Daenerys's Rage-Quit

So there it is. After eight seasons, Game of Thrones comes an end.

And...oof. What an ending it was.

As much as it seems like a bandwagon thing, I'm inclined to agree the show fizzled out in a spectacularly anti-climactic and unworthy letdown. I love the books, and the previous seasons of the show were arguably some of the best television produced, but, as tends to happen from time to time, when it came time to stick the landing...it crashed and burned.

Many would say things took a turn when the show went beyond the books—which would be circa Season 5—but I think the last two seasons, more than any other, saw a catastrophic drop in writing quality.

There's going to be no shortage of articles, essays and think-pieces all over the internet exploring the how and why, but one thing I want to focus on here is how things turned out for the Mother of Dragons, Daenerys Targaryen. 

**Spoilers ahead, obviously, for those who might care**

So-Called "Foreshadowing"

Now those who've been following the show already know the score.
In episode five of Season 8, "The Bells," just when victory is achieved and the Iron Throne is effectively hers, Daenerys goes berserk and starts raining fire and death upon the citizens of King's Landing because...fuck it, she was pissed.

Smarter people than me can and have already addressed the more problematic implications of this turn of events...of which there are many.
What I want to focus on is the execution of this heel turn. Because from the beginning, Dany has ostensibly always been presented as one of the more heroic characters—at least in a story that revels in shades of gray and moral ambiguity.

She's always advocated defending the helpless. She made ending slavery her personal mission. She's expressed a desire to "break the wheel" of cruelty that abuses and crushes the common people, and as a victim of such cruelty herself, she strives to protect others from suffering where she can.

That isn't to say she's perfect. Far from it.
But for her to go from the Breaker of Chains to "Imma burn every man, woman, and child in King's Landing 'cause fuck you" is a pretty big leap that would require some major character development to work.

Development I believe the show failed to provide.

It's been a few years since I read the books, but I definitely remember the fifth, A Dance With Dragons, demonstrating the cracks in Dany's stability. She always had a temper and tendency to see things in black-&-white, but in ADWD, we begin to see the pressures of ruling get to her, along with the possibility she—not unlike Robert Baratheon—is a better conqueror than actual ruler.

And what's more, Dany herself questions her stability throughout the book. As she continues getting visions from Quaithe (remember her?), she worries whether she's really being guided on some grand destiny or is simply a madwoman hearing voices.
And the book ends with Dany apparently making a significant choice about how she intends to proceed onward...as a peacemaker or by "unleashing the dragon."

So if you were to tell me Dany is going to eventually go mad in the books...I'll buy it. When George R.R. Martin finishes the series—assuming he ever does—maybe we will see her go down a darker path that could believably end with King's Landing's destruction. The seeds of that madness are already planted.

The show, on the other hand, I would argue hasn't done a good enough job setting that up.
People who've defended this turn will naturally point out the numerous questionable things she's done since the series began. She threatened to burn Qarth down. She crucified slave masters and executed suspected Sons of the Harpy. She burned the Dothraki Khals and later did the same to the Tarlys when they refused to bend the knee.

There's no denying Daenerys has done some ugly shit in her time. But nothing that would suggest "genocidal madwoman" was where she was headed.

The framing and choices of the filmmakers have to be taken into account.
There's a dissonance that can best be summed up by how the dragons are depicted in the books versus how they are in the show. In the books, it's fairly clear and consistent that, while the dragons are wondrous and awe-inspiring, they're still weapons of mass destruction and dangerous.

On the show, however, the dragons are pretty much uniformly presented as: "FUCK YEAH! DRAGONS ARE AWESOME!"

So it's somewhat hard to read Dany's actions as proof of her inevitable murderous insanity when, one, they're directed against slave owners and marauding rapists, and two, they're framed by the filmmakers as glorious.

Oh, but that's the point, some would say. The show was baiting us into rooting for her when she was going to be the villain all along. They deliberately framed her actions, however horrible, as great triumphs with glorious music and amazing spectacle so we'd be all the more shocked when she reveals her true nature.
Hell, in the finale, they practically state it outright through Jon and Tyrion: we were all "fooled" into believing in her.

And that...might actually be very clever.

But the problem is if you're going to do that, you need to be consistent with it.
I find it passing odd the show expects me to regard Dany's torching of Randyl Tarly as proof of her madness...but also cheer Arya cooking Walder Frey's sons into a pie and feeding it to him as bad-ass. Why am I supposed to see Dany killing Dothraki leaders as an example of how terrible she is...but Sansa feeding Ramsay Bolton to his hounds as justice? Or executing slave owners versus Jon Snow executing a begging and pleading Janos Slynt?

Yes, Dany has done questionable things—usually to worse people. She has made mistakes—some she's been shown to regret.
But so has every other heroic character in the show.

So if Dany's journey was foreshadowing her slaughtering innocent people in King's Landing, when can we expect Arya to start butchering random innocent people for no reason? Was she not told she had a darkness in her and that she should close many eyes forever?

Oh, right, apparently that was foreshadowing her saving the fucking world!

It's awfully late for the show to pull that kind of moralism. You can't have almost every hero engage in moral ambiguity just to suddenly declare, oh nope, it was only bad when Dany did it. It doesn't work that way. You have to be consistent with your framing.

I'll buy that this might be Martin's plan for the books, and the show-runners were simply following an outline. But that right there may be the issue: they followed an outline, leaving them to create the actual connective tissue to bring it together.
And that connective tissue was, unfortunately, sloppy, rushed, and contrived.

Meereenese Pretzel

So, okay, the show would have us believe that Dany going genocidal was caused by the setbacks and tragedies she suffered since arriving in Westeros. That she felt isolated and backed against the wall and just snapped.
But here's the problem with that and a big reason why it feels wrong: the only reason she's even in that position is because the show fucked itself into a goddamn pretzel to put her there.

Let's start with Cersei...because so much of this is dependent on Cersei.

Since the beginning of the series, a consistent aspect of Cersei is that she's not as smart as she thinks she is. She always goes for short-term win and never considers the long-term consequences.

So blowing up the Sept of Baelor and usurping the throne...yes, that's exactly something Cersei would do. In theory, it would be the short-term gain of a madwoman whose reign will not last.
And she does it at the worst possible time when Jon's become King in the North and Dany is sailing in from the east with Dorne, Highgarden, and the Ironborn as her allies.

Season 7 should've been the end of Cersei.

But that doesn't happen. Everyone, including Jaime, is oddly okay with her blowing up the Sept and stealing the throne, and they go along with it. Euron inherits Ramsay's supervillain plot armor.
Meanwhile, Tyrion becomes an easily outsmarted dumbass, Varys is useless, and all of Dany's allies are decimated with laughable ease.
All this in service of forcing her to put aside her drive for the crown to align with Jon against the Night King.

And let's talk about Tyrion and Varys, because I would argue the execution of Dany's madness doesn't just sabotage her character, but surrounding characters in order to facilitate it.

Tyrion, once the "cleverest man in Westeros," must've suffered some kind of head injury on his way to Meereen because this guy has been clueless since Season 6.
He was made a fool of by the slave masters. His plans cost Dany her Dornish, Ironborn and Tyrell allies. Going past the Wall and stealing a zombie to convince Cersei to help them was his idea. And twice—TWICE—his banked his plans on appealing to Cersei's humanity and compassion.

We're supposed to think Dany having Tyrion arrested is another sign of her madness, but she's well within her rights to kill him for sheer incompetence.

And Varys. Remember when Varys was orchestrating assassinations from across the world? Remember when he was able to ensure a pardon to Jorah ended in up Barristan's hands first in order to divide them?
Had this sumbitch offered Dany any useful intel since joining her? Maybe advise her on the morale of King's Landing? Is Cersei's reign going smoothly, or are the people aching for someone to overthrow her? Are her soldiers really that loyal to her?

Relevant information that could sway Dany's strategy in laying siege to the city.

It goes on.
Where Dany had once been real savvy about winning people's adoration...catapulting broken slave collars into Meereen, walking through fire unscathed for the Dothraki, big speeches atop her dragon...she's suddenly flummoxed that the Northerners don't love her sight unseen.

Arya, who wants to kill Cersei anyway, can't be bothered to offer her magic ninja skills in the war effort. Like, even if you don't like Dany, it would still save thousands of lives, Arya.

Bran...who's a glorified doorstop. Maybe he's honoring Hodor?

It's pretty much a textbook example of a story being dictated by plot and not characters.
"Dany goes crazy" was the endgame. And getting to that point involved dumbing characters down, breaking the rules of the world they established, and contriving everything else into order to put her in the exact position the plot wanted her in so she could be what the plot wanted her to be.

Final Boss-Monster

There was something that struck me watching "The Bells."
Once Dany starts her massacre, we never see her face again for the rest of the episode. From that point on, all POV is focused on every other character but her. And I found it peculiar that, for such a significant moment in her character's journey, we never see how she's reacting to her actions. Is she laughing? Screaming? Crying?

It aroused a suspicion that was ultimately confirmed with the final episode. The moment Dany "goes mad" she ceases to be a character with motivation, conflict, or pathos. She is a thing. A device for other characters to respond to and deal with.

In the final episode, when confronted, Dany only offers empty speeches about "freeing King's Landing" and "liberating the world" designed to reinforce that she's "crazy" now. So there's no reflection, no development—she is merely a "madwoman" who needs to be put down.
For all intents and purposes, she might as well have transformed into an uncanny valley CGI boss-monster for Jon to fight.

And that strikes me as a major disservice to the character and the fans who followed her for almost ten years.
Whether you loved her or hated her, whether you agreed with her or disagreed with her, whether you thought she was a flawed-but-good-intentioned hero or a ticking time-bomb, we have been asked to empathize with this woman since the beginning of the show.

And in the show's final moments, they abruptly and unceremoniously told us not to anymore. Even in their deaths, we empathized with Ned and Robb and Catelyn. Even at his worst, we empathized with Theon. The show even asked us to empathize with fucking Cersei.

Or a more apt comparison: Stannis.
Some argue that what they did to Stannis was character assassination akin to what's happened to Dany, but however you feel about it, when Stannis had Shireen burned at the stake, where was the camera focused? Who's face were we looking at? 

As everything went downhill for him afterward—his wife's suicide, Melisandre and half his army deserting, the Boltons bearing down on him, defeat, Brienne's judgment—we never lost sight of what he was going through internally. Through it all, we saw his regret and resolve and self-loathing and acceptance.
You, the audience, might hate him. You might pity him. Some might even still root for him. But the empathy never left him.
Stannis's downfall—in-character or not—was about him.

But they took that empathy away from Daenerys—or tried to anyway.
So her fall into madness doesn't come across as the sad story of a woman who meant well but broke under tragedy. Her death doesn't come across as the heartbreaking end of a eight season long journey. Her descent into madness isn't given the gravitas and pathos it deserves.

Instead, it comes across like a last-minute swerve to shock the audience. The final obstacle for other heroes to get over to resolve the plot. A sabotaged anti-climax disguised as bold storytelling.
The real pathos of her madness isn't hers, but Tyrion's and Jon's as they mope about how wrong they were to love her.

And in that regard, perhaps the real tragedy of Daenerys's character is, in the end, the show-runners robbed her of her agency and replaced it with "madness."

From Victim to Victim

As it is, Daenerys's insanity comes across like a game of Dungeons & Dragons where a player realizes the DM is actively sabotaging them, so they just flip the table and break everything.

There is something tragically ironic that her character be introduced to us as a victim—a piece of property sold and raped—and her story ends as a victim—a plot device brought about by ill-considered storytelling to be put down and brooded over by other characters.

And I don't know about anyone else, but I find it hard not to sympathize.
As much as the show would like me to dislike Dany now and regard her as (at best) a tragic villain or (worst) an irredeemable monster, I found myself rooting for her even more. She was undone, not by her own flaws, but by the failure of everyone and everything around her—including her creators.

Oh, well. The Game is over, and I guess Dany will never get her house with the red door and lemon tree after all.

She deserved better.