racefortheironthrone:
Nothing can change the fact that Dany is intended as a white beauty, educated to regard Westeros as her homeland and Westerosi values as her own. This is a story about a white person who goes into a not-white not-western world with higher ideals and values than everyone she finds therein. No matter how many times a character from Essos accuses her of being a “barbarian”, that almost always comes off as highly ironic when followed by examples of creative cruelty on the behalf of those accusers.
Daenerys is surrounded by lands and food and wine and costumes and cultures that are mostly only allowed to be exotic or gross, or both. This isn’t dependant on the actions she takes in-narrative or of the decisions she makes. GRRM makes it so that most independent decisions taken by the people she has been conquering/freeing end up badly for themselves… or well, but in a way that is, well, barbaric. Even if she doesn’t manage to save anyone, her narrative is a perfect example of a white savior narrative. It isn’t an attack on the character, far from it, but it is the way her story has been/is being written.
Is she though? Dany’s a Targaryen of the Blood of Old Valyria – and the Targaryens used that status to set themselves up as quasi-divine in Westeros. Hence why she’s taught Valyrian from such an early age, to hammer home the point that she’s descended from a higher, Essosi, civilization.
She’s ethnically Essosi, her “white beauty” would be completely ordinary if you plonk her down on a random street in Lys, she has lived her whole life in Essos, she speaks Valyrian the common tongue of Essos – how is she not Essosi?
In addition to crocordile’s bolded point above, some further examples of the way Dany is written as Westerosi/civilized as opposed to the Essosi:
1. Her fear and repulsion of the Dothraki in the first chapters of AGOT. If the Dothraki regularly participate in the local economy and maintain second homes there, then why are their cultural practices so outlandish and intimidating to her? (let’s assume for a moment that the Dothraki are more like the Mongols than they appear in the text)
2. In ADWD Dany VII, Dany is receiving reports about the various on-going crises in Meereen and discussing how to deal with them with the Green Grace. It’s all so confusing and insurmountable, alas, poor Harzoos. Quentyn’s arrival is announced, she kicks out all the Meereenese, and then she settles in for a lucid and insightful political discussion with the Dornishmen. It makes no sense for her to be more comfortable gossiping with the Westerosi strangers than with one of her primary local advisors — unless she has some affinity for Quentyn and his party that she doesn’t share with the Meereenese.
3. Dany often is (or reports that she is) the only person observing a group of Essosi committing atrocities who is willing to curtail the violence. Notable examples include the raid on the Lhazareen town in AGOT Dany VII, and the death matches in Daznak’s Pit in ADWD Dany IX.
4. Dany hears the discourse and proper names of the Dothraki, the Lhazareen, and the Masters of Slaver’s Bay, as charged with elaborate metaphor (my sun-and-stars), or unpleasantly buzzing and consonantal (“Kraznys mo Naklos”), or patently unctuous (XXD’s constant encomiums to her beauty). Westerosi people, even when they are lying and manipulating, generally speak in plain language, with traditional word order and grammar, including outliers like old Liddle, the Ironborn raiders, and the Wildlings. (Notable exceptions include outsiders such as the Stone Age mountain clans of the Vale, and Melisandre)
With all of these otherizing techniques that encourage the reader to identify with Dany, and to identify Dany with her plain-speaking, unspicy-food-eating, and properly-dressed Westerosi people, noting that Lys produces white slaves is totally missing the point.
1. Dothraki isn’t the same thing as Essosi – as to why they’re strange ways, it has a lot to do with the fact that the Dothraki are culturally multi-literate; they act and dress one way in the Free Cities and another way out on the plain. Dany misses this because she’s an isolated thirteen-year old who’s undergoing culture shock. However, I don’t think we can take Dany II in isolation from the rest of the assimilation narrative she goes through.
2. I think this misinterprets the scene. Dany’s not confused by Meereenese culture and needing to communicate with Westerosi – Quentyn asks her to clear the court and she agrees. But I wouldn’t call her conversation with them to be free from awkwardness at all.
3. Dany also often carries out violence. The revolt in Astapor, her surprise attack at Yunkai, summary judgement in Meereen.
4. Plain speech? Yeah, because the people in King’s Landing aren’t fond of abstruse metaphors, circumlocution, double-talk, innuendo, and flowery praise…
What’s missing the point is ignoring the text. Essos is technologically and economically more advanced than Westeros, Essos is more politically and culturally sophisticated than Westeros, Essos has colonized Westeros repeatedly and never vice-versa. Assuming that Westeros is hegemonic and Essos is the colonized Other is Orientalist.
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