That series finale tho

I liked those last two episodes of Game of Thrones. No doubt, there’s lots to remain annoyed about. Tyrion’s two big moments—his talk with Jon and his nomination of Bran—deserve nothing but an around-the-world eye roll (counter-revolutionary liberal nonsense and a thinly veiled smelling-their-own-farts moment for Benioff and Weiss, respectively). The ending was far too truncated; we probably needed at least two episodes between the burning of King’s Landing and the resolution we got.

BUT: I think they did an impressive job with Daenerys’s tragic narrative arc. Her character throughout the show contained contradictions, contradictions that I had no faith Benioff and Weiss would properly deal with. But I’ve got to hand it to them—I think they did a fine job.

Here are the contradictions. She is laser-focused on one thing as a character throughout the show: leading a revolutionary army to take control of Westeros. But both her personal story—daughter of a deposed and slain king, raised in luxury but exile, and under the yoke of a brutal patriarchy—and her claim to leadership contain contradictions. Let’s focus on the latter.

As far as I can see, Daenerys’s claim leadership is premised on three things that stand in tension.

(1) Her personal control over the three dragons, the most powerful weapon in the world (they’re effectively the only air force in a world without any effective means of countering it). And in the magic world, since the weapons are dragons that have total but exclusive loyalty to her, she alone has control over them. I thought for a bit that they’d use the Jon-the-Targaryen story they were hyping (what a bust, by the way) to change this situation (as in, the dragons might develop dual loyalty to both him and Daenerys, really changing the state of play), but they didn’t. Oh well.

(2) Her dynastic claim to the monarchy as the “rightful heir” from House Targaryen.

(3) Her promise of economic and political liberation.

The problem is (1) and (2) almost directly contradict (3). (3) is premised on the promise of equality and autonomy. But (1) virtually guarantees she won’t be anyone’s equal. Even if she wanted to be, the fact that she has exclusive control over the most powerful weapon in the world means there’s little chance she wouldn’t wind up in a position of authority. And (2) means her personal ambition is such that she doesn’t want to be anyone’s equal. The sort of dynastic-feudalistic nonsense she rightly decries when she kills the various aristocratic slaveowners is also one of her prime motives and claims to leadership.

All of this makes her decision to burn King’s Landing comprehensible. As the show progressed the last couple of seasons, she faced serious casualties. Two of her dragons were killed. Much of her army was wiped out defending against the army of the dead. And now, Cersei engages her in a protracted standoff, directly playing her liberationist program against her personal ambition by keeping the peasants within the city walls during wartime. Daenerys does choose her ambition and overwhelming power over her liberationist program. And as she does so, she chooses to burn down the city and slaughter its people. But she has to know the destructiveness of this choice—it virtually guarantees that her newly acquired subjects will hate her and many of her allies will desert her

I think this irrationality perfectly expresses her character’s contradiction: even as she desires King’s Landing and the iron throne, she hates them. She has contempt for the venality of its rulers. She despises the accepted system of daily barbarities perpetrated by the ruling classes of Westeros. So even her personal ambition is twisted and redirected against herself as she chooses her claim to the throne over her emancipatory movement.

What we’re left with at the end is a revolutionary movement that had to die with the death of its leader because of its distorted and super-vertical leadership structure. And we're left with a negative peace of continued (if less capricious) feudalistic domination--it was a nice touch for Benioff and Weiss to include the aristocrats' scornful laughter at Sam's suggestion of democracy. To me, that really felt genuinely tragic. I found the last scenes of the show to be pervaded by a mood of heavy disappointment. Daenerys and Jon, the only two leaders who represented democracy of any sort (Daenerys through her liberationist program, Jon because he actually was elected (or effectively elected) multiple times) are, respectively, killed and exiled.

But we do get something nice at the very end. I interpret Jon’s walking off beyond the wall with the free people as his leaving Westeros (including the Night’s Watch) behind. Westeros is a land of cruelty and hierarchy. The free people, by contrast, are anarchists. They live—flourish even—under harsh conditions, with genuine autonomy, and relate to each other as equals. I think it’s nice that the last shot of the show leaves us with them.