House of the Dragon Flood Gates Open

[Annara Snow]

On 7/26/2022 at 3:20 AM, The Bard of Banefort said:

Another thing that the showrunners keep bringing up in interviews is that “this is a story that needs to be told.” While this has the potential to be a great story, I definitely don’t believe that. I finished rereading “Rhaenyra Overthrown” in FnB the other day, and she’s basically Dany after Missandei died, wandering around haggard and friendless before she gets killed by someone named Aegon* (granted, she doesn’t torch any cities in the meantime). I have always appreciated how George writes historical characters to mirror those from the main series, but books and television are two very different mediums. We’ve already seen a version of Rhaenyra’s story on screen, and it didn’t go over well.

And if what Condal meant is that the Dance mirrors current politics. . . yeah, no. Anything can mirror current politics if you stretch it far enough. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Was it mentioned on GOT that Cersei was the first queen of Westeros (lol)? I know they talked about how Rhaenyra died, but that was from the earlier seasons.
 

*Also, Syrax’s death was almost as bullshit as Rhaegal’s. She just happened to swoop down on the crowd for no reason and gets killed? Laaaaame.

What are you talking about? Syrax didn't "happen" to do anything, she clearly went mad and desperate for revenge (and maybe almost suicidal) after seeing what had been done to the other dragons in the Dragonpit. Her Catelyn-at-the-Red Wedding moment was one of my favorite in The Princess and the Queen.  One of those moments when dragons are the ones having a big emotional dramatic moment and the maester writing it is like: "But who can know the heart of a dragon? She was acting so weird... No one understood why she didn't simply blast them all with fire from the sky, but got down to start killing them one by one with her teeth and talons, and got herself killed".

Which also paralleled Rhaenyra's own situation of losing her children one by one and losing almost everyone though death or (perceived) betrayal.

[C.T. Phipps]

Quote

http:// If the stolen eggs are Dany's eggs then them hatching is still a miracle, over 200 years after the fact.

Well, magic.

Kings blood + Fire = hatched eggs.

Which is one of the funnier jokes that Melisandre so utterly misreads the prophecy.

[dsjj251]

On 7/24/2022 at 12:36 PM, The Wondering Wolf said:

I don't think TPATQ calls them prince oder princess, at least I didn't find any mention. Laenor is always styled ser and Laena lady. So there wasn't a retcon but the correction of an error in the Worldbook.

Its a retcon because he(Laenor) is originally said to have blood of the dragon on both sides. The same would then be true of Laena ; although, i dont think we are ever told Laena and Laenor are brother and sister until Fire and Blood. I mean, we assume, but i dont think its actually said in story until F&B. anyways, staying on track.......

 

So thats not just a mistake, lineage was changed . Corlys  was likely the child of one of Jahaerys's unnamed children(unnamed daughters at the time anyways), or an Older Alyssa when she was the oldest living child. 


 

[Vaith]

12 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

I wonder if the Shepherd was an agent of the Citadel to try to destroy the dragons and thus kill magic.

I don't think the Shepherd was an agent of the Citadel directly... but rather was the sort of product of the war that the maesters had been looking for. I do believe that the maesters wanted to start a dragon war that could kill most dragons and allow the rest to be poisoned without drawing much suspicion to themselves, but the Shepherd is genuine and seems to be the result of the people coming to the conclusion that the dragons were too dangerous to live... just as the Citadel had planned.

Though pointing to him being a member of the Faith, I do somewhat like the larger theory that the Citadel had long sown the seeds of skepticism and prejudice against magic by centralizing the Faith at Oldtown and subtly influencing its dogma for millennia as the sort of anti-Bene Gesserit of Westeros, and turning it into one of the most anti-magic religions in the known world.

[Vaith]

11 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

First, it must strike us as very unlikely that there was an actual anti-dragon conspiracy while Vaegon Targaryen was an archmaester, and while a Hightower Hand and a Hightower queen were in KL, having dragonriding (grand-)children.

The maesters might be sneaky and all, but it is pretty hard to buy that they would dare to conspire against the Hightower-Targaryens under their very noses.

On the contrary, reading Fire & Blood solidified my opinion that a conspiracy likely happened (due to what is omitted or seems outright strange with the explanation the Citadel gives us via Gyldayn) and that Vaegon was a part of it when described as a sour, rude, dragonless man who seemed to have no love for his family. (I don't think that Vaegon was an active participant in the conspiracy. He was likely kept in the dark about the true nature of what the maesters were doing, but a dragonless Targaryen archmaester would certainly be a useful tool for the Citadel to influence the dragonriders in a more direct and personal way).

Moreover, I believe the maesters would consider the Hightowers their puppets. In Jaehaerys's old age, a Hightower is appointed as Hand just after a Targaryen archmaester proposes a Great Council overseen by the maesters... it's all a little too tidy for my liking. Otto and Alicent likely believed they would have a mutually beneficial relationship due to Oldtown's patronage, but the maesters likely saw them as puppets -- or at least at first, got the Hightowers in to be an easier vessel for their own political ambitions. I don't think they'd catch onto the conspiracy because their goal was gently nudging the course of history into a prolonged dragon war between two fairly large and balanced sides. As Barbrey Dustin says, how often is it that other people call into question 'who are the masters, and who are the servants'?

That being said, as I stated above, I do think the Shepherd was genuine and as an individual did not have any connection to the Citadel.

[Annara Snow]

2 hours ago, dsjj251 said:

Its a retcon because he(Laenor) is originally said to have blood of the dragon on both sides. The same would then be true of Laena ; although, i dont think we are ever told Laena and Laenor are brother and sister until Fire and Blood. I mean, we assume, but i dont think its actually said in story until F&B. anyways, staying on track.......

 

So thats not just a mistake, lineage was changed . Corlys  was likely the child of one of Jahaerys's unnamed children(unnamed daughters at the time anyways), or an Older Alyssa when she was the oldest living child. 


 

I'm pretty sure we were told they were brother and sister in tPatQ, Rogue Prince and The World of Ice and Fire.

[Vaith]

I suppose Laenor's blood of the dragon on both sides could go back quite far to the Targaryen mother of Valaena Velaryon who married into the family (and is an ancestor of Corlys), or the original Targaryen wife of Aethan Velaryon who was later retconned as Alarra Massey

[The Wondering Wolf]

2 hours ago, dsjj251 said:

Its a retcon because he(Laenor) is originally said to have blood of the dragon on both sides. The same would then be true of Laena ; although, i dont think we are ever told Laena and Laenor are brother and sister until Fire and Blood. I mean, we assume, but i dont think its actually said in story until F&B. anyways, staying on track.......

 

So thats not just a mistake, lineage was changed . Corlys  was likely the child of one of Jahaerys's unnamed children(unnamed daughters at the time anyways), or an Older Alyssa when she was the oldest living child. 

A retcon means something is changed in regard to an original source. In this case the original sources are TRP and TPARQ. The Worldbook was only based on these sources.

Now neither Laena nor Laenor are styled princess or prince in TRP or TPATQ. The original source says that Laenor had the blood of the dragon on both sides, that doesn't mean he is styled prince, though. There's no hint that Laenor was ever meant to have a recent Targaryen relative on his father's side. It's likely that Valaena's Targaryen mother was the first Daemon's mother, too, and even if not, there must have been a Targaryen woman in the Velaryon line, so of course Corlys had Targaryen blood. I seem to remember the line was removed, though, because it led to a lot of wrong speculations. But even if there had been a retcon regarding Corlys's ancestors, there wasn't one regarding the titles.

@Ran Please correct me if I'm wrong, you have got the best insights after all.

[The Wondering Wolf]

14 minutes ago, Vaith said:

or the original Targaryen wife of Aethan Velaryon who was later retconned as Alarra Massey

According to Elio, this one wasn't a retcon either on GRRM's side, they just got confused when they tried to trim down the material.

[Ran]

Yep, the confusion as we trimmed was also, IIRC, why we had the Laenor having Targaryen blood on both sides bit. Can't recall if it was an insert from editorial based on that error, but in any case, George never explicitly addressed the identity of Aethan's wife or Alyssa's mother until he wrote the "Year of the Third Brides" section of F&B (after TWoIaF was published). So I wouldn't call it a "retcon", myself.

[Vaith]

Quote

Alyssa Velaryon, the daughter of the king's master of ships and lord admiral; though she was a Targaryen upon her mother's side, this made her only a cousin. But when the tradition looked to continue yet again, matters came to a sudden head.

So this is an outright mistake that never came from Martin then?

[dsjj251]

1 hour ago, The Wondering Wolf said:

A retcon means something is changed in regard to an original source. In this case the original sources are TRP and TPARQ. The Worldbook was only based on these sources.

Now neither Laena nor Laenor are styled princess or prince in TRP or TPATQ. The original source says that Laenor had the blood of the dragon on both sides, that doesn't mean he is styled prince, though. There's no hint that Laenor was ever meant to have a recent Targaryen relative on his father's side. It's likely that Valaena's Targaryen mother was the first Daemon's mother, too, and even if not, there must have been a Targaryen woman in the Velaryon line, so of course Corlys had Targaryen blood. I seem to remember the line was removed, though, because it led to a lot of wrong speculations. But even if there had been a retcon regarding Corlys's ancestors, there wasn't one regarding the titles.

@Ran Please correct me if I'm wrong, you have got the best insights after all.

All 3 novellas/histories were written together , so it is equally a source, TWOIAF being announced first and martin saying he basically started writing and couldnt stop and thats how we got TRP and TPATQ. Not sure why you are saying its based on the other 2, when technically its the opposite. But if we get that technical, then the main series would be the only thing that qualified as a source, which also retcons Jaehaerys' children. 

So yes, its a retcon, and a significant one at that. 

Also blood of THE dragon is just that, its blood of the conqueror, not just house Targaryen, Its a specific way characters in universe speak . 

as for titles, everyone is styled in present tense, the argument in another forum is that Laenor is only called prince in context of being a prince consort, but Laenor was never prince consort, he died before Rhaenyra had her crown.  seems to me, it all ties in to simply George changing his mind about lineage at some point. 

 

Update(saw the other post)

If George didnt write it, it is what it is, LOL

[The Bard of Banefort]

Speaking of which, why were Bran and Rickon princes but Stannis and Renly weren’t?

[The Wondering Wolf]

3 minutes ago, dsjj251 said:

All 3 novellas/histories were written together , so it is equally a source, TWOIAF being announced first and martin saying he basically started writing and couldnt stop and thats how we got TRP and TPATQ. Not sure why you are saying its based on the other 2, when technically its the opposite. But if we get that technical, then the main series would be the only thing that qualified as a source, which also retcons Jaehaerys' children. 

GRRM didn't really write the Worldbook, he gave Elio and Linda access to material he wrote so they could put it together. In this regard TRP and TPARQ are original texts, and Elio and Linda used them to write the Worldbook. There is only one section in the Worldbook (the one about House Baratheon) where Laenor is styled prince. Since the book is based on GRRM's original texts and notes (where Laenor isn't styled prince - prince consort is clearly not the same as prince), the Baratheon section contains an error. The correction of that error is not a retcon. 

[dsjj251]

3 minutes ago, The Wondering Wolf said:

GRRM didn't really write the Worldbook, he gave Elio and Linda access to material he wrote so they could put it together. In this regard TRP and TPARQ are original texts, and Elio and Linda used them to write the Worldbook. There is only one section in the Worldbook (the one about House Baratheon) where Laenor is styled prince. Since the book is based on GRRM's original texts and notes (where Laenor isn't styled prince - prince consort is clearly not the same as prince), the Baratheon section contains an error. The correction of that error is not a retcon. 

I wrote the post before I saw the reply. I updated it. 

[Takiedevushkikakzvezdy]

On 7/26/2022 at 4:20 AM, The Bard of Banefort said:

Another thing that the showrunners keep bringing up in interviews is that “this is a story that needs to be told.”

I mean, they aren't going to say "Game of Thrones was a giant cash cow, and we want to keep it going for as long as possible because we enjoy the sight of money rolling in".

[Ran]

 

1 hour ago, Vaith said:

So this is an outright mistake that never came from Martin then?

That's right.

 

[dsjj251]

1 minute ago, Ran said:

 

That's right.

 

Any chance on getting a House Velaryon family tree ?

[EggBlue]

1 hour ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Speaking of which, why were Bran and Rickon princes but Stannis and Renly weren’t?

adding another question to that ... why were Maekar's children prince and princesses but Daemon's weren't? they were both brothers to the kings...and I always confuse these things

[Ran]

5 minutes ago, dsjj251 said:

Any chance on getting a House Velaryon family tree ?

Not presently, but one can never say what George comes up with.

ETA: I believe the choice of how to style people is entirely up to the monarch in question. Daeron clearly spread the title more widely than some of his predecessors.