Screenshot of Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryon in episode 4, season 8 of HBO’s series Game of Thrones.
Love it or hate it—or love it AND hate it—Game of Thrones gave its audience a lot to talk about in its last season. Over beer or coffee or dinner, through Facebook or Twitter, on YouTube, and in articles published pretty much everywhere, nearly everyone seemed to have an opinion on the show they wanted to share. For a few weeks, GoT was so ubiquitous that even my parents—who had never heard of that other pop-culture juggernaut, The Avengers—were not only aware of the series, but curious enough about it to ask about its appeal.
Personally, I left the season tired, ambivalent, and emotionally bruised from both the choices made by the show’s writers and the reactions of its fans. These are not feelings that make me want to think about it more, and they inspire me to write about it even less. And yet, GoT’s ability to have that kind of impact is exactly why it is worth talking about, especially now that it’s over and can finally be understood as a whole.
In the weeks following the show’s end, I have watched or read (too) many thought pieces of varying quality that deal with the show’s problematic ending. Some brave souls have even tried to rewrite the last season, and their efforts reveal how hard crafting a logical conclusion that fulfills the show’s themes and stays true to its ethos of dark, psychological and sociological realism truly is. This task is made even more difficult when trying to surprise the audience with the subversive storytelling GoT became famous for.
Add to this the further challenge of trying to adapt a giant fantasy epic for television, with all the time, budget, and story-telling constraints that entails, and it becomes easy to see how the writers ended up cutting corners that ultimately affect the logic and believability of the show. Because of this, I was willing to accept or overlook a lot. Things like too much plot armor during “The Long Night” or characters traveling impossibly quickly around Westeros were distracting blips that hurt the show because they departed from its well-established sense of realism but didn’t irreparably break it.
However, even acknowledging the very real challenges set before the writers and show runners, there was one choice they made that truly did wreck the show as a whole: they based the climax on a sudden, illogical—and thus unbelievable—character shift. Destroying the internal logic of one of the story’s central characters is bad enough, but doing so in a way that affects every plot point and character decision that comes after is deadly. And it’s that moment I’m going to focus on in this post.
Character, Context, and That Dany Moment
The character in question is of course Daenerys, whose difficult and miraculous rise to power is encapsulated in her formal name and list of titles: Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, First of Her Name, the Unburnt, Rightful Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons. The loyalty, devotion, and awe she inspires in those she saves (and, by the eighth season, she has saved thousands of people from death and/or slavery) is similarly captured in her other names, including “Mysa” (mother), “my Queen” (a term used most by those closest to her, including her advisors, friends, and lovers), and, simply, Dany. Embedded in all of these names are also the conflicting traits that lie at the heart of Dany’s character: her deep and sincere empathy for other people, especially those abused by the powerful; her belief that she has the right to rule over other people; and her willingness to brutally kill out of either necessity or revenge.
Now, before going further, I should clarify that I have never seen Dany as a perfect character or the embodiment of “good.” Nor did I ever want her, or any of the female characters, to represent some kind of ideal. She was not my favorite character (that minor honor is split between Davos, Cersei, and, until the final season, Varys). I also did not want the show to end with anyone on the Iron Throne (well, maybe Cersei, because that could have been fascinating). And I did not expect Game of Thrones to be a particularly feminist show (although some of the choices they made gave me hope it would prove to be more progressive than most media out there). But none of those fairly low expectations stopped the events of “The Bells,” GoT’s penultimate episode, from feeling like a sucker punch to the gut.
For those needing a refresher, “The Bells” serves as the climax for the show’s political arcs, bringing to a head the conflict between two long-embattled and politically striving characters. On one side we have Daenerys, the last known descendant of the House Targaryen, raised on foreign shores after her family was ousted from power and nearly driven to extinction. In the show, Daenery’s story begins when, as a teenager, she is sold by her brother into marriage with a man whose language she doesn’t speak and culture she doesn’t know. She is subsequently raped by her new husband until she finds a way to take control and turn her situation to her advantage, adapting to her new culture, embracing her new role as khaleesi (queen), and even finding love (?) with her husband, Khal Drogo. [There is a lot to unpack about that marriage and the audience’s romanticizing of Dany and Drogo’s relationship, but that is an essay for another day.] After Drogo’s death and many, many subsequent ups and downs, Dany enters the final season as a freedom fighter and adaptable, established ruler who has pretty much all of the “good guys” behind her. On the other side is Cersei, a woman born to wealth but not royalty, eternally frustrated by the restraints of her sex, used and abused by the men with power over her, and known for her own disregard or cruelty towards everyone but her immediate family—particularly her children. By the final season, Cersei is the story’s main villain, and she sits on the throne without a blood-claim to it (although, it is worth noting, she doesn’t actually appear to be doing a terrible job of ruling, and many of her gambits from the last two seasons have proven to be politically savvy). In the previous episode, her navy killed Dany’s second dragon, and she had Missandei, Dany’s best friend and advisor, beheaded. It was no surprise, then, when Dany literally came into the final battle hot, flying on her last dragon, Drogon, to destroy the naval fleet, break down the city’s walls, and crush Cersei’s mercenary army with dragon fire. The battle was over in a matter of minutes, and the remaining soldiers in the Queen’s Guard put down their weapons rather than fight. The bells rang to signal the city’s surrender, and all that remained was for Dany to take Cersei into custody.
But that never happened. Instead, Dany hears the ringing of the bells and pauses to look down, wild-eyed, at the city. In this moment, I, like many viewers, expected her to ride Drogon straight to the Red Keep, where Cersei has surrounded herself with civilians, and burn it down in a fit of rage, inadvertently killing innocents in the process. This would have been tragic but appropriate to the character, the situation, and events leading up to the episode. But she doesn’t do that either. Instead, she takes flight on Drogon and proceeds to mow back and forth over the city, indiscriminately burning everything and everyone beneath her, only eventually making her way to the Red Keep, which she does eventually destroy.
It’s clear the writers were trying to shock their audience in this moment, and, in a way, they succeeded. Even though most of us knew there was always a possibility they would twist Dany into “the mad Queen,” and that her many, many losses and frustrations of this season seemed to be pointing in that direction, watching her indiscriminately kill thousands of peasants—the very people she had always shown empathy for, had sworn to create a better world for—was shocking not only because it was horrible, but because it made no sense.
Grappling with these senseless events caused many viewers to reevaluate the character they thought they knew, reimagining her former sincerity as falseness, her empathy as selfishness. Worse still, it confirmed the misogyny-driven theories about Dany by confirming the already culturally widespread assumptions about women being unfit to rule because they (we) can’t handle their (our) emotions, especially anger, making them (us) prone to insanity. After all, in just a few emotionally unhinged moments, Dany—who up to this point had always been one of the most cool, even cold, protagonists—proved to not just be a bad ruler, but the worst ruler in the history of Westeros.
A few theories on Audience response
I know I’m not the only one disturbed/angered/frustrated/annoyed/bored/disappointed with Dany’s character reversal (see Kathryn VanArendonk’s “close read” from Vulture, Trope Anatomy’s video essay on how “Foreshadowing Is Not Character Development,” or even NPR’s episode recap). And the more time that passes, the more essays I find sharing this general opinion. But defenders of her arc were initially more vocal and copious, ranging from smirking “I-always-knew-she-was-a-baddy” to shrugged shoulders to apologists scrambling for an explanation that would allow them to still love this show. I’m not going to call out specific authors, commentators, or other individuals in the following discussion, because my intent here is not to attack or embarrass anyone, but rather to lay out some of the more troubling and widespread reactions that seem particularly revealing about our current cultural moment. I will say, though, that all the responses I’m drawing from were by English-speaking authors, most (but not all) of whom are based in the United States.
Although the events of the final episode solidified the fact that Dany had in fact lost her mind, the week between “The Bells” and the series finale was filled with responses split between outrage over the sudden turn in Dany’s character and justifications for the writing. The most popular theory during this time suggested that what propelled her to mass murder wasn’t madness at all but rather a strategic decision to kill her citizens in order to induce fear, which she believed she needed in order to rule. And, in fairness, Dany herself states she will rule with fear if she can not have love. However, this reasoning was always flawed because
a) she had already won the war,
b) everyone already feared her after watching her destroy both the world’s largest naval fleet and a famous mercenary army while riding a dragon, and
c) the show’s creators explicitly said in their post-credits interview that her actions were the result of her snapping under extreme psychological pressure and making the battle “personal.”
As both a writer and visual culture critic, I am always curious about viewer responses to potentially controversial narrative or visual choices. In this context, I found myself grappling with the question of why so many viewers did not immediately see Dany’s choice to kill hordes of defenseless, innocent people in “The Bells” as the character leap it very clearly is, and have come up with four explanations based on the responses I’ve read/heard/watched.
The first is that we, especially those of us in America, have become so acculturated to the idea that women are prone to insanity and/or unable to responsibly handle power that we can accept it doesn’t take much for a powerful woman to go dangerously insane. More on that later.
The second is a general distrust of anyone seeking power. There have certainly been plenty of atrocities caused by those trying to gain or hold on to political control. But there was usually some reason behind those atrocities. Not justifiable reasons, but something more than what we got for the post-surrender, out-and-out slaughter in this episode. And they were not typically caused by empathetic individuals who sincerely believed themselves to be protectors of innocents.
The third is blind narrative or authorial faith. Once we get engrossed in a story, we tend to take whatever happens on face value and rationalize away the plot, character, or logic gaps as we go. For many book readers, this has taken the form of blaming the show runners for pretty much everything they don’t like and claiming it “will probably go differently in the books,” despite the fact that George R. R. Martin was a consultant on the show throughout its run. For others, it means ignoring things like the underlying misogyny of the two-mad-queens storyline and reimagining it as an unfortunate narrative coincidence, putting all the blame for the sexist interpretations of the characters’ paths on the misogynistic viewers voicing those interpretations. Of course, we are certainly all guilty, at some point in our lives, of rationalizing away the choices of those we esteem or love. But an explanation of “unfortunate narrative coincidence” seems especially lazy and stubbornly blind when it comes from those willing to read a seemingly endless array of hidden meanings into every minor hint or happening that occurs in the books or show.
The fourth is a misunderstanding of human, and especially female, psychology. Honestly, I am deeply uncomfortable with this one, as bringing up the idea of female psychology as being somehow distinct opens up a whole new Pandora’s box of sexist tropes and arguments. And yet I fear there is no other way of getting to the bottom of why so many (especially, but not entirely, female) viewers recognize Dany’s sudden killing spree of innocents as being wholly unrealistic while others (both male and female) dismiss her actions with “well, it happens.” Because here’s the thing: spree killing like we saw in “The Bells,” and like we have become so accustomed to in the US, is an almost exclusively male form of murder, and appears to happen with women in only very specific circumstances. Circumstances that were not present in the lead-up to this episode.
There have been numerous studies and essays over the years trying to explain why, both historically and cross-culturally, the vast majority of spree killers are male, especially young men (for examples, check out this piece in Psychology Today or this one in Live Science). The explanations they offer for this gender discrepancy are never entirely satisfying, but the fact and degree of this discrepancy are both clear and staggering. According to a 2014 article from Vice, fewer than ten of the known 1,336 spree killings were committed by women. Women who did enact this kind of mass murder typically did so either as vengeance after a long period of real or perceived abuse from their targets, or already exhibited strong signs of pyschopathy, including a total lack of empathy. [The one thing the show did get right was Dany’s use of fire, which, historically speaking, appears to be a particularly feminine mode of mass murder.]
When people say Dany’s actions came out of nowhere, I think what they mean is that she does not fall into either of these two groups. Yes, she could be violent, but that violence was always directed at a specific target in response to a severe personal betrayal (those who tried to kill or enslave her or her loved ones) or a deeply ingrained and widespread moral wrong (those who enslaved groups of people and killed children). Even her executions of the Tarlys, who would have killed her and refused to bend the knee when given the choice, and Varys (painful as that was) fall within this scope. And although the severity of her punishments could be chilling, her character was always balanced with a profound sense of empathy, particularly for the abused and powerless. The show’s creators have even described her as the most empathetic character in GoT, a trait which decidedly moves her out of the realm of psychopathy.
The fact that she felt the throne had been stolen from her family also does not represent the kind of long-term feelings of persecution that could trigger a spree killing, because she has never indicated that she blamed the peasants, who ultimately became the focus of her rage, for her family’s betrayal.
I am not saying she wasn’t clearly set up for some kind of psychological break (a setup that felt manipulative and forced), only that the way she broke did not make sense. If, as I described above, she had flown Drogon directly to the Red Keep to destroy Cersei, unnecessarily tearing down the Keep and killing many of the peasants surrounding it in the process, I would at least be able to accept that as being a realistic extension of her character and psychological state. I personally still wouldn’t be happy they went the two-terrible-queens route, but I could have accepted this turn within the context of the story. To instead have her kill so many innocent people for no reason other than recent psychological isolation and a desire for power … no. No no no no no. NO.
How it could have been better
Not only is Dany’s sudden turn to violent, psychopathic madness bad storytelling and character building, but it’s a waste of other, far more interesting, explorations of the complexity of power and the limitations of even the best human beings. Making time to compare the ruling styles of Dany and Cersei could have led to some interesting places, especially if Cersei had turned out to be the better sovereign.
Although there was probably never going to be a “good” reason for Dany’s sudden turn or one that didn’t come across to many (myself included) as sexist, there are a few ways it could have been written to remain more consistent with her character, fulfill the show’s anti-power themes, not lean so heavily on very old misogynist tropes, and, ultimately, not so thoroughly break the show overall.
Perhaps the best path would have been to more clearly lay the groundwork for Dany’s eventual actions and then frame those actions as being intrinsically tied to her desire to rule. By killing the helpless, she would have been trying to kill the part of herself that has always empathized with the helpless (the part of her that remembered what it is to be helpless) in order to fully embrace the part of herself that needs to rule. We thus would have seen a character sacrifice the part of herself that had most made her a promising ruler in order to become that ruler. This works from a thematic perspective, encompassing both the show’s concern with the horror of power and the destructive nature of seeking it, while offering a rational resolution of Dany’s split nature.
Or, as I mentioned multiple times already, she could have chosen to destroy Cersei and the Red Keep even when it wasn’t strictly necessary. In the wake of the resulting deaths of innocents, Dany could have willingly given up the crown in a fit of remorse, which also would have been a reasonable (if still disappointing) resolution to her conflicting personality traits.
Instead, the writers took a lazy, illogical, and, yes, misogynistic route that just confirms the lazy, illogical, and misogynistic biases of a large portion of their audience. For many of the show’s female viewers, this meant getting beat up twice: once by the writers we trusted and again by the a-holes we already knew were out there.
Why the “two mad queens” storyline was never going to be okay
Most of the male reviewers and writers who have called out or expressed disappointment with Dany’s sudden descent into murderous madness have done so with the caveat that they don’t have a problem with the idea of Dany turning evil or the resulting two-mad-queens storyline, just with the fact that this twist wasn’t properly grounded in the previous seasons of character development. And, if I were coming from a purely craft perspective, I might agree.
But this perspective ignores the context in which the show is being made and watched. All of us would like to imagine our work as timeless, but the truth is that even the world’s great classics were products of their times, written first and foremost for the people of their times. To ignore this is to ignore that the very point of storytelling is delivering a narrative with meaning to its audience. Writing a story that draws in its audience by challenging old, harmful tropes—as GoT did when it created interesting, well-rounded female characters who rose to power by fighting their way through a violent, patriarchal society—only to then validate these very tropes in its climax is beyond tone deaf. It is making a choice to punch a large portion of your audience, the portion that embraced you because you seemed to offer understanding of the very real issues they must actually deal with, in the face.
After the rampant bipartisan onslaught of sexist waste that was the lead-up to the 2016 election, I honestly thought I had learned something about myself, my country, and people in general. I thought I wouldn’t be surprised and disappointed by sexism again. And yet, here I am. Watching “The Bells” made me feel like a fool for ever believing a mainstream TV show might actually do something interesting and powerful with its female leaders.
The Bottomline
By breaking the logic of one of the show’s central characters in such a plot-critical way, the writers ended up breaking the show itself. For although the series finale did its best to logically contextualize Dany’s actions and wrap up the fall-out (and props to Emilia Clarke for doing the best anyone could to sell the unsaleable), everything that happened after the massacre—including those aspects that felt “right” because they finally fulfilled the Azor Ahai prophecy and seemed to answer the question of why Jon was resurrected—were totally predicated on that indefensible plot point.
Game of Thrones possesses many aspects worthy of discussion, most of which are far more positive or nuanced than what I’ve focused on here. And I hope to eventually rekindle my desire to discuss them (ergo the “Part 1” of this post’s title). But for now, my overwhelming reaction to the show is exhaustion and sadness, and that means “Part 2” of this post will probably be a while in coming.