Brian Fowler Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 It's definitely not true that there were only three episodes of build to the heel turn. There have been hints of her being too much like her father basically ever since she first got power. She usually rose above it eventually, but the hints have always been there. It's just, ever since learning that her claim wasn't the strongest, and losing two of her most beloved hanger ons... She's lost that ability to rein herself in And, if nothing else, she is doing exactly what Missandei said to last week. Dracarys. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EVA Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 There were definitely hints that she could go bad, but foreshadowing something isn’t the same thing as doing the narrative legwork to pay it off in a way that feels satisfying and earned. And I don’t think they even got close to that. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_MJ_ Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 This Jon Snow dude keeps screwing up and yet people are still down with him becoming the Kang. I buy that in 2019's climate. They should have given the last dragon armor or something to explain why it was easier kill the boat crew this week than last week. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elsalvajeloco Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 1 hour ago, Craig H said: Sansa + Tyrion for the Iron Throne. Actually, who the fuck wants a throne now that the city has been destroyed? Or is this going to be another one of those things that this show does a shitty job of where they make it look like all the Dothraki are dead, but an episode or two later there's a shitload of them left. So I'm sure text week we'll see that 3/4 of King's Landing is all well and good. Gentrification of Thrones? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
piranesi Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 (edited) Not sure if we're still in spoiler mode here. Spoiler It feels weird in retrospect that they had such a halo of protection around Jamie the last few years just for that. I mean, I'm all in favor of an ignoble death or whatever, and I'm fine with characters people have invested too much moral hope in disappointing them...but what bugs me is the unrealness of how they protected him earlier if it turns out they didn't really need him for...anything. Imagine how much more weighty it would have been if he would have died when he should have, last season in that battle surrounded by dragon fire when he instead somehow "swam" away. Like, why did he need to escape that moment so badly that they made the whole show look cheap to protect him? Edited May 13, 2019 by piranesi 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
keith_h Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 2 hours ago, jaedmc said: Like Bebe's Kids.... Dothraki don't die, they multiply. CleganeBowl getting a dragon flyover before the start was great. If there was ever a time to ditch the orchestra and fire up some Dio...that was it. Someone on YouTube needs to rescore that fight into a Holy Diver music video immediately. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Fowler Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 Next week maybe we'll get something that can be set to 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheVileOne Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Craig H Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 4 minutes ago, piranesi said: Not sure if we're still in spoiler mode here. Hide contents It feels weird in retrospect that they had such a halo of protection around Jamie the last few years just for that. I mean, I'm all in favor of an ignoble death or whatever, and I'm fine with characters people have invested too much moral hope in disappointing them...but what bugs me is the unrealness of how they protected him earlier if it turns out they didn't really need him for...anything. Imagine how much more weighty it would have been if he would have died when he should have, last season in that battle surrounded by dragon fire when he instead somehow "swam" away. Like, why did he need to escape that moment so badly that they made the whole show look cheap to protect him? Yeah, this. This really bugged me. The prophecy for Cersei being nearly meaningless also bugs me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odessasteps Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Fowler Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 Also, "I hope I deserve this, I truly do" is one motherfucker of a line. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eivion Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 This was a good and horrifying episode. Kind of agree they could have shaved off ten minutes, but it was otherwise well done. Saying that, I'm disappointed they went in this direction though I can't say anything about them not building up it as the foundations have been slowly set going back to the very first season. I was just hoping like Tyrion and Jon it wasn't to be. 3 hours ago, EVA said: I would like to point out that the nitwits writing this show have concocted an endgame where the "bad guy army" is comprised of the totality of the people of color left on the show. Woof. I know there has been talk that this is "George's ending", more or less, but it's hard for me to believe he, in a series that set out to undermine fantasy tropes, would've stepped so hard into THAT particular one. Glad I wasn't the only one that noticed this. The final enemy being army of brown people led by a woman was not the smartest idea in the slightest. The broad strokes of the ending were told to the show runners years ago. Martin will likely change things, but Dany's turn was almost certainly something they were told. Of course Martin gets to be in the clear though since he can always write something different in the books. Its one of the great cheats writers get when their stories as shows run concurrently with their novels, manga, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odessasteps Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 He also gets to see what gets a horrible reaction and course correct if he wants. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
piranesi Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 4 minutes ago, odessasteps said: He also gets to see what gets a horrible reaction and course correct if he wants. It would be too bad, I think. I'm sure he would do a much better job depicting her turn than the show-runners have. I would hate to see him cave in to what I'm seeing a lot of right now on twitter from GOT fans upset is so similar, but almost the inverse, of what we saw from Star Wars fans over Luke Skywalker. Note: This is not anything I'm seeing in either discussion here! The line is "They ruined her arc." or "They ruined his character." The word "ruined" gives away a lot. The writers can't ruin an arc. They can make a bad one, but they can only "ruin" one if fans have a pre-conceived notion of what they want a character to be or to represent before the actual story tells you that. And that's not reading or watching a story...that's demanding someone play-act a story you've imagined for yourself. In this case taking a story hostage and demanding it have a happy ending. This seems to happen when people either identify the character as a representation of themselves or of someone in the real world who they want to have a heroic role model for, or if they associate the character with moral traits that they value. The weird SW fans associated Luke with some sort of unyielding idealism and unbreakable masculine honor. Some really upset GOT fans seem to assoicate Danearys with an image of liberation and empowerment for under-represented people. Once those identifications set in stone, then any kind of complextiy of realistic failures inserted in the story become a kind of betrayal that is repaid with claims of "ruining" something. Weird side note is that this is in fact how Danearys "sold" her brand to people to convince them to follow her, so in a way, the audience just bought Dany's own line of bullshit (which she probably bought herself) even though she showed herself numerous times to be unable to control the situations she created without resorting to brutality. It is also how the Jedi sold themselves to people. I think there is something interesting in that somewhere when the audience becomes just another consumer of the story's own internal discourse. I don't like this kind of hostage-taking of characters by audiences based on the audience's desire to see a character be one way or another. I didn't like it from SW fans and I don't like it from GoT fans. Now I DO like it from WWE fans because I know it pisses Vince McMahon off. But that's a different story because it's contained to a very particular universe that is safely bracketed off in a Jurassic Park-like compound that only seems to leak out onto a few basic cable networks one every couple of decades. 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odessasteps Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 (edited) I think that's just part of the nature of modern fandom: when "their" version of a character is "better" than the "official/real" version by the author/owner. Would include shopping, babyface and heel turns, deaths, etc... Edited May 13, 2019 by odessasteps 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
piranesi Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 Also I kind of really hate that we don't get to see Jorah react to all of this. It seems like a huge waste of time to go through the whole thing of having him get cured of Greyscale just to have him mope about in the background for awhile and then get killed before having to actually deal with this. How great would it be to see him dealing with his love/idol becoming a horror show? 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
piranesi Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 Oh and I guess that Daario guy is the big winner here. Dudes kicking back watching the old neighborhood maybe playing some cards like “damn...really hate to be missing out on all this.” Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Fowler Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 Martin has a huge advantage over the show for doing this: he can take us inside Dany's head in POV chapters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beech27 Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 (edited) 2 hours ago, Brian Fowler said: Martin has a huge advantage over the show for doing this: he can take us inside Dany's head in POV chapters. That is a crucial difference. And of course he’ll have far more space in which to demonstrate her fall. I think the show clearly established her capacity for ruthlessness, but I’m less convinced they got her to the point of mass slaughter of civilians—at the moment of her victory, no less. We might say Jon’s shadow looms too large now, but I still see that as “justifying” her trying to kill him, not lots of others. And I don’t think that’s what the show writers meant anyway. They seemed, rather, to lean on the “blood will tell” trope and a notion that it’s “personal” now. Problem is, killing innocents hurts Cersei not one bit. I think it also undermines some of the work done earlier. Why diminish Dany’s forces if not to make her face a hard choice between winning with a lot of collateral damage and losing? And why not indulge the question of how much evil is justified to win a theoretically good end? The firebombing imagers echoes Tokyo and Dresden, so it’s hard not to think that option was there. Still, I’m getting to close to fanfic now. Great spectacle and one of my friends, wearing a Seth Rollins shirt, gleefully yelled BURN IT DOWN right as Dang, y’know, did. So I had a good time. Edited May 13, 2019 by Beech27 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt D Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 So my gut says that 1) this is where Martin was leading things all along and he made it no secret to the producers/writers and 2) as the books will never actually be released, conventional wisdom will always be that whatever ending he would have done would be far superior and more justified to his characters than this. It is now in his best interest to never finish the books. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AxB Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 7 hours ago, odessasteps said: I just a story about how many people last year named their kid Thanos. I used to work for a guy called Thano. Many years later, he probably found out why I kept spelling his name wrong (He kept spelling my name wrong too. Alext.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odessasteps Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 21 minutes ago, Matt D said: So my gut says that 1) this is where Martin was leading things all along and he made it no secret to the producers/writers and 2) as the books will never actually be released, conventional wisdom will always be that whatever ending he would have done would be far superior and more justified to his characters than this. It is now in his best interest to never finish the books. I was wondering the other day if the bad taste left by this season would actually turn off people from buying any future books in the series. Prob not the people who were book readers before the TV shows but others? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt D Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 2 minutes ago, odessasteps said: I was wondering the other day if the bad taste left by this season would actually turn off people from buying any future books in the series. Prob not the people who were book readers before the TV shows but others? It's a moot point, old friend. Here's a fun thought, though. Is next week's MITB going to be the lowest watched WWE PPV in a decade+? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AxB Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 People who started reading the books after watching season one? If they didn't tapout halfway through the first book, if they read all the way to the end of Dance, they're probably on the Books > Show philosophy. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Fowler Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 Probably at least the lowest watched live since the network. I've figured there was a good chance Dany was going to end up on the "evil" side for years, and I assume that Martin is headed in more or less the same direction, but likely with a hell of a lot more nuance. If he ever finishes them, which I'm not exactly expecting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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