They are a powerful tool, of course, but Martin and series showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Though we are told that dragons are powerful harbingers of magic 4, the spectacular birth of the dragons (Plate 1) is not a magic cure-all for Daenerys, but one more responsibility she must shoulder in her efforts to survive and retake the Iron Throne.ģ Instead of heralding her success, they signal her frustrated ambition, as she is unable to feed them, and is helpless to defend them from theft. Though the supernatural takes on increasing importance as the saga continues, clearly, the author seeks to ground the story in the non-supernatural rather than using fantastic elements to allow the characters an easy way out of their difficulties.
And indeed, Martin has also commented on his desire to use the supernatural elements of his saga sparingly, especially in his first volumes 3 (and therefore the seasons that have thus far appeared on our TV screens): in the first book of the saga, A Game of Thrones, despite the clearly high fantasy world of Westeros in which the story is set, and the fact that the story begins and ends with spectacular use of magic (terrifying hostile creatures referred to as “White Walkers” and their possessed victims, “wights,” open the book and series, while the rebirth of Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons from the flames ends it), but the rest of the book sticks to a realism that the viewer or reader can identify with, a recognizable world that has links to our own past, making different eras and cultures coalesce. However, several elements make this a less clear-cut choice than it might at first appear: as mentioned above, Martin is an avowed atheist, who has explicitly said that there will be no Deus ex machina to come and save the day, no divine intervention 2.