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Episode 85: A CLASH OF KINGS, DAENERYS I: "Follow the Leader" SHOW NOTES!
🕑 Added 2019-10-28 14:00:03 +0000 UTCHello and welcome to the Not A Cast … podcast: the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish.
And I’m your other host Emmett, better known as PoorQuentyn.
Welcome to the eighty-fifth episode of the Not A Cast, titled: “Follow the Leader: An Analysis of ACOK, Daenerys I,” in which the messiah, her miracle babies, and her dwindling entourage wander the desert in pursuit of a star, only to be met by three wise men. Well...not all of them are men, and none of them are wise, but you get the idea.
Introduce our guest
MI says hello
This episode is brought to you by our Small Council:
- Hand of the King WolfmanZack
- Grand Maester Timbob
- Lord Commander of the Kingsguard Mark N.
- Lord Travis, Master of Ships and Warden of the Waves
- Ser Keith J, Master of Whisperers
- Lord Philip the Merciful, Master of Laws
- Jancy O, Lady Commander of the Night’s Watch
- Lord Gene, Master of Coin
- Archmaester June, Healer of the Lesser Poxes
- Ragged Michael, Warden of the North
- Nelson the Hammer, Prince of Dragonstone
- Scarlett the Other Red Woman and Mistress of Whisperers
- Lord Micah: Warden of the West and the Kraken’s Bane
- Lord James: the Jim that was Promised
- The High Bearded Priest
- The Blue-Ringed Octoling
- Lord Jake, Assistant (to the) Hand of the King
- Lady Xena Valyrian
- Hedrigal, Captain of the Air Ship Arrogance
- His Grace’s High Inquisitor Frank
- Lord James Stormborn, Warden of the World Wide Weirwood
- Ser Jasper the Cruel, the King’s Justice
- Laurence, Prince of Dorne
- Richard, Sealord of Braavos
- Kelly, Warden of the East and Mistress of (Old) Bay of Crabs
- Steven the Steadfast, Master of Hounds
- The Blue Winter Rose Knight of Highgarden
- Lady Stephanie
- Lord Wryinn
- Lord Anonymous
- And our three newest members of the small council. THREE! Wow!
- Lord Carlos
- Lord Andrew the Restless, a Priest of the Drowned God
- The King's Cook, Nolly Olly, Master of Cannoli
Spoiler warning: All published books - 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show. Anything and everything!
Question
Grand Maester Timbob asks:
My question is "what are your rankings of the Star Wars movies?" This was prompted by me hearing that Emmett thinks RotS is the best in the Tyrion II episode. I must know more. I suppose I should expand the question and ask why your #1's are what they are.
Thank you Grand Maester Timbob for the question. If you’d like to ask us questions that we’ll answer here on the NotACast pod-cast, you are welcome to join us as a Sworn Sword of higher patreon of ours at https://patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF.
And for all of our Poor Fellow and above patrons, our next patreon-only episode on the 2009 Zack Snyder movie Watchmen with commentary on the first episode of the new HBO series Watchmen is coming your way starting on Monday, October 28th for our small council patrons, Tuesday, October 29th for our High Lords and Ladies and Kingsguard patrons, Wednesday, October 30th for our Sworn Sword patrons and Thursday, October 31st for our Poor Fellow patrons.
It was a lot of fun recording that episode; so, please come check it out as a patron or sign up to join our patreon! Finally, our next livestream episode is coming your-all’s way on Monday, October 28th at 8:30 PM EST (tonight if you’re listening on our general release date) -- all about ACOK, Arya IV: our first battle chapter of ASOIAF. That will be available on YouTube and then out in audio format at our usual patreon and general release schedules.
But enough about patreon, let’s turn our attention to ACOK, Daenerys I. Last we heard from her, Daenerys Targaryen had birthed three dragons in a magical, messianic ceremony. Let’s check back in with Dany in this synopsis of ACOK, Daenerys I.
Synopsis
The Dothraki named the comet Shierak Qiya, the Bleeding Star. The old men muttered that it omened ill, but Daenerys Targaryen had seen it first on the night she had burned Khal Drogo, the night her dragons had awakened. It is the herald of my coming, she told herself as she gazed up into the night sky with wonder in her heart. The gods have sent it to show me the way.
At long last, we finally come to what the red comet truly heralds, and at long last, we return to Daenerys Targaryen, good mom to her dragons.
Dany vocalizes her thoughts about the comet to her handmaid Doreah, but Doreah, who you might want to start thinking about making your goodbyes to, says that if she goes east, there’s only the red lands, and them’s the bad lands. But Dany insists that they must go forward, only forward, following … the star, the star, dancing in the sky with a tail as red as some blood … with a tail as red as some blood.
Regardless, Dany won’t go north into the Dothraki Sea as she was sure that they’d encounter some khalasar up there who would murder the bejesus out of the men and enslave everyone else. To the south were the Lhazarene who, if you’ll recall, had suffered a recent bout of genocide at the behest of an invasion which Dany inspired. So, they would also have a less than fond opinion of Daenerys Targaryen. And sure, they could travel the river towards Meereen, Yunkai and Astapor, but Khal Pono was out that way, and while Pono was formerly one of Drogo’s ko’s and kind to her, he was the first to abandon Drogo and would almost certainly kill Dany and her merry band of one hundred warriors. But does she actually have one hundred warriors?
No, Dany thought. I have four. The rest are women, old sick men, and boys whose hair has never been braided.
Thank you for the quick answer, Dany.
Dany does have dragons, but the reality is that they’re mere hatchlings. An arakh would make short work of them, and Pono could easily seize the dragons for himself. The price that a dragon could fetch was entirely beyond the concept of price due to the low supply of dragons. And the demand was high. Quite high.
Well, Dany ain’t about to allow anyone to take her dragons. They were hers, born from her “faith and her need”. They got life from Drogo, Rhaego and Mirri Maz Duur. She’d walked into flames for pete’s sake. And the dragons were drinking her milk.
“No man will take them from me while I live.”
“You will not live long should you meet Khal Pono. Nor Khal Jhaqo, nor any of the others. You must go where they do not,” Jorah says.
Jorah, who sucks, got the honor of being the first of Dany’s Queensguard. His gruff counsel and the Dothraki omens were clear. She mounts her silver mare, bald as a damned baby but bedecked in that glam white lion’s pelt and leads her khalasar east with the future Viserion perched on her lion-clothed shoulder. And they’re off, following the red comet, moving by night and resting during the day.
But the journey was not a kind one. Some of the horses die first. And then the people start succumbing to the elements. Three days in, an old man fell from his horse, and the blood flies came. He was dead an hour later. They burned his horse with him that night. Then a baby girl dies with the mother’s wailing going on all day.
Not for her the endless black grasses of the night lands; she must be born again.
There was little forage for food in the red waste and less water. The rivers were dry. The horses subsisted on brown devilgrass. Dany’s outriders found no wells nor oases in the red waste -- only the occasional bitter pool of shallow, stagnant drinking water. And even those were growing smaller and rarer as the party kept moving east. Even the gods did not answer prayers for rain.
Cheerlessly, the wine runs out, then the clotted mare’s milk, then the bread was gone, then the beef jerky was exhausted. With no forage, no game to be found in the red waste, they ate the flesh of their dead horses. And everyone keeps dying. Even Doreah starts to look too thin. And her hair goes brittle. Not a good sign.
Daenerys, herself, suffered alongside of her people. Her breastmilk dried up, and her nipples cracked and bled. But instead of growing gaunt like Doreah, she got lean and hard as a stick. But she wasn’t scared for herself as much as for the dragons. She recalls how her various family members and those close to her died. But death wouldn’t claim her dragons. No one could have her dragons, Dany vows.
The dragons themselves were small as cats she once saw on the walls of Illyrio’s manse in Pentos. That is they seemed that way until they spread their wings:
Their span was three times their length, each wing a delicate fan of translucent skin, gorgeously colored, stretched taut between long thin bones. When you looked hard, you could see that most of their body was neck, tail and wing. Such little things, she thought as she fed them by hand.
The problem with feeding the dragons was that they didn’t take to the horsemeat -- that is, until Dany remembered that Viserys once told her that dragons ate cooked meat. So, she had the horsemeat charred, and the dragons went HAM on the seared meat, eating several times their own weight. They began to grow larger and stronger. And the dragons were hot to touch.
By night, the khalasar made their movement east, and each night Dany had a different dragon perch on her shoulder. The others stayed in cages that Irri and Jhiqui kept. And those dragons stayed close to Dany in order to keep them dormant.
One morning, Dany tells the story of Aegon’s Dragons and how they were named for the gods of Old Valyria: Vhagar, Meraxes and Balerion, giving some backstory to their origins and their dragon temperament and characteristics. When Dany’s bloodrider Aggo says that the black dragon is Balerion come again, Dany says yeah, maybe. But the dragons should have new names. So, she names the green dragon Rhaegal after Rhaegar, Viserion after her brother Viserys and Drogon after Khal Drogo.
Still, everyone continues to die as the dragons get larger and stronger. The devilgrass which fed the horses grows scant, and horses die one by one, leaving many of Dany’s khalasar to have to walk by foot. And poor Doreah, she gets a fever, her hair comes out in clumps, and then she is unable to mount her horse. Her bloodrider Jhogo says they have to leave her behind or strap her to a horse, but Dany refuses, thinking of the times when Doreah taught her the secrets of lovemaking on the Dothraki Sea. She gives her water from her own skin of water, takes a damp cloth to her brow and holds her until she dies.
Only then would she permit the khalasar to press on.
Quite sad.
Pressing father on and on into the Red Waste, they see no sign of other human beings. The Dothraki begin to fear that there’s no end to the desolation, and that the gods have led them into hell. Dany wonders herself, and she asks Jorah whether there’s any end to this hell they’re in.
“It has an end,” he answered wearily. “I have seen the maps the traders draw, my queen. Few caravans come this way, that is so, yet there are great kingdoms to the east, and cities full of wonders. Yi Ti, Qarth, Asshai by the Shadow.”
“Will we live to see them?” Dany asks.
“I will not lie to you. The way is harder than I dared think. Perhaps we are doomed if we press on … but I know for a certainty that we are doomed if we turn back.”
If they turn back, they are lost, basically.
Dany kisses ol’ slavebear on the cheek, and he smiles. Dany wants to be strong for him, to be the blood of the dragon. But the bad times only continue. Their next watering hole (if you can call it that) is a pool of hot, stinking water. Still, they have to drink. They drink or they die. And already a third of the her khalasar was dead.
The comet mocks my hopes, she thought, lifting her eyes to where it scored the sky. Have I crossed half the world and seen the birth of dragons only to die with them in this hard hot desert? She would not believe it.
The next day, when all hope feels lost, one of Dany’s outriders returns home and tells her that there’s a city ahead. Dany orders the outrider to show her where the city is, and he takes her to it.
When the city appeared before her, its walls and towers shimmering white behind a veil of heat, it looked so beautiful that Dany was certain it must be a mirage.
She asks if Jorah knew which city this was, but Jorah doesn’t. He’s never been this far east before. Dany wanted to run up to the city, but she orders her bloodrider Aggo to ride up to the city and determine whether it would welcome them or not. Unfortunately, the bloodriders return rather quickly, telling Dany that the city is dead with only wind and flies as its inhabitants. Jhiqui insists that they not go to the city as it is a dead city, and Irri agrees. Dany does not.
She rides her horse forward, riding under the shattered arch of an ancient gate, riding through a silent street with Jorah and her bloodriders following. Dany is unsure how long the city has been deserted, but she notes how pale-white the broken city is. She makes note the marks of fire on some of the buildings and judges that the Dothraki have been here in the past. Perhaps even the gods of this city were among the statues adorning the road to Vaes Dothrak.
Dany sends her men out to search out the city, and one old man returns with two handfulls of figs. And though they’re withered, everyone grabbed some up to eat. Still, more Dothraki return to tell Dany that fruit trees are growing with grapes and other fruits. However, in George RR Martin fashion, others return to tell Dany that there are other gardens in the city: gardens of bones.
“Ghosts,” Irri muttered. “Terrible ghosts. We must not stay here, Khaleesei, this is their place.”
Dany ain’t afraid of no ghosts, though. Besides, they needed the fruit. She orders Irri to go find some hot, clean sand for a bath.
While her handmaids are out, Dany heats up some horsemeat for her dragons. She wonders if this might be the place they stay. There was water and food here. They could survive, and it sure would be nice to wake up in the same spot every day.
Irrir and Jhiqui come back, and Dany gets undressed for her, uh, sand bath -- she bathes the Unsullied way. The handmaids comment that Dany’s hair is growing back, and Dany feels her scalp, noticing that is coming back. When her hair is all the way back, she’s going to grow it long and get it braided with oil, Dothraki-style to remind her that Drogo’s strength was inside of her. Dany then notices Viserion in the corner of the room, and she starts imagining what it would be like to be an actual dragon. She could stand on mountains, touch the sky, even see Westeros and then touch the comet.
But then that goddamn Jorah Mormont decides to interrupt Dany’s Aerys-like fantasy of becoming a dragon. He wants to see her. So, Dany slips back into her lioncloak, and Jorah enters bringing her a gift: a peach. It was small, but when she bit into it, it tasted sweet. Dany thinks that the gods were kind to bring them here, but Jorah’s like, yeah this is fine for now. A good place to recuperate before moving on.
Dany says that her handmaids think there’s ghosts here, and Jorah, having just listened to Band of Horse’s Is There a Ghost? Says that there are ghosts all about.
“We carry them with us wherever we go.”
“Tell me the name of your ghost, Jorah. You know all of mine.”
Well, Jorah reluctantly admits that his ghost is a woman by the name of Lynesse, his second wife. Dany presses him for more information. She was beautiful, a goddess come to earth, the Maid made flesh. And she was of higher birth than Jorah’s. The daughter of Lord Leyton Hightower and great-niece of Ser Gerold Hightower of the Kingsguard, she came from an ancient and proud family.
Dany puts in that the Hightowers were loyal to the Targaryens, and Jorah admits as much. Dany asks if Leyton and future Elsie Jeor made the match for Jorah. But Jorah says no. He tries to sidestep the question, saying the tale is boring and long. But Dany’s got all the time in the world for such a story.
So, Jorah proceeds to talk about his home of Bear Island with its rustic splendor but quite remote. It’s got trees and waterfalls and lots of nature shit, but the winters were hard there. But Jorah had enjoyed his time. And he had enjoyed his Bear Island ladies by the bushel, getting down with fishwives and crofters’ daughters before he ended up getting hitched with a Glover from Deepwood Motte. They were married for ten years. And though the woman was plain, they loved each other after some fashion. But the sex was kinda dull. Worse than that, it only resulted in miscarriages. Three of them. And the third took his first wife’s life.
Dany tells him that she’s sorry to hear it, while taking his hand in hers. Jorah nods and continues on with his story. At that point, Jeor was the Elsie of the Night’s Watch, and Jorah was a lord in his own right. He had lots of marriage offers, but all those offers came to a sudden halt when Idiot Pirate Who Sucks Balon Greyjoy decided on becoming Idiot Pirate King Who Still Sucks. Ned called the banners to aid Robert, and Jorah joined in the fight.
“The final battle was on Pyke. When Robert’s stonethrowers opened a breach in King Balon’s wall, a priest from Myr was the first man through, but I was not far behind. For that I won my knighthood.”
I … kinda forgot that Jorah was a lord first before he was knight. Don’t know if that means anything. But that’s an interesting wrinkle.
Anyways, after the war was won, a tourney was held at Lannisport, and there, Jorah saw Lynesse. He became, in the words of the immortal Beyonce, Crazy in love with the girl, and he begged to wear Lynesse’s favor. He didn’t think she would grant him this, but she did.
“I fight as well as any man, Khaleesi, but I have never been a tourney knight. Yet with Lynesse’s favor knotted round my arm, I was a different man. I won joust after joust. Lord Jason Mallister fell before me, and Bronze Yohn Royce. Ser Ryman Frey, his brother Ser Hosteen, Lord Whent, Strongboar, even Ser Boros Blount of the Kingsguard, I unhorsed them all.”
And then Jorah broke nine lances against Jaime Lannister in the final tilt, and Robert in what had to be a giant fuck you to Good Brother (bad brother) Jaime, declared Jorah the winner. Jorah crowned Lynesse his queen of love and beauty. Still, crazy in love, Jorah then went right up to Leyton Hightower and asked for Lynesse’s hand in marriage. He thought he would be rejected, but Leyton said yes. And Jorah and Lynesse married right there in Lannisport. And they were happy for a good two weeks.
Wait, Dany interjects. You were only happy for two weeks? She had more happiness from Drogo. Jorah says, yeah, sadly. That was the amount of time it took to sail from Lannisport to Bear Island. And Bear Island was something of a disappointment to Lynesse. There were none of the southron comforts Lynesse was used to. No dancin’, balls or jewelers. And the food was lots of roasts and stews. And Lynesse decided that she wasn’t about that after a bit. So, Jorah sent for a cook from Oldtown, because he lived for her smiles. And then he brought in goldsmiths, jewelers, dressmakers. Anything and everything. All for Lynesse. He built a ship for Lynesse, and they sailed all over the world. And Jorah began taking on debts and becoming a tourney champion. Sadly, his tilt at Lannisport was a one-hit wonder, and he had to go into more debt to replace all the tourney armor that kept getting damaged in the tilts.
So, they had to return back to Bear Island, and things grew worse. He dismissed his cook and harper, and started talking about pawning off Lynesse’s jewels to her fury.
“The rest … I did things it shames me to speak of. For gold. So Lynesse might keep her jewels, her harper and her cook. In the end it cost me all. When I heard that Eddard Stark was coming to Bear Island, I was so lost to honor that rather than stay and face his judgment, I took her with me into exile. Nothing mattered but our love.”
Ser Jorah, just too ashamed to admit that he sold human beings into slavery. What a guy.
They fled to Lys where he sold his ship. Dany asks if Lynesse died in Lys, but she only died to Jorah there. Jorah went into the sellsword business in Essos, and Lynesse moved in with a merchant prince named Tregar Ormollen. And she’s been his concubine ever since with even Tregar’s wife fearing Lynesse.
Dany was horrified. “Do you hate her?”
“Almost as much as I love her.”
Jorah asks if he can be excused, and Dany agrees. But just as he’s at the flap of the tent, Dany asks what she looked like.
Ser Jorah smiled sadly. “Why, she looked a bit like you, Daenerys.”
Warning bells now sounding in Dany’s head, she realizes that Jorah’s “love” for her isn’t courtly. It a sex type thing. She tries imagining going to bone town with Jorah, but it’s only Drogo’s face she sees in her mind. Drogo was her first, her sun-and-stars. She wonders if Drogo will be her last (No, he will not, Dany. Wait for book 5!) She thinks that no one will want her due to her alleged barrenness and whether anyone will match up to Drogo. Her thoughts drift back to Jorah, and she thinks that she’ll never play hide the Bear Island sausage with him, but she’ll give him back his home.
She sleeps that night and doesn’t dream of ghosts. Instead, she sees Drogo and remembers the first night after they were wed. In her dream they rode dragons instead of horses. In the morning, she summons her bloodriders and tells them to make for different directions on horseback. Aggo will go southwest, Rakharo will go south and Jhogo will ride southeast after the red comet. They’re to go in search of other cities - living and dead, find caravans and people, look for rivers, lakes and look for the salt lake. She wants to know how far the red waste goes. Dany wants all this, because she wants to know what’s ahead of her and how to get there before she starts her movement.
So, her bloodriders ride out as Dany and her reduced khalasar settle down in the city they name Vaes Tolorro: the city of bones. While she awaits her bloodriders, her people harvest fruit while the men get the horses into good order. Children explore the city, finding bronze coins and stone flagons with handles carved like snakes. One woman does die, but that was only because she was stung by a red scorpion. Fortunately, that was the only death. The horses grow strong, and Jorah’s wound mends with Dany’s help.
Rakharo arrives back first, saying that the lands to the south end at the ocean with only dust, sand, thorns and wind on the way there. He does mention that he saw the bones of a dragon there, so immense that he rode his horse through the jaw. She puts him back to work, getting him to pull up stones to let more devilgrass grow.
Aggo turns up next, saying that the southwest had two more ruined cities -- one with a very nice ward of skulls mounted on rusted iron spears. And that was it besides a iron bracelet with a neat thumb-sized opal the size of Dany’s thumb on it. And some scrolls. But they’re crumbling. Dany puts him to work in repairing the gate. She doesn’t want any enemies coming up on them.
Jhogo ends up being gone the longest -- so long that everyone thinks he died out there. But one day, he rode back with three “queerly garbed strangers atop ugly humped creatures that dwarfed any horse.” Jhogo and the strangers come up to the city, and Jhogo announces that he’s been to Qarth, and he’s brought people who want to see her.
Dany stared down at the strangers. “Her I stand. Look, if that is your pleasure … but first tell me your names.”
The pale man says that he’s Pyat Pree, a warlock. The bald man with jewels in his nose says he’s Xaro Xhoan Daxos, a merchant prince of Qarth. And finally, oh finally, at long fuckin’ last, a woman in a lacquered wooden mask tells Dany in the common tongue that she is none other than Dany’s mom Rhaella.
Wait, scratch that.
Guys, it’s fuckin’ Quaithe. Quaithe, the protagonist of ASOIAF, is finally here.
And she’s come to seek dragons.
“Seek no more,” Daenerys Targaryen told them. “You have found them.”
And that is ACOK, Daenerys I. That was … a lot. Not that I don’t mind some good solid worldbuilding and tales of woe and misery (Hell, we just finished recording our podcast on Watchmen last night). But yeah, a lot. What did you both think?
Depth
This chapter feels like a stand-alone experience more than most in ASOIAF. The rest of Dany’s ACOK storyline takes place in the city of Qarth, where George expands on the religious themes in Dany I, but within a different scenario with different imagery and a different tone. It’s comparable to Arya’s chapters in the middle of the book, in which she wanders the wasteland around the Gods Eye before arriving at the cursed castle of Harrenhal. Where Arya maybe gets one chapter too many early on in ACOK, Dany might’ve benefited from this chapter being split up. It contains not only the trek through the desert to the City of Bones, but also Jorah’s backstory with Lynesse and an infodump about the dragons, which is a lot to take in at once.
The throughline is Dany’s evolution as a leader. Arya is experiencing powerlessness, which is appropriate for a storyline in large part about the powerlessness of the smallfolk around her. Dany’s story in this chapter is about leadership in the midst of decay, trying to kindle life amidst death. That’s what holds Dany I together and ties it into the themes of ACOK.
Isobel opening thoughts
- As a show-watcher first this chapter shocked me with the scope of the world Martin was building in terms of time and space
- AGOT Dany is a narrative center of gravity; this chapter is Dany nearly cast out from her own story
- WORLDBUILDING, the deep history of Planetos, Dany coming to awareness of her place in HISTORY. For the reader, the mention of the comet in the first lines of the chapter makes that connection explicit, the same comet our Westerosi characters are interpreting in their struggles, but we know it was first seen over Khal Drogo's pyre and it is hard to shake the impression of Daenerys and her dragons being connected to it. The reader also knows that the War of the Five Kings is escalating in Westeros.
Last week, Emmett talked about how the “Tyrion burns Winterfell” storyline from the pitch letter was retrofitted to fit Theon Greyjoy and how some of those plot points don’t fit as smoothly as they could have while the character work George gets in on Theon with is some of his best work in ACOK. With Dany, we have something similar and something quite different altogether.
We’ve got the carcass - the literal carcass - of the leftover parts of her story for book 1. The bones of a giant dragon in the red waste that Rakharo finds? Yeah. I’m fairly sure that this was leftover from George’s original conception of Book 1. From the pitch letter:
When the moment is right, she will kill her husband to avenge her brother, and then flee with a trusted friend into the wilderness beyond Vaes Dothrak. There, hunted by Dothraki bloodriders [unclear] of her life, she stumbles on a cache [something about dragon eggs] a young dragon will give Daenerys [unclear] bend [unclear] to her will. Then she begins to plan for her invasion of the Seven Kingdoms.
It’s my belief that GRRM was originally going to have Dany stumble onto the dragon eggs in or around this giant dragon before rewriting this plotline in a much more satisfying direction -- that Illyrio gifts her the eggs during her wedding feast, and that she births the dragons in a mystical, messianic fire ceremony at the end of her arc. The bones of the giant dragon are the meta and literal carcass of that storyline.
However, George’s rewrites didn’t exactly stop the breakneck pace of Dany’s book one storyline. What happened was that Dany’s story essentially stayed on target with his expected endpoint for Book 1 while his other stories in Westeros lagged behind as GRRM expanded and slowed. Thus, this created a problem: What to do with Dany while GRRM plays “catch-up” with the rest of the narrative?
- Overall perspectives on Dany’s storyline in ACOK
- It’s...not the best. It’s the weakest in the book, in fact. Wait! I can say nice things!
- You can cobble together a structure out of Dany’s plot in book two: she’s a prophetic figure striking out into the desert in a transcendent search for truth
- We’ll note the religious imagery throughout the episode and try to put it in context at the end; suffice to say that George succeeds in terms of the imagery itself
- As I said when we began our analysis of ACOK, this book is where he really expands the story’s color palette, and for no POV is that more true than Dany
- I can close my eyes and see her in her hrakkar leading her little party across the endless red sands, the comet blazing above to light their way
- It’s the stuff of pulp adventures and Led Zeppelin as much as the Old Testament, and George is aiming for the sweet spot at the middle of all of them
- In the wake of the miracle Dany accomplished at the end of book one, with all the divine imagery George brought to the table, it’s appropriate that her ACOK chapters are overflowing with tableaux framing her as the center of creation
- That reaches its apex at the House of the Undying, which overshadows the rest of Dany’s chapters in book two--but to be fair, it overshadows everything ever
- This chapter grounds the imagery in life-and-death danger for Team Dany, unlike the rest of her ACOK storyline, which gets listless and unmotivated by the end
- Much more on that when we get to Qarth! This chapter, meanwhile, effectively strips everything down to provide contrast with the luxury of the big city
- On this reread, this chapter felt like a version of all the other storylines in ACOK boiled down to their essentials: the leader, the march, the wasteland, the comet
- From that angle, it works that she’s the last POV in the book to get a chapter; it’s as if George is commenting on what has come before by breaking it all down
- This is what Stannis is doing, what Joffrey is doing, what Robb and Theon and Elsie Mormont are all doing: pointing at the banner in the sky, declaring that it’s theirs, and heading off after it. Per Tyrion at the Blackwater, riding out to fight:
- He thought they were following, but never dared to look.
- This is the core act of the shadowplay of power we’ve been talking about with all our excellent guests of late: marching into death, seeing who follows.
- That’s a strong organizing principle for a storyline, but I don’t think George handled the specifics as well as he does with the other POVs
- The Dothraki still aren’t getting much characterization, which is a problem because they’re so tied to Dany’s rise to power and later twists in her story
- Meanwhile, Jorah’s backstory gets crammed in here where IMO it doesn’t particularly fit, as if George knew he just had to put it somewhere
- This is exacerbated by how few chapters Dany gets in ACOK: only 5! Everything set up in this chapter would’ve benefited from more room later on to develop
- That being said, the seeds of problems that will crop up later shouldn’t detract from our enjoyment of this chapter in isolation, and there’s quite a bit to enjoy
- There’s a fair amount to enjoy with Dany in ACOK, but I agree that it’s the weakest point of ACOK.
- With the Red Wedding being pushed back, GRRM has to hit the brakes on Dany’s story. So, he invents the story of Dany in Qarth.
- When the rest of the Westerosi story still lags behind, he invents a Slaver’s Bay arc for Dany.
- On the whole, I much prefer the stories of Dany in Astapor, Yunkai and especially Meereen to Qarth
- It’s not simply that I think wheel-spinning is bad. And it’s not that I feel like action-hero Daenerys is for the best. Not at all! Dany’s Meerenese arc in ADWD is her strongest character work and has little to no action until Daznak’s Pit.
- It’s when I can see the author rapidly palming the rubber of the wheels to make them spin that I become neutral-face emoji.
- Still, I’m not here to damn Dany’s ACOK arc altogether. Like Emmett, I find the overt religious imagery quite exceptional in this chapter.
- Moreover, the intermix of religious symbolism with the continued rise in magical themes in Dany’s storyline helps to widen and strengthen the foundation for the increasingly messianic roles found in this book forward to her mhysa role in ASOS.
- But before Dany is leading hundreds of thousands of freedmen, Unsullied and sellsword into glory, George does have to affix training wheels to Dany’s leadership arc with her mini-sar. Get it, it’s like Mini and khalasar. It’s a portmanteau!
- Dany’s opening moves as leader
- Dany’s leadership arc gets lost in the shuffle in Qarth, but it’s at the forefront of this chapter, right from the beginning with the question of their direction
- Dany I opens with her staring up at the red comet from the heart of a nuclear miracle, reborn along with the dragons, her entire worldview broken and remade
- Bran almost went through a process like this in book one, but the dreamworld of wonder and terror vanished upon waking, and waits for him at the cave in ADWD
- Dany now permanently lives on this plane, the Lonely God, and immediately must reconcile that with the urgent day-to-day realities of running a khalasar
- And not just any khalasar, but a tiny one made up of the defenseless and the damned, only four warriors left to protect them from danger in all directions
- The comet, as with the other storylines in ACOK, provides the perfect crucible for this moment, and how Dany handles it fuses her magical and political selves
- As far as the magic goes, I can’t really blame Dany for assuming the comet is about her; I think she has more reason than anyone else, honestly!
- It’s an unnaturally big comet blazing Targaryen red, she saw it right before lighting the pyre, and now here she is with three goddamn baby dragons
- But George slyly complicates that sense of manifest destiny by pointing out that politically speaking, Team Dany has no choice but to head in that direction
- Her miracle, as momentous as it is, doesn’t automatically reshape the cultural and geographic conditions as they stood for her people at the end of AGOT
- Drogo’s former followers are still her enemies, and still more powerful; her apotheosis isn’t going to make the Lhazarene forget about all the war crimes
- The mention of Slaver’s Bay emphasizes that an entire continent is ringing Dany in with steel, no place for her nor her miracle children nor her budding revolution
- The Qartheen only make a place for her because they hope to squeeze her dry for profit and power; when that fails, she’s left once more without a home
- Yet even though the dragons and the comet and that whole narrative doesn’t on its own lift Dany to power, she needs the shadowplay to keep her people together
- So she cloaks material need in the trappings of power, recasting the only route available to them as the one prefigured by destiny. Not a bad start.
- D R A G O N S
- But Dany’s story in ACOK is more about miracles than politics, and after the comet, the second miracle in this chapter is Dany’s lizard babies
- Dragons in fantasy are well-trod territory, to say the least; no creature looms larger in the genre’s collective imagination, and there are so many directions you can go. Are they monstrous? Are they cute? Are they somewhere in between??
- You can already see George working duality and ambiguity into his dragons. First of all, at this early stage, they’re more of a liability than anything else!
- They’re hard to feed, they get cranky if they can’t see Mom at all freakin’ times, and as Jorah points out, not only are they too small to offer any defensive advantages, but they’ll prove enticing as a prize to anyone they encounter
- That’s because of how rare and alien their beauty is, yet their preference for cooked meat connects them to humans, and so Dany bonds with them further
- Again, George nails the visuals here. I love the description of their wings, the detail of the steam coming off them at night, how Drogon echoes Balerion…
- ...but immediately after Dany christens her dragons, she notes that even as they finally start to grow and flourish, the khalasar withers and dies all around them
- That’s haunting in retrospect, implying a zero-sum game between her children and her people. Which will she be in the end, Mhysa or Mother of Dragons?
- This dynamic becomes central to her story in ADWD, when the dragons are no longer the defenseless infants they are in this chapter, instead posing a threat
- They’re her children, “born of her need,” so what happens when they eat children? To quote the Prologue to AFFC: are they signifiers of wonder or terror?
- The heat of their bodies and the translucence of their wing membranes -- her wonder at the small lives in her care is instantly recognizable to any reader who has cared for a human infant
- The dragons only eating cooked meat works as callback to Aerys’ “Let him be king over cooked meat and charred bones” as Jaime remembers in ASOS
- The duality in the dragons -- cute and dangerous works as character work for Daenerys Targaryen too!
- In this chapter, we’re seeing Dany doing many right things, empathetically giving Doreah water from her own skin while she dies
- But stop me if this sounds crazy, but I can’t help but read this line from the chapter:
- "They are mine," she said fiercely. They had been born from her faith and her need, given life by the deaths of her husband and unborn son and the maegi Mirri Maz Duur. Dany had walked into the flames as they came forth, and they had drunk milk from her swollen breasts. "No man will take them from me while I live."
- … and not think of Aerys II Targaryen.
- I am not doubting that a miracle occurred in the Dothraki Sea, and that Dany is a miraculous figure of destiny -- unlike Aerys.
- But like Emmett was saying, that fierce motherly feeling Daenerys experiences with the dragon children gets put to the test when they start targeting and eating human children in ADWD.
- Our setting: the Red Waste and Vaes Tolorro
- This chapter is a one-off in terms of setting, and maybe that’s why both the Red Waste and Vaes Tolorro feel like allegorical or even abstract locations
- The Red Waste is one of those cases in which George is trying to provide the ultimate example of a trope; my Wall is bigger than your wall, my cursed castle is bigger than your cursed castle, and my desert is gonna be the desert, goddamnit
- So Moses goes into the blender, and Muhammad, and Jesus (not only his birth, but his adult trek into the desert), and “Ozymandias” and “The Waste Land” and every shaman who ever isolated and deprived themselves for insight
- But it’s also a psychological plane, a gauntlet provided by the gods to test Dany, and so (as with Qarth) it feels unreal around the edges, like it’s all a mirage
- That gauntlet demonstrates that being the Mother of Dragons makes neither her nor her people immortal. They’re starving and dying behind her, one by one
- This shakes Dany’s certainty in not only herself as a leader, but the metaphysical order with which she has come into such profound contact:
- Dany looked at the horizon with despair. They had lost a third of their number, and still the waste stretched before them, bleak and red and endless. The comet mocks my hopes, she thought, lifting her eyes to where it scored the sky. Have I crossed half the world and seen the birth of dragons only to die with them in this hard hot desert? She would not believe it.
- After all, the desert itself reflects the comet, red on red; Dany thinks about reaching up and touching it, but what would that do to her? It’s killing her people!
- This desert also represents the creative process: a journey into dead space you’re trying desperately to bring to life, following a beautiful but unknowable muse with no guarantee of success, knowing only you’re doomed if you turn back
- This feels like George already realizing how his story is growing beyond control:
- "I will not lie to you. The way is harder than I dared think."
- As for Vaes Tolorro, City of Bones, it’s more ambiguous in its meaning
- On one hand, well: City of Bones! What happened here? Something bad clearly went down, and I can’t fault the Dothraki for being spooked; I would be too
- On the other hand, part of being a transformational figure is changing taboo:
- Jhiqui shuddered. "When the gods are gone, the evil ghosts feast by night. Such places are best shunned. It is known."
"It is known," Irri agreed.
"Not to me."
- Jhiqui shuddered. "When the gods are gone, the evil ghosts feast by night. Such places are best shunned. It is known."
- And Dany proves correct. The only death in Vaes Tolorro comes from a mundane scorpion, and the city proves full of food and water once you know where to look
- The khalasar is able to relax and rebuild atop the bones of those who came before; definitely feels like George is driving at a point, but again, it’s ambiguous
- Is George showing us an optimistic vision of life where once there was only death? Or is he hinting at what Dany and her children will leave behind?
- Why not both? And could it be argued that Vaes Tolorro symbolizes Daenerys Targaryen herself?
- We’ve got fruit tree, and we’ve got bones.
- In Meereen, Daenerys will order that trees be planted along the Skahazadhan River, to rebuild the economy, yes, but also as Dany will say: she wanted to rest, to laugh, to plant trees and yet she will conclude that Dragons plant no trees at the end of her ADWD arc. And at the start of ADWD story, the bones of the child Hazzea will be brought to Dany -- the girl whose name Dany will forget at the end of her ADWD arc.
- We have a Dany who will liberate slaves and break the wheel of the slave trade in Essos, and we have a conqueror who will burn Astapor to the ground, sparing slaves and children under the age of 12 from death.
- We have Daenerys who yearns for the peace and serenity of the fading memories of the red door in Braavos vs her turning all doors red in King’s Landing.
- Vaes Tolorro symbolizes so much for Dany and while there are no mentions of the city after ACOK, it remains subtext for all of Dany’s story going forward.
- Vaes Tolorro is the anti-Qarth, revealing the reality beneath prophetic imagery
- Dany also thinks of the City of Bones as standing in for all the empty cities the Dothraki leave behind. Will she do the same, and end up another vacant god?
- "Let him be king over charred bones and cooked meat … Let him be the king of ashes."
- I find the idea really appealing of Dany and her khalasar hunkering down in a desert oasis, healing their traumas from the destruction of Khal Drogo’s khalasar and from the Red Waste, and growing into a community together. And what a location to do it in, rich in history and lost lore! An unburned library? Seances with those ghosts??
- Doylism incoming: This chapter feels like a seed that didn’t sprout in the garden. Maybe a structural idea of parking Dany in Vaes Tolorro until after…. Blackwater? The Red Wedding? She could do all of her leadership-practice here until the Wot5K is winding down. But the tale grew in the telling, Dany moved on to her bad trip with the wicked wizards of Qarth, and we’re left with this evocative setting where not much happens.
- Jorah’s [R]omantic backstory
- Meanwhile, Jorah Mormont feels he’s earned the spotlight, being such a nice guy and all! I do love how George transitions us into Jorah’s backstory:
- "My handmaids say there are ghosts here."
"There are ghosts everywhere," Ser Jorah said softly. "We carry them with us wherever we go."
Yes, she thought. Viserys, Khal Drogo, my son Rhaego, they are with me always. "Tell me the name of your ghost, Jorah. You know all of mine."
- "My handmaids say there are ghosts here."
- Dany says that figs are more important than ghosts, establishing a material > supernatural dynamic...but she also says that dragons are more powerful
- In other words, you can’t easily assert the primacy of the present material world (Renly’s peach, previewed here) over magic nor the past, because the latter pair will inevitably crop up to bite you in the ass. Hence the setting of a city of bones
- Jorah can’t escape his ghosts, and Dany acknowledges she can’t escape hers. As with the deprivation of the desert, this grounds our messiah in human realities
- I also like how Jorah’s story sets up a culture clash between North and South. It reminds me of the opening line of Catelyn’s very first POV chapter:
- Catelyn had never liked this godswood.
- Catelyn still feels like an outsider in the North to a certain extent, and indeed, she compares herself to Lynesse when talking to the Mormont women in ASOS:
- She remembered how young the Lady Lynesse had been, how fair, and how unhappy. One night, after several cups of wine, she had confessed to Catelyn that the north was no place for a Hightower of Oldtown. "There was a Tully of Riverrun who felt the same once," she had answered gently, trying to console, "but in time she found much here she could love."
All lost now, she reflected. Winterfell and Ned, Bran and Rickon, Sansa, Arya, all gone. Only Robb remains. Had there been too much of Lynesse Hightower in her after all, and too little of the Starks?
- She remembered how young the Lady Lynesse had been, how fair, and how unhappy. One night, after several cups of wine, she had confessed to Catelyn that the north was no place for a Hightower of Oldtown. "There was a Tully of Riverrun who felt the same once," she had answered gently, trying to console, "but in time she found much here she could love."
- Ultimately, Lynesse assimilates to yet another culture, leaving Jorah behind after he’d broken the taboos of the North to try and make her feel at home there
- Cultural assimilation is a major theme in Dany’s story, and this ties into that
- After the story, Jorah all but confesses that he’s projecting Lynesse onto Dany, in the hopes of redeeming his choices by protecting/worshipping her instead
- It’s the classic pitfall of his generation: wanting so desperately for the romantic image to be real that you do all the terrible things left out of the romantic stories
- Jorah’s backstory sets up yet another gauntlet for Dany: will she handle her own ghosts better? How will she manage the immovable object that is the North?
- NO, GRRM: Dany naked under an animal skin with sticky peach juice on her hands for this scene is INAPPROPRIATE
- Jorah: Stupid sexy Iain Glen (like Hamlet, a side char in someone else's story)
- We get Jorah’s coming-of-age story -- the tourney, the marriage, the sLaVerY -- and it’s not BobbyB's rebellion story like all the other BobbyB generation coming-of-age stories. Jorah’s is a tawdry soap opera, and he knows it (BOATSEX) , and it’s his. Jorah is a participant/bystander in the Rebellion and his perspective on the Rebellion may be (kind of) interesting because he’s NOT wrapped up in the Stark/Baratheon family dramaz. He shows us run-of-the-mill Westerosi feudal relations, where Lynesse and Jorah are both stuck with a bad marriage bargain. Is his perspective helpful for Dany to understand Westerosi domestic politics?
- Island is "rich in bears and trees and aught else" -- you're goddamn right it's rich in bears and trees, says Maege
- For Clint: would he get a trial by combat when Ned comes to take his head for holding people in slavery? I Think Not. There’s no indication of any trial of fact, only a swift beheading by the Warden of the North. I think trial by combat is not a tradition before the Old Gods (sorry, MattTheMagician)
- Meanwhile, Jorah Mormont feels he’s earned the spotlight, being such a nice guy and all! I do love how George transitions us into Jorah’s backstory:
- The three tempters
- The chapter concludes with deliverance from three very suspect angels of mercy
- George is at his most blatant about the Rule of Three in Dany’s ACOK chapters; this is just a taste compared to the House of the Undying in that regard
- We’ll have more to say about the terrible trio of Pyat Pree, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, and Quaithe of the Shadow when we arrive in Qarth
- Suffice to say here that none of them are particularly depthful characters; they’re archetypes, and while I might want more, they’re skillfully deployed as such
- These three characters offer Dany different paths and different traps, and so they come complete with different styles--again, George leans hard on the visuals
- The detail I really love is that they all speak to her in different languages
- That communicates so many things at once: the cosmopolitan nature of Qarth, the ways in which all three will try to speak to her in a language by which she can be seduced, and above all, Dany’s own status as the center of multiple narratives
- She is at once khaleesi, heir to Westeros, and child of the Free Cities
- I also like that Quaithe, for all her cryptic prophecies, is the only one who occasionally speaks bluntly: telling Dany that they have come for her dragons
- Dany is now taking center stage as a living miracle along with her children, and George strives with Qarth to provide the biggest and most alluring stage possible, but right from the start, we get a warning that all is not as it seems…
- Yet Dany goes with them anyway, and it’s tragic in that she might’ve been able to make a home in Vaes Tolorro, as she will think to herself later
- For me, the heart of this chapter comes when her first two scouts return without success (again, Rule of Three) and Dany makes moves that silently speak to her growing willingness to stay in the City of Bones, to help it and her people bloom
- She’s seeing to defenses, pulling up the marble to get at the soil beneath...it parallels “Stay. Rule. Be a queen” from ASOS, a commitment to leadership
- But ultimately, tragically, destiny calls Dany on to Qarth and beyond, to Dragonstone and King’s Landing, where all the doors turn as red as this desert
- Dragons plant no trees; fire consumes, there is nothing left but sand and bones.
Foreshadowing/Groundwork
As with AGOT Dany IX, George takes time to remind us about Dany’s enemies among the Dothraki (like Pono and Jhaqo), who are certain to burn in TWOW as they did in Season 6.
Dany notes that the dragons need to be in sight of her or else they would grow restless and agitated. In ADWD, when Viserion and Rhaegal are chained and away from Dany, they burrow their way deep into the bowels of the Great Pyramid while Drogon flies restless in the Dothraki Sea before returning to his mom. He needs to be in sight of her. And boy, oh boy, Barristan’s thoughts about the dragons at the outbreak of the Battle of Fire:
They will come, Ser Barristan might have said. The noise will bring them, the shouts and screams, the scent of blood. That will draw them to the battlefield, just as the roar from Daznak's Pit drew Drogon to the scarlet sands. But when they come, will they know one side from the other? Somehow he did not think so.
If only mom was there to help Viserion and Rhaegal distinguish friend from foe in the battle to come.
Are the dragon names clues to who will ride them in endgame. I think they are not, but YMMV
Theory/Discussion
George is obviously going all in on Biblical imagery and other religious themes throughout this chapter, but what does it all add up to, especially in the wake of Game of Thrones? What does Dany mean, spiritually speaking? How does that resonate (or not) with our own spirituality?
Dany shows us civilizations disappearing into the dust and the deep history of this world while the nobility of Westeros are looking inward and missing the real story.
Conclusion
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- Join us next week for Arya IV, as her scrappy little fellowship comes under attack by one of Tywin’s worst cronies: Amory Lorch. Already can’t wait until he dies. And this will be our next livestream episode, so we will see you for that at 830 PM EST on Monday, October 28--tonight, if you’re listening on the general release date!
