#also i didnt get into details w the incest in the buendias bc too many examples

[maid-with-sunset-in-her-hair]

Your post was extremely interesting: The themes of 100 years are pretty similar to ASOIAF: incest, family ambition, prophecy, cheating death or immortality. One may argue that GRRM is writing a sort of “realismo mágico” since the very realistic social set up is sprinkled with weird elements like the ice zombies and cryptic prophets.

The Buendias are obsessed with deciphering Melquiades’s scrolls and in that quest they neglect their children and their community. In the end they destroy themselves by fulfilling their own prophecies. The ending actually explicitly mentions the “house foundations” are undermined by centuries of ants nesting there.

The Targ dragons in their sigil are chasing their own tails, eating themselves like the Buendias’s. The foundations of their “house” slowly crumbling away under the surface.

Thanks you! Glad you found it interesting! And yes, you're completely right about everything you said. What you said about the dragons chasing their own tails reminds me of that noble house in Dorne who took that as their sygil after they fooled the Targaryens. Conquest and opression will bring their doom.

Other thing the Buendía and Targaryen have in common is how the incest isolated them from society, it keeps them from creating a community through intermarriage, because holding onto power and being superior to others is more important to them than having equals.

The Targaryen believe in exceptionalism, as Viserys told Daenerys, dragons don't mate with the other beasts in the filed. If their members don't marry into another family, then the other nobles can't get spare heirs to replace them with. Remember how Robert being cousin of the Targaryen was used to legitimatize his rule on paper. If their members don't marry people from another family, then they can't gain power through the Targaryen, like Cersei and the Lannisters did after she married Robert.

Not having strong ties to the other families backfired during the Rebellion. Compare how many Northern noble houses are plotting to put the Starks back in power with how many plot to get the Targaryen back.

Like the Targaryen, the Buendía are members of the elite, and their incest is a metaphor for how the elite only marry among themselves, keeping their wealth concentrated, and the elite’s disdain for the middle and lower classes.

There's also the circular nature of time, with the Targaryen and the Buendía's tendency to use the same names among generations, and how it traps them people into their namesakes' roles and causes them repeat the same mistakes. History is a circle, it repeats itself again and again.

To be fair, we can also see this in other houses, like the Starks, who have a Brandon in every generation:

“I could tell you the story about Brandon the Builder,” Old Nan said. “That was always your favorite.”

Thousands and thousands of years ago, Brandon the Builder had raised Winterfell, and some said the Wall. Bran knew the story, but it had never been his favorite. Maybe one of the other Brandons had liked that story. Sometimes Nan would talk to him as if he were her Brandon, the baby she had nursed all those years ago, and sometimes she confused him with his uncle Brandon, who was killed by the Mad King before Bran was even born. She had lived so long, Mother had told him once, that all the Brandon Starks had become one person in her head. (AGOT, Bran IV)