Daenerys Targaryen Was Our Warning

What The Iconic Character Taught Us About Modern Political Extremism

*SPOILER ALERT* If you haven’t seen Game Of Thrones and plan to, beware of spoilers ahead. Also, why haven‘t you seen it?

In 2017, my partner at the time flagged a now-deleted Facebook post from a socialist friend of mine on the same day as the Season 6 finale of Game Of Thrones.

Invoking the Middle East conflict, he compared Israel to Cersei Lannister and Palestine to Daenerys Targaryen. Israel, like Cersei, is an evil, sociopathic force that was willing to slaughter anyone who stands in the way of her naked and selfish ambition. Palestine, like Daenerys, is an oppressed, exiled, underestimated force for good who wants to right the wrongs of the world.

This week, he posted again on another platform where he compared Israel and it’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Daenerys, likening the destruction of Gaza to the character’s destruction of Kings Landing at the end of the series. The comparison made me laugh when I thought about what he said seven years ago, and I dug up the 2017 posts where he made the exact opposite comparison.

I am a fan of “call out culture.” I believe people should be forced to account for hypocrisy, or at least explain conflicting positions. Sometimes it’s as innocent as “the facts changed.” That was his argument around Daenerys. In 2017, she was still the heroine of the show, freeing slaves and promising a fairer world. Now we know her as the butcher who slaughtered innocent civilians.

At the conclusion of the series, Daenerys fans were forced to contend with the reality that they had been wrong about her all along. She was always a “Mad Queen;” a cruel, evil and sociopathic monster like her ancestors she desperately tried to differentiate herself from the entire series. She was who we thought Cersei was, but Daenerys’ cruelty was shadowed by her cause for justice. We overlooked the shocking way she condemned Xaro Xhoan Daxos and Doreah in Qarth because the two of them viciously betrayed our queen. We cheered her on when she laid waste to Astapor to free the Unsullied slaves (we overlooked the part about marching them to their deaths for her personal cause). We were shocked, but pleased, when she crucified the slavers of Meereen after seeing that they did the same to children. We stood up and cheered when she incinerated the brutal Dothraki khals in their temple, taking their people with her to fight in Westeros, where she used a large number of them as guinea pigs against the Army of the Dead. When she screamed “dracarys,” it was a death sentence to untold number of people, but we loved it anyway. Tyrion Lannister laid it out to Jon Snow in the series finale, but his message was clearly meant for us:

“Everywhere she goes, evil men die and we cheer her for it. And she grows more powerful and more sure that she is good and right.”

That is the danger of extremism. We become so convinced that we are the most righteous ones and our cause is the only “just” one that we lose our humanity. We come to see our opponents as not only wrong, but as no longer deserving of basic dignity. Justice requires retribution and suffering of evil. There are times where there are clear good and evil positions, but if we truly believe we hold the morally correct “good” position, we can’t become consumed by it. We’re human beings, which means we’re by nature imperfect. Being on the “right” side doesn’t preclude the possibility that we’re “evil” in other ways. If we truly believe that we are unquestionably good, then nothing we do in service of that good can be considered bad.

This has always been my problem with major organized religions and why I still believe they are a net negative in the world. While I don’t believe religions are inherently evil, they are exploited by humans to provide cover for the most evil actions they take. You can get away with anything if you claim it is God’s will, not your own. Who can question God? He is not a physical being we can sit down and interview, though wouldn’t it solve a lot if we could?

For Daenerys, her righteous cause began as a selfish one. She was the last legitimate claimant to a throne usurped from her father (that we knew of until the last season). She started her quest to gain money, troops and supplies to stage an invasion of Westeros to win back her throne. During her quest, however, she became captivated by the inequality and injustice in Essos. It may have been genuine. Having been mistreated and abused by her brother, it its believable that she felt empathy for those mistreated and abused by others. Ultimately though, the fight was about her own ambitions, just as her arch-rival Cersei’s was. Cersei was just more open and blunt about it, which arguably made her less empathetic and more obviously cruel to us. Since Daenerys was cruel for “moral” reasons, we cheered for her.

Daenerys Targaryen reminded me of revolutionary figures like Maximilian Robespierre or Vladimir Lenin, an intoxicating and persuasive leader who appeared to be in it for subjectively moral reasons, but whose cruelty we now wonder how we blind to. Today, many extremist movements on the left and the right embark on cruel and vindictive strategies, but get away with it because supporters of these movements see them as the only righteous and morally sound ones. If we have to hurt bad people to do what’s right, then that’s what we’ll do. The righteousness behind it will mask the sadism.

What we learned from Daenerys Targaryen can be applied to some of the leaders of radical movements today and we should look at them with a healthy skepticism before it’s too late.