Favorite knight would be Dunk or Brienne. Note that the true knights are not knights.

Favorite lord would be Davos, the loyalest vassal in all of Westeros.

joannalannister:

To be very clear about the situation, I have never contacted YouTube about Preston Jacobs. His latest youtube conspiracy theory that I am “going after” him and that I have “filed false claims” against him is not true, and frankly, it is laughable. 

I quoted his public reddit AMA on my blog. I was shocked by his cavalier responses on reddit, and I expressed my shock on my blog. I think it is morally wrong to make money off ASOIAF artists without at least asking their permission first, no matter how small the amount of money being made. I believe Mr. Jacobs’s theories are crack. I stated these opinions on my blog. 

I have never contacted YouTube. I have never done anything to Preston Jacobs, other than state my opinions on my blog. His accusations that I have tried to have him shut down are false. 

Enjoy your conspiracy theories, Mr. Jacobs, but leave me out of them next time.

Amen. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that an ASOIAF conspiracy theorist would respond to an event in his own life with a conspiracy theory, but it is pretty damn rich. 

It’s quite possible, yes. Ironically, Cersei is the only one of them who thinks about creating a Lannister Bank of Casterly Rock, which would be an excellent idea if she hadn’t created total political chaos before she had that idea.  

He’s not. Only Rickard Karstark calls him that, and GRRM has said in the SoSpakeMartin files that Rickard Karstark was a desperate man in pain, lashing out at everything around him, trying to inflict as much damage as he could. 

Second cousins don’t count. If they did, all of Westeros is cursed.

I think that’s a fair guess – certainly, GRRM seems to have been marked by his own time and the war in Vietnam laid a long shadow over his generation. 

Yes that’s true. If you want to survive as a pirate, and it’s a possibility although still a gamble, you look for political patronage and adopt the title of privateer. Hence Henry Morgan as Governor of Jamaica. 

But I don’t know if Aurane will be able to pull that off – declaring yourself King of the Waters suggests really oversized ambitions. 

Well, the Saans have managed to survive. I was more speaking in terms of historical examples. A lot of your famous pirates – your Blackbeards, your Calico Jack Rackhams, your Captain Kidds, Your Anne Bonnys and Mary Reads – ended their lives rather violently. 

madeinmyr:

The Masters and the free born citizens of Yunkai, Meereen, Astapor, and New Ghis are members of the artificial Ghiscari culture, which requires a vast population of slaves for internal use and foreign export. These slaves are not considered part of Ghiscar’s culture, but, rather, its raw materials and products, in effect regulating them to a completely separate country which one might call anti-Ghiscar. Anti-Ghiscar is defined both by its enslavement to Ghiscar and by the existential inferiority the Masters attribute to and impose on it in order to justify, reinforce, and maintain said enslavement. This anti-Ghiscar is necessary for the support of Ghiscari culture but at the same time is always threatening to break free and negate what it supports. Hence Ghiscar is constantly locked in never ending and extremely violent conflict with anti-Ghiscar in order to keep it under control.

Now, when one moves from the ideological reality imposed by the slaver class to the lived reality of the slaves things are a bit messier. Many slaves partake in aspects of Ghiscari culture…

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that some of those slaves/freedmen in the back dream not of a world without Masters but of sitting in the Master’s seats.

In the liberation of Astapor most of the aristocracy and its enforcers were massacred, though the families survived in their prepubescent children. What follows is the world literally being turned upside down. Cleon the Butcher takes power with a cleaver, distributes the pyramids to various armed gangs, and turns the upper class boys Dany spared into new Unsullied (ending once and for all the great bloodlines of Astapor). Steven Atwell gets one thing wrong when he writes “the slaves of Astapor violently reject this culture the moment they have a chance” (A Laboratory of Politics Part VI). Only some of the slaves do. King Cleon and his ambassador Lord Ghael illustrate how there are many freedmen who creatively emulate rather than reject the culture of their former masters.

Madeinmyr makes a good point here – I think I somewhat overextended my argument in my efforts to argue against a simplistic conception of an “authentic” Ghiscari culture that Dany has no right to interfere with. 

However, I think there’s a real question as to whether “some” or “many” seek to emulate rather than reject Ghiscari culture. Cleon and Ghael aren’t elected leaders – Cleon rose to power through a violent coup d’etat and Ghael is his lackey. Certainly the Astapori refugees who flee his coup and arrive in Meereen to take shelter with Dany don’t share his vision of a new slave class and a new master class. Nor did the tens of thousands who followed her from Astapor to Yunkai. 

Likewise in Meereen, while it’s true that some freedmen attend the fighting pits, they number perhaps a few hundred in a city of several hundred thousands. Contrast those few hundred with the 4,000 Brazen Beasts who follow the Shavepate in opposition to the Great Masters and their culture, or the 6,000 who join the Free Brothers, the Mother’s Men, and the Stalwart Shields, whose very names speak to a devotion to freedom and Dany as a symbol of revolution. Likewise, it’s true that some slaves sell themselves back into slavery, but they are the well-educated minority; the tens of thousands of slaves who labored in the countryside rejoice when they have the opportunity to farm their own land without chains on their legs. 

asoiafuniversity:

madeinmyr:

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.