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Is Dany a White Savior?


Corvo the Crow
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1 hour ago, Craving Peaches said:

Okay, thank you for clarifying, and sorry if I got a bit cross. I have seen a worrying number of people on the internet genuinely buying into the 'Mission to Civilise' argument as justification for all sorts of atrocities.

I mean, that is the legitimate criticism you can have for genuine 'white savior' narratives - that it paints certain peoples as needing saving from higher cultured people. Insofar as they go hand in hand with the racist colonizer agenda they are certainly deeply problematic.

But if you take something like, say, 'Dances With the Wolves' then the only point you can criticize there is that Kevin Costner's character is interested in peoples/cultures that are not his own. It isn't his fault that he is a white dude from the US, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to broaden your horizon and learning things about other people and perhaps even joining them to the point that you feel comfortable with.

On a meta-level one can criticize that there are too many stories of that sort compared to stories about Indian/indigenous peoples from their point of view. But this doesn't mean stories like that are inherently bad or problematic.

Edited by Lord Varys
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21 minutes ago, Corvo the Crow said:

I very much doubt that man means male here, it is probably used as human. She doesn't say harm no boy, she says harm no child, no gender at work here.

I do think it means no girls due to in-world prejudice that women can't fight, were subservient to the husband etc. plus there are women left in Astapor.

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38 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

 

Dany is pretty much like a white or black person living in the pre-civil war south of the US coming to the conclusion that slavery sucks on the basis of personal experience. In a sense, Dany even herself was bought and sold like a slave by Khal Drogo.

The notion that, say, only black slaves do have a right to end black slavery in the US - or that only slaves can and should fight against slavery - is ludicrous. Everybody can and should come to the conclusion that (racialized) slavery is a monstrous practice and has to go.

 

Whenever this issue comes up, it's always worth reading what slaves themselves said about the institution, and those who fought to end it.

So, Frederick Douglass on John Brown:

"His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun. Mine was bounded by time. His stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for the slave."

Not, "he was a white saviour who had no business meddling in stuff he didn't understand."

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4 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Whenever this issue comes up, it's always worth reading what slaves themselves said about the institution, and those who fought to end it.

So, Frederick Douglass on John Brown:

If I could like this post 100 times I would.  What the experience of the enslaved people, who were reduced being treated as less than animals and the extreme dehumanization brought upon them by being considered property is truly important.  

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1 minute ago, LongRider said:

If I could like this post 100 times I would.  What the experience of the enslaved people, who were reduced being treated as less than animals and the extreme dehumanization brought upon them by being considered property is truly important.  

Thank you.

The arguments that are made against Daenerys' anti-slavery campaign, are all (in-universe and out of universe) made from the viewpoint of the slave owner, and those pampered pets like Xaro's "friend", who make their living from selling luxuries to slave owners, or working for them as overseers, accountants, etc.

I mean, there are plenty of arguments to be made against the mistakes that Daenerys made (mostly, being far to lenient and naive in her treatment of slavers) , but no argument can be made that freeing people is morally wrong.

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4 hours ago, SeanF said:

Whenever this issue comes up, it's always worth reading what slaves themselves said about the institution, and those who fought to end it.

So, Frederick Douglass on John Brown:

"His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun. Mine was bounded by time. His stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for the slave."

Not, "he was a white saviour who had no business meddling in stuff he didn't understand."

This reminds me of this quote :

 

"The best calumnies are spiced with truth," suggested Qavo, "but the girl's true sin cannot be denied. This arrogant child has taken it upon herself to smash the slave trade, but that traffic was never confined to Slaver's Bay. It was part of the sea of trade that spanned the world, and the dragon queen has clouded the water. Behind the Black Wall, lords of ancient blood sleep poorly, listening as their kitchen slaves sharpen their long knives. Slaves grow our food, clean our streets, teach our young. They guard our walls, row our galleys, fight our battles. And now when they look east, they see this young queen shining from afar, this breaker of chains. The Old Blood cannot suffer that. Poor men hate her too. Even the vilest beggar stands higher than a slave. This dragon queen would rob him of that consolation." (ADWD, Tyrion VI)

Also, Martin makes plenty references to what being peaceful with slavers means

 

"The Good Master Kraznys asks, are they not magnificent?" The girl spoke the Common Tongue well, for one who had never been to Westeros. No older than ten, she had the round flat face, dusky skin, and golden eyes of Naath. The Peaceful People, her folk were called. All agreed that they made the best slaves. (ASOS, Daenerys II)

 

"If it please you, Yurkhaz will be pleased to give us the singers, I do not doubt," her noble husband said. "A gift to seal our peace, an ornament to our court."
He will give us these castrati, Dany thought, and then he will march home and make some more. The world is full of boys. (ADWD, Daenerys VIII)

 

Edited by Oana_Mika
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Thinking a little more about things there, it strikes one as remarkable evident that Westeros/the Westerosi are deliberately portrayed by the author as a backwater/barbaric place. Most of the original rites and customs of the Westerosi are horrible (like wife-stealing and the First Night), with thralldom and salt-wives effectively being a more personal (that is, less developed) form of slavery.

Culturally, Westeros was able to produce a not-so-bad martial culture ... and they know how to build castles. But that's it. They have nothing to offer in the fields of progressive political or social philosophy, and all modern(istic) elements that find their way into Westerosi culture or practice come from the east - as do the peoples themselves who are all immigrants from Essos (possibly even the giants and the Children).

This is best shown with the Rhoynish influence in Dorne but we also see this with the effect Andal culture had on the First Men kingdoms. The one thing important about the First Men era is not any cultural stuff they may have come up with but actual knowledge about the (distant) past the Andals, who came later, had no firsthand access to.

It also seems as if currency and coins as well as the banking business are things the Westerosi picked up from the people of Essos.

High culture and the birth of civilization is also unanimously looked for and perceived as coming from Essos. The Westerosi don't view themselves as the pinnacle of civilization. And that we cannot understand them as 'white' in a political sense is because they never actually tried to colonize anyone outside Westeros.

In that sense, I'd say that one cannot view Daenerys as 'white' because she is Westerosi ... and since her family has Essosi roots and she herself actually grew up in Essos rather than Westeros it is also quite tough to view her and House Targaryen as 'Westerosi'. This would be different if she had grown up in Westeros.

Dany's take on both the Ghiscari cities as well as the Free Cities would not be one of cultural imperialism or an outsider's view on things since she actually is very much a part of those worlds. Hell, the simple fact that the Ghiscari and the Valyrians warred for centuries in ages past makes it clear that this kind of conflict is part of the greater framework of that region - kind of like wars between France and Germany or England and France were common throughout much of the history of those places.

Due to the fact that Ghiscar was eventually completely overtaken by Valyrian culture they are now part of the same larger cultural sphere.

The Dothraki are kind of a different animal ... but Dany is basically made a part of their culture and plays with a title and a role forced upon her by the Dothraki themselves. We have yet to see how they interact again when we finally see Dany return to Vaes Dothrak ... but my gut feeling is that we are more going to see a Paul Atreides parallel there - which means an outsider is kind of pushed into a particular role which is an integrated part of Dothraki culture (that Paul is a 'white savior' is an equally faulty interpretation of Dune). If Dany becomes the Stallion Who Mounts the World she will play a Dothraki role, will fulfill a Dothraki prophecy. She will not force her own view of herself on the Dothraki, nor is she going to force the Dothraki to view her the way she wants to be seen. Of course, such a role should give her tremendous political power ... but if she is able to use that power it will not because of, well, magic or plot convenience but because Dothraki culture and Dothraki society enable her - force her, even - to be their absolute ruler.

That is part of what being a religious savior figure is all about.

Edited by Lord Varys
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So right off the bat, the concept of Dany being a white savior is confusing. In their world? Where the slaves of the ghiscsri are multi cultural and white as in caucasian which won't make any sense? Or in our world where neo fascists will be prone to jerk off to the story of Dany? Because GRRM makes it painstakingly clear, Dany is not a racist supremacist.

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

The Dothraki are kind of a different animal ... but Dany is basically made a part of their culture and plays with a title and a role forced upon her by the Dothraki themselves. We have yet to see how they interact again when we finally see Dany return to Vaes Dothrak ... but my gut feeling is that we are more going to see a Paul Atreides parallel there - which means an outsider is kind of pushed into a particular role which is an integrated part of Dothraki culture (that Paul is a 'white savior' is an equally faulty interpretation of Dune). If Dany becomes the Stallion Who Mounts the World she will play a Dothraki role, will fulfill a Dothraki prophecy. She will not force her own view of herself on the Dothraki, nor is she going to force the Dothraki to view her the way she wants to be seen.

The Dothraki are a different animal. Where Dany is disrupting the culture of mass slavery and something about a harpy she's definitely going above and beyond her comfort in not fucking up their culture. By letting them gladiator fight in togas or whatever.

The Dothraki culture is over. They are sustained by slavers bay, without one the other dies. They own the sea and can continue to hunt horses or graze horses but their trade markets will shrink, no work is no good. 

I mean it is parallel with the American Indians, almost as soon as the slaves were freed the indigenous way out west started to fracture where it hurts, their wallet.

When looking at it like that Dany does draw comparison to people who were white supremacists or colonizers or imperialists or genociders, or whatever colorful word you choose to use. But I still think it's absurd to call her one

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I think there will be many people who will have a role in saving the living from the Others and their Stark servants.  Dany will be the main hero but there will be others as well.  She is already confirmed as Azor Ahai after having fulfilled all of the requirements for the role.  Bran will be the corrupted halfwood human who will support the invasion of the Others.  The ending battle will be Dany and her dragons saving the living from the corrupted Bran and his legion of White Walkers.  

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5 minutes ago, Aline de Gavrillac said:

I think there will be many people who will have a role in saving the living from the Others and their Stark servants.  Dany will be the main hero but there will be others as well.  She is already confirmed as Azor Ahai after having fulfilled all of the requirements for the role.  Bran will be the corrupted halfwood human who will support the invasion of the Others.  The ending battle will be Dany and her dragons saving the living from the corrupted Bran and his legion of White Walkers.  

I mean this isn't even on topic?

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2 hours ago, Aline de Gavrillac said:

I think there will be many people who will have a role in saving the living from the Others and their Stark servants.  Dany will be the main hero but there will be others as well.  She is already confirmed as Azor Ahai after having fulfilled all of the requirements for the role.  Bran will be the corrupted halfwood human who will support the invasion of the Others.  The ending battle will be Dany and her dragons saving the living from the corrupted Bran and his legion of White Walkers.  

Lmaoo GRRM will not so easily make Dany Azor Ahai

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4 hours ago, Aline de Gavrillac said:

I think there will be many people who will have a role in saving the living from the Others and their Stark servants.  Dany will be the main hero but there will be others as well.  She is already confirmed as Azor Ahai after having fulfilled all of the requirements for the role.  Bran will be the corrupted halfwood human who will support the invasion of the Others.  The ending battle will be Dany and her dragons saving the living from the corrupted Bran and his legion of White Walkers.  

Not only do you appear to not read the books, it also looks like you don't bother to read this topic since this post is completely off-topic and has nothing to do with what anyone else was saying. If you must spread your irrational and biased hatred of the Starks can you at least do it in a relevant thread?

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On 3/12/2023 at 3:11 AM, Alester Florent said:

I mean I think you have a point but this is a very difficult area generally.

The trope isn't really about skin colour; it's about cultural imperialism. Character A (from civilised, "correct" background, usually the same as the author's) goes to Foreign Place B and is horrified to discover that B does all sorts of things differently to A. They teach B the error of their ways, and this is good and necessary. This may involve A adopting some of the culture of B in the process but never any of the questionable parts.

The problems A has with B might be moral (human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery) or practical (they are doomed unless they listen to what A has to tell them). But the principle is the same: A is right and B is at best a noble savage awaiting enlightenment, at worst a degenerate who needs to be exterminated.

This trope is common not just because of the desire of a given writer to espouse the supremacy of their own culture, but because if you're having characters of different cultures interacting, in order for there to be a plot there needs to be some sort of clash of values and one of those value-sets is going to win. Otherwise all you have is a guidebook entry. And usually authors instinctively side with the character whose values most closely resemble their own (and their readers') so A tends to prevail over B. Now, it's common for this to be muddied somehow, so that, say, B is shown to be superior in some ways to A, and you might find that A ends up deciding to remain with B rather than return to their own people, but fundamentally the crisis of the story will be resolved by A in a way which wouldn't have happened if they weren't there. They are, for the purposes of the story, the "Saviour".

(The only real alternative, I think, is for A to accept that actually B is superior in every way and just bow to their inherent betterness. Note that when this type of story is written, it tends to be someone from culture-group B writing it, and really just represents an inversion of the standard trope template. See for instance the (bad) movie The Great Wall).

Now, the actual culture of A and B doesn't really matter and it's a pretty standard trope wherever you have one people who consider themselves the pinnacle of civilisation encountering other people who they think are more backward. A doesn't have to be white. I am not sufficiently familiar with world literature to be able to call up numerous examples, but I am certain that examples exist where A is Chinese, Persian, Indian, Arabic... and probably Mayan or Inca in various lost stories from those cultures, and so on. The reason we talk about "white saviours" though because (a) "white" is considered the dominant group in the US, and US cultural influence is pervasive, and (b) because the overwhelming majority of published stories in any format have been produced in the last 200 years when domination of world affairs and associated colonialism has been by Europeans or European successor states.

But this is fantasy, you cry! Well, yes. But that doesn't necessarily exempt it from the trope. Fantasy is often used intentionally as allegory: you don't really need any training in criticism to spot the message in a film like Avatar even though that takes place on a magic planet with blue people billions of miles away or whatever. And fantasy often takes a lot of its inspiration from the real world. Slaver's Bay specifically, and Essos in general, have been criticised for using generally orientalist tropes to depict the people living there. We get a sense of exoticism from them: they are not of our culture, but there's also a kind of specific exoticism about it. In the way that Westeros is obviously European in inspiration (and principally British at that) Slaver's Bay feels Middle Eastern and the Dothraki feel like steppe nomads. (And of course, Yi Ti feels Chinese, not that we ever go there).

This kind of thing can be present even if not intended. I don't believe, for instance, that George Lucas intended for The Phantom Menace to be racist, but it just so happened that the tropes he was drawing on to depict Watto corresponded so neatly with offensive stereotypes that what he basically gave us was a flying Shylock caricature. In the same way, I don't believe GRRM meant for Slaver's Bay (or Essos in general) to be orientalist, but it is, because what he's done is borrow a whole load of inspiration from a bunch of different middle eastern cultures (and pop-culture versions of said cultures) and mixed it up in a big pot until what comes out is not always obviously any one specific thing from those cultures but is still very obviously of those cultures.

And into that somewhat dubious setting marches Dany, our viewpoint character and protagonist, who is the whitiest whitey who ever whited, with a skin colour that matches GRRM's, and espousing values which we can unhesitatingly agree with because they're our own but which are anathema to the setting's inhabitants. And she tears down the institutions of which she disapproves of (and we cheer her on, because we disapprove of them too!) and becomes a figure of adoration and near-worship.

If this were the other way round, and a (still white, American) GRRM had written a brown-skinned Daznarys zo Tarkarzyn coming to Westeros and busting up their evil slaving cartels, there would be much less criticism on this subject - although some might feel that the intentional aversion/subversion was rather too heavy-handed. But what he's actually written, at least in the first three books of the series, is pretty textbook white-saviour stuff and in the race-hyperconscious era of the 2020s, that engenders comment.

The practical question of what can be done about it, though, is not easy to answer. There are increasing calls for writers to "stay in their lane", i.e. not write about anything outside their immediate cultures or experiences at all, because of concerns about appropriation (or straightforward offence). At the same time, lack of diversity, especially visual diversity on screen, is bemoaned even where such diversity is setting-inappropriate (see for instance, Bridgerton, and really HotD too). I don't know how one can square that circle, and I find the "stay in your lane" advice to be culturally damaging in any event (surely art is meant to be exploratory and challenging rather than confining?) It is probably impossible for an author like GRRM to win. But he could do better. I do think ADwD was a step in the right direction there from where we were in ASoS (notwithstanding that I found the Meereen plot interminable) and I would hope that when we finally leave Essos (hopefully soon in TWoW!) the problem will recede along with that setting. We'll see.

I enjoyed this post and your discussion with @SeanF.  However, I don't agree that you can really compartmentalize real life and literary "white saviour" tropes: both are intended as criticisms, whether you want to tear down a statue or call for a work to be boycotted.  It's precisely because the last time I heard the white saviour trope mentioned was in connection to calls by indigenous groups for Avatar: The Way of Water to be boycotted that I responded to this thread in the way I did.  The OP may not have been advocating censorship but this is where this leads.

The author has created Dany as an open-minded cosmopolitan, character, who moves seamlessly from culture to culture and whose empathy for the suffering of the downtrodden is repeatedly emphasised.  The idea that her actions and mindset are "problematic" because of skin colour (and therefore the author's mindset too), that she should only interact with "her own" people in a meaningful way, or that the author should only have the various fictional peoples of his world interact meaningfully with culturally / racially aligned groups or, worse, that he should only write about "his own" people, baffles and saddens me. 

The fact that you can point to all of ASOIAF, Avatar and Star Wars as "problematic" shows just how much of an issue this form of soft pressure to self-censorship along with the open calls for boycotts is.  None of these authors / directors are doing anything other than trying to create enjoyable and compelling stories and the idea of fantasy is to embody imagination and escapism, free from real life pressures and political dramas.  The stories and characters aren't intended as allegories (except in rare instances) but they do, of course, spring from the authors' imagination and there is nothing else to shape their worlds, cultures and histories, other than the examples of our own. 

GRRM has, for me, done a good job of making the Valyrian area of influence hard to pin down racially or culturally in terms of making real world comparison and this is entirely intentional but as some of the people are "non-white" and Dany is "white", here we are, which is a shame.

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@the trees have eyes"Problematic" is one of those words that should be removed from literary and artistic criticism.  It's used not to criticise a work for its artistic merit, but rather to judge it insofar as it corresponds to the political opinions of the critic.

Art should not be the servant of politics.

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