Sometimes I think the real betrayal wasn’t even D&D. It was the audience's reception. The part of the audience that followed Daenerys Targaryen’s story for years, the girl who was sold, the child who walked through fire, the woman who broke chains, crossed deserts, built cities from nothing, spoke to the forgotten, and still accepted seeing her turned into the mad queen, the threat, the final mistake of the story.
The truth is that Daenerys was always meant to be the central figure. Not one protagonist among many, not the love interest orbiting someone else’s arc, but the actual driving force of the story. That’s clear in the structure of the books, it’s written right there in the title, A Song of Ice and Fire. She is the fire, not as a symbol in the background, but as a living principle. She is the energy that refuses stasis, the fire that consumes dead systems so something new can be born. She wasn’t just a plotline, she was the temperature of the entire myth. Without her, there’s no ASOIAF.
But the way the show and a large part of the fandom responded to her story tells us something deeply, deeply unfortunate. We are still uncomfortable with women who possess power that isn't granted or allowed by someone else. Daenerys is Show!Sansa anthitesis. Daenerys wasn’t powerful because she belonged to someone, or because she was the daughter of a king, or the wife of a warlord. Daenerys’s power sprang from her will to conceive a radically different world and to act upon that vision. She aspired not merely to survive a broken world but to reforge it entirely.
That’s where the discomfort starts. Because the moment a woman says out loud that she wants to break the system instead of inheriting it, people flinch. That kind of ambition gets rebranded as madness. That kind of clarity becomes extremism. And that’s how she was rewritten, her character retconned to serve the comfort of viewers (readers too) who crave familiar patriarchal rhythms.
Men in that story destroyed cities and murdered innocents, and we called them calculated, burdened, tragic. Wherever Daenerys acts from fury and/or grief, it’s framed as a personal collapse. Even her victories are weighed with suspicion, as if her righteousness was always waiting to tip into tyranny.
And when the time came, they didn’t even let her fall through a real confrontation. She wasn’t undone by an equal, or even a villain. She was betrayed by the man who said he loved her, and silenced in the name of peace (by cowardly deceit to boot!) But peace for whom? For what world? For which vision of the future?
A lot of the audience and fandom accepted it. That’s what hurts. They said it made sense. They pointed to the signs. They said it was always going to happen. As if foreshadowing were a moral justification. As if showing the possibility of a fall means that the fall is deserved.
But myth does not compel us to follow predetermined breadcrumbs. We choose which myths to uphold, which voices to center, which futures to fight for. And in the end, the writers chose to extinguish the character who never lost faith in the possibility of renewal.
This is not only about feminism, although it is also that. It is about narrative imagination. Daenerys represented a kind of leadership that did not rest entirely on lineage or diplomacy or soft power, but on vision. She wasn’t flawless, she wasn’t always right, but she was real in a world that rewarded nothing but control. And instead of letting her challenge that world, they killed her to RESTORE it. Targaryen’s restoration suck y’all, except the feudal one approved by the Stark King. Now that we can get behind!!!! Long live the rightful Royal Family!!!!! Yay for progress…?
This isn’t just about representation. It’s about how narratives respond to disruption, to radical agency. Daenerys wasn’t a threat because she lost control. She was a threat because she challenged control itself. She questioned the structures, the cycles, the moral logic of the entire political world around her, and she stopped believing that playing by the old rules would lead to meaningful change.
What happened in the final season wasn’t a tragic arc unfolding. It was a political and symbolic containment of a character who had outgrown the ideological frame she was supposed to stay within.
Her death didn’t serve the story. It RESTORED the familiar order.
And the fact that so many viewers accepted it as “necessary” says more about our collective discomfort with revolutionary agency (especially when embodied by a woman) than it does about Daenerys as a character.
