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[SPOILERS] Distribution of Valyrian incest


Jaak

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In "The Sons of the Dragon", I find the phrasing:

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Old Valyria, where it was common amongst many of the ancient families, particularly those who bred and rode dragons.

Note the wording! Particularly, but not only, nor even "mostly". Many.

All dragonrider families besides Targaryens perished in the Doom. Not all the dragonless families did, and many who did not call themselves "ancient", with various/arguable justification. Notably Old Blood of Volantis in their Black Walls.

Do any Valyrian families in Volantis, Lys or elsewhere practice brother-sister incest? Not only as "common" practice, but also including groups where the practice is rare but not illegal when it does occur?

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My default assumption would be that the Old Blood of Volantis and ancient Lysene nobility still practice sibling incest (and I'm sure those Lyseni slaves that have striking Valyrian features are, at least in part, also bred by having brother lie with sister, etc. Perhaps not exclusively, but the Targaryens also marry the occasional uncle, aunt, cousin, or unrelated outsider, so one assumes this is how it is done in the Free Cities, too, especially among families which trace their origins back to Valyria.

Jaehaerys I spells out what had been obvious since ADwD and TWoIaF - that the families from which the Volantene triarchs are usually elected essentially can become dragonlords if they actually get themselves some dragons. Because they are actually cousins and kin of the dragonlords of Valyria and have thus more than just some drops of dragonlord blood.

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3 minutes ago, Jaak said:

Are Velaryons and Celtigars ever mentioned as having practiced incest?

No. But they live in Westeros. And they are not necessarily 'cousins and kin' to the dragonlords of old through the male line - the Old Blood of Valyria might be. The Velaryons may have only gotten dragonlord blood through their intermarriage with the Targaryens.

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Something else to consider; Dragonlords married brother to sister, uncle to niece/aunt to nephew and cousin to cousin. Yet it's unlikely that the Dragonlords were the entirety of the Valyrian nobility, merely the highest tier (think the families that had seats in the Senate during the Republic). Also, @Lord Varys, Jaeharys said something to the effect of "Imagine the Triarchs of Volantis with Dragons. We can't allow Valyria to rise again (which in itself is a fascinating little blurb)", not that the Triarchs are in any way related to the Dragonlords of old (doesn't the Old Blood supposedly descend from the original garrison at Volantis and not actual nobles?). So I think you might be taking too much away from that comment.

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4 minutes ago, Hiigara129 said:

Something else to consider; Dragonlords married brother to sister, uncle to niece/aunt to nephew and cousin to cousin. Yet it's unlikely that the Dragonlords were the entirety of the Valyrian nobility, merely the highest tier (think the families that had seats in the Senate during the Republic).

I'm not so sure that the dragonlords as such were the highest tier as such. They were certainly part of the elite, but it seems those sorcerer princes were the guys who were truly calling the shots - since they were the ones who occasional practiced polygamy, whereas the dragonlords usually stuck with just one sister.

Also, whoever created or bred or summoned or freed the creatures Aerea and Balerion had to deal with in Valyria (both the worm-like things and the moster of enormous size which injured Balerion) must have had powers dragonlords like the Targaryens can only dream of. If Aenar had been involved in such things, we could be reasonably certain that Valyrian sorcery would have not died with the Doom.

Now, it might be that some of those sorcerer princes were also dragonlords, but it is very unlikely that all the dragonlords were also sorcerer princes.

And there may have been men and women who only focused on the powers of the Fourteen Flames, 'the fires which fueled the magic of the pyromancers', as TWoIaF puts it, drawing on the power of (fire) magic that great surpassed anything you could do with a mere dragon.

4 minutes ago, Hiigara129 said:

Also, @Lord Varys, Jaeharys said something to the effect of "Imagine the Triarchs of Volantis with Dragons. We can't allow Valyria to rise again (which in itself is a fascinating little blurb)", not that the Triarchs are in any way related to the Dragonlords of old (doesn't the Old Blood supposedly descend from the original garrison at Volantis and not actual nobles?). So I think you might be taking too much away from that comment.

Oh, that's nonsense from the show (made up, I think, to come up with an 'explanation' why this 'Talisa Maegyr' woman doesn't look Valyrian - which she should as a member of a prestigious Old Blood tiger family).

The rulers of Old Volantis are repeatedly referred to as 'the cousins and kin' of the dragonlords of Valyria. The blood relations there are so close that the Volantenes even draw their Valyrian cousins into the campaign to destroy Sarhoy (and later called on them for them as well in the greater war against the Rhoynar, before they sent out their desperate plea for help).

And the idea behind is not that difficult - there isn't an unlimited amount of dragons. And Valyria was a large city with many a dragonlord family. Sometimes there would be too many children, too many cousins and cadet branches. When Valyrian power expanded and the colonies were founded many such people would have made up the ruling elite of those new colonies - especially in Volantis (the first proper Valyrian colony in the west) and Lys (which was founded as pleasure retreat for dragonlords where, most likely, many children of the dragonlords (both such born in and out of wedlock settled, if they could make a career in Valyria itself). The term used to describe such people was 'Valyrian adventurers'. Not all of them would be descendants of dragonlords, of course, but those would be among them, too, and they would intermarry with each other spreading the blood of the dragon among the people they intermarried with. And in places like Volantis and Lys this blood would have been by the incestuous and kin marriages of the ruling elites - very much in the same way as the Targaryens did it in Westeros.

In the other Free Cities dragonlord blood should run thinner - it would be thinnest, I think, in Braavos and the cities founded by religious settlers (Lorath, Norvos, and Qohor) followed by Pentos. But in Tyrosh and Myr there could also be a couple old families who can trace their ancestry back to some Valyrian dragonlords.

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