With the final season of Game of Thrones having aired just last night, an overwhelming number of fans are out to take back the ending they feel was stolen from them with fire and blood—or more appropriately, with a Change.org petition that garnered over 1,224,756 signatures and counting as of 5/20/19 at 10:55 EST.
For the record, I do not support this petition. The idea that fans should mandate the writers of a TV show to remake their own art is preposterous and arguably censorship, which I despise based on principle. The whole point of art is, to quote Dany, you “don’t get to make those choices.” Love it or hate it, you are merely a spectator of someone else’s story.
However, like any fan whether they’ll admit it or not, I can’t get enough of Thrones or of our ill-fated, tragically flawed, and almost universally loved Daenerys Targaryen. Despite that the signs of her underlying ruthlessness for enemies both real and perceived were evident from season one when she watched unflinchingly as her brother died in agony while she mumbled about him being “no dragon,” and again in season two when she locked the king of Qarth and her handmaiden in a tomb to starve to death without batting an eye for hiding her dragons.
She also called for Jorah’s execution numerous times before being convinced to spare him by Tyrion because “killing someone so obviously devoted to you is not an act that inspires devotion.”
Underlying madness aside, I do agree that her character deserved better. After overcoming insurmountable odds back in season one and watching her grow over seven seasons of complex character development—emerging from a poor, meek, orphaned child living off the kindness of strange Eastern noblemen with her abusive brother who sold her into marriage to a ruthless Kahl who couldn’t speak her language to become the formidable vision of power and influence she achieved by season 8—her decision to go full Anakin Skywalker on King’s Landing could’ve benefited with at least another two episodes of buildup. I agree that it this final season felt rushed.
But was it, though? Or was it simply that I couldn’t get enough? I too was won over by Daenerys’s beauty and charisma—her resilience in the face of incredible odds. After all she’d endured in season one, I cheered when she emerged from Drogo’s funeral pyre, naked and unburnt and cradling three dragonlings, as all the remaining kahlasar fell to their knees, their faces touching the ground in reverence. That was some of the most stunning and seductive cinematography I’ve ever seen, even in a fantasy series.
We were transfixed by Dany from the moment we laid eyes on her, lured by her inner strength and attention-commanding presence—and seemingly evident, at least at the surface level, passion for elevating the downtrodden from the tyranny of despots and their deplorable human-rights abuses. We all felt satisfaction when she had Drogon torch the ruler of Astapor who continually insulted her in Valyrian with this epic line:
A dragon is not a slave … Dracarys.
My Defense of the Ending
I fall into the seemingly small percentage of fans who are satisfied with the ending, however rushed it clearly felt. I think my reasons closely mirror why I’ve always preferred Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” to what Disney produced. I don’t hate Dany for her descent into main antagonist, nor do I hate the writers, whether we’re referring to Benioff and Weiss or Martin—for making it so. In fact, I still love Daenerys as a character; I will still revel at stunning fan art of her with her dragons that I wish I had the artistic skill to create myself, and I’m satisfied that she was too good to be true—too human to be perfect, and too tragically flawed to be a savior.
Maybe it’s that angsty goth high-school girl still inside of me who’s such a sucker for a good tragedy. At worst, I might just be a masochist for preferring these types of endings. Daenerys Targaryen was beautiful, intelligent, resilient, and passionate—but ultimately, her lack of impulse control and the devastating loss of the only people she felt she could trust wast too much, and it overruled any sense of compassion she might’ve retained for the people of King’s Landing who didn’t blindly fall to her feet at the threat of death by dragonfire. Her seemingly rapid descent into madness is shocking until you think about her intentions and actions all along; it’s also a throat-punch of a reminder that beautiful and charismatic people can be just as deadly as anyone else with a self-serving agenda, and they are experts at hiding it. Daenerys was Thrones‘ wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I loved this about Dany because it made her human, complete with all the good and horrors that being human entails. She was effectively the Disney princess of the series, and if she’d received a Disney-princess ending, I would’ve felt cheated and lied to.
Martin’s fantasy epic was never intended to be the fairy tales we’re accustomed to in Western society, and A Song of Ice and Fire was set up from the beginning to embrace some basic fantasy tropes while turning the rest on their heads. It was a beautiful reflection of human nature at its most base and primal; it was a reflection of us and of what humans are capable of behind the masks we wear for society, those we trust, and our “enemies.” People identified with Dany because she overcame so much; any woman who’s ever felt alone and hopeless could project themselves onto season one’s Dany and easily rationalize multiple successive acts of cold-blooded violence as “they deserved it,” even when those acts would, in modern-day real life, be war crimes. Fans were justifiably crushed when she didn’t achieve what she believed with all her heart she was destined to achieve. When she said she was going to break the wheel, we presumed she meant to create a democracy, but how could that be when, just before, she said, “I will burn cities to the ground and take back what was stolen from my family. With fire and blood, I will take it.”
That we all continued to cheer for her despite knowing that not all her victims were really “evil” is a reflection of our own origins as bloodthirsty mammals, and that is a concept that we still struggle, as a species, to reconcile, whether it’s through contact sports, watching UFC, or loving a violent fantasy drama like Thrones.
Nevertheless, Drogon broke our hearts when he nudged Dany’s lifeless body like a dog trying to wake its owner, and my eyes welled up at his poetic reaction to melt the pointy metal chair that had consumed and destroyed his family.
One last thing: I want to talk about the Queen of the North
No one gave Sansa a chance and shrugged her off as stupid and useless from the very beginning, and some nerds at a GoT-themed ren fest laughed in my face when I said she was quietly strong and resilient and would make it to the end, so it goes without saying that I loved her [appropriate] ending as being crowned Queen of the North. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why everyone hated her character so much. Like Daenerys, Sansa was a flawed human; however, since she had neither dragons nor a desire to wield weapons, fans mistakenly assumed she was weak and would be killed off early. Because she said some mean things as a twelve-year-old girl born to privilege, people hated her, but I implore you to go back and rethink all the ignorant and—let’s be real, downright mean—things you’ve likely said at that age. It didn’t make her a bad person; it made her a typical preteen.
Feminist fans in particular hailed Arya and Brienne on pedestals while declaring Sansa weak and “a little bitch.” Arya was my first favorite, but just because a woman isn’t an Arya or a Brienne doesn’t mean she lacks strength. It was refreshing to see a female protagonist in a fantasy series who chose to embrace her femininity and nobility rather than being just another Arya or Brienne—who, as badass as they are, are still tropes that we’re more than accustomed to seeing “win” things in the fantasy genre.
That Sansa’s more obvious strengths from the books weren’t sufficiently apparent in the show was a disappointment, but they were still apparent.
I think the reason so many were quick to write Sansa off was because, more than other characters, her early choices more accurately mirror the way a real-life preteen noble girl would likely have behaved given her unique circumstances, whether or not we all like to proclaim otherwise from the safety of our couches. (It’s worth noting here that, in book one, she did try to kill Joffrey by pushing him off that bridge where he made her stare at her father’s head on a spike, but the Hound physically stopped her while Joffrey had his head turned talking smack].
Another favorite Sansa scene and a testament to her resilience happened when Myranda—the kennel-keeper’s daughter at Bolton-controlled Winterfell—told stories of hers and Ramsay’s “hunting trips” that were thinly veiled threats to Sansa’s life while washing her hair in preparation for Sansa’s marriage to Ramsay. Sansa’s stone-faced response:
And exactly how long have you been in love with him, Myranda? I am Sansa Stark, and Winterfell is my home. You can’t scare me.
When it appeared that all hope of escaping her captors was lost, she bravely accepted her fate, asking Myranda to “please just kill me while there’s still some of me left.” Once back home as Lady of Winterfell, she demonstrated the knowledge and wisdom acquired from her years of captivity, abuse, and upheaval to display an enviable level of strategic logic and competence commanding the attention and respect of all the fighting men and noble houses of the North in Jon Snow’s absence. After all she’d seen, she wanted what the rest of the North always wanted—to have nothing to do with the [six] kingdoms and their strange customs and new gods—and her crowning as Queen of the North couldn’t have been more fitting an end [or beginning] for her character arc.
The Humble Pedant 