Spoilers ahead.
Over an eight-season reign, the showrunners of TV phenomenon Game of Thrones have made more than their fair share of mistakes. The ultimate fate of longtime fan favorite Daenerys Targaryen, who overcame abuse and assassination attempts to reclaim the Iron Throne from her royal father's usurpers, is not one of them.
Despite narrative flaws, making Daenerys the series's ultimate Big Bad was itself the right path - thematically speaking. Granted, our view is fogged somewhat by Weiss and Benioff's plot amnesia, ignorance of dramatic principles, and poor sense of pacing in latter seasons, but the decision to give us Bad Daenerys is a nuanced and productive one, and originates with George R. R. Martin, creator of the show's more layered source material. This is because the subtext of Bad Daenerys imparts a number of valuable lessons and warnings re: how to think about power and the people who wield it.
As a sylistic aside, the look of the series has been quietly priming us to see a dark shift in Daenerys, even if we haven’t been paying attention to plot and dialogue (and/or have been underwhelmed by the writers’ execution of Daenerys’s development in recent seasons).
Previously I wrote about a Game of Thrones cinematographic framing device I called the “leader shot.” It’s an image that positions a major character dead-center in the frame, visually sets them apart from a landscape or other figures, and subtly sets the tone of how we’re to regard them as a person and as a leader. In season 3 visual subtext, we saw that Daenerys already had the potential to be:
“a troublingly dismissive, aloof leader who establishes a cult of personality and who rises to power on the backs of people she remains willfully disengaged from, both personally and culturally”
Daenerys has been framed increasingly questionably since season three, which saw her floating euphorically above a vague mass of brown faces and figures as their “mhysa”, or presiding impersonally from a balcony over a land not her own, or summarily executing unwilling subjects rather than taking prisoners. Season 8 visually delivers on those hints, presenting us with a totalitarian, unmerciful Daenerys who dominates each frame, is bathed in cold blue light, and comes packaged with classic imagery of power gone wrong: lines of chanting, stomping soldiers, oversized flags, and a severe, high-collared, leather costume (which in this case looks both vaguely Sith and vaguely Third Reich).
Season 8 materially delivers on prior dark hints, too: Daenerys rejects counsel, assumes her own infallibility, isolates herself, makes inhumane decisions, trades diplomacy for military conquest, and affixes a tunnel-vision gaze upon “taking back” the Iron Throne even in the absence of a clear and productive vision of what it means to rule.
“This Daenerys does not want to rule people for the people - she wants to rule in spite of the people.”
Daenerys’s leadership has become acquisitive, punishing, rooted in pride and suspicion, and transactional. She thrills in power-trip fake-outs, making people nervous with icy tones and expressions until breaking out in a smile and the bestowment of a reward (e.g., Sam & Gendry, among others). She wants to be loved, because a loved ruler is a powerful ruler - but she has forgotten how to cultivate strong relationships, and she becomes puzzled and upset when her choices don’t secure an emotional hold on the people she seeks to rule (e.g., her looks of surprise at Sansa showing others affection, and at how quickly the lords of Winterfell moved on from her favor to Gendry). Most troublingly, gone is the Daenerys who exclusively punished slavemasters and oligarchs when “liberating” a city, replaced with a Daenerys who indiscriminately incinerates surrendering civilians. This Daenerys does not want to rule people for the people - she wants to rule in spite of the people.
Not exactly subtle imagery. Hard to see this figure as the fledgling hero and so-called liberator of seasons past.
You’ve got a problem on your hands when your new nation’s entire military is under the command of a man obsessed with unquestioningly serving his queen.
So what does Bad Daenerys suggest about power?
I.
We'd do well to be as critical and wary of powerful figures we're predisposed to love as we are of those we dislike...if not even more so.
"Love is the death of duty," Jon muses to himself during a turning point in the final episode. Our love and our esteem for a charismatic leader can lead us to rationalize questionable stances and choices that we wouldn't be so quick to excuse if they'd been made by someone else. Unconditional, unexamined love of a leader is how we first lose our capacity for critical thinking, then forget our principles, and finally erode our safety and freedom as we show a wayward leader that accountability means nothing to us, and that they can do anything they want.
II.
A good, responsible history or meteoric rise is not a guarantee of the future.
Just because a leader has generated good works in the past, or because we have loved them in the past, doesn't mean they are granted a free pass for poor choices in the present and future. People change, and circumstances change. A leader leaning too heavily upon a past reputation (khaleesi! mhysa! breaker of chains!) and reluctant to take accountability for fresh missteps deserves our extreme suspicion. Authority and esteem must be continually renewed and continually earned from the people. It's a serious mistake to say that the formerly wheel-breaking, slave-liberating Daenerys is not now a villain by virtue of having done good deeds before.
III.
Power should not be an end in itself, informed by personal, self-serving agendas or biases.
At this point, Daenerys has spent considerable screentime speaking of "taking what is hers," of her birthright, and of her dragons (a proxy for herself as queen) eating "whatever they want." But do we know what her vision of the day-to-day act of governing is? Do we know what her plans for the ordinary people are, beyond vague and lofty exclamations of "liberation"?
Daenerys’s power is self-interested, a broken record of “I take the throne” whenever she is asked about procedures. Sansa’s “what about the North” falls upon unhearing ears. Daenerys is also personally insulted by Sansa's pragmatic, empathetic exhortations to allow soldiers to rest and heal, choosing instead to move ahead with a major military offensive. Worst of all, Daenerys justifies the burning of King’s Landing as a reasonable and necessary stepping stone to her personal, shapeless idea of a better world. I've seen personal “grief” (e.g., over Jorah and Missandei) suggested by Daenerys fans as a justification for her King’s Landing decision, but if anything, the influence of personal grief upon a decision like that is as damning as any other context would be.
Power that cannot separate the personal from the impersonal - and power that is self-interested, self-justifying, and offers no acknowledgment of those under its control - comes frighteningly close to being evil. And power so brittle and egotistical that it views dissenting opinion as a threat or insult…is evil.
IV.
Some internal uncertainty over choices and values is good.
It means we know the importance of weighing options and scrutinizing a decision, and we know the importance of looking to others for diversity of opinion. In other words, it means we have a vital sense of humility regarding the value and importance of our own limited perspectives and judgment.
Daenerys, however, is unwaveringly confident that she "knows what is good," opposite Tyrion and Jon's confessed uncertainty. She says her subjects "don't get to choose" because, as she's driven home over several seasons, she believes she has the inborn ability to know what is best for all.
A leader so rigidly and militantly convinced of their own perfect sense of direction is dangerous. A society is freer, safer, and better off with the freedom to deliberate with others and risk a poor choice under those circumstances, than to give over absolute control to a single, unquestioned authority. How can we count on such a person to be balanced and principled all of the time? What happens to the rest of us when they make a mistake? What happens when they can’t own up to a mistake or can’t see that they’ve made one?
The internet is alight right now with female fans in particular upset at "losing" a character dear to them, one they'd identified with, rooted for, and championed. There's a sense they've been misled or let down, and that their previous enjoyment of the character is now tainted and wrong - but that's misguided. We're as free as we've ever been and as right as we've ever been to love the woman we thought Daenerys was, and that Daenerys thought she was until her assassination. It's right to see a split between the former Daenerys and her final incarnation, and our gut reaction to it - betrayal, horror, even mourning - is, again, good. It means that we know better, believe good leaders don't look like authoritarian war machines, and yearn to see those we love do better.
And it means that we, like Jon Snow, respond critically to warning signs and can't stomach rallying behind someone, even a fictional someone, after we've seen them unrepentantly commit a war crime on a massive scale. We should lean into our discomfort and disappointment - we will be better, more critical citizens for it.