Oh yeah, there is that and the point that I read on Reddit, that survivors of childhood abuse really felt that Emilia Clarke nailed their emotional state when she (that is, her character) burninated Kings Landing. The mask of a face, the little tics all through the last two seasons that pointed to her still being a little girl emotionally, who was still flinching at triggers.
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But she didn’t think they deserved to die. She blamed Cersei for using them as human shields. She saw it as a necessary act in the pursuit of her goal to rule the world. She didn’t even refer to it as killing them in her speech, she referred to it as freeing the people of King’s Landing.
I don’t think Dany changed. We were perfectly happy, cheering along, as she burned and crucified and entombed “bad” people, happy she was becoming the tyrannical queen of everywhere she went. We as viewers just got carried along in her self righteous mania, crowd surfing savior of the world, until she finally crossed a line we couldn’t stomach.
I think Martin artfully laid out the life cycle of a tyrant, and I think it is a disservice to the lessons the story has to teach if we react to our own discomfort by claiming something about her changed.
We just realized who we had been supporting, and we want to pretend it was someone different.
The people she fought against were shown as actually bad people actively and imminently committed to hurting other people, not as “bad” people.
This still feels a little like, “Dany punched a nazi, it was therefore inevitable that she would start punching every baby she finds.”
Almost every single major character was shown to straight-up murder people for their personal take on “the greater good”, and we’ve been given a pretty constant sympathetic filter at the end for a lot of them. Varys killed, Tyrion killed, Arya massacred, and nobody remembered the butcher’s boy when the Hound and Arya were having their goodbyes.
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I don’t think so. Rather:
TV is manipulative. But GoT played by its own manipulative rules until the final season and then just sped up too much to allow viewers to follow.
The constant hindsight of people defending the producers and telling everyone they have been so stupid to take the story of a queen who roots for the weak literally while following a genocidal megalomaniac is worse than the writing of the last episode.
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We’ve seen the original of the White Walkers (the Children of the Forest created them as a defence against the First Men. Whoops!). It is assumed the NK was the first WW but I don’t think we’ve been told either way.
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It’s easier when the bad guys are 100% bad, I get that, but there’s lots of fiction with those type villains.
It doesn’t strike you as somewhat familiar, the idea of “good” leaders “liberating” other nations by raining fire and destruction upon them, killing tens or hundreds of thousands in order to “free” them from tyrants?
I am glad they are telling stories now wherein the characters are more real, and might at one point righteously defend the downtrodden, even as the pursuit that leads them to great power, but later burn them alive when they stand in the way of money, power, or revenge.
It’s no less realistic than the news we watch and read.
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Brienne getting knighted was the last real thing that happened on the show. They should have just stopped right there. Gwendoline Christie smiles across the room, everybody toasts, fade to black, we’re done. Everything after that was bullshit.
What we saw this year was the history the Empire would teach its children if Darth Vader had succeeded at crushing the Rebellion.
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Imagine if they just went for it, and revealed that every bone-headed anti-character-driven recent decision that anybody made was just Bran puppet-master-warging them, a bad habit he’d picked up from so many years of just doing it to Jon Snow.
I was also surprised that there were no last minute characters pulling off their faces to reveal Arya underneath. I’m glad I don’t have to wait for that to happen ever again.
In that case the last line of the show would be zombie John saying:
“We must prepare. Summer is coming”.
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That Salon piece was weird, it seemed to retreat from its own point when it came to Brienne. Why does she give him a rosy pass in the record? Because ultimately she loved him! A complete motivation for a human being! As discussed in the first first paragraphs of said article!
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I thought he was a deserter from the Night’s Watch?
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I was mistaken, just like Bran and Robb Stark before me. I went back and had read the first page and missed the later reveal.
And the scavengers gather…
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The end.
(How long do you think it will be before there’s a GOT Broadway mega-show touring a la Lion King or Spamalot?)
I’m wondering if HBO will walk away from this money tree or if they will start a series of prequels.
or… see what is west of Westeros.
