House Lofston and their black bat sigil ruled Harrenhal during
what is arguably the darkest portion of its 300 year history.
Given what Arya and others experienced there, that's really
saying something. When Jamie hears of humans
eating humans, he thinks of Maddenel Lofston, and when
Brienne carries a Lofston shield given to her by Jamie, she is
repeatedly greeted with grim reactions.
One man even pulls a dagger on her.
While other Houses seem to have been corrupted or destroyed by
the castle, what makes House Lost and so unique is how they
became part of the bad reputation of Harrenhal rather
than falling victim to it like so many of the other Houses that
ruled there, they have performed differently.
Instead of trying to improve the reputation of the place, they
kind of did the opposite and like leaned into that evil and
said hey, let's make this work for us instead of fighting it.
Consider that this is the house that held Herrenhall the
longest, and they didn't die out so much as they were driven out,
if not killed off, and not by ghosts or curses or suspicious
fires, but by a king. In many ways they are the
embodiment of that ubiquitous Herrenhall mascot, the Bat.
House Lofsten's tale of child abduction and cannibalism, skin
changing and blood magic, treason and double dealing with
none other than House Black Fire madness and incestuous dealings
with none other than House Targaryen are what we have for
you today. As Sir Illifer said, a barefoot
man looks for a boot, a chilly man a cloak.
But who would cloak themselves in shame?
Lord Lucas bore that bat the Pander and Manfred of the Black
Hood his son. Why wear such arms, I ask
myself, Unless your own sin is Fowler still and fresher?
Well, we've got the answer to that.
Who said it to who? Well, Sir Elliphor reading who
he said it to, we know it was Sir Elliphor and what happened
next and why the rumors and the regard the realm had for this
house and still has for this family filled with infamous
features. Well, we've got all that and
more on this episode of History of Westeros Podcast.
Hello and welcome back everyone to the first live stream of
2025. We're looking forward to another
great year of content. It's going to be a lot of fun as
many of our past years have been.
We've got a lot of things planned and starting with this,
we are still going to be doing most of our live streams on
Sundays at this time, which is 3 Eastern.
If you're catching it later, that's when you can catch it
live. We'd love to have you show up
live and participate in the chat and talk to us live.
But otherwise you can catch it on any place you listen to
podcasts afterwards. And you can watch the video on
YouTube, the edited video on Spotify, and of course, if you
check us out on Patreon rather, you can get all our episodes ad
free. Our good friend Nina contributed
quite a bit to this episode. She had some really insightful
takes on themes and connections and parallels and just regular
insight into house lost in very, very useful, as is very common
for Nina's input to us or for us.
And her latest blog post over on goodqueenalley.tumblr.com,
that's with 1L in Alley is on Rhyme Red Wine.
In fact, Nina's working on a significant amount of Rhyme Red
Wine content that will probably be made into an episode, a Rhyme
red wine episode, one of the most famous Kingsguard of all
time, sort of the Barristan the Bold in a different era, maybe a
quieter era, but no less interesting.
So that's on the horizon. And if you want a little tease
of the sort of things that could show up in there, well check out
good queenalley.tumblr.com. If you have questions for us,
you can e-mail them to westeroshistory@gmail.com.
That's any sort of question you have, whether it's about this
episode or other episodes or just you have a question for us,
hit us up. And of course, you can also ask
questions live if you are here participating live at the end of
this episode, I'll mention some others that relate to this one
things that we mentioned that came up in the course of our
discussion. And if you are willing or
wanting to stay immersed, well, that's your ticket.
Starting with our frequent trivia question here.
What is the first hour of night in Westeros called?
I mean, all these hours have nicknames.
What's that one called? I first made notes for a House
Lofton episode. And it'll be, by the way, a a
miracle if I get through this episode not mispronouncing House
Lofton. That's very hard to say.
It's a tongue twister. But yeah, I started making notes
for this episode back in 2013. I mean, this show has only
existed this podcast since like 2012 era.
So you can show you can see where my interest was.
I've been fascinated by them a long since a long time ago.
And well, why didn't we make an episode about them until now?
Why blame the curse, the curse of Harren all yeah, that's
clearly who's at fault here. But but honestly, that 2013, I
mean, that's before the World of Ice and Fire and Fire and Blood,
both of which gave us more information.
So it's kind of a good thing that we waited and why the heck
not? You know, better late than never
and we'll have fun with it. And even if we have things to
add to it later, I do think we'll learn more about house
lost in in the long run. But we've got a lot to cover
today. So we have a substantial amount
and that'll set us up for whatever happens in the future.
This does have some companionship to our other
Herron Hall episodes like The Old God's Eye with Joe Magician
or Dreams of Damon with Quinn the GM, but this one has no TV
content. This episode.
I'm we're going to speculate a little bit at the end on how the
Lostons might appear on TV because that is likely to
happen, but so far it hasn't because the Lostons didn't exist
during the time period of House of the Dragon and they didn't
really, Well, they kind of did, but not really, but like very
vaguely barely like a hedge night style.
So technically they did, but not in any way you would ever expect
to see them, and they certainly didn't exist in Game of Thrones.
But like I said, we are likely to see them, and the likely
place for that is Dunkin Egg, the TV show and the future
books. So that's pretty cool.
So this episode is a house lore episode first of all.
But of course, Harrenhal lore is included because the two are
inextricable here. Obviously House Lost and didn't
have another seat, only Harrenhal.
So this is the one place that they've really made their name.
The sections of this episode, we're going to talk about the
first mention and the earliest mention.
The difference, of course, is the first mention is the first
time we read it in terms of when it was penned by George.
The earliest mention means the first chronological mention, as
in the internal timeline. Megor's Rewards is the next
section. Then we have a strong revival,
which, yes, does refer to how strong.
Then the black bat takes flight. The first Lord Lofton, the Young
Dragon's reign, Baylor's reign, Viserys the second in Aegon the
Unworthy, we're going to cover Lost in during those times.
Then there'll be AII dug up a little bit of real life
information about bats just for fun.
And then we have Harrenhal's Century of Blood, the first
Black Fire Rebellion, Manfred of the Black Hood, Mad Donnell, who
is probably the character you all are most familiar with from
House Lost in Mad Donnell. So she'll be near the end.
Then the inspiration for Mad Donnell is Elizabeth Bathory,
who was a Hungarian noble. Then the Last of Loston and the
Loston Legacy, followed by our standard outro.
All right, let's get to it. With that first mention, the
first time the name Loston is uttered comes in A Clash of
Kings RE9 in the relevant location.
Why should I wager my feet for the chance to sweat in
Winterfell in place of Harrenhal?
You know, old Ben Blackthum, he came here as a boy, smithed for
Lady Wendt and her father before her and his father before him,
and even for Lord Lofston, who held Harrenhal before the winds.
Now he Smiths for Lord Tywin, and you know what he says?
A sword's a sword, a helm's a helm.
And if you reach in the fire, you get burned, no matter who
you're serving. Lucan's a fair enough master.
I'll stay here. Narrator voice.
He did not in fact stay there. He being Gendry of course Arya
talks him into leaving. She sort of lies to him but also
sort of tells the truth that he wasn't willing to face.
Anyway, that's not the point here, but it is a a fun moment.
They are both very aware of the reputation of Harrenhal and
experience horrors while there personally and just things they
see to happen to other people. And that reputation that they
are aware of is mostly from house lost in not only is it, as
we said at the beginning, the house that held it the longest,
but they held it the most recently after house went and
house went really didn't have a bad reputation.
They had a tragic reputation, kind of like most of the houses
that held the the the castle instead of one that, like we
said, leaned into that evil and made it part of who they are.
In Old English, loft means evil or loathsome stun STON means
stone. So.
Well, this actually describes Harrenhal better than the house
lost in. Perhaps, but it works for both
because evil stone. Yeah, loathsome stone that yeah,
that works quite well. I don't know if George did that
on purpose. It seems maybe too much of A
coincidence to not be. But yeah, we we don't know for
sure. The first chronological mention
of House lost in comes in Fire and Blood quote.
Megor stood alone. The king turned to the crowd.
Who will come and stand beside his king, he called.
Many turned away in fear, or pretended that they did not
hear, for the prowess of the warrior's sons was known to all.
But at last one man offered himself no knight, but a simple
man at arms who called himself Dick Bean.
I've been a King's man since I was a boy, he said.
I mean to die a King's man. Only then as he slappeth.
I can't get you. Sorry.
OK. Only then did the first Knight
step forward. This being shames us all.
He shouted. Are there no true Knights here?
No leel men. The speaker was Bernard Broun,
the Squire who had slain hair in the red and been knighted by
King Amis himself. His scorn drove others to offer
their swords. The names of the four Magor
chose are writ large in the history of Westeros.
Sir Bram of Blackhall, a hedge knight, Sir Raiford Rosby, Sir
Guy Lofston called Guy the Glutton, and Sir Lucifer Massey,
Lord of Stone Dance. And you know, I could've said
Gee or Guy, but I like the idea of SER Guy.
Just a guy, dude. Yeah, just dude.
Yeah, I, I assume it's Gee, but yeah, guy is funnier.
There's a lot in that quote. It's creepy and it's funny as
actually I could barely get through it because of the
funniness. I could barely get through it
because you were laughing at me. I was like I said I'd.
Be I'd be. I know it's so funny.
There's also like all the rhymes in there.
It's like he called many turned away in fear, pretended that
they did not hear for the prowess of the warrior son was
known to all. Yeah, all these rhymes.
It's great. George is sneaky with his
alliteration and his rhymes that you sometimes don't realize are
even there. So.
And it's it has the phrase history of Westeros in there.
So of course we love that. It nods at Duncan Egg, which is
where a lot of today's story is going because again, this is the
era that the Lostons were most active in, in the in the same
era that Duncan Egg were active. At least the second part, the
trial by 7, is mentioned here. And are there true nights here?
That's the same line that Duncan utters in a pretty different
context, but it's a trial by 7. So there's a lot in common here.
Now in the hedge night, Lionel Baratheon, the Laughing Storm is
excited for the trial of seven because there hadn't been one in
more than a century. This one was more than 160 years
before Ashford Meadow. So this could be that one.
It's more than 100 years. It's quite a bit more than 100,
but this is, this definitely could be the one he's referring
to. We definitely don't have another
candidate, so that's cool and it's really on topic for us.
The tone ear for how the Lostons are viewed in world and how
George sets us readers up to think about them.
Guy or guy the Glutton is is killed in the melee along with
everyone else except Magor himself.
But the point is, the first Loston we ever hear of stands
for Magor, alongside a guy named Lucifer at a crucial moment when
his throne is up in the air. If Magor had lost, if guys like
Gee the Glutton hadn't stood for him, then Magor's reign might
not have even happened. He'd have been dead, or he would
have lost his challenge. So.
And they weren't going to do it. That bean shamed them all.
Dick Bean we all love. He's hilarious, but it's kind of
his fault that Magor's king, so I don't know.
Yeah, again, creepy and hilarious at the same time.
Now, this might mean that the Lostons were originally from the
Crown Lands. And it's a little confusing
because later we're going to hear that the Lostons are hedge
Knights. But here it says the speaker,
Bernard Brune, is a hedge knight, and it doesn't refer to
the others that way. So what our guess is is they
started off as household Knights to somebody or had a little bit
of acclaim or notice. Then because of this, they got
rewarded by Magor and rose up a little higher.
But then by the time Magor's rain collapsed, Magor's realm
didn't go rain didn't go very well.
The Lost In's declined again, became hedge nights.
And then in the future, you know, earn Harrenhal.
So this happened in the 40s and the Lost In's won't get
Harrenhal for real until 151. So yeah, we're well ahead of
that and it's because it's a little peculiar that just makes
me lean into even more what George is doing here by
associating the lost insurance with Magor and you know, Lucifer
and just a bad 'cause like they are very quickly notable as a
villainous house. There's very little about.
They say, oh, there's some good, some bad.
Not really, not with this house. There's some some houses like
Peak and to a lesser extent House Bracken, the Boltons,
there's really very few good things you can say about them
and and the Loftons, they belong in that category.
It looks like Amanda Molyneaux sends a super chat, says happy
New year, Ashaya and Aziz and all the West Orians.
Happy New Year to you as well. Yes, we're looking forward to a
great 2025. We hope it's the same for you
all out there. We hope you are happy and
healthy and well. If you're enjoying a podcast
then hey, you know you're doing better than a lot of people.
Speaking of rewards, Magor's Rewards is our next section.
He was, of course, well known for brutality.
I don't need to explain that to you all, but he was quite
generous on the rare occasions when he was pleased by something
the Lawstons would, like I said later, be gifted Herod Hall.
Gifted Heron Hall, Obviously not by Magor, he would be dead for a
long time before that. But Magor did hold a contest for
ownership of Herrenhall after he turned on someone he had been
quite generous to. Let's go through that briefly.
His second wife was Alice Harraway.
He at first lavished her with gifts and elevated her father
all the way to Hand to the King, something we'll see happen a lot
in the era where the Lawson's are active.
By that I mean a woman pleases the King and gets promoted to
Hand to the King. Yeah, of course we're talking
about Aegon the Unworthy, but here it happened with Magor as
well. So when she announced she was
pregnant, Alice Harraway, he was even more pleased because he was
desperate for an heir. Remember that he never did have
one. He never had a child of his own
body, at least not one that survived.
This one, in fact was born but premature and very monstrous,
right? The whole draconic baby syndrome
that only Targaryen seemed to have.
Well, this was a a case of that. Magor became convinced though
that it this couldn't be me, even though for our perspective
of of course it's you, of course it's a Targaryen child that this
happened too. Who else would it happen to?
But Magor became convinced of the exact opposite, thanks in
part to Tiana of the Tower, who appears to have come up with a
whole list of names that Alice slept with in order to make sure
she had a child by Magor, she went and slept with 20 men, all
whom had a kid. 20 good men, right, who had already had kids
to make sure she would have a kid, that she could have become
the king or Queen of Westeros, the next monarch or whatever.
So this is all probably made-up, though Alice was probably
innocent. Doesn't matter to me.
From Megor's perspective though, he believed it.
He was convinced he went full. Well.
He went full Megor, right? He executed Alice and her father
via gruesome torture. Then he marched on Harrenhal,
killed everyone that had a single drop of Harroway blood,
then marched on Lord Harroway's Town and did the same thing.
Then he held that aforementioned contest, which was a melee in
the streets of Lord Harroway's Town where the winner gets
Harrenhal. 23 men fought for it. So a little more than 20 good
men, 23 good or 20 bad men. I don't, I don't know about
this. These are people that may go or
liked. So you know, it's not a huge
number of contestants. You get a whole town and it's
like 23 guys are fighting. It's like you might, they might
not see each other for like an hour at a time.
These were all nights of his household.
So again, yeah, guys who were like close to Magor, who had won
favor with Magor. And how do you win favor with a
guy like Magor? Probably by doing bad things.
So maybe one of these 23 nights of his household was a
descendant of Guy Lawston. Maybe that was the reward for
the Lawson's at the time that since Guy Lawson stood for Magor
and helped him win his crown and died doing it, well, reward that
family. Even Magor would do something
like that. He wasn't.
He's not one to overlook that even as bad as he was, but maybe
there was no lost and to reward. Maybe the name just came back up
later. Anyway, we don't know, but it's
a it's a valid theory in my mind.
So this is perhaps the largest prize.
Well, it's certainly the largest prize in terms of physical size
ever for a tournament. Harrenhal, right?
Perhaps it's the most valuable ever for a tournament, But that
depends on how you value air and all air and all has a lot of
positive value and a lot of negative value.
I don't know how you adjust all for all that on the accounting
books, you know, which is the how do you value the curse?
You know, how do you value the the chance that your your heirs
will will die off or go insane or whatever.
I don't know how bad. How much do you factor in
nightmares, you know? But again, at this time,
Harrenhal, it had a bad reputation, but it hadn't yet
had the Lofstons. So the fully cursed reputation
that it has now hadn't been developed.
We have shown in past episodes how that reputation did come
along gradually, which is every year Harrenhal looks a little
bit worse. It wasn't just one thing, just a
lot of things that just kept happening decade by decade.
So Magor helped, of course, what he did to the Harrow waves.
Really. Kicked up the talk of curses
related to Harrenhal, but that's going to carry forward.
And the Lostons will be a big part of that, of course, perhaps
earning the most credit for how it's viewed now.
At the time, House Towers won the castle, they won the melee,
but they didn't win all the lands.
That's a big factor whenever you're talking about Harrenhal
and who thrives there and who doesn't.
It has a good bit to do with how much of the surrounding
countryside are they allowed to own.
When they own a lot of the surrounding countryside, they
can actually afford it. They can pay for it, they can
make repairs, they can have soldiers, and even though it's
still very expensive to upkeep, it doesn't swallow them up with
expenses. It's not like a white elephant
situation where the upkeep of the place is more than they can
afford, and so they just kind of sync with it.
That's what happens to a lot of the houses that hold it,
including this Magor Tower or this House Towers even though
they named their Air Magor towers.
He died impoverished with no children in 61 AC.
Now what a common thing to happen to a house that has
Harrenhal dying without children.
It isn't even necessarily awful things happen to them, they just
didn't have children. That's what happened to the
towers. They didn't get there.
Wasn't plague or anything like that, but there was Magor Magor.
Most of the members of House Towers were killed fighting in
his wars. But still, that doesn't mean
there couldn't be children, right?
So a long time theory we've had that will pop up again in this
one off and on is the idea that something is wrong with
Harrenhal from a fertility perspective.
Something in the water or the air, and it could be
supernatural. It could be both, could be the
humidity, could be just bacteria.
Oh, no mold. I mean, there's a lot of regular
explanations that would probably cover a lot of the bases here
for why so many families seem to have trouble procreating at
Harrenhal. There could be a mundane
explanation, but yeah, it could be supernatural, could be little
both. Now the Magor himself, Magor
Towers was sickly and didn't last very long.
This house only had Harrenhal for like like a decade or more
and Queen Reyna then kind of had it next.
Queen Reyna is in the older brother of Jairus and Alison and
all them the one who Magor overthrew or usurped.
So she lived there about 12 years and etcetera and then we
move on to how strong before that super chat from Tommy Joe
Wagner and thanks Tommy appreciate that say hey to to
everyone in New York up there and from books immersed from
Canada. I almost said Canadia.
Canadia sounds kind of cooler actually.
Canada sounds cool too. I like that.
I like that name. Anyway, happy books of mercies.
Happy new Year. Happy, happy new year to you
both. Thank you all for your hard
work. Looking forward to an amazing
year of West W content. We appreciate that.
It's very motivating to hear from you all and to feel the
support. We're going to keep them coming
no matter what. But you know, it's it, it means
a lot to feel validated from you guys.
It really does. The next section is called a
Strong revival. So when Reyna passed in 73 AC,
the Strongs got it right. The house, How strong?
They were a real mixed bag during the Harrenhal era.
Obviously Laris burned his own family and never had any kids of
his own. Under the Strongs, however, the
house did gain a lot of wealth and prominence and suffered none
of the pennilessness of house towers.
This implies that they were given more of the land around
Harrenhal right? And they didn't want it to be
poor in this area. How strong was prominent?
They had a hand to the king. Multiple hands and they had or
multiple small council members anyway yeah no multiple hands
yeah and the great council of one O 1 was held there the place
where they name a new king or the the future king anyway, and
almost everyone who's anyone comes there.
This place isn't going to be left shabby for such an event
No, they had to fix it up, but it definitely had to spend some
money on this place to hold the great council there.
You know even if it wasn't the fanciest as it could been
definitely required some upgrades.
You know, this is again, so we have to keep track of the, the
insurance and outs and ups and downs of herrenhall and make
sure we're aligning these things, these factors correctly
after the Dance of the Dragons. Skipping ahead, Herrenhall was
ruled for an uncertain length of time by Alice Rivers, right?
Who was probably a descendant of how strong and who definitely
claimed to be the mother of Prince Eamon's child.
As of now, we don't know whatever happened to her or that
kid or her dragony illusions, assuming they were illusions,
but either way, we don't know what happened to her.
It seems she was probably killed or driven off at some point.
That's the best we can do for now.
We do know that Herrenhall was empty and completely unowned
after that. Something like maybe 10-15 years
of this, of being completely abandoned, during which time,
well, the problems of upkeep would have gotten much worse.
Without regular upkeep, you're going to see some significant
damage. Maybe a maybe a thing collapses
here or there, something else rots away.
You got 10 to 15 years of knowing upkeeping this place.
I'm not so sure it was well taken care of by Alice Rivers
either, or Larry Strong. Because Larry Strong, as much as
he kind of fits the vibe of Harrenhal as a as a villainous
guy, he barely lived there. I mean, he did when he was
younger, but like all his villainy comes at court from
King's Landing. Like he didn't, he didn't even
go back there before his death as far as we know.
It's like he came to court and then never went back to
Harrenhal as far as we know. Or maybe August a couple of
times. None that were important enough
to mention. And not to mention how Strong's
wealth was taken by Prince Damon at the start of the war and the
castle was devastated during it by Prince Amon Don Vegar.
He got a thorough burning, not as thorough with Valerians, but
the castle probably lost to this splendor and prestige that it
had gained under the strongs or regained under the strongs,
whatever work had been done to make it nicer for the Great
Council, and that was probably lost.
So we have something like 90 years between Gee Guy, let's
call him Gee Guy Lost, and he's both.
He's Guy Gee, Gee, Guy lost in and the next name lost in.
And this is part of why we assume there was a reward from
Magor, because if you're a hedge knight or a hedge knight family,
like what are the odds that you're still around 90 years
later? Like it's really hard to keep a
landless family going, you know, like where do you raise your
children? You know, where do you how do
you have your stable income to support a family?
It's difficult. It's not impossible that the
Lostons had some lesser holdings that we've never heard about it
because it is a little strange that they go from basically
nothing to Harrenhal, but less strange when you here who was
involved in that decision and why?
So it's a little tricky for us to guess at, but there's a lot
of possibilities here. Let's talk about the Black Bat
takes flight here. This is when House Loston gets
going. So like I said, many houses were
destroyed by Harrenhal and Lostons seem to be the first to
embrace the place, like use the evil reputation as a form of
power in and of itself. Say, hey, I'm the Lord of
Harrenhal, that's the castle with all that cursed rough
reputation. That's the power I'm bringing to
the table rather than. They don't present it to
something they have to deal with, they present it to
something they can like, use against you.
That sounds like the pitch for your like home renovation show.
Embrace the place. That's the name of it, right?
Embrace the place. Yes, that is what I'm going to
call. Yes, that'll be how my that'll
be my claim to fame. If like, if I can turn a place
like Harrenhal into a beautiful living space, then what can't I
Do You know it? Almost had it completely wrong.
A A a beautiful living space place embrace.
Got a workshop on this a little more it's almost there.
So at at first maybe it didn't start as evil or cursed for them
that it did happen. Certainly it did come later.
At first it was just more scandalous incestuous maybe and
some other things of that nature.
Let's let's go through that and then work our way up to the
gradually increasing supernatural elements,
potentially the first Lord Lawston.
OK, five years after the Dance of the Dragons, roughly the year
136, we'll say there was a man named Sir Lucas Lawston.
He was named to replace Sir Gareth Long as Red Keep master
at arms. Remember, Gareth Long was sent
to the wall after that whole secret siege business and Sir
Lucas replaced him. He was, quote, a fine young
swordsman to have made the role of master at arms to have
achieved that implies, well, skill.
Obviously fine young swordsman. It's it's pretty clear there,
but he had to have been known already.
I mean, you don't just kind of randomly appear as master at
arms. You probably they picked from a
pool of available candidates people who were kind of Next up,
like guys who had been around for a while.
Again, this is the whole idea of them maybe being household
nights or living in the crown land, something relevant,
something to put them on the map.
I doubt anyone remembered Guy lost in at this point, Guy at
this time because it had been, you know, 90 years or so.
Maybe Lucas Lost In fought well in the Dance of the Dragons.
That's a very straightforward way to get noticed, right?
He got this appointment five years after the war.
It fits. Maybe Lost In was a neutral
party. Maybe his house being so small
didn't really take a side, didn't have a lot of connections
to the existing players like Unwin Peak or the other
factions, so someone they could both parties could agree on.
Like, hey, this guy doesn't come in and tip the scales one way or
the other. You know, he's a candidate
that's kind of an unknown. He's the grandson of a hedge
knight, so something that both blacks and Greens could maybe
agree on, I don't know. Anyway, compare him to
Littlefinger and these comparisons will continue.
Lucas has a lot of Littlefinger in him.
Littlefinger obviously not nearly as good as Swordsman, but
that's not of course the be all end all here.
Now a lot of people thought Littlefinger wasn't ambitious
either, So maybe they thought that about this guy just a up
jumped hedge knight, the son of a grandson of a hedge knight
swordsman. You know, what possible
political power can this guy wield?
He doesn't seem threatening. Maybe he's not very ambitious.
A Littlefinger again, didn't seem very ambitious either, and
that was a huge mistake. And this guy also is going to
rise a lot higher than you would expect for the grandson of a
hedge knight, which Littlefinger was too, let's not forget.
Grandson of the hedge knight Littlefinger was.
Yeah. So it's easy to imagine that
whatever status this family got under Magor, they lost it
because, you know, Magor lost the throne.
So that's not good. And if Magor, if they were in
one of the houses that stood by Magor and then abandoned him,
well, that's not good either because Jaharis was wary waries.
Jaharis was wearies of those who fought for Magor, and he didn't
really appreciate those who switched sides as, oh, now
they're on my side. No, they're just changing sides
because they're losing and they still fought for Magor in the
1st place, right? Which is this just he wasn't
really big on working with people that had worked for
Magor. A lot of them got sent to the
wall or just weren't given court positions.
So that that makes sense. But there's a lot of reasons why
you can just fall from grace. You can 1 Lord who manages the
family badly can destroy the whole thing.
So there's a lot of possibilities here.
But if it was something about shutting them out because of who
their allies were, well, Jaharis was king for a really long time,
so the Lostons would remain shut out for a really long time.
But by the time Lucas was named Master at Arms, Magor had been
dead for over 80 years, Jaharis for almost 30.
So the obscurity of the Lostons might have actually worked in
their favor a bit here. People might have forgotten who
that that history, you know, Lucas.
Lucas might not have even known his ancestor fought for Magor,
you know. Probably did, but it wouldn't be
common knowledge. I don't think the disappointment
actually came from Hand of the King, Lord Turin Manderly, a
Northerner who may had never have heard of the Lost Ones at
all. That wouldn't be surprising in
the slightest. And by account, Sir Lucas,
though he's going to turn into quite the scumbag.
He was a good teacher in terms of swordsmanship, as as far as
we hear. He was patient, he was
effective. Young Prince Viserys, who
eventually will be Viserys the Second, saw Lucas as his
favorite teacher and even his solemn, rarely happy elder
brother. The King Egg on the Third
actually also came to respect Sir Lucas, apparently
grudgingly. But it was real hard to get
respect out of King Egg on the 3rd.
That boy just was very sad. You know, he was traumatized and
well, you know, it was hard for him to see the good in anything.
13 years later, in the year 149, Sir Lucas was still the master
at arms and was thus well established.
So he had been at court for more than a decade.
His status had risen. His family status had risen,
though he wasn't married and I don't know if any of his family
was actually around. Certainly the name lost and was
on the rise. King Agon the Third was still on
the throne in 149, but by then Prince Viserys was handed the
king and both of them had children of their own, meaning
Viserys and Agon. Sir Lucas would have been in
turn teaching those children, right?
So he's still teaching Targaryens how to sword fight.
Now at this era since Prince Viserys and Aegon were older,
they're probably not getting those lessons anymore.
So now we have. It's a little confusing because
Viserys is the younger one, but he had kids before his older
brother, the King. Aegon the Third and the children
in question here. The eldest were Aegon, the one
that's going to be Egon the Unworthy, and Amon, the one
that's going to be Amon the Dragon Knight.
Those two are of course brothers and they were only born about a
year apart. They would have been 13 and 14
in the year 149. So that's the most likely the
two that he spent the most time with in this era, Lucas Loston,
Amon and Egon the Unworthy. The connection to Amon the
Dragon Knight's not going to amount to much.
Well, Amon was a good person and wouldn't have much in common
with Lucas outside of swordplay. Egon the Unworthy and Lucas
Loston would develop quite a relationship that would carry on
for decades. Aegon the Unworthy, of course,
had a huge uncountable number of mistresses.
But there's nine famous ones, right?
Nine particularly noble, notable ones who get who had a lot of
attention that they were the closest to him.
The first one was Felina Stokeworth.
Felina was born in the year 125 and came to court as a young
girl early in egg on the thirds reign and one of she was one of
the unfortunate ones injured by Unwin Peak when Unwin was trying
to like hurt all the little girls that he thought was a that
he thought were a threat to his daughter marrying the king.
Of course none of that worked out for him and he just like
hurt a bunch of girls for no reason.
As it turned out some of those injuries were really severe.
Thankfully for Feline it was only a broken leg.
She got pushed down some stairs that could have been a lot
worse, but maybe no lasting harm, even though maybe she had
a limp or something, I don't know.
But because she was one of the ones he targeted, it makes it
seem like she was particularly good looking.
I don't know, but that's a that would be a factor in, of course,
in becoming Aegon's mistress. Now, Aegon and Felina had a
relationship for about two years now.
It's relevant here that Felina was a lot older than him.
She wasn't old. She was 24, but he was 14.
So the, the, what we're told is that she made a man of him.
So what that sort of tells us is that she may be ambitious as
well. And she was trying to, you know,
get this Prince in her under her sway a bit.
She might be one of the few mistresses that was more than
willing rather than some of the ones who were like, I don't know
about this guy. He's creepy and gross and.
Yeah, anyway, maybe Prince Viserys didn't realize what he
was dealing with in terms of his son Aegon the Unworthy, and
didn't necessarily know how much Lucas, who he respected as a
swords teacher, was of that ilk, or how much he was willing to do
to advance his ambitions. So what happened when they got
caught by the Kingsguard was Viserys said OK, let's remove
her from the picture. I'm not going to send my son
away. Although he did do that later.
But this was after becoming exasperated with scenarios like
this where sending the girl away didn't do any good because he
just found another one. Yeah, it did not work.
Just like Gendry not staying at Harrenhal, sending away Felina
didn't do didn't even keep Felina away from him.
It didn't work in any way. So what they did here was
Viserys arranged for Felina to marry Lucas Lawston.
So perhaps is a reward for him because he had been such a good
teacher for so long. And a Stokeworth, that's a very
big marriage for a hedge knight family, a guy who's just a
master at arms and his family is is not particularly
distinguished. But she was, of course,
considered dishonored by Westerosi society by sleeping
with the Prince. And you know, she's not a virgin
anymore. Oh no.
But of course Westerosi care about that now.
So the idea was give her, give him Harrenhal and marry her to
him. So he went from Sir to Lord of
Harrenhal. And we're told that Prince
Viserys persuaded King Aegon to do this.
And because apparently because they both had respect for Sir
Lucas, that this was easier to get through.
And Aegon was relatively willing because he already had respect
for Sir Lucas mistake. But you can see why they did it
perhaps at the time. And for Felina, like, this is
your punishment. You, you get married to the
largest castle and will you, you're becoming the head of a
new family that's owns the largest castle in Westeros.
That's your punishment. Well, it is Harrenhal.
So yeah, maybe it is that bad. We'll see what happens next.
Let's go through it. And Nina argues that maybe lost
in status was so on the rise at this point that it wasn't such a
big gap as I'm making it out to be.
Either way, it was a scandal. So one way or another there was
some some embarrassment and some sweeping things under the rug
and and getting it out of court. So almost exactly 20 years after
the Dance, Herren Hall was finally given to someone again,
House lost and became the 6th noble house to rule Herrenhall.
And it looks like they received the rich version rather than the
poor. We've been through that a few
times, right? It depends on how many, how much
of the surrounding land, countryside they got.
I guess because of Lucas's popularity, his regard by the
Prince and the king and all these some of these other people
at court perhaps also liked him. He was given a pretty generous
gift here. Of course he's not the one who
did something wrong here. Not yet.
It was Felina cheating with Aegon or whatever at cheating.
Not cheating. Either of them were married at
the time, but you know what I mean them that it's they're the
ones who got the punishment. But let's remember Harrenhal not
that far from King's Landing. Two weeks ride, we're told
roughly. And Aegon just kept going there.
He would just show up. He would travel to Harrenhal,
sleep with Felina. It just maybe Viscera should
have sent Felina somewhere farther away.
In a way, this might have made things worse because Aegon could
continue to sleep with Felina but get away with it because it
would be out of sight. So maybe keeping things out of
sight was all they cared about. But clearly it was still known.
It's here in the history books. We know about it, right?
So yeah, as we said earlier, the castle was probably in really
bad shape given the war and it being left unattended for as
long as 15, maybe even 20 years. Well, probably not 20, but maybe
15 years. So even though we suspect the
Lostons had a large income, they would have had to spend a lot of
it on repairs and there would be a lot of bats.
While the humans didn't live there.
The bats would be moving in. Of course, the bats were living
there and still do even while the humans live there.
But the bats would be completely unfettered in their home space
there. And this is probably when the
bat sigil was taken by house lost in because I mean,
otherwise that's a pretty big coincidence, right?
If they just already had a bat sigil, they're like hey.
It you know. Yeah, or if we go to his son,
they're Manfred festing it. So that would be a huge
coincidence if they are, unless they manifested it.
Yeah, like that Nina reminds us there's lots of times where
someone changed their sigil because of a a big change in
fortune. The Tollens changed their sigil
during the conquest from a ghost to a dragon.
The Haraways, Coharises and Towers all made sigils inspired
by Harrenhal specifically. Right.
So yeah, it's not only common ish, but it's happened several
times at Harrenhal specifically. So that was probably keeping
them occupied for a little while, repairing their New
Castle, establishing themselves, trying to perhaps not be looked
down on as an up jump Lord. You know, that happens a lot in
Westerosi society. And he makes them, it becomes a
Lord and they get this big castle and it's bigger than the
castles of people who have been in noble families for thousands
of years. And they're like, well, what do
they deserve that bigger castle than us?
Well, hopefully that that castle just swallows them whole.
You know, the, the pettiness and jealousy of noble houses is was
probably a part of this. And anyway, six years into the
their lordship of Harrenhal, King Egon the third died and the
young dragon, his eldest son, ascended to the throne.
Now I'm guessing Lucas sent men to the campaign even though he
only had hair and all for a little while.
He would be expected to contribute.
And since he probably didn't have his own heir yet, or if he
did he didn't, he definitely didn't have an adult heir.
I don't think at this point it seems very unlikely given the
timeline. Unless he had a son with
somebody before Felina, which that kid probably would be a
bastard, I don't know. So it's very unlikely that he
had an adult heir. Probably didn't have an heir at
all at this point, but regardless that would explain
why Lucas probably didn't go on campaign himself.
As somebody with skilled with the sword you might think well
this is a candidate to go fight in the the wars in Dorn but
usually noble houses with one member don't risk themselves
like that. So I'm guessing he didn't go but
contributed with funds and soldiers perhaps.
Not much to say there. Baylor's reign.
This was a longer term reign. It was 10 years instead of
4:00-ish. And of course this happened
right after his brother Darren, the young dragon, was killed in
Dorn. Now we know the kind of man
Baylor was. Basically.
I don't suppose he would have been pleased with Herrenhall in
general. Just the dark reputation of the
place, the Old Gods Association, Heron, just everything.
Talk of curses like this is just not Baylor's bag, obviously.
Nor is the any sort of sex scandal.
He's down on any of that stuff too.
So the Aegon Felina stuff, he wouldn't have been happy with
that either. He might have thought, you know,
this castle needs a lot more prayer, but I don't know that he
had a lot to say about it, though he, they're certainly
Baylor had bigger things to be distracted by.
We don't hear about him dealing with Harrenhal or have any
comments about it. It's just kind of one of those
things where you can make some assumptions based on what kind
of man he was and what kind of castle that was.
He might have thought it a good thing that Felina was going to
marry Lucas. And maybe the, the this this
marriage would redeem them a bit.
It's an honorable marriage done under the sight of gods and men
and, you know, under the auspices of the faith.
So Baylor might look kindly on that.
And well, in 164, Felina gave birth to a daughter whom they
called Jane. And you know, Baylor would look
kindly on that. They actually had a kid.
This is rare to have what we've talked about.
It's hard to have kids and hair and all, but it's not like it
never happens. The problem is, though, we just
said a minute ago, who kept visiting Harrenhal all this
time? King Agon.
Well, he's not King Agon yet, but Prince Agon, who will later
be Agon the Unworthy. He continues to visit there all
this time. There's no evidence that he
stopped those visits and there's no evidence that he was
prevented from doing that until he was sent to Bravos, which
wasn't in 164. The point is that Jane Lawston
might have been fathered by Prince Aegon the Unworthy.
Still again, not called the unworthy yet, but you get it.
And because of that, we have almost the same level of
suspicion for all their descendants.
If Jane was Aegon's was fathered by Aegon or any of the other
children that Felina had, then those might have been fathered
actually by Aegon. Except any that came after Aegon
the Fourth Death, of course. But we don't even know when
those children were born. So right now it's a big question
mark that points very heavily towards this possibility.
Lots of Gray area. Jane's the only one for sure we
knew the suspicion fell on, but it seems likely to have fallen
on any other kids of her that were born around this time.
Now, I've always speculated that Baylor wasn't a big fan of
tournaments, but I'm not so sure I'd go so far as to say he shut
them down altogether. It's possible but maybe I'm
guessing Morel he just frowned on them.
This is a a good excuse for someone like Lord Lucas to say
hey I organize a tournament and that's a good reason for Aegon
to come to Harrenhal and sleep with Felina again.
Just kind of like how much later the Wentz had a attorney at
Harrenhalt as an excuse to gather some Lords together to
maybe talk about what to do about Aries.
A much bigger scale ambition there at at at the tournament at
Harrenhal vis a vis Aries and Rhaegar, but still a similar
sort of thing where you you hold a tournament and that's an
excuse to bring a lot of powerful people together and do
stuff under under that umbrella, under that disguise.
At some point, Lucas became known as Lucas the Pander.
If you don't know what pander means, it's basically pimp.
A man who offers his wife to a Prince for favor.
Yeah, fair game. Calling him the pander.
Even if she was willing, which it appears she was then still,
that doesn't change it. You're still the pander.
He still he still call him that. So now, late in Baylor's reign
or not long after, we don't. Another kind of uncertainty on
the the dates here, But Lord Lucas seems to have had a
bastard son. We don't know his name, we just
know there was a guy called the Bastard of Harrenhal and he was
mentioned around the time 193 as being beaten in a tournament by
Sir Arlen. A penny. 3A penny tree.
I said penny 3. There's a lot more than 3
pennies on penny tree. Anyways, yet again we see the
Lofton sort of wrapped into the Dunkin Egg story or era or
whatever. Just Sir.
Even Sir Arlen has a connection here.
Now, technically, this bastard of Fahrenhal could have been
born as far back as the one 50s, but since he's a bastard,
Lucas's bastard, he's not Egon the 4th's son.
That's the one thing we can say for sure.
He's not a Targaryen bastard. But we don't.
Of course, we don't know who the mother is, which I guess there's
a tiny chance that's a Targaryen, but really, not, not
not a chance. Not a chance that we need to
really consider much. Next up is the reins of Viserys
the Second and Aegon the Unworthy of Viserys the Second
reign for just over a year. So there's no specific things we
need to talk about that might have happened during for the
Lostons during that area. We'll just consider it all
wrapped up into this Aegon the Unworthy reign.
Now, Felina again, probably still seeing Aegon all this
time, maybe off and on, maybe less frequently.
You know, she was getting older and he had a lot of other
mistresses, etcetera. Who knows, but I'm guessing she
was no longer called Felina Stokeworth by this point.
She's probably called Felina Loston by this time.
Small point anyway. And given this relationship,
what was it? What was Lucas getting out of
this? He keeps having his wife sleep
with the Prince. Is he getting a return on this?
I mean, we called him a pimp. Pimps get paid for for these
arrangements, right? We guessed that he got some of
these favors that we discussed earlier.
Maybe he didn't have those expanded lands.
Maybe Harrenhal didn't have all that surrounding territory,
feeding it income to help pay for its ruinous upkeep.
If that hadn't been arranged yet, this would be a a good
candidate for the type of return favor Lucas would get or even
greater expansion of their land. Just whatever favors you can
imagine, little titles, new grants of land, they're the most
likely thing. And of course, this is egg on
the force we're talking about. This is even though he's not
king yet, this is exactly his modus operandi.
He would give lands, gifts, dragon eggs, Hand of the King
titles to people who brought him women.
And well, this was the first guy to bring him a woman that we
know of. So, yeah, he gets, he gets some
points from Aegon for being the the original, you know, like he
a little bit of as much as Aegon could have fondness and loyalty
to somebody for, for things, you know, it's hard to do that when
you're a raging sociopathic narcissist.
But, you know, still, he, he, he had that inner lane.
That first track accounts for something in the year 178.
So Aegon has been king for seven years.
He's treated his wife horribly. He's had lots of mistresses.
He's already had the the boy who will be called Damon Blackfire,
but isn't called that yet. The boy who is Bittersteal, who
also isn't called Bittersteal. By the time he's, you know,
seven years old, Bloodraven's been born aiming the Dragon
Knight is not yet dead, but about to be dead.
He dies around this time. So the Lostons come back around
again. They're trying to do a
Butterwell or a Bracken, but with better luck.
What I mean by that is what did Lord Butterwell do?
He tried to get close to Aegon the 4th by offering his
daughters for the night while Aegon was visiting Castle White
Walls. What did he what did he get in
exchange for giving Aegon his daughters for the night?
A dragon egg. If you recall that dragon egg
was the prize for the Mystery Night tournament.
Now for the Brackens, Barbara Bracken was the 5th mistress of
Aegon and her sister Bethany was the 7th and their father Lord
Bracken had been Hand. Now Bethany if you recall was
caught a bed with Sir Terrance Toyne of the Kingsguard by Aegon
himself. Now we theorize that this might
have been arranged. Maybe someone got them caught on
purpose, who knows. Lucas would be a candidate for
one of the people that might have arranged for this discovery
to happen because that's who swoops in next.
Bethany is executed horribly, Lord Bracken is executed
horribly. And who comes in?
Lucas with Felina again, but with their daughter Jane
Lawston, the aforementioned. She's now 14 years old, quickly
becomes the 8th mistress of Aegon.
So yeah, particularly young, but arguably even worse.
Well, definitely even worse if it's true.
This might have been his own daughter, as we said earlier.
So not only is this man was this man selling his wife to the king
for favors, and before he was even king, he was doing that,
he's selling his daughter, who might be that guy's daughter
too, or instead of his, might not be his daughter, might be
Aegon's daughter. Either way, it's like, really
bad, right? Like, this is terrible.
And yeah, Nina suggests some similar things here, that his
familiarity with Aegon in the aftermath of Terence Bethany was
like, well, hey, I'm someone you can trust.
You've dealt with me before. I'm you know, you know me.
I'm a known commodity. I'm you can have my daughter and
you know you won't feel betrayed by that etcetera.
So you know he was he found his in route again, and it worked
better than it ever had before for the reward for Jane and
maybe bringing Felina around again as Lucas was made hand to
the king again. Egg on the unworthy name someone
hand to the king for good service in bringing him women
right. This is a real comparison to
Littlefinger. Again we again have Littlefinger
selling Jane Poole into sex. Even your name is Jane.
Even in both cases to the Bolton's first to he has her in
his own brothels and then sells her to the Bolton's as a fake
Aria. And he's currently selling his
daughter the same woman as as you know, to there's
Littlefinger selling a Sansa quo Elaine to Harry Harding.
Yes, not actually his daughter, but everybody thinks she is.
And the vibes are very much there.
These similarities. So you got Lucas doing similar
things with selling his wife and daughter's honor or, you know,
sexual freedom or whatever you want to call it to for gain for
for mostly for himself. Now to make it more scandalous,
as if it could be there was a rumor worthy of Mushroom.
Except actually more believable than a lot of Mushroom salacious
tales. A lot of what Mushroom says is
believable, but some of the things he says about sexual
escapades or less so. In this case, though, we're told
that Aegon took both Felina and Jane Lawson into his bed at the
same time. Mother and daughter, possibly
his daughter. Yuck.
To be clear, all four of Aegon the Unworthy's hands got the job
of hand after bringing him one or more women.
Yeah, Lucas being included. So Lucas may have noticed this
pattern. He of course noticed Aegon's
proclivities early on, and those just escalated like, boy, the
more you bring Aegon a woman, the more he'll do for you.
But this didn't work out as it could have, certainly if Aegon,
or rather certainly if Lucas hadn't acquired the name Pander
yet. Well, it certainly would have
happened by this time. Now again, the the Brackens, you
see why this is like the Brackens?
Because the, the Lord Bracken also had two daughters that were
mistresses of egg on the fourth, while two different Lostons,
mother and daughter were also mistresses.
That's four of the 9 mistresses right there covered by Bracken
and Loston. So it's interesting to consider
the all the interplay with the Blackfyre rebellions which we're
moving towards very soon here in this episode because obviously
the Brackens were huge in the Blackfyre rebellions as well and
Bloodraven was too. And that's the the Blackwood
Bracken dynamic which is mixed up here in play with egg on the
Unworthy's mistresses as well. Because yes, Bracken mistress
was #5 Blackwood #6 bracken #7 Lost in #8 The big difference
here is the lost in's don't have a great bastard from these
unions. They might have Jane lost in.
Not a great bastard, but a very relevant 1.
But there wasn't some big male warrior figure leading troops or
being noticed like she era Sea Star.
Instead they got Harrenhal right?
So Nina wonders as well whether George was thinking of Henry the
Eighth and Anne Boleyn here. Who?
There's a rumor that that Anne Boleyn's mother Elizabeth Howard
was a mistress to Henry himself, and that maybe even Henry the
Eighth was the father of Anne Boleyn too.
Which this is not accurate. It didn't happen, but and
whether George knows that or not is kind of immaterial.
He might not, but George would often choose the more salacious
sounding story because it's more fun.
That doesn't mean he thinks it's accurate, but he might.
He might be under the mistaken impression that that really
happened, but either way, he chose to use it for a story.
What actually happened was immediately after the Terence
Toyn Bethany Bracken incident where he caught them a bed, he
didn't immediately start sleeping with Jane and Felina
again. That apparently happened soon
after, but not immediately because he got pox from a sex
worker in between this and then he passed it on to Jane.
Yeah, another piece of great luck for young Jane lost in
here. What a lucky young woman she is.
So she got banished from court because he gave her pox?
Yeah, that's fair. And because Aegon is, well, the
unworthy, he banished Lord Lucas and Felina as well, just because
he gave their daughter pox. Yeah, at least they didn't have
their heads cut off like Lord Bracken, because at least there
wasn't any cheating going on here.
So immediately the fourth hand comes in, that's John Hightower.
John Hightower begot that position by bringing Aegon
Shierra sea star. And Aegon dies six years later.
The loss of the story continues after this.
Like the Brackens, they're going to get very involved in the
Black Fire rebellions, and there's going to be a lot more
plot lines, a lot more to come. In fact, I'd say the second-half
of the story has a lot more detail, a lot more supernatural,
a lot more familiar elements. This is when we'll get into
Jamie and Brianne and some other elements that you know better
than the old school history stuff.
We've all heard the term mental health a million times.
It means different things to different people.
I want to talk about something called mental wealth, which is,
you know, it's a made-up concept like everything is really, but
it's relevant, I think in thinking about how we deal with
things. I had a therapist once tell me
as this is my personal experience, that the things we
that happened to us when we're young, whether it's trauma or
just things that we struggle with because not everything
needs to be called trauma. I think that word is thrown
around a little too often these days, but legitimate trauma, not
saying that isn't a real thing, of course.
You can describe a lot of the things you collect during your
life that burden you, we'll call them that burdens as a beach
ball that you're trying to hold underwater.
It's struggling to get out. It's it's trying to fly out.
It's it's going to jump into the air.
If it does escape, think of those as your problems.
If your problems escape, they fly out.
But if that beach ball is deflated, it won't fly out.
It'll just rise, come out, you know, And that's the metaphor
that she tried to impart to me for why it's important to
address your own mental health and take care of yourself.
And the concept of mental wealth is, is building up a, a backlog,
an extra like a, a cushion so that when bad things happen in
your life, you, you can rebound more quickly because you've got
a little bit extra, you've got a little bit of cushion to burden
you or to, to rather, to bolster you against negative things that
may come along. And of course, negative things
will happen to everybody, right? We like magic mind as part of
this process. It's not the whole process.
It's not a cure all, but it helps.
Having established routines with doing things well for your body
and mind is absolutely going to pay dividends in the long run.
It is not a quick fix, it is not a short term benefit, it is a
long term benefit. It is a commitment, but that is
where you get a lot of the best things by being committed to
something, sticking with it. Magic Mine has a new tool, a new
drink, a sleep elixir. So it's sort of like they got
you at the in the morning for the regular Magic Mine and they
got you at night for sleep elixir.
This sleep elixir, I'm going to report my personal experience
with it, but I haven't gotten it yet.
It's on the way to us right now, but we have looked up the
ingredients and we have looked into it a bit.
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for cities says a bat reputation.
He has to have a bad reputation. A bat reputation.
There we go. Very good, Dolorous Lady Dane
says I don't give a damn about my bat reputation.
I don't give a damn about my bat reputation.
Nice. And indeed, they don't really
seem to give a damn about that. And or they or they lean into it
even more. It's like, I love my bat
reputation. Yeah.
Amanda Molyneux says Ghee Guy is the guy I get my butter from.
Oh, that's a good pun. As in GHE e.g. we were calling
Guy Lawson or Ghee Guy. Yeah, he is the butter guy, the
butterman. We even mention a butter whale
in this one. Well, this is the real butter
whale here. As usual.
I can't help myself. I had to look up some bat facts.
20% of mammals on this planet are bats.
They are the second most common species of mammals next to rats.
So rats and bats. Like, why?
Why are you just the most common things called rats, bats?
Are cats actually next? I don't think so, but that would
be funny. They're the only mammal that can
sustain flight. There's other mammals that can
like glide but sustain flight like staying and flapping.
And you know, there's squirrels that can glide and a few other
things, but that's the only mammal that can sustain fly.
They haven't evolved a ton in the past 50 ish million years,
which is kind of wild to think about.
There's some bats that are just not that different from 50
million years ago, but there are some major changes even Despite
that. You would expect more than this,
but the major changes they have had are significant.
Like echolocation. The earliest bats didn't have
the whole like radar bouncing technology that some of them
have now and they fly better than they used to.
Early bats would like go from tree to tree, they were more of
gliders. Now modern bats have evolved for
full blown flying. There's two different types of
bats. Mostly they're categorized as
micro bats and mega bats. But like a lot of
categorizations these things aren't don't cover all bases.
Some micro bats are larger than some mega bats.
One of the major differences though, the micro bats use the
echolocation and the mega bats actually have pretty good
eyesight. Both types eat lots of insects,
including those that carry diseases like mosquitoes.
So that's good, but they can carry diseases themselves, so
that's not good. Some places they're considered a
food source. Other places they're a food pest
because they eat lots of fruit and that's not good.
If you're like, you know, you depend on orchards for your
living or something like that. Other places, they're so
interesting looking and in such great numbers that people go
there as a tourist attraction. So bats can be a tourist
attraction. They're a great example of
something that cultural views vary quite a lot in the West.
They're no, they have a pretty negative connotation, actually
very negative. Like witchcraft, vampires,
right? Death.
So this is what George has leaned into because this, you
know, most of Westeros is, well, it's pretty Western in terms of
its physical location, but also in terms of most of the
influence is is Western, right, in terms of how George designed
the continent and the culture. But a lot of societies in the
world look at bats as a symbol of rebirth or long life.
But many cultures look at them as a sign of disease.
Many cultures look at them as a sign of anti disease.
And as we just explained, well, sometimes they are one or the
other. So that's actually rooted in
reality. If we turn our attention to bats
in Westeros and Essos and such, the ones that George has
actually created, well, there's a few references here.
The hour of the bat is the first hour of night.
It's right after sunset. Harpies of Greek and Roman myth
tend to have bird wings, usually vulture or some other bird.
But for George, his harpies have bat or dragon wings, so that's
kind of cool. Well, as depicted in Slaver's
Bay, there's a real creepy Pentashi deity that looks like a
naked pregnant woman. You're like, wait, why is that
creepy? She has a bat's head.
OK, now you get it, right? That's creepy.
Yeah. Naked pregnant woman with a
bat's head. Yeah.
OK. There's also gigantic bats
living in the caves of the Green Sears Branses, which might be a
different form of bat than you'd find on Earth, because on Earth,
bats live everywhere except the really cold places.
Maybe that's why they're in the caves, because it got cold, so
they went inside. There's also killer vampire bats
in Sothorios. Real vampire bats are very
misunderstood. Yeah, they drink blood, but tiny
amounts. One really funny fact about
vampire bats is they when they try to take blood from like a
cow or an animal with fur, they actually shave a tiny spot
first. They do like a little look, a
little mini scalpel and shave a little hair so they can get
their fangs in there without that little, you know, air
getting in their mouth or whatever.
They're very they're very fastidious blood drinkers.
The whole culture of blood drinking animals is really neat.
Like vampire bats can will share blood with each other, like the
cough up blood to share with each other because they don't
store energy very well. Blood it's not fat.
You can't store that very well. So like they have to eat
constantly. So they're at risk of
starvation. Anyway, let's get back to
Harrenhal and the Lostans. No more bat talk for now.
This section is called Harrenhal's Century of Blood.
Like I said before the break, we had a lot more detail here and a
lot more blood. Lucas had a very, very bad
reputation, but I'm not sure he was like a murderer or overly
violent. Maybe he was, but that's not
what he was known for. We don't know how he treated his
subjects. I don't suspect he treated them
well, but you never know. We definitely know some things
about his descendants though that are bad.
We also don't know when he died. Lucas that is.
But we're we're going to guess he outlived Egon the 4th.
Egon the 4th didn't die very old and he obviously had huge health
problems and. And Lucas was a warrior, a
swordsman. So he who and who.
As far as we know, he didn't die in battle or anything, so he
might have lived a longer life. So we're guessing he lived into
early Deron's reign. Deron the Second's but maybe he
lived until the mid one 90s, we don't know.
We only know for a certain that he was dead by the time of the
first Black Fire rebellion in 196 because we know Manfred of
the Black Hood had taken over by then.
We also don't know what happened to Jane.
Poor Jane Lawson, but given the pox and how her parents ruined
her reputation for gain, well, she likely had to marry down.
Maybe she had to marry a household knight.
It would be interesting if this Jane Lawson was the origin of
House Went. House Went is going to take the
castle after the Lostons. If you look at the Lost in
sigil, it's silver and gold background with a bat.
The silver and gold could maybe refer to, you know, the House
Targaryen giving them their their play here.
House Went sigil is 9 bats on gold.
So it does have the vibe of a cadet branch.
You know, the same sigil with more of them and one of the same
two colors. So, yeah, we don't know how
Housewent came about. We do know they were household
Knights of of the Loftens who got the castle when they turned
on the Loftens at the at the crucial time later.
So that that's a good theory. I think that I don't have
another theory other than that Housewent just originated
somewhere and in the Riverlands and got their job and yeah,
that's what happened. We also don't know what happened
with Felina. Maybe she outlived Lucas.
Maybe she helped Manfred rule, but there's also a small chance
she died before Lucas. Maybe he even remarried.
Regardless, it was their son Manfred who ascended to the
lordship. There's a character referred to
as Manfred with AY instead of an E.
We are 100% assuming this is the same person.
The timeline kind of connects them and it would be pretty
weird for these two people to exist at the same time given
their name. You probably can't tell the
difference if it's spoken aloud. So yeah.
And again, this is around the era where we hear of that
bastard of Harrenhal losing to Sir Arlen a penny tree.
But let's go to the actual first Black Fire rebellion, rather the
memory of it from our good old friend Sir Eustace quote.
Sir Eustace cradled his wine cup in both hands.
If Damon had ridden over Gwain Corbray.
If Fireball had not been slain on the eve of battle.
If Hightower and Tarbek and Oakhart and Butterwell had lent
us their full strength instead of trying to keep 1 foot in each
camp. If Manfred Lofton had proved
true instead of treacherous. If storms had not delayed Lord
Bracken's sailing with the Mirish crossbowmen.
If Quick Finger had not been caught with the stolen Dragon's
eggs. So many ifs Sarah.
Had anyone come out differently, it could all have turned to
other way. It's hard to be sure of whether
this means Manfred turned on Damon Blackfyre or simply
promised his support and didn't show up.
I leaned towards the former though, because I suspect a lot
of houses didn't show up, but I doubt that many if any others
fully switched sides during and he's names Manfred lost in
specifically rather than saying if any number of these Lords
didn't show up or did show up instead of not showing up.
This this sounds a little more of a heavier indictment than
simply not showing up. So I I think that this was a
full change of of sides here. Nina suggests yeah, it could be
a little of column A, little of column B Manfred could have made
promises to support Damon but decided to change sides,
realized his fortunes were would be better to to stay loyal and
or maybe someone induced him. He was given a reason by the
king or by the someone on the small council, something that
induced him back or threatened him.
Probably more likely a benefit than a threat though that would
have moved him. Nina also wonders if there was
any bad blood later between Bittersteel and Manfred, given
the the treatment of the Bracken women and Jane and then what
would happen with the Lostons afterwards.
Like maybe from Bittersteel's perspective, it might look like
the theory we floated it was more salient, like he might be
confident that's what happened, meaning that the Lostons got
Bethany caught, and that's by the king, and we're able to
swoop in and bring Aegon the next mistress because they
eliminated Bethany from the picture so they could take the
mistress spot from Aegon and become Hand to the king
themselves. So from a distance, Bittersteel
might see it that way. He wouldn't have been in court
for any of that. He would have been fled over the
Narrow Sea, and he would have just heard from his spies and
gotten piece meal information. But we think this theory is
valid even without Bittersteel's angle.
So we could definitely see why he would believe it, and it
could even be true. It might even be real, like we
might be. He might believe it because it
really happened. Either way, he wouldn't be happy
about what happened on the red grass field.
He definitely didn't. He definitely wouldn't trust
Manfred over not showing up at the red grass field if not
showing up on the other side. So there's both.
There's multiple reasons why Better Steel might dislike or
distrust Manfred. Either way though, we got to
wonder why did he initially join game and why did he side with
the black fires? Right he the Lawson's owed their
support to the status quo. They got their appointment not
that long before from the royal house, not from the black fires.
So you would think that they were still sort of owing the
crown a bit for what happened, which maybe is why they didn't
go through with it. I mean, remember Damon's
supporters were mostly second tier houses and second sons.
Right now the difference here, the reason you might see them
wanting to fight for Damon is because if Damon wins, a lot of
the old traditions are thrown out of the out the window.
Sure, some of them are what he's specifically trying to defend.
Damon was a traditionalist in many ways, but in his new court,
if he has a new small council, it's not going to have any Reds
on it. It's all going to be people that
supported him. And most of his supporters are
new blood or at least second tier.
So that's the loss to an angle potentially here is that hey, if
they are on the winning side of the rebels, there's a better
chance for a high position afterwards than amongst the old
guard. It's harder to get a reward when
all the big players, Baratheon and Lannister and Stark or maybe
the Starks might not have been involved.
But you see what I'm saying? All these big names were
fighting for the loyalists. How are the losses going to
stand out amongst all that and deserve some big reward?
The bigger rewards, we're on Damon's side, but so are the
bigger risks. And that might have been what
the risk reward calculation might have changed.
If someone comes to the lawsuit to say, hey, look, if you change
sides to us or just stay out of it, we'll give you this.
All of a sudden they don't have as much to incentive to to try
to win something from Damon. They're like, well, we've gotten
50% of that value for just sitting here doing nothing.
Why risk everything for a little more?
So this is just a theory, of course, but that's all we have
to work with. We know Damon was turned on by
Manfred. We just don't know the
circumstances and much else besides that.
It's still very compelling mystery and one I'd love to know
more about. So yeah, you could see why they
might have angled for a bigger reward, as there's an ambitious
element to this. And you can see how that would
make things more difficult in the future for Lost in Black
Fire relations. But as we'll say see later, lost
in in Blackfyre sort of sort of kind of made-up later.
Let's let's get to that. We got to move forward a little
a little more before we get to that though, if we consider
still in the first Blackfyre rebellion, what a big deal this
would have been. Again, I I have to keep pointing
this out. Harrenhal is not far from King's
Landing two weeks ride or so. That's huge given the proximity
to the royal seat. If Damon has Harrenhal, that's
enormous. He's striking distance from the
capital. That's a massive military
problem for the Reds, right? He has this giant castle.
He can put all sorts of troops there.
They they don't know when he's going to emanate Forth allows
him to have a place to retreat and recover.
It's really bad for the Reds. If the black dragon gets
Harrenhal, what happened in the conquest?
It's the first thing they're going to conquer.
Did he destroyed Harrenhal? What happened in the Dance of
the Dragons? Is the first castle Prince
Damon, whom Damon Blackfyre's name for took at the beginning
and of course during the Dance of the Dragons Harrenhal changed
times multiple times right it it it changed hands multiple times.
Ditto the war of 5 kings. What does Tywin do almost right
away and the war of Kings 5 kings breaks out.
He takes Harrenhal right almost immediately.
It's so common as a first target.
So the Lostons may have made use of that like, hey, we're we're
all of a sudden we're in the center of of the action here.
We are in a crucial place. Let's play our hand.
Well, we can be rewarded by it. Yeah.
So there's a lot of things here. Now, as far as this bastard of
Harrenhal character, I keep bringing him up even though we
know very little about him. Good chance he fought in this
war. He fought in a tournament in
193. And the war was only three years
later. But if the Lostans stayed out of
the war, then he probably lived on.
If he fought in it, Nah, decent chance he died again.
Let's talk about specifically about man for the Black Hood a
little more than some of these decisions that happened.
We don't know if he was rewarded for switching sides, but when
you switch sides, yes, you can benefit from it.
But going forward, it tends to look bad because it's no one
will trust you from that point on.
At least they won't trust you fully.
They have to really think, OK, unless he's really bought in,
unless we know for sure he has incentive to fight with us, we
can't trust him. Now Lucas himself wasn't born in
Harrenhal and there's no reason to think he had Targaryen blood.
But we kept, we talked about how Felina kept sleeping with Aegon
the Unworthy. So this man for the Black Hood
might have been Targaryen. He might have been of bat and
dragon. This opens up some fun
supernatural rabbit holes regarding dreams and such.
He might have inherited something, some supernatural
elements in his bloodline. We don't know the full story of
the interplay of Targaryen blood.
Herrenhall, the curse, the proximity, the God's eye, Alice,
Amond, their child. There's a lot of things that are
rolled up into this mystery. This is part of it, though.
There's undoubtedly Manfred of the Black Hood belongs in this
pastiche of Herrenhall bloodline mysteries because he might be
part Targaryen. And even if he isn't, frankly,
all the Lords of Herrenhall are interesting in some way or
another. This guy also has some creepy
nickname, and we've no idea what that means either.
More on that in a minute. But again, being close to King's
Landing, Manfred of the Black Hood, was he at court much?
We know Lucas was a bit because he started there.
He was the master at arms, so he would have been well known at
court. So Man from the Black Hood could
have been a recluse who stayed in his towers.
And his reputation grew accordingly as a as a mysterious
dark figure that no one saw very often.
Or maybe he was someone that came to court and made pitches
and asked for stuff. And these are all fun things to
imagine if he was alive when his parents did what they did with
with Jane, which he a party to that meaning a witness to that
he would have been too young to like weigh in.
But like you see your parents treat your sister like that to
sell her to the king or to the Prince.
What does that do to your worldview?
In addition to growing up in a place like Harrenhal, I can kind
of see why Manfred of the Black Hood was a bad dude.
Like he didn't have the most uplifting ethical upbringing,
right? Like this is a guy brought up in
a cursed dark place with a father who is a real scumbag and
it might have thrown off his royalty because he, yeah, Lucas
was scummy, but a lot of people looked on him as positively.
So what have we like this guy is thought of as good.
So this is good. Maybe he maybe he thinks he was
brought up to think of some things that are like blatantly
evil is actually good. A very different world view when
you live in live and exist and grow at Harrenhal, right?
How much other bad blood would there have been between him?
We talked about bitter Steel, but but there's a lot of other
Blackfire supporters that would have been around that would have
looked negatively on a house that started off supporting them
and then switched sides. That's that's worse than just
starting off on the other side there.
Wow. You treat traitor.
Everyone hates the turn cloak no matter what side they turn to.
Right. That's the Westerosi thing.
Yeah, it it exists in other places too, but you all know
that it's a big deal in Westeros.
Was there ever a marriage on the table, I wonder?
Well, maybe Damon offered one of his daughters to Manfred Lawson
and then that offer got pulled and that's why Manfred switched.
Or maybe maybe someone else offered him a marriage.
We don't know who Manfred married.
I don't know who his wife was. And maybe it was maybe the the
the Reds offered him somebody. Not a Targaryen probably or
almost certainly not, but maybe a bride of status, a powerful
marriage that he said, OK, this is a sufficient reward for me
and I'll back out of my Blackfyre support and take this
woman to be my wife and or, or maybe someone for his son, maybe
a a promised bride or or husband for Manfred's descendants.
And Speaking of did he have any? Probably, but maybe not again,
Harrenhal. It's tricky like the sterility
issue, the descendants issues there.
Harrenhal is, is cursed in that sense, whether supernaturally or
otherwise. Jane was his sister, but was
there any other brothers or sisters and what children did
any of them have that? We just have no idea.
So yeah, what did what does oh, the black hood mean?
What does Manfred of the black hood mean?
Did he sneak around? Was he like a?
Voyeur, I see the man behind a lot of dark deeds, like a a
puller of strings, evil strings like you never the man behind
the mask, that kind of thing. It it does seem like a an
obscuring device, like the hood keeps you from knowing things
about him, like he was a secretive guy.
The most mundane idea I can come up with is that he had birth
marks or malformity that he kept hidden, which you could maybe
blame on Harrenhal or the Targaryen bloodlines even maybe
a little of column A, a little column B, Nina says always we
should consider that it's a little of both.
That's always of almost always a valid option.
So maybe he disguised himself. Maybe he had disfigurements.
Maybe the black hood is just his kind of calling card of, well,
that's a black hooded thing to do.
You know, if you see a black hooded rider coming their way
towards you, you don't think maybe this will work out.
You know, that's that's like a pretty ominous thing, right?
So, so maybe it's kind of vague, but the connotation is
definitely dark. Like you don't think of that as
neutral. I don't think.
George R Martin was an avid reader of comics.
And there was a character created in the 40s called Black
Hood who was very popular. He even had his own radio
serial. And this was an Archie Comics
production before it was called Archie Comics, but it was
eventually integrated into DC and even in the Riverdale TV
show. Yeah, Black Hood was in the
Riverdale TV show. How wild is that?
So he was created in the 40s and still around in this Riverdale
TV show, which I are they still making Riverdale that TV show or
is I know that was fairly recent.
And it had a really crazy ending.
I'll tell you about it after the stream, but however crazy you
think this ending is, it's so much more like wild than you
could conceive. Of so it's black hood is like
just it's nothing compared to that stuff.
Wild Anyway the black hood drove the hood cycle nice.
The hood cycle and the hood later made the black hood like
this. He made an actual object called
the black hood and it was a cursed object like it would, it
was like a like a Zorro ish kind of thing.
Or you know, like the shrouded Lord situation where whoever
wears it becomes the next black hood.
But it was cursed like it had a personality of its own.
It would impart like evil into the wearer.
There's also a black hood magic item in the game Eldon Ring,
which George contributed to some world building and stuff, but
that might just be a coincidence.
I mean black hood isn't that specific a thing.
But hey maybe maybe that's from George.
Let's talk about Mad Denel, the most famous of lost ends.
Most likely there's room between Manfred and Danielle on the
timeline in terms of maybe Mad Danielle isn't Manfred's
daughter. He might be her sister.
He might be his sister rather. And there's so much there's
there's not so much space in between them on the timeline
that we have to have someone between them there.
There's room for another generation, but that we don't
have to. I'm going to assume there
wasn't. I'm going to assume it went from
Manfred to Danielle and that's it.
By 212, Danielle Lawson was Lady of Harrenhal.
So yeah, we don't actually know when Manford died.
By the time Sir Eustace was talking about Manfred's
betrayal, Manfred may have already been dead.
But but Sir Eustace was talking about Manfred's betrayal in the
year 210. That's when the sworn sword
takes place. So yeah, Danielle could have
been a sister or daughter. Manfred, like I said, she could
have also been like a cousin, who knows?
We don't have a lot of idea how old she was.
So it's it's it's hard to nail down, especially because she was
rumored to bathe in blood to preserve her age, which that
throws off aging even more, right?
Like even if we assume that didn't work, well, maybe she
looked young because something is causing people to say this
about her, even if it's not nearly the truth.
So if she was Manfred's sister then it applies.
Manfred died without issue or his children predeceased him
which helps with the possibility of murder.
Maybe Donnell killed Manfred's children and took the castle for
herself, but that's pretty big speculation.
And the same things are possible if she was Manfred's daughter.
Like maybe maybe she had older brothers and killed them, or one
older brother and killed him. But that's just totally random.
There's no suggestion she's a kinslayer.
I'm just saying we can't rule it out right?
It's just one of the more salacious possibilities.
It's entirely possible that Herrenhall just did its thing.
There were very few descendants, and she was the oldest.
And it's that simple. And there's another element that
could really throw this whole thing off.
Not throw it off, but make things worse, which is the great
spring sickness, right? The great Spring sickness killed
a lot of people. It was particularly bad in the
Riverlands, where Herrenhall is. And Herrenhall is known for
being, you know, damp, humid, Maybe, so possibly more
susceptible to something like the great Spring Sickness.
So yeah, that could have hit them pretty hard.
Some the Lostons might have been doing pretty well before that.
And all of a sudden, there's very few Lostons left.
And that may be, in fact, the precise event that moved the
castle from Manfred's lordship to Danielle's ladyship.
Just like Manfred, we have no idea who she married, if anyone,
which would certainly add to her reputation if she chose to not
marry. And it also wouldn't help the
house continue. Though here's when we actually
see her briefly though quote. From Maidenpool had come Lord
Mooton, from Raven Tree, Lord Blackwood, from Duskindale, Lord
Darklin. The royal domains about King's
Landing sent forth Hayford's, Rosbys, Stokeworth's, Massey's,
and the King's Own sworn swords, led by three Knights of the
Kingsguard and stiffened by 300 Ravens teeth with tall white
weirwood bows. Mad Donnell, lost in herself,
rode forth in strength from her haunted towers at Harrenhal,
clad in black armor that fit her like an iron glove, her long red
hair streaming. Quite a striking figure like
Lord Mouton, Lord Blackwood, Lord Darklin, all these names
but only one person gets a description and a specific first
name here. Out of all these people she's
way the most striking. It inspires people like Ashaya
herself to dress this way, which I believe is now on screen.
How cool is that? Look at this Ashaya as mad
Danielle lost and less mad more lost in.
Also have to the Right Art of Donnell by Lady Ray Ray Laverne
and that's on the wiki and it's a a case of art imitating life.
Very cool. So yeah, thanks to Ray for
shouting out to Shay's look there.
It looks great. And she still has that costume.
Yeah, the armor still we, I told.
That he should wear it today. Yeah, I thought about it, but
it's not the most comfortable thing.
Armor is is rarely comfortable, so red hair not uncommon in the
Riverland. So by itself maybe that doesn't
say a lot, but we do have something to say about it.
The stoke worse would be her Ken, of course, and she descends
from Felina and they get mentioned here.
So that's kind of fun. And again, she might have been
Targaryen, right? If she descends from Aegon the
Unworthy, then, which is very possible, then she might have
Targaryen blood. But there's no mention of her
husband either. There's no mention of like Lady
Loston with her husband, blankety blank or anything.
Just rode forth from strength, rode forth in strength.
No sons, no relatives, just just her apparently, which is
interesting. Maybe she has one of her
relatives running the castle while she's gone, or maybe her
castle land is from a completely unrelated house.
Maybe it's house went. It's also more evidence that the
Lostons were powerful, right? This is not the this is not
house towers. This is not a a house that's
unable to afford their castle so they become a non factor.
She rode forth in strength. It said that doesn't you don't
have lots of soldiers and arms and and weapons and armor.
If your house is impoverished, Most likely they are potentially
still benefiting from Lucas's pandering.
In other words, the rewards heaped upon this family from egg
on the fourth are probably still in play here.
And possibly because those are providing income like if they're
if he gave them more land, which is the most likely thing, then
yeah, they're getting passive income from all that.
Maybe not passive income, but income from all that semi
passive income to pay for all these things.
Now during the second Black Fire rebellion, which is what this is
describing, right? This is the end of the mystery
night that we're seeing in that quote.
Dunk overheard earlier in the short story that they expected
Donnell to join them. Instead she comes in strength
against them, which might be political.
She might know that she is perceived as a possible Black
Fire loyalist, so she does everything she can to throw off
that notion and say, no, I'm showing up in strength to
support the king. I am putting these Black Fire
rumors to rest. And given the uncertain nature
of how things played out during the first rebellion with Manfred
switching sides, Lady Danielle might have wanted to make a very
strong statement of who she supported.
Very public, very well known. Again, she's makes the striking
figure, so it's kind of easy for her to be.
I want to make sure I'm noticed. For me, that's easy.
I am very noticeable. So this shouldn't be too hard.
Let me just ride to war in my fitting armor with my long red
hair. Very few people are going to
look like that on the battlefield.
There's very few women on the battlefield.
I'm going to be in charge of these men, blah, blah, blah.
I'm going to make a striking figure.
She knows what she's doing. She knows she's going to be
seen. She's not wearing a helmet.
She. Her hair is streaming behind
her. Yeah, well, or if she is wearing
a helmet, you can still see her hair.
So that's interesting that the Black Fire conspirators thought
she would join. And then very much didn't.
So maybe they thought that if they won that she was going to
maybe they were right. Maybe she would have joined if
things actually went well. I mean, if we're being honest,
this whole thing was a disaster. So why would she join them at at
this point? Maybe she was planning to join
and This is why she came out so strong against them because
she's worried blood Raven might know she's really got to be
really got to be public about this and take no chances.
So they saw the black fires as finished and want to make sure
that they're among those to spit on their graves so that they are
seen doing that again. If she's going to get taken down
in about 20 years after this, which is what happens, she loses
her seat roughly 20 years after this, maybe 15, something like
that. She may have already been on
thin ice. She may have already had a bad
reputation her her family probably did.
And despite her. So given she's going to lose her
seat not that long after, we can imagine that maybe she was
already feeling that pressure. Maybe there was already people
coming after her. Maybe there was already the
rumors were started. Notice that quote says Mad
Danielle lost and came forth. Mad Danielle.
This is the year 212. We're told that she lost her
seat because she turned to the dark arts.
Well, but she's already called mad in this era before she
turned to the dark arts. So that's a little a little
curious, not like a a flaw, but it implies that she had a
reputation before she even turned to the dark arts.
Now, Nina has a great theory here.
It's possible that like Visenya and maybe Alice Rivers, who is
even has a greater connection here in a lot of ways because
of, well, Harrenhal, obviously, maybe Donnell turned magic or
dark arts to have a child to try to force a pregnancy or to
conjure a pregnancy again. That's why I bring up Visenya,
because, yeah, Vicenya might have done that with Magor, and
that's why we talked about Magor the way we did at the beginning
of this episode, why Guy lost and might have been attached to
him. Not just as a way to show this
house is always associated with evil.
Whether it's Magor, whether it's curses, whether it's
cannibalism, whether it's blood magic, whether it's pandering,
whether it's gross, incestuous sexual things.
Yeah, so with Visenya's rumouring that, you know,
Visenya just had Megor when she was 40 and Aegon couldn't seem
to conceive it was it's it's peculiar.
We've talked about it elsewhere and I I'm big on this theory as
a potential. Certainly not enough to say it's
a for sure a sure thing. But yeah, the Lawsons definitely
held on to their dynamics, dynastic stability for longer
than the towers. But like, they still ended up
without heirs here apparently, or very few heirs because again,
you know, if you have a lady inheriting, that already implies
that there's a dearth of men. You know, obviously there's
something wrong. Obviously, in our mind, you
know, men and women should be equal in terms of ruling.
But that's not how it works in Westeros.
So it does. There is something you can imply
whenever a woman inherits that there were no men or something
else happened. So I do love Nina's theory here
that the idea is that Donnell was maybe doing some delving
into the dark arts to try to get pregnant, and this would
establish her as another of the Witch Queen archetypes, all of
whom existed Herrenhal pretty much.
Obviously Vicenia is not Herrenhal, but she's, we don't
really call Vicenia a witch queen.
She's just more of a dragon queen with a a a slice of magic
may be thrown in, you know? Whereas the the magic stuff is a
lot more explicit with someone like Alice Rivers or Danielle
Austin. Reyna has a little of those
vibes too. She doesn't really have the
magic but she's a dragon queen, dragon Lord, dragon lady and
lived in Harrenhal and had some association so definitely
interesting to think about. That and the whole Gil Austin
Magor thing. By the way, Magor looked like he
was dying after his trial by 7, and it was only after Visenya
came with Tiana, the tower. I brought Tien of the tower in
that Megor's health turned positively all of a sudden.
I always, it's always been a little suspicious there too,
that magic was involved. So yes, yes, all these things
are wrapped together. A huge open question for us in
general, but also for this episode is the third Black Fire
Rebellion. It was glossed over in the
histories for what we think are pretty obvious reasons.
George wanted to not commit. He wanted to think about it
later. It's too important for him to
just toss a few ideas out and then be stuck on that.
He doesn't want to, He doesn't want to commit to anything.
So in the history as it's presented as we all know that
story, whatever he says, we all know that story.
We pretty much never do. But it's a clue that George
wants to not commit. He wants to think about it more
later, which is fine. You know, we, we got to give him
some some room for that from time to time.
It would be a problem if he did that too often.
But it's cool here, even though we really want to know what
happened in the third Black Fire rebellion, but it really relates
to Lady Danielle. This is definitely Lady Danielle
in charge in this era still because the third Black Fire
building happened during the reign of King Aries.
And we know she was still in charge until the reign of King
Makar. Who would be next?
So maybe she did actually join the rebels in the third.
Maybe this is part of what put her on a slippery slope, was
fighting for the wrong side because in this case it was a
close run thing. The third Black Fire building
was almost won by the black fires.
It's hard to imagine someone signing up for a losing cause.
It's a lot easier to imagine someone signing up for either
side when both sides are pretty equally matched.
That's a real hard choice if your goal is I want to be on the
winning side and it's hard to tell who's stronger.
What do you do? Well, you might pull a a butter
well or a a high tower or one of these houses that in different
wars have supported both sides. That's what you might do.
And maybe that's on the table here as well for the Lofstons.
I'm not sure but this if they supported the rebels if or if
they supported the black fires here, the Lostons during the
third black fire rebellion, that would really help us explain why
they were on shaky ground with Makar later.
That would be part of the many reasons why this house needs to
go. We don't need that reason, but
it but it would certainly go a long way towards establishing
that. And since they're always heels,
since they seem to always be bad guys, it's, there's, that's a
strike against them, maybe fighting for the loyalists here,
you know, the team, the, the guys that just started a war
because they didn't like Dorn and didn't like maesters and,
and, and, and the king having a potbelly.
You know, I, I, I find the black fires fascinating, but I'm very
much on the red side here in terms of who was in the right
about that war. In the beginning of this
episode, I mentioned something about Jamie and how when he gets
news about some of the worst people he's ever heard of and
what they're up to, he thinks of of Danielle Lostin.
So here, here we go with that. He's thinking of Gregor and
Vargo. What Gregor when Gregor made
Vargo eat people, including himself, and when Gregor made
other people eat parts of Vargo. Forced cannibalism, right?
Disgusting. He he hears about this and it
triggers a memory of mad Danielle Lostin quote.
Father, Jamie thought, your dogs have both gone mad.
He found himself remembering tales he had first heard as a
child at Casterly Rock of Mad Lady Loston, who bathed in tubs
of blood and presided over feasts of human flesh within
these very walls. Somehow, revenge had lost its
savour. Take this and throw it in the
lake. Jamie tossed Hoat's head to Peck
and turned to address the Garrison.
So there's the cannibalism yeah that we mentioned in the
beginning that Herron Hall is associated with cannibalism.
Now we well, there's a specific example, right, But that's a a
current example that happens during the series Hannibal
Hannibal Herron Hall already had the reputation prior to this.
But you know, good, good way to bring it all back and to re
establish that reputation, right?
Yikes. A fun question would be not fun,
but fun in quotes. Is these so-called baths of
blood that that that Lady lost and had, was this the same tub
that Jamie and Brienne were in? Is this the same place these
so-called baths were taking place while they're talking
about it? Are they in the very bath where
it happened? Is it possible?
It's very possible, very possible.
Now, bathing in blood has a lot of connotations.
There's it's, it's not simply straightforward as oh, a woman's
trying to recover her age, but that is one of the reasons it
could be it. San Rixian, by the way, we got
some art from her here, The great Sanrixian, with some
bathing in blood. Specifically bathing in blood
art for Lady Donnell. Shout out to Sanrixian.
It could be exactly what it sounds like.
In other words, yes, it actually could be.
She bathed in blood to preserve her youth.
A couple of questions though. Whether it works is a separate
question to whether or not it's magical.
If it's magical, I'm guessing it works, but it probably isn't.
Although maybe other things she does are magical and those might
work. I'm not so sure about this one.
Several characters have said to bathe in blood.
Whether they actually did or not, I'm not sure.
Of all of them, she might be the most likely to have actually
done it. Sierra Sea Star has said to have
bathe in blood. Daenerys has said to have bathe
in blood. We know Daenerys didn't.
We've seen her chapters. She's gotten really bloody.
You know, maybe certain things she's done that could say she
was. We could symbolically say that,
but not literally. She'd not take a bath in a tub
filled with blood. She definitely didn't do that.
And I kind of doubt CRC started either, but maybe I'm also
sketch skeptical here, but definitely she's at the top of
the list of anyone I've heard of doing this that might actually
have done so. Our common mundane explanation,
we like to do that. We like to have the most
supernatural explanation we can think of, which would be that
hey, it actually worked. Bathing in blood restored her
youth or kept her young, Maybe it did.
The most mundane explanation has nothing to do with magic or
intent even is that she was just dying her hair and it looks
bloody and it looks like her head like gets on her skin from
a distance. Some servant or multiple
servants see that and all the the red is dripping from her
head. It looks like she's bathed in
blood. She might have dipped her head
in it or something. You know and like who, what is
it? The hair dye process look to an
ignorant commoner of you know, who's the employee at Harrenhal
that is not given an education and has Lady Donnell as her Lord
or lady rather, and who given all the other stuff the Lostons
are associated with, it's it's less of a jump to something like
this. So yeah, maybe that was all
there is to it, just regular old hair dye.
And of course no hair dye exists in the settings.
Sansa has dyed her hair and other people have dyed their
hairs. It's it's fairly common in fact,
but not amongst peasants. That's very expensive.
Presumably it's not like today where you can get hair dye for,
you know, a couple like 30 bucks or something, you know, anyway
or more, but not some huge amount.
Now we're told she quote turn to the black arts.
That's a direct quote and that their line ended in quote chaos
and madness. What does that mean?
The madness part were like, OK, well, Paranol has that effect on
some people. If she was, maybe she got some
disease and it got in her brain and made her mad.
But who's the mad person here? What's the chaos like?
This is very vague, very interesting.
But yeah, it's hard to, like, sink your teeth into it like a
vampire, right? Was it one event?
Was it like one big, like, that's the last, she can't be
doing that? Or was it like a lot of little
things that finally they had enough of it, like the straw
that broke the camel's back? And again, close to King's
Landing. That's the problem here for her.
If he's doing all these things like way off in the Dread Fort
or way off in the Iron Islands, you might get away with it.
You know, you might. Makar might not hear about it.
But this is close to the castle. And Makar is a guy that is a
hands on kind of dude. Remember that Makar died putting
down the peak rebellion. So if Donnell was brought down
under his reign, he probably led the army himself.
If he's going to go all the way to the South to fight the peaks,
he's probably going to go to Harrenhal, which is way closer.
And Nina adds, I tend to think Makar's reign was in part about
reversing the executive inaction and failure of feudal protection
that had defined the reign of Aries the First, who was the
predecessor, right? Aries the First was a bookish
king that just told everyone else to just handle things for
him, right? So Makar was very different than
that. He was much more hands on.
So this is a very good point here.
Whether this was the factor for this case, for the lost in
scenario is up in the air. But I definitely agree with Nina
that in general, Makar ruled very differently, in part
because that's just who he is, but also in part because of who
his brother was, which was the most relaxed, like hands off
King we may have had of all time.
I mean, this is the peaks. We also Dagon Greyjoy during
that era, right? Dagon Greyjoy ran rampant for a
while under King Aries and Lostons.
Like whatever they were doing, whatever she was getting away
with, she got away with it for a little while.
So this might be Makar saying, look, you can't do get away with
this sort of thing so close to me, you know, like I I'm not
going to turn a blind eye to much, especially not something
that's happening right under my nose like this.
The problem is scapegoating magic.
I don't know that that's enough of an answer.
Like, yeah, OK, that she turned to the dark arts.
She's trying to conceive a child through magic that could get
some attention and bring people down.
But Makar employed Bloodraven as his hand.
Bloodraven had a reputation from sorcery.
Now, what sorcery was Bloodraven actually employing in this era?
I don't know. Definitely some, though.
We see him do glamours and he had the reputation for it too.
So what What the public believed about Blood Raven versus what's
actually true is there's got to be some disconnect.
But there's some level of truth in the belief that Blood Raven
was using magic. That reputation, Makar would be
aware of. Makar wasn't a big fan of Blood
Raven, probably, but kept him on because maybe because of
political necessity, maybe because he grudgingly respected
how effective he was. And if he's going to be a hand
on king, hands on king, then blood Raven's going to be really
helpful for that. But still employing a guy who's
a known sorcerer makes it difficult to say that he went
after Lady Donnell because of sorcery, right?
That just doesn't that's something about that doesn't
feel right. She are a sea star again, also
had a reputation for bathing in blood.
She lived at court at the same time as all this, like, so how
is Danielle going to be singled out for this when people at
court are maybe doing the same things, right, Even closer to
Makar? So I got to think there's more
to it. Maybe too many infractions, too
much violence, too many other things, like something that
affects other people. If you're only doing things that
affect you, even if they give you a bad reputation, maybe
that's more acceptable. But it's these stories that
Jamie and others tell later that might be our clue, which are
stories of kidnapping children, which might have been actual
kidnappings and not just stories.
That's a much more serious crime.
Sure, there's a lot of cynicism, and we should be right to be
cynical about Westerosi ladies and Lords and justice for
peasants, right? A lot of times you might, you
might be like, come on, Aziz, this lady rounds up a few
peasants and does awful things to them.
She could get away with that. Yeah, she could.
She could. She might.
But what if she went a little too far and it's people started
talk about it a lot? She's a woman.
So like the patriarchal society, they might the the stories might
triple or quadruple because of who it's coming from.
And again, the proximity argument is, is huge here.
So whether Lady Danielle deserved her reputation or not,
or maybe she deserved something like it, it was probably
exaggerated, even if there was a lot of truth to it, because it's
such a scandalous thing. It's such a the kind of thing
people would talk about. And if people are going to talk
about it, it's going to get exaggerated.
Rumor always works that way, right?
And if we're comparing it to something like, well, where
Jamie comes from, if we're coming it to Casterly Rock, you
can keep information somewhat tied down in Casterly Rock.
It's a mountain. There's ways in and out that can
be guarded. Harrenhal's this giant ruinous
castle with Arya got out with one fake silver coin.
She drops it on the ground. The guard goes to pick it up.
She cuts his throat. She got out right?
Couple of kids escaped from Harrenhal.
It's not the same as Gasterly Rock.
The scenario is very different. So point being, lots of
different stories can leak out of Harrenhal in ways that other
Lords might be able to control information more tightly.
The both the proximity to cast the castle King's Landing and
the nature of the size of the castle and its its leakiness is
both work against keeping secrets there.
So I can imagine a scenario where Makar hears complaints
about Lady Donnell on a regular basis or semi regular basis and
eventually he just gets fed up like, OK, that's enough.
I've had enough hearing about this woman, we're going to go
take her down. And there may have been other
reasons like she doesn't have a descendant or she doesn't, she
doesn't have children anyway. So like it's going to happen.
We need to replace her anyway. This castle is going to go
become empty regardless. He might go months without
hearing someone mention the Bolton's or the Ironborn.
And even if he did hear about them, he might be like delegate,
tell someone else to take care of that.
Let the Greyjoys handle that, let the Starks handle that.
Like even for him, that might be too far away.
Interestingly, no one else has ever had the name Donnell that
we know of. There have been plenty of other,
you know, Manfreds and Lucas's, but Danielle is unique as far as
we know. There are some similar ones,
like there's plenty of Dan. This like Daenerys, Nina
suggests maybe she was even called Danny as a nickname.
Yeah, absolutely. Could be very, very possible.
Magell is, you know, there's the ELL suffix, is there?
Or Dan? Well, which is you get the L
sound and the Dan. So there's some similar names,
but yeah, no actual other Donnells anywhere in Westeros,
at least yet. Some of you may be aware, maybe
because you've heard of her or you've heard this mentioned
before on our show or elsewhere, that Elizabeth Bathory is the
inspiration for Lady Janelle. Elizabeth Bathory was a
Hungarian noble in the 16th, 17th centuries who was accused
and condemned for killing something like 600 peasants,
torturing, bathing in blood. Awful stuff, really horrible.
However, there's a serious scholarly effort to consider
whether or not this is actually fact.
She. I've read this in two different
ways. Either she owed the king a lot
of money, or the king owed her a lot of money.
I think the other one makes more sense.
If she owed the king a lot of money, then why would they kill
her? They would want to get that
money. But there's a very strong chance
that this was a drummed up story to take her land, in part
because yes, she may have the king may have owed her money and
the king is the one who ordered this investigation right after
her husband died. So supposedly she killed 600
people, yet no one heard anything about it until after
her husband died is very suspicious.
The the counter arguments are very strong here.
But we're not here to settle whether Elizabeth Bathory is
guilty or not. That's not important to us.
But what's important to us is some of these elements are
possible here. I think it's more likely Matt
Donnell really did do blood magic and some of these other
stuff 'cause that's just more fun for the story to have some
of these supernatural elements. George likes to turn it up to
11. But there's room for both.
There's room for the truth to be only a Colonel and the real
story to be, or the truth to be a Colonel and the rumor to be a
massively exaggerated version of this.
Like maybe she was actually mad again.
The mad story started before the magic stories, and one may have
been true and the other may not have been.
Maybe she really did use magic but wasn't mad.
Maybe she didn't use magic but was mad.
Maybe she was both. I prefer kind of both.
That's maybe the most fun to have someone that's both really
magical and kind of mad, because all sorts of weird stuff happen
when you have skill with magic and you're kind of crazy.
That's just, hey, you can have a lot of fun with that as a
storyteller. Of course, George's call,
obviously, we're just going with what we're picking up, what he's
put down so far, but he's got more to to put down and at which
point we'll pick that back up. We.
So anyway, it's very interesting to consider that some of the
stories about Mad Dinell might not be true or just exaggerated,
just like the inspiration for her.
The stuff is also on the table that maybe Elizabeth Bathory
didn't do any of that stuff. This may have just been the high
Lords playing their Game of Thrones by telling stories about
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well. So hmm, I'm not just a patron, I
am a patron subscriber. Let's talk about the last O
Loston, because there is a reason to believe there was one
more Loston after Donnell. Maybe not a Lord Loston, but
probably a Lord Loston. But whether they actually held
the castle is also up in the air.
The reason is from that very first quote from Gendry that we
read at the beginning, the first mention he said that Ben
Blackthumb was a blacksmith to the the last Lord Lofston, not
Lady Lord. Very possible that Gendry
assumed man that Ben Blackthumb said the last Lofston and he
just thought that was a Lord. Cause odds are it is going to be
a Lord. Most of the rulers of castles
are men so he doesn't if a gender isn't specified.
Gendry wouldn't. It wouldn't be the dumbest thing
ever for him to assume a man. It would be a mistake.
But you know, unreliable narrator.
That's going to happen sometimes right?
It's also possible that Danielle's husband was styled
Lord lost in and he was allowed to run the castle for a little
while before it all fell apart after her.
Maybe direct Lannister does that.
Braun does that, and maybe Donnell did have a son who tried
to claim Harrenhal later but was deposed by Makar.
And of course it's it's also possibly just a mistake by
George. But I think I don't like calling
something a mistake unless we just can't reconcile it and we
can Gendry just messing up is is a very rational, simple and
reasonable explanation. But so is there being one more
lost in afterwards that that had to be haunted down and killed.
Maybe he wasn't at Harrenhal, someone who tried to start a
rebellion to reclaim his title. Anyway, lots of possibilities
there. Maybe we'll find out.
Here's another little clue though.
Let's get back to our friend Sir Illifer from our one of our
favorite PO VS Brienne quote. Sir Illifer crooked a Bony
finger at her shield. Though it's paint was cracked
and peeling, the device it bore showed plain.
A black bat on a field divided bend wise silver and gold.
You bear a liar's shield to which you have no right.
My grandfather's grandfather helped kill the last of Lofton.
Nonsense has dared to show that Bat Black is the deeds of them
that bore it. He then goes on to name Lord
Lucas and Manfred of the Black Hood and accuses her of cloaking
herself in shame because she's guilty of killing Renly.
So there's two things going on here.
One, she he's upset to see her wearing a sigil that doesn't
belong to her. He's upset because of what sigil
that is because it's such a dark sigil and he recognizes her as
the one that's accused of killing Renly.
And yeah, so he he pulls his dagger, but she talks her way
out of it. She swears an oath.
It's it's a very it's a great scene.
They're like, oh, great, great oath there brew.
That's that's a really good swearing.
Well, if the if she's lying, the gods will sort her out.
Our work is done here. I I love that, but Sir Ilifer is
probably lying or exaggerating, which we already knew that he
both of these guys, Creighton and Ilifer are teller of tall
tales. That's their whole shtick.
Like it's half the reason we see them.
You know, they're part of the, the background of the hedge
night story, the questing night. They're they're, they're like a
traditional element here from this type of story that George
is adapting within A song of ice and fire, Brienne's quest.
So well the reason I'm pretty sure he's lying or exaggerating
is he says his grandfather's grandfather helped kill the last
of Loston Illa first. Probably like 50 if not 60 which
is when the Lostons fell. How is his grandfather's
grandfather alive 60 years ago when he when he was born?
Like I don't think so. I mean does his was his
grandfather's grandfather his grandfather and his keep having?
Did all his grandfathers have children at age 16 or something?
Even that probably doesn't make it work anyway.
It doesn't. So he's lying about his
involvement. But given his age, he absolutely
was around for those stories when it was really happening.
He would have been a young man, or right after it happened, he
would have been a young man. He would have grown up right
after the fall of Loston. It would have been a big deal
for storytelling. Like, people still tell stories
about Madden Nell. Now imagine right after her
fall, those stories would have been even more popular, even
more common. She would have been one of the
most scandalous topics to speak on probably in the Riverlands,
if not a lot of places. What an outstanding character,
even with even in world like to us she's outstanding, but in
world she would really stand out quite a lot too.
He would have heard those tales all about the cook pots and her
bats, kidnapping children and the bathing and all that.
Fresh story too, and one that happened not far from where this
quote occurs. They're on the road to
Duskindale in this chapter and again, and Duskindale's just up
the coast. So Harrenhal still, even though
they've left King's Landing, they're still only about two
weeks ride from King's Landing or they're 2 two weeks ride from
Harrenhal rather from from the road to Duskindale. 1 theory I
like is that King Makar himself or maybe he sent Blood Raven
maybe or something like that, removed Donnell, either had her
killed or sent to the Silent Sisters and then installed
another Lostin. And then this new Lostin was was
also terrible. So they removed him and just
said no more Lostins. Maybe they ran out of lost him.
Maybe there's weren't any more. Again, very a lot of smaller
possibilities here. We're cycling through our
options and pretty good. Now we're told that their own
household nights turned on them. The house house went turned on
house lost him during this era. So in fact, they might be the
initial impetus for this fall. Maybe they went to the king and
we're like, look, I can tell you because we're on the inside.
We've seen some real bad stuff that they've done and yes, we're
loyal to our overlords, but we just had to say something.
She's killing kids, she's kidnapping babies, she's doing
blood magic. I don't know what they said or
if they said it at all, but this is, I like this theory because
we know they got Harrenhal. So the way it tends to work is
the people that do the most work or do the pivotal thing or who
turn first, like the river Lords did for for Aegon the Conqueror,
which river Lord got the biggest reward?
The first river Lord to turn to Aegon, which was Edmund Tully.
So if house went was the first to turn on the Lostons and side
with the king, it would absolutely fit that they got the
biggest reward, which well, they did get the biggest reward.
So we're we kind of have to work our way backwards to say, well,
why did House went get such a big reward?
Probably because they were really crucial in overthrowing
the Lostons or did something really important or something
that made a big difference. Right.
And of course the bats still live on with House Went, right?
The bats are their sigil too. But of course during the events
of A Song of Ice and Fire, House went loses Aaron all as well.
But there's definitely still bats there.
So the sigil is still accurate. There is a John Lawston in the
Golden Company, but. Y'all don't forget the nature
and makeup of the Golden Company.
People call themselves whatever. There's also strongs in the
Golden Company. So that's kind of funny.
What happens if the Golden Company wins Harrenhal and
they're like the Lost in John, John Lawson is like, hey, I get
this right. And the strongs are like, no, we
get this. We're the strongs we get here.
I was like, no, but my house had it more recently.
Yeah, but there's three of us and just one of you, John
Lofton. So I don't know.
That could be, that could be a little thing later.
The Lost in Legacy is our final section here.
As we said early on, they had it for more than any other house,
something like 80 years. And in that time it's hard to
name a single positive, uplifting, or good thing they
did. A single good person even,
right? Not just a good deed, but like a
single character that isn't bad, or at least severely tarnished.
And the other side of the Ledger is full of dark deeds, right?
The list is lengthy and varied again.
Cannibalism, blood magic, incest, selling your own
children for favors, murder. Yeah, just the list is huge.
I don't have to go through all of them again, but you, you get
it. So 70 some years after losing
Harrenhal, probably dying out because that John Lawson
probably isn't a descendant. But maybe he is.
Maybe he's an exception. Regardless, they are nowhere
near forgotten. Their sigil still comes off like
a bad omen. I'm very amused by what happens
here with Jamie. George has Jamie make a small
but very on point, very thematic mistake here, one that doesn't
harm him in the slightest but is very funny quote.
He found an old shield in the Armory, battered and splintered,
the chipped paint still showing most of the great black bat of
House Lothston upon a field of silver and gold.
The Lothsten's held Harrenhal before the winds and had been a
powerful family in their day, but they had died out ages ago,
so no one was likely to object to him bearing their arms.
He would be no one's cousin, no one's enemy, no one's sworn
sword in some, no one. Who does he think he is, Arya?
He is trying to be in the disguise.
So there's some Arya vibes there.
And this is Harrenhal, where Arya also was right.
But of all the Shields he could claim, well, that's the
authorial hand at work here. George is really making moves
here. This is like third level
subtlety at least. He specifically wanted an
extinct house. Jamie did.
So no one would like call him out or whatever.
And he is like a bat out of hell leaving Harrenhal.
So there's a little symbolism there too.
But he's like, no, this will not attract attention.
I'll be a no one. It does the exact opposite.
It attracts a lot of attention. We already see it attract
attention for Brienne. And there's another actually two
more examples that we're going to read.
So it was a poor choice by Jamie in that regard.
But he's not the one who deals with that.
He doesn't ever maybe realize that he made this mistake.
And of course it's a, it's a very small mistake, but it's a
funny one. It's funnier because he's aware
he's heard the horror stories. He's like, I know about Mad
Donnell. I thought of her when Vargo
Haute and Greg or were brought up to me about cannibalism and
all that. So, but he knows what the deal
is with that sigil. Like he knows what it
represents, but he still thinks it's not a big deal.
He doesn't see the symbolism. I guess.
You know, it makes for a better mistake, too.
It makes for a good story. So this is George being really
clever by having Jamie do this. And let's move forward and see
where it leads. What he does next is right after
he decides he can't personally fulfill the vow to Lady Catlin.
He's like, well, the next best thing I can do is help Brienne
do it so I can sort of be fulfilling my vow to Lady Catlin
by sending a competent person to do this job, someone who's very
dedicated to it. Like, there's no doubt Brienne
is going to try her hardest to find Sansa and Arya.
So he gives her money, that letter and gear to go find Lady
Catlin's daughters, including the sword, right?
Oath Keeper and the shield. This shield, this lost in
shield, it's kind of lost in the shuffle because all there's all
these like outstanding important things like Jamie Brand's like,
all right, cool money, a new saddle, a Valyrian steel sword.
Oh, and that weird ass bat shield.
Lost in in the shuffle. Loft Dang good one good pun lost
in in the shuffle. Very nice.
So yeah, Brand is in turn accosted not once, not twice,
but like three times for the shield.
Three different people commented on it.
Remember, Jamie thinks no one is likely to object.
Several people objected. Jamie, the narrator voice is big
in this one, right? Several people objected.
Yeah, No, Gendry did not, in fact, stay there.
Several people did, in fact, object to the first accosting.
We already heard from Sir Illefer.
Here's the next accosting quote. The captain's eyes lingered on
her shield. The black bat of Lofston.
Those are arms of ill repute. They are not mine.
I mean to have the shield repainted.
Of course, his tone shifts dramatically after that, because
this captain's sister is a painter.
And he's like, Oh, go give my sister some business.
He's like, let them let her pass, right?
So she goes to his sister and brings the shield, and she
reacts to it, too. Here we go, quote.
She had a cheerful manner, but when Brienne showed her the
shield, her face went dark. My old ma used to say that giant
bats flew out from Harrenhal on moonless nights to carry bad
children to Mad Donnell for her cook pots.
Sometimes I'd hear them scrabbling at the shutters.
She sucked her teeth a moment, thoughtful.
What goes in its place? So this is like a Westeros
boogeyman story. People started to use Lady
Danielle as an enduring story of what you do if you don't obey
your parents. Kind of similar to the old dance
stories that we hear at the beginning, but one of the darker
ones, you know? But some of old nans are pretty
dark. Now what goes in his place is
the question asked by the painter.
And of course it is painted just like Duncan the tall shield,
which also had wings, but not bat wings.
A winged chalice. It's a lot more positive than a
bat in this setting. Now that's Duncan, not not
Duncan the tall shield didn't have wings.
I mean that Duncan the Tall's master, Sir Arlen's shield had
wings. So that's really neat that as
part of the parallel to Brienne and Duncan.
Of course, most of us here believe that Brienne has dunks
ancestor. One of the first things they
both do when they're introduced with their own POV's is to have
their shield painted. Dunk goes to have Sir Arlen's
shield repainted into the very same shield that Brienne has her
shield painted into, which is the the shooting star and the
tree. And so that's cool.
They both have their shield repainted.
Now, Dunk's shield wasn't repainted away from something
evil, but he actually thinks at first that the new version with
the comet and the tree in the night time, he actually is like,
oh, this is quote all painted up like death until Pate talks
about like, no, that's a tree. It's a living tree.
This is this is life. This is good.
And then that that sets Dunk to write.
He's like, OK, good point. And then he starts to look at it
more happily and positively. But it's kind of neat that it
has that sort of reverse situation here where he gets
this nice shield repainted. And at first he thinks it's
Grimm, whereas Brienne gets this Grimm shield repainted over into
this this new version. That is the same thing that Dunk
has nice symbolism here too. With with in Brienne's case,
she's covering over evil with good.
She's turning evil into good, which is a lot of what she's
about. I mean, she is a very good
person. She's on a good person's quest
and she's, you know, fighting evil, right?
And using the tools of evil against them.
It's kind of neat. I like that.
So the lost in legacy is how sufficiently villainous to be
the sample villain. The opposite.
Like you need to be a sufficiently villainous villain.
You need that to for a hero to be sufficiently heroic.
And if you want Brienne, which he is, to stand out as a big
hero, then the villains have to be pretty big too.
And Dunk also started and and not Dunk, but yeah, sorry, yes,
Dunk. Duncan, Lucas Lofton both
started off roughly as hedge Knights or descendants from
hedge Knights with connection to House Targaryen.
In this case, one of the worst Targaryens for the lost ends egg
on the unworthy and one of the best for Sir Duncan an egg.
So some of their experiences based on which Targaryen they
had a lot of association with. But I think that it's not
unlikely. In fact, it's likely that the
Duncan egg stories will take us to Harrenhal during the era of
Maddenel. Very likely, right?
What? How can George resist bringing
her into the story when she's been mentioned?
In fact, in 2015 someone asked that someone said to George in
an interview or not in an interview at a convention, asked
him. One of my favorite characters is
Matt Donnell. She's super interesting.
Will we ever see her in a short story?
And he said well we might see her in Dunkin Egg.
No promises though. So he was pretty quick with the
answer. One of the reasons I'm dying for
Dunk to go to Harrenhal is because of his his saying Dunk
the tall thick as a castle wall. I'm not so sure if he's thick as
those walls. Yes, he is.
She says like Nah Z. No doubts.
Thick with two CS. OK, we disagree on that one.
So yeah, one the the Targaryens Lofton association created the
evil black bats of Harrenhal, while the Targaryen Duncan, the
tallest scenario created the white cloaked good knight of the
Kingsguard. So yeah, it goes opposite ways.
So yeah, in some a few summary elements here, as we did
earlier, we compared them to houses like Bolton and Peak, and
to a lesser extent houses like Uller and Bracken that are
mostly villainous uller isn't 100% villainous, neither is
Bracken, but mostly villainous, mostly dark, mostly dangerous,
if not straight up evil. Very few good things said about
them. Now, did the castle make them
this way over the generations? I mean, Lucas was kind of
already a scumbag. It seems like maybe power went
to his head, so did it happen slowly or over time?
Did the power go to their head that ruling this important
castle, this dark castle that they associated with their own
personalities or their own vibe? Did supernatural mean slowly
ruin them? Or was it just the straight up
general generic being spoiled by power?
As usual, we have to say that it's quite possible that it's
both. Did they fall from status and
privilege not because of Harrenhal, but because they were
corrupted by its power? That's entirely possible too.
Or corrupted by the health impacts of the lack of ability
to bear children. You know, maybe it's just as
simple as that Harrenhal did for another family because they
couldn't procreate. But I have a feeling that when
we learn more, it won't be that simple.
It's more fun to bring out the supernatural elements.
No, but of of course this is Jar Jar Mar and he doesn't go too
crazy with that stuff, but he likes to include it.
So that's why we constantly come back to a little of both.
Some of it's the reputation of proto medieval women as rulers
and the negative attitudes associated with them.
Some of it is black magic and blood magic's kind of fun to
include in a story if you if you keep it contained and not go too
crazy with it. Maybe she went crazy with it,
but story wise it doesn't have to go too crazy.
So I feel like if we do learn more, and I think we will,
they're only going to cement this reputation by lengthening
the list of darty, darty dirty deeds, dark deeds, dark doings,
Rather than it becoming somewhat balanced out by like, oh,
actually the lobsters weren't so bad.
We find out some other takes from some different maesters and
maybe this balances. I really don't see that
happening. I don't see that happening for
the Boltons or Peaks either. But it just it, it'll, it's
better, maybe more interesting, more lurid, more lore about the
darkness of Harrenhal would be fitting if it goes in that
direction. And the supernatural, the dark,
the evil, rather than trying to rehabilitate the image of that
place. Why do that?
It's more fun the way it is. Other than John Lawston in A
Song of Ice and Fire, like I said, who in the Golden Company
probably isn't actually a Lawston?
Our chance to see more of them likely falls in the Duncan Egg
books and of course, the Duncan Egg show that's coming.
The fall of Lady Donnell might even be what we see in Duncan
Egg, if we see it. If we're going to have an
adventure to Duncan Egg that involves her, that might be it.
Like Makar wants to come take her down and maybe Duncan Egg
are involved in that. I mean, how can we not have a
Heron hall adventure in there somewhere?
I'm it's super. I mean the black fire rebellion.
She could be involved in the third black fire rebellion.
There's there's chances for her to be involved many times
actually. So it doesn't have to be just a
one time thing. I would also not be surprised to
see them in Ashford Meadow in season 1 of the show, not just
to introduce them not to. I'm not saying they'll have
lines that they'll be part of the plot.
Just see that flag, see that banner in the distance.
We're going to see a lot of banners.
It's the tournament, right, And Dunk isn't great with banners.
So from our POV versus the reader POV, which is his POV, we
should see a lot more sigils and understand what they are because
it's cameras. It's it's a narrator view.
When you're seeing cameras. It's not Duncan's point of view,
like the book. We might even see, we might
actually see blossoms involved in the plot line of hedge knight
somehow. Nothing big, I wouldn't guess,
but just to have them there just to see them to, you know, these
guys are going to matter. Build them up, get people
familiar with them. I I could see that they can do
the helmet trick, you know that they do where there's this is
Lord Lofton, but they just, he doesn't say a word and he's in a
helmet. So they don't have to cast the
person that they really have in mind for the long term.
Or they just have a temporary actor or actress that's just
wearing the armor and not talking, but has all the sigils
and heraldry and everything. Yeah, that could happen.
And of course, if there's ever a Black Fire era Rebellion show,
then they would definitely play a part there as well.
They'd play a significant part, maybe a very significant part.
So All in all, there's a lot here to work with and a lot of
room to do it. The direction the franchise is
heading seems to be a place that's going to include this
house. And I look forward to learning
more about them, and I look forward to whatever George gives
us in the future regarding them as well, because I think there's
going to be some stuff. The first hour of the night in
Westeros is called what? That was our trivia question.
And it is called. Yeah, I think a lot of you
probably got this one the hour of the bat.
People did guess. It nice it went a little easier
this time. You can kind of figure that one
out by context, but it's fun to refer to those.
There's there's, you know, 12. We don't know all the hours of
night, but we do know that one. Next time we have an episode
called Stormborn Coming, which will be all about Daenerys
birth, Rayela's flight to Dragonstone, and the events that
are happening around then, meaning the fall of King's
Landing, so the end of Robert Rebellion, basically.
What happened that night, why did she have that nickname, all
that. But we also have a scripted
episode coming out shortly on Nymeria's Conquest of Dorn that
will be available for patrons very soon and soonish, and for
the rest of y'all in a few weeks or so.
But you can sign up to Patreon to get it sooner.
We mentioned a few other episodes that you might want to
check out that are relevant to this one.
Certainly our Blackfire series, Egon the Unworthy is the first
part of that. So that's one place to start.
We talked about other Heron Hall episodes at the beginning,
Curses with Doctor Kavita Mudan Finn, Old God's Eye with Joe,
Magician, Dreams of Damon with Quinn the GM, some very fun
guest episodes we did that involve Heron Hall and the
surrounding territory, the region, but also, of course, our
Duncan Egg series. We just talked about Duncan Egg
a lot in this episode and we've got a lot of episodes on them.
We do. We did each book of the Dunkin
Egg series. We did a a full read through and
4 episodes on each I believe it was.
So you can find those in our catalog and everything else that
we've got. And we hope you enjoy the large
back catalog that we have. Lots of fun things to be found
in there. Lots of ways to stay immersed in
Westeros. Once again, Magic Mind, you get
45% off the Magic Mind bundle. That includes a subscription to
the Sleep Elixir and their classic mental performance
shots. That's magicmind.com.
VIPHOW Jan VIP How Jan. Thanks to Nina for her excellent
notes, lots of great theories and ideas.
And this one, this is one, like I said, we're working with a lot
less information, a lot of triangulating, a lot of reading
between the lines. Nina's really good at that, and
I think it shows in episodes like this.
Thanks as well to everyone else involved in helping History of
Westeros be what it is. That includes our our music
makers, Joey and Jesse and Michael Klarfeld for his video
intro, which we see often. And if you want to get support,
Michael claredox.de, that's KLARADO x.de.
You can get his maps there, download them, and then have
them printed on your own. That's it for today, everybody.
You know what to do. Valar rereads.