Dance with dragons:
I have to say, i´m quite dissapointed with all the people implied with the Targayren-Martell marriage compromise… they all act SO dumb!.
Doran Martell: O.K. Doran, old guy, seriously; What in the seven hells made you think that living as a beggar for almost a decade would help Viserys to grow into a man fit to conquer and rule Westeros? Didn´t you think that he would rather become…I don´t know,…for example, …a sad, bitter, resentful, uneducated, untrained, weak BEGGAR!!! You didn´t need to reveal him your “master plan” (which basically implies hoping that the Lanninsters, Baratheons, Tullys, Starks and Arryns somewhat sometime destroy themselves/each other and then stepping in and claiming the spoils), all you had to do was to anonymously send him a bag of gold now and them, in the name of the “secret supporters” (just make up some group of common-born merchants and artisans who are all Targaryen supporters but can´t help him other way; Viserys already thought the commoners were on his side, anyways) or to send him a loyal exiled knight to teach and guide him (like Varys and Illyrio did to Aegon), or ASK THE FREAKING SEALORD OF BRAAVOS, WHO ALREADY KNOWS YOUR WHOLE PLAN AND MAY BE THE RICHEST AND MOST POWERFUL GUY OF THE WORLD BESIDES THE KING OF WESTEROS, TO LEND HIM SOME HELP!!!).
So, Viserys and Daenerys had to fend by themselves, sell all their heirlooms to feed and clothe themselves, and once they had sold all they had, they started to travel, asking for the assistance of the rulers of the free cities, and when those where tired of their begging, they had to rely on the charity of mere merchants, until those where also tired, and you, Doran, allowed the siblings to become the despised, pitied, laughing stock of both shores of the Narrow Sea (which will really help a lot when they try to conquer and rule Westeros), and finally Viserys was so desperate that trusted the plan of some untrustworthy (even young naïve Daenerys knew of Illyrio´s bad reputation) rich merchant to marry his sister to some savage barbarian warchief who may or may not lend him a few thousand troops (I think Drogo would have considered his part of the deal done by crowning Viserys “king” of some town or city-state like Mantarys, or maybe a weak nation like Lhazaar), and Viserys ended committing suicide by douchebaggery, and Daenerys was pregnant with Drogos´s baby (and would probably have been never allowed to go to Westeros had not suffered an assassination attempt) and king Robert was sending assassins after her and Khal Drogo was pissed and was going to burn the Seven Kingdom to ashes, Dorne included…So, when were you planning to ask Daenerys to fulfil your little marriage compromise? And how exactly were you planning to convince Drogo to divorce his wife and let Quentyn marry the mother of his son?.
Maybe I´m being unfair, maybe Illyrio´s plan caught you unaware, but if you think about it, their lineage was the only thing of value they had left, the only thing they could offer, so of course they would arrange a marriage alliance with somebody else soon of later!; in fact, had Viserys been a sensible guy instead of a nutso, he would have realized he had zero chances to reclaim the throne of his father and would have resigned himself to a marriage into a rich merchant family as trophy husband, and the same for his sister.
Everything seems to point that Doran had already renounced to fulfil the marriage alliance before the hatching of the baby dragons; the only thing I can´t understand is why he didn´t let Arianne marry Edmure Tully, Renly Baratheon or Willas Tyrell, since he apparently wasn´t going to make her marry Viserys anyways (what was he gonna do? Wait till she was forty and Viserys a grandfather before letting them marry?); it may mean that Doran can´t make a decision to save his life, that he doesn´t care the future of his daughter, or that he wants to keep her for himself (hey, this is a GRRM book, and we all know he has a thing for incest).
Quentyn Martell: I sort of sympathise with this loveshy nerdy boy, but, come on, man, if you live in a world so dangerous and unforgiving like that one, and you aren´t a badass like Jamie or Ser Barristan or a cunning mischievous lying bastard like Littlefinger or Tyrion, and you haven´t an unnatural charisma like that of Daenerys (and when I say “charisma”, I mean “hypnotic boobies”), then at least try to have some sensibility; try to be prudent, reasonable, realistic, cold-headed, try to know your limits and be dependable within your level of competency, doing your best without overreaching; not everybody can be a Khal Drogo or a Victarion and get out of most messes by raw ballassery, but you can be a Kevan Lannister, a Davos Seaworth, a Rodrik Harlaw or a Wyman Manderly (heck, Quentyn, even Samwell Tarly is more efficient than you!); being serious, careful and sensible can carry you a long way when everybody else around you think with their sword or/and their genitals.
I know that sixteen years old boys tend to do very stupid things, but it bothers me that the guy who is presented as serious and dependable, who is trusted a mission of vital importance by his father –who doesn’t trust almost anybody else –happens to be the only one that acts like a retarded hormoned jackass-video-fan teenager (and got himself roasted alive), while all the other kids behave as if they where at least five to ten years older than their real age.
I also don´t like his behaviour with respect to the marriage; he is really square-headed, and doesn’t seem able to see or understand anything besides the will of his father. Quentyn, please, think about it for a second: it wasn´t even her marriage contract to start with, and also, that woman married another man two years ago, lived with him for months, got pregnant, gave birth, lost her child, became a widow, received several marriage proposals (one of them from one of the richest men in the world), took a lover –that you know about –and married a second time, and in between marriages, had time to hatch three dragons, cross a deadly desert the dothraki themselves fear, travel through half the world, raise an army, start a war, lay waste to three city-states and conquer a kingdom; that’s not being just late, that’s being L-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-T-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E (again, how exactly were you planning to convince Drogo to divorce his wife and let you marry the mother of his son? And, what would have you done if you had gone to Qarth and found Dany carrying in her belly the baby of Xaro or another of the Thirteen?); your little piece of parchment means nothing. And that’s without taking into account that your dad let her and her brother to their own devices, living as beggars for years, and only remembered the compromise when she got dragons.
You should also realize that she has no reason to trust you: You have no proof that you are who you pretend, you could be just another assassin seeking the promised lordship, and even if Daenerys believes you are who you say, Doran is far from trustworthy: he didn’t help Aerys during the Usurper’s War, and did nothing to help her for years before she got her pets. She knows (and everybody knows too) that you and your father want her dragons, not her.
Even if Daenerys believes and trusts you, you’re asking her to leave behind her army, her devout followers, her little kingdom and her hunsband in the middle of a war, knowing that all of them will be destroyed without her; yeah, I know, Slaver´s Bay is kind of crappy, and the Seven Kingdoms are bigger and shinier, but this girl has been a homeless beggar, dreaming of a lost kingdom all her life, and now she has something real and tangible in her hands, and you expect her to discard that for the same old bunch of hopes and dreams her brother died for, and even if she doesn’t care her current throne, she may care the lives of her people, who depend on her (and no, she can’t carry to Westeros all the freedmen of Meeren in her thirteen ships even if she where able to break the blockade).
Even if Daenerys believes and trusts you, and don´t care neither her little kingdom, nor the lives of her supporters, anybody with an ounce of brains would realize that she can´t use her dragons to fight; otherwise you, your Windblown buddies and your Yunkai´i old pals would be roasted meat long ago, so, what happens when she arrives to Sunspear and tells Doran that she hasn´t any secret super-weapon to win the war for him? What, then? Will you fight for her anyways, Dorne alone against all the other six kingdoms? Will you surrender her to the Lannisters? Or will you kick her back to the Free Cities, a beggar again, having lost yet another kingdom?.
If Quentyn or his companions had some common sense, they would had stopped insisting on the marriage contract, had reaffirmed their loyalty, even without a wedding, and offered her to prepare together the reclamation of her throne, asking her only to tell them what were her plans with respect of Westeros, and them Daenerys may have shared some of her plans and thoughts, or at least, they could have gone back to Dorne and told Doran that Daenerys wasn´t going to leave Meeren (Daenerys didn´t spend any time with them, but maybe she would had done, if they had spoken with Ser Barristan and asked him to pass their message; at the very least she would have had to say clearly if she was going to leave for Westeros in any foreseeable future, before letting them go).
I think poor Quentyn had his share of daddy and self-confidence issues; if Arianne suffered from lack of paternal attention, then he probably suffered from an excess.
Yronwood and Drinkwater, Quentyn companions: I think Quentyn´s party lost their wizard and their cleric during their travel, and got stuck with a barbarian, a fighter and a cavalier (each of which had 8 in every mental attribute); and they had no rogue.
Ser Barristan: “You had best guard that tongue, ser.” Ser Barristan did not like this Gerris Drinkwater, nor would he allow him to vilify Daenerys. “Prince Quentyn’s death was his own doing, and yours.”
Gerris Drinkwater : “Ours? How are we at fault, ser? Quentyn was our friend, yes. A bit of a fool, you might say, but all dreamers are fools. But first and last he was our prince. We owed him our obedience.”
Uh…no, sorry Gerris, your liege wasn´t Quentyn, it is Doran (you know, that old crippled man who is gonna have your livers pulled out through your nostrils if he ever learns all the truth about his son´s death), and you owe obedience to the latter, and I´m fairly sure than his first priority in this matter is to get his boy back alive and safe, above getting some dragons to avenge his sister who died sixteen years ago; also, I´m quite sure he expected you adult men to give his son sound advice, and not letting him to kill himself in the silliest possible way.
If those are the best Dorne can offer, I weep for Dorne, Land Of Stupid.
Daenerys: I think most people are too hard on her; from our perspective, she is wasting time and slowing the plot, we want her to go to Westeros already, but she doesn´t now she is a character in a book, and she doesn´t know what “plot armour” is, she is trying to do the right thing, from her position and perspective.
Look at it this way: Daenerys knows that the houses Stark, Arryn, Tully, Lannister and Baratheon and her respective kingdoms/regions/provinces are against her, the Tyrell started fighting for the Targaryen during Robert´s Rebellion, but switched sides later, the Martell and Greyjoy didn´t take arms one way or another; later, she didn´t received any help from anybody from the Seven Kingdoms during her years as a beggar, and Ser Jorah told her that the commoners don´t care who is their suzerain, so she (before Quentyn´s arrival) doesn´t know if anybody will help her when she arrives there.
Her Unsullied are strong, but few, and can´t be replaced, her freedmen are untrained, her dothraki are less than a hundred of unblooded young boys, her sellswords are few and untrustworthy, she has no fleet, and her dragons are too small, weak and untrained to be of any use in the battlefield, plus she fears that the freedmen of Slaver’s Bay will be re-enslaved once she goes, and can´t fully trust Illyrio, so she decides to stay some time, organize things in Meeren –so her supporters are able to fend for themselves when she lets them alone –strengthen her army, build her fleet and let her dragons grow, so she is stronger when she finally arrives to the Seven Kingdoms; it’s a bother for us readers, but it´s a reasonable strategy from her point of view.
Later she gets really invested emotionally with Meeren, and going back to Westeros becomes secondary; it´s only reasonable, from her point of view, to care more for the kingdom she has already conquered than for the one she can´t remember and is barely a pretty dream for her.
What disappoints me is not that she cares for Meeren and refuses to abandon her supporters to destruction, it´s that she doesn´t even try to explain to Quentyn and his companions that she can´t land with her dragons in Dorne and win the war for them (she probably can´t even transport them across the ocean, they would burn the ship and she couldn´t stop them); I´m quite sure that if she had told Quentyn “I can´t transport neither my troops nor my dragons to Dorne; do you still want to take me to Dorne and start a war?” that would have given him material for thought, and may have made him a bit more reasonable. Maybe she wanted to keep it a secret that she had no real control over her beasts, but it isn´t difficult to guess, since she hasn´t used them at all, and everybody will realize it eventually; plus she never seems to doubt Quentyn sincerity, even in her inner thoughts.
No comments:
Post a Comment