Jump to content

HOTD Musings


Recommended Posts

10 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

I think the point was supposed to be that he protected Nettles from the aristocrats who wanted to kill her and sacrificed himself to kill Aemond. Daemon is also a Valyrian supremacist whose incestuous practices were intertwined with his elitism, so falling for someone who is so far removed from that shows some character development. I agree that Daemon’s a POS, but I can see how GRRM may have been thinking differently when he wrote it. It’s kind of like how he wrote Rhaegar and Lyanna as a love story when Rhaegar was really an adulterous idiot.

I don’t know how this fan theory that Nettles is Daemon’s daughter became so popular. It’s not even hinted at in the books. As for the show, they’ve made it pretty clear that Daemon doesn’t care about his daughters. I see no reason why he would suddenly start caring about one now.

I don't care what GRRM may or may not have been thinking and I don't see that would even matter. It would only confirm that he never changed and remained a creep with a fixation on extremely young girls that he was in position of power over (especially knowing that he liked to deflower the youngest abd "most inmocent" of the girls in brothels, those who had just flowered - so arounc 13, 12 or even younger. You can't even say GRRM didn't know he was writing him as a pedophile). That's nof character development, that's remaining awful. It's almost dark comedy - exchanging your much younger wife, who's his niece and that he knew since childhood and groomed, but who now inconveniently was in a position of power over him and was not a wide eyed young girl who looked up to him, for an even younger girl that he was playing mentor to.

"But he cared about a lower class teenage girl he was sleeping with" - so he is not completely without feeling, cool, but protecting your new grooming victim from your earlier grooming victim isn't the stuff of heroic legend.

(And I doubt any show in the 2020s would try to do present if that way, let alone HotD, whose writing staff fortunately don't strike me as people who'd see if that way )

And he didn't "sacrifice" himself to kill Aemond. He was suicidal after everything that went down with Rhaenyra and Nettles and wanted to go down in a blaze of glory. A sacrifice is when you have something to lose and you give up your life for the greater good. If he had wanted to sacrifice himself, he would have done it earlier, rather than only trying to find Aemond with Nettles so they would have an advantage in a dragon fight.

Edited by Annara Snow
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Lord Varys I knew your post would deliver more elaboration abour Valyrian superiority (unless it's the Targaryens on the Green side) and specifically about how Rhaenyra and Daemon are all powerful godlike people who can do anything*, and you didn't disappoint. In fact, you overdid yourself this time with the line about how Daemon didn't need to kill himself to kill his "irrelevant failure of a nephew"! Indeed, it doesn't make sense, if he was so "irrelevant", why was killing him so important? I'll let you struggle with that baffling issue. But I I'm afraid the whole Dance will never make sense to you, with your belief that Rhaenyra could do anything and never be challenged by anyone in the realm, and yet the Dance somehow still happened.

* I guess Rhaenyra is only all powerful in relation to the rest of the realm minus Daemon, but Daemon's power goes even further since he can just "bend her [Rhaenyra] to his will".

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am so confused, are people trying to frame Daemon and any of his relations with women as self-sacrificial or positive? Daemon and Aemond having an ego-fueled dragon war above the weirwoods is not self-sacrificial or positive. The entire Nettles relationship is obviously gross: don't take naked baths with your perceived surrogate daughter, Daemon. Just don't do it. It's giving Aegon IV and Jeyne Stokeworth vibes; it's giving 50yearold Leonardo DiCaprio replacing his 19yearold girlfriend except he views his girlfriend as his surrogate daughter also. Like, icky stuff, and it's ok that it is icky. 

39 minutes ago, Annara Snow said:

I don’t know how this fan theory that Nettles is Daemon’s daughter became so popular. It’s not even hinted at in the books. As for the show, they’ve made it pretty clear that Daemon doesn’t care about his daughters. I see no reason why he would suddenly start caring about one now.

Norren says that Daemon treated Nettles like his daughter. And also took naked baths with her. Maybe people are saying she's his actual daughter, I think that would be much harder to prove, but the surrogate daughter angle is still creeeepy. edit: I just checked Fire and Blood, the maester calls Nettles "his bastard girl," whether that's like "his travelling companion who was a bastard girl" or "his bastard girl" is kinda up to interpretation, I veer towards the former. 

39 minutes ago, Annara Snow said:

"But he cared about a lower class teenage girl he was sleeping with" - so he is not completely without feeling, cool, but protecting your new grooming victim from your earlier grooming victim isn't the stuff of heroic legend.

 

This is so well-worded. And Daemon isn't supposed to be a heroic legend; he's supposed to be a really fucked up guy sometimes making the right choices, sometimes making the wrong choices, trying to temper his impulses and failing miserably.

Edited by GZ Bloodraven
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

I am so confused, are people trying to frame Daemon and any of his relations with women as self-sacrificial or positive? Daemon and Aemond having an ego-fueled dragon war above the weirwoods is not self-sacrificial or positive. The entire Nettles relationship is obviously gross: don't take naked baths with your perceived surrogate daughter, Daemon. Just don't do it. It's giving Aegon IV and Jeyne Stokeworth vibes; it's giving 50yearold Leonardo DiCaprio replacing his 19yearold girlfriend except he views his girlfriend as his surrogate daughter also. Like, icky stuff, and it's ok that it is icky. 

Norren says that Daemon treated Nettles like his daughter. And also took naked baths with her. Maybe people are saying she's his actual daughter, I think that would be much harder to prove, but the surrogate daughter angle is still creeeepy. edit: I just checked Fire and Blood, the maester calls Nettles "his bastard girl," whether that's like "his travelling companion who was a bastard girl" or "his bastard girl" is kinda up to interpretation, I veer towards the former. 

This is so well-worded. And Daemon isn't supposed to be a heroic legend; he's supposed to be a really fucked up guy sometimes making the right choices, sometimes making the wrong choices, trying to temper his impulses and failing miserably.

For the record, I don’t like Daemon and agree that his fixation on younger women/girls is gross. But I could see how the show might try to portray his relationship with Nettles as something redemptive—much like with Rhaegar and Lyanna, I didn’t get the impression that we were supposed to view this relationship as negatively as many of us do. I also don’t think think HOTD is as clever or profound about gender and patriarchy as the writers seem to think it is, even if it is better than GOT in this respect.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

For the record, I don’t like Daemon and agree that his fixation on younger women/girls is gross. But I could see how the show might try to portray his relationship with Nettles as something redemptive—much like with Rhaegar and Lyanna, I didn’t get the impression that we were supposed to view this relationship as negatively as many of us do. I also don’t think think HOTD is as clever or profound about gender and patriarchy as the writers seem to think it is, even if it is better than GOT in this respect.

Not if they have them sleeping together. I don't see how that would be framed in a positive light, and the writers and Emma D'Arcy certainly haven't framed the Daemon and Rhaenyra's relationship positively in their interviews:

Ryan Condal: "What Daemon does to young Rhaenyra is, in modern terminology, an act of abuse. And, as a traumatic event would, it shapes who Rhaenyra becomes."

Emma D'Arcy: "“This is essentially a grooming scenario. The idea that a teenage girl is in any way able to consent to that sexual interaction is a mess. There is no way that power can be equally distributed in that relationship.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, Annara Snow said:

Not if they have them sleeping together. I don't see how that would be framed in a positive light, and the writers and Emma D'Arcy certainly haven't framed the Daemon and Rhaenyra's relationship positively in their interviews:

Ryan Condal: "What Daemon does to young Rhaenyra is, in modern terminology, an act of abuse. And, as a traumatic event would, it shapes who Rhaenyra becomes."

Emma D'Arcy: "“This is essentially a grooming scenario. The idea that a teenage girl is in any way able to consent to that sexual interaction is a mess. There is no way that power can be equally distributed in that relationship.

The writers and directors all say different things. The director for E8, for instance, said that D&R’s bond is too deep for words. We’ll have to see. Either way, I don’t expect them to cut his and Nettles’ relationship.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

42 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

The writers and directors all say different things. The director for E8, for instance, said that D&R’s bond is too deep for words. We’ll have to see. Either way, I don’t expect them to cut his and Nettles’ relationship.

The writers, above all the showrunner,  are the ones deciding how the characters and story are portrayed.

They're certainly not cutting Daemon's relationship with Nettles. The issue we're discussing is how they might portray it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

@Ran Did GRRM have a hand in the animated Dance of the Dragons DVD feature from a few years ago? Because that pretty explicitly confirmed that Daemon and Nettles had a sexual relationship.

 

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Not to my knowledge.

I'm not entirely sure if these animated features are canon for the show universe, but even if they are, they're narrated by characters from GoT, so technically all that is canon is that this is the history these characters know, or how they interpret it. In this case, it would be canon that this is what Oberyn Martell believes happened 170 years earlier, not necessarily that this is what happened.

So, the show should be free to interpret the source material in any way regardless of what was said in the featurettes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Daemon had sex with lots of women, but the only ones he considered partners were Valyrian women—Laena, Rhaenyra, and Mysaria.

One of those women also happened to be a former whore ... as was Nettles.

I think you pay too much attention to the silly albino looks of the Targaryens and less on what marks their actual superiority - dragons. If we go with Nettles and Daemon being a romantic couple then her dragon would have been what made her attractive and his equal. A dragonlord is a person who can bind a dragon to his or her will, and that's ultimately what the Targaryen celebrate about themselves. Not their looks.

In that sense, there is no chance whatsoever that Daemon's character or attitude changed if he got into Nettles' pants. She was just another Laena, another Rhaenyra. Young and fresh dragonlord meat, if you will.

10 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

He and Nettles had adjoining bedrooms and took baths together. I consider that pretty solid sexual subtext.

They had rooms next to each other, but there is no talk about them actually being connected. And, yes, they bathed together. That could indicate a deeper connection ... or not. It is still vague. A creep like Daemon certainly would bathe with his own daughter.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

@Lord Varys I knew your post would deliver more elaboration abour Valyrian superiority (unless it's the Targaryens on the Green side) and specifically about how Rhaenyra and Daemon are all powerful godlike people who can do anything*, and you didn't disappoint. In fact, you overdid yourself this time with the line about how Daemon didn't need to kill himself to kill his "irrelevant failure of a nephew"! Indeed, it doesn't make sense, if he was so "irrelevant", why was killing him so important? I'll let you struggle with that baffling issue. But I I'm afraid the whole Dance will never make sense to you, with your belief that Rhaenyra could do anything and never be challenged by anyone in the realm, and yet the Dance somehow still happened.

* I guess Rhaenyra is only all powerful in relation to the rest of the realm minus Daemon, but Daemon's power goes even further since he can just "bend her [Rhaenyra] to his will".

Aemond is a joke as leader and general. He has the largest dragon in the world yet he ends up having no army and no power. Sure enough, he terrorized the Riverlands, but so what? That's not going to remove Rhaenyra's ass from the Iron Throne. Bothering with him at all was a mistake ... and throwing away one's life to kill the moron was the stupidest thing anyone could have done.

8 hours ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

I am so confused, are people trying to frame Daemon and any of his relations with women as self-sacrificial or positive? Daemon and Aemond having an ego-fueled dragon war above the weirwoods is not self-sacrificial or positive. The entire Nettles relationship is obviously gross: don't take naked baths with your perceived surrogate daughter, Daemon. Just don't do it. It's giving Aegon IV and Jeyne Stokeworth vibes; it's giving 50yearold Leonardo DiCaprio replacing his 19yearold girlfriend except he views his girlfriend as his surrogate daughter also. Like, icky stuff, and it's ok that it is icky.

Well, it is only icky if there was actual sexual stuff going on there. Bathing together is not necessarily an intimate practice in this world. Dunk and Egg bathe together, too. And if Daemon and Nettles knew they were father and daughter at that time there wouldn't have to be any sexual tension or attraction there.

I mean, it strikes we as American prudery to assume that people bathing together naked must have a thing going on. That is quite common in many parts of the world, not just in nudist circles (in fact, if you go to a mixed sauna here in Germany you would make a fool of yourself if you insisted to go there in bathing clothes). And we talk about a medieval setting where people would obviously have limited space to bathe (even nobility and royalty) nor show false modesty while doing so (as our good friend, Robert Baratheon, can attest).

Nettles and Daemon clearly are close, else they would not bathe together. But this is no confirmation of a romantic or sexual relationship. It is left vague - and as I pointed out above there were so many ways to make it more explicit if George had wanted to hammer home the fact that they were couple.

Hell, one obvious way would have been to make Nettles pregnant when they parted ways - and have her some silver-haired child up in the Mountains of the Moon who ended up founding the Burned Men or whatever.

8 hours ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

Norren says that Daemon treated Nettles like his daughter. And also took naked baths with her. Maybe people are saying she's his actual daughter, I think that would be much harder to prove, but the surrogate daughter angle is still creeeepy. edit: I just checked Fire and Blood, the maester calls Nettles "his bastard girl," whether that's like "his travelling companion who was a bastard girl" or "his bastard girl" is kinda up to interpretation, I veer towards the former. 

The whole bastard girl angle there is indeed one of the instances where it is implied he could be her father.

8 hours ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

This is so well-worded. And Daemon isn't supposed to be a heroic legend; he's supposed to be a really fucked up guy sometimes making the right choices, sometimes making the wrong choices, trying to temper his impulses and failing miserably.

Honestly, I don't think there are any instances where Daemon made 'the right choices'. He didn't accomplish anything lasting or good in his entire life. And if he is guilty of Laenor's murder in the book then, well, he is just a monstrous piece of shit. He is the kind of wastrel nobody needs in his family. A guy who is never content, never gets anything done, never gets his life in order.

4 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

For the record, I don’t like Daemon and agree that his fixation on younger women/girls is gross. But I could see how the show might try to portray his relationship with Nettles as something redemptive—much like with Rhaegar and Lyanna, I didn’t get the impression that we were supposed to view this relationship as negatively as many of us do. I also don’t think think HOTD is as clever or profound about gender and patriarchy as the writers seem to think it is, even if it is better than GOT in this respect.

As I said above - this won't work. Nettles will look like Laena if she is a brown girl, so there is no difference in the Valyrian supremacy angle you seem to care about. And Nettles happens to be a dragonrider, too. She has the same power as Daemon, is his equal in that regard. And dragons are power, everything else is pretense. This is what Daemon himself happens to believe very much in the show.

If Daemon were to fall for an actual peasant - like, perhaps, Duncan Targaryen did - then you could speculate that his priorities shifted. But the dragonseeds are pretty much Targaryens, too, from the moment they claim their dragons. Sure enough, they might be exactly like the others, there will be friction and all that. But it is obvious that the one thing in Nettles that made her attractive to Daemon - especially if she was as disfigured as Mushroom claims - would have been the fact that she was a dragonrider.

And I think there are subtle and not-so-subtle hints in the show that this is the angle they take with the dragon guys. Viserys, Rhaenyra, and Daemon are the royal family early in the show - and Alicent and Otto are outsiders who don't really fit in never mind how hard they try. Baela is favored by her father because she has a dragon, Rhaena is ignored because she has none. They are both his children, but dragons make them special, not looks, not bloodlines, not legitimate birth. Dragons.

4 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

Not if they have them sleeping together. I don't see how that would be framed in a positive light, and the writers and Emma D'Arcy certainly haven't framed the Daemon and Rhaenyra's relationship positively in their interviews:

Ryan Condal: "What Daemon does to young Rhaenyra is, in modern terminology, an act of abuse. And, as a traumatic event would, it shapes who Rhaenyra becomes."

Emma D'Arcy: "“This is essentially a grooming scenario. The idea that a teenage girl is in any way able to consent to that sexual interaction is a mess. There is no way that power can be equally distributed in that relationship.

That kind of self-interpretation is not worth all that much. There is certainly an age- and experience gap in Rhaenyra and Daemon ... but Rhaenyra also happens to be the Heir Apparent to the Iron Throne, the future queen. She outranks her uncle and does hold more power than he does. She is never a helpless little girl at her uncle's mercy ... nor is she ever put into a sexualized situation at an age when she is not yet ready or willing to participate in it.

We actually get a scene where actual grooming/sexual abuse of a minor is referenced in the show - when Prince Aemond has his encounter with the brothel lady who did have some sexual relations with him at Aegon's behest when Aemond was yet a young boy and taken to the brothel against his will. That was an abusive scenario, and the victim there was a young boy.

But Rhaenyra is never portrayed or depicted as her uncle's victim.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Onto a lighter topic: someone at HBO must have been worried about Westeros’ redhead deficit, because Olivia dyed her hair bright red. (It would be kind of interesting if Daeron turns out to have red hair).

With them even giving Aemma Arryn and the Rhaenys that silly hair - not to mention the black Velaryons - I'd be very surprised if there was a Targaryen in that show who doesn't have silver hair.

I'd also expect Hugh Hammer and Nettles to have Valyrian hair. What else would they go with?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

But I could see how the show might try to portray his relationship with Nettles as something redemptive—much like with Rhaegar and Lyanna, I didn’t get the impression that we were supposed to view this relationship as negatively as many of us do. I also don’t think think HOTD is as clever or profound about gender and patriarchy as the writers seem to think it is, even if it is better than GOT in this respect.

It seemed like the show writers really wanted to show that Daemon was trying to be a good husband to Laena, so maybe they'll transfer whatever positives they see in that relationship to his relationship with Nettles. Or they'll play up the "what the fuck" of it all. I would honestly prefer that they don't make it sexual as I don't wanna see what lengths people will go to justify some of Daemon's behavior. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

It seemed like the show writers really wanted to show that Daemon was trying to be a good husband to Laena, so maybe they'll transfer whatever positives they see in that relationship to his relationship with Nettles. Or they'll play up the "what the fuck" of it all. I would honestly prefer that they don't make it sexual as I don't wanna see what lengths people will go to justify some of Daemon's behavior. 

If not killing or physically abusing her makes a good husband. I'm not sure what particularly good qualities of him as a husband we saw there, rather than simply an absense of outright negatives. (So, good by Daemon standards?)

Mostly it was just both of them bekng bored in Pentos and Laena unsuccessfully trying to convince him to go back home, Laena saying she was his second choice as  wife, and we didn't see any enrhusiastic displays of love or happiness by either of them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Onto a lighter topic: someone at HBO must have been worried about Westeros’ redhead deficit, because Olivia dyed her hair bright red. (It would be kind of interesting if Daeron turns out to have red hair).

Olivia has dyed her hair auburn, not bright redy again because they're about the start filmingy so she needs to have Alicent's auburn hair as she did in season 1. I'm not sure what's notable about that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On a less light topic, this discussion again proves that many people don't know what grooming means.

So a reminder: grooming, in a child abuse scenario, neans an adult befriending / trying to win the trust of a minor with the intention of eventual sexual abuse. It may involve things like  gifts, attention, trying to portray themselves as the minors friend who undersrands them and values them etc. and it can last a long time, even years, before anything sexual takes place, but it was the end goal.

That's exactly what Littlefinger is trying to do with Sansa, and what Daemon did with his niece. The show scenario is less creepy and messed up than Mushroom's version, but the show also made sure to have Daemon flirting with Rhaenyra and giving her a gift in episode 1 when she was 14 (when she,incidentally, wasn't heir yet. Even after being named heir, she was shown to be very insecure throughout episode 2 and 3 and feeling like she would be replaced). Of course Daemon has known Rhaenyra since she was a baby and been her uncle she looked up to. I don't know if any of the lones from the leaked Alys Rivers audition will be in the show, but I really hope the "a child you used to bounce on your knee" makes it.

I'm glad some people acknowledge that Aenond was a victim of sexual abuse when Aegon took him to a brothel on his 13th birthday. Finally something @Lord Varyssays that I agree with.

However, that didn't involve any grooming.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Aemond is a joke as leader and general. He has the largest dragon in the world yet he ends up having no army and no power. Sure enough, he terrorized the Riverlands, but so what? That's not going to remove Rhaenyra's ass from the Iron Throne. Bothering with him at all was a mistake ... and throwing away one's life to kill the moron was the stupidest thing anyone could have done.

Well, it is only icky if there was actual sexual stuff going on there. Bathing together is not necessarily an intimate practice in this world. Dunk and Egg bathe together, too. And if Daemon and Nettles knew they were father and daughter at that time there wouldn't have to be any sexual tension or attraction there.

I mean, it strikes we as American prudery to assume that people bathing together naked must have a thing going on. That is quite common in many parts of the world, not just in nudist circles (in fact, if you go to a mixed sauna here in Germany you would make a fool of yourself if you insisted to go there in bathing clothes). And we talk about a medieval setting where people would obviously have limited space to bathe (even nobility and royalty) nor show false modesty while doing so (as our good friend, Robert Baratheon, can attest).

Nettles and Daemon clearly are close, else they would not bathe together. But this is no confirmation of a romantic or sexual relationship. It is left vague - and as I pointed out above there were so many ways to make it more explicit if George had wanted to hammer home the fact that they were couple.

Hell, one obvious way would have been to make Nettles pregnant when they parted ways - and have her some silver-haired child up in the Mountains of the Moon who ended up founding the Burned Men or whatever.

The whole bastard girl angle there is indeed one of the instances where it is implied he could be her father.

Honestly, I don't think there are any instances where Daemon made 'the right choices'. He didn't accomplish anything lasting or good in his entire life. And if he is guilty of Laenor's murder in the book then, well, he is just a monstrous piece of shit. He is the kind of wastrel nobody needs in his family. A guy who is never content, never gets anything done, never gets his life in order.

As I said above - this won't work. Nettles will look like Laena if she is a brown girl

I wasn't discussing Aemond's qualities or the lack of them as a leader or strategist. I was just baffled by you now claiming he didn't pose any serious danger to the Blacks.

So Aemomd was not at all a real danger to Rhaenyra and the Blacks, and she just sent two dragons and dragonriders, including her husband who was also her most experienced dragonrider, after him just for sh**s and giggles (leaving just herself, her preteen son and Addam in KL after she also sent Hugh and Ulf to the Reach. I guess Rhaenyra must have valued Daemon very little if she sends him and another dragonrider to take Aemond alone, while sending two orher dragons/ Dragonseeds to fight an army plus Daeron..And then Daemon goes and throws his and his dragon's lives away just to take out Aemond / Vhagar, although they were totally not a real danger to the Blacks!

Such strange behavior! Why would they keep acting like Aemond is a big danger they need to take out, when he was so inconsequential? I feel like the answer is so close, but keeps eluding me!

Till then, it's a mystery, just like it's a mystery why Rhaenyra kept acting like she was extremely bothered by people saying her sons were bastards, to the point of having people killed for it, or asking for her 10 year old half brother to be tortured into telling where he had heard the rumors - when, according to you, she was completely unbothered by those rumors and they could never hurt her standing...

Seems like there are only three possible explanations: either GRRM is a terrible writer who writes characters acting in bizarre and unmotivated ways; he deliberately wrote Rhaenyra and Daemon as weird insane stupid people who do things for absolutely no reason; or - your readings are completely off and not based on anything in the actual text.

Re: Nettles- there is zero indication that she had any Valyrian blood. Rhaenyra even wrote that "one look at her" made it obvious she had no Valyrian blood. Therefore she sure as hell won't have silver hair in the show. And if the HotD casting director has any sense, she will cast a dark skinned black actress.

Edited by Annara Snow
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...