Vanadis

I wonder... with Bran as king, will the Six Kingdoms now change their state religion into Weirwood Tree Worship? Will they plant a Weirwood in King's Landing?

16 hours ago, alienarea said:

And if the leaks are true, Daario should avenge Daenerys and behead Sansa.

Uh, Daario should behead Sansa because... when Daario reaches Westeros with his forces, and destroys King's Landing or what's left of it, he... captures Tyrion and tortures him into revealing that it was Sansa who told him that Jon was a Targaryen, and now that he has that knowledge, he seeks out Sansa in the North specifically to punish her for leaking?

Is this before or after he kills Jon for being a Targaryen?

Wow. 

2 hours ago, Gendelsdottir said:

Please! There is no *right* way to watch a TV show. Poking fun at absurdity is one thing (I'm certainly guilty of it) but outright mocking other groups of fans for their opinions? Mean-spirited.

Look -

If someone says, as many seem to be saying, that "Anyone who criticizes the ending are just upset because it's not a Disney ending" or "They're just upset because their favorite character didn't do what they expected them to" - 

- I won't call those statements mean-spirited. I'm sure it comes from a place of truly enjoying the show.

But those are just not correct statements. Most of the ire from the fans comes from the fact the writing is bad. Unnecessarily bad for a show that can certainly afford good writers. That's all there is to it. And yes, I do believe that anyone claiming otherwise is in a state of denial.

I think the kindest thing anyone can do if they truly care about the GOT universe's continued existence on our TV screens is to let HBO know that hey, this was bad, we know you can do better.

I'm just going to assume that those who were okay with the execution of the ending and who think that critics wanted a happier outcome or are just fanboys of certain characters, are in denial.

You want a good story, but you need bad writing.

3 minutes ago, Stonelands said:

Again,  you're applying a logical objection to someone who at this point isn't all there. The bells ringing might seem satisfactory to you but not to her.  I also think that much of the KL populace is still alive as well, I do seem to recall groups of them lying around with horrific burns and I think parts of the city will still be untouched. 

Yes, yes, 50% of them survived as they do

I'm only saying that if they are going to make Dany go against one of her most core beliefs, that she is a protector of the innocent, then they need to treat her arc with more care and not rely on a line of dialogue here and there to justify her action from a story point. It needs to be set up, so that we understand beforehand under which circumstances Dany will no longer care about innocents, even if we don't connect the dots before it plays out. We should have seen her slowly breaking more and more of her own principles, justifying every turn, until it was too late. Her burning enemies to death wasn't enough in this setting, because her dragons were her weapon, and in the first episode of season 1 we saw Ned Stark behead a man we knew to be innocent. Power by physical force is how Westeros works. She was no better, and no worse, than other heroes in that regard. But the others died not because they slowly turned evil from wielding power, nor because they went against everything they once believed in, but because they lived up to some ideal. Ned - honesty. Rob - true love. 

Dany broke her core belief at a point in the story when there was no point for her to do so.

It is not an implausible ending, but it is certainly not earned. 

Just now, Stonelands said:

Her conversation with Jon alone explains why she burned it because she felt she's only ever be able to rule through fear and that was also forshadowed in episode 4 when she watched his interactions with the Northerners and was clearly disturbed by them. 

But they surrendered. Meaning they did fear her. Why then cause more havoc? Why not be satisfied that so far, she did have many followers among the Westerosi. Jon might be an insensitive twit, but he did take her side against Sansa and bring his troops south. Tyrion, for all his bad advice, was still working to give her King's Landing. 

She had what she wanted. Fear. Power. And victory!

But it wasn't enough, because...?

They had to fear her more?

Because ravishing the fleet and the city's defenses wasn't enough to turn their fear to dread?

They certainly don't fear her anymore, because now they're all dead! Except a few main characters who will kill her because plot.

I think it is ComicBookGirl19 on Youtube who points out that it looks more like a case of someone achieving everything they ever wanted, only to discover that it's not really what they wanted after all. 

35 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I hope you enjoy the finale more, and that we all get the books soon so we can see how GRRM handles it!          

Thank you. I'm glad you enjoy it. I do enjoy the show too (dragons!!!) even though the writing is way off at the moment, and I hope others are inspired to create even better shows in the future.

Emilia's acting was superb. Kudos to her. 

Ned Stark was an example of how to do it right. I understand why Ned got killed. He was honorable, and he did what was right  to a fault. He never betrayed his own ideals, and in the end it was his stubborn belief in honor that led him down the path to tragedy. When he got killed it was a shock because usually in stories like this, the good guy survives. But Ned was Ned, and Joffrey was Joffrey, and the story refused to bend their characters to get Ned out of a though situation. I'm not happy Ned died, but his end fulfills his arc.

We know who Daenerys is. She is someone who cares about innocents. It is not all she is, but throughout the whole show it has been portrayed as one of her core beliefs. If she is going to turn on innocents, we either need to understand why she feels she has no choice to act differently, or she has to truly go mad. In either case, we need a better explanation for her betraying her own core than 'her loved ones died in the war' (she had lost loved ones before) or 'she didn't feel appreciated by the wildling man' or 'Jon didn't make out with her' or 'she risks not becoming a queen after all'.  

But I'll happily agree that Dany definitely is not the only character who has been doing weird things because the plot demands it as opposed to behaving in a way that makes sense to their characters. But she is the most egregious example.

Personally, I don't feel I ask for much. I don't feel this is nitpicking. I understand that it must be hard to wrap up a series like this, but - wow - Spartacus was way more fulfilling and made way more sense. "Kill them all!"

(What a beautiful man Daario Naharis was. I never appreciated him enough. Gods, Jon is useless.)

3 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Without her advisors, with her belief in her destiny as the last Targaryen destroyed by Jon, with her dragons and her friends dead, and with the realization that she is nothing to Westeros but a foreign conqueror even after fighting for its survival, it's very believable to me that she'd give in to her worst impulses; not because she's insane, but because she's angry and realizes that fear is the only thing she has going for her in Westeros.

And if it had happened under different circumstances, it could have worked.

But it happened after the city surrendered.

And why did it happen at that moment? Why did they introduce the bells as a signal in this episode at all? So that they could build a Point of Most Shock. That's all there is to it. There is no character development. There is no story. It's just a series of spectacles at this point. 

And as a note to the 'plot hole' argument, viewers and fans will naturally fill the plot holes with their own internal reasoning and find their own personal explanations. That is just how we work as human beings. But even if we have the ability and the proclivity as humans to find patterns in chaos, this level of inconsistency is still bad writing. 

11 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

People have been actively predicting this turn as of season 7 episode 4 last season; many thought it would come much sooner.  It's definitely been a possibility in the show since the middle of season 6,  when she gave her speech to the Dothraki. After The Last Stark, it was all but certain. After that first scene with Varys and her dialogue with Tyrion and Jon this episode, I would have been deeply shocked if Dany's descent into darkness didn't happen. I can see this "shock" criticism with some aspects of the series' plot in the last two seasons, like the Littlefinger reveal at the end of last season. I can see criticisms of the pacing of Dany's descent. But her decision was built up and hinted at to a far greater extent than other "shocks" in this series, from Ned's beheading to the Red Wedding. 

 

Again, I find myself humbly disagreeing with another person on the Internet =)

Is this the scene you talk about from season 6? 

Her speech:

"Every khal who ever lived chose three blood riders to fight beside him and guard his way.
But I am not a khal. I will not choose three blood riders. I choose you all.
I will ask more of you than any khal has ever asked of his khalassar!
Will you ride the wooden horses across the black salt sea?
Will you kill my enemies in their iron suits and tear down their stone houses?
Will you give me the Seven Kingdoms, the gift Khal Drogo promised me before the Mother of Mountains?
Are you with me? Now and always?"

No, not seeing her going insane.

In the beginning of this clip, her lover has this to say about her:
"You weren't made to sit on a chair in a palace. ... You're a conqueror, Daenerys Stromborn."

That is who she is. A brilliant (or insanely lucky) conqueror, but not a terribly good ruler.

However, for being a conqueror at heart, it is quite amazing how concerned she has been with slaves, innocents, and children. It's almost been a bit too much. She loved Khal Drogo who certainly was ruthless without that aspect rubbing off on her. She wanted to save slaves when she could. She enslaved her own dragons for fear they might kill another innocent.

Dany was ruthless and emotional but never insane until the last episode.

As for the recent foreshadowing, it has no basis in anything Dany did. It's basis was in Varys suddenly becoming suspicious of her. We were meant to wonder: Could he be right? But apart from her feeling left out when Tormund patted Jon on the shoulder, there really was nothing to see. There was no way to draw the conclusion that this means she will turn on one of her core beliefs and start killing innocents, except for the fact that it was Varys who was worried.

And again, I'm not against a Dark Dany storyline. But it needs to be handled with care. Not as a means to get a Dragon Burns The City Because It's Awesome scene.
 

3 minutes ago, Stonelands said:

I think you're overlooking the fact that she has had some serious knocks in the last few episodes that would speed up her transition a lot,  losing Jorah,  learning of Jon's identity and realizing that he's loved when she isn't, losing a second dragon and then losing Missandei.  I don't think the transition is perfect but I think it's a lot better than a lot of people are giving it credit for. 

She had taken many knocks in earlier seasons too.
If, as someone suggested, she had flown directly to the Red Keep and laid waste to it only, that would have made sense.
But it didn't make sense for her to burn the city after it surrendered to her.

Or, they could have edited what they had differently, made the beats of her arc more prominent, made the city not surrender and the deaths of her friends and loved ones happen at more critical points, they could have played the betrayal card fully until she truly was alone, and it could all have made more sense that way.

But I think they never wanted her descent into darkness to be plausible or worthy of her character. They just wanted it to come as as big a shock as possible.

I'm all for Dark Dany, but the writing in this episode wasn't worthy of a B-movie.

3 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

People throw out these buzzphrases like "plot holes" and "lazy writing" and they seem to have lost all meaning. There were no pIot holes in the last episode. I can apply the term lazy writing to anything and it will be meaningless. As for character assassination; I know that Dany's turn is controversial, as is Jaime's, and maybe you wish they'd gone another way or that these developments had more time, but a character acting in a way you don't want them to when they've shown these same traits throughout the story is not character assassination.

But even if all these things were true; is this really what 1 writing looks like to you? Have you seen other TV? People complain about the dialogue on this show declining since they ran out of the books, and it is true that the dialogue is generally not as good as it used to be, but Jesus Christ, I watched Aquaman over the weekend and every third line was as bad as this show's dialogue at its very, very worst which we get once a season (bad pussy). And Aquaman's script does not deserve a 1 either. 

Heh, if it's okay that Dany burned a city to the ground after it surrendered to her, then surely it's okay that I gave the episode a 1 too. Who needs logic anyway?
 

10 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Or to the insane expectations of the fanbase and the irrational anger and outrage produced by fandom culture. I'm sorry, even if somebody didn't like this episode, or thinks the script wasn't good, to rate an episode a 1 is to say that it's an abomination with no redeeming features: music, acting, plot, script, cinematography, direction, effects, etc... There is no way someone can in good faith argue that any of these elements were so bad they deserve a 1, let alone all of them. Much online fan criticism seems to believe that something has to be the best thing ever or the worst thing ever; god forbid there's anything in between. 

 

I humbly disagree. If you watch a movie and the sound is so noisy that you can't hear a word anyone is saying, to the point that it's not possible to understand what is going on, it doesn't matter if everything else is perfect. You have every right to give it a 1. 

Likewise, if the writing is so bad that you feel it's impossible to understand what is going on anymore, same thing. Especially if the writing deviates from a high standard you got used to in earlier seasons.

Is Daenerys going dark interesting? Yes!

Is a raging Daenerys flying over King's Landing on her magnificent dragon burning everything to the ground while women, children and men run screaming in the streets an epic, powerful image that evokes a range of emotions in the viewers? Yes!

Does it say something about how power corrupts? Yes!

Was it earned? No!  ... !!!!!

It was a cool scene, an interesting turn, but since we've followed Dany through several seasons, it made no sense.

"She is a Targaryen" just isn't enough of an explanation. By that logic, Jon is just as dangerous as her, and Varys shouldn't have supported her from the beginning.

I don't mind where the story went, I just mind that it didn't take us there on a step by step journey until we could look back at her snapping and realize that it was inevitable. Instead it gave us a few instances where Dany was unstable and ruthless, and used that as an excuse to teleport to a conclusion for the story that just isn't earned.

It's bad writing. The characters deserve better. The fans deserve better. The show deserves better. George deserves better. 

These writers don't understand human psychology. They don't understand storytelling. They don't understand what made GOT great in the first place. 

But it's not their fault. Someone should have recognized this a long time ago and replaced those writers with someone competent. I blame HBO. I hope they have the decency to apologize.

I just have to say...

I loved Dany in this episode. Go Dany!  evil laugh

I usually find her boring, but I thought she rocked in this episode. I agree that the build up could have and should have been a lot better. But after listening to "The Dragon Demands" on Youtube for a long time, I didn't really have high expectations for this season. 

I just sincerely love the idea of a vengeful beautiful mad queen on a dragon raining fire on a large city out of heart break.

I wish the build up had been better, and I wish there was a whole season left to explore this wild, crazy person trying to make it as a ruler. She did her bad act of the ages, time for a bad ass redemption arc!

But alas, it seems inevitable that they're gong to kill her next episode...

I guess I just wish the show had different producers/writers.