Parents Who Named Their Kids After Daenerys Targaryen Shocked and Lost After S8 Finale
One of the phenomena Game of Thrones produced was thousands of people naming their children after its characters. While a cute fan gesture, sometimes it ends… Poorly, to say the least.
Game of Thrones made the planet go wild: its brutal yet captivating world, morally gray and still compelling characters, and the sheer scale of the show kept the audience on edge since the first season.
Many fans felt so much toward the show they wanted to express it in some original way.
Only in the US, there are thousands of kids named after Game of Thrones main characters; among them, Daenerys Targaryen has the most children named after her.
There are hundreds of little Khaleesis in America these days and dozens of Danys. This is not surprising considering how popular this character used to be.
Everything changed when season 8 arrived — specifically, episode The Bells. From the fan favorite, Daenerys turned into a psycho and a terrorist after having burned thousands of civilians for no good reason.
Her arguably sudden madness shocked the entire audience… But the people with kids named after Dany suffered the most.
"I'm kind of in shock. <...> I definitely don't like the outcome of what she represents. So it's kind of bittersweet right now," shared Jasmine Estrada, the mother of a young girl named "Khalessi" (she misspelled the word when naming the child), on a call with The Daily Beast.
After watching The Bells, she recalled all the times her friends tried to talk her off giving this name to her daughter.
A father of a young Khaleesi (spelled correctly this time), Dre Campbell, had a bit of an embarrassing talk with his daughter after The Bells.
He revealed that he used to keep his daughter updated on the latest achievements of her namesake in Game of Thrones, and this tradition came back to bite him after the episode was released.
"I said that she used her dragon to kill a lot of innocent people," Campbell says. "Khaleesi was like, 'Wow. Oh, that's kind of scary.' And I was like, 'Yeah. That's not you, though,'" he told The Ringer.
"When I saw the dragon burning innocent civilians and houses with no restraint, I was sad. This is not the character I fell in love with," Hector Morales Rivera wrote to Vulture.
His daughter is called Daenerys, so he has every right to be upset; however, claims Rivera, he still doesn't regret giving this name to his child.
The Bells really put many things into perspective. In the show, we saw how even great aspirations can lead to terrifying outcomes; in real life, we saw that it's probably a good idea to wait until your favorite show is over before naming a kid after its characters.
But to be honest, it's not like everyone would've backed down on their decision to name their kids after Daenerys Targaryen if they knew what she'd do later: after all, there's an unhealthy number of little Anakins in America, and unlike Dany, that character killed not thousands but millions of civilians.
Sources: Vulture, The Daily Beast, The Ringer