Diagnosing a Sick Planet: Spitballing the World's Maladies

[hiemal]

Planetos is an ailing world, and I think magic is the infection. Bring me your tinfoil and spitballs, rumors and intuitions on the seasons, the Long Night, and anything else you think might be related. To get things started:

The Seasons:

1. The distortion to the seasons is caused by an irregular wobble to the world's axial tilt meaning there is no fixed pole star (the Ice Dragon's Blue being the current placeholder and the pale star in the Sword of the Morning's Hilt its seasonal alternate). This means the stars follow a continual progression, I think, and may explain why navigation is so unreliable and why a continent's worth of maester's must make astronomical observations and agree that the days are indeed getting shorter. This may mean that the North is less north than they think and explain why they keep referring to Asshai as south sometimes and east at others. Of course, this would depend on a lack of reliable compasses...

2. Something is going on with the sun, either directly as in my celestial warging theories or indirectly as the light enters the atmosphere (for fictional precedent, I'm thinking the Sunbane in Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series- leper messiah!) Pretty out there, but I recall a conversation in which some maester mentions compares something to the heat of the fires of the earth and the summer sun. What if it actually is hotter than the sun in winter? Tricky to explain the lengthening and shortening of days, but I don't recall a single mention of equinox or solstice.

The Moon(s):

Were there really two? If so where did the rest of the second moon go instead of forming a pretty ring and what happened to the tides when this happened? If not what caused this curious myth? There are so many tinfoils that instead of trying to bring up a new one I'd like to pose a question:

Why are there no apparent, regular and predictable eclipses? I would think that would be one the first things stargazers like the Maesters and the Starry Wisdom folks would set their scopes on after mastering the seasons and making a stab at some kind of pelagic navigation system particularly given the Long Night imagery and the concept of celestial weddings, etc...

The Fires of the Earth:

We have volcanoes, but no eruptions. There are hot springs, but I can't think of any mention of geysers? The earth has been known to shake, but I don't think that the world's normal, healthy tectonic and geothermal forces are responsible. I think they have been subverted and may well be made physically manifest in the form of dragons, firewyrms, and seadragons.

1. R'hlorr is the Bloodstone Emperor's "personality" grafted on to this force in a psuedo-weirnet.

Electromagnetism:

There are no compasses, no magnets, no lodestones that I can find. While that is convenient for seasonal theory 1 it is inconvenient for navigation and like the GEoDawnian geothermal tinfoil and its breathren I believe this is the result of magical tampering.

1. The Gray King created dragons, drawing fire from the storm and from Westeros' Pacific Rim (Nagga)- the latter matrix later being co-opted by the BSE/R'hlorr

Random thought- I remember reading that the Swan Ships of the Summer Islands are made without nails and while this is easily expainable by the fact that metal rusts while wooden fastenings would actually swell up when wet ( I think? I'm not a shipbuilder but this seems like a plus) I also remember reading legends about places where the magnetism was so strong it would rip metal nails right out passing ships.

Glaciation:

Do I suspect that the Others' are a physical manifestation of this force- Yes I do.

Death:

When the did problems with death and its sometimes partial effectiveness first arise? Were the Others always associated with undeath or did this come about with Night's Queen? It seems to be a problem old enough to be associated with the oldest burial practices we know of- burning, of course, and possibly the Barrows of the North (the oldest land despite being opposite Dorne where men were first said to cross from Essos?) and most fascinatingly, the Seven and their "untouchable" Silent Sisters, whose entire function seems to be a outgrowth of the need to reduce the human body to nothing but bone (good luck coming back from that!).

Time itself:

While this is more properly a subject for an entire thread, I wanted to mention the fact that there are dinosaurs, mammoths mixing with stone, bronze, iron, and steel age cultures and that this is probably a symptom.

Let me know what I've missed!

 

 

 

 

 

[The Weirwoods Eyes]

Another thread which sounds as though it is bound to be fascinating Hiemal! 

I personally have thought ever since the world book came out that the black oily stone is, in fact, the fragmented second moon. 

[hiemal]

2 hours ago, The Weirwoods Eyes said:

Another thread which sounds as though it is bound to be fascinating Hiemal! 

I personally have thought ever since the world book came out that the black oily stone is, in fact, the fragmented second moon. 

That's a whole other thread in and of itself but fragments of a moon or meteor are high on my list for this sinister substance and it is a likely source of infection (or fertilization). I tinfoil that the remainder of the moon could have either been pushed out of its previous orbit or somehow been rendered invisible. We know there are tides and they are regular enough for smuggling and such but we aren't given enough information to know how many moons are still acting on it, even if I were astronomer or sailor enough to decipher the data.

[The Weirwoods Eyes]

I'd decided with my lack of extensive knowledge about how these things work; that the comet is the remaining chunk of the moon. I have no idea if that is possible from the serspective of how this stuff works IRL though.