Interviewer: To what extent do you feel your characters are unreliable narrators? Sometimes we get accounts of important situations from different viewpoints and it’s very interesting to see what each character focuses on... Would you say that (what a character is telling) is not exactly what’s happening, that’s just how they see it?

George: I do use the device of the unreliable narrator, particularly when dealing with memory. I present these scenes sometimes from multiple different viewpoints and the versions don’t quite jibe and then you have to figure out what really happened. The only problem with that is I’ve discovered – not being perfect – that I make real mistakes, and I would prefer not to make real mistakes, but my readers are very good, and they point them out to me. I have a horse that changes sex between books and I’m terrible with eye colours, so I’ve got a couple of characters whose eye colour changes. When you make mistakes like that and when you come across the unreliable narrator, people think, ‘oh, he fucked up again.’. Actually, I didn’t fuck up, some of that is quite deliberate and I wish I could eliminate the real mistakes so that the fake mistakes could be seen for what they are, which is a sign of my literary genius. I think the point of the unreliable narrator is that you’re seeing everything filtered through the viewpoints of the characters who are your eyes and ears in that particular chapter…

We have a book coming out – The World of Ice and Fire. Elio García and Linda Antonsson helped me write it, and it’s got all the history of Westeros. The original plan for this book was that Elio and Linda would go through the books I'd already written, and they would pull out all the factual nuggets of history and organize them and then I would polish what they wrote and add sidebars with things that I knew about previous kings and legends. One of the things I did in the sidebars was present history, not in an objective manner, but as something written by a maester at the Citadel who lived hundreds of years after the events and was drawing on primary sources. In the particular case of the Dance Of The Dragons: Archmaester Gyldayn, based on court records and official things; Septon Eustace, the court septon, who was giving a religious bent to everything; and the court fool, Mushroom, who was relating all the filthy things that were going on and the lascivious stories. That allowed me to present three versions of every major event that were often at dramatic odds with each other, replicating real history. Mushroom’s version would always be completely outrageous but also the most fun to read and then you’d have the other more sober versions. So, I do have fun with this point of view thing and the narrator.

- George R.R. Martin, Edinburgh International Book Festival

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"Sometimes Dany would close her eyes and dream of him, but it was never Jorah Mormont she dreamed of. Her lover was always younger and more comely, though his face remained a shifting shadow."

the thing about dany youve got to understand to get what meereen and astapor and yunkai and her entire time in slavers bay is about is that she is fundamentally an answer to fantasy fiction that introduces slavery as a plot device but refuses to meaningfully engage with it in any way. what if the the self-inserty magical protagonist saw that the world they lived in was unjust and that people were being sold in markets and that everyone around her told them that was just how the world worked? what would they do? well im not sure but let me tell you what my buddy dany did

61_Juego de tronos_Daenerys VII

 La mujer envolvió la herida de la flecha con un emplasto de hojas húmedas, y se concentró en la herida del pecho, que untó con una pasta color verde claro antes de volver a colocar la piel en su lugar. El khal apretó los dientes y ahogó un grito. La esposa de dios sacó una aguja de plata y una bobina de hilo de seda, y empezó a coser la carne. Cuando terminó, pintó la piel con ungüento rojo, la cubrió con más hojas y envolvió el pecho con un trozo de piel de cordero.

—Deberás recitar las plegarias que te daré, y conservar puesta esta piel de cordero diez días con sus noches —dijo—. Sentirás fiebre, y picores, y cuando estés curado te quedará una gran cicatriz.

—Mis cicatrices son gloria, mujer oveja. —Khal Drogo se sentó y sus campanillas tintinearon. Flexionó el brazo, y frunció el ceño.

—No bebas vino, ni la leche de la amapola —le advirtió—. Sufrirás dolor, pero tu cuerpo debe estar fuerte para combatir a los espíritus venenosos.
 

—Soy el khal —dijo Drogo—. Escupo sobre el dolor, y bebo lo que quiero. Cohollo, dame mi chaleco.

Daenerys Targaryen. I commissioned this piece from @/sver_ver on twitter.

Doodle dump! Ko-fi donations of some lovely ladies 🤍

1. Daenerys Targaryen

2. Elenda Baratheon (née Caron)

3. Arianne Martell

3. Alaeyne Targaryen (OC)

I think GRRM does recognize that Dany’s relationship with Drogo was traumatic despite the good she was able to derive from it (the latter is also unsurprising given the comparative agency this relationship afforded her after Viserys’s tyranny). Her dragons figure in the scene from ASOS when she’s rediscovering her sexuality after Drogo’s death, something she never thought would happen, and it’s probably no accident that the one named after him becomes a literal bête noire with which she has to contend in ADWD, leading to their quite suggestively described first flight together

(ADWD, Daenerys IX)

Drogo and Hizdahr are slave owners and her marriages to both of them evoke this, and out in the countryside with Drogon she’s beginning to reclaim both her politics of liberation and her personal autonomy after chaining the dragons and making concessions to the slavers, starting by facing down another threat of rape and enslavement by a rival khalasar led by a man who once facilitated the rape and murder of a slave she’d tried her best to save

(ADWD, Daenerys X)

(AGOT, Daenerys IX)

(AGOT, Daenerys I)

(ADWD, Daenerys VII)

do i look like her?