Dany ASOS vs. ADWD

[jcmontea]

Question... does any one feel as if the Dany in ADWD is totally different from the Dany in ASOS?

Reading the book i couldn't help but bash my head against the wall thinking to myself it just doesn't seem right that this character would be making these decisions given what we know of her background.

At the very the end the book attempts to provide an explanation by saying she wanted to be a young little girl and was tired of war... However, it just doesn't quite feel right that the same person Tyrion called Aegon the conqueror with teats, who throughout ASOS made wartime decisions that Tywin Lannister would be proud of would just turn around and a few months later utterly compromise everything she believed with up to that point.

Additionally, it just felt as if the whole losing control of her dragons angle was another thing that came out of left field.... was there anything in ASOS that laid the ground work for this?

All in all i was left with the impression that Martin emasculated one of this great characters so that he could have a plot device and keep her in Mereen.... but it just didn't feel like a natural outrgrowth of the prior experiences the character had had or gone through

anyone feel the same or differently?

[ejhawman]

Is she supposed to be the same? She's a teenage girl, changing every day. Some developments will not seem organic. But she is learning and reacting differently, and will probably continue to do so.

[jcmontea]

Thats interesting... but where i find that not entirely convincing is that many of the characters in the book are teenagers and yet i can't think of a single one that has as wide an oscillation in terms of behaviour as Dany does.

She goes from being a broken little girl forced to marry someone who rapes her on her wedding night to a ruthless and cunning conqueror back to a little girl again.... it just didn't feel like a natural progression...

[The Lord of Ice]

Thats interesting... but where i find that not entirely convincing is that many of the characters in the book are teenagers and yet i can't think of a single one that has as wide an oscillation in terms of behaviour as Dany does.

She goes from being a broken little girl forced to marry someone who rapes her on her wedding night to a ruthless and cunning conqueror back to a little girl again.... it just didn't feel like a natural progression...

Dany is not ruthless. I don't know where you got that idea from.

I don't understand why she would seem a little girl (besides the fact that she is a teenager, I assume you are thinking about her mentality). She manages to ride a dragon, that is surely something a "girl" cannot do; Daenerys also knows that she HAS to marry Hizdahr zo Loraq to keep Meereen in control. She's grown a lot more intelligent, but she's not cunning.

[tbc]

Dany is not ruthless. I don't know where you got that idea from.

I don't understand why she would seem a little girl (besides the fact that she is a teenager, I assume you are thinking about her mentality). She manages to ride a dragon, that is surely something a "girl" cannot do; Daenerys also knows that she HAS to marry Hizdahr zo Loraq to keep Meereen in control. She's grown a lot more intelligent, but she's not cunning.

Exactly. If Dany were ruthless she'd have taken the Unsullied and ships, bribed the other free companies, and sailed straight to Westeros.

What she does (staying in Slavers' Bay to free the slaves and pacify the region) is very utopian, similar to what Jon attempts with the Wildlings (although he has no choice, unlike her). She's an idealistic teenager who finds herself captivated by the ideal of freeing the slaves and creating a brave new world on Slavers' Bay.

[Mad Monkey]

I've always felt that Dany's arc in Meereen is an examination of the concept of fealty -- the ruler's obligation to their subjects in addition to the subject's obligation to their rulers. Could Dany really just leave all of the people who pledged their loyalty to her -- the allied Great Masters, the freedmen, her khalasar, her shavepates -- and just sail to Westeros while they get butchered? Sure, that would have been easier for her. Just like how it would have been easier for Robb if he abandoned the Riverlands and left Edmure Tully and his mother's people to be slaughtered while he went back to Winterfell to hide out and wait for Tywin to come north and root him out. But they didn't do that because they promised to protect those people.

But the thing is, once you do that -- once you promise to look out for someone and then you decide to bail out of the commitment the minute it gets inconvenient, why should anyone trust you again? Chances are, ruling the Seven Kingdoms is going to be at least as complicated and perilous as ruling Meereen -- we know that from the previous four books that it's not going to be a cakewalk. If Dany can't handle Meereen -- and doesn't even try to stay and rule and be a queen there -- then why would anyone trust her to rule over a continent many hundreds of times its size?

Dany's decision-making as Meereen's ruler was poor, I'll agree, but she was in a different and more complicated situation than Dany the conqueror. Fighting a war like that is relatively straightforward; Dany just had to come up with the overarching plan and let seasoned battle commanders like Jorah and Barristan handle the implementation. But actually ruling a city and putting down an insurgency is much harder than simply winning a battle. I'll use Robb Stark again as an example -- in battle he was almost unbeatable; he beat the Lannisters in almost every battle they fought. But that didn't immunize him from making bad decisions in other aspects of government.

[Ser Endrew Tarth]

I see it as part of her natural progression... from pawn to conqueror, from conqueror to ruler. She makes mistakes, sometimes learns from them, just like any teenager I guess. I felt that her decision to stay was justified after she was told of the horror that she had created in Astapore.

As to her dragons being out of control I felt it was GRRM's way of saying: "This is not going to be easy". She is too busy ruling to get the proper info and help with her dragons.

[MRHD]

I actually felt the exact same way about Dany in ADwD as the OP. I'm not sure what it was; the lack of a five year gap and GRRM's need to write something for Dany to fill out her plot, the fact that there were likely long stretches of time between finishing ASoS and GRRM's work on ADwD where he didn't write any Dany chapters and therefore might have fallen out of "touch" with the character, or something else. All I know is that she didn't feel like the same character to me.

Sure, I couldn't expect a teenager to be a great ruler, but the way in which she was a bad ruler didn't seem consistent with the pre-ADwD Dany. She seems weak-willed in ADwD, whereas she was anything but in ASoS.

[Ser Endrew Tarth]

I actually look at it as a realistic road to leadership. Both Jon and Dany have many lessons (hard lessons) to learn before meeting their destiny... whatever that is.

[Selene1212]

I too, thought Dany losing control of her dragons was out of character. She seemed to totally just neglect them when previously she was always so concerned and attentive.

[Lost Umber]

Dany was gaining a lot of confidence in ASOS but then she started to see that her decisions were causing as many problems as she thought she was solving. She had the best intentions and wanted to save everyone (be the 'mother' figure) but no matter what she did, people were dying. This peaked when Drogon ate that little girl and her decision making process became paralyzed. Her POV in ADWD was basically her evolving sense of what it means to rule. I thought it was pretty logical, especially for a young girl with no experience in having the power over life and death of her subjects.

She has to come to grips with the fact that she can't solve everything before she allows herself to leave Essos. ADWD was her journey towards that realization.