SPOILERS for Game of Thrones.
As I covered earlier, Emilia Clarke did a longish interview with Entertainment Weekly about the end of Game of Thrones and what happened to Daenerys. Despite the lazy AF writing from Benioff & Weiss, it feels like the actors who actually played these characters understood that Dany’s arc wasn’t so black-and-white – it wasn’t just “well, she’s gone full Mad Queen, she deserves to die!” I wanted to highlight some of the comments from Kit Harington, Peter Dinklage and Gwendoline Christie:
Emilia Clarke on Jon Snow: “Um, he just doesn’t like women does he? He keeps f—king killing them. No. If I were to put myself in his shoes I’m not sure what else he could have done aside from … oh, I dunno, maybe having a discussion with me about it? Ask my opinion? Warn me? It’s like being in the middle of a phone call with your boyfriend and they just hang up and never call you again. ‘Oh, this great thing happened to me at work today — hello?’ And that was 9 years ago…”
Peter Dinklage on Dany’s fire-bombing of Kings Landing: Dinklage says the showrunners on set compared Dany’s dragon-bombing of King’s Landing to the U.S. dropping nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki to decisively end World War II in 1945. “That’s what war is,” Dinklage says. “Did we make the right choices in war? How much longer would [WWII] have gone on if we didn’t make horrible decisions? We love Daenerys. All the fans love Daenerys, and she’s doing these things for the greater good. ‘The greater good’ has been in the headlines lately… when freeing everyone for the greater good you’re going to hurt some innocents along the way, unfortunately.”
Gwendoline Christie on Dany’s Mad Queen arc: “The signs have actually always been there. And they’ve been there in ways we felt at the time were just mistakes or controversial. At this time, it’s important to question true motives. This show has always been about power and, more than ever, it’s an interesting illustration that people in pursuit of power can come in many different forms and we need to question everything.”
Kit Harington on Jon killing Dany: “I think it’s going to divide,” Harington says of the finale’s fan reaction. “But if you track her story all the way back, she does some terrible things. She crucifies people. She burns people alive. This has been building. So, we have to say to the audience: ‘You’re in denial about this woman as well. You knew something was wrong. You’re culpable, you cheered her on.’”
Kit on the sexism criticism: Harington adds he worries the final two episodes will be accused of being sexist, an ongoing criticism of GoT that has recently resurfaced perhaps more pointedly than ever before. “One of my worries with this is we have Cersei and Dany, two leading women, who fall,” he says. “The justification is: Just because they’re women, why should they be the goodies? They’re the most interesting characters in the show. And that’s what Thrones has always done. You can’t just say the strong women are going to end up the good people. Dany is not a good person. It’s going to open up discussion but there’s nothing done in this show that isn’t truthful to the characters. And when have you ever seen a woman play a dictator?”
Kit’s words irked me. “The justification is: Just because they’re women, why should they be the goodies?…Dany is not a good person. It’s going to open up discussion but there’s nothing done in this show that isn’t truthful to the characters. And when have you ever seen a woman play a dictator?” Um… he’s talking about Cersei being the dictator, RIGHT? Because that psychopath deserved to die, no doubt, and instead of allowing Arya to stab Cersei in the eye, the writers gave Cersei the death of a wounded heroine, complete with swelling, tragic music, like we were supposed to be torn up about it. As for Dany… as I said, chica had a bad day, she firebombed thousands of people, but who amongst us, etc? I think the “sexism” criticism is completely valid because of the way so many of Dany’s decisions were framed by the men within the story. It’s like Emilia says – “maybe having a discussion with me about it? Ask my opinion? Warn me?” Yeah. Again, I’ll buy that the idea was always to have Dany go mad and have Jon kill her. But I hate the way the writers got there and how they framed her “madness.”
Photos courtesy of HBO/Game of Thrones.
Kit’s comments on sexism are pretty disappointing, but I agree with his overview of Dany’s character. She has always had these, um, tendencies, and people cheered her on.
Arya slit people’s throats and people STILL cheer her on. Tyrion killed his own father and people still cheer him on. If Dany is a bad person then so is Arya and so is Tyrion and so is Jon and so is Sansa.
@Valiantly Varnished.
Its not about killing, but who you kill. Tyrion, Arya and Sansa never killed the innocent. Dany burning them was for me personally Stannis all over. I rooted for him before I cheered for Dany. Both surprised me.
Best written show regardless.
@ Valiantly Varnished
I don’t know why people don’t see this.
Then maybe they are all bad people. It’s not necessarily that complicated.
Tyrion strangled shae to death which is way worse than killing his Dad if you ask me. But no one ever talks about Shae’s death.
I think they are trying to sell the narrative that the “signs were there” a little too hard. Dany definitely executed “bad” people before, but because of lazy writing, there wasn’t much show-build-up for her to kill thousands of innocent people. I’m not saying it won’t be well done in the books, but the show just did not set it up correctly at all.
I’m definitely side-eyeing the actors that are coming out to defend this. Even Emilia seemed a bit taken aback. You want to see a slow decent from good intentions to evil? Breaking Bad. It can be done well. GoT did not do that.
That narrative is to defend D&D’s dumb choices and protect them from the fallout. Talking points have been coordinated and they will all (except Emilia) repeat them, one way or another.
They are trying to sell their BS mad queen story. Of all the characters of the snow the one who killed to free others? Daenerys the ones who killed for revenge & Power? Everyone else.
They all have blood on their hands…
“When have you ever seen a woman play a dictator?” Well, that makes no sense. Anyway, I don’t want the sexist version that all women are unfit to rule, but it’s not good storytelling that all of the women have to be good, but…I’ve said before that it would look really bad to have two insane/unfit women with a man to come in and save the day. D&D what I hoped and had a good female at the end: Sansa, Queen of the North.
Wait, wait…whut? Kaiser, is your response really, who among us hasn’t had a bad day and firebombed a city full of innocents after its leader had already surrendered?? 🤯 There’s much to criticize here, but I’ve had lots of bad days, and I can say, emphatically, none of it would have justified me pulling a Daenerys. Just…no.
@Enny RIGHT??? That comment is so, so disturbing. I can assure you that on my darkest days, never once have I gone to a place where I would have felt justified in indiscriminately slaughtering the masses, children included. I’d like to hope most people feel the same. I am disgusted that this writer thinks this is totally acceptable.
So, I get what he’s saying about the show doing a good thing by writing women to be flawed. That’s obviously important, and I find it a little sad how positively DELIGHTED I am to see women written as real human beings with complex emotions and actions. But…I don’t know. I think the combination of having multiple women in power turn out to be evil and insane and therefore determined by men as unfit to rule as well as women who AREN’T evil and insane do things like crediting their rapist for making them a strong person (as well as all the other sexist things this show has done over the years)…that’s when things get a little icky.
@case Totally agree!! Complicated women yes, Dany quickly abandoning her creed of never harming the innocent without buildup, no. I’m especially sick of people trying to justify her 180 degree turn into lady hitler as “well she killed all those rapists, slavers, and soldiers in combat! Obviously crazy!!” When alllllllll the men have done the same thing.
Here’s what would have been dope, and what I thought for sure they were building to: Dany makes the difficult decision to be merciful to Cersei, and then cersei commits suicide by blowing up ALL of King’s landing. We still get a ton of emotional fallout, complicated villainous women, etc, AND a Mad Queen storyline! But alas 😒
@case Totally agree!! Complicated women yes, Dany quickly abandoning her creed of never harming the innocent without buildup, no. I’m especially sick of people trying to justify her 180 degree turn into lady hitler as “well she killed all those rapists, slavers, and soldiers in combat! Obviously crazy!!” When alllllllll the men have done the same thing.
Here’s what would have been dope, and what I thought for sure they were building to: Dany makes the difficult decision to be merciful to Cersei, and then cersei commits suicide by blowing up ALL of King’s landing. We still get a ton of emotional fallout, complicated villainous women, etc, AND a Mad Queen storyline! But alas 😒
If a man did what Daenerys did, he would be a villain, but he wouldn’t be called “crazy”. Stannis burned his daughter alived and no one called him crazy.
Except Daenerys’s father was the Mad King. Because he was crazy and then used wildfire to burn everything. Her similar madness was hinted at throughout the show’s entire run. The writing was super rushed, lazy, and overall misogynistic but her being “mad” didn’t appear out of nowhere for the character.
That in and of itself is ridiculous. That’s not how mental illness works. One isn’t magically mentally ill because one of your parents were. That whole part of the story is frankly rather disgusting. And as I’ve said on this thread earlier- if the litmus test for being “mad” is killing people then they are ALL crazy.
@valiantlyvarnished My point was that the show had been hinting at her teetering on the edge of madness from the outset. And the fact that the Targaryens are endless inbreeders would have contributed to that. That the writers are lazy and can’t be bothered to write that character development well doesn’t change that the signs are there. Also, mental illness absolutely can be hereditary. Come on, now. Daenerys was born from parents who were also siblings. From a long line of a family that did that. Mental illness comes with that level of inbreeding. She was raised believing that the only TRUE rulers of the Iron Throne were Targaryens. The madness did not come out of nowhere.
“The dragonspawn were famous for losing their minds. It was the price they paid for centuries of keeping the bloodlines pure. And Aerys more than happily continued the “noble” sister-fucking tradition of his forefathers.” – Robert Baratheon
@MrsBanjo and again – that’s not how it works. That’s not how mental illness WORKS. Even if her parents were siblings. Inbreeding CAN cause a lot of issues – most of them developmental and PHYSICAL.
@valiantlyvarnished
1. Mental illness CAN be hereditary.
2. Regardless of the fact that inbreeding primarily presents as developmental and physical, GRRM WROTE IT INTO THE BOOKS that later carried into the show, that THE TARGARYEN INBREEDING LEAD TO A FAMILY LINE OF MAD PEOPLE. Fucking hell, even Joffrey was a crazy asshole and he was also the product of inbreeding – because that’s how it was WRITTEN IN BOTH THE BOOKS AND THE SHOW. Take it up with GRRM regarding the inaccuracy of mental illness and inbreeding.
3. Yes, the showrunners don’t give a flying fuck about women and how to write them. But Daenerys’s eventual descent into madness was established from THE BEGINNING IN BOTH THE BOOKS AND SHOW. That D&D can’t be fucking bothered to write that descent well, or even to care to try because they prefer men and BIG BANG BOOM shit, doesn’t change the fact that Daenerys’s storyline is how it was always going to end.
Y’all are arguing about “mental illness” in an alternative reality and magical world. I think a little suspension of disbelief is required about the madness of any of these characters.
Remember what Cersei said? “When a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin.” In this universe, being crazy definitely has a genetic component.
Yet it was Cersei who actually used the wildfire on everyone, but hey whatever. Kaiser was using tongue in cheek. As for Dany these people did follow the usurper. She was wrong but then that wasn’t her storyline. The Misogynistic Duo of D&D did this to quickly tie up a loose end so they can go destroy the next Star Wars movies. It was wrong & I am upset about ruining the character. Many people have horrible people as parents & don’t go the way of the father (or mother)
& an all alone Drogon broke my heart. Which is only active for animals & the like
She was angry and she has an uterus = MAD MAD so MAD!
Exactly this. Dany wasn’t crazy – she was PISSED OFF and who can blame her??
Let me ask this question, because it’s been bugging me. Does Tyrion deserve to be Hand of the King? Because I think there is a strong argument to be made that for two seasons, Dany checked her impulses and listened to her advisors. And Tyrion sh*tty advice contributed to the mess she found herself in, and that messed caused her to break. I’m not putting all of this on Tyrion. But it just really bothers me that he suffers zero consequences and is hamming it up with his buddies at the end while she ends up dead.
All of THIS. And how is Tyrion – a PRISONER- allowed to dictate who should be King?? Tyrion gets to keep his job while Jon is sent to the Wall??
Throughout Tyrion has been the best storyteller and mesmerizes those on the new council into listening. He does so in quiet tones, and they lean in to listen. Because of his diminished social and physical stature, he has never been perceived as threatening, so why not hear what the little man has to say. After all, he drinks and knows things.
Haha! Right?! And Tyrion appointed someone who acquitted him of his crimes. Hmm….hmmmmm…..hmmmm……
When it was over I walked downstairs and said “so that was the Jon and Tyrion Hour, right?” I was bored, honestly.
Tyrion should have been dead the moment Daenerys finds out about him freeing Jaime.
There was no reason why everybody else gets executed while he is given the time to plot against Daenerys and weasel his way out to go straight back to a position of Power.
I’m actually stunned how dull and nothing Jon Snow’s part in the final season turned out to be. I mean….maybe if the actor had more than two facial expressions I would have caught some nuance but….wow he was the dictionary definition of a *shrug*. Even his killing of Dany was super-quick and sort of….oh, that’s it?
“ to the U.S. dropping nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki”
Uhhhhh, that’s not it my friend. There is a lot to be re-examined and debated about that history and the morality and horror: but the proper analogy would have been if Japan had unconditionally surrendered, and then the bombs had been dropped. It’s a crucial difference.
I never got the hype around Jon/Kit. Jon is a super bland character, and Kit seems like a horribly uninteresting actor with little range.
Exactly Case. I always felt that Jon was dull and Kit was not a great actor.
I liked Jon for the first couple of seasons until I realized what an utter moron he actually was. And he couched his idiocy in “honesty”.
Jon was a boring character that was never really developed beyond the moody eye candy. Kit is actually a decent actor, I’ve seen him in other things and I have friends who’ve seen his stage performances. Like Emilia he did his best with the sh!t that they were given.
He’s pretty
Did you see the plastic water bottle behind Sam’s foot when they’re gathered to discuss Tyrion and Jon? Twice in one short season.
Three times technically. Last week they releases a promo photo of Jamie hugging Cersei…and his hand had grown back! 😂
I missed that! That’s amazing.
LOOOL
So the reddit leaks were accurate. I had read them but still hoped for something extra, so kind of plot twist in the end. Oh well
Reminder that they took an extra year to write and shoot this season. Time well spent, clearly. Well done show-runners, you took a look at the last season of Dexter and we did indeed hold your beer.
His take is CRAP. Dany is a bad person?? Then so is Jon, Arya, Sansa and Tyrion.
Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke’s comments are spot on.
This, totally this.
How can you possibly compare what Dany did to those other characters?
Tyrion – killed his father who treated him like sh*t and was going to have him executed for a crime HE KNEW Tyrion didn’t commit
Arya – killed Meryn Trant who abused little girls, The Freys who murdered her family, and Littlefinger who orchestrated the downfall of her family. She couldn’t even bring herself to kill Lady Crane who she clearly saw as an innocent
Jon – executed the men who murdered him, killed traitorous Northerns during BoB who sided with the Boltons, killed wildlings who were attacking castle black
How do any of these actions compare to murdering 1000s of innocent people?
Dany deserved to die. I’m team Sansa, liberator and first ruler of the North.
Tyrion deserved to die too. And so does Arya.
Definitely Team Sansa here too but I also liked Dany.
I’m somewhat puzzled by many of these analyses… if one hates the writing, then why attempt to justify Dany’s behaviour in the final episodes? If, on the other hand, Dany’s behaviour can be justified and made consistent, why hate the writing? Her behaviour is a product of the writing, after all.
Ok to be fair…
My only complaint is that they should’ve shown not told, as the old adage goes. There was more of secondary characters telling us, “see she’s not a good person” than examples of it. It should’ve been sufficiently evident that there should’ve been full on “is she a good person or not?” fan debates raging for the past couple years at least.
Of course he did. Loyal to the sexist hack writers to the end. Maybe he’s angling for a role on the “The South Won the Civil War” trash show they’re writing.
People would have had less problem with Dany going Mad Queen if they had just actually cultivated it from the start because it’s pretty fucking obvious that she started on a hero arc and as soon as they got bored with her and the show overall, they shoehorned a crappy ending for her and fell back on brief moments in the previous seasons to prove it had been there all along, when it really wasn’t. And so she has to be punished by getting knifed by Jon Snow, you know because she gives him no other choice.
I hated Cersei, but they gave the woman who had outplayed her enemies on every level such a terrible end – she had been cunning and powerful, but not enough to avoid ending up weepy and defeated in her brother’s arms under a pile of rubble.
This. This has beenmy theory this entire season: That D & D simply stopped caring. They have two major projects in the works and I feel like they just threw something together and were done with it. It feels like they all checked out – down to the editors who left everything from coffee cups, water bottled and even Jamie’s HAND in scenes.
The overall sloppiness is quite revealing…
I never expected Dany to rule. I never expected a happy ending. But I’ll never understand why she killed the innocent people. It just makes no sense. Cersei had time to try to escape. The soldiers had already surrendered. It was all pointless.
I saw Kit Harrington, the blandest of bland white dudes, in some forgettable horror flick once and he had absolutely zero presence on screen.
Considering the overall disappointment people appear to have with GOT, I am happy to have never wasted my time on this misogynistic claptrap.
The rest of you poor sods who invested your time in watching all eight seasons and chose to become invested in this world have my commiserations.
If this moron could never speak in public again, that would be great (he’s said far worse than this re: sexism in the past). He can’t act, he has exactly one facial expression and got extremely lucky to be cast in GoT (a part for which he is utterly miscast, BTW, going by the books version of Jon). I can only hope that he will now fade back into obscurity where he never should’ve emerged from in the first place.
My God…Kit needs to stfu
You know nothing, Kit Harington.
After 8 seasons you still know nothing, Jon Snow.
I honestly like the last season and was defending it to all of my friends who were hating it. I just don’t get how they made sense of Bran. It was just weird because he was such a nothing burger the whole season.
Jon tried to have a discussion with Dany, right up until the end. He basically asked her what if others are right and she said no, there is no other way. She’s proven that for the world to be how SHE envisioned, no one was safe. Jon made the only decision he could, I don’t have any problems with what Kit said. Dany won the throne on her terms. But how she won it, was her death sentence. I think it was a fair ending.
I’ve never read so many complaints about a work of fiction lmao! I expect to see thousands of fantasy/sci-fi sagas emerge from literary experts worldwide. It was a glorious ride, riddled with shocking scenes, a full range of questionable behaviors, character hate and character love, vast lands and climates, peoples, languages, religions, old world limits, horrors and oppression, and a very strange need, requirement or demand from programming and/writers to wrap everything up quickly. As the waif says, ‘So sad.’
Martin’s world takes a very very very long time to go from his brain to the written word. Frustratingly and oddly long, but that’s Martin and he seems to spread himself around a bit. Tolkien’s works are soooo tedious. I truly love reading Heinlein’s works, but he’s quite a wordaholic at times as well. But as I said, when writers read works from their genre, and become astute students of history, government, religion, mechanics, technology, sociology, anthropology, geography, etc. in efforts of believable depth, all the complaints should be a sign of masterful things to come in our near future. I’m ready!
I could agree with all the outrage, but please don’t justify killing of fictional entire town as a bad day. This is not about madness either, it’s about being unfit for position of power. Doesn’t ring any bells from actual reality?
Agree. This is what I get frustrated with. I get many people was rooting for Daenarys, but her willfully burning an entire city and showing NO REMORSE isn’t a bad day. This was always in Daenarys simmering just below the surface. As I said, Daenarys won her father’s throne back. However, how she won it was her downfall.
I thought the finale made the point clear that Dany had not gone mad at all, that burning King’s Landing was her plan all along. She just hadn’t conveyed that to Tyrion and Co, at least not overtly.
Grey Worm, the Dothraki, the tone of her victory speech, her conversation with Jon aaallllll lays out a concrete battle plan.
Tyrion and Co, like many of the fans, chose to interpret her words and actions differently. She planned to sack King’s Landing just as she sacked every other place she came to, everyone else who opposed her and she was going to Winterfell next, then to Dorne.
None of it was madness.
I Agree with you Dany went too far she was going to burn the rest of the world she wasn’t going to stop . If you listen to what dany was saying all along that was her plan her goal to burn the world to ground if Jon didn’t stop her she would have went after winter fell her victory speech was a warning she definitely plan to do what she did in kings landing to other plans . Her army was out control and ruthless I can’t believe people actually want dany to win after what she did
“Her army was out control and ruthless” Nonsense! They were very controlled and following their leaders instructions. Ruthlessness is part of any war, I’m afraid to say. But Dany was not mad nor crazy. She was angry after suffering many loses and after being stabbed in the back by people she trusted dearly.
Is it “madness” to kill those who oppose you? I don’t think it is exactly sane to kill people who have no weapons and live in a city that happens to have Cersei as a queen. It wasn’t as if it was easy to move about in those days. They weren’t opposition, they were innocent…and I’m speaking of the women, children, and elderly.
That she intended to “free” the world by forcing them to accept only her version of happiness, and only after she had burned their cities to the ground is not unlike certain dictators throughout history. We don’t view them as cunning, we view them as evil sociopaths.
They even get elected.
@ellekaye, Jon addressed that with her and she responded with language that matches what she’s said previously. She did not view women and children as innocents. She viewed them as part of a system that supported Lannister rule. She felt that they’d never support her as queen and wanted them removed.
Given how she was raised and how she was bred to seek back the throne “before she could count to 20” she saw those children the way she saw herself, the way Robert Baratheon saw her when he was trying to have her murdered as a child, the way the Mountain and Tywin saw women and children when the former killed them at the command of the latter.
Jon even asked her in that final conversation, what of the people who don’t think what you did was good… she shrugged.
All morality in GoT is not the same. The concept of protecting the people as a whole is not a widespread concept, not even among the Starks who protected Notherners but felt no such obligation to the wildlings and all of their women and children, which is how Jon ended up dead, championing a novel thought process.
@DS9,
Yes, Jon did address it, and she responded as a sociopath and/or psychopath would. She was born into a family of psychopaths and groomed to be an asset at any cost.
No, not all morality is the same. She chose to rule by fear, and the time had come to put an end to such rule.
@ElleKaye ” No, not all morality is the same. She chose to rule by fear, and the time had come to put an end to such rule. ” With barely human emotionless Bran? Really?
I hate his stupid argument that we would want Cersei to be a goodie just because she’s a woman. I think we can all agree that we loved watching Lena and she did a great job. We loved to hate her and we wanted to watch her die, not have her sit on the throne and be a good leader. I can’t remember what that kind of argument is called, except that it’s dismissive and wrong.
Everyone in this show murders and does terrible things. And yea, madness runs in the family, but before she killed all the innocent people she was pretty much the same as everyone else. Flip of the coin and all that and Dany’s fans were hoping she would be a good leader, instead she makes a weird, terrible decision to murder innocent people.
When have we ever seen a woman play a dictator: Juliane Moore in Hunger Games, Kate Winslet in that Divergent Series, Meryl Streep in The GIver, Cate Blanchett in Thor ragnarok…
Chica was a dictator. Dany intended to be a tyrant. She was the one in the making.
The fact that Cersei was one, doesn’t make Dany any less murdering, genocidal tyrant.
There is no killing of innocents for the greater good. Not ever in human history has that turned out to be a good idea. Not once!
The idea that it’s okay to kill civilians because they were used as human shield is the one that would see all the women, children, civilians of Afghanistan, for example, dead just because Talibans used them as human shields. That kind of behaviour was always massacre, not proper war. What is wrong with people, defending such atrocities just because they like the character?
What pissed me off is that Cersei is RIGHT THERE. Dany sees her in the window and makes a conscious choice to turn away and kill random kids instead.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world to have Dany decide to burn down the Red Keep instead (it would be completely in keeping with her characterisation for Dany to want to kill Cersei personally despite the surrender), the Red Keep collapses and kills civilians (collateral damage rather than deliberate slaughter), this re-starts the battle then Dany has to step in with Drogon. The end result is the same but without the completely ludicrous “Dany has Cersei right in front of her but decides to open fire in the opposite direction instead because why kill a tyrant when you can mass-slaughter kids right??”