The Five Forts and Beyond (Great Empire of the Dawn!)

Sam/Aeoron connecting chapters a la Meeranese knot will be awesome. That’s how we can kind of sort it out.

We are being guided by Quathe. In order to go forward we must first go back. History repeats which is why we love geeking out to the ancient history of Os so we can speculate about what will happen next. Love it

Hi ! Is there mentions about Planetos rotation side ? Does sun rises in the east ? Because if so, when you are located in, let's say the Womb of the World, then in the morning you should see the sun crossing the sword (the Bones) in the east. Maybe the Bones moutains are lightbringer.

So I’m fairly new to this channel.
(Absolutely loving it so far by the way.)
I’ll preface this question by saying that there is absolutely zero negativity regarding my curiosity here, but is it known that David is absolutely ripped during these streams? Im getting some serious halfling leaf vibes.

4th time watching this one ❤‍🔥❤‍🔥❤‍🔥❤‍🔥❤‍🔥❤‍🔥

Tbh David definitely felt like the one with superior knowledge and understanding of the symbolistic nature of the text here. Still, Tim's insights into particular areas were both valuable and interesting. Thanks guys!

I think the walls of the five forts are like Volantis'; they are wide enough to have a number of troops and materials transported between the forts a top them.

I love how plate subduction is a thing in asoiaf. I never thought something i learned about in a Magic Schoolbus edutainment game would come back into play with my favourite fantasy series

Thank you

No idea you were a Graham Hancock Fan as well! Actually now that I think about it, it makes total sense lmao

Rewatch binge 🎉

What if we take K’Dath’s claims of being the oldest city in the world to be true. They could have been followed of the Lion of Night who created an evil society and experimented with demon making. Ultimately they got walled out by the Great Dawn and then the Bloodstone Emperor joined in their teaching and then brought about the global apocalypse.

Fairly sure that Leng is supposed to be Vietnam, with the emperess' ruling, it being south of Yi Ti (China) and the jungles.

❤

Yeey 100k subs congratulations 🎉

Walls that are several hundred feet high are not basic fortifications

When GRRM wants us to see a wall on a map, HE DRAWS A WALL. That is obvious from The Wall of Westeros.
There is No Wall on that map between the Great Forts. They’re closer to the forts that used to lead up to Rome. They didn’t wall off the roads, they simply CONTROLLED them.

I can't remember when this was exactly but at one point in ancient Rome they actually believed that into India proper, and further, there were green cannibal people. Also, there was an ancient Chinese traveler who made it all the way to Eastern Rome and came back to China with his experiences and China referred to Rome as "little china".

So it's possible these distant places the maesters have only rumors of, have much more intimate knowledge ofwesterns. First hand, magic mirrors, or otherwise. Especially if they are so advanced for so much longer

A good example in the story too cement the idea of a ruined empire having groups fleeing in different directions is what happened after the doom of Valyria. Some went west and formed New Valyria, some went east like to the island of Elyria, and some lucky few families went way west and settled in Westeros. It's probably the exact same thing that happened when the Dawn Empire fell.

Hey Dave, have you seen The Great Wall?
Its about how the wall of China is used to defend the world from green hive mind aliens who came from a meteorite after an emperor was evil.

I dont think a wall would be necessary between the forts. Logistics would be a thing for an army of the dead, so simply putting fortifications on the edge of the grey waste would do the trick. The army of the dead would be pressed to find corpses to replace as I imagine that desert conditions are condusive to preserving a corpse. The White Walkers may need to build its army before hitting a population as massive as that would exist in Yi Ti. The forts, or the population in them, may be bait. I know there is populations in the waste, but they are probably not large enough to sustain the army of the dead. The populations of the grey wastes may not be viable for reasons involving magic.

Euron Greyjoy didn't just read the King jn Yellow, he adapted it into a musical and took it on tour.

to support the idea of a Hastur parallel, Euron flat out says at the Kingsmoot that he is the Storm, the Ironborn antithesis of the Drowned God. mayhaps both gods a deep ones, Hastur is the enemy of Cthulu just as the Storm God is the enemy of the Drowned God. Euron serves as the King in Yellow figure for the Storm God.

when i hear baashabad idk why i always think of narnia and the city of tashban, i wonder if he took any insp. from c.s.lewis, sometimes i feel like the purposely mysterious unknown system of magic was partly inspired from narnian magic. idk maybe a stretch i also believe we can see similarities in literature even when the authors may have not been influenced by each other, and then i think back on how ALL history is interconnected if u look far enough back even if we dont know it.

Have you heard that GRRM is going to an ayahuasca ceremony to help break his writer's block on Winds of Winter?

The idea of a false claimant is very western, all starters of new dynstasties in Chiense tradition do not claim blood links to the existing throne but instead say that the existing dynasty has lost the mandate of heaven based on the floods, plagues, riots, poor.harvest etc I think you guys need to do a bit more reading around Chinese history to get the correct terminology and feel. Although saying that I feel GRRM also has a relatively weaker grasp on Chinese history and mythology than Western one. Hence why it put them at the edge of the world.

Why 3 kingdom's vs waring states vs 5 kingdoms vs 7 kingdoms honestly we don't have enough information to go on. How do the alliances work? How developed/established are the kingdoms, how long has the civil war been going on, who has the imperial seal, who is issuing imperial mandates, what do the civil service think/write about, what are generals stationed at the borders like the 5 forts doing who do they side with?

George doesn't give us enough to accurately place the current sate of Yi Ti with a real world historical analogy.

3 kingdoms had 3 very clearly defined sides and fixed alliances and seperate civil ministries, scholars wrote and supported each kingdom and began to develop seperate systems of governance and ruling philosophies...it seems more chaotic than that, like In the breakdown after the short and weak Siyma dynasty after the 3 kingdoms period in my view as we have individual generals ruling cities and very limited imperial power.

I suspect that much as with the building of the actual Wall, we have it backwards with the Five Forts: what if they were built by the people of Kadath in the Grey Waste, oldest city in the world, to defend against the incursions by the Great Empire of the Dawn. Then later, these features get taken over by the people they were built to defend against, and used against their builders.

After all, who is most likely to have raised a gigantic wall of ice? The ice guys. Why are all the castles of far more mundane construction? They're much newer and built by someone else. Does a wall of ice actually act as a barrier to the Others? I look forward to seeing that tested.

Our own history tricks our perception because we think the Romans and Ancient China are old, so other old stuff must be similar and follow similar logic. But they're not, compared to the Younger Dryas or even the previous interglacial. In our world we see megalithic and monolithic structures, incredibly well-made, that don't actually make sense for our timeline, but we insist they do because the alternative means accepting weknow very little indeed.

I've always though of The Wall in Westeros being inspired by Hadrian's Wall, while the Five Forts, being closer to YeeTee being inspired in part by the Great Wall of China, only where the Great Wall's forts are mostly destroyed now, the Five Forts being MUCH more prominent and vast.

China was doing well untill Mao and friends came along and destroyed the old china.

"Graham Hancock and Randall Carson are my jam"

I hope I heard this wrong, because that would make you lose respect and credibility so fast. Ancient aliens and flat earth are not real things, people.

Maesters are like armchair anthropologists. They are just paying for stories, so of course they are gonna be sensationalized.
So... Um... Gengis Khan was born in 1162. The Mongols ruled a unified China between 1279 and 1368.
The Year Without Summer was 1816. Mount Tambora didn't cause the litttle Ice Age. We were in the midst if a cooling period that was cancelled out by the Industrial Revolution and Clinate Change. Please don't spread bad information.

One of your best videos

I hope you're not still on the Graham Hancock train...

Not your best but good effort

I only just started watching, but thinking about the walls between the Five Forts, the most obvious answer to me is if the Five Forts are supposed to be an Eastern version of The Wall, and The Wall is made of ice, then what if the Five Forts never HAD a wall of stone between them, but instead some kind of elemental wall, like one of fire to oppose the one of ice, but which has now fallen and extinguished. Or, perhaps, it was a metaphorical wall of fire, and they needed no physical wall because the Five Forts hosted the Empire of the Dawn's dragons, flying to war at the beckoning of one of the forts.

I think the Lands of Always Winter connects close to the gray waste when the map is viewed on a globe. The wall is there due to the Long Night and White Walkers also being a problem in Eastern Essos.

Mmmmm Baecon Targaryen

Where can I find this map?

Climate change context box lmao

i don't think any other author has built a fascinating world like this ever before

“The hour is late, and my Dragon is hungry.”

What is this bullshit? Do you guys hear yourselves discussing this imaginary shit?

I think George just thought it would be funny to have a place called Bone Town. Like a juvenile joke. 😂

I wonder if George is doing with the long life spans what happened with Babylon and other Fertile crescent civilizations. Someplaces counted the number of full moons not years. others got multiplied by 60 due to a quark of their counting system. There are also some that got multiplied by 10 or 100 years but I forget why that happened.

The Grey plague that's breaking out in Yi Ti might be a parallel to the Bubonic Plague that originated in Northwestern China, and spread to the rest of Eurasia, through trade and merchants, which relates to the sailors which might play a role in the transfer of merchandise and subsequently, the Grey Plague 🤔🤔

I can't imagine being a young earth creationist and analyzing media like this. "the Jogos Nhai and Dothraki are related because they crossed the bones and bred with the Sarnori". Hence their height and skin tone. How un-enriching it must be to deny all established science. They would never appreciate that explanation, not to mention tectonic plates.

The bloodless men could be an allusion to people without family ties?