So before I get into why I never liked her as a character I think it's important for us to understand what George RR Martin was trying to convey through her character. I recently come across a thought provoking analysis of Daenerys from a hardcore fan of the series that sums her up better than I could:
"[Daenerys's character arc] challenges people to consider how they think about and perceive violence and warfare... because we consider violence against “bad” people to be inherently justified — justifiable — most of us don’t put up a fuss if Dany crucifies slavers or feeds nobles to her dragons or burns Dothraki khals alive.
The problem comes when the perspective shifts — our perspective — but Dany’s doesn’t. People cried foul...because she’d never hurt “innocent” people before. It’d be more accurate though to say that she hadn’t hurt people the audience considered “innocent” before.
For a very long time, her foes were our foes. She beat up on comic book villains and many people (though not all) cheered, until our context changed but hers didn’t. Suddenly the people she was immolating didn’t look too villainous to us.
So that’s one part of it. It forces the audience to reckon with our own blood-lust and how we evaluate justifiable violence and atrocities. Because what Dany did to “bad” people was still atrocious — people just didn’t care because her victims weren’t sufficiently sympathetic, and her overall goal — protecting people from other, worse people — looked “noble.”
The other part of it — and the one with real-world parallels in recent history — is that, to be blunt, people were deluded into rooting for a stone-cold tyrant and didn’t realize it until it was too late and the jig was up.
The combination of a compelling life story, a pretty face and violence we can agree with — against other people, people not like us, people we find morally wrong — can lead to horror. You know, “first they came for the Jews, then they came for the unionists, then they came for me,” in so many words (I know that isn’t exact). The violence is always ratcheted up, and up, until one day it isn’t violence you agree with anymore. But by then it doesn’t matter, because the tyrant is too powerful, too convinced of their own righteousness (because you’ve told them for so long that they’re right) and too far gone to go back.
Tyrants rarely look like tyrants immediately — they might make promises, they might have good intentions, they might hurt all the “right” people, they might seem sympathetic, they might seem to want to do good (for the “right” people, the same way they want to punish the “right” people). But the mask will always drop. The trick is seeing them for what they are before the mask drops, because by then it’s too late.
Despite this being a HUGE wall of text, this isn't even the whole answer. If you'd like to read the whole thing here's the link:
As I'm sure you would have been able to guess from all the memes in this post, she's supposed to be a 21st century Darth Vader. The major exception is that you're supposed to cheer for her and then feel horrified that you cheered for "Stalin with tits" (which is a phrase that the linked answer uses to describe Daenerys).
I love the idea behind this arc. Had it been executed well, I think it could have been powerful and it would have given us all the opportunity to reflect on our views of violence. Unfortunately the execution in both the books and the show is rather poor.
In the books it's a little too obvious that Daenerys is a bad ruler and that she's eventually going to turn into a tyrant. She has the reverse of the hand of Midas. Instead of everything turning to gold, for her it turns into crap. So anytime she tries to do something good you can basically expect it to go wrong and to have major negative consequences. As a result it's really hard to root for her. And her list of atrocities increases over time which makes everything completely obvious.
The show takes a different approach that ultimately bit them in the rear end. In the show, each of Daenerys's actions from the books is framed in a heroic light. Sure she had moments where she was violent toward certain people, but there always a justification present for each of those actions. It's easy to see why people thought of her as a hero, it's what the show wants you to think.
Then George RR Martin told the show-runners how the story in the books would end. I'm guessing that the show-runners must have realized that they were in trouble because their depiction of Daenerys prior to the final season doesn't logically lead to her becoming a tyrant. As a result the show tries to aim for the same ending of the book, but does it in the dumbest way possible.
This is where the comparison between Daenerys Targaryen and Anakin Skywalker further comes into play. In Episode 3 Anakin starts slaughtering children on the turn of a dime with zero build up. This is exactly what happened with Daenerys. Before the second to last episode of the show Daenerys was like:
"I'm going to kill Cersei Lannister and liberate King's Landing from a tyrant."
And then 1 - 2 episodes later she proceeds to massacre all the men, women and children in King's Landing for no reason. The show did not build this up at all. Prior to the last two episodes of the entire show one would think that she'd be a little power hungry sure, but not a mass murderer. It's not a logical conclusion one would come to and I don't blame show-only fans for feeling like the show threw her under the bus.
"I'm going to kill Cersei Lannister and liberate King's Landing from a tyrant."
And then 1 - 2 episodes later she proceeds to massacre all the men, women and children in King's Landing for no reason. The show did not build this up at all. Prior to the last two episodes of the entire show one would think that she'd be a little power hungry sure, but not a mass murderer. It's not a logical conclusion one would come to and I don't blame show-only fans for feeling like the show threw her under the bus.
What I find to be further hilarious about this entire ordeal is that THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO NAMED THEIR CHILDREN AND / OR THEIR PETS AFTER HER! And not even after Daenerys either, they named their kids or pets "Khaleesi", which is one of her titles. It's not even her proper name.
Stephen Colbert recently did a sketch on this subject. In this sketch he made fun of all the people who named their kids after characters from Game of Thrones:
And you know what? I'm right there with him. Moral of the story: If you're going to name your kid after a fictional character you should wait until after their story arc is complete before you give your kids that name.
It's going to be really embarrassing when the kid finds out that they were named after a genocidal maniac....and I'll laugh my rear end off. It feels really nice to know that my dislike of Daenerys has been exonerated. I'll just end with his little gem of a video:
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