[TV] HBO Game of Thrones - Page 1821

On May 23 2019 05:38 Sent. wrote:
He did a pretty good job as the acting Hand to king Joffrey in season 2.

On May 22 2019 12:08 Stratos_speAr wrote:


This isn't the crazy angle.

Tywin talked like this (and actually did shit like this). Many other characters in the story acted like ruthless, brutal killing machines.

We weren't saying any of them were crazy or that it was signs of them being crazy. The only reason people are saying it now is as a retroactive justification for bad writing.



This is another great point. Basically all of her reasoning, both concerning the specific deed itself and what she was going to do in the future, revolved around justifying torching King's Landing, with no actual foundation to the logic at all. There was no real reason to torch King's Landing, and there is no "wheel" to break across Westeros, since she rules it anyway now. It was just supposed to somehow show us "why" she did it, but it still doesn't and only leaves the "crazy" angle as plausible, which has been shot down for a hundred different reasons already.

On May 23 2019 19:28 Rasalased wrote:
The cinematics and music show them as heroic and noble. If you are a critical viewer, which apparently most people are not, it is obvious that it is not. To me, this is really surprising. I never guessed it was that easy to make propaganda and to make someone doing evil acts look like a good guy just by changing the presentation.

The show did a similar thing with Arya. Yes, her only desire was killing people. Yes, she still did care about friends and had a sense of justice. I guess GRRM will kill Arya off for being a bad person in the book. All people in the show bend on vengeance die. Daenerys did show more warmth and compassion. But Arya never thought she was destined for greatness or that she should have enormous power and rule. She just was a girl with a sword and a kill list. (I don't buy into the assassin training thing, she wasn't trained in fighting. It was just her cleaning stuff and riddles. And not only did she not train the ninja fighting skills she showed later, they seemed to be supernatural. Especially for a show that seemed to do away with silly martial arts dances in favour of actual practical gritty fighting. It was stupid.)

On May 24 2019 00:00 The_Red_Viper wrote:


That is a flawed premise in the first place. Point 1 and 3 are not required, i'd even say that point 3 itself is something one shouldn't want to do in any circumstance. Going "hey she is mad" completely removes any empathy we could have for her, it removes the impact when jon has to kill her.
The big problem with the show's depiction is that there was an easy alternative for her, the city surrendered, there was no need to be this cruel on any level. If it didn't, there would at least be some form of motivation to burn down parts of the city and sadly innocent people with it, this dilemma is completely gone though.

A big part of the story is that people can do both morally good and morally bad things and that some acts might be ambigious depending on what angle we look at it. Pulling the "mad" card is an easy way out, it removes any form of ambiguity or motivation to do something "bad" , it is weak storytelling on that basis alone.

Now if you want her to become mentally unstable, isolated from everyone and thus more prone to questionable choices, sure you can do that. But that also needs more buildup, scenes where we can actually feel her losses, her sitting alone contemplating what happened to her, some talk with jon which deals with her fears, dreams, losses. The show tried a little, but ultimately it made her seem powerhungry, not really mentally weak due to what happened.

About point 2, well it would be shocking simply by virtue of being the first time she doesn't care about innocents (now we can talk about the slavemasters again who might have been innocent for a certain crime, but we surely agree that there is a big difference there?)

On May 23 2019 23:30 Rasalased wrote:
Inside the narrative, Daenerys burning KL is supposed to be a bad call. She was literally killed by her lover for it. And even besides that, it probably wouldn't really have achieved her stated goals. And you are supposed to think this. So I don't get why it is bad story-writing. You knew Daenerys, or should have known, that she was going to go bad, or at least go near the edge and it was an open question if she was going over or just prevent herself from falling in a dramatic fashion. And you knew it had to be sudden and shocking. And you knew there was supposed to be no good reason for it. That was all there in the story. Yes, if felt rushed but everything felt rushed because it was. And this disagreement about the number of episodes between d&d and HBO&GRRM is known.

But I still have not seen any concrete examples of which scenes needed to be added to make Daenerys do the following:
-Have her burn down KL completely
-Have it be sudden and shocking
-Have it be an act of insanity, not rational calculated evil

On May 23 2019 22:47 Dazed. wrote:
Well there was a rationale, its just a poor one: Rulers can rule with fear or love, but everyone loves Jon or at least their local lords. The only way she can get people to follow her, which will allow her to remake the world better, is if they fear her.

Not enough set up for that to be fully believable though. season 8 should of been two full seasons. Would of had plenty of time to set up danny slowly becoming more paranoid and jelous of a quasi worship cult that forms around Jon 'the undying'. Pah!

On May 23 2019 23:30 Rasalased wrote:
Inside the narrative, Daenerys burning KL is supposed to be a bad call. She was literally killed by her lover for it. And even besides that, it probably wouldn't really have achieved her stated goals. And you are supposed to think this. So I don't get why it is bad story-writing. You knew Daenerys, or should have known, that she was going to go bad, or at least go near the edge and it was an open question if she was going over or just prevent herself from falling in a dramatic fashion. And you knew it had to be sudden and shocking. And you knew there was supposed to be no good reason for it. That was all there in the story. Yes, if felt rushed but everything felt rushed because it was. And this disagreement about the number of episodes between d&d and HBO&GRRM is known.

But I still have not seen any concrete examples of which scenes needed to be added to make Daenerys do the following:
-Have her burn down KL completely
-Have it be sudden and shocking
-Have it be an act of insanity, not rational calculated evil

On May 24 2019 00:38 Rasalased wrote:


But if you discard 1 then all the foreshadowing about KL burning/being destroyed/being sacked becomes meaningless. And all these scenes then no longer connect with that Daenerys will do.

And if you discard 3 then talk about Targaryans being prone to madness also no longer work and Daenerys Machiavellian evil becomes the same type of evil that Tywin or Cersei employ and then a sudden switch cannot be explained. Because that process requires a gradual erosion of your own morals. This is distinct from you having your morals but applying them in a delusional way. And you didn't reject point 2.

People keep talking about the people in KL as 'innocents', but I don't think they are 'innocent' under her definition.

I guess the problem is that we have no idea ourselves what goes wrong in people that suddenly commit acts of great evil.

How can 'pulling the mad' card be an easy way out when the story is filled with nuanced evil and established that there are also cases of 'mad evil'? Her going evil the way she did just added a brand new type of how people go evil in the real world to the story. I don't get how that is bad.

And we had a scene where she was standing in the throne room alone and Tyrion tried to talk to her. And she tells Tyrion that she thinks Jon betrayed her. And then she doubled down on Jon having betrayed her.

Then she talks with Jon and Jon literally shows to her that he has no clue about any of it because he is a 85 IQ fool. And then she asks him if he would reject her, and he does.

Then there is a scene where Tyrion says "thousands of children will die." and Daenerys says she doesn't care and that it is Cersei's fault and that they will show no mercy to anyone in KL.

So you reject the premises that cannot be rejected without destroying story continuety and you offer only vague scene ideas that describe scenes that were already in the show.

The problem is the episodes feeling rushed in general with an unwillingness to accept that Daenerys turned evil. But if d&d had made Daenerys move to evil less strong and more nuanced, they would also have been harshly criticized that because it goes against the foreshadowing and against the gritty nature of the show.

On May 24 2019 03:18 Logo wrote:
I think one of the best parts of the motivation, in that the part that actually works for the story, is Dany's claim that those who uphold the wheel cannot be a part of breaking it. In her mind these people (and the other Lords she needs to reign in) didn't support just Cersei, they supported the entire wheel that created this system in the first place. The only way for her to truly liberate the world is to smash these structures apart. Basically a type of Accelerationism for feudal structure.

The reason why this is the only motivation I like to think about is because of the ending, the remaining nobility of Westeros basically lean into this theory. They elect Bran as a new king, change the succession rules in a way that will just create in fighting, and then... that's it. They pay lip service to breaking the wheel, but really they kept the same structure intact with no meaningful change. The only actual improvement is they elected a godking who may or may not live for thousands of years (long may he reign).

So... is Dany actually right even if her actions were indefensible? The people who are part of the wheel, even the ones who held contempt for it, were completely unable to break the wheel. Nothing she said about them prior to her death was wrong.

So how much of her actions are outright madness, and how much of it was a realization that even her closest allies would be unable to break the wheel. We see it as Varys and Tyrion committing treason, Jon being the heir but not wanting it, etc. but all that are also signals that these people are incapable of working outside the system that Dany is trying to smash.

Now I will say this is being way too generous to the writing of the last season, but the threads are there even if accidentally.

Having Dany go cartoon evil is just as jarring as if they’d made Jon superman with no flaws who kills the Night King all by himself and is Mr Destiny all of a sudden.

The only difference is that it’s ‘shocking’ in this instance to make Dany do that.

On May 24 2019 03:35 Wombat_NI wrote:
I think it’s pretty generous in a way, although depends how she sees it, what she wants etc.