The Unsullied
The slave-soldiers of Astapor: eunuchs trained from childhood into the most disciplined and fearless infantry in the world, until a dragon queen bought and freed them.
The fuller tale
Astapor built the Unsullied to be the most reliable infantry in the world, and reliability, in Astapor's slave markets, is achieved by removing everything that might compete with obedience ÔÇö bought as children, castrated, and drilled through a training regimen designed to strip away fear, pain, hunger, and want alike, until what remains is a soldier who will hold a line without breaking for any reason a normal army might. They fight with matching spiked bronze caps and short stabbing swords, in ranks so disciplined that onlookers across Essos consider them less an army than a machine.
Daenerys Targaryen's purchase of the entire Unsullied garrison at Astapor is not, on its face, different from any other slave transaction in the city's history ÔÇö until she frees every one of them on the spot and asks them to choose, for the first time in their lives, whether to fight for her willingly. The gesture becomes her signature: an army built on the total erasure of choice, handed its choice back, and choosing her anyway. Grey Worm rises from their ranks to command them and becomes, in the process, one of the story's clearest examples of a person rebuilding an identity the world had deliberately tried to erase.
What the Unsullied carry into the rest of the war is a discipline no other infantry in either story can match, and a silence that unnerves nearly everyone who fights beside them ÔÇö they do not boast, do not loot, do not break ranks even when a battle turns against them, because the training that stripped away their fear stripped away the impulses that make ordinary soldiers unreliable along with it. Grey Worm's own halting, hard-won romance with Missandei is the clearest sign of how much humanity survived the process anyway, a tenderness the masters of Astapor never intended their soldiers to have room left for.
The page and the screen
The books describe the Unsullied's training with a bleaker specificity the show mostly implies rather than shows outright ÔÇö each recruit forced to strangle an infant slave to prove complete obedience before earning the spiked cap, and the culture of emotional blankness the training instills examined at greater length, including the discomfort other characters feel around soldiers who seem to have had ordinary human want trained out of them entirely. The show gestures at the same brutality without dwelling in its full detail.
