Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

She's applying the same Fire and Blood Approach she did in the Slave cities.

Except her targets aren't slavers or mass murderers but the people she's supposed to liberate as well as people who surrendered.

There's a difference in her behavior.

It's like Daenerys stopped caring about Collateral damage after years of radicalization.

Specifically, the show argues, after she's completely won and already successfully beaten them in an overwhelming victory.

I'm not sure if radicalization is the right term but I agree with the idea. There were always indications that Dany could go all Fire and Blood, but those ranged from her ineffectually yelling at a city in helpless frustration to private seething within the confines of her court. Most importantly though, she rarely actually acted upon those urges. Her war against the slavers usually focused on the ruling class, and even her indiscriminate crucifying of masters in retaliation for them killing children had a head limit. I'm not saying her action was right or smart, I'm just saying it wasn't "Burn Everything!"

Those times she did threaten to raze cities and turn the entire population to ash either she had calmed down between the threatening and the victory, or someone talked her out of it. Dany's issues then usually revolved around the fact that not burning everything and everyone left a whole host of issues on its own. It's like she thought she was in A New Hope and blowing up the Death Star and getting a medal meant the story was over and she won, only to wake up the next day and be like, "WTF, the Abominable Snowman is trying to eat me, Hoth is lost, my friends are in trouble, and this little green Muppet keeps sassing me."

Granted, this probably has more to do with her administrative ability than anything else. Kinda like Robert in that respect. All the while in the back of her head she's probably thinking that none of these issues would be there if she had just roasted everything like she initially wanted to.

Once she gets to Westeros it looks like she's on the brink of victory only to get repeatedly sucker punched in the face. Her most resounding success was when she took Olenna's advice to ignore clever men and "Be a dragon".

Flash forward to King's Landing, toss in a few more setbacks, personal tragedies, and a sense of alienation and any sense of restraint a younger Dany had is gone, and anyone who could talk some calm into her is dead or out of favor.

They tried to do a slippery slope, but spent the entire series on a very gradual gradient and then chucked her off a cliff on the last episode but one.

On that I wholeheartedly agree with.

My favorite partisan hacks political commentators did a special episode of their show just for the Go T finale and one of the hosts said it best: "They didn't take enough time to tell the story that they wanted to tell."

Edited by Parable on Aug 18th 2019 at 5:43:03 AM

In case of Dany yes, she Is a desconstruction of good liberartor and it show, problem she just stuck in fire and blood mode in the book and the show have to improve.

That's what they were going for. Unfortunately, she's a bad critique / deconstruction of those things because her Moral Event Horizon moment had very weak justification and wasn't built up nearly enough. Up till then, she hadn't done much worse than any of the other rulers had done in order to keep order. There isn't much difference between her burninating slavers and Jon Snow / Ned Stark personally executing people on the chopping block. The journey between killing people for logical reasons and wholesale mass slaughter of civilians had to be made, and they never made it.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Aug 19th 2019 at 10:25:38 AM

There was that bit where she executed nobles at random for the crimes of the group as a whole. By literally feeding them to Drogon. At least the people Ned and Jon personally executed were actually guilty.

Then there was what she did to Mirri Maz Duur. Or the way she locked up Xaro and Doreah in the vault to die horribly.

Edited by M84 on Aug 19th 2019 at 5:36:40 PM

You mean the woman who'd just used blood magic to kill her unborn baby and leave her husband catatonic after she'd tried to rescue her?

And the people who'd stolen her dragons and killed a significant number of her people, including at least one she was close to?

The punishments were harsh, but they were done to people who'd directly done terrible things to her.

Yeah, but it's still a bit of a far cry from Ned and Jon's executions of people, which were at least relatively quick.

Edited by M84 on Aug 19th 2019 at 5:52:51 PM

Mirri Maaz Duur seconded. Yes, Mirri had a point when she said "Yeah don't think so highly of yourself, by the time you got to me I was raped 3 times by your men", but I still don't think Mirri's reasoning of "I saw your son would grow up to be a conqueror of the Rape, Pillage, and Burn kind so I killed him before he killed others" holds up. She may have seen a vision to that effect but given the kid wasn't born at that point I think there is a chance the kid would have turned out to have been better than that.

Edited by akanesarumara on Aug 19th 2019 at 11:54:43 AM

Ok, claiming she's as virtuous as the Starks is a bit much, but there were always reasons for her using force. Burninating King's Landing had no such justification.

Keep in mind that Mirri got raped multiple times and saw her entire community massacred. The Dothraki destroyed everything in her life. And that was because they were planning to invade Westeros on Dany's behalf — the Dothraki were taking their raiding to another level to gather slaves to sell (that's one of the main ways they make money).

Of course Mirri would want to take revenge on the man who took everything away from her. And do everything in her power to ensure that what happened to her wouldn't happen to the rest of the world.

Mirri Maz Duur: Saved me? Three of those riders had already raped me before you saved me, girl. I saw my god's house burned. There, where I had healed men and women beyond counting! In the streets I saw piles of heads. The head of the baker, who made my bread. The head of a young boy, that I had cured of fever just three moons past. So tell me again exactly what it was that you saved.

Edited by M84 on Aug 19th 2019 at 6:02:38 PM

Yes, they did, which is why Mirri is a very sad and complex character, but I still somehow don't think Dany putting her on the pyre is on the same level as Dany feeding Randyll Tarly to Drogon. Especially since Dany climbed the pyre herself too.

Also, as I said, the child wasn't born yet. Dany could have been a bettering influence on the kid, who was to lead the Khalasar. Yes, no matter what Dany did, she couldn't give back what was taken from Mirri, but we can't know what he would have grown up to be like simply because he never grew up. He would have been the leader of the Dothraki after Drogo though as far as I recall.

Edited by akanesarumara on Aug 19th 2019 at 12:03:56 PM

It was just wanton cruelty.

Even her negative actions had some motive behind them.

Killing a noble who hadn't done anything, it was terrible but there was A justification "nobles are trying to undermine me"

Fire and Blood, based on her previous actions would be either:

1: Make a beeline for the Red Keep and torch it, not minding collateral damage.

or

2: Make a beeline for the Red Keep while Drogon breathes fire, killing some civilians but getting to her target.

Both options that are questionable, but fit with using Fire and Blood... to beat my enemies and get what I want.

Not "taking the time to go back and forth over King's Landing like I'm mowing a lawn, incinerating every single person I can while slowing my advance towards my enemy".

It doesn't help that the showrunners' explanation was decidedly unsatisfying.

Game of Thrones’ showrunners say Daenerys’ big decision was completely spontaneous

Edited by M84 on Aug 19th 2019 at 6:07:21 PM

To be fair, pretty much every word they say or we see they wrote down makes the whole thing even worse.

That last episode script...blech.

I... think it's better I didn't read it but I have heard of it. Then again these are the guys who wanted to make Conferedate...

Just the snippets I did read made me genuinely despise the showrunners.

Kind of like how reading bits of Joss Whedon's proposed script for a WW movie made my already not so great opinion of the man fall to the center of the Earth.

Edited by M84 on Aug 19th 2019 at 6:28:05 PM

If they hadn't done those post-episode interviews, they could have maintained plausible deniability, or stoked fan theories. But no, they outright Word of God explain their dumb reasons, which actually makes those moments worse.

Like the Iron Fleet thing.

When I saw the episode, I thought "oh, maybe they found a cove or somewhere a bit hidden and shot the dragon from there, then when it was distracted, finished it off with the ones on the ships she'd have otherwise dodged, they could have filmed that a bit better but it'll do".

Nope.

Benioff and Weiss forgot about a ton of shit didn't they.