The bells were ringing in Game Of Thrones' final penultimate episode, "The Bells," but Daenerys Targaryen chose to ignore them. Spoilers for Game Of Thrones Season 8 Episode 5. Now that she's burned down King's Landing, Daenerys is the Mad Queen, and these tweets show that fans are not having it. And now she needs to be taken down before she yells "dracarys" again.
After Episode 5 aired on May 12, fans took to Twitter to tweet their grievances over how Game Of Thrones did Khaleesi dirty. Sure, Dany was dealing with a lot this season. She lost her closest confidants in Jorah and Missandei; all but one of her dragons is gone; she felt betrayed by Jon Snow, the rightful heir to the throne; and she wanted to make Cersei, the current Queen of the Iron Throne, pay for what she did. However, in the end, Dany made everyone in King's Landy pay for everything they'd ever done to her and her family by fulfilling her father, Aerys Targaryen, aka the Mad King's last wish, She "burn[ed] it all down."
While the theories that Dany would go mad just like her dad were everywhere, this move to have the breaker of chains ditch all the good will she built up over the course of eight seasons, freeing others from slavery and strongmen, felt forced. Especially, since she was a survivor herself, as user @carohuntz pointed out, which made this plot twist feel like "shock value."
Another fan, Elie Fares, a blogger and physician, saw this heel turn as a clear sign of "character assassination" and how little the showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss care about their female characters.
"As #GameOfThrones reaches its end, it shows us two things: women characters — despite how well they might be fleshed out — will almost never be as important as less interesting male counterparts," Fares wrote. "And women (or rather General characters) of color are at an even worse disadvantage."
Calling out Game Of Thrones' seeming lack of respect for its complex female characters was a common theme on Twitter. "#GameofThrones systemically tore down every strong female lead" this season, @Quotemeorelse tweeted, "outside of Arya for LITERALLY no reason."
While Twitter user @notlipglosse made the case that "the writers really ruined Daenerys in one episode" by putting their male characters ahead of their female ones. Specifically, Game Of Thrones turned Dany mad "with no setup for it just so they can justify her death/jon turning on her."
This quickie turn to madness felt like the price of fewer episodes in Season 8. Despite them being longer, it still gave writers less time to focus on Daenerys' descent into madness. And the show never really laid the groundwork for her to believably make this switch on an emotional level.
This is why so many were so disappointed — they wanted more for Khaleesi. "They seriously reduced Daenerys to a one dimensional 'mad queen' character just because she’s a Targaryen," @oshawildling wrote.
With one more episode to go, fans seem to feel they know where this is going: Daenerys, the new Mad Queen, will have to die at the hands of Jon Snow. But as the tweets from last night proved, most don't believe this final act was earned. It's possible fans are going to dracarys their timeline before Game Of Thrones officially ends.
