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Sympathy for the Citadel Conspiracy


Mithras

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Qohor makes a steel which is not as strong as VS but stronger than any other steel. All Valyrian sorcery was based on fire and blood. I think it is 99.9% true that Valyrians used blood sacrifice in creating VS and perhaps they sacrificed much more people than the Qohorik do today which is why VS was sueprior to all.

George said that magic in his world is not a science. It is unpredictable and unreliable. Equating magic to science and progress does not work in ASOIAF.

1.) so was a lot of science before people fully understood it. hell a lot of sci was considering magic.

2.) Valyria in term's more might technology is comparable to early industrial period.

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Thank you!!!

I have been entirely skeptical of magic and dragons being of any positive use since I read the series. Watching the show had me a fan of both Dany and her dragons. However, once I read and understood what they meant, I realized that they couldn't be good. This is also why I am no longer a Dany fan. I don't care for blood magic or those who use it to their own ends, neither.

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Where exactly is your proof of that? Any at all.

making steel equal to titanium, builder roads far more durable than concrete, long distance commutation (glass candles). making all these feat's constantly mean's there were some people in the free hold whose profession was sorcerer. the same way a normal person might be an engineer.

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making steel equal to titanium, builder roads far more durable than concrete, long distance commutation (glass candles). making all these feat's constantly mean's there were some people in the free hold whose profession was sorcerer. the same way a normal person might be an engineer.

Yes only thing is every single one of these things involve copious amounts of human sacrifice and will eventually lead to the sorcerers dominating the Non-Sorcerers.

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Yes only thing is every single one of these things involve copious amounts of human sacrifice and will eventually lead to the sorcerers dominating the Non-Sorcerers.

some of these things might involve human sacrifice. (unless you can give a a dragon road pov)

and besides Valyria was not the only kind of sorcery.

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Magic is no evil.

People are evil.

Agreed. Magic is just another technique used by people (well, also by the Children, probably the Others) to pursue their ends. War, too, requires blood.

And yes, there is a way of using blood magic that doesn't require killing other people: self-sacrifice. So I'd say magic isn't inherently evil. Sure, innocents might be killed by some people who use magic. But again, innocents are also killed in non-magical human acts.

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Bloodmagic doesn't require the blood of the innocent, the blood of the guilty works just as well. Magic doesn't push people into corruption as there is the will to power without magic as the Lannisters and countless others have demonstrated. There are examples of magic without blood sacrifice such as the cranngomen, the Rhoynar water wizards and some of the warlocks' magic.



We have no evidence that sorcerers caused the LN. Dragons didn't cause the LN, as the Others came before Dany's dragons were even born. Also, if they are the source of the imbalance then why didn't the imbalance end when the last dragon died out in Aegon III's reign?



I find the idea of exterminating dragons to be specism. Who are we to decide what species should live or die? Dragons aren't the problem, people are.



Also as has been pointed out, the maesters caused the most horrible war in Westeros's history to exterminate the dragons. Was it worth all the suffering and destruction?



I don't like to disagree with stuff with you often, Mithras, but this is my opinion.



And to be fair, science gave us industrial and nuclear warfare, with a scale of mass slaughter previously unseen on the battlefield in world history. It gave us more means for the economic exploitation of the poor and surveillance for a security state. Michael Crichton even goes so far as to say that scientific discovery is a violent, penetrative act that harms the natural world. I don't mean to decry science altogether as it also gave us medicine, greater means of communication and transportation, sanitation, and better food storage.


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As long as we don't know what the Citadel conspiracy is actually up to, or whether it even exists - all we have is Marwyn's word, after all - I'd not speculate on this whole thing. But generally speaking turning your back on magic is a really bad idea in a world in which magic is actually a reality.



If there was a conspiracy to exterminate the Targaryen dragons then it is very likely that this conspiracy was born in the fires of the Dance, as there is pretty much no evidence that the dragons started to die of sickness or stuff that could be poison prior to the Dance (however, Rhaena's broken dragon which died could be a hint).



The very fact that there is still an archmaester with a Valyrian steel rod, mask, and ring teaching the higher mysteries at the Citadel strongly suggests that whatever conspiracy there is was not actually taking a really hard stand on magic in general - but perhaps against certain kinds of magic.



Now, after the dragons were dead, certain spells did indeed lose some or all of its potency, which could actually be explanation enough for the whole Citadel policy. The maester are looking for testable and repeatable knowledge, not uncertain stuff. If magic no longer works, it is no good. Yet this seems to be a rather new development, as the Hightowers are, to this day, still very much interested in magic, and Marwyn is still alive, too.


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I think it's easy to see the maesters as evil, mostly because, well, they're shady old men. But I'm sympathetic to their intentions, if not to their methods (killing dragons is okay in my book, but causing wars not so much)

That said, the irony here is that you need magic to fight magic, or more specifically, you need dragons to fight the Others

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George designed his magic to be unpredictable, unreliable and even dangerous. No single character seems to know what the hell is going on behind the scenes when they do magic. They attribute magic to some gods who are good gracious entities that grant their followers magical boons should they make the necessary sacrifices/rites correctly. These gods seem to have no will at all. The whole process looks automatic, like a science, although George himself told us that magic is not science.



Burn the witch; get the dragons.


Bang the witch; get the shadow assassins.


Burn the boy; wake the stone dragons.


Only death can pay for life.


Fire for blood, blood for fire.



We have such simple formulas that seem to work.



However, most of the readers think (with good arguments) that gods do not exist in ASOIAF. The existence of magic does not mean that there have to be gods despite what magic users believe.



It is fairly obvious that the old gods are the collective memories/souls of past greenseers who chose not to die and dissipate into the nature as they normally should have done. So, they are in a sense taking part in this world from an unnatural dimension.



What if the other gods are transcendental races living in higher dimensions with little known abilities and agendas known even less? What if there is more to see behind those simple magic formulas? What if those transcendental beings take those sacrifices and do something terribly sinister in addition to grant the fool magician what he/she asked for? What if the transcendental beings are the ones who profit from this exchange?



This might sound like crackpot but it really is not. People can only see the tip of the iceberg when some magic is cast. Nobody knows what is going on under the waters (except Patchface :P).



Therefore, even the most innocent type of magic might have some unknown consequences which might be empowering sinister and transcendental entities. It is clearly established that meddling with things one does not understand is highly prone to yield results that could have never been anticipated.



The obvious example is the unbalanced seasons which are due to magic per SSM and Septon Barth. TWOIAF made it clear that there are messed up places in the world which is most probably due to the practice of nefarious magic.



Let us first look at the most “innocent” kind of magic: visions and prophecies.



It seems that you do not commit evil acts to get this knowledge (as far as we know) but



1. this knowledge often comes cryptic and in need of interpretation;



2. as a result, this knowledge is often interpreted wrong.



This is why even the most innocent type of magic is able to cause evil. We have seen several examples of this in the series. Mel is obsessed with her wrong interpretation and she could have burned an innocent boy had Stannis let her.



The other types of sorceries always come with great costs and sacrifices. Even the making of that dark magic requires evil acts.



There are cases like making blood sacrifice to summon good winds. If the time is of essence, casting these spells might have a justification but I think most of the readers should consider it evil in any case. If you add the meddling with not fully-understood phenomena to the mixture, casting that spell might eventually take its toll in a terrible manner even if one gets the good result first.



Here is an even worse case: consider Mance's attack to the Wall.



Mance had very good reasons to save his people from certain death. However, had Stannis not arrived, the NW would most probably be exterminated because there was no way for the NW and the wildlings to reconcile under those conditions. It has been too long that the wildlings are the only enemy of the NW. Even in ADwD the brothers of the NW do not completely agree with accepting them to the Realm. And the blame of this attitude is mostly on the wildlings that raided the Realm since the Dawn of Days but now running south tail between legs.



Even in this case, one can think that Mance was completely justified to attack the Wall but the Wall is a magical construct of unknown nature. It is very much tied to the NW whose vows clearly have some power. The Others spent two wights to assassinate the LC which shows that this was a risk they could afford to take. The Others also spent a lot of wights to wipe out as many crows as possible while they never attack the wildlings in numbers as far as we know.



What if the Wall is supposed to lose its magic as soon as the last member of the NW is killed? This is a very likely scenario and by threatening the NW, Mance might have risked destroying the only strong line of defense against the Others. This is another example of the bad consequences of meddling with higher mysteries that one does not fully understand.


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If you acknowledge that the magic behind the Wall is the "only strong line of defence against the Others" and that Mance was wrong to threaten it, how can you consider all magic inherently evil? Is Mance not entirely justified in taking down an object that "might be empowering sinister and transcendental entities"?


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Magic is effectively a craft or technique despite the fact that George does not want to portray it as such. The Valyrians really knew what they were doing when practiced their magics (creating Valyrian steel again and again and again), and you can also learn all the tricks a skinchanger and greenseer can do.



The idea that magic is inherently evil also makes no sense, since it should be possible to do something via blood magic if you sacrifice yourself.



More importantly, nothing suggests that the Others have anything to do with the Valyrians and their dragons. It is much more likely, in my opinion, that the Others are the result of a very different branch of magic - ice magic - that was either practiced by some men or other creatures (Children of the Forest) back before the Long Night.


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We all loved Marwyn and cursed the grey sheep for poisoning the dragons (which they surely did). We also did not like Luwin for discouraging Bran about his gift.

However, TWOIAF opened an entirely new perspective. We see that magic is evil. It operates on the blood of the innocent. The greater the magic, the greater the need for blood is. The will to power through magic pushes people deeper into corruption.

In fact, we knew all of these from the main series but no one could have known the full scale of the damage. I think the lesson we should deduce from TWOIAF that this corruption caused the LN and the seasons are still imbalanced because of some atrocious magic cast by power hungry fools.

Therefore, I am now more sympathetic to the Citadel Conspiracy and I think the dragons should be exterminated completely in order to restore the balance.

There are two very clear example of how magic corrupts one's mind in the ASOIAF universe.

1. Stannis. When he leaves Melisandre at the Wall, I feel that there is a change in his character. He is more relaxed, liberated and more like himself. Otherwise, he would not have been able to rally the Mountain Clans to his cause.

2. Victarion. As soon as Moqorro performs his little magic trick, there is this sense of evil arrogance affecting Victarion's true dutiful, solemn nature. For example; having Maester Kerwin killed, having a ship full of prostitutes being put to the torch, and putting the crew of a slave galley to the sword.

So, all in all, I totally agree with you.

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