Kelsey L. Hayes's answer to What is GRRMâs point with Danyâs character arc? Is he stressing that those who seek power cannot also be good? W
I really wish Emilia had read this answer.
Itâs an indictment and a challenge for the audience. So, us. It isnât about her, itâs about us and how we perceive her.
It challenges people to consider how they think about and perceive violence and warfare. This is encompassed in Tyrionâs line to Jon: Wherever Dany goes, evil men die. And because we consider violence against âbadâ people to be inherently justified â justifiable â most of us donât put up a fuss if Dany crucifies slavers or feeds nobles to her dragons or burns Dothraki khals alive.
The problem comes when the perspective shifts â our perspective â but Danyâs doesnât. Thatâs essentially what happened when she burned Kingâs Landing. People cried foul because it was something they saw as a departure from her characterization, because sheâd never hurt âinnocentâ people before. Itâd be more accurate though to say that she hadnât hurt people the audience considered âinnocentâ before.
Dany didnât consider the Kingâs Landing citizens to be innocent. They werenât proactive enough in welcoming her, they didnât do enough to boot Cersei out and they werenât grateful enough when Dany showed up to âliberateâ them. Her perspective hadnât changed; she was doing what sheâd always done, itâs just that this time the audience didnât â couldnât â agree with her or justify what sheâd done.
In the end thatâs what Dany was chasing: That mojo that came with liberation and all it entailed. That sense of justified, self-righteous, vengeful violence against a foe she believed deserved punishment. For a very long time, her foes were our foes. She beat up on comic book villains and many people (though not all) cheered, until our context changed but hers didnât. Suddenly the people she was immolating didnât look too villainous to us.
But they still did to her.
So thatâs one part of it. It forces the audience to reckon with our own bloodlust and how we evaluate justifiable violence and atrocities. Because what Dany did to âbadâ people was still atrocious â people just didnât care because her victims werenât sufficiently sympathetic, and her overall goal â protecting people from other, worse people â looked ânoble.â
The other part of it â and the one with real-world parallels in recent history â is that, to be blunt, people were deluded into rooting for a stone-cold tyrant and didnât realize it until it was too late and the jig was up. And I think some of the aggressive backlash against the final season is to do with this; people would rather complain about the story than take a good, long, hard look in the mirror and realize that they were tricked into rooting for Stalin with tits.
Would you want to own up to the fact that you were duped that way? Probably not. Most people arenât capable of that level of self-evaluation and introspection. Rather than look at the story and be horrified at what it means â because if people can be had by Dany, they can be had by tyrants like her in the real world, and they have been â people instead clap their hands over their eyes and ears and blame the narrative for being âwrong,â because itâs easier than admitting the truth.
The combination of a compelling life story, a pretty face and violence we can agree with â against other people, people not like us, people we find morally wrong â can lead to horror. You know, âfirst they came for the Jews, then they came for the unionists, then they came for me,â in so many words (I know that isnât exact). The violence is always ratcheted up, and up, until one day it isnât violence you agree with anymore. But by then it doesnât matter, because the tyrant is too powerful, too convinced of their own righteousness (because youâve told them for so long that theyâre right) and too far gone to go back.
Iâm not exaggerating when I say that I think the great divide over Dany â specifically, who saw her coming, and who didnât â will be the biggest line of demarcation in the fandom going forward. You were either had by her, or you werenât, and the joke is that for a very long time, people who were had by her treated those who saw her for what she was as morally inferior â misogynistic, sexist, overly severe, even pro-slavery. In hindsight though, whose âmoral compassâ was broken, and whose wasnât? I think of the many, many people who sneeringly told me how terrible I was for calling Dany out for what she was years ago, and I wonder how many of them are shocked at what happened to her. Probably most!
Tyrants rarely look like tyrants immediately â they might make promises, they might have good intentions, they might hurt all the ârightâ people, they might seem sympathetic, they might seem to want to do good (for the ârightâ people, the same way they want to punish the ârightâ people). But the mask will always drop. The trick is seeing them for what they are before the mask drops, because by then itâs too late.
What GRRM did with Daenerys Targaryen is fucking brilliant, but only if people realize and accept what he did and more importantly what it means. Too many of them will keep their heads in the sand, unfortunately, but itâs their loss â I just hope none of them end up in a position to boost the next Daenerys Targaryen in the real world, because they will.
And no doubt theyâll be equally shocked when that tyrant eventually shows their true face, because they learned nothing from Daenerysâ story. Thereâs always another Daenerys though; weâre just lucky this one was fictional.
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