Yes, the final season of Game of Thrones was a chaotic mess, and it was glorious
IV. On that massacre, and massacres in general
In particular, Daenerys Targaryen’s massacre of pretty much the entire civilian population of King’s Landing—at least hundreds of thousands, perhaps more if we add refugees who had crowded into the city and surrendered soldiers—did not sit well with many fans. There are several major reasons for this, but here we shall focus on the critiques that this shocking act made no sense and that this was therefore a “bad” outcome for the show.
Hiroshima after the U.S dropped an atomic bomb (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images)
I was in shock when watching it for the first time and had quite an emotional reaction: it is painful, horrific, and even traumatic to a degree when you watch it, representing mass killing in a television show in a graphic way that I am not sure has yet been replicated by any other show.
But I also loved it because this event gave us one the most awesome statements made by Game of Thrones over the course of its run.
To set up why, note how showrunner D.B. Weiss said that Daenerys’s (near-?)genocidal war-crime was not premeditated, but a decision made in the moment. That is not to say that there was not plenty of foreshadowing that this might be how Dany would end up: there was, though some argue that the foreshadowing was inadequate. I would argue that both are right in that there was foreshadowing but that the final leaps of her character go far beyond what foreshadowing suggested was likely at that stage.
Yet, what I think many people are missing is that this dramatic leap is precisely what is so brilliant: we humans often like to think there’s always a plan, that we make sense and are rational, but history is full of people suddenly and horrifically snapping with little or no explanation. When some people happen to be commanders in war with immense power at their disposal and the ability to decide life or death for hundreds or thousands of people, all too often mercy and restraint have not been the outcome. Such slaughter is both ancient and modern. For Christians and Jews (just to name two religious groups), such killing can even be endorsed or commanded by God Himself in the Nevi’im/Bible, as was the case with the Amalekites.
Mass killing, whether premeditated or not, whether rational or not, is hardly a rarity in history and can sink to the level of genocide; such horrors span the ancient world all through the ensuing centuries and up to even our present era. Not all massacres or particularly-murderous city-sacks are preplanned neatly with Germanic Nazi precision; while some decisions are a matter of policy or are a clear choice (surrender and be spared, fight and have your city be massacred if you lose) or have a clear (if sick) logic to them, other times such decisions are made on a whim or a snap or are just collective spontaneity, and still other times even solid commanders lose control of their troops.
We like to say that slaughtering most or all of those people is “unthinkable,” “indescribable,” even “inhuman.” But the sad truth is that such slaughter is uniquely human. To quote a passage from Iain Pears’s brilliant Dream of Scipio:
"When I was at Verdun [the WWI battle]… I saw things which were more appalling than you can imagine. I saw civilization coming apart at the seams. As it weakened, people felt free to act as they pleased, and did so, which weakened it still more. And I decided then it was the most important thing, that it had to survive and be protected. Without that tissue of beliefs and habits we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not."
In other words, no individual animal can wipe out so many other creatures during a single event… no animal, that is, except a human. Dragons are completely fictional, but even Drogon did not do what he did of his own will; he was controlled by Daenerys.
As I have noted before, the veneer of civilization is quite thin.
CNN broadcasts the Osama bin Laden tape December 13, 2001. The Bush administration called the tape the “smoking gun” that proves bin Laden’s direct responsibility for the September 11 attacks on the United States. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Perhaps most disturbingly and most frustratingly, we really don’t have any specific insight into exactly why Daenerys Targaryen did what she did when she roasted most of King’s Landing. We know she had been through a lot up to that moment, especially recently. Still, the show kept her thought process from us and left us only able to speculate, but that is also part of the brilliance I am getting at: we naturally want answers when something horrible like this happens, some sort of clear manifesto like that of Osama bin Laden, but all too often, mass murderers don’t give us a reason, there is no trial or neat debriefing like at Nuremberg, and the horrors of atrocity can also include never having an answer to “Why?”
1946: Members of the Tribunal (left), preside over the Nuremberg war crimes Trials. From left to right are : Colonel A F Volchlov (Russia), General J T Nikitchenko (Russia), Lord Justice Norman Birkett (Britain), The President Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence (Britain), Hon. Francis A Biddle (USA), Hon. John Parker (USA), and M. Henri Donnedieu De Vabres (France). (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
She might have just been angry or snapped, which seems be what’s suggested by Emilia Clarke’s performance and Weiss’ commentary. But after she has gone through with the massacre of pretty much the whole city, in the next episode it seems she had given deliberate orders to execute Lannister military prisoners; she may or may not have snapped, but after her burning of King’s Landing she seems to have embraced a more calculated policy of killing the defenseless beyond any temporary fury.
The innocent victims of Daenerys. Image: HBO/Game of Thrones
To television viewers, Jon, Tyrion, Davos, and quite a few others, Daenerys’ genocidal-level killing feels like madness. But massacres of entire civilian populations in history are not uncommon, with far too many senseless acts of unjustified violence. Many a would-be conqueror presented themselves as liberators, only to be a murderous tyrant in the end, from select Roman emperors through Stalin. Many felt they had a destiny to rule. We often cannot get into the heads of soldiers or kings or generals the moment they decide to massacre thousands of non-combatants, but plenty would involve sudden, unexpected twists and not necessarily a slow, anticipatory, well-advertised buildup. Conquerors are not saints, even if they found religions. And conquerors change often when and as they conquer. We may like our characters like Jon Snow: steady, stable, principled, and predictable, but Jon Snow and Ned Stark are often the exceptions, not the rule, in reality and on Game of Thrones.
But maybe Daenerys was not “mad” at all and did have a cold, heartless rationality to her massacre-by-dragonfire. Maybe she realized how hard it would be governing over an unruly population as a foreign queen; maybe, already sensing Sansa Stark’s defiance (no Six Kingdoms for Dany!), she wanted to make an example to avoid further such battles in the future. That’s perhaps the most common reason in history for such acts, from the Romans to the Mongols to Hiroshima.
That we don’t know and that this moment will forever be up for debate only adds to the singularity of the Game of Thrones mystique. Call it madness, call it rational, call it out-of-left-field, call it terrorism, call it genocide, no matter which, it is a brilliant reflection both of the horrors and, often, ambiguities of mass violence in the real world, ones we would do better as societies to consider and confront. That Game of Thrones makes us uncomfortable thinking about such violence, then, is, if anything, a service.