RE: Is Daenerys Targaryen a villain?
May 30, 2016 at 5:27 am
(This post was last modified: May 30, 2016 at 5:28 am by Homeless Nutter.)
I think she's a villain - whether she means to be one, or not. Nobody is ever truly a villain in their own narrative.
She has an army of Hun-like barbarians and fire breathing dragons, she plans to unleash on unsuspecting people of Westeros, so that she can sit on a chair. She's cold-hearted (watched her nuisance of a brother getting killed, without batting an eyelash), deceitful ("sold" the dragon to the slavers, then had it burn them) and willing to do pretty much anything to achieve her goals. She's also emotionally scarred and quite self-obsessed.
G.R.R. Martin is anti-war, I think it would be pretty hypocritical of him, or at least uncharacteristic of his work to present a warring princess as the hero of the story. Both Daenerys and Jon Snow are war-mongers, so I expect that their actions will bring more suffering to the world.
The actual heroes of ASOIAF/GOT are probably characters like Varys and Davos, perhaps Brienne - people consequently operating somewhat in the background and motivated by certain values and long-term goals, like peace for Varys, law for Davos, or honor for Brienne, rather than personal vendettas. I'm not all that sure about the Maid of Tarth, since her search for honor seems to align quite suspiciously with her personal vendetta and also G.R.R. Martin showed pretty early on, that honor is something of a handicap in his universe - just look at what happened to Ned Stark.
She has an army of Hun-like barbarians and fire breathing dragons, she plans to unleash on unsuspecting people of Westeros, so that she can sit on a chair. She's cold-hearted (watched her nuisance of a brother getting killed, without batting an eyelash), deceitful ("sold" the dragon to the slavers, then had it burn them) and willing to do pretty much anything to achieve her goals. She's also emotionally scarred and quite self-obsessed.
G.R.R. Martin is anti-war, I think it would be pretty hypocritical of him, or at least uncharacteristic of his work to present a warring princess as the hero of the story. Both Daenerys and Jon Snow are war-mongers, so I expect that their actions will bring more suffering to the world.
The actual heroes of ASOIAF/GOT are probably characters like Varys and Davos, perhaps Brienne - people consequently operating somewhat in the background and motivated by certain values and long-term goals, like peace for Varys, law for Davos, or honor for Brienne, rather than personal vendettas. I'm not all that sure about the Maid of Tarth, since her search for honor seems to align quite suspiciously with her personal vendetta and also G.R.R. Martin showed pretty early on, that honor is something of a handicap in his universe - just look at what happened to Ned Stark.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw
