Kelsey L. Hayes's answer to What is GRRM’s point with Dany’s character arc? Is he stressing that those who seek power cannot also be good? W
I really wish Emilia had read this answer.
It’s an indictment and a challenge for the audience. So, us. It isn’t about her, it’s 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 Tyrion’s line to Jon: Wherever Dany goes, evil men die. And because we consider violence against “bad” people to be inherently justified — justifiable — most of us don’t 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 — our perspective — but Dany’s doesn’t. That’s essentially what happened when she burned King’s Landing. People cried foul because it was something they saw as a departure from her characterization, because she’d never hurt “innocent” people before. It’d be more accurate though to say that she hadn’t hurt people the audience considered “innocent” before.
Dany didn’t consider the King’s Landing citizens to be innocent. They weren’t proactive enough in welcoming her, they didn’t do enough to boot Cersei out and they weren’t grateful enough when Dany showed up to “liberate” them. Her perspective hadn’t changed; she was doing what she’d always done, it’s just that this time the audience didn’t — couldn’t — agree with her or justify what she’d done.
In the end that’s 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 didn’t. Suddenly the people she was immolating didn’t look too villainous to us.
But they still did to her.
So that’s 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 “bad” people was still atrocious — people just didn’t care because her victims weren’t sufficiently sympathetic, and her overall goal — protecting people from other, worse people — looked “noble.”
The other part of it — and the one with real-world parallels in recent history — is that, to be blunt, people were deluded into rooting for a stone-cold tyrant and didn’t 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 aren’t capable of that level of self-evaluation and introspection. Rather than look at the story and be horrified at what it means — because if people can be had by Dany, they can be had by tyrants like her in the real world, and they have been — people instead clap their hands over their eyes and ears and blame the narrative for being “wrong,” because it’s easier than admitting the truth.
The combination of a compelling life story, a pretty face and violence we can agree with — against other people, people not like us, people we find morally wrong — can lead to horror. You know, “first they came for the Jews, then they came for the unionists, then they came for me,” in so many words (I know that isn’t exact). The violence is always ratcheted up, and up, until one day it isn’t violence you agree with anymore. But by then it doesn’t matter, because the tyrant is too powerful, too convinced of their own righteousness (because you’ve told them for so long that they’re right) and too far gone to go back.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think the great divide over Dany — specifically, who saw her coming, and who didn’t — will be the biggest line of demarcation in the fandom going forward. You were either had by her, or you weren’t, 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 — misogynistic, sexist, overly severe, even pro-slavery. In hindsight though, whose “moral compass” was broken, and whose wasn’t? 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 — they might make promises, they might have good intentions, they might hurt all the “right” people, they might seem sympathetic, they might seem to want to do good (for the “right” people, the same way they want to punish the “right” people). But the mask will always drop. The trick is seeing them for what they are before the mask drops, because by then it’s 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 it’s their loss — 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 they’ll be equally shocked when that tyrant eventually shows their true face, because they learned nothing from Daenerys’ story. There’s always another Daenerys though; we’re just lucky this one was fictional.
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