-OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING -
“For the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.”
Those are George R.R. Martin's words that closed “A Game of Thrones” when it was first published in 1996 and, ten years ago, on June 19, 2011, they came to life on the small screen as Daenerys Targaryen, played by Emilia Clarke, stepped unscathed out of a funeral pyre with three freshly hatched baby dragons.
Now, two years after the final credits rolled on the series finale, the legacy of Daenerys in the pop culture zeitgeist is a far cry from that iconic, triumphant moment. In 2019’s six episode final season, the dragon queen traveled North with her new lover/nephew/KingindaNorth Jon Snow and helped saved humanity from the fairly anti-climactic attack of the White Walkers. That took the first half of the stunted season. Over the next three episodes, she is betrayed by her closest advisors, abruptly decides to massacre the people of King’s Landing and finally is murdered by Jon, with little to no consequences for anyone involved in said assassination.
It’s a whole lot to unpack in just three episodes. And it did not go well. The backlash against the finale is still fueling late night jokes and angry Reddit memes here in 2021, even as production begins on HBO’s prequel series, “House of the Dragon.” So…. What went wrong?
Out of context, Dany’s villainous turn should not be at all surprising. George R.R. Martin’s determination to shatter the expected tropes of fantasy epics is no secret, and Daenerys retaking her family throne with Jon at her side is the fairy tale ending. So that was the one thing we could rest assured would NOT happen.
Not only that, but both the books and show had for some time been hyping her up as the “Prince Who Was Promised,” aka Azor Ahai, a mythical champion of the Lord of Light. Thing is, there’s a whole lot of shady stuff going on with the Lord of Light and prophecy in general in the World of Ice and Fire, so many have speculated that the Lord of Light’s idea of salvation looks a whole lot more like an apocalypse.
Problem is, even if those theories prove true and Dany’s already burgeoning savior complex is leading towards a Faustian pact with an Eldritch fire god, that plotline was abandoned back in Season 6, pruned from the show with so much else as the bored showrunners rushed to finish ahead of schedule and move on to new projects.
But even without the mythos in play, the fall from grace still fits thematically. The dangers of hero complexes and the hypocrisy of committing cruel acts for “just” causes are major themes in the books. But this is ‘Game of Thrones’ the show, not ‘A Song of Ice and Fire,’ the literary saga. And on the small screen, Westeros was under the rule of D.B Weiss and David Benioff, the same Benioff who once, when asked about the themes of his show, responded that “themes are for 8th grade book reports.”
And therein lies the primary problem. Daenerys’ story in the final season fails because it contradicts the message of the entire show up to that point. Benioff may think his work doesn’t have a theme, but it does. Every story does, whether it’s intentional or not. Some artists, like Benioff and Weiss, like to insist they can merely present events without commenting on them and let the audience draw an unbiased conclusion. But this forgets the classic story-telling maxim of “Show, Don’t Tell.” Often, silence speaks louder than words.
One of the clearest messages of the books is that violence and vengeance do not bring justice, they only beget more bloodshed. Having just re-watched Season One for the 10th Anniversary, it became apparent that the show was ditching that message even back then. When Robb Stark is named King in the North by his bannermen, his mother Catelyn’s arguments for peace are completely cut. There is never any doubt presented as to whether going to war is the 'right' thing to do.
This continues as the show goes on and the heroes are pushed to darker and darker acts. Daenerys racks up quite the body count in her abolition campaign, but we also watch as Arya becomes a hardened assassin and murders an entire noble House, Jon executes a child and Sansa feeds Ramsay Bolton to his own hounds. And that’s just the main characters. No one ever questions these acts in the show and it's never shown to wear on their moral fiber or identity. And they’re the good guys, killing the bad guys, so they get cheered on for doing it.
Then, suddenly, we see Tyrion and Varys, former Machiavellian schemers who have slowly shifted to Lawful Good voices of concern by the end of the show, suddenly start to criticize and condemn Daenerys’ violent actions, such as executing Randyll and Dickon Tarly. This leads to the final string of events: Varys betrays Dany, Dany burns city, Tyrion betrays Dany, Dany is murdered by Jon. (An assassination for which the show decides to pivot back to not passing moral judgement.)
And so, without a thematic basis and with no time left to develop the character further, the writers ask the audience to turn on Daenerys without establishing any reason for them to do so. And so they turn to a default excuse:
Madness.
The oft-quoted line “Whenever a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin” greatly exaggerates the frequency of insanity in the Targaryen line (even going by the famously terrible standards for mental illness held by middle age societies). However, Dany's father, famously, was The Mad King Aerys, a legacy she spends much of the show trying to escape. But in the end, the Benioff and Weiss chose to have it consume her. Kind of.
The Mad King got his name for his deluded paranoia, sporadic behavior, obsession with fire, disregard for basic hygiene and joy in burning people alive. Daenerys? Well, she got really angry once and burned an enemy city.
She is far from the only character in the mythos (or our own real world history) to unleash the cruelties of war onto a civilian population. But war crimes don’t make someone insane. No one calls Harry Truman the “mad president” for dropping atomic bombs on Japan. Or, to use an example even more blatant, being from the same world, you need only look to the one and only Tywin Lannister.
Brought to life by the inimitable Charles Dance, Tywin loomed large as the principle antagonist of the first three books and four seasons – a master strategist, ruthless politician and the world’s worst dad. As the in-world Billboard hit and really truly awful wedding serenade “The Rains of Castemere” will explain, Tywin established his reputation with the mass murder of two entire families who disrespected his own father, all the way down to the youngest children.
For Tywin, brutal violence to secure power and defend honor isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Had Tywin been at Daenerys’ side when she first reached King’s Landing, he would have certainly counseled the dragon queen, as Olenna Tyrell and the Sand Snakes did, to immediately attack King’s Landing, burn away her opposition and make an example of the city to any others who might oppose her.
The arguments in favor of such military action are, for obvious reasons, massively morally flawed. But Daenerys doesn’t get to make these arguments because it isn’t presented as a moral decision. Rather, the inferno she unleashes is a split-second burst of 'madness' brought on by the pressures of her power, loss of her allies and the spurning of her lover who, having discovered she is in fact his aunt, is not sure he’s down with incest.
This is the “easy” way out, waving away any need for character development or consequential moral discussions by deploying the classic trope from both fiction and nonfiction of labeling women who “break the rules” as mad. Villainizing Daenerys while letting Tywin’s crimes get rationalized is a sexist hypocrisy that would be expected from the world of the story. But in the final episodes, Benioff and Weiss choose to apply it themselves.
In the end, there is no debate between Daenerys or anyone else, no attempt by her to justify her actions or to show her thought process and how the attack affected her. Instead, we only get a talk between Jon and Tyrion that amounts to “Dragon Lady is crazy. Now she must die.” And that’s exactly what happens, with everything Daenerys spent eight seasons building ultimately brushed away as a footnote.
The fans didn’t buy it, to the point that Benioff and Weiss were let go from their new Star Wars project and their pictures spammed to become the top five Google search results for ‘bad writing.’ But the damage was done. A character as beloved and inspirational as Daenerys deserved a better ending. Not a happy one, perhaps, but a fair one. In the end, though, aspiring writers (including, hopefully, the team on ‘House of the Dragon’) can walk away with one important lesson:
‘Show, Don’t Tell’ applies to theme as well as exposition. And even if you don’t make a theme explicit, what you choose to show and not show sets the tone for what the audience will think of your story. And if you try to simply TELL them to think something different, your project is likely to go up in flames, just like King’s Landing.
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