#ghis

ARCHADIA : CHESS ARCHETYPE One does not win by preserving every piece; only by knowing which may be spent.

It must really rankle Ghis to not know what's going on. Do we know if he's aware of what happened to Zecht with the Midlight Shard? I'd assume no, but I have to cross-reference against known information about Zecht and Nabudis (unless anyone else knows!)

The Great City of Astapor.

from SQUARECN. alternative design here

Kinda surprised at how well it worked

The societies of Slaver’s Bay (and the Free Cities) are without a doubt slaving societies. A “slaving society” as described by influential historian Moses I Finley, is different from a “society with slaves” (which were most of ancient societies) where slavery was a small aspect of social/economic life; a slaving society had at least 20% slaves, there’s enough of them to create a cultural impact, and they’re an essential part of the economy. In Finley’s model, there are only 5 slaving societies in (Western) history: Greece, Rome, colonial US South, Caribbean, and Brazil. GRRM makes it clear that without slavery, Slaver’s Bay would collapse economically (as would the Free Cities further west). He provides comically high numbers of slaves in some of the Free Cities (slave to free are 3:1 in Lys, Myr, Tyrosh; and 5:1 in Volantis), but we hear of only a few slave rebellions in them (when the Doom of Valyria happened and they killed all the dragons surviving except the Targs’) until Dány, but why? In slaving societies, the threat of violence for rebelling was institutional and severe…but every one of those 5 had multiple examples of slave uprisings. And in some cases where the slaves outnumbered the elites by that level of magnitude, they were successful. The helots of Messenia took advantage of an earthquake and Thebes’ invasion of Sparta to revolt and eventually rebuild their old city, while the enslaved people of Haiti took advantage of the French Revolution/Napoleonic Wars to win their independence. It stands to reason as a hub of slavery that Slaver’s Bay has an enslaved population close to that of the Free Cities, but there’s never any uprising mentioned until Dány comes? Even though we know that natural disasters and institutional warfare took place in that area. And don’t tell me the magical Unsullied just prevented all rebellions forever; the Spartans were allegedly the best warriors in Ancient Greece, whole kingdoms couldn’t win against Roman consular armies, the French army defeated practically most of Europe during the Revolutionary/Napoleonic period…but there were slave rebellions that managed to beat all of them, even if temporarily (poor Spartacus). But we’re just supposed to assume that after the fall of Valyria—which TWOIAF did tell us coincided with slave rebellions against the dragonlords—absolutely none of these cities achieved any sort of lasting freedom for its enslaved people? Even when the source of the Valyrian might, the dragons, was gone and the elite could no longer rely on that violence to keep the population in line? They were all just suffering and waiting for a savior for centuries, despite being most of the city’s population (including much of the army) and there being only some backup for the elite? The USA had to outlaw educating enslaved people for fear of rebellion, but there were still uprisings; meanwhile, in Essos there’s no ban on education, but we hear of none in Slaver’s Bay? It’s absolute nonsense historically, and only serves to make the slavers look super evil and Dány to look more like an apparent hero; the byproduct is that the enslaved people are robbed of the spirit, agency, and solidarity that they had in real life.

🤩🤩🤩