The penultimate episode of Game of Thrones-"The Bells"-saw Daenerys Targaryen finally transforming into the Mad Queen that many viewers have predicted she would eventually become, burning King's Landing to the ground as her father Aerys tried to do years earlier.

While this twist has been hinted at as early as the show's first season, the accelerated timeline of this truncated final season left fans disappointed and angry at how quickly Dany turned.

despite how upset most of us are with daenerys outcome this season. my heart goes out to emilia clarke. couldnt imagine falling in love with portraying a character for over ten years only to witness them ruin her without being able to do a single thing #GameofThrones pic.twitter.com/VoGBdJvY57 - (@muertres) May 13, 2019

The idea of a woman whose unstable mental state leads to her lash out with fatal consequences is one that appears many times in the sci-fi and fantasy genre. Earlier this year, Ellen Page's character Vanya embodied the trope in Netflix's The Umbrella Academy, and this summer Game of Thrones' own Sophie Turner will play perhaps the archetypal version of the clich, Jean Grey, in X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

On the surface, this trope provides some shallow "girl power" platitudes, positioning women as more powerful than other characters, but it can also be interpreted as a genre-infused twist on the age-old "hysterical woman," a prevailing and sexist argument that woman are too inherently emotional to be able to properly wield power.

Melissa Leon at Slate wrote that "The Bells" essentially reduces Dany's character to a crazy ex-girlfriend, whose murderous rampage is motivated not by losing Rhaegal, Missandei, or Jorah, but by Jon Snow's romantic rejection:

"We know shes lost two of her dragons and her most loyal friends and advisors; shes realized shell never be loved as much as Jon as a ruler, and shes fresh off a breakup. Why does this translate into mass murder, and not every tragedy shes experienced before? If shes always had violent instincts, why do they manifest this way now, with victory in hand? We never get inside Danys head and for a moment like this to work, we needed to."

It's hard to argue with that take; the episode rushes Dany's transformation so much, encapsulating what should have been months of depression into a single scene in her chambers, that her actions in this episode don't track with everything else we know about her. We've accompanied the character on every step of her journey, from being abused by her brother and used as a bargaining chip to learning to exert influence and agency herself. It's not that fans don't want their fave to end up a villain; such a drastic about-face just didn't feel earned.

Dany has always defined herself as a liberator (leading some fans to criticize her savior complex and call her a "white feminist"), and so her snap decision to murder thousands of innocent people, including children, after their surrender, feels like something that happened simply because the plot required it. There was no catharsis to her slaughter in the way there was when we watched Cersei blow up the Sept of Baelor, no logical reason for it at all, beyond the writers having limited time left to cram in as much story as possible.

This entire season has been gearing up to a showdown between Jon and Dany, and after this, it is clear that we as an audience are supposed to side with Jon. It's just a shame that the show sacrificed multiple seasons' worth of characterization to get us there.