The color of a flame is about what it’s burning off, not a static temperature reading. You can use color ranges within a fuel, but it doesn’t match across all fuels.
The blue flame of a highly-sodium-based substance is going to be a different temperature than the same blue of a different material.
For the purposes of this silly dragon engineering speculation, the hottest part of a dragon’s breath might not even be registering as a color to the human eye, with the yellow parts being the by-product. Or it could be using fuel that burns hotter at yellow than the blue of one of those antique coal-fired dragons.
If you take Martin’s writing into account, a recurring line in Fire and Blood is something something “Who can claim to know the mind of a DRAGON?”
I’m ok with it. Dragons are pure fantasy, they can do whatever whim rides the writer. I was in for the politics, the first season got me hooked there. I would have liked an extended version of the whole 8th season with time to make Daenarys madness less sudden, and much more (serious) bickering about how the kingdoms would find new rulers. Or one.
I disliked Tyrion giving two hindsight exposition speeches in the final episode just to tie the loose ends together and ex-post the results. It doesn’t stand my personal post-hoc tests.
I’ve read post-show interviews with various cast members, and that seems to be the general feeling amongst them as well – that having the time for a few one-on-one conversations between Danerys and Missande, Dany and Tyrion, Jon & Dany, etc in which we get to really see where her head’s at would have made it seem less abrupt. I’m glad at least that they gave Tyrion a little exposition speech to say “look, she’s done seriously crazy stuff, but it was all for the ‘greater good’ so we’ve all been cool with it, but her idea of the ‘greater good’ is way nuttier than I anticipated, so, whoops.”
It feels like being mislead for season after season. Some people argue that it’s a silly fanboi attitude, but show not tell (especially not after the fact) would be much appreciated for a tele-visionshow.
And I’m not talking manic laughter and twitching eyes here. Just some character development which puts her under a visible strain. A bit of sulking and burning your advisor (who admittedly tried to kill you several times) is not enough to torch a whole city if you just defeated the deadliest foe the world has seen in the last 10k years.
I genuinely don’t feel at all misled. I watched the same show everyone else did, and I remember being kinda horrified at things like solving a slavery issue by crucifying hundreds of slavers. For a long time we’ve been seeing her commit atrocities that were acceptable atrocities, because they were for good causes, in the viewer’s eyes (and in her advisors’). We saw things from her perspective. But like Tyrion, at the end, we realized that her absolutist attitude extended to anyone in her way, including innocent kids who might possibly be Cersei supporters. But I agree that having more time to get inside her head would have been extremely helpful to flesh that out.
By being shown her perspective, and being shown her morals (don’t mix up ethics and morals, mind), with a soundtrack and camera angles and all the props the show had.
I call that misleading when, in the last 3h of the show, a different story is told through the same means inversed.
Someone compared her final troops speech setting to the Nuremberg rallies of the Nazis depicted by Riefenstahl on this BBS. That’s what I am talking about: manipulation. The aesthetic established in the series are used in a way to show what has happened, plain and for every viewer to see. The “dark angel” moment with Drogons wings spreading out behind her made me groan. It’s an in your fucking face, idiot moment. And the idiot is not Jon, nor Tyrion. No, it’s the director of that episode telling the viewer that the baddie is really bad.
As if at that point that would be still needed.
That adds to the feeling of being mislead, of course.
The smugness smaugness of using the DRAGON to show who now is the real supervillain is just someone having a laugh at us, as viewers.
Visuals in a show like this are definitely open to interpretation. Where you saw an eye-rolling vision of a “dark angel”, I saw dragon’s wings as a visual of her as the Dragon Queen, which I thought was a visually-clever iconic moment. Even her being a ‘bad guy’ is open to interpretation; I’m sure a lot of people in Westeros would agree with her that King’s Landing is a cesspit of Lannister supporters and she’s better off turning it to ash and starting fresh. Tyrion even refuses to be King when it’s offered because “half of the people hate me for following Danerys and the other half hate me for betraying her”.
But a significant number of the people being killed were NOT King’s Landing residents, but rather local rural peasants who fled there trying desperately to find safety in advance of an army marching through their villages and fields.
And most subjects of a monarch, especially a malevolent one, are just trying to survive. They’re not Kingsguard, sworn to fight to the end. They’re trying to stay alive. That’s it. The people in the streets who were burned beyond recognition were not Lannister supporters. They were peons.
My point is: IF you take the same scene to a different context, she would be wearing lighter armour or pastel satin, colour the whole setting differently and play the Star Wars ending scene tune, your interpretation as clever and iconic image of the dragon queen works.
That’s a big IF.
Iconic, yes. Clever? More of a cleaver.
You are arguing from the internal logic of the plot. I don’t even doubt that internal logic: when Danny explains that Cersei more or less weaponised the innocent, she does believe that. I argue that internal logic would cover why she killed them after the city had surrendered, if we would have been prepared for the Mad Queen outside of the internal logic, by visuals and acoustics - and some
Outside of the internal logic of the story, there is a TV show logic. Viewer is lead, and if you mislead them, you need to justify that. That’s what the last episode tried to do. Tyrion basically did nothing else in that episode.
And that’s quite annoying.
Oh, totally agreed, there’s nothing cool about what she did, but from the perspective of a far-off spot like Dorne or someplace, they’re probably like “bah, Lannisters can all fry, whatever”. That’s why it was important for the viewers to see what she did from the perspective of the kids and peasants trying to survive.
I generally feel that people who want to avoid an outbreak of war crimes should avoid trying to change the social order with war.
That should have been the overall message, and not “We only needed a more perfect leader.”
Dany took the biggest heel turn, but the soldiers on the street were obviously down-to-clown no matter what she did, and there were always going to be grosseries.
When these characters take up arms, they always have these fatal consequences to random people around them. At the battle of the Bastards, Jon Snow, as leader, acted just as self-destructively and thoughtless of consequences as Dany did, and would have been responsible for the deaths of everyone around him, except he was saved from his own actions. The biggest difference is that he wasn’t riding a dragon at the time.
You know, I would be perfectly happy if Drogon was carrying her off to munch down on her body in peace, away from that person who smells kinda sorta like a Targaryen. Dragons may be intelligent, but they do not have human brains or sensibilities, especially not such a young one like Drogon who is half-feral. Dragons may instinctively consider eating the body of someone they were fond of a sign of respect, internalising them like some cannibals are supposed to think.
If that makes you feel better, you should go ahead and do you.
I don’t think the dragons were sub-human intelligence, or they would have eaten Tyrion instead of listening to his pretty words.
And I’m also pretty sure Jon Snow was wearing an ALLISER THORNE WAS RIGHT T-shirt on under his cloak.
If Jon Snow had lopped her head off Ned Stark-style, I’d think she was done. But Jon Snow is the last character who would be involved in a stabbing that has to be permanent. And all the stuff we’ve ever heard about Essos is that there’s a god there that loves fire, fire, fire and royal blood and bringing back stabbed Targaryens.
Finally, Jon Snow was convinced he killed her. And Jon Snow is always wrong. Q.E.D.
This was actually my thought at the end. “Damn, they set up a whole series of sequels!” Of course, we don’t know how closely GRRM will follow that line in the books, assuming he lives long enough to finish them and doesn’t pull a Robert Jordan thing.
I think it’s less a big plan than writer’s insurance.
If the showrunners roll out some spin-offs, they can happily have a future encounter with an elderly Daenerys who is a recluse head of a R’hllor monastary somewhere. Or they could choose to set her up as a major character with a whole new country and set of politics.
So much of the early seasons was Daenerys flirting with ancient Targaryen history and magicians that didn’t care about Westeros, it could be good-story to park her there after this saga.
It would also have a nice symmetry with what happened with people like Maester Aemon, or Brother Ray, or Uncle Benjen, (or the never-used Lady Stoneheart), or even Bran, I guess, or any of the other characters who had a wildly different Third Act to their lives…
I would suspect the dragons were not hungry, and listening to humans talk is amusing to them.
Intelligence is not the same as experience, nor does it mean they would share the same morals as we do. When I wrote that Drogon was half-feral, my thoughts were of Mowgli in Kipling’s original The Jungle Books: intelligent, but he did not know what life beyond the jungle was like.
I would expect a dragon to be alien in its intelligence and morals. Which is why I brought up TrogdorDrogon eating the corpse of his “Mother” as a possible twist. And this is a very young dragon who should not be expected to know about what sort of priests exist, other than what Daenerys might have told him about.
You have your epilogue head-canon, I have mine. Besides, I never liked Daenerys in the books nor on television, as I felt she had no place in Westeros
