#my discourse

[cheesyradfem]

Genderists are really out there blaming “The Cis” on the exaggerated gender roles of the last 10 or so years as if it has nothing to do with them

[cheesyradfem]

”You have a narrow view of womanhood” I have a broad view of womanhood, actually (one that doesn’t rely on stereotypes). I just have the courage to tell men “no.”

[diamondperfumes]

Daenerys should forgive Jaime for killing her father. Daenerys should forgive Ned Stark for being best friends with Robert Baratheon. Daenerys should realize that Ned Stark's children aren't to blame for Ned Stark's actions. Daenerys should sacrifice herself for Westerosi, white humanity. Daenerys should take care of the Starklings. Daenerys should give up her noble title. Daenerys should bodily protect the children she meets in Westeros. Daenerys should renounce her family. Daenerys should legitimize Gendry. Daenerys should name Tyrion Lord of Casterly Rock. Daenerys should learn to appreciate the North and its people. Not a single theory or framework where other characters forgive Daenerys, or give her something, or sacrifice something for her, however.

[diamondperfumes]

Talking about how morally gray and morally complex the ASOIAF narrative is meaningless when people hold Daenerys to a stringent, modern, social justice framework. At this point, not even moral grayness is afforded to Dany; she's singled out and isolated as the worst person in the books for a variety of pretentious reasons. And even the reasons for her being allegedly "morally gray" often have to do with her encountering challenges in making change, or her being ruthless toward those who've hurt and killed her loved ones, rather than innate selfishness or desire for glory.

[diamondperfumes]

Why is Daenerys the only noble/monarch expected to abdicate feudal noble/monarchic title? What does her abdication solve that the rest of the other nobility's abdications wouldn't? ASOIAF is often routinely praised for being a human fantasy story, so saying that "she's the only one with dragons" isn't a good excuse, particularly because even prior to the establishment of the Valyrian freehold, dragons roamed all over the world. What aspects of oppression that George is problematizing would Dany, and only Dany, abdicating, fix?

[diamondperfumes]

I will be debunking this post about Skahaz being the Harpy.

Just as Daenerys is ruminating on equally implausible answers, the author introduces a wolf, unseen and far away but present enough to interrupt her thoughts. It is a deliberately jarring, almost incongruous moment: Daenerys certainly never encounters this wolf, and the threat of a lupine predator only briefly reenters her mind once more in the chapter. The story jumps from Daenerys' musings to the wolf's howling with a sharp immediacy, juxtaposing the theoretical considerations of a clearly political plot and the dangerous ambiance of the Dothraki Sea without any apparent justification for doing so. Yet I think the author includes the howling wolf in this moment specifically to identify the person Daenerys could not - that is, the individual actually responsible for the poisoning at Daznak's Pit. After all, the chapter immediately preceding "Daenerys X" is "The Queen's Hand" - a chapter which features none other than Skahaz mo Kandaq in a "new" Brazen Beasts mask, "a wolf's head with lolling tongue". If Skahaz has not yet openly taken credit for the poisoning - instead cleverly using the naturally suspicious Barristan to frame Hizdahr for the crime and thus bring down his, Skahaz's, great political enemy - the Shavepate has slyly hinted as much (andindeed by using masks): when Barristan and Skahaz enter the Great Pyramid to depose Hizdahr, Skahaz has his Brazen Beasts wear locust masks, and even tells Barristan that he "ha[s] more locusts if [Barristan] need[s] them". Now, in "Daenerys X", the story allows Skahaz the same sort of subtle boasting: narratively transformed into the natural equivalent of his bronze disguise, Skahaz presents himself as the true poisoner, the solution Daenerys herself could not reach. If we do in fact get an admission from Skahaz on this point - and I would not be entirely surprised if he said so in the moments before he also kills Barristan Selmy - then we can look to this moment for the author's clue to that revelation[.]

I agree with the introduction of the wolf being a tie into her political plot, but the parallel is with Jon Snow being betrayed, just as Dany was betrayed by someone she trusted. Jon Snow is killed for breaking his Night's Watch vows, upon declaring war to save his sister. Dany is betrayed by the Harpy, a figure she gives weighty political authority to during her rule in Meereen. The Harpy is a key figure on her Court.

The wolf's howling makes Dany feel "sad and lonely." Not angry or hurt, but sad and lonely. Yes, Skahaz wears a wolf mask in ADWD Chapter 70, but Jon Snow dies in ADWD Chapter 69, around the same time that ADWD Chapter 71 is taking place. There is a tonal shift from Dany ruminating on who may have betrayed her, to Dany empathizing with the wolf's loneliness. How the wolf's howl makes her feel is key to interpreting the passage.

Dany falls asleep after she hears the wolf howl. To reinforce the connection to Jon Snow/the politics at the Wall, George includes this passage when she wakes up:

“It turned out that their anthill was on the other side of her wall. She wondered how the ants had managed to climb over it and find her. To them these tumbledown stones must loom as huge as the Wall of Westeros. The biggest wall in all the world, her brother Viserys used to say, as proud as if he’d built it himself."

Ants are crawling all over Dany when she wakes up, and she compares their perception of her makeshift Dragonstone to how people must see the Wall of Westeros, the biggest wall in the world. This is a very deliberate analogy for George to make. He could have used any comparison, but he chose to analogize the ants crawling on the makeshift Dragonstone to the people on the Wall, right after a night where Dany has dreams of starlight and Quaithe, when she falls asleep hearing a lonely wolf's howl.

Skahaz's Brazen Beasts wearing locust masks is a deliberate anti-parallel to the Harpy using locusts to poison Dany. The Harpy is trying to take Dany down, and Skahaz is trying to take Hizdahr down. However, Skahaz would not wear locust masks to hint to Barristan that he's the real poisoner, because it would only make Barristan suspicious of him. The irony is in freedmen wearing the faces of the very insects that slavers devour as a delicacy, and that they attempted to use to poison Dany. It's a way of mocking the slaver hegemony. While Skahaz has political reasons to have Hizdahr arrested, he gains nothing from poisoning Dany. In the aftermath of Dany's flight, Skahaz is deposed and Hizdahr, as king, holds all the power, and is able to chip away at everything Dany achieved as Queen of Meereen. If Skahaz's goal is to get rid of Hizdahr, poisoning Dany, which leaves a vacuum in her absence that strengthens Hizdahr, does not service him at all, especially because Dany is the one who gave him power.

Moreover, Barristan in that very chapter realizes that the poisoner is not Hizdahr:

“In return he gave her peace. Do not cast it away, ser, I beg you. Peace is the pearl beyond price. Hizdahr is of Loraq. Never would he soil his hands with poison. He is innocent.” “How can you be certain?” Unless you know the poisoner.

Barristan understands that the person who poisoned the locusts––the person who coerced Hizdahr's confectioner by kidnapping his daughter, the person who butchered his daughter into nine pieces when he failed to poison Dany––is the same person who so confidently guarantees that Hizdahr would never poison Dany, who engineered Hizdahr's marriage to Dany, the one whom neither Dany nor Barristan suspected of poisoning the locusts or being the Harpy.

Hizdahr is not the poisoner or the Harpy, but he is a son of the Harpy.

The person who benefits most from Dany being poisoned is the Harpy. Skahaz and Hizdahr are both narratively framed as potential poisoners. Attention is drawn as far away from the real Harpy as possible in adjudicating who the real poisoner is. Hizdahr, to gain a throne and roll back Dany's antislavery accomplishments. Skahaz, to have Hizdahr framed for the crime and removed from power. Both are presented as viable political actors with realistic motivations for wanting to poison Dany––how did Hizdahr truly secure the peace? how did Skahaz know all the details about the confectioner?––while the Harpy herself is distanced from the act, from the means of the act, and from the motivation for the act.

Barristan certainly will die defending Dany from the Harpy. But it will not be a death in the shadows. It will occur in the moment where action is taking place, where Barristan is bodily defending Dany:

“The scarab unfolded with a hiss. Dany caught a glimpse of a malign black face, almost human, and an arched tail dripping venom … and then the box flew from her hand in pieces, turning end over end. Sudden pain twisted her fingers. As she cried out and clutched her hand, the brass merchant let out a shriek, a woman screamed, and suddenly the Qartheen were shouting and pushing each other aside. Ser Jorah slammed past her, and Dany stumbled to one knee. She heard the hiss again. The old man drove the butt of his staff into the ground, Aggo came riding through an eggseller’s stall and vaulted from his saddle, Jhogo’s whip cracked overhead, Ser Jorah slammed the eunuch over the head with the brass platter, sailors and whores and merchants were fleeing or shouting or both …” (ACOK Dany V) - “The old man feinted with one end of the staff, pulled it back, and whipped the other end about faster than Dany would have believed. The Titan’s Bastard staggered back into the surf, spitting blood and broken teeth from the ruin of his mouth. Whitebeard put Dany behind him. Mero slashed at his face. The old man jerked back, cat-quick. The staff thumped Mero’s ribs, sending him reeling. Arstan splashed sideways, parried a looping cut, danced away from a second, checked a third mid-swing. The moves were so fast she could hardly follow.” (ASOS Dany V)

In the fifth chapters of her ACOK and ASOS arcs, Barristan defends Dany from an assassin––the manticore and the Titan's Bastard. It will only be fitting that he finds his end defending Dany from the Harpy of Meereen, completing the pattern of threes where some symbol/figure of an antagonistic political institution (the Sorrowful Men of Qarth & Mero of Braavos, the original commander of the initially slaver-aligned sellsword company, the Second Sons) comes to murder Dany.

[diamondperfumes]

The assertions that Dany will "succumb" to her family's allegedly "evil legacy" or the "taint" in her blood require pathologizing her for being an abuse victim borne of rape and incest, buying into bioessentialist "genetics is destiny" argument, and decontextualizing most of the passages from her book arc. This post, with a song juxtaposed with out-of-context quotes from Dany's chapters, is an excellent example.

"Every child knows the Targaryens have always danced too close to madness." The only "mad" Targaryens were Rhaegel, Aerion, Aerys II, and Viserys III. If you want to stretch it, you can include Baelor, though he was more pious and fanatic than mad. Maegor was cruel but lucid. Rhaegar was not mad, despite being Aerys II's son. And the narrative has distanced Dany from Aerys II several times, because one of ASOIAF's central theses is not "you are your father's child," but "you can overcome your father."

"She could not look behind her, must not look behind her" is not Dany "refusing to look at her family's history." This is taken from her fever dreams in AGOT Dany IX, and what she can't look back at is an icy breath that would cause her a "death worse than death, howling forever alone in the darkness." It's the first time Dany sees the Others in her dreams, and she is the only other character in AGOT to dream of them, the other character being Bran.

"I made a horror just as great, but surely they deserved it. Harsh justice is still justice." This is Dany feeling guilty for crucifying 163 slavers. How is that a sign of madness or refusal to confront her family legacy? It's actually a sign that Dany has empathy even for the worst of humanity, even for her enemies. Also, crucifying slavers isn't evil. It's odd that the same fandom that calls Dany a slaver, slave trader, slave profiteer, and slavery enabler, also calls her a tyrant or mad for crucifying slavers. What is she supposed to do with slavers? What is the "proper" way to handle them?

The mother of monsters passage is more proof that Dany is introspective and self-critical. In children's media, shounen anime, and Marvel movies, a villain may unironically call themselves a monster, but in more complicated, nuanced, adult literature, characters who call themselves monsters usually aren't bad people. They're the self-deprecating, humble, and thoughtful characters who are reflecting on their flaws and mistakes. Again, if Dany is someone who refuses to think about the dark side of her family, she would not agonize over the consequences of using her power. Monstrosity is associated with being stigmatized, ostracized, and alienated by hegemonic forces in society, and those characters who identify with monstrosity often have something to reveal about the violence of the status quo and the normalization of oppression.

George is deconstructing the coin quote, not reinforcing it. Madness/greatness, ice/fire, east/west, north/south, sun/moon, pain/pleasure, love/hate, are all dichotomies in the novel that George sets out to show can unite in some way. As I said, most Targaryens were not "mad," and I find it odd that for a fandom as progressive as it frames itself to be, the ableist stereotyping of "foreign otherized race from the East is genetically predisposed toward madness" isn't something fans problematize more.

Dany longing for the house with the red door and wanting to rest, laugh, plant trees and see them grow, are also seen as signs of madness because of her statelessness and homelessness. If a teenage girl has been raped and abused, and is herself a product of rape and abuse, and comes from an exotic Eastern family, then apparently her longing for home is actually a bomb waiting to detonate inside her, because she's unfit to belong anywhere. It's shocking that this mentality is seen as media literate or subversive.

"Dragons plant no trees" has already been disproven by Dany's arc itself. Dany reclaims fire and blood by the end of ADWD because she realizes the peace in Meereen is false (which it is). Jon Snow goes from wanting to hire glassblowing apprentices to plant crops in greenhouses to grow food, to abandoning his vows and declaring war to save his sister, and then dies. Why is that not seen as a sign of "succumbing to madness?" The acts are narratively paralleled. Perhaps––and this may be crazy, but stay with me––the thesis of FeastDance is that you cannot grow, build, and heal a nation in soil watered with blood. No such rebuilding or regrowing is possible unless and until real change occurs, and for real change to happen, the corrupt old guard cannot stay alive.

Certainly TWOW will be a darker book for every viewpoint character, but it's interesting to see how a combination of pathologizing Dany for her gender, ethnicity, genes/biology, trauma, and stateless/rootless/homeless status as an exile/diaspora, with decontextualizing her chapters, quotes, and passages, and an overall misunderstanding of the themes of ASOIAF, to single Dany out as a "dark" character who won't be able to "outrun" her "negative family history."

[diamondperfumes]

Daenerys was not "gifted" her dragons. She was gifted three petrified eggs. If she did not walk into a funeral pyre with her eyes open, and nothing but bravery and resolution in her heart, the eggs would not have hatched. She paid the magical price––only death pays for life––to hatch her eggs. As a character who is routinely criticized for burning Mirri alive as part of the ritual, at least be precise about how Dany acquired her dragons. She didn't get them for free or stumble upon them.