But I Am Not a Khal
One of S6′s most exciting (and apparently most underrated?) aspects to me is that all the power brokers leading factions of the Great Game in the south are women. Ellaria recruits Olenna to join up with Yara to support Daenerys against Cersei. These women are all on the field for their own reasons, with their own strengths, liabilities, and styles. Exactly one of them is a conventionally feminine white woman under forty.
The next tier of influence in the Targaryen coalition is also pretty striking. By my count there are eight named characters in one faction or another. Four of them, Missandei and the Sand Snakes, are women of color. The other four are Grey Worm, Theon, Varys, and Tyrion, all of whom have bodies and experiences which exclude them from their world’s construct of masculinity. Once Daenerys dismisses Daario, there is nobody on her team who speaks from a place of conventional male privilege.
Without attaching a moral judgment to the storytelling here, this is pretty rare. This is interesting.
It opens up some intriguing comparisons between the characters’ different cultures. Daenerys and Yara click readily because they’re in similar situations. The Dothraki and the ironborn are similar in some ways. These hard nomadic cultures equate femininity with weakness and they have no place for weakness. That leads to the kind of glaring inequality on display in the kingsmoot, which rests on a thousand other, less visible, denials of opportunities. But those relatively small and ruthlessly efficient groups in a khalasar or on a ship means that when an unconventional leader does break through, there’s no decorative role to stuff her into, and no cover for the mediocre man who’s in her place.
These two are on their way to a world which is restrictive in different ways, where there is a space for some women who are conventionally feminine – but it can be a small and restrictive one in a lot of ways. Daenerys will be trying to at least navigate a world with different expectations of her, and she’ll be doing that while coming up against Cersei, who’s spent her whole life trying to break out of them.
These characters will shape a new world, and how they do this has a lot to do with how they experienced the old one. Daenerys has learned about authority from men, both from watching them and from relating to them. When she commits to becoming a conqueror, she doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but she does put her own spin on it.
I, Drogo, will do this. I will take my khalasar west to where the world ends and ride wooden horses across the black salt sea as no khal has done before. I will kill the men in iron suits and tear down their stone houses. I will rape their women, take their children as slaves, and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak. This I vow, Drogo, son of Bharbo. I swear before the Mother of Mountains as the stars look down in witness. (You Win or You Die)
I ask your oath, that you will live and die as blood of my blood, riding at my side to keep me safe from harm. I will ask more of you than any khal has ever asked of his khalasar! Will you ride the wooden horses across the black salt sea? Will you kill my enemies in their iron suits and tear down their stone houses? Will you give me the Seven Kingdoms, the gift Khal Drogo promised me before the Mother of Mountains as the stars looked down in witness? Are you with me, now and always? (Blood of My Blood)
Khal Drogo declares what he will do and expects his khalasar to follow. It is a statement of his own charisma and ambition. Daenerys asks the khlalasar what they will do. She tells them she’s asking for something hard and unprecedented. Her pointed omission of rape and enslavement is a major alteration of cultural norms. And as the sun beats down in witness, she gives – not promises, not offers, gives – them something incalculably precious.
Every khal who ever lived chose three bloodriders to fight beside him and guard his way. But I am not a khal. I will not choose three bloodriders. I choose you all.
That is a radical disruption of the relatively minimalist Dothraki social hierarchy, imposed from top-down, seemingly on a whim. It’s the kind of thing you can only do when you have real, serious power. It’s also the kind of thing you’d only think to do if you had a visceral experience of disempowerment.
This is a different story than it would be if you ripped Daenerys out of context and dropped her into a more conventional narrative. There are challenging and nuanced questions here: Is this decision fair? Is it moral for the Breaker of Chains to give a blanket promotion to thousands of unrepentant slave traders? Is it tactically smart? Is it wise in the long term? And when you saddle a narrative with Smurfette Syndrome, it always becomes loaded, it often becomes unbalanced, it sometimes becomes overpowered. Those subtle questions can disappear, or at least be harder to appreciate. Daenerys – like Yara, like Cersei, like a a lot of the characters who won’t even cross her path – can be a complex and singular figure precisely because there are other people like her on the screen.
Like I said, no opinion on whether anyone else should like it. But I am intrigued.