Flamefall author Rosaria Munda on female characters and the Daenerys problem

The Daenerys Problem

Rosaria Munda

My relationship with Game of Thrones has always been complicated. Fireborne, the first book of the Aurelian Cycle, became a twinkle in my eye my freshman year of college, when I had my first class on Plato’s Republic and a binge-read of A Song of Ice and Fire as it made its way round the dorm. I wasn’t as much a fan of the gritty Machiavellianism as a lot of the guys on my hall, but I did become preoccupied with one concept: dragons as political currency.

I was already fascinated by modern revolution, by the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Cultural Revolution under Mao. But what if you added dragons? I’d procrastinate on homework imagining a feudal world order based on dragonfire, a violent popular revolution, and a new regime that would assign dragons to riders based, not on family ties, but on test-taking ability—a faltering meritocracy inspired by Plato.

Two figures emerged at the heart of this story: Annie, a serf who rose up from the bottom on the test; and Lee, an aristocrat who had survived, Anastasia-style, and tested into the dragonriding program anyway. In the old regime, he would have been Annie’s lord. They both know it.

At the heart of Fireborne is the convoluted family history that Annie and Lee must untangle and with it, an examination of privilege. Lee’s task is to atone for his family’s sins and step aside; Annie’s is to step into the light.

It was a more personal story than I was at first comfortable admitting. I had been that scholarship kid on a full ride at boarding school, wincing when classmates made jokes about trailer trash without knowing I had lived in one, spending my summers cleaning the toilets of the same kind of vacation homes they summered in. I was from the bottom and a test had gotten me out. If I thought of privilege at all in those years—and I wouldn’t have in such terms, not knowing them at the time—it was as something viewed from the outside looking in.

But in Flamefall, the sequel to Fireborne, it felt time to complicate that narrative a bit.

After all, the sequel was written in a more complicated time. Fireborne was drafted in the waning days of the Obama era, a period that seems, in retrospect, almost halcyon; Flamefall was planned during the 2016 election, drafted under the Trump administration, and revised during the pandemic and the BLM protests. Between the first book and the second, the world had burned.

So too had the lines of privilege and where I or Annie stood with regards to them. After all, there’s the privilege of being born into a dragonriding family, but there’s also the privilege of testing in. This side of an Ivy League degree, I was beginning to realize that no matter what kind of neighborhood I had grown up in or what odd jobs I worked to get through school, I was decidedly more privileged than most.

Flamefall is about that catch-up moment.

This time, it’s Annie’s turn to struggle to recognize her privilege. Just as it’s easier for kids who were tutored their way to a perfect score to attest the injustice of the system than it is for those who weren’t, Lee’s got his finger on the pulse of the new regime’s injustice long before Annie does. Whereas he is good at following the scent of high ideals, a different lifetime of experiences has trained Annie to keep her nose on the ground and to aim low.

She has to face the limitations of her vantage point. But so must Lee. (So must we all, who were born in our particular places on planet earth, with our particular loves and fears.) Annie’s pragmatism holds her back, and Lee’s high ideals and good intentions come close to backfiring. It takes a near-civil war for them both to see that the path toward progress lies somewhere in the middle.

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In 2018, drafting Flamefall, I watched the final episodes of Season 8 of Game of Thrones with a sick feeling in my stomach. Daenerys had been the one who was supposed to break the wheel; instead, she descended into madness in what felt like a bad joke about PMS.

After the 2016 election, the joke felt a little too soon. My country had just shown it would rather be led by Donald Trump than by someone it deemed an Unlikeable Female Character. The extent to which people were ready to hate, to loathe, women in power still stung. Now I thought about how even fictional female leaders were being thrown under the bus.

The fact is, I didn’t mind that Dany torched King’s Landing. I minded that they didn’t bother giving her a better reason to do it. If you want to make a woman in power face the darkness, have her do it for the reasons real women leaders do all the time: set with impossible choices, making tough calls. Getting a reputation for being a hard ass, a bitch, whatever you want to call it. Not for having a meltdown.

And so that was the final turn I wanted to examine in Flamefall. The fate of women leaders who have the unglamorous task, not of burning it all down, but of holding it all together.

It’s easy to love leaders like Lee, and to hate leaders like Annie. Both because it’s easier to love the voice of revolutionary ideals rather than the voice of pragmatic restraint; but also because it’s easier to hate a woman’s voice than a man’s.

Lee learns from his mistakes. Annie learns from hers.

The people forgive one of them.

Flamefall hits shelves on Tuesday, March 23. Mark your calendars!