Daenerys's show ending still annoys me to this day because it flies in the face of what make her story so unique in the context of the time she was written and developed. In a lesser story, Dany would have been dead by the end of book 1. She would have been killed as a pawn of Visery's story to take back the throne. She would have have been killed to spur Drogo's campaign against the Seven Kingdoms. Maybe she would have shared the same fate as her mother and died in childbirth to give a chosen one-esque male protagonist an angsty backstory. No matter what way she meets her end, it's all in service to further the story of one of her male family members.
Dany as a character can only exist the way she does because every many that would had power over her in the eyes of either Westerosi or Dothraki culture is dead. If Visery's lived, he would have continued to violently lash out against Dany for the crime of asserting herself. If Khal Drogo lived, she would remain dependent on his status to exert any real authority with the Dothraki. If Rhaegar lived, he could've ended up marrying her off to deal with the aftermath of Robert's Rebellion, like Aegon V did with his daughter. I don't even try to think about what Dany's life would have been like if Aery's won. The point remains the same, every male family member in her life was or would have been an obstacle to her own agency.
Dany's character is a subversion of the trope where the woman/girl dies for whichever male protagonists growth both in the fantasy genre and within the text regarding her family. Each new entry in the Targaryen family's history beats you over the head with the fact that Targaryen men, no matter the generation will fuck over their sisters, wives, daughters, aunts, and cousins for their own ends. No one was above it. Not Rhaegar. Not Daeron the Good. Not Aegon the Unlikely. Someway somehow, whether by circumstance or intention, driven by duty, malice, or apathy, the end was the same. The women had to pay.
Daenerys's story was a break from the cycle of gendered violence her female ancestors had to endure. There was no male relative to impede her agency for their own ends, and through that she became what the true hope for the Targaryens, becoming realizing the best of what they could be. And yet the show decides that it is even more clever to subvert the subversion of Dany's role in her family's story by also ending it with gendered violence by a male family member, but don't worry, she deserved it this time.
