Hello and welcome to the Nothericast, podcast, the one true chapter by chapter podcast going through a song of Ice and Fire one chapter week.

I'm one of your host, Jeff, better knows Bernie Fish.

And I'm your other host Emmett, better known as Poor Quentin.

And welcome to the 73rd episode of the Nauticast entitled Red.

Part 1, an analysis of the prologue to a clash of kings in which old man Crescent stares down a

giant eye of Sauron in the sky before explaining a bunch of backstory and wishing he wasn't so

damn old. Wait, why did you write that I feel that in these notes here? Me,

I feel that that I'm old. Are you saying that I'm old? Uh, no, Jeff. I don't, that must have been my cats. They were just walking on the keyboard and they're just learning things every

day, man. You just can't stop them. God damn it, habit. Oh, that's awesome. Very, poned. But yes, folks, you may have noticed the part one in Jeff's title there, an act that will surprise absolutely nobody who's followed us this far.

The prologue to a clash of kings just proved so full of material that we love to analyze and analyze super deeply,

and there's no way we could cover it adequately within the space of one recording session, let alone one episode.

So we decided to split things up.

We're going to do the first half-ish of the chapter up to the introduction of Stanis Barathean himself for this week.

And then next week we'll do Red Part 2, covering Stanis's introduction, Melisandra's introduction,

and the final showdown between Melisandra and Crescent at the end.

We will have foreshadowing and groundwork sections and theory slash discussion

sections for both episodes covering different topics that are germane to the two halves of the chapter.

But we thought this was the best way to present to you just an incredible piece of work on George's part,

something we really love, but is definitely a case of him throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

I do think it's, you know, appropriate that we had to split this one up, given the fact that a clash of kings on the meta side of things was originally not intended by George. In fact, it was, again,

as we've said many times in the past, the Game of Thrones was supposed to end with the red

wending, and a clash of kings came in as George ended up expanding his work much more quickly,

...