The fifth episode of the final season of Game of Thrones
brought rioting from its fans. I’ma talk about it. As if you didn’t already
know, spoilers ahead.
The scene was set thusly: The Iron Fleet is burning. The
city’s gates are breached. The dozens of scorpions that line the city’s walls
have been reduced to ash and splinters by the creature they were designed to
kill. The allied troops of the Mother of Dragons are within the walls of the
city, though not yet the Red Keep, where Cersei stands looking out, stone-faced
and in denial.
Dany, atop Drogon, is perched on a tower, looking down at
her troops facing off with Cersei’s. The opposition drops their swords, an
unmistakable sign of surrender. Then the bells begin to ring out across the
city, an established signal to all and sundry that the city as a whole is
capitulating. In a word, Daenerys Stormborn has won. All that remains is mopping up the Red Keep, doing a dracarys
on Cersei, and giving the Iron Throne a good disinfecting.
It is then and only
then, in a wordless and commendable moment of the actor’s craft, that we see in
Dany’s eyes rage and hate overwhelm her. Really, it’s a brilliant bit of acting
on Emilia Clark’s part. Unfortunately, it’s also completely undeserved in terms
of her character’s arc.
Some people disagree. They point to all the many harsh and
bloody things Daenerys has done in her struggle for power. They tote up the
body count, as if every death was equal, and equally heinous. They are not; not
in fiction and not in real life. If they were, every soldier would be a war
criminal. Whatever your beliefs about violence and nonviolence, the world has
come to a general agreement that, even in war, there are actions that are too inhuman
to countenance. We call them war crimes, and when the stars align, we punish
them as such.
But let us put modern, real world notions of war atrocities
aside. Let us look solely at the previous actions of the Mother of Dragons. She
crucified slavers in the hundreds, and burned others of them alive. She looked
on as her husband killed her abusive brother, the rightful Targaryen heir, in
an exceptionally brutal fashion. She burned to death a powerful witch who
killed her husband and unborn child, making her barren in the process. She
locked another powerful, treacherous lord away in a lightless cell, there to
die of thirst and starvation. She killed a powerful, thieving sorcerer. She
burned the collected leaders of the Dothraki when they were going to imprison
her. She burned two noblemen who took up arms against her to death, because they
refused to bend the knee. She executed by means of dragon fire lord Varys, for
the crime of treason. And of course countless enemy soldiers and sailors have
died by her hand or at her orders.
In short, if you are powerful and/or belligerent and oppose
her, maybe don’t make long-range plans.
But do you know who she’s never killed, or had killed?
Peasants. Commoners. Children. The powerless. People who have not threatened,
harmed, or taken up arms against her.
In nearly eight seasons, she has shown exactly who she is –
a ruthless, powerful woman who will fight to her dying breath to reclaim what
she sees as her birth right. But she has also known and shown what lines she was
not willing to cross.
Let’s go back to Dany, perched on Drogon atop that wall. The
bells are ringing. King’s Landing is prostrate before her. Her enemy, the one
who beheaded her close advisor days before, is about thirty seconds away as the
dragon flies, waiting to get dracarysed.
And so Dany decides she’s gonna torch the defenceless,
surrendered city, with her troops still inside it, instead of flapping straight to the Red Keep – which holds Cersei
and any remaining troops willing to fight for her, and the iron throne. Why
torch the town first?
Because fuck those filthy peasants, I guess.
The truth is, we know why. The showrunners decided that Jon
and Dany had to go at it in the last episode. That’s all. That’s it. That’s the
only reason. They tried to backpedal the character in the last season, putting
her on an ‘I saved you all, why don’t you love me? The brown people loved me
when I saved them!’ jag – with tasteless overtones of jilted lover sprinkled on
top for added flavor – that was somehow supposed to prepare the ground for what
she did in King’s Landing.
It didn’t. Most fans weren’t fooled or satisfied, because
for six plus seasons they watched Dany grow into who she was. And it wasn’t
that. It wasn’t perfect, mind you – but it definitely wasn’t that. The Bells
required Dany to not only be insane, but stupid. To burn what she had already
won. To delay destroying her worst enemy for the sake of murdering a city full
of nobodies.
‘But she wants them to fear her!’ I hear the Game of Thrones
writer’s room cry out. ‘She can’t have love like in Meereen, so all that’s left
is fear!’
Except she’s got a fucking dragon and the living already
fear her, and the dead fear nothing, and Dany is not stupid enough to not
understand either of these points.
‘But she’s craaaazy now!’ that same writer’s room bleats. ‘She
snapped! There’s no accounting for craaaazy!’
Except there is. There was a way to show Dany deciding to
finish off her dear old dad’s bucket list item of roasting King’s Landing, a
way that, while unsatisfying, would at least have made a grudging sort of
sense. If she had destroyed the Red Keep first, and then some dumbfuck commoner
had pelted her with horse dung while she was giving her liberation speech, I
might have reluctantly swallowed the ensuing incineration. It would have been
at least tenuously supported by her character development.
But that’s not what happened.
The Bells, and indeed the entire seventh and eighth season, has
displayed other instances where the decision was made to prioritize plot
expedience over established character development, but none were as unearned
and unforgivable as those few, wordless seconds showing a woman atop a dragon
deciding to destroy what she had just conquered.
The Bells should serve as a reminder for every writer that your
plot needs to be true to your characters. If it’s not, we’re watching or
reading about puppets, not people – and even Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy.
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| Shoutout to the Goodest Boy. |
