Dany and her supposed “tyranny”
You know, the way this fandom talks about “totalitarianism” and “tyranny” in ASOIAF is so so weird. Because people seem to genuinely not understand that this story is a medieval story. The way antis talk about Dany, it’s almost as if Westeros is this beautiful democracy, and Dany the tyrant is coming to ruin Westerosi democracy with her tyrannical ways. Once I had an anti read one of my posts and reply to me, and this anti was completely baffled by one of the things I wrote. I was defending Dany by saying that there’s was no way for Dany to take back Westeros without force, and this anti came to me saying things like “You can’t seriously be saying this! You can’t seriously be defending that it’s ok for Dany to force people to submit to her! The people of Westeros don’t want her! Conquering is bad!” And like… I was, in fact, saying that I think it’s ok for Dany to use force. But this anti was completely baffled that I would even suggest that.
Here’s the thing. There’s this idea in the fandom that Daenerys is the only one that will force people to submit. And in their perception, the Starks are “the heroes” over Dany because they are not forcing people to submit to them, because people follow the Starks because they want to. But the fact is that this isn’t true. I mean, sure: the forceful nature of Dany’s conquest is much more obvious. Because when she gets to Westeros, we will see her use force, we will see people oppose her, and we will probably see Dany using violence to crush those who fight against her. But that doesn’t mean that the power that the Starks possess is not rooted in the same thing: force.
The current Starks are not trying to conquer anything. They want their home back, but even in that, the narrative justifies them, because to the readers, we see how the Boltons taking the North was unjust, how the Boltons are evil and cause suffering to the people of the North. The Northern people are eager to depose the Boltons, and they are eager to bring back Stark rule. So looking at the surface, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything forceful in the way the Starks will take power: they will take power because the people seem to “want” them, and their current rulers are terrible. So everything looks very justified, and people think that the Starks are “chosen by the people”, while Dany is a “tyrant forcing people to submit”.
But this isn’t true. Sure, people now want the Starks because the Boltons are bad, and because Ned Stark was a good ruler. But for the Starks to solidify themselves as rulers loved by the North, they first had to conquer it. The Starks didn’t come into power by election, they came into power by using force, like everyone else. The Northern lords and Northern people would eagerly welcome the return of the Stark children to power now, because the Stark children are benefited by the privilege of already having the Stark power solidified in the North. They didn’t have to get their hands dirty to ascend to power, but only because they were already born into power. Only because their ancestors already got their hands dirty before them.
The difference here is that the Stark children were born privileged, with the Stark power solidified in the North, and therefore they don’t have to get their hands dirty to conquer or to be eagerly accepted as rulers in the North. Daenerys, on the other hand, wasn’t born privileged: the power her house had was gone, she had no allies, nothing. So she is in a position in which, if she wants to have power, she needs to conquer.
And this is why the argument that “Daenerys should leave Westeros alone because the people there don’t want her” annoys me. Because that’s a very convenient argument to make when you (or your faves) are already in a position of privilege and already have power. If you are privileged, you don’t have to get your hands dirty, and you can claim that “the people want you there”. But people only “want” the Starks now because the Starks had time to solidify their power, to make people love them, to make their power over the North seem natural. But the same could happen with Daenerys. If she conquered Westeros, sure, she could be seen as bad and people could oppose her, but in some decades, she would also have time to consolidate her power, be loved by the people, and “be wanted” by them. Her descendants could be “wanted by the people”. The only difference here is in the time frame: the Starks are wanted now, but you can be sure their ancestors weren’t wanted and supported by the people, they had to use force to get there.
So what I’m trying to say is that, sure, Dany conquering Westeros is a more obvious use of force. But just because we don’t see the Starks using force against those who don’t want to submit to come into power (and their only opponents to getting back their home are conveniently evil, so everything looks justified), it doesn’t mean that their power isn’t rooted in the exact same principles. All Houses got into power by force. No house was “chosen by the people”, Westeros is not a democracy, nobody voted to put the Starks into power. Nobody had a choice in whether they wanted to be ruled by the Starks or not. And unlike the Starks, Daenerys is not in a position of privilege and power, so for her, the only option is to use force, to do what the ancestors of the Starks already did for them so they don’t have to get their hands dirty. Which is why it’s ridiculous to call Daenerys a “tyrant” for using force, while ignoring the fact that the people of Westeros were all forced to have all those lords as their rulers, that the people of Westeros never had a choice. If you’re going to say that Dany is a “tyrant” for not respecting people’s choices, you have to also say that the Starks are tyrants for benefitting from the forceful conquest their ancestors did against other people that allowed them to have power. The Starks are also tyrants, because they were never chosen by the people, they simply were born into power.
So this is why, to me, this fandom’s discussion of Dany’s “tyranny” is really stupid, because it’s completely anachronistic, it makes no sense in a world where democracy doesn’t exist.
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