Warning: Major spoilers ahead!

Any Game of Thrones fan who, for the past eight years, has been rooting for Daenerys Targaryen to take the Iron Throne was left very disappointed after the finale last Sunday (May 19), when Jon Snow literally stabbed her in the heart while she was in his arms. (That’s not to say anything of the previous week’s episode, where she went full Mad Queen and left people more than a little upset). And although the close-up shot of the moment left virtually zero doubt that she was dead—and, you know, it was the series finale—Game of Thrones is a show known for its shocking plot twists. Needless to say, fans who are still a little bit in denial about the show’s ending—and Khaleesi’s fate, specifically—have come up with not one, but two theories about how the Mother of Dragons might still be alive. And honestly? They don’t not make sense.

Theory 1: Daenerys Is a Dragon Now

There’s a warg-centered theory that actually makes for some interesting reading, especially if you’ve gone through the Game of Thrones book series. In the prologue of A Dance With Dragons, wilding Varamyr gets killed but then—twist!—apparently comes to in the body of one of his wolves. “It is possible for the warg to live a type of second life, a much simpler life inside the mind of an animal he controls. In the second life, the skinchanger’s [warg’s] memory slowly fades until nothing of the man is left and only the beast remains,” the passage reads.

Yeah, sure, Bran is the only warg left that we know officially exists, but Dany’s brother Viserys—and a few other Targaryens—also claimed to be dragons. So it stands to reason that Khaleesi could have warged into Drogon.

Theory 2: Kinvara Resurrects Daenerys

OK, so remember Kinvara, all the way back from season six? She was a Red Priestess of the Lord of Light from Volantis. Tyrion and Varys wanted her to mount a good-PR campaign on Daenerys’ behalf (she’s a “liberator,” not a “conquerer”), but Kinvara was already on board and said she thought Dany was Azor Ahai, the Price Who Was Promised.

Now, skip ahead to the finale: King Bran’s people tell him that Daenerys’ Drogon was last spotted heading east, “towards Volantis,” and Bran was all in for using his Three-Eyed Raven sight to find Drogon. Fans think that means Drogon was bringing Khaleesi’s body to Volantis so Kinvara can resurrect her with the power of the Light. Hey, Melisandre did the same thing for Jon Snow, as did Thoros of Myr for Beric Dondarrion (more than once).

A Little More Potential Evidence

This past season, a fan of the show, or just a sadist, decided to leak the plot points for the last three episodes of the final season on Reddit. Everyone thought/hoped they were fake, but they were surprisingly accurate—like, to the point people thought the snitch had access to inside intel at HBO. Anyway, this person wrote that there was a post-credits scene featuring Dany that didn’t make the cut for the final episode. Whether this involved Dany getting resurrected over in Volantis or still just dead, we don’t know. But she was (apparently) supposed to be there!

As others point out, however, the show is usually good at dropping hints into episodes, if you just look hard enough for them—and surely with a twist this dramatic, the signs would be there. Or are these the signs? Drogon, for his part, is probably taking his mother back to Old Valyria, where Khaleesi was originally from. It’s hard to know for sure, but I gotta say, Daenerys did look pretty dead in her final scene. In any case, fans who wanted something more for Dany after all of that can take some small comfort knowing it might not be totally over for the Mother of Dragons—even if it’s only in their own epilogues for the show.

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