#LIKE GIRL WHAT. GIRL WHAT. he is treating you badly what the fuck. or EUGH

[malyen0retsev]

hi! as someone who IS a daenerys fan, can i ask why you haven't thought she would end up on the iron throne (both in the books and the show)? because i know your answer won't be 'because i don't like her' - i'd be interested to hear your thoughts!

It boils down to two things, fundamentally, and this will be a long reply (I’m not sorry haha) - those two things are What Targaryen rule represents and The Long Night. Both of these are important as to why I hold this view, and they’re sort of intertwined (to an extent tbh). So, I’ll attempt to break these hella complicated things down! Btw - the show endgame? The way they did that? Bullshit bullshit. That will not be how it goes down in the books.

Daenerys is not her father. We know this, and anyone with an ounce of sense knows this from both the books and the show. She is tough, she is fierce, but she is also kind hearted, caring, very loving (and in the books she shows this a lot! She is always hugging and physically touching those she cares about to reassure them. She shows this love and care in every single way she can). She is not her brother (be it Viserys or Rhaegar, because yeah, Rhaegar was better than Viserys, but he was also… relatively shady, to say the least). She is good. In TWOW we will see her go through a dark arc, but she’ll come through the other side of it. I cannot reiterate enough she is good. She is not the sort of person who would ever torch a city ‘just because’. That isn’t Dany. 

However. Whilst we the audience know and understand that Dany is good, you have to zoom out for bigger context here. In a story where politics is incredibly important, and the great Houses are incredibly important, simply saying ‘someone is good’ isn’t… enough. Daenerys is, for all her goodness, kindness, and lack of similarity to her father, still a Targaryen. Targaryen rule in recent years, still in the very near memory for the Westerosi represents tyranny. It represents War. It represents a Northern girl who was abducted (yes Lyanna may have loved Rhaegar but her age makes it very iffy about her say in it), it represents her father and brother who rode south and were burnt and strangled to death, it represents the great Houses banding together to overthrow Targaryen rule. It cannot be stated enough how much the show simplified Robert’s rebellion. Lyanna’s abduction was sort of the cherry on top of the cake for tipping Westeros into open rebellion against the Targaryens. There was discontent, and hatred, stirring for years. Lyanna was the final thing that tipped it over. 

Add in the fact that in the books, it is highly highly likely that f!Aegon will have got there first, and he will be (to all intents and purposes to the people) a Targaryen, and a Targaryen who will likely bloody blow up King’s Landing… Daenerys represents a continuation of that sort of rule. The common people are already fairly ‘eugh’ towards Targaryen rule, and when she comes in after f!Aegon, that ‘eugh’ will have turned to palpable dislike. She is different. Yes. She is not a tyrant. But because she is a Targaryen, she still represents the tyranny of Targaryen rule. She represents a going backwards, not forwards. 

There is a reason the North, for example, is boiling over at this point in the books in a complex plot to overthrow the Boltons and bring back the Starks. Their loyalty was to Ned Stark and he is gone. But under the Starks, the North has known kindness, compassion, and good rule. To the North, that is what the Stark name represents. They may have no personal affiliation to House Stark, but the name means something. And unfortunately, in Daenerys’ situation, her name means something too. It just doesn’t mean a good thing. 

Let’s try and flip this into a modern day context that most of us on here could agree with - look at the USA, and the Republican Party. Most of us on here would agree with ‘ABSOLUTE TRASHBAGS’. Now, say a new leader of the Republican Party came along, and was genuinely a good, kind person. Someone who embodied Lincoln, a President most people think was a good President. Would you be sceptical and still not want them? It’s highly likely, yes. Because at the end of the day, what the Republican Party stands for will always hit harder than what an individual stands for. So, to go back to Daenerys - she is good. She is kind. She personally represents a new age. But because she is a Targaryen, who are intrinsically tied to a past age, and not only that, but a tyrannical age, she physically cannot represent that to Westeros. Yes, my analysis may be off here, but that’s how I see it.

As for The Long Night. 

I have long believed Dany would die in the Battle against the Dead. You see it in the House of the Undying, where she turns away from the throne to go North, beyond the Wall. And there, she meets Rhaego and Drogo again. Why the hell the show threw away all this symbolism I do not bloody know. To me, Dany’s arc has never actually been about Targaryen restoration - yes, for the massive paragraphs written above, but also because I have personally always read Dany’s arc as much much closer tied to that of slavery.

Dany has been sold as a slave. She was sold to Khal Drogo, and raped, and was essentially a slave. Yes, she was lucky in the sense she did fall in love with him, and as far as Khals go, Drogo was very very different to other Khals - but that doesn’t remove the fundamental point that she was sold as a slave. This personal knowledge of what it is to be sold, and bought, and treated like an animal, is what drives Daenerys into the abolition of slavery in Slaver’s Bay. She has personal experience of it. She doesn’t want anyone else to go through what she has had to go through. She is good, she is kind, she knows what she stands for, and what she stands for is anti-slavery. 

Look at the Army of the Dead. In its most basic form, the Others are effectively slaves. They are the dead, brought back against their will, and enslaved into this massive army against their will. All agency is removed from them, and they are tied to this ‘life’ of killing and darkness by their slaver - the White Walkers. They represent everything Daenerys stands against. She will fight against them, not simply to ensure Jon supports her, but because that is who she is. And they represent what she wants to remove from the world. 

I also think, unfortunately, the Nissa Nissa prophecy of Jon piercing Lightbringer through Dany’s heart will come true in the books - but I cannot stress enough how the context will be different. They will love each other in the books, and the R+L=J thing will be about Jon, not about destabilising Dany. Jon will be reborn as Azor Ahai, and in order to forge Lightbringer and end the Long Night, Azor Ahai has to plunge it through the heart of the one he loves most - and that is Daenerys. But it won’t be sneaky, or downright disgusting like in the show. If I know Jon and Dany’s characters like I think I do in the books, the two of them will have a downright argument about it. They will love each other, so so much, and Jon will not want to do it. It will be Dany’s choice to sacrifice herself. Yes, she will die, but the context will make it so so different. It won’t be murder. She will view it as this was her final purpose - giving up her life to free the entirety of Westeros from a tyrannical form of slavery. Because Dany’s arc is tied to slavery. For her to die in defeating the ultimate form of slavery, and choose to do so… it fits. It also makes Jon’s potential end of exile to the Wall believable, because I think Jon would choose to do so. Killing Daenerys, even though she will ask him to, will fuck him up so badly that he will actively choose to remove himself from society again. 

So to draw all of this to a close - I have never thought Dany would sit on the Iron Throne, because the connotations of Targaryen rule represent moving backwards, not forwards, however much she is a good, kind, person. But more fundamentally than that, I have always thought she would die in the War for Dawn. So she wouldn’t sit on the Iron Throne, because she would be dead. But the book context will be so so different - and it will be heartbreaking, but in a way we can actually live with, because it will be Dany being true to who she is right to the very end. Putting her people before herself, and ending slavery. That’s who Dany is. 

Thanks for the ask!

#asks #asoiaf #got #game of thrones #I KNEW THIS WOULD BE LONG BUT I DIDN'T MEAN IT TO GET THIS LONG SORRY #anyway #this is just my opinion #daenerys targaryen #meta

[unproduciblesmackdown]

@merkleymrack yeah the jeremy renner parallel continues because i don’t think his writing is horrible or anything, but it’s like. not That good and imo really overhyped. like, i’ve always found it Readable for sure because there’ll be good moments mixed in and like, usually suspense enough to power through, but there’s kind of repetitive Underwhelming Elements where it’s like, could you have tried harder here? been a little more creative?? it’s part of why i feel like plenty of stuff would be better as short stories. that, and i’ve read a short story of his that i liked better overall than novels of his. and yet the short story Still dragged on too long also, sooooo many “twenty bucks says it’s self-insert” moody lonely cishet dude protagonists. and he writes women unsurprisingly badly iirc and like, wild that his first novel was So all about women but also like, yeah that makes sense. all these high school girls are Bitches and/or Stupid and everyone just keeps absolute handfuls of menstrual supplies on hand in the locker room and has anyone in their life referred to using a tampon as “plug(ging) it up”?? was that a thing whenever stephen king was in college? anyways and then there’s the Nice Girl and the Nice Mom-Type Teacher and the Crazy Woman and carrie self-destructs. i question his commentary on misogyny and overall i’d probably drop a lot of my grudge here if he didn’t write women like he does for example the first book of his i read (like a whole decade ago or so) was salem’s lot? not The most popular i guess and it’s like, a vampire comes to a small town and the isolation / insular nature of said small town means that like, it just picks people off one by one and nobody notices b/c it’s just treated like scandals that people will whisper about but not really do anything about. which like, there’s the usual somewhat interesting premise, (also Protagonist being like, haunted by something he saw as a kid that freaked him out and idk what the parallels there were or weren’t) but god it’s a really long one and it really dragged on. and the ending was underwhelming for as long as it was. and anyways one of my main annoyances was that Moody Lonely Protagonist Man meets some helpful understanding supportive Woman Love Interest and she sparks his interest in life some more and they just up and fuck in the middle of a yard or something at some point (weird unnecessary sex scenes are also a usual feature once or twice a book when the protag is a moody lonely protagonist, but if he’s married it’s like “yeah the sex was alright but also just kind of hollow and routine and [weird descriptions of bodies]” but here it was like, oh she’s attractive and younger and this is so great for my morale!! and then like a chapter later this love interest lady ventures helpfully into the vampire nest mansion and gets caught and then protagonist man eventually ventures in too and she’s a vampire and he has to stake her and is so sad about it. and i was like, christ this sucks and not in the way i’m meant to think it sucks. and i’ve never known his writing of girls / women to get better or more complex (or of guys....or of....like, the story.....) and i didnt read anything else of his for like half a decade cuz i was hardly bowled over, but one summer i was just reading a lot and Giving Things A Shot at my local library so i read a handful all at once. which included like, carrie (fine), misery (eh), the shining (alright) and pet sematary (maybe my favorite that i read? but wild of him, when he’s usually perfectly satisfied to repeatedly write about vague lore like “this hotel is a malicious and sentient entity” and “there is a god in this cornfield that demands sacrifice” and etc, to just carve up his own terrible understanding of Ooh Indigenous Cultures’ Spirituality....Spooky) and maybe one or two more. evidently readable enough for me to power through, but not even enjoyable enough that i wanted to continue from there, and to this day i’m like, well there’s sure worse things to read, but i’d rather pick something i’d Enjoy More than all this stuff with his repeated exasperating plot elements and the same man over and over and over obviously i was kind of going for his Better Known shit cuz i figured that’d give me the best sampling (i’ve seen carrie and the shining but that’s all movie-wise, i think) but It is so fucking long and i was remembering dragging myself through salem’s lot like eugh no thanks, i’d have to Really want to read that to power tf through. and then i definitely ended up just too unimpressed after all of that. and then once on twitter a mutual was talking about his books including that one and said something about “interesting take on childrens sexuality” and i was like oh god i. what does that. oh god [my impression of his œuvre flashing through my mind] and did Not look into it until i assume whenever it was that that first remake came out and someone brought up What Specifically That Meant and i was like [deep breath] [my loudest continuous scream ever] and i’d punch him over that. and whichever editors were like yep alright let’s get this printed. christs Fucking sake like yeah there’s enough decent stuff in his books to make them readable and like, he can build suspense (or at least have suspenseful scenes) and enough momentum that it can be enough to get through the shit that just drags on and the moments that are like, for gods sake. it’s not like, sheer torture or complete regret by any means, but i also wouldn’t say it’s Must Reads or really recommend anything to anyone with any enthusiasm beyond “well parts of it will be somewhat enjoyable i’m sure” and he sure doesn’t deserve to be like, *The* Horror Writer for sure. i read stuff as a kid that like, i probably wouldnt find as impactful now, but that i still think involves better horror. shoutout to john bellairs. totally just gonna compile a Haters List lmfao like, im always bad at thinking of stuff off the top of my head but there’s all these people who i just immediately go UGHH goddd about & could go off on a decent annoyed rant about on a dime with enough pettiness to make it fun.