I don’t know how much stock I’d put in that.
The show clearly and unambiguously showed Brienne kill Stannis, but many people debated that for months. The show clearly and unambiguously showed Cersei and Jaime dying last episode, but people here debate that too. The “ongoing debate” can be more of a criticism of the discussion than the show.
Pretty sure that’s how the show presented it, yes.
Totally agree. Dany has never been a nice person. It’s just that her opponents were such sleezeballs that people cast her in a good light.
I don’t get the leap from “she wanted to rule by fear” to burning down the whole city. She could have easily ruled by fear without doing so. She could have easily destroyed the Red Keep without destroying the rest of the city (in fact, when she took off after the bells rung, I believe we were supposed to think she was heading for the Keep) if she wanted to ensure victory and death of Cersei’s crew. This isn’t supposed to be some long-held plan of hers, the show was trying to convey she snapped and went crazy, not like evil tyrant crazy, but absolutely unhinged freakout, need to be in a padded room, mad-king type of crazy.
Having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next episode she’s back to the personality she had before the battle. Not because it makes any sense, but because the writing in the show has been a disaster for the past two seasons.
some viewers believe what they want and it does not matter what is in the show. For example some people are 100% sure Tony Soprano [edited out spoiler]
Moderator Note
I edited out a spoiler from another show. Please don’t post spoilers from other shows, even if old.
Colibri
Because about 30 seconds earlier he had been willing to behead Papa Palpatine. It was sudden, with basically no transition.
Yes. She is a woman (as stated elsewhere in the thread) who grew up a threatened exile in Essos, then amongst the Dothraki and in Slavers bay. She ain’t a gender studies major from a Liberal Arts college. Brutality is part of her upbringing.
Yes, I remember being a bit miffed back in 2011(!) when it first aired, since it seemed out of character…then. Not so much now.
Agreed. I think part of the “problem” is that she is the designated heroine. And to be sure, she fights some truly awful people over the years. But, compare with Cercei, the designated villan. Cercei has done some truly reprehensible things. She has had reprehensible things done to her. Pretty much every one she beats down had or was intending to harm her and her family, or she had good reason to believe they had. Ned, Tyrion, the Tyrells, the Faith Militant, the Dorne women.
Yet, for some reason she is not held up as some feminist icon. Dany is.
Its, Qarth and she is admittedly a bit desperate there. Plus, pompos fatso talks, anger is a justified reaction. But it is basically foreshawdowing everythung she eventually does.
Exactly. Even the Khals, she provoked And lets not forget, she planned it that way, they were being correct to her (by the standards of their culture), she caused them to burst out at her, and she had men prepping the hut to become a fiery death trap.
Now maybe she had good reasons, but Cercei had very good reasons for the blowing up of Sept of Balor, and that never gets a pass.
Tell you what: Show me another instance anywhere in the history of the show in which Dany goes out of her way to slaughter innocents or noncombatants and I’ll agree with you. Or, for that matter, another instance in which she’s shown as not caring at all whether her army lives or dies.
I think Cersei doesn’t get a pass because she’s fucking a relative.
No, wait…
Mirri Maz Durr and some of the Master of Mereen (Hizdahr zo Loraq’s father and the one she fed to her dragons for specific examples).
I don’t think the person who just took your unborn child as an act of vengeance, and who possibly put your husband into a coma, qualifies as an “innocent.”
I don’t remember the specifics of the Meereen examples you quote, so I’ll need to revisit those to check.
First, it doesn’t make sense to ask for examples before her snap where she snaps, because that’s the entire point of her having this horrifying change of heart. Nobody is denying that she acts differently here from before, I think; the denial is that it’s out of character.
Every mass murderer has a first time.
Second, as for not caring about her army, she DID send her cavalry charging through the darkness at an undead army, and then she put her infantry standing between said army and the static defenses. 
If you rape and murder an entire village, I don’t think you get to wash your hands of burning an unarmed captive to death just because they resisted your barbarism.
I think you’re confusing the actions of the Dothraki horde with those of Dany, who specifically requested the women who were captured – including Mirri Maz Duur – be placed under her authority to PREVENT them from being raped and murdered.
Oh please dear husband, murder your way onto the throne. Oh dear me, was there some collateral damage? Who could have foreseen that?
Drogo specifically says he will rape women and enslave children and Dany assents, btw. Maybe she got cold feet after. I’m sure the dead feel better about that.
She’s morally culpable.
Yes, and that’s another example of a miscalculation by the writers. I’m not sure that makes the point you want to make.
We’re quibbling over semantics here. I disagree that Dany has been shown previously as the type of person who would indiscriminately execute someone who hasn’t hurt her – particularly not children, nor her own fighting forces. The fact that you and others are touting examples of her executing (or allowing to die) those who opposed her don’t hold weight with me.
I agree this was to be Dany’s arc the entire time. I just think the writers and showrunners did a terrible job getting us here.
Well she was the complete opposite of innocent from Dany’s perspective, for sure, since she essentially murdered Dany’s husband and unborn child.
But objectively she was an innocent who essentially went back in time to kill baby Hitler. Think of it from the witch’s perspective: The horde butchered her family and everyone she knows, raped her four times (I think that’s what she said) and then Dany enslaved her. This same horde was anticipating the birth of future Hitler. The witch then found herself with an opportunity to take out both the leader of the horde and future Hitler, and she took it.
Is the witch the bad guy because of that? I’d say no, she was an innocent who did the right thing knowing it would cost her her life.
Similarly, the people of KL were objectively innocents, but from Dany’s perspective they were anything but. If she doesn’t consider them innocents (which she explicitly said she does not and even explained why) then you can’t say she was massacring innocents.
That is EXACTLY what she did in Mereen.
Those mask-wearing fanatics were harshing her mellow, so she rounded up some random high ranking officials with zero evidence or even suspicion that they were involved in any way, fed one to her dragons and then threatened to feed more if they didn’t go discover who was behind the Harpies.
In the post-WWII Western world, there is an impression of the military as noble and wonderful, thank-you-for-your-service, that really was not typical before then. Of course that is in part because World War II was a very oddly justifiable war - one of the very few such wars ever. That combined with the modern attitude towards the principles of the Geneva Conventions, which we don’t uphold and much as we like to think we do but we try, gives people here and now a rather historically unusual opinion of militaries, and what sort of behaviour is typical of them.
In fact, for most of history, armies have been little more than giant swarms of locusts, except locusts that will kill you, not just eat all your food (but soldiers would eat all your food, too.) The sacking and pillaging of cities was just how it was. For much of human history war has been seen as an exercise in robbing people.
The armies of GOT are much more like most of the real armies in human history than people’s impressions of the armies Grandpa fought in back in the 40s, but we apply modern sensibilities to them. Furthermore, the makes of GOT manipulate your perspective - quite intentionally, to keep screwing up your expectations. The fact people think of Mirri Maz Durr was a villain says it all, really - the only reason anyone thinks that is because Daenerys loved Khal Drogo. If you back up, though, and look at the facts objectively, Khal Drogo was a dreadful villain, and a war criminal, and deserved all that and much worse. He preyed on Mirri Maz Durr’s people. If the show had been shot from a different perspective, from that of HER people, Khal Drogo would literally be one of the most hated villains in the history of television. And Daenerys Targaryen was by that point his happy accomplice. Burning Mirri Maz Durr to death was exactly as justified as the Emperor trying to kill Luke Skywalker.
So much so that it’s the third amendment of the United States Constitution:
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
That would be an odd amendment to have if the history RickJay describes wasn’t a thing.
First, those mask-wearing fanatics were inciting insurrection and a possible civil war. They had just killed her personal protector, Barristan Selmy, and wounded Grey Worm in a sneak attack in an alley.
Secondly, she didn’t round up “some random high-ranking officials.” She rounded up the heads of the leading families in Meereen. Granted, she had no hard proof that they were involved with the Harpies; but since they were the ones who had lost the most by her new rules, and since the Harpies seemed very well-organized, well-informed, and well-financed, she felt justified in the conclusion they were the driving force behind the Harpies.
But they weren’t. It’s only from Dany’s perspective that she was justified, same with the witch, and you seem to be arguing that as the case but then refuse to accept that same logic in the sack of KL despite Dany explicitly saying that the commoners of KL are not innocent bystanders.
Well, the Western Allies did rape and steal quite a bit. It was an issue during both the Normandy and Northern France campaigns, Life Magazine, even wrote about it at the time.
Jon’s ultimately doomed attempts to stop it is fairly accurate for the sentimemts of most commanders during history. They try and stop it, but fail.