Game of Thrones General (Non-Book Related) Discussion Thread - Part 1

[Roose Bolton]

As with a lot of the characters, they kind of cut out some of the more negative moments from Dany. Unlike Cersei, who they basically rewrote into being still very maternal even in her last moments (as opposed to the complete narcissistic psychopath she is in the books who doesn’t love her in a traditional sense), they couldn’t make this work properly.

 

[Marvolo]

 

[InCali]

I don't know... Dany had a streak where she very often got caught up in being self righteously vengeful and it was usually ameliorated by the other people in her circles that advised a different course of action. We did see in Essos her actions which she saw as justice, many a times brutally enforced, came to bite her at a later date in some fashion. At the point where the attack on King's Landing occurs she's bereft of any of the influences that would have had any affect upon her mind or emotions. Ser Baristan, Jorah, Misande... All dead. She had lost all faith in Tyrion and was, in a way rightly, starting to see treason all around her.

That is not an excuse for the what they did on the show or how it played out on my part. The entire time she was laying waste to the civilians I kept saying out loud as I watched... "But... WHY?" It was as so many have said, rather rushed in terms of the evolution of the character. That said, I did a podcast a few years back on GoT and my friend Anna was on. She was a fan of both the books and the show. I had at the time a pretty conventional view of Jon and Dany as the most traditionally "heroic" characters on the show, thinking they were both simply going to stay in the type of roles as more or less "good guys" in comparison to everyone else. Sure, they'd have set backs or have to make tough calls but I assumed they both were destined to be honorable protagonists for the most part.

Anna disagreed and laid out that for Dany there were seeds there wherein she could easily slide down a road that would make her a mix of her father the Mad King and Aegon The Conqueror. That she could be blinded by her self righteousness to condone any sort of terrible action. Sure, we might think that Tyrion's spiel to Jon was ham fisted in a way but I think that, while the change was rushed, the essential take away is valid. Unmoored from advice that would tamp down these tendencies, feeling threatened by the truth of Jon's heritage, and on and on, this side finally broke free in an orgiastic violent outbreak.

Again... It was HELLA rushed. It needed a lot of time to percolate to make us believe it's legitimacy as a turn for her and for us to feel the tragedy of this fall from our collective graces... But I do see now that this potential was always there and under the surface but just didn't want to because as Tyrion put it, the people that were in her sights were usually morally objectionable and it was easy to root for her. But if we look back, bloody vengeance was never that far from her mind and even the mere threat of it before she was capable of delivering on the threat was something she pulled like a .45 out of her metaphorical holster time and again, like when she was at the gates of Qarth, warning that she would not forget if they left her and her people to die. She swore then that should she live despite their abandonment of her that she would burn that city to the ground. She had said that those that would not accept her rule could live in the new world she was going to create or die in their old one. She was always on this precipice.

Now again... How they got to that point where she went over the edge was not as earned as it could have, should have been. But the set up, the frame to base such an evolution off of I think was always there.

A LOT of people died at Dany's hands who weren't necessarily deserving of it (My opinion to be sure). At least they were never shown to be directly responsible for what they were killed for. Take the US for example. Supposing there is some sort of revolution that overthrows the current economic system (capitalism) and the economy changes to a planned worker run economic system. Does this mean that everyone who is currently a capitalist should be punished? I just don't see that. There are some, IMO, who should be punished as I tippy tap on my keyboard, but handing out blanket punishment without looking into each case is dead wrong and kind of crazy. Some of Dany's actions turned my head way back when.

 

[InCali]

Also, how they handled the Dragons was bordering on criminal. One second the Dragons are vulnerable and one gets blasted out of the sky like a piper cub running up against a SAM. The next minute, the remaining dragon decimates the entire fleet and city in about 5 minutes....huh???

Oh wait.....Euron's fleet didn't have the element of surprise anymore or they lost their cloak of invisibility or something like that. The dragon getting ghosted like that was weird....

 

[InCali]

Oh yeah.....one....other.....thing.....

I didn't have too much of a problem with the story line itself, but I found the execution wanting. Obviously, I'm not the only one.

Here's what I thought would happen. I thought Bran was going to sit in a cave, under a tree for about 5,000 years and sorta scope everything out. I figured Sansa for Winterfell, Jon for the Iron Throne, thought Dany would get pregnant and get her head screwed on right, and Arya would end up being some mystic running Braavos (hated how they left Braavos hanging as there was a good story there), Jaime would end up having to off Cersei (maybe killing himself....maybe I wasn't 100% off on that one, but went in the wrong direction), and (obviously) the Hound kills Gregor while dying himself. Theon, to me, was a rather interesting character and I saw some parallels with Macbeth.

If you read the book, this got way, way condensed and was very different. Catelyn's role wasn't finished after the Red Wedding and Brienne was in a F#@&load of trouble amongst the notable differences.

 

[Mjolnir Reborn]

A LOT of people died at Dany's hands who weren't necessarily deserving of it (My opinion to be sure). At least they were never shown to be directly responsible for what they were killed for. Take the US for example. Supposing there is some sort of revolution that overthrows the current economic system (capitalism) and the economy changes to a planned worker run economic system. Does this mean that everyone who is currently a capitalist should be punished? I just don't see that. There are some, IMO, who should be punished as I tippy tap on my keyboard, but handing out blanket punishment without looking into each case is dead wrong and kind of crazy. Some of Dany's actions turned my head way back when.

What any of us viewers think is pretty irrelevant. The thing that matters in order to establish characterization consistency is what Dany's view is, and she went entirely against her own views in The Bells. We've even seen her advisers tell her that she can't care for every suffering innocent person because that's not how wars are won, and she's told them that they are wrong and that she will win the throne in her way.

The poor characterization isn't because of any viewer thinking she did the wrong thing, it's that she betrayed herself without justification in the writing. In fact I'd hope that most characters have been doing things that the audience thinks is wrong since problem solving in Westeros isn't modern problem solving, for obvious reasons.

 

[DACrowe]

She's also said:

There are others, including her first impulse being to "return their cities to the dirt" when she sees slave cities are laying siege to her Meereen, or burning a man alive who may have been a slaver but may have been innocent of why she killed him (trying to root out the Sons of the Harpy conspiracy). She said, "I'll let my dragons decide."

This stuff isn't foreshadowing; it's an actual part of her character. I agree Season 8 rushed it and how they got there in one episode with "The Last of the Starks" is tacky, but to say what she did is against her character... I think this is GRRM's point. We love some leaders and do not believe they are capable of doing horrible things, especially as we give them absolute power.

 

[InCali]

What any of us viewers think is pretty irrelevant. The thing that matters in order to establish characterization consistency is what Dany's view is, and she went entirely against her own views in The Bells. We've even seen her advisers tell her that she can't care for every suffering innocent person because that's not how wars are won, and she's told them that they are wrong and that she will win the throne in her way.

The poor characterization isn't because of any viewer thinking she did the wrong thing, it's that she betrayed herself without justification in the writing. In fact I'd hope that most characters have been doing things that the audience thinks is wrong since problem solving in Westeros isn't modern problem solving, for obvious reasons.

IMO, she was progressing towards this type of decision and whether the characterization was poor is, in itself, a subjective matter. I don't know about justification (If I understand you correctly, I don't see it in those terms), but I saw a progression of poorer and poorer choices due to the fact that she was becoming more and more isolated and was losing her bearings. She was never really able to make very good decisions on her own and when she made them, they generally didn't turn out very well (Think sending away Jorah). My reading of her was that she felt she had to become more reliant on her own decision-making and that wasn't going to take her in the right direction. At some point, she just snapped. Sort of like walking towards the end of a cliff. That last step is a doozy.

 

[Mjolnir Reborn]

IMO, she was progressing towards this type of decision and whether the characterization was poor is, in itself, a subjective matter. I don't know about justification (If I understand you correctly, I don't see it in those terms), but I saw a progression of poorer and poorer choices due to the fact that she was becoming more and more isolated and was losing her bearings. She was never really able to make very good decisions on her own and when she made them, they generally didn't turn out very well (Think sending away Jorah). My reading of her was that she felt she had to become more reliant on her own decision-making and that wasn't going to take her in the right direction. At some point, she just snapped. Sort of like walking towards the end of a cliff. That last step is a doozy.

I'd strongly contest the notion that Dany didn't make good decisions on her own. She made the choices that gained her the Unsullied. Her compassion for the slaves made her win an entire city without doing anything. She gained the entire Dothraki people on her side on her own plan as well. There's of course more, and I don't see how sending Jorah away was much of a mistake, and it was certainly not just Daenerys that thought Jorah needed to go. In fact the main thing she probably stood out with was to show Jorah mercy. Dany has made many good decisions, and the fact that she can't make all decisions right all the time and needs help is just standard fare as she doesn't have experience in all fields, and no one is beyond making mistakes (especially when trying to do good).

I don't see this as overly relevant though since her deliberately killing innocent, powerless people isn't a poor decision, it's fundamentally against everything she's stood for. There hasn't been any gradual signs of her going insane, nor have we seen her change her views on the powerless that suffer under the wheel. In fact she keeps her position on that in the last episode, just now it makes no sense.

 

[InCali]

I'd strongly contest the notion that Dany didn't make good decisions on her own. She made the choices that gained her the Unsullied. Her compassion for the slaves made her win an entire city without doing anything. She gained the entire Dothraki people on her side on her own plan as well. There's of course more, and I don't see how sending Jorah away was much of a mistake, and it was certainly not just Daenerys that thought Jorah needed to go. In fact the main thing she probably stood out with was to show Jorah mercy. Dany has made many good decisions, and the fact that she can't make all decisions right all the time and needs help is just standard fare as she doesn't have experience in all fields, and no one is beyond making mistakes (especially when trying to do good).

I don't see this as overly relevant though since her deliberately killing innocent, powerless people isn't a poor decision, it's fundamentally against everything she's stood for. There hasn't been any gradual signs of her going insane, nor have we seen her change her views on the powerless that suffer under the wheel. In fact she keeps her position on that in the last episode, just now it makes no sense.

OK. We disagree. I'm not saying she never made any good decisions because, you're right, she did. She just made more poor ones and her mental state became more and more unhinged. Ultimately, she didn't care, and I don't think she ever really did care, whether she was the "rightful" heir or not. Once she got it in her mind that she was going to rule Westeros, nothing else really mattered. She became incapable (and I think always was) of really caring about what was best for the populace (though she convinced herself differently). She was what was best for everyone and that was that. If she had to break a few (or a lot) of eggs, so be it.

 

[BrownEyedGirl]

The reason I believe that D&D are to blame for the drop in quality is not because they ran out of source material. We had plenty of fantastic episodes after the source material ran out. Battle of Bastards and Winds of Winter come to mind. So it was clear to me, that they could certainly still create a great show without the source material to fall back on. I just think that they were ready to move on to their other projects and rushed to get this one completed as quickly as possible. Why HBO allowed this is another question entirely. You'd think that HBO could have found another show runner to continue the story up to the ten full seasons that I believe the show needed to tell the story correctly. I would think that HBO owned the rights to the show and not D&D. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that particular point

We are led to believe this, but maybe there is more to the contracts that we know of, and one of them is that Benioff and Weiss have complete creative control of the GOT characters, no and's if's or but's. It could also be why Bloys is supporting/defending them, in hopes they will come back and finish what they started.

 

[Mjolnir Reborn]

OK. We disagree. I'm not saying she never made any good decisions because, you're right, she did. She just made more poor ones and her mental state became more and more unhinged. Ultimately, she didn't care, and I don't think she ever really did care, whether she was the "rightful" heir or not. Once she got it in her mind that she was going to rule Westeros, nothing else really mattered. She became incapable (and I think always was) of really caring about what was best for the populace (though she convinced herself differently). She was what was best for everyone and that was that. If she had to break a few (or a lot) of eggs, so be it.

Yes, we disagree. I don't recognize any of the descriptions you make of her. She's consistently been about the rightful heir, which is why she was devastated by finding out that Jon had a stronger claim. She's also never shown any signs whatsoever of not caring for the weak and innocent before suddenly murdering thousands. Not once. She also didn't have to break any eggs to win at that point as she had already won, but decided to kill innocent men, women and children instead of going to end her main enemy.

I think this is all just a function of that the writers' capacity is explained by how they explain events with things like that Dany forgot about the Iron Fleet, and things like how a dragon is like paper for scorpions in one episode and an unstoppable wave of terror in the next. They clearly don't write with consistency and logic in mind, and the same goes for character portrayals. Previously intelligent people have started to become idiots when they ran out of books to adapt.

 

[jolldan]

So that's what's west of Westeros

 

[JimThompson]

So that's what's west of Westeros

 

[Pink Ranger]

Also, we don't know what effect being unburnt in Ep 6x4 has on her. Is it a Targaryen rebirth? Did she lose some of her humanity? Does the fire act like a crucible, burning away and distilling more of what's unnecessary to becoming something other than a Dragon Queen?

 

[jolldan]

 

[Pink Ranger]

So that's what's west of Westeros

Now I'm going to go home and set up a diorama of Arya riding Aslan into battle.

 

[DarthSkywalker]

I don't know... Dany had a streak where she very often got caught up in being self righteously vengeful and it was usually ameliorated by the other people in her circles that advised a different course of action. We did see in Essos her actions which she saw as justice, many a times brutally enforced, came to bite her at a later date in some fashion. At the point where the attack on King's Landing occurs she's bereft of any of the influences that would have had any affect upon her mind or emotions. Ser Baristan, Jorah, Misande... All dead. She had lost all faith in Tyrion and was, in a way rightly, starting to see treason all around her.

That is not an excuse for the what they did on the show or how it played out on my part. The entire time she was laying waste to the civilians I kept saying out loud as I watched... "But... WHY?" It was as so many have said, rather rushed in terms of the evolution of the character. That said, I did a podcast a few years back on GoT and my friend Anna was on. She was a fan of both the books and the show. I had at the time a pretty conventional view of Jon and Dany as the most traditionally "heroic" characters on the show, thinking they were both simply going to stay in the type of roles as more or less "good guys" in comparison to everyone else. Sure, they'd have set backs or have to make tough calls but I assumed they both were destined to be honorable protagonists for the most part.

Anna disagreed and laid out that for Dany there were seeds there wherein she could easily slide down a road that would make her a mix of her father the Mad King and Aegon The Conqueror. That she could be blinded by her self righteousness to condone any sort of terrible action. Sure, we might think that Tyrion's spiel to Jon was ham fisted in a way but I think that, while the change was rushed, the essential take away is valid. Unmoored from advice that would tamp down these tendencies, feeling threatened by the truth of Jon's heritage, and on and on, this side finally broke free in an orgiastic violent outbreak.

Again... It was HELLA rushed. It needed a lot of time to percolate to make us believe it's legitimacy as a turn for her and for us to feel the tragedy of this fall from our collective graces... But I do see now that this potential was always there and under the surface but just didn't want to because as Tyrion put it, the people that were in her sights were usually morally objectionable and it was easy to root for her. But if we look back, bloody vengeance was never that far from her mind and even the mere threat of it before she was capable of delivering on the threat was something she pulled like a .45 out of her metaphorical holster time and again, like when she was at the gates of Qarth, warning that she would not forget if they left her and her people to die. She swore then that should she live despite their abandonment of her that she would burn that city to the ground. She had said that those that would not accept her rule could live in the new world she was going to create or die in their old one. She was always on this precipice.

Now again... How they got to that point where she went over the edge was not as earned as it could have, should have been. But the set up, the frame to base such an evolution off of I think was always there.

As one who has believed in the Mad Queen theory in the books and even thought they could go that way with the show, the chance of that happening is very different then the reality of what played out on the show. Once their season 5 and 6 played out, the idea of the Mad Queen Dany was not in play. Hell, outside of one scene in season 7, it wasn't in play. And then she nuked a city, while avoiding Cersei.

Saying it was hella rushed, kind of points to why it makes no sense for Dany on the show. Because the framework for it to make sense is never laid out. Dany's self-righteous, her arrogance, does not extend to murdering regular civilians for no reason whatsoever.

Dany on the show had a set of morals. Ones she kept through awful thing after awful thing. She has lost everything more then once on the show. But what I am now suppose to believe is seeds is that she spent a week in Westeros, fell in love with Jon and the people "rejected" her, when she hasn't even met the people outside of the North, where she is now acting out of character, to push the narrative that they would never accept her. This is of course before we get into her "loss" of those around here. Which... well they have to write Dany as suddenly the dumbest person on the planet, for any of it to happen and even then she isn't alone. Drogon doesn't abandon her. Jon doesn't abandon her. Greyworm doesn't abandon her. Tyrion doesn't abandon her. The false narrative that leads to her actions push Jon and Tyrion away.

It makes no sense. None. The only way it makes warp sense inside the narrative of the show is for the show to dumb itself down to a degree that was utterly painful.

 

[P Supreme]

I've been reading some more interviews going on, most on the prequels, and I am starting to feel we might be pointing our anger at the wrong people.

First interview/article was on how GRRM says something like 4 or 5 prequels are in the works, but then the HBO president, Casey Bloys, says that is not the case, and at the most, they are looking into one prequel, but nothing definite. He also shot down any spin offs on any of the current characters like Arya, and seems to be adamant that fans of GOT need to move on. I also find it interesting, he became president back 2016, and this would be about the time that GOT seemed to have lost some of it's focus. It's possible the Benioff and Weiss are not completely to blame, and maybe there is something going on behind the scenes that made them not want to work with HBO for now.

But seriously, go research GOT spinoffs, and notice how the president, Casey Bloys, seems to be shutting down anything that the fans want.

didn't AT&T buy HBO and supposedly put a mandate that they want to compete with Netflix and pump out more content? I mean I wouldn't put it passed corporate goons messing with the quality of HBO programming but D&D lazy writing is all on them they may have wanted out sure but what they wrote for season 8 was horse **** no matter the studio interference

 

[blackdragon6]

People get caught up on Dani turning heel, but I personally think there's other problems with this show going as far back as season 5. You could argue Stannis got the same treatment that Dani got. Furthermore people who seem to be ok with Dani's turn more than likely only care about a plot point being met and not how the show got to the plot point. On top of that I think this show started to slide by on spectacle too after awhile. That's just not enough for me personally. Usually it is, but not for this show which been heavily character and lore driven up until the last 3 or 4 seasons.

 

[Roose Bolton]

I mean, in the books Dany had a man’s daughters tortured because she suspected he might in some way know about the Harpy and held Ned Stark responsible for the atrocities that happened during the Sack of King’s Landing, even as Barristan tried to patiently explain that Ned was a good man who only argued in the defence of Targaryen children. There was a lot of mercurial rage that never made it into the show.

I definitely get the sense that they didn’t know this was coming for her character until they had their meeting with George after season 5, and had assumed she was going to be the big saviour. By the time it came into play they were pretty much over the whole thing and just wanted it done.

 

[BatLand]

Yep.

 

[DarthSkywalker]

I mean, in the books Dany had a man’s daughters tortured because she suspected he might in some way know about the Harpy and held Ned Stark responsible for the atrocities that happened during the Sack of King’s Landing, even as Barristan tried to patiently explain that Ned was a good man who only argued in the defence of Targaryen children. There was a lot of mercurial rage that never made it into the show.

I definitely get the sense that they didn’t know this was coming for her character until they had their meeting with George after season 5, and had assumed she was going to be the big saviour. By the time it came into play they were pretty much over the whole thing and just wanted it done.

 

[BrownEyedGirl]

didn't AT&T buy HBO and supposedly put a mandate that they want to compete with Netflix and pump out more content? I mean I wouldn't put it passed corporate goons messing with the quality of HBO programming but D&D lazy writing is all on them they may have wanted out sure but what they wrote for season 8 was horse **** no matter the studio interference

You are right, AT&T did buy out Time Warner, and I have been reading that at first, the new owner was going to claim to just stay out of the way, but then started mingling in projects. I also find it interesting that Time Warner held the other part of Hulu that Disney wanted so badly, and now they got it. I just feel there is more than just Benioff and Weiss here to blame. Really, if HBO wanted to continue with this series, why not just fire them and hire new writers? Now, we have the president of HBO making excuses like how he doesn't want to mess with their vision and he has no plans of making sequels or using any of the characters that were in Benioff's and Weiss's series. There is something going on behind the scenes that no one is talking about.

 

[BrownEyedGirl]

Uh, Barristan Selmy! If you don't know who he is, I don't know what to say.