Big rant of mine over Daenerys. I don't hate her or particularly dislike her, but I think she needs a big dose of reality and to be knocked off her high horse:
A lot of the frustration and resistance to Dany is actually resistance to the idea that her ultimate success is being sold (by Martin [possibly misleadingly on his part], by her fans, what have you) as inevitable. I for one highly dislike the idea of anyone being on an unswerving, inevitable path to ultimate glory because 1. it undermines the urgency of the story, because "well we all know what's going to happen" and 2. it puts Dany's story arc in the hands of some kind of — unearned, unappreciated — godlike power. It doesn't matter how much Dany screws up, how stupidly she behaves, how much cruel and unusual punishment she dishes out, how many enemies she makes or how many deaths she's responsible for, because in the end none of it will matter. The "higher powers" will take care of everything, and she's just along for the ride. That just leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth.
I think there's a distinction between "liking" Dany as a person and "liking" what GRRM is doing with her character from a literary standpoint. Since AGOT, we've been looking at Dany solely through her eyes, relying on her personal likeability (comparatively) and the reactions of those around her (Jorah, Barristan, etc.) to "push" our views of her one way or the other, while seeing all of this in a cultural milieu that heavily prejudices the reader in favor of Dany (and those that follow her) and against pretty much everyone else she encounters in Essos. It's not until ADWD that we really start to realize how incredibly one-sided this whole narrative has been from the start, how heavily GRRM has been utilizing the "unreliable narrator" to mold Dany's arc, how many things we can read into her thoughts and actions that weren't always readily apparent in earlier books.
On the one hand, ADWD is the time when I most disliked Dany as a person. But on the other hand, ADWD also highlighted and clarified a number of the rather brilliant literary devices GRRM has actually been using all along with this character, and it casts a really fascinating light both on her previous actions and on the road ahead.
Basically, ADWD is the book that made me want to smack Dany for being terrible but hug GRRM for making her terrible in such a fascinating way.
Dany never actually was a "super competent girl genius". That's the whole point---she looked incredibly competent in the first three books simply because all of her adversaries were supremely incompetent. The tactics that seemed so brilliant at first---cheating the Astapori out of an Unsullied army and then slaughtering the Astapori nobility, "Dracarys!", freeing all the slaves so as to deprive the slavers of their armies---were "brilliant" only in the short term. ADWD is merely the point at which the inevitable consequences of Dany's actions finally started catching up with her: she now has a rather well-deserved reputation for treachery, so her word is mud and nobody believes she genuinely wants peace; setting an emissary's tokar on fire just added to her terrible reputation, cause really, what kind of person attacks an envoy?; and the same actions that allowed her to neutralize the slave armies of Astapor and Yunkai led to a situation where she's stuck with tens of thousands of useless hangers-on whom she cannot feed or protect from disease; etc., etc.
All of our other POVs are centered in Westeros, so we got multiple viewpoints on characters and groups of characters. With Dany, we spent the first three (and most of the fifth) books only seeing events from her perspective, so of course she was going to be portrayed in a positive light. But if we look at Dany's entire arc with a critical eye, certain discrepancies pop up even at the very beginning: for example, was she really as well-integrated into the Dothraki, and as well-respected by them, as she believed? Were her "great military victories" in Slaver's Bay a result of her natural military cunning, as Dany and her hangers-on believed, or were they the result of incompetent adversaries coupled with Dany's own appalling lack of foresight and judgment, as ADWD seems to show? Is being a Targaryen the answer to Dany's problems, or is it the root of those problems? Is Dany really "a dragon", as she desperately wants to believe, or is she merely an ordinary person who performed a magic ritual and started buying into her idiot brother's delusions?
She needs some real advisors, not Ser Jorah 'I'm in love with you and hate the Starks because they banished me for slavery' Mormont and Ser Barristan 'I have to help you win because all my life I've been so craven and foolish about everything and now you're my meal ticket' Selmy. As well, she really needs to start personally coming to terms with her flaws (which are on Joffrey/Aerys levels of bad) and definitely start paying for them more.
Tywin, Tyrion, Littlefinger, Varys, etc. have all done some truly spectacularly idiotic things, things which either led to their downfall or seem poised to lead to their downfall in the future. The idea that they've been portrayed as naturally "smarter" than Dany seems bizarre. Dany has never been taught how to rule, has never had a mentor to teach her to rule (the only advisor she ever had who ruled anything in his life was Jorah, whom she sent away right before declaring herself Queen of Meereen), and she hasn't even had the opportunity of watching another ruler (save Drogo, who wasn't exactly a good role model here). She's trying to rule a city when she 1) has never ruled anything in her life, 2) was never taught how to rule anything in her life, 3) has nobody around her who's ever ruled anything in their lives, and 4) has a superiority complex that's been consistently fed and ennabled by literally everyone around her.
The whole point is that anyone who was raised in exile by a delusional narcissist, who was never taught how to rule or play any political game, who believes her gut reaction is always the correct reaction because nobody ever calls her on her BS, and who surrounds herself with yes-men whose goals aren't always in line with hers, isn't just naturally going to succeed in ruling anything. She's not learning from her mistakes, not because she's somehow naturally stupid, but because she has nobody around her who's willing or able to point out those mistakes. If she had people like Donal Noye, Aemon Targaryen, LC Jeor Mormont, Mance Rayder, even freaking Ygritte---people to smack her down when she needed it---I doubt she'd be in the situation she's now in. But a major reason why she doesn't have these kinds of people is because you can't consider yourself the uber-special "blood of the dragon" and be willing to get smacked down by non-dragons.
She lost all right to the Iron Throne when she left it (even as an infant). Dany has perhaps unknowingly settled her own case in this regard, based on a plea she heard in Meereen. A woman whose family had been killed when Dany sacked the city had to flee her house and take shelter with her brother. After she left, the house was turned into a brothel. Dany refused to give the house back to her because she lost the rights to it when she left it. Based on Dany's logic, she lost the rights to Westeros when her family left it. But the rules she sets for others don't apply to her, apparently. Because dragons.
Dany thinks she'll be the savior of Westeros. But why would any readers ever believe she's correct in that assumption? Because that's the role someone in her position would take in a traditional cliche fantasy novel? Because beauty = goodness in this series? Because dragons have anywhere been portrayed as saviors, rather than as purveyers of destruction? Because GRRM has actually shown Dany having a good grasp on the principles of justice (nope), because GRRM has portrayed her as a keen political operator (uh, no), or because GRRM has given her troops that have been well-seasoned in the same conditions, military-wise and weather-wise, that they'll face in Westeros (nope)?
This is what I mean when I say I admire the literary techniques GRRM has used in crafting this character. We only ever see her from her own POV---imagine if we only saw Cersei's journey since AGOT through her POV. Nothing from the Starks, Tyrion, Davos, Jaime, or anyone else in Westeros---if everything in Westeros had been filtered through Cersei's POV from the beginning, I suspect Cersei'd look a hell of a lot better to readers than she does now. Dany believes she's a beautiful, wise, blessed, righteous, and eternally put-upon Queen. But a closer reading points us in very different directions. Dany can be seen as a stubborn, imperious, delusional child with uncontrollable WMDs and a messiah complex. She believes she has superhuman abilities that she objectively does not possess. She's superficial, naive, paranoid, vicious, and impulsive. She doesn't have the cultural knowledge, political skills, or military acumen that would point to "inevitable" success in Westeros, and she doesn't have the tools, ability, or time to compensate for that lack. And we only know this about her through a close reading of her chapters. If we believe Dany herself, she's wonderful. But the point is that we're not supposed to blindly accept what our unreliable narrator tells us about how awesome and superhuman and clever she is.
We've spent four books watching her try---and fail---to fulfill the role of savior. I think it's becoming more and more obvious that GRRM hasn't been selling Dany's success as inevitable. Quite the opposite, in fact. I think if we actually look at everything Dany's done, GRRM appears to have been painstakingly outlining exactly why she's going to fail in conquering and ruling Westeros. In fact, sort of why she's not a player in the Game of Thrones, and why she's not a heroine, but a budding villainess.
Personally, I think she'll end up either dead, humiliated in Essos (but with a new lease on life where she doesn't have to be a queen or a conqueror, which should be good, considering the people of Essos are likely going to want to destroy her), or as the hot consort of whoever actually wins the Game of Thrones. If she's truly fortunate I suppose, she might end up with a reinstated House back on Dragonstone, though that would require Stannis being killed, and we can't have that. Granted, I highly suspect that whatever's left of Westeros will just be a wasteland overrun with Others and Wights.
Guest_simfamUP_*
Retour en haut
