Dany has shown no signs of madness at all up to this point...

Correct, on both counts. She had shown absolutely no signs of madness until now, and some people here dont know the difference between being ruthless or an asshole, and being crazy. Dany has NOT been crazy for seven entire seasons!

I'm not convinced she's actually supposed to be crazy now, maybe all the characters who are starting to think she's a few beers short of a six-pack are wrong. We will see, so I'm reserving the full -power ranting for two more episodes.

No, she wanted to execute the Tarleys. Tyrion tried to talk her down, but she didn't want to hear it. In one of the earlier seasons, without even a trial, she *crucified* scores of masters, which is an exceptionally cruel and barbaric punishment as it takes days to die. Would Ned Stark have done something like that? Fuck no. He would try each individually on what they had done and those sentenced to death would have got a quick clean beheading? Do you know who would have? That crazy mother fucker Ramsay Bolton.

All along, they have been concealing that monster under the mask of a pretty blonde girl that talks about breaking chains.

None of those actions were crazy or particularly Targaryan, that's just how politics is played in Westeros and especially Essos. She was brought up by her vicious brother and came to adulthood under the influence of her Dothraki Screamer husband, and if her first thought was to lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground, that was the standard way to get things done. She didn't suggest slaughter with any sense of enjoyment or cruelty, and was perfectly happy to accept alternatives when offered. For the next several seasons, she thought of methods to gain her ends other than mass slaughter, because she was written as an intelligent conqueror who killed, but never with enjoyment, and never without a reason.

She's always been ruthless, and since midway through season 1, she's been on a campaign of conquest. She's killed and even slaughtered when she needed to, avoided doing so when she could gain her goals without mass slaughter, because she's been consisitently written as an intelligent, rational, and not particularly bloodthirsty conqueror. Until now, of course, when she's suddenly stupid and bloodthirsty.

My take is that she acted out of pure rage and revenge for Missandei and the other dragon. Her original plan was to burn Kings Landing, but Tyrion talked her out of it. As she heard the bells ring and you could see the rage building in her face, I imagine she was thinking that Missandei and the dragon would still be alive if she’d burned it all in the first place. At that point, she snapped, overcome with rage, and went “fuck it”.

[deleted]

But the city DID kneel, they rang the bells of surrender without orders.

For seven years she's been very astute about the uses of fear, which is how she managed to turn three disobedient dragons into an empire, but this wasn't using fear. To use fear for political purposes you leave most of your victims alive - like when an armada of slavers attacked Mereen and she torched one ship and just to make it clear that she could burn them all. But this wasn't the use of fear, that was pointless, counterproductive slaughter, that would leave her without a capitol city - nobody to work in her palace or serve in her armies or engage in trade with other regions. It wasn't so much crazy as it was stupid.

She suffered an incredible amount of loss in the first season, her husband, her baby, her 40,000 followers, etc., and it didn't make her vicious and stupid. It may have made her suicidal, it was never clear why she walked into Drogo's pyre, but she didn't turn her anger and grief into rage at others. That just hasn't been part of her personality. In fact the only time she ever turned anger and grief into rage at others was when the Masters crucified thousands of innocent children to troll her, and she crucified the lot of them without a trial, and she came to regret that later and kept her temper under better control fter that.


The thing is, they really could have shown her to be cracking under the pressure of fighting supernatural forces and losing two out of three dragons, as well as her only real friend, but they didnt' do that. Or they could have shown her as developing progressive signs of mental illness, but they didn't do that either. She got a bit weepy when Jon got the first dragon killed, but she stayed sane and stable through the Battle of Winterfell, and even forgave Jon. They're making a mess of the Mad Queen business, they've just changed her into a different person in the course of about two episodes.

When all this is over, I'm going to post a long rant about how they could have shown her cracking under pressure or slowly going nuts, and Missandei could have been acting to keep anyone else from catching on, as they haven't bothered to do. Because for some insane reason, they want to cram two years of material into six episodes, and they've thrown character development out the window.

Jon doesn't become the new king unless he either marries Dany, or someone is able to prove that he's a Targaryan.