The thing is, right, in the books there is precedent for Daenerys going Mad Queen. The signs are there. This is literally how @geekychemist and I became friends on here, because we’d picked up on book signs and gone ‘HMMMM’. So if Mad Queen is GRRM’s endgame for Dany, he is sowing seeds for that to make categorical sense in the books (though in typical GRRM fashion, it’s very very subtle, and easy to miss. And therefore easy to be viewed as just ‘distracting the reader’).
The show has not taken those seeds at all. The show has just taken the absolute best parts of Book!Dany (this isn’t an anti-Dany post btw, I love her, I’m just trying to break down how we ended up in this shitstorm), and portrayed her as a chain breaker, a redeemer, someone who never does anything if it can harm innocents, who will fight for everyone, who will break the wheel of oppression. WHICH IS DEFINITELY BOOK!DANY TOO. But they missed out the major ‘Mad Queen’ seeds from the books. They gave us hints of it in S5, then abandoned it.
S6-7 was when most of us who were initially upon the ‘Mad Queen Daenerys’ train hopped off, because Daenerys was not portrayed as mad or unjust even slightly. Not at all. She burnt the Tarlys, but that’s no different to Jon beheading people. She sacrificed everything to save Jon and co from beyond the wall. She sacrificed/put off her Iron Throne goal to help in the fight against the undead. She put Daario Naharis in charge of Meereen, renaming it the Bay of Dragons, ensuring slavery was gone. She was good, and kind, and level headed, and rational.
So the issue is that sure, this may be GRRM’s endgame. BUT THE SHOW HAS GIVEN NO PRECEDENT FOR IT TO HAPPEN. The show’s precedent has simply been ‘Every Targaryen dances close to madness’ which is not narratively compelling enough for the audience to actually believe this. Particularly given JON IS A TARGARYEN TOO. But he’s sane just because? No. We aren’t ten year olds. Narratively that isn’t compelling, again.
Because the show refused to ever show any negative sides of Dany, it made the viewer believe - and rightly bloody so - that she was good. She was like Rhaegar. She was nothing like her father or brother. D&D HAVE LITERALLY SAID THAT ENOUGH BLOODY TIMES THAT SHE ISN’T. So show narrative wise THIS CAME OUT OF LEFT FIELD. It is NOT in line with the Dany we know. It isn’t even in line with the Dany we know from S8. This flip happened ACROSS TWO DAMN EPISODES.
I don’t care if this is endgame in the books. If it’s endgame in the books, IT WILL NARRATIVELY MAKE SENSE AND WE’LL SEE IT COMING. But in the show, the build up has NOT been there, it’s shitty writing, it’s lazy, and it stinks of misogyny and fucking stupidity.
Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.
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