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Johan Wehtje

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  1. Agree with this. A longer season, a more evenly pitched battle for KL (Cersei is like the queen of wildfire, even back in S2 it was originally her idea, so why not even the odds here with it) and the tragedy of Danys victory being hollow playing out over time, and her autocratic streak running headlong into westerosi opposition, that would have been a proper tragedy. As you say the scene with Dany and Jon should have been Shakespearean - and I did cry for Dany, but mostly because the writers had so horribly screwed her, and not because through a series of completely understandable but tragic decisions she had arrived at point where Jon had to kill her or say, lose Sansa, or see the kingdom wracked by another horrible war. But instead he was just euthanising someone who had, pretty much inexplicably, gone completely crazy with only a tenuous connection to reality. The character had already died 45 minutes and 24 seconds into The Bells, and it took about 3 seconds.
  2. But that's the thing - there isn't a moral equivalence - not really in our world (which is why we cheered) and most definitely not in the world of GOT. Surely it is not hard to see that overthrowing what was going on in Astapor is not only not connected to, but diametrically the opposite of doing the lawnmower with Dragonfire on a city packed with the refugees of a continent? It's holding Dany to the moral standards of pacifism in a world where such a concept is completely alien. It's the sort of thing that does help clarify how bankrupt pacifism can be if it is seriously argued that the right and sane thing to do in Astapor, when you have the power to change it is to leave it just the way it is. The "first they came for" shctick only works here if you honestly think that "first they came for the slavers" is a sentence that ends with then they came for everyone.
  3. It was not very clearly described in show but the arrangement in Mereen sounded more like a republic than Athenian demos. A Republic with a temporary dictator. This was a very successful form historically, from Mediterranean city states - Roman, Pheoneican and Greek to Italian and German and Baltic States in the high middle ages and Rennaissance to the Dutch Republic.
  4. Historically elective Kingships with the franchise restricted to high nobles were pretty disastrous. In general they resulted in sutuations where the nobility ran roughshod over the commoners and weak states. The Holy Roman Empire, Poland and Hungary are all examples. Danys policies in Slavers Bay were more likely to result in something workable. Democracy but with a circuit breaker.
  5. Given the givens the ending was not too bad - but what they had to do to Dany, and by extension Varys and Tyrion to get there remains unforgivable. Just to forestall the critics who think that the controversy over Dany is because her fans wanted her to have some kind of Disney arc are fighting a straw man. There might be some people who wanted that but all of the criticism that I have seen fully accepts that Dany was going to be a tragic hero, but fault what happened as completely breaking with the character and incidentally burning much pf the rest of cast in the process. And the attempt in this episode to have Tyrion ventriloquise the writers ret-conned justification with the idiocy about how the Mereenese crucifixions or bonfire of the Khals logically leads to methodically burning a city and it's inhabitants after it had surrendered just reinforces the sour taste this season leaves. A triumphant Dany, backed by fanatics, with limitless power and filled with a mission that requires the revolutionary remaking of society was always going to take a dark turn. But it should have played as tragedy - and needed time - at least half a season - to properly play out in a way that was true to character. Instead we got this bombastic nonsense, where Dany is preternaturally aware and figures out exactly what happened at the beginning of episode 5 and has turned into a gibbering madwoman barely connected to reality in the course of maybe a day or so. This is Morning cartoon stuff.
  6. West of Westeros is the spin off they need to make.
  7. Benioff and Weiss make an attempt to put a narrative justification for Dany's action in Tyrions mouth with the stuff about the slavers, the Mereenese nobles and the Khals. And it just made me even more angry about the face heel turn they inflicted on Dany. To try and justify the character turn as if these examples foreshadowed what happened next is to add an absurd moral equivalence to the steaming pile that they they have made of this season. Just to take the liberation of Astapor as an example - the orders where extremely specific, harm no child, only attack the masters. It seriously is not anything like the burning of a city after it's surrender - which of course the characters in world knew - Tyrion and Varys joined after most of these acts and had no problem until an episode ago, when suddenly Varys is required to worry about a mad Queen. This is ret conning and for all the incredible cinematography and acting and productions values the end became hollow because how spectaculalry they messed up both the NK story and Dany's arc.
  8. Over at AV Club Micheal Walsh in MailBag of Thrones expresses my frustrations perfectly:
  9. yes - but the point remains that there is plenty of factors - established in the show - to make it clear that - with Euron controlling the seas Dany is not in a position to maintain loads of prisoners.
  10. I really don't think that People saw what they wanted to - I have not read or heard or seen a single piece of criticism of what happened on "The Bells" that does not acknowledge the duality of her character and take note of her streaks of zealous harshness, vengefulness and capacity for unflinching violence towards those she views as enemies. But nowhere in the show or books has she been shown to be psychologically fragile and teetering on the brink of madness in the way her father was. On the contrary she has been repeatedly had almost everything taken from her, experienced betrayal, loss and terrible odds and every time proven herself psychologically strong enough to come back. Nor has she ever been shown enjoying cruelty wantonly. And the all the stuff about being merciful and having an especial concern for the people at the bottom is actually there as well, not a product of fan delusion. She really did lock up her dragons after the death of a shepherd child, she really did free slaves by the hundred thousand. She is the only player in the game besides Varys who has such concerns at all. Tyrion has decency, but he is not consumed with a mission to right the worlds wrongs. And She really did lose much of her forces just two episodes ago successfully protecting the realm from the White Walkers. At every point she has used shock and awe it has been with a rational end - burning the Tarly's was a case in point. Randall Tarly was openly spitting defiance, and she had experienced some serious reverses and lost all her Westerosi forces, and did not have the capacity to maintain large groups of prisoners. Literally the entire back story of Dragonstone and the Ser Davos is about how easy it is to starve there. There was plenty of material there for setting up a final conflict between Stark and Targeryen without having to send Dany Mad - and that really is out of nowhere beyond a sudden onset of a genetic affliction.
  11. I am not the only person to post a link to this video, but take this one as an extra vote to go and watch: Foreshadowing is not Character Development : https://youtu.be/2mlNyqhnc1M Like me, and many people who were appalled at how Dany was written this season, it is not because she is not getting some disney ending or heroic sendoff - there were plenty of ways in which it could go tragically wrong or she could end up as a villain to some, or we find characters we like on opposite sides. We could have even got to a Gotterdamerung with logical development. But the sudden onset of madness and wanton cruelty in a character who has spent seven seasons repeatedly facing incredible psychological ordeals and huge reverses and loss and risen stronger every time to suddenly snap? Completely illogical. As were the reverses themselves. Euron is so hated as a character because he is so obviously a movable plot device. The lunacy of him being able to not only snipe a a dragon from an ambush, and get multiple shots one week and the very next episode have every single scorpion in Westeros prove little more than kindling. Dany's loss of her Dothraki in an idiotic Battle strategy in the north, and the sudden re-emergence of Dothraki in horde like numbers for this episode. Having Varys worrying about her state of mind after the Tarly BBQ as if this was some horrible shock - when the same Varys crossed a continent to serve a Queen known for her mass executions of masters. Or having Jamie not care about the people of KL when he had become the Kingslayer to stop the father burning the city? There were a number of interesting ways where Dany's combination of zeal, destiny, imperiousness could have set up a conflict between her and the Starks, and her supporters and the established order of Westeros where she could have ended up as the Villian. And if you wanted a Gotterdamerung you could have had Drogon burn down KL after Dany gets assasinated as a result of her coming into direct conflict with the Starks. But instead we just got crazyness, supposedly genetically encoded.
  12. Completely agree - and would add that in addition the Lanister Army was, on Jaimes orders, stealing all the civilians grain , including the harvests in the fields from "reluctant farmers" inflicting a holodomor on the civilians of the reach right before winter. The Dany hate and painting her as the mad queen is getting ridiculous, she has , to a fault, tried to achieve her conquest in the gentlest possible manner. Every time she has been given voice to her temper she has let herself be guided by wiser councils. She has freed what may be millions of slaves and and made arrangements for the birth of independent governance in the cities she conquered in Essos. And just the very fact that she has turned the Dothraki towards a purpose other than sacking and slaving and raping in Essos would represent a huge reduction in the misery quotient there. And her arrangement with the Greyjoys would also have achieved a similar improvement in Westeros if it had succeeded. Almost every character who is intelligent and with a strong moral core is aligned with her or moving that way - and we have had multiple testimonies from Varys, Selmy, Tyrion, Jorah, Missandei as to her qualities. I would get a critcicism that in dramatic terms she is perilously close to being a Mary Sue, but the Dany hate isn't really about that, in fact it's the opposite, she gets blamed for even having some dragonish impulses , despite the fact that she frequently reigns them in. And what is really crazy is that Dany is heaped with this infamy in some sort of moral equivalence with Cersei - Cersei! No doubt about it, Cersei is immensely entertaining to watch - to the point that it almost becomes hard to hate her for what she does, and Dany can be a bit wooden in comparison. But that really shouldn't be confused with the moral argument. Nor should the fact that Dany is not perfect and is in conflict with herself over some definitely absolutist, impetuous, and vengeful tendencies detract from the way in which she mostly conquers those tendencies whilst Cersei has embraced them wholly, to the point where she is not even conflicted anymore.
  13. There is the call back to Jon putting Mance in the same position vis a vis Stannis. But the other part of that is the question of how reasonable or not it was for Stannis to be so inflexible on that point, and many viewers probably feel the same about Dany - and the show hasn't exactly done a good job of explaining why she is so insistent, and it comes off looking like a mixture of petulance, arrogance and Stannis like inflexibility. After all she was prepared to offer the Greyjoys independence (of a sort, the caveats are like the deal the Finns got from the USSR - which is better than being Polish but not as good as being Sweden). And the Show hasn't really clearly established the precise terms under which Dorne and Highgarden are pledged - though you have to think that in declaring for Dany they were doing so under the arrangement that she is the rightful occupant of the Iron throne therefore they have bent the Knee. But from Dany's POV Jon is in effect asking her to marshal the resources of the south as well as her subjects from Essos to aid a north that holds itself apart and moreover doesn't regard the arrangement as reciprocal. Like Tyrion said it's not a reasonable thing to ask. Of course Jon is suffering snow blindness on this issue - Sansa was correct in telling him that he can't see the threat from the South because he is consumed with the threat to the north. And he just thinks that as everyone will die if the North falls they are just being silly in not rushing to help him entirely on the North's terms. Dany and Tyrion seem to be the only ones to see that settling the issue in the south is the only way the South can aid the north, and that the only institution in Westeros capable of marshaling all of westeros is the Iron throne, and it can't operate a collective defence if the key kingdom demanding it's help also refuses to acknowledge it's authority.
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