I totally agree, except that the first night wasn’t consensual in the books either. So, Drogo gets the 13-year-old child bride he bought to say ‘yes’ that one time by virtue of not being the savage monster she expected. Wow, big deal. Are we supposed to assume that if Dany’d said ‘no’ instead he would have stopped right there? Really?
Dany was in no position to be no and be safe. More important, she wasn’t even aware that she could say no (because, let’s be frank, she couldn’t). From the first line of that chapeter Dany is painfully aware that she’s going to have sex with Drogo by the end of the night, and she’s scared out of her mind.
“He can have her tomorrow if he likes,” her brother said. “So as long as he pays the price.”
And
“As the hours passed, the terror grew in Dany, until was all she could do not to scream.”
The idea that she can say not doesn’t even pass through her mind, because Dany is from a culture where there’s no such thing as spousal rape, and just married a man whose culture involves men ‘mounting [a woman] as a stallion mounts a mare’.
All Dany has in this chapter is a semblance of control. She is asked what she wants, but she is in not real position to refuse (as her next chapter confirms – Drogo doesn’t ask if he can ‘ride her as rentlessly as he rode his stallion’ when she’s hurt and bleeding.)
She is in no position to give her consent. At this point, all Dany wanted was not to be married. Instead, her saying ‘yes’ is more about her taking whatever agency she could get, because Drogo at least made a show of giving a damn what she wanted any way or the other (I say made a show because he clearly didn’t care about Daenerys’s ‘consent’ when he bought her). Daenerys saying yes is about deciding to be a woman instead of a scared little girl under Viserys’s thumb, Daenerys saying yes is all about her and her character development, and is a very important, if fleeting way to assert herself. That’s good.
But Daenerys is also thirteen years old and a glorified sex slave, and it boggles my mind how much people like to ignore this, espcially in such an usually unofrgiving fandom.
We have fans acting like their relationship is so perfect when it started out incredibly stetcky and dub-con at least, even in the books.
We have Martin himself who continues to write Dany’s chapters as if Drogo was the great love of her life, but still parts of the fandom keep regarding him as if he were some sort of feminist god (I’m waiting eagerly for the moment where Dany finally realizes that she has Stockholm Syndrome. If that never happens, I’ll be disgusted.)
We have people dissing the show for treating Dany’s wedding night as the rape it was, but somehow conveniently unaware of how by romanticizing the scene in the books they are glorifying a relationship between a thirty-year-old man and a thirteen-year-old child bride.
This is fucked up.