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I guess we’ll get the answers to those questions next week, when everyone-including Daenerys-is forced to reckon with the gravity of her decision. When you’re on the ground in King’s Landing, watching Daenerys unleashing fire and blood, it’s terrifyingly clear why she might be the worst possible candidate for the Iron Throne. That major point-of-view shift in the latter half of the episode finally forces us to regard Daenerys as the vast majority of Westeros will regard her: a brutal conquerer flying far overhead, both unknown and unknowable, demanding loyalty and enforcing it with brutal spouts of dragonfire. Don’t these idiots know what Daenerys has been through? Don’t they know what she can do? Those natural sympathies have also made it easier to rationalize the brutal violence she has inflicted along the way, which adds a disturbing degree of complicity to the victory so many fans have anticipated with such relish. We’re naturally sympathetic to Daenerys because we’ve spent so much time with her-and when the people of Essos and Westeros have doubted or slighted her, our sympathies have always aligned with her anyway. On one level, there’s an artfulness to this choice. After that, she’s only glimpsed from afar, spurring on Drogon as he lays waste to the city. We get a great long shot of her face as she stares hatefully at the Red Keep. (And even that would probably have been enough to horrify her staunchest allies and prove her an unfit candidate for the Iron Throne.) But going out of her way to slaughter innocent people before confronting her actual enemy? Daenerys is absolutely ruthless to her enemies, but she’s never pointedly merciless to people who have done nothing to deserve it.Īnd maybe Game of Thrones knows this is a bit of a cheat, because it’s here-at what is clearly the defining moment of her arc-that the show pulls away from Daenerys’s point of view entirely. I could be persuaded that Daenerys is so blinded by her rage for Cersei that she would attack the Red Keep, writing off the deaths of the citizens in and around the Red Keep as tragic but necessary collateral damage. (This week, she adds Varys to the list, fulfilling a promise to kill him if he ever betrayed her.) And you can make a long, long list of the enemies Daenerys has killed with her magical dragons’ fire, from the smug slaver Kraznys to the stubborn members of House Tarly. She found her handmaid Doreah in bed with the traitorous Xaro Xhoan Daxos and buried them both alive. She strapped Mirri Maz Duur to Khal Drogo’s funeral pyre and shrugged off her screams of pain.
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Who wouldn’t kneel to a queen like that?īut then, at the same time, there was Daenerys the killer, who was unfailingly merciless to her enemies. She possessed the world’s only remaining dragons, which is another way of saying she literally brought magic back into the world. Daenerys began her arc powerless, raped, and abused, and grew into a powerful and uncompromising protector of the raped and abused. She was, to the best of our knowledge, the sole surviving heir of the royal family whose throne was stolen by an incompetent drunk. If you missed GQ's recap of the season's fourth episode, click here before reading below.įor the vast majority of Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen has been painted as the last great hope for Westeros.