DAENERYS TARGARYEN in HBO’s Game of Thrones 8x06 ’The Iron Throne’

Dany texting Jon from Volantis

antis: daenerys is a FOREIGNER!

me, thinking about how dragonstone is literally a part of westeros… and also how even if she wasn’t born in westeros, how xenophobic that statement is:

me, thinking about how people shouting “Winterfell always belonged to the Starks!!!” never mention that KL was founded by the Targs, the Red Keep was built by the Targs, and the IT was forged with dragon fire, and about how no amount of history excuses xenophobia:

me, thinking how certain stans believe only their fav should rule their caste while also hating daenerys for merely wanting to rule what she believes to be her birthright:

Me, thinking about how literally every single House had to conquer there lands from other people and fight to maintain it because that’s how medieval societies worked and that the title of “foreigner” is not only problematic but also entirely hypocritical because they’re all originally from Essos:

(I got this question on my curiouscat for twitter but I ran out of space so I’m answering it here instead). 

It’s a fake woke way of calling Dany a white savior/imperialist. Funnily enough, they end up sounding racist and orientalist as hell.

First of all, what Dany did is abolish slavery, and eradicate the slavery-based economy. A culture cannot be based on slavery. Slavery is an economic system of buying, owning, and trading human beings - it is fundamentally corrupt and immoral, and so the act of abolishing slavery is definitely not a bad thing, and it certainly doesn’t entail the destruction of a “culture”. If an economy is centralized around slavery, that means the economy MUST be destroyed and replaced. Anyone who argues that the abolishment of slavery is a destruction of culture, or that slavery is an “important part” of certain cultures, is a slavery apologist.

Second of all, there is often an orientalist assumption inherent in this faux-woke rhetoric that Essos, a huge continent, is this large, monolithic mass of brown and black people who apparently all have the same culture, nationality, religion, ethnicity, language, belief system, customs, and rituals. We know from the complex and rich history of Essos that this isn’t true. Many different Essosi places are mentioned throughout ASOIAF - Braavos, Vaes Dothrak, the Dothraki Sea, Asshai, Lys, Myr, Volantis, the Free Cities, Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen (which are all part of “Slaver’s Bay”), Lothar, Naath, the Summer Isles, Qarth, Lhazar, Old Valyria, and more. These places are all incredibly different from each other. Not only that, but there are thousands of different ethnic and national groups that inhabit these places. The Dothraki and Ghiscari are described as brown-skinned/darker-skinned, but people from Lys are pale. Melisandre and Kinvara are from Asshai, and they’re both white. Valyrians are from Essos, and they are silver-haired, violet-eyed, and pale-skinned. Varys is Essosi, and he is white. Illyrio Mopatis lives in Pentos, and he is white. Jaqen H'ghar lives in Braavos, and he is white. Thoros is from Myr and he is white. And so on. Dany is just as Essosi as Missandei or Grey Worm or Melisandre or Varys. 

So we see even on the show that there are plenty of white/pale-skinned Essosi. They wouldn’t be called “white” and Missandei wouldn’t be called “black” and Shae wouldn’t be called “West Asian” because those categories don’t exist in ASOIAF! We can’t read our modern system of racialization and white supremacy into ASOIAF because 1) it’s a fictional medieval fantasy world, 2) GRRM did not set up a consistent racial allegory in which there are groups that are neatly “white” and groups that are neatly “not white”, and 3) categories such as “white”, “Black”, etc don’t exist in ASOIAF. I do think things analogous to racism and orientalism clearly exist in Westeros and Essos both - the Dothraki, for instance, think the Lhazareen are lesser to them, and white Westerosi clearly hate the Martells (and the Dornish in general). But if you have Ghiscari and Dothraki (who are all our equivalent of “nonwhite”) enslaving people, imperializing people, and creating ethnic systems of oppression and domination, then you clearly can’t say that there is a white “supreme” race that exerts power and control over all non-white races. Though the show tried to make all Essosi slaves this monolithic “nonwhite” race, there are plenty of slaves in the book who are pale-skinned, and plenty of slavers in the books and on the show alike who would be considered our equivalent of “not white”. Furthermore, neither the slaves nor the slavers have one big, unified culture. The slaves and slavers have nothing in common, as one group is dominant and the other is oppressed. Moreover, both the slaves and slavers all came from different, varied cultures, so Dany did not destroy a single culture, let alone the thousands of cultures that the slavers and slaves alike came from. 

Third of all, Dany is never once shown peddling a racial or ethnic supremacist ideology. When she is with the Dothraki, for instance, she slowly comes to love her Khalasar and completely adopts the Dothraki culture. She braids her hair like the Dothraki (which she continues to do long after Drogo is dead). She becomes fluent in Dothraki and goes out of her way to learn and practice it, and speak it with her people. She adopts the title of “Khaleesi” proudly, and later becomes the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. She takes on the remnants of Drogo’s Khalasar, frees them, and vows to protect them (and does take her with her across the Red Waste, to Qarth, and beyond). She is the reason the Dothraki cross “the poison water” for the first time, and on the show, they willingly follow her to Westeros after she unites them into one Khalasar. In fact, she is fated in the books to become the Stallion that Mounts the World. She defends her people, even early on, when she is still under the yoke of Viserys, and tells him that “they’re [her] people now”, so he shouldn’t call them “savages”. She never forgets her time with the Dothraki, especially considering that on the show and eventually in the books, she becomes the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. 

Some fools argue that she’s a racist for not joining the Dosh Khaleen but why should a young girl be forced to live out her days in a temple because her rapist warlord husband died? The practice of the Dosh Khaleen is misogynistic, and no woman should be forced to participate in it. Other fools argue that she’s a racist for burning down the Temple of the Dosh Khaleen, as if the Khals meeting there didn’t literally threaten to gang rape her (which isn’t an idle threat, given that we know full well that the Dothraki rape women by the droves, and rape is one of their imperializing tactics). So they’re rape apologists for arguing that. Also, that Temple is really just a symbol of patriarchal oppression, where women are forced to live out their days for husbands that most likely (in most cases at least) enslaved their people and raped them nightly. 

She adopts the culture of Meereen when she becomes its Queen as well. She hates the Harpy’s City, and the Harpies, because they are hedonistic, corrupt, and oppressive. Yet she dons the tokar, she marries Hizdahr, she re-opens the fighting pits, and she keeps court in the Great Pyramid of Meereen, all to keep peace in Meereen. She didn’t love the Meereenese the way she came to love the Dothraki, but she made these sacrifices regardless. 

Even when Dany comes to Westeros, and even after Dany ~goes mad~ and burns down 500,000 people in KL, she never once states that Valyrians are superior. She doesn’t go on a campaign to ethnically cleanse descendants of the Andals, Rhoynar, or the First Men. She doesn’t ban all other languages besides High Valyrian. She doesn’t go around the world enslaving or imperializing people on behalf of Old Valyria. She has no delusions of restoring Old Valyria to its former glory. She doesn’t execute babies who aren’t pale-skinned, silver-haired, and violet-eyed. She doesn’t outlaw marriage between a Valyrian and non-Valyrian. She never once makes a xenophobic or racist comment about another group of people, or House, or race (but Cersei, Jaime, Randyll Tarly, and plenty of other characters have said all sorts of xenophobic and racist things about Essosi folk, namely the Unsullied and the Dothraki). Keep in mind that she actually suffered under Dothraki practices of child marriage and sexual slavery, and keep in mind that the Meereneese are a bunch of slaveowning nobles, and yet she doesn’t utter a xenophobic word about either group (and in fact she loves the Dothraki). 

If Dany “destroyed” the cultures of Astapor, Yunkai, or Meereen, she would’ve done what actual colonizers do. She would’ve made High Valyrian the official language of each city, she would’ve installed Valyrians in all the highest positions of political office (which she didn’t and feasibly couldn’t), she would’ve limited the use of other languages, she would’ve banned benign religious practices, she would’ve spread propaganda regarding the superiority of Valyrian culture and the inferiority of all other Essosi cultures that make up the cities of Slaver’s Bay, she would’ve usurped the resources of the city to try and rebuild Old Valyria, she would’ve forced laborers from the cities to be shipped off to rebuild it (if such a thing were possible), she would’ve made herself the wealthiest woman in the world off the riches of each city, she would’ve outlawed dissent or rebellion against this Valyrian supremacy, she would’ve renamed the cities in the Valyrian language, she would’ve eliminated all the political rivals in each city (but she even went as far as leaving slavers in each city alive, which is actually one of her biggest mistakes!), she would’ve stolen precious artifacts and housed them for herself or simply destroy them. Yet she didn’t do any of that. 

The thing you have to understand about Dany antis is that they’re very good at stumbling upon important academic language taken from anti-imperialist and anti-racist discourse and activism, memorizing those words, and then flinging them around without any actual thought, experience, or care. They don’t know what imperialism or colonialism or white saviorism really look like, but they know those are fancy words that have some form of capital among the fake-woke halls of pop SJ liberal feminist twitter/tumblr, so they’ll use those words. They’re not even leftists, most of them, which is the funny part, and like 75% of the people making these comments are white, which is the funniest part. 

Also I love the anti logic: Daenerys isn’t Westerosi, she doesn’t understand the culture, she doesn’t belong there, she was raised in Essos so she’s ‘Essosi’. Also Daenerys is an imperialist colonizer bc she imposes her Westerosi culture on the slavers.

Lmao wut?

“We will have it all back someday, sweet sister.” Viserys would promise her. “The jewels and the silks, Dragonstone and King’s Landing, the Iron Throne and the Seven Kingdoms, all they have taken from us, we will have it back.” 

happy Easter, Jesus wasn’t white

amazing 

when you and your best friend are silently judging someone 

Piper Anderson Klotz’s contribution to The X Files Season 10 ‘her hand is in pretty much every episode’

“They gave her responsibility and trusted her to follow through - and she follows through. And I’m really proud of her.” - Proud Mama Gillian Anderson 

Undercover Swing - Chapter 7

Chapter 1  Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4  Chapter 5  Chapter 6  

NSFW (no gifs)

Notes: This fandom needs to come together…and how better than through a little smut. Love you all. Happy Pride. As always, an amazing s/o to my internet wife @storybycorey who makes me a better writer every day. I’m so lucky to have such a talented writer as my beta, and friend. 

(I have no idea when Chapter 8 will be released. Please be patient)

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