The Trouble with Daenerys

I'm three episodes away from being caught up on Game of Thrones (since a financial fledgling without HBO can only legally view Season 7 by subscribing to Moochers with Friends), but I think I've seen enough of the show to have a pretty well founded opinion on every major character. One character that I want to discuss my opinion on today is Daenerys Targaryen.

She's easily the most iconic figure to come out of this series, being a white-haired beauty in blue who decimates whole armies with her trio of dragons, and she's always been one of the biggest fan favorites. She also gets praised by a lot of critics for being a strong, independent female character with a compelling story arc who builds herself into a powerful ruler from nothing and breaks all sorts of new ground in the fantasy genre.

...So it pains me to say that I really don't like her.

Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe her story is handled a lot differently in the books, or maybe getting into the show this late means I didn't get to see the events of her story unveil with the proper cultural context surrounding me. Or maybe all the memes, fan art, cosplays, and so forth that I've seen built her up in my mind as a bigger badass than she actually was when I finally saw the show. I don't know, but from what I've seen so far, I think she's an entitled little punk who doesn't deserve most of the respect that she has.

When you really get down to it, Daenerys's two biggest assets that got her where she is are that her body is fireproof and that she has three dragons to do her bidding. The problem is that she never did any work to obtain these assets. She was born with the ability to endure fire, rather than having to build up an immunity to it, and she was given the dragon eggs as a wedding present and just imprinted on the dragons when they hatched. Any time she tries to resolve a conflict with something else like diplomacy or strategic planning, she fails and resorts back to these two assets -- and then she sees these cop-out successes as good reasons to strut around and demand submission from every kingdom she comes across. I wanted to reach through the TV screen and high-five Jon Snow when he shot down her arrogant little list of reasons for why he should kneel to her when they first met in Season 7.

What's worse is that for as much as Daenerys relies on the dragons to resolve everything, she hardly ever puts any effort into training them. She teaches them one command to breathe fire, and that's pretty much all we see. When the dragons start to misbehave, she just locks them up without attempting to correct their behavior and then they all turn on her until they just decide to obey her again. Where's the character growth in that?

What's frustrating about all this is that Daenerys did start out as the clever, adaptable character that I expected her to be. You see her work to earn the respect of her husband Khal Drogo and his people in Season 1, learning their language and becoming more assertive, but then she gets the dragons and it's all fire and blood from there. Okay, I know "Fire and Blood" is the motto of her family, the House Targaryen, but I do find it pretty darn hypocritical that she keeps telling people not to condemn her for what a tyrant her father was while she keeps proudly toting his family name and credo.

To be fair, I know that Daenerys does have good intentions. She wants to rid the world of slavery and establish equal rights for all people. Those are noble causes, but her way of accomplishing them is all wrong. For starters, she's extremely ignorant about the cultures that she tries to reform. She doesn't bother to learn anything about their ways before seizing control of them. She just decides who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, and then takes over and gives everyone what she feels they deserve.

She never considers the big picture or long term effects of anything, and when those things start to creep in and break down the new foundation she's trying to build, her ability to rule falls apart. She starts to behave almost like a petulant child when this happens, sometimes threatening her more experienced advisors when they make suggestions that she doesn't like. She does this until the first brown-noser tells her that whatever she wants to do is best, and then she just burns everything down. And fine, she had to be headstrong like that at first to rise above all the abusive, sexist manipulators who were holding her down in the earlier seasons. However, she accomplished that rather quickly and then suddenly seemed to stop growing.

What's more, for all the revolutionary things that happen on her orders, she never does any of them herself. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that her current number of personal kills is still 0. She tells her guards, executioners, and dragons to kill people for her and then pretty much just watches them do it. And no, riding her dragons around while telling them to burn armies alive doesn't count as using a weapon herself. If she wants respect as a ruler, she needs to learn how to get her own hands dirty and deliver the sentences that she passes -- to paraphrase a wisdom that Jon Snow lives by. Otherwise she's never going to get in touch with anything or become a better ruler than her father.

To the show's credit though, I think this is all the point. They're showing us how easy it is for a hero to fall from grace and become a villain if they don't act wisely. Season 7 marks the first time since the start of the series that Daenerys has to make compromises in order to further herself, and it's great. I don't know if this development was George R.R. Martin's plan for future books or if the show's screenwriters came up with it themselves, but I think it's been needed for a while. I won't give up on Daenerys yet, but no matter how much older she is than her book counterpart, she still has a lot of growing up to do.