Poem: On the Fall of Edward Colston

On the Fall of Edward Colston

Let them pull the statues down

Let them sing around the town

Let them scream in fascist faces

And disrupt the brutal stasis.

*

I have seen the soft rebuttals

All the pleas to be more subtle

But this speech in quiet voices

Smothers those who beg for choices.

*

Let them pull the statues down

Let them throw them on the ground

Let them vent their rage and pain

And find air to breathe again.

*

I’ve been silent and complicit

Made excuses to dismiss it

But I knew our heart was rotten;

Those in pain have not forgotten.

*

Let us pull the statues down.

Let us build a better town.

Let us force the fascists back.

I will help you to attack.

---

I wrote this last Sunday, to try to express my feelings at the news that protestors had removed the statue of the slave trader, Edward Colston, and dumped it in the river.

The action was non-violent (no people were hurt), powerful, and important. Yet so, so many white people were flooding social media to condemn it. Their ignorance and thoughtlessness churned my stomach.

I, too, was raised in a society where peaceful protest was put on a high pedestal, and defined away so that the only protesting actions that were deemed acceptable were those that inconvenienced no one at all.

Protests must be approved by police first.

Strikes must be scheduled to ensure the least possible disruption to service.

A man kneeling when the national anthem plays is deemed shockingly disruptive. To the extent that he lost his career.

I only started to learn a little about civil disobedience when I studied philosophy at A Level. 16 years old and no one had mentioned it to me before.

Oh, I had heard of Martin Luther King. I knew he gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, and that he was killed. I knew about Rosa Parks solely because the character Odetta, in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three, was a black woman who had been involved in the protests, and she reflected on Rosa’s simple action of not moving from the ‘white’ section of the bus.

But I didn’t know what civil disobedience is or why it is important. That it is the action of breaking laws because those laws are unjust, as a form of protest. I didn’t understand until I took a A Level that most colleges didn’t offer, because it isn’t thought relevant to career development.

And even then, I don’t think I got it. How could I? I had been insulated from black history and the history of British imperialism my entire life. It had not featured at all in any history class. Oh, I learnt that the Spanish did terrible things to the Incas and the Mayans, but the British…?

Since then I’ve done work to try to understand. I know that there is a lot more work left to do.

For example: I did not know the history of Edward Colston, until those protestors tore down his statue.

I did not know that campaigners had petitioned to have the statue removed and been refused.

I didn’t know that the plaque on the statue described him as ‘virtuous and wise’.

I didn’t know that a new plaque was proposed that put his philanthropic contributions to the city in the context of his transportation of 84,000 enslaved people, of whom 19,000 died.

I didn’t know that the new wording was blocked by the Society of Merchant Venturers and revised wording that minimised his flaws has continued to be debated while black people in the city had to walk past the statue praising him.

Yet white people decry the destruction of this statue because the statue is supposed to be teaching us about history?

No one learnt anything from this statue but lies. And peaceful, law-abiding efforts to remove the statue to a museum, or even change the plaque to put the statue in the context of history, failed.

An MP – a Minister of Parliament – had the gall to compare this statue to the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum. (A historical site he also wrong thought to be in Germany, rather than Poland.)

The tweet has now been deleted, but responses to it are still visible.

Auschwitz is a museum that memorialises those murdered by the Nazis and presents the history of the terrible crimes conducted there for the purpose of education. The statue of Edward Colston celebrated him as virtuous. Virtuous! A man who transported 84,000 people into slavery and killed 19,000 of those.

Again: lawful attempts to place this statue in the context of Edward Colston’s violent history had failed. The statue was purely there to celebrate him and rewrite history to mention only the his philanthropic contributions. Contributions that were paid for with the blood of black people.

A better comparison would be what Germany did to the site of Hilter’s bunker: it is an unmarked and unmemorialised car park now.

Statues like this one don’t educate, they celebrate. And it is right that we remove them from our streets.

Martin Luther King is remembered by white people as an advocate for peaceful protest. But we should remember that he also said that ‘A riot is the language of the unheard.’

Black people have been unheard for a long, long time.

I submitted my poem to a market that publishes poems in response to news stories. It was not accepted, and to be honest, I expected that. I hope they choose poems by black people, whose voices deserve to be heard above mine.

This is a poem for a specific moment in time, however. And it seems worth saying to share a message that other white people seem to be struggling to hear: something is very wrong in our society. And it affects black people disproportionately.

The celebration of slavers and other rich white men who perpetrated genocidal atrocities continues in our towns and cities is a part of what’s wrong.

We can stop that. We can say: we do not celebrate these men and what they did. We can say: these are not the aspects of our history that we want people to venerate when they come to our towns and cities.

We can remove the goddamn statues.

You can take action today.

You can write to your MP and ask for the removal of statues that venerate slavers. The writetothem.org website makes it easy to find out who your MP is and send them an email.

You can sign the petition to remove all statues of slavers across the UK.

You can sign the petition to teach Britain’s colonial past as part of the UK’s compulsory curriculum.

You can donate to support causes that combat racism and police oppression, such as the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, and the Black Lives Matter UK Legal Fund.

It’s important that we educate ourselves and each other, but it’s even more important that we take concrete action to create change where we can. As a disabled person, I can’t get out and protest, but I can donate, I can write to my MP, I can sign petitions, and I can ask for change in the institutions I work for and with.

All of us can take some kind of action to build a better society. And we should.

Review: Sense8, Episodes 1-4

My first review since I went radio silent!

I submitted my thesis on Friday 29th May and I’m slowly trying to figure out what it is to live in a world where I am not constantly guilty about not writing my thesis. It’s been a strange and emotional week. I have been looking for jobs and sleeping and playing Dragon Age II. And mostly not watching as many shows as I’d like because so many of them are over and the only currently airing ones I’m watching are Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (great) and Game of Thrones (problematic). I was badly in need of some new fodder and despairing of finding any. Sense8 came out of nowhere and… and it’s fantastic, to be honest.

Sense8 is the new Netflix Original released on 5th June. Having originally been blown away by Netflix Original output, I’ve since been pretty disappointed. The difference between Hemlock Grove seasons one and two was astounding. House of Cards was so patriarchal I’ve given up in frustration. And as for Daredevil, there’s so much sexist disappointment I wouldn’t even know where to begin. So I’ve come to look at Netflix Orignals rather warily. And then I saw a post on Tumblr giving trigger warnings for it (but saying it was great), and my interest was piqued. Tumblr has a not unjustified reputation for liberal criticism, and when the Tumblrites I follow say something is painful but good, I pay attention. Particularly when they say it’s painful but good in its depiction of trans folk, and the programme in question was also created by a trans woman.

So, with nothing to lose and not yet ready to go to bed at midnight last night, I decided to give it a go. At 4am, I forcibly tore myself away.

What is Sense8, then?

Sense8 is a twelve episode show about a bunch of people who discover that they are telepathically and empathically connected – they are ‘sensates’. They find themselves feeling what each other are feeling, seeing what each other are seeing, and being able to act on each other’s behalf. Find yourself in a fight? Wouldn’t it be hella convenient for your body to be taken over by a Korean martial arts expert? It would certainly help!

The eight sensates we follow were ‘created’ when a woman being pursued by an Evil Scientist shoots herself in the head. They each witness her death and then start seeing images of her as they go about their daily business, and then they start seeing and feeling what each other are seeing and feeling.

These people are refreshingly diverse: a Korean business woman who participates in underground fighting in her spare time, a white cop in Chicago, a lesbian trans woman former hacktavist, a gay Latino film actor, a coach driver in Nairobi trying to get together the money for his mum’s AIDs medication, an Icelandic DJ in London, a Hindu woman in Mumbai who is about to marry a man she doesn’t love, and a German safe cracker. Different backgrounds, different levels of wealth, different sexualities, and a blessedly even number of women and men.

How is it?

It’s good. I mean, it’s stay-up-to-4am good. And maybe it’s the emotional week I’ve had, but I was weeping from complex feelings at the end of the last episode I watched, and for me that’s always a good sign. The characters all have complex plot arcs and relationships, the episodes are well paced and gripping, and it’s shot in a visually engaging manner.

That said, the trigger warnings on the Tumblr post mentioned above are well given. The trans woman’s plot, in particular, is painful and may cut awfully close to the bone for some viewers. Nomi Marks (Jamie Clayton) is a woman in a healthy, loving relationship with a cis woman named Amanita (Freema Agyeman (!<3)), but her family are not so awesome. When she faints in the middle of a Pride march she wakes up in a hospital with her family, who misgender her, prevent her partner from seeing her, tell her she needs brain surgery, and sign papers that (somehow) mean she is unable to leave the hospital – her door is locked.

As a non-binary person I don’t feel equipped to speak with authority as to whether this is well handled, but it seemed so to me. It’s certainly wonderful to see a trans character who was both created by a trans woman (Lana Wachowski) and played by a trans actor. I have no sense that the character herself is portrayed with anything but sympathy. Nevertheless, of the few trans characters that exist in TV and film, they are so often shown only through their pain – its a trope familiar across LGBT protrayals in film, what has been described as ‘dead gays for the straight gaze’ or ‘queers die for the straight eye‘ (although I hasten to add that we are not talking about literal death in this case, although identity death certainly looms as a possibility). I know some of my trans friends have lamented the fact that there are so few portrayals of trans people that are not difficult and painful to watch.

Whilst we’re here, I’d just like to add that it’s a pleasure to see the awesome Martha Jones Freema Agyeman on screen again, and whilst her American accent is somewhat wobbly, her portrayal of Amanita as Nomi’s compassionate, vibrant, sex positive partner is wonderful. Her presence on screen is a balm in difficult scenes.

I’m a little less comfortable about some of the scenes given to Lito (Miguel Ángel Silvestre) who winds up in an awkward three-way relationship with his boyfriend and Daniela Velasquez (Eréndira Ibarra) the actress who discovers Lito’s secret relationship and imposes herself as an unasked for live-in ‘beard‘. Miguel Ángel Silvestre and Alfonso Herrera are accomplished and subtle actors who play the motions of a couple living in a difficult, closeted situation well, but the comic relief offered by Daniela sits uneasily with their more serious portrayal. Overall, it just doesn’t work for me.

I also wonder about racial and national stereotyping. Sun Bak (Bae Doona) is engaging and convincing as the secretly badass Korean woman who can fuck you up but bows meekly to sexist treatment in the day. I recall all too well the questions raised by my Asian friends about the protrayal of Mako Mori in Pacific Rim. Ami Angelwings was particularly articulate on the issue of white women saying how wonderful Mako was whilst East Asian women had issues with the portrayal that were overlooked. There’s a culture of white feminists drowning out voices whenever there’s a meek feminine woman who is also shows strength, on the basis that there are so few of such characters, despite the fact that there are (to my eyes) more portrayals of this than any other type of female character. And I find it worrying that Mako Mori springs immediately to mind when I see Sun Bak. I wonder how much the charactisation of the extreme sexism against which Sun Bak must work reflects racist assumptions about South Korea. The truth is, as a white British woman, I simply don’t know, but if I’m noting a pattern in how East Asian women are being represented in American shows, there is a chance we are being presented with a type, and not a character.

Similarly, the poverty stricken black people beset by crime and AIDs in Capheus’s (Al Ameen) plotline raise flags. As does the fact that the Indian woman is facing the prospect of a marriage supported by her family and friends that she does not really want. Do people like this exist? Perhaps – I’m wary of making any judgements as to the truth of that as a British white woman – but I think it’s worth asking whether there weren’t other characters and plotlines we could have had for a woman in India or a man in Nairobi, ones that didn’t fit so very neatly into Euro-American stereotypes of what life is like in those places.

From a less significant aspect, we also see stereotyping of white characters based off their nationality. There’s an Australian girl (not a main character) who is very blunt spoken, and everytime she makes a faux pas either she or her boyfriend says it’s because she’s Australian. I’ve known a lot of Australians in my time, but none who acted like that. They… were as varied as other people? And then there’s the Icelandic DJ. She’s has whiffs of Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and her general nightclub/alternative music aesthetic makes me think of Björk. Part of me wonders if a musical alternative girl is the only kind of woman they could imagine coming from Iceland.

I also have questions about the use of the suicide of Angelica Turing (Daryl Hannah) as the inciting incident. Especially as it is at the urging of one man in order to escape another and to ‘give birth’ to the sensates. Whilst this is not a classic case of ‘fridging‘ a woman in order to advance a man’s plot – as she advances the plots of several woman, too – it is using the death of a woman as a plot device, it is to fulfil the designs of a man, it is also to escape man-on-woman violence, it substantiates a sense of men as patriarchal figures, and the ‘giving birth’ metaphor gives it an unnecessary veneer of reporductive violence as well.

All of which is not to undermine the fact that these are still engaging and rounded characters or that I find myself incredibly moved by their stories. Rather, it is to acknowledge that these stories are not perfect. In comparison to everything else I am watching right now the show is still infinitely more diverse, it does provide a range of female characters such that I don’t feel any of them particularly stands as representing what it is to be a woman, it also provides a racially diverse cast (including the beautiful Naveen Andrews as Jonas <3), as well as an array of LGBT characters. One could wish for some disability diversity too, but overall, it’s a refreshing improvement.

And as for the science fiction… well, it’s more fantasy than science fiction, but that’s OK. The light-touch on scientific explanations offered so far is better than the Heroes route of talking absolute rubbish about evolution in order to justify the plot. I would like to see more consideration given to the dodginess of just taking over someone else’s body, but it’s early days, yet. Bodily autonomy is definitely a theme. I feel for these people. I engage with these people. I see both male and female characters I don’t often get to see on screen, and that means something to me. And they have superpowers. And those superpowers are both making them awesome and giving them emotional problems. Which is right up my alley, basically.

If you’re in need of some quality drama and starved of shows that don’t give centre stage to straight white cis men, Sense8 is a really wonderful choice, and I commend it to you.

Whitsle-stop review: The Amazing Spider-Man 2

I wish I could devote more time to reviews, but it’s crunch-time in Rhuboland, so here’s a whistle-stop tour of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, good and bad.

The Good:

They beefed up Gwen’s (Emma Stone) role and gave her interests outside of her bf. They also showed her thinking about how kind of self-centred he can be and how she’s not content to wait around for him.

Plus, Gwen had some agency and some role in saving the day.

The character, Max (Jamie Foxx), is initially interesting, as a black guy getting to play something other than the tough guy, the guy presented as animalistic in some way. Although I wonder if the black nerdy, socially inept scientist is getting to be another stereotype. I was reminded strongly of Lem from Better off Ted, but I’m aware that I may be blinded by my own privilege in trying to assess what makes for a stereotypical black male character.

Max also gets to voice legitimate concerns of vanishing identity and feeling invisible, which can affect people of colour who are not recognised and rewarded for their achievements in the way that white men tend to be. Both Max and Harry cut sympathetic figures, at first.

The CGI is fucking fantastic. Second to none. And worth seeing in 3D, if that doesn’t affect you negatively.*

Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield shine, instantly lifting both the acting and (one feels) the script in any scene in which they are in.

The Bad

Hopefully it isn’t too much of a spoiler to say that things do not go well for Max. And whilst they toy initially with making him a human dude who doesn’t want to do bad things when he first gets his (basically very destructive) powers, he rapidly descends into the violent revenge trope and becomes a basic monster figure with almost nothing of his original character left. Fear of the Other. Terror of the Black Man (complete with hoodie, argh). It’s just all the worst stereotypes.

And they make him blue. Instantly cutting in half the number of obviously PoC characters I noticed in the film (the other being an anonymous cop).

And he cedes Chief Monster Spot extremely quickly to the spoiled rich white guy, swiftly assuming a Henchman role.

Prior to that he had been Comic Relief, aspiring to be Side-kick (but not actually cool enough for that). It’s basically a race ‘You wanted a “You Tried” sticker, but you really don’t deserve it’.

I think the moment where Random Unnamed Woman Secretary-I-Don’t-Know-What-Her-Role-Was-Meant-To-Be-That’s-Not-How-Oxbridge-Interviews-Work told Gwen she could go in for her interview was meant to make this film pass the Bechdel Test. But, honey, no, that’s not good enough. She could have easily been a professor, btw, but she wasn’t.

Peter Parker stalks Gwen and she finds this romantic. PETER PARKER STALKS GWEN AND SHE FINDS THIS ROMANTIC. NO, Hollywood! Stop putting this crap in our mouths. You want to have your hero stalk a lady, represent it as every bit as creepy as it is, and not ‘poignant’. NO, NO, NO.

Mental illness = evil. Illness that alters conventional beauty generates mental illness. People who get sick have cooties. White able-bodied men are better than everyone.

All the people in any position of power, from the unnamed people in dealing with a potential air crash in the powercut, to Harry Osborn (Dane DeHann), were white men. Harry delegates some power to Felicia (his father’s assistant, played by Felicity Jones) on a whim, but even if she is capable, her power is 100% derived from him and, as far as we are given any reason to believe, given to her because she is pretty and not currently trying to seize power from him.

And, last, but only so you can skip it if you don’t want spoilers…

.

.

The fridging. I knew (because people tell you these things) that Gwen Stacey was not slated to live that long, but this still pissed me off. I don’t care that that’s how it happened in the comics. I know fridging happens in comics, that’s how come we have a name for it. We are living in the 21st century, and if you are remaking something, you can make it BETTER and MORE SUITED to the world we now live in. The whole movie I was sitting there, trying to work out if it was going to go somewhere sexist or not. And I guess the moment Peter says he’ll go with her to England so that she can follow her dream (a totally legit thing to do that needn’t compromise his dreams in any way, as they discuss) she was doomed. Allow a woman too much agency, and she has to die to fuel the mangst. And we were treated to a longish epilogue to that effect. Not to mention the fact that Peter, for no apparent reason than just because he likes to be in control, never loses an opportunity to deny her agency. Webbing her hand to a car because she (rightly) points out that she knows more about how to solve the issue at hand than he does, is perhaps just the most painfully obvious of these.

Also, the pacing was really patchy, and the (exquisitely CGI’d and very impressive looking in terms of FX) fight scenes were too long and not punchy enough. Again, I felt like the Multiple Villain Factor was a problem – why not let Electro at least be head villain? Green  Goblin is totally up to fronting another movie.

So, there it is. I really wanted to like this. I did enjoy parts of it quite a lot. But it had a LOT of problems. And I’m kind of done making excuses for studios unthinkingly churning out this shit anymore. I’m done with saying ‘Maybe the next one will be less ableist/sexist/racist’. It’s not good enough. It doesn’t make the mark.

But do stay after the movie for the mid-credit Marvel Thang. Mistique kicking arse is a wonderful palate cleanser.

*On that note: please also be aware that this film contains strobing effects.

Reviewing through the Time Machine: The Count of Monte Cristo

Title: The Count of Monte Cristo (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo)
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Series/Standalone: Standalone
Genre: Adventure/Revenge/Historical
First Published: 1844-1845 (serialised in Journal des Débats)
Edition Reviewed: Project Gutenberg ebook (released 1998, accessed 2012) and the 1997 Wordsworth Classics edition (introduction and notes by Keith Wren)
Hb/Pb: ebook/Paperback
Price: free to download from Project Gutenberg, available in numerous editions from £0.01 on Amazon/Amazon Market Place

I started reading The Count of Monte Cristo after having gone on a spree of downloading books that are available free because they are out of copyright. In all honesty, I’m not sure I would have ever got around to it otherwise, but boy! I’m glad I did. Even though I broke my Kindle shortly after I began reading and had to find a copy in the library to finish. Woo libraries!

It’s a curious trend that’s emerging from the popularity of ereaders – more and more people are exploring older texts they might otherwise have neglected simply because these texts are now out of copyright and hence, effectively, free. Some are available from Amazon for no charge (although The Count of Monte Cristo will still set you back at least 77p as an ebook), more are available through charitable entities like Project Gutenberg – a fabulous website that has been set up as a globally available, free repository of classic works that are out of copyright. Of course, with works in translation it can sometimes be hard to find accessible editions that are out of copyright (for example, to my mind, the John Cottingham translation of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy is by far the best, but it was first published in 1986, and thus not available for free). However, most editions of TCoMC still rely on the ‘classic’ translation of The Count of Monte Cristo produced by Chapman and Hall in 1846 (I was unable to identify a named individual as the translator), and from my perspective it hasnt aged badly at all.

Plot

Edmond Dantès starts the novel as a young man with everything good in life to look forward to. After the captain of his ship dies, Edmond assumes responsibility of the crew, and gains the preferment of the ship’s owner for assuming the role of captain, despite his youth. This is particularly good news as Dantès has an aging father to support and is planning to marry a beautiful fisherwoman called Mercédès. The future is so bright it practically glows off the page with signals of ‘something bad is going to happen’.

Dantès’s success breeds jealousy in others. The scheming Danglars coveted the captain’s position for himself, and the love-lorn Fernand has been courting Mercédès, despite her protests that she is in love with, and promised to, Dantès. Dantès’s is also subject to jealousy from his father’s avaricious neighbour, Caderousse. Unfortunately for Dantès, Danglars overheard the captain pass to Dantès a mysterious letter, sent from the exiled Napoleon to someone in Paris. Whilst drinking with Caderousse and Fernand he learns of Fernand’s jealousy of Dantès and eggs him on in a plot to frame his rival. Danglars writes an anonymous note exposing the unwitting Dantès of working against the king, advising of where the incriminating letter from Napoleon may be found. When Caderousse drunkenly protests that this is going too far and starts defending Dantès, Danglars declares that it was all in jest and throws the note away; although he does so with care that it should still be easy for Fernand to take up, which he does.

Dantès is arrested at his own wedding feast, before his marriage, completely unaware of the incriminating content of the letter that has been entrusted to him. He is interrogated by Villifort, who can see that Dantès was an unwitting mule, and promises him leniency. However, upon opening that letter, Villefort sees that it incriminates his own father as a conspirator for Napoleon. Knowing that his own ambitions will be thwarted if his father is exposed, Villefort destroys the letter and condemns Dantès to imprisonment.

Shipped off to the fearful Chateau d’If, Dantès is condemned to the deepest dungeons as he continues to protest his innocence and is judged mad. After years, Dantès finally gives up, and begins to starve himself as his only means of taking his life. As he is enacting this resolution, however, he hears a mysterious scraping, and realises he has a neighbour who is endeavouring to escape. Together they make a tunnel between the two cells. His neighbour is the Abbé Faria, who has also been isolated because he is believed to be mad, on account of his insistence that he knows the location of a great fortune, which he says he will give to anyone who sets him free. Faria is disappointed to find that he has misjudged his calculations in reaching Edmond’s cell and not escape, but they are each glad for the company, and Faria begins to educate Dantès – teaching him not only languages and science, but the principles behind them so that he will have the tools of extending his knowledge further. He also reveals the location of the treasure to Dantès, on the rocky island of Monte Cristo.

When Faria dies, Dantès conceals himself in the sack into which Faria’s body is placed, and escapes. He makes his way to Monte Cristo and is stunned to find that the treasure is just as astonishing as Faria promised. Dantès uses this fortune to travel the world and plot for the downfall of those who condemned him to living death for fourteen years.

How was is?

Gripping, exciting, thoughtful, escapist, and surprisingly progressive. The Count of Monte Cristo is not what I expected it to be at all. The basic premise, a wronged man who escapes prison and enacts revenge with a massive fortune, had long appealed to me. Indeed, I now recognise it as what must have been some of the inspiration for the wonderful televisions series, Life, which could be described in much the same way, and which I thoroughly enjoyed. But even as a student of English literature I sometimes found that the ‘classics’, admirable as they were, could be a bit of a struggle. I was not expecting such an exciting romp.

The style of TCoMC changes over the course of the book. The earlier parts, which deal with Dantès’s happy beginning and his imprisonment, read almost like a modern YA novel. The style is simplistic and easy to read, which is not a thing you expect of a book that is nearly 900 pages long. There is an odd break, however, perhaps a third of the way through, as we move from Dantès’s perspective to viewing the introduction of the Count of Monte Cristo to aristocratic society through his interactions with others. The style becomes more detached from Dantès’s viewpoint just as Dantès becomes more detached from himself, assuming the guise of the Count, and so consumed by his revenge that he believes he can hold himself apart from those around him, sitting in cold judgement, helping only those who win his friendship. At the same time, the description becomes much more detailed and full. The text does not become difficult and impenetrable in the manner of some classic works I have struggled through, but it does contrast starkly with the free and easy style of the first third.

Another way in which the book changes after Dantès’s escape and inheritance of Faria’s treasure is that we move from a close focus on his story to a presentation of lots of different stories. We not only see the world from different characters’ eyes, but each frequently has cause to digress to tell some other tale which informs the present circumstances. It took a bit of time to adjust to this, as it was an unexpected and unfamiliar style. However, I soon realised that this was a deliberate stylistic choice, mimicking the embedded narrative structure of One Thousand and One Nights, which is frequently mentioned (indeed, Dantès takes ‘Sinbad the Sailor‘, the hero of some of Scheherazade’s tales, as one of his aliases).

I suspect the embedded multi-narrative technique is employed to highlight the sense of multiple perspective. As Dantès becomes more narrowly focused on his revenge and the ways people have wronged or helped him, we see more of other people’s perspectives. Dantès is our protagonist, and we are clearly meant to sympathise with him, but the text constantly encourages us to take a broader view, and to be aware of how each character has not just one tale to tell, but many – that all of us have not only secrets, but also simply other parts of our lives that our friends, enemies, and family members may be completely unaware of as they make assumptions about us and judgements upon our actions.

There is a surprising psychological depth realised. It’s tempting, at the beginning, to read Danglars as a flat villain, or as an Iago figure who encourages others to commit crimes, but stands back from action himself. But even he is shown as capable of having complex relationships. I wouldn’t say he is ever sympathetic, rather, I felt we were presented with a rather modern portrait of a sociopath. Not that I am attributing to Dumas psychological theories of which he could not have been aware, but I see in his writing the product of a careful observer of people and their characters. Danglars is not ‘evil’ as such, he simply doesn’t care about other people. He marries and raises a daughter and interacts in society as is expected of him, but he views everything as a transaction, always looking for what benefits himself. He thus hardly seems bothered by his wife’s infidelity, as long as it does not affect him financially. Nor does he evince any evidence of shame or pity, as other characters do when the Count’s revenge falls upon them. It’s a careful line to walk, presenting such a character and not making him a stereotype. There is clearly a condemnation of bankers and of Danglars’s obsession with money over people, but in a choice between money and his personal comfort, Danglars ultimately chooses his own comfort and safety.

Despite the psychological realism, the dialogue remains somewhat stilted. Some of this may be a product of translation, as well as the passing of time, but some of it is not. The dialogue of Maximillien Morrel and his secret love, Valentine, is the most striking example. Pages and pages are filled with them explaining in excruciating detail exactly what they mean as they describe to each other the passions of their love and debate how they may resolve the fact that Valentine is promised to someone else, and that her father, Villefort, would never condone the match. It’s a tedious exposition that one doubts would get past a modern editor’s red pen. And yet, this still only makes for minor inconvenience. There’s a lot of what we’d now describe as ‘telling rather than showing’ in this novel which would no doubt be dismissed by those who subscribe rather too fiercely to writing-by-numbers, but most of it adds to the style of the piece more than it detracts. We hear the narrator’s voice in the description of events, and that voice is often accompanied by a wry wit that, whilst it might lack the immediacy of ‘showing’, compliments the work in other ways.

The origins of the novel in a serialisation no doubt account for its gripping pace over what would usually be regarded as an unweildy length, each chapter leaving us with something new to anticipate and wonder about. One might expect a tale with such a premise to be characterised more as a revenge than as an adventure, but the genre fits. Fantastic wealth has enduring appeal, as do charismatic and enigmatic strangers (as the Count is, both to the aristocracy of Paris, and to us, as he differs from the Edmond we met at the start of the novel). It’s action packed escapism and suspense as much as it is dark and psychologically deep.

What was really surprising was how progressive the novel is.

Not in every way, I hasten to add. There are some serious issues of presentation of race. Dumas was mixed race himself, and the descendent of a slave, but some of the attitudes of the time are still present. People are not represented as evil on the basis of their race, but they are certainly exoticised. The characters of Haidée and Ali especially. Haidée is the Count’s slave – a greek princess whose father was overthrown. She is consistently described as exotic and oriental. Far more attention is devoted to her appearance than her character, and although she is presented as beautiful, the terms in which her beauty is described are othering. She is interesting because she looks different and dresses differently to what is normal in France. Ali is similarly exoticised and described as a slave (and seems happy in his slavery). Moreover, he is mute – literally robbed of voice, although he is able to communicate through signs. The Count himself is presented as a very cosmopolitan man, and, in truth, the French society is not held up as superior to any other. Indeed, although countries are presented with reference to distinctive national characters, none are prized or vilified above others – the consistent characterisations of Englishmen in comedic terms is an amusing mirror on my own culture. Nonetheless, the othering and exoticism of non-white people remains disquieting.

In other ways, however, the novel is progressive. The treatment of women was strikingly egalitarian. Although characters at certain points express their own prejudices, the rest of the text provides ample examples to contradict them. There are plentiful female characters, each an individual (with the exception, perhaps, of Haidée, whose sense of self seems almost non-existent) with a character just as rich as that of any male character. Be it the fragile Valentine, the independent Eugénie, the scheming Madame de Villefort, the passionate Madame Danglars, or the intelligent and virtuous Mercédès, each is unique and has qualities that are directly opposed to some of the others.

The most interesting of these is Eugénie. Frankly, I was shipping Eugénie with her friend Louise long before I realised that Dumas was intentionally presenting them as gay. Slight spoiler here: I couldn’t have been happier than when they ran off with each other, leaving very little doubt that the author conceived of them as a couple, and did so with no condemnation whatsoever. There are references to transgender characteristics, too, although I’m not sure our modern concepts map perfectly on how it would have been regarded at the time. Eugénie is frequently described as ‘masculine’, and describes herself as ‘Hercules’ to Louise’s ‘Omphale’ – referencing a tale in which Hercules dresses as a woman. Moreover, when it comes to disguising herself as a man so that she and Louise may travel together, Dumas writes:

… with a promptitude which indicated that this was not the first time she had amused herself by adopting the garb of the opposite sex, Eugénie drew on the boots and pantaloons, tied her cravat, buttoned her waistcoat up to her throat, and put on a coat which admirably fitted her beautiful figure

There is absolutely no sense of condemnation of Eugénie for assuming a masculine role or masculine clothes. And when Eugénie and Louise are rudely interrupted in a hotel room later on, they are found to be sharing a single bed in their twin bed room.

Although one male character dislikes Eugénie for her ‘masculine’ characteristics, they don’t stop most people (or the author) from describing her as very beautiful, and there is no doubt in my mind that Eugénie and Louise’s running away together is meant to be regarded as a positive side-effect of the Count’s revenge.

As regards the revenge itself… Dantès makes a curious character. I’m more familiar with revenge tragedies than tales of this kind, which bring in elements of romance – even happy endings. One expects to sympathise with the character’s motives, even if one personally disapproves of revenge. And it’s hard to blame Edmond Dantès for any action he may take, given what he has been through. And yet some of his decisions made me uncomfortable. Whilst the Count has the power to be very good to his friends, and frequently is, he seems perfectly content to allow them to suffer excruciatingly first – indeed, he almost seems to think it necessary. That true happiness can only be awarded to those who have suffered terribly. In particular, his treatment of the Morrel family, whilst presented as an act of friendship, seems heartbreakingly cruel. (Minor spoiler:) He risk’s his mentor, Morrel senior’s, suicide so as to be able to leap in and save the day at the last possible moment, and he never reveals to the old man that he did not die in prison. The extreme lengths he goes to to punish his enemies are understandable, but it is harder to see why he does not reveal the truth to his friends and simply give them the money they need.

My sense is that we are to take it that this is a consequence of Dantès’s sufferings and long imprisonment. Like his conviction that he is an agent of Providence, Dantès does seem, in some ways, rather unhinged. I can accept this as an aspect of the psychological realism of the novel – I can even praise it. To have endured such punishment only to receive such incomprehensible wealth could conceivably impart odd beliefs about the balancing of happiness with pain, and a general desire to inflict pain on others as one has received unjustified pain one’s self. It is natural to search for reasons to explain suffering in one who has done no wrong. I can accept and even enjoy that Dantès has become rather broken in this way.

It doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s also a bit of a tosser.

And I think we’re meant to. A bit. But, the paperback I borrowed from the library has a note from the donor of the book which reads ‘I adore Dantes. A hero.’ and I just can’t get behind that. He’s likeable and charismatic and he has suffered and his actions are understandable. But he’s also arrogant, cruel, and flawed. His actions are not what I would call heroic. Even where he saves lives he does so with the feeling that it is his right to do so. I enjoy flawed characters, and I like to acknowledge that he is flawed.

Lastly, I want to discuss one thing that really didn’t chime with me, but it’s a bit of a spoiler, so you may wish to leave this part of the review until later, if you haven’t read the book. Be content to know that I enjoyed it and heartily recommend it. For the rest of you, read on:

The part that read wrongly to me regards who Dantès ends up with at the end. All through the book I was rooting for him to get back with Mercédès, but he leaves her in poverty and takes up with Haidée. I’ve seen criticism of the book for its outdated morality, and for the most part, I disagree. I think that Dumas presents us with the flawed actions of a man who believes he is the agent of Providence, but who is really a broken man, struggling to deal with an experience of incomprehensible suffering, which leads to consequences where even slight crimes are awarded disproportionate punishment. Perhaps the punishment of Mercédès was motivated by an outdated attitude to an unfaithful woman, but the flaw is more one of the dramatic expectations set up in the novel. One is encouraged to root for Mercédès and Dantès, and those hopes are disappointed. Moreover, one is given real reasons to believe in their relationship as real love, whereas his relationship with Haidée is not at all satisfying on this point. Haidée serves as more of a plot-point than a fully fledged character. She is presented as beautiful and exotic, and as having had terrible things happen to her, but I never really felt like she had a personality beyond ‘has a tragic back story and loves the Count’.

I’m also just squicked by the fact that she was his slave, still regards herself as his slave even after he has freed her, and that both of them regard their relationship as parental. There’s really just no way not to see Dantès taking her as a lover as an abuse of power. Sure, she begs for it, but he’s still taking advantage of a woman whose sense of self has been so destroyed that she cannot conceive of herself other than as his slave. A slave that he has raised since childhood. Maybe that is my modern sensibility, but I think it is backed by an otherwise empty characterisation of Haidée. She’s basically a male fantasy – a beautiful woman who adores you and begs to be your slave to use however you like. It’s creepy, and I don’t think you can use the defence of the times having been different to claim that it’s not.

This note gave the novel an unsatisfying ending, for me, but I would not eschew the rest for this flaw. I was disappointed by it, but the journey up to that point was exciting and consuming. This is a wonderful book, rightly remembered and deserving of your time, which is all that you need sacrifice, given that it’s available for free.

Read Along with Rhube #28: Chapters 55 and 56

(Index of previous ADwD posts here.)

I know, I know, it’s been an age, but I haven’t forgotten you, you mad cap fools who for some reason are interested in what I have to say about every single chapter of A Dance with Dragons. Alas, I’ve had a number of bouts of illness and when I’ve had the critical energy for analysing heavy tomes I’ve been devoting myself to my PhD rather than this. But today I’ve decided I’m well enough to do something, but not well enough to read Crispin Wright on hinge propositions (or whatever the hell this paper I’m looking at is heading towards) so you get my thoughts on the inhabitent’s of George R R Martin’s mind, instead.

Chapter 55: The Queensguard

In this chapter we follow Barristen Selmy as he deals with Daenerys’s court in the absence of Daenerys. Last time we saw her she was flying off on a dragon – a great personal move, no doubt, but she has kind of left things in disarray. Hizdahr, naturally, assumes control, and he wants his people around him in court. He chooses pit fighters, whom Selmy can see are not really appropriate for the role. Factions are splintering in Daenerys’s absence. The Unsullied are loyal only to Daenerys and refuse to fight under a man of Hizdahr’s choosing. Selmy can see the issues, but his own inability to adapt to local customs makes it impossible that he should be able to provide a similar role to Hizdahr as he did for Daenerys. Hizdahr insists on being treated like a Meereenese King, Selmy insists on treating him as a king of Westeros, and without Daenerys’s deft hand and cultural flexibility the court is falling apart.

Added to this, no one is quite sure what has become of Daenerys. Some think her killed by the dragon, others that she was taken away against her will. Selmy saw her riding Drogon and knows she is not dead, but that does not tell him where she has gone, why she has not returned.

And then there is the question of who tried to poison Daenerys with the tainted locusts…

Shakaz of the Brazen Beasts seeks to involve Selmy in schemes, attributing trechery to Hizdahr, but it is anathema to all Selmy believes in. He only wants to do his duty, he has no interest in the game of thrones. Yet it is also his duty to protect Daenerys. She never commanded him to protect Hizdahr, and with the possibility that Hizdahr himself might be behind a plot to kill Daenerys, Selmy finds himself embroilled in intrigue nonetheless. Shakas reports that Volantis is moving against them and he believes that Hizdahr will open the gates to them. Steps must be taken to protect Daenerys’s reign if Hizdahr is a traitor. Reluctantly, Selmy agrees to talk to Grey Worm, to gain the aid of the Unsullied, on condition that he be allowed to question the poisoner, who has been caught.

This is an interesting chapter, showing us just how fragile Daenerys’s peace was, and how much it depended on her for its continuance. But it also underlines her mistakes – that she was too flexible, too benevolent, too eager for peace. Meereen bent to her because she commanded dragons and great armies. But she kept her dragons chained, and when Astapor fell she did not move to save it or calm it for fear of losing the peace she had established in Meereen. It is as though Dany regarded Astapor as a mistake, and cast it aside, determined not to make the same mistakes with Meereen, and therefore stood fast at her new base rather than returning to sort out the old one. The trouble is that the fates of the two cities were not disconnected. Trouble in Astapor and her failure to act upon it made her seem weak, and when Astapor fell to plague, her people followed her to Meereen and brought the plague with them. Similarly, she chained her dragons because it seemed that they might have killed children. She chained them to prevent further deaths, but this robbed her of their power and made it seem that she did not have the strength to wield such power and also control it.

What should we make of this? I’m still not at ease with this mother role Daenerys has been cast in – a role that is again re-emphasised in this chapter. We are told that the Unsullied will only follow their ‘mother’, and that the freedmen call her ‘Mhysa’ which means mother. I mean, yeah, yeah, ‘mother of dragons’ and all that, but the trope of motherhood is one of caring and enabling, not of commanding and dominating – she is not the rider of dragons or the ruler of dragons, she is the one who has nurtured dragons. The thing about mothers is, however loyal their children, they all go off and live their own lives eventually. Which is not to say that mothers cannot be more than this – they absolutely can – but it troubles me that a young girl like Daenerys is being cast in this role which seems to connote something at odds to her role as conqueror.

She also seems to be vulnerable to the stereotypical ‘weaknesses’ of mothers. It is hearing that a child has been killed by her dragons that leads her to restrain them rather than train and utilize their power. She has a soft spot for children. Which is entirely understandable. She lost her own child – I’m not saying this mothering role is out of character – it’s just that having her weaknesses be so stereotypically feminine is… uncomfortable, for me.

That said, it is also clear that the instability in Meereen is the result of a myriad of factors, many of which have had unforeseeable consequences. The book is called ‘A Dance with Dragons‘ and that should be the clue that all of the action is really circling around Daenerys and her ‘children’. She’s a power centre and almost everyone is drawn to her – Tyrion, Quentyn, Selmy, ‘Young Griff’, the Astapori, the Volantenes, the Yunkai’i… she stinks of power and agency. When she was on the move she went to the people and places she wished to encounter and act upon. By sitting still, the possibilities she represents swirl about her, and the more people catch up to her the more possibilities are added to the mix – events start rolling in ways impossible to predict. Her absence shows the instability of her reign, but it also shows the strength of her influence in that she managed to keep it in check.

Chapter 56: The Iron Suitor (Victarion)

I keep reading this guy’s name as ‘Victorian’, it’s a problem. But I confess that it is my problem. What’s more problematic is just where this character has come from. The name rings a bell and tickles distant memories of some kind of plot, but it’s the first time we’ve seen him in this book and it’s a big book that we’re three-quarters of the way through. Adjusting my mind to what he’s doing and why I should care requires a little bit of effort, but hey, I do so.

Victarion has been leading a massive fleet from the Iron Islands to (guess what?) try to get to Daenerys before everyone else, and especially the Volantenes. He’s been caught in the same storm as Tyrion’s boat and lost a hefty chuck of his ships. He’s also got a hand that’s festering from some cut he got in some battle I don’t know if I’m supposed to remember. There’s a Maester on board who’s tending to the hand, but Victarion doesn’t like him, and he really doesn’t like that the man keeps saying he wants to cut the hand off (which pretty much sounds like the sensible thing to do). He’s also got a ‘dusky woman’ with him. Because of reasons. Probably ‘sexy’ ‘exotic’ reasons.

Anyway, the priest, Moqorro, who was washed off of Tyrion’s ship, seems to have wound up on Victarion’s. He offers to help Victarion with his hand to prove his worth and save his life. Victarion has some qualms about this, ’cause, you know, he’s a good Iron Born, and he serves the Drowned God. But the Drowned God doesn’t seem to be being too helpful and/or pleased, if he sent a storm like that, and Victarion figures that if the red priest was washed up near him he might have been washed up by the Drowned God to help him.

Victarion accepts Moqorro’s offer and Moqorro heals his hand. Victarion is pleased and spares his life, taking the Maester’s instead as a sacrifice to the Drowned God.

So, there are a few interesting things about this chapter. It certainly is a striking coincidence that Moqorro should be washed up right by Victarion and be able to heal his hand. (I honestly can’t remember if we were aware of this wound before, or if it’s basically been parachuted in to allow Moqorro to have an in with Victarion.) What’s clear, as has been indicated elsewhere before, is that the gods in this world definitely have physical domains, their strength and ability to act in the world determined by the strength of their worshipers as well as other factors. The Old Gods seems to be tied to the frigid north. The Red God seems to be based in the warm south, although he clearly has eyes on the north. Thus, here, the Drowned God seems to have little to no power (you’d have thought the whole ocean is his domain, but I guess it’s still a long way from most of his worshippers), and R’hllor seems strong. We also get a few more tidbits of history about the destruction of Valyria, but we don’t really learn very much more.

I’m not awesomely happy with the whole ‘dusky woman’ thing, though. She has no voice and no name and she is quite literally a sex slave. That’s a… that’s a hell of a character for a woman of colour to have in your novel. I mean, I get it, the Iron Islanders are down with slavery and salt-wife taking and all that jazz. It’s a culture thing. GRRM depicts a lot of cultural stuff that he doesn’t seem to endorse. But this woman is so anonymous. She is given no character at all. In as much as we have any indication of her feelings, she doesn’t seem to mind being Victarion’s sex slave – he’s not the guy who cut her tongue out, so he’s kind of OK, right? Right?

There’s nothing wrong with having people of colour being slaves in fiction per se, it’s how it’s treated, and sensitively should be the key word. Similarly for women in sexually subservient positions. There are many ways to handle this that are fine. But just thrown in in a way that seems to add nothing to the plot, with no voice and no name, described in exoticised terms like ‘dusky’, with no real examination of how the woman herself feels about her condition… this is pretty clearly playing to the male gaze, and the white male gaze at that. Not classy, not classy at all.

Use the negative aspects of history to colour your fantasy novel by all means, but don’t just throw them in unreflectively because you think they’re ‘cool’. That’s a pretty easy way to be pretty damned offensive.

Womble out.

Review: Game of Thrones, Season 2

I really meant to review this ages ago, but it had the misfortune of airing at pretty much exactly the start of the shittiest part of my year, and I didn’t really review much of anything (or do much of anything) for a good while after that. But we’re coming up to the second year anniversary of this blog, and I find I just can’t let the year pass without paying tribute.

You guys know I like A Song of Ice and Fire, and you know I enjoyed HBO’s landmark first season of it last year (had, indeed, been waiting with anticipation for it since the end of Rome). It’s expected that I was going to enjoy the second season, I guess, but it’s no exaggeration to say that I was completely blown away. In almost every facet it was even better than last year. Part of that is because the source material is better – A Game of Thrones, the novel, is a slow burn that I probably would have given up on if not for the insistence of a friend that I had to keep reading. By A Clash of Kings many of the characters are established and we already understand a bit about the history and politics of this vast and complex world. In addition, we meet a number of new characters, including Brienne of Tarth, the fearsome and fearless women who has forced recognition of her fighting ability, gaining the status not only of knight, but of Kingsguard to Renly Baratheon. She’s one of my very favourite characters, and her relationship with Jaime Lannister becomes an increasingly compelling read.

But the success of Game of Thrones, season 2, is not solely down to the progression of the books and the development of the characters in the source material. Many actors who gave memorable performances in the first season out do themselves to become truly sparkling in season 2. Peter Dinklage won a well-deserved Emmy for his role as Tyrion Lannister last year, but his performance this year was even better. It isn’t simply that we get to see him perform in award winning episodes like ‘The Battle of Blackwater’ but that his performance is so masterful. ‘Those are brave men knocking at our door. Let’s go kill them!’ he declares, and you understand how the Half-man could win the support and loyalty of a bunch of disillusioned and dispirited commoners who have just seen their king run to hide in his mother’s skirts. For there is not merely bravery, but regret and fear in his tone. Dinklage portrays not only the intelligence, but the honour and the sadness of Tyrion. I loved this character in the book, but Dinklage has made the role his own – it’s a different Tyrion, in some ways, but I like it:

Lena Headey surprised me with the strength of her performance as Cersei in this season. Not quite at the heights that she would reach in her role as Ma-Ma in Dredd 3D, but strong, and in my opinion notably superior to her performance last year. I felt that she had relaxed into the role and really begun to understand Cersei. Again, I feel the need to draw attention to scenes from ‘The Battle of Blackwater’ – that episode was undoubtedly designed as a special effects extravaganza, but the quieter scenes away from the battle itself are not to be dismissed. The scenes between Cersei and Sansa (Sophie Turner) as they hide with the other noble women, waiting to find out if they will be raped and slaughtered, are claustrophobic with their sense of helpless imprisonment. And Cersei’s bitterness at the way she has been robbed of power, as a woman, seems to slowly permeate the room like a toxic fog – increasing with every glass of wine she drinks:

It’s masterfully done. I wrote quite a bit on Cersei and Sansa and the different representations of women in season 2 over on my Tumblr back in June. This was in response to Laurie Penny’s article that basically accused Game of Thrones of being sexist for all the wrong reasons. Because, all the praise aside, it is problematic, and if you’ve read any of my Read Along with Rhube posts on A Dance with Dragons you’ll know just how much I’ve warred, personally, with its issues. Baseless accusations like saying that Game of Thrones is just a ‘racist rape-culture Disneyland with Dragons’ do nothing but embarrass the author of the article. And it’s important to know the difference precisely so that the accurate criticisms don’t get silenced in the knocking down of the straw man. You couldn’t get much less Disneyland than Game of Thrones, and whilst it does tackle the issues of rape-culture head on, you can hardly pretend it endorses the world that supports them. However, the books of the Song of Ice and Fire series are considerably more problematic. The treatment of Daenerys, in particular, is often presented for titillation rather than critique. And let’s not forget that at the start of the series she’s meant to be thirteen. It’s all kinds of skeevy, and that’s why I’ve forced myself to write so extensively in critique of these moments in reviewing A Dance with Dragons.

Even so, it’s important to discuss such treatment in the context both of Daenerys’s growth into a formidable woman (and one clearly damaged by her experiences) and the other female characters. A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones are both notable for a range of female characters rarely seen in books or television. Women are not simply ‘strong’ or ‘weak’, they are multifaceted, fully rounded characters, many of whom express strength in very different ways: Brienne, the formidable knight; Arya, the determinedly ungirly-girl who is also becoming a skilled fighter; Cersei the queen, politician, manipulator; Catelyn, the honourable lady and ferocious matriarch; Daenerys, the wise and powerful girl-ruler, leading an army of disparate peoples to conquer a world, take back her birth-right, and challenge the slavery she herself was sold into; Margaery Tyrell, great beauty and canny political mover, who declares that she doesn’t want to be a queen, she wants to be the queen; Asha/Yara Greyjoy, capable of leading fleets of ironborn in a way her brother, Theon, could never hope to; even Sansa Stark – feminine and meek, but enduring with quiet dignity what she cannot change and showing a different kind of strength in sticking to her values in a hostile world. And there are many, many more.

As Cersei holds forth on a woman’s power residing in her sexuality, there is in no danger of this defining a view of women for the books or for the show – it is undercut both by Cersei’s obvious dissatisfaction with her lot in life and by the many and varied ways that other women have been shown to have power. We see the precariousness of power based on beauty in this season as Margaery Tyrell emerges as a rival to Cersei’s beauty – a younger rival – and Cersei is faced with men, such as Stannis, who cannot be seduced.

As to the accusation of racism… there might be some more truth, there. There’s certainly a presentation of savagery in the dothraki people that might seem indicative of a supposition of barbarism in non-white races. And I’m not entirely comfortable with the parroted phrase ‘It is known’ which seems to be almost the only thing the women of the dothraki are capable of saying – it rings of a lack of knowledge and a culture that discourages questioning and learning. One could read Daenerys as an unusual female example of the white man come to teach the ‘natives’ how to do their culture better than they do it themselves. I think there may have been an element of that at first, but I feel like there are also some significant differences from that archetype. Daenerys does not enter the culture possessed of power and confidence in some alternate ‘white’ norms. She is a lost and broken child who never really knew the culture that birthed her. She has a romantic memory of the ‘house with the red door’, but it’s a childish memory, barely connected with anything concrete. She does not force a home in this other culture, she learns it and adapts to it as a mechanism of survival. As the books go on we see her act as chameleon in several different cultures, and she makes many, sometimes grievous, mistakes as she tries to force her values – her dream of an abolition of slavery – on others. Slavery is wrong, but marching in with an army and demanding that a culture abandon central elements of its identity and economic structures can have catastrophic consequences.

Moreover, if one is inclined to cast the dothraki in the stereotype of savages, one can hardly say that all the races and nations outside of Westeros are presented as ‘uncivilized’. We haven’t seen much of them yet, but by modern standards the ‘Free Cities’ in many ways show more aspects of what we might call ‘civilisation’ from a ‘western’ point of view. Volantis is a democracy, Braavos is religiously tolerant and has outlawed slavery, as has Pentos – not much is known of the other city states, yet, but there’s some interesting discussion on the Wiki of Ice and Fire about them.

There is, perhaps, a case to be made for exoticism of other cultures. Here I feel like I’m not on a stable ground to make a judgement. My instinct is to say that there is always an element of exoticism in fantasy worlds. Part of the appeal is presenting cultures that differ from our own with a sense of wonder. Westeros itself is a somewhat exoticised view of medieval feudalism. Yet, there is no question that we are encouraged to identify with the white, European-like, faux-Britannia as the central locus for point of view action. To an extent the Daenerys plotline is unusual in fantasy novels in basing one of the major plots in completely different, non-European-like cultures, and it does allow for more non-white characters that are not ‘evil’ than you see in the average Hollywood show or Anglo-American novel. But equally, her plotline is the most exploitative in terms of titillation and presentation of other cultures for spectacle. I don’t know. I don’t feel confident making a call in this area as I’m aware of my own privilege as a white European, but my instinct is to make the same call as for the sexism issue: A Song of Ice and Fire is problematic, but does good things as well as bad, and, on the whole, Game of Thrones, the TV show, does its best to tone down some of the more problematic elements (see my discussion of the ‘Qartheen dress’ below).

Returning to the topic of the presentation of female characters, I can’t not stop off to tip a hat to the glorious Arya Stark. Arya’s story develops along new and interesting lines in season 2. Her plot takes a darker turn as she is forced to try and survive in war torn Westeros, concealing her gender for fear of what would be done to her if it were known that she is a girl. She travels with young boys and hardened criminals, heading for the Wall and learning to hold her own. Witnessing death and torture she begins to build a list of people she will kill one day as a coping mechanism, and having saved the life of the assassin, Jaqen H’ghar, she uses his debt to her to begin wreaking vengeance. We also see her treading a careful line in Tywin Lannister‘s shadow. This is sheer invention – a contraction of events from the books to enable a more digestible format for our screens – Tywin and Arya never meet like this. Yet it works; Maisie Williams and Charles Dance make captivating verbal sparring partners, creating for Tywin a charm he didn’t really have in the books, but which works very well for the TV series.

Another change from the books that I very much appreciated was concerning the notorious Qartheen dress. In the books this marks an uncomfortable and inexcusable exoticism mixed with misogyny. This is a style of dress that indicates the exotic nature of Qarth by having it just so happen that the women of Qarth traditionally walk around with one breast exposed. A breast that is described in loving detail. There is no obvious reason why the people of Qarth would favour such a style, and whilst some cultures do favour bare breasts, this usually comes with a more relaxed attitude towards nakedness that makes breasts a much less fetishised body-part than they are in much of the so called ‘developed’ world. Such an attitude does not seem to be present in Qarth, and it’s pretty clear that the reason why this outlandish fashion is the way it is does not lie in some flavour of world-building colour, but in seeking to titillate the (presumed male, heterosexual) audience. In case you can’t tell, I found these passages pretty sickening, in the book. It is to Game of Thrones‘ credit, then, that they chose to redefine the Qartheen gown to look like this (above). She still looks stunning, as is only right for a character described in the books as the most beautiful woman in the world, but she’s not in the least bit over-exposed. Rather, this is a dress that exudes strength – complete with metal power-shoulders – at the same time as enhancing her beauty. This dress says that being beautiful does not render a woman weak.

But lest we start thinking that the message is that ‘only bad witches are ugly’, let’s recall that this series also features Brienne of Tarth, or ‘Brienne the Beauty’ as she is mockingly called. At 6ft 3in, Gwendoline Christie was inspired casting for Brienne, and you can see that they made full use of the camera’s bag-o-tricks to enhance the height difference between her and other characters. Moreover, Christie reportedly put on 6.5 kilos of muscle for the role, enabling her to cut a truly impressive figure as a fighter. Granted, the Brienne from the books is described as considerably more ugly than Christie could hope to be, but her awkward gait and clear lack of typical female mannerisms marks her out in a way that one could see might well be judged unattractive to the men of her world.

It’s wonderful, then, to see the shift in perspective on Jaime’s face when he sees her fight and kill for the first time. He realises that she’s no joke – she might even be his equal, and few men could say that. I’ve always felt that the most interesting thing about Jaime is that, whatever else he may be, he’s a good fighter. He always seems more comfortable talking to people about battles and fighting, and on screen we can see him visibly relax when the conversation turns to such things, as he finds himself on firmer ground. In this way, Jaime is able to respect Brienne as he has no other woman, in the area that matters most to him.

Season 2 shows us just the beginning of what I’m hoping will become the Brienne and Jamie Very Bloody Buddy Movie, which is basically what I’ve been calling season 3 in anticipation. I can’t wait!

It’s not all squee. I can’t say that I’m a fan of how Melisandre has been presented. Not that I’ve ever really been overly fond of the character, but I didn’t think her relationship with Stannis needed sexing up the way it was. Apart from anything else, it’s completely out of character for Stannis. Whether you agree with his principles or not, Stannis is all about doing what’s right, and even if he doesn’t show much affection for his wife, having an affair with his priestess doesn’t seem like his style. It felt like the producers just saw another pretty woman they could get naked, and I couldn’t help but feel that this is a show with enough of those already. I like a bit of sex in my fantasy, but I prefer it in character and less exploitative.

The other big changes that I haven’t mentioned concern the ‘Battle of Blackwater’. In the books, Tyrion’s stroke of genius is not simply making use of Cersei’s stock-piled wildfire, but in trapping Stannis’s ships with a massive chain across the harbour, preventing escape. It’s a shame, as it’s a striking element in the books and a mark of Tyrion’s strategy, but you can see why it was cut. Blackwater was always going to be difficult to stage, and they went with the most dramatic looking elements to portray. It worked. The other significant change is that [spoiler] Tyrion’s nose doesn’t get chopped off. He does get a slice across the face that leaves him with a (supposedly) disfiguring scar, but losing half his nose becomes such a big issue for Tyrion in the books that it does seem like a slightly more problematic departure. Some people have said they thought the make-up would have been difficult to achieve, but I’m not convinced. I’ve seen noseless people/monsters on screen before. I suspect that it had more to do with keeping the face of one of their most celebrated stars intact than anything else. I don’t mind too much. I imagine it would have been difficult to look at a gaping wound like that, and I enjoy Peter Dinklage’s face the way it is, but I had half-hoped for a more gutsy move, there.

Aside from that, however, it really was an impressive production. I finished every episode bereft, like I could have continued watching forever. For quite a while after it had finished I really wasn’t sure how I was going to make it until next year. Of course, I have managed to fill my time with other things since then, but it’s undeniable that Game of Thrones has become a televisual experience not quite like any other.