Oh, no, wanting to destroy the enemy army, even if that meant lots of collateral damage is perfectly in keeping with her character’s progression. Nobody’s saying the opposite.
This episode was essentially like Truman going “The Japanese have surrendered, huh? Screw it, let’s give firebombing Tokyo one more go, make extra sure.” This show used to have a modicum of nuance.
You’re mistaken. “Torgo Nudho” is Grey Worm in Valyrian; he only ever had that name as far as we know.
I don’t think this is really comparable to WWII. I think this was something she wanted to do for a long time and a perfect storm happened, all of her trusted advisors dying or betraying her. I don’t even think she’s crazy, just extremely ruthless and power hungy.
In her previous endeavors she could get people to love her by essentially acting like a goddess and setting people free. That wasn’t going to work the people or Westeros and she knew it.
Nuking Japan was supposedly about ending the war quickly to save lives, and maybe that’s her justification, but really it was so she could rule the known world with an iron fist and fear. Similar to blowing up Alderran, to send a message.
Speaking of Star Wars, imo her evil streak was far more firmly established than Anakin’s was before he fully turned. I’ve been rewatching GoT over the last few weeks and it is painfully obvious that she was destined to go bad. So obvious that I didn’t think it would happen, because it’s TOO expected.
Huh. I stand corrected. Thanks.
Agreed. Her turning out to be a peaceful and collected ruler would have been the actual unexpected twist.
But of course, there are degrees of evil. And degrees of madness. If anything, I expected Daenerys to be on her way to become “another Cersei”- Because that’s what the whole set up was about.
Instead she becomes another Mad King Aerys, and make no mistake, this was the writers saying that she had gone full insane, and that she’s the new big bad evil, the final boss to be defeated in the last episode, and there was zero subtlety in that transformation, because ruthless as she had shown herself to be up to that point, her sanity had never been in question.
I’ve read that the name was changed because people had complained that a black character had been given an insulting name. Don’t know if it’s true.
I don’t think so. I think that what was foreshadowed has always been her turning out to be like her father.
The more I think about it the more I’m of the belief that all these outcomes were correct but that they don’t feel right because the show rushed to get to them. Blame it all on the pacing. I don’t know why the show runners abbreviated the last two seasons so severely. It’s really spoiling the storytelling.
Also note that he said he wanted to keep his slave name because it was the name he had on the day he was freed by Daenerys Targaryen. At that point I don’t think he’d even met Missandei yet.
On the show, we have only ever heard the one name for him, albeit in two different languages: Grey Worm in the common tongue, Torgo Nudho in Valyrian.
Trying to remember back, I think on the show Dany usually calls him Grey Worm, so you’re probably right that it was intended to be significant when she used his Valyrian name, especially when Arya called the Hound Sandor later in the episode.
What evidence is there that she’s “insane” though? We can’t use blowing up KL as evidence because she wanted to do that at the beginning of S7, so she’d have to be insane then too. The hunger strike was to avoid being poisoned. I do not think her distrust of the people around her as delusional, which is required to be paranoid.
I see pissed, I see emotionally isolated, I do see manifestations of a well-established ruthless and evil streak. I don’t see insane. Not yet anyway, maybe they’ll make that completely obvious in the next episode,
If you have to be insane in order to enjoy mass-murdering a couple hundred thousand people, then she qualifies. Otherwise, I’m not convinced the word applies.
May just Hangry, I get a bit irritable when I skip breakfast.
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I think it worth noting that I do not think Daenerys is insane. She isn’t psychotic. She is not suffering from hallucinations, and one can’t even say she is irrationally paranoid; her suspicions about everyone’s loyalties have all been quite justified. She is, in the strictest sense, fully sane. Her decision to burn King’s Landing is rational in terms of her achieving her goals from the position she was in. I have characterized her as a “little bit crazy” too, but in the sense that she has an obsession over taking power. She is, however, aware of reality, of morals and ethics as they exist in her universe, and of the consequences of her actions.
We tend to label tyrants as insane, but in fact they almost never are. Hitler was hideously evil, but he was sane. Stalin was sane. Saddam Hussein was sane. I think we do that because it’s much easier, emotionally, to label incredibly evil people as insane than admit the fact that sane people can be evil.
That’s fair enough.
But I think it’s worth exploring why so many people disagree. That relates directly to the next comment, and also comments other posters have made:
This argument would be better if there were direct evidence for it.
Now, I’m NOT denying that her violent actions against oppressors have also, conveniently, resulted in copious increases of her power. That’s a well-made point. These two things have gone together: (1) large acts of violence that have placed her in positions of greater and greater control, and (2) emancipation of slaves, corralling of warmongering armies, destruction of belligerent leaders who have oppressed their people. This is fundamentally the same problem as a statistical control, actually. How do you isolate the effects of two variables when they tend to move together?
The direct evidence I’d like to see here is a clear example of her grasping for power, in a situation that demonstrates complete and utter disregard of the moral concerns. Before this episode.
That simply hasn’t happened. Really. Quite the opposite, in fact. There has always been a moral component to what she’s doing – even a bent framework is better than none – and that moral component has in the past overridden the power component. The problem with the “power mad” argument is that the pieces of evidence we have move in exactly the opposite direction to the argument you guys making. Most notably: we have clear evidence of her putting a muzzle on her firepower – chaining her own children – for the sake of protecting the innocent, at least until she developed enough control over them to guide their flight and feeding herself.
Most of the time, variables (1) and (2) move together, but when they don’t, they actually move exactly the opposite way from the argument that she was always a power-grubbing madwoman.
They didn’t need much here to change that. They just have to tip the scales in the other direction. Just two scenes in Season 7 would have done the job. As a complement to the previous piece of evidence, we could have a foil to that: one scene of a dragon casually chowing down on a family, and one scene of Dany saying she didn’t give a shit, she needed her dragons as weapons. Something like that would work because it would highlight, with a direct comparison, the difference in her attitude from the previous seasons. If she had consciously and deliberately and willfully taken one single step in that direction, I would be much better satisfied.
The bottom line here for me is that actions speak louder than words.
That’s especially true in reality (I’d much rather be around someone who talked shit but always did the right thing, than someone who talked pretty but always transgressed), but it’s also true in television. Or at least, true for a large chunk of the TV audience which includes me.
That whole quip about dragons with Sansa (“What do they eat?” “Whatever they want.”) sounds like empty royal bluster when it comes from a woman who has literally chained her dragons for eating the wrong thing. This is my whole problem with all of those cited conversations: they can be interpreted in vastly different ways when we have an understanding (or believe that we do…) based on her actual actions from previous seasons. I’m not denying that the conversations were trying to set something up. But I am denying that that something should have been “dropping an A-bomb on a civilian population”.
I don’t find it remotely convincing.
If there were some piece of actual evidence that showed in her actions before now that she’d consciously chosen power over morality, rather than two conveniently going together, that would go a long way for me. I could nod along and go, “Okay sure, that’s true, and I totally missed that even though it was always there.” But I haven’t gotten that, and since this is like page 10 of the thread, I don’t think it’s going to show up. Instead we’ve gotten people showing up who have forgotten Season 1, and so don’t recall when Mirri Maz Dur nonchalantly confessed to murder. Not exactly an innocent bystander, that one. Nor the slavers. Nor the horse lords. Dany’s executions have never been arbitrary. But then mass murder is arbitrary? Really? I really don’t think so. They failed in using Season 7 properly.
Episode was totally awesome, tho.
My recollection is that the Unsullied were required to choose a different insulting name (like “Maggot” or “Puke”) out of a hat each morning, and that was their name for the day. The day Dany “freed” them, Grey Worm chose that day’s name to be his permanent name after that. Not sure if any of the other Unsullied chose new more dignified names, or followed Grey Worm’s lead.
I think part of Daenerys’ final rejection of whatever held her extreme ruthlessness in check, was the truth about John. Until that point, her singleminded pursuit of the throne was because it was her right, her birth-right, and therefore right in absolute terms. She was the good guy in her own story. Now she knows it isn’t her right, not anymore, it is the birthright of that sad-sack she’s tumbled a few times. So now her wanting the throne is not, any longer, inherently just, now she wants it solely because she’s always wanted it. At that point, appeals to her better nature are going to be less effective, there no longer is a self-image of a good guy to appeal to. And now she will be Saddam Hussein-like in her approach: scare the fuck out of anyone even thinking about opposing her, kill however many it takes to bring that point home, repeat as necessary.
(Of course the notion that anyone could have a birth-right to rule anyone else is in itself already insane. But it is an insanity widely shared in history, real and Westerosi)
I think it worth noting that I do not think Daenerys is insane, in the sense that she is unaware of the consequences of her actions. She isn’t psychotic. She is not suffering from hallucinations, and one can’t even say she is irrationally paranoid; her suspicions about everyone’s loyalties have all been quite justified. She is, in the strictest sense, fully sane.
We tend to label tyrants as insane, but in fact they almost never are. Hitler was hideously evil, but he was sane. Stalin was sane. Saddam Hussein was sane.
Unsullied Soldier: “Hufflepuff? What does that even mean?”
D’oh! And they’re not his. Dany seized them for the Crown I believe.
I don’t recall that and it would be silly if true. Pretty sure they all just had one demeaning slave name given when captured. You might be embellishing/misremembering Grey Worm’s comment that was something like “my original name is an unlucky one because I had that name when taken as a slave, Grey Worm is the name I had when you set me free, so it’s a lucky name”.