Woot woot! Enter the hero--Daenerys Targaryen! 

Welcome to GoTTalkPod! Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire Book discussion and analysis. Dany One is everything that the preceding chapters are not. In this chapter, Robert is the usurper, Viserys is the rightful king; children have no parents and no home; slavery is illegal but it nevertheless exists; all the traditional signifiers of power and authority are absent. The only sense in which anything in the series is familiar and has been seen before is Viserys appears to be just another "lost boy" in the same vein as Waymar Royce and Theon Greyjoy. 

Another source of continuity is that we've been setting up for this chapter throughout the early potion of the book. George has been priming the Joycean pump in prior chapters, and here it finally pays off. The point-of-view structure, maturity, usurpation, parallax and indeed, metempsychosis are all evident here. The early action of the chapter also tracks the structure of the first chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses. In this episode, we discuss how those themes are expressed in Dany One. For a more detailed discussion of Joyce's influence on the Song of Ice and Fire, please do give a listen to the Bloomsday special episode. Note that these re-read episodes are always spoiler free, while the special Bloomsday episode does contain major spoilers.

***The chapter-by-chapter reading will be spoiler free unless otherwise indicated.***

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