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Why Did the Show Turn on Jon?


darmody

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19 minutes ago, SeanF said:

There was no element of self-defence.

Dany was plainly out of her mind by the end, but she wasn't threatening him or his family.

No, she wasn't threatening him there, but she had previously threatened his family at least twice. Most recently she threatened many, many people and didn't see anything wrong with continuing on her crusade of mass murder. 

Jon made a moral choice over his own personal happiness and well-meaning. We have a word for this, and a long history:

Tyrannicide is the killing or assassination of a tyrant or unjust ruler, usually for the common good.

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33 minutes ago, It_spelt_Magalhaes said:

I may have been blindsided, and call me out if it's something you see differently, but the way it happened in the infamous Bells scene, I had a moment where I thought: 'Oh shit, they're surrendering to HIM, after she just single handedly brought the city to its knees? I have a bad feeling about this.'

That was my exact feeling! I thought she saw the city as being Jon’s now because of that surrender, and that this is what made her do what she did. She figured that she’d by then lost everything she’d come for.

After all, once she in her mind saw “her” city surrender to the Rightful Heir to the Iron Throne™, how did she matter to them? 

So she decided to disabuse the cityfolk of that perceived disregard, however figmentational or even delusional it might have been, in the most dramatic way possible: the way that had so well served her goats of conquest and retribution before.

With Fire and Blood.

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4 minutes ago, CrypticWeirwood said:

No, she wasn't threatening him there, but she had previously threatened his family at least twice. Most recently she threatened many, many people and didn't see anything wrong with continuing on her crusade of mass murder. 

Jon made a moral choice over his own personal happiness and well-meaning. We have a word for this, and a long history:

Tyrannicide is the killing or assassination of a tyrant or unjust ruler, usually for the common good.

She was certainly furious that Sansa had told Tyrion of Jon's ancestry, but as far as I know, she had made no threat to kill her. She was not Aerys, demanding that Jaime bring him his father's head.

I get that the show runners just made her into a dog that gone rabid and had to be put down.  

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3 minutes ago, SeanF said:

She was certainly furious that Sansa had told Tyrion of Jon's ancestry, but as far as I know, she had made no threat to kill her. She was not Aerys, demanding that Jaime bring him his father's head.

Didn't she in an earlier episode tell Jon that Sansa would have to bend the knee "or else"?

And didn't she in this episode in her jihad speech promise to "liberate" people from Winterfell to Dorne?

That's two threats by my count.

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9 minutes ago, CrypticWeirwood said:

That was my exact feeling! I thought she saw the city has being his now because of that, and this is what made her lose her cool with such a burning and wanton vengeance.

I saw her as deeply flawed all along. 

No one goes through what the character does and remains anywhere near sanity.

Her actions from arrival on Westeros onwards feel increasingly erratic as she looses allies and importance, which as many here claim would show a downward spiral. 

I get it but since I was watching a show I'd lost the ability to take as a serious story in character development, the continuous downshift into heroism and then absolutist leader I guess I was lulled into a kind of holding pattern?

The psychotic break moment of 'oh shit, now they've done it?' It was so... underehelming. 

I wanted more. Less explosions, maybe. Something. Even an others damned flashback would've done.

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14 minutes ago, CrypticWeirwood said:

That was my exact feeling! I thought she saw the city as being Jon’s now because of that surrender, and that this is what made her do what she did. She figured that she’d by then lost everything she’d come for.

After all, once she in her mind saw “her” city surrender to the Rightful Heir to the Iron Throne™, how did she matter to them? 

Upon which point I'm partial to the point that trying to parson 'reason' for her reaction went out the window.

What we got was a victorian trope of hysteria, by which woman cannot handle emotion or disappointment.

I wanted her to be as ruthless and calculating as you're describing. Even delusional, going to the reasoning of how destroying the capital of the nation she wanted to rule doesn'y ring of any sort of strategy. 

Why didn't she 'accidentally' set fire to the street Jon was standing on?

Indiscriminate destruction like that makes no sense.

The totallitarian rally in the finale episode I could spin into pleasing her remaining troops and her self-explaining her actions into something fitting a vision of a world she could control. 

The genocide by WMD was, to my understanding of what I saw, the result of inner conflict between 'I won' going to 'everything I went through was for nothing'.

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2 hours ago, CrypticWeirwood said:

It was immensely important in many, many, many ways.

One of the most important was that it showed us that Daenerys didn’t actually give one flipping fig about who the so-called “rightful heir to the Iron Throne” was, only about her own destructive obsession.

It also fueled many other critical plot points. It underpins almost the whole story. Without that, everything means nothing and nothing means anything.

yes I suppose, but all those plot points seem underwhelming in a way cos we expected certain things and they were subverted lol. I would have preferred that jons reveal came out with the council discussion and then he suggested a vote similar to the nights watch, but then Grey worm was the problem. I am gonna miss this show and the characters for sure...

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7 minutes ago, Sir Hedge of Hog said:

yes I suppose, but all those plot points seem underwhelming in a way cos we expected certain things and they were subverted lol. I would have preferred that jons reveal came out with the council discussion and then he suggested a vote similar to the nights watch, but then Grey worm was the problem. I am gonna miss this show and the characters for sure...

That would have ruined his only hope for freedom and peace. Their silence was their reward to him for saving the world. His true blood would have doomed him if it had become general knowledge. 

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34 minutes ago, CrypticWeirwood said:

Didn't she in an earlier episode tell Jon that Sansa would have to bend the knee "or else"?

And didn't she in this episode in her jihad speech promise to "liberate" people from Winterfell to Dorne?

That's two threats by my count.

She also said "If she can't respect me..." (then what?) and she also said dragons eat whatever they like (a threat).

 

She also said SANSA killed Varys just as much as Dany did. WTF.

I think there may have been rewrites because Emilia said Jon chooses someone over her. The final version didn't really make that clear. 

 
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1 minute ago, Rose of Red Lake said:

She also said "If she can't respect me..." (then what?) and she also said dragons eat whatever they like (a threat).

 

She also said SANSA killed Varys just as much as Dany did. WTF.

I think there may have been rewrites because Emilia said Jon chooses someone over her. The final version didn't really make that clear. 

 

Sansa and Arya?

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4 hours ago, It_spelt_Magalhaes said:

I may have been blindsided, and call me out if it's something you see differently, but the way it happened in the infamous Bells scene, I had a moment where I thought: 'Oh shit, they're surrendering to HIM, after she just single handedly brought the city to it's knees? I have a bad feeling about this.'

I'm not going to re-watch the thing so I cannot offer any thoughts on the matter.

My point is that there is just no way Dany could ever reach a point where she is going to think it would be a good thing/help her cause to burn down the Targaryen capital and the Targaryen castle. She - presumably, at least - wants to sit the Iron Throne, not destroy it.

Perhaps she might do this after her armies have been destroyed and she has only her dragon(s) left to make some sort of last attempt to destroy her enemies. Sacking the city and butchering them all I could certainly see as well, depending what those people and their leaders do to defy or hurt her. But that would not destroy it.

I mean, we also don't expect any of the Starks to burn Winterfell to destroy the Boltons/Frey who occupy it, no? Not because we think they want to spare the lives of the people occupying it right now (who are all enemies of House Stark) but because it is the Stark castle and they don't want to destroy the building.

In that sense I really cannot see a scenario where this kind of mad attack would make sense.

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7 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

I'm not going to re-watch the thing so I cannot offer any thoughts on the matter.

My point is that there is just no way Dany could ever reach a point where she is going to think it would be a good thing/help her cause to burn down the Targaryen capital and the Targaryen castle. She - presumably, at least - once to sit the Iron Throne, not destroy it.

Perhaps she might do this after her armies have been destroyed and she has only her dragon(s) left to make some sort of last attempt to destroy her enemies. Sacking the city and butchering them all I could certainly see as well, depending what those people and their leaders do to defy or hurt her. But that would not destroy it.

I mean, we also don't expect any of the Starks to burn Winterfell to destroy the Boltons/Frey who occupy it, no? Not because we think they want to spare the lives of the people occupying it right now (who are all enemies of House Stark) but because it is the Stark castle and they don't want to destroy the building.

In that sense I really cannot see a scenario where this kind of mad attack would make sense.

Exactly. 

Ony in the scenario of complete psychotic break, when you cannot attribute reason to it.

Kind of an all or nothing approach to MAD Queen, but what can you expect from such quality writing?

'She snaps.' Fantastic.

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3 hours ago, CrypticWeirwood said:

Didn't she in an earlier episode tell Jon that Sansa would have to bend the knee "or else"?

And didn't she in this episode in her jihad speech promise to "liberate" people from Winterfell to Dorne?

That's two threats by my count.

That's not exactly a threat, is it? And the way to resolve it would be to bend the knee, no?

It is also not clear that the proper punishment of a recalcitrant sister of the lover of the queen would have to be execution. Dany could just make Jon her Lord of Winterfell, meaning Sansa would be, again, nothing. It is not that she controls anything in the North or that she is more popular than Jon Snow.

As for liberating Westeros - no idea what was meant there, but if the plan had been to kill all the lords and ladies of Westeros then it is a pity that this wasn't done. Because the core rot of this fucked-up system is not the monarchy but the feudal aristocracy. It would have been another blood both involving a couple of thousand - or perhaps tens of thousands - of people, but the millions of Westerosi commoners would have been thankful for that.

Dany doesn't seem to feel conflicted or pissed at Jon for 'having to destroy the city' or whatever, so any interpretations imagining a conflict there don't seem to make any sense. Even the entire jealousy/fake tensions nonsense over Jon's claim disappeared in the last scene where she was asking him to join her. If jealousy had been a motivating factor she wouldn't have done that. She would have wanted him dead, too.

And this entire claim nonsense issue is something that cannot work for Jon-Dany. That is the Dany-Aegon plot. And having the same plot two times - first with Dany-Aegon and then with Dany-Jon would just be boring repetition. George is never going to do that.

7 minutes ago, It_spelt_Magalhaes said:

Exactly. 

Ony in the scenario of complete psychotic break, when you cannot attribute reason to it.

Kind of an all or nothing approach to MAD Queen, but what can you expect from such quality writing?

'She snaps.' Fantastic.

That's why I think we could see the utter destruction of a city in relation to Lannisport. If Euron/Cersei really hurt Dany greatly she could decide to resolve the Lannister problem ... permanently. And the Ironborn problem as well. In fact, I don't think many Westerosi would shed tears if she collectively killed all the Ironborn and freed their thralls and saltwives.

But it is obvious that the burning of KL was done simply because the showrunners wanted those ridiculous visuals. And they wanted this as 'the grand finale'. George might give us multiple sacks of KL in the books to come. Aegon should get the throne without a battle for KL or a sack, but if Euron/Cersei ever retake it it most definitely will involve a battle/sack and a subsequent reign of terror (and there are strong hints that Euron is going to sit the Iron Throne for a time). Dany should have no trouble to take the city from them considering who and what these people are. If she had to take it from Aegon then she might face strong resistance from the Kingslanders, but I'm not sure it makes sense that Aegon could (re-)gain the Iron Throne after Euron.

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6 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Because the core rot of this fucked-up system is not the monarchy but the feudal aristocracy

Which is why I Outright laughed at the fantastic solution that will fix everything!

Not.

The likes of Tywin Lannister or Olenna Tyrell would run that like a three ring circus. 

There are always more of those types.

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@Lord Varys - initially I defended this scene, and might still do so if Dany had come up with some cruel, but rational justification for it eg inflicting such an act of terror at the start of her reign that no one would ever again defy her.

But, you're right, she's not going to burn down the vast city her ancestors built, unless she's in danger of being defeated.  Mass executions of Lannister soldiers? Believable.  Hunting down anyone suspected of collaborating with Cersei? Likewise.  But, not shooting off both feet.

So, in the final episode, she becomes first some mad fascist wanting to conquer the world, and then with Jon Snow she's the madwoman in the attic, rambling on about how they know what's good and breaking the wheel.

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1 hour ago, It_spelt_Magalhaes said:

Which is why I Outright laughed at the fantastic solution that will fix everything!

Not.

The likes of Tywin Lannister or Olenna Tyrell would run that like a three ring circus. 

There are always more of those types.

Yeah, the cripple king (who also knows everything, meaning he has the potential of being a worse dictator than Dany could ever hope to be) and the elective monarchy nonsense are going to hurt millions of people more than Dany and Jon could have ever done had they ruled together. The very idea of electing a king within a societal framework where hereditary monarchy is the only imaginable way of doing thing - and still the standard on the lordly level - is ridiculous. It would increase the infighting among the great houses, not reduce it. It would give them all more motivation and reason to go to war, not less, etc.

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

But, you're right, she's not going to burn down the vast city her ancestors built, unless she's in danger of being defeated.  Mass executions of Lannister soldiers? Believable.  Hunting down anyone suspected of collaborating with Cersei? Likewise.  But, not shooting off both feet.

I can also see her getting jealous - getting jealous of Aegon's popularity, getting pissed that he stole everything she thought would fall into her lap, etc. - but not in relation to Jon.

Even with Aegon, though, things to have to escalate for there to be a proper Second Dance. Aegon and his allies have to hurt her on a personal level for things this to become an all-out hot war. There is a personal level to this all, with the involvement of Illyrio and Aegon being (allegedly, at least) her own nephew. That can hurt.

Cersei is a completely different issue, considering that neither Dany nor Cersei have so much as acknowledged each other's existence in the books. They have no connection or relationship at all, and Cersei is not likely going to ever be a main threat to Daenerys Targaryen. If she were to hook up with Euron she could become a powerful force of destruction but unless they really get around to do something to hurt Dany of a personal level chances are not that great that this is going to devolve into some personal issue.

I mean, they even failed in the show to make the Dany-Cersei thing a personal issue, and that is hardly surprising considering that these two characters simply have nothing to do with each other.

As I laid out a couple of times the time to try to defeat Daenerys would be at see when she tries to get her people to Westeros. Her armada will be vulnerable to Euron's fleet (especially if he were to increase the size of it by allying with the Three Daughters) and, especially, his magics. But once Dany gets her troops to Westeros the war will essentially be over. There won't be any stopping her on the battlefield, no matter how many minor victories the enemy wins. She will simply have too many troops (assuming she truly wins the allegiance of all the Dothraki).

But all the gold of Casterly Rock could never buy Cersei the troops to defeat all the Dothraki (and whoever joins Dany after her arrival), nor is anything she is going to do in the near future going to help her to erase her humiliation at the hands of the Faith. She might secure the allegiance of (the majority of) her Westermen, but that's it. She can never hope to really build a proper power base to (re-)gain the Iron Throne and rule Westeros in (relative) peace.

And that's how she and Euron could become the greatest dangers we have faced yet - because they could very well just want to destroy as much as they can, not caring what happens to them or Westeros as such. Sort of like the Joker. Euron seems to be more or less at that point already, although at this point he might still actually believe he could become a second Aegon the Conqueror. But that is going to change soon.

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

So, in the final episode, she becomes first some mad fascist wanting to conquer the world, and then with Jon Snow she's the madwoman in the attic, rambling on about how they know what's good and breaking the wheel.

Yeah, those scenes are all completely disjointed. Although I don't think Dany madly rambled in the last scene. She actually just described how monarchs rule in this world. They do not rule by committee. They do not ask everybody for their opinion. And they destroy their enemies. There was nothing exceptional 'fascistic' there that's not there in standard monarchism.

If they had wanted her to look *evil* there, they should have had her talk about burning some more cities or to burn everybody in Westeros, or whatever, but not something as mild as this.

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Dany's whole chat about "liberating" people just confused me. Who or what, was she liberating them from? Why was she liberating people? The whole thing I just found silly in the end. The fact that she only had one dragon at that point just made her quest even more silly, IMO

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11 hours ago, It_spelt_Magalhaes said:

I may have been blindsided, and call me out if it's something you see differently, but the way it happened in the infamous Bells scene, I had a moment where I thought: 'Oh shit, they're surrendering to HIM, after she just single handedly brought the city to it's knees? I have a bad feeling about this.'

That could well be one of the reasons she went fire 'n' brimstone on the smallfolk. "He doesn't want it, you fools! HEY! Look at me up here, I'm talking to you!" *dracarys* :devil:

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