Demon Babies

     So we've learned quite a bit about the King of Tars and it's lump baby, and several stories like it, but there are also other sources we can look at that might've taken inspiration from the story as well. One of these source is none other than Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones seems to get a lot of it's content from big titles that get their inspiration from history. King of Tars surprisingly also seems to make an appearance in the series.


    In what way you might ask? Well, during the first seasons we learn all about the great Khal Drogo and how Daenerys was sold to him in exchange for a crown and his people. Skipping ahead in time a bit, they fall in love and the great stallion that will mount the world is conceived. Although this doesn't exactly fit the bill word for word when compared to that of King of Tars, it definitely has it's similarities. We have the Islamic
Sultan of Damascus that wants the princess of Tars who is Christian and then we have the Khal Drogo who worships the Great Stallion being married to Daenerys who, assuming she follows what her family followed, the "old gods". We do not know for sure if religion plays any role in what happens next for Game of Thrones, but we do know that it did for the King of Tars side. Difference in religion on the princess's part caused a lump of a child to be born, creating a conflict between the two of them and creating a battle of religions. This is much different from Game of Thrones because it's a witch that causes Daenerys's scaled mutated baby to be born. The context being that the witch hated the Khal Drogo for what he's done so when asked for help in healing his illness, she took a life to give life, that being the life of their great stallion child who was supposed to mount the world. Again, religion might not have had anything to do with the Game of Thrones side, but there are definitely similarities as far as how it started and how it ended.

     The television series has proven time and time again that it's taken many thoughts from history and popular authors like the kingdom of Westeros being the 7 kingdoms in England, Hardians wall and the big ice wall, Tolkien's books, etc. It's very interesting to see that the series might've also taken some inspiration from King of Tars, even if it's not much.

Racism then and now

The racism that is seen in medieval texts is much different from the racism found in neo-medieval texts and media. Racism in texts that were written in the medieval era are obvious and blatant in their racism. However, racism in neo-medieval texts is very subtle and much of the time unintentional. In The King of Tars, a medieval text, we see the blatant racism between white, Christians, and non-white Muslims. The text makes clear implications that white skin is more desirable and right than dark skin, seeing as the white Princess of Tars is said to be the fairest lady in the world and when the Sultan converts to Christianity, his skin immediately turns white. This also serves to heavily imply that Christianity is the superior religion over Islam. Additionally, the text claims that if two people of opposing religions attempt to have a child, it will end up being a lump baby, so plan accordingly.

Stereotypes and generalizations of racism

However, in neo-medieval text and media, racism operates in a much more stealthy way, seeing as it is frowned upon in modern society. Even though it is frowned upon and generally unacceptable, racism has had such a strong root in human society for so long that many people are subconsciously racist. Many people are unaware that they hold archaic and outdated stereotypes and generalizations as truth, distorting their world view and giving them a misrepresentation of other races. For example, in A Game of Thrones, the races that are depicted as barbaric and primitive are the non-white, eastern people who do not practice the dominant western religion. On the other hand, the white races are depicted as civilized and live in the west, practicing the dominant organized religion.

Depiction of Dothraki camp in GoT

 This is eerily similar to our own world, or at least a commonly held, but distorted, view of our world. While this kind of racism is likely not intentional, it just goes to show that while blatant, malicious racism may be on the decline, there is still subconscious ideas of racial superiority that are unknowingly held by many.

The formula for your new demon baby

The demonic spawn is a well known symbol that dates back to even the Biblical times with references to demon babies being made in the Torah. They were created to show straying away from God and the consequences that resulted from that. The word in Hebrew used for these children was Nephilim which translates to giants or fallen ones. The demon child is used in a falling from grace in the Albina myth, the King of Tars, and A Game of Thrones. 

In the Albina myth, the women travel to an uninhabited island as a punishment for trying to kill their husbands to avoid being subservient. They become masculine on the island and learn to fend for themselves but are seduced by an incubus and have children who become the giants of Albion or demon children. The women can be interpreted to create these demon children because they have gone on the wrong path. They were led astray and created demon children because of their change in beliefs.

Actual real life image of the giants

In the King of Tars, the Princess of Tars is forced to convert to Islam because of her marriage to the Sultan of Damascus. She becomes pregnant but is horrified to learn that she has beget a child that is a lump of flesh. She and the Sultan try to make the baby normal by using their religions, Christianity and Islam respectively. The Sultan’s methods fail while the Princess’ methods turn the baby normal and the Sultan becomes Christian as a result. The changing from Christianity again causes a demonic baby to be born.

In A Game of Thrones, Daenerys is forced to marry Khal Drogo and covert to his lifestyle and beliefs as a result. As opposed to the King of Tars, Daenerys actually is happier as a result and is supposed to give birth to the “Stallion who Mounts the World”. However, when she tries to change her beliefs again by using blood magic to save Khal Drogo’s life, her child becomes stillborn and looks like a monster. This is in stark contrast to the other two texts when the changing of lifestyles from the predominately Christian one to another creates a demon child. Daenerys does give birth to demon children through a conversion back to her old lifestyle when she hatches dragons over Drogo’s funeral pyre and begins to proclaim herself as the blood of the dragon.

How could Daenerys not love this?

The demonic spawn is used many times to show the effects of falling from what the author considers to be the correct religion. In the Albina myth and the King of Tars, this is patriarchal Christianity while in A Game of Thrones, it is the old beliefs of Daenerys that her family is the blood of the dragon and blood magic that cause her to mother demonic children.. In A Game of Thrones however, it is used more positively when Daenerys hatches the dragons and to make her more powerful as opposed to the the King of Tars which shows the lump child as only causing grief. 

A Wicked Twist On the Lump Child

With diving into stories like The King Of Tars, race and religion are two distinctly important topics that are brought up. In The King of Tars, a formless child is born to a couple of different race and different religion. The mother is a white Christian, while the father is a colored Muslim. When this story was written, race and religion were so closely associated with each other that it was believed you had to be white in order to be a true Christian. Marrying someone of a different faith is sinful, and because of that sin, any resulting child could not be completely healthy or normal. Of course, today we know that this reasoning is complete nonsense, but people believed it was true for a long time. Since this crazy logic appears several times in medieval stories and texts, the sins of the family, along with mixed race and culture, bringing a curse on the child is also employed into modern day storytelling.

The story is a bit too close to fan fiction, but it does have great music!

The best example I could think of, other than Game of Thrones, is Stephen Schwartz’s musical Wicked, which is based off the book by Gregory Maguire. The story is basically a retelling of The Wizard of Oz; however, the protagonist is the Wicked Witch, named Elphaba, and it shows her descent into wickedness amongst other elements of her life. Elphaba, unknown to her but known to the audience, is born out of wedlock. Her mother committed adultery with a man from Kansas who arrived to Oz by balloon (three guesses who that is), and, as a result, Elphaba was born - with green skin and other abnormalities. Similar to The King of Tars, the parents of Elphaba are both from different cultures, her mother being native to Oz and the wizard being native to our world. Seeing that Elphaba’s mother is married, their union is also adulterous and considered sinful. Throughout the rest of her life, Elphaba causes commotion by simply being present. She is the only character in the story that can perform magic properly, she has crazy ideas about protecting animals, and, of course, everyone freaks out over her green skin tone. No matter what her good intentions are, everything she does backfires and makes her appear villainous. Elphaba carries the weight and the consequences of the sins committed by her mother and father. She is the definition of abnormal; therefore, she ends up isolating herself and losing everything.

Not exactly a lump child, but it does the trick. This story of mixed culture combined with sinful nature producing unnatural results is still used today, and in a smash hit musical for families no less. However, whatever progress we have made as a society definitely shows through. In Wicked, there is no battle of whose religion is the right one and no one’s skin tone changes based on the chosen religion. Ultimately, the wizard is seen as the fraud he is and goes to prison, and Elphaba’s mother dies after giving birth to another daughter. Neither one really wins in the end.

Why is the mixing of race and religion such a bad thing during the Medieval times?

   We saw our first form of mixing race and religion in the King of Tars when the white princess marries the Sultan, who is said to be a darker race. This marriage was of two different religions also. This happened to become an issue when the princess became pregnant and birthed a lump child. This was because she had not fully converted to the Sultan's religion because she did not want to so instead he converted to hers to try and fix their baby.

   Another time we see someone convert was in the Arabian Nights where the women converted to Muslim because that was her husband's religion and they end up having white children. In this story, there is no understanding of the Christian Faith which could have been one of the reasons it was easier to convert for the women in this story then for the princess in the King of Tars. 

  One of the biggest mixes of race and religion was in the Game of Thrones. You have Daenerys who is white and part of the House of Targaryen. Daenerys is given away by her brother to marry Kahl Drogo who is of darker skin color and is a part of the Dothraki. They end up getting married and Daenerys has supposedly converted to the Dothraki in ways, but she still holds on to a lot of her own race. She then becomes pregnant with Drogo's son who ends up dying when Daenerys has a lady perform black magic on him to keep him alive. After they burn Drogo, Daenerys goes into the  fire with the dragon eggs and does not burn up, but instead is found with the dragon's nursing off of her. She then takes both forms of the races and claims herself to be the mother of dragons. So why is interracial or religion marriages so bad? If people believed any of these stories of why mixing two different things together our culture would not be the way it has transformed into over the years.

Is White actually right?

Is White actually right?

So throughout the course readings this semester, an overarching theme that keeps coming back around is that being white is better than anything else in the world. This notion is seen through the constant white washing of characters in book-to-tv adaptations, animation to live action adaptations and most importantly throughout the writings of the medieval time, such as King of Tars, where the sultan becomes White after converting to Christianity as well as the miraculous healing of the incomplete lump child, who takes after his mother and is the perfect, healthy, and whole white baby.

This set up of thinking leads you to believe that white is right and to be considered as good or worthy, you have to be white. Which, in case you were wondering, is a terrible mindset to have.

But the silver lining is that now there are examples of white being wrong…like outrageously wrong. One of my favorites takes the form of Viserys Targaryen, our beloved “true king.” I know there already are examples of this happening but somehow it is romanticized to be the right thing and somehow it makes you sympathize with said whiteness and then afterwards you feel…tainted because you were tricked into having the feels for the wrong person. Or maybe that’s just me…which is cool.

So Viserys is attempting to take back the Iron throne which was stolen from his family by the Usurper a.k.a Robert Baratheon. So he tries to buy an army by selling his younger sister, Danerys to the Khal of the Dothraki, Drogo. One, I have an issue with this because even if you some deep rooted hatred for her because she may have possibly killed your mother during her birth, doesn’t mean you sell her. But that is beside the point. The real issue is that Viserys was attempting to exploit a whole race of people just to get a crown and what is “rightfully” his. Which I will say is a valid reason for doing something but there are ways you go about it and trying to bend a whole peoples to your will and what you want is going to backfire, but fire can’t hurt the dragon, right?       

        

If Viserys would have gone about this in a different way, he probably would have lived a smidge longer than he did… but in his tragically beautiful ending, Dany steps up and takes his place and makes it better in her very white way. But can we blame her? Sadly no. The only person that was a constant in her life was big brother Viserys and his skewed view of the world, so it makes sense for her to make feeble attempts to free the slaves, the oppressed, and the women that were raped, only to keep them under her rule. She claims that they are now free people and yet she doesn’t give them the resources to properly be free. So she is subtly doing the exact same thing her brother was except she is nicer about it and makes you feel good because she is basically Moses with boobs…and everyone loved Moses except for the crazy oppressive Egyptians a.k.a. the slavers/Dothraki men…

Coming back to the question, is White actually right? I don’t think I can say. There are times when yes it is and no it isn’t. In the case of the Targaryen clan being right, you are not right…

Why Do We Whitewash?

Pictured: a medieval Sultan, looking pretty damned white.

The King of Tars features a literal white-washing, in which the Sultan of Damascus is baptized and his dark skin turns white due to his new “holiness,” or “piety,” or something of that sort. Increasingly in modern media, however, a more subtle white-washing has occurred between the adaptation from book to screen--characters coded as people of color are suddenly white, or are perceived by some to be wrongfully casted as non-white. But this is not, as in the King of Tars, explicitly to rid these characters of sin, because in today’s society calling dark skin a “sin” is openly acknowledged as racist. And yet whitewashing still occurs--mostly, because white viewers cannot handle seeing good, decent protagonists who are people of color.

The vast majority of characters from M. Night Shyamalan’s (atrocious) film The Last Airbender, an adaptation of the wonderful Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, were made white rather than remaining based upon Inuit, Tibetan, and Chinese cultures; however, the villainous Fire Nation, originally based primarily on Japan, were cast entirely from desi actors and actresses. Suddenly the previously-Inuit protagonists were white, fighting off the mighty horde of brown invaders, an exact swap from the series and the majority of real-life conquests. Fan outcry was overwhelmingly against this choice, and the film was summarily panned, for good reason.

Ugggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I'm so sorry Dev Patel

An opposing scenario, however, took place in the Hunger Games movie--Katniss, who was implied in the book to be of Native American ancestry due to her “olive” skin and dark braided hair, was cast as white. There was a considerable amount of back-and-forth between supporters and opponents of the casting, but at the end of the day, as with The Last Airbender, the casting was set in stone.

So why do we whitewash? In both cases, this can be pinned on the sheer fact that white people have held power in this country for centuries; this is why we have racism, and this is why we whitewash. White people in this country do not like people of color to have power--or even to be seen as human.

The entire cast of Avatar: the Last Airbender were all of fictionalized cultures based upon real-life Asian and Native ones, and were extremely well-written. They were heroes, villains, one-off jokes--everything. They were greatly humanized and given extensive backstory. And quite a few of them were dark-skinned. But the minute their story is put to screen and this egalitarian view of non-whiteness is about to be shown off, that kind of humanity can only belong to white people. The villains, therefore, have to be non-white--it’s the only way we can root against them.

(And yes, a couple villains eventually become good guys, but holy shit this movie is so bad it basically doesn’t count.)

Look at that cinematography, and also that single rock in the middle of the shot. Glorious.

The reason for the resulting outcry was that the fans of the show were accepting of this Asian-inspired environment: they read the cultural under-and-overtones accurately, and were tolerant of them, and even enthralled by them. When this was taken away, they noticed--especially fans who were themselves people of color. Their representation had been ripped out from under them, and they would fight tooth and nail to get it back.

In the case of Katniss, her situation is more ambiguous; she is never explicitly described as Native American, but what little we are told of her physical features subtly suggests that she shares some stereotypically Native features with her father. This subtlety is what ultimately resulted in her casting as white--if she was not explicitly declared non-white, the casting directors are given full license to make the sympathetic protagonist white without fear of repercussion. And indeed, there is very little outcry against Katniss’s casting outside of social justice communities on sites like Tumblr--it’s just not as noticed as the Last Airbender casting because it’s not as explicitly racist.

And in a bizarre twist, here is Katniss actually photoshopped to look darker rather than whiter. Because they know JLaw is by no means "olive-skinned."

So, even though the characters in both situations are not literally dunked in water and rid of their non-whiteness, the fact that their goodness and person-ness as well-developed characters is taken from them purely because they are not white and therefore threaten white power structure--if white people see people of color being good and doing good things then they might--gasp--treat them like people!

Jackie Robinson Would Be Proud: Attributing Everything to Race

So as we learned in class a few days ago, the imagery surrounding the princess and the sultan in The King of Tars has absolutely nothing to do with race and only has to do with religion. However, the religious differences between the princess and the sultan do manifest themselves in physical form, both in the Lump Child that is born between them and in the sultan’s miraculous turning white. In the second example, it just so happens that the sultan’s transformation looks kinda like he changed races. This is not, however, the only time that human beings have been confused about the difference between traits that are cultural (such as one’s religion) and traits that are genetic (such as skin color). People frequently try to explain differences between individuals with biology they don’t actually understand—like trying to say that someone got a better grade than you because their brain is literally bigger--and when it comes to individuals of different races, these differences get attributed to racial differences.

There may be a lot of reasons why a large majority of athletes in certain sports, such as basketball and football, are black. An athlete’s body is the biggest part of his/her success, so probably an individual’s height or length of arms or legs—something that is partly determined by DNA—could contribute. But it’s probably not true that African Americans are better athletes because their ancestors spent a lot of time “running from lions” on the savannah. There are probably cultural and societal reasons why black kids in the U.S. are more likely to be encouraged in sports while white (or Asian?) kids are more likely to be encouraged to academic pursuits. And while it may sound complementary to talk about black success in athletics, it smacks of racism (or jealously?) to downplay the role that hard work plays in an athlete’s career. “Why do Blacks dominate sports then?” one Internet user asks. “Because they just work harder? Nothing to do with them being taller, leaner, more muscle mass, longer limbs? It's all been proven SCIENTIFICALLY.” Also, how can we attribute it to centuries of selective breeding if the Onion is correct in saying that “African-Americans Go From Being No Good At Sports To Only Good At Sports”?

So there are a couple uncomfortable things going on here at once. First, a desirable ability—in this case, athleticism—is assumed to be based in racial differences, emphasizing a belief that people of other races are inherently “not like us” on a level that goes down to blood and bones. Second, this racial explanation of success is used to say that African Americans (in this case) are not successful because of their own hard work or gumption but because of some unfair advantage over whites.

Also, can we talk about the myth that Jewish people use their yarmulkes/their hair to hide the horns on their head? That’s messed up.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080315214538AAwxWpK

http://www.theonion.com/article/african-americans-go-from-being-no-good-at-sports--7018

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2009/06/the-depths-of-ignorance/

Are You At Risk For A Potato Baby?

Are you in an interracial relationship and planning on having children? You may be at risk for having a child with physical deformities or mental gaps.

           The Sultan and the Princess of Tars were not the same on a cultural or racial level, or even a religious level. This made their relationship very difficult at the beginning until the Princess lied about her faith to make the Sultan happy. When they finally had their child, their precious baby was nothing more than a lump of flesh with no features or bones. That is when the Sultan realized they were not alike at all, he knew his wife had lied to his face about her faith. The couple began to blame each other and have a pray off. In the end, the Princess's religion, (Christianity) won. The Sultan converted to Christianity and  became white, like the Princess. After his transformation and the baby's baptism their child became an actual person.

           After reading King of Tars and discussing the lump child, I wanted to look into the risks that biracial couples have to face when welcoming a child into the world. Many websites I stumbled across believed that the babies of interracial parents were at significantly higher risks for birth defects, such as imperforate anus (being born without an anus) or cleft lip. I found one government based website that does show the higher risks per race BUT it says that the risks are barely higher. It is just there to show that there are difference between races for risks.

         Other websites I found were obviously published by racist people that wanted their perfect race like Hitler. These websites were filled with excuses and lies for reasons that two people of different races should not be together and have children. Their main reason was to keep different facial features across the world.

        Although many websites were completely misguiding and racist. I did find one that had great information. It explained that the more diversity a person had racial could be beneficial towards the gene pool because of the constant change in our surroundings. When populations migrate and have constant changing environments, diseases mutate. People of two races actually have a higher guard and resistance towards the mutated disease. The more multiracial the person is, the more resistance they have. In reality, people who have mixed babies are just looking out for their children. Those two races are giving to each other, not taking away from one another.

 Websites Used:
- http://interracialintersection.com/are-children-of-interracial-couples-at-increased-risk-of-genetic-defects/
- http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/data.html
- http://www.dailystormer.com/the-dire-consequences-of-interracial-breeding/