The Case for Daenerys
Oh, dear Game of Thrones writers. How I trusted you. How I thought I didn’t even care how the show ended, but here I am, over a year later, still fuming. Unlike most fans, I’m not mad about Arya killing the Night King, nor am I really even angry about Jon’s self-exile. Do I think these choices were bad ways to end these characters’ stories? Certainly. Still, none insulted me quite so much as what you did to Daenerys Targaryen (First of her Name, the Unburnt, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons).
Daenerys was never meant to be evil. I know this for an absolute fact. Within the narrative, Daenerys was always capital-G “Good.” Like every character, she was flawed, but her flaws were far from irredeemable. In fact, her faults were so few and inconsequential when compared to most other characters’ that she might as well not have had them at all. She was young, stubborn, proud, and at times, naive. She was also brave, just, compassionate, and driven. Her righteous indignation may have proved harmful at times, but it was always righteous. She was a brilliant leader with a formidable intellect, and she used both of those qualities to better the lives of the people around her. Like Jon, she was loved and respected by her peers and subjects alike. Yet in the end, it was Jon who was tragically left no choice but to end her life after she psychotically and out-of-characteristically destroyed King’s Landing and slaughtered its citizens.
It became apparent to me after the show ended, however, that my opinion of Daenerys was not shared with most other fans. In fact, I witnessed an unexpected and frankly disturbing rush to point out not where the writers went wrong, but why their decision to make Daenerys insane made sense. Some of her crueler or more misguided actions were retroactively labeled evidence of her madness, such as her ordering of the killings of hundreds of slavers or even simply her perceived negative reactions to advice from her various male advisors.
Get Paige Cirtwill’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Many point to her sanctioning of her brother’s killing as the first demonstration of her dormant madness, including co-director and writer of season eight, David Benioff. But what exactly, in the context of Game of Thrones, does it prove? So she had her brother killed. Tyrion killed his own father, but we all accept that it was justified. In the very first episode, Jaime pushes an innocent child off of a tower, but he dies at the end of the series a fully-redeemed hero. Didn’t Jon Snow himself murder a child? What was that about? Yes, the kid killed him first, but Daenerys’ brother treated her like a piece of trash and sex trafficked her in exchange for an army. If you think Jon, Jaime, or Tyrion are excused but Daenerys isn’t, I encourage you to recalibrate your moral compass.
One can make these comparisons with every one of her actions that supposedly prove her insanity. All of the alleged foreshadowing was simply her making the same flawed or unethical choices that her male peers made constantly throughout the series. When she did something bad, it was evidence of her inherent evil; when other characters did, though, it proved their “complexity” and added to their value. Her pride and ambition, far from being the same flaws that made other characters well-rounded, instead indicated in her that she was a power-hungry tyrant. Her desire to restore her family name to honor wasn’t an understandable goal but proof that she was secretly psychotic. Her good deeds, of which there were many, were supposedly sullied by the additional power she achieved through performing them.
In buying into these double standards, Benioff and Weiss both missed the opportunity and denied their imperative as writers of Game of Thrones to subvert the audience’s expectations. In many ways, the show ended in the exact same way that many fantasy stories end; the ambitious become too ambitious, and they must be stopped for the greater good, typically by another main character. The character who ends up in power in the end almost never wanted it but was deemed best suited for the job not because of any superior qualifications or relevant experience, but specifically because they did not want the power. While compelling, I feel like I’ve read this story a million times. I know that power corrupts because the message has been repeated ad nauseum by fantasy writers everywhere for decades. At this point, it’s a cliche. Ambition is a vice, reluctance, a virtue. The lesson has been thoroughly drilled into our heads.
However, despite this pervasive trope, Daenerys made it a whole seven seasons of continuously becoming more powerful without ever really letting it go to her head. She remained fair and compassionate as her empire grew, never wavering in her fight to bring justice to her world. She may have been growing impatient in her quest to reclaim the Iron Throne while her enemies simultaneously grew in strength and number, but why is this an inherently bad quality? She wanted the power, yes, but she was also the most qualified to have it. Even Tyrion, arguably the smartest character in the series, knew Daenerys would have been a great ruler.
Letting Daenerys remain righteous even for as long as she did was a refreshing subversion of the power corrupts trope in itself, and aligned well with the general Game of Thrones modus operandi of always subverting the audience’s expectations. It also would have accurately maintained Daenerys’ characterization as the force for liberation and justice she always was. Allowing her to rule the Seven Kingdoms would have been an original ending to a fantasy story that few fans saw coming.
All it had to do was stick the landing — and it would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling directors.
