I love Dany, or: what’s up with the Dany hate
This is only a knee-jerk response to the growing chorus I’m reading on the internet, and not the actual people I know.
The more I read about the hate, the more I’m suspicious that if you hate Dany, it is likely that you also love Margaery and hate Hilary Clinton.
Look, I’m not saying Hilary is a good dudette, or that Margaery is uncool (which would be essentially the opposite of what the internet chatters have decided).
I’m saying, it’s easy to hate a willful woman in a position of power, and it’s equally easy to love a sexy underdog woman.
In a way, I get it. It’s disappointing when leaders who espouse doing good end up scorching people in the process. How did you think it was going to be, though, with all those fire-breathing dragons? Dany definitely was not going to play hopscotch with her enemies and pray for their surrender. There was always going to be fire and blood; just how much of it depends on how she’s able to temper her power. Like Spiderman, she’s got to learn some responsibility, which she’s been trying really hard to practice since the day Drogon toasted the sheep boy.
I understand the disappointment, however unrealistic it was to expect otherwise, but I’m also troubled with the sort of charges aimed at her, from being handed over her power to being unreasonably demanding of knees bending. You don’t see these sort of charges lobbed at Stannis (who’s even more of a utilitarian than Dany, and yet more well liked by these Dany haters!), Renly, or any number of heirs to the thrones who did and would do the same things as she’s accused of doing. Never mind that these are contextually false in her case (she’s a conqueror; it’s reasonable she’s going to demand you bend the knee); I am sensing that there’s an ulterior reasoning to these unfortunate claims.
Dany’s whole arc is finding her way out of being a sexually owned pawn to claiming her sociopolitical power, and nobody, not even Jon, has had as many ‘opportunities’ for governing as she was thrown into. Her story is a hard look at the complexity of governing, full of big-picture compromises, temptations of power, moral ambiguities, personal sacrifices, imperfect decisions, and mistakes that cost lives simply because the chess board is so large. She has to learn to rely not only on her inherent power (the dragons), but on her judgment and her people, and learn when to be nice to a King of the North, and when to roast some Lannisters.
There’s another woman with a somewhat similar arc in the show, who plays for the dark side, Cersei. We’re supposed to hate Cersei, though, so no cognitive dissonance necessary there. In fact, it’s probably easier to like Cersei compared to Dany (for those Dany haters) because she doesn’t bother with the boring struggle of being good. But Dany is built up to be good, which becomes problematic when she’s anything less than perfect, wise, or a madonna. It’s hard enough tolerating greys in the 'good,’ never mind in a 'leader,’ and even less so in a power-wielding woman. I suppose it’s no wonder some people got their panties in a twist when it comes to Dany doing grey things.
In some ways, her character (up to now) is a feminist statement of sort. Dany was born with an inherent right to power (dragons, less so thrones), fought to control her power, took opportunities to nurture such power, networked to grow this power, and attempted to exercise said power in a way that also served other people. She grew from a possessed sexualized slave to a matriarch (NOT due to relationships with a man or a human child, let it be noted) with her own sexual AND non-sexual agenda. You could struggle with accepting the darkness in her, yes, but if you have a problem with her character, or her claiming power, you likely have a bit of a sexist in you. Them are my warring words, naysayers.
There’s probably a better article to be written on leadership in Westeros, but that’s for another time.
