12 of pop culture’s best birthday moments

Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen – Photo 6: HBO

Daenerys’ dragons are born on Game of Thrones

Normally, when we think of birthdays, we think of celebrations years down the road. Game of Thrones is a little more concerned with actual, literal days of birth, and Daenerys’ dragons being born pretty much set the stage for things to venture further into the high fantasy realm than they had for the entire first season of the show.

Let’s set the stage a little. It’s the end of the first season. Daenerys Targaryen has lost her husband and her child, and she now plans to send Khal Drogo off with a big funeral pyre. For a moment, it almost looks like she’s sending herself off, too, because she walks into the flames, presumably to be with her dragon eggs…

And then, after the flames burn out, bam! Daenerys has three dragons and not just the eggs anymore. Their echoing cries are one of the last things a viewer hears in the first season. Throughout the ensuing seasons, we’ve seen the dragons grow from little fire-breathing lizards to massive fire-breathing dragons. Drogon alone laid waste to a sizable Lannister contingent.
Sure, there are a lot of key events in Game of Thrones (a season 1 letter is currently a source of tension in season 7), but for my money, there’s practically nothing more important to the show as a whole than the birthday of Drogon, Viserion, and Rhaegal, which turned Daenerys from a young widow into the Mother of Dragons and a serious candidate for the Iron Throne.

-Cheryl Wassenaar, co-expert