Steven Atwell’s A Laboratory of Politics Part VI is quite impressive and drops quite a few well needed anvils. Yet we felt the essay to be somewhat incomplete, not through any fault of Steven’s but rather because of the breath of the subject. Steven analyzes in great detail the costs and consequences of Dany’s decisions, but he never stops to ask or explain why it is that Daenerys actually makes so many careless and compromised decisions. The end result is a catalogue of independent mistakes, the origins of which largely remain a mystery. We at Made in Myr are therefore going to build upon Atwell’s essay by providing explanations for the behavior of the various parties.
In order to understand the situation Dany finds herself in during A Dance with Dragons it is first necessary to understand the decisions she made during her rise to power in A Storm of Swords. The story is of a social revolution burdened from the start by its accidental beginnings and cascading build-up.
Daenerys did not liberate the slaves of Astapor because she emphasized with their plight. She liberated them because she felt she needed a large, loyal army and could not otherwise attain one.
Madeinmyr makes an excellent point; Dany’s motivations were not something I had time to get into in what was already an extremely long essay, but they’re vitally important to understanding this plot.
However, I do want to complicate madeinmyr’s analysis a little, because I think there’s a bit of over-emphasis on Dany’s desire to return to Westeros with an army. I certainly do not agree that Dany “did not liberate the slaves of Astapor because she emphasized with their plight. She liberated them because she felt she needed a large, loyal army.” Rather, there’s a mix of empathy/moral outrage and practical motives.
From her arrival in Astapor, Dany has a strong emotional reaction to the treatment of the Unsullied and identifies with them because of the way her brother sold her to Khal Drogo:
Did he see, or is he blind as well as cruel? She turned away quickly, trying to keep her face a mask…only then did she allow herself to say, “whose infants do they slay?”
…“Better to come a beggar than a slaver,” Arstan said.
“There speaks one who has been neither…Do you know what it is like to be sold, squire? I do. My brother sold me to Khal Drogo for the promise of a golden crown…if he had been a different man, it might have been much otherwise. Do you think I have forgotten how it felt to be afraid?”
…Ser Jorah…walked her aft. “How many men do they have for sale?”
“None.” Was it Mormont she was angry with, or this city with its sullen heat, its stinks and sweats and crumbling bricks? “They sell eunuchs, not men. Eunuchs made of brick, like the rest of Astapor. Shall I buy eight thousand brick eunuchs with dead eyes that never move, who kill suckling babes for the sake of spiked hat and strangle their own dogs? They don’t even have names, so don’t call them men, ser.”
If all Dany wanted was an army she didn’t have to pay for, she could have massacred the eight slavers and their guards there and marched out and left the city more or less intact in her wake. But instead she orders the destruction of the ruling class and the creation of a new government – both policies completely separate from her interests in returning to Westeros.
Likewise, when Dany arrives at Yunkai, there’s something about her behavior that conflicts with her "main preoccupation is still getting back to Westeros with her army.“ Namely, once she’s defeated the city and it’s open before her, she doesn’t seize their ships and leave Slaver’s Bay. Indeed, when Dany sees the slaves of Yunkai stream out of the gates, she doesn’t describe them as her army, rather she says "they are my children, Jorah.”
And that’s a rather consequential phrase for Dany, given how central the question of motherhood is to her story – as a mother who’s lost her child, who’s been prophesied as barren, children strongly motivate her. At Astapor, it was the organized murder of infants to produce the Unsullied that drove her to plan a rebellion rather than a theft (hence her desire to buy all of the child trainees, hence her command to spare all children in the massacre of the Masters). At Yunkai, the slaves become her substitute children (making the dragons her unruly middle child). At Meereen, the 163 children murdered as signposts are a clear motivation for her to conquer.
So I think there’s more going on here than a desire to get back to Westeros ASAP.
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