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[GoT/ASoIaF]: Our Watch has Ended (Open Spoilers)
ArbitraryDescriptor
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Game of Thrones was an HBO series based mostly on a mostly finished book series by George R.R. Martin.
Thus concludes the objective facts portion of our discussion.
Open TV Spoilers.
Please spoiler book talk.
Please do not discuss leaks at all.
Please remember that we're all reasonably respectful people here, and try to avoid flaming fellow posters because you think their opinion rings false.
If you already did not like this OP, please stay tuned for a Behind-the-Draft look at why you're really not going to like it.
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Cant wait for the last ep!
Red green or blluuuuueeeee
I never watch these kinds of shows out of principle.
If you need to explain to me what you were trying to say, you failed.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Have Dany be warned like she was in the show, she goes for a really smart tactical strike, accidentally triggers a wildfire cache killing thousands. She's horrified, the audience is horrified, Jon and Tyrion are exactly as horrified as they were in the episode, thinking she did it intentionally. Have the mounting pressure between her defending herself justly against people who are trying to slot her into the crazy targaryen hole vs people who see evidence that shows to them that she's going mad.
But hey I suppose if you have to wrap it up in just one ep left there's no room for interesting stories or nuance, just gotta checklist the major special effects scenes.
It's like if I missed the last 15 minutes of a movie because I really had to pee. I'm getting the stupid buddy in the car cliff notes. It's getting the job done.
So many of the things irritating me are short cuts, lack of nuance in the right places, and radical shifts in power dynamics every episode (after the second) because they're trying to cram a 10 episodes of twists in as well.
Arya / Hound infiltrating King's Landing / Red Keep should have been episode 8. Jaime could have been captured at the start of it and released at the end, placing him sufficiently behind.
We could have had a farewell to Vary episode in 7, delving into his efforts to undermine Dany; possibly involving flashbacks to parallel his efforts in the last days of Aerys.
We could have seen Dany revisiting the scene from the House of the Undying in a dream. Recalling the betrayals of Meereen and protracted, bloody resistance. Something.
They also could have used the Inside the Episodes to much better effect by filling in off-screen nuance rather than highlighting very obvious things and making them seem more contrived.
Example: Why did Varys take off his jewelry? We'll never know. This would be a great little detail to focus on and say "He wanted to ensure his little birds would find them so they could bribe their way out". Or just have a better life.
Whatever. What I don't need, what no one needed, was a reminder that Jaime and Cersei were the incest twins, so your intent was to go back to that.
Yes. We know. You're being a little hard on yourself as filmmakers if you think that failed to come across pretty clearly.
...but hearing some bells was enough to tip The Breaker Of Chains into committing genocide.
I figured we were going for a Mad Queen ending for Dany, but I thought it would make more sense than this. Hell, up until the last possible minute I thought she was about to spot Jaime running through the streets of the city, realize Tyrion had betrayed her, see how her armies responded to Jon's "stand down", and then snap as she realized she had won the war and lost her throne. That would have made sense.
Instead, "she decided to make it personal." Fuck B&W.
There are so many ways this could have been done better than "Dany sees the red keep and burns the city to the ground because... reasons we guess?"
Like I'm fine with the targ madness befalling Dany. There's been enough foreshadowing and she's gone through enough shit in very recent memory that ok, sure, I can buy that.
But they handled it so poorly that I'm actually having a hard time coming up with a worse way to do it.
Maybe have her flip a coin with a smiley face on one side and "burn all the things" on the other side and then address the camera and say "Like the thing the people said about when a Targaryen is born? Do you 'member that? The thing about the coin flip? Oh no it came up burn all the things well I guess that's that!"
Apparently valonqar can also mean “falling masonry.” It’s a pretty clever play on words but you have to speak High Valyrian to get it
my girlfriend hasn't read the books so she had to deal with a solid minute or two of me ranting about how a certain prophecy was 100% accurate UP UNTIL IT WASN'T BECAUSE PLOT LOL
But the rushed cliff notes version felt unearned.
Which sucks. Because done properly this could’ve been the ultimate game of thrones moment. This is Joffrey deciding to behead Ned. This is the red wedding. This is the viper slipping up and letting the mountain crush his skull. But from the point of view of our hero’s playing the villain. Jon gives us a great point of view character in the midst of it too.
It’s so close to being great. But because it missed it, it’s likely going to be viewed as terrible.
Maybe there’s some poetry there given Danys story?
Jaime's story was abandoned seasons ago when he was present in King's Landing when he should not have been.
Except I am mad. I really am. It seems like 9/10 of the fan theories I read for how this should have gone instead are way better than what actually happened.
I know criticizing military tactics on this show is basically reduced to a meme at this point but when I saw cavalry charging through crowded streets of stacked infantry I basically threw my arms up in the air and mentally walked away.
Have Drogon land on the wall closer to the Red Keep. The bells begin to toll and Dany looks out over the city with a slight smile. Then she looks at the Red Keep and sees Cersei standing with Qyburn and the Mountain on a parapet watching everything. Her smile slowly melts into a mask of rage and she mutters in a low growl something along the lines of "No, she burns". Drogon takes off and heads straight for the keep. She sees people fleeing out of the Red Keep through the gate and she again mutters the same thing the proceeds lights up the entire outer wall of the Red Keep including the gate that people are trying to flee through. She turns back and sees Cersei fleeing inside the keep and proceeds to burn the Red Keep to the ground except lighting up the outer wall starts an inferno that begins to rapidly spread throughout the city igniting wildfire caches.
There, she turns, hundreds of thousands still die horribly and it's at least remotely fucking believable.
Jamie’s story is interesting because him having a full redemption never would’ve made sense and what Tyrion said to him about him and Cersei was true. So I don’t hate his ending (the euron side show was a shit storm though)
There’s even some potential great irony in what Tyrion says to Jamie about Cersei and then his own decision to stick with Danny. Would’ve required a focus on Tyrion loving Danny and him being more aware of the futility in his efforts to keep her good. But potential was there.
Like I said a few posts up, you can see how so much of this could’ve worked if executed better.
Maybe this was the deal they made between hbo and GRRM. Botch the ending enough so folks will feel the need to read the better version
There were so many ways to have Dany go “mad queen” without literally destroying her city after she wins. Killing civilians to kill the stubborn Lannister’s who refuse to surrender? Burning the red keep, after Cersei stacks it with a thousand civilians to call her bluff?
I was expecting her to shoot the hostages to get at Cersei, not shoot the hostages, then go outside and start shooting more people, and eh who cares if we even got Cersei.... I’d like to point out that even the mad king’s *final desperate insane suicide plan* was less of a massacre than what this was
But I mean, she’s a woman, you know how emotional men make them right? Amirite fellas?
When the twist turns out to be 'Ah ha! You thought it would be smarter than this, but I was actually the cliche all along!', yeah, that's going to annoy people. And when you don't handle that turn well, when the culmination of all that character development and time we've spent with them is 'nah they were never any different, PSYCHE', that's even worse.
I was struck tonight by how little I cared about what was happening. There was pretty much no payoff for any character arcs - aside from Dany's fulfillment of becoming a stand-in for her mad father. She's basically just a prop now.
Cleganebowl had no emotional impact for me. In the end, it just showed to highlight how little the Hound has grown. There's nothing at stake here from a narrative or character perspective. It's just Sandor wanting payback. Okay?
I couldn't even get all that enthused about Euron dying, or the fight, because at that point I didn't have it in me to root for either side.
Bleh.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
This, basically. Don't even need the wildfire thing, though it's useful for the scale. Just, she knows there are people besides Cersei and her council in the Red Keep. The kingdom doesn't run without the smallfolk. She doesn't know that, e.g., Sandor went there trying to kill his brother. She doesn't know that, say, Jaime's been imprisoned in there by the Lannister men, who suspect him of plotting to murder the Cersei after he went over to the North and the Dragon Queen, and that Tyrion went in through one of Varys's tunnels to save his brother. She doesn't know that, say, Arya has already put Cersei out of Daenerys's misery, possibly while disguised as Jaime (Valonqar prophecy!). That's just to make the audience hate her more, for killing some of their faves.
She does know there are hundreds of servants in there. Perhaps thousands. People with families who just had a harmless job to do and came in every day.
And Drogon melts the Red Keep to slag with everyone in it. And she feels nothing but satisfaction.
The writing this season reminds me of plots in D&D where I see we have one hour of session time left and the party needs to get through two towns and a boss fight so I just start jettisoning plot elements and having characters go “AHAH I WAS THE BADDY”
The bones here are good, the actual burninating of the city was horrifying and beautiful (over long as fuck for some reason), and if this were the culmination of an escalation of madness out of Dany this would be the final straw in “is she redeemable or not?”
Dany’s very first atrocity is the worst atrocity anyone’s ever committed, previously her execution of enemies via dragon fire was only barely worse than standard-noble-activity of executing via sword, she’s been unreasonable from time to time, she’s been angry (rightfully so!), but she went... well as mentioned straight from stopping the Jedi from executing palpating to a massacre of a bunch of children with a sword
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I've been meaning to get this off my chest for a while.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
I too dislike Wyvernization of Dragons
Naw, the defining characteristic of a Wyvern is the tail not the forearms being wings.
I mean sure these aren't the perfect realization of European/DnD dragons but they're flying lizards with a "Fuck You" fire breath weapon and that's pretty much a dragon.
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Unfortunately that is too broad a definition as there are far too many flying things that breath fire in mythology. That's like the go to for scary mythology back then
I don't see how the shape of the tail could be the defining characteristic over leg-count. Tail shape can vary, but they're always portrayed as bipedal with winged forearms.
I actually can't remember how Dany's dragons are described in the books.
Anyway, I guess "Mother of Wyverns" wouldn't sound as cool.
You know, the thing is, lots of us were ambivalent to or disliked Dany. It's entirely possible to have unlikable protagonists. The problem is that the show writers have completely destroyed her character in the span of two episodes. Even if you don't like her, the things she has done in this episode in particular make absolutely no sense, and her decent into madness feels wholly unearned and incredibly rushed.
If anything, you want Dany to become an unlikable, if sympathetic, character at the end of her arc. But what they've done is the writing equivalent of having her show up and just randomly start kicking puppies. I mean, it gets the job done, but how does that help to tell your story other than to remind people that kicking puppies is shitty behavior?
There, now you've thematically tied in the wildfire caches that had been hinted at for the past 4 seasons, the fact that Westeros doesn't trust an outsider, and that everyone believes in the mad Targaryen myth.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
That puts Dany's character in a totally different place, though. In the show she's gone ultra hatstand, but in your scenario she hasn't and it's all a misunderstanding.
I'm not saying I think a or b is better or that the show is doing a good job (I haven't seen the episode), but that isn't so much a different way of handling "it" as changing what "it" actually is.
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I was fuckin dying in that scene man.
Just a total wtf!?
Why is this horse important!?
Exactly! That would have been so much better! Subvert the obvious. Everyone already thinks she's going to go full mad queen. So instead, have her actually listen to her advisors, only go after the objective (Cersei), save the day, then whoops an accident causes everyone to think she DID go mad queen anyway. Much more thematically interesting. But oh right, themes are for 8th graders I forgot
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126