Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) is an ENFJ 2w1 in Game of Thrones. Her personality revolves around an intense desire to champion, protect, and liberate other people, combined with a singular vision of herself as the rightful ruler of Westeros. As an Enneagram 2w1, Daenerys wants to see herself as a benevolent liberator and protector—but her expectation of love and loyalty in return for what she gives others eventually exposes the possessive and wrathful side of the unhealthy Two.
ENFJ 2w1 Characters
Why is Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones an ENFJ 2w1? Continue reading for my argument using cognitive functions! The headers for each section are clickable, so you can easily access more information about the dominant function and the Enneagram type, or discover more characters who share the type.
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Extroverted Feeling (Fe)
Daenerys thinks in terms of people, their needs, their loyalties, and her relationship to them. She readily absorbs the emotional language and customs of whatever group she wants to unite with or lead. Rather than remaining culturally separate from the Dothraki, she becomes their Khaleesi. Rather than merely acquiring the Unsullied as useful soldiers, she frees them and gives them the choice to follow her. Her leadership depends heavily upon creating reciprocal emotional bonds: I will protect and liberate you; you will love me and follow me.
Daenerys’s response to the freed slaves calling her Mhysa (“mother”) is to be overwhelmed by being embraced as their beloved maternal figure. She walks into the crowd and allows them to surround and lift her while they call her mother. Her identity as leader becomes intertwined with being emotionally needed and adored. Another example of her Fe is dealing with Yunkai. Daario points out that Yunkai isn’t her problem and conquering it doesn’t advance her toward Westeros. But once she knows what is happening to the slaves there, Dany derails her entire vision to liberate them. Her concern for humanity overcomes her goal of becoming Queen of the Iron Throne.
When she acquires Missandei, she immediately tells her that she is a free woman and can leave. Similarly, after freeing the Unsullied, she tells them they may depart rather than demanding service because she bought them. In both cases she wants voluntary allegiance, not possession or obedience. That makes her later deterioration especially poignant: early Dany desperately wants people to choose her; late Dany increasingly demands the allegiance she once inspired.
This also explains why rejection becomes increasingly intolerable to her. As Dany grows more powerful, she becomes more ruthless. She demands everyone accept and acknowledge her as the true Queen of the Iron Throne and gives no quarter to her enemies, enacting harsh punishments (crucifixions, feeding people to her dragons, having them burned alive to set an example to others) if they do not. Her unhealthy Fe becomes authoritarian rather than accommodating.
Daenerys increasingly assumes that because her intentions are benevolent, she knows what is best for everyone else. People who welcome her confirm her identity as a liberator; people who reject her become morally suspect. Her morality is not merely about remaining personally true to her own values, but about imposing what she believes will create a better social order and demanding collective participation in it.
Introverted Intuition (Ni)
Dany had much better Ni in the earlier seasons than in the later ones, where she felt a mystical pull to the dragon eggs. She knew to put them into the fire so they would hatch without being told. From that, she adopted the symbolic role of the Dragon Mother. She made the connection between her inability to get burned and her being the true ruler of the Iron Throne, and that vision drove her forward for multiple seasons without ever considering any alternatives. In The House of the Undying, Dany experiences highly symbolic visions (including the ruined throne room and Drogo) and develops a symbolic vision for her life. She interprets her own experiences as pieces of a larger destiny.
Rather than thinking that her dragons can give her a military advantage, dragons become who she is. Her various titles accumulate into a mythological self-concept (“The Mother of Dragons”). She constructs her entire life around a singular narrative: she is the last Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons, the Breaker of Chains, and the rightful queen who will reclaim what belongs to her. Dany is so devoted to her vision of what she wants for her future, she tries to force all of her distractions into it by reasoning that her liberation of the slaves, the Unsullied, and the Dothraki will help her gain the throne.
When Tyrion points out the low odds of her success, she sneers at his suggestion that she find “another dream,” because she has no other vision for her life. She knows she will take the Iron Throne. This is where her Ni becomes rigid. Rather than generating alternative possibilities when circumstances change, she keeps forcing everything back into the same future that she wants.
There is also her insistence throughout the series that she will “break the wheel.” She sees herself as the transformative figure who will replace an entire corrupt social order. When she argues with Tyrion about this, he is interested in mundane questions like succession, political structures, alliances, and what actually happens after conquest. Dany is much more attracted to her vision: she will break the existing system, and all of those things are irrelevant.
Dany becomes increasingly certain that everything she has survived proves her destiny. Walking into fire and emerging alive with dragons is the living proof that she is going to conquer her enemies. Her belief in this personal vision is so strong that when she starts to fail, rather than reconsider that she could be wrong, she doubles down and thinks other people are standing in the way of her inevitable success.
Mereen becomes her downfall, because she’s so busy looking at the big picture that she neglects the practical details of liberating slaves. By destroying a civilization based on slavery, she causes the Sons of the Harpy to arise. Former slaves and former masters spend all of her time airing their grievances and trying to make her settle their disputes. The traditions that she abolishes have unforeseen consequences, some of them awful. One example is a former slave who wants to return to his old master because freedom has left him without security or purpose. Dany is baffled because reality refuses to conform to her vision of having liberated all the salves.
Extroverted Sensing (Se)
Dany has knee-jerk, violent reactions to everything. She often often leaps into action because something demands an immediate response, without adequately considering what happens afterward. Conquering a city is easier for her than administering it. Destroying an enemy is easier than constructing a sustainable political system to replace them.
When Drogon appears in the fighting pit, she climbs onto him and flies away. She is often daring when circumstances force her into action, by walking into Drogo’s funeral pyre, locking Xaro and Doreah inside the vault, commanding Drogon to burn Kraznys, and flying into battle herself. Her Se is dramatic, visceral, and enormously effective in convincing others that she is not only fearless, but worth following, because she will burn civilizations to the ground who stand in her way. When diplomacy, persuasion, and vision fail, Dany realizes she has an extremely satisfying immediate solution: burn the obstacle.
Once she sees potential in the Unsullied army, Dany betrays the slave owners and burns their city to the ground. Her Se gives Daenerys a physical and confrontational streak. Once she decides what something means or what she wants, she acts with unapologetic boldness. Fire in particular becomes both symbolic (Ni) and something she literally uses to assert power (Se). She does not merely envision herself as powerful; she repeatedly demonstrates it through dramatic physical acts. She eats horse hearts, engages in black magic, has her dragon burn someone alive in front of her, and walks into burning buildings to prove she is invincible.
But the Battle at Winterfell proves her poor ability to adapt to a quick-moving environment (a limitation of low Se). Dany is so caught up in trying to handle her emotions, she fails to notice a horde descending upon her dragon. She loses another dragon in an earlier episode to a reckless battle north of the wall. This makes her different from a Se-dominant personality. Daenerys can be extremely bold and impulsive, but she is not consistently attentive to changing sensory information. Her actions are usually serving her emotional convictions or larger vision rather than arising from continual engagement with her surroundings.
Introverted Thinking (Ti)
She is almost incapable of questioning her own motives. Inferior Ti is especially apparent in the gap between Daenerys’s moral certainty and her ability to interrogate the reasoning behind it. She knows what feels morally necessary to her and what future she believes ought to exist, but struggles to detach herself from those convictions long enough to ask whether her assumptions are internally consistent. This is why advisers become so important to her. Jorah and Tyrion can supply detached analysis, practical objections, and consequences that she has overlooked.
But when their reasoning conflicts too strongly with what Daenerys feels is right or what she believes must happen, she tends to dismiss it. Whenever she does this, the situation blows up in her face (it gets one of her dragons killed and the Dothraki decimated in battle). Her weakest point is her lack of impersonal self-scrutiny. She becomes increasingly able to rationalize almost anything once she has decided that her ultimate purpose is righteous. By the final season, her reasoning has become circular: she knows what is good for the people because she is their liberator, and she knows she is their liberator because she intends to give them what she considers good.
The Enneagram 2
Daenerys wants to be loved. But being powerful is not enough for her; she needs to be the masses’ beloved source of salvation. Being called the “Breaker of Chains” and “Mhysa” mean more to her than merely being an effective conqueror. She wants people to experience her power as something benevolent that she has given them. She genuinely believes she is going to liberate people, in the expectation that this will cause them to love her, and that everything she does is just and moral. She decides who lives and dies, because she is the ultimate authority and can do no wrong.
But the dark side of the 2 shows also in her behavior. Dany expects things for her help. Such as loyalty. Support. Love. When the common people do not give her this, and actively work against her, she disintegrates into 8 and becomes wrathful. She incinerates and destroys entire cities. She burns innocent families alive. She ruthlessly enacts justice on those who do not show her deference as queen. But we also see this in the first season. After she saves a witch from being raped, Daenerys thinks that she has earned the woman’s service. It blindsides her to have the witch poison her husband and ensure his death out of a desire for vengeance; because I saved you. You owe me this. And when the witch disagrees, Daenerys has her killed.
Her generosity contains an increasingly unconscious bargain: I saved you; therefore you should love and obey me. She can tolerate enormous hardship when she believes she is beloved, but rejection strikes at the identity she has constructed as the loving mother and liberator of her people. When Westeros does not respond to her as Essos did, she cannot simply accept their indifference. This behavior is what causes Jon Snow to turn against her in the end. He cannot let an unstable, emotionally-reactive, wrathful woman devastate the world.
Jorah betraying her devastates her because he is hers. He loves her, believes in her, protects her, and belongs to her inner emotional circle. She banishes him despite his desperate pleas, but eventually allows him back into her life after he proves his devotion repeatedly. She values that he stays with and continues to serve her, even when he disagrees with her actions.
In Essos, Dany receives exactly the emotional reward that an unhealthy 2 wants: she saves people, and they adore her. They call her Mhysa. Crowds reach toward her. People choose to fight for her. Her goodness and her lovability appear inseparable. Then she reaches Westeros. They do not hate her. Worse, they love Jon instead. Their adoration for him is intolerable to her, because he receives the affection and allegiance she expects to receive because of everything she has sacrificed. When she recognizes that she does not have the people’s love, she decides that she will make them fear her instead. The unhealthy 2 who once needed to be loved becomes wrathful when love is withheld: if people will not willingly embrace the world she intends to give them, she will create it for them anyway. Whether they want it or not.
The 1 Wing
Her 1 wing contributes to her moralizing quality. Daenerys does not merely want to help people because she loves them; she divides the world into what is right and wrong, the oppressed and their oppressors, those deserving liberation and those deserving punishment. This gives her benevolence a crusading quality: she believes she has a responsibility to correct injustice, and justice is whatever she decides it is, regardless of whether Jorah and Tyrion agree with her.
Her crucifixion of the Meereenese masters also showcases her 1 wing black and white moral philosophy. Barristan urges mercy and warns her against answering injustice with injustice; Dany insists on answering what was done to the slave children. Later she discovers that at least one of those she executed had opposed the crucifixions. Her moral beliefs have become so absolute that instead of taking each case based on the evidence, she let her belief that her judgment was so righteous that it overrides any need to establish individual guilt among the slave owners.
