Mourning Dany

[kevinbgwrites]

The real mourning shouldn't be for what they did to Dany, but mourning the missed potential for exploring what was clearly always going to be the end of her character arc. 

At the end of the day it's undeniable the WW's and Dany both needed a whole season of their own give or take. Having her be the Mad Queen for the end of one episode where you don't see her, and the first half hour of the next episode is just so disappointing especially since she proved she could really do great in the role. 

It is sad to think just how mind blowing it would have been to have what is essentially one of the top 3 main characters for the majority of the series, become an absolute tragic villain resembling a far more successful version of her brother.

[Aldarion]

Precisely. One problem is that showrunners had been taking too many liberties with the show, even back when they had been following books. They had removed Aegon / Young Griff from the books, they removed many of Daenerys' more morally ambigious moments, they turned Stannis into a monster he never was while making Renly seem lot nicer. This had huge impact on how last seasons had played out.

Second problem is that they had never relly understood the characters. ASoIaF is a character-driven story, it is all about characters, their actions, reactions, interactions. But showrunners never took time to understand characters. Show versions of characters are, in many cases (Jon Snow, Stannis, even Daenerys) two-dimensional, shallow carricatures of their book counterparts. It was tolerable while they had raw material to take from GRRM. Once that ran out, their approach had them listing endpoints Martin told them, and then ticking off checkboxes required to reach that endstate. But in the process, they ignored the characters, turning them from actors in a Game to merely puppets serving the plots; from plot-makers to plot-followers.