r/HBOGameofThrones • u/WishRough7589 • 4h ago
No Spoilers [NO SPOILERS] Justice for Dany - Rant!
I’ve been rewatching Game of Thrones, and honestly, Tyrion repeatedly telling Daenerys, “You don’t want to be like your father,” is starting to really piss me off.
Every time she considers using power against people actively fighting her, Tyrion invokes Aerys. It stops being advice and starts feeling like psychological control. He keeps reducing her to her father’s bloodline, as though every firm decision she makes is evidence that madness is waiting inside her.
Meanwhile, almost every other character is allowed complexity and forgiveness.
Jaime has committed countless crimes, supported Cersei’s regime, fought against Daenerys, attacked Ned, pushed Bran from a tower and remained loyal to the Lannisters for years. Yet when he reaches Winterfell, Tyrion immediately asks Daenerys to forgive him because Jaime is his brother.
And she does.
Later, Tyrion releases Jaime from captivity against Daenerys’s orders because he wants Jaime and Cersei to escape together. That is direct betrayal. Yet Tyrion is still presented as the moral voice, while Daenerys is portrayed as unreasonable for no longer trusting him.
Tyrion constantly demands mercy when the person involved matters to him.
But when Daenerys executes the Tarlys—enemy commanders who betrayed their liege, fought against her, refused to surrender and refused the Wall—it becomes another sign that she is supposedly ruthless and becoming her father.
Jon executes Janos Slynt for refusing an order, and that is framed as necessary leadership. He hangs the men who betrayed him, including Olly, and nobody starts whispering that he has inherited some genetic madness.
Arya unalives an entire room full of Freys, and it is treated as a triumphant moment.
Sansa feeds Ramsay to his dogs, and the audience is expected to cheer.
Tyrion uses wildfire at Blackwater, unalives Shae and unalives his own father, but the story gives him pain, context and humanity.
Daenerys, however, is judged differently every single time.
Sam is another example. He discovers that Daenerys executed his father and brother and immediately decides she should not be queen and Jon should replace her. He is allowed to grieve, obviously, but Randyll was the same father who abused Sam, threatened his life and forced him to abandon his inheritance. Suddenly his fate becomes proof that Daenerys is unfit to rule.
Sam’s response was personal grief and anger, not an objective assessment of leadership. Yet the show treated it like moral clarity.
The hypocrisy is especially obvious when we compare Daenerys to Aegon the Conqueror. Aegon invaded Westeros with dragons, burned armies, destroyed castles and forced kingdoms to submit. History calls him the Conqueror and treats his ambition as legendary.
Daenerys arrives with dragons and wants to reclaim the same throne, and suddenly ambition itself becomes sinister.
Why is Aegon’s conquest an achievement, while Daenerys wanting power is treated as evidence that something is wrong with her?
Her ambition was not inherently evil. She had flaws, absolutely. She believed strongly in destiny, could be severe toward resistance and sometimes confused her personal claim with justice. That could have created an incredible tragic arc.
But the show did not properly develop that arc. Instead, it isolated her, took away almost everyone she loved, made her advisers repeatedly fail or betray her, and then used her reaction to all of it as proof that they had supposedly been right about her from the beginning.
That is what bothers me most.
Her advisers were not imagining threats. Tyrion protected his family over her interests. Varys openly plotted against her. Jon revealed information after promising not to. Sansa undermined her from the moment she arrived, despite Daenerys bringing armies and dragons north to save everyone.
Then the narrative called Daenerys paranoid for realizing she was surrounded by people who were actually betraying her.
None of this excuses what happened in King’s Landing. Unaliving civilians after surrender was indefensible. But that decision was written as a sudden transformation rather than the conclusion of a carefully developed fall.
Daenerys deserved accountability for that final act. She did not deserve to have everything good she had ever done retroactively dismissed as evidence of madness.
She freed enslaved people when there was no political advantage in doing so. She delayed her journey to Westeros to remain in Meereen. She locked away her dragons after one child was harmed. She took her armies north and risked everything to fight for people who did not trust or welcome her.
Her compassion was real.
Her accomplishments were real.
Her ambition was not evil simply because she openly wanted to rule.
A better tragedy would have shown a genuinely compassionate liberator gradually becoming convinced that her destiny placed her beyond restraint. Instead, the show seemed to say that the signs had always been there because she executed enemies, spoke confidently and wanted the throne.
By that standard, almost every ruler in Westeros should have been declared mad.
Justice for Daenerys does not mean pretending she was flawless. It means judging her by the same standards the story used for its male rulers—and acknowledging that the show destroyed years of character development to reach an ending it had not properly earned.
