The final part of the series. This part be read alone, even if you haven't read any of the series so far, and explores legacy, Lannisters, and Dany's reign in Slaver's Bay.

If you want to read the series and fully explore all of the symbolism I'm building on here, you can find links to the full series here. I hope you enjoy reading this part, and if you've read the series, thank you for taking the time and I hope you've enjoyed reading my analysis.

To anyone who is reading this part first, "Revisiting the Rat Cook" is a series built on the understanding that GRRM's use of metadiegetic legends provide a "road map" of symbols and meaning, used in their abstract form, which we, as readers, can use to better understand the relationships between symbols, motifs, and themes as they recur throughout ASOAIF as a whole. The Rat Cook story is about a rat which eats rats, or a cook who serves kings; The Rat Cook story is about fathers and sons, about cannibalism, about trust, about vengeance, and about damning one's legacy.

The Sons of the Sons of the Sons

Through this whole series, I’ve examined how a certain power dynamic plays out across ASOIAF, exemplified in the “Rat Cook” story. Meals, vulnerable and human, reveal the true intentions of the parties present. “Rats” may kill Kings, but it’s only in response to the Lords employing their dogs to enforce their absolute rule. In cannibalism, all is revealed at once—food and violence and power wrapped in one.

At the end of the last part, I pointed out that regardless of how many rats get skewered, roasted, hunted, and cut down, there seem to be more rats to replace them. Such is the reality of the Rat Cook, as Bran relays in ASOS Bran IV:

He had roamed the Nightfort ever since, devouring his children, but still his hunger was not sated.

An endless supply of rats replaces the insatiable hunger of the Rat Cook. His curse is not just his own, but his entire bloodline’s, forever after.

As Old Nan reminds us, the Rat Cook had a right to vengeance, and therefore he too must have been wronged. The implied past of that deserved vengeance and the known future of that curse point to the true scale of the story: the events around the Prince-and-Bacon pie are only one part of a much longer, ongoing struggle.

In that regard, the Rat Cook’s punishment does not only mirror his crime in eating children, but also in that same endless, infinite fate of self-replicating violence. The conflict between the cook and the King existed before the cook ever killed the prince, and, as the story goes, the ramifications of that act carry on for the rest of time.

To tell this story of the next generation reaping the violent, unwanted rewards of their predecessors’ actions, the Rat Cook story employs a metaphorical cannibalism of one’s past sins and one’s future legacy.

If this seems like a potent image, return to Arianne from AFFC The Soiled Knight:

"Have you ever seen the arms of House Toland of Ghost Hill?"

He had to think a moment. "A dragon eating its own tail?"

"The dragon is time. It has no beginning and no ending, so all things come round again.”

The arms of House Toland are the diegetic version of ouroboros within ASOIAF. The dragon eating its own self signifies the endless cycle of death and rebirth, of history repeating itself and creating its own repetitions. Like the dragon of House Toland, the “Rat Cook” story, too, has no beginning nor ending—the King eats his past sins in his son, and the immortal Rat Cook eats his future forever.

—

We need only to look at Dany’s story to see how the ouroboros imagery connects even more directly to the rat symbol from the Rat Cook story. After all, rats and dragons are usually quite different (although in the last part, I pointed out how those allegiances can change).

After Dany burns the undying—another avatar of immortality and the stagnation of time—Xaro Xhoan Daxos tells Dany of the chaos that she has caused:

Ghost grass grows in the Garden of Gehane, phantom tortoises have been seen carrying messages between the windowless houses on Warlock's Way, and all the rats in the city are chewing off their tails.

Rather than dragons, we see Dany leave in her wake rats reenacting the ouroboros pose, rats eating their own tails.

That image stays with Dany, as those rats reappear in her thoughts in ASOS Daenerys V:

I am the blood of the dragon, Dany reminded herself. Her thoughts were spinning in circles, like a rat chasing its tail. Suddenly she could not stand the close confines of the pavilion another moment.

Even without literally devouring themselves, the visual imagery repeats. Outside Meereen, Dany’s spinning thoughts are like a rat-ouroboros, head chasing after its own tail.

Interestingly, Dany’s rat-thoughts, in the same way as with Tyrion, show a shift in her mentality. In the last part, I argued that Tyrion becoming “a rat scuttling through the dark” was first preceded by rats replacing his wits in ASOS Tyrion XI:

“You'll have to help me with my last words, my wits have been running about like a rat in a root cellar.”

When Dany’s thoughts turn into rats, Dany leaves her pavilion—symbolically stepping away from her place of power—and it is immediately afterwards that she conceives of her plan to take Meereen with her “sewer rats.”

—

It’s fitting that Dany be consumed by thoughts of this ouroboros of rathood, as that ouroboros is her story.

Rhaegar, Aegon VI, and Rhaenys were all killed in vengeance for the reign of Mad King Aerys II; Daenerys and Viserys, in turn, are driven by force of legacy to retake the throne in their father’s name from the “Usurper’s Dogs.” But Robert Baratheon is dead, as is Ned Stark, as is Tywin Lannister, Hoster Tully, Jon Arryn. Who is left to answer to their actions but their “princes,” when these dragons-turned-rats return and fire the ovens?

Like the Rat Cook’s children, though, this fate is Dany’s curse, not her glory.

She struggles with her place in this ouroboros of legacy in ADWD Daenerys X:

You are a queen, her bear said. In Westeros.

"It is such a long way," she complained. "I was tired, Jorah. I was weary of war. I wanted to rest, to laugh, to plant trees and see them grow. I am only a young girl."

No. You are the blood of the dragon. The whispering was growing fainter, as if Ser Jorah were falling farther behind. Dragons plant no trees. Remember that. Remember who you are, what you were made to be. Remember your words.

Dany was “made to be” the queen who would use war to return to Westeros and to her forebears’ legacy. That onus is her blood, though, is not her wish.

All Dany wanted to do was plant olive trees—and trees escape this cycle of time, as Lord Brynden tells Bran in ADWD Bran III:

Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.

Rather than be the dragon of Toland, these olive trees would represent a different future for Dany, one where she escapes the cycle, staying unmoved against that river of time. Like the Rhoyne in The Sorrows, that river would otherwise bring her back to the very place she came from, and in the flow of this river, she would avenge the vengeance her father deserved to suffer for, and so repeat the cycle.

But, as Dany reminds herself, dragons plant no trees. Dragons burn trees down.

If we trust House Toland, dragons are as bound to this cycle as the rats Dany sets off in Qarth, as the Rat Cook and his children, as the King who ate his son.

Dany knows that dragons are the wrong tool for peace and for breaking the cycle. She knew it as early as ADWD Daenerys II, faced with the prospect of an endless legacy, represented here, just as in the Rat Cook story, by endless numbers of children:

She was the blood of the dragon. She could kill the Sons of the Harpy, and the sons of the sons, and the sons of the sons of the sons. But a dragon could not feed a hungry child nor help a dying woman's pain.

The Rat Cook took his vengeance, but he leaves behind a legacy of rats, the Rat Cook’s sons, and sons of the sons, and sons of the sons of the sons. Dany could use force to eradicate this iteration of the rebellion against her, but there are thousands more rats to kill, and thousands more that will be created in their wake.

Consider the futility—and cyclical nature—of her administration’s response to the Sons of the Harpy. Confronted with an anonymous, faceless, vigilante group of pro-slavers terrorizing her rule, Dany concedes to the Shavepate’s horrible suggestion to respond in kind with a practically-identical counter-force of anonymous, faceless, masked militia. Of course, the result of this response is only for each side to mutually succeed in continuing the cycle of death. Dragons can kill, but hunting all of the rats does not remove the Rat Cook’s curse.

The misery of her people cannot be burned away, it is a void demonstrated by being hungry enough to eat rats. Compared to Dany’s realization about the sons of the sons of the sons, the “Rat Cook” is telling the exact same story. She can kill this generation, and the next, and so on forever, but it’s futile to attempt to protect her people that way; the Rat Cook has been eating his children for one generation after another, but has never been sated either. The dragon of Toland, too, can eat its own tail for all time.

—

This story of cyclical action and reaction, of vengeance and revenge, is being told and retold throughout ASOAIF.

Dany must return to Westeros to take up her father’s place, but she’s not the only rat-child left seeking vengeance for her family’s death. Oberyn Martell arrives in King’s Landing in ASOS Tyrion X searching to avenge Elia, Aegon, and Rhaenys, and upon his arrival Tyrion also realizes how infinite this cycle is:

It all goes back and back, Tyrion thought, to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads.

Hoster Blackwood, well-spoken and bookish lad that he is, gives Jaime a history lesson about the Blackwood-Bracken rivalry that offers a sober insight into the nature of this cyclical conflict in ADWD Jaime I:

We've had a hundred peaces with the Brackens, many sealed with marriages. There's Blackwood blood in every Bracken, and Bracken blood in every Blackwood. The Old King's Peace lasted half a century. But then some fresh quarrel broke out, and the old wounds opened and began to bleed again. That's how it always happens, my father says. So long as men remember the wrongs done to their forebears, no peace will ever last. So we go on century after century, with us hating the Brackens and them hating us. My father says there will never be an end to it.

It’s fitting, too, that the Blackwoods are represented by a weirwood which died to the Bracken’s poison. A tree—a weirwood especially—might have been unmoved by this cycle, but their tree has been poisoned by revenge. The Blackwoods and Brackens are thousands of years deep into the kind of conflict that Dany wants so desperately to avoid.

Even if the King wronged the cook first, the cook now killed his son; even if the Rat Cook took his vengeance, the Rat Cook leaves behind children to bear the memory of his grudge forever. The tale of the Cook and the King are simply one moment in a history and future of cannibalism and counter-cannibalism, just as much as the Bracken’s siege of the Blackwoods—and the Blackwood’s rat-eating resistance—is only one moment in the endless cycle of wrong and counter-wrong between those families.

As is evident in Robert’s Rebellion and its aftermath, when the formerly-royal Targaryen dragons turn to rats for allies, even the roles of King and rat may switch, but the cycle of conflict remains.

—

The Rat Cook did have a right to vengeance. Nevertheless, the Rat Cook is still unequivocally responsible for dooming his entire bloodline and legacy to a life as rats scrabbling in the dark. The King, too, suffers the same fate and the same responsibility, where he, too, consumes his own son-and-legacy as retribution for his own wrongs. For both sides, it is the actions of the father which result in the father consuming his own children.

Tyrion himself arrived in King’s Landing as a King’s Hand and left as a “rat,” as mentioned in the last part. As Tyrion himself says, though, he is only a puppet dancing on the strings of those who came before him, and the Lannisters as a unit replay that same timeless story of the sins of the father borne by the children.

I’ve covered almost all of these quotes before, but it’s worth revisiting these moments as a chain of cause and effect where the crimes of the father result in the rat-dealings of the son, starting with Tywin Lannister giving the order to burn the Riverlands in AGOT Tyrion IX:

Tell them I want to see the riverlands afire from the Gods Eye to the Red Fork.

Burning the riverlands sends smallfolk fleeing to King’s Landing for shelter from the war… but the Lannister children hold King’s Landing, and have to deal with the refugee crisis and starvation that Tywin’s brutal methods have caused.

As we saw, eating rats signifies this starvation in ACOK Tyrion I:

What little produce he did see was three times as costly as it had been a year ago. One peddler was hawking rats roasted on a skewer.

Struggling to control a city that is devouring itself, Tywin’s children turn on each other, just like the Freys, just like the Rat Cook eating his children. Tyrion imagines Cersei as a master of rats in ACOK Tyrion X:

If Cersei has someone stalking me tonight, he must be disguised as a rat.

Cersei, in turn, imagines Tyrion a rat as he escapes with Varys in AFFC Cersei I:

She imagined Tyrion creeping between the walls like some monstrous rat.

The imagery that she imagines, Tyrion the monstrous rat, also evokes the Rat Cook “as huge as a sow”, off to punish the Andal King by feeding him his own son. Although the son kills the father this time, Tywin “loses” a son in the process, as he says in ASOS Tyrion XI:

“You . . . you are no . . . no son of mine.”

This, too, is the Rat Cook story, and the ouroboros: Tywin, the Hand, dies at the hands of the Hand he created in his cruelty. The lion eats its own tail, too.

Of course, Tyrion is eating himself alive by killing his father as well. All the power that Tyrion knew came from his father; his gold, the influence of his name, and even his Handship was his father’s. In the end, Shae proved the truth of that, because if all she wanted was a sound place at court, Tywin was the fount of that security, and Tyrion was just dancing on strings.

Even Tywin’s “funeral pyre” in AFFC Cersei III is poisoned by his children’s distrust of one another:

“If the gods are good, the fire may smoke a few rats from the rubble."

Jaime rolled his eyes. "Tyrion, you mean."

While the Hand’s tower burns, any honor that Cersei means to give Tywin’s memory is undermined as she imagines herself outpacing Tywin’s legacy as the Hand who ruled the King:

Cersei thought of all the King's Hands that she had known through the years…

…her father, Lord Tywin Lannister, her father most of all. All of them are burning now, she told herself, savoring the thought. They are dead and burning, every one, with all their plots and schemes and betrayals. It is my day now. It is my castle and my kingdom.

As Dany well knows, though, fire can kill, but not change the course of the river of time.

Despite what Cersei desires, Tywin’s legacy cannot die with him any more than the Rat Cook can die. Instead, his children continue to reap what he sowed, even after he is gone and the fires have gone out. Jaime faces this in AFFC Jaime IV in the fields his father burned:

They will be eating rats by winter, unless they can get a harvest in.

Simultaneously, Cersei suffers humiliation at the hands of the smallfolk uprising fueled by religious zealots displaced out of the Lannister-burned riverlands… a humiliation that echoes Tywin’s legacy, too, as it was identical to the one Tywin himself forced upon his father’s lover.

Irrespective of the Lannisters’ victory in the war, they are now cursed with the weight of Tywin’s actions, and each of his children are now in the company of the vengeful rats that Tywin’s actions birthed. Tyrion rides down the Rhoyne with one child survivor of Tywin’s massacre during Robert’s Rebellion, and travels to Meereen to join with another. Jaime has been cornered by the “rats” that have infested the burned riverlands, and Cersei’s power has been “stripped” by the sparrows who flew from Tywin’s fires.

—

Appropriately for a queen who began her conquest of Meereen with her mind a rat-ouroboros, Daenerys spends her reign struggling against the same cyclical trap like the one we see the Lannisters in.

Even as she frees the slaves in Astapor, Dany finds that she cannot free the city from the cycle of cruelty. In her absence, Astapor reinvents its former slavery, as Dany hears in ASOS Daenerys VI:

“King Cleaver's thugs have seized every highborn boy in Astapor to make new Unsullied for the trade, though it will be years before they are trained."

All that happened in Astapor was the exchanging of roles, not unlike the Targaryen dragons left in the dungeons below the Baratheon throne. The highborn became the low—and so here too the sons of the slavers pay for the sins of their fathers—but the violence has not changed nature, only subject, and the dragon has not stopped eating its own tail.

Dany immediately thinks that she’s seen this all before:

The thing that surprised Dany most was how unsurprised she was. She found herself remembering Eroeh, the Lhazarene girl she had once tried to protect, and what had happened to her. It will be the same in Meereen once I march, she thought.

Dany left rat-ouroboroses in her wake when she left Qarth, and Astapor, too, devours itself and repeats its own history. Dany shocks herself with her jaded recognition of the familiarity.

But if it was a mistake to burn the slavers of Astapor, not burning Yunkai the slavers of Yunkai was worse—and those failures compound on one another when the remaining slavers of Yunkai massacre the people she left behind in Astapor.

Or, as Dany reflects a book later in ADWD Daenerys V:

"And all I did in Astapor was make ten thousand Eroehs."

—

Dany tried to rescue Eroeh during Khal Drogo’s raid on the Lhazareen settlement in AGOT Daenerys VII. Only a few steps above a slave herself at the time, with very little agency to take advantage of, Dany could only save Eroeh by invoking Drogo’s authority as Khal:

"I will not have her harmed," Dany said. "I claim her. Do as I command you, or Khal Drogo will know the reason why.”

The Rat Cook’s story is only one instance of vengeance in a history that stretches through time, beginning with the subjugation of the cook and continuing through his rat-children. Dany’s ability to save Eroeh, too, only lasts for one moment as part of a much longer cycle of violence.

As Mirri Maz Duur explains for her own case, in AGOT Daenerys IX, stepping in for one moment does nothing for the past:

"Saved me?" The Lhazareen woman spat. "Three riders had taken me, not as a man takes a woman but from behind, as a dog takes a bitch. The fourth was in me when you rode past. How then did you save me?”

As Dany discovers, it may mean little for the future too. The violence was inherent in the system before Dany saved Eroeh, and since the only tool she had was the promise of the Khal’s systemic violence, the violence remains afterwards, too.

The Khal’s authority is a poor tool to stop abuse with because that same authority is what enables the future Khal Jhaqo to rape and kill Eroeh once Drogo dies, as Jhogo reports in AGOT Daenerys IX, an early mirror of the report of Astapor:

"Mago seized her, who is Khal Jhaqo's bloodrider now," said Jhogo. "He mounted her high and low and gave her to his khal, and Jhaqo gave her to his other bloodriders. They were six. When they were done with her, they cut her throat."

If it was the force of the Khal which could stop Mago, that same preserved power-of-the-Khal allows him to deliver Eroeh to an even worse fate now that the Khalship has changed hands. Dany could not break the system, nor Eroeh’s fate, so long as her power derived from the Khal, and the Khalhood derived from that cycle of violence.

In Slaver’s Bay, Dany has the force of her dragons, which gives Dany more power, but more responsibility too—and Dany fears that Eroeh was Astapor on an interpersonal scale. Dany can use that force to intervene for one moment, but should her power ever waver, the systems of violence would return tenfold, because Dany does not know how to use dragons to break the cycle behind it all.

—

Dragons are an especially powerful image in Slaver’s Bay because, on an even larger scale, the injustices plaguing the entirety of Slaver’s Bay result from cycles that have repeated in generations upon generations back. The same way that Daenerys is only the latest puppet dancing on the strings of the Targaryen legacy, the Targaryens were dancing on the strings of the Valyrians before them, and Dany is dancing on those strings, too.

Slaver’s Bay knew Valyria, remembers Valyrian dragons, as Dany considers in ADWD Daenerys III:

The cedars that had once grown tall along the coast grew no more, felled by the axes of the Old Empire or consumed by dragonfire when Ghis made war against Valyria. Once the trees had gone, the soil baked beneath the hot sun and blew away in thick red clouds.

The entirety of Slaver’s Bay in its current state was post-Daenerys Astapor only four centuries prior. In the past, Valyria defeated Ghis and made its people into slaves, and even after the fiery destruction of their former overlords, the region remained so damaged that the whole of Slaver’s Bay had little choice but to recreate their own abuse and reinvent the Valyrian’s slavery.

Even the tree metaphor is the same as Dany’s olive trees. Valyria burned their tall cedars and, without them, the very ground was cursed.

Although she won’t say it outright, the Green Grace comes close to explaining how the abuse of their culture wrought unto them into the abusers they have become:

"It was these calamities that transformed my people into slavers," Galazza Galare had told her, at the Temple of the Graces. And I am the calamity that will change these slavers back into people, Dany had sworn to herself.

Puppet that she is of Valyria’s legacy, Dany’s only tools in Astapor are the weapons of slavers past, just as her only tool in Drogo’s khalasar was the Khal’s force. She desperately wants to plant trees, but she has no idea how to use these weapons to break the cycle she’s caught in, if she even can—there is no way that a “calamity” could ever “feed a hungry child” or “ease a dying woman’s pain.”

Too much force leaves a precedent for force and an Astapor ruled by King Cleaver, but too little leaves a Yunkai intact with slavers and armies. In Meereen, she tries to use no dragons at all, believing that might break this pattern, but having no tools at all leaves her impotent.

All these factors and more Dany understands as early as ADWD Daenerys II, but she also knows that dragons are all she has to hold Meereen and protect her people:

Mother of dragons, Daenerys thought. Mother of monsters. What have I unleashed upon the world? A queen I am, but my throne is made of burned bones, and it rests on quicksand. Without dragons, how could she hope to hold Meereen, much less win back Westeros? I am the blood of the dragon, she thought. If they are monsters, so am I.

When Dany comes to Slaver’s Bay, she tries to solve the issue of slavery with the weapons and force of Valyria, slaver empire. It’s as if she tried to replant the Riverlands using only swords and torches.

—

The truth of Dany’s thoughts—that you can kill the sons of the sons of the sons but never feed a hungry child—warrants revisiting the Rat Cook story once again.

The Rat Cook may have had a right to vengeance, and no one would punish him for taking it, but he had a full kitchen of tools and ingredients—”onions, carrots, mushrooms, lots of pepper and salt, a rasher of bacon, and a dark red Dornish wine.”

All Dany has are the knives and ovens, and she desperately wishes for more. She might have a right to avenge her bloodline, but if she had a full kitchen, she would only feed the hungry under her care.

The Rat Cook’s cardinal sin, rather than the vengeance, was violating guest right. Dany’s tragedy is that she wants to feed the hungry, but she only has the tools to kill. The Rat Cook promised to feed, and killed instead.

—

And so the Rat Cook is cursed, and the sons of the sons of the sons try to run away from their father even as they are tied to their his curse like Tyrion’s puppets on strings. The Lannisters burn the riverlands and so ruin King’s Landing even as they claim to defend the city. Ramsay torches Winterfell to overthrow Theon and undo the Starks, only to be stuck defending a ruined and freezing castle during the onset of winter. Cersei grants swords and axes to the Faith Militant, who return to capture her.

Dany wants to do something else, something different than her forebears. Valyria left eddies of abuse in its wake like the tail-chewing rats Dany left in Qarth, and Dany wants to stop those cycles, but how can she? Dragons are flaming swords that cannot be reforged into plowshares.

—

It makes me appreciate the Gravedigger. The Hound dreamed of killing his brother to avenge the burned face that his brother gave him, but the Hound died, and Sandor has a chance to escape that cycle.