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Did GRRM really say Meereen would end like Iraq?


Rose of Red Lake

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2 minutes ago, SeanF said:

You can draw parallels between any two military conflicts, but Martin is clear that Slavers Bay is not Iraq.

Slaver's Bay is like the Civil War.  Daenerys Targaryen and her forces are the Union.  The Ghiscari are the southerners.  She is also Moses delivering the slaves from bondage in ancient Egypt.  

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48 minutes ago, Finley McLeod said:

I don't see any parallel between the two conflicts.  The Americans went into Iraq because they feared Saddam had WMD's.  Iraq was never about slavery.  GRRM would surely know this.

Sure, Dany is the weaker party, going into this fight.   She knows that she could die horribly, at Astapor.  She acts because it's the right thing to act.

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20 hours ago, Dothraki Khal said:

Slaver's Bay is like the Civil War.  Daenerys Targaryen and her forces are the Union.  The Ghiscari are the southerners.  She is also Moses delivering the slaves from bondage in ancient Egypt.  

 

1 hour ago, Finley McLeod said:

I don't see any parallel between the two conflicts.  The Americans went into Iraq because they feared Saddam had WMD's.  Iraq was never about slavery.  GRRM would surely know this.

He says in the quote that "GWB started doing the same thing [as Dany]" and he planned "Dany’s thing long before George Bush planned the Iraq War"

On 1/2/2020 at 1:12 PM, SeanF said:

In this case the "superpower" is the Slaver coalition.

He literally says she is wielding massive military superiority in the region. 

On 1/1/2020 at 9:15 PM, Lord Varys said:

The idea to frame or interpret this as an invasion is ridiculous.

He says Dany has taken over and conquered.

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16 minutes ago, Rose of Red Lake said:

 

He says in the quote that "GWB started doing the same thing [as Dany]" and he planned "Dany’s thing long before George Bush planned the Iraq War"

He literally says she is wielding massive military superiority in the region. 

He says Dany has taken over and conquered.

How do you wield "massive military superiority" when your opponents outnumber you three to one?  Explain that to me.

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11 hours ago, Bernie Mac said:

She has dragons. It is Aegon I all over again. Which side would you have rather been on in the Field of Fire?

Dany doesn't have dragons. She has hatchlings which never gave her any military advantage so far. Even Drogon in ADwD is a joke, and could have easily been put down - he nearly was. That the Ghiscari are afraid of dragons has nothing to do with a proper assessment of the dangers they pose.

And if Dany lacks one thing in ADwD - it is dragons. One flies away, the others are imprisoned and are quite useless without riders even if they were larger.

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3 hours ago, Bernie Mac said:

 

She has dragons. It is Aegon I all over again. Which side would you have rather been on in the Field of Fire?

If she had Balerion, Vaghar, and Meraxes, well, yes, she'd have a huge military advantage.

But, she does not.

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7 hours ago, SeanF said:

If she had Balerion, Vaghar, and Meraxes, well, yes, she'd have a huge military advantage.

But, she does not.

Without riders even those monsters would be pretty useless. She could only ride one of them herself.

It is pretty ridiculous how Dany's people and her enemies fear what the dragons might do now that they are freed - nothing coordinated while they lack riders. They are not going to differentiate between Dany's people and her enemies if they were going to kill and devour people they would just kill indiscriminately. And perhaps the weird horn is going to cause them to do just - run amok and burn and kill people left and right.

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7 hours ago, SeanF said:

If she had Balerion, Vaghar, and Meraxes, well, yes, she'd have a huge military advantage.

But, she does not.

But that is the point of GRRM's quote.

  •   a couple of the recent books Daenerys Targaryen wielding the massive military superiority offered to her by three dragons has taken over a part of the world where the culture and ethos, and the very people are completely alien to her

 

His point is self-explanatory, those Dragons and the fear they install is what gives her the massive military superiority. I presume most of us commenting on this board did not live through the cold war, but GRRM did and the threat of a weapon is hugely powerful all by itself. Just look what the Slavers were willing to pay for just one of those dragons.

 

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8 minutes ago, Bernie Mac said:

But that is the point of GRRM's quote.

  •   a couple of the recent books Daenerys Targaryen wielding the massive military superiority offered to her by three dragons has taken over a part of the world where the culture and ethos, and the very people are completely alien to her

 

His point is self-explanatory, those Dragons and the fear they install is what gives her the massive military superiority. I presume most of us commenting on this board did not live through the cold war, but GRRM did and the threat of a weapon is hugely powerful all by itself. Just look what the Slavers were willing to pay for just one of those dragons.

This is George simplifying and twisting his own story. Dany did not take over that part of the world with a military advantage offered to her by her dragons. She did it by means of her Unsullied - which were very much a part of the world she took over.

And the only part of that world she has issues with is slavery - and it is the only part of that world that's given in detail. Sure, they also have strange names and strange gods, but we don't get any conflicts on religious differences. Even their issues with clothing habits break down to Dany having to wear symbols of the slaver culture.

I'd even daresay she understands that she is making a mistake by being too lenient and conciliatory - she just doesn't want to be cruel, but she knows she has to. Deep down she knows that, and it thankfully comes out at the very end of ADwD. Showing mercy to the slavers would mean her own death and, more importantly, the restoration of slavery and the death of all her freedmen and followers.

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1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

This is George simplifying and twisting his own story. Dany did not take over that part of the world with a military advantage offered to her by her dragons. She did it by means of her Unsullied - which were very much a part of the world she took over.

 

How did she get an unsullied army?

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18 minutes ago, Bernie Mac said:

How did she get an unsullied army?

By tricking the Good Masters.  With the Unsullied, she had local military supremacy in ASOS.

But, as we saw in ADWD the balance of military power lay with the Slavers, once Qarth, Volantis, New Ghis etc. joined in the fight. If she had massive military supremacy, she'd be able to flatten her opponents.

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Drogon and Dany’s body count when she’s not even trying is 214 slain and three 642 burned or wounded, all within a very quick time period. Sounds like military supremacy to me. Its unfortunate that we can’t agree on this basic fact and I don’t know why it’s so important to argue against it. She is not the scrappy underdog from earlier books, Dany‘s character is changing.

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16 minutes ago, Rose of Red Lake said:

Drogon and Dany’s body count when she’s not even trying is 214 slain and three 642 burned or wounded, all within a very quick time period. Sounds like military supremacy to me. Its unfortunate that we can’t agree on this basic fact and I don’t know why it’s so important to argue against it. She is not the scrappy underdog from earlier books, Dany‘s character is changing.

So, who exactly, has placed Meereen under siege?  Is Daenerys just imagining that there is a coalition of armies surrounding the city?  Why doesn't Dany just unleash the dragons on the Slavers if they give her such a huge advantage?

You don't have "massive military supremacy" if you're the one who is under siege.  No government voluntarily lets its capital city be besieged.

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53 minutes ago, SeanF said:

By tricking the Good Masters.  With the Unsullied, she had local military supremacy in ASOS.

Which she only got because she had dragons, right?

The Good Masters were willing to give up their entire military for just one of her dragons. It is clear that they saw her Dragons as being a huge deal.

I think the problem here is that the people of Essos, GRRM himself and you have a different idea of the effect of those Dragons.

 

Quote

But, as we saw in ADWD the balance of military power lay with the Slavers, once Qarth, Volantis, New Ghis etc. joined in the fight. If she had massive military supremacy, she'd be able to flatten her opponents.

Reread what you have said. All these rival realms forming an alliance to take on Dany because they can't do alone sure sounds like they think she has a massive military supremacy in their eyes.

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4 minutes ago, Bernie Mac said:

Which she only got because she had dragons, right?

The Good Masters were willing to give up their entire military for just one of her dragons. It is clear that they saw her Dragons as being a huge deal.

I think the problem here is that the people of Essos, GRRM himself and you have a different idea of the effect of those Dragons.

 

Reread what you have said. All these rival realms forming an alliance to take on Dany because they can't do alone sure sounds like they think she has a massive military supremacy in their eyes.

In years to come, a dragon will be a very formidable weapon.  A dragon that's a couple of years old is not.  If you read the accounts of the Dance of the Dragons, in Fire and Blood, and TWOIAF, you'll see that small dragons are very vulnerable to masses of soldiers.  Even a big dragon like Syrax was destroyed when the people stormed the Dragonpit.

I'm not sure much plainer I can make it.  The side that has a huge advantage in numbers, and places its opponent under siege, is the side that has military supremacy.  

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1 hour ago, Bernie Mac said:

How did she get an unsullied army?

Described that above. But as @SeanF repeated it again. Dany's Unsullied are no longer slaves and agreed with her assessment of the injustice in Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen. Else they would have never fought for her.

Dany tricked the Good Masters, she broke her contract when she revealed she never intended to part with Drogon and instead used her to murder Kraznys mo Nakloz. If the Unsullied cared about slavery and the contracts and values of the slavers who made them they would have stood with the Good Masters and they implored them to do ... but instead they butchered them.

That tells us all we need to know about their allegiance. Those people are not mindless drones, they are slaves who very much like to be free and finally realized they had a shot at that when Dany helped them.

But she is little more than a figurehead or a catalyst in all that. And in ADwD she is nearly a slaver collaborator considering the lengths she goes to accommodate the slavers.

9 minutes ago, SeanF said:

So, who exactly, has placed Meereen under siege?  Is Daenerys just imagining that there is a coalition of armies surrounding the city?

Don't you know? Meereen isn't under siege, and if it were then Dany would be doing it because she is evil and everything that is evil in those books goes back to Daenerys Targaryen either directly or indirectly. And when something that she does looks good then you look at it the wrong way.

After all, even slavery is good in this world precisely because Daenerys Targaryen is against it.

1 minute ago, Bernie Mac said:

Which she only got because she had dragons, right?

She got them because she offered them a deal.

But then, as things stand we actually could make a case that Dany could have gotten the Unsullied to rebel against their masters even if she hadn't bought them. It may have been a bit different, but if the deal had fallen through and the Good Masters had decided to enslave her and her companions (which they certainly could have tried) then one can see them siding with the party who opposed slavery on principle.

This is not a stable society. The slaves do not like their places.

1 minute ago, Bernie Mac said:

Reread what you have said. All these rival realms forming an alliance to take on Dany because they can't do alone sure sounds like they think she has a massive military supremacy in their eyes.

Nah, she just a small temporary advantage. Her Unsullied are good infantry, but she still has pretty much no cavalry aside from the sellsword companies (one of which quickly defected back to the other side), but the Yunkai'i quickly regrouped hiring more and more sellswords, and assembling a coaltion army against her. Had the sellsword not abandoned Yunkai in ASoS Dany would have been crushed then. And without the sewer plan and, especially, the rebellion of the Meereenese slaves she would have never taken Meereen.

There is no supremacy there.

And Dany's dragons are still jokes. They probably will remain jokes until the end of the series when compared the Aegon's dragons. Those were real monsters, Dany's dragons are dangerous pets. A single man with a spear could kill Drogon still, as could a couple of archers. In fact, it is a miracle that those dragons still live. They should have been killed in ADwD, and it is going to stretch credibility that they should continue to live if they don't get riders soon. The Meereenese cannot and will not suffer wild dragons in their city.

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5 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Described that above. But as @SeanF repeated it again. Dany's Unsullied are no longer slaves and agreed with her assessment of the injustice in Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen. Else they would have never fought for her.

Dany tricked the Good Masters, she broke her contract when she revealed she never intended to part with Drogon and instead used her to murder Kraznys mo Nakloz. If the Unsullied cared about slavery and the contracts and values of the slavers who made them they would have stood with the Good Masters and they implored them to do ... but instead they butchered them.

That tells us all we need to know about their allegiance. Those people are not mindless drones, they are slaves who very much like to be free and finally realized they had a shot at that when Dany helped them.

But she is little more than a figurehead or a catalyst in all that. And in ADwD she is nearly a slaver collaborator considering the lengths she goes to accommodate the slavers.

Don't you know? Meereen isn't under siege, and if it were then Dany would be doing it because she is evil and everything that is evil in those books goes back to Daenerys Targaryen either directly or indirectly. And when something that she does looks good then you look at it the wrong way.

After all, even slavery is good in this world precisely because Daenerys Targaryen is against it.

She got them because she offered them a deal.

But then, as things stand we actually could make a case that Dany could have gotten the Unsullied to rebel against their masters even if she hadn't bought them. It may have been a bit different, but if the deal had fallen through and the Good Masters had decided to enslave her and her companions (which they certainly could have tried) then one can see them siding with the party who opposed slavery on principle.

This is not a stable society. The slaves do not like their places.

Nah, she just a small temporary advantage. Her Unsullied are good infantry, but she still has pretty much no cavalry aside from the sellsword companies (one of which quickly defected back to the other side), but the Yunkai'i quickly regrouped hiring more and more sellswords, and assembling a coaltion army against her. Had the sellsword not abandoned Yunkai in ASoS Dany would have been crushed then. And without the sewer plan and, especially, the rebellion of the Meereenese slaves she would have never taken Meereen.

There is no supremacy there.

And Dany's dragons are still jokes. They probably will remain jokes until the end of the series when compared the Aegon's dragons. Those were real monsters, Dany's dragons are dangerous pets. A single man with a spear could kill Drogon still, as could a couple of archers. In fact, it is a miracle that those dragons still live. They should have been killed in ADwD, and it is going to stretch credibility that they should continue to live if they don't get riders soon. The Meereenese cannot and will not suffer wild dragons in their city.

It's pretty telling that the slaves  turned against the Masters at Astapor and Meereen.  If they actually liked being slaves, they'd fight for their Masters, and kill Daenerys.  Instead, they fight for Daenerys and kill their Masters, because they prefer to be free.

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36 minutes ago, SeanF said:

In years to come, a dragon will be a very formidable weapon.  A dragon that's a couple of years old is not. 

This is GRRM's fictional universe. None of the characters are real outside of his head.

If he wants to say that the people of Essos feared Dany due to the weapons she had then I'm okay with that. 

I'm more likely to take his word on this than yours or Lord Varys. Sorry about that.

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