A Song of Ice and Fire is a story set in a world where
prophecy is 100% real and 110% dangerous.
But in Danis the Dreamer, perhaps the most famous prophet
in all the history of Westeros, we have a rare example of
someone whose prophecies or one particular prophecy that we know
of was listened to by the people in power or person in power, her
father, and it had a positive effect.
Most of the time it doesn't go quite so well, right?
Even if people actually listen to the prophecy in the 1st
place, which they often don't. But beyond that, take Jairus the
Second for example, listen to the Ghost of High Heart when it
comes to the Prince slash Princess that was promised.
Didn't go so well. Arguably you could say the
Targaryen dynasty being saved by Danis the Dreamer wasn't
actually a good thing, but for them it was.
For how Targaryen it was, it was certainly a benefit to them.
And it might have been a good thing for humanity as a whole.
Because maybe without Danis the Dreamer, the Others might be
primed for a big win right now because, well, they would be
able to make their plans for Westeros without having to worry
about Dragons. There have been a lot of
Targaryen dreamers, but she stands alone at the top.
None of the Others are particularly celebrated within
the their own family, even. We don't see histories written
about them. They get mentioned in their
dreams or mentioned kind of casually or not at all.
I mean, how many times have we theorized about a certain
Targaryen dreamer or otherwise, or their dreams?
A lot, right? We've done quite a bit of that
over the years. There's always a shroud of
mystery around it, and often a shroud of shame or a lack of
willingness to share. Right?
Like Darren the drunkard. Again, he's not super excited
about telling people what his dreams are, and you can see why.
Danis, though, is arguably explicitly the opposite.
Though again, there's a lot of mystery not just about the
prophecies here, but about her as a person.
We don't really have a a clear idea of her, say, personality.
But Danis the Dreamer wasn't just a prophet and a Dreamer.
That certainly impacts our full picture of her.
She was the Lady of Dragonstone, married to the most powerful
Targaryen Lord of the Century of Blood era, and he was, of
course, her brother. They had children, and since
their line continued unbroken after them, every Targaryen we
know of after them is related to her.
They're all her descendants. That, of course, includes Black
Fires and a few others. What about her dragon?
What about the rest of her family?
What was it like being right about the Doom?
I like I one of the things where you're like, I hope I'm wrong,
but yeah, well, you weren't wrong, were you, Danis?
And what was it like to live in that era after the Doom, The
thing you were right about, that you saw coming more than a
decade in advance. What a strange existence that
is. It's really hard to fathom that.
And how did other Targaryens of that era and later, how do they
look upon her? Is she an object of worship,
like a sacred figure in their history that without her they
wouldn't exist? Well, it's true they wouldn't.
That doesn't mean they look upon her with that sort of gratitude.
But I could assume probably some of them.
Would you? You'd just think that feeling
would be around there somewhere. That's just a sample of the
questions we have. We have a lot of questions about
her, and no, we can't answer them all.
As usual, there's too many and so many mysteries, we never have
all the answers. But the questions themselves, as
always, are often very entertaining, even without
answers, right? They lead to other thought
provoking questions about the nature of prophecy, the history
of Westeros, Essos and House Targaryen, and forms the Song of
Ice and Fire. It's a lot of related topics
here, so we'll compare her to other prophets, especially other
dreamers, especially other Targaryens, and to Daenerys with
whom she has many parallels. We also have real life examples
of prophecy in the how it works in the real world and how it's
been viewed. Lots of other examples like
that. Lots of other fun stuff.
All that and more in this episode of History of Westeros
podcast. Hello and welcome back
everybody. We are live here on YouTube at
3:00 Eastern. That's what we do with our live
streaming and that's how we do our schedule.
If you're available on Sundays at three, you should be checking
us out live. Otherwise, catch the video later
and you can watch it on Spotify after.
It's edited and it's a little cleaner, a little smoother, a
little better produced. And the audio only versions are
always available anywhere you catch podcasts, whether it's
Spotify, iTunes, whatever. And if you catch us on Patreon,
though, you get it without ads. Shout out to our good friend
Nina. She had a lot of great takes on
this one, as she so often does. Latest blog post over on her
over on goodqueenalley.tumblr.com that's
with 1L and ally is somewhat relevant to today.
By coincidence, the question she got was Valerian's death
somewhat symbolizes Viserys's reign.
Viserys the First says the bringing on the dying of the
Dragons. What about symbolism tied to
other crowns and Targaryen deaths over the years?
And Nina does have a lot of thoughts about the crowns and
what they represent and similar overlapping topics.
So check that out if you are so inclined.
It's a great post. You can always send us questions
during the episode or after Westeros history@gmail.com or
hit us up on any of our socials. And at the end of this episode,
I'll hit you with some episodes that relate to this one further
immersion set up for you. And if you listen on Spotify,
you can check these days. In the episode, we are now able
to embed links to other episodes.
So instead of me just telling you what other episodes there
are, there's actually links to those episodes.
Now, it's only going to be true for recent episodes.
We're going to try to update the the the our past catalog, but
that will take a little while. And that's on Spotify.
Yeah, only on Spotify right now, but of course our episodes are
on every platform now. Trivia question at the end, of
course. I'll give you the answer to this
one. What book did Archmaester Marwin
write? It's actually possible he wrote
other books, but we only know of this one.
So yeah, that's the question. What book did Archmaester Marwin
write? The answer is in the episode, so
if you pay close attention, you'll hear it.
Or you might know it already. Here's what we have for you
today. Here's the different sections
for this episode. We'll start with our first
mention, as we so often do, Danis's dragon divining the Doom
both before and after. Then we have the Century of
Blood game in the glorious Aegon and Elena, who are their
children, signs and portents. That's Danis's book of visions.
Possible prophecies. Why lost?
As in, why is that book lost? Prophetess tropes.
We've got some TV tropes work for you.
The end is nigh, Cassandra, one of the most famous prophets of
all time in in fiction and ancient times.
We have our quote of the week. Then we have death and legacy
for Danis, and then a brief outro.
And that's our episode. Let's get to it with that first
mention, shall we? It's slightly debatable which is
the first mention of Danny's, so we'll have both quotes for you.
Here's the first one, it's from A Feast for Crows.
It's Asha speaking to one of the best named characters in all of
the series. That's The Reader, AKA Rodrick
the Reader quote. What reading was so urgent that
you leave your guests without a host?
Archmaester Marwin's Book of Lost books.
He lifted his gaze from the page to study her.
Hotho brought me a copy from Old Town.
He as a daughter he would have me wed.
Lord Rodrick tapped the book with a long nail.
See here. Marwin claims to have found 3
pages of signs and portents visions written down by the
maiden daughter of Ainar Targaryen before the Doom came
to Valyria. The reason you are might argue
that this doesn't count as the first mention of Danis is, well,
did he say the word Danis? He didn't actually say her name,
did he? Said maiden daughter of Anar.
But that's who it is. I mean, there's no other maiden
daughter of Anar who wrote signs and portents.
So it's like what? No, both of his daughters wrote
signs and portents. It was like a warring.
Yeah, of course, there's just the 1.
So it actually doesn't say here that she predicted the Doom.
It just says written down by the maiden daughter of Anar
Targaryen before the Doom came to Valyria.
But that of course is clarified very thoroughly later.
Now here's the first time her actual name appears in any of
the texts, and it's not A Song of Ice and Fire, but the World
of Ice and Fire. Which is interesting in and of
itself, because as I pointed out in the intro, it's pretty rare
for this type of prophecy, or any type of prophecy, to be a
matter of historical record. But in this case, it's just too
hard to ignore. Too big.
This is what happened just after the settling of Dragonstone by
Valyrian traders over the era that that followed.
Quote. Two centuries passed, centuries
in which the coveted Valyrian steel began to trickle into the
Seven Kingdoms more swiftly than before, though not swiftly
enough for all the Lords and kings who desired it.
And although the sight of a dragonlord flying high above
Blackwater Bay was not unknown, it occurred more frequently as
time passed. Valyria felt its outpost was
secured, and the dragonlords thus continued their schemes and
intrigues on their native continent.
And then, unexpected to all save perhaps Aynar Targaryen and his
maiden daughter Danis the Dreamer, the Doom came to
Valyria. Yeah, that's really important.
And as an aside, one day we'll cover Aynar a little more
thoroughly. It's interesting to consider the
possibility that because the Targaryens lost all their
incomes, they certainly had a lot of stored wealth and jewelry
and, you know, stuff that they'd collected over the eons.
They lost a lot of their income, if not most of their income when
they moved to Dragonstone. So it's entirely possible that
the uptick in Valyrian steel was because of the Targaryen selling
off some of it because they needed money.
Now, As for the first mention aspect of this, it doesn't
really matter, does it? This is something we do for fun
to introduce the topic. So whichever 1 counts as the
first, I don't care. They're both really good,
excellent introductions to the subject.
They both belong at the beginning here.
And interestingly, both of the quotes refer to her as Maiden
Daughter, which is important. Now, one of the first things to
come to mind when you hear young woman with power in a fantasy
setting. I mean, magical power, not like
noble power, not like royal power or political power.
You think of the what would be classified as the virgin power
trope, which is a really common trope in fiction, which is you
have powers that you lose if you lose your virginity.
It's it's a lot of these versions of this out there.
It's an ancient trope. It's super old.
The most common subtrope of this probably is the unicorns prefer
virgins trope. This is a really really old
trope. It's traceable to Mahabharata,
an Indian epic which is part of ancient Hindu mythology.
There was a war between branches of the Kuru dynasty.
You guessed it, that's a royal dynasty that went to war against
itself. So figures, right?
It's actually traceable farther than this, but through like
iconography, you know, you know, drawn carvings and stuff like
that. But in terms of written version,
the Mahabharata was the first. So that's crazy super old, like
4th century BC or something like that.
But the twist here is that the Unicorn, not an animal, it is a
person. It translates literally as one
horn. And the original myth is about a
guy named Asgarngar. I don't know how to say it.
I which a name which I absolutely didn't pronounce
correctly. He's an ascetic and in ancient
Hindu mythology, ascetics who were ascetics for long enough
and for mastered it got to were granted one wish by the gods.
And to stop this particular ascetic from becoming a God, the
king of the of the region had him sent his daughter or someone
to seduce the ascetic. And then once they slept
together, well, you're not an ascetic anymore, are you?
You just gave in to worldly pleasure.
So that's how she stopped him so that there you go.
So then, then he lost his power for that.
So there you go. That's that's the actual like
scholarly original source for the unicorns prefer virgin's
trope, which is part of the virginity and power trope.
That is really, as I said, very ubiquitous.
And I probably didn't need to tell you that you've we've all
encountered it throughout, you know, our our days as readers
and of fiction and fantasy. So does Danny's belong on that
list? We don't think so, but maybe
because there's no indication that she lost her power after
losing her virginity after getting married, right?
And that isn't really a thing in A Song of Ice and Fire.
We don't have other examples of that.
Still, it's odd, isn't it, that that these mentions of her are
maiden daughter. That is a detail that gets
included in multiple times, so we shouldn't just ignore it.
That said, we it isn't obvious what it means.
It's also said in that quote that she that signs in portents
was of visions written down before the Doom.
Well, what about her visions after the Doom?
Did she stop having visions? That seems unlikely.
There's no other Targaryen dreamer we've ever heard that
about. Like they had dreams and then
they just stopped. I don't think we have an example
like that. Now we've of course there's
plenty of Targaryens that could have happened with and it just
wasn't documented, but it's hard for us to rest on that as a
likely concept because we have no other examples of it.
Did she stop having visions when she went to Westeros?
Maybe that was it. Maybe the change of location,
maybe the the loss of magic, Valyria collapsing and did a lot
of the magic in the world, a lot of the Dragons dying out.
Maybe just the magical forces were weaker and she wasn't able
to attune to them anymore. A lot of answers there.
It's it's there's some good solid theories, but we can't be
too sure, right. So the virgin power trope is it
may be George is toying with it here, but I don't think he's
fully engaging with it because it's just he doesn't bring it up
anywhere else. You know, it doesn't come up
elsewhere. But it is odd, right, that he
wrote it this way with the phrase maiden daughter.
And then there's no follow up. There's no adult Danis visions.
Like we don't know what happened to signs and portents.
It's a lost book. And that's part of what we'll
talk about today. Before all we know, there was a
Signs in Portents 2 Electric Boogaloo, but no copies of that
ever survived. Signs in Portents 3 Revenge of
the Unicorns. Yeah.
She wrote all these books, but the hell got destroyed.
We never heard about it. No.
Yeah, it's true. Actually, the Targaryens were
going to make that a franchise. That's how they were going to
make money in Westeros, the Signs in Portents franchise.
But no, it didn't work out for them.
Nina has a great take here on this.
She says it's less a literal connection between her
maidenhood and her prophetic powers and more a thematic 1.
Danny's, as Ainar's maiden daughter, was likely the least
power, powerful person in her family, in a very powerful
family. She's not the son that's going
to inherit. She's not a married woman who
can exercise power through her husband.
It's not some great Lord or lady.
Yeah, it was a teenager, a preteen girl.
That was the salvation of the entire family.
That's maybe the inversion George is working with here,
that it was a the least powerful member of the family that saved
them all. And I mean them all, right?
Not just the current family, but everyone that came after she
saved them all. So that's kind of what Danny is.
Danny in a sense, is the savior of the Targaryen.
She's bringing them back. She's the one who brings the
Dragons back. She's the one that's restoring a
lot of what they were, making them a power again.
And she's a teenager. She's young like Danis was.
And the name is similar, right? Danis Daenerys, right?
I mean, there's a lot of these like Rainey's other type
parallels or Daenerys is like kind of like Aries, you know,
Dan Aries. It's spelled a little
differently, but you can see that still Danny's Daenerys is
pretty close. Like of all the other Targaryen
names, Danny's is probably the closest one to Daenerys, right?
That's if I was like, what's the most similar one?
It's that, right? And and the other probably works
vice versa too. I.
Say, The funny thing is every time you try to Google Danny's
Targaryen and Google will be like, do you mean Daenerys
somehow? Like no I didn't.
I didn't. No.
That's really funny. Yeah.
It's like there's a raineries, you know, there is a Rainy's,
which might be, you could argue that's just as close to Danny's.
But for Daenerys, there isn't anything else really that close.
So I think Nina nails that. It's a really good take.
She comes into her power when she's unimportant.
Like everyone had made her an afterthought.
Illyrio and and Virus were using her as a pawn there.
You know, she was just a way to get Khal Drogo to be connected
to Viserys, to set up their whole bait plan to make Aegon
the hero. Yeah, she was nothing to them.
But then she rose to be the most important of all.
And that's that's also a strong parallel and great take, Nina.
Yeah. So.
And with the names and everything, it just really fits.
And both of them are taking their families to Westeros,
Right, Danny? Daenerys starts in Essos and
wants to migrate West. Danny's does too, for different
reasons, but it's to bring the Dragons over there.
It's to go to Dragonstone. They're going to end up in the
same place. Danny.
Danny went into the fire, the pyre.
Danny's fled before the fire. Stay away from the doom.
So he has a lot of strong parallels here.
And of course. Daenerys goes by Danny.
Yeah, Danny, Danny's. Yeah, good point.
Yeah, that's really close. And yeah, so this is just rife
with parallels here. We wanted to do a little bit of
research because I just couldn't remember, like before 2014,
before the World of Ice and Fire, what did we think
happened? What did we, how did we think
the Targaryen survived? What was it?
I think we just thought they moved.
You know, it might have been, we might have thought there was
some political upheaval. And then they fled from they,
they came out on the wrong side of a, of a political contest and
they fled so that they wouldn't get wiped out or something like
that. And they later invented this
story of a prophecy to, like, cover.
There's, like, everybody. The doom blew up Valyria.
No one's going to tell the truth version of our story.
No one's going to call out our lies here.
No. Danny set up.
Yeah. Prophecy.
Yeah, sure. One of our daughters from way
back when predicted all this. Yeah.
That's what happened. Sure.
No. There.
It probably did happen. But you can see.
And we'll touch on that on and off with this episode, that
maybe some of these details were exaggerated by the Targaryens to
make themselves look a little better.
I wouldn't go quite so far as to say the whole thing is made-up,
but that should be considered too.
Winners write history, and when everybody who knew the winners
is dead, you can't corroborate their story.
Nina found that the first time Danny's was name dropped in real
life was Worldcon 2012, when he was reading unpublished excerpts
from The World of Ice and Fire. Shay and I attended one of
those, not the World Con 2012. But we did hear some of those
early World of Ice and Fire readings and.
In 2014. Yeah, we heard one in 2014 was
the Lannister one, the western first time the Westerlands was
red. And I remember that because
there were some stuff in there that that he changed, remember,
like the the hooded man of the hooded necromancer of Bain Ford,
things like that. It was cool.
But didn't all stay. Let's talk about Danice's
dragon. We have every reason to believe
she had one They brought 5 from Valyria to Dragonstone and she
only had the one brother So where who else could have owned
these Dragons besides her right and and her her one brother and
you know her mother maybe probably I guess should say.
Now Anar had siblings. We're told he also had multiple
wives, so that could have accounted for some of the other
Dragons. But the children of Anar would
take precedence because they were going to be married.
They were going to be Lord and Lady next, so you'd think they'd
sort of have. They'd be first in line for
Dragons. And now Gaiman would come before
her. He was older and he was the boy.
I guess that matters. But either way, they were
expected to marry each other and rule together.
So let's refresh ourselves on this corner of Targaryen history
quote. Veigar and Meraxis had hatched
on Dragonstone. Valerian alone had come to the
island with Ainar the Exile and Danis the Dreamer, the youngest
of the five Dragons they brought with them.
The older Dragons had died during the intervening years,
but Valerian lived on, growing ever larger, fiercer, and more
willful. If we discount the tales of
certain sorcerers and mount banks as we should, he is
mayhaps the only living creature in the world that knew Valyria
before the Doom. We can safely ignore Veigar and
Meraxis when considering who Danis had as a mount because
they were born significantly later and because Blaring was
the youngest of the Dragons that Anar brought over.
Well, he's the least likely to be ridden by the head of the
household. He was.
Aynard probably had already had a dragon by the time Valerian
was born, and he wouldn't have picked a hatchling anyway.
This isn't the Egg in the Cradle era.
That tradition began in Westeros as far as we know.
Unless it was a revived tradition, but that was started
by Reyna, as in daughter of Anis and and Alyssa, so that's not
likely to be the case here. They didn't do the egg in the
cradle thing. So we can't use that as as as a
way of thinking about who how things would have gone.
So we're used to thinking Dragons in terms of how powerful
they are versus armies, right? Like dragon with an army with a
dragon is almost always going to be 1 without.
But here in the heart of Illyria, you have 39 other
families with Dragons. It's a different environment.
The calculus is a lot different. Like what they're considering,
what they're, what that, what kind of advantages it gives
them. It doesn't give them advantages
over the other dragonlord families.
It gives them perhaps equal footing at best.
Especially because we know the Targaryens weren't as powerful
as those other families. So it really fits that Valerian
was Danis's dragon. Add up all this evidence, the
smallest dragon at the time. She probably gets a dragon
because she's going to be the Lady of Dragonstone, the Lady of
House Targaryen in Valyria before they decided to move.
So she would be in line for an important dragon, but not the
biggest one. And since this was the youngest
one they had at the time, it just fits really well.
There's only 5 Dragons, Three or four of them were probably
already claimed, blah blah. There's not a lot of other
wiggle room here. It's certainly not a sure thing,
but we have long theorized that Valerium was written by Danis.
Because of that, Gaiman, as the future head of the household,
would have probably claimed a larger dragon, A big one.
One that was a full adult rather than one that's only 15 to 20
years old at most, right? So Danny's was probably the
youngest that was queued up for a dragon as well.
So it just all lines up pretty well.
Now. House of the Dragon full on was
like, yeah, we're going with that.
They had some text that I think we talked about at the time, but
y'all may have missed it on screen as Shea has this little
book that was visible in a in a scene or two as sort of a
background material. And we know who wrote this.
This was written by T T Mikkel, who is the only person in the
world that has the resume of being George R Martin's writing
assistant and a writer for House of the Dragon.
Nobody in the world has both those credits.
No one worked really close with George for years and is a writer
on the show, so she has a different level of credibility
and knowledge than the vast majority of other.
No shade on the other writers, I'm just saying she has this leg
up in terms of lore. She knows it better than anybody
on in that writing room. So we were super happy to see
this. And I immediately texted her.
I was like, T, did you write this stuff?
And she said yes. And she told me at the time
she's like, you feel free to share this.
This was months ago. We haven't had time.
We haven't had a occasion to share it until now.
But she said jokingly, I would much rather be associated with
this than that shrubbery stuff, which she wrote that too.
All that stuff about the singing shrubbery and the Valyrian
dragon Lord who was really into plants and all that.
That was from another book that you could see and translate and
all that. Anyway, So shout out to T She
did a great job with this. We're very happy to see.
She did some song lyrics. T did write some song lyrics,
yeah. She wrote the Nymerius song.
Yeah, that was really good. So she's sure her fingerprints
are all over a lot of the stuff. Her names and the credits, of
course, for House of the Dragon. And she went a little farther
with this. What she did was she had Danis
claim Valerian the night before she dreamt of the Doom.
So she claims Valerian, who is listed to be about only about
the size of a horse at that time, and that very night she
dreams of the Doom. That's pretty cool.
And they also invented a mother for Gaiman and Danis.
So that would be Anar's wife because we don't know her name,
and T named her Elena, which makes a lot of sense because
Elaine is also one of the daughters of Danis and Game, and
so it kind of makes sense that they would name one of their
daughters after their mother. It's also a recurring Targaryen
name, so it just fits. More on her later because T
fleshed out a bit of her personality in ways that I think
is a good template for us to consider how a lot of the
Targaryens felt about living in Dragonstone after having moved
away from Valyria. So more on that later.
Lady Sophia Valerian sends a super chat, says hello from the
DMV area. Have a great holiday weekend,
you as well, lady Sophia Valerian.
Glad we could be doing a topic here that relates to your
household indirectly and to the rest of you out there as well.
Have a great holiday weekend. We hope you're doing well.
Hope you're safe and happy enjoying this podcast in a in a
good place. Divining the doom.
We've said plenty of times that there's basically no way Aynar
would have listened to his maiden daughter about such a big
prophecy, such a thing that would cause them to move to
another continent, if she hadn't proven herself with other
prophecy first. Like there's no way this was the
first thing they gambled on. Like, well, looks like our
daughter's a dreamer. She hasn't proven it yet, we
haven't had a single one of her prophecies come true.
But let's uproot our entire family and move to Westeros
because of this, right? That doesn't make any sense,
does it? It's either it could be the
thing we said before that they made it all up to justify like
fleeing from some political thing.
They lost, you know, they were in danger and then they made-up
this prophecy stuff later. There's enough evidence to
suggest that it probably really did happen.
But again, I like entertaining these deconstructions of of
legends and and looking at how the winners would exaggerate
their their past to make themselves look better.
It's also kind of hard to imagine, though.
She was the only one, right? There's lots of prophecy,
there's lots of magic to predict the future in this world.
And Valyria was extremely steeped in sorcery, right?
And they were very open. Valyria was as a freehold to a
variety of religions, a variety of religions, many of which had
their own versions of prophecy, like the Red priests.
So do we, I suppose believe that a lot of them saw it, but it
just they didn't believe it. They didn't understand it or
they weren't willing to move to another continent to avoid it.
They just couldn't get themselves to accept it.
Maybe there was a lot of denial going on.
I tend to believe that some other people moved, some others
left, but not in a not on a scale that would have been
noticed historically, like some small sect, some small cult
leaves, you know, this other group with this followers is
maybe the some popular street prophet that they're listening
to him. So they go, they leave too,
because they hear that he is having dreams of, of this
violent destruction of the entire continent or of the city
or however the dreams manifest. It's just kind of hard to
believe the Danis was the only one, right?
Like that's, that's pretty tough.
It's also going to get really deep into theory.
There's always the idea that the weirwood network is responsible.
We'd be like, what? How is that possible?
Aziz Well, if the Werewood network is, is preparing itself
for a distant long term future battle against the others and
they know they're going to need the power of Dragons for that.
Well, they need to prepare for that was like, well, if they can
foresee the doom, they might They got to go.
Well, we need at least one of these dragonlord families to to
leave that place so that their Dragons survive, so that 102
hundred, 304 hundred, however many years from now, those
Dragons can help us defeat the others.
Now, of course, the Dragons died out anyway and then came back.
But but if those eggs and Dragons hadn't been rescued from
Valyria before the Doom, then the I don't even think that the
Dragons could have come back later, because even the eggs
would have all been destroyed, probably there may not have even
clutches left. So it's a thin theory.
It's very out there, but it's it's worth mentioning that, you
know, if you've got people that can see the future and they know
they're going to need Dragons, well then they would take steps
to that would explain why only one person or one family had
these dreams that they listen to because they were targeted.
The Werewood Nets, like let's target this young girl, give her
these dreams, make them real, make her believe them.
You know, do it in a way that her father is convinced because
she's been right about other things.
See, you see, when you stack it all up, it does kind of become a
little far fetched, but it's it's possible.
Nina adds that yeah, there's it's possible that people for
the most part, saw what they wanted to see when they're
looking for visions of the future.
Think of Melisandre. Melisandre just basically just
fills in the blanks, like, yeah, it's probably right.
And then tells people it's right.
Like she did with Eastwatch when she's envisioning the girl in
Gray on a dying horse. She's like, yeah, got to be
Arya. She just jumps to a lot of
conclusions there. It's a great example, a classic
example of someone seeing what they want and then being
confident without deserving it, right?
Like the it's unearned confidence.
But Melisandre is a very confident person.
She delivers these things with charisma and, you know, puts
them in a way that makes you believe them, right?
She's really convincing so that we could have a lot of that
going on. People don't want to go out
there and say everybody's going to die.
Like you sound like a crazy St. preacher.
Like the doom, the doom is coming.
Like we we've all probably seen a dude or it's usually a dude,
but a person on the street corner going, you know, the end
is nigh, you know, repent. Like nobody listens to that guy.
That's probably true in ancient times too.
Like who's going to listen to that?
No one wants to hear that, even if it's true.
Yeah, we're all, as a species, we're good at denial, especially
on a especially on a mass level. So, yeah, it's also, Nina also
has these Valyrian freeholders. There's they've been doing what
they've been doing for thousands of years.
And they probably just don't believe it.
They just, they're just maybe a little arrogant.
They're like, Nah, we got this. We we're so powerful.
We, we've got sorceress energy. We can control these volcanoes.
We rule the world. You know, we're not worried
about this. So, yeah, arrogance, you know,
arrogance paired with denial. And Yandel of all people does
allude to the faith of the lore, possibly being responsible or
partly responsible. He he says that others speak of
the priests of the Lord calling down the fire of their God and
queer rituals. Probably not.
But it goes to show how people just make these connections
because they don't have answers. And not having answers is an
unsatisfactory place to land for a lot of people.
A lot of us are very uncomfortable not landing on
something. We have to have reasons, even if
they aren't supported by evidence.
We hate mysteries, Not everybody, but that's the common
thing for people. It's like, we got to have an
answer here, you know, give me an answer so I can at least
think about something else. So did the red priest see the
dragonlords as favored by Rellore or?
Yeah, it is a whole nother subtopic here, but it's
interesting to consider. Like, how do Dragons figure into
the whole Rellorism angle? It's not, it's not exactly
explained to this point. Or was it the other way around?
Is it the doom was divine punishment by Rellore?
Like this is the ultimate power of fire being unleashed on a
civilization. They weren't Rellore
worshippers. You could easily see why they
deserve to be destroyed. They do all this manipulation of
fire and and all that and they don't give due to Rellore, the
God of all that. Like that's blasphemous.
You know, they should be thankful and we should give Anar
a little credit here. Probably going against the grain
would have been difficult. We saw how his family became a
laughingstock, which is, by the way, part of why the theory that
this was made-up to cover up some embarrassing political
failure is has a little bit of legs as an idea.
But again, I think this was something he had proof of.
His daughter had been right about several things.
She was already writing a book, Signs and Portents as a child.
So this isn't faith, This is evidence based, I think.
But there might have been a little faith mixed in there too.
But mostly I think it's evidence based, but there wasn't a lot of
time for this. Like how much could she have
proven if she was a child? Like how many possible?
There's no long term when you're what, 12 or 10 or something like
that. How many prophecies could she
possibly have been right about over just a decade or less?
Like she's not delivering prophecies when she's 2.
She can't even speak yet. So maybe she's four and she
starts delivering prophecies. That's kind of stretching it,
right? What a creepy kid, you know,
like what is she Alia from doom the dark, the speaking like an
adult the minute she pops out of the womb.
Like I don't think so. And she would go on to marry her
brother. So, you know, maiden daughter
couldn't have lasted that long. They probably got married
relatively early in life because, well, it was a it was a
foregone conclusion that they would and it's not like there
were a lot of them. They need to, they need to breed
to keep the the family alive. It's also possible that Aynar
may have been more ready to accept the idea of voluntary
exile if he knew it was going to happen, if he felt confident
that his daughter was right. And they're all laughing at him.
He's like, I can take the laughter.
I can take the shame and the shunning, because they're all
going to explode. And then who's going to have the
last laugh? I'm going to have to be patient
about it. It might suck.
It might suck for a long time, and it would be 12 years.
So it was a long time. We're not 100% sure Anr even
lasted all the 12 of those years.
But if he did, he would have it would have been maybe bitter.
So he's like, yeah, I'm not happy that Valyria exploded.
But those jerks that laughed at me and I showed them, you know,
really don't know what was in his mind at that point.
But, you know, I could see how it would all be very distracting
to when the when the tidal waves showed up, it was like, oh,
what's that smoke in the distance?
Did it? Did it really happen?
Oh my God, the doom happened. Holy crap.
Well, they wouldn't have called it the Doom yet, but that's when
they would have maybe started kicking around names for it.
So none of this undermines the point of Danny's being a Seer,
but you know, because we know a lot of it, like a lot of
Valyrian houses employed, like sorcerer Princess and they
controlled the the flames of the 14 volcanoes and all that.
So there's a lot of magic already implied here.
So yeah, the willingness to believe is somewhat preloaded
here, but I think what's even more interested or interesting
is how much the Targaryens rely on prophecy after this.
And you can see why they're only alive today because their
ancestor Anar listened to Danis in the 1st place.
So that's going to tilt you as a whole as a family unit towards
believing in prophecies given one saved your whole family from
exploding. The ball sends a super chat says
yay made it glad y'all guys are still going yeah, I'm glad you
made it too poof ball. We we always appreciate when
y'all show up live it it's it's great when y'all consume our
content. You know anytime whether you
watch it afterwards or during before it's all great for us.
We love that. But when you come live and hang
out and and chat with the other commenters and and join the
community like that it is it's special for us.
So we appreciate that. Let's talk about before the span
of time, just before the doom. Say, let's say after the
prophecy was delivered, but before it actually happened.
After they moved, but before the doom actually happened.
Here is a brief quote. 12 years before the Doom of Valyria, 114
BC, Aynar Targaryen sold his holdings in the Freehold and the
lands of the Long Summer and moved with all his wives,
wealth, slaves, Dragons, siblings, kin and children to
Dragonstone, a bleak island citadel beneath a smoking
mountain in the Narrow Sea. Really sounds like the setup to
a sitcom. It is, in fact, there.
We've got more tropes for you here.
Given this topic is low on direct detail, we're able to
play with some of the the vagueness in our own way, which
is its own kind of fun. But just before that, let me set
it up a little. This is a simple statement,
right? He moved everybody but that list
wives, wealths, slaves, Dragons, siblings, kin.
And there's a lot, there's a lot of people implied there, but we
don't hear about any of them really, except for the children
and the Dragons, the other kin, the cousins.
Like who are these people? Is this House Koharis and House
Baratheon right? Is this who we're talking about?
Probably like lesser lordlings, kind of the equivalent of a
House Cassell or a House pool. Houses that don't have land but
are deeply entwined with House Stark and have been holding, you
know, hereditary titles like Master at arms or the household
steward for generations. So the Targaryens probably had
things like that. We don't know who those houses
are necessarily, but yes, Koharis would have been one of
them and then Baratheon another one.
But yeah, who are those other people?
What happened to the other siblings and the kin?
And we don't really know, but it's something that maybe gets
developed a little bit later. So the word bleak is important
here, really important, right? The Bleak Island Citadel beneath
the Smoking mountain in the Narrow Sea.
Imagine living at the heart of the most powerful civilization
ever known, wielding immense wealth and control for Eon, and
then leaving to live in a Bleak Island Citadel.
And yeah, if the story of this flight in their early years that
Dragonstone were written, if this was like a a separate story
or ATV show being made, it would absolutely be the fish out of
water trope or the from New York to nowhere trope.
It's like Schitt's Creek. If you all know the show
Schitt's Creek, it's a family that loses everything except
they oops. We also have we happen to not
lose this one small town we own and we'll go live there.
This is kind of like that. They didn't lose it all.
They gave it all up. In this case, they they they
still had a bunch of money. Except for that small island
they own, yeah. Except for that small island,
it's the same. Thing it really is like that
show, yeah. And so this is where the TV show
added some extra background detail.
We pointed out that they gave a name to 1 of Aynar's wives, the
one who's Danny's mother. That's again, Elena and Hot Dee
portrays her as sort of trying to live the lifestyle as if she
was still in Valyria, just kind of stubbornly behaving that way
and still spending money as if they had the incomes they used
to have, which is that's a fish out of water trope right there.
You get the rich family that still acts like they're rich and
powerful, but they're they're living around a bunch of people
who don't even care that they're rich or it's not are not
impressed by it or, you know, variety of different shenanigans
pop up. So there you go.
Here is another quote to fill out the picture a bit more.
Here it is quote. At its apex, Valyria was the
greatest city in the known world, the center of
civilization. Within its shining walls, 2
score Rival houses vied for power and glory in court and
council, rising and falling in an endless, subtle, OFT savage
struggle for dominance. The Targaryens were far from the
most powerful of the dragonlords, and their rivals
saw their flight to Dragonstone as an act of surrender, as
cowardice. But Lord Anar's maiden daughter
Danis, known forever afterward as Danis the Dreamer, had
foreseen the destruction of Valyria by fire, and when the
Doom came 12 years later, the Targaryens were the only dragon
Lords to survive. Again, the mention of maiden
daughter Danis. It's almost always included here
as an important detail or as a detail, so we assume it's
important or notable because of that.
Ena has another good theory here.
The mockery from the other dragonlords might imply that
Aynar didn't tell them he got the prophecy from his daughter.
He believed it, but then made-up some other reason why he was
leaving. Didn't say we're leaving because
we know the doom or a doom is coming.
We we, we believe this entire continent's going to explode, so
we're leaving. That's another angle to this.
That is a a very worthy thought That explains a lot.
That explains why they didn't leave.
Because they didn't know about it.
Ainar was the only one to learn, or the only important,
historically notable person to to hear about it, and he didn't
tell anyone else other than, you know, his allies, the ones who
were going to leave with him. Do you think he didn't tell
anyone else because he wanted profit gain or because he didn't
want to be further made fun of? Maybe a little of both, yeah.
Like, he may have seen the long term advantage of being the only
dragonlords to survive, which is what happened.
But in order to pull that off, he would have to suffer.
He'd have to do pull, do the John Connington kind of thing,
like pretend that the shame was earned.
Like, yeah, I drank myself to death in exile.
And then. But he's all just waiting for,
you know, 15 years later, 17 years later are going to come
back and we'll you, we'll show you.
Well, they won't actually get shown.
They'll just be exploded. Everybody's be gone.
But either way, it's a long term play that it did work.
You got to say it. It worked.
If that's what he was aiming for, it played out brilliantly.
And and of course they're not going to like look for reason.
They're like, why is he really leaving?
You know, is there? Does he know about something we
don't like? No, they're just going to be
glad that in one of these forty families is leaving.
They're going to laugh at them for being weak, but they're also
going to be happy that that's just one less seat at the table
to fight over. All right.
So some other smaller family might be able to move up and
take their place amongst the 40 families.
Not that it's literally 40 at all times.
Probably. That's just an estimate, but
still, it does create an opening.
There's a small power vacuum that could be filled for about
12 years until they're all gone. The bigger power vacuum came
afterwards. But 12 years is a long time.
Like, did doubt start to creep in?
Was Aynor like, Nope, it's going to happen, be patient, y'all?
Or were some of his vassals like this was a mistake, I'm going
back. Like some of them returned to
Valyria. Like, yeah, I got antsy, you
know? Can you imagine if someone's
like, I'm just going to go back for a quick visit and like, and
it was that week. It was that week.
Whoops. Like bro, I would not go.
It could happen anytime. It's like a ticking time bomb.
Yeah, it could be tomorrow, it could be 5 years from now.
But like, who takes that risk? Yeah, you've been told that for
10 years and you're like, I I'm going, OK, I'm going and then.
You're like, Oh no, Oh no. Like did she have more visions?
Did she have follow-ups? It's like, yo, I have not had
another vision about this. It's been five years and I
haven't had another one. They'd be like, were you wrong
or is this like, 50 years in the future?
You know, Yeah. There's no timeline for these
visions. These things aren't, like,
notated with time stamps, you know?
She's not like, oh, yeah. In the dream, there were, like,
numbers. There was, like a chart.
Yeah, I got it all. Don't worry.
I have a photographic memory. Nah, of course not.
How would she have any sort of sense of when, You know what I
mean? Like I have an image of the of
Valyria exploding, but I what's going to tell her the timeline
of that? You know, I mean, she could have
a sense of it, like, oh, it's soon, It's soon, but maybe not,
might just be like, Yep, at some point in the future this will
happen. But but we also like that's a
general question about how this all works.
Like what triggers her vision? Does she know when they're
coming? Can she sit there and
concentrate, you know, or is it just kind of random?
Like Red priest can gaze into the flames.
That's a trigger for them. The Ghost of High Heart, I don't
even know. She can just seem to do it at
will. So we really don't know how it
works for Danis. If we go by other Targaryen
dreamers, it is sort of out of their control, just kind of
happens. But she is kind of unique in a
lot of ways. So maybe it's a little more
straightforward. Maybe it's a little more like
Macoro or the Ghost of High Heart where she can just kind of
rattle off facts about the world, you know, just by
thinking about it, like just kind of like the go goes to
higher. I just will tell them where
Barrick was like, well, you came to me to find Barrick.
He's there. He's over here.
You know, there's a wedding at the twins coming up.
She just knows these things. So Danny's that's not usually
how Targaryen dreamers are portrayed, but it we don't
exactly have a lot of bases here for what it's supposed to be
like. So yeah, it's it's very much an
open line here. Here's another little tidbit I
like. It's this is more of this is
show cannon but it it's a good little take that I enjoy.
This line is given to given to us by the animated History of
the Seven Kingdoms. Imagine Harry Lloyd's voice
saying this because he's a narrator for this line.
Legends claim that his daughter foresaw the destruction of the
city in a dream. More likely, Ahnar met with some
mishap at court and chose exile over execution.
So even the show extra bonus material is like entertaining
the idea that ain't our made it up to to save face.
Which is cool because we love the deconstruction of myths and
legends. George does a lot of that.
So I appreciate the show having Viserys of all people scoff at
it because Viserys is the, you know, he's the experiencing the
end of the Targaryen dynasty. So he a part of him might resent
the notion that they were that powerful in the past.
Like, yeah, we wasn't that big. He loves the idea of them having
Dragons and all that stuff. He can't deny that.
But the idea of this is like he's cynical about it.
But that's what it is. I think.
It's not history. This is Viserys opinion, but
it's a valid opinion. It's it's, you know, considering
deconstruction of myths and legends is a valid way to
approach the material. So yeah, let's see how this
fits. Is it, Is this a possibility for
a made-up thing or not? And then go from there.
So what about after? What about after the dune?
What my life must have been like?
It must have be just like, wow. And it's hard to imagine, but we
can at least give it a shot. There's another line from Harry
Lloyd's Viserys quote. Then Anar's descendant settled
into it like a tomb for their lost homeland.
So again, he's just denigrating his ancestors, saying they were
all pining for the glory days of speak.
What a hypocrite. Pining for the glory days.
Ava Saris. Doesn't sound like you at all,
does it? So, yeah, so he's, he's
imagined, he's projecting, I think, because they must have
been sad over their lost glory, like I am.
Those yeah, those histories and lores are good for like
capturing the character psyche a lot of the time very well.
Yeah, they're, they're surprisingly solid for, I mean,
even their show Canon differs. Yeah, they are.
They're surprisingly good. Even though they're they differ.
You have to keep your Canon straight.
When we're dealing with Canon like this.
So, so little of it is settled, which is why we have more time
for TV show content today, even though this is still
overwhelmingly book content. You know, the TV show stuff gets
a mention. It wouldn't take long for them
to know that the doom had happened, right?
There would be like visual signs.
You could look out the window of Dragonstone and probably see the
smoke in the distance, and there would be waves and stuff.
And it wouldn't be long before merchant ships arrived with news
like, yo, that continent's gone. There were some people that were
close enough to it that survived, like maybe in
Volantis, which is, you know, just outside the the continent
that it didn't sink. But maybe 10 miles, 20 miles, 30
miles West or east, it did. So there might have been some
incredible visual, like witnesses, people who saw it
happen. And their stories would be
sought after by people in power. They'd want to know what
happened. And just the immediate
aftermath, people writing down their reasons, the rumors, the
stories, just there's nothing like it in the real world for us
to point to. Like, remember that day that
that entire continent vanished? What?
What's the modern equivalent? Like China's sinking into the
sea? I mean, China's not Valyria,
like the US, maybe the entire East Coast of the US, like New
York and the Eastern Seaboard sinking into the sea.
Is that the closest thing we can think of?
Well, yeah. Nothing like that's ever
happened. Atlantis.
That didn't really happen. Atlantis is a myth, but the idea
of it is as close as we can get. Maybe.
And that's only one city, not a whole, like, civilization.
So weird. Yeah, I did like did Aynar like
hop on his dragon and fly over there to take a look for
himself, which is like a reasonable thing to do.
Like he would have an unique way to go see for himself.
Maybe Gaiman went with him, maybe Danis went, you know,
they. Couldn't get very close.
No, they probably couldn't get very close.
The air would be toxic, but they could at least get close enough
to be like, whoa, this is really bad.
Like, we're not even close and we can't go any farther.
That alone would be stunning, you know, wow and she might have
follow up visions like she would see the blasted landscape of
Valyria and then she could go fly out and see it and be like,
Yep, confirmed. I dreamed of this crazy thing.
Just it's it's again. I use this example in the intro.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think the hope of Valyria is going to
explode and then it happened. That's not satisfying to be
right about that. You go you.
She would spend that whole decade going, I hope I'm wrong,
I hope I'm wrong, I hope I'm wrong.
And then it actually happens. Like that would make any dream
you ever have of something bad just frightening.
Like, oh, God, there's another one.
Of course, nothing else would probably ever be this bad, but
maybe it maybe it would be. In the second-half of the
episode, we're going to discuss all the potential things she
could have seen in other dreams. Like, did she see Valerian's
future? Did she see the Dance of the
Dragons? There's a lot of examples like
that that we got to consider. And it may have kicked off a
whole new wave of dreams for her.
This is a new world now. Valyria's gone.
The world is vastly changed in a second.
The full extent of those changes takes a while to play out, but
she might have dreams of that, of the new world, of what's
going to happen. Maybe she dreamt of Gagasos's
rise and then death to, well, the Red Death, the plague that
wiped them out. These are just massive world
events that could have popped up in her mind.
Maybe not because they don't have anything to do with her
directly, but we don't know how these things work.
What is the nature of prophecy? Do you see things that are
irrelevant to you entirely that you have no perspective for?
Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Maybe you just don't write those
down because you don't know what to say.
More of the after after. You know, you're talking about
her mother Elena and and and TS concept for her or whatever, and
her being kind of, I don't know, a fashionista.
She likes to spend money or whatever, right?
Well, anyways, the idea just that Danis might have had a
conflict with her mother the whole time they're there where
her mother's resenting her for making them come there.
So there would be moments where Danis was like, man, I hope I'm
right. Oh God, I'm I'm messed up in the
head for thinking a whole continent.
But like she, she would have had to have had moments where she
was like, I'm tired of justifying myself.
I've all these people like not just her mother, but probably
many people resented her for making them all calm.
And so I, I, she has to have had moments where she was like.
A pariah. I'm right, yeah.
And then she felt bad for hoping she was right.
Yeah, I was like, if I'm right, all these people die.
If I'm wrong, then all these people are correct to label me
like an outcast or a pariah. At least her father was on her
side, you know, so that helps. At least he seemed to be on her
side. Maybe he even started to waffle
a bit. You never know.
Yeah. Exactly, like anytime anyone
doubts her, she would have these moments.
But she's like, oh I hope I'm wrong, I'm right, but she
doesn't want to be right anyways.
It's just really complex. It had to have been very
troubling to her. It really would like this is the
thing. Like in any media, in any story,
in any fantasy element, sci-fi will you name it.
If there's anyone who can predict the future, they are
unhappy. There is.
It's almost 99.9%. Like it's super hard to think of
an example of a character who can predict the future or who
has accessed the future and it goes well for them.
Like what are the exceptions? Like, I don't know, Back to the
future when not even really like Biff stole the the the sport
Almanac book so he could win bets and that ruined the future.
So like, at least everything's bad.
It's universally bad and George isn't that's not a trope.
George reverse. Like, yeah, we're going to stick
with prophecy equals bad because it's it causes conflict.
Like it's too easy to look at and see how that would screw you
up. It's hard to look at that and be
like, yeah, this is a benefit, you know, seeing what's going to
happen. It takes the saver out of life.
You, you just know everything that's going to happen.
There's so many reasons why it's bad.
Very few reasons why it's good, Although there are some.
This is the drought era right now with the news that the
night, Night of Seven Kingdom show is pushed to January or
February. It's going to be quite a while
between show seasons. House of the Dragons, obviously
really far between seasons. It's a lot of production effort
to get that done. So this is kind of like a a low
point for the fandom. There's always still a we never
run out of things to talk about. We have a list of topics that's
never going to run out, like literally, but definitely fewer
people are interested in Game of Thrones content right now than
let's say they will be in a year.
That's just how it is. It waxes, it wanes.
There's ups and downs. The fandom is always very
strong, but it it, it can be more or less from a certain
baseline. So that's why we really rely on
you all this time of when we're in these low points, when the
fandom's in a bit of a drought era, because there's just not as
many people around that are interested.
So we rely on you, the hardcore fans, to keep us going.
And the best way to do that is through Patreon.
Sign up for whatever level fits you best.
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If you sign up, you get access to our polls, to our bonus
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Once again, that's patreon.com History of Westeros.
Several questions from you all today, which I think is great.
I love getting questions from you all.
This is an interesting topic and one that's fraught with mystery
and difficult questions to answer, Desal says.
Is it mentioned how old of a religion Rellore is?
Like does it predate Valyrian religion?
We don't know now. We don't know how old it is, but
I believe it's extremely old. Like it's older than we know.
I some of the records may have been lost when the doom
happened, like there may have been ancient records of how it's
of how it began, because we're pretty sure it got its start in
Valyria. It became monotheistic, which is
when it became kind of hostile to the other religions there.
So they left because they wanted to be in a place that wasn't
open to other religions. They wanted to establish
themselves as the only religion. And well, in the long term that
kind of happened. I mean, they, they aren't the
only religion, but they are the most powerful and numerous of an
Essos. So yeah, that's kind of hard to
say. Now, a couple of y'all, Sir
Rogar and Pyramidion, for example, are totally on the
Valerian having a connection to the dreams here, like whether
it's Valerian directly giving Danis the dream, like the the
power of the dragon contains some of this prophetic energy
that Danis can tap into and see like see through the Dragon's
eyes. We've seen little bits of
supernatural connectivity between Targaryens and their
Dragons. Well, you know, it's not as
powerful as the skin changer bond, but there's a little
something there that goes beyond just, you know, pet and human
right. There's definitely a little more
to it than that. And you know, there's there's
things like Valerian will go back to Valyria under with area
riding him and we'll see the doom, the effect of the doom,
which may be that's something that Danny saw was Valerian's
future vision up close, like with his own eyes of what
Valyria turned into. So a vision of the future
through her Dragon's eyes. That's fitting that that could
work, right? That's not stretching the way
the supernatural powers seem to work in this world.
Here's an old tweet from Glidus. Shout out to Glidus.
Big fan of Glidus. We had him and Alt shift X
hanging out at our house last year.
That was good times. I wish I could do this in his
voice, yeah. Me too.
Valerian really was the main character, wasn't he?
Foresaw the doom, cyclically warned his rider Danny's, forged
the Seven Kingdoms in his flames, ruled over it for
decades, took a kid on a deadly joyride so he could see home one
last time, and died due to his saris's cringe.
That's Gladys is hilarious. That is a great take.
And and where is the lie? Where what what's wrong about
all that? You could.
This is a valid interpretation too.
It's not it's a little comical, but it's also like, yeah, that
all adds up. That all aligns.
You go to our Valerian the Black Tread episode for main character
Valerian action. Yeah, we, we were on that tip as
well. Here's a here's an A possible
ancestor of Valerian Cannibal, the dragon says.
Are the Dragons sending the dreams or someone else sending
them to get things they want, like the Children of Forest
maybe. Maybe they're just like
subconscious projectors of dreams.
Like they're too, I feel like they're too beastly and
animalistic to be like, you know, like the intelligent
Dragons of some stories like Smaug or whatever.
They're not, They're not that. But yeah, they, but they are
magical beings that could, you know, project energies that
humans could pick up on like a radar.
You meant descendant, not ancestor.
Oops. Yeah, descendant.
Yeah, not ancestor. Yes, the cannibal was descendant
of Valerian, not ancestor of Yes much later Valerian older,
probably there is some doubt, but yes, Blair and probably
older. Christina Kay says fun thing I
noticed about Targaryen names. A lot of the ray named women
were or should have been Queens and it sounds a lot like Reina.
Reina, which means queen. Oh, that's cool.
Yeah. I wonder if charge did that on
purpose. That's interesting.
Huh. Have maybe maybe further
research is is called for in this case.
Christina Kay. Good one, Magister 343 says.
Do we know that Danis and Gaiman had the same mother?
Valyrians tended to be polygamist.
Actually, that's a good call. We don't we the family tree.
We kind of do though, because the family tree says they both
come from the same pairing, even though we know that there were
multiple wives for Anar but and George did do that family tree.
So probably. But if George, I think he gave
himself room to maybe change that.
But I would suspect it's the same mother.
That's a very good, very good call of Magic 343 that it's not
a sure thing. Bryson Chung says.
The only happy future series I could think of are the second
Foundation. In the Foundation series, they
seem pretty OK with being entirely a secret as the Galaxy
collapsed around them. Yeah.
So even then they'll even in
this positive future vision, they're still amidst just
everything going horribly like a human civilization collapsing
into a dark age in this sci-fi setting, which is a big part of
Foundation. Shout out to that show, which is
coming back in July. Yeah.
That's true. Yes it is.
Poof, Ball says says another super chat says Danny's had a
weirwood tree bed. Just kidding.
It's possible. The the Valyrians, the
Targaryens, they brought in all sorts of fancy things from
Westeros and they wanted the rare woods.
And it's possible. It's possible.
Actually. Let's talk about the Century of
Blood. Given all these mentions of her
being a maiden before the Doom, most of her life was probably
during the Century of Blood. After it, she was probably in
her mid 20s when the Doom happened, maybe even a little
younger. And unless she died young, which
is possible, then we got to figure she lived probably 20-30,
maybe 40-50 even years on Dragonstone after the Doom.
Here's a relevant quote for us. Yet Even so, for the best part
of 100 years after the Doom of Valyria, the rightly named
Century of Blood, House Targaryen looked E not West and
took little interest in the affairs of Westeros.
Gaiman Targaryen, brother and husband to Danis the Dreamer,
followed Anar the Exile as Lord of Dragonstone and became known
as Gaiman the Glorious. Gaiman's son Aegon and his
daughter Elena ruled together after his death.
We don't know how long Eynar lived, but he was probably still
Lord when the doom occurred, which would have given him that
grim satisfaction. And knowing he made the right
call, and knowing that his family was now the only family
of dragonlords in the world, that's pretty huge, right?
But again, this these intervening years might have
been very difficult. We already have this this take
on Danny's mother, Elena, and her still trying to live like a
socialite in a in a backwater. What she would have seen as a
backwater. And they're just the kind of
people she would hang around with just literally don't exist
anymore. And if there were otherwise,
there could have been unhappiness as they just had
nothing to do. None of their old friends, none
of their old society. Just this is this place that
they shunned forever. They didn't care about Westeros.
They looked on it as a backwater.
Now they have to live there. Yeah.
Like, it wouldn't have been pretty.
It wouldn't have been happy, wouldn't have been a happy
environment, especially with what some of these theories
about. Yeah, maybe Danis herself was
looked down on or they resented her for that.
Even after the doom happened, even after she was right.
They they wouldn't. They're too proud, a lot of
these people probably to apologize that OK, you were
right. Maybe one or two of them did.
But a lot of them was still 12 years of resentment.
They just can't undo that. They're still they're still
resentful. It's it's, it's set by that
point. That's just a pattern.
It's a habit at that point. It isn't, it's no longer
governed by a logical outcome. It's like, no, I've resented you
for 12 years, even though you don't deserve it anymore because
you were right. I still resent you, you know,
and, and again with this bring and it comes back to this point
of when are profits ever happy? So you've got probably unhappy
Danis, probably unhappy household, probably unhappy
everything. Probably, you know, the world
they live in now, the doom that like everybody they knew was
dead. It just there's a lot to look at
here and think, yeah, they were probably kind of miserable.
You know, maybe they made the most of it.
But there's a lot to a lot of evidence, or at least
circumstantial evidence that would lead to to a conclusion of
they were unhappy. They were unhappy.
And this also has a bit of an aside.
This is partly why the Targaryens didn't exercise their
power in Westeros sooner. Why Aegon when and his sisters
when they did the conquest. This was a big change of policy
or a a big change of perspective because they were still stuck in
Essos. Even though they moved to to
Westeros. All their interests, their
lifestyle, their thousands of years of history were still set
in Essos. All their business connections
that might still exist. They might still have trade with
Volantis and lease and Pentos and all that.
They would have maybe some distant relatives there.
They might have some land in some of those other places, you
know, so they still have connections to all these places,
connections that they wouldn't yet have in Westeros and weren't
trying to establish because they looked down on it.
Even though they lived there, they were still kind of, they're
still like a little bit of separation.
It was like, yeah, we're not like these other Westeros.
We're still Valyrians. You know, they wanted to hold on
to that identity even though it was a dead identity.
And I guess this is when she got her nickname, right?
They. It said there in one of those
quotes we read. It said thereafter she was known
as Danny's the Dreamer. So, yeah, once the doom came and
word got out that she had predicted it, if it hadn't
already been out there, then yeah, like, oh, that's the girl
that predicted this. Whoa.
In a land where, you know, half of people get nicknames.
Yeah, of course she got one there.
You know, like people, you would think, like, some people would
be in awe of her, like some of the servants of Dragonstone that
knew she had predicted they'd be like, oh, my God, like she
predicted that. Wow, what are the what are the
winning lottery numbers? Danis, let's check out her
brother husband a bit. Gaman the Glorious.
What a pair those names together Gaman the Glorious and Danis the
Dreamer, Lord and Lady of Dragonstone ruling over
Blackwater Bay. Lord and Lady of alliteration.
That's right, So before assuming AR was still alive during the
Doom, Gaiman would have been heir along with his sister, but
he would be the the primary to the only Dragon Lord family in
the world if he wasn't already that.
Because it's possible that Anar died and he was already Lord
when the Doom came. What made him glorious though?
Why was he so glorious? An interesting time to earn that
nickname right? The Century of Blood.
We know why Danny's had her nickname.
It's extremely straightforward, but glorious is like, that's
kind of not very specific, is it?
It's certainly makes him sound like he was big successful,
right? If you called him Fire and Blood
says he was the greatest Targaryen Lord of the century of
blood. What if that doesn't tell us
anything? What greatest is about as
specific as glorious, right? It's he was successful,
competent, powerful. I guess you could at least say
he probably wouldn't have gotten that nickname if he had been
short lived, if he'd only ruled for a few years.
It's not a lot of time to acquire such a big name like
that glorious. Like you got to earn that one.
Like a lot of most Targaryens didn't have names that were so,
you know, unabashedly positive like that.
Even Aegon the Conqueror is like, that's an intimidating,
respectable name. But Conqueror isn't like
necessarily like a compliment. I mean, in most circles it is in
Westeros, but it's it's not as straightforward as great or
glorious, you know? You know, his mother and father.
We don't know how well Aynar adapted.
We know from Shokan that his mother didn't, assuming that was
his mother, Elena. Maybe Gaiman adapted better.
You know, he moved there as a younger man.
So did Danis as a younger woman. So maybe they were able to make
the most of it, adapt better because they didn't miss Valyria
as much. They weren't as attached to it,
right? Maybe they even embraced their
new, their new life. They they found a way to like
it, you know, but because of that focus E rather than W,
there is this sort of clinging to the past idea that shadows
over the whole thing, right. And if they're looking E well,
what does that mean? It must be dealing with the free
cities. Those are the that's the power
that still exists there. That's who filled the power
vacuum of Valyria being gone, at least on this side of Essos.
On the other side of Slavers Bay, Obviously the Ghiscari were
on the rise again. And as we mentioned before,
Gagasos was emerging as a power in the Basilisk Isles, and some
of these may have been people that Dragonstone had dealings
with, but we're guessing it was the more regional players they
were involved with. And it's interesting to consider
now, yes, Dragonstone had been built.
The castle was there, but was it fully built?
Was it in its final form? Did the Targaryens add to it?
They certainly developed the island more, more like building
of small towns and smaller hold fast and maybe expanding the
agriculture. Ditto drift mark.
So we can't just think, we can't just assume and we shouldn't
think of it as they move to Dragonstone and it's the
Dragonstone of today. No, definitely not.
It was held by petty Lords back in those days and they wouldn't
have had the money to fully develop it into the way it is
now. Ditto drift mark.
As I said, like drift Mark, building all its ports, building
Hull and Spice Town, these other things.
This popped up later. Right now, Dennis, if she was
the type of dreamer that could just rattle things off, that
just could be like the ghost of high Heart and be like, yeah,
they're just going to be ships over here.
This Lord's going to go on this day to this place.
If she just knows things, then that could explain part of why
gaming was game in the glorious. If he just like had this Direct
Line to future events, right, that would give you a big leg up
right now. We got to ask the question
though, is that really how George uses prophecy or
foretelling in the song of ice and fire?
It's debatable. Again, Melisandre makes a lot of
errors, but the ghosts are higher.
We come back coming back to her as an example.
She just like knows where people are on on a on a with a snap of
the fingers. So yeah, I'd say yes, it does
work that way sometimes. Macoro as well make some very
specific mundane predictions. He says, yeah, I'll tell you,
Victorian, where some of your lost ships are.
And he's right. Victorian separated from a bunch
of ships and they find some and he tells them where they can
find prey. He's like, you're going to go
over here and there's going to be some merchant ships.
He's very specific about it, and he's right.
So this begs a question of like, different types, different
categories of profits, visionaries, dreamers, they
don't all work the same. Some of them just have constant
flood of visions. Some of them only do because of
where they are. Like it goes to high heart if
she left the Weywood stump spot she lives in.
If she left high heart, would her vision still work so well?
Probably not, because explicitly her Thoros's visions don't work
well there because it's a magic that he can't tap into that
maybe interferes with other magics, like a signal
interfering with another signal. So we don't really know how to
categorize Danis as as a as a prophet.
What category of of visionary is she?
So I don't think she was this kind, but maybe she was.
It would explain a lot about why gaming was gaming the glorious.
But it it may be more likely it's just he was just competent,
intelligent, took advantage of his circumstances effectively.
So they're they're children, Aegon and Elena, plus another
daughter. There's a third child from them
who's unnamed. Her descendants will pop up
later, so hold on to that thought for now.
But just to focus on Aegon and Elena for a minute, just as
Gayman and Danis married, so did these two.
So they continued the sort of at this point unbroken line of
Targaryens marrying their marrying brother to sister.
So 4 generations later is Aegon Rainey's and Visenya.
So this Aegon was the great great grandfather of Aegon,
Renis and Visenya, and Elena of course was their great great
grandmother. Now that other unnamed daughter,
she married a petty Lord that's probably not Valarian since
Valarian's not petty. Petty usually means like they
have the title of Lord, but they don't actually have land.
Again, the Cassells, the pools of Stark fame.
So again, this could be Coharis or Baratheon, something like
that. Or it could be a vassal of the
Valarians, like one of their one of the other smaller families on
Driftmark. Like for example, the tollets
are sworn to the Royces and the bees berries are sworn to the
Hightowers, and then the Hightowers in turn are sworn to
Highgarden. So yeah, could be one of these
relationships. And some of these houses are so
small that we don't even know all their names.
Like there's lesser houses that would be part of that that
George could name tomorrow in A Song of Ice and Fire.
And it wouldn't be weird because they're just so tiny.
Maybe they've got 50 fighters to their name or two ships.
You know, some of Stannis's extremely lesser noble houses of
the Narrow Sea. Would it, would it be hard for
Aegon and Elaine to be the, the child of, of this, of, of a
woman who was a prophet like that?
Because if we take what we've said about how difficult it is
to be a prophetess and to have be burdened with this
foreknowledge, that might not make you a great mother.
Like you're too burdened by all this, the weight of everything
you know and everything that you know that's going to happen.
All these things we've said about how unhappy it might make
you, like that doesn't exactly make for a good picture as a
parent, does it? Like it'd be hard to be
positive. It'd be hard to like be happy
all the time, which is what you want for your children.
You want to present a positive image.
You want, you know, pump them up and be happy and, and provide
that environment, but be difficult living in the shadow
of the doom, living in the shadow of the century of blood,
living in the the death of their entire culture.
Like what a strange, unique scenario.
So it's really hard to put ourselves in their shoes.
But all you can see how a lot of it would be kind of negative,
but there will be positives too. They're the only Dragonlord
family in the in the world. That would be a point of pride.
The future might still be bright despite the past.
There might be things to look forward to.
A lot of it's just kind of attitude, I guess, you know,
like you're some people would look down on all this and it
would be it would bring them down and make them depressed.
But others could see the the Silver Linings to their
scenario, their situation. And these kids, well, they can't
miss Valyria. They didn't know it.
It's definitely different for Danis and Gaiman and even more
so for their parents who spent most of their lives in Valyria.
Had to give that up. This Aegon and Elena, they're
the first generation of Targaryens born in Westeros.
That's a huge deal. So they don't miss Valyria.
They only have stories of it, right?
They don't know anything about it.
It's kind of like Danny only getting stories of the Seven
Kingdoms from her brother, except it Aegon and Elena
probably got more accurate stories than what Viserys told
Danny. But everything she knows about
her family and and Westeros and the usurper comes from Viserys.
So like that's kind of be going to be the same here.
They're going to learn about their family and Valyria and the
Doom from just these elder members of their family.
Because everybody else who knew these things is dead, right?
Only maybe, maybe only a few other members of their extended
family whose names we don't have would be the only other people
that they could talk to about this.
What a strange thing, right? Bryson Chung says glorious.
Could simply man mean the man was a Peacock?
Like he dressed really fancy, like, as a way to overcompensate
or something like that. A satire.
It could be a mocking name. Probably not, because it
actually says he was the greatest Lord of that generation
of the Targaryens. That's what the World of Ice and
Fire set, or Fire and Blood says that.
And I doubt they would call him that just because he dressed
well. But you never know.
Again, a lot of these histories are written for, you know, with
the Targaryens made to look good.
You know, they kind of put a spin on it, put a little silver
lining on it, you know, spruce it up a bit.
So it's possible. And I like the thought process
regardless. Good one, Bryson, Let's talk
about Signs and portents. The book itself, we don't have
any of her other prophecies. The only one we know for sure is
the Doom. But we do know for sure that
there were others because she wrote a whole book, right?
How could it not be? Yeah, like 3.
There's 3 pages of this book are all that survive, apparently.
And if it's a book, it's not a novella, it's not a booklet,
it's not a pamphlet, It's a book.
So we don't know if it's a big book or a skinny book, but it
it's, there's a little, you know, it had some oomph to it.
Let's say some of the prophecies were really mundane.
She's like, I predicted my daughter would break my favorite
face. You know, that kind of thing.
As she's writing it, she hears the crashing sound like and I,
and I think these 3 pages are a place where maybe the story
could expand a little bit because Marwyn is the one that
found those 3 pages allegedly. And Marwyn's on his way right
now, allegedly to go see Danny. He might tell her about it.
He might be Look, look, yo, I'm your connection to these figures
like Danis the dreamer and your ancient ancestors and these
prophecies that are associated with your house.
So we first mentioned Signs and Portents in the first mentioned
section. Roderick the reader has the Book
of Lost books, which is a book of lost books, a book that
describes books that don't exist anymore.
And Signs and Portents is one of those books featured in the book
of lost Books. So.
Signs and Portents would be about 400 years old because she
wrote it just before the Doom, 12 years before the Doom, right?
She wrote it before, presumably before they went to Westeros,
but maybe during that time, maybe she was writing those
things down. She didn't have as much to do
when she got to Westeros. Like, I'm bored.
I'm going to write down more of my visions.
But it's a curious name, right? Signs and Portents, like it is
not dreams and visions, you know, it's not the dragon like
Confessions of a dragon dreamer, you know, signs and portents.
It's interesting. Yeah.
So I wonder where do you, where do we suppose Marwin found those
3 pages? I think the obvious guess is Ash
eye, but that's not by any means the definitive answer.
For sure. We shouldn't be like, oh, well,
that has to be it. No, there's Marwin's a a man
who's gone all over looking for obscure knowledge.
He goes to who knows where else he's been in in his quest for
lost Arcana. Ash Eye's just a great theory,
but we really have no idea He's he's been everywhere.
It's also possible 3 pages were copied down in another book,
like some other book used signs and portents as a source and
copied a little of that over. And it's like here I'm quoting
this book in my book. And that's why we have that.
That's actually a a fairly common way in the in the real
world where we learn about books that we don't have any more
because they get referred to as a source in a book that does
survive. I'm going to use as an example
of Beowulf is only around today because a single version was
copied into a surviving manuscript that contains some
other things. If not that we would have lost
that story forever. Amazing, right?
And just on the other side of that is the think of all the
stories that we could have today, if not for, you know, a
cork here too, like a random event of history that caused a
certain library to burn down or who knows?
So signs and portents will be a valuable book, though.
And that might be why it wasn't copied because the Targaryens
might have seen it as something that they wanted to keep to
themselves, especially if they given how they benefited from
the doom being the only dragonlord family.
Like there's there was immense profit in that profit in that
prophecy, the prophecy of prophets and they could, they
could see that a certain game in the glorious or a or Aegon after
him might this sign's importance.
It's kind of like trade secrets. We're not sharing this, which
would explain why it was would help explain why the book
doesn't exist anymore. We've seen Targaryens, multiple
Targaryens who find things in books that change their outlook
on prophecy. We don't always know why they
were looking in the 1st place. Rhaegar is a good example, Aries
the first, right? These are other examples.
Any Targaryen who has dream, Let's say you're a Targaryen and
you start to have dreams, prophetic dreams.
You're probably aware that you're not the first one in your
family to have that. So what are you going to do?
You're going to go look at books written by your ancestors about
their dreams. So signs and portents, if other
Targaryens had access to it, you got to think even the ones who
didn't have dreams would probably be some curious about
it. But the ones who did would be
particularly curious because they would be like, yeah, I the
way she's writing about it, that's kind of how it works in
my brain. Like the the way these images
are described, the way she has these dreams, just the way they
manifest, the way she puts it into words that that that lands
with me, whoever, me being whatever random Targaryen we're
Speaking of here. Like, was Aries the first?
Was he looking for evidence that the Dragons were would return or
was he just like really into old books and he stumbled on that?
Was it, was it something he looked for or is it something he
found? Right?
That's a that's an open question.
And same with Rhaegar. Was Rhaegar just bookish and he
landed on that or was he like looking for answers?
Because if you're looking for answers, sometimes you you see
what you want to see. And that's that's a big part of
how George writes a lot of people, especially when it comes
to prophecy. And Rhaegar was certainly a man
that seems to have fallen into that bucket of people that maybe
believed a little too much in their own destiny.
And yeah, like, like Ashea has suggested before, like dreamers
can be of there's a large scale here.
If Danny says maybe at the top of the scale where she just had
lots of them, you could have like, someone that just, like,
every few months has a vague prophetic dream that's minor,
you know, a glimpse into the future that isn't fire and
brimstone doom stuff. But, yeah.
Of Oz getting broken, you know, like Ashea's example, You know,
it's like, hey, I I had a dream of that.
Is it just a coincidence that I dreamt of that and then it
happened? Or you might think it's just a
coincidence, but if you were some other family.
But if you're a come from a family that has a a history of
prophetic dreamers, like Danny's a famous 1, you know, I'd be
like, yeah, I'm a descendant of her.
I'm a descendant of that woman who had very powerful prophetic
dreams. You might start to believe your
in yourself like Rhaegar did or maybe an Aries, Sir.
And that explains a lot, doesn't it?
Some of these Targaryens, some of their own beliefs and their
own dreams and their own magic is goes a little far, but if you
add this angle in it starts to make a lot more sense that they
are just believers because their whole family is predisposed to
believe 'cause they only exist because of a dreamer.
Jerry's the second he listened to the ghost of High Heart when
she said the Princess rather the Prince that was promised would
be born of their line. A wood switch that was weird.
When Danny hears about this, she's like, what?
That's crazy. My, my family listened to a wood
switch about a prophecy. That's bizarre.
But if you pair it with this knowledge that they're
believers, it's been such a part of their history, it makes so
much more sense. He was primed.
Jairus the Second was primed to believe in such things because
his family exists only because of they believed in prophecy.
They took that leap of faith. It might seem like a leap of
faith to them now. Maybe it wasn't because like we
said, Danny's probably proved herself, but they can imagine it
in a lot of different ways 200 years later, 300 years later,
right? It's the the exact details of
what happened back then won't always won't be carried forward
necessarily. And and the Targaryens of now
and of recent generations would have different interpretations.
They might get a little imaginative with what really
happened there because they don't have all the details.
So yeah, compared to the ghost of high heart, Melisandre,
Macoro, other Targaryen dreamers, hers is different in
that it's considered historical. Bloodraven was hand to the king
and master of whispers. He was in the spotlight
historically for a long time. We witness him use a glamour in
the mystery night and of course later he merges with the
weirwood. Of course, that's none of that's
in the histories, though. There's just like in the
histories they whisp, there's mention of him whispering, being
involved with sorcery, but there's no corroborating
evidence. There's no like, and we know
this because no, it's just they're presenting it as history
in that the history of this person, Blood Raven, was that
people believed this about him. They're not willing to say it's
true, even though we as readers know it is.
He definitely had magical powers.
He's using them now. But yeah, they're on the
drunken. He was troubled by dreams.
That's about as far as the histories go.
They're not willing to confirm that they were prophetic,
though. We know they are, though.
Ditto John the Fiddler slash Damon the Second.
These are not the matters of historical record.
The maesters and their hostility.
Maybe I'm using a word that's a little too strong, but denial
maybe? Or wish to get rid of magic in
the world. This fits in with some of that,
either whether it's a concerted effort to get rid of magic or
just their level of denial towards it, or their downplaying
of it, or a combination of the above.
Prophets usually aren't famous or remembered or given lots of
ink by maesters right now. That the way we shouldn't be.
We shouldn't close the book, pun intended, on all that, because
not all the books that exist in the Citadel and elsewhere were
written by maesters. Just a lot of them are.
There's definitely books that predate the the Seven Kingdoms.
There's ancient books from who knows where that George is going
to decide exist in the Citadel or elsewhere.
So yeah, not all these fall into that auspice where there's
they're problematic in that sense.
There's there's other options. Since we don't know any of our
other prophecies, what we did here was just kind of compile a
short list of major events that followed her life that she might
have foretold or seen coming. Mostly we're keeping this to the
events that affected the Targaryen dynasty because if we
get too big with it, well, I mean, what is she just like a
picking up all world events. We got to narrow it down
somewhat in other words. So here please, if you have, if
you have ideas, this is a wonderful time to share with us.
Tell us what visions you think Danis might have had based on
their importance to Targaryen history or just the fact that
they could be particularly vivid or interesting or whatever you
think. It's valid.
Probably at least worth entertaining.
We're we're working with very little here other than, well,
big events tend to be the things that prophets see.
So she might have seen some of these things, especially since
they're associated with her family.
So, yeah, the births and deaths of famous Targaryens and
Dragons, you know, maybe she foresaw the the birth of Vergar,
a dragon that had such a huge impact on the Seven Kingdoms.
Maybe she saw some of Vergar's deeds, Less likely than
Valerian's though, because she's got the association with and and
bond with Valerian. So, with that in mind, the birth
of Aegon the First, the rider of Valerian or Viseris the First,
the one who oversaw the the beginning of the Dance.
What about the conquest? Speaking of seeing through
Valerian's eyes the burning of Harrenhalm?
That's a big one, right? She could foresee that.
The field of fire, arguably just as big momentous.
I mean, yeah, like very historically important,
memorable, visually stunning Aegon's death.
That's not that was he just died of old age, but it triggered
rebellions, many rebellions throughout the seven kingdoms
his death. So maybe she saw that and maybe
she saw flashes of images of the various rebellions sigils.
She could see sigils in her mind.
Westeros is big with preloaded symbolism because of the the
sigils. Like remember the the three
headed dragon was not a a sigil of House Targaryen until they
came to Westeros. Maybe she dreamt of that before
it happened. That's a cool one.
Very memorable, very symbolic, very distinct visually.
What about the song of ice and fire?
Is she aware of the Princess slash Prince that was promised
prophecy? Is she aware of Azora High?
That one predates her so she's probably aware of it.
But did she have her own visions and dreams of it?
That's a tempting thought, isn't it?
Obviously in show cannon, Aegon had a dream about this, the Song
of Ice and fire. But book cannon, we don't have
to. We don't have to go with that.
Yes, George has mentioned it as a possibility for book cannon
that Aegon had these dreams doesn't mean Danis didn't have
them first. Doesn't mean he like we could
certainly be faced with a situation where Aegon had these
dreams similar to his ancestors, similar to his great, great
great grandmother Danis and went and referenced her book and was
like signs in portents. He's looking at her book and
he's like, I had that same dream.
I had this, I saw this, I saw this too.
Holy crap. Right.
That's a big possibility that that she is a maybe even the
progenitor of the idea, maybe the first one to have these
visions, or at least the first ones to write it down.
Magor's wars versus the Faith. Imagine the symbolism there, the
faith clashing with Dragons, like the images in her head of
the black dragon Valerian, her dragon again.
Again. That's another another reason
this fits really well with Magor, a figure who rings loud
in Targaryen history. And her from her perspective, it
would be in the future. And just so many people burned
all the all these faithful, all these.
She could have images of the father, the mother, the crown on
fire, you know? Yeah.
Or hacking the wings off a dragon.
I don't know. Just symbolic ways that the his
war with the Seven undercut the dynasty.
What about Arrea's flight? We mentioned that one earlier.
That's a big one, seeing that vision through Valerian's eyes.
150 a 180 years ahead of time. That's crazy, right?
Seeing the blasted landscape, images of that, knowing what
she's seeing is like, yeah, this is this is this is Valyria after
the doom. What about something a little
more mundane but really in terms of visual imagery, but huge in
Targaryen history, like the doctrine of exceptionalism.
Isn't that kind of fun to in a weird way to imagine the
prophecy of important documents? That's weird, right?
She's like, I keep having dreams of paper, but it's important
paper for some reason. Yeah, 'cause that is hugely
important, right. The doctrine of exceptionalism
was massive in changing how Westeros viewed House Targaryen
going forward. It, it, it kind of allowed, it
was sort of the grease of the wheels that enabled this them
all to get along 'cause so much of Targaryen culture really did
not work with how the sevens pre predisposition towards things
like ants, incest, Dragons and even things like polygamy.
So and then Joe Harris and Allison, what if there's a dream
of these, this pair of rulers who and that's a familiar sight,
a Targaryen brother and sister ruling together, picturing them
with their crowns. That's a big vision of the
future, right? Like a king and queen ruling in
the Red Keep. There's a lot of things you
could picture, right? And imagine this era of peace, a
golden age, right? That's that's something that's a
a good example, a rare example of a positive future that you
could see, but shortly after that, only 30 years later after
the death of Jairus, you've got even less really by a little bit
less. You got the dance of the
Dragons, a lot of imagery possible there.
Dragons in the storm, Veigar and Arax right?
Veigar burning the Riverlands with Amond A1 eyed Targaryen
causing massive devastation. Swirling green and black colors
right? Imagery of of the two factions
going against each other. Lot of visual possibilities
here. Then of course the death of the
Dragons not long after the dance.
Most of the Dragons die during the dance and they they're
completely gone less than 20 years later.
That could be something she pictured.
Maybe the image in her mind of that last stunted dragon
unhealthy and and struggling to live and with that with nobody
understanding why. What about even farther down the
line? The great bastards, The black
Fire rebellions. If we imagine swirling greens
and blacks, what about blacks and Reds?
What about all the various sigils of the important great
bastards? Bitter Steel's sigil, The
inverted arms of Damon? What about she era Sea star,
just because she's a fascinating, interesting figure?
What about Summerhall? The death of so many Targaryens
amidst green fire? What's that all about?
Right? She'd be seeing that like
wildfire. What are they doing?
Comets. What about the red comet?
What about the comet that came during Rhaegar's life?
There's been other red comets too.
What about the actual end of the dynasty?
What about Ares dead at the foot of the throne?
Did she picture that? Does she picture the futures
that didn't come to pass? Wildfire blowing up King's
Landing, which might be a future that does come to pass, you
know? And by the end of the books,
maybe she sees that. Maybe she sees the return of the
Dragons. Another one that to her might
seem positive, and it's a big one.
It's a so many post draconic Targaryens dreamt of the return
of Dragons that it's very compelling to imagine Danny's
did as well. Although it's a it's getting a
bit of ahead of herself there that comes so much later after
her life. But that's a rare one.
That's good. And that's a that's that's I
want to repeat that most of these major events are bad, you
know, like we could, if we thought harder about it, imagine
some positive ones. And maybe those are there.
Maybe Danny's had some. Maybe I'm being a little too
negative here, but where? But there could be, yeah, there
could be prophecies of summer. Maybe Danny saw the end of the
others. If she saw the beginning of it,
why not the end of it? Maybe maybe she sees times of
peace like the again I mentioned the golden age under Jairus and
Allison. Maybe she sees some of the other
ones too. Visions of a post others world
is maybe even too far ahead, but even that's possible.
Visions of Jon Snow, visions of things happening beyond the
wall, you know, visions that other people have had.
Like this isn't a great example, but it's it is an example.
Mother Mole had the visions of the of the free folk getting
picked up and taken away to happier places.
There's a lot of problems with that vision because some of the
people picked up by the ships were taken away into slavery.
Some of them did get away. So it's a good example of
prophecy is a hilt without a sword.
It's the sword without a hilt. Prophecy is the sword without a
hilt. Hey, either way, either way,
it's a hilt without a sword. It's sword without a hilt.
It's incomplete. It's half of the picture.
You need both to wield wield it effectively.
So, yeah, that that's that's a another way to look at it.
And maybe she sees really there's just no end to the the
momentous parts of A Song of Ice and Fire that you can imagine
someone hundreds of years before who was a particular sensitivity
to future vision seeing these things.
Why lost? Why was the book lost?
OK, well, we, we already pointed out that probably there weren't
many copies of it because they kept it as a trade secret.
You know, they wanted to keep these secrets to themselves.
They wanted to use this information in the future for
their own benefit and not for other people's.
So yeah, why would they share it unless there was an advantage to
sharing it? And what advantage would there
be to sharing it? I don't really know.
So one of the best examples, one of the best possibilities is you
take that, you take that situation where you probably
don't have a lot of copies of it.
And then Baylor, the Blessed Burner of books comes along.
There's the flaw in that plan of not having a lot of copies of
it. Now, we don't have to assume it
was because of Baylor, but if the book survived at Baylor's
time, then there's a very good chance that it was burned,
right? If it wasn't lost before Baylor,
then he probably took care of it.
Unfortunately, the definite bad sign of the bad, The downside of
Baylor there, You know, there was a 1994 episode of the show,
Babylon Five Season 1 Episode 13 called Signs and Portents.
It did involve prophecy and an ancient artifact.
I don't really know much more I I've never really watched
Babylon 5, but I happened to stumble on this when doing
research for this episode. I was like oh how about that?
There was also a magazine called Signs and Portents that I think
is now defunct, but it was a RPG slash wargaming magazine so it's
possible George stumbled on that magazine and decided to borrow
that title for for Danny's book. Who knows?
Prophetess Tropes The doom itself is like a straightforward
variation of the local area version of the end of the world
as We know it tropes. So instead of the entire world,
it's just Valyria, which is a lot, but not the whole world.
And then the Century of blood, which we went on to discuss and
we discussed the virgin power tropes earlier and some related
ones. Let's go a little farther than
that. The end is Nye trope is a big
one, as I just said, which is you probably already understand
what it is without hearing a description.
The end is not, it's just a trope that says in this story is
the idea that the world's going to end or that something big is
going to happen very destructive.
Maybe not the whole world, but yeah.
Anyway, in the real world ancient times, prophecy was
often very political and you can see why it was it was dishonest.
People were just making things up to get a political result.
And very often it was the opposite.
Though it's often real world prophecy in quotes prophecy.
Was not about the end, was not about big bad things happening.
It's about bright futures after calamity, like something bad is
going to happen, but after that everything is going to be great.
It's the change that will bring on the good times.
We got to suffer a little to get to the promised land.
The promised land concept is the one you should think of here
when you're thinking of these type of prophecies.
Prophecy is huge in the Bible, right?
It was big in the ancient world in Israel, Babylonia, other
places, you know, now scholars aren't entirely sure why
prophecy sort of mostly died out in the ancient world.
But but they think mostly it's because, well, it's all BS,
right? Like people just learned that
this is mostly people got more savvy.
It's like this is all just politicians just pretending this
stuff is true, then justifying it post facto.
And we're not going to. We're not that stupid anymore.
We've figured out we've gotten a little more sophisticated on
that as a society, as a culture, as a civilization, depending on
which civilization we're talking about.
All humanity, maybe. So, yeah, people just figured
that out. Like this isn't real.
This is just something made-up to get a result, to get people
fired up, to get them to behave a certain way.
And we're not falling for that anymore.
Well, that's not true. People still fall for it.
Nostradamus. He wasn't thousands of years
ago. He was 500 years ago the the
Israeli profits from the Bible, or that's that is thousands of
years old now. If you remember our necromancy
episode from earlier this year, you'll have learned that
prophecy and necromancy are very connected in the real life
ancient world. In fact, specifically you use
necromancy to speak to dead spirits who will tell you the
future. So that's very straightforward
in that sense. And of course, that's very
against God's law according to the Bible.
God's like, Nope, only I can do that sort of stuff.
So this is a little bit off the topic, but Nostradamus work was
not against Catholic teachings of the time, even though the
Inquisition was around. Like what?
Yeah, they are against magic, but they weren't against
prophecy or astrology. Which is weird, right?
Like how can you say prophecy isn't magic?
Well, you can because it's bull. That's how you can say it's a
clever way of just looking down on it.
Like, yeah, that stuff isn't real.
That's why we don't call it magic, because it's fake.
Of course, they're calling other things magic.
So they're still sort of in a way admitting that magic is
real, but not including prophecy in that category.
It's all very strange. But anyway, most prophets
though, in fiction, in literature, they, it comes back
to that image I put in your mind before of the the street
preacher with the sign going, you know, repent.
So you see madness very often associated with this and it's,
you can see why. It's like a person that has
inside information into the end of the world.
That's not a very happy place to be, is it?
Especially when no one's listening to you.
Now, in this case, Danis is the exception.
People listen to her. They did listen to her.
And it it worked out pretty well, at least in the short
term. And dragon dreams as well are
associated with madness, right? Not, not necessarily everyone
who has dragon dreams is mad, but they, it wears on your
sanity, it rubs on you. It's a difficult thing.
It's a burden to see the future, right?
This is a recurring theme, not just in A Song of Ice and Fire,
but not in, not just in the real world, not just another fantasy,
but especially with Targaryen madness because, well, there's
already an association with Targaryens and madness, and
there's already an association with Targaryens and dreaming.
And there's a lot of overlap between those two things.
Yes, the Targaryen madness concept is overstated, but the
Targaryen dreamer stuff is not. And that is associated with some
maybe not madness, but mental health issues.
Daron the drunken, for example, he wasn't mad, but he had severe
mental health problems, right? Because of what the prophecies
were doing to him that these visions messed him up.
And again, these properties are rarely about good things, right?
If, if Daron is just like constantly having visions of, of
awesome things, of a happy future, he's probably not
drinking himself into a stupor. He's probably like, this is
great. It's like my mind is full of
happiness all the time. I'm all seeing visions of good
things. So these St.
Preacher types in A Song of Ice and Fire.
What's the equivalent? The ghost of high heart, kinda.
She's right. She's got the kind of crazy vibe
about her that she's weird and and a little off, But George
inverts that a bit by having her be like, nearly unerringly
accurate Maggie the Frog. Just she's a woods witch that's
shunned that people are like, oh, that's this creepy old ugly
woman. But let's go, let's go be brave
and see what she has to say. She's got blood magic, right?
This is, you know, brave Cersei and her friends as children.
So but these are not people that are have high places in society.
These are not respected individuals.
Even those who are otherwise very well learned men like
Marwin and Amon are outcasts within academic circles because
of their belief in prophecy and in the supernatural.
And they're right to believe in those things.
They're the the voices of reason within a mass of people who are
in who are disbelieving, right And dare on the drunken to keep
him, keep on him, because he's such a great example of this.
He shuns a lot of the Targaryen lifestyle.
He doesn't live like a high born man.
He he goes to like the equivalent of dive bars.
That's where Dunk meets him, right?
He's not in fancy Inns. He's not hanging out at like
the, you know, the street of silk.
I mean, maybe he does when he's in King's Landing, but like he
just wants a drink to forget. He doesn't really care.
He's kind of trying to hide from the other nobility.
He doesn't want to be recognized, you know, So it's a
little bit of an inversion. Here we have Danny's being not
just really highborn, but being the Lady of Dragonstone, being
the about as powerful as it gets within the family, other than
being, you know, the Lord or King, which is a huge inversion
from street Preacher or ghost of High heart or Maggie the Frog.
And again, I come back to the visions, like the mechanism of
these visions is she just is when she's asleep?
Is it random? Is she just in the middle of the
day? She starts having visions.
She's like, get my pen. I need to write this down right
now. Is there anything she can do to
to make it happen? Could she try to enter a trance?
Can she take some mushrooms or something?
The most famous prophet or prophetess trope in all of the
world probably is Cassandra, at least in Western civilization.
Apollo, the Greek God wanted her as a lover and there's a few
different version to this. He gave her the gift of prophecy
and then she turned on him. Or he gave her the gift of
prophecy but was unsatisfied even though she did everything
with his ass of her typical unattainable deity standards.
She was thus cursed by him for whatever his whatever the logic
behind Apollo doing this was, whether he was just, you know,
being a jerk, or whether she was genuinely broke the deal.
The curse he put on her was he can't, apparently couldn't
revoke the divine power he gave her.
He gave her the power of prophecy and couldn't take that
back. That's just not how it works.
But he could give her an add something on top of it, which
would curse her, which was that no one would believe her.
So she would be right. She could see visions of the
future, but the curse would be that no one would believe her,
which honestly sounds like more of a curse on everybody else
because she's like, Hey, I can I have this vision of doom that we
could all avert if you listen to me.
So they can't listen to her because of the curse.
Sounds like they all suffered because of that too.
Because she and she's not an example of the lowborn prophet
trope. She's a Princess of Troy.
She was the daughter of Priam and Hecuba and was the most
beautiful of Priam's 50 some daughter.
That's pretty outstanding, right?
You got 50 royal daughters and she's the most good looking of
all of them. That's that's saying something.
And that right there tells you what the prophecies were
associated with. Of course, they're associated
with the doom of Troy, the fall of Troy at the end of a very
long Trojan War and the Trojan War.
The, the beginning of the Trojan War to the end of the Trojan War
was longer than the period where they waited for the doom after
the visions, which was like 12 years.
Right Now, the Trojan War was like 20 years.
But her prophecies started before the war started.
She warned against Helen. She's like, don't go, I see
you're going to Greece. Don't bring back Helen.
They're like, but of course, they don't listen to her.
She even argues that they kill Paris when he's born.
And some of the versions, not all the versions of there's a
bajillion versions of this Cassandra story, but she
actually argues to kill Paris as an infant because, like, he's
the one that's going to bring us all the harm on us.
And yeah, well, whoops. She also warns about the Trojan
horse. Like, how lazy are you, Trojans?
Like, check, Just check just to see if she's right.
You don't have just check the horse.
How hard is that? They didn't want to check the
horse, but that's and that's why I say the curse was really on
Troy and not just on Cassandra. In one version she actually like
takes an axe and a torch and is like if you aren't going to
check, I'm going to check and they stop her.
Damn it. She even predicted Eneus escape
from Troy, predicted that Eneus would escape and and found Rome,
which is, of course, isn't what happened.
That's a that is a version of the myth.
But yeah, she, she also predicted the Odyssey.
She predicted that that Odysseus would would have this happen to
him. She also predicted her own death
if she went back to Greece with Agamemnon.
Agamemnon took her as a as a slave, a concubine, basically.
She predicted his death and hers and that happened.
Yeah. So this is rough because, yeah,
it's a curse to be given knowledge of the future and no
one will listen to you. But we've already gone over how
it's awful even when they do listen to you just to having
knowledge of the future is bad regardless.
But yeah, this, this does sound worse, a lot worse.
So Even so, yeah, even in the real, even in real world fiction
and myths, prophecy is a curse. The the gift of prophecy is not
a gift at all. A lot, in a lot of cases, they
they read almost like a sacrificial victim, like a the,
the prophet is the, the person born with this knowledge that is
horrible for them to live with, but everyone else can benefit
from it. So they're like they are like we
sacrifice this person's life. They have to live a horrible
life because they're burdened with this, but we can all
benefit from it if we listen to them.
In Cassandra's case, they don't. So it's kind of like their whole
life is, is dedicated to others because they suffer.
But if people listen to their prophecies, then humanity, or at
least the city, the civilization can, can come out ahead.
So with Danny's, we have like opposites or inversions of the
Cassandra trope. And they we, they did listen to
her, right? They listened to her when it was
most important, although only her family.
So you still have kind of have, it's still kind of the same
trope because no one else listened to her.
Although if we go back to Nina's theory, Hainar didn't tell
anybody else. That's part of why did no one
else listen? They didn't even hear there.
It wasn't that they weren't listening.
They didn't even know what to listen to.
But yeah, as we've said throughout this episode, it's
entirely possible Danny's LED kind of a tormented life.
So yeah, living post doom would put a damper on everything, even
besides the prophecies. In one version of the Cassandra
myths, she and one of her brothers are left overnight in
the temple of Apollo. And that's kind of how they get
their powers. Or she gets her powers.
They're found in the morning with snakes licking their ears.
And the snakes are associated with knowledge in Greek
mythology. And for our purposes, it's it's
really just kind of a a step to go from snakes to Dragons,
right? It's not too not too far of a
leap there. Cassandra does go mad.
In some versions of the story. The curse becomes too much to
bear overtime. She sees her own death coming,
which is something we should consider Targaryen madness and
unwanted dreams, right? If you get what if you're
dreaming of your own death? What if Denis keeps dreaming of
her own death? What a horrible thing to see.
Like she doesn't know when it's coming.
Like if she knew it was 20 years in the future, then OK, that's
not so bad. It still would be kind of bad.
But at least you know you're not going to die soon.
But like, if you don't know, it's just one of these days I'm
going to die, you know, like, well, I mean, welcome to the
rest of us. But if she knows the exact
manner of it and has some sense of it being soon, that's
terrible. Now here's a description that's
a little off topic, but just hilarious.
I couldn't resist. It's it's it's it's a
description of Cassandra from a chronicler.
This just about killed me quote. Shortish, round faced, white
Manish figure, good nose, good eyes, dark pupils, blondish,
curly, good neck, bulky breasts, small feet, calm, noble,
priestly. An accurate profit for seeing
everything practicing hard virgin.
How do you just sneak that in there?
First of all, those descriptions are crazy.
Bulky breasts, this good neck. I mean, this is weird, but then
just an accurate profit for seeing everything.
Just throw that in there. Like, wait, that seems like the
only thing that matters, you know?
But virgin's in there, right? That actually is kind of an
important detail. So this was from John Malalas.
He was a Syrian living in Antioch under the Byzantines.
He lived to be 87, actually. He died in 578 AD, So Jon Milaus
is really important because he's the oldest surviving example of
a guy who wrote history for common people, for monks, rather
than the nobility. And this simple style and its
aim, the fact that it was aimed at a wide variety of people, is
why it survived. It was copied a lot.
It was effective because of its simple style.
A lot of people can understand it, and that's why it propagated
kind of the opposite of science importance.
Science importance was not meant for the common population.
It was not meant to be widespread.
And like the Book of Lost Books, Malalas cites a ton of sources
in his book. He has like, 'cause he's not a
contemporary of Cassandra, like the Trojan War would have been
almost 2000 years, maybe more like 1800 before he was born.
And yeah, the Trojan War did happen.
You all. It's, it's, it used to be a
thought to be a myth. But no, we have in the modern
world, semi modern world, we've discovered enough archaeology to
be sure that something like the Trojan War happened.
Obviously not with all the specific details that were
given. So, yeah, Milalis, in his book,
he cites sources that that we don't have.
And so that's a perfect example of that concept of, well, he's
citing authors that those books don't exist anymore.
So we must, we know those books existed.
We just don't have anything about them other than these
citations. Yeah.
So that virgin part's kind of important because Cassandra's
almost never married and any of them miss like, she's just, even
though she's the most beautiful of of Prime and Hecuba's
daughters, she's kept separate like that.
They don't arrange a husband for her.
But you can't really be a virgin if she was sleeping with Apollo,
right? Like, that part doesn't exactly
fit. You can't say sex with gods
doesn't count, because of course it does, right?
Why would that not count? Anyway, that's your little
that's our little foray into the real world Cassandra and the
Cassandra trope, which is you will hear that thrown around
here and there. Time for our quote of the week.
Here's a passage that when I read it, it immediately jumped
out to me as the space version of a certain castle in Westeros
that you will know immediately. You will grasp, certainly as I
read this, you'll know exactly what castle I'm talking about.
Here we go. Carved into IO's highest
mountain, the 18 kilometer high Buhasal Sungrave is a city of
Blackstone obelisks and Spires that rides the shoulders of the
mountain range. Centuries ago, after the use of
Lovelock engines was deemed inefficient for IO, great
mirrored lasers carved much of the mountain and part of its
attending 540 kilometer long range into a city of jagged
towers. The builders followed the
draconic predilections of their great progenitor Akari, bringing
creatures of childhood fables and ancient campfire stories to
life in the stone. A necropolis of animalistic
Spires flecked with Topaz, zircon, and a myriad
nilosilicate rocks looms above us, blocking the sky like the
petrified remains of a great dragon host.
They perch rank upon rank along the buhsal's Crest, some of them
encompassing whole peaks, legs straddling frosted valleys,
their wide wings buttressing their great heights as they
crane their stone necks up as if to drink the gases of marbled
Jupiter. Duroglass windows glitter with
internal light like scales. And deeper in the heart of the
mountain, where long ago red drill crews dugout the interior
lies the city itself. That's from Iron Gold book 4 of
Red Rising by Pierce Brown. That's my favorite series of the
last 10 years that I've read. So you gotta go back to the
Expanse to find a series that I enjoyed as much as Red Rising.
And obviously this is space Dragonstone description.
I mean that is space like mirrored lasers.
Carving the mountain into Dragons is very much like the
Valyrian sorcerer's carving gargoyles and Dragons into the
black fused stone of Dragonstone.
Very cool carving directly into the mountain, which is also what
Dragonstone has done. Also you can see there the
influence here. Red Rising has a lot of little
nods to Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire.
Even the name here is maybe an is a nod.
Sun Grave is the city, and King's Grave is in A Song of Ice
and Fire as well. Red Rising also has a Deep
grave, which is a mobile undersea prison for the worst of
humanity, so that's kind of cool.
Anyway, I hope I've inspired you to pick up Red Rising.
Maybe we'll do some coverage of it at some later date if enough
of y'all read it. Let's talk about the death and
legacy of Danisa Dreamer, how she is viewed now, and how her
character might still pop up as relevant in the story.
Now, we don't know how she died, we don't know how long she
lived, but it would have been a big deal no matter when it
happened given the status she probably had within the family
as the one who saved them all. It's also kind of important
whether she outlived her husband or not.
Like if she outlived her husband, then she would be like
a Regent advisory figure to her own children ruling Dragonstone.
If she died before him, then well, then that just didn't
happen and she wouldn't have seen her children ruling.
And it's a little bit less interesting of a possibility.
And if she was Valerian's rider, then that's a big deal because
Valerian needs a new rider. And that would be a large
opening, literally, for some Targaryen.
And it wouldn't be Aegon yet, because I don't the intervening
years. There's just too much time.
So someone would have ridden at least one rider of Valerian
between her and him, assuming it was even her that Rid rode
Valerian again. Would she have seen any of it
coming? Would she have seen her own
death coming? Would she have seen Aegon?
Would she have seen any of Valerian's future?
Seen maybe future riders of Valerian?
You know, that's another possible thing.
Now her other daughter, her unnamed other daughter, remember
she had Aegon, Elena and a third child who is unnamed.
That daughter's descendant showed up at the Great Council
of 101 making a claim. Now, there's no extra value to
this child in terms of her heritage.
She can't say, oh, I'm descended from Danish to Dreamer.
Like, you know, they're all descended from Danish to
Dreamer. So that doesn't, that's not a
leg up for her or him. We don't, I think it was a him
actually, But in this case they certainly didn't get very far in
the Great Council because they didn't even have their name
mentioned. I choose to believe that Danis
is somewhat revered by the Targaryens, but they're such AI
was they're kind of a spoiled family.
They don't necessarily Revere their ancestors.
We don't see them like over praising Egon the Conqueror that
much. You know, they're not.
They don't have like shrines to him.
So I'm not sure that they do a whole lot of ancestor worship or
they're all that grateful. Well, they can't.
They don't seem to name a lot of people directly after her.
Yeah, right. Good point.
They have Dana. They have Daenerys.
But why are there no other Danes?
Great point. Yeah, maybe they don't really
love that name. And there's no other gay man's
really either game in the glorious.
I mean, yeah, a lot of the Targaryen Dragonstone names
weren't repeated. Like there's an Alix and a
Megon. These are archaic, you know,
They sound old. They sound like Gertrude and
Ruth to us, you know. Yeah, maybe that's it.
There's like these names have fallen out of fashion, you know,
they were like, yeah, we need new names for a new era.
Something that Hot D pushed conceptually that I find fitting
for the books is the notion that the Targaryens were very pro
dreamers and visionaries because they owed their existence to
Danes, which is why they're maybe more open to the Song of
Ice and Fire, why Aegon was, you know, took that seriously and
why the dagger was made and all that.
We've talked about Aries, the 1st and Rhaegar and these other
characters who later found books and that put them, you know,
started them off on a new journey and maybe changed the
way they viewed the world and their own family.
They came along after Baylor the Blessed.
So they may not have been able to read signs and portents, but
they would still know of her. They would still be aware of her
existence. It's not like the people, it's
not like the family forgot about her.
So she likely instilled a healthy belief in many
Targaryens in the utility, if not value of listening or at
least being aware of signs and portents.
But that could have very mixed results if we remember what
Marwin said and, you know, the sword without a hilt thing.
So we've seen George fill in this material after A Dance with
Dragons, right? Like most of what we know about
Danis and the details of the Targaryen flight from
Dragonstone, of which there's still a lot more to be revealed.
I think more of that back story could come as a lot of these
plot lines come to a head. I mean, Danny's going to learn
more about her family history, whether through Sam, Marwin,
Tyrion, other people, who knows? George is really good at writing
in back story and creative ways and finding ways to sneak it in
there and not always in the POV it most relates to, right?
Obviously, for example, Eamon figures out some very important
prints, prints that was promised stuff that he right before his
death, he tells it to Sam and straight up tells Sam to tell
Danny. And then Sam tells some of this
to Martin and Martin's like, well, I'm going to go to Danny.
So these conversations have yet to happen, but they seem likely
to. Marwin could meet Danny and
argue with Tyrion about some of these things, kind of like how
Tyrion argued with Haldem. They could cite sources during
their arguments. And that would be a really good
way for George to sneak some of this in there and wouldn't even
be sneaky. He'd be get it out there.
Just drop it right in front of us.
And again, Marwin is not some naive guy.
He's the one. He's the one that said prophecy
is dangerous. So he, he, even though he's open
to it, he's not naive about it. So that's very interesting too.
And as the guy that wrote the book of lost books, he's perhaps
the foremost expert on this stuff.
So I do think that some of this is really just beginning.
George didn't develop it earlier because he didn't have to, but
now is the time where he needs to.
And well, it's been another 1213 years since a lot of that stuff,
so he's had a lot more time to think about it.
And I imagine the Winds of Winners has already got some
more detail in there. We just haven't seen it yet.
Trivia. What book did Archmaester Marwin
write? As we said, it's possible he
wrote other books, but we only know the one the Book of Lost
books. Yes, that's right.
We that came up a few times this episode.
Book of Lost books is certainly the a great concept for a book.
I bet there's some real world books of lost books, you know, I
mean, like we said, there's tons of examples of real world books
that refer to other books as sources that don't exist
anymore. So someone's probably compiled a
lot of that and some someone out there, I bet someone listening
right now has an answer for me. So let me know, tell us where we
can find examples of real life books, of lost books.
We mentioned a lot of episodes day that relate to this one
episode, the deal with prophecy, Targaryens, magic, Dragons,
Dragonstone is one such. We have an episode on the doom
of Valyria. We have an episode dedicated
entirely to Valerian. We have an episode dedicated to
the century of blood. We of course refer to the ghost
of High heart, a different type of prophet, different type of
prophecies, Summerhall, a big one.
And later this year we will have an episode called Who Knows the
Song of Ice and Fire where we trace the that particular
prophecy through the Targaryen dynasty and talk about who else
might know of it and who might learn of it.
So that one isn't out yet, but by the time you hear this
episode, maybe it is. Thanks to Nina for her great
takes. A lot of great notes.
And don't forget to check out good queenalley.tumblr.com.
Thanks to Joey Townsend for our amazing music.
Thanks to Michael Klarfeld for our video intro.
You can see the map behind me as an example of Michael's great
work. And you can buy a copy yourself
or a file and then go have it printed yourself from KLARADO
x.de. That's claradox.de.
And until next time, on behalf of Ishaya, I'm Aziz.
You know what to do, Valar Riridis.