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No one can still in denial about what Daenerys is after she just burned a million women, children and men with impunity.
There's also no way we can blame this on bad writing, because it's not. It's the culmination of years of hollow morals. And it's also brilliant.
There's also no way we can blame this on bad writing, because it's not. It's the culmination of years of hollow morals. And it's also brilliant.
It's horrific, tragic, and brilliant. And it's high time for a lot of people to wake up and look critically at what they've been stanning, because the point of this story is very much about them. It's about anyone who has uncritically stanned unchecked, destructive power.
There's a quote by George RR Martin where he likens Dany's dragons to atomic bombs, and to me it summarises a lot of the intent behind her character. Martin goes on to say that ”You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn't give you the power to reform, or improve, or build.” 
For Dany this is the tragedy. Her life has equipped her with insurmountable power, but it has taught her all the wrong lessons about how to use it. She is capable of annihilating a city at a whisper. No one should have that kind of power. It simply can't be used to do good.
I already wrote a thread last week about how Dany's story has been on a dark trajectory for years. I'm expanding on it because I want to discuss specific scenes and examples in greater detail. The old thread is here if anyone wants to read it:
This scene always bothered me massively: in the first season, after Robert's assassins failed to murder Dany, an unhinged Khal Drogo swears to conquer Westeros and ”tear down their stone houses, rape their women, and take their children as slaves”:
Dany watches him say these terrible things, and the only way to explain her expression is that she looks turned on. She has already tried once to convince Drogo to conquer Westeros for ”the stallion that will mount the world.” This is what finally lits the flame in him.
How do we read this scene in hindsight? As a war king making her a terrifying promise? Or as Dany having her first taste of power and finding it to her liking?
When Dany gets to Qarth with what's left of her khalasaar they're desperate for food and water. The city elders however refuse to let the Dothraki through the gates, and out of desperation she offers up the following threat, which do not go down well:
There's a glimpse of the blunt justice she will become known for in that threat. As viewers we overlook the implications because Dany's desperation is genuine: if they don't get admitted they will die.
On the other hand, what kind of person plans to burn cities to the ground?
On the other hand, what kind of person plans to burn cities to the ground?
It's also in Qarth's House of the Undying that Dany gets treated to three visions: she's standing in a destroyed throne room, covered in what seems to be snow. She's inches away from touching the iron throne when she hears a baby cry, and recoils, and walks into another vision.
It sees her move beyond The Wall, into the snow, where there's a small yurt, and inside is Khal Drogo and her newly born son. She cries when she sees them and wonders how they can be alive. ”Maybe I'm dead and I don't even know it yet.”
The visions show Dany that she can either be queen of the cinder, or that she can look for more human goals (the promise of love and family, which momentarily distracts her before she ends up turning away from them too and back to her dragons). She chooses fire.
We get a glimpse of what's awaiting King's Landing when her quest finally comes to an end. It isn't snow in that throne room – it's ash, falling from a melted roof that has turned the Red Keep into Harrenhal. This is going to be the cost of Dany's conquering ambitions.
Importantly, Drogo and the son who never survived are portrayed as a fantasy. The destroyed throne is the reality she returns to, although she's tempted to stay there forever with them. This is the personal cost of the destiny she's set out for herself.
Dany acquires the unsullied army in Astapor by pretending to sell their master a dragon and then having it burn him alive. She then sets them free, and offers whoever wishes to remain with her to help her free the slave cities of Essos.
It's a kind gesture, but it's also extremely calculated. The unsullied have no families and they can't start any. They have no gold or possessions. They have no skills beyond those of war, and they live in a country where they have no rights. Not a single man departs, and that >
< tells you all you need to know about who benefits from it. The unsullied are a smallscale version of the bigger issue that Dany struggles with on her abolition quest: if you don't offer an alternative way to live to a slave-based economy, how free are the people really?
When Dany arrives at Yunkai she tells the slaves that if they want their freedom they have to take it. They end up rising up against their masters with weapons she provides them with. It's easy to forget this, but the breaker of chains were the slaves themselves.
Dany then stands up and speaks in front of people who have no notion of what freedom even is, and they rush to show their affection for a new, kinder authority. The image of a white woman crowdsurfing a neverending sea of brown people is disturbing - and it's meant to be.
This scene always seemed to mock the naïve idea that slavery can be abolished so easily, just by a white person showing up and saying a few inspiring words, which is confirmed later on when the masters quickly retake the city after Dany leaves.
The white saviour image stays at the heart of the Essos storyline however. Dany grows surer in her role as western enlightener as they keep liberating cities, but she doesn't offer these societies what they really need: a reform away from a slave-based economy.
When Daenerys approaches Meereen, she finds the masters of the city have killed and crucified 163 slave children, leaving their corpses nailed up along the road to antagonise her.
After she takes the city, Dany speaks to Ser Barristan who tells her that ”sometimes it's better to answer injustice with mercy.” She has an opportunity to show people who have never known freedom what justice is. Instead she shows them revenge.
The two are the same to her. There's no discernible difference between justice and revenge in her world, and Barristan's advice is ignored – something that later causes conflict when we find out that some of the crucified masters were against the cruel treatment of the slaves.
The next scene takes place after Grey Worm and Daario Naharis capture a member of Sons of the Harpy, a separatist group consisting of former slaves that has been killing unsullied soldiers in Meereen as a protest against Dany's rule.
Dany wants to kill the Son of the Harpy, but after Ser Barristan schools her on the kind of justice her father doled out, she shows restraint and insists on a trial. Mossador, one of the former slaves, misinterprets her as wanting the man's head but having her hands tied however.
He kills the Harpy for her, and Dany then has him beheaded in front of all the other shocked slaves in the city. It's her worst instincts as a ruler at play: She starts out wanting to punish the masters but ends up executing one of their victims instead.
A victim who exacts justice the same way Dany was about to do only minutes before; the same way she did when she nailed 163 slave owners to crosses outside the city. She teaches them that revenge is the answer to injustice and then beheads them for following her example.
It's a confusing moral lesson for anyone, especially people who have never known laws or rights, and they begin to turn on her. Later on Tyrion finds ”Mhysa is a master too” written over the city walls, indicating that Dany's brand of justice isn't that different from theirs.
Dany is incapable of seeing evil as a product of oppressive systems. She only sees the individuals committing the crimes. It's why crucifying people seems like a good idea; why she sees Cersei as a villain but fails to see how the iron throne is the real tool of oppression.
She condescendingly speaks to the city about freedom and justice and then cuts off his head. Her righteous indignation over an act of revenge that she herself has committed comes across as hypocritic, and she stubbornly ignores their pleas for mercy to make her ill-formed point.
Crucially, Dany doesn't learn from this incident either, which ends with her fleeing as the people shower her with stones and start a riot that kills dozens. Instead she doubles down on her absolutism. When your idea of justice is a hammer everyone exposed to it becomes a nail.
Tyrion arrives in Meereen just a short while before Dany's lack of diplomacy results in an uprising at the fighting pitches that forces her to flee. He's left trying to reform the free cities, but without any queen or dragons backing him up his attempt at compromise fails.
Dany returns just in time to hold a meeting with the masters, who are expecting her surrender. Instead she executes them and uses her dragons to burn every single ship and person in Slaver's Bay. She leaves one representative alive to tell the others what happened.
The scene is thrilling, but it's also a bad lesson for Dany, who is convinced more than ever that blunt force and massacre is the only apt response to injustice. She abandons diplomacy and sets sail for Westeros, leaving Meereen still without any sustainable social structures.
The final scene of the season shows Dany with the Dothraki. After burning their khals alive she addresses their forces with a riling speech on top of Drogon where she, knowing what they're like, promises them to conquer and lay waste to Westeros:
Dany repeats Khal Drogo's speech from season 1 to them here. And while she leaves out the part about raping the women and enslaving the children, that's exactly what the Dothraki will do. She has no illusions about what they are and she still decides to lead them on her conquest.
Her arc in Meereen leads her to come to terms with the cost of conquest and dominion. Once she locked up the dragons for killing a little girl. From this moment on she embraces their nature instead (”What do dragons eat anyway?” ”Whatever they want”), and her own.
She learns that ruling through fear is better than ruling through kindness. She doesn't understand why the Sons of the Harpy rose up, why the meereenese turned on her after executing Mossador. She's left with one image that makes sense to her: the massacre of Slaver's Bay.
It also becomes part of her self-mythologising profile: mother of dragons, the unburnt, the breaker of chains, khaleesi of the grass sea. None of those titles ever gave her right or knowledge to rule. But Dany's story is not about becoming a good leader. It's just about becoming.
She gets wrapped up in ideas about destiny and being chosen. Who are the only other people who talk this way on the show? Stannis and Melisandre. A man who burns his daughter alive, who's consumed by getting people to bend, willing to kill a city for his birthright.
When she arrives in Westeros she initially refuses to take King's Landing through sheer force, echoing Tyrion's words about how she doesn't want to be ”queen of the ashes”. After the Lannister army sacks Highgarden however a furious Daenerys is about to burn down the Red Keep.
Jon Snow makes her change her mind at the last moment by pointing out that it would make her indistinguishable from every shit tyrant the people of Westeros have ever known:
She does however attack the heavily outnumbered, on-foot Lannister army with Drogon and horsemounted Dothraki, and it's portrayed like a onesided massacre with inexperienced soldiers shaking and later on screaming and crying in terror as they're being burned alive.
Dany burns the men, and in a demonstration of power she also burns the food they were carting back to the city, despite complaining earlier about how her soldiers have nothing to eat. She then burns the Tarlys alive despite Tyrion's pleas, because they won't bend the knee to her.
Killing POW's is a war crime. Tyrion is aghast. Varys compares it to how The Mad King used wildfire to burn dissidents. Like in Meereen, Dany refuses to show mercy, telling Tyrion: ”If a cell becomes an option many will take it.” Sheer convenience is used to justify execution.
A small act of mercy would have prevented setting Sam, the show's moral conscience, against her. But Dany fails these character tests precisely because she's unfit to rule and reform. She's only fit to conquer, and it has now become her real purpose for wanting the iron throne.
Dany is ill-prepared to rule a country where opponents are political rather than cartoonish manifestations of evil. When Tyrion points out to her that she can't rule through fear and mass murder she scoffs at him:
The irony is that Dany was the one who first brought up breaking the wheel back in Meereen, but she doesn't recognise that the wheel is the iron throne itself; the goal of her conquest. It's unchecked privilege at its finest: Dany is oblivious of her own role in upholding the >
< same system she claims she wants to change. She wants the status and house of her father, but none of the blame or responsibility for his misdeeds. She wants Jon to keep the promises of his ancestors, even though her father burned his grandfather alive.
How does the show portray her power? As unmatched and cruel. How does the show portray her in her meeting with Jon? As self-mythologising, incoherent and dangerous, a foreigner calling the North traitors; chiefly concerned with having him be subjugated.
Daenerys is in that moment every superpower who has ever tried to spread democracy through violence and occupation. It's never about democracy. It's always about ideology, about what they can get in return, and the lies (”freedom”) they tell to justify their power grab.
Stop for a moment and consider who George RR Martin is. Martin the pacifist, who refused to serve in Vietnam. Who has been very vocal about his objections to American imperalism around the world, who feels that Tolkien set a dangerous template for the use of war in fantasy:
Does it feel likely that Dany, a person possessing three rechargeable nuclear bombs, would ever be his hero? Of course not. She's a warning about idealizing destructive power, about fooling yourself into thinking it's used for the greater good. She's a mirror for imperialism.
The scene where she finally burns King's Landing, after Cersei has surrendered, is horrific. It's a repeat of Slaver's Bay, but these aren't slave masters. They are normal people whom Dany longs to instill fear in. Women and children and men are turned to ash indiscriminately.
Dany chooses to rule through fear, because it's the only thing she can. The only thing she knows will work. The people certainly don't love her, the lords don't trust her, and Jon is distancing himself from her. She sees her enemies denying her her revenge, and she responds >
< like every historical despot who's ever had their boot on someone's neck: by leaning in and stomping down. This is the wheel of power literally rolling over them, grinding them into dust; a wheel Dany claimed she wanted to break but just wanted for her own.
Shockingly, she tells Tyrion at Dragonstone, when he points out that thousands of children will die, that it's the people's own fault for living under a tyrant, and that they need to be destroyed so future generations will never again be held hostage:
This is not someone who goes mad at a whim. This is someone who has slowly convinced herself that the price of fire and blood is justified to get her what she wants. Destiny has been used to justify almost every atrocity during the last 100 years of real life dictators.
Varys is correct. They all talk about destiny and being chosen, religious or not. Divine providence is so infamous as a concept that it can be connected in some way even to people like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.
Yesterday Dany fulfilled a bloody promise of disaster that has been looming over her storyline for years. And as the people in Westeros pick up the pieces of whatever is left, we'll do well to remember this, and to reflect over why it happened. There's a lesson here for us all.
Late thread addition: I spent half an hour looking for this scene earlier but I was looking at the wrong season. It's from the fighting pits in Meereen. Dany threatens to return the whole city to the dirt it came from. The parallel to 8x05 is obvious:
