Why Did Drogon Start Listening to Danny Again

At the start of Game of Thrones' penultimate episode, "The Bells," Daenerys Targaryen sits high to a higher place the streets of Male monarch'due south Landing, on the back of her beloved dragon Drogon. She hears the tolling of the bells — the audio she'southward been told, over and over once more, means surrender, acquiescence to her rule.

The camera holds on her confront for a long, anguished moment, equally actress Emilia Clarke rolls through everything from triumph to gutted despair. She is virtually tears, exhausted and overwhelmed. She looks upon the Cherry Go on, the castle her family built, which she was smuggled out of in her female parent's womb, the building she believes to be her birthright.

She takes to the air on Drogon's back, and we are led to believe she'due south flight to the castle. The episode cuts to Cersei Lannister, the queen for a few moments more, watching with grim inevitability equally the dragon flies toward her. It cuts to Tyrion Lannister watching with dread. It cuts to the people running from the dragon on the streets below.

And then, instead of attacking the Blood-red Continue, Dany begins to attack the people in the streets indiscriminately, called-for soldier and noncombatant akin.

King'southward Landing has surrendered. These people pose no immediate threat to her. But Dany wants ... revenge? Fear? To feel something? It's not immediately clear, and the camera never cuts dorsum to Dany over again. She becomes a faceless buoy of terror, lighting upwards a city with dragonfire. The city is in ruins. Thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — are dead, either turned to ash or crushed beneath the rubble.

Some Game of Thrones fans think that what happened in "The Bells" marked the show's boldest subversion of tropes yet. Some Game of Thrones fans think it was barely explained or built to. Some Game of Thrones fans are actually fucking mad . Some Game of Thrones fans (hi!) retrieve Dany'southward conclusion to burn Male monarch's landing was a bold subversion of tropes that, nonetheless, was barely explained or built to.

How y'all translate this scene — and I'm not joking most this — could open up serious rifts in your friendships. People are yelling at each other over Game of Thrones similar never before, divided over Dany's choice and the show's depiction of that pick. And why they're yelling at each other is grounded in very, very former discussions well-nigh women in power, the nature of art, and the almost constructive way to tell a story.

Who is Daenerys Targaryen?

Daenerys has ever been one of Game of Thrones' primal characters.

HBO

I don't hateful the plot answer to that question — the just surviving kid of Aerys, the onetime King of the Seven Kingdoms who went mad and was deposed and killed in a political revolution, and whose daughter, Daenerys, thus grew up a refugee on another continent entirely. Nor do I hateful the simplest answer to that question (she's the Female parent of Dragons, duh). I mean, "Who is Daenerys Targaryen in our wider civilization?"

And that's trickier to answer, because she means a lot of unlike things to a lot of dissimilar people. Those who first encountered the character in the pages of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Water ice and Fire novels (hi!) seem to have markedly different reads on her — and her capacity for violence — than those who first encountered the grapheme on the HBO Television show adapted from those books.

In the books, Daenerys has roughly the same arc as she does on TV (at least until season half-dozen, when the testify passes Martin's books right by). But the books do a meliorate chore of indicating simply how preoccupied she is with the injustices perpetrated upon her family and on how, when push button comes to shove, she chooses herself in the heat of the moment. (Here's a peachy Twitter thread by Rowan Kaiser on this very topic.)

As on Tv, she'due south a rape survivor and a political reformer who does desire to make the world a meliorate identify on some level. But the books take more than care in showing how she frequently gets in way over her head and struggles to empathise what it ways to both possess accented ability and want to genuinely reform the arrangement (since doing and then would inevitably hateful the end of the monarchy that gives her that absolute power in the beginning place).

This is non to say that Book Dany is an incredible creation whose story has been told perfectly. Far from it. (Martin is a little too fond of having her wander effectually in the middle of nowhere in search of an epiphany, and there are strong elements of white savior-ness to her character arc that the show — which has oftentimes been criticized for this chemical element — has actually slightly toned down.) Just it is to say that when Dany made her choice in "The Bells," it was like shooting fish in a barrel for me to look back at the books and run across how Martin very well might exist building to this crucial conclusion, even if he has yet to commit it to the folio.

It'south harder — though non impossible — to do that with the Idiot box show. Indeed, throughout its beginning several seasons, Game of Thrones largely portrayed Dany as a kind of wish fulfillment character, someone who started out incredibly powerless and then became incredibly powerful. The show also wove that idea together with Dany's identity as a rape survivor. Here's how writer Jude Doyle puts it, writing most how Daenerys is the showtime meaning character on this series to be raped:

Character introductions ascertain characters. An arc — a character begins as one person, meets an obstacle, overcomes it, and becomes a different person over the course of the quest — depends on the clear and illustrative contrast between who the characters originally are and who they become. ... Daenerys' defining scene, her perpetually relevant starting point, is "rape victim." Nosotros sympathize, from her outset moments, that this is a story about a woman who is powerless, and that her powerlessness stems largely from being female. The obstacle, then, is misogyny, and her arc, her radical change, will presumably be a journey from powerlessness to power. Women who expected Daenerys to get a chivalrous feminist ruler, to break the wheel and end the cycle of oppression, were not stupid; they were following basic story logic. Their expectations didn't spring from delusion or narcissism, they sprang from Star Wars.

And many people have related to Dany deeply, seeing in her an avatar of feminine power they hadn't seen elsewhere in pop culture when the show debuted in 2011. (Effort searching Etsy to see just how thoroughly people tapped into this character.) HBO's marketing has more than leaned into this in the past, playing up the aspects of the story that made Dany feel similar a "chosen one" figure. (Meghan O'Keefe has written brilliantly about this.) No less than US Senator and Autonomous presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has written about how much she likes Dany.

The final image of both Martin'due south first volume and of Game of Thrones' first season is Dany emerging from the burn with babe dragons on her shoulder. But where the volume is at least a bit ambiguous most this, the Television bear witness paints it as a triumph. Her nakedness earlier in the flavour meant roughshod subjugation, but here it means she survived walking into a literal fire and emerged with three dragon children to kick. After several episodes of chaos and slaughter, finally someone who has truly seen what it means to have no power will take incredible power.

Over and over over again, throughout the commencement vi — maybe even seven — seasons of Game of Thrones, the show would acknowledge that, yeah, Dany was sometimes vicious and often vindictive. She tended to like to roast her enemies live. But the evidence always fabricated those enemies deserving of her hellfire on some level. And then it would return to the idea of her fundamental principles, her want to right wrongs and break wheels. Why wouldn't people come to heavily identify with that character?

The problem is that identifying with whatever character on Game of Thrones is a mug's game. Which brings us to how the series tells stories.

How Game of Thrones' top priority — the element of surprise — informed its portrayal of Daenerys's option

The backwash of Dany'south option.

HBO

If y'all go back and look at the scene where Dany attacks King's Landing, you'll note that it is a misdirect. The early shots lead yous to believe that Dany is going to roast the Cherry-red Keep — and Cersei within it. This would exist a violation of the spirit of surrender, but permit's presume that nobody in Westeros is bound by the Geneva Convention. Removing Cersei is Dany's stated goal, and then using Drogon to attack the Keep makes sense.

Just then Drogon drops a bit lower, and the first time nosotros see him breathe flame is from the perspective of the terrified people on the street below. (Manager Miguel Sapochnik does a pretty astonishing thing where the edits take u.s. lower and lower, closer and closer to the footing, and then once we're on the basis, that's when Drogon begins to exhale burn.) You tin can watch the sequence and 100 percentage know how information technology ends, and it's still gear up upwardly to brand you lot think, ever and then briefly, that Dany's about to attack Cersei, not commit a wholesale slaughter.

This brings the states to the key divide over Dany'southward choice — was information technology "earned"? By which I mean: Did Game of Thrones' storytelling properly set up and guide viewers to understand what was happening? And the reason this is such a divisive issue is that, well, every viewer is a different person with different expectations.

Game of Thrones, in full general, privileges spectacle and surprise over everything else. If it can find a story plough that information technology can change into something that will daze you, it will exercise everything information technology can to present that change in equally shocking a fashion as possible.

A good case of this is that when Arya and Sansa stopped fighting with each other and teamed up to kill Littlefinger in season seven, the showrunners decided to eliminate a scene where Sansa found out a central slice of data from Bran that led her to plough against Littlefinger instead of standing to fight with her sister.

Without this scene, the storyline ends somewhat nonsensically, but it did create a "shocking" moment that subverted viewers' expectations that Littlefinger's ability to manipulate situations to his advantage was all-powerful.

The style that Game of Thrones privileges stupor value is a big part of why information technology's such a colossal hitting and one of the dominant Idiot box shows of its era. At a fourth dimension when more and more viewing is being time-shifted and happening on streaming services, Game of Thrones gets millions of people to tune in to sentry alive because the second Daenerys decides to torch King's Landing, you know it's going to be all over Facebook and Twitter. And then on the 1 manus, the bigger and more shocking the moment, the ameliorate.

But on the other hand, this arroyo forces the series to constantly obscure certain details from the audition. And while there's definitely a story arc that conveys that Dany is feeling more and more isolated, Game of Thrones never actually lets you in on what it's doing. Information technology's not every bit if people didn't estimate this was where Dany was headed, and it'due south non as if Dany hasn't washed horrible things before. Merely for many viewers, there's a significant gap betwixt the worst things the character has washed and committing what would be wanton, unforgivable war crimes in our reality.

In that location's a bit of Hollywood-speak that usefully describes what I'1000 talking nigh hither: "tracking on." The thought is that when yous sentinel a pic or TV show, your brain has to work in a certain way to follow it. Y'all can't easily flip back a few pages like yous could in a book, so the filmmakers accept to think about how to present information then that it sticks in your head.

"The Bells" contains a skillful example of this in the way Sapochnik films the short-haired adult female and her petty daughter, who go on appearing in the King's Landing scenes. You don't know who they are, but you recognize them as familiar faces making their way throughout the chaos. As a viewer, you lot're "tracking on" them, following their importance to the overall story because their repeated appearances have encouraged your encephalon to latch onto them.

The trouble with the Dany arc is that Game of Thrones is and so intent on hiding her ultimate conclusion until the very concluding moment that information technology leaves literally no space to procedure why she makes her choice. Emilia Clarke's performance is remarkable, and the fashion Sapochnik films the sequence so that we gradually detach from Dany's point of view is amazing. Simply the work of figuring out why Dany does what she does — that's all on the audition. Watching "The Bells," we're either tracking on Dany'due south state of listen, or we're not. And for many, many viewers, they simply weren't.

A large part of tracking on a character or storyline requires not just the character's psychological arc, but as well the emotional arc, in order to land. And even people who are skeptical of Dany's turn seemed to exist at least tracking on the psychological aspects of her story — her despair, her rage, her possible madness. (And if you lot weren't, the Previously On segment for "The Bells" was prepare upward to do information technology for you, with an incredibly clunky moment where a shot of Dany was accompanied past voices from her past hinting that she might accept succumbed to the Targaryen madness.) (Yeah, this show treats madness a footling similar center disease.) (No, we don't have a lot of fourth dimension to go into information technology.)

But emotionally, even those who take accepted Dany's decision seemed to struggle with finding their way into her head to experience what she was feeling. Aye, intellectually, we can understand that she'd lost her friend Missandei and her dragon child Rhaegal just one episode prior, that her command of the kingdom was slipping abroad from her, and that she was increasingly isolated and boxed in. Merely because Game of Thrones made the choice to gradually disengage u.s. from Dany fifty-fifty before it turned her into a forcefulness of fire and fury, information technology'southward really difficult to understand with her in the moment when she makes her terrible choice.

To be clear: This could exist a huge positive in the episode's favor! And making it difficult for viewers to empathize was, mayhap, intentional. Game of Thrones is not in any manner obligated to hold our hand and explain everything it's doing. Sometimes people are mysterious, and they do big, horrible, awful things in ways that hateful nosotros can never again sympathise or understand with them.

And some of my favorite writing about this episode — like this LA Review of Books slice past Aaron Bady and this Fanbyte slice past Gretchen Felker-Martin — has taken the view that Dany'south choice is a bold artistic portrayal of this graphic symbol doing what she must.

But information technology's telling that Bady situates Dany's pick in the graphic symbol's political reality, while Felker-Martin situates it in her legacy of trauma. Sometimes, it's a sign of an artistically challenging piece of work when nobody can quite concur on why a character does a matter. And sometimes it'south but a sign of sloppy writing. (Plus, my example of sloppy writing may be your artistically challenging piece of work — and vice versa.)

Which brings us to the elephant in the room: A lot of people just don't like Game of Thrones' final season equally a whole.

A thou, unified theory of Game of Thrones disappointment

This has nothing to do with this article, but Cleganebowl was kind of a bummer, huh? I guess that was the point, but I felt literally no date in it.

HBO

In 2014, when Game of Thrones was wrapping upwards its fourth season, I wrote a piece for the A.5. Social club about how Game of Thrones' storytelling had subtly shifted between its commencement 3 seasons and its quaternary. I wrote:

Game Of Thrones' solution to [its increasing sprawl] is to make every scene its very own episode. Now that the cast is dispersed all over the wilds of the serial' universe, information technology's possible that a check-in with Bran will be all we see of that grapheme for an episode or two. That ways any scene with him has to count in a way that it wouldn't on most other Tv set shows. Every scene with every character non only has to remind viewers of where they've been and where they're going, just as well suggest the forward momentum a full episode might elsewhere — while besides telling a tiny story of its ain. Structurally speaking, information technology's a monstrous challenge. ... The overall feeling is almost of mixtape storytelling, rather than more typical episodic television receiver. Every episode features a little Arya here, a sprinkle of Tyrion there, in hopes of getting merely the right mix that will achieve true storytelling resonance.

Going dorsum and reading that piece, it becomes ever more clear that everything that at present divides Game of Thrones fans was already seeping into the prove even back and so. Privileging moments over the larger story fabricated the serial a cultural sensation. But it as well made the larger story murderously difficult to cease, considering on some level, ending a story is about whirling up a sense of inevitability.

Or, put some other way: If you spend an entire series setting up a certain grapheme as a would-exist liberator or a would-exist tyrant — and many viewers would fence that Game of Thrones spent way too trivial time on the latter half of that dichotomy with regard to Dany — it'due south still going to be jarring when that character makes her final choice and viewers aren't permitted into her head as she makes it.

You can respect that option. You tin can fifty-fifty honey it. But to many people, it'due south going to feel like a betrayal, considering we want, on some gut level, to understand it. It is this sense of expose that unites essentially every controversy that has bubbled up in the show's concluding season, every complaint almost how the series is no longer good or is making a hash of its reputation.

Much of Game of Thrones flavor viii seems designed, ultimately, to deny us the kinds of closure we might want. That'due south an artistically valid choice, and one that could be immensely powerful in the right hands. But its potential impact relies on viewers' belief that the choice to forgo closure is a deliberate one on the role of the artist, and not 1 fabricated accidentally via clumsiness.

Everything in the moment when Dany decides to burn King's Landing hinges on Clarke's face up, and she'southward so good that I more or less purchase what happens adjacent. But the remainder of "The Bells" — the residue of this final season — has done an exceptionally poor job of tracking on just what Dany is thinking and feeling, beyond what she straight tells us she's thinking and feeling. Her motivation ends upwards feeling more elemental than real, which may exist why "The Bells" drags in the notion that she's simply "gone mad."

And crucially, there's as well an unabridged larger chat happening that centers on the idea of madness as a trope practical to women, and peculiarly to women who atomic number 82. But in the interest of brevity, I'thou going to leave near of information technology to Vulture's Kathryn VanArendonk, who wrote my very favorite piece on this topic, and to Joanna Robinson at Vanity Off-white, who touched on how both the books and the show have handled this thought. Suffice to say, making Game of Thrones a story almost how a adult female who has long wanted power going a footling crazy the closer she gets to information technology has rubbed many people the incorrect mode.

But there's a common denominator to all the current conversations around Daenerys, in that each one is also a conversation about Game of Thrones' final season as a whole, and about all the ways that it is trying to (or failing to, depending on your have) offer a concluding summation of what the series is even about.

The longer the last season has gone on, the more its pacing has sped up to such a degree that information technology's more or less sprinting now, with petty time for connective tissue. In other words, it actually does seem as if the season was indeed adjusted from a very crude outline that Martin provided to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, because it feels more than like a bullet-points version of a story than a fully fledged tale.

Merely I wouldn't blame this accommodation process likewise much, beyond how niggling time the showrunners had to work with. Instead, I think the reason the final flavor has been so dogged past uproar stems from how fiddling the show still resembles its old self. Game of Thrones started out as a series with rich psychological realism. It started out as a series that featured lots of different women who wielded power very differently from each other. And it started out as a show well-nigh what information technology means to be a good ruler and how systems of oppression can be broken.

If you lot are disappointed in the Daenerys turn, it's likely because you feel that Game of Thrones has somehow violated one of the core promises it made at its start. The moment when she burns an entire city reveals that the show no longer cares almost rich psychological realism, or information technology would have invited viewers in to better sympathize her thinking.

It reveals that the show doesn't quite trust women in ability (the sequence with Dany's dragon ride even explicitly links Dany and antiheroine Cersei, both via editing and costuming). And information technology reveals that the ii people that Game of Thrones positioned as potentially expert rulers who could intermission the wheel have either gone mad with power (Dany) or are just sort of sweetness and impaired (Jon).

Yous don't even need to believe that Game of Thrones has betrayed all three of those themes to be angry. For case, I tend to side with Slate's Willa Paskin in thinking the Dany turn is not anti-feminist, but I do sort of think the scene violates the prove's former attempts at psychological realism. Game of Thrones has simply gotten so big that its spectacle overwhelms everything else.

This bear witness used to be near the moments between the spectacle, the moments that made us understand why a character would exercise what they did, even as their ultimate action proved shocking. We understood why Ned Stark lost his head. Nosotros understood why Catelyn Stark and Robb Stark died. But practise we sympathise why Daenerys does what she does? On a visceral, gut level?

I would contend we don't. At some point, Game of Thrones became all about the spectacle, with less and less room for the footling moments. Its evolution is non without merit — massive spectacle has an operatic emotionality of its own, and clearly the fact that I've written nearly 4,000 words about roughly lx seconds of idiot box proves something of merit happened in that scene.

Only somewhere along the way, Game of Thrones fundamentally stopped being the Game of Thrones many people roughshod in beloved with and became something else, something bigger and louder and just a fiddling scrap dumber. Its awe-inspiring spectacle fabricated information technology the biggest show on television, but it also distanced the series from what fabricated it so addictive and engrossing in the offset identify. The uproar over the last season isn't a fluke. It was inevitable.

Larn more near Game of Thrones' lasting touch on, on the May 17 episode of Today, Explained.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/5/17/18624767/game-of-thrones-series-finale-season-8-episode-5-the-bells-daenerys-dany-kings-landing-targaryen

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