From Breaker of Chains to War Criminal

Published May 13, 2019 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hi Shat Hosts,

I just listened to the Instacast and I disagree strongly with some of what was said about Dany Targaryen. There is absolutely no reasonable argument in support of Dany’s decision to burn King’s Landing. She was not doing “what she had to do to win.” In a show that thrives on the moral grey area, this is one situation that can very easily and conclusively be judged on black and white terms. Dany’s choice was purely, simply evil.

Let’s break it down. The battle starts off and she comes in hot with Drogon making targeted airstrikes against the Iron Fleet and the wall-mounted scorpions. Great move! Now the only dragon-killing technology is neutralized and her victory is inevitable. She then takes out the bulk of the Golden Company and an entire wall to the city. Great! Cersei’s foreign fighting force is destroyed and the capital can be breached with ease. Again, her victory is inevitable!

At this point, the Lannister army knows it can’t win so they surrender and all with minimal bloodshed. Whether intentional or not, Dany managed to spare her future subjects and could easily let them bend the knee like the Tarly forces after the Loot Train Battle. At this point all Dany needed to do was go for Cersei – capture her or kill her, it doesn’t matter because her own people have seen what they’re up against and have surrendered. Their loyalty to Cersei wasn’t strong to begin with. If Dany had done that, she’d be on the Iron Throne with a fairly united Westeros behind her. This can’t be overstated – when the bells begin ringing, no one left on the battlefield has any intention of fighting Dany. The Lannister men are, at this point, prisoners of war. Dany’s victory WAS ACCOMPLISHED.

Nonetheless, she decides to burn a city full of men who have surrendered and innocent civilians. The show told us last season that more people live in King’s Landing than in the entire North – roughly 500,000 people – and we know there are tens of thousands of Lannister soldiers. We don’t see many survivors. Dany and her army murdered roughly half a million people who had no intention of fighting. She did this after the war was won. There was no strategic reason to burn the capital. There was no need. She is, under any humane standard, an abject war criminal.

George RR Martin has gone on record saying that dragons are an analogy to nuclear weapons. In the real world, reasonable minds debate over whether the United States’ bombing of Japan in World War II was justified. The war in the Pacific was still raging on and the U.S. was facing an inevitable massive loss of life if it invaded on foot, yet given the vast devastation caused by these weapons, people remain unsure if it was moral to drop those bombs. But we don’t have to look at the attack on King’s Landing with nearly that level of scrutiny. The answer is clear. What Dany did would be the equivalent of bombing Tokyo after Japan surrendered. What Dany did was ghastly and unforgivable.

There is no justification for her actions which amount to, unequivocally, the evilest thing that any character has done in this entire series. This surpasses anything Ramsay or Joffrey ever did. It dwarfs Cersei’s bombing of the Sept. It is a worse breach of agreed-upon morals than the Red Wedding. The only person to rival Dany is the Night King, but only because he had a several-thousand-year heads start and is not a human being. It’s not shown on screen, but Dany Targaryen – with statistical near-certainty – killed thousands upon thousands of children by burning them alive this episode.

Also, nothing in Dany’s war room speech points to this result. Nothing! Dany tells us in the war room that she’ll destroy House Lannister “root and stem.” Destroying a house “root and stem” means killing every possible heir – it means killing the nobles. When Tywin destroyed House Rayne of Castamere, he killed the entire family. By the way, this is genocide. But even excusing it for a moment as a byproduct of brutal times in a brutal land, nothing is ever said about Tywin killing every member of House Rayne’s men at arms. The average Lannister Soldiers – like the Ed Sheeran and his friends that Arya meets on the road – are not a part of House Lannister. Those men do not need to die to destroy House Lannister. This is all to say nothing of the five hundred thousand innocent civilians who were sentenced to die simply for living in the capital. NONE of them needed to die to usher in a new era for Westeros. To the contrary, both the civilians and common soldiers were among those Dany supposedly swore to protect.

So let’s not pretend there’s anything up for debate here. Dany has gone beyond the point of no return. She is a mass murdering war criminal and she deserves worse than any of the evil bastards we’ve met since the very start.

Sansa Stark for President,

Ken L.

Subscribe Now