is worse."
 * --Elio and Linda, owners of Westeros.org, discussing the decision to combine both the fourth and fifth novel into Season 5.

"I defeated your uncle Victarion and his Iron Fleet off Fair Isle, the first time your father crowned himself. I held Storm's End against the power of the Reach for a year, and took Dragonstone from the Targaryens. I smashed Mance Rayder at the Wall, though he had twenty times my numbers. Tell me, turncloak, what "battles" has the Bastard of Bolton ever won that I should fear him?"

- Stannis Baratheon

Why I, as a diehard book-fan, worked to become an Administrator on a wiki focused on the TV adaptation:


 * Lisa: "Dad, for the last time, please don't lower yourself to the level of the mob!"
 * Homer: "Lisa, maybe if I'm part of that mob, I can help steer it in wise directions. Now where's my giant foam cowboy hat and airhorn?"
 * --The Simpsons, Season 4, "Whacking Day"

On TV-first viewers who genuinely believe that Emilia Clarke plays a character named "Khaleesi", don't recognize the name "Daenerys", only watch for the nudity, can't remember events that happened one season ago, don't know who Rhaegar Targaryen, Tysha, or Kyle Condon are...and yet continue to insist that they are the "equals" of the book-first readers, who treat the TV series as a serious drama and literary adaptation of George R.R. Martin's works:


 * "Now, as I live, I will. My nobler friends,
 * I crave their pardons:
 * For the mutable, rank-scented many, let them
 * regard me, as I do not flatter, and
 * therein behold themselves: I say again,
 * In soothing them, we nourish against our senate
 * the cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition,
 * which we ourselves have ploughed for, sowed,
 * and scattered,
 * By mingling them with us - the honoured number!
 * Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that
 * which we have given to BEGGARS!!"


 * -- Coriolanus, Act III, Scene I

Biggest complaints about the TV adaptation
I actually give the TV adaptation a large amount of slack; these books were written with no thought to the practicality of adaptation.

Also, if I kept a list of every tiny change I was annoyed about...that would overshadow the few most important complaints. So as triage, I really only try to fixate on the absolute worst changes. And the TV producers often wave off the excuse that "the TV series is just different" - yeah, I'm not talking about that and you know it. These "biggest complaints" are "biggest"...because there is no justificaction for them. The specific complaint is that the TV adaptation didn't need to do these things this way. And sometimes mistakes get made, sometimes major storyarcs simply need to be condensed, there are plausible justifications for such things.

So narrowing it down to the absolute top priority, "biggest problems" not easily forgiven or explained:


 * 1 - General fear of mentioning too much backstory, or using flashbacks - i.e. not mentioning Rhaegar Targaryen that much until Season 4, other stuff. The TV writers have a general fear that the audience won't remember things that happened one season ago, and definitely not remember things that happened more than one season ago.  Yes, some casual viewers won't remember things - but the entire reason that certain dramatic points have such impact is because they are the payoff for more than one season of buildup.
 * 2 - General fear of including prophecies - this one is a little more understandable; they've said they're afraid that if they include a prophecy, they can't guarantee that five seasons in the future they will have enough time to give it payoff. Even so, there are maybe two or three prophecies which were so important that they should have given them more payoff.  This is tied to point one:  we get a world with no past and no future:  they think if they set up a prophecy in Season 1, the viewer's won't even remember that setup by the time of Season 3.  And a few of these prophecies like "Who is Jon Snow's mother?" need more setup and clues, otherwise the full answer just pops into existence.
 * 3 - Gender nudity imbalance, so bad that SNL made the "Adam Friedberg" joke. The series has a heavy "male gaze" and doesn't write women very well - at the times it does, it is because they stuck close to Martin's original text, and Martin can write women better.  Admittedly the gender nudity imbalance improved from Season 3 onwards, though there are still one or two scenes now and again which strain credibility (...i.e. needlessly showing a rape montage in the invented return to Craster's Keep subplot in Season 4, in which they also needlessly threatened to rape Meera Reed; this was not a mature presentation of the threat of rape in wartime, it was lazy writing).
 * 4 - Omitting mention of Tysha as the real reason that Tyrion kills his father Tywin. Basically the apotheosis of point 1: The entire point of Tyrion's storyline is Tysha - it's the end of the third novel!  The climax!  You cut other things out to make time for that.  Without the buildup across multiple seasons, the stunning revelation that Tyrion has been in a lie this entire time and just how badly Tywin had mistreated him and he never even knew...the Tysha speech was arguably why Dinklage won an Emmy in Season 1 - and the lack of that Tysha impact is a reason why the Season 4 finale didn't get them an Emmy the next time around.  And if they think people won't remember across each season (and they did mention Tysha again in Season 2 and Season 3)....it's their job to make the audience remember by having Tyrion mention her frequently.  This is the embodiment of their fear that casual viewers won't remember characters only spoken about, and that flashbacks are too confusing - but by that logic they wouldn't have mentioned Elia Martell either.
 * 5 - Removing Catelyn's political agency - they didn't write Catelyn Stark very well at all. Apparently they thought they had to emphasize "she's a mother" to make her more "sympathetic" because she's cold to Jon Snow...even though Catelyn is entirely justified in their culture to not like her husband's bastard by another woman.  The result is that they never have Catelyn be the tough political leader of the Stark faction she is in the novels:  they just have her whining "I need to go home to Winterfell to see my children!" over and over.  Or they gave her major political decisions to Robb - part of their attempts to hype up Robb as a brilliant boy warrior-king, yet never show the fallout from that in the third novel when we find out that Robb is actually a terrible politician who gets his own men killed (they actually never really fault Robb for basic mistakes he made, presenting it as everyone else's fault).
 * 6 - Changing Jeyne Westerling to Talisa. - linked to the Catelyn-Robb problem from Season 2. The TV writers drastically changed Jeyne to the point that, as GRRM himself said, he asked that they have the token decency of renaming the character because she was nothing like his book character.  Simply...she was very poorly written, but the writers seem proud of her because she was their own creation.  As the saying goes, take pride in adapting things well - don't think you know better than the source material!  Talisa as characterized was the sort of stereotypical Fantasy series "beautiful medic/love interest" - as Westeros.org said, it's the type of stereotypical stuff Martin would never write.  She wasn't really a "character" in her own write so much as a Designated Love Interest and prop for Robb.  They also got a lot of basic details wrong (why make her from Volantis of all places?) -- There is also the massive fan theory that she was really a honeypot trap by the Lannisters - Talisa even said she was a spy, jokingly - as if to set this up.  There's a running theory that there was actually chaos in the writers' room, and Talisa went through multiple rewrites even as they were filming - the theory is that they were going to set her up as a honeytrap and her relationship with Robb was a lie, but then they got cold feet and dropped the idea.  This ties in with the overall complaint that the TV series doesn't write women very well (unless when they rely on what Martin himself wrote)...though it really grew into its own unique problem.  As Westeros.org pointed out, the fact that so many major critics and professional reviewers suspected that the entire Talisa character was just a cover story, she didn't really love Robb, and up until the Red Wedding itself thought she would be outed as a Lannister spy...indicates that a large number of people didn't think the Robb/Talisa romance was very well-written or convincing, and had to be fake.
 * 7 - Practically omitting the Greyjoys as a political faction after Season 2 ended. Yes, there is limited screentime, but they could very easily have just had Yara Greyjoy sent as an envoy to treat with Tywin in King's Landing.  Instead the Greyjoys have been sidelined ever since.  A season or so off is forgivable, but sidelined for three seasons?  (Three through Five?)  They might not have had enough time to fit it all in, but they could at least have made some mention of them, not the under three minute nonsense Yara had in Season 4.
 * 8 - It was ludicrous to attempt to adapt two novels as Season 5, when they were having trouble enough as it was adapting one book's worth of material or less each season. Who wanted that?  HBO fears over actor contracts running out?  Surely the TV writers didn't ask for that voluntarily, did they?

To Do List
I do what needs to be done, and I get results, damn it:
 * House Targaryen related topics
 * Culture & Society articles. World-building topics in general.
 * Maintain the the Cargo Cult.
 * Characters significantly changed between books and TV series
 * Actively enforce policy on using standard American English throughout all articles. I can no longer idly sit back and allow embarrassing instances of "favourite", "colour", "realise", and "aluminium".
 * Remove all instances of single apostrophe marks used instead of actual quotation marks. First, this distorts wiki-code by italicizing or bolding things by accident. Second, it is simply incorrect grammar by the standards of American English.
 * Actively enforce proper use of the serial comma: "Targaryen, Stark, and Lannister" is correct, not "Targaryen, Stark and Lannister". Are Starks and Lannisters a conceptual unit? Paired in any way? No. So why omit the comma that separates these two items?
 * Rewatch Seasons 1-3 to revise and update earlier episode information.
 * Finish screencapping and making updates based on the the Complete Guide to Westeros/Histories & Lore animated featurettes.
 * Take followers to the Threshold.

All Hail the Mother of Dragons
Daenerys of House Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, rightful Queen of Westeros.



Death to the cats and dogs of the Usurper, idiots too vicious to rule effectively and idiots too honorable to rule pragmatically.

My Favorite Characters

 * 1) Daenerys Targaryen
 * 2) Jaime Lannister
 * 3) Myrcella Baratheon
 * 4) Shireen Baratheon
 * 5) Sansa Stark

My favorite dragon is Caraxes.

I'm going to enjoy watching you die
See full explanation: User:The Dragon Demands/I'm going to enjoy watching you die

"Joffrey... Cersei... Ilyn Payne... The Hound... Polliver... The Mountain..."

- Arya Stark's "prayer"


 * Joffrey Baratheon
 * Tywin Lannister
 * Cersei Lannister
 * Ilyn Payne
 * Ser Meryn Trant
 * Ser Boros Blount
 * Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish
 * Janos Slynt
 * Ser Gregor Clegane
 * Several of the Mountain's men:
 * The Tickler
 * Polliver
 * Vargo Hoat/Locke
 * The Brave Companions
 * Roose Bolton
 * Ramsay Snow, the Bastard of Bolton
 * House Frey - particularly Lord Walder, Black Walder, Lothar, Emmon, Hosteen, and Walder Rivers.
 * Various other Freys
 * Rolph and Sybell Spicer
 * Balon Greyjoy
 * Euron Greyjoy

Trivia

 * I started reading the A Song of Ice and Fire series as part of the buzz surrounding the release of A Feast for Crows in 2005, thus making me one of the last wave of pre-TV series, book-only fans. A friend recommended the series and gave me the first novel as a gift.  While I enjoy the TV series it is inherently an adaptation of a book series and does not exist in isolation from it.
 * Before that, I was a big Lord of the Rings fan - read the books right before the announcement of a film adaptation came out (once again, one of the last of the book-fans before a live-action adaptation came out to compare it against). The years the film adaptations were coming out were great times.
 * I was born and live in the New York City area.
 * I am a heterosexual white male, born in the 1980s.
 * I hold a Master's Degree in Medieval History.
 * I know French and Latin (had to for the degree).
 * I am a graduate student - with few medieval jobs, I keep going back for "more training" in the vain hope it will boost my applications.
 * I am a teetotaler: I don't drink alcohol, nor do I smoke tobacco or marijauna (I do think that banning such things causes more crimes than it solves, as Prohibition showed us).  Though I do enjoy the occasional glass of wine, I dislike being intoxicated at all.  I don't go to scifi conventions to enjoy getting fall-over drunk - I come for the panels and intelligent discussion.
 * I am skilled in the deadly and exquisite art of the Vulcan Death Grip.
 * I will always be a proud member of the Colbert Nation.
 * I am Jack's smirking revenge. Under and behind and inside everything these people took for granted, something horrible had been growing.
 * "How I came to Game of Thrones Wiki" is a long and funny story, actually. I had never taken part in any online A Song of Ice and Fire fandom at all.  After Season 1 ended, HBO was going to hold a second round focus group for Season 2 in NYC, so I signed up.  I wanted to voice my views on how they were handling a few things (less Sexposition, more Renly/Loras, more Rhaegar and Lyanna backstory, etc.)  The day before the focus group meeting, however, I got a phone call saying I was removed from the focus group purely because I mentioned that I had read the novels.  I felt voiceless and I didn't like it.  So instead I started tinkering around voicing information via editing a point or two on the startup Game of Thrones Wiki.  Over the next three years, somehow I worked my way up to being one of the three co-head Administrators who oversee a wiki read by hundreds of thousands of Game of Thrones viewers per day, reading the notes and reactions I write which I was blocked from voicing at that Season 2 focus group.  I became the Great Red Dragon.