Chapter Text
INTRODUCTION
I must admit that my engagement with ASOIAF has been, to put it generously, rather idiosyncratic. I've only read it once: I have to be honest, I never went back for a re-read. What's more, I only read the POV chapters of Daenerys Targaryen and a handful of others.
Finally, I only read it years after the series had ended.
This hasn't stopped me from mulling over various aspects of it, though.
First of all, I should say I rarely read anything so depressing, sad and anxiety-inducing. I did some digging and realised that this feeling of depression and anxiety — two things that, incidentally, are fairly closely linked — isn't just mine: it's an experience other readers have had too. Indeed, online there's a whole anthology of people who find Miss Targaryen's narrative arc deeply unsettling.
But the question remains: why? How does this happen?
This short piece is an attempt to dig into that very mystery.
I.
Firstly, I realised that while reading it I was taking one thing for granted: that Dany is one of the broadly "good" characters.
In reality, rivers of ink have been spilled on the question of good and bad in ASOIAF, precisely because it's a story built around morally grey characters. But here too we perhaps ought to stop and ask ourselves some questions, because, as we know, what is familiar is not necessarily understood. So let's ask: what is a "grey" character? If we were to give a definition, it's one who can — and does — harm innocents for reasons that, within the bounds of their own worldview, are meant to strike the audience as rationally necessary. Indeed, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (The Americans) are an absolute paradigm of this kind of character. And, predictably, even with P&E the definition falls apart, because "coming across as rationally necessary" is a subjective judgement. There are, in fact, those who consider P&E entirely villainous.
But this is where we find the source of the anxiety: we read Dany and want her to be good — after all, she's a likeable, endearing young woman, and on top of that Martin puts her through horrendous ordeals, so how could one not grow attached to her? At the same time, though, we know we're in a narrative universe populated by grey characters as defined above: the tension lies in hoping she doesn't cross a certain line. What's more, since that line is subjective, each of us hopes Martin won't have her do that particular thing which, for us personally, would make her unforgivable — the point beyond which we'd stop rooting for her. And moreover, when Dany does something that comes dangerously close to that line, we at least hope she'll have a thought along the lines of: "yes, I did it, but I deeply regret it. Because if something must be done, it must be done, but I'm very sorry I had to do it; I certainly take no pleasure in it."
This is, above all, an extremely powerful narrative device, because it glues the reader to the page through suspense. It's the model of potential downfall. In essence, Dany could be a positive character who ultimately falls. Since it's unthinkable that she reaches Westeros, takes the throne, and then "they all lived happily ever after," it's obvious she doesn't take the throne. But the question is how she doesn't take it. Because I see two possibilities:
either she makes an enormous renunciation — a sacrifice, even of her life — to save Westeros from a greater threat, thereby losing the throne for good;
or she does something so terrible that the others, the truly good ones, kill her. This is what happens in the series.
II.
The one certainty I had is that if we're looking for a work, or a moment, in which George R.R. Martin's morality is absolutely unambiguous, we have to look at Armageddon Rag, where justice is clear-cut. But it's also a work that’s generally considered a critical failure: the final revelation was judged by critics to be inadequately set up.
This left Martin, with ASOIAF, at an impasse.
On one hand, he wanted to continue his social and moral critique; on the other, he wasn't satisfied with the techniques he'd used in AR. What was his solution? To use an entirely different tool: ambiguity. In essence, Martin no longer provides the interpretive key to the character; he lets readers split off and clash with one another based on their own personal inclinations and biases.
Indeed, so far, in the books she never commits the ultimate crime; but at the same time, regarding her worst crimes, Dany never says either "I did it and I'm horrified by myself" or "I did it and I'm proud of it." Precisely: the text almost always presents a structural ambiguity: Martin is extremely careful never to let us know whether Dany is genuinely empathetic, a true believer in the Elizabeth Jennings mould, or a narcissist. And bear in mind these are POV chapters — so we're inside her head. The steady undertone Martin maintains throughout the text is one of ambiguity.
III.
From this, then, we reach the end of A Dance with Dragons without knowing. And be warned: it's possible that even if we get to read the last page of A Dream of Spring, the ambiguity still won't be resolved.
What would happen — again, remember AR? — is what has already happened with Rhaenyra and Alicent, namely a readership split into two factions: for some, the good one (or the less bad one) is the leader of the Greens; for others, it's the leader of the Blacks. Indeed, this thesis has a certain appeal: Martin is a writer who loves "the heart in conflict with itself" (as Faulkner put it), so ambiguity is the message. We cannot know, and that's the truth of it.
However, there's a caveat. Whereas with Rhaenyra and Alicent it's a matter of taste, with Daenerys the question is far more political and sociological. In other words, Rhaenyra and Alicent aren't contemporary political archetypes — they're dynastic figures within a fictional medieval setting, and the debate over them stays confined to factional loyalty (Greens vs Blacks), not to a project for society. Dany, by contrast, embodies an ideology: liberation, breaking the chains, revolution from above, punitive justice. That's why the audience doesn't split — or shouldn't have split — merely over "who do I like more," but over "what do I think about revolution." And this is what makes her a politically dangerous character: she forces the reader to take a position on real issues (abolitionism, interventionism, decolonisation, the use of force for good).
And so here we find a contradiction within Martin's own intentions, given how much he detests what I'd call "revolutionary rigorism" — Martin is a champion of moral relativism when it comes to punishing evil, and we see this in his treatment of the "righteous anger" behind Daenerys's crucifixion of 163 masters — it turns out, in the matter of "righteous anger," that it gets mocked within the text. Precisely: Martin finds this so important that he can't even wait for Dany to repent despite the practical and political consequences of those actions. Instead, he has her repent almost immediately, in real time.
Why?
IV.
In 1991, when George R.R. Martin began writing A Song of Ice and Fire, the feminism that has dominated public debate over the last twenty years didn't yet exist.
Of course, being a good progressive, Martin is an avowed feminist, but his nightmare is the American Seventies — that is, political radicalism. Neither in 1996, nor especially in 1991, could Martin have ever imagined:
that, twenty years on, there would be Game of Thrones;
that a new aura of feminism would emerge, one that turns figures like Daenerys Targaryen into a "girlboss";
that the actress cast to play Dany — Emilia Clarke, of course — would be someone who, however technically proficient she is, cannot come across as a villain because of her public image and perfect physique du rôle, unless the script spells it out for her in bright highlighter (and/or unless she herself knows she's playing a villain, which doesn't seem to be the case going by the evidence available). Let alone when we're dealing with a character who, as we've established, is deliberately built to be ambiguous.
V.
And yet, ambiguous... in that sense, yes, she certainly is. But we must always return to AR: Martin also writes Dany to critique revolution.
And the fact that the Game of Thrones audience sees Dany as a positive figure is simply one enormous misunderstanding. Indeed, had the first book come out ten years earlier (and here one might ask: could Martin have conceived of ASOIAF in 1980? A fascinating question, but one that would take us too far off track), the message would have come through loud and clear: Dany is a revolutionary. An Ananda Caine — the arch-villain of AR — with dragons.
But by 1996 it was too late: too much feminism in the air, and the troubled issues of the Seventies too far in the past, and so on — so that already very many readers had interpreted her as a positive character.
As a result, what was in itself an utterly clear message — a cautionary tale against revolution, even though a revolutionary character in a Middle Ages/Late Antiquity setting could only present herself in the guise of an absolute sovereign, with Orientalist and quasi-divine overtones — took on, politically and sociologically, a different meaning: the audience, given the hermeneutic tools available to it at the time, could do nothing but read it instead as a feminist message against tradition.
But since Dany is an ambiguous character, the feminist reading has suffered a backlash that has split the fandom three ways.
In fact, no fewer than four factions have formed, three liberal and one radical (mine):
First liberal faction: readers who disliked Dany from the very first pages because they consider themselves cleverer than everyone else and, in their own telling, had already joined the dots. For them, Dany isn't a feminist but:
a revolutionary;
a white coloniser;
an imperialist;
a hypocrite (she talks of breaking chains but wants the throne for herself);
a narcissist;
Second liberal faction: Dany is a feminist heroine, but she went too far in exacting that blood price at Astapor, Yunkai and Meereen. Sure, she killed slavers, but she did it outside the bounds of civilised conduct. So she took exactly the extra step we'd hoped she wouldn't: we're fond of her, but our liberal superego forces us to feel guilty and to distance ourselves from her;
Third liberal faction: Dany is a feminist heroine, no question about it — the blood price at Astapor, Yunkai and Meereen is entirely acceptable, and anyone who criticises her is simply applying a double standard. In short, long live Dany — BUT only because they read Dany as a feminist in the first place;
Fourth faction, the radical one: Dany the revolutionary, who would burn even the wealthy feminists — say, the Masters' wives, the truly emancipated bourgeois women of Essos — in the name of a yearning for justice.
This is my own position when I put on my writer's hat (not so when I put on my politically engaged citizen’s hat, I should clarify) — and this is why, as the saints who read my fan fiction already know, for me Dany IS a positive figure – in the sense that I consider her a basically morally decent, profoundly empathic person in a terrible situation. Precisely because I understand the enormous potential of the grey character, I understand Dany's emotional turmoil when faced with certain choices she's forced into under a state of necessity, choices nonetheless made out of empathy — otherwise she wouldn't be a grey character at all.
EPILOGUE
When one decides to step outside the text — as I have done — to start picking apart authorial or political intentions, one takes a risk. Quite a considerable one.
But at the same time, to expect that Martin might, at some point, transform into a bard of revolution is misplaced. Every author has their own timing and their own truths. Writing is, without a doubt, a technical act. It demands adherence to a set of binding rules, to a grammar and a structure. And yet, it isn't only that. It's a profoundly rational act, but it's also, at the same time, the manifestation of an intimate will that flows within us and that always struggles somewhat to adapt to the binding form of narrative.
Ultimately, writing is, to all intents and purposes, a session of psychotherapy. It's a way of exploring oneself. On this point, Stephen King wasn't wrong at all when he said that writing is an act of inquiry into one's own soul, one that must spontaneously bring one's own substance out into the ineluctable form of storytelling — so that the unconscious presents itself within the story in the full truth of its conscious form.
This is why I believe the risk I took was ultimately worth it: my conclusion, then, is that Martin says he loves ambiguity, that he wants to portray the heart in conflict with itself, that he doesn't want to give easy answers. But the unconscious, in writing, betrays him: Dany is written in such a way that her revolutionary project is systematically delegitimised, punished, made to look naive or counterproductive. Not because Martin decided to mount a critique of revolution, but because he hates revolution so profoundly that he cannot write a revolutionary without making them collapse into violence and self-destruction.
But of course, the reader is sovereign, and will judge for themselves.