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Do you think Dany will vanquish her enemies next book?


total1402

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rushed? if dany doesn't get a move on i'll die of old age before she steps foot on westeros. also, she left the freed slaves to die in astapor. if george wants to finish this in 7 books we don't have time for dany to wander around essos and "free" the slaves from every city. i would like for dany to take care of business in mereen and gtfo of essos.

As would I. Essos is dull and lifeless. Plus everyone wants to see Dany get in on the GoT before the flipping Others arrive. Not after.

George is clearly under the impression that the dragons need to be controllable and larger before they can get to Westeros.They are also too powerful and whilst I personally would like to see another field of fire or Harrenhal; he probably has no intention of doing so for the sake of realism. He also probably doesn't share a lot of peoples views that the Essos storyline is just a plot device for Dany to get her army which myself and others take it for. These reasons are why he took the decision to spend two books without Dany significantly moving and create a whole bunch of unresolved threads for Dany and other characters. To leave them unresolved would be a cop out for a writer to not address these things for the sake of speeding up the plot. It would actually make ADWD pointless if Dany just flew away from Mereen.

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I don't know about that. The author has gone on about the two battle sequences left unresolved from the previous book occurring early in The Winds of Winter. There is also no telling what type of time jumps are likely to occur within the next book itself. There are POVs that have had chapters separated by months of time (i.e., Arya, Sam).

A device which was terribly absent in ADWD. Plus, having to resolve two battles that should have been in ADWD, a two part book, is pretty poor evidence that hes interested in moving things along quickly. If you look at his gift chapter for Ariance, part two, then he clearly has no interest whatsoever. Its not so much time, but the fact that the author has thrown a collossal amount of plots and characters to preoccupy Dany in Westeros and keep her away while he stacks the cards in Westeros. Again.

Actually the one moment where I liked the Meerenese and where they seemed to show some sense of nuance was when the Yunkai asked that they kill the dragons. I think Hidazhar finally realised that then that even without Dany, they were going to turn his city into an Astapor, butcher even its Ghiscari citizens and killing the dragons was the first step towards that. You know, instead of everyone wanting to kill Dany for the sake of it and come what may rather than try to make the best of their new situation.

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A device which was terribly absent in ADWD. Plus, having to resolve two battles that should have been in ADWD to justify a two part books existence is pretty poor evidence that hes interested in moving things quickly. If you look at his gift chapter for Arriance and the one before that then he clearly has no interest whatsoever.

There really is no telling what the pace of the Daenerys story will be, but I wouldn't automatically dismiss large time jumps. Arya and Sam are already well out ahead of everybody else and Sansa, given the time jumps her story saw in A Feast for Crows, might soon join them. The only way for certain storylines to sync up is for there to be a speeding up process with respect to some POVs. We might, for example, get only one POV of Daenerys on her journey to Westeros. As an example, think about how much time and distance Jon Connington and Quentyn Martell covered in A Dance with Dragons. When GRRM needs to get certain characters to far away places quickly, he finds a way to do so (even when it doesn't make much logical sense).

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Because its not just Dany but the ridiculous number of unresolved plots that were orbiting Danys story before the fighting pit scene.

*She needs to deal with Vic and his iron fleet/ the horn

*She needs to deal with Tyrion and his sellswords

*We have Quiathes storyline and the Warlocks

*Even if she beats the besieging armies she is still ringed by hostile enemies which want her dead.

*She has to deal with reuniting with Ser Jorah and Daario or otherwise dealing with their deaths

*Some of her dragons might be stolen and she needs them back

etc etc etc

Thats not a few chapters. Thats a huge chunk of POV and thats before you consider her further tale with the Dothraki. He really has set this up in ADWD and wants to finish it at his own pace. If his priority was Dany getting to Westeros then he really could have done it in Feast of Crows. All he had to do was relate her crossing the daemon road, get to Pentos and Illyrio gets a fleet to carry her to Westeros. She then meets Quentyn and marries him. He didn't do that coz he felt the Essos story had more going for it and needed a more satisfactory resolution; whatever that turns out to be.

Plus, WoW has to include other POV in Westeros for the GoT and the North and the Wall. All of which are complicated and in full swing. Assuming a third of the book is for Essos related stuff thats not a lot of room to resolve all that and have Dany invade Westeros; even if it is a big two part book.

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Here is what I hope the first Daenerys chapter will be in the new book... much better written of course :drunk:

"Daenarys awakes early as she has become accustomed. She picks up some dried fruit to eat, some water to drink.

As she walks out on the rooftop terrace, 5 unsullied guards fall in behind her, she hears the the sound of steel

on steel. She looks below to see Ser Barristen training his Knights, she smiles. Ahead, the scaffolding structure

awaits, about 20 feet tall, she sees Ser Jorah kneeling by the structure, waiting.. Daenerys walks by Ser Jorah

without speaking. She has not spoken to Ser Jorah in 4 years. She starts up the wooden stairs of the structure,

wondering if they will know whose turn it is... she hears the flapping of wings, her dragon lands, on the terrace

rooftop terrace and turns to look at her. Yes, she thinks, Rhaegal has remembered. Daenerys looks at Rhaegal and thinks as she

gets on his back, you have gotten large, over 20 foot tall, Drogon is a little larger. They take off into

the morning sky, quickly joined by Drogon and Viserion. Daenerys and her 3 dragons head out over what was once Slaver's Bay.

Tyrion was up early, reading as he usually does in the morning. He watches the 3 dragons fly out towards the Sea.

They have gotten very large, Tyrion thinks to himself, large enough that none can stand before her.

About an hour later, Dany returns. She looks out over Freedmans Bay, a busy port, in the distance the

remnants of burned ships. Tyrion had suggested that they leave the burned ships as a reminder of what it

means to defy the Dragon Queen. Daenerys walks down the wooden steps, Ser Jorah is still there. She stops by

Ser Jorah and says, Arise Ser Jorah, it is time to go home."

Flashbacks will be used to describe teh battle at Meereen, and Victorion fate .... but we are headed to Westeros, at last

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Genghis Khan conquered Mongolia, China, the Persian (Khwaerenzid?) Empire and sent an expedition into Russia. If you have a hundred thousand horse archers you can devastate even massive empires. It is actually something very much in world history that nomad invasions could rapidly cause the downfall of huge empires in a shockingly short amount of time. So there are real-world examples to draw on. If a nomad invasion could (repeatedly :)) bring down a Chinese state with hundreds of millions of citizens and armies in the hundreds of thousands; then I'am pretty sure Dany can overwhelm Qarth and Yunkai with the Dothraki; especially since she has a dragon.

I don't read particularly much fantasy but Ice n Fire it never struck me as particularly more realistic or gritty compared to other fantasy books. As an aside I tend to find a lot of books which claim to try that just "preachy". I just see ice and fire as well-written fantasy, nothing more and nothing less. Also, I'am not a fan of realism taking precedent over entertainment. Otherwise you would have characters being killed without any structure for example if littlefinger were to die of dysentry or Varys were to get food poisoning and die before any of their schemes got anywhere. Or if Robb fell from his horse and snapped his neck. Or if Victarion in his plate armour slipped on the wet wood into the ocean and drowned. No, I don't consider the series realistic.

If you're curious the series that I have read are

-Wars of Light and Shadow

-The Shannara trilogy

-LotR obviously

-Dragonlance

-Feists Riftwar saga

-The Crucible trilogy

TBH very few of those present the heroes as conquerors thats normally what the villains are presented as being. So I don't get why you think its cliche, thats just my 2 cents. Sterotypical fantasy for me is Fellowship of the Ring merry adventure type stuff.

I take your point re Genghis Khan. That actually occured to me when I first commented but I didn't want to start bogging my post point down with caveats given the main discussion of this thread was initial victory and conquest and the occupation/rule aspect had only been touched on by a few posters. That said however the Mongols stand as exceptions to the rule. I was thinking more the Hundred Years War, with the English (and English sponsored free companies) laying waste to most of France, the central French government disintegrating, and the English ultimately still being unable to occupy, rule and retain that much territory. The same goes for most wars of medieval Europe, from which Martin seems to draw a lot of inspiration (albeit Essos has a more eastern flavour).

Of course you could then point out that Dany with Unsullied, (presumably) Dothraki, and, you know, dragons, is closer to the model of exceptional success of the Mongols, but even the Mongols took decades to build what they did. Moreover, most successful empires (the British being a case in point) were able to conquer and hold what they did because of (relatively) light-touch rule, whereas Dany's whole freeing-slaves-and-therefore-disrupting-the-foundations-of-culture-society-and-economy thing is more reminiscent of the many would-be empire builders who pushed too hard and provoked too strong a reaction. As ever there are exceptions, the Romans and (again) the Mongols being the most prominent we're-going-to-be-brutal-as-hell-in-conquering-you-and-then-completely-change-your-way-of-life examples, although again the conquest there took decades and even centuries. The only example I can think of that achieved so much in so short a space of time was Alexander, and he didn't change much (unlike Dany), and his empire still didn't last much longer than he did.

Ultimately my point was that I agree with the theory posited in this thread that Dany will defeat most of the powers currently aligned against her, which seems to include most of Essos, but i think it's far more realistic - and thus far more likely - that it'll be smash-and-grab rather than uniting Essos underneath her.

As to your point about arbitrary but realistic deaths, I agree with you. Arya falling into a Bravosi canal and drowning, for example, would be supremely dramatically unsatisfying, but Martin still kills people who would survive in a lot of fantasy but whose actions would doom them in real life (3 Starks spring to mind). The point I was making about the cliche is more about unrealistic longevity/scope of military victory rather than anything hero/villain related, and actually came to me while thinking about Feist's Riftwar saga (and it's successors). Although Feist pays a lot of lip service to things like logistics, overstretch, manpower, etc, it just doesn't compare to the way that Martin's wars of surprises, plans going tit's up, brigandage going through the ceiling, devastation and scorched earth, moving armies about taking a bloody long time and things going wrong on the way, realistic betrayals from people naturally looking after their own interests rather than being cowardly, etc or evil so closely reflects the wars (wether civil or between rival actors) that I'm familiar with.

Meh we seem to agree on a lot of stuff and it's arguable that what we're disagreeing on is both splitting hairs and contrary to the thrust of the thread, but I just wanted to clarify.

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Yeah, Martin does take a lot of inspiration from medieval wars when it comes to Westeros. I once read a few books about tactics concerning steppe nomads. Completely different type of warfare. All about mobility and luring your opponent to his doom. Usually when faced with a larger force of infantry or a Chinese expedition they would retreat. The foot could never catch them, any detachments of (usually inferior) cavalry would be killed and they would burn the earth behind them. While the foot army exhausted itself they would feed on endless tundra and could always eat their extra mounts. Each nomad had four or five steppe horses. Then they would fall upon the enemy and destroy them. The books I read were even blunt enough to state that no Chinese army ever in that countries history lasted more than a hundred days in the steppe without being destroyed. Then they had their principal weapon, the composite bow, I don't exactly know how powerful it was vis a vis a longbow. But it was an incredible weapon and the books listed a long tally of knightly armies shot to pieces when they tried to charge nomad armies. Even if they did face a strong enough force, they could move, (I think though this was a year ago) 45 miles a day whilst a Roman army on its road system could only manage 15. They could just raid and outpace their enemies.

Anyway, if he knows that much about Medieval history and warfare then I'am sure he understands nomads and their military strength. He even implies as much in GoT when Ser jorah describes them in battle.

Of course the Mongols also had the advantage of having picked up elite Chinese siege engineers who could build trebuchets-equivalents for their army. Although Dany has Dragons. At any rate Qarth and Yunkai are not China. Even several Essos's, I doubt, would never make a single China in terms of population and military strength.

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Since GRRM's original plan was a straight 5 year skip just after ASoS I think hell have no problems doing it in tWoW. The whole point behind AFFC and ADOD was that he wanted to better explain the characters journey during the 5 year gap. Take Bran for instance, if he suddenly jumped from meeting Coldhands to being an able Greenseer, that would be a lot to take in.

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Since GRRM's original plan was a straight 5 year skip just after ASoS I think hell have no problems doing it in tWoW. The whole point behind AFFC and ADOD was that he wanted to better explain the characters journey during the 5 year gap. Take Bran for instance, if he suddenly jumped from meeting Coldhands to being an able Greenseer, that would be a lot to take in.

[Pained Voice]- Two books...for a montage? :shocked: :shocked: :shocked: :bs:

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First it will take her the rest of the book to conquer Merren. Then the next book she will just be just getting done saying hi to Essos and a quick stop to Pessos and Ethos after that. Have I mentioned she doesn't meet Tyrion until Bravos in 2019 on her way back from Pentos. Finally in the last book in 2045 she arrives as a old woman in Kings Landing being rolled off the boat in a wheel chair onto the dock. She marvels at the automobiles and skyscrapers of Kings Landing and realizes she's a few decades too late.

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Using my powers of narrative crow-barring, I'll guess that Dany's plot points could be resolved thusly

Dany I: Starts in Vaes Dothrak, she summons the Crones (fulfilling the HotU vision) in a big ceremony uniting all the clans, retires from the festivity to talk with Mago (GRRM told the show runners that Mago would be important, but they killed him off anyway) about what she'll do next. She indicates something along the lines of "I'll fly to Meereen at the head of an army, maybe send another army to Pentos where Illyrio will put them on ships, and perhaps some smaller Dothraki armies will go off and sack Qarth for the lols"

Victarion II: <Battle for Meereen. Victarion's navy wins and the Dragon horn does stuff and Dany shows up and *crushes* the besieging army>

Tyrion II: <Battle for Meeren. The Second Sons switch sides, and Dany shows up and *crushes* the besieging army>

Dany II: Dany is sitting on her throne in Meereen and deals with the fallout of the battle. Talk with Barristan, he mentions that her husband is dead, yay! She meets Victarion, accepts his fleet and talk about the horn and marriage until some decision is made. She receives Tyrion and Jorah, Tyrion speaks up for Jorah, Dany accepts Jorah and Tyrion into her Khalasar, yay!. Other stuff is discussed, yay!. Dany retires to her chambers where Daario shows up and they make out, boo!.

<Stuff happens>

Dany III: Dany is on the ship to Westeros, yay! She talks about stuff with Mago ("Khaleesi, I feel sea sick!"), Tyrion, Jorah, Victarion and Moqorro, and/or Barristan.

Dany IV: Dany is in Westeros, yay! or is in Pentos, kinda yay!

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i can handle it as when WoW is over Dany is has arrived on weserosi soil, i would be super pissed if she doesnt show up until aDoS.

if she isnt on westerosi soil by the epolouge of WoW, there is no way this will be a 7 book series it will have to be at least 8.

I think that after she reconnects with the dothraki, she will return to Mereen. I do not think that she will linger though. Mereen will be a hell hole of disease and death.
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One of the defining traits of the series is the different perspectives on leadership and failures thereof. Most of the major leader characters have some sort of leadership ineptitude. Tyrion lacks charisma. Robert irresponsible. Joffrey cruel. Catlyn overprotective. Jon leads his men further than they will go. Jamie is perceived as dishonorable. Stannis is too rigid. Renly is a flake. Tywin too proud. Cersei too paranoid. Ned was naive, etc.

Dany's big weakness is making poor decisions about who to trust. Mormont, the Maegi, Daario, Plumm, her new husband, the green grace, etc. One of the big tells in the series is that she thinks Ben Plumm is a sweetheart, whereas Tyrion has Plumm's number within seconds of meeting him. I see the Mereen arc getting resolved when Dany resolves that weakness (either through developing the skill on her own, or learning to trust someone who has it, like Tyrion).

As such, my guess is that WoW sees the following events happen: Dany getting control of the khalasar, slaver army destroyed, Victarion arriving with fleet, Dany getting the horn and seizing fleet, Tyrion joining as Dany's advisor and eventually her Hand, Dany putting the Shavepate in charge of Mereen and heading out on another conquest run, Volantis uprising, Yunkai crushed, Astapor reseized, Pentos falls, competent administrators chosen for each, Dragons get bigger and control is partially obtained, stage set for invasion of Westeros at end of the book.

Of course, given the fractal plotting of the last two books, it wouldn't shock me if WoW is mostly taken up with the Adventures of Grey Worm as he spends 500 pages trying to uncover the identity of the Harpy by travelling to Qarth and asking a lot of questions along the way. And I would probably enjoy the story even as I tore my hair out.

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