CANON DAENERYS CHALLENGE || How Dany’s actions, decisions and words refute her self-deprecating thoughts (which have been conveniently taken at face value by the fandom)
i know i’m extremely guilty of character hyperfocus myself 🦑 but so many bizarre asoiaf conversations could be skipped if people (re)read other chapters than their favs.
like the amount of time people that are focused on arya & sansa discuss whether arya failed to notice she put mycah at risk by asking him to play with her, as if arya was doing something wildly out of the norm by asking mycah, a butcher’s boy, to play with her, that seem to have entirely forgotten the bran chapters in which bran, rickon, the freys (all nobles) play with palla (kennel girl), turnip (the cook’s boy), bandy and shira (joseth’s girls; joseth is the horse master), calon and tomtoo (sons of stark houshold guards) in winterfell. specifically they played games in which you get muddy, wet and dirty, where you hit and attack each other with a stick. they played violent fighting games in which several girls and several boys participated. none of the adults present, nor bran himself (sensitive, attentive bran, who is well attuned to the duties of nobility, even when he resents them) see anything amiss with that, except for bran being sad he can’t participate. there is no indication in their play that the commoners must let the nobles win, or avoid hitting them too hard, or that it is in any way inappropriate for them all to mingle so (either because of gender or status). bran’s narration also makes it clear this is a normal occurrence; they are used to playing together so.
this is the context arya & sansa come from. they could not have been prepared for joffrey’s & then the adults’ extremely, exceedingly, shockingly violent reaction to arya having played stick-fighting with mycah. this is a horrifying moment, made especially horrifying because it is the literal king and literal queen of the kingdom! that have been supervising this & the carnage that follows from it. and ned, the father of the two victimised girls, hand of the king, and (we then still think) our hero, frozen in inaction and obedience within it. like. this is what this is about, not what it tells us about arya & sansa’s respective characters that they came to be in this situation and how they handle it.
“...The Dothraki are presented as sexually brutish, disposed to both rape and sexual slavery, when they aren’t cloaked in sexual exoticism. Illyrio tells us that “the Dothraki mate like the animals in their herds…they do not understand sin or shame as we do” (AGoT, 84-5) a statement we might take for his own view except that it is offered in the context of Dothraki men openly raping dancers at a wedding (we may argue about consent and social norms here, but “grabbed a dancer by the arm and pushed her down to the ground” doesn’t sound like consent to me, AGoT, 84).
We are also told that Drogo “always took [Daenerys] from behind, Dothraki fashion [emphasis mine]” (AGoT, 191). Some khals supposedly share their wives with their bloodriders, (AGoT, 328 – and can we just note how stupid this idea is, given that this is a society where sons of khals inherit their rule patrilineally? Knowing exactly whose son the khalaka was would have been very important!); given that Drogo is apparently unconcerned that Daenerys cries during sex with him (AGoT, 191-2), one assumes this is not generally consensual either.
What makes this tricky is that there is a lot of sexual violence in A Song of Ice and Fire (actually more of it than in the show) and so a reader might argue that this is just how things are in this fictional universe. The Dothraki account for 12 of the 117 (!!) rape victims in A Song of Ice and Fire in that counting (which I’d argue is an under-count, as it omits what happens to the dancers at Daenerys’ wedding, AGoT, 84-5), about 10% of the total. This is despite the fact that the Dothraki appear (with their traditional culture) in just 11 of the 344 currently published chapters, just 3.1% of the books. Very roughly then, the Dothraki are three times as rapey as the average culture in A Song of Ice and Fire.
So while on the one hand, all of the books are shot through both with Martin’s decision to build a fictional world with lots of rape and his deeply troubling tendency to, as one writer put it, “write from the point of view of the rapist,” on the other hand, the Dothraki seem to get more of this treatment than any other culture save perhaps the Ironborn. Consequently, compared to the other cultures of Westeros and Essos, the Dothraki are disproportionately associated with rape and sexual violence; it is hard not to notice how this plays into bad old cringe inducing Hollywood stereotypes of Native Americans as a threat to white women on the frontier.
Of course the other defense that gets offered is that all of this rape is historically correct. And to be clear, that defense gets offered, because George R.R. Martin offers it. And as should surprise no one who has been keeping track of Martin’s dismal record of understanding actual historical societies, that defense is wrong. I am not going to rehearse the reasons it is wrong here, but merely note that we’ve discussed it on this blog, it has been discussed on other blogs, and by other scholars. The idea, advanced by Martin, that the truly stunning amount of rape – most of it not in the context of war – in A Song of Ice and Fire somehow reflects medieval social norms or a true vision of the past or particular cultures is to be rejected. Needless to say, it is not considered OK to just begin raping dancing women in either Great Plains Native American or Mongol cultures.
Finally, Martin’s Dothraki murder each other at an exceptionally high rate. I want to be clear here that what I am looking at are not acts of war, but rather killings in the settling of private disputes within the polity (that is, the khalasar). I have, for instance, excluded Drogo’s killing of two other khals in battle. We’ll deal with warfare in the final essay of this series. Instead, this is about the characterization that nearly all disputes within Dothraki society are settled by violence, that such violence is extremely common and consequently, the Dothraki treat life very cheaply indeed.
Again, keeping in mind that the entire Dothraki society as we see it is contained within just about 3% of the corpus of A Song of Ice and Fire, we are told: “A Dothraki wedding without at least three deaths is deemed a dull affair” (AGoT, 85), that there at a dozen murders at Daenerys’ wedding, evidently primarily over sexual access to the dancers (AGoT, 85). At Khal Drogo’s nightly campfires he sat “watching women dance and men die” (AGoT, 191), reiterating the paired activities of a Dothraki wedding – women dancing and men killing each other over sexual access to those women. Jorah kills a Dothraki who insults him for wearing armor (AGoT, 556). Jhogo kills a Dothraki for not obeying Daenerys’ order not to rape the Lhazareen women, Aggo kills another moments later for the same reason (AGoT, 558). Then the burst of murderous violence as Drogo is ailing. Quaro is killed by Qotho (AGoT, 596) before Qotho is killed by Jorah (AGoT, 597), and then Rakharo kills Haggo and Aggo kills Cohollo (AGoT, 597). Later Mago and Jhaqo rape and murder Eroeh (AGoT, 634). And of course, Drogo has Viserys murdered quite brutally (AGoT, 418). That is a lot of murder. In just the year or so that we are with the Dothraki, nearly every named male character in the khalasar murders someone else in the khalasar.
Crucially, none of those murders are treated as even so much as a breach of decorum, much less a serious crime. Instead, again and again, we see that the way the Dothraki settle disputes is that they spit insults at each other and then the weapons come out and someone ends up dead.
That this is nonsense from a historical perspective should be fairly obvious to anyone who read the previous post on subsistence systems closely. Nomadic societies (either Plains or Steppe) had extremely low population densities, but also engaged in warfare where the raw number of warriors (nearly all free adult males) was the primary determinant of security. Consistently outnumbered, often dramatically so, by their sedentary neighbors, these societies were always pressed for good warriors or just population (male or female) in general. The big tribe was the safe tribe. Consequently, adoptive or assimilative warfare was important both on the Great Plains (McGinnis, op. cit. 42-3) and on the Eurasian Steppe (Ratchnevsky, op. cit. 12-3). Good humans (especially ones who already knew how to survive as nomads) were a valuable resource not to be wasted! Moreover, raising a child to adulthood represented a substantial investment in resources in a subsistence system that always teetered on the edge of failure; throwing away that investment in a dispute would mean wasting all of those scarce resources. In short, nomadic societies could not afford the insanely high rates of internal violence and murder we see with the Dothraki.
That is not to say nomadic life was safe – there was (as we’ll get to next time) quite a lot of inter-nomadic warfare between different ethnic and tribal groupings. But within those groupings, it will surprise no one to learn that murder was frowned upon (and by ‘frowned upon’ I mean ‘punished harshly’). By way of example, Temujin (who would later become Chinggis Khan) might be expected, given his rise to power, to have been involved in at least his share of of murders if not more. But while he brought about the deaths of many people in war, Temujin seems to have only ever murdered once, when he killed his half-brother Bekhter over a theft. The result? Temujin and his other brother, Jochi-kasar were condemned as murderers by their mother and the episode may have led to Temujin’s captivity with the Tayichi’ut. In any event, the affair was sufficiently shameful for Chinggis that it was concealed in the official histories and only described – with some face-saving obfuscation – in the Secret History (Ratchnevsky, op. cit. 23-7). Temujin’s later ally Toghrul had also killed a brother in a power-struggle and been exiled for it by his uncle and which remained a stain on his honor subsequently (Ratchnevsky, op. cit. 32). Murder was hardly an approved of thing, because of course it wasn’t, because these are humans and humans don’t like murderers as a general matter!
But this characterization goes beyond just the legal matter of “can you just murder people in this society” to a question of how disputes are resolved. Among both Steppe nomads and Great Plains Native Americans, there were systems for resolving disputes without violence. The Sioux had ‘shirt-wearers’ whose job was, among other things, to resolve disputes between family units. In Mongol society, restitution for a slight or crime could be made with a fine (Ratchnevsky, op. cit. 45) or resolved through the intervention of the khan or other tribal leaders. And – as discussed – both Mongol and Great Plains native American society have lots of councils and kurultais and peace meetings and other ways of diffusing conflict by talking in deliberative gatherings. Again, that is not to say that there was no violence, only that these societies were very interested in controlling the violence and channeling it outwards against external enemies in war.”
- Bret Devereaux, “That Dothraki Horde, Part III: Horse Fiddles.”
Some of these characters like to fight with weapons, some like to fight with brains, some like to fight with both, some like music, some yearn for romance, some like luxurious clothes, some prefer practical clothing. Some of these characters are fierce. Some are nurturing, some are hard. Some of these characters are quiet. Some are a bit of both. Some of these characters are proud, some are humble. Some are arrogant. Some are modest. Some change depending on their circumstances.
Some of these things I have just described them as are considered ‘feminine things’, others are considered ‘masculine’. And yet they are part of their characters regardless of their gender. All of them possess traits that are considered ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’. Male and female characters have preferences and attributes that span both the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. How can these traits therefore be male masculine traits or female feminine traits if male and female characters all possess them in abundance, regardless of gender?
Sam is a man. He is not good at fighting. Jaime is a man. He is very good. Sansa is a woman. She is not good at fighting. Brienne is a woman. Brienne is very good at fighting. Sam is a man, he likes wearing fine clothes that he can dance in. Arya is a girl, she dislikes wearing fine clothes that she cannot play or explore in. Tyrion and Jaime are men who like to dress well so their clothes reflect their rank. Sansa is a woman who likes to dress well so her clothes reflect her rank. Jaime is a man, he is a charismatic and brave commander. Daenerys is a woman, she is a charismatic and brave commander.
All of them have aspirations in the public sphere dominated by men, politics and warfare and social movements, and all of them have aspirations in the domestic sphere that is considered the realm of women, home and family and romance and love. Happiness and fulfilment in these characters come from having both these desires filled.
The characters possess these traits because of their upbringing, their experiences, their tastes, their strengths and their weaknesses. The only time gender comes into it is when other people pass judgement as to how they fit into their prescribed gender roles. Some fit in, some do not. Some conform to what is expected to them, and all internalise these teachings somewhat. But we look into all of their minds and we see that at their core what their passions and personalities are. And none of these fit into a box of ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’.
“Vengeance.” His voice was soft, as if he were afraid that someone might be listening. “Justice.” Prince Doran pressed the onyx dragon into her palm with his swollen, gouty fingers, and whispered. “Fire and blood.”
So when Daenerys, the child bride/sex slave who has just turned 14, didn’t manage to completely abolish the slavery practices in her Khalasar, yet IMMEDIATELY stood up to her Khal and attempted to mitigate the harm that was being perpetrated, she is a slaver. But then later on in her arc, when she has the power and the means and tries to abolish slavery completely, she is a tyrant… Something is not making sense here lol.
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
ellievsbear
kianamaiart
pixelskylines
areudirty
yousharknotpass
germansingergirl
