Aenar the Abolitionist

[Jon Fossoway]

Too long of a video for me to spend time in right now. But how come a not prominent family manages to pay for not one Faceless One assasination but 14? If the 14 fires were the pillars of valyrian survival, the cost of murdering the people who maintained them would be sky high. 

[SeanF]

On 12/15/2022 at 11:15 PM, Craving Peaches said:

Yes, but they said Targaryens, not just Daenerys, and they don't believe in R+L=J. So it is clear they mean House TargAryan is the main protagonist, which is just not true.

It seems to me that the author has increasingly fallen in love with the Targaryens, even if that was not his intent when he started.

I view them in much the same light as the House of Wessex, who united Seven Kingdoms into one.

Within Martin’s universe as a whole, I think one can see them as the main protagonists.  Within ASOIAF, the Starks are.

[SeanF]

On 12/16/2022 at 10:47 AM, Craving Peaches said:

Yes, it's good that Jon gets a fresh contribution to his gene pool through Lyanna.

I think the main problem is the dragons. Once the Others are dealt with, the dragons have to go. They turn the inbreeds with already massive egos into absolute megalomaniacs.

There I disagree.  The most dangerous animal in this world is Man.

Men don’t need dragons to inflict horrors.  The Ghiscari masters and the warlords of Westeros have demonstrated that.

If one takes the view that dragons are analogous to WMD, far more people have died by edged and pointed weapons, and by famine caused by war, than by WMD.

[James West]

On 12/16/2022 at 7:01 AM, The Commentator said:

Abolish slavery on a grand scale, yes. He also prevented the enslavement of Westeros. He knew it will be the next battleground with the evil forces of ice.  He and Daenys are heroes.  

Aenar, Daenys, and Daenerys are heroes.  Aenar and Daenys saved the great Targaryen bloodline and made it possible for Daenerys to be born in the future.

[Corvo the Crow]

8 hours ago, James West said:

Aenar, Daenys, and Daenerys are heroes.  Aenar and Daenys saved the great Targaryen bloodline and made it possible for Daenerys to be born in the future.

And they’ve been raping peasants for hundreds of years because they are heroes. Only reason they’ve stopped slaving is Westerosi won’t stand for it.

[frenin]

This is not a theory, it's a fan wish.

[Craving Peaches]

9 hours ago, James West said:

the great Targaryen bloodline

Only great in terms of how inbred it is. Forget about a gene pool, the Targs have a gene puddle, if it hasn't dried up already due to all the incest.

[King_Tristifer_IV_Mudd]

5 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

Only great in terms of how inbred it is. Forget about a gene pool, the Targs have a gene puddle, if it hasn't dried up already due to all the incest.

It’s only because of plot reasons that Rhaegar didn’t look like Charles II of Spain.

[Corvo the Crow]

26 minutes ago, KingEuronGreyjoy said:

It’s only because of plot reasons that Rhaegar didn’t look like Charles II of Spain.

If he did, then he couldn't seduce Lyanna, yes. Same goes for that floozy, Daenerys. She uses her sexuality to get what she wants every time she gets. She's Cersei in the makings considering she's also getting madder and madder with every passing day. No one would've looked at her twice if she looked like she's straight out of Habsburg family.

[Oana_Mika]

15 hours ago, Craving Peaches said:

Only great in terms of how inbred it is. Forget about a gene pool, the Targs have a gene puddle, if it hasn't dried up already due to all the incest.

Martin's anotation in The World of Ice and Fire app :

“Despite Viserys’s claim to Daenerys, the Targaryens often married non-Targaryens. Before they conquered Westeros, certain Valyrian families were regularly intermarrying with the Targaryens, and afterwards a number of great families of the Seven Kingdoms married into the Targaryen line. The most generous estimates suggest that Viserys and Daenerys are about 1/10th as Tagaryen as Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters." 

 

If you bother looking through their genealogical family tree you will see they married plenty outside their family so you and the rest can cut the crap with Targ-Aryans, whom btw Martin seems to want us to appreciate :   

 

[Oana_Mika]

Oh and for those who talk about biology and how Targaryens should look, maybe you should check out what actual biology students say about genetics and inbreeding.

 

As a biology student, I get really annoyed when literally everyone in this fandom tries to talk about genetics and incest, because people really don’t know what they’re talking about. And this ignorance comes both from Dany antis trying to shit on Dany and from Dany stans trying to defend her. I think I finally got fed up with takes like “Dany should have a Hapsburg Jaw if ASOIAF was realistic”, “Dany should have been deformed”, “Targaryens should be inbred-looking” (whatever the hell that means) so I’m just going to talk about this here. NO. She didn’t have to have a Hapsburg Jaw  or be deformed or sick for the genetics of ASOIAF to be realistic.

Here’s the thing that people don’t get: inbreeding doesn’t cause any mutations. Mutations happen randomly in every human being (every living being, actually) as a result of mistakes in the replication of DNA, and it has nothing to do with whether a person has sex with their relatives or not. What inbreeding does is increase the chance of homozygosity. Homozygosity is when you have two copies of the same allele for a certain gene. In every human, every gene has two copies (unless you have some chromosomal disorder, but that’s another thing entirely and also has nothing to do with incest; and unless we are talking about sex chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA), one copy that comes from the mother, and one that comes from the father. And these two copies can be either the same, or different copies. Let’s suppose you have a certain gene that among the general population has five different alleles (a1, a2, a3, a4, a5). This means that a person can have all sorts of different combinations in this specific gene. A person could have one copy of a1 and one copy of a3. This would make them heterozygous in this gene, a person who has different alleles in a certain gene. A person who has one allele a2 and one a5 is also heterozygous. Meanwhile, if a person has two alleles of a1, we’d say that person is homozygous. And here’s the thing: there’s nothing wrong with homozygosity in itself. A person with two alleles a1 can be just as healthy as a person who has a1 and a2. To give an example: people with type O blood are homozygous. They have two copies of the recessive allele for the blood type O. But does this mean anything negative about their health? No. It’s just a trait among many other traits that a person has.

Another important thing to know here are the concepts of dominant and recessive alleles. Some alleles will always manifest, even if there’s only one copy of them. To give one example, type A blood is dominant. So if a person has an allele for type A and one allele for type O, that person will have type A blood. Meanwhile, type O is recessive, so it doesn’t manifest unless it has two copies. For a person to have a type O blood, they need to have two copies of this allele.

So where does inbreeding come into this? Well, there are some recessive alleles (that can be caused by mutation, yes, but mutation is NOT caused by inbreeding) that can cause diseases. These diseases will only manifest if a person has two copies of this recessive allele, so if a person only has one, that person will still be healthy. What inbreeding does is to increase the chances of a person to have two copies of the same allele. So let’s suppose a certain family carries the recessive allele r for a certain disease. People related to each other are more likely to also have the same recessive allele for this disease, so this increases the chance that their child will have two copies of that allele. To give a visual example, let’s suppose two siblings, each carrying the r allele, have children. 

 Let’s suppose these two siblings that have only the dominant R allele have children:

Parents: RR x RR

Possible children: RR, RR, RR, RR

In this case, this incestuous family would have a 100% chance of having healthy children for this particular gene.

And incest doesn’t make it any more or less likely for a family to have recessive genetic diseases. Incest doesn’t cause mutations. So if a family doesn’t have any dangerous recessive alleles, that’s not a problem. So no, it’s not “unrealistic” that Daenerys and her siblings were healthy. It’s not “unrealistic” that they don’t have deformities. Quite possibly, the Targaryen family simply doesn’t have any recessive genetic disease that could be made more likely to be expressed by incest.

I have also seen in the past takes like “the Targaryens shouldn’t be able to reproduce anymore”, and saying that “all these generations of incest should have killed off the Targaryens”, and once again, no, this is wrong. Inbreeding would not have killed off the Targaryens, no matter how long it’s been going on. Inbreeding increases the odds for recessive genetic diseases. Let’s suppose the Targaryen family carries an allele for a lethal genetic disease. The only thing that happens is that the person that inherits this disease (the person that has two alleles for the disease) will die before having any children. This means that natural selection kills them, and they won’t be able to pass this lethal allele forward. The Targaryen family can still continue through the other members of the family, people that don’t carry the lethal allele or people that only carry one copy. Yes, generally speaking, inbreeding is not good for health, but in a family that has been inbreeding for many years, natural selection would ALSO have eliminated alleles that are too prejudicial, and kept the good ones.

I’ve also seen people trying to argue “but Dany is the fruit of several generations of incest, so she should have some problem”, and again, no. First of all, Dany is NOT the fruit of several generations of incest. She is the fruit of only 2 generations of incest. Even if all the Targaryen family had been incestuous and only married their siblings (which is not the case), all of that is cancelled by Aegon V and Betha’s marriage. Let’s suppose that Aegon V was very inbred (he actually wasn’t, neither his grandparents nor his parents were siblings), and was homozygous for all of his genes. This is already a highly unrealistic situation, given that humans have around 30000 genes, and most of these genes have multiple alleles in the population, meaning that the chance of a person to be homozygous for every single one of them is almost nonexistent. But for the sake of this argument, let’s suppose Aegon V is so inbred that he is homozygous for every single one of his genes. Let’s suppose this is Aegon V (the genes are A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H):

aabbccddeeffgghh (obviously a real human being would have thousands of genes, but I’m only depicting 8 here for the sake of the example)

And this is Betha Blackwood:

AABbccdDEEFFggHh

If they had children, that already cancels out much of the homozygosity. This is one possibility for what a child of theirs might be like:

AaBbccddEefFggHh

Notice how a good part of the homozygosity is cancelled. Because a child is made of one allele that comes from the father and one that comes from the mother, so by the very definition, one generation is enough to “get rid” of the inbreeding, because each allele is coming from a different place. And notice that my example is a highly simplified one. In real life, most genes don’t have just two alleles, most genes have several alleles spread among the population. A more realistic situation would be that Betha wouldn’t have as many alleles in common with Aegon, so their children would actually be more heterozygous than this example I gave.

So Dany is not really the result of several generations of incest, She is the result of only 2: Jaehaerys and Shaera, and Aerys and Rhaella. This still means that there’s plenty of variation in all genes. And Dany (or any other Targaryen) won’t necessarily end up manifesting a recessive genetic disease, because: 1) for the Targaryens to manifest a recessive genetic disease, they must have one in the family in the first place. If the family doesn’t have any recessive genetic disease, incest won’t cause it, because incest only increases the chance of homozygosity; and 2) because even if the Targaryens DO have a recessive genetic disease, and even if both parents (who are siblings) carry a copy of this recessive allele for the disease, there’s still a ¾ chance that their children would be healthy, as shown by the first example above.

So, no, Dany (or any other Targaryen) being healthy and not deformed is NOT UNREALISTIC. It’s perfectly possible considering real life genetics. So can Dany antis stop with the “Daenerys should be deformed”, and can Dany stans stop defending Dany by saying that “ASOIAF is not supposed to be realistic when it comes to genetics”, because lack of realism is not the reason Dany is healthy and not deformed, Dany being healthy and not deformed is not unrealistic, and I’m really tired of seeing misinformation about genetics being spread by literally everyone in this fandom. Also, if you’re looking for unrealistic genetic elements in ASOIAF, you should be looking at things like the Baratheon’s “seed is strong”, not at Dany.

Also, even if Dany had a recessive genetic disease because of inbreeding, it wouldn’t necessarily be a deformity, it could be any genetic disease among a myriad of genetic diseases, so Dany antis can stop with their “haha Dany should be deformed” bullshit.

By the way, before anyone accuses me of saying something I didn’t say, I’m not saying inbreeding is not risky or dangerous. As I explained in this very post, inbreeding does increase the chance of your children manifesting a possibly hidden genetic disease carried by your family. What I’m saying here is that inbreeding is not the end of the world, it’s not a guarantee that the children will indeed be sick, and there’s still a higher chance that the children will be healthy, so Dany and her siblings being healthy is not unrealistic.

 

https://rainhadaenerys.tumblr.com/post/673999850482876416/as-a-biology-student-i-get-really-annoyed-when

[Oana_Mika]

On 12/22/2022 at 11:02 AM, SeanF said:

Within Martin’s universe as a whole, I think one can see them as the main protagonists.  Within ASOIAF, the Starks are.

Martin said in his original outline that ASOIAF is a generational saga of five central characters : Tyrion,Daenerys,Bran,Arya and Jon and he said multiple times that he is still working towards it : 

 

Five central characters will make it through all three volumes, however, growing from children to adults and changing the world and themselves in the process. In a sense, my trilogy is almost a generational saga, telling the life stories of these five characters, three men and two women. The five key players are Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen, and three of the children of Winterfell, Arya, Bran, and the bastard Jon Snow. All of them are introduced at some length in the chapters you have to hand. (Source)

 

 

You’ve had these characters and places for 22 years, and that’s a long time to live with a particular set of characters. So have you lost interest in any of those characters during that time?

Yeah. I didn’t know at first, in ‘91 — I didn’t know quite what I had yet. I didn’t even know whether it was a novel or a novella, or something, at first. So I sort of found that out. But by the summer of ‘91, you know, it just came to me out of nowhere, and I started writing it and following where it led. But by the end of that summer I knew I had a big series. Initially, I thought it was a trilogy, but it’s grown beyond that. But the size is different, and I’ve introduced some other elements to the books, but it’s still the same characters, the ‘91 characters.

--

So people have this idea that back when Ice and Fire started as a trilogy, you had an outline where there was a single line that went, “And meanwhile, nobles squabble over power in Westeros.” And that single line turned into the middle three or four books of the series. Is there any truth to that?

It’s a grotesque exaggeration — but there’s at least a nugget of truth to it, yeah. You introduce characters, and sometimes they take on a life of their own.

Some major characters — yes, I always had plans, what Tyrion’s arc was gonna be through this, what Arya’s arc was gonna be through this, what Jon Snow’s arc is gonna be. I knew what the principal deaths were gonna be, and when they were coming. That would be the closest thing.

[Source]

Who is the most major character you've changed your mind about your plans for?

I don't want to reveal what I've planned for some of these characters, but I'm pretty well on track with most of the major characters. It's minor characters like Bronn that assume greater importance.

 

[Source]

Martin told IGN, "I know the ending in broad strokes but broad strokes are just broad strokes and the devil's in the details. As I write these last two books, I'll be moving towards the endings that I've known since 1991. But many of the fine details might be moved around and changed."

[Source]

Do you have an ending already in mind?

I have and have had since the beginning, yeah, in broad strokes. You know, I know the fates of all the major characters but not necessarily the fates of many of the minor characters. And things do change, sometimes, as you approach the finish line. You come up with a better idea or a twist you hadn’t thought of when you start. So I leave it open that I may change a few things when I get to the last book. But for the most part, yeah, I know how it’s going to end.

[Source]

Another of George's reiterations of knowing the ending of the main characters:

Do you know the ending?

I know the ending in broad strokes. I don’t know every little twist and turn that will get me there, and I don’t know the ending of every secondary character. But the ending and the main characters, yeah.

[Source]

George has also stated (recorded in an SSM) that he still knows who sits the Iron Throne and the end game of the main five (plus Sansa).

 

 

So you see, it's not just the Starks who are protagonists of ASOIAF. Plus, most had their first touch with the saga thx to Dany's AGOT previous published chapters.

[Craving Peaches]

6 hours ago, Oana_Mika said:

If you bother looking through their genealogical family tree you will see they married plenty outside their family so you and the rest can cut the crap with Targ-Aryans, whom btw Martin seems to want us to appreciate : 

I was joking about the gene pool part, I am aware, but the Aryan part has nothing to do with how inbred they are, but with the fact that they view themselves as superior to other humans because of their 'blood of the dragon' e.g. because they are of the Valyrian race. Which is sadly true.

[Oana_Mika]

1 hour ago, Craving Peaches said:

I was joking about the gene pool part, I am aware, but the Aryan part has nothing to do with how inbred they are, but with the fact that they view themselves as superior to other humans because of their 'blood of the dragon' e.g. because they are of the Valyrian race. Which is sadly true.

How they see themselves is no different than how the Starks see themselves from others, having the blood of The First Men :

 

Robb bristled at that. "The Westerlings are better blood than the Freys. They're an ancient line, descended from the First Men. The Kings of the Rock sometimes wed Westerlings before the Conquest, and there was another Jeyne Westerling who was queen to King Maegor three hundred years ago." - A Clash of Kings - Catelyn II

 

And this it why Martin tells us that Targaryens "kept their line pure":

 

The Targaryens have heavily interbred, like the Ptolemys of  Egypt. As any horse or dog breeder can tell you, interbreeding  accentuates both flaws and virtues, and pushes a lineage toward the  extremes. Also, there’s sometimes a fine line between madness and  greatness. Daeron I, the boy king who led a war of conquest, and even  the saintly Baelor I could also be considered “mad,” if seen in a  different light. ((And I must confess, I love grey characters, and those  who can be interpreted in many different ways. Both as a reader and a  writer, I want complexity and subtlety in my fiction))

https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/945/

The Targaryens are the extreme example of that policy [to  reinforce the family’s bloodline]: they only marry within the family to keep the purity of the blood, and that way you avoid the problem of having  several candidates for the throne or the rule of the family.If you have a generation of five brothers and each of them has several children (sons?), after two or three generations you could find yourself with thirty potential heirs: there could be thirty people named Lannister or Frey, and that produces conflict, because all of them are going to get involved in hereditary fights for the throne.That’s what originated the War of the Roses; An excess of candidates for the throne, all of them descendants of Edward III. Laking an heir (like Henry VIII) is just as bad as having too many of them. If you have five sons and you want to avoid that kind of problem, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to marry the firstborn girl of the oldest son with the third son (or with the firstborn of the third son?), and that way you avoid fights and the bloodline remains united

https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/Asshai.com_Interview_in_Barcelona/

 

So the Targaryens married eachother like the Ptolemaic dynasty and the reason he made that was to show the two extremes and because in history,monarchs did that to preserve their power as rulers. In addition, they also have to control their dragons : 

 

“The Targaryens have certain gifts and yes, taking the dragons and dragon riding and dragon breeding was one of them,” he says. “But the other gift was an occasional Targaryen had prophetic powers and could see glimpses of the future, which they didn’t always necessarily properly interpret because, you know, they were fragmentary and sometimes symbolic.

https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/game-of-thrones/game-of-thrones-author-gives-vital-clue-to-dark-finale/news-story/08055fded858694659b26fbf38e0365d

 

Yes, Aerys II and Viserys III can fit in your joke for how they saw themselves but I'm sick tired of it thx to the fact that people not only use it to make some puns (something not harmful) but to insult the fans too.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Oana_Mika said:

How they see themselves is no different than how the Starks see themselves from others, having the blood of The First Men :

 

Robb bristled at that. "The Westerlings are better blood than the Freys. They're an ancient line, descended from the First Men. The Kings of the Rock sometimes wed Westerlings before the Conquest, and there was another Jeyne Westerling who was queen to King Maegor three hundred years ago." - A Clash of Kings - Catelyn II

 

And this it why Martin tells us that Targaryens "kept their line pure":

 

The Targaryens have heavily interbred, like the Ptolemys of  Egypt. As any horse or dog breeder can tell you, interbreeding  accentuates both flaws and virtues, and pushes a lineage toward the  extremes. Also, there’s sometimes a fine line between madness and  greatness. Daeron I, the boy king who led a war of conquest, and even  the saintly Baelor I could also be considered “mad,” if seen in a  different light. ((And I must confess, I love grey characters, and those  who can be interpreted in many different ways. Both as a reader and a  writer, I want complexity and subtlety in my fiction))

https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/945/

The Targaryens are the extreme example of that policy [to  reinforce the family’s bloodline]: they only marry within the family to keep the purity of the blood, and that way you avoid the problem of having  several candidates for the throne or the rule of the family.If you have a generation of five brothers and each of them has several children (sons?), after two or three generations you could find yourself with thirty potential heirs: there could be thirty people named Lannister or Frey, and that produces conflict, because all of them are going to get involved in hereditary fights for the throne.That’s what originated the War of the Roses; An excess of candidates for the throne, all of them descendants of Edward III. Laking an heir (like Henry VIII) is just as bad as having too many of them. If you have five sons and you want to avoid that kind of problem, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to marry the firstborn girl of the oldest son with the third son (or with the firstborn of the third son?), and that way you avoid fights and the bloodline remains united

https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/Asshai.com_Interview_in_Barcelona/

 

So the Targaryens married eachother like the Ptolemaic dynasty and the reason he made that was to show the two extremes and because in history,monarchs did that to preserve their power as rulers. In addition, they also have to control their dragons : 

 

“The Targaryens have certain gifts and yes, taking the dragons and dragon riding and dragon breeding was one of them,” he says. “But the other gift was an occasional Targaryen had prophetic powers and could see glimpses of the future, which they didn’t always necessarily properly interpret because, you know, they were fragmentary and sometimes symbolic.

https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/game-of-thrones/game-of-thrones-author-gives-vital-clue-to-dark-finale/news-story/08055fded858694659b26fbf38e0365d

 

Yes, Aerys II and Viserys III can fit in your joke for how they saw themselves but I'm sick tired of it thx to the fact that people not only use it to make some puns (something not harmful) but to insult the fans too.

By way of comparison,  I doubt if Arya (meaning “noble” and from which the word Aryan was derived) was so named to be a proto-Nazi.

[Oana_Mika]

Just now, SeanF said:

By way of comparison,  I doubt if Arya (meaning “noble” and from which the word Aryan was derived) was so named to be a proto-Nazi.

Of course no one will say that because they can see how ridiculous it is. But with Targaryens, it seems easier thx to HBO, Aerys II and Viserys III.

Btw, Hitler also had a place called "Wolf's Lair" but no one will say Martin deliberately gave the family with the germanic name a simillar place to "draw parallels".

[SeanF]

1 minute ago, Oana_Mika said:

Of course no one will say that because they can see how ridiculous it is. But with Targaryens, it seems easier thx to HBO, Aerys II and Viserys III.

Btw, Hitler also had a place called "Wolf's Lair" but no one will say Martin deliberately gave the family with the germanic name a simillar place to "draw parallels"./cdn-cgi/mirage/d061fbc8a99b74d9127f1b0a19a8d29641ec2a7e3541937299ee1540bc7d0bf1/1280/https://asoiaf.westeros.org/uploads/emoticons/default_rolleyes.gif

“Wolf” indeed, was Hitler’s nickname, among friends.

[King_Tristifer_IV_Mudd]

On 12/21/2022 at 7:53 PM, Jon Fossoway said:

Too long of a video for me to spend time in right now. But how come a not prominent family manages to pay for not one Faceless One assasination but 14? If the 14 fires were the pillars of valyrian survival, the cost of murdering the people who maintained them would be sky high. 

The Faceless Men have their own agenda. David Lightbringer thinks the FM were opposed to Valyrian slavery on their own. His agenda match theirs. Plus I believe most VS weapons in Westeros are 400 years old, around the time Aenar moved to Dragonstone. Meaning all the VS weapons in Westeros likely came from him, and the cost of a single VS sword could pay for an army. I imagine the gold he got from selling 100+ to Westerosi nobles got him a decent fortune