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Suppression of Knowledge at the Citadel


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Book readers were probably already familiar with the suggestion that the Citadel has been actively suppressing knowledge of magic. 

This seems to be a theme of Sam's experience this season.  So far he's found hidden or forgotten information showing how Dragonstone was formed, where to find weapons to fight the others, and how to cure greyscale. The last one, especially, is remarkable: they've known all along that it's actually relatively simple to cure. And they've deliberately suppressed that knowledge. 

Curious what we will find, between show and books, about the motivation for this. 

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22 hours ago, Forlong the Fat said:

Book readers were probably already familiar with the suggestion that the Citadel has been actively suppressing knowledge of magic. 

This seems to be a theme of Sam's experience this season.  So far he's found hidden or forgotten information showing how Dragonstone was formed, where to find weapons to fight the others, and how to cure greyscale. The last one, especially, is remarkable: they've known all along that it's actually relatively simple to cure. And they've deliberately suppressed that knowledge. 

Curious what we will find, between show and books, about the motivation for this. 

I wouldn't say that it's "relatively simple" when the Archmaestar says its quite difficult and that countless other maesters with their healing links have been unsuccessful.

But it is at least curable.

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I think the reason it's rarely done is that it doesn't have a high chance of success (I thin sam got lucky more then anything else),it's incredibly painful because you essentially have to flay the persons skin to do it and since just touching the grey scale seemed painful it was probably worse. And most of all in the middle ages people were scared to death of sickness's and would have been more inclined to send people who were sick away rather then help them. And as the man said sam could have gotten the entire citadel infected. I do think they sped up ser jorah's recovery by alot.

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On 8/1/2017 at 7:20 PM, StarkofWinterfell said:

I wouldn't say that it's "relatively simple" when the Archmaestar says its quite difficult and that countless other maesters with their healing links have been unsuccessful.

But it is at least curable.

I just assumed Sam was successful over many "Maesters with chains heavy with healing links" because Sam didn't make assumptions and just followed the directions, and is studious enough to read thoroughly. The experienced Maesters may have questioned the instructions and interjected their own experience into the process, thus deviating from the instructions and failing, basically their knowledge and experience getting in the way of their success.

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Everyone's focusing on the greyscale medieval-Big-Pharma conspiracy. But I think it's definitely possible that there are valid reasons for that (anyone who gets it wrong could spread the plague, so it's safer to just quarantine than to try to cure), but there's still, entirely separately, a master Maester conspiracy to suppress magical knowledge for sinister (or good-but-secret) reasons.

Sure, that would mean that D&D misled us a bit, quite possibly accidentally, by making the two cases look so similar, but I wouldn't rule that out.

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