Dany will NOT fight the Others

[Stannis's Lawyer]

This thread made people hate ants :crying: :crying: :crying:

[LordStoneheart]

This thread made people hate ants :crying: :crying: :crying:

It's not the only thread that made people hate ants.

[JonCon's Red Beard]

This thread made people hate ants :crying: :crying: :crying:

It's not the only THIS thread WHAT that made people hate ants.

better.

[~~~~~~~~~~~~~]

The next morning she woke stiff and sore and aching, with ants crawling on her arms and legs and face. When she realized what they were, she kicked aside the stalks of dry brown grass that had served as her bed and blanket and struggled to her feet. She had bites all over her, little red bumps, itchy and inflamed. Where did all the ants come from? Dany brushed them from her arms and legs and belly. She ran a hand across her stubbly scalp where her hair had burned away, and felt more ants on her head, and one crawling down the back of her neck. She knocked them off and crushed them under her bare feet. There were so many …

It turned out that their anthill was on the other side of her wall. She wondered how the ants had managed to climb over it and find her. To them these tumbledown stones must loom as huge as the Wall of Westeros. The biggest wall in all the world, her brother Viserys used to say, as proud as if he’d built it himself.

This passage clearly shows that Dany will turn her back to the Wall and sleep through the night until the Others/wights coming from the other side of the Wall bite her ass.

It is not a dream. A real event with a symbolic interpretation. GRRM specifically mentioned the Wall and the anthill on the other side of the Wall where the ants were coming to this side and biting humans. There is no nother explanation.

Dany is not AAR. She does not have any investment in the war against the Others. It has been 5 books already and she does not know anything about them. She will be occupied with the Second Dance.

In short, it is not happening.

Oh, before Dany fans swarm the thread and bring the only thing they can use to “prove” that Dany will fight the Others, let me give that myself.

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.

This is the ONLY piece of “evidence” that can be brought up when arguing that Dany will fight the Others. And it is only when you take this dream at face value. Dreams and prophecies are seldom literal and they might have multiple interpretations. Though Dany fans love to take everything at face value because Dany fulfilled everything about the AAR prophecy at face value.

“The men of the winterlands are made of iron and ice, and even my boldest knights fear to face them.”

A very plausible explanation of Dany’s dream is that Usurper’s host armored in ice is Stannis with the Northmen (described metaphorically as made of ice) following him.

In addition, “melting away” before the dragons is exactly what the Dornish did to defeat Rhaenys. I really don’t see why this dream represents a victory instead of defeat. In the real setting of the dream, Rhaegar was killed by the Usurper.

Another important aspect of this dream is that it is not necessarily a normal prophetic dragon dream. Quaithe is using a glass candle and it is possible to send visions to a person by using glass candles. Dany woke up from this dream in the middle of the night and Quaithe appeared immediately after and told her this:

“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.”

If anything, that dream should be related to what Quaithe said afterwards. Rhaegar rode North to the Trident to his death. Quaithe started by warning Dany not to do the same.

I remember the passage about the ants. What I have to remind myself is to keep looking for clues under every rock and movement of even the smallest creatures. I can see the symbolism as you explained it so well and gave me a lot more to think about besides. Thank you for taking the time to answer me. Much appreciated!

[MoIaF]

Thanks for nitpicking.

You misremember the scene which thus invalidates your point. It's not nitpicking to correct an erroneous statement.

[Hodor's Dragon]

I don't think context matters in the foreshadowing we find in ASOIAF.

Sorry, that's nonsensical. Visions in a magical house, many of which we know to be true, or prophecies from a bizarre creature thought to be a witch or ghost, many of which we know to be true, are to be analyzed in exactly the same way as an authorial description of the furniture in a house?

From the bigger perspective, sure there's some foreshadowing in ASOIAF. There is some foreshadowing in a lot of literary works. But there's a great deal more description that is there for the purpose of describing things, building the world and drawing the reader into the scene.

Before I studied fiction writing in school and learned and inculcated the writer's mindset, I was crappy at figuring out murder mysteries, but now I'm top-notch at that, and sometimes at predicting other kinds of stories as well. My technique has nothing at all to do with foreshadowing, which I ignore unless it leaps out and grabs me by the short and curlies. I ignore it because foreshadowing is so easy to misinterpret - it's frequently written to intentionally mislead, you know, and even when it isn't it's typically written to mystify and to be difficult to comprehend.

Basically, foreshadowing is there to enhance a re-read after you know what happens. It's really not there to give away the plot, and it only does so when it is poorly executed.

Anyway, what I do is to sink into what the author is trying to do in a scene: what's the purpose of this scene, what kind of writing style is the author using here, what seems to be the author's purpose for the character, how do the events I see in this scene fit in with the scene's role in the ongoing action and in the character depiction, is there a stylistic shift? In other words, I try to adopt the writer's mindset. When I successfully do so, and then see something that is out of place with all that, it's almost always something that is stuck in just for the sake of the plot and if you concentrate on what the purpose of that thing might be, voila. There's your plot hook, there's your ending.

To sum up, in my experience, spotting out-of-place/out-of-style events and items works. Micro-analyzing language for foreshadowing doesn't.

Ants are part and parcel of what Martin is showing us in that scene, i.e., that Daenerys has brought down as low as you can get, to basically wild-animal status. They don't stick out in the slightest. That's why I see the ants as ants.

[El Guapo]

Ok getting back to the ants. if the ants represent the others and Dany is knocking them off her and crushing them with her feet doesn't that mean that Dany will in fact be fighting and crushing the others? I would also add that if the ants are everywhere and climbing all over Dany it doesn't sound like Jon and Co. are doing to a good job fighting the ants and obviously need Dany's help to crush them.

[PatrickStormborn]

Ok getting back to the ants. if the ants represent the others and Dany is knocking them off her and crushing them with her feet doesn't that mean that Dany will in fact be fighting and crushing the others? I would also add that if the ants are everywhere and climbing all over Dany it doesn't sound like Jon and Co. are doing to a good job fighting the ants and obviously need Dany's help to crush them.

Exactly... All it indicates - if anything - is that the Others will have kind of a headstart over Dany, because she's busy dealing with other things in the south. But surely we knew that anyway? The Others are obviously getting past the Wall, and that's hardly Dany's fault...

[the trees have eyes]

My interpretation of the ants is that they are ants. They show up because Dany slept on the ground. Dany slept on the ground and got covered with ants to give us a gritty depiction of how low she has been brought, physically, from her recent digs atop the great pyramid, with servants and an army.

Tactile details bring fiction to life. Ants are a great tactile detail. Doesn't it make your skin crawl even to read about somebody waking up covered with ants? Nothing brings sleeping on the ground to life like ants. That's why the ants are there, and while it's not inconceivable that they might pull double duty foreshadowing this, that or the other, it's absolutely impossible to pick out whether a detail like that does or does not foreshadow something and, if so, what. Predictions formed on such a shallow basis aren't worth taking time to analyze.

Just my opinion, but 90%+ of the time spent on this forum discussing what certain language "foreshadows" is a waste of brain power.

Amen. The painful analysis of language to "support" Howland Reed is the High Septon (axes, bears, mud, mumbo jumbo!) nearly drove me to drink....

I'm tempted to go with this but for the fact that the wall ants crawl over reminds Dany of THE wall. Sooo...probably some foreshadowing going on, along with everything you're saying.

What I took from that is that Dany's thoughts are turning away from Meereen towards Westeros. Why else indeed would any old broken down wall make her think of The Wall? Her final chapter is all about making a break with the status quo and moving away.

This thread made people hate ants :crying: :crying: :crying:

Clearly you never watched Phase IV before then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV

Maybe Paper Waver is on to something after all and just misinterpreted the foreshadowing here. The ants are the real threat not The Others!

[Hodor's Dragon]

snip ->

Maybe Paper Waver is on to something after all and just misinterpreted the foreshadowing here. The ants are the real threat not The Others!

Remember how in the Prologue to AGOT Will saw all the bodies at the camp, but then when they went back to check it out, the bodies were gone? Tell me, what animal swarms its prey and then removes its kills from the scene to take them back to the nest?

That's right: ANTS! The Others were only there to foreshadow the ants!

[RoamingRonin]

Ok getting back to the ants. if the ants represent the others and Dany is knocking them off her and crushing them with her feet doesn't that mean that Dany will in fact be fighting and crushing the others? I would also add that if the ants are everywhere and climbing all over Dany it doesn't sound like Jon and Co. are doing to a good job fighting the ants and obviously need Dany's help to crush them.

Exactly. It's not as if she awoke and completely disregarded being covered in ants. She acknowledged them, brushed them off and she even thought of the Wall.

[Queen‍‍‍‍‍‍ Alysanne‍‍™]

Ok getting back to the ants. if the ants represent the others and Dany is knocking them off her and crushing them with her feet doesn't that mean that Dany will in fact be fighting and crushing the others? I would also add that if the ants are everywhere and climbing all over Dany it doesn't sound like Jon and Co. are doing to a good job fighting the ants and obviously need Dany's help to crush them.

This is exactly what I was expecting the OP to conclude his theory with, since he is equating ants with whitewalkers.

[Dr. Pepper]

The coming of the Dawn will take place no thanks to her.

The coming of the Dawn is going to take place no thanks to any single person. That's kind of the point with ants, you know. They can't be eradicated and they certainly can't be dealt with by a single person. I had this little ant hill in my yard the other day. Poisoned the shit out of them. Those ants died, then a new ant hill popped up three feet away. Repeated process. Now my neighbor is complaining about ant hills. Reminds me of the Ghiscari empire. The Valyrians salted and burned that particular ant hill and they just popped up elsewhere. The Valyrian ants got burned, but they also popped up elsewhere. The Others were previously defeated sometime in history and if I have my facts straight, they've popped up again. Curiously, the keep popping up near hills.

No single person is going to be the only one who fights these ants and brings the Dawn. It will be a collection of forces. You'll recall that the Watch has been working to rally all these figureheads in order to get the men in their charge set up for the fight defend against the antZ. We already know that dragons are shitty in asymmetric warfare so this was never going to be the magical ingredient. However, this idea that Dany will have no involvement simply because she didn't murder all the ants of the hill is ridiculous. ffs, she very clearly took care of the ants that were an imminent threat by brushing them away from her body and crushing them under her feet.

I'm not making an argument about what songs will be sung for Dany, if any. It doesn't really matter in this argument because the premise is so faulty.

[butterbumps!]

The coming of the Dawn is going to take place no thanks to any single person. That's kind of the point with ants, you know. They can't be eradicated and they certainly can't be dealt with by a single person. I had this little ant hill in my yard the other day. Poisoned the shit out of them. Those ants died, then a new ant hill popped up three feet away. Repeated process. Now my neighbor is complaining about ant hills. Reminds me of the Ghiscari empire. The Valyrians salted and burned that particular ant hill and they just popped up elsewhere. The Valyrian ants got burned, but they also popped up elsewhere. The Others were previously defeated sometime in history and if I have my facts straight, they've popped up again. Curiously, the keep popping up near hills.

No single person is going to be the only one who fights these ants and brings the Dawn. It will be a collection of forces. You'll recall that the Watch has been working to rally all these figureheads in order to get the men in their charge set up for the fight defend against the antZ. We already know that dragons are shitty in asymmetric warfare so this was never going to be the magical ingredient. However, this idea that Dany will have no involvement simply because she didn't murder all the ants of the hill is ridiculous. ffs, she very clearly took care of the ants that were an imminent threat by brushing them away from her body and crushing them under her feet.

I'm not making an argument about what songs will be sung for Dany, if any. It doesn't really matter in this argument because the premise is so faulty.

so.......the conclusion to this is that Dany =/= the Orkin Man. I bet the Orkin man could save Westeros. (and here's the number for a free and fast quote to eradicate your ant infestation. you're welcome.)

also, can we talk about these things? not only do they have the most painful sting of any insect, the fucking things shriek at you (yes, shriek) before they attack you.

[BearQueen87]

also, can we talk about these things? not only do they have the most painful sting of any insect, the fucking things shriek at you (yes, shriek) before they attack you.

Alright, well...I'm never going outside again...

If those things are coming for the realm, Westeros is doomed.

[Dr. Pepper]

so.......the conclusion to this is that Dany =/= the Orkin Man. I bet the Orkin man could save Westeros. (and here's the number for a free and fast quote to eradicate your ant infestation. you're welcome.)

Even the Orkin Man can only control the nuisance so that there is a balance of sorts. He can swipe them off his limbs and crush them under his feet but ants persist.

[Hodor's Dragon]

Even the Orkin Man can only control the nuisance so that there is a balance of sorts. He can swipe them off his limbs and crush them under his feet but ants persist.

Tom DeLay for Hand of the Queen!

[MoIaF]

so.......the conclusion to this is that Dany =/= the Orkin Man. I bet the Orkin man could save Westeros. (and here's the number for a free and fast quote to eradicate your ant infestation. you're welcome.)

also, can we talk about these things? not only do they have the most painful sting of any insect, the fucking things shriek at you (yes, shriek) before they attack you.

Holly crap, I never knew those kinds of killer ants existed, you learn something new every day.

[UtherSnow]

This passage clearly shows that Dany will turn her back to the Wall and sleep through the night until the Others/wights coming from the other side of the Wall bite her ass.

It is not a dream. A real event with a symbolic interpretation. GRRM specifically mentioned the Wall and the anthill on the other side of the Wall where the ants were coming to this side and biting humans. There is no nother explanation.

I beg to differ. There is a 'nother' explanation. Why make the assumption this refers to The Others?

Going back to the ants crawling all over Dany. These would be Worker Ants. They would've been foraging for food. Dany would appear as one more obstacle to climb over, much like the wall separating their anthill from her.

Does that sound like The Others? It sounds more like the masses ranks of the Wildlings coming south. Aren't they foraging for food to feed their masses?

Another interpretation could apply to what's been happening in Essos.

[Marcus Agrippa]

The ant hill could be a lot of things. It could very well be the slavers. Since you know- she has been killing a lot of slavers- I don't know if others really qualify as ants.