OK.
Well, if so, that definitely leaves Mellos pretty firmly complicit in Aemma's death, especially since with a breech birth, well, that's something I suspect that an actually good midwife/obstetric maester should be able to handle with some hope of success if by no me.ans a certainty. Turning a breech birth was something known at least in concept in pre-modern times, I think.
And it does underline the pattern that as a physician, Mellos is... at best mediocre.
And he just pissed us off by suggesting that Rhaenyra be disinherited
Well, to play devil's advocate, it is true that in most cases a good midwife can handle a breech birth, and it has been like that for centuries, BUT as a consequence of having evolved from apes we have a very problematic reproductive system, and in quite a few cases there is no way of handling a breech birth without surgery...
Besides that, for a very long time "proper" medics thought that surgery was beneath them so even if the survival rate for the mother was very low (15-20%), barbers, butchers, or even gelders were known to have managed to save both the mother and the child...
If I rememeber correctly it's established that saving Aemma simply is not possible. The choice was between both them dying or maybe saving Baelon at the cost of doing something horrific to Aemma. Which is part of why Viserys is consumed with guilt, he blames himself for Aemma's death and he blames himself for how horrific her last moments were. He is entirely correct in blaming himself admittedly but he's also basically killing himself with this huge knot of guilt inside of him.
Very much so, even then doing the deed without knowledge or consent of Aemma was beyond fucked up...
Something else to consider is that even if there were cases in which both the mother and the child survived and, for most of its existence C-sections were used mostly when the mother died as an attempt to save the baby, or to extract a dead baby and the mother was unable to expel it because an operation with 15% chance of survival was better than a certain death for sepsis...
Now, wouldn't it be funny if Helaena got inspired by Rhaeynra and attempted to be Dragon Knight 2.0? Imagine the faces of most of the nobility.
I disagree, it would be awesome and cool, and pretty heartwarming to see our sister follow Nyra's steps but not really that funny...
What would be extremely funny is that despite being so big Heleana was an ultra girly girl, and Aelora a tomboy... That would be much funnir imo.
Yeah it's not that he planned to conqueror Dorne it's that an agreeement and marriage with Dorne upstages everything he's done in the Stepstones.
And that is pretty dangerous, knowing that Daemon is a chaotic trash goblin once he is done with sulking he will try to upstage us somehow...
So let's see what shenanigans come out of it
I mean in Daemon's ideal world he marries Rhaenyra but here it's not really out of attraction so much as it would give him a better claim as heir and indulge his Valyrian Supremacy brain worms.
Yeah, IIRC you were kind of glad that Visenya Reborn had won because she was the only one who would see through Daemon's grooming attempts straight away...
If you don't mind me asking
@Teen Spirit how you would have handled things regarding Daemon with Scholar Rhaneyra?
Because even if his objective was still to marry Rhaenyra to give him a better claim as heir and indulge his Valyrian Supremacy brain worms, in the scholar Daemon disliked Nyra from the beginning (instead of the relatively recent fallout of the knight route), and Scholar didn't have the defiant trait that made Daemon's attempts of grooming her a failure from the start...
