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Why is magic getting stronger?


Drogo_BR

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Here's the basics of magic in Westeros, according to me:

All magic is powered by the life force of living things. All magic is therefore ultimately blood magic. Fire magic consumes life (blood), cold magic extinguises life (blood), and the magic of the Children stores the life force (blood) of all dead creatures in the weirwoods, which powers their magic.

Fire and Ice magic waxes and wanes depending on some celestial cycle stretching over thousands of years. The magic of the Children remains constant, based on the number of weirwoods that remain.

Magic has NOT come back because of the dragons. The dragons are, like someone said earlier, a barometer indicating that the level of magic has risen sufficiently to allow them to exist again. Daenerys did not bring the magic back. Instead, Daenerys was able to raise the dragons because unlike in the many previous cases of Targaryens using blood magic to try and hatch dragon eggs, the ambient level of magic this time happened to be high enough to allow her ritual to succeed.

If Daenerys had tried the same ritual 100 years before, she would have burned to death, and the eggs would have remained encased in stone - kind of like what apparently happened at Summerhall.

Magic is naturally emerging again. And the dragons and Others are signs of this reemergence.

Throughout all of this, the magic of the Children has been constant, silent and watching, waiting for the time when they would need to step up again to counter the threats of both Ice and Fire, if life on this planet is to survive.

:agree:

Always liked this theory...Dragons being the result of something not the begining of something.

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The glass candles have not burned for 100 years according to the warlocks. So what happened 100 years ago: Summerhall? The death of the last dragon? Either one or both could have diminished (fire) magic, which might lead to the others returning.

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I support all the "It's cyclical/cosmic/environmental"-theories (although I'm agnostic about the involvement of any deities; I strongly suspect the series will never resolve that issue), but I also suspect that there's a man-made component, that heightens the phenomenon - just like with global warming.

The man-made component probably won't be down to a single actor (I'm pretty sure Dany for instance is fairly magical, but she's hardly the sole cause for the return of magic). Plausible suspects are Rhaegar with his AA-genetic engineering project, Dany with the Dragons, Mance with Horn, whatever Euron is up to, etc.

Basically I believe there are various factors, reenforcing each other, and it will be rather difficult to identify the direction of causation between them, because the arrow is probably going to point in both direction in many cases, just as in real life. All of these factors probably have been in play at various other points in history already, and the reason why the effect is now more pronounced than usually doesn't lie in any single one of them, but rather in their uniquely (un)fortunate combination due to bad/good timing.

Take for instance the White Walkers. There is certainly an environmental component - their strenght is plausibly assumed to be greater in longer winters, and since seasons in Westeros are irregular, it makes sense to wait with invasion plans for one of the longer winters. So the Others can probably feel that the coming winter is going to be one of the longer ones, which provides one factor for their rise. But it doesn't necessarily have to be an exceptionally long winter - one of the longer winters doesn't yet amount to "the long night" of mythical proportions. The causal relationship between Others and Winters might go in both directions however - the Others probably need Winter to gain sufficient strenght to make a move in the first place, but once their magic reaches critical mass, their mere presence might contribute to prolonguing the winter. The cold brings the Others, but the Others maintian it. Two factors reenforcing each other.

One could speculate that the Others might have tried to seize such opportunities at previous occassions as well, but were repelled by a more efficient Night-Watch (eg. the Night's King story). But now the Nightwatch is at low point in its history - that's an entirely man-made aspect of the dilemma, and it's probably not a coincidence. Now let's assume that the magic of the Others grows exponentially with every Wight created/every baby sacrificed to the Others. The Night Watch at the height of its power might have been able to nipp it in the bud; but this opportunity has already been missed. And now, what might have otherwise been not more than a couple of skirmishes at the Wall suddenly turns into an impending Zombie Apoklypse.

So the reason why the Others are now much stronger than ever is that they could make use of a cyclically returning opportunity more effeciently than usual, because the Night-Watch was to weak to keep them in check.

I suspect that it might be similar with the Dragons - only here it's probably the Maesters who dropped the ball (getting maybe too distracted by their invovlement in the Game of Thrones).

Yeah, I kind of agree with you because it seems more likely due to the way GRRM conducts the story, usually tanking several angles from different places in order to build the narrative. So, variety of factors looks pretty plausible and the sacrifices mentioned strikes me as a good explanation, same for the weirwoods.

But I like to think that an event such like Mance waking up the Great Other when looking for the Horn of Joramum would be far more interesting.

Maybe the magic was somehow locked up with the others? Anyone buy it? :cool4:

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But I like to think that an event such like Mance waking up the Great Other when looking for the Horn of Joramum would be far more interesting.

See, here's where I disagree - I think it would be much less interesting; I'm a big fan of multicausality. Problems with a single cause tend to have a single solution - that's far too easy for my taste. Doesn't reflect much truth about real life either. (eg. Magic comes back because Mance wakes the Great Other, Jon kills the Great Other, crisis averted; we can have a couple of neat battles with the forces of good vs the forces of evil, but we all know it's just a sideshow; it's like Quidditch where there are elaborate rules for all kind of moves, but in the end, it all boils down to whoever catches the Golden Snitch - that's fine for Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, but that's not why I read ASOIAF).

If there's a common thread uniting all the various factors that have contributed to the rise of magic, I'd say it's instituional failure due to myopic short-term thinking on part of powerful players only trying to maximize their own gains. Magic could gain power because the institutions tasked with keeping it in check lost sight of their purpose.

I have already described how Maesters and Nightwatch (or rather the Iron Throne and Nobles who underfunded and neglected the Night Watch) dropped the ball on dragons and white walkers, but the Faith of the Seven is just another instance of institutional failure.

There seems to be a general consensus on this board here that the Faith of the Seven is the most useless religion in Westeros because they don't seem to have any access to specific magical powers. It is however also the only one of the major relgions that does not practice human sacrifice. (The followers of the Old Goods seem to have dropped the practice a long time ago, but their relgion has also lost a lot of influence since then). But over the centuries the Faith has been corrupted, guarding the interests of the elite instead of standing up for the smallfolk - no wonder it does not (or does no longer) provide a sufficiently attractive option to many believers. As a result, other human-sacrificing religions are on the rise (and so is the magic resulting from human sacrifice).

Now that the damage is done, further involvement of the Faith of course will only make things worse, because it will lead to more war and distraction.

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I like the idea of magic being cyclical... and it would explain why wildfire is easier make as of late. (I recall one of the pyromancers saying that it was harder to make wildfire after the dragons left the world... and that, of course, recently they had been far more successful with it -- something about the magic working better now).

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See I think the opposite on this, simply because she hatched the dragons and several other Targaryens had failed to do it before her. It could be that only a life could pay for a life concept, but it could also be my bias because I love Dany.

The only magical person I see associated with the dragons hatching is Mirri. You say that Dany must be magical because other Targs had failed — it doesn't occur to you that maybe being a Targaryen has nothing to do with it? ;)

We still don't know how or why all the other Targs fail to hatch dragons, maybe we'll get more info in D&E novels.

But I don't think it was Dany nor something magical within her, but it was blood magic "3 lives for 3 deaths" it could have been anyone. I'm sure if Hot Pie put Drogo, MMD and Rhaego in a oven with 3 Dragons Eggs, he will found out 3 little dragons among his Pies when open the oven again :P

Most of the Magic was present years before the born of the Dragons, YET they seem to work like little magic batteries, and like the Wall magic is stronger in their presence

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