The Mad Queen

"I am Daenerys Stormborn of the blood of Old Valyria, and I will take what is mine; with fire and blood I will take it."
--Daenerys Targeryen, Game of Thrones (season two, episode six)


Historically speaking, women have hardly been provided with the opportunity to commit the same acts of savagery men are often asssociated with due to millennia of fallacious social conditioning.  Thanks to asinine conservative traditions, brutality is expected from men (which is more misandrist than many of the ideas conservatives war against), while women are regarded as naturally innocent beings who must be sheltered from the violence of the world.  These sexist stereotypes invariably result in a great deal of emotional and even physical harm of men--after all, treating men brutally is erroneously seen as less severe than treating women brutally--but they also exempt women from a great deal of just criticism.

Men are not naturally prone to violence, and women are not naturally prone to peacefulness.  All of a person's behaviors reduce down to either expressions of individuality or submission to cultural conditioning [1]; logical necessity dictates that these are the only two legitimate causes of a person's actions.  An integral part of genuine feminism/egalitatianism is acknowledging that women are no less capable of injustice and cruelty than men are--something that Game of Thrones repeatedly affirms.  The most recent episode of the eighth and final season, titled The Bells, provides an enormous example of this when Daenerys Targeryen finally yields to genocidal impulses.

Daenerys, her true goal of her conquests already exposed as the personal acquisition of power, rides her dragon through the city of King's Landing as it indiscriminately burns civilians and soldiers.  The injustice of this is heightened due to the fact that King's Landing had already surrendered.  The bells of the city ring beforehand, signifying the surrender of her enemy's army--yet she proceeds to incinerate numerous people and structures anyway.  Even some of her most staunch allies observe in shock and horror as she openly acts exactly like the kind of tyrant she would claim to despise.

Aerys II Targeryen, Daenerys' father and the Mad King, only attempted to burn King's Landing, but his daughter actually does the deed.  It is not as if this snap came out of nowhere.  Daenerys was already a despicable tyrant by Biblical standards long before season eight of Game of Thrones, having demanded unjust forms of tortorous executions and thus proven herself a thorough hypocrite in earlier seasons.  Her massacre of the people of King's Landing was hardly out of character in one sense.  She might have had better motives than many in Westeros and Essos in earlier seasons, but she already deserved to die just as her former husband, as well as numerous other characters, did, even before her genocidal dragon ride.

Of course, Daenerys' descent into madness is not the first time that Game of Thrones has portrayed the abusive actions of women.  Jon Snow's girlfriend, Ygritte, attempted to murder him by repeatedly shooting arrows at him when he left her for the sake of protecting the realm.  Unnamed women sexually assaulted Theon Greyjoy by fondling his body without his consent while he was in a disoriented state of mind when he woke up after being confined by Ramsay Bolton, something that many people are too stupid to even identify as sexual assault.  Cersei Lannister has demonstrated many times that she is willing to do whatever is necessary to expand or solidify her power, no matter how unjust: she even blew up an entire building full of innocents.

There is not a single act of cruelty that a man can carry out that a woman cannot, and atrocities like illicit genocide, illicit torture, and sexual abuse [2] are no exceptions.  Both complementarians and egalitarians of the religious or secular kinds often stupidly ignore this truth at best, outright denying it at worst.  As shocking as seeing them might be for some, there is a need for far more examples of tyrannical women like Daenerys Targeryen in entertainment [3] precisely because far too many people are not intelligent enough to realize this fact on their own.

If anything, The Bells has at least given viewers an opportunity to see a major power within the world of entertainment acknowledge that no amount of patriarchal deception can change the fact that women, like men, can choose to commit the worst of sins.  A person's moral failings are not dictated by their gender, and contrary ideas are inherently, inescapably misandrist or misogynistic.  Consistent egalitarians (i.e., true egalitarians) do not pretend like one gender is naturally more oriented towards empathy or violence, for gender is irrelevant to the human capacity for destructive behaviors.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-alleged-differences-between-men-and.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/06/when-women-rape-men.html

[3].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-need-for-female-protagonists-and.html