Over the many years we've spent analyzing these books, we've
gotten pretty good at identifying foreshadowing, and
you all have grown in that skill with us, especially those of you
who have been with us for a long time and or have been in the
fandom with an active mind for the long term.
Yet arguably, it doesn't take a whole lot of skill at catching
clues for the future of A Song of Ice and Fire.
When it comes to the notion that King's Landing will burn in some
form or fashion, if not multiple forms and fashions, it has been
foreshadowed. Whether it's Cersei's current
obsession with wildfire or Aries's past obsession with it,
the danger remains as caches are still sitting there like time
bombs in unknown locations. And I don't mean unknown to all,
but a select few. No, I mean truly unknown.
There's only one person who might know a little about the
hidden caches, and I doubt they know it all even if they know
anything. And without knowing it all,
well, you can't stop the problem from happening.
Only one cache is required to do massive damage, and if there's a
few, well, the damage is like exponential from there because
one sets off another, sets off another, sets off another,
etcetera. That kind of thing.
So it's really not just a * 2 * 3, it's a * 10 * 50 * 100 times
thing type thing. I'm not even talking about the
TV show. Not just because what happened
on the TV show was in foreshadowing.
That's just a whole different set of events that might
correlate, and also not just because several important and
highly involved characters and plot lines were missing from the
TV version, like Aegon and Jon Connington and Jon Connington
having grayscale. These are all important to us
today. Meanwhile, HBO did have the
Great Sept explode via wildfire, but that wildfire didn't even
spread it just it was this cool explosion, but it it there was
no like follow up to that. And in the book, if that
happens, there will be follow up that will cause a lot more
collateral damage. Many more fires will start.
So that's important. So the the show is of limited,
though not 0 use to us today. It it kind of gives us a few a
little help in outlining a few possible scenarios.
But this isn't just about the large scale death and
destruction. It's a huge plot point, but it's
also not necessarily simple. There's a difference between
those who burn the city and those who take the blame for
burning the city is not necessarily going to be an even
alignment there. We've got prophecy, major
symbolism and foreshadowing. So many parallels from Aries to
Danny to Cersei to Rainier, it's a lots of different matchups
here that add to the whole group of pairings and selections that
we have for you today. There's fires of many sources,
flames of many colors cascading in a climactic culmination.
Burn them. All that and more on this
episode of History of Westeros Podcast.
Hello and welcome back everybody.
It's time for another fun live stream.
If you're watching us live, then it must be 3:00 Eastern because
that's when we go live on Sundays.
Most Sundays we are here, unless it's ATV season, in which case
our streaming schedule is TBD and you'll know when it happens.
We are also on Spotify. Every episode gets posted as an
edited video, so the content is a little cleaner and clearer and
smoother over there, but it's available quicker here on
YouTube. That's the advantage.
And if you catch it on, if you listen on podcast platforms, if
you don't care about watching any of the video part, that's
your call. You can catch it anywhere you
get podcasts. And if you listen on Patreon as
a member, well, you get it ad free.
That's pretty cool. Shout out to our good friend
Nina Krusling, who added a lot of good thoughts for this one
today. And you can check her out over
at Good queenalley.tumblr.com, 1L and Alley.
And her latest post is on the theory that Sweet Robin isn't
John Aaron's child. Not just that he might be
Littlefingers, but just that he's not John Aaron's
Littlefinger being one possibility.
So you'll want to see what Nina has to say about that particular
set of theories over at Good queenalley.tumblr.com.
If you have questions for us, hit us up at
westeroshistory@gmail.com or ask a question live.
If you're here during the live stream, you could also hit us up
on any other social. We're pretty much everywhere
there is to be on social media, and we have a great Facebook
group and a Discord which you can join if you so desire.
Lots of good discussions happening there.
Let's start off with a trivia question where I will give the
answer at the end of the episode, along with some
episodes that relate to this one.
If you want to stay immersed in this general topic, we've got
you covered. The question is, who tells Jon
Connington that Tywin Lannister would have burned Stony Sept to
the ground at the outset of Robert Rebellion?
That is at the answer is at the end.
Like I said, let's have a little quick reading of what we have in
store for you today. The different sections that we
have. We have King's Landing.
We have the last burning. We have Aries's revenge.
We have the lions of wildfire. We have green fire, black water.
We have Searcy and the Tower. We have the Stony Griffin.
We have a quote of the day. We have return of the dragon and
then an outro. We also have Corn Emperor
sending a super chat saying history of Westeros, burn it.
Yeah, yeah, we will burn it. We we're doing some burnings
today. She said it as if the White
Walkers would say burn it. King's Landing.
WWI didn't catch that. Yes.
OK, they're yeah, they're all they're all about.
That makes their job easier, huh?
I'm all about burning it. Hey, all right, King's Landing.
Let's get going. As is well known, especially if
you're a listener to this show, King's Landing was built by
Aegon the Conqueror, along with Visenya and Rainey's.
Apparently, Visenya in particular, she had a lot to do
with the day-to-day of the building, Aegon had a lot of
planning in mind, but etcetera. Funny to think how in all the
years before the Dragons died out, King's Landing didn't
suffer any significant fires in the populated areas.
Most of the big fires that came in King's Landing or near it
came later, and they were mostly to do with wildfire rather than
instead of dragon fire. Dragon fire is hotter, but
wildfire is far harder to put out.
It spreads way more. It burns things the dragon fire
maybe can't or has a harder time burning like stone.
So it. Yeah.
So these are both important to keep in mind the differences as
well. Like when the Targaryens fought
each other early on, it was mostly in the Riverlands.
Magor did burn the Sept of Remembrance and then built the
Dragon Pit on top of the ruins that's Rainese's hill.
That was a little symbolic in that he was sort of torching the
other branch of his family, the one that he had usurped.
And they may have gotten a bit lucky back then too, because
water access within the city was limited until after the
completion of the Dragon Pit. It was under Septon, Barth and
Alison who convinced Jaharis that the city needed better
water. And, and when the Dragon Pit was
destroyed itself during the Dance of the Dragons, well, that
didn't cause fires elsewhere either.
I mean, there were fires in the city, but they weren't massive.
So of course, long after the Dragons died out, Aries plotted
to burn the entire city down with wildfire.
And as we've mentioned a couple times here and there over the
course of the show, yeah, there's a lot of evidence that
some of Aries's caches are still there.
So he may yet have his plan come to fruition, even if he's long
dead and won't see it happen himself.
That's why we have a section in this episode called Aries's
Revenge. And Nina points out this is
something we need to keep in mind too.
Not just the difference between wildfire, dragon fire and say,
conventional fire, but medieval cities or proto medieval cities
or whatever you want to call King's Landing, which I think
proto pseudo medieval city is accurate or fair enough.
Fires are a big problem in a lot of older style cities.
They didn't have, you know, piped water necessarily.
They didn't have fire departments necessarily.
So medieval London, Nina gives examples here. 2 huge fires in
the 12th and 13th centuries that caused massive damage, partly
because of how close the structures were.
Ignorance on proper safety to prevent fires.
Things that we kind of understand better today.
People like almost every house in the United States has a fire
extinguisher. Maybe not every house, but a
lot. You know, the fire extinguisher
is ubiquitous. And of course, there's zero in
Westeros. So there you go.
So the last burning, that's our next section.
What we mean by the last burning is when the last time King's
Landing had something along the lines of what we're predicting a
bigger version of 1/4 of the city burned under blood raid
when the Great Spring sickness happened.
Of course you say under blood Raven.
Well, he wasn't the King. No, it was Aries the first or,
but it was the transitional period between that because King
Darren the Good died of the Great Spring sickness and
Bloodraven didn't. So he was the hand of the king.
So he was the the continuing factor there of in terms of
ruling as Aries was being anointed and crowned and all
that. Bloodraven is still doing his
job day-to-day, which meant handling the great spring
sickness as it pertained to not just King's Landing, but
everywhere. And what he did was he had a, he
ordered a bunch of corpses, the corpses to be piled up in the
dragon pit like that was a, a place sort of out of the way
from the general population of King's Landing.
And he ordered them to be burned.
For some reason, he chose wildfire.
And it's curious that he did that.
Maybe he just thought this would be more effective in making sure
the disease is eradicated within these corpses.
I'm not really sure, but it's a curious case.
And here's a quote. Worst hit of all was King's
Landing, the High Septon. The Sevens voice on Earth died,
as did a third of the Most Devout and nearly all the Silent
Sisters in the city. Corpses were piled in the ruins
of the Dragon Pit until they stood 10 feet high, and in the
end Bloodraven had the pyromancers burn the corpses
where they lay. 1/4 of the city went up in flames along with
them, but there was nothing else to be done.
That last line of the quote is particularly crucial because it
describes the level of damage. 1/4 of the city.
That's huge, right? King's Landing is big, but it
also absolves Bloodraven, or at least purports to, by saying if
he hadn't done this, it would have been worse.
That's basically the message here.
Like 1/4 of the city went up in flames, but if he hadn't done
it, maybe the entire city would have died of the plague, or 2/3
of the city or something like that.
So better to lose a lot of property than to lose a lot of
people. I think pretty much all of us
can agree with that. Now we we're missing some
details here. Maybe there's more to it, less
to it. Maybe, maybe blood Raven made a
mistake. Maybe it was even more obvious
than it seems, who knows? But it's it appears that the
alternative was worse rock and a hard place type situation.
And it seems like even the even with their level of medieval
knowledge about how infections spread, it seems like they had
the right idea burning the bodies.
That probably was the correct call using wildfire.
I'm not sure that was the correct call, but maybe they
weren't able to burn. Maybe they just couldn't get it
to work with regular flames because the bodies were too
fresh. I don't know.
I I'm not really clear on the burning of corpses and the
logistics there. So anyway, we wonder how much
control blood Raven had over this fire.
I mean, they didn't expect the wildfire to get out of control.
They weren't like, well, we got to burn all these corpses and it
will probably spread, but that's worth it.
No, they probably had no idea that would happen.
Then of course, it's wildfire. So they probably had some sort
of understanding that there was a risk, but they might not have
expected it to get out of hand in a mundane situation like
this. I mean, it's one thing when
caches of wildfire might explode, right?
This is a controlled burn where they're like we're trying to
burn corpses in a on the top of a hill where there's not a lot
of other buildings, right? So like the fire spread down the
hill and then out and around it, I presume maybe it didn't go
evenly around the hill, but Ashay can pull up a, a map of
King's Landing here shortly and you can see just to get a
general idea, it's a very packed in place.
Like Nina was saying, King's Landing is is not full of space.
It's lots of people live there. It's a huge place, but it
doesn't have a lot of extra space.
Like all the space is used right.
It's like a like a New York or a Tokyo where there's a not a lot
of empty space. Every square inch is has a
function, you know, they're, they're trying to leverage every
little bit for, for people's living space or for storage or
whatever. And most of these things are
flammable, whether they're people, buildings and it's
wildfire. The list of what's flammable to
wildfire goes way up, right. It's it includes things like
stone and metal, which regular fire.
Nah, it's it's not going to be a problem.
It's even possible if you want to get really dark here, maybe
Blood Raven was intentionally letting the the fire spread.
Maybe he wanted it to hit certain parts of the city, not
just out of general ruthlessness or evil, but because those were
the most plague ridden parts of the city.
And he's like, well, if all those people who are infected,
if that part of the city is just full plague, if we burn it, that
still might be a good thing. The lesser of two evils kind of
thing. Now we don't know that for sure,
but it's it's a worthy thought to have in mind.
That's the kind of thing Blood Raven would do.
Well, look in the map, you see what it's next to.
It's right next to the Street of Silk.
So like taking on sex workers? That'd be bad, yeah.
Or maybe he wanted to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He either targeted them or didn't want them targeted or
something. Yeah.
So, yeah, you're right. Just by looking at the buildings
around the area, you can maybe come up with theories as to what
he was thinking one way or the other.
Like, yes, I want this to be destroyed or no, I want to
protect this. But the most overwhelming
factor, I think, is probably who gets targeted with the flames,
who's alive, I mean, people that are living but carrying the
plague. And those might be targets.
They might be like, yeah, let's just burn them.
The craziest thing to me here is these is when you look at like
what 1/4 of the city is, 1/4 of the city would actually also
include up to Flea Bottom. Like if it was that quarter, it
would include the Street of Silk and Flea Bottom both.
That's what's over there. And we it's great that you
mentioned that because this is going to come up a little bit
later in the episode when we discussed the Battle of the
Blackwater. And yeah, like Blood Raven might
not be terribly concerned about Flea Bottom.
It might be where the plague is particularly bad because there's
most people are living in closer quarters to each other and they
have even less knowledge about infectious diseases.
That which is already the bar is really low there.
But yeah, so it's a very interesting consideration here.
And all these factors matter to us, both the plague and the
burnings and the targeted burnings and where the layout of
King's Landing and what buildings might get hit or not
might not get hit. All this matters for our
purposes. And then analyzing what could
happen in the current story, because plague is part of it.
It could. We could have grayscale.
Grayscale could be involved. We got John Connington heading
to King's Landing. Secret plague bearer John
Connington, right? Nobody's planned for that, Not
even Varus, the guy who's planned all this 20 years on, he
doesn't know about that part. And this thing with Bloodraven
wasn't super long ago. We're talking 9091 years ago,
counting from the end of A Dance with Dragon.
So for counting from the beginning of the series, it's
even a little bit less. So even if you discount
grayscale as a possibility, there's other plagues that are
possible too. Just any general sickness
becomes more likely when food gets scarce and people huddle
together for warmth and winter. The communicability of diseases
goes way up. And then you add to that the the
ignorance of how these things work in a setting like this.
So again, it's important to keep in mind the dragon pit is on the
hill of Raines, which again is the same place that Magor burned
the Sept of remembrance. That's a pretty important so
that that didn't cause fires to spread elsewhere.
Even the even though he used Valerian and burned the whole
thing down, like that's nothing spread, but when it was wildfire
in a controlled environment, Megger wasn't controlling that.
He's burning a septus, you know, torching the thing.
You can kind of assume the pyromancers were using some sort
of plan to burn those corpses and something went wrong.
Maybe something along the lines of what happened in Summer Hall,
by the way. Just goes to show how hard it is
to keep control of that stuff. You wonder too, like, how did it
stop the quarter of the city burned?
Did they do something to make that happen or did it just gut
itself out eventually? They had no ability to stop it
and it just died on its own wildfire.
Just that's what they say. It keeps going, but it does have
a limit. It doesn't just keep going
forever, right? In fact, we can get into that a
little bit. Let's do that.
A small amount of wildfire probably isn't going to consume
like all the stones, streets, and bricks of the entire city,
but a large amount could do a lot of damage to even stone and
brick and things like that. Let's check in with an expert on
this one. Halene the pyromancer.
What it is what I'm saying here basically right?
That is so once it takes fire, the substance will burn fiercely
until it is no more more. It will seep into cloth, wood,
leather, even steel. So they take fire as well.
Tyrion remembered the red priest Thoros of Mir and his flaming
sword. Even a thin coating of wildfire
could burn for an hour. Thoros always needed a new sword
after a melee, but Robert had been fond of the man and ever
glad to provide one. Your hailing voice sounded a
little bit like Bobby Hill. I've been watching lots of King
of the Hill ahead of the revival, so yeah.
That's funny. I was.
Trying to give really do trees. Funny y'all Speaking of the King
of the hill revival, the first episode is called Return of the
King, which I just love that anyway Thoros's sword.
It sounds like it's well, it is ruined, but it doesn't sound
like it just turns entirely to ash, right?
It isn't like the steel is an entirely obliterated or
disintegrated or whatever. There's still some steel there.
It's just this really full of holes and it loses its edge and
all that. And Halene does say, does say,
the fire does run out eventually, It says until it is
no more. So yeah, it does have a
lifespan. It can't just burn forever.
Which brings us in turn to the sister hill of Rainey's Hill.
The Senya's Hill. Yeah.
Sister Hill. They were sisters.
Their hills were sisters before they had those names.
Yeah, which now has the Great Sept of Baylor atop it.
So it's really a case of history repeating itself.
Rainey's Hill had the Sept of Remembrance, which was then
burned to the ground. Now we have the Great Sept of
Baylor atop it, and the Pyromancer's Guild happens to be
below it. This is really symbolic, isn't
it? The fire seething and burning
below the surface of the hill, as if it were the fires of the
earth or the gullet of a dragon. And what color was Visenya's
mount? Vegar was green, of course.
Perhaps not the vivid green of wildfire, but green nonetheless.
So that's the kind of a cool little pairing there.
Could these flames burst forth explosively, like the fires of
the Earth, like an emerald volcano?
Like a like a version of the Doom, but with wildfire instead?
Which hey, that fits because most theories about the Doom
include some sort of human trigger, whether it's the
killing of the sorcerers of the Fort that are keeping the 14
flames back or some other thing. And who it was that killed those
sorcerer's, right? Was it the Faceless man, my
favorite theory, or was it just the Valyrians themselves just
going back and forth too much murdering each other?
So it really does provide us with a possibility, a Doom like
scenario within King's Landing where this entire pyromancer's
Guild could go up exploding and the entire hill and the Sept
would go with it. And since we saw the Sept
explode on TV, the idea is a little bit more believable
because, yeah, maybe George gave the TV show runners that idea.
They they didn't necessarily come up with that on their own.
In fact, most big plot points you assume came from George,
just that it didn't necessarily come from him exactly the way it
was portrayed. The big changes were probably
made, but the bottom line of an exploding Great Sept might be
what we're in store for. And if so, as I said during the
intro, it would be so different because, yeah, first of all, we
have the Pyromancers Guild, maybe the whole hill exploding
and not just the Sept. Second, while we would have the
fallout from that, all the secondary tertiary fires that
start from that explosion, there would be wildfires spewed
everywhere later in the episode. We're going to recap and recall
some of the Battle of Blackwater where we see wildfire explode.
We get vivid descriptions of exploding wildfire, including
like how high and far it goes. And that gives us an idea of
just how destructive something like this could be.
Because a ship blowing up in the Bay is nothing compared to an
entire hill full of wildfire blowing up and taking a giant
church with it, right? That's way bigger.
And of course, it's makes sense that it would escalate to bigger
things that we start off. You know, book 2's got some
pretty big wildfire explosions. We hear about someones in the
past summer Hall this other things wildfire burning the
corpses, culminating in some big climactic explosion in the main
series, right? That really fits.
And getting back to logistics a little bit, we talked about 1/4
the city of Shea had some good takes there on what buildings
were nearby. We have an idea that the
population is roughly 500,000. Now we can't just say strictly
1/4 of the city means 1/4 of the population was killed because
people can move, they can run away from the fires and, and not
every part of the city is equally populated.
But if it's but just for as a basis, 1/4 of 500,000 is 125,000
people. That's a lot of people.
That's a huge number of casualties in any scenario.
But in Westeros, where it's very rare to have that many people
even in one place, like this is the only place in the entire
continent this could even happen other than maybe Old Town.
Landis Port I don't think is big enough for that.
And certainly Goal Town and and White Harbor aren't.
So like you can think about what happened.
Some people fled before the battle of the Black Wars.
Some people fled King's Landing to escape it before the battle.
Some other people were fleeing into King's Landing, though,
during the before that when war was ravaging the Riverlands and
and Tywin's Raiders and reavers were burning the the region from
the God's eye to the Red Fork. So as he, you know, using his
own words or Kevin's words rather, or both anyway, so I
must reiterate, wildfire, if controlled wildfire took out 1/4
of the city hunter blood Raven, what's uncontrolled wildfire in
much larger amounts going to do. It's epic and destructive and
wow, all at once. Yeah, this isn't as slow an
actual burn. This is cash is going off huge.
300 jars at once or something like that.
Hundreds of jars at once. Just exponentially more
explosive. Now, just as a a fun side note
before we move on to the next section, Aegon the Unworthy also
managed to burn 1/4 of the Kingswood with his wooden dragon
contraptions slash siege engines that were designed to launch
wildfire. Yeah, if you've heard this part
before, you're shaking your head like, man, that guy was a dummy,
wasn't he? Yeah.
How do you create wildfire launching devices that are made
of wood? That's dumb.
So somehow these these dragon shaped wildfire carrying siege
engines caught fire on the way to Dorn.
Couldn't have possibly been sabotaged, could it?
The Dornish heard about this and they're like, this is the
easiest thing to sabotage ever. You just burn one torch and the
whole thing goes up. But yeah, it took out 1/4 of the
Kingswood. That's a massive forest, right?
So another quarter, by the way, that's kind of that number just
thrown around. I.
Tell you, thinking about that first fire taking out 1/4, I'm
like, this fire has to be bigger in my head, right?
Your fire's going to be in your head.
No, Yeah, no, you're right, though.
It's going to be enormous, it seems like.
Right. So you think it would be half
the city? Well, if you look at the map,
half the city would theoretically include the red
key. I don't know that I see the Red
Keep going completely up because maybe it's so high up, but maybe
the whole base of the Red Keep is is in flames around the the
high hill. And as we're going to see, we're
about to go through this next section, the places where the
wildfire caches were found, which might be mean there's more
of them there. And yes, the Red Keep is one of
those spots. Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, the Red Keep could detonate because of hidden
wildfire. That's.
It's absolutely possible. Even if it doesn't go on fire
completely, I think it would make collapse.
Detonate is the right word because it's on the hill, and I
think it. Could lead to sink down in.
Yeah, the show gave us the destruction of the Iron Throne.
What if the whole keep and the Iron Throne go up instead of a
bigger version of that? Yeah, I mean, I look at the map
and it does look awfully precarious there.
Right. Could sink into the sea.
The Iron Throne just goes way up in the air and just flies out
into Blackwater Bay. Harris's revenge.
Though few know it, King's Landing has Jaime Lannister to
think for foiling Aries's plan to detonate huge numbers of
wildfire caches placed strategically around the city.
The idea seems to be that only one cache need be lit to set off
a chain reaction that would unleash all the rest.
That's crucial for us because conventional fire would take a
serious, concerted effort to devastate King's Landing.
I don't. I mean it.
Even with what Nina said, they should be able to get it under
control, but not but not if it's wildfire.
But the weird thing about that is no one actually wants to burn
King's Landing to the ground. Aries did, but he's dead.
Even dragon fire, like even if Danny was like determined to
burn down Dragon King's Landing with, with Drogon, which I don't
know why she would do that, but even if she wanted to, it takes
so long, you know, like, and she can't burn the stone streets and
she yeah, like this isn't wildfire.
So wildfire is actually more effective at this.
So we pretty much have to envision wildfire as part of the
equation. If we were, if we're going to
envision the whole city or most of the city going up in flames,
it's going to be because of the wildfire.
It, it's probably going to be something else that starts it,
but the wildfire is going to be the main, the most destructive
element here, more so than the dragon fire, Nina adds.
I think when we imagine potential and probable future
wildfire explosions from the caches under King's land, we
should imagine something like a nuclear explosion.
This would and will be a series of chain reaction explosions of
fire which cannot easily be extinguished and which
exponentially increases the power of other wildfire.
Yeah, it's, it's really set up to be monstrous.
And so this is where we come back to Aries, because you need
a madman for this. Only a madman, only an insane
person actually wants to burn the whole city down.
Dan, even if Danny goes mad, which I'm very skeptical about,
she's not going to want to burn the whole city.
And if she and if she does, she'll get this assist from her
dead father, who you know, without even knowing it, because
in the effort to burn the city down, these caches would go off.
And that won't be something she planned for.
Again, no one knows about the caches.
So yeah, 'cause most people who who come to King's Landing with
violent intent, they want to capture it.
They're not trying to destroy the whole city forever.
Aries is like the only one Whoever like, had that idea and
well, here's how Jamie remembers it.
This is crucial. Let's get into the weeds with
Aries quote. He saw traitors everywhere, and
Varies was always there to point out any he might have missed.
So his Grace commanded his alchemist to place caches of
wildfire all over King's Landing, beneath Baylor Sept and
the hovels of Fleabottom, under stables and storehouses, at all
7 gates, even in the Cellars of the Red Keep itself.
Everything was done in the utmost secrecy by a handful of
master pyromancers. They did not even trust their
own acolytes to help. Those locations are so telling
beneath Baylor Sept in Fleabottom in the Cellars of the
red keep. Those are and then the general
stables and storehouses which just and at all 7 gates.
Good Lord, that's like they really covered their bases.
These were crazy people, but they know how to plant bombs and
they know how to make sure their plan work by not telling other
people and then all getting killed.
They died with their secrets, right?
Gosh, this is this is big. So yeah, the the stables and
storehouses part just like adds to the the bigness of it all.
It's like, well, this is that's too generic to give us specific
locations. But like there's tons of stables
and storehouses in similar type buildings throughout King's
Landing, especially in a place like Westeros that has has to
have, even though George doesn't talk about it a lot, you have to
have massive amounts of storage for winter, right?
Because of just the cycles of weather that exists in this in
this world, you have to have big storage for winter and then
everybody knows winter's coming. So it serves to show just how
widespread they were, how thorough they were and how large
they were too. Because we've when we get to
some of the examples, we see that these are we're talking
hundreds of jars in some of these caches.
And it really reinforces, as Nina points out, that yes, Aries
was aiming for full obliteration of King's Landing.
The burn them all thing that's literal book Aries didn't
actually say that, but he said similar things like make King's
Landing a charred bones and cooked meat and ashes.
So, yeah, same sentiment. Burn them all is this kind of a
sexy, simple way to put it, And it's effective.
And I thought that was a good way for the TV show to do it.
But. Yeah.
And and the book version, as usual, a little more, a little
more detailed, a little more nuanced, but it's the same basic
message. Yeah.
Everybody dies, everybody burns. So Jamie was smart about it, but
it was it may have been beyond him, if we're being honest.
Like, he didn't just kill all the pyromancers he found.
He made them show where the caches were, and then he killed
them and they had the caches removed, but clearly he missed
some. And how and how not they.
There were so many caches, and the pyromancers probably on some
level understood at least some of them.
But Tammy wasn't going to let them live.
So what incentive do they have to give up all the info?
They could say, hey, yeah, here's a few caches, knowing
he's going to kill them. What?
Leave a few? Don't tell him about all of
them. Why tell him?
You know what? What incentive do they have?
You know they're going to die anyway or go to the black cells
or meet some horrible end. They have no incentive to give
the truth, the whole truth. Only enough to placate Jamie so
he doesn't, like, torture them or.
Or make them, you know, something like that.
He may have not even trusted all the pyromancers.
He was so paranoid. He may have had extra caches
hidden by other people, like backup caches.
Yeah, like maybe Rossart, the the head pyromancer was also
like going above and beyond what Aries asked for because he's a
psycho. Like Aries was right?
So he didn't tell everybody. Maybe they knew that by not
telling each other, this ensured the plan would work.
If no one, it's the standard kind of operating procedure for
terror cells. You don't tell your fair fellow
terrorists where the other terrorists live or where they've
stashed their weapons because then no one can extract that
information from you. If you don't know the secret,
they can't get it out of you. It's common practice among
organizations that require great secrecy is to not tell anyone.
Then you can't torture it out of them.
Yeah. So given that plus Aries is in
exceptional level of paranoia, how could we really think Jamie
got them all? And again, we know he didn't,
but thinking of it this way just drives that point home.
It's like there's probably a lot of them he didn't find, but
here's an example of one we know he didn't find that was
discovered later. Quote.
Another cache of Lord Rossarts was found more than 300 jars
under the Dragon Pit. Some whores have been using the
ruins to entertain their patrons, and one of them fell
through a patch of rotted floor into a cellar.
When he felt the jars, he mistook them for wine.
He was so drunk he broke the seal and drank some.
Echoes of Aryan bright flame who Tyrion in like the next
paragraph thinks of like, oh, that's there's a Targaryen who
who did that. Didn't work out for him either.
Yeah, 300 jars though. Damn, that's a lot.
It only takes one jar to take out a whole ship.
You know, this would have been a pretty large boom had it gone
off. And it just really emphasizes,
as Nina points out, the terrifyingly unknown extent of
the wildfire caches here and the dragon pit.
We we already saw that when Magor had Valerian, the same
dragon who could burn Harrenhal, those fires didn't spread,
didn't cause some massive conflagration.
But this, Yeah, it will. And here's a second example.
You know what happens when George gives us an example and
then gives us another nearly identical example?
There's nothing to do but look at this as foreshadowing.
Right quote. Only last year, 200 jars were
discovered in a storeroom beneath the Great Sept of
Baylor. No one could recall how they
came there, but I'm sure I do not need to tell you that the
High Septon was beside himself with terror.
OK, Baylor's Sept, again, as mentioned, and Jamie knew there
were some in the Sept of Baylor. He listed the Sept of Baylor as
a place where he knew wildfire was and he got it, but there
were still some there. This is proving the point I was
saying earlier about they did not have incentive to tell him
where it all was. If they even knew some of the
pyromancers that he was holding a sword to their neck saying
tell me where the wildfire is, they might not have known.
And it's again, we have the high septon here.
This is high septon. This is the same High Septon
that has passed and another one was then another one after him
was murdered by Osney Kettleblack on Cersei's orders
and now it's the High Sparrow right?
So enough people have died now that this may have been
forgotten. The wildfire thing it just by
the time we get to the High Sparrow in multiple changes of
leadership, he probably has no idea about this.
So. So it sounds like both Hills,
Rainey's and Visenya's Hills are both compromised, especially
Visenya's because it's where the Pyromancers Guild exists and the
Sept, which is multiple foreshadowings.
And the TV show. And what are the odds that those
were the last two caches? No, those were the only two.
Jamie got all the rest except those two.
The odds are 0, but those were the last two, right?
In the real world, you might not.
You can't go that definitive with 0.
This is a story. We can be definitive.
This isn't the real world. George is setting us up here,
but we picked up on it because, well, that's what we do.
Even in the TV show, there were green explosions in King's
Landing when Danny was scouring the city with with strafes of
Drogon. They were just mysterious green
flames that popped up. It's clear the TV show had a
plan for this and abandoned it. They thought about the wildfire
caches going off and then just said, Nah, never mind.
But they left the green fire there.
If you go back and watch that episode or lower that scene,
you'll see green fire popping off, some explosions of it.
It just again, it amounted to nothing.
It was just like, hey, there's some green fire.
Those of us in the know like us were like, hey, that's wildfire.
But it was like it didn't do anything.
It didn't add to the, you know, it should have caused extra
destruction, but they didn't really portray it that way.
It was just hey, green fire over there.
So I mean, at least it was there, but it was kind of cool.
I guess. It was probably part of their
dream sequence. Aries going burn them all stuff.
There's probably they just decided to drop that along with
a lot of other things that they dropped anyway.
Yeah, I know. They were like, well, let's set
ourselves up for this. Actually, we're tired.
We're tired. It'll just be cool to have green
fire. We don't have to go any beyond
it. We don't have to explain it or
go anywhere with it. Just green fire.
And of course, so it's like, yeah, they, they clearly knew
what they were doing with that. Like in terms of setting that
up, they just abandoned it. He's like, where where?
Why else would there be green fire there?
So they, they knew, they had an idea they got, they were told by
George. So it was there.
They just gave up on it. And here's another thing.
Like, look at this line by Haileen talking to Tyrion.
Tell me this isn't further foreshadowing for all this
quote. As it ages, the substance grows
ever more fickle. Let us say any flame will set it
a fire, any spark, Too much heat and jars will blaze up of their
own accord. It is not wise to let them sit
in sunlight, even for a short time.
Once the fire begins within, the heat causes the substance to
expand violently and the jars shortly fly to pieces.
If other jars should happen to be stored in the same vicinity,
those go up as well, and so. He's describing the chain
reaction that would occur, or should we say will occur.
And again, Nina suggests nuclear reaction, just a chain reaction
of massive expansions of matter and energy.
And yeah, so he's not only saying, giving us all this
evidence that there's wildfire cash is still in the city, but
he's also saying that if you look at them funny, they
explode. I mean, this like the tiniest
little bit of heat. Yeah.
Like, these are the most fragile, most, like, ready to
blow substances that you can imagine.
And George is like, yeah, don't even some of y'all already
remembered a Saturday Night Live commercial from the early 90s.
It was happy fun Ball where it was like this great toy for
children. But then the warning was like,
happy fun ball contains a liquid core which can accelerate to
dangerous speeds. Do not taunt happy fun ball.
You know, it's like, don't you can't taunt the wildfire.
It'll explode on you. So the, the older caches are not
only just out there and hidden, but they're more dangerous than
new ones. It's this is massive, right?
And this is clever. This is really clever by George
because he's not setting this up for later.
It's there, but the converse, and you can catch that.
It's for later. But the thrust of this
conversation is Tyrion trying to prepare wildfire as a defense
against Stannis. So it's a very active plot
heading in another direction, but it's also groundwork in book
two that isn't going to pay off until book six or seven or
something like that. So it's like, damn, George, good
one. It's multi purpose.
It's active in that moment as a defense for the battle, but it's
also set up for a greater conflagration later.
And even before any of this, like Aries's obsession with
wildfire began before the notion that he would blow it up, that
he would make him a dragon or one of these other silly things
that got into his head. The other insane notions he had.
He also he just used it for heating.
Like during winter. He was like, hey, pyromancers, I
want to make wildfire lamps, which sounds kind of dangerous
and maybe expensive, but it might be efficient.
I don't know, 'cause more wildfire you can use other
things as fuel that might be cheaper, you know, like lamp oil
is more expensive than stuff that wildfire will burn.
Which is, you know, anything. Anyway.
To repeat though, no matter who, how all these caches go off,
whether it's by someone looking at them funny or during a battle
where fire is already spreading or a dragon happens to hit it,
it's going to be an accident. No one knows they're there.
So it has to be an accident. You can't have advanced
knowledge of that because no one has advanced knowledge of that
unless a certain person does know.
And we'll get to that in a minute.
There's one person I still have in mind for that.
So it's a, it's a dichotomy, right?
Again, the thing I introduced at the intro, it's, it's, there's
the catalyst for the fire and there's the blame.
The blame, as we've outlined here, a lot of it's Aries, if
not most of it, but that's not how it's going to actually play
out. People aren't going to know that
because people don't. Very few people even know Aries
did this in the 1st place. So how are they going to know
that it was him? They're not even going to think
of him. So keep that in mind.
Meanwhile, let's move on to our next section, the Lions of
Wildfire. Aries is not the only one who
used wildfire in King's Landing, of course, but even he is
associated with one of three Lannister siblings, each of whom
have a strong relationship to wildfire.
Janie, one who tries to stop it, Tyrion, one who uses it
reluctantly, and Cersei, one who has used it and wants to use it
again. Cersei's association with
wildfire goes back to the preparations for the Blackwater.
Everyone remembers Tyrion's clever use of it, but it's easy
to forget that it was technically Cersei's initiative.
She came up with the idea to use it, and it would be amazing if
it turned out that Varys planted that suggestions.
Our Varys was like, hey, maybe you should use wildfire here.
He who also was Aries's advisor during all that.
And yes, I'll reveal now that it was it's Virus who I'm thinking
of when I say someone might know where some of the caches are.
Like, Virus is so close to Aries and he would have maybe been a
part of those meetings or spying on them, those secret meetings
between Aries and the pyromancers.
That doesn't mean he can keep track of all the caches.
Even Virus wouldn't necessarily know about all of them,
especially if even they didn't know.
So again, Virus can't filter out secrets that no one knows.
So Serb going back to Cersei, though, she had begun the
preparations to use wildfire in the coming battle and might have
mucked it up because she's not cautious.
You know, Tyrion took that risk extremely seriously.
And as Hand acting Hand of the king, he took over that job from
her and she was fine with that. He's like, yeah, you go ahead
and you plan for that. And because he took the risk
seriously, it mitigated the potential for Searcy not being
serious enough with it. He couldn't count on her to
issue commands in a way that would minimize the risk, but he
could count on himself for that. He understood the risk.
And all throughout A Clash of Kings, we saw him go to great,
great lengths to make sure that wildfire was handled by
competent people. He had this elaborate scheme of
empty jars that would contain wildfire on the day of the
battle, but prior to that would be empty so that he could or not
not empty, but filled with green paint.
So that when his commanders and soldiers are working with it and
planning with it and preparing it and practicing with it, only
the people that are sure handed that don't drop their paint are
the ones that are given the job. So he went through this long
schema of testing and planning and saying, OK, who's capable,
who's competent? Who can I count on?
These are things that Cersei probably wouldn't have done.
So that's important. You got to see like the fact
that Tyrion was like the only even though he was using the
wildfire, he was maybe the only person keeping it from becoming
a disaster too, right? Like it's both his careful
management of it against the enemy in the right way that kept
it from becoming a bit much bigger problem and it even and
even then it almost became a bigger problem as we'll see.
It's actually kind of an interesting case of Cersei and
Tyrion working together, which technically in A Clash of Kings,
they actually did work together in a few different things while
also working against each other. He actually admits to himself
that wildfire was a good idea for from Cersei.
He doesn't tell her that he doesn't want to compliment her
on that, but he's like, yeah, actually this is pretty smart.
But he also quickly amends that note to himself, I think.
Yeah, but it it's not a good idea for her to be in charge of
it. So it's a microcosm of why
Tyrion was sent to be acting Hand in the first place.
Now here's a great moment of symbolism, if not foreshadowing
during the battle to Blackwater from the other major witness POV
during that battle. Sansa quote.
Cersei beckoned to her page for another cup of wine, a golden
vintage from the Arbor, fruity and rich.
The Queen was drinking heavily, but the wine only seemed to make
her more beautiful. Her cheeks were flushed and her
eyes had a bright, feverish heat to them as she looked down over
the hall. Eyes of wildfire, Sansa thought.
Not to mention the Arbor Gold knob there, which is a a clue
for dishonesty taking place. Lying taking place.
And of course, she has green eyes.
Yeah, green eyes, yeah. So check out our Arbor Gold
episode with Chloe from Girls Gone Cannon for more on that
topic. Lies and Arbor Gold What?
Did I say? What did I say?
No, you just said the Arbor Gold up.
Oh. My bad.
Yeah. If you're searching it, it's
Lies and Arbor Gold. Yeah, yeah.
So there's another time when Tyrion thinks of her eyes,
Cersei's that burn like wildfire.
It's when she's trying to convince the council and him
that he, Tyrion, should leave the city to deal with the
Tyrells. Of course, it's Littlefinger who
ends up doing that, but she's like, she loves the idea of
getting Tyrion out of the way because he's got, you know, Hand
to the King authority, and she doesn't like that and other
reasons, too. There's another, though Jamie
notices it too. Quote.
Their father had been as relentless and implacable as a
glacier where Cersei was all wildfire, especially when
thwarted. So both Lannister siblings think
of Cersei, and with this association of wildfire,
especially her eyes. And Sansa does too.
Then she goes on to suggest Haileen with Bobby Hill's voice
as a possible Hand of the King, like Aries, right?
She's he's, she's flirting with the idea of naming A pyromancer
hand to the king, just like Aries did, just like an Aries,
of course, with all these wildfire vibes.
It's like, hello, Cersei, Aries, you're so much like him.
I mean, and Cersei has so many other qualities you would be
looking for if you're trying to find a revenge arsonist
candidate. She's she's got a lot of it,
right? She loves wildfire.
She loves watching it. And at the time of this though
back in Clash of Kings, she wasn't Apov yet.
Her role is kind of passive in this scene, which is a rare
phrase to apply to Cersei. But let's move on.
Keeping Cersei in mind and getting back to the and getting
more into the details of the battle and wildfires use there
Greenfire Blackwater. Tyrion did make excellent use of
wildfire to defeat Stannis's fleet.
Taking Cersei's idea and running with it, making it very
effective. Destroying ships in close
quarters was a great way to use it.
He took extreme care, right? He didn't want any back.
Wild firing going on and he gets to witness some of it.
Here he sees Aries's fruits come to fruition.
Quote. He saw another of the hulks he'd
stuffed full of King Aries's fickle fruits, engulfed by the
hungry flames. A fountain of burning jade rose
from the river, the blast so bright he had to shield his
eyes. Plumes of fire 30 and 40 feet
high danced upon the waters, crackling and hissing.
That was almost like a tongue twister for a second there.
Fickle fruits. Just imagine that inside the
city, just going off 30 to 40 feet, you know, crackling and
hissing so bright you have to shield your eyes.
Like how many of you have watched fireworks displays in
your life? Probably most of you, if not all
of you. I can't recall them being so
bright that I have to shield my eyes.
Bright, sure, but so bright I have to shield my eyes.
This is really bright. And and Tyrion's not like that
close to it. He's on the walls of the Red
Keep. Seeing this play out in
Blackwater Bay, that's something.
So when Nina keeps referring to it as like nuclear blast level,
I think she's on to something there, right?
I mean, maybe not quite as much radioactivity, but still
wasteland type stuff we're talking about like massive
devastation. Davos is on the receiving end of
wildfire, and here's what I'll read.
A wall of red hot steel, blazing wood and swirling green flames
stretched before him. The mouth of the Blackwater Rush
had turned into the mouth of Hell Green Hill.
Which, by the way, is a song. Metallica covered it green how
that is. So yeah, the.
That's crazy, right? Like all these descriptions are
on the water. It's a great way to set up
what's coming later by having it play out on the water, where it
even spreads on the water a little bit.
But imagine it inside the city. It will spread way more and
cause way more damage. I mean, several examples,
multiple perspectives. Stone and brick and glass added
to that mix instead of just wood, the ships exploding,
you've got buildings, you've got earth, stone, steel, glass at
high velocity. I remember a show that is no
longer around. The podcast was called The
Podcast of Doom, and it was a show I listened to every episode
of and it was dedicated to mankind's greatest disasters.
Mankind's greatest not not the earth's greatest disasters.
The difference being man caused this disaster.
It's not like a volcano going off because that's not man's
fault. That's not humanity's fault.
But the largest shipping disaster ever in the history of
the world happened in a port I think in anyway.
It was in Texas, coast of Texas, there was a shipping disaster
where a ship came in too fast and it was carrying explosives
and it was, there was all this warning of it because the ship
couldn't stop, but it was firing off its its horns and the, and
people knew like it was coming and it was inexorable 'cause
they couldn't stop it. But it still took a while for it
to collide with the harbor. And so it gathered a crowd.
People were like watching from a distance.
People are looking at it. People are like up to hundreds
of yards away, a half a mile away.
People are looking at this through windows, waiting for it
to happen, waiting for the ship to collide with the shore.
And when it happened, the explosion was so big that
multiple people had glass blown into their eyes and went blind,
which is just a level of devastation that we should be
considering for this. Like this is just, people are
going to have no idea how big the explosion will be in this
case, of course, they won't even see it coming.
And and they won't see the slow motion ship coming towards the
shore and going what's going to happen?
They didn't even expect an explosion there.
In that sense, it'll be similar because the people of King's
Landing will be like, Oh my God, there's a battle happening or
there's a dragon attacking or whatever.
They won't expect a giant explosion.
Like explosions aren't really a common thing, a common part of
knowledge in medieval settings. Like where?
How often are there explosions in their world at all?
Right? Explosions are a modern world
thing for the most part, you know, I believe.
Other than like volcanoes? I believe you're talking about a
1947 industrial disaster at Galveston.
Galveston, TX. Yeah, that that's what you mean.
It says killed at least 581 people.
Ultimately this chain reaction of fires and explosions, it
actually, yeah, because it had all this ammonia nitrate.
This is definitely gives King's Landing explosion here.
Yes, Right. Yeah.
So And people, some people I and it's funny, it's called the
Podcast of Doom, which is like the Doom of Valyria, the Doom of
King's Landing, as we're talking about here.
As an aside, people, one time someone asked me like, why do
you listen to that show? That sounds horrible.
It sounds like so depressing. And I'm like, yeah, but it makes
my problems, my personal problems seem tiny by
comparison. You know, it's like you hear
about the worst disastrous humanity has ever suffered.
It's like, yeah, boy, my me being a little short on the
mortgage this month or because I'm just making shit up, you
know, like, that seems tiny compared to, you know, or I've
got a cough this month. You know, I stubbed my toe like,
yeah, but 580 people were killed in this shipping disaster back
in Galveston. You know, that's that's a bigger
problem, right? Anyway, so we got to look at
the, that's convent, a somewhat conventional of fire.
The, the, the shipping disaster involved.
Like I say, I said, sodium nitrate, which is a precursor to
gunpowder. It's a ammonium nitrate,
ammonium, I'm sorry, ammonium nitrate.
We, we talked about that actually during the TV season of
House of the Dragon with all that bat guano just like piled
up in Harrenhal and how that could actually go off like that
could explode all that because bat guano has that quality can
it can be ignited. Now, bat guano is not a problem
in King's Landing as far as I know, but we do get a look at
what just at what regular fire could do.
So we get a look, we've seen wildfire, we've talked about
dragon fire. But here's just just what
regular fire can do in King's Landing is pretty bad enough.
And here, here we go, a look at what almost happened during the
Battle of the Blackwater. Quote, My Lords, there's smoke
in the city. Flea bottoms of fire.
Tyrion was inutterably weary, but there was no time for
despair. Ron, take as many men as you
need and see that the water wagons are not molested.
Gods be good. The wildfire, if any blaze
should reach that. We can lose all of Fleabottom if
we must, but on no account must the fire reach the Guild hall of
The Alchemist. Is that understood?
It's just more set up. The fire didn't reach the Guild
hall of The Alchemist, but he's planning the suggestion of what
would happen if it did. We can lose all of Flea Bottom
if we must. That refers to the other
ruthless angles that leaders might take when considering
which population and sections of of the city are most valuable to
them, which the poorest section is predictably the least
valuable to them. But in this case, it's worse
than that, because they also are willing to sacrifice it to
prevent the fire from spreading. Which is not entirely evil,
right? He's right that you can't have
it reach the the stories of wildfire.
Tyrion is not wrong to to act like that is the worst possible
outcome because he's right. If it did reach there, then what
what we're talking about happening in the future would
have happened back then in a clash of kings.
But it's also a reminder that a conventional fire started could
lead to this outcome. Flea bottoms is burned for some
other reason. It's some other scenario.
The same risk is is is present or would become present.
And Halene speculation at the presence of magic and Dragons is
helping the process of creating wildfire.
It's making it work better. Does that make wildfire itself
more potent in the current times?
It might. It certainly isn't going to be
less potent, right? And imagine instead of
conventional fire creeping towards the stores of wildfire
that we have in this scenario during the Battle of the
Blackwater, what if it's actual wildfire flames creeping towards
the stores of wildfire? The fire managers Guild.
In which case the water wagons won't do anything.
They will not help at all. You need the sand wagons.
The sand is 1 is one of the things the fire managers use to
stop wildfire from spreading. And there are no sand wagons.
There's no such thing as far as we know.
Maybe they should have such a thing, but like they don't and
this would create tension to the story.
I think what we might get, Nina and I were discussing this right
before going Live Today, is the possibility that they will in
the book, there will be some sort of like ticking time bomb
type narrative where someone is aware that the caches are there.
Maybe Jamie thinks of it. He's like, you know what?
Maybe I didn't get all those caches and plants the suggestion
somehow or maybe virus appears on screen for a minute.
I don't know how a virus would appear on he's not a POV.
So you still This is why it's tricky to imagine the scenario.
But what I'm getting at is what we saw on TV was pretty
effective even though it was maybe a little silly.
Lancel slowly seeing the flame get closer and closer to the
wildfire building that tension is that it's like a fuse like an
hourglass. That was pretty effective as, as
building the tension before the explosion as people inside the
Sept were ignorant of what was about to happen, except for
Marjorie, who starts to be like, hey, y'all, maybe we should take
this seriously, you know, and then it was too late that I
could see something vaguely like that.
Not the not necessarily the Marjorie being in the Sept and
all that stuff, though. Maybe I just mean the, the
ticking clock of the explosion. That would be an effective story
because otherwise it's like it just all of a sudden we have
explosions and it's like, wait, where did.
Yeah, it it might be more effective if we see that, see
the sand through the hourglass of that flame getting closer,
something like that. So, yeah, something along those
lines. Now, again, Tyrion, only Tyrion
knew what to do. It was only Tyrion keeping
everything under control in that battle.
I don't mean the Lannister success.
I mean the wildfire. Only one brain in that entire
mix of the battle on either side was thinking of what happens if
this wildfire gets out of control and only one man was
issuing those commands and he almost died, right.
He he ended up in the in the battle, he ended up with his
face cut open and nearly drowned.
If the danger of wildfire hadn't passed before that, then the one
guy that knows to keep the city from going up in flames is out
of action and then that level of protection is gone.
So just consider how easy it would be to start a fire inside
the city in a combat or non combat situation.
You got maybe Aegon and John Connington's army, the Golden
Company, like battering down the gates, throwing torches, fire
arrows, any number of things, right?
Or like Danny with her, with Drogon, right?
That's not necessarily a conventional fire, but it's
close enough. Or just some saboteur inside the
walls. Like we had the antler men who
were planning on helping Stannis opening the gates for them.
Bars sniffed that out, and the antler men were disposed of.
But what if they hadn't been? What if there were some inside
element, some sort of inside the wall element, helping those on
the outside get in? They could start a fire as a
distraction, thinking it's a good idea to help their cause,
not knowing that starting a fire on the inside could lead to
caches of wildfire going on saboteurs inside the wall.
Starting fires is a very mundane thing during a large battle,
especially with all these different factions.
And so, yeah, multiple factions. We it's not just one-on-one.
We got Aegon's faction, we got the Lannisters, we got the
Tyrells, who may or may not stick with the Lannisters.
We got Euron's faction, We got the North, we've got the Vale.
Yeah, there's lots going on now. Maybe one place we can say maybe
did get cleared of his caches of wildfire is Fleabottom because
it caught fire during the Battle of Blackwater and nothing
exploded. But I could be wrong here
because what if Braun was effective at bringing the water
wagon to Fleabottom and and stopped the fire before it
spread? We don't hear about Fleabottom
being burned to the ground or after the battle of Blackwater,
so maybe the caches just didn't get hit and it was a close run
thing. So yeah.
So even this we can't be sure about.
There might still be caches of Fleabottom, Searcy and the
tower. Let's talk about that.
The burning of the Tower of the Hand is another use of wildfire
by a Lannister we should take a look at.
It's the only time we get her POV on wildfire because again
and during Clash of Kings when her she's got the eyes of
wildfire, she's not at POV yet. She doesn't have her first
chapter till till A Feast for Crows.
Even though she's been deeply involved with the substance.
We just don't get to see that. So here's her take on it.
When she's watching the wildfire take out that tower, it's a
little creepy. Cersei felt too alive for sleep.
The wildfire was cleansing her, burning away all her rage and
fear, filling her with resolve. The flames are so pretty, I want
to watch them for a while. I'm with you there.
Honestly Cersei green flame is really nice looking.
It looks I love multi colored fires.
Yeah, we like to get those little pouches you put in your
campfire or whatever, or the magic flame or whatever they
call it, and it makes it all multi colored.
I love that. And I think black walnut is the
one that actually does burn green when you're when you're
putting it in your fireplace. So this is the most recent going
on with Searcy and Wildfire. And the reason I want to bring
it to your attention is because all that stuff in the Clash of
Kings and some other things point to a big reckoning with
Searcy and Wildfire. It's not this.
This isn't all that was in leading up to desert burning the
Tower of the Hand. Now this is additional
foreshadowing for something bigger.
This is too small of an event, right?
It's just not that big of a deal.
It's also especially given George didn't even plan to write
A Feast for Crows back when he wrote The Clash of Kings, so
this was added on. This is a bonus material, right?
And when he added those wildfire eyes, he wasn't thinking of this
because it wasn't even part of the plan then.
I don't think so this. But on the other hand, this was
a good example of a well controlled use of wildfire.
Unlike the pyromancers during the Great Spring Sickness, this
one didn't get out of hand. This one worked, which is
another reason to think it's not foreshadowed.
It wasn't foreshadowed because this was a cool moment, but it's
more about showing Cersei's relation to wildfire than
showing the destructive power of it and how it can get out of
hand and what else it can do. Because this was actually well
controlled. I don't think it was a great
idea necessarily for Cersei to burn down the tower.
But on the other hand, someone really needed to do something
about all those secret tunnels. So, like, they're really a
problem, aren't they? We have with Cersei coming back
to the fact that she has this big problem with the face right
now with the High Sparrow and all that business, with her
trial and all that. And so she's made an enemy of
them. They've made an enemy of her.
And once again, I come back to the Pyromancers Guild being
right below their headquarters. Two pieces of foreshadowing for
caches under the Great Sept. It's just a lot, right?
This is so hard to not think this is important.
And I also come back to the idea of how silly it was on the show
that the wildfire didn't spread after all that there was a
massive explosion and then the city was like, ah, we're fine.
Nothing. There's no, there's no
collateral damage from that. Don't worry about it.
So that's going to happen, I think.
But will it burn down the whole city?
I still think they they weren't too wrong about that.
I think it's going to have a bigger effect than nothing, but
I don't think it's going to end the whole city.
I don't think this event, I don't think Cersei's use of
wildfire will be the final be all.
I think Cersei's use of wildfire, but I don't think you
think that it's only. The only chance of the wildfire
going off is Cersei's use. Right.
No, I think I want. To be clear about that, you said
it like that because you're talking about Cersei in this
context, but I you probably think it's just as likely that
just an attacker and aggressor of King's Landing sets it off.
Yeah, I do think that. I don't.
I think that Cersei will use Wildfire, but she won't be the
one to accidentally detonate the caches.
She'll her use will be intentional and we'll end with
that. It won't go beyond because it
won't hit the other triggers. I think these attackers, either
Connington or Danny, are the main culprits that we're going
to discuss in the second-half are the ones that are likely for
that. Whereas Cersei is, yeah, she's
kind of got her own plot, her own burnings.
And yeah, it's like this is part of what makes it a little harder
to predict because George is doing multiple things here.
Also, getting back to Cersei's thoughts there on burning away
her rage and fear, that is very similar to how Danny felt during
her fever dreams after Miriam Maz's Doer's ritual, but before
the actual hatching of the Dragons.
And then again in A Dance with Dragon.
She tells Zarozo and Axos, my fears were burned away the day I
came forth from the fire. Now with her, it's a lot more
literal. She was actually in the fire,
but still, yeah, there's some parallels going on there, right?
Nina also points out that she doesn't like the idea of of
Jamie stopping Cersei blowing up the city, which is a theory
that's gone around. It's got some merit to it
because it takes away a lot of that tragedy.
It's like Jamie is justified in doing this.
Looks like he was with Aries, which isn't tragic and
conflicted enough for cause. Jamie's had really dark thoughts
about killing Cersei that are mostly about her cheating on
him. Like not because she's a villain
who's done awful things, not because she's a terrible person,
but because he cheated on because she cheated on him.
That's what really makes him murderous towards her.
So that's kind of that's pretty dark.
It's not. I mean, it's human, but it's not
like it's not casting Jamie as a hero.
It's not setting him up to be a hero in that light.
Certainly it doesn't change that he was heroic and how he behaved
towards Aries, but I don't know that that's the exact parallel
that we're heading towards, even though it it you can, I can see
why people would think that. So here's another example we
have comparing Cersei to Danny, but she's not the only one that
uses that language or has that language associated with her in
terms of fire and and personality and and things like
that quote. Only the gods truly know the
hearts of men and women are full of strange.
Broken by the loss of one son, Rainier, a Targaryen seemed to
find new strength after the loss of a second.
Jace's death hardened her, burning away her fears, leaving
only her anger and her hatred. Still possessed of more Dragons
than her half brother, Her Grace now resolved to use them no
matter the cost. She would rain down fire and
death upon Aegon and all those who supported him, she told the
Black Council, and either tear him from the Iron Throne or die
in the attempt. Very fitting language for a
Targaryen, but a telling pattern as well.
Another example of rage and fear burned away, leaving only anger
and hatred, vengeance. And even the character being
displayed here and mentioned is an Aegon who might take the the
city before Danny does. Rain down fire and death upon
Aegon. Mm hmm.
Could be headed exactly towards that Danny instead of Rainier.
Absolutely. And it also echoes to a lot of
what Danny's arc has been pointing her to be a dragon?
Be a dragon. In the show, Elena straight up
says it be a dragon. Do what a dragon does.
That's destroy. Dragons don't plant trees.
Dragons don't sow. Dragons are like Greyjoys in
that sense. They don't sow.
So yeah, that's, you know, it's Danny doesn't have to go mad to
have her fears burned away, leaving only anger and hatred.
That's not madness necessarily. And Cersei has this coming.
She in many ways is more like Rainier because of the number of
children and the the pending death of those children and how
she may react to it, right. She's already lost Joffrey, and
that made her really sad, just like what happened when Rainier
lost Luke. But when Cersei presumably loses
Marcella and Ortamen, it might go this way as well.
Instead of breaking her, it hardens her and makes her,
reduces her to rage and anger, taking away fear and and all
that. So yeah, she Cersei could go
very much down a similar path there.
And that would mirror Aries a bit, whose madness and violence
also escalated alongside in in part because of the loss of so
many infants and his wife having so many stillbursts.
He lost a lot of children too, or they lost a lot of children
too. Not not under the same
circumstances, you know, but still that's it's a similar,
it's a factor uniting all of them for Cersei as well.
Another parallel could be Elia, Elia Martel, Princess Elia, the
city was taken, the Red Keep captured, her children slain,
and then she's killed 2 as everything falls down around
her, right? Yeah, Cersei could end up in a
situation like that. So obviously Danny has more in
common with Rainier than she does with Cersei, even as Cersei
has a lot in common with both of them when it comes to the
ability to rain down fire and death from above.
Obviously the dragon riders have more ability to do that, but
Cersei has wildfire, so she does have fire and death in her
arsenal. And if she does blow up the
Sept, well, then, you know, that's kind of like being a
dragon, but more of a lion with wildfire.
But it has similar damage. So yeah, I'm really curious to
see what happens there because I do think that, you know, if
you're going to pin me down on a precise theory, I do think like,
like we talked about with a Shay, I mean, or like a Shay and
I talked about a minute ago, I do think Searcy will probably
blow up the Sept, but I don't think it will set off the other
caches. And that will come later, which
is what we'll discuss here in the second-half of this episode.
Another little parallel though, before we get to that is Rainier
had to flee the city, deflate King's Landing in advance of her
rule collapsing. Sergey might have to as well
after perch back against her reign, especially if she does
something awful like blowing up the Sept that might get her
kicked out. That might get significant push
back to her rule. And Danny may also end up having
to flee King's Landing, not because she's losing, not
because of it's destroyed, although those are
possibilities, but she needs to head north to deal with a bigger
threat. Shaya and I have been using Ryze
productivity software for quite a while now and it's interesting
to me how we both use it differently.
I'll start with my experience and Shaya can talk a little bit
about hers and maybe some of this will resonate with you and
it'll be something that would be useful to you and your
day-to-day work life. For me, I don't arrange myself
into specific time frames or set aside chunks of work.
What I use Ryze for is to make sure I'm focused.
Rise is really good at like, Are you sure you want to look at
this right now? If I'm like checking baseball
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For example, if I'm looking at YouTube, Rise will at first Rise
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And Rise can keep you, keep you honest.
It'll say, hey, are you you? You don't want to be looking at
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Let me go back to my work. I'm just a scatterbrain that
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So that's really helpful to me. Now, what about you or Shea?
You use it differently than me. And that sounds really effective
as well. Yeah, I personally, I do use it
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And that burns you out and rise helps to keep me from overdoing
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mean? It lets me strike a good
balance. Yeah, it gives you structure, I
think is what it seems to do. Like it helps you like really
structure your day. I've noticed that.
Yes, exactly. And I, I, so I will be a kind of
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And I'm like, well, I have 10 minutes left on my focus
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you know. We've had this conversation a
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And so I respect that. I also feel kind of time blind.
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I found it just honestly, it's really made me so much more
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So you can potentially check out Ryze and see if it works for
you. We got the link in the
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Amanda Molyneaux says it's OK Wildfire.
I also get more volatile with age.
Good one. Christina Kaye says the comment
about it being bright reminds me of of welding or how magnesium
burns. Oh, yeah, magnesium burn.
Yeah. You also get like, people talk
about that with Dawn and how Dawn is really bright and how
maybe there's magnesium inside the blade that would accomplish
that or account for that. Good call Christina Kaye, deep
cut there. That cut.
See what I said? Gerald Garcia says in the Seven
Years War the French blew up their own Fort at Crown Point,
NY to deny it to the Brits. The gunpowder explosion lifted
the four story tower with 12 foot thick stonewalls several
feet off the ground. Holy crap, the whole Fort with
12 foot stick tone walls, 12 foot thick stone.
I said stick walls that would be that would be easier to lift,
but 12 foot thick stonewalls, not so much.
Wow. So we really could be looking at
the Red Keep. We were joking about the Iron
Throne just flying off into Blackwater Bay, but that might
not be so silly. It might be quite possible.
I mean, to see only the Iron Throne flying in green flame
across the that might be a little bit much, but the idea.
But that much force behind the explosion, Apparently that's not
so crazy. Wow.
We've looked at past examples of wildfire use, accidents, why
King Aries's caches are very likely a bomb waiting to go off,
and some other things. But for that bomb, someone has
to light the fuse, right? Even though a lot of it's
pointing at Cersei, we've talked about how it doesn't seem right
for the climax for it to be her. She's maybe a red, green herring
for that, because a lot is pointing to other characters as
well. We can't ignore the
foreshadowing for her. But there's so much more
foreshadowing on these other characters, or at least a
similar amount. And they can't all burn it down,
right? The city can't burn down three
times. That's part of why we think
Cersei's just going to do serious damage but not actually
do fully destroy the city. Which would be ironic, because
she's the only one of the ones we're talking about who's
intentionally planning on using wildfire that we can tell,
right? So it it appears that someone
trying to take King's Landing is more likely to set off the
caches than Cersei herself, who's actually intending to use
wildfire. That's a great irony.
Irony. Great irony what?
So this possibility hangs over many possible plot lines, which
all of which could intersect and overlap.
So again, let me bring up Virus again briefly, because he again
might know where some of the caches are, even if he probably
can't know where all of them are.
And if he did know what where they are, why hasn't he dealt
with them? What possible benefit to him is
there to leaving those untouched, to leaving them
there? How does that help him capture
the city for his king? Like his own candidate might
just blow up. That's not good.
Or he could blow up. Like why does Virus want to be
walking around in a city or a castle that has that threat
hanging over him personally as well as everybody else?
And and if Virus does know and left them there to some
advantage, he's like, well, we could this could be useful in
the moment to set off some chaos.
I don't think even Littlefinger wants that sort of chaos, The
city burning in the midst of him trying to take it.
Yeah, I don't think so. And Virus is thinking long term
and longer term. He wants to establish a new
dynasty. He's trying to have Aegon win
the throne by being a savior. Burning down the city is not
savior business. Right.
That is the opposite message. Like if he could somehow make it
look like Aegon stopped the city from burning, then that would.
That's the kind of thing he would want people to believe
about Aegon. Not that he used that tool and
killed a bunch of innocents. That's not savior stuff, right?
And this is where I come back to the disease thing though.
And this is what's going to port us over to Jon Connington.
Not everyone is so delicate. Virus might be wary, but Virus
isn't running the armies. Jon Connington and Aegon are,
and Varus doesn't know what he's dealing with.
When he had John Connington, he manipulated, exploited, and
plotted John Connington's role in this expertly.
But here comes a wrinkle that he couldn't have possibly seen
coming and is not aware of. Grayscale.
John Connington is now a ticking time bomb of his own whose time
frame has been accelerated. John Connington wants to do
everything fast because he doesn't have a lot of life left
and he knows that. He's not naive about what
Grayscale's going to do to him. He is maybe naive on how
infectious he is and on how he's going to be able to keep it
hidden, but he's not naive on how long his life will be.
He knows he's dying. So virus has accounted for a
lot, but he hasn't accounted for the fact that Jon Connington is
going to push his foot on the accelerator because he's out of
time himself. He's losing time himself.
Let's move on to that. The Stony Griffin, the Stoney
Griffin with an ESTONE Griffin, EY?
Because Stoney Sept is spelled that way.
And that's a big part of what we're delving into with John
Connington today. He is a major candidate to do
some or lots of burning of King's Landing.
One of his biggest regrets is not burning Stoney Sept at the
outside of Robert's Rebellion. This is a man whose entire
mission in life is to make good on his failure of the past.
He won't hesitate to commit an atrocity or three if it delivers
the end result he's looking for. And he's looking to move fast.
When you're looking to move fast at violence, at war, that means
collateral damage. More likely to cause harm, more
likely to do things that you weren't expecting, more likely
to have things spiral out of control.
And Kodigen of course wasn't on TV, so we we would expect a lot
of this anyway, though. But because he wasn't on TV,
that just throws off all of our predictions from what we could
see there 'cause like, well, some of his plot line was given
to somebody else. So we can't predict it.
We can't predict that all the things we would have normally
predicted because we have this whole missing element here.
Like how does how do we factor Danny into what we saw on TV
when we don't have Jon Connington and Egon, Which seems
more important or just as important?
Don't forget Jon Connington was briefly handed the King for
Aries and he was exiled after losing the battle of the Bells
at Stony Sept. He arrived with his army knowing
Robert was there. He knew Robert was inside the
city somewhere and Robert was hiding because he was buying
time for Ned to arrive with his army to relieve him and they
would have an army together, they could fight blah blah blah.
So Connington knew that was happening.
He knew Ned's army was on the way, but he got there 1st and
figured OK, I can get Robert before Ned arrives and if he had
the war would have stopped right there.
That would have been the end of the war because he would have
had Robert in in, in in his possession and that's the end of
it. Connington tried to do a lot of
things to get the town to give Robert up.
He hung people in crow cages, he took hostages, he searched
everywhere including the sewers. And of course, where Robert was
actually hiding is the a brothel called the Peach, where he
fathered a child with a punny name, Bella, for the Battle of
the Bells. This is followed up many years
later by Bella joking about ringing Gendry's bells, which
didn't happen, luckily for them and us, because they share
Robert as a father and didn't know that or don't know that.
So that would be incest, accidental incest.
But on their parts, they didn't hook up, thankfully, Yeah.
It'll be funnier the day Gendry's father is revealed,
assuming he finds out one day. He's like, whoa, I almost bang
my sister. Well, he won't think that
because he didn't almost bang her.
She might think that like, oh, I almost bang my brother.
If he is ever recognized for his birth, if he somehow ends the
the books as the Lord of Storm's End again, we can't predict that
for sure because there's also Edrick Storm out there.
There's two candidates at least for that.
But we can kind of hope that whichever Baratheon bastard gets
Storm's End, assuming that's what happens, that they make a
home for the other Baratheon bastard.
Maybe Bella could go live at Storms End instead of, you know,
at the Peach or whatever. Now there's a lot of them.
There could be a whole breath whole mess of Baratheans living
at Baratheon bastards living at Storms End.
That'd be cool. Now, Jon Connington was in
denial about how he handled Stoney Sept for a long time.
He isn't in denial now, but he was when his exile began.
Take note of this conversation here and what his friend tells
him he should have done. Tywin Lannister himself could
have done no more. He had insisted 1 knight to
Black Heart during his first year of exile.
There is where you're wrong, Miles, Toyne had replied.
Lord Tywin would not have bothered with a search.
He would have burned that town and every living creature in it.
Men and boys, babes at the breast, noble Knights and holy
septons, pigs and whores, rats and rebels.
He would have burned them all. When the fires guttered out and
only ash and cinders remained, he would have sent his men in to
find the bones of Robert Baratheon.
Later, when Stark and Tully turned up with their host, he
would have offered pardons to the both of them, and they would
have accepted and turned for home with their tails between
their legs. He was not wrong, John
Connington reflected, leaning on the battlements of his
forebears. I wanted the glory of slaying
Robert in single combat, and I did not want the name of
Butcher, so Robert escaped me and cut down Rhaegar on the
Trident. I failed the father.
He said. But I will not fail the son.
I like the parallel George throws at us here.
Toyne says it almost the way Aries would have on TV.
He would have burned them all versus burned them all, right.
Tywin and Aries said more in common than either would admit.
They were both quite willing to burn them all.
By the way, Robert got lucky that a closeted gay man was in
charge of the search here because pretty much anyone else
would have been, like, focus your search on the brothels.
This is Robert Brothian we're talking about.
But Connington's, like, I don't know, because he's repressed
within his sexuality entirely. He doesn't think about sex much
at all. And if he did, he'd like, oh,
yeah, Robert. Right.
And also, look at the wording there.
He doesn't say. He doesn't say to himself I
didn't want to be a Butcher, he says.
I didn't want the name of Butcher.
He wasn't unwilling to do it. He just didn't want his
reputation. He cared about how people
perceived him. It wasn't his conscience.
It was his reputation. He doesn't.
I didn't want to kill all those innocent people.
He doesn't say that. He says I didn't want to the
name of Butcher, he wanted the reputation of killing Robert.
So it's all about his reputation, right?
Both ends, both sides of this are recognition and glory.
And that last paragraph is what really sells the foreshadowing.
Though the last line of I failed the father, but will not fail
the son. He is just dead set on not
making that same mistake. And his mistake was not burning
the city. He will not scruple, not
hesitate to burn a city if that seems to be the right call or
it's the thing he'll need to do. And given he's on a timer, a
grayscale timer, he's going to be moving quickly.
Everything he's going to do is under this timeline, this rush
timeline. Like, Yep, burn a city.
We can't wait for a siege. We can't hold out.
We got to go now. He doesn't.
He didn't have, he wasn't that patient in the 1st place.
Once this, once the mission got launched again, once he waited
so long in exile and once they started sailing over, he's been
hyped ever since it began. He's been waiting to go.
And then the grayscale just made the timeline even quicker for
him. But there's still the question
of how Cersei or not Cersei, but how Jon Conington.
I mean, or Cersei could burn the King's Landing, even though he's
got this intent, even though it's clearly not something he
would be afraid to do. How is he going to burn the
city? Like what's going to happen?
We we said, you know, maybe conventional fire, just a
regular assault could start a small fire and burn it.
But is that enough? Let's give it.
Let's let's go a little deeper on Jon Connington's character
and see where it takes us. Here's someone else that weighs
in, Kevin Lannister, his thoughts.
Give us another angle here. Quote.
Old Lord Merryweather's in action had allowed the rebellion
to take root and spread, and Eris wanted someone young and
vigorous to match Robert's own youth and vigor.
Too soon, Lord Tywin Lannister had declared, when word of the
King's choice had reached Cast of the Rock.
Connington is too young, too bold, too eager for glory.
The Battle of the Bells had proved the truth of that.
Tywin nailed that one too. Eager for glory 1000% right on
that one. But now Connington doesn't care
about glory is. That is that Rhaegar's nickname.
Nice he, but he he doesn't care about being called a butcher
either. So none of this stuff matters to
him anymore. He only cares about the bottom
line of putting a gun on the throne and not failing Rhaegar's
not failing Rhaegar, not failing Rhaegar's son.
So I think if Connington is responsible, I mean, it would be
accidental. Again, the wildfire cash is
being set off, but just the regular fires being started in
the course of battle. Him, the Golden Company, his
friends in the Reach, you know, them trying to take the city and
something that happens, whatever lit Flea Bottom and during the
Battle of the Black Water, that same kind of just fire arrows,
trebuchets hurling flaming piles, you know, anything,
something like that. If we recall the locations,
Jamie mentioned that they definitely had wildfire out that
he pulled those caches away from and disposed of.
All 7 gates were mentioned, right?
He said the Great Sept was a place that they pulled wildfire
from, yet there was still more there.
What about these gates? What if the same thing happens
there? You might say, well, Aziz,
weren't the gates assaulted during the Battle of Blackwater?
No, only two of them were. Five of the gates were not
attacked. So there's potentially wildfire
still planted amongst maybe even all 7, but but at at least
potentially five of them. There were no explosions during
the Battle of the Battle of Blackwater, so they might still
be, you know, it's the mud in the King's gates.
By the way, if anyone's curious, which two were the had action
during the Battle of Blackwater? It would be very ironic if
Connington set off the caches himself and killed his own
claimant, right? Well, he would fail that you'd
that's one way to fail the son there by killing him.
And it would be really, really brutal and ironic beyond just
killing the guy he's trying to put on the throne, because it
would be Ares. This is even though Aegon the
Six probably isn't Aries's grandson, Connington thinks he
is. What a crazy turn that would be
for the Aries's curse, Aries's revenge to be responsible for
the death of his own grandson from beyond the grave.
Connington would think that he's like, what the hell?
You know, I just, I these flames went off and it killed my dude.
My, you know, my foster son and Aries is responsible from beyond
the grave. You've, you said you didn't want
to fail the sun, but then you burned him to death.
But gunning could also just like infect Aegon with grayscale or
just other people. That's another angle here to
what could happen in King's Landing.
That sets it up for a greater conflagration or a greater need,
which is what if King's Landing is infected by grayscale, Then
you have a, a reason that someone might say this place
needs to be destroyed to stop the spread of this horrible
magical disease. We've discussed this a little
bit elsewhere. For example, a very curious
mention of grayscale comes up in the North when Val the the Free
Folk woman freaks out basically over Shereen having had
grayscale 'cause she says there's no had, there's no had
grayscale. You have it, it's sleeping, it's
dormant, but she still has it. And, and anytime it could awaken
and start infecting people again, that's her take.
And while it's not proven that that's really how it works, I
think we should take that pretty seriously.
Like, I don't know if George is just throwing that in there as a
red herring. Maybe he is.
But we've talked about Shereen being an active contagion
element as maybe part of why Melisandre burns her.
Like, it's part of selling it, like, well, we need to get rid
of this infection. Source.
It's a part of the argument for burning this child saying I
support that argument. But you can see why some people
might be like, yeah, she's we're all going to die, you know, if,
if she infects us. And, and again, this brings us
back to Bloodraven and the burning of the corpses during
the great spring sickness. So there is a compelling reason
to ruthlessly kill a bunch of infected people if it prevents
the spread. So could we be looking at a a
situation where King's Landing needs to burn in order to
prevent a continent wide epidemic?
Maybe that's going too far, but I think it's worth considering.
Recall that example in Book 1 where Paisel describes his youth
when Lord Hightower locked the city gates to prevent plague
from getting out. The plague was in Old Town and
he locked the city gates and locked down the porch to make
sure it didn't spread. Of course, the problem with that
was when the plague passed, the inhabitants of High of Old Town
were pissed at him. And when he, you know, toured
the city with his son, a riot started and they killed him and
his son. He did the right thing, probably
like locking the gates probably did prevent the epidemic from
spreading elsewhere. He it was a brutal but correct
thing to do probably. But the rank and file, you know,
commoners and peasants didn't perceive it that way and they,
they just wanted their revenge. Now, why would an army be packed
into King's Landing? That's a possibility.
It's something that could make this all worse, make it all more
dangerous. We talked about people packing
together in winter for warmth. There's also the possibility of
them hiding or defending the city against a different army.
For example, the Dothraki or against the Golden could be the
Golden Company attacking the city, or the Golden Company
inside the city defending against Danny.
Something along those lines. An army of Dothraki and
Unsullied would be a good reason to hide behind walls, right?
But what if you're hiding behind those walls and grayscale is
breaking out inside the walls While that's happening, it's not
shelter if you've got plague bearers with you hiding.
Like that's worse than facing the Dothraki and the Unsolved,
probably. Let's take a brief moment for a
new feature that I want to include in episodes going
forward. A quote of the day, a quote from
outside of A Song of Ice and Fire.
I read a lot of other books and I'm just over time I've been
collecting these quotes. I just love to bookmark great
quotes and books that I'm reading and I thought it would
be fun to share some of them with you all from time to time
and tell you where they came from.
And you might want to read these same books.
This first quote is one day you will see that it is a mistake to
love an empire or a throne or a crown because those things
cannot love, they can only die. That's from The Bright Sword by
Lev Grossman, who's the author of The Magicians.
I really enjoyed that book. It's one of the most recent
books I read, as you can tell. Well, maybe not.
You can probably can't tell actually from that.
It's an Arthurian story and it's really, it's a clever Arthurian
story as modern takes on it. It's was written in 2023 and you
can listen to it on Audible if you go to our website and
download a free trial of Audible.
Or you can get the book through our website.
Just go to our website and browse around.
There's a lot of ways to support our show and get involved in
some of these great books that I'm going to start dropping
knowledge about from time to time.
Yeah, why not Return of the Dragon, our final section?
We saved Danny for last because she's the most likely to be
involved in all of this and the most important and prominent
character that's involved in this as well.
Because she's the one of the biggest characters in the story,
bigger than Connington, bigger than Cersei, and she's the
daughter of Aries. And unlike him, who thought
Wildfire might might make him into a dragon, she already has
Dragons. But still, Aries's dreams and
madness are very curious to us with regard to this topic.
Why did Aries and Aryan, Bright Flame and Hang on the 5th think
Wildfire was so important to bringing back Dragons?
Or why did they inuse it at all? Why do they think it was an
element? What got them on that track in
the first place? Maybe it related to dreams.
Maybe there's something in their dreams that told them this, and
maybe they were seeing the future in these dreams and maybe
they were seeing this future, this wildfire explosion that we
are talking about that is set to happen.
Maybe that's what they were seeing in their dreams.
The wildfire disaster that's still coming is what they were
dreaming of, but they somehow got it wrong.
They associated themselves with it.
Aryan Bright Flame saw himself at the end of all this as the
dragon emerging from it all, and so he drank the wildfire.
Then Aries did. But they're all wrong.
It's Daenerys. Daenerys is the one they were
dreaming of without realizing it.
Remember what Aries thought? He thought that after the
wildfire burned out that he would arise as a dragon from the
ashes and cinder. Obviously that's insane, but if
you try to parse or drill down that insanity, it could be along
the lines of a Danny dreamt, or what she's been having these
voices tell her for so long to be a dragon.
Aries got it wrong. He took it literally.
It wasn't going to make him into a dragon.
But doing those things is dragon behavior.
Burning everything, not sewing, being destructive.
That's being a dragon. That's what we're talking about
here. That's what Danny's dreaming of.
That's what Aries may have been dreaming of without correctly
sifting through, without correctly understanding what he
was seeing in his dreams. He doesn't have to have had
dreams here. He's insane.
But I think that fits pretty well.
And, and this also fits with Aryan and Egg.
Like any of them, they're all thinking of Dragons coming back
into the world, which Danny did. So it makes sense to associate
what they saw in their dreams as dreams of her, whereas they
mistake it for dreams of themselves.
So the fact that she's the one who really did bring Dragons
back, and all of them dreamed of Dragons coming back, ties these
two examples together, or ties all these cases together.
And just like King's Landing, where we have the possibility of
two distinct conflagrations, one from Searcy maybe, and then one
another from attacking armies, which may or may not include
Danny's Dragons and the detonation of the caches for
Danny herself. However, we have 3 fires to
consider, right? We have all these.
And what did the House of the Undying tell her?
Three fires must you light, one for life and one for death and
one to love. Drogo's pyre #1 the dosh Kaleen
burning all the calls, which we saw on TV and has been
foreshadowed in the books as well.
So I think that's coming. And she certainly looks to be on
her way back to Bae's Dothrak at the based on what happens at the
end of A Dance with Dragons and her likely being captured by
Khal Joko. So the third one could be King's
Landing. I don't know why that's to love,
but maybe that's explained by her not being the one to to do
it on purpose. If Connington sets it off, it
fulfills the one to love because he's loving Rhaegar.
It's his love of Rhaegar that causes it to happen, but then
she gets blamed for it. If Connington sets it off and
Danny gets blamed for it, that all fits.
She could also kill two birds with one stone as well because
she's the Slayer of lies. Also, if you keep thinking about
the prophecy of the House of the Undying, that's also included
there, right? One of those lies seems to be
the cloth dragon on Poles, who is probably Aegon the 6th, Her
nephew that isn't really her nephew because he's probably not
actually Rhaegar's son. She could destroy King's Landing
and him in one fell swoop of Drogon's wings and her father's
shadow. She won't be intentionally
trying to blow up the whole city, but if she's trying to
take out Aegon and it sets off caches that fits.
How could that work? Just specifically, we talked
about it earlier, what if there are caches still in the Red
Keep? As we've said, there were some.
There might still be more. What if Danny tries to be
precise and she tries to just burn the Red Keep only with
Drogon tries to take out, Let's say Aegon and Arianne are there,
or maybe Cersei. Probably Aegon and Arianne, but
maybe Cersei. Let's say she's trying to take
them out, just the Red Keep. She's not trying to torch the
whole city, just them. And wildfire goes off and it's
such a huge explosion that it spreads throughout the city.
Again, as we said in the beginning, no one's going to
blame Aries for that. They're not going to know
anything to do with Aries. It's going to look like Danny's
fault to a lot of people, even if it doesn't make sense.
Like where did this green fire come from?
But you got to think, y'all, most people aren't going to be
witnesses of this. Most opinions are going to be
through rumor. It's going to sound like dragon.
Her green dragon had green fire. Dragon's Fire City burns.
How could it be someone else's fault?
Right? Like it's too straightforward
when presented that way. And it is.
It's a tough argument to overcome unless you know the
truth. Like as we readers we will, but
the average Westerosi is just going to hear the basics.
Dragons Fire city burned down. Why would you blame the 20 year
old dead king? Doesn't make any sense from
their perspective. So Nina isn't as sold on the
idea that Aries was having prophetic dreams, but she
definitely agrees that there's this father daughter dichotomy
or opposite sides of the idea where fire as draconic rebirth
versus fire as pseudo draconic death, Right.
So that's pretty cool. It's that resonates, I think.
So there's a lot of ways to look at it that fit and it could be
more than one George as often as he does multiple meanings we
should consider. That's the possibility as well.
Like, you know, it could always be all the above.
So perhaps another way to put it is that Danny will not be able
to fully step out of her father's shadow because his
curse still hangs over King's Landing and no one knows it.
It's a special sort of tragic because she never even met the
man. He wasn't, she wasn't raised by
him. She doesn't really have his
proclivities. She's not like him, you know,
he's way, she's way smarter and more empathetic.
And I mean, she's the Mother of Dragons.
There's no comparing her to any to most other Targaryens at all,
right? It's just having her cruel,
having his cruel and mad legacy attached to her.
It's unfair, but it might happen.
Unfair doesn't mean it won't happen.
Unfair things happen all the time, in real life and in story.
She doesn't even know the extent that she's still in his shadow,
but she might realize it if Wildfire goes off in the city
while she's trying to precision strike the Red Keep or something
like that. She doesn't even really know how
mad he was. She hardly knows anything about
that, let alone the caches of Wildfire and his intent to
destroy the entire city. She doesn't know any of that.
She may not get it from Barristan before he.
They're separated forever before he dies.
They're separated right now. They may never be reunited.
The whole one of the reasons we even have Barristan's point of
view is because of this separation.
By the time she gets back in the fold, he might be dead.
So the the the source for this information may die with him.
And it'll only be for us, for tragic knowledge for us readers
to have and go. Danny.
No. Danny, no.
Yeah. It would be so tragic if she
learns after the fact. She's like, let's say she
accidentally sets up the caches in one of many possible ways and
then finds out where those caches came from.
She's like my father. That might change her whole view
of the justice of her 'cause she thinks she's owed that throne.
She thinks her family was cheated out of it.
She's been lied to. It came from Viserys and maybe a
little bit through Jorah and Illyrio.
Maybe like some dishonesty has sold this to her.
But if the lies are slain, is she still going to think she
deserves the throne if her father did all those things?
Her father's intent was to kill everyone.
Yeah, It's still my It's still my birthright.
That's not really how Danny operates.
I think she might be like, wait, maybe my father deserved to lose
the throne. Maybe his awful behavior is
that's why Ned and Robert and these people that she thinks of
his villains. She might be like, OK, these
guys weren't so villainous after all.
Maybe my dad was going to blow up the whole city.
These are the guys on the other side.
Like, how am I on the how is my dad the good guy here?
How, how deeply does she believe in the Targaryen right to rule?
Like, if it's with these factors and, and, and thrown in there,
I'm not so sure she would hold tight to that.
Like, yeah, maybe your birthright isn't really your
birthright, Danny. So this is very deep stuff with
it has the potential to change Danny's view of everything.
This might be the moment, the culmination of her deciding I
shouldn't be queen, I shouldn't be on the throne.
It could be the thing that turns her to Stannis's path, which was
I need to save the realm to win the throne, not win the throne
to save the realm. She might be OK, I'm going
north, I'm going to stop the others, and then we'll see about
this whole throne business. You know, maybe I don't even
deserve it, but I definitely don't deserve it if I can't save
the realm, right? So she may go north and maybe
she doesn't come back from that because, you know, the others
may be her end. She may die stopping them, who
knows? Either way, the Danny we know
now isn't wants to avoid civilian casualties.
She's not all about the yeah, strafe and burn.
I'm not really buying that from the TV show.
I think if she gets angry and and vindictive, it's not going
to be towards the civilian populace.
It's possible. I can't just throw that out.
It doesn't really fit for me, you know?
And the way I perceive her character and way the way things
are going, I still think her end is going to be heroic to the
readers and maybe not so heroic to the key characters in the
world. They may see her as a, they may
see her the wrong way. They may see her as a villain.
But I think us readers will have much different information and
it's just a very different scenario.
So like, no matter what Danny does, there's Dragons here.
I mean, it's just there, there's no way around that.
She's Eris's granddaughter, she can't escape that.
Even if she isn't responsible. It's it's just associated with
her. That's how people operate in
Westeros. You're, you're the crimes of the
family are all connected. Like if, if a son commits a
crime, it, it reflects on the entire House.
That's just how Westerosi people think.
So Danny's going to be blamed even if it's not her fault at
all. And it won't be her fault at
all. How could it be not?
As we've said, no one is responsible for setting off
Aries's caches other than Aries, even though you can't really pin
it on him. It's hard to pin things on a
dead man, but still, he did it. Yeah.
I mean, like even if you want to say like the pyromancers get
some cold, but they're just fall.
I mean like. They were all killed too.
Yeah, they all they're dead. You can't blame them now they're
dead. And they still had to.
Like if they, if they hadn't listened, they would've just
hired more people. Yeah.
So I don't know. It's it's on Aries.
You're right. It's, it's pretty hard, yeah.
It's like, if you accept that no one knows about the caches, then
it's hard to blame anyone for setting them off right?
You know, I mean, maybe we, we need to hold reserve judgement
maybe given on what actually happens, but it's, it's hard to
perceive it that way in my opinion.
And, and apparently Shay agrees with me.
Maybe a lot of y'all do as well. Here's another piece of
foreshadowing that might apply. Do you know whose fault it
really is? Who's that?
George. Damn it, George.
You do, yes. It was like I'm saying, like I
know what you're going to say. Damn you so.
Yeah, here's another piece of foreshadowing that might apply.
It's pretty obscure, but I think there's something to it.
It comes from the musical performances at the Purple
Wedding, of all places. Quote A.
Haunting ballad of two dying lovers amidst the doom of
Valyria might have pleased the hall more if Coleo had not sung
it in High Valyrian, which most of the guests could not.
Speak my over analytic review of those two sentences.
Actually, it's one sentence is that it foreshadows A Aegon and
Arianne burning to death in our new Doom of King's Landing,
perhaps set off by green flame. Or, well, probably set off by
green flame. The subtlety here is that no one
sees it coming because it's spoken in a language that no one
can understand, so no one has, like, no one even perceives the
danger. So that's kind of cool.
It might be a stretch, but it's fun anyway.
And Nina and I both have Arianne pretty high on the list of
people likely to die by dragon fire, right up there with, like,
Victorian. And of course, Quentin's already
on that list. But Oh yeah, And in the House of
the Dragon credits, right? We have some burnings there.
Yeah, we have what looks like 2 dying lovers amidst the doom of
Valyria. Yeah, sorry, not the credits,
but the. Intro credits.
That's that's not what it looks like because you know, it's it's
it's the one person holding, cradling another.
It could be mother and child, but I think it looks like
lovers. I do too.
Yeah. That's if you may remember what
we're talking about, folks. If you next time you watch House
the Dragon or just watch that intro.
Yeah, right during that, the tapestry.
Season 2 intro. Season 2 intro yes, if you don't
love the idea of Danny actually going mad like I don't.
This fulfills her tragic destiny away where she keeps her wits
but still gets blamed for a level of damage she never
intended. Still gets associated with
legacy for father, still has this curse of sorts hanging over
her which he doesn't deserve. But it will look like her fault
and. And maybe that's when she we get
into what might look like madness if she's just so pissed
off that she's blamed for something that's not her fault
that she does turn that on people.
That is if you are looking for a way to see it that way.
That's, that's how it could be. I mean, and that will be like
everyone, if the city's destroyed, then there's nothing.
There's no real witnesses. There's only the outside
opinions like, well, the city was destroyed and the only thing
we know of there was a dragon involved or multiple Dragons.
And well, that's the one. There's the Mother of Dragons.
Who are we going to pin that on but her?
Like, how you gonna not believe the big black dragon was the
reason? If you're just a regular folk
person, you know, this isn't that.
Nobody suspects the Drogon situation.
This isn't everyone suspects the Drogon situation.
Oh, yeah. So she's definitely the best
candidate to take the blame. There's no one else I could
really think of that would take the blame and have that be like,
a good story for us. Like, Connington takes the
blame. He wants to take the blame.
He's ready for it. You know, Cersei, she's already
a villain willing to do these things that wouldn't, you know,
maybe she does it, but it doesn't seem as interesting.
You know, it's like, yeah, that's that's something she
would do. But Danny, that's tragic and
conflicting. And no, you know, that's going
to. That just hits harder.
I think. So Jon Connington causing it,
but Danny taking the blame, I think is a strong possibility.
So as you can see, there's ample foreshadowing for the
destruction of King's Landing, but most of it rests on Aries's
leftover fruits. Danny's arc is full of
foreshadowing and a lot of that predicts death and destruction,
but not that much of it points to King's Landing directly.
There's lots of stuff about Danny leaving a trail of
destruction, about burning this and that being a dragon.
It isn't specifically associated with King's Landing, but it it's
hard to point it anywhere else. Like where where else could they
be talking about? Maybe it's just a general thing
all over Westeros. But yeah, I don't know about
that. Her goal, her her arc certainly
is headed towards the Iron Throne, which is in King's
Landing in the Red Keep. So yeah, you don't have to be
too specific with that, but it's still maybe a no worthy point.
With Coddington, there is his regret over not burning Stoney
steps. So it's more distinct in his
POV. And of course his POV is a lot
easier than Danny's because he's only got what, 2 chapters and
she's got dozens. So there's just his his story,
his role is a lot more narrowed down.
It's a little easier to perceive.
He is a bringer of disease and fire.
It's quite a role for this guy, this Tony Griffin, right, The
Stoney flaming Griffin. So yeah, but as we were saying,
Aries and his obsession with wildfire is probably going to go
down as the biggest culprit here from our point of view.
But the books, the characters in the world, not not so likely.
And again, this this whole thing of what does wildfire have to do
with the return of Dragons? And yeah, coming back to that
briefly as we wrap up this episode, he probably acquired
his obsession with wildfire initially through Summerhall,
where, you know, his grandfather tried to bring the Dragons back,
and it went horribly wrong. And it had also gone wrong for
Aegon's older brother, Aryan. So Aries knew about all these
things. That was his.
Aryan was his uncle or great uncle, rather.
So yeah, these are things that he's aware of.
And throw in all the other attempts to bring back Dragons
from his his previous ancestors. And just like it went horribly
wrong at Summerhall, it could go horribly wrong at King's
Landing. We've already seen how it can go
wrong with just controlled burns like Blood Ravens, let alone
battle the Blackwater and and what's yet to come.
That's why it's so hard to imagine a scenario where Danny
isn't either the culprit or the scapegoat.
Her family history is both tied to wildfire and these caches
specifically. And as I said, it just seems
like a bigger tragedy, bigger conflict if it's her instead of
Connington, who's just not as important of a character.
So there's some other factors I want to throw out at you without
getting too deep into them. Just some food for thought,
stuff that's maybe a little beyond the scope of this
episode, but is important. Like, again, I want to remind
you all the overlap with grayscale.
There's a lot of ways that could play out where it's just
necessary to quote UN quote to bomb or burn a lot of people to
prevent the plague from switching.
And what about the timing of all this?
Like we said, there's a good chance that this is what sends
Danny N. But what if it's the other way
around? What if N comes first and then
she comes back to King's Landing and then the caches are blown?
Maybe this is the post others event.
You know, it doesn't have to happen 1st.
And that could all the the benefit to the story playing out
that way is that grayscale could be playing out in the South
while so much is happening in the North.
And that problem could escalate. And it allows for that problem
to build. It allows for Cersei and Aegon
to kind of duel it out with, with Danny's kind of off doing
her own thing. Maybe, maybe Cersei's already
resolved by that point. But it is tricky to figure out.
And this is one of the things I love about George's writing.
Even with all this foreshadowing, it's still really
hard to parse a lot of it. And we have some good ideas of
the basics, but there's still so much that we really can't tell,
right? Like the the inner, the
inclusion of grayscale and the timing of some of the other big
plot lines. And yeah, it's that that's where
it gets really difficult. So as close as we can get to
some of us, we're still pretty far off on a lot of it.
And what are the consequences, too?
What if King's Landing is destroyed?
What is? What if Danny is blamed for
that? We say, what if Danny's blamed
for that? What if we call it likely?
But what actually happens if he's blamed for?
What does that mean? What did she do?
Is that why she goes N to prove herself as a as a as as the
worthy by defeating the others? It's like, OK, I'm going to
prove myself. Look, I will save the realm
y'all. And then she dies doing that.
So it just doesn't doesn't happen.
Or what if using some of Nina's examples, King's Landing is like
semi irradiated, right? Like the doom, you know, like
it's, it's not livable anymore. King's Landing is is you can't
live there the the capital's just gone.
How does that change Westeros? How does that leave the series
at the end? What if it's like the Shadow or
Mantari swear just magical fallout zone where it just can't
live there for reasons that no one can explain.
Especially if on top of that there's like no Old Town.
What if Euron takes down Old Town also, and it's just two of
the the two biggest cities in Westeros are destroyed or mostly
destroyed? Yeah.
Westeros is a new world going forward after that, a dream of
spring is a dream of a entirely new continent of just a very
different place, maybe not even a united place anymore.
And it's one thing. It is, even though I emphasize
Danny. Yeah.
What what about Connington? What if Connington blows up the
city Or. And.
And even though people don't blame him for it, what if he
does it? What's what's he going to think
he's like, oops, Well, I did. Is he going to become even more
murderous and vindictive since he has no purpose to life
anymore if his candidate is incinerated?
What if he blames himself but in denial for that too?
Yeah, yeah, that's a dangerous man, infected with grayscale and
capable Marshally and no reason to live.
Just wants to deal out death and destruction.
Not good, not good, y'all? This is one of the more
portentous episodes we've done in terms of so much evidence for
so much destruction in the big population center and Old Town
too. We we casually mentioned that
here at the end. So yeah, pretty heavy stuff,
y'all. The answer to our trivia
question. Who tells John Connington the
Tywin Lannister would have burned Stoney's step to the
ground rather than the way he handled it.
Sir Miles Toyne, AKA Black Heart, strongly implied that
Connington had feelings for Black Heart.
They might have been lovers, but I don't think so because I think
he was fully closeted. But still that vibe is there in
in his thoughts episodes that we mentioned today that are very
relevant to this one that you if you want to keep immersed in
this particular topic or related ones.
We have two episodes on summer Hall talking about Rhaegar and
Aries and Aegon the 5th and prophecy and yeah, wildfire and
Duncan and the other Duncan and yeah, lots of stuff there.
The Three eyed Bloodraven episode, That's the one that
refer that we deal with in terms of Aryan, bright flame and his
being sent to the wall. But there's some, we have some
discussion of him and Aryan with the whole wildfire business.
Valeridus, Cersei chapters, especially the A Feast for Crows
ones, which is of course the bulk of all her chapters.
A Feast for Crows, She is the most prominent POV in A Feast
for Crows if you go by total number of chapters.
And of course we refer to a Clash of Kings, the Battle of
Blackwater. So Valeridus, portions of that
are very relevant as well. That's Tyrion and Sansa and
Davos of course. Great multi POV battle, one of
the standouts of the early part of the series.
Always worth rereading that again.
But in this case, not just to enjoy it for the for what
happens then and for how well written it is, but to look ahead
to stuff like this that we've discussed in the episode that
you may not have considered when you first read those chapters.
Because as usual, there's always so much there to consider.
George's writing is nothing if not extremely rich and layered.
I think we've done a pretty good job today of pointing to that.
Thanks everyone for hanging out with us, for listening, for
consuming, for sharing, for pondering, for being a part of
our community. And I want to thank people that
helped us make this episode. Of course, Nina, big help with
some notes and some discussions with me that helped me get my
thoughts in order. And once again, good Clean Alley
with 1l.tumblr.com for more of her thoughts, years of thoughts
collected there by now. Joey Townsend for our music,
appreciate that, Joey. And Michael Klarfeld, our video
intro and the maps you see behind us.
You can get his work at his website.
KLARADO x.de.de, because the man is German, that's Deutsche
Pachea. Until next time, my friends, on
behalf of Ochea, we'll see you next time.
And Valar reread us.