You may have noticed that my blogging of "A Dance with Dragons" has stopped

and is not likely to resume.

As you probably know, Books Two and Three contain several chapters in which Arya wanders about the war-torn countryside and various characters opine about the effects of the war on the little people. Book Four does the exact same thing with Brienne. So far no problem, because this trend was in place before the War on Terror. And yes, nothing whatsoever happened in the Brienne chapters, but it wouldn't be A Song of Ice and Fire without one character dragging us away from the main action and dicking around in the middle of nowhere (Bran in AGoT*, Dany and Arya in ACoK, and Jaime in ASoS - not saying these chapters are bad, just that they do not move the main plot forward, at all).

*After his second chapter, obviously. Getting thrown out a window and paralyzed for life because you saw the Queen shagging her own brother is a pretty important plot development.

But I cannot read another Daenerys chapter in A Dance with Dragons. It's so blatant in its political subtext that it is in fact text.

A quick refresher: a foreign ruler with a foreign religion and a foreign custom has conquered a backwater city in the middle of the desert and is trying to bring some semblance of civilization to it. The ruler's greatest weapons are unavailable because they're too destructive and would make everyone hate the ruler. Meanwhile, in A Dance With Dragons, Daenerys (the USA) conquered Meereen (Iraq) and now has to try to hold it against its own population without the help of her dragons (nukes) which would just eat (nuke) everyone.

Look, I have no problem with political subtext per se. I like Battlestar Galactica and the Third Doctor's run on Doctor Who. I have a problem with political subtext springing up where it did not previously exist. As I said, the travelogues in Books 2-4 showed us the sort of collateral damage endemic to all wars. If there were suddenly security checkpoints where the Red Priests of R'hllor found a way to look at you nekkid, then yeah that would be different. But there wasn't any political subtext directed at one specific event until ADwD. Surely there was some other way of demonstrating that Daenerys was completely inept at learning how to be a queen.

Let me put it this way. If Tyrion Lannister had spent the entirety of A Storm of Swords building a railroad from King's Landing to Casterly Rock and then defending it against a corrupt government aided by his own family, would you still like the book?

So yeah, in a nutshell, my problem is that GRRM decided to turn Dany Targaryen into Dagny Taggart. 

I will keep reading. But already this one has found its way into last place in the series.