---
title: 'Game of Thrones Ending Explained, Part 1: The Downfall of Daenerys Targaryen'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=wUcT1XWn6sE'
video_id: 'wUcT1XWn6sE'
date: 2026-06-28
duration_sec: 1280
---

# Game of Thrones Ending Explained, Part 1: The Downfall of Daenerys Targaryen

> Source: [Game of Thrones Ending Explained, Part 1: The Downfall of Daenerys Targaryen](https://youtube.com/watch?v=wUcT1XWn6sE)

## Summary

The video analyzes Daenerys Targaryen's downfall in the Game of Thrones finale, arguing that her transformation from liberator to tyrant, though rushed in the final season, was a logical conclusion to her arc. It focuses on the moral that absolute power corrupts, and the destruction of the Iron Throne symbolizes breaking the cycle of tyranny.

### Key Points

- **Finale's central event** [00:00] — The finale hinges on the destruction of the Iron Throne, the symbol of ultimate power.
- **Groundwork for tyranny** [01:08] — Daenerys's descent was foreshadowed from the beginning, with her determination to disrupt the existing order turning into an obsession for total power.
- **Logical poetic end** [03:40] — Her turn is logical and poetic, but the final steps happened too quickly, missing deeper scripted motivation.
- **Duality of rhetoric and emotion** [04:50] — Her beautiful rhetoric masked a hatred-fueled emotional truth, leading to a dictator who believes her actions are righteous.
- **Win-win illusions** [06:34] — Daenerys never faced tough choices while freeing slaves, always killing evil men, which inflated her self-righteousness.
- **Belief in divinity** [08:03] — She came to believe she was a goddess, justifying any action as good because she did it.
- **Cautionary tale of power** [10:18] — The tragedy is her exceptional power made her more dangerous, illustrating that no one can rule justly without checks.
- **Lord of the Rings parallel** [12:30] — The Iron Throne is like the One Ring; Daenerys is both Gollum and Galadriel, unable to resist its corruption.
- **Drogon destroys throne** [13:46] — Drogon, realizing the throne killed his mother, destroys it with dragonfire, mirroring Mount Doom.
- **Jon as Frodo, Dany as darkness** [14:48] — Jon is the ring-bearer who resists the throne's temptation; Daenerys becomes the darkness he must save the world from.
- **Prophecy fulfilled** [15:52] — Her vision in the House of the Undying comes true: she stands as Queen of the Ashes, never sitting on the throne.
- **Empowering symbol lost** [17:51] — Her death takes away a powerful symbol of a strong woman, raising questions about female characters in power.

### Conclusion

Daenerys's ending, while flawed in execution, is the destination of the show's meditation on power: absolute power corrupts, and the only way to break the wheel is to destroy the throne itself.

## Transcript

“Who is the greatest threat
to the people now?”
The finale of Game of Thrones
is called “The Iron Throne,”
and it hinges on the event
the whole series has been building to:
the destruction of that bewitching,
corrupting symbol of ultimate power.
In a roundabout way, Daenerys Targaryen
does make good on her promise
to break the wheel.
“It’s a beautiful dream,
stopping the wheel.
You’re not the first person
who’s ever dreamt it.”
“I’m not going to stop the wheel.
I’m going to break the wheel.”
Instead of being the savior
she believed herself to be,
it turns out she’s the danger
the world needs saving from -
but her invasion and death
result in the old back-and-forth
between warring rulers
getting replaced
with a new, more enlightened
form of government.
“Sons of kings can be cruel
and stupid, as you well know.
His will never torment us.
That is wheel our queen wanted to break.”
In this video we’re just going to
focus on Dany’s ending.
While her transformation in
the final season feels rushed,
the groundwork for her
eventual descent into tyranny
can be traced back to
the beginning of the series.
The early sparks of her determination
to disrupt the existing order
finally flame up into
an all-consuming obsession
with wielding total, unchallenged power
over a new world that bows to her.
And as she ends up
Queen of the Ashes,
becoming the very thing
she set out to destroy,
“You’re not here to be
Queen of the Ashes.”
“No.”
the tragic fate
of this great character
contains the true heart
and soul of this story.
So here’s our take on the deeper moral
in the elimination of the Iron Throne,
the downfall of the Dragon Queen
and the Death of her Dream.
“Will you break the wheel with me?”
We open with Tyrion walking through
the burning remains of his home city,
forcing himself to stare the consequences
of his mistakes in the face.
Acknowledging that his idealistic dream
to bring about a better world
through the Dragon Queen is dead,
he weeps for all that he destroyed
in service of a lie,
as his family’s melody
“The Rains of Castamere”
plays one last time.
In our first glimpse of Daenerys
after her mass killing,
the cinematography reinforces
that she has become the dragon --
just as the visuals announced in “the Bells”
just before she killed Varys.
Now that her raging
Targaryen dragon has been woken,
“You don’t want to wake
the dragon do you?”
the world is feeling the pain.
“You are liberators!
You have freed the people of King’s Landing
from the grip of a tyrant.”
Daenerys the tyrant is a dark inversion
of the liberator she once was --
the emancipation she now promises
to bring to the rest of the world
is in fact death.
“We will not lay down our spears
until we have liberated
all the people of the world!”
This sequence echoes
Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will,
and it might make us look back
at past Daenerys scenes
to find parallels to Nazi
or fascist imagery
foreshadowing the totalitarian
she would become.
Daenerys’ turn actually is
a logical and poetic end
to her character arc.
You can watch our video comparing
Daenerys to Cersei for a closer look
at how the show hinted all along
that Dany had this potential.
However, the missed opportunity
is that the final steps
on Dany’s journey
happened so quickly --
her decision to burn King’s Landing
is explained mainly through this look
on her face.
It’s only in the “Inside the Episode”
commentary that we get deeper insight
into what glimpsing the Red Keep
here triggers in her.
“I don’t think she decided ahead of time
that she was going to do what she did,
and then she sees the Red Keep,
which is to her,
the home that her family built
when they first came over
to this country
three hundred years ago.
It’s in that moment on
the walls of King’s Landing
where she’s looking at that symbol
of everything that was taken from her
when she makes the decision
to make this personal.”
This is an incredibly interesting point
that unfortunately didn’t quite
make it into the script itself --
if it had, it may have illuminated
for viewers the true subconscious reason
Dany makes the choice she does.
Along her way Daenerys
has convinced herself
that she wants to rule
for the people
and created a utopian
ideology around herself
as a benevolent freedom fighter --
“Together we will leave the world
a better place than we found it.”
while on a repressed,
involuntary emotional level,
the Iron Throne is actually a symbol
to her of pain and trauma.
So even though she doesn’t
understand this herself,
all this time her inner dragon
wasn’t really driven by hope
or the promise of change,
but by rage and the will to avenge
the abuse she endured
at the hands of her enemies.
“When my dragons are grown,
we will take back
what was stolen from me
and destroy those who wronged me!
We will lay waste to armies
and burn cities to the ground!”
And this duality of the beautiful --
sounding rhetoric and
the hatred-fueled emotional truth
coalesces into a dictator
who is all the more terrifying
because her dreamy story allows her
to keep believing her actions are righteous,
no matter the body count.
“I’m here to free
the world from tyrants.
That is my destiny,
and I will serve it
no matter the cost.”
Tyrion resigns as Daenerys’ hand,
which is what you might call
the definition of
“too little too late” --
not to mention that he was about
to be tried for treason anyway.
“Take him.”
Despite how clear it seems
to everyone else
that Daenerys is
now the villain,
“I know a killer
when I see one.”
Jon Snow drags his feet and pays
unconvincing lip service to his Queen.
“What's it matter what I'd do?”
“It matters more than anything.”
So the imprisoned Tyrion persuades Jon
that he has to kill Daenerys --
through a brief analysis
of what went wrong
for the Breaker of Chains.
“She liberated the people
of Slaver's Bay.
She liberated the people
of King's Landing.
And she'll go on liberating
until the people of the world
are free and she rules them all.”
As Daenerys freed slaves
in her path to the Iron Throne,
she faced win-wins that allowed her
to avoid tough decisions --
she picked up armies
she didn’t have to pay for,
while she got to feel squarely
in the moral right
because all the men
she killed were bad guys.
“When she murdered
the slavers of Astapor,
I'm sure no one
but the slavers complained.
After all, they were evil men.
When she crucified hundreds
of Meereenese nobles,
who could argue?
They were evil men.”
The more absolute power
she consolidated,
the more she was lauded
as a selfless hero.
“Everywhere she goes,
evil men die and we cheer for it.”
Even her closest friends and advisors
were deferential servants, not equals.
“Do not walk away from your queen
while I command you to find the cure.”
“She bought me from my master
and set me free.”
“That was good of her.
Of course, you’re serving
her now, aren’t you?”
Being hailed as a savior for so long
has made her fall for that narrative
more than anyone.
“Do you know what kept my standing
through all those years of exile?
Faith.
Not in any gods,
not in myths and legends.
In myself.”
She’s come to believe she is
a goddess among men.
So when she slides into
doing the wrong thing,
“Children, little children, burned!”
“I tried to make peace with Cersei.
She used their innocence
as a weapon against me.”
it becomes easy for her
to justify why --
if she did it --
it must be right.
“How do you know?
How do you know it'll be good?”
“Because I know what is good.”
When she talks to Jon about deciding
what’s best on the people’s behalf,
“What about everyone else?
All the other people
who think they know what's good?”
“They don't get to choose.”
out of context her words sound
entitled-beyond-belief.
But if you are the person who has
freed countless souls from chains --
when all those people never imagined
freedom was a possibility --
you would feel you know better
than everyone else
what is best for them.
“It's not easy to see something
that's never been before.”
It’s almost impossible to imagine
walking through fire
and experiencing the intense worship
she’s known without coming to think
you have superhuman rights
to decide the future of the world.
“But when the fire burned out,
I was unhurt, the Mother of Dragons.
Do you understand?
I'm no ordinary woman.”
Many monarchs throughout history
declared their divine right to rule
based on far less.
“I’m the last hope of
the dynasty, Mormont.
The greatest dynasty
this world has ever seen,
on my shoulders
since I was five years old.”
Daenerys once put forward
a dazzling vision of
“breaking the wheel,”
"Lannister, Targaryen,
Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell --
they’re all just
spokes on a wheel.
This one’s on top,
then that one’s on top,
and on and on it spins,
crushing those on the ground."
but in the end she couldn’t
resist the allure
of becoming another spoke on it,
because feeling like a god on earth
will destroy anyone.
“And she grows more powerful
and more sure
that she is good and right.
She believes her destiny is
to build a better world for everyone.
If you believed that
if you truly believed it,
wouldn't you kill whoever stood
between you and paradise?”
In fact, Daenerys’ tale is
really the story
of the most powerful ruler
who ever was --
and perhaps the best, too --
that’s why almost everyone
she meets falls in love with her,
“I love her too, not as
successfully as you.”
“I love you.”
“It appears you’re not
the only Targaryen support.”
and we the viewers did, too.
The tragedy is that it’s
this very immensity of potential --
Daenerys’ exceptional,
even supernatural power --
that makes her even
more dangerous than a Cersei
or indeed than any other ruler
who ever tried to stop the wheel before.
The greater the power,
the great the temptation to misuse it,
to seize control over all people,
and ultimately to destroy all life
unless it perfectly obeys,
which is a vision of total,
global slavery --
exactly the thing Daenerys
sought out to end.
“Do not become what you have
always struggled to defeat.”
Despite the number of hints
we were given
that Daenerys would
evolve into a tyrant,
“Where are my dragons?!”
Tyrion gets it wrong
when he says,
“Our Queen’s nature
is fire and blood.”
The point the story is making isn’t
that Daenerys was evil all along,
or that her Targaryen coin
fell on the wrong side.
“You think our house words
are stamped on our bodies
when we're born
and that's who we are?
Then I'd be fire and blood too.”
It’s that ultimately this
strongest and best of people
still couldn’t withstand
the temptations of ultimate power.
So it’s because of all
this logic that Daenerys’ tragedy
is a cautionary tale illustrating
that no person can ever rule justly,
if their control is unchecked
by important restraints.
This commentary on what absolute power
is and what it does to the soul
is really the whole point
of Game of Thrones.
“She is no longer
yours to torment.”
“Everyone is mine
to torment.”
Daenerys’ story has to end
with the Throne being destroyed.
The best way to understand
the significance and
inevitability of this ending
is to look at one of
Martin’s biggest influences,
The Lord of the Rings.
The allure of the magical ring
is supernatural --
more or less impossible
to overcome --
and the Throne is this story’s
version of the ring.
When Daenerys finally
lays eyes on the throne,
she looks almost like Gollum
spying his precious.
And on a deeper level,
she might remind us
of the beautiful elf Galadriel.
Frodo offers her the ring --
because if anyone were capable
of wielding it justly,
it would be her.
“I do not deny that my heart
has greatly desired this.”
But while Galadriel is tempted
by the vision of herself
as the all-powerful Queen,
“All shall love me and despair!”
she refuses, understanding
that she would be lost to the ring
if she accepted.
“I will diminish and go into the west
and remain Galadriel.”
And as Jon kills Dany,
his last words to her --
“You are my queen,
now and always.”
are a tribute to the underlying
beautiful and good person
that she really is,
beneath this monster
the throne has made.
His words frame the murder as
an act of freeing her true self
from the Throne’s
corrupting influence.
And the crucial symbolic moment
comes when Drogon appears,
giving every indication
that he’s about to breathe fire
on the man who just
killed his mother.
But instead, he destroys
the Iron Throne.
Just as the ring is destroyed
by falling into Mount Doom
where it was forged,
the Iron Throne is destroyed
by dragonfire,
which is what Aegon used
to forge it.
“Forged in the fiery breath
of Balerion the Dread.”
So the finale reveals that,
despite how it looked for a while,
Jon is not the Aragorn
or final king of this story
“You’re the true king.”
he’s Frodo,
“You are the shield
that guards the realms of men.”
the suffering ring-bearer.
He’s the only one who can bear
the heaviest burden of
being the closest to the throne --
as symbolized by the fact
that he’s the rightful heir
“You're Aegon Targaryen,
true heir to the Iron Throne.”
while not falling into
its temptation.
“You are a ringbearer, Frodo.
To bear a ring of power is to be alone.”
As many predicted, Jon is
the Prince Who Was Promised --
it’s just that the Night King
was not the looming darkness
he was destined to
save the world from.
Daenerys was that darkness.
“It’s a terrible thing I’m asking.
It’s also the right thing.”
Martin has said this is
Daenerys’ and Jon’s story --
these two people represent
fast-spreading, powerful, chaotic fire
versus slow-moving,
steady, rigid ice.
We’ve seen countless parallels
foreshadowing how deeply
their journeys are intertwined.
In Season 7, fire and ice are
irresistibly drawn to each other
and fall in love,
but in the end
it turns out the reason
they are so interlinked is
because one’s fate is to destroy the other.
“This is our reason.
It has been from the beginning,
since you were a little boy
with a bastard's name
and I was a little girl
who couldn't count to 20.”
This story of an over-powerful fire
meeting its end through
an equal-and-opposite ice
is one of balance being restored.
“Love is the death of duty.”
“Sometimes, duty is
the death of love.”
And Game of Thrones has
always hinted at “balance”
as the moral underlying
the back-and-forths
of this story of
dualities and extremes.
Dany’s prophecy in
the House of the Undying
is very directly realized.
What appeared to be snow
in the vision was actually
the falling debris of
the city she would destroy --
and this Queen of the Ashes is
close enough to touch
her greatest ambition,
but she never gets to sit on it.
In the vision, she walks out
north of the wall
and meets her deceased husband
and lost baby,
just as in this future,
Jon Snow (who’s so linked
to that north and its snow)
sends her to join her dead.
We might also note that
Robert Baratheon foresaw
this ending from the start
“If the Targaryen girl convinces
her horselord husband to invade
and the Dothraki horde crosses
the Narrow Sea
we won't be able to stop them.”
(even though Ned Stark
acted like he was crazy)
and even Sam’s dad Randall Tarly
had a point when he refused
to bend the knee.
“You, on the other hand,
murdered your own father
and chose to support
a foreign invader.”
Drogon takes his mother’s body --
and we later hear that he’s gone east,
which implies he’s probably
returning her remains
to the Targaryen ancestral home
of Valyria,
“For thousands of years the Valyrians
were the best in the world
at almost anything.”
or possibly bringing her to
the shadowlands beyond Asshai
where the dragon eggs are
said to come from.
“Dragons’ eggs, Daenerys.
From the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai.”
Drogon’s behavior in this scene --
especially his understanding
that it was the throne
(and not Jon) who killed Dany --
reminds us that dragons are not
just the scary killing machines
they seem to be
in most of the show.
They are actually very wise,
ancient beings, as Tyrion once told us.
“Dragons are intelligent.
More intelligent than men
according to some maesters.”
Bran’s later comment
that he’s going to search for Drogon
“Perhaps I can find him.”
suggests that the Raven
and the Dragon share
a deeper understanding
of life’s mysteries.
While it’s tempting to paint
Daenerys’ ultimate nature
as the Mad Queen
who was destined
by her bloodline to
burn cities to the ground,
as she passes out of this world
she reminds us of the person
she was in the very first episode:
an abused, alone girl --
the victim of a cruel world.
“I would let his whole tribe f*** you,
all 40,000 men and their horses too,
if that’s what it took.”
Actress Emilia Clarke
has talked about how,
for her performance
in her final scene,
she tried to draw out
the little girl
inside this woman,
who began as innocent and naive,
full of hope and love.
“I imagined a mountain of swords
too high to climb.
So many fallen enemies,
you could only see the soles
of Aegon's feet.”
Daenerys’ endpoint sadly takes away
from our world the unequivocally
empowering symbol of the strong woman
who emerged from victimhood
to become a beacon of hope
for the oppressed.
“You’re a dragon.
Be a dragon.”
It raises questions of why female
characters in positions of power
so often tend to go crazy
or get torn down.
And out of context, the image
of a man killing a woman
while they're locked in
a loving embrace,
framed as a noble deed,
is not a good thing
to be sending out
into our culture.
But beyond the disappointment many feel
to mourn their Khaleesi,
“Shameful.”
and the disjointedness of
the last few steps in this journey --
Dany's ending is the destination
this meditation on power
was always heading toward.
Her inability to escape the cycle
of hate and lust for absolute rule
that has consumed her people
for generations
makes her the last casualty
of an old world
that her death
will finally end.
So Daenerys Stormborn of
the House Targaryen,
First of Her Name, the Unburnt,
Queen of the Andals and the First Men,
Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea,
Breaker of Chains,
and Mother of Dragons can finally
add the most coveted title
to her list:
Breaker
of
the Wheel.
“We break the wheel together.”