Tolkien gave us an excellent one, Denethor, in The Lord of the Rings, made insane by the pressing evil of the incarnation of total demonic power, Sauron, and by grief. But flying above them all is Daenerys Targaryen, the mad queen of Game of Thrones, herself the daughter of Aerys, known indeed as simply the mad king, who tried to burn down his capital, King’s Landing, and everyone in it.
Daenerys is dubbed the mother of dragons for her control over three of the creatures, the only dragons surviving from ancient times into creator George RR Martin’s faux-medieval world. She is the great hope for salvation from the inept rulers that control Martin’s central focus, the Britain-like Westeros. The single overall trajectory of the seven series of the biggest TV drama yet made was Daenerys’s quest for power, and the throne that was hers by rightful inheritance.
It took a single episode in the last season for this quest to mutate from the noble to the degenerate, as she charged her dragons to create a firestorm that would complete what her father had begun and destroy King’s Landing. Fans felt cheated at the sudden volte face, but wasn’t this just a fault of execution, an overly speedy plot development from showrunners in a hurry, rather than a case of implausibility? Wouldn’t the possession of fire-breathing dragons – shorthand for unassailable, thus absolute, power if ever there was one – make anyone lose their grip on the qualities of restraint, fairness and justice required for the best rulers?
They would have undone any of the cast of this article, that is sure. I can picture them laying waste to the Capitol now.
