“She felt desperately afraid. Was this what my brother would have done?”

Synopsis: Dany (Ocean) robs Astapor.

SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.

Political Analysis:

It is hardly a bold statement to say that this is the most pivotal of Dany’s POV chapters in all of ASOS, reshaping her narrative arc for at least two books in ways that remain controversial in the fandom to this day. Because it is such a departure, however, it is frequently read in a very presentist fashion, as if the entire course of events that leads from here to Daznak’s Pit should and could have been evident from the first, and the fact that they did lead there is emblematic of the overconfidence of the colonialist white savior. (More on that later…)

However, even though Dany III is the origin of her mantra of “if I look back I am lost,” in this chapter, far from evoking a stubborn rejection of self-reflection, it is an expression of supressed fear in the moment between the dice being thrown and them landing on the table. And I would argue that, if we examine the chapter on its own, what we see is not a story of conquest, but a heist, where Dany and her crew sweat the endlessly ratcheting tension as they attempt to con the Good Masters of Astapor until the cathartic burst of action at the end, where they lift an entire enslaved people out from under the noses of their captors.

“All” and Salesmanship

Appropriately for a heist, the chapter begins in media res, with Dany having put her plan into action with a bold offer that puts the Good Masters on the back foot:

“All?” The slave girl sounded wary. “Your Grace, did this one’s worthless ears mishear you?” “…Your ears heard true,” said Dany. “I want to buy them all. Tell the Good Masters, if you will.” While the Good Masters of Astapor conferred among themselves in low voices, Dany sipped tart persimmon wine from a tall silver flute. She could not quite make out all that they were saying, but she could hear the greed… “All,” growled Kraznys mo Nakloz, who smelled of peaches today. The slave girl repeated the word in the Common Tongue of Westeros. “Of thousands, there are eight. Is this what she means by all? There are also six centuries, who shall be part of a ninth thousand when complete. Would she have them too?” “I would,” said Dany when the question was put to her. “The eight thousands, the six centuries . . . and the ones still in training as well. The ones who have not earned the spikes.” …Dany let them argue, sipping the tart persimmon wine and trying to keep her face blank and ignorant. I will have them all, no matter the price, she told herself.

As we discussed last time, this gambit of buying every last Unsullied in Astapor is absolutely crucial to her scheme, because any Unsullied left unbought is one more of the finest infantry in Essos who could resist her surprise attack. To that end, Dany needs to appeal to the short-term greed of the Good Masters over the long-term interests of their industry:

“We cannot sell half-trained boys,” one of the silver-fringe Grazdans was saying to the others. “We can, if her gold is good,” said a fatter man whose fringe was gold. “They are not Unsullied. They have not killed their sucklings. If they fail in the field, they will shame us. And even if we cut five thousand raw boys tomorrow, it would be ten years before they are fit for sale. What would we tell the next buyer who comes seeking Unsullied?” “We will tell him that he must wait,” said the fat man. “Gold in my purse is better than gold in my future.” …The city had a hundred slave traders, but the eight before her were the greatest. When selling bed slaves, fieldhands, scribes, craftsmen, and tutors, these men were rivals, but their ancestors had allied one with the other for the purpose of making and selling the Unsullied. Brick and blood built Astapor, and brick and blood her people.

Because of the high wastage and substantial training costs involved, the production of the Unsullied is much more akin to modern mass-production than medieval handscrafts, requiring a semi-corporate management structure complete with a board of directors. (How appropriate that this board is made up of putative competitors who’ve formed a monopoly!) This creates a different set of incentives, as we see from the silver-fringed Grazdan who worries about losing future market share and what will happen to their reputation for product quality if they let the “half-trained boys” fight for the Dragon Queen. However, as so often happens in capitalist structures, short-term profits rule the day over the long-term interests of the business, so the deal goes ahead:

“Tell her that the eight thousands she shall have, if her gold proves sufficient. And the six centuries, if she wishes. Tell her to come back in a year, and we will sell her another two thousand.” “In a year I shall be in Westeros,” said Dany when she had heard the translation. “My need is now. The Unsullied are well trained, but even so, many will fall in battle. I shall need the boys as replacements to take up the swords they drop.” She put her wine aside and leaned toward the slave girl. “Tell the Good Masters that I will want even the little ones who still have their puppies. Tell them that I will pay as much for the boy they cut yesterday as for an Unsullied in a spiked helm.” The girl told them. The answer was still no. Dany frowned in annoyance. “Very well. Tell them I will pay double, so long as I get them all.” “Double?” The fat one in the gold fringe all but drooled. “This little whore is a fool, truly,” said Khaznys mo Nakloz. “Ask her for triple, I say. She is desperate enough to pay. Ask for ten times the price of every slave, yes.”

Here Dany really pushes her luck, going to suspicious lengths to purchase “even the little ones,” and while she pretends that this is about “replacements to take up the swords” from casualties, specifically mentioning the youngest possible inductees before they’ve going down the conveyer belt of degradation is a sign that Dany’s aim is humanitarian manumission. To cover up this moment of genuine emotion, Dany has to quickly pivot to offering double, re-orienting the Good Masters’ focus on greed.

Speaking of which, Kraznys’ response is a piece of why I give short shrift to arguments that Daenerys should be excoriated for breaking faith in Astapor. Given that the Unsullied cabal have already built their profit margin into the asking price, going beyond an already-generous premium to “ten times the price of every slave” is predatory. Thus, rather than an honest commercial exchange, what we have here is a transaction in which both sides are trying to cheat the other as much as possible.

The other piece of evidence comes next, as we see Graznys supposedly worrying about Danys’ credit rating:

The tall Grazdan with the spiked beard spoke in the Common Tongue, though not so well as the slave girl. “Your Grace,” he growled, “Westeros is being wealthy, yes, but you are not being queen now. Perhaps will never being queen. Even Unsullied may be losing battles to savage steel knights of Seven Kingdoms. I am reminding, the Good Masters of Astapor are not selling flesh for promisings. Are you having gold and trading goods sufficient to be paying for all these eunuchs you are wanting?” “You know the answer to that better than I, Good Master,” Dany replied. “Your men have gone through my ships and tallied every bead of amber and jar of saffron. How much do I have?” “Sufficient to be buying one of thousands,” the Good Master said, with a contemptuous smile. “Yet you are paying double, you are saying. Five centuries, then, is all you buy.”

Under the surface, however, both sides are playing a double game. What Graznys is doing is trying to define down the value of Dany’s liquid capital in terms of how many Unsullied she can now afford, knowing that the commitment bias of “all” will get Dany to put something else on the table, something that he wants more than any amount of gold, without having to state his interest outright. And far from this being a project only of Graznys’, the cabal as a whole are in on this hard sell strategy:

“Your pretty crown might buy another century,” said the fat one in Valyrian. “Your crown of the three dragons.” Dany waited for his words to be translated. “My crown is not for sale.” When Viserys sold their mother’s crown, the last joy had gone from him, leaving only rage. “Nor will I enslave my people, nor sell their goods and horses. But my ships you can have. The great cog Balerion and the galleys Vhagar and Meraxes.” She had warned Groleo and the other captains it might come to this, though they had protested the necessity of it furiously. “Three good ships should be worth more than a few paltry eunuchs.” “…Two of the thousands,” the one with the spiked beard said when he turned back. “It is too much, but the Good Masters are being generous and your need is being great.” Two thousand would never serve for what she meant to do. I must have them all. Dany knew what she must do now, though the taste of it was so bitter that even the persimmon wine could not cleanse it from her month. She had considered long and hard and found no other way. It is my only choice. “Give me all,” she said, “and you may have a dragon.” “Did I not tell you? Anything, she would give us.” …She knew the answer, though; she could see it in the glitter of their eyes and the smiles they tried so hard to hide. Astapor had thousands of eunuchs, and even more slave boys waiting to be cut, but there were only three living dragons in all the great wide world. And the Ghiscari lust for dragons. How could they not? Five times had Old Ghis contended with Valyria when the world was young, and five times gone down to bleak defeat. For the Freehold had dragons, and the Empire had none.

Whether the cabal have heard of the “beggar king,” the feint at her crown is a pretty dirty hardball tactic aimed at getting Dany to sell one of her dragon, which we can see from Kraznys was their real aim the entire time, well before Dany made any offer about doubling the price.

Unfortunately for the cabal, Dany is also running a game on them. She even gives them a clue that this is a con when she offers to throw in her three ships – how the hell did they think she was going to get her Unsullied to Westeros without any means of conveyance? She knows that they’ll overlook the clue, because “the Ghiscari lust for dragons” has blinded them to any danger. Thus in Astapor, as so many times before, cultural literacy is Daenerys’ secret weapon. Not only can she speak their language and listen in on their unguarded conferences, but she can speak their culture, that grinding sense of insecurity and resentment about the fall of Old Ghis that lurks in the hearts of the Good Masters the same way that Pickett’s Charge is still a sore subject among a certain kind of southerner. So in the grips of their romantic nationalism are they that the Good Masters will gladly sell her the rope she’ll use to hang them, and never see it coming.

Missandei the Translator

Once the bargain has been made, the Good Masters hand off Missandei to Dany in much the same way that banks used to give away free toasters for new customers. The irony is that Missandei will serve as a translator between Daenerys and the Unsullied in more than one way:

“The Unsullied will learn your savage tongue quick enough,” added Kraznys mo Nakloz, when all the arrangements had been made, “but until such time you will need a slave to speak to them. Take this one as our gift to you, a token of a bargain well struck.” “I shall,” said Dany… “…That is only for Unsullied,” the girl said. Then she realized the question had been asked in High Valyrian. Her eyes went wide. “Oh…Your Grace, forgive this one her outburst. Your slave’s name is Missandei, but…” “Missandei is no longer a slave. I free you, from this instant. Come ride with me in the litter, I wish to talk.” Rakharo helped them in, and Dany drew the curtains shut against the dust and heat. “If you stay with me you will serve as one of my handmaids,” she said as they set off. “I shall keep you by my side to speak for me as you spoke for Kraznys. But you may leave my service whenever you choose, if you have father or mother you would sooner return to.” “This one will stay,” the girl said. “This one…I…there is no place for me to go. This…I will serve you, gladly.” “I can give you freedom, but not safety,” Dany warned. “I have a world to cross and wars to fight. You may go hungry. You may grow sick. You may be killed.” “Valar morghulis,” said Missandei, in High Valyrian. “All men must die,” Dany agreed, “but not for a long while, we may pray.”

Already established as the clever intermediary who sees more than her arrogant masters, Missandei instantly understands what it means that Dany can speak High Valyrian. As a result, Dany has to demonstrate her good intentions by manumitting Missandei on the spot and offering a job opportunity (arguably one Dany tries to outright dissuade her from accepting) instead. Missandei’s response speaks both to the very pragmatic understanding she has about what freedom and safety mean for a freedwoman from an island nation frequently raided by slavers, but also to the very different meaning that the words are given in this scene compared to the show. (More on that in Book vs. Show.)

Once they have an only-partially-spoken agreement, we get to the translation I mentioned above. As long as she’s been planning this heist, Dany has been trying to get advance information about the Unsullieds’ mentality, which side they’ll choose when she launches her coup. However, up until now she’s only had information from (or at least approved by) the slave-masters. Out of everyone in Astapor, Missandei is uniquely positioned to give her an accurate “theory of mind” on the slave-soldiers:

She leaned back on the pillows and took the girl’s hand. “Are these Unsullied truly fearless?…Is it true they feel no pain?” “The wine of courage kills such feelings. By the time they slay their sucklings, they have been drinking it for years.” “And they are obedient?” “Obedience is all they know. If you told them not to breathe, they would find that easier than not to obey.” “If I did resell them, how would I know they could not be used against me?” Dany asked pointedly. “Would they do that? Fight against me, even do me harm?” “If their master commanded. They do not question, Your Grace. All the questions have been culled from them. They obey.” She looked troubled. “When you are…when you are done with them…Your Grace might command them to fall upon their swords.” “And even that, they would do?” “Yes.” Missandei’s voice had grown soft. “Your Grace.” Dany squeezed her hand. “You would sooner I did not ask it of them, though. Why is that? Why do you care?” “This one does not….I…Your Grace…” “Tell me.” The girl lowered her eyes. “Three of them were my brothers once, Your Grace.”

Here, Dany learns the critical piece of information: once the sale has gone through, the Unsullied cannot be turned against her by their former owner; then and not before is it safe to strike. At the same time, speaking to Dany’s motives in this chapter, Missandei works to persuade Dany not to think of the Unsullied as pure killers who should be discarded once the war is over, to remind both her and the reader that we are dealing with human beings.

The Present and Future Queen: Arstan’s Anger

Moving on from this first section, which focuses entirely on the question of the Unsullied, we move on to a section that focuses more on Dany as a ruler. I find this section particularly interesting, because up until now we haven’t had much of a thematic connection between Dany’s story and the political plot over in Westeros: where Ned struggled with how to be a good man and a good Hand, Dany birthed dragons; where Baratheons and Starks and Lannisters clashed over who ought to be king and why, Dany crossed a desert and received prophecy. Here for the first time we start to see Dany answering these questions, asserting herself as not merely a claimant to the Iron Throne but also as someone who thinks about what the Iron Throne means.

This thread begins with Barristan Selmy, who (just as he did in last chapter) acts as a distracting flourish, meant to convince the reader that Dany is actually going to go through with it:

Whitebeard stared in shocked disbelief. His hand trembled where it grasped the staff. “No.” He went to one knee before her. “Your Grace, I beg you, win your throne with dragons, not slaves. You must not do this thing—” “You must not presume to instruct me. Ser Jorah, remove Whitebeard from my presence.”

Dany’s instinctive reaction is to bring Barristan up short for openly contradicting her. On first glance, Dany’s line of private free speech but public unity is not an unreasonable position for a leader relating to their subordinate (especially given the gender issues involved). Moreover, because we have her internal monologue, we know that Dany in fact partially agrees with his dissent for her own reasons:

Arstan Whitebeard held his tongue as well, when Dany swept by him on the terrace. He followed her down the steps in silence, but she could hear his hardwood staff tap tapping on the red bricks as they went. She did not blame him for his fury. It was a wretched thing she did. The Mother of Dragons has sold her strongest child. Even the thought made her ill. Yet down in the Plaza of Pride, standing on the hot red bricks between the slavers’ pyramid and the barracks of the eunuchs, Dany turned on the old man. “Whitebeard,” she said, “I want your counsel, and you should never fear to speak your mind with me…when we are alone. But never question me in front of strangers. Is that understood?” “Yes, Your Grace,” he said unhappily. “I am not a child,” she told him. “I am a queen.” “Yet even queens can err. The Astapori have cheated you, Your Grace. A dragon is worth more than any army. Aegon proved that three hundred years ago, upon the Field of Fire.” “I know what Aegon proved. I mean to prove a few things of my own.”

That Dany’s anger towards Barristan in the moment is largely a reflection of her anger at herseof for selling her child into slavery, even if only for a ruse, still doesn’t answer the challenge that he poses. Barristan’s position that “even queens can err,” which we’ll see later is motivated in part by his fear that this last Targaryen will prove to be an absolutist by temperment, is an important line for evaluating Dany as a leader. At the same time, we do have to acknowledge that Barristan’s opposition is based on an overly-narrow perception of the value of dragons; Dany is using a bit of lateral thinking to use dragons to conquer in Astapor in a different way than Aegon might have done – which should count as a point in her favor as a leader.

Further complicating the idea that Dany’s character in this moment is all about serene (over)confidence, when Dany starts to speak at length about how she thinks about the purpose of her reign, she starts with a memory of failure and weakness:

“Do you remember Eroeh?” she asked him. “The Lhazareen girl?” “They were raping her, but I stopped them and took her under my protection. Only when my sun-and-stars was dead Mago took her back, used her again, and killed her. Aggo said it was her fate.” “I remember,” Ser Jorah said. “I was alone for a long time, Jorah. All alone but for my brother. I was such a small scared thing. Viserys should have protected me, but instead he hurt me and scared me worse. He shouldn’t have done that. He wasn’t just my brother, he was my king. Why do the gods make kings and queens, if not to protect the ones who can’t protect themselves?” “Some kings make themselves. Robert did.” “He was no true king,” Dany said scornfully. “He did no justice. Justice…that’s what kings are for.”

While she’s not given credit for it enough, Dany has a surprising gift for self-reflection, which we see demonstrated her. We might expect from her upbringing that Dany’s conception of monarchy would have been beaten into her by Viserys, but here we see that Dany has essentially reverse-engineered her thinking from his manifest failures, coming to the very Stannis-ish conclusion that “justice” is “what kings are for.” Sadly to say, it is not a given that individuals or groups once under someone’s boot to draw out from their own experiences a categorical imperative as to how others ought to be treated, but Dany does seem to be one of those people. Rather than coming across as a self-proclaimed messiah, however, Dany starts by recognizing that she falls fallen short of her own ideals in the past, having failed to “protect the ones who can’t protect themselves” when it came to the Lhazarene.

But because we’re still dealing with a fifteen-year-old, no matter how introspective, Dany’s conception of herself as a ruler is still largely a romantic one:

I ought to have a banner sewn, she thought as she led her tattered band up along Astapor’s meandering river. She closed her eyes to imagine how it would look: all flowing black silk, and on it the red three-headed dragon of Targaryen, breathing golden flames. A banner such as Rhaegar might have borne.

As I’ve suggested before, Rhaegar acts as a particular kind of political symbol within the Targaryen camp, not merely a Crown Prince (since that position was always somewhat tenuous thanks to his father) but as a kind of redemption from the short-comings of House Targaryen in general.

The Present and Future Queen: Dreams and Portents

Speaking of Rhaegar and romanticism, this is where we momentarily zag back to the magical meta-plot, as Dany dreams (not for the first time) of not just being like Rhaegar but being Rhaegar:

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper’s rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened.

This passage is one that I have occasionally struggled with. It’s definitely linked to the Second Battle for the Dawn, but I think it’s meant to be a dreamlike metaphor of her larger purpose, why Dany specifically should be queen, rather than an exact prediction. Namely, I think the fact that Dany dreams of fighting the army of the dead on the Trident isn’t proof that the Trident is where the final battle will be fought – I’m strongly of the opinion that the final battle will be in the North – but rather because the Trident is the battle most associated with Rhaegar, and Rhaegar is the romantic lens through which Dany perceives both monarchy and (unless I miss my guess, in future) destiny through.

And as if to confirm that this dream was indeed prophetic, Quaithe picks this moment to suddenly appear (presumably by use of shadow magic and/or the glass candle) to render prophecy unto the Chosen One:

She is standing over me. “Who’s there?” Dany peered into the darkness. She thought she could see a shadow, the faintest outline of a shape. “What do you want to me?” “Remember. To go north, you must journey 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.” “Quaithe?” Dany sprung from the bed and threw open the door. Pale yellow lantern light flooded the cabin, and Irri and Jhiqui sat up sleepily. “Khaleesi?” murmured Jhiqui, rubbing her eyes. Viserion woke and opened his jaws, and a puff of flame brightened even the darkest corners. There was no sign of a woman in a red lacquer mask.

I don’t want to belabor the prophecy particularly, since i already covered it the first time, back in ACOK. I do think it supports my interpretation of the dream above, since Dany is described as needing “to go north” (by journeying south) which suggests that her final destination and thus the second battle for the dawn will take place in the North. I do find its placement here interesting, because if it follows the trope of prophetic dreams before important battles, it suggests that Dany’s coup in Astapor (and by extension her entire crusade against the Slave Cities) isn’t a side trip but somehow necessary to achieving her larger destiny.

Raising the Stakes

When Dany rides out to put her plan into motion, GRRM uses the trip to raise the level of tension by showing us that Dany isn’t the serene badass she’s often depicted as:

If I look back I am lost, Dany told herself the next morning as she entered Astapor through the harbor gates. She dared not remind herself how small and insignificant her following truly was, or she would lose all courage. Today she rode her silver, clad in horsehair pants and painted leather vest, a bronze medallion belt about her waist and two more crossed between her breasts. Irri and Jhiqui had braided her hair and hung it with a tiny silver bell whose chime sang of the Undying of Qarth, burned in their Palace of Dust. The red brick streets of Astapor were almost crowded this morning. Slaves and servants lined the ways, while the slavers and their women donned their tokars to look down from their stepped pyramids. They are not so different from Qartheen after all, she thought. They want a glimpse of dragons to tell their children of, and their children’s children. It made her wonder how many of them would ever have children. Aggo went before her with his great Dothraki bow. Strong Belwas walked to the right of her mare, the girl Missandei to her left. Ser Jorah Mormont was behind in mail and surcoat, glowering at anyone who came too near. Rakharo and Jhogo protected the litter. Dany had commanded that the top be removed, so her three dragons might be chained to the platform. Irri and Jhiqui rode with them, to try and keep them calm. Yet Viserion’s tail lashed back and forth, and smoke rose angry from his nostrils. Rhaegal could sense something wrong as well. Thrice he tried to take wing, only to be pulled down by the heavy chain in Jhiqui’s hand. Drogon coiled into a ball, wings and tail tucked tight. Only his eyes remained to tell that he was not asleep. The rest of her people followed: Groleo and the other captains and their crews, and the eighty-three Dothraki who remained to her of the hundred thousand who had once ridden in Drogo’s khalasar. She put the oldest and weakest on the inside of the column, with the nursing women and those with child, and the little girls, and the boys too young to braid their hair. The rest—her warriors, such as they were—rode outside and moved their dismal herd along, the hundred-odd gaunt horses that had survived both red waste and black salt sea.

As I discussed at the beginning of this essay, the phrase “if I look back I am lost” has undergone something of a process of memetic mutation. At the moment the thought passes through her head, Dany is a terrified underdog who feels “small and insignificant,” with less than a hundred soldiers up against the whole of Astapor. Despite this numerical disadvantage, she’s already made the bargain at the beginning of the chapter, and thus has no choice but to forge ahead. This feeling of trepidation explains why she chooses to “put the oldest and weakest on the inside of the column” as if the khalasar were traveling through dangerous wilderness, but also why she shifts from her earlier Qartheen gown, which is meant to allure and distract, to her Dothraki garb. Not only does this earlier identity give Dany a sense of connection to her still-tiny khalasar, but it also gives a tangible connection to the last time she triumphed over a seemingly superior foe.

Paralleling Dany’s interior dialogue is the sense of paranoia and dread in the environment as the crew comes ever closer to the target: close to hand, the dragons pick up either on their mother’s emotional state or what is about to happen. From afar, as the column passes down the streets of the city, seemingly the whole of Astapor turns out to watch the procession, adding to the sense of being surveilled.

The Plaza of Punishment

Now we get to the Big Event of the chapter, and as if to emphasize what kind of social system Dany is about to overthrow, GRRM changes the scene of the crime from the Plaza of Pride to a new location:

The Plaza of Pride with its great bronze harpy was too small to hold all the Unsullied she had bought. Instead they had been assembled in the Plaza of Punishment, fronting on Astapor’s main gate, so they might be marched directly from the city once Daenerys had taken them in hand. There were no bronze statues here; only a wooden platform where rebellious slaves were racked, and flayed, and hanged. “The Good Masters place them so they will be the first thing a new slave sees upon entering the city,” Missandei told her as they came to the plaza. At first glimpse, Dany thought their skin was striped like the zorses of the Jogos Nhai. Then she rode her silver nearer and saw the raw red flesh beneath the crawling black stripes. Flies. Flies and maggots. The rebellious slaves had been peeled like a man might peel an apple, in a long curling strip. One man had an arm black with flies from fingers to elbow, and red and white beneath. Dany reined in beneath him. “What did this one do?” “He raised a hand against his owner.”

The imagery is hardly subtle, but then again not all imagery needs to be. Indeed, the point here is sadly necessary, given the amount of scholarly and pseudo-scholarly work devoted to arguing that slavery wasn’t that bad because whippings and beatings weren’t that frequent – that slavery as an institution is inherently linked to the terror of exemplary violence. It doesn’t matter what the marginal disutility of a whipping might have been for the individual slave; the point was that masters made sure that all the slaves had to watch, so that the consequences of disobedience (or in this case, rebellion) were impossible to forget.

It is also there, I would argue, so that the audience doesn’t get confused about what is about to happen. The violence of Dany’s attack on the Good Masters, its consequences and ethical implications, have been hotly debated in the fandom; less examined is the violence that was currently being visited upon the slaves of Astapor. These flayed bodies stand as mute witnesses to the fact that the Good Masters of Astapor, whatever else they might have been, were not innocent.

The final piece of evidence for that, if more was needed, is what happens when Dany actually makes the exchange with Kraznys. As I’ve been saying for a while, if Dany’s story in Qarth was all about whether she would give in to temptation and fall for the illusion, her story in Astapor is all about whether she will choose to be complicit in the horrors of the system:

“Tell her they are hers…if she can pay.” “She can,” the girl said. Ser Jorah barked a command, and the trade goods were brought forward. Six bales of tiger skins, three hundred bolts of fine silk. Jars of saffron, jars of myrrh, jars of pepper and curry and cardamom, an onyx mask, twelve jade monkeys, casks of ink in red and black and green, a box of rare black amethysts, a box of pearls, a cask of pitted olives stuffed with maggots, a dozen casks of pickled cave fish, a great brass gong and a hammer to beat it with, seventeen ivory eyes, and a huge chest full of books written in tongues that Dany could not read. And more, and more, and more. Her people stacked it all before the slavers. While the payment was being made, Kraznys mo Nakloz favored her with a few final words on the handling of her troops. “They are green as yet,” he said through Missandei. “Tell the whore of Westeros she would be wise to blood them early. There are many small cities between here and there, cities ripe for sacking. Whatever plunder she takes will be hers alone. Unsullied have no lust for gold or gems. And should she take captives, a few guards will suffice to march them back to Astapor. We’ll buy the healthy ones, and for a good price. And who knows? In ten years, some of the boys she sends us may be Unsullied in their turn. Thus all shall prosper.” Finally there were no more trade goods to add to the pile. Her Dothraki mounted their horses once more, and Dany said, “This was all we could carry. The rest awaits you on the ships, a great quantity of amber and wine and black rice. And you have the ships themselves. So all that remains is…” “…the dragon.”

Kraznys makes it all quite clear: Dany should take the soldiers she’s bought and, rather than using them to retake the Iron Throne, attack some of the “many small cities between here and there” to both “blood” her “green” army and to provide more raw human grist for the great satanic mill to grind into new product for the ever-hungry market. This is not a system which cannot be dealt with at arm’s length in the hopes of keeping one’s hands clean; inexorably, it will pull you in and make you part of it.

After all, that’s what a slave society is…

The Heist Kicks Off

Once the “harpy’s fingers” are handed over to symbolize Dany’s ownership of the Unsullied in exchange for “Drogon’s chain,” Dany’s heist moves from the setup to the action phase. The first move is for Dany to show as many of the Unsullied as possible that they no longer belong to the Good Masters:

She stood in her stirrups and raised the harpy’s fingers above her head for all the Unsullied to see. “IT IS DONE!” she cried at the top of her lungs. “YOU ARE MINE!” She gave the mare her heels and galloped along the first rank, holding the fingers high. “YOU ARE THE DRAGON’S NOW! YOU’RE BOUGHT AND PAID FOR! IT IS DONE! IT IS DONE!” She glimpsed old Grazdan turn his grey head sharply. He hears me speak Valyrian. The other slavers were not listening. They crowded around Kraznys and the dragon, shouting advice. Though the Astapori yanked and tugged, Drogon would not budge off the litter. Smoke rose grey from his open jaws, and his long neck curled and straightened as he snapped at the slaver’s face.

In the absence of any mechanical means of spreading the word, Dany does the best she can with lungpower, a galloping horse, and glittering gold held up in the air; this really is a crucial task, because any Unsullied standing in the back ranks who didn’t hear or see here might act out of programmed loyalty. However, this is still a risky move, because (as in so many heist films), canny old Grazdan realizes just too late that he’s been had, and even then there’s little he can do about it, as the Good Masters are completely distracted by a rebellious dragon, who’s playing the part to the hilt.

And then finally, finally, the tension breaks as Dany and Drogon launch their attack:

“…A dragon is no slave.” And Dany swept the lash down as hard as she could across the slaver’s face. Kraznys screamed and staggered back, the blood running red down his cheeks into his perfumed beard. The harpy’s fingers had torn his features half to pieces with one slash, but she did not pause to contemplate the ruin. “Drogon,” she sang out loudly, sweetly, all her fear forgotten. “Dracarys.” The black dragon spread his wings and roared. A lance of swirling dark flame took Kraznys full in the face. His eyes melted and ran down his cheeks, and the oil in his hair and beard burst so fiercely into fire that for an instant the slaver wore a burning crown twice as tall as his head. The sudden stench of charred meat overwhelmed even his perfume, and his wail seemed to drown all other sound.

As violent assaults go, this is a very symbolic one, with Dany turning the cruel whip against the master, and Drogon asserting his freedom with the fire which he embodies and which the Good Masters lusted after and feared for so long. At the same time, curb-stomping one slaver is not the whole of the plan bur rather a signal for the rest of her team to spring into action:

Then the Plaza of Punishment blew apart into blood and chaos. The Good Masters were shrieking, stumbling, shoving one another aside and tripping over the fringes of their tokars in their haste. Drogon flew almost lazily at Kraznys, black wings beating. As he gave the slaver another taste of fire, Irri and Jhiqui unchained Viserion and Rhaegal, and suddenly there were three dragons in the air. When Dany turned to look, a third of Astapor’s proud demon-horned warriors were fighting to stay atop their terrified mounts, and another third were fleeing in a bright blaze of shiny copper. One man kept his saddle long enough to draw a sword, but Jhogo’s whip coiled about his neck and cut off his shout. Another lost a hand to Rakharo’s arakh and rode off reeling and spurting blood. Aggo sat calmly notching arrows to his bowstring and sending them at tokars. Silver, gold, or plain, he cared nothing for the fringe. Strong Belwas had his arakh out as well, and he spun it as he charged.

Irri and Jhiqui, who are so often dismissed by the fandom as mere wallpaper, are in charge of dragon-handling, and their freeing Viserion and Rhaegal panicks two thirds of the Astapori cavalry. Jhogo, Rakharo, and Aggo shut down the remaining Astapori cavalry, preventing them from counter-attacking or even warning the city, while targeting the enemy leadership with ruthless efficiency.

In the midst of the chaos, only one of the enemy is able to keep his head. Old Grazdan attempts to command the Unsullied to “defend your masters,” believing that Astapor’s system of brutal conditioning will kick in and protect the city from this unexpected danger:

“Spears!” Dany heard one Astapori shout. It was Grazdan, old Grazdan in his tokar heavy with pearls. “Unsullied! Defend us, stop them, defend your masters! Spears! Swords!” When Rakharo put an arrow through his mouth, the slaves holding his sedan chair broke and ran, dumping him unceremoniously on the ground. The old man crawled to the first rank of eunuchs, his blood pooling on the bricks. The Unsullied did not so much as look down to watch him die. Rank on rank on rank, they stood. And did not move. The gods have heard my prayer.

And he fails. Not because of anything that Dany does, but because the Unsullied make a choice. As an act of collective disobedience, halfway between a general strike and a slave rebellion, it is deceptively passive. Yet at the same time, it’s perfectly fitting, as the Unsullied turn their discipline and training against their masters, keeping their eyes fixed straight ahead as their masters bleed out at their feet. And as Dany recognizes, her coup would have failed at an instant if the Unsullied had made a different choice.

But this is where we get to the center of the debate over Dany’s revolution in the Slave Cities: is this a top-down liberation handed down by a white savior, or a genuine uprising of the masses against their oppressors? In other words, in this passage, is Dany giving a command or making a bargain?

“Unsullied!” Dany galloped before them, her silver-gold braid flying behind her, her bell chiming with every stride. “Slay the Good Masters, slay the soldiers, slay every man who wears a tokar or holds a whip, but harm no child under twelve, and strike the chains off every slave you see.” She raised the harpy’s fingers in the air…and then she flung the scourge aside. “Freedom!” she sang out. “Dracarys! Dracarys!” “Dracarys!” they shouted back, the sweetest word she’d ever heard. “Dracarys! Dracarys!” And all around them slavers ran and sobbed and begged and died, and the dusty air was filled with spears and fire.

I would argue that GRRM sees it as the latter: Dany tells the Unsullied to “slay the Good Masters,” but in the same breath she visibly throws away the symbol of ownership, proclaims that the Unsullied are free, and then waits for their response. And the Unsullied, implicitly equating fire and freedom, vote with their voices and their spears for freedom – and this, not the attack by dragons and Dothraki, is where Dany’s revolution really begins.

Historical Analysis:

Speaking of Dany’s order to “slay the Good Masters, slay the soldiers, slay every man who wears a tokar or holds a whip,” I want to put it into the context of the history of slave revolts, because while part of the fandom points to the order as an unacceptable act of collective punishment, it’s honestly far more moderate than the way that most slave rebellions have gone.

The reality is that there really isn’t an example of such a thing as a non-violent slave rebellion, hence Frederick Douglass’ maxim that “without struggle, there is no progress.” In the Third Servile War (the famous one led by Spartacus), 41,000 slaves and another 4,000 Romans died in the fighting; in the Zanj Rebellion of the 9th century CE, as many as 1.5-2.5 million people died in the fighting between a coalition of African slaves and lower-class people against the Abassid Caliphate that lasted for fourteen years. And in the most successful slave rebellion in world history, the Haitian Revolution saw 200,000 Haitians, 45,000 British soldiers, 75,000 French soldiers, and 25,000 white colonists die – although in that case, epidemic disease was responsible for many of the deaths among European soldiery.

Moreover, the intensity of violence of slave rebellions is not merely a side-effect of the size of the conflict. The First and Second Maroon Wars in Jamaica, for example, involved small absolute numbers of combatants – with the Maroons and their allies never having more than 500 fighters up against 5,000 British at the height of the fighting in the second conflict – but the combination of guerilla warfare directed against both British milita expeditions and plantations and scorched-earth tactics used to deny the Maroons access to food and water took a heavy toll on a small population. Likewise, in the United States, the 1811 German Coast Uprising involved maybe 500 slaves who burned 5 plantation houses, but still saw the victorious white militia executing dozens of captives, decapitating them and placing their heads on spikes and hanging bodies from the gates of New Orleans; Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 saw 120 slaves and free blacks massacred and another 55 executed (in addition to those slain in battle) in order to intimidate and discourage potential rebels.

Indeed, when we’re talking about historical parallels for Dany’s order, it pales in comparison to Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ order to massacre the remaining white inhabitants of Haiti in 1804, which, to be fair, came after years of nigh-genocidal violence warfare by the Vicomte de Rochambeau, who had used sulphur dioxide gassings, mass drownings, and 15,000 attack dogs, in addition to take-no-prisoners warfare to try to brutalize the Haitians into surrender. In contrast, Dany specifically orders the Unsullied should “harm no child under twelve,” and exempts the non-slaveowning Ghiscari from violence.

Four years before the beginning of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass gave a famous speech castigating white abolitionists who disliked both black militancy and partisan politics, and preferred Christian passive resistance:

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”

If ASOIAF had been around in 1857, I think his analysis of this fictional slave revolt would be much the same.

What If?

Let me quickly address “what if Daenerys’ coup fails?” (I’ll address the aftermath of the coup in Dany IV.) This is a bit problematic as a hypothetical, both because everything in GRRM’s narrative going forward depends on her succeeding, and because Dany really has stacked the deck in her favor, so it would really require some pretty heavy thumb on the scales for it to happen.

Instead, I’ll address the alternative of “what if Dany just buys the Unsullied?” because I want to address the whole “Dany broke faith” issue. In the short term, if Dany actually goes through with the sale, in the short term she gets the Unsullied and marches to Westeros as fast as possible, so the entire Yunkai and Meereen plot gets bypassed to the relief of some fans. The human cost, however, is much worse than just allowing the machinery of slavery to continue, because now the Good Masters of Astapor have a dragon, and if you put a dragon in the hands of a bunch of Old Ghis-cosplaying cultural revanchists, they’re going to try to rebuild the Old Empire with fire and blood.

So far from avoiding bloodshed, all that would happen is to ensure that Yunkai and Meereen would be conquered by an even more intensely pro-slavery power, which would go on to conquer and enslave all around it.

Book vs. Show:

Ah, the episode that launched a meme.

I feel profoundly ambivalent about this particular point on the downward arc of Daenerys’ story line: on a pure action level, all the elements of production came together to create an astonishing spectacle, one that rightfully blew people’s minds coming so early in the third season. I don’t honestly know that Dany’s sack of Astapor could have been done better, and it’s a testament to the director, cinematographer, art director, SFX and stunt teams, actors, and yes even the writers (mostly for getting out of their own way). This is the sort of thing that Game of Thrones does right.

However, I think even here we can see the first sign of the flattening of character. Both in the writing and directing, a clear choice was made to emphasize only Daenerys’ aloof confidence, a well that they’ve gone back again and again so often that I think it’s more than a little bit responsible for perceptions that Emilia Clarke is a rather flat actress. (My own take is that it’s hard to come across as fully emotionally-rounded when the material and direction won’t let you.)

As I’ve pointed to in my essay, Dany’s interior monologue throughout the chapter is one of uncertainty and self-doubt, and the tension between that doubt and her outward show of confidence is what gives the chapter its energy and driving force. Even without the use of internal monologue, it was entirely possible for the writers and directors of Game of Thrones to have preserved this more three-dimensional character choice, but there is a disturbing tendency in the writing of HBO’s Game of Thrones to flatten characters down to a single note – Dany’s confident, Jon’s brooding, Tyrion quips, and so on.

And keep in mind, this is before this storyline takes a wrong turn into White Saviordom…