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


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16 minutes ago, CrypticWeirwood said:

You're utterly and completely right.

Martin has said a million times that being able to win battles is nothing like being able to rule. He set out to show us the ramifications of all that.

And he did so, in spades and in dragonfire.

I thought to myself: Self, doesn't the pretty girl in the pretty dress sound like a moron?

Daenerys: I will do as queens do, I will rule.

Targaryens are depicted as conquerors.

She repeatedly claims 'A dragon is not a slave.'

Isn't an effective ruler mostly a slave to duty?

Unless it's a scenario like the sort of stable peace - with sharks under the surface -arranged through Jon Arryn's management? And in which case, Robert Baratheon was only a non entity, at best a figurehead, at worst an obstacle?

A warrior is a shitty king. 

The minute the war is over, what good can a conqueror, warrior, hero type be?

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4 hours ago, RFL said:

But isn't that the danger of what Tyrion warned about.  The most dangerous people are those who are convinced they are correct.  Self assurance of knowing what is best for everyone and incredible power are dangerous things.  I think that is why, for instance, Brann was the worst possible choice.  Not only is he incredibly self assured in his abilities apparently (and without evidence it seems) so is everyone else.  

Actually, I think that Bran makes sense as the best possible choice.  :) 

I don't think that he has incredible power.  If anything, the new King doesn't have as much as past Kings did.  His natural power base is no longer (officially) part of the Realm.  He can't sire children, so another House can't further their ambitions through marriage.  Does he get the old Crownlands?

I do agree that we were not clearly shown evidence of his abilities.  They are only hinted at.  And vaguely at that.

 

Quote

Brann:  We must destroy Dorne, root and stem, or war will overtake the seven kingdoms again.

The small council:  My Lord, Dorne is a large area and inaccessible.  Even with our armies that would be nearly impossible

Brann:  I have found a way to raise an army of undead zombies AND I can control Drogon.  We must destroy it

The council:  Wonderful.  We are blessed to have you as our ruler.  We made a great choice naming you king.  

More appropriate would be that Bran sees a threat brewing from Dorne, and works (with his Small Council among others) to defuse it.  If defusing cannot be done, then he can get the Realm prepared.  He would know that Dorne cannot be outright conquered.  ;)

Of course, how or why Dorne would cause war to overtake the 6 kingdoms is something of a question.   :)  But I understand what you are getting at.

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Daenerys proved that she just couldn’t balance her emotions when it was needed the most. She should have always known that there was a chance she could lose her dragons and advisors.  However, she was so confident that everything was her right and destiny that she felt invincible.  She was unwilling to let her army and dragons rest after the war with the dead.  She was probably tired herself and that is why she forgot about the Iron fleet.  The closer she got to power then the harder it was for her to exert impulse control.   Her anxiousness combined with grief, loss, jealousy, and vengefulness unleashed her need to take total control with fire and blood.  Her victory was exhilarating and having power made her yearn for more.  Daario was right when he said she was meant to be a conqueror. I don’t think she would ever have been happy just ruling Westeros.  

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12 minutes ago, TheFirstofHerName said:

Daenerys proved that she just couldn’t balance her emotions when it was needed the most. She should have always known that there was a chance she could lose her dragons and advisors.  However, she was so confident that everything was her right and destiny that she felt invincible.  She was unwilling to let her army and dragons rest after the war with the dead.  She was probably tired herself and that is why she forgot about the Iron fleet.  The closer she got to power then the harder it was for her to exert impulse control.   Her anxiousness combined with grief, loss, jealousy, and vengefulness unleashed her need to take total control with fire and blood.  Her victory was exhilarating and having power made her yearn for more.  Daario was right when he said she was meant to be a conqueror. I don’t think she would ever have been happy just ruling Westeros.  

They should've probably said ''Dany kind of forget about the Iron Fleet and Euron's forces, because she was mentally not stable'' or something like that, if you don't finish that sentence like that then people would rightfully make fun of you.

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10 minutes ago, TheFirstofHerName said:

Daenerys proved that she just couldn’t balance her emotions when it was needed the most. She should have always known that there was a chance she could lose her dragons and advisors.  However, she was so confident that everything was her right and destiny that she felt invincible.  She was unwilling to let her army and dragons rest after the war with the dead.  She was probably tired herself and that is why she forgot about the Iron fleet.  The closer she got to power then the harder it was for her to exert impulse control.   Her anxiousness combined with grief, loss, jealousy, and vengefulness unleashed her need to take total control with fire and blood.  Her victory was exhilarating and having power made her yearn for more.  Daario was right when he said she was meant to be a conqueror. I don’t think she would ever have been happy just ruling Westeros.  

"Fire destroys, cold preserves." —Maester Aemon

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13 minutes ago, RYShh said:

They should've probably said ''Dany kind of forget about the Iron Fleet and Euron's forces, because she was mentally not stable'' or something like that, if you don't end that sentence like that then people would rightfully make fun of you.

That would have cleared up the confusion infans mind and made things clearer.  They were just lazy bad writers this season.  It is like they expected us to fill in the character development in our minds with our imagination.

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17 minutes ago, CrypticWeirwood said:

"Fire destroys, cold preserves." —Maester Aemon

What exactly is your interpretation?  I guess there could be many according to the context it is used in.  As it relates to Jon Snow, I see it as meaning he is the perfect balance between fire and cold.  He utilized fire (his Targ side) to fight against the Others when they threatened to destroy the world and then cold (his Stark side) to preserve the world when it was threatened to be consumed by fire.

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3 hours ago, Tywin Tytosson said:

This is where we disagree. 

What are the 'other obvious reasons to follow her'?

 

But Dany doesn't really have a form of government.  As Daario Neharis points out, she is a conqueror, not a ruler.

Edit:  at best Dany's form of government is personal absolute autocratic rule.

 

Who said that she didn't consider input?  Not I.  She did listen, for a while.  And it curbed her worst impulses, as Tyrion states.  But then she stopped listening.

If you don't see a magical dragon controlling woman who helped you fight an army of dead people after going on a campaign of revolution across a distant continent as worthy of following, I don't know what to say. After the battle of winterfell the north would be so far past bickering(in the short term at least), it would be so fundamentally shocking that I have no doubt the people there would instantly rally around her. Comes back to my point in the prior post that killing her would be out of the range of acceptable action no matter what she did because the continent itself would be looking for a strong leader who him or herself was other-worldly.  

Dany stopped listening when it failed, it's possible she would start listening again. Like I wrote before I don't agree that kings landing is the only act which defines her but that's what everyone here has done and it's a very flawed perspective when considering rulers. Nothing showed her action fundamentally prevented her from going back to what she was, it's just assumed so - because she did things people perceive as bad she's irredeemable. 

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I personally agree, OP. After "The Bells" aired, I speculated that Dany's turn could be seen as a deconstruction of the messiah complex, and just how dangerous and vain it is to believe you are a savior among men. A number of people seemed to agree with this interpretation, so I think there are more of us out there that feel this way than meets the eye.

I do think the showrunners bear the most blame for this sense of cognitive dissonance among viewers, since they always portrayed Dany's violence as "girl power." However, as a female fan, one reason why I never talked about Daenerys with other show fans was because of this unspoken rule that Daenerys was the height of female empowerment, and anyone who didn't agree was plainly wrong: sexist, if you're a guy, or self-hating if you're a woman. While words like "sexist" are more inflammatory on paper, there's something especially hurtful and frustrating about the implication that you must be secretly hate yourself if you're not a fan of a fictional character. 

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The destruction of Kings Landing was not out of character for Dany.  She would have done similar sooner except for her advisors and she did in the case of Vaes Dothrak.  We just allow ourselves to believe “they had it coming”.   It wasn’t even, as others have successfully argued, out of the norm in regards to military tactics of the day it’s just dragons are MUCH more efficient than trebuchets.  

But, partly because of how it was shown to us, we reacted to it differently.  Aside from the breaking the wheel speech Danys actions were entirely in character.  If it was madness it was madness that existed for most of her story arc. 

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12 hours ago, TheFirstofHerName said:

That would have cleared up the confusion infans mind and made things clearer.  They were just lazy bad writers this season.  It is like they expected us to fill in the character development in our minds with our imagination.

I wouldn't call anybody involved in the show's production 'lazy'.  Nor call the writing 'lazy'.   Lazy is not the same as having to meet hard deadlines and going with the best that you can come up with.

I am not saying that it wasn't bad, or that things could not have been done better (they could certainly have).   But 'lazy'... no.

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4 hours ago, RFL said:

The destruction of Kings Landing was not out of character for Dany.  She would have done similar sooner except for her advisors and she did in the case of Vaes Dothrak.  We just allow ourselves to believe “they had it coming”.   It wasn’t even, as others have successfully argued, out of the norm in regards to military tactics of the day it’s just dragons are MUCH more efficient than trebuchets.  

But, partly because of how it was shown to us, we reacted to it differently.  Aside from the breaking the wheel speech Danys actions were entirely in character.  If it was madness it was madness that existed for most of her story arc. 

Interesting.  I think that I agree with this, the more that I think about it.

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5 hours ago, RFL said:

The destruction of Kings Landing was not out of character for Dany.  She would have done similar sooner except for her advisors and she did in the case of Vaes Dothrak.  We just allow ourselves to believe “they had it coming”.   It wasn’t even, as others have successfully argued, out of the norm in regards to military tactics of the day it’s just dragons are MUCH more efficient than trebuchets.  

But, partly because of how it was shown to us, we reacted to it differently.  Aside from the breaking the wheel speech Danys actions were entirely in character.  If it was madness it was madness that existed for most of her story arc. 

The problem is that we've not seen her wantonly slaughtering tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of civilians before this point.  Nor do we get any narrative justification for her burning down the city that her ancestors built - this is all her property, which she's about to inherit, after all.

I get that her becoming a tyrant was foreshadowed, that there were disturbing tendencies in her character, but this was not developed properly across previous seasons. Why couldn't they have just shown her massacring the Tarlys and their surviving soldiers by dragon fire, without even giving them the chance to join her?  That would then give Varys a genuine reason to turn against her, and the Northerners a genuine reason to fear her.

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12 hours ago, Techmaester said:

 

Dany stopped listening when it failed, it's possible she would start listening again. Like I wrote before I don't agree that kings landing is the only act which defines her but that's what everyone here has done and it's a very flawed perspective when considering rulers. Nothing showed her action fundamentally prevented her from going back to what she was, it's just assumed so - because she did things people perceive as bad she's irredeemable. 

Perceive as bad? She killed most of King's Landing AFTER they surrendered!! 500,000 or so innocent people, women, children & elderly died unnecessarily. Considering that much of Westeros was appalled at Walder Frey for ignoring guest right at the Red Wedding, one would imagine that Dany killing half a million surrendering people would be perceived as a war crime of the Nth degree. It wouldn't seem likely that they'd want her on the Iron Throne just because she might do better next time. 

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On 5/25/2019 at 5:10 AM, the trees have eyes said:

Well, yes, conceptually.  And this is the most fearful thing in human experience, whether Pol Pot emptying Phnom Penh for the Killing fields of Cambodia or Mao deciding that the only thing stopping the Chinese people achieving what he wanted them to achieve was the Chinese people themselves and deciding first to remake society - five year plans and collectivization of agriculture - and then to remake the Chinese people themselves - the cultural revolution - and causing tens of millions of deaths and ushering in immeasurable chaos and suffering.

 But is there really that much of a wheel to break in Westeros compared with Essos?  And do we really need to be shown that using fear and coercion to make people into what you want them to be and slaughtering those who get in the way, whether class enemies, imaginary bourgeois reactionaries, or kulaks or teachers is a bad thing?  It takes a particular cold ruthlessness, even sociopathic personality to be so casual about the destruction of so many lives, livelihoods and the things people hold dear to hammer a them into the mould you set for them and ignore the consequences.  Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot were all indifferent to human life, it's a pretty hard sell for the girl who wanted to do justice.  

One does not have to be indifferent of human life in order to decide to take it. Lots of it. What one does need (at least) is the capacity to not value a specific life over another life.  Current life over future life. Or life that is close compared to life that is further away. 

I don't think the American leadership was indifferent when the decision to drop those nukes was made. What they hoped was that x mostly innocent lives lost here and now would stop x+1 mostly innocent lives from suffering later. Their care for the z+1 won. Good/bad/crazy? Different question. 

When heinous acts are committed, the horror is easy to note. It's happening right there and then. But as previously stated in this thread, the (possibly) resulting benefits might take decades to fully materialize. 

I find Genghis Khan an interesting parallel to Dany. 
Everyone knows him as a ruthless barbarian. And based on what I've read, he most definitely was. Man, the things one can read about the tactics the Mongolians sometimes used. 

But, and here's where my gripe with the way D&D ended Dany's arc lies, Genghis Khan ALSO ended much suffering, changed so many things for the better and probably raised the quality of life for many generations to come. Yet his legacy is that of a war-mongering tyrant. 

By going full Hitler in the treatment of Dany, nothing remains of all the the good intentions, noble acts and beneficial change she had already caused and might have caused in the future. 

Dany always led from the front making sacrifices every step of they way. That is not the trademark of a sociopathic demagouge. It might be of a misguided, isolated, over-powerful liberator enslaved by her own legacy high on her own juice and trapped between cultures - but not a cynical mass murderer. 

Like Anakin ultimately got a sliver of redemption and nice final paragraph in the book go his life, D&D should have done more to thank the pre-KL torching Dany for all that she had done. Leaving Jon and Tyrion in doubt as to whether they had done the right thing or not was something, but not enough. Imho. 

Thanks for responding and thanks for helping me explore these thoughts further. 
 

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3 hours ago, Rory Snow said:

Perceive as bad? She killed most of King's Landing AFTER they surrendered!! 500,000 or so innocent people, women, children & elderly died unnecessarily. Considering that much of Westeros was appalled at Walder Frey for ignoring guest right at the Red Wedding, one would imagine that Dany killing half a million surrendering people would be perceived as a war crime of the Nth degree. It wouldn't seem likely that they'd want her on the Iron Throne just because she might do better next time. 

She risked her only remaining child and herself so that all of them would be alive when it was time to surrender. Drogon made the city surrender. Not Jon, the unsullied and the northmen. We saw what happened when the street fights erupted. 
If we take the long night into account, she basically ensured that they were still breathing in the first place.

Had all those people who were not slaves cared for their own liberation, they could have risen up and toppled Cersei. 
They didn't. They either preferred continuing on as subservient pawns to be used and abused - effectively blocking progress for generations to come - or they just preferred that someone else risked everything to liberate them. 
Innocent? Hmmm... 

Doesn't excuse what she did, but the full Hitler treatment was not warranted given the mission she was on. She was trying to break the wheel. Not just replace the dudes driving the cart. 

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3 hours ago, Rory Snow said:

Perceive as bad? She killed most of King's Landing AFTER they surrendered!! 500,000 or so innocent people, women, children & elderly died unnecessarily. Considering that much of Westeros was appalled at Walder Frey for ignoring guest right at the Red Wedding, one would imagine that Dany killing half a million surrendering people would be perceived as a war crime of the Nth degree. It wouldn't seem likely that they'd want her on the Iron Throne just because she might do better next time. 

In this world, Daenerys might not be regarded as a war criminal.  She gave her enemies the chance to surrender, and they beheaded her best friend.  Other rulers might think she had been very stupid to destroy such an important economic centre, but would not consider her to have broken the laws of war.

Jon Snow, on the other hand, would be considered the worst type of war criminal, a traitor, an oath-breaker, and kinslayer.

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17 hours ago, Techmaester said:

Nothing showed her action fundamentally prevented her from going back to what she was, it's just assumed so - because she did things people perceive as bad she's irredeemable. 

Not only going full carpet bombing of civilians in a surrendered city is an act on itself absolutely irredeemable, but also, the speech to her arms - all nazi style - about conquering the whole freaking world, and her megalomaniac delusional talk with Jon were the final nails in her coffin.

 

 

 

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1 minute ago, Señor de la Tormenta said:

Not only going full carpet bombing of civilians in a surrendered city is an act on itself absolutely irredeemable, but also, the speech to her arms - all nazi style - about conquering the whole freaking world, and her megalomaniac delusional talk with Jon were the final nails in her coffin.

 

 

 

Where was the confrontation? The argument? The disagreement? The ending didn't have Jon try to reason with her and fail, he just stabbed her.  If they wanted to make it seen as more justifiable he would have needed to actually try which he didn't. I get if she was about to attack Winterfell but that's not what we got. 

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16 minutes ago, Señor de la Tormenta said:

Not only going full carpet bombing of civilians in a surrendered city is an act on itself absolutely irredeemable, but also, the speech to her arms - all nazi style - about conquering the whole freaking world, and her megalomaniac delusional talk with Jon were the final nails in her coffin.

 

 

 

The only problem there is that Dany had never harmed so may defenseless civilians up until this point. It just seemed to come out of the blue, because the show runners wanted to achieve this end.

As for her delusional talk and messianic complex, she has veered in that territory since almost the beginning of the show. But other characters (looking at you tyrion) only loved and believed in her for it. Plus, she was never this unhinged despite of the megalomaniacal talk. 

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