ASOIAF Central Mystery Roundup

My ASOIAF studies have outpaced my ASOIAF writings so severely that the only way I can make time to get my ideas and the results of my research out into the world is to sit down in front of the microphone and just start talking. If you want a no-frills, straight to the point crash course on how ASOIAF’s central mysteries resolve, these videos are the only places I’ve shared those ideas. There are more episodes to come, but the first two or three contain the core of ASOIAF’s surprise endings.

Part 1

https://youtu.be/DWnWS3Q967I

Part 2

https://youtu.be/5PyjKyBuA00

Part 3

https://youtu.be/WlIuPobxn7M

Part 4

Will probably be about Elia Martell and/or Rhaella Targaryen.

Part 5

I will show where and how the R+L situation is symbolized throughout the story.

Somewhere along the way I will cover the Trident more thoroughly.

Somewhere along the way I will show where and how the Tower of Joy situation is symbolized throughout the story.

I will update this page with video links when I make new videos in the Central Mysteries series.

Created Sep 20, 2025

Preview of Robert’s Rebellion Symbols

I’m finally on A Storm of Swords in my second read-through of A Song of Ice and Fire. Now that I know the answers to most of the central mysteries, one of the things I’m doing during this reread is I’m finding many places where those answers have been symbolized all along. I’m far from finished, but I thought I would share some of what I have found so far because it’s exciting. Seeing how the secrets of all these mysteries were secretly being shown to us every step of the way is really awe inspiring. It is increasing my awareness of the massive scope and beauty of ASOIAF as a work of symbolism. Anyway without further ado let me give you a glimpse of what I mean.

To understand my notes, you’re going to have to know what some of those secrets are, so I will tell you explicitly now. I used to guard these secrets closely but I don’t have the time to do them the justice I wanted to and nobody believes me anyway so it’s time to set them free.I know much more than this anyway. If you don’t want to be spoiled close out of this page now.

…

Here are a few of ASOIAF’s most closely guarded secrets about its central mysteries, meaning the mysteries about the various things that happened during Robert’s Rebellion.

1. At the Battle of the Trident, Rhaegar drowned to death because his feet were caught in his stirrups and his horse couldn’t stand up after it took a stray hit and fell over in the water.

2. Lyanna Stark was a skinchanger who skinchanged Rhaegar at the Tourney of Harrenhal, fought in the tournament and won, and placed the crown of blue roses in her own lap.

3. Rhaegar was homosexual.

4. In the riverlands, when Rhaegar and company came to arrest Lyanna for skinchanging him, Lyanna skinchanged Rhaegar again and raped herself with his body, making herself pregnant with his baby.

Mirrors That Rhaegar is Gay

Vaegon Targaryen
Signals a bunch of Rhaegar similarities (targ prince, wine pour, surprise combat training, loves books) to show you that Rhaegar, like Vaegon, was uninterested in women (vaegon = asexual, rhaegar = gay) As with Rhaegar, the audience will say Vaegon was a pervert (used porn scrolls), mirroring when they said Rhaegar was a pervert / pedo who statuatory raped Lyanna.

Gaemon Palehair
Gay man pale hair. enough said. clue that rhaegar like gaemon was being manipulated by a group of whorish power hungry women who were trying to advance feminism (make rhaenys king).

Daemon “The Fiddler” Blackfyre
is gay, mirroring that Rhaegar was gay. See: Mirrors of the Trident Battle: Daemon The Fiddler.

Loras Tyrell
gives a red flower to Sansa Stark at the Hand’s Tourney in King’s Landing. Loras is Rhaegar, Sansa is Lyanna, the red rose is the blue rose crown. Loras being gay is a clue that Rhaegar was gay, and that therefore, in both situations, the giving of the flower/s did not indicate his romantic interest in her. Sansa realizes this later when Loras comes to get her from her room and escort her to meet Olenna.

Mirrors That Lyanna Skinchanged Rhaegar

ACOK Bran I
Bran warged into Summer fighting the old wolf and winning = Lyanna warged into Rhaegar fighting Barristan and winning in the Harrenhal final tilt. Summer being “prince of the green” matches Rhaegar being prince of the kingdom. Tyrion = Lewyn because in both cases that prince is his nephew. Rhaegar is Lewyn’s goodnephew, it matches with Joffrey being Tyrion’s nephew. Bran being in an isolated tower makes this partly a TOJ parallel, because Lyanna was the skinchanger in the Tower of Joy.

Rhaenyra Targaryen and Criston Cole
At the start of the Dance of the Dragons. Rhaenyra paralyzes Criston and rapes him. I think she used the same poison that was used to castrate Varys. Varys says it paralyzes you but you can feel everything. It was probably popular in the sex circles Rhaenyra was running in during her brothel tour with her uncle Daemon.

Joffrey Velaryon
Steals his mom Rhaenyra’s dragon Syrax. Joffrey is Lyanna, she “stole a dragon” when she skinchanged Rhaegar. In FAB. Joffrey is impaled by his own sword, symbolizing when Lyanna impaled herself with her own sword, Rhaegar’s dick. There is a Tower of Joy parallel here too with the 7 queensguard and 3 of them died. 7 and 3 invokes TOJ.

Mirrors of the Trident Battle

Davos
Drowning at the Battle of the Blackwater mirrors Rhaegar drowning at the Trident. Blackwater river = Trident river. Wildfire trap and feet tying trap have trap in common. Tyrion’s chain = Rhaegar’s shoelaces practically LOL!

Dunk vs Lucas “Longinch” Inchfield in The Sworn Sword.
Two men fighting on horseback in a river. Lucas is Robert because he has a two-handed weapon. Dunk is Rhaegar because his horse takes a stray hit from the enemy’s weapon, his horse falls over in the water, Dunk’s foot is stuck in the stirrup, and he almost drowns to death.

Daemon “The Fiddler” Blackfyre
gets defeated in a joust in the rain. They call him “The Brown Dragon” because he’s covered in mud, like the mud that the horses kick up in the Dunk v Lucas scene and the Davos Blackwater scene. Daemon is the symbolic Rhaegar because he’s a Targ prince, like Rhaegar he’s trying to be king, like Rhaegar he’s trying to usurp the current king, like Rhaegar he loses the fight and gets wet and muddy, and like Rhaegar he’s gay.

Mance Rayder
when Stannis attacks the wildlings. Mance is Rhaegar, he goes into battle on a horse and his horse gets hit and goes down and then there’s watery language (steel tide washed over him). It mirrors that Rhaegar’s horse took a hit, went down, and Rhaegar drowned to death. Mance’s tent is a mirror of the TOJ, it’s a shelter that the Rhaegar symbol left to go fight a battle, and where he left a pregnant woman who’s pregnant with his baby (Dalla / Lyanna).

ASOS Samwell I
After escaping the battle at the Fist, Sam is crossing a frozen stream when a Night’s Watch man runs up and pulls him off his horse and steals his horse and rides away. Then Sam’s foot gets stuck in a root and he falls down. It mirrors Rhaegar in the Trident having his foot stuck in his stirrups, falling in the river (Trident) and drowning to death.

Created Jul 4, 2025

I cracked The Trident!

After thinking about the Trident mystery for months, yesterday I cracked it!!! I mean I figured it out. Today I spent an hour ironing it out in my ASOIAF notebook. The answers are cool and sad and dramatic and symbolic and all that fun stuff.

It was the last central mystery I didn’t know the answer to yet, so that’s why it gnawed at me for the past 6 months or so. At the rate I’m going, maybe I’ll write an essay about it in 3 years. -_-

If you want to take a crack at solving the Trident mystery yourself, the scenes I used to figure it out were:

ASOS Jon X: Mance Rayder vs Stannis’s army (Mance is symbolic of Rhaegar)
The Sworn Sword: Dunk vs Lucas “Longinch” Inchfield (Dunk is S-Rhaegar)
The Mystery Knight: Daemon “the Fiddler” vs Glendon (Daemon is S-Rhaegar)

I feel like I’m forgetting a scene but if I remember it I’ll edit and add it here.

This goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway. You also need to have a working knowledge of the information available in the main and extended book series about the Battle of the Trident.

That’s all for now.

Mood: excited

Created Feb 13, 2025

Aerys The Mad King

Calling people crazy is dismissive.

When it comes to Aerys the Mad King I pick out one specific situation that involves Aerys being evil and I ask the reader to put himself in Aerys’s shoes. I say, ‘Tell me what you would do if you were Aerys in that situation.’ Invariably, one of the things the reader will say is ‘The question is moot because I wouldn’t have made the mistakes Aerys made that led to that situation (because I’m not crazy).’

The purpose of the question is to get the reader to reconsider Aerys’s moral alignment. The question is supposed to make that easier by constraining the reader’s attention to one situation at a time, protecting his moral judgement of the one situation from being influenced by the cloud of evilness in the situations that surround it. This response shows me that the reader still has not really reconsidered Aerys’s moral alignment. The reader defers the origin point of Aerys’s innate evilness to an earlier time. Thus, the intention of the challenge is essentially dodged.

If you go back far enough to a time when Aerys’s evilness can’t be deferred to an earlier time, such as in Aerys’s childhood, the reader’s willful blindness to a sympathetic consideration of Aerys will become more obvious. Elsewise, the reader will proclaim (as though I were suggesting it) that the sympathy in Aerys’s childhood doesn’t excuse the villainy in Aerys’s adulthood! The reader is right, of course. But yet again, the reader will deliberately resist sitting with the idea of sympathy in Aerys no matter Aerys’s age, because the feeling is that to acknowledge any sympathy in any version of Aerys is to excuse or justify the evils that he did later in life.

But for someone who is seriously concerning himself with the question of how to fight evil, the question of how evil develops is where the rubber meets the road. The transition from innocent child to evil king obviously happened somewhere in-between those two points, so the questions are where? And what could Aerys have done differently to right the situation? And even, what evils were non-Aerys people doing to worsen the situation?

Thus, readers are instilled with a belief about Aerys’s moral alignment that amounts to original sin. Their treatment of Aerys is as though his evilness is inherent and innate, it has no discernable point of origin, and there is nothing to be gained in taking the question of its origin seriously. Worse, that there is something to be lost in taking the question of its origin seriously.

What is to be lost? Perhaps a stable consensus. And inasmuch as a stable society needs a stable consensus about good and evil, perhaps a stable society is at stake, too. This seems the likely function of our stubbornness about questions of morality. If we begin considering Aerys in a sympathetic light, and worse, if we succeed and find sympathy in him, couldn’t that become an invitation, nay an inspiration, to more Aeryses and evils in the future?

It’s a fair concern, and one to be taken seriously. History has no shortage of copycat villains whose manifestos tell the story of a disaffected person who came to sympathize with a notorious villain too much, and then set out to be just like him.

Yet, at the same time, aren’t we at risk of becoming stupid about the true origins and nature of evil if we misrepresent the people who did evil? If we tell each other the lie that they were evil all along? Neither has history any shortage of people who succumbed to cruelty, fear, and temptation because they had become naive about how harsh or sneaky evil can be — the almost imperceptible way ordinary everyday sins give way to extraordinary ones down the road.

If I press the issue, sometimes I may get the reader to say ‘I guess Aerys’s behavior is understandable, but I still wouldn’t have done what he did.’ Then I say ‘But if you have never experienced the same thing, how can you know for sure? These are extreme circumstances we’re talking about, here. Betrayals from lifelong friends and partners, tragic stillbirths, being kidnapped…’ And if I’m feeling snarky, I might say ‘Are you the first person who lived to never act rashly from extreme emotion?’

People ask me, ‘Why do you think the story contains a hidden sympathetic angle for the Mad King? What purpose would that serve for the story?’

Stories are how we gain a deeper understanding of people. In a story, we get to see the main characters develop gradually before our eyes. We get to vicariously experience their emotions and share in their distresses and euphorias alike. This activity gives us a kind of understanding of other lives that goes well beyond what we can get from a collection of dry facts about the same life.

Our mistake with Aerys is a natural one, but in ASOIAF it is a mistake nonetheless. We assumed Aerys’s development is not supposed to matter because we didn’t see it and he is not a main character. So, ASOIAF asks its readers an open question: How much improvement is there to be gained in our real lives if we all stopped assuming the same thing about one another?

Created Dec 31, 2024

Tower of Joy, A Study in Symbolic Interpretation – Chapter 14

Chapter 14 – The She-wolf

Previous: Chapter 13 – The Black Bat

Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction

Three Kingsguard

One of the long lasting questions about the Tower of Joy is ‘Why were there three Kingsguard, as opposed to one, two or four?’ It seems overkill for Rhaegar to have so many of his deadliest fighters devoted to guarding a 14 or 15-year-old girl and a tower in the middle of nowhere, especially while those Kingsguard could have been the difference between victory or defeat at the Battle of the Trident, as Ned and Oswell point out in Ned’s Tower of Joy dream.

“I looked for you on the Trident,” Ned said to them.

“We were not there,” Ser Gerold answered.

“Woe to the Usurper if we had been,” said Ser Oswell. (AGOT 39 Eddard X p354)

Ned’s line suggests that Ned was expecting more Kingsguard at the Battle of the Trident, and Oswell’s line suggests that Oswell would have preferred fewer Kingsguard at the Tower of Joy and more at the Battle of the Trident. So these lines steer me away from the questions “Why not four?” and “Why not more?” and toward the questions “Why not two? Or one? Or none?” What’s so important at the Tower of Joy that Rhaegar thinks two Kingsguard are not enough to guard it?

If the baby Lyanna is birthing at the Tower of Joy is Jon Snow and Rhaegar is Jon’s father, then maybe Rhaegar wanted to protect Lyanna and his son Jon. But since Rhaegar’s first son and heir (Aegon) was still alive in King’s Landing at the time, it may not make sense for Rhaegar to have placed the three Kingsguard at the Tower of Joy rather than at King’s Landing. So maybe Jon isn’t the reason. On the other hand, the Tower of Joy is more vulnerable than the Red Keep, so it might make sense after all.

The Number Three

In November 2012, a mobile phone application was released by the name of George R. R. Martin’s A World of Ice and Fire — A Game of Thrones Guide (henceforth AWOIAF). AWOIAF provided new tidbits of information that can’t be found in any of the previously published books. The information in it is considered semi-canon, because it was written by Martin’s co-authors from The World of Ice and Fire, Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson, with input from Martin himself.

In the Rhaegar Targaryen section of AWOIAF, we learn that, after the Targaryen defeat in the Battle of the Bells, King Aerys sent his Kingsguard commander Ser Gerold Hightower from King’s Landing to find and retrieve Rhaegar. Though Rhaegar returned to King’s Landing, Gerold did not. Gerold was next seen at the Tower of Joy in Dorne, with Arthur Dayne and Oswell Whent, guarding Lyanna Stark.

To judge by this information, it seems that when Gerold found Rhaegar at the Tower of Joy, Rhaegar told Gerold to stay and help guard it, and then departed for King’s Landing himself.

It’s a little strange that the commander of the Kingsguard obeys a command that keeps him far away from the king he’s sworn to protect, and during dire times such as these. It seems even stranger considering that the command comes from Rhaegar, who the king believes is trying to usurp the throne from him. Though, it doesn’t seem much stranger than Oswell Whent and Arthur Dayne doing the very same thing.

Whatever is really going on here regarding these characters’ true loyalties and motivations, I notice that this new crumb of information has the effect of highlighting a familiar-looking intrigue about the Tower of Joy: When Gerold arrived, Rhaegar left. In other words, when three guards became two, Rhaegar made it three again. Yet again, the Tower of Joy clues lead us to a question about the number of guards.

What’s so important about the number three guards? What can three guards do that two can’t?

Now that we know Lyanna was a skinchanger, we can tie a bow on this mystery, too. Three is the minimum number of guards needed to guard a skinchanger.

Think about it. Whenever a group of two or more travel companions go to sleep in dangerous territory, what do they do? One person stays awake to keep watch while the rest of the group sleeps. Halfway through the night, the watcher wakes a second person and they switch places so the watcher can get some sleep too. The purpose of this is to make sure there is always somebody keeping watch and the guards get enough sleep to function the next day.

If the group is guarding a prisoner day and night, two guards is enough guards to ensure there is always one person watching the prisoner, and each guard has a chance to sleep if they take turns. But if the prisoner is a skinchanger, two guards isn’t enough anymore. While Guard-A sleeps, the skinchanger can take the body of Guard-B, use it to kill Guard-A, then open any prison doors and manacles, and then manacle or kill himself before returning to her own body. With three guards, that won’t be possible because two can stay awake and watch each other for suspicious behavior.

So, when the third guard arrived (Gerold Hightower) that freed up Rhaegar to leave the Tower of Joy and bring battle to the Trident.

Now recall the “strange chill” that Ned felt on the way to visit the dying Robert Baratheon. It becomes even more understandable. The three Kingsguard Ned passed reminded him that Lyanna skinchanged Oswell Whent, but it did more than that. It also reminded Ned why the number of Kingsguard at the Tower of Joy had to be three. Two was not enough guards to guard a body snatching prisoner. Like so, the implicit question in Ned’s Tower of Joy line “I looked for you on the Trident” receives an answer. ‘Where were you on the Trident?’ asked Ned. ‘I was stuck here,’ each of the three kingsguard men could have answered, ‘because two isn’t enough guards to guard your sister.’

The Queen of Love and Beauty

If there is one single moment in ASOIAF that comes to readers’ minds more than any other when the phrase “Central mysteries” or “mysteries” is uttered, then I think it must be the image of Rhaegar placing the queen of love and beauty’s crown of pale blue roses in Lyanna’s lap at the Tourney of Harrenhal.

Yet when the jousting began, the day belonged to Rhaegar Targaryen. The crown prince wore the armor he would die in: gleaming black plate with the three-headed dragon of his House wrought in rubies on the breast. A plume of scarlet silk streamed behind him when he rode, and it seemed no lance could touch him. Brandon fell to him, and Bronze Yohn Royce, and even the splendid Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning.

Robert had been jesting with Jon and old Lord Hunter as the prince circled the field after unhorsing Ser Barristan in the final tilt to claim the champion’s crown. Ned remembered the moment when all the smiles died, when Prince Rhaegar Targaryen urged his horse past his own wife, the Dornish princess Elia Martell, to lay the queen of beauty’s laurel in Lyanna’s lap. He could see it still: a crown of winter roses, blue as frost.

Ned Stark reached out his hand to grasp the flowery crown, but beneath the pale blue petals the thorns lay hidden. He felt them clawing at his skin, sharp and cruel, saw the slow trickle of blood run down his fingers, and woke, trembling, in the dark. (AGOT 58 Eddard XV p526)

‘Why did he do it?’ we all want to know. Did Rhaegar fall in love with Lyanna because of her selfless deeds as the Knight of the Laughing Tree? Did Rhaegar know how insulting this would be to his wife Elia Martell? That it would be received as such a scandal? That it would start a civil war? Was Rhaegar just so obsessed with prophecy and getting his “third head of the dragon” prophecy baby that he calculated those risks and damages were worth it to, ostensibly, save the world from the Others and the Long Night?

As with the mystery of the three guards, the mystery of the queen of love and beauty can now be solved by applying what we learned in our Tower of Joy investigation. The reason Rhaegar Targaryen rode past his wife Elia Martell and laid the crown of blue roses in Lyanna’s lap was because, for that moment, Rhaegar was not Rhaegar. He was Lyanna Stark.

Lyanna reached out with her psychic skinchanging power and took control of Rhaegar’s mind and body. She jousted in the tournament, won the crown of blue roses and the opportunity to bestow it upon the loveliest woman present. Then Lyanna, as Rhaegar, rode past Rhaeger’s wife Elia Martell and laid the crown of blue roses in her own lap. Now having awarded herself with a public display of affection from the crown prince, Lyanna returned to her own body to receive her reward in full, leaving the prince atop his horse feeling “love struck” indeed.

I use the phrase “love struck” because I’m referring to GRRM’s answer to a fan question in 2016 at an International Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico.

u/dyhtstriyk

88 pts 2016

So my question was: Why do you think the political institutions in the Seven Kingdoms are so weak? His [GRRM’s] answer: the Kingdom was unified with dragons, so the Targaryen’s flaw was to create an absolute monarchy highly dependent on them, with the small council not designed to be a real check and balance. So, without dragons it took a sneeze, a wildly incompetent and megalomaniac king, a love struck prince, a brutal civil war, a dissolute king that didn’t really know what to do with the throne and then chaos. Interesting answer. [reddit]

Lyanna skinchanging Rhaegar is a resolution to the Queen of Love and Beauty mystery that will undoubtedly cause much of the ASOIAF subculture to shift uncomfortably in their seats, because it comes during the 28th year of a tradition of heaping most of the blame onto Rhaegar, and of enshrining Lyanna as simultaneously empowered and helpless, woman and child, hero and victim.

u/Salem1960s

625 pts 2023

(…) Rhaegar Targeyen was a cunt. Who looks up from a book and says: ”It seems I must be a warrior.”? That’s a fucking pompous statement, isn’t it? Forget for a moment that Lyanna was a dumb teenager in love, who may not have not known any better, essentially groomed by an adult male. Forget that for a moment. Forget about the prophecies for a moment. Let’s imagine for a moment that prophecies, or at least, that prophecy were absolute and utter bullshit. Let’s look at this in practical terms: This guy was, in all honesty, a massive fucking idiot: Reckless, impulsive, heedless, irrational, and frankly, selfish and narcissistic. He threw everything aside for a fucking prophecy that he was narcissistic enough to think was about him. And one could argue that that “prophecy” was an excuse to bang a young girl. Didn’t seem to care that his actions got his new side piece’s dad and brother killed. Oops! (…) [reddit]

A teenage girl’s desire for the most desirable man in the kingdom, in and of itself, should not be surprising. Rhaegar has the good looks, athleticism, authority, money, and prestige that has always attracted women. Yet it still surprises us, and one major reason is because it’s a reversal of our modern expectations. Wherever a man and woman are found cohabiting a scandal, our collective tendency is to assume the man is the predator and the woman is the victim. But as every sufficiently attractive, successful, and prestigious man can tell you, the truth is often quite the reverse — that the woman is the predator and the man is the object of her predation.

Sadly, most of us will never experience what it’s like to be Rhaegar-Targaryen levels of desirable to women, leaving us with little cause to consider that a woman’s desire for a man, even a 14- or 15-year-old “child-woman of surpassing loveliness” as Ned Stark puts it, is the smoking gun in a long beloved and belabored mystery. With this acknowledgement, I can see that this old mystery owes much of its fortitude to its audience’s protectiveness of women and jealousy of men alike.

In a Tower of Joy parallel at the Whispers, Brienne’s hatred of men resulted in the death of an innocent man named Nimble Dick Crabb, symbolizing that if the ASOIAF audience wants to solve the Tower of Joy mystery, we need to notice how our own hatreds of men are preventing us from discovering what happened at the Tower of Joy. In the fog of the Rhaegar and Lyanna mystery, jealous men and man-hating women have found a common cause. As one commenter all too aptly said it:

u/Usual_Jackfruit

7 pts 2023

All this subreddit do is trash on Rhaegar like he is a real person [reddit]

A New Whisper

Once more, we’ve come upon a compelling partial answer to the question of what the whispered promises were that Lyanna asked of Ned in her dying moments. ‘Promise me, Ned, that you won’t let anyone know that I skinchanged Rhaegar and crowned myself the queen of love and beauty.’

A Fledgling Philosophy

To echo something I said in Chapter 7, the first time you solve a big mystery you have your first complete model of how ASOIAF’s symbolic revelations work from bottom to top, and the things you can learn from that model will generalize to the rest of the story’s mysteries, setting in motion a gradually snowballing effect of mystery solving by improving your understanding of the story’s philosophy and your educated guesses.

We’ve got our snowball rolling at a good pace now and we have knocked down a handful of the big mysteries at the center of ASOIAF, so now is a good time to stop and ask, what do you think is the story’s philosophy? To put it another way, what attitudes in the audience are the story’s revelations consistently subverting?

Nimble Dick Crabb was being a good guide when we thought he was being a bad guide.
Brienne was being a bad knight when we thought she was being a good knight.
Rhaegar was a victim when we thought he was being a predator.
Lyanna was being a predator when we thought she was a victim.

The pattern will become easier to see if I rewrite them this way.

A man was being good when we thought he was being bad.
A woman was being bad when we thought she was being good.
A man was being good when we thought he was being bad.
A woman was being bad when we thought she was being good.

The philosophy that’s guiding all of these revelations is about men characters being better than the audience thought and women characters being worse than the audience thought. The story is implicitly suggesting that its audience, on the whole, is overcritical of men characters and undercritical of women characters. To put it another way for those who don’t like the notion that a story makes suggestions, George R. R. Martin is suggesting that his audience, on the whole, is overcritical of men characters and undercritical of women characters.

It is a simplistic philosophy, to be sure, but just like when defining a symbol, when defining a philosophy it’s good to start with a simple and straight-to-the-point description and then refine it as you go. The implicit prescription, then, is that we should become less critical of men characters and more critical of women characters, if we want to solve more ASOIAF mysteries. Because of its repetition, we can expect this philosophy to generalize to the rest of the story.* In the next chapter we’ll apply this understanding to the mysteries of Rhaegar Targaryen. “It seems I must be a warrior” the mysterious boy prince enigmatically said.

[[ * While 2-4 repititions are enough to warrant this conclusion, if tentatively, in practice I didn’t notice the philosophy until I saw it repeated across many mysteries. So admittedly I am jumping the gun with this conclusion for the sake of demonstrating an advanced stage of symbolic interpretation while constraining myself to information we’ve covered in this Whispers≈TOJ symbol investigation. A sad side effect of doing this is that I’m spending revelations that would have been more satisfying by booting up a new symbol and working up to them incrementally like we did in this essay series. For instance, a Prologue≈TOJ symbol could have taught us some of the same things we learned from Whispers≈TOJ, like that Gerold’s sword broke (like Waymar Royce) and one of Ned’s seven men did not fight (like the six Others). This would have been our predicament no matter which TOJ parallel I chose to investigate, so it was unavoidable, but hopefully the Whispers was a good choice and the surprises will still be satisfying. ]]

Next: Chapter 15 – The Dragon Prince

Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction

Created Dec 6, 2024
Updated Dec 12, 2024
Updated May 17, 2025 small fix
Updated June 2, 2025 small change

AGOT 17 Bran III

Chapter Reading:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db7oC-g8uoA&t=637s
Odysee/LBRY: https://odysee.com/@applesanddragons:f/chapter-reading-a-game-of-thrones-17:b
WordPress Embed:

Created Oct 13, 2022

AGOT 13 Tyrion II

I recorded an audio reading of this chapter with my own voice just to try it. Here’s that.

They had left Winterfell on the same day as the king, amidst all the commotion of the royal departure, riding out to the sound of men shouting and horses snorting, to the rattle of wagons and the groaning of the queen’s huge wheelhouse, as a light snow flurried about them.

George R.R. Martin is a master speedpainter with words. It never ceases to amaze me how fast he can immerse me in this world.

I’m noticing a trend with this story in which many of the chapters are structured like an optical illusion. My first impression of a chapter will be one thing, and it tends to be a resilient impression that’s difficult for me to challenge. But after I’ve challenged it seriously, my new impression is opposite or nearly opposite to the first one, yet even more resilient.

The first impression that Tyrion and Jon’s conversation leaves me with is one of disillusionment. Jon is being disillusioned by Tyrion about the venerable Night’s Watch, the fabled monsters beyond the Wall, and ultimately about his lot in life as a bastard. But the Others in the prologue give the lie to Tyrion’s assertion that the monsters beyond the Wall are not real. So do the direwolves, which are monsters in their own right.

It suggests that, while Jon may have been harboring illusions that his noble uncle Benjen is representative of most of the men in the Night’s Watch, Tyrion is harboring illusions of his own.

Tyrion’s illusions are not simply pertaining to the threats beyond the Wall, but also to the very attitudes and impulses in Tyrion that compelled him to inflate the truth beyond the limits of his knowledge. Tyrion has no first-hand knowledge of what lies beyond the Wall, because he has never been beyond the Wall, so he has less credibility on the matter than characters like Benjen and the deserter, who have both traveled beyond the Wall and attested to the existence of the Others.

So in my new interpretation, I’m left with the faint impression that maybe it’s Tyrion, rather than Jon, who is more profoundly illusioned about the world.

Jon’s illusions will last only as long as it takes him to learn that the shabby and foul-mouthed thieves, rapists and murderers who populate the Night’s Watch are also capable of great feats of loyalty, bravery, valor and honor, recontextualizing even the worst lives that mankind has to offer as redeemable, and recontextualizing the Night’s Watch as the catalyst for that redemption, and therefore as a truly noble calling after all.

The illusion that causes Tyrion, on the other hand, to believe that it’s appropriate to propel other people toward cynicism and nihilism at the earliest opportunity, seems like the kind of illusion that will be more difficult to dispel than Jon’s illusions are. I think that impulse is rooted in a deep-seeded desire in Tyrion to prove to himself, through Jon’s false enlightenment and perhaps his development and life, that life is meaningless, thereby alleviating himself of his own responsibility to embody the hero. Because if life is fundamentally meaningless, then it’s meaningless no matter what you do. And then there’s no reason in particular to do anything other than to seek cheap self-gratification, which is exactly what Tyrion does with his life.

I think one way of thinking about what it means to embody the hero is that it involves a recognition that life is arbitrary, followed by a conscious decision to do everything in one’s power to impart meaning to life anyway.

Suddenly, absurdly, Tyrion felt guilty. He took a step forward, intending to give the boy a reassuring pat on the shoulder or mutter some word of apology.

Tyrion’s guilt being sudden and absurd evokes the question of its explanation. I think Tyrion’s guilt comes from a perhaps subconscious recognition that there’s something about his message to Jon that misses the mark, and that therefore Tyrion isn’t fulfilling the second part of that description of being a hero.

Benjen Stark seemed to share his brother’s distaste for Lannisters,

I wonder if this is partly a situation where the little brother has adopted the views of his big brother. It’s possible that Ned’s distaste for Lannisters is partly misguided. Jaime later reveals that Aerys intended to burn King’s Landing, and that detail certainly stands in judgement of Ned’s distaste for Jaime. There are other reasons Ned dislikes House Lannister, but the kingslaying is one of them.

Then, since Benjen is the youngest brother, it seems likely that he would have looked up to Ned the way little brothers do. That usually includes adopting the older brother’s views and attitudes, often unchallenged and unexamined. Not that Benjen had any better access to Jaime’s side of the story than Ned did.

Perhaps he had learned a lesson. The Lannisters never declined, graciously or otherwise. The Lannisters took what was offered.

These are a few peculiar little lines, aren’t they? It’s hard to be sure what prompted them in Tyrion. Perhaps it shows his awareness of the way House Lannister interprets and acts in the world. From an authorial point of view, it seems like these lines stake out the Lannister philosophy. I think it’s useful to examine the competition of characters and their Houses as a landscape of competing philosophies about life and how to behave in it. So the Lannister philosophy includes taking every advantage life offers you, as opposed to foregoing some advantages that could be taken.

It’s a philosophy that is already shown to be different than the Stark philosophy, even at this early stage in the story. For example, Ned Stark was hesitant to allow the kids to keep the direwolf pups, and he considered it carefully and listened to the opinions of people around him before making a decision.

The “learned a lesson” part could mean a few different things. On the surface, it seems like Tyrion is proud of at least this part of his Lannisterness, which would suggest that he agrees with the Lannister philosophy of opportunism.

But in consideration of the fact that Tyrion hates his family, maybe the tone of this line is disdainful of the Lannister philosophy, rather than proud, which would suggest that Tyrion doesn’t agree with the Lannister philosophy of opportunism.

So there’s a question of which tone is mostly at work, here, the prideful one or the disdainful one? And the answer may be demonstrated in Tyrion’s advising of Jon, as well as the guilt he feels after. Because Tyrion’s advising of Jon was an instance of Tyrion acting out the Lannister philosophy of opportunism by seizing the opportunity to proliferate his nihilism by attaching it to some useful lessons like a Trojan horse. I think he agrees with the Lannister philosophy consciously, but his guilt reveals a subconscious disagreement with it.

As black as onyx, polished smooth, so the bone seemed to shimmer in the light of his torch. They liked the fire, he sensed. He’d thrust the torch into the mouth of one of the larger skulls and made the shadows leap and dance on the wall behind him. The teeth were long, curving knives of black diamond. The flame of the torch was nothing to them; they had bathed in the heat of far greater fires. When he had moved away, Tyrion could have sworn that the beast’s empty eye sockets had watched him go.

As with Viserys and Ned’s personifications of the dragon skulls, Tyrion’s personification has unique implications, too. There’s a strong sense of wonder, awe, and perhaps even longing in Tyrion regarding the skulls. Ned was discomforted by the gaze of the skulls, but Tyrion almost seems to like it. Tyrion’s earlier comment makes it clear why dragons appeal to him.

“Oh, yes. Even a stunted, twisted, ugly little boy can look down over the world when he’s seated on a dragon’s back.”

To Tyrion, a dragon’s back is a place from which to look down over the world, an ultimate way to correct for an inequality that he inherited at birth: His dwarfism. Not one man among the near four thousand men who burned on the Field of Fire would have been any less dead if the riders of Vhagar, Meraxes and Balerion had been dwarves.

It was the only time that Vhaghar, Meraxes, and Balerion were all unleashed at once. The singers called it the Field of Fire.

Near four thousand men had burned that day, among them King Mern of the Reach. King Loren had escaped, and lived long enough to surrender, pledge his fealty to the Targaryens, and beget a son, for which Tyrion was duly grateful.

In other words, if it weren’t for the subjugation of Tyrion’s ancestor King Loren, Aegon’s Conquest would have deprived Tyrion of his very existence. It’s a detail of Tyrion’s heritage that places his obsession with dragons in an ironic and self-destructive light. It suggests that he’s currently on a path that will ultimately end with him stuck at a crossroads, with subjugation on one hand and death on the other.

References to Aegon’s Conquest throughout the story are accompanied by an air of reverence, both for Aegon himself and for his measured domination of the continent of Westeros.

For a few moments, the chroniclers wrote, the conquest was at an end . . . but only for those few moments, before Aegon Targaryen and his sisters joined the battle.

Aegon’s Conquest is presented by the chroniclers in the form of a narrative that paints Aegon as an underdog who won against the odds. However, an alternative picture of Aegon’s Conquest is hinted in the juxtaposition between Tyrion’s romanticized idea of dragons as symbols of his personal liberation, and the inescapably brutal reality of flesh-and-blood human beings having feebly burned to death in dragonflame by the thousands.

If that picture of Aegon’s Conquest happens to be a more truthful characterization of history than the perhaps romanticized version that the characters and readers are led to believe, then Tyrion’s apparent role in the story as a misunderstood good guy is hinted, here, to be incomplete, with the nature of his ending perhaps hinged upon the question of whether or not he will manage to dispel the illusions that blind him to the terrible alternative picture that the symbols of his personal liberation represent. The feeling I’m left with is that Tyrion’s apparent desire for personal liberation is really disguising a desire for existential revenge.

all that remained of the last two hatchlings born on Dragonstone. They were the last of the Targaryen dragons, perhaps the last dragons anywhere, and they had not lived very long.

Viserys and Dany foreshadowing?

Jon Snow’s albino direwolf pricked up his ears at the nightly howling, but never raised his own voice in reply. There was something very unsettling about that animal, Tyrion thought.

Another reminder that Ghost is a mute.

Ghost’s muteness stands in curious contradiction to the way in which Jon discovered Ghost. Jon discovered Ghost by hearing a noise which was presumably made by Ghost. But none of the other characters seemed to hear the noise. It’s the first and major hint that the direwolves have a psychic connection with the Starks.

What these reminders are saying to the reader is “Hey, there’s a mystery you missed.” Because when I read the direwolf chapter for the first time, I didn’t know that Ghost was a mute. And even after I know it, the noise and Jon hearing it seem easily explainable in mundane terms. Jon simply heard a faint noise that the other characters didn’t. It’s the kind of thing that happens in life once in a while, so it isn’t that strange.

But as the story goes on, the evidence of a psychic connection between direwolves and Starks gradually piles up. The greatest piece of evidence is that Ghost is a mute. If Ghost never ever makes a sound, then what did Jon hear in the first non-prologue chapter of the series? There are dozens of mildly strange situations throughout the story just like that first situation between Jon and Ghost. To name another that I saw in the reread so far, Nymeria acts out Arya’s subconscious desire to stay with Jon when she follows Jon and then turns around realizing that Arya is not following him.

Based on any individual strange event, it would be difficult to make a wholly convincing case that the direwolves have a psychic connection with the Starks. But as the little oddities pile up, the pile becomes so large that the intentions of the story and the author are revealed.

The biggest problem that deniers of the direwolf-Stark psychic connection will encounter in this discussion is that, while they may be able to explain each event individually using a variety of materialistic, non-magic, non-extraordinary reasons, they will corner themselves by shrinking the possible explanations for the pattern that exists across all the events, as well as the pattern that exists across an enormous portion of readers like me, down to one possible explanation.

The pattern that exists across all the events is that, in every event, there is structural and intentional ambiguity written into the event regarding the explanation for how the direwolf knows what it appears to know. IE. If the author didn’t want any ambiguity in the event, he could have written it a different way. He could have written it so that Bran and the other characters heard the noise, too.

The pattern that exists across the readers is that a large portion of the audience interprets the direwolves to clearly have some kind of psychic connection with the Starks. I would estimate no less than half of the audience is in agreement about that.

The singular explanation that the denier is forced to use at that point is that the pattern does not really exist in the story itself. It only exists in your head and the heads of half of the audience. He discredits his interpretation of the story by proving that his interpretation cannot account for the author’s repeated behavior of creating ambiguity around the issue, and cannot account for the match between half or more of the audience’s interpretations without calling them all crazy.

Created Sep 8, 2021
Updated Sep 22, 2021 – Added Ghost
Updated Sep 24, 2021 – Added Benjen, Lannister

AGOT 12 Eddard II

“No, no, no,” Robert said. His breath steamed with every word. “The camp is full of ears. Besides, I want to ride out and taste this country of yours.” Ser Boros and Ser Meryn waited behind him with a dozen guardsmen, Ned saw.

The chapter starts out with Robert wanting to talk to Ned very privately. Not even Ned’s tent is private enough for whatever it is Robert wants to talk about. Boros and Meryn and a dozen guards are with him, which is kind of funny because it makes me wonder: Why did Robert bring so many people if he wanted to talk privately? The observation suggests that Ned noticed the same contradiction, because we’re in Ned’s POV, and observations are as good as thoughts as long as it’s reasonable to think the POV character understands the implications of what he’s observing.

Considering that the Kingsguard are sworn to protect the king, the situation suggests that the king may have told them to stay behind, or told them that he wants to go alone, but that they followed him anyway. So I think maybe it shows that the king has difficulty getting a private word with anybody.

When I consider that Robert spends most of his time in the Red Keep, which is full of eavesdroppers, political players and secret tunnels, maybe over the years Robert has developed a sense that he can’t be sure when his private words are actually private. So my impression is that Robert has identified this rural environment as a rare opportunity to have a conversation that he can be absolutely sure is private.

By then the guard had fallen back a small distance, safely out of earshot, but still Robert would not slow.

It seems like Robert is really trying to make sure the conversation is private. It’s unclear whether that’s what Robert is actually doing now, or if he’s just overcome with an urge to ride and enjoy nature. But judging by his earlier comment about ears, I think it’s a bit of both.

I also wonder if Robert’s monologue about the joy of riding is partly a performance meant to distract from his behavior — behavior which he’s afraid could appear to Ned to be paranoia. Maybe it alludes to one of the not-so-mad ways that the Mad King became paranoid when he was king, too.

The guard had reined up well behind them, at the bottom of the ridge. “Well, I did not bring you out here to talk of graves or bicker about your bastard. There was a rider in the night, from Lord Varys in King’s Landing. Here.” The king pulled a paper from his belt and handed it to Ned.

Ned still has his eyes on the guard, suggesting that his mind is still on Robert’s secrecy, which keeps the reader’s mind on Robert’s secrecy, too.

So what I’m trying to highlight is that the chapter builds up a context of secrecy and privacy. They ride out to the middle of nowhere, the wind is blowing noisily, Robert is being secretive, Ned and the reader are wondering why, we learn that one of the people in Dany’s retinue is a spy, and we even learn that there’s somebody in the king’s service known as a “master of whisperers”. So the perception being built up in the reader is: Privacy, secrecy, privacy, secrecy. We’re absolutely certain that nobody can hear what Ned and Robert are saying except Ned and Robert.

Then look what happens at the end as the conversation is winding down.

The king threw back his head and roared. His laughter startled a flight of crows from the tall brown grass.

Crows. Maybe this conversation wasn’t as private as it seemed. It’s a bit of comedy and magic that only has a chance of occurring to the reader on a re-read, after I already know that skinchanging is a part of the story.

When I think back to the handful of chapters I’ve read so far in this re-read, I can remember crows in the scene when Jaime pushed Bran from the tower. It’s still early in the story to judge for sure, but so far it seems like the crows have a knack for witnessing and hearing key events and conversations.

“The barrows of the First Men.”

Robert frowned. “Have we ridden onto a graveyard?”

“There are barrows everywhere in the north, Your Grace,” Ned told him. “This land is old.”

I didn’t really know what a barrow was. From context I thought it was a hill, but Robert seems to think it’s a graveyard. It turns out it’s kind of both. Here’s a definition I found.

a large mound of earth or stones over the remains of the dead

I thought it was mildly noteworthy that both of the conversations between Robert and Ned happened at a burial place — first in the Winterfell crypts and now in the barrowlands. I have no ideas for what the significance of that might be. Both characters die by the end of the book, so that’s good enough, I guess. It seems lacking to me, though, and my tendency is to think there’s a better answer that I haven’t found yet.

“Do you remember Ser Jorah Mormont?”

“Would that I might forget him,” Ned said bluntly. The Mormonts of Bear Island were an old house, proud and honorable, but their lands were cold and distant and poor. Ser Jorah had tried to swell the family coffers by selling some poachers to a Tyroshi slaver. As the Mormonts were bannermen to the Starks, his crime had dishonored the north. Ned had made the long journey west to Bear Island, only to find when he arrived that Jorah had taken ship beyond the reach of Ice and the king’s justice. Five years had passed since then.

I was surprised that that happened five years ago. I always assumed it happened more recently. It makes me wonder what Jorah has been doing for those fives years. Apparently he has spent enough time among the Dothraki to earn a trusted place in Khal Drogo’s inner circle. It’s maybe a little strange, considering the Dothraki stigma against wearing armor. They think wearing armor is cowardly. So as beneficial as the armor is in combat, I would’ve expected the stigma to raise the cost of wearing it among the Dothraki high enough to outweigh those benefits. Come to think of it, I think maybe Jorah does wear leather or something, and he only puts on his metal armor when he has a duty to protect someone else. I’m not sure about that but I’ll keep an eye out for what Jorah wears.

Jorah’s presence among the Dothraki is more than a little suspicious, too, considering the Westerosi stigmas against rape and slavery. I don’t think it’s fair to call what the Dothraki do with each other rape or slavery, because there are a lot of meanings in those two words for me that do not actually describe what the Dothraki are doing when they do those things. It would be like saying the horses are raping when the horses mate. But I think those meanings do hold true in the conscience of someone who wasn’t raised in Dothraki culture. It seems like Jorah may have come to live among the Dothraki to fight and fuck his way into an early grave, perhaps having given up on redemption.

“So the slaver has become a spy,” Ned said with distaste. He handed the letter back. “I would rather he become a corpse.”

“Varys tells me that spies are more useful than corpses,” Robert said.

Yeah but if Ned didn’t want Jorah dead, Jorah wouldn’t be a spy, either. Ned wanting Jorah dead was the reason Jorah had to flee.

“I will kill every Targaryen I can get my hands on, until they are as dead as their dragons, and then I will piss on their graves.”

Ned knew better than to defy him when the wrath was on him. If the years had not quenched Robert’s thirst for revenge, no words of his would help.

People tend to divide the world into good and evil, and I think that tendency, both in the characters and in the reader, is the fundamental critique that ASOIAF makes. Robert divides the world into good and evil when it comes to Targaryens. He thinks Targaryens as a collective are evil and nothing can change his mind about that. Getting Robert to look at the Targaryens as individuals, each with a unique perspective that warrants sympathetic consideration, is an impossible feat even for Ned and Jon Arryn.

So I gather that part of my job as the reader is to identify when and where the characters are dividing the world into good people and evil people. That informs me where their blind spots are likely to be, and therefore where I need to search to find what the character is missing. In the case of Rhaegar Targaryen, Robert is missing the glaringly obvious possibility that Lyanna went with Rhaegar willingly.

The act of dividing the world into good vs evil is something I sometimes refer to as moralizing or moralization. It will probably come up again, so this seemed like a good opportunity to explain what I mean by it.

“You can’t get your hands on this one, can you?” he said quietly.

The king’s mouth twisted in a bitter grimace. “No, gods be cursed. Some pox-ridden Pentoshi cheesemonger had her brother and her walled up on his estate with pointyhatted eunuchs all around them, and now he’s handed them over to the Dothraki. I should have had them both killed years ago, when it was easy to get at them, but Jon was as bad as you. More fool I, I listened to him.”

I wonder if Illyrio became aware of Robert’s hired knives lurking around his mance. If he did, maybe Illyrio was trying to protect Dany by marrying her to the Dothraki. She might be safer with the Dothraki than with Illyrio.

It’s so contrary to my initial impression of the Dothraki, but it makes sense in a lot of ways after I’ve taken a close look at Dothraki society. Hardly anybody who isn’t Dothraki themselves can infiltrate Dothraki society. Their existence is too harsh for most people to manage it. Dothraki are also virtually impossible to bribe because of the way their psychology develops in their culture. As khaleesi, Dany will be surrounded by protectors for the rest of her life, because even in the worst case scenarios the khaleesis are protected and escorted to Vaes Dothraki. Once in Vaes Dothrak they’re safe too, because they’re surrounded by the visiting Dothraki, and it’s forbidden to carry a blade in the city.

It may be too favorable a reading of Illyrio, who, according to Dany, profited enough from his part in her marriage that no additional explanation for Illyrio’s motivations is necessary. Still, Illyrio’s motivations are a constant mystery throughout the story, so I think it’s good to be on the lookout for alternate explanations.

“The barbarians have no ships. They hate and fear the open sea.”

Ned is right about that. The Dothraki fear of the sea is strong enough to prevent them from ever sailing for Westeros. If Robert’s decision to send the wine poisoner after Dany can fairly be thought of as Robert trying to prevent the Dothraki from crossing the sea, then Robert trying to prevent the Dothraki from crossing the sea caused them to decide to cross the sea.

Stannis proved himself at the siege of Storm’s End, surely.”

He let the name hang there for a moment. The king frowned and said nothing. He looked uncomfortable.

Why is Robert uncomfortable? This part made me want to know more about Robert and Stannis’s relationship. I remember that Stannis is not well liked by his brothers. Maybe that’s all this is, but it feels like it could be something more.

“The Others take your honor!” Robert swore.

This is the fifth use of “The Others take” curse in the books. I’ll try to remember to make a list of them as I re-read.

It’s a little interesting that this old curse still lingers so long after the Faith of the Seven has replaced the Old Gods religion in most places in Westeros. It’s similar to the common uses of “God” by non-theists in the curses of people in the real world. On one hand, these sayings are simply habits leftover from a time when people were more religious. On the other hand, it’s a paradox that shows the way that the culture into which we’re born can deeply characterize our behaviors, attitudes and values even when we think we’ve chosen different values.

“The Others take his eyes,” he swore. (AGOT 1 Bran I)
—Robb to Jon regarding deserter
“The Others take your mild snows,” Robert swore. (AGOT 4 Eddard I)
—Robert to Ned
“The Others take my wife,” Robert muttered sourly, (AGOT 4 Eddard I)
—Robert to Ned
“The Others take both of you,” Ned muttered darkly. (AGOT 6 Catelyn II)
—Ned to Catelyn and Luwin regarding going south
“The Others take your honor!” Robert swore. (AGOT 12 Eddard II)
—Robert to Ned regarding Lannisters

“The Others take your honor!” Robert swore. “What did any Targaryen ever know of honor? Go down into your crypt and ask Lyanna about the dragon’s honor!”

“You avenged Lyanna at the Trident,” Ned said, halting beside the king. Promise me, Ned, she had whispered.

At the beginning of the chapter there was a good example of the way the context of a situation can help me figure out what a character is thinking.

Ned was thinking about the contradiction between Robert wanting to speak privately and Robert having a bunch of guards with him. It alluded to a hidden story in which the guards may be disobeying the king in order to fulfill their duty to protect him, and perhaps to protect themselves from the repercussions they might likely suffer in the event that some tragedy befalls the king while the guards are absent, regardless of Robert’s wish to be unguarded.

These lines about Lyanna are a good example of the way a character’s thinking can help me figure out the context of a situation.

In isolation, the “promise me” sentence is completely mysterious. There’s no way to get any clues about what the promise was by looking at that one sentence. But in the context of Ned and Robert’s argument, I’m able to get some clues.

Ned is arguing that Jaime shouldn’t be made Warden of the East because the Lannisters are dishonorable because they sacked King’s Landing treacherously. Robert strongly implies that the Targaryens have no honor, citing Rhaegar’s rape and murder of Lyanna as evidence of that. Robert’s point isn’t particularly strong because it’s a two-wrongs-make-a-right argument. Ned wants to rebutt that point as strongly as he can, but the rebuttal Ned gives is weak too, in a way. He says that Robert already avenged Lyanna. It’s weak because it doesn’t contradict Robert’s point that the Targaryens have no honor. The point merely begs Robert to let go of his grudge against Targaryens as a collective, which we and Ned already know is something Robert has never been able to do.

So when Lyanna’s “promise me” line intrudes in Ned’s thoughts, it’s as though Ned is reminding himself to keep the promise. It suggests that the difficulty of keeping the promise has just surged for some reason. In the heat of the argument, that reason might likely be that Ned has a much stronger point he could have made, here, if only he were willing to break his promise to Lyanna.

For example: ‘Actually, Robert… Rhaegar didn’t rape and kill Lyanna. Lyanna chose Rhaegar over you. They had a baby and she died from childbirth.’

“I cannot answer for the gods, Your Grace . . . only for what I found when I rode into the throne room that day,” Ned said. “Aerys was dead on the floor, drowned in his own blood. His dragon skulls stared down from the walls. Lannister’s men were everywhere. Jaime wore the white cloak of the Kingsguard over his golden armor. I can see him still. Even his sword was gilded. He was seated on the Iron Throne, high above his knights, wearing a helm fashioned in the shape of a lion’s head. How he glittered!”

“This is well known,” the king complained.

This is good. I get to compare Ned’s version of the story to Dany’s version of the story from AGOT 3 Daenerys I. Here it is again.

Yet sometimes Dany would picture the way it had been, so often had her brother told her the stories. The midnight flight to Dragonstone, moonlight shimmering on the ship’s black sails. Her brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper in the bloody waters of the Trident and dying for the woman he loved. The sack of King’s Landing by the ones Viserys called the Usurper’s dogs, the lords Lannister and Stark. Princess Elia of Dorne pleading for mercy as Rhaegar’s heir was ripped from her breast and murdered before her eyes. The polished skulls of the last dragons staring down sightlessly from the walls of the throne room while the Kingslayer opened Father’s throat with a golden sword. (AGOT 3 Daenerys I)

Dany presumably heard the story from Viserys, so this is Viserys’s version of the story.

Ned’s version is more reliable in some ways. For example, I was skeptical that Jaime’s sword was golden until I heard it from Ned. Ned is giving a first-hand account of the event, and I’ve seen that Ned is an honest person. Viserys and Dany’s accounts are second- and third-hand accounts, because neither of them were actually there at the time to witness what happened in the throne room.

There were also a bunch of soldiers in the throne room by the time Ned arrived, so that’s probably how certain details of the story travelled, such as Jaime’s sword being golden.

Both versions of the story personify the dragon skulls, describing them as if they’re alive and watching.

The polished skulls of the last dragons staring down sightlessly from the walls of the throne room

“His dragon skulls stared down from the walls.”

“I rode the length of the hall in silence, between the long rows of dragon skulls. It felt as though they were watching me, somehow.”

I wouldn’t have expected that from Ned’s version. I would have guessed that the skulls in Viserys’s version were dramatized because the skulls have more meaning to him as a Targaryen. But Ned is not a Targaryen, yet the personification is present in his version too. So maybe it means Ned is a Targaryen! Just kidding.

Maybe the author is just reusing the personification for no great reason in particular. Then it doesn’t really mean anything. That’s certainly possible. But, to me, it’s the least interesting explanation, and this author does a great job of making his story interesting. So it seems less reasonable to suppose that the similarity means nothing than it does to suppose that it means something more than, say, authorial laziness, descriptive consistency or idle coincidence.

It’s a very specific kind of similarity. Viserys and Ned aren’t merely noting that there were dragon skulls on the walls, they’re both personifying them as if the dragons are watching the murder of King Aerys and what is ultimately the fall of the Targaryen dynasty. Since the dragon is the sigil of House Targaryen, the skulls could be symbolic of dead Targaryen ancestors. I think the personification of the dragon skulls evokes the idea that the Targaryen ancestors are watching and judging.

It breathes life into all kinds of questions, like:

What would Targaryen ancestors think of Aerys?
What would they think of Jaime killing him?

Each Targaryen ancestor might think differently about those things.

Would things have turned out differently if House Targaryen’s dragons were still alive?

One thing that might have turned out differently is the killing of Aerys. But the quality of Aerys’s reign is another thing that might have turned out differently, because dragons would have had a major effect on the outcome of certain events and challenges that Aerys faced. Even Aerys’s development as a child is one of the things that might have turned out differently, because growing up in a family with living dragons would have been different than growing up in a family with dead dragons.

So the personification of the dragon skulls causes my imagination to reach into many other aspects of the story. And if this is what it does to me, then it gives me insight into what is happening in the minds of Viserys and Ned.

Viserys is entertaining thoughts of revenge. He’s probably thinking that the Kingslayer never would have dared to depose a Targaryen king if the dragons were still alive. Viserys may be imagining what harm a dragon could do to the likes of Jaime, Robert, Ned and Tywin.

Ned’s thoughts, on the other hand, are somewhere between ominous and respectful. There’s a sense of superstitious dread regarding the dragon’s judgement of Ned and Jaime below, as Ned walks the entire length of the throne room. And there’s also a sense that Ned has respect for the dynasty that he has helped to overthrow. Ned’s respect is apparent in the fact that Ned included the dragon skulls in his description. It’s a subtle confession of his uneasiness under the stare of the skulls and therefore their power to influence him. After a Targaryen reign that lasted nearly three-hundred years, the gravity of a moment like this would bear heavily on any rebel who has some sense.

Maybe Viserys and Ned’s matching personified descriptions of the dragon skulls are the story’s way of announcing that ASOIAF is a story where two identical observations can have different implications when made by different people.

Created Jun 23, 2021

Dany’s First Dream

This is a deep analytical dive into Dany’s first dream in AGOT 11 Daenerys II that I did during a re-read. As with most things, it is best read after reading the chapter. But rejoice, for there be dragon in it. Enjoy!

Yet that night she dreamt of one. Viserys was hitting her, hurting her. She was naked, clumsy with fear. She ran from him, but her body seemed thick and ungainly. He struck her again. She stumbled and fell. “You woke the dragon,” he screamed as he kicked her. “You woke the dragon, you woke the dragon.” Her thighs were slick with blood. She closed her eyes and whimpered. As if in answer, there was a hideous ripping sound and the crackling of some great fire. When she looked again, Viserys was gone, great columns of flame rose all around, and in the midst of them was the dragon. It turned its great head slowly. When its molten eyes found hers, she woke, shaking and covered with a fine sheen of sweat. She had never been so afraid . . .

I’m a big lover of metaphor and symbolism. I like to abstract what the words mean a lot. But I’ve learned that I tend to get too abstract too fast. Usually I find that a grounded look at the dream or prophecy has more information in it than I found before I became ungrounded in my thinking and began looking for symbolic meanings. I find that the grounded interpretation provides invaluable starting points and guard rails to prevent me from wandering too far into abstract nonsense. So now I try to start as grounded as I can be.

The first question I have is: Are the events in the dream connected? Because maybe they aren’t. Maybe they’re flashes of random images, memories or events that don’t necessarily relate to one another. There’s a pivotal phrase in the dream that actually answers that question for me:

As if in answer,

It ties the second half of the dream to the first half, even if only through suggestion. Dreams are made of suggestion, so suggestion is plenty to go on. The second half is presented as potentially a consequence of the first half. And it inherently creates a mystery. The mystery is: Was the dragon a response to something Dany did? Like closing her eyes and whimpering?

So the parts of the dream are related, and it’s a causal relationship, which suggests that the dream is chronological too, because an effect can only occur after its cause.

So the dream tells a story. It’s a simple story, but I think it provides the overarching framework for how to approach it. The story is roughly: Dany is being abused by Viserys, then a dragon appears and rescues her from Viserys. There’s room to quibble about the details, like maybe the dragon is motivated by hunger rather than rescue, but that’s a good enough starting point. If I get stuck later I can return to this spot and challenge assumptions like that that I’ve made.

Viserys was hitting her, hurting her. She was naked, clumsy with fear. She ran from him, but her body seemed thick and ungainly. He struck her again. She stumbled and fell. “You woke the dragon,” he screamed as he kicked her. “You woke the dragon, you woke the dragon.” Her thighs were slick with blood.

The next question I have is whether or not the first part of the dream is something that really happened. After all, a dream that depicts an event that really happened in Dany’s past would be a dream that’s more grounded in reality and lends itself more to literal interpretation than a dream that depicts an event that didn’t really happen in Dany’s past and lends itself more to symbolic interpretation. So I would like to start with the most literal interpretation to see how it holds up.

When I recall the previous Daenerys chapter, AGOT Daenerys I, I find a line that confirms that the abuse that Viserys is visiting upon Dany in the first half of the dream has already happened in reality.

His anger was a terrible thing when roused. Viserys called it “waking the dragon.” (AGOT Daenerys I)

So as it turns out, I was asking the wrong question. I asked whether or not the first part of the dream is something that really happened, but given as fact that it has really happened already, the question I should ask now is how much sense it makes to suppose that the first half of the dream is not depicting it? It’s the kind of abuse that is so traumatic and memorable that the idea that the dream is not depicting it is revealed to make little or no sense at all.

So the first half of the dream is in fact a real memory — or majorly derived from one — of something that happened to Dany in the past.

There’s one part of it that actually tells me when it happened. And it might even give me a big hint about why it happened.

Her thighs were slick with blood.

Remember, I learned in AGOT Daenerys I that Dany has already “had her blood.”

“She has had her blood. She is old enough for the khal,” Illyrio told him, not for the first time. (AGOT Daenerys I)

So maybe Dany received this attack when she had her blood. And maybe the reason for the attack had something to do with her having her blood.

There are a number of questions that can come out of that, like: Did Viserys not want Dany to have her blood yet? If so, why not? Did Dany say or do something that set him off? What is that likely to be? Then I can look at Viserys’s character and his rampages to see what kind of things actually set him off, to help me make a better guess at what set him off in the past. But I’ll shelve that for now so I can finish the dream.

She was naked, clumsy with fear.

Dany being naked in the dream could mean Dany was actually naked at the time of this attack, or it could be a manifestation of Dany’s feelings of vulnerability from the day/time when she’s having the dream. But the second one is a symbolic interpretation, and I’m trying to stay grounded. So I’ll suppose that Dany is actually naked in the dream and at the time of the attack.

“Clumsy with fear” also seems to track with vulnerability.

She ran from him, but her body seemed thick and ungainly.

“Thick and ungainly” tracks with vulnerability too. She’s trying to run away from Viserys but she’s immobilized by her body. Maybe “having her blood” is what slowed down her body.

He struck her again. She stumbled and fell. “You woke the dragon,” he screamed as he kicked her. “You woke the dragon, you woke the dragon.”

Then Viserys strikes Dany again and she stumbles and falls while he kicks her and screams “You woke the dragon.” More rampage, more vulnerability.

The first half of the dream was pretty easy to understand. I think if I had launched into metaphorical interpretation too quickly, I would have missed the possibility that the first half of it was something that really happened.

Onto the second half!

She closed her eyes and whimpered. As if in answer, there was a hideous ripping sound and the crackling of some great fire. When she looked again, Viserys was gone, great columns of flame rose all around, and in the midst of them was the dragon. It turned its great head slowly. When its molten eyes found hers, she woke, shaking and covered with a fine sheen of sweat. She had never been so afraid . . .

Dany closes her eyes and whimpers, no doubt a response to being kicked and shouted at. I want to point out that each sentence logically follows from the one before it, and that’s how I can tell that the events are all happening in the same scene and chronologically, rather than being random flashes of unrelated or loosely related images. I don’t have any reason in particular to think that Dany closing her eyes and whimpering is not caused by Viserys’s rampage, or that “As if in answer” is not referring to Dany closing her eyes and whimpering.

there was a hideous ripping sound and the crackling of some great fire.

Dany’s eyes are closed now. I’ve seen everywhere else in the story that the story sticks to a POV writing style in which the amount of information that the reader is allowed to perceive is strictly limited to what the POV character can perceive. So when Dany closes her eyes, she loses vision, and so do I. Instead, there are only sounds to go by.

As of this line, there’s nothing I’ve seen yet that could reasonably explain these two sounds. Neither Viserys nor Dany are the sort of things that would make a hideous ripping sound or a fire sound. So the line immediately creates a question of: What the heck is going on out there, beyond Dany’s closed eyes?

When she looked again, Viserys was gone, great columns of flame rose all around, and in the midst of them was the dragon.

Dany opens her eyes, and I see some big clues to help me answer the question. Viserys is gone and there’s a dragon where he was standing, surrounded by great columns of flame that presumably surround Dany, too.

So maybe the hideous ripping sound was the dragon eating Viserys. Maybe it was the dragon’s wings when he flew in. Maybe it was the sound of the dragon magically appearing, as things can do in a dream. Or maybe it was Viserys transforming into a dragon. Those are a few ideas that occur to me.

Considering that Viserys was attacking Dany, I feel safe to assume that Viserys was facing Dany. And since Viserys was facing Dany, I think the dragon is not Viserys, because the dragon had to turn its head to look at Dany.

It turned its great head slowly.

So that strongly suggests that the dragon was not facing her, and so the dragon is not a transformed Viserys. With that possibility ruled out, I can see that the only possibilities remaining that make sense to me are the ones in which the dragon got rid of Viserys. Maybe he squashed him, burned him, or ate him, I don’t know. But Viserys is definitely gone, so is Dany’s problem, and the dragon definitely did it. dragon flying 200

When its molten eyes found hers, she woke, shaking and covered with a fine sheen of sweat. She had never been so afraid . . .

The dragon looks Dany in the eyes, and then she wakes up. Here I learn that the dragon’s eyes are molten. His molten eyes and great head are the only identifying characteristics I get to see. Since there are only a few known living dragons in the story, as of ADWD, that’s plenty of information for me to narrow down the possibilities.

Viserion: When Dany passed his eyes came open, two pools of molten gold. (ADWD Daenerys I)
Drogon: His scales were black, his eyes and horns and spinal plates blood red. (ADWD Daenerys IX)
Drogon: His eyes were molten. I am looking into hell, but I dare not look away. (ADWD Daenerys IX)
Drogon: In the smoldering red pits of Drogon’s eyes, Dany saw her own reflection. (ADWD Daenerys IX)

Two of Dany’s dragons have eyes that are described as molten. Since the dream doesn’t say gold, and since Drogon is Dany’s main dragon and largest dragon, I think the dragon in the dream is most likely Drogon.

As an aside, that gives me an idea of how long this story is willing to withhold some of its secrets. The color of Drogon’s eyes aren’t given until ADWD, that I could find. So if the dragon is Drogon, the identity of a dream dragon in the first book is held in ambiguity until the fifth book.

she woke, shaking and covered with a fine sheen of sweat. She had never been so afraid . . .

When Dany woke she was shaking, sweaty and she had never been so afraid. It doesn’t seem like part of the dream, but since dreams are made of suggestion I think it’s fair to say that the way she feels in the dream is part of the dream. And when the way she feels immediately after the dream matches with the way she felt in the dream, it’s fair to say that is a product of the dream and therefore part of the dream, too, at least for my purpose of trying to understand it.

Phew. So that is the most grounded version of my interpretation of Dany’s dream. So far, I haven’t tried to explore symbolic meanings of the dragon, of Viserys, of the blood or anything. The dragon is very much a dragon, not three dragons or a symbolic representation of power or anything like that. Viserys is very much Viserys, not Drogo.

But when I look at the dream in the context of the chapter, I can see why I would tend to want to interpret the dream in the context of Dany’s marriage to Drogo. The marriage is the premiere event of the chapter. It’s certainly where Dany’s fear is placed in the chapter. Look what the story is doing immediately after the dream.

She had never been so afraid . . .

. . . until the day of her wedding came at last.

The ceremony began at dawn (…)

The story deliberately pulls my attention back to the wedding before I’ve had time to give the dream due attention in the context of Viserys’s actual death and the greater story.

Our author is a sly man, indeed. But don’t let me jump the gun. I’m not finished with this dream yet!

Using the powers bestowed upon me by Daenerys V, I can see that this dream foreshadows a whole lot about Viserys’s death. Viserys wasn’t killed by Drogon, but he did die, and that’s significant enough to call this dream foreshadowing of it. What catches my attention the most is how Dany’s role in the dream mirrors her role in Viserys’s death.

In both situations, there’s an impenetrable layer of ambiguity regarding the question of Dany’s involvement with Viserys’s death. In the dream, the ambiguity is created with the phrase “As if in answer.” At least a few questions come out of that, like: Did Dany somehow summon the dragon? Did she want it to kill Viserys? How does she feel about it afterwards?

At Viserys’s execution, the ambiguity is created in a number of ways, and the same questions are present.

Did Dany somehow summon Drogo? — Dany translated Viserys’s damning insults and threats from the common tongue to the Dothraki tongue for Drogo, and the reader is left in the dark about whether or not Dany used the opportunity to try to save Viserys’s life, or at least earn him a less painful execution, by softening or changing Viserys’s words through the translation.
Did Dany want Drogo to kill Viserys? — Another layer of ambiguity is the question of to what extent, if any, a khaleesi is culpable when her khal executes her brother.
How does Dany feel about it afterwards? — And another layer of ambiguity is the question of why Dany insisted on watching the execution when Jorah advised her to look away.

He was no dragon, Dany thought, curiously calm. Fire cannot kill a dragon. (AGOT Daenerys V)

So what the dream and Viserys’s execution have in common is ambiguity surrounding Dany’s involvement in Viserys’s death. That ambiguity may very well be another thing that the dream foreshadows.

When I look at Viserys’s death in Daenerys V, an obvious symbolism grabs my attention. Drogo is the person who killed Viserys, and Drogon is named for Drogo. So that seems to retroactively confirm that the identity of the dragon is Drogon.

Taking a step back, my initial tendency, based on the context of the chapter, was to see Viserys in the dream as a symbolic representation of Drogo, because Dany is afraid of marrying Drogo, and Dany is afraid of Viserys, so the most obvious relationship between Drogo and Viserys is that Dany is afraid of both of them. But when I consider the dream in context of a greater portion of the story, it turns out that the dragon is a symbolic Drogo, and that Drogo plays a more protective role in the dream than a threatening one.

This is one of countless expressions of the Good and Evil theme that I’ve stumbled across in my journeys analyzing this story . It was my prejudgement that “Drogo is a scary bad guy” that blinded me to the possibility that “Drogo is a protective good guy” in the dream.

Looking back on the whole investigation, I can see the way that my revelation with the dream mirrors my revelation with this chapter. Drogo is built up in Dany’s thoughts as a scary figure who might hurt her.

“I am the blood of the dragon,” she whispered aloud as she followed, trying to keep her courage up.

I’m instilled with a sense of dread for the consummation of the marriage, because Dany is understandably afraid of it throughout the chapter and leading up to it.

“No?” he said, and she knew it was a question.

When Drogo asks the question, it shows that Drogo cares about Dany’s feelings and respects her freedom to refuse him if she wants to.

Dany recognized it as a question and therefore as respect for her feelings, driving home the loudest implication of the whole sex scene from beginning to end: “You and Dany were wrong about Drogo!” Drogo’s every Dothraki word and touch stands in contradiction to Dany’s and the reader’s expectations of him.

She took his hand and moved it down to the wetness between her thighs. “Yes,” she whispered as she put his finger inside her.

And that’s why Dany became comfortable enough with Drogo to become aroused and consent to sex in unmistakable terms. The lesson of the chapter is “You and Dany were wrong about Drogo.” The lesson of the dream is the very same one. I think it’s a good example of the way the story conceals its bigger mysteries, such as those found in the symbolic images of dreams and prophecies, by hiding them in the fog created by the reader’s unchallenged perceptions.

Another thing I notice is that my adherence to a grounded interpretation was, in the end, rewarded with some pretty awesome and resilient symbolism. (Dragon=Drogo) I think that’s a pattern in the story too. The story seems to reward the reader for walking a middle path between taking things too symbolically and taking things too literally.

That’s all I have for now. Thanks for reading!

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Created Jun 15, 2021
Updated Dec 1, 2021 – Clarified some parts

AGOT 11 Daenerys II

for the Dothraki believed that all things of importance in a man’s life must be done beneath the open sky.

The story communicates so much about the Dothraki with just one line. Dothraki place a lot of value in their traditional beliefs, ceremonies, manhood, and they like the outdoors. They also may worship the sky, or a god in the sky, or maybe there’s more to it. Since light comes from the sun, moon and stars, a roof would block out the light. So maybe it has something to do with a relationship between light and truth. Being able to see everything clearly would be a good idea during the most important moments of my life. I don’t know if that’s right, but I’m intrigued by different cultures. It’s fun to try to figure out why groups can develop such different belief systems.

“Best we get Princess Daenerys wedded quickly before they hand half the wealth of Pentos away to sellswords and bravos,” Ser Jorah Mormont jested. (…)

Magister Illyrio laughed lightly through his forked beard, but Viserys did not so much as smile. “He can have her tomorrow, if he likes,” her brother said. He glanced over at Dany, and she lowered her eyes. “So long as he pays the price.”

In my strained attempts to see things from Viserys’s point of view in a sympathetic way, I was thinking…

Viserys takes on the attitude that he doesn’t care about Dany or what happens to her. But the attitude is so extreme that it seems absurd, unnaturally so. The “and their horses too” line is the pinnacle of that. Now that I re-read the part above, it seems like Viserys’s I-don’t-care-about-her attitude is actually a way that Viserys is trying to convince himself that he doesn’t care about her, as a way to cope with losing her.

Viserys grew up with the expectation that Dany was going to be his wife. He has been taking care of Dany since he was eight years old, taking her along with him everywhere he goes, making sure she’s taken care of, teaching her about their family history and so on. He started to blame Dany for his mother’s death, and he became abusive toward her. Implicit in the abuse is a lie that his problems are Dany’s fault. So that’s a really old lie that Viserys has been acting out for a long time. He scapegoated her. But now that he’s facing the actuality of losing her, his genuine feelings for Dany are at odds with his self-delusional narrative that she’s the problem. So the strength of Viserys’s insistence that he doesn’t care about Dany is proportionate to the strength with which his deep seeded love for Dany is flaring up at the prospect of losing her to Drogo. He’s losing her as a sibling companion, a wife, and a scapegoat.

Considering that, it’s no wonder why Viserys is so offended that he has to wait to be “paid” for her. He didn’t realize how much he valued what he had until he already agreed to losing her.

I analyzed Dany’s dream, but the analysis got kind of long and took on a life of its own, so I put it on its own page here: Dany’s First Dream

I’m trying to track the way chapters shape and control the reader’s perceptions, so this is a list of lines that do that. They drive a sense of dread for the marriage and consummation. It’s a perception that’s built up constantly throughout the chapter, and then subverted at the end when Drogo’s gentleness, patience and respect stand in criticism of ours and Dany’s expectations of him.

Daenerys Targaryen wed Khal Drogo with fear and barbaric splendor (…)
(…) Illyrio said. “He will have the girl first, (…)
She had never been so afraid . . .
. . . until the day of her wedding came at last.
She did her best to hide them, knowing how angry Viserys would be if he saw her crying, terrified of how Khal Drogo might react.
I am blood of the dragon, she told herself. I am Daenerys Stormborn, Princess of Dragonstone, of the blood and seed of Aegon the Conqueror.
Drogo watched without expression, but his eyes followed their movements, and from time to time he would toss down a bronze medallion for the women to fight over.
(…) pushed her down to the ground, and mounted her right there, as a stallion mounts a mare.
(…) the winner took hold of the nearest woman— not even the one they had been quarreling over—and had her there and then.
As the hours passed, the terror grew in Dany, (…)
She was afraid of the Dothraki, whose ways seemed alien and monstrous, as if they were beasts in human skins and not true men at all.
Most of all, she was afraid of what would happen tonight under the stars, when her brother gave her up to the hulking giant who sat drinking beside her with a face as still and cruel as a bronze mask.
I am the blood of the dragon, she told herself again.
And after the gifts, she knew, after the sun had gone down, it would be time for the first ride and the consummation of her marriage. Dany tried to put the thought aside, but it would not leave her. She hugged herself to try to keep from shaking.
He lifted her up as easily as if she were a child and set her on the thin Dothraki saddle, (…)
“Please him, sweet sister, or I swear, you will see the dragon wake as it has never woken before.”
The fear came back to her then, with her brother’s words. She felt like a child once more, only thirteen and all alone, not ready for what was about to happen to her.
“I am the blood of the dragon,” she whispered aloud as she followed, trying to keep her courage up. “I am the blood of the dragon. I am the blood of the dragon.” The dragon was never afraid.
She felt as fragile as glass in his hands, her limbs as weak as water. She stood there helpless and trembling in her wedding silks while he secured the horses, and when he turned to look at her, she began to cry.

I have a lot to say about Dany’s three weapon bride gifts, but it seems I have already said it! It can be found in Dothraki Superstition: Bride Gifts.

And for the first time in hours, she forgot to be afraid. Or perhaps it was for the first time ever.

Great line. Among other things, I think it’s a clue that Dany’s fear is chronic, being derived from her life with her brother, and therefore somewhat unreliable.

I have a pretty strong Dany bias, and it has taken me a long time to get to a point where I can look at her character with as critical an eye as I can with other characters. So what I’m trying to do in this re-read is to make a concerted effort to disconfirm that bias. I’m deliberately trying to see things through lenses that are critical of Dany. It’s a difficult thing for me to manage, but I gather that the story challenges the reader to do it, in order to find a more complete picture of the story.

So that’s why I’m not spending much time looking at Dany through a sympathetic lens. I’m already very sympathetic to her. In fact, not many types of characters or people are more sympathetic to me than a young girl. There’s a protective feature in me and in most men (that some people are all too eager to conflate with sexual motivations.) But I think my greater sympathies for females, young people, and young females are part of the reason why my favorite characters tend to be young girls: Arya and Dany. Even Sansa has grown on me in this re-read. Another reason is common interest and personality. Dany and Sansa are very interested in stories, Arya is very interested in people, and I’m very interested in stories and people.

One problem with making criticism primary in my approach to something is that it inevitably causes me to overshoot the target. I’ll tend to veer into too-critical interpretation, overcompensating for my bias.

So I haven’t actually solved the bias problem by trying to disconfirm my Dany bias. All I’ve done is adopt a new bias. But that’s the only way to do it, because that’s how the human mind works. It’s really good at championing one idea and trying to make everything else fit into it.

Because of that, I fully expect my criticisms of Dany to go a little too far once in a while, because there’s no other way to do it. If I allow my sympathetic eye to interfere with my critical eye then I’ll sabotage my ability to see the most substantial of the critical interpretations that I haven’t seen yet.

So the best, truest and most complete interpretations live at the midpoint between those two biases. After I’ve allowed both the sympathetic eye and the critical eye to have their turn, then I still have to weigh the two interpretations against each other, negotiate the differences to figure out what it is, exactly, that I really think about the character or the situation. Doing that properly becomes less impossible only gradually over the days, months and years that pass as the critical or sympathetic attitude’s possession over me subsides. This is definitely a kind of story where the reader’s interpretation is meant to evolve and mature along with him.

In Dany’s first chapter, I did a little bit of testing of the idea that Dany is ungrateful for the marriage. I went through the chapter and gathered up lists of all the gifts she received as a consequence of the betrothal, and all the slaves and servants who served her in some way. So I’m going to make the same kind of lists for this chapter. Dany’s gifts, treasures, servants and slaves could stand in criticism of her fear, attitudes and faulty assumptions about the wedding, Drogo, the Dothraki people and things like that, both in the past and in the future. I predict that I’ll be glad to have these lists for future reference.

Three handmaids: Irri, Jhiqui, Doreah
Small stack of books: Westerosi histories and songs
Great cedar chest bound in bronze
Piles of the finest velvets and damasks the Free Cities could produce
Three petrified dragon eggs
Slippers
Jewels
Silver rings for her hair
Medallion belts
Painted vests
Soft furs
Sandsilks
Jars of scent
Needles and feathers and tiny bottles of purple glass
A gown made from the skin of a thousand mice
A prized horse: Silver

Noteworthy quotes:

The gifts mounted up around her in great piles, more gifts than she could possibly imagine, more gifts than she could want or use.

When he returned, the dense press of Dothraki giftgivers parted before him, and he led the horse to her.

Food was brought to her, steaming joints of meat and thick black sausages and (…)

Created Jun 14, 2021
Updated Jun 15, 2021 – Small clarifications and expansions, moved Dany’s dream
Updated Jun 19, 2021 – Expanded