ABSTRACT
The Tudor myth presents Henry VII as a heaven-sent soldier whose divinely sanctioned conquest over the demonic Richard III established the Tudor dynasty as divine-right monarchs drawing their authority to govern not from earth but from God. Yet Martin’s liberal fantasy is just as much of a myth as divine-right monarchy, and the Targaryen myth is busted in two ways. First, Daenerys Targaryen’s campaign in Slaver’s Bay shifts from liberation to occupation. Second, the Targaryen myth was busted in the penultimate episode of the show, where Daenerys turns tyrant, becoming the Mad Queen and burning down King’s Landing and many innocent civilians inside. While Game of Thrones took from Shakespeare’s first tetralogy the notion of a mythological dynasty bringing peace to a land beset by civil war—the Tudors and the Targaryens—the political ideologies represented by Shakespeare’s Henry Tudor and Martin’s Daenerys could not be more different.
