Bronze She-Dragon

--- Author's Note 2 ---

Hi guys!

If you are reading this, you have probably reached the end of Bronze She-Dragon. Well, first things first, thank you so much for your support and actually devoting your time to something I put a part of my soul in (like really, I did). I started it off very impulsively, but it soon turned into something I really became passionate about, and sharing it with you was truly magical :)

In this note I want to tell you more about my ideas regarding the storyline, where most of them came from, and also mention some of the things that were kinda not obviously mentioned in different chapters but meant. I hope it will be quite interesting for you, as well as help you understand the actions of certain characters and their reasoning slightly better.

Well, to begin with, when I came up with the whole idea of writing something based on Fire and Blood universe, I really wanted to get off the beaten track with my main character, and my first idea was making her the daughter of Daemon and Mysaria. From a lot of points of view it would've been very intriguing, but there was one important aspect: I wanted to make the whole fanfic as realistic as it possibly could be, and, realistically speaking, a natural daughter of Daemon and a commoner would have zero political influence or social standing, which was quite necessary for my OC to affect the course of Targaryen History. That was the reason why I switched my focus on Rhea Royce and found everything matching perfectly. That's how Daena was born :)

As for Daena's name, it wasn't really random. If we look into the further history of Targaryens, we will see another G.R.R. Martin's character having this name: Daena the Defiant. Interestingly, she had a son named Daemon with her cousin Aegon, so I instantly found the whole name game very appealing. Also it could be later supposed that Daena the Defiant was actually named after her great-grandmother Queen Daena, which looked very cool in my head ;)

Turning Daena to the Greens was, in some sense, an accident, it wasn't really intended from the beginning of my writing. To be honest, when I started, I didn't really have the whole storyline in mind. What I wanted to do is to live my life with Daena and go wherever she takes me. I wanted to make it natural and believable, however, the more the story progressed, the more twists and connections actually formed in my head, and the more I really planned the chapters to make everything align.

Well, for obvious reasons, I always knew that Daemon would be an absent father to the daughter with the woman he genuinely loathed. I am also a firm believer in the fact that both the Greens and the Blacks fell victims to Viserys's incompetence as a parent, and it was really him who caused the Dance (you don't have to agree with it, but this is really the way I see it). So, we can definitely say, were Viserys a better father, the war wouldn't have happened, and were Daemon a better father, Blacks would've won pretty much effortlessly.

But well, Alicent happened to be at the right place and at the right time, and by providing Daena with a motherly figure she so desperately seeked after the death of Rhea, she basically, without even knowing, secured the succession of her line.

I saw a lot of you commenting about Daemon and his role as a father to Daena in particular, so I will definitely answer the main question that arose among many of you: did Daemon have any fatherly love for Daena at all? Well, the answer is yes, he did, in a very weird way. However, he had no clue about how to express it or how to act in front of the child he had basically abandoned. He was not around while Daena was growing up in Runestone, and when he had to take his daughter in, he couldn't understand what to do with her and how he felt about her. This was reflected quite a lot throughout the fanfic: he stepped away from her upbringing, but let her claim Vermithor; he married her off to a Lannister, but named his twins with Laena the names Daena came up with as a child. Giving Daena to Alicent was a quick way to solve the problem, but it was his biggest mistake in terms of their relationship and The Dance. He wanted to get rid of the burden so much that he was careless about the consequences. Did he realize that at some point? Of course, he did, he was not that ignorant. However, it was quite late. As soon as Daemon realized it, the confusion he had towards Daena turned into the mixture of love and hate. At first hate prevailed: he considered Daena his enemy, the Green, and he even tried to kill her quite a few times (yes, the attempt in Lannisport was not the only one, I have left it out quite a lot, but he tried to assassinate her multiple more times before their first battle in King's Landing). The more The Dance progressed, the more Daemon was coming to the understanding of his role in it, and how the way he mistreated Daena led to heartbreaking consequences. Their last encounter in Harrenhal ended with Daemon's death by Daena's hand. And it was him, in some sense, who let it happen. He could've attacked Daena, he could've won that battle, but his guilt swallowed him, and he literally let Daena kill him. In some sense, he believed that it was the only way for him to do justice to his wronged daughter. Another question arises, however: did Daena love Daemon? Well, honestly, she didn't. He was a complete stranger to her, so the way she felt about him was the same as the way she felt about King Viserys, for instance. She did feel certain discomfort from the realization that she didn't love her father, so she sometimes wanted to spend more time with him, but every encounter of theirs made her more and more disappointed in their relationship. Despite that, she felt horrible after having realized that she killed him. She never quite got rid of that guilt till the very end of her life, wondering if things could have been different between them.