To clarify, if it didn’t come across: I meant loyal to Aerys. No need to stab him, results are similar. Burn, motherfuckers, burn.
I guess this episode was just the right for our times. People don’t change, they even regress. Except for those who are in power. They change, of course, to homicidal maniacs.
In twenty years time, someone would look at this and interpretation will be “oh, how clear-sighted”.
Or not. Because they just kicked most development up to this point in the bin.
That’s my main point of puzzlement. Why even bother if in the last three episodes, everything goes back to older personalities?
Nuclear Dragon winter has arrived. Talking about heavy handed analogies.
The story was always about the Game of Thrones; the Night King was just a distraction. Dany has been ‘breaking bad’ for six seasons now and kept reminding everyone that she was going to burn the heck out of King’s Landing, so it wasn’t really a surprise when she did, really.
Any idea why she didn’t earlier? With three dragons, e.g.?
ETA: I don’t buy the breaking bad idea, her character was developing a slight bit into the other direction. But even if not, she could have just burned a lot of places instead of going on side quests.
For a good long time, that was the plan. She’d get her Unsullied and her Dothraki on Iron Island boats, head to the mainland, fly the three dragons to King’s Landing, burn stuff (“I will take it with fire and blood!” - season 2 or 3) and take the throne. But then Jon Snow convinced her that the immediate threat was the Night King (true, really), and that not only lost her Dragon #1 and Jorah but ended up with Jon finding out that he’s the real heir and her nephew. By the time she lost Dragon #2 she’d convinced herself that all of her advisors and friends were enemies and that the people of King’s Landing would be loyal to Cersei unless she terrified them, turned things to ash, and started fresh.
She burned the city with one dragon. No army needed, at all. Those armies are just more cannon dragon fodder. Even a small army can take a burning ruin and sit on the throne. Keeping it is a different story, but that’s clearly not what she’s aiming for any longer.
Which brings us back to: why the hell build a character for seven seasons and then discard it like this?
I’m honestly not sure what you think was ‘discarded’. She’s the same character who burned groups of her opponents because they wouldn’t bend the knee, who literally crucified hundreds of slavers in Mereen, and has been threatening to use her dragons to burn King’s Landing for seven seasons. The only thing holding her back has been her advisors and Jon Snow, and she thinks they’ve all betrayed her, so she gives no fucks.
I know. I was saying his loyalty should have been reserved for Brienne.
Also… Jamie never told anyone else there was fucking wildfire sitting stashed all over King’s Landing?
The whole entire time Robert was king, he never thought once thought it would be a good idea to remove it?
That kind of shitty writing makes me glad this show is almost over.
Also the comparison to BrBa is highly inaccurate;
Over all 5 seasons, the audience can clearly see Walter’s White’s gradual journey over to the ‘dark side’; it’s a metamorphosis into evil that is completely earned.
That is very much NOT the case with the “Dany’s just as bad as her father!” narrative.
Complete agreement here. My spouse and I are at odds…she believes Dany’s descent was telegraphed; I’ve argued…FULL ON NOPE. Burning one or two people here and there who are direct threats to your person is one thing…torching all of KL is another. And burning Sam’s dad and bro she did with remorse. You could see it on her face that she was willing to do it but not happy about it. Much the same as Jon executing men in the Night’s Watch. And even then that is a far cry from “let’s just torch the entire city and have my armies rape, pillage, and murder their way through the streets”.
I never expected a happy Disney-like ending here. My issue is that they’ve taken story arcs and just thrown them away; or even worse…taken story arcs and done a complete 180. I (like most people) hated Jamie in season 1, and grew to accept he had changed only to find that is how they end it for him? yeah BIG FAT DOUBLE MIDDLE FINGERS UP there to the viewership. When producers/writers do a deliberate gut punch like that for literally no reason than to do the gut punch my response is eff off.
More like many hundreds. And then there’s the mass-crucifictions, the massacres, the repeated promises to burn the city… it hasn’t been subtle. By no means do I enjoy Dany torching the populace, but I don’t know why it’s at all surprising that she did what she promised she would do.
this can stop right here and we can agree to disagree. This entire last two seasons is UTTER SHIT and I care not to debate that with anyone whatsoever. You see it your way, I see it mine. We have 90 minutes left to close out this shit show.
To be totally clear: in no possible way am I debating your opinion of the show, its writing, or its overall quality. I’m not saying you are wrong. I am not debating you.
What I’m saying is that I’ve seen tons of thinkpieces and posts about Dany’s somehow shocking “heel turn”, which is weird to me, because she’s literally doing what she kept saying she would do. I feel like there’s so many narrative threads in the show that all the Duterte-level stuff she’s done was forgotten amongst all the crazy murderers, rapists, psychos, and ice zombie massacres. I don’t think it’s great writing and it’s damn sloppy stuff.
Dany going mad queen I do not like, but it works just fine…but it is still LAZY writing. Her killings aren’t any more or less madness driving/indicating than any others we’ve seen. Her torching the Dothraki warlords who captured her and clearly were not going to follow her isn’t her massacring anyone…that was her ridding the world of her enemies. She didn’t then roast their horsemen and followers too.
And that’s focusing only on one character lazily written this season.
Jamie, Brienne, Jon Snow, Arya, Tyrion…I could keep going on the stupid that these characters suddenly have befallen. Because they made it to the end by being smart characters in various situations. Now all of a sudden they are Fifeld and Millburn in Prometheus lost even though they literally MADE the map and touching the alien critter even though they know not too. Its stupid bad writing.
The only characters that I am happy with where they’ve gone is…
Sansa: Ended up exactly where her character should be…trust nearly no one, question everything.
Brann: complete emotional detachment as he knows where they’ve been and where they will go
Varys: the spy who followed the same path throughout, even to his death
Bronn: The man willing to sell his sword to the highest bidder always
The Mountain/Hound: destined to die at each others hands
I’ve suspected that after six/seven years of the pressure of writing this show that the writers started sort of churning the scripts out and writing Dany/Jon on autopilot while actually focusing on the ones that are fun to write for. Varys has been my favorite character for awhile, the most true to himself and the most complex and interesting in a lot of ways, and the writers seemed to agree. And part of that is due to how well the actor plays him. See also: Tormund, Bronn, and the Hound, all of who could have been minor one-off characters except for how fantastic their actors are and how many quotable lines they were given.
You are ignoring the motivation shown to the audience. She first had no but inkling what the Mad King wanted to do and did, and thought she was wronged all along. She even thought the realm would be glad to have Targaryan’s back on the Throne at some point! Also, all her killings were motivated either by a strange moral or were in aggressive defense. While I could happily live with an explanation how she goes from spoiled brat over white saviour colonialist conquerer to homicidal maniac, such an explanation was only given in the fucking plot exposition (verbatim, no less: the coin toss line, twice!) and by some weak hints (tried poisoning by Varys, rejection by Jon).
You can argue all you want “the signs were there” - all who are now saying she u-turned have been shown a compassionate dragonpowered superhero with some serious issues, been build up for several seasons, only to see her deflated in the course of 90 minutes to a supervillain.
Your position simply is not tenable for most of the audience. We were told to root for her, in word, image and sound, and mostly did root for her. You usually don’t throw that over board in the course of one episode, and if you do you better do it right and at least make the person a kind of martyr. Rob Stark, e.g., was build up as a headstrong idiot and died that way, but he died like he was described before. That was credible. The my-name-does-not-fit-on-a-starbucks-cup girl burning as many surrendering innocents as possible? Not so much.
I’m not saying “the signs were there”, I’m saying that she said, repeatedly, that she planned on burning King’s Landing — and this was after dealing with the slavery problem in Mereen by crucifying hundreds of slavers.
I absolutely agree that she was built up to be a savior, and that watching her destroy the city was horrifying and shocking and terrible. But that’s what I think was clever: she was doing a lot of genuinely terrible murderous things season after season, but for good reasons: ending slavery, freeing people, ending the rule of tyrants. We were convinced she was the Good Guy and had to break a few eggs. The show was so full of cartoonishly evil people (Ramsay Bolton, Euron Greyjoy) that she came off as enlightened and the one to root for, absolutely. Realizing that we may have been rooting for the wrong side and that Varys was quite right is most definitely difficult to accept.
The character arc and her eventual descent into madness/evil was really poorly written: once they went off book, the show producers/writers barely ‘told,’ let alone “showed.”
As I alluded above, Walter White’s journey from ‘Mr Chips to Scarface’ was gradual, nuanced and multilayered; so that it felt earned and much more believable.
Sure, the writers in this show dropped hints here and there along the way about Dani’s transition to main villain; but they utterly failed to create a compelling arc.
