It’s not without precedent in Westerosi history. To the Children of the Forest, the First Men were barbarian invaders and yet after a long war, the two peoples signed a Pact of Ice and Fire that saw them fighting side-by-side against the buy rs gold White Walkers during the Long Night.

To the First Men, the Andals were barbarian invaders, who brought with them a foreign religion but as the history of Westeros shows us, in the Westerlands, the Reach, the Stormlands, the Iron Islands, even in Dorne, there was as much assimilation and intermarriage as there was war and conquest. The same is true of the Rhoynar or the Targaryens, each of which added their culture and their ideas to those who had come before them, to make something new.

Over in Meereen, Dany is dealing with a different question of assimilation she is a conqueror in a new land, and she is struggling to choose between peace and justice. The instincts of her Targaryen ancestors tell her to strike back against the Sons of the Harpy, and the Great Masters of Meereen who pay them to assassinate the Unsullied and Ser Barristan the Bold and so Dany brings the leaders of each house before her to threaten them with collective punishment, and to remind them that she remains the Mother of Dragons.

Indeed, as her children roast and eat one of the Great Masters a life for a life Dany has never seemed more in tune with her Targaryen heritage, and hasn’t seemed this close to her dragons since she chained him. At the same time, speaking with Missandei and weighing the costs that the ex-slaves of Meereen will pay for her decisions, Dany chooses a third option between peace at any price and killing the master class: she will assimilate with Meereenese culture, by opening the fighting pits and marrying the unlikely suitor Hizdahr zo Loraq.

The difficulty for Dany is that she is attempting to have it both ways doling out fiery death www.rsfarmer.com with one hand while offering bread and circuses with the other. As I discuss in my essay on Machiavellian theory in A Hymn for Spring, the Florentine theorist of power advised that violence is a necessary, but double-edged tool of statecraft: