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atopvisenyashill · 1 year

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thoughts on unsullied

i think the reason it takes so long for dany to realize “slavery bad” as well as her continued weirdness surrounding slavery is because dany “learns” through her emotional attachments and then doesn’t really dig in anymore after the “lesson.”

she identifies with the unsullied despite never having been a slave so she sees their slavery as the same as her mistreatment. i think the dissonance between how she sees the dothraki (mostly as same faced servants) and how she sees the unsullied and meereenese (as her loving and useful children) is because she can relate to the unsullied emotionally in a way she can’t to the dothraki. her bloodriders were never slaves so while she’s fond of them for their loyalty to her she doesn’t love or relate to them the way she does Jorah, Barristan, Missandei, or Grey Worm. Irri & Jhiqui were slaves but they accept their fate without a fight; Irri & Jhiqui are mentioned to be the daughters of Khals that Drogo defeated. They are very dothraki in that they don’t try to break free from their enslavement; Dany associates strength with violence so often that I think she looks down on them for not having her same thirst for freedom, nor Doreah’s interest in stories, nor Jorah’s Westerosi heritage. The Unsullied are different; like Dany, they experience terrible violence through no fault of their own and like Dany, their worth is tied to their name (Unsullied vs Targaryen) and their ability to do great violence.

Therefore, unraveling the institution of slavery should be as easy as her own freedom - standing up to Drogo, killing Viserys, and gaining her dragons saved her so surely killing the masters of astapor with her dragons will save the Unsullied. of course, it’s so much more complex than that! Not everyone is given gifts of food and clothes just for being who they are. as queen she has the job of ruling but that’s not really a paid position and she doesn’t even think of how to pay the Unsullied or anyone in Meereen.

this wine of courage…it seems that while Unsullied who have already been cut have been on this for a long time and likely don’t feel pain, but the unsullied from astapor aren’t just the fully trained ones - dany explicitly buys and takes the young boys with her as well. i’m wondering if it’s going to come up once she leaves Meereen or if it was just another “look how dehumanizing the Unsullied training is” thing.

it’s this passage that i think convinces Dany to do something riskier than just buy them but sack Astapor. I don’t think it’s something that occurred to her before she talks to Missandei partially because she’s been so surrounded by slavery for so many years that it clearly doesn’t occur to her that slavery is awful. Dany is impressed with Missandei’s ability to translate on the fly & work under pressure so when Missandei opens up quickly it makes Dany question her decision to buy the Unsullied even more.

Then Quaithe makes her worry about getting to Westeros fast enough with the worst advice in the world. I think - just me guessing - that Quaithe chooses now to message her because Dany is weighing her options. Kraznys suggests they sack smaller cities and send the captives back to him to train into more Unsullied. While I think it’s unlikely Dany would have sent the Unsullied back, I do think there’s evidence that Dany is weighing the idea of sacking several towns with her Dothraki anyway.

Whether she means to attack more slaver cities to conscript the slave soldiers into her army or whether she’s thinking of other cities, to me it seems the idea is already there to sack a city. It’s only Missandei mentioning her brothers that makes Dany realize she doesn’t like the deal she’s made because there’s a human face and emotional connection there, then Quaithe makes her nervous about the long road ahead of her.

but the sack…that’s the dragon in her. she might have left by killing the unsullied masters, using her dragons as a threat to allow anyone who wants to be freed and come with her. instead she leaves astapor a ruin. again, it’s because of her emotional reactions. she’s not actually breaking any wheels or ending slavery; it’s the same as when she takes the lhazareen women into her personal slave khalasar. Better to serve Dany than serve an evil person, no matter if they don’t want to serve anyone at all.

they are the dragon’s now. bought and paid for.

#rani liveblogs asoiaf #anti daenerys targaryen #anti targ restoration #daenerys is old valyria risen again #daenerys as orestes #her first few chapters make me deeply sad #daenerys of the dothraki

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atopvisenyashill · 1 year

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i accidentally went down the fake dany rabbit hole on reddit and to be clear, i think it’s fun to think about but it’s absolutely not gonna happen BUT one of the main pieces of evidence for this is…A Thing and that’s Dany’s memory of the House With The Red Door:

…one night Ser Willem Darry and four loyal men had broken into the nursery and stolen them both, along with her wet nurse, and set sail under cover of darkness for the safety of the Braavosian coast.

She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her "Little Princess" and sometimes "My Lady," and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever.

She mentions the lemon tree more than once:

All that Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, the childhood she had never known.

And again she sees it in the house of the undying:

And there outside the window, a lemon tree! The sight of it made her heart ache with longing. It is the house with the red door, the house in Braavos. No sooner had she thought it than old Ser Willem came into the room, leaning heavily on his stick. "Little princess, there you are," he said in his gruff kind voice. "Come," he said, "come to me, my lady, you're home now, you're safe now." His big wrinkled hand reached for her, soft as old leather, and Dany wanted to take it and hold it and kiss it, she wanted that as much as she had ever wanted anything.

But we get it mentioned several times that there are not citrus trees in Braavos. Sam says it here:

Trees did not grow on Braavos, save in the courts and gardens of the mighty.

And then there is Arya's description:

Braavos, devoid of grass and trees ... They have no trees, she realized. Braavos is all stone, a grey city in a green sea. ... In the forest, they see all. but there are no trees here ...

Now, this could mean she stayed with the Sealord of Braavos, since he signed the marriage contract with Dorne as a witness:

"It is a secret pact," Dany said, "made in Braavos when I was just a little girl. Ser Willem Darry signed for us, the man who spirited my brother and myself away from Dragonstone before the Usurper's men could take us. Prince Oberyn Martell signed for Dorne, with the Sealord of Braavos as witness." She handed the parchment to Ser Barristan, so he might read it for himself. "The alliance is to be sealed by a marriage, it says. In return for Dorne's help overthrowing the Usurper, my brother Viserys is to take Prince Doran's daughter Arianne for his queen."

Except George has been Cagey As Fuck about this when asked TWO separate times:

Q: “Dany remembers a lemon tree outside the house with the red door in Braavos, but citrus trees shouldn’t really grow in Braavos’s cold, foggy climate. Is this discrepancy significant? Does it point to future revelations about Dany’s past. Thank you so much.”

GRRM: “Very perceptive of you. Yes, it does point to … well, that would be telling.”

And again here:

Question: “How old was Daenerys when she left the house with the red door, was it located close to the palace of the Sealord of Braavos?”

Answer: “That’s a interesting question. But I don’t think I’m going to answer it. There’s a certain revelation about the red door that will come into the books that I have yet to write. So we’ll keep an eye to it.”

Obviously there’s the whole lemongate thing, with some saying this means she’s a fake - some say Blackfyre, some say Rhaegar’s daughter. I think it’s more likely her memory is just faulty; she was so young when this happened, and we see Ned, Sansa, and Bran misremember things that traumatized them because it’s a very common coping mechanism. There’s theories around her memory as well - she was in Tyrosh or she was in Dorne.

But for me, it’s more about WHY he’s being cagey and WHY there’s this discrepancy in her memory. If she was really in Tyrosh or Myr or Dorne, why does that matter? I think it’s something that will only matter to Daenerys, and not the plot at large. Will she find the house with the red door or hear the story from Doran (or Areo??) and find out she misremembered that way? And why will it affect her? I’m not sure if “Daenerys realizes even those memories are tainted by the fact that she was only in Dorne because of politics and was sent out of Dorne and safety and now holds a grudge” because…the memories are already tainted by how sick Willem Darry was as he was dying.

Like, “Dany was Rhaegar’s daughter raised by Willem Dustin then sold to Illyrio and passed off as Rhaella’s last child who actually died, because it puts Viserys ahead of her in succession and gives him a Targaryen bride to marry or sell off and Viserys has spent the last few years torturing her into thinking she’s his sister, the same way Ramsey tortures Theon into being another person” is such a crackhead theory lmao but a revelation like that would shake Dany to her core. “Dany misremembered Dorne as Braavos” like that’s such a nothingburger so WHAT IS GOING ON. If she just invented a happier memory for herself to hold onto, what is the original memory hiding? Is it not even real, and while the lemon tree is our sign the memory is fake, the real secret is the red door and it’s going to be some metaphor for something?

The House With The Red Door represents everything Dany really wants from her life deep down and that’s to belong somewhere. So what I’m leaning towards is it’s not even a real memory, just something she cobbled together from several of Viserys’ stories. It’s not just that the lemon tree and red door were in the wrong place but none of it existed. Not the peace she had, not Willem Darry. That seems devastating enough that if none of it was real, that she can never find peace, that the red door she was chasing all these years never existed. I think it might be, emotionally, a big step in her deciding to burn king’s landing.

But it was not the plains Dany saw then. It was King's Landing and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conqueror had built. It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind's eye they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window. In her mind's eye, all the doors were red.

and later on:

She saw sunlight on the Dothraki sea, the living plain, rich with the smells of earth and death. Wind stirred the grasses, and they rippled like water. Drogo held her in strong arms, and his hand stroked her sex and opened her and woke that sweet wetness that was his alone, and the stars smiled down on them, stars in a daylight sky. "Home," she whispered as he entered her and filled her with his seed, but suddenly the stars were gone, and across the blue sky swept the great wings, and the world took flame.

If there was never any red door, never a lemon tree, if even her sweet memories of Willem Darry are somehow false, just a scared child trying to make sense of the world, I think that loss will completely push her towards the path of destruction, and she won’t just embrace the dragon, she’ll embrace its devastation as well. Behind the red door isn’t her salvation, only destruction.

The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door. “… the dragon …” And saw her brother Rhaegar, mounted on a stallion as black as his armor. Fire glimmered red through the narrow eye slit of his helm. “The last dragon,” Ser Jorah’s voice whispered faintly. “The last, the last.” Dany lifted his polished black visor. The face within was her own.

GEORGE I AM IN YOUR WALLS

#the point is the emotion so WHAT EMOTION SILL TBIS MAKE HER FEEL #getting on my soap box #anti daenerys targaryen #if the red door never existed im literally gonna cry. she makes me so sad. it’s like seeing cersei age 13 you know. not just the after where #she’s already evil but instead all the moments in which she breaks and becomes a monster #a child weaned on poison considers hurt a comfort #daenerys is old valyria risen again

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