David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the showrunners behind Game Of Thrones, have been chatting about Dany’s big decision in the latest season 8 episode. Here’s what they said about the move…

We’re talking, of course, about Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen’s decision to burn the Red Keep of King’s Landing to the ground, as well as very much deliberately killing a bunch of civilians, including women and children. Despite the foreshadowing that Dany had a dark side and was inhabiting a quite negative headspace, this still came as quite the shock to a lot of viewers.

Benioff said this, in this week’s Inside The Episode documentary: “If circumstances had been different, I don’t think this side of Dany ever would have come out. If Cersei hadn’t betrayed her, if Cersei hadn’t executed Missandei, if Jon hadn’t told her the truth — if all these things had happened in any different way, then I don’t think we’d be seeing this side of Daenerys Targaryen.”

And Weiss added this: “I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did. And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It’s in that moment, on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.”

Now that Dany has made it personal, it’ll be interesting to see how the surviving characters react. There’s only one episode to go, and it’ll be fun to see how it ends…