The next hour passed in a blur of judgement. The men in chains were led before the bench one-by-one, and kneeling next to the headless bodies, fell to their knees and begged to take the black.
Even with the shutters firmly bolted against the howling winter wind, an insistent draft pushed its way through and set the candles to guttering. Munkun snatched up the fresh vellum sheet from his desk to spare the creamy white expanse from spatters of wax, and once again resented the fact that the pressures of office had forced him to confine his writing to the dark hours of…
How much of your navy would you send to fight someone else’s battles?
Even with the alliance, none of the Three Daughters had been attacked directly by Rhaenyra (although they had beef with Daemon Targaryen, certainly), nor had direct interests at stake. It was really more of an alliance of convenience, a hope that victory would bring with it rewards, advantages, a renegotiation of the Stepstones perhaps.
The Battle of the Gullet is rather weird on the dragon angle. Given what happened in the Battle off Gulltown, you’d think the battle would be one-sided in the extreme. My guess is that GRRM wanted the battle to go one way but had already decided the numbers and dispositions of dragons.
And ultimately this is why I have a problem with the army sizes during the Dance, which in turn are part of my overall problem with the Dance as military history. Where we have numbers to tell, the armies of the Dance are pretty small by the standards of later Westerosi wars:
Battle of Rook’s Rest: >800 greens, 100 blacks.
Battle of the Gullet: ~100 ships on both sides.
The Fishfeed: At least 2000 greens, at least 3,100 blacks.
The Butcher’s Ball: 3,600 greens, ~7,000 blacks.
First Tumbleton: >9,000 greens, ~7,000 blacks.
Second Tumbleton: <= 9,000 greens, 4,000 blacks.
While one could argue that, post-Aegon’s Conquest, the Westerosi had shifted to a model of having multiple smaller armies rather than one big host to avoid losing everything to one dragon, this creates another problem.
We know from later wars that the various regions of Westeros can field much larger armies in the several tens of thousands, so if that is the case, the various regions of Westeros should have had more armies in the field at one time, and should been able to raise new armies and be ready to keep fighting.
Moreover, these numbers create new problems for historical consistency: if only 2,000 or so Westerlanders marched east with Jason Lannister, then the Westerlands couldn’t have been “thinly defended,” and so Dalton Greyjoy’s reaving should have been met by 43,000 Westermen ready to defend their homes against the 15,000 Ironborn. But since we know the Westerlands were “thinly defended,” then the casualties at the Red Fork and the Fishfeed should have been larger by at least an order of magnitude.
I didn’t mean why Daemon Targaryen was a bad person, that, as you exposed long time ago, is quite obvious. What I meant is how was he developed into such an awful person?
For example, we pretty much know Joffrey’s background, how Cersei encouraged him to think himself higher than anybody as Targaryens thought themselves higher than anyone (in a suicidical way, not like others), and how she herself thought so high that she would threaten the wetnurse, and other things, all because Tywin promised her from little to make her even more than Lannister, to make her Targaryen.
So, I hoped that you could provide some insight in how Daemon the Mocker of newborn’s corpses came to be this person. His brother was a “happy go-by” boy, why was Daemon so warlike and even deranged (even though equally charming and “sociable”)?
I see what you mean. I don’t know if there’s a straightforward answer. We know that “In his youth, Daemon Targaryen’s face and laugh were familiar to every cut-purse, whore, and gambler in Flea Bottom,” so clearly he liked to slum it to ward off boredom and enjoyed breaking social mores. We know that during the Council of 101, Daemon assembled a private army to fight it out if the Council didn’t name Viserys (and thus making him the heir to the throne).
I don’t think this is a case of nurture beating out nature – rather, I think Daemon was always temperamentally aggressive and an adrenaline junkie and never burdened much by a sense of conscience.
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