The wolf-headed king is Sandor clegane, who is crowned shortly after Cleganebowl, and the feast is a metaphor for what will happen if he doesn’t get his chickens
The great spring sickness sounds a lot like the real life sweating sickness. It was one of those pop-up shop versions of a disease, shows up for a little while and then vanishes from history. It was big in Tudor England during the reign of Henry the eighth. You would wake up fine in the morning, then he would start feeling faint, and then he would basically sweat to death. Anne Boleyn actually caught it and managed to survive.
So people have prophetic dreams of the dragons… so the dragons are a prophecy come true… which ties into the membership theory… it’s all coming together..
The fact that Sam doesn’t freak the FUCK out when the goddamn magic door FUCKING TALKS TO HIM absolutely blows my mind. Like holy shit there’s a magic goddamn talking door up at The Wall, in a world where magic is rare and mysterious, and there are maesters who think magic is a load of bullshit…
Another point in greyscale being a smallpox analogue is the fact that survivals of greyscale are often scared by the disease, just as in the case of smallpox.
Ok Ive never heard "Jon wrote the pink letter" before and I 0% believe it but here's my stab (hah) at why he might've: He wanted an excuse to go reinforce Stannis and ditch the Watch. Does not even begin to explain the inclusion of Reek but he _does_ have all the other information and materials he'd need, assuming that as Lord Commander he could just passively hear that a notable noble (Ramsey) had married
Viruses aren't considered alive because they are incapable of self-reproducing. They require the apparatuses of cells to replicate. They're also way less complex than cells are. Viruses kind of straddle the line between biology and chemistry.
I like to think of all the near misses in the series as george going "lots of neat coincidences happen in life, but even more don't quite happen" and then he winks and laughs in his weird sean connery voice
The word "cancer" means "crab" in old greek, hence the name of the star sign; the disease gets the name because a dissecated cancerous mass has wrinkles (or something) that resemble the shape of a crab. Dengue, zika and chikungunya are all transmitted by the mosquito Aedes aegypti, and they're all (but specially dengue) real pains in the ass down here in Brasil
Actually for the longest time syphilis was to thought to have been a new world disease brought over as a part of Colombian exchange as it’s only after that when the disease begins to appear concretely in written records (hence why the name would be from a 1500s poem). Some newer evidence has cast some doubt on the idea but there currently isn’t consensus. But if the former is the case then Europeans gave the Native Americans small pox and got great pox in return.
Spring Fever sounds like it could represent the Sweating Sickness from England. Death usually occurred in the first several hours of symptoms showing, so people would wake up sick in the morning and die before night.
9:13 Pilou Asbæk is an amazing actor and if you want to see him ACTUALLY play Euron, I gotta recommend the 2018 movie Overlord. It's an alt-history action horror, where US soldiers are sent behind enemy lines just before D-Day and stumble across nazi experiments. And yeah, idk why Pilou wasn't allowed to do this for the Bad Dragon Show, but he is kinda 1940s Euron.
sweating sickness, the thing that killed henry viii’s brother arthur (the actual heir) and ran rampant during his life, of which he was terrified of getting and took quaranting very seriously, even when his wife got it.
Winter Fever is the 1918 Spanish Flu It killed very quickly. It was said you felt fine at breakfast, were taken ill at lunch, and were dead by supper. It took place in the aftermath of a devastating war (WW1 / dance of the dragons) and ended more than the war did It tended to hit the healthy rather than the children or old as most flu does And it was the worst epidemic before COVID hit
What about a Hantavirus for the Great Spring Sickness? The main symptoms of Hanta Pulmonary Syndrome are a fever, headache, body aches, a cough, lethargy, and chest pain, and it can kill in as little as 2 days after symptoms are first presented. Various Hantaviruses are carried by rodents worldwide, though the one that causes HPS was first discovered in the Southwestern United States, not too far from where a certain writer lives...
I've had a theory for a while that Eurons bribe Gold is disease tainted in a " smallpox blankets" kind of plot. The timeline matches up that he would have been in the far East when the gray death was happening
13:24 Almost equal to the impact of smallpox being brought to the Americas is the impact of smallpox being completely eradicated by the World Health Organization's intensive vaccination campaign. We've never fully eradicated a deadly virus before, and we'd have finished the job on polio by now too, if not for issues of some regional wars in the last places it exists in the wild, and anti-science propaganda by the (usually theocratic) governments in those areas. Both are massive achievements that have saved millions of lives, and are one of the few things that actually make me kind of proud of our species.
I think your SARS joke was probably closer than you think. To me, the Spanish Flu is the closest match to the Great Spring Sickness. Something that spreads really quickly. Something that usually takes a week or so to kill you (so that it can spread between major cities), but that can kill a healthy man within a few hours if the first symptom you notice is not being able to breathe. We haven't known that the flu was almost entirely airborne until the last few years, and I think the panic and confusion that led Bloodraven to burn down a quarter of Kings Landing has a lot in common with a disease named after wartime propaganda.
