Is Dany a White Savior?

[Craving Peaches]

11 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

I'm not sure it is a very good way to analyze (high) fantasy stuff. Stuff like Robert E. Howard's stories you can interpret with his racism in mind since his world is supposed to be earth's past and also deliberately reflects racial and cultural hierarchies he very much believed in. Similarly, you can use such an interpretative matrix if it is really evident or easy to demonstrate that the work in question just moved a real world racial/cultural hierarchy take into a fantasy setting.

The white savior is more a real problem in the sense that black or indigenous people are often enough still portrayed as people needing saving from some white person (a white woman, say, in the case of adoption black kids from Africa). And historically the white savior narrative goes definitely hand in hand with the more blatant racist 'they are all savages without culture' narrative. The stories about the noble savage welcoming the white person's wisdom and help is the nicer, fairy-tale version/justification for colonialism, etc.

But we don't really have that kind of thing in ASoIaF.

In fact, while, say, wildling culture is kind of ridiculous the author makes it clear while there is certainly a strong exotic allure to their lifestyle (best illustrated, I think, in the sidebar in TWoIaF about that maester writing about them who 'went native' after he finished his book) it is clear that the whole wife-stealing and raiding practices do suck. The books never present a given culture or society as being completely or even predominantly good.

The trope used to be a good identifier but now it has been watered down to include any sort of help to people with a different skin colour. Previously it seems it was restricted to 'mission to civilise' and pro-imperialist type depictions of 'white saviours' but I think it has been extended to cover more, at least in some people's view, so now what Daenerys is doing falls under it.

[BlackLightning]

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is that I resent this question because it is insincere and pretty ignorant

[sifth]

2 hours ago, BlackLightning said:

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is that I resent this question because it is insincere and pretty ignorant

Wise words.

[GZ Bloodraven]

On 3/15/2023 at 1:56 AM, BlackLightning said:

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is that I resent this question because it is insincere and pretty ignorant

The short answer is yes she is. 

That doesn't mean it's a problem: she's definitely a critique on the white savior trope in that most white saviors are colonizers with nukes claiming to want to abolish slavery and then creating terrorist states. At this point, that's exactly what Dany is and it isn't ignorant to ask that question and wonder about the consequences of thinking like a white savior thinks. 

[the trees have eyes]

7 hours ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

she's definitely a critique on the white savior trope in that most white saviors are colonizers with nukes claiming to want to abolish slavery and then creating terrorist states.

Care to give an example?

[SeanF]

8 hours ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

The short answer is yes she is. 

That doesn't mean it's a problem: she's definitely a critique on the white savior trope in that most white saviors are colonizers with nukes claiming to want to abolish slavery and then creating terrorist states. At this point, that's exactly what Dany is and it isn't ignorant to ask that question and wonder about the consequences of thinking like a white savior thinks. 

Is this post intended to be treated seriously?

[GZ Bloodraven]

3 hours ago, the trees have eyes said:

Care to give an example?

In the real world or in the book? In the real world....it rhymes with Ittack, you can fill in the rest; in the book, Dany shows up with a nuclear threat and lofty ambitions to depose objectively horrendous leaders and then a massive terrorist group attempts to fill the power vacuum.

 

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

Is this post intended to be treated seriously?

I mean as seriously as you want to treat it: If you think that there aren't parallels to US exceptionalism and Dany's ideology in her invasion of Meereen, you can treat the post as silly. 

[Alester Florent]

3 minutes ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

In the real world or in the book? In the real world....it rhymes with Ittack, you can fill in the rest; in the book, Dany shows up with a nuclear threat and lofty ambitions to depose objectively horrendous leaders and then a massive terrorist group attempts to fill the power vacuum.

 

I mean as seriously as you want to treat it: If you think that there aren't parallels to US exceptionalism and Dany's ideology in her invasion of Meereen, you can treat the post as silly. 

The only reason I'm sceptical as to this point, which I referenced myself earlier, is that Dany's invasion of and capture of Meereen and Astapor - and indeed Cleon's coup - were published in 2000, i.e. before Iraq or even Afghanistan, so unless we're crediting GRRM with some kind of prophetic ability, I don't think her initial escapades are likely to have been commentary on that. (Yes, obviously, there had been US foreign intervention before that, but those two - Iraq in particular - marked a phase shift in both the nature and perception of them).

I wouldn't be at all surprised if these events influenced the writing of ADwD though.

[SeanF]

18 minutes ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

In the real world or in the book? In the real world....it rhymes with Ittack, you can fill in the rest; in the book, Dany shows up with a nuclear threat and lofty ambitions to depose objectively horrendous leaders and then a massive terrorist group attempts to fill the power vacuum.

 

I mean as seriously as you want to treat it: If you think that there aren't parallels to US exceptionalism and Dany's ideology in her invasion of Meereen, you can treat the post as silly. 

What nuclear threat?

Who is Daenerys colonising?

Are the Sons of the Harpy an anti-colonial movement?

Are the slavers anti-imperialist?

Which mother country is Daenerys exploiting her colonies on behalf of?

Which foreign ethnic group is Daenerys dispossessing the natives in favour of?

In what way are the Mereenese freedmen colonists?

In what way does the abolition of slavery promote colonialism?

Aren't the foreign interventionist powers Qarth, New Ghis, and Volantis?

Is the abolition of slavery a good or bad thing?

I'll repeat 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."

Was Douglass right, or was Brown simply a coloniser wrongly imposing his values upon people who disagreed with them?

[SeanF]

On 3/15/2023 at 8:56 AM, BlackLightning said:

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is that I resent this question because it is insincere and pretty ignorant

As @Phylum of Alexandriasays, it's sub-undergraduate stuff.

[GZ Bloodraven]

26 minutes ago, Alester Florent said:

I wouldn't be at all surprised if these events influenced the writing of ADwD though.

The regime change and resulting destabilization in Astapor and Yunkai can be from any of the Latin American countries that the US deposed that lead to random military dictators, and the Sons of the Harpy were introduced majorly in 2011 with ADwD. I'm not saying that the parallels are one-to-one, but the themes are definitely there. 

25 minutes ago, SeanF said:

What nuclear threat?

Who is Daenerys colonising?

Are the Sons of the Harpy an anti-colonial movement?

Are the slavers anti-imperialist?

Which mother country is Daenerys exploiting her colonies on behalf of?

Which foreign ethnic group is Daenerys dispossessing the natives in favour of?

In what way are the Mereenese freedmen colonists?

In what way does the abolition of slavery promote colonialism?

Aren't the foreign interventionist powers Qarth, New Ghis, and Volantis?

Is the abolition of slavery a good or bad thing?

The dragons are the nukes.

Daenerys is participating in the regime-change of Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen; not colonization persay, but creating a clear problem considering the Yunkai stuff and the Astaporians dying of dysentary en masse.

The Sons of the Harpy are an anti-Targaryen, anti-colonial, pro-slavery movement.

The slavers are anti-imperialist in the sense that they don't want to have an imperial power controlling them.... But they're also slavers. 

Daenerys is not a colonial power, she's an invading and destabilizing power using her objective moral ground to justify the destabilization. The Targaryens were a historically colonial power before its...forceful abolition with The Doom.

In her mind, she aims to be Queen of Westeros while also ruling Slaver's Bay, so Westeros in about 5 years. We aren't there yet, though.

The Meerenese freedmen aren't colonists, who said that?

The abolition of slavery does not promote colonialism, the forceful regime change of a nation, failed nation-building of that nation, and quick "see you bye I'm going home" ideology promotes colonialism.

Yes.

The abolition of slavery is a morally good thing, just like Saddam Hussein not being Saddam Hussein anymore is a morally good thing. But that's just the start of the process of stabilizing a region, and Dany isn't in it for the long haul, unless she ends the books being the legitimate queen of Meereen and never getting home.

If you don't think anti-war George was considering the fucking war that was happening when writing his white savior character, you aren't paying attention. 

26 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I'll repeat 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."

Was Douglass right, or was Brown simply a coloniser wrongly imposing his values upon people who disagreed with them?

John Brown was totally right, but John Brown was from the United States. Dany is from Westeros; her fighting slavery in Westeros is great. But she's not from Ghiscar, and she's planning on leaving Ghiscar shortly, why is she doing regime change there?

[SeanF]

5 minutes ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

The regime change and resulting destabilization in Astapor and Yunkai can be from any of the Latin American countries that the US deposed that lead to random military dictators, and the Sons of the Harpy were introduced majorly in 2011 with ADwD. I'm not saying that the parallels are one-to-one, but the themes are definitely there. 

The dragons are the nukes.

Daenerys is participating in the regime-change of Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen; not colonization persay, but creating a clear problem considering the Yunkai stuff and the Astaporians dying of dysentary en masse.

The Sons of the Harpy are an anti-Targaryen, anti-colonial, pro-slavery movement.

The slavers are anti-imperialist in the sense that they don't want to have an imperial power controlling them.... But they're also slavers. 

Daenerys is not a colonial power, she's an invading and destabilizing power using her objective moral ground to justify the destabilization. The Targaryens were a historically colonial power before its...forceful abolition with The Doom.

In her mind, she aims to be Queen of Westeros while also ruling Slaver's Bay, so Westeros in about 5 years. We aren't there yet, though.

The Meerenese freedmen aren't colonists, who said that?

The abolition of slavery does not promote colonialism, the forceful regime change of a nation, failed nation-building of that nation, and quick "see you bye I'm going home" ideology promotes colonialism.

Yes.

The abolition of slavery is a morally good thing, just like Saddam Hussein not being Saddam Hussein anymore is a morally good thing. But that's just the start of the process of stabilizing a region, and Dany isn't in it for the long haul, unless she ends the books being the legitimate queen of Meereen and never getting home.

If you don't think anti-war George was considering the fucking war that was happening when writing his white savior character, you aren't paying attention. 

John Brown was totally right, but John Brown was from the United States. Dany is from Westeros; her fighting slavery in Westeros is great. But she's not from Ghiscar, and she's planning on leaving Ghiscar shortly, why is she doing regime change there?

The dragons are the size of dogs, when she arrives.  By the end of ADWD, they’re the size of horses.

My reading of the text is that the problems in Slavers Bay are caused by, you know, the anti-imperialists who kidnap people, murder them, rape them, torture them, and who fight like tigers to re-enslave them.

Man-stealing, and chattel slavery are imperialism at its most brutal and exploitative.

Overthrowing people who run the equivalent of Treblinka, is at least in my view, the right thing to do.  And yes, it’s destabilising.  Slave-trading, however, destabilises an entire continent, by fuelling war and piracy.

Dany has lived all her life in slave-owning societies in Essos. She is certainly not a meddling foreigner, ignorant of what chattel slavery entails.  You’re overlooking, too, that slaves and freedmen are themselves fighting for their own freedom.

Do I think Martin considers it legitimate to wage war to overthrow slavery?  Well, one of the points of Fevre Dreme is that the hero, Abner Marsh, concludes that “fire and blood” is needed to end it.

[GZ Bloodraven]

18 minutes ago, SeanF said:

My reading of the text is that the problems in Slavers Bay are caused by, you know, the anti-imperialists who kidnap people, murder them, rape them, torture them, and who fight like tigers to re-enslave them.

Man-stealing, and chattel slavery are imperialism at its most brutal and exploitative.

All true, the governments are, to put it simply, bad governments. 

18 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Overthrowing people who run the equivalent of Treblinka, is at least in my view, the right thing to do.  And yes, it’s destabilising.  Slave-trading, however, destabilises an entire continent, by fuelling war and piracy.

Also true, it's good to kill Nazis.

18 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Dany has lived all her life in slave-owning societies in Essos. She is certainly not a meddling foreigner, ignorant of what chattel slavery entails.  You’re overlooking, too, that slaves and freedmen are themselves fighting for their own freedom.

This is also true: women in Iran fight for their own freedom, Kurds fight for their own freedom. 

19 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Do I think Martin considers it legitimate to wage war to overthrow slavery?  Well, one of the points of Fevre Dreme is that the hero, Abner Marsh, concludes that “fire and blood” is needed to end it.

All true, we all agree it is legitimate to kill Nazis and have wars over slavery, and we are grateful George does too. The question is about future building. Is there going to be a sustained society after Dany does her Ghiscari regime change? Or are we going to back to having the Taliban in control? Will Dany go back to her birthright with a shattered Ghiscar, or will she fix the problems, successfully nation-build, and leave the place better than she found it? Either way, she is still a white savior: a white character who helps mostly people of color and grows because of it. This is, and I must again stress this, completely fine. It is OK that Dany is a white savior with some imperalist thinking AND genuinely making the lives of the Ghiscari better by forcefully abolishing the morally abhorrent systems of slavery alongside the slaves of the system. But to resent the question entirely is missing some of the themes I think.

[Alester Florent]

48 minutes ago, SeanF said:

The dragons are the size of dogs, when she arrives.  By the end of ADWD, they’re the size of horses.

My reading of the text is that the problems in Slavers Bay are caused by, you know, the anti-imperialists who kidnap people, murder them, rape them, torture them, and who fight like tigers to re-enslave them.

Man-stealing, and chattel slavery are imperialism at its most brutal and exploitative.

Overthrowing people who run the equivalent of Treblinka, is at least in my view, the right thing to do.  And yes, it’s destabilising.  Slave-trading, however, destabilises an entire continent, by fuelling war and piracy.

Dany has lived all her life in slave-owning societies in Essos. She is certainly not a meddling foreigner, ignorant of what chattel slavery entails.  You’re overlooking, too, that slaves and freedmen are themselves fighting for their own freedom.

Do I think Martin considers it legitimate to wage war to overthrow slavery?  Well, one of the points of Fevre Dreme is that the hero, Abner Marsh, concludes that “fire and blood” is needed to end it.

Yeah, as GZ Bloodraven says above, and as I was trying to say earlier in the thread, the point is not that overthrowing bad governments is bad. It's that if you overthrow even a bad government and then just walk away, things get even worse. You need to actually put in the hard yards of rebuilding the society so that it has a chance to prosper and survive and be better than what was there before.

To take the two examples that have come up already in this thread, after bad actors were removed in Germany in WW2, the victorious powers expended a lot of energy and effort rebuilding (west) Germany into a country that could stand on its own two feet and it soon became highly prosperous. By contrast, in Iraq, there appears to have been no plan for reconstruction and the power vacuum led to the near-disintegration of Iraq as a state, reliant on foreign military support and unable to defend itself effectively against the IS incursion. You will not find many people disagreeing that Saddam was a bad ruler. You will also not find many people disagreeing that IS were/are worse. And it was the removal of Saddam and the failure to rebuild effectively that allowed for the creation and rise of IS.

Yes, the actual horrors perpetrated by IS are on them. They deserve every bit of opprobium that comes their way. But that doesn't absolve the conquerors of Iraq in 2003 from responsibility, because it was entirely predictable that something bad would fill the power vacuum left by the removal of Saddam (even if that was the simple disintegration of the central government entirely and the rise of warlords) and the steps taken to prevent it were wholly inadequate.

The parallels between Astapor and Iraq are actually quite striking. The horrors that afflict Astapor after Dany leaves are not what she wanted and the people who inflict them are bad. But she is still to blame for creating the circumstances which allowed that to happen and not doing a sufficient job of proofing Astapor against the forces which would inevitably assail it once she destroyed the existing government institutions.

She is doing a much better job in Meereen, but Astapor was a catastrophe and I think even she would admit that she bears much of the blame for that, if she could ever convince herself that "if I look back I am lost" are not words to live by.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

All true, the governments are, to put it simply, bad governments. 

Also true, it's good to kill Nazis.

This is also true: women in Iran fight for their own freedom, Kurds fight for their own freedom. 

All true, we all agree it is legitimate to kill Nazis and have wars over slavery, and we are grateful George does too. The question is about future building. Is there going to be a sustained society after Dany does her Ghiscari regime change? Or are we going to back to having the Taliban in control? Will Dany go back to her birthright with a shattered Ghiscar, or will she fix the problems, successfully nation-build, and leave the place better than she found it? Either way, she is still a white savior: a white character who helps mostly people of color and grows because of it. This is, and I must again stress this, completely fine. It is OK that Dany is a white savior with some imperalist thinking AND genuinely making the lives of the Ghiscari better by forcefully abolishing the morally abhorrent systems of slavery alongside the slaves of the system. But to resent the question entirely is missing some of the themes I think.

Now that is a fair comment.  

A "white saviour" however, is typically used as a perjorative term, for someone who either pretends to help the natives, whilst actually exploiting them, such as Leopold II, or someone who, like Kipling, views the natives as "half devil and half child" (although, with Kipling, it's not entirely clear if he's endorsing that outlook or satirising it.)

45 minutes ago, Alester Florent said:

Yeah, as GZ Bloodraven says above, and as I was trying to say earlier in the thread, the point is not that overthrowing bad governments is bad. It's that if you overthrow even a bad government and then just walk away, things get even worse. You need to actually put in the hard yards of rebuilding the society so that it has a chance to prosper and survive and be better than what was there before.

To take the two examples that have come up already in this thread, after bad actors were removed in Germany in WW2, the victorious powers expended a lot of energy and effort rebuilding (west) Germany into a country that could stand on its own two feet and it soon became highly prosperous. By contrast, in Iraq, there appears to have been no plan for reconstruction and the power vacuum led to the near-disintegration of Iraq as a state, reliant on foreign military support and unable to defend itself effectively against the IS incursion. You will not find many people disagreeing that Saddam was a bad ruler. You will also not find many people disagreeing that IS were/are worse. And it was the removal of Saddam and the failure to rebuild effectively that allowed for the creation and rise of IS.

Yes, the actual horrors perpetrated by IS are on them. They deserve every bit of opprobium that comes their way. But that doesn't absolve the conquerors of Iraq in 2003 from responsibility, because it was entirely predictable that something bad would fill the power vacuum left by the removal of Saddam (even if that was the simple disintegration of the central government entirely and the rise of warlords) and the steps taken to prevent it were wholly inadequate.

The parallels between Astapor and Iraq are actually quite striking. The horrors that afflict Astapor after Dany leaves are not what she wanted and the people who inflict them are bad. But she is still to blame for creating the circumstances which allowed that to happen and not doing a sufficient job of proofing Astapor against the forces which would inevitably assail it once she destroyed the existing government institutions.

She is doing a much better job in Meereen, but Astapor was a catastrophe and I think even she would admit that she bears much of the blame for that, if she could ever convince herself that "if I look back I am lost" are not words to live by.

The thing about Iraq or Afghanistan, it's not that the Americans took out the government, and then departed.  They actually spent a fortune in terms of nation-building (and got it wholly wrong in Afghanistan, and partly wrong in Iraq).  IMHO, Astapor is closer to something like the Anglo-Dutch attack on Algiers, in 1816.  They bombarded the city to secure the release of thousands of slaves, then left, and the city degenerated into civil war, afterwards.  

Yunkai perhaps resembles more the Union's overthrow of slavery in the Confederacy, but at the same time, leaving the Confederate leaders in a position to regain power.  I don't think that anyone (other than pro-Confederates) would dispute that the Union could have done a far better job at securing the rights of the freedmen.  OTOH, the Union were entirely right to end slavery.

Daenerys' view, on learning of the horrors at Astapor was.  "I'm a queen, it was my place to know".  She considers she let them down terribly.

[GZ Bloodraven]

4 hours ago, SeanF said:

A "white saviour" however, is typically used as a perjorative term, for someone who either pretends to help the natives, whilst actually exploiting them, such as Leopold II, or someone who, like Kipling, views the natives as "half devil and half child" (although, with Kipling, it's not entirely clear if he's endorsing that outlook or satirising it.)

I understand this read of "white savior," mine is a little less about the moral culpability of the character and more about the metatextual framing of the scenario. A white savior is when the center of a story about people of color's liberation is not a person of color. Because our main POV on Dany's liberation of the POC slaves is from Daenerys' perspective, instead of Missandei's or Grey Worm's, people claim she is a white savior, which I don't think is a ridiculous question to ponder, on top of the future building post-regime change questions. But George is also very intentional with who he makes POV: he knows what he's doing when Dany's war against the slavers is told from her perspective alone (and Barristan, Victarion, Tyrion and Quentyn kind of). Maybe a Prologue as one of the liberated slaves would alleviate the concern, but I do think he's being responsible in his depiction of what could reasonably be argued to be a white savior story. 

[Lord Varys]

52 minutes ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

I understand this read of "white savior," mine is a little less about the moral culpability of the character and more about the metatextual framing of the scenario. A white savior is when the center of a story about people of color's liberation is not a person of color. Because our main POV on Dany's liberation of the POC slaves is from Daenerys' perspective, instead of Missandei's or Grey Worm's, people claim she is a white savior, which I don't think is a ridiculous question to ponder, on top of the future building post-regime change questions. But George is also very intentional with who he makes POV: he knows what he's doing when Dany's war against the slavers is told from her perspective alone (and Barristan, Victarion, Tyrion and Quentyn kind of). Maybe a Prologue as one of the liberated slaves would alleviate the concern, but I do think he's being responsible in his depiction of what could reasonably be argued to be a white savior story. 

The problem of that kind of framing is, in my opinion, the idea that Martinworld includes or reproduces the kind of racial hierarchy we have in the real world. And it clearly doesn't.

Whiteness as a political concept as created by the British Empire and other European nations doesn't exist in this world. The race or culture which can be reasonably constructed as a superiors is the Valyrian race/people/culture ... and the Ghiscari of Slaver's Bay as well as Dany herself are both part of that superior race/culture. Even if we were to view the Ghiscari not as a Valyrianized people - which they clearly are - they were a master race/culture themselves, before the Freehold of Valyria conquered the Empire of Old Ghis.

The slaves in Slaver's Bay are just slaves - they are not racialized slaves, they come in all colors - like the runaways slaves who founded Braavos. It is a wrong take on the setting to equate the slaves in Slaver's Bay with PoC. Just as it is wrong to view the Westerosi as 'white' when they most obviously don't view themselves - nor are they viewed - as the rulers/most powerful people of the world ... nor have they ever been a colonizing force. Hell, even Valyria is more the American Empire than the British Empire in the sense that they didn't really try to colonize, say, Sothoryos. They did establish some military outposts and the like, but they didn't act like the British and took over huge countries.

Daenerys turning against slavery can, perhaps, be interpreted as the last scion of the former Valyrian ruling class to try to make up for her ancestors crimes by finally ending slavery - although, of course, the Valyrians learned slavery from the Ghiscari, so while the slavery in Slaver's Bay continued under Valyrian rule the Ghiscari themselves invented the institutions of slavery.

You can say that on a superficial level the Ghiscari and Lhazareen and Dothraki and Naathi do not look like Europeans - but that doesn't make them primitive natives in need of saving - nor are they described as such.

And while you can say that the Dothraki are kind of clichéd Mongols/Huns, etc. ... the Westerosi people are very much clichéd and unrealistically portrayed pseudo-medieval knights, lords, kings, and, especially, peasants. Not to mention even more ridiculously portrayed 'wildlings'.

[Nathan Stark]

The claim being made that Dany is a "white savior" mostly derives from how the Thrones show chose to portray these events. In the show, we were subjected to the image of white, blonde Dany moshing on the hands of millions of nameless brown and black people. In the books, that same scene outside the gates of Yunkai played out rather differently, and as has been discussed, the slaves themselves hail from many different cultures, including a few from Westeros. It was the showrunners choice to involve 21st century American notions of slavery into George's established narrative. 

[the trees have eyes]

21 hours ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

In the real world or in the book?

This is a book forum to discuss the books.  I'm pretty sure you can't have missed that.  The discussion is about a "literary trope", so as you waded in to allege terrorist states I'm keen to hear what series or novels you have in mind.

21 hours ago, GZ Bloodraven said:

in the book, Dany shows up with a nuclear threat and lofty ambitions to depose objectively horrendous leaders and then a massive terrorist group attempts to fill the power vacuum.

So you are projecting the Iraq war and rise of ISIS onto Slaver's Bay.  That's a rather crude, even facile, comparison. 

[Aldarion]

On 3/21/2023 at 1:53 PM, the trees have eyes said:

Care to give an example?

I know I'm not Bloodraven, but - entirety of Africa and the Middle East. Europeans divided the map by drawing lines on the map, while completely ignoring the ethnic/tribal composition of these areas. So you have the situation where each state has multiple tribes in it, while at the same time some tribes are divided by artificial borders. Result being that Africa is full of dysfunctional states.