Something Vaguely Poetic

Butterfly Costume

House of Worth

c.1912

Yes. Probably it would be a lot less faithful, because when Terry was alive and well, we were determined that someone was going to write the scripts and make it, and that someone definitely wasn’t us. I didn’t have the time to write six hour long scripts, then take 18 months to showrun and oversee it, and neither did Terry. And our agreement was that we did things together or not at all.

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A Wisconsin mall Santa decided to handle one of the naughty list members early this year when a young girl told him her Christmas wish was for her stepdad to stop molesting her. He and four of his elves attacked the guy, who was waiting nearby, and pummeled him unconscious.

Blanket statement before I start on this one: you can love a story to pieces and still point out its flaws and blind spots, including the racist kind. If we only consumed non-problematic media, we would consume no media whatsoever, but we still gotta be honest with ourselves about where our faves fall short. ASOIAF is my very favorite thing (shocking, I know), yet aspects of it are disappointing, and this is one of them.

For me, what really crystallized the problem with how GRRM writes the Dothraki and the Ghiscari especially is when I read some insightful people comparing that writing to how the author frames the wildlings. Personally, I think GRRM does some of his very best writing with the Free Folk. Throughout the series, the author lavishes attention on their individuality, their rich and sad history, their multi-faceted ideology and how it plays out in each of their unique life stories, all geared toward making Jon—and us—feel for them. Not just intellectually understand that they are human beings like anyone else, but feel it, in his and our bones.  

I want to really emphasize individuality, because it’s important—putting faces on the monolithic swarm changes Jon’s entire worldview over the course of ACOK, ASOS, and ADWD. That’s not just a band of stinking wildlings howling for blood, not anymore. That’s Ygritte, kissed by fire, who loved and was loved, lost and was lost. That’s Tormund Giantsbane, the only one of Jon’s many dads who doesn’t project anything onto him, but simply enjoys his company and wants him to be happy. That’s Mance and Gilly and Val, people that I care about and feel I have come to know. “This is a whole people come together.” One of the worst among them gets a POV; Varamyr Sixskins is the most stomach-churning face we ever wear, but by his prologue’s end, he’s a thoroughly fleshed-out villain, his life story told. I understand him, and my understanding of the wildlings as a whole is richer for what his story communicates.

This is good storytelling, in other words. Really good. Not flawless, but overall, it’s an engine of empathy and humanization with a big-picture political aim: the wildlings are people too, and that means we have to stand with them against the Long Night.

“When the cold winds rise, we shall live or die together. It is time we made alliance against our common foe.” He looked at Jon. “Would you agree?”

“My father dreamed of resettling the Gift,” Jon admitted. “He and my uncle Benjen used to talk of it.” He never thought of settling it with wildlings, though… but he never rode with wildlings, either. He did not fool himself; the free folk would make for unruly subjects and dangerous neighbors. Yet when he weighed Ygritte’s red hair against the cold blue eyes of the wights, the choice was easy. “I agree.”

It’s stirring stuff, and a model to be studied. Those who were initially barbarians in our POV’s eyes are humanized…

…when they are white. When they are not white, the humanization drops off to a glaring and significant degree. Jon and Dany are paralleled throughout the story, but this is one very telling difference: the cultural Other in Jon’s story gets a human face, while Dany’s (to an overwhelming if not 100% complete degree) stays a swarm. This is true whether said swarm is being presented negatively…

Four of the men seemed to be named Grazdan, presumably after Grazdan the Great who had founded Old Ghis in the dawn of days. They all looked alike; thick fleshy men with amber skin, broad noses, dark eyes.

…or positively.

She trotted, then cantered, then broke into a gallop, her braid streaming behind. The freed slaves parted before her. “Mother,” they called from a hundred throats, a thousand, ten thousand. “Mother,” they sang, their fingers brushing her legs as she flew by. “Mother, Mother, Mother!”

You can definitely see parallels between Dany’s assimilation into the Dothraki in AGOT and Jon’s rumspringa with the wildlings in ASOS; @racefortheironthrone makes that case here. But the difference is that in Dany’s story on the Dothraki Sea and in Slaver’s Bay, there’s so rarely even the pretense of individualization. I challenge anyone to describe to me the characterization of Dany’s bloodriders—give me a paragraph on what makes Aggo and Rakharo different. (You would be able to with Mance v. Tormund.) Tell me about Hizdahr zo Loraq and Reznak mo Reznak as human beings. (You would be able to with Ygritte and Varamyr.) Where is the Tormund of the Dothraki? Where is the Ygritte of the Ghiscari? They are not there…or rather, they are, but GRRM doesn’t bother showing them, and seems more than a little disinterested in the people he does show. He finds “the human heart in conflict with itself” in so many other parts of the story, yet not here.

This is where Jon ends up RE the wildlings:

“I am the shield that guards the realms of men. Those are the words. So tell me, my lord—what are these wildlings, if not men?”

This is where Dany ends up RE the Ghiscari:

It was a city of strange men with strange gods and stranger hair, of slavers wrapped in fringed tokars, where grace was earned through whoring, butchery was art, and dog was a delicacy.

The latter is never countered within the text itself. We are not shown how Dany is wrong. This is a problem. (I say that even while worshipping at the altar of Dany X ADWD and recognizing that moment’s place within her personal arc; vast, contain multitudes, and so on.) But this failure of empathy, imagination, dramatization, and humanization did not occur in isolation. This is a major problem with the genre as a whole, and it’s honestly one of the reasons I’m generally much more of a horror and sci-fi guy than a fantasy guy. Those have their own issues, of course (because, again, everything we create does), but fantasy’s history lends itself to a particularly colonialist-nostalgia-tinged take on things. That is far too big a subject to summarize here, and of course concerns our relationship to all media, not just fantasy stories. So, given that a picture is worth a thousand words…Peter Jackson knew to cut Tom Bombadil, but he didn’t know to cut this: