You Might Have Worked Out How Game Of Thrones Will End

Warning: This article deals with predictions of the ending to A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. We have no idea if these predictions are correct, but: they might be!

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There are almost as many fan predictions around George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire as there have been deaths in Game of Thrones — so it makes sense that a few would be accurate.

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival yesterday, Martin spoke about how odd it was reading through fan theories, and stumbling upon those who’d got everything right. “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.”

The author struggled with how to react. “So what do I do then? Do I change it? I hate predictable fiction as a reader, I don’t want to write predictable,” Martin says. “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’.”

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Below this line is a fan theory. Run away if you hate fan theories.

Probably the most popular and enduring of these theories is “R + L = J” – the theory that Jon Snow is not in fact Ned Stark’s son, but the child of Ned’s sister Lyanna and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen. Some genius on Youtube collated all the clues from the books and the HBO series so far, and made a pretty comprehensive video explaining it.

Sean Bean (Ned Stark) fuelled this theory last month, when he told Vulture, “I’m obviously not Jon Snow’s dad” – and in a Reddit AMA last week, he did absolutely nothing to dispel the theory.

R + L = J is just one in a seriously impressive list of theories and predictions about A Song Of Ice And Fire. Whichever happens to be correct, actress Maisie Williams disapproves.  “I’m so sick of going on the internet and seeing all the book readers being snobby,” she said in an interview last month, “spoiling it for other people.”