The Ravenry: Week of 1/11/16

Hello, you awesome people!

As you may or may not know, Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire has its own Tumblr page (as well as its own Twitter and Facebook pages).  Even more excitingly,  we here at the blog have partnered with ASOIAF University to answer questions about A Song of Ice and Fire.  We – that is, SomethingLikeaLawyer and I – take the text-based questions submitted to us, write up thoughtful, text-based answers, and publish these answers on the Tumblr.

With yours truly on vacay, it was a quieter week at Wars and Politics Headquarters. The Hand, as usual, did a fantastic job, keeping up a very steady pace of great answers all by himself; his thoughts on the various fighting styles favored by each region is particularly smart and very well-informed worldbuilding. I was more focused on the Dance this week, with not only an essay (the first of the year, hooray!) on the murder mysteries of the Year of the Red Spring but a Tumblr piece on the real winners of the Dance (that is to say, no one).

Without further ado, here’s The Ravenry for the week of January 11:

Blood of the Conqueror, Part 3: The Conspiracies

Introduction

Disaster. Aerys and Rhaegar Targaryen were dead, Viserys and Daenerys were fled, a new powerful Baratheon regime was in power in King’s Landing and – most importantly for our purposes – Varys and Illyrio’s first conspiracy against the Targaryens had catastrophically failed. This failure could be partially attributed to Varys overplaying his hand by pushing Aerys too far towards paranoia and rash action, but the greater part of this failure was Varys’ inability to take the human element into account.

As we’ll see in Part 3, however, this was a failure that was not unique to Varys. Varys and Illyrio would engineer new schemes in Essos to elevate Aegon, the Bright-Black Dragon, onto the Iron Throne during the main timeline of A Song of Ice and Fire. Fearsome sellswords, known as the Golden Company, would be the cornerstone of Illyrio’s efforts. Prince Viserys Targaryen would also feature prominently early on, but as Illyrio’s conspiracies evolved, his attention would shift to Daenerys and her three adolescent dragons. But above them all was the boy and the conspiracy to put this dragon onto the Iron Throne. 

But as Varys discovered in Westeros, Illyrio would find the human element interfering with his well-laid plans time after time.