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If you're looking for fic, it's all over at startwithsparks!

Maybe it's just me, but when I was reading the glare-filled, courier-fonted original pitch, I spent more time concentrating on how things hadn't changed. While it diverges in a lot of places, there were a lot of things that remained ultimately, in terms of what a writer needs to push a plot in a certain direction, more or less serving the same purpose.

I'm going to try to approach this as a writer, and someone who's watched closing in on hundreds of hours of GRRM's interviews, in hopes to break down what has and hasn't happened and the potential logic behind those changes.

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The story begins in 1614 when a group of settlers took a ship-full of Patuxet tribe back to England bound for slavery. They left little behind except a ravaging case of smallpox. When the settlers returned they found only one man left of the Patuxet tribe - a man named Squanto who had learned English from the settlers, taught them how to fish and hunt the land and negotiated a peace treaty between the settlers and the Wampanoag tribe. At the end of their first year there, the settlers and the Wampanoags held a feast to honor Squanto and the help they'd received from the native people. With peace attained, more English - including the Puritans - were free to come over to the so-called New World.

It was only a matter of time before a tribe not included in Squanto's peace treaty rose up against the enslavement and murder of the native people there and the acquisition of their land for these new colonies. The resulting Pequot War was one of the bloodiest ever fought on American soil. As a result, in 1637, on the day of the Green Corn Festival, the English and Dutch settlers surrounded the Pequot tribe in the early hours of the morning and ordered the people to come outside. Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death and 700 men, women and children were burned alive in their homes. The governor called the day a "Day of Thanksgiving" because they had defeated the native people for their land.

They attacked village after village, taking every child over 14 into slavery while those younger were murdered. Boats with more than 500 slaves were loaded and taken to England, while bounties were paid for native scalps. A second "day of thanksgiving" was called for by the heads of the churches in Massachusetts and Connecticut to celebrate these victories over the native people, though the settlers had resorted to beheading - kicking decapitated heads around like balls and even impaling the head of the once-friendly Wampanoag chief on a pole in Plymouth where it stayed for 25 years.

These "Thanksgiving" feasts continued for years, celebrating successful battles and raids, until George Washington ordered the settlers to keep it to only one day a year. Abraham Lincoln made the day a legal holiday on the same day he ordered troops to march against the Sioux in Minnesota. And while people today gather together to thank their God for everything they've given in life, they never pay a moment to think about the impoverished, sick and needy people living right around them - the same people they mercilessly murdered in the ransacking of this nation.