The region known as the Crown Lands was never actually a
Kingdom, despite being formed by Westeros's first king.
It had been claimed the region itself that is but never
properly developed by a number of rulers over the preceding
eons, but it took Aegon and his sisters to finally maximize the
potential of the place. But before it became the Capital
Region of the new 7 kingdoms, before the Iron Throne was
forged in dragon fire, the region that became the crown
lands was the land base of operations.
The jumping off point if you will, for the conquest.
Before a gun could March on Heron, before Vizania could
March on the veil before rain East and or East could March on
the storm lands and all the other places left to conquer.
They needed to control their immediate surroundings.
The Blackwater, Duscandale, Rosby, Stokeworth, Crack, Claw
Point. These are familiar names, and
they mattered a lot back then too, Perhaps more now, but still
a lot back then. They were claimed by Argalac the
arrogant the Storm King, and actually bent the need to Heron
the King of Isles and Rivers. As we discussed in the last
episode, it made sense to strike at an area that no one had a
strong hold on. Agon, Vissenia, and Rainey
subjugated the area with a variety of interesting results.
King Argalac and King Heron mostly just allowed it to
happen, and that might have actually made a certain kind of
sense. Nor did they simply do nothing.
They didn't just twiddle their fingers.
They prepared for something you probably can't actually prepare
for, but they didn't know that. They didn't know what they were
up against. We'll discuss all that, why this
might have been a smart plan or the best plan.
Best doesn't mean smart. Sometimes it's just all you've
got available. All that and more on this
episode of History of West Rose Podcast.
Hello and welcome everybody. We're here to talk about the
Crown lands. More about Aegon's conquest
We're getting set up for the destruction of Heron Hall.
We thought we'd get to that today, but as I was writing
well, the tale grew in the telling, as it so often does.
We actually change the title of this one in advance.
Probably won't be the only time that happens because of the
nature of our reread, but we'll always be very prepared and have
lots of detail and nerdy fun for you.
That, of course, will not change.
We've always been committed to that, and we'll maintain that
live streams are always at 3:00 Eastern on YouTube if you want
to participate in the live chat and catch us while we're
recording. Otherwise, every video is on
YouTube and Spotify and audio only is available everywhere
that you listen to podcasts. It's Adfree if you listen on
Patreon, Sean. So I see you've got your Pulp
Fiction shirt there, the dancing nondancing Shawns on your shirt.
So you're like meta dancing there.
Yeah, this might be a more appropriate shirt for a Dance of
Dragons episode. Red for the Targaryens.
And there will be some dragon dancing of his sorts.
Yeah. And you know, just like in A
Dance With Dragons, everyone ends up dead.
Pretty much like Pulp Fiction, you know, half the characters
end up dead. So it's kind of fitting.
Right. Yeah, Tommy Papas has like a
mash up. It's this shirt, but it's John
and Danny dancing in this sticky post, which is so good cuz
remember how he stabs her with the yeah, the syringe in the
heart like John. That's a good point.
How about that? I never.
That's a good point. I'm wearing a Craghas Crab
Feeder mask shirt in honor of my upcoming Dragon Con costumes.
Next week we won't have a new episode.
We'll play an older one and Shay and I will be at Dragon Con.
And why don't we take two seconds here to talk about what
we're gonna dress as? Cuz most years of Dragon Con I
have not done more than one costume.
A lot of years I didn't do any costumes.
This year I've got four. Yeah, so it's a huge change from
from my normal. I'm doing Alan as in Alan from
Barbie, which has nothing to do with the Song of Ice and Fire,
but the others are related. I'm doing 2 versions of crab
feeder. I'm doing the upscale crab
feeder which I have a suit for. I did that at Ice and fire con,
so it's pretty much the same one.
I'm gonna have a black fire tattoo and a few other things.
Some rings and just look fancy, like wearing a suit with the
mask. Then I'm gonna actually do the
regular crab feeder with the sores.
The grayscale Shea is helping me do that.
Well, she's doing it. I'm not.
I'm just, yeah, you know, other people put it on me.
I can't really do it. And the mask.
It's pretty cool. Yeah, it looks really neat.
We had. We posted some on Instagram to
see what it would show, what it looked like, and yeah, it's
gonna look gnarly in a good way. I saw those posts but I wasn't
sure what it was for. Yeah, yeah, crap feeder.
Now it. Yeah, I was using liquid latex
and body painting, face painting, all that.
And paper towels, it's, yeah, paper towels makes it look
really like they're. Rough tech.
Add stuff and you like, wrinkle it.
Anyways, it's really fun, but it'll take a while.
Yeah. And then last but not least, I'm
doing better. Call Drogo.
Yes, we've, which I have done before, but it's like 10 years
ago. So this was a little different
than the first version. Similar.
Though I fully support that, you can see my Better Call soul
poster behind me. Yeah, instead of the belt to
the, like, studded belt that he's got, I'm gonna have a bunch
of neckties tied around my waist instead to make a sash.
So that's the concession to office attire.
But we'll have the blue stripes on a suit jacket, yeah.
Yeah, well first I'll say my shirt.
Since we all started saying our shirts.
I'm wearing a Peep Show shirt, which is one of my favorite
shows, the British show. And it says I'm not sick, but
I'm not well. But anyway, so I have that shirt
on for Dragon Gon itself. I have a lot of costumes.
First Thursday night I'm doing a half version of Poison Ivy.
They have a Bunny hutch event there, so it's like Hugh
Hefner's like a smoking jacket and hat.
And stuff. Then I'm wearing my Expanse
jumpsuit on Friday. Sam Rosenberg.
And then changing out of that into an emo night outfit,
because my friend is doing an emo night party.
So I'm doing a Severa from the game Fire Emblem, and I designed
like band tshirts for that. And then Saturday I'm doing the
character Yunaka, also from Fire Emblem for the Nintendo shoot,
and then going to do Rainbow Barbie.
So that's like the cowgirl Barbie fit from the movie, but
with like, rainbow accents. And then Sunday, I'm doing a
rainbow variant of Spider Gwen from, you know, into the spider
verse across the spider verse and all that, but custom printed
with a rainbow accents and that's gonna be really cool.
The Spider Gwen looks really good.
It looks so much like the real, like the actual Spider Gwen.
It's amazing. Yeah, yeah, I'm very, very
excited about that. If we wear a Spidey suit and
also we'll be going to the Game of Thrones shoot on Saturday and
the World of Ice and. Fire shoot on Friday.
So lots of photos, yeah. So if you're going to Dragon Con
and you want to find a place to find us, go to those shoots and
we'll be walking around mingling and you can say hi.
I'm gonna get lots of photos and video content for social media
with all the cosplay that I see. Yeah, so it should be great.
Look out for some of that stuff next week.
I was tracking today was that. Yeah, I think it's six.
I think it's six different things.
I remember counting one. Maybe 5-5 different things,
actually, yeah. Yeah, they step it up a little
if it's easy doing. Yeah, yeah, you can let me catch
up. Yeah, well shout out to our good
friend Nina. Her notes are all over this
episode, as they so often are. The latest post on her blog,
which is good. Queen ally.tumblr.com.
That's 1L in alley. And yeah, the latest post is on
Dana and Baylor. Baylor The Blessed and Dana the
Defiant. Why were they set to be married?
What caused that arrangement to happen?
It's a little unusual when you look at it cuz Baylor wasn't the
first born son and Dana was, you know the from a different branch
and it kind of made sense that to do things differently.
Anyway, let Nina explain it better than I would.
She really likes responding to this particular type of question
which is about the song of I suspire marriages and and why
and what it meant and then the the fallout or upside to all
those things. So it's very detailed post.
I enjoyed reading it and I suspect you will too.
So check it out. I want to give a shout out to
Lady Ray. One of our listeners made a
point in the the chat. We we we talked a lot about the
idea that there's probably more behind Aegon's plan than than is
known or revealed. It's probably more than just I
have Dragons I'm taking over right.
We talked a lot about like the. The sort of plotting he would
have had to do to think about how the different leaders would
react to his attack. You know what he wants the state
of the Westeros to be after he takes over the idea of how
taking down Heron first makes it so the other dominoes will
probably fall to him. But she pointed out that there
some of this other planning. You know, I feel pretty
confident. Certainly happened.
And he had a master plan. It wasn't just, I guess today's
the day I'll take my Dragons. And he probably was playing for
a long time. Time things just right.
Had some chess pieces moves in advance plotted out how it was
going to go, and she suggested that even if some of those plans
might have been more known or even public, or could have been
spied on or or guest at or whatever, that no one was paying
attention to him, they didn't consider him a real threat.
And so no one was writing this down, right?
There were there were no maesters taking note right until
after he's there with Dragons beating here.
And then everyone's like, oh. All right.
We need to keep record of this for history.
But there probably would have been, if they had been keeping
record all along, better evidence of how well he had this
all planned. I'm not sure I agree with that.
I think it's just that the sources were probably not
maintained or not lost or that George didn't write them as the
obviously, obviously the rain, the main thing.
But we don't have to, we can ignore the the real world
explanation because the maesters do record almost everything.
Like that's part of what they do.
We we we know that. I mean, some of them are absurd
about it. Like we have that example of the
maester on the wall that recorded every time the Lord
Commander woke up and use the bathroom and was just like
extremely, you know, I think that maybe the notes were, maybe
these notes were taken, maybe Agon didn't want them written
down. There's other explanations.
I think it's worth exploring. I'm not sure.
It's simply that the maestro didn't think it was noteworthy,
though. I'm skeptical that they would
decide not to write down something as important as this
if they're writing down things like when people go to the
bathroom. Well they may have also not had
access to what he's plus. No he had a he had a maester,
so. Oh did he Yeah.
All the Lords of Westeros have baisters.
Yeah. Always.
Yeah. That's not a new thing.
Every Lord and every if you're it's kind of like a sign of your
status if you're high enough ranked Lord to get a maester.
Well you're high enough ranked Lord.
But yeah, I got of course was yeah, they had, they had
maesters for sure. Do we know his name Where they
said, I mean there were been lots of made.
Well, yeah, all maesters come from the Citadel, so yes, it
would have come from there. But no, we don't know their, we
don't know their names. Like I wonder if the Citadel
chose, someone said, hey you go check out this Aagon guy.
Or if Aagon said hey Citadel give me a Meister.
Now I wonder what the. Yeah, absolutely.
I would wonder about that too. You'd think that they might
choose carefully because of it's an unusual situation.
And I don't know and there would have been several because
obviously there's 100 years of Targaryens before.
So there would have been probably a maister for ain't R
the Exile, but maybe not. Maybe they there would have been
a point at which that started and it may not have started
right away. But I assume by the time Agon it
would have because Agon had a maister with him.
For example Agon has a maister with him.
When he treats with Herron it, it even says both had maisters.
So we have the exact words written, you know.
So yeah it's but either way you know, my opinion aside it is a
super interesting topic. Like, what other things would
they observed and and would Agon have kept?
Yeah, he might not have trusted the maesters.
Like the system is new to him. Like a lot of Westerosi Lords
are used to having maesters around.
But this might not be something they're used to and they might
be skeptical of, like, well, is he telling the Citadel?
Like, I don't know. Maybe we don't want him to know
some of these things, so. The maester wasn't in the inner
circle. Yeah.
Do they trust him or not? You know who's he sending
letters to? So, yeah, great question, Lady
Ray. Great point, great discussion
tidbit there. Throughout the episode we'll
encounter topics that we've done full episodes on and we'll point
them out as we go along and at the end, so you can check those
out if you want to stay immersed in Westeros and the wonderful
world of A Song of Ice Fire. That list is at the end, along
with this answer to the trivia question.
In Fire and Blood, we meet the Muppet Tullys.
But way back in the Game of Thrones, George R Martin gave us
the Three Stooges. They were men in arms.
For what house? Yes, three men named after the
Three Stooges. It's not their exact names.
They're not Larry, Moe, and Curly.
They are similarly named. What house were they sworn to?
I went for George to name Atolly Muppa Muppettolly.
That'd be great. The time came for hostility to
begin. Agon had built the Agon Fort.
Rather his people did. He did probably didn't
participate in the construction at all, and they established
their beachhead and and got the submission of a couple of local
Lords. But most of the big ones came
shortly after and no one interfered with them.
We pointed that out last time. Maybe that was a big mistake,
but maybe it made a certain kind of sense.
They could have ganged up on the Targaryens, but you know, better
late than never or not. Nope, never.
It never is. What happened?
Basically so unmolested. They just went about building
this. What would be called the Crown
Lands? We don't know when it was named
the Crown Lands. We don't know when the final,
like legal paperwork was drawn up to define it the way it
finally is. So we don't really have that.
We assume that Mostly was dealt with early in Aegon's reign, but
we here's where it started to be formed, and that will be the
most of the focus today. We might get into the beginnings
of the conflict directly with Heron, but even these vassals
that immediately surrendered, well, they were.
Most of them were Heron's Vasals, and they just went over
to Aegon without a fight, or without any sort of or with very
little fight. In the case of Rainy's going to
Rosby, there literally was no fight.
They just said, okay, I see your dragon.
We already knew you were coming, is probable like they probably
knew about the landing and had obviously heard about the claim
that Aegon sent the Ravens out. The word would have spread to
them by now, so they were probably ready for this.
Vicenia went to Stoke, where I think I mentioned this one last
time real briefly. They shot a few crossbow bolts
at her, maybe just so they could say they had done something to
resist. And Vicenia set the roof on
fire. And they're like, okay, That's
it. We're done resisting.
Meanwhile, what they probably should have done much sooner and
with far more allies finally happened.
Someone finally took action and tried to stop.
Aegon quote. The conquerors first true test
came from Lord Darklin of Duskandale and Lord Mooton of
Maidenpool, who joined their power and marched S with 3000
men to drive the invaders back into the sea.
Aegon sent Oris Baratheon out to attack them on the March whilst
he descended on them from above with the Black Dread.
Both Lords were slain in the onesided battle that followed.
Darkland's son and Mooten's brother thereafter yielded up
their castles and swore their swords to house Targaryen.
So unlike most battles of the conquest, this one is definitely
under described. The field of Fire is pretty well
described. What happens at Heron Hall is
pretty well described that that last storm is extremely well
described. There isn't much of A battle in
the Veil, but what's happens is well described.
So it's not what makes the conquest interesting, these a
lot of these battles because well, how the Dragons were used
is interesting because we might can see them later.
But some of these battles are, as it says, kind of 1 sided and
that, well, in some ways that might make the maesters or
George think it's not as interesting.
I kind of disagree. I kind of wonder like what it's
like put yourself in the place of one of these foot soldiers
whose Lords like you wish you fought for.
Lord Stokeworth who gave up after a few shots of crossbow
bullets. You're like you don't want to go
down with this ship. This guy's like, yeah let's
let's fight the dragon. Let's do it.
Let's be brave and stop these Targaryens and yeah.
Reven. Argalac who just goes out on his
own like, I'll just fight you myself rather than sending all
those armies into their suicidal death.
Yeah, Argalac at least he's like, well, I want a death.
Like he knows he's lost and he wants a noble death.
Like what are these guys doing? I don't quite get like they
haven't known. They didn't know they'd lost
like they would have known, maybe knew as soon as their army
lines were drawn up and they saw Valerian.
But it's not too late to surrender at that point.
Say never mind. Like Agon would would raise them
back up and probably let them keep their seats, but they were
just. I don't know if they really
feared Heron. They they didn't want to.
They thought that this upstart wouldn't succeed and they if
they didn't do their duty as vassals that Heron would punish
them. And Heron's pretty nasty, like
he's cruel and and tyrannical. So I can understand that being
the primary motivation here. Like, I don't think it was just
bravado and bluster. I think it was.
They were caught between Hair in the Black and the black dread.
And I guess they chose wrong, because yeah.
I wonder, you know, we, we talked a little in the past
about the idea that people might not have really understood the
nature of the dragon, right? And so some people might
literally just think it's a myth or a rumor that there's not
really a dragon. If there is, maybe they're just
a little dragon and not that big deal.
They can shoot it down, even a big dragon, even when they see
it. They might not really believe
that it breathes fire like. Like, even like in a real world,
something like a pterodactyl seems almost silly, You know,
like it just to see it flying around in modern times.
But we know they're real. But what if it also breathes
fire, right? Like, no, it doesn't really
breathe fire. But then it does, and then
you're all dead. So, you know, I I wonder if
that's 11 aspect of what they were underestimating or does it
like breathe a little bit of fire that's not that
threatening, you know, OK. It can get going.
Its breath is really hot. It's not actually fire.
Yeah, yeah. You can see how these things
are. Exactly how far the blast is,
how hot it is, how long, how sustained it can be and so on.
Yeah, or if they knew more about it.
If you look at the flip side of that coin, and they actually
have some knowledge of Dragons, they might think, well the a
dragon isn't going to be very useful.
In a smaller conflict, whenever all the men are close together,
like how does Balerian tell friend from foe?
Balerian doesn't recognize banners.
It's one thing at the field of fire when the enemy lines are
just rows and rows and rows and rows deep.
When it's 30,000 troops versus 3000, it's a little easy for the
Dragon. Just go get all those 30,000.
Or if you're just burning the castle, that's also pretty
straightforward for Heron Hall and some and a lot of these
castles in Dorn. But here, yeah, you've got
relatively small armies. We know Agon didn't have very
many men yet he had 15102 thousand, maybe 3000 at most.
Not. Which is not that large.
Of course, for an instrument of conquest it leaves much to be
desired. But Valerian of course by
himself does a lot. So if we're imagining it, like
who? Imagine being a foot soldier.
So you, even if they, even if the Lords know a lot about the
Dragons or regardless of their knowledge of the Dragons, the
foot, the foot soldiers probably know Jack.
So they're being called up to fight.
They're like, what's going on? You know, we're fighting against
this, this Dragon Lord guy. What's that all about?
Like that sounds a little intimidating, but maybe I don't
know what to expect. And they get there and they see
the soldiers and they're like okay.
We outnumber them, we're doing good.
And then all of a sudden this shadow passes over.
Maybe it comes behind them and it goes straight for the Lord on
his horse sitting behind, you know, on the on a hill.
Or maybe it lands and does battle on the ground like
Moraxis does at the last storm. I don't know.
But those men were brave if they didn't run away immediately, and
this is the only time Agon and Ori's fought together in the
same battle that we know of. There may have been some smaller
skirmish that was so small that it didn't even bear mention.
But yeah, as far as we know, this is the only time they
fought together. They trained together as boys.
So it might have been kind of a neat little moment afterwards.
Like, yeah, that's what we trained for.
You know, we actually did it for real this time.
So it would have been a testing ground, though, for as much as
the the army was effective, as much as we knew Balerian would
be effective, as much as Agon and sisters knew that, they
still didn't know exactly how they hadn't.
You know, until you actually do it, you don't know exactly how
it's going to go. Sure, they knew they had the
advantage, but seeing Balerian in the midst of all these
troops, or whatever it was he did, it would have been the
first time that Aegon led his troops and led troops of his own
in Westeros. He had seen what Valerian could
do in the war against Valantis during the century of Blood.
Although as far as we know that was just burning ships.
I don't know if he had any conflicts on land.
It's so maybe not so maybe this was a new in a different way
that sense too. So maybe the first time he took
on infantry and any sort of sizable numbers which is pretty
significant, he would have learned from that.
He would it would have affected the future plans might have
given him more confidence or he might have just been so
confident in the 1st place. He's like Yep that's exactly
what I expected. We won pretty easily.
That's how it's going to continue to go, and he just the
ball just keeps rolling with that supreme and well deserved
confidence, I suppose, Nina adds.
This battle may have also represented potential drawbacks
to dracontic combat. Dragons are incredibly effective
at wiping out large swaths of enemies, but with Aegon's own
troops under Auris on the ground, he may have burned some
of his own men. He may have Blair and his tail
may have hit some of his own people.
This may have been part of the test.
This may have been why it wasn't written about that much.
Maybe Agon didn't want it written about that he actually
killed some of his own men while first learning how to use
Balerian and ground combat. That would be a thing to kind of
keep on the down low. That's not exactly going to
bring men to your side. That's still an issue in Modern
Warfare. It's friendly.
Fire like and and a lot of times you think of that as, you know,
literally fire in this place. Yeah, yeah.
You know, sometimes it's like. One soldier with his rifle
shooting down range, and there's other allies also down range and
he may can't see or distinguish good or bad or whatever, but
more often than not it comes from like artillery and
aircraft, stuff like that, just just blowing up the whole area
that there were troops in. Even with like all the modern
technology, satellite imagery, everything, we still do that
sometimes. Like just imagine flying around
in a dragon. He's got no way to talk to the
commander on the ground. The commander's on the ground
have no way to. Let him know where the positions
are. So I imagine that would have
been an issue. Some amount of either holding
back or figuring it out or or just killing some people
accidentally. It's got to have been something
that they were working on that you might not have been very
public with the Messrs about Nina suggestion.
The one of her suggestions here is good.
It's like if a gun was being very cautious, he might have
just planned to use Blair and just to scare them, just fly
them over the battle lines and the other men are going to be
like holy and they just run because it's way bigger and more
intimidating than they expected. Like the stories are true.
It actually is large enough to swallow an oryx hole or
whatever. Like, Oh my God, I thought that
was just a story. And no, look at that thing, its
mouth is that large. Yeah, maybe even just blasting
fire that doesn't hit anyone. Just shooting it over.
Just look what's coming. Yeah, just firing a bullet in
the air. If you're firing your gun in the
air and no one else has a gun, that's very intimidating.
Everyone's like, all right, this person's in charge now.
Or if they never even heard of a gun before, like what the hell
is that thing? You know, like, wow, So this is
more like a large, you know, aircraft platform mount with a
huge gun mounted on it rather than just a gun so heavily
armored flying machine. Yeah, just unbelievable.
So it will have been really interesting for them to make use
of what they learned in this first incursion.
It's almost like a good for them to have like a smaller testing
battle before they get to some real ones.
Another thing they could have just done is say Blair could
just fly right over the battle and keep going.
And then, like, I'm going to. The implication being I could
just go burn your town right now.
You marched out of maiden pool. You marched out of Duscandale.
Or not Duscandale. Wait, was it Duscandale?
Yeah, Duscandale in Maiden Pool and just fly right over them and
go. Yeah, I could just go burn your
town right now and there's nothing you can do about it.
That's just how much of an edge we have That might be enough to
be like we've made a huge mistake.
So the Targaryen Allied troops might not have seen the Dragons
in action yet either. Until now.
Nina Success. Maybe some of them were veterans
of a gun service in the century of blood.
But if it was just him flying Valerian over there and burning
ships, then he might not had any of his foot soldiers may have
participated at all. So it's entirely possible that
this was the first time there. That would have given them
confidence. Unless, of course, there were
some friendly casualties. Then they'd be a little wary.
But overall they'd be like, sure, it's good to be on this
side. Wow, that thing we just we can't
lose, you know, that would give his men a lot of their first
time seeing it in action. They'd be like, yeah, because
even if there were some veterans that had seen blaring in action
in the Century Blood, the vast majority of them would not have,
That would be, you know, these would be new, new recruits.
Or, yeah, he wasn't shipping lots of men over to Essos during
that. As far as we know now, there's
no mention of captured swords yet.
The Iron Throne as we know, he started capturing swords, making
them turn them over or just pulling them off the
battlefield, shipping them back to King's Landing or what's
becoming King's Landing and starting to melt them down for
the throne. There's no mention of that yet,
so he probably didn't have the idea yet.
There were certainly enough swords to at least get started
here, but it's not mentioned yet.
It looks like the first mention of that is after Heron Hall, so
it looks like that's when it began.
So maybe Aegon had that idea then.
It's always interesting to wonder if the Iron Throne
figures in the dreams at all. Like he he knows that his line
has to be on the throne. It's not him, it's his line, and
so is Does the throne loom large in those dreams, as like a
symbol of that rule being in place?
Or maybe he maybe he just knew he needed some large symbol to.
Anyway, it's the throne. If you dreamt of that throne,
that would be like that was quite a dream I just had.
And if you kept having it and like, I'm going to do that.
It might seem kind of abstract in a dream too, like you might
not fully understand what it is until after a battle you see a
bunch of swords melted and fused together, and then you're like,
oh, that's what was in my dream. Yeah.
Nina also suggests he didn't know Agon.
That is, that he hadn't yet even decided about King's Landing.
That's entirely possible. So where, Let alone having a
throne, where is it going to be at this point?
Some people, maybe even him, was thinking Duncandale.
Why not just start out in Duncandale?
It's a prosperous port city, More properly a town, I suppose,
but a prosperous spot near where King's Landing eventually goes.
So it could have been a consideration and I don't you
wonder what the the Darklands at that time we're thinking like no
don't take our town over for your new capital.
This is ours. You know why not build down
there maybe they suggested that you know they're a real city by
the mouth of the black water would look great.
Y'all you know why don't you build that because Dunscandale
is very significant the largest trading port in the area.
You have to go north to Gull Town to find, you know a bigger
trading spot and at this point that you know that's that's
pretty far away and manpower and wealth wise as well.
Visenia didn't allow the sacking of Dunscandale partly because
they wanted as an ally but they were happy to take a lot of its
wealth away and again give it to Agon and and use that for more
fuel for the conquest. Maiden Pool is a large town as
well. They're probably similar in
size, Maiden Pool, and we've been to in A Song of Ice and
Fire, Brienne goes there and technically it's not going to be
in the Crown Land. So it's the eastern border of
the Riverlands. A little more on that later.
It's interesting that Agon didn't include it in his his own
region. I wonder if it was like a check
against the power of the Riverlands or he just wanted the
Riverlands to have a certain level of strength to hold itself
against the other regions. Because it's always in the
middle and I'm not sure. It's an interesting question
though. It probably doesn't make that
much difference to him, but it's still manpower.
I mean, if you're calling up the the troops in the Crown lands,
you would think he would want made in Pool included in that he
must have had a good reason to included in the Riverlands.
He might want the Riverlands to maintain the ability to call up
their own their own bands, right?
He doesn't want to completely usurp them.
It's, especially if. It could easily be a sort of, I
don't know how to say it's a negotiating tool to to keep the
Riverlands allied with him. Like let us keep made in Pool.
Thanks so much for that. OK.
Yeah, that that's true. And there's also just regular
tradition to keep track of. You know, Maiden Pool had been
part of the Riverlands before and that's what they're used to
and it's not broke. Don't fix it.
That kind of situation just let it leave as much as is a guns
plan in general seems to be change as little as possible.
Let them do what they were doing as much as possible.
And that maybe, just maybe, it's just as simple as that, it fits
in with that whole idea, that plan, that, that approach.
Which adds to like you don't want every town you come up
against to feel like they have no choice but to fight.
It's all or nothing like that. No, you don't have to fight me.
You could just keep being like you, like you average soldiers
and farmers just keep living your life.
I'm just going to be in charge of these other Lords who have
been in charge of you. Like, I don't need to destroy
your town. I don't need to take you over.
Yeah, I did. Everything would be cool, man.
Just be cool. And that's why I think they were
afraid of Heron or just really overly duty oriented, because
otherwise they would much rather have Aegon as their Lord.
You would think, I mean, he's not, even though they don't,
maybe not don't know much about him, they know a lot about
Heron. And it's just like if you roll
the dice, you're probably going to get someone better than
Heron, You know? There's plenty of Lords you
could have you like. Well, we could do a lot worse
than him, you know? But you can.
You could. Heron's about as bad as it gets,
so that's a worthy gamble there. So these are pretty big
additions to the team, so to speak.
We got Dusk and Dale, Maiden Pool.
A dozen Lords in total we're told have Bethany to Agon.
We can assume we don't know exactly which ones they are.
We can assume some of them are those Lords of Massey's Hook,
Stone Dance and Sharp Point, Far Emmon and and Massey that is,
who had been vassals of Argalac. So already House Targaryen has
peeled off some of Argalac supporters and some of herons.
Herons only herons went with took needed a fight Though at
this point so far now Vicinia is eventually going to subjugate
rather easily. It's not much of a fight
required. Crack Claw Point, which will
become part of the Crown lands as well, but not yet.
That has not actually happened yet.
It's not going to happen until after the field of fire.
Natsenya's part in all this is interesting in that it's a
little more piece meal. She goes and takes part of the
veil and then has to fly over to fight the field of fire before
returning to the veil to finish things off there.
So but we'll focus on more on her a bit later.
So as I said a minute ago, it's not clear exactly when all this
was organized and when it was called the Crown Lands, but it's
pretty clear that the things closest to King's Landing would
be part of this new region. And maybe going a little farther
out, it wasn't quite as clear, but that all would have been
settled a bit later. You know, I just thought of
something that I wonder if it had to do with something along
the lines of a day's ride, like how far from how far the King's
writ will go. Yeah, that that's often how
these ancient distances are calculated because they don't
have like, feet and yards and aren't, you know, used very
regularly and not in a way that is universal.
So yeah, you're right. That's like the kind of thing
that someone would go like how many steps, how many sheep that
can live on a certain amount of land, that that's what counts
as, like how much, how many people it can be, it can
support. Yeah, these measurements are
more like natural rather than based in some unit of measure.
And so that's why I'm wondering if maybe that's why we already
supposed some other reasons but Dusk and Dale or you know, some,
any town that's kind of on the edge.
Maybe they were just like past a day's travel or a week's travel,
whatever it is. And some of the other 12 are
kind of easy to figure out. We've got antlers ruled by House
Buckle, Buckwell. We already said Rosby and
Stokeworth. Dunscandale was Darkland then.
It's House Riker now Hollered. Hall, of course, has now been
destroyed, thanks to Aries's revenge for the defiance of
Duscandale. But Hallard Hall would have been
there then. The house, you know, with the
the Haller descendants and all that.
Then Rooks rest, held by House Staunton, and there's a Rosby
Rd. from King's Landing to Dunscandale.
We're not sure if that road existed then, and Rosby's in
between. Obviously Dragonstone, Drift
Mark and Claw Aisle are part of it.
Ashea is pulling the map up here so you can see Blackwater Bay.
You can see the basic area of the crown lands there and it
should be pretty clear. And you can see all the major
spots there, marked by little castle indicators.
You can see Sharp point and stone dance over there on
Massey. Hook to the right slash E right
north of that is Dragonstone and Drift Mark and you can see
King's Landing, which wasn't there at the time but it
certainly tells you where the general idea is.
And all those things N Rosby Stoke worth Dusk and Dale
Hayford and Antlers. Yeah, how sunglass would be in
here somewhere we don't know where how sunglasses sweet port
sound is actually located so but it would be in there somewhere.
The house sunglass. You may remember how Sunglass
cuz Melasandra burned the Lord of Sunglass really early in in
Clash of Kings. And of course the Aegon Fort is
what stands in for King's Landing at this point.
And I can just assume or we can safely assume rather, that it's
just constantly being added to like all while these other
events are happening, more and more people are moving to that
area, more and more fortifications are being built,
more and more businesses are opening, more settlers,
etcetera. It's becoming a safer place,
becoming more developed. That means more people are going
to want to live there without any more major interference.
I wonder if Agon was surprised. It's just like no one's coming
for us, or if this just goes to his supreme confidence.
Or maybe it's just what his dreams were telling him, Like
destiny. This is all fitting in with the
destiny he expects. Now.
Here's another reason to wonder about why, or to explain rather,
why some people might have been reluctant to join Agon, Vasenia,
and Rainey's, despite all their great strength with the Dragons
and extreme capability and confidence and all that, which
is that their line might have seemed a little fragile.
Aegon didn't have any kids yet. That's a little He didn't have a
brother either. So it's not like there's someone
out like that they would pass to Visenna if he died, and then,
well, she would have to get married and have a child to
continue that line. So it's just a little messy in
that sense. There's no clear line of
succession there, and there may not be one.
Is like, if you don't have kids there, the doubt will be that
you can't have kids, that you are sterile or that, you know,
that's the normal enough thing that happens in the real world
and in Westeros that people just don't have kids, no matter how
hard they try. It's just a fairly regular
medical occurrence. And he's got two wives, so the
proof is like double than it would be otherwise.
So it might be like might be. No one's going to say this out
loud, especially not to his face at least.
Well, they would say it out loud if, you know, certain company,
like make sure no one's listening, is he capable of
having kids? Are we just going to bend the
knee to this guy? And then this whole kingdom's
going to fall apart in a decade when he has no children and it
just collapses on it and on itself.
That's scary for these Lords and ladies who were trying to decide
what side to take. It's a tightrope walk of
decision making and that's really scary, not having a the
succession like you see how it was a big deal for Rob.
They're like Rob, you got to have a kid.
You got to get married and get this started, man.
You got to like when he was 16, they were pressing him for that.
Aegon's like 27 at this point. It's pretty unusual.
You know, this might be a little bit of a tangent, but what other
Targaryens were there? Like is there any thought that
did he have like an uncle or a cousin or something?
Is there not that we know of. Targaryens.
And we know of nothing. Yeah, there there's no there
shouldn't be any uncles. There might be a cousin or
something out there, but no mention of anything like they
would have come up. You think you know, his mom's
alive? Maybe.
But she was a Velarian, not a Targaryen anyway, so she
wouldn't. Exactly.
I mean, she's relevant, but not to this particular question.
And she might not have been alive.
So even that is, that's just kind of like a well, I don't
know. So there's a lot of unknowns
here, which if there were no other cousins and we're pretty
sure they're at, that's the only thing there could be.
I think is a cousin because there's definitely no brother or
uncle probably know and there may have been an ants, but I
don't even know about that And so that's about it.
There's just cousins. The only possibility.
And that doesn't seem to be the case.
Like, if there was a cousin, why didn't they, Why did they have a
dragon? Why didn't you know there?
It just seems like they just didn't exist.
It seems like there's too many. It's unlike a lot of other
family members. Like it's pretty easy to to find
another Baratheon or another Lannister, especially Lannister,
really. Or Gardener, you know?
But an extra Targaryen in this era is kind of hard to conceal
between the lines, You know, It's like, well, no, this would
have been talked about. Why weren't they part of the
conquest? Why didn't they have a dragon if
they didn't have a dragon? Well, why not?
Like, what's the reason there? So there's all these open
questions. So I I feel pretty strongly that
it's not just a case of it not being recorded, that to the fact
that it's not recorded, it does seem to tell us that it just
didn't exist. I don't know if there's room for
it. It's a clue in its own that it's
not mentioned, you know, You know that.
I don't know if I hope we're not jumping too far ahead, but Nina
talks a little bit about the, I don't know the the symbolicness
of the Crown itself. Yeah, yeah, we can talk about
that. This is what happens here.
Let's let me set that up briefly.
The coronation comes, we we mentioned it before when he has
his first coronation, but this is when it actually happens.
After these first 12 Lords are so surrender, they have a little
ceremony. Presumably those Lords are
present. And Visenia says those words
that we discussed last time, noting the lack of the phrase
House Targaryen and all that interesting stuff.
So this is when that actually happens.
And he declares the small council, we don't have to rehash
that, We'll just place it here in our timeline.
Now, Sean, what are you going to say about the Crown?
Well, even that is worth, I'm glad you brought it up because
it is kind of in line with what Nina's saying here.
I'm not necessarily going to full detail out of mine if you
want to, but but just the idea that this question of how the
line might succeed, he might be usurping that by not talking
about how Targaryen and by this being a Conqueror's crown like.
Look, I'm just going to beat you militarily, like we can figure
out succession later. That doesn't matter.
That's not a factor. I'm going to rule this.
It fits with his boss presentation, doesn't it, that
we were saying before project extreme confidence.
And yes, no, I'm ahead of you. I'm in front of you, doesn't you
don't. You don't have to worry about
those things. That's for me to worry about,
whether I can have kids or not. I'll just name someone to be my
successor. My sister will do it.
I'll Maybe I'll have a kid, maybe I won't.
None of that matters. I have an army.
I have these Dragons. I'm going to take Heron down and
you're going to realize that you're next and that you're
thankful that I took Heron down and this is just happening.
You just don't see it yet. But this is happening, and
details like that shouldn't shouldn't matter to you.
I like it. This this dragon detail is what
should matter to you. It does really fit with his his
attitude towards a lot of these things.
I I like that a lot. And it might have been why he
took this approach, because he knew that might be an issue, the
idea that the right question, the succession.
So he just needs to not let that be an issue, right?
Like I'm not our family isn't taking over.
I'm taking over. Yes, yes, he will decide who the
successor is. It may or may not be someone
from his family. And that might be why that this
might be why that was partly phrased that way because he
didn't have a successor yet. So saying House Targaryen is in
charge now, might that might be a corner he didn't want to paint
himself into because he might have been worried he couldn't
have kids. Which is I don't know how to
square that with the dreams and saying his family has to be in
charge, like, well, how is that going to work out then if if
they're not, I don't know. Maybe.
Again, there's his sisters that could have children with
somebody else. So it's not like he's the only.
The last Bloodline. He's the last man of how Star
going at that point. But yeah, there's still other
possibilities. The Crown being so simple is
interesting, and it's kind of funny in a sense, like the irony
of the Iron Throne being that a king shouldn't sit easily.
Well, what's that old phrase? The crown shouldn't rest easy on
the King's head. This is like the easiest crown
to rest on someone's head. It's a Valyrian steel circlet.
Valyrian steel's extremely light, so this is like,
ironically, the gaudy giant gold one that Amy's had made.
He was not a very good king. He actually had a crown that fit
that. You know that metaphor.
It didn't rest easy. Probably It was a giant gold
thing. You got a thing.
Guarantee that thing was heavy as hell.
Minimal. Agons was like a war crown think
you'd wear in battle. And not like, mess him up or
slow him down or anything. So it's kind of, yeah, kind of
ironic, which I as Nina points out, that it it's sort of
symbolic that he's not here as some sort of royalty or some
fancy leader that was handed this like he's seizing it, and
he doesn't even need some trappings of fancy crowns to
prove it. He's got these Dragons.
And furthermore, she points out that the crown itself is made
from valerian steel, which is probably more rare than gold and
usually used to make a sword. And he's just wearing it like a
crown. Like it just kind of shows.
It's sort of like however he means it to be or not.
It's just sort of an indication of how far ahead he is in
resources and power and everything that everyone else
doesn't need to show it off, even though he kind of is
showing it off, you know? Yeah, that's a great point about
using the material best, or perhaps more ideally suited for
weapons. And he's like, no, I'm going to
wear this on my head as a symbol of power instead.
Even if it got enough weapons, yeah, even if it isn't
necessarily that much, cuz I'm guessing it didn't take a lot of
Lyrian steel. But still, the stuff is wildly
expensive and rare, and it had the rubies in it to give it a
little bit of extra weight, both metaphorically and literally.
Maybe it would fly right off with a little.
You need a little bit of weight or it'll just, Oh no, fell right
off the dragon, you know? Like where did that go, the wind
up there and flying a dragon? Yeah, he had to fasten that
thing onto his helmet. So they'll let the chin strap.
Yeah, crown chin strap. Take any chances there.
So yes, they probably had to melt something else down to to
do that. They probably rework it.
I doubt they just had a Valerian still circle just sitting around
ready for that. Like crowns in old Valeria are
probably frowned on. They were very anti kings and
Queens, so. Emperors or anything like that,
Yeah, I'm guessing crowns were kind of a very bold fashion
choice that we look down on, we're trying to call back to.
This What's the line between Crown and Circlet and Tiara and
like died, you know? Like, that's exactly the sort of
fashion limits that the Valyrians would be testing
amongst each other. Like, what can I get away with
this thing? Is that a tiara or a crown or?
I remember that scene in in Rome season one where he's Caesar,
which who's played by Karen Hines.
I always forget how to say that name Kieron Hines and he's
obviously Mans Raider and he's he's as he's dressing for his
triumph which is his great celebration after conquering
Gaul. So it's this huge state
sponsored event that if you slay enough enemies, they put this,
you get to do this. And it's a huge deal.
Like all the, like most ambitious men in Rome always
wanted one of these. And he's sitting there choosing
his garments for it and he's like his, his, like slaves and
attendants are like, what about this one?
He's like, it's a red, it's a deep red.
He's like. It's a little too purple.
Little too, because purple's the imperial color.
He's like, no, I don't want to come off like I'm trying to be
an emperor here. So he's very.
He's choosing his garment. Yeah.
He's like, no, that comes, give
me a few more year, give me another year before I do that.
But it goes to show that like these high-ranking people, like
the way they dress and the what what that projects it like, it's
it sends a message and they're very careful at curtailing that
message and and making sure it's the message they want to send
and not like oh I'm trying to conquer you.
Or or it is. I'm trying to conquer you.
I mean that depending on the scenario.
Caesar was not trying to say that even though he was trying
to do it. Whereas Agon seems like he's
pretty clearly just I'm going to conquer you.
You know I'm in your face. I'm going to like Shawn said,
there's there's no Hemming and hawing here.
It's all I'm going to dominate you.
You don't these other factors don't matter.
As to the no children thing, another factor in there that
refers this thing we talked about before.
That's part of why he got those third wife offers too.
Not only was it, well, maybe I will have a child, it's also an
ambitious move. They're like, well, maybe if the
if the child that comes first comes from me, then my child is
the heir to this new throne, this new entire dynasty.
So that's a pretty big deal that would want to get in on that if
possible. And since that spot wasn't taken
yet, a lot of people would want it.
And that spot? Meaning, of course, the heir to
the throne. But once again I'll say we'll
return to the topics of Agon, Rainey, Vicinity and their
stories individually and combined, but we'll stay focused
on the conquest for now. However, I want to bring up
Danny for a minute. When Danny arrives in Westeros
it looks like it's going to be chaotic.
It looks like it's going to be several kings and queen and or
queen still fighting for supremacy.
Maybe Agon Slash Young Griff has settled things a bit.
Maybe he's solidified things a bit, started making some
progress there. But I seriously doubt that the
Lannisters will be completely defeated, that the Reach will be
just copacetic with whatever's happening, let alone Dorn,
whatever's happening there, Dorn, they may have their
marriage to him, which might upset the Reach, or vice versa.
Something could happen. In other words, all these kings
and Queens might be awfully distracted by each other to
properly deal with Danny. Which is kind of the same
scenario we have here. They probably should have ganged
up on Aegon in their best interest.
That might have been in their best interests.
They should probably gang up on Danny when she comes, But I can
see it going very similarly where they're all too busy
dealing with each other. Or like, we'll let him deal with
it. Why should I expend my strength
on this new invader when their first attack is against one of
my enemies, right. Like Tywin's argument that
Wolfman's Raider or or bail and Greyjoy wants to attack the
North. Let them.
That's our enemies. They're attacking.
We don't have to be allies with them.
Like I think you said earlier that the the different Lords
might have been too scared to to face the Dragons, but we've also
talked about how they might not have even really been aware of
the power of the Dragons. I think they were more they were
as reluctant to work with each other as they were to face a
dragon. Does that make?
Sense. Yeah, Because that's just that
can be just as dangerous. Maybe not to?
They're soldiers and their and their lands but to them
personally like an assassination or a political type maneuver,
you know something like that something getting close to
something or even a concession of weakness or you know on on
and on right like or even like grudges from the past.
There's all kinds of reasons why they might not want to work with
each other and and and so that also could be similar when Danny
shows up and it kind of kind of this overall theme that they're
all squabbling over who should be in the Iron Throne.
You know when Aegon shows up like he is maybe far in the
future and he's not telling them, but they are facing an
existential threat right then. Never mind the dream, right?
Yeah. Same thing with Danny shows up.
She might be like, look, you guys don't understand, like the
fact that the parallel here, the fact that you couldn't team up
to stop me, means you're not going to team up to stop the
whitewater, right? Now with Dorn, that's certainly
an interesting point and with the North as well because.
So that's sort of the sort of why she needs to, or why Aegon
needs to be, because the fact that they aren't able to work
together well enough to stop them is an indication they
couldn't work well enough together to stop and even bigger
threats. These are the kingdoms on the
extremities. They're the ones that have the
most ability to sit back and wait and see what happens.
If they gone starts to do well, they can be like, Oh yeah, we'll
surrender to you now without having expended anything, just
waiting to see how it goes. Dorn and the North both have
that option, and that seems to be sort of what happened.
Let's let's look in the north though, to see.
Focus on there for a minute. Even in the North, King Torrance
Stark of Winterfell sat with his Lords, Bannerman and counselors
late into the night discussing what was to be done about this
would be conqueror. The whole realm waited anxiously
to see where Agon would move next.
Within days of his coronation, Agons armies were on the March
again. So only days they moved pretty
quickly. There he defeats the local
Lords. Gets made in bull Duskindale,
all those all those places we named sort of sorts out the
crown lands and then apparently has his coronation.
Within days of that he's on the March again.
So probably in those in that short time they were probably
organizing the armies into groups they were deciding where
they would go. They they probably had decided
there would be 3 thrusts at first, which we'll get to in a
minute, and a certain amount of troops left behind to defend the
new Aagon Fort and to see to logistics like.
Sending food out to the armies and gathering taxes to pay for
everything. There must have been a lot of
other conversations. As it says here, the whole realm
waited anxiously. They didn't just wait, they
talked about it, I'm sure. And that would have been
happening in Tavern to the largest long haul and fanciest,
you know, rooms. I can't think of a good word.
So just rooms around the the Kingdom.
Well, imagine the the puppet shows.
We've always seen that as a way to sort of gauge the the common
folks attitude towards the nobility in a certain time.
Like what sort of things, what sort of scandals are they
mocking? Which Royals and Lords are they
praising or making fun of, or gossiping about what have you?
The puppet shows would have a lot of material to work with in
a time like this. They might actually be able to
make fun of Heron cuz they could get away with that.
I'm sure the farther S you go the more you can make fun of
Heron gestures too. Could mock their Lords for not
for being afraid of the Dragons or whatever.
These different fools. And they're allowed to make fun
of powerful people. They would have a lot of that
going on. Makes me wonder about the spy
game in general in this era in the Conquest.
It feels like more of the spy game came when Westeros was at
peace by. There's more spying in times of
peace in some ways, because the things you're spying on are
different, like you're trying to learn secrets about your people
who are ostensibly your allies. It's different when you're
spying on people for pure military reasons, like trying to
learn, like where do they keep their money and where do they?
Who has the keys to the safer, you know, where does the general
sleep and things like that. It's different than.
Like who's sleeping with who? Or there's just different things
you would be spying on depending on whether it's peace or
wartime. And with the lack of trust
between so many kingdoms, it might you might not just have
like ambassadors and people there that are just playing a
double game of also a diplomat who's also a spy, which is a
fairly common thing. And so I just wonder how it was
played out. Like what's the basis, what's
the the framework of spying in this era and intelligence games
in general? I don't have a strong handle on
it. I'd love to hear some ideas from
y'all or theories or just general thoughts.
Cuz yeah, I don't know, there isn't.
Who is the little finger of this era of anyone?
And what is a little finger in this era do, given there isn't a
central power structure to try to climb?
Do you attach yourself to whoever you think is the
strongest and just hope you've chosen well and do everything
you can to make sure that that actually works out?
And then? Once you've ascended, then you
start manipulating from within. Or when does it start?
When do you start turning on? When do you start working for
yourself? And yeah, it's a big question.
My suosition is that Aegon probably did the most spying in
this this little moment, because there's not much reason for the
North to be spying on Dorn. There's not much reason for Dorn
to be spying on the Iron Islands, but Aegon needs to know
about all of them. He's going to conquer the whole
continent and he needs also he's got Dragons.
He can fly around and see where the true bases are, see where
the bridge crossings are, see what etcetera, etcetera.
So he has more motivation and more ability to do it.
And it makes sense to me that other spies, it would have been
operating. We're probably more locally,
right? There would have been like
within a city or two cities or maybe even there a neighboring
Kingdom. But they're not spying all
around the continent, where I think Aegon would have been.
Is this perhaps against his attitude of straightforward
dominance? Like if he's if people whisper
that he's got spies and doing this stuff, would they would
that undermine? His, you know, front facing
strength. Would they look at him as
someone that won his Kingdom by cunning rather than?
If he's any good at spying, they don't know he has the spy so.
Right, well said. Very well said.
So maybe he just can't do it too much.
He can't, yeah, he can't be. Maybe a little bit of a balance
to strike. There, if you do it effectively,
then yeah, it's not a problem. And and again I think we've said
a couple times it's sort of the, it looks like he has this you
know, straightforward, assertive, I'm more powerful
tactic. But I think that comes from the
moment he chose to make his play.
I think there was a lot of planning and logistic and spying
leading up to that that enabled him to use this tactic if he had
done it at a different time or in a different order when it
played out as well. So I think that it's it's maybe
not. I think there is some spying
behind it for sure. Okay.
Yeah. More of the spying of like, is
the timing right? Is, you know, is everybody
distracted properly? What's their attitudes like?
What will they do? Like getting a read on these
leaders and their personalities to understand how they react
rather than, like, snooping on their planning sessions and
hearing what they say. So yeah, I can see that that
works pretty well and it could be the snooping stuff as well.
I just think that's a little bit less likely, but certainly not
something we can discard, not remotely.
So he did something that's a little unusual that you wouldn't
necessarily see a lot of generals do, which is split your
army into three, especially when you are already kind of small
like you normally you would think strength in numbers, you
know, three Dragons together. Like who's going to possibly
stop that? On the other hand, who's going
to stop one dragon in this era? Until they started getting an
understanding of how to stop Dragons, which they never really
did during the conquest. The Dornish maybe did, but that
was we'll call that separate. Hit them as hard as you can
before they figure out what few options they even have before
they start putting scorpions on every castle wall.
Take as many castles as you can. You know, before they get to
that point where they're like, okay, now we at least have
something that might stop a dragon.
At this point they might not have anything at all.
Their chance of victory is like 0 percent, or killing a dragon
is perhaps 0%. So maybe get a lucky arrow and
kill a rider. But.
That's a pretty thin hope to rest everything on, so you can
both see why it's a little unusual in terms of standard
military planning. Not necessarily that unusual,
but it's not what you would usually see so.
But it also maybe keeps them safer in some ways.
It doesn't put all your eggs, your egg ONS, in one basket.
Also, if he's choosing targets well, if he's choosing battles,
he know that he can win. You get more troops flipped to
your side more quickly, right? And you also have this momentum
that other people can't ignore. And you know it's it is.
There are some risks to it, but I think the reward far outweighs
the risks in this scenario. OK, yeah.
And I think you could pretty reasonably plan for what would
happen. I don't know if he knew, he
could probably predicted that Heron would haul himself up in
his big castle that he just spent 40 years building that
he's really proud of. Like that's not some genius
insight. Meanwhile, the The Reach and the
Westerlands bringing out all their big ass armies, that's
also fairly predictable. They have huge amounts of
manpower they'll probably expecting each Kingdom to rely
on. Their strength is.
Again, that's not some genius insight, They just kind of
expected them to do the thing that they're best at and they
knew that that Agon and his sister knew that wouldn't be
enough to beat them. And like, yeah, they're going to
do what they do best. And they're what they're their
best is not good enough. So there you go.
Nina also writes, interestingly, that the trust, the level of
trust here between Egon and his sister, wives, he could send
them out. And I don't just mean, and she
doesn't just mean trust, like are they going to turn on me and
be traitors? But that is a little bit of a
part of it. Mostly it's just like, are they
capable enough to do this? Right.
Trust their competence? Yes, and the answer is clearly
yes. There's there seems to be 0
doubt like he had. It seems like he had ultimate
confidence in them, and presumably vice versa.
That was something we talked about earlier too.
The idea that this is a perfect storm of things had to come
together for Aegon to make this conquest you right.
There may have been some Targaryen with Dragons in the
past with this ambition, but he didn't have two other dragon
riders. It even if he did have or she
had two other dragon riders. Didn't necessarily trust them to
not turn on them or to manage it properly or not just burn
everything down. And you know, they they had.
They had to have this, this big foe that people would be happy
to get beaten in Heron. Had to have trusted people close
to you with Dragons to make the move and to have a certain
ambition. Maybe you also have to have the
the dream to give you motivation on and on.
So you might cause you might have, you know some powerful
faction of Lords might be like, Hey Rainy's your second fiddle
here. Maybe we'll put make you queen
over your brother and other sister and that may have been.
I don't think that was a motivation for Agon to marry
Rainy's as well as Vicenia, but it might have been an added
bonus that it helps keep them even more as a unit, rather than
creates the possibility of another branch forming.
A branch that I didn't even think of the idea go to war with
his, which ended up happening anyway.
Rainy Sis and Visenna's lines both went against each other
anyway, so. I didn't consider true that it
might have been another thing. He was thinking ahead that there
are going to be some Lords that offer marriages to them.
No, I'm marrying them. Yes.
We're not having an alliance through marriage.
We're having an alliance through submission.
Yes. Don't even ask for my sister's
hand what an oops that would be like.
He's got Vasenia is his wife. They got the two big Dragons and
then all of a sudden Morakshi's go rainy.
Some Maraxis Mary's, I don't know the Lord of Castor rock.
And they start like like in house the dragon where they
start building another dragon pit over there.
All of a sudden the land is trying to get golden haired,
green eyed. Targaryen's popping out and it's
like, well, we really screwed that up, didn't we?
Like I really should have married my sister, you know, my
other sister too, you know, But yeah, you could totally see that
coming. Like of course we hear that
Eggman was just like really into rainies too.
So that that's probably even more important than anything
else. But it doesn't have to be just
one reason he could have been like, well, This is why I'm
going to marry you and not just have, you know, maybe he would
have just kept her as a lover or something.
I don't know. Who knows what the go back and
forth between them on a personal level and how that went,
especially with Pizania in the mix.
And that's a thing too. Like if Rainy's is an egg on,
are the ones who are actually, like, really close in terms of
intimacy? Apparently Visenna didn't have a
big problem with that. Or if it wasn't that big of a
problem for her, because that might have been an issue of
like, loyalty as well, maybe. But apparently nothing ever
seems to happen with that. So except for her, you know,
being willing to slice his face open to prove a point.
So maybe there's a little, a little of that anger in there
that came out in that moment. By the way, you asked kind of
rhetorical, like, who knows what went on between and I'm like
Oris might know the major Dragonstone might.
That's a good point. George knows.
Come on George, tell us Some people know some servants that
kind of get ignored might have let have heard some things.
So here's the next quote that tells us what the three groups
of armies were headed off to do. The greater part of his host
crossed the Blackwater Rush. Making S for Storm's End under
the command of Oris Baratheon, Queen Rainey's accompanied him
astride Maraxis of the Golden Eyes and Silver Scales.
The Targaryen fleet under Damon Valerian left Blackwater Bay and
turned N for Gold Town and the Vale.
With them went Queen Visenna and Vega.
The king himself marched northwest to the God's eye and
Heron Hall, the gargantuan fortress that was the Pride.
And obsession of King Hair in the Black.
All three of the Targaryen thrusts faced fierce opposition.
We'll focus on each of the thrusts individually, starting
with Eggons. For a couple of reasons.
It's the way we've been framing this.
It makes sense, for all we've set up is talk about him going
to knock off the biggest bully first.
So we don't actually know which of these things happen first,
but I do think it probably did happen first cuz it was the
closest target. You know, Heron Hall's closer to
King's Landing or the site that becomes King's Landing.
Then Storm's End is certainly closer than the Veil.
So the Veil. I can feel pretty confidently
the Veil was the last of these, but what order we do them in
doesn't necessarily matter that much.
Either way, we're going to do Agon first, but for a couple of
things. First though, Morocci's just
sounds so stunning as a dragon. Golden eyes and silver scales,
like the black dread says a lot, but it it's not.
It's the size and menacing features, not the coloration.
I mean, maybe being pitched black makes it a little more
menacing, but golden eyes and silver scales?
That just sounds beautiful. Just like, wondrously amazing.
A little bit like Sunfire, perhaps?
Sunfire, considered the the most beautiful dragon of of the dance
era. Well, I feel like Maraxis was
probably the most beautiful of this era.
It just sounds like it. Just wow, right?
And Nina points out as well, something I think we've pointed
out before. It's more of a theoretical thing
that's now come true. We always wondered if Vega's
color would create a pairing Danny's Dragons with Aegon's
Dragons. When Vega's color was finally
revealed, indeed it did create a loose pairing.
It's not 100% overlap, but it's very close.
We got Drogan and Valerian black.
Drogan is black and red. I'm not sure Balerian is red,
has any of the red, but whatever, mostly black.
That's pretty similar. It's extremely similar.
Vissarian is like goldish, creamish silver, like a light,
pale kind of color. So it's metallicish, which is
similar as to the silver. And then we've got a Veigar
who's more of a pale green and Regal who's darker green with
bronze colors. So there's the green, the
metallicy lightish color and the black.
So they're like I said, not exactly 1 to one, but pretty
close and probably on purpose. It's hard to imagine that that
was just a coincidence by George, the three Dragons being
so similar like that. So what does that actually mean
in terms of this parallel? Well I guess it apart from
deepening with Danny Agon parallels but what does it mean
specifically? Well I don't know.
We'll have to see. Does it how does it say anything
about who the eventual riders will be Does their name say
anything about that like Regal versus Raygar and Raygo and yeah
I don't know but great fertile ground for theorizing is
something the fandom has wondered about a lot.
But interestingly you've only had that confirmation for a
little while now that they GAR is green to really be sure that
this that this was even possible because if George been like
actually they GAR is blue or red or something like that, we'd be
like well that's just right out then that doesn't fit at all but
he left it just close enough that you could make that
comparison. All right, let's do take a few
questions and do our mid roll business and then get back to
it. Lady Ray with a followup from
your intro there. Sean, let's start with that.
She says my point was more about the maesters as a whole and less
about a singular maester. The Citadel has very strong
opinions about what is worth paying attention to and surely
do not listen to just anyone who was a Maester.
So when did a truly cohesive narrative begin, corroborated by
many, many learned men? When did become worthy history
and not a footnote? OK, yeah, I like that framing of
the question. The the first take Sean had was
a good thing point to make and discuss, but this getting a
little drilled in and more specific also makes a lot of
sense. Like would the may, would the
Archmaesters even believe what this Meister was telling them as
part of one thing she's suggesting.
The other thing is, well if we have several Meisters over a
century at Dragonstone, eventually the point would be
like, well this this Meister said the same thing as the last
Meister and the same as the last Meister.
Or do they end up being sent to the wall like Amen for getting a
little too getting a little too mystical and magical about it.
A lot depends on who is in charge.
Like, it's academia in a sense, but it's way more powerful than
academia. And anyone who's experienced
academia knows like, well, just like any business or corporation
or industry or group of any kind, there's like a internal
culture that determines a lot of what they like and don't like.
And that culture at this point for us to determine what the
maesters were like is pretty hard for us to guess at.
We can kind of assume it's been similar to how it's always been,
but their attitudes towards Dragons are always a common
feature of our discussing of them.
And this is maybe before they had established a lot of those
attitudes because they hadn't seen the destructive power of
Dragons unleashed on the continent, something that became
a problem. They're like, well, look at all
the times the Dragons went to war like the dance was.
We got to not let that happen again.
It was so destructive. They may not have been thinking
this way back at this time. They didn't know about all that
destruction, or they'd only read about it.
It would have been in books. They'd read about the Valyrian
wars and some of them, some few, might have been like, this is
serious. Like I've read about what
Dragons can do, and I have every reason to believe these sources
and it to them it isn't just a book.
It's like, no, this could really happen.
They might be in the minority though.
The other ones are more focused on like what's in front of them
and things that are more clear and present, dangers or crops
and winter and things that are still really important.
And they're worried about the what this war would do to the
continent and less about the specifically the Dragons.
Eventually they might be like, oh, it's not just this war
ravaging the country, these Dragons are ravaging the
country. They're the worst part of it.
I don't know what their attitudes are, just saying
there's a lot of possibilities and we can't, we have to start
fresh rather than going back to the old, oh, the ministers want
to kill the Dragons like this is this is before that maybe?
One thing we can maybe suppose we talked about the idea that
Aegon just showed up and said, I'm king now, so you have all
these these Lords, these kings who've been there for thousands
of years. Like, sure, dude, who are you?
Right? And you can imagine that the
Gardeners and the High Towers probably had a similar opinion,
and they probably had a lot of influence over the Citadel.
The Maester at Castle Rock probably would have been In Sync
with the Lannister in charge. You know they if the the kings
around the realm are kind of blowing them off.
The maesters may have also, they might have taken more effort to
write stuff down than the Lord would have, but they still might
not have had the same. Sort of like everything's
changed now until that that first battle and people get
burned up or whatever that it might have.
So some real actions started. It might have, they might not
have really been paying enough attention and recording it
properly, giving it the proper credence and or Aegon might have
been keeping it on wraps too. He might have been keeping the
main streets from knowing what his plans were.
Right on. Well, well said and thanks for
the clarification, Lady Ray. Very insightful comments there,
Dornish Dame says. I wonder if Agon got Oris to spy
for him. He was obviously trusted and was
black haired, so his lack of dragon and valerian looks would
have enabled him to blend in better than Agon and his
sisters. Interesting.
He wouldn't have necessarily been famous.
Yeah, Oris most likely wouldn't have met, wouldn't have met with
high lores. But I think we see in Davos 2 in
the Dance Dragons how much info can be learned despite blending
in with the small folk and listening to gossip.
That's a great point. Davos 2 is in a Tavern.
There it that's White Harbor. And yeah, he does learn a lot.
He's also at a Tavern and the sisters and three sisters.
So that's a great point. Yeah, Orius is there's other,
perhaps members of his court that don't look necessarily
look, Valerian, we're not sure who had the Valerian looking,
who didn't. Amongst some of these other,
like the House Coheries, I kind of assume they did.
But that's not a sure thing. They might have had some
marriages to other families that started producing some non
Valyrian looking children. I mean everybody acknowledges
how different the story would be if Jon Snow looked like his
father. Assuming it's regular like oops,
can't hide that kid. You're going to have to, you
have to get a little more creative than that, Ned.
You can't just say, oh that's my kid, no, that's not going to fly
bro. We discussed.
I like to. I just want to say real quick, I
like to imagine the idea that. The Aegon took Ory's in the
middle of the night on Valerian, drop them off at Lannis Port and
an Ory's goes into Lannis Port and hangs out in the Taverns to
get information, while Aegon goes to Hightower or whatever
and then picks Ory's back up in the middle of the night.
Would you find out? Yeah, I wonder if Ory's has ever
written on a dragon. We know that there are cases
where someone you know a dragon had a second person riding with
them. We see it in Harris's time.
If any dragon could have a second second person on their
back, it's Valerian. I mean if Verma Thor could do it
and and Quicksilver could do it or Silverwing, then yeah, no
problem for Valerian. Next question comes from Night
of Peaches on our Discord. Would Valerian have been
murdered back in old Valeria? This references our discussion
that Valerian was unusually large, and as a way to Is it
possible that we know that there was lots of assassinations
between the great houses of Elyria?
That's a thing. In fact, it's one of the
theories for why the doom happened was that enough of the
house sorcerers were killed that they were unable to hold back
the the force of the geothermal vents that they had been holding
back with sorcery for so long. All that finally came to a head
with one gigantic explosion Goes to show just how much pressure
was being held back if that large of an explosion happened.
So it certainly fits that if you have assassination of sorcerers,
of Lords, of dragon riders, why not assassinate a dragon as well
if it's looking like it's going to be a particularly large
dominant dragon? See, you don't want that as
another house. You don't want that house to
gain the benefit of what that large dragon would do for you,
and so you kill it when it's young.
Probably a lot of ways to do that.
Bribe a dragon keeper? I don't know.
There's who knows the kinds of weird sorceries and techniques
they used back in old Valeria, but it's probably doable.
I like the idea a lot as like a world building point to make for
Valeria. Whether true or not, I could see
it fitting very well in. My mind when you ask.
Why not assassinated Dragon Like, Well, sure, you go ahead
and do it. We're talking about hatchling
here, but even yeah, even hatchling might.
Be a little scary. Still, still might be too much
like Nah. I don't want to mess with a baby
tiger. Yeah.
I don't want to mess with a baby Komodo dragon.
You know those things. Yeah.
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I really like that. That one's cool.
Yeah, I do like that one too, because the the Wherewoods look
cool on black. Just it looks so creepy and dark
and neat. Yeah, it does look good.
All right, let's talk about Speaking of black, talk about
her in the black. Let's review why he's so
unpopular. His his family prior to him,
like we we've gone over while he was unpopular, he was a tyrant
and all that. But it isn't just him, it's his
family. His father tried and failed to
expand the to most of his attempts to expand the Kingdom.
There was a few things he was successful at, but mostly he led
a bunch of failed attacks against places that you could
guess were bad ideas. Like he tried to attack the Veil
a few times. Like the Bloody Gate is the
reason it's called the Bloody Gate.
What makes you so special that you can overcome these enormous
geographical constraints? Well, nothing.
In fact, nothing makes you that special.
Hallek was his name. Hallekor and possible Dune
reference there, naming that guy Halleck as in Gurney Halleck.
But George is a fan of Dune. Halleck was Heron's father.
Halleck's father was named Harwin Hardhand.
Harwin Hardhand is like a George's version of Harold
Hardrada from the the Viking King who was also a Byzantine
guard and did all this. His life is really interesting
and lots of stories have been written about him, so no wonder
George used that as inspiration for Harwin Hardhand.
Has Daniely Bolili done an episode on him?
I think he's mentioned him, but I don't.
Think he's a type of material? Typically, yeah, that would be a
good one. That's history on fire.
Y'all. If that reference went over your
head could show a friend of ours we've collaborated with a number
of times. So thrall them used in the area
and in general obviously this is a big no no for Westeros.
So not only is he a tyrant, but he's breaking all these
traditions. He follows a religion that isn't
very popular that's not well, like it's one thing to follow
the old God. People kind of respect the old
gods even if they don't worship them.
The mainland doesn't really give a fig about the Drown God.
They they kind of think of it the way Macoro probably does.
The Drown God is some demon, you know?
He's like they. He's not a deity that needs to
be placated. It's some evil being that lives
under the sea that you should be wary of but not worship.
That seems to be pretty similar to a lot of Westeros views.
The Drowned God I think. Maybe not quite that specific
and not something you maybe would say to a group of ironborn
to their faces unless you have an army behind you.
But yeah, definitely one of many things that makes him unpopular.
The the drown God's chosen people Plus there it's kind of
like you know some religions have this as part of their dogma
that they're the one true religion that the followers of
this religion are going to inherit the earth.
There's a few real religions like that where there it's it's
framed that way or marketed that way.
If you want to get a little more cynical or realistic depending
on how you want to see it, if you see maybe you're cynical
enough to see that as realistic And well with that in mind the
Drown God's religion is one of those that is one of those
religions that says that you know, the meek shall inherit the
earth but erase meek and say followers of the Drown God shall
inherit the earth. So they believe it's their duty
to conquer the world, their religious duty.
Now not everyone follows that religion that closely but a
leader whose conquest oriented loves to have that on his side,
like my people want to do this because it's their religion.
So all he's got to do is kind of coop that and sort of guide that
energy in the right direction and you've got a big old
Kingdom. I mean it's the biggest, it's
it's bigger than the reach at this point in in history, this
Kingdom. I think it's close.
We'll say it's not more populist, though.
The fact that it's even close to the size of the reach, if not
larger, is just maybe is a point you hadn't realized, which just
points out just how large this, this Kingdom is and basically
everyone. So everyone's basically a slave
like you're you've been conquered by a people whose
belief system says this is right, we deserve to conquer you
and rule you. So they're not going to treat
you well. They think they're superior
based on their religion. It's a deeply held belief that
they're superior to you and that they're allowed to enslave you.
Enthrall you is the right word. Yeah.
So it's pretty, pretty darn bad. Heron Hall took 40 years to
build. And so he's all this time he's
ruining the Riverlands, you know, bleeding a try, Nina says.
I wonder if George was partly inspired by the old myth of
slaves constructing the Egyptian pyramids.
You know, the biblical stories there.
That's not actually true. They are noticed, Nina said.
Myth there that it's not accurate, but it is a popular
misconception, which is something wrong with drawing on
popular misconceptions to put in your stories.
Cuz it's fiction in the 1st place.
What's wrong with drawing on it? It's just drawing on existing
fiction, drawing on existing world myth, drawing on reality.
They're all inspirations, they're all good sources for
creating a realistic world around your fantasy setting, and
it just fits really well. It fits in a fantasy setting to
have virtually enslaved people laboring under these extremely
harsh conditions to make this huge edifice.
Valeria Heron Hall. It's these things are kind of
the same right. And it's kind of funny that that
Aegon of Valyrian is the one kind of setting these people
free from that when his own people were known for doing that
for way longer than 40 years. Try 4000 years is still too
short for that. It's longer than that even.
But not only was he offending the seven, he was cutting down
wherewoods to make Heron also he was pissing off the north too.
So this is this guy really just made enemies everywhere, but he
also wanted to conquer everyone. Agon also wanted to conquer
everyone, but he was a little nicer about it.
He didn't trample on their beliefs and traditions.
In fact, he made a point to uphold their beliefs and
traditions for the most part, whenever possible.
I want to maybe defend Agon a little and say that it's not so
much that he wanted to conquer everyone, is that he wanted to
unite the continent, and to do that maybe need to conquer
everyone. But Agon didn't have some like.
You know, altruistic ideal of establishing more peace across
the land through organization or saving everyone from a prophecy
of doom in the future. He was just violent and greedy,
you know? Yeah.
And if you factor in how he behaved afterwards, yeah, like
he didn't try to codify things at all.
He mostly just let the regions be different.
And that started to become a problem over time.
But his descendants had to deal with that.
It wasn't a problem so much for him.
So the unification was more of a gradual thing like, which makes
sense. You just can't force all this
change all at once. One step at a time?
Yeah, exactly. So Heron had just done the
opposite of all this. He just shat on everyone's
beliefs, traditions, you know, made them suffer.
Pretty easy to turn that against him.
I wonder you know his his another black.
Here we have hair in the black we have the black dread.
We have the color black for the Targaryens for their their
house. We talked about taking the black
is another phrase that comes up in Westeros.
The actual first mention of hair in the black in all of A Song of
Ice and Fire was on the wall. A mention of his brother and how
his brother when Egg on the Conqueror came.
Heron's brother was Lord Commander of the Knights Watch
and he did nothing like a good Lord Commander of the Knights
Watch is supposed to do. He didn't show any loyalty to
his brother and just did the thing in Knights Watch Lord
Commander supposed to do. He ignored the troubles of the
realm and focused N on what might be coming from there.
Couple of points on that. Some of these will require us to
expand on later. One of them is how ironic it is
that Aegon's The King's Peace destroyed the Knight's Watch,
which is very ironic given that he is supposed to supposedly,
supposedly trying to protect the entire realm from a future
invasion by the Other. So hamstringing the Knight's
Watch and undermining their manpower is an odd way of going
about that, but it's kind of something he didn't exactly
predict or manage properly. It was inadvertent.
He didn't. He didn't do it on purpose,
Exactly. I mean, why would he do that on
purpose if it makes no sense? Yeah.
And so I have to think that it's almost like, well, he didn't
interfere. Even when it was his brother, he
was like, did Aaron's brother actually like him?
Would he have interfered even if it wasn't a taboo?
Like, why was this guy on the wall?
Like, was it because it was the only way to keep his brother
from killing him? Like, this is a guy that doesn't
trust anyone? Probably.
Is he going to trust his own brother to not usurp him?
It's probably one of the few places his brother could be safe
in this world. It's like I've forsaken all
claims, bro. Seriously.
I'm no threat to you like climb on the wall now because I mean
Aaron probably like Halleck may have killed one of his brothers
to take over and I think Heron killed one.
I think Heron killed his older, may have killed one of his older
brothers. It's it's it's not certain which
it probably was exactly what happened.
So if you're going to kill your own brother to take over that
you're probably the type that will be suspicious of your own
brothers doing that to you. Like a lot of people who are
dishonest, expect other people to be dishonest.
You know, it's kind of one of those things like you are you
see people kind of through the filter of your own personality.
So I'm not sure Heron's brother would have given a crap about
helping her in the 1st place. Like, no, hell no, I'm not
helping him. Even if I could, I wouldn't have
done it anyway. You're gonna get you're gonna
praise me for this. I'll take the praise, but I
really don't deserve it. Convenient praise to earn.
Yeah, yeah, he's like, I'll take all your acclamations, but man,
I would not have done a thing. I would not have sent him one
onion. He gets nothing.
Not a not a single spearhead for me.
Yeah. Now remember too, this isn't the
first time we've had an outsider or a a tyrant ruling over the
river lands. Nina reminds us of House Teague
when, back in their day, various River Lords had risen up against
King Humphrey Teague and welcomed Eric the 3rd to Arlen
the Third rather Durindon to help him.
He was going to come in and kick out Humphrey Teague, but he
didn't leave. He came in and kicked out the
king they didn't want with their help.
And then he's like now I've got you.
You helped me come in and I'm not going to leave and they fell
for it again with with Heron's grandfather.
Cuz Heron's grandfather kicked out the kicked out the storm
Landers and then also decided to stay and betrayed the river
Lords there. So fool them twice, shame on
them. Although to be fair these were
like 300 years apart so still fool them twice.
Shame on them. Here is a another quote that
kind of summarizes a lot of what we've said into a nice succinct
point about the attitude of the River Lords quote.
Though House Whore had ruled the river lands for three
generations, the men of the Trident had no love for their
ironborn. Overlords here in the black had
driven thousands to their deaths in the building of his great
castle of Heron Hall, plundering the river lands for materials
and beggaring the Lords and small folk alike with his
appetite for gold. Now what did he do with all that
gold? Was that just like decorating
his castle with it? Because there's one thing to
just cut down the wherewoods because you need rafters for
your castle. But it sounds like he was also
just making it as fancy as he could, evidence of which would
have been destroyed by Blerion quickly out there after, which
is maybe why we don't hear about it so much.
So again, we have this parallel to maybe AG on the 6th.
Who's going to come into this realm when it's in chaos and be
the the guy to settle it all down and kind of put people back
on a path towards peace and stability again, only for maybe
Danny to come in and maybe things would get thrown off
again. Maybe the others throw that off
first. I don't know what order these
things are going to happen in, but you can see how it's a very
strong parallel where you have unpopular kings, whether it's
you're on might be our best parallel for Heron depending on
what kind of in routes he makes how what kind of success he has.
Cersei, not the most popular ruler ever.
And so there's a lot of unpopular people that could be
cast as sort of a heronish type that the Kingdom will be glad to
be rid of. And that allows the savior
figure, whether it's Aegon the six, whether it's Danny, whether
it's both of them in different arcs, kind of playing this role
of using that acclaim, using that leverage that everyone's
giving them to vault themselves to greater heights of power.
Once they've once they're the savior, once they've proven
themselves, once they're the hero, it's pretty easy to to
utilize that to rise even higher, to make yourself king or
queen or what have you. And Stannis was sort of trying
to do that. It just didn't work out.
And now he's trying to do it again, trying to be a savior for
the realm. And like, well, I'm trying to
save the Kingdom, to be the king.
You know, Like, yeah, that is that is a good way to do it.
Like, there's other criticisms we could throw out there, but
that is a pretty good way to, it seems like honorable, like be
the savior. Like, if you really are the
savior, instead of just casting yourself in that role, if you
actually save the realm, you do deserve.
I don't know to be king necessarily, but you deserve a
hero's status and everything that comes with that which might
mean being king. What?
What other criticisms are there of Stannis?
I'm confused. So before Agon could actually
face Heron, Heron, you know, had already just kind of let him
take Dusk and Dale and these other spots.
Here's what I'll describe why it makes almost makes sense for
Heron to wait. I think if Aaron's unless
Aaron's a total dummy, he had to realize the political say, the
situation. That is, if he calls his
banners, they might not come. He doesn't want to look.
He doesn't want to have that embarrassment.
He doesn't want to look that weak.
So make him come to me. Maybe something else goes wrong.
Maybe he dies before then. Maybe he meets his end at my
castle. This is where we're strongest.
It's it's kind of a power move of itself.
He's like, I don't, I don't care about what you do on my borders,
you know, come face me, you know, and then we'll see what
happens. And so it's kind of like
responding to Aegon's boss attitude with the boss attitude
of his own. It's like let's settle this
between us rather than, yeah, you took some, some of my lesser
castles. Like, what does that mean?
That's nothing like this is the real showdown is going to come
between us. But that said, he tried a few
things before Aegon got to Heron Hall.
One major thing, and his goal may have been, well, by the time
Aegon comes to me, well, he doesn't have a lot of men.
Again, he's still not clear on the power of the dragon and
exactly what he can do, so he's still thinking in terms of more
conventional warfare. Like, well, Aegon doesn't have a
lot of soldiers, so if I could just like have a few smaller
battles and whittle down his army, how's he going to besiege
this gigantic castle I have if his army isn't large enough?
Like, sieges are hard and long and slow and he feels
invulnerable to a siege because of the size of his castle and
the size of his supplies and how much water he has stored and all
this other stuff. So, which is, by the way,
another reason not to call his entire forest up.
If he's going to try to outlast egg on through logistical
tactics and not having as many frontal assaults and things like
that, let's try to whittle him down and wear him down.
That's where there's maybe some intelligence behind all this.
I'm not sure if that's what it was or if it may have just been
pure pride and arrogance. It's easily could just be that.
But I'd like to explore alternatives.
Maybe this guy is a complete dummy.
It's probably a mix, like he probably is arrogant, but also
he does have this big castle. Even if you're not arrogant, why
did you build this big castle? This is it.
This is the way you built it for and even if it even with
Dragons, if it if it was like Drogan and Rhagar or whatever,
it kind of burned hair and haul down.
It took Balerian right? So he he was almost right.
He just happened to not really truly understand Balerian.
But aside from that, I think it was the right move.
Yeah, yeah. And and facing blaring in the
field wouldn't have been better, you know, like, how's that
better? Yeah, like the if you the more
troops you put in your army, the easier it is for the dragon to
burn a lot of them at once. So this is also a sign of
intelligence. This next move we have here.
Well, if you can't face a dragon on a battlefield, what you got
to use other means. And so they're marching along
the shore of the God's eye towards Heron Hall.
What happens? They get attacked.
A night attack. It was called the Battle of the
Reeds. Has nothing to do with Howland
and Mira and Jojin. It's no, not some sort of
internal Gray Water Watch conflict.
These are the actual reeds we're talking about.
You know, those little things that stick out of the water in
lakes and rivers. I get the impression that
Valerian had nothing to do with this battle.
It was a night attack on ships. They apparently used muffled
oars to get really close and this battle was repelled.
So this first battle, there's 2 battles that we're going to
describe here. Battle.
The reeds didn't go that well for the attackers.
The targetians repelled them. Maybe Balerians saw them coming.
I say he wasn't involved in the direct battle that we know of,
but again, seeing them or or make smelling them or something
is possible and I would understand a dragon not being
able to join a battle in the reeds.
I fight a dragon would not take my dragon into a swamp like
that. Seems like a bad idea, like one
of the few things that can go wrong.
Dragon's feet gets stuck might actually be fatal, like it might
get very stuck and not be able to get out.
Probably not that bad. Not to mention, if you've got
boats sneaking up on other boats, All right, what's Blair
and do now? Burn up the bad guys and the
good guys all together? Blair can maybe give the warning
because seeing them from above by flying but getting mixed up
and it would have been difficult.
So it's the Targaryens are given by history, the win in this
battle, but we don't really know if there were a lot of
casualties or maybe the Ironborn accomplished their goal even
though they were repelled. It may have been like a probing
attack. See how they would respond, see
what kind of defenses they would mount like test their mettle.
The next battle was called the Battle of the Wailing Widows.
This is the one where they definitely snuck up with muffled
doors. We're not as clear on what
happened in the Battle of the Reefs, but it was almost
certainly a night attack. So they snuck up with muffled
doors. They came to shore, climbed out
and attacked the Targaryen camp. And this was a successful
surprise attack. That's why I'm guessing it was
at night. If you're going to go fighting
against the dragon, do it at night right, like Dragon can't
see you again. The problem of friendly fire
comes up like we saw it at We got a little tease of a dragon
battle at night with episode three of House of the Dragon,
where Damon's just kind of clambering around to the beach
yelling for Crab Feeder come out and fight him.
They shoot flaming arrows at him when he's exposed, stuff like
that. Like a lot of Caraxi's
advantages were muted by being dark.
Same thing would be true for Balerian, maybe even more so
because Balerian's larger, less, more, maybe more cumbersome,
especially if it's by the shore. We talk about swamps and reeds
and uneven ground, and yeah, just a good smart place to
attack from if you're the Ironborn.
Except for they didn't really think it through.
Yes, the attack was successful, but it was less successful than
the counterattack. Yeah, because.
Usually you could just run away from another army and they might
have a hard time tracking you down, but the dragon can track
you down. You can only go so far.
So many places. The dragon just spiral out so
they see you. Yeah.
So that's exactly what happened. I'm guessing tents were
attacked, horses were scattered, supplies were destroyed.
Maybe a little something like Ramsey and his 20 good men
getting amongst Stannis's army. Something like that, but a
little, maybe a little more realistic version.
Probably was more than 20 good men, probably a lot more than
20. I mean a bunch of long ships
were unloaded. 2 of Heron's sons led this attack, by the way.
And I wonder if this was a conversation they had.
Heron's like, no, we're gonna let them come to us.
We're gonna hold up here and have a show down here.
And some of her and sons were like, yeah, but Dad, we can hit
them at night. We can ambush them.
We're Ironborn. This is, this is.
We're good at this. We're Raiders.
We're a raiding culture. They're right by the water.
It's a golden opportunity to hit them when they don't see it.
Coming to use our strengths at maximum capacity here, that's
what we're good at. But again, they didn't fully
understand what they were reckoning with, so the attack
was successful. A lot of Targaryens were killed,
probably maybe as many as like 1000.
It was pretty bad. But. 1000 is like a lot.
That's like at this point it's. 10% of their forces, yes, yes,
because the majority. Literally decimated.
Right. The majority, yes, the majority
of the army was sent S with with Oris and Rainey's to fight at
Storm's End in order to fight the storm lands, not just
Storm's End. So yeah, Aegon took a smaller
army with him which is yet more of a boss move.
I was like, no, I don't need that many.
Even though it's Aaron Hall. Like I got Balerian, bro.
That's that's really all we need here.
And yeah, so they get away, the Ironborn Getaway.
They get back to their muffled or ships and start sailing back
home, Which to them, that's it. They're free.
They've they've gotten away. That's been the truth throughout
thousands of years of Ironborn rating history.
They get back to their ships. That's it.
They've won. No, not this time.
At night, they're still safe. They're sailing back.
But I guess Agon knew it would take them more than one night to
get home, which makes sense. The God's eye is huge, and this
was the southern side of it, so they would be sailing all night.
When dawn arose, they were still sailing home and visibility
came, and Balerian was already up there looking for them.
So when Light came, Balerian easily spotted them on the lake,
flew over, burned every ship, and that was that for two of
Heron's sons. We don't know how many sons
Heron had, but he still had multiple left after he had at
least two that survived or didn't survive.
They weren't in the battle at all.
The two that were were killed and the remainder, you know,
we're presumably just holed up in Erin Hall.
One of these might have been his heir.
Who his heir was is a little bit of a moot point, since they're
all going to die. But it would have mattered to
Heron at the time. It would have maybe caused a
little. Well, you're the new heir now.
Whoever this unnamed son was, we know none of his son's names.
So, you know, what are you going to do?
The distance was their undoing. Had they attack made this attack
when Aegon and his army was a little closer to Heron Hall,
they might have been able to do it all in one night before the
sunlight comes, and they would have gotten back to Heron Hall
before Valerian could hunt them down.
But they just clearly didn't plan for this.
They just didn't even think of it.
They didn't even conceive of this possibility, most likely,
and just shows their inexperience in dealing with
Dragons. I just want to say real quick,
I'd rather learn some of the names of the mothers in the
story than Heron's sons. Yeah.
Same, same. We don't.
Yeah. We don't know who heron's wife
was. Maybe he had multiple wives
because, like, he's an ironborn king.
He probably had salt wives and a rock wife.
And, I mean, what would stop him, you know?
Here's a nice little succinct quote to describe the action.
I like how George writes it, even though we've already
described it. Let's have this to put a dot on
it. And the victors at the Wailing
Willows. Returning across the lake to
Heron, Hall were ill prepared when Valerian fell upon them out
of the morning sky. Heron's longboats burned.
So did Heron's sons. So an entire squadron slash
raiding party completely annihilated every single ship
burn. No survivors, I'm guessing not
one it sounds like. So just extreme superiority over
wouldn't like not. Dragons have superiority over a
lot of things, but there's really nothing they have more
superiority over than wooden ships.
Like, that's an easy target, especially when they don't have
scorpions. Like when scorpions are put on
the deck of a ship, it's a lot more of a danger for the dragon,
but this is before they had figured that out, apparently.
Also, egg on, no go ahead. Putting a scorpion on your ship
is probably not. Ships are designed in a certain
shape and size and weight to fit the soldiers and the cargo, and
for maneuverability, just stick a scorpion there.
It's probably not as easy to do as to say, right, these are long
ships to you, right? They probably, yeah, that's
These are not. They might for that, right?
It might not sail properly, It might not be weighted, probably.
It might not be easy to maneuver the scorpion.
That's one of the problems of the ship is it's just slow to
turn. It's just that Dragons are,
Dragons are. Flying is a big difference but
compared to like someone on foot or even a horse even a dragon
still has to kind of can't like hover and turn on a dime like a
helicopters ships will be even worse.
So unless the scorpion can maneuver around, which on a
little rating long ship, I I don't know, man.
Yeah. Bigger wooden ships that could
handle maneuverable scorpions would also have big sails that
are even more susceptible. The dragon could hot fly in,
hidden on and on and on. It's it's scorpions are not a
magic answer to the Dragons. They may present more of a
threat, but they're not just going to like they don't even
the battlefield at all. Well said.
Now, Next up, Aegon's use of time of day, his use of dusk and
dawn and the time of day for his timing and to his advantage is
something that we're going to see a couple times.
And it occurs to me that I, when I was writing this episode,
particular, I can't think of other examples of that.
I can't think of it happening in The Dance of the Dragons maybe
once or twice, but I can't think of a specific one.
I'm going to keep an eye out for that.
Agon may have been a little bit smarter about his dragon tactics
than a lot of other dragon riders.
Maybe something he learned from the books or something that
occurred to him. But yeah, it's something that's
going to come up when he actually attacks Aaron Hall too.
The the picking his time of day as part of his strategy.
I think it's very interesting. Yeah.
I don't I don't know of other times where that's even come up
but Egon use does it multiple times.
So very good to know maybe something that Danny will figure
out or yeah, I'd be very curious about that very curious about
that. It's an important thing in the
strategy of Dragons is not just where to deploy them, but what
time of day. Yes, yes.
So this had a big effect. Maybe the kind of thing that
Heron was trying to avoid was his own people turning on him
because he had to know that he wasn't popular.
He couldn't possibly be under any illusions about that.
I I don't think he was a complete idiot.
I think he was arrogant and foolish and maybe naive about a
lot of things, but a complete but just a dunderhead.
I don't know about that. That seems that seems wrong.
It is possible though. It is possible that he was just
this proud that he's like, well, they'll fight for me or else
well, Or else what? Or else you're going to punish
them after you are incinerated? Yeah, I don't think so.
So even though that battle was a loss, the whaling widows
willows. Haha.
See, now I'm doing it too. The army that won that battle
was destroyed and it's not hard to see who came out ahead and
all that. Even though there was a little
back and forth, ultimately Aegon came out ahead of that and that
may have been the straw that broke the Trouts back quote.
So now the River Lands rose against him, led by Lord Edmund
Tully of River Run. Summoned to the defense of Heron
Hall, Tully declared for House Targaryen instead raised the
dragon banner over his castle, and rode forth with his Knights
and Archers to join his strength.
To Aegons, his defiance gave heart to the other river Lords.
One by one the Lords of the Trident renounced Heron and
declared for egg on the dragon. Blackwoods, Malisters, vances,
brackens, pipers, phrase, Strongs.
Summoning their levees, they descended on Heron Hall.
So it seems that Heron may have gotten a little desperate, or
maybe decided he should call his banners after all.
Or maybe he called just a few of them because it says he summoned
Lord Tully. Doesn't necessarily say he
summoned the others, but he might have and it just isn't
mentioned that way. But it's Tully who turned 1st
and that's huge. And apparently that as it says
his defiance gave heart to the other River Lords.
They were already thinking it, but they were maybe afraid to be
the first. Maybe they couldn't go over to
egg on so quickly, but they were probably thinking it once the
tide turned, it turned in a in a hurry and it seemed to fall
apart pretty quickly for Heron and his Kingdom.
However, it wasn't lost yet, because how few men actually
showed up is a little unusually small.
After the various river Lords had gathered, you saw that list.
That's a list of very famous houses.
Only 8000 men is what Aegon has outside Heron Hall.
We know that because of the exchange they have.
It's like I have 8000 men outside your walls and it's
like, you know your what's outside my walls is no concern
to me. My walls are tall and huge and
super thick. 8000 is actually pretty small for encircling
force. Of course, he never intended to
encircle it. He intended to use Bolerian.
But that is another thing that might have given given Heron a
little bit of confidence. Like, that's all that's tiny.
Like that's not enough for a lot of smaller castles, you know?
Like, it's definitely not enough to for this castle.
So he might have been thinking, yeah, what are they going to do?
A lot of them probably talk to each other like messages going
back and forth. Like, is it time to, should we
raise our banners for Agon? Is that what you're going to do?
Like, yeah, we got to do that. It's time.
Yeah, we got secret messages back and forth.
You wonder if Heron has some spies, like, looking out for
that sort of thing. Like, are they are they plotting
against me? But I don't know if he had that
sort of network, if he had informers to spy on his own
people, or if he was too arrogant to do that sort of
thing. He kept them in control via fear
rather than spying on them. He may have done both.
There's a lot we don't know about how hair and ran his
Kingdom. We just know he was a tyrant.
So what however it was that people were glad to be done with
it? And we do know that he's ravaged
the lands, right. He's just drained the resources.
You know, probably human resources as well.
They're just might literally not have been as many people to
send. They just have been gone through
a generation two of probably being short on food, short on
resources, short, you know, if the.
If all the strongest, healthiest men from each village were
basically kidnapped and brought to build Heron Hall, well, who's
left in a village to farm and and raise kids and etcetera,
etcetera. So, like, it flash for another
generation if someone calls the banners, like, all right, we'll
send you seven people, I guess, you know, like, you're right.
Like the Riverlands had been in a war first.
They had a war 100 years ago to overthrow the Storm Kings, and
they were ruled by Harwin Hardhan.
He wasn't a great ruler. Like, not very kind.
And then the next guy, Halleck tried to start all these wars
that failed and these were mostly riverlanders that were
brought to these wars and they so a lot of death there.
And then you, like you said, two or three generate whatever 40
years is in Westeros times two or three generations of
thousands of captives dying to make this castle.
So you're right, there'd be Knights and people with money
and means would still be around. Those guys aren't being forced
to build the castle, but the people, the same people, the
same peasants that would be called up to fight in the levees
would be these ones building river, building the castle.
So you're right there. There'd be a severe depletion of
peasants and commoners and and the people on the lower rungs of
society because they're the ones that would have no way to get
out of being conscripted for for these workforces, you know,
again, basically slavery. Add to that, even if they did
have more people, you can imagine all the reasons why they
might not have been sent like there might have been like even
if you know it was like layers of Lords, you know, 1 Lords like
all right, call the banners, send your men.
His four under Lords might have been like, I don't know about
this avian guy. We're not sending our soldiers,
not yet. But we don't even have that many
in the 1st place. You know, there'd be plenty of
the men just want to sit back and see what happens, which is
we see that all the time when large scale conflicts break out,
whether it's the War of 5 Kings or something like this, people
sometimes just sit on the sidelines for various reasons.
They decide that's their best play.
Between Heron and a dragon, we don't want our people get mixed
up in this. Yeah, yeah.
And the ones that were willing to didn't have that many to
send, right? And again, we have this problem
of Lowell. Is the realm going to accept
this guy long term? He doesn't even have a son.
I mean, they might not have the confidence in Dragons that that
Aegon and his men have learned, having seen them in action.
It goes both ways. If you're winning allies and you
don't know what a dragon can do, you might not be so quick to
take that the side of the Dragons, because you're not, you
don't actually know just how dominant they are.
So that cuts both ways. Like Heron's not preparing
properly because he doesn't know exactly what he's faced with.
Well, the the people who are sitting on the fence, not sure
who to fight for, they also don't know.
So that's part of why Aegon does what he does later.
But so to make an example of all this which really turns the tide
even for farther, something to consider here that's like a side
note. House Malister, they're one of
the houses mentioned there that the tide turned.
I bet they were second or third to join.
Tully's like the whole point of the Malisters existence.
There's C guard the point of they have that bell that's only
supposed to be rung when the Ironborn invade.
Like their purpose of existence is to stop the Ironborn raids
from the West. They're like the first line of
defense against Ironborn raids, so it must really chafe being
ruled by the Ironborn. This is like our whole thing.
And so they were like, yes, finally, yes, we're definitely
glad to join the anyone who's not Ironborn and fight against
them to freeze. Ah, this is terrible.
Yeah, it would have been. They would have been relieved to
get out from under that black thumb of Heron.
Side note, I'm guessing Quentin Coheris the one who is the
master at Arms. Maybe he was too old to be
fighting in the army by this point.
This is the guy who gets Heron Hall as his seat later, so kind
of feel like he was probably there, But if he wasn't there,
his sons would have been, and maybe his grandson as well.
So if they were capable of fighting the army, he wasn't.
But perhaps the whole batch, all the Coheri, we're there now.
It doesn't have to be, though. He doesn't have to be there.
He doesn't have to be a front liner.
Just a a guess that I think makes a lot of sense now.
Notably, they showed up at Heron Hall to join Agon.
They didn't necessarily pay homage to him immediately, They
knelt to him after Heron was defeated.
So I wonder what kind of conversations happen first.
They're like nominally on his side that we're with you to
fight Heron but you're not our king yet.
I kind of wonder about like the the specifics of that like how
do they address him you know do they call him King Egg on and
he's like Lord egg on there. Like he's got some dude that's
like King Egg on you know someone that's like correcting
them. He's like your Grace, you know,
not my Lord. You know some guy that's like
sitting there and egg on's like, all right chill dude.
We'll we'll get to that later. Or or he's like yes I am king
Egg on. You will address me as like I
wonder which it was. I kind of feel like it might be
the latter, because he's such a such a boss.
I I think the former. My idea is that you'll see just
when he's playing. Yeah, I don't.
I don't need to be pushy about it now.
They'll all, they'll all kneel once they see what Blarian does.
Yeah, that's a good point. He knew because he he probably
knew what he was about to do. He's like, I'm going to burn
this whole castle and they're going to see now that they're
here, I they're going to see he might have been waiting for
that. He's like, I want to make sure
there's lots of witnesses to this.
Yes, yeah. And he, yeah, he and he wants to
keep them friendly in the meantime.
And I think there's a lot of reasons for like, you know, the
enemy of my enemy is my friend. I think they can all just
coexist there for a moment. And Agon just knows at the end
of this that they'll all be happy to kneel to you.
There's no reason for him to talk down to them.
That that's just doesn't serve a purpose.
Like he we don't know that he actually had a giant ego, that
he needed to feel that way. He he, he needed to be in
charge. But he didn't need to like have
his, his ego stroked. I don't think he doesn't seem
like that kind of guy. He's like, no, I'm in charge and
I know I'm in charge and soon you will too.
That kind of. I feel like that's true
confidence rather than projected confidence.
If you need to tell someone you're the king, you're not
really. Yeah, there you go.
I'll show you. Just wait.
Yeah, they can call me what they want right now, but it won't be
long before they're, like, rushing to kneel.
Yeah, and indeed they did. So yeah, that's that's a good
point. So yeah, I kind of, I think I
see it that way too. Sean and the rest of y'all I I
would love to hear your takes on this.
Whenever we're going through this, this particular reread
especially we're really trying to get into the the tiny details
of some of these things, trying to like insert ourselves into
these characters minds. So it's really, really open to
interpretation, which that's I always love to hear from y'all,
love to hear your opinions, your takes, your theories.
But here I feel like there's even more room for it because
this is just we're just talking about like people's
personalities. This isn't something that like
we are. I think we're all on fairly even
footing here as long as we like. We have basic understanding of
what this person did. But Aegon's personality is very
hidden from us, like he is Another factor that goes into
speaking his his the way he comes off, even as a mystery to
the Maesters, fits in with that conversation we were having
before that that Lady Ray brought up that you brought up
that. Maybe that's part of why he's an
enigma to the Maestres too, is that he he did keep himself a
bit of a secret. He didn't like, let the Maestres
record a lot of what he was doing it.
It is possible, but maybe for other alternate reasons or for
additional reasons like this, that he just was like that.
He kept, he kept his own counsel.
He didn't want people making guesses about who he was.
Or maybe he thought it was better to seem a little bit of
mysterious, like that. Projects.
More power, you know, having his having it be about the office
and not about the man you know. And and also, I don't know how
to say this, He wants to control the narrative.
Okay. Like, yeah.
There might be times like in modern times you might have like
no press. No press for this.
But once the meeting is done and the decision is made, okay,
let's have a press conference. Right.
And that's like the coronation is sort of like all right, get
all the maesters let let's get witnesses.
But. But when he's doing the battle
plans or meeting with the new allies, maybe doesn't want that
interaction to be recorded for posterity, You know?
So what are the commoners at this time?
The commoners We hear they cheered loudly and happily when
Egon had his first coronation on the Blackwater after those few
dozen Lords surrendered. Dozen Lords surrendered early
on. What about these commenters?
What are the commenters in the Riverlands thinking?
Were they like Here comes our Savior?
Were they a little wary? Oh, this is just another
different crappy guy to have? Like, who cares who our king is?
It's going to be terrible. Regardless, was their optimism
because of how terrible Heron was?
I'm guessing there probably was because yes, things could get
worse, but man, they were bad. So they're probably going to get
better under this guy, especially if they even believed
half of what he was saying. Yeah, even if they were wary of
Agon, they probably, there was still probably some optimism.
So I feel like there are probably some that like kind of
happily marched alongside him that just joined his army.
They were like, yeah, like I want to be part of this, this
thing. I want to be maybe the king,
this new king will reward me for being in his army.
They might see it as an opportunity.
Small scale ambition could be a new new rulership over the river
lands. It's a lot of chaos.
Chaos is a ladder, you know that's one of those possibly the
most quotable show line that's relevant, you know, And cuz it
is pretty true and it's a good succinct way to put that.
So there might be, yeah, there's a lot of opportunities from
small scale to high scale, from high Lords and ladies seizing on
opportunities to become counselors or close to Agon or
close to his sisters in this new regime.
That's true on a smaller scale too.
There's like new tax collectors are going to get hired, new
offices are going to be formed. There's all sorts of like think
about local government, think about your local City Council or
your state Senate rather than the the federal Senate.
Or you know, if you don't live in the US, whatever form of
government you have, yeah, there's a lot of possibilities
there. And yeah, they're all, they're
all pretty strong. So I really like to think about
that. It's a strong part of the world
building that we don't get much talk about.
It's not the maestros don't tend to spend a lot of time on the
sort of thing. They don't know a lot about it.
They're they spend most of their time inside the castles.
They're not out in the farms and fields talking to peasants, not
very often or not very many of them.
I'm sure there's exceptions. I would love to hear those
stories. Okay, let's talk what we're
going to have just the beginning of egg on arriving in Heron
Hall. And then we'll leave it there
and get the first thing we'll do next time is discuss the parley
between Agon and Heron. And that's pretty cool cuz
that's a that's a great place to start.
Start with the conversation. One of the few recorded times
that Agon's dialogue is is specifically recorded for us.
So let's start with the quote. As we finish up today of Heron
Hall, suddenly outnumbered King Heron the Black took refuge in
his supposedly. Impregnable Stronghold The
largest castle ever raised in Westeros.
Heron Hall boasted 5 gargantuan towers, an inexhaustible source
of freshwater, huge subterranean vaults, well stocked with
provisions and massive walls of Blackstone, higher than any
ladder and too thick to be broken by any ram or shattered
by a tribuchet. Heron barred his gates and
settled down with his remaining sons and supporters to withstand
a siege agon of Dragonstone. Was of a different mind.
Yeah, he expected a siege, but Egon was like, I'm not doing a
siege. What are you talking about?
I've only got 8000 men. How could I besiege this big
ass? It's like, that's what Heron's
thing is like, how's he gonna besiege this?
Yeah, I wonder who Heron's remaining supporters were.
It's entirely possible it was just other Ironborn, you know,
But but it's not like every single house that joined in the
Riverlands was, was accounted for.
When we heard that list of the tide turning, it was a lot of
big names, Bracken, Blackwood, etcetera.
But there's plenty of other houses we haven't heard about,
smaller scale ones that would have felt less protected, ones
that were maybe closer to the West.
Like what about the far West of the Riverlands?
The ones on the shore? Yeah, Malister is an exception,
perhaps because they're so anti ironborn.
But what about some of the other houses along the shortening?
They might be a little wary of flipping when they're so close
to the Iron Islands. Like we're we're in a sandwich
here. We're nowhere near King's
Landing or the egg on for it because there is no King's
Landing yet. We're nowhere near the base of
this new king. Whatever.
I don't know what they called it at this point.
Do they call it the egg on for it?
I guess. But yeah, so he heron's like the
guy, that proverbial guy that buys a big fancy new truck or
new car and just wrecks it the first time he drives it because
he's he's way overestimated what it's capable of, you know, or
what he's putting it up against. In this case, like immovable
object meets immovable resistible force.
No, actually, irresistible force.
Force meets burnable object. All very, very distinct Okay
folks. That's a good stopping point for
this week. We've covered right up to the
point of the war, and as at the beginning of the true conflict
of Aegon's conquest, the first major domino will fall, we'll
have a lot to say about that, how it sets up such a example
for the rest of the realm, and so many other things.
We'll be having a lot of fun with that.
There is another question we have here from Gerald Garcia.
In the first Punic war, the Romans put a boarding ramp
called a Corvis to their ships to board Carthages ships.
It worked but when a storm hit their fleet the Corvis
unbalanced the ships and they sank.
I do remember this. That's right, the Corvis which
is in because the Corvis is is like Raven for.
But it was a big old thing, like a a large ramp with two big
spikes at the end and they would just get close to an enemy ship
and drop it and it would just smack down and Pierce the enemy
ship. And that get the Romans were
trying to use their advantage as a use their disadvantage into an
advantage. Which was the Carthaginians had
way naval superior over them and the Romans had way land superior
over the Carthaginian. So they were like, well, if we
can use our soldiers in ship to ship combat, our soldiers will
easily overwhelm their sailors. And that was true.
But as Gerald Garcia points out, and it unbalanced all their
ships and once the seas became difficult, they lost the like
the entire fleet of these Corva ships and never built them
again. As far as I know, that was naval
and experience. The Carthaginians would not have
made that mistake. Hopefully I'm coming through
smooth right now, but I'm guessing that's a parallel to
the my talking about the Scorpions.
Problem, right. Yes, absolutely.
You're totally right. Yeah, it is an exact building of
of that point. Let's answer the trivia question
for you. Remember, the question was who?
What house were the Larry, Moe and Curley men at arms sworn to?
They were sworn to anyone get this house.
Bracken is the answer. They were Bracken.
They were Laris, LHARYS, Mohor and Curlicette, Larry's Larry,
Moe and Curly. People did get the lorries in
the Mohor Mohor part too, but they did not.
Get the Curly what Curly was short for?
Yeah, Curlicette. So if you remember them, Sean,
those were those three guys were in Catlin's party when she
captured Tyrion at the at the end of the crossroads.
And then all three of them died in the mounds, all the way to
the to the Erie. I remember that sequence, of
course, but I don't. I didn't take note of those
names, so I appreciate. Being enlightened.
So George has a longer history of this.
This was, you know, a lot more hidden than the Muppet Tully's,
which are just blatant. Like Grover Tully, Oscar Tully,
Elmo Tully. Yes, next week we'll even spell
them with Y's and K's or anything.
Yeah, no. Yeah, exactly.
Just the exact. Same spelling.
Yeah, he's like, you know what, I don't need to hide this.
Let's just go right out and do it.
Let's see it's cited as an example.
I mean maybe you've seen this in social media.
People people over exaggerate George's stories and say that it
he's nihilistic. He's not.
He's like there are good, like nihilism is like nothing is
good. Like everything ends in despair
and what's the point that they're not.
They're not like that at all. People have good endings and
positive things. That's The funny thing with that
the those men at arms really are.
They're described. Like the actors, too.
Yeah, which I find fun. Oh, they're physical
descriptions Masters researchers like Mohore MO has.
An iron. Like helmet, Iron helm that
makes him look like he. Has a bowl on his head.
Where's the bowl cut for Moe? Yeah, Lotteries has.
Wild Tufts of rust. Colored hair that stick out of a
conical cap. So yeah, he's got like the curly
had the well, Larry had the big hair.
Yeah, Larry had the big hair. Curly is just a great fat oaf
with short cropped hair and a pig's.
Face and Curly was a big guy. Yeah, that's right.
That's genius. There's really great art of them
on the wiki that someone has done that.
Anyway, so that's pretty fun. Squisher King has done nice of
each of. That is pretty fun.
Yep. So.
You know, one last note about Agon's personality that I wanted
to add. I think maybe from a meta
perspective, one of the reasons George kept Agon's personality a
little undefined was because he's such a parallel to Danny.
He wanted to maybe leave some of that undone so he could later
write backfill some of those parallels a little more cleanly
after he's developed Danny. More like Revert, like make draw
the parallel back to Agon rather than starting with Agon and
connecting us Danny. Danny's the main character, not
Agon the Conqueror. Even though he came before her.
Like, obviously she's the one that gets more focused.
He wants so. So he wants her to be fleshed
out more than to create. Parallel or contrast to yes.
Yeah. Or you're right.
Contrast as well as parallels, so so.
Some of that, like she hasn't even landed in Westeros yet.
So like, if you think about, wow, so we've gone really far
with that. Not not to this part of the
story, though. Like she hasn't.
She hasn't been in Westeros except for when she was born.
She's been in Westeros for like a few days her entire life.
So yeah, the parallels are already immense, but let's not
forget that there's room for a lot more.
And yeah, George may not have wanted to write himself into a
corner, wanted to leave room for those later.
Because after all, he started this so long ago and he he knew
it would be a while before she'd land on Westeros, even think,
even even if at first he thought it would be sooner than than
2023. But still he knew it would be a
while. So yes, we will pick up next
time, not next week. In two weeks time.
We'll be back for another live stream at 3:00 Eastern.
Join us for that or listen to or watch it after the fact.
You can do. You have many choices in how you
consume history of Westeros podcast.
We mentioned a lot of episodes or alluded to a lot of episodes
along the way here. Our Valeria episodes, of course
House Valerian and Celtic are Century of Blood, Summer Hall,
The Doom. We got an episode on.
Valerian We got an episode on Before the Dragons.
We've got multiple episodes on Under the Dragons, the Rule,
Under the Just After the conquest.
Lots of things there as well. Thank you to anyone who supports
on Patreon or as a Spotify subscriber.
There's lots of ways to support the show.
You can also just tell your friends about us.
That's one of the best ways to spread word of mouth.
You are a better salesperson than you might think when you're
discussing things that you care about a lot.
That is the heart of of bringing people over is enthusiasm for
the thing that you are preaching about passion.
Passion, yes. Passion works true passion.
Best of. All and we certainly have a true
passion for the world of Westeros and the writings of
George R Martin. Thanks as well to Nina who also
has that level of passion and obsession and we are really
appreciate everything she contributes to our show.
Thanks to Joey, Jesse and Bran for the music and our intro.
Thanks as well to Michael Clarfeld for the same as well As
for the amazing maps you see behind us.
And thanks as well to our engineer for audio quality
assistance. Engineering sound like a
engineer would. That's right.
Well, until next time, my friends and fellow Westorians
Valerie Riis.