Why were people surprised by Daenerys [Spoilers]

"People are just disappointed because they expected a clean cut liberator."

That is totally unfair. Almost everyone I know said they would have been okay with a Mad Queen story arch if the arch had been there, there was no arch it was a nose dive story and totally jarring change of character.

"It was in total step with her mental degeneration and growing despotism - not unlike her Mad King father. There were signs from the start and it was planned all along by the writers."

I call total bullocks to this, from the beginning she had a growing concern not to abuse her power for no reason, she had always from the start been concerned with the abuse of the innocent.

She was never any more ruthless to her enemies than say Tywin, and he would never burn burn an entire city for no apparent reason other than a crazy delusion of 'freeing' them.

Her last speech was of total bizarre insanity. Talking about "freeing" people like she did in Kings Landing. She was planning on killing and burning the entire world. She never, once, showed this level of madness.

Speak in ng as someone who knows what "mental deterioration" looks like in real life... she wasn't written as having believable mental deterioration. Instead, she was written as intelligent and rational, if flawed, up until the battle of Winterfell.

At that point she got stupid and whiny for a couple of episodes, seeming totally out of character, then she did something batshit with no lead-in and it rang completely false.

But you hit the nail on the head. They were supposedly bad. I think the difference between Dany and other villains is that, throughout the first 70+ episodes, Dany never deliberately executes INNOCENTS (like Stannis does, or Tywin intends).

The three people in Qarth had deliberately betrayed her, kidnapped her dragons, and had arranged for several of her entourage to be murdered. The slave trader in Yunkai, was a sexual pervert, and both he and the Dothraki khals threatened and insulted her to her face. The Mereen sailors had been fighting on the sides of the Wise Masters. Viserys threatened to have her raped by 40,000 men, then cut out the baby she was carrying. Mirri Maz Durr performed a spell that resulted in the deaths of her husband and son. The Tarlys had been fighting on the side of Cersei and refused to submit, even after Dany told them she wouldn't take their land and title from them if they knelt. And Varys had betrayed her for Jon.

What we get in the first several seasons is foreshadowing (this is the way Dany is and always will be) rather than character development (this is the way Dany was, but not the way she will end up), and there were better ways to handle it. One thing I wish they had included was the scene in the House of the Undying where Dany is told about her three betrayals. They could have then followed it up with a couple of scenes later where she mulls over them like she does in the books. It would have shown her growing paranoia that becomes more present in the last couple episodes.

Sorry, but Danerys didnt burn the fleet at Mereen. She burned ONE ship, thereby showing them how easy it would be to burn them all, and then gracefully accepted the surrender of the others. She then used the ships to get her army to Westeros, as she was too rational to waste a perfectly good armada when she could have it nearly intact, for the price of some intimidation.

She actually followed the same pattern with the Tarlys, she fried two people with dragon fire (for excellent political reasons), and then let the rest of the surviving Lannister army go free with wet underwear. They promised they wouldnt fight her again, she accepted the promise and saved herself the trouble of feeding prisoners of war, and again used no more violence than was necessary to achieve her goals.

That was a pattern she followed quite consistently through the run of the show, up until the last few episodes.

foreshadowing does not equal character development. As I said in reply above, Dany's going mad had no satisfying arch and there was no character development. They chose a cheap shock over a satisfying character arch and try justifying it with loose at best foreshadowing.

She never once targeted innocent people of a city. not once. She was never more ruthless than any other leader around her what Dany does at the and who mad she goes is full on crazy worse than even Cersie. One does not go from a Slave freeing/small people concerned ruler to random mass murderer without there being some sort of arch to get there. The few hints that were given throughout the show are not enough to demonstrate an actual character or story arch. The hints served only as a plot tool people could go back and 'look it was going to be like this all along'.

I like you was not shocked by what Dany did, I saw it coming since the beginning of the season, they really laid it on pretty thick. What I was shocked about was how poorly they wrote the story that lead to that end. Yes Dany always had it in her but there needed to be more development for it to be revealed naturally into the story . Sacrificing development for the twist ending was not acceptable in this case. Instead of being a twist that was awesome it was a twist that had me shut off my TV in frustration because it was so stupid.

Okay then you must group in Jon for his execution of the Nights Watch. Stannis for killing Mance Rayder, the Wildlings, using blood magic to assassinate Renly, the burning of Shireen, his own daughter and the suicide of his wife. Then you need to judge Tywin the same for the slaughter of Robb and Catelyn Stark, the murder of a pregnant Talisa Stark, all of Robb's bannermen and the rape and murder of Ellia Martel and her children at the hand of The Mountain who was sent by Tywin. You must also judge Ramsey and Roose Bolton for their complicity in the murder at The Red Wedding. You must also judge Robert Baratheon so for his murder of Rhaegar Targaryen at the Trident, the murder of any and all who died during the War of the Five Kings on Tywin who was responsible for that carnage.

Dany as not insane. The Gods didn't flip that coin to land on her, but landed on Viserys. It was cliched to say she "would always go mad" based on what? Her desire to not kill or maim innocents? Her care for her armies and her advisors? Her wish to free slave cities? What happened in that last season was obscene. Dany deserved better than that.