gatlin

You just lit a bulb in my head. Humans probably wiped out Singers on Essos, the Singers then retreated to Westeros, and they have continued retreating ever since as humans advance. Their advantage is their magic and their weirwood network. And what an ally magic is! They "sing the songs of the earth," whatever that means, but it apparently gives them the ability to break apart continents, remote control wildlife, change their appearance, assume the appearance of others, and reanimate the dead into useful automatons. The house system in Westeros seems like it was created to protect the bloodlines of humans who could also use magic. After centuries of course there are no doubt some houses that have no magic, and there are likely a handful of magical bastard families dotting the countryside none the wiser, but on balance I think my assertion is correct. Are the Singers interested in controlling and influencing some of these magical royals? Probably. Are they perhaps behind the house system to begin with? I can't decide. All of this brings me to the quoted post. Almost. The Maester system seems to go hand in hand with the Faith of the Seven. Together they do what magical worship does by itself: explaining how and why things are and connecting the living to the dead. So yes, as the quoted post suggests, the basis of most of these religions is probably equivalent to what northern westerosi call "the old gods," and the Faith of the Seven is in a way a derivative. But that's because it is designed to systematize nature worship in a way that reinforces a stable social order while satsifying irrational spiritual needs. I would not be surprised to learn that the Singers invented the Faith of the Seven as part of a strategy to control and contain humanity. Need to think more on it though.

I'm not an ASOIAF super scholar, so I only have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that Martin has doubled down on the notion that this is a fantasy series, *not* a science fiction series, and that eg the weird seasons have ultimately magical explanations. I certainly could be mistaken but I believe that's the consensus around here. But, and I realize how hair-splitting this is, if he's decided that all technology above a certain level or of a certain origin is regarded as magic in-universe then he wouldn't be lying; and yet behind the scenes I imagine he has drummed up some pastiche of real world diseases (just like he's done for cultures and geographic regions) and has some "rules" to help keep things at least consistent when those details do matter. I think that dragons probably do accumulate the minds of their riders since you're sort of "warged in" while flying, and from Varamyr Sixskins we know definitively that your soul lingers in the animal body if you die while warging. I'm not sure that all dragons have 3 souls specifically but I do wonder: maybe 3 souls were used to revive Dany's eggs not because the souls themselves were transferred but because they burn hot enough? Mulling this over. Edit: that last part is very silly and I regret it but I'll leave it out of shame.

Moon Man's point is subtle and still not quite addressed. Everything Evolett has said is true (or at least I'll take it as true, it seems right) but doesn't change the fact that the very authorities themselves don't have firsthand experience with all parts of dragon husbandry. Moon Man has made a very good (and to my reading as-yet unaddressed) point that nobody has actually proven that a stone dragon egg can't be revived. People simply state that it can't be done and don't know how (and they conclude quite rationally that the eggs are forever unviable). Moon Man has already made that case though, no need to overstate it here. That being said, I think the buried lede here is the notion that the eggs are afflicted with greyscale. Consider that you risk getting it if you visit the ruins of Valyria because it's prevalent there. Tolkien's (and probably thus some brands of European, idk) dragons turn to stone when they die, and considering the number of inverted Tolkienisms at every level of the narrative it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if "the affliction that turns dragons to stone" is a more generic (perhaps magically engineered) disease that doesn't just select for dragon DNA. Dragons themselves harden as they get older. It's part of why older dragons are deadlier: it becomes harder and harder to pierce their, ahem, harder and harder scales. It might be that greyscale was derived from whatever that process is. And if dragons themselves literally harden over time it stands to reason that their eggs do too; is it unreasonable to speculate that eggs literally develop greyscale if they're too cold, perhaps to protect them if they are removed from heat. (This thread has been one of the most civil and enjoyable disagreements I've read online thank you all for simply being able to disagree lol)

Given that WOIAF is written as if it were authored by a Maester as a gift to King Robert^HJoffrey^HTommen Baratheon, it's worth considering the relative amounts of detail given to characters, I think. The underhanded editing that went into the book is part of the story. Why would the Maesters have so precious little to say about the age in which dragons ceased to exist on Earth? Very shortly after a destructive and costly conflict involving dragons, proving them to be giant liabilities, it stands to reason that - all incentives considered - people would be stockpiling dragons if they could help it, and it just seems like the rich aristocrats with living dragons actively producing clutches could find a way to help it. This is a specious argument, true, but then what do you want I'm on break. It simply seems highly unlikely that dragons were done away with so thoroughly with so little to say about the effort. Then again we have evidence that someone has been trying to extinguish the dragon in all its form for centuries ...

First post, but, my personal head canon is that she's a fire wight and actually isn't eating at all.