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masha-russia:

Daenerys Appreciation Month – Elements

Making this gifset made me realize how much Daenerys is connected to all the four elements. I’ve never really thought about it before, but all the classical elements are strongly present in, and are important to, her narrative. 

• Earth 

Daenerys quickly connects to it during her journey with the Dothraki.

The green swallowed her up. The air was rich with the scents of earth and grass, mixed with the smell of horseflesh and Dany’s sweat and the oil in her hair. Dothraki smells. They seemed to belong here. Dany breathed it all in, laughing. She had a sudden urge to feel the ground beneath her, to curl her toes in that thick black soil.

And when Viserys comes to berate her for what he considers an unrefined look and behavior, Daenerys doesn’t feel ashamed. On the contrary, she feels a part of nature around her. 

She was barefoot, with oiled hair, wearing Dothraki riding leathers and a painted vest given her as a bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here.

Daenerys is the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, and will be the leader of the greatest of Khalasars. And although the Dothraki do not represent Earth per se, their nomadic style of life, their customs and culture, their usual environment – the Dothraki Sea – could be seen as attributes of it. 

Later, while in Meereen, Daenerys loves to spend the little free time she has in the garden of her

terrace, and once even sleeps on the grass, preferring nature to the comfortable bed in her

apartments. 

The pale pink light of dawn found her still out on her terrace, asleep upon the grass beneath a blanket of fine dew.

• Water 

She carries water in her name. Daenerys Stormborn, as she was born during the fiercest tempest in history. She also spent her first few years in Braavos – a city

of the Hundred Isles, built among canals and a lagoon – and following Willem Darry’s death, all of Daenerys childhood and early adolescence was spent on ships, traveling in between the Free Cities. 

The narrow sea was often stormy, and Dany had crossed it half a hundred times as a girl, running from one Free City to the next half a step ahead of the Usurper’s hired knives.

Her love for water is greatly felt in this quote:

She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small, but free as well. She liked the dolphins that sometimes swam along beside Balerion, slicing through the waves like silvery spears, and the flying fish they glimpsed now and again. She even liked the sailors, with all their songs and stories. Once on a voyage to Braavos, as she’d watched the crew wrestle down a great green sail in a rising gale, she had even thought how fine it would be to be a sailor.

• Air 

Before her dragons, came her silver. 

The silver horse leapt the flames as if she had wings. When she pulled up before Magister Illyrio, she said, “Tell Khal Drogo that he has given me the wind.”

She raced by on her silver, riding like the wind.

And then came Viserion, Drogon and Rhaegal. Though even before they hatched, Daenerys has been dreaming of flying.

A great knife of pain ripped down her back, and she felt her skin tear open and smelled the stench of burning blood and saw the shadow of wings. And Daenerys Targaryen flew.

Flying, she thought. I had wings, I was flying. But it was only a dream.

With the birth of her dragons, Daenerys’s dream of flying became very real and only a matter of time until it came true, and she impatiently waited for this moment.

If I had wings, I would want to fly too, Dany thought.

Another year, or perhaps two, and he may be large enough to ride. Then I shall have no need of ships to cross the great salt sea.

“If you were grown,” she told Drogon, scratching him between the horns, “I’d fly you over the walls and melt that harpy down to slag.” But it would be years before her dragons were large enough to ride.

They grow quickly now, and when they are grown I shall have my wings. Mounted on a dragon, she could lead her own men into battle, as she had in Astapor, but as yet they were still too small to bear her weight.

They are all three growing. Soon they will be large enough to bear my weight. Then she would fly as Aegon the Conqueror had flown, up and up, until Meereen was so small that she could blot it out with her thumb.

If I were a dragon, I could fly to Westeros, she thought.

And finally when the moment came for her to reach the sky, Dany was exulting: 

Her heart felt as if it were about to burst. Yes, she thought, yes, now, now, do it, do it, take me, take me, FLY!

As she says herself, on Drogon’s back, Daenerys feels whole. She loves flying. 

Hers had been a lonely sojourn, and for most of it she had been hurt and hungry … yet despite it all she had been strangely happy here. A few aches, an empty belly, chills by night … what does it matter when you can fly? I would do it all again.

Up and up and up he’d borne her, high above the pyramids and pits, his wings outstretched to catch the warm air rising from the city’s sun baked bricks. If I fall and die, it will still have been worth it, she had thought.

And in her dreams at night, it is in the air that she finds happiness and peace.

She dreamed. All her cares fell away from her, and all her pains as well, and she seemed to float upward into the sky. She was flying once again, spinning, laughing, dancing, as the stars wheeled around her and whispered secrets in her ear.

Daenerys embodies this famous quote perfectly:

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

And her eyes were turned skyward long before she tasted flight.

• Fire

The most obvious of the elements associated to Daenerys, and she has it in her blood.

The water was scalding hot, but Daenerys did not flinch or cry out. She liked the heat. It made her feel clean.

The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don’t you see? Don’t you SEE? 

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I don’t know if this has some kind of literary significance, but the fact that Daenerys connects so strongly in her soul with all the four basic elements is pretty amazing.