"Fire burns them. Fire is always hungry."- Bran(ADWD II). "He was always hungry, her Drogon. Hungry and growing fast."- Dany(ASOS I). Fire is many times associated with hunger. Fire consumes. Jon compared R'hllor to 'hungry fire god.' The dragons during DOOM of Valyria were consumed by 'hungry fires.'
Hi anon!
Of course, it is only in its excess that the fire becomes monstrous.
Numerous times in the books, life-giving little fires are described as being "fed" by human hand. Human beings and their animals, children, all living beings must feed, as well. Humans need heat, to stay warm, to cook, to create. Humans need to consume and want to consume. We desire, we want, we make use of the world around us.
As such, fire represents a facet of all life, certainly of all humans.
GRRM doesn't condemn "consuming" or killing for consumption, he doesn't condemn hunger. Only excess and abuse.
Where does he want our sympathy to reside when comparing two cases of hunger in "The Sacrifice"? The starving soldiers practiced cannibalism but is that remotely as horrific as the punishment visited upon them? Both are cases of humans roasting humans, but still very distinct from one another.
Stakes. Nightfall would be on them soon, and the red god must be fed. An offering of blood and fire, the queen's men called it, that the Lord of Light may turn his fiery eye upon us and melt these thrice-cursed snows. (...)
Asha had been as horrified as the rest when the She-Bear told her that four Peasebury men had been found butchering one of the late Lord Fell's, carving chunks of flesh from his thighs and buttocks as one of his forearms turned upon a spit, but she could not pretend to be surprised. (...)
"He was dead," the weeping boy screamed, as the flames licked up his legs. "We found him dead … please … we was hungry …" (ADWD, The Sacrifice)
Human beings must eat to live. But the red god, the greedy fire, demands homage and sacrifice that sustains nothing, only destroys.
GRRM makes a fairly clear and consistent distinction between natural hunger and consumption meant to sustain - and the kind of hunger that is psychological and unchecked, that does not stop consuming until everything is destroyed, because it does not feed life, only power.
When Dany murders Mirri Maz Duur - a fellow living human being - she consumes her body and soul in order to wake a magical weapon to serve herself. She does not sustain life in any way, she extinguishes a life in order to create constantly hungry creatures to mirror the hunger inside her soul that comprehends no food but power.
He wanted something from her, but Sansa did not know what it was. He looks like a starving child, but I have no food to give him. Why won't he leave me be? (ASOS, Sansa IV)
The hungry soul is a dangerous thing because it can turn everything around it into its food, whether freely given or not.
Dragons make no distinction between animals and humans, they burn and eat it all, and Dany struggles with that knowledge for a while, though she has been pretending it away early on.
"You warned me that only death could pay for life. I thought you meant the horse."
"No," Mirri Maz Duur said. "That was a lie you told yourself. You knew the price." (AGOT, Daenerys IX)
Animal or person, it should make a difference but doesn’t. She forgets Hazzea's name, and embraces her dragon side in the grasslands. It alienates her from her own humanity. It turns her into a predator herself, or rather further reveals her for one.
There's a great deal of significance in the blurring of lines that occurs when humans begin to identify more with predators than with each other, a blurring of lines that goes hand in hand with the difference between scavenging meat off the dead and actively killing to consume. Actively killing just to kill. Murder and butchery reduce human beings to consumable goods.
"I killed my first man at twelve. I've lost count of how many I've killed since then. High lords with old names, fat rich men dressed in velvet, knights puffed up like bladders with their honors, yes, and women and children too—they're all meat, and I'm the butcher. (ACOK, Sansa IV)
One presumed to threaten me, so I killed him and fed him to the other three. They refused to eat of their friend's flesh at first, but when they grew hungry enough they had a change of heart. Men are meat." (AFFC, The Reaver)
He died weeping and alone when I ripped his second life from him. Varamyr had devoured his heart himself. He taught me much and more, and the last thing I learned from him was the taste of human flesh. (ADWD, Prologue)
The dead men's clothes and coins and valuables went into a bin for sorting. Their cold flesh would be taken to the lower sanctum where only the priests could go; what happened in there Arya was not allowed to know. Once, as she was eating her supper, a terrible suspicion seized hold of her, and she put down her knife and stared suspiciously at a slice of pale white meat. The kindly man saw the horror on her face. "It is pork, child," he told her, "only pork." (AFFC, Arya II)
Lamb and dog and mutton and the flesh of man. Some of her little grey cousins were afraid of men, even dead men, but not her. Meat was meat, and men were prey. She was the night wolf. (ADWD, The Blind Girl)
When human beings cease to be persons and become consumable goods, it’s time to worry.
"He would make a monster of me," she whispered, "a butcher queen." But then she thought of Drogon far away, and the dragons in the pit. There is blood on my hands too, and on my heart. We are not so different, Daario and I. We are both monsters. (ADWD, Daenerys IV)
That’s something GRRM illustrates with the excesses of fire, but the fire itself is only a metaphor for a facet of human nature that can degrade down to monstrocity when unchecked. It’s visible in other imagery, the butcher, the cannibal, the sadistic murderer, the greed for power that would observe the beauty of a conflagration over the horror it inflicts on its victims.
I wonder, if the solution to the fire threat lies in the death of Dany's dragons as the first step towards the magic slowly but surely dying out, where do you think it lies with the ice threat? Do the Starks and the Others make another pact and rebuild the Wall or do the Others need to be annihilated in order to destroy the danger of eternal winter?
My thoughts in this direction are by no means final or especially sophisticated. I'm mostly trying to analyse what all these threats seem to have in common and why - objectively - they are worth condemning, and I always arrive at blood magic and abuse of power over others.
The dragons? Born from murder and blood magic. The Others? Kill and then control corpses through what is likely blood magic. Warging? Mind rape, potentially created through blood magic. Whatever Euron has going on? The Faceless Men? Melisandre? Blood magic. Human sacrifice. Murder. For power.
It's no different from the petty cruelties of the more worldly villains who sacrifice human beings for their own advantage to find an outlet for their emotional scars.
So I think that ice and fire are two sides of the same blood magic coin, in that regard. Grief and wrath translate to the desire for power, just on a more apocalyptic level.
The solution is neither a status quo like the Wall and a world of illogical, unnaturally distorted seasons. Nor a cataclysmic devastation like the Doom of Valyria. The Others are obviously back and were never truly defeated, and the Doom didn't end inhumane slavery nor all dragonlords, it merely led to scattered successors all over.
The solution is going to have to be stepping away from the seductive, corrupting power of magic. Because magic is always presented as a trade and the trade is usually the sacrifice of a third party. The link between the human world and the supernatural world needs to be severed.
So I think that both Bran and Dany especially will be foils in this, presented with the opportunity to refuse that power they have grown accustomed to abusing, and Dany will fail to refuse it and either go down in flames or be stopped in a very worldly, mortal way, while Bran will use his power to work toward ending access to magic entirely, leaving himself once again a helpless, disabled boy who must face the reality of his grief and loss with bare hands.
The dragons are likely to die or at least become inaccessible through magic, the direwolf warg bonds, the greenseeing, all will be sacrificed - not necessarily in the form of a new pact but in the reversal or reparation for an ancient crime that created the Others in the first place. Be that a crime of the original Starks or the Children of the Forest or both. This threat will end through revealing a truth and following through on a logical if uncomfortable consequence.
It is interesting that Maqoro refered the Drowned God as the demon, which begs a question what kinda Eldrich abomonation is gonna come out of the sea when Euron does his bloodsacrfice?
If he's anything like Dany, he'll have a bunch of vicious baby krakens in a bucket still waiting to grow up. "Feed us, father! The blood of innocents, please!"
But Euron isn’t sacrificing to the Drowned God. He is practicing blood magic, which is universal in its appeal.
Watch me derail my response to a different subject: the fake duality of the gods, and of ice and fire. (Long post.)
GRRM likes to remind us occasionally that the gods aren’t solid and separate.
In the sept they sing for the Mother's mercy but on the walls it's the Warrior they pray to, and all in silence. She remembered how Septa Mordane used to tell them that the Warrior and the Mother were only two faces of the same great god. But if there is only one, whose prayers will be heard? (ACOK, Sansa V)
Catelyn calls them “the seven faces of god”. God, singular.
“One god with seven aspects” Septon Meribald calls it.
"Seven? No. He has faces beyond count, little one, as many faces as there are stars in the sky. In Braavos, men worship as they will . . . but at the end of every road stands Him of Many Faces, waiting. (AFFC, Arya I)
One god: death.
The struggle is not between the god of death and the god of life, but how humans deal with loss and grief, or with the desire for power, in a world where the door between life and death is more permeable than it should be.
The other whores said that the Sailor's Wife visited the Isle of the Gods on the days when her flower was in bloom, and knew all the gods who lived there, even the ones that Braavos had forgotten. They said she went to pray for her first husband, her true husband, who had been lost at sea when she was a girl no older than Lanna. "She thinks that if she finds the right god, maybe he will send the winds and blow her old love back to her," said one-eyed Yna, who had known her longest, "but I pray it never happens. Her love is dead, I could taste that in her blood. If he ever should come back to her, it will be a corpse." (AFFC, Cat of the Canals)
Shades of Dany and Drogo “When will he be as he was?” Shades of blood magic. Only death can pay for life.
That’s a door that should never be opened. But it is. Again and again it is.
But death never buys life. It only ever buys horror. Horror and power.
I have very few concrete ideas about what exactly Euron’s kind of magic is meant to summon. But true to the above, GRRM makes sure we know that the Drowned God and R’hllor are essentially mirrors. Or, if you will, the exact same thing.
Their god was Red R’hllor, and a jealous god he was. Her own god, the Drowned God of the Iron Isles, was a demon to their eyes, and if she did not embrace this Lord of Light, she would be damned and doomed. They would as gladly burn me as those logs and broken branches. (ADWD, The King’s Prize)
v.
“Your Drowned God is a demon,” the black priest Moqorro said afterward. “He is no more than a thrall of the Other, the dark god whose name must not be spoken.” (ADWD, Victarion I)
Demons hungry for sacrifice, both.
The Drowned God also mirrors the special duality of R’hllor.
In their theology, the Drowned God is opposed by the Storm God, a malignant deity who dwells in the sky and hates men and all their works. He sends cruel winds, lashing rains, and the thunder and lightning that bespeak his endless wroth. (The World of Ice and Fire - The Iron Islands)
v.
On one side is R'hllor, the Lord of Light, the Heart of Fire, the God of Flame and Shadow. Against him stands the Great Other whose name may not be spoken, the Lord of Darkness, the Soul of Ice, the God of Night and Terror. Ours is not a choice between Baratheon and Lannister, between Greyjoy and Stark. It is death we choose, or life. Darkness, or light." (ASOS, Davos III)
Both work the same way. They are two faces of the same hungry abyss.
Significantly, Dany didn’t sacrifice her blood magic victims to any particular god in order to gain the dragons. She did not chant, she did not call on any deity. The presence of the eggs alone, coupled with her intentions, seems to have been enough.
It is blood magic, not fire magic. Or water magic. Or ice magic. Blood, always blood.
In that, Dany is very similar to Euron. Neither care for the gods in particular, but they understand the mechanics of trading life for death.
“All gods are lies, but yours is laughable.” (...)
"The Crow's Eye has fed your Drowned God well, and he has grown fat with sacrifice. Words are wind, but blood is power. We have given thousands to the sea, and he has given us victories!" (TWOW, The Forsaken)
Both call themselves the storm(born) and liken themselves to gods or godliness.
And how did Dany feel when she stood, godlike, atop the pyramid? Lonely.
Are the gods lonely, though?
He saw his brother on the Iron Throne again, but Euron was no longer human. He seemed more squid than man, a monster fathered by a kraken of the deep, his face a mass of writhing tentacles. Beside him stood a shadow in woman's form, long and tall and terrible, her hands alive with pale white fire. Dwarves capered for their amusement, male and female, naked and misshapen, locked in carnal embrace, biting and tearing at each other as Euron and his mate laughed and laughed and laughed... (TWOW The Forsaken)
What is this, but a mockery of the entire concept of duelling gods? They aren’t at war, they are reigning together, watching the carnage commited in their name with inhuman hilarity.
They are in on it together. They are the same.
Given the theme of a fake duality, perhaps, on a deeper level, ice and fire are also the same. Two faces of the same coin. Two masks of the same inhumane hungry energy.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
Both are death. Eternal winter, eternal summer. All just means the end of the world. Different roads lead to the same castle.
@fedonciadale gave me a bit of a brain tweak with this line in a chat:
“I just think that the Ice magic that the CotF woke enabled the Fire magic. So, first we have Ice magic that is warped Cotf magic and the scales are tipped and Fire magic is made possible.“ (...) And I think "awakening the Fire magic" at Summerhall - which is different than just continuing to have dragons - was the action that awoke the Others
There is clearly a connection and a reciprocal relationship between the various kinds of magic in the ASOIAF world. It might just not be as fully dualistic as this, but again different faces on one coin.
When the door is open, the door is open for all. Just in changeable forms.
The dragons don’t like the cold, the Others shatter from obsidian. But if they are both only products of blood magic, they are only tools at the disposition of those who summoned them, and their disparate interests. Like the gods, they only seem mutually opposed, while they spring from the same source.
That might be the reason that both Others and dragons and Melisandre’s magic and glass candles and Euron can happen at the same time, all with disconnected motivations. They all amplify each other to an extent.
It’s possible and even likely that something led to the current escalation of magical destruction, but I can’t properly guess what.
Jaqen emphasizes a transactional aspect between life and death:
"The Red God has his due, sweet girl, and only death may pay for life. This girl took three that were his. This girl must give three in their places. Speak the names, and a man will do the rest." (ACOK, Arya VII)
He doesn’t say what will happen if that exchange is disturbed. Maybe nothing. Maybe the Curse of Garin. Maybe the Doom of Valyria.
Whatever originally opened the doorway between life and death that enabled these exchanges of blood and life for power, is the true problem.
Whatever prompted it then and now, in the North, a full-on apocalypse is already slowly underway. The Others bring the cold, they enslave the dead, all life flees before them, or joins them in death. Clearly, something powerful went into creating them. This dark magic attracted more dark magic. Stannis and his blood sacrificing priestess cannot hope to defeat the Others, perhaps they are even helping make it worse.
In the South, something similar may begin gather, bought with blood magic. Perhaps Euron is simply waiting for someone with powerful enough blood to come along and be of use to him.
The different kinds of magic cannot defeat each other.
In order to end all of it, the door needs to be closed.
Is Daenerys really going North? Maybe it's my own wants clouding my judgement on my part (I'm not really a fan of the good vs. evil long night), but I just can't see it tbh. Especially w/ Faegon to deal with and the limited time.
I sincerely doubt she will go north. I think her arc will be mirrored and contrasted with what happens in the North, she will not be involved in it in any significant way.
Bran is her magical foil, the key to the ice threat, as she is the key to the fire threat. Both will have to choose between their heart's desire and the right thing to do. Their parallels will likely become more fleshed out when GRRM really pulls out all the stops with Bran's arc in a spectacular speed run, while slowly leading Dany's to her inevitable conclusion. If both touch the climax of their moral dilemma at roughly the same time, we can better appreciate the build-up to both.
It's bound to be more interesting watching the Field of Fire 2.0 when we see it through the eyes of someone who liked the idea of burning thousands of wights from the air, and then considers how such a weapon should not exist at all while watching it employed on human beings. (This likely being Jon's perspective.)
While the actual solution to the ice threat is quasi-political (negotiation and sacrifice), we'll likely watch the initial promise of Dany's political arc devolve into a monster-slaying conspiracy. Bait and switch.
Comparing the trained unquestioning obedience (or not!) of the Unsullied with that of the wights, the Dothraki with the wildlings, the human crises in between... all of that will work better when events happen in parallel and not kind of muddled together by making Dany pull a Stannis 2.0 and head North.
hiii do u have/know of more metas about the ice and fire threat and how it's possible that the cotf creating the others caused the dragons to be born? or anything similar to that it's so interesting and i could spend a whole day reading them 🥹
Hi! Sorry for only replying now.
I think I already saw you reblog most of what @fedonciadale has written on the subject, so my big recommendation there is already out. :(
If anyone has any recommendations on meta about this magical relationship, I would be most grateful!
I think Jon and Bran will be instrumental in the fight against the threat of ice, and Jon and Arya will be instrumental in the fight against the threat of fire. What do you think?
Hi there!
I think it won't make sense for Jon to be an indispensible factor in the solution to both or even either magical threat, on a narrative level.
Mostly, because if Jon is the key to saving the world, it would put a deeply uncomfortable retroactive justification over Rhaegar's horrific prophecy baby ideas and all the misery they created. I just don't see GRRM going down that path. Not ever.
Jon has been instrumental on an administrative level that has the largest effect in the number of human beings being kept alive. He prevented the unchecked invasion of Mance's army, the chaos of which would have obliterated any sensible winter preparations left to make. He saved thousands of wildlings through political negotiations, peacefully, and he was aiming to save thousands more. If he is a key aspect of lining up the North to survive winter and war both, he will have done the work that is a) crucial to the survival of humanity, and b) parallel but not directly related to solving the ice threat itself.
That is the role I see Jon in. It fits with what he's been doing so far, and it leaves the magical solution up to those who have been embroiled in it, AND it frees up Jon for his messy business in the South, which involves dealing with the implications of RLJ and the fire threat.
While Dany is one key aspect of the fire threat, she is also only a copy of Aegon the Conqueror. We've been there and done that. It's not great but it's not apocalyptic. Burning a city is horrific but it is not on par with the apocalyptic destruction of the ice threat. Unless you divorce Dany herself from the heart of it and let her be the equivalent to Bran (her true foil). Both are the masters of their magical corners. Bran will most likely resolve the ice threat (and ultimately give up his powers), so it should fall to Dany to have that option for the fire threat. Meaning the real fire threat is potentially rooted in an extreme and apocalyptic escalation related to the kind of blood magic nonsense Euron is cooking up.
So, the apocalyptic fire threat is something Dany can very possibly actually defeat.
The problem will likely arise in whether or not she is willing to give up her own powers (dragons) and how this will affect her political ambitions. My guess is: she will cling to the dragons and it will doom her, horribly.
Arya is very connected to all things fire threat, and Jon obviously has a family connection to it, and I utterly see them involved in that plot, but I am not sure they will be the "solution" to it, either, though they will likely try. This is where brother and sister who can finish each other's sentences are going to have to shine. Ideally, also by quite simply saving as many people as possible. Though perhaps also in trying to stop Dany.
Dany may well doom herself within her own conflagration. GRRM loves poetic justice, and Dany being consumed by her own obsession is a lot more poetic than simply being stabbed to death - no matter by whom.
(As always: these are my current thoughts, subject to change.)
Why do i get the feeling that Dany will use Euron's black magic in DotD 2.0 in desparation if she fears losing. Much like how Rhaenyra and Daemon. (Dany actually parallels Rhaenyra a lot but this time the woman will win a short lived victory over the man)...
I am so torn about Dany and Euron and blood magic!
I deleted a draft post yesterday because I changed my mind mid-way. Ugh.
If ice and fire are to be equivalent threats, the fire threat needs to attain a much greater doom level than just copying the first Targaryen invasion. Euron's godhood blood magic plans are likely to be related to that. They are the only thing that offers a threat to human life remotely on par with the Long Night 2.0.
Bran is at the center of the Northern magical plot. (Jon is an administrative assistant in it, sorry not sorry.)
Dany is at the center of the fire magic plot.
Bran will be the one to defeat the apocalyptic ice threat by - probably - sacrificing the magical powers that have been sold to him as a replacement for the loss of his mobility and the attached dreams. A power he has abused and a power he will likely use in order to create a new harmony before setting it aside.
Dany would then, equivalently, be placed in a position to give up her own magical powers/dragon children, which she attained in order to compensate for the losses and tribulations she has suffered. That or she will simply face the loss of (most of) them in defeating Euron and rejecting whatever ascension-to-godhood ideas he is championing. She will see what devastation is inherent in them and not do it. Much like she sort of had a decent kernel in her opposition to slavery, no matter how hypocritical and ill-performed.
Curtain falls on the apocalyptic threats and the greater magical plotlines.
But. Unlike Bran, Dany will likely refuse to give up her remaining dragon, Drogon. She refused to accept the loss of Drogo and turned to blood magic, then she took that lesson to marry the fire.
If Westeros refuses to love her, she won't suddenly settle down peacefully. Especially, if she thinks that she saved them. So, if she isn't offered compensation in the shape of love and power in return for her losses (Hello, Viserys? Is that you?) then she may go down a dark path of trying to make a political conquest with quasi-magical fire and blood. By clinging to the dragons, she will be dooming herself.
This will be the political plotline, which culminates in the destruction of KL, Dany and the dragons. Whichever form exactly that would take. After which Westeros begins to restructure itself and rebuild.
That's be my current take on the ice and fire threats. Subject to change.
I wonder why GRRM changed the title of the last book from A Time for Wolves to A Dream of Spring? If you only take out the threat of Ice, you'll have eternal summer which pretty much sounds like hell. Without winter you can't get spring. The only way to fix these unbalanced magical seasons is to remove both Ice and Fire. I'm sick of the insistance of a certain part of fandom that dragons are useful against the Others because both are equally horrible. Also the Last Hero used peace and diplomacy.
Well, I'm not GRRM. I'm also not very versed on the history of the fandom. I don't know when he switched the titles, etc. Sorry.
My personal guess is that "A Time for Wolves" sounds pretty gruesome, given how we've had plenty of images of wolves hunting and eating innocent human beings in the books. It implies triumph for the Starks, at best, but not necessarily as a force of good. (To me, anyway.) The general vibe is destruction and doom.
45. Brothers shall fight | and fell each other,
And sisters' sons | shall kinship stain;
Hard is it on earth, | with mighty whoredom;
Axe-time, sword-time, | shields are sundered,
Wind-time, wolf-time, | ere the world falls;
Nor ever shall men | each other spare.
(Völuspá)
An even darker touch than "The Winds of Winter", no? I suspect GRRM may have wanted something a little more uplifting to end on.
"A Dream of Spring" has a hopeful, optimistic vibe, implying both the ability to imagine a better time, and the importance of spring as a time of renewal, growth and the return of life. Rebirth.
I don't personally get a sense of only defeating the ice threat from it, mostly because spring isn't terribly associated with the power of fire, but rather the power of the sun and nature.
The dragons are as antithetical to the idea of green spring as the Others. Dragons plant no trees. I have a suspicion, after The Winds of Winter, their role as a threat to humanity will be fairly clear.
