This essay will show you that Dany’s arc does not start out with a princess, but a dragon egg dreaming to be born and grow up in the wilderness. When I say Dany is the true dragon, I mean that Dany is like a dragon soul trapped in a human body. But I do not just mean this in the same way like a fan of a sport’s team would shout “Go dragons!”. The issue is that George deceived us: Dany is the true (last) dragon!īy itself that is a statement that makes readers (both fans as well as sceptics) fist pump. GRRM is too experienced a writer to do this merely for window dressing. And yet the allusions and evolution of the story fits the Saint George legend, step by step.
And it becomes more and more a struggle to attain, when we simultaneously pick apart details and double layers of every other character, events or items used, but ignore the many layers of Dany and insist as seeing her only as a “princess in distress”. Most of the time, the re-enactment only “works” because some characters refer to her as princess, despite the fact she is neither behaving or dressed like a princess.
Meanwhile, we could sense in that essay already that Dany did not truly match this “helpless princess” image of the legend. Certainly the knight in the chapters is no true knight. Except that dragon turned out not to be a dragon after all, just a cruel small-minded and abusive man claiming wrongly to be a dragon.
On the surface, GRRM manages to reenact the legend across three chapters with the killing of the dragon. In Dany Part I – The Slaying of Saint George’s Dragon, I started out with analysing Dany’s first five chapters of aGoT through the conventional lens to establish how much George alludes to the legend of Saint George and the Dragon. (Top illustration:A dragon herself, by Rossdraws)