A POSTHUMANIST CRITIQUE OF TARGARYEN-DRAGON INTERDEPENDENCE IN FIRE AND BLOOD

Abstract

Moving beyond anthropocentrism which privileges human sovereignty and political power, this research claims that Martin’s text builds a human-nonhuman collaborative world where dragons as nonhumans act as co-constitutive, active agents shaping identity, history and power. George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Blood scrutinizes the non-human agency through Donna Haraway’s conceptual frameworks of companion species and sympoiesis highlighting the relationship between dragons and Targaryens. The study illustrates Martin’s destabilization of human exceptionalism and political authority as an interspecies collaboration by foregrounding human-nonhuman relationship.

Employing Haraway’s sympoiesis that species making with one another instead of being an autonomous being, this study demonstrates the Targaryen Empire as constructed by its collaboration with dragons. This research also claims that dragons not only construct the psychological and physical constitution of their dragon lords but they also shape legitimacy, succession, and territorial control as defeating weapons. The textual analysis of the main episodes of Fire and Blood demonstrates how the relationship between dragons and their riders challenge the binary differences between humans and animals. The text continuously portrays that the political imperial power, lineage and stability come through interspecies collaboration.

 Dragons symbolizing non-humans appear as not only tools of power but significant actors who co-construct political structures, identity, and power dynamics in Westeros. This study analyzes the Targaryen’s transcendence of human limitations through the usage of their dragons. By examining human-dragon relationship through a posthumanist approach, this study subverts the conventional perspectives of fantasy fiction offering a different paradigm that appreciates the value and agency of non-humans. It broadens the epistemological vocabulary of Haraway to a genre that prioritizes anthropocentric quests indicating a multispecies narrative of dependency, alliance, and co-evolution.