So, I agree that Preston Jacobs is not a good source for critique or theories, but one of his videos covered the idea that the Targ’s had a genetic ‘ability’ to hatch or ride dragons and how the gene to ‘hatch’ dragons was lost after the dance. I found it a compelling idea if nothing else. What are your thoughts on that?
Look, I tried. It took me over an hour, but I made it through Part 1 of his “The Genetics of Dragons and War” series (which, for the record, was 16 minutes long; I literally couldn’t sit and watch it all at once). I did this so that none of you poor followers would have to watch it; take it from me, your beloved overlord, that this is wholly without merit and as piss-poor analysis of the text as I have ever see. It is unmitigatedgarbage.
Ordinarily, I would just laugh at something this bad. I mean, the insistence on Mendelian mapping of a “double dragon x” gene on the pre-Conquest Targaryens (which he invents ex nihilo and applies to individuals with the same accuracy and care as a drunken creator god), the highlighting of Rhaena as a marital prize because she had the coveted “double dragon x” gene, his statement that “Religion was just the pretext for the Faith’s war against Maegor. Dragons were the real reason”, all of these are just amusingly bad anecdotes. Every statement de-contextualizes or outwardly ignores textual evidence, but in such an earnest and determined way. This isn’t my first time at the crack rodeo, I’ve seen these tricks before, and this is just a particularly thoroughly amusing example.
Until you get to the part that broke me. The part that turned this from “annoying but stupidly entertaining” to “just plain pissed me off”. He asserts that Vermithor and Silverwing were actually hatched by Aerea and Rhalla Targaryen (you might wonder how the former was possible, considering Vermithor was “almost a hundred years old” at the tail end of the Dance of the Dragons, in 130 AC – along with some other factors – while the girls weren’t born until 42 or 43 AC, but he doesn’t), and that the reason the dragons were so close, coiling about one another, was because they were twins’ dragons. You, the careful ASOIAF reader, might say “But wait! Their riders, Jaehaerys and Alysanne, were happily married, couldn’t that explain their closeness?” To which Preston Jacobs has an answer:
“However, [Jaeherys and Alysanne] didn’t have the best marriage, suffering two estrangements.”
This man’s argument is literally based on the idea that Jaehaerys and Alysanne “didn’t have the best marriage”. You know, despite the fact that Alysanne ruled the realm as much as the king did, despite the fact that they were married for 46 years and for the most part had a happy marriage, despite the fact that Yandel literally calls her Jaehaerys’ great love, for some reason, Preston Jacobs decided that this all meant they “didn’t have the best marriage”. That was where I was done. This isn’t the only out of context quote he uses, but it’s the most angering for me, because it flies so fundamentally in the face of evidence. You don’t get to talk smack about Jaehaerys and Alysanne around me, and you certainly don’t get to use your bullshit analysis of their marriage as a keystone of your bullshit theory.
I wish I had the strength to go through every statement this video makes and explain just why it’s wrong and why it makes no sense. But I don’t. Psychologically, I can’t. This video, and I presume the others of his, are littered with nonsensical statements like the one above, built out of singular lines from the text that either utterly ignore the context or are actually contradicted by the context, alongside non-sequiturs that he brings up to undermine his point, then never answers (like how, if neither Rhaenys nor Visenya were “double dragon x”, the dragon Quicksilver could have hatched and been presented to Aenys while still a hatchling). Preston Jacobs does not deserve your time and attention. Do not watch him. I do not endorse him.
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