Hello my fellow Westorians. Happy Sunday, happy July 4th.
Welcome to Valeritas For Dunkin Egg.
Our approach will be different than it was for A Song of Ice
and Fire. Rather than setting out a
specific number of chapters each week, we'll aim to spend about
two hours per episode, covering as much as we can each time.
There will be a lot of coverage of the setting parallels and
plot connections to A Song of Ice and Fire and almost
everything else else you can imagine.
And I know you can imagine quite a bit.
Obviously that's a Star Wars reference, maybe not obviously
to a few of you, but I think most of you get that.
And well, one of the reasons I like to throw Star Wars
references in is because, well, I like Star Wars, but also
because Sean, one of your former nickname, one of your many
nicknames, people know you as Dancing Sean, Sean of House
Beard, but sometimes you're Sean Solo, are you not?
Yes, yes, yes. I am somewhat of a Star Wars
fan, but I'm really a Han Solo. You're.
Not really Sean Solo anymore though.
Yeah, you're not solo anymore. Yeah, you can't really call
yourself Sean Solo when you're newly married.
Sean Duo. Sean Duo that's great that's
great What are you drinking today, Sean It's similar to last
week. It's one of the naked drinks,
but the Berry protein instead of the green protein and it also
has Mountain Dew. But this week I got in a
watermelon sparkling ice which it really the just the smell of
the watermelon makes it so delightful.
So delightful. I bet Duncan enjoy a beverage
like that. He's never had any of the
individual drinks that make up that strange concoction, but
he'd be game to try. Well, thanks to Nina for her
contributions. We're going to have extra
thoughts from her today, as we often do.
Good queenalley.tumblr.com. Thanks as well to all of you who
contribute on our discussion groups.
Some good questions are in here today as always as well.
Now good discussions are happening on Facebook and Flick
and Discord, and sometimes on Slack as well.
We also, of course, offer the chance for you to ask live
questions and you can send them ahead of time as well.
Thanks as well to our lovely patrons.
Without you, we would not be able to keep the lights on.
We're not be able to do this at all.
We'd have to spend most of our time doing other things.
So we are. How many patrons does it take to
screw in a library? I don't know, I'll have to send
them a group message and ask. Maybe we'll find out.
Last time we focused on set up what the realm is like at the
time of this novella. And then we had a detailed look
at the first scene we discussed the life of a hedge night.
The massive differences in perspective and lifestyle were
shown through this character's POV, and we laid the groundwork
for his parallels and ancestral connection to Brienne,
especially as it pertains to knighthood, while teasing a lot
more to come in that department, not to mention quite a few other
comparisons and other surprises along the way.
Some of these themes are going to continue on, and we've got a
few new items to discuss as well, of course.
Let's see what today brings us. A my fellow W Oriens and a Sean.
Sean solo dancing Sean. And a fellow Canadian.
True, true. So let's talk about the the
meeting. Sweet Foot had an easier gait
than old Chestnut, but Dunk was still sore and tired when he
spied the N ahead tall dog and timber building beside a stream.
Warm yellow light spilling from his windows looked so inviting
that he could not pass it by. I have 3 silver, he told
himself. Enough for a good meal and as
much ale as I care to drink. As he just mounted, a naked boy
emerged dripping from the stream.
He had to stride himself on a rough spun ground cloak.
Are you the stable boy? Dunk asked him, glad.
Looked to be no more than 8 or 9.
Hasty face, anything. His bare feet kicked in mud up
to the ankle. His hair was the furious thing
about him. He had none.
He did have none. So something strikes me just as
we're reading this. I didn't have this in my notes,
but him emerging dripping from the stream reminds me of Bran's
vision of the pregnant woman emerging from the pool beneath
the weirwood at Winterfell. And of course the next vision in
that sequence is of a young woman standing on her tip toes
to kiss a knight as tall as Hodor.
A popular belief is that is Dunk, and since these visions
are in reverse chronological order, it's even possible that
if they're the same person, this woman, that that is the child of
Duncan's, which of course we know there's children out there
and we know Hodor is a is a strong potential to be his
descendant. Got a?
Another. Go with what comes.
Another thought that just popped into my head reading that, which
is a little bit more broad I guess, but I wonder if it's sort
of a baptism. Yeah.
Come anew from his princely self into this stable boy Squire.
Role with shaved head baptized yeah that's a very much kind of
emerging anew. You're right that's some that's
very strong symbolic resonance there I think I think you're on
to something there. Nina writes just as Dunk's first
introduction to some extent hints towards his own death.
So eggs does as well emerging wet alone and naked from a
stream by a humble in a far cry from how he's going to die 50
years from now in flames. So that's also kind of a
bookending or an opposite you know merging from the water to
eventually go into the flames or into the sand.
We're not exactly sure some that's something we'll talk
about today. The interplay between sand and
wildfire is something that we have to keep our eyes on because
sand is one of the few things that sort of stops wildfire.
It doesn't stop it, but it helps a little bit.
Or if it gets going soon enough, it can stop it before it it
really spreads. Continues here.
Yeah. In one way, Eggs emerging naked
may prefigure the birth of his own great grandson, Rhaegar, who
was also born at Summerhall during these flakes.
And that's the day Egg and Dunk died as well.
So really almost everything here when we're reading like the
entire story, it's we really have to be on our toes keeping a
lookout for things that tie into Summer Hall and connect to all
that. Of course, we also see
comparisons to things happening in book one of the Game of
Thrones and book 5, and perhaps in between as well, if we
consider characters like Sansa who have also used tricks with
their hair to conceal their identity.
But of course, I'm referring to shaving your hair here, right?
Shaving hair to hide identity, which of course makes us think
of Varis. Now, Varis doesn't have purple
eyes, but you can see here that the shaving of his hair and
basically Dunk isn't able to tell that his eyes are purple.
They look, he said they look, he thinks they look almost purple,
which really they're they're just a dark purple.
And that's kind of why. But Varus's identity there, it's
been long theorized that maybe he shaved his head because it's
a certain color. Certainly it makes us think of
him. Of course, we learned from the
Mercy chapter that shaved heads are ideal for wigs.
So there's also that. But it doesn't have to be just
one thing, right? There's lots of things that are
going on, right? We don't just say, oh, it's,
it's for wigs and then be done with it.
No, there's there. There could be multiple reasons.
So what did this, did this strike you when you were reading
the scene? Did you think of virus or did
you come up, did that thank you later or what?
What do you have to say about the scene in general I guess
would be my question. I, I didn't think of that.
I did think a lot about like the shaved head maybe makes them
seem younger or maybe even more innocent, but I didn't make the
connection to to virus or other I I had seen in the notes from
before the the comparisons that other people trying to disguise
themselves. And that kind of makes sense,
although in a certain way shaved head draws more attention to
you, but but it doesn't necessarily reveal who you are
as much as the the Targaryen white hair, you know?
That's a good point. Yeah.
He was like, boy, this kid's got like, what happened to him?
Where's your hair, you know? And it happens a couple more
times in a story. People will take note of his
lack of hairs. Yeah, but you're right.
Like if he had silver hair, they'd definitely take way more
notice. That would be far more
outstanding. You're right.
So it's it's the lesser of two notable hairstyles, I suppose
you could say. Another thing I'll say is from
this passage and once we've read earlier and throughout the whole
thing, maybe a little bit of tangent, but I still think this
is a good thing to go for it. I remember in high school in
English class, I, I remember for the most part, and I just didn't
like a lot of my teachers in school.
I, I, for the most part, as a good student, I wanted to learn,
but I was kind of disappointed when teachers seem like they're
going through motions. If I could get away with the
class and not read the book, you know, like pass the test without
having read it. I was like, man, screw this
class, Screw this teacher. But I had one teacher really
challenged me. She wasn't asking questions like
what happened when they went to the end.
You know what? I mean, that's just to see if
you read it, yeah. She would ask questions, she
assumed we read it right and would ask questions like why did
the author choose to have them in whatever location, you know,
she, she assumed we not only read this book, but read the
author's biography. You know, I really wanted us to
like really research everything around it and find meaning and
everything. I, I took that and put that
effort into film, you know, analyzing film in that way.
And one thing I, I remember this a, a thought, a way to write, a
potential virtue or signal of expertise in writing or
whatever, is that every word is chosen for a specific reason.
There's, there's nothing missing and there's nothing extra.
Everything there was placed carefully.
And Martin I think is the epitome of that, that I think
every scene, every sentence, every adjective, he's so
perfectly carefully piercing every little bit together.
It's created a whole community of people reading these books
over and over again and hours and thousands of hours of
discussion about it. And I, I think even just as this
little paragraph that we read and we're like, oh, that could
mean this, that could mean this. Think about these other times
that happened. There's so much to every little
bit of it. And that that's why we're doing
this whole podcast. You're totally right.
That's very well said, and it's why I wanted to go a little
slower through this. I mean, we blasted through the
books. We covered them well, I think,
but we could have gone at a much slower pace and not been
repetitive. You know, we would have still,
we would have had more to think about, more to do.
You know, it would have taken a lot longer.
We were trying to make sure we were done before when's the
winter comes out. Of course we still have plenty
of time, but you know, we couldn't have known that at the
time we. Didn't know that.
Right, we we didn't want to be caught halfway through or
something like that. That's part of why we're doing
here is taking a little more time with that and that's it's
it's paying off already even though it's only episode 2 here.
Here we go. I had a a realization while, you
know, something I hadn't thought about before.
And Jonathan Hagee in the chat comments says the egg emerging
from the water like that also reminds him of the Danny scene
at the mother of mountains where there's the Crohn's making
emerging from the water and to kneel before her and all that.
So that's neat. Yeah.
There's definitely some some connections to be made here,
surely some more that we haven't thought of.
But yeah, now, on top of of Varus's shaved head being
similar, we also have Young Griff who dyes his hair instead
of coloring it. Now it's the same thing, right?
Tyrion's like the blue hair. This kids are going to laugh at
you for your blue hair, you know, you know, blah, blah,
blah. He just makes these jokes about
him. But it's the same point.
If he had silver hair, they'd be saying a lot more.
They'd be pointing and they might not be laughing.
They'd be like, whoa, look at that, Targaryen or something.
Like, what's his deal? Of course, in Essos that's less
true 'cause there's plenty of silver haired people around.
There's plenty of blue haired people around in Essos too.
Yeah, that's a good point. That's a very good point.
So when he gets to Westeros, he's like, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm
gonna take this dye out or not reapply it or whatever.
But it it's a similar concept, you know, hair is one of the
best ways to conceal your identity that we have without
putting on a disguise, right? I guess you could say blue hair
is sort of a disguise. But you know, Jamie shaves his
head and grows out a beard to try to go.
You know, there's lots of examples like this.
A famous person concealing their identity by changing some basic
features. The image of Aegon Thunder.
This is also another parallel here Nina caught.
It's a similar enough to Barristan the bold.
Remember, Barristan was too young to even fit his armor, but
he made it into the tournament, you know, kind of snuck his way
in and and couldn't really hold his Lance up properly.
But everyone loved it because look at this bold boy.
They cried, right? And they're all excited.
And it was, in fact, Prince Duncan the small who actually
accepted the challenge and, you know, beat him friendly, you
know, didn't like Lance him in the face or something.
Just, you know, gave him what he, you know, he gave him what
he wanted. He's like, I want to compete.
And he gave him the chance to compete and then unmasked him,
as is the tradition for a defeated mystery knight.
And it's a 10 year old kid. And so the dots are connected,
right? You've got Egg's son doing this.
And it's pretty similar to Egg sitting on the back of this
horse, the armor too big for him.
You know, Dunk catches him that way.
And he doesn't call him bold. Oh yes, he.
Bold as you please, yeah. He says it, he thinks it in his
mind, but yeah, he. Doesn't say it.
He thinks it. OK, so it is there.
Yeah. In fact, actually, that's right
here in the notes. Also, Nina throws in a note
about Erea Targaryen, another person that concealed her
identity, dyed her hair muddy brown and then hid in the
stables. So this is perhaps even closer
to of a parallel in that sense. Then of course, that ending was
very tragic. But so is dunks, or so is
dunking eggs. But Ares was much quicker hers.
Her tragic end was, you know, when she was still very young.
I guess Sean doesn't even know what her tragic end is, huh?
We're not going to tell him, but I just realized he has no idea.
That's true. I just kind of that took that
for granted. You're right.
But it's also fiery and awful, so we'll talk about that some
other time. But yeah, it's not good.
That was something that Rita and I were talking about is that
even though I'm not as completely unsolied as I used to
be, that I still, I, I think still a similar role in this
coverage here, that my takes are still relatively original.
I'm not. I'm not tainted by by years of
research into this and and all of the other established takes.
I'm still kind of coming up with this on my own.
And sometimes it means I have blind spots to potential
parallels or other ironies have come, things to come in the
future or things that happen in the past or whatever.
So it's good, Yeah, it is a good.
I think we do work together well in that sense because of that.
A couple other things on my mind fire away this little area here
1 is the nature of how we're we're trying to go kind of
chronological, right. We had a lot of introduction and
background and we're going a lot of tangents but we're sort of
trying to go chronological good way to cover everything but
because we do jump around so much by the time we get to the
end we're probably like, oh, we've already done it but to an
extension of that something it's it's going to be a point that's
going to come up later, but it's coming up now so I'm going to
bring it up now. The idea of bears in a bowl and
entering the tournament is a mystery.
And the next book, or I guess it's two books from now the the
mystery now John the Fiddler, right joints.
It's a common thing, and in fact, didn't Lyanna Stark?
At least she's entered as a mystery knight.
Knight of the Last Mystery. Absolutely good call.
Here's a point that Rita brought up that was like, yeah, good
idea. Think all the hassle Dunk gets
trying to enter the lists. Like, who are you?
How do we know you're a knight? Had embarrassing a boat in the
other list. He should have been a mystery
tonight. Yeah, well, well, because it's
it's in part because they just rode up, like in their gear and
they look like a knight. That's the big problem for Dunk
is he doesn't look like a knight.
It's really the appearance is really, I think, crucial here.
They look at his rope belt, at his lack of any display of
wealth at all, and they're like. I don't know.
If I saw a big, big, big man roll up ready to to be part of
it, I'd be like, OK, that's a fighter, right?
I would, you would, but like a lot of these nobles, they're
like. I would maybe I if I was a
noble, I'd be like, I don't want him to fight.
That's why everyone was trying to stop him.
Now we're uncovering the real reason they keep this all closed
off. They don't want, they don't want
to get beaten. But there there really is
literally the the people letting him into the list are
gatekeepers. They are.
And they got to make sure you look the look and play the role.
And so and maybe even I thought maybe like someone like Leanna
Stark, she could go have someone on her behalf, like, hey, go,
get go tell him I'm someones doing a tournament.
I'm a mystery night. I'll be there.
I still seems like it's a lot to keep the secrets.
You know who's she telling, and the person she tells has to just
go along with it. Are they paying money?
Is there any dishonorable bribery involved in entering a
mystery night? Anyway, it was just a thought, a
thought that I hadn't considered.
The idea that trouble that Dunks having get in where other
characters who are traitors or women or like all these other
things that won't be allowed, they get in somehow.
So I think what you said, basically, it's his appearance.
He just doesn't look fancy. Something I wanted to to
leverage for this episode for talking about tournaments is
your own personal experience. You used to run magic
tournaments and other tournaments at this at your
place of employment super games for a long time.
And that's that could be a pretty big hassle.
You got lots of different people complaining about the rules.
You got different formats to manage and that's one thing I
wanted to bring up is different formats.
That's one difference here is you got different people holding
There's no there's no like set rules.
Someone says I want to hold a tournament.
They get to make whatever rules they want.
So they don't necessarily have to be this barrier the same
barriers to entry to all of them.
You know what I'm saying? Plus we've had time has passed,
you know, cultures changed a little bit, certain attitudes
are different. I figure in this time there
might be even more gatekeeping in this era because the realm is
less united. We just got through talking last
episode in depth about how the Dornish are not fully accepted
and they don't really all want to be.
They're not exactly like chomping at the bit, champing at
the bit, whichever you prefer to to fight in tournaments in
Westeros. Maybe they want to do other
things in Westeros, but not all. They're not all happy.
They're not like fired up to go make friends with all these
people that they've been enemies with forever.
And by the same token, our our good friend Javi Marcos from
breaking podcast sends a question, says, what can we
imagine would be in the hedge night had George fully created
and fleshed out the black fires? Like, how would the story have
changed? And that's a perfect example.
What we're talking about. That's someone they would date,
keep like, oh, you were you fought for the black dragon.
I don't know if we want to, you know, are you welcome here?
That's exactly the kind of thing that they might stay home
because they're not welcome or they might be shunned a bit
because of what side they took in this big civil war.
That was only, you know, 15 years ago or 13 years ago.
In fact, the gatekeeping might have even tightened up when they
knew the Princess were coming. Yeah.
Yeah, we can't let this guy in with his rope belt, not when the
Princess are here. Right.
And they might have even been a little bit looser at the and the
mystery night. They might have wanted to get as
many people involved as possible.
That one they might have wanted witnesses to the event, or
allies to gather a word to spread, or whatever.
As long as none of them beat John the Fiddler, you're right.
Like they're the witnessing is a good thing.
Because they wanted everybody to see him win.
You're right. They wanted to see.
They wanted, of course they were manufacturing it, but they
wanted as many eyes to be impressed as possible and spread
the word. So yeah, that's a really good
point too. I will say by the way, I did
run, yeah. So many it was almost like
almost every day sometimes, right?
Yeah, yeah, pretty much every day of the week.
And, and sometimes we'd have small tournaments like, well,
eight person tournaments, we'd do like 10 a day.
Sometimes it'd be 150. Some people you know in.
Case it wasn't clear, folks running Magic the Gathering,
Yu-gi-oh, Pokémon, things like that.
You know, game store stuff. Collectible cartoons, yeah,
they, they, there's a whole circuit.
There's a pro tournament and there's qualifiers and there's
local tournaments. It gets pretty intense.
And yeah, I will say that that is something that I have a the
mind for in general, especially when I'm reading these types of
novels, sort of logistics. I'm constantly thinking about
where are all those horses pooping, all the people, They
have this huge feast. Everyone eats now.
You got to go to the bathroom. It's a thing that has to be
accounted for. And it's not the most exciting,
interesting thing necessarily to read about.
You want to hear about the night and the war and the, you know,
the adventurer, not the logistics, but logistics affect
the movement of war and adventure and everything.
And I appreciate that, George, I think more than average does
account for these things and it, and it's also something I'm
thinking a lot about the rules of this tournament.
You know, that is also something I think Georgia can't afford to.
I think he I think Nina might talk about it in her notes, but
he likes Ivanhoe and it this format of the tournament and
Ivanhoe he he wanted it to do that.
And it's also I thought about it.
I was reading it. She was like, this is dunk even
says it at one point. This is a chance for him to be
able to relatively easily, relatively easily call himself a
champion. Just has to win one tilt.
You don't have to win the whole tournament, right?
5 champions and as soon as you beat 1, you become a champion.
It's like, hey, I could be a champion pretty easy in this
tournament, so it's a good opportunity.
Yeah, he's he's maybe underestimated how difficult
we'll be, but he's not wrong that in terms of making a name
for himself, it's a very, very rare opportunity.
Like most of the time you need like a war or like something
that's a lot more actual dangerous, you know, and
obviously you can't just conjure those up.
So, yeah, you're right. Something you brought up last
time is the Dunk sells himself short on his, his, his, his
cleverness. You know, maybe he doesn't have
a big IQ and he certainly doesn't have worldliness.
But yeah, yeah, he's got some. He's got some.
Fun. He gives himself credit.
Yeah, he's not dumb. Right.
Yeah, He's not dumb. He's not thick as a castle wall.
Maybe there's some things he's thick about, but we're we're
dynamic, all of us. Just being thick about one thing
doesn't mean you're thick about. It I mean a lot of what Dunk is
is just naive. Yeah, absolutely.
Exactly. It's literally the word I was
going to use. Yeah, he is naive and maybe even
and it's this word might sound more more negative than I mean
it to be, but maybe a little ignorant, right?
He just has a unlimited perspective of the world.
But guess what? So does everyone, right?
Less ignorant than some people you know.
Let's read here real quick what George says about tournaments.
This is the From the Suspect Martin collection on his
tournament rules. It was not so much a question of
some king changing the rules as you venture as it was of the
rules themselves being very variable Middle evil medieval
tourneys were never governed by a single set of rules or rules
makers like NCAA Football or Major League Baseball or even
Shutter Boxing. In essence, every tourney had
its own rules. The Lord or King who was staging
the event would usually choose the format of the tournament in
the broadest sense and then appoint a quote master of the
games to run the event and make all the fine print decisions.
As to your questions regarding the participation or non
participation of self, swords, Squires, free riders and the
like, again I don't see that as the difference as being
chronological so much as geographic.
The Reach is the heart of the chivalric tradition in the Seven
Kingdoms, the place where knighthood is most universally
esteemed, and therefore the place where the Master of the
Games is most likely to devise and apply stringent rules in
Dorne and Storms End. In the Riverlands and the Vale,
things are perhaps a little less strict, and north of the Neck,
where the Old Gods still reign and Knights are rare, they make
up their own rules as they go along.
Personalities of the sponsoring Lords and their master at arms
are another factor. Robert Baratheon was not a great
respecter of old traditions and he would hardly have won today.
Knights Only tournament to honor Ned, who was not a knight.
Lord Ashford of Ashford, on the other hand, was trying to Curry
favor with Baylor Brakespeare, the preeminent tourney knight of
his time. So there's another set of
reasons why the tournament was the way it was.
So this adds to what we were saying.
The reach being the heart of of what's proper and knightly.
They hold to those beliefs perhaps as much as anyone, or
more so, as George said. But then we also have this
notion of who he's trying to Curry favor with.
Now, you brought this up as well, Sean, earlier.
And it's super relevant because we know it's relevant here.
We know it's part of the case here.
Valar is young and they're trying to make him look good.
That's part of why the two Kingsguard are like Nah it
wouldn't be chivalrous for for us to compete against him yet we
have lots of examples of Kingsguard riding in tournaments
against Princess so definitely something is inconsistent here.
Some specific examples. Arthur defeated Arthur, Dane
defeated Rhaegar in the tournament to celebrate Prince
Viserys birthright. Barris and Selmy beat him at
Storm's End. Rhaegar and then Rhaegar also
defeated Arthur Barrett's. Like I had a running battle
between the three of them. Like who's best?
Rhaegar, Arthur Bariston. And then we have Eric and Eric,
the Kingsguard Knights. They fought alongside Damon
Targaryen and apparently Duncan the Tall competed in a
tournament alongside Duncan the Small later in life, so much
later, clearly, because that's AG's son.
So still right, We have Renly Rd. in tournaments against
Jamie, right? We saw that Jamie Road and
Barristan Rd. in the tournament, the first tournament we ever see
in the Game of Thrones. What were they going to do, just
not have them If they were paired up against someone
important? They were just like, no, you
know, that's not going to happen.
So I mean, there were no Princess in that tournament.
Joffrey was too young, but you see that it's pretty normal for
Kingsguard to compete and even to fight against Princess.
So that does tell you something was something's different is
going on here and it's not necessarily super underhanded,
but there's definitely like a we want to impress the Prince's
kind of deal here. Yeah, based on how we see the
tournament and the third book go, it easily could have been
that certain competitors were given some Look, you go
challenge a Prince, we'll give you 100 gold Dragons.
So we'll let you use you can hunt in the Kingswood for the
next three months or something. They could have given him to
encourage these people to challenge him.
Or maybe, hey, we'll give you 100 gold Dragons.
I'm not you would challenge Lionel Prince.
It could be that some of those other nights or maybe a
combination. Maybe the Rhaegar had done
enough to prove himself already, like he was already a a a
formidable competitor that it would have been a good match for
him to fight when the other nights where Valor maybe could
not. There's no way he's going to
beat this other people and they didn't want to set him up for a
sure loss rather than a good battle, you know?
But also he might have had or they might have had better
personal relationships with each other like Barris and the Bull
and Rhaegar maybe had a good enough rapport with each other
that they were OK competing. Where's Belar?
Or maybe fairly knows these nights or.
Rego might just be better. I mean, he's definitely, I think
a little bit older, but that's, that's going to be part of it
too. You can see a lot of factors, a
lot of potential reasons, but clearly the the the Kingsguard
seemed to be giving and or he meant you can't really.
OK, fine, that makes sense. You know what I mean.
You can't argue against what? They're saying also from from
Rhaegar's perspective, I wonder if he might have known and he he
says that quote where he says it seems I must be a warrior.
And if he knows that Kingsguard sometimes like throw matches to
Princess, he might be like don't do that.
Yeah, you know, beat me for that.
Said non Kingsguard would have no control there.
And we at the time we we talked about Cersei's almost marriage
to Rhaegar, that when Tywin presented that option to Aries,
only to be rejected insultingly. Remember when that happened?
It was at a tournament at Lannis Port where Cersei, who was only
10 years old at the time, remembers how her all of her
father's men lost to Rhaegar. And we're like, they wanted to
announce this marriage at the end, maybe after Rhaegar is
victorious, you know, like, yeah.
So you should always be suspicious in these spots.
I think you mentioned Ivanhoe. Yeah.
Nina put the notes about Ivanhoe in here.
I had not even heard of this movie.
And it's a book or a. Book.
Maybe there's a movie, but it's a classic.
Yeah, I guess. No, you're right, It's a book.
It may have been filmed also, but.
Yeah, yeah, it's a book and a movie.
There is a movie. Oh yeah, Yeah, an old movie and
an even older book. Right on a 1819 novel about a
12th century English knight. And the tournament is held at
Ashby Zela Zoku Ashby Ashford. Yeah, of course there's an
actual Ashford. I'll, I'll talk about that in a
second. And then this was when Prince
John, the, as in the, I guess the, the crappy King John of, of
legend, who was a real person. And there was 5 challengers.
So it's kind of the same thing. You get to pick who you want to
fight against. And then they're honoring a
queen of love and beauty at the end when Ivanhoe wins disguised
as a mystery night. So, you know, George borrowed
some of those other things. He even said also from the SSA,
I'm at Ashford. Instead of the single
elimination, I went with your basic Ivanhoe Champions against
challengers format, which suited the story better.
He wanted to have, he wanted this set up for Dunk to be able
to risk all like that, like what you were saying, like he wanted
that opportunity to be there only for it to go another way.
And he finishes this line by saying, and I confess, I've
always loved the scene in Ivanhoe where the disinherited
Knight rides down the line and knocks down all 5 Norman
Shields. So it's like he challenges them
all. I guess.
I'm not sure I've I haven't read the book so I don't know, but
that sounds pretty cool. Another central theme of the
book, by the way, was this idea that they really, truly believed
that the gods were acting through them.
It's no one challenged a trial by combat.
You know, if someone accused someone of something and you
say, well, let's fight to death over it.
If you won the fight to death, like, well, you're, you weren't
knowing God chose you. You must have been telling the
truth. They, they really genuinely had
this faith in God and that he would direct the course of their
lives based on truth and justice, however silly and naive
that might be, however true it might be.
I don't know. I should also point out, by the
way, Ivanhoe I, before I take too much credit or you ask me
too many questions, Ivanhoe is one of those books that got away
with not reading. Still pass the test.
Nice, but you watch the film. Not every OK.
You know the movie has Elizabeth Taylor.
Elizabeth Taylor. Yeah, she has purple eyes.
Yeah, it was also written, by the way, like screenplayed by
the guy who did Wizard of Oz. Oh nice, might have to check
this out. You guys are selling this to me
here. Everyone except Sean's T-shirt.
Also, it's kind of funny that most of the tournaments we've
seen throughout A Song of Ice and Fire history, they have a
lot. A lot of times they have pretty
big championships prizes. Rather the Hands tournament.
Massive money prize, right? Just obscenely.
I think there is an extra digit added on to that, yeah.
It just doesn't make sense. Right, Yeah, people, it's been
said more than once the George and and coins he his he hasn't
put as much thought into that as just about anything else.
So it's a it's a small weakness of his.
It doesn't really affect the story, but we can laugh at it
every once in a while because it's like, yeah, 40, that's a
crazy amount of money. And then an guy blows it all on
women and wine. Like what?
How much women we're talking? Millions of dollars, like easy,
like, wow. So anyway, it's it's not
important, but yeah, it's kind of funny.
And then a Dragon's egg for the White Walls prize, which of
course that was set up. So that one you can maybe set
aside given the circumstances. But here, what's the prize for
this one? You get to name the Queen of
Blood and beauty, but I think that was it.
Yeah, what a racket, man. This guy's like, the prize is
the honor of names. Like, what a surprise.
Come on, yo. It's just like throwing all this
in this event but not offering any prize.
It's like, yeah, everyone come spend your money at my castle
and I'm going to get in good with the Princess and offer
nothing. You know, it is worth noting
though, again, like having thrown a lot of tournaments,
even with no prize, there's still some resources.
You're still. Like, yeah, you still got to
like. You're throwing this feast, you
know what I mean? You've got to have judges and
set up the canopies. You're still hiring lots of
people. Yeah, it it costs a lot of money
to throw a party. Did.
You have a lot of feasts and canopies at your tournaments,
Sean. We often would have, you know,
pizza and you know, well, we, we had treats, you know, prizes
aside from like the winner or whatever.
You know, it's a lot of hassle. It's a lot of work and hassle
when you have suddenly have like hundreds of people constantly
like I need this, I need this, I need this coming at you.
Even if they're paying you for it, it's still hard to manage
all that. Yeah, I mean, and some of them
are, I don't want to say like kids are worse than adults
because adults can an adult that feels entitled is can be way
worse than a kid. But you got to deal with both of
those types now speaking, also Speaking of gatekeeping and, and
athletic events, I mean, we got that going on right now all the
time and like the Olympics and things.
I mean, that's not even new. Like it's happening this year,
but it it happens every year. There's people excluded because
of obscure rules about what makes you qualify as a certain
gender or drugs no one's even heard of, you know, just really
stringent restrictions and. I've never heard of what is it
marijuana. Yeah, What is that?
Marijuana Marriage. I don't even know how to
pronounce it. Marriage.
You wanna it's it's a it's a
drug that makes you want to get married.
Ashford Castle A real There's a real Ashford Castle.
It's in western Ireland and Galway on the border with Mayo.
It was built in 12/28, initially held by the House of Burke.
The motto of House of Burke is familiar to you all, or or
should be. Their motto is 1 King, 1 Faith,
One Law, which is almost identical to what the Free folk
are forced to say when Stannis lets them through the wall, when
they have to burn a piece of wearwood and swear.
The line is 1 realm, one God, one king, cried Lady Melisandre.
It's really intense because they all pick up the cry, the Queens
man and George writes it as yelling and louder and louder
and so one king, 1 faith, one law, one realm, one king, one
God. It's pretty much the same thing.
One realm, one law, 1 faith, one God, one king, one king.
That's notable almost certainly where George got that influence
the case. The castle changed hands a few
times over the centuries. Not many times one at one point
it changed hands during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the 1st
and the Guinness family. As in the beer people.
They owned it for a while. It's now a 5 star hotel like
it's a lot of castles have become.
John Ford directed the film The Quiet Man there at the castle
with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara and the show Rain.
Speaking of something more modern on The CW, that's had
some episodes or scenes filmed there as well.
In retrospect, I'm disappointed. We were in Galway when we were
in Ireland and we could have totally gone to this castle.
Yeah, we did not go to Ashford Castle.
You're right. Well, we'll just have to go back
to Ireland. I know.
It is awfully nice there. And there's all those great
castles. All right, so let's go back to
the inn and talk about what's happening because of the
tournament, right? The tournament has drawn all the
focus of the area to it. And it reminds me, like, the inn
is empty. And she's like, yeah, well, you
know, no one's coming in to buy anything because everyone's over
there. It really reminds me of like
when a presidential motorcade comes to town or, or a movie is
shooting in your neighborhood and you just, you have nothing.
There's nothing you can do about it.
They just everything shuts down. You, you are faced with
something much more powerful than you that's doing whatever
it wants, that has its reasons. And you just got to live with
it. And the only thing you can say
is, well, it's going to be over pretty soon.
And you know, this tournament probably, I mean, as it turns
out, this tournament is over quicker than they expected
because of the death. But it wouldn't have lasted more
than, I don't know, a week or two.
I don't really know exactly, but not super long.
But still that's it's a familiar thing and it's one of the many
things that makes the story relatable.
We don't know what it's like to like have our place in the line
of succession stolen from us, but we do know what it's like to
be stuck in traffic or to have like some famous person in town
that comes in and we all have to live with that, right?
Like, that's very familiar. I remember being stuck in
traffic in Atlanta which is already bad enough for literally
3 out. Like not moving for three hours
for both Obama and Trump. Just was 15 lanes of Hwy.
We're just stopped. It's completely.
Or when we had snow here and, and Atlanta just doesn't know
what to do. We're not a city that knows how
to handle snow. And the mayor of all people just
really made a terrible move. The mayor was like, all right,
there's too much snow. No one should be working today.
So there's like a big announcement.
Mayor's like, go home, everyone. So everyone goes home at the
same time in the snow? Yeah.
It's like she was trying to be smart about, she was trying to
get ahead of it, 'cause the snow was like coming, it was like
forecast. It was starting to come down a
little, but then everyone left at the same time.
Traffic gridlocks and then the full.
The snow got worse. Down on top of everyone on the
streets, it was. A baby was born in one of these
snowbound cars. Like, no one was injured or
anything. And so it's just a good story
now. But that probably was pretty
intense and anxious for the family at the time.
The kids got to have a great story to tell, though.
I was like, like, yeah, I was born in a car in a snowstorm.
Like, that's the real Jon Snow right there.
Born in snow and traffic? Consider salt and snow.
Snow and smog. This really touches on what you
said before about logistics. Like in in some stories, the
mayor would have told everyone to go home.
I know this isn't a story, but if it was a story, the mayor
could tell everyone to go home and they just do, they just go
home. But the logistics of the
scenario are like, no, the story became a failure to properly
handle the logistics. And that's why we have this
story is because massive traffic jam caused by an ill advised
order anyway. But yeah, it just changes
things. So these perspectives like
getting back to the story, Dunk, he's sitting down.
He's like, he doesn't mind that there's nobody there.
He can kind of stretch out and just eat all the food he wants
and he's happy. Like remember, he he has a
second or a fourth ale just because he can't.
Meanwhile, when Tyrion gets on the Shy maid, which is a good
comparison here because it's right when Tyrion meets Young
Griff, who is our egg parallel. So this is this.
This is happening almost the same moment.
He's happy to be eating the the plain food that they've got on
the ship because he is so sick of Illyrio's like ridiculously
rich, overbearing food that just knocks you out.
You eat it and you're like, no, I'm tired.
I need a nap after every meal. Which I got to say, Tyrion, he
should be able to just. Ask for different foods.
Don't have? To eat what he gives you,
that's. True, it's.
Like we eat a little less. Yeah, do.
You have anything besides fancy stuffed snails and cooked, you
know, roasted larks that you eat whole?
Like do you have any just? Two sticks and a whole
cheesecake. I guess I have to eat it all.
Can I just have like a plain piece of fish?
Or I'm so tired of all this cheese.
Just a just a bowl of rice, but yeah, yeah, I can buy a nap out
of your cheesecake and breakfast more.
That's why Elyria got so big though.
His chefs just kept making food and he didn't think he could
refuse it. Well, that honeyed locust,
that's. Right, These are very tasty.
He's like, you only eat that when you've tried everything
else, right? Like this sounds good.
Egg wants to go with him and here we get back to dunks
worthiness. He feels bad for leaving Egg
behind, but it's a decision he makes because he doesn't think
he's worthy. He he doesn't think this kid
would do well with him. He's like, Nah, you're better
off with somebody else. It's he's got a low opinion of
himself. He's listened to what the world
has told him. Even though he's got some pride,
he still accepted this as sort of the way things are.
Well, how did you do you kind of read that the scene similar to
that? Is this kind of fit fill in with
his true knight or not sort of attitude?
In certain ways like I, I, I think that's a reasonable take
that you have there. But I also think there's another
side to it that it aside from his own lack of confidence or
whatever, he also knows this is just a tough life to choose in
general. Good point.
He's a big, tough dude. He's been living on the road.
I can handle this. But look, kid, man, you're
better off with the roof over your head.
In his mind, you've got like a family.
You got like a mom taking care of you.
You know what I mean? Don't give that up and run off
with me. You know, it's too tumultuous.
You, you should. You'll have more stability as a
stable boy. And then once he finds out who
the kid really is and he sees these, the crappy behavior of
these Princess, then he realizes actually maybe this is what he
needs. And he tells Makar so.
I think he really kind of realizes it when Egg says his
mom's dead. I think that's when he kind of
accepted him, Like maybe it wasn't all the way, but that's
when he lets Egg sleep next to him.
That's a good point, when he realizes maybe what is it.
You don't have so much to go back to after.
Yeah, by the way, I I'm now going through this a fourth time
as I because I just want to refresh on this specific
sections of the book that we're on now.
You know, as we come up to this and I started to key in on
something, especially with perspective of what we know is
coming, right. Because after when when Dunk
finds out who Egg is, he's kind of upset with disappointed in
him for for having lied to him. And Egg basically says, I didn't
lie to you. And so paying attention here,
he's like even says you've lied about your names.
Like people really call me Egg. And when Dunk asks Egg, are you
an orphan? He's like, are you?
She doesn't say yes or no. And when he says and when he
when Dunk acts about his mom, because he's just showing the
innkeepers, his mom is like, my mom's dead.
And so, so far, I haven't caught Egg in a straight up lie yet,
but but it was an interesting thought that I had was does Egg
not realize that Dunk is assuming that the innkeeper is
his mom? And even further, does the
innkeeper, because the innkeeper does talk about her boy?
How long has Egg been there? How long is like really this
stable boy, you know, like, or does she actually have a son?
I think an Egg is just mistaking identity here.
I think that's how that's how I read it.
I read it that she does have a son and because she says that he
run off again and she's like he's dunks like no, he's in
there, but that's because it's egg and not because it's his
herself. That's how I read it, but
there's definitely no certainty for me.
I'm not like this is definitely what happened.
That's just how my interpretation.
I don't, I don't have any like super strong evidence it's.
Just one of those things I didn't even think twice about
before, but now I'm like trying to add it up.
But maybe it doesn't matter. But I think the innkeeper
actually had assumptions separate from egg and there's
just a little bit of miscommunication going on here.
Yeah, because. I don't think she would call him
her boy, you know, like that. It's kind of weird to call Egg
that. Like, you're right.
They couldn't have been there that long.
Like, the tournament just started.
Deron's hanging out. He was trying to find a woman.
They had been there a whole week.
Yeah, you know, maybe, but. Longer than that, it's hard to.
It's kind of hard to believe. Yeah, I mean it, you know, in a
in the society like this, things are very inexact in terms of
time. And you can be off by, you can
arrive for a tournament a whole week early because you don't
know exactly when it's going to start.
But yeah, it's still. Or exactly how long your journey
will take. Yeah.
And maybe Deron's not paying any attention to what he's doing and
he gets away with just. Well, I want to be a stable boy.
OK, Copper, go get some oats. I'm not sure but it's it's
something I started thinking. About yeah, I do have a clear
image of, you know, Egg and Deron go to the inn and what do
you like? You got to entertain a kid
somehow, OK. You want to be a stable boy for
the week, Darren. Just like drinks, he's like go
and do whatever. Like I don't care eggs.
Like, yeah, I'm going to go hang out with the horses because you
are boring and pathetic. I do feel bad for Darren.
Like we'll talk about him more later rather than in pieces.
We'll talk about him all at once.
But so let's let's talk about the arrival.
Let's talk about his elbow now. His elbow.
And you stoled her later. And then, yeah, we talked
briefly about the banners last time, but let's talk a little
more about take approach it from a different angle here.
And here's a little quote to get it started.
Three score pavilions had already risen on the grassy
field. Some were small, some large,
some square, some round, some of sailcloth, some of linen, some
of silk, but all were brightly colored, with long banners
streaming from their center poles, brighter than a field of
wildflowers, with rich Reds and sunny yellows, countless shades
of green and blue, deep blacks and Grays and purples.
I guess these are new, huh? They haven't been sitting in the
sun. A.
Lot of them would be, I suppose. Some of them maybe like they're
trying to show off they had new ones made to just make an
impression. You know, where we're going to
the tournament. We got to like, look our best.
You know. The Princess are going to be
there, You know, there's all this stuff, right?
So, yeah, you're, you're trying to look at and it's the heart of
shit or the reach, You know, they take knighthood seriously.
They want to. Yeah.
I think they're going to spend some money on, on appearances, I
think. And.
Yeah. And it really is staggering,
right? It's a really quite a sight for
people who aren't used to seeing bright colors.
Again, I think I said this last time, it reminds us of Dantos.
You know, another thought that I had is that times change, right?
So it's hard any one moment to quite attribute this, But it's
possible, if not likely not guaranteed, that the colors of
banners might be based on the wealth of a house in the first
place. Yes, right, because of certain
colors more. Expensive for a house they're
just going to have brown and Gray banners, but a fancy,
prestigious, wealthy house they're going to have keep
Crimson and bright blue or whatever, so.
You're totally right. The Starks are real poor then.
I mean, because certain colors come from certain plants and if
you have those plants in your country, then those colors are
cheaper. It's it is actually.
For the money to import. Them, yes, you're totally right.
I mean, that is a great. That's a very another excellent
point. Rooted in to conquer the places
with those plants. Yeah, absolutely rooted in
logistics. Like for example, the British
colonial Empire, It's it's maritime empire of the, you
know, not too distant past. They had a whole what to do
about the dye Cuciniol, which is red dye.
It's little red beetles. Well, you crush them and you get
red dye. They eat cacti, a specific
cacti. They they infest these cactuses,
these specific cactuses and then you harvest them from that.
England tried to plant these cacti and Australia and put
coquinnial on them. Didn't work.
Instead what they got was a bunch of cacti growing all over
the place. All the coquinnial Dutch, they
just started a cactus infestation, screwing up the
local ecology, kind of like kudzu in, in the, you know, in
several places in the US And it was a big money move.
Like they were trying to make mad money from that because red
dye is expensive and valuable. And if they instead of buying it
from the merchants, they could have their own source, then
they're making that much more money.
Purple dye. We talked about the ancient
supply of purple dye coming from sea snails, smur ex snails,
which George borrowed for the Tirashi dyes.
So he expanded on that call on that whole idea.
And there's even a Tirashi person selling fancy armor here
at this tournament. So yes, you're totally right.
The The Witcher story Eternal Flame has a funny part about dye
and how like one house overthrows another house and
this smart merchant no like immediately buys all the dye of
their house colors because he knows that that color is going
to become all they're going to have to buy all these uniforms
because they just took over. Like they're going to outfit
everybody in their colors like well, that dye is going to go up
in price. Like this dude makes a ton of
money just by buying the dye right before the overthrow.
Right place, right time. Yep, Yep, right move.
Capital. Yeah, so, so that's pretty
important. And it's probably Westerosi
merchants doing things like that.
Certainly that's happening off page.
Like, it's just not what George chooses to write about.
Let's talk about specifics. Like, yeah, you you brought up
half some of these houses, like their colors and their their
sigils might be chosen based on what they have available.
That's a good point. Last time we talked about who's
not there. Let's real quick.
Who is there? We have how they're presented
just as a bunch of names and banners.
But we have a sort of a list here to to give you a little
more understanding of what's going on.
There's only one house from the Vale.
That's House Harding. That's the this Harold Harding
guy that's very prominent in the story.
Of course he does at the end, but Oh well.
And from the West, we had Lannister, Marbrand, and
Westerling. Not a lot, but big names.
But those and those are Lannister.
Banterman, Marbrand and Westerling are very directly
sworn to the Lannisters, unlike, you know, the rest of the of the
West. They're all sworn to the to
House Lannister. But these are direct vessels
like neighbors. Even so, the Reach has Tyrell,
Tarly, Fossaway, Mullandor, Hightower, Florence, Perrin,
Beesberry, and Riesling. There's perhaps a few others
that we just don't see, but that's the longest list.
Riverlands there's a lot as well.
Tully, Black, Bracken, Blackwood, Frey, Mallister and
Derry and that's most of the big names.
There's no Harrenhal represented there.
That's one notable omission, although the name is going to
come up a few times elsewhere, certainly indirectly, crown
lands is represented by Cargill and Stokewire.
So not much going on there. But also the the Princess.
So that's, that is actually kind of a big deal if you include
them. And the Stormlands is, is House
Karen, Baratheon, Estremont, Dondarian Swan, Penrose and our
good friends at house Wild who we talked about last time.
So that's a pretty good list. The Stormlands, the Riverlands
and the Reach, by far the most represented and a lot of names
that are familiar and famous in current and song of ice and fire
times. And even back then, a lot of
marcher houses and a lot of houses that fought against the
Dornish for time immemorial, especially House Karen and house
Thundarian as well as house Swan.
That's that's three of the four main marcher houses right there.
A lot of a lot of anti Dornish houses.
You would say to back up what we had brought up before returning
to Javi's question about what other Black Fire stuff would be
here if the books had been written a little bit differently
or if George had finished fleshing out the Black Fire by
the time this was done. This is a good example of things
that he might have switched, which is that he gives us this
Bracken Blackwood feud popping up again, something that's
happened many, many times. I have a feeling that this would
have been still will between black dragon red dragon
followers instead of Blackwood bracket.
Even though black and Brackwood has been a feud forever, it fits
perfectly. I think this would have been
more pressing to portray, you know, on the page.
So that's a good a good example of something that I think would
have been slightly different bracket and Blackwood did fight
on opposite sides of the black fire rebellion as well.
So that could be in fact, it could have been both.
It could have, he could have used that as the sort of the,
the tip of the spear, the two houses that are still the most
upset with each other because they their grievance goes back
even farther than black fire stuff.
So I think that's an interesting possibility.
You know, another group that isn't represented for pretty
much the same reasons, I think, is the Iron Man.
You know when. Yeah.
And islands are similarly don't really have Knights and they're
kind of removed geographically, Yeah.
They're not very popular. That's why I'm happy to not have
to deal with their perspectives. And of course, we talked about
the one representation of Dorne is the puppets, puppeteers, and
we'll come back to her shortly. From patron Delena Sands sends a
comment that says there's a nice parallel between Dunc's thoughts
before the trial by 7 battle and Barristan's eve of battle speech
in his The Winds of Winter chapter.
Barristan thinks, what if you shame yourself?
You are actually, Barristan says in his speech, what if you shame
yourself? You wonder, What if you forget
all your training? And that's pretty much what Dunc
thinks as the horn to start the trial sounds.
He thinks, I've forgotten, He thought wildly, I have forgotten
all. I will shame myself.
I will lose everything and it's a first hand example of that
because Barristan's point of view, he's just so experienced.
I mean, this is a guy he's, he is scared, but he's also feeling
alive and he knows what to do. He's done it so many times.
Plus he knows the men are following him.
He knows men are depending on him.
It's not quite the same for Dunk, where he feels like yes,
these men are fighting with him and obsessively for him, but he
feels but they're the superiors in his mind.
You can also imagine embarrassed in saying that just to make them
feel better. But no, it's really true.
Yeah, right. Even Duncan at all, this great,
huge strong knight who goes on to do greater things, even he
still has this gut fear when the moment comes, you know, yeah,
good point. But he also gets over it and
moves forward. This is also fun to point out,
because that's one Lord Commander to another.
In a sense, we've got Duncan the Tall ends up being Lord
Commander, the Kingsguard. Barristan Selmy when we meet him
is already Lord Commander, the Kingsguard, and there's only one
Lord Commander between them, the White Bull.
It went Duncan the White Bull and then Barristan Selmy, and
Barristan knew Dunc from having defeated him at the winter
tourney wear egg on the fifth night of him.
So that is pretty cool. Very, very cool though.
All these connections, Kevison says, in reference to my
splitting the difference, as it were, between how we can relate
to Dunk as a person, but maybe not when it comes to pulling 3
feet of Lance out of your side and keeping going.
Kevinson says Aziz can't relate to Dunk yanking a piece of Lance
out of his side. You've clearly never played ice
hockey, Kevinson. You are correct.
I have never played ice hockey and I never will if that's
something that can happen. I didn't know that was a thing.
Yeah, you're that's a good way to keep me off the ice.
I am not eager to have that happen.
No, I've played broom ball, which is sort of like hockey,
but you just have shoes on the ice instead of skates and your
stick is just straight. It's just like a a broomstick
and it's a ball instead of a puck.
I can't believe I did that. It's so dangerous.
There's so much falling and smashing and.
You are a real jabroni. You keep using this word
jabroni, and it's it's awesome. OK, so let's talk about the
pavilion pool. This is Dunk.
You know, he, he takes note of all the the fantastic banners
and then goes off to find a spot away from all the banners, which
is a really peculiar inversion. It's, it's, it's almost funny to
think about. I'm going to take Nina's words
on it. She writes it well here.
Dunks reluctance to to camp on the tourney grounds with the
highborn Knights again speaks to the novellas exploration of the
hedge knight as a liminal social class.
I like using the word liminal here 'cause he's like separating
himself where he's almost not there right.
They like where he's just like a part of it, but he's not there
except when he's when he is. Dunk is ostensibly no different
in terms of his knighthood from any of the highborn Knights on
the turning grounds. They all have sur in front of
their names. They all had some other knight
bring the moon, but a highborn knight with wealth, much more
confident in status, much more confident in sort of belonging
to the brotherhood of of wealthy people.
Like they they kind of protect their own.
They protect. They defend the their rights as
nobles to hold above the commoners and all that.
And we've talked many times about how being a Lord in a, in
a situation like this, in a, in a setting like this, which was
true in the real world, given the appropriate parallel times,
was almost like being a God or a demigod.
You just had that much power and you could do whatever you wanted
with with almost little consequence.
And that is to a lesser extent true of, of the families of
these Lords and ladies. And that's what most of the
people here are. And so he doesn't want to be
mocked by them. He doesn't want to be looked
down on, yet he's trying to win their attention, trying to prove
himself. So it's a really a bit of a
paradox that he wants to be recognized, wants to be seen,
yet he also has to camp far away from them where they won't see
him. Yeah, it's interesting because
through his fighting prowess, he has the ability to impress them.
Yeah, he's got to like stay out of sight, out of mind until that
moment comes. Right.
Good point. Yeah.
Also just this moment here where he's thinking about how he
doesn't have a home or he's never had a home is a really,
that is a really good quote, one of the, I think one of the
stronger, more like heartfelt quotes of the whole story.
And there's a few good ones here.
Duckett seen many in Market Town during his journeys with the old
man. This is prettier than most.
The whitewashed houses with their thatched roofs had an
inviting aspect to them when he was smaller.
Used to wonder what it would be like to live in such a place, to
sleep every night with a roof over your head and wake every
morning with the same walls wrapped around you.
Maybe that I'll soon know. Yeah, right.
Maybe not. Maybe not what an aspiration,
though, Like he just wants to have a house, you know, like
that's pretty basic. It's not it's it's not some
grand ambition it, but it's very understandable.
Like I just want to have be somewhat normal.
It reminds me a little bit of Ragnar, Ragnar Lothbrok from
Vikings, right? He, he kind of has to go be a
warrior, but in the end he's just doing it so he can settle
down with his family, right? That's true.
Just wants to make sure he and his people have good farmland.
I guess I have to like be a leader.
I have to go to war. But I don't really want to be
killing people. I want to be spending time with
my family. Yeah, yeah.
It's like it means to an end. It's like, well, I'll do
whatever it takes to get to this goal, even if it means doing
awful stuff, But it's for that goal.
Yeah. And then, of course, power
corrupts. That interrupts the whole thing.
But you know, that's a big part of this story, too.
Same little piece here, Rita pointed out a good quote.
Reluctantly, he turned his back on the turning grounds and laid
his horses into the trees. Rita says.
Sums up Dunk's whole journey. Yes, yes, good point.
Good call, Rita. Shout out Rita of the copper
Maine. So while he's hanging out at his
pavilion, that's not a pavilion. There's a very interesting quote
here that kicks us off on several different discussion
points. Shout out to anime lover Nicole,
long time supporter, a friend of the podcast, for being one of
the first people to point this out here.
A couple of a couple of y'all noticed this, so I grabbed it
and we are going to delve into this.
Let's have this quote. He sat naked under the Elm tree
while he dried, enjoying the warmth of spring air on his skin
as he watched a dragonfly move lazily among the reeds.
Why would they name it a dragonfly, he wondered.
Looks nothing like a dragon. I've also wondered that, yeah.
So there's in fact Silva and you know me.
I went and looked up dragonflies.
So let's start with that. They've had many other names.
Dragonflies are one of the oldest insect species.
They've existed for millennia and that's that's actually
selling it short. I mean, millions and millions of
years. What's funny about them and
thinking about the name Dragonfly is that most other
cultures don't have a name like that.
China does. China also has a dragonfly name
for them. And so that also has given a big
impact to how they're viewed in the modern world.
But other places, these are of course translations have called
them things like Adder Bolt, Snake, Doctor, Devil's Riding,
Horse Devil's darning, Neater, and Horse Stinger.
Which is funny because they don't sting.
It's a perception that they do, but they don't actually.
They're shiny and metallic and extremely aggressive.
I read that they when a dragonfly attacks something,
they get it 95% of the time. They have an extremely high kill
rate and they have they can fly like drones like they can fly
any direction up down backwards. They can fly backwards.
They can fly left like not turn left and go that direction.
They can fly left. This will really blow your mind,
y'all? It sounds like a drone, right?
What that that kind of movement and drones have been designed
like dragonflies. In fact, there are dragonfly
drones. There is technology.
This exists. This is a real thing.
There are actual living dragonflies that have been
outfitted with devices that attach to their brain and can
send we humans can send signals that cause them to change
direction and do things. And because they're just,
they're flying has evolved over these millennia.
It's just so incredible. They're the physics behind it
all and the way they can hover and move and it's they're
impressive, but they're also shiny and metallic.
And that's part of the the dragon thing, the aggression.
Minor tangent by the way, but hummingbirds are unique among
birds that they also fly like drums.
They can. Go.
Backwards to left, right and everything else.
They're yeah, they're really impressive too.
Talk. Nature creates some incredible
things. So it's like people look at the,
the mythical Dragons and like nature, it's like, that's so
unrealistic. It's like maybe, but like nature
has produced some incredible things.
Now. Moths, right?
Moths we, we talk about moths only living a day.
That's not really true. Moths don't live.
Moths live more than a day. It's just, it's that's a
misconception based on the fact that they have multiple life
stages and one of those some one of those stages can be as short
as a day, but they have like 3 life stages and those other ones
are longer. But even the longest lived Moss
can only live like a year. Some of them only live like a
week, but dragonflies can live like 6 or 7 years, which fits
nicely with the up to 200 or even more year lifespan of of
Westerosi Dragons. This comment dragonflies among
the reeds. Oh, that's cool around the reeds
like a Howlin Reed like the the the chronic men or or house
Reed. That's cool.
That could be a little something something there.
Yeah, I mean, he goes towards the Riverlands.
He does. He goes N we know he goes N We
were just talking. We were just talking about old
man and him and all that. So you got to cross through the
neck to get there. The Reeds are going to be like,
man, this Prince is lazy. By the way, this is to be clear,
because I don't think we've actually said it yet, but the
Prince of Dragonfly is that's Egg's son.
His first born. Yeah.
The one who marries debt. Jenny of old stones.
The one Jenny's song is written about.
So that's them. That's.
She dances with her ghosts, you know, and he is possibly one of
them. Maybe she survived Summerhall is
is 1 theory. But everyone, you know, like
everyone she knew was killed. But we're not sure.
But it obviously, the song is very popular.
It's very heartfelt. And the show helped make it even
bigger. So that's a wonderful connection
is tragic as it is. Yeah.
So he's thinking about that. He's going to be named for
Duncan the Tall. Duncan the Small is Prince of
dragonflies. And one of the reason he's
Prince of dragonflies is because he gives up his inheritance to
marry Jenny, who's a common girl.
And you know, the realm is not OK with that.
So he has to give up his his throne.
So he's not of the Dragons, he's of the dragonflies.
Right, so it is. It is.
Sean Hagee says that Lady Gwynne has a theory that Jenny of Old
Stones was a Krannig woman. Yeah, I I have felt the same way
and I think, I think Lady Gwynne is right.
There you go, the dragon among the wreaths.
Yeah, it is a a very telling line, isn't it?
Of course, while talking about dragonflies and the death of
Dragons, non literal Dragons, this is tied into the tale of
the death of actual Dragons. We briefly touched on this
before, but we haven't talked about a lot of how it affects
the realm. So let's get deeper into the the
weeds or the reeds here. 153 is when the last dragon died.
And here's a quote of from Dunk about seeing that dragon.
Dunk had heard the story half 100 times.
Elster Orlin had been just a little boy when his grandfather
had taken him to King's Landing, and how they had seen the last
dragon there the year before it died.
She'd been a green female, small and stunted, her wings withered.
None of her eggs had ever hatched.
Some say King Aegon poisoned her.
The old man would tell 3rd Aegon that would be not King Darren's
father, but the one they named Dragon Bane or Aegon the
Unlucky. He was afraid of Dragons, for
he'd seen his uncle's. He'd seen his uncle's beast
devour his own mother. Summers had been shorter since
the last dragon died. Winters longer ruler.
So that's a huge amount of setup in this chapter.
First of all, at this point in the story, you don't know Egg is
another egg on that he's going to be the 5th egg on, so that's
a big deal. And that he's going to try to
bring the Dragons back, which of course will get him killed.
Presumably. By the way, that reference to
Egon the Unlucky, that is a huge part of the Dance of the
Dragons, and we'll be seeing that on House of the Dragon.
Assuming that show gets a full run.
I would, I would guess it will, but you never know, I suppose.
But this last line also, I want to speak to that the summers
have been shorter since the last dragon died and the winters
longer and crueler. So that's a really big deal that
effects everyone, right? But it affects the common people
more than the wealthy because they have more ability to, well,
to use modern parlance, climate change doesn't affect them as
much, right? They can.
They've got the wealth to weather the storm, so to speak,
to hide indoors or whatever, to pay for an escape, whatever,
whatever terms you want to use. And that's really important here
because that's going to going forward.
It's going to really, it's going to cause the realm to be
agitated, right? I mean, think about that.
You got a whole realm of people that are just hot and angry
because they're hot. It's annoying, right?
You're sweating all the time. It's frustrating.
You can't live your life. I mean, that's rebellions start
in part because of people leaders tapping into discontent.
And this discontent can take many forms.
And in this case, it's eventually going to be pointed
right at Bloodraven. They're going to say that guy is
the reason for the summers being this hot.
It's kind of ridiculous. But you've got a realm full of
illiterate people that don't know better, and they'll believe
what they're told. And, well, a lot of people can
manipulate that. And hey, maybe Blood Raven is
responsible. We can't say it's not true.
We have no evidence one way or the other.
We can the. Gods will let us know.
That's right, here's another tale that I think is interesting
with a connection point perhaps to the real, where we talk about
real dragonflies. Now, when you saw those dragon
skulls on TVI don't know about you, but I've I thought of
Tyrannosaurus rexes. The skulls look pretty similar.
I mean, they're in fact designed that way.
Dragons are sort of patterned off of dinosaurs.
In fact, there's ATV tropes page, Dinosaurs are Dragons.
There's a lot written on why people write Dragons as
dinosaurs. In fact, there's bringing China
up again. A lot of there's some Chinese
words that refer to dinosaurs as Dragons and that it's kind of a
misconception, but it's rooted in some truth about how they're
perceived in ancient times. I'm probably not explaining it
super well, but the point is that there's many cultural
associations in the real world of Dragons and dinosaurs.
I mean, hey, you're some older culture.
You dig up a giant skull of AT Rex.
Are you going to think dinosaur? No, you've never heard of
dinosaur. You're just like, what the hell
is this? It's a giant skull with razor
teeth. Like, Oh my God, I'm glad this
isn't around anymore. Which brings me to mind.
I haven't specifically researched this, but I do assume
that ancient cultures would have unearthed some fossils.
Yeah. And they would have been all
around Earth, so all cultures would have found them.
And all cultures have these dragon myths, you know, So it
it, it adds up. Yeah, right.
Yeah, totally. You're right.
And so that brings me to my next point.
What if T rex's put ourselves in the real world?
Turn on your real world brain for a minute and think about
that. What if instead of T rex's dying
out when they did, they died out 60 million ish years ago, long
ass time ago? What if they only died out 60
years ago? What if, like your granddad had
seen a living T Rex? That's what we've got here.
That's what we're faced with here.
There's Dragons died out 60 years ago.
It's so hard to perceive, but so interesting to me to think
about. Like, what kind of world would
it be if people had been living like, because that's an old
myth, right? Like dinosaurs and humans lived
alongside each other? Not really.
There was a few like still
around that you could say descended from dinosaurs.
But T Rex and humans? Not even close.
We're talking 10s of millions of years apart.
I'm just going off that a little bit.
I'm thinking in the modern world, like in the past 100 ish
years things have changed a lot like just our civilization and
and infrastructure and technology has kind of ramped.
Up Our ability to get fossils out of the ground has changed.
Yeah, but imagine that same thought about dinosaurs having
gone away 60 years ago if we were in a time period 100 years.
Ago you wouldn't, you wouldn't necessarily know that they're
gone, right? Well, you, you might, but I'm
thinking more because it might one thought I had was like, what
if some species it now is near extinction, actually went
extinct like tigers or something, some big ferocious
monster. But even now I got a tiger.
They're like in zoos or far away.
They're in jungles. Not really that.
But 100 years ago, what if people at that time knew that
tigers had just gone extinct, right?
And it's some people had seen them and know they really were
cats as big as a person, You know, it would have been pretty
fantastic And, and it's scary to think about and etcetera.
That's a good point, yeah. I mean, even going back to
dragonflies, there were dragonflies that were that had a
30 inch wingspan back in the day.
And that's. Crazy to think how big some.
Goodness, that's like, Yikes. I always think that when I hear
about dodos. Oh yeah, the dodos.
Because dodos are interesting. They're a very unusual type of
bird. Yeah.
Relatively recently. Yeah, relatively, yeah.
Yeah, or or they. Weren't like man eating monsters
that yeah. Exactly, which is kind of which
is kind of where in terms of wanting them to come back, I can
relate more to wanting the dodo to come back than to wanting the
dragon or the T Rex to come back.
Yes, Jurassic Park had it all wrong.
By the way, I don't know if you guys know this.
Jurassic Park was a documentary and it was filmed in real time.
So yeah. So we already know what happens
when you bring them back. Just watch that documentary.
You can see another take here on the the Dragons, which leads us
into nicely leads us into what we talked about at the beginning
with keeping in our eyes on clues for Summerhall and for
wildfire. So Arlen saw exhibited in 152.
That's Arlen, a penny tree. The last dragon Tyrion says the
last two Targaryen Dragons were quote, hatched on Dragonstone.
But the last dragon presumably died in King's Landing, where it
was exhibited a year before its death.
So it's not clear whether this stunted little female was one of
those two Dragonstone hatchlings or not.
Probably is the Tyrion's quote seems to lean that way, but
we're not certain. Likewise, it's unclear if that
last dragon hatched from a specific Targaryen's egg because
we know that the Targaryen's are given in this era and going back
a little farther, though not all the way back to Egg on the
Conqueror. This wasn't a this isn't a long
standing tradition unless it was a revived tradition that was
gone for a while where they give eggs to the young Targaryen.
That seems to be something that started near the early in the
Dance, I think before the Dance anyway.
Whether this was the an egg that was given to a specific
Targaryen or just some random egg that they had lying around,
we're not sure. Probably one of the ones that
was given to somebody, but there's really no way to be
sure. So Deron the future, Deron the
first, meaning Deron the dragon, the one who attacked Doran.
He was 10 when the last dragon died and then he was named
Prince of Dragonstone at some point in his father's reign.
So Nina suggests it's possible Deron the young dragon, the 10
year old, is living there since he was the Prince of Dragonstone
and then that this stunted green dragon hatched for him and then
died. And you know, the rest is
history. This could be foreshadowing for
Dunks eventual demise as young Arlen of Penetry saw the demise
of the original line of its Targaryen Dragons.
Dunk himself is going to see the end of quite a few Dragons as a
result of trying to bring the Dragons back.
There's just so much book ending and dot connecting from front to
back here that it's really quite impressive.
Haileen the pyromancer. Now why am I bringing Haileen
up? Oh, pardon, I was just
remembering something old wisdom Pulitur told me once when I was
an acolyte. I'd asked him why some of our
spells seemed, well, not as effectual as the scrolls would
have us believe, and he said it was because magic had begun to
go out of the world the day the last dragon died.
So that line brought forward from Dunk.
That's why of course, why I brought it up.
A couple reasons why, but because it's the same thing,
Arlen said. And or at least is that he's
Dunk thinks while thinking about Arlen.
So Tyrion goes on to say, yeah, because Haileen is saying, well,
you know, our spells are working better right now.
So do you know of any Dragons in the world?
And Tyrion's like, Nope, I don't know of any Dragons in the
world, but Danny's have just been hatched.
That's really important to point out here.
OK, once again, I want to remind you guys, when this was written,
this book came out a month before this is the structure
came out a month before Clash of Kings.
So he was writing them in tandem.
So all this stuff about wildfire, which doesn't appear
until Clash of Kings. Keep in mind this is really
important, folks. Wildfire is not mentioned in
Book 1 at all. It's like he invented it in
between the two books and put it into and thought about it for
the hedge knife. If I invented, you mean
discovered? Right, discovered, discovered.
This is this is a pretty big deal, right?
Aries? There's all these like vague
things about Aries about how what he did, what he didn't do,
but they never say he used wildfire.
They just said he did something unthinkable.
Catlin doesn't even know Bran thinks Ricard Stark was
beheaded. He says that he was like, yeah
my, my grandfather was beheaded because Ned didn't want to tell
them the truth. How awful it is.
It's not till Catelyn goes to face Jamie in the dungeons of
River Run when she eventually sets him free, which kicks off
is the Storm of Swords arc. But this is still the end of
Clash of Kings. Or near the end of Clash of
Kings. That's when she finds out what
really happened. She finds out what Aries did
with the whole strangulation and burning of Rickard.
Even their wildfire isn't mentioned, though it is said the
pyromancers built the flame that killed Rickard.
Piece it all together. George isn't coming up with all
this around the same time, so it makes even more sense that these
concepts are delivered side by side almost, even though the
books are apart, Even though some people probably didn't read
Hedge Night till years after Clash of Kings, or maybe didn't
read it till recently, you got to keep that in mind.
They're both written side by side and so these themes are
really well connected. It's almost like when we're
reading one of the main novels and you find a theme that
doesn't really appear in the current chapter, yet it's
discussed. It's meant to reference other
chapters. George loves that kind of
oblique storytelling. We brings up lore or literary
themes in one chapter to set them up in someone else's POV or
multiple other POVSI think that's what's going on here with
the wildfire setup it's being. Yeah, that's the thing that
happens in literature just in general, that I think we should
all be aware of. I.
You're right, You're right. I say that I put it that way
because it's reading A Song of Ice and Fire is what's taught me
to look for those things. But you're totally right.
Yeah, anything I read now, I definitely think about that a
little more. Yeah, I'm a much better reader
than I was before this podcast. I'm so much better.
Like knowing what to look for. And I'm sure there's so much
more I have to learn about being a better reader.
But yeah, it's George has taught us much.
I think a lot of people have a lot to learn about being better
writers from this. Very true, very true, my friend,
and that's a good point. So I think that's super
interesting that we have all the set up, but it goes beyond this.
The magic had begun to go out of the world the day the last
dragon died yet yet clearly not all of it, right?
There's clearly some Darren's having dragon dreams right here
in this story, right? Three stories from now or two
stories from now, whatever blood Raven glamorous.
That's that's sorcery. That's not some trick of the
eye. I mean, it does fool the eye,
but it's actual magic. And then he joins the tree at
some point. And of course there's there's
got to be green seeing and there's the children still
exist. There's still some magic out
there. So I suppose we could say it
waned rather than die and now it's waxing again.
The comment was like the sign of it waxing.
That may be in the magical forces, the tides of magic, for
lack of a better word, is what enabled in part the Dragons to
come back and all these other things.
How do you see this is that? A few thoughts 1 Is that it?
It's maybe it's kind of semantic, but how much
difference is there between magic and the power of the gods?
Yeah, who knows? And, and whatever difference
there might be between those, how much difference in there is
there in the, in the mind of these speakers, Harlan or this,
this Hollister or who, who, whoever else, you know, that
would, that they may use the word magic and just mean more
generically anything kind of fantastic.
But some people might mean like this particular type of
fantastic thing, which is different from when a God does
something. So maybe these fortuitous dreams
don't count as magic. Or, you know, you could see if
you're spinning it a lot of. Yeah.
Yeah, In other words, you could be like glamorous count as
magic, but dreams are are mystical, not magical.
Yeah, but one way or the other, it does seem like the world at
the time of Dunk that George is presenting us is free of magic
now. For all we know, over in Essos,
crazy stuff has happened, and maybe the red priestesses are
doing sacrifices and speaking through candles and having
revisions of the future, but maybe not.
Maybe they're not. Maybe they're all just praying
to their God and not witnessing anything special.
But I generally prefer a lower amount of magical fantasy.
I think it makes it easier for me to absorb and predict and
relate. Relate.
Yeah, I think relating especially is a big one, yeah.
And I appreciate that George has minimized it so much.
And it gets dangerous when you start to do things like have
Arya take on someone else's face.
Well, now you have to suspect almost every character could
just be someone faceless man. You know, like it's really.
Easy, you're right, the theories in this in this fandom do got to
get crazy with people being other people.
And I feel like George is careful to limit that.
But once you introduce it, it's impossible to completely ignore.
So. And that's why I prefer for it
to not be there as much. And, and maybe at least subtly
is why I like the dunk. I mean, don't get me wrong, I
obviously love the whole Song of Ice and Fire, but but I love
Dunk. I love the Sword of the Seven
Kingdoms as much. It's right up there for me.
And I probably could say this 10 times an episode.
I can't believe they're not making some kind of media, some
kind of TV show. They are.
They are, they are. The plan is there not.
Fast. They haven't.
I can't believe they haven't already done.
They haven't already dunked it. Yeah, it's just so ripe.
It's just so beautiful. I just can't believe it's been
overlooked. I mean.
In terms of magic though, I think one of the more striking
bits of magic in the whole series for me is in the mystery
night with Bloodraven with his glamour.
I was. It's one of the most memorable
honestly, is the glamours, I suppose in general because I
don't really understand it. Yeah.
But we'll have plenty of fun talking about it at the time
because, yeah, there's there's so much we can draw a connection
to with, with Melisandre and things that we expect might be
coming that will be that will be fun.
Blood Raven is quite a character.
We've done so many episodes on him and I don't feel like it's
fully covered. And it's really interesting too,
Sean. Like one of the things is this,
this fits in with what you were saying before.
Like I think someone could predict that you would prefer
lower magic based on your comments about wanting logistics
more and how you you prefer the stories to be rooted in reality
more. And that I I'm with you on that
a lot of the way. And it's, and Dunk is too.
I mean, who does Dunk have? What does Dunk have time for
this? Dunk can't be thinking about the
mysteries of existence and the nature of Dragons or sorcery.
The dude's just trying to eat. He doesn't have a roof over his
head. Like, who has time for that?
When you, when you, when you have a rope belt, I mean, you,
you can't be worried about other stuff.
Like you got to he's got to make a living.
He's what? He doesn't even know how old he
is. He literally doesn't know his
own name. Yeah.
Also, I just want to say Dunk is young.
He's maybe 17. He's 16 or 17.
I can't bring this up enough. People don't realize that he's a
child. Yeah, he is.
Not he. It's thrown off because he's
big, because he's around someone even younger than him.
Yeah, he's exactly. He has to be the mentor, not the
mentee. Yeah.
And he's been thrust into the role of an adult also.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Totally, yeah. For himself and for for EG.
Yeah. And it's interesting to think
about how it's harder to live outdoors because of these, the
weather changing, and how. So he looks real rough and old
is what you're saying? Yeah.
Haggard, the old man, You know, by the way, when I was 16, if
someone had told me I was naive or ignorant or like, what's for
you? You don't know they're.
Called you a child I. Was so dumb when I was 16.
We all knew nothing. Yeah, we're we were all Johnson.
I mean, we still are. But that's the only difference
really is now we know it. Yeah.
We still don't know anything. But we do know that we know
nothing. That's the one thing we've
learned. Let's briefly discuss the
meeting of of Dunk's first encounter with Tanzel.
Of course, we'll have plenty more to say about her, but we'll
start off with this great observation.
This actually happened last episode, but we didn't have time
to cover it, so let's talk about it now.
John Hagee, Great observation. Yeah, John Hagee brought up that
this quote. The puppeteer who worked the
dragon was good to watch too. A tall drink of water with the
olive skin and black hair of Dorm.
And then he says house drink water is a landed nightly house
in Dorn. Could Garris be a descendant of
Dunkin Tansel or could Dunk have knighted the founder of House
Drink Water? And I think that's a really
interesting idea. And so I looked into it.
I did some searching and and well one Garris is specifically
noted to be tall. He's a big dude.
But this is the more striking part to me, which is that Dunk
is described as having a thick mass of sun streaked hair and
Garris is described as having sandy sun streaked hair.
Sun streaked is pretty specific. Yeah, it's pretty specific.
It's not a lot to go on, but I like the idea that Duncan Tansel
had kits. Tall drink of water also is
sticks out like a sore thumb because that sounds like a real
world idiom, not a a tall drink of water it's.
Strange, a tall drink of water has got to be a real compliment
in Dorn. Yeah, I also, I didn't make any
of these connections to drink water, but when I saw John
Hagee's, no, I was like, oh, it's pretty good.
But it did. I knew the note is that because
I remember that motor did stand out so much, a tall drink of
water. I remember thinking what an
interesting description. He even pondered it a little
bit. I was like, it's like
refreshing, you know, rejuvenating, you know,
delightful. I got the words other similar
words that it invokes thoughts and invokes and that, but the
idea I wonder if he came up with drink water and then just
decided to describe her as that or remember that he used tall
drink of water and decided to name them drink water.
Like just what's so bad to get in George's mind.
I I want him to watch this podcast and then give us the
answer. Maybe one day he'll give a lot
of these secrets away. Who knows?
Maybe.
But yeah, that's super.
That's super neat. I love connecting that. dot.
Good job, John Hagee. Excellent catch.
You know, real quick. Sorry, another tangent went to
Seattle and the the Museum of Pop Art there and they've got
all kinds of stuff, fantasy, science fiction, horror, video
games, Disney, but they and and it like Seattle stuff, all the
grunge music, Jimi Hendrix's from there.
I didn't realize that by the way, but Pearl Jam just gave
them all their stuff. They just have like all their
notebooks, all their lyric writing and all their set lists.
It's all just laid out there and and I just remember thinking how
much, you know, they had some of it where you could just like
read the pages, right, But then they had looks like dozens of
other notebooks that were just sealed in cases what you
couldn't see, but you just imagine pouring through that and
seeing their the writing process.
Yes, actually, I have something to tell you, which is that a
bunch of Georgia's stuff is stored at Texas A&M University,
where you can see a manuscript there that people have looked at
that has interesting information, but he also has an
agreement to give them his notes and a bunch of that stuff.
He doesn't allow copying of it either, right?
So he doesn't allow copying. Of it, no, he you can't copy.
I don't believe that's allowed at all in this text and a this
Texas A&M section archive live. Yeah, I don't think that I I
don't think he's unique in that. I think it's meant to give you a
behind the scenes look. So it's like you, but if you, if
you want, you have to go there and be like a, a real
researcher. You know you can't just like
give me the, give me the Cliff notes, give me the the link.
Yeah. So, yeah, basically he has said
there's, there's no doubt that we will see these notes in this
process, which is why he was so upset because they're, you know,
we have gotten stuff that wasn't meant to get out, like the 1993
letter where he kind of just laid out some ideas because that
he had, you know, his pitch. But that was never meant to see
the light of day to anyone else. So he was actually quite upset,
as it turned out, about that. Yeah, unfortunately, yeah,
that's, I remember that as well. There's so many little, just
like 3 line pieces of set up in this story that you could spend
hours on with each one of them. But a lot of them relate to each
other, so we're trying to tackle them in batches.
Let's talk about his first brush with Aryan and the Kingsguard.
It's neat. The Dunk mistakes Egg for a
stable hand and then Aryan, his brother, mistakes Dunk for a
stable hand, which is kind of fun, like a little bit more
bookending and and paralleling. I suppose Aryan really comes off
the way it's the setup you would expect for someone that's just a
total jerk, but he's way worse than you might even think.
Based on that, he comes off as just haughty and kind of
arrogant, which by itself that's annoying, but that doesn't tell
you that he's also a like psychopath or whatever the
appropriate diagnosis is. A man who loves violence.
But it's neat as well that after he meets Baylor and realizes who
Baylor is he he's also recognized this one.
He doesn't know it's Aryan, he just knows it must be the
Targaryen given the banners and the hair color.
So he's met 4 Targaryens in about I don't know the 1st 10
pages but only knows the two of them are.
He doesn't know Deron is 1 and he doesn't know Egg is 1.
So that's kind of funny. Just goes to show how many there
are around and they joke about how the King's not there.
He's like I've got enough problems to deal with already.
Doesn't even realize how many Princess are there.
But let's talk about these two Kingsguard.
This is something that's a really different reaction.
Everywhere Dung goes, people are like turning their nose up at
him, giving him the side eye, mistrusting him, looking down on
him, which makes this moment with the Kingsguard very
different. They're very friendly.
They're accepting. They call him Sir.
There is no Hemming and hawing about his title, about his rank.
No looking down on him. No, like are you you know, they
just it's very different. It's complete, complete night
and day situation. Did you did that strike you that
way? Sean?
Did you catch it this way or a? Little bit, yeah.
I, I will say what stood out to me is that he introduced himself
to them as a knight with no shame or hesitance or red ears
or anything like I'm Sir Duncan like.
And it sometimes he questions his own boldness, but this is a
nearly the highest authority that he could approach and call
himself a knight. And he does it without thinking
twice. So I want to give him credit for
being bold and potential evidence for him really being a
knight. But also, it was pretty unique.
How? I don't know how to say this,
but yeah, like you were saying, like, respectful They were of
him. How down to earth that they
were. They didn't seem to have any
kind of like, leave us alone. Stable boy.
You know, the Kings Bar. We don't have time for you.
Like. Hey, how's it going, Sir?
Duncan. Hey, nice to meet you.
You know, they were, and it made me, it did make me wonder a
little bit about the nature of these particular Kingsguard,
like if we knew their past or who had chosen them to be
Kingsguards, etcetera. Well, we do know about one of
them a little bit. At least we have a guess.
Sir Roland of Craig Hall is one of them.
And we'll see Roland again. But we also have Sir Donald of
Dusk and Dale here. Now this is this is an
interesting point here. Nina did a little research on
this and found a quote from George as well.
George was asked about Sir Donald of Duskindale.
Now we know that House Darklin which is the lordly House of
that rules Duskindale. At least they did until Ares had
them all killed after the defiance of Duskindale that the
one that Barristan rescued him from.
That of course relates to Sir Dantos as well.
Funny that Sir Dantos comes up twice because Dantos is related
to was a Hollard and the Hollards are related to the
Darklands and Barristan asked Aries to spare Dantos because
Aries was killing all the Hollards and Darklands and
Barristan's like, well, I can save two people here, not just
the king, but this guy, the King's killing his his family,
the King's killing. Anyway, the question posed to
George was, is Sir Donald one of the seven Darkland Kingsguard?
The dark house Darkland has had more Kingsguard than any other
house ever. 7 as I said, but George says he's probably not a
darkman because it's Sir Donald of dusk.
If he was at Darkland, it would be Sir Donald Darkland.
But of Duskindale implies that he may not have had any noble
title at all. He may be common born like
Duncan because he doesn't have a noble last name.
So it's very in fact likely, and that might be part of the
friendliness here. He recognizes someone that has a
bit more of a kindred spirit than most of these other, you
know, lordly nice Donald might be like happy to chat for a
minute with someone who isn't all snobby like the people he's
around all day. Not that they're all snobby, but
you know, I'm sure he gets a. Lot of that it's deal with.
Aryan so so that's pretty interesting as a possible reason
in addition to them being nights and and accepting him for that
reason. Or maybe they're just decent
guys, but there may be an actual like social class connection
here as well. I thought that was cool.
Good catch by Nina on that one. When he finally meets Baylor,
Baylor kind of comes to the rescue, right?
This quote here, I remember Sir Arlen of Penny Tree, the man in
the high seat said quietly. He never won attorney, that I
know, but he never shamed himself either.
At King's Landing 16 years ago, he overthrew Lord Stokeworth and
the Bastard of Harrenhal and the Melee.
And many years before Atlantisport, he enhorsed the
Gray Lion himself. The lion was not so Gray then,
to be sure. Real quick shout out to our
friend Micah Clark, who I was chatting with about Crusader
Kings 2, which I stream on Fridays, as some of you know,
and he is currently he's he's telling me about a campaign in
Crusader Kings 2 for Game of Thrones.
He started where he's played the Gray Lion, who is Tywin's great,
great grandfather. So there's, you know, a little
connection there. The bastard of Harrenhal would
almost certainly be a lost in bastard.
And the losses have had the castle since 1:51, which is a
good 58 years. They've had it for, you know,
several generations now. And then we'll and we'll still
hold it until the reign of Makar is when they'll lose it.
They're not here, though. There's no Herrenhall isn't
represented here, which is interesting.
There's no, no Loftons here. And that might be because, well,
we're told that Manfred Lofton was supposed to support Damon
Blackfire, but at the on the eve of battle, he changed sides.
So there might be some people that still kind of look down on
him because it's oh, it's known that he switched sides.
So maybe that means it's not trustworthy.
Do you think that if a lost in loses at attorney people make
fun of them and say ha lost in? If they win, do they get to
become Winston? That's the one of the name
Winston. That's where we got went.
They went. It's funny because Went is a
single bat, 09 bats and Herron Hall's The Lost in Sigil is 1
bat. So you could say that they they
are Winstons, Winstons, but they're not.
So that tournament would have been in the year 193 this
tournament that Sir Arlen fought Bailor Brakespeare.
So he wouldn't have been Bailor Brakespeare then.
He would have just been Baylor the Prince Bailor because the
Blackfyre rebellion was in 196. Well slash 197.
So the tourney was before that. And some of these, a lot of
these people would not have survived the war to be around
for this. I suppose this is something else
that might have made its way into the story if George had
fully fleshed out the black fires prior to this.
But another one that's hard to say, but a pretty good guess, I
would think. Let's talk about horses.
It's really interesting to me to think about Duncan's sweet foot
and how attached to the horse he is and how we get such a
different view of horses from the nobility.
Jamie is taught not to name his horses, right?
And when he goes to sell sweet foot to the master of horses,
takes one look at the horse and says, my Lord of Ashford has no
need of such and just instantly and he still gets a a lot of
money for the horse. I don't know if it's a lot of
money for a horse, but it's a lot of money amount that he says
he could live a year off of. It's a huge amount of money.
But here's a couple of competing quotes to give us an example of
how these horses are are sort of viewed by the different people.
So we'll start off with Arlen's quote.
The old man always says that a knight should never love a
horse, since more than a few were liked to die under him, but
he never heeded his own counsel either.
And then Jamie says. His palfrey was a blood Bay
destrier of magnificent grey stallion.
It had been long years since Jamie had named any of his
horses. He had seen too many die in
battle. That was harder than that was
harder when you named him. But when the Piper boys started
calling them honor and Glory laughed and let the name stand.
Glory word trappings of Lannister Crimson.
Honor was guarded in King's Guard White.
So I just have two things here. One, I wonder what Jamie named
his horses in the 1st place said It had been long years since he
did it. So I guess as a as a teen, as a
child, he did it so. That's sarcastic.
Probably right? But yes, also just the idea of
honor and glory dying. Yeah, it does seem to me I've
thought about this quite a bit even aside from Game of Thrones
or just other contexts of, I don't know, Westerns and life
and olden times or whatever. How important horses are that
because in a way they're in a way they're like a car.
They are. And a car it's you know, give or
take, you know, 20 ish, $1000 maybe get a cheap car for 5000
or expensive one for 80,000. There's probably some variation
in the value of horses, you know, their age or their breed
and all this stuff. But but to someone like dunk or
a a night in general, but maybe especially a hedge night, it's
not just a car, it's kind of your home and your job and
everything right And you're. Not a knight without a horse,
yeah. Right.
And it's, it's to me, I feel like I, I, I, I, I'm hesitant to
say this because I don't want to be like a knock on George or
anything, but I almost feel like they should think more about
their horses. You know, it should be more a
part of their life, the effort to keep them fed and watered
and, and armored and, and, and taking care of their, their,
their, their hooves, you know, their, they call it the, the
horseshoes, you know, etcetera, etcetera.
It seems like that's just such an imperative, integral part of
their lives. And even some of the stuff along
that in our life, cars now they don't like, they don't have
personalities and they're just so even cars to US versus cars
50 years ago, we just like press a button and they just start up,
you know what I mean? Like, but in the old days you
had to know how to change a tire and check your oil.
You had to kind of take care of your car.
Nowadays things are better streamline.
But so I, I, I can see how maybe some wealthy Lords horse are
expendable that they don't deal with that.
They have stable boys and blacksmiths or whatever.
But someone like Dunk or even a knight, even a wealthy knight,
it seems like the connection to their horse would be very
important. And I guess I understand the
idea of like they're going to die, can't get attached, but I
just, I just, I feel like the more attached you get, the
better knight you'll be. The better you know and care for
your horse, the better they'll perform in battle or contest or
whatever else. You're right.
Yeah, Can I also say I found out something recently, there's a
horse farm near us, right? And someone took a picture and
posted on next door of these horses and they had these like
bright neon colored, like look like leg warmers on their legs.
And it's the summertime. So everyone was really confused.
I was making jokes about them being out of the 80s because it,
it looks ridiculous. No, they're not coolers.
It's because of flies. Because it, it'll not only annoy
them, but they'll stomp and they'll hurt themselves and
they'll sometimes run and move a lot more than they need to.
Little things like that, that your horses apparently need to
be protected from. Flies even.
Yeah, I could. That could be really annoying I
would think. This is an interesting little
tidbit. I learned one time also that in
the early 1900s, there was a a doctor of sorts who was studying
human behavior or behavior in general, and he realized that he
had found this horse that could count and.
He was touring it around, he was studying it, he was inviting
other scientists. He's like he was, he was
genuine, you know, like this isn't some kind of trick.
I really believe this horse can count.
I'm inviting other scientists to help me study how and why it is.
And eventually someone realized that the horse was anticipating,
you know, if they, he would tell the course count to 4 and horse
would stop. It took 1234 and A and 714,
whatever it was, and a horse would just do it.
And they realized that the horse was detecting little
subconscious nuanced biting language of the people around.
Like I'm going to exaggerate it. But like, what if you're
supposed to count the four when when you got the three and
everyone when it got the four, everyone were like 4, you know,
like obviously that's exaggerated, you know what I
mean? But animals are just as keen as
humans and detecting little bits of facial expressions and
shoulder movements, Just like we can kind of tell when someone's
lying, animals have that same sort of thing.
What happened was when when they figured out what was really
happening, everyone was like, oh, horses are just dumb
animals, but no, they're not. That's their super.
That's smart. That's really intelligent.
That's super clever. It was almost proof of how smart
they were, but it was taken to be of proof that they weren't
smart at all. And I just, it just hurts my
soul to think about horses just being kept in little boxes,
staring at blank walls, you know what I mean?
They. Were literally designed
evolutionarily over millions of years to run around in open
fields and when we realized they have such a connection with
humans to read our body language, have some
understanding, even if they can't quite understand like
numbers are counting, but to understand that we want
something connected to counting and to read our language.
But then we're like oh they're dumb stick in my boxes like oh
man I and it's one thing I particularly appreciate about
Don because he seems to really care about his horse.
I think that's a he's a, he's a good.
Pet owner, I mean, it is, it's, it's, it's more than a pet
because it, it provides a service.
Like he said, it's part of his employment.
But yeah, he, he loves his. He's grateful.
The name of that horse is Clever Hans if you want to look that
horse up. Oh, the counting horse.
Nice. Yeah.
Like it's, it's a, it's a dichotomy of a lot of Western
thought. Maybe, maybe I'm wrong to say
Western, but I think it's it's common.
Maybe that's just 'cause it's what I'm most familiar with.
But to say that to denigrate non IQ forms of intelligence, right,
that's what that horse did was clever.
It's maybe a form of emotional intelligence, like using context
clues to figure out the right answer.
Like you said, that's intelligent.
Maybe intelligent isn't the right word, but it's some sort
of brain power that arrived at the right answer repeatedly
using a a pattern or a method that came naturally to the brain
of that horse. I mean, emotional intelligence
is a thing. I think Dunk has a lot of
emotional intelligence. He's not he, he's not be
defeated by his situation. He's got a great attitude about
his future. He's got confidence, which I
think is a form of emotional intelligence.
Too much confidence is. Yeah, is that's not a form of
emotional intelligence. Maybe it's something that needs
to be tapered a little. Bit a lack of emotional
intelligence. Yeah.
But it's really important to just as a real world thing to,
for us to all establish that IQ, it is one form of intelligence.
It's not the form of intelligence.
Yeah, are you street smart? Yeah.
Are you horse smart? Are you horse trail smart?
Are you hedge smart? Yeah.
Hedge smart, nice, that's what it is.
And this OK, So what you were saying about the horse like
knowing and being smart, but we have that.
You're right that George puts that in here.
Look at this quote from Danny of like really early in A Game of
Thrones. The call had commanded the
handmade Erie to teach Danny to ride in the Dothraki fashion,
but it was the Philly who was her real teacher.
The horse seemed to know her moods as if they shared a single
mine with every passing day. Danny felt sure in her seat that
Athraki were a hard and unsentimental people, and it was
not their custom to name their animals.
So Danny thought of her only as the silver.
She had never loved anything so much.
Like that line is so telling. She had never loved anything so
much. Like clearly George R Martin
understands bonding with a horse.
You know, like. Yeah, I mean, she's never had a
pet. I mean, George has a bunch of
pets. He's had them since he was a
kid. So yeah, he definitely
understands that. And, and this is not the only
example of it, like Dunk's closeness to his horse is is
heartfelt. Danny's is as well.
And in both situations, these are people, especially at
Danny's, that point in Danny's story, she's pretty lonely.
She's got her brother who's been pretty terrible at her.
She's just been married off to this barbarian warrior guy, this
warlord fearsome guy that she's like, what's going on here?
So it's super early in her story.
So like to have this, this relationship with her horse is,
is like a, a lifeline almost as she gains strength because it's
not long after that where she starts to really come into her
own, you know? In terms of Danny and that line
also, I think it really sets things up for her Dragons when
it says she had never loved anything so much, which is that
her, her children, her pets, that's what she loves the most.
It's a good point. It's a good point.
And then there's other examples like Sandor's Stranger, like
Sandor is very keen on that horse.
Like when the, when there's the riots, the riot, for God's sake,
he's like, I'm going back out there to get my horse, right?
Like now. Gregor would not do that.
Gregor clearly doesn't. Head.
Off. Yeah, it's the opposite, right?
Like once again, Gregor is the reason Sandor thinks all the
whole idea of knighthood is ridiculous, because if that
guy's a knight then the whole thing is garbage.
Oh, there are like, named horses that come to mind.
Theon's smiler, who of course also has a horrible ending,
worse than Gregor's horse, because Gregor's horse at least
died quickly. This one was burning as Theon
is, as Winterfell is burning with it, so that's anything but
smiling. And then Brand's horse, Dancer,
the one that is given to him after his fall on Tyrion's
suggestion. And that horse, of course, is
pretty special. Bran had a connection to Dancer,
but of course Dancer. I don't even know what happened
to Dancer. I assume Dancer may have been
killed. Yeah, yeah, I think that's
that's what Bran assumed is that Dancer has been killed and all
that. I wonder why Bran named her
Dancer, for one. And I wonder if there's any
significance to that other than the fact that Bran will never
dance again. I I think there was something
about like how the horse was like light on his feet maybe.
But the quote it hears from Dornish Dame says Bran had named
her dancer. She was two years old and Joseph
had said she was smarter than any horse had a right to be.
They had trained her special to respond to rain and voice and
touch. Nice.
Yeah, there you go. Another smart horse.
They're popping up all over Song of Ice and Fire.
I'm glad that this novella gave us a chance to bring this topic
up. Clearly we could have brought
this up at some other time. Is obviously most of our
examples come from the main main novels, but it it takes dunks
close attention and love and sadness to really draw it out
and to make us a two more looking and we found.
I really wish I could remember who made this joke in our
Facebook group, but so sorry. But someone made-up brought up
that any Dithraki that sees a bracken is not going to be happy
by them using the face of their God as a sigil.
Yeah, right. OK, let's maybe they'll be
proud. Oh, these guys get it.
Yeah, you're, you're right. Maybe.
OK, so our last subtopic for the day.
It's going to take us back to the wildfire topic while keeping
us rooted in a hedge night while also looking forward to the
mystery night. Steely Pate.
Let's talk about Steely Pate for a second.
Dunk thinks on how armors are also wary of hedge nights, and
Steely Pate does seem to No, he doesn't look down on him, But
he, you know, he's like, skeptical.
A little skeptical. Yeah, a little skeptical.
That's a good word. This guy, Yeah.
I'm the this is good armor. What about it?
Yeah. And so he says this line.
I have some pieces in me wagon that might do for you, the man
said when he was done. I make Helms that look like
Helms, not wing pigs and other queer formed fruits.
Mine will serve you better if you take a Lance in the face.
He does. Take a Lance to the face and the
mystery night. Here's the line.
How is it that you're still walking about the snail stove
your face in? Steely Pate made me a good
strong helm. The Lord in my head.
It's hard as stone, Sarah Arlen used to say.
That's pretty good. So set up and delivery there we
go. We were talking about how
certain lines stick out tall drink of water like winged pigs
and queer foreign fruits. Like that's a pretty those are
pretty peculiar examples for him to throw out there 'cause
there's mostly like most of the, the helmets are like animals,
right? Like winged pigs, sure, that's
an animal, but like, they're mostly like lions and tigers
and. Well, here we have make it clear
that either Clayton Suggs is there or Steely Pete has been
asked to do that, or he just has other blacksmith friends who
either way he's aware of that helm.
But my question is, what is the queer foreign fruit that someone
has? I I, yeah.
Does someone actually get a helmet of a queer foreign fruit?
Well, I I have a maybe a take on this.
Might not connect, but yeah, just just to make sure it was
clear. Sir Clayton Suggs, as Shea said,
that's the night that, you know, constantly taunting Asha about
how she's going to be burned to death.
His sigil is a flying pig for a winged pig, so there you go.
But yeah, the queer foreign fruits.
It's a weird line, isn't it? Like.
I just took it to be like, I don't know, sarcasm, mockery,
even these fancy Lords with their nonsense.
I'm just making a helmet. And you know, maybe he did want
to reference certain ones, but I thought he would just making fun
of the type of things that they wanted.
I definitely think he's making fun.
I agree with that. But I think it might be one of
these multiple meaning things. And here's where.
And this brings us back to the fact that this was written right
next to A Clash of Kings, right at the same time.
Check out this line from the pyromancer Haileen.
There is a vault below this one, where we store the older pots,
those from King Airy's day. It was his fancy to have the
drawers made in a shape of fruits.
Perilous fruits indeed, my Lord. Hand and Ripper now than ever if
you take my meaning. So there you go, George is just
sticking wildfire and all these different places in between A
Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings, likely inserting it here
into the Hedge Night or with plans for Summer Hall and all
that. I'll repeat that it wasn't
mentioned in A Game of Thrones at all.
And perilous fruits, I mean, these fruits are still there.
Some of these were were hurled into the Blackwater during the
Battle of the Blackwater, and some of them are probably still
concealed somewhere and King's Landing undiscovered as of now.
And well, that could that's probably going to be relevant,
isn't it? Do.
You have any clever fruits to have wildfire stored in like I I
thought of passion fire, maybe passion fruits, green apples?
Wild strawberries are already a thing.
There's got to be something wild.
There you go. Yeah, wild Blueberries, wild.
Strawberries Wild. I was thinking maybe like if
winged winged pigs or something unlikely, maybe these this queer
foreign fruit is also a particularly unusual unlikely
type of thing. I was trying to think about what
kind of fruits are punny. Yeah, that's an.
That's a reasonable thought for sure.
If you have idea. Just wanted like banana horns.
Oh I love that. I really like that.
No, I'm just picturing now that like, we don't have bananas in
Westeros, they exist in Essos. Orange, orange, the Thorios or
whatnot. And so yes, someone has a banana
helm. Doesn't have to be horns, but it
could just be 1. Instead of Knight of the
Laughing Tree, we have Knight. Of the banana.
Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm picturing right
now. Banana Corn.
Instead of Knight of the Laughing Tree, it's Knight of
the Lemon Tree. That's the real mystery of the
Red Door and Danny. It's the Knight of the Lemon
Tree with a red shield. So if you guys have theories on
the queer foreign fruits or any other way to connect this to
Eris's Wildfire? We've got 1 here in the chat
from Teddy D, says House Merryweather started to appear
in A Storm of Swords and they have a horn of plenty with
apples, carrots, plums, onions, leeks, turnips and fruits.
So picture they just have like a a horn of fruit bowl on their
helmet. That's quite a helmet.
A Dunk also eats duck with lemons and cherries at at the
end and he's excited about that and of course eating duck makes
you think of Sir duck. You know who he's a parallel to.
So hey, maybe that's a little you just can't keep up with
George. Even when we do we do this like
2 hours plus a week and we still can't keep up with this guy.
Well, he did have a head start, but still OK that we'll leave
off there. We've got of course plenty more
story to go. We'll we'll most likely start
next week with almost right away.
We'll get into the shield and the sigil, which is a great
juicy topic. That's going to be really fun to
talk about how that echoes forward into a Song of Ice and
Fire and pops up in other places.
But we'll have lots of other things to say as well.
Prepare your questions, your thoughts, your comments.
So thanks again, everybody. Thanks to Michael Klarfeld for
our video intro and for the lovely and detailed maps you see
behind me. Thanks to Kevin McLeod for the
Valeritas music. Thanks to Joey Townsend, Jessie
Koal for our regular Valeritas music.
Thanks to Ben Janeer for our sound quality.
And check out our friends Here Be Dragons over on Steven
Stark's channel. They're going to talk about
world building and campaign design for D&D and related
properties. So that's cool.
That's a great topic. I love how big D&D is now.
It was, it's so it's so different when I was a kid, when
I was a teenager, D&D was just like so denigrated by so many
people. Now it's like very mainstream
and I just. I love that it was almost like a
secret society. So it's a good way to put.
It you cool? You cool?
Yeah. It's like, really?
But really, everybody else thought we were uncool, but
yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's like like so much
of fantasy and, and, and these things that were not so cool
when we were younger, they're a lot more mainstream now.
I don't know if they're cool now, but they're definitely more
people like them and. They're hot that DND.
Like, like the summers after the Dragons died out.
Indeed. All right, folks, we'll see you
all next week for more Valar rereads.