I may have missed it, the way this thread keeps sprouting, but I want to shoot down all the speculation of Jon and Dany sitting together on the throne.
“Shoot down” is a pun. In any standard fantasy, the ending would always have been the king and queen on their twin dragons flying around their kingdom to the loving cheers of their subjects. When Rhaegal got shot down that fantasy got shot down with it. One dragon, one ruler. And that’s only if the dragon survives. That’s not going to happen. Leaving Dany alive with a dragon turns her into a power too great for Westeros. They’re both going down somehow. Especially if she keeps riding the dragon straight into the ballistas because she’s too dim to think of attacking from the rear.
Forget who sits on the Iron Throne. Who sits on her throne with her gone? Most of the world will be in the same position. House Tarly has Sam, who foresworn it. With the Wall down, do all the pledges get cancelled? House Baratheon has Gendry, who knows nothing about kinging. Riverrun and Hightower are apparently up for grabs if Bronn can be put so easily in them. The Freys are dead. The Martells are dead. Arryn seems dead. The Mormonts have a preteen. Most of Essos’s males are dead and their system of slavery has been destroyed. The Lannisters are about to go kaput.
A prediction that would be startling: all the houses fall and a one world government succeeds them.
OK, so I keep seeing that Jaime went back with Cercei, but is that what happened? I asked my wife if she thought he was leaving to rejoin her or to maybe kill her.
My wife said it was ambiguous.
Was the dialogue clear that he is legit leaving to freaking rejoin the woman he just ran away from?
What a crappy development if so. They wanted him in that big battle so bad, they had him leave. Now have him rejoin her? No way.
I hope he was returning to kill her, or at least attack her in his own way.
…its only “sensationalizing” if you pretend that black people don’t exist, that black fans of Game of Thrones don’t exist, and that the death of one of only two black characters to forward the arc of both the white character and the male character didn’t piss off significant chunk of that fanbase. It was a near-classic fridging.
I really see something like this as the ending, but with (I hope!) both Jon and Dany dead. Neither one of them is a fit ruler of a small village, much less a kingdom. Hell, give Bronn Highgarden to boot. All great houses begin somewhere. Except let someone else rule from Dragonstone - Tyrion belongs with Sansa.
I think its safe to say that in the end there will only be Dany or Jon sitting on the throne! Theres no way that they would end the show with them living happily ever after in GOT universe.
And another problem with this season is how they suddenly out of the blue are changing Danny attitude. Up until this episode there was no signs that she was building up resentment and suddenly in this episode she ready to explode!!! And just seems so out of her character too.
Im really disapointed with how this season is unfolding and I think the plot armor will continue forward to get an unlikely outcome like for example Sansa becoming the Queen of the seven kingdoms.
Right now it seems highly unlikely but the writers can make it happen with some twisted plot line that nobody can imagine…
Anyway I am for anything now… heck lets Dany get more dragons somehow and instead of having one she gets another three and obliterate the city…
They’re opening up locations everywhere, aren’t they?
I kinda wondered if Rhaegal was going to wash up onshore still alive like Tyrion did. Doesn’t seem likely though.
The more you think about it the more absurd it gets.
I got the impression that Qyburn just found the plans somewhere for something that was never actually built. The Targaryen Conquest took place over years, not decades and was 300 years ago; by the time anyone figured out a defense system against dragons they extinct and the only families with the resources to fund development were House Targaryen and it’s allies.
Varys seems to be the only person in show with any conception of Westeros as a nation-state and not just a hierarchy of fiefdoms.
To be fair they never actually tried Loras fluffing him up and/or Margaery dressing up like her brother.
Best case scenario for Gendry is that he either ends up a vassal; the Baratheon Dynasty wasn’t even well established enough for him to serve as a convenient figurehead for somebody else.
I’m thinking this is how the story ends; in the end there’s no Iron Throne left for anyone to sit on.
IIRC in theory Cersei’s claim to the throne is that the Lannisters are related to the Baratheons and now that House Baratheon it’s claims devolve onto House Lannister (of which Cersei is the heir since Jaimie & Tyrion are disqualified), but it’s just window dressing for her holding the throne by right of conquest.
I’ve always taken her plans to break the wheel as plans to replace Westeros’s feudal monarchy with an absolute one; instead of local nobility more or less ruling as they please as long as they payed homage to the Iron Throne there’s be a network of non hereditary provincial governors answers only to her.
I think this neatly sums up Daenerys. And at least Cersei has moments of self-awareness about herself.
I think the maesters deliberately try to keep as much as their knowledge a secret as they can to preserve their own position.
Highborn children are tutored at home by septas, maesters (at least for the boys), and the occasional specialist (like now Ned Start hired a “dancing master” for Ayra).
I’d like to think that some septs might have some kind of schools attached to them where promising (and/or obliging) lowborn children can learn the basics of arithmetic & literacy while local septon/septa scouts for the next generation of lower clergy.
Which is basically what Westeros was like before the Targaryens.
You’re right. No one possibly could. So many fans have already decided exactly what should have and shouldn’t have been gone and there is no possible way that any one story could satisfy all of these disparate stories at once. Can’t be done.
I get wanting stories to play out a certain way but reading the messages and watching fan videos I get people predicting what is going to happen based on story constructs they’re used to and it made me wonder if we’ve gotten too good at recognizing story elements to actually enjoy stories any more.
I mean, even people saying they are expecting trope shattering writing are making expectations on what to expect only based on what it should not be rather than on what it actually is.
I’m not talking about the folks complaining about characters making stupid decisions here. i’m talking more about people disappointed about who did or didn’t die and when they did or didn’t die and the like. Those who expect the writing to follow a formula that it didn’t follow.
So, like I said, I don’t think any creator ever who shared his creation to 2 or more people could expect to have created something that satisfies everyone who experienced his creation. People don’t work that way. Everyone has an opinion.
I don’t remember who posted this above but they said that the current writing has been slanted to appeal to the less critical fans rather than write for the hard core fans.
What’s wrong with that though? Even Shakespeare did that. It’s doing that and still creating the masterpiece that is the trick.
Gotta say on the bad tactics front I’ve gotta agree the decision for a frontal assault is made due to only having 2 more episodes not for story reasons. Cercei has laid out a fair amount of coin and they’re not going to stick around forever. When the gold runs out, they are gone or worse, they turn on her. I’d let her keep running up that bill as long as possible if I was her enemy.
Of course, Dany may not feel she has the time due to Jon’s growing popularity. Every day people aren’t doing something is another day for them to prefer him over her.
This can, just barely, be construed as an attack on the post, rather than on the poster, and so won’t earn a Warning for personal insults. But it’s still way too personalized for CS. Dial it back, Dale Sams.
Good episode, I enjoyed it despite its flaws. I agree that those were howitzers, not ballistas.
The thing that pisses me off is Bronn just walking into Winterfell like that. And why wouldn’t Tyrion and Jaime promise whatever and later just have him quartered? The whole scene is just stupid IMO.
It’s easy. The wait until night time, get up to a very fast speed and then just strafe the tops of the walls with dragon fire. One pass per side. No time to line up a shot, or anything.
There are more dragon eggs floating about, but they are ‘inert’; they are seen as items of beauty and value, but have no practical purpose. The same was true of Dany’s eggs when they were given to her…they were nothing more than pieces of ‘historical art’. Nobody dreamed that they would ever hatch.
The fact that they did hatch is what gives credence to the idea that Daenerys is destined to take the throne - she apparently has powers that literally no one else in the world has.
Wait, the Starbucks cup wasn’t Photoshopped? :smack: How could they fuck up that bad?
I really hope that wasn’t Winterfell that Bronn strolled into carrying a crossbow. I heard a podcaster say it might have been a local inn, and hopefully that’s so because otherwise…yeah. (Even then, it’s still not a great scene.)
If you mean Lyanna, she dead. She died in the previous episode, fighting the undead giant. That was pretty dark and hard to follow, admittedly, but they also showed her corpse at the beginning of this episode.