Every week throughout season six, a handful of Vox's writers will discuss the latest episode of Game of Thrones. Before you dig in, check out our recap of Sunday's episode, as well the archive of our entire discussion to date. Next up this week is executive editor Matt Yglesias.
Matt Yglesias: I have a different complaint about Dany's rousing speech to the Dothraki than what Todd and Andrew have raised: Why are the Dothraki cheering?
What are they being promised that sounds so appealing? If you were a nomadic horseman living on the steppes of Essos enjoying a lifestyle of raiding, raping, and plundering, why on earth would you want to follow a foreign, dragon-riding queen onto a bunch of boats to travel to a distant, poorer continent and start raiding there?
She wants to do it to vindicate some lost family grudge. But what do the Dothraki care about the Targaryen family's animosity toward House Lannister?
Game of Thrones' version of the Meereen plot certainly had its share of flaws, but it did convey the basic message that politics is a lot harder than setting your enemies on fire. Even if we're supposed to believe that Dany has had a change of heart since the failure of her social reform program in Slaver's Bay, that same lesson still ought to apply in the heart of Vaes Dothrak.
Trapping the collected khals together in one building and then burning them to death was a clever trick. And it's easy enough to believe, given when we've seen of Dothraki culture, that this display of cunning and ruthlessness combined with the timely arrival of Drogon could awe the Dothraki into bowing down to Dany.
But she's effectively asking the Dothraki to abandon their entire way of life.
Their language doesn't even have words for "boat" or "armor" or "castle," so she has to talk about "wooden horses" and "iron suits" and "stone houses." What about her speech is supposed to be so convincing?
Going all the way back to season one, people have been raising concerns about the racist depiction of the Dothraki on the show. As a purely semantic manner, I'm not sure that's right. The Dothraki seem far enough away from any "real world" analog that it's not quite clear which actual human ethnic group is being maligned here.
But they are flattened out and denied any real individuality or agency. When Dany emerges from the flames, they all bow down. When she says they should completely abandon what they've been doing for generations and embark on a harebrained scheme to conquer Westeros, they all cheer.
Maybe — hopefully! — this storyline will become more complicated in future episodes and we'll see something of the dialogue and debate within the Dothraki community over what exactly they're doing. But for now it strikes me as awfully crude.
Nor is it clear, incidentally, why Dany thinks importing a gigantic army of Dothraki to another continent is a good idea. Recruiting horselords to conquer Westeros was her brother Viserys's idea, but Dany has dragons and the Unsullied at her side.
Aegon the Conqueror took Westeros with three dragons and a relatively small number of troops by offering the great lords of the realm a simple deal: Either bend the knee (as the scions of Houses Stark, Tully, and Lannister did) and keep your lands and titles or else be burned to death.
This seems like a good model to emulate, and one for which an elite strike force of disciplined Unsullied would be very useful. But the Dothraki are, presumably, not interested in accepting a bunch of peaceful surrenders. And if they run around sacking and pillaging, the local lords are going to have no choice but to fight back, no matter how scared they are of Dany's dragons.
Long story short, I don't think this storyline makes sense from either side. Having escaped from the khals, Dany and the Dothraki ought to simply go their separate ways.