He Sent His Pregnant Queen, Rhaella, And His Younger Son And New Heir, Viserys, Away To Dragonstone ||We

He sent his pregnant queen, Rhaella, and his younger son and new heir, Viserys, away to Dragonstone || We speak of Rhaegar’s sister, born on Dragonstone before its fall. The one they called Daenerys.

fixing game of thrones →  Rhaella survives Dany’s birth and gets to raise her children in Essos 

asoiaf quotes  // A Game of Thrones - Daenerys I ↴ Her mother had died birthing her, and for that her brother Viserys had never forgiven her. […] A princess, Dany thought. She had forgotten what that was like.

everyone is happy au:

King Aerys is not mad. Rhaella raises Dany and Viserys.

Lmfao, never mind that the Targaryens switched from Valyrian god worship to the Faith of the Seven to adopt Westerosi culture.

Never mind that they adopted a house sigil to adopt to Westerosi House customs.

Never mind that they married people from non-Valyrian descended Houses like Martell, Dayne, Blackwood, Arryn...

Literally what part of this says "spit on Westerosi customs" lmfao?

The Red Comet appears exactly 400 years after the Doom of Valyria. Doesn’t that seem significant?

Because round numbers like that make me want to look twice here… and in doing so, there’s something very interesting in the timeline that GRRM has made efforts to keep slightly veiled.

The Red Comet appears a year before the turn of the century in ASOIAF—that is to say, 299 AC. The Doom occurs in 102 BC. The non-existent year zero of this kind of timekeeping makes it look wrong, but that’s exactly 400 years.

I always thought it was interesting that the Doom of Valyria happened in 102 BC—it’s so close to being a round number, but it’s just off. Just enough off, though, that the Red Comet in 299 AC lines up.

Round numbers feel meaningful, and that’s even true for the characters within the world of ASOIAF:

Joffrey and Margaery shall marry on the first day of the new year, which as it happens is also the first day of the new century. The ceremony will herald the dawn of a new era. (ASOS Tyrion I)

The new century, of course, is 300 years since Aegon’s Conquest:

It’s a new century, my lady. The three hundredth year since Aegon’s Conquest. (ASOS Sansa IV)

It’s almost dissatisfying that all this talk of the new century doesn’t line up with the Doom and doesn’t line up with the Red Coment.

So do we have Aegon to blame for making these numbers not line up? Actually, no—Aegon invaded Westeros in 2BC, exactly 100 years after the Doom of Valyria.

It was then that he crowned himself… but that’s not the date that Westeros counts years from; Westeros counts the years from his coronation in Oldtown. This is a detail apparently so interesting (and perhaps important) that it’s described twice in The World of Ice and Fire. For example:

Only a handful of lords had been present for Aegon’s first coronation at the mouth of the Blackwater, but hundreds were on hand to witness his second, and tens of thousands cheered him afterward in the streets of Oldtown as he rode through the city on Balerion’s back. Amongst those at Aegon’s second coronation were the maesters and archmaesters of the Citadel. Perhaps for that reason, it was this coronation, rather than the Aegonfort crowning or the day of Aegon’s Landing, that became fixed as the start of Aegon’s reign.

If Westeros counted years from the year Aegon crowned himself, rather than from the year Aegon was crowned by the Citadel, then the year that the Red Comet appeared in the sky would be 300AC, and that would be exactly 400 years after the Doom. Seen that way, everything lines up curiously well…

So much happens when the Red Comet arrives—the revival of dragons and the return of magic in the world, whatever the relationship between those things is. Those events, and that year, feels much more like the “dawn of a new era.”

Additionally, seeing it all line up so well raises some eyebrows. Seeing all the dates like this make it seem significant that Aegon invaded exactly 100 years later, and makes room for interpreting the Red Comet as potentially having some kind of relationship to the Doom, because 400 years feels just too regular. Why does the comet appear exactly 300 years after Aegon’s invasion, exactly 400 years after the Doom?

At the least, there’s a sense of fate involved that Dany’s dragons wake exactly 400 years after the Doom—or do the revival of magic and the return of dragons both relate to some unknown third factor?