[Warning: This post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones]

As Game of Thrones has grown in popularity I’ve noticed people start to talk about it like a sports match. Lots of chatter about who is going to “win,” intrigue over who will take down who, which characters will wind up together or in the ground. It’s all a little disturbing to me because, more or less from the beginning, I’ve considered Game of Thrones to be a brutal drama about the cycles of trauma and violence and the horrors of war. It’s not just that this show isn’t about heroes; it seems pretty determined to smash the whole trope of heroism.

As the show crashes towards its tragic conclusion, I notice more and more outrage about where the story is going. The notion that characters are making bad decisions, or that their hallowed “character development” has somehow been betrayed. And if this were a Marvel superhero movie following the trope of heroism, I might agree. But it’s not.

This is a show about trauma and violence. People who are traumatized make bad decisions. They have outsized, irrational reactions. In extreme cases, they can have flashbacks to the moments when they felt most helpless and sometimes cannot distinguish past from present. In this light, I would expect, after 8 brutal seasons, that most of these characters would be making questionable decisions at this stage. In many ways, that’s the whole point. Trauma begets violence begets trauma.

We could analyze many of the characters through this lens, but here I’m going to focus on Daenerys Targaryen, whose story is among the most tragic. For those who viewed Daenerys as a hero, overcoming obstacles in an ascent towards defeating evil and taking the throne to be a truly just ruler — her bloody turn at the end of the series might feel like a betrayal of everything she is. But if this isn’t a story about heroism, and is instead a tragedy about trauma, her arc looks very different.

Daenerys is an orphan. Her family was nearly wiped out in the previous war. Her one close relationship is with her physically and emotionally abusive older brother Viserys. We can pause right there and take note that Dany almost certainly experienced developmental trauma growing up, having no home and likely no secure attachments to loving caregivers. Individuals who grow up this way often struggle to form healthy relationships as adults. Fortunately, in the modern era, we have therapists to help sort this sort of thing out, but Dany has no such resources. And this is only the beginning.

As soon as she is sexually mature, her brother literally sells Daenerys to a brutal warlord, Khal Drogo, as a child bride. Most would argue that given her age and position, she cannot possibly have consented and was thus raped on her wedding night. And in the days that follow we get to see just what a monster Khal Drogo is. He leads his band of Dothraki to peaceful villages where they slaughter any who resist, and then proceed to rape the women. This is Daenerys’s husband, whom she claims, even in the show’s final season, to be a man she truly loved. This isn’t altogether surprising — captives often develop close feelings for their captors in a twisted kind of intimacy that helps them cope with the horror of their situation. But the fact that Dany still claims to love Drogo even after her supposed ascent to heroism is one of many warning signs that she hasn’t really dealt with what happened to her.

In one of the most horrific scenes from the first season of the show, Daenerys walks through a village her husband has just destroyed. The Dothraki are not only raping the women, they are throwing them down and raping them on top of their loves ones. Take a moment and imagine what those women were going through. Their peaceful lives suddenly shattered, their families murdered right before their eyes, and in the midst of this horror and grief, the monsters who took away their loved ones forever are now raping them next to, or on top of, the corpses of their fathers, husbands, and sons. There is no way to make this right. And there is no way to redeem Drogo as anything but a monster.

And yet, when we’re faced with unspeakable horror, we grasp for ways to cope. And so begins Daenerys’ dubious journey as a savior. She walks through the village asserting her power as Drogo’s bride and heroically demands that the raping stop. She then kindly invites these devastated, bereaved, violated women, to come under her protection and travel with the Dothraki. None of this could possibly make up for what was done to these women, and we might question if living among the men who did this to them would not be an unbearable torture. Nevertheless, we as the audience, naturally grasp onto Daenerys’ good intentions — at least somebody in this world is trying to do something amidst the horror.

Later, one of these violated women, Mirri Maz Duur, betrays Daenerys and takes revenge for the horrors Drogo and the Dothraki have visited upon her people. She poisons Drogo and also aborts Dany’s baby, leaving her barren. Frankly, after what Drogo put her through, Mirri shows tremendous restraint in her actions by sparing Dany’s life. In fact it’s rare on Game of Thrones that a character takes their revenge in such a restrained way. But Dany doesn’t see it this way. She has Mirri Maz Duur burned alive in punishment. And here we have our first real warning sign: A “hero” would take pity on this poor woman, realizing that ultimately they had both been Drogo’s victims. Instead, Dany ends Mirri’s life in one of the most painful ways possible.

And it’s in the moment of taking that first life that the magic happens. Dany walks into the flames consuming Khal Drogo’s body (along with Mirri Maz Duur) in what is either an attempted suicide or an intuitive bit of black magic. And in the morning, she emerges, unburnt, with three baby dragons, freshly hatched by the flames, ready to do her bidding. Who wouldn’t have a hopeless messiah complex after an experience like that?

People who go through trauma often come up with rationalizations and justification to help make sense of the horrible things that have happened to them. Emerging from the fire unburnt, Daenerys now has all of her essential coping mechanisms in place. She is a savior. She will mercilessly destroy her enemies. She is destined to be Queen of Westeros. All the abandonment, abuse, heartbreak, and violation of her childhood were all for this: she will overthrow all tyrants and sit on the iron throne as the chosen one.

This is completely understandable from a trauma perspective. But it is also an inflated and unbalanced state of mind. Whereas in our modern times, we have an opportunity to deal with our traumas through deep reflection, psychological support, and the cultivation of healthy relationships, Dany lacks these resources. She deals with her trauma by saving people, by burning people, and by relentlessly seeking power.

There is a story of feminine empowerment here that is genuinely inspiring. It is thrilling to watch Daenerys slowly accumulate power and do a lot of genuine good along the way. But, like almost every other character on Game of Thrones, she does her share of terrible things as well. Her punishments are often needlessly cruel. Often, she’s mindful of sparing the innocent, but her ethics become more cloudy if those “innocents” are somehow associated with those she deems to be her enemies (the more or less random crucifixion of Mereenese Nobles in season 4, for example — many of them were no doubt guilty, but Dany doesn’t bother with a trial to find out — she has a large number of them selected at random to die horribly). Daenerys’ self-understanding is that she is a good person doing what’s right, but she has always had a prominent shadow.

When Daenerys finally arrives in Westeros, she’s met by a mounting number of psychological crises. First, almost nobody on this continent views her in a way that matches up with her messianic self-understanding. Her entire identity and reason for being, and the coping mechanisms entangled with that identity, are suddenly being questioned. In the midst of this, she faces one devastating loss after another: two of her dragons, half her forces, the deaths and betrayals of her closest advisors. And finally, rejection by Jon, who is perhaps the one taste she has ever had of a healthy intimate relationship. Each pushes her further away from her own sense of security and self-understanding, and her reactions grow more extreme.

When arguing over the morality of burning King’s Landing in the penultimate episode, Dany uses logic not unlike most US politicians when trying to sell a military intervention. Innocents may die, but it’s for the greater good of future generations. I think the people that prosecute America’s wars often really believe this. And I frankly think it was brave for the showrunners to show so much of the episode from the perspective of the civilians on the ground, who actually feel the impact of what their “merciful savior” is doing.

And in the heat of that moment, I don’t think Dany really knows what she’s doing. Calling her the “mad queen” implies that she has genetically inherited some psychosis from her father. But maybe she’s simply the Traumatized Queen? Among the most insidious aspects of trauma is that it can collapse time, confusing what is actually happening in the present, while also dissociating us from ourselves. In this sense, trauma is really the opposite of “character development,” because it throws us outside of ourselves, the people we have become, and leaves us trapped in the past. In season seven Olenna Tyrell tells Dany that she should “be a dragon” — and that’s what we see here: her humanity swallowed by her inner monster, she becomes death from above, and we no longer even get to see her face.

And it’s absolutely heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking to see this powerful woman with so much potential for good become consumed by her own shadow. It’s awful to see a person we believe in betray their deepest values. To watch Dany transform into the very monster she set out to destroy. It’s so painful that to really let it in might be hard to bear. Many have complained that the final season of the show lacks emotional resonance, but when dealing with material this dark, I wonder if in part we don’t want it to resonate? If on some level, the expectation for another Marvel movie about heroes runs so deep that when we are presented with a genuine tragedy instead, we want to throw things at the screen?

Perhaps part of the frustration is that we’ve reached a moment of cultural exhaustion with the disempowerment and degradation of women. We don’t want tragic stories about a woman being twisted by her past traumas. We want stories about trauma resilience. Stories about women who heal and grow strong. And I agree we need these stories — and we need a lot of them. Healing and wholeness and empowerment are possible for women (and men) in the face of trauma, and that is the real work we are being called upon to do in this era.

But a story about trauma resilliance is a hero’s journey. And as I said in the beginning, Game of Thrones has never been about heroes.

I believe that Game of Thrones is a show worth watching because it reflects back to us something about human nature that we are collectively still struggling to deal with. On one level, it’s all an epic fantasy, but on another, it’s very real. The cycle of violence and trauma is real. The horrors of war and their long-term impacts are real. Military interventions with good intentions that destroy countless lives are real. Tragedy exists as an art form to hold up the mirror so we can see these difficult truths for what they are. We may not like what we see, but it’s still important, sometimes, to look.

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Jonathan Michael Erickson is a science fiction author and Phd in depth psychology focusing on embodied psychology, the unconscious mind, and imagination — all of which play into his fiction writing. You can get access to stories and sample chapters from his books at www.JonathanMichaelErickson.com.