Episode 127: A CLASH OF KINGS, DAENERYS IV: "House of Leaves (Part 2)" SHOW NOTES! (Patreon)

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast … podcast: the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. 

And I’m your other host Emmett, better known as PoorQuentyn.          

Welcome to the one hundred and twenty-seventh episode of the Not A Cast, titled: “House of Leaves, Part 2: An Analysis of ACOK, Daenerys IV,” in which everything somehow gets even weirder and scarier and trippier than last week. 

This episode is brought to you by our NotASmallCouncil: 

• Hand of the King WolfmanZack 
• Grandmaester Timbob, troubleshooter of systems and designer of circuit boards
• Lord Commander of the Kingsguard Mark N. 
• Lord Travis, Master of Ships and Warden of the Waves, Captain of the war galley NIGHT WOLF, the ship that stalks the Seven Seas, and Wielder of the Valyrian Steel trident SUMMONER, the blade that brings the Deep Ones
• Ser Keith J, Master of Whisperers
• Lord Philip the Merciful, Master of Laws
• Archmaester June, Healer of the Lesser Poxes
• Ragged Michael, Warden of the North
• Nelson the Hammer, Prince of Dragonstone
• Scarlett the Other Red Woman and Mistress of Whisperers
• Lord Micah, the Quilled Lion, Warden of the West, Herald of the Golden Tooth, Master of the Banefort and the Kraken’s Bane
• Lord James: the Jim that was Promised
• The High Bearded Priest
• Lord Jake, Assistant (to the) Hand of the King
• Lady Xena Valyrian
• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen's Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• His Grace’s High Inquisitor Frank
• Ser Jasper the Cruel, the King’s Justice
• Laurence, Prince of Dorne
• Kelly, Warden of the East and Mistress of (Old) Bay of Crabs
• Steven the Steadfast, Master of Hounds
• The Blue Winter Rose Knight of Highgarden
• Lady Stephanie
• Lord Anonymous
• Lord Carlos
• Lord Andrew the Restless, a Priest of the Drowned God
• The King's Cook, Nolly (No-lee) Olly (Oh-lee), Master of Cannoli
• Ser Sourcedelica 
• Low Energy Dent, True Master of the Banefort and True Master of Coin 
• Lord Penchant for Nostalgia
• Queer Alex, Rainbow Commander of the They-des and Gentle-thems (ladies and gentlemen)
• Haldivar, The Waiter for TWOW
• A-a-ron Damphair Prophet of the Forsaken and High Priest of Euron Crows Eye
• Lieutenant Glenn Lord of H town
• Vanerys of the House Colgaryen, the First of Her Name, Princess of Dragonstone, Mistress of Art, The Overworked, Queen of the Pencils, the Eraser and the First Draft, Queen of Monochrome, Devotee of the Great GOT, Portraitist of the Realm, Lady Realist of the Seven Kingdoms, Blender of Paints and Maker of Drawings
• Lord Adam T
• Lady Alexandra of Tarth
• Ser Kristoph Logas, Bloody Scorpion of the Red Field, Defender of the Letter of Kin, and the Wolverine of house Qorgyle
• Lady Elizabeth, Mistress of Horse (Faced Lesbians)
• Ser Josh Snow Bastard Bounty Hunter of the North
• Ser Veyor, Chief of Parties in the Frozen Wastes
• Lord Peter
• Lady Ashley
• The Dead Sheppard Reborn, Preacher of the Poor Fellows
• Marshall Harrison—Absent, shipwrecked in the Jade Sea
• Grave-Robb Stark, the Cadaver King and Horror of Harrenhal
• Olaf, proponent of establishing a feudal, pseudodemocratic system of Great Councils, wherein every count votes
• Ser Tim: The Knight Who Was Guided By Voices
• Lord Nick
• Thucydides, Lord of Plagues
• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen’s Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• Lord Gene the Splendid, Master of Coin, Warden of Tampa Bay who believes that the sudden vacation plans made by certain witnesses clears him of all charges  
• Lady Anna, The Lovely Castellan
• Pat Yronwood, the bloodroyal and guardian of the Boneway
• Lord Charles Tyrell of Highgarden, Lord Paramount of the Mander, Defender of the Marches, High Marshal of the Reach, Warden of the South, and The Heir of House Tyrell
• Luke, Lord of Lone Leaf & The Pillar of Autumn
• Squid Pro Quo
• Master of Zorse
• Joe Snow “King of the Metro North and protector of the Tri-State”
• Hedrigal, Captain of the Airship Arrogance
• And our newest members of the small council: Squire Matt S, future Ser Matt S, the one who will bring balance to the Kingdoms

Spoiler warning: All published books, 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show. Anything and everything!

Question

We’ve gone heavy on questions for months now. So, I figure we’d do a quick pause on questions and instead read some of the recent reviews we’ve gotten on Apple Podcasts. Thank you again for all the reviews!

The Iron Bank writes:

Avatars of Romney & Beto Discuss ASOIAF

Jeff gives a 10,000 ft. synopsis of chapters from the perspective of a RINO. Emmett follows with an hour of Marxist talking points from an apartment decorated with posters of Westeros.

OfTheEveningOrchidVale writes:

A noun of plurals

I stumbled on this while looking for an excuse to re-read ASOIAF for the fourth time. Within a few weeks I was caught up and delightfully hooked. I love the chemistry between Emmett and Jeff, yes, even in spite of how much they agree. 7/7 would recommend

NotBryndenBFish writes:

Probably the best podcast

Just 2 handsome and cool guys (mostly Jeff) talking about a great series of books (not as good as THE CAUTIONER’S TALE)

Silverwing Flyer writes:

NotACast offers great content and insights into every aspect of asoiaf - the plot, the characters, the overarching themes, and writing techniques. Jeff's "readings" eg., Catelyn's "Moonlight Sonata" from AGoT, often highlight specific aspects of writing that take my breath away. Emmett provides articulate and wonderfully profound big picture insights on characters and themes. Emmett and Jeff balance each others' pacing and perspective to make for a content rich podcast that holds my attention. Five (5!) stars guys!

July 29, 2020: Updating my previous review from five stars to five plus plus stars.

One plus one is greater than the Seven.

Finally, Pedro G wrote us a really kind email several weeks ago telling us about how thankful he is to have gotten to know us during our weekly livestreams during a recent family emergency. He’s been inspired to write his own theories about how the BWB might crown Gendry as king in Winds and a detailed analysis of the “mad dogs” of the lords of Westeros. He plans to become a Lord Confessor as a patron at some point and is looking forward to every livestream. Thank you Pedro, and our thoughts are with you and your family during this time

So, thank you to all of you for your reviews! Keep them coming! We’ll return to answering questions for our Sworn Sword or higher patrons over at patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF where you can sign up to get bonus episodes, show notes, special posts and … merchandise!

Yes! As we announced last week, designs from Sanrixian, AKA Mallory are in. If you’re a Sworn Sword or higher patron, you can vote on the winning design that Mallory will then colorize and finalize. And a special additional announcement! Mallory told me last week that she will be colorizing and finalizing not just one, but two designs. So, if you’re watching this livestream and are a Sworn Sword or higher patron, go and vote now! Oh, and also, if you are a Sworn Sword or higher patron, you’ll be getting a free t-shirt from us with the winning design on it! So, head on over to patreon.com/notacastasoiaf to find more!

But enough about patreon. When we last checked in with Dany, she had come to the House of the Undying for truth and wisdom. Then she had done some drugs. Let’s find out what happens when she enters the house in this synopsis of ACOK, Daenerys IV, Part 2!

Synopsis

Look, this is just going to be one of those synopsis things that’s barely a synopsis. The scenes for most of this chapter are of incredible importance to the story and for Dany. So, I am doing nothing wrong as I have never done anything wrong in my entire life.

Dany is allowed to enter the house. She enters and finds herself in a anteroom with four doors. She takes the door on the right. She then finds herself in an identical room. Another door to the right, and she finds herself in a small antechamber with four doors. She takes yet another right door, realizing that she’s in the presence of sorcery.

The fourth room was an oval instead of a square like the first three rooms, and she finds six passageways. She chooses the rightmost chamber and finds a row of torches but only doors to her left. Drogon flies forward but is only able to fly a few feet before crashing. Dany moves after him. But as she moves, she sees that the carpet is mold-eaten, and she hears what sounds like rats running in the walls. Drogon hears this too, and he shrieks at it. There were other sounds, too, fucked up dystopian sounds. A crashing sound like someone was trying to break through. Dissonant piping from probably headless Johannes Bach comes from behind another door, Dany moves past these doors quickly. 

Dany realizes that some of the doors were open, and it’s a big-ass passage, but I’m just going to read to the end. PAY ATTENTION TO ALL OF THIS, PEOPLE!

I will not look, Dany told herself, but the temptation was too strong.

In one room, a beautiful woman sprawled naked on the floor while four little men crawled over her. They had rattish pointed faces and tiny pink hands, like the servitor who had brought her the glass of shade. One was pumping between her thighs. Another savaged her breasts, worrying at the nipples with his wet red mouth, tearing and chewing.

Farther on she came upon a feast of corpses. Savagely slaughtered, the feasters lay strewn across overturned chairs and hacked trestle tables, asprawl in pools of congealing blood. Some had lost limbs, even heads. Severed hands clutched bloody cups, wooden spoons, roast fowl, heels of bread. In a throne above them sat a dead man with the head of a wolf. He wore an iron crown and held a leg of lamb in one hand as a king might hold a scepter, and his eyes followed Dany with mute appeal.

Can I just quote the rest of this? I mean, no, that defeats the purpose of a synopsis, but really! 

Moving on Dany comes to another room, and she knows this one:

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.

I’m so excited about all of this! Let’s progress on for a moment: Dany moves through endless doors to her left: iron, wood, carved doors and plain with pulls, locks and knockers. They were all closed. Drogon kept pressing her on until she can’t run any more.

And then she enters a great bronze door that looks grand. She presses through it, and she finds herself in a stone hall

The skulls of dead dragons looked down from its walls. Upon a towering barbed throne sat an old man in rich robes, an old man with dark eyes and long silver-grey hair. "Let him be king over charred bones and cooked meat," he said to a man below him. "Let him be the king of ashes." Drogon shrieked, his claws digging through silk and skin, but the king on his throne never heard, and Dany moved on.

Viserys, was her first thought the next time she paused, but a second glance told her otherwise. The man had her brother's hair, but he was taller, and his eyes were a dark indigo rather than lilac. "Aegon," he said to a woman nursing a newborn babe in a great wooden bed. "What better name for a king?"

"Will you make a song for him?" the woman asked.

"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.

And that is the “synopsis” of ACOK, Daenerys IV, Part 2! I think we really nailed last week in setting up the visions that we were always going to meet in this chapter. Let’s delve into some of the most potent imagery in all of ASOIAF, shall we?

Depth

As I said about Aeron’s drug-induced dreams in our series on “The Forsaken,” this is my favorite kind of thing, my taste in art encapsulated. Psychedelic imagery that stimulates the senses and the intellect in equal measure, the author working unabashedly to bring you to your knees with awe. It’s Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return...I love when artists ambitiously seek the structures undergirding all existence and convey their insights not with dry monologues nor leaden irony, but with a rush of awe, religious in its fervor even as the manipulations behind divine imagery are ruthlessly exposed. We will do our best to interpret these images, as Dany does, but the House of the Undying is foremost to be experienced.

I’ve been thinking about our questions at the end of part 1 with regard to how the shade of evening actually worked. It dawned on me after we recorded that episode that Daenerys already has prophetic ability as seen in A Game of Thrones when Daenerys has dragon dreams. In-between A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings, George published The Hedge Knight which showed that Daeron the Drunkard also has prophetic dreams, with all of his siblings having “dragon dreams.” Then, Maester Aemon tells Sam about his own prophetic dreams. Later, we learn about Daenys the Dreamer from TWOIAF who dreamed about the Doom of Valyria. And finally in 2018, GRRM gave credence to the fan theory that Aegon the Conqueror dreamed of the Others and that’s what caused Aegon to invade. In a word, Daenerys’ prophetic seems tied to the Targaryen/Valyrian bloodline. The shade of the evening then may be the substance which unlocks Dany’s magical Valyrian/Targaryen prophetic ability or allows her to access it more easily. 

Now, magical bloodlines is a topic which has bad racial connotations. I genuinely don’t feel qualified to talk about it - though I recommend an article from Tor which addresses the topic of race and magical bloodlines in GoT and ASOIAF. I will say that George may have drawn inspiration from Frank Herbert’s Dune in which - I’ll keep this as lightly-spoilered as possible as I assume a fair number of you haven’t read the book and plan to watch the movie - the Bene Gesserit attempt to create the perfect bloodline to bring forth the Kwisatz Haderach who will have prophetic abilities when brought on especially - but not exclusively - by spice melange. That may be where George got his inspiration from, and h/t to Travis, Grant and Frank from the NotASlack for the conversation on it! As we talked about last week, this chapter is in dialogue with SFF that has gone before it, and today, we enter the world of pure fantasy through doors, rooms and hallways.

• The door, the first few rooms, the hallway
  • As I said last time, the entrance Dany takes into HOTU emphasizes the metafictional nature of this chapter: a wall like a face, a door like a mouth
  • It’s as though the House of the Undying is alive--a person unto itself with its own head and mouth, and now it’s swallowing Dany whole
  • It represents George, of course. Dany is entering his mind and accessing his creative process. But it’s also a commentary on how art takes on its own life, separate from the author; it belongs instead to the audience
  • Engaging with art is similar (in certain respects) to engaging with another person. There’s the surface, the subtext, and your own projections
  • The wall shaped like a face, the door shaped like a mouth: these are warnings to both Dany and the reader to treat the House of the Undying like a living being whose nature we influence--such is the nature of art!
  • Lord Travis, our small council master of ships and co-host of the Planetos Podcast (Are you listening to that podcast yet? You should), brought up a really excellent point on the NotASlack and on twitter in which he said:
    • Reread HOTU this morning and caught this parallel: Dany enters the House of the Undying through its door which is an oval mouth set in a wall fashioned like a human face. This is reminiscent of Bran passing through the Black Gate at the Nightfort to the Lands Beyond the Wall. The Black Gate is a weirwood tree’s face and its mouth opens and swallows Bran and company to pass through, metaphorically swallowing them. Very much in line with Dany almost being consumed by the undying as well
  • This was such a good point! It speaks to the hidden danger from within for Dany in the HoTU and how she nearly gets consumed by the temptations of secrets and magic.
  • But of course, this led me to a long tangent in my own big brain thinking about how George is layering the metaphor even more - speaking to how Daenerys is surrendering herself to the temptation of sorcery and magic yet again (It won’t be the last time)
  • Bran, too, will be tempted by his magical ability to embrace the dark side of the weirwoods and the cannibalism of the old gods and power of controlling another’s brain (Hodor).
  • And what did Jon find at White Tree six months ago inside the giant mouth of the weirwood? Bones. Death.
  • But wait, what happens at the end of this chapter? Travis alluded to it in his comment, but the Undying try to eat Daenerys.
  • Dany passing through the mouth that is a door is a metaphor for the temptation of Dany being consumed with magic, and the metaphor becomes horrifyingly literal by chapter’s end.
  • Dany walks into the face, into the book, and finds a series of identical rooms, each with foor doors; she takes the rightmost each time
  • To stick with my HOTU-as-story metaphor, these rooms are a table of contents, offering ways into the story. It’s not linear so much as choose-your-own-adventure, its direction dictated by Dany, aka the reader
  • The door she goes through, the path she takes through the story, will determine its meaning. Same goes for us--look at the GGC order!
  • George is again following the same strategy as Danielewski in House of Leaves: the story is not a mental structure but a physical one, and so your actions (not just your thoughts) determine what direction the story takes
  • And as in House of Leaves, George knows that the most effective way to communicate the uncanny is to mix the supernatural with the banal
  • In House of Leaves, our first POV Johnny Truant merely alludes to the horrors contained within. We follow the Russian nesting doll of POVs inward, in search of something to justify all the creeping dread
  • When we finally get to the Navidson house, the titular house, the first signs of something wrong are mere spatial anomalies, not monsters
  • Dany is convinced by these rooms that she is in the presence of sorcery. But there’s no big magic show--no lightning bolts, no elevators of blood
  • It is the spooky similarity between the rooms, the way they’re absolutely identical even though that shouldn’t be possible, that speaks to magic
  • The final room has six doors. Why? Well, when you go deeper into a story, the possibilities start adding up....at first. Later in the chapter, they narrow, perfectly mirroring story structure: so many chances, until they’re taken
  • We can’t know what’s waiting beyond the other doors. HOTU is not a line nor even a circle but a web of alternate dimension. Every time Dany makes a choice, it splits off into another quantum universe, another door
  • It’s a potent metaphor for how the choices we make determine what path we can follow; this insight applies to real life decisions as well as art
  • From there, Dany enters a hallway. The main thrust of the story, you could say. Narrative offers the illusion of choice, all those other doors, but they’re never taken because the author knows where she’s ultimately going
  • Both the final room and the hallway are dominated by decay. The room was made of worm-eaten wood; it was oval, more womblike than the previous rooms, shaped like squares, like pages, like screens
  • Dany was birthed into the hallway, which used to be lavishly decorated...but it’s all gone to rot. As with the appearance of HOTU from the outside, this speaks to how immersion in drugs--or immersion in story--can blind you to dust and decay setting in all around you
  • What carpet remains muffles her footfalls. Dany is the reader here, and the reader is not actually present in the story, so our footsteps are silent
  • That just allows Dany to hear sounds--read the story--all the more clearly. But that’s not necessarily a positive thing! Narrative clarity offers disturbing sights and sounds. There are rats in the halls and walls of Story
  • Then there are the doors, which are all to her left. In HOTU, going left disturbs the flow of time, forward and thus rightward across the page
  • Many are closed, yet she hears music behind one, and something banging to get out behind another. A song stuck in George’s mind, an anxiety relentlessly gnawing at him. Dany doesn’t get to see those, and neither do we; they serve to whet her appetite and ours for what comes next. HOTU is about temptation, after all: the lure of power, clarity, drugs, story
  • When George talks about writing, when it’s going well, especially, I think he hits the exact point you’re alluding to.
  • Here’s George in a Guardian Interview from 2018:
    • “On the other hand, once I really get rolling, I get into the world. The rest of the world vanishes, and I don’t care what I’m having for dinner, what movies are on, what my email says or who’s mad at me this week because The Winds of Winter isn’t out – all that is gone and I’m just living in the world I’m writing about. But it’s sometimes hard to get to that almost trance state.”
  • That imagery of George hitting a trance-like state should remind us of this chapter of Dany’s entry into the HoTU.
  • When George and Dany enter into the muse, into the daemon of inspiration, into the world of the undying, the rest of the world vanishes.
• Vision #1: The rape of Westeros
  • What Dany sees when she succumbs to temptation is a provocation aimed at the audience, refracted through the dictates of her character arc
  • She looks through an open door (a cleansed eye, a portal to truth) and sees a naked woman being assaulted by four dwarves
  • I held off on discussing Pyat Pree’s description of HOTU last week so we could talk about it here, where it really becomes relevant:
    • “Other doors may open to you. Within, you will see many things that disturb you. Visions of loveliness and visions of horror, wonders and terrors. Sights and sounds of days gone by and days to come and days that never were.”
  • Remember, nothing in Qarth is as it appears. So are these actually rooms at all? They depict events that vary tremendously in terms of scope. Dany’s room in the house with the red door is of a different size than the Frey feasting hall or the throne room. How does this physically work?
  • What seems more likely to me is that these are projected tableaux, fantasies that function as deceptive mirrors just like the rest of Qarth
  • The House of the Undying is fantasy made flesh; these “rooms” are 3-D artworks designed to give the illusion of space, depth, reality
  • The essential falseness of art does not alter its ability to reveal truth, because as you said RE The Things They Carried last week, art reveals a side to truth that the bare facts cannot, and must use artifice to do so
  • Dany is tempted by the image; she feels controlled by it. She has to look. What does it mean to feel like you have to look? What does it mean to bear witness? Is it a passive act, or one charged with moral meaning?
  • Generally, I think movies and plays are better at asking these questions, because they are visual arts with performers made for mass audiences
  • I think about how watching Hamlet live becomes a profoundly unsettling experience during the play within the play, as you watch some actors play actors and other actors play audience members like you, and the act of engaging with and recognizing oneself with art is explicitly addressed
  • I think about how cinema as an artform sprang like Athena outta Zeus’ forehead from the Lumiere brothers’ train terrifying the audience
  • ASOIAF may be unadaptable in George’s eyes, but there’s no denying how consistently and enthusiastically he draws from the visual arts
  • HOTU in particular is unabashedly a series of movie trailers and montages, with George’s “edits” increasingly imitating cinema
  • The maturation of each artform in turn is tied to its ability to recognize itself in the mirror and address that primal power over its audience
  • The novel works differently, coming from the fantasies of a (generally) single mind. It’s not as visceral; it lacks performers and physical space
  • Books don’t ape reality like theater and cinema do, so in order to address issues of spectacle, voyeurism, and responsibility at the heart of the audience experience, books have to get really self-conscious about it, as with Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s a night a traveler
  • This book openly addresses the reader from the very start in the second person as “you,” describing the process of choosing the book, buying it, getting through your day before you sit down to read it, etc
  • As the novel continues, it fragments into various short stories, each of which is supposedly the novel proper. But things keep happening to “you” and interrupting the story. The binding is wrong; it’s a different book entirely; “you” suddenly get caught up in a legal scandal
  • This isn’t just a snarky game with the reader (although it is that). It’s a way of addressing the borders always crossed between art and audience
  • Calvino argues that old novels are the only way to access the continuity of time, after The Past (in which time stopped) and The Future (in which time exploded). The form of his book is in the latter era looking back
  • He pulls tricks like describing a train station and then saying the smoke is obscuring the next paragraph--not dissimilar to George’s inkstains!
  • As he goes along, Calvino calls attention to how he has chosen not to describe certain details about his settings and characters, knowing that the reader will fill in the gaps based on what we are given:
    • Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it—a trap.
  • Calvino describes the process of reading as being perched in between obliviousness and awareness, because pure obliviousness prevents one from finding lasting pleasure in the book, but becoming too aware of the machinations at play will ruin the pleasurable reading experience
  • As such, observing art is both a passive and active experience. You take in another world as someone who is not present in it, but that world would not have meaning (nor even exist) without someone to observe it
  • Dany-as-audience-member allows George to argue that the act of looking (and hence reading) carries with it sacred significance, moral weight
  • To transcend humanity, cleansing the doors of perception, is to enter into a world of manipulated images, fantasies; this is also the reading experience
  • So how do we engage with this manipulated image? Pyat said Dany’s visions would combine loveliness and horror, wonder and terror. As such, we see beauty defiled and under assault, opposites juxtaposed and united
  • He also said these visions would be unstuck in time: they would speak to the past, the future, the present, or days that might never come at all. Melisandre says much the same about visions in the flame
  • So magic isn’t pure bunk, but nor is it unclouded vision. It’s both, one and then the other, complicating the ability of both character and reader to interpret what they see in a linear spacetime cause-and-effect sort of way
  • On one hand, the meaning of this vision is quite clear. The woman represents Westeros; the dwarves raping her are the kings at war
  • That’s clear from their number (four) and the constant presence of rape in ASOIAF as a signifier of irresponsible authority using terror as a weapon
  • An interesting chronological note here is that since there are “four” kings, we can deduce that Dany enters the House of the Undying after Renly Baratheon very mysteriously who-did-it passed away quite peacefully.
  • This is important, because for so much of the timeline of A Song of Ice and Fire, Dany’s story exists practically out of time to the rest of the story.
  • However, to add some ambiguity here: in AFFC, Archmaester Benedict argues in a very academic way that they shouldn’t be calling it the “War of the Five Kings” since Renly died before Balon Greyjoy crowned himself.
  • So, perhaps this chapter occurs before Balon crowned himself, but I think given the context of the four kings committing violence on Westeros, this would happen after Balon was crowned since Renly’s army hadn’t done any overt violence yet while the Greyjoy invasion was predictably violent and horrible. But the Greyjoys were not alone in their use of sickening violence and rape.
  • The Mountain’s men in the Riverlands, Theon’s reavers in the North--even the smallfolk use rape as a weapon when striking back. Jusk ask Lollys
  • This is what it’s all about, this vision conveys to us. This is what they’re really doing over in Westeros. All the kings with their factions and intrigues and elaborate justifications--they are rapists on a continental scale
  • It’s a staggeringly bleak image, cathartic in how it strips away so much to get at a core concept denied by so many, a completed puzzle composed of pieces from each limited POV. A coherent conception of war, one that irons out individual nuance to give us (as you say) the 10,000 foot view
  • As I said, it’s provocative, like a political cartoon or even a work of propaganda: angrying up the blood by comparing disputed territory to a ravished woman, playing on sexual jealousy as much as ideology
  • Or perhaps sexual and political needs have more in common then we’d like to think? Stannis and Joffrey are both working out sexual frustrations in their own different ways. So, too, is Tyrion, the book’s protagonist
  • Yet this vision is not an objective constant. It is a reflective image that takes its true meaning from its audience, in this case Dany
  • Dany herself is a beautiful woman who has suffered sexual assault, and will continue to suffer the threat of it throughout her story
  • Part of the whole idea of the sacral medieval monarch is that at some level, they are the land and the land is them. If Westeros is a woman under assault from its current rulers, then so too is Westeros’ queen
  • In other words, Dany is less likely to see the woman as someone helpless she must protect and more likely to see the woman as a mirror of herself
  • Those usurpers are attacking me, and (as she will say in ADWD), they are all one and the same. Equally guilty, equally deserving of punishment
  • She doesn’t literally step into the room, into the story, but she projects into it as the reader does, resolving archetype and metaphor in her own image. This is my story. That is me. The war is a problem only I can solve
  • Is that why she is seeing this image as she does? Does HOTU just happen to contain a propagandistic distillation of the war going on halfway around the world, of interest to no one in Qarth besides Dany herself?
  • Does this image exist in a pure inviolate form, or is it being shaped by the perspective viewing it? Such are the elemental questions of art, reflections of the mysteries of the human mind. Does the author create the text, or audience? Or both? Where is the border? It’s invisible, perhaps illusory
  • Godlike vision is linked to illusions and projections. Dany does access truth, but someone may be controlling it, shaping the narrative around her. And even if she is shaping it, that reveals her more than empowers her
  • This is the dilemma of seeking truth. What Dany sees here is true in the sense that it is a philosophical perspective on real events, but the self-conscious and reflective aspects of it complicate that truth
  • I think you nailed how George does this vision, questioning whether the visions are true or are true to Daenerys.
  • But Dany is inspired by this vision, and it shapes her worldview going forward — albeit subconsciously.
  • For instance, Dany will never again think about or mention this scene in the books again. 
  • (She will reflect on other visions in other spots though.)
  • But this filters into her subconscious, shaping her ideology and outlook on the world.
  • As you were pointing out, Dany continues to think about her father’s enemies as “usurper’s dogs” as late as A Dance with Dragons.
  • And then in her final ADWD chapter, Dany finds herself alone in the Dothraki Sea.
  • It’s my belief that in writing ADWD, Daenerys X (best chapter in all of ASOIAF), GRRM was specifically inspired by events from the HoTU.
  • Dany is alone in the world, encountering ghostly visions brought on by taking a possibly mind-altering substance. (See the parallels?)
  • And in re-reading these passages, I remembered one scene that is criminally under-analyzed by the fandom:
    • The next morning she woke stiff and sore and aching, with ants crawling on her arms and legs and face. When she realized what they were, she kicked aside the stalks of dry brown grass that had served as her bed and blanket and struggled to her feet. She had bites all over her, little red bumps, itchy and inflamed. Where did all the ants come from? Dany brushed them from her arms and legs and belly. She ran a hand across her stubbly scalp where her hair had burned away, and felt more ants on her head, and one crawling down the back of her neck. She knocked them off and crushed them under her bare feet. There were so many …
  • I can’t re-read this scene without seeing the woman from the House of the Undying with the four dwarves or the Red Wedding.
  • In the HoTU, Westeros and Dany are the woman as you pointed out so well, and the woman is defenseless against the violence done to her.
  • However, in the case of Dany with the ants, she is no longer helpless.
  • She has agency, and her enemies have become ants to swat away.
  • On one hand, it’s good that Dany grows in her agency and is able to fight back.
  • On the other, though (there’s always a “on the other” with Dany), the ants are nuisances and irritants, and she kills them all.
  • Making the metaphor and given the context of the end of ADWD, with Dany as a dragon rider, and her embrace of fire and blood, this reads as a disquieting note.
• Vision #2: The Red Wedding
  • The second vision acts in a contrapuntal fashion to the first, a sharp dialectical relationship that throws everything into question
  • It is again an image of violence, acts of chaos and cruelty that seem to demand some form of redress, whether political or divine in origin
  • As the Red Keep is soaked in the blood of those who built it, HOTU is ironically built on death, the mortality its denizens struggle to transcend
  • And just as the shade of the evening trees outside parallel the weirwoods, the cave of the Children beyond the Wall works on the same grisly logic:
    • "Bones," said Bran. "It's bones." The floor of the passage was littered with the bones of birds and beasts. But there were other bones as well, big ones that must have come from giants and small ones that could have been from children. On either side of them, in niches carved from the stone, skulls looked down on them. Bran saw a bear skull and a wolf skull, half a dozen human skulls and near as many giants. All the rest were small, queerly formed. Children of the forest. The roots had grown in and around and through them, every one. A few had ravens perched atop them, watching them pass with bright black eyes.
  • These are the keystone images of world-shattering violence that dominate George’s mind, infesting the rest of the story not only in terms of plot but also in terms of theme and mood. Here is what my story is about
  • If the first image zoomed out to show us the present in the most broad possible terms, the second image zooms in to the near-future fallout
  • Here is the end result of that squabbling over spoils, the rape of Westeros by the remaining kings. Psychedelic drugs often make one feel like one understands everything, connections between all events large and small
  • This vision is of the Red Wedding, of course. That’s obvious to the rereader: the slaughter at dinner, the iron crown, the wolf head
  • We have entered the thorny gauntlet of Red Wedding foreshadowing, one of the most impressive narrative gambits George pulls off in ASOIAF
  • The single most iconic sequence in the series is so iconic, so memorably dreadful, such an inversion of the state of nature, that it beats down the walls of spacetime itself, sending signals back into the past. It’s a gravity well of pure evil next to which all else is judged, haunting the whole story
  • To return to a point from last week, we can see that George had very clear ideas about the Red Wedding while writing ACOK.
  • Other future events - even ones like mhysa from ASOS - are less firm, more ambiguous.
  • But here, we have the imagery that George will use, the setting and dead king: Robb.
  • Even as the thread of Dany’s perspective on Westeros at war remains consistent, the emotional tenor has flipped from the previous image
  • The first image told us that the kings are the problem. They are rapists attacking Westeros, despoiling and defiling the land to sate their desires
  • But those other monarchs aren’t just going to stand down when Dany shows up, she will have to take Westeros with fire and blood
  • This is what that looks like, and it’s a horrorshow. Dany didn’t commit the Red Wedding, of course, but we’re seeing the death of a king, the death of one of her enemies, the son of one of the “Usurper’s dogs” she loathes
  • This is what it would take to make her dream come true. Her own projected fantasy tableau requires this one; her dream is also a nightmare, the marriage of heaven and hell defining the labyrinth of the human heart
  • Neither one of these images is a lie. Even as they stand in opposition, they achieve coherence together: truth as a mosaic of competing truths
  • The kings are tearing Westeros apart, and yet when one of them is killed and can no longer do that, it is framed as a devastating tragedy
  • We saw this specifically with Renly Baratheon where George takes nothing away from the visceral horror and a sorcerous shadow sword going through his throat.
  • Balon Greyjoy “falling” from his rope bridge, AKA getting thrown from it by a Faceless Man also reads horribly.
  • Hell, even Joffrey Baratheon’s death was so agonizingly awful, that it made us pity the boy for once.
  • Obviously, we’ll talk more about Young Grift next week, but one of the lies that Daenerys has to slay is the mummer’s dragon which means that Aegon is going to die.
  • The death of a fifteen or eighteen year old boy via likely dragonfire is going to be as horrible if not worse than what we saw with Quentyn.
  • In the wake of Season 8, some hackles were raised by the implication that by fighting powerful villains in the first place, Dany was inevitably destined to go down a path that led to the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians
  • I understand this lens, but I think this chapter demonstrates that the primary implications of Daenerys’ story are for the artistic presentation of violence, not so much how we are meant to deal with IRL violence
  • It is not that Dany’s understanding of power and violence is totally off-base. Again, that first image is true, and it bolsters her campaign
  • Rather, what Dany has failed to fully understand is perspective. From her perspective, the Usurper’s dogs are all equally traitors, as was MMD
  • From MMD’s perspective, Dany is a hypocritical war criminal to whom she could not possibly owe loyalty. From Catelyn’s perspective, our POV on Robb, his death is the end of the world, not the removal of a traitorous piece from the game of thrones (one who was wreaking havoc anyway!)
  • That question of perspective in a political sense is linked by this chapter to perspective in a narrative sense: the POV of a character, or a reader
  • The author plays with perspective and information, controlling what we see through the doors of our perception, fantasies masquerading as reality
  • The Red Wedding will mean different things to different readers as it means different things to different characters. This is not to wash away the horror experienced by the victims, but to say that there is no singular truth
  • In the maze of HOTU, the maze of a book, the maze of our own mind, we will pursue Truth and Beauty forever, because they are mirages and the maze is a circle. Nothing waits at the center but a mirror and then mortality
  • The only escape from the wheel of time other than the grave is, well, fantasy: the projected image of art, faith, and individual empathy
  • Since we are trapped inside our perspectives, condemned to see our cages but never escape them, the best we can do is combine them
  • That’s the act of empathy inherent to art: my aim is to make you see. The first two images we see in HOTU, the story made structure, contradict one another, but when fused by the artist’s perspective, they become true
  • The lingering mystery from this image is why the wolf’s eyes follow Dany with mute appeal. Is she somehow meant to “resolve” this situation too?
  • How could she? No theory I know of puts Dany up against the Freys! Rather, I think this moment speaks to the overall patterns at work
  • These cycles of power, blood, and revenge play themselves out, perspectives clashing with one another. For a moment, they line up
  • For a moment, these POVs on opposite sides literally see eye to eye. It’s a recognition of mutual fate: we are both doomed, the dragon and the wolf
  • If the first image seemed to speak to Dany’s situation, the second one seems to reach out for her. The third vision will literally do so
  • It’s all part of George’s exploration of the blurring borders between fantasy and reality, author and text, audience and character. These spirits pass like ships in the night, united only in the author’s POV and ours. The empathy was gained only in death and then it fades, and Dany moves on
  • Dany believes that usurpers like the Starks and Baratheons and Lannisters stole her father’s and her rightful throne.
  • And she works so hard to learn how to rule, school of hard knocks style.
  • Come Winds and Dream, the truly galling thing for Daenerys will be how Westeros will likely reject her and see her as her father’s daughter, a mad queen, a monster.
  • I sincerely don’t believe that Dany will be any of those things in any objective sense, but you understand why she might be perceived as such by the people of Westeros.
  • But when there’s dragons dancing above them, with death brought forward by the fire and blood all around them, it will look like the Red Wedding times a million.
  • As I recently discovered in my research travels to write a new Winds resource post, GRRM told artist Michael Klarfeld (what’s up, brother!?) after looking at his excellent map of Westeros that “Soon, there will be fires everywhere.”
• Vision #3: The house with the red door
  • The third vision breaks from the first two completely, speaking to Dany personally and using imagery in a considerably different fashion
  • The first vision didn’t take place anywhere in particular--it presented an image of the war from a distance, on an abstract projected plane
  • The second vision takes place at the Twins, but neither Dany nor the first time reader knows that, and there are no geographic signifiers
  • The third vision explicitly takes place in a setting familiar to both Dany and the reader: the house with the red door and lemon tree in Braavos
  • I say “takes place,” but again, I don’t think these are physical spaces so much as VR environments. That’s emphasized by how Dany’s position in the room is unclear. She’s not looking through the room’s doorway, because Willem Darry presumably uses the doorway to enter the room. She’s looking through the fourth wall. This is a diorama, a movie set
  • She’s hovering above it all, like a reader, like Bran from within the heart tree; his last chapter in ADWD parallels this chapter in many ways
  • And George has used the movie effect before as we saw in AGOT, Eddard X.
  • There, Ned Stark had a powerfully emotive memory of the Tower of Joy, his memories and conversations with Aerys’ surviving white cloaks with A storm of rose petals blowing across a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death while Lyanna screamed “Eddard!”
  • If you’ll recall from that episode, we talked about what George said about Ned’s dream:
    • I might mention, though, that Ned's account, which you refer to, was in the context of a dream... and a fever dream at that. Our dreams are not always literal.
  • Looking back on it now, I think your idea of Daenerys as camera for a movie scene works beautifully with how George did the Tower of Joy dream sequence for Ned.
  • Here, at the HoTU, the colors are vibrant, the memories nostalgic, but as you were saying: was this truly home? Or this smoke and mirrors to tempt Dany to stay here at the HoTU?
  • Yet there is an intimacy and wistfulness to this image that wasn’t there for the others, because Dany knows this place, loves it, and wants it back
  • It’s an avatar of innocence. Carved animal faces instead of the fearsome animal banners of war; these are Catelyn’s happy gods of her childhood
  • This is the only place Dany ever felt at home. This is the place that made her feel happy, secure, whole. This is what she wants Westeros to be:
    • ...it was not the plains Dany saw then. It was King's Landing and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conqueror had built. It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind's eye they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window. In her mind's eye, all the doors were red.
  • The way Dany’s story ended in the show cast a certain pall over her motivations; we gotta remember that her #1 goal is always finding a home
  • What makes that sympathetic impulse tragic is how it gets refracted through power, perspective, and prophecy. Rather than rebuilding the City of Bones, Dany drives ever onward and winds up making a new one
  • Remember the first line of the story:
    • “We should start back.”
  • And remember how Asha describes Stannis, who is the herald for Dany:
    • ...a man who would never, ever turn back from his course.
  • Dany says that if she looks back, she is lost. HOTU forces her to look back and get lost. These are the movements of her story. She’s always pulling back even as she pushes forward, a dance with dragons
  • Indeed, her story in ADWD is all about this give-and-take process and how it rubs her raw from the inside out. It’s not that she always had evil waiting inside, so much as the failure of good leaves her alienated and desperate
  • The crown is a way for her to get home, not the other way around. She wants the Iron Throne so she can never be thrown out of her home again
  • But Westeros is not the house with the red door. The house with the red door is gone. Dany has lost it forever. The intoxication of visions, fantasy and faith, will not materially turn back time nor restore our dead to us
  • Dany is being tempted not only by her childhood home, but by the only worthy parental figure she’s ever known: Ser Willem Darry
  • He walks into the room, and our emotions are thrown into beautiful confusion. Willem Darry is always a figure of comfort for Dany…
  • ...but we know that’s not really him. It can’t be. So this is uncanny, skin-crawling, like one of the Faceless Men imitating your loved ones
  • It’s particularly creepy because he appears as soon as she realizes what room she’s looking at, as if he’s part of the environment, completing her thoughts. It’s Proustian recall filtered through fantasy and horror
  • As I said last week, when we walk the labyrinth of HOTU, we must keep in mind David Lynch’s question from Twin Peaks: “who is the dreamer?”
    • “Dwellers and servitors may speak to you as you go. Answer or ignore them as you choose, but enter no room until you reach the audience chamber."
  • Pyat mentions “dwellers or servitors” as if there’s no particular distinction. The servitors might be warlocks like him. Are there dwellers beyond the Undying themselves? If so, that recasts what HOTU actually is
  • It’s not just an opium den for this one cabal of sorcerers, but a sort of hub and meeting place for seekers of transcendent knowledge from all over
  • It might even be a Thin Place, a crossover point between the material world and the astral plane. I talked about Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg last week; he believed reality was divided into the physical and spiritual worlds. But Blake and Huxley countered that they are one
  • Countless traditions speak of these convergence points: caves and shrines, social clubs for spirits. They appear constantly in the pop cultural world that produced ASOIAF: the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks where spirits dwell at right angles to mankind, or the bathhouse in Spirited Away
  • The first two images might have been just that: images, as Pyat describes them. But is this one of the “dwellers and servitors” disguised as Willem?
  • If so, it is weaponizing nostalgia, turning Dany’s love against her by stealing the sweetest parts of her heart and deploying them as a lure
  • This is a cynical view of art, like the fiery ladder in Dany’s previous chapter. That which makes your heart burst with longing, fantasies that capture emotional truth--they are lying to you. They are traps
  • HOTU is a dazzling hall of mirrors offering insight but no satisfaction, the infinite power of images rooting you in place as you slowly decay
  • Dany almost gives in and walks through the door. She had no temptation to enter the previous two rooms. Why would she? They were horrifying!
  • But this is true temptation of the type undergone by shamanic and messianic characters. Negate your Hero’s Journey, return to the womb
  • This is life and love, not death and hate. This is what she wants, a hand reaching out. She edges forward...and then pulls back, and runs
  • Dany knows that Willem Darry is dead, the sweet old bear. He died long ago, or she wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t have gone through any of it
  • Per Pale Fire: 
    • For as we know from dreams it is so hard 

To speak to our dear dead! They disregard
Our apprehension, queaziness and shame -
The awful sense that they're not quite the same.

And our school chum killed in a distant war
Is not surprised to see us at his door.
And in a blend of jauntiness and gloom
Points at the puddles in his basement room

• That heartwarming image of home and family is, beneath the surface, an image of loss and pain like the previous two, the third painting in a triptych
• The first two showed her the triumph of death. This one shows her paradise lost. This world is forsaken; you are left with rape and murder
• This is the marriage of heaven and hell, the collision of the angel and the devil within the human soul, captured in art. These two halves do not even have the decency to stay distinct. They are forever intertwining within us
• A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. They make each other possible. The love in Dany’s heart, her need to secure that love and have it returned, is what drives her on to her destiny of fire and blood
• George is showing us the keystone image of Dany’s arc. If HOTU is his creative process, he is demonstrating how this image haunts his mind as it haunts hers, and now ours: art as a mutual torment of voyeurism
• The past is dead. Dany knows it. But her vision of her future is haunted by that past and its unknowability, as she chases it round the wheel of time
• She doesn’t know Westeros nor its people, so her understanding of it is clouded by her perception, her own fears and desires. In her mind’s eye, it becomes the house with the red door. It becomes that lemon tree, those carved animal faces, Willem Darry’s wrinkled hand. It’s all she ever had
• She runs away from it now, but HOTU moves in a circle, as does the story shape it stands in for. She will be brought back here, again and again
• You talked so beautifully about how the House with the Red Door intermixes with Dany’s future, I would be remiss not to mention how this chapter provides glimpses of Dany’s backstory and the House with the Red Door continuing to be in Braavos.
• You can go all the way back to our fourth episode of the podcast titled “The House with the Red Door is in Braavos” (Who named that episode that lol. It was me) to hear us talking about this topic in our depth section.
• Here, I want to point out a couple of aspects that point to the House with the Red Door being in Braavos that come up in this chapter and how some later revelations.
• First, there’s the infamous lemon tree. Dany sees that here in this chapter. But in Arya’s first AFFC chapter, Arya states that there were no trees in the city as it was “made of stone.”
• Meanwhile, one of Harys Swyft’s guards in the Mercy TWOW chapter states that there were no orange trees in Braavos as the climate was too cold.
• Finally, in 2015, GRRM answered a fan questioning how lemon trees shouldn’t really be able to grow in Braavos by saying “Very perceptive of you. Yes. It does point to … well, that would be telling.”
• This, of course, has led to many people thinking that the House with the Red Door couldn’t be in Braavos and is instead in Dorne - a land known for overripe blood red oranges.
• However, Samwell Tarly notes in AFFC, Samwell III that trees did not grow in Braavos, “save in the courts and gardens of the mighty.”
• Meanwhile, the Sealord of Braavos was signatory to the pact between Oberyn Martell and Willem Darry that sealed the original Arianne-Viserys marriage alliance.
• And then when The Lands of Ice and Fire: GRRM’s atlas of ASOIAF was published in 2012, one of the maps featured an extensive look at Braavos, and fans found something interesting.

• On an island in the middle of the harbor was a large palace with a thicket of trees on the north side of the palace.
• This palace with trees was none other than the Sealord of Braavos’ Palace.
• And here’s where it gets even more interesting. This chapter has Daenerys seeing animal carvings on the beams as you were pointing out earlier.
• In A Game of Thrones, Syrio Forel tells Arya Stark about the Sealord’s palace, stating that the sealord kept a menagerie at the palace with wondrous animals in it.
• Getting back to The Lands of Ice and Fire, originally, the wooded isle and the menagerie were not featured in an early draft of the Sealord’s palace.
• But GRRM pointed this out to the artist (Jonathan Roberts) and stated that he wanted that wooded isle and the menagerie drawn into the map.
• These were important details for GRRM, and coming onto this scene from the House with the Red Door, we perhaps can see why.
• To me, this reads as evidence that Dany and Viserys were housed at the Sealord’s Palace while in Braavos.
• But then that brings up the question of the significance of this revelation, and here I’ll turn it over to our friend Curtsy While You Tweet who wrote a fantastic theory about the significance in 2018:
  • One thing I thought of immediately is what if the Last Targaryens were part of the menagerie? Seems a bit bizarre (and probably way off the mark) but for some reason as I read through those quotes I was reminded of the Twilight Zone episode where humans are trapped in a zoo on a foreign planet.
• That would be devastating for Daenerys to find out that the House with the Red Door wasn’t home at all. 
• Instead, it was a cage for her and her brother: the last of the exotic Targaryens, and that revelation may very well turn Dany away from her nostalgia for the House with the Red Door and towards making all doors red.
• Vision #4: Father’s ripe fruits
  • Dany runs past countless doors, narrative paths forking off into infinity, choices not taken, futures unmade...and then a pair of doors swing open
  • They are bronze, grander than the rest. More important, more significant, more on George’s mind. As he writes it, Dany feels compelled to look
  • The first two visions spoke to larger political conflicts; the third vision spoke to her internal personal struggles. This one fuses both
  • It is an image of apocalypse, the unfettered ego embracing the worst of both political and magical power, the double helix structure of ACOK
  • But it is also a glimpse of her father and the fate of her family. It is the keystone image of House Targaryen: they climbed, reached, and fell
  • And this is where I have to bring up the most obvious reference point for this chapter, just as Lovecraft was for “The Forsaken.” It’s Shining time
  • Stephen King’s The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining are very different, but both borrow the form of the labyrinth from the Greeks and Borges and apply it to the modern horror tropes of the haunted house and the domestic abuser. It’s a vision quest rooted in patriarchal control
  • The book establishes how the Overlook Hotel functions as a repository of bloody histories, evil sinking in deep and leaving its mark until it forms a kind of consciousness, one that seeks out the young psychic Danny
  • Personal demons like alcoholism and child abuse are metaphorical ghosts, the ones that haunt us without any spiritual intervention
  • You can see the connection to HOTU--the psychic Danny becomes the tripping Dany, she is plagued by both sorcery and her own memories. The sins of the father recur for both Danny Torrance and Daenerys Targaryen
  • Those concepts remain in the movie, but Kubrick changed the focus and meaning of the antagonist, and so the human characters change as well
  • In the movie, the hotel doesn’t want Danny. It wants his father Jack, the alcoholic child abuser in question. It feeds not on Danny’s power, but on Jack’s bloodlust. The temptation of Jack is a means to an end in the book, a way for the hotel to get to Danny; it’s the whole point in the movie
  • King complained that Kubrick had stripped Jack of his nuance, his struggle, as he tries to resist being his worst possible self
  • A fair critique! But Kubrick was aiming for another insight entirely: that there is no real inner struggle, only the animal id waiting to be unleashed
  • Jack is a wannabe author; he takes the painfully isolated position of winter caretaker at the Overlook because it’ll give him time to finish his book
  • Yet for days on end, he comes up with nothing. It is his awareness of his own creative deficiencies that breaks him, not the hotel itself
  • The most revealing change in adaptation was Kubrick replacing the topiary animals that come to life in the books with a sinister hedge maze
  • As Jack snaps, his wife and son are outside running through the maze. Jack looks down on a model of the maze and sees them. It’s as if they’re running around his own mind, a maze like the hotel...and there’s nothing in the middle of the maze. It’s empty because there’s nothing inside Jack. He looked for creative inspiration inside himself and come up empty
  • When his wife Wendy finds what he’s been working on, it’s just All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy over and over and over again
  • That profound emptiness at the heart of all those twists and turns is what Kubrick unearthed in The Shining, and he had to kill King’s story to do it
  • Again, the connection to HOTU is clear. It’s a maze that only half-exists in the real world; the true labyrinth is an inner one, your mind made flesh
  • You see images of wonder and terror as you rush around the maze. In an infamous moment in the movie of The Shining, Wendy sees a man in a bizarre furry costume giving a blowjob to a well-dressed businessman
  • You can interpret this image as many have, but what it really signifies is inexplicability, the human mind running up against the limits of perception
  • They stare back at her impassively, menacingly; they are staring right into the camera, as if we are the observers, caught looking, caught reading
  • Danny’s wild trippy visions, just like Dany’s, ultimately point at the mundane realities of death. Nothing waits in the maze but mortality. Underneath HOTU is the City of Bones; underneath the Overlook is a Native American burial site, and so many covered-up crimes like Jack’s
  • And in this vision, we see the great covered-up crime of ASOIAF: when the last dragon king fell from the tower, he was prepared to take everyone with him. The first thing Dany sees through the doors are skulls
  • They are the skulls of dragons, looking down from the walls like her, like the faces in the weirwoods. Seeing, watching, and doing nothing
  • The Kingsguard observing Aerys’ atrocities and letting them happen is something George returns to over and over again: looking as a moral act
  • They watched as Aerys descended into his dragon dreams, trying to bring back the skulls on the walls so they could do more than watch
  • And if Aerys failed, as he probably would have? Well, then let Robert be king of charred bones and cooked meat. Let him rule a city of bones
  • If I can’t have Westeros, nobody can. The traitors want my city, but I’ll give them naught but ashes. My world will end with a bang, not a whimper
  • Obviously, we’ll have more to say come ASOS Jaime V, when what we see here is explicated in full. The first time reader might be able to realize that this is Aerys--it’s obviously the Iron Throne, he has Targaryen hair--and we know about the wildfire, but it’s too scattered to put together
  • But even outside of that context, wrung free of the pattern like the rest of these images, it carries a foreboding weight in its presentation
  • These visions of death sink deep into the story’s infrastructure. They are the pillars on which the rest of it sits, disguised but ever lurking. They snake their way into your subconscious and then lie there in wait
  • George unearths these primal moments, these defining images. He has shown us the war, the major plot structure of the books. He’s shown us the Red Wedding, the most distinctive and devastating scene. He’s shown us the keystone image for the character arc of our POV Daenerys
  • Now he shows us the abyss of power, the worst use to which it can possibly be put: resentment and paranoia fueling a fire to claim thousands
  • Yet because it’s only a vision, a passing image out of context, there’s no way for Dany to appreciate the moral significance of her observation. She cannot internalize and learn from it, so she’s doomed to repeat it
  • It’s the same logic of The Shining: what Dany’s third eye shows her is actually something very intimate, paranoia and death within her family, yet these images are inherently incomplete and so cannot help her
  • It’s another mirror, the past passing through the present on its way to claim the future, and even cleansed perception can’t alter her doom
  • Dany has accessed prophetic truth as we have been shown the backstory, but in both cases, it’s not enough to truly help us achieve clarity
  • This vision keeps snaking its way to the surface of ASOIAF, a nightmare always on the verge of tipping back into reality: power as mass sacrifice
  • You’re absolutely right that Daenerys doesn’t recognize her father there, and why would she? She never met him as she was born on Dragonstone when her father died.
  • So, is this one of those scenes which only has resonance to the reader alone? Is it a wink from George to the reader, a revelation that people who have read ASOS, Jaime V will recognize and be blown away by?
  • I don’t think so! At least not entirely!
  • Without the crucial context of knowing who Aerys II Targaryen, this scene has always read like a warning to Daenerys Targaryen about her future and the embrace of fire and blood. 
  • It’s almost as if George was reaching across page, time and wonder to warn Dany not to do the thing that he knows she will do down the road.
  • But it’s like George has talked about in 2014, he can’t turn away from his course now:
    • “I’ve been planting all these clues that the butler did it, then you’re halfway through a series and suddenly thousands of people have figured out that the butler did it, and then you say the chambermaid did it? No, you can’t do that.” 
  • GRRM has been seeding the clues for Daenerys to fulfill what her father Aerys attempted at the end of Robert’s Rebellion since A Game of Thrones, and it’s been an old theory that Dany will burn King’s Landing.
  • But I kinda think he knows that’s what he has to do, but it’ll be emotionally painful for George.
  • GRRM has stated many times that he loves “all of his children, especially his POV characters”, but he seems to have an especially soft spot for Daenerys.
  • George also had a soft spot for Robb and Catelyn, but as he said in 2013, he knew where their story was leading:
    • "I knew it was coming but it was very hard to write and was the hardest thing I've ever wrote. I went back and made myself write that scene because it was painful to kill these characters I'd created and lived with for so long. "
  • So, George will still write Dany burning King’s Landing, even as he tries to warn her across space, time and wonder not to follow the example of her dad.
  • Again, this is quite a meta chapter!
• Vision #5: The song of ice and fire
  • We meet at last the character hidden from us behind a veil of memory and tragedy, the closest ASOIAF has to a prime mover: Rhaegar Targaryen
  • It’s basically impossible to overstate Rhaegar’s importance to the plot, themes, and major character arcs of ASOIAF, yet he’s gone before it starts
  • His actions dominate the backstory; his ghost haunts so many characters large and small; he embodies the bruised romanticism at the heart of it all
  • Rhaegar seems to stand in for everything George finds compelling in fantasy, as well as mythology and storytelling in general
  • The melancholy Byronic prince, born in grief and dying in battle with love on his lips, forever singing bittersweetly of his own prophesied doom
  • Rhaegar is kept at a distance, seen always through the rose- or blood-colored glasses of others. He is a projection like the rest of these images in HOTU. The man is lost inside the myth, a creature of song
  • What makes him work emotionally is that he seems to have realized that. As Jojen knows the manner of his own death, Rhaegar seems to have perceived the story shape around him, seen through it as Dany does now
  • Judging from how Aemon and Barristan talk about him, Rhaegar’s life was forever changed by his belief that prophecy had ensnared his family whole
  • One of George’s best touches with prophecy is that knowing or suspecting the future doesn’t lead characters in the story to happiness.
  • It instead imbues them with a sense of melancholy, foreboding about things to come, and this is the key to Rhaegar.
  • Again, this isn’t simply George winking at the audience and providing information that only impacts readers.
  • The vision of Rhaegar and the interaction Dany bears witness to is a warning to the future dragon queen about knowing the future.
  • I’m reminded of Quaithe’s warning to Daenerys to beware of all - after, of course, she gives Dany an ambiguous prophecy about where she needs to go, and what she’ll see.
  • Daenerys should beware of the example of Rhaegar before her, and the doom that came from his belief in prophecy.
  • We will talk more about what Rhaegar thought was going to happen and what he was trying to do about it toward the end of the episode
  • He may have come to the conclusion that the petty wars of men do not matter when set next to the end of the world. He’s not wrong about that!
  • But simply reaching that conclusion is insufficient. It doesn’t resolve political struggles on its own. Rhaegar realized that when it was too late:
    • "When this battle's done I mean to call a council. Changes will be made. I meant to do it long ago, but...well, it does no good to speak of roads not taken. We shall talk when I return."
  • That’s such a haunting line because Rhaegar himself became a road not taken, guaranteeing his own doom even while trying to escape it
  • Whatever he wanted to accomplish was erased, not only by his own downfall but that of his family. Everything stays secret; we can only guess 
  • This vision provides us the clearest look at who Rhaegar Targaryen really was. This is Rhaegar Targaryen as he exists in George’s mind
  • He is introduced naming his son: Aegon, the ultimate Targaryen name, the name that signifies kingship, the wheel of time come round again
  • Elia Martell is there as well, nursing the babe. This is the closest we get to her, an innocent victim of all these machinations when the bottom falls out
  • She asks if Rhaegar will write a song for their son. A fantasy, a diversion, like ASOIAF. But Rhaegar responds that his son already has a song
  • His song is his life. His destiny, the path he has already begun walking without knowing it. We are not separate from story; we are inside story
  • Aegon Targaryen is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire. And with that statement, the fourth wall falls completely
  • Rhaegar knows he’s a character in a story, A Song of Ice and Fire. He has interpreted signs like the reader has, especially in this chapter
  • He has reached his conclusion, incorrect as so many of our conclusions about the story are, locked as we are behind the doors of perception
  • His son will die. His wife and daughter will die. He will die. He lives on only in story. But all men must die; we’re all just stories in the end if we’re lucky
  • This is the only time in the series that the title phrase appears, which lends this moment so much weight. We have accessed pure truth, the wisdom promised us. The heart of story, meaning, identity, myth
  • It’s the still point of the turning world, the moment in which past, present, and future all collapse into the individual perception, the story compressed
  • Rhaegar looks up, and seems to see Dany. His eyes burn through time and space like they burned through story. Divine sight lets us see truth
  • Or does it? There must be one more, Rhaegar says. The dragon has three heads. As rereaders, we know he will come to fixate on fathering that child with Lyanna Stark, completing the song of ice and fire to fulfill prophecy
  • Indeed, this scene is written with such care so as to suggest this could be Rhaegar and Lyanna. The woman isn’t named; the babe is another Aegon
  • We know it’s Elia, of course, because Rhaegar says he needs a third child. But the ambiguity is built in, as with the PTWP prophecy
  • In the very early days of the ASOIAF fandom, fans were able to IM George on AOL (seriously!), and George would respond to people.
  • One of those people was a fan who went by the name “Revanshe” who asked who the couple was in this vision.
  • GRRM responded that this was Rhaegar and Elia, which, duh now, but apparently, back then, there was discussion as to whether it was Rhaegar and Lyanna or someone else.
  • Regardless, the interesting point that was brought up in this chat from 1999 was about the child, and George said that “the child from the scene is dead.”
  • Again, this was very early on in the fandom, and GRRM may have had second thoughts or fake second thoughts about Aegon being dead, but at least in 1999, GRRM stated definitively that Aegon was dead.
  • Dany thinks he sees her, is talking to and about her. Why shouldn’t she? Is she not a head of the dragon, a figure of power and prophecy?
  • Artworks are dreams that beg us to wake up; my favorite books/plays/movies are often those that acknowledge we don’t know how to wake up, and anyway, we don’t want to. We tend to prefer the fantasy
  • Such is the conclusion reached by Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian author who could sustain HOTU-level writing for the length of an entire book
  • I reread his masterpiece Pale Fire in prep for this episode; it ranks with Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow as the greatest novels of the 20th century
  • Nestled within the book is a poem entitled “Pale Fire,” written by a character named John Shade--like shade of the evening, you could say??
  • The poem opens thusly:
    • I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
      By the false azure in the windowpane;
      I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I 

lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. 

• In four lines, Nabokov communicates a coherent perspective on art, nature, death, and the glory and tragedy of man caught between them all
• Art is the windowpane with its false azure. It seems to be a window onto reality, but it’s inaccessible, and if you try to step into it, death stops you
• You are reduced to a shadow, a smudge of ash--and yet, you live, you fly, in the reflection. You sought to master art, but you can only become it
• Nature grounds you in mortality; it is only your reflection that lives on, the image, the memory. The very definition of a bittersweet ending
• Nabokov could’ve been describing the House of the Undying, full of windowpanes with false azure, threatening to reduce Dany to “ashen fluff”
• We all end that way, but Dany will live on in the “reflected sky” that is ASOIAF. As long as there is an observer, an “I,” she will live on
• Yet if we zoom out on the poem “Pale Fire” to the rest of the novel with that same name, we reach the same realization as zooming out on the images of HOTU: we see these images are being manipulated, corrupted
• The rest of the novel Pale Fire is a foreword to the poem and then a lengthy analysis of it (longer than the poem itself). It is purportedly written by a man named Charles Kinbote, who claims to be a colleague of Shade’s honoring his work by publishing it after his untimely demise
• Shade himself has become the shadow of the waxwing slain, living on in the reflected sky, and Kinbote is very much an unreliable narrator
• If you read between the lines, analyzing Kinbote as he analyzes Shade, he starts to sound like a madman, like the POVs of House of Leaves
• He keeps talking about the fictional kingdom of Zembla (like semblance, get it??) and hinting that he is its true ruler in exile. Is it true? Who knows!
• Kinbote claims that the man who killed Shade had come to kill him, but the tone of his writing and the gaps in his story call that into question
• It even remains ambiguous whether Nabokov intends for us to appreciate the central titular poem on its own merits or to consider it mediocre
• The entire book is a distorted mirror, not just the opening lines of the poem that make the manipulation clear to us. We are the waxwings slain, running headlong into the windowpane of art, thinking we can get through
• Rhaegar misinterprets prophecy; Dany misinteprets Rhaegar’s misinterpretation. She thinks he’s Viserys at first, just as she couldn’t recognize their father. We are being shown how the divine image of truth breaks down in the human mind, the observing eye, as we try to read it
• We love story because we are story, but stories don’t die. We do. Rhaegar picks up his harp and plays, as the winds of winter take them all away
• As someone writes in Pale Fire--Shade, Kinbote, Nabokov, someone:
  • And when we lost our child

I knew there would be nothing: no self-styled

Spirit would touch a keyboard of dry wood

To rap out her pet name; no phantom would

Rise gracefully to welcome you and me

In the dark garden, near the shagbark tree. 

"What is that funny creaking - do you hear?"

"It is the shutter on the stairs, my dear."

• Word.

Foreshadowing/Groundwork

No.

Theory/Discussion

What, exactly, was Rhaegar trying to accomplish?

• Dany’s vision in this chapter is the first indication the reader gets that Rhaegar was involved in the magical side of the story. He’s been called “the last dragon,” an impressive figure loathed by Robert RE Lyanna but beloved by many
• After book one sets that foundation, George digs deeper into Rhaegar’s motivations. Barristan describes to Dany how Rhaegar changed his whole life trajectory one day on a whim, based on what he read in some ancient books:
• Barristan also says Rhaegar did not have it in him to be happy. He was deeply depressed, haunted by the grief of his birth at Summerhall...but was that all?
• Was Rhaegar depressed by his prophesied doom? Or was it depression that caused him to take refuge in prophecy? As with the images in HOTU, it’s both, one feeding into the other, changeable as flame, to quote Maester Aemon
• And according to Aemon, Rhaegar drew on prophetic signs similar to the comet we see in this book to reach the conclusion that he was the prince that was promised. As Aemon tells us and as we see in HOTU, Rhaegar later came to believe that his son Aegon VI was the prince that was promised 
• So who’s this prince that was promised, and what did Rhaegar have in mind regarding him? TPTWP next comes up in Melisandre’s monologues about Stannis as a messianic figure, suggesting he’s the same as Azor Ahai
• This connection is bolstered at the Wall, when Melisandre describes the coming battle against darkness and Aemon recalls the ancient prophecy
• So perhaps Rhaegar saw the Others coming and wanted House Targaryen to prepare to defeat them. Fire melts ice. Yet he never mentions them specifically
• The only clue we get in that regard is that Rhaegar thought his prophetic role had something to do with the North: Lyanna Stark and “the song of ice and fire”
• Rhaegar wanted to fuse these elements together to protect Westeros from apocalyptic extremes of either one. Some have suggested he prophetically glimpsed as far ahead as the downfall and doom of his own family; I disagree
• Rhaegar says here that “the dragon has three heads” as if it’s a key plank in his worldview. Given that he named his first two children Rhaenys and Aegon, it seems likely he was looking to recreate the OG Targaryen trio with his kids
• Rhaegar may have had a real, true prophecy with regards to the dragon having three heads.
• The irony is that he thought it was Rhaenys, Aegon and “another”, but the prophecy wasn’t intended for them.
• George likes to tell this apocryphal story from the Wars of the Roses that I’ll quote in full here:
  • There was one Lord who had been prophesied he would die beneath the walls of a certain castle and he was superstitious at that sort of walls, so he never came anyway near that castle. He stayed thousands of leagues away from that particular castle because of the prophecy. However, he was killed in the first battle of St. Paul de Vence and when they found him dead he was outside of an inn whose sign was the picture of that castle! So you know? That’s the way prophecies come true in unexpected ways.
• At the very least, the three heads of the dragon prophecy was never intended for all of his children.
• But it will come true all the same.
• As I quoted above, he also seems to have intended to win the Battle of the Trident, and then call a council to depose his unfit father once and for all
• That doesn’t sound to me like someone who is on board with the fall of House Targaryen. Rhaegar still seems to see his family as a potential vessel for good
• With that in mind, I think the tragic structure might be that Rhaegar didn’t reckon with how his family could tear itself apart from the inside: first with his father’s madness undoing everything for which Rhaegar had hoped, then with Viserys passing on the impossible dream of home to Daenerys, and finally with Rhaegar’s own secret son Jon planting a knife in the heart of Rhaegar’s sister
• Rhaegar is a far nobler sort of Targaryen then his father, no question about it. Westeros might’ve been better off with him as king than with Robert
• But he, too, is a victim of perspective. He saw just enough through his keyhole, his doors of perception, to convince him he knew more than he did, and so he fell victim to that which he couldn’t have seen coming and yet made possible
• Since Season 8, a lot of the conversation around Dany has centered on her following in her father’s footsteps, but Dany is ultimately Rhaegar as much as Aerys, in that her efforts to save the world are inextricable from how she dooms it
• Jorah and Barristan make this point about Daenerys in seeing Rhaegar in her, rather than Aerys.
• They intend this as a compliment to Dany as they view Rhaegar favorably, but these compliments should raise our hackles a bit.
• Rhaegar’s fixation on prophecy, his sense of doom brought about by his desire to bring TPTWP into being that contributed (but didn’t cause) Robert’s Rebellion, that brought about the destruction of most of his family and his aims to forestall the coming doom.
• Another character has been fed prophecy: by dragon dreams, by Mirri Maz Duur, by Quaithe, by the HoTU and probably someday down the road by Moqorro and Marwyn the Mage.
• So, I full-heartedly agree with you that Daenerys is following in Aerys’ footsteps as much as following in Rhaegar’s footsteps.
• Because her belief in her prophetic destiny will ultimately lead to her own demise, much as it did with Rhaegar. 

Conclusion

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