Keep in mind that Bran's vision of a lone dragon over King's Landing and Daenerys' vision of the Red Keep's ruined throne room came way back in season four. Rather than signposting Daenerys' flaws in neon, her most concerning inclinations have been patiently stoked. Yet while her flight in "The Bells" was shocking, it was also evidence of careful writing - and admittedly, "careful writing" has been something of a rarity in the otherwise clumsy scripts as of late. Daenerys' creep toward tyranny, by contrast, has been downright subtle, and you might be forgiven for missing it at all. Game of Thrones has nevertheless struggled to produce genuinely complicated and believable antagonists, often falling on the crutch of "pure evil" characters like Euron or the Night King.
With the former failing, Daenerys resorts to the latter in "The Bells," a decision we've seen her inch closer and closer toward with every season. Martin has frequently expressed, Thrones is much more about how that conflict takes place in individual hearts: "In real life," he has insisted, "the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which." Daenerys, then, represents a choice all leaders have to make: to rule by earning love or by instilling fear. After all, Game of Thrones was never supposed to be a story about the battle between the so-called forces of good and evil. That Daenerys is not "pure good" makes her a far more compelling character, though, just as her many positive attributes make her turn in "The Bells" all the more tragic. There's a scene early on in the books where she sees the dothraki raping a young woman whose family they have just murdered, and she silently thinks to herself through tears that this is the cost of war.
#DAENERYS VISIONS TO WAKE THE DRAGON TV#
The books are often even more direct in tipping the hand than the TV series: Daenerys' uncompromising sense of "justice" has remained a constant ever since, from the Sack of Astapor, when she ordered every un-enslaved man in the city killed, to shrugging off her advisers and demanding the crucifixion of the Great Masters of Meereen. The first sign that something was off in her judgment came during season two, when Daenerys ordered her handmaiden Doreah and the merchant Xaro to be locked alive in a vault after the pair conspired to betray her to the Warlocks of Qarth. As the "previously on Game of Thrones" recap before "The Bells" reminded viewers, her turn toward tyranny has been in the making since the very first season, rooted in the echo of her brother Viserys' threat: " You don't want to wake the dragon, do you?"Įven Daenerys' earliest flirtations with power were deeply unsettling.
Construing Daenerys as a stand-in for all female leaders has in fact always been a mistake. Since Thrones' debut, Daenerys' storyline has been willfully misinterpreted as "empowering," despite warning signs that she is not the one-note heroine some people yearn for.
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