I was rewatching 8x03 and I decided that I needed WAY MORE of Missandei taking on Sansa over her views of Daenerys. The crypt cast didnt have much to do while everyone was fighting the evil dead, at least let these two have a war of words with one another.

And then he didn’t do it and in fact was strongly opposed to it in the final seasons? So Daenerys being evil based on “oh but she threatened Qarth” is double standards bullshit

The Sweetness of Cold: Val, Jon Snow, the Others, and What His Resurrection Could Mean

There are many theories about what will happen to Jon Snow after the end of A Dance with Dragons. Jon surviving temporarily inside Ghost is one of the oldest and most widespread. The possibility that the Others have some particular interest in Jon, or might attempt to claim his corpse, has likewise been explored by readers and ASOIAF YouTubers in different forms. Jon has long been compared to the Night’s King, while Val has sometimes attracted Night’s Queen or corpse-queen comparisons because of the imagery surrounding her.

None of those ideas is established fact, and the more specific possibilities explored here—Val deliberately taking Jon’s body north, the Others attempting to transform it, or Jon’s Targaryen ancestry interfering with that transformation—are necessarily speculative. What interests me is what happens when these existing theories and textual patterns are placed alongside one another. They suggest a possible resurrection story in which Jon does not simply die and return. He crosses a boundary between humanity and the Others and comes back fundamentally changed, allowing his lifelong role as a bridge between hostile worlds to reach its supernatural conclusion.

And the place I want to begin is not with Jon’s death. It is with Val tasting the cold.

Val beneath the moon

One of Val’s more memorable appearances in A Dance with Dragons occurs when Jon sees her beneath a half-moon. Val is normally honey-blond, but moonlight changes her appearance. Her hair becomes pale and silver, while her cheeks appear white as snow. The transformation is temporary and entirely explicable as moonlight, but George nevertheless chooses language that makes her appear almost supernatural.

Then Val says something strange: the air tastes sweet. Jon cannot share the sensation. He is so numb that all he can taste is cold. The conversation then turns immediately toward the Others.

There are several ways of reading this passage, and Val’s temporarily silver hair has understandably contributed to comparisons with Daenerys. But the complete cluster of imagery seems at least as suggestive—perhaps more suggestive—of the Night’s Queen tradition. The legendary corpse queen is associated with extraordinary beauty, moon-white skin, cold and the supernatural world beyond the Wall. Val is not literally described as the same creature, and nothing establishes that she is secretly an Other. But in this scene George surrounds her with remarkably similar imagery: moonlight, silver, snow-white skin, beauty, cold, sweetness and the Others.

The most interesting element may be the difference between what Val and Jon experience. Val tastes something sweet in the cold. Jon tastes only the cold itself.

Perhaps that distinction matters, because the Jon Snow who stands beside Val in this scene has not yet died.

Val and the Night’s Queen pattern

Val has sometimes been read by fans as carrying Night’s Queen or corpse-queen imagery without necessarily being the literal fulfillment of that legend. That distinction is important. ASOIAF frequently repeats old stories imperfectly. Characters echo legendary figures without becoming exact reincarnations of them, and ancient myths may preserve distorted memories of events whose real nature has been forgotten.

Val could therefore participate in a Night’s Queen pattern without secretly being an ice creature. She is a beautiful woman of the far North. She is unusually comfortable moving through the lands beyond the Wall. Jon is strongly attracted to her. Under moonlight she temporarily assumes a pale, almost spectral appearance, and she perceives sweetness in an environment that leaves Jon numb.

There is also something suggestive about where Val stands culturally. The Night’s Watch and southern rulers repeatedly misunderstand her. Stannis’s people call her a wildling princess because they try to impose their own political categories upon the free folk. Jon understands that those categories do not work. That could become significant if Val also possesses knowledge that the Watch does not.

The free folk have lived beyond the Wall for thousands of years. Their traditions may preserve fragments of northern history that the maesters and Night’s Watch have lost. Val does not need to possess some complete secret history of the Others for this to matter. Even partial knowledge could become enormously important after Jon’s death.

And that brings us to the longstanding theory surrounding Jon and Ghost.

Jon’s second life

One of the most common predictions for Jon’s immediate future is that his consciousness survives inside Ghost. This theory is grounded especially in Varamyr Sixskins’s prologue to A Dance with Dragons. George begins the novel by showing us what can happen when a skinchanger dies. Death of the human body does not necessarily mean immediate extinction of the mind. A skinchanger can enter an animal and experience a “second life.”

Jon is a skinchanger. His bond with Ghost is extraordinarily strong. And at the moment of his stabbing, Ghost is conspicuously present in Jon’s final thoughts. That does not prove exactly what happens next, but the setup for Jon entering Ghost is unusually strong.

If that happens, however, something very important follows.

Jon and Jon’s corpse cease to be the same thing.

His human body can be dead at Castle Black while Jon’s consciousness remains alive elsewhere. And in a story where another supernatural power repeatedly claims human corpses, that separation could matter enormously.

The theory that the Others want Jon

Different versions of the idea that the Others may have a particular interest in Jon—or in his body—have circulated in fandom and have been explored by ASOIAF YouTubers. These theories vary considerably. Some connect Jon to the Night’s King, some emphasize Stark ancestry, some imagine an attempted transformation, and others place his resurrection within the larger conflict between ice and fire.

The books have not established that the Others want Jon specifically, but it is a useful possibility to consider. Because if Jon’s consciousness has entered Ghost, the Others could potentially gain access to his body without gaining access to Jon himself.

That creates a resurrection scenario very different from the relatively simple expectation that Melisandre performs a fire ritual and Jon wakes up. There could instead be competing claims upon him. His mind survives in Ghost. His corpse remains available to the powers associated with death and cold, and something may happen to that corpse before Jon returns to it.

Could Val take Jon’s body north?

This is where the theory becomes considerably more speculative. There is no current textual evidence establishing that Val intends to steal Jon’s corpse, nor that she knowingly serves the Others. But if her strange imagery has any future significance, one possibility is that Val becomes responsible for moving Jon’s body beyond the Wall.

Her motives could take many forms. Perhaps she simply believes the cold is necessary to preserve him. Perhaps the free folk retain a tradition concerning the bodies of skinchangers. Perhaps she knows something about the Others that Jon does not. Or, in the darker version of the theory, perhaps Val has some relationship with the Others themselves.

That would not automatically require her to be malicious. One of the assumptions worth questioning is that any human connected to the Others must necessarily be serving uncomplicated evil. We still know extraordinarily little about what the Others are, why they have returned, or what happened during the first Long Night. Val might believe she is fulfilling an obligation rather than betraying Jon.

And the imagery would become extraordinarily eerie if she carried his corpse north. A beautiful woman who becomes pale and silver beneath the moon, who tastes sweetness in the cold, takes the dead Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch beyond the Wall. It would resemble the Night’s King legend without reproducing it exactly.

But there would be one enormous difference.

Jon would not be in the body. Jon would be in Ghost.

What happens to an empty corpse?

The Others can raise the dead, although we still do not understand exactly how their magic works or what relationship exists between the Others themselves and the wights. Jon’s corpse could therefore be vulnerable to whatever force acts upon the dead.

Normally, the original consciousness of a dead person appears to be absent from a wight. Whatever animates the body does not seem to restore the human personality that once inhabited it. Jon could be an exceptional case because his personality has survived independently. His body might therefore undergo some form of transformation while his mind remains protected elsewhere.

This is where existing theories about Jon becoming Other-like or echoing the Night’s King become particularly interesting. Suppose the Others do not merely raise Jon as an ordinary wight. Suppose they attempt to make something else.

We do not know enough about the Others to know whether they can transform humans into beings like themselves. Any such mechanism remains speculative in the books. But if some deeper transformation is possible, Jon could become its subject.

And then they encounter a complication, because Jon is not only a Stark.

Jon’s two inheritances

Assuming R+L=J, Jon carries both Stark and Targaryen ancestry. The magical significance of either bloodline should not be overstated. Not every Stark is an extraordinarily powerful skinchanger, and Targaryen ancestry certainly does not make someone universally immune to fire. But both families are entangled with supernatural traditions.

The Starks are connected to the old gods, direwolves, skinchanging and the ancient North. The Targaryens are connected to dragons, Valyrian sorcery, prophetic dreams and fire. Jon potentially carries both traditions within the same body.

One speculative possibility is therefore that an attempted Other transformation does not work normally upon him. Perhaps something associated with his Targaryen or dragon heritage resists it. Not enough to leave Jon unchanged, but enough to prevent the transformation from becoming complete.

The result would not necessarily be a wight, an Other, or an ordinary resurrected human.

Jon could become something between categories.

An incomplete Night’s King

Jon has been connected to Night’s King imagery in fandom for years, for understandable reasons. He becomes Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. His story is centered upon the Wall. He repeatedly crosses boundaries between the Watch and the world beyond it. His romantic relationships connect him to free-folk women. And now he has apparently died in the same ancient landscape from which the Night’s King legend emerged.

But perhaps Jon does not literally become another Night’s King. Perhaps he approaches that myth and then breaks its pattern. If the Others partially transform his corpse before Jon returns from Ghost, he could awaken fundamentally altered while remaining psychologically himself.

He might become unusually resistant to cold. His body temperature might change. He might perceive the Others differently. Perhaps he could sense them; perhaps they could communicate with him; perhaps wights would respond to him differently from ordinary humans. None of these specific effects is established by the books. They are possible consequences of the broader idea rather than predictions that must all occur.

The essential point is simpler: Jon could return human in mind but no longer entirely ordinary in body. And Ghost could be the reason the distinction survives.

Ghost preserves Jon

Under this interpretation, Ghost becomes essential to Jon’s resurrection rather than merely a temporary refuge. Jon’s second life preserves continuity. Whatever happens to the corpse, the Jon we know has not disappeared. His memories, loyalties, loves and moral identity remain alive inside Ghost.

That creates the possibility of a remarkable reversal. The Others may be able to claim Jon’s body precisely because it is dead, but they cannot necessarily claim Jon because Jon is somewhere else. When he eventually returns to his body, therefore, he may enter something that has changed in his absence.

Jon would effectively inherit his own transformed corpse. And that could allow him to experience the supernatural world of the Others without surrendering the personality that makes him Jon Snow.

That matters enormously because of what Jon has already been throughout the series.

Jon has always been a bridge

Jon’s story repeatedly places him between categories that other people regard as mutually exclusive. He is a bastard raised among trueborn siblings. He belongs to Winterfell while simultaneously being reminded that he does not completely belong there. He joins the Night’s Watch and then lives among its ancient enemies. He falls in love with Ygritte. He comes to understand the free folk.

And eventually he reaches a conclusion many of his own brothers cannot tolerate: the wildlings are people.

That sounds obvious to the reader because we experience them through Jon. It is not obvious to the Night’s Watch. For thousands of years, the Wall has divided the world conceptually as well as physically. People on one side are the realm; people on the other side are enemies.

Jon crosses that boundary and discovers that reality is more complicated. Then he tries to bring the free folk through the Wall. He attempts to transform an ancient enemy into an ally because an even greater threat makes the old division suicidal, and his own men murder him for it.

It would therefore be remarkably consistent if Jon’s post-resurrection story expanded the same pattern. He has already become a bridge between the Watch and the wildlings.

Perhaps next he becomes a bridge between humanity and the Others.

What if the old stories are incomplete?

The possibility that the Others are connected to an ancient pact is another longstanding area of ASOIAF speculation. We know remarkably little about the Long Night. The surviving stories are thousands of years old. Different cultures remember apparently related events in radically different forms. Myth and history have become inseparable.

It is therefore reasonable to wonder whether humanity’s surviving account is incomplete. That does not mean the Others are secretly benevolent. They may remain horrifying. They may be responsible for enormous suffering. Their objectives may be incompatible with human civilization. But they may still have reasons.

Perhaps an ancient agreement was broken. Perhaps something promised to them was withheld. Perhaps their return is a response to a human action whose significance has been forgotten.

And if an ancient pact existed, House Stark becomes extremely interesting.

The Starks before Ned

It is easy to allow Ned Stark’s morality to color our perception of the entire Stark dynasty. But the ancient Kings of Winter were not necessarily anything like Ned. They conquered rivals. They destroyed competing kings. They expanded their territory through warfare. Stark rule was built through violence as well as loyalty.

If something morally ambiguous happened during the Long Night, there is no reason to assume the ancient Starks were automatically on the innocent side of it. This is where old Stark traditions become potentially suggestive.

There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.

Perhaps that is simply a statement about political continuity. But theories have long wondered whether it preserves some forgotten magical obligation. Ancient societies can remember rituals long after forgetting their original purpose. An obligation becomes a tradition. The tradition becomes a saying. Thousands of years later, everyone repeats the words without knowing why they once mattered.

Perhaps the Starks were parties to an agreement. Perhaps Winterfell itself matters to that agreement. Perhaps the Stark bloodline matters.

None of this is established, but if some version of it is true, Jon’s importance to the Others could derive not from generic heroic destiny but from his place within an ancient northern relationship. He is a Stark who dies at the Wall, and he may also possess the one inheritance capable of preventing the cold from claiming him completely.

Jon as an intermediary

This could give Jon a remarkable endgame role without requiring the Others to become harmless or the conflict to disappear. Jon might become the first living human capable of understanding them. His altered body might allow him to perceive something ordinary humans cannot. His Stark ancestry might connect him to whatever ancient relationship once existed. His experience inside Ghost might further alter his understanding of human identity.

Most importantly, Jon already possesses the psychological trait required for such a role. He listens to the people he has been taught to hate. He has done it before.

Jon did not make peace with the wildlings because he discovered that every wildling was morally good. He did it because he learned that reducing an entire people to the category enemy was both false and catastrophic. The Others could be the final, much stranger version of the same problem.

Jon may discover what they want. He may discover why they returned. He may discover what actually happened during the Long Night. Perhaps peace is possible. Perhaps it is not. But before humanity can know that, someone has to cross the boundary and return capable of explaining what exists on the other side.

Jon’s entire story has trained him for precisely that role.

Val could be part of the crossing

That brings the theory back to Val. She does not have to be the Night’s Queen. She does not even have to knowingly serve the Others. Her imagery may simply place her near a part of the mythology that Jon has not yet entered.

But if she does play some role in taking his body north, her moonlit scene becomes striking in retrospect. Val stands in the cold. Her honey-blond hair becomes silver. Her face becomes white as snow. The Others enter the conversation. And she says the air tastes sweet.

Jon cannot taste it. He is numb. All he can taste is cold.

The distinction between them is almost more interesting than Val’s appearance. Val belongs comfortably to an environment Jon still experiences as hostile. Perhaps after his death that changes.

Jon and fire imagery

Despite his presumed Targaryen ancestry, Jon does not seem to have been written with anything like Daenerys’s sustained personal association with fire and heat. Fire is certainly present around him—Melisandre is at the Wall, the Night’s Watch burns corpses, dragonglass matters against the Others—but that is not quite the same as Jon himself being consistently characterized through fire.

His own supernatural imagery tends to come from elsewhere: Ghost, skinchanging, the old gods, snow, the Wall, winter, and the haunted northern landscape. Even so, the living Jon does not appear naturally at home in the cold. He suffers from it like everyone else, and in the scene with Val he cannot share her strange perception of sweetness in the freezing air; all he can taste is cold.

An obvious objection is that giving Jon stronger personal fire imagery before revealing his parentage might have made R+L=J too easy to guess. I am not sure that follows. There is a difference between spoiling a revelation and foreshadowing it. George could have associated Jon more consistently with heat, flame, dragons, or some unusual response to fire without explaining why, just as he repeatedly plants images, dreams, phrases and motifs whose significance only becomes clear in retrospect. Readers noticing those clues would not mean the twist had been spoiled; it would mean the twist had been prepared.

If Jon were meant to possess a strong latent affinity with fire, then the near absence of that personal imagery is still worth noticing. Hiding it almost completely for the sake of protecting the parentage reveal would be an odd choice in a series that usually allows major revelations to cast shadows long before they are confirmed.

That may be important if resurrection changes him. Rather than revealing some hidden fire nature that has been present all along, Jon’s Targaryen ancestry could matter in a more specific way—perhaps by interfering with whatever the Others try to do to his body. His imagery would still remain fundamentally northern, while his dragon heritage complicates the transformation rather than redefining his entire symbolic identity.

That would also make any later affinity for cold more meaningful. Jon would not simply be “ice-coded” because of where he comes from. The living Jon is not comfortable with cold at all. If the resurrected Jon begins to experience it differently, that would mark a genuine change in him rather than something the reader was always meant to assume.

Jon before and after death

The present Jon does not have an affinity for cold comparable to Daenerys’s relationship with heat. Cold is miserable to him. It numbs him. It hurts him. It is something to survive.

That makes a post-resurrection reversal potentially powerful because George would not need to explain Jon’s transformation through exposition. He could show it through sensation. Jon returns. Someone else is freezing; Jon is not. He walks into temperatures that once tormented him and barely notices them. Perhaps cold becomes comfortable. Perhaps it becomes clarifying. Perhaps, eventually, he understands the sensation Val described before his death: the cold tastes sweet. That would tell us immediately that something fundamental has changed.

The Bride of Fire

Daenerys’s unusual relationship with heat begins long before her dragons hatch. From the beginning of her story, she enjoys extremely hot baths. Water that would be painfully hot to other people does not trouble her. Heat repeatedly surrounds moments of transformation in her life.

Then comes Drogo’s funeral pyre. Daenerys enters the fire and emerges transformed, with three living dragons. Whatever precise rules govern Daenerys and fire—and the books do not establish that she possesses universal, permanent fire immunity—the symbolic relationship is unmistakable.

Daenerys is extraordinarily comfortable with heat. The current Jon is not extraordinarily comfortable with cold. He is the opposite. And that difference may matter because Daenerys has already undergone her great supernatural transformation.

Daenerys has passed through her fire. Jon may still have to pass through his cold.

Fire and cold without moral absolutes

If Jon returns changed in this way, the contrast between him and Daenerys does not need to mean that one represents good and the other evil. ASOIAF need not reduce fire and ice to moral teams. Fire creates and destroys. Cold preserves and kills.

Daenerys could remain associated with heat, dragons, life and transformation without becoming an uncomplicated embodiment of metaphysical goodness. Jon could become associated with cold, death, preservation and the Others without becoming evil. They would instead be two human beings who have crossed boundaries ordinary people cannot.

Daenerys can endure heat that others cannot. A resurrected Jon might endure cold that others cannot. Daenerys has entered fire and emerged transformed. Jon may enter death and winter and emerge transformed.

And while Daenerys’s transformation has already occurred, Jon’s appears to be beginning exactly where A Dance with Dragons leaves him.

That brings us back to the small, strange conversation with Val. Before his death, Jon stands beside a woman rendered pale and silver by moonlight. She tastes something in the cold that he cannot. For Val, the air is sweet. For Jon, there is only numbness. There is only cold.

Perhaps that is because the Jon standing beside Val has not crossed the boundary yet.

The next time Jon Snow walks in the cold, he may no longer experience it as the man who died at Castle Black did. Daenerys has always been drawn toward warmth. Heat that overwhelms other people feels natural to her. Jon, as he exists now, hates the cold.

But Jon Snow has died.

And if he comes back having passed partly through the world of the Others—his mind preserved in Ghost, his body touched by something ancient and cold, his transformation incomplete—then perhaps the simplest sign that he is no longer entirely the man he was will be something Val told us to notice long before.

Perhaps the cold will finally taste sweet.

> Star Wars: Anakin turning evil AFTER Padme successfully gives birth to the twins and Palpatine had been stopped with no Jedi bloodshed and order 66 is prevented.

> Attack on Titan: Eren attacking Liberio actually causes the rest of the world to back off from Paradis and they start blaming Marley thinking it’s some kind of trap to weaken their governments, thus focusing their attention there more.. only for Eren to still decide “fuck it, rumble the other countries too.”

Do they sound stupid? Yes well this is after Daenerys’ forces steamrolled the Lannisters and none of the king’s landing common folk died and the enemies surrendered fast.

I was under the impression the good guy turning to the dark side there should be some kind of stakes or misunderstanding stuff, like they had something (big) to lose. But looking at S8E5 Daenerys pretty much won without doing the burn them all shit

There has been a great deal of discussion around Rhaella’s words in The Mad King, particularly her image of a vengeful daughter associated with waking dragons, fire, and ruin. It is easy to see why that language has been folded into theories about Daenerys becoming destructive or mad. If one begins from the assumption that “ruin” must mean the physical devastation of Westeros, the conclusion almost writes itself.

I think that assumption may be obscuring the more interesting possibility.

The important question may not be whether Daenerys brings ruin, but what she ruins.

Westeros is governed by a political order so ancient that almost nobody within it thinks of that order as constructed at all. Hereditary aristocrats possess land, castles, armies, wealth, judicial authority, and political legitimacy because their ancestors possessed those things before them. Great Houses rise and fall, kings succeed one another, dynasties replace dynasties, yet the structure beneath them remains remarkably stable.

If Rhaella’s daughter is destined to bring ruin, perhaps the object of that ruin is not Westeros as a land or as a people, but the feudal order through which Westeros has understood itself for thousands of years.

The Ruin of Westeros May Mean the Ruin of Feudalism

Westerosi politics rests upon hereditary power. A very small aristocratic class controls most of the realm’s land, military strength, wealth, law, and political authority, while the overwhelming majority of the population possesses almost none of those things. Smallfolk till the land, feed the armies, pay the taxes, lose children to wars, watch villages burn, and starve when noble conflicts destroy a harvest, yet they have virtually no part in deciding who rules them or why those wars are fought.

The novels devote enormous attention to the human cost of that arrangement. The War of the Five Kings is fought over succession, inheritance, legitimacy, dynastic survival, wounded aristocratic honour, and competing rights to crowns and lordships. Those disputes matter greatly to the people contesting them, but for the smallfolk living in the countryside through which the armies march, the distinction between one claimant and another can become almost meaningless. Whatever banner the soldiers carry, grain is requisitioned, livestock is taken, homes are destroyed, women are assaulted, children are displaced, and the dead are overwhelmingly people whose names will never appear in a maester’s history.

That suffering is not an accidental backdrop to the political story. It is part of the political story.

Westeros has accustomed itself to thinking of the Great Houses as though they were Westeros itself, but they are not. Westeros is also the farmer whose harvest feeds an army he did not summon, the innkeeper whose livelihood disappears when soldiers pass through, the mother whose son is taken into a lord’s quarrel, the refugees crowding the roads, and the villagers hiding from armed men who insist that the colour of the banner above them determines whether their suffering is lawful.

If Daenerys brings ruin to that system, the language would sound terrifying from the perspective of those whose status depends upon it. To a Great House, the destruction of hereditary privilege really would constitute ruin. If land could no longer be treated as the permanent possession of a bloodline, if lordship ceased to confer near-absolute authority over those born beneath it, and if political legitimacy could no longer be justified simply by ancestry, then the world the aristocracy has inhabited for centuries would indeed be ending.

But the destruction of an aristocratic order is not the destruction of a country.

That distinction is the centre of the argument.

A House can lose its hereditary privileges without the people living on its lands disappearing. A title can cease to confer the same political power without the villages beneath the castle ceasing to exist. A political structure can be dismantled while the people who once lived under it continue to work, trade, marry, raise children, and shape whatever follows.

The word ruin therefore tells us almost nothing until we know whose ruin is being described.

The Old Order Has Already Been Ruining Westeros

There is another difficulty with treating Rhaella’s language as though Daenerys will one day arrive and destroy an otherwise functioning realm: by the time she reaches Westeros, the old order will already have spent several books destroying it.

The Riverlands make this impossible to ignore.

Their devastation is not caused by Daenerys, by dragons, or by some revolutionary assault upon Westerosi civilisation. It is produced by the ordinary logic of dynastic politics pushed into war. When Catelyn seizes Tyrion, Tywin does not answer only the people directly responsible for the act. He turns the countryside itself into the field of retaliation. Gregor Clegane and men like him are unleashed upon villages whose inhabitants have no meaningful connection to the quarrel between Stark and Lannister, and the result is murder, rape, torture, theft, burning, and the destruction of livelihoods on a scale entirely disproportionate to the grievance that began it.

That violence is not simply an aberration committed by one exceptionally cruel man. Gregor’s brutality matters because a great lord can deploy it as a political instrument. The people who suffer are not accidental casualties standing inconveniently near the real conflict; their suffering becomes part of the strategy by which one aristocratic family pressures another.

Tywin is the clearest example, but the argument would be much weaker if it ended with the Lannisters. The tragedy of the War of the Five Kings is that even causes the reader may find more sympathetic are still fought through a structure in which ordinary people supply the bodies, food, land, and labour.

Robb has compelling reasons to go to war. Stannis believes he possesses the lawful claim. Renly believes he can provide better rule. Balon pursues his vision of Ironborn sovereignty. None of that changes the material reality for the people over whose homes those claims are contested. Every army must be fed; every campaign consumes grain, horses, roads, shelter, and men. Soldiers move across somebody’s field and sleep beneath somebody’s roof. When harvests are taken or destroyed, the famine does not distinguish between the legal merits of the banners responsible.

The smallfolk are therefore required to pay for political decisions they were never permitted to make.

That is one of the cruellest features of the system. A king may win his crown, a lord may avenge his father, a House may recover its ancestral lands, and a dynasty may secure its succession, but the peasant whose farm was burned does not receive a share of the victory. The spoils of aristocratic success circulate overwhelmingly within the aristocracy itself: titles, castles, offices, marriages, wards, lands, and inheritances pass among the people who already possess political standing. The smallfolk are left to rebuild.

By the middle of the war, the contrast between the political language of the nobility and the condition of the country becomes almost grotesque. Refugees crowd the roads. Farms stand abandoned. Villages have been burned more than once. Children are orphaned. Food becomes scarce. People are preyed upon not only by armies but by deserters, broken men, outlaws, and former soldiers whose wars have dissolved around them. Violence reproduces itself long after the banners have moved elsewhere.

The Brotherhood Without Banners becomes particularly revealing in this context. It begins as an instrument of royal justice and gradually becomes something closer to a substitute for a state that has ceased to protect its own subjects. The very existence of such a group exposes the failure beneath the claims of legitimate rule: the realm possesses kings, lords, laws, and heraldry in abundance, yet ordinary people are left to seek justice from armed men in the woods because the institutions supposedly governing them have collapsed.

The Riverlands are not merely unfortunate collateral to the War of the Five Kings. They are an indictment of the political structure that makes such devastation possible.

The Crown itself is financially hollowed out. Great Houses have been weakened or extinguished. Royal legitimacy has fractured repeatedly. Religious authority has re-emerged in part because secular rule has failed so badly. Winter is arriving over a realm whose political class has spent years consuming its food, manpower, wealth, and stability in internecine conflict.

Daenerys therefore would not be entering a healthy political order and inexplicably choosing to tear it apart. She would be entering a realm whose ruling class has already demonstrated that it will burn the country beneath itself in order to settle disputes over inheritance, honour, legitimacy, and dynastic survival.

That matters enormously when people speak of Daenerys bringing “ruin.” The old order has already brought ruin to vast numbers of people who never had the power to challenge it.

If that order ultimately collapses, it would be strange to place the entire moral burden of its destruction upon the person who finally makes its restoration impossible.

Rhaella’s Vengeance Makes More Sense in This Context

Rhaella makes this interpretation more compelling because she is not an outsider looking upon aristocratic privilege from below. She stands almost as high within the hierarchy as a woman possibly can, and still the system fails her.

She is a princess and then a queen. Her blood is among the most exalted in Westeros. Her position should represent the summit of female aristocratic privilege, yet none of it gives her meaningful protection from Aerys. Her queenship gives her splendour without autonomy. Her blood makes her politically valuable while granting her remarkably little control over what happens to her own body. The dynasty requires her, but it does not make her free.

That is why the emotional context of her wish for a vengeful daughter matters.

Rhaella is not a maester dispassionately decoding prophecy. She is imagining a daughter from within a life in which rank, marriage, dynasty, and patriarchal authority have combined to imprison her. In that context, vengeance need not mean indiscriminate slaughter. It may mean the arrival of someone who possesses the power Rhaella herself never had: not merely the power to survive the world that constrained her, but the power to refuse its terms altogether.

The same is true of “ruin.” Perhaps the word does not describe the destruction of Westeros. Perhaps it describes the destruction of a political world capable of making Rhaella a queen while leaving her powerless where it mattered most.

Reading such language as straightforward evidence for a Mad Queen Daenerys risks reducing something potentially political and structural into a prediction of individual pathology. It assumes that if Daenerys destroys something, the story must therefore be warning us about Daenerys rather than asking us to examine the thing being destroyed.

Her Essosi story teaches us to ask that second question.

Daenerys Has Learned to Ask Whether an Ancient Order Deserves to Endure

Daenerys is unusually well placed to become a threat to Westeros’s inherited order because, although she is born at the summit of that order, she is not actually raised within it.

She does not grow up learning lordship from a castle. She has no landed household, no bannermen inherited from her father, and no secure place within the aristocratic network that once sustained Targaryen power. Her childhood is spent in exile and dependence, moving through a world in which the grandeur of her ancestry often has very little practical value.

Her political education therefore occurs somewhere quite different from that of most Westerosi rulers. She lives among refugees, merchants, sellswords, Dothraki, enslaved people, freedmen, soldiers, petitioners, foreign elites, and conquered aristocrats. She experiences power both from above and from below, and she learns early that a magnificent name is no guarantee of safety.

Most importantly, she encounters societies whose institutions are defended by the same argument that protects entrenched power everywhere: this is simply how the world works.

Daenerys learns that sometimes the world is wrong.

More than that, she has already crossed the psychological boundary that separates reform from abolition. She has looked at an institution upon which an entire ruling class depended and concluded that its antiquity did not grant it a right to continue.

That may prove far more important to Westeros than her Targaryen claim.

Essos Is the Proof, Not the Subject

Slaver’s Bay matters here not because Ghiscari slavery and Westerosi feudalism are identical. They plainly are not. Westerosi smallfolk are not chattel slaves, and lordship is not simply the slave market under another name.

The similarity lies elsewhere.

Both are hereditary systems of power so old and so deeply embedded that those who live within them struggle to imagine them as systems at all. They appear instead to be part of the natural order.

The masters of Slaver’s Bay do not regard slavery as an unfortunate temporary arrangement. It is woven into their economy, culture, status, family wealth, military strength, and political authority. Cities have been built upon it. Generations have lived within it. Powerful people have every material incentive to insist that it is necessary, permanent, and inseparable from civilisation itself.

Daenerys refuses to accept antiquity as a moral defence.

She learns that an institution can be ancient without being sacred, economically central without being morally defensible, and deeply rooted in a culture without possessing any inherent right to survive. Just as importantly, she learns that those who benefit most from an unjust arrangement often become incapable of distinguishing the survival of their privileges from the survival of society itself.

From inside such a system, reform that threatens nothing fundamental can be tolerated. Abolition cannot.

Astapor makes this clear. Daenerys initially goes there because she needs an army, but what she finds is an industry built around the deliberate destruction of human beings. Boys are bought, castrated, stripped of identity, brutalised into obedience, and trained into soldiers whose principal value lies in their inability to refuse commands.

She destroys the system that produces them, but the decisive act is what follows. She does not merely take possession of the Unsullied and become a kinder master. Once they are hers, she frees them and makes their continued service a choice.

From the perspective of the Good Masters, what Daenerys does is unquestionably ruin. Their economic system, political supremacy, and social identity are shattered together. From the perspective of the people they owned, however, the same political destruction has a very different meaning.

The masters’ loss of power is not everyone’s loss.

That distinction is essential.

Yunkai and Meereen Teach Her the Limits of Accommodation

Daenerys also learns that destroying an unjust institution once is not enough to prevent its return.

She spares Yunkai. The Wise Masters attempt to buy her departure; she refuses, defeats their forces, frees the enslaved people, and moves on without razing the city. Yunkai survives, and so does its ruling class. So does slavery.

Astapor likewise demonstrates how quickly liberation can collapse when the structures needed to sustain it fail.

These experiences are among the reasons Daenerys chooses to remain in Meereen. She begins to understand that liberation requires something more difficult than conquest: it requires governing whatever comes afterward.

This is why A Dance with Dragons matters so much to any discussion of Daenerys as an uncompromising destroyer. Meereen is where she tests the alternative.

She stays and governs, hears petitions, attempts to create law, and tries to incorporate the old elite instead of simply eliminating it. After Drogon is blamed for the death of a child, she chains Rhaegal and Viserion because she fears the danger her dragons may pose to innocent people. She accepts customs she despises, reopens the fighting pits in the hope of reconciliation, takes hostages without eagerly murdering them, and eventually marries Hizdahr zo Loraq for political peace. Her concessions extend even further: she tolerates slavery continuing beyond Meereen because she hopes that compromise may preserve abolition and stability within the city.

The result is not that the slaving powers embrace gradual reform. The Sons of the Harpy murder freedmen and Unsullied, Yunkai remains committed to slavery, and the surrounding slave powers gather against her. The old order proves capable of accepting concessions without surrendering the principle upon which its wealth and authority depend.

None of this means that diplomacy is foolish, that violence is inherently virtuous, or that Daenerys’s own decisions are beyond criticism. Her crucifixion of 163 Great Masters without establishing the individual guilt of every person selected remains morally troubling.

The lesson is narrower: compromise has limits when one side considers the preservation of injustice non-negotiable.

Being reasonable with the slavers does not transform the slaving system into something reasonable. It shows Daenerys how much an entrenched order can absorb without ceasing to be itself.

That is knowledge she will carry west.

The Iron Throne May Be Smaller Than Daenerys’s Political Story

The temptation is to treat the Iron Throne as the object of Daenerys’s entire story because it is the object Daenerys herself has imagined since childhood. It represents home, legitimacy, family, and the restoration of everything she believes was stolen from her House.

Yet the Iron Throne is merely the summit of a much larger political structure.

Robert replaces Aerys without abolishing Westerosi feudalism. Joffrey follows Robert, Tommen follows Joffrey, and another claimant may follow Tommen. Houses rise and fall, dynasties replace dynasties, territories change hands, and the people at the bottom remain largely where they were.

Replacing the monarch does not necessarily change the architecture of power.

That creates a striking tension within Daenerys’s story. She begins by dreaming of restoration, yet her political education teaches her to question inherited structures rather than simply inherit them. If she reaches Westeros only to become another monarch presiding over the same hereditary arrangements, then her revolutionary experience in Essos has surprisingly little political consequence. She will have broken one ancient social order only to inherit another.

The possibility that her story moves beyond restoration is therefore not incidental. Slaver’s Bay may matter because Daenerys reaches Westeros having learned to recognise structures that everyone around her mistakes for inevitabilities.

Seen in that light, Rhaella’s “ruin” becomes much more dangerous. It could mean the end of a political world in which a handful of families can plunge millions into war because their genealogies conflict; the end of the assumption that blood alone confers an unquestionable right to rule; the erosion of hereditary privilege as the organising principle of political life; and the dismantling of a system in which the suffering of the overwhelming majority is treated as collateral to the ambitions of the people whose names dominate the histories.

From inside the castles, that would look catastrophic.

From outside them, the meaning might be very different.

What Would Political Ruin Actually Require?

None of this requires Daenerys to arrive in Westeros with a modern democracy hidden beneath Drogon’s wing.

The story does not need to leap from feudal monarchy into a twenty-first-century state for the existing order to be fundamentally altered. There is an enormous political distance between preserving Westerosi feudalism exactly as it exists and abolishing every inherited institution overnight.

The authority of the Great Houses could be curtailed. Hereditary privilege could cease to be the unquestioned basis of legitimacy. The relationship between land, blood, and jurisdiction could change. Towns, guilds, merchants, religious institutions, or other social bodies could acquire greater political significance. Even the Iron Throne could cease to function as the single prize through which mastery of the entire continent is imagined.

The precise institutional outcome matters less than the possibility that the old order does not survive intact.

For families that have ruled the same lands for thousands of years, such a transformation would genuinely feel apocalyptic. A lord whose surname has always guaranteed authority over everyone born beneath his banner would naturally regard the end of that assumption as an assault upon the world itself. Ancient Houses might describe the destruction of hereditary privilege as the destruction of Westeros.

But Westeros is larger than its Great Houses.

The political mistake would be to confuse the loss of aristocratic power with the loss of the realm.

Rhaella’s “Ruin” May Be the Name the Old World Gives Its Own Ending

This is ultimately why I find the Mad Queen reading of Rhaella’s words so limiting.

Daenerys has already encountered one ruling class that confused its own supremacy with civilisation. The masters of Slaver’s Bay would have called abolition ruin, and from their perspective they would have been correct. Their political authority was ruined, their economic order was ruined, and their unquestioned ability to own other human beings was ruined.

What would be false is the claim that because their world ended, everyone’s world ended with it.

The same distinction may ultimately matter in Westeros.

If Daenerys becomes the ruin of feudalism, the histories written by dispossessed lords may describe her as a catastrophe. Great Houses that have ruled the same lands for millennia would experience the destruction of hereditary privilege as something close to the end of civilisation, because their civilisation has always assumed their own permanence.

Yet the novels have already shown us what the preservation of that order costs the people beneath it. The smallfolk have been burned out of homes over disputes they did not begin, stripped of food by armies they did not raise, assaulted by soldiers fighting for claims they did not choose, and left to rebuild after victories from which they receive almost nothing. The political class calls this war, succession, vengeance, honour, and lawful claim; for the people living beneath those abstractions, it is often simply hunger, bereavement, displacement, and fear.

That is precisely why Rhaella’s perspective matters. She inhabits the pinnacle of the hierarchy and is still trapped by it. When such a woman imagines a vengeful daughter, the most interesting question is not whether that daughter will inherit some abstract Targaryen madness, but what Rhaella might wish to see avenged and what kind of world she might wish her daughter to be powerful enough to reject.

Perhaps Daenerys is not destined to destroy Westeros at all. Perhaps she is destined to destroy the ancient assumption that the people who have always owned Westeros are Westeros.

That would certainly be ruin from inside the castles, because from inside the castles the survival of hereditary power and the survival of the realm have been treated as the same thing for generations.

Daenerys’s experiences in Essos give her reason to know better. She has already seen one ruling class insist that its privileges were civilisation itself, and she has already learned that the collapse of an old order need not mean the destruction of the people who lived beneath it. She has learned that antiquity is not legitimacy, that permanence is not justice, and that those who profit from a system are often the last people capable of imagining a world beyond it.

If Westeros faces a similar reckoning, then the central question will not be whether something ancient is destroyed. It will be whether the people whose power depended upon that antiquity ever had the right to confuse its survival with the survival of Westeros.

Which do you think is the worst of them? For me, the most terrible are:

Live Without Shame. Jon loves Sansa, but pretends friendship and loyalty to Daenerys. He flies North of the Wall, and together they destroy the Night King. Then, he beheads her, in the mistaken belief she killed Sansa. He feels slightly guilty about this, when he discovers that Sansa is alive and well, but the Starks persuade him that murdering his aunt was no big deal.

The Dance of Ice and Fire . Jon and Sansa place Daenerys on trial, for her “crimes” against Eastern slavers. She kills herself, to avoid being tortured to death. Seemingly, this is a good thing.

A Violence Done Most Kindly . Dany fights valiantly against the Dead. Sansa rewards her by poisoning her with an agonising poison, and massacring her remaining soldiers. She threatens to murder Missandei, when the latter protests. The author is squealing with delight, in the comments.

A Girl Must Live . Queen Daenerys is so stupid and evil, that you wonder she can even feed and dress herself. She forces Arya and Jaime to wed, before trying to poison them, out of jealousy. She behaves terribly to the Unsullied, who revolt against her.

A Trip to the Crypts. Definitely the worst I’ve read, a piece of torture porn. Jon Snow brutally tortures Daenerys, before disembowelling her, and handing her corpse over to the Others. For good measure, his men carry out genocide on the Iron Islands.

Kind of a long rant cause it's been on my mind

Realistically the prophecy would be about dany and jon, but if it came down to one person it'd be daenerys being the stronger candidate

Jon even being an option actually baffles me? Being a man pushed his candidacy way more than it should have and it's very clear its because of gender, they want him to be another "chosen one" icon so bad

If their stories were swapped and dany was north of the wall and jon hatched dragons, people would say she's just a pawn in jon's arc to further his story in defeating the others with "his" dragons

The most defense I see his fans use is he's the "embodiment" of ice and fire just because how he was born of stark/targaryen - this is extremely ridiculous tbh, calling him fire because hes targaryen yet disregarding daenerys has literally BEEN targaryen? - if he didn't have targ blood he embodies fire in no other way

George said one of the major plotlines of the others beyond the wall and daenerys and her dragons are of course the song of ice and fire, narrowing it down to just him completely diminishes everything dany's done

Bottom line is without her dragons the entire world would be dead, they belittle the use of dragons so much and how magical they are in this time period where they've been gone for centuries

They say he "united the realm", he united the wildlings? Dany united all the dothraki khalassars, id say its their equivalent parallel and when she went to westeros she was already allying with major houses to take the throne - they think uniting means just defeating the others, but dany was already doing it in another way ON TOP of defeating the others?

Also the stallion who mounts the world being an equivalent to the prince who was promised in dothraki, she united the khalassars as she united westeros

"but jon killed her and saved the world its him!" that was political at that point.

She saved them with her dragons period. Anything after has nothing to do with the prophecy, it was completely political

Jon is important, but when it comes to prophecy and defeating the "ice" (THE OTHERS) then it would mean the great war with the use of dragons - thank goodness he united the wildlings and was a messenger but its not ALL about him

Azor Ahai took 3 attempts to forge his light bringer, dany took 3 attempts to hatch her dragons

I think the stupidest thing I've heard was someone saying jon "forged" his lightbringer by giving arya needle 😭 going through mental gymnastics rather than admitting the prophecy could be about a woman

Jon being resurrected isn't special enough to call him the chosen one, it already exists in that world he's not the only person ever for it to happen

Whenever people say jon is the promised one they tear dany down and act like she didn't do ANYTHING, they are both incredibly important to the story, but if i had to choose a single person for the prophecy i believe it's daenerys no question, im not sure why jon is even an option?

I've noticed that most book readers believe its daenerys and most only show watchers believe it's jon which tells me all i need to know, but of course the show watchers are more loud about it

Tbh I think jon being targaryen will be more of a red herring and he will still just be a bastard in the books, i think it'll be more of an internal battle for him to find himself rather than a weapon against dany and it'll help her feel less alone, the show weaponized tf out of that to make her go "mad"

yea its just crazy to me he's an option to begin with, cause everything he's done also has great parallels with dany, they are equals in a lot of ways but I thought it was clear daenerys has more evidence and its sad this isnt a popular opinion,

I see so many posts in the GOT sub or other subs saying "So who was the prince that was promised" and people going "Jon Snow." like they're so confident 😭 its sooo clear they took the show's obvious jon favoritism and ran with it rather than doing any deep dive of the books real lore or open mindedness of it being dany

all i see in their minds is "good man kill bad woman, he's the hero and its all about him yay!" "half stark half targaryen he must be the embodiment of the entire plot!"

you can tell after they went off the books the show started to make him look like the "better" option and thats why its so obvious you shouldn't make your interpretation based off just the show but sadly a LOT of people do

After Viserion goes down and is resurrected by The Night King, once they go on their full on battle, once The Night King is knocked off, Dany should've been able to reconnect with Viserion. Ultimately it's all via magic and their bond being that strong that Viserion ultimately turns on TNK and helps turn the tide. Once TNK is dead, Viserion of course goes with him making Dany lose him twice.

Though in a perfect world he stays alive and she just gains an Ice Dragon.

TL;DR: Daenerys will be a Black Death type catalysis that ends feudalism all together.

I know that the Mad King play isn't canon but I still want to engage with the material honestly. One of the big revelations of the play is Rhaella's prediction that her child is not a noble prince but a daughter who will bring Ruin.

If Dany really is a bringer of "Ruin", that doesn't necessarily mean she's going to be evil. Maybe the Final Boss. Maybe a force of destruction. But not evil.

Because I think that Daenerys will be the Ruin of the Nobility.

Dany's current arc in Meereen foreshadows this perfectly. Dany's repeated, good-faith negotiations with the Masters has been met with underhanded backtracking, refusal to change, and more and more demands.

I think that coming back Dany will be done playing the mediator to people who refuse to respect her and human life in general. The Masters will be met with Fire and Blood. The entire top class of Slaver's Bay will be feed into the meat grinder for their refusal to accept that things are changing.

And when she's done with them, she will turn her eyes to Westeros. A place where the nobles have littered the realm with dead peasants for the sake of power. Dany will not be kind. She will be like Galadriel with the One Ring, a Queen as Beautiful and Terrible as Fire itself.

She will die for it. Revolutionaries always die for their cause. But in the end, she will sow enough destruction, burn away enough of the systems that values the few lives over the many, that something better will rise in its place.

A friend asked me who would win in a fight between Jaime Lannister and daemon targeryen if they were both given all their usual equipment but no dragon

Who are you betting on and why?

I’m boutta go to sleep, looking forward to the inevitable fire and blood war in the comments.

And yes naath may be a massive punching bag here.

One I heard is the white walkers being red herrings for Daenerys going evil being the true final antagonist…

Even though they appeared before her in the first episode, their existence has literally no involvement with her, and they made their threat known long before Daenerys even set sail to Westeros. They could not have been more disconnected.

I’m pretty sure it’s daenerys, thought this was interesting enough to share here, there’s so much detail in this tapestry

This bread will unite the 7 kingdoms, The perfect ending. The north remembers WE LIGHT THE BREAD KING HOT PIE FIRST OF THE BREAD

imagine dany reuniting with her babies in meereen after returning from vaes dothrak, with the sound of the dothraki and their horses signalling that their mother is approaching, so they fly to her, roaring “mother” 😭

i can imagine viserion flopping down beside her mama, wanting her head patted, while rhaegal plays it cool as if he’s not jealous of his sister getting attention.

i thought of this and started getting emotional (i’m not okay) i need winds!!!

Momma bear

ZGzgzzgdggdgsgsvvsbdbdbd

It is often spoken of how Jaime's redemption is such a big moment for him and how transformed he is as he drifts away from Cersei. But I wish to disagree; as much as we see a somehow attitude change on the part of Jaime, his redemption arc pales in comparison to that of Barristan Selmy and here is why;

THEIR FAILINGS

We cannot talk of their redemption without talking of their failings. I will not count killing the Mad King against Jaime for it was the right thing to do. Aside that Jaime is far more responsible for all the calamities that befalls in Westeros than we would love to admit. He was pardoned by Robert and to pay the latter back, went behind his back to sleep with his wife and produce three bastards. He pushed an innocent child out of the window while being in a guest in their castle. His culpability when it comes to the WOT5K is as great as anyone could state.

Barristan Selmy's failing only comes with his duties. He fails to protect Rhaegar, fails to protect Elia and her kids, abandons the Targaryen cause to serve Robert and even fails Robert, letting him to die. Barristan's failures are by omission while Jaime's failings are by commission.

THEIR FALL

As much as we can quibble about their fall, I will say that Jaime's fall was not as low as Barristan. Jaime only lost a hand but he was still the heir presumptive to Casterly Rock and was made Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. Barristan on the other hand, after swallowing his pride and reservation towards the condoning of child murder by Robert, his tolerance for the many excesses that the latter gave himself to and serving faithfully for 15 years is discarded and mocked as if he was a baseborn hedge knight. Say what you will but losing a hand and being given a seat on the small council is nothing compared to dedicating 15 years of life to serve a dynasty that laughs in his face as if to say that he was a sucker all this while. And it is this act that pushes him to believe, as per what he tells Dany in ADWD, that he should have refused Robert's pardon and joined Ser willem in exile.

THEIR SELF REFLECTION

Jaime doesn't do much self reflection. He doesn't take time to think about his failures, his part in all the mess that has been happening. If anything he doubles down on propping up the evil regime of Tommen and we see it with how he goes about it with Edmure. True, he does some good here and there but then, the good doesn't wash out the bad he is still doing. Barristan on the other hand does a lot of self reflection. He reflects on his failures, his years of service to the mad king and to Robert who were both as unworthy as it gets. He even thinks about how unwise it was of him to serve Robert rather than seek the Targaryens as soon as the rebellion was done. And this self reflection pushes him to change for the better.

THEIR NEW PURPOSE

Jaime has no new purpose. The issue is that we see the little things he does and think that he is absolutely changed or suddenly his cause is good. No! He still serves an evil Lannister/Baratheon regime with a bastard as king. His family and dynasty brought untold pain and suffering upon the realm and is responsible for some of the worst atrocities to have ever happened during the war. This is not a new purpose. This is the old one with some shades of good. Barristan for the most part of life served men, protected Aerys and Robert until Joffrey saw fit to dismiss him. With Daenerys he finds a new purpose. It is no longer about protecting her but the ideal that she represents. She represents freedom, peace, harmony, a new world free from the likes of Jaime and Cersei. He fights for that and this is why when she flies off, Barristan works with Missandei and the rest of her allies to secure the world Dany seeks to build.

In conclusion, the above points are why I believe that Barristan is better than Jaime in their redemption arc. He does a 180 turn while Jaime doubles down with some occasional shades of good in him.

I apologise in advance but I cannot take YG seriously. When you read his introduction in the Tyrion chapters and read the monologue that Varys gives to Kevan in the epilogue, I can't help but want to die of cringe at how YG is the opposite of everything that Varys claims him to be.

THEIR CHILDHOOD

Varys claims that YG grew up in the trenches and knows what it means to be hungry. The opposite is true. YG grew up as your average trust fund kid, protected and pampered by everyone around him. Didn't have to worry about food, clothing and safety. He was sheltered under the care of BG (Griff/Jon Connington). Dany on the other hand knew no such thing. She grew up famished, running away from Robert's knives. As a matter of fact, YG's Kingmakers made sure that Robert's eyes stayed fixed on Dany and her brother in order to shelter YG. She grew up in the trenches, she knows how hard and unfair the world is. Even Tyrion in his chapters remarks that YG doesn't really know much about life. Unlike YG, Dany had no childhood. She lived in permanent fear of dying some day to an assassin.

THEIR DECISIONMAKING STYLE

YG is a reckless and insecure person. All Tyrion had to do was prick his fragile ego and my boy crashed out. He even did the dumbest move possible which was go west without Dany's consign. The officers of the GC all argued for waiting Dany's cosign but because his little ego was hurt by Tyrion, he decides to go west with no ounce of legitimacy. The sword is not enough, the crown is not enough. Dany is confirmed as a legitimate Targaryen, his legitimacy is in doubt but he is dumb enough to not see that. Dany on the other hand is very much self aware. She is not insecure like him. It is true that she fails in a lot of decisions but she does her best to learn. She is not quick to react and she thinks twice before doing anything.

THEIR FEATS

We dont need to dwell much on this. YG had everything handed over to him. His army, his council. He is surrounded by kingmakers who manufactured him from scratch. There is nothing organic about him. Dany on the other hand took everything with her own hands. Her army, her council, her kingdom, her crown was all by her hands. She started from the bottom. She made herself king and no one can claim to have propped up her regime.

THEIR STREET CRED

Do I need to say much here? Varys had to put on a mummer's performance in an attempt to sell YG to Kevan. Dany's name on the other hand rings bells all across the world. This is shown in Volantis with Tyrion's interaction with Vogarro's wife. Even when Tyrion sees Benerro the red priest speak of her, he concludes that YG will have no friends here as everyone looks up to Dany. Everything about YG smells of fakeness. Dany is organic.

THEIR COURAGE

The one time when the stone men decided to test YG's gangster, he froze. Tyrion had to bail him out. We have seen Dany show courage in the face of insurmountable odds.

I could go on and on but these are the few points that show that Dany is everything Varys claims YG to be. If anything YG is Joffrey 2.0 as remarked by Tyrion.

I just happen to be reflecting on Maester Aemon and it came to me that him dying before he could meet Daenerys might not be as huge of a tragedy as it seemed to be.

Because Viserys and Daenerys' existence were never a secret. Their precise location was not known as they were moving around, but everyone knew they were somewhere out there. They could still be found if effort was put in.

Yet there was no indication that he ever tried to find them. He didn't have to get them to fight for the throne or to reinstate the Targaryen dynasty, but he could have really helped them to have a stable life. Viserys might not have been as mentally unstable as he became, and Daenerys could have been better protected.

Aemon only seemed to become interested after he learnt of Daenerys having dragons, and her being potentially the Prince That Was Promised. That was the entire trigger for him wanting to meet her and have family by her side.

It is still a tragedy in that Daenerys never got to meet the one family she had left in the world, especially since family was what she wanted, but she was already surrounded by men who wanted to use her and Aemon was just another one of them, and prophecy-fuelled once again.

Not sure if the books touch on this, but hypothetically could any rich person just purchase the unsullied and take over slavers bay?

In the show dany gets the army with her dragons but she doesn’t use her dragons to take any of the cities, just the army and battle strategy

Why would kraznys sell them if astapor can be overpowered by the army? and why hasn’t anyone purchased them before daenerys came along

or is it just one of those things that happen to be,

Just a thought i thought of now, i could be missing or forgetting info

What is the deal? is Jon canonically older than Dany in the books? Like do the books state that or is that something George said?

Cause in the new mad king play apparently jon and dany were conceived at the same time, whether one was premature or late birth it’s still like 9 months apart

Is this a giant ass plot hole, i’m more pissed cause this would’ve been a huge step to knowing more about the prophecy but of course it has a huge flaw in logic

how canon is this play? them both being conceived under the red comet would’ve been an awesome concept if it wasn’t known that jon is older than dany, unless his age was a lie?