Much digital ink has been spilled the past few years over what’s to come in Winds of Winter, which may or may not actually come out in 2016. It’s a perennial subject at nerd and culture sites worldwide, certainly including this one, and I’ve written many such speculative analyses myself. But it’s worth remembering not just that we can’t correctly predict the plot of a book that isn’t out yet… but that George R. R. Martin loves surprises, loves to throw people for a loop, and revels in unintended consequences for his characters. Just look at Aegon in A Dance With Dragons.

GRRM Is Full Of Surprises

Pretty much every book in A Song of Ice and Fire has thrown a major unexpected plot twist in our way. Feast for Crows doesn’t really have one, but the first trilogy is famous for its twists—Ned Stark’s death, Stannis Baratheon’s unexpected loss in the Battle of the Blackwater (leading to the victory of the “villains”), and the Red Wedding. A Dance With Dragons threw us for a different kind of loop by introducing Young Griff, née Aegon Targaryen, son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Elia of Dorne, long thought dead, but actually being trained in secret, being prepared for kingship (is that enough dependent clauses for you?).

No one really saw Aegon coming. Sure, there had always been theories that the boy had survived—but it wasn’t a mainstream belief in the fandom, and certainly no one expected he’d just turn up in Essos out of nowhere and would be invading Westeros by the end of the book (He’s much faster than Daenerys, that’s for sure!).

Point is, GRRM loves to throw surprises our way. All of our imagined spoilers about Dance with Dragons came to life when the book actually came out. The same thing will happen with Winds of Winter. Is Jon Snow definitely coming back? No. He probably is, but the consequences for that may range deeper than we now imagine. And who knows what other total surprises will come down the pike? We can make educated guesses about Winds of Winter, but in the end, we’ll end up with lots of wrong in our column. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s exciting.