Quentyn had enough dragonblood to tame a dragon

[CamiloRP]

6 hours ago, The hairy bear said:

@CamiloRP

The author has already given to the Targaryens another 'superpower', in that many of the members of the family have prophetic dreams. And his fictional world already has established other abilities restricted to a particular race, such as the fact that only First Men can be wargs.

But prophetic dreams are not restricted to Valiryans, the Hightowers have it, the Lothston likely do too, as do the Starks, the Reeds, Lancel Lannister, etc. And there's people who can recibe this visions without blood being important at all, like priests of R'lhor, and people that can send them, like people with a glass candle (AKA 'nettelling applied to visions and dreams').

And we don't know if only the first men can be skinchangers, the Lothstons and the Arryns are suspected to have been skinchangers, and the Cranes supposedly still are.

 

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"I wouldn't like this theory to be true" is not a great argument against it. 

That's true, but it isn't my argument. The "Nettles is the daughter of Daemon" theory provides no evidence for it, just for the fact that she could tame a dragon. Except that the whole purpose of her story is that she could tame it by being smart, not by having the right blood. It's like having a theory that the Turtle had super speed and that's actually how they won against the Hare.

George is a pretty forward thinking guy, he loves having women, and specially women of color, come up with solutions as a show of how he thinks the world is moving. For example, the first Dornish chapter:

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They watched a nut-brown girl yank a towheaded boy off his brother's shoulders to tumble him headfirst into the pool.

That is, a woman of color making the white patriarchy fall.

And he's doing the same thing with Nettles, a bunch of great warriors and knights came forth, but the clever brown girl was the one able to do it.

The thing with this theory is that it can never be confirmed by the text. So you can claim that Martin is 'double subverting' and Nettles's story is actually about a girl with the right blood. But that'd be a dumb subversion, as it ends up confirming fantasy tropes, sounds kind of racist, and it can never be revealed by the text.

 

[Lord Varys]

8 hours ago, The hairy bear said:

@CamiloRP

The author has already given to the Targaryens another 'superpower', in that many of the members of the family have prophetic dreams. And his fictional world already has established other abilities restricted to a particular race, such as the fact that only First Men can be wargs.

"I wouldn't like this theory to be true" is not a great argument against it. 

I don't think that's what the text establishes. Bloodraven gives us statistics on skinchangers/greenseers, not special bloodlines and arguments why only people from a specific - and rather broad and completely undefined - ethnic group can be skinchangers/greenseers.

By comparison, the Valyrians - or rather: those Valyrians who tamed, bred, and rode dragons - are marked as a very special group with very special abilities which are unique to that group.

But then - the Targaryens themselves don't really believe they are that special. Queen Rhaena thinks Lannisters can become dragonlords, just as she thought that Androw Farman could mount one of her dragons. Jaehaerys I believed if the triarchs of Volantis or other people in the Free Cities - even in Braavos - could hatch the dragon eggs and thus would become dragonlords. Rhaenyra and Jace later believed that people with confirmed dragonlord blood as well as just people who wanted to mount a dragon, should be allowed to try and could succeed. Rhaenyra even went so far as to declare that the dragonrider Nettles couldn't have Targaryen blood and would have used other nefarious means to bind Sheepstealer to her will, etc.

Bottom line is - the author deliberately tries to keep this thing vague and actually goes out of his way to undermine any kind of weird system the readers might come up with ... although I definitely agree that there is no way that any of the known dragonriders in the books did not have at least a drop of dragonlord blood. If George had wanted to send the message that other people can ride dragons we would have gotten some where nothing indicated that they had Valyrian ancestors - which isn't the case for people who grew up on Dragonstone and Driftmark, especially after Gyldayn laid out that the Targaryens fathered a lot of bastards on their island in the previous centuries.