Daenerys Targaryen

Daenerys Targaryen

Rhaenyra Targaryen and Daenerys Targaryen + Parallels and anti-parallels

There seemed to be no end to the petitioners. For every two she sent off smiling, one left redeyed or muttering. - Daenerys VII ADWD

Ok, but can we appreciate how Dany is able to please two out of each three people that come to her court? That seems like a pretty good track record to me.

Daenerys with her first born son.

Just your monthly reminder that in the books, Arya never once called Sansa stupid.

Arya did call other people stupid but not Sansa. Sansa though, she called and thought Arya was stupid. She also called her ugly, hairy, wished she had died, wished her Arya had been born a bastard, and thought Arya was unsatisfactory as sister. Sansa also described Arya's grin and face as horsey.

So if you think Arya was a bully to Sansa in the books for calling her stupid even though she didn't, you have to think Sansa was a bully for calling Arya stupid and more, right?

And this isn't Sansa hate, it's just book canon.

A very long post about the dragon show and "white supremacy"

Been hanging out in the ASOIAF tags because I'm watching HOTD and there's a certain way the fandom keeps saying the Targaryens are "white supremacist" that doesn't sit right with me. Obviously it's worse when they also assume this of every single person who likes Daenerys or the various Targaryen characters on the current prequel show, which I've also seen happen repeatedly, but I also think it's one of those cases where fandoms need to be clearer about how differently you have to apply arguments when talking in an in-universe way vs. an out-universe way. In the latter case, obviously there's a lot we can critique about how these super-badass world conquerors are depicted as not only white but extremely white (very pale skin and hair) -- though, props to HOTD for muddling that by making House Velaryon, the other Valyrian noble house that the Targaryens frequently intermarry with, black (while still possessing the characteristic platinum hair) -- and how often that is a trope in European-influenced fantasy like this. And there's been plenty of great stuff written by others on how Daenerys is written as a white savior and the way that the various darker-skinned people she encounters in Essos are Othered by the narrative. But that still doesn't mean that every single person who identifies with Daenerys (which, in the heyday of the show, I also remember being frequently the case with POC fans in particular, who wrote long strings of meta about this) is a white supremacist. That shouldn't need to be said. Call out the people who do actually say racist things -- but like, the narrative is designed to make you sympathize with and root for her, and HOTD to do the same with Rhaenyra (at least so far). That is what most viewers' reactions are going to be!

That said, I think I also want to make a post examining the question of "is a royal family choosing to keep its blood line 'pure' but otherwise having no concern with the racial makeup of the kingdom it rules, including in which families it chooses to intermarry with when the incest isn't an option, meaningfully understood as 'white supremacist'?" and also "what are the in-universe racial hierarchies of Westeros (and broader Planetos)? does it make sense to view them through the [even in our world, very modern and very culture- and country-specific, frequently shifting] terms of 'white' and 'black' etc. when discussing it in an in-universe way?"

So this post is about that. Let's strap in. (Disclaimer, just because I know how this fandom is: I have no real stake in the "question" of how the fandom views House Targaryen. I'm neither a Targ stan nor a hater. The Tyrells and Martells have always been my favorites, personally. I just find these discussions really interesting, as those of you who follow me for other things like DS9 likely know already.)

I think the first thing to talk about is that "royal families marrying brother to sister/uncle to niece/etc. to preserve their bloodlines" isn't a thing this show made up, but an example that it took from history. It especially is common in ancient history, before the issues with repetitive incest were understood all that well but also notably before whiteness as a concept existed. For instance, it was a common practice throughout the history of ancient Egypt to wed brothers to sisters. (King Tut, for example, married his half-sister, and his parents were also siblings.) I don't know if GRRM has talked about this, but to me the obvious antecedent to the Targaryens were the Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra's family, who both practiced that kind of incest and like the Targaryens were originally from a different part of the world and a different ethnicity (Macedonian Greeks) from most of their subjects. (Though ancient Egypt in this period was also incredibly diverse, including other groups from Europe that had been spread around by the Roman Empire's dominance over the area... which is a point we'll return to.) Obviously, to engage in that kind of intermarriage requires some kind of investment in the importance of one's own bloodline, but is it necessarily "white supremacist" in the way we think of that term now if that does not extend beyond that?

"White supremacy" as a term requires an investment in the broad category of "whiteness," a category that extends beyond both one particular family but also one particular nationality. (It's also very nebulous in terms of what "counts" and has frequently shifted, as anyone knows who is familiar with the history of Eastern and Southern European immigrants to the U.S., or like, anything about the history and present of antisemitism. It's not purely about skin color, as you'll meet a lot of people from various parts of the world like the Middle East, Asia, etc. who are paler than your average Italian but still don't count as white.) It also in action, pretty much always requires the belief in ideas such that a country is better off when all of its people are of a particular racial group that has some kind of tie (in the supremacist's mind) to the history of that place, and/or a social hierarchy that spans throughout a society. So there are a couple of questions that this raises about whether the Targaryens count as "white supremacist": whether their investment in their blood line is meaningful understood along the lines of "whiteness" as we discuss it today, and whether there is a hierarchy and/or "blood-and-soil" ideology in Westerosi society that extends beyond the Targaryens' marital choices (and if there is, whether the Targaryens were active in either creating or furthering either of those).

While Westeros is largely white, it's interesting to me that what hierarchies there are between groups of people don't seem to be based on "whiteness" as it works in the real world, nor is it something that most Westerosi seem to factor in when deciding on marriages or alliances. For instance, one of the most powerful houses (rulers of one of the titular "Seven Kingdoms") are House Martell, who are darker-skinned due to their Dornish ancestry from Essos. Meanwhile, the wildlings who live beyond the Wall and the mountain clans of the Vale are both at the bottom of the hierarchy in a way that's clearly tied into their regional origin and family-of-birth, but they are also across the board white by our modern Western racial standards. The "white" major houses of the realm frequently intermarry with House Martell and other darker-skinned Dornish families, as well as with nobles from the Free Cities, who vary in "racial" features but include many more darker-skinned people than Westeros does -- but doing so with a wildling is scandalous, and in the TV show, doing so get Samwell Tarly (re-)disowned by his family.

Even the Targaryens intermarry with the Martells, initially to cement Dorne as a part of the realm but later the way they do with any other house (as when Rhaegar is wed to Elia Martell). When they don't have incestuous marriages as an option or don't want them, the Targaryens don't seem to discriminate between the other noble houses based on skin color or ethnic origin. The exception is their frequent intermarriage with the Velaryons, who are also Valyrian -- but in the TV show House of the Dragon (the first real appearance in the show universe), they are portrayed as black. In that case, the Valyrian "features" are the platinum-blond hair which they share with the Targaryens, not white skin... not really the markers of what we consider "whiteness" in the real world. (Because sure, light hair is associated with whiteness, but you wouldn't call Corlys Velaryon in the show white.) Not the books, sure, but with GRRM having a much bigger hand in this show than in GOT (especially in its later seasons), the casting choice makes it clear Valyrian-ness isn't necessarily tied in with "whiteness."

I think that answers the second question, at least: Westeros doesn't order power around race in the same way that we do in the real world. "Whiteness" as a concept likely doesn't exist there. In terms of the first question... I think there's a little more ambiguity in terms of whether the Targaryen investment in keeping "Valyrian" can be understood along racial lines. The "doctrine of exceptionalism" ordered by Jaehaerys I Targaryen in-universe (and detailed in Fire & Blood, which is written in an in-universe style as a history book about the Targaryen dynasty) uses the Valyrian origins of the family as a reason why incest is justified for them even though the Faith of the Seven condemns it for the rest of Westeros. Some of this is based on inherent "features" of their Valyrian heritage like being dragonriders, but there's also a cultural argument to it: that Old Valyria did not have the same attitude toward incest as Andalos (the ancestral home of most southern Westerosi, and where the Faith of the Seven originated) and the way the Targaryens continue to raise their children with an investment in Valyrian ideals means that there is a cultural difference there that should be acknowledged and respected. That said, the root of it is still that Valyrians are somehow "above" other groups due to their dragonriding abilities. (There's an argument to be made here that maybe it's hard to analyze "racism" in an in-universe way when the fictional universe is such that you do actually get specific magical abilities based on your ethnic background, including not only the Valyrian dragonriding but also the warg abilities available to descendants of the First Men like the Starks, Reeds and Blackwoods. But that's a side point and I think there I'm more interested in the out-universe discussion of why fantasy novels keep doing that exactly.) It's easy to see it as racial, but about whiteness? When most of the people they're arguing that they're superior to are white, one of the families (in the show) that also belongs to their special racial group is not white, and they don't discriminate along racial lines in terms of how they treat their subjects... I don't think you can really say that Targaryens are white supremacists.

Daenerys is particularly interesting as a lightning rod for so much discourse, because with all the problems for how her story plays out as a narrative and the framing of various people within that narrative, in-universe her story also shows that she's not someone who sees people's inherent worth and political rights as racially contingent. Her whole arc is about disrupting that system in a place where racial hierarchies play out in one of their most brutal forms, slavery. She makes the ex-slaves she frees part of her government, having power over the people who used to subjugate them. While again there's a lot that's thorny about this storyline for us as viewers, in our world, I think an in-universe sense it pretty clearly puts the lie to Targaryens, and Daenerys especially, being "white supremacists."

Again, this doesn't necessarily engage with the real-world politics and the out-universe/Doylist/non-diegetic questions about why these stories are written in this way, why they focus so much on what we consider white people, why the storyline that focuses the most on non-white people still has a white woman conqueror as its focus. Certainly there are people who like Daenerys because they like a very blonde woman conquering people, and I've seen racist comments from individual "Daenerys stans" (but also from stans of other characters). I think the problem is that the fandom doesn't recognize these as separate from the question of whether these labels are meaningful in-universe, and whether they apply to a discussion of the characters as if they were real people: their motivations, their backgrounds, their places in this fictional world... one that, for starters, just doesn't seem to construct "whiteness" as its own distinct Thing in the first place. So calling the characters themselves "white supremacists" just doesn't make a lot of sense when you stop to actually think about it, and not just flippantly apply discourse terms you learned in one context to a new one where it doesn't fit.