Game of Thrones

[Dreampipe]

This post is deleted!

[GangOfDolls]

***=SPOILER SPOILER***

click to show

@Sparks said in Game of Thrones:

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER DIS-COURSE DIS-COURSE... (to the tune of the Badger Badger song, as always)

***=SPOILER SPOILER***

click to show

@Roz said in Game of Thrones:

Honestly I just feel bad for the Dany stans at this point.

I feel bad for all those people who named their kids "Khaleesi" several seasons ago.

I hope they were saving War Crime for a backup.

[Dreampipe]

Wowee some big ol spoilers over here whoaaaaa look out

***=Spoils***

click to show

So the Golden Company kinda sucked, eh? Lots of hype to do literally nothing whatsoever but to look fancy and not have elephants.

[GangOfDolls]

@Ghost

***=Spoilers And Salty AF***

click to show

I must quibble.

I hated the arc that they gave Dany, not because they made her insane. I think that was always the in game for her character. It's how they got there is the problem for me. For one, you don't really see her fragment into madness. The books and even the show go out of their way to talk about how for even the crazier of the Targaryen's their spirals into insanity were difficult. Some of them fought what was happening even as they were unraveling. Here? It just feels hacky and cheap.

A bunch of traumatizing shit happened for yeaaaars and now Dany cray cray for real. But Dany's whole arc has been about about abuse and trauma. Her brother sold her to her husband-rapist. She fell in love with her husband-rapist (!). (Yeah, yeah Moon and Stars and all that ... they sexualized the rape of a woman who was made older in the tv series because censors but she's a teenage girl in all reality. But because Khal D ended up being an okayish guy, he gets the pass where as Sansa's own marital rape trauma wasn't given the pass because Ramsay Bolton wasn't an okayish guy. This show has no idea what to do with this issue and has fucked it up forever but I digress...)

Anyway, dead babies. Dead husband. Assassination attempts. Fucking over Mereen so bad they couldn't see straight after she was done with it. The other dead dragon which she didn't act all that broken up about when it got turned into a zombie. The summary of all those things wasn't apparently bad enough and Dany was written instead as this somehow promising alternative to the endless Westeros horror show, okayish woman, and white savior. She was terrible at being a ruler but in an approachable, just needs to figure it out way.

But one more dead dragon and one dead woman who for all their best friendness- Missande's relationship with Dany's war criminal in arms right hand goon, Grey Worm, was way more emotional and deep and compelling. Missande was just like every British period drama where the beautiful and sad great lady uses the woman who is her assistant as an emotional crutch because being rich and beautiful and sad with your peers is so taxing. Truly loving and freeing Missande would have been setting her up far away from all this shit to do great things. Instead, she was just an upgraded servant who died just to a make a white woman feel bad enough to kill a bunch of kids. Yeah, fuck a bunch of that shit.

Clearly, I have a lot of feelings about this.

But anyway, yeah - the only real sense we have that this is going off the rails is her casual and cold reasoning that it's fine if she kills every child in King's Landing because something something history will remember this as something. And then she's doing it. Oh and depressive staring at the sea. I guess that's how you know someone is into child murder. They stare depressively after the sea because their nephew-boyfriend gets a little squeamish about continuing to get their fuck on. This whole season has been in short cut wrap ups but this one was super cheap to me.

I hated the end of Jamie and Cersei, too. I kept waiting for him to knife her in the there-ain't-no-baby-in-there-maker because the whole schtick was that her younger brother was going to kill her. Instead, they were cuddling all sad and dying with the person you love and presenting her as somehow sympathetic and him as weak and worthless and unable to stand up to anything. What did I just watch for 6 years about his whole redemption arc if that's how it was supposed to end?

The goodbye between The Hound and Arya was perfect in tone and execution though. I'll give it that.

[surreality]

There have been hints all along, for me. They went through a number of them in the 'previously, on... ' segment, but ultimately?

***=Blorp***

click to show

...no one in that world is as wholly good and noble as the 'all giving mother' figure she seemed to the people she saved in this story.

We see much of the story from their perspective, with less a view of the people she subjugated or destroyed -- whether they had it coming or not.

There's no hesitation when she thinks someone has it coming.

Pretty sure we'll hear the reasoning as to why she thinks the random citizenry did... because that's the kind of thing that'll come up, even if it's only briefly.

We saw the throne room full of what looked like falling snow back in, what, season 1 or 2? I always sortakinda wondered if that wasn't snow, but ash. I suspect odds are high we will revisit that set.

I'm ultimately just not surprised, though, because no one in this story world is truly the all-loving, selfless Jesus/World Mother figure, even if they truly want to be wholesome, good, decent, etc. There are only people who seem to be, but have some failing or another that prevents them from truly being that. (Prime examples: Marjorie, Ned, Jon...)

As much as she is made out to be a messianic figure? She's still just as human as the rest of them. Watching this realization dawn on some while others continue to follow (into war crime land) is pretty dang powerful.

[Rinel]

Hard disagree with most of the positivity here. USA Today, of all places, ended up nailing it. Also, I think @GangOfDolls is spot on in their assessment.

***=And here is their (and my) take on the matter.***

click to show

"In an alternate timeline, George R.R. Martin would have finished writing "A Song of Ice and Fire" before it was ever adapted to series. His seventh and final book would have been hundreds of pages that offered copious explanation for its hero's descent into madness and cruelty. And that long, complex and thoughtful book would be adapted into far more than six episodes of television.

The problem with Dany going full Mad Queen isn't that she used to be a hero or that the show never foreshadowed it. There have been seeds, all the way back to Season 1 when she burned Mirri Maz Duur alive as vengeance for Khal Drogo's death. She has long been vain, ruthless and completely convinced of her own brilliance.

But the show spent far more time making Dany a hero, if a rather boring one. Making her Mad Queen Dany now is rushed, unearned and emotionless."

[jibberthehut]

@Rinel Yeah, I agree. I've said to dreampipe and to my rl husband more than once, that they really needed about 3-4 more episodes to make everything fit and not feel very much like there are transitionary pieces and moments that got left on the scrap heap of script writing.

[Selira]

One two three, no spoilers, no spoilers, no whammy, STOP

***but spoilers here***

click to show

I really don't feel like Dany is mad. I feel like she's pissed, and that it's a deliberately cruel act that is half out of revenge and half out of feeling like the only way she will ever solidify her rule is if she crushes her opposition totally and completely - otherwise, the Sons of the Harpy, Westeros Edition, will spring up.

Fear and Love, the Machiavellian dichotomy is what we saw. She chose fear.

They were pretty explicit about this - she has always been willing to go /hard/ if she thought it was the right time.

[Rinel]

@Selira

I can agree but idk how replacing "crazy" with "pants-on-head stupid" helps anything.

[Lisse24]

Yeah, I've got some thoughts.

***=Thoughts and all that***

click to show

I must quibble.

I hated the arc that they gave Dany, not because they made her insane. I think that was always the in game for her character. It's how they got there is the problem for me. For one, you don't really see her fragment into madness. The books and even the show go out of their way to talk about how for even the crazier of the Targaryen's their spirals into insanity were difficult. Some of them fought what was happening even as they were unraveling. Here? It just feels hacky and cheap.

A bunch of traumatizing shit happened for yeaaaars and now Dany cray cray for real. But Dany's whole arc has been about about abuse and trauma. Her brother sold her to her husband-rapist. She fell in love with her husband-rapist (!). (Yeah, yeah Moon and Stars and all that ... they sexualized the rape of a woman who was made older in the tv series because censors but she's a teenage girl in all reality. But because Khal D ended up being an okayish guy, he gets the pass where as Sansa's own marital rape trauma wasn't given the pass because Ramsay Bolton wasn't an okayish guy. This show has no idea what to do with this issue and has fucked it up forever but I digress...)

Anyway, dead babies. Dead husband. Assassination attempts. Fucking over Mereen so bad they couldn't see straight after she was done with it. The other dead dragon which she didn't act all that broken up about when it got turned into a zombie. The summary of all those things wasn't apparently bad enough and Dany was written instead as this somehow promising alternative to the endless Westeros horror show, okayish woman, and white savior. She was terrible at being a ruler but in an approachable, just needs to figure it out way.

But one more dead dragon and one dead woman who for all their best friendness- Missande's relationship with Dany's war criminal in arms right hand goon, Grey Worm, was way more emotional and deep and compelling. Missande was just like every British period drama where the beautiful and sad great lady uses the woman who is her assistant as an emotional crutch because being rich and beautiful and sad with your peers is so taxing. Truly loving and freeing Missande would have been setting her up far away from all this shit to do great things. Instead, she was just an upgraded servant who died just to a make a white woman feel bad enough to kill a bunch of kids. Yeah, fuck a bunch of that shit.

Clearly, I have a lot of feelings about this.

But anyway, yeah - the only real sense we have that this is going off the rails is her casual and cold reasoning that it's fine if she kills every child in King's Landing because something something history will remember this as something. And then she's doing it. Oh and depressive staring at the sea. I guess that's how you know someone is into child murder. They stare depressively after the sea because their nephew-boyfriend gets a little squeamish about continuing to get their fuck on. This whole season has been in short cut wrap ups but this one was super cheap to me.

Can't disagree. I'm salty because I can see how we'd get here with Dany. I can see the tracks that GRRM laid to tell a story of how 'liberators' turn into 'tyrants,' a story that is all too familiar in the modern era. I'd love to see a Dany who believed that she was doing the right and necessary thing go mad and burn King's Landing to the ground ... but they didn't tell that story. If only HBO had offered them an increased budget and two more episodes so that they could have told that story ...

... oh right.

I hated the end of Jamie and Cersei, too. I kept waiting for him to knife her in the there-ain't-no-baby-in-there-maker because the whole schtick was that her younger brother was going to kill her. Instead, they were cuddling all sad and dying with the person you love and presenting her as somehow sympathetic and him as weak and worthless and unable to stand up to anything. What did I just watch for 6 years about his whole redemption arc if that's how it was supposed to end?

Y'all, I read the first book a couple months after it came out. For 22 years it's been pretty clear that Jaime was going to kill Cersei. 22 YEARS! D&D saw all that groundwork the same as all of us. If they got Jaime to Cersei's side there was no reason NOT to follow through on it. NONE. It just makes no sense.

The goodbye between The Hound and Arya was perfect in tone and execution though. I'll give it that.

[insomniac7809]

Is this a spoiler? What is spoilers? Who is time?

***=Sill tho!***

click to show

I checked the prophecy scene--the "younger brother's hands around your throat" bit was book-only. The show never had that, just the part about being replaced by a younger queen.

[Arkandel]

I will sign off on the sentiment that the plot feels rushed now.

Part of that is the time scale though, and I don't mean in screen minutes. Going by those it's not too crazy - we've had 6+ hours of episodes this season alone, after all. That's more than long enough for an entire movie trilogy where characters are introduced, developed, progressed and completely changed.

But the thing is those hours are compressed into a 5 week period iRL. It's hard to sign off on character development without a lot of real time to process what happened. Not to mention, as people have mentioned, there are a lot of 'character supporters' out there who are taking it personally.

[Ghost]

I will reiterate my prediction from a few weeks ago that this short 6 episode final season was going to feel very:

AAAAAAAAAAAndABunchaStuffHappenedThankYouGoodbyeTHE-END!

This story is wrapping up at lightspeed pace.

[Testament]

@Ghost In a sudden twist, the entire series was nothing but a Holodeck simulation that went haywire at the end because Data kept screwing around with the main computer.

[Ghost]

Oh man...

***=Warning...you dont wanna...***

click to show

#endspoiler

[surreality]

@Ghost I noticed that, with a side order of, "I wonder how the concept designers feel about that choice now... "

[Ghost]

@surreality said in Game of Thrones:

@Ghost I noticed that, with a side order of, "I wonder how the concept designers feel about that choice now... "

Oh pssssh. That scene was probably on storyboards and prepped in 2018.

[surreality]

@Ghost Oh, I'm sure. Long before that, even. But damn if that wasn't a moment of likely 'my, don't we feel a bit awkward about that design reference all of a sudden'.

[Arkandel]

This link contains spoilers from tidbits of an interview on Varys' actor.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/game-thrones-apos-conleth-hill-171803071.html

[Ghost]

***=Another Meme...***

click to show

#endspoiler