Ramsay's a clown. Eventually his antics will push people beyond their tolerances, no matter how boosted by their need to curry favor with his father. He's Cersei with balls - he'll destroy himself once his competent but too-paternally-tolerant father is out of the picture.

The real asshole, in my opinion, is Daenerys. She is as bad a ruler as Cersei, who had the decency to usurp her kingdom with far more subtlety and less bloodshed (or at least less that is directly her fault - a lot stems from the murder of Ned Stark, in explicit defiance of her wishes), than Daenerys, who invades and sacks Mereen for their explicit and provocative decision to be on her route of march, and to have old alliances and friendships with cities that refused to give her slaves cheaply. Her entire war in the previous books was unjustified, and now we see her ruling Mereen based entirely on her whims and wishes. The goodness of her intentions does not excuse the fact that her very presence and existence in the city is a crime and the Sons of the Harpy are completely justified in their executions of her Unsullied and shavepates and brazen beasts. Less so of the freedmen they later target, but how is that any different from her targeting people for their association with the slave trade upon which the entire city and region depend? I also note that her moral indignation to the existence of slavers and slavery comes only when she fails to profit from it herself, and then disguises her outright robbery of the Unsullied under the pretense of an emancipation crusade. She ordered her slave soldiers to kill anyone wearing a tokar back in Astapor, so how can she complain of her enemies turning around and serving her the same dish in Mereen? She whines about her "children" and their suffering, but the killings and murderers are happening because of her. The violence is because of her unjust and unwarranted invasion and occupation of a foreign city that did her no harm.

All of her whining about sacrifice for her people is obnoxious too. Her "rights" to rule anything depend entirely on her having been born the daughter of a king. She seems to be acting on the premise that her blood somehow elevates her above ANYONE, not just grants her the right to inherit her father's throne, as his last surviving child. She is a "queen" of the "dragon's" blood, so of course she sees herself as possessing the right to rule foreigners who have never accepted the rule of ANY Targaryen. Meanwhile, the people of Westeros, to whom she owes the DUTY of rulership, must wait on her pleasure. In this, Daenerys is not unlike Tommen in the comparison Varys draws for Kevan Lannister; she seeks the eventual crown of Westeros solely because it is her RIGHT. If she truly felt a duty to serve her people in the Seven Kingdoms, she would not expect them to wait on her personal growth experiment of practice-ruling Mereen.

Up until this book, the candidacy of Daenerys rested on the fact that she was the only one left who could reunite Westeros and bring peace and justice once more to the country. Now, with another candidate with all her qualifications, minus the uncontrollable fire-breathing, man-eating lizards, who has been raised as a proper Westeros noble and trained to rule, rather than haphazardly tutored by the Mad King's truest son, Daenerys just looks like more of the same. The only difference between her and Cersei, is the fact that some of her emotional whims which get enacted as policy might be founded on genuinely benevolent intentions.


As for Rickard Stark, if what Barbrey Dustin says about him is true, all of the sufferings and failures of his descendants can be laid at his feet. The fact that no Lord of Winterfell had ever built a sept in the castle strongly suggests they really never did marry southern women, or have much to do with the rest of the Seven Kingdoms in times past. There are certainly no reports of Starks or their bannerman mentioned in the Blackfyre Rebellion in the Dunk & Egg stories. Now, however, Rickard comes along and decides to start making connections with the Southern realms, and we get Lyanna unhappily betrothed to drunken, over-sexed glutton, encountering a selfish prince with all sorts of chick-magnet qualities, and getting herself kidnapped/eloped with him, touching off events that lead to her death and the murder of her father & brother. Then there is the betrothal to the idiotic Tully family, which can be seen as the source of most of the rest of the Starks' misfortunes (Ned becoming foster brothers with the aforementioned drunken asshole being the source of the rest). It was Edmure's incompetence that necessitated Robb's moving south to liberate Riverrun, and his ego that ruined Robb's strategy for getting Tywin Lannister out of the way. It was Catelyn's arrogance and blind-stupid trust in those who shared her childhood at Riverrun that precipitated the whole conflict in the first place, and compounded her idiocies by losing Tyrion, thus leaving the Starks and Tullys with the burden of starting the war, and none of the benefits of her actions, such as possession of a hostage. Nice going, Ricky. The Starks last 8,000 years by keeping to themselves and staying in the North, but no. He has to go sniffing around the South and gets a spoiled, idiotic granddaughter who betrays her father for the court society.