BY TERRI SCHWARTZ
It’s said that when a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land: madness, or greatness.
And in the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, "The Bells," the world finally saw that madness take hold of our purported hero, Daenerys Targaryen.
This character turn sparked instant debate and backlash for the most-watched episode of the HBO series. How could the woman who was set up to be Westeros’s savior, who learned from past tyrants’ mistakes and who outright said she would not burn King’s Landing turn so quickly on all of the morals she held dear? How could the daughter of the Mad King who promised to break the wheel, to be better than those who came before, become the same evil that these characters have fought so hard to destroy?
While I do agree that Season 8 has done a pretty shoddy job explaining its character motivations -- particularly in bringing these character traits in Daenerys to the forefront -- Game of Thrones has been setting up this about-face for its Khaleesi since the beginning. Like with the best and most devastating of this show’s plot twists, from Ned Stark’s beheading to the Red Wedding, Daenerys’s dark side has been in front of us all along.
The Mother of Dragons
The Daenerys Targaryen of Season 1 is an innocent, but one whose entire life experience is colored by an unjust banishment from her home and an ingrained sense of purpose. Because the two most influential people in her young life -- Illyrio Mopatis and her older brother Viserys -- told her from the beginning that the number one goal for any surviving Targaryens was to return to Westeros and reclaim their rightful seat on the Iron Throne, the backbone of her upbringing were basic ideas of revenge and betrayal.
Of course, Daenerys always thought her cruel brother Viserys, who was clearly mad from the start, would be the one on the Iron Throne. It’s only when she married Khal Drogo and he killed Viserys that she even gained the opportunity to one day return to the Seven Kingdoms and sit on that spiky chair.
Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss point back to Daenerys’s reaction to Viserys’s death -- when she calmly watched him die in a horrifying manner and rationalized, “He was no dragon” because fire cannot kill a dragon -- as a worrying reaction early on. It’s one of the first instances of the audience dismissing a dark personality trait in a main character because we are rooting for them.
“
Daenerys learned that giving mercy to those who seem vulnerable can be a weakness.
Daenerys became our stereotypical heroine when she walked through the flames, unburnt, with three baby dragons draped around her. But let’s not forget the cold-blooded murder of Mirri Maz Duur that led to the dragons being born. Daenerys initially tried to show the old witch mercy by trying to save her from the Dothraki, only to have that perceived kindness repaid with a curse. In that moment, Daenerys learned that giving mercy to those who seem vulnerable can be a weakness - one that robbed her of her husband and unborn son. Burning Mirri Maz Duur seemed justifiable after what she did to Dany’s family, but it was still a pretty chilling moment for the Mother of Dragons.
The Breaker of Chains
Daenerys’s entire ascension to ruler of the Slaver Cities has left a trail of blood and bodies behind. She killed the warlocks of Qarth and left Xaro Xhoan Daxos (and her handmaiden Doreah) to die in his empty vault. She had the Unsullied kill the masters in Astapor when she became the Breaker of Chains. She crucified the masters of Meereen in response to their cruel use of slave children to mark the path to the great city. She burned all of the Khals alive in Vaes Dothrak when they dared try to make her a Dosh Khaleen.
In each of these situations, we rooted for Daenerys to succeed because we saw the world from her perspective, and these people were “evil,” based on her experiences. Game of Thrones never did anything to dissuade us from the viewpoint that she was a hero, not a tyrant. But Daenerys made a mess in Slaver’s Bay, pure and simple, and she never proved herself to be an effective ruler. In Meereen she attempted to be just and kind, but when it came time to subdue the mutineers that rose up against her, she destroyed the city and left the entire country behind with a pretty weak support system in order to conquer a different continent altogether.
It seemed like Daenerys had learned from her prior mistakes when she did make it to Westeros. She found allies in the Martells and the Tyrells. She helped the North defeat the Night King and save the world. Back in Season 7 in "Stormborn," she opted not to torch King’s Landing when Ellaria Sand suggested it, specifically saying, “I am not here to be queen of the ashes.” She tried to take the peaceful route, tried to do what was right, and where did it leave her? Surrounded by strangers who did not want her as their queen, with all of her friends and allies dead, advisors who sided with her enemies to seat someone else on the Iron Throne, and citizens who do not love her as their “Mother.”
On top of it all, the one truth that had been ingrained in her from as far back as she could remember -- that her brother, and then her, should sit on the Iron Throne -- was challenged when she learned that another person, more loved by the people than she was, had a better claim to rule.
Protector of the Realm
Of course, all of this criticism of Daenerys is ignoring the character development Game of Thrones did to set up her as the hero of this story -- because as with any of us, we are the heroes of her own story. For all these decisions that do seem mad or cruel in retrospect, Daenerys still is the woman who freed slaves, locked her dragons away for accidentally killing one child, and tried to help other nations because it was right, not because it was convenient to her. She wanted to fix the injustices in the world and we cheered for her as she tried. She was our Khaleesi who was promised, and we loved her for it. “
We only saw Daenerys's story through her own lens.
But that doesn’t mean she’s a ruler without flaws, and as much as Game of Thrones is doing a one-dimensional job examining her dark turn in Season 8, it did a similarly bad job challenging her as our hero in previous seasons. By Daenerys being so removed from the rest of our main characters, we only saw her story through her own lens, and those of people like Jorah and Missandei, who were devoted to her. The biggest changes in our perception of her in Seasons 7 and 8 have been because we’re suddenly seeing her through the eyes of our other heroes, specifically Sansa Stark, Tyrion Lannister, and Varys. (Only in episode 5 did Jon Snow seem to let his puppy dog infatuation with Daenerys fall aside.)
It’s similar to what the show has done with Arya Stark, who we cheer on as the slayer of the Night King and heroine who may save the day, without paying much attention to the fact she’s also become a cold-blooded assassin who put aside her humanity for many seasons to murder a trail of people who had slighted her and her family.
Daenerys’s story is now running parallel to itself, with her conquering Westeros instead of Essos. In the Seven Kingdoms, Jon Snow is our Daario Naharis, Tyrion Lannister is our Hizdahr zo Loraq, and Cersei Lannister is a concentrated version of the Sons of the Harpy. Whereas we cheered when Daenerys raged against Meereen, taking out their fleets with her dragons and sacking the city, now she is doing that on the audience’s “home turf.”
There’s no better example of this dichotomy and conflict as a viewer than in “The Bells” when we compare the look on Grey Worm’s face to Jon Snow’s after Daenerys goes in to torch the city after the bells start tolling. For Grey Worm, this attack is revenge, and in previous seasons set in strange lands, we might have been cheering as he got it. But on Jon’s face, we only see horror, as he sees a person he trusted -- we all trusted -- choose violence instead of mercy and destroy the place they were supposed to save.
Queen of the Ashes
Game of Thrones’ biggest disservice to Daenerys in these past couple of seasons has been its decision to keep the audience at arm’s length from these characters. Instead of getting the intimate “perspective” scenes that mirrored the POV chapters in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, which really put us in the characters’ heads and allowed us to follow their thought processes, the TV show has opted to keep their motivations a secret until a surprise plot twist that’s meant to shock us. (Exhibit A: Sansa and Arya teaming up to kill Littlefinger after the audience was led to believe they were being turned against each other.)
“
Daenerys accomplished what her father, Mad King Aerys, never could. He wanted to 'burn them all.'
A lot of these plot threads involve dissecting more than just what is shown on the page, and it will be a huge disappointment if Game of Thrones doesn’t dig deep into Daenerys’s psyche to explain her motivations so the audience can understand her violent choice in the final episode. She was treated as a one-dimensional villain in “The Bells,” and the showrunners’ explanation for why looking at the Red Keep was enough to make her choose murder over mercy, even after she’d already claimed victory over King’s Landing, is pretty shallow.
What’s more poetic is the fact Daenerys accomplished what her father, Mad King Aerys, never could. He wanted to “burn them all,” torching King’s Landing and its ungrateful residents with Wildfire before Jaime Lannister killed him to become the Kingslayer. Many years later, Daenerys carried out Aerys’s sadistic wish - it’s just hard to track why, when Daenerys never previously expressed a desire to make the residents of Westeros suffer, only Cersei.
It doesn’t help that the showrunners explicitly said Daenerys wasn’t a Targaryen ruler like her father only three years ago. "I think Dany's been becoming a Targaryen ever since the beginning of Season 1," said David Benioff in the “Inside the Episode” for the “Battle of the Bastards,” with D.B. Weiss adding, "She's not her father and she's not insane and she's not a sadist, but there's a Targaryen ruthlessness that comes with even the good Targaryens." Maybe they forgot a very key “yet”?
Fire and Blood
As IGN’s Game of Thrones reviewer Laura Prudom examined in her review of “The Bells,” Season 8 hasn’t dedicated much time to tying these pieces together, trading character development for shock value and making Daenerys’s sudden cruelty towards civilians seem like a complete departure from her established goals. It’s why Daenerys’s turn feels so out of left field even when the show has been laying the groundwork for a Mad Queen Daenerys from the start. The characters around her might have only started questioning her tyrannical streak this season, right as we’re approaching the endgame, but it was there all along.
It’s interesting how much “The Bells” mirrors Season 7’s “Stormborn,” where Daenerys meets with her advisors to discuss her plan for taking the Iron Throne. Yara Greyjoy and the now-dead Olenna Tyrell and Ellaria Sand encourage her to enact the same plan Dany roughly ends up using in Season 8, torching King’s Landing with her dragons and destroying the Iron Fleet. (Ironically, Tyrion Lannister challenges Ellaria’s bloodthirstiness by saying “we don’t poison little girls here,” when little over a season later that’s exactly what Varys tries to do to Daenerys in virtually the same room.)
Olenna advises Daenerys: “Commoners, nobles, they’re all just children, really. They won’t obey you unless they fear you.” In the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, Daenerys finally chooses fear. Maybe it was madness, maybe it was ruthlessness, but this choice was waiting for her to make it all along. The real question is how she can come back from it -- if she can come back from it -- and whether Game of Thrones was ever about breaking the wheel after all.
Terri Schwartz is Editor-in-Chief of Entertainment at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.
Culled from www.ign.com
It’s said that when a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land: madness, or greatness.
And in the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, "The Bells," the world finally saw that madness take hold of our purported hero, Daenerys Targaryen.
This character turn sparked instant debate and backlash for the most-watched episode of the HBO series. How could the woman who was set up to be Westeros’s savior, who learned from past tyrants’ mistakes and who outright said she would not burn King’s Landing turn so quickly on all of the morals she held dear? How could the daughter of the Mad King who promised to break the wheel, to be better than those who came before, become the same evil that these characters have fought so hard to destroy?
While I do agree that Season 8 has done a pretty shoddy job explaining its character motivations -- particularly in bringing these character traits in Daenerys to the forefront -- Game of Thrones has been setting up this about-face for its Khaleesi since the beginning. Like with the best and most devastating of this show’s plot twists, from Ned Stark’s beheading to the Red Wedding, Daenerys’s dark side has been in front of us all along.
The Mother of Dragons
The Daenerys Targaryen of Season 1 is an innocent, but one whose entire life experience is colored by an unjust banishment from her home and an ingrained sense of purpose. Because the two most influential people in her young life -- Illyrio Mopatis and her older brother Viserys -- told her from the beginning that the number one goal for any surviving Targaryens was to return to Westeros and reclaim their rightful seat on the Iron Throne, the backbone of her upbringing were basic ideas of revenge and betrayal.
Of course, Daenerys always thought her cruel brother Viserys, who was clearly mad from the start, would be the one on the Iron Throne. It’s only when she married Khal Drogo and he killed Viserys that she even gained the opportunity to one day return to the Seven Kingdoms and sit on that spiky chair.
Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss point back to Daenerys’s reaction to Viserys’s death -- when she calmly watched him die in a horrifying manner and rationalized, “He was no dragon” because fire cannot kill a dragon -- as a worrying reaction early on. It’s one of the first instances of the audience dismissing a dark personality trait in a main character because we are rooting for them.
“
Daenerys learned that giving mercy to those who seem vulnerable can be a weakness.
Daenerys became our stereotypical heroine when she walked through the flames, unburnt, with three baby dragons draped around her. But let’s not forget the cold-blooded murder of Mirri Maz Duur that led to the dragons being born. Daenerys initially tried to show the old witch mercy by trying to save her from the Dothraki, only to have that perceived kindness repaid with a curse. In that moment, Daenerys learned that giving mercy to those who seem vulnerable can be a weakness - one that robbed her of her husband and unborn son. Burning Mirri Maz Duur seemed justifiable after what she did to Dany’s family, but it was still a pretty chilling moment for the Mother of Dragons.
The Breaker of Chains
Daenerys’s entire ascension to ruler of the Slaver Cities has left a trail of blood and bodies behind. She killed the warlocks of Qarth and left Xaro Xhoan Daxos (and her handmaiden Doreah) to die in his empty vault. She had the Unsullied kill the masters in Astapor when she became the Breaker of Chains. She crucified the masters of Meereen in response to their cruel use of slave children to mark the path to the great city. She burned all of the Khals alive in Vaes Dothrak when they dared try to make her a Dosh Khaleen.
In each of these situations, we rooted for Daenerys to succeed because we saw the world from her perspective, and these people were “evil,” based on her experiences. Game of Thrones never did anything to dissuade us from the viewpoint that she was a hero, not a tyrant. But Daenerys made a mess in Slaver’s Bay, pure and simple, and she never proved herself to be an effective ruler. In Meereen she attempted to be just and kind, but when it came time to subdue the mutineers that rose up against her, she destroyed the city and left the entire country behind with a pretty weak support system in order to conquer a different continent altogether.
It seemed like Daenerys had learned from her prior mistakes when she did make it to Westeros. She found allies in the Martells and the Tyrells. She helped the North defeat the Night King and save the world. Back in Season 7 in "Stormborn," she opted not to torch King’s Landing when Ellaria Sand suggested it, specifically saying, “I am not here to be queen of the ashes.” She tried to take the peaceful route, tried to do what was right, and where did it leave her? Surrounded by strangers who did not want her as their queen, with all of her friends and allies dead, advisors who sided with her enemies to seat someone else on the Iron Throne, and citizens who do not love her as their “Mother.”
On top of it all, the one truth that had been ingrained in her from as far back as she could remember -- that her brother, and then her, should sit on the Iron Throne -- was challenged when she learned that another person, more loved by the people than she was, had a better claim to rule.
Protector of the Realm
Of course, all of this criticism of Daenerys is ignoring the character development Game of Thrones did to set up her as the hero of this story -- because as with any of us, we are the heroes of her own story. For all these decisions that do seem mad or cruel in retrospect, Daenerys still is the woman who freed slaves, locked her dragons away for accidentally killing one child, and tried to help other nations because it was right, not because it was convenient to her. She wanted to fix the injustices in the world and we cheered for her as she tried. She was our Khaleesi who was promised, and we loved her for it. “
We only saw Daenerys's story through her own lens.
But that doesn’t mean she’s a ruler without flaws, and as much as Game of Thrones is doing a one-dimensional job examining her dark turn in Season 8, it did a similarly bad job challenging her as our hero in previous seasons. By Daenerys being so removed from the rest of our main characters, we only saw her story through her own lens, and those of people like Jorah and Missandei, who were devoted to her. The biggest changes in our perception of her in Seasons 7 and 8 have been because we’re suddenly seeing her through the eyes of our other heroes, specifically Sansa Stark, Tyrion Lannister, and Varys. (Only in episode 5 did Jon Snow seem to let his puppy dog infatuation with Daenerys fall aside.)
It’s similar to what the show has done with Arya Stark, who we cheer on as the slayer of the Night King and heroine who may save the day, without paying much attention to the fact she’s also become a cold-blooded assassin who put aside her humanity for many seasons to murder a trail of people who had slighted her and her family.
Daenerys’s story is now running parallel to itself, with her conquering Westeros instead of Essos. In the Seven Kingdoms, Jon Snow is our Daario Naharis, Tyrion Lannister is our Hizdahr zo Loraq, and Cersei Lannister is a concentrated version of the Sons of the Harpy. Whereas we cheered when Daenerys raged against Meereen, taking out their fleets with her dragons and sacking the city, now she is doing that on the audience’s “home turf.”
There’s no better example of this dichotomy and conflict as a viewer than in “The Bells” when we compare the look on Grey Worm’s face to Jon Snow’s after Daenerys goes in to torch the city after the bells start tolling. For Grey Worm, this attack is revenge, and in previous seasons set in strange lands, we might have been cheering as he got it. But on Jon’s face, we only see horror, as he sees a person he trusted -- we all trusted -- choose violence instead of mercy and destroy the place they were supposed to save.
Queen of the Ashes
Game of Thrones’ biggest disservice to Daenerys in these past couple of seasons has been its decision to keep the audience at arm’s length from these characters. Instead of getting the intimate “perspective” scenes that mirrored the POV chapters in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, which really put us in the characters’ heads and allowed us to follow their thought processes, the TV show has opted to keep their motivations a secret until a surprise plot twist that’s meant to shock us. (Exhibit A: Sansa and Arya teaming up to kill Littlefinger after the audience was led to believe they were being turned against each other.)
“
Daenerys accomplished what her father, Mad King Aerys, never could. He wanted to 'burn them all.'
A lot of these plot threads involve dissecting more than just what is shown on the page, and it will be a huge disappointment if Game of Thrones doesn’t dig deep into Daenerys’s psyche to explain her motivations so the audience can understand her violent choice in the final episode. She was treated as a one-dimensional villain in “The Bells,” and the showrunners’ explanation for why looking at the Red Keep was enough to make her choose murder over mercy, even after she’d already claimed victory over King’s Landing, is pretty shallow.
What’s more poetic is the fact Daenerys accomplished what her father, Mad King Aerys, never could. He wanted to “burn them all,” torching King’s Landing and its ungrateful residents with Wildfire before Jaime Lannister killed him to become the Kingslayer. Many years later, Daenerys carried out Aerys’s sadistic wish - it’s just hard to track why, when Daenerys never previously expressed a desire to make the residents of Westeros suffer, only Cersei.
It doesn’t help that the showrunners explicitly said Daenerys wasn’t a Targaryen ruler like her father only three years ago. "I think Dany's been becoming a Targaryen ever since the beginning of Season 1," said David Benioff in the “Inside the Episode” for the “Battle of the Bastards,” with D.B. Weiss adding, "She's not her father and she's not insane and she's not a sadist, but there's a Targaryen ruthlessness that comes with even the good Targaryens." Maybe they forgot a very key “yet”?
Fire and Blood
As IGN’s Game of Thrones reviewer Laura Prudom examined in her review of “The Bells,” Season 8 hasn’t dedicated much time to tying these pieces together, trading character development for shock value and making Daenerys’s sudden cruelty towards civilians seem like a complete departure from her established goals. It’s why Daenerys’s turn feels so out of left field even when the show has been laying the groundwork for a Mad Queen Daenerys from the start. The characters around her might have only started questioning her tyrannical streak this season, right as we’re approaching the endgame, but it was there all along.
It’s interesting how much “The Bells” mirrors Season 7’s “Stormborn,” where Daenerys meets with her advisors to discuss her plan for taking the Iron Throne. Yara Greyjoy and the now-dead Olenna Tyrell and Ellaria Sand encourage her to enact the same plan Dany roughly ends up using in Season 8, torching King’s Landing with her dragons and destroying the Iron Fleet. (Ironically, Tyrion Lannister challenges Ellaria’s bloodthirstiness by saying “we don’t poison little girls here,” when little over a season later that’s exactly what Varys tries to do to Daenerys in virtually the same room.)
Olenna advises Daenerys: “Commoners, nobles, they’re all just children, really. They won’t obey you unless they fear you.” In the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, Daenerys finally chooses fear. Maybe it was madness, maybe it was ruthlessness, but this choice was waiting for her to make it all along. The real question is how she can come back from it -- if she can come back from it -- and whether Game of Thrones was ever about breaking the wheel after all.
Terri Schwartz is Editor-in-Chief of Entertainment at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.
Culled from www.ign.com
RSS Feed