New Theory Explains The Most Devastating Scene In GoT (and Characters' Sudden Stupidity)

Even the smartest of them, like Tyrion, began making stupid mistakes and lost their minds' sharpness, and even the most principled of them, like Daenerys, went completely crazy.

Most people obviously blame the writers of Game of Thrones who saw the show's quality drastically decline after they had to write the script on their own.

That's only fair and logical: after all, the characters behaved very differently when the show was following George Martin 's books…

But what if we told you there can be a valid in-world reason for that behavior shift?

Reddit user CaptainThirdWorld came up with an intriguing theory that explains the overtime decline in characters' intelligence and sanity.

In medieval societies, beverages for commoners and aristocrats were different. While the folk drank ale, lords enjoyed wine.

Prior to the discovery of sugar, the main way of sweetening wine was by boiling it for extended periods of time which led to lead from cauldrons dissolving into the wine.

Lead was a sweetener, but it was also an accumulative poison. Lead poisoning reduces cognitive functions over time, and this is exactly what was happening to the characters who were primarily lords and ladies: we saw them gradually lose their reasoning, critical thinking, and self-awareness.

Why did it only start happening at a certain point in the show, you may be wondering?

As the situation in the Seven Kingdoms worsened, more wars, intrigues, and betrayals emerged. This led to massive stress for lords and ladies participating in the game of thrones, and they started drinking much more, accelerating the pace of lead poisoning and continuously damaging their own mental abilities.

This also explains why less aristocratic characters were not affected by this: for instance, the Hound (or any of the free folk) doesn't become dumb, and Jon Snow was escaping that fate until he became a lord and started drinking wine, too.

Daenerys Targaryen was the most dramatic example of this process, but, as the author of the theory claims, there was more to her sudden change in the end.

Daenerys might have suffered a mild stroke due to blood clotting as a result of G exposure: remember, she was traveling on her dragons most of the time and was constantly exposed to high G forces during aerial maneuvers.

The behavior and thinking of people suffering from a stroke can change quite dramatically, so this alongside lead poisoning and the grief of recent losses led to her breaking, going insane, and starting the horrendous massacre at King's Landing.