A dragon or three

This post has all the spoilers for Game of Thrones season 8.

In the closing episodes of season 8, Daenerys murdered thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people.  Not because they were a threat, but just because she was pissed off.  There are all kinds of blog posts and articles and petitions that are angry about this because people wanted Dany to be good and pure!  She could be the saviour of Westeros!

Dany was never good or pure.  She was just white, as white as white can be.  The story of Dany as the great saviour is a pile of racism as far as I am concerned.  Dany is very much the embodiment of privilege, a person who wants the feeling of having helped people, the belief in herself as a benevolent person, but who has no interest whatsoever in considering what sort of help other people actually want.  She wants to *feel* good, not *do* good.

Throughout Game of Thrones Dany has been merciless, cruel, and hopelessly self centered.  She refuses to see anyone else's suffering as relevant, and regularly makes it clear that while she lays claim to titles like "The Breaker of Chains" she actually isn't interested in offering freedom.  She wants to be seen as a liberator, but she demands perfect subservience from everyone around her and total personal loyalty.  People should be free, she thinks, but what freedom means is simply "Have no other master other than Daenerys."

Dany 'saves' people occasionally, no doubt.  But she saves them without any idea of the consequences of her actions, and her expectation afterwards is perfect obedience and adulation.  Simply put, Dany sees herself as the natural and righteous ruler of the world.  When any power structure is destroyed she is happy because it means that more of the world is falling under her sway, and she is closer to the absolute power she thinks she deserves.  When she saves someone she thinks she is doing them a favour - the favour of being ruled by Dany instead of someone else.  Most people think of being saved as being given more freedom, more security, or a otherwise better life.  Dany doesn't think that, because they only thing that makes the world better, in her mind, is her controlling more of it.

Just look at how the whole thing with her rescuing Mirri Maz Duur from a rape goes down: Dany assumes that because she rescued Mirri Maz Duur that she is owed eternal loyalty and love.  Mirri Maz Duur, of course, remembers that the army that Dany showed up with raped and murdered her entire family, destroyed their homes, and enslaved them.  And then she was 'rescued' by being taken forcefully by her oppressors as a servant.  No wonder she strikes back when given the chance!

Daenerys is a delusional, murderous, megalomaniacal tyrant.  The fact that Varys and Tyrion, among others, could not see this is mostly a function of their own racism, and the fact that they really didn't see the suffering in foreign nations as important compared to the suffering of people in Westeros.  They saw her being a force for destruction and evil but hoped that she would suddenly stop when she arrived amongst white people... and she did not.  I wasn't surprised in the slightest, and they shouldn't have been either.

It was honestly funny to me that people complained about this turn of events as though it was impossible to predict.  Dany has been written and acted in such a way as to foreshadow this throughout the show.  Just watch how often Tyrion tries to convince her that she shouldn't use her dragons to burn King's Landing, and how she consistently ignores that line of reasoning.  She doesn't say "Of course burning a city with dragons is a heinous crime!  I would never do such a thing!"  She stares icily, and makes it clear that she would *love* to burn the city with her dragons, but just maybe if people beg and grovel enough she might forgo that pleasure.

Because she is the rightful ruler, and if she wants to burn a city, well, that is her perogative.  People only live because she allows it.

While Daenerys had a terrible time of it in many respects, she has always been a villain.  Many people were hoping that she was the one truly good person in a world of moral ambiguity, (again, way too strongly influenced by her whiteness) but that has never been borne out by her words or actions. 

Face it.  Daenerys is one of the great villains of Game of Thrones.  Just because she occasionally struck back at men for their sexist behaviour or ruthlessly murdered evil people doesn't change that.  Just because she is pretty and white doesn't make her pure.  Her suffering, appearance, and gender do not qualify her for Team Good status.

When Dany burned King's Landing I nodded to myself and thought "Yep, that sure was always going to happen."  You don't have to like it, but this was coming right from the beginning.