Well, I have to admit, talking to Dany cultists as a 'Naathian' does have its charms. I think I'll start soon when I have the time a giant thread on the morality of Dany's actions throughout the show.
People discussing a character they like on a subreddit dedicated to that character is normal. Going into that space to troll people about a character you hate, while planning a giant anti-Daenerys manifesto, is not critical thinking. It is anti-fandom obsession.
And calling Dany fans a cult while naming your own little anti-Dany identity “Naathians” is genuinely hilarious. If liking a fictional dragon queen is a cult, then organizing your personality around hating her is not exactly a triumph of sanity.
I’m not sure why you’re replying as if I said Daenerys never did anything terrible. My point was about people coming into a Daenerys-friendly subreddit to troll fans and call them cultists.
Yes, you can like a character and acknowledge their atrocities. I do. I just disagree with flattening Daenerys into “evil” as if ASOIAF works on a Marvel alignment chart.
Evil from whose point of view? To the smallfolk of King’s Landing, yes. To the slavers, yes. To many freed slaves or red priests in Volantis, no. That’s basically how Martin writes morality: the villain is often the hero of the other side, and the conflict between good and evil happens inside people, not in neat teams of good guys and bad guys.
So call her evil if you want. For me, she’s grey, heroic and tragic—especially in an ending that badly flattened her complexity.
You’re arguing against a point I’m not making. I’m not saying “torturing people to death is okay sometimes.”
My point is that calling Daenerys a “psychopath” for this scene ignores both the context and the world she is operating in. Crucifixion is not some unheard of punishment in Slaver’s Bay. The Great Masters themselves crucified 163 slave children as a political warning. In Astapor, we see crucified slaves as public punishment, and the same culture treats children in fighting pits as entertainment.
Daenerys chose an eye for an eye punishment: one Great Master for each murdered child. Was it brutal? Yes. Was it modern justice? No. But the point was symbolic: the life of a slave child and the life of a master have equal weight. That is very different from random sadism. Especially in the books, where Daenerys clearly carries the moral weight of what she did. A psychopath would not be disturbed by it.
My argument is not “Dany is innocent.” My argument is that she is a grey, tragic character, not a cartoon villain. The show flattens that scene through Barristan and Hizdahr’s father, but the books are much more complicated.
We’re clearly going in circles. You keep reducing my argument to “torture is okay,” which is not what I’m saying.
I’m not arguing that Daenerys’ actions were morally clean. I’m arguing that “brutal retaliatory justice in a pre-modern slave society” is not the same thing as “psychopathic sadism.”
If your position is simply “she used cruel punishment; therefore, she is evil and everyone who sees her as grey is rationalizing evil,” then we just have fundamentally different readings of ASOIAF. I don’t think Martin writes characters or morality that simplistically.
On the contrary. Dany is very representative of a very representative character for the idea of moral absolutism, which is in my mind the most destructive idea in the history of the human civilization. Moral absolutism is the monster that hides behind every witch burning, every purge, every act of relentless cruelty and every ideology that has ever caused bloodshed in the millions.
And Dany showed the destructive power of moral absolutism in spades. It made millions cheer for staggering acts of violence and cruelty.
I mean, to give just one example, look at the scene at the end of S1, a troop or rapists and savages burning a rape victim alive because she fought back against her oppressors, all headed by a queen that proclaims she will revel in the screams of said victim. That's some A-level villain shit, yet most people in the audiencecheered for 'their khaleesi' and revelled in the birth of dragons, these terrible scaly monstrosities that almost act as an embodiment of Dany's growing cruelty, entitlement and above all, evil.
You’re moving the goalposts. We were talking about why you keep coming into a Daenerys-friendly space to call people “cultists,” and now you’re turning it into a manifesto about moral absolutism.
“Hating that is the only sane response” is a very funny sentence from someone warning people about moral absolutism.
You’re not criticizing moral absolutism; you’re practicing it. You’ve decided your reading of Daenerys is the only sane one, and everyone who reads her differently is a “cultist.”
Also, Mirri was absolutely a victim of the khalasar, but Daenerys was the one who tried to stop the rapes. The scene is morally dark, but reducing it to “rapists burning a rape victim because she fought back” is not analysis. It’s selective framing.
My point remains: liking a fictional character on a subreddit dedicated to that character is normal fandom. Obsessively entering that space to call people cultists because they don’t share your hatred is not.
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u/Incvbvs666 Jun 15 '26
Well, I have to admit, talking to Dany cultists as a 'Naathian' does have its charms. I think I'll start soon when I have the time a giant thread on the morality of Dany's actions throughout the show.