Spoilers for Game of Thrones final season are absolutely ahead.
For eight seasons, the people of Westeros have been fighting and dying for one thing: the Iron Throne. Except for the White Walkers, whose purpose was never made more complex than the Night King’s unexplained thirst for death, the central conflict and consequential carnage of Game of Thrones was sparked by the fight for power.
And nothing represents the dangerous concept of inherited entitlement to power more than the Iron Throne.
Daenerys Targaryen said she wanted to “break the wheel” and “liberate” people from dictatorship, except she represented that very monarchal wheel and “liberate” was a thin euphemism for commit mass genocide. It was that seed of entitlement that grew into an unhinged thirst for power and caused her’s eventual demise.
And so we come to one of the most surprising plot twists of the Game of Thrones final season. When Daenerys’ last remaining dragon, Drogon, finds his own ‘mother’ slain, it seems as if he’ll put two and two together and burn Jon Snow to a crisp. Jon is the only other person at the scene and it’s not a huge stretch from what we believed about the Dragons’ ability for critical thought for Drogon to seek revenge on Jon.
But instead, Drogon looks past Jon, and burns the Iron Throne into a molten mess. He seeks revenge on the power system that corrupted Daenerys, indicating an understanding that that’s what really killed her. NOT Jon!
The dragons’ grasp of physical metaphor is way stronger than I had been led to believe
— Helen Rosner (@hels) May 20, 2019
Drogon is a lot more aware than we initially assumed of the complex system of power in which the humans are all players. So exactly how smart are the dragons?
The Dragons know the command “Drakarys”, but do they actually understand High Valyrian any further than that? Or is it ‘understanding’ the way a dog understands ‘sit’ and ‘fetch’?
Drogon burning down the Iron Throne – and thus the existing system of political power in Westeros – indicates that the dragons actually very intelligent and tuned in.
Drogon really gave us the moral Mean Girls moment that Game of Thrones needed.
Dragon on some Mean Girls moral shit pic.twitter.com/4ggD90cP4L
— Jaya Saxena (@jayasax) May 20, 2019
The biggest shock of all is just how sentient and self-aware the dragons really were this whole time. And it can’t help but make you wonder how Drogon really felt when he burned all those innocent people alive in King’s Landing on Dany’s command?
Current mood is feeling sad for the super smart dragons who watched silly humans play the Game of Thrones for too long. Shout out to Drogon for shutting it down.