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The Case of Quentyn Martell...


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7 minutes ago, Regular John Umber said:

 

 I still feel that it points to the fact that Dany can't have three dragons. What I mean is: she's bonded to Drogon, but she's feeding the other two. They stay because she's 'Nettled' them. If they bond with someone like she has with Drogon, then she loses them.

Good point. This may very well be the case. I think the simultaneous scream of Dany and Drogon (when he is stabbed in the pit) is strong evidence of their bond, and we don't have strong evidence of such a bond with the other 2 dragons.

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9 hours ago, 40 Thousand Skeletons said:

I think what it tells us is that while dragon-rider blood is normally necessary to ride/hatch dragons (providing a nice explanation for things like the incest and Dany being immune to common diseases and some people trying to ride dragons and getting burned alive and why the number of Targ dragons fluctuated greatly over time/exploded at the time of Rhaenyra and why the Targ women were locked away in the Maidenvault), Nettles shows that there is another method that can be used to substitute for dragon blood. Obviously it is not necessary to feed dragon sheep to ride them because Nettles is the only example of this. It's not about "double guessing" author motivations, it's about answering questions that we have no given answer for at face value. Namely: why can some people ride dragons and others can't?

I don't see any evidence that someone else couldn't do what Nettles did. I mean, there's always a risk with the aggressiveness and unpredictability of dragons, but I think it's clearly indicated Nettles isn't "special" in her birth or anything. I reckon all you need to ride a dragon is time, sheep, and a bit set of balls (because I'm guessing they're like other animals and can sense fear).

 

8 hours ago, falcotron said:

But GRRM has explicitly told us that Dany miraculously surviving Drogo's pyre was a one-time-only special miracle, not a Targaryen trait.

Also, in-universe, he went out of his way to show us Dany's brother being killed by heat. Dany thinks this means Viserys isn't a real dragon as he so often claimed—and she's right. And then we learn that she has ancestors who died drinking wildfire, blowing up Summerhall, etc., which further confirms that everything special about Dany is not at all because of her name or her blood, it's because of something unique about her. Which you should find a lot more palatable.

Of course that doesn't mean people in-universe won't expect Dany's descendants to be magic. After all, the people of our universe based their theory on hereditary Divine RIght of Kings on the examples of biblical Judah and imperial Rome, which are actually pretty solid arguments against hereditary leadership, not for it. Sometimes people are stupid.

I know, but why did a miracle happen to Dany? It's a bit of coincidence that one happened to the exiled queen, and not the swine heard, rgiht?

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2 hours ago, Regular John Umber said:

I still feel that it points to the fact that Dany can't have three dragons. What I mean is: she's bonded to Drogon, but she's feeding the other two. They stay because she's 'Nettled' them. If they bond with someone like she has with Drogon, then she loses them.

That makes a lot of sense, but what do you mean by saying she can't "have" three dragons? She has three dragons. She can't ride more than one at a time anyway, I don't think anyone thought she could. I can't ever recall her addressing this in the text, has she ever thought about other people riding her other two dragons?

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5 hours ago, falcotron said:

And? Sure, Zeros would impress the hell out of anyone in Westeros, or medieval Europe or Asia for that matter, but they weren't particularly special in the 1940s. Also, the only reason only the Japanese flew them is that only the Japanese had them (much like the dragons). And I can't imagine that you're arguing that the Japanese imperial family actually were special people because hundreds of years in the future some people not even related to them except for being the same ethnicity would be pilots. So honestly, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

No. I was try to point out that Japanese are real people, and Valyrians are made up people in a high fantasy. Saying that Valyrians can't be extraordinary because all men are just men ignores the fact that ASOIAF is all high fantasy in which men can be more than just ordinary men. 

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28 minutes ago, mankytoes said:

That makes a lot of sense, but what do you mean by saying she can't "have" three dragons? She has three dragons. She can't ride more than one at a time anyway, I don't think anyone thought she could. I can't ever recall her addressing this in the text, has she ever thought about other people riding her other two dragons?

 

 Bad wording; I mean she can't trust the loyalty of all three dragons. Drogon is the only one that is 100% hers. The other two could go to anyone, even her enemies.

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7 hours ago, 40 Thousand Skeletons said:

OK, well now we are getting down to semantics, but I think a generally good way to judge any asoiaf theory is to judge whether or not it provides a reasonable hypothesis for unanswered questions without being proven impossible, and preferably with quotes/hints/foreshadowing that seem to support the original hypothesis.

Having positive evidence—whether hints or foreshadowing, or story-external evidence of how it fits the themes, or something—isn't just "preferable", it's essential. And, on top of that, you need to either show that it's something GRRM would want us to figure out, or something that would have helped him write the particular story he wrote even if we don't ever see it. There are a million ways to explain the thousands of tiny gaps left unexplained in the story that aren't impossible; you need more than that to have an actual theory worth actually discussing. Some of Preston Jacobs' ideas do fit these criteria, even if they seem to be wild tinfoil at first glance. But the X-linked dragonrider-gene really doesn't.

I could offer the idea that some nobles in Westeros have middle names given to them at their naming ceremony but never used again until their funerals, and Sansa's is Sally. Since we don't see any naming ceremonies, and we don't see Sansa's funeral, and of course we never see anyone speaking or thinking Sansa's secret middle name where they shouldn't be even though people speaking Sansa's public first name, there's abundant proof that it's not actually impossible. And I could even point out that names usually mean something in ASoIaF, and "Sally" means to go forth to later return, and going forth to King's Landing and then trying to return to Winterfell is obviously meaningful to Sansa's story. But a secret name that doesn't appear in the story is clearly not something anyone could figure out from the story—sure, someone could invent it, as I just did, but you could invent a thousand other secret names that are meaningful to Sansa's story, or, more simply, just not have secret names for the characters, and none of those are any more impossible. But I can't explain why giving Sansa a secret name would help GRRM in writing Sansa's story. So it's not a theory, it's just pointless fan fiction.

And the same is true for the X-linked dragonrider gene. It's not going to come out in the story, and it's not very plausible that GRRM would have found it easier to design his genealogy by coming up with a set of scientific rules he wanted to apply than that he'd come up with the same genealogy by handling the Targaryens the same way he handled the other families. Even if there were good in-story evidence for it, or the idea that female inheritance is a much bigger deal than it appears on the surface had any thematic impact that fit with the other themes of the series… but there isn't.

7 hours ago, 40 Thousand Skeletons said:

Both these points are explained by the incest. It doesn't matter if they trace things patrilineally (did the Valyrians even do this?)

The Targaryens certainly trace things patrilineally, and have since before the Conquest. Their sons are Targaryens no matter who they marry, and their daughters are not if they marry outside the family, and the leadership of the house has gone from father to son (or occasionally brother to brother or nephew to uncle) following the rules of either male-preference or strict salic primogeniture (the Dance was, of course, fought over which one of those rules, which implies that the difference hadn't come up in recent times—but it doesn't matter anyway for our purposes). That's pretty much the definition of tracing things patrilineally.

Is it possible that the Targaryens were somehow unique, and the other Valyrian dragonlord families did everything differently? I suppose it's not impossible, but it's certainly not likely, and there's no reason to believe it.

7 hours ago, 40 Thousand Skeletons said:

Both these points are explained by the incest. It doesn't matter if they trace things patrilineally (did the Valyrians even do this?) as long as they remain incestuous. And millions of other people never got the influx of the dragon rider gene specifically because the Valyrians were incestuous and kept their genes mostly within their families, with the notable exception of their encounters with prostitutes on Lys.

No, those points are only explained if they remain perfectly incestuous for 5000 years. Even a single outbreeding can ruin it. And as we can see, they couldn't even go 300 years without 5 outbreedings.

You do have to get the science right here. Otherwise, you're not just starting from the somewhat implausible assumption that GRRM decided to use a scientific principle to work out his genealogy even though it's obviously never going to be explained in-story by a people who've never heard of Mendel much less Troy, you're starting from the assumption that GRRM decided to use a scientific principle that he didn't understand properly and happened to get wrong in the same unlikely way as you.

"Mostly" doesn't cut it. Do a simulation, and it's pretty clear that the odds against the last generation of Targaryens having the same X allele as Aegon I are worse than 1000:1. Just a handful more outbreedings over the preceding 4700 years, and the odds against Aegon having the same allele as his original dragonlord ancestor are astronomical.

The only way to counter this is to have an outside pool to get the gene from. For example, the children of kohanim marry the children of Jews in general, not of other kohanim. And, while being a Kohen is traced patrilineally, being a Jew is traced matrilineally. So, there's a population of millions of Jews who have the X-linked traits of Aaron, and therefore some of Aaron's patrilineal descendants are also his matrilineal descendants, so some of them have both X- and Y-linked traits going back 3000 years at the same time.

So, could there be a similar such population that most of Betha, Lyarra, Mariah, Larra, and their likely predecessors come from? Well, it's not impossible, but you're explicitly arguing that they haven't been spreading the gene around, so that means no.

And so, the only conclusion is that if your theory were true, the odds of the line of Aerys and Rhaella having the dragonrider gene are astronomically low. Which makes it a pretty bad theory.

While we're at it, we've also seen multiple Targaryen daughters marrying non-Targaryen sons, not to mention the Targaryen bastards, and the bastards of Velaryons who'd married Targaryen daughters, and so on. So what makes you think they haven't spread the gene around in the first place? We don't have too much evidence of the matrilineal descent beyond the first generation for any house, except when they happen to marry the patriarch of another house, but the little evidence we do have shows the opposite. And it would actually make your theory more workable—although, admittedly, it would also make it more pointless.

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4 hours ago, mankytoes said:

I know, but why did a miracle happen to Dany? It's a bit of coincidence that one happened to the exiled queen, and not the swine heard, rgiht?

It's a miracle. Miracles don't really have explanations unless you have an anthropomorphic god who either thinks like humans (a la Zeus) or tells humans what he's up to (like Yahweh).

But in a vague sense, it makes sense that whatever force wanted the dragon to reawaken would pick someone who had dragon eggs and who could plausibly build up a big army to bring to Westeros, and that's a lot more likely to be true of an exiled queen than a swineherd, so it's not that unlikely that the person it was true of was the exiled queen. 

4 hours ago, Lost Melnibonean said:

No. I was try to point out that Japanese are real people, and Valyrians are made up people in a high fantasy. Saying that Valyrians can't be extraordinary because all men are just men ignores the fact that ASOIAF is all high fantasy in which men can be more than just ordinary men. 

Of course you could write a fantasy that reinforces the idea of divine right of kings, as Tolkien famously did. But that doesn't mean you're required to do so, and all evidence points to the fact that GRRM was more interested in challenging that idea than reinforcing it or ripping it off uncritically from Tolkien.

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Whipping and dragon that is bonded to you is one thing, whipping another that is not or even you hope to be is another. Approaching one while ignoring the other one that was lurking or creeping up on you at the same time is not very bright. Quentyn was under a lot of pressure and was not prepared for the task he undertook.

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7 minutes ago, falcotron said:

It's a miracle. Miracles don't really have explanations unless you have an anthropomorphic god who either thinks like humans (a la Zeus) or tells humans what he's up to (like Yahweh).

But in a vague sense, it makes sense that whatever force wanted the dragon to reawaken would pick someone who had dragon eggs and who could plausibly build up a big army to bring to Westeros, and that's a lot more likely to be true of an exiled queen than a swineherd, so it's not that unlikely that the person it was true of was the exiled queen. 

Of course you could write a fantasy that reinforces the idea of divine right of kings, as Tolkien famously did. But that doesn't mean you're required to do so, and all evidence points to the fact that GRRM was more interested in challenging that idea than reinforcing it or ripping it off uncritically from Tolkien.

But we do have folks with supernatural abilities and super long life spans in ASOIAF. 

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6 hours ago, Regular John Umber said:

 

 Bad wording; I mean she can't trust the loyalty of all three dragons. Drogon is the only one that is 100% hers. The other two could go to anyone, even her enemies.

 

I see, yeah I think someone else is going to get a dragon, there has to be a narrative point in having three dragons instead on one.

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5 hours ago, falcotron said:

Having positive evidence—whether hints or foreshadowing, or story-external evidence of how it fits the themes, or something—isn't just "preferable", it's essential. And, on top of that, you need to either show that it's something GRRM would want us to figure out, or something that would have helped him write the particular story he wrote even if we don't ever see it. There are a million ways to explain the thousands of tiny gaps left unexplained in the story that aren't impossible; you need more than that to have an actual theory worth actually discussing. Some of Preston Jacobs' ideas do fit these criteria, even if they seem to be wild tinfoil at first glance. But the X-linked dragonrider-gene really doesn't.

I could offer the idea that some nobles in Westeros have middle names given to them at their naming ceremony but never used again until their funerals, and Sansa's is Sally. Since we don't see any naming ceremonies, and we don't see Sansa's funeral, and of course we never see anyone speaking or thinking Sansa's secret middle name where they shouldn't be even though people speaking Sansa's public first name, there's abundant proof that it's not actually impossible. And I could even point out that names usually mean something in ASoIaF, and "Sally" means to go forth to later return, and going forth to King's Landing and then trying to return to Winterfell is obviously meaningful to Sansa's story. But a secret name that doesn't appear in the story is clearly not something anyone could figure out from the story—sure, someone could invent it, as I just did, but you could invent a thousand other secret names that are meaningful to Sansa's story, or, more simply, just not have secret names for the characters, and none of those are any more impossible. But I can't explain why giving Sansa a secret name would help GRRM in writing Sansa's story. So it's not a theory, it's just pointless fan fiction.

And the same is true for the X-linked dragonrider gene. It's not going to come out in the story, and it's not very plausible that GRRM would have found it easier to design his genealogy by coming up with a set of scientific rules he wanted to apply than that he'd come up with the same genealogy by handling the Targaryens the same way he handled the other families. Even if there were good in-story evidence for it, or the idea that female inheritance is a much bigger deal than it appears on the surface had any thematic impact that fit with the other themes of the series… but there isn't.

The Targaryens certainly trace things patrilineally, and have since before the Conquest. Their sons are Targaryens no matter who they marry, and their daughters are not if they marry outside the family, and the leadership of the house has gone from father to son (or occasionally brother to brother or nephew to uncle) following the rules of either male-preference or strict salic primogeniture (the Dance was, of course, fought over which one of those rules, which implies that the difference hadn't come up in recent times—but it doesn't matter anyway for our purposes). That's pretty much the definition of tracing things patrilineally.

Is it possible that the Targaryens were somehow unique, and the other Valyrian dragonlord families did everything differently? I suppose it's not impossible, but it's certainly not likely, and there's no reason to believe it.

No, those points are only explained if they remain perfectly incestuous for 5000 years. Even a single outbreeding can ruin it. And as we can see, they couldn't even go 300 years without 5 outbreedings.

You do have to get the science right here. Otherwise, you're not just starting from the somewhat implausible assumption that GRRM decided to use a scientific principle to work out his genealogy even though it's obviously never going to be explained in-story by a people who've never heard of Mendel much less Troy, you're starting from the assumption that GRRM decided to use a scientific principle that he didn't understand properly and happened to get wrong in the same unlikely way as you.

"Mostly" doesn't cut it. Do a simulation, and it's pretty clear that the odds against the last generation of Targaryens having the same X allele as Aegon I are worse than 1000:1. Just a handful more outbreedings over the preceding 4700 years, and the odds against Aegon having the same allele as his original dragonlord ancestor are astronomical.

The only way to counter this is to have an outside pool to get the gene from. For example, the children of kohanim marry the children of Jews in general, not of other kohanim. And, while being a Kohen is traced patrilineally, being a Jew is traced matrilineally. So, there's a population of millions of Jews who have the X-linked traits of Aaron, and therefore some of Aaron's patrilineal descendants are also his matrilineal descendants, so some of them have both X- and Y-linked traits going back 3000 years at the same time.

So, could there be a similar such population that most of Betha, Lyarra, Mariah, Larra, and their likely predecessors come from? Well, it's not impossible, but you're explicitly arguing that they haven't been spreading the gene around, so that means no.

And so, the only conclusion is that if your theory were true, the odds of the line of Aerys and Rhaella having the dragonrider gene are astronomically low. Which makes it a pretty bad theory.

While we're at it, we've also seen multiple Targaryen daughters marrying non-Targaryen sons, not to mention the Targaryen bastards, and the bastards of Velaryons who'd married Targaryen daughters, and so on. So what makes you think they haven't spread the gene around in the first place? We don't have too much evidence of the matrilineal descent beyond the first generation for any house, except when they happen to marry the patriarch of another house, but the little evidence we do have shows the opposite. And it would actually make your theory more workable—although, admittedly, it would also make it more pointless.

I don't want to get into an argument over semantics, but I provided 2 examples of "positive evidence" from PJ's theory there. And I'm not going to rehash the whole theory but 1) the other Valyrian families obviously had dragon genes too, so as long as they do a combination of incest and marrying other ruling families they should be just fine for the 5000 years of Valyrian history and 2) the theory explicitly argues that the last generation of Targs do not have the same allele as Aegon.

You can say there isn't "enough" positive evidence for this theory, but that is setting a super high bar for what constitutes a theory imo.

And on a side note, this theory isn't just out of left field. GRRM specifically alluded to the concept of sex-linked telepathic genes in Nightflyers. So at a bare minimum it is a concept that the author has thought about.

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10 hours ago, mankytoes said:

I don't see any evidence that someone else couldn't do what Nettles did.

I agree... sorry if I wasn't clear on that point. But no one else has tried it and so we really need an alternative explanation for why every other rider succeeded in riding a dragon without using the sheep method.

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On 10/20/2017 at 6:20 AM, falcotron said:

You do have to get the science right here. Otherwise, you're not just starting from the somewhat implausible assumption that GRRM decided to use a scientific principle to work out his genealogy even though it's obviously never going to be explained in-story by a people who've never heard of Mendel much less Troy, you're starting from the assumption that GRRM decided to use a scientific principle that he didn't understand properly and happened to get wrong in the same unlikely way as you.
 

100% agree. If we are using real world standards, then Aegon II being able to bond with dragons disproves the X-linked theory. I don't know how to put it any simpler than that without getting into a pointless argument with someone unable or unwilling to understand.

On 10/20/2017 at 6:26 AM, falcotron said:

It's a miracle. Miracles don't really have explanations unless you have an anthropomorphic god who either thinks like humans (a la Zeus) or tells humans what he's up to (like Yahweh).

But in a vague sense, it makes sense that whatever force wanted the dragon to reawaken would pick someone who had dragon eggs and who could plausibly build up a big army to bring to Westeros, and that's a lot more likely to be true of an exiled queen than a swineherd, so it's not that unlikely that the person it was true of was the exiled queen. 

Of course you could write a fantasy that reinforces the idea of divine right of kings, as Tolkien famously did. But that doesn't mean you're required to do so, and all evidence points to the fact that GRRM was more interested in challenging that idea than reinforcing it or ripping it off uncritically from Tolkien.

I disagree with this. It is not so much ripping off Tolkien as drinking from the same well of inspiration as Tolkien.

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