Post by markg171 on Mar 18, 2016 5:07:29 GMT
Introduction
The purpose of this essay will be to examine the possibility that Daenerys Targaryen, protagonist of our beloved ASOIAF novels, is not actually Daenerys Targaryen. Well more specifically, that she’s not the Daenerys Targaryen born of Aerys and Rhaella like she thinks she is. To do this we will examine the following areas that cast doubt on Dany being who she thinks she is
• Aerys and Rhaella’s history of troubled conceptions
• Dany’s official timeline vs what she remembers
• Jon being 8-9 months older than Dany
• The storm that marked Dany’s birth
• Willem Darry
• Lemongate
• Dany and Viserys being robbed by their servants
• Illyrio
Following all of this, we will examine a few proposed alternative parentages that I believe are the most likely options, before concluding with a brief summary of the essay.
Aerys and Rhaella’s history of troubled conceptions and births
As we can see from the above, Aerys and Rhaella had an extremely difficult time conceiving children. While we don’t know when exactly the two married beyond that it was pre-259AC given that Rhaegar’s born that year, we do know that between 259AC-284AC they officially have 3 children. Those children of course being Rhaegar, Viserys, and Dany.
Yet as you can tell from the title of this essay it’s Dany that I want to examine, and more specifically her parentage. Or rather, her real parentage. Because again, prior to Dany, in 25 years of marriage they managed to produce 2 children… and 7 stillbirths, miscarriages, and children dead in the cradle. Yet suddenly, in House Targaryen’s greatest hour of need Aerys manages to finally successfully impregnate Rhaella and she happens to successfully deliver the child who’s the girl named Daenerys Targaryen in our story? I call BS.
And really, you should too, and I hope you do once you realize the staggering amount of things in our Dany’s story that simply do not at all make sense, and precisely don’t make sense because she’s not who she thinks she is.
Let’s start with Dany’s own timeline that she tells us in her first chapter, and compare it with what she actually remembers doing in her later chapters.
Dany’s official timeline vs what she remembers
As we can see, Dany’s official itinerary is Dragonstone -> Braavos -> Myr -> Tyrosh -> Qohor -> Volantis -> Lys -> Pentos, where her story starts in AGOT. Seems all well enough, except for one problem: Dany later remembers having made a trip to Braavos when she was too old to fit this itinerary
As we saw in her first chapter, she says that they ran from Braavos and then went to a bunch of different places. But never once that they returned to Braavos. Yet here’s Dany, I don’t know, maybe age 4 or 5, or something like that, on a trip to Braavos. How? Did she just forget to include in her first recalling of everywhere she’d been that she’d been to Braavos multiple times and that her memory of their wanderings isn’t correct? Or is it more likely that she actually remembers the one, and only trip she ever made to Braavos. And it’s obviously not when she was a newborn child.
Also, look at any map and try and follow that route that Dany says she did, of Dragonstone -> Braavos -> Myr -> Tyrosh -> Qohor -> Volantis -> Lys -> Pentos. It makes absolutely no sense, especially given the above quote that says that she “crossed it (the narrow sea) half a hundred times”, meaning that they were sailing quite often to their destinations.
Dragonstone to Braavos? Sure it’s an easy trip to make, but why would you ever go to Braavos with the last two dragonlords in the world? Braavos is literally founded by descendants of dragon haters.
Braavos is NOT a safe haven, or at least it really shouldn’t be. Yes the Sealord later witnesses a pact between Viserys and Arianne, so it’s possible that that particular Sealord was Valyrian friendly, but most Braavosi are not, and Darry should have zero idea if this Sealord will be Valyrian friendly. So why was Braavos picked? It’s an odd choice for the last two dragonlords in the world to do to for safekeeping.
Next up we’ve got Braavos to Myr. I’d say though that you probably stopped in at Pentos after Braavos actually, seeing as you have to sail by Pentos to get to Myr in the first place. So that’s a little odd. They could’ve hired the ship to sail straight to Myr of course, but why skip Pentos? What brought them straight to Myr over Pentos? Pentos has tons of nobility, we know this, and Viserys should know this too. Yet they go to Myr instead of Pentos.
Then we’ve got Myr to Tyrosh. Now this actually ties into why they went Braavos to Myr in the first place as well, but this doesn’t actually make much sense that Myr came before Tyrosh. Tyrosh is closer to Braavos, not Myr. You’d have to literally sail within sight of Tyrosh to get to Myr. The itinerary should really go Braavos -> Tyrosh -> Myr, not Braavos -> Myr -> Tyrosh.
Next we have Tyrosh to Qohor. Again, this doesn’t make much sense. Qohor is inland in Essos, and more specifically looking at a map, if you’re travelling from Tyrosh, you’re either stopping in at Myr or Pentos first before you ever get near Qohor. Which supports the previous paragraph’s assertion that there’s better ways to accomplish their itinerary, and this supports this as this itinerary means they’ve got to stop at Myr twice now, or possibly Pentos again if they ever stopped there on the way after Braavos. But again, there are far more efficient trips. Currently Dany and Viserys are going in circles.
Next we’ve got Qohor to Volantis. And you know what, this one actually makes sense. Oh there’s some small cities along the way that I’m sure that they’d have stopped at as well, but you can sail southwards down the Qhoyne, merge on to the Royne, and you’ll hit Volantis no problem.
Next we’ve got Volantis to Lys. Again, this one actually makes sense too. Just sail westward from Volantis and Lys is the first Free City you’ll hit.
What gives me some pause though, and it may be nothing, but Dany and Viserys, as I mentioned earlier, were previously going in circles, yet now seem to be getting direct to their next destinations in their last few stops. I find this odd as as the years passed Dany and Viserys are getting poorer, not richer. Their previous travels should be the more direct routes, not their later ones where they’re likely taking whatever passage they could get. It could be nothing, and like I say there’s some logical stops being made, but the previous illogical order of the stops, back when they had more money than they do currently, seems off. I’d expect thing to be the opposite.
But anyways, next we get Lys to Pentos. This is extremely dubious. To go from Lys to Pentos, you need to sail past Tyrosh and Myr. But more importantly, and I’ve alluded to this several times already, why the hell was Pentos literally the last place that they went to, 13 years after they fled Dragonstone, when Pentos is the nearest Free City to Dragonstone? That should’ve been their very first stop, not the dragon hating Braavosi. It should’ve been their stop after Braavos if not their first stop. It should’ve been their stop after Tyrosh if not their first stop. Pentos should’ve occurred so much sooner.
As we can see, this whole trip is wonky. They go all over the place, in no logical order.
But it’s even wonkier when you consider the fact that again, Dany remembers sailing to Braavos. Now, not only does Dany never list having returned to Braavos in her itinerary of where her and Viserys wandered too so already there’s 1 red flag in that, I’ve got to wander, when the fuck did they sail to Braavos? Literally look at the itinerary she gave us, the stops she says she made. At no point whatsoever will she be sailing to Braavos. Braavos is nowhere near any of the Free Cities she goes to. Once Dany and Viserys sail south, they remain in southern Essos. Braavos is as far north as you can go in Essos. They’d literally never once, ever, ever, ever sail back to Braavos to get to any of their locations. Not once. No ship ever makes this trip that Dany remembers making. It makes zero sense.
And again, Dany seems pretty young in this memory, if she’s naively thinking about being a common sailor when she’s the heir to a dynasty. But all of their trips are in southern Essos at this time. At no point do they ever go north enough to ever warrant sailing remotely anywhere near Braavos for one of their stops… except the first time that Dany would’ve gone to Braavos that is.
But that aside, Dany’s journeys utterly do not make sense anyways.
Which makes sense itself because if we simply go over the timeline, as we will in the very next section of this essay, they shouldn’t make sense because the itinerary itself is not correct, but Dany’s memory of that trip to Braavos is.
The problem with Jon being 8-9 months older than Dany if Dany’s born 9 months after the Sack
So we know from a rather infamous SSM that Jon's 8-9 months older than Dany. This is… problematic to say the least. From Dany I in AGOT we know that Dany is born “nine moons” after the Sack. So Jon is therefore born within a month of the Sack then. Now most commonly, fans of ASOAIF tend to believe in RLJ, and that Jon was born at the TOJ shortly before or during when Ned arrives, within this month of the Sack.
But this isn’t actually possible though.
First off, Ned says that the war had raged for a year by the Sack of King's Landing.
And we know that the Siege of Storm's End also lasts a year as well
So both events occur after a year from their respective start dates. The Siege however only begins after the Battle of Ashford, and the battle of Ashford can't happen until Jon Arryn calls his banners, which marks the start of the year until the Sack, marches to Gulltown to fight the Battle of Gulltown, Robert then travels to Storm's End, Robert calls his banners, his bannermen arrive with their forces, Robert travels to Summerhall and fights the battles of Summerhall, Robert returns to Storm's End and goes hawking and feasting with the lords he'd just beat at Summerhall while spending enough time to win them to his cause, then travels to Ashford for the Battle of Ashford. Then the Siege of Storm's End can't begin until Mace Tyrell marches from Ashford to Storm's End. Thus begins the year until the end of the Siege, after all this has occurred since the countdown began for the year until the Sack occurs.
Now if Jon Arryn calling his banners to the Sack is one year, and after the Battle of Ashford to the end of the Siege of Storm's End is also one year, then all the time between Jon Arryn calling his banners to the beginning of the Siege of Storm's End is the same amount of time between the Sack of King's Landing and the end of the Siege as a year is a year. That's the only way for them to have both lasted a year. The Battle of Ashford doesn't start till months into the war, so the Siege of Storm's End doesn't end until months after the Sack either.
And we know that by the time of the TOJ the Siege has already been lifted
So what we get if we follow the timeline is that the Sack occurs, a few months pass before the Siege ends, and then however long it took for Ned to go to the TOJ (which by the way we are never told immediately occurred after he accepted Mace’s surrender).
Therefore if Dany is born 9 months after the Sack, and Jon's born in the TOJ as most fans think, which occurs after the Siege, which itself occurs months after the Sack, I'd expect him to be around only at most 5-6 months older than Dany as the TOJ would be a few months after the Sack.
Jon cannot be 8-9 months older than Dany if he's born at the TOJ. He'd be like 3 months old at that point. Someone's birthdate isn't right here. Either Dany's not born 9 months after the Sack like she thinks she is, and therefore Jon's birthday can be whenever as it no longer has a fixed time to occur at, or Jon was a few months old by the time Ned arrived at the TOJ if Dany's birthday of 9 months after the Sack is actually correct.
And that’s the key point: if Dany’s birthday in the books is correct. Which we just established that it might not be. It’s either her or Jon’s birthday that isn’t right, but notably Jon’s birthday is never actually established anywhere in the books. Dany’s repeatedly is. We have no idea how to figure out Jon’s birthday without using the info in the books about Dany’s birthday. Which we just established doesn’t end up being right, or at least not “right” in how most fans perceive things.
Dany’s birthday is the basemark here. And well, it’s wrong. Hence why Jon’s birthday doesn’t seem to make any sense either. And there’s a boat load of information that can be found in the books that supports that Dany’s past doesn’t quite add up, precisely because it’s not supposed.
So let’s examine these oddities then.
The Storm that marked Dany’s birth
Now much has been made in the books about the storm that occurred during Dany’s birth. As we can see, she even earned an epithet from it. The problem is though, no one in Westoros has ever actually mentioned this storm as having ever occurred, and the evidence that it didn’t is rather damning.
First up, the lack of any mention of this storm whatsoever by anybody who lives in Westoros. Oh there’s plenty of mentions about storms hitting Dragonstone in general, but nobody other than Dany ever once mentions this storm that she was born during. Not Stannis. Not Davos. Not Florent. Not Cressen. Etc. Nobody on Dragonstone ever mentions any storm that wracked the island in 284 that Stannis then had to repair/there’s still damage showing. Nobody elsewise ever mentions any storm at all. The only mention of any storm that struck Dragonstone during Dany’s birth, is Dany herself. It’s found absolutely nowhere elsewhere in the series. There’s no record about this storm except from Dany. Which is odd because Dany claims it was the greatest storm in the memory of Westoros... yet nobody in Westoros has any memory of this storm.
Which then brings us to the many different logistical problems that come from this storm supposedly having occurred.
First off, if a storm wracked Dragonstone, why didn’t it wrack King’s Landing too? Both are on Blackwater Bay. Surely if the “greatest storm in the memory of Westoros” struck Dragonstone, it also struck King’s Landing no? Yet again, no one mentions King’s Landing having been struck by any storm at that period in time, and more importantly we know that the storm which struck Dragonstone supposedly shattered the Targaryen fleet, yet Stannis was in the process of building a new fleet for Robert to take Dragonstone
So why wasn’t Stannis’ fleet also destroyed? If this storm was so bad that it wrecked the Targaryen fleet, it should’ve also wrecked Stannis’. Yet Stannis clearly sails to Dragonstone, and he mentions zero storms troubling him. In fact he never once even mentions that any storm struck Dragonstone then, or that one shattered the Targaryen fleet, let alone that there ever was a Targaryen fleet.
Also, if a storm destroyed the Targaryen boats, then how did Darry sail away?
You just told us that this fiercest storm in Westoros’ memory shattered the fleet. It probably shattered every single other boat there too seeing as any seaworthy boat doesn’t come on land. So where the hell did Darry find a boat to get across to Braavos if there should be no boat lefts?
And finally, there’s the problem of the storm itself. Dany tells us that the storm was a summer storm
Yet we learn from Cotter Pyke
That autumn is when storms frequently wrack the Narrow Sea, and winter when the worst ones fall. So how did the greatest storm in Westoros’ history wreck Dragonstone during summer? The worst storms occur in winter, not summer.
Credit’s got to go to the user Pretty Pig/Beautiful Bacon for pointing out all this Stormborn nonsense.
The storm that supposed happened during Dany’s birth makes absolutely no sense from any angle. And it’s not the only one. The guy who supposedly saved her following this storm doesn’t add up either.
“Willem Darry”
While Lemongate will indeed be rearing its head in this essay, we need to first address the oddness surrounding “Willem Darry”.
Now there are a lot of very odd things with Willem Darry, and they start right from the beginning of our introduction to the man, and GRRM just builds and builds on them. Which isn’t surprising really considering that Dany straight up admits that she can barely even remember the man in the above paragraph. But let’s start with the fact that Dany remembers that Darry had “soft hands”.
Now this is extremely weird because Dany just identified that he was “Ser” Willem Darry, and therefore a knight. And Barristan also tells us that he was the master-at-arms at King’s Landing.
And Yandel tells us that Darry has held the post of master-at-arms since 270AC
So we know that Darry had been a master-at-arms and knight for many years by the time Dany should meet him. Which is where the fact that he had soft hands is extremely weird because a man whose life literally stems from wielding weapons would not possess soft hands.
A knight and master at arms would have had hard hands from years of sword play. Now some might argue that Darry’s hands might’ve softened over the years after Robert’s Rebellion where he wouldn’t have been practicing his sword so much, especially if he’s sick, but Cersei says that Robert’s hands were rough and hard like Ser Osney’s. And as we all know, Robert became a physical wreck later in his life, and probably was little, if ever, training anymore. Yet Cersei never says that his hands became soft, even though we know the rest of him did. His hands remained calloused from his years of training, plus whatever little work he probably got in every now and then. But anyways, no, Darry’s hands wouldn’t have softened, especially considering the AWOIAF app says that he died in 289. Which is only at most 5 years that Darry might not have been practicing the sword. Robert didn’t lose his calluses in 9 years (as Eddard mentions Robert declines after the Greyjoy Rebellion). Darry wouldn’t have lost his calluses according to this world.
As a slight aside to the above point, only two types of men are ever even described in ASOIAF as having soft hands: maesters and Varys.
". . . obsidian," said the other man in the room, a pale, fleshy, pasty-faced young fellow with round shoulders, soft hands, close-set eyes, and food stains on his robes.
Which are quite obviously two people who never spend any time wielding any swords. A man who worked for his life, whose living came from his ability with his sword, would not have had soft hands.
And it’s not just Darry’s “soft hands” that don’t make sense; the other descriptions of Darry also continue to not add up.
Dany remembers Darry as a “great grey bear of a man”. While I’ll touch on his physical size in the next part of this essay, the “grey” part is odd. Now as we previously covered, Darry got his post as master-at-arms in 270, after Aerys choose him instead of heeding Tywin’s advice to choose Tygett. Now while we’re never told Darry’s age, anecdotally I’d say that there’s some fairly good evidence that Darry shouldn’t really be a “grey” bear of a man.
First off, like I said, Darry got his post because he was chosen over Tygett in 270. Now we know that Tygett himself is only 20 years old in 270AC because we know that he was 10 years old in 260 during the Ninepenny Kings war.
So for me, given that we know that Aerys chose Willem specifically to spite Tywin and his proposal of his young prodigy brother Tygett, and not necessarily that Willem was the best man for the job, that it’s fairly logical that Aerys would’ve chosen one of Tygett’s own contemporaries to add salt into the wound. If Tygett’s only 20 in 270AC, then I’m expecting Willem to not be that far off either, or at least within the same ball park (his 20’s).
And this isn’t something that Aerys hasn’t done before of course.
During Robert’s Rebellion Aerys specifically turned to Jon Connington in an effort to try and match the rebels’ youthful, energetic, and highly skilled Robert, with the equally youthful, energetic, and highly skilled Jon. So why wouldn’t he try and match Tygett’s youthfulness, energy, and skill with an equally youthful, energetic, and skilled man who happened to be Ser Willem Darry? The parallel is there that Aerys will match somebody, not try and oppose them when he wants to one up a person. Aerys would’ve picked a contemporary of Tygett’s, not some older veteran.
And furthermore, we know that Willem and Jonothor were brothers.
While we never learn Jonothor’s age, there’s nothing to indicate that he was particularly young or old. He seems to be right in the middle. Which again, would fit if his brother Willem was around his 20’s in 270, seeing as our main looks into Jonothor come from Jaime remembering the man in 283, 13 years later. If Willem was in his 20’s, and he and Jonothor were reasonably close in age, then Jonothor would be in his 30’s by 283 when Jaime’s remembering him. So neither old nor young, just like he seems.
So now if Willem was basically in his 20’s in 270, then it’s odd that he’s a “grey” bear of a man in Dany’s memories seeing as the app AWOIAF says that Darry dies in 289. Which would only have made Willem some age between 39 and 48. AKA not an old man who’d have gone grey (or shouldn’t have).
And nobody ever calls Willem Darry an old man anywhere else in the story. Dany is our only source of information for Willem being this old man.
Another oddity is in how Darry supposedly died.
So here we’re told that Darry died of a wasting sickness. Now this is odd because as mentioned before, Dany remembers Darry as a “great grey bear of a man”. A bear of a man. So Darry was a big man according to Dany. Which is odd because he’s dying of a wasting sickness. He should be you know, wasting. Like Hoster Tully did when he got sick.
How can Darry be dying of a wasting sickness if Dany remembers him as this great big man? That’s contradictory. It makes no sense. Darry can’t possibly have been dying of a wasting sickness if he was still this great big man. Now personally I believe that indicates that Willem was actually poisoned and not dying of a wasting sickness, which is further supported by the “sickly sweet” smell that Dany remembers, seeing as Tywin’s corpse is also said to have smelled like that, and many believe that it’s possible that Tywin was poisoned before his death. But either way, his physical size does not match how Dany says he was dying.
And Willem’s physical size is weird itself seeing as none of the Darrys in our story are ever described as big men in the first place. Now of course you don’t need to have a family trait of being large, like the Baratheons, Cleganes, or Umbers to produce a member who himself grows into a “great grey bear of a man”, but it does help, and it is odd that no Darry is ever described as being a large man besides Willem, not even his brother Jonothor. And more importantly no one ever calls Willem a big man either. Barristan makes no mention of it, Yandel makes no mention of it, Ned makes no mention of it, etc. Dany is our one and only source who ever says that Darry was this big man. As you’ve no doubt noticed if you’ve made it this far, Dany’s the only person who describes a lot of things one way, isn’t she?
And finally, Dany says that Darry lived in his sickbed
But Dany then has a vision in the House of the Undying of Darry walking around with a cane
The vision could of course be a false vision, of something that never happened, but nonetheless we’ve got another contradiction found here: Dany said that Darry never left his bed at the house with the red door, yet she has a vision of presumably her past, of Darry walking with the aid of a stick.
All in all, there’s a ton of odd things with Darry and Dany’s past that don’t add up.
And it makes a lot of sense that they don’t particularly add up, seeing as the stories that Willem Darry helped out Rhaella and Viserys don’t even add up themselves.
The Flight to Dragonstone
In the TOJ dream Ned says that Willem Darry fled to Dragonstone with Viserys and Rhaella
Now it might come as a surprise to some, but Ned is actually the only person to ever say this, that Darry fled to Dragonstone with Rhaella and Viserys. No one else ever mentions this. Oh people mention that Viserys and Rhaella were sent to Dragonstone, but no one mentions Darry.
Jaime remembers that after the Trident Aerys ordered Viserys and Rhaella to go to Dragonstone.
And Yandel also reports this.
But as you can see there’s no mention of Darry by either of them. Ned, in a fever dream that the author himself has mentioned as being unreliable, is our only source saying this. Which leads to me to thinking there’s something wrong here, both because of nobody mentioning Darry leaving, and also because if you examine things, it’s quite clear that Viserys and Rhaella did NOT go to Dragonstone together.
Here we see that Jaime remembers seeing Rhaella depart for Dragonstone in the morning. No mention of Viserys or Darry ever leaving with her.
And yet here we have Dany telling us that Viserys told her that he left for Dragonstone at midnight. And there’s no mention of having left with Rhaella or Darry either.
And while this is an aside, credit should be made to I believe the user Voice for pointing out that Viserys’ “ship with black sails” sounds quite a lot like a smuggler’s ship as Davos describes his own smuggler’s ship exactly like this, and not any official royal ship. Which we know that Rhaella at least took, because the ship was waiting for her in King’s Landing’s harbour and everything. Rhaella at the very least left King’s Landing officially, but Viserys seems to have been smuggled out.
But that aside, it’s quite clear from the different descriptions, as well as lack of similar details, that not only did Viserys and Rhaella NOT go to Dragonstone together, but that Darry wasn’t with either of them as nobody ever mentions him except Ned.
Which actually could make sense because if you read Ned’s line like so
That Ned is saying that he thought the Kingsguard would’ve sailed with Darry and not Viserys and Rhaella. As in, Darry later joined them on his own.
Which at least would make more sense as there seems to be no doubt that Viserys, Rhaella, and Darry were all at least on Dragonstone together at some point. But when you combine everything together, it seems far more likely that they were not always together.
And it should be noted, that while I am arguing that Dany’s “Willem Darry” is not Willem Darry, I am not suggesting that the real Willem Darry never did play a role in at least Viserys’ life. He’s certainly well attested to there, be it from Stannis recalling that Darry smuggled him out of Dragonstone before he got there, or Darry signing for Viserys’ marriage pact, etc. THAT Willem Darry seems well and accounted for. It’s Dany’s “Willem Darry”, which I’ve gone over already not matching up to what the real Willem Darry should’ve been like, that doesn’t make sense.
IMO, Dany was simply told that the man she remembers, her “Willem Darry” was Willem Darry, the man who’s at least clearly involved in Viserys’ life. Who her “Willem Darry” was is a topic in and of itself, but as I believe I’ve demonstrated, there’s enough oddities surround everything “Willem Darry” and the actual Willem Darry, that something is odd.
Which of course, inevitably, has to lead us to discussing Lemongate.
Lemongate
Now without knowing anything about Braavos, this lemon tree outside Dany’s room is nothing. And notably, GRRM avoids describing Braavos or having any characters at all go to Braavos for many books, precisely because of this. Because Braavos cannot actually grow lemons. It has the completely wrong climate to do so.
Braavos is, to put it kindly, a climate shithole. All it ever does is rain there and be foggy, with only rare days of good weather. This is not at all the places were a southern citrus fruit grows. In fact we’re specifically told that citrus fruits are found in lower Essos, not Braavos because Braavos is too far north.
Braavos is not only too north and too foggy to grow lemon trees, they’re too much of either to grow any trees at all except hardy pine trees
The only trees that we’ve ever been told that grow in Braavos are pine trees. Which obviously are much heartier trees, and perfectly capable of growing in a wet, damp, and cold environment unlike a lemon tree.
And not only that, but if we follow the guardsmen’s talk that Braavos is too far north, we can indeed establish that there is a line of latitude where lemon trees do grow. The guardsman mentioned Lys, Myr, Volantis, but we also see Meereen grows lemon trees as well
But rather notably, the one place that is again and again associated with lemon trees, is Dorne
While some believe that this overabundance of lemon trees being linked to Dorne means that Dany’s house with the red door was actually located there instead of Braavos, and we will talk about this later when we discuss some of the potential mothers for Dany, we can at least establish however that Braavos is indeed too far north to grow lemons based on all the quotes that say that lemons come from places like Dorne, Meereen, Lys, Myr, and Old Volantis, as if you look on a map, all of these places are not only very far south of Braavos, they’re also all on about the same latitude as one another. There is a very clear area of the world that grows lemon trees, and Braavos is nowhere near this.
And furthermore, to put to notion to rest the idea that Braavos could grow lemon trees, here is how Littlefinger’s lands are described.
They’re exactly the same as Braavos: cold, overcast, uninviting, and treeless. And if you look at a map once again, Littlefinger’s Keep and Braavos are roughly the same latitude. They fall into the same latitude and have the exact same climate. And as one of the above “lemons come from Dorne” quote proves, the Vale can’t grow lemons and instead imports them from Dorne.
So if the Vale cannot grow lemon trees, and Littlefinger’s Keep is in the Vale, and it shares not only the same latitude as Braavos but also the exact same climate and geography, then Braavos can’t grow lemons either.
Wherever Dany’s house with the red door was, it most assuredly was not Braavos as Braavos can’t possibly grow the lemon tree that Dany says was outside her room.
And GRRM himself has recently noted that this is a great observation by the user Victarionchainbreaker while corresponding with the user in a private message:
imgur.com/EXN26tk
Quite clearly there is SUPPPOSED to be a mystery about Dany’s memory of the lemon tree from “Braavos”. GRRM put this here, that this does not make sense, on purpose. Much as we’ve seen likewise already that Dany’s past doesn’t make much sense. It’s a discrepancy in a long list of them, and it’s seemingly done on purpose according to the author.
And the lemon tree isn’t the only oddity about the house with the red door, there’s also the fact that Dany dreams of fields as being located with the house with the red door
And once more, this is just utterly incompatible with Braavos seeing as Braavos is a city of stone, with no nearly vegetation and certainly not green fields of it.
While some propose that while Dany’s house with the red door might not conventionally fit Braavos, but could fit the Sealord’s Palace which is located in Braavos, due to the fact that semi-official maps of Braavos depict the Palace as having stretches of grass, and that the Sealord could grow a lemon tree in a glass garden if he possessed one, there’s a few problems with this.
1) Dany dreams of fields of grass. A stretch of grass is not a field
2) Dany makes no mention of any glass garden, she just says there was a lemon tree outside her window. Nor does the Sealord palace ever have a glass garden in any descriptions of it
But perhaps the most damning thing of all is that Dany equates her life in the house with the red door as a life of simplicity
Yes Dany says that they had servants at the house with the red door, and I’ll touch on that in the next part of the essay, but the fact remains is that Dany dreams of a house with a red door and simple folk with simple lives. A few servants does suggest a tad more than just a “simple life”, but definitely not the Sealord of Braavos and the complicated life that comes with that. The Sealord’s palace lacks the green fields, the lemon tree, and the simplicity. It doesn’t fit at all beyond the fact that it happens to be located in Braavos, and that Darry happened to sign a marriage pact for Viserys (and again NOT Dany or anything to do with Dany or her storyline) with the Sealord as witness. It just doesn’t remotely fit.
Dany’s house with the red door simply put does not fit in Braavos. It’s quite clear that Dany does not know where the house actually was, and has never actually been to Braavos herself. Her memories, as they do so often, completely clash with other things found in the novels about the same place.
The oddities surrounding Dany’s house with the red door are enormous, and they don’t just stop with that lemon tree that couldn’t exist in Braavos, or the rolling fields of grass that couldn’t exist in a city of stone, or everything else: they also include just exactly what happens while Dany lived in this house.
Being robbed when they got kicked out of the house with the Red Door
So above we can see that Dany says that after Ser Willem died, the servants of the house robbed her and Viserys and then eventually put them out of the house. Now this doesn’t actually make any sense because Dany then says the following:
Now Dany just told us that the servants robbed them before they eventually put them out of the house and took “what little money they had left”. Now I have to ask: what servants steal a small amount of coin, but NOT the treasures, whatever they were, and Rhaella Targaryen’s crown? Dany just told us that those treasures and Rhaella’s crown was enough money for them to live for years. Yet the servants took a bit of coin and not these? That makes zero sense. If you’re going to rob someone, then actually rob them. Those treasures were worth far, far, far more than “what little coin they had left”, yet they didn’t get stolen too? That’s the height of unlikely. The servants would’ve stolen both… if both happened to be in the house with the red door that is.
Yes Dany says that “they” had been put out of the red door, and seems to think that Viserys lived there as well. Yet Viserys himself never gives any hint of having lived in this house. He not only never once mentions the house himself, he’s the heights of arrogance still. He’s clearly gone from nobility to nobility over the years. Yes he’s the “Beggar King”, but he clearly hasn’t actually ever lived as a “simple folk who lived a simple life” like Dany remembers. Viserys is quite clearly still comfortable in his role as royalty. It’s what he’s used too. There’s no indication whatsoever that Viserys had ever lived a simple life.
Times might’ve gotten hard at some points over the years, and he clearly reflects this in his gauntness and encroaching madness, but like look at the way he treats Drogo and the Dothraki: there’s no respect there, they’re just savages. He doesn’t respect their “simple folk who lived a simple life” at all. He just doesn’t get it. If Viserys had spent years, and the app says that Darry dies in 289 so that would be 5 years spent living in the house with the red door, he should’ve shown a tad less hauntiness from his experience. He’s the Beggar King sure, but the King part was never once forgotten or let become unaccustomed. Viserys has lived his life as a king, he remembers being treated like royalty, and he’s used to it. He’s certainly never spent 5 years living a simple life. Whereas Dany is uneasy in silk, which I’ll discuss in a bit, Viserys is at ease. He’s quite clearly had a different experience than Dany.
And this is where the whole “Willem Darry” vs Willem Darry comes in. Dany and Viserys’ pasts are just fundamentally different when you come down to it. Undoubtedly Viserys spent time with Willem Darry. Dany? Not so much. As has already been covered, it’s just a different person who really doesn’t fit the real Willem Darry. So how did Dany and Viserys get robbed of their money, but not their treasures and crowns? Well only Dany got robbed of her “little money”, while Viserys had all the treasures and was never at this house in the first place.
Dany had the simple life, she dreams for it, she remembers it, it entirely fits that her house with the red door only had a “little money left” if they never had a lot of money in the first place, this “simple folk who lived a simple life”. Viserys on the other hand, who’s at ease in his silk and jewels, who’s been treated as royalty his whole life, who shows no sign of ever having lived at a house with a red door at all, let alone as “simple folk who lived a simple life”, is the much better source for having treasures and Rhaella’s crown. The treasures weren’t robbed because Dany didn’t have them, Viserys did and he was elsewhere. The servants couldn’t rob what Dany didn’t actually possess.
Hence how Dany can say that “they” got robbed, yet Viserys then has a bunch of treasures that were worth enough to live for years on, yet Dany has no knowledge of living well. Viserys was never robbed, he was never in the house with red door to begin with.
And as an aside to help support this, that Dany spent time elsewhere other than with Viserys, hence their differences, credit to the user Rippounet for noticing this, but Dany can speak High Valyrian, and Viserys seemingly can’t.
Viserys never once speaks anything in High Valyrian, while Dany repeatedly does throughout the books, but more importantly, Viserys always speaks the common tongue with Dany whenever he doesn’t want to be understood by the Dothraki.
The Common Tongue is used by Viserys when he wishes to keep his words hidden with Dany. Which is just well odd, because almost nobody at all speaks or understands High Valyrian
I could go on quoting more things, but nobody really speaks High Valyrian, or really understands it. Dany herself undoubtedly speaks High Valyrian though, and almost nobody else does. And Dany was supposedly raised by Viserys.
So if Viserys didn’t want people to understand him when he has private discussions with Dany, why doesn’t he just speak High Valyrian with her? Nobody would understand them. Yet Viserys never speaks High Valyrian once. He can probably speak a few words of it, but he’s certainly not fluent like Dany is. So how did Dany get to be fluent in this dead language, while Viserys seemingly didn’t? They had different upbringings.
Viserys was around 8 when he flees Dragonstone, so he should’ve had a few years of formal education under his belt, which should be far more than Dany seeing as she should have none, nothing beyond what Viserys could teach her. Yet Dany can speak this dead language perfectly, while Viserys never does and instead speaks the Common Tongue to speak privately with Dany. This really does not make much sense.
So now if Dany was the one who lived in the house with the red door, Dany who got robbed, Dany who learned High Valyrian somewhere, while Viserys lived with the archons, princes, nobles, never got robbed, can’t speak High Valyrian as he was never taught it (or only learned a bit of it), how did she and Viserys end up together if they were never together in the first place?
Because Dany’s a pretender, a girl raised to be “Daenerys Targaryen” the daughter who Rhaella died birthing, who quite likely, as the opening of this essay showed, died young given Aerys and Rhaella’s history of such things. There’s just too many things that are fundamentally wrong with Dany and what she knows and doesn’t know, for her to actually be who she thinks she is.
There’s just so much odd with Dany’s backstory. One mistake could be an error on George’s part, but this many? These are not errors… at least on his part. They’re errors on Dany’s part. Quite clearly, as has been demonstrated, what Dany “knows” doesn’t add up. What she doesn’t “know” doesn’t add up either. Things just do not add up, again, and again. And it doesn’t because it shouldn’t. She’s not who she thinks she is. Again and again she displays the wrong memories of places and events. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong with Dany’s backstory. How can this possibly be? Because Dany was simply told this information. She didn’t experience it, she was told she did. She’s repeating multiple stories, and getting them messed up around what she remembers, and what she also forgets, creating all these conflicts every time we try and compare what Dany says vs what someone else says about the same events and things.
Quite clearly IMO, Dany isn’t Dany. She really doesn’t at all have the grasp of reality that Dany should have had she actually done the stuff she claims to have.
Which is where Illyrio possibly comes in.
Illyrio
At the start of AGOT, Dany informs the reader that she and Viserys have been living with Illyrio for the last 6 months. Yet as the story progresses we are told information that makes this somewhat doubtful.
Firstly, Illyrio himself says the following about Viserys:
Illyrio says that Viserys would have undone “years of planning” had he claimed Dany’s maidenhead. Yet how is this actually at all possible? Dany told us in AGOT that she and Viserys had only been living in Pentos for 6 months, and then that very night she’s betrothed to Drogo. There’s no “years of planning” at all here, there’s 6 months of planning based on what Dany tells us that she knows. Yet Illyrio says it would have ruined years of planning. So quite clearly, Illyrio at least has had a plan up his sleeve for far longer than when Viserys and Dany moved into his palace 6 months before AGOT begins. The question is though, did Viserys have this exact same plan too and had he been a part of the “years of planning”?
Well first and foremost, Dany’s very first chapter sees Viserys again and again seem doubtful that not only is Dany Valyrian, but that she’s a princess, and Illyrio again and again has to assure him that she looks fine and will serve her role, as well as Dany herself again and again shows that all this stuff seems odd and unusual to her.
Here we see that Dany has never worn any good clothing, despite supposedly having been pampered by Illyrio for the last 6 months, that Viserys is attempting to make Dany look Valyrian by emphasizing her violet eyes, and attempting to make her look like a princess, something that Dany thinks she’s never known. Again, supposedly for the last 8 or so years Dany has been living with archons, nobles, princes, magistrates, etc., yet she’s never worn nice clothes or been treated like a princess. This is all very odd.
Again, here we see that Dany has bad posture despite living among the upper class, when one of the things we see every other girl maintain is strict posture for these circles. As well, Viserys says that they need to “wash off the stink of the stables” implying that Dany’s spent her days playing with horses and what not, but later we’ll learn that Dany actually clearly has not spent any time around horses
So why Dany smell like a stable would when she’s clearly never been around horses much? Again, Viserys is overly obsessed about making sure Dany looks like a princess, and erasing any traces that she might NOT be one.
Here we see that despite supposedly living pampered, Dany still has snags in her hair. How is it that her hair isn’t routinely brushed and flawless? What kind of pampered lifestyle has Dany supposedly been living if she doesn’t even get her hair routinely brushed?
And here we see that the maids are rather to surprised to see that Dany looks like a princess when they’re done dressing her up, Viserys doubts that she looks like a princess and can pull this all off, Illyrio’s got to reassure him she’ll do fine and that there’s no doubt she’ll work, that Dany is somehow skinny despite again supposedly living pampered for the last 6 months at least.
Dany I, is literally one big game of “dress up”. It’s literally a chapter where they specifically go over many times how they make Dany look like she’s a princess, of how she’s high blood, etc. And Dany’s uncomfortable through it all, Viserys doesn’t think it will work, etc. It’s all rather odd behaviour and actions for someone who actually is, you know an actual princess. It is odd behaviours all around.
Now the other thing too that suggests that it’s doubtful that Dany and Viserys have only known Illyrio for 6 months, is once again provided by Illyrio
Now as was just shown in the previous quotes above, Illyrio spends a lot of time in Dany I of AGOT telling Viserys that Dany is a woman, that she’s plenty old enough. And yet here Illyrio says that the first time he met her, she was “half a child”. For a man who spent so much time raving about how she’s NOT a child, this seems a little odd.
But the far more important connection is the second bolded part about how Illyrio vigorously fucked a bedwarmer after he first met Dany. That’s… well impossible.
At the start of AGOT it takes two strong men to simply get Illyrio on his feet after he sits down. The man can’t even stand up on his own he’s so fat, yet he saw Daenerys and then immediately fucked the crap out of some bedwarmer? That’s impossible, Illyrio couldn’t fuck anybody, let alone vigorously. He could get fucked sure, but he claims he did the fucking and that’s just not possible with his present size.
And yet, we know that Illyrio was not always this big, nor such a physical ruin. Once upon a time he was lean and lithe, a skilled bravo.
Yet as Illyrio says, he’s now the man he is, and no longer the man he was back then. But yet it does show us that Illyrio has gained his weight over the years, and that he’s not always been so fat and uncoordinated. So it makes a lot of sense that, given the “years of planning”, the “half a child”, etc., that Illyrio actually first met Dany before she came to live in his house. If we push back Illyrio’s first encounter with Dany, then he’s far more capable of summoning a bedwarmer and fucking her vigorously until his madness passed. Creepy for sure that he got so turned on by a child, but things are still very creepy anyways if he did this when Dany was 12-13 years old anyways.
And really, the idea that Illyrio might have met Dany and Viserys earlier than their 6 months in his house before the story, isn’t that farfetched. Not only do the books never say that they’ve only known the man for 6 months, solely that they’ve lived there for 6 months, but even without the above stuff that we just covered, that Illyrio says there were years of planning, that he shouldn’t be able to vigorously fuck a bedwarmer at his size, we already discussed a complete other reason way back over 25 pages ago: that logically speaking, Pentos should have been one of the first places, if not the first place itself, on Viserys and Dany’s trip around the Free Cities, not the last place. Or it should’ve been visited many times in between all the trips Dany says they supposedly made. Point is, they should’ve already visited Pentos, and that would indeed have occurred a few years before, which suddenly makes everything fit. All things combined, it makes complete sense IMO that Viserys and Dany, or at least one of them, had known/had connection to Illyrio for years.
Which I suppose inevitably leads us to the question of who exactly is “Dany” if she’s not Daenerys Targaryen, as this essay’s been saying all along that she’s some other than the real Dany. IMO, we have a few candidates for the mother, one real candidate for the father, or the option that Dany’s just the child of some random people. We’ll start with the last option seeing as we can build off the Illyrio connection to at least this one of the IMO likely candidates for her mother/parentage: Dany is just some random girl, the daughter of some random whoevers, who happened to look like a Valyrian
The Chosen Pretender
This theory is simply as the above said: Dany is just some random girl, from some random whoevers, who happened to look like a Valyrian so she was adopted to serve as the replacement to the real Daenerys Targaryen after she died, however that was.
First and foremost, there’s the possible Illyrio connection. As we previously covered, Illyrio seems to have been working at a Dany plan for a long time, and this theory works the best with that idea as Dany comes out and says that Illyrio is a slave trader, something which is supposedly illegal in Pentos
And furthermore, we know that Illyrio specifically has dealt in Lyseni slaves before with his wife Serra, and that Lyseni slaves are noted as resembling Valyrians the most of anybody on the planet because they’re specifically bred to.
So Illyrio knows how to buy and trade slaves, and has experience with Lyseni ones who resemble Valyrians, so it wouldn’t be a surprise at all if he bought and traded Dany to Viserys in the first place. He can indeed get a girl who could look like she was the real Daenerys Targaryen.
And this would then make sense of a few other things then, first and foremost among them being that Dany has never worn very nice clothes before, and that Dany instead wishes for tatters, and a simple life, and finds herself so at ease in Dothraki rough garments.
And credit must go to the user Lady Dyanna for pointing this out, but Dany’s pretty much “sold” to Drogo, even right down to being collared and presented to him as the stories say his own slaves are
Dany it could be argued, is presented to Drogo as a slave. A princess slave yes, but a slave, right down to the collar and being sold to do something she doesn’t want to do. And Dany trembles at the thought. A repressed memory perhaps?
But finally, and I suppose possibly more importantly IMO, thematically speaking, the girl who has spent the entire series talking about her right to rule due to who she is and what not turning out to be a bastard/random person could make sense. That Dany never actually had any right to rule in the first place, that she got so caught up in Viserys’ dream, for it’s indeed Viserys who dreams of Westoros and the Iron Throne, not Dany, that she forgot that it was never hers in the first place.
But I do agree with most who are probably reading this who will say that Dany being some random girl who happened to look Valyrian might not be the most likely.
Now before we move on to the other two options for Dany’s mother, I think we need to first examine who the proposed father is for the next two options seeing as it will make things much easier to examine them later. Dany’s father was Rhaegar Targaryen.
Dany’s Father – Rhaegar Targaryen
Now we get an awful lot of Rhaegar dumps in Dany’s story. Using asearchoficeandfire.com reveals that “Rhaegar” gets mentioned 44 times in Dany’s chapters. By comparison “Aerys” gets mentioned 5 times. Already there is a whopping disparity that Dany’s story focuses on her “brother” rather than her “father”. Which is odd, considering that Dany is trying to succeed her father and climb his Iron Throne, something Rhaegar never did. Dany is trying to follow in Aerys’ footsteps, yet it’s Rhaegar who gets all the plugs in Dany’s story. And they’re rather specific plugs that keep drawing her and her story back to Rhaegar.
Firstly, there are many plugs where Dany is directly compared to being like Rhaegar was, like the opening quote, as well as the following ones
Then there are the ones where she parallels/attempts to parallel his story
There are also times where she gets random insights into his life/who he was
And of course Dany receives some visions of Rhaegar in general
I could go on, and I skipped many, many other examples for brevity’s sake, but the Rhaegar dumps are just absolutely so hugely fundamental to her story, and are just located everywhere within it.
Contrarily, this is the girl who never even found out that her father was actually mad until ASOS.
Yet she knew in AGOT that Rhaegar was a good guy, the last dragon, yadda yadda. She learns so much about Rhaegar, and with such consistency and so repeatedly, and so much of her story is directly about him, that really how can Rhaegar NOT be her father? He’s one of the central characters in her entire story, far more than her actual father ever is. Heck that last quote literally has in it
But I want to focus a bit more of a few rather specific times that Rhaegar comes up in Dany’s story as they’re much better at showcasing how Rhaegar’s more likely to be her father than her brother.
First, there are many times where Dany actually physically sees herself as him
First, here we see that Dany relives the Trident, which was of course the most pivotal moment of Rhaegar’s life, and it was the moment that Rhaegar failed in most. And Dany sees herself win where Rhaegar couldn’t.
But it’s this next instance Dany once more sees herself as Rhaegar that I want to focus on.
And has you can see, she physically sees herself as him, directly after she opens the red door, which we know is a massive mystery about her past. She’s literally unlocking and opening her past here… and she saw Rhaegar, who becomes herself.
And not only this, but this whole dream/vision of hers… occurs while she herself is giving birth to Rhaego, named after Rhaegar himself. She sees herself as him while she’s giving birth to the person she wants to be him reborn. It’s all there, so clear: Rhaegar is tied to the secret of the house with the red door, and this goes back to births, and more specifically Dany’s own. Rhaego failed to come into the world from Dany, but Dany didn’t fail to come into the world from Rhaegar.
Which actually, if we got back to one of the Rhaegar dumps in Dany’s story we already covered, when we quote the full part of it this time, see this very thing
Dany is literally called the “daughter of death” after a scene showing her how Rhaegar died. Sure, Dany’s “mother” Rhaella died giving birth to her, and thus that could be how she’s the “daughter of death”, but the name “daughter of death” coming right after Rhaegar’s own death makes it much clearer who the death was: Rhaegar’s, not Rhaella as it was Rhaegar, not Rhaella she just saw die. And if she’s the daughter of death, and Rhaegar’s the one who died, then she’s his daughter.
And secondly and directly tied to that last point, there is the other House of the Undying vision where Rhaegar looks directly right at Dany and then says “there must be one more”
He. Looks. Right. At. Her. And he says there must be one more. It doesn’t get much clearer. Dany’s Rhaegar’s daughter.
So then who’s her mother if Rhaegar’s her father? Well the first option I’m going to present is Ashara Dayne.
Dany’s Mother Option #2 – Ashara Dayne
So right off the bat we’re straight up told that Dany has Ashara’s very same eyes, and that Barristan thinks that she looks a lot like what Ashara’s daughter could have looked like. So immediately we know that there are very clear physical similarities between Dany and Ashara.
And of course, we happen to know from Barristan that not only was Ashara pregnant right around this time, but that she also happened to give birth to a daughter as well
And while yes, Barristan does say that Ashara’s daughter was stillborn, you have to wonder how Barristan even knows any of this information in the first: Ashara was at Starfall, Barristan was in King’s Landing. As well, both Catelyn and Cersei seem to at least be somewhat convinced that Ashara gave birth to Jon Snow. Which would obviously not be a stillborn child, let alone a daughter. Barristan’s our only source that Ashara’s child died, and that it was a girl in the first place. So perhaps he’s wrong, seeing as everybody else, who should be no better informed than Barristan, seems to think the child lived.
Regardless, we know that she happened to be pregnant at around the right time that Dany gets born. And that Dany happens to look like her. And that GRRM chose to give us both these pieces of information one after the other.
And of course if Dany happened to have been Ashara’s child, and at least spent some part of her life in Dorne before she ends up with Viserys, then this obviously explains Lemongate as lemon trees grow in Dorne, and Starfall happens to be located in one of the more hospitable parts of Dorne which would also cover the green fields that Dany remembers.
It would also help explain why GRRM has made so much of the Daynes, if one of the main characters happened to be half Dayne themselves. As well, the series seems to be progressively getting more and more Dayne involved, so something up with them.
And if Dany happened to be born in Starfall instead of Dragonstone, it could explain the “Stormborn” part of her history, that not only does nobody else ever remember or mention despite it supposedly being the greatest storm ever, or were ever affected by, but that is completely contrary to the very nature of storms in the narrow sea. Starfall is located on the coast of the Summer Sea. While we don’t know the storm patterns for the Summer Sea like we do with the Narrow Sea, we do know that the Summer Sea is indeed stormy
So the possibility is there that Starfall gets wrecked by violent summer storms unlike Dragonstone which gets wrecked by violent winter storms.
And if it were Starfall that got wrecked, well then nobody ever mentioning the storm or it’s fallout suddenly makes a lot more sense because we’ve never had any characters visit Starfall, or talk about its past, and certainly not any who just so happened to be there right at this time like we do with people like Stannis and Dragonstone. Eddard of course happens to go to Starfall around this time yes, but unlike Stannis he never talks about this trip so we can’t say what Eddard did or did not do and experience here. There’s a much bigger lack of information around Starfall than there is Dragonstone which disputes that Dragonstone actually experienced the things it supposedly did.
And Ashara and Rhaegar actually make quite a bit of sense together as being Dany’s parents.
Firstly, we know that there’s a song which, if we take Ashara and Rhaegar, fits them absolutely perfectly
• Ashara Dayne threw herself of the Palestone Tower
• Rhaegar Targaryen was dead by then
• One of the reasons people say that she committed suicide is because of the death of the man who dishonoured her at Harrenhal, where both she and Rhaegar were
As the user Slywren has pointed out before, there’s only actually two women in the entire series who commit suicide by throwing themselves off a tower: Lady Stark from Bael the Bard, and Ashara Dayne. So unless there’s some other women throughout Westoros’ history, as Daeron is a Westorosi singer and should know mainly Westorosi songs, who did this same thing, the story likely references one of them.
And Daeron happens to be from the Reach, and not the North. He’s much more likely to know southern songs than a northern song, a northern song that a northerner in Jon Snow didn’t even know. Ashara pretty notably committed suicide, it would be odd if nobody ever made any songs about it.
And of course, back then there were only 6 princes in the realm: Rhaegar, Viserys, Aegon, Doran, Quentyn, and Oberyn. And only 2 of these princes are dead yet when Ashara commits suicide: Rhaegar and Aegon. And while some people have theorized that Ashara’s son, should she have actually given birth to a son, was used as the “Pisswater Prince” who got his brains bashed in by Gregor, Rhaegar makes more sense as being the one who Ashara killed herself over if this song’s actually about her.
And really, it shouldn’t be such a stretch to think that Rhaegar and Ashara were possibly boning. I mean, cheating on your wife with the maid or her best friend are the oldest infidelity stories in the book. And Ashara happens to fulfill both roles, thereby knocking back two stereotypes in one go if Rhaegar cheats on his wife with Ashara. Going and sleeping with the girl who’s betrothed to your cousin, and lives thousands of miles away… is really not. Not at all what a reasonable person goes and does.
Note: this is not to say that he doesn’t also go and do this as well, just it’s not the first or logical thought processes for someone who’s looking for another child. And that part really needs to be considered. As much as fans consider that Rhaegar turns to Lyanna for prophecy reasons, and this is not to say that he might not have, all we actually have to go on is that he seemingly turned to her for the third head of the dragon, not the prince that was promised which he thought he had in Aegon. He just needs a kid, that’s it. And while I’ve joked about this before, but seriously: if Rhaegar just needs a kid like he says he did, and not the prince that was promised, are you telling me that he’s NOT going to fuck that hot Dornish pussy who’s literally his maid? Like come on, Ashara is literally the very first person that Rhaegar should turn to when he decides that he needs another child. She’s hot, she’s single, he knows her likely pretty well, and she’s literally right there.
And as I mentioned, I don’t think that Rhaegar/Ashara at all changes Rhaegar/Lyanna or means that Rhaegar never went and kidnapped Lyanna and possibly tried to impregnate her too. I mean Rhaegar needed a third child, of course he slept with multiple girls after he decided to cheat on Elia in an attempt to get another child. It’s illogical to put all your eggs in one basket. Like what if Lyanna was sterile? Does he have to go kidnap someone else now too? Why wouldn’t he just be trying to impregnate many girls at the same time, in an effort to increase his odds of success? That’s the logical thing to do.
And of course as well, we know that Ashara was Elia’s maid and companion.
And yet, we also know that Ashara ends up in Starfall around this time
And not in King’s Landing with Elia.
So Ashara seemingly got dismissed from Elia’s service at some point between Harrenhal and when Ned arrives at Starfall given that she’s no longer with Elia. We’re given a few reasons why a lady-in-waiting could be dismissed, such as stealing and spying, but we also know one that applies in perfect concert with the idea that Rhaegar and Ashara were sleeping together: precisely that, sleeping with their lady’s husband.
We know from Rhaella and Aerys’ relationship that Rhaella, Rhaegar’s own mother, used to dismiss her maids and companions who slept with Aerys, Rhaegar’s own father.
And then Elia seemingly dismissed Ashara. And Ashara doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of girl who was stealing from Elia, or spying on Elia. And yet she seemingly gets dismissed, and the only other reason we’ve got left is she was sleeping with Rhaegar. Which I mean she was Dornish herself after all, and we know that she has to lose her virginity and get knocked up somewhere from.
And if Rhaegar was sleeping with Ashara, and Ashara was the one he actually loved, then it could make some sense of the HOTU visions of Rhaegar dying murmuring “a woman’s name”. Now notably, Dany never says that the name was Lyanna. The app does say the name was Lyanna, but not to question the authorial bias of the app’s writers given that they enjoy the theory RLJ quite heavily, but Dany knows that name. When she hears Rhaegar’s murmur all she recognizes was that it was some woman’s. If she could describe it as a woman’s name, then she heard the name. And she’d had known the name “Lyanna”. She’d also know the name “Elia”. There’s zero reason why Dany couldn’t identify this woman’s name given the typical people it should’ve been… but she wouldn’t have recognized the name “Ashara”.
But perhaps you don’t quite buy that Rhaegar was banging Ashara and she birthed Dany, so let’s examine the girl other than Elia that we’re told that Rhaegar was having sex with: Lyanna Stark
Dany’s Mother Option #3 – Lyanna Stark
As we all know, history tells us that Rhaegar Targaryen abducted Lyanna Stark and raped her. Some think Lyanna instead eloped and was instead having consensual sex with Rhaegar, but the point of distinction between the two is really not necessary here: they were having sex. It’s right there in the book. And any one post “the birds and the bees” knows that sex, consensual or not, can lead to pregnancy. So first we should examine if it’s possible that Lyanna got pregnant from Rhaegar’s rape/sweet lovemaking.
Well first off, the first thing that we need to know is whether Lyanna’s even flowered or not yet seeing as she has to have flowered to be able to get pregnant. Now we know that Lyanna dies at age 16
The “child-woman” comment is a little weird, but otherwise a 16 year old Lyanna should’ve already flowered, and should therefore indeed be capable of getting pregnant. Of course timeline wise, which we’ll discuss next, says that Lyanna would’ve been kidnapped when she was 14-15 given that there’s about 2 years between her kidnapping and her death, but regardless, she’d still likely be old enough to have already flowered. So yes, Lyanna is indeed old enough that she could get pregnant. So now was gone long enough to have been impregnated?
Again, the answer is yes. Rhaegar leaves Dragonstone at the very start of 282
Now of course we don’t know exactly when “ultimately” means in relation to the “coming of the new year”, but we also know that Brandon dies at age 20, that he only dies because Lyanna had already been kidnapped and so he rode to King’s Landing, and we know that Brandon’s born in 262.
AKA Brandon dies in 282. Meaning that Lyanna also gets taken in 282 seeing as she gets taken before Brandon dies. So while we don’t know when the “ultimately” took place exactly in relation to the “coming of the new year”, we do at least know it happens in the same year. Personally, Lyanna probably gets kidnapped at the start of 282, given that Brandon has to ride to King’s Landing which probably takes a month, Rickard and all the father’s need to arrive which probably takes another month, making this like mid 282 now, then the war begins when Jon Arryn calls his banners and lasts for a year to King’s Landing, which seems to take place mid-late 283. But speculation aside, Lyanna still gets kidnapped in 282.
Now we’ve already discussed exactly when the TOJ should actually take place according to the timeline given that it would take place months after the Sack as it occurs after the Siege, and probably I don’t know like another month after the Siege given that it’s quite a distance away from Storm’s End (and that’s assuming that Eddard rode right there which we don’t know), hence I think the TOJ probably occurs in 284 rather than 283 (which is just an arbitrary year that most fans assume precisely because they’re trying to work out Jon’s own birthday and he’s born in 283 and they believe he’s born at the TOJ). But regardless of whether or not you think late 283, which indeed at the very least it must be, or sometime in 284, that’s still at least over 1 year since Lyanna got kidnapped, possibly almost 2 years. So indeed, plenty of time for Lyanna to get pregnant, and deliver the baby.
And while I won’t get into the debates of whether or not Lyanna was actually ever in the TOJ or not (possibly at Starfall instead), we know at the very least that Rhaegar does not return from wherever he was, which is presumably also with Lyanna, until after the Battle of the Bells
And we know that based on Ned and Catelyn’s marriage, which occurred 15 years ago in 298
Which occurred after the Battle of the Bells because Jon only married Lysa after his heir Denys Arryn was killed in that very battle
So we know that Rhaegar doesn’t return until sometime in 283. Which is again at least a year after he first kidnapped Lyanna back in 282. So plenty of time that Lyanna can get impregnated by Rhaegar, and plenty of time to also then deliver the baby in time to be the right age of Dany.
So now is there any proof that Lyanna was ever even pregnant?
Much and more has been made of this passage and ones like it
Given that similar passages like the following
Seem to associate that Lyanna’s “bed of blood” was probably caused from childbirth given that that’s what the phrase means when used elsewhere during the novels.
So Lyanna was
• Old enough to get pregnant
• Having sex with Rhaegar
• Gone long enough to get pregnant and deliver a baby
• Seems to have delivered that baby
So where are the proofs that Dany is Lyanna’s child then?
Well first, there’s Dany’s horse, her Silver. Credit must be given to the user Weaselpie for first noticing these connections that I’ll be pointing out.
As we’ve already covered in this essay, Dany isn’t actually a particularly good rider, nor has she spent much time around horses.
Her body isn’t at all used to riding horses. She’s not an experienced rider or anything. Heck Dany even says that she knows barely anything at all about horses.
As well as that’s she’s not much of a rider
And yet when Dany first rides her silver, there’s an instant connection and Dany’s an amazing rider
Dany can suddenly ride expertly when she’s with her silver, when by her own words she’s not much of a rider, and by her own body’s reactions to riding the silver, that this is true.
And more importantly, Dany tells us straight up that while Irri gives her lessons, it’s her silver that’s teaching her to ride.
Now this could simply be nothing, but this sounds an awfully lot like potentially skinchanging, that Dany’s skinchanging her silver, hence her vast improvement as a rider, her shared mind with her horse, etc. And as we know from the current Starks, they’re all skinchangers.
So if Dany was half Stark herself, then it would be a fairly logical assumption that Dany could also skinchange “to a greater or lesser degree” just like all the other Starks can.
And of course, given that we’re arguing that Lyanna was her mother here, we know that Lyanna herself had a great connection with horses, and was an expert rider herself
So it wouldn’t be the strangest thing in the world if her daughter had the potential to be a great rider herself, especially after meeting the right animal that she “bonds” with.
And of course, the silver is “the right animal” in more ways than just being a great horse itself. Look at the way that it’s even described
The silver is a perfect representation of Lyanna, and also Lyanna and Rhaegar’s possible child
• “She was a young filly” fits Lyanna herself in the Lyanna was a young girl
• “Spirited” fits Lyanna herself perfect as Ned says that she had a touch of the wolf’s blood
• “There was something about her that took the breath away” fits Lyanna herself in that she seems to have taken many men, including Rhaegar’s breath away. It’s also rather ironic too that Rhaegar possibly dies breathing out his last breath of air saying “Lyanna” if you believe the app that that was the name
• “She was grey as the winter sea” fits Lyanna in that House Stark’s colours include grey, and that Lyanna’s of the north and “winter”
• “With a mane like silver smoke” fits Rhaegar in that he had silver-gold hair
• A grey and silver horse combine those two Stark and Targaryen colours
The horse, simply put, fits the proposed parents here extremely well. Otherwise it’s just some random horse. But if you look at it like Dany’s Rhaegar and Lyanna’s daughter, then the horse is full of symbolism.
Dany fits the horse, because the horse fits Dany.
But really, the biggest clue that Dany is Lyanna’s child is really Eddard himself.
Now we all know about “promise me”
It’s one of, if not the last things that Lyanna did in her life. She extracted a promise from Eddard that he reflects on multiple times in AGOT. We’re never told what the promise was exactly, but given the possibility that Lyanna was pregnant/gave birth, most fans do tend to consider that “promise me” has to do with her child. And there’s plenty of reasons why, based on “promise me” that we should think that that child is Dany.
Firstly, “promise me” happens to happen in our story multiple times either around conversations about Dany, conversations that started about Dany or conversations that immediately turn to being about Dany.
The above “promise me” comes during the chapter where Robert informs Ned that Dany has just married Drogo, and that Robert thinks she should be assassinated, while they are trying to figure out how to secure the realm if Dany and her new husband invade.
And these “promise me”(s) occur right around times where Dany will come up soon in the conversation.
As you can see, these “Promise me” quite clearly gets put into connection with Dany by our author. And those connections just so happen to be right around discussions about assassinating her. When Dany’s death is brought up is around Ned, “promise me” happens.
Furthermore, we know that Ned specifically quits as Hand because Robert has just ordered the assassination of Dany
Yes Ned is against killing children in general, but it’s a very venomous reaction, to end his friendship once more with Robert, over something that… well makes sense. Dany IS a threat to the realm. She’s married a man with 100,000 followers, a known sackers of countries, and she’s now pregnant and giving him an heir. It’s distasteful, but this is the safety of the realm at stake here. You don’t marry a warlord when you’re deposed royalty unless you mean war. Assassinating Dany is indeed a logical choice. And yet Eddard’s so opposed to it. Murdering innocent children is one thing, and Eddard has every reason to be opposed to this, but Dany’s not innocent. Moreover, with Jorah there informing on Dany Eddard should know that Dany is indeed planning on invading with Drogo, that she’s not some potential threat, that she actually is a threat. Letting her just live and Drogo’s khalasar land is stupid.
And furthermore, consider the very next thing that Ned does after he quits as Hand over Dany’s assassination: he goes and visits Barra
Which happens to be a bastard daughter born of royalty. Same as Dany would be if she were Rhaegar and Lyanna’s child.
And of course, this visit to Barra causes him to remember one of the only conversations we ever see of Lyanna.
And if you notice, we’re reminded that another bastard daughter was born in this very sequence in Mya Stone. It’s Mya Stone, and Barra Waters that get brought up here. Both bastard daughters of royalty.
And furthermore, if we look at the descriptions of Barra and Mya, we see that
Both look just like Robert did. Yes, “the seed is strong”, but it also continues in this very chapter then Ned then goes onto also think about how Jon Snow looks just like he does too
This very chapter keeps showing us these men with bastards who turned out looking like the father… so why wouldn’t Rhaegar’s, if he had one, as well? Which leaves only Dany given that she’s the only kid with silver-gold hair and purple eyes like Rhaegar in the right age group.
And of course, this chapter also has Eddard think the following
This is the first, and only time that Ned ever speaks of a “price” he paid to keep “promise me”. And it gets brought up in the chapter immediately after Eddard Stark just resigned as Hand and just broke off his friendship with Robert… over assassinating Dany. Odd coincidence if the promise has nothing to do with Dany no?
And of course, immediately after this whole sequence of events which went
- Assassinate Dany
- Eddard resigns
- Eddard meets a royal bastard
- Eddard thinks about a price he’d paid to keep the promises he’d made Lyanna
Etc.
We get the infamous TOJ dream. I won’t go into that as it’s been analyzed to death, but you get the picture. There’s a whole sequence of events here triggered by Dany that just keeps rolling.
And furthermore, after Robert informs him as he’s dying to call off the attack on Dany, Varys informs him that that’s impossible and in Ned’s very next chapter, as he sits in the black cells, he thinks to himself of broken promises
Again, this is the only time in the books that Ned ever thinks about broken promises… and it’s after he’s found out that Dany will be assassinated and he can’t do anything about it. He can’t do anything about a lot of things at this point too (such as looking after Robert’s bastards), but again, it’s another coincidence where promises keep coming up around Dany, and this is after we’d heard in the previous chapters that Eddard supposedly kept his promise to Lyanna. And yet now he’s got broken promises now that he’s been informed that Dany will die.
And continuing in the line of promises, Ned says the following which is very interesting
Which if you examine the bolded, then Ned’s thought process goes
- Robert sending an assassin against Dany
- Rhaegar’s dead child
- Sansa’s pleading for Lady’s life reminds him of Lyanna’s pleading
Flip the thought process around and you more or less get
Lyanna’s “promise me” -> Rhaegar’s child -> Dany
And when you think about it, this should come as no surprise seeing as Ned just told us that Sansa’s pleading reminded him of Lyanna’s pleading. And Sansa was pleading for Lady… who’s a female direwolf. Which is what Dany would be if she’s the child of Lyanna and Rhaegar. Yes officially speaking Dany would be a bastard, or a dragon, but she’s still also a female direwolf as she’d be half Stark. And Sansa was pleading for that very thing.
Ned also gives us a few more clues that Dany’s Lyanna’s child.
Much has been made about this passage and how it relates to Jon, but this doesn’t actually make any sense. Jon is 14 at the time sure, but he’s turning 15 in like a few weeks/months. If Jon were Ned’s lie, not that he might not still be another lie, then Ned’s been living his lies for 15 years, not 14. Dany on the other hand is 13 turning 14 in a few months, the perfect age to fit Ned’s lies. The year is 298, the lies are 14 years old, the lies therefore began in 284. AKA the year that Dany’s born.
And the other way that Eddard shows that Dany’s Lyanna’s child, is how he reacts to any message that Jorah sends. Think about what Ned does when Ned first learns that Dany has wed Drogo: he asks who the source is
The very first thing Ned does is attempt to cast doubt on the information, to question its validity. Like why would anybody lie that Dany married Drogo? There were hundreds of people at the wedding, of course the information’s true. Someone like Drogo, and hell Dany herself, doesn’t just get married with nobody noticing. And then when Ned finds out that the source is Jorah Mormont, his old bannerman? Oh ho, watch out
He’s incredibly angry, and immediately says that Jorah needs to die. Sure, Jorah broke the north’s laws and fled from Ned’s justice, but it’s been 5 years since that. At the mention that Jorah’s now spying on Dany though, it all comes bubbling back to the surface.
Again, these are all Ned’s thought processes. He’d just received word that a dangerous claimant to the realm has married a vicious warlord… and he focuses on Jorah? No Warden of the North, a man literally in charge of a quarter of Westoros’ entire armies and the defence of one quarter of the country, is just going to completely ignore this threat, dismiss it so lightly, and focus on the spy as the man who should be eliminated instead of the very clear threat to the realm. You might personally dislike that Jorah escaped justice, which is in itself odd seeing as Ned does not like killing at all but he really wants Jorah dead, but you don’t just dismiss these reports the way that Ned does.
And this is not the only time Ned does this: he does it again when Jorah informs them that Dany is now pregnant
He tries to discredit Jorah at every turn, to say that Jorah’s messages about the threat Dany poses aren’t real… why? She’s very clearly a threat to the realm in everything she’s doing, and the reports very clearly are real seeing as hundreds of people witness each one of these, yet Ned keeps trying to say that these messages are just lies. It makes no sense, he knows the need to defend Westoros better than almost anybody, yet he keeps trying to saying that Jorah’s just lying, there’s nothing to see here. Ned’s message is clear: ignore Dany. He wants her alive, despite she keeps providing ammo that she needs to die.
And again, Jorah’s informing here. They know that Dany’s trying to invade, that would be right in his messages. She’s not getting married because she fell wildly in love, she got married to give Viserys an army. She’s not having his babies for the sake of having his babies, she’s doing it to make the stallion that mounts the world. Etc. She’s all doing this to invade Westoros. And Ned pretends that there’s nothing to see here. That just makes no sense, she’s not some innocent kid, she’s a ginormous threat to the realm.
And of course, while there’s debates back and forth about whether Lyanna was at the TOJ, or Starfall, she does seem to have been in Dorne. Which if Dany was then born in Dorne, and at least spent some time there before joining Viserys, then that does also explain the whole house with the red door because as we’ve already covered, lemon trees are indeed heavily associated with Dorne.
Conclusion
So in quick summary,
Aerys and Rhaella had a long troubled history which casts doubt on the fact that Dany could be their child in the first place, be it from their stillbirths or early deaths that they experienced across at least 25 years of marriage.
Her itinerary makes no logistical sense, either from the order she says she saw the Free Cities or why you’d ever take those routes. Nor does it match what she remembers doing.
Her birthday of 9 moons after the Sack does not seem to actually be possible due to the fact that she’s also 8-9 months younger than Jon.
The storm that marked Dany’s birth, that earned her the epithet “Stormborn” has no actual evidence of ever having taken place, nor does it make sense that it did considering that Dany says it was a summer storm, yet the Narrow Sea gets hit by its worst storms in winter.
Willem Darry does not match the physical descriptions that Willem Darry should. Nor does his cause of death fit with what Dany describes.
Dany remembers a lemon tree outside her house in Braavos, yet Braavos very clearly cannot actually support the growth of a lemon tree as lemon trees all grow in the southern latitudes, while Braavos is in the northern latitudes. More so, we know that the Vale imports their lemons, and Littlefinger’s lands, which are on the same latitude as Braavos and possesses the same climate, do not grow lemon trees due to the fact that they’re located in the Vale which cannot, so Braavos cannot either.
Dany says that the servants from the house with the red door robbed her and Viserys before they kicked them out, But Dany also says that she and Viserys possessed a bunch of treasures, including Rhaella’s crown, and that they still possessed those treasures after this robbery. Those treasures should have been stolen too.
Illyrio says some very curious things about both Dany and Viserys, such as that the plan to marry Dany to Drogo was years of planning, and that when he first saw Dany he went and vigorously fucked a bedwarmer despite being so fat that he can’t even presently stand up on his own, that implies years of interactions and knowledge. This is despite the fact that Dany and Viserys have only been living in Pentos for the last 6 months at the start of AGOT.
The first proposed alternative Dany parentage in this paper states that Dany is simply a random girl, possibly Lyseni, chosen to play the role of Daenerys Targaryen. Evidence possibly to support this includes the fact that Illyrio has dealt in the slave trade, and more specifically the Lyseni slave trade, as well as that Dany is presented collared to Drogo.
Rhaegar however is the favoured alternative father proposed in this theory. Dany receives an absolutely astonishing amount of Rhaegar plugs in her story line, in the forms of characters discussing him with her, or many visions about the man, including ones that showcase herself as him, and even one such vision which places Rhaegar in the mysterious house with the red door.
And Ashara is one of the favoured alternative mothers proposed in this theory. Dany happens to look like Ashara enough that someone who was in love with her thinks she could be her daughter. And Ashara supposedly gave birth to a daughter right around the same time that Dany’s born too. Dany being born in Dorne would obviously explain why she remembers lemon trees at her house with the red door. If a storm was present during Dany’s birth, it could make more sense if it occurred at Starfall. Rhaegar and Ashara hooking up makes a lot of sense given that there’s a song which seems to say this very thing, Elia seemingly dismisses Ashara from her service
And finally, Lyanna is the last proposed alternative mother. Evidence includes that Rhaegar and Lyanna were supposedly having sex, that Lyanna seemingly got pregnant, that Dany almost seems to skinchange her silver, that she becomes a very good rider quite quickly and Lyanna herself was a great rider. And Lyanna’s “promise me” comes up quite often and with a lot of connections in and around Dany. Eddard is also very opposed to killing Dany and seems to try and discredit every report about her actions, as well as thinks about lies he’s been living for 14 years, which conveniently works out right to around Dany’s birth
Either way, at the end of the day whether you were convinced or not by all of this, I’ll leave you once more with this question Dany asks herself:
"Remember who you are, Daenerys," the stars whispered in a woman's voice. "The dragons know. Do you?"
The purpose of this essay will be to examine the possibility that Daenerys Targaryen, protagonist of our beloved ASOIAF novels, is not actually Daenerys Targaryen. Well more specifically, that she’s not the Daenerys Targaryen born of Aerys and Rhaella like she thinks she is. To do this we will examine the following areas that cast doubt on Dany being who she thinks she is
• Aerys and Rhaella’s history of troubled conceptions
• Dany’s official timeline vs what she remembers
• Jon being 8-9 months older than Dany
• The storm that marked Dany’s birth
• Willem Darry
• Lemongate
• Dany and Viserys being robbed by their servants
• Illyrio
Following all of this, we will examine a few proposed alternative parentages that I believe are the most likely options, before concluding with a brief summary of the essay.
Aerys and Rhaella’s history of troubled conceptions and births
Sadly, the marriage between Aerys II Targaryen and his sister, Rhaella, was not as happy; though she turned a blind eye to most of the king's infidelities, the queen did not approve of his "turning my ladies into his whores." (Joanna Lannister was not the first lady to be dismissed abruptly from Her Grace's service, nor was she the last). Relations between the king and queen grew even more strained when Rhaella proved unable to give Aerys any further children. Miscarriages in 263 and 264 were followed by a stillborn daughter born in 267. Prince Daeron, born in 269, survived for only half a year. Then came another stillbirth in 270, another miscarriage in 271, and Prince Aegon, born two turns premature in 272, dead in 273.
As we can see from the above, Aerys and Rhaella had an extremely difficult time conceiving children. While we don’t know when exactly the two married beyond that it was pre-259AC given that Rhaegar’s born that year, we do know that between 259AC-284AC they officially have 3 children. Those children of course being Rhaegar, Viserys, and Dany.
Yet as you can tell from the title of this essay it’s Dany that I want to examine, and more specifically her parentage. Or rather, her real parentage. Because again, prior to Dany, in 25 years of marriage they managed to produce 2 children… and 7 stillbirths, miscarriages, and children dead in the cradle. Yet suddenly, in House Targaryen’s greatest hour of need Aerys manages to finally successfully impregnate Rhaella and she happens to successfully deliver the child who’s the girl named Daenerys Targaryen in our story? I call BS.
And really, you should too, and I hope you do once you realize the staggering amount of things in our Dany’s story that simply do not at all make sense, and precisely don’t make sense because she’s not who she thinks she is.
Let’s start with Dany’s own timeline that she tells us in her first chapter, and compare it with what she actually remembers doing in her later chapters.
Dany’s official timeline vs what she remembers
She did not remember Dragonstone either. They had run again, just before the Usurper's brother set sail with his new-built fleet. By then only Dragonstone itself, the ancient seat of their House, had remained of the Seven Kingdoms that had once been theirs. It would not remain for long. The garrison had been prepared to sell them to the Usurper, but one night Ser Willem Darry and four loyal men had broken into the nursery and stolen them both, along with her wet nurse, and set sail under cover of darkness for the safety of the Braavosian coast.
She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her "Little Princess" and sometimes "My Lady," and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever.
They had wandered since then, from Braavos to Myr, from Myr to Tyrosh, and on to Qohor and Volantis and Lys, never staying long in any one place. Her brother would not allow it. The Usurper's hired knives were close behind them, he insisted, though Dany had never seen one.
A princess, Dany thought. She had forgotten what that was like. Perhaps she had never really known. "Why does he give us so much?" she asked. "What does he want from us?" For nigh on half a year, they had lived in the magister's house, eating his food, pampered by his servants. Dany was thirteen, old enough to know that such gifts seldom come without their price, here in the free city of Pentos.
She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her "Little Princess" and sometimes "My Lady," and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever.
They had wandered since then, from Braavos to Myr, from Myr to Tyrosh, and on to Qohor and Volantis and Lys, never staying long in any one place. Her brother would not allow it. The Usurper's hired knives were close behind them, he insisted, though Dany had never seen one.
A princess, Dany thought. She had forgotten what that was like. Perhaps she had never really known. "Why does he give us so much?" she asked. "What does he want from us?" For nigh on half a year, they had lived in the magister's house, eating his food, pampered by his servants. Dany was thirteen, old enough to know that such gifts seldom come without their price, here in the free city of Pentos.
As we can see, Dany’s official itinerary is Dragonstone -> Braavos -> Myr -> Tyrosh -> Qohor -> Volantis -> Lys -> Pentos, where her story starts in AGOT. Seems all well enough, except for one problem: Dany later remembers having made a trip to Braavos when she was too old to fit this itinerary
The narrow sea was often stormy, and Dany had crossed it half a hundred times as a girl, running from one Free City to the next half a step ahead of the Usurper's hired knives. She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small, but free as well. She liked the dolphins that sometimes swam along beside Balerion, slicing through the waves like silvery spears, and the flying fish they glimpsed now and again. She even liked the sailors, with all their songs and stories. Once on a voyage to Braavos, as she'd watched the crew wrestle down a great green sail in a rising gale, she had even thought how fine it would be to be a sailor. But when she told her brother, Viserys had twisted her hair until she cried. "You are blood of the dragon," he had screamed at her. "A dragon, not some smelly fish."
As we saw in her first chapter, she says that they ran from Braavos and then went to a bunch of different places. But never once that they returned to Braavos. Yet here’s Dany, I don’t know, maybe age 4 or 5, or something like that, on a trip to Braavos. How? Did she just forget to include in her first recalling of everywhere she’d been that she’d been to Braavos multiple times and that her memory of their wanderings isn’t correct? Or is it more likely that she actually remembers the one, and only trip she ever made to Braavos. And it’s obviously not when she was a newborn child.
Also, look at any map and try and follow that route that Dany says she did, of Dragonstone -> Braavos -> Myr -> Tyrosh -> Qohor -> Volantis -> Lys -> Pentos. It makes absolutely no sense, especially given the above quote that says that she “crossed it (the narrow sea) half a hundred times”, meaning that they were sailing quite often to their destinations.
Dragonstone to Braavos? Sure it’s an easy trip to make, but why would you ever go to Braavos with the last two dragonlords in the world? Braavos is literally founded by descendants of dragon haters.
"My lord jests. You will forgive me if I do not laugh. We Braavosi are descended from those who fled Valyria and the wroth of its dragonlords. We do not jape of dragons."
Braavos is NOT a safe haven, or at least it really shouldn’t be. Yes the Sealord later witnesses a pact between Viserys and Arianne, so it’s possible that that particular Sealord was Valyrian friendly, but most Braavosi are not, and Darry should have zero idea if this Sealord will be Valyrian friendly. So why was Braavos picked? It’s an odd choice for the last two dragonlords in the world to do to for safekeeping.
Next up we’ve got Braavos to Myr. I’d say though that you probably stopped in at Pentos after Braavos actually, seeing as you have to sail by Pentos to get to Myr in the first place. So that’s a little odd. They could’ve hired the ship to sail straight to Myr of course, but why skip Pentos? What brought them straight to Myr over Pentos? Pentos has tons of nobility, we know this, and Viserys should know this too. Yet they go to Myr instead of Pentos.
Then we’ve got Myr to Tyrosh. Now this actually ties into why they went Braavos to Myr in the first place as well, but this doesn’t actually make much sense that Myr came before Tyrosh. Tyrosh is closer to Braavos, not Myr. You’d have to literally sail within sight of Tyrosh to get to Myr. The itinerary should really go Braavos -> Tyrosh -> Myr, not Braavos -> Myr -> Tyrosh.
Next we have Tyrosh to Qohor. Again, this doesn’t make much sense. Qohor is inland in Essos, and more specifically looking at a map, if you’re travelling from Tyrosh, you’re either stopping in at Myr or Pentos first before you ever get near Qohor. Which supports the previous paragraph’s assertion that there’s better ways to accomplish their itinerary, and this supports this as this itinerary means they’ve got to stop at Myr twice now, or possibly Pentos again if they ever stopped there on the way after Braavos. But again, there are far more efficient trips. Currently Dany and Viserys are going in circles.
Next we’ve got Qohor to Volantis. And you know what, this one actually makes sense. Oh there’s some small cities along the way that I’m sure that they’d have stopped at as well, but you can sail southwards down the Qhoyne, merge on to the Royne, and you’ll hit Volantis no problem.
Next we’ve got Volantis to Lys. Again, this one actually makes sense too. Just sail westward from Volantis and Lys is the first Free City you’ll hit.
What gives me some pause though, and it may be nothing, but Dany and Viserys, as I mentioned earlier, were previously going in circles, yet now seem to be getting direct to their next destinations in their last few stops. I find this odd as as the years passed Dany and Viserys are getting poorer, not richer. Their previous travels should be the more direct routes, not their later ones where they’re likely taking whatever passage they could get. It could be nothing, and like I say there’s some logical stops being made, but the previous illogical order of the stops, back when they had more money than they do currently, seems off. I’d expect thing to be the opposite.
But anyways, next we get Lys to Pentos. This is extremely dubious. To go from Lys to Pentos, you need to sail past Tyrosh and Myr. But more importantly, and I’ve alluded to this several times already, why the hell was Pentos literally the last place that they went to, 13 years after they fled Dragonstone, when Pentos is the nearest Free City to Dragonstone? That should’ve been their very first stop, not the dragon hating Braavosi. It should’ve been their stop after Braavos if not their first stop. It should’ve been their stop after Tyrosh if not their first stop. Pentos should’ve occurred so much sooner.
As we can see, this whole trip is wonky. They go all over the place, in no logical order.
But it’s even wonkier when you consider the fact that again, Dany remembers sailing to Braavos. Now, not only does Dany never list having returned to Braavos in her itinerary of where her and Viserys wandered too so already there’s 1 red flag in that, I’ve got to wander, when the fuck did they sail to Braavos? Literally look at the itinerary she gave us, the stops she says she made. At no point whatsoever will she be sailing to Braavos. Braavos is nowhere near any of the Free Cities she goes to. Once Dany and Viserys sail south, they remain in southern Essos. Braavos is as far north as you can go in Essos. They’d literally never once, ever, ever, ever sail back to Braavos to get to any of their locations. Not once. No ship ever makes this trip that Dany remembers making. It makes zero sense.
And again, Dany seems pretty young in this memory, if she’s naively thinking about being a common sailor when she’s the heir to a dynasty. But all of their trips are in southern Essos at this time. At no point do they ever go north enough to ever warrant sailing remotely anywhere near Braavos for one of their stops… except the first time that Dany would’ve gone to Braavos that is.
But that aside, Dany’s journeys utterly do not make sense anyways.
Which makes sense itself because if we simply go over the timeline, as we will in the very next section of this essay, they shouldn’t make sense because the itinerary itself is not correct, but Dany’s memory of that trip to Braavos is.
The problem with Jon being 8-9 months older than Dany if Dany’s born 9 months after the Sack
So we know from a rather infamous SSM that Jon's 8-9 months older than Dany. This is… problematic to say the least. From Dany I in AGOT we know that Dany is born “nine moons” after the Sack. So Jon is therefore born within a month of the Sack then. Now most commonly, fans of ASOAIF tend to believe in RLJ, and that Jon was born at the TOJ shortly before or during when Ned arrives, within this month of the Sack.
But this isn’t actually possible though.
First off, Ned says that the war had raged for a year by the Sack of King's Landing.
The war had raged for close to a year. Lords great and small had flocked to Robert's banners; others had remained loyal to Targaryen. The mighty Lannisters of Casterly Rock, the Wardens of the West, had remained aloof from the struggle, ignoring calls to arms from both rebels and royalists. Aerys Targaryen must have thought that his gods had answered his prayers when Lord Tywin Lannister appeared before the gates of King's Landing with an army twelve thousand strong, professing loyalty. So the mad king had ordered his last mad act. He had opened his city to the lions at the gate.
And we know that the Siege of Storm's End also lasts a year as well
Why did Stannis leave? Had he played some part in Jon Arryn's murder? Or was he afraid? Ned found it hard to imagine what could frighten Stannis Baratheon, who had once held Storm's End through a year of siege, surviving on rats and boot leather while the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne sat outside with their hosts, banqueting in sight of his walls.
Maester Cressen remembered the day Davos had been knighted, after the siege of Storm's End. Lord Stannis and a small garrison had held the castle for close to a year, against the great host of the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne. Even the sea was closed against them, watched day and night by Redwyne galleys flying the burgundy banners of the Arbor. Within Storm's End, the horses had long since been eaten, the dogs and cats were gone, and the garrison was down to roots and rats. Then came a night when the moon was new and black clouds hid the stars. Cloaked in that darkness, Davos the smuggler had dared the Redwyne cordon and the rocks of Shipbreaker Bay alike. His little ship had a black hull, black sails, black oars, and a hold crammed with onions and salt fish. Little enough, yet it had kept the garrison alive long enough for Eddard Stark to reach Storm's End and break the siege.
Tyrion had to bite his tongue at that. Robb Stark had won more battles in a year than the Lord of Highgarden had in twenty. Tyrell's reputation rested on one indecisive victory over Robert Baratheon at Ashford, in a battle largely won by Lord Tarly's van before the main host had even arrived. The siege of Storm's End, where Mace Tyrell actually did hold the command, had dragged on a year to no result, and after the Trident was fought, the Lord of Highgarden had meekly dipped his banners to Eddard Stark.
During Robert's Rebellion, Lord Tyrell of Highgarden laid siege to Storm's End for a year, without result. If the garrison's supplies had been sufficient to the task, the castle might have held out indefinitely, but the war had come quickly and the storehouses and granaries were only half-full. By year's end, the garrison under Lord Robert's brother Stannis was sorely tested by hunger and want, only to be saved by a common smuggler who slipped through the Redwyne blockade one night carrying a load of onions and salt fish to Storm's End. Thus, the castle was able to stand unbroken until Robert defeated Rhaegar on the Trident and Lord Eddard Stark arrived to end the siege.
I defeated your uncle Victarion and his Iron Fleet off Fair Isle, the first time your father crowned himself. I held Storm's End against the power of the Reach for a year, and took Dragonstone from the Targaryens. I smashed Mance Rayder at the Wall, though he had twenty times my numbers. Tell me, turncloak, what battles has the Bastard of Bolton ever won that I should fear him?
So both events occur after a year from their respective start dates. The Siege however only begins after the Battle of Ashford, and the battle of Ashford can't happen until Jon Arryn calls his banners, which marks the start of the year until the Sack, marches to Gulltown to fight the Battle of Gulltown, Robert then travels to Storm's End, Robert calls his banners, his bannermen arrive with their forces, Robert travels to Summerhall and fights the battles of Summerhall, Robert returns to Storm's End and goes hawking and feasting with the lords he'd just beat at Summerhall while spending enough time to win them to his cause, then travels to Ashford for the Battle of Ashford. Then the Siege of Storm's End can't begin until Mace Tyrell marches from Ashford to Storm's End. Thus begins the year until the end of the Siege, after all this has occurred since the countdown began for the year until the Sack occurs.
Now if Jon Arryn calling his banners to the Sack is one year, and after the Battle of Ashford to the end of the Siege of Storm's End is also one year, then all the time between Jon Arryn calling his banners to the beginning of the Siege of Storm's End is the same amount of time between the Sack of King's Landing and the end of the Siege as a year is a year. That's the only way for them to have both lasted a year. The Battle of Ashford doesn't start till months into the war, so the Siege of Storm's End doesn't end until months after the Sack either.
And we know that by the time of the TOJ the Siege has already been lifted
"I came down on Storm's End to lift the siege," Ned told them, "and the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne dipped their banners, and all their knights bent the knee to pledge us fealty. I was certain you would be among them."
So what we get if we follow the timeline is that the Sack occurs, a few months pass before the Siege ends, and then however long it took for Ned to go to the TOJ (which by the way we are never told immediately occurred after he accepted Mace’s surrender).
Therefore if Dany is born 9 months after the Sack, and Jon's born in the TOJ as most fans think, which occurs after the Siege, which itself occurs months after the Sack, I'd expect him to be around only at most 5-6 months older than Dany as the TOJ would be a few months after the Sack.
Jon cannot be 8-9 months older than Dany if he's born at the TOJ. He'd be like 3 months old at that point. Someone's birthdate isn't right here. Either Dany's not born 9 months after the Sack like she thinks she is, and therefore Jon's birthday can be whenever as it no longer has a fixed time to occur at, or Jon was a few months old by the time Ned arrived at the TOJ if Dany's birthday of 9 months after the Sack is actually correct.
And that’s the key point: if Dany’s birthday in the books is correct. Which we just established that it might not be. It’s either her or Jon’s birthday that isn’t right, but notably Jon’s birthday is never actually established anywhere in the books. Dany’s repeatedly is. We have no idea how to figure out Jon’s birthday without using the info in the books about Dany’s birthday. Which we just established doesn’t end up being right, or at least not “right” in how most fans perceive things.
Dany’s birthday is the basemark here. And well, it’s wrong. Hence why Jon’s birthday doesn’t seem to make any sense either. And there’s a boat load of information that can be found in the books that supports that Dany’s past doesn’t quite add up, precisely because it’s not supposed.
So let’s examine these oddities then.
The Storm that marked Dany’s birth
No squall could frighten Dany, though. Daenerys Stormborn, she was called, for she had come howling into the world on distant Dragonstone as the greatest storm in the memory of Westeros howled outside, a storm so fierce that it ripped gargoyles from the castle walls and smashed her father's fleet to kindling.
Now much has been made in the books about the storm that occurred during Dany’s birth. As we can see, she even earned an epithet from it. The problem is though, no one in Westoros has ever actually mentioned this storm as having ever occurred, and the evidence that it didn’t is rather damning.
First up, the lack of any mention of this storm whatsoever by anybody who lives in Westoros. Oh there’s plenty of mentions about storms hitting Dragonstone in general, but nobody other than Dany ever once mentions this storm that she was born during. Not Stannis. Not Davos. Not Florent. Not Cressen. Etc. Nobody on Dragonstone ever mentions any storm that wracked the island in 284 that Stannis then had to repair/there’s still damage showing. Nobody elsewise ever mentions any storm at all. The only mention of any storm that struck Dragonstone during Dany’s birth, is Dany herself. It’s found absolutely nowhere elsewhere in the series. There’s no record about this storm except from Dany. Which is odd because Dany claims it was the greatest storm in the memory of Westoros... yet nobody in Westoros has any memory of this storm.
Which then brings us to the many different logistical problems that come from this storm supposedly having occurred.
First off, if a storm wracked Dragonstone, why didn’t it wrack King’s Landing too? Both are on Blackwater Bay. Surely if the “greatest storm in the memory of Westoros” struck Dragonstone, it also struck King’s Landing no? Yet again, no one mentions King’s Landing having been struck by any storm at that period in time, and more importantly we know that the storm which struck Dragonstone supposedly shattered the Targaryen fleet, yet Stannis was in the process of building a new fleet for Robert to take Dragonstone
"His," Stannis broke in, "when by rights they should be mine. I never asked for Dragonstone. I never wanted it. I took it because Robert's enemies were here and he commanded me to root them out. I built his fleet and did his work, dutiful as a younger brother should be to an elder, as Renly should be to me. And what was Robert's thanks? He names me Lord of Dragonstone, and gives Storm's End and its incomes to Renly. Storm's End belonged to House Baratheon for three hundred years; by rights it should have passed to me when Robert took the Iron Throne."
So why wasn’t Stannis’ fleet also destroyed? If this storm was so bad that it wrecked the Targaryen fleet, it should’ve also wrecked Stannis’. Yet Stannis clearly sails to Dragonstone, and he mentions zero storms troubling him. In fact he never once even mentions that any storm struck Dragonstone then, or that one shattered the Targaryen fleet, let alone that there ever was a Targaryen fleet.
Also, if a storm destroyed the Targaryen boats, then how did Darry sail away?
She did not remember Dragonstone either. They had run again, just before the Usurper's brother set sail with his new-built fleet. By then only Dragonstone itself, the ancient seat of their House, had remained of the Seven Kingdoms that had once been theirs. It would not remain for long. The garrison had been prepared to sell them to the Usurper, but one night Ser Willem Darry and four loyal men had broken into the nursery and stolen them both, along with her wet nurse, and set sail under cover of darkness for the safety of the Braavosian coast.
You just told us that this fiercest storm in Westoros’ memory shattered the fleet. It probably shattered every single other boat there too seeing as any seaworthy boat doesn’t come on land. So where the hell did Darry find a boat to get across to Braavos if there should be no boat lefts?
And finally, there’s the problem of the storm itself. Dany tells us that the storm was a summer storm
She had been born on Dragonstone nine moons after their flight, while a raging summer storm threatened to rip the island fastness apart. They said that storm was terrible. The Targaryen fleet was smashed while it lay at anchor, and huge stone blocks were ripped from the parapets and sent hurtling into the wild waters of the narrow sea. Her mother had died birthing her, and for that her brother Viserys had never forgiven her.
Yet we learn from Cotter Pyke
The ship was Blackbird, the largest of the Watch's galleys. Storm Crow and Talon were faster, Cotter Pyke told Maester Aemon back at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, but they were fighting ships, lean, swift birds of prey where the rowers sat on open decks. Blackbird was a better choice for the rough waters of the narrow sea beyond Skagos. "There have been storms," Pyke warned them. "Winter storms are worse, but autumn's are more frequent."
That autumn is when storms frequently wrack the Narrow Sea, and winter when the worst ones fall. So how did the greatest storm in Westoros’ history wreck Dragonstone during summer? The worst storms occur in winter, not summer.
Credit’s got to go to the user Pretty Pig/Beautiful Bacon for pointing out all this Stormborn nonsense.
The storm that supposed happened during Dany’s birth makes absolutely no sense from any angle. And it’s not the only one. The guy who supposedly saved her following this storm doesn’t add up either.
“Willem Darry”
She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her "Little Princess" and sometimes "My Lady," and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever.
While Lemongate will indeed be rearing its head in this essay, we need to first address the oddness surrounding “Willem Darry”.
Now there are a lot of very odd things with Willem Darry, and they start right from the beginning of our introduction to the man, and GRRM just builds and builds on them. Which isn’t surprising really considering that Dany straight up admits that she can barely even remember the man in the above paragraph. But let’s start with the fact that Dany remembers that Darry had “soft hands”.
Now this is extremely weird because Dany just identified that he was “Ser” Willem Darry, and therefore a knight. And Barristan also tells us that he was the master-at-arms at King’s Landing.
"As you wish," said Whitebeard. "As a young boy, the Prince of Dragonstone was bookish to a fault. He was reading so early that men said Queen Rhaella must have swallowed some books and a candle whilst he was in her womb. Rhaegar took no interest in the play of other children. The maesters were awed by his wits, but his father's knights would jest sourly that Baelor the Blessed had been born again. Until one day Prince Rhaegar found something in his scrolls that changed him. No one knows what it might have been, only that the boy suddenly appeared early one morning in the yard as the knights were donning their steel. He walked up to Ser Willem Darry, the master-at-arms, and said, 'I will require sword and armor. It seems I must be a warrior.'"
And Yandel tells us that Darry has held the post of master-at-arms since 270AC
The growing rift between the king and the King's Hand was also apparent in the matter of appointments. Whereas previously His Grace had always heeded his Hand's counsel, bestowing offices, honors, and inheritances as Lord Tywin recommended, after 270 AC he began to disregard the men put forward by his lordship in favor of his own choices. Many westermen found themselves dismissed from the king's service for no better cause than the suspicion that they might be "Hand's men." In their places, King Aerys appointed his own favorites...but the king's favor had become a chancy thing, his mistrust easy to awaken. Even the Hand's own kin were not exempt from royal displeasure. When Lord Tywin wished to name his brother Ser Tygett Lannister as the Red Keep's master-at-arms, King Aerys gave the post to Ser Willem Darry instead.
So we know that Darry had been a master-at-arms and knight for many years by the time Dany should meet him. Which is where the fact that he had soft hands is extremely weird because a man whose life literally stems from wielding weapons would not possess soft hands.
She almost slapped his face. Almost. But she had gone too far, and too much was at stake. All I do, I do for Tommen. She turned her head and caught Ser Osney's hand with her own, kissing his fingers. They were rough and hard, callused from the sword. Robert had hands like that, she thought.
A knight and master at arms would have had hard hands from years of sword play. Now some might argue that Darry’s hands might’ve softened over the years after Robert’s Rebellion where he wouldn’t have been practicing his sword so much, especially if he’s sick, but Cersei says that Robert’s hands were rough and hard like Ser Osney’s. And as we all know, Robert became a physical wreck later in his life, and probably was little, if ever, training anymore. Yet Cersei never says that his hands became soft, even though we know the rest of him did. His hands remained calloused from his years of training, plus whatever little work he probably got in every now and then. But anyways, no, Darry’s hands wouldn’t have softened, especially considering the AWOIAF app says that he died in 289. Which is only at most 5 years that Darry might not have been practicing the sword. Robert didn’t lose his calluses in 9 years (as Eddard mentions Robert declines after the Greyjoy Rebellion). Darry wouldn’t have lost his calluses according to this world.
As a slight aside to the above point, only two types of men are ever even described in ASOIAF as having soft hands: maesters and Varys.
The eunuch spread his soft hands. "On more than that, I hope, sweet lady. I have great esteem for your husband, our new Hand, and I know we do both love King Robert."
They sent for me last. The realization made her almost too angry for words. And Pycelle runs off to send a message rather than soil his soft, wrinkled hands. The man is useless. "Find Maester Ballabar," she commanded. "Find Maester Frenken. Any of them." Puckens and Shortear ran to obey. "Where is my brother?"
". . . obsidian," said the other man in the room, a pale, fleshy, pasty-faced young fellow with round shoulders, soft hands, close-set eyes, and food stains on his robes.
A fool's question. Maesters had their uses, but Victarion had nothing but contempt for this Kerwin. With his smooth pink cheeks, soft hands, and brown curls, he looked more girlish than most girls.When first he came aboard the Iron Victory, he had a smirky little smile too, but one night off the Stepstones he had smiled at the wrong man, and Burton Humble had knocked out four of his teeth. Not long after that Kerwin had come creeping to the captain to complain that four of the crew had dragged him belowdecks and used him as a woman. "Here is how you put an end to that," Victarion had told him, slamming a dagger down on the table between them. Kerwin took the blade—too afraid to refuse it, the captain judged—but he had never used it.
"Can you offer any proof of this incest, ser?" Maester Theomore asked, folding his soft hands atop his belly.
Which are quite obviously two people who never spend any time wielding any swords. A man who worked for his life, whose living came from his ability with his sword, would not have had soft hands.
And it’s not just Darry’s “soft hands” that don’t make sense; the other descriptions of Darry also continue to not add up.
Dany remembers Darry as a “great grey bear of a man”. While I’ll touch on his physical size in the next part of this essay, the “grey” part is odd. Now as we previously covered, Darry got his post as master-at-arms in 270, after Aerys choose him instead of heeding Tywin’s advice to choose Tygett. Now while we’re never told Darry’s age, anecdotally I’d say that there’s some fairly good evidence that Darry shouldn’t really be a “grey” bear of a man.
First off, like I said, Darry got his post because he was chosen over Tygett in 270. Now we know that Tygett himself is only 20 years old in 270AC because we know that he was 10 years old in 260 during the Ninepenny Kings war.
Lord Tytos’s three eldest sons also acquitted themselves well upon the Stepstones, however. Knighted on the eve of the conflict, Ser Tywin Lannister fought in the retinue of the king’s young heir, Aerys, Prince of Dragonstone, and was given the honor of dubbing him a knight at war’s end. Kevan Lannister, squiring for the Red Lion, also won his spurs, and was knighted by Roger Reyne himself. Their brother Tygett, a squire of ten, was too young for knighthood, but his courage and skill at arms were remarked upon by all, for he slew a grown man in his first battle and three more in later fights, one of them a knight of the Golden Company. “Those who beheld these proud young lions on the battlefield might rightly wonder how such could ever have sprung from the loins of the quivering fool beneath the Rock,” Grand Maester Pycelle wrote scornfully in his Observations Upon the Recent Blood-Letting on the Stepstones.
So for me, given that we know that Aerys chose Willem specifically to spite Tywin and his proposal of his young prodigy brother Tygett, and not necessarily that Willem was the best man for the job, that it’s fairly logical that Aerys would’ve chosen one of Tygett’s own contemporaries to add salt into the wound. If Tygett’s only 20 in 270AC, then I’m expecting Willem to not be that far off either, or at least within the same ball park (his 20’s).
And this isn’t something that Aerys hasn’t done before of course.
Ser Kevan wished that he could share his certainty. He had known Jon Connington, slightly—a proud youth, the most headstrong of the gaggle of young lordlings who had gathered around Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, competing for his royal favor. Arrogant, but able and energetic. That, and his skill at arms, was why Mad King Aerys had named him Hand. Old Lord Merryweather's inaction had allowed the rebellion to take root and spread, and Aerys wanted someone young and vigorous to match Robert's own youth and vigor. "Too soon," Lord Tywin Lannister had declared when word of the king's choice had reached Casterly Rock. "Connington is too young, too bold, too eager for glory."
During Robert’s Rebellion Aerys specifically turned to Jon Connington in an effort to try and match the rebels’ youthful, energetic, and highly skilled Robert, with the equally youthful, energetic, and highly skilled Jon. So why wouldn’t he try and match Tygett’s youthfulness, energy, and skill with an equally youthful, energetic, and skilled man who happened to be Ser Willem Darry? The parallel is there that Aerys will match somebody, not try and oppose them when he wants to one up a person. Aerys would’ve picked a contemporary of Tygett’s, not some older veteran.
And furthermore, we know that Willem and Jonothor were brothers.
AERYS’S KINGSGUARD
I was wondering about the kingsguard at Aerys' death, I know that Jaime Lannister, Oswell Whent, Gerald Hightower, Arthur Dayne and Barristan Selmy were in the kingsguard, who where the other two? Was one Prince Lewyn of Dorne?
Yes.
The other was Ser Jonothor Darry, brother to Ser Willem.
I was wondering about the kingsguard at Aerys' death, I know that Jaime Lannister, Oswell Whent, Gerald Hightower, Arthur Dayne and Barristan Selmy were in the kingsguard, who where the other two? Was one Prince Lewyn of Dorne?
Yes.
The other was Ser Jonothor Darry, brother to Ser Willem.
While we never learn Jonothor’s age, there’s nothing to indicate that he was particularly young or old. He seems to be right in the middle. Which again, would fit if his brother Willem was around his 20’s in 270, seeing as our main looks into Jonothor come from Jaime remembering the man in 283, 13 years later. If Willem was in his 20’s, and he and Jonothor were reasonably close in age, then Jonothor would be in his 30’s by 283 when Jaime’s remembering him. So neither old nor young, just like he seems.
So now if Willem was basically in his 20’s in 270, then it’s odd that he’s a “grey” bear of a man in Dany’s memories seeing as the app AWOIAF says that Darry dies in 289. Which would only have made Willem some age between 39 and 48. AKA not an old man who’d have gone grey (or shouldn’t have).
And nobody ever calls Willem Darry an old man anywhere else in the story. Dany is our only source of information for Willem being this old man.
Another oddity is in how Darry supposedly died.
Dany hungered and thirsted with the rest of them. The milk in her breasts dried up, her nipples cracked and bled, and the flesh fell away from her day by day until she was lean and hard as a stick, yet it was her dragons she feared for. Her father had been slain before she was born, and her splendid brother Rhaegar as well. Her mother had died bringing her into the world while the storm screamed outside. Gentle Ser Willem Darry, who must have loved her after a fashion, had been taken by a wasting sickness when she was very young. Her brother Viserys, Khal Drogo who was her sun-and-stars, even her unborn son, the gods had claimed them all. They will not have my dragons, Dany vowed. They will not.
So here we’re told that Darry died of a wasting sickness. Now this is odd because as mentioned before, Dany remembers Darry as a “great grey bear of a man”. A bear of a man. So Darry was a big man according to Dany. Which is odd because he’s dying of a wasting sickness. He should be you know, wasting. Like Hoster Tully did when he got sick.
Hoster Tully had always been a big man; tall and broad in his youth, portly as he grew older. Now he seemed shrunken, the muscle and meat melted off his bones. Even his face sagged. The last time Catelyn had seen him, his hair and beard had been brown, well streaked with grey. Now they had gone white as snow.
How can Darry be dying of a wasting sickness if Dany remembers him as this great big man? That’s contradictory. It makes no sense. Darry can’t possibly have been dying of a wasting sickness if he was still this great big man. Now personally I believe that indicates that Willem was actually poisoned and not dying of a wasting sickness, which is further supported by the “sickly sweet” smell that Dany remembers, seeing as Tywin’s corpse is also said to have smelled like that, and many believe that it’s possible that Tywin was poisoned before his death. But either way, his physical size does not match how Dany says he was dying.
And Willem’s physical size is weird itself seeing as none of the Darrys in our story are ever described as big men in the first place. Now of course you don’t need to have a family trait of being large, like the Baratheons, Cleganes, or Umbers to produce a member who himself grows into a “great grey bear of a man”, but it does help, and it is odd that no Darry is ever described as being a large man besides Willem, not even his brother Jonothor. And more importantly no one ever calls Willem a big man either. Barristan makes no mention of it, Yandel makes no mention of it, Ned makes no mention of it, etc. Dany is our one and only source who ever says that Darry was this big man. As you’ve no doubt noticed if you’ve made it this far, Dany’s the only person who describes a lot of things one way, isn’t she?
And finally, Dany says that Darry lived in his sickbed
She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her "Little Princess" and sometimes "My Lady," and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever.
But Dany then has a vision in the House of the Undying of Darry walking around with a cane
She fled from him, but only as far as the next open door. I know this room, she thought. She remembered those great wooden beams and the carved animal faces that adorned them. And there outside the window, a lemon tree! The sight of it made her heart ache with longing. It is the house with the red door, the house in Braavos. No sooner had she thought it than old Ser Willem came into the room, leaning heavily on his stick. "Little princess, there you are," he said in his gruff kind voice. "Come," he said, "come to me, my lady, you're home now, you're safe now." His big wrinkled hand reached for her, soft as old leather, and Dany wanted to take it and hold it and kiss it, she wanted that as much as she had ever wanted anything. Her foot edged forward, and then she thought, He's dead, he's dead, the sweet old bear, he died a long time ago. She backed away and ran.
The vision could of course be a false vision, of something that never happened, but nonetheless we’ve got another contradiction found here: Dany said that Darry never left his bed at the house with the red door, yet she has a vision of presumably her past, of Darry walking with the aid of a stick.
All in all, there’s a ton of odd things with Darry and Dany’s past that don’t add up.
And it makes a lot of sense that they don’t particularly add up, seeing as the stories that Willem Darry helped out Rhaella and Viserys don’t even add up themselves.
The Flight to Dragonstone
In the TOJ dream Ned says that Willem Darry fled to Dragonstone with Viserys and Rhaella
"Ser Willem Darry is fled to Dragonstone, with your queen and Prince Viserys. I thought you might have sailed with him."
Now it might come as a surprise to some, but Ned is actually the only person to ever say this, that Darry fled to Dragonstone with Rhaella and Viserys. No one else ever mentions this. Oh people mention that Viserys and Rhaella were sent to Dragonstone, but no one mentions Darry.
Jaime remembers that after the Trident Aerys ordered Viserys and Rhaella to go to Dragonstone.
"My Sworn Brothers were all away, you see, but Aerys liked to keep me close. I was my father's son, so he did not trust me. He wanted me where Varys could watch me, day and night. So I heard it all." He remembered how Rossart's eyes would shine when he unrolled his maps to show where the substance must be placed. Garigus and Belis were the same. "Rhaegar met Robert on the Trident, and you know what happened there. When the word reached court, Aerys packed the queen off to Dragonstone with Prince Viserys. Princess Elia would have gone as well, but he forbade it. Somehow he had gotten it in his head that Prince Lewyn must have betrayed Rhaegar on the Trident, but he thought he could keep Dorne loyal so long as he kept Elia and Aegon by his side. The traitors want my city, I heard him tell Rossart, but I'll give them naught but ashes. Let Robert be king over charred bones and cooked meat. The Targaryens never bury their dead, they burn them. Aerys meant to have the greatest funeral pyre of them all. Though if truth be told, I do not believe he truly expected to die. Like Aerion Brightfire before him, Aerys thought the fire would transform him . . . that he would rise again, reborn as a dragon, and turn all his enemies to ash.
And Yandel also reports this.
Birds flew and couriers raced to bear word of the victory at the Ruby Ford. When the news reached the Red Keep, it was said that Aerys cursed the Dornish, certain that Lewyn had betrayed Rhaegar. He sent his pregnant queen, Rhaella, and his younger son and new heir, Viserys, away to Dragonstone, but Princess Elia was forced to remain in King's Landing with Rhaegar's children as a hostage against Dorne. Having burned his previous Hand, Lord Chelsted, alive for bad counsel during the war, Aerys now appointed another to the position: the alchemist Rossart—a man of low birth, with little to recommend him but his flames and trickery.
But as you can see there’s no mention of Darry by either of them. Ned, in a fever dream that the author himself has mentioned as being unreliable, is our only source saying this. Which leads to me to thinking there’s something wrong here, both because of nobody mentioning Darry leaving, and also because if you examine things, it’s quite clear that Viserys and Rhaella did NOT go to Dragonstone together.
Jaime had only seen Rhaella once after that, the morning of the day she left for Dragonstone. The queen had been cloaked and hooded as she climbed inside the royal wheelhouse that would take her down Aegon's High Hill to the waiting ship, but he heard her maids whispering after she was gone. They said the queen looked as if some beast had savaged her, clawing at her thighs and chewing on her breasts. A crowned beast, Jaime knew.
Here we see that Jaime remembers seeing Rhaella depart for Dragonstone in the morning. No mention of Viserys or Darry ever leaving with her.
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.
And yet here we have Dany telling us that Viserys told her that he left for Dragonstone at midnight. And there’s no mention of having left with Rhaella or Darry either.
And while this is an aside, credit should be made to I believe the user Voice for pointing out that Viserys’ “ship with black sails” sounds quite a lot like a smuggler’s ship as Davos describes his own smuggler’s ship exactly like this, and not any official royal ship. Which we know that Rhaella at least took, because the ship was waiting for her in King’s Landing’s harbour and everything. Rhaella at the very least left King’s Landing officially, but Viserys seems to have been smuggled out.
But that aside, it’s quite clear from the different descriptions, as well as lack of similar details, that not only did Viserys and Rhaella NOT go to Dragonstone together, but that Darry wasn’t with either of them as nobody ever mentions him except Ned.
Which actually could make sense because if you read Ned’s line like so
"Ser Willem Darry is fled to Dragonstone, with your queen and Prince Viserys. I thought you might have sailed with him."
That Ned is saying that he thought the Kingsguard would’ve sailed with Darry and not Viserys and Rhaella. As in, Darry later joined them on his own.
Which at least would make more sense as there seems to be no doubt that Viserys, Rhaella, and Darry were all at least on Dragonstone together at some point. But when you combine everything together, it seems far more likely that they were not always together.
And it should be noted, that while I am arguing that Dany’s “Willem Darry” is not Willem Darry, I am not suggesting that the real Willem Darry never did play a role in at least Viserys’ life. He’s certainly well attested to there, be it from Stannis recalling that Darry smuggled him out of Dragonstone before he got there, or Darry signing for Viserys’ marriage pact, etc. THAT Willem Darry seems well and accounted for. It’s Dany’s “Willem Darry”, which I’ve gone over already not matching up to what the real Willem Darry should’ve been like, that doesn’t make sense.
IMO, Dany was simply told that the man she remembers, her “Willem Darry” was Willem Darry, the man who’s at least clearly involved in Viserys’ life. Who her “Willem Darry” was is a topic in and of itself, but as I believe I’ve demonstrated, there’s enough oddities surround everything “Willem Darry” and the actual Willem Darry, that something is odd.
Which of course, inevitably, has to lead us to discussing Lemongate.
Lemongate
She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her "Little Princess" and sometimes "My Lady," and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever.
Now without knowing anything about Braavos, this lemon tree outside Dany’s room is nothing. And notably, GRRM avoids describing Braavos or having any characters at all go to Braavos for many books, precisely because of this. Because Braavos cannot actually grow lemons. It has the completely wrong climate to do so.
After that, she had nothing to do but sit and yawn for a long while as Brusco and his sons pushed them through the predawn gloom, wending down a confusion of small canals. The day looked to be a rare one, crisp and clear and bright. Braavos only had three kinds of weather; fog was bad, rain was worse, and freezing rain was worst. But every so often would come a morning when the dawn broke pink and blue and the air was sharp and salty. Those were the days that Cat loved best.
Braavos is, to put it kindly, a climate shithole. All it ever does is rain there and be foggy, with only rare days of good weather. This is not at all the places were a southern citrus fruit grows. In fact we’re specifically told that citrus fruits are found in lower Essos, not Braavos because Braavos is too far north.
"Seven hells, this place is damp," she heard her guard complain. "I'm chilled to the bones. Where are the bloody orange trees? I always heard there were orange trees in the Free Cities. Lemons and limes. Pomegranates. Hot peppers, warm nights, girls with bare bellies. Where are the bare-bellied girls, I ask you?"
"Down in Lys, and Myr, and Old Volantis," the other guard replied. He was an older man, big-bellied and grizzled. "I went to Lys with Lord Tywin once, when he was Hand to Aerys. Braavos is north of King's Landing, fool. Can't you read a bloody map?"
"Down in Lys, and Myr, and Old Volantis," the other guard replied. He was an older man, big-bellied and grizzled. "I went to Lys with Lord Tywin once, when he was Hand to Aerys. Braavos is north of King's Landing, fool. Can't you read a bloody map?"
Braavos is not only too north and too foggy to grow lemon trees, they’re too much of either to grow any trees at all except hardy pine trees
"There's no more wood." Dareon had paid the innkeep double for a room with a hearth, but none of them had realized that wood would be so costly here. Trees did not grow on Braavos, save in the courts and gardens of the mighty. Nor would the Braavosi cut the pines that covered the outlying islands around their great lagoon and acted as windbreaks to shield them from storms. Instead, firewood was brought in by barge, up the rivers and across the lagoon. Even dung was dear here; the Braavosi used boats in place of horses. None of that would have mattered if they had departed as planned for Oldtown, but that had proved impossible with Maester Aemon so weak. Another voyage on the open sea would kill him.
The only trees that we’ve ever been told that grow in Braavos are pine trees. Which obviously are much heartier trees, and perfectly capable of growing in a wet, damp, and cold environment unlike a lemon tree.
And not only that, but if we follow the guardsmen’s talk that Braavos is too far north, we can indeed establish that there is a line of latitude where lemon trees do grow. The guardsman mentioned Lys, Myr, Volantis, but we also see Meereen grows lemon trees as well
Afterward her lord husband led his guests onto the lower terrace, so the visitors from the Yellow City might behold Meereen by night. Wine cups in hand, the Yunkai'i wandered the garden in small groups, beneath lemon trees and night-blooming flowers, and Dany found herself face-to-face with Brown Ben Plumm.
But rather notably, the one place that is again and again associated with lemon trees, is Dorne
"Lemons. And where would we get lemons? Does this look like Dorne to you, you freckled fool? Why don't you hop out back to the lemon trees and pick us a bushel, and some nice olives and pomegranates too." She shook a finger at him. "Now, I suppose I could cook it with Lem's cloak, if you like, but not till it's hung for a few days. You'll eat rabbit, or you won't eat. Roast rabbit on a spit would be quickest, if you've got a hunger. Or might be you'd like it stewed, with ale and onions."
For me, Alayne thought, as they wheeled it out. Sweetrobin loved lemon cakes too, but only after she told him that they were her favorites. The cake had required every lemon in the Vale, but Petyr had promised that he would send to Dorne for more.
A second, rival High King of Dorne also existed during the times of the First Men, ruling from a great wooden motte-and-bailey castle on the south bank of Greenwood near Lemonwood, where the river flows into the Summer Sea. This was a curious kingship, for whenever a king died, his successor was chosen by election from amongst a dozen noble families that had settled along the river or the eastern shores. The Wades, Shells, Holts, Brooks, Hulls, Lakes, Brownhills, and Briars all threw up kings who ruled from the high hall amongst the lemon trees, but in the end this curious system broke down when a disputed election set the royal houses to warring against one another. After a generation of conflict, three of the old houses were wiped from the earth, and the once-powerful river realm had shattered into a dozen quarrelsome petty kingdoms.
"Lemons?" Pod said hopefully. "A purple field strewn with lemons? For House Dalt? Of, of Lemonwood."
Only three leagues of coast road divided Sunspear from the Water Gardens, yet they were two different worlds. There children frolicked naked in the sun, music played in tiled courtyards, and the air was sharp with the smell of lemons and blood oranges. Here the air smelled of dust, sweat, and smoke, and the nights were alive with the babble of voices. In place of the pink marble of the Water Gardens, Sunspear was built from mud and straw, and colored brown and dun. The ancient stronghold of House Martell stood at the easternmost end of a little jut of stone and sand, surrounded on three sides by the sea. To the west, in the shadows of Sunspear's massive walls, mud-brick shops and windowless hovels clung to the castle like barnacles to a galley's hull. Stables and inns and winesinks and pillow houses had grown up west of those, many enclosed by walls of their own, and yet more hovels had risen beneath those walls. And so and so and so, as the bearded priests would say. Compared to Tyrosh or Myr or Great Norvos, the shadow city was no more than a town, yet it was the nearest thing to a true city that these Dornish had.
"We're almost there, Your Grace," Garin told Myrcella cheerfully when they spied more sandbeggars up ahead, a thicket of them growing all around the dry bed of a stream. The sun was beating down like a fiery hammer, but it did not matter with their journey at its end. They stopped to water the horses again, drank deep from their skins and wet their veils, then mounted for the last push. Within half a league they were riding over devilgrass and past olive groves. Beyond a line of stony hills the grass grew greener and more lush, and there were lemon orchards watered by a spider's web of old canals. Garin was the first to spy the river glimmering green. He gave a shout and raced ahead.
While some believe that this overabundance of lemon trees being linked to Dorne means that Dany’s house with the red door was actually located there instead of Braavos, and we will talk about this later when we discuss some of the potential mothers for Dany, we can at least establish however that Braavos is indeed too far north to grow lemons based on all the quotes that say that lemons come from places like Dorne, Meereen, Lys, Myr, and Old Volantis, as if you look on a map, all of these places are not only very far south of Braavos, they’re also all on about the same latitude as one another. There is a very clear area of the world that grows lemon trees, and Braavos is nowhere near this.
And furthermore, to put to notion to rest the idea that Braavos could grow lemon trees, here is how Littlefinger’s lands are described.
Off the bow of the Merling King stretched a bare and stony strand, windswept, treeless, and uninviting. Even so, it made a welcome sight. They had been a long while clawing their way back on course. The last storm had swept them out of sight of land, and sent such waves crashing over the sides of the galley that Sansa had been certain they were all going to drown. Two men had been swept overboard, she had heard old Oswell saying, and another had fallen from the mast and broken his neck.
“A little wine will be good for that. We’ll get you a cup, as soon as we’re ashore.” Petyr pointed to where an old flint tower stood outlined against a bleak grey sky, the breakers crashing on the rocks beneath it. “Cheerful, is it not? I fear there’s no safe anchorage here. We’ll put ashore in a boat.”
They’re exactly the same as Braavos: cold, overcast, uninviting, and treeless. And if you look at a map once again, Littlefinger’s Keep and Braavos are roughly the same latitude. They fall into the same latitude and have the exact same climate. And as one of the above “lemons come from Dorne” quote proves, the Vale can’t grow lemons and instead imports them from Dorne.
For me, Alayne thought, as they wheeled it out. Sweetrobin loved lemon cakes too, but only after she told him that they were her favorites. The cake had required every lemon in the Vale, but Petyr had promised that he would send to Dorne for more.
So if the Vale cannot grow lemon trees, and Littlefinger’s Keep is in the Vale, and it shares not only the same latitude as Braavos but also the exact same climate and geography, then Braavos can’t grow lemons either.
Wherever Dany’s house with the red door was, it most assuredly was not Braavos as Braavos can’t possibly grow the lemon tree that Dany says was outside her room.
And GRRM himself has recently noted that this is a great observation by the user Victarionchainbreaker while corresponding with the user in a private message:
V: Dany remembers a lemon tree outside the house with the red door in Braavos, but citrus trees really shouldn’t grow in Braavos’ cold, foggy climate. Is this discrepancy significant? Does it point to future revelations about Dany’s past? Thank you so much
GRRM: Very perceptive of you. Yes it does point to… well that would be telling.
GRRM: Very perceptive of you. Yes it does point to… well that would be telling.
imgur.com/EXN26tk
Quite clearly there is SUPPPOSED to be a mystery about Dany’s memory of the lemon tree from “Braavos”. GRRM put this here, that this does not make sense, on purpose. Much as we’ve seen likewise already that Dany’s past doesn’t make much sense. It’s a discrepancy in a long list of them, and it’s seemingly done on purpose according to the author.
And the lemon tree isn’t the only oddity about the house with the red door, there’s also the fact that Dany dreams of fields as being located with the house with the red door
The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door.
And once more, this is just utterly incompatible with Braavos seeing as Braavos is a city of stone, with no nearly vegetation and certainly not green fields of it.
The city had seemed like one big island from where the Titan stood, but as Yorko rowed them closer she saw that it was many small islands close together, linked by arched stone bridges that spanned innumerable canals. Beyond the harbor she glimpsed streets of grey stone houses, built so close they leaned one upon the other. To Arya's eyes they were queer-looking, four and five stories tall and very skinny, with sharp-peaked tile roofs like pointed hats. She saw no thatch, and only a few timbered houses of the sort she knew in Westeros. They have no trees, she realized. Braavos is all stone, a grey city in a green sea.
While some propose that while Dany’s house with the red door might not conventionally fit Braavos, but could fit the Sealord’s Palace which is located in Braavos, due to the fact that semi-official maps of Braavos depict the Palace as having stretches of grass, and that the Sealord could grow a lemon tree in a glass garden if he possessed one, there’s a few problems with this.
1) Dany dreams of fields of grass. A stretch of grass is not a field
2) Dany makes no mention of any glass garden, she just says there was a lemon tree outside her window. Nor does the Sealord palace ever have a glass garden in any descriptions of it
But perhaps the most damning thing of all is that Dany equates her life in the house with the red door as a life of simplicity
What is it?" she cried, as Irri shook her gently by the shoulder. It was the black of night outside. Something is wrong, she knew at once. "Is it Daario? What's happened?" In her dream they had been man and wife, simple folk who lived a simple life in a tall stone house with a red door. In her dream he had been kissing her all over—her mouth, her neck, her breasts.
Yes Dany says that they had servants at the house with the red door, and I’ll touch on that in the next part of the essay, but the fact remains is that Dany dreams of a house with a red door and simple folk with simple lives. A few servants does suggest a tad more than just a “simple life”, but definitely not the Sealord of Braavos and the complicated life that comes with that. The Sealord’s palace lacks the green fields, the lemon tree, and the simplicity. It doesn’t fit at all beyond the fact that it happens to be located in Braavos, and that Darry happened to sign a marriage pact for Viserys (and again NOT Dany or anything to do with Dany or her storyline) with the Sealord as witness. It just doesn’t remotely fit.
Dany’s house with the red door simply put does not fit in Braavos. It’s quite clear that Dany does not know where the house actually was, and has never actually been to Braavos herself. Her memories, as they do so often, completely clash with other things found in the novels about the same place.
The oddities surrounding Dany’s house with the red door are enormous, and they don’t just stop with that lemon tree that couldn’t exist in Braavos, or the rolling fields of grass that couldn’t exist in a city of stone, or everything else: they also include just exactly what happens while Dany lived in this house.
Being robbed when they got kicked out of the house with the Red Door
She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her "Little Princess" and sometimes "My Lady," and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever.
So above we can see that Dany says that after Ser Willem died, the servants of the house robbed her and Viserys and then eventually put them out of the house. Now this doesn’t actually make any sense because Dany then says the following:
At first the magisters and archons and merchant princes were pleased to welcome the last Targaryens to their homes and tables, but as the years passed and the Usurper continued to sit upon the Iron Throne, doors closed and their lives grew meaner. Years past they had been forced to sell their last few treasures, and now even the coin they had gotten from Mother's crown had gone. In the alleys and wine sinks of Pentos, they called her brother "the beggar king." Dany did not want to know what they called her.
Now Dany just told us that the servants robbed them before they eventually put them out of the house and took “what little money they had left”. Now I have to ask: what servants steal a small amount of coin, but NOT the treasures, whatever they were, and Rhaella Targaryen’s crown? Dany just told us that those treasures and Rhaella’s crown was enough money for them to live for years. Yet the servants took a bit of coin and not these? That makes zero sense. If you’re going to rob someone, then actually rob them. Those treasures were worth far, far, far more than “what little coin they had left”, yet they didn’t get stolen too? That’s the height of unlikely. The servants would’ve stolen both… if both happened to be in the house with the red door that is.
Yes Dany says that “they” had been put out of the red door, and seems to think that Viserys lived there as well. Yet Viserys himself never gives any hint of having lived in this house. He not only never once mentions the house himself, he’s the heights of arrogance still. He’s clearly gone from nobility to nobility over the years. Yes he’s the “Beggar King”, but he clearly hasn’t actually ever lived as a “simple folk who lived a simple life” like Dany remembers. Viserys is quite clearly still comfortable in his role as royalty. It’s what he’s used too. There’s no indication whatsoever that Viserys had ever lived a simple life.
Times might’ve gotten hard at some points over the years, and he clearly reflects this in his gauntness and encroaching madness, but like look at the way he treats Drogo and the Dothraki: there’s no respect there, they’re just savages. He doesn’t respect their “simple folk who lived a simple life” at all. He just doesn’t get it. If Viserys had spent years, and the app says that Darry dies in 289 so that would be 5 years spent living in the house with the red door, he should’ve shown a tad less hauntiness from his experience. He’s the Beggar King sure, but the King part was never once forgotten or let become unaccustomed. Viserys has lived his life as a king, he remembers being treated like royalty, and he’s used to it. He’s certainly never spent 5 years living a simple life. Whereas Dany is uneasy in silk, which I’ll discuss in a bit, Viserys is at ease. He’s quite clearly had a different experience than Dany.
And this is where the whole “Willem Darry” vs Willem Darry comes in. Dany and Viserys’ pasts are just fundamentally different when you come down to it. Undoubtedly Viserys spent time with Willem Darry. Dany? Not so much. As has already been covered, it’s just a different person who really doesn’t fit the real Willem Darry. So how did Dany and Viserys get robbed of their money, but not their treasures and crowns? Well only Dany got robbed of her “little money”, while Viserys had all the treasures and was never at this house in the first place.
Dany had the simple life, she dreams for it, she remembers it, it entirely fits that her house with the red door only had a “little money left” if they never had a lot of money in the first place, this “simple folk who lived a simple life”. Viserys on the other hand, who’s at ease in his silk and jewels, who’s been treated as royalty his whole life, who shows no sign of ever having lived at a house with a red door at all, let alone as “simple folk who lived a simple life”, is the much better source for having treasures and Rhaella’s crown. The treasures weren’t robbed because Dany didn’t have them, Viserys did and he was elsewhere. The servants couldn’t rob what Dany didn’t actually possess.
Hence how Dany can say that “they” got robbed, yet Viserys then has a bunch of treasures that were worth enough to live for years on, yet Dany has no knowledge of living well. Viserys was never robbed, he was never in the house with red door to begin with.
And as an aside to help support this, that Dany spent time elsewhere other than with Viserys, hence their differences, credit to the user Rippounet for noticing this, but Dany can speak High Valyrian, and Viserys seemingly can’t.
Viserys never once speaks anything in High Valyrian, while Dany repeatedly does throughout the books, but more importantly, Viserys always speaks the common tongue with Dany whenever he doesn’t want to be understood by the Dothraki.
"No!" Viserys screamed. He turned to Ser Jorah, pleading in the Common Tongue with words the horsemen would not understand. "Hit her, Mormont. Hurt her. Your king commands it. Kill these Dothraki dogs and teach her."
Viserys was less impressed. "The trash of dead cities," he sneered. He was careful to speak in the Common Tongue, which few Dothraki could understand, yet even so Dany found herself glancing back at the men of her khas, to make certain he had not been overheard. He went on blithely. "All these savages know how to do is steal the things better men have built … and kill." He laughed. "They do know how to kill. Otherwise I'd have no use for them at all."
"The dragon speaks as he likes," Viserys said … in the Common Tongue. He glanced over his shoulder at Aggo and Rakharo, riding behind them, and favored them with a mocking smile. "See, the savages lack the wit to understand the speech of civilized men." A moss-eaten stone monolith loomed over the road, fifty feet tall. Viserys gazed at it with boredom in his eyes. "How long must we linger amidst these ruins before Drogo gives me my army? I grow tired of waiting."
The Common Tongue is used by Viserys when he wishes to keep his words hidden with Dany. Which is just well odd, because almost nobody at all speaks or understands High Valyrian
When she saw the guardsmen on the third pier, in grey woolen cloaks trimmed with white satin, her heart almost stopped in her chest. The sight of Winterfell's colors brought tears to her eyes. Behind them, a sleek three-banked trading galley rocked at her moorings. Arya could not read the name painted on the hull; the words were strange, Myrish, Braavosi, perhaps even High Valyrian. She grabbed a passing longshoreman by the sleeve. "Please," she said, "what ship is this?"
The red woman walked round the fire three times, praying once in the speech of Asshai, once in High Valyrian, and once in the Common Tongue. Davos understood only the last. "R'hllor, come to us in our darkness," she called. "Lord of Light, we offer you these false gods, these seven who are one, and him the enemy. Take them and cast your light upon us, for the night is dark and full of terrors." Queen Selyse echoed the words. Beside her, Stannis watched impassively, his jaw hard as stone under the blue-black shadow of his tight-cropped beard. He had dressed more richly than was his wont, as if for the sept.
"So I see. Dracarys?"
All three dragons turned their heads at the sound of that word, and Viserion let loose with a blast of pale gold flame that made Ser Jorah take a hasty step backward. Dany giggled. "Be careful with that word, ser, or they're like to singe your beard off. It means 'dragonfire' in High Valyrian. I wanted to choose a command that no one was like to utter by chance."
The harpy of Ghis, Dany thought. Old Ghis had fallen five thousand years ago, if she remembered true; its legions shattered by the might of young Valyria, its brick walls pulled down, its streets and buildings turned to ash and cinder by dragonflame, its very fields sown with salt, sulfur, and skulls. The gods of Ghis were dead, and so too its people; these Astapori were mongrels, Ser Jorah said. Even the Ghiscari tongue was largely forgotten; the slave cities spoke the High Valyrian of their conquerors, or what they had made of it.
Kraznys's High Valyrian was twisted and thickened by the characteristic growl of Ghis, and flavored here and there with words of slaver argot. Dany understood him well enough, but she smiled and looked blankly at the slave girl, as if wondering what he might have said.
“I know what Aegon proved. I mean to prove a few things of my own.” Dany turned away from him, to the slave girl standing meekly beside her litter. “Do you have a name, or must you draw a new one every day from some barrel?”
“That is only for Unsullied,” the girl said. Then she realized the question had been asked in High Valyrian. Her eyes went wide. “Oh.”
Then the heralds summoned another singer; Collio Quaynis of Tyrosh, who had a vermilion beard and an accent as ludicrous as Symon had promised. Collio began with his version of "The Dance of the Dragons," which was more properly a song for two singers, male and female. Tyrion suffered through it with a double helping of honey-ginger partridge and several cups of wine. A haunting ballad of two dying lovers amidst the Doom of Valyria might have pleased the hall more if Collio had not sung it in High Valyrian, which most of the guests could not speak. But "Bessa the Barmaid" won them back with its ribald lyrics. Peacocks were served in their plumage, roasted whole and stuffed with dates, while Collio summoned a drummer, bowed low before Lord Tywin, and launched into "The Rains of Castamere."
"The maegi." The words came tumbling out of her. She could still hear Melara Hetherspoon insisting that if they never spoke about the prophecies, they would not come true. She was not so silent in the well, though. She screamed and shouted. "Tyrion is the valonqar," she said. "Do you use that word in Myr? It's High Valyrian, it means little brother." She had asked Septa Saranella about the word, after Melara drowned.
The wine has blurred my wits. He had learned to read High Valyrian at his maester's knee, though what they spoke in the Nine Free Cities … well, it was not so much a dialect as nine dialects on the way to becoming separate tongues. Tyrion had some Braavosi and a smattering of Myrish. In Tyrosh he should be able to curse the gods, call a man a cheat, and order up an ale, thanks to a sellsword he had once known at the Rock. At least in Dorne they speak the Common Tongue. Like Dornish food and Dornish law, Dornish speech was spiced with the flavors of the Rhoyne, but a man could comprehend it. Dorne, yes, Dorne for me. He crawled into his bunk, clutching that thought like a child with a doll.
The red woman walked round the fire three times, praying once in the speech of Asshai, once in High Valyrian, and once in the Common Tongue. Davos understood only the last. "R'hllor, come to us in our darkness," she called. "Lord of Light, we offer you these false gods, these seven who are one, and him the enemy. Take them and cast your light upon us, for the night is dark and full of terrors." Queen Selyse echoed the words. Beside her, Stannis watched impassively, his jaw hard as stone under the blue-black shadow of his tight-cropped beard. He had dressed more richly than was his wont, as if for the sept.
"So I see. Dracarys?"
All three dragons turned their heads at the sound of that word, and Viserion let loose with a blast of pale gold flame that made Ser Jorah take a hasty step backward. Dany giggled. "Be careful with that word, ser, or they're like to singe your beard off. It means 'dragonfire' in High Valyrian. I wanted to choose a command that no one was like to utter by chance."
The harpy of Ghis, Dany thought. Old Ghis had fallen five thousand years ago, if she remembered true; its legions shattered by the might of young Valyria, its brick walls pulled down, its streets and buildings turned to ash and cinder by dragonflame, its very fields sown with salt, sulfur, and skulls. The gods of Ghis were dead, and so too its people; these Astapori were mongrels, Ser Jorah said. Even the Ghiscari tongue was largely forgotten; the slave cities spoke the High Valyrian of their conquerors, or what they had made of it.
Kraznys's High Valyrian was twisted and thickened by the characteristic growl of Ghis, and flavored here and there with words of slaver argot. Dany understood him well enough, but she smiled and looked blankly at the slave girl, as if wondering what he might have said.
“I know what Aegon proved. I mean to prove a few things of my own.” Dany turned away from him, to the slave girl standing meekly beside her litter. “Do you have a name, or must you draw a new one every day from some barrel?”
“That is only for Unsullied,” the girl said. Then she realized the question had been asked in High Valyrian. Her eyes went wide. “Oh.”
Then the heralds summoned another singer; Collio Quaynis of Tyrosh, who had a vermilion beard and an accent as ludicrous as Symon had promised. Collio began with his version of "The Dance of the Dragons," which was more properly a song for two singers, male and female. Tyrion suffered through it with a double helping of honey-ginger partridge and several cups of wine. A haunting ballad of two dying lovers amidst the Doom of Valyria might have pleased the hall more if Collio had not sung it in High Valyrian, which most of the guests could not speak. But "Bessa the Barmaid" won them back with its ribald lyrics. Peacocks were served in their plumage, roasted whole and stuffed with dates, while Collio summoned a drummer, bowed low before Lord Tywin, and launched into "The Rains of Castamere."
"The maegi." The words came tumbling out of her. She could still hear Melara Hetherspoon insisting that if they never spoke about the prophecies, they would not come true. She was not so silent in the well, though. She screamed and shouted. "Tyrion is the valonqar," she said. "Do you use that word in Myr? It's High Valyrian, it means little brother." She had asked Septa Saranella about the word, after Melara drowned.
The wine has blurred my wits. He had learned to read High Valyrian at his maester's knee, though what they spoke in the Nine Free Cities … well, it was not so much a dialect as nine dialects on the way to becoming separate tongues. Tyrion had some Braavosi and a smattering of Myrish. In Tyrosh he should be able to curse the gods, call a man a cheat, and order up an ale, thanks to a sellsword he had once known at the Rock. At least in Dorne they speak the Common Tongue. Like Dornish food and Dornish law, Dornish speech was spiced with the flavors of the Rhoyne, but a man could comprehend it. Dorne, yes, Dorne for me. He crawled into his bunk, clutching that thought like a child with a doll.
I could go on quoting more things, but nobody really speaks High Valyrian, or really understands it. Dany herself undoubtedly speaks High Valyrian though, and almost nobody else does. And Dany was supposedly raised by Viserys.
So if Viserys didn’t want people to understand him when he has private discussions with Dany, why doesn’t he just speak High Valyrian with her? Nobody would understand them. Yet Viserys never speaks High Valyrian once. He can probably speak a few words of it, but he’s certainly not fluent like Dany is. So how did Dany get to be fluent in this dead language, while Viserys seemingly didn’t? They had different upbringings.
Viserys was around 8 when he flees Dragonstone, so he should’ve had a few years of formal education under his belt, which should be far more than Dany seeing as she should have none, nothing beyond what Viserys could teach her. Yet Dany can speak this dead language perfectly, while Viserys never does and instead speaks the Common Tongue to speak privately with Dany. This really does not make much sense.
So now if Dany was the one who lived in the house with the red door, Dany who got robbed, Dany who learned High Valyrian somewhere, while Viserys lived with the archons, princes, nobles, never got robbed, can’t speak High Valyrian as he was never taught it (or only learned a bit of it), how did she and Viserys end up together if they were never together in the first place?
Because Dany’s a pretender, a girl raised to be “Daenerys Targaryen” the daughter who Rhaella died birthing, who quite likely, as the opening of this essay showed, died young given Aerys and Rhaella’s history of such things. There’s just too many things that are fundamentally wrong with Dany and what she knows and doesn’t know, for her to actually be who she thinks she is.
There’s just so much odd with Dany’s backstory. One mistake could be an error on George’s part, but this many? These are not errors… at least on his part. They’re errors on Dany’s part. Quite clearly, as has been demonstrated, what Dany “knows” doesn’t add up. What she doesn’t “know” doesn’t add up either. Things just do not add up, again, and again. And it doesn’t because it shouldn’t. She’s not who she thinks she is. Again and again she displays the wrong memories of places and events. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong with Dany’s backstory. How can this possibly be? Because Dany was simply told this information. She didn’t experience it, she was told she did. She’s repeating multiple stories, and getting them messed up around what she remembers, and what she also forgets, creating all these conflicts every time we try and compare what Dany says vs what someone else says about the same events and things.
Quite clearly IMO, Dany isn’t Dany. She really doesn’t at all have the grasp of reality that Dany should have had she actually done the stuff she claims to have.
Which is where Illyrio possibly comes in.
Illyrio
A princess, Dany thought. She had forgotten what that was like. Perhaps she had never really known. "Why does he give us so much?" she asked. "What does he want from us?" For nigh on half a year, they had lived in the magister's house, eating his food, pampered by his servants. Dany was thirteen, old enough to know that such gifts seldom come without their price, here in the free city of Pentos.
At the start of AGOT, Dany informs the reader that she and Viserys have been living with Illyrio for the last 6 months. Yet as the story progresses we are told information that makes this somewhat doubtful.
Firstly, Illyrio himself says the following about Viserys:
"Dothraki neither buy nor sell. Say rather that her brother Viserys gave her to Drogo to win the khal's friendship. A vain young man, and greedy. Viserys lusted for his father's throne, but he lusted for Daenerys too, and was loath to give her up. The night before the princess wed he tried to steal into her bed, insisting that if he could not have her hand, he would claim her maidenhead. Had I not taken the precaution of posting guards upon her door, Viserys might have undone years of planning."
Illyrio says that Viserys would have undone “years of planning” had he claimed Dany’s maidenhead. Yet how is this actually at all possible? Dany told us in AGOT that she and Viserys had only been living in Pentos for 6 months, and then that very night she’s betrothed to Drogo. There’s no “years of planning” at all here, there’s 6 months of planning based on what Dany tells us that she knows. Yet Illyrio says it would have ruined years of planning. So quite clearly, Illyrio at least has had a plan up his sleeve for far longer than when Viserys and Dany moved into his palace 6 months before AGOT begins. The question is though, did Viserys have this exact same plan too and had he been a part of the “years of planning”?
Well first and foremost, Dany’s very first chapter sees Viserys again and again seem doubtful that not only is Dany Valyrian, but that she’s a princess, and Illyrio again and again has to assure him that she looks fine and will serve her role, as well as Dany herself again and again shows that all this stuff seems odd and unusual to her.
Her brother held the gown up for her inspection. “This is beauty. Touch it. Go on. Caress the fabric.”
Dany touched it. The cloth was so smooth that it seemed to run through her fingers like water. She could not remember ever wearing anything so soft. It frightened her. She pulled her hand away. “Is it really mine?”
“A gift from the Magister Illyrio,” Viserys said, smiling. Her brother was in a high mood tonight. “The color will bring out the violet in your eyes. And you shall have gold as well, and jewels of all sorts. Illyrio has promised. Tonight you must look like a princess.”
A princess, Dany thought. She had forgotten what that was like. Perhaps she had never really known. “Why does he give us so much?” she asked. “What does he want from us?” For nigh on half a year, they had lived in the magister’s house, eating his food, pampered by his servants. Dany was thirteen, old enough to know that such gifts seldom come without their price, here in the free city of Pentos.
Dany touched it. The cloth was so smooth that it seemed to run through her fingers like water. She could not remember ever wearing anything so soft. It frightened her. She pulled her hand away. “Is it really mine?”
“A gift from the Magister Illyrio,” Viserys said, smiling. Her brother was in a high mood tonight. “The color will bring out the violet in your eyes. And you shall have gold as well, and jewels of all sorts. Illyrio has promised. Tonight you must look like a princess.”
A princess, Dany thought. She had forgotten what that was like. Perhaps she had never really known. “Why does he give us so much?” she asked. “What does he want from us?” For nigh on half a year, they had lived in the magister’s house, eating his food, pampered by his servants. Dany was thirteen, old enough to know that such gifts seldom come without their price, here in the free city of Pentos.
Here we see that Dany has never worn any good clothing, despite supposedly having been pampered by Illyrio for the last 6 months, that Viserys is attempting to make Dany look Valyrian by emphasizing her violet eyes, and attempting to make her look like a princess, something that Dany thinks she’s never known. Again, supposedly for the last 8 or so years Dany has been living with archons, nobles, princes, magistrates, etc., yet she’s never worn nice clothes or been treated like a princess. This is all very odd.
Her brother hung the gown beside the door. “Illyrio will send the slaves to bathe you. Be sure you wash off the stink of the stables. Khal Drogo has a thousand horses, tonight he looks for a different sort of mount.” He studied her critically. “You still slouch. Straighten yourself” He pushed back her shoulders with his hands. “Let them see that you have a woman’s shape now.” His fingers brushed lightly over her budding breasts and tightened on a nipple. “You will not fail me tonight. If you do, it will go hard for you. You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?” His fingers twisted her, the pinch cruelly hard through the rough fabric of her tunic. “Do you?” he repeated.
Again, here we see that Dany has bad posture despite living among the upper class, when one of the things we see every other girl maintain is strict posture for these circles. As well, Viserys says that they need to “wash off the stink of the stables” implying that Dany’s spent her days playing with horses and what not, but later we’ll learn that Dany actually clearly has not spent any time around horses
At first it had not come easy. The khalasar had broken camp the morning after her wedding, moving east toward Vaes Dothrak, and by the third day Dany thought she was going to die. Saddle sores opened on her bottom, hideous and bloody. Her thighs were chafed raw, her hands blistered from the reins, the muscles of her legs and back so wracked with pain that she could scarcely sit. By the time dusk fell, her handmaids would need to help her down from her mount.
So why Dany smell like a stable would when she’s clearly never been around horses much? Again, Viserys is overly obsessed about making sure Dany looks like a princess, and erasing any traces that she might NOT be one.
The old woman washed her long, silver-pale hair and gently combed out the snags, all in silence. The girl scrubbed her back and her feet and told her how lucky she was. “Drogo is so rich that even his slaves wear golden collars. A hundred thousand men ride in his khalasar, and his palace in Vaes Dothrak has two hundred rooms and doors of solid silver.” There was more like that, so much more, what a handsome man the khal was, so tall and fierce, fearless in battle, the best rider ever to mount a horse, a demon archer. Daenerys said nothing. She had always assumed that she would wed Viserys when she came of age.
Here we see that despite supposedly living pampered, Dany still has snags in her hair. How is it that her hair isn’t routinely brushed and flawless? What kind of pampered lifestyle has Dany supposedly been living if she doesn’t even get her hair routinely brushed?
“Now you look all a princess,” the girl said breathlessly when they were done. Dany glanced at her image in the silvered looking glass that Illyrio had so thoughtfully provided. A princess, she thought, but she remembered what the girl had said, how Khal Drogo was so rich even his slaves wore golden collars. She felt a sudden chill, and gooseflesh pimpled her bare arms.
Her brother was waiting in the cool of the entry hall, seated on the edge of the pool, his hand trailing in the water. He rose when she appeared and looked her over critically. “Stand there,” he told her. “Turn around. Yes. Good. You look...”
“Regal,” Magister Illyrio said, stepping through an archway. He moved with surprising delicacy for such a massive man. Beneath loose garments of flame-colored silk, rolls of fat jiggled as he walked. Gemstones glittered on every finger, and his man had oiled his forked yellow beard until it shone like real gold. “May the Lord of Light shower you with blessings on this most fortunate day, Princess Daenerys,” the magister said as he took her hand. He bowed his head, showing a thin glimpse of crooked yellow teeth through the gold of his beard. “She is a vision, Your Grace, a vision,” he told her brother. “Drogo will be enraptured.”
“She’s too skinny,” Viserys said. His hair, the same silver-blond as hers, had been pulled back tightly behind his head and fastened with a dragonbone brooch. It was a severe look that emphasized the hard, gaunt lines of his face. He rested his hand on the hilt of the sword that Illyrio had lent him, and said, “Are you sure that Khal Drogo likes his women this young?”
“She has had her blood. She is old enough for the khal, “ Illyrio told him, not for the first time. “Look at her. That silvergold hair, those purple eyes... she is the blood of old Valyria, no doubt, no doubt... and highborn, daughter of the old king, sister to the new, she cannot fail to entrance our Drogo.” When he released her hand, Daenerys found herself trembling.
“I suppose,” her brother said doubtfully. “The savages have queer tastes. Boys, horses, sheep...”
“Regal,” Magister Illyrio said, stepping through an archway. He moved with surprising delicacy for such a massive man. Beneath loose garments of flame-colored silk, rolls of fat jiggled as he walked. Gemstones glittered on every finger, and his man had oiled his forked yellow beard until it shone like real gold. “May the Lord of Light shower you with blessings on this most fortunate day, Princess Daenerys,” the magister said as he took her hand. He bowed his head, showing a thin glimpse of crooked yellow teeth through the gold of his beard. “She is a vision, Your Grace, a vision,” he told her brother. “Drogo will be enraptured.”
“She’s too skinny,” Viserys said. His hair, the same silver-blond as hers, had been pulled back tightly behind his head and fastened with a dragonbone brooch. It was a severe look that emphasized the hard, gaunt lines of his face. He rested his hand on the hilt of the sword that Illyrio had lent him, and said, “Are you sure that Khal Drogo likes his women this young?”
“She has had her blood. She is old enough for the khal, “ Illyrio told him, not for the first time. “Look at her. That silvergold hair, those purple eyes... she is the blood of old Valyria, no doubt, no doubt... and highborn, daughter of the old king, sister to the new, she cannot fail to entrance our Drogo.” When he released her hand, Daenerys found herself trembling.
“I suppose,” her brother said doubtfully. “The savages have queer tastes. Boys, horses, sheep...”
And here we see that the maids are rather to surprised to see that Dany looks like a princess when they’re done dressing her up, Viserys doubts that she looks like a princess and can pull this all off, Illyrio’s got to reassure him she’ll do fine and that there’s no doubt she’ll work, that Dany is somehow skinny despite again supposedly living pampered for the last 6 months at least.
Dany I, is literally one big game of “dress up”. It’s literally a chapter where they specifically go over many times how they make Dany look like she’s a princess, of how she’s high blood, etc. And Dany’s uncomfortable through it all, Viserys doesn’t think it will work, etc. It’s all rather odd behaviour and actions for someone who actually is, you know an actual princess. It is odd behaviours all around.
Now the other thing too that suggests that it’s doubtful that Dany and Viserys have only known Illyrio for 6 months, is once again provided by Illyrio
The fat man grew pensive. "Daenerys was half a child when she came to me, yet fairer even than my second wife, so lovely I was tempted to claim her for myself. Such a fearful, furtive thing, however, I knew I should get no joy from coupling with her. Instead I summoned a bedwarmer and fucked her vigorously until the madness passed. If truth be told, I did not think Daenerys would survive for long amongst the horselords."
Now as was just shown in the previous quotes above, Illyrio spends a lot of time in Dany I of AGOT telling Viserys that Dany is a woman, that she’s plenty old enough. And yet here Illyrio says that the first time he met her, she was “half a child”. For a man who spent so much time raving about how she’s NOT a child, this seems a little odd.
But the far more important connection is the second bolded part about how Illyrio vigorously fucked a bedwarmer after he first met Dany. That’s… well impossible.
The palanquin slowed and stopped. The curtains were thrown back, and a slave offered a hand to help Daenerys out. His collar, she noted, was ordinary bronze. Her brother followed, one hand still clenched hard around his sword hilt. It took two strong men to get Magister Illyrio back on his feet.
At the start of AGOT it takes two strong men to simply get Illyrio on his feet after he sits down. The man can’t even stand up on his own he’s so fat, yet he saw Daenerys and then immediately fucked the crap out of some bedwarmer? That’s impossible, Illyrio couldn’t fuck anybody, let alone vigorously. He could get fucked sure, but he claims he did the fucking and that’s just not possible with his present size.
And yet, we know that Illyrio was not always this big, nor such a physical ruin. Once upon a time he was lean and lithe, a skilled bravo.
Beneath his window six cherry trees stood sentinel around a marble pool, their slender branches bare and brown. A naked boy stood on the water, poised to duel with a bravo's blade in hand. He was lithe and handsome, no older than sixteen, with straight blond hair that brushed his shoulders. So lifelike did he seem that it took the dwarf a long moment to realize he was made of painted marble, though his sword shimmered like true steel.
"So he did. I met him not long after he arrived, one step ahead of the slavers. By day he slept in the sewers, by night he prowled the rooftops like a cat. I was near as poor, a bravo in soiled silks, living by my blade. Perhaps you chanced to glimpse the statue by my pool? Pytho Malanon carved that when I was six-and-ten. A lovely thing, though now I weep to see it."
Yet as Illyrio says, he’s now the man he is, and no longer the man he was back then. But yet it does show us that Illyrio has gained his weight over the years, and that he’s not always been so fat and uncoordinated. So it makes a lot of sense that, given the “years of planning”, the “half a child”, etc., that Illyrio actually first met Dany before she came to live in his house. If we push back Illyrio’s first encounter with Dany, then he’s far more capable of summoning a bedwarmer and fucking her vigorously until his madness passed. Creepy for sure that he got so turned on by a child, but things are still very creepy anyways if he did this when Dany was 12-13 years old anyways.
And really, the idea that Illyrio might have met Dany and Viserys earlier than their 6 months in his house before the story, isn’t that farfetched. Not only do the books never say that they’ve only known the man for 6 months, solely that they’ve lived there for 6 months, but even without the above stuff that we just covered, that Illyrio says there were years of planning, that he shouldn’t be able to vigorously fuck a bedwarmer at his size, we already discussed a complete other reason way back over 25 pages ago: that logically speaking, Pentos should have been one of the first places, if not the first place itself, on Viserys and Dany’s trip around the Free Cities, not the last place. Or it should’ve been visited many times in between all the trips Dany says they supposedly made. Point is, they should’ve already visited Pentos, and that would indeed have occurred a few years before, which suddenly makes everything fit. All things combined, it makes complete sense IMO that Viserys and Dany, or at least one of them, had known/had connection to Illyrio for years.
Which I suppose inevitably leads us to the question of who exactly is “Dany” if she’s not Daenerys Targaryen, as this essay’s been saying all along that she’s some other than the real Dany. IMO, we have a few candidates for the mother, one real candidate for the father, or the option that Dany’s just the child of some random people. We’ll start with the last option seeing as we can build off the Illyrio connection to at least this one of the IMO likely candidates for her mother/parentage: Dany is just some random girl, the daughter of some random whoevers, who happened to look like a Valyrian
The Chosen Pretender
This theory is simply as the above said: Dany is just some random girl, from some random whoevers, who happened to look like a Valyrian so she was adopted to serve as the replacement to the real Daenerys Targaryen after she died, however that was.
First and foremost, there’s the possible Illyrio connection. As we previously covered, Illyrio seems to have been working at a Dany plan for a long time, and this theory works the best with that idea as Dany comes out and says that Illyrio is a slave trader, something which is supposedly illegal in Pentos
Dany said nothing. Magister Illyrio was a dealer in spices, gemstones, dragonbone, and other, less savory things. He had friends in all of the Nine Free Cities, it was said, and even beyond, in Vaes Dothrak and the fabled lands beside the Jade Sea. It was also said that he’d never had a friend he wouldn’t cheerfully sell for the right price. Dany listened to the talk in the streets, and she heard these things, but she knew better than to question her brother when he wove his webs of dream. His anger was a terrible thing when roused. Viserys called it “waking the dragon.”
There came a soft knock on her door. “Come,” Dany said, turning away from the window. Illyrio’s servants entered, bowed, and set about their business. They were slaves, a gift from one of the magister’s many Dothraki friends. There was no slavery in the free city of Pentos. Nonetheless, they were slaves. The old woman, small and grey as a mouse, never said a word, but the girl made up for it. She was Illyrio’s favorite, a fair-haired, blue-eyed wench of sixteen who chattered constantly as she worked.
There came a soft knock on her door. “Come,” Dany said, turning away from the window. Illyrio’s servants entered, bowed, and set about their business. They were slaves, a gift from one of the magister’s many Dothraki friends. There was no slavery in the free city of Pentos. Nonetheless, they were slaves. The old woman, small and grey as a mouse, never said a word, but the girl made up for it. She was Illyrio’s favorite, a fair-haired, blue-eyed wench of sixteen who chattered constantly as she worked.
And furthermore, we know that Illyrio specifically has dealt in Lyseni slaves before with his wife Serra, and that Lyseni slaves are noted as resembling Valyrians the most of anybody on the planet because they’re specifically bred to.
"A maiden? I know the way of that." Illyrio thrust his right hand up his left sleeve and drew out a silver locket. Inside was a painted likeness of a woman with big blue eyes and pale golden hair streaked by silver. "Serra. I found her in a Lysene pillow house and brought her home to warm my bed, but in the end I wed her. Me, whose first wife had been a cousin of the Prince of Pentos. The palace gates were closed to me thereafter, but I did not care. The price was small enough, for Serra."
The Lyseni are also great breeders of slaves, mating beauty with beauty in hopes of producing ever more refined and lovely courtesans and bedslaves. The blood of Valyria still runs strong in Lys, where even the smallfolk oft boast pale skin, silver-gold hair, and the purple, lilac, and pale blue eyes of the dragonlords of old. The Lysene nobility values purity of blood above all and have produced many famous (and infamous) beauties. Even the Targaryen kings and princes of old sometimes turned to Lys in search of wives and paramours, for their blood as for their beauty. Aptly, many Lyseni worship a love goddess whose naked, wanton figure graces their coinage.
The Lyseni are also great breeders of slaves, mating beauty with beauty in hopes of producing ever more refined and lovely courtesans and bedslaves. The blood of Valyria still runs strong in Lys, where even the smallfolk oft boast pale skin, silver-gold hair, and the purple, lilac, and pale blue eyes of the dragonlords of old. The Lysene nobility values purity of blood above all and have produced many famous (and infamous) beauties. Even the Targaryen kings and princes of old sometimes turned to Lys in search of wives and paramours, for their blood as for their beauty. Aptly, many Lyseni worship a love goddess whose naked, wanton figure graces their coinage.
So Illyrio knows how to buy and trade slaves, and has experience with Lyseni ones who resemble Valyrians, so it wouldn’t be a surprise at all if he bought and traded Dany to Viserys in the first place. He can indeed get a girl who could look like she was the real Daenerys Targaryen.
And this would then make sense of a few other things then, first and foremost among them being that Dany has never worn very nice clothes before, and that Dany instead wishes for tatters, and a simple life, and finds herself so at ease in Dothraki rough garments.
Dany touched it. The cloth was so smooth that it seemed to run through her fingers like water. She could not remember ever wearing anything so soft. It frightened her. She pulled her hand away. “Is it really mine?”
When he was gone, Dany went to her window and looked out wistfully on the waters of the bay. The square brick towers of Pentos were black silhouettes outlined against the setting sun. Dany could hear the singing of the red priests as they lit their night fires and the shouts of ragged children playing games beyond the walls of the estate. For a moment she wished she could be out there with them, barefoot and breathless and dressed in tatters, with no past and no future and no feast to attend at Khal Drogo’s manse.
What is it?" she cried, as Irri shook her gently by the shoulder. It was the black of night outside. Something is wrong, she knew at once. "Is it Daario? What's happened?" In her dream they had been man and wife, simple folk who lived a simple life in a tall stone house with a red door. In her dream he had been kissing her all over—her mouth, her neck, her breasts.
Viserys came upon her as sudden as a summer storm, his horse rearing beneath him as he reined up too hard. “You dare!” he screamed at her. “You give commands to me? To me?” He vaulted off the horse, stumbling as he landed. His face was flushed as he struggled back to his feet. He grabbed her, shook her. “Have you forgotten who you are? Look at you. Look at you!”
Dany did not need to look. She was barefoot, with oiled hair, wearing Dothraki riding leathers and a painted vest given her as a bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here. Viserys was soiled and stained in city silks and ringmail.
Dany did not need to look. She was barefoot, with oiled hair, wearing Dothraki riding leathers and a painted vest given her as a bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here. Viserys was soiled and stained in city silks and ringmail.
And credit must go to the user Lady Dyanna for pointing this out, but Dany’s pretty much “sold” to Drogo, even right down to being collared and presented to him as the stories say his own slaves are
The old woman washed her long, silver-pale hair and gently combed out the snags, all in silence. The girl scrubbed her back and her feet and told her how lucky she was. “Drogo is so rich that even his slaves wear golden collars. A hundred thousand men ride in his khalasar, and his palace in Vaes Dothrak has two hundred rooms and doors of solid silver.” There was more like that, so much more, what a handsome man the khal was, so tall and fierce, fearless in battle, the best rider ever to mount a horse, a demon archer. Daenerys said nothing. She had always assumed that she would wed Viserys when she came of age.
When she was clean, the slaves helped her from the water and toweled her dry. The girl brushed her hair until it shone like molten silver, while the old woman anointed her with the spiceflower perfume of the Dothraki plains, a dab on each wrist, behind her ears, on the tips of her breasts, and one last one, cool on her lips, down there between her legs. They dressed her in the wisps that Magister Illyrio had sent up, and then the gown, a deep plum silk to bring out the violet in her eyes. The girl slid the gilded sandals onto her feet, while the old woman fixed the tiara in her hair, and slid golden bracelets crusted with amethysts around her wrists. Last of all came the collar, a heavy golden tore emblazoned with ancient Valyrian glyphs.
“Now you look all a princess,” the girl said breathlessly when they were done. Dany glanced at her image in the silvered looking glass that Illyrio had so thoughtfully provided. A princess, she thought, but she remembered what the girl had said, how Khal Drogo was so rich even his slaves wore golden collars. She felt a sudden chill, and gooseflesh pimpled her bare arms.
When she was clean, the slaves helped her from the water and toweled her dry. The girl brushed her hair until it shone like molten silver, while the old woman anointed her with the spiceflower perfume of the Dothraki plains, a dab on each wrist, behind her ears, on the tips of her breasts, and one last one, cool on her lips, down there between her legs. They dressed her in the wisps that Magister Illyrio had sent up, and then the gown, a deep plum silk to bring out the violet in her eyes. The girl slid the gilded sandals onto her feet, while the old woman fixed the tiara in her hair, and slid golden bracelets crusted with amethysts around her wrists. Last of all came the collar, a heavy golden tore emblazoned with ancient Valyrian glyphs.
“Now you look all a princess,” the girl said breathlessly when they were done. Dany glanced at her image in the silvered looking glass that Illyrio had so thoughtfully provided. A princess, she thought, but she remembered what the girl had said, how Khal Drogo was so rich even his slaves wore golden collars. She felt a sudden chill, and gooseflesh pimpled her bare arms.
Dany it could be argued, is presented to Drogo as a slave. A princess slave yes, but a slave, right down to the collar and being sold to do something she doesn’t want to do. And Dany trembles at the thought. A repressed memory perhaps?
But finally, and I suppose possibly more importantly IMO, thematically speaking, the girl who has spent the entire series talking about her right to rule due to who she is and what not turning out to be a bastard/random person could make sense. That Dany never actually had any right to rule in the first place, that she got so caught up in Viserys’ dream, for it’s indeed Viserys who dreams of Westoros and the Iron Throne, not Dany, that she forgot that it was never hers in the first place.
But I do agree with most who are probably reading this who will say that Dany being some random girl who happened to look Valyrian might not be the most likely.
Now before we move on to the other two options for Dany’s mother, I think we need to first examine who the proposed father is for the next two options seeing as it will make things much easier to examine them later. Dany’s father was Rhaegar Targaryen.
Dany’s Father – Rhaegar Targaryen
"As you command." The knight gave her a curious look. "You are your brother's sister, in truth."
"Viserys?" She did not understand.
"No," he answered. "Rhaegar." He galloped off.
"Viserys?" She did not understand.
"No," he answered. "Rhaegar." He galloped off.
Now we get an awful lot of Rhaegar dumps in Dany’s story. Using asearchoficeandfire.com reveals that “Rhaegar” gets mentioned 44 times in Dany’s chapters. By comparison “Aerys” gets mentioned 5 times. Already there is a whopping disparity that Dany’s story focuses on her “brother” rather than her “father”. Which is odd, considering that Dany is trying to succeed her father and climb his Iron Throne, something Rhaegar never did. Dany is trying to follow in Aerys’ footsteps, yet it’s Rhaegar who gets all the plugs in Dany’s story. And they’re rather specific plugs that keep drawing her and her story back to Rhaegar.
Firstly, there are many plugs where Dany is directly compared to being like Rhaegar was, like the opening quote, as well as the following ones
"I am not Viserys."
"No," he admitted. "There is more of Rhaegar in you, I think, but even Rhaegar could be slain. Robert proved that on the Trident, with no more than a warhammer. Even dragons can die."
"No," he admitted. "There is more of Rhaegar in you, I think, but even Rhaegar could be slain. Robert proved that on the Trident, with no more than a warhammer. Even dragons can die."
"Just so," she agreed. "I think we should attack from three sides. Grey Worm, your Unsullied shall strike at them from right and left, while my kos lead my horse in wedge for a thrust through their center. Slave soldiers will never stand before mounted Dothraki." She smiled. "To be sure, I am only a young girl and know little of war. What do you think, my lords?"
"I think you are Rhaegar Targaryen's sister," Ser Jorah said with a rueful half smile.
"Aye," said Arstan Whitebeard, "and a queen as well."
"I think you are Rhaegar Targaryen's sister," Ser Jorah said with a rueful half smile.
"Aye," said Arstan Whitebeard, "and a queen as well."
"If I send the Brazen Beasts into the pyramids, it will mean open war inside the city. I have to trust in Hizdahr. I have to hope for peace." Dany held the parchment above a candle and watched the names go up in flame, while Skahaz glowered at her.
Afterward, Ser Barristan told her that her brother Rhaegar would have been proud of her. Dany remembered the words Ser Jorah had spoken at Astapor: Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died.
Afterward, Ser Barristan told her that her brother Rhaegar would have been proud of her. Dany remembered the words Ser Jorah had spoken at Astapor: Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died.
“There is, Your Grace. Of him, and those who came before him. Your grandfather Jaehaerys and his brother, their father Aegon, your mother... and Rhaegar. Him most of all.”
“I wish I could have known him.” Her voice was wistful.
“I wish he could have known you,” the old knight said. “When you are ready, I will tell you all.”
“I wish I could have known him.” Her voice was wistful.
“I wish he could have known you,” the old knight said. “When you are ready, I will tell you all.”
Then there are the ones where she parallels/attempts to parallel his story
"Death?" Dany wrapped her arms around herself protectively, rocked back and forth on her heels. "My death?" She told herself she would die for him, if she must. She was the blood of the dragon, she would not be afraid. Her brother Rhaegar had died for the woman he loved.
Dany mounted her silver. She could feel her heart thumping in her chest. She felt desperately afraid. Was this what my brother would have done? She wondered if Prince Rhaegar had been this anxious when he saw the Usurper's host formed up across the Trident with all their banners floating on the wind.
Side by side the queen's procession and Hizdahr zo Loraq's made their slow way across Meereen, until finally the Temple of the Graces loomed up before them, its golden domes flashing in the sun. How beautiful, the queen tried to tell herself, but inside her was some foolish little girl who could not help but look about for Daario. If he loved you, he would come and carry you off at swordpoint, as Rhaegar carried off his northern girl, the girl in her insisted, but the queen knew that was folly. Even if her captain was mad enough to attempt it, the Brazen Beasts would cut him down before he got within a hundred yards of her.
There are also times where she gets random insights into his life/who he was
Dany turned back to the squire. "I know little of Rhaegar. Only the tales Viserys told, and he was a little boy when our brother died. What was he truly like?"
The old man considered a moment. "Able. That above all. Determined, deliberate, dutiful, single-minded. There is a tale told of him . . . but doubtless Ser Jorah knows it as well."
"I would hear it from you."
"As you wish," said Whitebeard. "As a young boy, the Prince of Dragonstone was bookish to a fault. He was reading so early that men said Queen Rhaella must have swallowed some books and a candle whilst he was in her womb. Rhaegar took no interest in the play of other children. The maesters were awed by his wits, but his father's knights would jest sourly that Baelor the Blessed had been born again. Until one day Prince Rhaegar found something in his scrolls that changed him. No one knows what it might have been, only that the boy suddenly appeared early one morning in the yard as the knights were donning their steel. He walked up to Ser Willem Darry, the master-at-arms, and said, 'I will require sword and armor. It seems I must be a warrior.'"
The old man considered a moment. "Able. That above all. Determined, deliberate, dutiful, single-minded. There is a tale told of him . . . but doubtless Ser Jorah knows it as well."
"I would hear it from you."
"As you wish," said Whitebeard. "As a young boy, the Prince of Dragonstone was bookish to a fault. He was reading so early that men said Queen Rhaella must have swallowed some books and a candle whilst he was in her womb. Rhaegar took no interest in the play of other children. The maesters were awed by his wits, but his father's knights would jest sourly that Baelor the Blessed had been born again. Until one day Prince Rhaegar found something in his scrolls that changed him. No one knows what it might have been, only that the boy suddenly appeared early one morning in the yard as the knights were donning their steel. He walked up to Ser Willem Darry, the master-at-arms, and said, 'I will require sword and armor. It seems I must be a warrior.'"
"Your Grace," she corrected. "Prince Rhaegar led free men into battle, not slaves. Whitebeard said he dubbed his squires himself, and made many other knights as well."
"There was no higher honor than to receive your knighthood from the Prince of Dragonstone."
"Tell me, then—when he touched a man on the shoulder with his sword, what did he say? 'Go forth and kill the weak'? Or 'Go forth and defend them'? At the Trident, those brave men Viserys spoke of who died beneath our dragon banners—did they give their lives because they believed in Rhaegar's cause, or because they had been bought and paid for?" Dany turned to Mormont, crossed her arms, and waited for an answer.
"My queen," the big man said slowly, "all you say is true. But Rhaegar lost on the Trident. He lost the battle, he lost the war, he lost the kingdom, and he lost his life. His blood swirled downriver with the rubies from his breastplate, and Robert the Usurper rode over his corpse to steal the Iron Throne. Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died."
"There was no higher honor than to receive your knighthood from the Prince of Dragonstone."
"Tell me, then—when he touched a man on the shoulder with his sword, what did he say? 'Go forth and kill the weak'? Or 'Go forth and defend them'? At the Trident, those brave men Viserys spoke of who died beneath our dragon banners—did they give their lives because they believed in Rhaegar's cause, or because they had been bought and paid for?" Dany turned to Mormont, crossed her arms, and waited for an answer.
"My queen," the big man said slowly, "all you say is true. But Rhaegar lost on the Trident. He lost the battle, he lost the war, he lost the kingdom, and he lost his life. His blood swirled downriver with the rubies from his breastplate, and Robert the Usurper rode over his corpse to steal the Iron Throne. Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died."
And of course Dany receives some visions of Rhaegar in general
Rubies flew like drops of blood from the chest of a dying prince, and he sank to his knees in the water and with his last breath murmured a woman's name
I could go on, and I skipped many, many other examples for brevity’s sake, but the Rhaegar dumps are just absolutely so hugely fundamental to her story, and are just located everywhere within it.
Contrarily, this is the girl who never even found out that her father was actually mad until ASOS.
“Some truths are hard to hear. Robert was a... a good knight... chivalrous, brave... he spared my life, and the lives of many others... Prince Viserys was only a boy, it would have been years before he was fit to rule, and... forgive me, my queen, but you asked for truth... even as a child, your brother Viserys oft seemed to be his father’s son, in ways that Rhaegar never did.”
“His father’s son?” Dany frowned. “What does that mean?”
The old knight did not blink. “Your father is called ‘the Mad King’ in Westeros. Has no one ever told you?”
“Viserys did.” The Mad King. “The Usurper called him that, the Usurper and his dogs.” The Mad King. “It was a lie.”
“Why ask for truth,” Ser Barristan said softly, “if you close your ears to it?” He hesitated, then continued. “I told you before that I used a false name so the Lannisters would not know that Id joined you. That was less than half of it, Your Grace. The truth is, I wanted to watch you for a time before pledging you my sword. To make certain that you were not...”
“... my father’s daughter?” If she was not her father’s daughter, who was she?
“... mad,” he finished. “But I see no taint in you.”
“His father’s son?” Dany frowned. “What does that mean?”
The old knight did not blink. “Your father is called ‘the Mad King’ in Westeros. Has no one ever told you?”
“Viserys did.” The Mad King. “The Usurper called him that, the Usurper and his dogs.” The Mad King. “It was a lie.”
“Why ask for truth,” Ser Barristan said softly, “if you close your ears to it?” He hesitated, then continued. “I told you before that I used a false name so the Lannisters would not know that Id joined you. That was less than half of it, Your Grace. The truth is, I wanted to watch you for a time before pledging you my sword. To make certain that you were not...”
“... my father’s daughter?” If she was not her father’s daughter, who was she?
“... mad,” he finished. “But I see no taint in you.”
Yet she knew in AGOT that Rhaegar was a good guy, the last dragon, yadda yadda. She learns so much about Rhaegar, and with such consistency and so repeatedly, and so much of her story is directly about him, that really how can Rhaegar NOT be her father? He’s one of the central characters in her entire story, far more than her actual father ever is. Heck that last quote literally has in it
If she was not her father’s daughter, who was she?
But I want to focus a bit more of a few rather specific times that Rhaegar comes up in Dany’s story as they’re much better at showcasing how Rhaegar’s more likely to be her father than her brother.
First, there are many times where Dany actually physically sees herself as him
That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper's rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened.
First, here we see that Dany relives the Trident, which was of course the most pivotal moment of Rhaegar’s life, and it was the moment that Rhaegar failed in most. And Dany sees herself win where Rhaegar couldn’t.
But it’s this next instance Dany once more sees herself as Rhaegar that I want to focus on.
The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door.
“... the dragon... “
And saw her brother Rhaegar, mounted on a stallion as black as his armor. Fire glimmered red through the narrow eye slit of his helm. “The last dragon,” Ser Jorah’s voice whispered faintly. “The last, the last.” Dany lifted his polished black visor. The face within was her own.
“... the dragon... “
And saw her brother Rhaegar, mounted on a stallion as black as his armor. Fire glimmered red through the narrow eye slit of his helm. “The last dragon,” Ser Jorah’s voice whispered faintly. “The last, the last.” Dany lifted his polished black visor. The face within was her own.
And has you can see, she physically sees herself as him, directly after she opens the red door, which we know is a massive mystery about her past. She’s literally unlocking and opening her past here… and she saw Rhaegar, who becomes herself.
And not only this, but this whole dream/vision of hers… occurs while she herself is giving birth to Rhaego, named after Rhaegar himself. She sees herself as him while she’s giving birth to the person she wants to be him reborn. It’s all there, so clear: Rhaegar is tied to the secret of the house with the red door, and this goes back to births, and more specifically Dany’s own. Rhaego failed to come into the world from Dany, but Dany didn’t fail to come into the world from Rhaegar.
Which actually, if we got back to one of the Rhaegar dumps in Dany’s story we already covered, when we quote the full part of it this time, see this very thing
Rubies flew like drops of blood from the chest of a dying prince, and he sank to his knees in the water and with his last breath murmured a woman's name. . . . mother of dragons, daughter of death
Dany is literally called the “daughter of death” after a scene showing her how Rhaegar died. Sure, Dany’s “mother” Rhaella died giving birth to her, and thus that could be how she’s the “daughter of death”, but the name “daughter of death” coming right after Rhaegar’s own death makes it much clearer who the death was: Rhaegar’s, not Rhaella as it was Rhaegar, not Rhaella she just saw die. And if she’s the daughter of death, and Rhaegar’s the one who died, then she’s his daughter.
And secondly and directly tied to that last point, there is the other House of the Undying vision where Rhaegar looks directly right at Dany and then says “there must be one more”
"He has a song," the man replied. "He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire." He looked up when he said it and his eyes met Dany's, and it seemed as if he saw her standing there beyond the door. "There must be one more," he said, though whether he was speaking to her or the woman in the bed she could not say. "The dragon has three heads." He went to the window seat, picked up a harp, and ran his fingers lightly over its silvery strings. Sweet sadness filled the room as man and wife and babe faded like the morning mist, only the music lingering behind to speed her on her way.
He. Looks. Right. At. Her. And he says there must be one more. It doesn’t get much clearer. Dany’s Rhaegar’s daughter.
So then who’s her mother if Rhaegar’s her father? Well the first option I’m going to present is Ashara Dayne.
Dany’s Mother Option #2 – Ashara Dayne
Even after all these years, Ser Barristan could still recall Ashara's smile, the sound of her laughter. He had only to close his eyes to see her, with her long dark hair tumbling about her shoulders and those haunting purple eyes. Daenerys has the same eyes. Sometimes when the queen looked at him, he felt as if he were looking at Ashara's daughter …
So right off the bat we’re straight up told that Dany has Ashara’s very same eyes, and that Barristan thinks that she looks a lot like what Ashara’s daughter could have looked like. So immediately we know that there are very clear physical similarities between Dany and Ashara.
And of course, we happen to know from Barristan that not only was Ashara pregnant right around this time, but that she also happened to give birth to a daughter as well
But Ashara's daughter had been stillborn, and his fair lady had thrown herself from a tower soon after, mad with grief for the child she had lost, and perhaps for the man who had dishonored her at Harrenhal as well. She died never knowing that Ser Barristan had loved her. How could she? He was a knight of the Kingsguard, sworn to celibacy. No good could have come from telling her his feelings. No good came from silence either. If I had unhorsed Rhaegar and crowned Ashara queen of love and beauty, might she have looked to me instead of Stark?
And while yes, Barristan does say that Ashara’s daughter was stillborn, you have to wonder how Barristan even knows any of this information in the first: Ashara was at Starfall, Barristan was in King’s Landing. As well, both Catelyn and Cersei seem to at least be somewhat convinced that Ashara gave birth to Jon Snow. Which would obviously not be a stillborn child, let alone a daughter. Barristan’s our only source that Ashara’s child died, and that it was a girl in the first place. So perhaps he’s wrong, seeing as everybody else, who should be no better informed than Barristan, seems to think the child lived.
Regardless, we know that she happened to be pregnant at around the right time that Dany gets born. And that Dany happens to look like her. And that GRRM chose to give us both these pieces of information one after the other.
And of course if Dany happened to have been Ashara’s child, and at least spent some part of her life in Dorne before she ends up with Viserys, then this obviously explains Lemongate as lemon trees grow in Dorne, and Starfall happens to be located in one of the more hospitable parts of Dorne which would also cover the green fields that Dany remembers.
It would also help explain why GRRM has made so much of the Daynes, if one of the main characters happened to be half Dayne themselves. As well, the series seems to be progressively getting more and more Dayne involved, so something up with them.
And if Dany happened to be born in Starfall instead of Dragonstone, it could explain the “Stormborn” part of her history, that not only does nobody else ever remember or mention despite it supposedly being the greatest storm ever, or were ever affected by, but that is completely contrary to the very nature of storms in the narrow sea. Starfall is located on the coast of the Summer Sea. While we don’t know the storm patterns for the Summer Sea like we do with the Narrow Sea, we do know that the Summer Sea is indeed stormy
He smiled modestly. "Of trading ships I have a few, that is so. Who can say how many? One may be sinking even now, in some stormy corner of the Summer Sea. On the morrow, another will fall afoul of corsairs. The next day, one of my captains may look at the wealth in his hold and think, All this should belong to me. Such are the perils of trade. Why, the longer we talk, the fewer ships I am likely to have. I grow poorer by the instant."
They had come a long way since. Victarion could talk to the dusky woman. She never attempted to talk back. "Grief is the last," he told her, as she eased his glove off. "The rest are lost or late or sunk." He grimaced as the woman slid the point of her knife beneath the soiled linen wound about his shield hand. "Some will say I should not have split the fleet. Fools. Nine-and-ninety ships we had … a cumbersome beast to shepherd across the seas to the far end of the world. If I'd kept them together, the faster ships would have been held hostage to the slowest. And where to find provisions for so many mouths? No port wants so many warships in their waters. The storms would have scattered us, in any case. Like leaves strewn across the Summer Sea."
So the possibility is there that Starfall gets wrecked by violent summer storms unlike Dragonstone which gets wrecked by violent winter storms.
And if it were Starfall that got wrecked, well then nobody ever mentioning the storm or it’s fallout suddenly makes a lot more sense because we’ve never had any characters visit Starfall, or talk about its past, and certainly not any who just so happened to be there right at this time like we do with people like Stannis and Dragonstone. Eddard of course happens to go to Starfall around this time yes, but unlike Stannis he never talks about this trip so we can’t say what Eddard did or did not do and experience here. There’s a much bigger lack of information around Starfall than there is Dragonstone which disputes that Dragonstone actually experienced the things it supposedly did.
And Ashara and Rhaegar actually make quite a bit of sense together as being Dany’s parents.
Firstly, we know that there’s a song which, if we take Ashara and Rhaegar, fits them absolutely perfectly
He is a man of the Night's Watch, she thought, as he sang about some stupid lady throwing herself off some stupid tower because her stupid prince was dead. The lady should go kill the ones who killed her prince. And the singer should be on the Wall. When Dareon had first appeared at the Happy Port, Arya had almost asked if he would take her with him back to Eastwatch, until she heard him telling Bethany that he was never going back. "Hard beds, salt cod, and endless watches, that's the Wall," he'd said. "Besides, there's no one half as pretty as you at Eastwatch. How could I ever leave you?" He had said the same thing to Lanna, Cat had heard, and to one of the whores at the Cattery, and even to the Nightingale the night he played at the House of Seven Lamps.
• Ashara Dayne threw herself of the Palestone Tower
• Rhaegar Targaryen was dead by then
• One of the reasons people say that she committed suicide is because of the death of the man who dishonoured her at Harrenhal, where both she and Rhaegar were
As the user Slywren has pointed out before, there’s only actually two women in the entire series who commit suicide by throwing themselves off a tower: Lady Stark from Bael the Bard, and Ashara Dayne. So unless there’s some other women throughout Westoros’ history, as Daeron is a Westorosi singer and should know mainly Westorosi songs, who did this same thing, the story likely references one of them.
And Daeron happens to be from the Reach, and not the North. He’s much more likely to know southern songs than a northern song, a northern song that a northerner in Jon Snow didn’t even know. Ashara pretty notably committed suicide, it would be odd if nobody ever made any songs about it.
And of course, back then there were only 6 princes in the realm: Rhaegar, Viserys, Aegon, Doran, Quentyn, and Oberyn. And only 2 of these princes are dead yet when Ashara commits suicide: Rhaegar and Aegon. And while some people have theorized that Ashara’s son, should she have actually given birth to a son, was used as the “Pisswater Prince” who got his brains bashed in by Gregor, Rhaegar makes more sense as being the one who Ashara killed herself over if this song’s actually about her.
And really, it shouldn’t be such a stretch to think that Rhaegar and Ashara were possibly boning. I mean, cheating on your wife with the maid or her best friend are the oldest infidelity stories in the book. And Ashara happens to fulfill both roles, thereby knocking back two stereotypes in one go if Rhaegar cheats on his wife with Ashara. Going and sleeping with the girl who’s betrothed to your cousin, and lives thousands of miles away… is really not. Not at all what a reasonable person goes and does.
Note: this is not to say that he doesn’t also go and do this as well, just it’s not the first or logical thought processes for someone who’s looking for another child. And that part really needs to be considered. As much as fans consider that Rhaegar turns to Lyanna for prophecy reasons, and this is not to say that he might not have, all we actually have to go on is that he seemingly turned to her for the third head of the dragon, not the prince that was promised which he thought he had in Aegon. He just needs a kid, that’s it. And while I’ve joked about this before, but seriously: if Rhaegar just needs a kid like he says he did, and not the prince that was promised, are you telling me that he’s NOT going to fuck that hot Dornish pussy who’s literally his maid? Like come on, Ashara is literally the very first person that Rhaegar should turn to when he decides that he needs another child. She’s hot, she’s single, he knows her likely pretty well, and she’s literally right there.
And as I mentioned, I don’t think that Rhaegar/Ashara at all changes Rhaegar/Lyanna or means that Rhaegar never went and kidnapped Lyanna and possibly tried to impregnate her too. I mean Rhaegar needed a third child, of course he slept with multiple girls after he decided to cheat on Elia in an attempt to get another child. It’s illogical to put all your eggs in one basket. Like what if Lyanna was sterile? Does he have to go kidnap someone else now too? Why wouldn’t he just be trying to impregnate many girls at the same time, in an effort to increase his odds of success? That’s the logical thing to do.
And of course as well, we know that Ashara was Elia’s maid and companion.
Rhaegar had chosen Lyanna Stark of Winterfell. Barristan Selmy would have made a different choice. Not the queen, who was not present. Nor Elia of Dorne, though she was good and gentle; had she been chosen, much war and woe might have been avoided. His choice would have been a young maiden not long at court, one of Elia's companions … though compared to Ashara Dayne, the Dornish princess was a kitchen drab.
And yet, we also know that Ashara ends up in Starfall around this time
That cut deep. Ned would not speak of the mother, not so much as a word, but a castle has no secrets, and Catelyn heard her maids repeating tales they heard from the lips of her husband's soldiers. They whispered of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, deadliest of the seven knights of Aerys's Kingsguard, and of how their young lord had slain him in single combat. And they told how afterward Ned had carried Ser Arthur's sword back to the beautiful young sister who awaited him in a castle called Starfall on the shores of the Summer Sea. The Lady Ashara Dayne, tall and fair, with haunting violet eyes. It had taken her a fortnight to marshal her courage, but finally, in bed one night, Catelyn had asked her husband the truth of it, asked him to his face.
And not in King’s Landing with Elia.
Birds flew and couriers raced to bear word of the victory at the Ruby Ford. When the news reached the Red Keep, it was said that Aerys cursed the Dornish, certain that Lewyn had betrayed Rhaegar. He sent his pregnant queen, Rhaella, and his younger son and new heir, Viserys, away to Dragonstone, but Princess Elia was forced to remain in King's Landing with Rhaegar's children as a hostage against Dorne. Having burned his previous Hand, Lord Chelsted, alive for bad counsel during the war, Aerys now appointed another to the position: the alchemist Rossart—a man of low birth, with little to recommend him but his flames and trickery.
So Ashara seemingly got dismissed from Elia’s service at some point between Harrenhal and when Ned arrives at Starfall given that she’s no longer with Elia. We’re given a few reasons why a lady-in-waiting could be dismissed, such as stealing and spying, but we also know one that applies in perfect concert with the idea that Rhaegar and Ashara were sleeping together: precisely that, sleeping with their lady’s husband.
We know from Rhaella and Aerys’ relationship that Rhaella, Rhaegar’s own mother, used to dismiss her maids and companions who slept with Aerys, Rhaegar’s own father.
In 263 AC, after a year as the King's Hand, Ser Tywin married his beautiful young cousin Joanna Lannister, who had come to King's Landing in 259 AC for the coronation of King Jaehaerys II and remained thereafter as a lady-in-waiting to Princess (later Queen) Rhaella. The bride and groom had known each other since they were children together at Casterly Rock. Though Tywin Lannister was not a man given to public display, it is said that his love for his lady wife was deep and long-abiding. "Only Lady Joanna truly knows the man beneath the armor," Grand Maester Pycelle wrote the Citadel, "and all his smiles belong to her and her alone. I do avow that I have even observed her make him laugh, not once, but upon three separate occasions!"
Sadly, the marriage between Aerys II Targaryen and his sister, Rhaella, was not as happy; though she turned a blind eye to most of the king's infidelities, the queen did not approve of his "turning my ladies into his whores." (Joanna Lannister was not the first lady to be dismissed abruptly from Her Grace's service, nor was she the last). Relations between the king and queen grew even more strained when Rhaella proved unable to give Aerys any further children. Miscarriages in 263 and 264 were followed by a stillborn daughter born in 267. Prince Daeron, born in 269, survived for only half a year. Then came another stillbirth in 270, another miscarriage in 271, and Prince Aegon, born two turns premature in 272, dead in 273.
Sadly, the marriage between Aerys II Targaryen and his sister, Rhaella, was not as happy; though she turned a blind eye to most of the king's infidelities, the queen did not approve of his "turning my ladies into his whores." (Joanna Lannister was not the first lady to be dismissed abruptly from Her Grace's service, nor was she the last). Relations between the king and queen grew even more strained when Rhaella proved unable to give Aerys any further children. Miscarriages in 263 and 264 were followed by a stillborn daughter born in 267. Prince Daeron, born in 269, survived for only half a year. Then came another stillbirth in 270, another miscarriage in 271, and Prince Aegon, born two turns premature in 272, dead in 273.
And then Elia seemingly dismissed Ashara. And Ashara doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of girl who was stealing from Elia, or spying on Elia. And yet she seemingly gets dismissed, and the only other reason we’ve got left is she was sleeping with Rhaegar. Which I mean she was Dornish herself after all, and we know that she has to lose her virginity and get knocked up somewhere from.
And if Rhaegar was sleeping with Ashara, and Ashara was the one he actually loved, then it could make some sense of the HOTU visions of Rhaegar dying murmuring “a woman’s name”. Now notably, Dany never says that the name was Lyanna. The app does say the name was Lyanna, but not to question the authorial bias of the app’s writers given that they enjoy the theory RLJ quite heavily, but Dany knows that name. When she hears Rhaegar’s murmur all she recognizes was that it was some woman’s. If she could describe it as a woman’s name, then she heard the name. And she’d had known the name “Lyanna”. She’d also know the name “Elia”. There’s zero reason why Dany couldn’t identify this woman’s name given the typical people it should’ve been… but she wouldn’t have recognized the name “Ashara”.
But perhaps you don’t quite buy that Rhaegar was banging Ashara and she birthed Dany, so let’s examine the girl other than Elia that we’re told that Rhaegar was having sex with: Lyanna Stark
Dany’s Mother Option #3 – Lyanna Stark
"Robert was betrothed to marry her, but Prince Rhaegar carried her off and raped her," Bran explained. "Robert fought a war to win her back. He killed Rhaegar on the Trident with his hammer, but Lyanna died and he never got her back at all."
As we all know, history tells us that Rhaegar Targaryen abducted Lyanna Stark and raped her. Some think Lyanna instead eloped and was instead having consensual sex with Rhaegar, but the point of distinction between the two is really not necessary here: they were having sex. It’s right there in the book. And any one post “the birds and the bees” knows that sex, consensual or not, can lead to pregnancy. So first we should examine if it’s possible that Lyanna got pregnant from Rhaegar’s rape/sweet lovemaking.
Well first off, the first thing that we need to know is whether Lyanna’s even flowered or not yet seeing as she has to have flowered to be able to get pregnant. Now we know that Lyanna dies at age 16
Lyanna had only been sixteen, a child-woman of surpassing loveliness. Ned had loved her with all his heart. Robert had loved her even more. She was to have been his bride.
The “child-woman” comment is a little weird, but otherwise a 16 year old Lyanna should’ve already flowered, and should therefore indeed be capable of getting pregnant. Of course timeline wise, which we’ll discuss next, says that Lyanna would’ve been kidnapped when she was 14-15 given that there’s about 2 years between her kidnapping and her death, but regardless, she’d still likely be old enough to have already flowered. So yes, Lyanna is indeed old enough that she could get pregnant. So now was gone long enough to have been impregnated?
Again, the answer is yes. Rhaegar leaves Dragonstone at the very start of 282
As cold winds hammered the city, King Aerys II turned to his pyromancers, charging them to drive the winter off with their magics. Huge green fires burned along the walls of the Red Keep for a moon's turn. Prince Rhaegar was not in the city to observe them, however. Nor could he be found in Dragonstone with Princess Elia and their young son, Aegon. With the coming of the new year, the crown prince had taken to the road with half a dozen of his closest friends and confidants, on a journey that would ultimately lead him back to the riverlands. Not ten leagues from Harrenhal, Rhaegar fell upon Lyanna Stark of Winterfell, and carried her off, lighting a fire that would consume his house and kin and all those he loved—and half the realm besides.
Now of course we don’t know exactly when “ultimately” means in relation to the “coming of the new year”, but we also know that Brandon dies at age 20, that he only dies because Lyanna had already been kidnapped and so he rode to King’s Landing, and we know that Brandon’s born in 262.
Not even the wisest could have known that Aerys II would in time be known as the Mad King, nor that his reign would ultimately put an end to near three centuries of Targaryen rule in Westeros. Yet even as Aerys donned his crown, in that fateful year of 262 AC, a lusty blackhaired son named Robert had just been born to his cousin Steffon Baratheon and his lady wife at Storm's End, whilst far to the north at Winterfell, Lord Rickard Stark celebrated the birth of his own son, Brandon. Another Stark, Eddard, followed within a year. All three of these infants, would, in the fullness of time, play crucial roles in the downfall of the dragons.
Brandon had been twenty when he died, strangled by order of the Mad King Aerys Targaryen only a few short days before he was to wed Catelyn Tully of Riverrun. His father had been forced to watch him die. He was the true heir, the eldest, born to rule.
"He was on his way to Riverrun when . . ." Strange, how telling it still made her throat grow tight, after all these years. ". . . when he heard about Lyanna, and went to King's Landing instead. It was a rash thing to do." She remembered how her own father had raged when the news had been brought to Riverrun. The gallant fool, was what he called Brandon.
AKA Brandon dies in 282. Meaning that Lyanna also gets taken in 282 seeing as she gets taken before Brandon dies. So while we don’t know when the “ultimately” took place exactly in relation to the “coming of the new year”, we do at least know it happens in the same year. Personally, Lyanna probably gets kidnapped at the start of 282, given that Brandon has to ride to King’s Landing which probably takes a month, Rickard and all the father’s need to arrive which probably takes another month, making this like mid 282 now, then the war begins when Jon Arryn calls his banners and lasts for a year to King’s Landing, which seems to take place mid-late 283. But speculation aside, Lyanna still gets kidnapped in 282.
Now we’ve already discussed exactly when the TOJ should actually take place according to the timeline given that it would take place months after the Sack as it occurs after the Siege, and probably I don’t know like another month after the Siege given that it’s quite a distance away from Storm’s End (and that’s assuming that Eddard rode right there which we don’t know), hence I think the TOJ probably occurs in 284 rather than 283 (which is just an arbitrary year that most fans assume precisely because they’re trying to work out Jon’s own birthday and he’s born in 283 and they believe he’s born at the TOJ). But regardless of whether or not you think late 283, which indeed at the very least it must be, or sometime in 284, that’s still at least over 1 year since Lyanna got kidnapped, possibly almost 2 years. So indeed, plenty of time for Lyanna to get pregnant, and deliver the baby.
And while I won’t get into the debates of whether or not Lyanna was actually ever in the TOJ or not (possibly at Starfall instead), we know at the very least that Rhaegar does not return from wherever he was, which is presumably also with Lyanna, until after the Battle of the Bells
He floated in heat, in memory. "After dancing griffins lost the Battle of the Bells, Aerys exiled him." Why am I telling this absurd ugly child? "He had finally realized that Robert was no mere outlaw lord to be crushed at whim, but the greatest threat House Targaryen had faced since Daemon Blackfyre. The king reminded Lewyn Martell gracelessly that he held Elia and sent him to take command of the ten thousand Dornishmen coming up the kingsroad. Jon Darry and Barristan Selmy rode to Stoney Sept to rally what they could of griffins' men, and Prince Rhaegar returned from the south and persuaded his father to swallow his pride and summon my father. But no raven returned from Casterly Rock, and that made the king even more afraid. He saw traitors everywhere, and Varys was always there to point out any he might have missed. So His Grace commanded his alchemists to place caches of wildfire all over King's Landing. Beneath Baelor's Sept and the hovels of Flea Bottom, under stables and storehouses, at all seven gates, even in the cellars of the Red Keep itself.
And we know that based on Ned and Catelyn’s marriage, which occurred 15 years ago in 298
And one day fifteen years ago, this second father had become a brother as well, as he and Ned stood together in the sept at Riverrun to wed two sisters, the daughters of Lord Hoster Tully.
Which occurred after the Battle of the Bells because Jon only married Lysa after his heir Denys Arryn was killed in that very battle
If she had lost a child before, that might explain Father’s words, and much else besides... Lysa’s match with Lord Arryn had been hastily arranged, and Jon was an old man even then, older than their father. An old man without an heir. His first two wives had left him childless, his brother’s son had been murdered with Brandon Stark in King’s Landing, his gallant cousin had died in the Battle of the Bells. He needed a young wife if House Arryn was to continue... a young wife known to be fertile.
So we know that Rhaegar doesn’t return until sometime in 283. Which is again at least a year after he first kidnapped Lyanna back in 282. So plenty of time that Lyanna can get impregnated by Rhaegar, and plenty of time to also then deliver the baby in time to be the right age of Dany.
So now is there any proof that Lyanna was ever even pregnant?
Much and more has been made of this passage and ones like it
Promise me, Ned, his sister had whispered from her bed of blood. She had loved the scent of winter roses.
Given that similar passages like the following
That was the way of this cold world, where men fished the sea and dug in the ground and died, whilst women brought forth short-lived children from beds of blood and pain.
Seem to associate that Lyanna’s “bed of blood” was probably caused from childbirth given that that’s what the phrase means when used elsewhere during the novels.
So Lyanna was
• Old enough to get pregnant
• Having sex with Rhaegar
• Gone long enough to get pregnant and deliver a baby
• Seems to have delivered that baby
So where are the proofs that Dany is Lyanna’s child then?
Well first, there’s Dany’s horse, her Silver. Credit must be given to the user Weaselpie for first noticing these connections that I’ll be pointing out.
As we’ve already covered in this essay, Dany isn’t actually a particularly good rider, nor has she spent much time around horses.
At first it had not come easy. The khalasar had broken camp the morning after her wedding, moving east toward Vaes Dothrak, and by the third day Dany thought she was going to die. Saddle sores opened on her bottom, hideous and bloody. Her thighs were chafed raw, her hands blistered from the reins, the muscles of her legs and back so wracked with pain that she could scarcely sit. By the time dusk fell, her handmaids would need to help her down from her mount.
Her body isn’t at all used to riding horses. She’s not an experienced rider or anything. Heck Dany even says that she knows barely anything at all about horses.
She was a young filly, spirited and splendid. Dany knew just enough about horses to know that this was no ordinary animal. There was something about her that took the breath away. She was grey as the winter sea, with a mane like silver smoke.
As well as that’s she’s not much of a rider
Nervously Dany gathered the reins in her hands and slid her feet into the short stirrups. She was only a fair rider; she had spent far more time traveling by ship and wagon and palanquin than by horseback. Praying that she would not fall off and disgrace herself, she gave the filly the lightest and most timid touch with her knees.
And yet when Dany first rides her silver, there’s an instant connection and Dany’s an amazing rider
And for the first time in hours, she forgot to be afraid. Or perhaps it was for the first time ever. The silver-grey filly moved with a smooth and silken gait, and the crowd parted for her, every eye upon them. Dany found herself moving faster than she had intended, yet somehow it was exciting rather than terrifying. The horse broke into a trot, and she smiled. Dothraki scrambled to clear a path. The slightest pressure with her legs, the lightest touch on the reins, and the filly responded. She sent it into a gallop, and now the Dothraki were hooting and laughing and shouting at her as they jumped out of her way. As she turned to ride back, a firepit loomed ahead, directly in her path. They were hemmed in on either side, with no room to stop. A daring she had never known filled Daenerys then, and she gave the filly her head.
The silver horse leapt the flames as if she had wings.
The silver horse leapt the flames as if she had wings.
Dany can suddenly ride expertly when she’s with her silver, when by her own words she’s not much of a rider, and by her own body’s reactions to riding the silver, that this is true.
And more importantly, Dany tells us straight up that while Irri gives her lessons, it’s her silver that’s teaching her to ride.
The khal had commanded the handmaid Irri to teach Dany to ride in the Dothraki fashion, but it was the filly who was her real teacher. The horse seemed to know her moods, as if they shared a single mind. With every passing day, Dany felt surer in her seat. The Dothraki were a hard and unsentimental people, and it was not their custom to name their animals, so Dany thought of her only as the silver. She had never loved anything so much.
Now this could simply be nothing, but this sounds an awfully lot like potentially skinchanging, that Dany’s skinchanging her silver, hence her vast improvement as a rider, her shared mind with her horse, etc. And as we know from the current Starks, they’re all skinchangers.
Q: Are all the Stark children wargs/skin changers with their wolves?
A: To a greater or lesser degree, yes, but the amount of control varies widely.
A: To a greater or lesser degree, yes, but the amount of control varies widely.
So if Dany was half Stark herself, then it would be a fairly logical assumption that Dany could also skinchange “to a greater or lesser degree” just like all the other Starks can.
And of course, given that we’re arguing that Lyanna was her mother here, we know that Lyanna herself had a great connection with horses, and was an expert rider herself
Both horses were lathered and flagging by the time he came up beside her, reached over, and grabbed her bridle. Arya was breathing hard herself then. She knew the fight was done. "You ride like a northman, milady," Harwin said when he'd drawn them to a halt. "Your aunt was the same. Lady Lyanna. But my father was master of horse, remember."
"For the moment. I had another, once. Domeric. A quiet boy, but most accomplished. He served four years as Lady Dustin's page, and three in the Vale as a squire to Lord Redfort. He played the high harp, read histories, and rode like the wind. Horses … the boy was mad for horses, Lady Dustin will tell you. Not even Lord Rickard's daughter could outrace him, and that one was half a horse herself. Redfort said he showed great promise in the lists. A great jouster must be a great horseman first."
The lantern light in her eyes made them seem as if they were afire. "Brandon was fostered at Barrowton with old Lord Dustin, the father of the one I'd later wed, but he spent most of his time riding the Rills. He loved to ride. His little sister took after him in that. A pair of centaurs, those two. And my lord father was always pleased to play host to the heir to Winterfell. My father had great ambitions for House Ryswell. He would have served up my maidenhead to any Stark who happened by, but there was no need. Brandon was never shy about taking what he wanted. I am old now, a dried-up thing, too long a widow, but I still remember the look of my maiden's blood on his cock the night he claimed me. I think Brandon liked the sight as well. A bloody sword is a beautiful thing, yes. It hurt, but it was a sweet pain.
And of course, the silver is “the right animal” in more ways than just being a great horse itself. Look at the way that it’s even described
She was a young filly, spirited and splendid. Dany knew just enough about horses to know that this was no ordinary animal. There was something about her that took the breath away. She was grey as the winter sea, with a mane like silver smoke.
The silver is a perfect representation of Lyanna, and also Lyanna and Rhaegar’s possible child
• “She was a young filly” fits Lyanna herself in the Lyanna was a young girl
• “Spirited” fits Lyanna herself perfect as Ned says that she had a touch of the wolf’s blood
• “There was something about her that took the breath away” fits Lyanna herself in that she seems to have taken many men, including Rhaegar’s breath away. It’s also rather ironic too that Rhaegar possibly dies breathing out his last breath of air saying “Lyanna” if you believe the app that that was the name
• “She was grey as the winter sea” fits Lyanna in that House Stark’s colours include grey, and that Lyanna’s of the north and “winter”
• “With a mane like silver smoke” fits Rhaegar in that he had silver-gold hair
• A grey and silver horse combine those two Stark and Targaryen colours
The horse, simply put, fits the proposed parents here extremely well. Otherwise it’s just some random horse. But if you look at it like Dany’s Rhaegar and Lyanna’s daughter, then the horse is full of symbolism.
Dany fits the horse, because the horse fits Dany.
But really, the biggest clue that Dany is Lyanna’s child is really Eddard himself.
Now we all know about “promise me”
Promise me, she had cried, in a room that smelled of blood and roses. Promise me, Ned. The fever had taken her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister's eyes. Ned remembered the way she had smiled then, how tightly her fingers had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals spilling from her palm, dead and black.
It’s one of, if not the last things that Lyanna did in her life. She extracted a promise from Eddard that he reflects on multiple times in AGOT. We’re never told what the promise was exactly, but given the possibility that Lyanna was pregnant/gave birth, most fans do tend to consider that “promise me” has to do with her child. And there’s plenty of reasons why, based on “promise me” that we should think that that child is Dany.
Firstly, “promise me” happens to happen in our story multiple times either around conversations about Dany, conversations that started about Dany or conversations that immediately turn to being about Dany.
"You avenged Lyanna at the Trident," Ned said, halting beside the king. Promise me, Ned, she had whispered.
The above “promise me” comes during the chapter where Robert informs Ned that Dany has just married Drogo, and that Robert thinks she should be assassinated, while they are trying to figure out how to secure the realm if Dany and her new husband invade.
And these “promise me”(s) occur right around times where Dany will come up soon in the conversation.
He was walking through the crypts beneath Winterfell, as he had walked a thousand times before. The Kings of Winter watched him pass with eyes of ice, and the direwolves at their feet turned their great stone heads and snarled. Last of all, he came to the tomb where his father slept, with Brandon and Lyanna beside him. "Promise me, Ned," Lyanna's statue whispered. She wore a garland of pale blue roses, and her eyes wept blood.
"Serve the boar at my funeral feast," Robert rasped. "Apple in its mouth, skin seared crisp. Eat the bastard. Don't care if you choke on him. Promise me, Ned."
"I promise." Promise me, Ned, Lyanna's voice echoed.
"The girl," the king said. "Daenerys. Let her live. If you can, if it … not too late … talk to them … Varys, Littlefinger … don't let them kill her. And help my son, Ned. Make him be … better than me." He winced. "Gods have mercy."
"I promise." Promise me, Ned, Lyanna's voice echoed.
"The girl," the king said. "Daenerys. Let her live. If you can, if it … not too late … talk to them … Varys, Littlefinger … don't let them kill her. And help my son, Ned. Make him be … better than me." He winced. "Gods have mercy."
As you can see, these “Promise me” quite clearly gets put into connection with Dany by our author. And those connections just so happen to be right around discussions about assassinating her. When Dany’s death is brought up is around Ned, “promise me” happens.
Furthermore, we know that Ned specifically quits as Hand because Robert has just ordered the assassination of Dany
“I will not be part of murder, Robert. Do as you will, but do not ask me to fix my seal to it.”
For a moment Robert did not seem to understand what Ned was saying. Defiance was not a dish he tasted often. Slowly his face changed as comprehension came. His eyes narrowed and a flush crept up his neck past the velvet collar. He pointed an angry finger at Ned. “You are the King’s Hand, Lord Stark. You will do as I command you, or I’ll find me a Hand who will.”
“I wish him every success.” Ned unfastened the heavy clasp that clutched at the folds of his cloak, the ornate silver hand that was his badge of office. He laid it on the table in front of the king, saddened by the memory of the man who had pinned it on him, the friend he had loved. “I thought you a better man than this, Robert. I thought we had made a nobler king.”
For a moment Robert did not seem to understand what Ned was saying. Defiance was not a dish he tasted often. Slowly his face changed as comprehension came. His eyes narrowed and a flush crept up his neck past the velvet collar. He pointed an angry finger at Ned. “You are the King’s Hand, Lord Stark. You will do as I command you, or I’ll find me a Hand who will.”
“I wish him every success.” Ned unfastened the heavy clasp that clutched at the folds of his cloak, the ornate silver hand that was his badge of office. He laid it on the table in front of the king, saddened by the memory of the man who had pinned it on him, the friend he had loved. “I thought you a better man than this, Robert. I thought we had made a nobler king.”
Yes Ned is against killing children in general, but it’s a very venomous reaction, to end his friendship once more with Robert, over something that… well makes sense. Dany IS a threat to the realm. She’s married a man with 100,000 followers, a known sackers of countries, and she’s now pregnant and giving him an heir. It’s distasteful, but this is the safety of the realm at stake here. You don’t marry a warlord when you’re deposed royalty unless you mean war. Assassinating Dany is indeed a logical choice. And yet Eddard’s so opposed to it. Murdering innocent children is one thing, and Eddard has every reason to be opposed to this, but Dany’s not innocent. Moreover, with Jorah there informing on Dany Eddard should know that Dany is indeed planning on invading with Drogo, that she’s not some potential threat, that she actually is a threat. Letting her just live and Drogo’s khalasar land is stupid.
And furthermore, consider the very next thing that Ned does after he quits as Hand over Dany’s assassination: he goes and visits Barra
The girl had been so young Ned had not dared to ask her age. No doubt she'd been a virgin; the better brothels could always find a virgin, if the purse was fat enough. She had light red hair and a powdering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and when she slipped free a breast to give her nipple to the babe, he saw that her bosom was freckled as well. "I named her Barra," she said as the child nursed. "She looks so like him, does she not, milord? She has his nose, and his hair …"
Which happens to be a bastard daughter born of royalty. Same as Dany would be if she were Rhaegar and Lyanna’s child.
And of course, this visit to Barra causes him to remember one of the only conversations we ever see of Lyanna.
“Robert will never keep to one bed,” Lyanna had told him at Winterfell, on the night long ago when their father had promised her hand to the young Lord of Storm’s End. “I hear he has gotten a child on some girl in the Vale.” Ned had held the babe in his arms; he could scarcely deny her, nor would he lie to his sister, but he had assured her that what Robert did before their betrothal was of no matter, that he was a good man and true who would love her with all his heart. Lyanna had only smiled. “Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man’s nature.”
And if you notice, we’re reminded that another bastard daughter was born in this very sequence in Mya Stone. It’s Mya Stone, and Barra Waters that get brought up here. Both bastard daughters of royalty.
And furthermore, if we look at the descriptions of Barra and Mya, we see that
The girl had been so young Ned had not dared to ask her age. No doubt she’d been a virgin; the better brothels could always find a virgin, if the purse was fat enough. She had light red hair and a powdering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and when she slipped free a breast to give her nipple to the babe, he saw that her bosom was freckled as well. “I named her Barra,” she said as the child nursed. “She looks so like him, does she not, milord? She has his nose, and his hair...”
“She does.” Eddard Stark had touched the baby’s fine, dark hair. It flowed through his fingers like black silk. Robert’s firstborn had had the same fine hair, he seemed to recall.
“She does.” Eddard Stark had touched the baby’s fine, dark hair. It flowed through his fingers like black silk. Robert’s firstborn had had the same fine hair, he seemed to recall.
Both look just like Robert did. Yes, “the seed is strong”, but it also continues in this very chapter then Ned then goes onto also think about how Jon Snow looks just like he does too
She had smiled then, a smile so tremulous and sweet that it cut the heart out of him. Riding through the rainy night, Ned saw Jon Snow’s face in front of him, so like a younger version of his own. If the gods frowned so on bastards, he thought dully, why did they fill men with such lusts? “Lord Baelish, what do you know of Robert’s bastards?”
This very chapter keeps showing us these men with bastards who turned out looking like the father… so why wouldn’t Rhaegar’s, if he had one, as well? Which leaves only Dany given that she’s the only kid with silver-gold hair and purple eyes like Rhaegar in the right age group.
And of course, this chapter also has Eddard think the following
“I will,” Ned had promised her. That was his curse. Robert would swear undying love and forget them before evenfall, but Ned Stark kept his vows. He thought of the promises he’d made Lyanna as she lay dying, and the price he’d paid to keep them.
This is the first, and only time that Ned ever speaks of a “price” he paid to keep “promise me”. And it gets brought up in the chapter immediately after Eddard Stark just resigned as Hand and just broke off his friendship with Robert… over assassinating Dany. Odd coincidence if the promise has nothing to do with Dany no?
And of course, immediately after this whole sequence of events which went
- Assassinate Dany
- Eddard resigns
- Eddard meets a royal bastard
- Eddard thinks about a price he’d paid to keep the promises he’d made Lyanna
Etc.
We get the infamous TOJ dream. I won’t go into that as it’s been analyzed to death, but you get the picture. There’s a whole sequence of events here triggered by Dany that just keeps rolling.
And furthermore, after Robert informs him as he’s dying to call off the attack on Dany, Varys informs him that that’s impossible and in Ned’s very next chapter, as he sits in the black cells, he thinks to himself of broken promises
When he kept very still, his leg did not hurt so much, so he did his best to lie unmoving. For how long he could not say. There was no sun and no moon. He could not see to mark the walls. Ned closed his eyes and opened them; it made no difference. He slept and woke and slept again. He did not know which was more painful, the waking or the sleeping. When he slept, he dreamed: dark disturbing dreams of blood and broken promises. When he woke, there was nothing to do but think, and his waking thoughts were worse than nightmares. The thought of Cat was as painful as a bed of nettles. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. He wondered whether he would ever see her again.
Again, this is the only time in the books that Ned ever thinks about broken promises… and it’s after he’s found out that Dany will be assassinated and he can’t do anything about it. He can’t do anything about a lot of things at this point too (such as looking after Robert’s bastards), but again, it’s another coincidence where promises keep coming up around Dany, and this is after we’d heard in the previous chapters that Eddard supposedly kept his promise to Lyanna. And yet now he’s got broken promises now that he’s been informed that Dany will die.
And continuing in the line of promises, Ned says the following which is very interesting
Ned rose and paced the length of the room. "If the queen had a role in this or, gods forbid, the king himself … no, I will not believe that." Yet even as he said the words, he remembered that chill morning on the barrowlands, and Robert's talk of sending hired knives after the Targaryen princess. He remembered Rhaegar's infant son, the red ruin of his skull, and the way the king had turned away, as he had turned away in Darry's audience hall not so long ago. He could still hear Sansa pleading, as Lyanna had pleaded once.
Which if you examine the bolded, then Ned’s thought process goes
- Robert sending an assassin against Dany
- Rhaegar’s dead child
- Sansa’s pleading for Lady’s life reminds him of Lyanna’s pleading
Flip the thought process around and you more or less get
Lyanna’s “promise me” -> Rhaegar’s child -> Dany
And when you think about it, this should come as no surprise seeing as Ned just told us that Sansa’s pleading reminded him of Lyanna’s pleading. And Sansa was pleading for Lady… who’s a female direwolf. Which is what Dany would be if she’s the child of Lyanna and Rhaegar. Yes officially speaking Dany would be a bastard, or a dragon, but she’s still also a female direwolf as she’d be half Stark. And Sansa was pleading for that very thing.
Ned also gives us a few more clues that Dany’s Lyanna’s child.
“You were not there,” Ned said, bitterness in his voice. Troubled sleep was no stranger to him. He had lived his lies for fourteen years, yet they still haunted him at night. “There was no honor in that conquest.”
Much has been made about this passage and how it relates to Jon, but this doesn’t actually make any sense. Jon is 14 at the time sure, but he’s turning 15 in like a few weeks/months. If Jon were Ned’s lie, not that he might not still be another lie, then Ned’s been living his lies for 15 years, not 14. Dany on the other hand is 13 turning 14 in a few months, the perfect age to fit Ned’s lies. The year is 298, the lies are 14 years old, the lies therefore began in 284. AKA the year that Dany’s born.
And the other way that Eddard shows that Dany’s Lyanna’s child, is how he reacts to any message that Jorah sends. Think about what Ned does when Ned first learns that Dany has wed Drogo: he asks who the source is
“And cold,” Robert grumbled, pulling his cloak more tightly around himself. 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.
Varys the eunuch was the king’s master of whisperers. He served Robert now as he had once served Aerys Targaryen. Ned unrolled the paper with trepidation, thinking of Lysa and her terrible accusation, but the message did not concern Lady Arryn. “What is the source for this information?”
Varys the eunuch was the king’s master of whisperers. He served Robert now as he had once served Aerys Targaryen. Ned unrolled the paper with trepidation, thinking of Lysa and her terrible accusation, but the message did not concern Lady Arryn. “What is the source for this information?”
The very first thing Ned does is attempt to cast doubt on the information, to question its validity. Like why would anybody lie that Dany married Drogo? There were hundreds of people at the wedding, of course the information’s true. Someone like Drogo, and hell Dany herself, doesn’t just get married with nobody noticing. And then when Ned finds out that the source is Jorah Mormont, his old bannerman? Oh ho, watch out
“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.
“Ser Jorah is now in Pentos, anxious to earn a royal pardon that would allow him to return from exile,” Robert explained. “Lord Varys makes good use of him.”
“So the slaver has become a spy,” Ned said with distaste. He handed the letter back. “I would rather he become a corpse.”
“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.
“Ser Jorah is now in Pentos, anxious to earn a royal pardon that would allow him to return from exile,” Robert explained. “Lord Varys makes good use of him.”
“So the slaver has become a spy,” Ned said with distaste. He handed the letter back. “I would rather he become a corpse.”
He’s incredibly angry, and immediately says that Jorah needs to die. Sure, Jorah broke the north’s laws and fled from Ned’s justice, but it’s been 5 years since that. At the mention that Jorah’s now spying on Dany though, it all comes bubbling back to the surface.
Again, these are all Ned’s thought processes. He’d just received word that a dangerous claimant to the realm has married a vicious warlord… and he focuses on Jorah? No Warden of the North, a man literally in charge of a quarter of Westoros’ entire armies and the defence of one quarter of the country, is just going to completely ignore this threat, dismiss it so lightly, and focus on the spy as the man who should be eliminated instead of the very clear threat to the realm. You might personally dislike that Jorah escaped justice, which is in itself odd seeing as Ned does not like killing at all but he really wants Jorah dead, but you don’t just dismiss these reports the way that Ned does.
And this is not the only time Ned does this: he does it again when Jorah informs them that Dany is now pregnant
Ned looked at the eunuch coldly. "You would bring us the whisperings of a traitor half a world away, my lord. Perhaps Mormont is wrong. Perhaps he is lying."
"Ser Jorah would not dare deceive me," Varys said with a sly smile. "Rely on it, my lord. The princess is with child."
"Ser Jorah would not dare deceive me," Varys said with a sly smile. "Rely on it, my lord. The princess is with child."
He tries to discredit Jorah at every turn, to say that Jorah’s messages about the threat Dany poses aren’t real… why? She’s very clearly a threat to the realm in everything she’s doing, and the reports very clearly are real seeing as hundreds of people witness each one of these, yet Ned keeps trying to say that these messages are just lies. It makes no sense, he knows the need to defend Westoros better than almost anybody, yet he keeps trying to saying that Jorah’s just lying, there’s nothing to see here. Ned’s message is clear: ignore Dany. He wants her alive, despite she keeps providing ammo that she needs to die.
And again, Jorah’s informing here. They know that Dany’s trying to invade, that would be right in his messages. She’s not getting married because she fell wildly in love, she got married to give Viserys an army. She’s not having his babies for the sake of having his babies, she’s doing it to make the stallion that mounts the world. Etc. She’s all doing this to invade Westoros. And Ned pretends that there’s nothing to see here. That just makes no sense, she’s not some innocent kid, she’s a ginormous threat to the realm.
And of course, while there’s debates back and forth about whether Lyanna was at the TOJ, or Starfall, she does seem to have been in Dorne. Which if Dany was then born in Dorne, and at least spent some time there before joining Viserys, then that does also explain the whole house with the red door because as we’ve already covered, lemon trees are indeed heavily associated with Dorne.
Conclusion
So in quick summary,
Aerys and Rhaella had a long troubled history which casts doubt on the fact that Dany could be their child in the first place, be it from their stillbirths or early deaths that they experienced across at least 25 years of marriage.
Her itinerary makes no logistical sense, either from the order she says she saw the Free Cities or why you’d ever take those routes. Nor does it match what she remembers doing.
Her birthday of 9 moons after the Sack does not seem to actually be possible due to the fact that she’s also 8-9 months younger than Jon.
The storm that marked Dany’s birth, that earned her the epithet “Stormborn” has no actual evidence of ever having taken place, nor does it make sense that it did considering that Dany says it was a summer storm, yet the Narrow Sea gets hit by its worst storms in winter.
Willem Darry does not match the physical descriptions that Willem Darry should. Nor does his cause of death fit with what Dany describes.
Dany remembers a lemon tree outside her house in Braavos, yet Braavos very clearly cannot actually support the growth of a lemon tree as lemon trees all grow in the southern latitudes, while Braavos is in the northern latitudes. More so, we know that the Vale imports their lemons, and Littlefinger’s lands, which are on the same latitude as Braavos and possesses the same climate, do not grow lemon trees due to the fact that they’re located in the Vale which cannot, so Braavos cannot either.
Dany says that the servants from the house with the red door robbed her and Viserys before they kicked them out, But Dany also says that she and Viserys possessed a bunch of treasures, including Rhaella’s crown, and that they still possessed those treasures after this robbery. Those treasures should have been stolen too.
Illyrio says some very curious things about both Dany and Viserys, such as that the plan to marry Dany to Drogo was years of planning, and that when he first saw Dany he went and vigorously fucked a bedwarmer despite being so fat that he can’t even presently stand up on his own, that implies years of interactions and knowledge. This is despite the fact that Dany and Viserys have only been living in Pentos for the last 6 months at the start of AGOT.
The first proposed alternative Dany parentage in this paper states that Dany is simply a random girl, possibly Lyseni, chosen to play the role of Daenerys Targaryen. Evidence possibly to support this includes the fact that Illyrio has dealt in the slave trade, and more specifically the Lyseni slave trade, as well as that Dany is presented collared to Drogo.
Rhaegar however is the favoured alternative father proposed in this theory. Dany receives an absolutely astonishing amount of Rhaegar plugs in her story line, in the forms of characters discussing him with her, or many visions about the man, including ones that showcase herself as him, and even one such vision which places Rhaegar in the mysterious house with the red door.
And Ashara is one of the favoured alternative mothers proposed in this theory. Dany happens to look like Ashara enough that someone who was in love with her thinks she could be her daughter. And Ashara supposedly gave birth to a daughter right around the same time that Dany’s born too. Dany being born in Dorne would obviously explain why she remembers lemon trees at her house with the red door. If a storm was present during Dany’s birth, it could make more sense if it occurred at Starfall. Rhaegar and Ashara hooking up makes a lot of sense given that there’s a song which seems to say this very thing, Elia seemingly dismisses Ashara from her service
And finally, Lyanna is the last proposed alternative mother. Evidence includes that Rhaegar and Lyanna were supposedly having sex, that Lyanna seemingly got pregnant, that Dany almost seems to skinchange her silver, that she becomes a very good rider quite quickly and Lyanna herself was a great rider. And Lyanna’s “promise me” comes up quite often and with a lot of connections in and around Dany. Eddard is also very opposed to killing Dany and seems to try and discredit every report about her actions, as well as thinks about lies he’s been living for 14 years, which conveniently works out right to around Dany’s birth
Either way, at the end of the day whether you were convinced or not by all of this, I’ll leave you once more with this question Dany asks herself:
If she was not her father’s daughter, who was she?