A Requiem for the Mother of Dragons: Our Beloved Anti-villain
The first 40 minutes of “The Iron Throne” was in many ways the ending many of us had come to expect from Game of Thrones — perhaps not in terms of plot developments, but certainly in tone. From the hauntingly serene ash constantly floating down from the sky like snowflakes on a winter’s morning to Grey Worm’s slaughter of surviving Lannister soldiers, the first half of the episode set the perfect tone for Daenerys’ brief reign as queen of the ashes.
While the abruptness of the Mother of Dragons’ turn from increasingly isolated and paranoid of her advisors but still ostensibly “good” to someone willing to burn civilians is perhaps the biggest flaw of Thrones’ final season, the finale did a fantastic job reckoning with the fallout of her turn. Rather than simply being framed as a “Mad Queen,” Daenerys’ rationalization of her actions was perfectly conveyed.
At some point — likely due to the cumulative loss of so many trusted advisors and suspicion of those remaining — Daenerys decided that rather than seek outside counsel she would trust fully in her own moral authority, assured that her “good” ends justified whatever means were necessary. Her conversation with Jon in front of the Iron Throne was illuminating in that regard. “Because I know what is good” she replies when Jon asks her how she knows the world she is trying to build will be good. Moments earlier she rationalizes her genocide of the Kings Landing population by displacing blame to Cersei who “used their innocence as weapon” against her.
Taken together, it effectively reinforces the picture Tyrion paints a few scenes prior — Daenerys as an anti-villain with dangerous certainty in the morality of her new world and who has a track record of dispensing with her “evil” enemies who oppose that vision.
It makes for a remarkably effective bit of after-the-fact explanation of Daenerys’ actions in “The Bells” which does enough to make Jon stabbing her feel somewhat earned. However, by the same token it doesn’t retroactively fix the issues with the jarring extent of her abrupt heel turn. Now that it’s all said and done, I think the show failed Daenerys’ shift to tyrant in two key ways.
The first is what I mentioned in last week’s column. We needed a full episode or two in Dragonstone following Missandei’s death to get a fuller sense of Daenerys turning from her isolation and sorrow to fanatical belief in the morality of her rule and willingness to achieve it by any means — even those that she previously balked at. The second, which only became clear after the finale, is that her burning the Khals at the Dosh Khaleen needed to feel more disturbing and less triumphant. The show had begun to make us feel uneasy with Daenerys’ sense of justice when she crucified the masters of Meereen. Had burning the Khals felt like another troubling step in her willingness to exact brutality in the name of justice or good, the buildup to burning King’s Landing likely would have tracked better.
Regardless, I liked that even in her final moments Daenerys was never depicted as mad, purely evil, or relishing in cruelty. She was simply a Targaryen alone in the world, and with everyone who had grounded her either dead (Jorah, Barristan, Missandei) or abandoning her cause (Tyrion and Jon) she turned to Fire and Blood.
I never wanted Daenerys’ story to end this way. As I said last week, despite my appreciation for the subversiveness of Thrones, I wanted the conventional ending — Jon and Daenerys ruling together as king and queen. Yet I appreciate that the story’s final subversion was perhaps its most powerful. Daenerys was the Mother of Dragons. She was the breaker of chains. But neither of those titles make her morally infallible nor give her unassailable right to rule.
As Daenerys slipped from this world after being stabbed by her last remaining relative I felt a strange sense of relief. Not relief that a villain had been defeated, but relief that the emotion that overtook me was pity for Daenerys. Jon’s dagger likely saved thousands of lives across the Seven Kingdoms from fire and blood, but the moment wasn’t triumphant — it was tragic. After everything we’d been through with Daenerys, a triumphant tone to her death would have felt incredibly off.
Through eight seasons of Game of Thrones, a majority of those who watched the show came to love Daenerys — her fiery confidence, her fierce pursuit of justice, her charming vulnerability, and the lingering hint of loneliness she never could quite shake. That the worst parts of those characteristics emerged and the best receded as she neared closer and closer to the Iron Throne is the great tragedy in the song of ice and fire.
She was our queen, now and always.
