purely for the sake of diplomacy, of course
it was up to a young princess to know these sort of things
But the most curious thing happened. You stayed.
SPOILERS THROUGH TO A DANCE WITH DRAGONS
eh, dany conquers and ‘liberates’ with no thought of long term effects. especially with astapor and yunkai, there’s no follow-through. ending slavery isn’t as simple as killing all the masters and saying hey congrats you’re free now woo bye. she just like…utterly destroyed their whole economy. free people still need to eat. you can’t just walk away from all that destruction claiming you’ve fixed the problem.
and people wonder later at all the refugees trailing after her (and dying) in the desert. well, yeah? what the heck else are they supposed to do? she didn’t give them many viable options for survival.
in ASOS, dany appoints new leaders to astapor, but they are quickly overthrown by cleon, who reinstates slavery (only as a reversal, with the former slaves as masters). wow good job, dany.
and then in meereen when she does try to follow-through on her actions, it’s the biggest clusterfuck of the entire series. she imposes her own moral standards and expectations onto an entirely different culture. she oppresses and denies cultural traditions. she tries to mold people into what she deems correct and is surprised when they rebel against her rule.
the whole thing is commentary on dany’s white saviour complex (which she DOES HAVE. am sick of seeing people trying to deny that when it’s the whole fucking purpose of the arc). throughout the books, dany tries over and over again to rescue the people of essos from themselves, from their culture. she sees it as her moral obligation, yet it fails every single time.
anyway. i still very much like dany as a character, but there’s no point in denying how wrong her actions become.
