Hey YouTubers! It's Charlie. So season 5 episode 1 is getting ready to air tonight.
So I wanted to do a bonus video for the Sons of the Harpy, one of the organizations inside Meereen.
There's also a lot of news is going around. Some big stuff happened yesterday. So I'll address that at the end of the video too.
Careful for spoilers for everything from season 1 to season 4 on the show
The Sons of the Harpy are a counter-insurgent group, put together by the noble houses of Meereen
before Dany moved in; the slaving houses.
They're basically 10 big families that all live in like really big pyramids.
They controlled the city before Daenerys moved in and abolished slavery.
They're pissed. They don't like the idea of democracy, which is basically what Daenerys represents.
So what you have going on in Slaver's bay right now is very much like an American Civil War situation
where the states are like 'Hey we still like slavery. We want to keep doing things the way we've done them forever.'
Daenerys is like 'Nope. Not gonna happen'.
Even though she has the Unsullied, the Second Sons, her dragons, and a lot of very grateful freedmen,
it's still not quite enough to overpower the ruling families.
The name the Sons of the Harpy derives from the symbol the harpy of the old Ghiscari Empire
This is where it gets really interesting because a lot of historical events in George R.R. Martins's books
in the Song of Ice and Fire repeat themselves
'This has all happened before. This will all happen again'
It's a very Battlestar type of idea.
If you look at this image in the trailer of them pulling the Harpy down off the top of the pyramid,
It's a methaphor for the fall of the Ghiscari Empire.
The Valyrians crushed them using their dragons.
So Daenerys, Valyrian descendent, has come into Meereen and is tearing down slavery
So you can think of this like a mini-version of the Valyrian's war against the Ghiscari
To be fair though, the Ghiscari weren't like crazy awful people and they didn't even create the name Slaver's Bay.
Although they did originate all the major cities of Slaver's Bay.
Just to refresh your memory that's Astapor,
Yunkai (that's where the wise masters are - the last big group of people she defeated before she came to Meereen),
and then Meereen, the largest city in Slaver's Bay.
The reason it's called Slaver's Bay, the reason why slavery became such a problem,
is because that rose up in the ashes of the Ghiscari Empire.
Like after the Valyrians crushed them, it made it impossible for them to grow new crops.
People in the area turned to slavery to survive.
So you could look at slavery, the Sons of the Harpy, and the problem that Daenerys has trying to abolish it
as being caused by the Valyrians.
Sometimes the best problems are the you create for yourself and that's true of all characters on Game of Thrones.
Jaime Lannister caused so many problems, so many consequences that he didn't think about ahead of time.
Cersei Lannister same thing. So Daenerys has a civil war on her hands.
The Sons of the Harpy rising up, trying to push her out of Meereen.
The person giving them orders in the books is called The Harpy.
I don't know if they're gonna have that person on the show or not.
So far it's a mystery person but the most likely candidate in the books is someone that the show has not introduced yet.
It's not a character on the show. What I think is going to end up happening on the show is that it'll be Hizdahr.
During season 4, he was introduced as the envoy of the slaving families.
So he is like the representative of the old guard in Meereen, the people that still want to slave.
He seems really nice but we'll see where that goes. He's kind of like a Varys-type person.
He keeps his cards pretty close to the vest.
It should go without saying that the show is going to change a lot of things from the books.
But as I go along with my episode videos, I'll try to explain what they did and why they did it.
What about solutions though? How is Daenerys gonna solve this problem?
Well if she acted like the old Valyrians she would just used her dragons to roast them alive.
The problem is, is that her dragons are chained up and Drogon is roaming gods know where.
She also wants to think of herself as a liberator; a benevolent mother, Meesa. That's what that term means.
Using dragons to roast her opponents alive is something that her father would do, The Mad King.
She doesn't want to be like her dad.
So it's going to be really interesting to see her try to balance her true nature as a Targaryen, mother of dragons
and her desire to be the mother of these new people.
It's like when your child is first growing up, you know, a lot of people say you can't be either best friend AND their parent at the same time.
It's only much, much later in life that that can happen.
Right now all these people on Meereen are like little children trying to learn a new way.
So it's either going to be the carrot or the stick. Or like a stick of fire if you want to use the dragon analogy.
When you think about the whole situation, it's kind of funny because she's really just trying to fix a very small part of the Eastern continent.
It seems like it is much bigger than it actually is.
Slavery is a big problem. Slaver's Bay is just like the central location for slavery in the Eastern continent.
It's not like she's trying to subdue the entire Eastern continent. It's massive.
Just look at the Dorthraki Sea here. Then you have like the Iron Bank, all the money up in Braavos. That's a whole other story.
But if she can subdue and unite Slaver's Bay, she will have an army big enough to take Westeros.
She doesn't need to conquer the entire Eastern continent. She just needs to win popular opinion.
So I guess when you think about it though, the Sons of the Harpy are really just like co-opting the name of an empire that fell.
That they bare very little resemblance to. The Ghirscari weren't even that bad. It was just what things turned into after the empire fell.
We will probably get like a much better look around the streets of Meereen. There are actually statues of harpies all over the place.
That's Ghiscari architecture. There are a couple of places that we will be seeing in Meereen that we haven't seen before.
Including the fighting pits. Most notably Daznak's Pit. That's where they are right here in this scene.
As you can see the Harpies want Daenerys's head on a pike.
The fighting pits are self-explanatory though
There are good examples of an entertainment devices used by the slaving families historically to keep the citizens happy.
It would be like erecting a giant movie theater in the middle of like a low-income housing district.
It'd be like 'Yea we understand you don't have any money. We know things are bad but here have some entertainment, free entertainment'.
In Ancient Rome, the colosseum ended up being used the exact same way.
People could come see fights and get free food. Sometimes the Caesars would give away free bread.
So like peasants could come and get free bread and watch people bleed all over the place.
Daenerys, as you can imagine, not a huge fan of this. So we'll see what's going to win out.
Daenerys, you know, trying to be this rational mother person or classic Targaryen mother of dragons.
One of the things I always really love about this show is that
even if you spend a lot of time in the same cities season to season they always find new place to film; new locations.
So the same thing is going to happen in all the familiar places, like King's Landing for instance.
We'll get to see a lot of new places inside the city.
Although I'm most excited to see the Water Gardens in Dorne. That's going to blow your mind. That and Braavos.
You will see those places like you've never seen before.
So just a quick reminder, what's going to happen tonight is after episode 1 airs I'll post my episode 1 review.
And that's where I'll do the give away for my signed copies of Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons.
All you have to do to enter that is be a subscriber and leave a comment whenever I post the video.
Real simple.
And then I'll announce the winner in my Q&A on Monday.
It's gonna be the same thing every week. I'll have, like, a give-away in my review video
and then Monday, I'll announce the winners in my Q&A videos. I know everyone's asking
about the leaked episodes. Yeah, unfortunately, like, four episodes from Season 5 leaked.
I'm not gonna be doing any spoilers. I try to stay away from that kinda stuff
I just ask that if you guys wanna talk about that stuff,
please use spoiler tags in the comments.
I know a lot of you guys have asked for spoiler videos. What's probably gonna happen is
after Season 5 we'll probably be in to Winds of Winter territory
so we can all start speculating without worrying about spoiling stuff.
So it'll be a little bit more fun. Which reminds me, congratulations to this
week's giveaway winner
Ian Simmons, you win an HBO Now gift certificate. Since it's only available on iTunes if
you live in the UK or somewhere else
we'll find, like, a workaround so don't worry. Just be sure to direct message me
on the back end of my channel so I can get your contact info.
So what's gonna happen tonight after the episode airs is I'll post my episode review.
You can click here to watch that, I'll update the annotation whenever it posts,
and you can click here for all my other Season 5 videos.
Thank you so much for watching. Everybody, let's high-five, I'll see you guys tonight.