Daenerys Targaryen has always sucked.
As I watched the second-to-last episode of Game of Thrones, The Bells, I knew that the general viewing public was going to be very upset. Here was Daenerys Targaryen—survivor of abuse, mother of dragons, freer of slaves, the strong female character subverting the Hero’s Journey cliche in part simply by being a woman, modern feminist merch icon—breaking mad and just war crimes-ing all over the capital city. #TeamDany had spent years yas-queening their Khaleesi at every turn, and she was supposed to be the one who was good enough, was woman enough, to sit the throne while breaking the wheel. Much of the audience imploded in outrage on Sunday night that the creators of Game of Thrones would dare do this to their Khaleesi. But I sat watching her reduce King’s Landing to ash with a great deal of relief (and horror)—the show was telling the story I thought they’d been telling all along. I’ve never understood why so many were openly rooting for Daenerys to win the throne, and The Bells felt like a bit of reassurance that I wasn’t crazy.
Daenerys Targaryen has always been unfit to rule. The show has portrayed her as unfit to rule since the beginning. But I’m not going to write another one of those “Actually, that wouldn’t have surprised you at all…if you’d been paying attention” posts, because the internet is full of those this week. And, probably, if you feel like the show has betrayed Daenerys in some way, there isn’t any amount of pointing to her past behavior that could convince you that your feelings are wrong. So let’s not do that!
Brief slightly conciliatory aside: I think it’s worth pointing out that a lot of the #teamDany stuff is a perfectly understandable result of the audience expecting to have someone in the universe of the show to root for. The show is called Game of Thrones, after all—surely we’re supposed to pick the right horse and cheer it to righteous victory! We’re conditioned to love our protagonists, and Dany was certainly presented as one of the best candidates of the declared claimants, if her fire and blood instincts could be properly restrained. But that misses what the whole broader project of Game of Thrones was about—that it’s a mistake to frame the political power struggles of complex human beings, and the deployment of unimaginable power by fallible humans, as contests between easily identifiable factions of good and evil. I think the writers recognized that the audience had lost sight of this primary theme—again, understandably, as we always look for the hero—and actually ham-handedly tried to drive the point home in the last couple of episodes, especially in the “previously on…” voiceover montage that started the episode. I’m convinced that the negative reaction to the episode has less to do with the audience feeling like the rug had been pulled out from under them from a character or narrative standpoint, and more to do with being confronted with the dismal fact that the show had just foreclosed on the only possible happy ending that was left in the cards. But then again…
So instead of litigating all of that, I want to talk about why I’ve never liked Daenerys, and it has little to do with all the stuff mentioned in all those “they tried to warn us” articles linked above, though that doesn’t help. Nothing makes me more suspicious of someone than the demand that they be respected or bowed to or worshiped because they say so. The underlying aggrievement and entitlement of Dany’s claim to the throne has always spilled over into rage—that she usually channeled her rage toward people who “deserved” it doesn’t redeem her character defects, but masks them, right up to the moment that she runs out of people who deserve it.
Rather than go through a whole bunch of examples, I’d like to focus on the end of Daenerys’ season one story line as an example of what made me so disdain the character. In episode eight of season one, The Pointy End, Drogo and his khalasar attack a peaceful village in order to secure slaves to sell to finance Drogo’s and Dany’s plans to sail across the Narrow Sea and take the Iron Throne, so that their unborn son can become the Stallion Who Mounts the World. (Gross.) Dany puts a stop to some of the rapes that are going on, including that of a healer. After Drogo is injured, Dany asks the healer to tend to his wounds. Drogo’s condition only worsens, and Dany asks the woman to use blood magic to save him, whatever the cost. The witch performs the rituals, but it costs Dany her unborn son, and Drogo lives, but he is catatonic.
Dany confronts the witch, demanding to know why she has wronged her, even after Dany stepped in to save her life.
Dany believed she had earned, if not quite bought, that woman’s loyalty and love when she saved her life. But Drogo and his forces, in Dany’s name, had already taken everything about her life that gave it meaning. Dany felt entitled to her love—the conquering hero who demands appreciation for putting out the fire that the hero himself started, after the fire had already burned everything of value to ash.
And what lesson does Dany draw from this? Does she consider the possibility that the implicit violence of her mission might have drastically negative consequences for the very people she claims to want to help? The witch spells it right out for her, and then Dany burns her alive, taking a woman who did not assent to the false benevolence of her charity, and boiling her blood to give life to her dragons—the real stallions who would mount the world, and turn it to ash.
Dany goes through this over and over again, finding herself infuriated by the people who will not love her, despite all that she promises them. She wants to be adored. She wants to be worshiped. She wants to be loved. She eventually helps deliver humanity from an existential threat to its survival, and still, they will not love her. She wants these things because she believes she is entitled to them, by virtue of magic and blood, as she says over and over again. She wants to rule, not because she’s good at it, or wants peace for the realm, but because some watery tart threw a sword at her, which is of course no just reason to be entitled to wield supreme executive power—”I am Daenerys Stormborn of the blood of old Valyria, and I will take what is mine, with fire and blood, I will take it.” She frees slaves because it is Good to free slaves, sure—but also because slavery is the mechanism by which those who she aims to replace as ruler maintain their power. She wants to break the wheel, not because of the harm the machinations of constant war and political turmoil do to the common folk, but because she wants it to stop rotating with her on top.
Daenerys Targaryen is who she always was—who she learned to be at the feet of awful, violent men, who she learned to be from an awful, violent world. Her aggrievement and entitlement and her rage have always been there, often simmering just below the surface, ready to explode at any moment she found the world and its people unwilling to bend to her declared authority, and to her awesome power.
There’s something else worth noting about Daenerys’ decision to torch King’s Landing, and it has to do with what her, ahem, lived experience has taught her. Why does Dany lay waste to the city, even after it appears that her victory is assured? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she has learned, over and over again, that only magic and fire and blood and violent destruction will get her what she wants.
At the end of season one, Dany walked into Drogo’s raging funeral pyre and rose out of the ashes in the morning with three dragons. She learned that there was no amount of pleading or reasoning with powerful forces that would give her what she wanted—so she took it, with magic and fire and the blood of her enemy, the witch who she believed had wronged her.
At the end of season two, Dany burns a warlock alive after no amount of pleading and reasoning could get her what she wanted—so she used magic and fire and the blood of her enemy to free herself and regain control of her destiny. (She then locks those who have betrayed her in a vault to slowly starve to death. Yas queen?)
In season three, Dany burns a slaver alive after pretending to sell him one of her dragons. Say what you will about the dubious ethics of the slave trade, but once again, Dany has used magic and fire and the blood of her perceived enemies to get what she wanted. After failing, through seasons four and five, to prove herself a capable ruler of the former slaving societies she has recently overthrown, she reasserts her dominance and authority by laying waste to her enemies with magic and fire and blood.
She is then captured by the notoriously shitty and patriarchal Dothraki, and after failing to persuade their leadership that she should be in charge, she once again uses magic and fire and the blood of her enemies to get what she desires. Returning to her throne in Meereen, she finds that the slavers have revolted, and she uses magic and fire and blood to reestablish her authority. Having never proved to herself or anyone else that she can justly rule in peacetime, and can only keep power and maintain something approaching order with the occasional deployment of weapons of mass destruction—magical fire, boiling the blood of her enemies—she takes her army and her dragons and sails for Westeros, leaving a military dictatorship to rule Meereen in her absence.
In Westeros, she heeds the advice of her advisers to not use magic and fire and blood to eliminate her enemies to consistently disastrous results, and ultimately has to bail herself and her forces out with magic and fire and blood. She has learned, over and over again, that the only way she is going to get what she wants is with overwhelming violence, and she has the living embodiment of overwhelming violence at her disposal, and she calls it her children.
Daenerys knew, sitting on Drogon above King’s Landing, listening to the bells ringing, that these people would never love her. She knew she had consistently failed to maintain rule across the sea, despite a majority population that she freed from actual bondage. She knew that Jon Snow had a “better” claim to the throne, and the just disposition to rule benevolently, and the love of much of the people. She didn’t know if Cersei had anything else up her sleeves, but she knew that all the people she once trusted were either dead or had betrayed her, in her eyes. And most importantly, Daenerys knew—hovering there immediately after laying waste to a massive enemy fleet and the defenses of the city—that she had never gotten anything she wanted in this whole rotten world without deploying the overwhelming violence at her disposal. So she took what she believed was hers, finally, the only thing she had ever really wanted, with magic and fire and blood and overwhelming violence.
Of course she did. It’s the only thing that’s ever worked for her.
