Why people hate Dany, but love Arya?

[chrisdaw]

Arya doesn't feel entitled to rule Westeros for having been born.

[Lollygag]

I see this on Sansa and Catelyn threads, too: people don’t like x because they have some problem with women.

Some folks definitely do have a problem with women in certain roles, but I’m really tired of people projecting misogyny onto others as a knee-jerk excuse to reject views they don’t like.

It completely denies a massive range of possibilities for why someone doesn’t like a character, can't relate to a character, or that they may have very personal reasons for disliking a characters (like say, they remind them of someone they dislike in real life).

No character is that f***ing perfect and awesome that the ONLY way you could not like that female character is misogyny.

 

[Clegane'sPup]

3 hours ago, Lady Winter Rose said:

People would loved Dany more is she's Warrior Princess than Princess Ruler.

 

3 hours ago, Lady Winter Rose said:

Just like Arya was princess while Robb was alive, but do people mention it at all? Noooo.

 Let me go make some pop corn.

 

[Ferocious Veldt Roarer]

3 hours ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

I think there will always be people who hate Dany, mainly because she is now in the position of being a female leader. Her actions will always be more scrutinized, reviled, disliked, and whatnot compared to the other male lords or kings in the book. 

I remember several years back people here were debating Dany freeing the slaves, as if she did something wrong. She is called a poor leader mainly for her actions in DwD, but the same doesn't apply to Jon, who also makes similar decisions ending is disaster, or near disaster. (Actually, in DwD, Dany does certain things like marrying Hizdar and opening the fighting pits to appease and reconcile, even though she's clearly against these things morally. The book actually ends with her realizing she doesn't need to appease anyone).

You mean, Dany forsook her moral beliefs for nothing (well, for insincere promises), and she doesn't get any love for that? Must be because those readers hate women. There's simply no other possible reason. 

3 hours ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

Dany could end up saving the world at the end,

Then we'll talk. It's not entirely fair to proclaim in advance what the readers' opinions will be and why.

[Clegane'sPup]

6 hours ago, Lady Winter Rose said:

She's just a masculine girl wielding a shortsword and killing people, not sad poor girl from rich and old family struggling to survived. (BTW, Dany is girl form once rich and old family struggling to survive, just having more luck than Arya.)

 

I had to go check Martha for the best alcoholic beverage that goes with pop corn. Then I had to go out and buy truffle oil for the pop corn and stop by the beverage store and pick up some Gruet champagne.

What are you trying to communicate?     Ahhhhhhhh, I get it, maybe. This is a vehicle to discuss the strong female and the opposition against such.

Let’s take a look at how martin wrote Dany’s story. Rather sad and sometimes disturbing.

Her brother physically and mentally abused her. Her bother sold her to a Khal. I’m sure you read the treatment she had to endure so that she could survive in La La Land.

The Targ princess now has a valuable commodity. Dragons. She has power because she has dragons even though the dragons are small and she doesn’t really have control of them now. People want her dragons. If she loses those dragons she loses power.

How many loyal subjects does Dany have? Barry, Jorah, Missandei (11 years old), the sellsword Daario, and the Unsullied (who fight for who owns them).

Dany is a pawn in a rather ambiguous plan set into motion by Varys and Illyrio.

In this scenario it matters not if Aegon is the real deal. Because it speaks for itself:

A Dance with Dragons - The Lost Lord     "Illyrio could not have been expected to know that the girl would choose to remain at Slaver's Bay."      "No more than he knew that the Beggar King would die young, or that Khal Drogo would follow him into the grave. Very little of what the fat man has anticipated has come to pass."

A Dance with Dragons - The Lost Lord      "The plan—"     "Which plan?" said Tristan Rivers. "The fat man's plan? The one that changes every time the moon turns? First Viserys Targaryen was to join us with fifty thousand Dothraki screamers at his back. Then the Beggar King was dead, and it was to be the sister, a pliable young child queen who was on her way to Pentos with three new-hatched dragons. Instead the girl turns up on Slaver's Bay and leaves a string of burning cities in her wake, and the fat man decides we should meet her by Volantis. Now that plan is in ruins as well.

Not to mention the Dorne aspect:

The Winds of Winter - Arianne I     The secret pact that Prince Doran had made all those years called for Arianne to be wed to Prince Viserys, not Quentyn to Daenerys. It had all come undone on the Dothraki sea, when he was murdered. Crowned with a pot of molten gold. "He was killed by a Dothraki khal," said Arianne. "The dragon queen's own husband."

Even before that WoW chapter, JonCon sent a letter to Doran and Doran has sent a emissary for a meet and greet.

Remind me, how powerful is Dany and her horse size dragon and the two free ranging dragons that have taken up residence in separate pyramids.

Vic has arrived. Him and his 30+ Ironborn ships. Does he love the Dragon Queen?  No. What does he want according to what martin wrote?

Who are some of the mysterious citizens floating around the story trying to get to and influence the Dragon Queen ----Quaith, Moqorro, Marywn and who else?

The story is violent. The treatment of females can be extremely gruesome. It is what it is.

If a person wants to talk misogyny or cage match one female against another speak your truth.

 

[Kandrax]

8 hours ago, Shouldve Taken The Black said:

I've debated Robb with you on several threads (I enjoy it btw ;-) ), as I have with many others. 

I don't hate Robb.

[Kandrax]

4 hours ago, Lollygag said:

Catelyn

Speaking about Catelyn. I think that calling her abusive is unfair.

[Hodor the Articulate]

12 hours ago, cyberdirectorfreedom said:

There's almost no chance that those 163 people were the ones who conspired to crucify the children. That was the basis for their crucifixion. Others who may well have been the guilty party in the crucifixion of the children were not punished for their part.

She crucified 163 people because she decided they were guilty by association. That's hardly debatable.

I assure you, you are mistaken. The men she crucified weren't just random slavers, they were the Great Masters...you know, the rulers of city, and the people who get to decide to pin up slave children to taunt an invading enemy.

7 hours ago, Horse of Kent said:

And yet, you could say much of the same about Arya. Labelling Dany as feminine and Arya as masculine is ludicrously reductive. Arya has many traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine traits - pointless though these classifications may be when Westerosi society allows such a narrow range of activities for women.You would probably be right if you argued that such a simplification also occurs amongst many of those who claim to be fans of Arya, who erroneously view her as masculine and like her because of it.

Ask 100 people to describe Arya and "tomboy" is guaranteed to pop up in most of the responses, if not all of them. Sure, Arya has both masculine and feminine features, as do all multi-dimensional characters, but you can't deny that she is seen as more masculine than feminine, and that effects her likeability.

[cyberdirectorfreedom]

13 hours ago, Shouldve Taken The Black said:

Well...it was a symbolic act wasn't it? Visiting the same sort of punishment on the slavers they meted out to their slaves. Frankly I'll shed no tears, but you do you.

Sure, it was symbolic, but that doesn't mean it wasn't cruel, stupid and misplaced. She sorted the people into two groups, slavers and slaves, and took all of the crimes of the individuals and placed the punishment on the group. That's simply not justice, no matter how you look at it. Punish the guilty party, not their peers.

Imagine if there was a murderer who worked where you work, and because the police didn't know who the murderer was, you and a bunch of other random people were arrested for their crimes. That'd be mad, wouldn't it?

1 hour ago, Hodor the Articulate said:

I assure you, you are mistaken. The men she crucified weren't just random slavers, they were the Great Masters...you know, the rulers of city, and the people who get to decide to pin up slave children to taunt an invading enemy.

So... because they could have chosen to crucify those children, they should be punished because someone else did? There's no proof that the ones she had crucified were the ones who crucified the children, and there's no reason to think that the Great Masters were all of one mind about doing so.

It'd be like Ned Stark being crucified for Roose Bolton's crimes. It doesn't make sense, it's not just, and it's needlessly cruel.

9 hours ago, Lollygag said:

I see this on Sansa and Catelyn threads, too: people don’t like x because they have some problem with women.

Some folks definitely do have a problem with women in certain roles, but I’m really tired of people projecting misogyny onto others as a knee-jerk excuse to reject views they don’t like.

It completely denies a massive range of possibilities for why someone doesn’t like a character, can't relate to a character, or that they may have very personal reasons for disliking a characters (like say, they remind them of someone they dislike in real life).

No character is that f***ing perfect and awesome that the ONLY way you could not like that female character is misogyny.

I could not agree with you more. There are many, many reasons to both like and dislike most of the characters in these novels. "Being a woman" is surely a reason for some people to dislike a character, but I'd venture to say that for the vast majority of this forum, that isn't the primary reason (or any reason at all) for disliking someone. So I'm not really sure why it keeps coming up.

Come to think of it, I don't recall seeing anyone saying that people don't like x male character because they just hate men. I wonder what that's about.

[Hodor the Articulate]

Re: "projected misogyny". I don't see the problem with pointing out the influence sexism and misogyny has on character likeability. No one is unaffected by it.

9 hours ago, cyberdirectorfreedom said:

So... because they could have chosen to crucify those children, they should be punished because someone else did? There's no proof that the ones she had crucified were the ones who crucified the children, and there's no reason to think that the Great Masters were all of one mind about doing so.

How this idea, that a portion of the GM were benevolent slavers who objected to harming slave children, persisted? Did I miss the scene where Skazzzzzos Mo Kazzzzos tried to tuck a child's intestines back in as he wept? Or the scene where even one of them codemned the Harpy's Sons' murders of freedmen? The author had no problem painting Dany's actions as morally grey, so if he intended for the issue to be that there were "innocent" slavers, he would have had at least one of them come out and proclaim his innocence.

[Prince Yourwetdream Aeryn]

Some people hate Dany, but love Arya. Some people love Dany, but hate Arya. But all these people hate SANSA for sure. 

[goldenmaps]

Personally I like most of the female characters in the books.  I like Arya and Dany and Sansa and Catelyn and Asha and Arianne.  My least favorite is Cersei and Lysa.  But I could also sympathize with these characters too.  And Cersei's chapters are entertaining.

[Quoth the raven,]

On 4/5/2018 at 5:18 PM, Lady Winter Rose said:

Just because one is feminine smart ruler, and another is adventurous tomboy assassin, doesn't mean I don't enjoy reading both of them. But to be honest, Dany is more realistic than Arya. There are RL princesses, no matter how much some readers hated idea of princesses in the novel, while Arya is stereotypical rogue of any fantasy novel/game.

It doesn't matter who is more realistic.  As for me, I am a big time fan of Daenerys Targaryen.  Your question is not really applicable to me.  Dany is my favorite among the characters.  Dany is the most beautiful woman in the world, the mother of dragons, one of the smartest and bravest of the major characters.  I suppose many people are jealous because you know, the Starks are none of those.  

I am not fond of Arya but I don't hate her.  Sansa is the one that I hate.

[Kandrax]

I hope that among  those who criticise Daenerys for 163 slavers aren't advocates for collective punishment of Freys.

[cyberdirectorfreedom]

13 hours ago, Hodor the Articulate said:

Re: "projected misogyny". I don't see the problem with pointing out the influence sexism and misogyny has on character likeability. No one is unaffected by it.

Did you just accuse literally everybody in the world of being sexist?

13 hours ago, Hodor the Articulate said:

How this idea, that a portion of the GM were benevolent slavers who objected to harming slave children, persisted? Did I miss the scene where Skazzzzzos Mo Kazzzzos tried to tuck a child's intestines back in as he wept? Or the scene where even one of them codemned the Harpy's Sons' murders of freedmen?

Well, I never said "benevolent", but does one have to be a particularly good person to object to the crucifixion of 163 children? They weren't "harmed", they were murdered in an unreasonably horrific manner. There's a bit of a difference between disciplining a disobedient slave and crucifying someone.

What makes me think that some of the slavers weren't so bad is the fact that many of the slaves wanted to be their slaves again. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to work for someone who crucifies people on a whim. It seems unlikely that the 163 children were all going to be crucified anyway, so they were used to taunt Daenerys. Therefore, they must have been randomly chosen. If you were freed from someone who'd do that, you wouldn't want to go back.

As for condemning the murder of the freedmen, there's Hizdahr. Now, I'm not so sure that he's such a good guy, or that he doesn't have direct influence over the Harpy's Sons, but he did stop the murders. Should he be genuine, that's a direct condemnation of their actions, no? Admittedly, I don't really think he is genuine, but I've been wrong before.

13 hours ago, Hodor the Articulate said:

The author had no problem painting Dany's actions as morally grey, so if he intended for the issue to be that there were "innocent" slavers, he would have had at least one of them come out and proclaim his innocence.

It's a lot easier to paint Daenerys's actions as morally grey as we see her thoughts, her reasoning, her motives. We don't have that for any of the slavers. I'm quite certain, however, that a proclamation of innocence would fall only on deaf ears, and I really don't think the 163 people she had crucified were given a trial and allowed to defend themselves.

5 hours ago, Kandrax said:

I hope that among  those who criticise Daenerys for 163 slavers aren't advocates for collective punishment of Freys.

I am absolutely not an advocate for the collective punishment of the Freys.

[Trigger Warning]

 

15 hours ago, Hodor the Articulate said:

Re: "projected misogyny". I don't see the problem with pointing out the influence sexism and misogyny has on character likeability. No one is unaffected by it.

Nothing's being pointed out though, no one put forward a misogynistic post about disliking Dany. Suggesting that people don't like Dany and like Arya because of sexism with absolutely no evidence achieves exactly nothing other than likely confirming one's own biases. It completely strips away all nuance of why someone may or may not like a character and basically frames sexism as the main basis for liking characters that are so much more than that. 

If someone makes a post that exemplifies these misogynistic opinions by all means point it out, trying to sweep people into little taboo boxes of sexism, racism, or whatever else because of the most general opinions achieves nothing except perhaps irritating people that are basically being accused of being a sexist arsehole just for not liking a female character, the OP was just one massive blanket assumption. 

There definitely are people that dislike certain female characters for sexist reasons, are they even close to being the majority that dislike those characters? I highly doubt it. 

[BRANDON GREYSTARK]

Don't know .

[Springwatch]

3 hours ago, Trigger Warning said:

Nothing's being pointed out though, no one put forward a misogynistic post about disliking Dany. Suggesting that people don't like Dany and like Arya because of sexism with absolutely no evidence achieves exactly nothing other than likely confirming one's own biases. It completely strips away all nuance of why someone may or may not like a character and basically frames sexism as the main basis for liking characters that are so much more than that. 

If someone makes a post that exemplifies these misogynistic opinions by all means point it out, trying to sweep people into little taboo boxes of sexism, racism, or whatever else because of the most general opinions achieves nothing except perhaps irritating people that are basically being accused of being a sexist arsehole just for not liking a female character, the OP was just one massive blanket assumption. 

There definitely are people that dislike certain female characters for sexist reasons, are they even close to being the majority that dislike those characters? I highly doubt it. 

To the bolded, I agree totally. That still leaves the problem of unconscious bias, which if I remember rightly, is the way our instincts are formed by the messages we're constantly getting from the world. In research, even consciously fair-minded people have found themselves instinctively associating men more with strength and success etc.

This is not something that can be detected in any single post obviously (it's like trying to work out the climate from a single weather event) - but I do think there's something of an anti-female bias over the entire forum. It's only an impression, but it seems that male characters are given more credit for being competent than female characters: e.g. Illyrio and LF are widely seen as very clever, despite crashing and burning through their plans, pretty much constantly. On the other hand: Mel is incompetent, Mirri is incompetent, Cat is incompetent, Cersei is incompetent, Sansa is incompetent, Dany is incompetent - basically all of them, except of course, Arya.

I don't know if this is what the author intended or not, but he almost sets it up for us. We spend a lot of time in Sansa's head, thinking 'How stupid I am!' We hear Cat thinking that she's trapped and helpless. We hear Tyrion thinking 'Stupid Cersei', and praising his own intelligence (the mind honed by books). Males project strength, females weakness. It's hard to cut through the fog and evaluate what is actually getting done.

 

[Ghost+Nymeria4Eva]

On 4/7/2018 at 1:09 AM, Ferocious Veldt Roarer said:

You mean, Dany forsook her moral beliefs for nothing (well, for insincere promises), and she doesn't get any love for that? Must be because those readers hate women. There's simply no other possible reason. 

There's nothing in the books that indicate Dany gave up her moral beliefs! Did you even read the part about the Daznak's pit? Her problem in Mereen is that she tries to appease the slavers and others in power in return for peace. She even imprisons her dragons for them. But in the end it all goes wrong. (Contrast this to Jon, who stands by his moral beliefs without trying to cave into pressure, but it all goes wrong for him as well. Typical GRRM). Stannis gave up his moral beliefs in many more ways than Dany but for some weird reason he has fans. 

What insincere promises? 

Uh, when did I say that people who don't like Dany are people who hate women? (But if the boot fits...) I said that her actions would be more scrutinized by nearly everyone. Conjecture much?

Quote

Then we'll talk. It's not entirely fair to proclaim in advance what the readers' opinions will be and why.

She did free all those slaves and what happened? lol. 

[Kandrax]

6 hours ago, cyberdirectorfreedom said:

Did you just accuse literally everybody in the world of being sexist?

Well, I never said "benevolent", but does one have to be a particularly good person to object to the crucifixion of 163 children? They weren't "harmed", they were murdered in an unreasonably horrific manner. There's a bit of a difference between disciplining a disobedient slave and crucifying someone.

What makes me think that some of the slavers weren't so bad is the fact that many of the slaves wanted to be their slaves again. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to work for someone who crucifies people on a whim. It seems unlikely that the 163 children were all going to be crucified anyway, so they were used to taunt Daenerys. Therefore, they must have been randomly chosen. If you were freed from someone who'd do that, you wouldn't want to go back.

As for condemning the murder of the freedmen, there's Hizdahr. Now, I'm not so sure that he's such a good guy, or that he doesn't have direct influence over the Harpy's Sons, but he did stop the murders. Should he be genuine, that's a direct condemnation of their actions, no? Admittedly, I don't really think he is genuine, but I've been wrong before.

It's a lot easier to paint Daenerys's actions as morally grey as we see her thoughts, her reasoning, her motives. We don't have that for any of the slavers. I'm quite certain, however, that a proclamation of innocence would fall only on deaf ears, and I really don't think the 163 people she had crucified were given a trial and allowed to defend themselves.

I am absolutely not an advocate for the collective punishment of the Freys.

I'm glad to hear that.