Why do people always ignore how Jon puts Gilly’s hand over fire while threatening to burn her and kill her baby, as well as the wildling children he kept as hostages ? But somehow he’s definitely the hero and Daenerys is the tyrant.
If Daenerys was threatening innocent mothers like this we’d never hear the end of it.
Jon later admits that he’d willingly kill the other wilding children he has hostage if it’s needed.
“You will make a crow of him.” She wiped at her tears with the back of a small pale hand. “I won’t. I won’t.” Kill the boy, thought Jon. “You will. Else I promise you, the day that they burn Dalla’s boy, yours will die as well.” — A Dance with Dragons, Jon II
People are more desensitized towards a man doling out violence, even (or esp) against women and children, abused or not. Violence or destroying boundaries is the way a man affirms and/or obtains authority and respect from his male peers and in this system, it literally gets romanticized as necessary for those he is in charge of or wishes to be or others perceive him to be: "greater good" and all that. Because they say that he had to do what he had to do...but then argue Dany is "proving" how evil or unstable she is if she were to do anything similar, and they already try to by saying her violence against raping, pedophilic, dehumanizing slavers was "too much"...think about it. They don't say similar about male prisoners raping pedophiles or those who hurt kids, they even openly wish for the pedos to get "roughed" up in their cells. Oh, but a teenager former bridal slave killing slavers is too much.
That been the exact opposite for when women dole out violence for similar or even just to defend themselves or others. you see female monsters and monstrous characters take on a particular pattern of being more...simple, inhumane in stories with male heroes through the history of Western literature, but esp so from Victorian literature, the society/era where us Westerners inherited most of our ideas of sexuality and gender roles/expression--from the bourgeoise class to the working.
I hope you and anyone reading looks up the "monstrous feminine" theory first elucidated by Barbara Creed: horror film both have women as needing to be victims so they don't materialize as "castrators" (unmanners) of men AND positions mothers near bestial matriarchal figures, as monstrous because of their primal maternal instincts and reproductive capabilities. Think Grendel's mother in Beowulf. All in all, it's about abjecting women and esp their passion, or trying to "explain" something innately terrifying about them that presents, sometimes, an eternal and necessary, order-affirming challenge to male heroes or masculinized heroes/perceptions.
Anyway, back to Jon. The issue is this double standard; even if Jon "had to do" what he did to Gilly (he didn't), why isn't it when there is a slew of enslaved people (that these people imagine as brown bc of GoT even though they are pretty diverse in ASoIaF but either way are not Westerosi or "Westerners"), then it's not that serious as to leave hundreds of slavers dying on poles along a path to a city the same way they did to the enslaved? Because Americans and white people of today's world already don't care that much about trafficking, slavery, etc. unless it happens to them of course. And Gilly was not a Westerosi, either, but a wilding whose only role is to be there so Jon and Samwell can do whatever to become better versions of themselves in their minds.