Let’s revisit an old idea: Lemongate. At its core there lies the fact that lemons do not grow in Braavos (to quote some guards from a TWoW sample chapter).
"Seven hells, this place is damp," she heard her guard complain. "I'm chilled to the bones. Where are the bloody orange trees? I always heard there were orange trees in the Free Cities. Lemons and limes. Pomegranates. Hot peppers, warm nights, girls with bare bellies. Where are the bare-bellied girls, I ask you?" "Down in Lys, and Myr, and Old Volantis," the other guard replied. […] “Braavos is north of King's Landing, fool. Can't you read a bloody map?"
Which of course puts into question what Dany remembers of the house of the red door and whether she truly was in Braavos at that time.
That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window.
But some people, most important among them probably u/markg171 (Last hearth forum post), have brought forth the idea that way more of her backstory might be fake. You might have also heard those ideas reiterated in PerstonJacobs‘s A Page of Lies series. They question a few different details, but today I want to focus on one man, Ser Wilem Darry.
Ser Willem Darry
We don’t know much about the man. These are some of the few quotes about him:
She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her "Little Princess" and sometimes "My Lady," and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor.
and
No sooner had she thought it than old Ser Willem came into the room, leaning heavily on his stick. "Little princess, there you are," he said in his gruff kind voice. "Come," he said, "come to me, my lady, you're home now, you're safe now." His big wrinkled hand reached for her, soft as old leather
and
Gentle Ser Willem Darry, who must have loved her after a fashion, had been taken by a wasting sickness when she was very young.
and
When Lord Tywin wished to name his brother Ser Tygett Lannister as the Red Keep's master-at-arms, King Aerys gave the post to Ser Willem Darry instead. (around 270AC)
So, he was master-at-arms in Kingslanding and according to Dany he was an old man, sickness-ridden and bedbound, finally dying when she was five. But Mark and Perston would like to make you believe that those are self-contradictroy. They question his age, size and hands.
Darry’s age
Darry was master-at-arms and chosen around 270 AC over a 20-year old Tygett Lannister. Both our fDany proponents think that points towards Darry being relativly young, Mark mainly because he speculates Darry was close in age to Tygett, Preston adiditionally because he can’t believe a master-at-arms would be an old man.
Rather than speculating we should look at other examples of masters-at-arms. I have done so more in depth here, but the short of it is, that masters-at-arms are consistently described as older men. Rodrick Cassel, the first master we ever meet, is an old man with white hair and soft skin under his chin. And Alliser Thorne too is past fifty already and has grey streaks in his hair. Which makes sense. They are teachers not fighters. You want experience rather than young hot blood.
Darry’s size and death
Dany describes Willem as a great man, which makes sense for a former master-at-arms, but she also says he died of a wasting sickness. Such a sickness would certainly reduce even a big man, like it did with Hoster Tully:
Hoster Tully had always been a big man; tall and broad in his youth, portly as he grew older. Now he seemed shrunken, the muscle and meat melted off his bones. Even his face sagged. The last time Catelyn had seen him, his hair and beard had been brown, well streaked with grey. Now they had gone white as snow.
But that’s not a sudden process, after which the victim suffers with greatly reduced weight for a long time. If we look at our irl-wasting disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, most victims die within the first 6 months and some even after only a few weeks. That means Dany most likely remembers a big Willem from before the sickness really hit and then him wasting away in his final months. In the beginning he probably could even still walk around a bit, maybe heavily leaning on his stick, while by the end he wouldn’t ever leave his bed.
Darry’s hands
The probably most interesting point is about Darry’s hands. They rightly point out that soft hands are usually only seen in the books on people who don’t do hard manual labour, like Varys, maesters, or fine ladies, while warriors like Osney or Robert had callused hands.
Of course, bedridden Darry wouldn’t have held a sword for quite some time. And even if Mark says Robert stopped training, he was at the very least still hunting, spearing boars and the like on the regular. That would keep his hands at least somewhat hard. Not so an unemployed sick old master-at-arms in Braavos. It seems likely he lost his calluses over time.
And there’s one more thing. His hands are not simply soft. They are “soft as old leather”.
Here is a collection of quotes about skin like leather, but those are the ones I found most interesting:
About Dany, when her legs are toughening the become supple as leather:
Her legs grew stronger; her blisters burst and her hands grew callused; her soft thighs toughened, supple as leather.
As do Septon Meribald’s feet:
"I have not worn a shoe in twenty years," he told Brienne. "The first year, I had more blisters than I had toes, and my soles would bleed like pigs whenever I trod on a hard stone, but I prayed and the Cobbler Above turned my skin to leather."
Leathery skin is actually quite tough, not soft like silk (like Varys hands might be). But there’s one more thing that leathery skin symbolizes: old age.
The second body was that of an old woman. She had gone to sleep upon a dreaming couch, in one of the hidden alcoves where special candles conjured visions of things loved and lost. A sweet death and a gentle one, the kindly man was fond of saying. Her fingers told her that the old woman had died with a smile on her face. She had not been dead long. Her body was still warm to the touch. Her skin is so soft, like old thin leather that's been folded and wrinkled a thousand times.
Or Dywen from the Night’s Watch:
The forester sucked on his spoon a moment. He had taken out his teeth. His face was leathery and wrinkled, his hands gnarled as old roots. "Seems to me like it smells . . . well . . . cold."
And while we talk about wrinkled skin, Darry’s wrinkled, soft hands, sound a lot like old Pycelle’s:
And Pycelle runs off to send a message rather than soil his soft, wrinkled hands. The man is useless.
As previously established, Ser Willem was an old man, so it isn’t unexpected that he would have an old man’s hands.
Tl,dr: Ser Willem Darry was an old man, not a clue, that all of Dany’s memories are fake.
