I personally don't understand how people can view Daenerys as a "girl boss" type. She was quite literally a child bride, and she still carries that history while bearing the heavy burden of being "The Prince That Was Promised." Her worldview is completely distorted because all she heard growing up, from the very person who abused her, was bedtime stories similar to how we, as children, watched Disney movies and thought our lives would mirror those of Disney princesses. Furthermore, when she is only sixteen in the current books, people give her a hard time, as if she isn't bound to mess up. She is still learning, just like any average sixteen-year-old going through developmental phases. Strip away the fantasy, and she is essentially an Afghan child bride with dragons, raised on the indoctrination of her brother's teachings. It is bizarre how people will completely blame a child for the actions of the adults around her: it shows how many performative "feminists" there truly are. The exact same grace and empathy the fandom rightly demands for Sansa Stark as a traumatized victim of political abuse should be extended to Daenerys Targaryen, as both are ultimately deconstructed "princess" archetypes children forced to navigate severe patriarchal trauma and adult warfare using whatever survival mechanisms they have. Disney princesses are frequently marketed as simple fairy tales, but their core conflicts are driven by severe generational trauma and narcissistic parental abuse. Mother Gothel in Tangled represents the textbook narcissist, isolating Rapunzel in a tower and weaponizing gaslighting under the guise of maternal protection. Similarly, Lady Tremaine in Cinderella engineers a toxic family dynamic by weaponizing her daughters as "golden children" while reducing Cinderella to a degraded family scapegoat. In Encanto, Abuela Alma enforces a hyper controlling environment where familial love is entirely conditional, forcing children to perform to impossible standards to earn basic worth. King Triton in The Little Mermaid showcases explosive, authoritarian enmeshment, using destruction to suppress Ariel's autonomy due to his own unresolved prejudices. These animated stories mirror real world psychological dynamics, proving that the classic princess trope is inherently rooted in surviving domestic toxicity. Ultimately, characters like Sansa Stark and Daenerys Targaryen are simply realistic, uncensored evolutions of these exact archetypes. They are children desperately trying to survive the catastrophic choices of the predatory and narcissistic adults who raised them.
