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Hi💙 Just saw your latest post and I'm so excited now for the Balerion x Vhagar with their little ones😍 And I loved reading your thoughts about her bond with Caraxes as younger. Do you have more theories to share?👉🏻👈🏻

Yes!!! Dragons and trying to figure out how they work in GRRM’s universe has been my hyperfixation lately. Here are some, but I’m not going to ramble for tooooo long.

- Cannibal is described as older than Sheepstealer, and Sheepstealer was born as early as 35 AC, so I’m relatively confident that Cannibal was hatched from Balerion and a mate, most likely Vhagar but possibly Meraxes (the other explanation for his origin is that he’s an egg from a yet unmentioned dragon, but I doubt this as his description is very similar to Balerion’s). This makes him an old dragon during the Dance! My headcanon is that as a hatchling, he was actually extremely shy and flew away away due to fear of the other dragons. Later on, his fear manifested in violence instead and he became the dragon we know in the story. I don’t think this is meant to be canon, buuuut I like it.

- I think I touched on this a little with my Caraxes Vhagar post, but my theory on Caraxes’s neck is that it’s not that he’s from other long-necked dragons that aren’t mentioned in the story, but rather that it is a result of a mutation. Environmental factors can play a role in birth defects/mutations, so I feel as if perhaps being in Valyria impacted Balerion and he passed on defect.

- Admittedly, GRRM probably doesn’t take into account lore of dragons in other media, I do think he makes his own rules. That being said, he tends not to *share* these rules, so my only choice to make sense of things is to go off other lore. In most dragon lore, dragons mate for life. We know, or at least it’s heavily implied, that Balerion, Meraxes, and Vhagar were mates. However, the general consensus of this and that this was a special case to mirror the conquerors (and a theory that has been going around that dragons mate in accordance with their rider’s opinions of other riders), and people have been pairing dragons mainly in duos. There’s a lot of unanswered questions if the duos mating for life theory is true, so my longstanding theory has been that they mate for life in trios. The trios being the one mentioned above, Vermithor-Silverwing-Dreamfyre, Syrax-Caraxes-Seasmoke, then potentially a duo with Vermax and Moondancer (if you believe that Laena daughter of Baela’s is offspring of Moondancer). However, I did have to adjust this to any one dragon having two mates, so Syrax can mate with Caraxes and Seasmoke, but Seasmoke is allowed a separate mate of Tessarion as well. That being said, this also doesn’t give Meleys a mate so I am coming around more to the possibility that dragons mate freely.

-Same disclaimer that I feel like GRRM prefers his own lore instead of something like lizards, but I’ll drive myself crazy without having something like this to tether my theories to, and lizards are some of the closest animals to compare to dragons. More often than not, a clutch of lizard eggs will be fathered by two different male lizards (meaning some of the eggs are fathered by one lizard, and the other eggs another). This was a large inspiration for my dragon trio theory, but would also work for dragons mating indiscriminately. Keeping this in mind is how I supported my idea of Syrax continuously producing fertilized by both Caraxes and Seasmoke. That means that Jacaerys, Lucerys, and Joffrey could receive eggs fathered by Seasmoke, but that Aegon, Viserys, and Rhaena’s eggs, as well as Mysaria’s egg, were fathered by Caraxes.

-As for the idea that dragon mating is influenced by their riders’ feelings, I am of two minds about it. We have Silverwing and Vermithor, whose riders were obviously in love and they continue to mate even after Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s deaths. However, this can also be explained by the fact that the two dragons were often in close proximity and the two riders oft flew together. It very well could have been that by the time Jaehaerys and Alysanne died, Silverwing and Vermithor had formed their own bond so strong that they continued to mate (this would always be true if you believe that all dragons mate for life, but would be true for these two regardless). As for the conquerors’ dragons, I do believe they were a special case. The three dragons were symbolic and thus no matter how Aegon and Visenya felt about one another, Balerion and Vhagar remained mated until Balerion’s death, and it’s my headcanon that she continued to remain without a mate for the rest of her life. Because their bond was more than them, it was a symbol of House Targaryen and the Conquest as a whole. As for Rhaenyra and Daemon’s bond, or even something possible between Daeron and Addam, I don’t know. I don’t have any strong opinions on it.

-Drawing my opinions/headcanons from lizards yet again, I do believe dragons can reproduce asexually. Lots of species of lizards can do this. That being said, I am not sure the trigger for this, because then what is the motivation from them to reproduce with male dragons when they can do it by themselves? Either dragons feel some sort of sexual pleasure (which I’m not getting into bc I’m not into that!) or they can only reproduce asexually in certain circumstances. I do believe that female dragons can only produce other female dragons asexually, and that there’s no magic involved in this.

-I do not believe dragons can change their biological sex. In real life, as far as my research has taken me, you cannot determine outwardly if a lizard is male or female. I would think the same would go for dragons. What I believe happened is that people were assuming if a dragon was male or female based on external features being more masculine or feminine, and that when they were proven wrong they took this to mean the dragon had changed sex. However, it has been confirmed that most of what Septon Barth wrote in his book about dragons was, in fact, true. Septon Barth wrote that dragons could change sex. This means that my headcanon very well is not meant to be the case. I simply believe this because it makes it far easier for me to nail down a family tree, which I’ve been attempting to do.

That’s all for now, I do have more dragon thoughts but this is just what I thought of off the top of my head. If you’re interested in more dragon content, I’m posting Balerion, Vhagar, and their hatchlings next Friday and I am currently working with the artist moonwyvern (the lovely artist that did the art of Vhagar and Caraxes for me) on a long form project to create a dragon family tree art.