A major point of the story is that the people of Westeros REJECTS Dany. They don’t want her for a Queen - and she makes things worse for herself by her penchant for burning people alive. And all those Essosi who believed in her: she led them to their deaths in a war that they had no stake in. None of the Unsullied or the Dothraki cared about Westeros and its people. The Dothraki cared about killing and plunder - and she certainly gave them that (at least the men, the women and children were apparently left behind in Essos, wonder what happened to them? They are most likely wearing slave collars). The tragic irony is that the Unsullied ended up waging a war to subjugate nations that didn’t want to be ruled by Dany - and they initially followed her because they had a personal stake in the war she waged in Essos, against the people that had enslaved them. Their liberator waged war so subjugate other people - and when those people didn’t welcome her with open arms (because her reputation for burning people preceded her), then she burned them all, just like her father wanted to.
The thing about Dany is that she is a hypocrite. A self-righteous hypocrite who enjoys killing people in cruel and unusual ways. We’ve seen it again and again, in EVERY SINGLE season, she has people killed in ways that are viciously brutal. People just didn’t care as long as the people she killed were cartoonish villains, but there’s a morale here that so many people overlook. It isn’t just that she kills a lot of people, it is the WAY that she kills them. She makes them suffer needlessly and she enjoys making them suffer. That is due to her trauma - she spent such a long time being a powerless victim of abuse - and when she finally gets power to strike back, she lashes out at the world in a horrific and vicious way. That is an explanation and not an excuse. I hated people yelling YAS KWEEn! at all those so-called “badass” moments where Dany sets people on fire. That wasn’t badass actions, that was Dany letting go of her humanity bit by bit. Those were sad moments - moments that ultimately led her into a wholesale slaughter that outdid all of her cruel ancestors. In one day, she did worse than The Mad King and worse than Maegor the Cruel. People keep saying that she would never, missing the point that this was the end point of a long journey where each brutal killing stripped her of a little bit of her humanity.
The show omitted some of her worst acts from the book, where her actions regarding the issue of slavery are, in fact, deeply hypocritical. She allows people to sell themselves into slavery and then takes a percent of the profit from those sales, just like the slavers in Astapor did (this makes Dany a slaver by proxy, profiting directly from the slave trade). She also uses forced, unpaid labour, which IS slavery by another name (she becomes a slaver directly). So in the books, Dany wages war against the slavers whilst engaging in the very same practices that they do. That is hypocrisy at its finest.
The show decided to leave out these less than flattering parts of Dany’s arc. However, ShowDany is still a hypocrite, just of a different sort. Dany likes to think of herself as a liberator - and she was one in Essos. However, she wasn’t a liberator in Westeros, she was just another conqueror out to subjugate a people and a country that she didn’t know. She didn’t actually care about the people she claimed she wanted to “liberate”. If she did, then she wouldn’t have demanded that a nation give up its independence to help stave off the freaking apocalypse! If she actually cared, she wouldn’t have called the war for the very survival of humankind “Jon’s war” and blithely admitted that she only went North because was infatuated with a man, or rather a fantasy of her own making (because she certainly didn’t seem to care very much about Jon himself, his identity crisis was nothing to her, only a threat to her desires). In the end, she was one of the most selfish characters in the show - she cared more about her own desire for power than about the people she wanted to rule. She wasn’t the only character who did that, but she was the only character to dressed up her selfishness as benevolence, her slaughter as “liberation” - and that is why I cannot really enjoy Dany (like I enjoy Cersei as a villain), because hypocrisy just turns my stomach. I can enjoy a good villain and I can enjoy a Fallen Hero/Descent into Darkness but I cannot enjoy a hypocrite.
That is the irony and tragedy of her arc. In the end she was just another tyrant who dressed up her indiscriminate slaughter of a city as “liberation” (as all tyrants do) - and she wanted to do that everywhere, because ruling actually bored her (as we saw in Meereen). Daario was the only one that actually recognized that about her. She’s a hypocrite because she cannot or will not acknowledge this about herself. She striving after a throne when she hates the actual daily work of ruling - what she wants is this:
She wants to be worshiped and adored. It is a very human desire but she is incapable of loving anyone from a place of equality. It is no coincidence that the people she cares about the most - Jorah and Missandei - are people who have made Dany the center of their world, though Missandei was moving away but Dany never realized that. Part of this is due to the fact that Dany embraces her toxic heritage of Targaryen exceptionalism. Everybody has to be smaller than her - and it is something that has been reinforced by the way that Jorah and Tyrion talks about her (to her) as well as her surviving a fire and bringing an extinct species back to life. That is enough to mess with the minds of anyone - but Dany buys into her own cult, which is absolutely disastrous for any kind of leader.
Dany’s story is a tragedy, it was always meant to be a tragedy - because her quest is a deeply misguided quest, she’s looking for her heart’s desire in the wrong place. What Dany actually searches for is a home but a throne is not a home. Dany doesn’t realize this because she’s never had a home, through no fault of her own. She identifies the Iron Throne with Home because that is what Viserys taught her (and he was actually old enough to remember his home). The thing that so many people forget is that Dany was raised by Viserys. He became her abuser, but he was also her parent. It is no wonder that she became so much like her brother at the end, when she was confronted with not being the most beloved, with people who rejected her. Just like Viserys couldn’t handle Dany being more beloved, Dany couldn’t handle Jon being more beloved. When you think about it Viserys’ story was also a tragedy. He was a child when his world collapsed - his mother died, he had to flee his home and then becoming solely responsible for his sister. He wasn’t born a monster, he became one - and so did Dany. The difference is that, unlike Dany, we meet Viserys at the end of his story. We don’t get to follow his descent into darkness, from a scared and abandoned child to a cruel an abusive man. That makes all the difference when it comes to audience perception - because we followed Dany from her being a scared and abused young girl, through her rise to power and to her eventual fall. We felt for her, we cheered for her when she broke free of her abusers - and that is why her fall is painful for so many in the audience. Because we followed her entire journey. Her story is a sad one. She did good things and she did a lot of bad things as well. We shouldn’t put her on a pedestal for her good deeds and willfully ignore her bad deeds. That is an immature approach to a complex character.
The deck was stacked against her. She was raised by a man who abused her, a man who became a monster. She was married to another abuser - and from Drogo she learnt that might is right, and that ruler-ship is based in fear. That was repeatedly reinforced when intimidation and violence got her fast results instead of the infinitely more complicated process of diplomacy and compromise.
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