During its eighth season, “Game of Thrones” has been doing its darnedest to make viewers question whether
Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains, is fit to rule the Seven Kingdoms. In
her recap, my Washington Post colleague Alyssa Rosenberg correctly noted, “ ‘Game of Thrones’ has committed itself to a fairly predictable path, one in which Dany falls prey to the hereditary strain of Targaryen madness.” And as a political scientist, I find some of the deck-stacking to be very silly.
Part of the challenge to Dany’s legitimacy is due to the discovery at the end of Season 7 that Jon Snow is actually not a bastard but rather the child of lawfully wed
Lyanna Stark and
Rhaegar Targaryen, and therefore the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. Bran and Samwell pieced the details together and then told Jon, who told Dany, Sansa, Arya and all of the wildlings still left in Winterfell as near as I can calculate.
There is more than just monarchical succession rules going on here, and this season has nudged in many not-so-gentle ways that perhaps Dany is not the right person to rule Westeros. There is the small matter of
her executing the leaders of House Tarly, which appalls Sam. There is her performance during the Battle of Winterfell, which was, how you say,
not good (though see
Slate’s Rob Farley for a defense of Dany). And finally, in the most recent episode, Dany’s advisers Varys and Tyrion debate whether Jon, because he does not seek the throne, might be the better ruler as a result.
This is certainly the conclusion that
Vox’s Zack Beauchamp draws after watching the latest episode. Beauchamp relies on
some recent political science research to argue that Dany is just the worst:
She’s a revolutionary, working to overthrow the Lannister dynasty and install a new government — one that is hostile to “tyrants,” as she says this episode — in its place.
The problem, though, is that this kind of revolution can often replace old tyrannies with new ones. ...
“The same characteristics that allowed revolutionaries to succeed in their domestic struggle,” [researchers Jeff Colgan and Jessica Weeks] write, “also make such leaders more likely to initiate international conflict once they have obtained office.”
Daenerys fits this pattern to a tee. A woman whose iron will and ruthlessness allowed her to rise to power on Essos, and to eventually win most of Westeros to her cause, she’s clearly an effective revolutionary. But that same will to power makes her unwilling to share it, and that same ruthlessness makes her willing to go to extreme lengths to punish her enemies. Any innocents who get hurt along the way are just collateral damage. ...
Daenerys’s behavior this episode — her impulsive dragon charge, her desire to burn King’s Landing before her advisers persuade her not to, her pleading with Jon about how the throne is hers and hers alone — sure suggests that she shouldn’t win this final war.
So, should Dany not sit on the Iron Throne?
First, let’s dispense with the obvious preferable outcome: no monarchy at all, just
an anarcho-syndicalist commune with lots of filth to strip-mine. Assuming that there has to be a monarch, our goal is to pick the best one. Beauchamp suggests that it should not be Dany. Here’s my question: Who is the better choice?
Is it Cersei? No, it is not Cersei. One could argue that her strategy has been pretty good this season, since she sat out the human-Night King war, which appears to have worked out pretty well for her. Of course, had the battle gone differently, she and hers would have been wiped out, so she seems lucky more than canny. More importantly, Cersei is far worse than Dany in terms of ruthlessness and wanton disregard for other human beings.
Is it Jon Snow? No, it is not Jon Snow. First, he does not want it, and no matter what people say, you have to want to rule to be any good at it. Second, Jon’s decision-making in recent seasons has been way worse than Dany’s. As Rosenberg pointed out in her recap, Jon’s decision to tell his siblings the truth was a questionable move: “He wants to maintain his old relationships even as he radically rewrites his origin story, and he wants his siblings to maintain their loyalty to a woman they have accepted as their queen even as he upends the legitimacy of her claim to the throne.” Jon always wants to do the right thing, and that is commendable, but he rarely, if ever, thinks things through to their logical conclusion. He has a Ned Stark-sense of strategy — there’s a reason he’s died once already. He would likely get stabbed by the Kingsguard at some point during his first year as ruler.
This does not leave a lot of attractive options.
Sansa Stark seems like she’s mature enough to do it, but Sansa has also displayed a narrow parochialism throughout this season. She has focused exclusively on the North to the point where she has failed to acknowledge Dany’s rather significant contributions to the defense of Winterfell. This is not a great recipe for someone to rule all seven kingdoms. And I think we can all agree that
Euron Greyjoy does not deserve it either.
As for Dany, I think she’s getting a bum rap from the writers and the viewers. There are
obvious ways to call her a neoconservative, but she has been way more successful at preserving her gains than the neocons. Despite considerable resistance, Dany successfully ended slavery in the free cities of Essos and put down rebellions with dispatch.
More importantly, Daenerys does not fit Beauchamp’s profile of a risk-loving revolutionary. If anything, she has acted in a more risk-averse fashion as she has acquired greater capabilities. She passed on crossing the Narrow Sea until she had an armada of overwhelming firepower. Rather than take King’s Landing by force, she decided — correctly — that the threat from the North was greater. She attempted to fashion an entente with Cersei to face the White Walkers.
I suspect the reason that Beauchamp and others have turned against Dany is that her first impulses do tend toward the violent — and we have seen those impulses in recent seasons. Unlike every other potential potentate in Westeros, however, Dany has also demonstrated a willingness to listen to her advisers — and, when they make mistakes, forgive them.
It is entirely possible that the writers will showcase Dany’s flaws even more in the last two episodes — one can see the strings being pulled more now than in the first few seasons of the show. All I am saying is that based on the evidence to date, if I had to choose a monarch among the rivals to the Iron Throne, I would choose Dany and not lose any sleep about the decision.
@ begging when you bringing together dudes that never agree, through means of your sheer stupidity...I’m sorry bro, but I dont need any help, when your arguments sole backbone is “i can argue whatever, simply because I ****** can and no one can tell me otherwise”
