The conversation hasn’t completely stopped around Game of Thrones‘ series finale, with some fans speculating about the episode’s unanswered questions. If one of the more gruesome ones – what happened to Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) after her death – is still on your mind, a new interview from The Huffington Post UK might give you your answer. In it, Dr. Carolyn Rando, a forensic anthropologist at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, breaks down whether or not Dany’s last surviving dragon, Drogon, ate her after carrying her away from King’s Landing.
“Might he eat her? Possibly, yes,” Rando revealed. “I don’t think we can discount that he was going off to eat her.”
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Rando goes on to cite the fact that pets eating their dead owners “probably happens more than we think”, which could explain what Drogon ultimately did.
“When you look at the case studies, it’s very specific conditions,” Rando explained. “So someone lived alone, not a lot of friends came by the house, they died of natural causes, the pets couldn’t get out of the house. There’s no food in the house. Those types of things.”
“There’s one case where they consumed the entire body of their owner, which is not very common,” Rando said. “What it looks like when you look at the house and the pictures is that they ate as much of the dog food in the other room as possible first, and then eventually went on.”
Rando also cites “attention-getting behaviors” that pets have done shortly after their owner’s demise, such a licking or pawing — which coincidentally sound a lot like how Drogon initially approached Dany.
“It tends to lick, and there’s a lot of blood and then eating might happen, but more out of just stress or something like that.”
As macabre as that sounds, Rando does cite some of the show’s past canon as evidence that Drogon might not have eaten Dany. As fans will remember, Ramsay Bolton was famously fed to his own dogs in Season 6, but that human-pet relationship was drastically different from the rapport between Dany and her dragons.
“It seems like the dragons in the show have some sort of semblance of understanding of human behaviour a little bit.” Rando continued. “And so they see her as a parent. So it was a grief type of thing.”
“At the birth, it was the first thing they saw.” Rando added. “The first thing they would have seen was her. So I think that imprinting is really strong. And if you look at animal studies in zoos, where they’re trying to raise animals to go back into the wild, they’ll use puppets and things that look like the animal that they are so that they don’t imprint on people. So I think it’s probably down to really strong imprinting. This is my parent, and I need to protect them.”
What do you think of this take on Drogon and Dany’s final Game of Thrones scene? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
