Game of Thrones has always been about politics. The show gave us a vast, complicated world of rival houses, competing claims to legitimacy, and a pretty great metaphor for climate change. Even with the lackluster final seasons, it’s still one of the greatest television shows ever made. It wasn’t a tired fantasy story about a chosen one having to summon up individual courage: It was a story about how societies function or don’t. It was The Wire with swords, and it was brilliant.

Until it wasn’t. I’m not going to rehash why the end of the show felt so different. If you want to understand that, read this excellent post from Scientific American. Instead, I want to talk about how the last episode made a big play with some political symbolism that it probably shouldn’t have.

Game of Thrones needed to signal Daenerys had gone bad and reached for a reference that didn’t fit

When Jon walks to meet Dany, we see something familiar: An plaza sporting an enormous banner. It’s filled with rows of soldiers, each wearing dark, face-obscuring helmets.

Credit: HBO

In the center of it all is a broad lane and immense staircase, leading up to where a leader will address the well-ordered troops. The leader will speak, passionately, about glory, power, and changing the world.

Credit: HBO

Those straight rows of troops, the enormous plaza, the dark helmets, the grand staircase, and the charismatic leader all come from somewhere: Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. You’ve seen footage from it before, either in a history class where you had to learn about propaganda, or in one of thousands of documentaries about WWII.

Triumph of the Will is one of the most influential movies of all time, and referencing it is an easy way to show that a character or group is militant, organized, and irredeemably evil. It worked in The Lion King, when the creators wanted to assure us that Scar and the hyenas were bent on conquest:

Credit: Disney

It worked in the Star Wars franchise, when viewers needed to see that The First Order was an existential threat to peace in the galaxy:

Credit: Disney

It worked in the excellent Legend of Korra when the creators wanted to make it absolutely clear what kind of ideology the villain had in that show’s final season:

Credit: Nickelodeon

(If you haven’t already, watch Legend of Korra. It’s one of the best fantasy shows of all time and features Henry Rollins as a magical kung-fu anarchist. Really.)

Honestly, it works in Game of Thrones. As soon as we saw Jon moving through that plaza of straight lines and armed men, we knew he was approaching a leader who could not be reasoned with. When Dany speaks to the assembled, troops, we know from the visual language of the scene that this isn’t a mere victory celebration. She’s rallying a militant force that must be stopped. Shit’s bad, we’re afraid, and the reference works on a visceral level.

That was only the first thing Game of Thrones did to equate Daenerys Targaryen with fascism. A bit later in the episode Tyrion recounted Dany’s ascent toward Mad Queen status by saying:

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 Dothraki khals she burned alive? They would have done worse to her.

If you had to study the Holocaust in history class then your ears might have perked up at the sentiment and structure of Tyrions’s speech. His lament, that he should have seen the escalating violence coming, echoes Martin Niemoller’s short bit of prose usually known as “First they came…”

You’ll recognize it:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemoller, a Lutheran pastor, said that in 1946 during a sermon, where he recounted his own cowardice and inability to resist in the face of growing Nazi power. Game of Thrones appropriated the structure of Niemoller’s lament, but substituted slavers for socialists. On the surface, it might seem appropriate. One act of violence leads to another, and we should feel empathy and solidarity with people who are not like ourselves. If we wait until a violent leader threatens us directly, we’ve waited too long.

There’s a big problem here, though: Slavers aren’t socialists, and Daenerys Targaryen is not a fascist.

What Was Daenerys Targaryen’s Politics?

Fascism is a hard ideology to pin down. Unlike Marxism or liberalism, fascism is based on emotions, grievance, and identity, all of which are pretty mercurial. The best definition of fascism remains Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay Ur-Fascism, where he outlines fourteen different features fascism tends to have: It lionizes tradition, rejects modernism, rejects analysis, and stokes fear of difference and outsiders. It’s elitist and populist at the same time, and cultivates a tradition of machismo, heroism, and xenophobia.

This is not exactly what Dany has been about. She’s a hard character to pin down in terms of ideology or politics. Her motivation and claim to legitimacy do come from tradition. She’s the last of the Targaryen’s so, in her eyes, that makes her queen. But, that’s not Dany’s only source of legitimacy. She also sees herself as a rightful ruler because she overturns unjust systems. Being a queen isn’t just something she was born to, in her eyes freeing slaves and killing off evil nobles is her way of earning it.

Also, she’s immune to fire and has dragons. That’s not nothing.

Dany, though, is explicitly non-fascist in that she overturns traditions (like slavery, or women not being able to lead Dothraki) and instead of cultivating a strong fear of outsiders, seeks to put together a diverse coalition of followers. It’s true that she had selfish motivations for doing this (she wanted the Iron Throne, after all) but toward the end of her run Daenerys had Dothraki, Unsullied, and Westerosi support. When she encountered opposition she invited them to bend the knee and join her. Instead of creating a romanticized, reactionary cult of heroism around the identity of her followers, the Khaleesi courted universalism.

What’s more, Daenerys’ opponents have always been those in power. She isn’t the type who stokes fear of sedition or sabotage within her ranks. She finds others who holds power, confronts them directly, and executes them publicly in a way that would make the Robespierre proud (more on that in a moment). There’s no good real-world parallel to Dany’s politics, but she’s not a fascist. She’s more of an overzealous revolutionary, albeit one who still believes in monarchy.

Which makes the Triumph of the Will and the “First they came…” references just really fucking weird. They point to a real-world array of politics and beliefs that are, if anything, antithetical to how Dany has presented herself as a political actor. Fascists don’t talk about breaking the wheel, they believe the wheel is all-consuming.

There was a better reference point for Dany’s politics, but Game of Thrones ignored it

It’s especially weird because we have a shared point of reference for a mass movement built around burying the old regime, empowering the downtrodden, and killing nobility in a dramatic, public fashion: The French Revolution. Had they put Dany in the center of the crowd rather than above it, perhaps while waving a banner, that reference would have rung true. You know. Like in Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix:

But with a shirt on, obviously. And with a dragon in the background.

If they’d swapped out the tricolor for the Targaryen banner and referenced Delacroix’s painting instead of Leni Reifenstahl’s propaganda film, she would have read more properly as the noble-killing, regime-toppling force that she is. She also would have maintained her complexity up until the end.

Daenerys Targaryen was a fascinating and sometimes infuriating character. She was ruthless, power-hungry, and also behind some very necessary political revolutions in Essos. Toppling slave-based regimes is, in general, a pretty good use of dragon power. It’s fiery and violent, but it also gives power to people who never had it before.

Fascism doesn’t do that. Fascism reinforces existing social and class roles and invites people to subjugate themselves to the needs of the nation. In many ways it’s not complex at all, and unlike Marxism, liberalism, or other ideologies, fascism has nothing constructive to add to the overall political or philosophical conversation. It merely needs defeating.

Overzealous revolutionaries, even when their hands are covered in blood, maintain an inkling of their idealism and sympathy. They’re understood to have a legitimate target and legitimate goal, once upon a time. Fascists don’t, and never did. Painting Dany (and Grey Worm and the rest of her followers) as fascists flattens them and reduces them as people. It also feeds into some of the laziest conventions of modern political discussion.

False equivalency makes for bad politics and boring stories

Indicting Dany and her followers with references to fascism feeds into dangerous far-right narratives.

The Khaleesi’s forces are multinational and multiethnic. The Dothraki aren’t Asian (this is a fantasy world, there is no Asia) but they’re obviously based on the real-world Mongol Empire. The Unsullied aren’t African (there is no Africa in this world) but they’re played by Black actors and are former slaves. Their race, culture, and status vis a vis Westeros still matters in the context of the fictional world. In Westeros they are still foreign and still other.

Game of Thrones ended by showing an army composed of Black actors arranged like Nazi troops, and Asian actors as Triumph of the Will’s cheering section. The episode also showed us the consequences of this militarism and zeal, with Grey Worm (a Black man) executing white Lannister troops. The contrast was especially stark because the Lannisters aren’t just white; with their blonde hair and blue eyes the look like the Third Reich’s Aryan ideal. They’re also, it’s worth noting, extremely rich. Our sympathies were supposed to be with the executed Lannisters, and I wondered, watching it, if anyone thought that the inversion of power between a Black soldier and white one was, perhaps, Very Interesting.

By suggesting that Dany is some kind of Fantasy Hitler, and showing Grey Worm as a ruthless executioner, Game of Thrones implies that women, people of color, former slaves, former peasants, and other members of dispossessed classes are just as likely to commit genocide as people with power are. It made the destruction of Cersei’s regime (which everyone should have been happy about) into an opportunity to tell us that rich white people can be victims, too.

As I mentioned earlier, the French Revolution would have been a far better reference point. There’s complexity, idealism, and tragedy in that story, and in the end most modern people who believe in democracy and equality would probably come down on the side of the revolutionaries, even while being uncomfortable with the violence. It’s a story about people doing wrong things for the right reason, of idealism that goes to far, of a genuine yearning for equality in a violent world, and of tragedy. That reference point would have felt real and in-character.

But, by comparing Dany to Hitler, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss not only betrayed Dany’s character, they did it while playing on cheap fears of women and people of color. They said, essentially, “What if the worst crimes of white people, but with Asians and Blacks, and led by a woman?”

This isn’t to say that women or people of color can’t be villains. Cersei Lannister and Erik Killmonger prove otherwise. But, making the Khaleesi, Dothraki, and Unsullied into villains whose symbolism merely mirrors the white men have been villains (and fascism has historically been a white guy project) reduces and flattens those characters by robbing them of their identity.

It also plays into simplistic reactionary fears. It intimates that, if given power, marginalized people will do to their oppressors what their oppressors did to them. This false equivalency is the stuff or far-right rhetoric. I’m not going to link to any hateful sites espousing paranoid fears of “white genocide,” but their talking points are familiar enough to anyone who’s been paying attention to politics these past few years. Reactionaries seem to believe that everyone is evil in the way they are evil, wish to dominate in they way they wish to dominate, and harbor hatreds that are the mere inversion of theirs.

This is nonsense, of course. Cersei Lannister’s gender shaped her as an antagonist, but she was not the female equivalent of a male sexist. Erik Killmonger’s motivation depended on his Black identity, but he didn’t become the mirror-image of a white racist. In both of those cases, the characters villainous modes felt like natural extensions of their identity and politics. They did not feed into reactionary narratives by adopting the ways white or male oppression. They formed their own.

I don’t know if Benioff and Weiss are reactionaries or even conservatives, and it’s difficult to know how Game of Thrones reflects their real-world beliefs. I do, however, think they’re politically lazy. In 2017 they announced Confederate, an alt-history follow-up to Game of Thrones about slavery persisting into the modern day. (A premise, really, that isn’t exactly alt history.)

In an interview with Vulture Benioff name-dropped Shelby Foote as one of his main influences as to why he was interested in the Civil War. Foote was a Confederate apologist, and he was also the one Civil War historian you’d happen upon if you only kind of did your homework. While Foote wasn’t the only historian in Ken Burns’ The Civil War, he was the breakout star and, listening to him, you’d think the War Between the States really was just a big misunderstanding. Foote being their go-to guy for Civil War stuff is a big tell. These are not fellows who’ve done their homework when it comes to history or politics. They have a surface-level understanding, and if you have a big platform you need to do better.

This is all a shame. Game of Thrones is one of the most incredible television shows ever made. It gave us a wonderfully constructed web of fake politics to enjoy, so it’s frustrating to see it drop the ball when it decided to play with very real symbols of very real politics. I still love this show, and someday I’ll probably rewatch the whole thing and be thrilled all over again. I just wish I could love it more.