[SPOILERS] Tyrion and Jorah: Talking about Dany

bardotinmotion asked: What are your thoughts on Dany? Has she disappointed you in her latest chapters? And what do you think of the accusations of her being a "Mary Sue"-type wish fulfillment figure?

Thoughts on Daenerys, as they come to me:

1. I like Daenerys.
2. I was going to say “She’s a good dude” like I did with Jon, but…Well, let’s put it this way: I think she’s a good dude at heart. She has a capacity for empathy that’s all but unparalleled by anyone in the entire series – empathy for the suffering of others regardless of their nationality, religion, social station, you name it. It’s so unusual for someone of her rank to care this deeply about the absolute lowest of the low that it’s almost like a genetic mutation. You can see that in how her inner circle reacts with stunned surprise and dismay to each new attempt to right some wrong – she might as well have grown a third arm in the middle of her back, that’s how weird it is to them. That makes her a powerful potential agent of change in this world, the same way the sudden arrival of people who can read minds and shoot force blasts out of their eyeballs and control magnetism and whatnot would. She’s a goddamn moral X-Man.
3. The problem is that justice from Daenerys Targaryen looks an awful lot like a bloodbath from anyone else. Dany’s primary method of effecting social change is killing the people who were in the way, and with a flair for the dramatic in doing so that suggests she gets some enjoyment out of the violence quite aside from its ameliorative effects for the slaves or what have you. I think that in the initial excitement of her campaign in Slaver’s Bay, with these truly odious and cruel slavers dropping like flies, it was very easy for me to start screaming “MOTHER! MOTHER!” along with everyone else, but in the immortal words of Proposition Joe, she’s got more bodies on her than a Chinese cemetery. The freedom she offers comes with a heaping helping of fire and blood. Only death can pay for life.
4. Has she disappointed me in her latest chapters? No, I can’t say she has. Politically, she’s in what I’d call the single most difficult position of anyone in the series. It’s only by holding up some shortcut, I think, that we can look at her conduct as disappointing. For example, if we say to ourselves “Well, fuck Slaver’s Bay and fuck the slaves, she should just burn her way to King’s Landing now,” and then she fails to do that, then we get disappointed, but we need to ask ourselves if that move at this moment in the narrative (in the middle of Dance somewhere, that is) would be satisfying thematically, or be good for the societies Dany hopes to rule or influence, or make sense for who she is as a person. I think the answer is no in all three cases.
5. That’s not to say that at the END of Dance, she might be born-again hard and become a Genghis-like unstoppable juggernaut warlord – although I still think so many seeds of a Volantene slave revolt on Dany’s behalf have been planted that it’d make no sense for Martin to have her forsake her “children.” But if she does that there will be a price to pay for her humanity, her empathy, the quality that made her who she is. It won’t be 100% awesome, you know what I mean? It’ll hurt, as it should.
6. In general Dany’s an illustration of the way the road to Meereen is paved with good intentions – and bodies. I despise neat allegory as much as the next guy, particularly if the next guy is Martin or Tolkien, but given my personal political history I can’t help but ask myself really hard and unpleasant questions about the nature of “humanitarian intervention” or “just war” when looking at what Dany set out to do and what became of it. We’ve seen that movie before. Yet I do think Martin intends us to feel positively toward Dany’s desire to break the slave trade – that makes her the Abraham Lincoln figure in the books, after all, a heroic archetype if ever there was one. It’s complex, in other words, and I think we do ourselves no favors by responding to that complexity with “This is BORRRRINGGGG, stop fucking Daario and helping people and start fucking shit up.”
7. I must say I don’t really understand the intensity of the hate directed at Dany/Daario. Daario’s a creep, obviously, but then this is also obvious to Dany, so you can’t fault her for not seeing it. He’s hot, he talks to her in a way that enables her to be not-queenly for a while, he’s good at his job, he kills enemies of hers that she herself can’t reach, and she finds all of that very attractive, understandably. To quote Alyssa Rosenberg again, I can’t fault Dany for succumbing to a bad case of teenage fuck fever now and then.
8. And while my recent experience being tarred with this brush (I feel) unfairly makes me a little gunshy about wielding it myself, I do indeed think that we as a fandom are FAR more forgiving of the men’s sexual indiscretions than we are of the women’s. I’ve never seen anyone rough Jon up for carrying on with Ygritte, or Tyrion with Shae, and so on. Dany, however, is treated like, basically, a dumb slut. Fuck that noise, whatever you may think of her choice of partner.
9. I think Daario will be the treason for gold btw. Even so!

I don't know if you've addressed this before, but what are your thoughts on Dany as a character? I read people treating her like a saint, a monster, and everything in-between.
— Asked by mramgine

Terrific character, hugely readable, one of the main reasons anyone gives a shit about this series. As a conqueror, her first conquest is the pain of her own physical, emotional, and sexual abuse — think about that. She mixes Targaryen messianism and severity with perhaps the most advanced and empathetic sense of political morality of any character in the series; one can and should take issue with the execution, but she is seriously trying to end the slave trade. Magic and destiny swirl around her like a vortex, prophecies and miraculous feats and mythical beasts clinging to her like she’s some kind of sorcerous Katamari Damacy. She’s going to save the planet, for crying out loud. If she becomes monstrous on the way, or otherwise fucks up, that’s part of what makes her a terrific character. Your fave need not be flawless, you know? I really like reading about her.