‘Valar Dohaeris’ is the third season premiere episode of the HBO fantasy television series Game of Thrones. Written by executive producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, it aired on March 31, 2013.
The first scenes show us some adventures behind the Wall, some filmed in Iceland. It is worth saying that in Martin’s novels the lands north of the Wall are not as arctic as they appear in the HBO series, without any vegetation. If I had been the director I would have filmed those lands as they appear in novels.
More serious is that both in this episode and in subsequent episodes in which the redhead Ygritte appears, she is represented as one more warrior among the wildlings north of the Wall. In real life, and even more so in semi-nomadic societies like the wildlings, young and beautiful women like Ygritte would always be pregnant since the infant mortality rate was very high. It’s a great assault on reason to invent characters like Ygritte for mass consumption (they did something similar in the Vikings series). All the scenes in which Ygritte appears in various seasons annoy the male whose judgment has not been impaired by the System.
However, in this episode we see one of my favourites shots of the series: a beautiful bay that seems to me like a kind of combination between paintings by Claude Le Lorrain and Maxfield Parrish. I’m talking about King’s Landing Blackwater Bay and I put the image here because I didn’t want to put it together with the one below.
In Martin’s prose Lady Melisandre, often referred to as the Red Woman or the Red Witch, is a Red Priestess in the religion of R’hllor and a close counsellor to King Stannis Baratheon in his campaign to take the Iron Throne. There is something that Davos tells Stannis that seems very true to me: that Melisandre is an evil woman who will destroy all who follow her, which happened in a later season: by following the advice of the witch the House of Stannis was annihilated in the fifth season. In this episode, instead of listening to what his loyal advisor says about the witch, Stannis sends Davos to the dungeon.
But more than just blaming women as is sometimes done at MGTOW, I would say that the morons are us when we allow ourselves to be hypnotised by their feminine charms. For example, in the final scenes of the episode Dany, who as we have seen already has Ser Jorah Mormont as a loyal dog, gets another dog: Ser Barristan Selmy who had belonged to the Royal Guard and in the episode swears loyalty to this woman. Dany wants to recruit an army of mulatto warriors for sale to the highest bidder to conquer the predominantly white lands of Westeros. You heard right: mulattoes to conquer white lands. But it is Aryan men like Jorah and Barristan who empower the capricious blonde.