5 things nobody wants to admit about Game of Thrones

Daenerys Targaryen was always going to become evil

We arrive here at the last hot take of the day, and one I still regularly get into arguments about with friends and colleagues: Daenerys Targaryen's heel turn. This was a huge point of contention for Game of Thrones season 8, which depicted Dany's slide from being a beacon of hope to those around her to a megalomaniacal warlord willing to scorch thousands of innocents with her dragons because some bells started ringing in her head.

I love Dany as much as the next person. We rooted for her ever since the first season of the show, where she was sold off to Khal Drogo as a slave wife only to eventually birth the first dragons the world had seen in more than a century. Daenerys is a borderline messianic figure, who goes around freeing slaves in Essos before she heeds the call from Jon Snow to join the fight against the White Walker army. She makes war on Cersei Lannister, pretty much the worst/best villain on the show. How can we not cheer Dany on?

All this made it more than a little painful when she snapped in the show's penultimate episode, "The Bells," and burned swathes of King's Landing to the ground after the city had already surrendered.

Many have rightfully criticized the speed of Dany's heel turn. It seems like the show really rushed the turn in its final season by basically having everyone around Dany treat her like garbage in a way that strained belief. She and her dragons and Unsullied just helped save the world, and no one wants to give her the time of day at the Stark banquet after? Come on.

But for any problems I had with how Dany's heel turn happened, I do think it's pretty indisputable that this dark fate was always in store for her. Dany was always going to turn bad. The signs were there early and often — crucifying Meereenese nobles without checking to see which were bad and which weren't, trying to use blood magic to bring back her dying husband against everyone's advice, feeding a captive noble to her dragon, torching Samwell Tarley's family, take your pick. Hell, rewatch the scene where Dany's brother is murdered by her husband right in front of her all the way back in season 1, and her chilling, distant reaction that "He was no dragon...fire cannot kill a dragon." That is not the way a healthy, stable person reacts to a death.

Yes, there are many reasons Dany goes down this dark path...but isn't that the same of Joffrey, or Cersei, or Jaime, or so many other people who do horrible things in Game of Thrones? George R.R. Martin — and by extension the HBO show — is expert at putting you into the lives and minds of other people, helping you understand why they act the way they act, only to then pull the rug out and force you to watch them do the unthinkable.

Earlier I mentioned how Martin revealed three twists to Benioff and Weiss, with the final one being something right at the end of the series. Bran's rise as king may have been part of that, but for my money, I think that Dany burning King's Landing and Jon subsequently killing her for it was the main thrust of that final huge twist. The foreshadowing is there in Martin's books as well; it's just even more subtle than it is in the television show. And that sort of cynical twist — that even characters striving to do good things can become horrible when driven far enough in the pursuit of power — is exactly the sort of thing I would expect from Martin, given some of his other works. It's got his authorial stamp all over it.

But hey, he's still writing A Song of Ice and Fire. If you're still upset about Dany's heel turn, you can always imagine it'll go differently whenever the books are finished. Just don't be surprised if you get hurt again.

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