All the Sad, Lonely, Mediocre White Men (Vs. The Girl on Fire)
In 2013, the second movie in The Hunger Games trilogy was released. Its title? Catching Fire.
Also in 2013, a group of white men, led by Larry Correia and Brad R. Torgersen, created the Sad Puppies, in protest of the Hugo Awards becoming more diverse — they felt shortchanged for being white, cis, straight men. The movement became an aggressive, violent doxxing campaign, but the Sad Puppies believed their cause was righteous — defending Sci-Fi/Fantasy lit against a changing world.
I’d forgotten about Sad Puppies — until last night, while watching two white men mope over the tyranny of the girl they loved, a girl who’d wanted to change society for the better, a girl who needed to be stopped before she destroyed the world in her insanity.
Of all the ways I thought Game of Thrones could end, I didn’t expect it to be Tyrion — who I’ve loved — and Jon — who I’ve tolerated — in a makeshift jail cell, morosely discussing duty’s superiority to love. I didn’t expect the trope where Good Lover kisses Evil Lover, only to stab her, crying as she dies. (Maybe I expected it from Jamie.) So I remembered that morose group of white men on the internet discussing the evils of inclusion and representation in a world they’d seen as solely theirs — a world where the old wheel was breaking, spoke by spoke.
I should be clear — Benioff and Weiss aren’t Sad Puppies. But they live in Sad Puppies culture, and aren’t equipped tell The Girl on Fire story.
Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games) exemplifies The Girl on Fire: A desperate girl, raging against an unjust society, burns the world down to create a better one. Sometimes she succeeds. Sometimes, the wheel doesn’t break.
Alicia Keys sings about the “Girl on Fire”:
Oh she’s got both feet on the ground
And she’s burning it down
Oh, she’s got her head in the clouds
And she’s not backing down
She’s not talking about Daenerys Targaryen — First of Her Name, The Unburnt, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men, Queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the Great Sea, Protector of the Realm, Regent of the Seven Kingdoms, Breaker of Chains and Mother of Dragons — but she could be. Game of Thrones took the Girl on Fire trope too literally — and turned it into a cautionary tale about the evil that women do. But why did the arguably most powerful woman on screen need to burn down with it?
People have pointed out the problems with Dani’s arc — white savior/colonizer in the form of a beautiful, blonde, white feminist. You could argue the finale critiques white feminism and the harm of the white savior trope. Forgive me, though: I’m skeptical that two white men — who wanted to create a “both sides” show about the South winning the Civil War — are that insightful when it comes to race and intersectionality.
(Cough, only two Black characters with speaking roles; cough, Dothraki depicted as rapists and savages. And let’s not forget the scene where Dani crowd surfs on freed slaves — that’s as burned into my brain as Missandei, a freed Black woman, back in FUCKING CHAINS before Cersei beheads her, as a way for the showrunners to pretend their Mad Queen storyline tracks.)
If only we’d seen Dani falling apart over the series, instead of one musical score-assisted panic attack in “The Last of the Starks” and half an episode of madness before she went full on cray. Varys and Tyrion paying lip service to “mad” genes (yes, please throw in harmful mental illness tropes while you’re at it) as character development? It’s the ultimate example of Telling vs. Showing. Benioff and Weiss know this; their increasing desperation is visible in the after-the-episode recaps.
Though it seemed inevitable that this Daenerys would be assassinated by Jon (But did it have to be in such a melodramatic way that reeks of domestic abuse?), the path there wasn’t inevitable. Arya’s pivot wasn’t inevitable. Cersei’s death under a pile of rubble wasn’t inevitable. Missandei dying in chains wasn’t inevitable. It wasn’t inevitable that Grey Worm go against his beliefs, just so Jon could give him sad, disbelieving looks as he played hero against the Angry Black Man hellbent on destruction. Was it all so the storytellers could set Jon up to, once again, Be The Hero — and so we could get him and Tyrion in a room, discussing love and duty and the madness of the woman they’d believed in?
As Benioff and Weiss’s mouthpiece, Tyrion lists the evil men Daenerys killed — the masters of Slavers Bay, the raping and pillaging Khals of the Dothraki, the warlocks of Qarth, etc. “Everywhere she goes, evil men die and we cheer her for it. And she grows more sure that she is good and right.”
It’s an attempt to sell Dani as evil tyrant and breaking the wheel as path to destruction; it does the opposite. Dani killed evil men. The real Dani — in all of her colonizing, white savior, often brutal ways — knew the people of King’s Landing weren’t evil. She wouldn’t have gone nuclear on them. She never wanted to rule a pile of ash. What happened to her “bend the knee” catchphrase? Her speech to the Dothraki (Hey, didn’t you all die?) and the Unsullied about liberating everyone is classic Dani… to a point. If only she’d spoken to all of King’s Landing. If only Tyrion and Jon hadn’t stood there, disappointed, disbelieving, and, above all, sad.
The braver thing, the smarter thing, the harder thing, would’ve been to bring Dani back from the edge. If Drogon was able to rein in his usual rage and burn the series’ symbol of strife instead of his mother’s murderer, why couldn’t Dani? Why did the writers give a CGI character more respect than the flesh and blood one?
Why is Bran king? Why is his story the best? What about Arya’s? (I’d say what about Sansa’s, but it reminds me of her shitty “If it weren’t for Littlefinger and Ramsey and all the rest, I would still be the little bird” line. Fuck that noise.) Why is Brienne’s last moment filling in Jamie’s story, instead of her own? Resting the show’s final episode on men’s shoulders while women get quick wrap-ups reveals a message I don’t think the show wanted to make.
Or maybe it did. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. For eight seasons, I watched women raped, humans brutalized, and people of color often treated as props. Maybe this is what the show’s always been and I made a mistake, believing better.
People forget a happy ending — especially for marginalized people — is a revolutionary act. Not that Dani and Jon should’ve happily shared the throne — I never bought she loved him back and I didn’t buy her throwing a nuclear hissy fit because he dumped her. Not that Dani is particularly marginalized, or Jon for that matter. Even so, Dani deserved a better ending. Hell, Jon deserved a better ending. MISSANDEI AND GREY WORM DESERVED A BETTER ENDING.
I like to believe Dani ended up in some afterlife with Khal Drogo and their baby and found peace after this shitty season, that the God of Light brought Missandei back and she and Grey Worm sailed to Naath together. The Handmaid’s Tale comes back soon; I hope Drogon flew to Gilead to help June Dracarys the fuck out of it.
In the end the Westerosi didn’t break the wheel — just a few spokes. Tyrion got to fix things; Sansa became Queen of the North as she always was; they elected Bran in a nod to a republic (as if these people’s children won’t be fighting for the throne again in thirty years). Arya got a new adventure; Ghost got the hug he deserved; Jon got to mope off into the distance, which, frankly, fits him perfectly.
Ice and Fire, right? Ice is stasis. Fire is change. It burns off the rotten parts so good can grow.
We live in a world of narratives where powerful women can’t be trusted and are sacrificed for the Greater Good, where Black women are plot devices and Black men are violent and other people of color are nothing more than “savages” raping and pillaging… while helpless white men watch, wringing their hands, until they do their sad, lonely duty. And we’re supposed to love them for it.
That’s a world of fiction I don’t want to live in anymore. That’s a literary wheel I’d like to see broken.
Dracarys.
