Every time a new Targaryen is born, he said, the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” – Barristan Selmy in A Storm of Swords, Chapter 71 King Jaehaerys once told me that madness and greatness are two sides of the same coin. “But every child knows that the Targaryens have always danced too close to madness. In the books, it is Barristan Selmy who speaks the line, as a quotation from the first king he served in the Kingsgaurd, Jaehaerys II: “When a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin,” says Varys on the show. We also know that the Targaryens have a history of madness. Her expectations did not match her reality from the second she arrived in Dragonstone at the beginning of Season Seven, and the introduction of Jon Snow as a rival who is preferred largely on account of having a dick is a legitimate source of aggravation that most non-cis-men can understand.) Varys and Tyrion both had plenty of opportunities to explain to Daenerys that Things Work Differently in Westeros, particularly for women and both have the context to do so this would probably have made for boring television to anyone who wasn’t a total book nerd, but there were ways to imply that it had been done without showing it directly. (And this has as much to do with her advisors as anyone else, let’s be clear. We know she’s been frustrated by the reception she’s had in Westeros, having blazed her way across Slaver’s Bay in a haze of victory and dragonfire only to find that the realm that had once been her family’s saw her as a terrifying outsider, not the, um, liberator she’d been led to believe she was. And any time her dragons turned their firepower on the Army of the Dead, we knew the living had a decent chance of winning that fight. When she took back the city of Meereen from the Sons of the Harpy, we cheered her on (even if we weren’t quite on board with how the show handled the Dothraki, but, well, it’s not like they’ve ever given us reason to expect better). When she freed the slaves of Astapor by unleashing Drogon on the slaver Kraznys, we loved her for it. We’ve seen Daenerys relish in the power of her dragons before. I’m not saying they haven’t foreshadowed this in the books-or even, to a limited extent, earlier in the show.
I guess it’s fitting that the episode of Game of Thrones that aired on Mother’s Day would be the one where the Mother of Dragons let her last remaining child run wild and slaughter the population of an entire city.
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