Asher ending kind of is terrible by Westeros standards
I mean, he breaks guest right no matter what.
The Freys are reviled with the same vehemence and hatred the Campbells were in their own time and even more so, arguably, since those who break the sacred covenant of guests are accursed before the gods.
I have no doubt Asher would this because Asher is a crazy man and more Essos than Westeros.
But it means the Forresters will have as much honor as Jaime Lannister after this.
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Don't he have to propose bread and salt ,?To enable the guest right ?
The act is done by sharing food and water underneath your house. The bread and salt thing is just the bare minimum you want to do in order to show you're able to do it. I mean, Ramsay Bolton doesn't violate guest right (why he knocks away the bread and salt offered him).
Let me spill a secret for you. No one gave a damn. It was WAR. The Whitehills were not fucking guests, they were enemies. Asher tried to end the war by ambushing Ludd and his family or poisoning him. And even if he did break the guest-right... it really doesn't matter. I doubt that anyone would cry over ambushed Whitehills. I mean are you really that naive? How many more people have to die to prove that honor in Westeros gets you nowhere?
Well, that's Jaime Lannister thought when he stabbed King Aerys who murdered people by the dozen with wildfire and was the scum of the Earth.
The Forresters are a house without honor.
Like the Freys.
Great job, Asher.
Fuck that rationale. Asher was simply retaliating against a bully lord who outnumbered him 10:1. He was slaughtering men who came to slaughter the Forresters, not men who were attending a wedding and did not expect violence.
Also, Asher never offered bread and salt. He was basically forced into letting Ludd inside but drove him back out at least.
Well, everyone was guest in King Joffery's wedding and he got poisoned too.
I think Asher saw an opportunity to end the war, here and there. Even through it might cost the Forrester's their honor, it was the best option to defeat the Whitehills. But then again, you can make Asher decide to maintain the guest rights and agree that nothing will happen. If so, then it is Ellissa's fault for breaking the guest rights, but can you really blame her? She lost two sons because of the Whitehills, her youngest is held captive, her husband is dead and now her second son is marrying the enemy. If anything, the Whitehills are the cause for all of their miseries.
Besides, I think no one ate anything, so technically there wasn't any guest rights invoked.
This is a war, not a friendly discussion, the Whitehills are enemies, not allies. You need yo understand that. There is no supposed guest right.
Then the Freys wouldn't be reviled throughout Westeros. The Red Wedding was abominable not because they were raising up against their lord, then the Boltons would have been loathed and no one holds it against them, but because they turned a wedding and a flag of truce into a bloody mess.
It's one of the North's strongest taboos.
I wonder if it will come up in Season Two.
And I'm not saying it's not UNDERSTANDABLE. I'm just saying it's a big no no and will revile the Forresters in Westeros history.
You may be right as you can loophole these things. For example, the Boltons didn't break guest right at the Red Wedding because it wasn't their house even though they helped the Freys do it.
Likewise, in the Prequel Short Stories, a Baratheon ancestor let a guy murder someone the moment he stepped out of his house.
It will probably come up in season 2 as Whitehills calling out Forresters and Asher to have no honor etc. but I doubt anyone else is interested. Well maybe Boltons, but seeing them whine about Asher not respecting guest right would be somewhat ironic.
The Boltons & Whitehills should be the LAST houses (after the Freys) to complain about breaking guest right. There is no way Telltale should even include that in their writing.
Besides, their was no bread & salt, and no drinking really, so guest right wasn't broken by the Forresters.
I don't know. I loved Asher's ending way more than Rodrik's ending. Asher boosted my rating for the finale game from a 4 to a 7.
Apart from y'know Jaime wasn't at war with Aerys and had sworn an oath to protect and serve him....
Even though Jaime did break a vow, Tywin was always the king in all but a crown and was responsible for most things in the country and killing him would have broken another law (kinslaying). He was going to break some damned vow no matter what he did
Well my Asher didn't break guestright, his mother did, so no he doesn't break it no matter what.
But they weren't guests.
You know, I was thinking about this earlier, but I think people here bring up good points. Ludd sort of forced himself into Ironrath, he wasn't really invited. Also, I don't think bread and salt are what guest right is about. As soon as you serve them any type of food or drink, it goes into effect.
Am I the only one who LOVES the dark decent of House Forrester losing its northern honor?
At least in my play through, Ludd and the Whitehills never ate any thing or drank anything though, so by that same logic that Ramsay didn't violate guest right, Asher didn't either.
For everyone saying they were NOT guests: Yes, they were. No, it doesn't matter if the houses were enemies. That was a call for truce and an opportunity for an alliance, they were guests.
They were invited for a trap disguised as a celebration of peace. Yes, they were invited. Was Ludd being forceful? Yes. Did Asher still invite him in? Yes, Asher could have decided for open war instead, but he decided to lay a trap for them instead disguised as a celebration. It was as much of a trap as the Red Wedding was, and it broke the guests rights just like the Red Wedding, too. They were served food and drink (even if they didn't get the chance to eat these) and, most important of all, there are rules regarding letting your guests know that they are not protected by guest rights. Asher should have been sitting down with his unsheathed sword on his knees when Ludd and Co. came in.
So yes, Asher (or Elissa, if you try to call off the plan) broke guests rights. And yes, EVERYBODY cares. Everybody in the whole freaking kingdom cares. I won't be surprised if someone brings it up on season two and says that they "deserved to be destroyed for breaking guest right" and that "the gods do not favor them because of their treacherous behavior". Do I blame Asher for doing that? Heck no. It was obviously a desperate attempt to survive the war. Will other people blame him and badmouth the Forresters for it? They should, if TellTale remembers the value of guest rights to the people of Westeros. If they eventually meet Stannis (yes yes I know that it doesn't happen in the show, but Stannis gets support from the Glovers in the book and they send Forresters to him, so stay with me here), I will be surprised if he doesn't demand Asher to be punished for breaking guest rights. Maybe if Elissa was the one who broke it we can tell Stannis that her attack to Ludd caused the Whitehills to attack the remaining Forresters, and then maybe the king will have mercy on Asher.
A bit ironic how some might now consider the Forresters to be as reviled as the Freys... I mean in Asher's playthrough the Forresters did essentially pull off a Red Wedding.
Yeah, it wasn't much different from the Red Wedding. Honestly, if we make a cold, unbiased evaluation, the Forresters are not much better than their enemies. And that's a good thing. I can't stand goody-two-shoes characters in this kind of media. In kids stuff? Sure, okay, I can roll with that, but I generally prefer my characters to be more multidimensional. More human.
For example, how is what Morgryn did to Mira different from what Mira did to Andros? I tell you how: We were playing as Mira, not as Andros or Morgryn. Mira set Andros up to be executed just like Morgryn did to her, and considering the fact that Morgryn had a personal issue with her (she personally stole his business deal and ultimately made him be pushed off of the Ironwood business) while Mira did not have a personal issue with Andros (he was following Ludd's orders and not acting on his own accord to destroy the Forresters, really if you blame him for this you gotta blame Lyman too, and Lyman wasn't beheaded for that), I could argue that what Mira did is much harder to justify. Especially taking into consideration that Mira could actually be guilty of killing the guard, while Andros did nothing worth of the death penalty as far as we know.
And we don't know the full story of the Whitehills and the Forresters. We don't know what Ludd means by "the Forresters have been shitting on us for centuries" and "our part was taken from us". What if the Forresters actually did take the Whitehill's Ironwood? What if they did much worse things to the Whitehills in the past? What if the only reason the Forresters didn't wipe the Whitehills completely in the past was to not upset the Starks, but they did some culling here and there anyway? That's the problem with having all Forrester POVs, we only get their side of the story. And, you know, that was present on the first ASOIAF book too. In the first book, A Game of Thrones, the only non-Stark POVs other than the prologue POV were Tyrion and Daenerys, who were not antagonizing the Starks back then.
And that's why it would be great to have antagonistic POVs on the next season. I want the full story, or as close as I can of getting it. I'm sorry if I'm derailing the discussion, that's not my intention, I just wanted to elaborate on the "the Forresters are not saints" thing.
I don't know, I wouldn't want to be completely against Asher, Malcom, Rodrik, Talia, or Gared. I like them too much, I'll gladly deal with gray than black and white.
That's a lot of 'what-if's' and hypotheticals to justify mass murder in cold blood... and a little frightening if this wasn't a video game.
Is there such thing a "guest rights" in Essos? If not I'm wondering if that would be what people would think now. "Oh the Forresters? They are no better then Essos pit fighters."
The only thing I agree with in your post is that we don't know the Forresters past history. I hope we more insight into the Forresters vs Whitehills story down the line.
Yeah they shouldn't whine ablut it but what is to stop them? I mean Whitehills were pretty hypocrits through the first season: always blaming Forresters for starting war and being arrogant. I really wouldn't see it being out of character for Ludd or Gryff to whine about this too. Actually I could even see Gwyn do it.
But thats exactly what happens when Elissa and Ludd drink the wine. Iam not sure about the ambush, but at least in this wine scenario they are breaking guest right imo.
Asher invited them to a wedding he accepted. I'm pretty sure that qualifies as being guests. It was a LIE to ambush them but that would mean Robb Stark and his men weren't guests at the wedding.
Hell, I give Telltale KUDOS for this because it's an awesome twist.
It also fits perfectly with the kind of Trauma Conga Line House Forrester has gone through.
They're willing to do the WORST THING you can do in the North.
And you understand completely.
It also makes perfect sense Asher would do it while Roderik wouldn't.
My current theory is the Forresters and Whitehills used to be partners in the Ironwood trade but the Whitehills accidentally overcut their forests and came to the Forresters for help in replanting them, only for the Forresters to laugh in their faces. I also have the theory that the Forresters weren't any better than the Whitehills but were able to replant their trees using seeds from the North Grove.
Rodrik... Never Roderik ;-;
In Season 2, I want a scene with Rodrik where he have a "Say my name" moment.
Rodrik: "My name is Rodrik Forrester. I am the Lord of Ironrath. And no one, not you, nor the Whitehills or DEATH, will stop me from saving my family!"
I'm not justifying it, I am hoping that TellTale gives us a POV that gives them more gray and less black. One of the interesting things in ASOIAF is that who is the good guy and who is the bad guy depends on the point of view. It get especially clear when you see how Daenerys hates the Starks, and that she doesn't know the whole story yet. She doesn't know all the horrible things her father did and she sees Ned in a pretty bad light.
We do not know the whole story either. All we know of the Whitehill side of it is what Ludd yells at us occasionally. For all we know, the Forresters might have done just the same to them in the past.
I want to see more gray in the antagonists, I guess. Make them less one-dimensional.
Well, that was the main point of it. We don't know their past so we can't possibly know if they have been horrible in the past or not.
Now you got me. I don't remember any mention of guest rights in Essos. It might not be a thing outside of Westeros.
is everyone missing the whole bread and salt thing? The invitation is the first part of guest right, the second is dependent on the act of eating food off the table. That's why the Freys make a big show of passing the bread and salt around for the Starks in the TV show. Also it's why Ludd get his knickers in a twist over it in Episode 1.
The Whitehills never get to eat before they're attacked/poisoned. No law was broken. We're good.
Even if they don't get to drink or eat anything, that's hard to explain to anyone else in the kingdom. "Sure there was food or drink on the table but they didn't get to eat/drink it so we are good, right?". I don't think someone would buy it. Especially since either Ludd or Gryff escaped, and they will tell their story around.
I liked it, Asher doenst seem like someone who follows the rules.