Daenerys Stormborn - A Re-Read Project Part II: ACoK & ASoS

[Nictarion]

I could tell you the same thing, no offense, and, not to sound patronizing, but I have been studying foreshadowing much longer than you have. How do you know it isn't going to turn out that way? You don't have a text of ADoS in front of you I believe. Robb said Tywin couldn't be caught with his breeches down, and look at how Tywin died.

:rolleyes:

[Fire Eater]

Exactly! Tbh I don't know how you could interpret this any other way except as foreshadowing of Dany fighting the Others.

By looking at Mully's line, and the WoIAF saying the Dornish melted away into the mountains and deserts.

:rolleyes:

If that is your only response, I'll take it that my point is valid.

[Nictarion]

If that is your only response, I'll take it that my point is valid.

No, your point is not valid, proclaiming yourself the resident foreshadowing expert of Westeros. org doesn't mean you know any more about it than MoIaF, or anyone else. Comments that start with "no offense" or "not to sound patronizing" usually are.

[Fire Eater]

No, your point is not valid, proclaiming yourself the resident foreshadowing expert of Westeros. org doesn't mean you know any more about it than MoIaF, or anyone else.

That is a straw man argument as I never stated anywhere that I am the premiere expert of foreshadowing on this forum.

I don't think I was clear earlier, for that I apologize, I was referring to my argument that Dany fighting the Others is not the only interpretation of that dream.

Comments that start with "no offense" or "not to sound patronizing" usually are.

Actually no, as I said nothing that could be taken as offensive or patronizing. It is a precaution I use often to signal that I do not intend to cause or initiate conflict.

[Parwan]

1. Do you believe that the systematic problem are cause by both men and magic? If so, what kind of transformation can we expect by the end of the series if they will both continue to exist? By the end will the good people of the Planetos have better understanding of the pitfalls that have lead to the current state of affairs or will we see an eventual return to business as usual because in the end they are men who are flawed.

2. Going back to the idea of magic, we had discussed pervious in a brief conversation that GRRM's brand of magic is not well defined and that it seems he doesn't seek to solve problems with only the use of magic. I ask myself then what is the purposes of the magic of ASOIAF? I enjoy the fantastical aspects that magic brings to a story but I do wonder what will be the end use of it and how or if it will become part of the development of the Planetos after the Long Night.

1. I think that the main problems are socio-political ones. What is needed is less of Ned to Catelyn in KL: "All justice flows from the king." There should be more of Catelyn to Stannis in the field near Storm's End: "My son reigns as King in the North, by the will of our lords and people." Davos is a good guy, but his attitude toward service shows the problem well: "Stannis is our rightful king. It is not for us to question him. We sail his ships and do his bidding. That is all." Far better is the Greatjon's question: "Why shouldn't we rule ourselves again?" It's interesting that the characters with something of the right approach are people of mid-level power. They aren't intellectuals. Not infrequently, they are women.

A very important idea is this: Things are supposed to be based on contracts. Any contract worth the name binds both parties. That "We" in Lord Umber's speech was very important. Of course, he doesn't mean "we the people." His "me and mine" phrase shows him to be a paternalistic leader, much like Ned Stark I'd say. Had things worked out better, democracy would not have broken out in the north. I wouldn't expect it to. However, you can see that a leader being selected by some sort of council is not at all the same as a leader who gets the throne solely by right of birth. Even if there is no formal agreement signed, things are likely to be required of the leader in the first case, actually required, not just spoken about. I don't see such a leader as having followers like Kingsguards who swear vows that are essentially promises of slavish devotion. At one point, Lady Cat tells her son that the lords made him king. He replies that they can unmake him.

2. Magic feeds into this situation in a few ways. Attitudes toward magic are important. I understand why the maesters do not like it, but their approach is a poor one. Magic is very real. It is a part of the world. The men from the Citadel seem to think that the stuff is dangerous, so it should be denigrated, made light of, and perhaps removed by political means. This is highly unrealistic. It's like saying that radiation and atomic explosions are dangerous, therefore one should ignore atoms and avoid or make light of the study of nuclear physics. There appears to be a good bit of class prejudice involved here. The people in Westeros who take magic seriously are lower class individuals like Marwyn and the Crannogmen. Additionally, there are foreigners like Melisandre, and there are the wildlings.

I don't think magic is going to go away. I think people will need to accept that. One central issue--the "myth" of the Others has to be seen as a severe and dangerous reality. They existed (despite the opinion of some maesters); they almost certainly never went entirely away; they may be defeated, but they probably won't be eliminated. It seems likely that Daenerys and her dragons will be important, not just in the initial conflict with the Others, but also in the whole attitude that Westerosi have toward magic.

There are a number of ways in which the politico-social situation could improve. Of relevance to this thread: Jorah's oath of fealty to Dany was typically bad. He promised to do what she ordered, no matter what. That is not a decent contract. More encouraging is the council that was ruling Meereeen at the end of ADwD. Barristan Selmy put it together, but he used factions (the pit fighters, freedmen, etc.) empowered by Dany.

[Ragnorak]

Don't have time to post a reply but I wanted to say thanks to Parwan and MoIaF for some very good and interesting responses.

Also before the next chapter I think it is worth noting that Dany makes a number of very good choices here-- like bringing Barristan because he's the counselor that disagrees with the buying of slaves. I wanted to compile a list but there's that time thing again.

[Suzanna Stormborn]

Exactly! Tbh I don't know how you could interpret this any other way except as foreshadowing of Dany fighting the Others.

I agree with you and MOIAF about the interpretation of the dream, but I do also see how it could be interpreted differently. it seems that we all look at foreshadowing a little differently. Obviously there is no right or wrong answer until we get the WoW or the History book at the least.....

My take on Dany seeing herself as Rhaegar is more about her being the last dragon now that he is dead. Like she has to fight for their lost dynasty in his place now since she is the only one left.....I think that her vendetta against the 'usurpers' is going to melt away to nothing when she finally gets to Westeros. I mean the country is in shambles, all the peasants are starving, scared and burned. The White Walkers will be marching soon, the wall may fall, and Stannis and fAegon are both much more serious contenders than Tommen or Cersei. Dany will have soooooo much to deal with when she gets there, so IMO, I really dont think she will get to Westeros and feel like she has to go to the Trident to take up Rhaegars literal battle against the usurpers.

To me it is more of a metaphor about her carrying on the family name than anything.

[Queen‍‍‍‍‍‍ Alysanne‍‍™]

There are a number of ways in which the politico-social situation could improve. Of relevance to this thread: Jorah's oath of fealty to Dany was typically bad. He promised to do what she ordered, no matter what. That is not a decent contract. More encouraging is the council that was ruling Meereeen at the end of ADwD. Barristan Selmy put it together, but he used factions (the pit fighters, freedmen, etc.) empowered by Dany.

I agree with this, its very encouraging and kind of like a constitutional monarchy.

[Annara Snow]

I am really sorry for this big delay - life (or rather unexpected work) has been crazy these few days!

A Storm of Swords, Daenerys III:

The Die is Cast

Summary

A continuation and resolution to the dilemma Dany was facing at the end of the previous chapter, this chapter opens with Dany the meeting with the most prominent slave masters (called “Good Masters”) of Astapor, including the Kraznys mo Nakloz. She surprises everyone telling them that she wants to buy all the Unsullied of Astapor: 8600 of them, as well as all the young boys who are still in training, even those who have just been castrated and still haven’t killed their puppies.

Dany has come to the meeting, which takes place at the top of a pyramid, dressed in a Qartheen gown and accompanied by her bloodriders, handmaidens Irri and Jhiqui, Strong Belwas, Barristan aka “Arstan” and Jorah Mormont, in order to appear impressive enough to the eight slavers, who have each brought a few personal slaves with them. She is still feigning ignorance of the High Valyrian language, so the slavers have brought the young slave girl that we have met in the previous chapter to translate the business negotiations.

Some of the slavers are against the idea of selling half-trained boys, out of fear that they will bring shame upon them if they fail as warriors (and therefore, obviously, bring down their reputation and value of their goods in the market), and because of the fact that they will be out of Unsullied to offer to the next buyer who comes along, since training lasts about a decade. However, others are too taken with the prospect of fast gold in their hands to think long-term (as one of them puts it, “Gold is my purse is better than gold in my future”). Finally, Kraznys announces their decision to sell her the Unsullied that they have already been trained, while the others will be sold to her when she comes back in two years; but Dany insists that she doesn’t have that much time, since she intends to be in Westeros in a year. She offers them a lot of gold and other goods as well as the three ships she has, but the price is still not high enough, and Dany refuses the sell her crown the way Viserys sold their mother’s.

Finally, she offers them something she is aware they would not be able to refuse: one of her dragons. Barristan, a staunch opponent of slavery, objects loudly to this, and Dany has Jorah remove him from the meeting. The slavers naturally choose Drogon, the largest and fiercest of the three, and the deal is struck.

The slavers also decide to give Dany the slave girl as a translator to communicate with the Unsullied until they learn the Common Tongue, unaware that she is able to talk to them already. After the meeting, Dany tells Barristan that she wants him to talk openly to her in private, but to never question her in front of strangers. She then talks to the young translator in High Valyrian and learns that her name is Missandei. Dany tells Missandei that she is no longer a slave and that she can be her handmaiden and translator, but she can also choose to leave her service or return to her family. Missandei tells her that she has no parents and nowhere to go and will gladly work for her, even when Dany warns her of the dangers she will be facing, including wars, hunger and death. Dany asks Missandei, as a far more reliable source than Kraznys, after she has accepted service with Dany and is not bound to her former masters anymore, a lot of questions about the Unsullied, and if they really are fearless and obedient to whoever is their current master. Missandei admits that the Unsullied would even kill themselves if their master asked them to once they were done with them, but Dany senses that the girl is very sad and troubled by that idea, sensitively making her admit that her three brothers are among the Unsullied. Dany admires Missandei’s intelligence and courage and a relationship of trust is clearly being established between the two.

Dany spends the night on one of her three ships, Balerion. She argues with captain Groleo, who is against her selling the ships and tries to use Illyrio as an argument why she should not; and then she invites her bloodriders and Jorah, the people she trusts the most, to her cabin, for an undisclosed reason. She has a talk with Jorah about the duties of the true king or queen; when she finally goes to sleep in her room, she dreams of being Rhaegar again, fighting at the Trident and vanquishing her enemies. After waking up, she sees Quaithe standing over her, repeating the cryptic words of advice she told her in Qarth. But when she opens the door for the light to come in, Quaithe is gone, and Dany tells her handmaidens it was just a dream.

The following morning, Dany, dressed Dothraki style and with braided hair and the silver bell that she gained as a sign of her victory over the Undying of Qarth, goes with all her people, and her three dragons, chained to the platform of her litter, to the centre of the city, where the transaction is supposed to take place. Since the Plaza of Pride is too small for all the Unsullied she has bought, they are instead assembled at another, larger city square, the Plaza of Punishment, a place where disobedient slaves are tortured to death in gruesome ways. Kraznys, the other Good Masters are there to greet her and conduct the transaction, and many other of the Ghiscari ruling elite are also there, surrounded by their slaves. Dany’s people bring some of the gold and goods, as much as they could carry, promising that the rest awaits them on the ships; finally, Dany gives Kraznys Drogon, tied to a chain, while he gives her a whip (“the harpy’s fingers”) that symbolically stands for the ownership of the Unsullied. Dany mounts her silver and loudly announces to all the Unsullied that they belong to her now, in High Valyrian, which catches the attention of one of the slave masters who seems more astute than the others. The rest of them are too preoccupied with a disobedient Drogon.

Dany explains that the reason Drogon does not obey them is because “a dragon is no slave”. She hits Kraznys over the face with her whip and calls to Drogon to burn him, using “Dracarys”, the High Valyrian word for dragonfire. The Plaza erupts in chaos as the three dragons start burning the assembled slave aristocracy of Astapor, and Dany’s bloodriders and Jorah start killing the Astapor non-slave soldiers. One of the Good Masters calls for the Unsullied to defend them, but they do not even move and calmly watch him dead. Finally, Dany commands the Unsullied to kill the Good Masters, the soldiers and all other slavers in Astapor – marked by wearing tokars and whips – but not to hurt any child under 12, and to free every slave in the city. Flinging the slaver’s whip aside, she shouts “Freedom” and “Dracarys”, and the thousands of Unsullied shout back “Dracarys” and follow her command, helping her destroy the Astapori slaver society in fire and blood.

Observations

• Dany’s choice of clothes is very deliberate. For the meeting with the Good Masters, she dresses like a highborn woman from Qarth, trying to appear like a part of the slave-owning culture that they belong to, while remaining a foreign buyer; she can’t look like she is trying to be one of them as this would suggest weakness, but she also does everything to appear as rich as they are to convincingly deal with them. However, when she comes to the Plaza of Punishment, she is about to drop the mask, so she dresses like a khaleesi, with braided hair and a silver bell standing for a victory she achieved over another powerful, decadent group of people (in Qarth, none the less). It’s another sign that Dany is, at her core, a khaleesi more than a traditional queen dressed in silk.
• It’s also telling that Dany likes Jorah’s sweaty “earthy” smell as a contrast to the sweet perfumes that the Good Masters are wearing. Kraznys notably smells like peaches. This is another the sign of Dany not being a traditional princess/queen who enjoys the court comforts; this is the girl who dreamed of being a sailor and who was at her happiest riding her silver through the Dothraki grass sea.
• Clothes are also means to tell free men from slaves in Astapor, since only free men can wear a tokar. The high status of slavers is further shown through the silver, gold and pearl fringes on their tokars.
• We learn more details about Astapor and its history in this chapter, including the fact that the founder of the city in the ancient times was Grazdan the Great, which accounts for the popularity of that name among the Astapor slave masters, and the fact that the Empire of Ghis fought five wars against the Freehold of Valyria and lost all of them - because of the dragons.
• The one thing Dany refuses to sell is her crown, remembering that Viserys took a turn to the worse once he sold their mother’s crown. That may be odd considering what she does at the Plaza of Punishment, but I suppose the crown could have easily gotten damaged or lost in the chaos, if she had given it to the slavers.
• The Westerosi are seen as “savages” by the Astapori, but that “their savage steel knights” are considered formidable warriors that even the Unsullied could lose to. This is an interesting perspective, with the latter being consistent with what we have seen in Jorah’s and Barristan’s successful fights with the Dothraki and the Meerenese fighters, respectively.
• Dany couldn’t have been too surprised by Barristan’s reaction to her supposed deal to sell a dragon for a slave army; although she warns him later not to oppose her in front of strangers, having him forcibly removed from the meeting by Jorah (who must have quite enjoyed the opportunity) was a useful display of her apparent determination to get through with the deal.
• Missandei says with emotion that three of the Unsullied were here brothers, in past sense. I don’t think she means that they are dead; she seems to fear for their possible deaths. Dany once thought of Viserys, while he was still alive but about to die, as a man who was her brother - but that was for very different reasons. In Missandei’s case, though she obviously still feels very strongly about them, they have had their identities taken away from them by their masters. Could she even recognize them now?
• She also repeats the statement that the Unsullied are “not men”. Eunuchs (including Varys and “Reek” Theon) are often referred as “not men” in the series, but with the Unsullied, as with Theon, it is not just about denying their masculinity; it is also about denying their humanity. Theon is treated as an animal and the Unsullied as machines. As have seen in the previous chapter, the purpose of the training of the Unsullied is to completely dehumanize them. Dany herself thinks of them as “her stone halfmen with hearts of brick”. (Which could perhaps be a foreshadowing of her future alliance with Tyrion, although he couldn’t possibly be more different from the Unsullied.)
• Dany’s khalasar presently includes 83 Dothraki, though still does her best to make them look as formidable as possible.
• While the dragons are being driven to the Plaza of Punishment, chained to the roof of the litter, Rhaegal and especially Visarion are restless and seem to feel that something is wrong, but Drogon, the wildest and fiercest of the three, is so perfectly calm that it’s hard to see that he’s awake. This is another sign of the special connection between Dany and Drogon – he is the only one who is in tune with her feelings so much that he seems to feel her true intentions and knows to keep calm until the time comes to destroy her enemies.

Analysis

The narrative voice

Although one of the main advantages of the POV narrative structure of ASOAIF is that we are able to know characters’ internal thoughts, that does not mean that Martin always allows us to know everything that the POV character is thinking; as a matter of fact, there are times when he deliberately hides some of the character’s thoughts that are particularly relevant. For instance, we only get to know some of Ned Stark’s thoughts about Lyanna, the Tower of Joy or Jon, enough to give hints but not enough to explicitly reveal the mystery; sometimes the POV character witnesses an event but Martin does not tell us their thoughts and feelings about it (for instance, withholding Sansa’s thoughts about some of the things Littlefinger tells her) which is often the case with cliffhanger endings of chapters.

The most notable example of this approach is this chapter, in which Martin deliberately withholds the information about Dany’s intentions. Dany had made her decision before she came to the meeting with the slave masters, but what the decision is, is only revealed at the end. Just like Dany is expertly manipulating the slavers and hiding her true intentions even from many of her followers, Martin is trying to hide them from the readers, in order to make the climactic moment at the end a bigger twist. One could say that he did something similar in Dany’s last chapter in AGOT, but in that chapter he was simply not telling us anything about Dany’s goals; in this one, however, he is trying to make us believe that Dany’s intentions are completely different from what they really are – using the method called lying by omission; or, at least, to make the reader question Dany’s intentions and create more tension before they are revealed.

Whether or not the reader is fooled into believing that Dany is really going to buy a slave army, even at the price of giving up Drogon, probably depends on the reader’s expectations and opinion of the character. The first time I read this chapter, I never believed that Dany - who had expressed such disgust at slavery and especially the slavery in Astapor and the treatment of the Unsullied, and who had tried to save victims before and had made everyone in her khalasar a free person – would decide to make a deal with the slavers of Astapor and continue propagating their slaving business, which would mean causing thousands of new boys to be castrated, dehumanized, made to kill their puppies and later kill babies who are taken from their mothers. When she supposedly offered to sell one of her “children” – to make it even more incredible, Drogon, who is her alter ego – it became even more obvious that the slavers were in for a nasty surprise. However, this did not lessen my enjoyment of the chapter – quite the opposite, it made me impatient to see Dany prove right my trust in her, and it made the ending really satisfying.

Throughout most of the chapter, he keeps Dany’s thoughts as well as her statements about what she is doing and about to do very ambiguous, with many of them functioning as red herrings or hints – or both, depending on how they are interpreted by the reader.

• Dany announces several time that she wants to buy all the Unsullied, and thinks to herself “I will have them all, no matter the price”, “Two thousand would never serve for what she meant to do. I must have them all.” But at no point in her internal narration do we learn why. The slavers believe that she needs them to conquer Westeros, but that doesn’t really make sense: why exactly would she be so adamant that she must buy them all, including the young boys, who will need years to grow and become capable warriors? At the same time, Dany is claiming that she will be in Westeros in two years. Six hundred soldiers more or less is not crucial in winning the war, certainly not the way one dragon is. It’s not a question of numbers, the word “all” is crucial. Dany may want to save them all, but that would only mean that thousands of new boys would suffer the same fate in order to replace them. There is only one logical reason to want them all, which the slavers should have thought about: to ensure that the slavers had no slave warriors to send against Dany’s, and prevent the possibility of the Unsullied fighting each other.
• On the other hand, some of her thoughts are meant to fool the readers:

  Dany knew what she must do now, though the taste of it was so bitter that even the persimmon wine could not cleanse it from her month. She had considered long and hard and found no other way. It is my only choice. “Give me all,” she said, “and you may have a dragon.

  She did not blame him for his fury. It was a wretched thing she did. The Mother of Dragons has sold her strongest child. Even the thought made her ill.

  This sounds like Dany feeling awful about what she has done but going through with it anyway, but it’s really Dany being disgusted by what she has to pretend to be doing.

• This, however, is a pretty big hint, though not as obvious that it couldn’t have been read as Dany just talking about the prospect of conquering Westeros:

“I am not a child,” she told him. “I am a queen.”

“Yet even queens can err. The Astapori have cheated you, Your Grace. A dragon is worth more than any army. Aegon proved that three hundred years ago, upon the Field of Fire.” “I know what Aegon proved. I mean to prove a few things of my own.”

• Dany’s questions to Missandei include this one, something that the slavers completely forgot to think about, which will be their undoing:

“If I did resell them, how would I know they could not be used against me?” Dany asked pointedly. “Would they do that? Fight against me, even do me harm?”

“If their master commanded. They do not question, Your Grace. All the questions have been culled from them. They obey.”

• Before going to sleep, Dany summons her most trusted followers – Jorah and her bloodriders – to her cabin. It’s not hard to guess that she has something important to reveal to them about tomorrow morning’s proceedings.
• Dany’s conversation about Jorah about her past, her feelings on slavery and what it means to be a king is a really huge hint; more about that later.
• Once the fateful morning comes, Martin gets closer and closer to dropping the pretense just as Dany does, dressing as a Dothraki warrior and thinking of the upcoming meeting as a big, crucial battle. Drogon’s calm behavior is another hint in the right direction, and there is also this ominously ambiguous thought about the Astapori who have come to see the dragons:

They are not so different from Qartheen after all, she thought. They want a glimpse of dragons to tell their children of, and their children’s children. It made her wonder how many of them would ever have children.

The slavers of Astapor

The names of the two main squares in the city are Plaza of Pride and Plaza of Punishment. Pride and Punishment would indeed be a perfect title for the story of the slavers of Astapor, beginning with the arrogance displayed by Kraznys in the last chapter when he was showing Dany the Unsullied at the Plaze of Pride; with its last act, appropriately, being played out in the Plaza of Punishment.

Martin made the slavers of Astapor entirely repellent. The feasibility and sustainability of such an extreme society based on slave labor and castrations and murders of so many people is indeed very questionable. The “Good” Masters are ruthless, cruel, inhumane, greedy and not very smart – or at least, they are careless too blinded by their own arrogance and greed. Dany plays them like a fiddle, making correct guesses about their inferiority complex regarding Valyria and its dragons, which defeated Ghis so many times. Kraznys is a particularly loathsome individual, who adds open misogyny and xenophobia and a high degree of stupidity to the mix, in addition to incredible callousness. At one point he suggests to Dany that she should try out her new Unsullied by using them to sack a few cities on the way, taking the riches for herself and making their people into slaves and sending them with a few Unsullied guards to Astapor. The Astapor masters have no problems encouraging the plunder of other cities as a good business venture. It’s really astonishing that none of them ever thinks of the possibility that someone may attack their city and that they would be quite defenseless if they didn’t keep some of their Unsullied warriors to protect them; or maybe they put too much faith in the free warriors from their own class, who proved to be quite useless in the end.

Contrary to the idea that true monsters are those who are aware that what they are doing is evil and do it anyway, the Astapori slavers are particularly abhorrent because they don’t see anything wrong with their horrific practices. I’m sure that, from their POV, Dany would have been an evil woman who fooled them, broke their business deal, took their goods and killed them, but I’m not one of the people who think every view point is valid. They are meant to be the epitome of institutional evil, of an unjust and cruel society, in order to motivate Dany into her first major revolutionary act. Dany did not decide that she is against slavery because she studied political systems, it is a result of her compassion for the victims and rage against the perpetrators.

True knight/True king

The question of what it means to be a “true knight” is one of the series’ big themes and plays a crucial role in several character arcs – Sansa, Brienne, Jaime, Sandor, Barristan among others. Another big theme is what it means to be a good king, and what rights and/or obligations a king should have. In the previous chapter, Dany was thinking that Jorah was not a “true knight” when he kissed her, seeing him through the prism of the ideal behavior or a knight to his lady/queen in courtly love. This time, however, Dany is thinking about what it means to be a true knight in the sense of defending the helpless, and in her view, the requirements for a true king are the same as for the true knight:

“I was alone for a long time, Jorah. All alone but for my brother. I was such a small scared thing. Viserys should have protected me, but instead he hurt me and scared me worse. He shouldn’t have done that. He wasn’t just my brother, he was my king. Why do the gods make kings and queens, if not to protect the ones who can’t protect themselves?”

“Some kings make themselves. Robert did.”

“He was no true king,” Dany said scornfully. “He did no justice. Justice... that’s what kings are for.”

Unlike the many who believe that subjects have obligations to protect and obey their kings no matter what the king is like and no matter what he does, Dany believes that kings have a responsibility towards the people and are not allowed to break this pledge.

This is why I think she would understand why her father had to be dethroned, if she learned the truth about him. Robert was not a good king, but Dany doesn’t know much about his rule; I assume that she is referring to her family’s fate, including the deaths of Rhaegar’s children, as Robert’s failure to do justice. However, she is not aware that Aerys was something worse, a tyrant who was endangering the realm instead of being the “Protector of the Realm”. She has only heard Viserys’ biased version of the story, in which their father’s nickname “the Mad King” was just a slander. Jorah is not willing to tell her anything otherwise, and Barristan is obviously avoiding the topic whenever it comes up; they both prefer to keep silent about Aerys and talk about her brother Rhaegar instead. But I think it is for a reason that Dany has seen Aerys in the House of the Undying, saying “Let him be king over cooked meat and charred bones, let him be the king of ashes.” I believe she will one day understand what she was seeing in that scene.

Dany believes she has to be the “true king” and protect the helpless, the victims. She still remembers Eroeh, the young Lhazareen rape victim she tried to save but wasn’t able to. Even though Dany had lost her husband, her unborn son and found her in a desperate situation in the last AGOT chapter, Eroeh’s fate moved her to swear vengeance on khal Mago.

While in classic tales, brave knights slay dragons (this is the case in ASOAIF, too – Dany’s handmaidens first knew of dragons as monsters that brave men slay, and the puppet show in The Hedge Knight had a dragon as the monster), in this case, a “dragon” princess wants to be the true knight and slay evil human monsters with her dragons. Her brother, “the dragon prince” Rhaegar has always been her role model, based on the stories she has heard about him from Viserys, Jorah and later Barristan. She has dreamed about being Rhaegar, “the last dragon”, before (Daenerys IX, AGOT)

“…don’t want to wake the dragon…”

The red door was so far ahead of her, and she could feel the icy breath behind, sweeping up on her. If it caught her she would die a death that was more than death, howling forever alone in the darkness. She began to run.

“…don’t want to wake the dragon…”

She could feel the heat inside her, a terrible burning in her womb. Her son was tall and proud, with Drogo’s copper skin and her own silver-gold hair, violet eyes shaped like almonds. And he smiled for her and began to lift his hand toward hers, but when he opened his mouth the fire poured out. She saw his heart burning through his chest, and in an instant he was gone, consumed like a moth by a candle, turned to ash. She wept for her child, the promise of a sweet mouth on her breast, but her tears turned to steam as they touched her skin.

“…want to wake the dragon…”

Ghosts lined the hallway, dressed in the faded raiment of kings. In their hands were swords of pale fire. They had hair of silver and hair of gold and hair of platinum white, and their eyes were opal and amethyst, tourmaline and jade. “Faster,” they cried, “faster, faster.” She raced, her feet melting the stone wherever they touched. “Faster!” the ghosts cried as one, and she screamed and threw herself forward. A great knife of pain ripped down her back, and she felt her skin tear open and smelled the stench of burning blood and saw the shadow of wings. And Daenerys Targaryen flew.

“…wake the dragon…”

The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door.

“…the dragon…”

And saw her brother Rhaegar, mounted on a stallion as black as his armor. Fire glimmered red through the narrow eye slit of his helm. “The last dragon,” Ser Jorah’s voice whispered faintly. “The last, the last.” Dany lifted his polished black visor. The face within was her own.

After that, for a long time, there was only the pain, the fire within her, and the whisperings of stars.

She woke to the taste of ashes.

This time, she dreams of being Rhaegar again, but this time she is not scared and running, she triumphant:

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper’s rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened.

This dream has recently been analyzed and discussed extensively in this thread, so I don’t have much to add, except that I don’t believe that the dream has just one meaning; and that the most surface reading – Dany fighting for the Iron Throne – is, IMO, the least likely to have great importance as foreshadowing. Within the chapter, it serves as both a red herring (potentially fooling the reader into thinking that she is completely focused on winning the throne against the Usurper’s heirs) and a foreshadowing, as the end of this chapter is Dany’s first great victory. In the long run, it’s an open question as to which enemies Dany will face (there may be more than one) but “icy breath” (in a dream that is remarkably similar to one of Bran’s dreams) and “melting like ice” most strongly suggest the Others. That doesn’t mean that Dany will not start her campaign in Westeros fighting for the Iron Throne; the question is how she ends it.

Quaithe’s advice

In relation to this, it may be interesting to revisit Quaithe’s cryptic advice from ACOK:

“To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”

And this is exactly what Martin himself does: Quaithe makes a mystical reappearance in Dany’s room and repeats her advice word for word - or she makes an appearance in Dany’s dream and Dany is simply remembering her words; it is kept ambiguous, though I think Quaithe may have some means of communicating with Dany even if she is not physically there.

”

“They sleep,” a woman said. “They all sleep.” The voice was very close. “Even dragons must sleep.”

She is standing over me. “Who’s there?” Dany peered into the darkness. She thought she could see a shadow, the faintest outline of a shape. “What do you want of me?”

“Remember. To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.

Dany thought in Qarth that Quaithe was telling her she should go to Asshai (“east”) but that may have just been Dany’s interpretation; Quaithe seemed to agree, but it is possible that Quaithe, like Melisandre, is not sure herelf what her advice actually means. Going east to reach the west may refer to Dany going to the Dothraki sea with Drogon at the end of ADWD before she is ready to go to Westeros. Going south to go north could mean that Dany lands in Vale, goes to King’s Landing to fight for the throne, but finds out that her real purpose is up North in the fight against the Others. What is the shadow? It may be the shadow of the dragon – Drogon’s shadow, which is mentioned explicitly at the end of the chapter when it falls over Kraznys just before his death. But maybe the most interesting part is the advice: “To go forward you must go back”, especially because Dany constantly thinks to herself:

If I look back, I am lost.

which she once again thinks to herself as she is going to the Plaza of Punishment in Astapor – just a couple of paragraph after hearing Quaithe’s advice again. Dany has not forgotten her past, she is motivated by it, but she tries to encourage herself to go forward and not think about that painful burden. But Quaithe tells her she must go back in order to be able to truly move forward. Is she referring to Dany going back to the Dothraki, to the beginnings of her story as a khaleesi and Mother of Dragons, to beat her enemies she swore revenge against, maybe even to try to change and reform their society? To her own childhood in Braavos? Or to the history of her family?

Crossing the Rubicon

To arrive to the Plaza of Punishment, Dany and her khalasar have to cross the river that flows through Astapor. Dany compares this in her mind to Rhaegar fighting his fateful battle at the Trident; Dany is starting to fight hers against the slaver establishment in Essos:

I ought to have a banner sewn, she thought as she led her tattered band up along Astapor’s meandering river. She closed her eyes to imagine how it would look: all flowing black silk, and on it the red three-headed dragon of Targaryen, breathing golden flames. A banner such as Rhaegar might have borne. The river’s banks were strangely tranquil. The Worm, the Astapori called the stream. It was wide and slow and crooked, dotted with tiny wooded islands.

It is time to cross the Trident, Dany thought, as she wheeled and rode her silver back.

This is remarkably similar to the expression “crossing the Rubicon”, a reference to Julius Caesar deciding to refuse to obey the Senate and move to fight Pompey instead, starting a civil war – a moment of a big, brave, life-changing decision that marks the point of no return, which he supposedly summed up in the sentence: “Alea jacta est” – “The die is cast”.

This is indeed not just a pivotal moment for Dany, but also the moment that will change Slaver’s Bay and the entire Essos forever.

Dany did take a big risk – although she was sure that her dragons and her loyal followers would so their part, she couldn’t have been sure of the behavior of the Unsullied until the end: “The gods have heard my prayer”, she thinks when the Unsullied don’t try to help their former master.

Although we have seen Dany trying to save rape victims in AGOT, she was only able to do that on a small scale and to make those women her personal protected slaves rather than set them free, and the fact that she was a part of the society of their enslavers/abusers and operating within it with limited. This time, she has the power to use fire and blood; she is dressed as a Dothraki warrior khaleesi, but instead of coming to raid the city and take slaves, she is coming to free them.

Contrary to some readings of the character, Dany is very much an idealist, trying to save helpless victims, motivated by compassion and empathy, but also by rage and contempt against the victimizers. She is as harsh to her enemies as she is caring to the people she wants to protect, but in the world she lives in, stopping abuse and oppression that is so deep rooted necessarily means using extreme violence.

This is something that brings moral ambiguity to Dany’s story; I doubt that many feel sorry for Kraznys, but her order to the Unsullied to kill the slavers, but not any child under 12, may sound disturbing to contemporary ears, since our society has (mostly) a different view of adulthood and responsibility, though it makes sense for Dany, who is herself no older than 15 and did not consider herself a child when she was 13. Furthermore, even when it comes to adult members of the slaver class, there is a question of collective responsibility, which is a debated topic in the contemporary world, too. This will be more relevant when we come to Dany’s actions after taking Meereen; in this case, however, she saw herself as leading a battle, and was arguably acting like a military leader ordering her troops to kill enemies in battle. This implies a certain black and white mode of thinking, but if black and white thinking was ever justified, it was in this chapter.

Some readers are so disturbed by her mass killing of the slaver class that they declare her a villain and claim that she should have never done what she does in this chapter. I could never agree with that. Standing by and letting the horrible practices go on in Astapor would, IMO, have been a morally much worse decision; and definitely the worse of the two evils; people are not responsible just for their actions but also for their failures to take action. Like it or not, the slavers of Astapor were not going to change the system if she asked them nicely or told them that what they were doing was wrong; and the slaves were being horribly punished for every disobedience and were not going to start a rebellion. Bottom line, liberating the slaves was undeniably a good thing and a step in the right direction; the problem was that it wasn’t enough by any means, as we see later when Dany finds out what happened in Astapor after she was gone.

This is a moment of great triumph for Dany – she has freed slaves, seems to have destroyed an evil system, and has still gained a loyal army of ex-slaves who are willing to fight for her; but although it’s the beginning of her anti-slavery campaign that will make her the beloved “mother” of the majority of Essosi slaves and ex-slaves, Astapor will eventually also become the first and maybe most bitter reminder that revolution is not that easy as it seemed.

The islands of freedom

Finally, I want to finish this review by mentioning the contrasting powerful images of Astapor that Dany comes across as she is about to confront the slavers at the Plaza. Images that represent freedom and slavery, horrors and beauty of life, respectively.

The most horrific image of what slavery is the one Dany sees at the Plaza of Punishment itself – an image that drives home why it would be naïve to expect the slaves to rise in a rebellion, and why Tyrion was dead wrong in ADWD when he came to the conclusion that every slave “has a choice, even if it is a bad choice”:

At first glimpse, Dany thought their skin was striped like the zorses of the jogos Nhai. Then she rode her silver nearer and saw the raw red flesh beneath the crawling black stripes. Flies. Flies and maggots. The rebellious slaves had been peeled like a man might peel an apple, in a long curling strip. One man had an arm black with flies from fingers to elbow, and red and white beneath. Dany reined in beneath him. “What did this one do?”

“He raised a hand against his owner.”

Just before reaching the Plaza, Dany observes very different scenes taking place by the riverside:

The Worm, the Astapori called the stream. It was wide and slow and crooked, dotted with tiny wooded islands. She glimpsed children playing on one of them, darting amongst elegant marble statues. On another island two lovers kissed in the shade of tall green trees, with no more shame than Dothraki at a wedding. Without clothing, she could not tell if they were slave or free.

The peace and happiness of these people – the only ones not involved in the events, not interested in seeing dragons or conducting business – comes off as something from another world. Children playing; lovers, uninhibited, naked and happy, and free of class and status constraints. What is sad about it in the context of the world of ASOAIF is that children are rarely allowed to stay innocent for long, and there are so few people who are free to really choose their sexual and life partners and have genuinely free, loving relationships without consequences. Even among people who are technically free and not in a horrible state of having absolutely no freedom at all and no rights as human beings, as slaves are, genuine freedom is difficult to find in Essos and Westeros.

Conclusion

This is one of the most important chapters in Dany’s story, and represents the turning point for her as a character. She proves to be not just a girl who overcame her victimization and became a powerful leader, or an exiled Targaryen princess trying to go home and regain her family’s throne; she becomes a revolutionary.

[Parwan]

A quick note:

Thanks, Annara, for not referring to "The Sack of Astapor." If you do a search using this phrase, you will find all kinds of threads, wikis, blogs, etc. that discuss the matter as if it were an established fact. But the fact is that there is no proof that Dany's forces sacked the city. Quite the contrary, everything indicates that they didn't do this. It seems quite clear that there was little, probably almost no, looting and pillaging. I decided to start a thread on this admittedly rather limited technical matter. You can find it at:

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/topic/110595-dany-didnt-sack-astapor/

[Queen‍‍‍‍‍‍ Alysanne‍‍™]

Very good and in-depth analysis Annara.

I agree on the queen vs. khaleesi motif that Dany is not a traditional queen based on the stuff on this chapter and what we have seen in the previous chapters of the reread.

Thanks for the explanation on the narrative choice, I initially thought Dany was buying all simply so that the masters won't make anymore unsullied, but I can see your explanation makes far more sense that she needed all to prevent any attack from them.

Crossing the Rubicon

To arrive to the Plaza of Punishment, Dany and her khalasar have to cross the river that flows through Astapor. Dany compares this in her mind to Rhaegar fighting his fateful battle at the Trident; Dany is starting to fight hers against the slaver establishment in Essos:

Quote

This is remarkably similar to the expression “crossing the Rubicon”, a reference to Julius Caesar deciding to refuse to obey the Senate and move to fight Pompey instead, starting a civil war – a moment of a big, brave, life-changing decision that marks the point of no return, which he supposedly summed up in the sentence: “Alea jacta est” – “The die is cast”.

This is indeed not just a pivotal moment for Dany, but also the moment that will change Slaver’s Bay and the entire Essos forever.

Dany did take a big risk – although she was sure that her dragons and her loyal followers would so their part, she couldn’t have been sure of the behavior of the Unsullied until the end: “The gods have heard my prayer”, she thinks when the Unsullied don’t try to help their former master.

Although we have seen Dany trying to save rape victims in AGOT, she was only able to do that on a small scale and to make those women her personal protected slaves rather than set them free, and the fact that she was a part of the society of their enslavers/abusers and operating within it with limited. This time, she has the power to use fire and blood; she is dressed as a Dothraki warrior khaleesi, but instead of coming to raid the city and take slaves, she is coming to free them.

Contrary to some readings of the character, Dany is very much an idealist, trying to save helpless victims, motivated by compassion and empathy, but also by rage and contempt against the victimizers. She is as harsh to her enemies as she is caring to the people she wants to protect, but in the world she lives in, stopping abuse and oppression that is so deep rooted necessarily means using extreme violence.

This is something that brings moral ambiguity to Dany’s story; I doubt that many feel sorry for Kraznys, but her order to the Unsullied to kill the slavers, but not any child under 12, may sound disturbing to contemporary ears, since our society has (mostly) a different view of adulthood and responsibility, though it makes sense for Dany, who is herself no older than 15 and did not consider herself a child when she was 13. Furthermore, even when it comes to adult members of the slaver class, there is a question of collective responsibility, which is a debated topic in the contemporary world, too. This will be more relevant when we come to Dany’s actions after taking Meereen; in this case, however, she saw herself as leading a battle, and was arguably acting like a military leader ordering her troops to kill enemies in battle. This implies a certain black and white mode of thinking, but if black and white thinking was ever justified, it was in this chapter.

Some readers are so disturbed by her mass killing of the slaver class that they declare her a villain and claim that she should have never done what she does in this chapter. I could never agree with that. Standing by and letting the horrible practices go on in Astapor would, IMO, have been a morally much worse decision; and definitely the worse of the two evils; people are not responsible just for their actions but also for their failures to take action. Like it or not, the slavers of Astapor were not going to change the system if she asked them nicely or told them that what they were doing was wrong; and the slaves were being horribly punished for every disobedience and were not going to start a rebellion. Bottom line, liberating the slaves was undeniably a good thing and a step in the right direction; the problem was that it wasn’t enough by any means, as we see later when Dany finds out what happened in Astapor after she was gone.

This is a moment of great triumph for Dany – she has freed slaves, seems to have destroyed an evil system, and has still gained a loyal army of ex-slaves who are willing to fight for her; but although it’s the beginning of her anti-slavery campaign that will make her the beloved “mother” of the majority of Essosi slaves and ex-slaves, Astapor will eventually also become the first and maybe most bitter reminder that revolution is not that easy as it seemed.

I agree with alot here, it's kind of like the saying that "someone who sees someone doing [insert any morally bad act] and doesn't say anything or does anything is worse off then the person that actually commited said action.

If Dany just walked off it would seem she doesn't have a problem with what is going on.

This also comes back to one of my favourite quotes from the TV series this season

"What good is power if you can't protect the ones you love?"

Power is one of the themes of ASOIAF, and how it is used is one of the hot discussion points. I always wonder if other characters in the story had Dany's dragons at this point and came to Astapor, would they take a stand? Dany has been taking stands even before she got her dragons, so I wonder if other characters in the story would do so.

I also think Dany's experience of travelling alot which allowed her to see a cutpurse in Qarth, is what gives her the extra eyes to see every detail of the things going on in Astapor, I think many of our POV nobles wouldn't have taken notice of everything.

I wanted to hit on a point on Quaithe. I think on of the key things about Quaithe is the timing of when she appears to Dany and what she says. She appears to Dany the day before Dany Dany buys an army and sells Drogon (Quaithe wouldn't know she really isn't selling him). IMO I think Quaithe is just like bloodraven just like when he cleared Brans memory of Jaime pushing him down the tower, Quaithe is trying to steer Dany away from the political parts of her arc and steer her towards what is more important up north.

[Fire Eater]

Very well done, Annara Snow

Not much to add,

As for her sacking Astapor, she did take a city be treachery like Tywin, but she arguably had purer motives than Tywin. Although I do fault her on making twelve the age at which to be spared as she was thirteen when she had slaves. I think she could have at least gone for fifteen years of age.

Dany is mentioned several times to be drinking persimmon wine. Persimmon was the lotos in the Odyssey where those who ate the fruit or flowers ended in a state of peaceful apathy. That seems to be the case for the Astapori aristocracy. They are asleep only to be rudely awakened by Dany.

"Do you remember Eroeh?" she asked him.

Eroeh was the girl Dany saved, but it ended in a worse fate with her rape and murder. We will later see that is the case with Astapor.

One man had an arm black with flies from fingers to elbow, and red and white beneath. Dany reined in beneath him. "What did this one do?"

"He raised a hand against his owner."

"What did they [decapitated Volantene slaves] do?" Tyrion inquired innocently.

The knight glanced at the inscriptions. "The woman was a slave who raised a hand to her mistress."

I think Dany is definitely going to visit Volantis. She could likely get the slave soldiers of Voltanis, the tiger cloaks, to join her like she did the Unsullied, the slave soldiers of Astapor. Dany and Tyrion will definitely be joining up.

[Suzanna Stormborn]

Excellent and very thorough analysis Annara. Love your work!!

Dany explains that the reason Drogon does not obey them is because “a dragon is no slave”. She hits Kraznys over the face with her whip and calls to Drogon to burn him, using “Dracarys”, the High Valyrian word for dragonfire. The Plaza erupts in chaos as the three dragons start burning the assembled slave aristocracy of Astapor, and Dany’s bloodriders and Jorah start killing the Astapor non-slave soldiers. One of the Good Masters calls for the Unsullied to defend them, but they do not even move and calmly watch him dead. Finally, Dany commands the Unsullied to kill the Good Masters, the soldiers and all other slavers in Astapor – marked by wearing tokars and whips – but not to hurt any child under 12, and to free every slave in the city. Flinging the slaver’s whip aside, she shouts “Freedom” and “Dracarys”, and the thousands of Unsullied shout back “Dracarys” and follow her command, helping her destroy the Astapori slaver society in fire and blood.

I still cannot figure out why this sentence bothers so many posters so much. She commands the unsullied to kill all the slavers wearing a Tokar. She specifies at the beginning of the sentence, kill all the slavers. She does not mean kill everyone in the world wearing a tokar. This entire chapter in general has so much controversy and debate over it, and so much of what the haters say makes no sense at all. Are people really upset that Planteos is short of these people?? What about killing the tokar wearing slavers is so bad? I mean it's not even close to an eye for an eye. The unsullied kill 1 baby and 1 puppy each, and 1 out of every 3 unsullied dont live through the training, which means that for every single UNsullied that does make it through that equals 5 dead people and 3 dead puppies, so Dany bought 8000, which means that those 8000 alone = 40,000 dead people and 24,000 dead puppies. Is there even a question at all in anyone mind about whether these people should be left alive?!?!? It is the ONLY right thing to do in her case. 40,000 innocent dead people (on purpose) to make 8000 warriors is worse than anything Ramsay or Tywin has ever done. It is such bullshit that posters argue in defense of the slavers and it makes me sick.

• 
  

  Quote

  
  
  

  This sounds like Dany feeling awful about what she has done but going through with it anyway, but it’s really Dany being disgusted by what she has to pretend to be doing.

  
  
  
• This, however, is a pretty big hint, though not as obvious that it couldn’t have been read as Dany just talking about the prospect of conquering Westeros:
  

Quote

• Dany’s questions to Missandei include this one, something that the slavers completely forgot to think about, which will be their undoing:
  

Quote

• Before going to sleep, Dany summons her most trusted followers – Jorah and her bloodriders – to her cabin. It’s not hard to guess that she has something important to reveal to them about tomorrow morning’s proceedings.
  
• Dany’s conversation about Jorah about her past, her feelings on slavery and what it means to be a king is a really huge hint; more about that later.
  
• Once the fateful morning comes, Martin gets closer and closer to dropping the pretense just as Dany does, dressing as a Dothraki warrior and thinking of the upcoming meeting as a big, crucial battle. Drogon’s calm behavior is another hint in the right direction, and there is also this ominously ambiguous thought about the Astapori who have come to see the dragons:
  

Quote

I have to say Dany is extremely clever about all this, and the writing is also very smartly correographed. I have to admit when I was reading this chapter I didnt know what Dany would do . I was furious at her at first for agreeing to trade drogon, she tricked me as well with her genius ploy. That is to say, when I was reading the Red Wedding I was not tricked by TYwin and Walder Frey, I was shouting at Robb to not go in there just like Grey Wind was trying to. But with Dany I was nervous for Drogon. This is my absolute favorite chapter in the books, and my favorite episode on the show thus far. I JUST LOVE IT. Little abused and molested girl comes out of the Dothraki sea with 90 people and is able to defeat this city with her baby dragons, something it took Ancient Valyria 5 tries to do, with plenty of full-grown dragons and a proper army. GO DANY! make your dragonlord ancestors jealous and proud at the same time.

• Dany’s choice of clothes is very deliberate. For the meeting with the Good Masters, she dresses like a highborn woman from Qarth, trying to appear like a part of the slave-owning culture that they belong to, while remaining a foreign buyer; she can’t look like she is trying to be one of them as this would suggest weakness, but she also does everything to appear as rich as they are to convincingly deal with them. However, when she comes to the Plaza of Punishment, she is about to drop the mask, so she dresses like a khaleesi, with braided hair and a silver bell standing for a victory she achieved over another powerful, decadent group of people (in Qarth, none the less). It’s another sign that Dany is, at her core, a khaleesi more than a traditional queen dressed in silk.
  
• It’s also telling that Dany likes Jorah’s sweaty “earthy” smell as a contrast to the sweet perfumes that the Good Masters are wearing. Kraznys notably smells like peaches. This is another the sign of Dany not being a traditional princess/queen who enjoys the court comforts; this is the girl who dreamed of being a sailor and who was at her happiest riding her silver through the Dothraki grass sea.
  
• Clothes are also means to tell free men from slaves in Astapor, since only free men can wear a tokar. The high status of slavers is further shown through the silver, gold and pearl fringes on their tokars.
  

Yes again we see the importance of fashion in Dany's story. I have heard people say that people in Westeros won't accept her as they will see her as a Dothraki savage, I disagree. She can chose to look however she wants, for any culture and any race of people. I think people forget sometimes that she grew up on the run all over Essos, even though she doesnt have any great formal education she has tons and tons of culture smarts, and street smarts, which could be argued as more valuable, than say Aegon's education, which has left him book smart but not quite as street smart as Varys claims in the epilogue of DwD (some of what he says is complete bullshit) Aegon has never known what it is like to be hungry if he grew up with Illyrio as his benefactor, please. Anyway if Dany gained anything from her travels is it learning how to dress in every situation that will put your guests at ease.

To arrive to the Plaza of Punishment, Dany and her khalasar have to cross the river that flows through Astapor. Dany compares this in her mind to Rhaegar fighting his fateful battle at the Trident; Dany is starting to fight hers against the slaver establishment in Essos:

Quote

This is remarkably similar to the expression “crossing the Rubicon”, a reference to Julius Caesar deciding to refuse to obey the Senate and move to fight Pompey instead, starting a civil war – a moment of a big, brave, life-changing decision that marks the point of no return, which he supposedly summed up in the sentence: “Alea jacta est” – “The die is cast”.

This is indeed not just a pivotal moment for Dany, but also the moment that will change Slaver’s Bay and the entire Essos forever.

Oh for this, I wanted to add that I think it is an important point that Dany mentions the river as she walks up to thwart the slavers, especially since she had just had the dream about Rhaegar on the Trident. I think this is showing that Rhaegar fought for a cause on a river and failed. Now Dany is having her first fight for a cause by another river and wins, she did not fail and die as Rhaegar did.

She is a stronger dragon than he ever was IMO.

And in regards to the below quote, (which my stupid posting box will not let me type underneath) I completely agree Annara!!! I do not feel sorry for the terrible monster Kraznyz either.F him.

This is Dany's most shining awesome moment in the books thus far, and I do think she had an obligation to take the Slavers out. I mean posters give her such a hard time, but if she hadn't done anything and had just bought the Unsullied straight up then all those same posters would be ripping her apart as a hypocrite and a terrible person who should not have done that. She definitely picked the lesser of two evils, but that's only if you consider killing in general 'evil', personally, like I said before. I do not consider killing these people who have killed 40,000 young children, just in the past 8-10 years, evil at all. If you ask Mel she would say that death by fire is a blessing and they are with R'hollor now, so good for them :)

This is something that brings moral ambiguity to Dany’s story; I doubt that many feel sorry for Kraznys, but her order to the Unsullied to kill the slavers, but not any child under 12, may sound disturbing to contemporary ears, since our society has (mostly) a different view of adulthood and responsibility, though it makes sense for Dany, who is herself no older than 15 and did not consider herself a child when she was 13. Furthermore, even when it comes to adult members of the slaver class, there is a question of collective responsibility, which is a debated topic in the contemporary world, too. This will be more relevant when we come to Dany’s actions after taking Meereen; in this case, however, she saw herself as leading a battle, and was arguably acting like a military leader ordering her troops to kill enemies in battle. This implies a certain black and white mode of thinking, but if black and white thinking was ever justified, it was in this chapter.

Some readers are so disturbed by her mass killing of the slaver class that they declare her a villain and claim that she should have never done what she does in this chapter. I could never agree with that. Standing by and letting the horrible practices go on in Astapor would, IMO, have been a morally much worse decision; and definitely the worse of the two evils; people are not responsible just for their actions but also for their failures to take action. Like it or not, the slavers of Astapor were not going to change the system if she asked them nicely or told them that what they were doing was wrong; and the slaves were being horribly punished for every disobedience and were not going to start a rebellion. Bottom line, liberating the slaves was undeniably a good thing and a step in the right direction; the problem was that it wasn’t enough by any means, as we see later when Dany finds out what happened in Astapor after she was gone.

This is a moment of great triumph for Dany – she has freed slaves, seems to have destroyed an evil system, and has still gained a loyal army of ex-slaves who are willing to fight for her; but although it’s the beginning of her anti-slavery campaign that will make her the beloved “mother” of the majority of Essosi slaves and ex-slaves, Astapor will eventually also become the first and maybe most bitter reminder that revolution is not that easy as it seemed.

[SeanF]

A quick note:

Thanks, Annara, for not referring to "The Sack of Astapor." If you do a search using this phrase, you will find all kinds of threads, wikis, blogs, etc. that discuss the matter as if it were an established fact. But the fact is that there is no proof that Dany's forces sacked the city. Quite the contrary, everything indicates that they didn't do this. It seems quite clear that there was little, probably almost no, looting and pillaging. I decided to start a thread on this admittedly rather limited technical matter. You can find it at:

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/topic/110595-dany-didnt-sack-astapor/

An excellent post from Annara Snow. I'll comment in detail tomorrow.

In terms of descriptions, I think a Sack can still be a Sack even where the objective is massacre, as opposed to pillage. Whether we call it the Sack of Astapor, or the Massacre of Astapor, makes little difference, in m view.

[Nictarion]

Very well done, Annara Snow

Not much to add,

As for her sacking Astapor, she did take a city be treachery like Tywin, but she arguably had purer motives than Tywin. Although I do fault her on making twelve the age at which to be spared as she was thirteen when she had slaves. I think she could have at least gone for fifteen years of age.

Dany is mentioned several times to be drinking persimmon wine. Persimmon was the lotos in the Odyssey where those who ate the fruit or flowers ended in a state of peaceful apathy. That seems to be the case for the Astapori aristocracy. They are asleep only to be rudely awakened by Dany.

"Do you remember Eroeh?" she asked him.

Eroeh was the girl Dany saved, but it ended in a worse fate with her rape and murder. We will later see that is the case with Astapor.

One man had an arm black with flies from fingers to elbow, and red and white beneath. Dany reined in beneath him. "What did this one do?"

"He raised a hand against his owner."

"What did they [decapitated Volantene slaves] do?" Tyrion inquired innocently.

The knight glanced at the inscriptions. "The woman was a slave who raised a hand to her mistress."

I think Dany is definitely going to visit Volantis. She could likely get the slave soldiers of Voltanis, the tiger cloaks, to join her like she did the Unsullied, the slave soldiers of Astapor. Dany and Tyrion will definitely be joining up.

I'd be interested to hear someone make the argument that Tywin had a "purer motive" than Daenerys wanting to punish Astapor for their crimes. I think it's pretty clear his motive was one of an opportunist, much like Walder Frey waiting to see which side was going to win. Tywin didn't join the rebels because he felt Aerys needed to be removed for the good of the realm, he joined them because they had basically already won. Daenerys obviously had purer a motive.

Also, Excellent analysis Annara :bowdown:

Obviously this is one of the most highly debated Daenerys chapters here on the forum, so it's nice to get to discuss it rationally.

[SeanF]

Annara Snow

A great write-up for a great chapter. Although I suppose I have to accept it's slightly far-fetched that the Good Masters never thought to guard against someone using the Unsullied against them, the chapter is so well-written and tense that I'm willing to suspend disbelief,

Was it a Massacre?

One argument is that the numbers who died were fairly small. After all, Cleon is able to claim that Dany's council planned to restore the Good Masters to power, and was able to castrate thousands of free boys to make new Unsullied. As against that, Dany recalls in a later chapter that "blood aplenty had soaked the bricks of Astapor" Her wondering how many of the onlookers would survive to have children made no sense to me when I read it, but made perfect sense in retrospect. She didn't intend them to survive to have children.

Her order, to slay not just the Good Masters, soldiers, and men with whips, but anyone wearing a tokar suggests that - if it was interpreted literally - a large proportion of the adult free population would be executed (adult, in this context, meaning anyone aged 12 and above). It seems that that this order was interpreted literally, because one of her Dothraki was shooting down any man wearing a tokar ("plain or fringed with silver or gold, it made no difference).

No massacre is entirely comprehensive. People will have escaped. People will have been out of the city on business, or simply be living in the hinterland. Martin is rarely specific about numbers, but my view is that the dead must have been numbered in the low thousands.

Was it Justified?

The Good Masters are a loathsome bunch. When I read the chapter for the first time, I was delighted. It was only later that doubts began to set in. We're told that there are 100 slave traders in Astapor, and the greatest half-dozen collaborate to produce the Unsullied. That must be only a tiny fraction of the free population,. but far more of the free population must either be directly employed by them, or else work in occupations that are associated with the slave trade, such as shipbuilding, food production, or as notaries, accountants, bankers, etc to the slavers. In all likelihood, many free citizens who weren't slave traders still owned a slave or two. No doubt, some of them were as vile as the Good Masters in their treatment. Others were probably relatively humane (the fact that thousands of slaves have been given time off to see the dragon suggests that not every slave owner was heartless).

I don't shed any tears for the Good Masters, and clearly, killing was necessary to take control of the city. My own view though is that Dany's orders went beyond strict military necessity, and were intended as punishment for a population that she regarded as irredeemably wicked. Ordering the death of anyone aged 12 and above who wore a tokar was pretty arbitrary, and a savage act of collective punishment. . Dany, like most people in-universe, is a firm believer in collective punishment.

Why was it done?

Dany wanted to free the Unsullied, whose treatment disgusted her. And, she wanted to punish their oppressors, who (in her eyes) included not just the Good Masters, but the free citizens who worked for the Good Masters, collaborated in slavery, or else just turned a blind eye to it.

A further reason though, is related to your theme of "Daenerys as a knight". Daenerys has had dreams of herself being a knight in armour (and indeed dreams of herself as being Rhaegar at the Trident, the previous night). She comments internally that she should carry a banner as she rode into the city, seeing herself as a knight riding into battle..

Dany could not have known for certain that the Unsullied would switch sides. She must have known that had her gamble failed, she would likely be tortured, raped, and put to death very painfully. She must have been full of fear as she rode into Astapor, as a knight would be who was about to go into battle. Having won her gamble, she acted as plenty of knights would, who'd survived death and taken a city by storm, by slaughtering her enemies. The tone of the chapter's end, as she order the massacre, is full of exhilaration and triumph. In no sense, did she view the deaths as being a regrettable necessity.

[MoIaF]

snip

Excellent analysis Annara! :bowdown:

True knight/True king

The question of what it means to be a “true knight” is one of the series’ big themes and plays a crucial role in several character arcs – Sansa, Brienne, Jaime, Sandor, Barristan among others. Another big theme is what it means to be a good king, and what rights and/or obligations a king should have. In the previous chapter, Dany was thinking that Jorah was not a “true knight” when he kissed her, seeing him through the prism of the ideal behavior or a knight to his lady/queen in courtly love. This time, however, Dany is thinking about what it means to be a true knight in the sense of defending the helpless, and in her view, the requirements for a true king are the same as for the true knight:

Quote

Unlike the many who believe that subjects have obligations to protect and obey their kings no matter what the king is like and no matter what he does, Dany believes that kings have a responsibility towards the people and are not allowed to break this pledge.

This is why I think she would understand why her father had to be dethroned, if she learned the truth about him. Robert was not a good king, but Dany doesn’t know much about his rule; I assume that she is referring to her family’s fate, including the deaths of Rhaegar’s children, as Robert’s failure to do justice. However, she is not aware that Aerys was something worse, a tyrant who was endangering the realm instead of being the “Protector of the Realm”. She has only heard Viserys’ biased version of the story, in which their father’s nickname “the Mad King” was just a slander. Jorah is not willing to tell her anything otherwise, and Barristan is obviously avoiding the topic whenever it comes up; they both prefer to keep silent about Aerys and talk about her brother Rhaegar instead. But I think it is for a reason that Dany has seen Aerys in the House of the Undying, saying “Let him be king over cooked meat and charred bones, let him be the king of ashes.” I believe she will one day understand what she was seeing in that scene.

Dany believes she has to be the “true king” and protect the helpless, the victims. She still remembers Eroeh, the young Lhazareen rape victim she tried to save but wasn’t able to. Even though Dany had lost her husband, her unborn son and found her in a desperate situation in the last AGOT chapter, Eroeh’s fate moved her to swear vengeance on khal Mago.

While in classic tales, brave knights slay dragons (this is the case in ASOAIF, too – Dany’s handmaidens first knew of dragons as monsters that brave men slay, and the puppet show in The Hedge Knight had a dragon as the monster), in this case, a “dragon” princess wants to be the true knight and slay evil human monsters with her dragons. Her brother, “the dragon prince” Rhaegar has always been her role model, based on the stories she has heard about him from Viserys, Jorah and later Barristan. She has dreamed about being Rhaegar, “the last dragon”, before (Daenerys IX, AGOT)

Quote

This time, she dreams of being Rhaegar again, but this time she is not scared and running, she triumphant:

Quote

This dream has recently been analyzed and discussed extensively in this thread, so I don’t have much to add, except that I don’t believe that the dream has just one meaning; and that the most surface reading – Dany fighting for the Iron Throne – is, IMO, the least likely to have great importance as foreshadowing. Within the chapter, it serves as both a red herring (potentially fooling the reader into thinking that she is completely focused on winning the throne against the Usurper’s heirs) and a foreshadowing, as the end of this chapter is Dany’s first great victory. In the long run, it’s an open question as to which enemies Dany will face (there may be more than one) but “icy breath” (in a dream that is remarkably similar to one of Bran’s dreams) and “melting like ice” most strongly suggest the Others. That doesn’t mean that Dany will not start her campaign in Westeros fighting for the Iron Throne; the question is how she ends it.

Dany's view of what it is to be a true king is probably very similar to what Ned would believe a true king to be. There is an idealism there that it both naive and yet very wise. King's should care for justice, should care for the people that they are ruling. We have seen very little of this in ASOIAF; Dany along with a few others believes in this strongly, so strongly in fact that she puts aside her dream of Westeros in order to help those who cannot help themselves.

I don't have too much of a problem with what happened in Astapor because I don't think that there were many alternatives left to Dany. What should she have done? Walk away? Buy a few Unsullied with the goods that she had and then freed them? Try to insight a revolution for the bottom up? Are any of these truly viable solutions to the goals of stoping the slavers and the making of the Unsullied? I really don't think so.

What was happening in Astapor was an atrocity, and atrocity that was taking place every day, year after year, decade after decade. Anything but the complete destruction of this industry would be a half measure that would be good for very few people and would not have stopped the slaver industry from continuing to perpetrate these atrocities. Of course, the way things eventually paned out lead many people to suffer and eventually die. However, taking into consideration the amount of children, boys and men that have died and would have died in order to continue to produce the Unsullied might make the sacrifice of other worth while in the long run.

[MoIaF]

1. I think that the main problems are socio-political ones. What is needed is less of Ned to Catelyn in KL: "All justice flows from the king." There should be more of Catelyn to Stannis in the field near Storm's End: "My son reigns as King in the North, by the will of our lords and people." Davos is a good guy, but his attitude toward service shows the problem well: "Stannis is our rightful king. It is not for us to question him. We sail his ships and do his bidding. That is all." Far better is the Greatjon's question: "Why shouldn't we rule ourselves again?" It's interesting that the characters with something of the right approach are people of mid-level power. They aren't intellectuals. Not infrequently, they are women.

A very important idea is this: Things are supposed to be based on contracts. Any contract worth the name binds both parties. That "We" in Lord Umber's speech was very important. Of course, he doesn't mean "we the people." His "me and mine" phrase shows him to be a paternalistic leader, much like Ned Stark I'd say. Had things worked out better, democracy would not have broken out in the north. I wouldn't expect it to. However, you can see that a leader being selected by some sort of council is not at all the same as a leader who gets the throne solely by right of birth. Even if there is no formal agreement signed, things are likely to be required of the leader in the first case, actually required, not just spoken about. I don't see such a leader as having followers like Kingsguards who swear vows that are essentially promises of slavish devotion. At one point, Lady Cat tells her son that the lords made him king. He replies that they can unmake him.

2. Magic feeds into this situation in a few ways. Attitudes toward magic are important. I understand why the maesters do not like it, but their approach is a poor one. Magic is very real. It is a part of the world. The men from the Citadel seem to think that the stuff is dangerous, so it should be denigrated, made light of, and perhaps removed by political means. This is highly unrealistic. It's like saying that radiation and atomic explosions are dangerous, therefore one should ignore atoms and avoid or make light of the study of nuclear physics. There appears to be a good bit of class prejudice involved here. The people in Westeros who take magic seriously are lower class individuals like Marwyn and the Crannogmen. Additionally, there are foreigners like Melisandre, and there are the wildlings.

I don't think magic is going to go away. I think people will need to accept that. One central issue--the "myth" of the Others has to be seen as a severe and dangerous reality. They existed (despite the opinion of some maesters); they almost certainly never went entirely away; they may be defeated, but they probably won't be eliminated. It seems likely that Daenerys and her dragons will be important, not just in the initial conflict with the Others, but also in the whole attitude that Westerosi have toward magic.

There are a number of ways in which the politico-social situation could improve. Of relevance to this thread: Jorah's oath of fealty to Dany was typically bad. He promised to do what she ordered, no matter what. That is not a decent contract. More encouraging is the council that was ruling Meereeen at the end of ADwD. Barristan Selmy put it together, but he used factions (the pit fighters, freedmen, etc.) empowered by Dany.

I'm glad you say that because if ASOIAF seeks to be fantasy, then I would be disappointed if magic eventually goes away. We've barely gotten into what magic is in the Planetos and I would be sad to see it go before it ever really came.

Don't have time to post a reply but I wanted to say thanks to Parwan and MoIaF for some very good and interesting responses.

Also before the next chapter I think it is worth noting that Dany makes a number of very good choices here-- like bringing Barristan because he's the counselor that disagrees with the buying of slaves. I wanted to compile a list but there's that time thing again.

You're welcome! :D And thank you, it's an interesting question to ponder.

[Parwan]

...

Was it a Massacre?

One argument is that the numbers who died were fairly small. After all, Cleon is able to claim that Dany's council planned to restore the Good Masters to power, and was able to castrate thousands of free boys to make new Unsullied. As against that,

1. Dany recalls in a later chapter that "blood aplenty had soaked the bricks of Astapor"

2. Her wondering how many of the onlookers would survive to have children made no sense to me when I read it, but made perfect sense in retrospect. She didn't intend them to survive to have children.

4. Her order, to slay not just the Good Masters, soldiers, and men with whips, but anyone wearing a tokar suggests that - if it was interpreted literally - a large proportion of the adult free population would be executed (adult, in this context, meaning anyone aged 12 and above). It seems that that this order was interpreted literally, because one of her Dothraki was shooting down any man wearing a tokar ("plain or fringed with silver or gold, it made no difference).

No massacre is entirely comprehensive. People will have escaped. People will have been out of the city on business, or simply be living in the hinterland. Martin is rarely specific about numbers, but my view is that the dead must have been numbered in the low thousands.

Was it Justified?

The Good Masters are a loathsome bunch. When I read the chapter for the first time, I was delighted. It was only later that doubts began to set in. We're told that there are 100 slave traders in Astapor, and the greatest half-dozen collaborate to produce the Unsullied. That must be only a tiny fraction of the free population,. but far more of the free population must either be directly employed by them, or else work in occupations that are associated with the slave trade, such as shipbuilding, food production, or as notaries, accountants, bankers, etc to the slavers. In all likelihood, many free citizens who weren't slave traders still owned a slave or two. No doubt, some of them were as vile as the Good Masters in their treatment. Others were probably relatively humane (the fact that thousands of slaves have been given time off to see the dragon suggests that not every slave owner was heartless).

I don't shed any tears for the Good Masters, and clearly, killing was necessary to take control of the city. My own view though is that Dany's orders went beyond strict military necessity, and were intended as punishment for a population that she regarded as irredeemably wicked. Ordering the death of anyone aged 12 and above who wore a tokar was pretty arbitrary, and a savage act of collective punishment. . Dany, like most people in-universe, is a firm believer in collective punishment.

...

3. Dany could not have known for certain that the Unsullied would switch sides. She must have known that had her gamble failed, she would likely be tortured, raped, and put to death very painfully. She must have been full of fear as she rode into Astapor, as a knight would be who was about to go into battle

...

1. I find this a very vague statement, nowhere near sufficient to aid much in the calculation of the death toll in the city. As I have argued elsewhere, I once saw the results of a very bad traffic accident. "Blood aplenty soaked the pavement" would have been a very apt description. This does not mean that all of the pavement in the critical area was soaked. It certainly doesn't mean that the blood spread all over the road and the side areas.

2. That's one interpretation. There are others. It seems to me that Dany's thoughts and feelings here are quite wistful. She seems well disposed toward the Astapori in general.

3. This provides another interpretation to #2. Dany is uncertain and scared. She knows there will be a battle. She doesn't know how it will turn out. Crucially, she doesn't know how long the battle will last or how far it will spread. A lot of the onlookers Dany saw could have died in a more general, long-lasting battle.

4. This has been discussed a lot. Here is a selection from a thread I started recently:

.................................................................

Mourneblade, on 25 May 2014 - 2:16 PM, said:

LordStoneheart said:

The later facts we get that the slavers have now become the slaves tells us not every noble was slaughtered, though they should've been. The chapter ends right as the battle commences so its only through assumptions that we can say she either killed them all or not, but the later information we get shows that not all were gone.

Four things could cause this:

One. GRRM made a clerical mistake.

Two. The Unsullied and co chose to ignore her orders.

Three. She has an Off scene change of heart.

Four. Some of them hid, threw down their whips and took off their tokars.

.................................................................

Parwan's Reply:

Hurray for number four! I have made the underlined point a few times, and I have never received a response. The word "some" is not precise. I don't know how you are using it. I will take it in the sense of formal logic: At least one person took off the tokar. Thus, if one person took off the tokar, the assertion is true; if 65% of the tokar-wearers took off the tokar, the assertion is true. If every damn tokar-wearer outside the plaza took off the tokar, the assertion is true.

If we assume that the residents of Astapor are at least somewhat more intelligent than the average chimpanzee, then the last possibility, or something like it, is a very good one. Dany does not exactly whisper her command. Even if we assume that the Unsullied continued to kill people beyond the plaza, they could scarcely have done so at light speed. The word would have spread much more quickly than the killing. Even those not directly informed by the mounted soldiers and others who fled the plaza could scarcely have missed the criteria which the Unsullied were using in choosing victims.

I maintain, however, that there are more than four possibilities. For one thing, her shouted command has strange elements: "...but harm no child under twelve, and strike the chains off every slave you see." I can't help but think of myself as one of the soldiers hearing this. My reaction would be "Huh? What is this crazy little broad talking about? Does she think we have been working the door at a local tavern? What if I get hold of a kid and he doesn't have a birth certificate or other ID handy? I would think this would be true of all the kids here." It seems quite unlikely to me that the Unsullied would be able to tell the difference between an eleven-year-old and a twelve-year-old. It's quite likely that they would not be able to tell the difference between an eleven-year-old and many smaller fourteen-year-olds. The slave soldiers are made to be somewhat robot-like. If we think of them as robots, the response to Dany's instruction would almost certainly have been an error message. For me, the take-away from this is that Dany's shouted command was not part of a well-planned tactic. It's her first battle, after all. She certainly did not give instructions to the Unsullied before the battle. She gave an emotional and not a pre-planned instruction.

I maintain that the burden of proof is not on those who believe that the killing did not extend beyond the Plaza of Punishment. She doesn't specifically say to stop there. She doesn't specifically say to go anywhere else. The battle takes place in the plaza. It seems overwhelmingly likely that Daenerys was nervous, uncertain, scared. She was by no means confident that things would go her way. Once she shouted out her strange emotional command, things did go well, and did so quite easily, I think it is more likely than not that she would have been satisfied. The battle was over; the city was hers. To free all the slaves, there would be no reason to kill anyone else.

The "strike the chains off every slave you see" bit also is significant. Unsullied can't see through walls. They don't have the visual capacity to see other parts of the city where they are not present. Furthermore, how many slaves are ever in chains? Damn few I'd say; they have to do work. Those being transported and those being punished would be the main ones in chains. Thus, one could argue that the command applied to the plaza, the place the soldiers could see and the place where a lot of slaves would be in chains. This is scarcely convincing. It doesn't have to be. My main point in this post is that the matter is unclear, debatable.

[Ragnorak]

Very impressive write up, Annara.

In the more mundane psychological meaning, I think Dany's dream is about her choosing Rhaegar over Viserys. Last chapter Dany thought Viserys would simply use the slave army and Jorah said:

Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died.”

Here Dany refuses to sell the crown for fear of becoming like Viserys and dreams of herself as Rhaegar. This is all in the context of her thinking of regents as being responsible for justice. She's choosing Rhaegar's path of honor and nobility even if that risks death over becoming the type of monarch a Viserys would have been. Her crossing the river Worm adds to the Rhaegar Trident parallel and if we think of "Worm" as a synonym for dragon it adds to the symbolism. For Dany here this choice is all about "Justice… that’s what kings are for.”

We get a mix of thematic lessons here as this is what Davos will teach Stannis that leads him to the Wall. I think her actions in Astapor are being intentionally colored by Doran's favorite lesson as well.

“Lessons?” said Obara. “All I’ve seen are naked children.”
“Aye,” the prince said. “I told the story to Ser Balon, but not all of it. As the children splashed in the pools, Daenerys watched from amongst the orange trees, and a realization came to her. She could not tell the high-born from the low. Naked, they were only children. All innocent, all vulnerable, all deserving of long life, love, protection. ‘There is your realm,’ she told her son and heir, ‘remember them, in everything you do.’ My own mother said those same words to me when I was old enough to leave the pools. It is an easy thing for a prince to call the spears, but in the end the children pay the price. For their sake, the wise prince will wage no war without good cause, nor any war he cannot hope to win.

Like her namesake, Dany also sees naked people and cannot tell the difference. This comes immediately after she is riding by the river and thinking of how she needs a banner like Rhaegar's.

The river’s banks were strangely tranquil. The Worm, the Astapori called the stream. It was wide and slow and crooked, dotted with tiny wooded islands. She glimpsed children playing on one of them, darting amongst elegant marble statues. On another island two lovers kissed in the shade of tall green trees, with no more shame than Dothraki at a wedding. Without clothing, she could not tell if they were slave or free.

The lesson she's takjien from Viserys/Rhaegar is being contrasted here with the lesson of the Water Gardens. Perhaps there's something of a looking from Viserys to Rhaegar before she'll eventually look inside to Daenerys? There is a bit of an internal literary criticism of Dany's choice in Astapor based on this Water Gardens lesson because Dany's orders to attack are framed specifically in terms of clothing.

“Slay the Good Masters, slay the soldiers, slay every man who wears a tokar or holds a whip, but harm no child under twelve, and strike the chains off every slave you see.”

This order is framed in terms that are antithetical to the Water Gardens observation she had earlier and I don't think that's unintentional. I think it fits with her thoughts last chapter about how “The blood of my enemies I will shed gladly. The blood of innocents is another matter." She still believes the two can be mutually exclusive-- and if she didn't she wouldn't have started to crush the slave trade. We get more evidence of this with her question about the future of the Unsullied (even though it seems to have an ulterior motive.) There are always more battles to be fought.

“When I have won my war and claimed the throne that was my father’s, my knights will sheathe their swords and return to their keeps, to their wives and children and mothers… to their lives. But these eunuchs have no lives. What am I to do with eight thousand eunuchs when there are no more battles to be fought?”

The narrative does take her a step closer to the lesson as she watches the fighting and realizes that station and trappings don't matter.

Aggo sat calmly notching arrows to his bowstring and sending them at tokars. Silver, gold, or plain, he cared nothing for the fringe.

.Before we see the Water Gardens, before we get Doran's explicit telling of their lessons, or have Quentyn mention them to Dany in Meereen, Martin has introduced the theme into Dany's arc. Given the context of the choice of Rhaegar over Viserys it seems that one level of the subtext is that intentions can be black and white but actions have consequences. Consequences come panted in shades of grey.

Part of the context of the Water Gardens theme is clothing (or lack thereof) and clothing is a pretty big theme throughout the chapter as Annara astutely pointed out. I imagine that a closer look at the clothing theme may shed more light.

I read this bit as a little nod to the history of Braavos given the context.

“I can give you freedom, but not safety,” Dany warned. “I have a world to cross and wars to fight. You may go hungry. You may grow sick. You may be killed.”
“Valar morghulis,” said Missandei, in High Valyrian.

Peaches

Ser Jorah stood behind her sweltering in his green surcoat with the black bear of Mormont embroidered upon it. The smell of his sweat was an earthy answer to the sweet perfumes that drenched the Astapori.
“All,” growled Kraznys mo Nakloz, who smelled of peaches today.

“I’ve brought you a peach,” Ser Jorah said, kneeling. It was so small she could almost hide it in her palm, and overripe too, but when she took the first bite, the flesh was so sweet she almost cried. She ate it slowly, savoring every mouthful, while Ser Jorah told her of the tree it had been plucked from, in a garden near the western wall.
“Fruit and water and shade,” Dany said, her cheeks sticky with peach juice. “The gods were good to bring us to this place.”

“The high lords have always fought. Tell me who’s won and I’ll tell you what it means. Khaleesi, the Seven Kingdoms are not going to fall into your hands like so many ripe peaches. You will need a fleet, gold, armies, alliances—”

“Renly offered me a peach. At our parley. Mocked me, defied me, threatened me, and offered me a peach. I thought he was drawing a blade and went for mine own. Was that his purpose, to make me show fear? Or was it one of his pointless jests? When he spoke of how sweet the peach was, did his words have some hidden meaning?” The king gave a shake of his head, like a dog shaking a rabbit to snap its neck. “Only Renly could vex me so with a piece of fruit. He brought his doom on himself with his treason, but I did love him, Davos. I know that now. I swear, I will go to my grave thinking of my brother’s peach.”

Vaes Tolorro's peach was too small at the time so Dany seems to have found a bigger one to pluck. Since Martin had Stannis ask I imagine there is some hidden meaning.

I don't want to jump ahead, but we should make note of the tokar meanings here for when they show up again in Meereen.

It was the fringe on the tokar that proclaimed a man’s status, Dany had been told by Captain Groleo. In this cool green room atop the pyramid, two of the slavers wore tokars fringed in silver, five had gold fringes, and one, the oldest Grazdan, displayed a fringe of fat white pearls that clacked together softly when he shifted in his seat or moved an arm.

So fringes matter and we probably ought to reference back to the pearls here for Dany's wedding tokar.