Daenerys Targaryen

Who is Daenerys Targaryen?

Daenerys is the daughter of Aerys II, the last Targaryen king, and his queen Rhaella, and the sister of Rhaegar and Viserys. When the story opens her family has already lost the Iron Throne, and she and her brother Viserys are the exiled heirs of a deposed royal house. In Game of Thrones she is played by Emilia Clarke, and in the novels she is one of the most important point-of-view characters.

Her arc is the series' great reversal. She begins with nothing but a name that has become dangerous to carry, is married to Khal Drogo, and ends up commanding dragons, armies and cities of her own. Readers and viewers follow her rise from inside her head, which is why the question of what her power does to her is the one the whole story eventually has to answer.

How does she come to command dragons?

Daenerys has three dragons, Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion, and they change her from an heir without a kingdom into the most dangerous person alive. Drogon becomes her own mount and the one she can least control. The others are chained when they become a danger to the people she rules, a decision that captures her dilemma in a single image: the power that makes her a liberator is also a threat to everyone near it.

The dragons also tie her to her family's history. The Targaryens conquered Westeros on dragonback three centuries earlier, and the realm still remembers what fire did to the kings who fought it. Every lord who hears that Daenerys has dragons hears that history repeating, which is why her claim frightens even people who might otherwise welcome the end of the war.

What does ruling Meereen teach her?

In the east she conquers the slaver cities of Yunkai and Meereen and then makes a choice most conquerors would not: she stays in Meereen to learn how to rule it. It is the part of her story where liberation turns into government, and government turns out to be harder. Freed people need food, order and justice; the old masters plot; and every decision forces her to choose between mercy and control.

Meereen is where the series lets her fail without disaster, and the lessons stay with her. She learns to accept advice, takes a second husband, Hizdahr zo Loraq, as a political bargain, and discovers that a city can be won by fire but not run by it. Whether she carries those lessons to Westeros, or abandons them when they stop working, is the argument her final season provokes.

What does her family's history mean for her claim?

Daenerys's claim rests on being Aerys II's daughter, and Aerys is the king whose fall ended Targaryen rule. That makes her campaign a restoration in her own eyes and a return of the old regime in the eyes of many Westerosi lords, who remember why the rebellion happened. She spends much of the story trying to persuade people that she is not her father, and the realm keeps measuring her against him.

In the show the claim is complicated further by Jon Snow, Rhaegar's son and her nephew, whose birthright outranks hers. A queen who had built her legitimacy on blood discovers that blood favours someone else, and the series makes that one of the pressures that bear on her in the final season. The Targaryen family tree sets out how the line runs.

Why does her story end the way it does?

She reaches Westeros in the seventh season, landing at Dragonstone, her family's ancient seat, with an army and three dragons, and before the last war is over she has lost Viserion to the Night King. The show's case is that grief and isolation strip away the restraint she had learned, until the destruction she brings to King's Landing shows the realm what its new queen would be.

Jon Snow kills her in the final episode, and the outcome remains the most argued point of the ending. To some it is the tragic payoff of a character who always believed she was right; to others the turn came too quickly to be earned. Either way it is the end of her line in the show, and the novels have not yet reached it as of the date this page was last checked.