Even if I don’t consider myself the biggest Daenerys fan in the books or the show, what they did to her in the last season is absolute narrative trash, and on top of that, it’s a total sexist move. Daenerys’s storyline has always been messianic, centered on freeing people and her determination to claim what she sees as rightfully hers, while at the same time breaking with the old governing methods of her ancestors. That is CONSTANTLY maintained throughout the series, until the last goddamn season, where suddenly they decide her values over the previous seven seasons were just a dream, and suddenly she’s some totalitarian, arrogant villain. Well.
Then there’s all that nonsense with confronting her with Sansa for no real reason, and tangentially Arya too, which sets up two camps between her and the Stark sisters, with Jon as the poor guy stuck between the women in his life which, to me, is first-grade-level mishandling of female character dynamics. But beyond that, the confrontation is very symbolic because all three are pillar characters in the story and women, and instead of handling their problems civilly, they decide to mess with each other in passive-aggressive ways, which falls into super misogynistic gender tropes. But okay.
Then there’s Daenerys’s “madness,” which comes straight out of the creators’ asses, because over seven fucking seasons there’s not even a HINT that she’s starting to unravel or that her mental health is deteriorating. And no, the genetic argument doesn’t cut it, reaching the level of psychosis required to burn an entire CAPITAL is not something you can just drop suddenly; it needs its own arc to feel realistic. But on top of that, the downfall of one of the most important female characters in the series being “she was so ambitious she went completely mad” is literally the most sexist stereotype for women with goals in fiction. The trope of the ambitious woman being evil, crazy, or both has been repeated constantly in patriarchal narratives.
If we look at it, both Daenerys and Cersei end up “punished” for being ambitious; Arya and Brienne don’t because they’re not ambitious in terms of seeking power, and Sansa is ambitious but wins the crown only after enduring the worst atrocities and becoming a “woman of ice.” Since she’s suffered the worst of the worst, they let her have a nice ending. But Daenerys, after years of freeing cities and slaves, suddenly has a psychotic break and destroys a city? She’s become so power-hungry that the only possible outcome is that she’s psychotic? It’s such a sexist cliché, it’s horrible.
And there’s another layer, too: how women with mental health struggles are treated in media. Even if Daenerys really inherited the Targaryen mental health issues, so what? What about women with mental health struggles? Can’t women have moments of instability? Can’t they experience episodes? Can’t they feel rage and express it? Is the only option for a woman who doesn’t suppress a mental breakdown to be a goddamn genocidal maniac?
Everything about Daenerys’s ending in the show is so, so wrong from so many perspectives that it’s unbearable. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to grab the producers and cut off their balls.
