259 replies to this topic

[The Knight of Grasses]

Aoife Trevgaryen, on 23 June 2011 - 01:49 PM, said:

Are you talking about the dragon's "thumb"? (Which is present on the other wing structure, too.) The tail's tip may be sticking out somewhere, but the base end is very definitely going down behind the leg, as I mentioned already. As Anti-Targ pointed out, look at the difference in thickness between it and the actual leg structure.

Yeah, on second look, you're right.  My apologies on that.

[The Knight of Grasses]

Unnamed, on 23 June 2011 - 01:47 PM, said:

As I recall, it was made very clear that Daeni was the only one that perceived these changes. She thought they were warm when everyone else thought they were cold rocks. So, does this mean they were changing, and only she could perceive it? Or does it mean she was sensing the potential? Or that she was bonkers?

I favor the second; you favor the first. Then again, it could have been a long, slow process that happened over the months that she carried them around. She kept heating them up at every opportunity...maybe over time, this changed them. Even if that was the case, I would still think there would be a need for something to give them a "spark of life". Changing them from rocks to eggs, live or not, is impressive enough...

-VM

I don't remember others touching the eggs once they'd been given to her, but I'm not sure.  Either way, I don't think that's a big deal.  We know Dany isn't crazy.  She's not imagining things.  More likely it's her touch that causes the eggs to heat up, as she's essentially become their mother and has whatever power is imbued in her as "the last dragon."  There's still no indication that she could do any kind of blood magic.  MMD's death (or Drogo's or Rhaegar's) were not required for her dragons to hatch, other than the symbolical meaning that GRRM wanted to portray in Dany's thoughts.

[Aoife]

Unnamed, on 23 June 2011 - 02:07 PM, said:

I haven't exactly studied the scene, but I thought I saw a big 'ole tail on Viseryon, when he was shimmying up Daeni's leg...

"No, seriously, there was a third dragon in that scene, down by Daeni's left foot."

"What? You're kidding...down by her foot? That's nowhere near her tits."

-VM

I think my favourite extra dragon was this one, found on Twitter, put out by quarterlight: Welsh Dragon tries to get in on the Game of Thrones season finale (spoiler): http://t.co/EWRpJa6

[Unnamed]

The Knight of Grasses, on 23 June 2011 - 02:46 PM, said:

...We know Dany isn't crazy.  She's not imagining things...

Funny how the way we express ourselves can reveal our attitudes. I would have said something like "I never thought she was crazy, and I don't think it was all in her imagination..." because, well, I tend to draw a distinct line between 'things that I know' and 'things that I have opined or inferred'.

The air of confidence definitely lends your "voice" a certain authoritativeness, but my reflex is to recoil from it, the same as I would from someone waving a Bible in the air. I like to have discussions where both sides might have something to contribute. However, if you're the keeper of The One Truth (which puts me in the role of poor, foolish, misguided soul), then this doesn't feel like a discussion: It feels like you're correcting my ignorance.

I just don't really like being corrected. Even when I'm wrong. And I'm always ignorant, to some degree or other.

Pretty much everyone I know feels the same way.

-VM

Edited by Unnamed, 23 June 2011 - 03:48 PM.

[Unnamed]

Unnamed, on 23 June 2011 - 03:47 PM, said:

However, if you're the keeper of The One Truth...

One Truth to bring them all
One Truth to find them
One Truth to rule them all
And, in the darkness, bind them

--> I think I like that better than the orignal.

-VM

[Stark Truth]

Unnamed, on 23 June 2011 - 04:06 PM, said:

One Truth to bring them all
One Truth to find them
One Truth to rule them all
And, in the darkness, bind them

--> I think I like that better than the orignal.

-VM

To continue this analogy then, GRRM holds the One Truth.  We are stuck with the 9 truths of mortal men (and women), and our truths are owned by the Truth of GRRM.  Wonder what the truths of the elves are?

[Captain Tripps]

The Knight of Grasses, on 23 June 2011 - 02:46 PM, said:

I don't remember others touching the eggs once they'd been given to her, but I'm not sure.  Either way, I don't think that's a big deal.  We know Dany isn't crazy.  She's not imagining things.  More likely it's her touch that causes the eggs to heat up, as she's essentially become their mother and has whatever power is imbued in her as "the last dragon."  There's still no indication that she could do any kind of blood magic.  MMD's death (or Drogo's or Rhaegar's) were not required for her dragons to hatch, other than the symbolical meaning that GRRM wanted to portray in Dany's thoughts.

She offers them to several people, her hand maidens, Jorah, etc, and asks if they feel anything.  No one does.

It's my theory that MMD changed the eggs from rocks to living, when she performed the ceremony on Drogo.  The eggs were in the tent, massive amounts of casualties were happening outside it to feed the magic as chaos erupted in the camp, and then Jorah carries Dany inside, which adds Rhaego to the mix (they TOOK him, and changed him).  I think the witch began the process, and it ended with HER death, which seems like the way Blood Magic should work.  Dany merely finished what Mira started.  However she made that connection in the books she clearly intends/hopes for MDDs death to hatch her eggs, and not simply the heat from the flames.

I mean clearly SOME magic is going on here, being a Targ alone isn't enough to give life to dragons, or they'd have never died out to begin with.

Edited by Captain Tripps, 23 June 2011 - 04:35 PM.

[Unnamed]

Captain Tripps, on 23 June 2011 - 04:33 PM, said:

It's my theory that MMD changed the eggs from rocks to living, when she performed the ceremony on Drogo.  The eggs were in the tent, massive amounts of casualties were happening outside it to feed the magic as chaos erupted in the camp, and then Jorah carries Dany inside, which adds Rhaego to the mix (they TOOK him, and changed him).  I think the witch began the process, and it ended with HER death, which seems like the way Blood Magic should work.  Dany merely finished what Mira started.  However she made that connection in the books she clearly intends/hopes for MDDs death to hatch her eggs, and not simply the heat from the flames.

For what it's worth, I generally like it. But I lean toward the notion that MDD's spell would be complete whenever she finished dancing. (Otherwise, things could be randomly dying and reanimating all around.) At that point, as you described, the eggs are no longer rocks but are viable. Not to say that there was NO magic going on at the Drogo barbecue, but I'm not convinced it's necessary. Once the dragon eggs are live, then theoretically heat would be all you need to hatch them. (I'm still scratching my head over what a dragon would want with human breast milk, but that's a different subject.)

In which case, MDD's death is just icing--nice for Daeni, but not really necessary. Of course, that doesn't mean that Daeni didn't THINK that MDD's death was necessary...

Anyway, I still find that our "theories" have more in common than they have in opposition...

-VM

[Unnamed]

Captain Tripps, on 23 June 2011 - 04:33 PM, said:

I think the witch began the process, and it ended with HER death, which seems like the way Blood Magic should work.

It just occurred to me...wouldn't that be a strange way for blood magic to work? I mean, who would ever even consider engaging in such magic?

TEACHER: Okay, here's the deal. You can do ONE blood magic spell in your life. Once you start the spell going, it is not complete until your death...

STUDENT: You know what, I don't think I really even need to learn this one. Can we just go back to the toe-jam magic stuff? I think I like it better.

-VM

[Unnamed]

Stark Truth, on 23 June 2011 - 04:17 PM, said:

To continue this analogy then, GRRM holds the One Truth.  We are stuck with the 9 truths of mortal men (and women), and our truths are owned by the Truth of GRRM.  Wonder what the truths of the elves are?

And I wonder if that giant eye hovering over GRRM's house makes the other New Mexicans nervous...

-VM

[Unnamed]

Unnamed, on 23 June 2011 - 05:14 PM, said:

And I wonder if that giant eye hovering over GRRM's house makes the other New Mexicans nervous...

-VM

No, honey, I don't think it's an interesting decoration. Every time I leave the house, I'm positive that thing is watching me.

-VM

[Greywolf2375]

Unnamed, on 23 June 2011 - 12:06 PM, said:

Yeah, it wasn't clear what he meant by "one time"...is Daeni herself the one time? Is this portion of a year the one time? I don't know, but the implication was, regardless of her general resistance to heat, she couldn't walk into a flaming pyre every day. [Ahem] That is to say, that is how I interpreted the remark...

-VM

For the books, one time is just one moment in time - if Dany sticks her hand in a fire now, she gets burned.

For TV series Dany...who knows.

[Sega AM2]

Captain Tripps, on 23 June 2011 - 04:33 PM, said:

I mean clearly SOME magic is going on here, being a Targ alone isn't enough to give life to dragons, or they'd have never died out to begin with.

It is implied that the Maesters of the Citadel were responsible for the extinction of Dragons from Westeros. Not the failure of the Targaryens to hatch or raise the young animals. Had the Citadel not interfered with the Dragons they likely would have lived on until the start of the series and beyond. Tyrion knew a lot about Dragons and even Viserys passed along lots of good knowledge about the beasts to his sister before he died.

We see that a blood sacrifice of some king, likely that of a King, is required to awaken Dragons. Fire and Dragon blood (Targaryen blood) is possibly also necessary. We also know that Melisandre strongly suspects that King's blood can "awaken stone dragons" and that Stannis has a small amount of Targaryen blood in him. We also know that Euron had hired a Warlock to hatch his egg, but when the Warlock failed Euron drowned him, and tossed his egg into the ocean.

[Leuf]

I'm going to quote myself here because I guess people didn't understand what I was trying to say.

Leuf, on 22 June 2011 - 10:40 PM, said:

While I don't think Dany was performing the exact same ritual as Mirri, the idea of awakening the dragons requiring heat plus sacrifice is sparked by it.  It just resonates with her on a subconscious level because she is indeed the dragon.

People are arguing that Dany can't know how to do the blood magic, and I agree with them.  She wasn't doing blood magic.  The dragon eggs were never petrified into stone, that's just how dragon eggs appear to people who aren't of the dragon.  They were always ready to be hatched, if you knew how to do it.  Dany knew instictively that hatching them required fire, but that wasn't enough.  Dany did dragon magic, not blood magic - she just took inspiration and knowledge from Mirri, the idea that a sacrifice can be an important component of powerful spells involving life.

[tetsuo]

The King, on 21 June 2011 - 06:41 PM, said:

Good god, this thread has really started plumbing the depths of nonsense!

2 legs or 4 legs, a dragon's a dragon.  Sheesh.  

Shae: look, there comes a time when we all have to accept that the showrunners aren't necessarily going to hew exactly to the text, and in fact they may take really wide turns around some of the plot points.  For example, why Tyrion falls for Shae and how she betrays him.  

It's nothing like the change that begat Arwen Warrior Princess.There's not perfect fidelity with the book, however the interpretation is much much more faithful than LotR, thank goodness.

[I love Cersei]

The Knight of Grasses, on 22 June 2011 - 06:21 PM, said:

Dany's baby was the price for Drogo's life.  My personal take on the disfigurement of the baby is that it's because she entered the tent, but that's just speculation.  It's also my guess that MMD told Dany not to come into the tent because she didn't want to be interfered with, NOT because Dany coming into the tent would cause her baby to die.  Her baby was going to die anyway.  The horse was either a diversion, or the blood was needed for the spell.

That sums up my own understanding, which btw hasn't changed since I first read the book. Furthermore, I've always blamed MMD for Drogo's wound festering in the first place. The horse's blood was needed to touch them all for the spell to work imo, thus no more than another sort of holding hands during the spell. I guess that's why it's called blood magic.

The Knight of Grasses, on 22 June 2011 - 06:21 PM, said:

The dragons hatched because they were ready to hatch and were placed in a hot enough fire.  My guess is that Dany's touch of the eggs awakened the dragons within them (whether that occurred much earlier or the night they hatched, I don't know, but it doesn't really matter).  But the actual catalyst for hatching dragons was a super hot fire, and didn't have anything to do with Drogo or MMD or Rhaego dying.

My take is that Dany sort of incubated the eggs for a longer period, and that what made them hatch was a bunch of certain things summing up and coming together - surely not only the heat of the fire was needed, but Dany's extremely intense feelings were needed too and very much.

Seeing it that way you could argue the eggs wouldn't have hatched if it were not for MMD and for Drogo's  and her baby's death and for the death of her brother and many other circumstances, even if those things were not directly related or needed to hatch the eggs in a cooking recipe way of understanding. Every single event of those on its own wouldn't have been strong enough to make the eggs more than wobble a little. You can't just say add these and those ingredients and the dragons will hatch, it was all a great big coincidence that it finally worked out.

[Abaddon]

tetsuo, on 24 June 2011 - 02:22 AM, said:

It's nothing like the change that begat Arwen Warrior Princess.There's not perfect fidelity with the book, however the interpretation is much much more faithful than LotR, thank goodness.

Plus one billion.  Every time I hear someone drone on about how faithful the LOTR adaptation was (cutting T.Bombadil was a good choice, not talking about that) I have to grit my teeth.  To give credit where it is due, the LOTR movies did look absolutely gorgeous, though...

Game of Thrones in comparison was extremely faithful as an adaptation.  I think the later season(s) will be less so, most likely, but I absolutely have faith at this point that the producers are invested in producing the best most faithful adaptation they can given the limitations they are working with.

[Unnamed]

Abaddon, on 24 June 2011 - 09:30 AM, said:

Game of Thrones in comparison was extremely faithful as an adaptation.  I think the later season(s) will be less so, most likely, but I absolutely have faith at this point that the producers are invested in producing the best most faithful adaptation they can given the limitations they are working with.

I agree. In particular, I see every evidence that they are trying very hard to stick to the "spirit" of the story, if not every last detail. Even though I qualify as one of the TV-Shae haters, I don't think it was done maliciously, and I hope it wasn't an effort to "improve" on the original. I expect they would be pretty shocked at the amount of strong reaction to this "minor change" of a "minor character". Although, not too shocked: They also know that there will always be a certain amount of complaining from the faithful.

And, of course, they know better than we do that perfection is an ideal, not an achievable goal.

-VM

[Unnamed]

Leuf, on 23 June 2011 - 07:07 PM, said:

They were always ready to be hatched, if you knew how to do it...

This caught my eye, because on my reading it seemed clear that the eggs had basically turned to stone by the time Daeni received them. And on the TV show, did you look at the eggs when she had them on the hibachi? I noticed that the sides had been made to resemble weathered stone (some color/texture was rubbed off, revealing what looked like granite). Was there something in the story that led you to believe they were always viable?

Just as an aside: What kind of critter lays eggs that can sit dormant for hundreds of years, waiting for the right conditions to hatch? And wouldn't people have known that dragon eggs were freakishly resilient?

-VM

Edited by Unnamed, 24 June 2011 - 05:16 PM.

[Unnamed]

equestenebrarum, on 24 June 2011 - 04:58 AM, said:

Seeing it that way you could argue the eggs wouldn't have hatched if it were not for MMD and for Drogo's  and her baby's death and for the death of her brother and many other circumstances, even if those things were not directly related or needed to hatch the eggs in a cooking recipe way of understanding. Every single event of those on its own wouldn't have been strong enough to make the eggs more than wobble a little. You can't just say add these and those ingredients and the dragons will hatch, it was all a great big coincidence that it finally worked out.

This is certainly a very nuanced way of looking at it. Of course, you could be right, but my gut reaction is that, if every one of this long chain of events contributed (which I translate as "was needed"), the fact that it all got done makes "great big coincidence" seem an understatement. Even "miraculous" seems a little understated. The fact that your specifying that it's not in a "recipe" sense mitgates this somewhat, but still...

If nothing else, we've established that there are quite a few ways to interpret the chain of events in the books. As I've been mulling over the various arguments, a few random thoughts occurred to me (this is not directed at you in particular, just the board in general):

• If dragons are required for magic to work, how could blood magic work, while the dragons are still egg-bound. For that matter, how could "dragon magic" (or whatever made them hatchable) work? And how come the Others are still able to do their zombie-creation trick, with no dragons? I think there must be some sort of unwritten rule here that dragons are needed for certain kinds of magic, but not all. I do wish GRRM would exposit more on the rules--how am I supposed to figure out if my light saber will work in Westeros?
  
• MDD says that "only death pays for life" as if it were a general principle. Seems an odd inversion--I would understand it better if she said "life pays for life", but even so...it seems that people in this world conceive children in the normal way. Whose deaths are paying for regular conceptions, all the spermy men with the pumped up kicks? Does this mean that there is always the same number of total living creatures in the world? When a woman gets pregnant, does a lizard drop dead somewhere?
  
• I'm still trying to internalize the whole idea of dragons being responsible for magic. It just blows me away that magic starts working in Westeros with no more foundation than a small handful of 5-ounce dragons half way round the world. It's a cool idea, I just can't help but wonder how that "works".
  
• Daeni thought she didn't need MDD's screams, just her life, but what if she had it backwards? Maybe the high-pitched shrieks are what cracked the dragon eggs.
  
• Given that the dragon eggs hatch under such high heat, you reckon the baby dragons come shooting out like popcorn? That would be cool, as long as they don't come leaping out like those hand-critters from the Alien movies.
  
• I'm still wondering how much a dragon would benefit from human breastmilk. Most egg-born creatures don't do the nursing thing...then again, maybe Targ breastmilk has lighter fluid in it, or something.
  
• Whenever someone complains about the way magic breaks rules in books, someone else says something like, "It's magic, it doesn't have to follow normal physics notions." And yet, whenever someone wants to do some BIG magic, suddenly, the spell is harder or requires more stuff--this can only be done with blood (or a basilisk tooth, or whatever). Well, if magic is completely unlike physics, wouldn't it be just as likely that the big impressive spells might be the easiest? I'm still waiting for a book with a scene something like, "I'm afraid he's passed beyond the reach of a healer's arts. Only snot magic can save him now. Bring me a large boar and a spoon."

Whew, hope you enjoyed that--I feel much better, anyway. Seriously, these sorts of things just pop right into my head, completely uninvited...

-VM