I’m still waiting for House of the Dragon season three to air, and so I’m still obligated to posting articles every two weeks related to HBO’s recent series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, featuring the lowborn (but exemplary) Ser Duncan the Tall.
But, this post will not be talking about that TV show.
It’s the ten-year anniversary of Balticon 50, which ran from May 27th to May 30th in 2016, at Baltimore, Maryland’s Inner Harbor Renaissance hotel. I’ll be talking about author George RR Martin’s appearance there and some misinformation that sprung to life immediately afterwards. And also why Artificial Intelligence is bad.
BALTICON 50
My wife and I attended Balticon 50 (as did our daughter, who obligingly would put up with us taking her to boring Science Fiction conventions…) and we were very excited with the prospect of seeing George RR Martin, whose Game of Thrones (or rather, HBO’s) was still going on (Episode 6 of Season 6 aired that Sunday, May 29th) – of course everyone was wildly imagining that GRRM was going to announce that Winds of Winter was nearing completion. Womp womp.
I had a great time. I saw GRRM talk at panels, waited in line to get him to autograph one of his books that I owned, and heard him read a chapter from the unpublished Winds of Winter, his The Forsaken chapter – the trippy, chilling, and apocalyptic Aeron Damphair point-of-view.
I also got to meet various luminaries from Twitteros. Lady Gwyn from the podcast Radio Westeros recognized my name from my convention badge (she knew me from Twitter) and she introduced herself to me, which was incredibly kind. From her, I got to meet her partner Yolkboy (also from Radio Westeros) as well as Aziz from the History of Westeros podcast, and I introduced myself to the legendary (sometimes troll) Jeff Hartline (aka Brynden BFish from Twitter and the /r/asoiaf subreddit.) That was all very exciting and gratifying for me.
At The Forsaken chapter reading, there was a brief question-and-answer session. My most vivid memories include everyone booing a guy who asked GRRM “Who are Jon Snow’s parents?” and laughing at George refusing to confirm definitively that Ser Arthur Dayne died at the Tower of Joy. “Let a thousand goofy theories reign,” he said (or so I recall.)
THE BIG NEWS
But, after the convention, news broke that there had been a big announcement.
Apparently at the convention, George had publicly announced that Brienne of Tarth was a descendant of Ser Duncan the Tall. This had been a long-running fan theory for some years.
Because Game of Thrones was airing and I was listening to a bunch of podcasts covering the show, nearly every podcast I listened to repeated this breaking news about Brienne of Tarth. But more specifically, the claim was that George had announced this during the question-and-answer session at The Forsaken reading.
This was being reported by the various entertainment sites that were covering Game of Thrones, and at the time I would read details like “fans attending George RR Martin’s reading of his new Winds of Winter chapter got more than they were expecting, when George confirmed during a question-and-answer session that Brienne of Tarth was descended from the famous knight Ser Duncan the Tall” or “fans audibly gasped as Martin confirmed a long-held fan theory that Lady Brienne had a famous ancestor, Ser Duncan the Tall.”
(For [reasons] I’m paraphrasing what I remembered reading at the time.)
Not every article included instances of the “fans gasping” stuff, but all of the ones I read did link the Brienne reveal to The Forsaken post-reading crowd interaction by GRRM.
The above screenshot was from an IGN.com article (with an accompanying video) dated May 31st 2016.
Vanity Fair is called out as a source, so presumably right after the convention, Vanity Fair was asserting that George publicly told the crowd about Brienne of Tarth’s ancestry.
So why I am talking about this?
Remember, I was at the reading George gave and I heard the question-and-answer session. Brienne of Tarth was brought up, but only in that someone asked about George’s real world or historical inspirations for Brienne. Ser Duncan was not mentioned.
So when did George reveal this lineage detail? Why was it being reported as part of a crowd reveal in Vanity Fair and repeated on podcasts? Did I miss the reveal somehow?
(In the intervening years, I even read a transcript of the question-and-answer session, just to confirm that my memory wasn’t worse than I thought. There was no talk about Brienne’s ancestry in the transcript.)
Looking over the convention schedule, I didn’t see any reading that I’d missed. George was on multiple panels and I’d seen most of them. For the one panel that I hadn’t seen, I quizzed people who’d attended and they confirmed that there was no Brienne talk.
I was beginning to wonder if this had been something that someone just made up, and it had been absorbed by the pop culture in a Mandella Effect sort of way.
I was half-right.
THE FACTS
I reached out to various people trying to track down the news, but my ASOIAF-reading friends who’d attended the convention had no clue where the Brienne/Duncan reveal had come from. Since I had an established rapport with Brynden BFish (and had a great experience meeting him at Balticon) – I also asked him about this. He had the goods.
The BFish told me that George did confirm Ser Duncan being Brienne’s ancestor at the convention, but not in a public way.
BFish (aka Jeff) explained that at the event where George was signing books for fans, a convention attendee took the face-to-face opportunity with George to ask him when we would learn that Brienne was Duncan’s descendant, and that George had responded that eventually, all would be revealed in time. (I’m paraphrasing my recollection from my conversation with BFish/Jeff.) BFish went on to say that he had no reason to doubt what had been said by the fan – she’d reported the conversation to her ASOIAF Facebook group, then blogger Adam Whitehead (of The Wertzone) posted about the interaction on his blog and he’d confirmed the conversation with George’s people. From there, it had been picked up by more mainstream media.
That was good enough for me.
But the Wertzone story specifically mentioned the reveal happening when a fan asked George in the semi-private book signing event, it didn’t associate the reveal with the chapter reading in front of a crowd. The facts were fairly laid out.
As I’d mentioned above in my Balticon recap, I’d also had a book signed by George. I’d waited in line, I’d got to approach the seated author who only had an assistant nearby. I didn’t ask him any questions (I did bring up that Roger Zelazny was the guest at the very first Balticon I’d attended in 1987- GRRM and the Big Zee were friends, and we both commiserated at that moment on Zelazny’s untimely passing nearly two decades before. Why would I bring up a dead friend of his? Look, I am not good at small talk with celebrities. He at least seemed to take it well.) ANYWAY, it was just the three of us, not a crowd, so it would have been the same small encounter for when George was asked about Brienne.
Adam Whitehead had confirmed that the conversation happened, no one is questioning that, or even is questioning that GRRM’s answer was indeed a confirmation – that we’d eventually learn that Brienne was a descendant. That all seems to check out.
But why were people, especially well-regarded entertainment sites (I’m looking at you, Vanity Fair), reporting that George had announced this lineage reveal to a crowd, when in actuality it was kind of a low-key semi-private moment?
THE FICTION
Look, I don’t know. I guess it just sounded sexier or something that this was a big reveal for a crowd. It’s likely that the media sources who reported it widely might have misinterpreted the details from the Wertzone because of lack of context (or lack of reading comprehension) and made an assumption on when it happened.
It was kind of a big deal that George read from the Winds of Winter – a fan-created transcription of The Forsaken was widely circulated right after the convention. People were hungry for Winds of Winter content and it seemed logical to lump in the Ser Duncan –> Brienne reveal along with it.
Once that got reported on, the fictional story of George announcing the news to a crowd took on a life of its own. And fact-checking was not thoroughly executed in the rush to put out content. As I mentioned previously, the IGN video was out the Tuesday after the convention, and IGN was sharing things reported on by other media that had been out a day or two before.
Okay, but why is this a big deal? After all:
- George did confirm (or so it all but seems) that Brienne is descended from Dunk.
- George did do this at Balticon 50, in 2016
Who cares if people think it was a public announcement when it wasn’t?
THE FALLOUT
I don’t know if I can meaningfully answer that, except to say that the truth should matter.
The detail of George having a quiet personal moment, answering a fan’s question (which actually happened) is no less important than if it had been done in front of a crowd (which didn’t happen). I would not have had the fortitude to ask such a question of the author, and I think the fan responsible should be celebrated for taking that shot.
And I don’t like that the falsehood was reported so widely online. Because those non-facts have absolutely been consumed by Artificial Intelligence. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained up with publicly available information, and all of the online publications and postings and newsgroups etc. get scraped for LLM consumption and training. True or false, once the LLMs have text and that text matches a search/query/etc. the A.I. models will spit them out as truth.
I recently Googled a very specific question “Did George RR Marting reveal that Brienne of Tarth was Ser Duncan’s descendant at a reading in Balticon in 2016?”
Google had some quibbles on my question (see the screenshot below), and weirdly made it less grammatical –
Stannis: Fewer. Oh wait, never mind.
– and then produced an A.I. Overview, falsely confirming that the news was revealed during the Balticon chapter reading (which would have been from The Winds of Winter aka The Forsaken chapter.)
Interestingly, the referenced Time Magazine article in the initial part of the A.I. Overview answer doesn’t say that the reveal happened at the chapter reading.
George R.R. Martin appeared at a science fiction convention in Baltimore this past weekend, where he shared an interesting biographical note about the knight Brienne of Tarth: she’s a descendant of Ser Duncan the Tall, who was, as you’d gather, very tall. (Seven feet, to be precise.)
Duncan predated the show’s timeline by about a century, and, as Esquire reports, he has a special place in Martin’s heart. The author has penned a collection of novellas about the knight.
At his Baltimore appearance, Martin also read a chapter from Winds of Winter, the long-awaited next book in the series.
— Time Magazine, June 2nd 2016
The Time article does include that a Winds of Winter chapter reading happened, but it’s an ‘also’ event, so Time Magazine isn’t getting things wrong currently. But clearly some sites did for the full overview error to have been generated.
Although, the initial article from Time might have been wrong and edited later into a more accurate state, and that’s what’s online now. There has been some editing of the online reports over the years.
I’ve gone back and read some of the sites that I’d originally checked out when the news first broke ten years ago. In the intervening decade, the articles have been edited to separate out the confirmation of Brienne’s ancestry from the Winds of Winter chapter reading. There isn’t a tight coupling anymore, but the two events are often stated together. Along the lines of (what follows is me paraphrasing, not an actual quote…)
“George RR Martin answered a fan question about Brienne of Tarth being Ser Duncan the Tall’s descendant. The author read an unpublished chapter from work-in-progress The Winds of Winter.”
Reading it shallowly, you might still think that they’re connected (and I guess that they are connected in that they both happened at Balticon, but that’s about it.)
So, the human-written articles that were almost uniformly in error originally did eventually change their presentation to be less wrong (although somewhat lacking in details.)
But, any erroneous factoids that had originally been presented were already consumed as part of training up search engine LLMs on publicly available content. And the factoids and the consequences of them being part of the training data for LLMS are unlikely to be corrected or correctable without the models being re-trained.
THE FOLLOW-UP
At the time I was asking Brynden BFish what had transpired, I didn’t know Kristin Reed Treado – her name wasn’t known to me in 2016. (She’s identified in the Adam Whitehead blog post as the fan who asked GRRM the Brienne question when she got to meet him for a book signing.)
Coincidentally, because we’re both A Song of Ice and Fire fans and we had both been active on Twitter, we eventually became social media associates/mutual follows. We’re both in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area and have similar political leanings, so we have some things in common. When I migrated from Twitter to BlueSky, I eventually re-connected with Kristin there, mostly because I was trying to rebuild my social connections from the now poisoned site called ‘X’.
I hadn’t realized that she was the relevant person who’d got the confirmation from George about Dunk and Brienne.
With the ten year anniversary of Balticon 50 coming up and with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms on the air, I knew I would probably end up writing something about Ser Duncan the Tall, Brienne of Tarth, and the (minor) misinformation that clung to George’s private confirmation of their shared lineage.
But I wanted (unlike every entertainment site in 2016) to get my facts straight. I vaguely remembered the details that Jeff Hartline had given me but I felt that due diligence would be to reach out to the fan who’d actually asked George the question.
I did manage to find Adam Whitehead’s blog which had the account that matched my recollection as told to me by BFish. I was delighted to see that my social media association Kristin was the fan who asked.
I sent her a private message on BlueSky, and she was happy to confirm the details of my recollection – that she’d asked George at the book signing (not at the Forsaken question-and-answer session), that Adam Whitehead had reported on it, and a confirmation from George’s people had been made.
Now that I think about it, I could of just shared that short conversation I’d had with Kristin and that would have probably made most of my points, instead of me writing up a giant blog post about it. I apologize for taking up so much of all of our time.
Although at least I got to call out the problems of Artificial Intelligence running rampant with errors and half-truths. And why we should try to prioritize posting truths online, as opposed to falsehoods.
Okay, I’m glad that I wrote this. (Your mileage might vary, reader.) Anyway, it was SO EASY for me to fact-check and get confirmations from primary sources.
Everyone should make that effort.
Or not. I’m not the boss of you.
Happy Tenth Anniversary!
(Comments are always welcome. Super welcome! But if you want to talk spoilery Game of Thrones talk with me (also welcome) I’d invite you to visit my Safe Spoilers page on my backup blog. That way my non-book-reading friends won’t be shocked with foreknowledge.)
Images are from HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Game of Thrones (obviously). I make no claim to any of the images, but some claims to the text (at least, the text that isn’t being referenced from the online magazines covering Balticon 2016 – I believe what I’m doing there is fair use.)
The image of GRRM signing a book is from Balticon 2016 and was found on the BalticonHistory Facebook group. (I believe what I’m doing is fair use as well. Maybe Meta can come after me or something.)
The image of the robots is one that I happen to know was created using the Midjourney image generation tool (don’t ask me how I know, I’m not ratting anyone out) and A.I. generated images cannot be copyrighted, so I feel my use of the image in a post critical of A.I. is not out of bounds.
If you liked this article, thank you! I have all of my Game of Thrones related articles on my handy-dandy Game of Thrones page should you want to read more but don’t want to navigate around my site.
© Patrick Sponaugle 2026 Some Rights Reserved
I Can't Possibly Be Wrong All the Time 