Mallory “Mother of Dragons” Rubin: Another week, another slew of baffling decisions from our girl, Daenerys Stormborn. For someone who’s got most of the grown men in Westeros and Essos soiling their underthings in fear, Dany has made her share of questionable calls, most recently publicly executing a freed slave who defied her orders. She sparked a riot in the process, reminding us that as good as she is at some things (like looking smokin’ hot and feeding CGI dragons), she’s bad at plenty of others. But what is she worst at? Glad you asked!
You’d think someone sporting the moniker “Mother of Dragons” would be the poster girl for parenting, but you’d be wrong. Though Dany has collected children (in human and critter form) by the thousands, her maternal instincts have proven to be deviously unreliable. After losing her human baby due to a botched blood magic bargain, she let her dragons go on an open-air feeding frenzy, trying so hard to be the cool mom who lets her kids sneak a beer or two in the backyard that she accidentally allowed Drogon to barbecue a human child. Then, she overcompensated by chaining Rhaegal and Viserion in the catacombs of Meereen; she couldn’t lock up Drogon because he was on the lam, cruising the skies of Slaver’s Bay, looking for another score. Now, Dany’s hordes of adopted offspring have stopped lovingly shouting “Mhysa” (Ghiscari for “Mother”) and started hissing in horror at her beheading betrayal. For those counting at home, that’s death, imprisonment,
abandonment, and abuse.
Dany has proven that her military game is on point, assembling a lethal and loyal army and expertly conquering cities where unsavory acts occur. She’s also the envy of countless sad sacks like Viserys, who know she has what they never will: the love of her people. Unfortunately, she kind of blows at every other aspect of governance. She lost the bulk of her khalasar because they sensed weakness. She led her remaining subjects into dehydration and despair, then “rescued” them by leading them to eventual mass slaughter inside the gates of Qarth (where she also allowed a creepy warlock with blue lips to steal her dragons). She failed to install a system for maintaining the new order in Yunkai, which reverted back to a chaotic terror state as soon as she skipped town. And now she can’t keep the peace in Meereen, despite actually staying there after dropping her badass “I will do what queens do; I will rule” line in Season 4.
Also, she really needs to beef up her background checks: Jorah ratted her out to King Robert; Doreah betrayed her in Qarth; and now her three most trusted advisers are a freed slave, a sellsword, and the former lord commander of Robert’s Kingsguard. Worse, she’s giving John Kerry a run for his money in the flip-flopping department, succumbing to the whims of the moment, failing to maintain consistency with her policy, diplomacy, and even her own personal goals. Wasn’t she supposed to be, you know, heading to Westeros to reclaim her rightful throne? Jorah was right when he told Dany she has a gentle heart; the question now is whether the thing that helped her win some thrones will cost her a chance at the only one that matters.
Dany. Girl. Can we have some real-talk time? About that hot piece of knighted hunkery who’s been waiting for you to liberate him from friend-zone purgatory for lo these many moons? When George R.R. Martin told your tale on the printed page, he made Ser Jorah Mormont a hideous ogre so that you would be less tempted to let him handle your dragon eggs (if you know what I’m saying, and I think you do). When Sers Benioff and Weiss brought your journey to the small screen, however, they cast Iain Glen, who has a jaw like an anvil, inflects like a Siren, and would have surely made sweet love to you all across the Red Waste. But you spurned his delicate advances, opting instead for that rogue Daario, who is admittedly quite dreamy, and who says awesome things like “a man cannot make love to property,” but who is not, you know, a suave middle-aged Scottish man who’s so committed to you that he passed up a royal pardon granting his return to Westeros so that he could continue gawking adoringly at you during your desert camping trip. Think on it. And please, let him return from exile. He’s sorry!
To be fair: Dany’s love life was going just fine, thank you very much, until Drogo’s pectoral wound morphed from “a scratch” into a stinking, festering harbinger of death. And to be fair once more: Dany’s heart was in the right place when she asked Mirri Maz Duur to treat her ailing Sun and Stars. Still, the Khaleesi’s good intentions can’t erase the foolishness of putting the Maegi who’d just been raped and captured by the Dothraki in position to do their Khal harm, nor the unrivaled idiocy of letting the same witch use blood magic to attempt to “save” the man she’d just tried to surreptitiously kill. If only Dany hadn’t been traveling during her Obamacare open-enrollment period!
The flip side, of course, is that if Dany had used some Essos-brand Neosporin and Band-Aids instead, Drogo wouldn’t have died, Dany and her eggs wouldn’t have wound up cooking in the Khal’s funeral pyre fire, and this story wouldn’t have any dragons. And then where would we be?
from GRANTLAND
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