Be a Dragon

Dany and her Silver in the Dothraki Sea… (the shallow end at least)

with video

LUCY LAWLESS in XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS Season 5, Episode 14, ‘Amphipolis Under Siege’

The orientalism in her storyline is present in the entire work as a whole, as George Martin is a white American orientalist writer. This isn't unique to her arc. For instance, that Westeros is significantly racially segregated, ethnically and religiously homogenous, and presents a narrative of white European characters who hardly interact with a nonwhite/nonwestern arena, hardly inspires confidence in the white POV characters whose stories are grounded in Westeros. Moreover, while Dany is white, what specifically about her makes her a white savior? She is an ex-slave leading a revolutionary abolitionist war in which she redistributes wealth, affirmatively power shares with politically active freedmen, and arms, trains, and organizes politically militant freedmen. Slavers in ASOIAF can be white, like the Basilisk Isle raiders, Ghiscari. Ironborn, Northern noblemen, several mainland Westerosi factions and characters, and formerly, the Old Valyrians, or nonwhite, like the Dothraki, and the slaves are all from ethnically varied backgrounds. What is white savior about that?

As to whether Dany is a good or bad ruler, is there an example of a "good" ruler in the current narrative that you can think of, one who doesn't fail at their "project of power?" What is the definition of a good ruler, here? Someone who maintains the feudal-noble status quo and the material violence required to uphold "peace," perhaps even through feudal benevolence and paternalism, a la Ned Stark?

Magic permeates the series because it's, well, a fantasy novel. Daenerys reclaiming fire and blood, and her return to magic, is a symbol of her rejecting the false, reactionary Meereenese peace and the detrimental compromises she made with the Meereenese/Ghiscari & Essosi slaveowning nobility that chipped away at the antislavery revolution. George Martin isn't a dialectical materialist, and the thesis of ASOIAF is not a Marxist thesis of ideological demystification for the proletarian, serf, or peasant masses, so the binary you're proposing between ruling and magic doesn't apply. You can criticize George for falling into liberalism, but fantasy doesn't exactly lend itself to rigorous dialectical materialism to begin with.

I disagree with the idea that the orientalism in her storyline is present in the work as a whole, because it is specifically her storyline that deals the most with the Othering aspects of Martin's work; compare and contrast, for instance, the way Martin approaches the humanization of the wildlings in Jon's plotline, another group of people who were, until then, portrayed as Other and evil and savage, and how Martin approaches the Dothraki customs, or Qarth, or Slaver's Bay - there's a clear qualitative difference there, in as far as the humanisation of the characters go.

And fundamentally, that's the key thing about the white saviourism in the story - it's not about ethnicity, it's about whiteness. It's about the coded behaviour, and the inhumanity with which the characters in Dany's plotline are characterised, always in contrast with her, the young white woman kept in white slavery by the savage Dothraki and exploited by the odd and scheming Qartheen and opposed by the exotic Meereenese ruling class.

Dany isn't a white saviour because of who she is, or what she's doing - she is so because of how the story is written and structured. I very much agree that there's a great potential to a story there! But with the writing standing as it does under Martin, my scrutiny is increased because the characters surrounding Dany, with very few exceptions - perhaps only Jorah and Barristan, also white, and more controversially the Shavepate, Green Grace and Hizdahr. Missandei and Grey Worm are fan favourites, but not really endowed with extensive characterisation; and Quaithe, as fascinating as she is, speaks of an entirely exoticised oriental mysticism to her character.

It isn't a criticism being leveled at the character on a personal level, but one leveled at the narrative as written by George - and that, therefore, impacts her. Because nobody around her feels quite as real, because the characters surrounding her aren't as firm and solid, they're Othered and given little effort to be defined and humanised. Her opponents aren't granted complexities, her allies are always dubious and shallow. This is, of course, a consequence of the lack of PoVs surrounding her plotline - but even when we get Barristan and Tyrion, Penny in Tyrion's plotline is more humanised than any local Meerenese ever is. It's a systemic issue around how Essos is written.

When I speak of her being a bad ruler, I mean that she is a fourteen year old child going through troubles, and she's not equipped, ready or trained to rule; this is a key touchstone that Martin has talked about before, with his infamous quote that "ruling is hard" - it's not enough to be a good person. And no, there aren't good rulers! That's part of the point! Feudalism doesn't create good rulers, whether they are children or adults, and the characters are learning to rule - Jon is learning to rule, Dany is learning to rule, it's a bildungsroman for all the main child characters. The definition of a good ruler is one who represents the will of their people, and Dany fails at it - she compromises too hard, she fails to keep the Harpies under control, she fails to make her alliances count and employ everything, because even though she has the best of intentions, she doesn't know how to rule, because she's a child with no experience or training for it. Viserys' abuse didn't prepare her for ruling! Drogo's abuse didn't prepare her for ruling! She was treated as a pawn throughout AGoT and ACoK, and when in ASoS she takes up agency as a liberator, ADWD is directly leading from that wherein she doesn't know what to do.

The binary I'm proposing has nothing to do with Marxism or historical dialectical analysis; it's a thoroughly romantic binary in terms of themes, and it's very clear that when she runs off with Drogon, she's not choosing to reject the compromise or take a revolutionary stand. When Daenerys runs off with Drogon, she's choosing her son, her dragon, over her role in Meereen; she's reevaluating and deciding that protecting Drogon is more important to her, that she's compromised enough, that she'd rather be with Drogon again. It's not a triumphant reclamation of Fire and Blood or an act of revolutionary praxis; it's an escape from the cage binding her in Meereenese society, it's a return to the comfort of her child, of whom she loves, after feeling like she can't go back home, after losing Quentyn, after seeing the fighting pits. She's not contesting the status quo in Meereen, or rejecting the reactionary nobility - she's escaping! She's running away to magic, to her fate, to her destiny, away from her failures. This isn't definitive, however - I believe that Winds will deal with her returning, and learning to rule for herself, and indeed, once again overthrowing the Meereenese nobility; but as of ADWD, that's not where she is. She's finishing the book at a moment of failure, not triumph.

But that's not true, which was the point of me bringing up the ethnic homogeneity of Westeros. People of color are presented exclusively as savages, exotic subjects, or uncivilized entities, in the rest of the white viewpoints, be they the various Essosi that Tyrion, Victarion, Jon Connington, or Quentyn meet in their ADWD POV's, or the Summer Isles characters in Samwell's POV & the various King's Landing court POV's in ACOK/ASOS, the various Essosi (including Dothraki) that crop up from time to time, like the Brave Companions in Arya & Jaime's ASOS POV's, Taena of Myr in Cersei & Jaime's POV's, etc. The North is so ethnically and racially homogenous that two white Northern women––Jeyne Poole and Gilly––at two different occasions comment on being "scared" of Summer Isles people and their skin color. The AFFC prologue presents the acolytes and maesters of the Citadel as deploring Marwyn because he has the "audacity" to hang out with the exotic subjects of Essos. Leo Tyrell, Cersei, and Jaime use racial/ethnic epithets to refer to Essosi people. There are more examples, but these points are what immediately came to mind.

It's true that the way George has written the Dothraki, when compared to how he's written the Free Folk, is extremely orientalist, especially considering that they are presented as similar nomadic cultures with similar lifestyles and values. Yet Dany's POV remains the only one wherein a white character befriends people of color and presents a version of them beyond the "criminal" (e.g. the Dothraki members of the Brave Companions), "exotic" (e.g. Taena of Myr), or mystical sidekick. Yes, there is just as much racism and orientalism in how George has written those characters in Dany's arc, but those characters at least have underlying motivations and relevance that extend beyond Dany's arc. For instance, you will never see a character like Missandei in the other white POV's. You will never see nonwestern and nonwhite people take up a role in a military revolution in Westeros, aside from Dany's own people who will of course accompany her to Westeros. Even the "war for the dawn" is presented as a problem exclusively for the white Western characters.

The Qartheen and Ghiscari are white. If you're including the otherized white Easterner in the category of orientalized subject in ASOIAF, then this should include Daenerys and other Valyrians. Daenerys is the only minor in the series whom George repeatedly and explicitly sexualizes. He isolates her by writing about her breasts, genitalia, and body, in a very Otherizing manner, and puts her in explicit sexual situations that he does not with other young female characters. Indeed, the way he writes about Dany's body is similar to how he writes about Arianne's, who is a textual example of the exotic-erotic trope. The characters within the series also Otherize her, namely the Valyrian, Ghiscari, and other slaver & slaver-allied characters who speak about Dany's sexuality and body, and disparage her for her association with the Dothraki. Westeros isn't even accepting of ethnic Valyrians, as exemplified by a reactionary mob in King's Landing murdering the Pentoshi Rego Draz and blaming him for the spread of the Shivers, or Aegon III's court being hostile to Larra Rogare, for being a Lyseni polytheist who spoke Lyseni Valyrian. Thus I'm not sure why "Qartheen and Ghiscari" count as "people of color" in your estimation when they are white, because if we do such a calculus then Valyrians would have to be included as well, which I'm sure you'd be opposed to doing.

Missandei does have more characterization than you think she does. At the age of 10 she rises from an enslaved scribe to a Queen's scribe, handmaid, translator, and advisor, offering explicit advice to the Queen that becomes policy, being part of her inner court, treating with her diplomatic allies, directly offering her opinions to the Queen. Her relationship with Daenerys is warm, loving, and one of the only sources of comfort Daenerys has in Meereen. Melisandre of Asshai remains the only formerly enslaved POV character who rises from slave to de facto queen (other than Dany herself)––there is no Westerosi equivalent to Missandei's character. George could do much better with the characterization of Irri, Jhiqui, Jhogo, Aggo, Rakharo, Grey Worm, Strong Belwas, and several others, but all of them are not presented as dubious allies to Dany, but rather as people she fiercely loves and cares about, and who have seen her at her best and worst.

When it comes to the Dothraki in particular, Dany is the only person in the series who actually cares about what happens to them. The reason she is Otherized by Ghiscari and Valyrians for associating with them is because she adopts the Dothraki culture as her own. Yes, she was sold to and raped by a Dothraki man. There are also Dothraki men in Westeros, among the Brave Companions, who rape and murder women. Those white women do not affirmatively adopt Dothraki culture (nor would I expect them to; I don't subscribe to a racial identitarian framework in which "talking about bad things happening to a woman who happens to be white = white feminism") and, if we took out Dany's POV, we would never learn about anything regarding Dothraki culture other than its imperialist political economy. Yet Dany accepts the culture as her own and comes to genuinely love it, feeling at one with the Dothraki sea and land (a motif that is ubiquitous in her arc), loving horse riding in the Dothraki style, wearing bells in her hair in the Khal's style, worshipping the Dothraki Horse God (she is religiously syncretic, and really one of the only religiously syncretic characters in the text), engaging in Dothraki rituals like eating the heart of a stallion and bathing in the Womb of the World and doing so seriously, and protecting her tiny Khalasar for the entire series, no matter who tells her to abandon them. She mourns Quaro even in the fifth book. Her Khalasar matters to her. The Stallion prophecy, which the entire fandom deems scary and a portent of genocide, is actually a positive prophecy for the Dothraki because it entails a unity within their culture and their survival within the Long Night. And Dany loved her Dothraki-Targaryen child, who was ripped away from her. This mixing of cultures and religious and cultural syncretism present in her arc is simply not present elsewhere in the text, even Arya's POV, where the "ethnic and religious diversity" in Braavos is mostly white.

I question why you're calling her a white savior not because I disagree that there is orientalism present in her storyline but because your definition of white savior is ahistorical. The white savior framework, as popularized by Rudyard Kipling and other ideological arms of European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, explicitly called for white western civilization to colonize the third world as a project of civilizing and enlightening the third world "savages." This is not what Dany is doing, despite analyses to the contrary. She's not introducing Valyrian/Western institutions of education, religion, or governance to Meereen, or the Dothraki. She's not enforcing her language upon them. She's not installing Valyrian/Western rulers, or local rulers as proxies for them, to disseminate Valyrian/Western values. She's not partitioning or carving up Meereen or the Dothraki sea by using demographic/anthropological "studies" to categorize people based on ethnicity. White saviorism has an actual definition beyond "white woman was raped by man of color = white feminism." In fact, Daenerys herself is Essosi, her ethnicity is indigenous to the continent, and she grew up in both a culture and a geopolitical context in which slavery is the norm. She herself had to rid herself of the internalization of that norm through a gradual process of political consciousness. This is not a case of an enlightened Westerner using civilization, or progress, as an excuse to plunder and colonize. Thus your assertion that she's a white savior is at odds with your assertion that she isn't an imperialist, for fundamentally white saviorism is the epistemological arm of western imperialism.

"There are no good rulers" is not GRRM's thesis––if it was, then he'd be a hypocrite for gearing toward an ending in which the Starks regain their feudal, noble power, and absolute authority over the North (an authority that is unelected, inequitable, and has no reparations or redistribution of land for the populations that the Starks and their ancestors genocided in order to obtain their land and dominion). Which of course he is one, I don't deny that, but "ruling is hard" isn't the same as "no good rulers." With the very quote that you mention, George specifically said /Daenerys/ is his answer to Aragorn, which doesn't exactly evince the idea that George is writing Dany as a bad ruler. Dany fails in ADWD because she tries to compromise with a reactionary slaveowning elite, an action that would of course end in failure because her personal revolutionary values, and her values of her people, clash with that of the Ghiscari hegemony. Yet Dany is the only POV character who affirmatively learns and puts into practice the widest range of ruling skills and tasks. For example, she's the only one who levies taxes not at starving serfs or fleeing refugees, but at slaveowning nobles and their wealth. This clearly has significant precedent and isn't just something George wrote to condemn her as a failure (otherwise it wouldn't be unique as the only type of tax a ruling noble has levied against the ruling class).

Absolutely she ends ADWD on failure. But you're incorrect that she doesn't reject the ruling status quo in Meereen. ADWD presents a dichotomy between the dragon and the harpy (a dichotomy that was actually established at the end of ASOS). The freedmen of Meereen deplore the would-be dragon slayer, Harghaz, while the slavers hail him a hero. The slaves of Volantis believe Daenerys is Azor Ahai, that her dragons are a symbol of glory, and that the Triarchs are aligned with darkness, while the slavers of Volantis believe she is a sinner whose biggest sin is clouding the water of slavery that spans the entire world (including Westeros). The slaves want Daenerys to smash the Yunkai'i, while the slavers see Dany's dragons as monsters. The sons of the harpy are represented by a mother (the harpy is a woman)––two maternal figures going against each other, mother of dragons vs. mother of the harpy's sons. Within Daznak's Pit, the slavers sit closest to the carnage, while the serfs, servants, and slaves sit highest up. This is why the slaves are unaffected by Drogon's wrath and the slavers are the only ones burned or killed. One slave even tells Tyrion that he sat to watch the slavers get eaten because he came to see a show. It was the slavers relishing on lowborn humans being killed and dictating the terms of the violence, until Drogon arrived and the slavers became the victims of violence instead.

This culminates in Dany's own actions and thoughts in the Pit:

How is this not a rejection of the Meereenese status quo? It's a direct reclamation of her maternal identity, which she had compromised throughout ADWD:

Daenerys chains her own children, her dragons, in the very pit that the Great Masters––slaveowners––imprisoned people. She is unable to save the refugees of Astapor and has to close the city gates to them. She fails both of her maternal identities, Mother of Dragons and Mhysa, as those are interconnected, which is why the author parallels her thoughts: what kind of mother lets her children rot in darkness, and what kind of mother has no milk to feed her children? Her dragons are isolated, angry, and alone, just as her people are hungry, suffering, and poor, because her compromises with the Meereenese elite distance herself from them. In ADWD Dany IX, however, she reclaims both of her maternal identities: she is fire made flesh, one with Drogon, and mother of the slaves and people. She is not a Harpy, and she is not the mother of Meereen. Her embrace of her draconic identity is inherently connected to her rejection of the Meereenese status quo.

Before Drogon's arrival, Dany does something monumental yet subtle that signifies this:

The "floppy ears" are her Tokar, which her advisors cautioned her to wear so that she can align herself with Meereenese interests. Yet the Tokar is a slaver's garmet, a master's garment, a symbol of wealth and status. Dany donning the Tokar is a betrayal of her people, children, and values, forcing her to be a Harpy; by taking it off, running barefoot toward Drogon, she is rejecting the false peace and reclaiming her identity all in one. Where this will end up is her raining fire and blood upon the slavers of Meereen and Volantis, as she should have done instead of compromising. But she had to experience failure to understand the nuances of when to use violence, where to use violence, and how to use violence.

Indeed, the entire point of ADWD Dany X is showing her looking back:

This isn't just her running away from Meereen and seeking comfort with her son. Does she consider doing so? Yes, just as she considered running from her duty and settling down in Vaes Tolorro, back in ACOK. But while Dany thinks about how liberating it would be to live on the Dothraki Sea with drogon, eat horseflesh and live in the makeshift Dragonstone, she doesn't let herself accept the easy way out. That is why, rather than fleeing from Jhaqo's Khalasar, she stands with Drogon (as an equal) and faces the incoming Khalasar with him, which is exactly where the chapter ends.

Thus claiming that her failing in ADWD, or her being 14/15, or her being abused, naturally means that she's a bad ruler, doesn't conform to the themes of her storyline. Daenerys learns from every one of her failures. As an example, her failure to save Eroeh and the Lhazareen women is what leads her to understand that she has to conquer Astapor and execute the slaveowning nobles if she actually means to abolish slavery there. This is the next step within that process. While ASOIAF fans speak of abstract symbolism and scattered key words to support the idea that the other feudal noble POV's are "good rulers" with "good potential," Dany has concrete experience that concretely aligns with the rebuilding George wants to see in Westeros.

NEW GIRL 1.02 Kryptonite

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