*This article contains spoilers*

FURY over the ending of Game of Thrones rages. Hundreds of thousands have signed an online petition demanding the final series be remade. And chief among the grievances is the fate of the seemingly heroic queen, Daenerys Targaryen.

The argument goes something like this: Daenerys was built up as a beloved character only for the writers to betray the viewers by having her burn a great city with little regard for innocents or victorious soldiers raping civilians in the aftermath.

While Daenerys undoubtedly has compassionate characteristics, the show repeatedly flagged up her potential for righteous egoism and indiscriminate destruction.

She grew up believing that the Targaryens have an innate right to rule and established this rule with, to quote the words of her house, “fire and blood.”

Daenerys is content with and later echoes Drogo’s promise to deliver the Seven Kingdoms through tearing down houses, raping women, and enslaving children. Mirri Maz Duur, the healer who Daenerys burnt alive, knows perfectly well that Daenerys’ child with Drogo would have burned cities and trampled nations into the dust. Daenerys implies she would be prepared to return the city of Mereen to the dirt and would do so for the right reasons. Tyrion later warns her that flattening even the cities of slavers parallels her father’s plans to burn King’s Landing.

With everything that happens to her support in the final series and all the mistakes of her advisors, Daenerys’ response is clearly not out of character.

However, we should not be surprised that some fans are shocked that she is presented as a killer, despite all the evidence. We should be familiar with this sort of cultural phenomenon. To help us understand we need only look at the common liberal comparison between Daenerys and Hillary Clinton around the time of the 2016 American election.

We saw clickbait articles comparing the two leaders-in-waiting, such as ‘Hillary Clinton: 7 Ways She’s Just like Daenerys Targaryen’ and memes with Clinton’s head proudly photoshopped on Daenerys’ body. Rather than revise or ignore these comparisons in light of what we now know, we should instead push this argument further.

Despite both characters’ overt hawkish and destructive tendencies, their supporters have a tendency to act as if this were somehow not the case. After all, the liberal argument for Clinton somehow managed to ignore or downplay her well-known views on Honduras and Iraq. Such fans have struggled to accept that their heroes might not be saviour figures, particularly when faced by a hated opponent.