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Thank you GRRM for the forensic deconstruction of Dany


Arakan

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1 hour ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Lenin was a true believer who fought to liberate Russia, then turned tyrant in due time.

Yes you are right. At first it was noble ideals for building a better world, which turned into a bloody revolution and a terrible civil war. Daenerys killed all the masters of Astapor it is like "revolutionary terror". Even the blood of bad people on your hands makes you worse... 

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So Daenerys is Westeros version of Paul Atreides.Had a similar backstory ,become a tyrant,going against everything he believed.

In the original book Paul Atreides tried everything to prevent the war to become a galactic genocide,in the end he didn't care.He commanded the fremen to anihilate entire planets,becoming in his own words "worse than Hitler".

 

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@Arakan If you think this is how GRRM is going to end Dany's arc, then you haven't been paying attention to what happens in the books. Think of it like this: what if you had seen season 2 before you read book 2? Would you have been able to predict Dany's trajectory in the canon version? Definitely not. 

In season 2, the only thing the show really has in common with canon is that Dany goes to Qarth and leaves Qarth. What Dany does there, and even the ancient city itself, is completely different in the show. Notably, the show adds several murders and burnings that Dany certainly doesn't do in canon. She doesn't lock up Xaro and Doreah in a vault, no one kills her remaining khalasar, no one steals the dragons, and Pyat Pree is not one of the Undying that gets burnt. In fact, It also changes her character into a spoiled brat who demands ships. But the books show her learning, heeding counsel, and essentially making up her mind about what to do now (it ends up with her heading off to Illyrio, but Ser Jorah changes course to slaver's bay). 

And I think you are misremembering GRRM's quote about the show ending. GRRM said it "might look" similar to his ending. But he did tell Rolling Stone or Fast Company that he only gave the showrunners his storyline but hasn't seen the script or anything. 

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On 5/15/2019 at 12:26 PM, Arakan said:

And therefore, once again, thank you GRRM for holding the mirror right in our faces and confronting us with our own dark desires. 

Are you serious? In the books Daenerys is lost in the Grass Sea, alone and badly sick… 

I refuse to consider that the shit that was served to us in Ep5 derives, until further informed, from GRRM's work.

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2 hours ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

And I think you are misremembering GRRM's quote about the show ending. GRRM said it "might look" similar to his ending. But he did tell Rolling Stone or Fast Company that he only gave the showrunners his storyline but hasn't seen the script or anything. 

Yea, but I have finally seen bits of that interview of GRRM's, where he hints that people shouldn't be naming their daughters after Dany - they were  included in one of the video reviews of the episode 5, I don't remember which. This doesn't give me much hope, sadly. I now honestly don't understand why we spent so much time on her PoVs in Meereen and why GRRM is/was so obssessed with Meerenese Knot. He could have easily trimmed a couple of chapters and given us The Battle of Ice and the Battle of Fire in ADwD. 

Nor can I fathom why he thought that it would be a good idea to have 2 mad queens in the series - since Cersei's PoV shows that she is definitely that. She is becoming obssessed with fire, even. Juxtaposed with a saintly Arthurian hero, no less... Sigh.

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2 minutes ago, Maia said:

Yea, but I have finally seen bits of that interview of GRRM's, where he hints that people shouldn't be naming their daughters after Dany - they were  included in one of the video reviews of the episode 5, I don't remember which. This doesn't give me much hope, sadly. I now honestly don't understand why we spent so much time on her PoVs in Meereen and why GRRM is/was so obssessed with Meerenese Knot. He could have easily trimmed a couple of chapters and given us The Battle of Ice and the Battle of Fire in ADwD. 

Nor can I fathom why he thought that it would be a good idea to have 2 mad queens in the series - since Cersei's PoV shows that she is definitely that. She is becoming obssessed with fire, even. Juxtaposed with a saintly Arthurian hero, no less... Sigh.

I haven't heard of that interview. But people name kids even after Arya, you know the assassin. You make good points. Also, in the dream visions Dany has early on, she sees herself flying, and all below trembles under her wings. The Stallion Who Mounts the World probably isn't Aragon. But she also sees herself in Rhaegar's armor, as the last dragon that he never lived to be. 

Mereen is a convergence point for many characters--Dany, Tyrion, Euron, the Martells--so that's probably why he's supposedly stuck there. But I think he wrote more chapters to ADwD than we read. The publisher decided to cut those out to keep the book in one piece, because they couldn't literally but all those pages in one book. So the knot might not be what we think it is. 

As for the two mad queens, I know right. In the books, Cersei is more incompetent than sinister though. 

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I was convinced since ADwD that Daenerys would have a very bad ending. She is at the origin of a plague, the Pale Mare, to shame the great plagues of the Middle Age. The Meereen situation is so bad, the only predictable conclusion is the death of all her "children".

The Dothrakis are just good for destruction. They erased all the cities and states where is now the Dothraki Sea. An area as big and populous as all Westeros. Her insufferable obsession to impose herself to everyone, leading to her incapacity of reaching agreement with her opponents, and always resulting in wars, and only producing unreliable, revengeful enemies.

When she'll return, she'll find fAegon, trained to please the Faith and the pious. And probably having already a great number of lords for him. She will have for her the ever popular slaves eunuchs, Dothrakis savages and rapists, likely Ironborn reapers, bad repute sellswords, likely red priests eager to burn the 7s. Welcome home Daenerys.

All this I could have passed over... If there was not a man completely the opposite of her. A prophetised hero.

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20 minutes ago, BalerionTheCat said:

When she'll return, she'll find fAegon, trained to please the Faith and the pious. And probably having already a great number of lords for him.

Return from where? Which Faith, the one destructed by Cersei? Which lords? You realize this thread is about the show?

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3 minutes ago, Nowy Tends said:

Return from where? Which Faith, the one destructed by Cersei? Which lords? You realize this thread is about the show?

The question is to GRRM. So I suppose it relates to the books.

ETA:

On 5/15/2019 at 12:26 PM, Arakan said:

I have to thank GRRM for this very important deconstruction. And no one will convince me that GRRM won’t play this out in similar fashion in the books. There is no rational reason to assume that the KL genocide (yes we have to call it this) was a show invention. This is GRRM all along.

 

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10 hours ago, Nowy Tends said:

No we don't have to, this is not a genocide, look at a dictionary if you know what it is.

Depends how the burning of KL is interpreted. And thank you very much for your concerns, I do know what a dictionary is :)  

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I don't think Dany will do this to Kings Landing in the books.

But Volantis, or Pentos, or other places that stand in the way of her ride Westward, and offer defiance? I've no doubt that she will open the gates of hell to such cities.

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Hmm... should we assume GRRM also meant for us to view Robb as a villain then? He was another charismatic populist figure.

54 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I don't think Dany will do this to Kings Landing in the books.

But Volantis, or Pentos, or other places that stand in the way of her ride Westward, and offer defiance? I've no doubt that she will open the gates of hell to such cities.

I think someone will blow up KL, or at least the Red Keep, but whether that's Cersei or Dany or someone else, I don't know. I certainly don't think Dany will purposely roast all the smallfolk as she did in the show, in any case. No amount of build up will make that make sense thematically.

I'm very confident Volantis will see a slave uprising.

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24 minutes ago, Hodor the Articulate said:

Hmm... should we assume GRRM also meant for us to view Robb as a villain then? He was another charismatic populist figure.

To be fair, it is the feature of the books from the beginning that Stark men are presented as "whiter" than they should have been as feudal leaders and victorious generals. They are always the noble, unfairly attacked party who are seen as morally in the right. We never hear about all the civilian casualties and suffering that Ned's army must have caused during the Robellion and how it was fought for personal reasons, we never see the results of Robb's raids on the West and the atrocities that his army commits in the Riverlands are shifted on Roose Bolton, the Karstarks, etc. even though the ultimate responsibility still should have been with Robb. Jon is usually saved by the narrative from making any morally dubious choices, except for Gilly's baby. In hindsight all of this should have been a major clue, I guess.

 

24 minutes ago, Hodor the Articulate said:

I think someone will blow up KL, or at least the Red Keep, but whether that's Cersei or Dany or someone else, I don't know. I certainly don't think Dany will purposely roast all the smallfolk as she did in the show, in any case. No amount of build up will make that make sense thematically.

Who knows?  I am fairly sure that Dany is going to sack Volon Therys and New Ghis after she grabs the Dothraki and hears that they have been invited by the slavers to attack Meereen, though. Possibly also Yunkai and, of course, Barristan also obligated her to take Pentos. Pretty much LoL at Dany's advisers having to constantly check her violent impulses in the show, when it has been mostly the other way round in the books until now.

24 minutes ago, Hodor the Articulate said:

I'm very confident Volantis will see a slave uprising.

Yep. My hope has always been that Dany's actions and evidence of the impending Long Night will spark an anti-slavery movement and/or will cause a major Essosi religion or two to adopt the anti-slavery stance as part of their tenets. It would have never been plausible if Dany actually managed to succeed as a liberator by herself. But maybe she is just intended to be a destroyer and a cautionary tale and none of her acts are going to have any positive results whatsoever.

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1 hour ago, Hodor the Articulate said:

Hmm... should we assume GRRM also meant for us to view Robb as a villain then? He was another charismatic populist figure.

 

No, but if you were peasant having your livestock and goods seized by his army, or members of your family being butchered and raped by men who were answerable to him, you'd probably think of him as a villain.

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13 hours ago, Nowy Tends said:

No we don't have to, this is not a genocide, look at a dictionary if you know what it is.

Yes, it's a sack of a city, not genocide. Almost every victorious conqueror from history right upto  Napoleonic times has played a part in one, in most cases because you can't control your soldiers after breaching a siege even if the population of the city are likely friendly to your cause (the first soldiers attempting the breach are almost sure to die, so the chance to loot and pillage is a kind of motivation), and in other cases because you want to set an example (Alexander in Thebes, the Mongols pretty much everywhere). In some cases, of course it has been done out of spite or anger (Alexander in Persepolis which was burned after he had full control of the city, don't think it was aimed at the people though, more to destroy Persian achievements). And sometimes it's difficult to separate the last two - Edward I in Berwick (purely aimed at killing the people, left the castle intact), Timur everywhere.

However, I don't think there are many cases where the capital city is sacked by an exiled Monarch (or their heir) returning.  Looting and some pillaging by the troops, but systematic laying to waste of the entire capital? But anyway this is the show  :dunno:  Yeah, I get they're trying to tell us she's now bat shit crazy or has a tendency to loose her mind and go postal or whatever, but I will wait for the George to tell his story of exactly what's going through her mind. As was pointed out in the thread, the build up in the books leading to this will be more convincing than what these hacks have served up.

 

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