Dany’s an interesting conqueror because she’s a direct descendant of the original conquerors who created the slave trade. It’s a rich dramatic parallel that the tools that made slavery possible in the first place—the violent power of the dragons—end up being what dismantle the power structures in the first place.
But on a larger note, of course it leaves a bad taste in anyone’s mouth. Horrific power structures like slavery only end by dismantling every embedded power structure in a society, and that means wholescale violence across the board, physical, political, economical, etc. It’s the Snowpiercer model—you can’t simply claim power for yourselves and think it will turn out better than before; you have to blow up the train.
What Dany has done is return power to the populace, even in instances she didn’t want to—allowing freed slaves to sell themselves again, opening the gladiatorial battles again, etc. In every situation where her personal morality conflicts with her political morality, she resisted but ultimately relented to the wishes of her people (which in my mind is the direct opposite of the white savior model—as much as she wants to impress upon her people her own personal values, she is killing the girl inside of her who would have done that).
I guess my point is this—the problematic thing about ending slavery by violence is that the end of slavery will always be violent in one way or another. To misappropriate and misapply a Flannery O’Connor quote—what you need is change, and change is violent. Always. The end of American slavery was violent, horrifically so, and not only within the context of the Civil War. The end of American slavery collapsed the Southern economy, and that would have been the case even if the Civil War were never fought. Not to be too post-colonial about the whole matter, but power is violence is structure, and changing any of it comes with embedded violence. And the beautiful, horrific thing about Dany’s narrative is that it can’t shy away from that—in doing what I still consider to be the good thing, Dany creates conditions for violence of a scale unknown and unimaginable anywhere else in the world. And that’s, essentially, part of ASOIAF’s moral thesis—that the consequences of a good action don’t make the action wrong.
Also from float-freely-forever :
I feel Dany is justified, but much of it reminds me of the way “wrong” practices were forcefully eliminated in colonised countries. Here in L.A. even with all the “advances” Spain brought with them, they way they forcefully established their traditions and erased ours was real shitty. Dany executed the masters who were the powerful in Slaver’s Bay. Spanish slained the Incas, and the heads of most indigenous population. It’s not a=b but tiny aspects of it are similar.Tho I do agree that the ethnic part of it is completely out of the question. Dany is not a racist, she does not have a white saviour complex, etc. She does not think them inferior and she does not think Westeros superior for not having slavery. I think branding Dany as an imperialist is completely wrong. She has problematic aspects. BUT ALL of GRRM characters do, because people are not divided in good and bad people and she’s a girl really making very difficult decisions.
I completely agree with that. Conquering is almost never a good thing for the conquered culture, because it fundamentally is the imposition of an outsider perspective that doesn’t understand what’s going on and doesn’t have the necessary capacity for circumspection. Replacing or eradicating a bad practice is such a tricky affair, even when done internally (sad sighs at American domestic policy tbqh). And Dany grapples with that a lot (as she should). But, as you say, there’s a difference between an outsider instigating change and an “insider” doing the same. And the justifications for the change are really well intentioned in Dany’s part. She also shows a desire to assimilate herself to Meereenese culture as best she can—at least, within what she deems “reason”. But that’s not the same as if someone of Ghiscari Blood led a slave rebellion and sought to change things from the inside.
(This is def me having my obsessive filter, but I’d be really curious to see a discussion of Dany’s experience in Meereen through a lens that involves the American Civil War—a slave society whose economic, cultural, even religious to some extent foundations are based on slavery and the slave trade, and then going through the shit that happens with the compromises of the Reconstruction, where everyone compromised, work was left undone, and then it ended because the old political elite still had too much power. Also the concept of an outside force coming in and instigating a change, without leaving a new infrastructure in place, because yes, American, but the North-South cultural dichotomy was a huuuge thing (and still is in different ways.)
But regardless of that wonky comparison, I guess my filter is this: I do not believe that a slave society can morph to exist into something new that’s still got remnants of its old self. Like if you’re going to eradicate slavery, you’re not just freeing the slaves—you have to make it culturally sound through economics, through education, through religion, through every single cultural element, because otherwise you just make new forms of oppression. Even if the Ghiscari cities had been able to create some level of emancipation on their own, it would have been at the destruction of many historical aspects of cultural pride. It would have had to be. Hands down. So yes, Dany’s an outsider. But she’s not to my mind doing anything that would not have needed to be done to make a free society out of a slave society. And that’s a hard truth. But it is one. And especially if, in her absence/post-departure, people can use her as a symbol to keep pressing change on their own, I feel uncomfortable knocking that on a number of levels, for all it’s got a lot of elements that leave a weird taste in my mouth. And I guess at this point that’s the dream situation, right? Like with Dany gone the changes that she made to destroy oppression aren’t for nothing and people are able to keep pushing forward without losing all of their cultural heritage.)
There’s a part of me that almost wishes she’d stay in Meereen—not because of a lot of the shitty reasons thrown around—but because I’d be fascinated to see how she would engage with being a long-term conqueror, and comparing her rule with someone like Aegon I’s (who like…changed a lot of Westerosi structure, but also didn’t, you know)? I’d just be fascinated to read that story as well. (Though obvi I want the other one more.)
I see the problems of Dany’s time in Meereen as really being Doylist ones, and that’s not an original perspective.
The problem is that GRRM has written this story so that there’s no way for Dany to win. He’s engineered the narrative so that no acceptable resolution is possible. As another meta writer noted, “GRRM deconstructs every notion of success….He doesn’t reward his heroes for passing tests; he just punishes them for failing.”
Almost every mechanism in Meereen unfolds so that Dany has to stay true to her values and lose, or put aside her values participate in what he wants us to see as unforgivable brutality: The Sons of the Harpy insurgency, the child hostages, the lack of other natural resources, the Shavepate’s mechanizations, Selmy’s gullibility, the Pale Mare, the slaves who “want” to return to their masters under dubious contracts (I believe I remember that from the books as well but correct me if I’m wrong), and last but not the least the fact that her dragons are uncontrollable at this point. And the entire way that’s framed seems to be is that Dany’s inner nature, what she desires as a “dragon” and Targaryen is to fight: to wage war and to just burn her enemies to the ground and no matter how much she resists it she’ll eventually go down that path.
Does GRRM want us to think that slave masters like the ones here in the U.S should be allowed to live and continue when he has Dany reject Daario’s “Red Wedding Redux” idea?
I find this all very perplexing because it feels nihilistic, whereas the Stark and Lannister narratives are fundamentally not nihilistic.
Just want to throw my two cents into this fascinating debate.
1. Culture. There is some really, really weird cultural discourse going on here that I think ignores the fact that that, for the most part, the slaves of Astapor, Meereen, and Yunkai are not part of the “oppressed culture” in the same way that the Masters are. Slavery was not their tradition, it was imposed on them by violence and throughout ASOS and ADWD we see slaves creating their own culture and polity – the Unsullied taking new names, the formation of the Mother’s Men, Free Brothers, and Stalwart Shields, the Shavepate cultural movement that embraces both ex-slaves and ex-Masters. Yes, there’s some elements of the old culture in there, but there’s no such thing as a cultural revolution that doesn’t bring some of the old into the new. After the Haitian Revolution, the people of Haiti were still speaking French.
2. Violence. As I mention in the essay I linked, we cannot ignore that the previous status quo in Slaver’s Bay and the peace deal with Yunkai are violent. So we have to weigh the violence against the slave with the violence against the master – and I don’t think we can weight those equally. In fact, I would argue this is the main mistake Dany makes that makes defeat inevitable.
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