People's reaction to Dany turning Mad Queen says something about us as humans

[A man doesn't have a name]

I see people complaining about poor character development, or unforeseen corruption of Daenerys, but I honestly feel like people are mad because of how humans are. We pick our favourite heroes and turn a blind eye to everything they do from the moment they become our heroes. We leave them unchecked or justify their actions on the basis of a greater purpose that they are trying to achieve.

I literally saw people trying to justify the burning of King's Landing in order to spare their heroin from moral judgement. That's the danger of idolizing someone for whatever reason. You grant the person the status of immaculate hero and from that moment the person becomes unaccountable. It happened to many dictators in history. A tyrant is seldom born a tyrant. They win people's hearts and then go rogue as people support them unconditionally.

I have observed that people who didn't idolize Daenerys from season 1 could clearly see how she was slowly becoming obsessed with power and gave up support to her by season 7,  as she failed to display lenience and to rule with wisdom.

I don't know. I'd like to hear people's opinion on that. Although I feel like Dany's fans are so passionate that this might attract some angry comments.

[NewJeffCT]

My problem on the show was that it seems like too big of a jump from the Khaleesi with a gentle heart to the avenging queen torching King's Landing killings tens of thousands. 

I think the books have had some hints at it, but it seemed more sudden on the show.

[SeanF]

On 21 May 2019 at 3:22 AM, A man doesn't have a name said:

I see people complaining about poor character development, or unforeseen corruption of Daenerys, but I honestly feel like people are mad because of how humans are. We pick our favourite heroes and turn a blind eye to everything they do from the moment they become our heroes. We leave them unchecked or justify their actions on the basis of a greater purpose that they are trying to achieve.

I literally saw people trying to justify the burning of King's Landing in order to spare their heroin from moral judgement. That's the danger of idolizing someone for whatever reason. You grant the person the status of immaculate hero and from that moment the person becomes unaccountable. It happened to many dictators in history. A tyrant is seldom born a tyrant. They win people's hearts and then go rogue as people support them unconditionally.

I have observed that people who didn't idolize Daenerys from season 1 could clearly see how she was slowly becoming obsessed with power and gave up support to her by season 7,  as she failed to display lenience and to rule with wisdom.

I don't know. I'd like to hear people's opinion on that. Although I feel like Dany's fans are so passionate that this might attract some angry comments.

Some people are passionate about Daenerys.  I'm not.  I like her a lot as a character, because she's sympathetic, interesting, and well-written in the books, and for much of the series. I don't mind if she ultimately fails, or does break bad, so long as the writing justifies it.

But, the show was trolling us.  She is portrayed as a flawed heroine for 70 episodes, until .........she's Adolf Hitler, after all.  Fuck that.

[Daemos]

No. I cheered Dany in the books and the show knowing full well there is a Tyrant inside her. A tyrant she struggles everyday to keep in check, and succeeds. That is a realistic take on a hero. The idea that one day she was going to slip was ALWAYS in the cards and that is what made her interesting.

Our complaining is about the absolute SHITASTIC way we were lead to the character's conclusion. Utter shit. It says nothing about us and everything about the writers.

[Vanadis]

It's not just Dany. But Dany is the obvious example of poor writing. 
I think almost all the characters suffered from this in some form or another..
 

[Apoplexy]

I was indifferent to dany in the show and in the books. But even i saw her suddenly burning innocent people as jarring. She wasn't perfect, she wasn't cruel enough to burn children alive either in the show. That 'twist' ruined things for me.

[Dokivi]

On 5/21/2019 at 4:22 AM, A man doesn't have a name said:

I see people complaining about poor character development, or unforeseen corruption of Daenerys, but I honestly feel like people are mad because of how humans are. We pick our favourite heroes and turn a blind eye to everything they do from the moment they become our heroes. We leave them unchecked or justify their actions on the basis of a greater purpose that they are trying to achieve.

I literally saw people trying to justify the burning of King's Landing in order to spare their heroin from moral judgement. That's the danger of idolizing someone for whatever reason. You grant the person the status of immaculate hero and from that moment the person becomes unaccountable. It happened to many dictators in history. A tyrant is seldom born a tyrant. They win people's hearts and then go rogue as people support them unconditionally.

I have observed that people who didn't idolize Daenerys from season 1 could clearly see how she was slowly becoming obsessed with power and gave up support to her by season 7,  as she failed to display lenience and to rule with wisdom.

I don't know. I'd like to hear people's opinion on that. Although I feel like Dany's fans are so passionate that this might attract some angry comments.

 

What I think this goes down to is that no "twist" ever is a good twist if it relates to a major, well-established character suddenly going 180, just so it can come as a surprise to the viewers. And this one was, up until the last second, meant to be a surprise to us and the writers sacrificed all logic, character development and anything worthwhile about this arc, just so there can be a surprise. And so that Jon Snow will not be in a gray area for killing her and remains a flawless hero figure.

I'm really disappointed with this and by no means is this the result of just wanting my favourite characters to be good and moral. Quite the opposite, I most like my characters edgy, flawed, and broken. But if this is a corruption arc, it needs to be earned.

My other beef with this arc is on purely ideological level, as I believe there are not nearly enough inspirational, well-written, strong female characters in the mainstream media. And this turn for Dany I believe enforces negative stereotypes of women in power AND robs us of a potentially inspirational figure and source of inner strength (which she was for many, including Emilia Clarke).

So much from me in your research on why people might dislike this turn for Dany.

[SeanF]

21 minutes ago, Dokivi said:

 

What I think this goes down to is that no "twist" ever is a good twist if it relates to a major, well-established character suddenly going 180, just so it can come as a surprise to the viewers. And this one was, up until the last second, meant to be a surprise to us and the writers sacrificed all logic, character development and anything worthwhile about this arc, just so there can be a surprise. And so that Jon Snow will not be in a gray area for killing her and remains a flawless hero figure.

I'm really disappointed with this and by no means is this the result of just wanting my favourite characters to be good and moral. Quite the opposite, I most like my characters edgy, flawed, and broken. But if this is a corruption arc, it needs to be earned.

My other beef with this arc is on purely ideological level, as I believe there are not nearly enough inspirational, well-written, strong female characters in the mainstream media. And this turn for Dany I believe enforces negative stereotypes of women in power AND robs us of a potentially inspirational figure and source of inner strength (which she was for many, including Emilia Clarke).

So much from me in your research on why people might dislike this turn for Dany.

Without getting into the politics too much, it's obvious that Daenerys' story does resonate with a huge number of people, who must feel that D & D pissed on them.

It's easy to laugh at people who called their children Khaleesi, but ever since people started to tell stories, humans have identified with people in sagas and literature. It's like reading Pride & Prejudice to have Austen reveal towards the end that Lizzie Bennett was a poisoner.

[Staenerys Stargaryen]

I feel like the roasting of the Tarly duo last season was the first moment they really let us know Dany has a better chance of going mad then being logical or treating people fairly.  Her dragonpower never felt so abused to me before that.

What bothered me the most about the burning of kings landing was the treatment of Cersei in it all.  If Dany is truly going mad queen it would have been more powerful to me if she flew with Jon Snow to the throne room. Long claw could take Cersei's head and Drogon roast her body. Then they fly the head up to the pike joff put Ned on. They could have even kept clegane bowl but made it a more meaningful fight. Then after they clearly won Jon tries to get Dany to regroup outside the city and she denies him and roasts the small folk as she does.

Like if she is mad queen surely she should have been somehow cruel to Cersei, the one who murdered her best friend in the previous episode.

[Nightwish]

On 5/21/2019 at 5:22 AM, A man doesn't have a name said:

I see people complaining about poor character development, or unforeseen corruption of Daenerys, but I honestly feel like people are mad because of how humans are. We pick our favourite heroes and turn a blind eye to everything they do from the moment they become our heroes. We leave them unchecked or justify their actions on the basis of a greater purpose that they are trying to achieve.

I literally saw people trying to justify the burning of King's Landing in order to spare their heroin from moral judgement. That's the danger of idolizing someone for whatever reason. You grant the person the status of immaculate hero and from that moment the person becomes unaccountable. It happened to many dictators in history. A tyrant is seldom born a tyrant. They win people's hearts and then go rogue as people support them unconditionally.

I have observed that people who didn't idolize Daenerys from season 1 could clearly see how she was slowly becoming obsessed with power and gave up support to her by season 7,  as she failed to display lenience and to rule with wisdom.

I don't know. I'd like to hear people's opinion on that. Although I feel like Dany's fans are so passionate that this might attract some angry comments.

This relates with the intention the writer or the screen writer has. It is actually quite hard, not to say unbelievable to think that DD wanted to deliver us a lesson about human nature or how people are portrayed so heroic when they are just tyrants.

My problem isn't Dany or my perception of human nature, my problem is that I am not willing to believe that there was such an intention from the script writers.

We are talking people who made Arya jump on the NK, ruining all the development from Jon's arc to create surprise, who turned Sansa into a bitch, who gave no role to Bran for 2 seasons, who had a coffee cup and a plastic bottle around. 

They even destroyed the Starks. Since the end was about them, they should have focused in presenting them far more useful and good. Now it's like they didn't earn the titles and the freedom.

It's apparent that they didn't share a drop of skepticism in there. They love shows. They make shows. They prefer surprises and this is what they did. Obviously. 

Why? Because it was far easier to create surprise than character development. 

 

[Daemos]

12 minutes ago, Staenerys Stargaryen said:

Her dragonpower never felt so abused to me before that.

Abused? The Tarlys are not innocent. They had a choice. They made it. How is this any worse than Arya's mass murder?

[Staenerys Stargaryen]

9 minutes ago, Daemos said:

Abused? The Tarlys are not innocent. They had a choice. They made it. How is this any worse than Arya's mass murder?

They also could have gotten some shackle time and eventually found that knee. Everybody loves to be on the winning side of war.  And if not they could have gotten used as collateral or ransom or even burnt later on. To me it was abuse of power because it was immediate. Roberts rebellion was successful because he won over the people. Even those that initially opposed him. 

Arya and Dany are independent of each other. The Freys got karma for red wedding. I'm not saying Arya is a saint I just don't think her actions are related to Dany. 

[the red god]

she lost me by book/season 2 the moment she locked up xaro in his own vault to either starve or suffocate to death, simply for the crime of being a bit of a fibber. the same guy who saved her life by vouching for her entrance into qarth in the first place. then she let her army of savages ransack the city of any valuables they could get their hands on. from then on, every single person that she killed was done in a gruesome manner. even the lannisters were decent enough to give a quick death to traitors like ned stark.

[Daemos]

And the Tarlys got their karma to deal with too is what I am saying.

[LucyMormont]

On 5/20/2019 at 11:22 PM, A man doesn't have a name said:

I see people complaining about poor character development, or unforeseen corruption of Daenerys, but I honestly feel like people are mad because of how humans are. We pick our favourite heroes and turn a blind eye to everything they do from the moment they become our heroes. We leave them unchecked or justify their actions on the basis of a greater purpose that they are trying to achieve.

I literally saw people trying to justify the burning of King's Landing in order to spare their heroin from moral judgement. That's the danger of idolizing someone for whatever reason. You grant the person the status of immaculate hero and from that moment the person becomes unaccountable. It happened to many dictators in history. A tyrant is seldom born a tyrant. They win people's hearts and then go rogue as people support them unconditionally.

I have observed that people who didn't idolize Daenerys from season 1 could clearly see how she was slowly becoming obsessed with power and gave up support to her by season 7,  as she failed to display lenience and to rule with wisdom.

I don't know. I'd like to hear people's opinion on that. Although I feel like Dany's fans are so passionate that this might attract some angry comments.

I believe that what you say is not exclusive to Daenerys. I've seen people justifying  many other character's wrong deeds, Many fans praised Littlefinger for his "intelligence and manipulating skills", for example,  instead of rejecting him as the piece of s**t of human being he was. 

It's not so much about idolizing, as it is about not having a clear moral compass. Sadly, many people justify carnages for some reason of another. 

[Hedgehog1977]

For me, I just feel betrayed, like they broke a promise. There's always a bit of an unspoken promise every time you start to read or watch or listen to a story. The first book had a lot of grey characters, and the only one who was a (stereo)typical (fantasy) hero, honest, good and trustworthy, got his head chopped off in the end. *That* was something new, something unexpected, and all of a sudden I had to choose a different (main) pov-character to follow (in multi-pov stories I usually concentrate on one and emphasize with one protagonist, with very few exceptions - don't know if that's just me)...

There was this unspoken promise of: "this is something entirely different, and lots of grey characters" (and I really, really love grey characters and have for many years found the stereotypical fantasy cliches of good is good and evil is evil very annoying). I found that really no pov character managed to fascinate me, but the "NPC"s did - mainly the Hound and Jorah. Also, because the POV narration is deliciously biased and I liked trying to find out how a scene might have played out from a more neutral perspective.

As for Daenerys, she was childish, immature, then testing out her powers (both as a queen and as a grown woman with more experience in life) in Mereen and making lots of mistakes on the way a wiser, older ruler might have or probably even would have avoided. However, Planetos is a brutal world, and, for instance, her decision to kill everyone of the noble families who might have been responsible for abusing children as signposts seemed more like the decision of someone with a strong sense of justice, but not much common sense nor homicide detective policing qualities. She's legislative, judicative and executive in one person at that moment, and it's a fantasy world. And compared to Frey-Pie... much less appalling.

On the other hand, I very strongly oppose pre-judging a person for the family they're born into. Holding children responsible for their parents' mistakes is just wrong. The Mad King, Viserys... statistically, I was hoping to see one Targaryen who wasn't entirely mad. Because "all Targs are just crazy" just isn't what I believe in.

What I was hoping for was a grey character developing even stronger moral ambiguity. I like those moral dilemmas, as in "is it okay to push one man in front of a car to save a whole family, including two children?" I had a feeling it was Drogon's job to melt the iron throne (although that thing isn't cursed and it doesn't change a bit who sits on which symbolic oversized chair), as it seemed to have a symbolic function being responsible for all the sh*t begetting people, and some things are just too much meant to be (created by Dragonfire, destroyed by Dragonfire is just very typical fantasy).

However, what I had in mind were numerous different ways this could have played out, some with Daeny on the throne both as a good queen with some negative traits and as a difficult queen with some redeeming qualities, some with her getting defeated or getting killed (Nissa Nissa?), and all leaving me wondering "was it really worth it? How many bad deeds can be outweighed by one ultimately good decision?"

Now the only thing I'm wondering about is why I wasted so much time only to see Evil is always Evil *again*. With the right build-up (I remember vaguely, it's been some time since I read the books, there was this thing about the bells with the Dothraki, and mayyyyyybe...) the structure might have worked, but the way they did it... and the chainsaw-massacre of character-depth and -arcs in every one else... it doesn't exactly leave me questioning myself. It leaves me promising myself to not just enjoy good writing when I see it (and there are some shows and books that have it), but to cherish and worship it - and run away screaming turn off the telly whenever I get a whiff of chronically bad writing in the future (and I was soo close to stop watching the show after S4!)

Plus, it is a bit anticlimactic to have a mainly inactive/passive  protagonist character get "the big reward" in the end - it's like reading a Sherlock Holmes story and in the end it's the landlady who walks in to unmask the killer. There are rules of writing you can challenge and play around with, and some you just don't touch. Never make a promise to the reader/viewer and then go break it, never give the big reward to someone who's just not paid a high enough price for it.

[Hodor's Dragon]

On 5/20/2019 at 7:22 PM, A man doesn't have a name said:

I see people complaining about poor character development, or unforeseen corruption of Daenerys, but I honestly feel like people are mad because of how humans are. We pick our favourite heroes and turn a blind eye to everything they do from the moment they become our heroes. We leave them unchecked or justify their actions on the basis of a greater purpose that they are trying to achieve.

I literally saw people trying to justify the burning of King's Landing in order to spare their heroin from moral judgement. That's the danger of idolizing someone for whatever reason. You grant the person the status of immaculate hero and from that moment the person becomes unaccountable. It happened to many dictators in history. A tyrant is seldom born a tyrant. They win people's hearts and then go rogue as people support them unconditionally.

I have observed that people who didn't idolize Daenerys from season 1 could clearly see how she was slowly becoming obsessed with power and gave up support to her by season 7,  as she failed to display lenience and to rule with wisdom.

I don't know. I'd like to hear people's opinion on that. Although I feel like Dany's fans are so passionate that this might attract some angry comments.

Don't be presumptuous. I didn't turn a blind eye to anything.

I understand you're trying to make a point beyond this forum and this story but you need to find a way to word it that doesn't assume that your interpretation is correct and other folks' interpretation is incorrect if you actually want people to focus on the point instead of the correct/incorrect part.

[Nightwish]

5 minutes ago, Hedgehog1977 said:

 

Plus, it is a bit anticlimactic to have a mainly inactive/passive  protagonist character get "the big reward" in the end - it's like reading a Sherlock Holmes story and in the end it's the landlady who walks in to unmask the killer. 

 

I agree with you, since the end was about the Starks and it was supposed to be bittersweet they did nothing to present them more sympathetic or active for the audience. Let's suppose that this book is about them and their adventures, Sansa and Bran are practically non-existent and instead is Dany the big focus. 

The end seemed so unearned for the Starks - probably also lacking appropriate development. Awful story telling. Even Emilia Clark was surprised - what to discuss? 

 

[rustythesmith]

49 minutes ago, Daemos said:

Abused? The Tarlys are not innocent. They had a choice. They made it. How is this any worse than Arya's mass murder?

This always comes up and I think it's ridiculous. How is death a choice? Death is the absence of a choice. If I gave you a choice to do something or die, you wouldn't feel like you have a choice because dying isn't a viable option. It's the end of you and the end of all your future options. Tyrion even has an internal monologue about this exact thing in the books. He thinks something along the lines of:

Slaves could fight to the death for their freedom. Therefore slaves are only slaves because they choose to be slaves.

It's an extremely ugly and wrong rationalization that places the blame on the victims. That's exactly the same thing Team Dany people are doing with the Tarly situation. They're saying it's the Tarly's fault that Dany burned them alive because Dany gave them a non-choice.

[beeeeeen]

On 5/21/2019 at 4:22 AM, A man doesn't have a name said:

I see people complaining about poor character development, or unforeseen corruption of Daenerys, but I honestly feel like people are mad because of how humans are. We pick our favourite heroes and turn a blind eye to everything they do from the moment they become our heroes. We leave them unchecked or justify their actions on the basis of a greater purpose that they are trying to achieve.

I literally saw people trying to justify the burning of King's Landing in order to spare their heroin from moral judgement. That's the danger of idolizing someone for whatever reason. You grant the person the status of immaculate hero and from that moment the person becomes unaccountable. It happened to many dictators in history. A tyrant is seldom born a tyrant. They win people's hearts and then go rogue as people support them unconditionally.

I have observed that people who didn't idolize Daenerys from season 1 could clearly see how she was slowly becoming obsessed with power and gave up support to her by season 7,  as she failed to display lenience and to rule with wisdom.

I don't know. I'd like to hear people's opinion on that. Although I feel like Dany's fans are so passionate that this might attract some angry comments.

I agree with you, however i think that it's not the only thing happening here.
It's not only that they try (or we try, because we are all like this at some point of our lives) to justify the bad actions of the peoples they idolize, it's also that they hate being wrong. That's why you can see a lot of the complaining peoples say things like "it would have been more credible if she had commited attrocities on innocent civilians before burning Kings Landing", which you can translate by "since i did not see it coming, it must be poorly written, my mighty intelligence could have never been fooled in normal conditions".
But we should not worry about being fooled by the writers, they are giving us an opportunity to question ourleves, to think about what we believe, to check out again earlier seasons to see if there wasn't signs that it would happen (Spoiler Alert, there were a lot of signs)... but no, some peoples simply refuse to do anything like this, i have seen it several times with other fictions (Star Wars ep VIII, The Shield...)
There is a name for this phenomenon (including the aspect you described), it's cognitive dissonance.