The most f&cking idiotic thing I've read on io9 in a while

Now, look. Io9 is one of those sites I find myself visiting pretty often despite the fact that its obnoxious liberalism rears its head on a semi-regular basis. They write mostly good stuff about a lot of things that are relevant to me as a sci-fi nerd, but every once in a while they post something so utterly f&cking stupid that I wonder what the hell I'm doing on that site.

Case in point: an article posted today (appropriately tagged as a "Rant") entitled "Daenerys' whole storyline on Game of Thrones is messed up." It's messed up because it's about a white girl going around saving POCs from their own backwards societies. In doing so, Daenerys paradoxically becomes "a liberal white woman who goes around saving and civilising [sic] brown people" in a story that is "at its heart, a neocon wet dream." Got it? A liberal living out a neocon dream.

But let's cut through the semantic gobbledygook (can I still say "gobbledygook?") and get right down to the bone the author wants to pick.

The Klingons are the Dothraki of Star Trek — the scary, warmongering Other from the Heart of Darkness out in deep space. The great thing about imaginary black and brown people is that white sci-fi/ fantasy writers can project their repressed oriental fetishes onto a blank canvas without taking responsibility – “WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S RACIST, THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS KLINGONS OR DOTHRAKI! How can we be racist towards people WHO DON’T EVEN EXIST??” Funny how it’s always real black and brown people who have to play the role of the imaginary ‘non-existent’ warrior/tribal/primitive/race. (With the exception of the original Star Trek, which had white actors in blackface as Klingons.)

You can dress it up as fantasy, but we know who you’re talking about.

Ah. Real black and brown people are always stuck playing Klingon savages in the more modern Trek shows, eh? Check out the skin tones on the actors playing the craziest and most battle-hungry Klingons on DS9, and compare those to the tone of the actor playing the most civilized Klingon in the entire franchise. Your point would be a bit more valid if, y'know, it were true.

I also love the "damned-if-you-do,-damned-if-you-don't" mentality he uses when roping in white actors in blackface as the "original" (and again, for someone who actually does the damn research, modern) Klingons. We could paint them green and give them four eyes and people would say they're stand-ins for Arabs. (Skip to 10:20) Grievance-mongers will always see what they want to see.

By the way, the Klingons-as-Dothraki argument is crap to begin with. Yes, they have dark skin, prefer archaic weapons, like to shout, and value strength above everything. But whereas the Dothraki are pretty much a stand-in for a Mongol horde (look, George didn't pick the word khal because it was one letter away from the name of a Star Trek villain), the Klingons were the USSR. I'm not up to date on the liberal racist codebook, but to me, "oriental" means Chinese (or Romulan), not Russian. And while they were generally ham-fisted villains in the original series, TNG and DS9 gave them Honor and taught us that the Other doesn't have to be an enemy.

Did... did you watch Star Trek? Like, at all?

Anyway, back to Daenerys. "She is Laura Bush, advocating for the invasion of Iraq under the pretext of saving its women who are desperate to live a life like hers." Oh, okay. So Dany is really after the copious oil hidden underneath Astapor. "We are supposed to forget that she is fighting for nothing more than her own sense of entitlement to the throne, like some upper-class brat who loses her family’s fortune and eventually manages to become CEO of her own corporation." Yes, because upper-class brats are usually sold into sexual slavery for the benefit of other family members. Upper-class brats are chased around the world by goons hired by the CEO of a corporation that toppled Daddy's 20 years ago.   "Somehow all the grateful brown people she liberates are happy to march behind her for the sake of an imperial project that they have no stake in." Okay, you've got me there. I mean, obviously, there's no historical basis for that anywhere in history, is there?

Do... do you live in the real world? Like, at all?

"Oh - like every good white liberal, she manages to pick up a Black Best Friend (Missandei) along the way." Got it. Because when we're not projecting our "repressed oriental fetishes" on POCs, we're making them extremely smart (Missandei is the Game of Thrones equivalent of C3PO). Make up your mind!

The Season 3 finale took things to the next level; after liberating another city of slaves, Dany waits to see whether she will be greeted as a liberator or conqueror. (the [sic] writers try to get off the hook by acknowledging that she is aware of the difference). [sic] In fact, she gets a better deal - they claim her as their ‘Mother.’ She ends up crowdsurfing over the brown people like some kind of Tagaryan [sic] Bono with all of the smug satisfaction of a gap-year backpacker that has just built an orphanage in a village somewhere.

Yup. And then later on in the books, America Daenerys withdraws from Iraq Yunkai and it goes to pot again. This. Is. Deliberate. (Again, it helps to have done your homework before you try to argue.)

I could rant about how it wasn't particularly smart to break the story off where they did - I maintain that if D&D weren't so obsessed about making the Red Wedding episode 9, they could have bloody well crammed the entirety of Storm into a single season - but that'd be giving this guy too much credit.

Now, to be sure, there is a problem with Dany's arc, but it only kicks in in the fifth book, when George deliberately capsizes her story to tell us a parable about the Iraq War. Anyone with the vaguest idea of what's been happening in the past decade could tell you that.  Now it's obvious that this ranter hasn't read the books, because Dany dicks around in Meeereeeeeeeeen for quite a long time considering her "sense of entitlement to the throne."  Or maybe he has, he's aware of the contradiction, and just said "eh, what's one more contradiction in a rant full of them?"

The moral of the story is that we're never allowed to represent anything other than WASP culture in fiction. And then the grievance-mongers can bitch us out for not being "inclusive."