Daenerys Targaryen's Worst Decision In Game Of Thrones Still Baffles Fans
As most characters in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen is prone to making mistakes and bad decisions from time to time.
But there is one particular event, which popular vote usually marks as the worst low of Daenerys' decision-making by far, see for example this thread on Reddit.
Namely, the whole story with Mirri Maz Duur, the Lhazarene healer and witch. First, Daenerys employs her to heal Khal Drogo, after the latter sustains a gruesome, but not immediately life-threatening injury.
In case you don't remember that episode, Khal Drogo was injured in the first place in a fight that immediately followed the brutal sack of Mirri's hometown by his Dothraki horde, and enslavement of all the survivors. In the aftermath, Daenerys "takes Mirri under her protection" (i.e., puts a nicer name on making Mirri her personal slave) and shrug off warnings about this old woman being a witch. And then Daenerys allows her to tamper with the health of a man whom Mirri has every reason to hate. But that in itself is not so bad.
At that point Daenerys is a teen, who has to cope with one difficult situation after another and is trying to rationalize the fact that the quest for her ancestral throne is involving slaughter of innocents. Thinking that being nice to Mirri Maz Duur can make up for all the evils inflicted upon her and her people is, if anything, more realistic for a person Daenerys was in the moment, than clear-headed assessment of the situation.
So, fans might have not been so baffled, if not for what followed – when Khal Drogo's wound festers and is about to kill him, Daenerys believes that the problem was in Drogo not following Mirri's directions – to be fair, that was theoretically possible, but how many reasons for suspicion one has to get?
Daenerys asks Mirri for help again, and does as she says, even after it becomes abundantly clear that the Lhazarene woman is indeed a witch, whose "help" is going to consist of black magic.
Well, this degree of stupidity was not something that readers and viewers could easily forget and forgive.
Particularly as while Daenerys' decisions killed her husband and unborn son, they also directly resulted in hatching of the dragons, which instantly turned Daenerys from the Khal's trophy wife into potentially the most powerful woman in the world.
No wonder there are still heated arguments among the fans about whether the story gives Daenerys special treatment, rewarding, instead of punishing her for doing stupid things.