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‘Game of Thrones’: 6 Great Articles to Read About Daenerys’s Dark Turn

Emilia Clarke in “Game of Thrones.”Credit...HBO

In the wake of Daenerys’s Sack of King’s Landing on “Game of Thrones,” many have grappled with possible motives, finding the explanations in the show’s weekly “Inside the Episode” video unsatisfactory.

It’s personal (as one of the showrunners, Dan Weiss, says)? It’s like wanting more chocolate cake (as the actress Emilia Clarke says)? We get that Dany was hungry — she’d been skipping meals — but are the contents of her stomach (or lack thereof) the point, as the actor Andy Daly suggests? Perhaps they are, and not in the way people are thinking.

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Few fans picked up on Varys’s apparent poison plot, and after assessing all the different reads on Dany’s behavior (see below), we have to wonder — did Varys actually succeed somewhat? Did some of his poison make it into her meals, possibly causing her to feel sick and then refuse more food? (Her skin had a sallow tone, which we initially attributed to her being in mourning.) If Varys dosed Dany with a slow-acting poison (affecting her mental state), it’s another example of history possibly repeating itself. After all, Varys was also suspected of poisoning Dany’s dad, the Mad King — not with literal poison, but with whispers of treason and traitors at every turn, stoking his paranoia.

Thirsty for more assessments of “The Bells”? Read on (but watch your glass).

Daenerys Doesn’t Need to Be a Feminist Hero’ [Slate]

“ ‘Game of Thrones,’ the show, is working off an ending delivered by George R.R. Martin, an ending that makes sense inside of the moral world he has created — where good and evil coexist inside the same people, war is awful, and history never ends. But in delivering that ending, the show is hitting viewers in the nose, extremely hard, with an idea that has been latent since the beginning: that rooting for anyone is a loser’s game.”

‘“Game of Thrones” Delivers Its Most Cataclysmic Episode’ [The Atlantic]

“If the idea is that the ‘game’ itself — the unending contest for the Iron Throne — is broken, well, I imagine every viewer figured that out a few episodes into the first season. The characters whom audiences have been invested in for so long had been evolving into something new, pointing toward a deeper change for this rich and fascinating fantasy world. Instead, in “The Bells,” more often than not, characters reverted to their base nature.”

The Unearned Madness of Daenerys Targaryen’ [The Ringer]

“In the chaos of ‘The Bells,’ the show forgot about the empathy that has been as fundamental to Daenerys’s character as her ruthlessness. She isn’t the Breaker of Chains for nothing. Daenerys used to personally save women from being raped by Dothraki warriors. She freed the Unsullied and countless other slaves. She took Yunkai, Astapor, and Meereen with minimal bloodshed, and she succeeded in creating a better world for the people in those cities. She wanted to rule, yes, but the girl who had spent so much of her childhood being bullied and tormented by more powerful men also knew what injustice was.”

‘“Game of Thrones,” The Bells’ [Los Angeles Review of Books]

“If Daenerys wants the Iron Throne — and she does want it, it’s the only thing she wants and has always wanted, her entire character is built on wanting that one thing to the exclusion of all else — then she can’t let herself be a Ned Stark, having it both ways and dying in the middle ground. To win, she must follow Olenna Tyrell’s advice: Ignore the clever men (“the lords of Westeros are sheep”) and be a dragon. So that’s what she does. And because she all but tells Jon Snow that this is what she’s going to do, the only interesting question is why we aren’t listening when she says it. Are we as dumb as him?”

“Invincible Arya illustrates just how ridiculous Game of Thrones has become” [The Week]

“Arya then proceeds to be flattened by no fewer than about half a dozen collapsing houses, survive getting trampled in a stampede, evade a Dothraki attack and countless blasts of nearby dragon fire, and then, right when it seems like it must be her end, she stumbles on an uninjured horse and rides out of the city. I was so disoriented by her miraculous survival that I momentarily wondered if the horse wasn’t a metaphor for her death.”

‘Everyone Missed This Massive Hint at How Dany Might Die’ [Gamespot]

“It’s a very Varys-like move; the Master of Whispers is always plotting, and frankly, his arc this season has felt uncharacteristically dumb. His plan was to approach Jon and Tyrion directly, and if they didn’t go for it, he’d just die? That’s not the Spider we used to know. But openly defying the queen — a classic, if risky, misdirect — while he secretly plots to poison her from the shadows? Now that’s more fitting.”

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