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Advanced Crackpottery 5 - Dragonsteel


Lady Blizzardborn

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4 hours ago, cgrav said:

There is the "frozen fire" motif in ASOIF. Really I'm inclined to assume that the dragons have some chilly equal in Otherland. The mutually destructive exchange of forces seems like a very GRRM thing. 

And that makes me wonder... if "frozen fire" melts Others, does it freeze dragons?

I do think Bran will skinchange a dragon (the famous "but you will fly" line from BR), and I think it will either be an ice dragon or a dead dragon. It would make sense if like Aegon I, one of Dany's dragons is killed in her eventual conquest, maybe even by the Dornish again. The Dornish may have knowledge about killing dragons that no one else does because all copies of Septon Barth's Dragons, Wyrms, and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History were destroyed throughout the realm, but Dorne was not part of the realm at the time. The book that Arianne had in her tower was probably a surviving copy of Barth's book.

So if one of Dany's dragons dies and then Bran can skinchange it as a wight dragon, I wouldn't surprised if it was effectively transformed from a fire dragon to an ice dragon in the process. And I would expect Bran to then fight Dany and Drogon (and maybe the other remaining fire dragon as well). Otherwise, I always thought the eventual battle between dragons and Others would end up pretty one-sided. Additionally, an ice dragon would be the perfect weapon for the Others. It could literally just freeze humans to death (like the enemy riders in The Ice Dragon), and this would preserve their bodies perfectly for being raised as wights. And of course, GRRM did include ice dragon myths in TWOIAF, so it won't be a big surprise if/when they appear in the story.

Does "frozen fire" freeze dragons? That is an interesting thought. I can't imagine how one would manage to stab a dragon with obsidian, but the language is suspicious. I'm betting no, but I have always thought that the Others basically use telekinesis to maintain their physical form and stay alive (as "ice made flesh") and obsidian disrupts their telekinetic power and causes them to melt. Mayhaps a similar thing would happen to a dragon. Mayhaps the obsidian would disrupt its telekinesis that it uses to maintain its physical form as "fire made flesh" and the dragon would freeze or turn to stone.

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@40 Thousand Skeletons,

Excellent points, my friend.   Again, I'm tripping over the words "steel" and "iron"-- if Sam's library book was written 3000 years back it could be modern interpretation of the substance.   There and again those Kings of Winter are utilizing iron in their crown.I have pondered the possibility that ASOIAF may be some post apocalyptic tale where history repeats itself.   Certainly technology would (come to be again in various versions of itself) and it makes Asshai a slam dunk to explain.  I'm not pooh-poohing anything you're saying.   The 1st Men couldn't write anything but runes.    The Andals brought the written word.  With that in mind I only see 3 options:  All the books came after the Andals and these are interpretations of other words; The 1st Men had a written language and wrote it all down with the full knowledge of steel;  The World book lies.   This isn't the 1st time those pesky Andals have screwed up a decent train of thought for me.  

A while back I researched the Wildlings for a topic.  The Thenns are the stand outs for me.  They forge weapons and armor and have a different political view than their contemporaries.  I still got nothing for steel or iron, but perhaps the answer lies with them?   

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@Curled Finger

You have made excellent points as well my friend. :cheers: 

I really question the claim that the FM had no writing. Like, really? They built amazing castles and ran entire kingdoms without being able to even write? I doubt it. The only explanation that would make sense if that is true is that the weirnet is serving as their "library", like it does for the COTF (who specifically have no books). It may be that all FM books just rotted away over time. Paper doesn't last that long, and books need to be copied over and over to preserve them through the ages. And then the only thing left would be runes on rocks, because the rocks don't rot like paper. You might be able to govern a more primitive nomadic society with purely oral knowledge, but doing the administrative work for a kingdom without being able to write things down would be a monumental challenge.

I do agree that technology was probably more advanced in the past (as evidenced by the super impressive castles like Storm's End), and this would make a ton of sense because it happens in real life throughout history. For instance, we currently do not know how to make Damascus steel. The knowledge was lost. We have a pretty good idea, and we can get close, but we are still unable to reproduce how they did it. And going back a thousand+ years, Roman roads were used literally for centuries after the empire fell (similar to Valyrian roads). People simply lacked the ability to make better roads, even after they had suffered centuries of use. Same thing with the aqueducts. People did their best to repair them for a while, but they couldn't build them from scratch. German tribal peoples would look at them and think it must have been built by giants, just like when Ygritte questioned how men could build a tower so tall without giants to lift the stones.

Their level of technology is also weird. Military technology seems to have only reached the point of medieval Europe, while the maester's knowledge of certain things, particularly treating infections, seems to be near as advanced as 20th century science. For some reason, they have not made huge advances in many areas, like discovering electricity or gun powder. It is possible that the weirnet has been influencing human history to prevent certain advances and keep humanity in a perpetual dark age. We certainly know that the Long Night was a form of apocalypse, and it is unclear how much damage it did to human progress.

All that said, that's a really good point that "dragonsteel" could just be a post-Andal interpretation of other words. Maybe it was dragon-[blank], and the Andal historians were like "well we don't know what [blank] is, but we know swords are made of steel so let's just call it steel".

The Thenns are interesting. My best guess is that they were a group of First Men who decided to live in the far north after the Long Night ended but before the Wall was built. The rest of the wildlings seem to be rebels who didn't want to kneel to a king, and so they settled the only area outside of Westeros that wasn't part of a kingdom, the lands north of the Wall. The Thenns have no problem serving a ruler. But then the question is, who in their right mind would settle an area so cold? It is even possible that the Thenns settled that area before the Long Night, when it was potentially much warmer (before the climate got all screwed up), and either survived the Long Night or moved back to their established home once the LN ended, even though it had become freezing cold. Unfortunately this explanation does not help us with the pre-Andal steel/iron mystery. :P 

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