Sansa Is So Privileged She's Still Sheltered Even When She's In Captivity & Hiding As A Bastard Planning Lavish Fesats Wasting Most Of The+ - Tumblr Posts
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.