We Will Have It All Back Someday, Sweet Sister, He Would Promise Her. Sometimes His Hands Shook When

“We will have it all back someday, sweet sister,” he would promise her. Sometimes his hands shook when he talked about it. “The jewels and the silks, Dragonstone and King’s Landing, the Iron Throne and the Seven Kingdoms, all they have taken from us, we will have it back.” Viserys lived for that day. All that Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, the childhood she had never known.

     —   Daenerys I,  A Game of Thrones

You know what I really love about Dany?

Despite her birth, her childhood was exceedingly underprivileged. She knew hunger, and cold, and how to sleep in the streets with only her brother’s body next to her to keep her warm. She’s seen the abuses others suffer, has suffered many of them herself. She lived most of her childhood running from city to city in fear of her life.

And she gets that. She recognizes that no one’s going to bat an eyelash at the stranger starving in the gutter. She realizes that nothing in life is free. Easy breaks are as rare as rain in the desert.

It’s bred into her a unique sort of humility that’s rare in the other key players of her station. She can take care of herself when she has to because she knows she can’t expect complete strangers to do it for her. And more, she’s willing to take care of the decent people around her because she knows what it’s like to be alone and have nothing.

Daenerys Targaryen and Jon snow 🤍 Snowstorm(Bridgerton’s version)🏹

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Please don’t repost without credits

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not only is pol!jon extremely disgusting, it's also laughable to think that dany (out of ALL characters) would fall for a man's lies lmfao

media literacy would automatically go up 100% if people knew how to consume stories without self-inserting themselves into the characters' shoes. "if i were him..." you're NOT. you may relate to his story, his past, his traits, his quirks, his identity but the moment you start treating the story accepting what you feel/think as what the character feels/thinks, you're misunderstanding the story.

Is Dany really a underdog? She has dragons! She's top of the foodchain, not like the Starklings staying hidden and hunted. Arya, Sansa, Bran and Tyrion is who comes to mind when I think underdog.

When GRRM refers to underdogs he is referring to the characters at the start of the books. Jon, Dany, Arya and Tyrion are all underdogs when the story starts and Bran soon joins them in a couple of chapters. These are characters who don't normally fit into Westerosi society - that's GRRM's definition of the underdog. That they actively engage in changing their life, pursue power and obtain it doesn't negate their underdog status at the start. Jon is Lord Commander of the watch, doesn't change how he started the story and how he is still viewed as.

GRRM has always grouped Dany in along with the rest of the underdogs, sees her as a sympathetic character and identifies with her struggles.

2003 interview with GRRM (After ASoS):

Shaw: You created Jon as a bastard and an outcast from the get-go. Yet he's also one of the most attractive characters. Did you choose to make Jon a bastard to make him more attractive as an "underdog," or was his bastard birth central to the shaping of his character itself?

Martin: Almost all the characters have problems in some way. Very few of my major viewpoint characters have all the answers or have an easy path through life. They all have burdens to bear. Some of them are women in a society that doesn't necessarily value women or give them a lot of power or independence. Tyrion of course is a dwarf which has its own challenges. Dany is an exile, powerless, penniless, at the mercy of other people, and Jon is a bastard. These things shape their characters. Your experiences in life, your place in life inevitably is going to change who you are.

http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0410/theheartofasmall.shtml

Jon Snow has me in him, and Sam Tarly. The women too, Lyanna and Shaara, and the girls, Arya and Adara … Daenerys Stormborn, searching for that house with the red door. And Tyrion Lannister? Oh, yes. The Imp is me in spades, the horny little bastard.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjreiP50DG8

“I had a walk past that house every day on my way from the projects on 1st Street to 5th Street, and it’s like, well, that used to be our dock, that used to be our house. Now we don’t have a house, we don’t have a yard, but I had always had the sense of, yeah I’m poor, but I come from royalty, or I come from greatness that somehow was destroyed by the depression, by corrupt politicians, by things like that. So maybe that gives me a little of the emotional temperament to understand somebody like Daenerys Targaryen.

There was a watchman on the dock, though, and if he saw us he’d come out of his shed and shout at us. "Get out of here, you kids,” he’d yell. “You got no business here.” Yes, I do, part of me always wanted to shout back, you’re the one who’s got no business, my great-grandfather BUILT this dock.

This theme of fallen families is one that made it directly into A Song of Ice and Fire, George explained, in the characters Daenerys and Viserys Targaryen. With that same feeling of loss of a future, wondering about the family he never knew and their upper class lifestyles, he felt like disinherited royalty much like the two Targaryen siblings. When Dany reads about Westeros in the books she received from her wedding, or when Barristan told her stories about her brother Rhaegar, or she lands in Dragonstone and walks in her family’s home those are actually George wondering about his own family and dreaming of a better life stolen from him in the projects of Bayonne.