SourceSady Doyle said:
Yeah, I'm upset.
I get it: if you thought this had a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention. Go ahead and post the gif or whatever constitutes your witty response. I'm an idiot because I got invested in the wrong part of the story for so many years, I'm a fool who apparently didn't notice I was rooting for a fascist monster the entire time. I guess I'm just stupid.
I guess I finally know what TLJ detractors feel. I still think their disappointment with Luke's character arc stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Jedi and the Force, but I don't blame them for their misunderstanding. Decades of Star Wars media have provided a very muddled interpretation of the meaning of the Force, so I can see why they would be very confused and betrayed by a more spiritual and pacifist ending to Luke's character rather than something cool and badass. They thought they understood the character and his story and were instead left empty and unsatisfied.
But...at least he got an ending. At least he dies a hero.
When I think about Game of Thrones now, I just get this crushing sense of disappointment and emptiness. I've read the books three times, I've rewatched the show four times. I've spent hundreds of hours discussing and debating and theorizing. I loved this franchise and I evangelized it to everyone I knew. Even when the writing went off the rails in season 5, I still got immense enjoyment from the series. I would defend the series as a whole as being better than its individual parts. You can even find my posts, as recently as mid-April, defending the show as an entertaining spectacle unlike anything on TV. Now I look back on it all and just feel empty, like it was all a massive waste of my time.
Game of Thrones and ASOIAF were always a story with three major moving parts. There's the political war for the Iron Throne, starring Tyrion Lannister and a variety of others, in which dozens of houses wage war, make alliances, and stab each other in the back, to see who can accumulate the ultimate power. There's the mysteries of the north, starring Jon Snow, who is lost and feels without a destiny until he joins the Night's Watch and finds brotherhood and a new purpose: fighting a deadly enemy that knows no allegiance to any house and seeks only to destroy everything. And then, across the sea, is a third storyline segregated from the others. For five books (and counting) and six seasons, we follow the almost completely unrelated story of Daenerys Targaryen.
Daenerys, or Dany, as we like to call her, is a teenage girl who was born amidst the collapse of her house and her family. As an infant, she gets shipped off to a foreign country with her brother. She grows up hearing stories of the life she could have had and the country her brother wants to rule. She just wants a house with a red door. Viserys, who exhibits sadistic and perverse tendencies, tells her that one day he will marry her. She will never have a life of her own. Then he changes his mind and sells her off to a savage warlord instead, to be raped and used as property. This would be the end of her story. But it's not the end. She's stronger than Drogo, and bends him to her will. She makes him care for her as his equal. When Viserys oversteps his bounds and threatens her unborn child, she gets Drogo to kill him. Finally, she's taken control of her story. Dany starts to form her own identity: she is someone who wants to make the world better for the downtrodden, and to take the Iron Throne in the process. She tries to change the Dothraki and end their cruelty towards women. When Drogo is injured, she becomes desperate and enlists a witch to save him. Drogo is left in a coma and her unborn baby is dead.
She thought she could have a better life and now everything she loved was taken from her. Dejected, she steps into a pyre with her dragon eggs to die. But she doesn't die. She comes out, unburnt, with three dragons. They're the only children she'll ever know. She takes control of Drogo's khalasar and they set out to fulfill her mission. When she learns of the slavery in Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen, she doesn't stand idly by and let these socially acceptable injustices continue to go unchallenged. Even as everyone around her tells her that's just how the world is, khaleesi, she refuses to accept it. She doesn't accept the world as it is. She wants to make it better. She frees the slaves and conquers their cities. In Meereen, where she finally has the army and the strength to sail to Westeros, she decides against it. Instead, she decides to remain in Meereen so she can learn how to rule. Winning was easy, young lady, governing's harder. She doesn't always succeed at what she tries to do. She tries things and sometimes they fail. Sometimes she does things that others call cruel, like executing the slave masters. But everything she does is guided by a sense of justice for those who can't fight for themselves. She's been told that her father went mad, and that she might too. She is ever-conscious of this. But she doesn't have to be like her father. She can be kind and strong instead of wicked and weak.
Dany served as an inspiration to many young people who looked at the world we live in today and saw that it needed to be changed -- radically. People who knew that our system was rigged, that common people are being hurt by the powerful, and that the only way to fix it is to break the wheel. Yes, she kills people along the way -- cruel, violent, wicked people who, in a feudal medieval society, deserved to die. That is the way of Westeros and Essos, and should not be apologized for. Perhaps if we had been harsher to the slaveowners of the United States, and the traitors who fought to defend their right to own human beings as property, the modern US might look very different. For viewers who wanted to see a better world, Dany served as a power fantasy to make that world a reality. Power fantasies aren't really what ASOIAF is about, but this type of story -- the downtrodden girl who rises to the highest of heights in the pursuit of uplifting others alongside her -- is so rare in fantasy fiction. Why couldn't we have just this one?
Eventually, after six years, she goes to Westeros to take back the Iron Throne and hopefully change it just a bit. Maybe she can make it just a little better. But thanks to the advice of the wise Tyrion and Varys -- and a little help from some of the worst and most contrived writing in TV history -- everything goes wrong. Her fleet is devastated, huge portions of her armies and her alliances are destroyed, and Jon Snow shows up with a wild story about walking dead men and the fate of the world. Dany could just ignore him. She could go to the Red Keep and wipe Cersei off the face of the planet. But she doesn't, because she trusts Jon, and she eventually loves him. Because what she really wants is the family she never had and a house with a red door. So she goes north to help him and loses one of her dragons, her baby, to a magic plot device so that the White Walkers can get through the Wall. Then she arrives in a Winterfell that doesn't accept her and treats her like vermin. But they're part of her kingdom, even if they don't want to be, and the more important war for the fate of all life is upon them, so she sets that aside and helps fight the dead. Dany loses a huge chunk of her army and is nearly killed. While Tyrion and Sansa are cowering in the crypts, Dany fights the dead herself, even picking up a sword and fighting them head-on when all hope seems lost. Ultimately, it turns out her help wasn't even really needed, since Arya's magic knife powers end the threat instantly. But when the battle is won, nobody thanks her. Nobody appreciates her help. She learns that Jon is apparently the real heir to the throne, although he can't prove it, and that his ungrateful sisters are trying to undermine her even after she risked everything for them.
This is where the story of Daenerys Targaryen ends, because the character that appears in the final three episodes is not her. She is a character who is warped and twisted into some hateful, psychotic, evil mass murderer because of a few unjustified betrayals, a few deaths, and some obscenely bad writing and plotholes so big they'd cause the entire planet to collapse on itself. And after everything she's been through, everything she's fought, everything she's beaten, and everyone she's inspired, it all ends in complete chaos and destruction and death. Her story ends with her and her people accomplishing absolutely nothing. Unlike Ned and Robb Stark, whose causes live on in their family, Dany has no one to pick up her torch. There was no point to any of it. She's dead, and she dies a terrible villain. No throne. No acceptance. No friends. No dragons. No love. No house with a red door. No family. Apparently, if you are ambitious and seek to change the world, you are a fool -- worse, a psychopath and a monster, one who deserves to have everything stripped away from you before your untimely death.
ASOIAF is not supposed to be a story of power fantasies coming true. A storybook ending where Dany takes the throne and everybody cheers would ring hollow for a lot of people. But there are so many other satisfying ways to end her story beyond turning her into a genocidal monster, Hitler on a dragon, her army of people of color marching in the streets like a Nuremburg rally while she screams about conquering the world. Tyrion, in a hilariously stupid meta scene, decides to don his Dril hat and explain to the audience that there's actually zero difference between killing good & bad people, you imbecile, you fucking moron. We were the baddies, apparently, us audience members who felt that killing slavers and rapists was a morally good thing in a cruel and violent and lawless world. In her final scene, Dany attempts to explain to Jon that she knows what is good and what is bad and will try to bring this goodness to other people around the world. Aha, the show tells you, just like every other dictator! She thinks she's knows what's right and wrong!
But I reject this cheap, high school philosophy attempt at moral relativism. I do know what is right and what is wrong. Slavery is wrong. Rape is wrong. Murder of innocent people is wrong. Subjugating women is wrong. And for 69 episodes, Dany's view of what was right and wrong was a true one. Yes, an absolute monarchy ruled by birthright is wrong too, but Westeros completely lacks any legal, moral, or philosophical framework for democracy to work at the moment, so a benevolent monarch is the best they can hope for right now. Perhaps an ending where Dany understood that would be a better one too. An ending where she realizes her ambition for ruling Westeros might hurt more people than it helps, and so she stands down. Maybe she lets Jon have the throne, or she sacrifices herself to defeat the army of the dead (read this very good theory to learn why this might be the case in the books). The idea that Dany is actually some insane tyrant who is and has always been evil is sexist garbage that overlooks the moral complexity of Dany and every other hero in ASOIAF. The idea that she is incapable of escaping her family's history, and is somehow just genetically a violent genocidal dictator, is offensive to people with mental illness and incredibly lazy writing.
I don't know to what extent this story resembles the one that is yet to be told in the books, or may never be told. Frankly, I no longer care. I invested years of my life into this character and this story and this franchise -- as did millions of others -- and this was our reward. To be told that the person we admired, appreciated, and loved wasn't a hero or a liberator or even a good person, but an evil, violent, witch that has to be put down like a rabid dog. Apparently my understanding of the five books I read and 69 episodes I watched up to that point was wrong, as was the understanding of many others. We, apparently, completely and utterly misread the text and the character. We were fools, and we got played like fools.
I just feel empty thinking back on all of it. I feel like an idiot for caring and investing myself into this story and this character. I feel like it was all a huge waste of time and emotion.
I'll end it this way: this is not how I choose to remember this series, or this character. I choose to remember her as someone who was kind, who helped others, who looked out for the downtrodden. I choose to remember her as a liberator, just ruler, and protector of women and children. Someone who was inspiring and gave hope to people in a world wracked by violence and horror -- a world not unlike our own. To Emilia Clarke, thank you for bringing this character to life and making her into an icon around the world. To Ramin Djawadi, thank you for the cool, badass themes that you gave her and her dragons across the series. And to Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lady of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, Queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons, thank you for being my favorite character of this series and for being an inspiration to everyone who wants to leave the world a slightly better place than they found it.
Missandei said:
SourceEmilia Clarke said:
