When the Blacks and Greens went to war in the year 1/29 1:30, it
had been over 80 years since a dragon had fought another
dragon. And of course I'm referring to
the literal Dragons, not Targaryens.
The hard won lessons learned during the days of the Freehold
and Aegon's Conquest. And the subsequent wars
involving Mega or the Cruel had apparently been forgotten during
the long peace that followed those events.
In this episode, we highlight that lost wisdom ourselves.
Hey, just because they forgot it doesn't mean we need to.
We'll showcase the destructive power of Dragons throughout
known history. And a little bit.
In the not so known history areas, which is a power the
Targaryens took for granted to the peril of all Westeros during
the Dance as the Dragons. Arguably a few other times too,
but the Dance was the last big mistake they were able to make
in that regard. Because obviously afterwards,
well, they couldn't really lose Dragons they no longer had.
So we'll make. Sense of how the Valyrian dragon
riders. Kept from making that same
mistake how they. Avoided destroying each other,
as well as how their methods of conquest reveal some of the very
internal struggles that could have led to that destruction.
But they were able to manage things in a way that didn't do
that for thousands of years and yet.
Well, the blacks. And Greens didn't do whatever
the old Valyrian dragon riders were able to do.
So we're going to examine how that lack of unity still managed
to avoid complete destruction, unlike the Blacks and Greens.
Then we'll discuss how the Targaryens.
Had a unique opportunity when the Doom made them the lone
dragon rider family in the world and how the Iron Throne itself
might be a key reason they blew that massive advantage.
So from Valyria all the way up till right before the Dance of
the Dragons, we've got all that and more on this episode of
History of Westeros podcast. Hello and welcome everybody.
As of this recording, we are getting very close to House of
the Dragons Season 2. This is a book topic, book
centric episode. But of course, Fire and Blood,
especially season one of House of the Dragon, lines up pretty
well with a lot of the events of the books.
So a lot of times when we discuss one, it really does
discuss the other and we're excited for that during the
season. Since it's coming close, I'll
let you know. House of the Dragon streams are
going to be at six Eastern on Mondays and three Eastern on
Saturdays. The Saturday episodes will be
spoilery. We'll be looking towards the
next episodes, laying out everything we know.
The Monday episodes will not be. We'll be discussing what
happened and only what we know from trailers and things like
that. We'll also do some episodes on
Wednesdays at 7 Eastern. Some of those will be live, some
of them won't be. And the topics will be TBD.
It's going to partly be a play by ear based on what things
happened during the season kind of deal.
The episodes on Monday might be spoilery depending on how good
my predictions are. That's true.
The last frontier of Sean's
Unsullied Dumb is the Dance of the Dragons and the few events
that occur afterwards in fire and blood.
So we're going to do it like. That just as we did last year,
It's been a lot of fun and we'll keep it rolling that way.
After every episode, whether it's a book centric episode or
ATV centric episode, you'll find the video up on YouTube, the
original live stream you'll be able to find an edited version
up on Spotify, and anywhere you find podcast you'll be able to
find an audio only version. If you go to Patreon though and
sign up to be a supporter of History of Westeros, you get
those ad free. So that's a nice little bonus,
as well as getting bonus episodes and access to scripts
and voting on polls. Other fun stuff we offer if you
join us on Patreon. So hey Sean, we're, we're black
and green today. We've got our colors lined up
and you've got the office, I've got Dragonstone.
It's about the same really. The office is located on
Dragonstone. Scranton is the Westerosi word
for Dragonstone, so you know. Is the path up to Dragonstone
Abbey Road. Yeah, I guess it must.
Clarify this is a mash up shirt. Yeah, you're right.
My. My all time top band, The
Beatles and my all time top show The Office and coincidentally
this shirt green. Yeah, also shout out to our good
friend Nina. Her blog is over at
goodqueenalley.tumblr.com. That's one Y in alley, and the
latest post over there is right up her alley.
Her alley? Hey, I didn't even mean to make
that pun, but it works pretty well.
She got a question. Do you see a similarity between
Marjorie Tyrell being put on trial and the trial itself of
the daughters in law of King Philip the Fair of France in the
Accursed Kings? Now Nina loves questions about
the accursed Kings. It is most likely her favorite
parallel to discuss to A Song of Ice and Fire and two of her
favorite novels of all time or series of all time.
And yeah, she loves that discussion, so check it out.
She's basically the short answer is yes, she does see a
similarity in between those two, but if you want the details,
you'll have to go to goodqueenalley.tumblr.com as I
do on a regular basis. If you have questions about this
episode or any other, go to westeroshistory@gmail.com or
send us an e-mail to that address rather Westeros
history@gmail.com. Or if you want to and you're
live here with us, just post a question in the comments box.
And there's a decent chance of Shay will grab it and we will
answer it and or discuss it. Also at the end of this episode,
I will give you some suggestions for more episodes that relate to
the topics in this one so as to facilitate further immersion in
the world of Westeros. Also will be the answer to this
trivia question, which is we're told the largest ever army
assembled in Westeros was at the field of fire.
That was 55,000 soldiers on one side there.
That's just the one sides army. What was the largest single size
army ever assembled in Essos? Yes, let me tell you, it's
larger than 55,000 soldiers. And the answer, as usual, is in
this episode. Pay close attention, you'll know
the answer. If you don't already.
You know, before we dive into this, I wanted to preface it
with a thought that was dominating my mind prepping for
this. It reminds me a lot that this
topic reminds me a lot of the movie War Games with Matthew
Brodick in the 80s. Oh yeah, I love that movie.
Yeah. And, you know, the, the idea is
that, you know, there's a, you know, computer technology is
assisting, you know, the powers that be, the Pentagon or
whatever, and the management of the nuclear warheads and the
computer is kind of becoming sentient and it, and it just
doesn't understand the idea that everyone loses in nuclear war.
You know, Matthew Brock's like a young kid.
He's like hacked into computer and Pentagon's who is this kid?
And you know, it's all this intrigue unravels.
But but you know, eventually the computer kind of learns, you
know, that that you could, you just can't win.
And, you know, the the only, the only way to win is not to play
the game. You know, and I that that
thought process was dominating my mind a lot throughout the
course of thinking about, you know, basically this episode
we're going to talk about like how destructive Dragons can be
and how the Targaryens over time use them destructively against
opponents. But in the Dance of Dragons,
they use them against each other.
And then so like they just can't.
There's not a way to win in that scenario, you know?
Yeah, that's a great. Analogy because not only does it
use the phrase game, not only war games, and we talk about if
you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die, especially
if you play with Dragons. And George himself has used that
nuclear comparison many times. And it is appropriate because of
that analogy, because no one wins if nukes are deployed.
So yeah, peace is always the goal, right, In any society.
But sometimes peace has reigned so long that the horrors of war
are forgotten, and that those memories are a big.
Part of what keeps you from making that mistake again, those
lessons have to be not you don't have to repeat the lessons, but
you have to remember the lessons in order to not repeat them.
But if and if you don't, then you kind of inevitably do repeat
them. Not to nitpick or two point too
much, but I I would say that peace should be a goal.
Yeah, it isn't always. You're right, You're right.
Sometimes the ruler's goal is to maintain a power, and also peace
is a goal, but maybe even the main goal.
But you know, liberty and justice are also goals you.
Know. Sure, sure.
You could. At some point you might be
willing to to fight to go to war or whatever for the sake of
liberty and justice. But when you go to war with
Dragons and nuclear weapons, it's like no one has liberty or
justice when everyone's dead, right?
It's it's terrible, It's so bad. Yeah.
So the the best I the the reason it's another rather another
reason it's such a great comparison to nuclear weapons is
that it's a deterrent. No one wants to go into nuclear
war. I mean no, hopefully no one
wants to like. Really like you.
Shouldn't want to. Which is why it's effective.
Neither side uses them. They both.
Know OK, let's not fight because, well, both sides can
utterly annihilate the other it's not the best system, but if
people understand it, it does keep either side from actually
using them and the Dragons should work similarly but.
Yeah, if, if we do fight, we'll fight via some proxy, right?
We'll fight over some other foreign territory or some
political control. Maybe we'll even like send some
troops on foot and but we're not gonna like really go to war.
Yeah, exactly. Slash nuclear weapons, right?
Which is what happens in the real world.
There's lots of wars going on right now that involve nuclear
powers that just they're not stupid enough to deploy their
nukes. They might threaten it, they
might rattle that Saber. But to date, you know, we
haven't had nuclear war. We've had nuclear bombs drop,
but it wasn't nuclear war, so. Don't jinx, it is easy.
Yeah, right. So.
The. The Valyrians held this power
for thousands of years and no other world power did.
It's sort of the equivalent of 1 nuclear state existing in the
world and none others. And yes, the Valyrians learned
to only use that power for the most part.
I mean, obviously there's lots of parts of their history we
don't know, but. Clearly, they didn't.
Self destruct because they kept going for thousands of years
until, well, the doom did destroy them, but that wasn't
necessarily self destruction anyway.
It's an interesting comparison to the real world.
It can because it's humanity that makes it more dangerous.
Nuclear power is a real thing. It happens naturally in the sun
and other stars. Right?
Just like if Dragons were real, they wouldn't kill people nearly
as often as when they're ridden and controlled by humans.
Like we've seen the behavior of wild Dragons in this world.
Both under Daenerys and during this year.
And yes they do occasionally kill a her a person, but they
don't like torch entire armies or castles or anything like
that. That's with humans behind the
wheel. Same with nuclear.
Power. So when the Doom came along,
yeah, they dodged. That fate of being annihilated
with everybody else? They had just enough Dragons to
perhaps restart the whole population with them in control
of it all instead of 40 families with them at the bottom.
They could dictate this new world of draconic power, but
interestingly, they just kind of sat on it for 100 years.
The number of Dragons didn't increase and they well, it
stayed that way. So it shows like the willpower
of one individual, or at least a few individuals is required to
expand beyond that. But maybe they were smarter than
Aegon, right? Maybe they did the right thing.
Things didn't start going downhill for the Targaryens
until they had the Iron Throne. So that's going to be a big
topic today when they when Anar the.
Exile brought his family over from Valyria, you know, 12 years
ahead of the doom. Yeah, they brought the Dragons,
they brought their saddles, they brought dragon keepers, they
brought knowledge of. Dragons needing to live in
volcanoes. They knew how to hatch eggs.
They knew all these things, but they didn't bring with them
probably the most important lesson, the wisdom of not
pitting dragon versus dragon. Or perhaps they did and just
forgot it later at at some. Point.
They seem to have forgotten how important that was.
Now there's they never. Fully forgot it.
Even in this latest season. We have quotes during the
trailers of how bad an idea it is to do this.
But that's just usually one or two intelligent individuals
standing against, you know, a tidal wave of forgetfulness or
stupidity or naivete. Whatever you want to, whatever
terms you want to use. Most of the people are ready to
go to war, whereas only a few voices of wisdom are like.
No. Don't do that.
Like Sean said, the two nuclear states launching against each
other. It's most likely the end of both
and not to mention some of their neighbors.
Perhaps so. So the Blacks and Greens forgot
if they ever knew, if they were ever taught in the 1st place
what the Dragons were capable of.
They know the power you feel when you're sitting in the
saddle lying high above. It was the first scene we.
Saw in the show, in fact, was Rainier flying over besides that
quick shot of, you know, the. Great council, but the I they
never learned. Not to turn that against each
other the less is why some of it's some of it's obvious right.
But if you really get into why it looks like madness, it's the
only way they could lose their top spot not just in Westeros
but in the world. So this was the lesson that kept
the freehold from destroying itself for thousands of years.
They figured it out somehow that not to destroy each other
somehow they they put put laws, customs restrictions, who knows
we're going to we're going to theorize about some of those
things, but. It's a war, and all of that
ended thousands of. Years of Dragons and dragon
riders it all ended because of a war that might never have
happened if they had just remembered the lessons of the
past and of course history of Westeros.
We're going to we're going to emphasize the lessons of the
past as much as we can. Super chat from Zach Remley says
history of Westeros. Let's go.
I love you guys. Well, well, thank you.
We love you too. And we love, we love that we're
getting into another peak of of attention here with the show
season coming upon us and lots of excitement building up.
So we've got lots of content coming for y'all.
By the way, once again, I don't mean the mince words, but I want
to point out it's not just like forgetting the lessons.
Like you have to teach them, you have to pass them on like this.
This new generation of Targaryen kids, it's not like they knew
and forgot it. No one told.
No one taught it to them, as far as we could tell.
You know, or they didn't teach them enough.
They didn't emphasize it. Like they kind of know on some
level. It's just kind of obvious on
some level. But it's not obvious enough.
It's not like why? It's so important, paramount or
foundational to to their mentalities or philosophies or
objectives or whatever. They they, they, they seem to
have relatively temporary or slash emotional motivations that
are about to have world changing consequences that that they're
not weighing against the knowledge of the world changing
consequences. Yeah, it's like a strategy.
You should say OK, like in when you when two people go to war,
when two people are going to fight, often times the one who's
willing. Like you said, Sean, you said
you brought this up before the the first person that really
realizes it's a fight, the person that's willing to go the
farthest. That can be an advantage.
This is. This is why.
It's kind of natural that it went this way and why it's a
lesson that needs to be taught and enforced because if you just
go the general like attitude towards war and fighting this,
it will end in self destruction because the weapons of war are
that powerful. If it's just swords and Spears
and arrows, well, you probably won't just wipe everybody.
One side won't just both sides won't wipe each other out.
They might severely handicap each other or damage each other,
but it won't be like outright genocide of both sides, right?
Because they they just don't have the the technology doesn't
exist except with this. This is the one thing that is
above the. Board, a new thought popped in
my head. It's something else I think
we've talked about before is the idea that throughout history,
like in the real world, throughout history, there's been
this sort of limitation on how much damage you could do in in
war or whatever, right? Like originally you like punch
someone or hit them with a rock or maybe throw a rock, shoot a
bow and arrow. But that's still just one person
hurting one person at a relatively limited range.
But then eventually you had maybe like catapults, you know,
like, you know, bows and arrows were an advancement over like
punching. And then catapults maybe could
hurt several people at once from a significant distance.
And eventually you have, you know, artillery and machine guns
and it starts to become one, a little easier for one person to
do a lot of damage to a lot of people at a greater distance.
And you get to the most extreme with the nuclear weapon.
But it took thousands of years for human society to kind of
make that progression. But in in Martin's world, it's
it's been that way for thousands of.
Years the technological advantage had already existed it
was a natural thing yeah it's it's totally different or maybe
even supernatural you want to call it but it wasn't technology
which is a great point cause yeah like in human history
you've only had. Machine guns for what, a
hundred, 120 years? Something like that?
Not, not super. Long 150 the original
rudimentary A. Fraction of the length of human
history is the point right. Like this is relatively new, but
you so that's a great point that it's it's existed much longer.
So yeah, Valyria had wealth and soldiers as well, and that's
most of what their conquest involved.
It wasn't. The Dragons didn't play a role
in or played a small role in a lot of their conquests in.
Part. Because, well, it wasn't
necessary in the other part, because the 40 dragon rider
families were mostly concerned with internal power struggles
and usually the expansion. If one dragon rider family is
gaining power outside of the city by engaging in conquest,
well, I don't know that the other dragon rider families
wants to support that. Because then that makes that #3
dragon rider family jump to number one and #1 and two don't
want that to happen. So there are a lot of times
going to sabotage each other's efforts outside of the city,
which frees up the more regular conquests to to take place.
But another point is that a lot of nations will just surrender.
Like if. The modern U.S. military.
Marches up to, I don't know, almost any country really.
They're just the US is really powerful.
Let's say they just March to like Barbados, you know,
something really small, it doesn't even really have a Navy
or an army. They'll be like, yes, we
surrender. Like, of course, apart from
world diplomatic consequences for the US, let's just pretend
that's not a thing. Yes, of course they're just
like, yeah, we can't win. Of course we surrender.
That's what a lot of nations are going to do because like, yeah,
well, they have Dragons. Like we can't fight that.
We, it's better to to bend the knee and live to live under this
yoke than it is to die. Now, that's not going to be true
for everybody because some people are going to be enslaved
and they're just like, no, I would rather fight to the death
because it's slavery. Like yes, I would rather fight a
dragon than be enslaved. You might have to face the
overpowering force, might have, might get the surrender in a
moment, but then face subversion, guerrilla warfare,
terrorism, whatever down the road.
Yeah. And a small people, group of
people. You know, it depends on what's
at stake. If we say like, we're going to
take over your country and we're going to tax you 10%, like, OK,
otherwise you destroy us, sure. But if we if you say we're going
to take over your country and enslave every man, woman and
child, like, well, you might as well fight to the death over
that, right? Absolutely.
And so what's at stake, you know?
Yeah, and with the with Valyria, it's a little of both because
they will enslave a lot of people, but they won't enslave
everybody because they do want to keep it a functioning nation
that they can tax and draw repeated wealth from rather than
just one shot and destroy the whole society and loot the whole
thing. They're not the Dothraki.
That's what the Dothraki would do, for example.
Also kind of a a dark thought, but is it strong chance that
they're just going to enslave people that were already
enslaved? Just going to be our slave
instead of your slaves in. In.
Some cases, yes, like with with the Ghiscari, but not with the
Roynar or the Andal's. So yeah, you're right, it
depends. But it couldn't have always been
this way. And what I mean about Valyria,
they weren't always just outward.
They had to start off learning from their mistakes like any
other nation would I I doubt very much the very first
Valyrians to tame Dragons immediately attuned a deeply
held prohibition against fighting one another on dragon
back. Right.
Like a lot of animals are stupid enough to do that in the real
world. Like there's a lot of animals,
like snakes will kill each other.
Like they'll wrap around each other like a poisonous snake
versus a constrictor. Like the pricing videos of this
out there, they're certainly available if you have that kind
of curiosity. Like a Python strangling or boa
constrictor strangling another poisonous snake with a poisonous
snake bites the boa and they both die.
Like this sort of thing happens in the real world.
Animals kill each other because they're just so single minded or
what have you. Humans have don't have that
excuse for the most part. They should be able to learn
from their mistakes. But yeah, you kind of wonder
like wild Dragons, like, again, bringing them up, they don't do
a whole lot of damage to humanity.
They'll occasionally steal a sheep.
Here and there. But yeah, it might ironically be
humans that cause them to behave even more stupidly.
They make them more likely to kill each other.
They make them more likely to drive them into violence.
So records records of wars. In Valyria, meaning Valyrian
wars against Valyria, wars against itself.
We don't have that, but it had to have happened.
I mean, it's like what nation doesn't have some infighting
when it's new or even when it's not new?
Now we don't know whether this what that entailed, but.
It's easy to imagine some dragon Little Rider families going to
war against each other, causing great devastation.
So many nations. Have this in the real world.
Have this history where they just just keep.
Fighting and fighting and fighting.
And destroying each other over and over.
And maybe, maybe eventually they learn not to do that.
And sometimes those lessons last for a long time.
But of course, those lessons never involve the kind of level
of technology that the Dragons bring to the table, which is
just blowing everything away in a manner that wouldn't be
possible. Otherwise, if the dragon.
Lords of long ago of Valyria had torn each other apart as much as
the Blacks and Greens are about to.
Dragons might have just gone extinct a lot sooner, right?
Like they clearly didn't go the quite that far.
Maybe there were cases where a couple of dragon rider families
went next to war against each other and the others sat back
and reaped the rewards of not shredding each other and just
eventually they just learned it's just.
Stupid to do this. Somehow they got.
Over that I imagine this early phase of self destruction that
the surviving elites formed of spoken or unspoken pack not to
use Dragons against each other. Kind of like how so far the the
real world has again knock on wood hasn't.
It's only one side has nuked others but there's never been a
back and forth exchange of nukes.
Let's hope it stays that way, but I'm guessing it didn't stay
that way in old Deliria. They did.
It was too early. The technology wasn't evolved,
evolved over time, like you said, it was just there for the
taking. One day people learn to fly
Dragons. And how long before they started
turning that against each other? Probably not long, right?
But we're talking thousands of years that they had of this, of
figuring it out, of trial and error, of societal evolution, of
saying, OK, maybe this time we won't turn the Dragons on each
other. Maybe this time we've learned
our. Lesson Maybe it took them just.
Dozens of of iterations, but finally it it stuck.
And they're like, all right, we don't do this to each other.
We've learned our lesson over hundreds if not thousands of
years of destroying each other. Let's finally not do that.
There's similar prohibitions in other societies.
I'm talking sure there's there's real world ones too.
But I we can. Just stick to Westeros or Essos
really for that. Like the Ironborn aren't
supposed to fight other Ironborn, that's a religious
prohibition. They obviously do it anyway.
But it's there and it partly works.
It certainly stopped them it it certainly has prevented some
violence, just not all of it. I wish they would go ahead and
take each other. Out it's a.
Similar thing, though, they they're much more successful as
a society when they don't fight each other.
It does it does make sense even for a for a, a country that's
just rife with violence, it makes sense that they would
evolve to mostly inflict that on others.
Like obviously, like if I'm with you, Sean, it would be better if
they just only inflicted it on themselves and didn't go out
slaving and torturing and and pillaging and all that other
stuff. If you had a a, a righteous,
just enlightened culture and they went to war amongst
themselves, that'd be kind of disappointing and they would be
unlikely to go to war against other people.
But when you have a country who's based on slavery and
destruction and like, please do that just to yourselves and not
other people. Yeah.
So the guess right is a similar one.
Like the idea that you shouldn't, that it's this huge
societal and cultural prohibition against killing
someone that gives you shelter. That had to evolve.
From something like otherwise, like society can't function if
people are just afraid to let people in, you know, like
everyone's an enemy. Everyone might potentially kill
me and steal my house. You know, like no society's
going to get off the ground if people are doing that.
So you can you can understand this might be a thing.
Because that was a thing. There's a big prohibition
against it because it was a real problem, right?
Like it, it wouldn't prohibit something that isn't an issue.
Let me give you an example real world example.
In in the. US, the US of A, we have drunk
driving laws. Every state has drunk driving
laws. There's countries in this world
that don't. It might surprise you if you
live in the US to hear that, because it's like, really?
Isn't that a problem? People driving drunk?
Not really. Yeah, for some reason, Americans
are just worse with drunk driving.
We're just more violent. We cause more damage with it.
We have more driving, too. There are more people with cars
and roads and higher speed limits, and it's more, yeah.
So you, you look at these things and you must think it must have
been a thing. It must to, to prohibit it and
to have a serious cultural prohibition.
Again, it must have been a problem.
Like no spilling blood at Vase Dothrak right now they get
around. That with strangling and molten
gold. But they do care about the rule
enough to work around it, rather just to ignore it, right?
It it's it's. Stuck at some point they
established that rule for a reason, and they might find some
ways around the letter of the law, but it seems like they
generally follow the spirit of the.
Law, and you can see why it makes sense even of warlike
culture. That like they have a central
meeting place, you got to have rules against fighting if.
You're going to. Have all these like people whose
whole world view is all about violence and fighting, and
that's the best thing you can do well.
You got to have a place where that doesn't happen, or else
you'll just destroy your own capital.
Your, their, their. The Dothraki culture would have
collapsed. It's already not that strong as
a civilization, but yeah. Even when you're already at war
and you're determined to wipe out your enemies, there's still
this agreement that we're not going to kill the invoice.
Yeah, right. Someone.
Banners. Stuff.
Awful, terrible thing that no one can believe happen when
someone kills an envoy. You know, so so let's have a a
quick. Quote here that sort of frames
this a little bit more for the Valerians.
Here's what we're told briefly. Quote.
At its apex, Valyria was the greatest city in the known
world, the center of civilization.
Within its shining walls, 2 score rival houses vied for
power and glory in court and council, rising and falling in
an endless, subtle, OFT savage struggle for dominance.
This is why we're so certain there was infighting.
I mean, this is power. We're talking about world grand
power on an epic scale. So it's not hard to guess.
People wanted that, sought it, tried to claim it, tried to take
it, went all out. But.
It's not quite the Game of Thrones, is it?
Because there's no throne? Some major point we'll keep
coming back to you. If you create an office that
dominates everyone, then people will fight for that office.
The Valyrians, that was a smart from their perspective, cultural
innovation not to have that office in the 1st place.
Don't have a king, don't have an emperor, then you don't all
fight each other for it because that is who would fight.
The dragon rider families would fight each other for that and
they would use their Dragons because it's absolute power.
Better to not have that office at all then they don't have to
fight each other then it. It enables them to continue to
look outward rather than fighting each other.
And it says that. It says subtle, OFT savage,
endless struggle for dominance, but not destructive.
They're not raining fire down on each other's castles or
mansions, whatever buildings they had in Valyria.
We always come back to the lack of knowledge about some of these
specifics. But could it really have lasted?
Could they have risen to be the most powerful nation in the
world if they were constantly just raining fire on each other?
I really don't think so 'cause Dragons are just so destructive,
right? And and we'll see.
Examples. Where there is 100 or even 300
Dragons functioning in the same military operation.
A rare thing, but it did. Happen, and it wouldn't have if
they were constantly fighting each other 'cause these Dragons
would just be killing each other, right?
Like, Dragons are offensive weapons.
They're not defense. They don't carry Shields.
Scales are pretty tough, but long necks and.
Yeah, they're just. Vulnerable.
They have bellies that are big and yeah, they're.
I don't think their scales are as tough as teeth.
Right. No, they're not not very, very
unusual cases only are exceptions.
Yeah, their. Scales might be tougher than
Archer's arrows, you know that. That's why they're effective.
But when they turn on each other, they can, and it's hard
for one dragon to kill another dragon without also endangering
itself of being killed. Like sometimes the size
difference can can can help. And maybe with numbers things
could be different. We don't have a lot of knowledge
of like dogfights of multiple Dragons.
Yeah, if 3. Take three smaller ones, taking
on one. Could they like, maybe if with
the proper training and tactics, that might be doable.
But that's the kind of thing we don't see.
We don't know there. There might be written about,
there might be books about that. More on that later.
So not only was it likely a cultural evolution, but probably
a societal evolution. It might have even had laws.
They might have been like look, if any of the 40 families turns
its dragon fire on another there some sort of prohibition, some
sort of sanction. Maybe the other houses are
allowed to go to war against them if they break that rule,
like as a last resort, though I think still they would you would
use force soldiers poison, even sorcery maybe, but the Dragons,
I think that's that's the absolute last resort.
I. Wonder if they had a Wards, you
know, like a Theon and the Starks or whatever.
I wonder if they had something like that.
That's not unlikely. It's such a common real world
way of keeping peace. Because it would not only be in
in a similar scenario, it would not only be like a deterrent,
like they'll kill my son if I turn against them, but also
having the the children grow up with other families makes them
less likely to want to go to war with the other families, bond
with them or whatever. Exactly.
It's the same. Concept that that applies to so
many places so. Kind of like how?
When Aries broke the feudal contract, he started just
murdering great Lords and calling for their heads.
They're like, well, we better team up on this guy or he's
coming for us next. This is how the the political
system in Dune is set up the lands rod if like if, if the
emperor ever tries to attack one of the great houses, the other
great houses are have signed an agreement to attack the emperor
so that he won't do that. And that's that's basically the
set up to the whole thing. They, they, they so.
Clearly, the Emperor needs to have an even more powerful army.
Yeah, right. Exactly so.
So the bottom line should be for the Valerians to preserve their
special unique advantage. Don't squander it and wind up
like every other race on the planet.
Dragonless. You have Dragons.
Don't screw that up. Obviously we don't know exactly
how that evolved, but it did somehow over time.
These because these families would have destroyed each other,
just like the blacks and the greens.
It took the doom. It took something like the doom
to finally accomplish that, to end the world to to to remove
their authority from most of the world.
It took this. Hyper geological event that is
potentially somewhat supernatural in either trigger
or the event itself, who knows, but that's not our focus today.
Let's talk a little more about the nature of Dragons.
Like we we talked about a lot of this already.
Let's just kind of focus on it for a minute.
They're far more. Destructive than they are
defensive you have just think about flame and tooth and talent
and how. Destructive that are versus.
Wings. The Dragon's wings are
incredibly vulnerable. We mentioned necks, but wings
are also extremely vulnerable. And like scorpion bolts and
other large missile weapons, those can do pretty serious
damage with dragon if you hit them in the right spot, like in
an eye or maybe in the neck. But it's really hard to aim and
hit that properly and it might not even do that much.
It might just annoy them. For the most part though, human
weapons aren't equipped to deal with the the wings.
Like even a scorpion bolt through a wing would just put a
hole in it. It still would work.
Like we've seen Veigar flying around with some holes in her
wings. She gets around fine, and it
might heal up a little bit, but another dragon biting onto
another Dragon's wing, that's that's pretty quick.
You're going to make tear through that like Kleenex or
something, That's just weak. So I figured the Valyrians had
figured some of this out too. Strategies to deal?
With anti dragon, anti aircraft, missile weapons like scorpions
and things like that. Like Aegon the First attacked
Harrenhal at night. That might have been an existing
Valyrian military strategy for using Dragons in a way that
keeps the dragon safe. There's two basic strategies for
using a dragon. One is just don't use it.
Use it only as an intimidation and fear.
Two, yeah, like we said, if you're going to have a dragon
fight another dragon, make sure you have a huge size advantage.
Otherwise, don't do it. It's a bad idea.
Again, the long neck your neck is, Every creature needs its
neck. It's one of the most vulnerable
things. And Dragons have those hugely
long necks, which again, humans can't take much advantage of
that, but another dragon can. One dragon could bite one
Dragon's neck while the other dragon bites that Dragon's neck.
That's how long and gangly they are.
They could just neck each other. Sounds kinky, yeah.
So there again, it's like some. Grim Uroboros 1 dragon biting
one while the other bites it. Do they both die?
Like like Vagar killed Arax without much difficulty, but
Arax probably would have gotten away if he was really trying.
But you know, Dragons aren't smart.
They're aggressive. And maybe with some clever
maneuvering, Arax. Couldn't have killed Vagar but
Arax might. Could have killed Aymond.
Like, killed the rider with mine.
Like we said, like we theorized earlier, maybe three.
Yeah, like you said, Sean, you ever know here?
What if there were three air axes and they were all?
Three air axes might have been able to like it still would have
been risky and one of them might end up dying.
But if two, you know, if one can like come from one side and one
from the other and bigger commits to one and one comes
from behind, bigger chases one while the other two come around
from behind or underneath there. There's ways with coordination,
especially if they were trained in this and that.
And that's the type of thing I wonder if that there's knowledge
of that, like books that exist or existed at some point they
got lost. But I, I, I was thinking a lot
about in terms of like, I want to say Modern Warfare, but I'm
honestly thinking more about like World War 2 where you'd
have bombers that were kind of big and slow and couldn't defend
themselves very well, but they could do a lot of damage.
But they would be escorted by a little fighters that were quick
and maneuverable. And the combination of those
just almost unstoppable. It's the same for ships.
Right. You have big old ships with
little ships, Yeah. Bombers, the bombers, the the
little fighters would beat the bombers.
So that is a little bit different than the the dragon
scenario, but it's and but but but we don't have that.
We don't have a scenario we see like 3 or 4 little Dragons
swarming one big dragon. But I it would be interesting.
As far as I know, maybe that happens to dance and I just
don't know it, but. And and the Valyrian.
Dragon wars, we can assume in all those thousands of years it
had to have happened and maybe and and it seems likely that
they had tactics and and books written about that.
Now these books, it's not the same as we brought up, you know,
the the cultural preservation, the the ideas like the Dothraki
prohibition and guest right. Those are society wide.
The difference here is that these is just the dragon.
Writer Maybe they don't write everything down.
Maybe they want. Maybe some of this is like
family secrets that they don't want other families to learn.
Maybe some of it is like, not quite the level of like the Song
of Ice and Fire dream that's passed down, but something like
this, something you keep within the family rather than something
you write books about and share with everyone because it's
something that you all learn from everyone.
This might be a little more like corporate secrets, like the
recipe to Coke. They're not sharing that with
other soda companies, you know. Some things might be hard to
write down too. Some things are maybe kind of
subtle, like like subtle little things that a pilot or race car
driver, whatever does, it might be hard to describe or write or
teach, You know, all sorts of like high level athletes
probably have a little nuanced things that they figure out and
they might be able to explain to some other elite athlete on
their level, like oh, this or you could see her in slow motion
film. But it'd be hard to write a
book, or even for someone to read it to understand how to do
what they're writing about, you know?
Exactly. Let's talk about some specifics.
We got a lot of different conflicts to cover here.
Let's start with the Gaskari wars 'cause that was the first
big superpower that the Valyrians went up against 5000
years ago. The Gaskari were the greatest
power in the world, we're told, and they had been that for some
time. And they weren't excited about
giving up that title to someone else because if they had held it
for so long, even though that power had an insurmountable
advantage. But I don't think the Ghiscari
properly came to terms with the fact that the Valyrians had an
insurmountable advantage. The Valyrians.
Took on this Ghiscari, but really it was the way around the
Ghiscari. Started all five of the Ghiscari
Valyrian Wars. Which sounds kind of stupid,
doesn't it? Now maybe the maybe the
Valerians. Who wrote the history?
Yeah, maybe they didn't, but like, I don't know that the
Valerians were shy about being conquerors, so I'm not sure they
would have concealed that. You know, On the other hand,
it's like, why? Like they weren't like trying to
look nice. They were horrible, slaving,
authoritative monsters in a sense.
Like I don't. Know that they were concerned
with looking good. Maybe they were.
Maybe they were and all that. Maybe they were when those books
were written. I don't know 'cause this would
have been a long time ago or. Maybe they were to some extent
like, you know, Rome had slaves and was conquering people, but
they still wanted to paint the Gauls or the with the, the
Barbarians were Barbarians that, you know, they, they, they
didn't talk about how we starved out these people that had a
system of laws and produced wine.
He destroyed these Barbarians in combat, you know.
Yeah, yeah. Like they needed to go.
Yeah, yeah. That's how they phrased that.
So the Valerians took on. So it's interesting to think
about how the Valerians took on the Ghascari, maybe through
maybe they got them to draw first blood, but it's what they
wanted. They wanted the showdown,
potentially. And this is reminds.
Me of the. The conquest Aegon the Conqueror
went for the big dog first. He went straight for hair in the
black in order to perhaps encourage slash intimidate the
rest of Westeros into saying, well, he took out the biggest
guy, we should surrender to him. He's like look, look, or at
least to intimidate them and it and it kind of worked.
Not entire maybe not as well as it could have, but he didn't
have to valerianize everyone. Several people did surrender.
I mean the Lords of. Westeros are pretty stubborn and
prideful too, and they had been in charge for thousands of years
as well, at least in their corners of the of Westeros.
But at least the kings. This is where I think there's a
big difference to the kings of Westeros for the most part were
at least willing to take on the risk themselves.
They were willing to lead their armies and face the dangers
themselves. Which, you know, I do respect
that more than what I think the Ghiscari's did, which is mostly
fight a long. Series of proxy wars, which is
that's why I think they were so willing.
To get into these wars is because they were fighting in
territory in between them. Like Shay's going to pull up a
map here. We've got the the region between
Slaver's Bay and the Ghascari, or sorry, the Valyrian Freehold,
and there's a lot of territory there, Mantaris, Borash, these
kind of neutral zone, what would have been a neutral zone perhaps
at some point in the past. I just want to say real quick
that, you know, we describe it as like this neutral zone, but
the fact is innocent people lived there and got killed.
You know, like that's which is why you're saying that you have
less respect for them to like just sacrifice all these people
in some distant land you don't know anything about.
Exactly. Going out there yourself, like
I'd rather there's not be any war, but.
It's like sports, they hear whether they're team won or lost
and then they and then they lose money 'cause they had bet on
their team. And by in this sense, betting on
the team means investing in the the invasion army or what have
you. But they only lose money like
from way far away in Old Geese, which is farther away than even
Marine and and Astapore and Yungkai would have been from
Valyria. They just to them, it's just
these ultra rich people sending their citizen and slave soldiers
to war and losing and being like, Dang, well, let's try
again. You know, like to them it is
just a Dang like maybe they're maybe maybe a little more mad
than that, but it is that's all it is.
They're just mad they lost. So they don't suffer any real
consequences. Their armies obviously suffer
massive consequences. Back then, the Valyrians didn't
have slave soldiers. Maybe that's part of why the
Ghascari were more willing to start wars, because they're
throwing their slave soldiers away, whereas the Valyrians are.
Yes, these they're not. Losing Dragons, but they are
losing citizens, they are losing, you know, resources.
So it's still something. You have to wonder like when did
the Dragons come into the into this and how often and how
readily and in what number? Because if you.
Feel like if they just had this concerted effort to send all.
The Dragons against the Ghiscari.
There wouldn't have been five wars.
There would have been maybe just the one.
They were particular. Ghiscari were particularly
outclassed in certain theatres of war.
They fought over Sithorius, they fought over the Basilisk Isles.
That must have been particularly.
Bad for the Ghiscari. Like how do you win?
Naval verse naval when one side has Dragons like your ships are
ships are the most vulnerable thing.
They're way more vulnerable in armies.
Armies can scatter hide in caves.
There's nowhere to hide A ship even pretty much at anchor it
can't hide like there's one or two exceptions like lanisport or
Castley rock has a protected harbor with inside the caves.
There's I don't know of any other spot on all the.
Planetos, where ships can hide from Dragons.
Even that Castle Rock you might be able to hide a few ships from
a couple Dragons, but I. Don't know even about a whole
fleet. Dragons hovering around.
Yeah, yeah. It's it's, yeah, it's, it's
hopeless, basically so. Why did they keep fighting?
This is why I think they kept fighting. 1 The detachment from
consequences is a big one. Another is pride.
They just can't accept that they're no longer the biggest
power in the world and they have so much money.
They've been on top for so long. They they they, they don't want
to be the one generation of Ghiscari that that fumble 5000
years of being at the top. That's a that's a quite for
people who are concerned with their legacy, that's a big, big
deal and they but also. I don't think the the Valyrians
ever fully concentrated all their firepower at the Gaskari
because of their constant infight.
They don't want anyone family to gain any more powerful than
another. They're obviously.
They're like the crabs in a bucket pulling each other back
down. No one can crawl out of the
bucket. It's a weird analogy for ultra
rich, hyper powerful people, but it it works to serve that none
of them want any others to be to succeed.
They all want to keep them at this level so that they can't
dominate. Like I don't want this crab to
be above me or he'll use his crab powers on me from above
where he has leverage, you know, let's all drag each other down.
And it did finally end when they did gang up and they did send a
whole bunch of Dragons to old geese and to torch the entire
city. And that was the end of it.
So once they finally got their act together and said, hey,
let's end this for good, they did it.
But why did it take them five different wars to finally do
that one? There's a couple reasons.
One, they may have hoped on long term conquest and didn't want to
destroy them. Two, but at most I think it was
political willpower. They just didn't.
The Valyrians weren't united on that goal.
They didn't want one or two or three or four families to.
Get all the credit and all the wealth, and so they easier to
oppose it than to support it and get the the short end of the
stick from the spoils. There are pros and cons to
having power split up. You know that that that is a
pro. When you have a good king or
queen, you know, a good central authority and they want to do a
good thing, they can just do the good thing and it just gets
done. If they want to do a bad thing,
they could just do the bad thing and it gets done too.
So if you split the authority up between, you know, Congress and
consecutive branch or forty families or whatever, then it's
it's difficult if someone wants to do a bad thing to get it
done. It's hard to get everyone on
board to work together to do it. But also, if you want to do a
good thing, ostensibly destroying the Sakari is a good
thing. It's hard to get everyone to
agree. Eventually they did, but it took
a lot, right? It took multiple wars.
Eventually it was like, OK, fine, I guess we have to.
Let's just end this problem once and for all.
There's probably like a big push for it.
There may have been a push forward after the third war and
then after the 4th and finally, like, see, it's just going to
keep happening. Let's just end this once and for
all, which is how there's so many comparisons between the
Roman, the, the Punic Wars between Roman, Carthage.
That is eventually what happened there.
There was a a push within the Roman.
Upper class to just wipe Carthage out.
The Third Punic War was just an aggressive let's kill them.
It didn't start over any real conflict.
It was just they're powerful, they've regained their strength,
let's destroy them because we're afraid of them, and also we'll
get to loot their city and take everything.
Yeah, yeah. I wonder if another factor IA
couple of things. I wonder if if maybe the
Valerians, the Dragons weren't as numerous yet.
Maybe their their power, the control of the Dragons was still
new enough. That might also explain why the
Giscari thought they could beat them.
Did they have really, you know? Yeah, or they were aware, aware
of their political system and how it kept them hamstrung from
like, uniting. And they're like, well, this
will like we'll never have to face more than a few at a time
because blah blah blah. But yeah, I like that theory.
I wonder if another reason too is if maybe this is when the
Valerians started, there's slave trade and that's why Kaskari
wanted to stop them. They're like, hey, that's our
business they didn't have. Slaves.
That's a good point. After this time before they did
have slaves. I wonder if that's what was
prompting this is that they? Were starting to.
Get into that business and the Kaskari were like no, no, no.
So bringing it back again to this Carthage in Rome example,
when Carthage was on the verge of defeating the Romans in the
Second Punic War under Hannibal, Carthage stopped supporting.
Him like the home, like their home city, the capital.
Was like, oh. Because they were worried that
he would use this grand, enormous victory to make his
family king to to dominate all the Carthaginians.
So it would be like one. It would be like one dragon
rider family was about to defeat the Ghascari by themselves.
And the other words were like no, we can't let this happen.
And they ganged up to stop that from happening.
And that's why there was a third and 4th and 5th war potentially
because. He still almost did it.
He did, still almost. Yes, he did.
Yeah, you're right. And it lasted a long time.
It was a very, it was like a multi decade war.
Also, Carthage didn't have a king and neither did this
Gaskari. So these these.
Things are all like somewhat fitting, but you'll see like you
think about Rome. Rome also kind of freaked out
and did some crazy things whenever they were afraid of
someone naming themselves king or dictator for life in the case
of Julius Caesar. And they were probably usually
right about those people's intents.
Like Julius Caesar, they were right about that.
So perhaps the 40 families, the individual family should less be
thought of. As you know, elite families.
I mean, that's true, but maybe it's good to think of them as
like individual nuclear states or pirate kings or organized
crime cartels, something, some version of that.
It has elements of all those things.
They definitely have the nuclear power, like a nuclear state.
They have the grand wealth and kind of agreement not to fight
each other, sort of like pirate kings and and organized crime.
But they rarely work together. And when they but but when they
do. It's really bad for whoever
their foe is 'cause they're awfully effective in those short
windows when they do work together.
But underneath all this is a reluctance to use Dragons.
They were reluctant to use them not just against each other, but
against military targets. As well, because they don't want
to risk them, they don't want any chance of your dragon dying.
Is it's. It's a.
Huge loss. You you lose that permanent
intimidation, that permanent status, that permanent elite
level within society. Yeah, it's probably not easy to
get a new dragon, even even within a dragon rider family,
especially if you have a particularly big dragon or
something like that. Yeah, and imagine how much
you've invested in the dragon over time, too.
Oh God, yeah. Fricking food, a lot of training
and and maybe even there's AI don't know what to say.
Like a bond, like a pet, like you really care about your dog,
your cat. Sure.
Probably has a a personality, a character that you care about,
you know? Absolutely.
So they, for the most part, they want.
Conquest, not destruction. But of course, in the case of
old, the Giscari capital, they're like, well, let's
destroy it. There and there are other.
Exceptions. Let's talk about the Roin.
This is one of the juicier parts of all the history is one with
some parallels we've never explored before.
We have of course, explored it in other ways.
Our episode Mother Royne focusing more on the Royneish
side is is one we made quite a while ago and it's still very
relevant. The wars with the Royne were
characterized by an early lack of interest by either side in
the large scale war. These were like the little city
state affairs where Dragons weren't even involved.
The Royne now were powerful and older than in some ways than the
Ghiscari. Not older, but maybe even maybe
they were older, but not on an empire, not an imperial level.
They didn't have an empire. They were not as foolish as the
Ghiscari to pick fights with the Roy, the the Valyrians.
At least not right away, or at least especially not five
fights, 5 wars. But they did actually eventually
do that. It took a little more.
Maybe it was something like what the?
Ghiscari decided to go to war over, but yeah, it was.
The Roinar that they were, they were like, hey, go ahead, yeah,
go ahead and settle along the Roin like we do have some
cities. Just coexist with us.
Eventually that didn't go so well.
It worked well for a while and the Valyrians started Like
religious problems happened. The Valyrians would kill some
turtles and the Roynar worship those turtles and there's
probably other issues. But they started to regret that
their parents and grandparents had allowed the Valyrians to
settle there. I think this is another
forgotten lesson. I think their parents and
grandparents realized that this is the best deal they can get.
Yes, they're going to be annoying, even violent
neighbors, but it's better than them turning their Dragons.
Against us it was the lesser of two evils, but.
Those grandparents and parents didn't have to do live
day-to-day alongside their learnings.
It wasn't exactly their they weren't faced with the same
consequences so. They might not have known how
close the two evils were to each.
Other, yes, yeah, like and especially if there's like.
Maybe there's some slaving? Here and there and the Reiner
don't like that. A lot of just cultural friction,
we'll say, if not worse and. Maybe because the Valyrians were
so reticent to use their Dragons along the Roin, the Roinar got
comp a little complacent with that.
Maybe that same thing happened with the Gazar.
Like, well, they hardly ever use those Dragons.
Maybe they don't even have as many as they say they do.
Maybe they don't have the control over them as they claim.
Maybe it is all just intimidation.
Turns out, no. They can Marshall a lot of
Dragons at once and do an enormous amount of damage, but
until you see that happen, you don't know it's possible.
Maybe even the Valyrians aren't sure that they can organize
that. Level of effort or that level of
unity. So Valyri didn't just come
Dragons blazing right away. They weren't like, let's send a
huge invasioner in. Fact, it looks like they hardly.
Ever did that? It looked like it was it.
It looks like it was one or two or three of the families going
on an endeavor to conquer some territory and using that wealth
to support their internal struggles within the capital.
Like the point of of conquest outside of Illyria was to fuel
the internal struggles that still managed to keep.
Dragons out of it, right? So when the wars did start along
the Roin it again, it was the Roiner that started them.
They had had enough, I guess, and it was more than five wars.
So the the forbearance of their earlier generations to make them
look not as dumb as the Ghiscari, well that fell off.
Eventually and they. For whatever reason, they
thought they could win, or they just had to, I don't know.
But even after numerous conflicts, the Dragons were
still not a big part of it. It's really interesting.
Here's a quote. This series of conflicts reached
a bloody climax 1000 years ago in the Second Spice War, when 3
Valyrian Dragon Lords joined with their kin and cousins in
Volantis to overwhelm, sack, and destroy SAR Hoy, the great
Roynar port city upon the Summer Sea.
The warriors of SAR Hoy were slaughtered savagely, their
children carried off into slavery, and their proud pink
city put to the torch. Afterward, the volunteers sowed
the smoking ruins with salt so that SAR Hoy might never rise
again. SO3 Dragon Lords accomplished
this. Remember there were two port
cities at the end of the Rhine, one on the West Bank that was
Sarhoi. And then the east bank is
Volantis. And of course Sarhoi had been
there longer. But the two cities developed a
rivalry and eventually this was the the great end of it.
So a series of bloody climaxes, a series of bloody conflicts
that ended in this. And even at the climax, there
were only three Dragon Lords involved.
All these hundreds of years of war, of back and forth
conflicts, lots of different events, lots of different
battles. But the Dragons were pretty much
not involved until this climax, and it was still only three.
So you can see why like a lot of these conflicts were just
continued on a rather normal conventional military level and
was like, yeah, well, and that might be why the.
Lot of the again, might be a lot of the Royner got just got to
thinking that's how it would be like, yeah, the Dragons just
aren't a part of this for some reason.
The dragon Lords, they got their own things to worry about.
This is the volunteers. They're descendants of the
Valyrians. They're Valyrian by ethnicity,
but none of them are dragon Lords.
They don't have that kind of power.
They're not coming for us with that.
So it's very different. But this wasn't just an ending.
The destruction of the city put the other cities on notice.
They're like, oh, what's to stop them from destroying US one by
one? It's that same whole we have to
band together at the same as the lands, Rod and Dune, same as the
great houses against Aries, same as any countless other examples
like this where if we don't band together, they're going to
destroy us one and one. They're going to divide and
conquer. Was that?
True, we don't know, but it was certainly the perception.
And the greatest leader of the Rauner at the time, Garen the
Great, got them all on board with this idea, this attitude.
Three, they had Sorcerer Princess too.
The, the, the Roinar had magic. So it's not quite the same that
Gaskari didn't. So in some levels, maybe they're
not being as foolish. Maybe they did have a chance.
Maybe I I don't know, they didn't win, but maybe it wasn't
as as all foolish as it seemed. Did the Roinar have a king?
Did they have a a capital city? You know, 'cause that's another
thing I, I was thinking about that there's sort of a, there's
plenty, I'm sure. But one parallel thing about
like Russia was at war with Afghanistan for tennis years,
never knew used any nuclear weapons.
And maybe partly because what good would have it done?
They blow up one village in Afghanistan with a nuclear
weapon there. Aren't central targets, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. The it's, it's, it's so that
that's got to be one factor. This is a little bit of a
tangible. I wonder if another factor is
like just the dragon Lords don't want to be mass murderers.
Maybe they just know that when they go on with the dragon
burning people alive, like they have to live with that
themselves, Like, and you know, it's got to be a factor for
someone launching a nuclear weapon too, you know, so.
Certainly. And we don't hear about Dragons
dying during the Ghiscari wars. Maybe they did.
Maybe there were a few lucky shots, which might be part of
what the Ghiscari looked at said.
Hey, look, we can kill a dragon here and there.
Let's let's keep going. So yes, this is something of
like what happened with Garen the Great and his army.
It's going to be familiar it it began with something that will
remind you all of the Field of Fire quote.
The largest army that Essos had ever seen soon assembled at
Croyne under the command of Prince Garen.
According to Beldocar, it was a quarter of a million strong.
From the headwaters of the Roy and down to her many mouths,
every man of fighting age took up sword and shield and made his
way to the Festival City to join this great campaign.
So long as the army remained beside Mother Royne, the Prince
declared, they need not fear the Dragons of Valyria.
Their own Water Wizards would protect them against the fires
of the Freehold. It was sort of true there, and
they weren't fools to believe it might be true it but they had
never put it to the test against a large number of Dragons.
They. Had put it against the test
against a small number of Dragons and it worked pretty
well, so yeah. It it's there's reasons to think
they had some advantages that the Valyrians might have
actually feared. Again, individual dragon rider.
Like if they were like drones soldiers, they could, they could
they would take some losses. These are individual elite
members of top families. They all really value their
lives. They aren't doing this for some
cause, they're doing it for personal gain or to maintain
their status. It's not the same as when Aegon
invaded Westeros where you have a lot of kings that have pride
in their dynasties. It's a similar, it's it's, it's
dissimilar for a lot of reasons, but very much unlike the army at
the field of fire which formed for one battle and then lost,
this largest army of Essos did quite a lot.
It destroyed many lesser cities. Towns and villa.
It overwhelmed Valasar and Salhoris, large cities but no
Dragons were involved in those battles.
However, the next battle did quote.
This is interesting. At voluntaries, Garin found
himself facing 100,000 foes, 100 war elephants, and three Dragon
Lords. Here too, he prevailed, though
at great cost. Thousands burned, but thousands
more sheltered in the shallows of the river.
Whilst there Wizards raised enormous water spouts against
the foes Dragons. Roinish Archers brought down two
of the Dragons whilst the third fled wounded.
Very interesting. So these techniques, it shows
techniques that aren't available to any other nation that we're,
we're aware of the water spouts. That's that's really neat and I
hope we get to see that on screen one day in the far-flung
future 'cause that sounds really cool.
So that's that sounds more. Defensive and definitive than
anything like putting out fires and stopping the flames before
they get going. I'm not sure that it would kill
a dragon. Maybe it would.
Maybe it would knock one out of the sky and the concussion.
Or knock its rider off It might. Knock the rider off?
Yeah. If a rider falls off, they would
drown. Now riders are apparently
attached to their saddles with chains, so they might not be
able to knock one from the saddle so easily.
So you might not know that just seeing Daenerys fly without a
saddle. But yeah.
But no, we've seen other Dragons.
Yeah, saddles are. That's more of a wartime thing,
I think. If you're just flying around on
your own without any danger, you may not bother with chains.
I wonder if we'll see that in House of Dragon this year now.
But The Archers taking you on Dragons?
Is very interesting, very interesting.
Like that doesn't seem possible in Westeros.
Like they've tried so many times.
Like do they have special bows, special arrows?
Maybe. Maybe.
It's not stated what wounded the third.
Dragon. It may have been more arrows,
but maybe it was the water spouts or some other some other
beans. Might just be sheer numbers.
Yeah, two. 150,000 people in the army right?
And the army might have been as simple knowing it was going to
face Dragons. Can you imagine 50,000 Archers?
Right. Yeah, right.
Which they would be prepared, maybe because they know what
they're facing. And consider also when you have
those huge numbers, the likelihood of having a prodigy
increases too, right? Like the you.
Know some hang guy, the Archer or some Yeah.
Yeah, like I'm, I'm imagining, like, you know, the 50,000 at
the field of fire, there might have only been 5000 Archers
among them. Five of them might have been
outstanding Archers. But even the outstanding Archer
has to be in the right spot at the right moment.
But a 250,000 army that might have had a higher ratio of
Archers, they they might have had as many Archers as all the
soldiers in the field of fire, It's true.
And if only, if only one in a hundred of them is a an
outstanding prodigy, then you might have had 5000 master
Archers with the support of these waterspouts and all this
other stuff. Yeah, who knows, Like what we,
we, we talked about several small Dragons going against a
big one and how they might have tactics for that.
They might have had tactics. For this, like use the water
Wizards in concert with the arrows and some method to slow
the dragon down in order to get a bunch of good shots at it.
You know, something like that. Or like, shoot the waterspout
that The Archers know the Dragon's going to move a certain
direction to avoid that, and then shoot preemptively.
Shoot the arrows at that spot. It's a good idea. 1000 arrows
coming all at once. Our imaginations can probably
come up with a lot of fun examples that might be pretty
close to the truth. Here.
It's easy to see how there's a lot of possibilities.
But it isn't it interesting and telling that all this happened?
You get this massive army, apparently the largest Armory
ever seen in Essos and the Valyrians for the most part.
Didn't do anything like the they the, the freehold, like the
dragon riders. I mean, like the dragon 40
families, like 3 dragon riders were there.
That's it. Out of all that, like we got 40
dragon rider families and there's only.
Three Dragon Lords there out of like, that's just a couple,
three members of maybe just one family.
Maybe there were three guys, one from each family, but I, I'm
guessing that might have been one family with ties to
Volantis, to the elite and Volantis, They had interests
there that they were trying to protect all this time.
The other dragon Lords weren't interested.
But for some reason, like, look, the Dragons were beaten.
That's bad for everyone. Our the spell of the Dragons
can't be defeated has been broken.
Now the world knows that Dragons can be beaten when they know who
did it. We got to answer that.
We got to prove decisively. That they just got lucky that we
come strong and we'll show them that it won't be close.
So something got them going. The loss, the loss of.
Status. The idea that maybe Dragons
weren't going to be feared as much.
Something got them going and this made them act that if the
Roinar were winning. The reputation that they rested
on their laurels of hey, no one's going to fight us because
we can't be beaten. That isn't true anymore.
Well, they they're going to have to prove that hey, actually,
this was just a one off. We're going to go crush them.
And here's how they did that quote.
The volunteers retreated back behind their black walls and
appealed to the Freehold for help.
And the Dragons came, not three as Prince Garen had faced at
volunteers, but 300 or more if tales that have come down to us
can be believed. Against their fires the Roynar
could not stand. 10s of thousands burned, whilst others
rushed into the river, hoping that the embrace of Mother Royn
would offer them protection against dragon flame, only to
drown in their mother's embrace. Some chroniclers insist that the
fires burned so hot that the very waters of the river boiled
and turned to steam. That's not that hard to believe
with 300 Dragons burning the water.
You know, that's a lot of Dragons.
That's a lot of heat. And dragon fire is so intense.
Maybe just a little bit like the river's awfully large, like
we're talking about the whole thing boiling.
It's you can't even see the other shore from one side.
But still I can see that happening in in on the the
shallows or what have you. Also that that idea you can't
see the shore from one side to the other.
The whole river isn't like that. Just.
Sections of the. Yeah, we don't know exactly
where this battle was. And if the Dragons did
concentrate their fire, you know, up river, wherever the
Anyway, yeah, I could see that being like, just terribly,
painfully tragic. So they, they're never, they
weren't united to make this conquest.
They were united when something went wrong, right?
They didn't 300 Dragons didn't come to subjugate the Roiner.
300 Dragons came because. There had been a loss 'cause
they lot like the the the supremacy of draconic authority
was being challenged. That's how I interpret this.
I don't think these like. It's kind of.
Irrelevant to the whether they had been provoked, like who
started it doesn't matter. You know, it's all about we have
to be seen as the dominant people in the world and if any,
ever, ever a challenge to that, we have to answer it as a group.
It's the one time they show unity that we've seen here is
when. That supremacy is challenged.
It isn't because there's gain to be had.
Like there was that. That was clear prior to this,
you know. But you could also see why they
didn't want to get involved too. You got guys getting shot down
by arrows like, well, I don't want to go near round.
Now that's not a risk they want to take, but if 300 Dragons come
at once, it's pretty hard They they have the.
The safety in numbers arguments like, well, they can't
concentrate their fire on one out of all three hundred of
these. Like that's also enough to make
people run. You're like you see that coming.
You don't stand your ground. You're like 300 Dragons, like
you might not be able to count that high but you would be just
the sky would be black with. Dragons and you.
That's terrifying. You.
You might not have thought that. Was possible have to get before
you decided it didn't matter if it's 247 or 292.
Picture that like all these wars have gone on for a while, months
if not years, and there's just never thing like this ever
happened. Is all of a sudden 300 Dragons
like they had never seen more than like 3 at a time.
This, this must have seemed impossible.
It was like, wow, they really are capable of a lot more than
we thought. That's what I was saying.
Like if they had known that this was possible, they might have
surrendered long ago. They might not.
They might, they might have still fought.
People are stupid. People are stubborn, people are
proud. They might have brought more
water Wizards. They didn't know what they were
truly faced against. Yeah, that's right.
I was thinking about that, by the way, 300, That's like seven
or eight Dragons per house. I wonder, I wonder how many of
them might have been smaller Dragons just to beef the numbers
up. I wonder how many were truly
trained or. It's a great question.
You wonder you don't see the smaller Dragons being deployed
for the same reason they're more vulnerable.
Like why risk it? It's one thing to risk a huge
dragon. It's a small dragon that's just
hold off a little longer and it's a then it is a huge dragon
and then it's not as risky it. Really feels like you could have
gotten your point across with 50 Dragons.
With 30 Dragons, like you could do three times, you know, 10
times more and I think you wouldn't have risked all of your
small dragon. Which is why.
I think it's very telling. Like I think it's political.
They really wanted to show the world what happens, Like this is
what we're capable of. Like it's, it's, it's very
demonstrative, you know? Yeah, I wonder, I wonder how
many. Even if the numbers exaggerated
a little and it was only 200, that's still 5 Dragons per
house, right? Yeah, and how many Dragons does
each else have? Like I wonder if that might have
been 95% of all the Dragons you know?
It might have been, it might have been a really huge number.
You wonder, like it was like a draft, almost like a dragon
draft, like, Oh yeah, everybody's got to go unless
your, unless your dragon is under five years old or your
rider is still a teenager. Like everyone goes if you're
under 16, you can stay, but that's it.
Everyone else has to go. Like a basically a draft for for
the elite only, which is kind of a strange thing like only the
elite are drafted because. No one else has the Dragons, so.
Another interesting dynamic. We've talked about this idea a
little bit before too. Those 300 Dragons can, they can
all show up and burn stuff down and kill that army, but then
they can't like take over a city.
They couldn't take Over The Rhine, you know the the the
Dragons can't like. Land control the.
City and collect taxes or farm the you know, they had they they
fly back home and eat more sheep or whatever.
So it it shows that that the potential that the Valerians had
to go destroy something, but that's still different from
going to conquer something. Yeah, and you're right.
Like that's the thing. Remember again, I'll have to use
Dune as an example. The the, the ability to destroy
something is, is controlling it. That's what they relied on.
That's why I say they're a lot like mafia, because it's not.
They don't control everything, but they can get what they want
by threatening to destroy it, which they are very which you
know they're capable of. Or or at least destroying part
of it or killing you, the person standing in their way.
Same with the Dragon Lords. They didn't care about the
Roinar, but when they did. They destroyed it.
They they were absolute with it. They're like, you couldn't get
them interested. They didn't care.
But once they but when they finally did care, Oh my gosh, it
was, it was terrifying and destructive and the whole world
saw it, which is what they wanted.
They wanted the whole world to know and remember and leave and
you know and bow down to them. When?
When the time came, let's have a quick break and then we come
back. We have another example of a
huge number of Dragons all at once, the only other example we
have, and then we'll move on to Westeros in more modern times.
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Let's talk about the Andalls. Andalls are a little interesting
because they were distinctly the third big culture that the
Dragon Lords took on or that the Valyrians took on.
And I say that it is important to distinguish that because a
lot of times it was just the nation of Valyria with the
Dragon Lords not directly involved or just their agents
being involved because again, reluctance to use Dragons
because. Losing the dragon means losing
your power and authority. So these conflicts were after
the Roinar and Gaskari wars because, well, the end alls were
between. We're on the other side of the.
Roinar, they were West of it and so the Roin were like a butt,
was like a buffer stayed in between.
But they were much lower tech state so they were in big
trouble when the Roinar fell. They didn't have sorcery or this
vast wealth and large empire, the Gaskari and those didn't
work anyway. Both those nations lost.
So the end alls were in big trouble because all they had was
their faith of the seven, which is potent, you know, as a
religion. There are a lot of very strong
lot of very strong belief in that.
But it's as far as we know it was non supernatural.
So they didn't really have any sort of edge there or anything
to. Nothing to stand against
Dragons, really. I think faith in the Dragons
outweighs faith in the seven, I'm going to say.
Yeah, it seems. Like one is definitely real, the
other, yeah, I don't know. Was there ever any conflict or
tension that we know of between the Andals and the Roinar?
Not of of not of substance. I think they lived in peace for
the most part, the Roinar. The thing is the roinar stuck to
the river. They didn't expand.
So that enabled them to live in peace with a lot of people, and
they became powerful and, and rich and and civilized.
People didn't really want to mess with them.
You know, it's like, yeah. They're they're powerful,
they're a good neighbor and they're powerful.
It's just like there's a lot of deterrent and they're friendly.
So like, yeah, why, why do that? I I'm sure there were some
zealots amongst the end alls who hated the worship of turtles.
And but, you know, and other things, but what, what were they
going to do about it? You know, they were, they were
the weaker nation by far. Now the one thing that helped
the end alls. Avoid some of the Valyrian
hegemony and authority and depredations was that they're
pretty far away. And the farther you get away
from the capital, given so much power is concentrated in the
capital, the less interest the the Dragon Lords will.
Take in you there's. Certainly you're the handle
certainly weren't a threat and the distance was kind of
annoying, but Valyria did have that endless appetite for slaves
and wealth, so they definitely went there and took slaves and
wealth. How many Dragons actually came
to Andalos though? Skeptical.
It wasn't that many. If, if your goal is to take
slaves, I don't know the Dragons are that helpful in that regard.
Like Dragons will intimidate and kill.
But again, if you're going to be taken captive and enslaved, you
might fight to the death. And if a dragon is very capable
of killing you, well, then well, that they haven't accomplished
their goal. If they've killed you, they want
to take you as a slave, right? So that's tricky.
They they might have had some standard shock and awe type
strategy. Again, come back to Aegon, and
maybe this is something he learned from from his own
family's history, from Valyrian lore.
Go in, blast a central target or two.
Smash their biggest castle, burn their largest castle, kill their
biggest king like they did with the Plancky town.
They burn the Rainy's, burn the Plancky town at the start of
their conflict with Thorne, their their war with Thorne.
Aegon burns Harenhalf right off the gate, right off the bat,
right? That's the first thing he does.
So this is one attempt this in one way you, you dishearten your
foe, You, you tell them there's no point in fighting and you get
the noble class to give up because the nobles give up.
They have an expectation to be able to keep some of their power
as long as they're feeding a lot of that wealth to Valeria.
Now we're we're subject to you, we'll keep our people in line
and give you some of that wealth.
Because if you don't do that, then the people at the bottom
who are the ones that are going to be faced with slavery are
just going to fight to the death because they're faced with
slavery. So you use you subjugate the
nobles who then in turn subjugate their own people or
who have already subjugated their own people and just
continue to use those levers of power to accept this compromise
from the conquerors so that. Yeah, it's it's, it's the
opposite. Of trickle down, like, yeah, you
trickle down the pain, you trickle down the suffering.
It's like we we're we've been conquered, but the lower classes
are going to be ones that really suffer through this conquest.
We're going to still hold a lot of our power.
We're still going to be, we're going to be vassal states
instead of independent kingdoms. But that's better than losing
everything. The people at the bottom did
lose everything. They get enslaved as a as a
price of conquest. A certain number, a certain
amount of society has to be given into slavery.
Same thing happened when, say, the Roinar showed up at the
Basilisk Isles. The Pirate kings were like,
we'll let you live here if you give us slaves every year.
You got to give us 30 girls, 30 boys, this and that.
And we'll leave you alone. They're like, we can't accept
that deal. You're just more slavery like.
How would we decide amongst ourselves who has to be the
slaves? And then how would we live with
ourselves afterwards, after we send some of our kids away to
die like that? So, but the Valerians know that.
The Valerians know that people act like that.
They know that they will fight. But this is this is the line
they'll draw in the sand, and they're used to it. 5000 years
of slavery teaches you how people.
React to the threat of being enslaved and you.
You. Have tactics and strategy to
work around that. But there was also.
Given again, that the big distances there's large periods,
perhaps multiple generations if not centuries, where the
Freehold just kind of ignored Andalos because it just wasn't
worth it for them. This is so far away.
They have bigger concerns they have there's more money to be
made elsewhere. But as I teased before the
break, there was at least one example of a huge flight of
Dragons and it. Kind of sounds similar in a lot
of ways to what happened with the Roinar quote.
The Norvashi sent to Valyria for help, and the Freehold rose to
the defense of its distant daughter.
Though all the lands of the Andals and the Roynar lay
between them, distances meant little and less to the Dragon
Lords in the summer of their power.
However, it is written in the fires of the Freehold that 100
Dragons took to the skies, following the great river north
to descend upon the Andals as they lay siege to Norvos.
Carlon the Great burned with his army, and afterward the dragon
Lords flew onward, bringing blood and fire to the Isles of
Laura. Carlon's great keep went up in
flames, as did the towns and fishing villages along his
shores. Even the great stones of the
mazes were scorched and blackened by the fire storms
that swept across the islands. It is said that not a man, woman
or child survived the scouring of Laura, so hot did those fires
burn. Nasty huh?
Like like the Roinar when they came, they came to destroy, not
conquer. Contrary to a lot of other
scenarios, it seems that the Valerians were more likely to
conquer when it was close enough to them that they could manage
it. But if it's too far away, they
just destroy it. They just like, they're like
exterminators. They come in and just this, this
will make sure there's no problem again, kill everyone,
right? It's that, that Roman piece, the
version of Roman piece which is you just kill everyone and well,
that's the end of that problem. So it's the piece of a blasted
landscape, the piece of desolation.
Sometimes they just wanted to make sure the problem went away.
They didn't have an example, so but it also does the other thing
that they like to do every once in a while, reminds the world of
what they're capable of. It says look what the Dragons
can do. In case you forgot 'cause when
those Dragons were flying north across the river like they they
headed north along the Rhine, there would have been a lot of
ruined Roy in our cities. That they passed along the way,
ruined by their very ancestors. Some of them might have.
Stories they were told as children about.
Great, great, great grandma jewelry.
Jay Reeves. Yeah, some Targaryen delirium
name, Right. And how they were there for the
burning of Croya in the great festival city.
And they tell stories of how that green marble burned so
beautifully and it's at night. Like, gosh, that's terrible,
But. They would remember it.
Well, and you know, the winners would would would glorify this,
this conquest, this success, this dominance and here there
this was generation had a chance to be the the example setters
yet again, like, ah, we're the ones that get to re establish
Valyrian supremacy by showing the world that we can do no one
will mess with us. Again.
And here, it wasn't the the end. Alls weren't attacking the
Dragon Lords, they weren't attacking Valyria.
They were attacking one of the Free Cities which had been
founded by the Dragon Lords but was one of the Free Cities.
It was ruled independently. It just had Valyria to thank for
its protection and it surely sent taxes and things like that.
Again, it was, they called for help.
They didn't come on their own. It was like we had to petition
them, we had to get them here. That what did they they, they
maybe had to give something. They maybe had to like give tax
concessions or what are you going to do for us?
Or maybe they just did it for their own, you know, their own
reputation and all that. But again, it was, it's a rare
event when you have this political unity within the
Dragon Lord families to come together to show the world what
they're capable of in a way that helps them all equally.
When they go out and destroy everything.
No one family gets to take a lot of wealth.
Home and hold that over the others.
If they're all just going in and burning everything.
Insight, All they get from that is glory, you know, and fear.
They don't, actually. It doesn't give any of them more
status amongst each other or wealth amongst each other, which
again is their chief concern. The rest of the world is their
playground to them. They totally destroyed Lorath,
but they didn't conquer Lorath right?
Like so in general, the the the thing you can't do with the
powerful Air Force is take something over, you can destroy
it. And if the 40 families are
worried about anyone of them getting more powerful than the
other going to destroy something, sure, fine, we'll go
destroy it. We just don't want the Jones to
have a greener grass than us or whatever, you know?
I think. About the idea of just just some
kids, some family, some farmer in this field and Lorath all of
a sudden here come these Dragons burn everyone everything to
death. It's just, it's just so unfair
you. Know, yeah, it really is kind.
Of understand why we want to have democracy so we can kind of
keep control over what our leaders are getting mixed up in.
And again, how the, the, the, the difference in how modern
military or in George's world, how Dragons change things
because you can't. I'm just thinking about like in
Vietnam, like American bombers just flying over dropping
napalm. Like Rome couldn't even do that.
You know what I mean? Like other ancient empires, you
know, even an attack take a while for the soldiers to get
there. And it was, you know, they're
going to be fighting in fields. It's hard to just suddenly kill
all the innocent civilians from hundreds of miles away, totally
wipe them out. It's just like a a devastating
powerful power to for anyone to have these Dragons, you know?
Think of how that goes to your head too.
As a Valyrian dragon rider, you're, you've been sitting at
the pinnacle of, of the world for as long as you can.
Plus your family has been doing that for generations, if not
eons. And then you get to go out and
do that and remind yourself why you are elite.
And so, yes, I am one of the most powerful beings on this
planet, 'cause I can do this and there's nothing they can do
about it. I can inflict my will upon the
world with my 99 cohorts here, all flying Dragons too, and they
can't even take out one of these, let alone all 100.
Yeah, it's really, you're right. It is kind of, it is almost
unfair. It's just like there's no,
there's no contest there. And that creates such a
disparity within within the world and they.
Had all this time too. On top of that, they have all
this time. They've had thousands of years
to figure out the best. Ways to use this unique?
Power that they have, that they're.
Holding over everyone else again, maybe it wasn't written
down in military manuals 'cause they might have wanted to keep
some of that stuff secret. And maybe some of those have
been lost because, you know, if any of it was written down,
well, a lot of it would have been destroyed by the doom.
But. Maybe some of them survived
like. Again, we we theorize that Aegon
might have been using some established tactics by best ways
to use Dragons in war best ways to use a particularly large
dragon like Valerian, one who has particularly higher levels
of invulnerability and and fear and the ability to melt a
castle, unlike a lot of the other Dragons which their fire
isn't quite as hot. Kind of like when I was seeing
about like World War Two warfare, Like there's a certain,
I imagine as dragon gets bigger, it's fire can be shot from
farther away. Does that make sense?
It doesn't have to expose itself as much when it can shoot it's
fire blast. And when it if it could be out
of the range of an Archer but still blasts fire into a castle,
that's like got to be like a threshold that where strategy
changes, you know? Yeah, absolutely.
In general, it just makes me wonder about other books,
Valyrian books that are out there.
Like did Aegon was seemingly well read, but did he read books
that were relevant to dragon conquering and well, and
prophecy while we're at it, those those two things like
we're mostly interested in Dragons this episode, not
prophecy, but those things do overlap.
If it was part of his motivation and his preparation, he wanted
to do it right. He took it seriously.
He's like, well, let me let me read some things and figure out,
you know, maybe I'll learn something from there now.
In fire and. Blood, for example, we hear that
Alice Ann Queen Alice Ann, the Alice Ann when she went to the
Citadel one time she attended lectures on Valyrian dragon
wars. That's that's a topic that she
attended. Who knows how good these classes
were, like how well they understand it, what books
they're using, but probably pretty good.
I wouldn't suspect it's, you know, like National Enquirer
stuff. I figured like it's pretty
solidly academic text. They probably got some real
books they're working with some actual history there, but kind
of teases fun tease to think about.
Now, of course, part of the the deal with Laura is that it's in
or past Andalos and a lot of the free cities were founded in that
region after Valyria cleared it out, right?
They cleared out the Rhine and some new cities popped up.
A lot of them were volunteer cities or sisters of of of
Atlantis, Pentas and Mir and all these other cities were in this
region, especially Cohor and Norvos in particular were in
former Andalos, so that those areas were maybe scoured of
Andal's, many of whom fled to Westeros.
And later Valyrian settlers went there.
For example, that is what happened at Laura.
It was empty. For like 100 years or more, I
forget exactly. Check out our episode on Laura
where we go into a lot more detail on it.
But eventually it was religious dissidents that left Valyria
'cause they weren't they, they wanted to be the only, They
didn't want to be around all the other religions.
Valyria was open to all religions, but these guys, they
didn't really like that. So they some of the some of the
religions that didn't like the other didn't get along.
They went the the worshippers of Boash, the blind God moved to
this empty scoured maze that was left behind.
So that was many years later, but it kind of came full circle
by people from Valyria that took a place that the Dragon Lords
had emptied out for them a century before now.
We do know that the free cities, even though they were partly
free, and the word free is. Not exactly true, but they were
smart enough to not make any of the mistakes of the previous
cultures in the region. They never, well, they knew
better. Here's what we're told.
Quote. Dutiful daughters, none ever
made war upon Valyria, nor defied the Dragon Lords in any
matter of significance. Common sense really.
Like why would they? They saw what happened to they
had. They also had thousands of years
of history to look at and see how the Valyrians dealt with
people who stood up to them. And they by then would have been
aware that there was a time when 300 Dragon Lords just came
together. And it was like there was a time
when 100 yeah, let's not. Let's just do what they.
Say and make the best of it. Super chat from James Boris.
Boris sorry if I said that wrong.
Speaking of anti air, do you think any non Valyrian
civilization of Essos developed anti air slash dragon tech?
Maybe the others if you buy the other invasion of Essos theory.
I do wonder about that. Like the Valyria we see the
Roinar. I mean they were able to shoot
Dragons down with just arrows, which seems impossible given
Westerosi technology. Like there's nothing's even come
close to that. Vicenia once got an arrow in the
shoulder and it wasn't even a big deal.
So, oh, that's it as far as arrows hitting any Targaryen,
like of all we know, like it just doesn't seem to have it's
it's very difficult to do, but it might be a matter of
technology that might just have better bows.
Maybe the Roiner had for all we know, they had some magic in
their bows. Maybe they had a something
comparable to Valyrian steel, you know, and not as good, but
maybe better than Westerosi steel that would penetrate the
armor or dragon scales better. Yeah, you wonder about that.
I don't really picture the ice javelin of season eight kind of
thing, but water. Spouts is pretty high magic, so
like maybe that's not so crazy that there are things like ice
javelins or something like that. I was, I'd still defaulted
talking about the sheer numbers and, and potential increase in
skill that would come with that. I will also throw out there that
a lot of times in this discussion, I, I was thinking
about Avatar the Last Airbender because that's some of the, the
sorcery in that world is based around the elements.
There's fire benders, water benders, earth benders, right?
And there's some variations like some of the water benders can
blood bend. That's kind of like a dark magic
and often the ice, the water benders can like turn the water
to ice. So I you know, I wonder if that
could be a factor if you could like I thought it when you said
an ice javelin. You know what?
I mean, yeah, could the. Yeah, pull up, you know, a gush
of water from a river and sweep it off into the air and
crystallize it into ice as shooting toward a.
Drag because it's shards that would be yeah, at that velocity.
Maybe too, if the Dragon's in flight, it would add to.
It a bunch of different water droplets becoming little ice
shards could rip through a wing or something like that, yeah.
That's interesting. Like, yeah, it's like.
It's like a grape shot but ice shot instead.
Instead of a sail, it's a wing. There are enough lessons in the
Dance of the Dragons alone for multiple episodes.
In terms of dragon versus dragon and dragon versus army.
There are some innovations or some lessons were remembered,
for example Westeros. Did recall some of the lessons.
Of Aegon's Conquest, which was. Don't put 50,000 soldiers in one
place when you're facing Dragons.
Smaller armies. Makes sense.
So the the. The the blacks and the greens
at. Least have that level of sense
and let's do so. Let's talk about Westeros,
starting with Aegon, or actually not Aegon.
Let's go to his more immediate ancestors after the Doom, the
Targaryen, the Dragonstone. A lot depends on Anar, the exile
and those in charge of his household.
And what I mean by that is. They had wealth.
Accumulated over centuries if not longer.
And what they brought with them to Westeros like.
And I don't mean people and artifacts, although those are
interesting too. Just the books the the knowledge
they brought with them represents a large portion of
all the surviving dragon lore in the world.
Given that, we should assume that a huge percentage of it was
destroyed by the Doom itself and as we've talked about before.
There may have. Been some reluctance to write
down some of these things in the 1st place, given some of it
might have been like the equivalent of corporate secrets.
You don't want other families, dragon rider families to know
what you know. Unless you're exchanging
secrets, maybe that's worthwhile.
Maybe some of them have alliances where certain secrets
of dragon lore and dragon kind are traded behind the scenes
there. I mean, Dragonstone has to have
some scrolls, right? But are these scrolls going to
contain the kind of common wisdom that we're speaking to
directly in this episode of why it's stupid to have Dragons
fight each other? Maybe they just took that for
granted because it's common sense to them.
Maybe after so long it was it became so ingrained that they
didn't need to say it anymore, that it was just too obvious,
which is the condition that eventually leads to it being
forgotten, or the reason why it was emphasized, the underpinning
cultural reasons. The underpinning thought process
is lost. It's like it's like having.
An ancient device that functions really well, but lost the
instructions for it. You've lost the manuals for it.
You still have it. It still works, but you forgot
why it was developed in the best ways to use it.
Forgot. Is using a term applied to a
whole culture or a whole group of people rather than they
didn't literally forget like how did?
That work again. It's like they got amnesia.
No it's not that. Of course, since we're told no
Dragons fought each other in Westeros until Valerian fought
Quicksilver during Magor's ascension, that means the
Dragons of the Lords of Dragonstone era never fought one
another that we know of. Though they might have done it
just without Dragons. Right?
So what I'm saying here is the pre royal Targaryens didn't
fight each other, or at least if they did it wasn't using
Dragons. At least not in a sense, not in
a way that any dragon died because of it.
But we're said they didn't. They literally didn't.
Fight No Dragon fought dragon in the sky since Valyria.
When Meghor and Aegon the Young Crown fought, it was the first
time since then. Maybe they get well and well
enough, maybe they lack the ambition for infighting.
Who knows. But.
The Lords of Dragonstone, they kept it tight.
They kept. Unity, at least to a certain
point. Maybe there's just a lot of
collective trauma about the loss of Valyria.
Like wow, like that's a big deal.
Like only, and it only happened twenty, 30-40 years ago.
Does that put you in a conquering?
Mood I don't know how these. Things work, but.
The Century of Blood itself was pretty brutal too, and maybe
they just, and maybe some nasty fates befell some of the
Targaryens on their Dragons in outside conflicts, just not
against each other. Maybe they were, they kept that
the wisdom of not fighting each other, but they went and got
embroiled in various events that happened during this Century of
Blood and that some of them may have not come back from that.
I mean Aegon did this, he fought against the volunteers, he
burned a a fleet at least that was trying to invade.
And maybe he wasn't the 1st to get involved.
He was just more successful. And the Dragons that were older
than Valerian, they were he was the youngest of the five Dragons
that came over. They died, maybe all of them of
old age maybe, but that's maybe not, you know, that's you can
see why there's room to think that maybe something else
happened. But we know it wasn't dragon
versus Dragons. So interestingly, the population
of Dragons actually declined in this time frame.
You'd think that they'd really want to make sure that Dragons
didn't go extinct, but they also didn't want anyone else to have
Dragons. They weren't marrying out a lot.
This was a period of the Targaryen sort of looking
inward, staying inward. They weren't expanding.
They weren't conquering. It's a big point.
There's a lot of missing info here.
We don't know a lot about these, these Targaryens, but it may
have been a strategy. They could have hatched more
eggs if they wanted to, but they just maybe they didn't want
anyone else getting Dragons and riding them.
It was, it was a tense, you know, it was a touch and go kind
of period. They might have wanted to
consolidate. They might have rather have
three really big, powerful, strong Dragons than 10 average
Dragons. Let's let's get Valerian big
enough that he can burn down a freaking castle, and then we can
start cultivating some younger ones.
And they didn't. Even have 10 riders.
Yeah. So like, they couldn't.
Yeah. There, there may have been
because one thought is like, maybe they want to like preserve
the Dragons and start repopulating that that's one
reason we see like we can't risk fighting each other.
We can't even risk fighting other people.
Maybe Aegon knew he could risk burning some ships down 'cause
it's not really a risk, right? But we definitely can't have
them fighting each other. But that that conflicts with the
idea of the population declining.
But maybe it's because they were trying to get one or two Dragons
up to a certain threshold. Then they could burn fire down
from a distance greater than, or to reach the fire strong up to
melt stone or whatever. Again, maybe lessons that they
knew from Old Valyria that had been lost or written down or
records don't exist or whatever else could also be all part of a
prophecy. Maybe they knew they needed to
have X number or a dragon of X size.
Or dragon must have 3 heads. Yeah, yeah.
So 'cause it's, it's, it's definitely curious, 'cause they
could have hashed more if they wanted to.
Like when Jerry's and Allison had a bunch of kids, there were
a lot of eggs to go around. Like they didn't all become
dragon riders, but it wasn't because they weren't allowed to
for the most part. And some of them maybe in one or
two cases, but for the most part, like they weren't like,
Nope, Nope. It was just as many Dragons as
there are Targaryen. So there's another thing here,
Sean, that I that we've brought up a few times.
It's like it must be really expensive to upkeep Dragons.
These are not the Targaryens of with the wealth of Valyria
anymore. And they're not the Targaryen to
the Iron Throne that had the taxation of the entire
continent. So maybe it was actually a part.
Due to cost, they clicked. We can't, actually.
We should keep fewer Dragons because it's so.
Expensive. It's hard to imagine the
Targaryens. Ever having money problems?
It's kind of like, really. Did they?
But it's possible like this is where's all their money coming
from at this point? Like they have this small island
whereas before they must have had massive holdings.
Some of it would just be stored. Well, they sold off their.
Property in Valyria, which was most certainly the most
expensive real estate on the planet.
But eventually you'd run out of money, and we're talking
generations and generations here with a with a severely reduced
income. From what they had been
operating on. So it could be something
something more mundane like that.
Yeah, it could also be like, aside from money, just like the
ranging territory where the Dragons would feed, you wouldn't
have to get too far away to find enough food to for the young
ones. I I don't even think it is so
just now. It could also be that they
wanted there to be a disparity between the bigger, older
Dragons and the younger, newer. Dragons.
That's possible. When we start do breeding new
ones that these young upstart kids don't dare challenge the
elder Targaryens with these massive Dragons.
Maybe I like that. Idea to be a bigger disparity.
Anyway, so escalating. The cost is another form of the
Dragon's undoing. We could say.
Expenses do matter now. The Conquest.
Let's talk about that. The Iron Throne may be the thing
that made the end of Dragon's inevitable, or at least made it
not unlikely because the Valyrians were a.
Freehold, and with the name Freehold, is as laughable as
Free cities, given the widespread violent dominance and
slavery they inflicted on the region around them for eons.
Internally, it's a sign of their pragmatism.
They're like, yeah, they learn not to fight each other, at
least not with Dragons, as we said, and had a system
apparently built around keeping that status quo, of reminding
themselves of why they shouldn't fight each other with Dragons.
Again, we said there must have been exceptions times when
Dragon fought Dragon, but that. A must have been resolved and
clearly it didn't end them because they were able to
continue as A. Society beyond that.
A throne, I think, did destroy the blacks and greens, and that
throne never existed in Valyria. They knew better than to do
that. They knew better than to play
the Game of Thrones 'cause when you play the Game of Thrones,
you win or you die. Let's play the game of freehold.
That's a better game for US. Forty of us can win, 40 families
can win. So yeah, the phrase is you.
When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die.
But the Dragons die even when you win.
That's why you can't play that game.
You win or you die, but all the Dragons die.
The the people survive, but all the Dragons are going to die.
So. And a lot of people die too,
for. Yeah, yeah, it's.
Only the Dragons father Dragons, yeah, you know, but it's the
Dragons and people fighting Dragons and people, so.
Yeah, so maybe you can actually we should consider blaming Egg
on the Conqueror for forgetting how important it was to not do
that when you have Dragon. Maybe he thought because they're
all in one family, they'll all stay united.
But that's. Naive.
The throne is too much of A temptation.
It didn't. Take his own.
Sons fought over the throne. I mean, it didn't take took one
generation for them to start fighting over it.
And arguably. That was a.
Mistake on his part too in creating 2 branches and not
doing enough to reconcile them before the time.
Just like Viserys created 2 branches and just.
Kind of demanded. That they get along.
He didn't, really. Too much to make it happen.
Just kind of ordered them you must get along because I say so.
But yeah. But when you're not when you're
dead and not ordering them to get along, what's going to make
them get along? They're not getting along even
with you don't telling them to. So what's going to make that
happen when you're gone? Yeah.
You know, I I've made that argument that I thought that
thesaurus slash Ranira should have been flying on their
Dragons to all the different kingdoms that had sworn
allegiance, just like Aegon did. It's just this reminder.
But they didn't. And so when the time comes for
this civil war, all the other house, like, yeah, I'll fight
for you. Yeah, I'll fight for you.
But if they had seen these Dragons and like, I'm going to
wait till I really have to chew, you sure you want to.
There would have been more negotiating effort.
There would have been more standoffishness.
There would have been I I think it would have been a whole
different scenario if everyone had been constantly reminded of
the power of the Dragons. I think you're right, and I
think that's part of what they forgot.
Like they forgot it was important to show people the
power of the Dragons. They kind of like what Stannis
realized. He at first Stannis thought this
throne belonged to him and then everyone should just get in line
with that. And he realized now it doesn't
work that way. That's that's sort of how these
two sides are behaving right here is sort of acting like,
yeah, the throne's mine. It was promised to me.
I get it, period. The Greens are like, no, it
should belong to the man. We get it.
We took it you, we've seized the opportunity and you should back.
Down. These are not good arguments.
For, for owning the throne, for having the throne, Stanis was
like, yeah, I know I should. I should earn it.
I should show. That I'm the best king and like
if I the blacks and greens never learn that lesson, but usually
you don't get a second chance. To be fair, Stanis got a second
chance, which is rare, and it's probably not going to.
Result in him winning the throne in the in the long run anyway.
Not with that attitude, not with that.
Attitude. Yeah.
So wouldn't that be really ironic if Agons dreams told him
he had to unite the seven kingdoms to face this threat and
then he did this thing that led to the destruction of his own
family, the very family that's supposed to be there to stop
this threat 'cause that is what happened.
They blew up all their Dragons. They lost the the advantage,
They lost the advantage. They lost the thing the.
Prophecies go right When you try to like, live up to or fight
against the prophecy, it always blows up in your face.
So. So it's it's obviously very hard
to know exactly what he was thinking or dreaming or both.
Not to mention what advice he got from anyone he brought it up
to, which we can assume he didn't keep it all to himself or
else how would anybody know about it?
I'm talking book obviously, because it's show.
Of course he told people, but we don't know exactly who.
Did he tell Vicena? Did he tell Rainey's?
Did he tell them both? Did he tell Annie's?
Did he tell Megor? Good questions, but we don't
have the answers. Was some of this written down in
the Citadel? Was it read in the in the
library of Dragonstone? Did he rediscover something that
that past Dragon Lords already knew?
Again, the night attack on Harrenhal was that something he
read about was like a good way to keep them from getting good
aim at you is to attack at night.
The fires that you light with your dragon will be all the
light you need. You can see the cat the.
Moonlight will be enough for you.
There won't be enough for them. You know and.
They're going to be afraid, and you will be the thing that's
making them afraid. They will be less afraid if they
can see you. Which is kind of ironic cause
Dragons are very terrifying to look at, but still.
It's not like they won't be afraid if they can see you,
they'll just be even more afraid if they can't see you.
Yeah, what we know for the more certainty is that Aegon had the
most powerful dragon in the world, and it may have been one
that stood out as huge even back when there were hundreds of
Dragons. It's entirely possible that when
100 Dragons went to torch Lorath or when 300 Dragons went to
torch the Roinar, that Valerian would have stood out as one of
the biggest, if not the biggest even then, because damn, that's
a big dragon. I got to figure he wasn't the
biggest ever. Like that's a that's a lot, you
know, to think that just, but it would explain a lot of Aegon's
ambition, just realizing what he had here is like this.
With this dragon, you can do more than these books say you
can do with a large dragon. It's even bigger.
Like you can go even beyond that because the conquest was
relatively easy until Dorn. It's a new thought for me to
have, but I do wonder if they were sizing Valerian up in 100
years before they moved on Westeros.
Yeah, and I've got more on valerian size.
Coming when we get to Megor, so stay tuned for that.
Another thing Westeros learned during the conquest was that the
obvious, which is don't use ships.
It's really bad idea to use ships.
They're the most vulnerable. Somehow they.
They did need to learn that lesson again, apparently.
And learn that they did. They also learned that a dragon,
even in a rainstorm, even a vicious downpour where they
can't fly. It's still very formidable.
Miraxi's proved that at the Battle of the Last Storm, which
is an episode we did with Jim Mcgeehan.
For patrons and subscribers only.
Check that out if you're so inclined.
So, yeah, the Field of Fire and the burning of Harrenhal, those
we, we, we talked about those during Valarriatus.
We pointed out repeatedly that those are examples designed to
stand the test of time, to remind people of the power of
Dragons. It was so perfect in part
because the field of fire, largest army ever assembled and
see what happened to it. That's this kind of thing.
People are going to remember burning of Harrenhal.
Well, it's still there. Harrenhal is still.
Burned and sitting there so it it just obviously that stands
the test of time and it worked A lot of you know, the Starks gave
up the Aaron's gave up after just a little bit after just
having their Navy torched yeah so.
It. It worked.
It got a lot of people to surrender ahead of time.
And to think that people would go against this, let's not
forget the real world people chart.
Like you said, Sean, when modern, when machine guns were
invented, people still did the charge the front lines strategy,
even though they were running right at machine guns and bombs
and flamethrower. So you think people won't charge
a dragon? You think that's unrealistic?
Let me remind, let me introduce you to.
Real life where people charge at machine guns and bombs and
flamethrowers. Flamethrower being perhaps the
best example because it's what Dragons do.
People charge right at that. It's it's crazy.
It's like, wow. You got to, really.
Yeah, that's a mindset I don't ever expect to have.
And, and hopefully not for all of us.
And the Tully's sort of also bent the knee like the Starks
and Aaron's. But for them, it was sort of not
wanting to face Dragons but also wanting to not be under hair in
the black anymore. So there was a double whammy
there. Now Dorne, of course, didn't go
so well for the Targaryens. The the Dornish were like, we
don't have to surrender. We don't value our castles as
much as we value people. Go ahead and burn the castles.
We'll hide in the caves and strike later.
But remember how it started. Miraxi's just showed up with
Rainy. Or Rainy showed up on Miraxi's
burned the Plankey town, a center of great economic
activity. This was devastating.
And then they continued. Since Dorne didn't surrender,
Targaryens kept using the same playbook.
We'll destroy more of your country until you give up.
We won't give up. We'll.
Destroy more of your country. Until you get we won't give up.
And eventually Darn was reduced to a, quote, a smoking ruin.
There was glass on the sand in some places.
Every castle was burned repeatedly except Sunspear,
which was done to maybe get the Darnish to turn on each other to
show that hey but. Yeah, but it didn't work.
And the but the and the Targaryens didn't have another
gear to shift to. They're like, this has always
worked. What do we do?
But it the irony of this in terms of like looking at is a
historical example that shows us of what the Dragons are really
capable of. It's like, yeah, if they keep
going, they will just turn blow up every castle in the entire
region. They will destroy every farm or
that that's maybe that was obvious but.
Yeah, even like it they were able to bring 300 or even 100,
or Shea pointed out 30 probably would have done it.
They didn't have 30, but still, two or three could still just
destroy a whole country. It doesn't even need 30, just
two or three. Yeah, it took longer with two or
three, but it was just as it was just assuredly done.
And it partly took longer because they didn't really even
want to do that. They wanted to conquer them.
They wanted to bring them in and have people to rule and taxes to
collect. But so, so they they dragged it
out out, but it's still with terrible losses all around.
And the Dragon Lords didn't want anyone to see this strategy
work. They didn't want this strategy
to work because then they would encourage other people to do it.
Even though it was a it's a devastating strategy that's hard
to to use. There was they last thing they
want is a winning strategy shown to the world.
Like this is how you beat Dragons.
That that said, I still question your terminology work and
winning strategy. I still don't think the reach
was something like, yeah, let's we can fight against the Dragons
just like Dorne. Like, I don't think anyone else
wanted to use Dorne's strategy. No, you're right, You're right.
But but that that seems to be part of maybe the Targaryen's
thinking is like, no, we can't. We got to, we got to make sure
we win here. They didn't.
They had to give up. But because of, you know, the
cloak and dagger and assassination attempts, the kind
of stuff that we suspect was going on in Valyria, rather than
the Dragons just directly fighting each other.
And if Dorne had Dragons of their own.
Well, would Valyria? Like would Aegon would just
probably never have invaded them, They would have maybe
looked straight, would have gone straight to marriage offers
right off the bat, or who knows. Culk and Dagger assassination
attempts or whatever else you. Know yeah, so it would have been
like them. How many innocent lives would
have been saved? Yeah, this is partly why I mean
the real. World, it's a tough argument.
This is why people argue like, yeah, there should be more
states with nukes 'cause then there would be.
It's a tough argument. It's like, yeah, you can see the
downside to that for sure, but this is the upside.
It's like, well, no one will ever invade them because.
They will. That nuke has pointed at that
invading country. And.
Yeah, so. Yeah.
So the death of Moraxis also was another reminder of why they're
reluctant to use the Dragons. Even when it's a cakewalk, even
when it's easy, even when there's very little they can do
to fight back. Because you might get unlucky if
you never have to use your dragon, if you only use it as a
threat. It's not getting shot in the eye
by a scorpion bolt, is it? Right.
You're not. It's not crashing to.
It's not the end of the war basically, 'cause you capture
the dragon rider and use that as leverage to against his beloved
husband, her, her beloved husband, etcetera.
So as you said earlier, Sean, Aegon and his sisters famously
failed in dorm, but they kept up the pressure on their vassals by
just friendly parties. I show up with Mike entourage,
we hang out, we go hunting and Hawking.
These aren't equal. These aren't equals, though.
These aren't friends at the same social level, enjoying, you
know, their equal status. This is one guy with the silk
love rather than the gauntlet, the the gauntlets outside
chowing down on an Orox and intimidating the hell out of
everybody. It's But that's the way that's
such a good way to do it, because these these Lords are so
proud. They have so much pride.
That pride will make them do stupid things, and Hagan knows.
That he's like, well. This is the way to assuage their
pride without rubbing their faces in it.
Like, look, I will destroy you and this is proof of it.
Bend the knee now. No, they show up and like, yeah,
we're friends 'cause the unspoken threat is there.
They're not stupid. They've already.
The field of fire has already happened.
Dorne has already happened. They know what happened.
You don't have to remind them. You don't have to be like Meg,
or will be. You don't have to rub their
faces in it. But you also shouldn't be like
Annie's. Who doesn't?
Who goes the extreme opposite and doesn't rub their faces in
it even a little bit. Is afraid to use his dragon in
any form of violence. Aegon did the thing that Titus
did, pulled kind of like a Jaime Lannister, to use the books as
an example. When Jamie is very nice to Titus
Blackwood, he doesn't make him actually bend the knee, just
makes him agree, makes him say, yeah, you can send whatever
hostage you want. But when he's leaving, he's
like, let me remind you, this was unnecessary.
He Jamie's like he kind of lose. He he steps back like kind of
goof, just a little bit. Like he didn't have to say this,
but maybe this was for the reader.
He's like, just to be clear, I will come back here and kill you
all if I if you give me Cosby. He's like, yeah, I know.
I know who I'm dealing with. Kingslayer.
He says that he's like, yeah, I know.
We like the smile comes off his place.
Like you didn't have to say that.
Like, we were exchanging the subtleties properly.
I read between the lines. It was obvious, bro.
You didn't have to say that and this is the same.
Thing going on here, like Aegon's like, yeah, you don't
have to rub my face and I know exactly what your giant dragon
chowing on an Orox means. By the way, it's a little bit of
a tangent, but I read that a little bit as like Jamie
reminded himself, he's like, I can't be their friends.
I still have to be ruthless. You're kind of right.
Yeah, He kind of was reminding himself, yeah, 'cause he also
says that to the to Haas the hostage.
He's like, this isn't of game little kid, you know he's.
Like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm my bad, Sir Jamie.
So Amis, let's talk about Amis. This is this is this is amazing.
How? Well, the 1st 4 Kings provide us
a different look into the insight of how they use Dragons.
Aegon showed what he would do, proved it all, made all examples
of a lot of people and then backed off and was just like let
that do the talking for the rest of his reign.
Amis relied maybe too much on what his father had done and
didn't re establish the examples which.
He. Needed to do because they're
like well, you're not your dad, you're not the guy, you're not
the one who did this. So he had a dragon Quicksilver.
Several of his dragon children would be dragon ours as well.
But he really showed that willpower is everything when it
comes to draconic authority. If you aren't willing to use
your dragon, you effectively don't have one.
And that was the message that that developed in Ames's very
short reign. And he says Father instilled
fear in everyone he reminded. Them of what he was.
Capable of and what he had. Done again, Heron Hall, Field of
Fire? Not very.
Far in the past visual example in Heron Hall's case.
That's never going to not be true.
He was willing to be a dragon, but over.
Time and right away because some of some rebellions broke out
almost as soon as Amy took the throne.
He was unable to fulfill the standard set by his father and
everyone knew it. In fact, they had probably
learned that while he was Prince that a lot of them got to meet
him face to face and took took his metal and realized well.
He's he's not the he's more of the copper like Renly.
You know that example where the three Baratheons are compared to
types of metal? Well, Aegon would be Valyrian
steel, AE and E would be copper. You know, Magor would be iron
breaks before he bends right there.
There's also work in this in this example.
When he took the throne, more than 25 years had passed since
his father's examples his his violent examples.
He had still been making the nonviolent examples all along.
Quicksilver never killed a person.
That we know of. And I bet not a lot of people
knew that Amy's never killed a person with his dragon.
He never used his dragon for violence at all.
So when all these small rebellions broke out and Amy
sent no Dragons, not even not not just to not himself, he
didn't deploy any dragon riders. People got the message right.
They were like, he's just shy about using the Dragons.
But it wasn't the. Valyrian shyness to the risk of
using them. This was actual shyness.
This was actual anxiety of of restraint.
Maybe he doesn't want to kill people.
Maybe he's a little bit of a pacifist.
Don't. We don't.
Exactly. Say, like, I understand maybe
his responsibility as a leader and especially in the context of
this world and the wars and Dragons and fantasy adventure
and everything, but in my mind, he's doing the right thing.
The only reason we have any judgement on him is 'cause these
other people are doing the wrong thing.
And our expectation for him to deal with people doing the wrong
thing is to go burn them to death.
It's I, I want him to be more heroic.
I wish we were talking. I was, I wish we weren't talking
about the his failures and not being more violent, you know?
But if he had. Everything else was failing and
want you to be violent. That's how I see it, yeah.
Yeah. And and he was unable to meet
that challenge. Meanwhile, Megor, who eventually
claimed Valerian, must have been shaking his head in frustration.
He's like, I've got the big dragon.
I he. He this is a guy who saw a lot
fewer of the subtleties and intimidation and saw it as a
very straightforward thing and he was more than willing to do
it right. But eventually Amy's and Megor
had issues with each other. Megor took his brother's
forbearance as opportunity. Took a second wife, maybe on
Vicenia's advice, his mom's advice, and this brought things
to a head. Megor was exiled, which probably
embroiled the Crown's enemies even more.
They're like, oh, the one guy that's actually capable of
harming us has been exiled. Well, that just gave them more
license to do their dirty deeds. So.
But even with Fasenia there sticking around, 'cause she
didn't leave, she was still there.
People were afraid of her. But he continually projected
weakness, went against her advice, and these rebels kept
doing awful things. I mean, these aren't rebels just
fighting for independence. These are people like Aaron the
Red that was just just a bandit, basically a glorified Brig.
And there's he's not fostering any grand cause.
So yeah, so over time, more and more of these things happen, and
more and more of the time he refuses to do hardly anything.
Not just not send Dragons, he barely even sent armies.
Like what did the Lords, what did the the Warden of the South
in the ward of the West, what did they do about these bandits?
So why isn't it them failing and not Amy's you?
Know well yeah, he didn't give them clear order like he on one
hand they should be doing it on their own but they kind of
waited for orders that never came.
Yeah. So you're right.
He take, he's maybe taking a little too much blame here.
But. They also would have realized
that how long is this guy going to last?
He's not going to be king forever.
He probably won't be king for 30 years like his father was.
So how long is this opportunity? How this you got?
A weak king sees the advantage now before something changes.
And yeah, something did change pretty quickly.
A good example of this, though, of this principle of taking an
opportunity when you have a weak king, you can maybe just say
sorry before you have any consequences.
Look at what the three sisters did during the conquest.
They declared they're some themselves independent of the
Seven Kingdoms entirely. No seven, no, no new Iron Throne
for them, no rule by the veil either.
And then Veigar flew there and they backed down before a single
ship was burned. And This is why we suspect they
had put a puppet ruler up 'cause then they could punish that
puppet ruler and say, look, we, we removed her.
We're on your side. It was her all along.
You know, it's like, can we get away with this?
Let's do this. But it's like they put.
One toe into the Independence water, that toe is another
person's toe, or rather another person's head or tongue, because
she lost her tongue when she was sent to the Silent Sisters.
That's Marla Sunderland, of course, so Amy's Rangers.
So there's probably a couple of those cases where they're like.
Well, we'll just apologize. We'll, we'll do everything we
can. Then when Amy's finally, you
know, if he, if he ever gets us cornered, we'll just apologize
and bend the knee and that'll be it.
He's he's, he's reluctant to execute people.
Sure. So it's it was a good gamble by
some bad people, probably because it it did work.
That's what I mean by a good gamble.
Obviously it's not very ethical. And this, by the way, is the
source for a lot of the theories behind Vicenya's either
assisting her nephew's death or causing it outright 'cause she's
just like, we're losing it. We're losing the throne, we're
losing our reputation. The the fear that keeps everyone
in line. We're losing it that you're,
you're establishing a a reputation.
The opposite of what me and your father tried to do.
Even your deceased mother was on board with that king Ainice.
But anyway, on to Megor contrast.
Huge contrast here. Night and day when there's one
king who was too reluctant to use force, and one that was way
too willing to use it. Got to find that middle ground.
Yeah, I got to find that middle ground.
You know, You know, when when Vicena and Megor turned their
dragon S towards Old Town of the Starry Sept, it was like, oh,
no, we surrender whatever you want.
Just as like just like when Aegon himself declared war on
the seven kingdoms. This the Old Town and the starry
step were like pass. Well, we bend the knee.
Yeah. Oh, I had a dream.
Yeah. The gods told me it wasn't my
decision. Yeah, yeah, He he did a but even
Mego appeared maybe somewhat reluctant to go dragon versus
dragon. There were times when like Reyna
didn't see to his authority and others just kind of were
reluctant to like didn't come to him or didn't obey him, but he
was reluctant to come to them either.
He wanted to stay at the capitol, do his business.
He had buildings to construct his hold fast and the dragon pit
and all these other things. So he kind of understood that at
maybe because he was a warrior, that stuff happens in battle.
You know, you shouldn't shirk from battle, but you don't
necessarily need to go seek it out either when it's dragon
versus dragon. Of course he did that when he
sees the throne in the first. Place when Aegon the Uncrowned.
Raised an army with the intent of fighting Valerian or fighting
Megor. This is when we got our war and
it wasn't really a contest at all though.
So Aegon the uncrowned good example of was he too proud to
back down like this? Seems like a obviously bad idea.
You got to drag in the quarter the size of Valerian and you're
going to go after him? Not only is Valerian
experienced, when Megor experienced, Aegon wasn't,
Quicksilver wasn't. I just pointed out under Aenes
who Quicksilver was born with no war, no fighting.
This was a dragon that had never fought in a battle and he's
going to go take on Valerian. There's some missing piece here.
Maybe Aegon was a little insane. There's that's a Targaryen
thing. Maybe he read some books and
read about smaller Dragons being more maneuverable.
Maybe he thought he could pull it off.
He could kill Megor and not kill Valerian.
Anyway, all these things are possible.
It's possible he thought he could do that.
It's possible it could have been successful.
We don't know. Here's what we do know, quote.
15,000 men had joined the rebellion as Aegon the Uncrowned
began his March across the Riverlands to stake his claim to
the Iron Throne, led by the Prince himself on King Aenes's
beloved dragon Quicksilver. Before declaring for the Prince
of Dragonstone, they wished to be convinced he might prevail.
For the first time since the Doom of Valyria, Dragon
contended with Dragon in the Sky even as battle was joined below.
Quicksilver, 1/4 the size of Valerian, was no match for the
older, fiercer dragon, and her pale white fireballs were
engulfed and washed away in great gouts of black flame.
Screaming and smoking, the young dragon plunged to Earth and
Prince Aegon with her. So the Dragons never.
Got to grips with each other. We never had physical contact in
the battle that we are told here.
It was all fire, which is maybe how more of them go than we
know. We don't have a lot of examples
of dragon aerial combat, but. You can see here.
Even looks like Aegon wasn't trying to get close which is
smart. Like don't get close to the
bigger dragon. He's trying to use fire to maybe
kill Megor and be done with it. But Valerian was up to that
contest too with hotter fire and enough to burn this dragon to
death. It would no tooth, no tooth or
talons were ever involved. It was just purely the the.
Dragon Flame. I didn't suspect that Valerian
has a a greater range. Yeah, maybe far from farther
away, you know. Yeah, maybe maybe Aegon was was
overconfident in maneuverability and and thought, you know, like
again, they couldn't have tested these things in advance, you
know, like how could he have known so and maybe.
That's how he talked people into it.
He's like, look, I'll be able to beat Megor.
He's slow. You know I'll be able to do
this. He must have 15,000 men were
following him. They were they?
They clearly believed in his chances and they probably gave
up. They gave up immediately
afterwards since this dragon was killed and we're like, oh, that
was quick. And there's that quote.
That we were relying on to show that there hadn't been dragon
verse dragon combat during the time of the Targaryens of
Dragonstone because it says the first time since the Doom
Dragons fighting each other or contending in the skies.
And so, yeah, Megor might have again, you see someone like
Gregor Clegane, he's a, he's a dummy.
Everybody points that out. But when it comes to combat,
he's got some and he's not, he's not entirely stupid.
He understands sunlight and, you know, like having the sun at
your back and certain things about fear and morale and yeah,
Megor suicidal and. Psychopathic as he might have
been, he had some sense of of preservation and strategy, so
those are things he probably wasn't stupid about.
Yeah. Use the use the ranged weapon.
Don't get burned to death. Let's continue with the battle.
There's another quote here that gets Sparks a little further
discussion. Here it is.
Amongst the dead were Lord Alan Tarbeck, Dennis Snow, the
Bastard of Barrowton, Lord Ronald Vance, Sarah Willem
Whistler, Melanie Piper and three of her brothers, and the
Prince of Dragonstone, Aegon the Uncrowned of House Targaryen.
Would the addition of a second dragon to the Prince's host have
made a difference when battle was joined?
We don't know. We, we've theorized about this
already. Like what difference would that
make? How much difference would it
make it? We, we, we got to feel like in
some cases it would totally make a big difference.
Maybe not in all cases. And the reason it's being asked
here is that. Aegon's sister, wife Reyna on
dream fire did not participate. And that's they're wondering,
had she participated, maybe it would have gone differently.
Maybe there was within two dead Dragons.
Two dead Dragons. This is Blarian we're talking
about. But maybe Blarian would have
been severely. Harmed or could have changed a
lot. Yeah, I think it would have
definitely made a difference. I don't know if they necessarily
would have defeated Megor and Valerian, but I think they would
have. I think a second dragon.
They might not have defeated Valerian, but I think they would
have defeated Megor if that makes sense.
Probably at the expense of one or the other of them.
I think 1 dragon and it's rider dies while the other one takes
out Megor. Absolutely.
So that may have been a question Reyna asked herself the whole
rest of her life. She may have gone to her
deathbed wondering that question.
And she lived a long time now, and she lived past Megor.
Megor didn't have a long reign, so she at least got to see him
dead in the ground. And Megor the Cruel earned that
nickname. He it wasn't exaggerated.
Him being stupid might be a little exaggerated.
He did some stupid things, but he did some clever things too.
He kind of reminds me of Cersei in some ways.
Like he when he gets angry, he gets real stupid.
And he got angry a lot like Cersei.
But he also. But like, Cersei did some pretty
clever things, some cunning things, and here's.
One thing he did that was smart, maybe at least they would rate
it under this topic as smart. He didn't focus on Throne.
He wasn't concerned with the Iron Throne.
He was concerned with Valerian. He didn't claim a younger
dragon. He didn't claim a hatchling.
He was waiting. For valerian to be available.
And then when he had Valerian, then the throne was easy to take
because he had the biggest dragon.
So it's like focus on the means to take the the throne rather
than taking the throne, because when then you can hold it right
and you have Valerian and the throne, but one helps you hold
the other. And a guy like Megor who sees
things a lot more like straightforwardly, he's not a
subtle guy. This makes sense to him, and he
may have been encouraged in this by his mother.
Like have a dragon, have the big dragon.
This is where the source of our power.
This is our, this is where This is why people fear us.
Without these Dragons, we're just like everybody else with
silver hair, you know, And the silver hair doesn't intimidate
anybody. The Dragons do, even when you
don't use them. So he makes for an interesting
case study because he kind of understood on a very basic level
where the real power was the Iron Throne was the seat of
power, but the real. Seat of power was the saddle of
Bilarion. That's the Realty to because
that's what best enables you to take.
The iron Throne or to forge the. Iron Throne in the 1st place,
which is what literally happened.
So he also kind of maybe understood that part of why it
will help him hold the throne is that even another dragon coming
after him, he's got a good chance to win that, which is a.
Very difficult thing to win without taking severe damage or
even the rider surviving. He probably understood that.
And this is a guy who had a chip on his shoulder in the 1st
place. He wasn't first born.
He felt jilted a bit, he thought.
More capable of his brother. And who else feels that way?
Let's. Think of the blacks and the
greens. Prince Aymond of course also
feels he has a chip on his shoulder.
He also isn't first born. He also feels more competent
than his older brother. Lot in common.
Plus, they also are the rider of the largest.
Dragon of their time. Yep.
And yeah, Veigar has been the largest dragon in the realm for
decades by the time Eamon claimed him, because Blaring
died in like the year what, 92 or 93?
But back to Megor for now. He got most of Westeros to see
sense again in that the quick. Relatively historical period of
5:00-ish years of Amy's being in charge, where people forgot to
be afraid of Dragons because no one was using them in a way
manner that would make you afraid of them.
Megor restored that pretty fast. Like all right.
Yes, we should be afraid of the Dragons.
We should be afraid of how they're used.
One thing. That's one thing he
accomplished. Except, except for the zealots.
This the faith of the seven were not down for bending the knee to
mega or or any dragon rider and violence be damned.
It wasn't going to intimidate them.
That's the way of zealots, right?
They're like, they're more worried about their the
penalties in the afterlife than they are the penalties in the
current life. So they were willing to go up
against him in a manner that we suspect might have been
reminiscent of the early wars of the Faith and Andalos 'cause we
talked about zealots there as well.
They might have been willing to face some dragon flame.
Didn't help them in the long run.
The lack of fear didn't win them any.
Well, many, many. Maybe they won some battles, but
they didn't have much success against Megor.
I'm talking about maybe they had some success back in their
homeland, but in the long run, of course it didn't work.
Kicked off the end all migrations to Westeros cause of
how bad it was. Going This must have sent quite
the message too. Even the Faith.
The Faith will stand up to Megor, but they can't win.
Even when you're just like, locked in.
Even with. God on your.
Side you're still lost. That's that's the exactly.
The kind of message that Vicenia and Megor valued, like, yeah,
they came at us with everything they had.
And they still lost. Perfect.
That's exactly what we wanted to demonstrate.
Like see, don't try in the future 'cause this is what
happens. They needed someone to try to
prove. That it was hopeless and.
Yeah, it didn't go very well. Is this something we'll see in
the Song of Ice and Fire? Will we see?
I mean, the undead will be fearless against any foe, but
will the Dothraki, like they'll be the the dragon will be on
their side when Danny fight, but not when the Dragons, not the
Dothraki who were trying to capture Danny.
So that's that's a different matter.
Like will they be fearless against that?
I mean, it's such a big part of their culture to not show fear,
but. This is the ultimate test.
Flying fire breathing monster that your arrows seem to be
useless against. Now Sean, you had earlier you
brought up the size of Valerian and I liked your theory on maybe
they wanted to have a generation of Dragons that were way far
ahead of the others so that they would.
Yes there'd be other Dragons, but they would have 50 years of
size or some or the equivalent on the new ones.
Megor is responsible for the dragon pit.
The dragon pit kept Dragons from growing to their maximum size.
It's interesting that he might have done that on purpose.
He's already got the biggest dragon, now I make sure no one
ever has one as big as me. Interesting.
Maybe that was part of his angle do.
You think he realized the dragon pit would have that effect?
I don't. Know.
I don't. I don't.
Yeah. We don't know if they knew it
would limit growth, but it might have.
It might be something in the document, it might be in the
literature. That might be something the
Valyrians figured out. You would think the Valyrians
would figure that out. It's a pretty basic.
You know, like they're, they're breeding and growing Dragons for
eons. You'd think they'd noticed that
one's grown inside versus outside.
There's differences. They had a lot of time to notice
that. I wonder if maybe even someone
else figured that out but didn't even tell Megor.
They'd just hey, let's build a dragon, you know?
Maybe they had this motive of limiting the growth of Dragons,
but didn't necessarily let Megor or anyone know that.
Yeah, Yeah, that's a good point. It's it's it's.
Entirely possible. So I wonder about that.
I wonder if there was an angle this because yeah, Megor maybe
not have noticed that, but maybe Vicenya did.
Maybe Vicenya noticed that because I would.
You can put things past Megor that are harder to put past
Vicenya, but they may not have had that knowledge.
That may be another piece of lost knowledge.
Like maybe they just yeah, it might have been something that
was too so obvious back in the day that they it wasn't written
down anymore. I know.
Remember I think we brought this up before on the show Roman
concrete. They just the ingredients called
for water. It was seawater.
They didn't bother to write that down 'cause they're like, of
course it's seawater. They didn't that that that why?
Would we use good drinking water?
Yeah, that knowledge was lost 'cause it was, it seemed too
obvious. This is a good example.
Maybe the Valyrian just stopped writing that down 'cause it was
so obvious, like. Of course if.
You put them in a small building, they won't grow to
their full size. That does seem kind of obvious
when you lay it out like that. I mean, pretty much any animal,
not that's not true. There are some animals that
don't work like that. But like, maybe that's obvious
to me, 'cause like, I've had aquariums my whole life, but.
Like you get fish will definitely something most
animals will not grow to a size that would trap them in their
enclosure. You know, there's also the idea
that even if something is quote UN quote obvious, the the the
concept of the principle might be obvious, but the details
might not be obvious or or known.
Even humans, for even prehistorical humans, even
animals understand on some level gravity, yes, but it's really
recent that we actually understood the details of
gravity, the rate of acceleration and what cause all
the, you know, the the mathematics behind it isn't
obvious. Does that make sense?
And so maybe dragon Lords or even Megor understood that a
dragon pit limits how big or how quick a dragon can grow.
But how much what? What is the rate of growth, what
is the limit of growth, etcetera, that that might not
have been exactly known? Though he focused on Valerian
rather than the Iron Throne. As we said, Megor died on the
throne, not in the saddle, which goes to show which one truly
gave him power, at least the kind he most relished in.
It would have been a lot harder to kill him in the saddle, but
what's he going to do, stay in the saddle 24/7?
Got to get off sometime bro. So before the other kings
though, let's take a look at a great quote involving Princess
Reyna, who existed during and after the time of Megor and
before. Well not before.
Before he was a king, but she wasn't older than him is my
point. She had married Aegon, her
brother that was killed and she was the oldest, though she was
older than him and she was writer of Dream Fire.
For a while she lived on Fair Isle.
Remember we talked about how she was kind of in fear of maybe him
coming for her. He never did.
Eventually, though, the Lord Farman that had taken her in
died and the son took over and he wasn't as a big a fan of her.
He didn't like her or the relationship with her sister.
And this is what happened. Quote.
You are not welcome here. Take your dragon with you and
your friends and my little brother who would surely piss
his breeches if you were made to stay.
Do not presume to take my sister.
She will remain here, and she will be wed to a man of my
choosing. Franklin Farman did not lack for
courage, as Maester Smike wrote in a letter to the Citadel.
He did lack for sense, however, and in that moment he did not
seem to realize how close he stood to death.
I could see the fire in her eyes, the maester said, and for
a moment I could see Fair Castle burning, the white towers
blackening and collapsing into the sea as flames lept from
every window and the dragon wheeled about again and again.
The new Lord Farman didn't know the lessons that apparently this
Maester Smike. Did Smike by the way, what kind
of name is that? But Lorena did leave in peace.
She didn't. Reduce fair castle to a
blackened, collapsed heap. But this is exactly the fear
that was inspired by Aegon and Meghor and others that causes
people to think twice when they're dealing with the dragon
rider. Even when the dragon is outside
and the the woman is there kind of by herself.
And what's she going to do? Yell for the dragon?
You know, it's not. It doesn't quite work that way.
There's some connection between the dragon and dragon rider.
The bond is a discussion for another day, but it just goes to
show like you were you're afraid of that person.
It makes sense this this guy is shown is is described as being
foolish for pushing her like that even though.
He didn't go too far. He, she didn't burn his castle.
He said what he said, which maybe should have been more
diplomatic about it, but she didn't, you know, kill him.
It might have been a coin toss. Though it might have been.
It might have been closer than he thought.
Yeah, the Maesters seems to think that it was a close run
thing. Maybe not, but that's that's the
point, right? That goes to show you don't want
to test them. You don't want to see, you don't
want to get right up to that line.
You want to get nowhere near that line.
Like she almost burned the whole castle.
You don't even get close. To that you know.
What? I mean like no, she never even,
she never even considered burning our castle down.
That means we did it right. While Speaking of Reyna, we
should mention that she spent time with the Lannisters who
tried to get eggs from her. They wanted eggs to make
themselves. The new Valyria or something
like that, a new like, will there be multiple dragon rider
families in Westeros? Will these powerful families
have Dragons of their own? Those who cannot control the
power of Dragons fear it. Those who can control it lust
for it. And that's the difference here,
because at Fair Isle. They were scared of dream fire
hatching eggs. They were like, Oh no, they'll
she'll hatch eggs and they'll be Dragons everywhere and they'll
be eating our castles and killing our people and stealing
our sheep and our women and our children.
The Lannisters are like, that's for us.
We want to take that so it's night and day.
One is afraid of it, the other ones to control it.
Had this happened, had the Lannisters gotten eggs and
hatched them and learned to ride Dragons, that might have caused
war. Jeharis has gentle as he was
was. Absolutely willing to go to the
mat was actually willing to go to war over another family
getting dragon eggs. He might have unleashed
Vermathore on Casterly Rock, which would have been something
because Vicena was even like I don't want that.
That's that looks tough. When Alyssa fireman were still
on Fireman's here stole three dragon eggs to Harris declared
we'll have to go out and kill any hatchlings born anywhere in
the world. Doesn't matter where they're
born, doesn't matter who has them, doesn't matter what
political fallout it causes, doesn't matter who we have to
burn. We are not allowing a new
Valyria to rise. He he said, quote, I will not
allow Valyria to rise again. Imagine what the triarchs of
Volantis would do with Dragons. He's not wrong.
It's a it's a tough question. It's like, do you have the right
to police the world like that? It's almost irrelevant whether
he does or not. He's going to do it.
He might say, I don't, but I'm going to like, I don't, I
shouldn't have that, right? But I'm, I'm not going to allow
that to happen to the world again, which is kind of like
it's kind of honorable. He's like, yeah, my ancestors
were horrible. Look what they did with draconic
power around the world. I'm going to be a decent king,
maybe because he's he's the guy kind of the guy you're talking
about, Sean. Like this is when you have a
decent guy that's not going to overwhelm people, not shove it
in people's faces, not go off conquering, not burn people to
death unless he absolutely has to.
But he can't trust anyone else to be that way.
Right. And he knows the world is an
evil place. Yeah.
He knows the world is an evil place full of violent, ambitious
people that if they got their hands on, just like there's
certain people in this world, if they got nuclear power, it would
be. Horrible.
And there's a lot of Cias and KGBS and Mossads and agencies
all around the world that are exactly trying to stop nukes
from falling into those hands. And it's a different thing as
this 'cause this is like a frontal assault, Like we will
take our Dragons and bomb anyone who who has that.
It's not, we won't assassinate them 'cause they got to kill the
dragon too. They got to kill the hatchling.
It's kind of similar to the slavers, right?
The slavers that Danny tricked into thinking she was going to
sell an egg. Of course she wasn't going to do
that. They should have realized it was
a trick. But they were too blind to their
ambition, too blind to their lust, too blind to thousands of
years of being subjugated by their ancestors, being
subjugated by these very beasts. Barristan knew the lesson.
He was like, don't do that. This is the one thing that makes
you powerful. He just wasn't thinking on
Daniel's level. He should have figured out that
it was like, you just didn't give her enough credit.
Like, if she's a 13 year old girl, she's not pulling off some
grand scheme here. Yeah, she is.
That's exactly what she's doing.
Yeah, let's let's just wrap this up real quick.
We've got only a few more points here and it's gone a little
long, but we'll we'll talk real quickly about Harris and Viserus
a bit more and, and say that and, and.
Leave it there. But Jairus was the probably
mastered just better than anyone, even better than Aegon.
The implied threat. He didn't have to rub it in your
face. Shows you respect.
Doesn't doesn't take it to the point of humiliation.
You're intimidated. You're not humiliated.
It's a fine line. Magor wasn't was intimidating to
the point of humiliation to the point of just overbearing.
Anis was was weak. Aegon was the Conqueror.
So it's just different with him. He was the guy that started it
all and he's just in a different category.
Jairus found that fine line. His wife Shirley was a big part
of that 'cause she was great at that, great at conciliation.
You know, he got the title, but she was clearly really good at
it too. And.
On that he did a good job, but the dragon population?
Just exploded under him and that might have been a bad idea.
Well, maybe the the targands and Dragons might have had the right
idea keeping the dragon population small.
But it's hard to tell your kids you can't have Dragons, right?
You buy your eldest kid a car and you don't buy your smallest
kid a car. Like, what is that, right?
Obviously it's not the right analogy.
Do what I say, not what I do, yeah.
But also the upkeep thing's no longer an issue.
Like they're right now are established.
They can have all the money isn't a problem.
So I don't know, maybe this is when they just lost sight of
some of the important things. They they thought, oh, this is a
different thing. This isn't Valyria, we have a
throne. Everything's different.
That might have been a naive thinking dragon pit is built.
They might have thought they had things more under control, might
have looked good, Jerry said. And that's that's the message I
started this episode with Peace. Occasionally breeds complacency
and you forget why peace is worth fighting for in the 1st
place. And as solid as Jeharis was,
Viserys was pretty lax. Allowed a lot of these
conditions to. He didn't create them, but he
allowed them to foment and and get worse.
And yeah there's a few other examples that happened during
Jeharis reign. There was a couple times where.
You remember the example. Of Prince Morion, where he tried
to get a fleet and invade the Stormlands and he was loud about
it. And then Jeharis just took Eamon
and Balon and they burned those ships.
And that's essentially where some of those Dragons got their
first battle experience. That was Vermothor's first time
in war, as well as Karaxis and not Vegar.
Vegar. I've been to war before, but
good to keep fresh. And of course, during Viserys's
reign, there were those wars in the step stones.
Those were a constant thing, but those were not really as an
example of where the people of West Rose didn't feel the pinch.
You know, like it was a war in another theater.
It wasn't on the mainland. The Dragons were as very
effective versus ships, but they weren't as effective in the.
Island to island. Combat where there are caves to
hide in. Now this is something we want to
go into detail in our Step Stones episode and rather than
describe it again, here's a great quote from Prince Damon
himself. Quote.
And the step stones. My enemies learned to run and
hide when they saw Cracksy's wings or hurt his roar, but they
had no Dragons of their own. It is no easy thing for a man to
be a dragon Slayer, but Dragons can kill Dragons.
And have any maester who has ever studied the history of
Elyria can tell you that I will not throw our Dragons against
the usurpers unless I have no other choice.
There are other ways to use them, better ways.
The problem is both sides have to understand that Damon
understands this. He's.
A man who was. Read his history, he's fought on
dragon back before. He has these concepts down.
But the Greens don't have that. They don't know that you
shouldn't do this. They don't have this level of of
knowledge. They don't.
All the dragon riders on that side are young and experienced,
cocky if not arrogant, if not a little borderline psycho.
Maybe in Amon's case. He's the one, and maybe he could
have, should have had some experience to realize what was
about to happen here. It might be Ayman might be the
one who most needed to learn a few lessons.
Don't use dragon verse dragon unless you must and he might be
the one be like, yeah, but I have the big dragon.
I'm the exception. I can do this cause I've got the
the huge size advantage He's. Wrong.
It's not quite that simple. It is if he's in Arax's case, it
looked like it was true, but it might not always go that way.
And not all Dragons are that small.
There's Dragons that are pretty darn big and not as big as
Vagar, but Vermothor's huge. Caraxis is of great size.
Melis is really, really big. Yeah.
It wouldn't go so quite so simply potentially, if that
happens. So, yeah, what happens with the
other side doesn't share that restraint.
If you have two nuclear states facing each other, one of them
knows it's a last resort. What if the other one doesn't?
Then you're both going to start nuking each other.
It's like, well, there they go, they launched nukes at us.
Well, we have to respond in kind.
That's it. They don't have that sense to
not do it in the 1st place. This behavior was lost in Old
Valyria because it died out. The people that were foolish
enough to do it didn't survive. That's why it's like great to
describe as an evolutionary trait.
Like in the real world. In the real life, creatures that
don't evolve die out. You have to keep up doing
something that self-destructive is.
Is your shark? Sharks don't die out, they just
keep on swimming. Sharks don't attack other sharks
unless they have a huge size advantage.
They figured that out too. So it it's it works as a genetic
trait that was bred out of former Valyrian dragon large.
Don't be the guy that attacks other Dragons with your.
Dragon don't do that, but this era that.
Lost trait has resurfaced and the blacks and greens are going
to behave stupidly. So the Dragons during the time
of Jeharis and Viserys for the most part didn't engage in war
we saw. How that?
Only happened one time at all. Through the history of Westeros
before the Dance of the Dragons, at least during the time of the
Targaryens. Who knows what happened, You
know, 10,000 years ago. Because apparently there were a
few Dragons in Westeros back then as well.
Whether they were even ridden or fought each other is anyone's
guess. But we always have a few
caveats, for truly ancient times anyway.
The the Targaryens lost sight of the costs, the dangers, and the
reasons to avoid it in the 1st place.
Yes, a few of them remembered, but not enough of it.
It was no longer collectively collective knowledge.
It was no longer a deeply held belief by the majority, if not
all of them. It's fun for us to go into depth
on what the Dragons are capable of, but when you lay it out, you
see how much destruction they're capable of, how much devastation
they're capable of, not just to everyone else, but to each
other. It shows one of the central
themes of A Song of Ice and Fire that power corrupts here.
They it's throwing off common sense even like it's dumb to do
the things that they're doing are about to do.
And they're not dumb people, right?
They aren't unintelligent. They're not, you know, some of
them are a little bit psycho, but they're not stupid psycho in
that sense. You know, it's this mix of
ambition, fear, pride and not listening.
Arrogance, yeah, that's a big one, right?
And not listening to those who came before, which is part of
the arrogance. Not listening to the lessons
learned by people that you could learn something from 'cause they
are doing the same things you did learn from them of.
And of course, we at History of Westeros, as I said at the
beginning, love to emphasize learning from the past or the
lessons that come from failing to learn.
That's our episode today, folks. Let's do our outro.
Spiel here. I want to say real quick that
that quote by Damon, it's it's it's it irked me.
I'd rather like I Yeah. Wait, who said that?
Damon, Yeah, of all people like, yeah, why doesn't he?
He needs to, he needs to have to spread that advice to his his
nephews before that or whatever. It's too late for this message
now. Like, because what I remember
he's responding to Lord Celtigar, who says, why is this
even a conversation? You have more Dragons than them.
Go to King's Landing. Burn it, we win.
That's book, book and show. That's not even much of A
divergent. It's pretty much the same
language and Damon's like, well, in addition to us not wanting to
burn the capital that that's we want to hold the capital and
rule from it. We also.
Would probably just result. In the death of most of the
Dragons involved, and that's also bad for us keeping power
afterwards. Neither of those things are on
meet our goals. That's a level of like wisdom
and restraint there that he doesn't typically seem to
demonstrate. Yeah, OK folks, the trivia
question was the largest army ever assembled was at the field
of fire, 55,000 men. What is the largest?
That's Westeros. What's the largest army ever
assembled in Essos for in scare in the Great's army of 250,000
that not only defeated some Dragons, but some war elephants
and plenty of other things. Probably the biggest army we
know of in Planet Toast, right? Yeah, Yeah, it would have to be.
Yeah, we certainly. There certainly isn't a bigger
one in Satorios or like the Summer Isles or.
Anything you know we. Know of that we know of exactly.
Episodes that relate to this one.
If you want more about the Roinar and the fall of the
Roinish cities and Garen the Great and greyscale and all
that, Mother Roin is the episode for you.
More about Dragonstone and the landing of the Targaryens and
that era and the secrets of that castle are in the Dragonstone
episode. I've even got a Dragonstone
shirt on. We have several episodes on
Valyrian Wars and the Valyrian Freehold and the Doom of
Valyria. Some of those came during
Valoritas for Fire and Blood. Some of those came scripted
elsewhere. We got a Century of Blood
episode. We have a lot of reread its
content on Aegon's Conquest, which was fairly recent.
A lot of that was earlier this year and late last year.
And we have several episodes on the Free Cities, individual
ones. We got one on Lauraf.
We have one. On Cohor we have one.
On Pentas, yeah, we got some good ones.
Hope you all check those out if you haven't already or maybe
it's time for a re listen. Thanks again to.
Nina for her valuable assistance, frequent notes and
thoughts, and helping me work through some difficult parts of
the episode. Check her out at
goodqueenalley.tumblr.com. Also thanks to Joey, Jesse and
Bran for the music. We're getting ready to re
reissue our brands intro for fire and blood for for House the
dragon rather and it's it's awesome.
It's a upgraded version. His first one was so good.
This one's even cooler. Thanks as well to Michael
Klarfeld for the regular video intro that we use on most of our
episodes. The maps you see behind us go to
KLARADO x.de to buy maps for yourself or just buy copies of
them. Have them printed out yourself
on at a printing store. And folks, no live streams for
the next two weeks. We're going to have some, we're
going to have the con doll interview will be posted and we
will have some some one or two older episodes that we'll bring
back to the front and then it's. House the Dragon season time.
So folks, we're getting into the fun stuff and we are looking
forward to experiencing that all with you.
Now you know what to do In the meantime, Valor re read us the.