Missandei
A young scribe and translator of the peaceable island of Naath, fluent in the tongues of the world, freed from slavery in Astapor.
A soul born at Naath.
The fuller tale
Season Eight
In The Last of the Starks ÔÇö Born free, died chained, last word a command. Missandei of Naath dies in chains on the walls of King's Landing, with one word: Dracarys.
Where they stand. Winterfell and King's Landing.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Executed at King's Landing (S8┬ÀE4)
Captured at sea and paraded in chains on the walls of King's Landing, the freedwoman of Naath was beheaded by the Mountain at Cersei's nod, in full view of her queen and Grey Worm. Her last word was Dracarys.
The showÔÇÖs Missandei dies in the eighth season, in the warÔÇÖs cruelest staging. Captured at sea in Euron GreyjoyÔÇÖs ambush off Dragonstone, she is held in KingÔÇÖs Landing and brought out in chains onto the city walls ÔÇö before Daenerys, Grey Worm, and the assembled parley ÔÇö as CerseiÔÇÖs answer to the demand for surrender. Offered last words, the freedwoman of Naath chooses the queenÔÇÖs own word of fire: Dracarys. The Mountain beheads her where she stands, in her chains, in front of the man who loves her and the queen who freed her ÔÇö the chains a deliberate, calculated obscenity for a woman whose whole story was the removal of them.
The death functions exactly as Cersei intended and rather more than she intended: it is the moment the campaign for KingÔÇÖs Landing stops being a war of thrones and becomes, for Daenerys and for Grey Worm, a matter of grief ÔÇö the last counterweight to fire gone. In the published books Missandei is alive in Meereen, a child at a queenÔÇÖs side, her story still unwritten; the showÔÇÖs walls-of-KingÔÇÖs-Landing ending belongs to the adaptation alone.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Book Missandei is a child ÔÇö about ten when Daenerys frees her, a solemn, uncannily clever little scribe whom the queen half mothers, and whose brothers, taken with her, were made Unsullied; one of them, Mossador, the show borrowed by name for a Meereen subplot. She has no romance with Grey Worm on the page ÔÇö the show aged her up and invented the relationship whole ÔÇö and she remains alive in the published books, serving in Meereen through the queenÔÇÖs absence. The showÔÇÖs Missandei, in Nathalie EmmanuelÔÇÖs performance, became one of the adaptationÔÇÖs most significant expansions: a background functionary grown into a principal, whose death was written specifically to detonate the final act ÔÇö a purpose the books, with their living, eleven-year-old Missandei, cannot and likely will not mirror.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.