So, has anyone seen or heard mention of the Knights of the Vale, such an important, last remaining untouched army of the realm?
Did they just pop by for the Battle of the Bastards, then go off? I assume they weren’t in Winterfell last episode.
Another thing forgotten. Quite an important thing. Did they just dump it when Littlefinger died? I though the head honcho of the Vale was perfectly fine with LF getting the chop…
It’s not done. It’s A Song of Ice and Fire. It will come down to the wire and either be Jon or Dany. That’s all it’s ever been and it shall remain.
Huh. You’re completely right. Tyrion is talking to her like she’s one of the boys, but the truth is that her having ever taken a lover would be highly taboo in that society.
You can see the leader around in some scenes with Sansa, he’s the one she’s talking to when Tyrion goes to talk to her pre battle. I assume they are just part of the northern forces now, and I don’t recall seeing him post battle.
Daenerys has always struck me as being just a little bit insane; it comes and goes depending on the circumstances, but she’s very fanatical, and fanatics are usually a bit nuts.
I am not the first person to point this out, but I may be the first to phrase it this way:
**Daenerys seeks power.
Power seeks Jon.**
Throughout eight seasons, what has happened, over and over, is that Daenerys Targaryen has wanted power. At first I guess she was pushed by Viserys, but it didn’t take her long, and power is really the only thing she’s ever cared about. Yes, she freed slaves - but it was to her benefit to do so. Her conquering of Slaver’s Bay relied on slave support, and she conquered Slaver’s Bay to increase her own power. She burns people to death for defying her. The concept of compromise is something she fights against every time it comes up; she has to be cajoled in to it, over and over. She cannot even begin to negotiate with Sansa; she tried to charm her, but the reason she cannot win Sansa over is she isn’t offering her anything at all except “I’m a nice monarch once you get to know me.” No suggestion of a new political arrangement between the North and the Iron Throne. Daenerys SAYS she wants to break the wheel, but it’s all bullshit. It may be bullshit she believes, but she’s just bullshitting herself; all she means is “I Am A Better Ruler Than The Other Guy.” That’s what monarchs have been telling everyone, including themselves, since the dawn of time.
Breaking the wheel would mean changing the system - breaking up the Seven Kingdoms, for instance, or instituting constitutional monarchy of some kind. If she were to do that, THAT would be an absolutely incredible jump in character; it’d be some of the worst TV series writing in the history of TV. It would be every bit as insane and ridiculous as having Columbo suddenly become a wisceracking, homicidal Steven Seagal type, or Selina Meyer deciding to abandon ego and become a Buddhist monk. In 70-80 episodes of this show Daenerys hasn’t displayed the tiniest iota of character that would suggest she could ever do that. Every moment Emilia Clarke in on screen the point of her character is made clear; she must be Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. It is her rightful place. She deserves it.
The only person who strikes me as being capable of thinking that far outside the box is Jon Snow, and maybe Varys. (Which is a perfectly fair thing; in a world without liberal democracy, of course people will think in terms of feudalism and oligarchy. It’s what they understand, and how everything has always been. People are like that.) Jon has always had power given to him; he has ascended, over and over, because people want him to. He does not seem thrilled at being Aegon Targaryen in part because he does not seem terribly impressed with the concepts inherent in the feudal system, a system that he was part of and yet an outcast from. It is an old truth that those who want power most are least worthy of it, and those who want it least are often the most worthy.
A conflict between Daenerys and Jon would be a gutsy move by the writers, but would be the most thematically consistent ending.
Oh, I wanted to add… speaking of Emilia Clarke, I find her acting a bit in and out. But the last scene, where her face is twisted with hatred and fury, is a masterclass in acting without speaking. Her beautiful face is turned hideous and scary with rage, but it’s not overdone.
I believe Cersei just used the cache of wildfire that was already under the great Sept of Baelor. The rest of the wildfire is still in place, as far as I know. And there was a scene with Tyrion before the battle of Blackwater Bay where he had the maesters start manufacturing more wildfire for use in the battle.
I think the wildfire has to still be there, or we would have been told otherwise.
Damnit…I think you just spoiled the ending. That makes perfect sense.
Whether we lose Dany in the explosion or through guilt that takes her out. Jon doesnt want to rule so he goes north of the wall and Gendry becomes king. Though that last part seems a little farfetched.
If the parting of Jon and Ghost seemed unresolved, maybe it is actually unresolved … and on purpose.
I don’t think we can rule out an ending where Jon is exiled or self-exiled beyond the wall. Almost his entire story is bound up in the far North and he’s no more likely than Tormund to ever be happy in the South.
I just didn’t read that scene as a goodbye. I read it as foreshadowing. Prophecy and fan theories be damned, Jon as a character is not made for the warm courtly life of King’s Landing. If he lives, he goes back north. To his home.
Jaime indicated that was the reason he killed Aerys II. Because he had stashed wildfire around the city and was going to set it off.
For the Battle of the Blackwater, Cersei was having the Alchemists made wildfire and storing it in barrels under the Alchemist Guild. There was reference to gathering up all the stashes around the city.
It seemed that the Great Sept of Baelor exploded using the stores that Aerys II left under there.
All known wildfire pre-Blackwater was used during that battle so I don’t think that matters.
Yeah, but why do we assume it was only the stores that were already there vs Qyburn having wildfire moved there? Cersei seems like the kind of person that would order all known sources of it moved there.
Now maybe they didn’t move known caches, and maybe they didn’t find all of the ones that Aerys had placed around the city, but as far as I can tell we don’t know either of those things.
This is what’s happening. There is a lot, a story that has been designed and was decided to cram it in six episodes.
So we are steam rolling the plot with eye rolling scenes because they need to move with the plot.
The story called for the ww to be defeated and the nk killed by Arya. Along the way kill some other characters just for impact. They don’t have any relevance for the story anyway.
Then the story needs that dany needs to turn to a dark character so that she becomes the mad queen. So let’s show her alone in the victory feast like suddenly nobody likes her anymore and kill one dragon and Missandei to complete the change.
How the story is told is irrelevant what is important is that it unfolds that way.
Heck they could have made the dragon die by bleeding to death after stepping on a bone. It would serve the plot just as fine because whats really important is the final that the two masterminds have decided is the best one.
So the dragon had to die but it didn’t matter how.
There were several Knights of the Vale with their distinctive bird-and-moon shields visible behind Brienne at the start of the Battle of Winterfell: https://www.quora.com/Whatever-happened-to-the-Tully-Army-and-the-Knights-of-the-Vale-as-of-season-8-episode-3
Sure, but they could pick titles that are more cryptic, then, as they did during the previous seasons. It’s not like “The last of the Starks”, for instance, was a title so incredibly fitting and so incredibly good that they couldn’t pick another.
Maybe one of the last episodes has indeed an incredibly fitting and incredibly good title that would be a give-away, but then, they could have hidden only this one.
I too feel that the attitude towards nudity and sex is seriously messed up and…I don’t know…neurotic? Aberrant? Especially indeed compared to the attitude wrt violence. Maybe that’s what he meant by “sickness”?
On top of it, even in we ignore violence and concentrate only on sex, as many have pointed out, in a show filled with random “sexposition” and gratuitous sex, this “sex” scene was one of the nicest we have seen in 8 seasons. That people don’t blink an eye when watching brothel scenes followed by the courtesans being variously dispatched by crossbow bolts or beaten/penetrated with a spiky scepter, but then are on the verge of fainting when they see the back of a character about to have loving sex with someone she likes because they’re not sure whether the character is supposed to be 18 or not in the lore goes beyond the weird, in my perception.
Was it? I don’t think that’s the case. Qyburn informs Cersei that they found wildfire stashes after the High Sparrow banned Trial by Combat (responding to a ‘rumor’ that Cersei told him about). I think it was implied that the wildfire under the Sept was the ones that had been there beforehand.
I think Tyrion had an idea that there was wildfire in other parts of the city, but they just used the ones they had by placing it on a boat to explode in the middle of the Bay.
Lord Royce is part of the post-battle assessment scene. He removes half the markers of the Knights of the Vale, just as everyone else removed half their forces. They’re still around at roughly half strength, like everyone else. They’re loyal to Sansa most likely, since it’s never shown that Lord Royce interacts with Daenerys at all, let alone to bend the knee. Which is possibly a bit of a plot oversight - Lord Royce is not the Lord of the Vale (Robin is), but you’d think she’d be demanding the allegiance of one of the Seven Kingdoms when the guy that’s effectively the ruler of the region is there.
Especially considering that in a lot of places around the world the age of consent is now 16 (and in the medieval ages, people would get married younger than that all the time).
This is fun.
While looking at the causes of death, I noticed that one character is listed as having died by hanging himself and another by stabbing himself with a knife. I can’t remember either. Who would they be?
Checking back, Cersei commissioned the Guild of Pyromancers to make wildfire before the Battle of the Blackwater. Tyrion was surprised they were able to make the huge amounts he saw, suggesting that they (evidently the pyromancers, not Qyburn) had actually found the previous stashes. Tyrion ordered all that they had at the time to be put on ships to use in the Battle of the Blackwater.
Later on Qyburn finds (presumably additional) caches, which are used for the Sept of Baelor explosion. I’m not sure it’s clear that they used all of it up. In any case, the knowledge of making it hasn’t been lost, and Cersei could have commissioned more. It’s also uncertain that all of the caches left by Aerys have been found.
Only suicide i can think of is Tommen and he jumped out a window, the only hangings i can think of are when Jon hung the traitors who killed him.