u/BigAbbreviations9512

This is NOT another Daario = Euron = Tyrek = Alisar Thorn’s Mother = Doran Martell’s favorite cherry toe theory.

But something with Daario feels totally off and I’m trying to put my finger on it. Might still sound like tinfoil, but I can’t unsee it anymore.

Daario enters the story right in time for the siege of Yunkai. This is a city famous for its bedslaves, and even the breeding/training of those slaves is part of the system. In general, the whole southern Essos arc is built around slavery economies and treating human bodies as products. And right here Daario shows up.

He doesn’t get introduced as a normal “hot guy” character. Honestly, for the reader he feels more like a cartoonish, clownish, exaggerated peacock - almost anime main character energy in the worst possible way.

(Compiling the description here from wiki passages so I don’t have to quote everything separately:)

> Daario is lithe and smooth skinned with bright, deep blue eyes which can appear almost purple. His curly hair reaches his collar, and he keeps his beard cut in three prongs. Daario dyes his hair and trident beard, sometimes in blue and other times in deep purple. His fingernails are also enameled blue. Daario's mustachios are painted gold, and he has a large, curving nose. A golden tooth gleams in his mouth when he smiles.

Blue eyes that shift toward purple, dyed hair, gold accents… that’s basically the same visual language we get with Young Griff / Jon Connington disguises (and also with John the Fiddler in the hedge knight). Not saying Blackfyre or secret Targ or anything like that, but it’s definitely a running motif.

Also, I don’t think this is just “natural attractiveness.” To pull off that kind of colouring, his natural hair base has to be light. Planetos doesn’t exactly have L’Oréal bleach, as far as we know. So I’d assume there’s at least some Valyrian or Lyseni mix in there, even though he’s introduced as Tyroshi.

Now Lys.
We know from TWOIAF that Lys isn’t just “pretty people island” it’s explicitly described as being shaped by generations of Valyrian slave breeding focused on beauty and sexual appeal. Basically a sexual Disneyland powered by slavery. And honestly, Yunkai feels like a darker mirror of that same concept.

In that context, Daario reads less like a normal character and more like something engineered for visual and sexual impact.

But here’s the weird part:
Dany’s reaction to him is completely disproportionate.

Not just “she finds him attractive”, but borderline obsessive and lusting over him. Way more intense than anything she shows for other men. Even Drogo at first is fear and intimidation and only later shifts after her dragon dreams. (So yeah, magic might play a role in her perception there too.)

Barristan basically reads it not as romance, but as destabilization or just a horny teenager with terrible taste.

So the pattern I keep circling back to is:
Lys = preserved Valyrian beauty selection and breeding system
Yunkai = commodified sexual body economy
Daario = some leftover echo of that system (not a secret identity twist, more like lineage/trait cluster/cultural residue)
Dany = last dragonlord bloodline reacting to something “compatible”

Not saying literal magic pheromones or anything like that. More like Valyria didn’t just leave dragons behind, but also biological/cultural selection effects that still show up in weird ways in Essos.

Could obviously just be “teenage horny Dany + bad boy mercenary with red flags”.

But then again: why isn’t he just described as attractive? Why does he have to be this over-the-top, almost artificial visual overload? And why does basically nobody else react to him like Dany does?
You could argue GRRM just thought this would be appealing to a teenage girl POV. But at the same time, he has no problem describing Renly, Jaime, Loras, young Robert etc. as conventionally attractive.

So putting this exact type of character into this exact storyline still feels like there’s something going on under the surface.

What do you think?

TL;DR: Daario feels like an artificially over-designed product of Essos’ beauty/sex economy, because the human body as a product is a theme in Slaver‘s Bay. No secret identity, I swear.

In ADWD, Daenerys VI:

“This one heard the Astapori scratching at the walls last night,” the little scribe said as she was washing Dany’s back.
Irri and Jhiqui exchanged a look.
“No one was scratching,” said Jhiqui. “Scratching … how could they scratch?”
“With their hands,” said Missandei. “The bricks are old and crumbling. They are trying to claw their way into the city.”
“This would take them many years,” said Irri. “The walls are very thick. This is known.”
“I dream of them as well,” Dany took Missandei’s hand. “The camp is a good half-mile from the city, my sweetling. No one was scratching at the walls.”
“Your Grace knows best,” said Missandei.

What stands out to me is how completely isolated Missandei’s perception is here. Everyone immediately dismisses it.

The usual explanation is Viserion digging his lair, but that feels weak in my opinion, because:
- only Missandei hears it
- everyone else denies it and even gaslighting her
- and later (ADWD, Daenerys VIII) there’s no strong indication that some huge tunnel had already been dug.

It could be little birds or mices and spy stuff like in Kingslanding, but there is this strange undertone that striked me before.

A few Bran chapters earlier, in ADWD, Bran II, Bran about Bloodraven:

the whisperer in the dark

That feels like a direct Lovecraft nod (The Whisperer in Darkness).

And Missandei’s scene strongly echoes The Rats in the Walls: scratching inside ancient walls, heard only by certain people (and cats). Also its matching the theme of the chapter with sickness, cannibalism and old atrocities.

So is GRRM using Lovecraft references here as genre markers? Not just easter eggs, but signals that these scenes should be read as cosmic horror intruding into the story?

Rereading Tyrion X in A Storm of Swords, I noticed something in Oberyn’s duel with Gregor that made me rethink the Hammer of the Waters.

I know, that is not a new observation, but it made me think about the Mountain in this role and the timeline of events. Lets start:

In the middle of the fight, Gregor misses Oberyn and hits a stableboy instead:

“The stable was behind him. Spectators screamed and shoved at each other to get out of the way. One stumbled into Oberyn’s back. Ser Gregor hacked down with all his savage strength. The Red Viper threw himself sideways, rolling. The luckless stableboy behind him was not so quick. As his arm rose to protect his face, Gregor’s sword took it off between elbow and shoulder. ‘Shut up!’ the Mountain howled at the stableboy’s scream, and this time he swung the blade sideways, sending the top half of the lad’s head across the yard in a spray of blood and brains.”
A Storm of Swords, Tyrion X

What struck me is the sequence.

First the arm.
Then the neck.

That maps almost perfectly onto the two major “Hammer” events in Westerosi myth: the Breaking of the Arm of Dorne and the creation of the Neck.

And in exactly that order. That feels too deliberate to be random. It made me wonder if GRRM is hinting at something important here: maybe the Hammer of the Waters was never one single cataclysm, but at least two separate strikes.

That would actually make a lot of sense. The Arm and the Neck are distant, separate, and seem to have produced very different geographic results. Two targeted acts fit better than one giant event.

What makes it more interesting to me is Gregor’s role in all this. Not Gregor as Gregor, but Gregor as “the Mountain.”

If the Mountain here is symbolically standing in for the old powers that called the Hammer, the title matters. And when I think of magical mountains in ASOIAF, I keep coming back to High Heart.

But first: What is also interesting is that different sources in Westeros seem to place the Hammer of the Waters in slightly different focal locations. Catelyn’s recollection in Catelyn VIII ties it to the Neck and the Children’s Tower, while The World of Ice and Fire places emphasis on the Isle of Faces as the ritual center where it was supposedly invoked.

So we have at least two different kinds of “anchor points” for the events. One is a raised, fortified structure in the Neck. The other is a sacred island at the heart of the Gods Eye.

What they share is elevation and ritual significance, a kind of physical prominence paired with religious meaning. That overlap is exactly what makes High Heart feel relevant here as well, since it combines height with an unusually dense concentration of weirwoods and a strong sense of sacred presence.

High Heart has the densest confirmed concentration of weirwoods in the series. (On the Isle of Faces this is hinted, but we don’t see it) Thirty-one trees, arranged in a ring or crown. Arya even describes it as feeling like they were above the rain. That sounds less like a hill and more like an ancient ritual mountain.

So now I’m wondering if GRRM is quietly connecting the Hammer to an elevated weirwood site like High Heart, and using Gregor as a symbolic stand-in for that.

Not proof of anything, obviously. But the arm and then neck sequence feels incredibly precise.

Am I reaching, or does this look intentional to anyone else?

Moat Cailin is described in the text as a once massive fortress in the Neck:

“Immense blocks of black basalt, each as large as a crofter’s cottage, lay scattered and tumbled like a child’s wooden blocks, half-sunk in the soft boggy soil.”
(A Game of Thrones, Catelyn VIII)

Later, we see it still functioning as a defensive choke point, but already in a heavily decayed state:

“The way is guarded by three great towers, and the rest of Moat Cailin is a ruin drowned in the Neck.”
(A Dance with Dragons, Reek II)

It is consistently attributed to the First Men, but that attribution always feels slightly at odds with what is actually being described.

Not in the sense that the First Men couldn’t build in stone, they clearly did in multiple regions, but in the scale, material, and location of Moat Cailin specifically. A massive multi-tower basalt fortress placed in the Neck, one of the most unstable and inaccessible environments in Westeros, feels unusually extreme compared to most other surviving First Men structures.

What we actually get in the text is mostly the structure itself, not the context of its construction:
- enormous basalt stonework
- multiple towers and a wooden keep (now long gone)
- a critical choke point controlling movement between North and South
- a ruin so old that its original form is barely reconstructable

Maybe I’m overthinking it, but Moat Cailin feels like one of those places where Westeros preserves the result, but not the explanation for how or why something like this was ever built there in the first place.

Does anyone have a solid in-universe explanation for the scale and location of it that actually fits First Men-era capabilities?

The questions that don’t quite fit

Why is the Starry Sept in Oldtown and not in the Vale?
Why does the Ravenry have a Weirwood at its center?
Why does the Citadel feel older than the Maester system that defines it today?
Why is there no equivalent Maester institution anywhere in Essos?
Why are ravens in Westeros so symbolically overdetermined?

And why do the Hightowers survive every religious and political shift without ever being displaced?
Taken together, these questions suggest that Oldtown is not simply a city with old institutions, but a place where older structures were never fully replaced — only rewritten.

The basic timeline problem

The standard explanation places the Citadel very early in Westerosi history, often in the Age of Heroes and linked to early Hightower tradition. But the Maester system as we know it — chains, formal education, raven networks, healing, political advising — only becomes fully functional once Andal culture spreads across Westeros.

The important point is not the Faith of the Seven, but Andal-era conditions: literacy, standardized scholarship, and a political landscape where neutral learned advisors can operate across competing kingdoms.

So the tension is simple: the Citadel appears to predate the world that makes its current function possible.

Oldtown as stacked history

Oldtown behaves less like a city with a single origin and more like layered history preserved in place.
The Starry Sept anchors the Faith of the Seven in a city already culturally central. The Citadel holds intellectual authority over Westeros despite having no counterpart in Essos. And the Hightowers remain constant through every transformation.

This suggests Oldtown is not built from institutions, but built over something older that all later systems reinterpret rather than replace.

The Starry Sept and appropriation

Why is the Starry Sept in Oldtown and not in the Vale?

If the Faith originates with the Andals, its early sacred geography should be centered where Andal identity formed. Instead, its most important southern holy site is embedded in Oldtown.
That pattern looks less like origin and more like appropriation.

A new religion does not create a sacred center here — it anchors itself onto an existing one.

Like Rome becoming the center of a later religious order: authority is gained not by building anew, but by inheriting meaning already present in place.

The Ravenry and the Weirwood

Inside the Ravenry stands a Weirwood at its center.
Weirwoods are tied to the Old Gods, memory, and the earliest belief systems in Westeros. Their presence inside the heart of the Citadel is difficult to reconcile with a purely rational scholarly origin.
It suggests continuity rather than replacement.

So the original Citadel may not have been a library in the modern sense, but a memory structure
embedded in living systems — where knowledge was not stored in texts, but in a network.

The chain as inversion

The Maester chain becomes the symbolic reversal of that system.

If the Weirwood represents living, connected memory — roots, continuity, shared perception — then the chain represents fragmentation.
Knowledge is no longer unified, but divided into disciplines. No longer organic, but controlled. No longer networked, but institutionalized.

The chain is not just a tool of learning. It is the transformation of memory into structure.

Bloodraven and Bran as echoes

Bloodraven and Bran Stark perform functions that resemble what Maesters are supposed to do more closely than the Maesters themselves: communication across distance, access to memory, perception beyond physical limits.

Through greenseeing and the Weirwood network, they bypass Maester mediation entirely.

They are not anomalies outside the system — they are echoes of its original function before it was formalized and rationalized into chains and ravens.

Closing thought

The history of Oldtown is not a transition from magic to science.
It is a process of overwriting: older functions of memory, communication, and perception are absorbed into institutions that gradually strip them of their original nature and reframe them as scholarship, administration, and rational order.

And this fits one of the deeper themes of the series: that the Maesters are not neutral observers of this shift, but participants in the slow removal of magic from the world.

The Citadel is not just what remains of an older system. It is what remains after that system has been rewritten.

TL;DR
The Citadel only makes sense if it is the rationalized end-state of an older system where memory, communication, and knowledge were once unified in living networks and later broken into institutional scholarship.

This post was written with the help of AI because English is not my native language and this stuff is quite complex. Please don‘t hate me :)