Her thoughts were that being ruthless right now is a mercy for future generations who will never have to live under tyrants.
Ok, just watched it for you.
“Your sister knows how to use her enemy’s weaknesses against them. That’s what she thinks our mercy is. But she’s wrong, mercy is our strength. Our mercy towards future generations that will never be held hostage by a tyrant.”
Or thereabouts. Quickly transcribed.
Thank you, CarnalK. Basically-- fuck mercy 'til I get what’s mine.
I agree that those three reasons are not mutually exclusive. There are elements of all three motivations in prompting Dany to do what she did.
When I first read the speculation about Dany becoming an antagonist when I started reading these threads after Season 5 after I had caught up on DVD, I was skeptical. But in the seasons since she’s come to Westeros the evidence is all there, and if you go back there are plenty of indicators back to the first season. Some things in the series haven’t been set up well, but this wasn’t one of them. I was somewhat surprised in how far they went in making her a villain, but if the turn itself had been telegraphed any more obviously people would be complaining about it “not defying expectations.”
I think it’s even beyond that: it’s a deliberate and profoundly evil redefining of “mercy” to include “mass murder.” It’s not clear to me whether she believes her own propaganda, but it’s absolutely a rhetorical trick to make mass murder of civilians an act of goodness.
In that dialog she was justifying a military attack on the city, which inevitably creates civilian casualties in actual combat. Basically she was indirectly accusing Cersei of using the civilian population as a shield.
That is what Tyrion wanted to avoid with his antics. A direct attack on King’s Landing.
Prediction of the end of the next episode: Sansa and Tyrion in charge, and last of the Starks is Brann, and the family name left:
Lannistark.
After all the bloodshed and whatever, it all ends with the original enemies together.
I like Starkster, like it’s an old file-sharing program.
I don’t disagree with you, but… the fact that we’ve spilt so much virtual ink arguing over all of this is evidence (to me) that the show didn’t do a very good job of communicating any of this. Did the showrunners think they were communicating “here are three reasons Dany did what they did, her motivation was a combination of the three”? We have no idea. I’d like to think they put some thought into it and had a motivation and mindset in mind, but the fact that we have no idea what it was demonstrates that they failed to communicate it clearly.
That’s an interesting observaiton. When the guard tells Tyrion he speaks the “common tongue” he says so with an audible sneer. People in the various Valyrian cultures look down on Westerosi. Actually, so did the Dothraki, who aren’t Valyrian.
But as Stanlislaus has already pointed out, if she DOESN’T raise some serious hell, she has every reason to believe she won’t win the Iron Throne. If she hops off her dragon and they quietly take Cersei into custody, it’s just a matter of time before Jon is crowned Aegon VI, or some other outcome that is not her winning the throne. Her support is very, very thin - her only real supporters are her private armies, and that’s not going to win the whole continent. Word about Jon’s lineage is out; she was “Betrayed” in that regard. All of Westeros will back Jon, and if not him, some other Westerosi, because there is literally no component region of the Seven Kingdoms with any real reason to support her once Cersei’s gone…
… unless they’re terrified of her.
Striking fear in the hearts of the people IS her path to power. She’s screwed otherwise. If she survived the next Game of Thrones, she’d either be a lesser noble or have to return to Essos.
When the dragons first appeared in this show my wife and I would laugh and say the result was inevitable “because dragons.” How do you beat that? But the writers, man, I’ll give them credit; they have created a story where the dragons are ludicrously powerful but it traps the characters in having to act a certain way. Drogon is Daenerys’s trump card, and she was damn well gonna play it because everything we’ve seen for seven seasons showed she’d play any card she had.
The only ones that needed to fear her were the noble houses. Wiping out Cersei’s entire army and the entire Iron Fleet in under 10 minutes would have done that just fine. The original conquering Targaryens were in her same exact position, they won the kingdom by destroying their opponents armies. There seems to be a lot of effort going into trying to paint this as a tactical decision instead of what it was, a mental breakdown.
Not at all. I believe the point was explicitly made by Dany that the common people of King’s Landing chose to they could have overthrown Cersei easily. (In fact they did only a few seasons ago when they supported the High Sparrow against her.) The common people aren’t completely powerless. Dany actually thinks the common people are complicit in Cersei’s crimes because they haven’t overthrown her. I think Tyrion makes the point that they don’t overthrow Cersei because they are afraid of her - something that only reinforces that the rule of fear is the way to go.
Or, it’s another internet mob thing like we’ve seen numerous times in the last few years. Or, some people have become far too invested in the Daeneris character to accept that she is not a saviour, regardless of how much evidence there is. Hell, in 2018, 560 newborns were named “Khaleesi”. I suspect their parents are going to cling to the vision of a ‘good’ Daeneris regardless of what the show says. Or they’ve got some explaining to do to their kids one day.
For example, when Viserys is given his golden crown, Daeneris’ reaction was, 'He was no dragon. Fire can’t harm a dragon." Coupled with a look of disgust - not at his brutal death, but disgust for him, because he wasn’t the true dragon.
She also follows the pattern of many sociopaths - she was abused as a child and young woman, then rose to heights as adoring crowds cheered her on. You can see parallels to all kinds of sadistic rulers in the past.
So here’s the other reason why viewers might be reacting like this: They have been taught very little history of war and conflict. They don’t know that this pattern echoes through history - rulers who think they are the ones who will fix all the problems if only they have ultimate power, only to have that power or the messy realities of life interfere with their idealistic plans and they become more and more compromised until it becomes easy to do horrific things.
Very few rulers start ruling just because they are sadistic monsters. More commonly, they get pushed into hard decisions with no good outcomes, and over time it just gets easier and easier to make ‘hard’ decisions that cost millions their lives.
For example, there’s little evidence that Hitler started out wanting to exterminate the Jews. He had planned to simply ship them out of Germany into occupied countries and leave them there. He thought he was building a glorious new future for his people, and he really believed that he was doing good works for Germany. But simply removing the Jews turned out to be hard. They wound up in concentration camps, and they became a real problem. But by then people around the world were dying by the millions, so it was easy to say, “Well, for the good of Germany, we will have to undertake the final solution.”
And so it went for him - once wins started turning to losses and the allies began closing in and Hitler’s vision of a thousand year Reich was in ruins, he completely stopped caring about even the German people. He was willing to let all of Germany burn to the ground rather than surrender his vision.
Lenin no doubt believed in his socialist paradise. He honestly thought that collectivizing agriculture and taking industry away from the rich and giving it to the benevolent state would make the lives of the people better. The revolution was going to break some eggs, but he was making an omelette that would be worth a few broken eggs. But when that doesn’t happen and you’re the ruler everyone expects will fix things, it gets easier and easier to order increasingly harsh measures to keep the dream alive.
Even Stalin’s forced starvation of the Ukraine, one of the most heinous acts of the 20th century, was justified on the grounds that if the people in Russia went hungry they could rise up and rebel, and chaos could ensue. So by taking all the grain out of the Ukraine for the Russian people, he ensured the stability of the government and, in his mind I’m sure, actually saved millions from a worse fate. Of course, the reason there was a famine in the first place during a year when crop yields were high everywhere else is because of the failures of his previous policies. Failures lead to more extreme acts, leading to even bigger failures. Tyrants get backed into a corner, just as Daeneris was.
In a complex world, you can justify anything if you look for just the right evidence. Tyrants generally don’t think they are evil - they think they are people capable of making ‘hard’ decisions for the good of the people. Everyone is the hero of their own story.
See, I disagree. This isn’t a fault of the show, it’s a fault in the audience, in a way. The thing about Game of Thrones is that people have built up huge expectations for their favorite characters, and the internet is full of fan theories, fan fiction, etc. The delay between seasons created his huge market for Game of Thrones videos, web sites, podcasts, etc. All of this has elevated Daeneris, as she is the perfect hero in many ways - poor background, rose up on her own, freed slaves, is beautiful, strong, etc. She was a role model for girls. Parents named their daughters Daeneris or Khaleesi. People invested a whole lot in her being a good person, despite the clear and mounting evidence throughout the show that she was not quite what they wanted her to be, and deviated from that ideal more and more as the stresses and compromises she was forced to take exacted their toll.
I just watched a scene last night, I think from season 2, where Daeneris is at the gates of Yunkai, and she tells them that if they won’t surrender she’ll come back when her dragons are grown and not only burn their city, but every city that trades with them. She said she’d lay waste to their entire kingdom. And she had real murder in her eyes when she said it. Ser Jorah gave her a look like, “Holy shit, that was a little extreme.”
When the envoys came to see her to demand her surrender, she had Greyworm murder two of them, then Tyrion told the third to go and tell everyone what happens when Daeneris Stormborn and her Dragons came to town. That’s not ruling with love, it’s ruling by fear. But the show went out of its way, like it did with the Khals, to make those characters behave in the most obnoxious way possible to mask the fact that she was committing cold-blooded murder for political ends. But she was.
It reminded me of Anakin killing the younglings.
A desperate about-face to shock the audience that was not set up properly to make sense for the character.
It was an impressive spectacle, but I was shaking my head through much of it.
I don’t think so. I think the nod simply meant : “OK, do as he says”.
It was no more a mental breakdown than Bomber Harris ordering the firebombing of Dresden, or a medieval general ordering the complete sacking and destruction of a city - which happened all the time.
From Daeneris’ point of view, it was totally logical for her to do what she did. There was no path to the throne for her left other than to rule through power and fear. None. She couldn’t marry Jon Snow, and Jon Snow was not just the rightful heir, but a beloved figure. If she doesn’t rule by fear, she doesn’t rule at all. And she has spent her entire adult life working towards one end - rule of Westeros. She isn’t giving up on that. Also, she has an army of Unsullied and Dothraki counting on her to win. If she gives up and goes home, they sacrificed for nothing and would probably turn on her.
As for the people, they seem satisfied with Cersei, and they treated her like garbage in the North. She went there to save them and in return got nothing but hostility, suspicion, or indifference - even AFTER she actually did save them.
I could easily see her deciding that Westeros is full of selfish, hateful people who don’t recognize what she was trying to do for them. They won’t love her. Probably won’t even LIKE her. So the only way to possibly rule now is through fear. And if you’re going to do that, you had better instill that fear right out of the gate, or you’re just going to have to do it later.
This isn’t insanity - it’s the logic of tyrants. And many tyrants have been heroes - until the going gets really tough and ‘hard’ decisions have to be made. Then they show their true colors.
Compared to Anakin’s character development, we have had the creators nearly shouting, ‘Daeneris is pretty sketchy, y’all!’ for 8 years. Rewatching the series after you know how she turns out makes it pretty clear that they have been telegraphing this for a long time.
I shoud add that King Robert was correct about her when he wanted her killed. He said that a Targaryan with dragons and a Dothraki Horde was an existential threat to the realm. Ned Stark laughed at him. But Robert was right, and if he had killed her back in the day, King’s Landing would still be fine.
Just checked, and no. There are indistinct shapes in the background, but I think they’re Dothrakis. I don’t think it’s necessarily significant, though.
Meh, I don’t know. There are people named Attila and Timur in the world.
The next move, as has been mentioned, is to eliminate Jon as a rival or a focus for rebellion. And now that the battle against Cersei has been won, order the Dothraki and Unsullied to turn on the Nothern troops and eliminate them as well.
The move after that will be to head for Winterfell on Drogon to take out Sansa and Bran, but I don’t think she’ll get that far.
I agree. Anyone who thinks this is a “sudden turn” needs to rewatch the series from the beginning.