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Why Targaryens have actual dragon blood.


Starspear

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I never claimed Targs are fire resistant. You should read what people write if you want to communicate. Or is this just a propaganda stunt on your part? Answer all posts at all costs and raise awareness of the masses that everything GRRM writes is just some propaganda. However, you still never touched the main argument. How come Targs can ride dragons and others cannot? Nettle being an exception.

Nettles proves others can...weird question.

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Does anyone else but Dany enter a funeral pyre and survives? No. Does anyone else in ASOIAF ride a dragon? No. So, your point is?

Does GRRM have said that the pyre scene isn't a one time miracle? Yes.

Does anyone in ASOIAF have the chance to ride a dragon? No.

BTW: Do we have to go all personal etc? Do we have to attact to the poster and not at what (s)he say?

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Does GRRM have said that the pyre scene isn't a one time miracle? Yes.

Does anyone in ASOIAF have the chance to ride a dragon? No.

BTW: Do we have to go all personal etc? Do we have to attact to the poster and not at what (s)he say?

Everyone in ASOIAF has a chance to ride a dragon. There are three of them. Quentyn tried. Did he succeed? Dany easily rode Drogon. So? What's your conclusion? Nothing special about her?

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Of course they are if they are actually well meaning and have actually read a poster's arguments. Do you think you qualify? Just asking ...

I do, because if they aren't fireproof, why would others be afraid of riding dragon's? I quote you

"How would you feel if you were riding a rocket which has a flame thrower in its head? Do you think you'd survive? "

Yes, if the dragon accepts them, like Nettles. So yes, not only Targs can ride them.

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Really? Teleported genetic swap. You just did prove that Targs are indeed the blood of dragons, because Dany's womb, in your opinion, quickened the eggs, not the heat of Drogo's funeral pyre, not the magic inherent to her ancestry, not the human sacrifice of a witch - a teleported genetic swap. I live and I learn.

I don't understand this post. It looks like you think my post about how Rhaego and the dragons were swapped is stupid, but then also seem to be under the impression that I was arguing that Valyrians aren't magical or something (which I wasn't), and that somehow I proved the opposite point I was trying to make or something. Since this is in response to me, can you clarify?

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I never claimed Targs are fire resistant. You should read what people write if you want to communicate. Or is this just a propaganda stunt on your part? Answer all posts at all costs and raise awareness of the masses that everything GRRM writes is just some propaganda. However, you still never touched the main argument. How come Targs can ride dragons and others cannot? Nettle being an exception.

If Nettles is an exception, then "Targs can ride dragons and others cannot" is not true. You can't say, "This is true, except for this." If Nettles is not a Targ, and Nettles can ride a dragon, then saying "others cannot" is not true.

And it's also an assumption that Nettles is the only non-Targ among the successful seeds. The World book seems to suggest that Addam and Alyn really are Velaryon bastards, sure, but why do you take it as a given that Hugh and Ulf had Targaryen blood? Ulf, for example, is described as a man-at-arms, a group that is explicitly said to be from the non-seed pool of contenders.

Everyone in ASOIAF has a chance to ride a dragon.

What an odd thing to say, considering that the dragons are thousands of miles away from the vast majority of the major characters at this point.

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Everyone in ASOIAF has a chance to ride a dragon. There are three of them. Quentyn tried. Did he succeed? Dany easily rode Drogon. So? What's your conclusion? Nothing special about her?

... Because the dragons are basically the Westerosi equivalent of dogs and everyone have a chance to have one :bang:

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One other problem with Targs have dragon blood thesis is sheer amount of people with Targaryen heritage. In 300 years Targs have been in Westeros, many of them married non-Targs, and many surely sired bastards around the country. Does each and every one of their descendants have special abilities because of their Targ blood? Is e.g. Rennifer Longwaters considered blood of the dragon? If that's the case, the whole concept of dragon's blood becomes obsolete, as so many people possess it.



I've read once how all the Europeans are descended from Charlemagne - guy who lived 1200 years ago. So, in 300 years, I'd expect at least thousands of Westerosi to have at least one Targ ancestor.


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One other problem with Targs have dragon blood thesis is sheer amount of people with Targaryen heritage. In 300 years Targs have been in Westeros, many of them married non-Targs, and many surely sired bastards around the country. Does each and every one of their descendants have special abilities because of their Targ blood? Is e.g. Rennifer Longwaters considered blood of the dragon? If that's the case, the whole concept of dragon's blood becomes obsolete, as so many people possess it.

Bingo.

You have not just the Targaryens, but the Velaryons and the Celtigars and the Baratheons too. Look at every house each of those families married into over the course of 300 years, and every house those houses married into, and those houses, on and on and on over three centuries. And that's to say nothing of any bastard descendants. Just Aegon IV's philandering alone probably yields hundreds if not thousands of potential descendants. Some milk maid or farmer or fisherman in the innkeep has "dragon blood" too, and probably many of them.

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Bingo.

You have not just the Targaryens, but the Velaryons and the Celtigars and the Baratheons too. Look at every house each of those families married into over the course of 300 years, and every house those houses married into, and those houses, on and on and on over three centuries. And that's to say nothing of any bastard descendants. Just Aegon IV's philandering alone probably yields hundreds if not thousands of potential descendants. Some milk maid or farmer or fisherman in the innkeep has "dragon blood" too, and probably many of them.

And Starks married every northern house throughout the centuries, some houses in the Vale and lately a Tully. And I don't see any of these houses having children able to warg into direwolves. I see wildlings who can warg. So, your point is totally mute, but it will not stop you, because it never did before.

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I've pondered what I can say on this subject.

Okay, we have a number of different kinds of situations in which dragons can be bonded to a person.

For example, children presented with dragon eggs and hatchlings. I can say that in every case in which a healthy hatchling was born, no Targaryen was ever rejected by it, so far as I can recall and find through a cursory search of what I have.

Then we have older dragons, either ones that once had riders or perhaps never had riders. These can be dangerous -- especially if old and ill-tempered -- even to a Targaryen, but there's the sense that it's even worse for non-Targaryens (but hey, I can see the argument that it's just a recognition thing -- dragons may be more tolerant of silver-gold, purple-eyed people through long association with them). The belief is that you have to be of Targaryen blood -- or, lets be more general about it -- dragonlord blood to have a chance with these. But it's impossible to prove this 100% based on just the information provided in the texts, because you can never know if a "black swan" will or has shown up. That said, there's certainly a widespread belief that all dragonriders have had dragonlord blood somewhere in their lineage.

I might suggest that it's more specific than dragonlord lineage, though. If it's a genetic thing, it's entirely possible that the particular genes required for a dragon to "sense" that you are an acceptable rider might skip a person -- they may look 100% Targaryen, and simply not have that particular thing. I can't think of any Targaryen who was actually rejected by a dragon, of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean much. But we may then see that in the dragonseeds, the converse can be true -- they may have very little dragonlord blood, but what portion they have happens to be exactly what's needed to permit them to ride a dragon.

The best evidence, I think, for some magical genetic component to dragonriding is simply the fact that the dragonlords in particular practiced incest -- other Valyrian nobility did as well, I guess, but it seems the dragonlords really led the way. Which suggests that they may well have believed that there was a genetic component, one they wanted to keep strictly to the family. (Alternatively, I guess you can argue it's all just inheritance matter -- marrying family members out might lead to their offspring, members of other families entirely, might be able to claim your dragons for themselves).

For my part, I am quite convinced that GRRM views this business as being a kind of magical fantasy genetics thing -- there's literally something "in the blood". And from that, I am convinced that having no dragonlord blood means that you couldn't ever hope to ride a dragon.

The "dragon dreams" of Daenys the Dreamer, Daeron the Drunken, or Daemon II Blackfyre seems to match well enough with the idea that there's a distinctive, inherited kind of magic in the Targaryen line, possibly a broader dragonlord thing, we don't know. And given the prominence of dragons in such dreams -- even from people who exist after the dragons are dead, who never saw a living one -- it just seems natural to suppose that there's something "there" to it.

I would guess the more dragonlord blood you have, the likelier you'll have those aspects necessary for various expressions of Targaryen/dragonlord magic, whether it's prophetic dreams or sorcery or dragonriding, but having just a drop could in itself -- by the grace of the gods and the whim of GRRM -- be sufficient.

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And Starks married every northern house throughout the centuries, some houses in the Vale and lately a Tully. And I don't see any of these houses having children able to warg into direwolves. I see wildlings who can warg. So, your point is totally mute, but it will not stop you, because it never did before.

The Starks didn't marry into the Tullys, a Tully married into the Starks.

We'll also told explicitly that the odds of being a warg are one in a thousand. So it's rare even among those of First Men descent.

Also, it's "moot," not "mute."

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And I don't see any of these houses having children able to warg into direwolves.

How do you know that that they don't? How can we be sure that e.g. Lyanna Mormont is not a warg? Or Larence Snow?

ETA: I should clarify - yes, wargs are rare, but they're not limited to Stark bloodline.

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I would guess the more dragonlord blood you have, the likelier you'll have those aspects necessary for various expressions of Targaryen/dragonlord magic, whether it's prophetic dreams or sorcery or dragonriding, but having just a drop could in itself -- by the grace of the gods and the whim of GRRM -- be sufficient.

In which case, there are a hell of a lot of people out there with said "drop," no?

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Not just "a drop", but the "right drop", I guess.

Are there lots of them? Well, if we accept the dragonseeds had in some cases very distant drops but still had the "right drop", it seems likely that the dragonriding gene is probably pretty well-spread. Like, every noble family who can trace Velaryons or Celtigars or other dragonstone houses can probably notionally have a chance at having that "right drop".

The other aspect of all this is that GRRM's as much as admitted that there's a certain fantasy genetics even in other families -- like Robert's always-black-haired-and-blue-eyed-kids. That's obviously not a trait that necessarily passes to all his offspring, or to the offspring of his ancestors with similar weird dominant traits, because otherwise Westeros should be over-run with black-haired-and-blue-eyed people.

Basically, it's all authorial fiat. George decides who can ride a dragon and who can't, by whatever rules he wants. I think the rule here is that, yes, there's something special about dragonlord blood, but having dragonlord blood in and of itself isn't necessarily enough to convey that specialness.

ETA: I see another argument comes from deformed infants with scales and wings and such. While it's easy to suppose that this is further proof that there's actual magical genetic stuff going on, I wouldn't absolutely rule out the possibility that proximity to dragons -- who are, after all, magical creatures -- could lead to strange things to embryos in the womb. Like ... magical radiation.

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Basically, it's all authorial fiat. George decides who can ride a dragon and who can't, by whatever rules he wants.

Yes. But in that case, trying to pin it all down according to predictable rules is kind of futile, isn't it?

Since I'm guessing you'd be in a position to know ... apart from the fact that they successfully rode dragons, is there any other indication that Ulf, Hugh and/or Nettles were actually of Targaryen descent? Because if the only indication is that they rode dragons, it gets to be an issue of circular logic. "How do we know they're Targaryen? They rode dragons. How did they ride dragons? They're Targaryens." So I'd be interested to know if there's anything else besides that which would corroborate the claim that they did in fact have Targaryen blood in them.

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I believe they have Targaryen blood besides things not in the texts, yes, related to the origins of the Valyrian-dragon connection. I think The World of Ice and Fire will have one or two tidbits on the subject.

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