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.

How Do You Talk to a Dragon?

By far one of the most iconic figures from any work of J.R.R. Tolkien’s is Smaug from 1937’s The Hobbit. While not the first treasure-obsessed dragon to terrorize villagers in the history of literature, Smaug is one of the most memorable and widely portrayed. This is possibly because he was one of the first and still one of the few who speaks. 

Dragons in fantasy traditionally don’t serve as characters, but rather as plot devices; they are obstacles without personalities or voices that are in the story for no other reason than to be vanquished by the heroes. Tolkien’s fiery villain, in contrast, is a character with a cunning and cocky personality that he frequently makes known to Bilbo Baggins and the readers by boasting of his abilities in words.

With that said, here’s my latest fan theory that I want to put to the test: that the Smaug played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the Peter Jackson Hobbit film trilogy does not in fact speak English.

One of the films’ more clever changes to the story of The Hobbit is the One Ring’s power to make its bearer understand the language of magical creatures while wearing it. We see this occur once in the second film, when Bilbo rescues his companions from a nest of giant spiders. This concept was obviously created as a means of being true to the source material, where Bilbo hears the spiders talking, while also keeping with the screen adaptation’s more realistic approach of not having any of the animals actually talk. What’s interesting about it though is that we clearly hear one of the spiders say something in English to Bilbo after he takes off the Ring. Some viewers may see this as a continuity error, but others see it as Bilbo retaining his ability to understand the creature's words once the Ring grants him with that power.

It’s possible then that the same thing occurs during his meeting with Smaug later in the film. Bilbo initially puts on the One Ring to conceal himself from the dragon, then he reluctantly takes it off when its power becomes too overwhelming. From there, the hobbit and Smaug share two conversations until the latter exits the Lonely Mountain to attack Lake-town. One wonders if either conversation would have taken place if Bilbo had kept the Ring in his pocket the entire time that he was in the mountain.

This theory gains a bit more weight when looking at Smaug’s scenes without the burglar. We see the dragon assault the city of Dale and take over the Lonely Mountain in the opening of the trilogy’s first film, but not once does he ever say anything during that massacre. The argument can be made that he’s too preoccupied with his task to comment on it, as it’s probably difficult to speak while breathing fire, and the filmmakers are clearly trying to keep him under wraps until Bilbo meets him. Still, from what we learn about Smaug in the next film, it seems odd that he would do something so catastrophic without bragging about it to the people he’s killing.

Smaug doesn’t say very much when the dwarves are trying to apprehend him in the second film either. The only times he ever seems to address anyone in those scenes is when Bilbo is present. He says a great deal to Bard the Bowman while attacking Lake-town, which Mr. Baggins is not present during, but upon closer inspection, that exchange doesn’t seem quite as interactive as the ones with the hobbit.

Bard never speaks to Smaug. He just goes about his business of preparing to fire his black arrow while the dragon taunts him. Again, it’s possible that the man is too preoccupied with what he’s doing to say anything (and really, what can anyone say to a dragon who just burned down their entire town?), but the notion that the audience is being allowed to hear something that he can’t in that scene holds up fairly well. Bard’s supposed reactions to some of the things that Smaug says could be seen as Smaug commenting on things as Bard is realizing them for himself.

For instance, the bowman looks at his son Bain after the dragon makes a comment about the boy; Smaug’s glare at Bain while making that comment would be enough indication that he’s taking note of the youngster and would give Bard enough reason to look at his son with concern. Also, Cumberbatch’s Smaug certainly seems like the type who would gloat at someone even when he knows they can’t understand him.

The only other person that the dragon speaks to, just before flying to Lake-town, is Thorin Oakenshield. The following lines are said:


THORIN: Here, you witless worm!
SMAUG: You.
THORIN: I have taken back what you stole.
SMAUG: You will take nothing from me, dwarf. I laid low your warriors of old. I instilled terror in the hearts of men. I am King Under the Mountain.
THORIN: This is not your kingdom. These are dwarf lands, this is dwarf gold, and we will have our revenge.
SMAUG: Revenge? I will show you revenge!


This could almost read as Thorin giving a separate speech to Smaug that just happens to be about the same thing as the dragon's speech to him, unbeknownst to the dwarf king. It would make sense for both characters to have similar mindsets like this since they’ve spent the past several minutes fighting each other for the mountain, and since Smaug's ability to understand English is not being questioned, it makes sense for him to give the appropriate reactions and responses to what Thorin says. However, Thorin's reply to Smaug calling himself King Under the Mountain can read as a comprehending dialogue between the two and is probably the strongest argument against the “Smaug doesn’t speak English” theory.

To still humor that idea though, this scene could perhaps be interpreted not as the dragon speaking English to Thorin, but as Thorin also having the ability to understand dragon speech.

Just look at the third Hobbit film. When it becomes clear to Thorin that he and his company will have to defend the Lonely Mountain from the Lake-town survivors and the Mirkwood elves, he sends a raven to his cousin Dain to call for reinforcements. The raven isn’t carrying any letters when it leaves the mountain, and since the dwarves are able to communicate with the ravens in the book, it has to be assumed that Thorin verbally gave the bird his message to deliver and Dain was able to understand the animal in order to receive that message. 

If the film dwarves are able to converse with one creature, then they may be able to converse with others. And who knows? It’s possible that Thorin’s susceptibility to dragon sickness could have given him the ability to understand Smaug, similar to how the One Ring may have given it to Bilbo. Durin's line is said to be more susceptible to dragon sickness than other dwarves are, and since none of the other members of Thorin's company attempt to speak with Smaug during their confrontation, it could be common knowledge among them that only their leader has the skill to do so. They may not know that dragon sickness is the cause of it, though.

By either of these rationals, Bard remains the one character out of the three addressed by Smaug who can't decipher the villain's words; the plot point of him learning of Smaug’s weak spot from the thrush is written out of the films, implying that this version of Bard can’t communicate with other species, and he of course is never corrupted by dragon sickness.

Whatever language Smaug does speak, he remains one of epic fantasy’s most outspoken dragons. He rightfully deserves his distinction as one of the most famous (or infamous) as well, and Cumberbatch’s eerily arrogant portrayal of him in the Hobbit film trilogy will no doubt be the most prevalent one in people’s minds for many years to come. If the above theory has intrigued anybody, then perhaps the regard of that portrayal will be just a little more open to interpretation — so to speak.