Did the Hobbitsess return to the same Shire that they had left a year earlier? What did the Autobots find when they made it back to Cybertron? What did the United Earth Government say when the SDF-1 finally brought Macross island back from the edge of the solar system? Did the Galactica bring humanity back to its ancient, ancestral home? Or did it bring something else entirely to a different planet?
Will Arya ever be Arya again or will she forever be someone else?
Did the same Jaime that left King's Landing return to King's Landing?
Theon returned to two homes and was welcomed by neither.
I can't return home IRL because my baby sister painted my room some kind of orange at some point and now my parents use the space to store old furniture. I can't return to my original moniker of Littlefinger here because that was three FFG message boards ago... FFG isn't the same company now that it was seven years ago. (Its better!)
Six months ago, what was left of the Twin Cities Source Comics and Games AGOT CCG meta got together to try the AGOT LCG at the FFG Event Center. (The Event Center that fills the space that used to be the wharehouse that I would send out prize support from.) The new titles seemed to add a layer to multi-player and... look, what you need to know is that we forgot how to play the game. We hosted the first North Regional Championship, for crying out loud! I still have the T-shirt. We were in the place that it all began, surrounded by AGOT FFG art, and something just wasn't right.
Simultaneously we all realized that it was us. We were different. We were not the same nerdy men that we were almost a decade before. (We are way cooler now.) Divorces, marriages, children in college, children in diapers...
We grew older and FFG grew up.
So on the one hand, we can't- FFG can't- no one can- go back to the way things were. (Nor should we.) And on the other hand, I am looking forward to FFG taking AGOT back there and I will be along for the 2ed ride. (I'm a human; I can be as contradictory as I please.) It won't be the same, but it will be close, and all of us and FFG will be there with all kinds of life-baggage trying to play a game together. Kind of like back in the 'good' old CCG days.
I can't wait!