Game of Thrones leaves no doubt that this is murder of the most horrible kind. We see this from the micro view, when Daenerys nearly kills Arya by unleashing dragonfire on a street filled largely with civilians. We see this from the macro view, the view from the Red Keep that follows Daenerys as she burns each city block, one by one. If it were about revenge, as it had been in the past, she would have flown straight to the Red Keep and burned it to the ground rather than destroying the entire city first.ĭaenerys’s rampage was something new for her: the intentional mass murder of civilians and destruction of an entire city, the Westerosi equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on a civilian population after the war was already won. Yet that’s exactly what happens in “The Bells.” Her decision to burn King’s Landing in its entirety wasn’t a misbegotten kind of retribution for Cersei’s killing of Rhaegal and execution of Missandei. Bush felt like the war on terrorism justified extreme measures Dany seems to think the same about her crusade against slavery and the “tyrant” Cersei.īut it’s one thing for Daenerys to act like Bush, and another for her to act like Hitler.Īt no point has she demonstrated a kind of genocidal insanity, a need to kill civilians indiscriminately. Bush, who authorized torture and launched a war on flimsy pretexts in the name of fighting evil, are pretty natural. In the real world, this deep sense of moral rightness can allow people to justify committing atrocities to themselves.Ĭomparisons between Daenerys and someone like George W. As my colleague Alex Abad-Santos notes, Daenerys has always seen herself as being on a moral mission - be it abolishing slavery, restoring her rightful position as queen, or “breaking the wheel” of competition over the Iron Throne that has hurt so many people. Her confidence in her righteousness and a deep belief that evil needs to punished led her to exceed the bounds of morality, convinced that her noble ends justified her evil means. She has either killed helpless people who refused to submit to her rule, like Samwell Tarly’s father and brother, or who she felt had committed crimes deserving of punishment, like the slave masters of Yunkai and Meereen. In the past, Daenerys’s cruelties have had a sort of logic to them.

The many, many problems with Daenerys’s heel turn But in practice, its execution was sloppy and rushed, a microcosm of what’s felt wrong with much of this final season. In theory, her turn toward villainy really could have worked. I get that the show has been building toward Daenerys becoming the Mad Queen for seasons now - really, I do. It felt as if Daenerys had become a monster simply because the show needed her to become a monster, not because it was paying off a thoughtfully developed character turn. She’s been callous and even cruel before, but never murderous for the sake of being murderous. There was no reason for Daenerys to burn the city so systematically, to so deliberately target civilians who posed no threat to her. It was an arresting and disturbing sequence, an excellent dramatization of Game of Thrones’ fundamental theme that war is hell.Īt the same time, though, it made absolutely no narrative sense. Daenerys Targaryen, riding her last remaining dragon, systematically laid waste to King’s Landing - seemingly going block by block to ensure that no one and nothing remained of the city she wanted to conquer. The fifth episode of Game of Thrones eighth and final season, “The Bells,” showed us the true horror of a dragon unleashed on a city.

Stronghold kingdoms