“How many hundreds of thousands of lives have you changed for the better here? Perhaps this is where you belong. Where you can do the most good.”
It’s been over five years since Game of Thrones ended and left an Iron Throne-shaped hole in our hearts, but the show’s ending remains just as infamous now as it was then. After struggling through hardships, setbacks, and betrayals for eight seasons of television, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) finally claimed the ultimate seat of power in the Seven Kingdoms. Unfortunately, she burned half of King’s Landing to the ground in the process, which forced her nephew and lover Jon Snow (Kit Harington) to murder her rather than allow her to continue on her path of tyranny. When last we see Daenerys, her corpse is being carried off into the distance by her mournful dragon, Drogon.
That ending is the stuff of TV legend, largely because of how much people revolted over it. A petition appeared online for the final season to be rewritten with “competent writers,” and think pieces sprouted like weeds as people debated whether the show had adequately set up Dany’s heel turn. Whether you agree with the foreshadowing and execution of Daenerys Targaryen’s ultimate descent into villainy, there’s no denying that it got people talking.
It’s always fun to look back on Game of Thrones and the journeys of long-developing characters like Daenerys. I’m in the camp who thinks the show set up her heel turn well over the course of the series, but botched it at the finish line. But that doesn’t mean I don’t wish Dany could have had a happier ending. And there’s one line in particular that has always haunted me from the series. It comes in the eighth episode of season 5, when Daenerys is meeting with Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) for the first time in the city of Meereen and decides to make him her advisor.
During the conversation, Tyrion asks Dany what he should help advise her on, and she replies to “get what she wants.” When she specifies that she means the Iron Throne, Tyrion asks if she’s considered wanting something else. She assumes he’s making a joke at her expense, but he insists, he’s “not entirely joking,” pushing her to consider the question: “How many hundreds of thousands of lives have you changed for the better here?” he asks. “Perhaps this is where you belong. Where you can do the most good.”
Dany replies that no matter how much good she’s done in Slaver’s Bay, it is “not her home.” That’s the Seven Kingdoms, the seat of House Targaryen for nearly 300 years before Robert Baratheon overthrew her father Aerys “the Mad King” Targaryen. Regardless of her feelings about Meereen, or the people there, she feels drawn to return to Westeros and reclaim her birthright.
But what if she made a different choice? What if Daenerys did stay in Meereen and rule over Slaver’s Bay — or the Bay of Dragons, as she renames it after defeating the slave master armada at the end of season 6? How differently might things have gone for her?
Whenever I think back on Thrones, I find myself circling around to this question. No, it would not at all have been satisfying for viewers if Dany just threw away her grand ambition to go to Westeros, which the show had been setting up since its very first episode, and just hunkered down in the Great Pyramid of Meereen. But might it have been a happier ending for Daenerys Targaryen herself?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
The Targaryens have just as many ties to Essos as Westeros
First, let’s consider Dany’s initial claim that Meereen is not her home; the Seven Kingdoms is. It’s important to remember that Daenerys never actually lived in Westeros; she was born on Dragonstone shortly after the Mad King was deposed, and subsequently spirited away to Braavos as an infant. So she doesn’t remember Westeros so much as yearn for the home she never had, a yearing often symbolized by “the house with the red door” in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, a reference to a place she stayed in Braavos with her brother and their protector Ser Willem Darry. For Dany, it’s less about returning to her actual home, and more about reclaiming the childhood she feels was stolen from her.
If you look at the full history of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy world, the dragonlords of Valyria have far more ties to and a much greater history in Essos than in Westeros. In the ancient days, the Valyrians warred with the Ghiscari Empire, eventually conquering it and bringing the Ghiscari under control of the Valyrian Freehold. So in warring with those slavers during the time of Thrones, Dany is actually following in the footsteps of her ancient Valyrian ancestors.
An argument could be made that Daenerys has just as many ties to Essos as she does to Westeros. Yes, the Targaryens ruled in Westeros for 300 years, but before that the Valyrians roamed the skies of Essos for thousands of years. I think a good case could be made for why Essos and the Bay of Dragons could have been just as much a home for Daenerys as Westeros, if she had been of a mind to consider it.
Could Daenerys have kept ruling the Bay of Dragons?
Now, let’s talk about the actual situation in Slaver’s Bay while Daenerys is there. It goes without saying that it was not easy for her to take over Meereen and learn to rule there. That’s the whole point of the plotline: before Daenerys can go rule well in Westeros, she decides to get a feel for what ruling is like by bringing stability to the newly freed people of Slaver’s Bay. The rich slave masters and nobles of the area do not take kindly to Dany freeing all their servants and upending the societal structure which existed there for centuries, and make it a living hell for her to try and hold the city.
We all watched how that played out in the show, with the Sons of the Harpy trying to assassinate Dany in the Great Pit of Daznak, her flying out on Drogon, and eventually returning to torch their armada with her dragons. That it would have been difficult for Daenerys to stay in Meereen pretty much goes without saying. But at that point it kind of seemed like…maybe the worst was over? The whole reason Daenerys feels comfortable leaving Daario Naharis (Michiel Huisman) in charge of the Bay of Dragons when she sails to Westeros is because she anticipates there will be less resistance there moving forward. All that’s needed is a steady hand to keep things from boiling over again.
But let’s be serious: does anyone really think Daario Naharis is a good choice to leave in charge of the city? The guy’s a mercenary, not a politician. Dany, on the other hand, was perfectly positioned to keep watch over the region if she had stayed there. And she had three adult dragons to back her up. So I do think that, if Daenerys had stayed in Meereen, the region of Slaver’s Bay likely would have remained somewhat under her control. That big clash in the bay outside the city was her great victory, and while there would have been setbacks after that, she likely cleared one of the greatest hurdles she would have faced.
Paramours, advisors, and enemies
So in my opinion, Daenerys could have kept on ruling Meereen. But what about all the other characters in her orbit? Would she have stayed with Daario Naharis, or found some other lover? Dany had tried to marry Hizahr zo Loraq (Joel Fry) — and does marry him in the book — out of a need for political alliances. And while she might have been happy with Daario, and kept him on as a paramour, I imagine Dany would similarly have found herself in a situation where she’d one day need to make a political marriage.
Of all the characters surrounding Dany, Daario obviously would have had the least problem with her holing up in Meereen. Her loyal knight Ser Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen) would have still had to go off to find a cure for his greyscale. As for Tyrion and Varys (Conleth Hill), whether they decided to stay with Dany or not is a big question. I think that if Daenerys had chosen to stay in Meereen, it’s likely that Varys at least would have eventually left her in favor of tending to his own schemes in Westeros. I also think Tyrion would have eventually parted ways with the Dragon Queen if she had truly been resistant to leaving Meereen.
Then there’s the question of the dragons. Daenerys had three very large dragons by the time she left Slaver’s Bay, and they were causing problems in the surrounding countryside by eating sheep and children and stuff. If she stayed in Meereen, the housing and care of those dragons would have been a huge conundrum to solve. After all, she wouldn’t have been a very good queen if she let them just keep munching on her subjects.
But one thing’s for certain: the dragons living around Meereen would have made Daenerys’ position there nigh-unassailable to her foes. It’s important to remember that when the slave masters initially started picking fights with Dany, she hadn’t yet ridden a dragon and they were much smaller. After all three of them went into battle and destroyed the armada from Yunkai and Astapor, there’s no longer room for doubt that anyone who opposed her in battle would have to face them. At the time of Dany’s departure, Meereen was as secure as it could be in that regard.
So, would she have just lived out her life, ruling happily in Meereen and building up the city for all the freed slaves? Would her reign there have brought her into contact with the other major powers on Essos, like Volantis, Lys, and Myr? And what of the Dothraki? Dany assembled a great Khalasar in order to take back Meereen and conquer Westeros. If she decided to just stay there, who knows how the Dothraki might have reacted? Perhaps Meereen could have become a place where they were welcome; perhaps they would have decided she was a coward for abandoning her plan to go to Westeros.
These are all big questions, with nothing but our imagination to fill them. But there is one other, very large thing to consider…
Could the White Walkers have gotten past the Wall without Daenerys?
If Daenerys stayed in Meereen, that doesn’t mean life would stop in Westeros. All the backstabbing and bloodshed would have continued there. The White Walker army, which was massive by the time Daenerys boarded her ship for Westeros, would have continued its march south. Daenerys, her dragons, and her Unsullied army are a major component in the ultimate victory against the Night King at Winterfell. I think it’s very fair to say that if she hadn’t led her considerable forces to Westeros, the people of Westeros would have probably gotten steamrolled by the White Walkers and all died. Maybe they could have all fled south and eked out a living in the deserts of Dorne for a while until the eternal winter reached there, but the odds of survival in Westeros would have been significantly worse without Daenerys Targaryen.
But there’s another big question: how would the White Walkers have even gotten past the Wall without Dany? In George R.R. Maritn’s novels, it’s hinted that there’s a mystical horn, the Horn of Joramun, which has the power to bring down the Wall. But we won’t know whether that pans out until The Winds of Winter is released. As of right now we have no idea how the White Walkers will get south of the Wall in Martin’s books.
In Game of Thrones, however, the only reason they’re able to get past the Wall is because one of Daenerys’ dragons, Viserion, is killed by the Night King and resurrected into the army of the dead. The Night King then uses Viserion to blast a hole in the Wall and march his army into the Seven Kingdoms.
If Daenerys had never gone to Westeros, that means the Night King would have never killed Viserion, and never had a scary undead dragon to knock down part of the Wall. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the White Walkers would never get past the Wall otherwise — the concerns about them getting south go all the way back to the season premiere of the show, and I have no doubt they would have found some way eventually. But it probably would have taken them longer without Viserion.
I can’t say that for sure, though. Maybe the Night King and his army would have just been stuck north of the Wall for centuries, until every living thing up there was zombified and bent to serve his will. But however long it took the White Walkers to get south, whenever they did manage to get there, the people of Westeros would almost certainly have fallen without Dany and her dragons there to help out.
The Plotline That Was Promised
Ultimately, as fun as it is to imagine these alternate versions of Daenerys Targaryen’s life, I think it’s pretty safe to say that what we got in the show was the arc she needed to have, even if the execution of her late-game heel turn left something to be desired. Could you imagine a version of Game of Thrones where Daenerys never met Jon Snow? Where she never led her Dothraki into battle against Jaime Lannister on the Gold Road? Where that crucial summit in King’s Landing never happened and dragons never clashed in the sky over Winterfell as the army of the dead swarmed over the castle walls?
The idea of Daenerys laying down her lifelong ambition to go to Westeros would have felt like a betrayal in its own right. And no matter what came after, that shot of Dany setting sail with her armada and her dragons still gives me chills whenever I see it. That was always the road she was going to take in the series, and I wouldn’t change it.
But it is fun to dream of the life Daenerys Targaryen might have had if she had put down roots in the Bay of Dragons and built a new sort of Valyrian empire there. Perhaps in an alternate universe, the Valyrian Freehold might found new life through Daenerys Targaryen, the Queen of Meereen.
