Speculation based on poetry: The Bittersweet Ending

[LadyNoOne]

44 minutes ago, LadyNoOne said:

Yes, but the only remains to fight are Dany's two dragons...  There may be a new machine for the dragons, but I doubt it will be successful.  A blockade, as originally proposed could work.   Let us face it, though.  This last battle was the toughest yet.  It is going to take people time to process.

Upon further reflection, there is no time for speculation/error.  If Dany will take the Iron Throne, which at this point I cannot understand why should be so important, she should take her two dragons to the red keep and burn every last NobleMan/Woman there, driving out each who are not loyal to her. and take her "chair" as the Great Khal would. 

I would be profoundly sad, but this is the way things are now:  her way, or the high way (without a high way).

[Capo Ferro]

11 hours ago, Dragons 7th Eye said:

Speculation: Humanity lives, Cersei rules; our heroes are dead and nobody remembers the Great War - because laying dead at the gates of King's Landing The North remembers, no more.

There will be legends of A Queen of fire and Bran the Seer and Jon the Dummy (I couldn't resist) but they are just legends. 6/7 Kingdoms know that they are just stories and the Wildlings up North where the Seventh Kingdom once was are just wildlings.

A thousand years later they will still be telling the stories about "8000 years ago" when The God of Winter attacked a stronghold in the Northern Wastes, but in the end Winter fell.

The End.

I don't think this is how it will all end, but clearly the major beat of the show, and really probably even the books, has been an examination of the way possession of power -- something that's often more or less a dice throw -- allows pettiness, vindictiveness, stupidity, and arbitrary cruelty to inflict horrible pain and destroy things of real value. 

Everything the battle of the North represents: dedication to some purpose,  the struggle to live honorably, and the struggle to protect the world of men is genuinely important. Without it everything -- including those as stupid and petty as Cersei --would come to a grisly end. But that doesn't mean the rewards of success fall on those who earned it. People like Cersei can come out on top and people like Ned Stark can die ignobly.

 The cavalier way the threat in the North was dispensed with is, I think, in keeping with the ethos of the show, which is, I think, that in the end power and virtue don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. And, in the end, a shamelessly shameful bet like Cersei's -- that the heroes will defeat the Night but be so weakened by it that she can sweep them away might be a good one. The next three episodes, I think, will be all aboutshowing us that Injustice as those who saved the world -- including its Cerseis -- are threatened with suffering at her hands because they acted for the good of humanity.  Because in the end that's what the show is about, not some epic struggle in which evil is defeated by virtue, toil, prophecies, or arcane wisdom. 

Cersei's ultimate victory isn't the only thing that makes sense in the context of that theme. All that they really have to do to further elaborate it trot before us the spectre of a Cersei led Westeros and allow us to feel sufficiently how likely it is and how bleak the unfairness of it is before right triumphing in the end.  But the ending you suggest is certainly in keeping with themes that have been there all along

[AryaNymeriaVisenya]

The dragons will die. We saw the death of ice, we will see the death of fire. Dany will abdicate her claim as has been foreshadowed by the line 'A dragon queen with no dragons is not a queen."