Hiroshima wasn’t nuked after Japan surrendered.
Mirri Maz Dur was an unarmed prisoner that only defended her tribe, Dany burned her to death. Dany randomly chose masters of Mereen to kill explicitly without knowing whether they were innocent or not. Hizdahr zo Loraq’s father and the one she fed to Rhaegal and Viserion, to be specific.
Now, I don’t think that moment was earned in this episode, but she definitely had killed innocents before, and once for the expressed purpose to terrify other people into subservience.
a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce and a visiting professor at the U.S. Army War College comes to pretty much the same analysis.
As others have noted, this episode is virtually without meaningful dialog --just grunts and shrieks and a few barked commands. And I think that’s what makes this so controversial – we don’t get any dialog to help with motivation or rationalization; we’re just left to guess, based on facial expressions.
I don’t think that’s accurate at all. The first third or so of the episode comprises some amazing dialogue.
-Varys has some great conversations, including his final exchange with Tyrion.
-Tyrion and Dany talk before the battle, and she gives her chilling monologue about the true meaning of mercy, and then she threatens Tyrion.
-Tyrion and Jaime have a beautiful final conversation.
-Arya and The Hound have a conversation that may change Arya’s life course.
-Jaime has a conversation with that sailor fucker whose name I can’t remember where he decides to be the Kingslayerslayer in a way that makes him even more loathsome than before.
-Cersei and Jaime have a wonderful final scene together.
-Jon–well, Jon goes through the episode looking like a dog who just realized that he’s at the vet’s office, but that’s how he always looks. He has a conversation with Dany that ends his auntfucking career forever.
If you’re looking for rationalization of Dany’s change of heart, look at her conversation with Jon, where she decides that Fear is da Bomb. Look at her conversation with Tyrion where he tells her of Varys’s betrayal, and she’s already prepped to be betrayed but guesses the wrong person because she’s just that paranoid. Look at her conversation with Tyrion where she explains how massacring everyone in King’s Landing is true mercy. Look at her threat to Tyrion that if he betrays her again (as he does like fifteen minutes later), it’ll be his last time.
There’s plenty of dialog, just in this episode, to support her snap.
Did anybody else catch that Dany called Grey Worm whatever “grey worm” is in High Valyrian, and the subtitles didn’t translate it as Grey Worm, but left it as some foreign sounding name? I wonder if that’s what he goes by now? Has anybody actually called him Grey Worm in English or “the common tongue” on the show?
But it was to her advantage to be on the side of the innocent in Slaver’'s Bay. She was always in it for herself. The innocent gave her power and provided her with soldiers and support.
People are entitled to feel how they feel, but I think maybe that’s part of it. People LIKE the character of Daenerys Targaryen. She had all the hallmarks of a protagonist you want to root for:
- Underdog
- World out to get her
- Came from nothing but is a person of destiny
- Gave many jerks their comeuppance
- Beautiful and sexy
- Lots of bad-ass lines
- Cool pets
- On the side of the downtrodden
And then the person people have rooted for for seven seasons turns out to be a murderer. That sucks; it’s a punch to the gut, and I say people would have hated it even if they’d spend ten extra hours of screen time setting it up. But it’s logical, at least I think so.
There is a line in the Michael Crichton novel “Rising Sun” where the two detectives are interviewing a Senator, and when they leave the older detective says “what did you think” and the younger says “I liked him” and the older says “Of course you did. It’s his job to make you like him.” It is Daenerys’s job to make you like her. Or it was, but that stopped working… and like she said, she decided to try the other way. Her decision to burn the city is awful and gross but it is dreadfully logical, if her only intent is to seize the Seven Kingdoms, and of course that IS her only intent. And you hate it, and that’s natural.
Hell, this kind of stuff has happened in war before. The Romans annihilated Carthage; the British blew Dresden to pieces for no real military reason; a post about the slaughters of Genghis Khan would be thousands of words long. There was always a REASON, though.
As I wrote previously, I had expected and even hoped from very early on that Dany would turn into a tyrant and a mad queen. And I wasn’t the only one.
I’m wondering if the divide wrt whether Dany’s behavior is consistent or not with the way she has been depicted until now is based on whether or not people had such an expectation. I guess I looked for evidences of her murderous and tyrannical tendencies during all these years, noting every detail that hinted in this direction, while people who didn’t expect or hope for such an ending probably didn’t and paid less attention.
Still, I’m not fully convinced by the build up. Even for me it was beyond what I expected, and more sudden than I expected. I was waiting for something more progressive. Then again, avoiding a too obvious build up was probably deliberate. A (relatively) sudden change is much more dramatic than having people slowly come to expect this over the course of many episodes.
Also, I’m still unclear about whether this was the mental breakdown of someone who quit being sane or the planned move of someone who decided to go into full tyrant mode. And I think the writers should have made clear what was happening in her mind.
Khal Drogo was a murderous monster, and she had no problem with that. And when a woman whose people has been massacred and enslaved put an end to his life, did she congratulate her for having avenged the murdered and the enslaved? No, she burned her alive on a pyre.
Her interest in justice has always been all too relative, since the very beginning of the show.
Not that I can remember. I noted that too.
It was more complicated than that. Dany saw it as a personal betrayal after she went out on a limb to have her spared. She also sacrificed Dany’s child for nothing more than a prophesy. Dany has always had a huge blind spot over Drogo, and all dothraki and their culture, but there was a lot more going into burning Mirri Maz Durr than that.
When you can hand wave away burning an unarmed prisoner to death you can hand wave away other things too. Dany was good at that.
I mean… turned her child into a demon is a bit more than a hand wave. At that point shes not an unarmed prisoner, she’s the person who murdered your child.
I’m unclear on this, too. But her “mercy” speech is how I resolve it: she’s quit being sane, and therefore is going into full tyrant mode. She can’t schmooze, but she can make people suffer, and that’s strategically not an idiotic move (although deeply fucked up); her desire to enact psycho vengeance dovetails nicely with this approach.
No, it didn’t. Robert’s army was marching on the city when Tywin Lannister showed up with his army; he claimed to be allied with the King at the time, so they opened the gates for him. After he entered the city, he instead took it for Robert…he sacked the city, but didn’t need to attack the Keep itself, because Jaime was busy killing the Mad King at about the same time.
So the Red Keep was captured, but it never fell. Plus, it was her own father that did it…so it doesn’t really count anyway…
Jorah brought Dany into the blood magic tent, not Mirri Maz Dur.
Regardless if she murdered her child, it’s still burning someone to death for hate and revenge. Not the emotion and circumstances that were ascribed to Dany previously in this thread.
Tell that to Dany who wanted to nuke KL to the ground at the beginning of season 7 and gave two shits about the kids. It took Jon to talk her out of it.
This was her just doing what she always would have done if she didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought. And this time she didn’t. Everyone she gave a shit about was dead or on the outs with her.
I’ve had some occasion today to contemplate the virtues of contrition, forgiveness, and penance. I did not intend to cause discord, but I did and even unintentional wrongs are wrongs. I am sorry.
I challenge everyone to do as I have done this afternoon and evening: find a few random strangers in real life and wish them the best day possible. The best cure for toxicity in this world is to shift the balance with extra smiles.
Have a spectacular day, everyone 
Yep, I saw that and forgot to mention it. This is what I think that means: When Daeneris first asked his name, hey said what it was, but that he wanted to keep his slave name. When asked why, and he said because it was the name he had when he met Missendai. Going back to his earlier name is basically erasing Missendai - similar to burning her slave collar. I think that’s another clue that she and Grey Worm were planning to Dracarys the crap out of King’s Landing no matter what bells were ringing.
The delay Daeneris took when the bells rang might not have been indecision about surrendering, but more to give a bit of time for the Lannister army to surrender and drop their weapons, to make it easier for Greyworm and co. to slaughter them.
Jon was not in on the plan. But he never is.
It’s been an odd season, so far.
At the highest level, the big things that have happened, I think it’s been decent. Dany going mad makes a lot of sense. Jamie going back to Cersei. Discord between Dany and Sansa and Jon. A big fight against the night king, etc. My major complaint at that level is that the night king really has been built up as the big bad, but the overall flow of the season has been decent.
At a very small level, the individual images on the screen have been AMAZING. No TV show in history has ever looked this beautiful and compelling. The mood, the sense of dread and foreboding, the way the show has been put together has been stunning. And the acting is near-universally excellent (although a few key things, particularly the hot hot chemistry between Dany and Jon, never quite worked).
It’s at the level between those two things that things have failed so spectacularly. Never have I read so many people (here and on reddit) say “wow, that could have been SO much better if they’d just done (simple change)”. All of the medium sized story beats just feel like first drafts, like they had to plot A to B to C as fast as they could, never stopping to think how plausible or reasonable or dramatic or satisfying any of it would be.
I’ve certainly still enjoyed watching it, but DAMN is it frustrating.
(And I think both “sides” are right about Dany. It’s absolutely in character, in her arc, for her to turn evil the way she did. At the same time, the show did a poor job of pushing her over the finish line, so to speak.