Who got the most screwed over

[SeanF]

2 minutes ago, Mystical said:

If she hadn't come to Westeros, the wall would never have fallen. 7 Seasons (and thousands of years previous) and the NK and his army apparently had no way of getting over/through the wall. Not even around the wall. Apparently he needed a dragon. If Dany had never come, the dead would still be beyond the wall.

True.  The wight hunt was another brilliant idea on the part of Tyrion.

Dany should have hanged him for his dreadful advice.

[kissdbyfire]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

True.  The wight hunt was another brilliant idea on the part of Tyrion.

Dany should have hanged him for his dreadful advice.

She should have dracaryed his arse the second he said he was "the gift", back in series whatever. 

[Wall Flower]

3 hours ago, SeanF said:

Westeros would be a graveyard now if Daenerys had not landed there with her army, and marched North.

At the very least, she deserved to be remembered like Caesar "the evil that men do lives on so that the good is oft interred in their bones," rather than just a tyrant who was either evil because she refused to save her brother, or went mad at the last moment (depending on the argument that the show runners are using).

Dany also took out Cersei and Euron, who would undoubtedly have continued to harry the Starks and other lords. Essentially, she took out the Starks enemies for them, allowing the Starks to emerge triumphant (once Dany had been taken care of).

[Wall Flower]

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

True.  The wight hunt was another brilliant idea on the part of Tyrion.

Dany should have hanged him for his dreadful advice.

One of the things that most annoyed me was the depiction of Dany as an out-of-control woman needing to be held back by her reasonable male advisers, all while the show inadvertently depicted those advisers as being incompetent and consistently giving her bad advice.

[Mystical]

5 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

She should have dracaryed his arse the second he said he was "the gift", back in series whatever. 

Well you know, Dany kind of forgot that she knew this man barely a week before she went on holidays with her kid and that when she came back from Vaes Dotrak, her city was under siege because of his cleverness. Hand of the Queen!!!

[Ser Hedge]

17 hours ago, Apoplexy said:

Threatening to do something is not the same as actually being crazy enough to do it.

This is a very good point. Likely from the time the Valyrian shepherds learnt to ride dragons, these threats have been made.

From FaB:

'If his Hand was not able to settle the matter amicably, however, His Grace would have no choice but to come himself on Vermithor for what Barth termed "vigorous discussions." '

...

Sealord: "Can they show me proof of ownership?"

Septon Barth: "His Grace can show you proof of Dragons"

....

"As you will. Your king could bring down my city to ash, I do not doubt. Tens of Thousands would die in dragonflame. Men, women and children ..... "

Septon Barth does not dispute the above.

Does this make Jaeherys and Barth bat shit crazy as well? No, if you have nukes you threaten to use them, or you at least remind everyone you have them.

Show-Dany threatening the 13 who refused to let her in from the red waste where she and her people were starving and left a trail of their own dead behind is in no way foreshadowing she was going to 'snap' years later. That whole scene with the 13 could have been much better written though (or left out altogether obviously), it was a D&D attempt to inject fake drama into what was a relatively quieter sojourn in Qarth in the books as another member on the forum pointed out.

Threatening to use a weapon you have is fairly standard practice in this kind of setting, whether it's regular military, faceless men (as the Sealord does) or Dragons. It don't mean she crazy 

I'm not saying there might not be other foreshadowing in books or show, my point is restricted to the above.

[Br16]

2 hours ago, Mystical said:

Well you know, Dany kind of forgot that she knew this man barely a week before she went on holidays with her kid and that when she came back from Vaes Dotrak, her city was under siege because of his cleverness. Hand of the Queen!!!

Lol, Tyrion trying to play Westerosi style "gentleman agreement" type of power play in a place as brutal as Essos was fun to watch. Moreover, he trying to seal the deal with the Masters with women was naive considering that one of the Masters is from Yunkai.

When Valyria fell and the dragons were lost, it became free for all in Essos. When the last Targaryen dragon died, all the Lord Paramounts still upheld their oaths to the Iron Throne. We like to think of Westeros as a Machiavellian world of intrigue where good people can't win. However, it's probably actually the most honorable part of Planetos. 

[SeanF]

7 hours ago, Wall Flower said:

One of the things that most annoyed me was the depiction of Dany as an out-of-control woman needing to be held back by her reasonable male advisers, all while the show inadvertently depicted those advisers as being incompetent and consistently giving her bad advice.

Dany's military instincts were sound.  No intelligent military advisor would have quibbled with her plan to flatten the Red Keep, at the outset.

[Wall Flower]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

Dany's military instincts were sound.  No intelligent military advisor would have quibbled with her plan to flatten the Red Keep, at the outset.

Were there no secret passages into the city/Red Keep that Varys could have advised on?

[Beardy the Wildling]

4 hours ago, Mystical said:

Well you know, Dany kind of forgot that she knew this man barely a week before she went on holidays with her kid and that when she came back from Vaes Dotrak, her city was under siege because of his cleverness. Hand of the Queen!!!

I love the BS Tyrion pulled too.

'We're under attack because I was doing too good of a job. I proved that Meereen could flourish without slaves, so those mean jealous slavers attacked me!'

If you didn't plan for an outcome involving the obviously pissed-off and disenfranchised neighbouring slave cities doing something about their problems, you did a shit job. It doesn't matter why it happened, if the city is under attack, it's under attack.

[It_spelt_Magalhaes]

5 hours ago, Ser Hedge said:

Does this make Jaeherys and Barth bat shit crazy as well? No, if you have nukes you threaten to use them, or you at least remind everyone you have them.

The idea would be that 'b*tch be crazy' and 'no, she ain't' is more contentious at a base level than 'threat of force will eventually be forced to become use of force', which becomes 'she was screwed the moment she got the dragons, fool'. 

But tv audiences want the warrior to win, so, D&D got the cake and ate it too. How'd that work out? 

Meh...

[Kajjo]

14 hours ago, SeanF said:

Westeros would be a graveyard now if Daenerys had not landed there with her army, and marched North.

We don't know that. No Daenerys, no ice dragon, no breached wall. 

Nightking and his army against Jon Snow and company could have ended in many ways.

14 hours ago, SeanF said:

ather than just a tyrant who was either evil because she refused to save her brother, or went mad at the last moment

Well, Jon certainly will remember both good and bad sides of her.  But she destroyed King's Landing and that will happen in the books, too. 

14 hours ago, Apoplexy said:

If she snapped, no one could see that coming.

Many did, though.

14 hours ago, Apoplexy said:

killing your enemies at war isn't the same as killing civilians.

It happend in WW2 against Dresden and Hamburg, too. Civilians are frequent victims to war.

14 hours ago, Apoplexy said:

If she snapped, then that's the reason she burnt down a city, it wasn't due to her 'ruthless nature'.

The great thing about the show is that it was not black-white. Now please adhere to that.

You can have the intention of "let it be fear", of destroying a lot of ramparts and simply accepting civilian victims and intending on destroying the Red keep -- and then snap anyway and overdo it.

Both is possible. These are not opposites.

14 hours ago, Apoplexy said:

Dany was called 'Mhysa' in essos. You normally don't call an antagonist 'mother'.

Those who she freed, did. Not everyone. In-show the word "antagonist" makes no sense at all. As watchers we knew she had two sides to her.

14 hours ago, Apoplexy said:

and the show did not foreshadow it.

It did, and very much so.  There are hundreds of old Youtube videos explaining exactly that. I saw it coming early on.

 

[YoungGriff89]

11 hours ago, Wall Flower said:

One of the things that most annoyed me was the depiction of Dany as an out-of-control woman needing to be held back by her reasonable male advisers, all while the show inadvertently depicted those advisers as being incompetent and consistently giving her bad advice.

Ultimately I agree she got probably the worst deal but I have some issues with this sentiment.  Slightly off topic rant about this in the spoilers.  Read if you want. 

Spoiler

I kind of get the rationale behind this, but you can’t hold her enemies having schemes of their own and being unwilling to just lay down and let Dany destroy them, against her advisors.

Every move is a risk in war, you don’t just come up with an plan and get your way every time.  If Dany didn’t listen to her advisors there’s no evidence to suggest she would have fared any better, or even made it as far as she did.  Not to say her advisors didn’t fail her, because they did in a lot of ways.  Nobody considered the possibility of giant crossbows in a universe where crossbows exist?  Tyrion of all people should have seen that move coming.  

But who could have predicted the Night King was a Goddamned javelin champion?  The show as a whole made no compelling case as to why the people south of the wall needed to do anything about the NK army besides stay south of the wall.  Hell, UnBenjen said outright since he was a wight the magic in the wall wouldn’t allow him to cross it south.  That’s a major storytelling failure that goes well beyond Dany’s advisors.  Plus, Tyrion did advise her not to go.  Besides Jorah, she was no better or worse off losing any of those involved in the Wight Hunt.

There’s no evidence to suggest Daenerys was ever going to make an ally out of Sansa so that was a conflict she’d find herself in either way, even when she saved Jon and kept him in the picture.  Who could have predicted Euron’s fleet had stealth powers and could just sneak up on Yara’s fleet in the middle of the Goddamned ocean?  Who could have predicted Jaime and Cersei would give up Casterly Rock for a greater strategy?  Tyrion didn’t have any way of knowing the gold mines were dry (Tywin discusses this with Cersei when he was imprisoned) and I’m not sure Jaime even knew that fact.  If Dany had just went right for King’s Landing after they lost Highgarden and Olenna Tyrell she would have found out the hard way about dragon killing weapons and found herself with no exit strategy besides just torching King’s Landing.  The thing she was allegedly trying not to do.

None of her advisors knew Jon had a better claim to the throne before she did, so nobody could warn her and give her time to figure out how to manage her own feelings about what this meant for her.  Nobody advised her to crucify people without even attempting to determine guilt first in Meereen.  She made plenty of bad calls without her advisors.

Unless Benjen is just revealed to be dead in the book, then he got a pretty bad deal.  George was adamant to D&D that Benjen wasn’t Coldhands and they just said screw it and made him Coldhands anyway.  His role after season one served almost no purpose, except to further explain that the best plan those south of the wall could come up with to deal with the army of the dead was to stay south and leave it alone.  

[Beardy the Wildling]

22 minutes ago, YoungGriff89 said:

George was adamant to D&D that Benjen wasn’t Coldhands and they just said screw it and made him Coldhands anyway.  

This is part of why I'm very sceptical about claims D&D make about stuff like 'we knew Arya was going to kill the Night King for three years' and that every plot point in the final season is based off GRRM.

[Beardy the Wildling]

34 minutes ago, Kajjo said:

Well, Jon certainly will remember both good and bad sides of her.  But she destroyed King's Landing and that will happen in the books, too. 

Tbh, given the bell-related trigger to burn innocents, I think it's not out of the question that JonCon is the one to go nuts and torch KL (at the Battle of the Bells, he failed to kill Robert, directly leading to him killing his gay crush Rhaegar on the Trident, due to the Septons ringing the Bells and signalling the peasants to lock their doors. One of his mantras in the books is 'I failed the father, I will not fail the son', and he continually regrets being too honourable to pull a Tywin and just burn the village of Stony Sept down).

I do think Dany will go mad in the books, but I think her role in burning the capital has been merged with dropped characters (just like how Jon and Cersei have both been merged with varying traits of (f)Aegon).

[Apoplexy]

58 minutes ago, Kajjo said:

Many did, though

Many guessed. That's not the same as strong foreshadowing.

59 minutes ago, Kajjo said:

t happend in WW2 against Dresden and Hamburg, too. Civilians are frequent victims to war.

You have to admit, there is a difference between carpet bombing a city and collateral damage. Both are horrid, one is worse than the other.

1 hour ago, Kajjo said:

The great thing about the show is that it was not black-white. Now please adhere to that.

You can have the intention of "let it be fear", of destroying a lot of ramparts and simply accepting civilian victims and intending on destroying the Red keep -- and then snap anyway and overdo it.

Both is possible. These are not opposites.

Both are possible. But again, the show did a terrible job of foreshadowing either. The whole goal of the show was shock, which is why I believe they deliberately did not foreshadow anything definitively. It was bad writing and it backfired.

1 hour ago, Kajjo said:

Those who she freed, did. Not everyone. In-show the word "antagonist" makes no sense at all. As watchers we knew she had two sides to her.

Yeah, but he show touted her as the liberator. while she certainly has two sides, she was never portrayed as capable of carpet bombing a city. The whole 'didn't show remorse when her brother was killed' is a cop out. Viserys had threatened to kill her and her baby, of course she was glad he died.

1 hour ago, Kajjo said:

It did, and very much so.  There are hundreds of old Youtube videos explaining exactly that. I saw it coming early on.

How do you know those people on YouTube didn't read the books, or didn't online search for theories? How do you know they were show only viewers?

 

My point is, making a guess is not the same.

[Kajjo]

47 minutes ago, Apoplexy said:

there is a difference between carpet bombing a city and collateral damage.

Dresden and Hamburg were NOT collateral damage but intentional targeting civilians. Get your history straight. It was the uttermost cruelty of war.

48 minutes ago, Apoplexy said:

did not foreshadow

If you want to believe it, then do. But there was not only a lot of strong foreshadowing but also clear telling of Daenerys' nature. It has been repeated so often here. Threat to the 13, crucifying masters, feeding master to dragon, talked out of destroying Yunkai, being a "dragon" herself and so on. Seasons 1-4 were almost perfectly done and a good mixture of real storytelling (like actually doing the crucifying) and foreshadowing (being talked out of a lot of vicious things).

She always needed advisors to go for the better. Now she finally lost all advisors and there she goes.

54 minutes ago, Apoplexy said:

My point is, making a guess is not the same.

All the good storytelling and foreshadowing has been explained over and over. It's a lot more than a guess.

But yes, I partly take your point: A story is about surprises and it is not necessary to be able to accurately know the ending. Of course a certain amount of guessing is always involved. Is that bad? Is that unusual? No, not at all. This is how stories are supposed to be. 

I don't like the proverbial "rabbit out of the hat" in crime stories or thrillers. There has to be some foreshadowing, the main figures have to be there, it needs to be possible to guess the solution. But on the other hand the solution should not be apparent in the first three quarters of the book, otherwise it gets boring.

So yes, we knew Daenerys had to side to her. But we didn't know how it would end. That's exayctly how it is supposed to be.

So, again, I don't get your point.

[SeanF]

23 minutes ago, Kajjo said:

Dresden and Hamburg were NOT collateral damage but intentional targeting civilians. Get your history straight. It was the uttermost cruelty of war.

If you want to believe it, then do. But there was not only a lot of strong foreshadowing but also clear telling of Daenerys' nature. It has been repeated so often here. Threat to the 13, crucifying masters, feeding master to dragon, talked out of destroying Yunkai, being a "dragon" herself and so on. Seasons 1-4 were almost perfectly done and a good mixture of real storytelling (like actually doing the crucifying) and foreshadowing (being talked out of a lot of vicious things).

She always needed advisors to go for the better. Now she finally lost all advisors and there she goes.

All the good storytelling and foreshadowing has been explained over and over. It's a lot more than a guess.

But yes, I partly take your point: A story is about surprises and it is not necessary to be able to accurately know the ending. Of course a certain amount of guessing is always involved. Is that bad? Is that unusual? No, not at all. This is how stories are supposed to be. 

I don't like the proverbial "rabbit out of the hat" in crime stories or thrillers. There has to be some foreshadowing, the main figures have to be there, it needs to be possible to guess the solution. But on the other hand the solution should not be apparent in the first three quarters of the book, otherwise it gets boring.

So yes, we knew Daenerys had to side to her. But we didn't know how it would end. That's exayctly how it is supposed to be.

So, again, I don't get your point.

To conclude that the deliberate incineration of tens of thousands of people for no military reason whatsoever was part and parcel of Daenery's character, one does of course, have to disregard an awful lot of evidence in the other direction eg:-

1. Specifically ordering restraint at Astapor**

2. Not carrying out a sack at Meereen

3. Locking up her dragons when they killed a child

4. Sparing Yunkish soldiers and sailors in the face of intense provocation, when she broke their siege of Meereen

5. Not to mention stuff like trying to give water to dying slaves etc. 

It was certainly shown that Daenerys could be cruel and brutal, by the standards of 21st century Europe.  But, there was no reason to believe that this cruelty and brutality was anything unusual by the medieval world of the show - until she went batshit in the penultimate episode.  

 

** One of the Unsullied killed an innocent horse, but that's hardly Genghis Khan standards of brutality.

 

[Apoplexy]

12 minutes ago, Kajjo said:

Dresden and Hamburg were NOT collateral damage but intentional targeting civilians. Get your history straight. It was the uttermost cruelty of war.

I am not talking about history here, at all. I am talking about Dany and her actions.

13 minutes ago, Kajjo said:

If you want to believe it, then do. But there was not only a lot of strong foreshadowing but also clear telling of Daenerys' nature. It has been repeated so often here. Threat to the 13, crucifying masters, feeding master to dragon, talked out of destroying Yunkai, being a "dragon" herself and so on. Seasons 1-4 were almost perfectly done and a good mixture of real storytelling (like actually doing the crucifying) and foreshadowing (being talked out of a lot of vicious things).

She always needed advisors to go for the better. Now she finally lost all advisors and there she goes.

As @SeanF said, nothing she did was cruel and unusual for that time. By this logic, all battle commanders were tethering on the edge of insanity.

17 minutes ago, Kajjo said:

All the good storytelling and foreshadowing has been explained over and over. It's a lot more than a guess.

But yes, I partly take your point: A story is about surprises and it is not necessary to be able to accurately know the ending. Of course a certain amount of guessing is always involved. Is that bad? Is that unusual? No, not at all. This is how stories are supposed to be. 

I don't like the proverbial "rabbit out of the hat" in crime stories or thrillers. There has to be some foreshadowing, the main figures have to be there, it needs to be possible to guess the solution. But on the other hand the solution should not be apparent in the first three quarters of the book, otherwise it gets boring.

So yes, we knew Daenerys had to side to her. But we didn't know how it would end. That's exayctly how it is supposed to be.

So, again, I don't get your point.

My point is, show only viewers had no reason to believe that Dany was capable of being that cruel. You may have guessed it, but the show went out of its way to show Dany's just and kind and fair side. The showrunners botched up this twist.

[SeanF]

5 minutes ago, Apoplexy said:

I am not talking about history here, at all. I am talking about Dany and her actions.

As @SeanF said, nothing she did was cruel and unusual for that time. By this logic, all battle commanders were tethering on the edge of insanity.

My point is, show only viewers had no reason to believe that Dany was capable of being that cruel. You may have guessed it, but the show went out of its way to show Dany's just and kind and fair side. The showrunners botched up this twist.

When Emilia Clarke herself says "It came out of f**ing nowhere" that suggests there is a problem with characterisation.