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It’s possible to see Daenerys’s madness as a well-constructed endgame, or at least long-planned element of Martin’s vision for Game of Thrones, something destined from the beginning of the series, while also feeling disheartened by it.ĭisheartened isn’t even the right word. But at some point, the debate over whether Daenerys’s madness is a well-constructed story becomes secondary to a broader concern, a deeper disappointment.
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It’s a helpful crucible for all of the biggest conversations about the show’s final season: what themes the series wants to land on, concerns about its pacing, thinking through its character arcs. The conversation about whether this plot feels “earned” is an important one, a useful way to think through the things that have long been Game of Thrones’ strengths and weaknesses.
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There is a different way to read this development for Daenerys.
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(The best “The Bells” was able to do on this topic is loosen Dany’s regal braids and smudge up her usually pristine make-up.) As a TV series, Game of Thrones may have gotten the “right” answer - that Daenerys would go mad, that this was always her destiny - but without a richer exploration of Dany’s internal life, the series failed to show us the work that got it there. But the thing about madness is that you can’t necessarily see it from the outside.
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Weiss and David Benioff as the “broad strokes” for how he planned to end the book series. Daenerys could’ve been fated to go mad from the very beginning it may well have been a plot George R.R. As a result, the events in both the books and the TV series may be the same - the same major deaths, the same twists, the same relationships - but in the TV adaptation, we have less grounding for why any of this happens, why any character feels anything, or how any of their minds work when they’re not putting on a dramatic show for the benefit of others. Martin’s use of multiple narrators, a structure that lets us peek into the innermost motivations of all the major characters. The show has never been able to replicate George R.R. Robinson places much of the “earnedness” conundrum at the feet of Game of Thrones’ increasingly inept book adaptation. “In the chaos of ‘The Bells,’” McAtee writes, “the show forgot about the empathy that has been as fundamental to Daenerys’s character as her ruthlessness.” About Daenerys’s tyrannical massacre, McAtee suggests that “the broad strokes may have been suggested earlier, but the specifics came out of nowhere.” As Riley McAtee lays out in the Ringer, Dany has always tried to temper her family’s legacy with her own sense of mercy, the idea that a queen could be loved for being good rather than feared for being all-powerful. In the show’s last two seasons, though, that sense of being earned starts to look a little shakier. Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson has been anticipating Dany’s madness for years, which on its own suggests that close reading supports Mad Queen Dany as something “earned” that Game of Thrones has been building toward all along. Indeed, the early seasons did a lot to point to Daenerys as a cold-blooded killer, someone who ultimately cared more about power than about goodness. In Variety, Daniel D’Addario describes Daenerys’s madness as “perfectly in character,” situating it within her history of tactics that have been “more deeply rooted in dominance than in empathy.” Her motivations have always “pivot around the idea of revenge,” and so it’s unsurprising that given the opportunity for absolute dominance, for total revenge for what’s been done to her and her family, she might forget everything she ever said about the lives of innocent people. The dominating question about “ The Bells” was a much more essential one: Did it feel earned? More specifically, did Daenerys Targaryen’s swift descent from benevolent despot into vengeful war criminal make sense, and had the show laid enough groundwork so that when she finally snapped, the moment felt consistent for her character? As the second-to-last Game of Thrones episode ended on Sunday night, the biggest question for many viewers had nothing to do with what would happen next, or whether a character really did die, or why a strategy played out the way it did.