A Dance With Dragons

The price of power in A Dance of Dragons includes loneliness, distrust of others, and surrendering of individual wants and needs for the sake of getting that power. Characters like Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Quentyn Martell grasp at power because of what it offers—the ability to refashion themselves and the world around them.

Daenerys Targaryen carries the weight of being the daughter of a powerful ruling family overthrown because of its excesses. In Meereen, she believes she can redeem the cruelty of her ancestors by being a “mother” to the formerly enslaved people of Meereen. She is a woman who wonders if her potential suitors desire her as a person or because of her power. She learns that getting and keeping power requires her to surrender her desire for Daario for a strategic marriage to Hizdahr, a sacrifice she makes because she believes a “queen belongs not to herself but to her people” (473). She has to surrender her self-identity as a merciful mother and liberator by shutting the gates against Astapori with the bloody flux and re-opening the slave pits in Meereen to maintain her position as queen because accommodating herself to being a foreign ruler who is a woman isn’t enough to allow her to keep her power in Meereen.