Winning the Game of Thrones: The Host of Characters and their Agendas (24 page)

Heroic Gifts

Daenerys has magical Targaryen gifts, immune to fire and illness as she is (V:473). And she has a destiny: A child of the forest said that “the prince that was promised would be born of their line,” the line of her parents Aerys and Rhaella (V:300-301). (Maester Aemon notes that the word “prince” is gender-neutral in the prophecy, reflecting the nature of dragons.)

At the same time, Daenerys receives a number of talismans, particularly during her wedding scene. She’s given three fine weapons, which she uses to gain her bloodriders. Drogo brings her the magnificent silver horse. Ser Jorah gives her books of Westeros, land of her past and future. And Illyrio, who brokered the marriage, gives her the three dragon eggs.

“The universe begins with roundness; so say the myths. The great circle, the cosmic egg, the bubble, the spiral, the moon, the zero, the wheel of time, the infinite womb; such are the symbols that try to express a human sense of the wholeness of things,” writes Barbara G. Walker in
The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects
.
^[63]
Thus the egg and circle are divine symbols of the lifecycle. They represent the woman as life-giver and font of intuitive wisdom, allowing her to channel the future. Eggs are a popular feminine symbol, representing life and fertility, symbols of the heroine herself. Eggs also represent potential, important for the innocent and untried Daenerys who grows alongside them into a conqueror and queen. Eggs are the entire lifecycle bound in a single sphere, simple of reincarnation and rejuvenation. As such, they feature in Easter and Passover traditions, coinciding with a time of spring and rebirth. Several cultures traditionally eat eggs after a death. Chinese and Native American legend has the world beginning as a single egg, which opens to reveal everything inside. Daenerys’s eggs are all these things for her, resurrecting her as a mother, guardian of not only three dragons but a world in which magic itself has been reborn along with her. The comet itself, round and red in the sky, might be seen as an egg of sorts.

While the hero always carries a magic sword, heroines get books and spyglasses, potions and amulets. This echoes a subtler form of questing, with cleverness, healing, and perception in place of combat. The books Ser Jorah gives Daenerys give her a clearer picture of Westeros than that her brother offers. They are tools of divine intuition, offering the heroine powers of wisdom and prophecy.

Her beautiful horse makes Daenerys believe her new husband has given her the wind, an image of freedom (as she comments in the book). With it, the young khaleesi is no longer a sheltered princess but a rider of the Dothraki. Silver is the color of moon magic and feminine strength like Artemis’s bow or Galadriel’s ring. Silver’s mirrorlike clarity suggests vision and deep knowledge, while the metal itself is shapeable yet strong. The heroine’s path mirrors this, blending flexibility and endurance.

Mentor

Daenerys has several mentors, including Ser Jorah and Barristan the Bold. However, her most significant mentor is the Maegi Mirri Maz Duur. The Dothraki describe her as a woman who “lay with demons and practiced the blackest of sorceries, a vile thing, evil and soulless, who came to men in the dark of night and sucked life and strength from their bodies” (I:671). The mentor of the heroine’s journey is no kindly Gandalf or Merlin. Instead, she is the wicked stepmother of Snow White, choking the innocent maiden with tight corsets and a poisoned apple as she forces her to face the cruel reality of adulthood. The original Little Mermaid has the unfeeling sea witch, who cuts out her tongue, not cruelly, but as a fair price for her services. Even the mermaid’s grandmother is callous to suffering, clipping sharp oysters to the girl’s tail to indicate her rank. Many myths reflect this relationship:

Venus’s initiation of Psyche is demanding in the extreme. Psyche suffers torments and afflictions; she despairs of accomplishing her tasks and becomes suicidal. But these strenuous labors develop her consciousness and her capacity to love. The Terrible Mother is the heroine’s catalyst. She represents the dark, unexplored side of the heroine, a side Psyche still must face.
^[64]

Daenerys’s lot is much the same.

These are the typical mentors for the heroine, and the Maegi is no exception. While the show sees her using a poisoned dressing on the Khal, the book is more ambiguous – The Khal pulls off the dressing because it stings, and the wound festers. If he had followed directions, the Maegi insists, he would have survived. Harshness and pain are part of life, the mentor teaches.

Whether or not that’s true, the cruel mentor’s job is to force the innocent heroine to face the harsh realities and ugliness of her own mortality. “The gaps from housewife to career woman; from wife to widow; from widow to lover; from lover to single woman again: all involve pain and ungainliness and a change of consciousness,” notes Joan Gould, author of the fairytale analysis
Spinning Straw into Gold
.
^[65]

Snow White’s stepmother makes her eat the apple, the thirteenth fairy pricks Sleeping Beauty with a spindle. And the Maegi strikes her terrible bargain: a life for Drogo’s. She teaches Daenerys the value of life and of making bargains without considering: When Daenerys protests that she would not have willingly sacrificed her child, the Maegi can only say that Daenerys secretly knew the true cost. The mentor’s job is to make the heroine accept these grim realities, rather than ignoring them. A girl can live in innocence, but to be a mother, one must know the pain and ugliness of real life. As Silvia Brinton Perera comments in
Descent to the Goddess, “
Until the demonic powers of the dark goddess are claimed, there is not strength in the woman to grow from daughter to an adult who can stand against the force of patriarchy.”
^[66]

Like Mance is for Jon, this dark mentor represents the shadow, all the protagonist isn’t but must learn from to tap these skills within the self. Cersei tutors Sansa this way, showing her the grislier side of life as a woman. Daenerys indeed learns from the Maegi’s betrayal: that kindness will not earn her kindness, that life is needed to buy life. It is a far harder, crueler Daenerys who burns the Maegi in the fire, for only this cruelty can allow Daenerys’s dragons to be born.

More mentors come to Daenerys as the series progresses: After the dragons arrive, Quaithe appears to Daenerys and offers her perplexing riddles:

“To go north, you must go south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”

Asshai, Daenerys thought. She would have me go to Asshai. “Will the Asshai’i give me an army?” she demanded. “Will there be gold for me in Asshai? Will there be ships? What is there in Asshai that I will not find in Qarth?”

“Truth,” said the woman in the mask. And bowing, she faded back into the crowd. (II.426)

On the show, the masked woman of Qarth is more direct, cautioning Ser Jorah that Daenerys faces danger: “I’m no one but she is the Mother of Dragons. She needs true protectors, now more than ever...They are dragons, fire made flesh. And fire is power” (2.5). Of course, it is possible this mentor will be another source of cruelty, torturing Daenerys when she travels southeast as ordered – what Daenerys needs will certainly not be what she would choose for herself, as her season one arc reveals.

Mirri Maz Duur is Daenerys’ first magical mentor, Quaithe is the second. Melisandre may become the third.

Daenerys and Men

On the heroine’s journey, the young woman is surrounded by males who evoke her untapped masculine side and teach her to use its power. This animus, or male archetype, “evokes masculine traits within her: logic, rationality, intellect. Her conscious side, aware of the world around her, grows, and she can rule and comprehend the exterior world.”
^[67]
This is Jungian analyst Marie Louise Von Franz’s model, adapted into a chart for easy viewing.

Viserys certainly embodies passion and physical force as he manhandles and even gropes his sister, making ribald comments and demanding his birthright, the throne. He threatens to kill slaves, hits them and his sister, and even jeers at powerful warriors. He has inherited the family madness, invoking emotion without any self-control. His rage indeed leads to his own destruction, though Daenerys has the sense not to interfere.

If Viserys is childish untempered emotion, Khal Drogo is the body – force and physical splendor, energy and rule through strength. Their son, the Stallion Who Mounts the World and conqueror of nations, echoes him, as do his warriors. Whether they respect Daenerys or antagonize her, impulse, passion, and swordplay are their first resort. Under Drogo’s influence and filled with love for him, Daenerys trusts the Maegi who offers dark magic to save Drogo, following her heart rather than her head. This intemperate act leads to Drogo’s death as well as her son’s.

Ser Jorah is the mind, always a figure of restraint and wise counsel rather than action. His practical advice remains bloodless and expedient rather than emotionally based as he counsels Daenerys to sell the dragon eggs, abandon her dying husband, and later leave the dragons behind in the House of the Undying. This is all the rational course to take, if one sets aside the deeper feminine wisdom born from dreams and love that’s blossoming within Daenerys. She ignores his advice, like ignoring the rational voice within herself, and wins the day through the deeper wisdom of faith and love.

The second book introduces male villains: the Qartheen dignitary Xaro Xhoan Daxos, who is calculating and expedient like Jorah, and Pyat Pree of the Warlocks of Qarth, the evil spiritual guide, deceiver and distorter of the future. Xaro is always scheming and plotting with his rise to power and wealth. He offers Daenerys marriage in return for his aid to conquer the Seven Kingdoms. This is not for love, but for power and political gain. However, he betrays her when she refuses him, and he seizes control of the city through treachery. Having learned during her time in the magnificent patriarchal city, Daenerys outwits him, locking him in his own impenetrable vault on the show. By the second season’s end, she’s beginning to master the calculating world of the intellect.

Battling the Patriarchy, Battling Pity

As Daenerys travels, she outwits the arrogant slaver of Astapor by offering him her largest dragon in trade. Like the Starks’ wolves, Daenerys’s dragons reflect her buried feelings, all the wrath and power she’s only beginning to integrate into the self. The slaver cannot control the dragon and is burned to ashes. By letting out her hidden strength in careful bursts, controlling and guiding it, Daenerys gains an army.

Ser Jorah points out that the Unsullied do not kill civilians or rape women, unlike other soldiers. Back in Westeros, Rhaegar’s love or lust for Lyanna and Jaime’s for Cersei have both begun civil wars. As the slaver of Astapor points out, the Westerosi men sworn to chastity soon break their vows. “Their days are a torment of temptation, any fool must see, and no doubt most succumb to their baser selves” (III:317). The Unsullied by contrast have been castrated of their emotional and physical urges to be a perfect fighting force, completely obedient to the will of Daenerys. As such, they symbolize a new kind of soldier in service to the reigning queen, bodies without destructive emotion.

The Unsullied are a fit army for the mother of the downtrodden: They worship a goddess they call the “Mother of Hosts,” an echo of Daenerys herself. As former slaves, they are also victims Daenerys longs to free. Recruited as five-year-old children, robbed of even their names, castrated and forced to murder their own puppies, they have been brutalized, stripped of all individuality and self-worth. Two children are killed for every Unsullied who survives. Daenerys ends the brutal practice of making Unsullied. She also returns their names and with them the beginnings of their identity.

As the mother-protector of her growing community, Daenerys also frees the slaves and stays in the east to protect them. The slavers’ symbol is the harpy, a female monster that would afflict the innocent, snatching their food and rending them with claws. By battling them, Daenerys sets herself as a hero-protector. However, in her campaign for Westeros, staying in the east is a disaster. To Slaver’s Bay, she is no legendary Targaryen, only a barbarian conqueror determined to destroy their way of life. As terrorist attacks escalate, Daenerys refuses to respond in kind and forbids anyone to harm her underage hostages.

Male heroes are tested by having to endure pain, hunger, and thirst to prove their forbearance – the strength of self all heroes need to overcome their initiation. Heroines, however, must resist pity, withstanding the claim of what is nearby for the sake of a distant abstract goal. This is a task of single-mindedness, of willpower.