Danerys Stormborn has fallen in with a bad crowd. In Game of Thrones season 6, she has been captured by a Dothraki khal. Her chances of an immediate return to Meereen, the city she rules, are slim indeed. After revealing her identity, she’s being taken to Vaes Dothrak to live among the widows of khal’s for the rest of her days. Before revealing herself, she was destined only for a life of slavery and rape in the hands of the Dothraki. The show isn’t subtle about this. The Dothraki are terrible. They’re also Daenerys’s own adopted people. She embraced them, and now she’s on the other side.

The Dothraki Are Terrible, And They Were Still Terrible When Daenerys Ruled Them

Game of Thrones has largely portrayed the Dothraki as the wild, violent barbarians that they are. In season 1, their barbarity was obvious—their penchant for conquest, rape and slavery, for violence in their own ceremonies, for brutal infighting and knowing no law but strength. They’re steppe hordes, after all. In Game of Thrones season 6, we’re seeing their true nature again. Daenerys, taken at first as any ordinary captive, is told that she’s now a slave to the khal, who immediately boasts about the children she’ll bear for him. The Dothraki are a barbaric people—slavers and sexual predators riding across the plain.

And Daenerys used to embrace them. Sure, she was afraid of them early in season 1, but she took to Dothraki customs. She ate that horse’s heart. She backed Drogo, and continued in her role of khaleesi after Drogo died. She tried to hold Drogo’s khal together, and is very open to recruiting the Dothraki again to spearhead her invasion of Westeros. Sure, she tried to change them a little bit—to cut down on the slavery and rapine. But she found that it was not so easily done. Largely, she went along.

Now she’s back in Dothraki hands and it’s a quick reminder that they’re not noble savages. Daenerys has largely treated the Dothraki as a cultured people with some unacceptable customs. And they do have their customs, certainly; the Dothraki are a distinct culture. It just happens to be a violent, misogynistic culture built entirely around war.

Daenerys seems appalled by her treatment under the Dothraki in Game of Thrones season 6. But these are a people she embraced, that she was going to use to conquer Westeros. She doesn’t deserve her fate—not the one she’s facing, nor the one she would have had she not been a khal’s widow. But neither does anyone else the Dothraki capture, and—token efforts aside—Daenerys did little enough for them when she could have. These are the people Daenerys will use to conquer Westeros. Think about what that means.