there are three things of note happening with mirri & dany in agot
- โtell me again what it is you saved.โ โ โyour life.โ โ โlook to your khal and see what life is worth, when all the rest is gone.โ dany saves mirri from certain death back at the lhazareen village and it's a meaningful exercise of whatever little influence dany had over drogo but mirri is completely unmoved by this gesture because the life she leads in drogo's khalasar is that of a slave. "tell me again what it is you saved" is about dehumanisation โ mirri's home is gone, she's lost her autonomy and has to serve the people who did this to her.
โMy time is near,โ Dany said. โI would have you attend me when he comes, if you would.โ Khal Drogo laughed. โMoon of my life, you do not ask a slave, you tell her. She will do as you command.โ
[...] Dany turned back to Mirri Maz Duur. The womanโs eyes were wary. โSo you have saved me once more.โ โAnd now you must save him,โ Dany said. โPlease โฆโ โYou do not ask a slave,โ Mirri replied sharply, โyou tell her.โ
emphasis on dany's continued insistence that she "saved her" because at this point dany still believes there is nothing worse than death but in the world of ice and fire there is something much worse, the others don't just kill people, they reanimate them as wights. the real evil in these books is dehumanisation, that manifests in westeros as the lannisters and the boltons' (and the kingsguard's) corruption of feudal oaths to mean complete subversience and in essos as slavery - the others are not a fantastical threat removed from the political climate of westeros, they are a reflection of the worst of westeros. mirri is the first person to teach dany this when she repays in kind by returning drogo to her as a shell of his former self (โThis is not life, for one who was as Drogo was. His life was laughter, and meat roasting over a firepit, and a horse between his legs...โ)
- โif joffrey should die... what is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?โ โ โeverythingโ mirri killing rhaego is not some kind of a baby hitler thought experiment with no correct answer, the narrative has a very clear stance on this because the murder of children is one of asoiaf's big preoccupations. robert climbs his throne over the corpses of rhaenys and aegon, stannis considers feeding edric storm to the flames (and will burn shireen), mycah's death, the miller's boys etc. the narrative has boundless empathy for mirri but her reasoning here, that of โthe stallion who mounts the world will burn no cities now. his khalasar shall trample no nations into dust.โ is pretty much what robert has to say about dany
Eddard Stark had seldom felt quite so alone. โYou will dishonor yourself forever if you do this.โ
โThen let it be on my head, so long as it is done. I am not so blind that I cannot see the shadow of the axe when it is hanging over my own neck.โ
โThere is no axe,โ Ned told his king. โOnly the shadow of a shadow, twenty years removed โฆ if it exists at all.โ
[...] โWhereas Daenerys is a fourteen-year-old girl.โ Ned knew he was pushing this well past the point of wisdom, yet he could not keep silent. โRobert, I ask you, what did we rise against Aerys Targaryen for, if not to put an end to the murder of children?โ
and you might say it's only a possibility of an invasion with dany but a certainty of it with rhaego because of the prophecy and to be fair it's probably hard to tell with martin's orientalism but the prophecy of the stallion who mounts the world is obviously playing with racist anxieties of an invasion led by "the barbarians from the east" because it's clearly the dothraki cultural variation of the myth of azor ahai and is in truth about dany's destiny of uniting and then defending the realm during the long night (which is possible to read as like, dany as the white westerosi figure civilising the dothraki even though i don't think it's played that straight, dany's khalasar is mostly made up of women and the elderly and those who cannot fight so the dothraki's culture of violence is being associated with patriarchal ideals, which is in line with martin's criticism of war in westeros) so it's not a matter of whether or not you agree with mirri on the ethics of child murder for utilitarian purposes, you cannot unironically say something like "the murder of children in asoiaf is presented as unconscionable. except for dany's ontologically evil child of course". reflect on this.
- โbut it is not your screams i want, only your life. i remember what you told me. only death can pay for life.โ on a basic level dany is simply executing mirri for a crime against her person, as any westerosi lord would do (when people criticise dany here they do it with the expectation that she should've read some foucault and recognised that mirri and her are merely actors under the structural force of patriarchy. which. is ridiculous obviously) there is nothing uniquely repulsive about what dany does here, other people have done it. she can only hatch dragons through such a sacrifice, through the murder of another person (and the sacrifice is definitely mirri, not herself. dany never exepcts to die, she walks into the pyre because she knows the fire will not harm her) because power is not an uncomplicated force, by definition it means having an amount of control and influence over someone else (not exclusively through coercion, but it's often the case) and that's only possible through a hierarchy that facilitates unequal status โ kings have power because the smallfolk don't. the same is true for magic (which is power) in asoiaf, the price of true magic is someone else's life. a magical blood sacrifice is not any different from the concept of taking however many lives in a war for someone else to ascend to power, what were rhaenys and aegon's deaths if not a blood sacrifice that ensured robert's ascension to the iron throne?
now asoiaf's not woke enough to posit that a power hierarchy itself is evil and we must work to dismantle it in which case dany doing a blood sacrifice magic ritual to gain dragons would be an unforgivable act. asoiaf is about how power can be redeemed if used well (โWhy do the gods make kings and queens, if not to protect the ones who canโt protect themselves?โ) so dany murders someone to get her dragons (power), but she's also presently making using of that power in a crusade against dehumanisation in essos. dany could've just decapitated mirri and that would've been the end of it (A word, and Dany could have her head off โฆ yet then what would she have? A head? If life was worthless, what was death?) afterwards she could've either jumped into drogo's funeral pyre or spent the rest of her life as a widow in isolation, but instead dany creates life out of her death because at the end of agot she's left with the remanant of drogo's khalasarโthe old and the weak, the ones who cannot protect themselvesโand when she walks into the fire she's not simply doing it out of a desire to reclaim her identity and autonomy, but also because of the awareness that she's now responsible for all these other lives, because she has to answer for what was done to eroeh. because she's a queen and for what other reason do gods make kings and queens if not for this.
She told herself that there were powers stronger than hatred, and spells older and truer than any the maegi had learned in Asshai.
โ Daenerys X, A Game of Thrones
