Look, I don't know how dragons work, ok?

So first of all spoilers. That's your fair warning. If you haven't seen the most recent episode of Game of Thrones, go do that. Second of all, and I can't believe I have to point this out again, Game of Thrones is not news. I mention it because this. Again.

Pictured: Not news.

Oh c'mon, yesterday's post was
tangentially related at best.

I'm not picking on Huffington Post here. All kinds of news sites are reporting on the events of this TV show like it's news. And if this complaint sounds familiar, it's because it's in no way new. Remember the Red Wedding? Of course you do, even if you don't watch GOT (acronym, nothing I can do), you probably saw something on the news about it. I guess talking about the TV show that everybody's into at the moment is a cheap and easy way to get people to read your website. Or blog.

Changing the subject, awkwardly, I'd actually like to nitpick Sunday night's Game of Thrones. And no, this is not about how characters behaved so out of character, and no, I'm not going to complain about how that horse somehow knew to go pick up Arya. What I want to discuss how dragons work. Biologically I mean.

That's easy, she pressed up on the d-pad.

Hey, you got warcrimes all
over my escapist television!

So Emilia Clark's character spends the last half hour of the episode napalming a city with her dragon. A huge city. I know this is a fantasy and not the actual middle ages and it doesn't necessarily follow that the fictional King's Landing should follow the rules of historical cities, but it's clearly intended to be an enormous place with a population of like a million people. That's bigger than anything in real-life medieval Europe. London for example wouldn't hit a million people until the eighteenth century.

I don't know, maybe devour a herd
of goats? I'm not the one on trial here.

Wide shots from the show make King's Landing look massive, like, modern day New York without the sky scrapers, and Daenerys makes repeated passes on her dragon to incinerate as much of it as possible so what I want to know, is how much fire can a dragon carry? Sure they're mythical creatures and that's super, but don't they need something to spit? Like naturally occurring lighter fluid or something? It felt like she should have had to land and refuel or something, right?

I've consulted all the standard texts,
but still, the answer eludes me.

Again, I know it's a TV show about wizards and shit, but even from a writer's perspective, it seems like there should have been some consistent rules about how dragons work. Within the show's logic, Daenerys' dragon is a limitless source of explosions and could just torch the whole kingdom if she wanted it to. She's OP AF to put it in to the vernacular. Also, this was kind of unnecessary. I mean, King's Landing is a quasi-medieval city in a fictional universe, but one presumably without the office of fire inspector. And what are medieval cities famous for? I mean other than plague outbreaks?

Right. Frequent and devastating fires. I don't want to tell Daenerys how to betray eight seasons of character development, but it seems like she could have just hit some key locations and commanded her dragon to go eat Lena Headey and been back in time to claim the throne and make out with her nephew. She'd would have still gotten her murder fix and as an added bonus everyone would have blamed Cersei for her lax enforcement of King's Landing's fire code. What, am I over thinking this?

Pictured: London, like every hundred years or so.