Was Daenerys' downfall inevitable after she left Meereen in Game of Thrones?
07.06.2025 17:30
Early in Season Two, David Benioff has Daenerys threaten to burn down Qarth if she and her khalisar are not admitted, then again later she promises to burn down cities who disobey her to the head of the Spice Guild, who is refusing to give her ships to sail to Westeros. Neither speech happens in Book Two, A Clash of Kings, nor does Dany in fact ever say anything like this. In Clash, Dany is lured into Qarth from a veritable desert oasis, an empty walled city full of fruit trees, by promises from Qarth of lavish treatment for her people there. No threats are made. Dany in the books never asks the Spice Guild for help; she instead asks for help from the Pureborn (the citizens of Qarth belonging to the oldest families of the city) by urging her case before an assembly. After she leaves, they send word rejecting her plea, but she’s only sad and resigned when they do, not angry. She tells Jorah they never even considered helping her; they only wanted to be entertained by her begging them for assistance. It was during the Second Season of Game of Thrones that I realized David Benioff was writing her as much more scary (and potentially dangerous) than George Martin’s Dany. The end to the series is really the capstone to the speeches David Benioff created for her in Season Two threatening to burn up cities (like Mad King Aerys II wanted to do right before Jaime killed him), rather than anything she has done yet or even threatened to do in the books.
Book Dany has to eventually come to Westeros, or else the Others are going to bring a Winter that never ends. And even before that, Westeros is descending into complete chaos in the Winds of Winter after years of civil war as the Seven Kingdoms further fracture: Euron is carving out his own kingdom as an Iron Born conqueror. Young Griff has landed with the Golden Company and is about to take King’s Landing and declare himself king. Ceirsi will probably retreat to Casterly Rock with Tommen and call herself Queen there. Stannis is a different King up North. Robb Stark seems to have named Jon Snow King in the North in his Will. Wyman Manderly is about to crown Rickon Stark King in the North. With everything else separating, Littlefinger might declare the Vale independent. There isn’t a Seven Kingdoms anymore, there are seven different kingdoms, or getting there. Eventually, people like Young Griff will beg Dany to come back to Westeros to help them and end the horrible civil war. So in the books she will be coming as a peacemaker and a uniter not a conqueror. That was Illyrio and Varys original plan for Young Griff to do after Dany and Drogo invaded earlier; but their places have switched.
Book Dany is closely paralleled to Jon Snow. They both face insurmountable odds at various points and surmount them, but they both keep being given very difficult challenges and beset by risks, with no clear answers. Things won’t be easy, but that’s different then going MAD EVIL.
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We Bring the Dawn
But Queen Rhaella named Rhaegar after herself, rather than the king, despite his being the oldest son who would normally be named for his father or grandfather not his mother! This also wasn’t a traditional male family name like Aegon or Aemon or Daeron or Jaehaerys. It wasn’t the name of an earlier king, as would be expected for a first born son in line for the throne. Quite shockingly, Rhaegar’s name is only similar to the names of earlier Targaryen women: Queen Rhaenyra, Princess Rhae, Princess Rhaena, Princess Rhaenys, and herself! Naming Rhaegar after the female line secretly suggests only his mother was a Targaryen.
House Dayne Sigil—with the magical sword Dawn and a comet, which means dragons! (at least so we’re told in a Clash of Kings)
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But it has to be confessed that the show, unlike the books, was headed in that direction all along because David Benioff never liked Daenerys. Daenerys is certainly one of the most popular characters for fans, but there has always been a subgroup who did not like her for various reasons: The story is told from the Stark’s perspective. The first thing we hear about Rhaegar is that he was a rapist, from Ned’s best friend. There are like 25 clues in the books that Robert was wrong about this and in fact, Robert got drunk with Lyanna and upset her badly, and she ran away from Robert to the only one who would listen to a teenage girl and accept what she said about a high lord as true: Prince Rhaegar. That will all come out in the books, but the point is that lots of people read the first book and come away hating the Targaryens as a group and distrusting Dany and reading everything she does with bad intent compared to the other Houses.
It’s beyond the scope of this answer, but I have written up theories elsewhere outlining extensive book evidence that Queen Rhaella, Dany’s mom and Jon’s grandmom, was really in love with the handsome Ser Arthur Dayne, her Lancelot at Court. There are plenty of clues that Dany’s father was really Arthur Dayne, and so was Rhaegar’s father and Jon’s grandfather.
She chose Viserys because its close to Aerys for the trueborn, second son.
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We know that David was always headed in his own directions with Dany, or thinking strongly about it, in several ways, but I will focus on a couple of them:
It was revealed by HBO interviews with the people who worked on the show that the special effects order for the Destruction of King’s Landing episode didn’t originally include Daenerys breathing fire on the City. Like many fans (including me) had written about, the original idea was Mad Queen Cersei blowing up the city with wildfire in spite to prevent Dany and Tyrion from capturing an intact city. The special effects guys had already finished their work. Then they got a rush order at the last minute to replace a many of the shots of green wildfire blowing up the city with red dragon fire. Fire work is really intensive on special effects guys. They were pissed! They had to work overtime around the clock to redo their work for that episode.
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Dany may die in childbirth, like her mother and Jon’s mother did. Or she may lose the election to sit the Iron Throne and go back to Essos to re-found the Empire of the Dawn as the Freehold of the Dawn. I’ve written about both these possibilities. But no Daenerys Targaryen, who is maiden-maiden-crone in this story—which is the ancient pre-Christian trinity of the female divine celebrated by George Martin’s favorite author Robert Graves in the book the White Goddess—will not suffer an inevitable downfall. That’s not the story George Martin is writing. This is a story about the White Goddess saving the world not burning it up.
In a similar vein, only a male heir of House Dayne can wield the special magical sword Dawn, which is probably the red sword of heroes Azor Ahai is prophesized to wield in the Battle for the Dawn. if Jon’s grandfather was really Arthur Dayne, only then can he be the next Sword of the Morning and use Dawn to fight the Others. Which he will do.
Dany will fight the Others with dragons and Jon will fight the Others with Dawn because they are Daynes, more than because they are also 1/2 and 1/4 Targaryen respectively. Once we view Dany and Jon as the heirs to House Dayne—whose House Words will be revealed as something like “We Bring the Dawn”—and the progeny of “the greatest knight who ever lived” rather than the Mad King, suddenly the whole story makes a lot more sense.
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No! It wasn’t even inevitable when David Benioff and Dan Weiss finished the original versions of the scripts for Season 8. :)
Ultimately, the argument given by the showrunners for why Dany did what she did, in their after the episode interviews, such as it was, that that she was always the Mad King’s daughter. It was genetic madness, not fighting with the Son’s of the Harpy, who are modelled on the Klu Klux Klan, and not the decision to leave Meereen for Westeros, that send her over the edge. At least that’s what the guys who gave us this told us.
Then after the Mad King perished, she named Daenerys…after Arthur Dayne—Dayne / Daen-erys / Dany.
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The best explanation for why Dany could hatch dragon eggs when Targaryens couldn’t for 170 years is that House Dayne retained this magic in their genes (separate and parallel to the Targaryens) and it was Dany’s Dayne heritage that brought back the dragons because the dragons were originally originally created by the Empire of the Dawn to fight Others and magical monsters like them, and that’s why Dany brought them back.
Mirri Maz Duur’s prophecy about Dany ends with her giving birth to a living human child; D&D dropped that part of the prophecy inexplicably from the show way back in Season One. That’s when I noticed something was going wrong and divergent with her character from the books—and first started complaining about it in writing.
It’s revealed that King Aerys II often claimed that Rhaegar wasn’t his son and that Queen Rhaella had always had an secret lover. The Mad King even locked her up with septas during the year before Prince Viserys was conceived. The Mad King also talked about declaring Rhaegar illegitimate publicly and naming Viserys his heir, though he never went that far because his aids couldn’t produce solid proof. But without going too deep into all the evidence, one of the simplest clues comes right in the names Queen Rhaella chose for her kids:
Like members of the kingsguard, Dany and Jon do their duty. As leaders, they don’t chase thrones. Jon Snow turns down Winterfell, and Dany keeps rejecting Jorah and Barristan’s pleas to sail off to war for the Iron Throne. Instead, they free slaves from bondage in Essos and bring free folk to safety south of the wall. They’re the heroes, not the entitled, selfish princes, like Robert Baratheon and Edmure Tully and Mace Tyrell, nor the rapacious, manipulative villains of the story, like Tywin Lannister, Littlefinger, Roose Bolton, and Euron Greyjoy.