Emilia Clarke didn’t win the award for outstanding lead actress at the 2019 Emmy Awards. Is there still hope that the television series didn’t solidify her character’s dismal fate?
Since 2013, Emilia Clarke has been nominated for four Emmy Awards for her role as Daenerys Targaryan in HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” All four times, she was handed defeat.
Sunday’s 71st Primetime Emmy Awards saw “Game of Thrones” enjoy a moderate amount of success. The drama series walked away with the best drama series award, adding to the show’s already existing record of most wins of any drama in television history. Even the queen’s hand, Peter Dinklage, won the award for best supporting actor in a drama.
But Daenerys Targaryan, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Lady of Dragonstone, Breaker of Chains and Mother of Dragons, didn’t enjoy a fairytale ending to what has been eight long seasons of bloodshed and conspiration on the journey to King’s Landing.
Fans took to Twitter to proclaim how the actress “was robbed.” To them, her transformation from her first appearance as a young, innocent princess to a powerful, dominant character after her fire-induced rebirth in season four was deserving of the victory.
But if taking into account the backlash that followed after fans realized Bran the Broken was next in line to be king, and that oligarchy will continue to dominate the seven kingdom’s oppressive feudal system regardless of the build-up to the realization of Daenarys’ dream of “breaking the wheel,” wasn’t that to be expected?
After all, out of the 32 awards that the drama was nominated for, none of the major characters won in their categories except for Tyrion Lannister. Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow in the series, didn’t take home the trophy for outstanding lead actor in a drama series either.
This has a lot to say about viewer dissatisfaction with how a series with more sub-plots than viewers can follow. The series conclusion of six long episodes which were filled with too many gruesome killings and too few storyline developments did not appeal to all viewers.
More than 1.7 million people have signed a petition demanding HBO to remake the season finale with the same intricacy and eye for detail that the rest of the seasons were crafted with. But with a world on its toes that was hungry to find out whether or not the Night King would succeed in enveloping the entirety of the seven kingdoms in eternal winter, it seems that David Benioff and Daniel Brett Weiss’ were too eager to feed the belly of the beast rather than waiting on the author of the book series, Goerge R. R. Martin, to pen the rightful ending that the show deserved.
The result? Daenerys’ descent to becoming the Mad Queen is short lived. It doesn’t come close to representing the idea of terror and instability that has been methodically built-up around the Mad King’s reign over the course of the series.
The time frame within which she finds out that she is related to Jon Snow by blood and their dragon-flying honeymoon turns into a bloodbath in King’s Landing is too naive. And at the end of it all, when Jon Snow musters the courage to stab his loved one and Daenerys’ remaining dragon reduces the Iron Throne to a “molten slab,” he simply picks up his queen’s lifeless body with his talons and flies away into the distance, never to be seen again.
Where is Drogon now?
What kills Daenerys on the show is her hamartia: her desire to break the wheel and to overthrow a political system that has been dominated by Westeros’ ruling class. But what kills her character, are the miniscule details that Benioff and Weiss derived from Martin’s manuscripts to construct the rich character everyone couldn’t help but fall in love with in its seven preceding seasons, before their source of creativity ran dry.
This was not Martin’s initial intent. The author vocalized his desire in March 2014 to keep the show’s producers from catching up to where he was in solidifying the fate of his characters in what remains, an unfinished series that currently consists of five books. At the time, Vanity Fair coaxed fans of Westeros that they “shouldn’t panic just yet.”
It has been eight years since Martin published his fifth book, “A Dance with Dragons” in 2011. It has been another two since he publicly admitted that he tried, and failed to finish the sixth book in time to outrun the speed at which the television series was progressing. It’s as if he subconsciously anticipated this back in 2014, when he said that the kids are getting older.
“Maise was the same age as Arya when it started, but now Maisie is a young woman and Arya is still 11. Time is passing very slowly in the books and very fast in real life,” Martin said.
But now that one of the world’s most popular television series has come to an end, and the dust is beginning to settle on the public outcry that ensued from it, there remains a shred of hope. Martin’s fans are still hungry for that revolutionary ending that the series worked so hard to foreshadow but didn’t end up delivering on, and he has the power to mold a divergent ending that will redeem what season eight has done to the reputation of the series.
As a prominent journalist said, “George R.R. Martin can still fix this [crap].”