Game of thrones: Final Season: Winter finally arrives....

Foreshadowing is not the same as actually developing the character. A show like Breaking Bad spent many seasons turning the character from A to B, despite the hints being there from early on. Disregarding the past 2 episodes, Game of Thrones did it as well with a character like Jaime, changing him through the course of many interactions and events throughout the seasons. There was nothing like that kind of groundwork with Daenarys.

The showrunners themselves have also strongly suggested themselves the mass-murder was a spur-of-the-moment thing, not premeditated strategy. Granted though, you can't entirely rely on what they're saying, given how they also said after E03 that the Dothraki were gone.
 
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She premeditated burned all the Dothraki elders in an earlier season. No hint there at all. Crucifying all the masters. CRUCIFYING. No hint there either.
I think that counts as long term development.
 
Yeah, only in comic books do the villains destroy cities. In real life that would never happen.

It did, but it was extremely rare. The only big city destroyed that I can think of is Carthage (there are probably some in China's or India's past).

I got curious and watched the episodes, just saw last week's, those magic bolts that defy gravity to shoot down a dragon flying high. At least the could do magic bolts, it'd have been more believable! :rolleyes: It's already a fantasy themed series, I mean... dragons and zombies! At least spare physics!
 
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Yeah, only in comic books do the villains destroy cities. In real life that would never happen.

It rarely happens in real life, and usually it's for a practical reason and not just because the narrative requires that you suddenly becomes a bad guy. Seems to me you're just purposely missing the point that I was specifically making, and the fact that you deliberately left out the part of my post which explain it makes me even more sure of that.
City destruction was difficult until the 19th C, but it did happen and we don't know what happened to many ancient cities.

These come to mind though:
  • Dresden
  • Coventry
  • Birmingham
  • Hamburg
  • Nanking
  • Carthage
  • Tokyo
  • Lenningrad
  • Stalingrad
  • Nagasaki
  • Hiroshima
I'm sure there are others.
 
So I just found out that HBO originally wanted Season 8 to be 10 episodes. D&D declined.

I assume they wanted to use the budget for these superfluous action scenes while not developing stuff correctly.

It would all make sense, at least.
 
Yeah, I guess they want to work on their star wars project.
 
Having caught up now (watching the episode and overviewing this thread), I must say that the key scene of this episode was the talk between Dany and Jon. Him Flinching before the kiss is understandable (she's his aunt!)
Well, I think it's more to do with "we just cooked Varys so I'm not really in the mood, and darling you DO look a bit unstable right now" actually. He's known she was her aunt for awhile now.
Hmm five episodes to turn her mad. Over 6 hours of material. I don't thing that's unrealistic at all considering all the foreshadowing and other peeks that we saw in the first 7 seasons. Actually I would have been surprised if she hadn't turned. Better than seeing it only take 30 minutes (or usually less) in a Marvel Super Hero movie.
Ah, yeah, it bears repeating :

She had been shown as being potentially ruthless. What happened in King's Landing was not "ruthless", it was "comic book villain".

There were also seven seasons of Dany being very strict about justice, punishing only the evildoers while sparing the innocents and going up to entomb her dragons ("her children", remember ?) because they killed one shepherd. But somehow, all this count for nothing because she also had a strong hand in punishing those who betrayed her. I have this feeling you guys are just so used to narrative tropes you can't see past them and notice the difference between an (overused) narrative trope and an organic progression.

At the time of S8, she could have been callous in collateral damage and vengeful. That's a effing far cry from burning a whole city for the lulz.
She premeditated burned all the Dothraki elders in an earlier season. No hint there at all. Crucifying all the masters. CRUCIFYING. No hint there either.
I think that counts as long term development.
All these were people who actually tried to kill her or had a position of power and fought her.
See above.

Foreshadowing is not the same as actually developing the character. A show like Breaking Bad spent many seasons turning the character from A to B, despite the hints being there from early on. Disregarding the past 2 episodes, Game of Thrones did it as well with a character like Jaime, changing him through the course of many interactions and events throughout the seasons. There was nothing like that kind of groundwork with Daenarys.
Yeah, this.
 
I think that this time around the iron fleet only had 1 "scorpion". Or at least only one was shown. Makes a lot of sense: you miss once and all your ships get burned ^_^

I just remembered why I thought the iron fleet was loaded with scorpions, they shredded the ships delivering Dany's people who were captured before that chick got her head cut off by the mountain.
 
Arbitrary executions? What on earth are you talking about???

She executed the Tarlys because they fought against her and refused her demand to submit ... and that's kinda what happens in these kinds of wars. She needs to win quickly, that's why she wasn't willing to be all willy-nilly. If she were a man, she'd be called strong and decisive.
Executing defenceless prisoners of war is universally recognised as A Bad Thing. I don't think the audience would be encouraged to see it as wise or admirable if a male character did it.
 
I think the moral of the story is that war is bad, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and people can do objectively bad things for perfectly logical reasons.

I really don't understand why ppl think that Dany's "turn" was surprising. They've been talking about how she might be a mad tyrant literally the whole show. She's constantly being restrained from doing terrible things by her advisers. She loses faith in them, in Tyrion especially, and ignores their advice this time. She's ignored it before. Really don't get why this is surprising?

Well, I do, actually. It's because you feel betrayed by her as well. You thought she'd grown into a capable and compassionate ruler, but no, turns out she's just as tyrannical as all the other rulers of Westeros have been. I felt it hard when she started burning all those people, I felt really, truly awful, not just for all the people that were dying needlessly and horrifically, but also for believing her, supporting her, and believing in her. It felt bad. And I think when people feel bad they do weird intellectual contortions to avoid feeling bad, like trying to pretend that Dany wasn't capable of this, and this was a huge surprise to them.

It reminds me of Stannis the Mannis. We thought he was the Good Guy, the capable, compassionate leader who went North to do the right thing and fight to defend the kingdom. Then he burnt his daughter alive. Only this time, with Dany, you feel it even more, because we as the audience have invested so much more into her story than we did with Stannis.
 
I think the moral of the story is that war is bad, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and people can do objectively bad things for perfectly logical reasons.

I really don't understand why ppl think that Dany's "turn" was surprising. They've been talking about how she might be a mad tyrant literally the whole show. She's constantly being restrained from doing terrible things by her advisers. She loses faith in them, in Tyrion especially, and ignores their advice this time. She's ignored it before. Really don't get why this is surprising?
She had been shown as being potentially ruthless. What happened in King's Landing was not "ruthless", it was "comic book villain".

I didn't knew that english was such a difficult language to read.
 
it's almost as if i disagree with you?
I understand, all the foreshadowing when she weighted all her power to prevent mass killing and rape in every single instance where her armies (or the armies of her husband) captured villages/cities obviously prove how she would suddenly start to burn half a million of civilians. That makes total sense, how could I have been so blind ?

The foreshadowing for six seasons has been how she had an authoritarian streak and was inexperienced in politics and having a hard time to grasp the complexity of society, leading to counter-effective policies.
That can totally translate into a tyrant that enforce repressive policies because of being blind to them being, well, repressive. That doesn't translate into starting to large-scale massacre whole populations.

Foreshadowing of her being potentially trouble doesn't mean that ANY KIND of trouble are logical.
 
FWIW, I never saw Dany as purely a noble character. She has a sense of justice, but of course her goal from the start has been self-aggrandising and motivated by a lust for power/revenge.

But she did have no real choice here, from her perspective. If we can look back at past seasons, she's seen that conquering is the easy part and maintaining power is the hard part. The lords are opposed to her and the people of King's Landing have been brainwashed to hate her for the same reasons. Either she could cede the throne to Jon or try keeping it and eventually succumb to plot and rebellion. Faced with either losing now (despite winning the war) or a slow death, she gambled on doing something drastic instead and making a clear example, plus the decision was also spurred by emotional turmoil. Just destroying a few blocks wouldn't do for something truly drastic. She had to raze the whole city (something done at the click of a button in Civ, incidentally) in order to be sure she's really done it. It does make sense.

And here we have the fundamental weakness of TV compared to literature.
If the same thing happened in a book, a talented author could have justified it with two pages of flashbacks and internal monologue, but a couple of seconds of her crazy facial expressions just doesn't cut it.

And the fundamental weakness of literature is much fewer people experience it, often no one at all. TV wins and narratives will increasingly be driven by visuals and shock moments (subverting expectations in the manner that only a sequential visual medium can).
 
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I'm sure there are others.

Corinth (Romans, 146 BC)
Colchester (Boudica 61 AD)

Destruction was often not permanent. Both Carthage and Corinth later became Roman colonies. Cities tended to grow up in good locations so if destroyed there was good reason to refound them.
 
Sorry but i see no women issues here, one evil does not make another legitimate.
Using a real life example, if a woman gets abused for years in really bad ways, and then decides to murder men she becomes a mass murderer, and should be punished without mercy as well.
While those cases might be tragic, making excuses for them would be totally disrespectful towards her victims.

I mean... "without mercy"?
 
I think the moral of the story is that war is bad, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and people can do objectively bad things for perfectly logical reasons.

I really don't understand why ppl think that Dany's "turn" was surprising. They've been talking about how she might be a mad tyrant literally the whole show. She's constantly being restrained from doing terrible things by her advisers. She loses faith in them, in Tyrion especially, and ignores their advice this time. She's ignored it before. Really don't get why this is surprising?

Well, I do, actually. It's because you feel betrayed by her as well. You thought she'd grown into a capable and compassionate ruler, but no, turns out she's just as tyrannical as all the other rulers of Westeros have been. I felt it hard when she started burning all those people, I felt really, truly awful, not just for all the people that were dying needlessly and horrifically, but also for believing her, supporting her, and believing in her. It felt bad. And I think when people feel bad they do weird intellectual contortions to avoid feeling bad, like trying to pretend that Dany wasn't capable of this, and this was a huge surprise to them.

It reminds me of Stannis the Mannis. We thought he was the Good Guy, the capable, compassionate leader who went North to do the right thing and fight to defend the kingdom. Then he burnt his daughter alive. Only this time, with Dany, you feel it even more, because we as the audience have invested so much more into her story than we did with Stannis.

I think a lot of it is a reflection on ourselves that we aren't comfortable admitting. She was actually ruthless and did terrible things from the very first season, but we always felt as though the person who received it deserved it. "It" being the key word. Even if some, many, or all of these people deserved to die, Dany's idea of how to accomplish "it" was among the most barbaric of any of the rulers. That says a lot about us that is unsettling (and I'm lumping myself right in there - I was a big fan of hers and never gave any of this a second thought until Sunday).

Does an admittedly cruel person deserve to have his face melted by gold because of a drunken threat and if so, and it happened in front of any "good" person, would they take it so nonchalantly as Dany did?
Does a person deserve to be burned alive at the stake? Perhaps to die for what she did, but in that way?
Do people deserve to be locked away in darkness to slowly starve or suffocate? What about the poor small girl in that cave with that giant man? What do you think became of her as he grew hungry? Even if she deserved to die, did she deserve that?
What about all the people she had her Unsullied slaughter in their first scene together? Were they all evil because they were in a certain class? Were they all beyond redemption? Were all cruel and unjust and deserving of the slaughter? She spared their children, but also made them orphans, often, we must assume, right in front of their eyes.
What about all the people she crucified? Were they all evil because they were in a certain class? It seems like she chose them based on outward appearance only (their garments).
What about the person she fed to her dragon? She flat out admits she has no idea if the poor guy deserved it: "Who is innocent? Maybe all of you are, maybe none of you are. Maybe I should let the dragons decide."
As far as I can tell (at least from the show--I haven't read all the books), she granted one person a trial before handing out their fate, only after basically being begged by an adviser. Hardly a just ruler in my eyes.
Was it OK for her to basically appropriate an entire culture by trapping their leaders in a tent and burning them all alive in front of their subjects just because we don't hold their values in high regard?
Was burning two prisoners alive who surrendered, but who refused to bow to her greatness appropriate? They were essentially burned alive because they refused to follow her and do her bidding. She would have burned any person there who defied her. Is that a good reason to kill someone?

Look, let's put it plainly - she's not a good person, and never has been. We thought she was because she waged class warfare against groups of people (Masters, Dothraki leadership, Westeros leadership) that we assumed were all worse people. They even might have been. But we don't really know that, any more than we know that anyone is guilty without a fair trial. We just assumed because of the way one side portrayed them that all were evil, and gave her a pass to do some pretty unspeakable things to them on a whim. Now we are faced with the prospect of holding ourselves accountable for this and asking ourselves what that says about us. Few enjoy that prospect, though many muddle through it.

Frankly, I think this is all a brilliant reflection on modern times and the way we're quick to lump each other into groups without considering the individual, especially when we think we're doing it "for the greater good." It's caused me to reassess the way I approached the series and how easily I was willing to overlook all the stuff above. There are a lot of good lessons and morals here. I'm looking forward to watching the series again with a fresh perspective.
 
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